“Go,” the boy said.
“There is… there is nowhere to go,” Sadie said.
“Go, go, go! Dada, dada,” Leo demanded impatiently.
Sadie took a cautious step toward the edge of the island of reality. The void ahead retreated, revealing more of the ground. She turned. Behind, the void had advanced. She’d remained at the center of a tiny speck of existence. It followed her for another step, though the way ahead didn’t match what it should have been. As she paced forward at the child’s urging, the rug of the palace was replaced by the icy cobblestone of the courtyard, then the packed gravel of a road.
She swallowed hard and looked to the child. He wore a dull smile, but in his eyes was something she’d rarely seen in him, or in any child of his age. There was something approaching determination. Certainty. It was as though he knew what he was doing. What had to be done. He jabbed his finger. Sadie steeled herself and continued on. There was only one way, and that way was forward.
#
A scene opened out before Myranda and the others as they finally approached their destination. She had prepared herself for something disastrous, something horrid. She hadn’t prepared herself for this. The sword was still in place, still driven into a piece of ground scarred by heat and battle. A constellation of sigils orbited about it, but there were three glaring gaps. One was the embodiment of music, still in Ivy’s hands. The other was the space sigil, which lay in pieces on the ground. The third was nowhere to be seen, and none but Deacon knew which it might be. And though he was present, they knew better than to ask him.
The man Myranda loved, the father to her child, was no longer recognizable. His body had been completely consumed by the affliction. His form was in vague but perpetual flux, dancing between an assortment of shapes from moment to moment. One was Deacon’s own body. Others ranged from a twisted black-as-night silhouette to a featureless white figure. His gem was similarly fragmented. It was broken into dozens of cruel shards that spread about his upheld fist like a swarm of luminous bees. The pieces of what had once been the space sigil lay spread out before him, disassembled like a clockwork mechanism. Deacon poked and prodded at the pieces, fitting them together with a childlike sense of curiosity and experimentation. Whenever a pair of pieces fit together, the void around them trembled, shifted, and produced a slice of landscape. Some lingered, stretching far into the distance. Others came and went in the blink of an eye. It had produced a calico assortment of environments spread around him.
When Ether’s carefully woven reality finally reached his, Deacon noticed the fresh patch of earth. He looked up.
“Ah. You are alive,” he said calmly. “I had anticipated Myranda and the other Chosen would survive. But Ayna and Calypso are alive as well. Interesting.”
There was no relief or joy in his voice. He noted the survival of his friends as something worthy of jotting down in a journal for further study.
“Deacon. We need to set this straight.”
“In time. In time. And we have plenty of it. All of it, in fact,” he said. “I did have a job to do, and I mean to do it. It is genuinely intriguing, the complexity of the underlying mechanisms of our world. I’ve learned much already.”
Ether, no longer called upon to craft the very ground they walked upon, dropped to the patch of reality stretching out from the sword. She was visibly fatigued by the effort, even with the help of Ivy and the others. Myranda and the others spread into a semicircle around Deacon. A handful of the greatest warriors the world had ever known looked upon the wizard as an enemy. He wasn’t even concerned enough to pull himself from his puzzle. He raised a hand, coaxing a wheel-shaped sigil into position before him. It was comparatively simple, five spokes leading from an outer circle into a small round hub.
“This is an element of the space sigil. It represents the permeability of our world. While it exists, and is whole, creatures like the D’Karon can find their way in, and we can find our way out. If I could simply destroy it, that would be all. A wall would be built that none could penetrate. We would still have our own threats from within, our own wars, our own troubles. But we would be safe from external forces.”
“You can’t toy with such things, Deacon.”
“That is plainly untrue. I am doing so presently.”
“What’s happened to the rest of the world?”
“What happens to day when night falls? What happens to winter when it is summer? The world is still there… or here, I suppose.” He indicated the fragments spread before him. “When the pieces come back together, so too shall the world. The same goes for every sigil. The hard part isn’t assembling them. They want to be whole. The hard part is getting them to remain apart. But I am making progress.”
“So to solve what you’ve done, we need only gather the fractured sigils together and they will heal themselves?” Calypso said.
“No. You can’t do that. Only I can.” He held up his blighted hand. “Chaos. Only chaos can effect true change. Furthermore, I am devoting a fair amount of my skills to preventing this particular sigil from reassembling, so you would also have to kill me to even allow the pieces a chance to assemble. And that won’t happen for a number of reasons. Myranda loves Deacon. As does Ivy. I have my doubts about Myn, but I believe the affection is sufficient to stay her flame. And—”
There was a blur of motion. His words were choked off by Ether’s stone hand wrapped about his throat. She raised him into the air. “I have no such compunctions.”
“Ether!” Myranda shouted.
It was too late. She hammered him to the ground with a punishing blow. The impact crackled the frozen earth beneath him. Deacon’s flickering, chaotic form twitched once and became still. The fragments of gem floating about his fist darkened and fell to the ground. All were silent, shocked.
“Ether…” Myranda said, when she found her voice.
Ether stood, eyes fixed on Deacon’s fallen form. “It needed to be done. The man you knew was gone.”
“We could have saved him…”
“There was nothing left to save. And he was long past deserving it.”
Deacon’s body twitched. The gems flickered to life.
“Impossible…” Ether growled.
She raised her rocky foot. Deacon’s battered body dragged itself away and drifted up into the air. She tried to attack again, but he raised a shield to deflect the first few blows.
“Don’t waste your time, Ether. I’ve taken precautions.” He held his hand out to one of the other sigils. “And if you don’t calm down and listen to reason, there is always free will to be toyed with. I would hate to do so. It would make things unbearably dull. And were I to damage my own, I believe that would be the end of things.”
Ether, vibrating with rage, backed away. Deacon lowered his hand.
“What just happened?” Ayna demanded.
“I am glad you asked. It is a contingency I am rather proud of. You see I wasn’t confident I would be able to hold all of you off, should you arrive before I was through with my work. So I took the liberty of removing the death sigil and breaking it in two. I have had access to the means to create and manipulate reality for a considerable amount of time before you arrived. I feel quite certain you won’t be able to find the pieces of the death sigil while I am still alive. And you won’t be able to kill me until you find them. In short, I cannot be defeated at the present time. So why not be civil? Let me see to my work. We can all learn so much.”
“Deacon, you need to—” Myranda snapped.
“You must stop calling me that,” he objected. “Ether is right. Does this look like the man you knew? The chrysalis has split. Do not mourn the caterpillar when the butterfly is born.”
Myranda began to pull her mind to focus. The others did so as well. Myn widened her stance and spread her wings. One by one, their eyes shifted to the assortment of sigils. The thing that no longer wished to be called Deacon looked crestfallen.
“All of time, all of creation, all of possibility hangs before you to be studied and understood, and this will degenerate to coarse combat and a scramble for shiny baubles?” He shook his head. “Such a waste. But I have planned for this as well.”
He fitted a few pieces of the space sigil together. The fractured bits of landscape shifted again, expanding out to consume the area around them. As the island of reality grew, the Chosen and their allies were scattered. The land between them was expanding along with the rest, spreading them dozens of yards away from Deacon and away from each other. Where once they had been standing in a broken remnant of reality, now an arena-sized field of frigid ice and snow spread out around them. It was a moment locked in time, and it was easily one of the worst moments in their world’s history. The very same moment Deacon had summoned to make the spell work in the first place. This was Lain’s End, in the moments before it earned its name.
Horrid monstrosities, products of the D’Karon, flooded the field. They were motionless. Even windblown snow was still. The chaotic Deacon took advantage of the disorientation of having the world around them shift. He touched his hand to the time sigil. A few choice creatures dropped to the ground, freed of the stasis that held the rest of them in check. The simple-minded things assessed their surroundings. They represented a terrible assortment of the D’Karon monstrosities. Blade-mouthed, panther-shaped predators. Great, lumbering behemoths. Deacon’s monstrous new form raised his voice and spoke in the fractured, otherworldly dialect of the D’Karon. The things couldn’t help but obey.
Monsters clashed with each of the heroes. Now with ice and wind at their disposal, Ayna and Calypso were quite ready to lend a hand. Myn locked claws with a thing twice her size and belched flame. The monsters were skewered, scorched, and pummeled. Most shrugged off the blows. Those who fell to them quickly rose again, either exempt from death as all other things were or restored by the influence of the time sigil.
“Get to the sigils! Nothing else matters!” Myranda called out.
Ayna filled the battlefield with wind strong enough to peel the flesh from bones. Calypso sealed monsters in impenetrable shells of ice. They fought valiantly, the legion of beasts to choose from was nearly endless, and any who were soundly defeated could simply be conjured again with barely a gesture to the time sigil.
“It’s no good,” Ether called out. “His control over this moment is too great. We need something beyond his control.”
“We need to end him!” Ayna said.
“But there is no way to kill him. We simply don’t…” Calypso paused. “Wait.”
Ayna’s wind sent two beasts clashing against one another to give the mermaid some cover. Finally, she revealed an elegant blade.
“We have this!”
“What good will a blade do?” Ether demanded, driving an abomination into the frozen earth. “If I couldn’t kill him by shattering his body, stabbing him will be of little worth.”
“This blade was augmented in the crystal arena by Azriel. She’s always seen more of what is and what will be than anyone short of Hollow. We’ve got to try. If only I’d taken my combat training in the blade rather than the spear.”
Ayna grasped the handle of the weapon and wrenched it away. It was larger than the whole of her body, but she held the grip firmly. “I am quite familiar with bladed weapons. Clear the way as best you can.”
The wind master conjured a potent gale and buzzed her wings to a blur. Combined, they propelled her tiny form with arrow swiftness. Lances of ice pinned down leaping beasts ahead of her. Ether smashed and heaved aside a hulk that targeted her. Bursts of flame from Myn, bolts of magic from Myranda, everything that the group could manage was brought to bear.
Deacon must have felt the point of magic streaking toward him. He raised a shield and hurled a bolt of magic of his own. Ayna circled up and away to dodge the bolt. Ivy dashed forward, flares of red in her aura, and clashed with the shield at the same moment that Ayna did. The twin blows weakened it enough for the fairy to break through. The air crackled with spells as Deacon hurled an onslaught of attacks at the fairy. Beasts elsewhere prevented the others from helping, but this close to Deacon the monsters wouldn’t dare attack.
Using guile as much as magic, Ayna kept ahead of Deacon’s attacks. She harried him, keeping him from the sigils. Deacon, in his right mind, was far from the most skilled of fighters. Blighted by his affliction and distracted by the need to hold the Chosen at bay, it was inevitable that Ayna finally landed a blow. The supernaturally sharp tip of the blade met Deacon’s shifting flesh. He growled in rage and managed to strike Ayna with a savage dose of black magic. The blade dropped to the ground. The fairy retreated to regroup. But the damage was done.
Deacon held up the arm that had been slashed by the weapon. The dagger had left an ugly, deep gash in it. It drizzled deep red blood. The flesh around the wound was pink and human. It had wounded him, but in doing so it had pushed back the affliction.
The realization that the weapon might truly threaten the affliction’s control over him brought first fear, then fury to Deacon’s twisted eyes.
“So be it,” he said. “I just wanted you busy before. I didn’t want you to suffer. But if that is how it must be, then I’m not holding back any of the creatures. You face them all.”
He touched his fingers to the time sigil. The ground trembled as each of the beasts dropped down at once. He barked D’Karon orders at them, and the battlefield was consumed in a sea of slashing claws and bellowing beasts. They closed ranks, winged monsters filling the air, stout abominations blocking the ground. The twisted Deacon watched with vague interest as the Chosen gathered together. Mystic shields rose. Potent flashes and flares of elemental magic roasted foes. But always there were more to replace those that fell.
#
Satisfied they were of no concern for the time being, he broke the space sigil down again, taking pains to retain his recent adjustments, lest they be freed from their battle. He was close. He could feel it. The pieces could be made to fit solidly without the gateway aspect he had removed. If he could make a complete and seamless rune, then he would need only shatter the remnants of the gateway aspect and the task would be complete. An endless sequence of further experiments on improving things still remained to be done, of course, but one solid and inarguable goal would be achieved.
The battlefield, still echoing with monstrous bellows and shrieks, took on a new tone while he worked. Quietly at first, something harmonious and pure penetrated the chaos. Rapid notes and complex chords started to push back the tide of discordant sound. A blue-white light of intense magic shined through the cracks of a mounding collection of monstrosities. Then, all at once, something burst from within the mound. Deacon didn’t spare a look, at first. His hands were full. Keeping his army in place to keep them at bay while still manipulating the rest of the sigil was delicate work. There were too many moving pieces for him to risk setting any of them down to take a direct role in the battle. He placed his trust in the overwhelming numbers to keep him safe until he was finished.
Myn soared high and fast, propelled not just by her own considerable flight prowess but by Ayna’s wind magic. Ivy, Myranda, and Calypso held on to her back tightly, the former sawing at the violin with a manic enthusiasm. Her gleeful mastery of the music flooded the others with power. Myranda kept a flickering shield in place around them. Calypso ripped up vast sheets of ice from the field to foul, freeze, and ensnare the monsters. Ether swirled windily ahead of Myn’s snout, tearing at anything that breeched Myranda’s shield. They were unified in their strategy, a single force slicing through the monsters like a hot knife.
Deacon offered the briefest glance. “Impressive. I’d not anticipated this level of synergy with a pair of non-Chosen in the group,” he said. “Entwell truly is a wondrous place. I shall have to make it a point to return, once there is an Entwell to return to.”
As Myn darted toward him, the legion of dark forms grew dens
er. Myranda’s shield began to fail. Deacon focused more intently on his work. So close. Myn heaved in a deep breath. Ether shifted to flame before her maw. The dragon belched out a column of flame around her. Ayna funneled wind into the inferno. The acrid hide of the D’Karon creatures were consumed by the flames, fueling its intensity all the more. Deacon could feel the heat of it. Still he worked. When the burst of flame finally tapered away, a single swirling point of it remained, Ether’s fiery form. Her white-hot body made short work of the last few rows of beasts between her and Deacon.
He tried to peel away a bit of his focus to raise a shield. She shattered it easily. The glow of her body was stinging his eyes now. In heartbeats she would be upon him. But heartbeats were enough. The final piece slotted in place. The space sigil was his to manipulate again. He raked his fingers across the surface, banishing the Chosen and the beasts in a single, monumental wave. They weren’t destroyed. The space sigil couldn’t manage that. And they weren’t far enough away that they could never return. He’d yet to repair reality sufficiently for there to be someplace from which they couldn’t return. But they would have to find each other again and find him again. And when they did, he could simply banish them again. It would be irritating but manageable, and would give him the opportunity for further experimentation.
“What warrants my attention next?” he murmured aloud. “I think perhaps… Oh… Clever.” His gaze settled upon the time sigil. It was slowly rotating. “You weren’t after me, were you, Ether? You were just reaching for a sigil. And you reached it. Poor foresight on my part. Such is the danger of distraction.”
He crouched before the sigil. “What did you do…” he mused. “It was only time. She could only bring something that had occupied this slice of the space. What am I missing…”
The Coin of Kenvard Page 31
