Eclipse Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 2)

by Gage Lee

  “I am sorry, Jace.” He looked at the wound my blade had opened in his arm as if surprised he felt anything at all. “If you had accepted your role, this would not have to happen.”

  The Lost glided toward me. His hand descended, pointed fingers glowing like white stars of annihilation headed straight for my heart. The man’s dark eyes were narrowed, and I sensed an abiding sorrow deep within him.

  He didn’t want to kill me.

  But his nature wouldn’t allow anything, anyone, to stand in his way.

  A sound like a ripping sheet of paper roared through the air between us. The Lost’s arm plunged into nothingness, just before his fingers would’ve pierced my heart. His momentum carried him forward, and half his body vanished into the narrow portal that had opened between us. He glared at me from above its edge and tried to recoil his arm.

  The gateway snapped shut with an electric hiss.

  The Lost screamed and fell away from me. His right arm and half his chest were gone, the flesh scooped away to reveal the gleaming white loops and whorls of his innards. The man sagged to his knees, blood spurting from open arteries and drooling from dissected veins.

  Abi, Clem, Eric, and Rachel stared at me through a portal just beyond where my foe had fallen. The hole in space showed me the pilot’s station Abi was supposed to be guarding. He carefully lifted his hands away from the control panel, then rushed through the portal with the rest of my friends right behind him.

  “I’m really glad that worked,” Abi said, his eyes wide with shock.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “None of you should be.”

  “You’re welcome,” Eric said. “Next time we’ll wait for the bad guy to kill you before we take him out.”

  “Are you okay?” Clem and Rachel asked at the same time.

  “I will be.” I was angry at my friends for putting their lives in danger, but I was grateful for what they’d done. As soon as I finished this, I’d figure out some way to show them that.

  But, first, I had to deal with the Lost.

  I summoned my fusion blade again.

  “Why?” he gasped through the blood that bubbled from his lips. “You were meant for so much more. You could have led the next generation, Jace. Why would you throw all that away?”

  “You can’t fix anything by burning it to the ground,” I said with a shake of my head. “I couldn’t step aside and let that happen.”

  “Killing me hasn’t stopped anything,” the Lost gasped. Pale, almost colorless, blood oozed from his terrible wound. “The hungry spirit horde is coming. It will pour across this world in a flood of death. If we are not here to control it, there won’t be anything left when the waters recede.”

  “I’ll stop it.” My blade plunged through the center of the man’s forehead.

  Satisfied he was dead, I put my foot on his chest and pushed his body off my weapon.

  The Eclipse Warrior collapsed to the floor, his mutilated body curling into itself.

  I turned my back on my fallen enemy and strode toward the portal he’d created. Blackness boiled beyond its orange ring, the dark cold of the Far Horizon just inches away.

  This is where I should’ve had something heroic to say. Some last words to bolster my friends’ spirits and let everyone know I’d be back right after I saved the day.

  But there weren’t any words, and no guarantee any of us would ever see each other again. I had to stop the Locust Court, but I didn’t know how. Stepping into the Far Horizon might very well be a hopeless battle.

  But it was my battle.

  I’d summoned the Lost back to Earth. This was my mess to clean up.

  I rolled my neck on my shoulders, and it crackled like a string of firecrackers. Then I hefted my blade and followed in the footsteps of mankind’s greatest creation and most horrible enemy.

  The Host

  THE FAR HORIZON WAS a buffer between Earth and everything else that was out there in the universe. Some said it was created by the Empyrean Flame by burning away the worlds that ventured too close to its territory. Others believed the dead space around Earth was proof that humans were the only non-spirit culture in all the universe. I didn’t know who was right, and it didn’t matter at the moment. The dead black plane of glossy stone and gray ash was just another obstacle in my way.

  “What can we do?” Clem asked from the other side of the portal, her voice frantic. “I won’t leave you alone.”

  I took in as much of the scene as I could stand. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of portals hung in the darkness, their orange frames lit by the cityscapes within. I recognized Dallas, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro, and I glimpsed what might have been New York. Every one of those portals was an attack point for the Locust Court. If I didn’t stop the attack, the hungry spirits would pour across the Far Horizon and strip those cities to their metal bones by morning.

  Far across the black emptiness, an arch of violet fire faced the smaller portals. I saw a strange and twisting landscape on its far side, a place of chaos and constant change. Hills crumbled into valleys and were washed away by turbulent rivers of lava, which spread into wide, deep lakes before vanishing into whirlpools rimed with frost.

  In the distance, an army of crystalline figures swarmed through the nightmare landscape. They glittered like sharpened blades under a shifting sun, drawing closer to the portal every moment.

  Closer, but they hadn’t arrived.

  There was still a chance to stop them.

  “Abi, you have to to tell your commander we need to close a portal,” I called back to my friends. “A big one. I’ll try to hold them off, but I don’t know how long I can last.”

  “I’ll tell them,” he said, his eyes searching my face. “How will we find it?”

  “How did you know where to open the portal that cut the Lost in half?” I asked.

  “Rachel and Clem,” he admitted. “They thought of you, and we used that as an anchor to find you. Once we’d opened the portal to your location, I opened a second portal to deal with the Lost. The offset was tricky, and I wasn’t sure it would work. Thank the Flame that it did.”

  “Thank you for taking the chance. I don’t think I’d be here if you hadn’t. If Rachel and Clem can find me, they can find the gate,” I said. “Because I’ll be standing in it.”

  “We can’t close it with you inside,” he said. “It will kill you.”

  “Just do it,” I said. “It’s the only way. There’s an army of hungry spirits from the Locust Court headed this way. If they get through that portal, they’ll kill us all, anyway.”

  “We can close this portal,” he protested. “That will keep them on the other side of the Far Horizon.”

  “No,” I said. “There are hundreds of portals already opened. Trust me, Abi. This is the only way. Get your people and seal the gate as fast as you can. You have to do this.”

  My friend’s eyes were wet with unshed tears. He reached out, one hand coming through the portal. I clasped it in mine, and he pulled me close to throw an arm around my shoulders.

  “I do not want things to end like this,” he whispered. “But I will tell you, Jace, that I finally sense the peace within your grasp. Whatever tormented you before, today is the day you can reconcile with it.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  I wasn’t sure Abi was right. I certainly didn’t feel at peace with the monster still raging in my head and a terrible hunger squeezing my stomach in a black fist. Even if I pulled this off, I was a monster. The sages had seen that, and they would make me pay. Dying a hero seemed far preferable to facing that punishment and disgrace again.

  I left my friends behind and sped across the Far Horizon at the speed of thought. Distance there was an illusion, a conceptual space that I found I could discard. One moment I was far from the enemy gate. The next I stood before it.

  The world of the hungry spirits was a horrifying place. It broke itself down and built itself up following rules I didn’t understand. How the spirits could survi
ve there was a mystery to me. I wasn’t sure I could do the same.

  Let’s find out, I thought. Other Eclipse Warriors had done it.

  My fusion blade hummed in my hand, a comforting presence, and my aura throbbed with power. My Eclipse nature was ready to devour everything in sight.

  It was time to give it that chance.

  I took a deep breath, cycled the strange alien air of the Far Horizon through my core, and stepped through the gate into the world of the Locust Court.

  The shift was disorienting and yanked my stomach up into my throat. There was solid ground beneath my feet, but everything else changed faster than I could comprehend. Forests bloomed and then collapsed into ash. Thickets of blackberries burst from the ground in coiled, thorny brambles, only to fade away when I got close to them.

  There was something familiar about this place. Not the chaos or instability, but the way it seemed to respect the edges of my presence.

  “It’s like the school,” I muttered.

  I concentrated on the horde and willed the shifting terrain to take me to them. It wasn’t easy, but the place slowly, painfully, bent to my will. The ground remained solid beneath my soles, and a stretch of ground ten feet ahead of me remained stable and clear of obstructions. That was the most I could do. If my core had still been at the initiate level, I likely wouldn’t have been able to even manage that.

  I pushed ahead on a collision course with the invading army. The path ahead of me was straight and true, but what burst from the ground on either side and behind me was another matter entirely. Ravens the size of grown men erupted from patches of moldy ground. Droplets of rain fell from a black sky and cried like children when they splashed into the dirt.

  “No,” I said. “None of this is real.”

  I was an Eclipse Warrior. I’d been built to defeat this madness, and that is what I was going to do. There was nothing to be gained by chasing after the invaders, when I could make them come to me.

  I stopped moving and sculpted my surroundings into a steep-walled ravine that funneled from its wide mouth to a narrow exit behind me. I stood in that gap, blade ready, determined to stop the horde from passing through to reach the portal. It took me what seemed like an hour to complete the task, and I finished not a moment too soon.

  The Locust Court poured into the ravine’s mouth in a boiling tide. Unlike the animalistic creatures I’d battled in the courtroom, these seemed more advanced. They wore crystalline armor covered in hooked spines and wielded jagged weapons that danced with sparks of jinsei. Aspects of violence and destruction, chaos and death, churned in the spirits’ auras as they bore down on me in a crazed flood.

  This was it.

  My last stand.

  My mind hung in a cold, dark space far removed from the fear that coursed through my veins or the hunger that poured from my Eclipse nature in an endless torrent. The grim calculus was obvious. There were too many enemies coming for me, and eventually they would wear me down and rip me limb from limb.

  If I couldn’t win, then I’d make the monsters pay for killing me. I’d hold them until Abi and the Portal Defense Force could seal the gate between worlds.

  I could do that.

  That was enough.

  I sank into my Eclipse Warrior nature. I felt the hunger bubble up within me like poison gas. I didn’t fight it or try to control it. This was what I was meant to do. It was the reason I’d been born, and I finally understood that. My core, aura, and blade were all in perfect unison. I was as ready as I’d ever be.

  The first wave of hungry spirits slammed into me, and Thief’s Shield technique devoured them. The shattered armor tumbled away from the wisps of their bodies and crashed into their allies. The next rank stepped up and I sheared through their chitinous blades with my fusion blade.

  My Eclipse nature transformed me into a tornado of destruction. My weapon carved through spirit bodies, while my Shield technique consumed their sacred energy and twisted their aspects to harden my aura. In this strange and alien world, I’d become more than I’d ever thought possible.

  It was a terrible thing to behold.

  My blade killed spirits on contact. It devoured their jinsei and stole their aspects. No sooner did an enemy come near me than it was consumed and its remains cast aside.

  I was an untouchable god of death.

  That power, though, had a price. The unrestrained dark urge consumed any spirit who touched my aura or was touched by my blade. It fed a constant stream of jinsei into my core, pushing it to its limits. The pain from an overfull core threatened to overwhelm me, and I pushed as much of it as I could into my body’s channels. I became stronger and faster than ever before.

  Much stronger and faster than my body could stand. My channels were overloading, and the jinsei they couldn’t contain burned through my flesh like acid. That damage couldn’t be healed by jinsei, and as the battle wore on, it would only become more serious.

  But I couldn’t stop. While I was up and fighting, the spirits wouldn’t get past me. They couldn’t reach Earth.

  That was all that mattered.

  I felt a gentle touch across the throbbing ache of my core and recognized the tingling sensation from the moments before Abi and the others had arrived. It must have been Clem and Rachel helping anchor the portal to my core. That meant Abi had gotten through to his people. They knew where I was. They’d find the gate. If I kept fighting and held the gap for just a bit longer, they could close the gateway forever.

  Then, I wouldn’t have to fight anymore.

  The fight melted into a timeless slough of burst bodies and jinsei. Time had no meaning in the heart of darkness, and survival was the only thing that mattered. My channels burned, so overloaded with sacred energy they glowed through my skin.

  And, then, the spirits retreated. They pulled back from the fray and set up a perimeter around me.

  I had no idea what they were up to, but I knew it wouldn’t be good.

  The Truth

  THE LOCUST COURT HAD given up on getting past my choke point and had called in the big guns.

  The army of spirits split down the middle to reveal a group of the Lost. The pale figures advanced toward me with determined strides, their black eyes fixed on mine with a hypnotic intensity. Their hands were wreathed in black fire and the ground smoked where their feet touched it.

  “You cannot stop this,” their leader said. She was more muscular and taller than the rest, her physical presence the most imposing of all the Lost I’d seen so far. “We are the inevitable price of betrayal, and the Empyreals must pay what is owed.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to start this song and dance again. In the next few minutes, the portal between this world and the Far Horizon would close forever. Spending eternity debating what I could or could not do wasn’t my idea of fun.

  “I’ve already been over this,” I shot back. “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.”

  “I can take you to your mother,” the tall woman said. “Right now. You can make sure she’s safe while we deal with the betrayers.”

  The offer hit me like a bucket of ice water.

  “You don’t know where she is.” It was a trick. There was no way it could be true. The Lost hadn’t even been on Earth before I was born. They’d been here, trapped on the wrong side of the Far Horizon.

  “We do,” she said. “Eve and I were friends, Jace. Long before you were born. I was called Larissa then. Now I am simply First among the Lost. Come with me, and your mother will be happy to tell you the truth.”

  It couldn’t be true.

  Niddhog had told me the Utter War had ended a hundred years ago. That would make my mother much, much older than she looked. I couldn’t see how that was even possible. Only the most advanced practitioners could slow their aging and extend their lives for centuries.

  Memories of my mother’s strength flashed through my thoughts like blasts of lightning. She’d taught me to fight despite my broken core. She’d healed my shattered h
and at the tournament. She’d somehow designed the machina...

  The truth crashed through my thoughts like a wrecking ball. The pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that was my life clicked together to form a picture that made me want to run screaming into the darkness.

  “No.” The tip of my fusion blade drooped to the ground. The more I understood about the world, the more I hated it.

  “You see it now,” the woman said, her voice low and calm.

  The Lost in my cottage had insisted I’d guided them back when I’d healed my core and become the first of a new generation of Eclipse Warriors. If that was true, then they’d planned for that to happen.

  Somehow, the Lost had crippled me before I was born. They’d forced me into the misery I’d suffered. That’s why my core was veiled. They didn’t want anyone to know what I was.

  “Tycho did this,” I snarled. He was the veil’s creator. Zephyr had told me as much.

  “He helped, but he was not the architect of this plan,” First said dismissively. “His veil hid you, and the others, from discovery. And, of course, he pushed you harder than the rest. Perhaps that is why you were the first to manifest.”

  The first...

  There were other people out there, kids like me with broken cores and ruined lives. And none of them had gotten as far as me. Their lives must be horror shows.

  “The Empyreals killed your people,” I said. “But what you did to me was worse. You stole my life and gave me pain. You turned me into a slave before I was even born.”

  “Pain is the crucible of greatness,” First said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “You are better for what you have experienced. And, now, you will be a king. A truly perfect warrior with the power of an Eclipse warrior and the soul of a pure Empyreal. We will, of course, have to cull the others, but that is a detail you will not have to concern yourself with.”

  “You’re lying,” I shouted at her. My mother would never have agreed to this insanity. She wouldn’t have let her own child be turned into a monster. She was kind and good. She’d sheltered me through my life, she’d taught me how to fight. “I’m not like you.”