by Nazri Noor
The glassy dome appeared several feet above us, formed wide enough to cover the combined forces of the Lorica and the Boneyard. I watched, my stomach in knots, as the Heart’s attack plummeted towards our location.
Please let it destroy the rift, I thought. Please let us survive.
The world turned red. The beam of the Heart struck the bubble, its hideous energy running like scintillant blood around the outside of the force field, bathing the night in crimson. It roared like a dragon, smashing against us like a massive, unending hail of ruby fire. Odessa remained steadfast, but Bastion screamed, the veins in his neck bulging. Hairline cracks appeared all over the dome, and I held my breath.
But the shield held fast. The red light of the Heart disappeared just in time. The two mages lowered their hands, Odessa falling to her knees, Bastion scrambling to help her. I blinked my eyes quickly, clearing the haze of red away from my vision, and my heart sank.
Faint red sparks shimmered in the singed grass of what had once been a clearing. The expanse of forest around us had been all but obliterated in a huge, perfect circle, trees splintered and smashed into the earth, the ground itself pummeled and flattened by the force of the beam.
But the rift was still there. The Scions’ attack had failed.
Ancient, powerful words sang through the night, hissed and sputtered by two voices. Carver and Asher raced forward and slammed their palms against the rift, their hands wreathed in plumes of arcane energy. They’d successfully used the time Odessa and Bastion had bought us to prepare a dispelling, to destroy the rift.
Any minute now, I thought. Any minute and the rift would shatter into a hundred tiny shards, the way the other portals had, before disintegrating into nothingness. But its energies only kept on swirling and shimmering. Worse: it was widening. Larger than we’d ever seen.
“I thought that your spell was supposed to shut those things down, Carver.” Prudence had called on her own power, her fists covered in blue flames, ready to fight. “And this time you doubled the effect. What’s happening?”
“I don’t understand it,” Carver said, one hand held to his forehead, rubbing at his temples. “This simply isn’t possible. None of the rifts we’ve encountered thus far have resisted the dispelling. Unless – ”
He stroked at his beard, his eyes going distant, and to my chagrin, filling with something that resembled fear. I followed his gaze to the portal, as something that wore the shape of a woman stepped through. No, not a woman, exactly, but the caricature of one.
In place of hair she had a corona of horns growing out of her skull. Her eyes were huge and black, insectoid. The thing-woman wore no clothing, but something that resembled a carapace, like plates of gleaming, white armor.
“That can’t be her,” I breathed. “She’s dead. They took her, they killed her. That can’t be Thea.”
Carver’s fingers dug into my arm once more. When he spoke, his voice was small, and distant.
“Dustin,” he said. “That isn’t Thea.”
Chapter 32
“Yelzebereth,” Carver said. “The White Mother. The womb of corruption. Mother of legions.”
“Could have fooled me,” I hissed back. “She looks a hell of a lot like Thea.”
“That is no coincidence. The Eldest like to twist their servants and worshippers into shapes familiar to them. It stems from sheer egoism – from wanting to make everything in their image.”
A shiver ran up my spine as I watched Yelzebereth cast her baleful glare across the clearing, her eyes cold, unblinking. “Is there a reason they call her the White Mother, then?”
Carver’s lips tightened. “You’ll see. Everyone,” he shouted. “Fall back.”
And we did, just in time, as Yelzebereth walked further out of the portal, her steps careful and precise. As she entered our reality, I understood why her movements seemed so slow, so deliberate: attached to her back was a massive, glistening capsule, black and segmented, like the abdomen of some huge insect queen. She walked, and kept walking, until the heaving bulk of the thing attached to her – about the size of a damn bus – slithered and wriggled along with her body into the clearing.
“Oh, hell, no,” Sterling said.
“Oh God,” I murmured. “Is that why?”
Carver didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t just some bizarre feature of Yelzebereth’s alien physiology, after all. It was an egg sac, used to deliver her twisted children, bringing them into her world, and into ours, across dimensions. So this was what one of the Eldest looked like. The mad being’s slimy belly quivered. My stomach turned.
The White Mother’s lips parted, and I held my breath as I listened for her words. But she never spoke. She coughed, sputtered, then lurched over, her mouth opening wider, ever wider, until her cheeks split at the seams as her jaw came off its hinges completely. The White Mother retched and heaved, and from her perfect mouth spilled the first of what appeared to be wriggling, black snakes.
But I knew that shape. The slithering thing speeding towards my feet looked like just one piece of the shrikes that my allies and I had come to know and hate, a singular tentacle. The White Mother kept up her horrible, guttural vomiting, spitting a ghastly quantity of her spawn onto the grass.
Other Dustin had halted his assault with the blades of the Dark Room, as if to accommodate these new guests. Against the dark green of wet grass, it was incredibly difficult to make out the creatures as they snaked their way through the undergrowth.
That didn’t stop me from launching a fireball at the one closest to me. The flames exploded in a burst large enough to fry five or six of the larvae, but there were more where they came from. The forest was awash with furious arcane energy, flashing blue and green and white as my companions fire spells to obliterate the White Mother’s offspring.
Distant leaves rustled and trees swayed as Vanitas, in blade and in scabbard, came rushing back through the forest, ready to join the fight. Not just join, in fact. It looked like he was interested in ending it as quickly as he could, sailing in a direct, unwavering line towards the White Mother’s head.
“She’s the one who killed me,” Vanitas thundered in my mind. “I recognize her. I’m gonna gut her. Split her open, then cut out her insides.”
“It isn’t her,” I thought back. “But hurt her as much as you want. If you can. And be careful.”
Hah. I should learn to take my own advice. I danced away from another of the White Mother’s larva, vaulting out of its path in time to reposition my dagger in my hand, then falling to my knee to stab the little fucker straight down its middle. It was the kind of slick, surprise move I didn’t even know I was capable of, the kind that made me swivel my head around looking for approval, but everyone was too busy fighting their own quota of monsters to notice.
The White Mother’s stock had run out, though. That, or she was far too busy fending off Vanitas’s attacks with her bare hands, the fingers of which ended in massive, razor-sharp talons. Yelzebereth’s lips were curled far back enough to show her fangs, smeared as they were with the slick black liquid that accompanied the birth of the shrikes.
Surely she hadn’t penetrated our reality just because Other Dustin called for her, just to puke out several dozen mostly harmless ground slugs. And as if hearing my thoughts, the White Mother’s obsidian eyes locked with mine. With black, sharp teeth, she grinned.
“Out the other end,” Sterling cried out. “I am so tired of this shit.”
The White Mother’s enormous abdomen was quivering harder, this time because it was ejecting the fully-grown form of the things it was vomiting out of its mouth. A shrike burst wetly from out of her egg sac, its body glistening in black slime, and it picked itself up off the grass, stumbling, shambling. The White Mother brought her hands to her cheeks in grotesque ecstasy as she birthed another shrike, and another, until the clearing was filled with the shrill, high-pitched ululations of her corrupted brood.
And before I could even gather enough of my en
ergies to form a fireball, a sphere of flames exploded just by my feet. The heat itself was enough to scare me away, but it was the sheer explosive impact of the projectile that threw me off balance.
I looked up, scowling, already aware of the fireball’s source. Fucking Other Dustin. “Get down here so I can rip you apart,” I shouted.
The homunculus only smiled and said nothing. He raised both his hands, and at first I thought that he had gathered two large fireballs in them. How wrong I was. The light came from the dozens of little spheres he’d effortlessly created. They hovered in his palm, like fireflies – then zoomed towards the ground, scattering in different directions.
The forest turned bright orange from the sheer quantity of Other Dustin’s grenades. That asshole had a direct line to an insane amount of spiritual force, tapping right into Nyx’s supply. He wouldn’t be able to pull off these feats otherwise. If only I could take the Crown of Stars from him, wear it myself. Then I could take down the White Mother. At least then I would have a chance of –
“Fuck,” I shouted again, dodging another salvo of Other Dustin’s flaming bombs, three of them slamming into the ground in succession. I scrambled away from the fires they lit in the brush, gritting my teeth as I tested my connection to the Dark Room, like some fucked up magical version of resetting my wifi router and hoping for the best. No response. No signal.
But I still had my brain, didn’t I? Maybe I was taking the wrong approach. I dashed in a wide arc around the White Mother and her shrieking children, looking for the first telepath I could find – Royce, as it turned out.
“Distract the homunculus,” I said, pointing up at Other Dustin. “Tell the others.”
“No, you tell the others,” Royce said, lobbing his own fireball at one of the shrikes, turning it into a writhing mass of tentacles and flames. “If you haven’t noticed I’m kind of busy at the moment and – ”
“Royce,” I said, clutching him by the shoulder. “Please. You gotta trust me. You gotta trust in – ”
“Don’t fucking say it.” His eyes flicked up and down my body. “And I don’t know why I’m listening to you when you’re half-naked and covered in your own blood, because you look completely insane, but fine. Consider it done.”
He touched two fingers to his temple, like he was activating some unseen electronic device. From around the clearing heads turned in our direction, if only briefly. At least half of them nodded, understanding. That was good enough for me.
I broke away from Royce as he covered his entire fist in flames and punched the living daylights out of a shrike. I ran until I was close to Prudence, who was kicking shrikes into exploded giblets that burned blue from her arcane fire. Next to her was Gil, who used his talons to shred anything that came too close. Asher, I noticed, and Romira were doing what they could to pelt Other Dustin with magic missiles.
Okay. He was preoccupied, and I’d found good enough cover. I took off my shoe, sucked in a heaving chestful of air, then ran my dagger across the sole of my foot. I hissed at the pain as black blood bloomed on my skin, but hey, we were running out of options, and I had to get creative. So the Dark Room wouldn’t listen? I was bloody well going to make it.
I winced at the initial pain of moving around the glade not only barefoot, but with a gash cut into my sole. I grimaced as I felt every blade of grass that made contact with my open wound, but after a quarter of the way the cold air and the sheer adrenaline pumping through my blood numbed the pain. Plus I still had to hurl fireballs of my own making to help with the tide of shrikes the White Mother was pushing out of her horrible womb.
Yelzebereth’s eyes snapped towards me, even through the thick of battle. I couldn’t have been imagining things. She could hear my thoughts. How else was she picking up so quickly on everything? Again she said nothing, only grinning at me. Then the White Mother threw her head back, and screamed.
The sound was horrific, as terrible and as alien as the shrill keening of the rift that she had used to enter our world. It mixed the discordance of flutes with the screeching of metal – and what sounded convincingly to me like the voice of a woman screaming as she was being flayed alive.
From above her, Other Dustin descended gently, the shadows at his feet lowering like a moving pedestal. He shrugged off the magical projectiles the others flung at him, ignoring them as if they were as harmless as flea bites.
“You call, and I come, White Mother,” the homunculus cooed, commanding the shadows to recede until his feet were planted firmly on the ground. Then he went to his knees, embracing his mother by the thigh, planting a kiss on one of her cruelly taloned hands. “You call, so I am here.”
And all the while Yelzebereth screamed, like a siren to signal the end of days, like a trumpet meant to herald the apocalypse. And from the ground at her feet, from all around her, erupted tentacles as black as night, flailing and whipping indiscriminately, bashing her own shrike children, swatting them into the forest, and striking Gil and Sterling hard enough to send them both flying.
I looked on in mounting terror as a creeping familiarity came over me. The White Mother was conjuring shapes and swords from out of the darkness, using them as weapons to smash and to slash at her enemies. It looked very much – too much like how Other Dustin had taken full control of the shadows of the Dark Room to create his own meadow of cutting black grass.
It looked too much like the power that dwelled in my very heart.
Chapter 33
Cold sweat ran down my neck. So this was it, then. All this time I’d been using the Dark Room I had never once paused to consider that I was tapping into the same unholy energies that powered the Eldest. At least on a visual level, it was clear to me that the White Mother was using the same horrible shadow magic that I had access to.
It was clear to everyone else, too. Prudence had retreated far enough to safety, but her face, illuminated in the azure fire burning at her knuckles, was rapt in shock. She looked between me and the White Mother, recognizing the field of spears, the storm of swords. I caught Carver staring as well, his expression, perhaps mercifully, unreadable in the moment.
But this wasn’t the time for doubt. Shouts of renewed vigor rang across the battlefield as Romira and Royce sent balls of flame sailing towards Other Dustin’s vulnerable body, as Herald shot huge, lethal icicles to pierce him from stem to stern. Across the way I caught the glow of pale green energy as Asher executed a spell of his own.
Wicked spires of sharp bone rose from the earth by the White Mother’s feet, but she smashed them with a single slash of her talons. Yelzebereth only shrieked harder, flicking her hands in a strange, jerking gesture. As her fingers turned up, so did the shadows, the tentacles of darkness forming a cocoon around Other Dustin, a sheath made of blackest midnight.
The spells meant to destroy and assail Other Dustin crashed against the ebony shield, dissipating into wisps of elemental nothingness. The White Mother recognized one of her own brood, and she was protecting him. And even she knew that the homunculus wasn’t as expendable as the shrikes. Surely she knew what it meant for him to wear the Crown of Stars.
And what would the Eldest do with such power?
Fuck that. No more hesitation. I kept on running, my bleeding foot aching with the contact, hurting ever more as the White Mother continued her horrific, wordless song. In my mind I summoned Vanitas to return to me, and without hesitation he sped through the darkness, whistling and screaming through the air towards my body. Then I took the final step, that last bloody footprint the one thing I needed to complete the sigil. I looked across the clearing, seeing none of the redness of my blood against the wet, black grass, but I knew it was there, seeping into the ground.
Vanitas stopped precisely as he made contact with my palm, and I clenched my fingers to grasp him by the hilt. The star-metal was rough, cold, and ancient within my hand. I fell to one knee, stabbing Vanitas into the earth.
I closed the circle.
The world around me exploded in blood
, wisps and whorls of crimson gushing from the circle that I had drawn with the traces of my own vitality. The red transformed quickly into black, blood turning into shadow, cascading wetly across the top of the circle to create a dome of midnight. I heard my friends shouting in alarm as my ritual came to completion. As the final threads and tendrils of shadow closed a gap somewhere in the roof of the sphere, I heard Herald call my name.
The White Mother stopped screaming, and even Other Dustin rose to his feet, glancing about in alarm. In the gloom I felt comfort, even with the cold of the Dark Room’s shuddering, hungering mists. This chill penetrated to the bone, but it was familiar enough to think of as home. I’d done it. By giving enough of my blood, by casting a circle, I had seduced the Dark Room back to me. And with that surge of renewed power, I had brought both Other Dustin and the White Mother to the very source of my dark magic.
In the darkness I could see the White Mother’s black eyes grow wet with something like fear. She glared around her, calling out in a sibilant, alien tongue as she pushed shrike after shrike out of her tainted womb, summoning more of her offspring. Glimmering pinpoints of white light appeared in the air above Other Dustin’s head. He’d reengaged the Crown of Stars, to call on its power again. But he couldn’t wrest control of the Dark Room from me, not anymore.
Here, within the Dark Room, I was home. And here, within the Dark Room, I was the master.
Voicelessly I called for the starving denizens of the Dark Room to clamber out of their black corners, to creep out of cyclopean corridors long forgotten within that shadowy chamber’s huge, twisting mazes, out of its tenebrous tunnels. And so they came, rushing, reaching out with spiraling talons, with jaws and fangs shaped out of smoke, these apparitions that had served me for so long.
