by Jade Alters
“You want to unite the Realms again? You’re even batshit crazier than I thought,” I growl at Deliah and Horace, who finally staunches the bloodflow of his hand. The bowl is about a third full.
“Just here, in the Epicenter,” Dorian explains, still mostly to Cece, “A space through which all who pass can unleash their true potential from the True Realm. We’ll need power to break off from the Council. Too much for them to contend with. It’s the only way this doesn’t end in bloodshed.”
“And the blood shed by the Normans…by the Academy students who stayed behind to protect our base… That doesn’t count?” Cece simmers. “I was raised by two of them!”
“I know that! It haunts me every day!” Dorian cries back. Behind him, Horace steps away from the bloody bowl. Ferres Haruman takes his place.
“Blood of the Origas… They still need a Warlock and Shifter’s blood to perform the ritual. The others are just here to stop us,” Helena realizes. Ferres takes up the stone knife. He poises to shed his precious blood for power.
“A better future has to be built on sacrifice, Cece,” Dorian pleads one last time. I watch her, watching him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen those blue eyes glow with such raw hurt.
“Any future built on a sacrifice like this…can’t be better, Dad,” Cece whimpers. She watches him for any pang of emotion. Guilt. Sorrow. Anger. But Dorian is concrete. He remains as a wall, along with Lucidous and Fey Rorelia, to stand between us and their ritual. One last wall for us to break through.
Cece clenches both her fists. She takes the step. One foot over the line is all it takes. Everyone makes a move for someone else. We have to break through. They have to keep us out. All at once, the Epicenter becomes the stage for an unwritten, biblical entry in the books of supernatural history.
“Go for the bowl! Don’t let it fill!” I cry out for those with their faculties still about them. For those not blinded by the rage of a grudge they hold against someone in the pit. That is, to say, for none of us. Lucidous blurs away from his group to stop us. A second blur, Bart, crashes into him, to hold him still.
“Have you learned nothing of toying with the forces of other Realms?” Bart digs in. “How could you do this, without consulting me?”
“I knew you lacked the drive…to do what we must!” Lucidous counters with a hard shove. The two entangle in a tempest of color and motion I can’t keep track of.
“I really want to hit Lucidous,” Darius whispers to me.
“Go. Help Bart,” I agree. Darius grabs my shoulder before he goes. We meet eyes.
“Kick their asses,” he urges me, then he’s gone. I don’t even need to ask. I set my sights on the people who brought me into this world as another chess piece on their board. Horace and Deliah. It all led to this.
I rush down onto the battleground. On my way, clashes erupt all around me. Dorian builds fire in his transforming throat for Stephanie, who appears from the ground before him. He hesitates just long enough for Cece to slam his armored face with her own scaly gauntlet. Helena fires a lightning bolt ahead of me, straight for Ferres. The blast is stopped only by a trick from my parents, similar to the one I used to capture Helena’s lightning. She abandons the spell to try and help Lee and Serge get past Fey Rorelia. They can’t seem to cut and burn faster than she can regrow the thick wall of reeds that blocks them from advancing.
My feet slide across the dirt in front of my own targets. I’m not fool enough to make the first move. Horace taught me better than that. So I stop and stare at them. But they’re not fool enough either. Someone has to force a hand. I snap open a portal under Ferres, to drop him from where the Academy once sat in the sky. Horace turns to snap it closed. This cleaves off one of Ferres’ feet, but leaves him free to bleed in their forsaken bowl. Roran holds Ferres up to bleed him into the bowl, feet or no. I take the opportunity to hurl a portal at Horace’s exposed side. The portal bounces off of Deliah’s illusory shield, as I expected. That’s why I opened a second portal, through which the first is transported. It appears behind them, but opens, rather than hits them. From within, my actual body jumps out. The trick they’ve been focusing on dissolves.
I come out swinging, an illusory blade in each hand. It slices Horace and Deliah through at once. Or at least, the illusions they made me believe were them. Their illusory clones waver out of existence like a heat mirage. The true Horace and Deliah appear on either side of me. I feel a touch of ice, then a surge of heat through my front and back. Before I know what it is, I’m being wrenched around like a ragdoll. Horace’s spear skewers me through my left side to the ground. Deliah’s impales my right, pulling me the opposite way. She and Horace regard me for the first time as parents, some sick imitation of remorse on their faces. Then they vanish again.
I hang in the air, eyes wide while my feet kick. My fingers clamber up and down the trick pikes. They smear running rubies everywhere. I can hardly believe it’s happening, even as my hands grasp the wounds, the weapons. My strength fades. with each hard pulse of my heart.
“Emery!” I hear someone scream, a hundred worlds away. It couldn’t be someone here. This must be a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up. But every time I manage to open my eyes from a hard blink, I’m right back there. Stuck through on both sides, hanging in the air.
By the time I feel hands on me, rushing to help, it’s too late. Roran fills the last empty lip of the stone bowl with his blood. Horace, Ferres and Roran join hands. Dorian unleashes a burst of flame to boil their fluids, and complete the ritual. A blinding column of yellow surges straight up into the blue moon. It all mixes together to light the Epicenter a haunting green. Silhouettes dance around me. Buildings twist into knots like the whole place has been sucked into a house of mirrors.
It must be the bloodloss. This can’t be happening. The walls between Realms can’t really be lowering. I watch in disoriented horror as Horace, Deliah, Dorian and the rest of the Kyrie leaders vanish into that column of light.
“Cece! Don’t!” someone else screams. But Cece’s outline appears, a body-shaped hole in that pure, shining pillar. She looks back at me, at the others huddled together around me for what little chance of survival we have. Then, Cece turns back. She steps into the light of the Epicenter. Of the True Realm.
True Potential
Darius,
The Epicenter
Cece steps through the wall of light that marks the boundary of the True Realm. The leaders of the Kyrie have already vanished inside. The screeches and yowls from inside make me fear to consider what’s happening to them. But, as soon as I lay my eyes on her, I have concern for only one.
“No,” I shiver when I see her. She hangs over the ground, lifted on two pikes, one through each side. A fountain of red pools beneath her shoes. Just then, the unmistakable weapons of her own accursed parents dissolve from her wounds. I zip in just in time to catch her. “Emery…Emery!” I scream down into her lightening face. Her eyelids don’t even give a flutter. Her arms dangle down, useless at her sides. Even so close to me, I can hardly hear her heart pumping. Each beat is weaker than the last. I throw my head back to cry out another name, the only one that might be able to help her. “Fey Deller!”
“What- oh my…” the mint-green girl appears at my side. To hear such fear shake her soft symphony of a voice reawakens a primal fear in me I thought long gone. The fear of death. I turn to her with a face soaked with water.
“Can you save her?” I whimper. Fey Deller runs two green palms over Emery’s gushing midsection. Helena appears on her other side while Rock and Hoster draw near behind us.
“Go. Help Cece before we’re all toast,” Helena manages to get out through her choking throat. She gives Rock’s arm a gentle shove. “Go! We’ll take care of Emery.” Rock and Hoster share an uneasy glance, before sprinting off for the cylindrical gate to the True Realm. Fey Deller clenches her eyes shut. Her forehead wrinkles. Two beads of amber bulge out in the corners of her twinging eyes. She shakes her head.
“No, that’s not good enough,” I snarl. “You have to…you have to save her!”
“I can’t, Darius,” says Fey Deller. She jostles backward from the impact of my palm. I bunch up the collar of her scorched uniform in a threatening fist. But her face stays exactly the same. Broken. “I can’t.”
“You…” I wrap her shirt so tight my fist shakes. Then I let the fabric slip from my hands. I hang my head down over her. Emery has become the farthest thing from her true self. Lifeless. Weak. Her true self…that’s it! “Help me get her to the column,” I say to Fey Deller and Helena.
“Darius…she won’t make it,” Helena whimpers.
“The hell she won’t!” I crackle back. All that stays me is a soft hand on my shoulder. I turn up to Fey Deller.
“If you move her…she’ll die,” she says. I let my head down. Brown tangles of wet hair dangle down over my eyes. Water streams unstaunchably from both eyes. My cheeks cascade with salty rapids like they haven’t in a lifetime.
“Fuck!” I scream into the blue-lit sky. I open my mouth wide. The blue moon glints off the ivory daggers from my top and bottom jaw.
“What are you doing?” Helena asks.
“Saving as much of her as I can,” I snarl. I puncture my lower lip with one of my own fangs. I just need a little blood to infuse my curse in her. Before either of the girls can stop me, I drive my fangs into Emery’s neck.
Cece,
The True Realm,
Warmth. Cold. Matter. Space. It all swirls around and merges into one confusing soup the second I touch that wall of pure energy. The gate to the True Realm couldn’t have been wider than fifty feet across, where it shot up from the Epicenter. Yet, inside…things like distance and size appear to be redefined.
Everything takes on the crater-pocked, clay texture of the blue moon. Every surviving skyscraper I can see through the energy wall. The ground beneath my feet. The little hole at the top of the column, where the light beam connects with its power source. And there’s more to see than just San Francisco through those energy walls, too. Lanky silhouettes lumber just on the other side of the boundary, in the Realm I opened with the Vampires. Gray Fiends. The long fleshy chains of Silver Fiends lurk in a different section of the veil. Beasts swirl through foreign environments of massive trees and towering mountain peaks. The Fiends from which all creatures like me were born. Like us, they’ve come to see the unity of Realms.
I hardly have a chance to glance up at the Kyrie leaders who jumped in before me before a surge of pure sensation rips through me. A river of electricity surges between every one of my cells. I dig my fingers through my hair, only to find that they’re no longer fingers. My hands have been replaced with scaly gauntlets, bigger than they’ve ever been before. I comb out long strands of my dark hair only to find it’s changed colors. Black and silver strands drape down all around me. Two wings burst from my back, stretching into a wide canopy of skin. Then two more appear, then two more. But these wings are not organic. They burn like a silver-blue flame, manifested from spiritual energy inside me. Dragon. Astral. The True Realm has given me my true form. I shine two glaring sapphire headlights from my eyes up at the similarly enhanced Kyrie leaders above.
Fey Rorelia’s limbs spiral and grow like the mighty trunks of trees. Horace and Deliah steam with tendrils of shadow and sharp rays of light. Lucidous’ back arches over while his limbs snap loose and extend, not unlike the Gray Fiends. His already red eyes glow with a new bloodlust. Roran’s shape loses definition, fluctuating madly between forms both animate and inanimate. Ferres’ body is encircled in a vortex of flame and particles of rock. Then I see him. He sees me. We hardly recognize one another.
Dorian’s scale plates are the size of my head. His wings radiate flame like two canvas grills. Orange glow seeps from beneath every inch of his jet black armor. His eyes glare down at me while his mouth cracks open. Each tooth crooks forward and back like a torturous blade. I won’t wait for him to make the first move this time. I have to move now, while he and the others are still screeching with transformational energy.
A single stroke of my six wings launches me up at my father faster than I could have known. The world screeches around me for all of half a second. I’m there. I slash a handful of claws up at him, but he bats them away. He fires a scaly knee into the side of my head. I reel off to the side into a roll. A flick of my wings unleashes a surprising wave of blue energy. The blast of it separates us by a few feet. I operate on instinct, before I’m even sure what each new ability does.
I open my jaw to unleash a blue flare. It hits Dorian’s chest and rolls around to condense behind him. He concentrates a beam of crimson inferno right through it. I can feel it fighting with me. Burning through. I cut right just before his flame blasts through mine. I eye him from the side, gauging if he’ll really go for the fatal blow. How far he’s willing to push it for his precious new order.
In the tense pause, I can’t shake an odd feeling that there’s another Astral with us, now. One very much like me. I realize, as I bank a wide turn around Dorian, that’s because it is me. A shimmering blue imitation of me hovers behind him, born from my enhanced spirit breath. To my surprise, when I urge it to strike, it does. Dorian throws his head back to unleash a pained cry. My spirit-clone’s talons scrape down through his armor. Dorian spins around to scald it from existence with a spit of blood-red fire. He turns his eyes back around to me. We both crack our jaws to unleash our flame.
Before either of us can unleash, Fey Rorelia lugs her enormous trunk-arm at me. Before it connects, a gigantic Astral tentacle seizes the trunk. I trace the blue limb down to the growing blue storm of Hoster. The True Realm has unleashed his strength, body or no. I open my jaw even wider to summon a deeper breath of spirit fire. Lucidous fires across my vision like an arrow to stop me. He blurs up a tilted column of debris and leaps for me, straight through a flood of crimson flame. It’s Lee, rising up at my side to provide cover fire in his enormous true form.
Dorian unleashes his bombshell of flame. It ripples and swirls through the air, distorting everything with the intensity of heat around it. Before it reaches me, the fire hits Rock, who transforms into a thick, black steel wall. He’s backed by River, who shifts into a shimmering white one. When Dorian doesn’t relent, and his fire forces Rock to fall away, River is there to shield me. She’s there to help me build my spirit fire even bigger. River can only hold out against Dorian’s flame for so long, but friends and allies leap through the veil of the True Realm from all around me.
Stephanie’s Astral form condenses into a sharp, blue torpedo. She fires up into the underside of Dorian’s jaw. His flame sputters up at the moon for just long enough. River shifts into an enormous raven and glides away from my spirit fire. The explosion from my throat launches a firehose blast of blue flame so vast and bright, it blots Dorian out for a moment. I keep it steady as long as I can. The light of it hits everything and everyone inside the True Realm. When the light fades, Dorian hangs loose in the air, his wings extinguished. His shimmering eyes are the only sign he’s still alive. Then his body reignites. Silver scars shine all over him, but he’s far from out. A confusing mix of relief and fear bubbles in my gut.
“You had such potential.” I jerk my head sideways at Horace Dalshak. Over my shoulder, Deliah hovers, ready to strike from behind. Just like they got Emery. I prepare to spin and unleash a fiery, Astral blast. But, before I can, a truly massive shard of translucent crystal whooshes straight for Horace. His palms flatten out in front of him. The very rays of light leaping from his body converge in a solid, white wall to block it. I trace the path of the crystal attack back to its wielder. Serge. He’s already materializing a second crystal weapon from the light in his own body.
“You don’t know the first thing about potential!” Serge bubbles. The white sheet of light grows beneath his flickering fingers.
“Nor you, about respect!” Deliah shouts. She raises her hands to conjure a collection of smaller crystals above
her head. I hardly believe my eyes when a shadow zips above Deliah. It takes my eyes a moment to identify it as a body. It takes another to figure out just who it is, or was. Emery stands with a foot atop two of Deliah’s crystals. At least, it looks like Emery. This girl is paler. Her eyes have a glow even brighter than her formerly honey-gold. Now they look like orange stars.
“We learned from you,” she says. It certainly sounds like Emery, if a bit more sinister. She digs her heels in, to shatter Deliah’s crystals to dust. “Hello, mother!” She falls and snaps her arms around Deliah’s shoulders. I shudder as Emery’s new ivory appendages cut out from her gums. Fangs. She digs all four of them deep in Deliah’s screaming throat. The woman plummets to the ground as Serge’s crystal finally breaks through Horace’s shield. The former Magister lifts his legs over the slicing blade and plunges to help his wife.
“The spell stems from the bowl!” Serge shouts up to me. I shoot a glance down at the stony bowl of blood in the podium. It still bubbles from Dorian’s dragonsfire. “We’ll do what we can to keep them off you! We have to put it out!” Though my new Dragon-Astral snout seems incapable of speech, I nod to let Serge know I understand.
We know how to end this. But can we? Can I?
Emery,
Nothing gives me greater pleasure than tasting the fear in Deliah’s blood. After she skewered me through and left me to die. After she pretended to feel something as she looked back. The pure, sweetness of her rotten iron is the crispest of sensations since I woke up new. The first thing I noticed, when I opened my eyes, was that I could feel Darius’ pulse. It was so loud and strong, compared to usual. The next thing I noticed was that we were about to lose. That we could change that.
Deliah and I hit the ground. I don’t loosen up on her for a second. She kicks and wrestles, but I keep my teeth in. I rip and bleed her all over the earth. It’s all I can do to return the favor. What breaks her free is Horace’s sling of a crystal dagger. It hits my shoulder hard enough to wrench me away. Deliah rolls over and hobbles to her husband’s side. They’re forced to part ways when Serge’s humongous crystal blade slices down into the earth between them. He trots up beside me.
