Not without time.
Ada could make herself plenty of time.
She raised a hand and squeezed time to a crawl.
Okay, okay. Code could be written in the air, right? She had seen it hovering around the Elysium crystal. She could get something together. Something simple.
Force! There were plenty of sigils for directing force. She thought of the simplest one she possibly could, and from her extended hand she called forth the tiny, interwoven spindles of dark code that would be her weapons.
She could reach for Isavel herself, but that was too far, and she didn’t want to kill Isavel. For whatever reason. She wasn’t even completely sure Isavel wanted to kill her, either. So she stopped halfway and, in mid-air, started rearranging the spindles into shapes. Like a thousand-legged spider without a head, the spindles wrapped and knotted around one another, forming the shape of a sigil of force - flipped around, so it faced Isavel.
When the sigil was solid and she bridged the final gap in code, she was greeted with the amazing sight of her sigil coming to life in incredibly detailed slow motion. A ripple of energy in the sigil, in mid-air - how was such a thing even possible? - flowed through all the right channels until it hit the centre, and a distortion coursed through the air between the sigil and Isavel.
Ada let time slip back to normal, and suddenly Isavel buckled and was thrown back. She staggered to her feet, eyes wide with fear and surprise, and Ada was suddenly grinning. She could do anything. She was going to win this.
Chapter 17
Isavel was flung back by a seething chain of darkness, the coil striking out towards her and blowing her off her feet with a snap. She had never seen anything like it, not gift nor relic nor anything else. It was magic. Sorcery. She could think of no other word.
She jumped back to her feet, light as a feather - and then, suddenly, the ground underneath them heaved and groaned. Something was changing, and Isavel had even less time to lose.
She snapped out a palm and a shot in Ada’s direction, but the sorceress didn’t even need to use her shield. Instead Ada raised her hands and summoned something - some kind of coder sigil - in mid-air between them, and suddenly Isavel’s shots were turned back against her. She swung up her shield and caught them, but this was getting harder.
Luckily, she had more than a few tricks up her sleeve herself.
She feinted to the left, shifted her skin to a brilliant blue-white, and at the same time fired off a large, slow-moving pair of shots in that same direction. Even as she let them loose, she shifted back to a dull grey matching the ruins around them and jumped to the right. Ada would be confused, and she could get around the side -
Ada completely ignored the distraction and struck out with force again, knocking Isavel away from the doorway. How had she noticed the trick in a mere splinter of a second? Isavel glimpsed a crystal in that room, though, glowing angrily with light. Somehow, she knew that was what she needed to destroy. The gods had said as much, hadn’t they? Isavel’s duty, Ada’s will. She would fulfill her duty - after all, no human will could outcompete a duty to the gods. What else could they have meant?
She tried firing through the doorway directly, but Ada blocked her again with her magic. This wasn’t working. She needed to try…
Isavel fired several blasts at the ceiling, and Ada stared at them in confusion. Dust and concrete chips rained down from above, and she held up a hand to keep them from hitting her eyes, batting the larger chunks away with her dark sorcery. The building continued to heave and howl, and Isavel felt her sense of balance wavering. The room they were in was moving , somehow.
She darted forwards, dragon’s gift lifting her near weightlessness. She cut through the air like a blade straight into Ada, knocking her down. Even as she did, the sorceress’ preternaturally fast magic responded, and Isavel felt crawling claws gripping at her. She called up shields, small scales of energy moving across her skin without a care for where a warrior’s shields usually lived, and struck Ada’s head with her first, hoping to knock her out.
Then something writhed black and exploded and knocked them both apart. Isavel righted herself immediately, and Ada was slouched against a trembling column, bringing more magic to bear. There was no time for this. Isavel roared, feeling the rage and wings and fiery heat of dragonblood, and from her throat spewed a cloud of jagged golden-red flame and light that filled the entire room.
Yet Isavel could see through it to an extent, her hunter’s gift still doing the job of picking out her targets. Ada, it seemed, could not. Isavel fired a shield into the blaze, striking near Ada and throwing her to the side with explosive force.
Sweating, trembling, Isavel raised a shield and prepared for a counter-attack, but Ada lay still, bloodied, lying on the ground amidst debris that was shifting and sliding with the heaves of the ruins beneath them. She didn’t move.
So. That was that.
Heart pounding, Isavel took a step back, looking at that unmoving form, that familiar face, and she felt a chill slither down her spine and wrap itself around her heart. Why? Why did this have to happen? What had the gods been telling Ada, in their ancient tongue, that she was so angry about - and why hadn’t she stepped aside? It would have been so easy to just… step aside.
Isavel took a deep breath, then another, and began to notice strange light filtering into the room. It looked like… daylight. She was well underground, in the heart of a mountain. How was that possible?
She turned to the crystal room, which lay up a set of stairs, and started climbing. Then, quite suddenly, the stairs and the room cracked, and the chamber containing the crystal rose up, torn free of the ruins and floating in the throes of magic.
“No!”
She ran forward, shields ready, firing one off at the crystal even as it ascended, but the impact missed as the room accelerated away and out of sight, accompanied only by a faint, dusty plume of blue-white light.
And then there was more light, and even more, and Isavel turned around to see cracks in the building all around them. The doorway into the antechamber where they had fought… She ran over to it. No. That was impossible .
A cavernous horror hollowed out her chest as she realized the room they were in was floating above the mountaintop. In the sky. Below them a vicious crater scarred the side of the peak, and between Isavel and the ground were dozens - hundreds of pieces of the ruins, walls and rooms and chunks of rock, all floating in the air, slowly ascending… and slowly being pulled inwards, towards where the crystal shrine had once been.
She looked back, and saw that the ruins nearest where the shrine had been was being torn apart, melting away into a great beam of light. Everything was moving closer, and Isavel knew just by looking that it would consume and destroy everything it touched.
She needed to escape. She needed to fly - but without any drones or dragons to carry her, what hope did she have?
She looked up at the crackling ceiling, to the skies and the ring and the gods beyond, and shouted. “Is this it?!”
There was no answer. The shrine had escaped her; she had failed. What use was she to the gods, now? What use was she to anyone?
Her eyes rested on Ada, lying dead on the floor. Or… Was she actually dead?
Isavel knelt by the fallen sorceress and took her hand, feeling for a pulse. It was there. She brought her face close to Ada’s, and could feel faint breaths. Ada’s eyes, all their vivaciousness, remained hidden beneath her flat eyelids, but she was not dead.
Isavel saw the gun that lay next to Ada and, almost without thinking, reached down and fixed it to her tattered pants. Then she picked Ada herself up, carrying her as a wounded comrade to the edge of the room they were in, as the walls crumbled and the antechamber was sucked into the pillar of light behind them. She looked down at the rocks and walls and debris floating in the air below them, and she began to see… stairs. Stairs that no human could cross, certainly, but Isavel and Ada were no mere humans.
Isavel felt for th
at lightness, that hollow in her core that was the gift she had found in the dragon’s heart. She extended it throughout her being, throughout her body, and she felt almost weightless - but Ada was still heavy, and Isavel could not share her gift. So Isavel started trying to push the hollow outwards, give it shape. What shape? How did the dragons fly? They didn’t just float around. They needed wings.
With the concrete beneath her feet starting to crack and splinter, she summoned up something like warrior’s shields, imbued with even more of that lightness and that hollow. She felt them grow, saw a hundred white blades of light extend on either side into great wings, brushing against the crumbling ruin. Then something began pulling at her back, dragging her towards that hungry pillar of light.
They were out of time.
Isavel jumped.
She heard her wings hum eerily in the wind, electric sounds of the gifts given a new song to sing. They were falling slower than Isavel had feared, and when a great chunk of the walls of the ruins rose up to meet her she landed cleanly on it, bouncing off to continue the descent.
Her arms were shaking, and there was sweat pooling on her brow and down her back. Slower than she had feared, but harder than she had hoped.
A dragon beat its wings in the distance, above the forests. She looked away and kept descending.
Another piece of mountain rock, another floating doorframe. Ada was starting to slip. Isavel wasn’t sure how much longer she could carry her. She let a bit of the lightness go and was falling faster now, kicking off debris, closer to the ground, the dragon - where was the dragon -
Suddenly Isavel realized the thing below her was not a rock, but the mountain face itself, scraggly trees and rock and shrubs, and then her wings started to give way, electric howling and screeching as she flipped over -
With a painful thud to her back, Isavel landed on solid ground, Ada thumping down on top of her and rolling off. For a moment she could only see stars and light - and then she realized those were real, and all there was. A great spike of bright light jutted from the wound in the world Ada’s magic had carved, and a whirl of debris was floating up around it, sucked up in twinkling flashes. And at the top of that spike of light was… something dark, something unreachable.
There was a beauty to the spectacle, something about the slow careening of the rocks and rubble into that bright gateway to oblivion. It was growing faster and faster, and Isavel wanted to see it reached its climax. There was nothing she could do to stop it, now, anyway.
“Get down!”
Suddenly there were arms around her, and Isavel was almost too exhausted to resist as Ada, suddenly awake again, pulled her back behind a shrub and down onto the ground. Isavel managed only to get another shield up, and even that effort was draining. Their eyes locked as Ada tried to explain.
“It’s going to -”
The word “explode” was insufficiently cataclysmic for what happened. For a brief instant the mountain gave screaming birth to a second sun, loud and bright, a howling firestorm of light and wind and fire. Isavel and Ada hunkered down underneath the shield as the shrub in front of them was flattened and the splintering death cries of trees and boulders all around them filled their ears.
In moments it was all over, only dust and smoke remained, and Isavel looked up to see the dark tip of that spike of light extending far into the sky, growing ever smaller, carried ever higher by the thinning beam of light born of the mountain’s scar.
A most incredible quiet settled on the mountain, even as dust and smoke curled away from the chaos. Isavel stood, helping Ada up, and the two traded stares again. Isavel was under no illusions about the situation; she knew what she ought to say.
“I… I have a walker to kill. And then I need to go tell my people the shrine is destroyed.”
Ada bit her lip. “It wasn’t destroyed, though.”
Isavel looked at Ada, and wondered what had brought her here. What strange twist of the gods. They were alike in that way, perhaps, torn from whatever they had known and brought somewhere new.
But Isavel was the Herald - there was no room in that title for her to be sentimental, or to feel kinship. Only duty. “Good luck, Ada Liu. I…”
She didn’t know if she wanted to meet her again. Isavel turned away, walked off, left Ada on the mountaintop. She heard nothing, not footsteps nor words, that might indicate Ada was doing anything besides staring at her as she went. Whether or not she wanted it, whether by the gods’ will or their own, they would meet again; Isavel was certain of that.
She descended the slopes through the pines and firs, keeping an eye out for the last dragon above, but it was nowhere to be seen. She listened for the sounds of battle, but there were none to be heard. She felt the breezy mountain air slowly give way to the slightly warmer, wetter coastal summer further down, and smelled no blood - only earth and wood and humidity. It was too quiet. Where had the ghosts gone?
She let her intuition guide her, following the slopes and ridges of the mountain as she descended to where she knew the ghosts had stood, not long ago. But now - now they were gone, it seemed, leaving only tracks and battle scars behind. She heard a few faint shots in the distance, towards the coast, the gasping remnants of a battle. That battle was on the verge of silence.
Isavel stepped into a flatter clearing and stopped at the sight of a man, kneeling down with his head hung backwards, as though communing with the gods. She felt like this was where ghosts should be, but this man was alone, and he was… not in this world.
She stepped closer. The bubble of unreality around him, as he walked the thousand worlds, was small and subtle compared to the horrific darkness of the afterlife the last walker had confronted her with. He was in some kind of forest.
She raised her voice as she approached. “Ghost. Walker. I’ve found you.”
The walker turned around, inside his bubble, and smiled at her. He shifted and settled onto his knees again, facing her. “So you have. Come closer.”
“I’m not an idiot.” She held up her palm and called forth the hunter’s gift, but he seemed oddly unfazed.
“You are welcome kill me. I am not afraid anymore. Ada, she… she did it.”
Isavel paused, her mind racing back to the explosion, to the shrine slipping out of her grasp. “Did what?”
“Come and see for yourself. See with your own eyes, before you kill me. Don’t you want to see what the afterlife looks like, now?”
Isavel knew what the afterlife looked like, though - at least the one she was destined to. It was a barren, featureless hell, an empty void without humanity or peace. Only anguish existed there.
“I’ve seen it.”
He smiled, and shook his head. “Not like this. I’ve been dead, White Witch, for hundreds of years. I know what it was like until today, and I promise you - it has changed. It’s no longer that terrible place. Come see.”
She bristled slightly at yet another unwanted title, but more than that, she wondered if he was telling the truth. Had he died? Had he been… alive? The ghosts were spirits that inhabited the road to the afterlife, or so Venshi had said. How could this make any sense? It didn’t.
Except… Ada had talked of fixing the afterlife.
Isavel lowered her hand and stepped closer. She would kill this walker like she had the last, but perhaps first he would show her what Ada had meant. She wanted to understand why they had had to fight.
“You ghosts come from the world between this one and the next.” She stepped closer. “How can you know what our afterlife is like?”
He smiled even more broadly. “I was once human, just like every other ghost. I died. But something broke hundreds of years ago, and that place… that place was all there was left. There is no other world in between.”
Her eyes drifted upwards. Would the gods allow such a thing?
She stepped into the walk, into the bubble of unreality around the walker, and suddenly she was in another place, another world. All around her was a vast, brightly-lit
forest, trees of turquoise and cyan foliage and pale pink bark. A carpet of bluish grass extended underneath her feet, soft and fuzzy and just warm enough. Songbirds chirped in the trees, not a cacophony but a carefully orchestrated concert, the core of the music slowly moving between the trees, ebbing and flowing like breathing of the forest itself.
And around them were other people, people in various clothes or none at all, all of them staring around in wonder. None of them had been there outside the walk.
“What… where is this?”
The walker extended his arms. “This is Elysium. This is what Ada has given us - a prison for the dead, yes, but the most beautiful prison imaginable. A compromise I’m more than happy with. Touch something. Take something. It will all melt away when you send me here for good.”
In the distance there was a lake; on the other side, a mountain range. The sky’s blue was deep, curling here and there into pure white clouds. It was quite lovely, but Isavel couldn’t help but wonder. “So this is it? An endless forest?”
“No. It’s everything. Everything you could imagine. This is a forest, here, but walk far enough and you will find anything you want. Cities, deserts, orchards, vast plains, temples in the sky. It’s everything we could ever need.”
“You’ve been to all these places?”
“No, but the spirits here told me, and spirits tell the truth. I doubted Ada, you know - she is a harsh woman, with no patience and no trust. But she has delivered this incredible gift, and now… I have found faith.”
Isavel could smell something in the air, something like flowers. She was not deeply touched, but if she were to die this would still be a lovely place to end up. She looked back at the walker, and he was looking up at her from the ground.
He pulled down his shirt, baring his neck to her. “I believe you have a job to do? Bring them my head. The severed head of the Shadowslayer. I think it would be more… dramatic, that way.”
She called up her warrior’s blade and rested it against his neck. “You’re just going to give up? All of you?”
First Angels Page 29
