by Joe Ducie
The two faded statues were Fair Astoria and Dread Ash, their light and life stonewashed from whatever intricate, complex magic renewed and regenerated the statues.
Oblivion caressed the slipper covered feet of each black statue as he walked past them, and I felt another pang of something dangerously close to sympathy for one of the Everlasting.
At the head of the promenade stood a final statue, twice as tall as all the others, and robed in a silver-blue hooded cloak, which also served to hide the profile of whatever face was hidden within its depths. I felt a spike of envy, of animosity from Lord Oblivion as we gazed at the ninth and final statue, though it was quickly masked.
“My eldest brother, the first born of the Everlasting,” he muttered. “Lord Hallowed Dusk.”
The World-Eater, last in shadow’s husk
The Never-Was King—Lord Hallowed Dusk.
Of him, of that bastard, I knew nothing, only that he had to be a bastard.
‘Will he be here?’ I asked. ‘For the funerals?’
Oblivion said nothing.
I took that as an affirmative.
He strode past his brother’s grand statue and entered the vaulted white archways, the flowing aqueducts and alien gardens beneath the central dome. Here was a grand space, an open-air ballroom, fit for any occasion. Including funerals, it seemed.
Five figures mingled together in the heart of the chamber, underneath the marble dome which, from within, was see-through and gazed out at the immense wonder of the galaxy. Innumerable stars and gemstone asteroids dotted the sky. A decadent buffet, a horseshoe table holding meats and fruits I couldn’t even begin to identify, sat on one side of the chamber nearest to the five figures—and we all knew who those figures were, didn’t we?
Oblivion ignored their stares as he swept across the chamber. His first stop was the open bar, a table containing goblets and glassware before more pitchers of ale, twisted bottles of clear and dark liquors, and silver jugs of frosty white wine, and thinner jugs of more relaxed red. He filled a goblet to the brim with something amber and aged. The wisp of aromatics I got within my mind from the bottle smelled fantastic, vanilla and clove and good, peaty earth.
Oblivion took a breath and a heavy swallow of liquor, then turned to his brothers and sisters mingling near a raised dais at the heart of the chamber.
Upon that dais sat two diamond coffins.
Within those coffins rested Fair Astoria and Dread Ash of the Everlasting.
Glimpsed through the diamond, two vaguely humanoid shapes—one blue, one purple, a haze of something a little lighter than smoke, though more fluid. Their failed essence, all that remained of their true forms… I felt immeasurably sad at that, for Emily—Astoria—in particular. I had loved her. And Ash, despite her malevolence, had felt young. As young as an ageless god could feel. She may have been older than the Earth itself, but she still had a lot of growing up to do when Annie and I had killed her.
I may have hated the Everlasting with every fibre of my being, every shred of my corrupted soul, but if I was going to end them, kill them, then I could at least admit the truth: they weren’t evil, so much as at odds with how I, the rightful king of the Knights Infernal, thought they should behave. Was I wrong? Was I as much a monster as these creatures? Perhaps I was, and I could own that truth, too.
Someone had to do the dark things.
“I saw your eternal statue,” whispered one of the five elder gods near the coffins as Oblivion strolled on over, goblet filled to the brim anew with amber liquor. He was aiming to get drunk, it seemed, if the Everlasting ever could. “But I didn’t quite believe it, brother.”
“Scion,” Lord Oblivion said with an abrupt, impolite nod. “I heard rumour that you had run afoul of Declan Hale and one of his blades of celestial illusion.”
I recognised the man from the statue, from the hideous mess of scar tissue where his right eye should be. I had blinded him forever, it seemed, across whatever vessel he chose to inhabit. Score another victory for the Shadowless Arbiter.
“Oh leave him, baby brother,” said a tall woman with silver hair flowing to her waist. She sipped from a crystal champagne flute, the liquid within bubbling and black like something out of a witch’s cauldron. “I admire the dark humour in this jest, if nothing else. Well done, Oblivion.”
“Sister,” Oblivion said and inclined his head—my head—far deeper than he had for Scion. That didn’t go unnoticed. From the corner of my eye I saw Scion bristle, snarl, and quickly cover it with a sip from his goblet.
“Mother may not be pleased,” a little girl sitting on the edge of the coffin dais said. She was young, possessing a body no older than fifteen, and stood just under five feet tall. Despite her appearance, curled blonde hair hanging in gentle ringlets and shining blue eyes, swirling with gentle power, she sipped from a glass of wine that looked far too big in her petite hands.
“Sister Hail,” Oblivion said. I felt his genuine affection for the girl through our mutated bond. “I had hoped to see you here. It has been… aeons.”
If that’s Hail, I thought, then the woman with the silver hair… Iced Banshee? The Everlasting were genderless, for the most part, as in not too particular of the gender of their mortal hosts, but there were four males, four females—that I knew for certain. Lord Dusk suggested a fifth brother. So five and four, with two of the sisters dead. Five and two.
I was learning a lot, filing all the information away for later use. If I survived this day. The days to come even less certain.
“We last met at the Desecration of Jester’s Moon,” Hail said idly, swishing her wine about the glass. “You destroyed most of my arsenal and unleashed the Void against my territories. I lost countless universes that day, all so you could gain what amounted to nothing, in the end.” She chuckled without mirth. “Pride, brother, ever your ruin.”
“I’ve missed you,” Oblivion said.
Hail sighed and stared into her glass. Her eyes flicked up to mine and back down again, a glimpse of something that wasn’t quite hate. “And I you. A pity our reunion is on such dark business.”
She shrugged a shoulder at the two coffins that sat above her and then looked right into my eyes.
Not at Oblivion using my eyes, but beyond that, into my mind, into the brig where I was being held. She looked right at me, appeared briefly before me as an actual representation of her physical form within my cell.
“Hey, there,” I had time to say, to actually say within my cell and not ‘think’ aloud, before she was snatched away.
Oblivion blinked. “Stop that,” he said, and pressed his thumb and forefinger against my eyelids. “He is quite contained.”
Hail smirked. “Just making sure, brother dear. You bring a war criminal, a murderer, the Everlasting’s executioner and the constant thorn in our side, into our midst, after all.”
“Agreed,” a sharply bearded man said. Like the others, he was sipping from a cup of something delicious—aromatic and alcoholic. He wore a suit of clothes in similar style to Oblivion, though stood a head taller than me. Very much the image of a lord, of royalty, of divinity. He was handsome, in a classical way, but I knew him.
I always knew him.
“Axis, brother,” Lord Oblivion said. “I see you have recovered from your… imprisonment.”
Scarred Axis—scarred (tortured and butchered) by me ten thousand years ago in Atlantis, and imprisoned on the border of reality and the Void in a prison hidden within the storm clouds of Jupiter. I almost laughed. Another of the Everlasting I had pissed off, another to hate me, but here I was, right in front of him, and there was nothing he could do. Last I had seen him, not counting our red work in Atlantis, I had cast him and my wayward shadow, the Shadowman, my dark twin, into the Void.
But I was beyond attack and vengeance here… for now, anyway.
Oblivion, and here was something I never thought I’d say, was my protector.
“You stole something precious from me,” Axis said, addressin
g not Oblivion but me directly.
The others murmured at that, including the final Everlasting present among the five of them, an old man, hunched over a crooked cane, his spectacles sitting on the end of a hooked nose and a beard, knotted and grey, trailing to the marble floors. He roused himself and grunted at Axis.
“Do not address the host,” he said, his voice gruff. “He is beneath you, Axis. Oblivion, you upstart, why bring him here on this, our day of mourning? Hmm?”
“Forgive me, Chronos,” Oblivion said, sounding anything but apologetic. “But although we mourn, we must also plan—our vision, our future, our purpose is as old as the stars and does not die with our sisters. We are closer than ever to dominion over the Story Thread. To saving it from the horror to come.”
“Bah,” Chronos said and waved him away. “I would have a drink. Sister, dear, help an old man.”
Hail rolled her eyes but sprang to her little feet, dressed in velvet slippers. “You choose to be an old man, brother. The brandy or the port?”
“Mix them both together in one of those goblets, dear.”
Hail laughed. And I approved.
The conversation flowed away from my presence and toward pleasantries, if talk over universal domination and governance of the ungovernable wild west of creation could be considered idly chit-chat for beings of supreme age and power. I suppose that such topics could be so considered, but then I had a mortal mind set in that regard. I was more concerned about the cost, the lives alive now, than whatever dark end game was at play here.
I paid attention, though. Not so long ago I would have given a great deal to glimpse the Everlasting at their plotting, to be within the confidence of the enemy. They must have been certain I was beyond salvation, trapped in Oblivion’s grasp. They were fools. I’d sworn, on my life and Will, on my oath as a Knight Infernal, to kill all the beings in this grand chamber. They forgot that at their peril.
Ash hadn’t forgotten, but she had died anyway. What had she said to me, on a set of swings in a lovely little park on the outskirts of the Atlas Lexicon, as the sky tore itself apart and the dead haunted the city streets?
No, don’t do that. You don’t get to do that anymore. We may not have taken you seriously in the past—or the future, depending on how you look at it—we may have underestimated you to our detriment, but no more. The Everlasting see you, Declan Hale. We see you very well.
Not here to warn them now, are you, Ash?
I glimpsed Dread Ash in her coffin, liquid purple smoke, and suppressed a dark grin.
Well, not here in any way that can help.
CHAPTER THREE
HALLOWED DUSK IN THE CITADEL
’How do ya like me now, boss?’
My life, by choice and circumstance, was a constant struggle against enemies stronger than me, often smarter (but not cleverer, not yet, and there was an important distinction between smart and clever, wasn’t there? Yes, sir), who ruled vast swaths of creation, held armies and battleships at their command, who could unleash the Void and destroy worlds with a wave of their hand… From my brother, King Faraday on his stolen throne in Ascension City, to these idle Elder Gods before me now, I had met and tangled with the worst and still had my head on my shoulders, so to speak.
Though it had been a near thing more than once. And let’s just glance over the time I had actually died in the ruins of Atlantis. That didn’t count. Emily had killed me and saved me, and it had needed to happen.
So you could say I didn’t intimidate easy, no sir, in the presence of the mighty and powerful. I had defied kings and gods before breakfast, even when such defiance was pointless, merely to bother and dissuade. My default setting in such matters was to be an asshole, and I defaulted well.
Which is why when the man in the silver-black hood strolled into that vast and opulent chamber, lit well from the heavens above, cast in hues of white and gold and rainbow gemstone, and my heart leapt into my throat I was as shocked as I was fearful.
He moved with no sound, not a swish of his cloak, and seemed almost to hover an inch or two above the floor, gliding across the marble. He was of no particularly intimidating stature, about my height, his face hidden within the folds of his enchanted hood—a disguise, then, a black maw.
But I knew who this had to be—it could be no one else. The last of the living Everlasting. First born, oldest, most cruel. The rhyme again:
The World-Eater, last in shadow’s husk
The Never-Was King—Lord Hallowed Dusk.
The other Everlasting fell silent as their older brother approached, a few of them even took an unconscious step back, away from him, closer to me, which was a devil’s choice for the ages. Damned if you do. He arrived heralding frost-bitten air and malice. A rime of frost coated the marble in his wake, which shattered as it thawed. Death. Dusk was death, of that I was certain. Damned if you don’t.
Dusk stretched out his arm, shrouded in robe, which ended in a human, if deathly pale, white hand. Across the chamber at the open bar, a silver jug of the red wine shot through the air, spilling not a drop, and Dusk grasped the jug by the handle.
He sipped from the jug, a good three litres of wine, as if it were your standard pour, smacking his lips around the alcohol as if it were apple juice.
That broke a little of my fear, but only a little. I understood a little piece of Dusk. Another far-too-human moment for the Everlasting. He was a drunk, one of my bar folk, with no time or pretence to pretend he was anything but, if he was drinking wine by the gallon. I’d seen the type before—I’d been that type of alcoholic before—where another drink wasn’t as charming as the warm haze of alcohol seemed to whisper. Charming, no, pathetic, yes.
So long as you rotate friends every night then none of them will see just how much you’re drinking. Save the ones you’ve already dragged into the abyss with you.
In that one gesture, that one sip from the jug of wine, I learnt more about Lord Hallowed Dusk than I ever could have hoped to learn in an hour of conversation, in a whole book written on the bastard. The devil, if he was the devil, was in the details.
Curiously, and I was one who noticed those devilish details, the Everlasting Dusk did not cast a shadow. Shadow’s husk? I glanced at the other Everlasting, all of them with fine shadows, unlike me and Dusk. I had bargained my shadow, a piece of my soul, in a way, to Oblivion himself over seven years ago now, when I first met one of the Everlasting. He had torn it from me as price for the Degradation, which ended the Tome Wars.
Back then I’d had such simple, little problems. Ha. Let the universe fall upon my enormous modesty!
My shadow had been cast into the Void, where it had taken on a life of its own. A half-life, corrupted by that dark place. We had met when my shadow, Shadowman, I called him, my twin, had escaped the Void. He had kidnapped the Historian, stolen the grandest ship in the fleet from the Knights Infernal, intent on destroying Scarred Axis in his prison. Instead, he had freed another Elder God.
I couldn’t blame him - I’d done the same, more than once.
But no shadow for Dusk. Which meant…
‘You’re wondering what face he’s wearing under that enchanted hood, aren’t you?’ I spoke directly to Oblivion. ‘Oh, you’re going to be so pissed off.’
Oblivion didn’t say anything out loud, but I heard his reply regardless. Yes. You know something, Hale? Not one to mince words, this god.
I smirked. Cleverer, not smarter. ‘Count the shadows, pal,’ I said. ‘And consider our first meeting.’
Speak clearly, he said, his voice one of command echoing about my skull like a thunderclap, but even as he spoke I felt his eyes—my eyes—darting about the marble floor, doing as I said. My eldest brother wishes he was an only child, Hale. Should he turn against us, press his power, you will die as surely as I. We are allies in this—
Oblivion shut the hell up. He had counted the shadows, had understood what I had understood.
Dusk took another sip of wine, the rim of the jug di
sappearing into his dark hood, but we both of us—Declan and Oblivion—felt his eyes on us within the folds of that mawish hood. Like two hot irons pressed against the skin, we felt those eyes.
That whore’s son! Oblivion cursed.
I snorted. Genuinely finding that funny. ‘He’s your brother, so what does that make you…’
Oblivion growled and knocked back half a goblet of the honeyed liquor. Not one to be shown up, he clicked his fingers and the twisted bottle of amber booze floated over from the bar and refilled his glass.
‘Easy there, pal, we’ve only got the one liver, and I did a number on that long before you took my motor out for a spin.’
“We thought to see you not, Dusk,” Scion said, a touch of jovialness to his tone. The levity sounded forced, as if he were trying to calm a dog set to bite.
And that was the fear I felt when I stood in the presence of Lord Hallowed Dusk. Like I was standing next to a dog, fur rigid, teeth bared, low growl in its throat. Rabid.
“And why would you think that, Scion?” Dusk asked idly. He tilted his head, considering his brother, but I still felt his eyes on me like a brand. I don’t think they had left me since the oldest Everlasting had arrived in that blessed and consecrated hall.
I had a thought—strange, desperate, but with a ring of felt truth—that Dusk considered me, not Oblivion, but Declan Hale, the true threat in the room.
Perhaps I was just being arrogant, but then the two coffins nearby certainly spoke to my credit. I was a threat. I fell ass-backwards into my victories, for the most part, but here we were at an inconvenient funeral nevertheless.
“None of us have had word of you in aeons,” Scion said.
“We thought you dormant,” Banshee said, curling a strand of her silver hair back behind a pointed, elfin ear. She was quite beautiful, cold in that beauty, like a glacier. “Slumbering through this age, perhaps. Waiting for the rest of us to mature, dear brother?”
