by Nazri Noor
It was a start. With every Agatha distracted, it meant that they were diverting power away from prying open the gateway for the Eldest. The hole in the sky was bigger, but not nearly big enough for the eldritch thing to push through. It blinked at us in malevolent silence. It felt as if the thing was looking directly at me. I know, it seems egotistical, but it made sense. I wasn’t special, or better than anyone else around me. I just happened to be the man that Thea Morgana stabbed through the heart.
But I could feel the shard of star-metal in my heart burning, tugging, like something was beckoning to me, calling me into its dark service. I dug my nails into the palm of my hand and bit my lips, praying that the pain would keep the uncanny new voice out of my head. I couldn’t understand the words, only knowing that they came from the thing in the sky. But I knew what it wanted. My fealty, my cooperation. Everything that Agatha Black had once told me. I was to be their heir, the ruler of their new world.
Fat fucking chance. The next fireball I threw was larger, heavier with the heat of my anger. I wanted Agatha to burn. All we had to do was get rid of her, and the Eldest would leave the earth alone forever. One could hope.
Yet I knew that we were in a stalemate. The Heart’s fire had destroyed Agatha’s shields, and our combined attack was draining enough of her attention away from tearing open her interdimensional portal. It was a battle of attrition, a sorcerous tug of war, and we needed something to nudge it all in our favor.
I glanced around me. What else could we try? Maybe the Hands had some way of joining their forces to create something explosively spectacular, something that could truly blow Agatha out of the water. We certainly couldn’t afford another sniper shot from the Heart. That thing needed time to recharge. It drew energy directly from the Scions, and as far as I knew, said Scions were presently involved in getting Agatha to roll over and quit her bullshit.
And like an answered prayer, the pressure we needed came careening out of the sky, like a burning meteor. I shielded my eyes as I caught sight of the unidentified flaming object. Shouts erupted from the gathered mages, and a few stray spells went up in the direction of the new threat, but I finally made out what it was through the haze of golden fire.
“Stop!” I shouted, flailing my arms over my head. “They’re here to help.” Cautious eyes flitted towards me, but the spells stopped. Then those same eyes swiveled upwards to observe the meteor-thing, and several mouths dropped open. I turned to face the flaming chariot, waving my arms again. “Holy shit, you guys. Thanks for coming.”
Artemis stood on one end of the chariot, Apollo taking the reins, six blazing white horses keeping them suspended in the sky. They’d discarded their modern garb in favor of how they were depicted in more traditional imagery, all loincloths and togas. Artemis twiddled her fingers at me in a casual wave. Apollo grinned and flexed his biceps, then winked at me. He seemed a little shinier than usual, which was when I noticed that he’d oiled himself up just for the occasion. Cheeky fucker.
“What’s up, loser,” Artemis said. “We’re here to save the day.”
Apollo cupped one hand to the side of his mouth. “Hey Dustin. Dustin! You like my wheels? This is what my baby really looks like. I’ll take you on a ride one of these days.” He winked again, leering at me. “Bring your boyfriend.”
I blushed, both over the lurid comment and the fact that I wasn’t even sure I had a boyfriend anymore. Herald answered for both of us, his fingers engaged in firing an endless cannonade of frost at the Agathas. “Will you guys just fucking help already?”
Apollo threw the reins and laughed. Artemis rolled her eyes, flipped her hair, and readied her bow, nocking a single arrow. I felt a tug on my sleeve, then turned my head, surprised to find myself face to face with Frau Helena.
“We’ve heard of you even on our side of the pond, boy,” she said, her face hard, but only just disguising the fact that she was more than a little impressed. “But we didn’t know that you had friends in such high places.”
I shrugged, trying my hardest to remain modest. “I did them some favors. You know how it is.”
Frau Helena’s mouth set into a grim line, and she nodded firmly. “Let us pray that it will be enough.” I nodded in agreement as a high-pitched whistle split the air. Artemis had loosed her arrow.
I followed its flight, golden and glimmering, as it flew for the ritual circle. Apollo flicked his wrist at it, and then the arrow was ablaze, glowing gold with the blessing of sunfire.
The Agathas swiftly took notice, their heads eerily whipping in the same direction as the barrage of arrows whistled for their hearts. All at once, they held out their hands, erecting shields to protect themselves.
Then somehow the arrow produced a sister, then another, until the missiles had multiplied in number, until the needle had turned into a storm. The arrows reproduced so quickly and thickly that they blotted the circle of witches out of view, shrouding them in a cloud of deadly flaming spines.
Agatha’s screams filled the night. The arrows that shredded past the circle disappeared, leaving a single bolt thudding into the dirt. Artemis and Apollo had done a number on Agatha, all right. The thirteen witches were bloodied and burned. The problem was that they didn’t look any weaker.
The twins had only made them angrier.
Chapter 29
Artemis shook her hair, letting the wind carry it. I had the very keen sense that she was trying to impress us humans. I heard some oohs and ahs from the bank of mages behind me. It sort of worked, then.
“And now we must be off,” she said heroically. “Our father sends his regards.”
“Well, that, and something else,” Apollo said, grinning. “Wink.”
“Spoilers.” Artemis elbowed him hard in the ribs. “Will you shut up?”
Apollo clutched his side, eyes huge and pitiful, wounded in more ways than one. “What did I say?”
“Too much,” she snarled. “Also, you said ‘Wink.’”
“So?”
Artemis leaned back into her seat on the chariot, put her feet up on the – I guess you could call it the dashboard? – and folded her arms. “Just drive.”
Apollo shrugged, threw the reins, then blew kisses at us sad, sad mortals as he reared his chariot back into the skies. Surreal. I waved back, to be polite. To either side of me, suitably charmed women, as well as a fair few men, mirrored my gesture, their eyes starry. I groaned.
Then a tremendous bolt of lightning crashed from out of the sky. The humongous roar of thunder that followed rocked the earth and rattled my teeth. There was no warning this time, but I was pretty sure the lightning was headed directly for Agatha Black and her sisters.
I was right. With the lightning cleared, but the smell of ozone still in the air, the witches were turning their heads frantically, seemingly looking at each other, like they were counting. I counted along, my heart leaping when I found only twelve copies of Agatha Black remaining. Where the thirteenth should have been was just a pile of ashes.
Well, hot damn. Zeus actually delivered. I turned my head to the skies, silently mouthing my thanks to the god I least expected to help us.
The bad thing about it was that pruning their numbers didn’t actually do much to diminish their power. If anything, it felt as though the remaining twelve witches were compensating for their fallen sister with more ferocity. Still, the mages around me gave a ragged cheer as they resumed their bombardment of spells. Knowing that the Agathas could be killed was obviously a huge boost to morale.
But it quickly became clear that Zeus’s gambit had given some of us bigger, more ambitious ideas. To my surprise, it looked like someone else was going in to take a bite out of the ritual circle, almost literally. A huge blue dragon was approaching the witches, getting close enough that Bastion had to call another ceasefire to ensure her safety. Prudence swung her head at us, as if in gratitude, then turned back to the twelve Agathas, opening her great maw. But she stopped cold at the sight of a second dragon.
; I rubbed my eyes. I definitely wasn’t confusing them this time, and I wasn’t just seeing double, either. Prudence stood tall and terrifying over the witches in her shifted form, but the dragon that stretched its serpentine body far above us all was larger and more threatening still. My jaw dropped to the ground. I couldn’t believe it. Tiamat herself had come to help.
The great dragon-goddess reared her head, the membranes over her eyes sliding open and shut as she searched the sea of human faces for one she recognized. She stopped when she found me, locking gazes. I could have pissed myself. Tiamat extended one wicked, reptilian talon directly at me, her voice booming across the hilltop as she spoke.
“You cannot say that the Great Beasts were cowards, little speck of dust. I come for my brothers and sisters. I come to consume.”
I could feel the mages rushing away from me as a crowd, hear them chattering in hushed voices about me and the dragon. My feet were rooted to the spot, and I turned to them, shrugging. What the hell else was I supposed to do? I turned back to Tiamat, waving limply.
“Um, thanks, I guess,” I murmured, too quietly for her to hear, yet she understood anyway. The edges of Tiamat’s great maw pulled back, and she showed me her rows and rows of vicious teeth. I shuddered.
The voices of the twelve witches rose as one as they addressed the great dragon. “You have no quarrel with us, beast,” they shouted. “Why do you defy us? We are only doing the work you are too weak and lazy to finish.”
Tiamat threw her head back and roared, a grating, feral sound that I was sure they heard all the way in Valero. She shook her head, dangerous spines emerging down along her back, the wind shifting as her great wings unfurled. She poised herself above the ritual circle, her body curved into a giant S. Tiamat opened her mouth to speak again. I didn’t miss the familiar haze of bluish-green light forming in the back of her throat.
“We have very different desires, witch,” Tiamat hissed. “You will not take this away from us. The universe is ours to shatter.”
The great dragon reached down, its scales shimmering sea-green and blue under the dazzling fusillade of spells the witches threw at it. But no amount of magic could penetrate her hide. One of the witches shrieked as Tiamat pulled her out of the circle, flailing as she was lifted bodily into the air. The shrieking ended as Tiamat squeezed her talons, turning the witch into a twisted pulp. The wet noise Agatha’s body made as she exploded – that damp, crunching pop – will haunt me forever.
“Sick,” someone next to me said. It was one of the younger Hands, recording the grisly scene with his phone. I frowned at him disapprovingly, then turned back to Agatha Black as a shrill, layered screaming filled the night air.
The remaining witches wailed, as if the pain had reverberated through their own bodies. Empowered by their agony, Tiamat rose to her full height, running the claws of her bloodied hands against the hilltop, digging huge grooves, as if cleansing herself of the gore. But I knew there was another purpose to the motion, the same one that Prudence herself was mimicking. The exhalation of dragonfire comes with such impact and pressure that the dragon in question needs to reinforce itself, kind of like how guns and recoil work. And both our huge blue beasts were locked and loaded.
Tiamat’s flames lit up the night, bathing the ritual circle in a shower of blue-green sparks. Gouts of her dragonfire licked at the hilltop, singeing what was left of the grass. If the witches were screaming, I couldn’t hear over the outrageous roar and rush of fire. On a smaller, but no less impressive scale, Prudence swayed her neck from right to left and back, spraying the hill with her own brand of brilliant blue flames.
Then the fires cleared, the dragons spent of their gifts. Prudence lumbered away backwards, only stopping when she stumbled against a tree, where Gil was waiting. He patted her belly, and she lowered her head, which again received a fond, friendly pat. Tiamat, on the other hand, whipped her tail triumphantly through the vegetation, issued a rattling, reptilian laugh, then took off spiraling into the air, the great beating of her wings knocking down the smaller, lighter mages, and even flattening a couple of small trees in the process.
The wind of her wing-beats also put out the last of the fires still burning on the hilltop, and as the smoke cleared, it showed what was left of the witches. The majority of them had erected shields at the very last minute for protection. Two hadn’t been so lucky. Where there were originally thirteen, now there were only ten. I liked those odds better.
I heard a tutting at my side. Frau Helena shook her head at me, the lines of her face deep and disapproving, but something like hesitant awe was glimmering in her gray eyes. I scratched the back of my neck and shrugged.
“I, um. I have friends in low places, too.”
Chapter 30
And yet – and yet for all of the effort, even with two witches dead, we hadn’t done the one thing we’d set out to do: closing the great portal in the sky. It stared down at the world, burning and yellow, a ghastly reminder of what Agatha Black had in store for all of reality.
The onslaught of spells from the gathered mages continued in earnest, but even with reduced numbers – or maybe because of them – the remaining witches were defending themselves with increased fervor, pelting us with their own spells in between bouts of shielding. Every so often, one of the ten would lob an ethereal spear in our direction, glimmering and vicious. Most of our people were lucky, dodging or shielding in time. A few were not, and it was a gruesome, brief taste of Agatha Black’s power. A single strike, even a glancing one from a spear, was enough to kill a human. We’d lost a dozen lives already, at least. That was a dozen too many.
“We have to end this,” I shouted. “It’s not like we can count on more entities to show up tonight.”
There was only one thing left to do. I whirled in place, scanning the battlefield, finally finding Mason planted to one end of it, protecting a cluster of mages with a shield from the Vestments. I rushed to him, and I knew he saw me running, but his gaze was flitting away, like some last ditch effort for him to pretend not to see me.
“Ladies,” he said to the mages behind him. “I need to help some others. You think you’ve got this handled?”
“Oui,” said one of the mages, someone from the Hooded Council, as she chanted words to raise a force field around herself and her allies. Mason nodded at them as soon as he caught the gleam of magic in the air, then moved in the opposite direction from me. I glowered, then sprinted straight for him, my blood and muscles pumping from anger.
“Dude,” I shouted, slamming my palm against his shoulder.
“What the fuck?” he said, twisting away from me, pretending like he didn’t know that I’d caught up to him, his eyes wandering like he’d only just noticed it was me. “Quit shoving. What do you want?”
“You know what I want,” I said, reaching out an open hand. “The last sword. Give it to me. Otherwise more people are going to die. It’s the only way to stop this.”
His mouth opened, then closed when he saw something behind my back. I turned in place, the breath catching in my throat as I locked eyes with Herald. Carver was beside him. It was clear that they both knew exactly what Mason and I had been talking about.
Mason ran his fingers through his hair, his eyes creasing with frustration. “I’m not just going to help you kill yourself, Dust.”
“That’s not how it works,” I said. “The ritual will remove me from reality, sure – ”
Herald scoffed. “Yeah, cause that’s a better deal, isn’t it?”
I tugged at my own hair, my eyes shutting for the briefest second before I focused on Herald again, speaking carefully. “I’m going to be gone for years. That’s it. I’m not going to die.”
He shrugged. “Then I guess we can all just wait for you until we’re eighty and dying. There are other ways to do this. There must be.”
“This is the quickest,” I yelled, hating that I was raising my voice at him, hating how he flinched and staggered away from me. Then I added, with
my voice faltering: “This is the best option we have.”
“If you are quite finished,” Carver hissed. “I propose that you do not let personal feelings get in the way. The fate of the universe is at stake.”
I thought it surprising that he was so easily siding with me, for once, and I thought it fitting that his words could have been meant for any of the three of us.
Herald folded his arms and shook his head. Mason glared at him, his gaze flitting from Carver, to me, then back to Herald. It hit me just then. Mason was trying to be a friend, not just to me, but to the man I loved. My heart sank.
“Do it,” Herald said.
I looked down at my hand, flexing and unflexing my fingers. I was ready to go. Why weren’t they?
Mason stared me dead in the eye, then cursed under his breath. “You know what? Fine. It’s your funeral.”
I had never properly seen him use his power before. The weapons and armor he could summon from heaven’s stocks appeared almost instantly in his hands, as quickly as he could think of them. This time was different. Mason clasped his hands together in an almost prayerful way, his eyes firmly shut, but his eyeballs moving around under their lids, as if they were searching the darkness for something. As he worked his talent, the tattoos inscribed up and down his body glowed with a soft yellow light.
I thought I caught the faintest glimpse of golden radiance spilling from his back, from the crown of his head. It could just have been the emanations from the sigils on his skin, but for a moment it looked as if he had wings, and a halo. I blinked, and they were gone. I blinked again – and there it was.
Mason hadn’t been praying, not exactly. The thing that he claimed from the Vestments needed both his hands to hold steady, probably because of its length, and the fact that it was on fire.
“Oh,” Herald murmured. “Oh wow.”
I couldn’t see the look in his eyes, his glasses reflecting only the hallowed glow of the sword clasped in Mason’s shaking hands.
