by Blake Rivers
She took a breath. “How do you know?”
“I know,” he said, and with surprising strength peeled himself from beneath her and rolled onto his side, his half-dead and useless body slumping to the ground.
Now that the moonlight had been extinguished, the cellar lit a dim orange glow from the cracks and chasms that spanned the floor. By their light, Ami watched Britanus pull himself across it, anchoring his fingers into each gap until he lay across the largest. He looked back over his shoulder, his eyes burning blue.
“Come, please.”
Giving a glance to the only exit now closed, she shuffled over to him and looked down into the warm-lighted abyss; the back of her neck prickled as a strange sense of power touched her. It was familiar and yet alien, emanating from the colour of the light as though it were something tangible she could touch and feel in her hand, as though it were separate from the essence and visibility of light itself. Sparks of jade and purple dripped from the ends of her hair to fall within the cracks, disappearing with no ill effect. Ami brushed her hands through the loose strands to keep them back and out of the way.
“What is it?” she asked.
Britanus smiled, the blood on his face now dark lines that defined him.
“It is a split between the layers of this world,” he whispered. “They appear quickly now because of the quakes. He is moving beneath us. But here, thrust your sword within.”
“Who is he?”
The man shook his head, grimacing. “Show, not tell. You must…understand.”
He grasped her arm and guided the sword forward blade first. “Will he get me?”
“He is not here, at least, not yet. Trust me.”
Ami wasn’t keen on trusting anyone, yet there was something in his eyes, something familiar that pushed her doubts aside, at least for now. The blade entered the light, molten gold sliding across folded steel.
“Just watch,” he said, and Ami did, her eyes fixed to the blade as she continued to lower it. The feeling from before was now stronger, and for no reason it brought to mind the song she’d sung, the Celtic melody from a long-ruined wedding—it was a note that resonated in memory and actuality, a single sound that was joined by a second and a third, the perfect chord that made her want to sing and dance, and mourn and fear. She clasped the sword all the harder, yet her grip loosened all the same. The chord resonated and travelled into her arm, and when it reached the rest of her body the air changed, the temperature rising rapidly. Her heart raced in her chest, her breath held tight for a moment and then released.
Everything had changed.
It was as if she’d been picked up in a second she’d missed, and set down in a different place, a different time. The stone was now a rug, white and warm, her leather garb changed for jeans, a tee, a dark, worn hoodie. There was no sword in her hand, no fissure in the ground, and no darkness. The taste of plaster, dust and destruction had dissipated beneath the spritely scent of citrus.
Her hands steadying her each side of her crouch, her eyes sweeping the room. Directly behind was a low coffee table, sporting a colourful array of fruit in a glass bowl, and beyond that, lounging at one end of a dark brown sofa was a man she recognised, though it took a moment to place him. She stood up very slowly, backing up against the chimneybreast, her hands raised in submission—yet he didn’t seem to be looking at her at all. He looked instead at the mindless colours of a television screen that sat idling in the corner.
“Hi, do you—?” The man pushed his finger deep into his nostril, rooting deep, his eyes still fixed, chapped cheeks stretching to a smile. Ami frowned and waved her hand. Nothing.
A sudden waft of freshly baked bread sailed in through the door in the corner, and from somewhere deep in the house came the sound of a woman singing amid a clatter and clang of metal trays. Ami took a step forward, the man taking no notice. Finding nothing of interest, his finger was removed and wiped against his top. Another step and she was round the table, facing a painted landscape that hung on the wall. The house was unmistakable in its watercolours, though painted much more idyllic than she herself had seen it. Currington House. She could see the stable block behind where her cabin would be, and was in fact, just a few steps away.
“Hello?” she tried again, but it was Britanus who answered her.
“He can’t see you.” She turned, but there was no one there. “He can’t hear you either, nor me.”
“What am I doing here?” she asked, edging back to the fireplace where the coals glowed their deep orange and red. “I don’t understand.”
“You are walking the layers through cracks that have fractured.”
At that moment the door opened and a small woman walked in with a tray of food. Her apron was marred only slightly, though her weather-worn face showed signs of flour, dabbed as if a fragrance upon her cheek. Her lips were set in a practiced smile, and when she set the tray down on the table, Ami turned and made a beeline for the door. She heard the muttered thanks, the clatter of a spoon against porcelain, and ducked round the corner just in time before the woman swung back through, sauntering off toward the kitchen. She saw it at the end of the hall, the stainless steel worktops, the pots and pans hanging high on hooks.
“Am I dead?”
“You aren’t truly there, but neither are you here,” Britanus said.
Ami shook her head. “I’m a ghost.” Another step found her walking the dirt track she’d followed to the shack. She spun, seeing Currington House just down the slope, the cabins dark shapes to the left. The evening had drawn in and the wind snuck cool across her skin, throwing her hair back behind her. Through a lit window in the house, she could see the man, Benjamin, scooping the soup from his bowl and dunking a fresh chunk of torn bread. She turned, knowing she was to follow the trail into the trees. The sounds and smells were vital and riveting, yet even here she was not seen, not heard. A roaming badger snuffled the ground, unaware of her presence at all, while other evening prowlers stalked the shadows to either side; an owl cut her path, a wild flapping and hoot that sent Ami stumbling backward, reaching for her sword and finding only the front pocket of her hoodie.
Ahead and to the right she spied the old woman nodding silently in her rocker, and off to the side the bound and blind Jonus. Ami hoped to pass by, though she felt the same sensation as before pulsating from the shack, camouflaged and yet also luminous, a nuclear power station on overload.
Her tread was careless, a twig snapping beneath her foot.
“I see you,” Jonus sniped, his whisper a cutting edge in the calm. “A light like yours can’t hide, even between the fabric of worlds.” He lunged forward, the cords of his thin, frail neck straining against his bonds.
Ami’s heart raced. “What am I doing here?”
“A tour,” the voice said. “Touch the old man.”
The shack behind screamed, a thick limb bending low and lifting high, the old boards bowing as it shifted and settled. It spoke, it cried. Ami walked from the track and reached out to the old man, but Jonus threw his head to the side.
“Don’t come near me, Assassin. Madam Romany will—”
“She’s not here,” Ami said, and gripping the blind man’s robes she—
—knelt in the circle, the high sea wind blowing hard across the cliff’s edge. It was Darkscape, though not as she’d known it; each next to her was as she was, frail and old, nearing the end of a life just starting. The Well of light seemed a lunar up ahead, a ground moon of the goddess, open to the night. And there she was, the goddess herself who’d killed almost everyone she’d known, the sanctity of life shattered for all time; many younger than she had died, had been throw to the river, flung to the sea, left to rot in the hot summer sun… Now though was a sacred time, a time long promised, the sharing of the gift, the power. They were a group of six, the wisest among many, a human link to her most holy, and when the goddess placed her hand upon each head, they were to be given everlasting life. The gift of power was to be used in the settl
ement, in the places of worship where the old gods of the trees and the water had been discarded and burned. They were to be the priests of the people, the chosen. The goddess had explained that together they would be powerful, that together they could keep order amongst the people, though none would be so powerful alone. She hungered and lusted for this power as Madam Romany passed around the circle. She was next, and she bowed ready, her beard white and long.
Not she, but he. Jonus.
The goddess had rested her hands upon the head of another, one of the six, and from her mouth came a scream that pierced his mind like a shard. “Heresy!” she cried above the wind and the waves. “Who is this girl? Who is she?” The man was thrown through the night, Madam Romany’s grip still tight around his skull, and though he screamed, his screams were nothing beneath the cries of the goddess, and he fell back to the circle, broken but alive. “He has been purged,” she said simply, and moved on.
Romany had never known that her own demonic power had purged one man and created another.
Ami removed her hand from Jonus, letting it fall to her side.
“Stay out of my head,” he spat, waking the old woman from her sleep, but Ami was already beneath the undergrowth, her journals so important they were clutched painfully to her collapsed chest. She would not have them. Now she knew what she truly was, having glimpsed her mind in that brief union. She hid them. They were important, the truth, and some day, she now knew, the Assassin Princess would come… She would, she’d seen it, but now she—
Britanus.
—was at the edge of the cliff, hiding.
The temple at the point of the cliff looked out over all and had grown large over the Well, over time, over eons. That’s how long it had been since he’d been split, and it had taken him a long time to come to terms with the truth of it, though reading back his own writing had helped. The other, the one split from him, had continued in ignorance much as Romany herself had. But he’d kept the journals safe all this time, hiding them in the ground or within the hollowed trunks of trees, and with each new decade a new hiding place was found. He wrote more, hid more, until his collection had become a small library, histories taken as fairy tales, and only by those who could in fact read. Sometimes it was necessary to rewrite, to transfer pages into volumes, and so with each new age the book-man became his own descendants, passing down the bookshop from book-man to book-man, the scribe, the scribbler.
It was as the town’s scribe he watched the goddess slip through the humble dirt streets, stealing out of the town in secret to visit her newly finished temple. He watched her through a crack in the door as she crawled the stone floor and lifted the first stone stair to reveal the Well within. The flashing white light humbled him, and he had to stop himself from falling to his own kneels to pray to the moon—but no, that was not why he was there. He was to write, to chronicle, to record the secret truth of the monster behind the façade.
He watched her step into the light of the Well and saw her thrown across the temple, rejected from that which she claimed was hers; her return was as swift as her anger. He sketched out the woman, never changing, slender and dark, her eyes a furious red as she screamed and cursed, thrusting her arms into the light and crying out names he couldn’t spell. The earth began to shake then, and the temple walls began to crack. Britanus retreated, tripping over his own robes and landing amid the large rounded stones, grave markers old and new. He clung to one as the land shifted and buckled under the sudden violence. It was terrifying and terrific, and half hidden between a falling tree, slanted and bowing across his sight, he saw Romany thrown through the stone wall of the temple.
And then…something happened to the world.
Trees broke through the ground where there had been none, while the temple exploded into a high rise tower that shot up from nowhere, scattering stone into the sea like pebbles. Its shadow loomed tall and dark, Britanus cowering beneath. He stood, not knowing which way to turn, clinging to the fallen tree and watching the world around him change and change again.
“With my own eyes I watched the land—gulley, slope and hill—bulge and bend; a crunching sound put me to flight and I ran, my heart nearly exploding in my chest as I witnessed the change, the birth of a new land.
“Walls sprung up quite literally from the ground as if a rooted vegetable shoot, reaching to find the sun; buildings, tall and strong, the likes of which I’d never seen, sprouted up across the hillside, our small settlement dwarfed by towers and grand houses of leaded windows and thatched roofs. I fell to the ground, fearing for my life and sanity as the grass beneath me turned grey and hard, and broke as brittle blades that changed to rock and dirt. The sky disappeared into shadows as men and women alike crawled from the earth as if the dead arisen, and the now town sealed itself behind giant walls of grey flint. An alien town, merged with our own small valley in a matter of minutes.
By the time the quake had stopped I was too weak to move and so stayed where I was, knelt in a new street, watching a new town and its new people. I watched them panic. Two worlds had collided that day, and it had changed everything.”
Ami was apart again, not the man whom she’d shadowed, but an observer from the outside. She followed Britanus through the streets to the newly finished palace, a gothic Court with a tower that rose to rival the highest hill.
Then the cold floor was beneath her once more, the light of a day replaced with the glow of orange; the man beside her was dying, croaking, his thoughts turning to laboured words that echoed above the rumblings above.
“She’d reached in, and in her efforts and vain reasoning had pulled one layer into another, breaking the boundaries between them.”
“That’s what she did?” Ami lifted her sword from the ground and kept it close. Pieces began to fit together, everything that had happened and all that was still happening. Whether deliberate or not, Romany had begun to destroy the walls between the layers of reality, and instead of fulfilling the purpose of the portals, to re-merge all layers into Celestial once more, she was creating a new whole from the many.
“Yes,” he said, “and I’ve borne witness to it for all these years. Keeping my writings, showing them to others in secret over time, making your coming…legend.” Britanus broke into a fit of coughing and lay fully down upon the floor. She touched his face, a gentle flow of power leaving her to enter him, colouring him a purple hue. A peace passed across his face, and his eyes remained closed as she withdrew her hand, his lips moving still with grated breath. “The memories I cannot explain. I do not know, but you, Assassin Princess,” his eyes opened, slits only, “you are the one who can match her.”
“She means to use me.”
“To increase her power, to increase his, for beneath the layer she crushed into this, lay a world darker than any before it, a land where men have never existed, and the monsters rule.”
Ami stroked his cheek, healing all that she could, but she knew it wouldn’t be enough. “Tell me. Is it a beast?”
A laugh escaped him, the croak of a man too old and wise. “Much, much worse. The layers of the world, they are not all as this, or others you’ve known.” His finger raised and he pointed into the fissure, the light steadily pulsing. “Down there, not too far away, are demons.”
Then it happened fast, too sudden. His hand opened like a flower, his fingers petals, loose and dead. His last breath blew at the dust and dirt, a small cloud falling into the unknown chasm.
She placed her hand against his neck to feel for a pulse, but there was nothing there. His legs were bones in raw meat, a pool of blood reaching far and wide. “No, not yet,” she whispered, taking his head in her hands, her tears touching her cheeks in small kisses. “Don’t die, please.” Her hands were the paddles, her power the charge. Flashes of green and purple lit his thin skin, outlining his ancient skull.
Flashes of a wood, black trees and blue light. A wood she knew all too well.
Flashes of swords, parry and thrust, duck and roll.
<
br /> A black lake of tar-like mist, six spheres above; white skin, red lips, emerald flashing eyes.
Then nothing.
She withdrew from the dead body and shuffled backward on her knees, finding the blood trailing after her, thick and sticky.
He hadn’t died. None had killed him. Anyone who had been to the Mortrus Lands remained immortal… “Unless they’ve gone through the portal,” she murmured to the dark, her eyes fixed on Britanus. “Adam.”
Part Three
Revelation
Chapter Fourteen
The gates opened wide for their triumphant return, and Hero, Raven and Kane re-entered the city amid cheering crowds. Everyone had turned out for them, a true celebration, for upon the back of Hero’s horse rode the beautiful heir of Legacy, Princess Ami, daughter of the long-lost Lord Graeme. Dressed pretty in pink, the princess waved to her people, sending up an array of colours that popped and fizzed and painted the sky. The crowds cawed with delight, their number stretching far back up the mountainside, disappearing behind litters of sun-struck buildings that lined the winding road. And at the peak, rising from the vibrant festivities and thunderous applause was the castle, a large and welcome sight. It’d grown outward from the single keep, now a sprawling mass of adjoining towers and halls, its turrets and spires scoring low-slung clouds. Each window draped a banner of red, gold or blue, the silk fluttering and flying for their victory, the heir of Legacy at last restored. Trumpets sounded out, the throng parting for Lady Grace who welcomed them with open arms and a warm smile.
“Hero!” The nudge in his side awoke him, and all slipped into the darkness of a dream, already half-forgotten. “Hero, wake up.”
The next nudge was more painful and he groaned, making a grab for the hand that poked him. Florence. “Stop jabbing me, damn it, I’m awake.”
“About time,” she whispered, urgent and low. “Raven? Are you there?”
“Yes,” he replied, though from far away. Hero twisted round to try to find him, but the space was too tight, Florence pressing his side, a metal grate at his back. Both were more than uncomfortable. “Where the hell are we?”
