The city held its breath. Dark dust fell like rain. Pale undead shock troops rode the lines of black matter like lengths of ebon rope.
“Black!” Grissom emerged with his AA-12 ready. Ash stood next to him, her spirit coiled tight. Ronan followed close behind with a katana. Only Maur was still inside, and Black heard the mini-guns slide out of their panels in the outer mansion walls, thaumaturgically powered weapons that Maur operated from a hidden console deep inside the complex.
Black held her spirit ready. She took a breath and felt him burn inside her like smoke. He tasted of tobacco and funeral flames, and his whispers burned in her mind.
Light refracted off the massive mirror shard hovering over the city. The device rained daylight into the center of the swirling storm.
Thornn’s buildings faded from view as darkness eclipsed them. The Razorwings, contrarily, shone like glittering diamonds. Light bounced away from their sheen armor and iron fangs.
The serpents spread apart and came at the mansion from different directions. The wind intensified at their approach, and it smelled of brimstone and hot steel.
Black uncoiled her spirit and let him roar into the sky at the last possible moment. The flames blistered her hands and turned them black before her skin faded back to normal. Her fingertips glowed like burning embers.
Her spirit became a jet of flame. He punched through the chest of a Razorwing and brought it to the ground with a thunderous crash. Its vampire riders jumped clear, and they descended with the grace of birds in flight, but Kane and Grissom tore their bodies apart with ruthless waves of deafening arcane gunfire.
Everything was too bright. The shard above – it was difficult to see how far away it really was, since its two-dimensionality and the blinding haze made it seem like a phantom, a mirage in mid-air – spun faster than before. Waves of heat throbbed and pushed against Danica. Concentric bursts of energy blasted out of the disturbance.
It was a rip, a hole in the sky. It looked like glass that had been melted by the sun.
Blades and gunfire turned everything to a din of shrapnel noise. Vampires fell upon the team, and they were met with magic, bullets and swords. Black fired into pale bodies and dark-winged shadows. She dodged attacks and flew through the air, cushioned by her spirit, who lashed at her enemies with coils made of electric steel and blades of black frost.
He undulated and pulsed around her, a living shield. She moved with him, inside of him, a passenger in a ghost dreadnaught.
Even as the battle raged, she stayed aware of the blasting vortex of light. It grew and expanded, doubled and redoubled in size to the rhythm of the battle. It somehow remained flat and nearly invisible, a cage of golden power that strained the eyes to see. It was like looking at a cracked star.
A vampire’s blade came at her, and she ducked, kicked back, and sent the beast sprawling before she brought her spirit down like a hammer to smash its undead heart.
Knotted pain lanced up her arms. She felt herself swimming, as if lost in a golden sea. Everything pulled her towards that light.
The ground cracked. Gouts of steam erupted from cracks in the street and shot upwards like flaming geysers. Debris spiraled and caught aflame and scattered into tiny embers.
Danica blasted through another Razorwing with her spirit, which tore into its armored flesh like a drill of burning ice. Her breaths came labored and dry. Sweat glazed her skin. Every inch of her body ached with fatigue.
She landed, came to one knee, and for just one moment the world paused, the chaos of the bullets and hex saws and nail-cannons and blades caught at a space between, a breath, a fold between the moments. And in that fold, that frozen shard of time, she heard something.
A heartbeat.
It was a pulse, an emanation that came from the sun mirror, the un-crystal, that two-dimensional vessel that coordinated the chaos.
That heartbeat was slowing down. The pulse of beats was concentric, and the rhythm slowed in a pattern, so that fewer seconds passed between each beat. The variance was almost imperceptible in the maelstrom of blood and fire and noise.
Black realized what was happening, and her heart leapt into her throat.
Oh, God. It’s a countdown.
NINE
WRAITH
Black called her spirit around her. He pulled her off the ground.
Darkness welled around the city. What had began as a laggard flow of dark clouds turned to a churning cyclone of ebon fumes. Shadow lightning danced and crackled in the black wind.
Danica saw faces in the storm, disembodied screams that tore apart. The wind intensified and yet made no sound…or at least that was what she thought until she realized the silence was the sound of the wind, the cyclone, the dark cataclysm of noise from the necrotic gale. That silence roared.
The real sounds – the fighting, the gunfire, the bomb blasts, the calls of Razorwings and the clarion alarms of the city and the booming war cries of mercenary gargoyles – were drowned out by that silence. Scraps of noise pushed through in muffled cries and static bursts. The quiet storm pressed in and smothered Thornn.
Razorwings and armed dirigibles battled in the sky. Traces of machine gun fire and mortar shells rattled against the hulls of vampire warships. Shards of stone and metal carried into the air like derelict birds. Streams of dust and debris fell in waves.
Danica fired at vampires and enemy gargoyles armed with moon blades and barbed electric spears. Hexed bolts of frost launched from her fingers and tore fliers out of the sky. On the ground, Kane and Ronan hacked through wight shock troops and multi-limbed zombie giants with blood-soaked blades. Grissom blasted through ghouls with the thunderous AA-12. Black only knew how loud the weapon was from memory: she couldn’t actually hear it, as the storm was too quiet, and too loud.
The mansion was on fire. Vampires had punched through the exterior walls. Undead remains were smeared everywhere thanks to the mansion’s outer defenses, but the undead pressed on, relentless.
The Ebon Cities’ forces were legion. They came in swarms.
How did they get through Thornn’s outer defenses? Danica wondered. How can there be this many of them in the city?
They had to have used some subversive means of getting into Thornn. It was the only explanation.
Black ascended. She emptied the H&K and drew her kukri blades, and the black steel edges crossed with hexed male energy and sliced through gargoyle flesh. Razor nails and bone shards repelled and exploded away from her arcane shield.
She kept her eyes on the molten sheet in the sky. Wind rushed through her hair. She sensed the distance lengthen between herself and the ground as she arched her back and flew, straight as an arrow and into the sky.
Wait…I can’t fly. I can levitate, at best.
A Razorwing came straight at her. It turned its wings out and narrowed its blank eyes as it extended razor claws. Black turned into it, flew forward in a maelstrom of orange fire.
Something helped her, and made it so she could fly. Some foreign energy lent her spirit its strength. She felt him release himself, open his form up to some other power.
Black took a deep breath. Adrenaline rushed through her with such force she could barely see straight. Her fingers went white from clutching her blades.
She floated up and over the charging reptile. Her blades swept in an ‘X’ formation across its armor-plated head, and then cut up and into its lead vampire rider. Steel slashed into her body as she flew by, and her skin pulled open from a sword wound in her side and arm, but Black let her spirit seal the injury and stem the flow of blood, and even as she screamed soundlessly into the quiet storm her eyes focused on the glazed eye that hung in the sky, and the shadow that passed before it.
The mirror squeezed in on itself, folded, bulbous, like a drop of golden oil. She peered through its shimmering face, and on the other side of the mirror she saw roiling fogs of black energy and the ghostly parapets of a keep that stood on a black cliff over a grey sea.
Some
thing vast waited on the other side of that dank hole. She sensed the enormity of the rip between the worlds, a fusion of the reality she knew and the dead lands waiting on the other side.
The pulse between the heartbeats grew shorter. She didn’t have much time.
It was almost impossible to keep the rip in sight. It wasn’t meant to be viewed by human eyes, just as it couldn’t be measured by corporeal dimensions. Just because she flew towards it didn’t mean she actually got any closer.
It resisted physical explanations. It was vast and miniscule, two-dimensional, a hole. The closer she got the further away it seemed, save for the light, which was so bright it pained her eyes. Sweat ran down her face. Fear grew in her heart, fear that she would never see Lara again. Or Cross.
A length of metal wrapped around her arm. Her spirit violently lashed out and cut the chain in two with an acid strike. Her smoldering skin blistered beneath her armor coat.
She turned to face the Razorwing rider. He yielded a grotesque hand-cannon that churned acid slime and spit thaumaturgic crackles of green energy as it charged for another blast.
Something passed between Black and the un-vessel: a dark splotch, a shadow in the blinding light. Formless and fast, it nevertheless bore a signature she was familiar with, an energy signal. And it had a voice. It passed like a wraith between the seconds, and it almost escaped her notice because it moved in time to the countdown.
The battle raged on soundlessly below her. She heard herself breathe, and heard the cannon crackle. Her spirit swelled around her. Invisible claws turned upward and fused into a cold shield.
The wraith above her twisted and moved through the light. It bore down on the hole. As it neared, she recognized it.
It was Cross. Cross…and yet not Cross. His shape was incorporeal and uncertain. He bore no real physical form, but had become a ghost, a dark aggregation of shadow, like a man who’d been fused to some dark-winged accomplice. He/they moved like molten bats. She knew instantly he shouldn’t have been there, and that his presence was in some way responsible for what was happening.
Black hung suspended in the air for those last few desperate seconds. A moment of sound pierced the deafening silence, and her ears bled from the roar of cannons and the howl of reptiles, from guttural vampire war chants and the roar of the team’s considerable arsenal. She felt heat wash over her, and blood trickled down her arm. She sensed her own weightlessness as she hung there in the sky at a dizzying height, frozen over a city illuminated by a razorine shaft of light at the center of a pitch black storm.
Danica was acutely aware of the wound in her side, but it didn’t matter, because she knew she was going to die in another few seconds.
She reached out her hands, and her spirit swam to her. He was warm, and he moved through her fingers with tremendous force, a ghost made of heat and smoke.
At the center of the chaos, the world slowed down to a crawl. Black saw the wraith, the ghost that was Eric Cross. He passed over that false sun and blazed through the black eye of the blinking doorway. His shadow stretched and expanded and then folded in on itself. By the time the world returned to speed, he was gone.
Moments later, the countdown ended and the blast came, a deafening explosion of blazing energies that tore outwards in waves of black fire. In moments, Thornn had been destroyed.
She drifts through a maelstrom of black dust. Ashes fall around her like broken angel wings. She sees darkness, a yawning void, eternal and endless. The night is infinite, a pitch black hole.
She watches bodies descend, pale and silent, into the abyss. Debris falls like rain. There is no sound.
Far overhead is a hole, a cut that bleeds light. She feels its gravity, feels her own body wanting to return, to ascend. The tip of a jagged black mountain hangs over the edge of the bleeding entry to the void. She sees clouds of red iron and blades, monstrous bodies that move in slow motion to the rhythm of some mad clock. The sound shakes the sky. Soldiers plummet, their mouths opened wide in empty screams, shaken loose by the rattle of unseen world gears.
She falls, and yet remains stable. She feels like she has been there for some time, trapped like a tear in the rain, writhing and plummeting without motion, screaming without sound.
The world falls. She hovers. The distance is so great she doesn’t seem to move.
Memories of life flash before her, not all of them from the past. She sees a black keep on a black shore. She sees a woman in the shadows who stands and waits for a derelict vessel as it navigates alien waters. She sees the sword, a blade of meteoric steel, alone in a prison of darkness.
None of this is familiar to her, and yet she gets the sense that she‘s seen it before, that she’s lived this already. Memories of a dark landscape come to her, a collage of disaster, scattered and moving images that float like sheets of shattered glass.
The hole grows more distant. She tries to swim to it, but her feet find nothing but darkness, which stains the sky like spilled ink. The world above is frozen. Blood holds thick in spattered streams and obscures her view of the sky.
She thinks of what she has lost. She does not want to stay here, trapped in this vortex. Her breath is a constant, frozen in a bubble around her. She will never die, so long as she hangs at the precipice of that dark tear, at the edge of the pit of endless night.
Something shudders. Shadows fall like clumps of earth. Screams melt out of the darkness.
The world returns to motion. Sounds held solid explode like glass. The roar of detonations and shouts and steel all echo and spray down in a torrent. The hole throbs and pulses and shrinks, and she and everything in it are thrown back up, ejected from the netherworld they’ve been trapped in. They are vomited back to reality.
The sky turns and bleeds. Her vision goes flat, and for a moment she is without dimension: a phantom passing through a crack between worlds.
TEN
TRACKS
The pale morning bled like a wound. Blood-colored clouds stained the eerie crystal sky. The Darkhawk sailed low over a landscape covered in dead forests, dry plains, empty riverbeds and long-abandoned train tracks. Everything wound through a twisted network of jagged hills the color of bones. Pools of brackish water ran down cracks in the landscape like puss.
Black saw an occasional abandoned shack or a half-broken wall, reminders that the Southern Claw had tried and failed to settle the desolate Bone Hills. There was little to be found in the way of settled areas for another hundred miles, not until Wolftown, a settlement populated by half-mad hunters who made their living collecting pelts from the deadly region called Wolfland. Sadly, by that point, the team would probably have to stop to replenish at least some of their food and other basic supplies.
She wasn’t looking forward to that. Contrary to what she was sure the rest of the team sometimes thought about her, Black actually liked things to stay nice and boring.
Which is why I’m going to kick you in the ass the moment I see you, Eric. I don’t appreciate changes to my routine, you schmuck.
It had thankfully been a quiet trip to that point. The Darkhawk was a relatively fuel-efficient vessel, and so long as they avoided a lot of combat maneuvering and were able to steer clear of arcane storms they could travel a few hundred miles before they needed to stop and refuel.
Maur behaved like a very no-frills pilot most of the time, and the Gol kept the ship low and level and masked by the terrain when possible, but he never flew so close to the ground that they’d be threatened by the monstrosities that made the wastelands their home. For the past couple of hours he’d followed the old train tracks as they wound through once cleared sections of forest and mountain, a path that was easy to navigate. Even though scrub oak had grown over the railway in the years since the failed Southern Claw Railroad experiment, the tracks themselves were still in good condition, and much of the natural life in the region avoided the arcane iron simply because it bore an unnatural thamaturgic signature, not to mention the stench of humans.
While the trip to Fane had thus far proved relatively safe, one thing more difficult to combat was the sheer boredom of the voyage. That was the one fundamental flaw to the Darkhawk: it wasn’t meant to be used as a long-range vessel. The combat airship had just a small space between the two rows of opposing seats, and while there was a lower level it was filled end-to-end with equipment.
The entire ship was essentially a single mid-sized room with leather seats built directly into the walls and a single strip of narrow windows. Consoles for weapons control were located at the aft end and at the pilot’s seat, and there were exit portals on the starboard side and in the floor beneath the lower cargo area, each large enough to fit two people or one Doj. A tiny restroom that Black thought resembled a broom closet was located at the aft end of the lower-deck, but it was so far past the crates of equipment and gun racks that she felt certain she’d empty her bladder well before she ever reached it.
There wasn’t much to do, so Black went over the intelligence regarding Fane with the rest of the team. They’d already determined that the best course of action would be to avoid the city altogether, unless they found themselves in dire need of supplies they otherwise couldn’t acquire from outskirt settlements or legitimate mining camps. The loyalties of the Hammer and Fist were dubious to begin with, and when they took into consideration the presence of Wulf, the Raza and the Troj, the team decided that waltzing into the city-state was just asking for trouble. The last thing Black wanted was for them to get into a dangerous situation in Fane before they even had a chance to investigate the excavation.
They did their best to stay busy. They cleaned weapons, checked equipment, and aided Maur by working the nautascopes and watching for trouble. Aside from that they listened to arcane-rigged headphones, played cards, read books, and stared out the window at the bloody skies and the cracked golden landscape.
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