Soulrazor

by Steven Montano

  Somehow, his spirit is with him again. He feels her inside him, and she makes him volatile. Her anger stirs in his heart, and he is afraid.

  The inside of the tower is hollow and covered in ice turned grey with age. Large reams of frost cover the walls and drip black residue on the smooth marble floor. Pillars of smoke have solidified into columns of dark matter. Everything smells of fat and blood. The taste of brine and salt hangs heavy in the air.

  He looks down the interior of the tower. A black sword rests at the center of the chamber. The blade is sharp and cold and so utterly dark it damages the light. It has no dimensions, no markings. It is a sliver of night shoved into the stone. The hilt is edged and inconstant and difficult to see.

  The darkness eats his eyes. He can’t clearly see the blade or those who came to steal it, but after a moment he hears their pain and feels their screams. Their bodies burst in the darkness as they bladed shadows and soul-tearing concertina rip them apart. They fall into vast pits of bone and frost.

  You were foolish to come here, Korva says.

  She is next to him. She has a gun drawn and aimed squarely at his face. Her smirks at him, and her eyes shine unnaturally blue.

  So were you, he says. What is this place?

  She smiles.

  No, she says. You’ve done enough harm.

  She squeezes the trigger. He sees the bullet eject from the gun, sees the metal burst free of the barrel, but it doesn’t matter.

  Back in the physical world, Avenger is without magical properties. It’s just a shard of bone, no longer connected to the deity it represents.

  But here, in this place, it is powerful.

  The blade spins up and deflects the bullet into the stone wall, where it tears out a fragment of black rock.

  Korva pushes him away with her boot and jumps into the chamber. The fall is too far for her survive, and yet she does. She moves between the holes and races towards the dark blade.

  He jumps down after her, and almost lands in one of the pits. He gazes down into twisted shafts that stretch for impossible miles to a labyrinth of murderous tunnels. Skull visages glare up at him.

  She moves quickly and nearly reaches the blade before he can react. He throws Avenger into her back and sends her to the ground. Blood flies from her mouth and spatters the black sword.

  Soulrazor.

  He isn’t sure how he knows its name. He shouldn’t know anything about it…and yet he does.

  He knows that Soulrazor is the opposite to Avenger, a shard of The Black, just as Avenger is an extension of the White Mother.

  Unfortunately, he didn’t realize how much Avenger had protected him. Without it in his hand he struggles to remain stable in the black sword’s presence. It changes and shifts everything around it.

  He looks at the stygian walls of the tower chamber, and understands where he is. The sword is a sliver of that vessel he saw before: the dark ship from distant times, the derelict craft built in a nightmarish alien world. But this place, this prison, the towers and the curtain wall and the iron-hard mist, are all within the blade, just as they contain it. It is the prison and the prisoner, a paradox he will die in.

  His form stutters and fades. He takes a step, and part of his shadow body melts into the floor. His hand clings to the rune-crafted wall. He feels himself pull apart.

  Korva rises and desperately tries to pull Avenger out of her back. The dulled tip protrudes from her chest, but she is stable, held that way by the blade.

  He realizes his mistake in releasing Avenger, and he tries to take it back. Each step sends pieces of his ash body into the air. He reaches his hand out and grabs parts of his own smoking form as they drift away.

  Behind him, back on the battlements, a battle rages. He smells the smoking scent of black magic, and he almost feels the slice of razor wings against shadow flesh.

  The avatars were not brought to stop him, nor were they meant to retrieve the blade. Korva can do that on her own.

  Their purpose is much more direct: they were brought to battle The Sleeper. They were brought to keep it away.

  Korva cannot pull Avenger out of her back, but she reaches Soulrazor just the same.

  He stumbles forward. He disintegrates with every step. His body flakes away.

  She grabs Soulrazor, just as he grabs her.

  He screams. His body draws back together, fuses into a whole as he falls through cracks in the dome of reality. He plunges, frozen, through the brittle crust of forgotten worlds.

  The city is in ruins. He sees the remains left behind by the vortex bomb. A cold black moon hangs low in the sky. Drifts of ebon smoke curl up from the ground. Shards of glass and stone hang at awkward angles and jut into the air.

  The sky is red, and the ground is black and charnel. Everything has burned.

  It’s Thornn.

  He can’t believe his eyes. His entire body shakes with rage and fear and disbelief.

  I could have done something, he thinks, and even though he doubts that is true, it doesn’t change the way he feels.

  He wanders across a wounded and desolate scene. Krugen’s, the café he once knew, was destroyed in the explosion. The watch towers have toppled, leaving only smoking slivers of stone in their place. The streets are so filled with debris it is almost impossible to walk. He climbs over the broken remains of fallen doors and across sharp and craggy stones. Glass cracks and shatters beneath his feet. Mortar crumbles into dust.

  The air is suffused with choking debris. Flames burn in the distance and illuminate the crimson haze. He hears nothing but the moan of the wind and the occasional drifts of ruined buildings as the structures collapse.

  He smells burned skin and feels cold ash in the air. There are no bodies. Whatever happened here reduced everyone to dust. He walks through the shifting remains of Thornn’s citizens, people he knew, and people he didn’t. People he desperately wanted to protect, only he hadn’t been strong enough.

  It’s not your fault, a voice tells him, but he can’t accept that, because it is. It is his fault, and always has been. He could have stopped it, if only he’d made better decisions.

  This hasn’t happened yet.

  He isn’t sure how he knows that, but he does. Everything has been in flux, ever since he fell into the black blood in the Bonespire. He has stepped out of synch, existed

  Like the avatars. They have to exist like I did when I piloted the Woman in the Ice – something of the shadows, out of synch with time and space. That was the only way I’d been able to fight The Sleeper at all

  in the same space as that shadow, that blade, Soulrazor. Korva can touch it – she is like him, somehow, infused with shadow energies, even though she is an avatar of the pale goddess. He doesn’t know what she wants with it, but he can’t imagine it’s anything good.

  But if I exist out of synch with time, that means I should be able to ignore its boundaries. I should be able to go where and when I want.

  If only there was some means for him to control his newfound state.

  He wanders through the ruined city. Somewhere, in a distance that can’t be measured by spatial or temporal boundaries, he feels something change. It is himself, a separate self, not a different version but another aspect, himself removed, one that exists somewhere else, and as

  I know

  he feels that change

  that I have to stop it, and now I can, only

  the sky falls onto him, and he is smothered by the burning stars.

  it won’t be me.

  The keep hangs dangerously over the dark sea. Black water crashes against the rocky shore. A ship rocks beneath him, and it is all he can do to cling to the mast. The tattered sail flaps in the storm like a battered ghost.

  The water freezes his skin. His eyes burn from the touch of shadows.

  The wall before him stretches for hundreds of miles, and it is the same wall he stood upon before,

  stands on now, there is no time

  with its bladed crenellations
and grim glowing pyres.

  Collapsed siege equipment and crushed bastions are littered on the ground near the sea. A channel of water winds its way directly into the keep between two tightly-positioned walls. The dark waters cuts through the barbican and into a wasteland of rotting timber and shattered girders.

  A woman stands on the far shore. He doesn’t want to see her face. Ethereal wisps of white smoke connect like tendrils to her shadow-flesh. Nothing about her is certain: she is a dark slate, a silhouette with pale and glowing eyes.

  He is in the city. It is alive and well.

  What the hell is happening to me?

  The vampires have launched an attack. Gol-piloted dirigibles launch short-range missiles that perforate Razorwing bodies. Chunks of meat and steel hail down from the sky. Automatic weapons fire and mortar blasts detonate in the air. Klaxons sound into the sky.

  Southern Claw soldiers run and meet their attackers. Ice cannons launch liquid blasts that turn the air to frost. Poison fumes deploy over the city in a shimmering green wave filled with acid sparks. People flee into bomb shelters and iron-bound rooms.

  Gargoyles fly and collide with their brethren, and they slam into one another like flesh hammers. Wings and claws rip and tear in an orgy of blood and skin.

  Shards of steel rip into buildings. Vampire warships and Razorwings soar overhead, and they are cut down by massive motorguns and Flak 38’s. His ears ring from the force of explosions and the screams of the dying.

  He can’t interfere. He isn’t really there.

  He sees Danica. She stands outside the mansion with the others, where she stands alongside Kane and Ronan and uses her spirit against the vampires. They plough through shock-troops and undead foot soldiers and skewer enemy gargoyles on their blades and burn through hordes of ghouls.

  She senses the bomb the same time that he does. She moves towards the portal through which he fell, the liquid mirror that leads to the uncertain barrier between those cryptic realities.

  He helps her. He isn’t sure how he knows, but the vortex bomb wasn’t placed here, was not meant for Thornn, but it will destroy the city nevertheless. Soulrazor has sliced between the worlds. Thornn, the crater, the keep (before it is destroyed, and after) are all connected. Soulrazor exists in all four places. In order to break it free, Korva has placed a bomb that can destroy all of the locales: it will detonate across the arcane threads of time.

  He and his spirit dissolve, melt, and fall around Black. He pushes against her from the other side of a liquid veil of night, closer than he has ever been, closer than he would ever be again, but still separated by the skin of worlds. He lifts her into the sky.

  The portal shimmers and expands. He senses the bomb, feels it, but he can’t pinpoint it.

  He feels a heartbeat. Slowing, slowing. He moves sluggishly. He feels Danica look at him as the crescendo of power builds.

  She’s looking at me. Looking into me.

  His heart glows like a swelling silver sun. He feels dark blood pour through his veins and tear his brittle unskin apart. Power scorches his flesh.

  The Black is inside of me. The dark blood…it’s stained my soul.

  I am the bomb.

  It is his last thought before he explodes. Light tears out of his body in a rippling liquid storm that carries his consciousness like ripples across the sea of worlds. He travels to the edge of reality and watches the blast tear through the dome that staves off the realms of oblivion.

  There, waiting on the other side, is The Black. It is a vast and incomprehensible presence. He sees eyes like frozen suns and claws that ooze through the veil of stars. He senses hearts as cold and as hollow as the void.

  The explosion rips across the world, and tears it apart.

  Where is Jennar? This is his doing. The Black is trying to invade. What came before…the event that we call The Black…was only the beginning. The invasion has just begun.

  He wakes at the edge of the crater. He floats, returns to where he was, to where he is meant to be. Everything feels lost, and disjointed.

  She is there: the Woman in the Ice.

  How? he asks.

  Rules are broken here.

  Where is here?

  Nowhere.

  He stands, shaking. They are at the center of the crater.

  Pyrotic gases flood the sky and turn the area to a bowl of flame. Dark soil clings to his boots and cakes to his skin. He feels so very tired, like he hasn’t slept for years.

  Please, he implores her. Tell me what’s going on.

  You have determined much yourself….

  Tell me anyway!!!!

  He can’t control his rage. He stands at the brink of a dying world. Its death is his fault.

  It is not, she explains. If not you, it would have been another.

  He shudders at the power of her voice.

  The avatars, she continues. The false avatars. They were not designed to battle the Dra’aalthakmar, or to retrieve Soulrazor, the blade that is The Black. They are just weapons: detonations held in stasis, waiting for the right moment to release. They bear a volatile mix of opposing energies…

  What opposing energies?! he pleads. God damn it, why can’t you stop speaking in fucking tongues??!!

  She stares at him. Frost mist surrounds her. Her hair, her skin, her cloak and her armor are all silken white, pure and clean. She is a brutal contrast to the darkness of the crater and the blood red sky.

  The Black. The realm beyond. It is not a person, or a people. It is not a place, or an item. It is not a concept. It is all of those things, and none of them. It has sought access to this realm since the beginning of what you call time. It was allowed to seep through – just a drop, and that came through a single tiny crack – and with that taste, it has been intoxicated with your world ever since. Obsessed. Something about your reality, your physicality, your temporality…the very fabric of your world…draws it. It is consumed by Earth, by a need to take it, and to destroy it.

  His head spins.

  And you? he says. What are you?

  Everything they are not. I am what came before. I have always guarded against these beings, these monsters. I cannot and will not let them destroy this place.

  Her form starts to waver in the dank, cold wind.

  You, she continues, are the most potent bomb now. You are bonded to me – to us – in a way no other living creature is, or could ever be, and you hold some of our power inside you.

  But you have also been infused with the power of The Black.

  The dark blood you inadvertently fell in has seeped into your flesh and saturated your soul. It is only a matter of time before the energies, white and black, collide. If you follow Korva and her pursuit of Soulrazor, that explosion will happen in the void between the worlds…which is exactly what the creature you call Jennar wants, because that is where you will do the most damage, where you will destroy more than just one world.

  He understands. He will destroy all worlds, and all possible worlds. In that space where the holes exist between realities, where the muddied temporal bonds between time and place and possibility have been weakened by Soulrazor, his death will rip through that hole and sunder everything.

  What can I do?

  There is no escape, she says. The dichotomy of energies within you must be released.

  Until it does, you remain trapped in the unspace between worlds, and so long as that is true there is little you can do to avoid going exactly where Jennar wants you to go. He will hound you and pursue you. He has some measure of control over you now – he will find a way to ensure you are where he wants you to be when your power erupts.

  But I’ve died already, he says.

  Yes. And you will die again. But like all cycles, even the trap of time eventually comes to an end. That heartbeat you heard was the chime of inevitability. The cycle will only play out so many times. Eventually – inevitably – the loop will close, and when that happens…

  The Black will win. Earth, already shatt
ered and fused with the bastardized remains of other worlds, will be cast into a sea of instability, a void of uncertain darkness and crumbling banks of time, a place without dimension, and without form. It will slip like liquid through the cracks, and bleed into The Black.

  You can contain the blast, the Woman says. You can curtail the damage.

  How?

  The Soulweavers.

  How can I find them here?

  They pass through the realms, at will. They use the ether and weave it into their soul nets.

  Find them, she says. They may help you.

  He doesn’t know how to find the Soulweavers. Soon, he has forgotten much of what the Woman in the Ice said to him.

  His existence becomes a fugue of movement. He walks across landscapes blistered by explosive pores and rocks made of fused teeth. He stalks the parapets of the massive curtain wall, and walks among its ruins.

  He sees the woman in the shadows, and he is afraid of her.

  Jennar is behind him, always hedging him on, making sure he goes where The Sleeper wants him to be.

  Ghost feet trek across fossilized plains and ossein hills. Banded pillars of bone hold flayed skins that ripple like flags in the bitter wind. Skeletons in armor man the catapults.

  He sees the avatars and eludes them, just as before, but this time he tries to let Korva take the sword. He cannot, and he confronts her, and he finds the dead city, watches his friends die, stands in a boat that brings him before the dark woman he fears and knows.

  Time revolves. He is doomed to exile in this quagmire of repeating moments. He is lost in a metaphoric maze, a cryptic temporal prison.

  Skies of rust surround him. Iron statues leer at him from the keep walls, only to be reduced to little more than corroded metal the next time he sees them.

  Sometimes he stops and battles Jennar, only to lose. Always he ends up in Thornn, where he watches the vampires assault the city.