Soulrazor

by Steven Montano

  He is condemned to repeat the explosion that destroys Thornn and everything around it, city by city, mile by mile, minute by minute, a rippling tidal wave of resonant arcane force that pushes across reality like a blaze of dark fire.

  Is there no end?

  It will end. That he knows. It will end when he has failed for the final time…when he has died for the final time. It will end when the conflicted energies inside him destroy not just Thornn, not just the Southern Claw…but everything. When they scorch out across the ripples of time and ignite them like slicks of volatile oil.

  He walks, and soon he stands in a land of winter. He passes through a film of air, a shimmering haze border, and finds himself in a desert.

  He has wandered for decades. He can’t remember doing anything else.

  He lashes out in desperation. His spirit is long gone.

  She abandoned him at the outskirts of this bitter realm years ago by his reckoning, but still he tries to channel her.

  He has done this before, and never to any effect.

  He wanders, and runs, and fights, and somehow he always ends up in the boat, staring at the unknown woman.

  Then he dies in the city of Thornn, and takes everyone with him.

  But not this time. Something is different, and the change to the mind-numbing reality makes his senses reel. He stands stunned with confusion.

  A creature stares at him. It is a serpent.

  The creature is tall and elegant, with intelligent sapphire eyes that stay constant in the shifting winds of the crimson reality. While everything else is in flux, a quagmire of dark shades and smeared boundaries and liquid details, this human-sized snake with oddly feathered wings and prismatic scales is solid. It looks so real he can’t keep his eyes on it. Its sharp edges and deep colors almost cause his mind to fold in on itself.

  It regards him quizzically. It is as surprised by his presence as he is by its.

  It does not speak.

  Power emanates from its glittering scales and its vast cobalt eyes, which look like glass shields filled with colored smoke. Condensation ripples along the surface of its undulating skin.

  Its breathing makes its body fan and expand and recede back in as it sucks shadow essence from the air. That dark dust fills its lungs and turns its eyes black, and for a moment the creature shudders, as if injured by the grime it imbibes.

  But after a moment the creature breathes out, and what had entered its body black and thick is expunged as pale vapor. It has cleansed the vile atmosphere like an organic filter. As it does so, thin streams of its skin fan out around its floating snake body and take on the semblance of a stringy web, trace lines of luminescent silk that shake in the air.

  Its serpent hood unfolds, and in it he sees a dark reflection of himself, a drone visage. His face is only a silhouette, a molten shadow that fades and crumbles like a soot mannequin.

  He stares at his grim image, and realizes how long he has been there. His heart sinks, and dark tears stain his face.

  It wants to know who he is…what he is. He cannot answer it. He can only hope it will help him.

  He races across the crater. He is desperate to stop Black and the others before they enter the gate and are trapped in that same hell. A metal tower armed with motorguns fires at him.

  He changes things again, but in the end he changes nothing. They are meant to enter that gate, and he is meant to fail, so that is what happens. Attempting to change the details does nothing except kill more temporary lives. Reality is what it is, across the worlds. There is only one outcome, and nothing he can do to avoid it.

  Black’s spirit twists and turns the tower and causes it to explode. The blast shatters outward. Arcane fuel freezes into bladed ice tears that hang in stasis. The air is frozen plasma. Firmaments of debris lie embedded in the atmosphere like dead flies in honey.

  He stands on a sliver of crimson stone. The sky is dead and dark. The shadow of a broken mountain looms behind him.

  He has seen this before. He has witnessed their deaths when he tries to interfere. All he can do is let things run their course. There is no way to change the inevitable.

  One way or another, they enter the gate, and he pursues Korva to stop her from taking Soulrazor.

  He detonates, and he dies, and he slays a colony of realities in the process, times and places and possibilities connected by the corridor of his destiny.

  The serpent is curious.

  It leads him away. It is not truly a snake, he knows that. The Soulweavers take whatever forms they want.

  Nothing is known of them. They are the weavers of fate. Depending on whom one asks, the Soulweavers are either the guardians or the slavers of lost souls. They cast fragmented spirits into a tapestry of wraith matter, bind the threads of lost lives into the fabric of reality, and roll ghostly threads into the skeins of time. They study, and they shape.

  They are not the crafters of the world, but they re-imagine it. They work with the vampires, because the vampires speak their language. They would work with the humans, as well, if only humans knew how to contact them.

  He feels it reach towards him with its mind. Its thoughts turn him inside out as it studies him. He feels himself scrutinized. Alien eyes burrow into his soul. He relives his pain and his trials. He walks through the crater, across the parapet, and sails through the ruins of a blasted keep. He sees his city destroyed, and feels as he is frozen in time.

  Jennar is in the distance, watching.

  He is lost, but he is no longer alone. He feels the Soulweaver travel with him, even though it keeps out of sight. It hovers at the edge of his presence. He feels warm wind sweep over him from the flapping of its rainbow wings. Arcane energies emanate from its serpentine body and scorch the ground.

  When it is close to him, everything dark is bleached with light. Terrains covered with ebon mist are illuminated, and decaying stone is rendered pale and whole by the presence of the Soulweaver.

  Will you help me?

  He knows it will not answer. It observes. It remains at a distance, a shadow of color and light. It drifts over the ground as a shimmering coil. A trail of pale vapor marks its passage through the black and red murk.

  The crater captures him. He sails in the ship. He watches Thornn explode and his friends die.

  His soul pulls open and is laid bare to the raw sky. He sees Snow, burning on the train. He sees his father on the playground with him, two figures against the sunset. He sees Viper Squad enter the city of Rhaine, the last place they will go. He sees himself battle The Sleeper in the ice, his soul cleaved to the white blade. He sees himself in the gladiator pits in Krul, a hollow echo of what he’d once been, a cruel and heartless killing machine fueled by need and blood.

  Is this what I am? Is this what the Soulweaver sees? Pain, and suffering, and longing for things to be as they once were. This is all that you are, he tells himself. You have become a shell. A ghost.

  And yet it is drawn to him. It senses something inside him worth saving, something in his soul that hasn’t been soiled by death and pain.

  He steps into the ruined remains of Thornn. The Soulweaver is joined by more of its kind. They are a council. Serpent tails twitch in the air and probe the ruins, turn over bits of rubble and push away the smoking husks of creatures petrified in the ashen drift. Their tongues lick the air and create arcane spittle that transmits messages in the dank wind. Their hoods fold and collapse and glitter with psionic colors. Their scaled feathers shift and pulsate to the beating of his heart, and the beat grows slower, slower, counting down.

  The serpents hover in a loose ring and surround him. There are a dozen of them, at least, and they slither and twist in the air like smoke. Their eyes grip him as if with claws. He feels the cold vapor of their breath sweep over him and hold him in place.

  They close in. Their hoods and wings expand and form a barrier. Their fangs glisten in the dark light.

  Something inside him turns to stone. He wants to run, wants to escape, but
he knows he is past that. Nothing they can do to him will change things. Nothing they do can possibly eclipse the pain he has already witnessed, and caused.

  Snow. Graves. Dillon. Black. Kane.

  Their fangs sink into him. His screams echo into the void.

  I’m sorry.

  He walks through a time-eaten ruin.

  He is still in the moment. His skin is black flakes of matter that peel away in the crystal wind. He senses himself elsewhere, many places at once. His breaths stretch across the seconds, into what has been, and what will be. He remains frozen in a loop of sealed possibilities.

  But for once, he doesn’t feel eyes on his back. He doesn’t sense the presence of that darkness that has soiled his soul.

  This place is familiar. Metal poles jut out of the earth like red bones. The merry-go-round looks gnawed upon, and it spins silently in place. The sky is the color of rust. The remains of old houses sit in the distance, dark silhouettes against the falling sun.

  Where am I?

  Some place you remember, the Soulweaver says. We made this for you, from the remnants of your memory. It is imperfect, because your memory of it is imperfect. You recall everything through shades of pain, and filters of regret. You will never heal, because you won’t allow yourself to.

  He walks to the remains of a swing set. Memories of his father come to him unbidden. It has been so long since he’s thought of him. He was only a boy when The Black came, and his father was one of the first claimed by the cataclysm.

  He shouldn’t be able to remember anything about him at all, but he does. He remembers feelings of safety, feelings of love.

  He thinks of his mother. She is so filled with sadness. She, too, filters her life through a lens of regret. He is always so worried about her. She is always haggard and tired, and she never expects them to live through another day. She never smiles.

  The morning that Cross awakes from a bout of sickness and Drogan, the old warlock, tells her that her son has bonded with an arcane spirit, something dies inside of her, some last vestige of hope.

  You will never heal, the serpent tells him again. He knows the Soulweaver is there, even though he can’t see it. It will reveal itself to him if he wants it to.

  Maybe I’m not meant to heal, he tells it. He looks at the merry-go-round. Sadness weighs his heart. I can never go back, he says. Dark tears stain his eyes.

  No. Even we cannot do that. We can only shape things that are, or that are yet to be.

  Can you help me? he asks.

  Can you help yourself?

  He sees the faces of his friends in pools of brackish water on the ground. The world shifts and turns beneath his feet. The cold makes him shake. Everything is vast and endless, a void wasteland that crawls under a solid bed of blood clouds.

  My death should be my own, he says. I don’t wish others to die with me.

  Are you sure? Is that why you formed your team?

  I formed my team…so that I wouldn’t be alone.

  But now you want to be alone?

  Only to die. He drew a cold breath. I want to die alone.

  What will you do for us, if we agree to help you? it asks.

  What would you have me do?

  You must set things right.

  He raises his head, and watches the world change.

  The air shifts and twists into a tunnel of fluid. Organic stars squeeze through space like bleeding pores. Pillars of detonation wait on the other side, shimmering black storms that riddle a landscape turned red and white like a formless sea of milk and blood.

  You will stop this. You will keep the sword out of its hands.

  Soulrazor, he says, to let it know he understands.

  Soulrazor. It is a lost vestige of The Black, a shard of the substance that once broke through the dome between worlds. It is the substance of a black world, a foreign realm of darkness and pain, oblivion and endless cold.

  Its invasion shifted realities, re-crafted Earth and fused it with other realms.

  The Sleeper is an aspect of that darkness, a vestige captured long ago by the Pale Goddess. She is charged with protecting this realm from The Black, the void that waits beyond the edge of existence.

  Soulrazor is more powerful than The Sleeper. It is pure: not a manifestation of that dark energy, but the energy itself.

  It does not belong here, the Soulweaver explains. Its presence has remained on the outskirts of your reality for some time, but now an avatar of the Pale Goddess wishes to escape her own fate by finding the sword. She believes that doing so will set the balance right and return The Black to its realm. She is wrong.

  He stares through a coiled vortex. He sees the mire of molten realities, the purging flames of black perdition as they spread across a pulsing landscape. Cold explosions petrify the sky and cast it to the ground like shattered stone.

  How can she even exist? he wonders. How can the Pale Goddess have so many avatars…

  That cannot be known. Not yet. For now, keep Soulrazor out of her hands, and out of The Sleeper’s grasp. If you do that…we will help you.

  He knows there must be some reason why they can’t do it themselves. Maybe they’ve waited for him…maybe this is what he was always meant to do. If he was in junction with time, he imagines he would see a white spider crawl across his path.

  Darkness leaks from his soul and falls to the ground like shadow rain. Daylight cuts through the clouds and sears him, slices into his unstable flesh like sunbeam knives.

  His body solidifies and regains form. Color returns to his skin. He sloughs off shadows.

  His vision clears. His heart races faster.

  His feet leave the ground, and he hovers in place over the wine-dark landscape. He is a stationary beacon, a floating monument over the shifting earth.

  Like the Soulweaver, he is brighter than the landscape. He radiates life and power. He is solid in a sea of rippling uncertainties.

  The serpent laces the disparate shreds of his body together. He is frogged and undone, then re-knit into a stable pattern. The threads of his soul are tightly wound before they are spun back into something less burdened by shadow. Blades of light form around his wrists and join them to the threads of his spirit, who he had thought lost, or at least incapable of reaching him here.

  She is frightened and exhausted. It has been so long since they have been together. For a time he forgets she is not his…not really. He mistakes her for the spirit he grew up with, and later, when he realizes his error, he hopes he has not given her insult.

  You are ready.

  What do I do? he asks.

  Stop the woman, the Soulweaver explains. Stop The Sleeper. Don’t let them get Soulrazor. They each want it for their own ends, but in either one of their hands it will cause irreparable damage.

  How? How can I stop them?

  You are stable, the serpent says, but that will not last. The darkness inside you has been subdued, but it is still there. It will grow, and it will destroy you…but if you keep Soulrazor out of their hands, only you will have to die.

  Why are you doing this? he asks.

  He sinks into the earth. He falls through the ground as if it were cloud. Dark bolts of lightning strike across the zenith of the impossible sky.

  Because, it says, we do not wish to see our work undone.

  He sees the mountain. It is jet stone embalmed in hoarfrost. A dark copse of grim trees stands encased in translucent ice. He feels the dead wind, and it carries voices. His feet sink into the mire as leaves fall and cover the ground.

  Could she be there? He knows she cannot.

  And yet she is. He would know her anywhere. She is there in the trees, her hair tossed in a wind filled with crystal rain. She walks barefoot in the churning waters. Her skin is lunar pale, and delicate.

  The distance closes between them. He steps through the membranes of time, and falls into the past. He will not be there long.

  She puts her hand to his face. He knows he can’t stay there with her, a
s she is long dead. What he sees is real, but it’s not where he is meant to be.

  I love you.

  She smiles. Warmth spills through him.

  He falls up and into the sky. Air rushes through his fingers as he reaches for her, but she shrinks away. He flies, inverted, feet first toward the brick red sun. He will never see her again.

  His new spirit rejoins him as he ascends, and they vanish back into the unstable folds of time. It will be his last chance to set things right.

  He comes, once again, to the curtain wall. It’s not until he settles onto his feet that he feels the tears in his eyes. He wipes them away with hands covered in soot. Skin turned black with grime is reflected back at him from a puddle of dank and oily water. Obsidian catapult stones have been stacked nearby, and grim gargoyles loom overhead. Dim pyres burn in braziers set aside the wide walls. Dark crenellations protrude over a sea of mist and salt.

  Silhouettes move in the shadows. He smells the taint of unnatural magic and corrupted souls.

  Jennar is close. The Sleeper moves towards him with purpose. It knows he has changed, and that its plans must change accordingly. It will force him to die at the place of its choosing.

  I’ll beat you. I’ll die on my own terms, you son of a bitch.

  With grim resolve and a heart filled with regret, Cross draws his blade, and moves towards the tower.

  PART THREE

  RAIN

  FIFTEEN

  SHADOWMERE

  She falls through folds of black ichor. She sees the sea, and the keep. Waves crash against the grim beach.

  She sinks up to her knees in silt and sand. Thick folds of seaweed tangle and grab at her.

  The keep is in ruins. It looks as if it has been cleaved in two by some preposterous blade. Stone shards and steel debris dangle like tree limbs into churning waters.