by Jak Koke
Lucero did not turn to look at him; she could not afford any doubts now. Could not allow herself any hesitation or Oscuro would control her once again. He would stop her from purifying herself in the beautiful song.
Lucero heard the wondrous voice more clearly now, near the rim of the spreading stain. And the exquisite loveliness of its harmony and strength made her heart ache for more. The song was her salvation. Her rectitude.
I must not stop now.
“Do not be hasty,” came Oscuro’s words, like hissed ghosts from the darkness behind her. “You will have time enough for frivolity after.”
With difficulty, Lucero maintained focus. Time seemed to lengthen as she pushed against the glowing rim of the stain. Her advancement slowed; it was as though the atmosphere around her had grown thick.
Step.
Another onslaught of Oscuro’s minions struck the barrier before she could pass through. Corpses and gum toads, hideous crawlers, all bathed in the blood of a new sacrifice, threw themselves into the light. All around Lucero, they shrieked in agony, bursting into flames as they plunged into the searing white. The song drove all the stain from them until there was nothing left but a bubbling black splotch where each one had stood.
Black smoke fouled the air around Lucero as the creatures vaporized. But the blood they carried fused into the ground, advancing the line of darkness. Lucero lost her focus then. Smoke clouded her vision and she could no longer see the light.
The intolerable shrieks from the burning monsters winnowed their way into her brain, and she could no longer hear the song.
Is it gone? Has Oscuro finally extinguished the light? Silenced the song?
Lucero groped through the darkness for a long moment, listening for anything. Any fragment of the song.
Darkness and blood swirled around her. Smoke and screams.
Then it filtered through again, the hint of gray in the night. The perfect tone of the song touching her ears. It sang to her in desperation. And she understood the words.
You are the reason he can be here. You are the balance between good and evil. The yin and the yang.
Lucero squinted against the smoke. The dark wedge took up nearly all of the outcropping now, the stain of blood spanning the entire width of the unfinished bridge.
Your weakness has allowed you to be used. Step into the light and he can use you no more.
Only at the tip, a meter away, did the light still shine. A small area of glowing perfection in a wash of putrid stench.
Embrace the light, and you will be free.
Lucero stepped closer to the tip of the outcropping. She heard the music grow as she neared the new edge. It was obvious that the singer would not last through another onslaught; Lucero must join her now.
Oscuro’s hissing voice whistled on the cold wind. “If you step into the light, you will only end up like the others—vaporized and bubbling. You will die.”
Step.
One more and . . .
“My child,” came the hiss again. “You have been useful to me thus far, but your betrayal pushes even the limits of my patience.”
Lucero maintained her focus and started through.
Searing heat flayed the flesh of her right hand and arm as she entered the light. Its beauty bringing intense pain into the parts of her body that had penetrated the barrier of brilliance. Part of her face and torso, her right leg. Purifying patches of her stained soul as the song flowed around her.
Thick tendrils of flesh, like ropy intestines, flew from the eviscerated corpses surrounding Oscuro and latched onto her. Shackles that coiled around her left leg and arm, the two that were still in darkness.
Stopped her mid-step. Half in light, half in dark.
“I cannot allow you to leave me,” came the hissing wind to her left ear. She barely heard it, however, as her soul strained under the power of the rift between worlds. Torn asunder by juxtaposition.
Immobilized on the brink of contradiction, Lucero lost all capacity for rational thought.
You must fight him. The goddess spoke to her. Her name was Thayla, and she was the protector of the world. Lucero knew all that now, all about the light and the dark. You must give yourself wholly to me.
She knew all, but could not move. She could do nothing.
Oscuro raised another onslaught of corpses and creatures, bathed in blood. She felt them coming, and she knew that when they hit the barrier this time, they would swallow the song. Thayla and the light that came from her was on the verge of extinction.
Lucero’s breath caught in her throat as she waited for the end.
17
Ryan floated in an inky black void, silent and odorless. The absence of sensation.
He tried to remain calm; he had heard stories about metaplanar travel. During his undercover stint at Fuchi Industrial Electronics, his friend Miranda had told him about the dweller on the threshold—an entity that guarded the gateway to the metaplanes.
Miranda had told him that the dweller appeared to each traveler in a different incarnation, to test his worthiness. Ryan tried to put the thought of Miranda out of his mind. She’d been part of the Assets, Inc. team for a brief period, and had died in a battle with Burnout. A battle for the Dragon Heart. Ryan still felt partially responsible.
The void took shape around him. Coalescing and brightening until a small dracoform glowed a fiery red in front of Ryan. It stood about two meters high and was similar to the silvery statue holding the spirit of Dunkelzahn that had tasked Ryan his mission. Standing upright on hind legs, its wings spread and radiant, there was an intelligent look in its silver eyes.
“You must pass a test, Ryanthusar,” it said, using the name Dunkelzahn always called Ryan. “Before I can let you cross.”
Ryan nodded. “Who are you?”
“As you suspect, I am known as the dweller on the threshold,” it said. “But for you I take the likeness of a drake—a small dracoform who lived long ago and was just like you are now—a servant of the one you serve.”
“Dunkelzahn?”
The drake inclined its scaled head. “He went by a different name then.”
“You must know that he is dead,” Ryan said.
“I know what you know, no more. No less.”
“Then you know that I have no time to waste. I must get the Dragon Heart to Thayla. It was the last mission given to me by Dunkelzahn.”
“I know that since you lost your master, you have been through a harrowing search for who you are. I know that since overcoming Roxborough and defeating Burnout, you think you have found your true self, and I know that you are wrong.”
“I have no doubts.”
“Liar!”
The accusation hit Ryan like a tongue of flame and heat. Suddenly, two other creatures materialized in the dark space around them. Ryan crouched in a defensive stance, turning to assess the situation. One creature shimmered in the air like a heat wave, barely visible. Its presence was a tornado of wind.
An air elemental.
On Ryan’s other side was a creature of molten clay. Animated lava, heat rippling out from its glowing red skin.
A fire elemental.
“Ryanthusar, in your master’s absence, you have embraced change with reluctance and fear.”
The fire elemental struck out with two globular arms, trying to engulf Ryan in fire. Simultaneously, the air elemental fanned the flames and released a billowing stench of smoke.
Ryan focused and struck out, accelerating up to his maximum speed as his blows landed on the fire elemental.
The spirit barely flinched, coming on with limbs of lava, spread wide.
Ryan whirled to get clear, trying not to breathe the noxious gas as he struck again.
His blows landed in rapid succession, but the elemental seemed unfazed. His hands and arms came away burned, but Ryan channeled the pain away with his magic.
“You must know that you cannot defeat both of them,” said the drake. “Using your standard tactics.”
>
Ryan immediately saw that the dweller spoke the truth. These were the most powerful elementals he’d ever faced. Smart and resilient.
“If you do not pass the test, you cannot complete your mission. You will have failed your master.”
Ryan tried to ignore the drake’s words. He struck again, but the fire elemental wrapped itself around Ryan, engulfing him in searing heat. Pain like he’d never known struck him. His skin melted from his flesh, stripped in burning shreds from his bones. His eyes seemed to pop from the heat.
He tried to use magic to hold himself together. He tried to channel away the pain, but it was too great. He took a deep breath to gather his remaining strength to get free. His lungs seized up as the fumes filled his chest, making him cough and wretch.
I am failing, he thought. There must be another way. The dweller wouldn’t give me an impossible task.
Ryan remembered defeating the fire elemental that Foster had sent to attack him. He remembered what Harlequin had said afterward. “You banished that fire elemental, my friend.” Ryan hadn’t believed him for a second; he had never banished a spirit before. Physical adepts couldn’t do that.
If he had banished Foster’s elemental, it had been the Dragon Heart’s doing. He didn’t have the Heart now.
No choice, he thought. I have to try.
Ryan focused on the fire elemental, studying its aura as he focused his mana. He targeted the spirit with his magic, using his will in an attempt to send it away.
“Be gone, spirit!” he yelled.
The elemental wavered around Ryan, then faded out.
The pain dissipated, and Ryan sank to his knees. He needed to gather his strength to banish the other one.
He looked up to see it all around him, sucking the wind from his lungs. He couldn’t speak the words to banish it so he drew power through himself as though he were throwing a telekinetic strike at it. In his mind he willed it to disintegrate, and threw the last of his force.
The air elemental wavered for a second, teetering on the brink of life. Then it fluttered and shredded into nothing.
Gone.
“Congratulations,” said the drake. “You passed the test.”
Ryan took a deep breath of fresh air. His pain was completely gone, his wounds vanished. He felt whole and strong.
The drake faded in front of him, its words like echoes in a canyon. “Remember, Ryanthusar, your master may be lost to you, but you must continue to grow. You cannot deny your nature.”
The dweller vanished, and Ryan floated in the void again. Then a glowing object appeared in the space next to him.
The Dragon Heart.
Harlequin’s ritual had worked. It had transported the artifact across. Ryan picked it up and wrapped it in his sash.
“Took you long enough,” came a familiar voice, edged with sarcasm.
Ryan found himself looking at Harlequin. “I had a run-in with the dweller on the threshold.”
Harlequin smirked under his face paint. “I should’ve warned you, I suppose.”
Ryan finished putting his sash around his waist. “No,” he said. “Wouldn’t have done any good.”
Harlequin nodded. “You ready?”
Before Ryan could answer, the scenery materialized around them. Flat sky of muted rainbow colors. Smell of blood and leaking guts. Ryan recognized the stench of the battlefield.
A feeling of nausea ground inside him as they appeared on the cracked plane of rock. Something was terribly wrong.
Ryan recognized the place from his dream, though the details were off. The plane of darkened rock was ten meters or so wide here, narrowing to a point about a hundred meters along the outcropping. The edges of the plane dropped away into a bottomless abyss.
A chill wind cored into his skin as it whipped up through the Chasm, but it carried away the stench and lifted Ryan’s hopes a little.
“Shit!” Harlequin said, holding his hand to his ear. Listening. “What the fuck happened here? Where’s Thayla?”
He started running toward the tip, moving faster than Ryan would have thought possible.
Ryan followed close behind, watching for Thayla. Looking for any clues that might tell him what had happened. He heard it then, a distant singing, like a muffled songbird. The music behind the veil touched Ryan’s heart and broke it. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
Suddenly, he was walking over corpses and blood. He looked up to see a line of hideous creatures attacking something at the very tip of the outcropping. Throwing their own lives away in a series of vicious attacks.
The woman who stood at the tip fought them off with her song. Ryan could see a brilliant radiance emanating from her now.
Thayla!
As Ryan watched, pushing past Harlequin in a burst of speed, the creatures overcame her. They were simply too numerous. They crashed into her.
Ryan was too far to reach her.
Thayla staggered back and fell over the edge. She teetered for a second, still singing. Her eyes fell across Ryan and Harlequin, intense sadness cast in her single glance—a look that shattered Ryan’s heart.
Ryan dove for her, plowing through the last of the animated corpses and oozing spider creatures to reach the tip of the outcropping.
He was too late.
Thayla stopped singing as she plummeted. “I am lost,” she called out. “Find the spirit Lethe. I named him and he carries part of me inside. He will know how to wield the Dragon Heart.”
Ryan lay on his stomach, watching her disappear into the abyss. Helpless to save her. He had failed after all.
“Get up, Ryan,” Harlequin’s voice. “Get up now!”
Ryan stood and turned to see a fresh army of blood-let corpses and other creatures coming for them. Ryan momentarily cringed at the cuts in the zombies’ pale flesh crawling with tiny maggots. Many of the corpses changed shape before his eyes, some growing tentacles, others pustules of oozing brown and yellow stench.
Behind the advancing guard stood a human woman and a man Ryan had seen before. Seen in a dream, in a distant memory, ordering Ryan to be beaten, tortured for information.
The woman’s skin was stark white and smooth on one half of her body, the other half marred by runic scars. She knelt at the man’s feet, shackled by ropes made of flesh.
The man had raven-black hair with a matching beard and mustache. He held a sacrificial knife in one hand, a stone bowl in the other, and wore an ancient robe of the Aztec priesthood and a ceremonial collar of enameled feathers. He looked at Ryan and Harlequin with hatred and glee flashing in his black eyes. Pupils like windows to Hell itself.
“Who is that?” Ryan asked.
“That’s Darke,” said Harlequin. “He’s the pawn of the Enemy, and seems to have grown somewhat in power since I last fought him.”
“So what do we do?”
“We try to get out alive,” Harlequin said as the dark horde closed in around them.
18
Lucero knelt on the hard stone, sticky with drying blood, cowering in the shadow of her master. She had seen everything. Thayla, the goddess of light, thrown into the Chasm by Oscuro’s army. The two newcomers, arriving to help Thayla.
Coming too late.
A rush of regret shook Lucero, intense sadness at the fact that she had waited too long to cleanse herself of her addiction. It was too late for that now. Too late.
She put her head in her hands and heaved sobs of despair. The sounds of combat filled the black air around her, but she didn’t care anymore. Her life was lost. With Thayla gone, Lucero had abandoned hope.
Soon, these two others would fall before Oscuro’s onslaught. Then it was only a matter of time before construction on the bridge would accelerate. How many innocents would lose their lives for that? Lucero couldn’t comprehend such a number.
My life is forfeit now. The realization hit her like a sledgehammer, sending a ripple of fear through her. She had been necessary for Oscuro to maintain the dark blood circle against Tha
yla. But now that the goddess was gone, now that the song had been silenced, she was no longer necessary.
Expendable.
The word swirled around inside her head like a leaf on a wind. Faster and faster until she grew dizzy and weak. Her shoulders shook from fright and sadness. Tears came in heaves and sobs, wracking any remaining strength she had.
She realized after a while that Oscuro no longer stood near her. She lifted her head and looked about her.
All around was death and wretched ruin.
Near the tip of the outcropping one of the newcomers fought the zombies and the spider creatures. He was human, handsome and strong with shining auburn hair. His muscular arms and legs struck with incredible speed, his blows deadly and accurate, felling Oscuro’s minions with precision and phenomenal power.
His aura glowed with a golden brilliance, and Lucero noticed that he carried an artifact of immense magical strength, that he was using it to focus his energy.
The other fought Oscuro directly, using spells as weapons. This mage was an elf, and his face was painted white with red diamonds over his eyes. His magic was very strong. He was a good match for Oscuro, and perhaps would have handled Oscuro without trouble if the corpses and other creatures hadn’t kept interfering.
The zombies grew elongated nails like sharp, blue-black claws that slashed out to tear at the flesh of the newcomers. Their bones and teeth jutted from flesh in barbed cornices, spurs for ripping skin and muscle.
The army kept on coming. Zombies replacing fallen zombies. Crawlers and oozing toads taking the place of their dead counterparts. It was too much, Lucero saw, for the two metahumans. They would soon be destroyed.
Flashes of brilliant white, like lightning, arced from the elf with the painted face, slicing through the minions, and stinging Oscuro. He flinched visibly, and a wound opened up on his chest. Lucero watched as the wound knitted itself closed in the moments that followed, and an identical gash formed on the body of one of the sacrifices.
