by Sam Sykes
“What. . do I do?”
“You speak. He will li sten. He can not hear an y thing else.”
Somewhere far away, there was a crashing sound in the darkness beyond the rubble. Then a moment of the hollow quiet, the long, blank page waiting for the words. She pressed her left hand to Denaos’s face.
“Not like that. He does not be lieve you.”
Her right hand trembled. She closed her eyes, let it fall upon his body, slide down beneath his tunic to the great wound beneath.
“Ask him a gain.”
She spoke a whispered word.
“Please.”
And she could feel him dying. She could feel the blood drying, skin blackening, organs failing. Pain. Agony. Her fingers drank it like water, all the suffering in the blood. Her arm grew heavy, glutted with the agony. She felt it course into her, into her arm and from death into life.
She could feel a life lived in reverse, pulled out of the darkness and into a burning light, the sensation of skin kissing steel, the sound of air dying before a body hit the floor, the first breath a woman takes when her husband plans to kill her, the wail of a mother when she gives birth to a murderer.
She was screaming. Her arm was ablaze. Skin was bathed in something bright white, something hideous and hungry that drank his pain and left behind black bone as it grew brighter with each drop drank. She was screaming. And through it, she could hear him. In her arm, she could hear the demon.
What is this, don’t like it, it hurts, can feel it, why does it hurt, why can’t I find anything here, I can fix this, I can make this work, I can make it work, I can fix everything, I will, do not be worried, do not fear.
It was a sensation she had felt before, in Sheraptus’s clutches, as she watched a young woman die. It had craved her pain, then, craved to fix it as Asper had wanted to. She opened her eyes long enough to look down at her arm. No skin remained. No cloth remained. Only the bright white light. Only the black, black bone. Only the blood growing wet, the skin pulling itself together, the organs waking up from their slumber.
Only the light.
Over her own agony, she could not hear the crash in the distance growing louder. Against the light, she could not see the stream of water racing across the floor. As she felt Denaos’s body grow warm, as she felt the pain inside her own arm, she could not feel the earth shake beneath her.
A moment before the wall of water came to swallow her up. A moment between when she drew breath and when the thing in her arm went silent and the water had just begun to burst beyond the archway. A perfect silence, the moment of the quill pressed to parchment.
And she heard Denaos breathe as the silver glow enveloped them both completely.
Gariath came to the crest of the staircase after he had left a good deal of his life on the stone steps below. He looked up at the face of the mountain and saw the carving of Ulbecetonth, arms stretched out and smile wide with benevolence. He looked over his shoulder to see what the hell she was so damn happy about.
Bodies. Some of them his friends. Blood. Some of it his own. The battle in the ring raged, as it would always rage until they all fell. But they hadn’t all fallen. The netherlings that did not know the words “lie down and die” swung at the demons that spoke to them with gurgling voices and reaching claws. As they would, always.
Perhaps that was just how life for the Rhega was, to drift from battle to battle. To stand over corpses and say, “This is what we fought for.” He had done just that, or intended to. He had intended to stand over the corpse of Daga-Mer, to look at his friends and say, “This is what I fought for. These humans. Not my family. Not even close. The Shen were close. And I left them. For these humans.”
Maybe it would have sounded better if he had been standing on the corpse of a titanic demon.
But he was going to die here alone, at the top of these stairs, surrounded by the water and with only one corpse to share it all with.
Mahalar. Blackened and split apart, lying there like ashes from a fire. His eyes were still dull, still yellow, still staring as Gariath approached him. The dragonman reached down, plucked the elder Shen up in his arms. Funny, he thought; his eyes still looked alive, as though he were expecting something from Gariath. Words of encouragement? A report?
Why the hell not.
“The fight isn’t going well,” the dragonman said. “Your people, they fled. They left their oaths behind and ran. Some are alive. Some are not.” He sniffed. “I thought you should know.”
Maybe not the best words to end on. Maybe not something the elder wanted to hear in the afterlife. But for a moment, the Shen’s eyes looked like they grew darker, slipping away from whatever they clung to.
But that might have been from the vast shadow falling over them.
Gariath turned and saw him. Daga-Mer’s light was a dim, steady, bloodred throb as he loomed over the dragonman at the top of the staircase. His great webbed claws clutched the bridge. Stale wind tinged with red burst from his jaws with every long, ragged breath. Deep within a hollow eye socket, a red fire burned upon Gariath.
The dragonman took a step back and felt something beneath his foot. He looked down and saw a trickle of water weeping out from the doorway behind him. Daga-Mer clawed forward, reaching out to haul his tremendous body forth with a great quaking sound as he settled upon the stone. His hand rose, clenched into a fist and prepared to bring it down upon the tiny red parasite on the stone before him. There was silence. All of creation held its breath for fear of being noticed.
Almost all, anyway.
Gariath’s earfrills fanned out with the sound. A distant rumbling, growing louder. The stream beneath his feet grew swifter, sweeping over the bridge, beneath Daga-Mer’s fingers. He watched the black flesh of the titan’s skin sizzle and steam. The great beast did not seem to notice.
Gariath did.
Gariath slung Mahalar’s body over his shoulder and leapt, scrambling up over a pile of rubble and into the arms of Ulbecetonth over the doorway.
And the water came in a great roar of froth and liquid, dragon’s breath from an old, rocky beast. It washed over Daga-Mer, striking him like a fist and bathing him in a silver glow. The titan howled with agony as it raced over him like a living thing, setting his black skin afire with steam.
He roared, he thrashed, he held out his titanic hands as if to hold it back. But the water kept coming. The water was pitiless. The water devoured him.
Gariath watched as Daga-Mer disappeared beneath a colossal wave and a cloud of steam. He rose again with a howl, his white bones left bare as the black skin of his body shrank like puddles under the sun. He fell beneath the water and rose again, soundless, stretching out a skeletal hand as if to grab Gariath with whatever hatred kept those bones alive just long enough to swing out with a skeletal claw and sink back beneath the water.
He did not rise again.
Gariath watched the water rush endlessly out, sweeping down the stairs and onto the battlefield below. His eyeridges furrowed. Theoretically, this would be a good time to say something pithy.
But at that moment, he caught a glimpse of them. The humans, the tall ones, carried out over the water and down it. Alive? Dead? Irrelevant. He had only one course of action and, thus, only one thing to say.
He turned to Mahalar and grunted.
“Hold your breath.”
Voices without words. Screams without substance. Agony unending. He could hear them as though they were drops of liquid dripping into his skull from the tiny gouges the crown’s spikes dug into the tender skin of his brow. He could hear pleas, wails, individual terrors blended into a swampy soup of pain that could not be shaken.
The Gonwa. Screaming. As their lives fed into his skull, down his throat, into his body.
He looked at his hands and saw them tensed and strong. He could feel the disease burning away, the weakness sweeping into the stones upon the crown and being carried to someone else.
Dreadaeleon felt strong. Impossibly strong.
And this would have come with such impossible relief had he been able to disregard the screaming.
“They won’t stop, will they?”
Sheraptus was still smiling when Dreadaeleon turned upon him. Despite the fact that his eyes were a pale white and his body was fragile and weak, the longface was still beaming as though nothing had changed.
“It was difficult for me to get used to, at first, too,” Sheraptus said as he picked himself up off the earth. “Eventually, you learn to block them out.”
Dreadaeleon found that hard to believe with how long and loud they screamed, with how clear and crystalline their pain was. He would have torn it from his head and cast it upon the ground if not for. .
Damn it, old man, he cursed himself. Not this way. You’re not supposed to feel this. It’s heresy. It’s treason. It’s against every oath you took and every lesson you knew. It’s. . it’s. .
“It’s power,” Greenhair chimed, coming up alongside him. “The power to end all of it.” She swept her arm over the battlefield. “The power to do what no one else could do.”
“In all fairness, I tried to do it,” Sheraptus replied. “But the people in the sky had a different plan for me.”
“Starting with him,” Greenhair hissed, pointing a webbed finger at Sheraptus as she laid a hand on Dreadaeleon’s shoulder. “He tried to kill you. He defied the Sea Mother. He served darker masters than even the Kraken Queen.”
“Shut up,” Dreadaeleon replied, rubbing his eyes. “Just. . let me think.”
It was hard to do so. The sound of the Gonwa’s pain did not fade. Every ounce of their life that flooded into him, burning away his sickness, filling his body with life, came accompanied by a scream to a god, a cry to a mother, a wail to a brother to save them.
“I wouldn’t take too long,” Sheraptus replied. “She might grow tired of you and arrange for someone else to kill you, as she did me.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Greenhair said.
“Yes, don’t listen to me, little moth. Don’t listen to the only one here who’s had dealings with that creature. Don’t listen to the man who knows what she’s about. She proclaims to want peace, bliss, for the Sea Mother or whatever. But all she’s interested in is the power. Same as any sensible creature, really. I can’t fault her.”
“Lorekeeper,” the siren said, pulling on his shoulder. “Ignore him. All that I have done has been to save this world, to preserve it from Ulbecetonth, to serve the will of the Gods.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” Sheraptus held up a finger. “Of course, you claim to serve the Gods. You get others to do it for you, naturally, to use their power to serve them on you wield. A liar’s power. One I hadn’t really appreciated until everything was made clear to me by them.”
He pointed upward, to the bloodstained sky, and smiled. He drew in a breath, let it out as a cold cloud of frost.
“And so, I do name you a pretender to their power and their servitude, and so honor their distaste.”
Dreadaeleon saw it. The gesture of the hand, the twitch of the lips that heralded the spell. He saw the ice crystals form in the cloud of frost and become a jagged icicle. He saw it fly past him. He felt the warmth of her life spatter upon his face as it struck her squarely in the sternum and carried her to the ground, pinning her there. He saw it, before it had even happened, as it happened, after it happened.
And he did nothing.
Greenhair lay upon the sand, eyes wide and reflecting the cold blue chill of the icy spear pinning her to the earth. She reached out a hand to him, as if to beg him to pull her up, as if there weren’t a jagged chunk of ice in her chest. She gasped for air through a mouth dripping red.
“Why?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“She has a point.”
When Dreadaeleon whirled on him, his smile had faded. The longface simply looked at Dreadaeleon, all the boy’s wide-eyed, jaw-clenched shock, and blinked.
“What?”
“You killed her,” Dreadaeleon said.
“Sorry, have you not been paying attention? I kill lots of things.”
“She. . she helped you, though. She was your ally. You treated with her and you killed her like. .”
“So? She helped you and you watched her die. You have the crown, you could have stopped me.”
“I was confused, the screams, they’re just. .”
“Just more screams. No different than any you have heard before. You could have stopped me. You could have saved her.”
And Dreadaeleon was left with nothing more than a silence and Greenhair’s blood crackling as it froze upon the ice.
“You’re ashamed,” Sheraptus observed. “Afraid, perhaps. I felt the same way.” Now a grin began to creep across his face, as though whatever he were about to say he had been dying to say for ages. “The awareness of it all, how insignificant it all is, and then you realize it’s not insignificant by design, but by perspective. It is looking down upon the crab and marveling at how tiny it is without realizing just how very tall you are next to it.
“To summate: she died because you no longer felt it worthwhile to save her. Not with what else you could do with that crown.”
“Magic wasn’t meant to be used that way.” He cringed as another chorus of screams echoed through his skull. “This way.”
“This is where you fail to understand. Power, magic, nethra: all the same. It’s there to be used. As a concept, it’s worthless. Gods are the same way. They do not sit there and wait to be assailed with the whining of weaklings. They wait for worthiness. They wait for me, little moth. I am alive because I use their strength and the chances they gave me.”
Dreadaeleon hadn’t even noticed the lightning crackling on the longface’s fingers until they were raised and thrust in his face.
“Just as that power is not yours to wield.”
By the time the longface spoke the word and sent the forked lightning from his fingers, all Dreadaeleon could muster was a feeble hand raised in defense. But in the flash that it took, he needed nothing more. He could feel the electricity enter his skin as though it belonged there, snaking into his body and disappearing into his fingertips with a few stray sparks. It crackled inside him, settling into his body like a new home.
And the two shared a look of shock, neither having expected that. But neither had the opportunity to dwell upon it.
The distant rumble grew to a roar. They turned and saw the wall of water rushing down from the staircase, becoming a colossal wave unto itself. It swept away the living and the dead, the screaming and the silent, the faithful and the faithless alike in a pitiless rush.
“Ah.” Sheraptus sighed. “I see.” He clicked his tongue. “They really are fickle, aren’t they? It seems a little unfair.”
With that, the longface folded his hands behind his back and walked. Slowly. Toward the water.
“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon demanded. “You can’t-”
“Enough with the limitations, little moth,” Sheraptus said, waving a hand over his shoulder. “They saw fit to give you the crown and give me. . this. I suspect you’ll find that limitations mean nothing to those willing to recognize their insignificance.”
“But where are you going?”
The water rushed up to meet him. Sheraptus had but enough time to look over his shoulder and smile.
“I suspect we’ll find out.”
And he disappeared beneath the flood.
Dreadaeleon should have dwelt on just how psychotic that was. Or on how he could have saved Greenhair. Or on the fate of his friends. But desperation lent clarity to thought. He drew in a breath, spoke the words, and released.
The wall of force formed nearly instantaneously. Nothing more than a flick of his wrist, a wave of his hand, and the air became rippling, solid, parting the colossal flood as easily as he would fold paper. And in brief, fleeting moments of clarity, he could but marvel at how effortless it all was. How easily the power flowed
from him, how he felt nothing burning or breaking inside him to do it, how swiftly the water carried the blood and the bodies and the skeletons around him.
But only in brief, fleeting moments.
The rest of him was dedicated to trying not to listen to the screaming as he heard the Gonwa’s voices rise to shattering and fall silent, one by one, until their agony was a candle flame flickering in the wind.
THIRTY-FIVE
AWASH IN GLORY
Waist-deep in water, Dreadaeleon waded among them, and the dead would not stop looking at him.
Bobbing in the water, their long faces still screwed up in a battle they had not stopped fighting, the netherlings scowled at him. Hollow and empty as they had been in life, the skeletons of the Abysmyths stared at him from fleshless eye sockets as they lay submerged beneath the crystalline water. The Shen. .
The Shen floated upon the lake that had been the ring. Face down. Motionless.
He paused and looked to the mountain. The clouds swirled overhead. Perhaps unable to bear giving the rest of the sky a look at what happened on the earth below. The water still vomited from the mountain’s face, though in a slow, steady stream that twisted down the shattered stone stairs and beneath the ribs of Daga-Mer’s colossal skeleton.
The fleshless titan froze in death, reaching out to the mountain with a bleached-white hand, as though still, in some small way, alive. As though, if he could but try a little harder, he could reach what he sought.
All in your mind, old man, he told himself. There’s no one left here but you.
He looked over the ring. The entirety of it was submerged, the bones and bodies bobbing along its surface like lilies of purple and white.
Somewhere in his mind, someone whimpered.
They’re still alive, he thought. Some of them, anyway. After all that. After all you did to them. . He paused, shook his head. Stop that. You didn’t know. And by the time you did, there was no choice. The power was there, you happened to have it, so you had to use it and. .
