by Stone Thomas
The marbleskin potion. All this time it sat in my pocket, forgotten. I rolled onto my back. Every muscle ached. I tried to get to my feet, but my leg wouldn’t bend. The full bottle of marbleskin potion sank into my hip and my thigh, turning my leg to stone beneath my clothes.
Duul bent over me and laughed. “I’ll tell you how you’ll serve me now,” he said. “Your death will break the spirit of resistance and prepare the path for my triumph.”
Pain rocketed through my core as Duul plunged his sword through my chest. He hooked the curved blade through my heart and lifted the weapon into the air, skewering my limp body and holding me aloft.
My eyes peeked open. The world wasn’t swirling in shadow, or in Cindra’s illusions. It was just dark. The silver light of Akrin’s shrine still beamed at the edge of our hill, but it was alone. Valona hadn’t accepted a shrine of her own.
Duul whipped his weapon forward, tossing my body off his sword and flinging me toward that stone cylinder by our defensive wall.
I couldn’t speak, only cough, but each sharp breath brought more blood into my lungs. I opened my skillmeister menu and confirmed what I already knew. My HP had hit zero, and the damage to my body was too severe. I couldn’t come back from this.
“I answer freedom’s call at last,” Savange said. “I am ready to be born into the world you leave behind. Let go, boy. Your shadows are mine now!”
I looked up at Duul one last time to the sound of Savange cackling in my ear. The scents of smoke and tar and blood and sweat receded as my mind let go. My eyelids shut, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t open them again.
+63
If my death opened a rift to the underworld, I didn’t see it. All I saw were shades of gray. My world had lost its color and I was just a glowing soul, separated from a body that lay bleeding on the ground. My former vest was torn, my former leg was stone, and my former face was calm. Pale from loss of blood, sweaty from fear and exhaustion, but calm.
A pinprick of light hovered before me, beaming every color at once. It was an impossible prism, a diamond of spectral radiance that called out to me. My hand lifted toward the light before I had time to think through what it all meant.
“Oh, Arden.”
I spun around. I hadn’t moved, yet here I was, in a completely new place. I stood on a small round stone at the center of a round room whose walls were like polished quartz. Seven doors were built into those walls, each with different designs.
One door was open, looking onto a dismal void. Reyna stood in its doorframe, her body as firm and supple as always. Could I still hold her in this form? Could I run my hands through her long white hair, feel the warmth of her bright red lips against my own?
“Reyna,” I said. My voice was an echo. “Where am I?”
“This is the nexus,” she said. “The afterlife lies behind one of these doors.”
“Send me back.” I walked up to the doorframe with Reyna on the other side of it. “I have work to do. Nola. Vix. Halcyon. It’s not over.”
“It is,” she said.
“Open a rift for me,” I said. “Or let me be a ghost. I don’t care if the morning sun erases what energy I have left, I have to go back. They need me.”
“That’s not how this works,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You have to help them if I can’t,” I said. “Or Valona.”
“Her evolution is almost complete,” Reyna said, “but she needs more time.”
“So do I!” I yelled. Reyna pressed her hand against my cheek, but I didn’t feel it. Her large, dark eyes glistened with newly-formed tears.
“Kāya,” I said. “She’s dead. Her ghost stayed behind to destroy Nola’s divine soul and take over her body. I can’t let her do that. Nola is too important, too good. Please.”
Reyna’s expression changed to shock. She spoke quickly — to me, to herself, to her swarthling companion. “That’s not the natural order of things. No, I can’t. It doesn’t matter that I want to! If Nola is lost, Duul is the only way forward. Valona and I have no choice but to serve the god of war.”
Her gaze had drifted, but she turned back toward me now. “Arden, wait. Where are you going? How are you doing that?”
My hands began to fade. My face felt wet. I tried to ball up my fists and dry my eyes with them.
When I opened them again, I was lying on the ground staring up at a swarm of fairyflies. Hundreds of them took turns diving toward me, shedding a single diamond tear, then zooming back into the sky. They drenched me in their healing power.
Duul swiped a massive red hand through the air above me, but he couldn’t disperse this cloud of insect healers. One landed on my chin and kissed my nose. I’d recognize her red-gold-green wings and sapphire eyes anywhere.
“Thank you,” I said.
Duul balled a fist and I rolled to the side. He slammed into the ground where I just lay. I took my spear and got to my feet.
My skill menu. That’s how I’d know where things stood. All my skills were intact. My XP hadn’t changed, but my HP and AP had. They were at full capacity again.
This was my second chance.
I stood. Duul’s war dog rushed past me with a skeleton dragon chasing behind it. The two tangled on the hill, wrestling and rolling together, trading bites and kicks.
Another explosion rang out, and the war dog yelped. A cannonball crashed into its ribs and knocked the black, muscular familiar on its side. Behind me, high atop our cannon tower, our candlemaker raised a fist in the air. She had finally learned to aim.
The murky clouds overhead didn’t part as Nola plummeted through them. She flapped her wings at odd intervals, slowing her fall somewhat, but she crash-landed in the dirt. Kāya’s ghost trailed behind her.
Nola crawled toward me. I thought you died.
That doesn’t mean I’d give up.
Nola gave a weak smile, closed her eyes, and collapsed on the ground. Duul laughed and stepped toward her while a rift opened above her.
My heart leapt into my throat, but Nola’s soul didn’t rise from her battered body. Instead, Reyna flew through the rift, arcing high into Halcyon’s sky, a gray woman with black wings whose long white hair was a bright beacon against the darkness Duul summoned to our hill.
“My mother wants a word with you, Duul,” she said. Then, with her hands clasped before her, she pulled at Kāya’s soul. The goddess of chaos struggled and beat her arms against the bubble that formed around her, but she wasn’t strong enough to escape it. Reyna had ages of practice, and I had skilled her well. She Encapsoulated Kāya and held her bubbled soul away from Nola’s prone body.
Two seraph guardians ran to Nola’s side and helped the goddess pull herself up from the ground.
I can unlock their signature skill now, I said. It may be our last chance.
Do it, she said. She turned her eyes toward the rift.
Valona stepped through next. Her short elven frame stood a little straighter since I saw her last and her wrinkled gray skin was healthier, less pale. She had regained the strength to break the Great Mother’s bonds and traveled here to our hill. The only question now, was why.
“My Valona,” Duul said. “You’ve looked better.”
“Age hasn’t softened you,” she said. “Tell me, god of war. You wear my necklace. Why?”
“The Great Mother stripped you of your armor,” he said. “I have begun to recover it. Consider it a dowry, from one shriveled old powerhouse to another.”
“Explain why you attack this city,” she said.
“I attack all cities,” he said. “Gods like us have been forsaken, but our day is nigh. The Great Mother’s followers look at you with disgust and terror. She has polluted their minds with false ideology. Join me as my queen. War and death will rule in perfect harmony!”
“I shall see the Great Mother dethroned,” Valona said. “I will pave the way for my daughter to live in the light. But you make one misstep, god of war. I am the goddess of life after life. W
ar and death are inevitable, but my hand will accelerate neither.”
“I will control this world,” Duul said. “And I will come next for the worlds you protect. Stand by my side or lay beneath my feet. The choice is yours.”
“My work requires that all souls have the chance to stay pure,” Valona said. “If you offer a world where impulse negates intention, we will always be at odds.”
Amidst the cannon blasts in the background and the crackling fire working its way through Duul’s massive, slow-burning tower, the sound of thunder clasped loud and quick. A serpent’s face pressed against the rift’s window, then through it, sliding its jaw along the ground and racing out of the world of folding stillness. The rex fulmin had come to Halcyon, and its body still glowed faintly with the Great Mother’s curse.
The majestic snake crackled with electric power as its body, hundreds of feet long, slithered across the hill. Duul raised his sword, but it was Mamba’s voice that rang out next. “You will not hurt him!”
The rex fulmin thrashed its body against the god of war. Duul’s sword began to spark, but he plunged it into the dirt and reached for the snake with his bare hands. The rex fulmin wriggled away from his grasp.
I planted my spear in the ground by my side as the black clouds overhead lit up with lightning. It struck our hill at random, blasting apart a roof here, splitting a rock open there. The rex fulmin reared its head and stuck out its long, forked tongue before charging north across the hill.
Mamba stepped into its path.
“Mamba!” I yelled. “Stay back!”
She planted her heels into the dirt, rested her hands on her hips, and stared the rex fulmin down. When the snake’s face came within inches of hers, it bent its neck to the side and skidded to a stop. She pet the animal once, kissed it on the forehead, then climbed onto its back.
Duul held his hands out and summoned orbs of pulsating magic, black spheres with red centers that glowed brighter as they grew. He hurled them at the rex fulmin, but they bounced off of it. The snake creature was encased in the Great Mother’s curse, and all Duul’s attacks did was send small cracks along the white sheen that covered the animal’s scales. With its vendetta against the Great Mother’s enemies, and with Mamba at the reins, no rage-filled curse would ply the rex fulmin from its mission.
Lightning crashed down from the sky and struck the ground by Duul’s feet. He jumped back, another step away from his vile ore sword.
“You already have your daughter,” Duul said to Valona. “We all deserve that privilege. Being trapped in the world of folding stillness is not the only way to be alone. She forbade any goddess to bear my children. She had no right.”
“And you have no right to force anyone,” I said.
Mamba sped alongside our hill’s wall with the rex fulmin, skirting the inside perimeter of the city. Thin tendrils of electricity connected between the snake’s body and the wall, brighter the longer it raced. It drew power from it, building up its own electric stores.
“How are the gypsies?” Duul asked. “I trust they’ll raise my children well.”
“They’ll stay here where they’re safe,” I said.
“For now,” Duul said. “My children will need their father. I will not abandon the family I created.”
He threw another round of curse magic at the rex fulmin when its path brought it within range again. The white sheen covering its body cracked and flickered.
“Mamba!” I yelled. The snake took her on another full loop around the city at breakneck speed. She was getting closer now. “Mamba, it’s not safe!”
As the snake brushed past the electric energem at the heart of our defensive wall, the stone exploded, showering sparks over the southern half of our hill and firing pillars of lightning upward, into the thick black curtain of dark magic blocking the sun from our hill. Those electric spikes split apart into more tendrils of electricity, then split apart again, and again, until the sky was a web of overlapping streaks of brilliant light.
The rex fulmin’s body was surrounded by sizzling strands of energy now, small eruptions of lightning that burst from its scales and fizzled alongside its body all the way down its tail.
“It wants justice,” Mamba said, steering the animal toward us. The lightning raining down from the sky intensified, striking my spear, Duul’s sword, and a dozen other places on our hill.
“Another gypsy,” Duul said. “How did I miss one?”
He reached toward Mamba’s direction and her body lifted from the rex fulmin. She hung in the air like a rag doll while her body, her clothing, her eyes — everything turned the darkest black.
“No!” I yelled. “Don’t take this from her!” My spear was burning hot, but I grabbed it with both hands. The sky flickered with another round of lightning. I didn’t care. I ran at Duul faster than I’d ever run before.
I used Upsurge. I used it again, engulfing my body in white energy and redoubling its effect. Then I Vaulted — not ten feet, not twenty, but forty feet high. Duul stood below me, gripping Mamba in some malicious spell, a dark “miracle” that would steal the one dream she held tight. A child of her own. A healthy, beautiful, not-at-all-evil baby she could shower with love and affection.
Mamba didn’t stop fighting. Her mind controlled the rex fulmin, and it coiled around Duul as tightly as it could. Its body pulsed with light so bright it burned my eyes to watch, but I didn’t blink.
My ascent slowed, stopped, reversed. Gravity pulled me down with increasing speed. I turned my spearhead down and aimed.
Nola gasped as I crashed onto Duul, piercing my weapon deep between his shoulder blades and leaving it there as I rolled onto the ground.
Duul screamed out. Mamba fell three feet to the ground. The rex fulmin unleashed a legendary storm.
Twelve lightning bolts shot from the sky, converging on the iron spear embedded in Duul’s back. His body seized as that energy tore through his flesh. The scent of his burning leather vest and his singed hair was stifling. Duul fell onto his knees and reached with one hand for the weapon, but he couldn’t get it free.
The sky lit up again. The rex fulmin wasn’t through. Another dozen lightning bolts charged down on the god of war, the god who thought he could curse this majestic creature, conquer heaven and hell, and force every man and woman alive to abandon everything they held dear.
The rex fulmin’s body was sleek and green after that. Its curses had been discharged along with the last of the energy it spent on Duul, leaving the creature vulnerable. The god of war stumbled forward and retrieved his sword while the snake weaved its way across our hill. Its body was too long to pull free of Duul’s range though, and the god raised his blade.
Before he could slice into the rex fulmin’s body, golden energy shot toward it. Charging to the snake’s aid was Brion, leading five seraph guardians. The signature spell those familiars Cast were wisps of magic that halted in midair, spreading into a barrier that shielded the snake from Duul’s blow. His sword recoiled against the floating panel of guardian magic and he bounded back a few feet.
I raced to Mamba’s side while Duul faltered. She was crying, but at least the color returned to her rich red skin.
The rex fulmin continued on its path, brushed past us just long enough to rub its cheek against Mamba’s arm, then it slithered across our wall and disappeared into the forest beyond.
Duul staggered away, blood trailing down his back. He reached for his war dog mount, but the creature lay on its side, bleeding its black lifeblood. He summoned a ball of curse magic and tossed it weakly at the skeletal dragon lying by its side. The enlivened creature’s bones turned black.
“You are not brave,” he said, climbing onto our goblins’ beloved skeleton. “You are not strong. You are alone. The Great Mother will take everything, but she will not protect you. When I return with an army a hundred times stronger, you will know the inevitability of my reign.” He charged ahead on his new mount, leapt over our defensive wall, and rode into the dark fo
rest beyond.
The cursed men had gotten free of Mamba’s snakes and the holes dug by gi-ants. Their skin had lost its gray pallor, but they ran after their master anyway.
“Your curses are broken!” I yelled. “Don’t go with him!”
Nola was on her feet now. “They chose this,” she said. “They’ve heard what Duul envisions for the world and they approve. They want freedom from the empire, from the Great Mother, and from the morals that bind normal people.”
“But how?” I asked.
“They likely always felt that way,” she said. “Trapped by the system. Trapped by the status quo. Trapped by their own powerlessness over their destinies. It made them angry, but they played nice. They went to work, raised a family, followed the rules.
“Duul gives them a vision of the future where they can live without responsibility and without mercy for others. It’s a destructive kind of freedom, all taking and no giving back. It appeals to them though. They’re revealing their true colors, the same way the brave, selfless people who took up arms for Halcyon have revealed ours.”
Our people approached us from every direction. Then, at a full sprint, a glowing green slime guardian charged at a pair of exhausted fighters. They turned around in terror.
An explosion rocked our hill again, and a cannonball splashed through the slime creature’s body. It collapsed into a puddle.
“You should probably turn the cannon energems off,” I said.
“No need,” Nola said. “That was the last charge. With Kāya gone, all of her divine effects will wear off. Her energems, her shrines, her familiars.”
“She’s not gone though,” I said. “She’s right there. That’s her soul.” A perfect sphere of light hovered behind Reyna.
“Valona, Reyna,” Nola said. “Thank you for coming to my aid. You helped save the people of Halcyon from Duul’s control.”
“My power only returned,” Valona said, “because you allowed your priest to help me. Let me ask this, goddess of clever insight and premonition.”
