The Last Winter (The Circle War Book 2)

by Matt King

  From the mist of black soot and debris, Shadow stumbled to August’s side. She picked him up and held him with both hands. Just like the night Aeris first saw her in the church, she lifted her child high to save him from harm. Aeris reached for him. Her outstretched fingers glanced off the surface of his suit.

  “I can’t reach him!” she yelled.

  “I can,” Bear said from above.

  He knelt beside her and leaned over the end of the ramp to take August from Shadow. Their eyes met briefly. “I got him now, girl.”

  Shadow’s claws let go of August’s arm. She took a tired step back. As soon as she did, the end of a sword slammed through the meat of her chest.

  Aeris screamed. Talus appeared over Shadow’s shoulder, his white eyes raging. He jammed the blade deeper as Shadow’s arms fell lifelessly to her side. Her jaws stood open, silent. The monster let her fall off the blade, then turned his eyes to the ship.

  “Shadow?” August said groggily as Bear raced up the ramp with him.

  “Don’t look,” Bear said. He shouted into the hull. “Get us out of here!”

  “Shadow!” August called out again.

  The ramp started to close, cutting off the sight of the monster as lava licked at the sides of the spire. Aeris crawled back into the hull with tears building in her unblinking eyes, staring at the ramp as it closed.

  Behind her, August collapsed against a wall as Bear tried to console him. She stayed on the floor, her trembling arms barely keeping herself from falling over. The ship’s engines roared to life. She stood, wavering on legs that barely felt like they were there, and walked to look through the portal beside the door.

  Earth slowly grew smaller as they pulled away. Lava moved across its surface in a relentless wave, coating the planet with red fire. She watched it burn until she couldn’t take the sight of it anymore.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Meryn waited in darkness for Amara to arrive. Despite Cerenus’s warnings, she didn’t fear Amara’s invitation. She knew better than anyone that Amara would never go back on her own rules. She prized them too much. Even though part of her knew that peace was long dead, she held out some hope that the goddess had asked for their meeting to put an end to the war, especially in light of their losses. Still, she was not unarmed. She brought her full energy with her, and let herself burn brightly, creating a cloud of excited particles around her for Amara to see. She looked around for the nebula the Circle had created the last time they met here. It was nowhere to be seen. Curious, she thought, but hardly surprising. The edge of the universe was one of the few unknowns still left to her kind.

  She felt an influx of energy behind her and braced herself for Amara’s arrival.

  The Lady of the Circle arrived in full display. Even at Meryn’s strongest, her light was nothing in the face of Amara’s. She was a brilliant spectacle, emitting enough energy to create a cascade of nebulas on her own. A smaller light drifted at her side, bound in a writhing shapeless form. The energy inside raced frantically, looking like it was pushing at the edges to escape.

  “I wondered if I would see you here,” Amara said. She reigned in her light until she took her human shape.

  Meryn waited until she was done to do the same. Some habits would never change, it seemed.

  “It still fills me with sadness to see you on the other side of this war,” Amara said. “You should have been at my side.”

  “I couldn’t sit by and watch you kill them all,” Meryn replied. “As you would me in the end.”

  “Is that what you think of me? An executioner?”

  “After Ule, how could we not?”

  “Because if I were, you would all be dead.” She stared into Meryn’s eyes. Eventually, her gaze fleeted to the object hovering beside her. “I asked you here because I wanted you to see what end awaits the enemies of Pyra, in hopes that it might convince you to end this senseless challenge. I wanted you to understand Ule’s fate for yourself.”

  Meryn’s eyes drifted to the shifting orb to Amara’s left. She’s imprisoned him. She’s imprisoned Balenor.

  “What are you going to do with him?” she asked.

  Amara held out her hand and pulled the orb tighter just as it seemed ready to explode. “I found him trying to hide inside a star, an idea he said he got from you. Balenor will suffer the penalty of our laws. His champion is dead. His part in this war is done.”

  “No,” Meryn said. “I won’t be a part of this. I won’t accept his life.”

  “That is what you have always failed to understand, Meryn. His life is not for me, or for you. It is for Pyra.”

  Amara’s eyes turned to the empty void. She looked at it with a hint of excitement and awe. Meryn looked in the same spot and saw nothing but black emptiness stretching to eternity.

  “When you look at this, what do you see?” Amara asked.

  “I see nothing, because there is nothing.”

  Amara gave a slight nod but never stopped staring at the void. “For a long time, I saw the same. I used to come out here alone and simply look out into this empty space, wondering how such a thing could exist. There is nothing. Surrounded by a universe that is teeming with life, this one void remains untouched. Why?”

  Once again, Meryn looked through the darkness and saw emptiness. She is truly gone, the woman I once knew. Her mind is lost.

  “For long stretches of time I would float here and listen, hoping that if I could not see the answer, then perhaps I could hear it. That is when Pyra spoke to me for the first time.”

  “There is no Pyra,” Meryn said. “You’re fighting this war to win the favor of a phantom, Amara. Are you so far gone that you cannot see this?”

  Amara turned to her. “It may surprise you to know what I have seen.”

  With Balenor still struggling to free himself, she left him and floated forward with her arms rising from her side. She swelled with energy. Wisps of light formed along her skin, rising in tendrils. The fingers of energy stayed connected to her as they swam through the void, fanning off in different directions.

  Something began to form in the darkness. Meryn watched it grow. It started as pinpoints of light, a vague cloudy shape in front of Amara’s outstretched hands. Her wisps of energy fed into it, disappearing into the shape and fueling its growth. Then, a tear appeared. Like an eye opening, a rip in the darkness widened. An image started to form as the canvas grew, revealing a landscape through the window that Meryn had never witnessed before. She floated away on instinct in the face of the tear, hardly able to believe what she was seeing. This can’t be. There is no other universe besides this one. This is impossible.

  The tear stopped growing as Amara withdrew some of her energy. She relaxed her arms. “This is the doorway to Pyra,” she said proudly. “The doorway to Ascension.”

  Meryn looked past her to the strange worlds floating on the other side of the tear. Instead of the dark void of space she knew, there was a liquid quality to the alien universe where amorphous worlds drifted like cells, each giving off its own light independent of any stars. Rocky flecks like dust meandered through the suspension.

  Something approached from the murky haze. A jagged black slab drifted closer to Amara, inching its way through the liquid universe until it was nearly to the tear. When it got to the barrier, it shot forward, slamming through an invisible wall between the two realms. Meryn gasped. She could hear something coming from the slab, a greedy sound like an infant searching for its meal.

  Amara drifted closer. She held out a hand as though she was going to touch its face.

  “Amara, don’t!”

  A green light appeared on the monolith. It grew like crystals, spreading slowly across the face. Another patch appeared. They stretched and widened, slowly forming the eyes and mouth of the creature. Its light was dull, barely a hint of the face it seemed eager to realize.

  “Do you see now?” Amara said. “Pyra is real, Me
ryn. As is her promise of life in Ascension.”

  “No,” Meryn said softly. She struggled to reign in her frantic thoughts. “You should not have called to this creature.”

  “She is not a creature. She is our Creator.”

  Amara turned to Balenor. She pulled him forward. Inside his prison, he fought wildly against the impenetrable walls.

  “What are you doing?” Meryn asked.

  “Giving her the power she needs to live again.”

  “Amara, please.”

  Amara drew Balenor forward until he was floating between her and the beast she called Pyra. The walls of Balenor’s prison began to dissolve as he inched closer to the doorway between the worlds. When the confines were weak enough, Balenor burst forth in an attempt to escape, but his light couldn’t get away fast enough. His screams tore through Meryn’s head as he fought against the current drawing him toward Pyra. His light melted into the black surface. A sound like a distant giant drawing breath pulled him into Pyra’s maw faster. Balenor’s cries were silenced. His energy washed over her surface, crackling with light as it was absorbed. Amara watched with jubilation, her mouth stretched in a wide grin.

  Pyra’s emerald features swelled with intensity. Balenor’s energy ran like blood through her, fueling her awakening.

  “My child,” she said.

  “This is a miracle, Meryn. She has finally awakened.” Amara welcomed Pyra’s blazing expression with arms open wide. She turned her wild stare on Meryn. “Now you see. Now you know I was never going to sacrifice us all. Only the ones who would not cede to her rule.”

  Meryn backed away from them. “Amara, this thing is using you.”

  “No,” she said. “She is saving us.”

  Pyra’s hungry eyes turned toward Meryn. They peered through her, seemingly tasting every part of her energy.

  Meryn felt an overwhelming urge to run. She could feel herself being pulled toward the creature. Join him, a voice hissed in her head. Join him and free yourself from this curse of life.

  Meryn pulled herself away while she still could.

  “Do not run from your fate,” Amara called after her as she turned to escape. “All she needs is one more soul and she can save us from this life. She can free us, Meryn! She will free us!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  “Do you remember the sensation of closing your eyes?” Soraste asked.

  August shifted on the cool metal table. His body was still dealing with the effects of the induced coma she’d put him into. Her words meandered through his head, blindly searching for meaning. It took all of his concentration to finally understand what she was saying. He waited to answer until the fog in his head had mostly lifted. “Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

  “I want you to picture yourself closing your eyes. This will trigger the latent nerve signals to send input to the necessary receptors.”

  He at least understood the first part. He tried to picture his lost eyelids closing.

  “Good. One moment.”

  “Should I keep them closed?”

  A loud humming noise surrounded his head. He could feel small taps from Soraste’s instruments where his eyes had been.

  “Soraste?”

  “Hmm? Oh. Yes. You may open them.”

  “Do I think about myself opening them or is there actually anything to open?”

  The humming stopped. “See for yourself.”

  As soon as she said the words, he felt something, a sensation he’d resigned himself to never feel again. He tried to keep his expectations in check, even as his mind registered a thin haze of red spreading from the center to the edge of his eyes.

  He did as she said and imagined his eyelids opening. His vision exploded in a rush of blues, orange, and reds. He brought his fingers up to his face, staring greedily as he moved each digit. She did it. I can see again. He jumped when his vision cut out for a split-second. It took him a moment to realize that it was flickering each time he involuntarily blinked.

  He touched his fingers to his right eye. There was no sensation of touch as his fingers probed the metal surface. He looked over at Soraste for the first time. She was a figure of solid bright orange light with only the slightest hint of a face.

  “There are no lids to cover your eyes. Seemed impractical,” she said. “Though you will still feel like you are using them.”

  His fingers ran along the ragged edge of his new eyes at the border with his skin. “Colors seem different.”

  “That is because you are looking in the dark.”

  At once, the room lit, and the orange, blue, and red hues flipped to a brilliant display of colors. Soraste stood near the end of the operating table, studying his face with proud yellow eyes. He lifted himself off the table and swung his legs around. Just to the left of the table stood a cart covered in something that looked like charred bits of skin. Soraste quickly covered it.

  “Your eyes were heavily damaged,” she said.

  “I remember.”

  He got up and eased his arms into his armor, still trying to make sense of the fact that he was seeing things again. He’d only been blind for the better part of two days, but he couldn’t remember his sight ever being so clear before. When he turned around, he caught his reflection on the face of the table. His heart raced. He hadn’t seen what they looked like yet. He leaned forward, letting the image reveal slowly.

  He wasn’t sure if he would be disgusted or excited by what he saw, but in the end it was neither. Soraste’s implants made him feel like he was looking at someone else. My eyes were brown, he thought as he took in the sight of the dull red sensors surrounded by spidering lines of circuitry. The new concave lenses reminded him of a honeycomb, each one covered by a reflective red coating. The border between the machinery and his skin was seamless, but the metal film had asymmetric borders that traced what must have been the edges of his injury.

  “How do they feel?” she asked.

  He fastened the latches on his suit and looked around the operating room again, drinking in the colors of the lights of the machinery and the sharp reflections on the face of the metal table. “It’s strange. Everything seems so clear.”

  “The eyes of your species were designed for seeing in water, not land. These new lenses offer the clarity you would have known had your ancestors not left the ocean.”

  “And they let me see in the dark, apparently.”

  “You can see more than that,” she said, motioning to the wide porthole on the side of the room.

  He walked over slowly, taking in the sight as it unfolded. The window showed a view of space, but it was nothing like the space he’d seen before. Instead of a black curtain with dots of light, he saw a massive highway of intertwined connections, thin strings of blue light running from one sun to another, and there were trillions. He felt like he could see each of them. The ones that were closer registered as various shades of red and blue, some white. The space in between the stars appeared as a cool blue-green mist, dotted with strange orange oblong shapes. As the ship passed by a Jupiter-like planet, he watched as fingers of light stretched from the northern pole of the gas giant, retracting and extending as if it were dancing to a silent soundtrack. For the first time, space seemed alive.

  “What you’re seeing is a new spectrum of light for your species. You may have a name for it, but…I couldn’t find a link in your thoughts.” She sounded embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was never that good at science.”

  “Hmm. Well.” She shuffled some instruments around behind him as he stared through the window.

  “Out there,” he said, pointing to the void of space. “Those orange blobs. What are those?”

  Soraste followed his direction, the corners of her mouth lifting slightly as she studied the canvas of the universe. “Those are stars,” she said.

  “Stars? They don’t look like stars.”

  “You see them as the gods see them, both those alive and dead.”

  “They all l
ook alike. How do you know which is which?”

  “The birth of a star paints the same picture as the death of a star. Fitting, don’t you think? Life and death, two end points along the same circle.”

  “I thought a circle never ended.”

  She paused, her eyes dropping to the floor. “Everything has an end.”

  He turned his attention back to the room. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to an oblong container against the wall.

  Soraste didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice was quiet. “The remains of your friend. Meryn retrieved them. She thought you might want some say in what happened to them.”

  His fingers reached for the shell of the container but stopped short of touching it. Internally, he felt the sensation of tears trying to form even though they couldn’t anymore. The image of her lifting him to safety one final time drove a wave of sadness through him. In the end, she’d suffered like so many others the Circle had touched. Innocent, yet punished for the crimes of gods.

  Soraste’s voice barely registered. “I’ll be going now. Much to do, yes.”

  He nodded without looking back.

  “You have some visitors waiting,” she said. “If you want to see them.”

  He stared at Shadow’s closed casket.

  “August?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let them in.”

  Soraste nodded and put away the last of her instruments as he walked back to the metal operating table. She gave him a final shy smile before morphing into a band of light and shooting through the hull of the ship like it wasn’t there.

  As soon as she left, Aeris peeked around the open door.

  He motioned for her to come in. “You can come closer. As far as I know they don’t shoot lasers.”

  She stepped inside, followed closely by Bear, who had to duck to get through the door.

  For a second, no one spoke. The two of them stood at arms-length from the table. He felt like an animal at the zoo.