by Joe Ducie
“In a way, I suppose. But it kept Ethan and Sophie alive.” Marcus had been at my side during Nightmare’s Reach, and before. We had been Knights of the highest order—trained to kill and worse. “No matter. He’s doing what he thinks is right.”
We reached the top of the ridge at long last and found the flag of the Dragon Throne alight with orange flame. A wide-open space, grassed and covered in supplies and military vehicles from Ascension City, lay in ruin before the Degradation. The rippling indigo shield stood less than twenty meters away. From this distance, I could smell the hot and heavy stink of it, like burning plastic.
The encampment was devastated.
Jon Faraday and a cadre of Knights stood in the center of the grassy area, surrounded by dead Knights and masked Renegade soldiers. Their supplies and support vehicles had been destroyed. Of King Renegade there was no sign, but he had to have come this way, the only path to Atlantis.
“Faraday!” I called across the clearing, my voice harsh and unyielding. “Where is he?”
Faraday glanced over his shoulder. Beneath his crown, a momentary flicker of dismay at my presence crossed his features. One of his Knights bellowed something, and he turned back toward the Degradation.
A shadowy creature of torn leather skin emerged from the shimmering shield. It was a cousin of the demons that attacked me in the Fae Palace. As one, the Knights still standing raised their glowing blades and cast bolts of heat and energy into the monstrosity. It went down wailing.
I jogged across the smoking earth, and as I drew closer I knew for certain where Renegade had gone.
“You should have stopped him,” I whispered, staring not at Faraday but over his shoulder, at an imperfection in the mighty shield just an arm’s length away.
“We were overrun here, Hale,” Faraday said. He shifted his chest armor and followed my gaze. “This is your doing. You forced peace from war and now force war from peace.”
A vortex in the Degradation warped the mighty shield and sucked in the construct like a drain sucking down water. The ethereal whirlpool was quiet save for clashes of bruised purple lightning and the gnashing of invisible bones.
“He went through there, didn’t he?” I asked.
Faraday nodded. “He had a knife, coated in blood. Just a small dagger, really. He cut that hole and stepped in.”
“There’s a good chance the vortex killed him,” I said aloud, mostly to myself.
“And there’s a chance it didn’t.”
I gazed at the King of the Knights Infernal as if seeing him for the first time. “Are you asking for my help now, Jon?”
“This is your mess. We are here because of you.”
I had to laugh. Even here, beneath the glare of the Degradation, old habits died hard. “So you want me to step through?” My blood had opened the way once before. I had walked out of this terrible shield on the night it was created. I could walk back in. It was tied to me, to my shadow lost in the Void.
“You did this. You fix it. Morpheus Renegade cannot be allowed to seize the treasures of Atlantis. The Infernal Clock… Broken quill, the Roseblade, Declan!”
Aaron shifted uncomfortably. “For Clare. Do this for Clare.”
A thought came to me then—a terrifying, awesome thought. The Infernal Clock could grant life. Eternal life, if the stories were to be believed. It could bring Clare back. I had to reach it before Renegade. There was only one course of action left to me. I’d been too late to stop the mad king, but I was going back to Atlantis anyway.
To save the world?
No.
To save the girl.
“Are you coming?” I asked. Faraday shook his head. “And you think you deserve that crown?” I spat on the ground at his feet and stepped toward the wailing vortex. Before I could touch it, Aaron grasped my shoulder and pressed a wrapped bundle into my arms. I frowned in confusion and—
“It’s what you asked me to hide in my basement, you fool.”
My hands shook and I almost dropped the package. “I… no.”
“Yes.”
“But…”
Aaron sniffed. His hands were stained with Clare’s blood. “Kill that monster, Declan. Be—”
“Ruthless?”
“—who you are.”
Well, okay.
Steeling my resolve, I followed Morpheus Renegade into chaos unbound. The Degradation consumed me whole, and I was thrown across realities once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Lost City
Stepping into the Degradation was like walking into a furnace of cool energy. A spring of spinning and flowing ice pressed in on me from all sides. The effect was startling, fresh, and altogether unnatural.
Then it began to hurt, of course.
Nothing this important could be gained easily or be won without spilling enough blood to sink the Titanic twice over.
A thousand knives of red-hot iron pierced my skin. My eyes rolled and boiled in their sockets, and a shower of molten, hissing steel drowned all thought and sense, save for the maddening, endless pain. The Degradation was on overdrive, kicked into third gear already doing a hundred miles an hour.
Yeehaw!
I rode that wave of pain across the space between worlds, rode that motherfucker down through the moments between seconds, and over the impossible gap in forever. It was always, always one helluva ride.
The world disappeared, and in its place was a between enchantment and a pathway of forgotten light. The road to Atlantis, the speckled road to power was suspended on a wing and a prayer. I spotted a tiny figure in the distance, hunched against the maelstrom.
Morpheus Renegade was already half a mile away. Time was different on this side. His few seconds of advantage through the gap in the Degradation had become minutes on the other side.
I set off after him, my palms ablaze with blue flame. But there were memories on that road. Scarred memories of the past and all the many wonderful mistakes I’d made were set to waylay and distract me.
“What do you think the kids will remember of the war, Tal?” I held my head in my hands, fighting a headache—a migraine of epic proportions.
“Grim-faced Knights patrolling the streets of Ascension City? The threat of attack, the sense that something’s wrong with the world…” A pause. “And they’ll remember you, of course, they’ll remember Declan Hale. The Arbiter—the light against the dark. You’ll be legend, Declan.”
“No, they’ll not remember it that way,” Clare said, drawing deep on a warm, comforting cigar which looked out of place in her tiny, bloodstained hands. “They’ll remember the sweet shops in Farvale going out of business… they’ll remember school being cancelled.” She shrugged. “Aye, but I suppose they’ll remember you, Declan. You’re the hero.”
“Perhaps that’s the best way to remember it,” Tal said. “Better than the mass graves, the killing fields, the cost to the Knights…”
Something was rising from the pain, out of the sparkling darkness, something I’d fought so hard to see, to set the world ablaze for… what was that old line? About hopelessness, regret, and bitter angst at my existence? Oh yeah…
The odds are long. Life’s unfair, and death’s no better.
But you know what? Fuck the odds.
There was a great roar and an unexpected thump into the ground.
The sky filled with diamonds and became an ocean of twinkling stars scattered across an inferno of soft purple menace. I felt uneasy. I felt out of sorts. Death warmed up.
“I’m here.” But I wasn’t there. I was still floating on memory, in the worlds of the better-left-forgotten…
“Everything I do, I do it for you.”
Tal glared. “Don’t you dare throw Bryan Adams at me, Declan. You’re better than that.”
I pulled myself from the memories, from the furnaces of distant stars, and forced the searing pain back where it belonged—in the nothingness between this world and the last. The task wasn’t an easy one but it was a task i
n which I was well versed.
I don’t know how much time had slipped by, but I sat up and surveyed the old world around me. Renegade, if he had fared better through the Degradation than me, had a good head start, but I knew where I was going.
The ground was soft and spongy like moss. I sat halfway up a steep rise that stretched into the sky for what must have been miles. From my vantage point, I held a commanding view of the most awe-inspiring range of mountains ever conceived. The twisted peaks were covered in electric-blue snow and light cast from the spectacle far below, yet the range extended for miles and miles up toward the heavens. The peaks brushed the sky, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they pierced the upper reaches of the atmosphere.
Great crags of rock and cliff faces a dozen miles high played tricks with the eye and created a numbing sense of size that was hard to visually comprehend. Those rocks and cliffs were just the boundaries of this world inside the Degradation.
Down and away to the right, just past Atlantis itself, miles upon miles of black rock and twisted thrusts of reef, marred with burnt coral, brushed up against the Lost City. The ruined landscape was the coastline with the ocean just beyond, but those waters had long since dried up, leaving behind a terrifying, lifeless wasteland. The sight of it made me feel sick.
I turned away to behold the main event.
The Lost City of Atlantis sat far below, surrounded by natural barriers of impenetrable rock. A haze of indigo light merged with neon-blue over the outlandish architecture.
“Oh my,” Tal whispered. “It looks so small, and yet…”
“It’s huge,” I assured her, and despite my bruised and bleeding condition, I managed a wink. “We’re just far away… five miles at least.”
And we had been, back then. Despite the uninterrupted view into the valley below, the commanding sight of Atlantis aglow in the evening, I was still miles up above the city. Halfway up a mountain that touched the stars. Far below, in warmer climes, towers that rivaled the highest skyscrapers back home, and towers that eclipsed such modern heights, looked like pinpricks scattered across an impossible terrain.
“What do you feel right now?” I asked Tal, and then laughed. “We’ve just escaped all true worlds, and now… behold another! What do you feel?”
“Afraid,” she said, and that was enough. Fear—of a world where there could be no world. Neither Earth nor Forget nor Void.
Below lay the unknown, the better-left-forgotten, and we had been so small against the backdrop of this impossible place. But there wasn’t just fear. No, not at all. There was wonder, astonishment, and all manner of conflicting emotions as the goal of not just one lifetime but more than I could fathom came into sight…
The Great Quest, done at last.
Yet above all there was pain. The pain of remembrance—oh goddamn it—and the pain of existence outside existence.
“Keep moving, Declan.” I rubbed my legs to get them working. The piercing ride across realities, through the Degradation, had left me numb. Aaron’s bundle lay on the ground a few feet away. The object within had half-fallen out of the cloth, and the pommel of a sheathed sword was revealed. With a heavy sigh, I unwrapped his terrible prize and strapped the cursed thing to my belt.
Only as a last resort, I thought, stroking the hilt of the weapon.
I headed toward the city using an old path, cobbled with broken stone and overgrown with mossy weeds. Dozens of gnarled and twisted cherry blossom trees, in full bloom, lined the path. Those trees were new. Last time I’d been here, with Tal, nothing had been living.
There was no sign of Renegade, but I kept my wits about me as I made quick time down the mountainside on the old road. He could be laying in ambush—I would be—or he could have made a run straight to the city. I didn’t know which worried me more. I kept a pool of Will cupped in my palm, ready to kill.
Atlantis drew ever closer, and the city began to seem that much more real. The alien architecture and ancient design came into relief against the backdrop of the darkening sky. It looked beyond its time, for damn sure, yet most of it was in utter ruin.
The lights were on, though, so someone was home…
Towers scraped the sky, connected by clear walkways and bridges that stretched from the peak of one building to the next in the air over the city. Neon-blue lighting ran up and down the streets and throughout hundreds of the buildings. Legend held that Atlantis was fuelled by the same near-eternal source of energy that kept Ascension City aglow, powering the streets and keeping the abandoned metropolis running even after its defeat.
The legend came close.
Atlantis was powered by the Infernal Clock.
Clare’s second chance. A shot at redemption for those of us who deserved no such thing.
One tower rose above all others in the heart of the city and shone like a beacon in the broken light. The dark spire was cut from the same obsidian stone as the Fae Palace and was huge, an unbroken citadel eclipsing all other structures in the dead city. Blue lights ran up the tower in a spiral—again, just like the Fae Palace—and at the very top, still far below me, a single sphere of white fire hovered above a flat plateau.
A few miles and an hour later I entered the city proper and beheld the splendor of a lost world.
The main promenade into Atlantis was a thin, narrow canyon lined with statues a hundred feet high on either side. Men, old lords and kings, glared down at me in silent judgment—the distant ire of the long dead.
From where I’d entered this realm, high up above on the mountainside, the city had looked mostly whole save for a few patches of ruin and rubble. However, as I walked the streets of Atlantis itself, the calamity and chaos that had claimed this fabled utopia became all too clear. The city was a husk, beyond all recovery.
A lot like your good self, tittered the voice in the back of my mind.
Not a building was left that wasn’t marked, burnt or gouged by impossible powers lost so long ago. Dust lay inches thick along the roads and walkways. Wreckage and chunks of weatherworn stone lay within the dust, silent and accusing, covered in a thin layer of struggling, brown moss. Decaying husks of various metallic machines lay rusting where they had fallen. Shells of what could’ve been something akin to cars littered the roads.
I saw no bones.
The bones were the dust I waded through. The lost lives of millions in one, terrible night.
Yet the lights still worked, for the most part, and even in ruin the city was a wonder. A silent, mournful wonder.
“Save for the trees…”
More cherry blossoms had grown here, as well, up through the cracks in the sidewalks and twisting around streetlamps. The carpet of dust was peppered with soft petal-falls, like drops of rain against a sandy beach. Hundreds of the pink blossoms lined the streets. The trees did not grow thickly enough to be called a forest but could claim such a title eventually, if given enough time.
I was weary from the walk down the mountain. The only sign of Morpheus Renegade was the fresh path through the dust ahead of me. The city was massive but silent. I should have been able to hear his boots clapping against the stone from a mile away. But no, nada.
Still, I could feel eyes on the back of my neck, almost as if I was walking in the Void. Eyes unseen and unfound. Was I being followed? Impossible, unless Renegade had moved behind me, and if so, who—or what—was I following through the dust trail?
“Hello?”
Someone laughed. A woman.
The sound hit me like a punch to the gut. I knew that laugh.
“Oh dear,” I said, and sat down on a stone bench in an inch of ancient dust. The bench belonged to what could have been an old Atlantean pub. Even ten thousand years old, I knew a drinking house when I saw one. “Oh dear, oh dear…”
A whirlwind of vicious light dug furrows in the ground. A barrage of tiny yet fierce lightning strikes scorched the stone. Flames ran through the dust, quickly exhausting their fuel. Within that column of spiraling and wild light a s
hadowed and terrible form took shape. A woman emerged from the vortex and stepped lightly across the space between us on delicate bare feet.
Tal Levy took my hand and brought it up to her lips, planting a soft kiss on my palm.
She stared at me with eyes the color of blood.
“Hey there, songbird,” I said. “Of all the bars in all the world…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
…Is New Again
Apart from those blood-red eyes, twin orbs of crimson enchantment, Tal was as beautiful as I remembered. More so, due to the length and breadth of time that had passed since I’d watched her die. Her olive skin, her dark hair, her gentle smile upon a face of soft angles… God, I had missed this girl.
“Come close.” She leaned in her head as she touched my forearm with both her hands. Her touch was insubstantial, frail and weak, as if she was doing all she could to hold herself together and tethered to reality. Her touch was almost too much.
I felt her breath, warm and fresh on my face. The lilt of her voice, the yielding accent of her Israeli birthplace, was so familiar, but her scent was what made her presence real. A mix of citrus and primrose. The smell of winter becoming spring.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I am truly sorry.”
“Oh, don’t you apologize, Declan Hale. It makes me think you’ve done something wrong.”
“If I could rewrite it. Go back and change…” A small smile touched my lips. “Well, coulda, woulda, shoulda, songbird. Our first time would never have been to a Dire Straits song, I’ll tell you that much.”
“You can’t, and you wouldn’t. We both know that. I made my choices here, and so did you.”
“It was supposed to be… That fucking god tricked me.” Tears half a decade old blurred my vision. I blinked them away. “Tal, you still exist. You’re here. I can find a way to bring you back. The Infernal Clock can grant eternal life.”
Tal smiled. “Only if there’s a body, and you’re kneeling in what’s left of mine.”
“No, I don’t accept that. I refuse that.”
