by V. Lakshman
“Better,” Baalor said, drinking in this man’s knowledge as he sat up in his new body and brushed himself off. Were it not for the Lady, he’d never have known the capabilities of a builder’s body. They were the first children of Edyn and as such had wondrous powers, the knowledge of which had been lost to time. No matter, for Baalor knew what he could do with a body that commanded the very elements surrounding it.
Two sentries came around the corner at a run, sliding to a stop at the sight of the dead man and their guard, still sitting in front of the body.
“What happened?” the first demanded, a sergeant from his markings. He had his blade half-drawn as he came into sight, but upon seeing the scene he drew it fully but aimed it in the direction of the dead assassin’s body, not at Baalor-as-guard.
Baalor looked up with the eyes of his new body and said in the dwarven tongue, “At first I thought it was a joke. Then he attacked.”
“He’s dressed like Sovereign’s forces,” said the other guard.
The sergeant moved up and grasped the blade in the fallen intruder’s neck and pulled. It came out in a smooth motion, leaving a line of blood on the ground. He then looked at the two of them and said, “Take your blade.”
He turned to the other guard and said, “Mason, the two of you take this body for identification. If he’s Sovereign’s, he’s likely got family here. Find out who he is.”
The sergeant looked around at the scene saying, “Any other time, I’d tell you to take Fenris to the Talkers. They love ruining a first kill”—the man paused to spit—“but stay together until we know there aren’t more of them. If they’re attacking here that means it’s likely a distraction to something else.”
Mason nodded and saluted. “Yes, Sergeant.” He didn’t say much else but to come over and offer Baalor a hand.
“We’ll raise the alarm?” Baalor asked, hoping an alarm here would pull many of the patrols he saw below away from where he needed to go.
“Not yet,” said the sergeant. “Get this guy identified. If we raise an alarm and he has friends, they’ll know we’re onto them.”
Baalor nodded, inwardly cursing at running into a smart man-at-arms, then got up and took the offered blade but still said nothing.
Mason said, “Come on, grab the arms.”
Baalor sheathed the blade, then picked up the dead man by his arms. He took a step forward but the sergeant grabbed his shoulder and stopped him.
“Good job, taking him out,” the man said, nodding once. Baalor nodded back, then when the sergeant let him go, he took the body down the tunnel.
Once they were out of earshot Mason said, “I can’t believe it!”
Baalor didn’t reply, raising an eyebrow.
Mason took it as a question and said, “This is the first incursion since that skirmish with the winged ones.” The man turned to look behind him then gestured with his chin and phased into the rock. He headed downward, pulling the body behind him with Baalor taking up the rear.
Baalor knew dwarves could phase things touching their hands, like he had with the guards in Bara’cor, so this was nothing new. They descended past patrols, past other chambers, finally to one that was larger and isolated. Without Mason and this body, it was doubtful Baalor would have gotten this deep without being noticed. Perhaps fate’s dice were rolling in his favor.
When they emerged, it was into a room where dozens of stone tables sat arranged in rows.
Mason said, “Over here,” and walked over to one, heaving the dead man’s feet onto the stone tabletop. Baalor did the same, then stepped back, surveying the area.
The man must’ve caught his look. “This is just for identification. There’s really no reason to come here unless you’re missing someone. Hopefully you’ll never have a reason to visit.”
Mason looked around. “I’m surprised how empty it is.” He moved purposefully to the side where Baalor stood, still looking up. Then he pointed down below and said, “All the interesting stuff happens down there.”
Baalor looked down with his stonesight. He could see a number of tunnels and chambers below. He had the option to stay in mist form, but to get there he would need the dwarven body he now wore.
He searched his host Fenris’s memories. All were stupid and inconsequential dreams mortals held up as “life,” but never truly lived. He’d spent most of his time living at home with his birthers or wasting his evenings at leisure activities. Of the homestone, the man knew nothing. It sickened Baalor to see such a waste. When the Aeris came, he knew these bodies would find spirits worthy of their flesh.
He realized Mason was looking at him strangely. The man was backing up, a hand slowly going to his blade. “Your eyes, they changed.”
Baalor sighed, knowing he’d made a mistake using the stonesight, for though it was a common dwarven power, it still revealed his true nature. He thought about the ineptitude of Fenris trying to kill him and decided there was an easier course. He drew his dagger and plunged it into his own throat.
Mason rushed forward, shouting, “What are you doing?”
Baalor left Fenris’s body as it died, flooding Mason’s own through his touch. The process was over in a few seconds, a measure of time he was familiar with from the time of the First Laws. More interestingly, these dwarves still used it in all aspects of their society. He put Fenris’s body on another table and began absorbing Mason’s memories. The man was slightly more competent, likely being groomed for some kind of command position. He’d witnessed much in his time here, including . . . there!
Baalor smiled. Mason had once been at a ceremony for the homestone! In fact, it was clear that many of the citizens of Dawnlight saw the same ceremony, which only cemented the fact these creatures had no true morals. They celebrated their freedom but then fought others who were just trying to survive Sovereign’s inept fall. It was intolerable.
Without wasting a moment, he sank into the floor and looked around. The homestone sat in a chamber much farther down than this, near the base of the mountain. Without Mason’s memory, it would have been indistinguishable from the thousands of other caverns within the deep bedrock. It took Baalor some time to navigate there, avoiding the increased activity he could see spreading from the place where Fenris had died, leading to the identification room. No doubt they’d found two bodies and now looked for the man they once knew as Mason. No matter. The time for secrecy was almost at an end. He relished the chance the Lady had given him.
Baalor saw another chance and didn’t hesitate, diving through a wall and into a corridor, turning and blasting one guard with a lightning stroke, cooking flesh on bone, then slicing through the other foolhardy enough to rush in without thinking.
From the Lady’s research, the idea of an assault on the homestone was as foreign to these dwarves as attacking the sun in the sky. Even though Mason was missing, it was likely they thought him captured by the enemy, not become the enemy. Baalor smiled as he wondered if the sergeant himself would come under scrutiny. After all, he was the last to see everyone alive.
He waited until four more guards rounded the corner. Baalor called lightning and shaped it into a ball before casting it before him. Two turned their skin into stone, sure proof against his might, but they’d not anticipated him combining the dwarven power of builders with his own power over storms.
He gestured and the floor opened up, swallowing them. Of course, they would not be hurt by being submerged in rock, but he expected they would come back to meet him. In fact, he counted on it.
He strode forward past the point at which they sank, lightning erupting from his fingers and driving the ball of crackling force at the remaining two. Arms appeared behind him. Without looking back, Baalor made an explosion of rain appear, engulfing the tunnel corridor from end to end with water. The two before him had just recovered from his initial blast while the two behind were emerging from the ground when Baalor knelt and released his lightning into the water.
The dwarven guards caught in the bl
ast shrieked in agony before slumping over, cooked from the inside out. Their smoking forms, two still stuck in rock and the other two caught half-curled in agony, looked now like caricatures of normal people.
Baalor clenched his fist and the rock mercifully crushed any part of those still imbedded. Moving forward, he looked down each corridor and realized he’d have to be more violent if he expected to prevail against soldiers boiling up from passages below. Worse, these people had no idea what their possession would mean.
He smiled and called upon the storms again. Dark clouds formed, heavy with wet mist, woven from the very air itself as it reconfigured under his command. They could not be contained within this space and began flowing along the corridors, filtering into every nook and cranny. Soon the underground passageways of this one section was filled with fog, dark and wet.
Baalor used the practicality of the dwarves against them. Keeping their vital areas independent of each other was a fine tactic against others who could phase through rock, but a poor one against any change in the air.
He concentrated, then breathed in, not stopping until he had breathed in all the air there was. In phase, they could breathe just as he could. But his purpose was not to asphyxiate them.
The lack of air in the corridors forced everyone to phase into the rocks around them, where they could breathe. Most moved to posts higher up, no doubt to report. Baalor smiled, then looked down at the chamber of the homestone.
It was not far off, sitting within a hexagonal chamber that was fed with dozens of pipes radiating outward to join a network of similar ones woven throughout the mountain like some enormous circulatory system. Baalor descended, entering the room quickly.
There were two guards there, dressed in long white robes. They looked to be tending the various implements within the room. Baalor didn’t care, blasting them both with coruscating lightning. Their charred forms fell, clearly never expecting an attack here and certainly not by one of their own.
In fact, he found it puzzling just how much easier these dwarves were to kill than Sovereign’s black-clad assassins. These did not seem well versed in combat at all. Perhaps their choice to isolate themselves within phase had dulled their martial preparedness? In any account, these dwarves were nothing compared with those protecting the Dawnlight in Edyn.
The Stormlord moved into the chamber proper and spied the homestone, a large vertical piece of metal surrounded by glowing bars that held some sort of liquid. At the bottom lay a panel adorned with a pad of unfamiliar symbols and a few dials. Lilyth had been very specific about how to manipulate this pad, so he set to work.
First he pulled two levers that opened the protective cover of the panel. Then he set the dials to a particular symbol each. Finally, he pressed the pad’s symbols in the order his queen had made him memorize. Then he replaced the dials back at their original positions and hit a button to one side that glowed red.
The glowing tubes alternated flashing on and off in a barely discernible pattern. There was a subtle vibration, a feeling of solidity, as if his weight had somehow increased. Then it was gone. All the tubes returned to their normal color and the panel’s button glowed green.
Outside, the mountain of Dawnlight shimmered in phase, then it solidified into the realm of Arcadia, becoming one with their world. The dwarves within the mountain, along with their city in phase, had been transported to and fixed within Arcadia.
Baalor knew what would come next. He held onto the tubes casually, waiting for the inevitable. When it came, it came with a sudden and overwhelming force of dwarves bursting in from every wall of the chamber. They flooded in, weapons ready, their purpose clear. They could not know that Baalor had no intention of fighting them, nor of escaping. That had never been his plan.
Instead, the Stormlord whispered, “My eternal love, Lady,” and then channeled all his power over the Way through the tubes and into the homestone itself.
The resulting blast, constricted by this small space and magnified by the surrounding materials, became a seismic detonation that eradicated the chamber and created a spherical hole in the mountain more than a thousand paces across. The blast created cracks racing up and through the bedrock, through chambers above and across fault lines.
The empty space Baalor created collapsed, causing everything above to crumble downward. It was a sinkhole, except in this case it was the mountain itself that disintegrated, taking the dwarven city within it to its ruin.
Of Baalor and any of the hundreds who’d entered the homestone chamber to stop him, there was nothing left.
* * * * *
“He did it,” Lilyth said breathlessly. The simple statement belied the immensity of the task the Stormlord had achieved. The realignment of the homestone had corrected the phase shift, putting the phased Dawnlight back into Arcadia. Its subsequent destruction had sealed their fate.
Mithras looked at the Lady and said, “Dazra’s people?”
“Marooned in Arcadia, a world about to be overrun by nephilim.” Her face slowly broke into a smile, though her mind continued to work through all the loose ends that needed tying.
“The elves that survived my city’s appearance can only be below, and should be trapped. Take whatever men you need to ensure none survive.”
“At once, my lady,” said Mithras, bowing fist to chest. He walked out followed by a small contingent of guards, leaving Lilyth alone with her thoughts.
She wandered over to one of the arched windows encircling her private throne room, now feeling empty and bigger with no one around, and sat down on her favorite sill, hugging herself. She missed Baalor, her confidante and second. He would know the right thing to say now that victory was so close at hand. Instead, she felt the silence weigh in on her, as oppressive in its own way as a room full of sound.
“Kalika,” she said into the air.
The air shimmered and out of that haze walked a beautiful woman, her skin an azure blue. She came forward with head bowed, each step making a delicate jingle as small bells on her anklets bounced into each other.
“My Lady, how may I serve?” she said in a voice that was harmoniously pitched.
“You’re the instrument of change, Kali. Of your many gifts, I love that about you most.”
“You are too kind,” Kalika said, bowing her head.
“Change is upon us, for we walk again amongst those who worship us as gods and goddesses,” Lilyth said, looking over the lands spread out before her. “As such, we must shine with a divine light incontestable by mortals.” She turned her attention back to the one she’d named a goddess and said, “You will organize our people, create a celestial hierarchy we will decree to the mortals from here, atop Olympious.”
The demon queen looked out of the arched windows encircling her throne room. The ocean of sand known as the Altan Wastes lay before her on one side; fertile valleys spread out below Lands Edge on the other.
Kalika stepped forward and said, “Forgive me, Lady, but I must ask. Will not the mortals resort to their own form of worship? Is that not inevitable?”
Lilyth’s gaze drank in the world, so different from Arcadia’s verdant green fields and sunlit mountains. The sky was so vast and empty. Not a single island floated by. It was harsher, the sun smaller and whiter. It was a world bleached of color and life, a world she would have to learn to love. Still, she’d achieved something that had started eons ago as a dream. Now they were only a few steps away from Unification, a chance to correct Sovereign’s mistakes and set themselves on the right path.
“Nothing is inevitable if the people are taught what to believe. We will never be under the yoke of their faith again,” Lilyth said, breathing in the warm air. “We will give them order, discipline, and laws on how to worship, how they must believe and act. Mortals wish to be told what to think, feel, fear”—her eyes softened—“and love. But the last must be doled out sparingly lest it becomes expected.”
“Of course, Lady.” The goddess moved up closer to Lilyth and looked o
ut over the world, her eyes widening at the sight of it, so harsh and alien.
“I miss home,” she said in a small voice.
Lilyth pulled her into a soft embrace, rubbing her arms to console her. “We are home, Kali.”
Then she let go and rose, meeting Kalika’s eyes with her own of cerulean blue.
“We will rule Edyn with virtue and dignity, as it was always meant to be. This is our world, and no one will ever make us leave again.”
A New World
Perhaps we are small fish below a mighty shark,
living on its detritus and offal.
Its vast shadow moves over us and we eat
whatever drops our way from above.
Duncan Illrys, Remembrances
T
arin stopped abruptly and looked down at the floor of the stone corridor, then back at her team, eyes wide.
“Someone’s here,” Tarin said, looking around. She could feel it, a presence emanating through the stone of this corridor. Perhaps it had followed them from the other chamber, a phantasm tracking their group from the beginning. Whatever it was, it was with them now and very real, even if it was invisible.
Before she could move a figure appeared out of thin air. To her shock, it was Adept Dragor. She looked at him in confusion, not sure how this could be true.
The elder adept moved quickly, placing himself in front of Jesyn. His expression was desperate. “My doppelganger saw Dazra’s team ambushed. Their entats were disabled and they were captured. It’s only a matter of time before they get here, too.”
“What?” exclaimed Tarin. She looked at them both and then touched her jaw. “They’re silent. We’ve got to get out of here. Hit your transition entat.”
