by Will Wight
Contents
[Title Page]
[Dedication]
[Copyright]
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
[Sequel Page]
[Bloopers]
[Other Books]
Underlord
Cradle - Book Six
Will Wight
www.WillWight.com
To Patrick, who has been with me from the beginning.
Blame all the covers on him.
Copyright © 2019 Hidden Gnome Publishing
All rights reserved.
Cover by Patrick Foster Design (www.patrickfoster.net)
Prologue
Iteration 986
Pariana was the last Abidan stationed in this nameless world. Sectors Ninety-Nine and One Hundred had been completely abandoned, but they still clung to Sector Ninety-Eight.
All the sectors from Ninety up were border worlds in the process of stabilization. The Way had a tenuous grasp on 986, so it was strange, lacking many of the fundamental laws that kept other Iterations stable. It was a flat plane, not a planet, with a sky that was a patchwork of a dozen bright colors during the day. At night, it became a sea of black, with ethereal creatures flying slowly overhead instead of stars.
She loved it here. Pariana had been born far from the human standard—she was three meters tall, bald, and golden-skinned, an outcast even in the world of her birth. But the population here, workers trained to operate in border worlds, had been born in Sanctum: the home of the Abidan. They were used to stranger sights than her.
They treated her no differently for her appearance, nor for her power or status. She was only a one-star Titan, not too far above them. So they treated her as one of her own.
That was why her teammates had left Pariana behind, as they were called one by one to fight off other border incursions in the sector. She actually liked it here.
Ten thousand souls called this place home, and they had brought with them a collection of buildings and machines to support colonization. The longer they lived here, the closer the Way would become, until eventually this world would be stable enough to support a long-term population. At that point, it would either become a source of raw materials for the Abidan or be split into multiple fragments that would become new Pioneer worlds.
She had long felt sadness at the thought of that day approaching; the day she would have to turn over this Iteration to someone else. Now, she couldn’t wait to see that day arrive.
It would mean they had all survived.
The Abidan had been without Ozriel for too long. Corrupted fragments were spreading, so it took longer for worlds to stabilize, and even stable worlds could begin to fall apart. The Abidan were stretched beyond their means, leaving Pariana alone in a world that should have been protected by a small team.
Protected from invasion.
Across the multi-colored sky, three massive circles of arcane symbols flashed into existence. Kilometers wide, these formation circles were her specialty. She had been recruited by the Abidan not because of her power, but because of her skill in creating these energy formations.
The golden circles blazed with power, shining like the suns this Iteration didn’t actually have, and Pariana heard a warning siren in her mind.
[Impending spatial violation,] her Presence warned her. [World defense formations have automatically engaged. Sector Control has been notified.]
The sky cracked like glass in between the golden formation-circles, revealing darkness beyond.
Pariana heaved great breaths, her hands trembling. With a thought, she summoned her armor, which flowed over her in seamless white plates. Another thought, and alarms sounded all across the colony.
“Danger!” a mechanized voice shouted. “Danger! Seek shelter immediately!”
She didn’t look back to see the workers dropping tools and hurrying toward the nearest fortified structures. She didn’t need to see armored plates lowering over windows, or buildings sinking down into the earth for protection. She knew the security protocols. They had drilled for this, and everyone in this world was a trained volunteer.
Many of them were also her friends. Now, she was the only one standing between them and the invaders.
In minutes, the colony had sunk entirely beneath the ground, leaving only plains of crops and abandoned machinery. The cracks in the sky had widened until she could see the void beyond.
She cast out her will, taking control over the formation-circles. Even as the one who designed them, she found it difficult; these were complex structures, and controlling them one at a time required great skill and concentration. Controlling three was a point of pride.
As soon as her Presence indicated that someone had slipped through the spatial crack, she fired.
Each of the three circles released a white-hot beam of destructive energy that thundered through the air, focusing on the crack. She had over-fortified this world, both in her zeal to protect it and out of a lack of other things to do; any one of these formations was powerful enough to scour Iteration 986 clean in a single blast.
Three at the same time released a blinding light and a deafening roar. Her Presence automatically protected her eyes and ears, throwing up a barrier around her to protect from the furious explosion of wind that tore up the plains for kilometers, shredding crops, sending a ring of dust blasting into the distance.
As a Titan, she had been trained to produce shields and barriers of all kinds. With her best efforts, she could maybe have defended against one of these attacks. She would have no hope against all three.
She trembled and caught her breath as the dust settled, trying to convince herself that this would be all there was to it. Her defenses had worked. The threat was over.
[Incoming!] her Presence warned her, and Pariana drew on the Way.
A perfect cube of blue power surrounded her, protecting her. It was just in time.
A cloud of black smoke stretched out from the crack in the world, forming into a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth. It bit down on her, large enough to swallow her whole, but had caught a mouthful of her Titan barrier instead.
The teeth scrabbled on the solid edges of the blue cube for a moment, trying to find a purchase.
Then her barrier began to break.
Panic threatened to swallow her from the inside. She had yet to catch a glimpse of the enemy, and they had already shrugged off her best attack and casually broken her defense. This was not a probe or a scout; it was a true assault.
And she was alone.
Pariana reached out for her formations again, turning them onto her enemy, but a spike of pain lanced through her brain and suddenly she could feel the defenses no more.
[Your authority has been overridden,] her Presence told her.
Impossible. She had designed and placed those circles herself. How could someone take them from her this easily?
But even to her eyes, the truth was clear. The golden formations were shot through with red light, and as she watched, they turned to focus on her.
The jaws stopped chewing on her barrier, the column of smoke slithering back to its summoner. Only then did she get a look at her attackers.
Four enemies of the Abida
n floated in the air before her.
The first looked to be a standard human with dark brown skin, wearing a helmet with a pane of transparent red glass covering his face. Red light streamed from his fingertips, and its signature matched what had taken over her formations.
The second was an aquatic-adapted human, with slick blue skin, no hair, and gills at the side of her neck. She carried a pair of sickles that looked as though they had been torn off of a giant purple mantis, each of which carried a dark power that suggested they should be sealed away in an Abidan vault. The woman looked at Pariana with clear hatred, as though the Abidan had personally offended her.
She could see nothing of the third figure. He, she, or it was covered in a mechanical suit of synthetic fabric and steel. They carried a rifle, and even without examining it carefully, Pariana could tell the weapon carried far more power than her formations had. It felt like the sealed form of one of the Judges’ weapons; it terrified her.
The final invader was another standard human, with pale skin and long, black hair tied into a tail that fluttered in the wind. She wore furs and leathers that looked as though they had been taken from a dark-furred lion, and they gave her a barbaric air. The black smoke drifted around her palm.
Her dark eyes surveyed Pariana with absolute disregard.
The Abidan’s Presence whispered, [All four match descriptions of tenth-generation Vroshir.]
Pariana didn’t ask for their names. It wouldn’t help.
The first generation of Vroshir had worked for the Abidan, long ago. They lived to shatter the Eledari Pact and see the Court of Seven cast down. It was not a grudge that she could resolve.
In the face of her death, Pariana reached out to the Way. The touch of its absolute order soothed her.
But she couldn’t fight the despair. Everything she had worked for, everyone she loved in this world, was coming crumbling down.
“Relinquish your Presence into our keeping,” the black-haired woman ordered, drifting down to hover over Pariana’s cracked barrier. “You shall be taken as a prisoner of war, and all others will be liberated.”
Did Sector Control respond? Pariana asked her Presence.
[No. I cannot confirm whether they received our report or not.]
Pariana closed her eyes. In truth, it wouldn’t matter even if Sector Control had heard them. No one else was close enough to respond, and even if they had been, it would be too late.
Destroy yourself before they capture you, she ordered.
[Of course. I am sorry I could not serve you better,] the Presence added, its voice tinged with sadness.
Smoke boiled out of the fur-clad Vroshir’s palm again. “Too late,” she said.
The mouth shattered Pariana’s barrier.
At the same time, the formations she’d created turned on her home. Impossibly hot pillars of light carved furrows through the crops, spearing into the bunkers beneath.
Pariana could feel the Way weakening as people died. She threw everything she had into a barrier to protect them, and a blue dome flickered into existence over the smoking hole in the colony, cutting off the weapon’s beam.
The gilled woman swept one of her sickles through the air, and a violet slash tore open a canyon in the earth. It split Pariana’s protection in half.
Earth blasted upwards as though a volcano had erupted underground, spewing fire and debris all the way into the atmosphere. The four Vroshir were surrounded by invisible barriers, protecting them and Pariana.
The Abidan Titan collapsed to her knees, soaked in tears. The smoky maw had left her alive. For now.
The armored figure had its rifle trained on her. Pariana surged forward—the Way was too distant for her to manipulate now, and her specialty had never been violence, but she had nothing left to lose.
He shot her.
The sound of the gunshot somehow pierced the deafening sounds of exploding earth. It drilled a hole through her white-plated armor, through her personal barrier, through her chest, and out the back.
Slowly, Pariana toppled to the ground.
She could feel her Presence trying to eradicate itself when it was seized by red power and dragged out, a mass of colorless light like a ghost. The Way had never felt more distant.
As she died, she desperately cast out her mind, trying to feel someone alive. Without her Presence to guide her powers, she was left with only her mundane senses. It was like going suddenly blind.
Armor and powers broken, Pariana drifted into death alone.
…but as the darkness had almost claimed her entirely, it stopped.
“Fear not,” said a woman’s warm voice. “I have come for you.”
The world reversed itself.
Pariana was pulled to her feet as though on a puppet’s strings, her vision returning, her flesh stitched up and her armor restored.
The cascade of debris fountaining into the sky froze, then drifted back down, sliding back into place.
Pariana’s Presence, a squirming mass of silver, ripped itself from the hands of the Vroshir in furs and settled back into her mind. She sobbed again, in relief at having this piece of her restored. One by one, she could feel the lives of the colonists coming back, like candles being lit once more.
The only things in the world that had not been reversed were the Vroshir themselves. They resisted, pitting their wills against the power that had rewound the entire Iteration. They all rose into the air again, facing the source of that power, and of the blue light that shone down on the scene.
Suriel, the Phoenix, Sixth Judge of the Abidan Court, floated with the power of the Way streaming off of her to either side like massive wings. Her mantle blazed behind her, like a river of light, her armor seamless and white—identical to Pariana’s. Ghostly correlation lines, like strings of gray smoke, ran from her fingertips to the back of her skull. Her hair drifted behind her, bright shining green, and her eyes blazed with purple formations that could see Fate. At her hip hung Suriel’s Razor, dormant now, like a meter-long ruler of blue steel.
Pariana sagged forward, lowering her head in both respect and relief. A Judge had come for her.
Now everything would be all right.
The woman in furs began to laugh.
Ignoring Pariana, she threw her hands to the sky. Black smoke gushed from her hands, covering the world. The man in the red visor swirled his fingers in a significant pattern, and the smoke was threaded through with red lights. Pariana’s golden formation-circles drifted beneath them, still under his control. The robotic figure pulled a mechanical device from behind him, like a computerized bear trap, activating it with a touch.
And Pariana realized she could no longer touch the Way. The lives of the people behind her had been restored, and her connection should have returned with them, but now it was as though the Way had vanished completely. The world had been cut off.
Suriel’s mantle dimmed, weakening immediately, but the scars in the earth finished knitting themselves together. Finally, the entire Iteration had been restored to pristine condition. Only then did her mantle gutter and die. Even the blue ‘wings’ streaming from behind her vanished, leaving Suriel surrounded by enemies.
Without the Way, the world’s laws would eventually crumble, which the Vroshir wouldn’t want any more than the Abidan would. They wanted to use this world, to add it to their network, not to see it dissolve into fragments with no causality or consistent physics. But that would take time. For now, they had simply rendered any Abidan in the world powerless.
This had been a trap from the beginning.
Suriel still floated in the air, but now she was relying on her own power, not her authority as a Judge. Pariana ran beneath her. “Do we have reinforcements coming, Judge?”
“Stand down, Titan,” Suriel said, and her words were calm and certain. “I am enough.”
A rifle, two sickles, three golden formation-circles, and a maw of smoke all turned toward Suriel. Each weapon carried enough power to rend continents and shatter sp
ace.
The Phoenix faced them all with nothing but her own personal power.
“Surrender, and I will grant you mercy,” Suriel said.
The black-haired woman bared her teeth in what Pariana hesitated to call a smile. “Keep your blighted tongue still, tyrant.”
With no discernible signal, all four Vroshir attacked at once.
The aquatic woman slashed her sickles together, sending a cross of violet power rushing through the air. The attack cracked space behind her, the world splintering for hundreds of kilometers in her wake. The earth quaked and shook, and Pariana could feel the world’s tenuous hold on reality begin to shake.
The woman in lion fur conjured a thousand ghostly mouths on worm-like bodies of black smoke. They dove for Suriel, and each one felt like a plague that could decimate planets. They carried ancient hatred that soaked Pariana’s soul, and only her Presence’s protection kept their energy from sending her into madness.
The armored man’s rifle cracked, and this time the sound echoed through the entire world. Air exploded away from him at the sound, and the bullet flashed forward with a thousand times the power he had used to kill Pariana the first time. That one shot alone carried enough energy to obliterate everything in this Iteration.
Finally, the red-visored man triggered the three golden formations. They fired pillars of superheated destructive energy. The columns of light blasted down.
Obliterating him instantly.
The attacks happened instantly and simultaneously, so Pariana had to piece the entire scene together afterwards. Without being empowered as an Abidan, and without the Presence’s effect on her mind, she wouldn’t have been able to follow what happened at all.
The formations fired, not at Suriel, but at the one who had taken them over. As she arrived, Suriel had taken control back, and neither Pariana—their designer—nor the red-visored Vroshir had noticed a thing.
Suriel flew through the air in an erratic pattern, a bright streak that dodged the thousand mouths of smoke effortlessly. The X-crossed slashes from the sickle had grown in size and power, destroying everything in their path from ground to sky, and they would not be avoided.
