The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3)

by Ben Peek

  ‘Why don’t they speak, then? Why must they use you?’ Zaifyr waved at the shifting colours around him, at the waves that twisted into trees, into waterfalls, into a whole he was only beginning to comprehend. Around his hand, the blue strands from earlier streamed out, as if caught in a wind. ‘Or are you telling me that I made them as well?’

  ‘What you sense is all that remains of the gods’ divinity. They have given you the ability to create this in their last moments. They have used what remains of their power and left themselves exposed so that you can influence what happens next.’

  ‘That’s what the Wanderer told you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then he lied to you,’ Zaifyr said. He raised his hand with the blue stems. ‘I have seen the future. We do not win. It is Se’Saera’s.’

  ‘What you saw was just one possibility.’ The dead painter reached out for the threads on his hand. They moved from his grasp, twisting away, ballooning, then shrinking. ‘It is all a possibility,’ he said, looking up at Zaifyr, ‘but none of it is real until you leave. All of fate is contained within this sphere. Here, everything is real, and everything is not. Where we stand now there is field that I lie in, but there is also not. There is no tower in Heüala, but there is. There is no Heüala. There is no Glafanr. There is no River of the Dead. But there is. There is nothing and there is everything. We stand within creation itself.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To create.’

  ‘A fate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Overwhelmed, Zaifyr glanced around him. ‘How could I even begin to do that? When I put my hand against those strands, I felt millions and millions of souls. To create a fate is to ask the impossible. It would take me thousands and thousands of years to make a single moment.’

  ‘You should not be afraid.’ Soren looked up into the colours and shapes above him. ‘You are creation.’

  The sphere was a skull, he understood suddenly. It contained all the colour that Zaifyr saw. He realized that they were not waves, or trees, but thoughts, twisting and merging, blending together, to a single whole. What he saw was a mind.

  ‘It is Se’Saera,’ Soren said quietly, staring up into the coloured shapes. ‘She is binding fate within her. She is making it singular. She has drawn what is left of the gods here. Soon, they will all be part of her, and cease to exist.’

  ‘Look in the centre,’ Zaifyr said. There, dark blue threads etched with red blossomed. Each of the strands he saw was like the ones in his hand. They were, he knew, Se’Saera’s future, the future he had seen outside the crooked tower. ‘Tell me, is she creating her fate?’ he asked. ‘Or is fate creating her?’

  ‘All the gods are creations of fate. Se’Saera is no different than those she seeks to replace.’ Soren laughed, and in that laugh, Zaifyr heard the pain and bitterness Anguish had laughed with. ‘Fate creates. It is all fate does. There is no purpose, no structure. The gods themselves make that. How many thoughts do you think the gods had before this moment? How many thoughts that became threads that split fate into futures that ended differently for both us? Only numbers that don’t exist could count it. Se’Saera was meant to end that splitting. She was fate’s creation against its creations. It is why the old gods tried to starve her out of existence, but once that failed, it was why they were forced to create possibilities to stop her. It is why they tried to trap our souls. Why the Leviathan kept Lor Jix’s crew. Why the Wanderer trapped them in his staff. Why Meina is here. Why I am here. Why you are here as well, Zaifyr.’

  He tried to respond, but pain erupted in his chest.

  It was not the same as he felt when Se’Saera was returning him to his body. It was not poisoned sea water lodged in his lungs, not air trying to push it out. Instead, it felt as if a part of his soul was being attacked, that the very fabric of his being was under assault.

  Zaifyr fell into the middle of the sphere and, as he did, a smoking, unformed head rose up from the darkness beneath, from the unconsciousness of Se’Saera.

  Angrily, instinctively, he reached with all his energy for the dead in Heüala. His power flowed from the centre of his being, as pure as it had ever been, and he felt it spread through Queila Meina and Steel, felt it spear through the ancient killers from the Plateau. He felt the exultation as it slipped into the dead that had been in the Wanderer’s staff.

  Then something grasped not him, but his power. It took hold with a startling ferocity and wrenched it from his control.

  The dead did not spear into Se’Saera’s form below him, but burst upwards, to the thoughts she had. It was not Zaifyr’s command: he felt hollow as if he had become a conduit. As the dead continued to spear into Se’Saera, the sphere around him began to break apart. Against the darkness, they were like stars falling through the night sky. Barely able to move, Zaifyr watched as the combined thoughts of the gods spiked and burst, as if they were a storm, the last of their consciousness bursting in a fury he could not comprehend, a fury that sought to break apart and devour the blue that had been Se’Saera’s fate.

  The light of their thoughts brightened, turning into a nova that began to fill the sphere, obliterating not just the blue, but the green, the red, the shades of each, the combinations that had birthed so much difference. Zaifyr’s own sense of self was breaking apart as it did. He could no longer sense—

  Soren thrust him away as he disintegrated into the light.

  He pushed him down to the bottom of the sphere, into the darkness of the skull where there were no thoughts of the old gods, where only the new waited.

  His action broke the latent command of the Wanderer over Zaifyr’s power, over what had once been the god’s power, and it broke the control the god had over the dead. The brightness above Zaifyr stilled and, as he fell further and further into the darkness, the smoking head of Se’Saera rose. But it was not him that she wanted, he knew. Not now. She cared not to rend or tear him apart.

  She wanted the parts of her fate that still clung to him, the blue strands in his hand. The strands from which she could rebuild her future. The future where he would sit in front of Aelyn outside the crumbling tower of his prison. Where he gazed at the sky. Where the dark shapes of remade souls passed and he could hear his sister speaking.

  The dead speared through him in silver shafts, purging the thoughts that were Se’Saera’s fate from Zaifyr. His power ran through them, entirely his own, his fury and anger at not just the new god, but at all the gods destroying the command of the Wanderer.

  Below him, the unformed head of Se’Saera broke apart. He heard screams, not just around him in the darkness of the sphere, but in the field, where a child with dark wings stumbled backwards, and in the cathedral room, where she dug her fingers into Zaifyr’s arms. He could feel the pain of that, but he ordered the dead to rip away what remained of Se’Saera’s fate in him again. But this time, as the silver light burst through him, he directed it up into the blue and green and red of the old gods’ thoughts. Fuelled by his fury, the dead ripped at the threads of fates. They tore at what had been made. At the thoughts that bound a world together, that shaped it.

  Zaifyr would leave them nothing. He would not leave the divine a single thought to force fate into a future, into a past, into a present. He poured more and more of his power into not rebuilding fate, or giving it structure, but into breaking it. He did it not just for himself, but for Anguish, for the people who had been turned into haunts for thousands of years, for Jae’le, Tinh Tu, Eidan, Aelyn, and for Ayae. He did it for all those he had known and loved and hated. He tore at the structures that dictated those relationships. He ripped at what had built them. He let the dead enact the fury that had been lurking in their hearts for over ten thousand years, let it combine with the anger that had been seething through his veins since he had seen his first man die by a roadside in Kakar.

  With all the power and all the emotion he had, Zaifyr tore apart fate until there was no single colour, no skull, no Soren, no old gods, no new.
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br />   Until he could sense not even himself.

  2.

  Zean crouched on the shoreline, just before the black tide of Leviathan’s Blood.

  The moonlight illuminated him to Bueralan and Aelyn and revealed not just his thinness, but his length, the height that was already that of an average human. His skin was black, but not in any coloration Bueralan recognized: rather, Zean’s skin appeared to pull in the darkness of the ocean and of the night sky, both of which left him with a skin tone much closer to a bottle of ink than to flesh. If that was not alien enough, a pair of wings unfolded from his back, not yet the length of him, and not yet fully grown. At the edge of the sand, Bueralan and Aelyn Meah watched them unfold and fold, as if being flexed. Each time they saw a tremble when both stretched out to their full span.

  ‘Wait here,’ Bueralan said to Aelyn, sliding off the grey. He rubbed the beast’s nose before he passed the reins to her. ‘Let me talk to him first.’

  Behind her, at the edge of the marsh, a handful of swamp crows stood like guards. ‘How do you know he can talk?’ she asked, taking the reins.

  ‘I don’t.’

  What did he want to happen?

  Did he want to kill Zean? When he had left the cathedral, Bueralan believed that he had little choice but to kill him. When Aelyn had said that Zean might be mad, that he might not know who he was, or what he had done, Bueralan accepted that. In truth, he thought it the best outcome of the carnage he stood in. If Se’Saera had created nothing more than a mad dog, then his responsibility was the moral one. Bueralan would end Zean’s madness. But what if he wasn’t mad? That question grew inside inside Bueralan as he and Aelyn followed Zean’s trail. He saw the intelligence in Zean’s movements, saw his curiosity about the world around him, even if that curiosity was ultimately expressed violently. The question, then, Bueralan knew as he slowed his chase, was not if Zean was mad, but what if he was not? What if he was but a child, and horrified by what he had done? What if he was simply afraid?

  He did not make a sound across the dirty sand. Half a day’s ride to the north, the Mad Coast began and, as Bueralan came within a handful of steps of his blood brother, he thought of how fitting that was.

  ‘Zean,’ he said.

  The wings shivered and pulled in safely against his long back. Slowly – deceptively slowly, Bueralan thought – Zean turned.

  He was male, that was at least clear, but it was his face and not his nudity that revealed the horror of what Se’Saera had created. Defined by long, high cheekbones, Zean had a predatory look to him, much like a bird of prey. He had no hair, either, but his skull was defined by a hard, ridged skin, patterned strangely and not entirely unlike the white tattoos that twisted along Bueralan’s arms. Yet it was the mouth that he was drawn to, for though it was small, it was dominated by hard, sharp teeth, so much so that the top of the jaw extended past the skin, as if it was too big for Zean’s body.

  ‘I know you,’ he said in Ooilan.

  ‘We met a long time ago, when we were children.’ Zean had never liked to speak in Ooilan. ‘My name is Bueralan.’

  ‘And mine?’

  ‘Zean.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Not Zean.’ Se’Saera’s child gave a shallow hiss and Bueralan took a step back. ‘I remember you talking to Mother. I could hear you day and night. You told her it would be okay. That nothing would hurt her.’ His wings twitched. ‘You lied to her and to me.’

  He felt a twinge of sympathy, but his hand still settled on his sword. ‘I didn’t know you could hear,’ he said. ‘I thought we could keep her safe.’

  ‘And me?’

  ‘It was one or the other.’

  ‘I was being suffocated,’ Se’Saera’s child said. ‘Each day it would get worse and worse. I did not want to hurt Mother, but I must breathe. It was an urge to me. I had to be free.’ His wings folded back, as if he was hugging himself. ‘Do you think mother forgives me for what I did?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘She was so fragile.’ He made a motion to Bueralan. ‘You are all so fragile. You break. You bleed. Mother was right when she said that about you.’

  He had never heard Taela say that, but she might have, he allowed. She might have said it at the end. Or it may have been that the child heard Se’Saera. ‘You speak well for one so young,’ Bueralan said, changing the subject.

  ‘You are not born with language?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was born with awareness.’ With sharp claws, Se’Saera’s child – he would never be Taela’s – tapped his chest. ‘I hear everything in womb. I learn. Mother Se’Saera talks to me in there.’

  ‘Mother . . .’ Bueralan’s voice trailed off. ‘She talked to you, did she?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded excitedly, like a child who had been given a gift. ‘She would tell me about the world. She taught me language. She taught me this tongue first. I would need it. I would need it to talk to the man who would teach me.’

  ‘Did she tell you who that man was?’

  ‘No. She was speaking just before you arrived. She wanted me to go back to Ranan. She said two people were coming for me, but then she stopped talking. Do you know why?’

  Bueralan shook his head. ‘Did she tell you I would be here?’

  ‘You and the woman.’ A claw waved towards Aelyn. ‘She said you would help me. She was going to tell me my name. She said I had to tell it to you.’

  ‘But it’s not Zean, is it?’

  ‘No.’ Se’Saera’s child shook his head furiously. ‘That name angers me. I have heard it before but it is not mine. It is another’s name.’ A second hiss escaped him. ‘Don’t call me it.’

  Se’Saera would have named him Zean. For a brief moment, Bueralan saw himself and the child as they were now, but instead of denying the name, the child awkwardly said that his name was Zean. He saw how it tied him to Se’Saera and her child. ‘It is the name of a man very dear to me.’ As he spoke, that reality broke apart, an old, decayed creation. ‘He was my brother. I thought he might be here so I came to help him.’

  ‘But now you help me instead, yes?’

  ‘No.’ Bueralan drew his sword. ‘No, I am afraid not.’

  3.

  Zaifyr could see Se’Saera’s face, her girl’s face, her young woman’s face. He could see both crack and split, as if a larger force was breaking her body open.

  ‘No!’ Lor Jix’s voice was a bellow around him. ‘What have you done?’

  The sky above Heüala was riddled with fractures. Within those fractures, the silver light of the city had lit a shifting mass. At first, Zaifyr thought he saw Se’Saera. He imagined that the multi-headed form of the god had been drawn into the broken sky. But no, he realized it was something that flowed in constant movement, much like a river, and appeared to have its own current. Zaifyr felt his awareness pulled, but only the part of him that was divine, that held a god’s power. The river was trying to draw him through the cracks and beyond Heüala, he remained lying on the ground. Above him, the splits began to widen and the impression he had of a river buckled under what he saw. He saw not just movement, but time.

  He saw fate, saw it run into itself, flood over its possibilities, its outcomes, saw it submerge and erupt.

  He saw choice.

  ‘What have you done?’ Jix’s voice, again. His hands shook Zaifyr roughly. ‘Godling, you must stop what you are doing!’

  Zaifyr could not sense the sphere, could not see the thoughts, could not sense the gods. However he had reached the sphere that had contained fate, he could not return to it. Instead, he felt only pain. It was primarily in his chest, but it was of such acuteness his vision swam. The towers of Heüala looked as if they were changing, as if they were both rising and crumbling, the domes and flat roofs breaking and forming. But when the vision of what he saw did not alter, Zaifyr realized that it was not pain that caused Heüala to change, but rather that he was witnessing change. Beneath the new, moving s
ky, the City of the Dead was rebuilding itself, was fashioning itself on the new thoughts it could sense.

  Zaifyr pushed himself away from Lor Jix and rose unsteadily. Beneath the burned soles of his boots, the ground shifted, and he felt paved stone, dirt, grass and even snow. Before him, the walls of buildings warped as stone turned to wood and wood turned to brick. Doors disappeared and reappeared, each time with different designs.

  ‘There must be a god in the holy city!’ Jix shouted. ‘Se’Saera must be here to focus Heüala! What have you done to her?’

  A small town.

  No, a trading outpost. That, Zaifyr realized, was what Heüala was shaping itself into. The rough wooden buildings, the dirt streets, the vendors with stalls on the side of the road.

  ‘Answer me!’ The Captain of Wayfair grabbed him and thrust him against the wall of one of these stalls. ‘Tell me what you have done!’

  ‘What do you see?’ His words were painfully torn from him, but what startled him most was the arm he lifted to fend off Jix. It was completely red and had, within its depth, a pulse. ‘What is happening to me?’ he whispered.

  ‘It is life, godling.’ The other man shook him. ‘Tell me what you have done so I can fix it when you leave!’

  The thought jarred him. ‘What does the city look like to you?’

  ‘It is a port town.’ He spat the words at Zaifyr. ‘It looks like a thousand others perched on shorelines throughout the world.’

  ‘I see a trading post.’ He tried to take a deep breath, couldn’t. ‘Jix, we’re not meant to stay here. No one need live in the City of the Dead.’

  ‘Are we to live and die only to live and die again?’ The Captain slammed him against a wall that appeared differently to each man. ‘Our existence is not a carousel. We are not beasts to ride in a carved circle forever.’