Gods of Rust and Ruin

by Azalea Ellis

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  —It’s only a basic join. It will break again in the same spot if you’re too rough with it, too soon.—

  -Sam-

  Jacky inched over to me, when he was finished, and found my hand in the dark.

  —Are you okay? Sorry I didn’t drag you away soon enough. I didn’t even know what was happening.—

  -Jacky-

  I squeezed her hand.

  —I’m okay. Can’t stop crying, though. That thing did something to my head.—

  -Eve-

  The ink covering over our little nook evaporated, and Adam tossed out another shield, but in the brief moment of twilight, I saw his wide-eyed look of exhaustion.

  I questioned, and he answered.

  —Whatever that light is, it’s attacking my shield. If we weren’t dug into the ground, I don’t think I could keep this up.—

  -Adam-

  “If we had something to reflect the light, instead of trying to block it?” I murmured aloud. “But I didn’t bring anything like that. And my Skills aren’t any good for something like that.”

  Torliam’s head lifted, then, and his eyes met my own, obviously thinking quickly. “I am of the line of Aethezriel,” he said, touching me so I could interpret his vibrations.

  —Why doesn’t he have a VR chip, again?—

  -Adam-

  Wraith could feel the scowl on Adam’s face, which I ignored along with his Window, in favor of the more pressing matter.

  “Okay…? You told me your last name before. What does that have to do with anything?” I frowned. “I really hope this name sharing isn’t some type of before-death ritual for you guys, because I’m damn sure not giving up.”

  “Aethezriel is not my name. It is my line. My . . . ancestry. It is the line of power that has been passed down since ancient times.”

  “ . . . Your Skill? Is that what you’re saying? Aethezriel is the power you have?”

  “Aethezriel is my ancestor, who mated with a god. But, your meaning is correct.”

  I tried to think of the implications of what he was saying, but I couldn’t concentrate. I lifted my good arm and wiped away the line of my tears, sniffing to clear my nose. “So why is that important? Can you get us out of this?”

  “My power comes from the god of the upper air. It is a greater power, like your own Chaos. It is the bloodline of a god with a wide domain. There are many aspects—interpretations—of the power, if you know how to draw them out. One of them is light.”

  I smiled then, a sudden relief coming over me. “Oh, well that sounds promising.”

  “As your incompetent scientists may have discovered, light is quite interesting. I may be able to oppose the light of his sentinels, using an opposite, ahh . . . vibration, to nullify its reach.”

  “You’re going to cancel out—” my breath hitched as my body tried to sob and I tried to restrain it, “the wavelength, like sound.” Hey, I’d learned plenty in my relatively short lifetime, and my upgraded brain was good enough to put together at least that much. “But is that even possible? You can’t think faster than light.”

  “His light is very steady. You are correct, I may not think faster, but if I can anticipate ahead of time and set up a pattern, perchance it will not matter.”

  After I relayed this to the rest of them, Adam opened up a hole in the edge of the ink lid, positioned so that the light from outside wouldn’t hit any of us directly. It was enough for Torliam to test his theory.

  The blue light rippled out of the huge man again, and he reached a hand wreathed in it upward, through the hole up above and over the edge of the crater.

  Nothing happened, other than the muscles in his face and neck straining taut. But then the area around his hand started to change. I felt like my eyes were deceiving me in the fading light, but when I reached out with my Perception, I saw the same thing. Between the light of Torliam’s power and that of the sentinel was an area of darkness. Not a shadow. A place where the light just . . . stopped. It ceased to exist. I’d seen quite a bit in the time since I’d become a Player, but this was something else.

  Something no human had ever seen before, probably. I stared for a moment, the little involuntary shudders my body was making easing as I became fully distracted from my own mind. It was beautiful, in a frightening sort of way.

  Torliam pulled his hand back, and his light faded. His breath came fast, and when he moved back to me and laid his mouth against my temple, I could feel the sweat, cold and clammy on his skin.

  Whatever he’d done, it wasn’t easy.

  “He is strong, so close to the seat of his power. And . . . loathe as I am to admit it, even in the height of my own power, I would have had difficulty shielding all of us.” He paused, and then said, “I am far from the height of my power,” with a heavy significance, shoulders drooping.

  When she read my Window of explanation, Jacky squeezed my hand, hard enough that my joints protested. The sharp pain of it distracted my mind from both the images and the aching of the rest of my body.

  Torliam couldn’t get us out. Adam wasn’t going to last much longer. Sam and Jacky didn’t have any Skills relevant to the situation. And the dirt was as good a shield from the light as any. It didn’t take long for me to realize what I needed to do. I kept thinking anyway, because I was hoping to come up with something else. When I didn’t, I let out a drooping sigh of my own. “If we were farther away, where the sentinels were smaller and more dispersed, could you shield us all?”

  “For short distances, maybe. But we would need places to hide again when my stamina ran its course.”

  I nodded, then closed my eyes. I didn’t really need them closed to send out my Perception anymore, but psychologically it helped. I concentrated as best I could, trying to calculate the “dimmest” areas nearby, in any direction that could lead us away from the god behind us, who I could practically feel the crazy radiating off of.

  I found the most advantageous spot, and then with a deep breath, I gestured for everyone to move aside.

  Once they’d huddled to one side of the small cavity, I pushed Chaos out with a surge, forming it into a clumsy drill of destruction, though it resisted my attempts to constrain it to any form. Still, it did what it was supposed to, and the dirt in front of me collapsed in a slide of gritty sand. Weariness washed through me. I’d put too much power into it. We didn’t need sand. Pebbles would have done.

  Torliam understood the plan quickly, but when I moved to start scooping away the sand with my hands, he motioned for us to move back and cover our eyes.

  I did so, after making sure Birch was safely behind me just in case, and watched with my Perception as Torliam created a short, hard burst of wind that cleared the tunnel I’d made. I shook my head, letting the blown sand fall off me, and opened my eyes.

  The ink lid disintegrated again, and this time, Adam couldn’t reform another immediately. I slammed my eyes shut, and hunched flat to the ground, only sitting up again when complete darkness was restored.

  —I thought using chaos hurt you.—

  -Jacky-

  —Eve, this will accelerate the timeline for chaos overtaking your healing abilities.—

  -Sam-

  I closed my eyes, unseen by anyone except maybe Torliam in the darkness. At this point, did it really matter? I’d hoped that the God of Knowledge would be the answer to my problems. Whether he agreed to help me or not, I’d hoped that I’d be able to get what I needed from him, even if I ended up having to take a piece of his Seed core, to mitigate the effects of Behelaino’s. But he was crazy. Crazy like the spidermonkey. There was no way he was going to help, and anything from him would be tainted, anyway.

  —It’ll be okay. I have plenty of Seeds left.—

  -Eve-

  Torliam and I shared a nod, and I crouched down, shuffling the couple feet into the tunnel and repeating the drill of Chaos with a bit less force, then retreating so he could clear it again.

  My
knee hurt a bit every time I moved, and Torliam was so big he basically had to army crawl through the small tunnel, but I couldn’t spare the power to make it bigger, if this was going to work. It was a lot of back and forth shuffling, to clear the volume of dirt we needed. Dirt and sand got into my clothes, my eyes, and even my mouth.

  I grew tired, and Torliam took over digging out the tunnel, though his power wasn’t suited to it.

  When he grew tired, Jacky crawled down and began to hack at the dirt and rock with her bare hands, digging like a dog. It was surprisingly effective, with her Strength and Stamina. It also peeled back her fingernails, which she ignored until I noticed and forced her to stop so Sam could at least help her nail beds scar over.

  Eventually, we got enough of the tunnel dug so that all of us could fit in it at once—though not comfortably—without being exposed to outside light from above, so Adam was able to take much needed breaks from shielding us against the sentinels.

  Halfway to our destination we stopped and ate some of the rations we’d brought, while I took a couple more Seeds.

  It took half the night to reach our destination, which was only a few hundred meters from where we’d stared. “Your turn from here,” I murmured to Torliam and Adam, repeating myself with Windows to translate as I spoke. “I don’t know if you can tell, but the easiest path—with the least light—takes us in a loop around the line of rocks out there, and then a sharp turn to the right.” I gestured without looking over the edge of the tunnel.

  We all held hands, and Adam picked Birch up, doing his best not to press on the creature’s injuries.

  The blue light wafted off Torliam again and spread to cover all of us, and after a few moments, he nodded and took a step forward.

  I moved in sync with him, ignoring my kneecap as it grated.

  When we hit the golden light, a barrier of darkness immediately spread out where it intersected with Torliam’s own. He grunted, but kept moving forward, breathing harder with each step, each exhalation visible in the freezing air. He was trembling as if he’d just completed a race when we reached the spot I’d indicated, and I wasted no time unleashing my own power into the earth, creating a hiding place for us, so he could release his power.

  Then, we tunneled only a bit further and took a break, because Torliam would have a much harder time negating the god’s light in the full light of the fluctuating sun. And because I needed it.

  Even so, the spontaneous bleeding started again, right before we reached the end of the second tunnel, and with it came a wave of agonizing pain. I flopped onto the hard-packed ground below, twitching and moaning as it washed over me.

  Someone put their hand on my shoulder, saying something I couldn’t hear.

  When the pain passed, I lifted my head from the ground, spitting out the dirt I’d bitten mindlessly into, and wiping away the stringy saliva my mouth had created from the nauseating agony. “At least I didn’t bite my tongue,” I muttered, forcing a small smile.

  Adam said nothing back, but his hands were exceedingly gentle as he helped me back to my hands and knees, as if I were made of eggshells, or flower petals, or something. And from there, we tunneled again, till morning hit.

  I took another handful of Seeds, carefully not looking at Torliam as I did, and not long after we broke through to the surface again. My supply wouldn’t last long, at this rate.

  We were going to run out of water soon, and food not long after that. I hoped that we could escape far enough from the god’s reach before it became an issue. I slept deeply, aided by a touch of Sam’s hand to my forehead, and whatever he’d secreted through his skin into mine.

  When I woke, a Window was hanging in front of my face, from the Oracle.

  Chapter 22

  I have won every battle but scarred my soul.

  — Laodisia

  KILL THE GOD OF KNOWLEDGE

  DESTROY THIS MANIFESTATION OF THE GOD OF KNOWLEDGE BEFORE THE SMALL MOON HAS DARKENED THRICE, DEALING THE FINAL BLOW BY YOUR OWN HAND.

  COMPLETION REWARD: KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE SEED OF CHAOS

  NON-COMPLETION PENALTY: DEATH

  Well, shit.

  I wanted to assume the Oracle was guiding me for the better. I was trying to be smart about it, and not make the same mistakes I had with NIX. It seemed like she’d been aiding me so far, cryptically showing me the path that was best for me.

  But I couldn’t defeat the God of Knowledge. Even with my whole team, and Torliam, we wouldn’t even come close to being better than him. The Oracle had just given me a suicide mission, with the penalty for failure being death.

  Perversely, the seemingly insurmountable obstacle actually helped to calm me. It gave me a problem to work on, something to solve and overcome. It was something I could actually do something about, and it helped give me the focus to push the memories the god had forced on me from the front of my mind.

  Working under the assumption that the Oracle wouldn’t give me a quest that was literally impossible to complete, there was something I could do. I just needed to figure out what. As far as willingness went, I had no qualms getting revenge on him.

  Especially if by doing so I might be able to save myself from death.

  So, I bent my mind to the usual questions. My problem—I wanted to defeat the God of Knowledge. What did I have? What did I need to get where I wanted?

  I had myself, probably my team, and maybe Torliam, if he could be convinced. I needed more information about the god, but a preliminary estimation put him at about ten times stronger than all of us.

  I was forced to admit that I couldn’t make the team ten times stronger before time ran out for me. Could I instead make our enemy that much weaker? It sounded nice, but I had no idea how to go about doing such a thing, or if it was even possible. Maybe I could somehow get the Oracle to work against him. She was the one who wanted him dead, after all.

  I groaned and rolled over, setting aside my thoughts for the moment. My body protested against the abuse of the cold, damp ground beneath me. An aching stiffness had seeped into my bones as I slept, and I felt like an old, old woman, whose body had been forced to stay on the earth too long.

  Birch lay on his stomach in the corner of our little dugout, breathing shallowly.

  “Did you sleep at all?” I whispered, leaning over the cub and placing a hand gently on his forehead.

  He let out a faint squeak, and I sighed. I turned to Sam, who was already awake, his back pressed against the wall of our little hole. “Is there anything you can do for him?” I said aloud, testing the sound of my own voice in my healing ears.

  “I’m pretty much out of juice. And my Skill has never really worked that well on animals, anyway. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. “Well, help me out, then. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.” I took a few deep breaths and expanded my awareness through my hand, into Birch’s body. “This might hurt a bit,” I whispered to him. “But try not to move.”

  Sam lay his hands gently on Birch’s body, ready to restrain the small creature if the pain was too much.

  I nodded my thanks and gave him a small smile, though my focus remained on the injuries beneath my hand. The bones in Birch’s wing needed to be set. I understood vaguely what needed to be done, thanks to the mandatory training I’d received in NIX’s classes, but we’d never practiced setting a wing.

  I unwrapped the gauze, then gripped the feathered appendage in my hand and pulled, using my Perception to make sure the bones within were shifting and meeting back together as they should.

  Birch stiffened and I heard the faint sound of his scream.

  Sam made sure Birch couldn’t move enough to hurt himself in his pain, and I splinted and re-wrapped the wing carefully, so the bones wouldn’t shift around.

  Birch settled down with a shuddering sigh when I was finished, but after that he breathed easier, and seemed to fall asleep.

  We still had a couple hours till sundown, so we sated our hunger with a worryingly l
arge portion of the remaining rations, and then I meditated. I should have done it the night before, but I’d been so exhausted, and distracted, that I’d forgotten. It helped, both with my physical body and with the pseudo-flashbacks.

  When the sun set, we continued on, again alternating between tunneling, Torliam’s strange light wave negation, and Adam’s ink barriers. As we got farther away from the God of Knowledge and his sentinels grew sparser and weaker, we were able to do much more above-ground traveling. We were all hurt, tired, and scared, and my ears were still healing, so I found myself relying even more on my Perception to scan the surroundings.

  It took us two days to get close enough for my Windows to reach Blaine again. We’d run out of food by then, and Torliam said it was okay for us to drink the water around us, but only if it was running water, and only if I used Chaos to force it to a boil first.

  “I told Blaine not to come meet us,” I said, my voice cracking from disuse. “Not till we’re away from the sentinels.” I didn’t know what might happen if the god discovered them coming to meet us, but it couldn’t be anything good.

  “Good. There is no need to place others in danger. The Sickness has reached so far . . .” I thought he was finished talking, but he suddenly spoke up again. “I believe we have completed your vision quest from the Oracle, now. It is obvious, I think, that you will not be getting any aid from the God of Knowledge. I do not know the purpose of her revelation, but perhaps when I am home again, this news will bring good somehow. Or maybe, it is just a warning that the end is near.”

  “We have to come back!” I blurted out.

  “We had a deal, human.” His voice deepened ominously. “I will not put myself in danger just because you cannot accept that the Oracle did not lead you to salvation.”

  My stomach soured with apprehension. I needed him, or the whole quest would fall apart. I couldn’t let him decide he’d fulfilled the deal and just leave. “You’ll have to return. The Oracle sent me another quest.”