Guardian Glass

by Christopher Nuttall

  I had a flash of what it must be like for the men back home, on what I couldn’t help thinking of as the surface, as the Forsaken army rolled over them. The clashes between humanity and the Faerie – and many of the lesser supernatural creatures – had never ended well. The Forsaken might not care about humanity, but it might well stop to scratch an itch. It was still hard to make sense of the concepts that had poured into my head, a legacy from my Grandfather’s image, but I knew that it could have destroyed humanity with ease. The sheer level of power was beyond belief.

  “I don’t understand,” Aylia said, grimly. I could barely make out her face in the semi-darkness, but I could see the magical glow of the Beauty Stone easily. It might have served as a beacon in the darkness, attracting the Forsaken Fragment’s attention to us, but there was no way I could have asked her to leave it behind. The Faerie might have been offended if she had left it at home. “You can hear it?”

  “It’s strange,” Brother Andrew said. He sounded numb, but his eyes were alight with wonder and fascination. “It’s not really intelligent as we understand the term, not yet. I can’t understand everything it’s showing me, but it’s building up into an intelligent creature, spawning into something altogether different.” He paused. “When this particular egg is cracked, who knows what’s going to come out?”

  “Nothing good,” I said. Another piece of the puzzle had fallen into place. The Forsaken couldn’t manifest in our dimension without altering it radically to suit themselves. The Forsaken Fragment had been so badly shocked by the contact that it had been rendered comatose until Vincent Faye had awoken it, probably by accident. What could have happened to the remainder of the Forsaken? Had they completed the destruction of Faerie, or were they waiting to hear back from their advance scout? “We have to stop it.”

  “Something God created so long ago,” Brother Andrew whispered. I don’t think he had even heard me. “I can hear voices surrounding us, trying to talk to us. They’re calling for us all.”

  I looked around, but saw nothing, apart from the strange burned walls. We moved onwards, picking up our pace as quickly as we could but stopped dead when we entered a large chamber. It was packed with bodies as far as the eyes could see, slight bodies that were inhumanly perfect. My first thought was that they were Elves, but when I looked closer I could see that they were Faerie, locked down and trapped into one form. The perfect faces hadn’t decayed at all, but they bore the signs of massive suffering, enough pain to kill even a creature made of magic. I looked for faces I might recognise, even though it was futile, and saw none. The Faerie had just been slaughtered ruthlessly.

  “The Forsaken locked them into one form,” I said, grimly. I understood the how, but not the why. Cold Iron could affect the Faerie in some way, grounding their magic against the metal’s elemental nature, but this was on a much larger scale. “They couldn’t change any longer, or use their magic, and it killed them.”

  “They were in its way,” Brother Andrew said, reaching out to touch one of the Faerie with a long finger. I tensed, ready to snatch him away if the corpse proved to be booby-trapped in some way, but nothing happened. There wasn’t even a flicker of light from what had once been a being with more magic than any human had ever possessed. “They tried to make a stand and it just overwhelmed them. It didn’t even think that they were important enough to bother with; it didn’t even care. It just overwrote their form and left them to die of shock.”

  I looked at him, carefully. Tears were streaking down his cheeks. I had needed the Sensitive to help guide us to the core of the Mound, to locate the core of the Forsaken Fragment, but his gifts were supercharged in this realm. He might have been aware of my thoughts; he certainly might know what I was carrying on my back. What would a man of God say to an atomic bomb? I hadn’t known anyone who could feel sorry for the Faerie – apart from isolated tree-huggers who thought that all Faerie were tragic creatures, because they’d never met one – but if Brother Andrew could feel sorry for them, what else could he feel sorry for?

  “They should be buried,” he said, slowly. “Can’t we take them out of here?”

  “There’s no way to move them,” I said, not unkindly. I wouldn’t have felt sorry for them myself – the lowest of the Faerie still thinks that he’s far superior to any other creature – but I respected his decision, even though I was going to keep a sharp eye on him. “We’ll have to leave them here. Perhaps, afterwards, we can bury them properly.”

  “Maybe,” Brother Andrew said. He listened to the voices that only he could hear. “We have to move now, Guardian. Part of it has noticed us.”

  We walked onwards, quickly, though the semi-darkness. “It’s noticed us?” Aylia asked. “What is it going to do about us?”

  “I don’t know,” Brother Andrew said, slowly. He rubbed the side of his head. “The machine is full of ghosts, whispering and talking to themselves…and they’re all mad. I can hear them all. They want us to save their souls.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Ghosts aren’t souls…”

  “They’re part of the machine somehow,” Brother Andrew said. He winced. “They’re all talking at once, but…Glass, they’re people! They’ve been pulled into the multiplicity. I can hear them trying to talk to us!”

  I stared. How many people had gone missing when the Mound had appeared in Central Park, back when part of the world had made sense? Hundreds. How many had disappeared afterwards, before Central Park had been cordoned off by the NYPD, despite the appeals of the Mayor? Hundreds more. How many magicians and would-be sorcerers had tried to reach the Faerie they thought lived in the Mound? Too many to count. Had they all been absorbed into the Forsaken mind?

  Is that it? I wondered, seeing another piece of the puzzle. I had thought that it was the Forsaken Fragment itself that had talked to me, but had it been the collective voice of the humans trapped within the multiplicity? I didn’t understand, but somehow I was sure that it all made sense, at some level. Had my Grandfather’s image been composed by human souls and thoughts, animated by my own memories, and used to speak to me? Just what was the Forsaken Fragment, really?

  “They want us to save them,” Brother Andrew said. He staggered and would have fallen, had we not caught him by the arms. “They’re demanding that we save them!”

  “I would like nothing better,” I said, truthfully. “Ask them if they know how we can save them.”

  A wave of light washed thought the chamber. It illuminated hundreds of figures surrounding us, staring at us with wide pleading eyes. There were humans, elves, vampires, werewolves, mermaids and hundreds of other creatures, including some I had only heard about by inference. No one knew for sure what some of them looked like, largely because no one had ever survived an encounter with the monsters. I saw a man with the head of a child and the arms of a monkey, a toad-like creature that seemed to spit constantly and a creature that seemed to be made of living shadow. They were all begging for us to help them, I realised, and yet we could do nothing to save them…

  I reached out to touch a man wearing an NYPD uniform. My hand went right through the image. There wasn't even the cold shock of touching a ghost, just…nothing, like a holographic image. They barely paid any attention to me, or Aylia; all of their attention was focused on the Sensitive. He was the only one who could hear them.

  “I can’t,” Brother Andrew pleaded, shaking back into my arms. His entire body seemed to be shivering at their touch. “I can’t…”

  He broke off into a Latin chant I couldn’t recognise. Not for the first time since Cecelia had vanished – how safe and normal the world had seemed them – I found myself completely at a loss. A normal ghost was scary as hell, particularly to those with a guilty conscience, but they weren't actually dangerous. They were really little more than psychic video recordings of particularly traumatic events. These ghosts, on the other hand, seemed far more dangerous. It was almost as if they thought they could force their way into Brother Andrew’s body
.

  “They had their thoughts strip-mined for useful concepts,” Brother Andrew said, blood trickling down from his nose. I cursed under my breath and tried to help him back to his feet, but he kept threatening to collapse again. “Everything they were was torn out of them and pushed into the gestalt, and then they were just shoved into the multiplicity. They’re dying, Glass, they’re dying.”

  I blinked. “How can a ghost die?”

  “The Forsaken Fragment is waking up,” Brother Andrew said. “As it builds itself into something that can survive our world and do battle with the Faerie, it starts to claim more of the ghosts into itself…and that would be the end. I can feel them screaming as they are taken, finally, and absorbed. The more the Fragment eats, the faster it can expand into the remains of the Mound…”

  “Come on,” I said, grimly. I raised my hand in preparation for unleashing a burst of random magic, but it might only make the whole situation worse. There were creatures that could be dispelled or driven away with random magic, but I doubted that the ghosts would care. Being destroyed utterly, rather than becoming just another cog in the Forsaken Fragment’s mind, might be preferable to them. It might also alert it to our presence.

  A thought struck me. “Can they influence it?”

  Brother Andrew concentrated, asking the question under his breath. “They can convince it not to think about us for a while,” he said. The ghosts pressed closer, their expressions bleakly pleading. “They want us to help free them in exchange.”

  “I’ll try,” I promised. The ghosts seemed to step back slightly. “Come on, Brother; there isn’t much further to go.”

  “If only you knew,” Brother Andrew said, but he seemed to allow me to help him to his feet. I was shocked by how light he suddenly was. I’m not the strongest person in the world, but even so, it should have been more of a struggle to hold him upright. “I know what’s coming now and why God wanted me here. I’ve known it all my life.”

  I looked at him oddly, but he only smiled. “I wanted to go with the other White Monks to the Monastery in the hills overlooking Rome, but instead His Holiness insisted that I go to New York,” he said. “He told me that I had a destiny here…and he was right. My entire life has been building up to this moment.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, perhaps more sharply than I intended. “There’s no such thing as destiny.”

  Aylia disagreed. “Glass, the centaur told you not to trust your Grandfather,” she said, slowly. “Wouldn’t the creature have had some advance knowledge to issue that warning?”

  “I’ve never liked the mangy beasts,” I admitted. There are entire books of nonsense about how noble and wise centaurs are. The authors of those books have never met them, but only read romantic fiction and popular trash. It was about on a par with the morons who declared vampires sexual creatures and wanted to be bitten by a particularly handsome bloodsucker. “Even so…”

  I took a breath. “I don’t like the concept of destiny, love,” I said. “It suggests that we as humans have no free will and no control over our own affairs, leaving us as puppets without being even able to see the strings. It’s an unpleasant concept to suggest that we might be headed for a pre-determined end without even knowing who is the puppet-master…”

  “It’s always been that way,” Aylia said. Her voice was unusually sharp. “Even when the world was just humans, without magic, there were always people controlling other people. Every year, the government stole money from the people and made laws that were sometimes good and sometimes bad, closing their ears to all remonstrance from the people they claimed to govern. What recourse did the people have against the government? The government was never wrong.

  “But even the government was held in chains, bound tight by human ambition and greed,” she continued. “The world economy held the politicians fast. The limits on global power prevented a one-world empire from forming. They were all at the mercy of vast impersonal forces, unable to control or influence them in the slightest, while pretending to be above them to win votes from an increasingly desperate public. The advent of magic didn’t change any of that, Glass; it merely added new factors…

  “And it starts right from the start. No matter how much sex you have, you will never get pregnant, so you will never know motherhood. Your parents gave birth to you as a boy, so you will never know what its like to be a girl. Your sexual identity demanded that you liked girls, so half the human race was removed from your list of possible sexual partners…”

  “You’re made your point,” I said, tiredly. She did have a point, although there were transformation spells for men who wanted to be women and vice versa. They were banned in the more sexually-repressive cultures, although for some reason they were still immensely popular. “Destiny is always around us, isn’t it.”

  “He,” Brother Andrew said, suddenly. “Destiny is a he.”

  The ghosts seemed to fade away as we stepped into the next chamber…and stopped dead. It was another Faerie room, now torn and broken, but it wasn’t the debris that caught our attention. A thousand bodies, human and non-human, floated in the centre of the chamber, glowing faintly under the illumination. It was easy to see that they were all dead. They’d died in any number of horrific and painful ways.

  “Why?” I asked, angrily. I had thought myself used to horror, but this was just something new, yet chillingly familiar. “What possible purpose could this serve?”

  “They wanted to know about us,” Brother Andrew said. I wondered if the ghosts had come from those bodies…and if they knew that their bodies were dead. It was possible, even, that the Forsaken had never realised that humans were so attached to their bodies. It might not be capable of understanding what it had done. “It just took the bodies and studied them.”

  We walked onwards through chamber after chamber, some empty and cold, others filled with horrors and signs of the great battle that had wrecked the Mound. Finally, the sound of a mighty heart beating grew stronger as we stepped into another chamber, this one dominated by…something hanging in the air, right in the centre of the room. It was so…other that our eyes just slid past it, as if it wasn't really there at all.

  And then I saw her. It was Cecelia, the girl whose kidnap had started all this, floating right in the centre of the…otherness. She was alive, yet not alive; floating endlessly between life and death. She looked to be at peace, and yet…there was something weird about the smile on her face. It was the smile of something other than human.

  “That’s it,” Brother Andrew breathed. “That’s the core of the Forsaken Fragment.”

  “I see,” I said, unstrapping my rucksack and leaving it on the ground. “Can you…”

  “No,” a new voice said. A figure had been waiting for us in the gloom. “He won’t.”

  Alassa stepped out of nowhere and smiled at us.

  “This is the end,” she said. “Game over.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Captain Steven Hiller: I ain't heard no fat lady!

  David Levinson: Forget the fat lady. You're obsessed with the fat lady. Just get us out of here!

  -Independence Day

  “Well?” Alassa asked, a moment later. “Isn’t anyone going to say something?”

  “You’re dead,” I said, numbly. I had thought that I was beyond surprise, but this was something new. Even the most powerful magic can’t bring back the dead. “I saw you die.”

  “Well, in a manner of speaking,” Alassa said, smiling. There was a new air around her now, not a glamour, but something else. It was an unhealthy, yet captivating beauty. I could barely look at her without feeling as if I was looking at something unbearably disgusting, yet eerily attractive. “My new patron understood that I wanted power and when he started the manifestation process, gave me all the power I could handle and then some. I am currently the most powerful magician on Earth.”

  She held out her hand and a staff materialised in it. Powerful magic crackled around it as she held it up triumphantly. �
��I will always be the most powerful magician on Earth,” she added. “I will usher in a new age of wonder and terror for the human race.”

  “You destroyed our family,” Aylia said, very coldly. Alassa looked surprised to see her sister talking; the look she gave her was anything, but loving. “Father is dead, mother is dead, and Cecelia…what about her?”

  “My new patron required a moment of permanent unreality to manifest on our world,” Alassa supplied. I recognised the symptoms and almost smiled. Most magicians can’t help, but brag, even though they know that it’s deadly dangerous. The wrong word, said to the wrong person, could be disastrous. “Our darling sister is poised endlessly between life and death, the moment of her death prolonged endlessly…”

  Her face twisted. “And they stopped loving me when they had her,” she said, angrily. “She took their love away from me.”

  “You acted the spoilt brat all the time,” Aylia retorted. I was the only one who saw how her hands were shaking. “You had to have the best of everything; the best clothes, the best tools and the best jewels. Mother was just the same and encouraged you to demand as much as you wanted…”