Halcyon Rising_Shadow of Life

by Stone Thomas

  “I fled. When I found Nola I hoped she could erase my mistakes, but my mind remains an uncontrollable sea of decimals.

  “Did Nola not try?” Brion asked. “Did she ignore my suffering and cast me aside, a man too broken to make her own? Kāya is all I have now. She has turned my mind against me, and turned me against your champion goddess.”

  “You want the numbers to cease,” Cindra said. I glanced over to her. In Brion’s vision, she wasn’t a shapely green woman, she was a formidable goddess in a suit of armor. She was the Great Mother. “Rise, beastkin. Submit before me and pray for my blessing.”

  “She’s really good at this,” I whispered.

  Savange laughed. “Her soul has a flare for the divine.”

  Brion gazed at the army of false angels surrounding Valleyvale. He walked toward Cindra. Then knelt at her feet.

  “Great Mother,” he said. “Please forgive me. I knew not who the goddess Kāya was when I accepted her offer. Cleanse me of the chaos that infects my mind.”

  “Not yet,” Cindra said. “Patience is your penance.”

  Brion began to weep. His long lion tail swept the street behind him as his face pressed against Cindra’s shoes. He wheezed and gasped. His body lurched. Then he made sort of a hacking sound. A gagging. Cindra stepped back and gave him the space to cough up a furball.

  As Brion ejected that wet blob of his own hair, Cindra turned to me and whispered. “I can’t hold it much longer.”

  “When he sees who you are,” I said, “he’ll run. We need rope, or handcuffs.”

  Ambry walked up to us. She glanced at me and Cindra, whispering to each other. She glanced at Brion, prone on the ground. Then she lifted her wooden battle staff and cracked it against his head. The lionkin lurched forward and crumpled into a limp pile.

  “Ambry!” I yelled.

  She shrugged and said, “Concuss.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good move. And Cindra, that was inspired. Promising to stifle the numbers for him was a nice touch.”

  “I meant it,” Cindra said. “You know how Nola feels about fixing him.”

  “But now we know it’s not her fault,” I said. “Kāya got to him first. She filled his mind with numbers he couldn’t control. He’s not just a skillmeister, he’s a lunatic! He’s been touched by chaos.”

  “His numbers haven’t been wrong,” Cindra said, “just unruly.”

  A chorus of “Kill the gods” was still in full swing, and we left the unconscious lionkin behind for a moment. Akrin was still timelining people to Roseknob. Kāya was high in the air, pumping her own magic into the anibomb that formed above the city.

  Nola, however, was on the ground. Telara’s bandit warriors held her arms out and her feet down. I sprinted toward her with all of my might.

  Telara had her hands on my Vile Lance, in a tug of war against a burly man trying to claim it as his own. With a kick to his considerable gut, Telara doubled him over, yanked the weapon away from him, and slammed its point into his foot in a burst of dark blue energy. His boot tore open, and so, I expect, did his foot. He collapsed in blood and pain.

  I held out my hand, casting Call to Arms from too far away. Telara took on five bandits at once, forcing them to release Nola in order to defend themselves. Still, I reached for my spear.

  Finally I came within range and the weapon lit up. Telara’s grip was strong, and I felt my body pull forward as my skill forced the space between man and weapon to close.

  “If you won’t kill Kāya, I have to!” Telara yelled, fighting against my Call to Arms.

  Akrin, meanwhile, landed on the ground and looked at the bandits. He put his hands on his hips and said, “On second thought, you’re not the model citizens we’re looking for. It would appear that I do have standards, and you lot fall below them.”

  One of those thugs looked away from Nola, knives in his hands and greed in his eyes. He threw a blade that landed in Akrin’s forearm. Rich red blood seeped from the wound.

  The silver god lost his grin. He plucked the knife from his arm and glared down at the man that dared throw it. The rogue had a second knife, and he pulled back his arm to give that a throw too.

  “Kill the gods!” he yelled.

  “Game over,” Akrin said. His whole body pulsed with radiant light. “This, boys and girls, is what we call rage-quitting.”

  The would-be slayer of the god of passing time aimed his second knife and released. Akrin summoned a pellet of silver magic and threw it like a dart at the man’s weapon, forcing the item to vanish and reappear in the man’s hand. Confused for a moment, the man looked down. His knife wasn’t just in his grip, it was in his palm. The blade was deep in his flesh.

  Akrin threw a larger ball of silver light which enveloped the man, sending him back along his timeline to a place out of sight. Akrin didn’t stop there. Eyeing the other thieves Telara had trained, he started throwing magic in every direction. Some of it splashed against those men and forced them to disappear from battle.

  Other orbs of mirrored magic landed at random, sinking into the arms, legs, chests, and faces of men still tinged by the gray touch of Duul’s curse. One crashed against Telara, whisking her away to a time unknown. She might be outside Valleyvale’s gates, or all the way back in the Imperial City.

  Behind us, the anibombs inside the temple’s belfry lost their suspension in time. They exploded, a dozen bursts of lilac fire that cracked the temple tower wide open and blasted chunks of Kāya’s partially-dedicated shrine in every direction.

  The explosion thundered through the city, scaring Kāya’s conscripted construction crew out of hiding. They ran screaming from the houses and shops that lined the main street, charging toward the city’s front gates even as rabbijacks tried attacking them.

  “Mamba!” I yelled. “Tell me you have enough AP left to summon Larry.” She nodded. “Get as many people to Halcyon as you can. Lily, Ambry, go with them!” It was time to jump ship. “Cindra!” I yelled. She lay next to Brion on the ground. After all of the energy she had put into deluding Brion, she didn’t seem to have any left for herself.

  I ran toward her while Akrin blasted people with silver magic. Kāya’s floating anibomb was larger than a house now and growing steadily. “Cindra, we have to go!”

  The ground ruptured as a giant snake burst forth. Larry the bonersnake shot toward the sky, turned flat, and slammed against the ground. His long ridged spine supported tightly-compacted ribs that protected the hollow space inside him. He parked outside the city’s gates.

  Mamba, Lily, and Ambry guided exhausted men and women into the snake’s body while Nola flew toward me.

  “You knocked Brion out,” she said.

  “He’s awful,” I replied. “I don’t care how badly Kāya hurt him, he shouldn’t have laid that burden on your lap and expected you to fix him.” I could tell from her face that she didn’t understand. “You didn’t do this, Nola. Kāya got to him first. He tried to put that all behind him and serve you instead, but his mind was too far gone.”

  A wave of relief washed over her face, even as the city crumbled around her. “We have to heal him.”

  “Take him to Halcyon then,” I said, “Go! I’ve got Cindra.”

  Nola lifted Brion’s limp body and took off, gaining altitude with the first few flaps of her wings, then distance as she headed home.

  “Larry’s full!” Mamba said. There were still fifteen people outside the city waiting for transport.

  “Go!” I yelled. “We’ll take the portal arch. Go go go!”

  The bonersnake pulled away and I helped Cindra to her feet. “It’s just so hot,” she said, “in the sunlight.”

  It wasn’t so hot, which worried me. I bent down in front of her. “Climb on, I’ll carry you.”

  She looped an arm around my neck and I stood, grasping my hands beneath her thighs.

  She wasn’t as heavy as she looked, this full-bodied slime gal. Her skin was firm and soft, but the magical ether Mercifer the elf used w
hen he built her was lighter than one might assume at first glance.

  Either that or my Strength was finally at superhuman levels, surpassing the average man’s capacity to whisk a girl off her feet and sprint with her to safety. Yeah, it was probably that.

  As we ran toward the city’s front gates, the massive dark purple anibomb swelled with magic from the energem Kāya had set in motion. We had almost reached the city’s exit when Cindra begged me to stop.

  “Arden, do you hear that?”

  Reluctantly, I paused. A small voice cried out nearby.

  “Is that a child?” she asked. “We can’t leave her behind.”

  Dammit. Of course we couldn’t. I set Cindra down outside a nearby building as the words, “Mamma! Mamma!” rang out from inside.

  I kicked the door down and raced up the wooden steps. “Mamma!” I followed the voice into a small pink bedroom. Toys. Teacups on a small table. A tiny crib with a swaddling of blue blanket inside. “Mamma!”

  I lifted the small bundle from the crib and raced back outside. Kāya pumped magic into her creation in a frenzy now, adding to the energem’s effort and forcing her new anibomb to balloon to an unprecedented size.

  I handed the baby to Cindra and helped her walk as quickly as we could toward the city’s gates.

  “When will it stop?” one man asked, pointing toward Kāya.

  We were a half-day’s walk from Halcyon, but I couldn’t be sure how far that anibomb would reach if we left Kāya unchecked so I said, “When we make it stop.”

  Cindra carried her swaddled companion into the shade while I ran back into the city. A few more people had come out of hiding and ran for the front gates. There was no telling how many others hid in their attics, their basements, waiting for the battle to die down. I wouldn’t let Kāya’s familiar blast them to kingdom come.

  I reached the lumber launcher and I started pushing. It was heavy and rolled slowly at first, jostling against the cobblestones, but it picked up speed the longer I sprinted with it toward the city’s exit.

  Twenty people stood in the clearing now, watching me aim the siege tower as high as it would go. I cracked open one of the plank projectiles with my Vile Lance, then inserted the seraph guardian’s thin golden spear until it was jammed firmly into the log. If this technique worked on a general, it would work on Kāya’s familiar too. Probably.

  With a good solid yank, I released the spring’s tension and fired that wood-and-gold bullet at the growing menace in Valleyvale’s sky.

  Kāya didn’t look up at the last second. She may not even have known there was a last second. As the tip of that tiny spear pierced the monster she conjured, its dark purple skin burst like an overripe eggplant. One that had a bomb inside it.

  Dark purple smoke rushed so quickly from its body that it forced a strong wind in every direction. Tree trunks bent away from the city. People leaned into the wind to keep from falling over. In the distance, a few birds got knocked terribly off course.

  That dark smoke enveloped the entire city, shrouding the streets and stores, the temple’s tower, and the city’s walls. It came close to my face as I stood just outside the front gates, but I turned away and held my breath. Just when I thought it would choke the entire forest and us along with it, the smoke began to recede. It pulled away from us as quickly as it had emerged. It forced a vacuum that caused the trees to bend toward the city, forced us to lean backward this time, and pulled the birds right again.

  Rocks pelted our backs as anything light enough got sucked into the heart of that shrinking violet cloud.

  As the smoke vanished, so did the city. Everything touched by Kāya’s magic was gone, transported whole to a location we could only guess at. A perfectly round crater sat in the space the city used to be.

  I’d have to update my mental review of the Grippersnout to Permanently Closed.

  +26

  I dropped to my knees and stared at the chasm that used to be a city. Men and women gasped at the sight of it. They stood just behind me, but their voices were a million miles away.

  “Do you think anyone was still in the city?” one man asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure of it,” a woman replied. “My neighbor said it would blow over and she wasn’t leaving for nothing.”

  Sitting at my feet, dashing all hope of a quick and easy route home, was a battered green statuette of Avelle sitting amidst the rubble and debris kicked up by the explosion. The force of that vacuum had knocked over a few trees and dislodged a few large rocks. It also demolished the portal arch. I picked up the small statue for safekeeping.

  “Do you think they’ll be okay?” the man asked.

  “They’re in the gods’ hands now,” the woman said. “But no, I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Or maybe,” I said, “we dealt Kāya a severe enough blow that she’ll leave the city behind, wherever it ended up. Listen, it’s a long walk to Halcyon but you’ll find your families there. We’ll only slow you down, so go on ahead and tell the goddess Nola that Cindra and Arden are on their way.”

  The men and women nodded and headed off down the road. Cindra sat on the dirt and leaned against a tree, a bundle of blankets still in her arm. I sat next to her and she leaned her head on my shoulder. I closed my eyes.

  Gone. The entire city was gone. And I had delivered the finishing blow.

  Yes, we had saved everyone we had seen, and yes, we kicked Kāya’s plans off course, but at what cost? I couldn’t face the walk home just yet, or Nola. Or Gowes. Or Lily and Ambry. I wondered if a nap in the shade was too much to ask for first.

  “Mm?” Cindra asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said. I cracked my eyes open the tiniest bit, just enough to see the tiniest thing. It was only a few inches tall, a female insectoid woman with lines of red, yellow, and green crisscrossing four wings that beat madly against the air. Cindra must have mistaken the buzzing sound for a voice.

  “Fairyfly?” I asked. Cindra lurched forward, but it was too late. The little insect landed on the bundle of blankets in Cindra’s arms and grabbed it with her four tiny green insect-hands. She yanked it away from Cindra with surprising strength while the slime woman swatted and missed.

  “Mamma!” came the small, vulnerable voice we had first heard inside Valleyvale.

  I hopped to my feet, but couldn’t exactly swipe my Vile Lance at the tiny insect for fear of hitting the child instead. Then the fairyfly reared its head and opened its mouth at a wide angle, showcasing the three fangs — two on top and one on the bottom — that would allow it to feast on its favorite meal. Baby blood.

  I slapped at the flying menace with my open hand but she ignored me, diving with her prey into the bushes and tearing through the swaddling that was the poor child’s only armor. Bits of blue blanket fluff flew into the air as I reached toward the child, scratching my arm through the brambles and thorns in the forest’s underbrush, feeling my way toward the fairyfly’s victim.

  “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma!” it cried.

  Finally, my fingers curled around something soft and plump. I lifted that child from the bushes and swatted the fairyfly away.

  Unnaturally large brown eyes stared back at me, unblinking, from a dirty, chubby face. Deep punctures pocked its cheeks where the fairyfly had bit, over and over, in its hungry search for blood. The baby’s leg was bent backward, and its hair was three strands of thin twine sticking out of its bulbous ugly head.

  I burst out laughing.

  “Mamma!” it begged. I just laughed even harder.

  “Cindra!” I yelled. “It’s just a doll!”

  She was behind me, breathing in short bursts. She snatched the child-shaped toy from my hands and held it before her.

  “Mamma!” Its voice sputtered, as if the doll’s broken state had broken its voice as well.

  Cindra’s grip on the doll tightened. “I thought,” she said. “I thought…”

  “I know,” I said, laughing so hard I was starting to cry, “but it’s too ugly t
o be a baby. It’s just an enchanted dolly.”

  Cindra exhaled deeply before allowing the laughter to take hold. We stood in the bushes, surrounded by the fluffy blue shreds of a fake baby’s blanket and holding the creepiest enchanted doll I had ever seen.

  “This thing is going to give me nightmares,” I said. “Its eye just fell off. Better call mamma!” I was cracking up.

  The fairyfly, not amused, landed on my arm next. It bared its fangs and hissed. I shooed the bug away and dropped the dead doll.

  For a moment, the insect hovered, staring at me with eyes devoid of any white. I stared back, challenging those shimmering blue orbs with my glare. It flew circles around my head. I ducked, but couldn’t get away. Then it latched onto my ear with all four of its small green hands.

  The fairyfly tried pulling me by the ear toward the dirt path that would take us home. Home to a place where, soon enough, I would have babies of my own. I shook her away and cupped my ears.

  “Go away!” I yelled. “You’re not welcome here! I banish you from my personal space!”

  The insect, perhaps frustrated by its overall failure, flew away.

  “What was that about?” Cindra asked.

  “Those adventurers we had recently,” I replied, “they told us that fairyflies drink babies’ blood, but they carried one around in a bottle because their tears have healing powers. The only way to make them cry is to pull off their wings, so the whole thing just wasn’t my scene. I wonder if this one was friends with the one I set free.”

  “Well,” Cindra said, “I’m relieved it’s gone. I suppose we can abandon this broken doll and move on. Now that we’re out of the sun, I feel much better. If we stick to the shade, I’ll be fine for the walk home.”

  “Has Lana been able to help with your exhaustion?” I asked.

  “She has no experience with slimes,” Cindra said, “so no, she has not been a help. Nor has Rinka. I inquired at her brewer’s booth whether she had any potions that would bolster my energy, but she didn’t. She offered a marbleskin potion that would harden my skin instead, and I wasn’t sure if that offer was genuine or if she wanted to turn me to stone.”