by S. M. Beiko
The bed shifted and Eli was pulling himself up beside me. Extremely close. He stretched his long legs out in front of him, folded his hands over his stomach, and leaned his head back against the wall, shutting his eyes. The porch light outside the window was set on a timer, and it suddenly clicked on, sending a slanted beam into the room, and I saw his passive face in profile. Really looked at it for probably the first time.
Definitely getting crowded. If I scooted any farther over, I’d be sitting on the nightstand. So I gave up, stretched my own legs out, and tried to get comfortable . . . despite the fact that I didn’t know what I was feeling right now, if there was any room for that, anyway —
“I can leave,” he offered, his eyes still shut.
I frowned, more annoyed than embarrassed. “Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Doesn’t it get tiring, the mind reading?”
“I wasn’t,” he claimed. “You’re just exceedingly obvious.”
I tried to push the growing grin down and turned away again, even though his eyes were still closed.
“Roan?”
I prickled at his sudden, careful use of my first name. “Hm?”
“I said I’d help you the best I can,” Eli said. “Now close your eyes. I’ll try to help you now. If you like.”
I should’ve rebuffed him, gone to the living room myself, spent the night in turmoil like I deserved, as if marinating in all the possible disasters scratching at the door would do me any favours. Instead, I did as he asked, because he had asked nicely, and behind the dark of my eyes there was an almost-relief from the pain in my heart, a gold tether reaching out, wrapping around my withered senses, and pulling them into a state of peace I never imagined I’d feel again, when I grabbed hold.
Enemy of Ancient
They had reached the summit of the mountain long ago, but this still wasn’t what Phae had expected. She knew that something was wrong as they’d climbed, a creeping doom growing in the pit of her stomach. She knew that the closer they got to the top, the sooner she hoped she would see Roan, catch a glimpse of her dear friend — but it wouldn’t be anywhere approaching pleasant. And she would be unable to act, since her own task was still not done.
“This is what you wanted,” Fia said, standing over Phae with their hands pressing her shoulders. “This is your test. You must watch but you cannot intervene. You will know what it has been for us, with these children we made. You will try to change the Narrative, even from here, but you can’t. No one can.”
Phae stiffened, biting her tongue, because by now she knew better than to talk back to a god. She heard the great neck creak, saw the shadow of the enormous triple rack of horns shift as their faces changed. But Phae knew, without looking, that each face would have the same expression; that all three held a sort of bitter contempt and maybe even a sadness, however reluctantly felt.
Fia’s three rings glowed beneath them, and Phae saw Roan and Eli in one, sitting side by side on a bed, her head tipped on his shoulder, his eyes wide open as she slept. Images of Barton and the coalition occupied another, preparing to board a plane.
The third ring was dark, set between the other two. It was this ring she watched, trembling.
“If you still think the world is worth saving after this,” Fia sneered, “then the Quartz is still not for you.”
More riddles. Phae shut her eyes, felt her spirit grow, and reached for Barton.
~
The plane dipped. Barton held on, cringing.
It’s happening too fast. It’s happening now. Barton, please. You have to help Roan. Do it for me. Even in another realm, on the upside-down of reality, Phae was looking out for her best friend. And here he was, desperate to help Phae.
Across the aisle of the military plane, Solomon sweated through his fatigues despite being strapped securely in place.
Barton didn’t comment, but the man smiled bitterly. “The last time I was on a plane, things didn’t go as planned.” He cleared his throat. “And what’s your excuse?”
Barton raised an eyebrow. This man was definitely not like his son; his demeanour was too pleasant. “You could just read my mind, I guess.”
“I could,” he conceded, “but what’s on your mind is one thing. How you communicate it and interpret that is entirely another.”
Barton sucked on his teeth as they banked, the Broadford Aerodrome coming into view through the small window by his head. He and Solomon had had many conversations in the days leading up to this, the man eager, almost, to be a teacher and a father to anyone who needed it, maybe to distract him from his fears for Eli’s safety. And he’d been the only one Barton had told about Phae — in fact, Solomon had been helping him hone his focus to take in Phae’s desperate messages from the other side, using the neutralizer’s skills that Arnas had passed on to him. If only he could open a passage that might allow Phae back through . . . but he knew he couldn’t be so selfish, not when she had her own tasks to complete.
“I’m just . . . I hope we aren’t too late.”
Solomon did not hesitate. “We just have to trust,” he said. “Trust that they’ll be all right. Eli has more than just the power of the stone to rely on. He feels a strong pull for this girl. And he wouldn’t trust her lightly, either.”
Barton shut his eyes. “We can trust Roan all we want,” he said, “but she has to trust herself.” They weren’t his words but Phae’s, and though he’d kept his voice even, across the tether she’d cast to him, there was more doom and desperation than blind faith underneath them.
~
I’d been dreaming. Something I hadn’t done, really, in so long my brain and body forgot the way of it. I had been dreamed into the lives of others so often that mine had become forfeit. Cecelia. Ravenna. Ruo. Eli. I’d faded behind the weight of them all. What was left for me, anyway? What kind of life or future? School or a job or a career? No — they were fairy tales. And the monstrous reality was, I might not live long enough to remember I once cared about any of those things, anyway.
I’d been dreaming of kindness. Of a world unburdened. Of vast, empty spaces, populated by no one. I dreamed of a room, with a woman sitting next to a hospital bed that held another woman, silent for years. Ruo shuffled a handful of postcards she could not see — postcards she will send to her almost-granddaughter, in Cecelia’s stead. She will send one out whenever she remembers, but her mind has been failing her lately, and no one is there to hold her hand through it. Just ghosts, closing in.
And then the room, and all those blissful vast spaces before it, turned to ash, and death, and I was still alone. But still serene.
In the middle distance, separated by gnarled trees, a woman with long dark hair striped with grey approached. She wore armour that made her look like a fox god, long legs set in leather bracers depicting battles and triumphs. She removed the helm with the pointed ears, the cape that was split nine ways, and she discarded them, along with her sword, in the dirt at my feet.
“Well,” I said.
“I know,” Cecelia sighed, ragged and bloody. She surveyed the land as I did.
“You made a mess of things,” I told her, but she didn’t need to be told. She knew it better than me.
“All we can do,” she said, “is try to make things right while we still have the chance.”
“Not much of a chance now. And you could’ve made it right when you were alive, instead of leaving it to me.” I was bitter, true, but the apathy was fast taking over. “At the end of this, how much of it will have mattered? The mistakes. The fixing of the mistakes.”
“Come with me,” she said. And we walked the path across the Bloodlands that she had taken, to a place the thing inside me called the Darkling Hold, and I heard grave singing.
The hold was at the bottom of a canyon, it seemed, stretching on into infinity. It had cracked. Would keep cracking as the gre
at bodies of its prisoners rallied.
“Look into the fissure,” she said. “What do you see?”
I didn’t want to. “I already have. I’ve already tried looking.” The sea, the chasm. Eli. I had tried to see . . .
“Look again.” And when she pointed, I couldn’t help it. I saw what could have been the very edge of the universe. A web of dark, and in the centre of it, I saw —
— me.
“Just tell me what it means. I don’t have time for riddles.”
When I looked at Cecelia again, she was Ruo, young and still able to see her future. She touched my face. “It’s not a riddle,” she promised. “It’s the cost of freedom. It’s love that brought us all here. Love can consume you or set you free. But at least there’s a promise in it, however fragile, of the continuation of life. You just have to hold on.”
“I can’t.” I felt the dark fire stoking higher on the pyre of my good intentions, and it was climbing up my feet, consuming. “I’m not strong enough. I’m not either of you.” Ruo’s eyes turned black with pin-dot red centres, as if stained by black acid rain. Her skin hissed away, revealing something underneath, and then it wasn’t Ruo at all.
Ruo was now me. The dark copy. The thing with the voice that had staked me as its territory.
“You keep treating me like I’m an invader,” this duplicate me, this dark me, said, a finger pressing into the Opal. “But I’ve always been here. I’m nothing more than you. What you were meant to become. Not long now.”
“You’re not me,” I said, but she grabbed hold of my hands, pulling me close, and the fire ate us both up, and I could really feel us smouldering, fusing, like burnt acrylic.
“We are all the children of the Bloodlands,” the dark me said, “and it’s time we embraced our family.”
~
Down on the beach where we’d first crash-landed, Saskia asked the question I couldn’t.
“Once you take the stones off,” she said, skipping a flat rock across the expanse of the water, “what will you do with them?”
Another stone skipped after hers. Eli had thrown it. “We’ll destroy them.” He said it as if it had been obvious, so easy, and when he saw my face, he frowned. “What? We can’t hide them. If we do, this will just keep going on until Seela finds them. He needs all of them to succeed. Destroy them and they won’t fall into the wrong hands. It’s simple.”
“Simple,” I muttered. “Why don’t we just try to take the Serenity Emerald back instead? And just destroy that one? Or the other stones that aren’t currently attached to anyone that we know of.” I had only the barest details about the Horned Quartz or the Abyssal Sapphire, and I was reaching. Of course, Eli knew it.
“This is what we have to do, Harken. It’s the only option available to us.” He shielded his eyes from the harsh wind, looking out to the water. “There are no guarantees, anyway, whatever we do.”
He was right, but I wanted to change the subject. We’d come outside to chill, not do this dance again, and it’d been me steering us back into it.
We’d allowed ourselves the one day. Eli was starting to come down as I had, his stone losing some of its potency as the dark virus took it over. We were running out of time. Neither of us could sleep anymore, but we still tried to bolster each other.
“And what about you, Saskia?” Eli swung in and changed the subject for me, and this time I didn’t call him out for the psychic thing. “What will you do, once this is over?”
It was an odd question, coming from him. He was making an effort not to look at me. He didn’t believe there was something on the other side for any of us — he’d already said as much.
But there was more skin in the game than just Eli’s and mine. There was always so much more at stake than just our own lives. He was a Paramount, after all, even if I’d only seen the dictator-ish side of that until lately. But even the few Owls here in Uig we came across — they respected him. Trusted him as they would a true leader. The kind I’d only played at.
Saskia was considering Eli’s question carefully, and I wondered if she had always been such a serious child. “I will find my true daddy, so he isn’t alone anymore,” she finally replied. “I’ll tell him what happened to Albert. And then,” her eyes were narrowed, “we will go to Disney World. You guys can come, too.”
“Never been,” Eli and I said in unison, and he smiled.
“If there is still a Disney World,” Saskia corrected. “If the sea hasn’t eaten it by then.”
The three of us looked across the water, at the shapes in the distance, an insinuation of land. I felt something stir in the water as it lapped at our shoes.
“What . . . is that?” I asked Eli, the most likely of any of us to know what was going on.
He shut his eyes, casting his mind out. The Moonstone guttered with the effort, and his face strained. “The wind has changed.” He tipped his face up to the sky, as if he were up there, looking down at us. “And the sea, well . . . it’s not my area. But it’s changed, too.”
I blew out my cheeks. “You sound more and more like a D&D DM as time goes on. Roll initiative already.”
Eli rolled his eyes instead. “Whatever that means.” And he checked the horizon once again. “I think the Sapphire has been brought up. I can’t tell for sure. But it’s a presence that hasn’t been in the world for a while, and the stones react to their sisters.”
I almost envied him; I hadn’t felt anything from my stone in so long, I’d almost forgotten it was there.
And now it was time to pry it out, before . . .
“Then we better do this now,” I said suddenly, glancing at Saskia, whose eyes were raw, wide wounds. “While we still can.”
~
Barton fastened his flak vest, tightened and secured the running blades. Commander Zhou had gathered them in the hangar, the vehicles waiting just outside on the runway dock.
“Spar Cave is where we’re headed.” His finger was on the map of the Isle of Skye, but his eyes were up at Barton, who nodded. “Tough to get to, but nothing we can’t handle. We have to time this right. The tide will go out but only stay out for a short time. We go in and grab the two, whatever state they’re in. And the stones, if they’re still intact.” His mouth was twisted. “Don’t think the Owl Council or the Conclave of Fire will be too pleased that our priority isn’t extraction of the stones. But there it is. I’m making the calls out here, and I agree with Eli’s plan. If they are successful in removing their stones, then we have to destroy them. Don’t get any ideas into your heads, any of you, that we’re here to do any less.”
The assembled Rabbits, Foxes, and the odd Owl, decked out for whatever was to come, just nodded. The coalition had one purpose, and it was to stop Seela, without direct conflict if they could manage it. Too many had died already. The attacks of things seeping out of the cracks in the world had gone up, even in the past twenty-four hours. The world was watching. This needed to be stopped before there was no one left to watch.
Hurry, Barton felt Phae insisting, her voice breaking.
Solomon sat on a steel crate, knowing he’d only be in the way, trusting Barton to be his eyes for this. He’d had only one request: “No matter what happens . . . please bring my son back. If you can.”
Hurry!
“We have to go,” Barton said. The Commander nodded, and they fell out.
~
I knew we’d have to cross into the Veil, and that this time it would have to be me leading us there. I’d only done this once before, when Sil had been compromised and needed me to take the wheel when reconnecting Barton to his powersake. Thinking about it now, despite how high the stakes had been, compared to this it was a bit of whimsy — if I believe hard enough in myself, it’ll all be okay! This time there was no room for Hallmark card affirmations. I had to be certain.
The dark thing — the dark me — stirred.
“I don’t even know if this will work,” I muttered, carving the lines in the dirt with the garnet — now obsidian — blade. I’d been reluctant to even take it out, but it was the only Ancient tool we had to work with if I was going to make a convincing, or even potent, summoning circle. A darkling summoning circle. The blade stained the ground with my blood, spilled from a cut I hadn’t felt at all.
“Here.” Eli took the blade from my hand, marked the points of certain sigils I didn’t know. “I saw these in Seela’s chamber. And one in Cecelia’s memory.” When I raised my eyebrow at him he shrugged. “Eidetic memory. Made studying almost comical.”
“That and the mind reading, which probably allowed you to cheat on a few tests.”
“Now, now, Harken, that was, of course, frowned upon,” he chided. It almost felt nice, normal.
That was about to end, too.
We’d driven out here in a small car Agathe had lent us. For the entire ride, I pretended we were just a little family going on a day trip. The sun was out, the sky was clear and infuriatingly beautiful. Eli drove, and he did it with a strange, one-handed ease. We could’ve easily flown here, but he’d insisted we do it this way. I had a feeling he was pretending like I was. Playing a nice game of make believe to make the pill easier to swallow.
“So I figure . . .” He looked at me, and if I could feel it under my breast anymore, maybe my heart was breaking just a bit. “That I’ll have to . . . do you, first.”
Eli’s cheeks, pale from exhaustion and the sickness, coloured just a bit. If I had anything left in me, I’d have laughed at him. With him. But he wanted to get this over with, whatever would happen. “Yes. I figured the same. You’re the one who’s going to have to separate us from the stones. You can’t very well do that if you remove your stone first.”
Like a suicide pact. Two bullets, one gun. Someone had to fire first. I was very, very still. “You trust me?” I asked quietly.
Eli stabbed the blade into the ground, leaning forward on it, considering me. He could have been King Arthur — or any other sad, doomed fairy tale knight trying to negotiate with the dragon that was really the princess, the one he’d tried to save now about to open its jaws to thank him for it.
