Armageddon Rules

by J. C. Nelson

  “It doesn’t belong to anyone?” Ari stopped staring at me, went back to staring at it.

  “It is only a casting off. An accident, trapped here.” The Fae Mother set her hands together, and uttered a word, dark like the depths of the ocean. The crystal pillar hummed in response, cracking down the edges. Shards of crystal fell away, leaving the wish glimmering, hovering.

  I reached out a hand to it, and it drifted away, like I’d pushed it. A full-on swipe, and it skittered to the side like greased butter.

  “You may not claim it.” If she’d said that first, I wouldn’t have tried.

  Ari held out her hand, and it transformed, wrapping and swirling around her like a living light show.

  “How come she gets to hold it?”

  Ari smiled. “When you make princess, we’ll talk about getting you a pet wish, I promise.” She looked to the Fae Mother. “What do I do?”

  “Desire, and ask, princess. But do not set magic against magic.”

  The Fae Mother never gave me that much warning, but she had a point. If Ari wished, for instance, to have her eyes back, she’d get them. In a bag. If she wished she wasn’t a witch, it might kill her.

  I knew what Ari would say before she spoke. What she desired more than anything. “I wish Wyatt still loved me.”

  The wish began to cry. To wail, and convulse, as strands of it flew outward, like a sweater unraveling. The noise went on for seconds, or an eternity, as the wish tore to pieces. And then it was gone, a fading glow left where once it existed.

  “Well done.” The Fae Mother turned to go back toward our trail. “You have claimed its power and life for your own. May your wish bring you happiness.”

  Ari gasped, her hand on her chest like she’d been punched. “I didn’t mean—” A sob choked her, and she stumbled forward. “She didn’t say that wishing would kill it.”

  The death wail had done a number on me too. Like I’d run a marathon, followed by a triathlon, followed by getting beat up by an entire team of ogres. In the fairy tales, they never say what wishing does to the wish. You never hear about the thing that dies to give someone their happily ever after.

  I took Ari by the hand and stood her up. She stared blankly ahead. I mean, I think she did—I couldn’t exactly tell without her eyes, but she took each step only as I pulled her, and she continued to shiver. We made our way back to the path, where the Fae Mother waited, and followed her onward.

  * * *

  FROM A DISTANCE, the focus point looked like a Hollywood opening. Those massive searchlights that beam up into the sky shone up into the darkness, each a slightly different color. When I got closer, I could make out lesser beams of light. Some shone so bright, it hurt to look. Some looked like pale flashlights, barely visible at all.

  After a few more hours, the dots on the horizon below the searchlights became pyramids like the ones we arrived on, and with Kingdom only knows how many more steps, we approached a low wall. Only a couple of feet high, it curved into the distance, around the pyramids.

  “Princess, you may not enter here. To come into contact with fairy power is death.” The Fae Mother drifted over the wall, then beckoned to me.

  “I’ll be back for you.” I hugged Ari.

  “I didn’t mean to kill it.” She sat at the edge, staring off into the distance.

  Part of me burned with anger at her. Her words cost the poor wish its existence.

  I followed the Fae Mother on. The first pyramids had only weak beams of light arcing into the sky. As we passed others, the light became stronger, brighter. These had channels carved into the ground. Light burst from crystals in the channel, then through prisms that reflected the beams to the top of the pyramid, where they joined into what looked like solid light.

  “Beware. Come into contact with another fairy’s power, and you too will die.” She didn’t bother looking back.

  At last, we stopped. I’m guessing we’d reached the center of the focus point, and judging from the size of the pyramid, Grimm was once truly powerful, or perhaps truly old, older than I could imagine. The light channels around his pyramid began farther away than I could see, hitting crystal after crystal, joining, rejoining, and finally blasting up toward the top of the pyramid. The beam that came out, however, was pale, barely visible.

  I climbed the stairs slowly, to be honest. Not because I wasn’t excited about being here after all this time. I could only walk so far. So I took one step at a time, and rested in between. Near the top of the pyramid, the beams gave off a hum that echoed in my bones.

  A few steps farther up, the air crackled with power. That’s where I could finally see what Grimm had done to himself, and what Queen Mihail had done to him. Fixed in place at the peak of the pyramid stood a crystal buffed until it was nearly opaque. Light entered it full force, but the cloudy crystal reflected only a tiny smidgeon of the light.

  This was Grimm’s constraint, his punishment for the Black Queen.

  If fairies traveled as pure light, this would have reduced his power a thousand-fold. But Queen Mihail had tampered with it, poisoned it. Near the top, spider veins of black spread out, strangling the light. The veins looked like blood vessels at first, but when I finally stood at the top, I saw the truth.

  Thorns.

  Crystal thorns, grown through his constraint, strangling his power. This was what left him frozen, fading from my bathroom mirror.

  The sick feeling in my stomach wasn’t fear; it came from the piles of meat cascading down the pyramid steps, chunks of flesh and torn clothing.

  Queen Mihail’s strike team had delivered their blow and paid for it with their lives.

  “Choose.” I’d almost forgotten the Fae Mother, lost in my own thoughts, but her word centered me on the now.

  “Choose what?” I once accepted a gift from the Fae Mother that turned out to be my blessings. After that, I learned to ask for more details.

  “If you free him, you will unleash all his power. The constraint cannot be repaired.” I knew that. The spider thorns through it looked somewhat permanent.

  “How did Queen Mihail do this to him?”

  “The Black Queen has pawns everywhere. Our half sister is patient and has waited several lifetimes to gain her revenge. Do not help her do this.”

  “I thought Mihail was the one who attacked Grimm.” Having a conversation with the fae taxed my patience at times. Their constant conversational shifts made it possible to say yes and have their next statement be “Thank you for offering me your liver.”

  “Your foe sought power to harm a fairy. The Black Queen sought a pawn to do her bidding. Your enemies aligned against you.”

  I approached the constraint, reaching out to touch the edges of it. The smooth rock, cold, and dark, hummed under the force of Grimm’s power. With my hand on it, it reminded me of listening through a wall. Grimm’s voice came through, muffled.

  A sound like ice breaking came from the constraint, and as I watched, the veins of black pushed farther into the constraint, stabbing or eating through it, I couldn’t tell. It would continue to grow until all the light was blocked and Grimm was completely sealed away.

  I hopped down the pyramid and seized a shattered chunk of crystal from the ground. When I finally made it back to the top, I swung the chunk like a hammer, striking the constraint. It rang like a bell, high and long, and spun in midair, throwing off flashes of Grimm’s power.

  “Can you give me a hand?” I looked back to the Fae Mother, hoping she could lend a crystal shattering spell or two.

  “Your decisions are your own. I cannot act, even to protect you.” She bowed her head, looking like a Catholic saint.

  “I don’t need protection. I need help.” I swung again, sending sparks off the constraint, and as it resonated, again the crystal thorns grew thicker. Barely a flicker of light made it through the constraint. I grasped at the edges of the constraint, pulling myself up onto the face of it. Black veins covered it like a crystal tangle.

  I began to
hammer on it, at the center, the broadest, weakest part. With each blow, the thorns shifted and grew, and the ringing sound the constraint made grew so loud I could hear nothing else. With one final blow I drove my hammer down. The crystal clicked, shivered.

  I raised my hand for another blow, then stopped, as the clicking sounds in the crystal matched a recognition point in my brain. A single shard shot off, allowing a ray of blinding light to lance skyward. I tried half rolling, half jumping, but as I reached the edge of the constraint, it exploded.

  A volcano of power blasted me into the sky.

  Thirty

  THE WORST PART, hands down, was the taste. It tasted like I’d always imagined Grimm smelled. The second worst part was when I flew free of the current, tumbling like a rag doll before gravity grabbed me by the ankle and yanked me toward the ground.

  I rolled into a skydiving position, more out of instinct than usefulness, as I’d conveniently forgotten to bring a parachute, let alone wear it. I’d done a HALO jump from a bean stalk once, and fallen from the top of a skyscraper in Kingdom. This, I figured, rated somewhere in the middle—high enough to make breathing difficult and my limbs numb from cold, low enough that I didn’t mercifully pass out.

  I plummeted toward the ground, watching the pyramids and their light beams pass underneath. And I struck something like iron so hard my teeth rattled. I grasped at the nothingness, the empty air that hit me so hard, and fell again, this time straight down.

  Then it smashed me in the face, causing me to see stars. And then in the legs, tumbling me over. The next time, it was right across the breasts, which hurt as bad as my face, if not worse. Over and over, I’d fall a few feet, then slam into something. One of my teeth slipped down my throat, and a surge of copper filled my mouth as I slammed into the wall again.

  “I’ve got you, M.” Ari’s voice sounded a thousand feet away. The next time I hit something, it was surprisingly soft, being rocks and dirt. I couldn’t move, but Ari rolled me over and looked down at me. The pain from the worst beating of my life made it easy to ignore her eyes. Easy to ignore almost everything.

  “Stay with me, M. I almost didn’t catch you.” She held her hands over me, working that hangover magic. It barely touched the agony in my body.

  “That was you?” I’m not sure how she understood me, with my lips swollen like that.

  “I had to slow you down. You were moving so fast I could barely see you.” She lifted my shirt, looking at my ribs.

  “Feels funny.” Every inch of me tingled with pins and needles and burned with agony at the same time. It was the same feeling I got that time I rode the escalator for nearly sixteen hours as part of a job. My teeth, my ears, everything about me buzzed.

  Ari squinted at me. “This isn’t good. You’re filled with magic, M. Drowning in it. And I think you have a concussion and at least one broken arm. I’ll worry about dragging you back to the portal later. Right now I’ve got to figure out how to drain off this magic before it chokes you.”

  She lay a hand on my thigh, and a burst of pain like a trumpet shot through me, coming out as a strangled gasp. “No, that won’t work. Did you feel that?”

  I gasped, breathing raggedly, and nodded. “Little.”

  The noise that followed sounded like noon at Grand Central Terminal. Like the roar of the entire baseball stadium when someone hits a grand slam. And every one of those voices belonged to Grimm.

  I managed to turn my neck, to where a miniature sun glowed, shining so bright that I couldn’t stand to look at him. I once saw Grimm, in his native realm. There, as in the mirror, he looked like a butler. The living sun, that was his true form, stripped of all facade. The Fae Mother stood with him, so close the tendrils of light from him flickered around her, making her look ghostly.

  Again, the roar of the crowd came, louder. I recognized my name, maybe Ari’s, but the thousands of voices drowned out everything else.

  “Princess, my father asks that you create him a mirror to translate for you.” The Fae Mother stepped out of Grimm’s corona so that we could see her.

  Ari ran into the desert, beyond my view.

  While she was gone, Grimm began to speak again, this time sounding like the whisper of waves on the beach. A thousand voices trying to comfort me, I think.

  Ari came back, lugging a large shard of quartz. Setting it up at an angle, she began to murmur, her hand outstretched toward it. My entire body rippled as she drew in magic. Then a glowing pencil of white-hot light shot from her palm, tracing back and forth. The top gradually cooled to glowing red, then, as the image faded from my eyes, I recognized molten silver.

  Ari turned the shard over, yelping as the crystal burned her fingertips.

  A beam of light that leaped from Sun-Grimm to the quartz began to glow, and a faint image appeared in the silver.

  “Thank you, Arianna.” Grimm’s voice sounded like a loudspeaker at a football game. “Now, I need your assistance with Marissa.”

  Ari took her fingers out of her mouth. “I’d rather you handled this. I can’t even put people to sleep and you want me to heal her?”

  “Young lady, I’m the cause of this. Marissa accidentally absorbed some of my power, and it isn’t doing her any good. Also, we must practice your telekinesis. It’s not necessary to break every bone in someone’s body to catch them.”

  “I can’t take the magic out of her. Every time I try, I tear off a little piece of her.” Ari leaned over me, staring into each of my eyes.

  “I see the witch’s mark on you, Arianna. Though it comes with consequences, it also grants you abilities. Use your sight. Use all of it, and the difference between Marissa and the magic drowning her should be evident. I suggest you use it to heal some of her injuries. Just this once, I won’t grade you on efficiency.”

  “Also thought you could do the healing.” Ari’s annoyance mirrored my own.

  “Young lady, look at me. I can barely hold a stable form. I’m not going to risk working healing magic when there’s a perfectly capable spell caster standing right in front of me. Now I’m not going to tell you again. Use your sight, and look into her.” I resolved that among the many, many other things I had to say to Grimm, at least one of them would be that his teaching manners could use work.

  Ari closed her eyes and then began to look over me. I think it bothered me more that she did it that way than looking with those eyes. After a moment, she reached out and touched my solar plexus, barely brushing it. “I understand.”

  Ari put one hand on my head, the other on my stomach, and drew her mouth into a tight line with concentration. The hand on my stomach turned ice-cold, the one on my head burned like molten lead. I kept waiting for the piercing agony that hit me last time, but as she moved her gaze from point to point, the humming in my bones began to subside. Also, the double vision that left me seeing at least two of Ari drifted back into one.

  “I can’t do anything about the tooth.” Ari glanced up to Grimm. I moved my neck, and while it was stiff, at least I could move it without aching.

  “I’ll schedule an implant procedure next week.” Grimm almost sounded like his normal self.

  “Not going to matter. World won’t be around by then.” I spoke, my voice raspy, but functional.

  “Stop moving, keep quiet.” Ari moved her hand from my head to my mouth, smothering my protest, as she continued her work. She glanced up at Grimm. “When I’m done, you and I need to talk.” She passed her hand over me, like a silkworm wrapping me up in a cocoon, and the pain faded, bit by bit.

  After several minutes, Ari stopped to rest, taking a deep breath.

  “You need to rest for a spell?” I reached up to grab her shoulder and pulled myself to a sitting position.

  “I don’t need to rest. If anything, I need to do more. You have no idea how much power I’m pulling out. I could work miracles with a fraction of this.” Ari snapped her fingers, throwing a bolt of lightning that could have powered a city block. “Maybe I could just wave my hand in
the light—”

  “Princess—” The Fae Mother raised her hand in alarm, though not because of Ari’s pitiful lightning bolt. Fae royalty could swallow a bolt like that and have it tickle.

  Grimm glared at Ari. “The sheer power would tear your soul from your body. If you so much as make a move toward those beams, I will send you home faster than you can say ‘abracadabra.’” Grimm’s anger caused the earth to tremble.

  “Whatever.” Ari slapped a hand on my chest, pushing me down. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your magic lessons didn’t exactly help.”

  By now, it no longer ached to breathe, and my lips felt more like lips than bratwurst. Where my legs, and frankly, almost every part of me had tingled like I was charged with enough static to kill a cockatrice at twenty paces, now only the tips of my fingers pricked like I’d slept on them. “Can we go?”

  “You can. The princess and I have much to discuss.” Grimm’s sun floated over closer to his mirror, opening the way to the path.

  “No way. I didn’t travel halfway across the galaxy to find you only to be sent home without answers. I know about the pills. And the appointment.” I dusted myself off.

  “My dear, you’ve crossed three singularities and haven’t even reached the main transfer point. Exactly which galaxy are you halfway across?” Hug him or kill him, the war within me raged, held only by the fact that I wasn’t keen on touching a living sun.

  “It’s all right, M.” Ari wiped her hands down her arms, squeezing lightning from her fingertips with each pass. “I think for once he’s right. I really need to talk to Grimm alone.”

  “I think we figured out why you don’t grant wishes anymore.” I wasn’t sure if I should address the mirror or the fusion ball, so I split my address between them. The seconds ticked by as I waited for his confident, smug response.

  “Do you?”

  Grimm’s tone worried me. I glanced over to Ari, but she looked as confused as I did. “We found a wish trapped, on the way here, and—”