The Brilliant Dark

by S. M. Beiko

  Let go, the voice howled.

  Crossing his arms over himself, summoning the unspooling thread of his will, Eli cried out and cracked them back. “This is getting old,” he bawled. “We did this. We know. We came here to make it right. To wake Ancient. We thought we were going into the Brilliant Dark. Please.” And Eli hadn’t expected the words to come out, but he let them: “Help me.”

  The shades, in their mad circling, seemed to slow, to look at each other, and as if they’d collectively decided something in their silence, they banked up and away, and they left Eli alone once again.

  He’d call that a semi-win, at least.

  God killer. Phyr was gone? The Moth Queen shut out? It was worse than he’d thought.

  For the first time since he’d woken up in this place, Eli felt certain the answers would be at the top, even if Roan wasn’t, though he childishly hoped for both. He climbed desperately, tripping over himself, blood rushing behind his eyes. Roan would be there, and they would fix this.

  Let go. The voice had folded back into the corner of Eli’s mind, momentarily defeated.

  “Not yet,” Eli hissed.

  * * *

  For a while, I was happy to let the dark take me. I deserved it. I’d jumped at the chance for the Opal, just like I had in Cecelia’s summoning chamber, hoping for a different outcome. Wasn’t that the definition of insanity, or something?

  Buried alive. Just barely alive, though. Intermittent tremors from beneath the Den squeezed me and pushed me up closer to the surface. And as if I were some demented plant that the soft soil rejected, I burst back out into the ashy air, half-buried, half-cocked.

  And still alive, to my infinite surprise.

  I stayed there for a while, hefting handfuls of crumbling tan dust into my empty palms. My head rang and my stomach burned with hunger. I didn’t know how long I’d been underground, crushed. It didn’t matter. Now I was back in a world of pain and confusion with nothing beyond the ringing in my head.

  Eventually, I kicked my way to flat, solid ground. Behind me was a recent heave in the surface pierced by an enormous black plinth. Behind it another, and another, onwards into the murky distance like drills, not shining or glinting like glass in the grey light but devouring it. I knew something so evil-looking had to be from the Bloodlands. But how it got into the Den, I had no clue. And none, either, about where I’d ended up now.

  I touched the pocket of my hoodie but didn’t put my hand into it. I needed to think.

  I’d come back up to the edge of a forest. Trees toppled and wrecked, but their boles enormous, blocking out the sky above me (if that’s what it was) I didn’t know where the fissures had carried me. I didn’t know if I was above the Den, or miles from it, or if there was even a Den left. I wondered if my legs would even work if I tried to get up.

  Why bother, I thought. You’re going to die of thirst or starvation soon anyway.

  So I was pretty surprised when my inner voice became Eli’s — not him, not really, just the memory of his complete lack of pity: Stop being a bloody baby, Harken, and get the hell up.

  Like it was someone else’s body obeying a command, I rolled aside, putting one leg up and the other under me. I caught myself staggering against a tree and put my forehead to my clenched fist against the severe bark. I had to find Eli. I’d brought him into this mess. Maybe together we could stumble our way out of it.

  Find Eli. It was enough to buoy me forward, one painful step at a time.

  It took awhile, but as I trekked further through the weird wilderness, I found the light above breaking through what I thought was just an endless dusk. I’d walked far enough, it seemed, to find day.

  The light was not the sun, though — it couldn’t be, could it? It was, instead, a red disc wreathed in acrid yellow. It reminded me of when forest fire smoke from B.C. floated eastward over Manitoba, casting everything in its dystopian fume. There really was no place like home, Dorothy.

  This place was trying hard to be real; it felt like it was breathing, calculating. It was tangible, like me. Grass and dirt and rock and tree. Most of it upended, the aftermath of a prehistoric meteor. Huge cracks in the ground that’d shattered, like the tectonic plates of one realm crashed up against another.

  I touched the vegetation. Things growing. We’d learned about this type of thing in geography; I glanced at the sky again, took a breath of what had to be air, and assumed this biome was new but functioning. Living within the limitations of a natural cycle. But I thought of Sil then, of her original lessons, painfully not that long ago: the realms were eternal. Real and not real. Lands of the dead, of the ones who came before.

  But this was different. Had what we’d done above made this place explode with real life? Dead life?

  My head hurt.

  I didn’t register stopping, hunkering down in a twisted bed of roots, too tired to go on, to guess. This was Eli’s department, not mine.

  My eyes stung, but I closed them. I missed that giant asshole.

  I slept a little. The dome above dimmed. Darkness settled in. Hours later, it lightened again. I scratched the movement of this night and day into the ground. When I got up to try to find water, I found a lake and drank from my shaking hands, desperate to quench my thirst. Eli would’ve hesitated. Why didn’t you boil it? he’d scowl at me. I watched the water bead off my skin. I was so cold. Inside and out.

  The landscape beyond the lake spread into a type of badlands, a middle ground between the woods and rocky steppes. There was very little shade activity in that place, and though rough and sandy hard-packed ground, my little square of land was sheltered by a bank of weird gnarled trees, growing sideways out of a rock face at the edge of it.

  If I walked far enough, would I come to the edge of everything, and maybe even the Abyss, the realm of the Seals? Or had that, too, dried up entirely, and were the dead souls of that place refugees on this hateful shore? Maybe I’d walk right off the edge into nothing. Maybe that’s where Ancient was.

  I went back to my root-bed in the woods, paralyzed by not knowing. I drew my knees up to my chin and shut my eyes.

  I needed to go back to how we’d got here.

  We’d started by dropping blindly into the portal the five Calamity Stones had made, stupidly thinking Eli and I would land on the final boss level, do what we came to do, and leap back out again. Instead I’d woken up alone, without a clue. No powers. No gods. No Fox familiar on my shoulder barking directions. Not even Eli, always mocking me. Sometimes I squeezed my hand open and closed, already forgetting his in it. We were supposed to be here together.

  He was probably dead, too. Like everyone else here. I began to truly believe I, too, was turning into a ghost.

  “Maybe you are.”

  When I looked up, I had already tensed, no time to move if a blow was coming. But it wasn’t — this was just an echo of something I didn’t think could have followed me down here.

  Myself. My dark self. The passenger riding coach in my body, in my head, that had tried to make me into a darkling. The thing I had sacrificed everything to eject. And she was standing right in front of me.

  I tripped to my feet, cold sweat burning. “It’s not possible.”

  The other me just grinned, spreading her hands. “Of course it is. I’m still a part of you. Maybe a little subdued. But at least I still have a voice.”

  “Shut up.” I snapped my hands to my ears, wrenched my eyes closed. “You’re not real.”

  “I’m more substantial than you, right now,” she said, moving past me to survey the trees, frowning at the dark plinths jutting out of the ground. She pointed. “These things have to be from the Bloodlands. But you knew that already. At least it’s familiar territory.” She folded her arms. “How are you going to get out of this one, Harken?”

  What, my shadow id was a motivational coach now? “Mind your own fucking business a
nd go back to the hole I put you in.”

  This other me’s eyes were black, blank, but not threatening. “We all have our darkness. Some manage it better than others. But if I’m here,” and she laid a hand across her heart, like a pledge, “it’s because you need me.”

  “You’re lying!” I shouted, but I held my ground, however shaky it was. I remembered this me in dreams, pulling me in, and I wondered for the briefest flash if she was keeping the fire from me. I still hadn’t been able to conjure even a spark.

  Nega-Roan looked disgusted. “That one’s on you. So is all this. But you can work with it. You always do.” She opened her arms. “You’ve heard the noises at night. Animals, monsters, call them what you will. This place has rules, like your own world. Things here hunt and feed. You’ll need to do the same if you’re not going to be the hunted or the starved.”

  I’d had enough of this. I brushed past this flimsy hallucination and hiked deeper into the trees — to where, I didn’t know. Anywhere but here.

  “I don’t intend to stick around,” I muttered to myself. “I’m finding Eli, and we’re going to get Ancient, and we’re getting out of here.”

  I looked over my shoulder and the vision was gone, but when I came up a rise I nearly staggered backward down it; other me was standing in the tree just off my path, arms crossed and casual. She looked bored. “And how long do you think you’ve been here, already? A day? A week? A year? A hundred?”

  I ground my teeth. “You’re just trying to fuck with me.”

  “Why would I? If you die, I die. I’m not exactly transferrable.”

  I looked above me. The light had moved, it’d been a day and night. But suddenly my head felt light, my throat thick, breathing windless air in a wild deadland I could never hope to understand. Shadows shifted in the middle distance, and already the light seemed like it was fading.

  “How are you going to make up for all the mistakes that brought you here?” other me asked, sinister surround sound in both ears. I couldn’t move. “Eli could be anywhere. Time works on fairy-tale logic. The princess gets trapped under the hill for a day, and when she returns a hundred years have passed and her loved ones are long dead.” I felt her teeth at my throat, her presence a cold spot at my side. “You could walk for miles and come back to this tree. The woods could just be changing around you. Nothing here wants to see you survive.”

  I closed my eyes, pulse racing. “You can’t hurt me. You’re not real.”

  Her hands felt very real, suddenly cupping my neck with absolute tenderness. “You’ll need me soon,” she said, “if you’re going to make it. No one can live with so much regret eating them up inside.”

  I crumpled to my knees, weakened and resigned to the kill, but she was gone. If she’d ever been there at all.

  But the cold she left behind lingered inside me, and I rubbed my chest, that absent space where the Opal once burned. Everything had happened so fast. It had been cinematic, heroic. There hadn’t been time to breathe, let alone think. Back in Cecelia’s summoning chamber, I’d taken the stone because of what having it had promised. I’d taken everything it came with and had become a willing prisoner in my own body, blindly assuming it would all work out without really knowing how.

  I curled up on the ground, cradling my head. Eli was right all along. I was — am — stupid. I never thought ahead. I never thought about what could happen to me if I failed. Happen to everyone around me. Happen to the fucking world, the one above and this one below. I’d never once imagined failure as a possibility if I just kept going.

  I stared at my hands. My palms were stained purple from the ripe berries I’d snagged hours earlier. These hands weren’t good for much now. I’d thought, without the stone, I’d still be as I was before it. I’d had power even back then. And I’d brought it out myself. Now I was keeping it from myself.

  That just made me think of Sil again, and Winnipeg, two more things that made my head hurt more. It had been all so easy. The Chosen One. What a joke. Now look where my gods-damned choices had brought me. Sil should have let the Moth Queen take me when we’d all had the chance. Zabor would still be in play, but it would have been someone else’s problem.

  I didn’t need a shadow-me telling me any of this.

  I pulled my damp, grimy hoodie closer to my unwashed body. The truth was, I’d made every stupid choice that had led me here, to this miserable, cursed place. I’d brought my body and all its limitations with me into a plane I’d broken. And if I didn’t get my shit together, I was going to die down here for nothing.

  And so was Eli. If he wasn’t dead already.

  * * *

  Eli was not much of a camper in recent years, not after ambition had given him access to the finer things. But he wasn’t an idiot. He knew he couldn’t go on much longer like this.

  He kept looking over the edge. He kept considering it, adding his own ruin to the one below.

  Then he’d find something inside himself, something so small but still there, and he’d turn away. A little fire.

  The voice in his head had turned oddly conversational.

  What will you do when you get to the top?

  “Ask questions.”

  And what if there is no one there to answer?

  “Then I’ll find the answers for myself. Like I’ve always done.”

  Not lately, the voice corrected. You’ve had help. From more than one person. From her.

  Eli felt the migraine at the back of his skull throb forward into his temples, like a crown. “Then I’ll find her.”

  And what if she’s gone? What if she left without you? What if she’s dead?

  Without thinking, Eli reeled back and smashed his fist into a tree. He choked on his own cut-off scream, cradling his mangled hand. Certainly bashed, luckily not broken. Still, a stupid thing to do.

  The last barrage of questions had been thrown back at him in his own voice. His own thoughts. His own fear.

  Why do you care so much for that girl? the voice asked, and it was with a tenderness Eli nearly trusted. He shook his bloody hand after test-flexing the joints, then straightened his spine.

  “What do you care?” he shot back. “Are you bored? Are you unaware that the last ten years of my life have been infected with voices thinking they could command me? I’m a prodigy for insanity-deflection. You’re wasting your time.”

  The silence was so heavy that Eli held his breath, waiting. The answer came with the sigh of the wind, which startled him. After all, the wind had died, hadn’t it?

  I know what you’ve gone through, it said, and if Eli were in any shape to empathize, he’d have thought it was tinged with regret. I know what you gave up to take that stone.

  “Oh, do you?” He scowled, heaving himself up the next platform of rock. His injured shoulder sang with the effort, his bruised hand throbbed. The rocks were getting farther apart, the higher he went, the gaps between them wider and more treacherous. “Is this the part where you renew your encouragement that I’ve ‘done enough’ so I can fling myself overboard?”

  No, the voice replied, after a moment’s consideration. Though I’m not sure what you’re persisting for. Not yet.

  That made Eli stop, look around, because the voice, however faint, seemed less in his head now, and more in his ears. He peered ahead, the fog peeling back momentarily to show that his next ledge would require a jump. A narrow grab of sure fingers on rock — fingers he’d just stupidly smashed out of childish angst. He needed peak skills and reflexes, but they were likely operating at about five percent.

  Eli stared as the fog seeped back in. “What do you want from me?”

  The voice crept across his awareness like a many-legged insect, and Eli knew these words were spoken with a smile. For you to jump.

  Foolishly, he looked down. Nothing much to see, obscured as things were, but he could guess. The Roost was the realm abo
ve all things. If Eli did fall, he’d die before he hit anything. Or he’d fall for a hundred years or longer, and by the time he did crash, it would be far too late to find Roan. To fix what they’d broken. To finish what they started. Maybe months ago — years? — before any of this had happened, before he’d woken in the Bloodlands with a better grip on himself despite being chained to another person, he would have just done it on his own. After all, everyone else he’d ever trusted had left him. His mother. His father. He only had himself to rely on.

  Roan was the only person who hadn’t let him down.

  Stop being such a dick! Roan’s voice was a sonar ping in his chest.

  At that he grinned, took it at a run, and jumped.

  Ah, the voice said just as Eli’s fingertips caught the ledge. I see now.

  With that small kernel of what he had left, he pulled himself over, legs lead, head rushing and empty all at once, his many injuries from his shoulder, to his fingers, to his back roaring with white hot pain. Everything hurt, every sense, and suddenly the wind rose and he felt like he was being ripped apart.

  The air around him cleared. The fog had dropped, and above him, Eli saw a sky of impossible stars in an inky void.

  “I didn’t want to leave you,” the voice said, and the words were clear, harsh, no longer in his head. Eli jerked up, despite the pain it caused him.

  There was a shade a few feet away, its feathered back to him. Eli rolled to his knees and dipped his head.

  “Phyr,” he said. “Great Mother of Owls.”

  The shade rose, taller, but not as huge as a god. Its owl wings, pinned to its side, did not divide into nine. There was no Pendulum Rod, the sacred item the First Matriarch used to manage time. And when the shade turned, striding for him, Eli put one leg up, unable to stand, numb. This was not Phyr.

  The features clarified. The face looked at him with the sorrow he’d seen so often in his waking nightmares. The face he could never save.