by S. M. Beiko
Below, the world watched the three beings as one move into the path of the sun. As they came together, the light cast a red umbra. And all at once, absolutely everywhere on that blue, fickle, precious, doomed world, there was a red dark.
The world stopped turning. It didn’t need to, any longer. It was an echo of the great battle between the Darklings and the gods, when time had been stopped. Though Phyr was gone now. If Ancient was rising, all the gods were gone.
The Darklings’ position in the sky pointed the way down like an invisible pole. And Ancient, whose own design had been to pull the Darklings down to the world to cleave it in half, rose to meet this path.
Not even the Creator could slip its own design now.
* * *
Phae and Natti were together with the chancellor as they watched the eclipse. The ring around the Darkling Moon was red and unforgiving and Natti thought, This is it, then. She imagined it would be like this: the moon would just blink everything out of existence, in one merciful jolt, and then . . . nothing.
But of course there’d have to be some kind of spectacle first.
* * *
The world was caving in from the inside of its matrix. Thrusting itself upward through this last Bloodgate, to which the Darkling eclipse pointed the path below, Ancient pushed the Heartwood through. Ancient had spent so much of its own time sending little barbs throughout the Deadlands, and it pulled the underworld up with it. The dead and the living would share an equal playing field, and they would all go out together.
But what Ancient did not count on were the humans inside of the Heartwood, carving their own path. Think of home, Roan had said. They all did. And they thought of Winnipeg.
Saskia thought of One Evergreen and her bedroom of inventions. She thought of Jet and all his questions, of Phae, and her compact, fierce devotion, and Saskia wondered if her last thoughts could go to them, carried by Ancient’s deadly trajectory.
Barton had heard Saskia’s prayer, even though he was losing his battle, the tree consuming him. The Emerald let out a sigh, crushed to dust, but even with it gone, Barton held on. He thought of Phae, too, of running again, of breathing the air of his world, of watching Saskia grow up.
Eli thought of his mother, and his father, of the possibility they could all get some peace after this, whatever happened.
Roan thought of Cecelia.
Ancient thought of nothing at all.
* * *
The entire world shook when the Heartwood came through, but not even the people trapped within the tree knew, exactly, where this enormous destructive tree was going to come out the other end. Like a heavy drill it churned through concrete, up and under Portage Avenue and Main Street, in a Canadian city that had become the epicentre of the last war.
And the Heartwood was not a delicate instrument. The downtown core, and all its empty skyscrapers, asphalt, and abandoned cars, were sucked into the chasm at the Heartwood’s base. The tree, and Ancient underneath it, intertwined within it, didn’t care. It just reached for the Darkling Moon like a mother beckoning its lost children.
Then something inside the Heartwood made it lurch to a stop. A sickening, horrible hope, a girl with one last stone, at first a Quartz, and now an Onyx, screaming with every inch of her spirit, gathering her friends to her, sending out a beacon for the one being left in any of the realms who had been watching and waiting, for her moment.
The Moth Queen gathered Roan, Eli, Saskia, and Baskar into her thousand arms and pulled them free of the Heartwood.
* * *
Many of the military drones that had been hovering above Winnipeg didn’t make it out unscathed. A few did, and their coverage was transmitted back to where Phae had been watching, from the Old Leg, with the others.
Phae had only run once, full tilt, and it had been when she was in the Glen, that forgotten realm, alongside the Deer shades with whom she’d felt a brand new kinship. Now there was the tangible, living kinship that she had with her family, and that’s what drove her out of that parliamentary office and into the street.
Even with the world coming down around her, and the smoke of wreckage wreathing the city, Phae ran for Portage and Main, knowing this was what her legs were made for. Air screamed through her.
Deer were fast as Rabbits. Phae was fleet. She felt like she was one of them, four long legs pulling her and her spirit, in tatters as it was, through deserted streets. Bodies were just shells, after all. Hers could do anything if her spirit was willing enough — Fia had taught her that. So Phae ran for that horrific tree in the middle of downtown. I’m coming, she said in her heart, always ready to rescue that gods-damned boy she loved. Always.
* * *
Natti was a bit more practical. She leapt into a heavy artillery ETG vehicle. Mi-ja stayed behind to guide the last ETG units on standby, to send them in, with Natti bringing up the charge, to retrieve the survivors. If there were any.
Natti would make sure there were.
* * *
The Moth Queen could only get them so far. She’d pulled them out, yes, but after that, they were on their own. She had her thousand hands full, it seemed, since the dead had come back to this world, and there was already so many new dead to manage.
But Eli was happy to take over for her.
A great wind came up in the shuddering intersection, the aftershocks of the tree fierce and terrible, and swept the smoke out of the way of the torpedo of flame that brought up the rear. The one-eyed woman controlling the fire pumped her legs as fast as possible and carried a dark-haired girl in her arms.
Eli ran by Roan’s side, the ground heaving as spikes — roots — shot up and tried to bar their path or send them flying. Eli pulled up a zephyr that was as powerful as Roan’s garnet blade had been, cracking these intrusions aside and clearing the way.
Ahead, on the empty, shuddering avenue, someone was running towards them. Behind the runner, a vehicle attempted to navigate the splitting, bursting chasms in the road.
“Phae!” Roan called, and even Eli couldn’t help but grin.
She was coming fast. Her arms were out, and even in the dark, all of her pulsed with that blue, effervescent light that encircled her antlers, her flickering shield, and she sent it to them just as a wall of singing roots was coming down on top of them.
When Phae reached them, they all pushed their way through just as the military truck pulled up. The rat-tat-tat and surging of an armed cavalcade — guns, shouts of soldiers, machines in the air — drew the ire of the tree with a gunfire assault. The woman driving the vehicle was shouting something, maybe obscenities, but loudest of all, “I don’t have the same death wish you do! Get in!”
The roots clutching their shield retracted and flew upward, swatting at the Mundane men and women who had put themselves at the front line even though they might not come back from it, because the impulse to fight for something was still there. The world was still there.
The vehicle swung back around as soon as it was loaded with its precious cargo, throwing itself down side streets and crashing through parking meters that wouldn’t charge anyone anything again, back towards the Old Leg, back to a place where they could celebrate whatever small victory this was.
Phae watched from the back window as the Heartwood went in and out of view behind the wrecked, burning remains of the buildings that hadn’t come down yet. She stared at that tree and promised it she would be back, because she’d felt something. A pull on a thread that she thought broken. Barton.
For now she held tight to Saskia, unconscious in someone else’s arms, and looked up into the drawn face of Roan Harken — a tear-streaked, eye-gouged, soot-stained pale face of a no-longer-a-teenager, a hero. And, most of all, her best friend.
“It’s you,” Phae said dumbly. Roan’s expression was fevered, but she managed to just shrug. Sitting pressed into Roan’s shoulder, rolling his eyes behind her, was Eli. Phae didn’
t believe her eyes at the sight of them both.
“You all really waited till the last fucking second to show up,” griped Natti from the front seat, flooring it and smashing over a barricade. For an instant, everyone in the back left their seats, especially Eli, whose head actually smashed into the roof. He cringed, and Roan burst out laughing, and then Phae laughed, and somehow it was really happening. They were really here.
Roan’s smile fell when she leaned forwards, pushing Saskia’s hair out of her eyes. Clutched in the girl’s stiff hands was a mask made of bark crudely shaped like a rabbit’s face.
“Is she . . .” Phae couldn’t help asking.
“She’s the person this has been the hardest on,” Eli said, rubbing his head as Natti brought the truck to the Old Leg. “She’s the one it’s all for.”
* * *
Saskia was inside the Onyx. She didn’t want to come out. She felt safer in the dark.
She curled in on her own spirit. It was too much. Too much for one person. Too much for one world. Imagine finding out the Creator had only one purpose, and that was to correct its mistake. You. Everyone.
What could you do against that? What could anyone do? No matter what Saskia had chosen, this is where it had brought her. Choice seemed, then, like it was just an illusion, overseen by a bitter cosmos that could take it away from you at any moment. What did any of it matter?
“The spirit is matter,” something else said. Something inside the stone with Saskia.
She unfolded a little to look. It was a small, golden moth. But it had silvery eyes, like the shades had, and it unfolded, too. It was a Fox shade.
“Love matters,” said another moth, another shade, an Owl this time. “You who have been touched by Death, you know you are not alone.”
“Even when the last living person is just made back into matter,” said a much more familiar voice, one keeping her close, still protective, a Rabbit shade who loved a good story, “the dead will still be there. And the dead will stand with you, for the sake of the lives they lived. For the possibility of the lives ahead.”
Saskia still couldn’t do it. It was a pretty speech and a pretty notion, but it wouldn’t be enough. It couldn’t be.
“How can we even think of winning this?” she asked them, asked herself, asked any god left to listen.
“We can’t think,” said the dead as a chorus. “We can just hope. When you have breath, you use it. We will be with you. Until there is nothing. Making the wrong choice, when there are none left, is better than making none at all.”
Saskia’s own words, thrown back at her. She needed to remember what the risks had been for.
For Barton, Phae, Roan, Eli, Natti, Jet, Baskar, Ella.
For tomorrow.
Saskia didn’t have to be worried that the stone would take her over and exact its will on her. That’s not what its purpose was; after all, she’d poured her will into it first. It would follow her lead. It may have been the last Calamity Stone left, but it was the only one that could do this.
She had always wanted to be chosen.
Now she had to choose.
She woke up.
* * *
“. . . a year?”
Saskia woke all at once, staring up into lights in a ceiling above her. It was strange to look at a light bulb and think, I haven’t seen one of those in a while.
Baskar had come out of the Onyx with her. “Hello,” they said. The voice was smiling, even if the bark-face couldn’t.
She turned her head, even though it ached to do so. The lights in the room flickered. They were in a large office filled with fancy furniture and bookcases that seemed more like a movie set than a real place. The shattered Realms of Ancient, even the expansive nothing of the Brilliant Dark, had seemed less extreme than this office.
A Korean woman — Mi-ja, Saskia’s memory said — sat with her hands between her knees. Behind the huge desk, arms folded like the general she once was, stood Roan, squinting her single amber eye down at a screen in her hand. Eli was at the window with Natti, speaking quietly. Scraps of the conversation floated towards Saskia, but she didn’t want to draw any attention to herself. She just wanted to rest here a while before she had to stand up again and do what she’d woken up to do.
“. . . so that makes eight since we . . .” Roan sighed, putting the tablet screen down and sliding it back towards anyone else who wanted it. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that,” Phae snapped. “You did exactly what you aimed to do. None of us expected this outcome. We were all too trusting when we should’ve known better.”
Natti had turned towards the argument that seemed to be escalating too quickly. “Hey, this was the hand we dealt ourselves. We still have a bit of wiggle room, I think. If you guys could come crawling out of the underworld without being totally annihilated, then we can take this to the finish line.”
Then Natti patted Eli’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, about your dad.”
Saskia winced, remembering the last time she’d seen Solomon. What he’d done to make sure she got through the Bloodgate. Someone must have told Eli while she was unconscious. She was glad it hadn’t fallen to her.
Eli did something that seemed to surprise Natti. He smiled. “I’m sure Solomon isn’t sorry. And my . . . views on death have rather changed somewhat in these intervening years.”
“That’s all well and good,” Mi-ja said, picking up the tablet Roan had abandoned. “But communications with, well, the rest of the world, are down.” She threw it aside. “We’re all we’ve got. If there’s a plan, best we mobilize it now. My troops, what’s left of them, have fallen back, but our firepower is grossly limited. These back-up generators will blow soon — I’m surprised they haven’t already.” She dug her fingers into her eyes. “We can try to blow the thing to kingdom come, but if we couldn’t do it to the Darkling Moon, then I doubt we can bring down the, uh, Creator, with a gun.”
“We can’t blow the tree up. Not with Barton inside it.”
The group swung as one to Saskia, and Phae was up and at her side in a rush, pulling her in uncomfortably hard.
“Agh,” Saskia grunted, feeling Phae’s power go into her and reset bones she hadn’t known were actually out of whack.
“You’ve seen him,” Phae said, pulling away but not letting go. “You know he’s in there? How can he still be alive?”
“Because he’s stubborn,” Saskia half-smiled, “like you and me.”
“I don’t know if we can —” Mi-ja started.
“Oh, no,” said Roan. “We’re going to get him out of there. Barton is the only thing preventing that tree from getting any closer to reaching its goal, I think. Once we pull him out, we’re going to finish this thing.” She slammed a flaming fist into her open palm. “We shouldn’t still have our powers if the gods are gone. But we do. And I’ll use them up to the last to stop this thing.” Her face brooked no argument. “None of us are getting left behind.”
Saskia uncurled her fingers to reveal the Onyx, turned it over, saw that it was coming out both sides of her hand. Phae sucked in a breath at the sight of it.
“The dead will help us, too,” Saskia said. The Moth Queen had disappeared since she’d helped them, but Saskia still trusted Death’s earlier blessing. She looked to the others. “After that, if it doesn’t work, at least we can say we tried.”
She put her feet under her and stood up. Baskar rose alongside, tipping their mask down in a bow.
“We have to be the last thing we believe in,” Saskia said to them all. “Whatever the ending is, it’ll be ours. Our choice.”
“Our choice,” Roan repeated. And that was it.
Straight to You
The Darkling Moon did not move. Red light, and the immovable night, covered the world.
In Winnipeg, Heart of the Continent, a famous intersection split in half, there was a tree
. There had been malignant trees like it before, but this wasn’t a tree that could be healed. The Darkling Moon stopped above this tree. And the tree, its roots going as far down as the underworld that it had brought up with it, only had one purpose.
Pull the moon down into its broken, twisted branches, break this world apart, and cast everything in its Brilliant Dark.
The world sharply took a breath.
But there were still those, at ground zero, who were willing to fight.
* * *
“We should have left. With the others.”
“No,” she said, standing in the living room, looking out onto the dark, deserted street, as if watching for guests to arrive. Or for a wayward niece to finally find her way home before curfew.
They’d returned to the house on Wellington Crescent as though magnetized there. The three of them hadn’t lived there long; most of their life as a family, hodgepodge as it was, was spent in Wolseley, after all. They’d only spent a year here. But that year had changed everything. It had been the beginning of the end. And when it came time to get as many people out of Winnipeg as possible — people the priest had become responsible for, had thrown his life towards helping — it made a strange kind of sense to send them off and go back to a place that had been home.
He slid his arm around her waist. She leaned her head on his shoulder.
