“We have to have the hammer,” Fortarian told her. “We must be allowed back into the Ever After.”
But her anger was mounting and she couldn’t hear him. No matter how badly she wanted to find her place of peace, she couldn’t. This wasn’t a class. This wasn’t a lesson. This was real, and this monster had just infected her sister.
Abagail let her glove fall to the ground.
“Abbie, no!” Leona called to her sister.
Abagail didn’t listen to her.
The torches streamed fire toward Abagail, wreathing her feet. The consuming flame answered her call, twining up her legs and around her body. She stood tall, her head back, her hands splayed open before her, commanding the fire as any self-respecting fire bringer would do.
But the fire wouldn’t obey. It ringed her body, flared around her head and soared higher. Abagail opened her eyes and looked to her hands, but she no longer saw flesh. Instead of skin she saw molten rock. Her hands were cracked and glowing red as if she were in the heart of a volcano.
The pain came to her right palm, and she cried out. The shadows rippled up past her wrist and slithered up her arm. She felt the shadow plague go wild, painting itself across her chest, around her neck and over her face. The shadow plague was like rivers of black malaise against the red of her new, rocky skin.
Fortarian stumbled back. His sly smile was no longer there. His mouth was open, but no smart remarks came out. His eyes were wide. His body gave the merest of trembles.
“Your eyes,” he said. “What is wrong with your eyes?”
She felt the wolf inside of her then. She felt the darkling god known as Anthros enter her and whisper into her mind.
Chosen. Together we can be rid of him. Together we can use the fire of your birthright to be free of this parasite. All you have to do is let go.
“No,” she said. She turned her face away from Fortarian, and though the fire now controlled her body, Abagail willed her wyrd to answer. It wouldn’t. It was no longer her wyrd. It was the darkling wyrd within her, taking her over.
“You’re no darkling,” Fortarian said. “Why do you have the eyes of my brother? Why do your eyes glow blue?”
She couldn’t answer. Abagail was trying to force Anthros from her mind.
You’re imprisoned, she reasoned with the darkling god.
But my chains weaken each day the gods are away from the Ever After.
But they still exist. The All Father is still alive, Abagail said. In his name, I command you to leave my body.
There was a bark of laughter in her head. She could almost see the white wolf howling that laughter at a moonless sky.
The All Father disobeyed the rules of the void. He tried to make amends for it, but he’d already allowed me into his body with his transgression of the rules that bind us all. He and I share a common wyrd now. He and I share the same fate.
Helvegr, Anthros whispered into her mind.
She fought him. Abagail tried to make the fires dim, but her panic that she would lose control of them only made the fires tower higher.
Giving in would be much easier. Just let go Abagail. This is the man who sentenced your sister to death. He deserves to die.
And with that the fires exploded from Abagail.
The concussion of the explosion was felt all through Haven. Debris of the stockades rained down as far away as the meeting place of the harbingers of darkness. Stones shuttled in an arc into the Fey Forest.
When the harbingers of light finally realized where the destruction came from, there was nothing they could do to save the stockades or the barracks. Where the stockade had once been there was nothing but a burned out crater.
Healers were hard at work carrying wounded guards from the barracks and to the infirmary. But there were more dead bodies then there were living.
“What happened?” Rowan asked, pulling to a halt beside Gil.
“I don’t know,” her protégé said. “I think I heard someone say Abagail went in there.”
“Was this her?” Rowan asked.
“Yes,” Huginn said, coming to a stop behind the two of them. Rowan turned to see the raven twins behind them. Their faces were a mask of sorrow. “And Leona.”
“Leona is dead?” Rowan asked.
“We found someone!” a harbinger yelled from the wreckage. “It’s a girl.”
Rowan didn’t wait for an answer. With her heart in her throat she charged into the wreckage to where she’d heard the harbinger call from. Inside the stockade looked strange with no walls. Somehow smaller. She stepped over the foundation and struggled to the gathering of people. She pushed her way through until she stood over the small form of Leona. Her hair was singed here and there, her face covered in soot. One arm lay over her chest, the other lay beside her, palm open and up.
The new plague stared out of her palm and up at Rowan like an accusation. You hadn’t been able to protect me as a girl, and you couldn’t do it now, it seemed to say.
Rowan clasped her hand to her chest to stop the cry from tumbling out of her lips. She closed her eyes and let a single tear slip from the corner.
She still breathes, she thought. “Get her to the greenhouse. I need to tend her myself,” Rowan commanded.
The spear fell from the All Father’s hands. He collapsed to his knees into a pool of Boran’s blood. A sob tore from his throat and a tear leaked from his remaining eye. Though his left eye was nothing more than a patch of skin now, a tear trickled out of a crack in the skin to streak down his cheek.
I’m sorry my son, he thought. I had to do it.
He looked down into the perfect amber brown eyes of Boran. The same eyes that he thought for the longest time could see more truth in the cosmos than any of the other gods combined could even imagine.
How was he to know that his father was going to betray him? How was Boran, so naïve and trusting, ever to suspect that someone could want to do him harm when all the God of Peace had wanted was harmony.
The All Father grabbed the spear, pushed to his feet and turned away from the room that belonged to Boran. He stepped one foot out of the window and on to a celestial staircase that appeared just for him.
The All Father turned to the south and threw the spear high above the Ever After. It glittered in the light of a billion stars. The scarlet blood a testament to what he’d done. The terror he’d brought upon the world. And then the spear fell into the fires of Muspelheim.
Down the All Father traveled out of the Ever After and into exile.
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Gorjugan remembered the fire that cleansed the harbinger he’d inhabited. The fire that had chased him from his roost in Fortarian’s soul and back to the realm of the damned.
Standing before him, Abagail glowed to life in the light of the torches, calling the fire of her birthright, bending the flames in the darkened stockades to her will. Her sister, the blonde seer was on the floor behind her, clasping a hand to her chest. A hand Gorjugan had just infected.
He hadn’t been expecting Abagail. He hadn’t thought the harbinger would come with Leona.
She was supposed to be alone! He thought. He was sure Leona would have been alone.
Blinding light and consuming flames accosted Gorjugan. The white light tore through him as the human host died and his darkling soul was eradicated from the vessel. For a moment he knew the peace and love he’d once felt in the Ever After. Then he was sinking into darkness, into despair, into exile.
Gorjugan floated in a miasma of darkness within the Underworld. Around him was the familiar
creaking of a ship. He knew this ship. He knew the bed in which he lay. His emotions were dulled, the voice that pleaded with him to flee this place was muted under a haze of wyrd. His mind drifted on the moan of the worn wood of the ship, shifting as the vessel crested waves of fire that bore the ship through the Void underneath Eget Row.
The interior of the boat was uncomfortably hot, even for the giant snake, Gorjugan. It was a heat that was palpable and there was almost a noise that went with the heat. His senses were filled with the heat, with the moans of the tortured dead. He was in the sickness chamber. The beds where souls were condemned to an eternity of illness and disease.
To his right someone wretched, their sickness splattered across the floor, wet and putrid in the head of the ship. Gorjugan tried to shift away from the oozing mess that crept closer to his bed, but he was bound with chains and spikes that held his serpentine form in place.
A door creaked open and an orange light from outside the chamber seeped in. Screaming from the torture chamber chased him down into delirium. He knew this place. He could smell the oniony musk of his own fear, the smell of fear only a snake can emit.
“You’re home now,” a gravelly voice soothed him. He didn’t need to open his golden eyes to see that it was his half rotten sister, Hilda, who ran a parched hand over his scales. “You failed me, you failed Anthros. As I promised, your sick bed was waiting for you.”
Lanterns swayed from the wooden ceiling. A glow of golden light haloed Hilda’s head casting orange highlights through the half of her head that bore shining golden locks. The other half of her body, the rotten half seemed to absorb the light. The golden flames gleamed on the half of her skull that was rotten, flea-bitten, and spackled with brittle white hair.
In the dim light he could just barely make out the beautiful half of her face, the part that hadn’t been rotted away by the touch of the shadow plague so many eons ago. Like always, Gorjugan couldn’t focus on her rotten half, even though it was with that hand that she always touched him; always petted him. He thought maybe that was another torture of hers. She knew how he hated her withered half, and she forced him to focus on it.
:I nearly had it!: he thought at Hilda. It was the only way he could communicate in his birth golem form. When he struggled out of the afterbirth of Hafaress, he had been in the terrifying form of a snake. When in the Void and Eget Row, he could only speak mentally.
“Nearly isn’t good enough,” Hilda whispered. It was amazing he could even hear her over the moans and weak crying surrounding him. The smell of vomit wafted to him as the ship listed to the side. “Not nearly good enough.”
Gorjugan closed his eyes and tried to will himself from the ship. He would rather be anywhere, including the plagued blackness of the lake Elivigar at Eget Row. But he couldn’t manifest there. He was bound to the bed by a metal mesh lined with spikes and studs that pierced his flesh, keeping his contorting body in place.
“How in the nine worlds did you ever think that you could corrupt Hafaress to our side? How did you think infecting that little girl with the plague would work?”
:I don’t know,: he thought.
“Of course you don’t know, because there’s no way that she could have lifted that hammer if she’d turned to darkness. She needed to come to our side on her own. We are darklings Gorjy,” Hilda crooned. “We have more poisons to aid us than the shadow plague. Use your words!”
:Yes sister, I will do better next time,: he thought. Hilda was all he had. She raised him when no one else would. He lived only to please her. Not fulfilling her demands was more punishment to him than he could ever imagine.
“Next time?” she barked a laugh. “There won’t be a next time. You failed us all. You will stay here, writhing in pain on your sick bed until the end.
“We are on the path of Helvegr. The end is near. You will stay here until we rise up against the gods and claim the Void as our own.”
:But how will we defeat the gods without the hammer?: Gorjugan wondered.
“It’s no matter,” she said, turning away from him with a flick of her rotten hand. The fingers clattered together like dried reeds. “There’s another God Slayer.”
:Another?: Gorjugan wondered. :How?:
She turned to Gorjugan, her withered white eye rolling in her socket. Was she rotting further? Her healthy half smiled and her healthy hand tugged her dress around her shoulders. She ignored his question. “And this one we don’t need to be worthy to lift. We won’t need to corrupt anyone. Freeing Anthros is within our grasp!”
:Where?: Gorjugan hissed into her mind.
“Muspelheim.” The smile that cracked the rotten half of her face would haunt Gorjugan the rest of his life.
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About Travis
Travis Simmons was kicked out of magic school for his refusal to study and his penchant for mundane activities like cooking. While selling his sword he stumbled upon dogs that he wrongly thought were magical and imagined he could commune with them. After a vicious zombie attack in which witches helped him push back the undead horde, Travis found himself apprenticed to a necromancer.
Afraid that winter was coming, Travis tucked into his magical studies, but always chased his dreams of writing tales science fiction tales and fantasy stories where he could explore his wild imagination about life on other planets. Adamant that Travis learn the esoteric ways of the occult his master made his life a horror of practice and studies. But no matter how he tried, he could never conquer Travis' questing mind.
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