"Of course not."
"And yet we are stumbling onward regardless."
"If you see any maps carved into the floor, I'll be happy to study them."
"I am reminded that the last time we wandered aimlessly within one of the Four That Fell, it almost killed us."
Dante ducked under a spear of diamond that had appeared from nowhere in front of his face. He squeezed between a pair of amethysts taller than he was and tripped over something silvery and translucent. While he was down on the ground, though, he had the perspective to spot a hole in the cavern wall off to his left, and he picked his way to it through the gems and crystals and minerals.
It turned out to be a steeply upward passage surfaced with uncut emerald. It switchbacked twice before leveling out and putting them into a new chamber that looked to be a forest of simply-shaped crystalline trees. Dante tried to find a path through them, but found it almost impossible to make any progress without getting stabbed and sliced.
"Larisse?" He craned his neck forward, searching. "Have you been asleep? Do you remember Rale? Its people? How you once saved it? Give us your aid just once more. Then you can return to your rest."
He almost thought he could see his words traveling away through the crystal branches only to be lost among the wider forest. He swore under his breath, backed up from where he'd gotten stuck, and wriggled his way past a different tree.
With a sharp clink, the trees surrounding Dante swayed side to side as if in a storm, their branches threatening to impale him. He crouched low and drew the nether to him. They bowed toward him, jabbing through his cloak and piercing his skin, then pulled back and went still.
Opening a wandering path through the middle of the forest.
"All we had to do was promise her more sleep?" Blays said. "Come to think of it, that would definitely work on me too."
Dante started forward, wary at first, but with increasing speed as nothing tried to crush or stab him. They reached the far end of the chamber, where an emerald staircase led up into a third room. This one was smaller than the first two, and all but uncluttered, furnished with nothing except for a low dais of white marble topped with a three-foot thick slab of solid gleaming emerald.
"This has to be it," Dante said. "The heart of the Titan. All we have to do is—"
Another series of clinks echoed through the chamber. Long, spindly crystals burst from the walls and ceiling. Their points were as sharp as any spear. They reached toward the three humans, already halfway towards them, about to impale them on a score of bright points.
Dante backed toward the dais. "What are you doing? Stop!"
He grabbed hold of the shadows within the spikes, melting them back toward the walls. But for each one he blunted, another sprung forward, growing toward his gut or his heart or his eyes.
Blays slashed the rod forward, producing the Spear of Stars. He flicked his wrists, smacking the weapon's point into a pair of incoming spikes. With a groan, they snapped in half, but the impact staggered Blays backward toward another set of crystals, which Dante scrambled to liquefy before they could stab Blays through the back.
"Larisse!" Dante yelled. "Enough!"
"We're not talking our way out of this. We have to open a door for ourselves!" Blays braced the spear against his hip, bounced on his feet, and charged toward the wall.
He swung the weapon tightly, getting knocked from side to side as he clashed his way forward through the spikes. But each time he was flung toward a different set of protrusions, he whipped the Spear of Stars into them instead, dashing them apart and bouncing him in the other direction. It looked more than anything like the spear was driving forward of its own accord and dragging Blays along behind it.
Dante and Gladdic followed in his wake, with Dante dissolving any of the crystalline blades that grew in behind Blays while Gladdic held a hefty dose of ether in hand to heal anyone who got gored. Blays fought his way to the wall, almost falling down as he broke the newest spikes there, then caught himself, braced himself, and leaped forward, jabbing the Spear of Stars ahead of him.
It struck the wall with such a bang that Dante went blind.
"Forward!" Blays yelled. "Right now!"
Unable to see a thing, Dante ran toward the voice, staggering over the rubble thrown off by the spear. And found himself falling.
He no longer smelled sharp crystal, but the leaves of the forest. He yelped something that would have been an oath if he wasn't too frantic-minded to speak. Yet he had been able to survive a much worse fall in the past. He hurled his mind ahead of him. The ground was already closer than he would have liked. He shifted it to the softest mud he could. He was just starting to get his sight back when he splashed down.
Blays had landed just before him; Gladdic right after. He solidified the earth beneath them and pushed them up to the surface, leaving a shallow pool of water.
He sat down in it with a plop and splashed it over his face to wash off the glop. "What was that?"
"When someone starts shoving the spiked walls at you, that's typically a sign to get out," Blays said. "I'd say we're in a much stronger bargaining position from out here, wouldn't you?"
"In the name of the gods," Gladdic said. "What have you done?"
"Saved our lives. I know you're confused, since it's only about the thousandth time I've done that—"
Something splashed down ten feet from them. Blays clicked his mouth shut and followed Gladdic's gaze to a spot eighty feet up the side of the Titan's leg. A slight purplish light permeated the night, enough to make out the hole punched out from the leg—and the fissures breaking away from it.
Another splinter landed beside the pool, sticking from the earth like an arrow. Dante threw himself out of the water and away from the Titan. At the same time, he launched his mind up and behind him, reaching the leg and moving upward along it until he came to the cracks zagging away from the rupture.
Immeasurably sharp chunks of broken gemstone stabbed and thudded into the ground around them. Dante took hold of the shadows that surrounded the cracks in the Titan. The matter resisted him—he couldn't tell if that was because it wasn't quite rock, or if some inborn defense of the Titan was attempting to preserve it from outsiders—but he rammed his will across it, melding the seams.
He worked his way upward to the hole in the side. He drew on the wall around it to fill in the wound, then moved to the spiderweb of cracks above it, smoothing these solid as well.
"I think," he said, "that I just saved the world."
Dante found himself shaken with the thought that they had almost accidentally destroyed the very object they needed to survive and he took a moment to catch his breath and gather himself. The purple light hung in a broad circle overhead, casting a long dark shadow of the Titan behind it.
You should never have left, said the same weak voice that had told them to leave when they first came to the Titan.
"You were trying to kill us!" Dante said.
To save you. To bring you back here. Before… The voice of the dead entity trailed off. Dante could feel it struggling in the space beyond the surface of things.
"Larisse! What has happened to you? If you will give us your help, we will do whatever we can to help you in return. I swear it on my father and my mother. On my own blood. On the name of Arawn himself! Grant us your power!"
With a presence unseen but readily felt, she shuddered like a wounded and exhausted beast attempting to stand. The shadow of the Titan rippled and twitched, as if the mustering of its will had to pass through its shadow before it could manifest within the Titan itself.
Something stirred and rose. Dante's heart froze. He could barely see it within the darkness, but he already knew exactly what it was.
"The entity," he said. "It's here."
Blays had shortened the spear to a rod when he'd fallen from the Titan and he lifted it but didn't yet snap it back to its full length. "Nolost? Isn't he a bit too massively colossal to be hiding from us?"
"
He isn't hiding from us—he's coming for us."
Dante pointed into the shadows. He was already bleeding from recent events and had no need to cut himself to convince the nether to come to his command. As shadows whirled down his arms, others lifted from the one cast by the Titan. An immense arm rose into the night sky and flexed its fingers wide.
"Curse the gods for what they have done to us," Gladdic murmured.
You profaned the fate planned for you. The voice of the entity sounded through their heads, invading their minds, the noise of it like glass crushed underfoot or pages being ripped from an invaluable tome. You were not supposed to save them.
"I don't know who 'them' is." Blays pointed the rod at the arm of Nolost. "But you'd better get used to it, because thwarting fates is pretty much all that we do."
With a blast of ethereal light, he jabbed forth the Spear of Stars.
Your people. You should have been tempted to try to save them, but you should never have been able to reach them in time. Instead, you should have found their bodies heaped in the field, and despaired for your impotence—and for having thrown all your hope away in service of nothing. I am angry that you cheated me of this.
"Yeah, well we all have our problems, don't we?"
I do not. For I will make you know an even worse despair. I could have done this more than a day ago. But I waited, so that I could witness the agony you robbed me of at the lake.
The hand came toward them. It looked to be floating along as slow as a summer cloud, but this was an illusion caused by its great size. It would be on them within moments.
"We've fought this thing before," Dante said. "We know we can hurt it. Hit it as fast and as hard as you can. Before it has the chance to do whatever it's talking about."
He'd already been shaping his attack and launched it at the enemy before he'd finished speaking. The arm of the entity had started off some hundred feet in the air, reaching out through some unseen tunnel through reality, and it sank lower as it closed on them, its long nails or short claws dragging furrows through the field. Yet rather than heaping the disturbed earth to either side of the gouges, Nolost erased the dirt from existence.
Dante's assault plowed into the webbing between two of the pitch black fingers, spraying smoke from the wound. Gladdic's ether clipped into the thumb, shredding the tip into long streamers.
Dante had time to give it one more broadside. Then it was upon them, looming over them like a falling moon, and Dante ran left while Gladdic broke to the right and Blays lagged, letting it come just close enough that he could scrape the wrist and arm with his spear as they soared past. The limb curved upward, trailing some nether-like smoke behind it, but entirely unslowed by their initial attacks. After gaining height, it leveled out. Rather than heaving about for another blow at them, it kept going.
"It's not coming for us." The words stuck in Dante's throat. "It's going for the Titan!"
Blays ran toward the monument, but even if he'd been able to catch up to the entity, the arm was far too high for him to reach. Dante and Gladdic hurried after him, sending a solid stream of shadows and light at Nolost's grasping limb. The bolts and darts ripped into the hand before it reached the Titan, but it homed in on the exact spot where they'd punched their way out from inside it.
"We have to stop it!" Dante's voice climbed to something like a scream. "If it tears down the Titan, it will tear all Rale apart!"
He threw the biggest volley of nether he could handle up into the sky. A cone of something dark and half opaque flowed from Nolost's outstretched palm. As it touched the Titan, a cross-shaped crack popped across the structure's leg.
Dante's volley chewed into the side of the entity's arm. He stacked the waves of his attacks right on top of each other, meaning to bore all the way through the limb and hopefully destroy it, but the primal substance that made up Nolost's form borrowed itself from around the wound, preventing the severing of the arm at the expense of thinning itself elsewhere. Gladdic hurled long spears of ether into the entity's wrist, filling the air above them with black steam.
The hand made contact with the Titan. And grasped it. A crack rang through the air, louder even than the breaking of the trunk of one of the great city-trees of Weslee. Green shards fell from the Emerald Titan, gleaming in the odious purple light hanging above it.
"That's a hole," Blays said. "A big one."
"I can see that!" Dante said.
"Can't you kill that thing any faster?"
"Can't you throw your damn spear at it or something?"
This is why I forced you to get out, whispered a voice—not the entity, but the Emerald Titan. He was waiting here…all along.
Dante swore. Everything about their talk with the Titan suddenly made much more sense. The only question left was whether its diminished mental state had been inflicted by Nolost, too. He executed another strike on the same spot in the arm. A circle of "flesh" around the wound waned semi-translucent as it healed the worst of the damage.
It has been so long since I've been able to contend against mortal men, Nolost spoke. There is no thrill in it, since there is no chance of defeat. But the feeling that provokes is even finer than the rush of well-matched combat. I imagine it is the same feeling a wave has as it drowns a sailor lost at sea.
"I don't know what you are," Dante said. "But whatever it is, it's deeply insane!"
Darkness pulsed above them. The Titan cracked again. A splinter the size of a wagon plunged toward them, its edges sharp enough to sever their souls from their bodies. Dante and Gladdic dashed apart. The chunk cleaved into the ground, showering them with dirt. Smaller pieces thumped down around them. Most ranged from pebbles to fist-sized blocks of emerald, but that would be more than enough to rip their heads from their necks.
"We are not harming it fast enough," Gladdic said.
"I can see that!"
"Continue the assault. I will attempt to preserve the Titan with the ether."
Dante nodded, shaping his third volley as it flew toward the gigantic arm reaching across the sky and crushing the Emerald Titan within its grip. The storm of bolts opened a hole through the arm, giving Dante a view of the purpled clouds beyond, but strings of dark matter shot back and forth across it until the limb was whole again.
Gladdic had his arm lifted above his head, hand splayed wide as he poured harsh white light into the fissures and cracks high on the leg of the Titan. Ether glowed from within these, closing some of them; the hail of broken gem had ceased, but Dante could still see and hear new cracks spreading across the structure. The void-like power emanating from Nolost's hand looked to be doing all the damage and Dante kicked himself for not trying to smash the hand instead.
"I can but minimize the damage being done to it." Gladdic's voice strained like a sail in a storm. "Yet the damage is still being done. Break the entity! Quickly!"
He cannot, Nolost said, managing to sound amused despite the inhumanity of his voice. As you come to realize this, you will realize also that before I destroy your bodies, I will first destroy your minds. The doubt, fear, desperation—I feel them growing already. They will soon replace everything else.
Dante did his best to ignore this, opting to direct his next burst against the hand. The barrage of bolts clouded the hand in puffs of dark smoke. These cleared, revealing that he'd obliterated the last knuckle of the index finger. A good start, but he'd need to do a lot more.
The entity sent a pulse of anti-being from its palm. Cracks shot across the leg of the Titan. For the first time since Gladdic had shifted to protecting it, a piece of the structure peeled away, a thumbnail-shaped slab the size of a barn wall that tumbled end over end before slamming down just twenty feet from them.
"I can hold no longer!" Gladdic raged.
Your hold is slipping. Your mind will go with it.
Moving too hastily for any precision, Dante gathered another attack and lashed it upward at the hand. With a glassy pop, another chunk of the Titan fell from its body. It was sh
aped like a finger itself and it plummeted down like the return of an arrow shot straight into the sky. It landed hard enough to jar Dante's knees, sticking from the earth like an emerald obelisk.
His shadows streaked upward. He drove them all into the palm. They punched a hole right through it. The annihilating fog it had been channeling faltered.
A web of black strands shot back and forth across the wound. It was healed as quickly as it had been made. The fog rolled from it once more, shattering a circular patch of the Titan's surface.
I should like to draw this out, Nolost said to them. But even if it would bring me more pleasure to do so, my nature does not allow it. For all that was made must be unmade.
The entity's palm disappeared within a cloud of erasing mist. With a hiss, it poured toward the Titan. Dante backed away from the structure to avoid the hail of debris that was about to rain down on them, but he wasn't sure why he bothered. Once Nolost destroyed the Titan, his death became inevitable.
Please. The Emerald Titan's voice was somehow both a shriek and a hiss. Save me. Save me!
Flakes of its surface broke away, spinning groundward. Nolost laughed like dry leaves in the wind. Did you think that dying once and being reduced to a mere spirit would protect you from ever dying again? Everything that is contains its death from the moment of its creation!
The Titan wailed. Knowing it would do nothing, Dante reached for the shadows one last time.
A star caught fire just above the arm of the entity. It fell downwards, though much less swiftly than any shooting star Dante had ever seen, pulsing as it went. Just before the star dropped into the shadowy arm, Blays' laughter rang out from above.
The Spear of Stars whirled, slashing into the top of the arm, then vanishing from sight as Blays cut straight into the limb.
"Hit the arm!" Dante yelled. "Everything you've got!"
Shadows winged from his hands while ether knifed up from Gladdic's. Light flickered within the arm like lightning within a storm cloud. It erupted from the underside with a huge plume of dark vapor, which was gushing from the wound on top of the arm as well.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 49
