In the last moments, he brought as much nether as he could to himself, throwing part of it behind him into the vapor and flooding the rest of it throughout his body. By the time the vapor washed over him, it was both much reduced in volume and thinner in color than when it had first left the limb.
But it still felt more ecstatic than any drink, apothecary's potion, or nethereal balm that he'd ever experienced.
He inhaled with a hard rasp. He'd been ready to try to use the excess nether in his body to heal himself the instant the vapor touched him, but he'd been expecting pain, not euphoria, and the shock of it paralyzed him—until he looked down and saw his thumb and forefinger turning transparent.
Dizziness rushed up his spine and over his head, gauzing his eyes with gray specks. Without waiting for his sight to return, he pulsed the shadows within his bones and flesh and veins, ordering them to restore and preserve, and to cleanse the gray vapor from his body. His fingers grew more substantial, less like just-glimpsed things from the Mists or Becoming. But this also brought about the collapse of the euphoria within him, and he looked up at the sky in sudden and incredible anguish.
I told you what it was like.
"This can't be real," Dante said.
I might wish to destroy you. But I would never lie to you. Let it take you, and see for yourself.
It hung before him like a white doorway. He walked into it. His vision lightened, colors paling until they all became shades of gray. His skin and flesh buzzed and he could no longer tell where he ended and his surroundings began nor feel the ground under his feet. He floated. He no longer knew what "he" was and first his thoughts and then his very senses seemed to be coming from outside him.
Wherever he'd been before was now gone. He had no memory of what it had been, just the vague recollection of trouble and turmoil and disappointment and pain. These things already seemed unnecessary, irrelevant. Everything around him was gray, but a warm and beautiful gray, as if he was enfolded in a giant cloud—no, as if he was the cloud, and the cloud was everything, and he knew the deepest rhythms of himself/the whole, slowly breathing, breaths that might take a year to complete if there was still any such thing as time, and that there would be infinite of them, unbroken and forever.
All was perfect. All was as it had always meant to be. He no longer had any thoughts, for there was nothing more that could ever be known, nor nothing that would ever need to be known. He simply was, and he breathed, and the oneness hummed to the tune of itself.
Come back to me, Nolost said.
I don't want to!
Only for a minute. Then you will never have to go back again.
He wanted to refuse even this much, but a stupendous force took hold of him, excising him from the oneness, cutting him away from the cloud. He stood once more in a dark field among the shadow of the Titan and the limbs of Nolost, and he wept for the pain that he felt in every droplet of his being.
Watch, the entity said. Watch not as punishment. But to be freed from your punishment.
Dante had only been out of his head for a few seconds and Blays was still whirling between limbs and slashing at them with the Spear of Stars while Gladdic was retreating from others while striking out at them with his incalculably complex designs. Dante looked past them, and higher, to the Emerald Titan.
Chips of it were falling away like scales from a fish. The limbs of the entity were still at work on it, but all at once, they withdrew from it. Except for the hand, which ceased caressing the Titan and rested its fingertips against the structure instead.
You have to help me! Larisse, soul of the Emerald Titan, cried to them. If I die again—if I die…
A thunderously loud scraping and squealing shattered the night. It would have hurt Dante's ears badly, but he was already in such pain that it felt like no more than a scrape. A massive crack shot from the Titan's leg up through the middle of its tall triangular body. The Titan held then and looked like it always would.
Debris burst from it in a horizontal line two-thirds of the way up its great height. With impossible slowness, the top of it sank into itself, pulverizing what stood beneath it under its own unimaginable weight. Emerald shards shot away from it as if fired from a bow, trailing sparkling clouds of dust behind them.
I am ended, Larisse said as she fell. I am nothing!
Her body fell in an expanding mass of undifferentiated rubble. It consumed itself and collapsed over the two legs, crushing them apart with mindless and merciless gravity. The purple light that had suffused the clouds earlier glowed back into being and Dante knew that she was dead. And then there was no structure left to the Titan at all, just broken hunks and a broad cloud of ground emerald, the pieces hailing to the ground with a discordant storm of chinks and clatters while the cloud hung there like the haunting spirit of the disintegrated colossus.
"It's over, isn't it?" Dante breathed, tears of joy streaming from his eyes. "The fighting, the struggle—it's all over."
For you, it is. Others will continue to struggle, for that is what they were created to do. But bear no worry. I will send them all to you. Every single one of them. And they will all be one with you.
During the collapse of the Titan, all of the fighting had stopped. Now, Nolost sent the limbs that had been assaulting it toward Gladdic and Blays.
There is nothing more for you here. Are you ready to return?
"Yes," Dante said. "Please send me back."
The lizard-headed limb loomed above him. It drew back, readying its breath. Dante closed his eyes and inhaled, hoping it would hurry to bring his friends to him next.
I don't know why I'm showing you this. Dante knew this new voice but couldn't name it. But I can still see it myself. And that means it can still exist.
Dante fell forward into a second vision. He stood in a green field with bright yellow flowers. A woman stood before him. He couldn't seem to bring her face into focus, but he could clearly see that of the infant girl she bore in her arms, as well as that of the small boy who stood behind her clinging to her long dark dress. Both of the children had black hair and gray-blue eyes. Just as his father had—and just as he did.
The place wasn't one that he knew, and so he thought it must be the Pastlands. But the feel of the place—the impossible combination of both a dream-like blurring and a hyper-clarity—spoke of something else. Something more like a Glimpse.
Yet looking into the children's eyes, he knew it wasn't the past that he was looking at.
With a gasp, he wrenched himself free from the euphoric glamour the gray vapor had drugged his mind with. The pain was like being stabbed in every place at once. But he had no time to numb himself. The lizard-headed limb yawned its false mouth wide and exhaled another cone of the dissolving mist.
He couldn't let it touch him again. Even if he could shield himself from being vaporized by its touch, it would imprison his mind again, and he would beg Nolost to kill him.
He threw his focus into the dirt and ripped open a hole. Not straight down, as he'd done to dodge the pincered limb early in the battle, but slanted. And he kept running it deeper until it broke through the wall of the pit.
He jumped down the hole, skidding downward. The limb pressed its mouth to the entry and spewed vapor behind him. He cast shadows behind him, absorbing the vanguard of the vapor, then reached his mind forward to the exit into the pit, shaping the earth there.
He shot from the tunnel into the gaping pit, grabbing the loop of rock he'd just extended from the side of it and hanging over the black expanse of the portal below him. The ten limbs rose from it like titanic black snakes. His feet swung above the void.
The stream of vapor shot from the hole behind him, enlarging the tunnel as it obliterated its sides. Gray fog poured downward like a lethal waterfall. It landed directly on the portal, chewing through it like boiling water poured over a lump of sugar.
Dante had an arm hooked through the stone loop, which he clung to as tight as he could. He called to the nether and
hacked down into the fraying wound of the portal, ripping and tearing at any threads that hadn't yet snapped. He sent a second black scythe downward before the first was used up. The last of the vapor spilled from the side tunnel and hissed over the portal.
What are you doing? You saw what waits for you!
"Yes," Dante said. "I did."
He ripped the nethereal scythe through the fabric of the doorway to the Becoming. It was already tearing itself apart, and would collapse in another minute, but he was driven by a hopeless wrath, and stabbed into it with wild abandon, like a man who's hunted down his brother's killer. Nolost's limbs slid downward. Retracting through the doorway.
About half of them had made it back through when the gate ripped apart at the seams. The half that didn't make it popped apart with the smell of wet ashes, sifting to the ground and staining it black.
Dante now hung above a floor of blank rock. He extended a ledge under his feet and gently lowered himself to the ground.
He tilted his head at the sky. "Was that real? What you showed me? What he showed me? Was any of it real?"
But Nolost was gone, and if Carvahal was still listening, then he wasn't answering. Dante got down on one knee. With the destruction of the Emerald Titan, Nolost had won: they had no way to stop him from destabilizing Rale layer by layer until it unraveled and ripped apart just as the portal had. So what if Carvahal had shown him that a different future might still exist? All the gods lied, and Carvahal was the most infamous liar of them all. He couldn't trust him any more than he could trust that Nolost was telling the truth about the bliss of annihilation. Then again, what if they were both telling the truth? Why would he want to pursue the future Carvahal had shown him if that meant separating himself and his line from the ecstasy of oblivion?
These weren't even the darkest of his thoughts. For if he hadn't gone back to Gallador—if he'd only let his people be sacrificed—they would've been able to activate the Titan in time, wouldn't they? And everything might have been saved.
He sat alone under the unworldly sky. Should he just pull the rock down on himself? Crush himself and find oblivion? There was nothing left to pursue, no goals nor hope of victory. It made no sense to go on. He was soon going to be killed no matter what he did, and most certainly in a way that would be much more gruesome and painful than under a quick slide of rock.
Someone was calling his name. He looked up. Blays peered down from the edge of the pit. Dante kneeled there a moment longer, then stood and began the long climb back to the surface.
31
The Emerald Titan rested among its own debris. A few shards of its feet poked into the air, the only parts of it that were still standing. The rest was nothing more than loose chunks of emerald and the dust stirring gently in the breeze.
Blays had been waiting at the edge of the pit, watching him ascend. After giving Dante the chance to take in the scene, he lifted his eyebrows. "Well?"
"He's gone," Dante said.
"What about the Titan?"
"What Titan?"
"There's nothing we can do about it?"
"What do you want to do? Glue it back together?"
"Yeah, I was afraid of that." Blays turned to gaze at the ruins. "So what do we do now?"
"Go back to see Carvahal."
"What can he do for us?"
"I don't know. Nothing, probably."
Blays crossed his arms. "Right. Let's be on our way, then."
Though they were exhausted, and it would probably be just as safe to make camp where they were as anywhere else in the belowlands, there was no question of staying among the ruins of the Emerald Titan. They headed south through the blue woods toward the distant cliffs of the Vault of the Sky. The purple light that had hung above the Titan slowly spread across the heavens, but the night was placid, and they traveled a solid ten miles before deciding to make camp in another of Dante's underground shelters.
Before sealing themselves inside it, he took a short walk by himself and looned Nak. Nak had been asleep but woke quickly, anxious to hear the details. Dante relayed them, including the vision Carvahal had given him that had awakened him from his trance, which for reasons he didn't understand he hadn't mentioned to Blays or Gladdic.
"Carvahal saw that in the future?" Nak asked. "So does that mean there's still a way to save Rale?"
"I don't see how," Dante said. "Activating the Four That Fell was the only chance we had."
"Then what was the vision?"
"It might be of a future that once could have been, but hadn't had time to fade away. Or maybe it's just a lie Carvahal told me for reasons of his own. Or maybe whatever power Carvahal used showed him a bunch of nonsense. I don't exactly have a scholar's understanding of how the gods' divination systems work."
"I don't see why Carvahal would bother to lie to you. If Rale is doomed, then it's doomed." Nak inhaled sharply. "Hm! What if what he showed you isn't in Rale? What if it's in the Realm of Nine Kings?"
Dante cocked his head. "You think we can still survive. Just not here."
"But here isn't the only there that there is, is it?"
"Taim and his allies will probably try to destroy us the second they find out we're there."
"Have we just come up with a new plan?"
"Staying here is suicide. The sooner we accept that, the better our chances of getting out alive. We'll bring our people through to the other side. And then we'll do everything we can to force a treaty."
"Excellent. I shall make the move as soon as you've spoken to Carvahal."
"I'm not waiting for his permission," Dante said. "Get our people on the march to the portal at Lake Owlin and do it now."
"Won't that take us through the Becoming? That seems a little, ah…"
"Insanely dangerous? It is. If we're very lucky, Maralda may be able to redirect the portal straight to the Realm. But if she can't or won't do that, we have no other choice than to risk the Becoming."
"I see. It will be done, lord," Nak said. He hesitated, then spilled out the words. "I know this isn't what you were hoping for. But it's still more than anyone else in this world could have accomplished."
That might have been true. Yet even when Dante finally managed to fall asleep, he still saw the Titan collapsing in his dreams, too.
~
They slept later than Dante would have liked under normal circumstances. But there was no such thing as normal circumstances anymore.
He expected to reach the Undazim before two o'clock that afternoon. The day was calm, almost terribly so, as peaceful as it had been since the earliest days of the plagues, when the worst they had to worry about was a few people falling ill. Dante spent their southward travels drinking in the landscape, memorizing as much of it as he could. For it would all be gone soon, and the generations to come in the Realm of Nine Kings would know nothing of the world they'd once called home except for what he and the others could pass down to them.
He'd been at this for over an hour before the full implications of it sank in. They might be able to preserve tales of what Rale had been like, and make some drawings and paintings of its lost cities and beasts and mountains, but they were going to lose everything else. There wasn't time to go back to Narashtovik to gather up their most prized possessions and relics. The only things they'd be able to hang onto would be their memories, and whatever the people had carried with them across the long march to the lakes.
That meant the sum total of literature was about to be reduced to The Cycle of Arawn, three or four different prayer manuals, a few books of poetry (half of it children's rhymes), and a handful of ribald adventure yarns like The Troublesome Travels of Riddick Dover. They could bear their songs to the other side, but all sculpture, painting, and architecture would be dissolved to the void, along with all of their resources and tools and livestock and houses and forts and temples and farms.
He had already rebuilt Narashtovik once. But the project ahead of them was orders of magnitude more daunting. It would take th
e work of generations to even come close. And if war came to them—whether from spiteful gods, barbarian ramna, or Nolost's legions—what little they'd be able to build back up would be burned to the ground within minutes.
They found Tono's body on the banks of the lake where the Greatfall fell. The lower half of him was missing. There was no sign of Adi and they didn't search for her. Dante lowered what was left of Tono into the red rock and lifted a short column to serve as a marker. He said a prayer, then moved on.
Within the cavern behind the falls, the Undazim lay in ruins as total as the Emerald Titan.
"It must have fallen from the very top," Blays said. "I kind of wish I'd seen that."
Dante gazed up the three-mile-high shaft. "Why in the world would you want to have seen it get destroyed?"
"Just think how loud the bang must have been."
Dante nicked his arm and began shaping a path up the shaft. It was tedious work and took all the remaining daylight and half of the evening. As he neared the top of the cliffs, the Greatfall thinned, then petered out altogether. When they reached the surface, they looked upon a damp but empty river bed.
Silent lightning snaked across the sky, casting their shadows before them as they trudged on. Smoke rose from fissures in the ground that hadn't been there a few days before. Just when Dante was ready to suggest they make camp for the night, a cone of black rock pulled itself up into being and began to vomit burning hot rocks into the sky. As they put some distance between themselves and it, a fissure opened right in front them, forcing them to run to prevent being swallowed by it. The earth quivered and rattled.
"We should not stop until we reach the portal," Gladdic said. "Or else we might never reach it at all."
The prospect was a miserable one. But looking around at the smoke and fires, the lightning and the clouds that looked as high and solid as the cliffs they'd just climbed up, Dante could only nod and keep going.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 51
