“That would take an insane amount of power!” Marlow shouted back in Basic.
“Think like a julah for once, you…” The string of words falling from Nerilis’s bruising lips would have shocked his own mother, assuming Lady Dunsman still breathed in some corner of the universe. She didn’t. The shock of her own son turning into the most wanted criminal in the known cosmos had been enough to end her long life.
Lady Dunsman’s infamous son would be damned if his old friend forgot who he was, however.
“I am, for Void’s sake!” Marlow was two seconds closer to smacking Nerilis on the head with his walking stick. Would that do it? Would that make this criminal idiot realize that even their kind had limitations? Just because Nerilis Dunsman ran around without the aid of a cane or spectacles didn’t mean he wasn’t a hundred Federation years older than Ramaron Marlow, who may have had a few genetic predispositions to poorer eyesight than his peers. Time would come for him too, eventually. They weren’t young men conducting experiments at the Academy and training for their futures in the priesthood.
They were two old sods playing God.
“We don’t know the location of the nearest parallel universe,” Marlow quickly explained, in yet another vain attempt to redirect Nerilis’s fixations. “If we attempted something like that, Void only knows where we would end up. We might be obliterated!”
“Then what do you suggest?” A whole wave of departing butterflies washed over them. Only a few feet away, Devon wrapped his arms around his face and barricaded Danielle’s head from the golden dust threatening to choke them. Every butterfly that turned to ash was another life permanently lost to the Void. The ones remaining had a chance to return to their bodies before they were destroyed. But with every second passing, hundreds more died.
A fisherman making his way home to his family in the South Pacific.
A daughter carrying water back to her village in Africa.
A boy suffering through his exams in Mumbai.
A baby born two seconds ago in Moscow, the doctors already prepared to declare it dead.
An old woman enjoying the last sunset of her life in New Mexico.
A young woman rinsing her art supplies, thinking of the person she wanted to see most.
The hundreds, thousands more either succumbing to the earth’s structural turmoil or dropping like the swatted flies they were to the universe.
Earth had never seen anything like it before. Such sights were not meant to be seen.
Nerilis was halfway to suggesting they try it, anyway. The two most powerful sorcerers in the universe should have enough clout between them to pull one universe into another and hope they fused together. There would be more loss of life, but what if it was the only chance they had? Besides, if Nerilis died with them, wouldn’t it be a fitting end to his existence?
“The Third Piece,” he blurted out.
Marlow withheld the cane in his hand. “What about it?”
Nerilis pried Miranda’s hand apart to reveal the ring. “If it is destroyed, then both of the Relics obliterate themselves. This is the failsafe of a planet’s soul. Ramaron… do you think… if destroying the Third Piece can cause Earth to disappear… that infusing it with more power could have the opposite effect?”
“I know where you’re going with this, but that’s such a long shot. Nothing we ever learned suggests that the Relics derive strength from the Third Piece, only the opposite.”
“But we also know that one of the fundamental laws of the universe is that every reaction has an opposite and equal reaction…”
The two old men were able to concur. “I swear to the Void, if you’re wrong about this…”
“Sure, put another planet’s death on my hands. Don’t think it’s going to change my bounty.” Nerilis raised his hand to inspect the ring resting on his palm. “It will take a substantial amount of power, though. A very specific power, don’t you think?”
Marlow scoffed. “We’re madly powerful, but we’re not that powerful. We can’t will an entire planet in that direction. ‘A million years to build it up, a single second to tear it down.’ We can tear this planet down, but we don’t have enough time to build it up.”
“But we’re Priests of the Void. If not us, then who?”
“First of all, you’re the only one who hung out in the Priesthood for any significant amount of time. Well, except for…”
They turned back to Miranda, still lifeless and still a sorry remnant of the spirit inhabiting her only a few moments before. Marlow looked up at the dancing parade of butterflies and counted their glittering trails until he spotted the one he wanted. “If anyone could convince a soul to live, it would be the Head Priestess of the Void, right?”
Both Nerilis and Marlow looked up as the butterflies parted. “My friends,” the honored soul in their midst whispered, “even this is beyond my power. I can only aid those that are already a part of the Void.”
The ground shook again. An aftershock. Mourning. “We must try, anyway,” Nerilis asserted. “I’ll go first, since it is my own fault.”
He held the ring in one hand and raised the other above his head, gritting at the prospect of exuding a vast amount of magic. Even Marlow backed away.
“Come on…” Nerilis psyched himself up. “You once danced with the dead, Old Man.”
An explosion of light erupted from his hand, encasing the ring and sending a wave of energy through the pulsating darkness. The butterflies above them scattered in various directions, like frightened fish fleeing for safety beneath the sea.
Nerilis’s power subsided quickly. He stared in bewilderment at the ring in his hand.
“It’s not enough,” he heaved. “I blasted it… with everything I have…”
The silence was deafening among the admittances of failure and defeat. The ring clinked to the ground. Marlow approached. “Come on, then,” he goaded, “let’s get away from here before we’re taken down with this condemned rock.”
“What about us?” Danielle said after them. “You two get to run off… and we die? Trapped forever in this thing? What kind of fucking deal is that?”
“Danielle…” Devon coaxed her with his hand.
“No! This is bullshit! You fucking fix this mess! Fix it!” Danielle’s eyes darted between the sweeping butterflies, Devon’s aching hand, Nerilis’s shattered ego, Marlow’s defeated face, and the two tattered bodies littering the ground with their blackened faces and twisted limbs. Eventually her eyes rested on the tacky blue ring resting a foot away from Miranda’s hand.
“Danielle, look…”
Before the earth could shake again, Miranda’s languished body pushed itself up with the embittered force of a thousand headaches. Even after possession by two different entities in the span of twenty minutes, she was still strong enough to gather the willpower to rise and face the two sorcerers and ignore the others behind her.
Shocked, Nerilis opened his mouth to address her, but Miranda’s strength gave out, ankles buckling. A butterfly flew close. She snatched it, its glow diminishing with every stream of sweat flowing from Miranda’s hand and across its wings.
“Give it to me.” Her snarl snapped in the stale air.
Nerilis took a step back at the gruesome approach. “You think this is yours to claim?”
The tired hand holding the dying butterfly extended toward him. “I will trade you this soul for that ring.”
“What are you talking about? That’s not a fair trade.”
The ground shook again. Miranda did not falter. Instead, a pleasant smirk crowned her cheeks. “I bet this is the soul of your mother.”
“She has a point, Nerilis,” Marlow interjected, as his old companion seethed next to him. “Your mother is dead, after all. It could be her.”
Nerilis gritted his teeth.
“Oh, come on, you fool! We have nothing to lose at this point! Let her have it!”
With a growl, Nerilis plucked the ring off the ground to exchange for the butterf
ly now wandering away on brittle wings. “I hope you know what you are doing,” he muttered.
She said nothing as she stared down at the ring and slipped it onto her finger. Nothing happened.
“How unfortunate…” Joiya’s voice echoed in tired minds.
Miranda pulled the ring off and looked up at the man who claimed to be her sire. Time slowed as she stared into his features. Pale, lined with age, white hair that used to be blond shrouding the fear eliciting from his eyes. Nothing in her came from him. Not even the shape of his eyes, nor the jawline so like her Earthling mother’s. If none of this they shared, then what? How was it possible for this old decrepit man from another galaxy to share her blood? How different did he look thirty-five years before, when he seduced her mother?
“If you claim to be my father,” she said, “then that makes me half-you, right?” Miranda held up the ring, a butterfly flitting between both sides like it was in a playground for the yet-to-be-born. “So I should feel really, really bad about doing this, right?”
She tossed the ring behind her, Nerilis’s eyes alight in the fires of anger once more at her foolishness. Miranda sank to her knees in exhaustion. Nerilis caught her in his arms.
The ring landed in front of the mercenaries. Devon snatched it in his hand before Nerilis could come after it.
Devon held Danielle closer to his chest, the ring losing its luster. “Did you hear what they were saying?” He asked his partner. “We have to find a way to infuse this ring with power. We won’t die, and we won’t be trapped in the Process… and… Danielle?”
Her eyes sagging in their sockets, Danielle reached for the ring.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. The ring twirled between her fingers, still warm from Nerilis’s attempt to infuse it with power. “You know, the last time I tried this ring on, I had such a bad flashback that I thought I was going to die…”
Devon lowered his voice again. “I won’t leave you.”
Against her better judgment, Danielle slipped the Third Piece over her ring finger and buried her face in Devon’s warm and sweaty chest. She hardly had enough time to perform that feat, however, before the first burst of pain exploded inside her head.
She screamed a sound so ruthless, that its tearing tone slaughtered the butterfly nearest her. The others scattered, including Joiya, who darted for her julah brethren and landed atop Miranda’s brow. Devon held Danielle’s arm away from them as the ring atop her hand glowed in a bright, hot white light and seared the skin around it.
But the rancid odor of Danielle’s burning flesh did not compete with the curdling calls emitting from the depths of her throat. As her body writhed in rejection of a forced regression, Devon refused to leave her side – her screams could have opened a cavern to Hell and he would have fallen into it with her.
The two old men had no explanation for what happened, aside from what they were perhaps once taught a long time ago. But that was not enough to give words to the sight of a soul trapped in the Process reacting like this. Joiya departed and took a trail of butterflies with her, and the darkness of the world began to melt away into bleak nonexistence.
Stars erupted across the sky, across the atmosphere, and opened Earth to the gaping maw of the cosmos another mere millisecond away. The minds and hearts of six billion souls opened across the failing planet, some in prayer, some in fear, and some in the welcoming awe of death.
The only sound anyone could hear, however, was the primal scream of a tortured soul.
Miranda used the last of her strength to crawl out of her father’s grasp. Devon did not stop her as she went to the source of the cry for spiritual help. Miranda dragged her weakened body to Danielle’s side, her hand grasping the one covered in the white light of the ring.
“Sulim!” she shouted over the mercenary’s screams. “Sulim, we’re here!”
Her voice was drowned by an explosion. The Earth broke apart, and the dark sweep of death eased across the terrain, coming to claim them.
The white light of the ring sprang toward the zenith like an arrow. A colossal mass of butterflies, perhaps six billion in total, fluttered toward a black hole Joiya guarded. The entrance to the Void.
She rejected them all.
--- THE FIRST DEATH, PART 3 ---
Everything was as Sonall foretold. The inner sanctum of the fortress, where mercenaries could pray to their gods from across the galaxy, was deserted. Books left open and unread, an incense offering on a golden platter left burning, and daggers carelessly sitting next to satchels long since abandoned. At any given sundown, the sanctuary was filled with people, but now their possessions remained as eerie mementos of a savage civilization. Sonall carried Sulim’s battered body through the library of the sanctuary, a trail of her blood oozing behind him as he kicked aside books and satchels and headed for the prayer room in the rear.
As Sulim heaved in his arms, her blood caking his skin in crimson, Sonall shoved his shoulder into the doors of the sanctuary and hoped for the best. The prayer room was the gathering space for riding out natural disasters. He begged what was left of the cosmos to allow at least one of the surgeons to be inside.
It, too, was devoid of life. Save for one woman.
She sat upon the altar, her thin silk robes draping across the granite as if she were a priestess. Her long black hair washed across her skin and melded into the gray surrounding the altar. Her mien reflected the weight she shifted on her shoulders for a majority of her life.
Cairn lifted her head at the sound of the clanking door, a crash of relief befalling her face. Her smile faltered, however, the moment she saw the state of Sulim’s health.
“What happened?” she demanded.
Sonall laid Sulim between him and Cairn, the blond’s blood congealing in the wound in her side. “I should ask you that. Where is everyone?”
Cairn answered before her emotions could claim her. “I initiated evacuation. I had the flames ignited to the First and Third Tribes too, but I cannot say if their leaders heeded them.”
“Evacuation? But there were guards at the side gate!”
“I know. Some refused to leave, so I sent them to the garrisons to keep watch for… intruders…” Her voice plummeted to a sob as she grasped the gravity of Sulim’s wound. One hand covered the gash and the other stroked Sulim’s matted hair. “Dare I ask?”
“I found her like that, in a grove about two miles out,” Sonall explained. “I did everything I could to get her back as quickly as possible.”
Cairn did not respond. One of her hands buried beneath Sulim’s head. Sulim opened her eyes before rolling her head onto Cairn’s arm and sighing into sleep once more.
“The surgeons are gone.” Cairn said. “I don’t know what to do for her. How bad is it?”
“It’s bad.” A gravity not often heard fell from Sonall’s mouth. “She bled all over my horse. The wound’s stifled, but,” he lowered his eyes, “she’s lost a lot of blood.”
“It was him, wasn’t it?”
Sulim opened one eye, arm rising to stroke Cairn’s soft robes. “He took it…” she spat, breath racked inside her lungs as she fought for the strength to speak. “I was bringing it to you.”
Cairn caught the arm before it could drop to the cold floor like dead weight. “It cannot be helped. You did your duty. Now, we shall flee. There is one small ship left that I reserved.”
However, Sulim was not as much at ease. “He has them all now.”
“He doesn’t have the guts to do it, though.” A man’s voice entered the chamber with a surety since abandoned in the fortress. Marlow, black-haired and without a cane, came through the door, a black dog at his side. “He won’t dare go back on his words.”
He looked upon the disturbing scene before him, the leader of Cerilyn’s famed Second Tribe and her second-in-command hovering over the wounded body of a guard once sworn to never kill. They were all mercenaries of different backgrounds. A whore’s daughter, a lord’s
son, and the former servant of a plantation. They were equal now, in near status and strength, and they feared the death creeping down the prayer room’s marble walls.
Marlow had marched into Cairn’s office and demanded her two best mercenaries to undertake the task of saving their own wretched planet. Sonall, the brawn once controlled by rage and a thirst for revenge against his own adoptive people yet now Second-in-Command of the very tribe he loathed, and Sulim, the cunning woman who shut out the entire world and followed her commander. Somehow, they managed to locate both of Cerilyn’s disturbed Relics, but Nerilis Dunsman either took them first or stole them from the Second Tribe’s possession.
When no one would respond to his presence, Marlow spoke again with optimism. “It’s clear that your services are no longer needed. You three should depart, just in case, but I will tend to Nerilis myself. He can’t easily take out another julah.”
They remained silent, Sulim’s breath becoming more strained as her life slipped away.
Cairn’s face shot up to meet Marlow’s, her eyes burning brown and her cheeks hot with desperation. “You’re a sorcerer! You got us all into this mess! Heal her!”
“I don’t know if I…”
Sonall swung his arm out, clutching Marlow by his throat and slamming him against the wall. “How about you actually do something for once?” His fingers tightened around Marlow’s gasping throat. “If she dies because of your mission, I swear to the Void that I will destroy you before your kin realizes you’re missing!”
Marlow glanced toward Cairn for help, for her to call off her man, but the chief continued to glare at him with a stern visage. Her hand clutched Sulim’s even tighter, feeling the blue ring.
He had the realization the same moment they heard the last pair of footsteps to come stomping outside the prayer room. Sonall’s grip around Marlow’s throat lessened, and the julah slithered away as the doors exploded open to admit Nerilis Dunsman.
“Ramaron! Fancy seeing you here like this.” His hair was still a slick blond falling around his shoulders. “Did you come for the show?”
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