by Daryl Banner
Then the lid covered his rasping, desperate face, and he listened as the nails drove into the splintering wood one at a time.
And now it is eternal darkness.
The darkness, however, is a friend of Aardgar’s now. Much like the light was once his companion, now the dark is the friend who imbues him with superhuman power. He is able to dream worlds down here in the depths of the planet. He has dreamed his life a hundred times. He has reached with his phantom hands and felt a hundred histories pull through them.
In the eternal darkness, Aardgar is a god.
I never needed Three Brothers. I am only one, and I am more powerful than they will ever hope to be. I will own Atlas and set it to rights.
I am ready.
The histories that his phantom fingers drink are histories where the Kings and Queens of Atlas turn and turn, century for century. He watches it all unfold yet again. His own fall at the golden, jealous hands of Evanesce. His own descent into madness the first time he met the comforting darkness. His freedom when a curious halfwit named Thadold brought him to the Lifted City, changed. The wound of Atlas as its twelfth ward exploded into black fire and death. The Wall as it rose. The cry of the slums as they rage against the oppressive, smirking fist of the rich and the self-righteous and the Lifted. The crackle of stone as the slums overtook the sky, and the groan of a city as it turned yet again from one set of hands to another.
And still, Aardgar waits. And still, Aardgar dreams.
I am ready.
He patiently watches the city race through time, like a struggling child hurrying toward an imaginary finish line, stumbling, stumbling, falling to their knees, then pushing back up, then falling again, then pushing.
Atlas’s eternal struggle that may never end.
But Aardgar knows there must be an end. In all of his pain and misery, he finds hope from the very one who put him here in the first place: he finds hope from the vision that the golden light gave him long ago. His only solace.
In that vision, he saw two beautiful women.
And himself wearing a crown made of lightning.
I am ready for that crown.
When the light at last touches Aardgar’s face, he feels it before he sees it. Of course he can’t see it. After over a thousand years in the darkness, he is blind once again. But the light that his face drinks in tells him all he needs to know.
And his ears. “Is that you?” comes a woman’s voice as its sweet, gentle sound kisses his ears.
They move him. For the first time in a thousand years, he moves. Light passes over his face like a silk curtain. He drinks it in.
“Is that you, my King?”
Such sweet, sweet words.
“You need eyes, my King. Eyes you shall receive.”
I am ready.
Ten pairs of eyes do not work. Then yet ten pairs more come from ten more fools, and Aardgar still cannot see. But the histories find a way to his severed fingertips, even if his fingertips are on opposite sides of the city, still buried, still lost to the soil of the planet, and the worms. He sees a broken Atlas. He sees a darkness beyond his tomb.
And he sees a light.
Lightning.
“Aardgar, my King.”
Such sweet, sweet words.
He blinks, and the last set of eyes make colors swirl into place before him. He blinks again, and the world shifts and twinkles, sharpening like the edge of a knife against flint. Sparks rain before him, a great storm of white shapelessness, swirling mother’s milk, and light.
Light …
He blinks.
Two women are gazing keenly down upon him. Two women with long white hair. Two women who have been waiting as long a time for him as he has been for them.
“My King?”
He spent an eternity thinking he’d met his end at the hands of Three Sister and Two Brother, only to find that his destiny simply awaited him on the other side of the eternal darkness.
The other side of eternity.
The Thrice King Aardgar smiles for the first time in over a thousand years. The hour has come, at long last, to save the Last City of Atlas one final time.
And I am ready.
An afterword from the author
Thank you for taking the thousand-year journey with Aardgar. The events that unfolded in this book are unknown by nearly every character in the main Outlier series, which makes this tale precious in a way, as immortal Aardgar alone carries with him the secrets of Atlas’s birth.
Even the nature of his true Legacy has fallen between the cracks of history. Only he knows of his history-drinking touch, while the world will only see him as immortal.
The bald and stoic Baron continues his pious story of devotion to the Goddesses in Outlier: Rebellion (Book 1). It picks up quite some time after he was abandoned in an unknown era during the Three Brothers’ battle.
The time-walker Baal’s story continues an indeterminate amount of time later in Outlier: Reign Of Madness (Book 3), where he is still in tireless pursuit of the Sisters Three.
As for our hero Aardgar, his story continues in Outlier: Beyond Oblivion (Book 4) as he works to fulfill the vision of a crown of lightning and two women with long white hair. Will he embrace the light, or succumb to the swelling darkness in his chest where a human heart once beat?
Outlier: Rebellion (Book 1) is available on Amazon:
http://www.amzn.com/B00M1XUK7W
Table of Contents
OTHER WORK by Daryl Banner
Kings & Queens of Atlas
The TwiceKing
The Outlier
The Brother
The King
The Lightless
The Immortal
The Risen
The Three
The Two
The Lover
