Judarius grunted and crossed his arms. His armor rattled.
“I take it this is yet another trick or fascination you’ve plucked from the prophet’s journal?”
In answer, Azariah withdrew Velixar’s spellbook from his robe pocket and flipped it to his chosen page.
“Not a trick, my dear brother. Nor mere fascination. At last I am ready to save us from Dezrel’s madness.”
For centuries, the pair had watched over Dezrel from high above. Azariah knew his brother better than perhaps any being alive. The subtle shift in his arms? The slight rise of an eyebrow? He could read those like he read the prophet’s neat handwriting. Something disturbed his Executor, even though he tried to hide it.
“And how will you accomplish that?” he asked.
In answer, Azariah gestured to the faintly visible stars high above, their twinkling muted by the thick glass that was the tower chamber’s ceiling.
“For every star, there is a world,” he said. “Each crafted in worship by the god or goddess granted dominion over it. Thulos conquered several worlds, yes, but he was a bird pecking away at grains of sand as if he might one day conquer the ocean. There are thousands more, vibrant and beautiful, with mysteries we cannot begin to fathom. They need not be barred to us. I know the words. The door is no longer locked, for I hold the key.”
Judarius stepped closer, and for perhaps the first time in Azariah’s entire existence, he did not know his brother’s thoughts.
“You would have us flee?” he asked softly.
“If you must put it so improperly, yes, we will flee.”
His brother shifted his weight back and forth on his heels. Angry, Azariah realized. Furious, even. Had he erred in revealing these deeply held truths so soon? Was his brother not yet ready for these brutal realities?
“We are the masters of this world,” Judarius said, the volume of his voice steadily increasing, until by the end he was shouting. “We are the guardians of these wretched humans and their eternal souls. You would flee that responsibility like a coward? You would deny our sacrifices? We died for these people, Azariah. We fought their wars, and now we fight for their hereafter. How can you think to turn our backs on our god?”
“Because he is not our god!” Azariah shouted.
Judarius staggered as if Azariah had punched him in the neck.
“You would, here at the end of all things, deny our merciful god?” he asked.
Azariah flared his wings to either side and stood to his full height. He may not compare in size and strength to Judarius, but he still felt taller, larger, a more complete presence than any other being alive.
“Ashhur is not our god, and neither is Karak. Neither of them is whole. Neither of them is complete. We are imprisoned here, my brother. Forced to live under the inane laws and beliefs of a god who split his very being in a horrid, failed experiment. Thulos, Karak, Ashhur, all the countless others who have been slain...they never should have been separated from Kaurthulos. They are unfulfilled imperfections. They are the broken shards of a statue insisting each was the original work of art. And so long as Celestia refuses to let one slay the other, they will always remain apart. It will drive them mad, Judarius. It has driven them mad. Does all of Dezrel’s history not prove my words true?”
Judarius had Azariah by the throat before he could react. The mighty hand closed about his neck and lifted him off the ground. The world blurred, and Azariah cried out as his brother slammed his back against a wall, pinning him there. Judarius’s pale eyes burned with fire. Blood dripped from his mouth as he bared his jagged teeth.
“Our fallen brethren hail you as our leader and King,” he said. “And yet you would speak to me such heresy?”
Judarius’s fingers loosened so he might speak.
“Is it heresy?” Azariah asked. “Look at our flesh, brother. What delusion do you labor under to believe Ashhur holds love for our kind? I would acknowledge the truth before us. My words and laws honor the Ashhur who walked Dezrel in the original days of creation. So too do I honor Karak as he was prior to being cast into the Abyss and made lord of murderers and thieves. I honor all the broken pieces of Kaurthulos, for he is the only divine being worthy of our worship. But that being will not return, perhaps not until the stars are swallowed by the eternal space beyond.”
Judarius’s fingers tightened. Azariah endured the pain. Magic gathered in his fingertips, fire and lightning that he could unleash at a moment’s notice. He did not fear for his life. He only feared that when he finally escaped this insane land, his brother would not follow.
“You mock my faith and make light of our sacred task,” Judarius said. “I have ever performed my duty to Ashhur. I have ever been loyal to my god’s desires.”
“Ashhur’s command was to fall,” Azariah argued. “His only desire for us now is to suffer and die. Will you honor that wish, too? Or will you finally see it as the true betrayal that it is?”
He prayed his brother understood, even as the first crackle of lightning sparked off his palms and into the wall he was pressed against. He did not wish to explore the unknown alone, but neither would he allow his life to be taken in Ashhur’s name. His god had asked everything of him, even his own life once, and Azariah had given it. No more. He would give Karak and Ashhur nothing but the faith and loyalty their initial incarnations deserved, when Paradise was still an achievable reality.
Judarius glared, and within his mind an unspoken battle raged. It ended as suddenly as it began.
“Do as you wish,” he said, and released Azariah’s neck. “I shall watch this experiment of yours, and say nothing of it to the others.”
It wasn’t quite a promise to accompany him, but Azariah felt confident that when the time came, and the decision must be made, his brother would make the right call. He smoothed out his robes and let the excitement of the task soothe his bruised ego. No matter how well he understood Judarius’s frustrations, it was still insulting to have him raise his hand in violence against him. Even if he planned to abdicate his throne, he was still King, and would be until the portal tore open before him.
“Be quiet and observe,” he said, doing his best to push away all those distracting thoughts. “This will take tremendous effort, and I cannot afford to fail.”
He stood before the circle of stones, the spellbook resting on a wooden lectern so he might read with his hands free. In many ways, the principle was the same as opening the portal to Veldaren. What changed was the sense of distance, shifting to a scale that was difficult for mortal minds to comprehend. But that distance was irrelevant when ripped apart by magic. He could do this. Others had done so before, after all. Still, he looked over the words in Velixar’s spellbook and rehearsed them a dozen more times while building up the nerve.
“Can you truly open a link between worlds?” Judarius asked, watching from beside the door to the tower, having positioned himself there to avoid getting in the way. “It took the might of Qurrah, Tessanna, and Velixar to open the last one. I question whether you possess the power of a daughter of balance, let alone those three combined.”
“That was a portal meant to draw in armies,” Azariah said. “Not escape a chosen few.”
No more stalling. No more dwelling upon the miserable land of Dezrel. Azariah lifted his arms, called upon every shred of his divine power, and read aloud the words. The spell was over fifty lines long, Velixar’s handwriting even tighter than normal to ensure it all fit on one page. At the start, it seemed his nerves were undeserving. The words flowed easily despite the difficulty of pronunciation and variance in pitch. It was just a spell, the fallen told himself, once everything was boiled down to its barest essence. Just a spell like any other spell.
The slightest tear split the air before him, wriggling like a hair lodged in his retina, and then the true cost of the spell struck him. The needed power ripped forth from his chest with savage fury. He gasped as his mind threatened to turn white. Every single part
of his essence flowed out of him like a broken dam. The portal, it needed so much more than he felt he could give. The strain, it was unbearable.
No, his mind screamed. He would endure. He would survive. He was stronger than Tessanna, stronger than the wretched half-orc betrayer. His vision faded, the colors turning into a strange mixture of reds, purples, and yellows. Yet despite the distortion, the spellbook blazed upon the lectern as if wreathed in flame. Wind howled, flickering out the candles and swirling in a great funnel that scattered books and rattled Judarius’s armor.
He should have done this in Veldaren, he realized far too late. He should have done this where the wall of the world was at its thinnest. He should have enlisted the aid of other angels who had begun learning magic alongside him. His pride...his arrogance...
Azariah was doomed.
There was no stopping the spell. The words bellowed out of him with no need for the spellbook’s guidance. The storm grew, blasting apart bookshelves, scattering papers, and making a mockery of the stone walls. The floor rumbled beneath him, as if the portal would bring the entire tower crashing down with its unleashed fury.
“Brother!” Judarius cried, his voice sounding distant. “You must stop this! Halt it now, before we perish!”
But Azariah couldn’t halt it. Nothing could. His mind flailed as if pulled by wild horses. Pride had convinced him of his inevitable success, but that pride shattered beneath fear and helplessness. Azariah tried to say goodbye to his brother, to say anything other than scream. He failed.
“Damn it all, I said enough!” Judarius screamed. With an arm up to protect his face from the blinding light of the uneven portal, he barreled straight into Azariah with his shoulder. The impact sent Azariah flying, shock ending the flow of words from his tongue.
Yet it was not the end. His momentum sent him tumbling into the incomplete portal. A sensation like blunt razors scraped across every inch of his skin. He felt himself falling, falling, and then all the world turned black.
This was not death, for Azariah had experienced its sting before. The cosmos swirled about him, colors slowly growing amid the empty. A cloud of violet. A crimson wisp of smoke. Below him, perhaps hundreds of miles, perhaps only a single foot, he saw a stretch of grass disconnected from all realities. Fifteen blades growing from a little patch of dirt, an island of color amidst a yawning black abyss. He was not in water, yet he floated in place, somewhere within the deep depths of nothing.
Where am I?
The moment he thought those words, color exploded about him, the black canvas painted by an invisible brush greater than the hand of a god. His confusion was given material form, and he saw himself, not once, not twice, but a thousand versions standing in a small patch of light enveloped by darkness. They surrounded him on all sides, like frozen drops of rain amid a downpour.
And then he understood, and the knowledge terrified him.
Azariah was lost amid the Weave, the very essence of magic that composed Celestia, and perhaps many other gods and goddesses throughout the countless worlds of the stars. His physical body, assuming he still occupied his physical body, was in a realm he’d not dared enter even during his time in the Golden Eternity.
At the remembrance of the Golden Eternity, the world about him changed again. He saw verdant hills beneath a crystalline sky. He felt the peaceful calm of the land, then the horror of it being stripped from him. In his sudden torment, the sky turned red. Blood fell like rain upon the grasslands, which shriveled black and died. It was a warning to the reality of this place, of how thought itself could be made manifest. The words spoken on the material plane of existence merely tapped into this power, giving form to the formless to create fire or summon lightning with a flick of a wrist.
Azariah? his brother’s voice echoed across the void. He was still nearby, in the castle tower, calling out to him. Can you hear me?
Hear? asked a crystalline, feminine voice. It shimmered through the expanse. Its every word made the colors vibrate and dance. The fire and destruction of the Golden Eternity faded away, to be replaced with a rainbow of infinite length that curled and looped into eternity. Nothing shall make the closed mind hear.
Azariah’s fear heightened tenfold. There could only be one entity speaking to him now. The divine creator of the Weave. The elven goddess, Celestia. This must be her domain, and it must be her voice. Would she cast him aside? Destroy him with a thought, as she most certainly could in this floating expanse of magic and chaos?
“Closed?” he called out to the unseen goddess. “Closed, though I see clearly the purpose of all the gods? Blind, for peeling back the false layers of dogma to see your true nature?”
The rainbow tightened about him, its colors bleeding so that the green and blues were bathed with red and orange.
Who are you? No god. No prophet. Fallen one, wretched being, clinging to hate and lusting for violence. I mock you. I deny you. My lover has turned his back to you, and now I behold why.
The surrounding rainbow of colors rippled, long streaks of it burning with sudden fire. The goddess’ rage and contempt were shaping the Weave. Azariah felt heat on his skin, shocked at how fiercely it burned.
“I am a king!” he screamed to the infinite. Flames sparked, danced, and died across his robe. “No living being bears my wisdom, my power, or my righteous purpose. Who else alive deserves to sit upon a throne? Who would you put above my knowledge? My claim must be honored, goddess. It must be treasured. Do not deny me my crown!”
Crown? purred that mysterious voice. Here is your crown. Every crown. In every realm.
Darkness consumed the rainbow of color. Heat died, becoming cold frost that swirled unseen through the black. In the distance, he heard a sound like breaking glass, and it marked a sudden bloom of light. An image appeared before Azariah, that of his own reflection. He gazed upon it with such clarity that his mind ached. The reflection split, first once, then twice, then a thousand times, until a seemingly infinite array of reflections filled the space before him once more. He witnessed them like little mirrors, images of himself, locked in a moment of time.
In some he knelt. Others he crawled. In some he bled from a wound in his neck, another from a gash in his side. Sometimes he stood outside the Mordeina castle, other times in the room with his failed portal.
In all of them, he died. In all of them, the Godslayer, Harruq Tun, killed him.
“Let me out!” he screamed. His voice felt so meager and pathetic in this magical space. The Weave, it mocked him, his fate, his purported ‘destiny’. A million times over, the half-orc stood over his body, Salvation and Condemnation dripping with his divine blood. What did it matter if he escaped the Weave, the reflections seemed to ask. Why live, if that fate ultimately awaited him?
But this was a realm of magic, the realm of magic, which meant it still followed rules. The words flowed from his tongue, and he focused on a specific location. It couldn’t be far, after all. Part of him was certain he had never left the tower. The magical incantation for a portal finished, he lifted his arms and screamed out the final words. The darkness parted, and in clear blue light he saw his own body lying unconscious on the floor. Judarius knelt over him, cradling him in his arms.
Azariah didn’t think. He didn’t hesitate. He leapt straight on through, felt himself rising, felt his limbs growing cold and his face warm with sudden fever...
“Azariah? Azariah, my brother, please say something.”
He pulled himself free of Judarius’s arms, gulping in air as if he’d been drowning. Sweat clung to his neck and face. Where the portal had meant to be in the room was now a deep crack cut into the stone floor. Nothing else remained of the great magic storm but for the mess of scattered shelves and papers.
“You’re alive,” Judarius said. “The magic, I thought it took you from me.”
“I saw,” Azariah said, ignoring his brother’s concerns. His sanity felt so close to breaking, so very close. “I saw, I saw
, I saw...”
“Saw what?” a baffled Judarius asked.
“My deaths,” he said. “Every death. Every murder. One hand, all at one hand.”
“What are you rambling about? I don’t understand.”
But Azariah understood. There was no possible misinterpretation. A thousand lifetimes. A thousand outcomes, yet his doom had been singular. It was a cruel jest, but perhaps it might serve a purpose. He spoke his lone hope, gave voice to the words so that he would remember them as his vision darkened and he felt himself slipping away into a much-needed slumber.
So long as the Godslayer lived, he himself would not. There was no alternative.
“Harruq Tun must die.”
7
Deathmask quietly slipped into the flow of people heading east, Veliana at his heels. Curiosity kept him moving despite the risk of traveling in broad daylight. Fallen angels had circled overhead for the past ten minutes, demanding attendance for some balefully important event, and they guided people toward a common destination with short barks and points. Deathmask and Veliana traveled without mask or guise, lest they inadvertently draw attention to themselves.
What maniacal nonsense have the fallen cooked up this time? Deathmask wondered.
The gathering was in an ancient open-air theater, its curved space surrounded with wood walls and sporting low, flat benches of stained pine. The stone stage, if Deathmask remembered correctly, had been built by Ashhur himself all those hundreds of years ago when he still walked the land. To enter the theater through either of its two enormous doorways, they had to pass through lines of undead watchers standing perfectly still. Once through that rotten barricade, Deathmask found himself blessed with the sight of three fallen waiting on the center stage, that number swelling to six as time passed and the streams of people trickled in.
Deathmask and Veliana positioned themselves at the farthest edges of the crowd in case they were recognized and needed a hasty escape. The few people nearby gave them only cursory glances, their attention locked on the theater stage. Constant murmurs soaked the crowd, only slightly diminishing when the center angel on the stage stepped forward to begin whatever ceremony was to take place. His armor was smooth and finely polished, yet instead of reflecting sunlight off it in a blinding radiance, it seemed to soak it all in, appearing shadowed and gray even in the bright light.
The King of the Fallen Page 8
