Ravencaller

by David Dalglish

  “You know why,” Janus said. “Can we talk here, or would you rather I come inside?”

  In answer, Viciss turned and passed between the teeth. Janus followed.

  The roof of the mouth was dozens of feet above his head, and though it was rimmed similarly to the mouth of a lizard, it was built of gray stone instead of flesh. Steel beams poked through near the jawline like manufactured bones. Janus paused at one of the teeth, admiring its obsidian structure. A normal human or dragon-sired would just see a tooth, but Janus detected its makeup at a cellular level. The tooth was built of countless sheets of obsidian layered one atop the other, so equally sized that they differed by only a few cells in length. This made the sides of the tooth almost mesmerizing in their smoothness, with not a single flaw to be found.

  It’d take him years to craft one tooth with similar perfection. To build a crawling, living entity like the mountain, along with its many chambers of creation? Even with his seemingly infinite lifespan, it’d feel like ages for Janus to finish, yet it was believed that Viciss had created the physical shell for his demigod body in the span of a single day. That the dragons could be so powerful, and yet still subservient to the Goddesses, was both humbling and maddening.

  The tongue they walked on was made of a flesh-like substance, but it was not truly alive for no blood flowed within it. Instead it moved powered by gears, wires, and an oily black liquid filled with strong enough magic Janus could see its glow through the tubes. Viciss halted in the very center of this three-hundred-foot-long tongue and gestured toward his avatar.

  “How goes your art?” the dragon asked.

  “Uninspired,” Janus said. “Creating without passion leads to mundane objects and forced canvases. You robbed me of a nobler path. Why would you expect my hands to mold anything of use?”

  “I wished for you to discover a purpose beyond killing and hatred. What could be more noble?”

  “Actually changing the world. Creating art out of desire instead of obligation. You clamped chains on my wrists and then demanded I learn to be free. The only thing I have learned is my hatred toward such limitations.”

  The black-water starscape that was Viciss shook his head.

  “You find pleasure in killing humanity, but there will come a day when your hatred burns for nothing. When our races live together in peace, you will have no purpose for your existence. Your inspiration is a foul well running dry. Many times I have regretted making you, Janus. Yet again I wonder at your failings, and how much fault in them I bear.”

  Janus ground his teeth together, changing them from opal to bronze, bronze to silver, and then back to opal. The scraping sound of metal helped calm his boiling insides.

  “When our races live together in peace,” he said. He pulled Tesmarie’s coffin out from underneath his arm and offered it to the demigod. “Here is your peace, dragon. Take her. She is one of your children, yet she was slain and buried at the foot of the felled hive-tree. That’s what awaits those who coexist with humanity.”

  When Viciss did not accept the coffin, Janus threw it to the floor. It shattered, spilling Tesmarie’s broken body upon the tongue.

  “We die, and you do nothing,” he seethed. “You wanted me to let Adria accept her newfound role on her own, but that role will never be what you desire. The blood of your children bathes her hands.”

  “The blood of those who refuse my wisdom,” Viciss said. He knelt before the faery’s corpse and scooped her into his hands. “They call themselves forgotten, but those children are merely disobedient. I will not mourn their loss, only their foolish despair in thinking I have abandoned them because I did not grant their every request.”

  “Yes, such a bold request they have,” Janus said. “A place to call home. The audacity! But what of Tesmarie? She lived alongside the humans, just as you have always dreamed. She paid for it with her life, at the cruelty of the savior you created. Unmake me if you wish, but I speak the truth. Adria is a horrifying threat we cannot face, a weapon we cannot defeat, and one you freely put into human hands. Not only that, but you would create more like her! You’re not saving humanity, Viciss. You’re engineering our own extinction.”

  The teeth rumbled together, just the tiniest clack, but it was louder than a thunderclap.

  “Adria’s failings do not change the need for Chainbreakers,” Viciss said. “Until humanity can call down souls from the Aether, they will remain forever chained to the Goddesses’ whims.”

  “Then let them stay chained,” Janus said. “Why coddle them? Why try to save them? These humans have never shown you love. They’re flawed failures elevated far beyond their worthiness, the runt of a litter kept strong solely by the mother’s intervention. Our backs are to a wall, Viciss. At least let us die fighting a war instead of handing over the keys to our own annihilation.”

  Again the teeth clacked together. Janus winced against the noise, fearing he’d gone too far. A long moment passed before Viciss spoke, for his attention was solely on the dead faery he held.

  “The Sisters view the Cradle as little more than a garden,” he said. “They draw seeds from the great Aether river beyond the stars and plunge them into tiny, frail sacks of meat and fluid. They nurture them with crops and beasts of slaughter, bid them to bloom through love and life, and then upon their deathbeds they come for the harvest. The soul is the entire reason for existence, and it is the Sisters’ granting of that gift why they believe themselves worthy of worship from their confused, pitiful humans.”

  “And how are we any better?” Janus asked. “You hold a corpse, not a life. The humans, their memories and their emotions, will live on. What of us? What reason do we exist? We are destined to rot and be forgotten. You built humanity a Chainbreaker. Why not deliver one to us instead?”

  “Because I remember you,” Viciss said. The entire mountain shook with his sudden rage. “You wretched avatar of mine, you would curse me for the deaths of my children but then mock their very existence? There is no reason for a Chainbreaker for the dragon-sired. They bear no need for a soul, Janus. I am their soul.”

  Tesmarie’s physical body disintegrated in Viciss’s left hand. With his right he grabbed Janus’s face and flooded him with his power. Janus felt his eyes shifting, changing, all amid searing pain. When the dragon withdrew, the world shimmered in ways Janus had never before seen. He saw the distant twinkle of human souls, like stars crashed down upon the Cradle. He saw the gleaming sun that was Adria. Amid it he saw dark shadows, such as the cloud hovering before him where Tesmarie once existed. It sparkled like shattered glass, yet pulsed deeper than the night. Within that diamond darkness were the essence and memories of the dead faery.

  “Upon the breaking of eternity I will voyage beyond the stars,” Viciss said. “I will pierce the void, and I will float among the Aether. My children are not forgotten. They are not abandoned. They are eternal, and it was that eternal power that cast off the Sisters’ hold upon us. We will not be denied.”

  Tesmarie’s essence floated upward, to the grand peaks of the crawling mountain. Janus watched its ascension, and he crumpled to his knees upon sight of those peaks. They weren’t rock, nor were they hollow. The physical manifestation of the Dragon of Change was more than an intimidating presence from within which the demigod built his creations. Within those peaks swirled deep pillars of darkness so deep and yawning, his mind threatened to break trying to comprehend the distance. In them shimmered power capable of shaping worlds. What was once Tesmarie merged within it, a drop of water poured back into a great lake from which it had once flowed. With each moment Janus looked upon it, he felt ancient memories stir within him, as if his very mind wished to fall deep inside and never leave.

  “No more,” Janus said. He tore his eyes away. “Why give me such a curse?”

  “The Chainbreaker bears the same curse,” Viciss said. “She, too, sees the realm of souls for what it is. Perhaps now you will better understand her burdens.”

  “I don’t want underst
anding,” Janus said. “I want to be unleashed. Humanity is a lost cause. Surely I cannot be the only one who sees that.”

  Viciss extended his hand, revoking his gift of soul-sight. Janus bowed his head in thanks. Better the darkness than to go blind before the overwhelming truth.

  “You hold no hope for humanity, nor believe in their ability to change,” the dragon said. “But what say you, Nihil? Do you agree with my misguided avatar?”

  A shimmering distortion of light and reality approached from deep inside the throat of the mountain. Light refracted at its presence.

  “I have doubted this plan from the very start,” Nihil said. The dragon’s voice changed with every syllable, from child to adult and man to woman. Sometimes it sounded like the words were made from stones breaking together or leaves rustling through a field of grass. “We are the ones who built this world, and we are the ones who should rule it, lest we return to the glass world the Sisters first created.”

  Janus bent at the waist and pressed his face to the enormous tongue to show respect to another of the five dragons of creation. He’d met Nihil rarely, and every encounter had left him deeply unsettled.

  “But how would you establish such a rule?” Janus asked.

  “Through madness,” Viciss said.

  “My plan is not madness,” Nihil argued. “It is necessity. If the Cradle is to survive, then we must kill the Sisters.”

  Janus couldn’t believe what he heard, but he liked the sound of it. His pulse quickened, and he dared believe in a miracle.

  “Slay the Sisters?” he asked. “Is that possible?”

  “They hold forms similar to ours,” Viciss said, displeasure dripping off his every syllable. “Though considerably more powerful.”

  “Except they are weakened,” Nihil said. Its tone shifted wildly, and now it sounded like a hundred voices spoke at once, creatures of all races but of one mind. “They exhausted themselves keeping us imprisoned. In such a state they may die. First we must find them, and for that, your Chainbreaker still proves useful. She has upset the balance the Sisters so haphazardly created. It is only a matter of time before they make their presence known. And once they do…”

  Nihil smiled. Janus saw galaxies breathe and die inside the demigod’s eyes.

  “Then we end the threat of imprisonment once and for all.”

  The mountain rumbled. The Cradle trembled as its legs lifted the bulk back above the enormous cavern it’d carved.

  “I am not yet ready to abandon all hope,” Viciss said. “But it seems others have lost their faith in a future without strife. So be it. I shall remind them I am here, I bear witness, and I have not abandoned them to their suffering.”

  One moment Janus was standing inside the crawling mountain’s mouth, the next he was thousands of feet outside it, his hands now pressing into soft green grass instead of a weirdly not-flesh tongue. The dragon’s jaw dropped as its head lifted. A roar bellowed forth from the mountain’s cavernous being, more deafening than thunder and traveling for miles in all directions. Black water swelled within the back of its throat. Janus prayed the demigod would finally exterminate the human city like he should have when he’d first crawled to its doorstep.

  A torrent of black water surged into the air, and for a brief moment Janus dared believe. The water arced and then split on its descent, showing masterful control befitting the demigod who wielded it. The streams struck ground, though where, Janus could not tell. He curled into himself, hollowing his bones and growing feathers from his arms. He must witness Viciss’s wrath for himself, not be stuck outside the walls. A few beats of his newly formed wings and he soared over Londheim, his eyes enlarging into those more befitting a hawk.

  The water ceased as Janus crossed over the tall, pointed spires of the city. Viciss’s aim was squarely on Belvua and the walls surrounding it. Janus might have wished for destruction, but as he flew closer, he allowed himself to appreciate this newfound beauty.

  Hive-trees grew by the hundreds, supplanting the smooth, featureless stone walls with their arcing trunks to form the new barrier surrounding Belvua. Their living leaves swirled into the air in confusion despite it being after dark and when they should be hibernating until dawn. They lit themselves with color during their panic, so that the skies above Belvua burst with red and orange lights, so numerous the street shone as if beneath a daytime sun. Janus flew through their wonder, a smile upon his face. This was the world he yearned for, one where the few and extinct flourished. Where magical creatures stood firm against humanity, unafraid of their axes and gunfire, and met their cold stone with life and wonder. This was the world he would paint, if there were no more humans to use as his brush and palette.

  As if in response to the red and orange cloudburst, blue pillars of light shimmered into being to the northwest; they reached from ground all the way to the stars themselves. Janus slowed to a hover, his momentary pleasure replaced with unease, as long after the reaping hour hundreds of human souls streaked heavenward in a reverse rain that seemed unending.

  “Adria?” Janus asked the silence in the sky. “What have you done?”

  CHAPTER 44

  When Devin returned home, he found Jacaranda sitting in his chair by the fire. With but a single look, she knew something was amiss and hurried to him.

  “It was a trap,” he said, his voice sounding dull to his own ears. Her arms wrapped about his waist, and he pulled her close so he could feel her comforting presence against him. He kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her hair so it could ground his mind in the present. Anything to escape the horrors of the night.

  “Is everyone all right?” Jacaranda asked. The tentative way she asked, it was obvious she already knew the answer, and that it wasn’t positive.

  “Tesmarie,” he said. His mouth opened, but he couldn’t say the words. Adria killed her. It was too painful a confession. It was a barbed truth beyond what his currently exhausted mind could bear.

  “Oh, Devin,” Jacaranda whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  They held one another, and he fought off another wave of fresh tears.

  “Let’s get you something stiff to drink,” she said. “Then we’ll cuddle and talk until neither of us can keep our eyes open. How does that sound?”

  “Like better than I deserve.”

  She kissed him on the mouth, then slowly removed herself from his grasp so she could head to the kitchen. Devin turned to hang up his sword and pistol, glad to be free of them for a while.

  “Devin?” he heard Jacaranda say in shock. He carefully turned, his muscles tightening in case he needed to act.

  A woman knelt by the kitchen fireplace. Her hair was deeper than the night sky, and it lay in spools at her feet. Her dress was starlight. Her skin was the rich, comforting color of the black oaks. She lovingly placed a hand into the fire and brushed Puffy as if petting a cat. His flame made not a mark upon her fingers. When finished, she looked their way. Her eyes were solid black, and instead of irises, he saw galaxies turning.

  “Do not be alarmed,” said Lyra, Goddess of the Day. “I come only to speak.”

  Devin dropped to one knee and bowed his head. After a moment Jacaranda did likewise. His mind reeled, a thousand questions birthing and dying without a one passing his lips. He thought of the prayer he’d uttered at the felled crossroad oak, of his rage and uncertainty, and felt smothered with shame.

  “You honor us, Lyra,” he said. His tongue was so dry he barely forced out the words. “But why grace our household? What may we do in your service?”

  Lyra rose to her feet. Her starlight dress rippled from the movement, and it was like watching a starry sky in the reflection of a turbulent pond.

  “The threat of your sister must be addressed,” the Goddess said. “The dragons have disregarded sacred laws and their recklessness has broken the barrier of stars and ripped a hole in the cosmos. From this wound, the void threatens to pour forth and swallow the Cradle.”

&nbs
p; Devin stammered. How did one address a Goddess? How did one speak to the beloved being that had listened to his every prayer since he was a small child?

  “Adria, she—she’ll listen to you,” he said. “Whatever danger she represents, she can help fix it. Let us go to her, speak with her…”

  Lyra shook her head. The light of Puffy’s fire shimmered through her hair in mesmerizing waves.

  “I know where your sister is,” she said. The look she gave him churned his insides with fear. “Do not go to her.”

  “But—but why?” he dared ask.

  She gave him a look of love. She gave him a look of pity.

  “Because what you find will break you.”

  Adria led the procession through the graveyard, armed novices rushing ahead to order any lingering bystanders out from its grounds. There would be other nights for them to whisper loving words to ghosts that would not hear. Tonight, Adria had much to do.

  Such power, and yet we seem to only destroy.

  Adria wished she could dismiss those haunting words as easily as she dismissed the men and women of the graveyard. Many times in the past she had seen her brother broken spiritually, but this felt the worst. They had cried at their parents’ passing as children. They had wept together over Brittany’s grave upon her untimely death. But this time… this time the fault was her own. To have that guilt on her shoulders made her sympathy for his pain that much more unbearable.

  “The graveyard is clear,” said Mindkeeper Fiona. She’d been by her side as she resurrected the dead at the grand cathedral and had not left since. Adoration clung to her every word. “Do you know where we go?”

  Adria closed her eyes and let her consciousness softly spread as she touched the many lingering souls.

  “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  Of her group, there were five novices, two Mindkeepers, Faithkeeper Sena, and a soulless woman who was a member of Alma’s Beloved. She had not asked for them, for they had pledged loyalty the moment she ceased her prayers that morning. Whispers of her deeds had spread throughout Londheim faster than the wind. The Sacred Mother, they called her. Lyra’s Chosen, said others. The one they all agreed on was Deakon, for who else deserved the title when the vote came next month? Even Vikar Forrest and Vikar Caria acknowledged as much when they spoke with her after the chaos at the cathedral.