by Will Wight
He stands before the infinite shadow that is Urg’naut. The embodiment of death and absence. A wave of power intends to erase him from existence.
But his armor, the armor that has faced down each of the Great Elders, flows with his Intent. He does not intend to be erased.
For he is the Emperor, and his will is law.
Calder’s mind went from chaos to order in an instant.
His eyes opened and he found himself on the floor, three others discussing him by the light of a dying match.
They did not feel familiar to him. Even his own name sounded wrong in his head.
He smelled an old enemy in the air.
Mentally, he tapped into the crown contained in the pocket of his armor. It provided another source of his Intent, clarifying his thoughts.
Calder reached out and took the matchstick from Foster’s hand. He lifted it in two fingers and felt the faint Intent within. No one had invested much while making it. Even Foster hadn’t been thinking about the match while lighting it.
So Calder invested it now.
Give me light, he commanded.
The fire bloomed into a blaze that should have consumed the stick immediately. The orange light pressed against the darkness and pushed it back, lighting the area like a torch at midnight.
Andel leaned closer to Calder, gripping his White Sun medallion. “Captain?”
Calder handed the match back to Foster, then reached behind the gunner and into his pack. From it he pulled the final piece of armor: his helmet. The most difficult piece to craft; the one that had required the most research in Ach’magut’s library and the most inventive Reading.
With the helmet dangling from his fingers, Calder turned to walk away. “Follow,” he ordered.
He didn’t need to look back to know they would obey.
They emerged from the ruined fort onto a strange world: darkness hung heavy over everything, the sky completely black, but it was still possible to dimly see, as though the world were lit by a distant gray moon. The darkness whispered and slithered around them…
But when the tendrils of Urg’naut touched him, they flinched back.
As they descended from the ruins, he saw The Testament in the dull light. A chunk of wall leaned precariously over the entrance to the harbor.
That couldn’t be allowed. It would threaten the ship as they left.
Calder reached his Intent down, into the ground, investing the cliff.
Do not let go.
The entire island shook as earth moved out from the cliffside like fingers, gripping the slabs of stone tightly. Grass grew among the rocks, binding them together. The wall was lifted up slightly, and the ground echoed its resolve to maintain its hold.
He braced himself for Reader burn. He had never used active Reading before, but he was sure it would exhaust him. It was surprisingly easy. Why couldn’t everyone do this?
No, he had invented active Reading. It was easy because he had centuries of practice.
Reader burn? He hadn’t experienced such a weakness since he was practically a child. Reader burn occurred when one’s ability as a Reader outpaced one’s constitution. With its recent alchemical enhancements, this body was sturdy enough.
He walked down to the ship, not ignoring the others so much as he was focused on sensing his surroundings. Urg’naut was facing down Jorin and a handful of others, but the Regent was on his last legs.
From miles away, Calder felt blood trickle from Jorin’s nose. The Regent’s mind lost focus. His Intent ran out, and his eyes went slack. The nameless sword that had devoured so many curses spilled from Jorin’s hand, and he fell to the ground.
In the body of a man, Urg’naut stood over him. He wore silver armor and his face was a black sun, an endless hole, a radiating hunger that yearned to devour all.
The Great Elder sensed Calder’s attention, and the empty face turned toward him.
Calder focused on Jorin, communicating a simple message with his Intent.
Hold on.
Jorin felt him…but so did Urg’naut. The shadows around the island off the shores of the Capital rolled, and they all whispered with one voice: “You were gone.”
Petal, Andel, and Foster heard the voice. They stopped on the ramp headed up onto The Testament, gripping lights and weapons.
“Stay on the ship,” Calder told them. “He watches.”
Miles away, Urg’naut raised one hand of his new body.
Calder slid the helmet over his face. The glass visor did not inhibit his vision.
“You became nothing,” the Elder whispered. “But they were not thorough. Pieces of you remain. I am sorry I did not correct this mistake sooner.”
“Be gone from my Empire,” Calder said. He raised his own hand to match the Creeping Shadow’s.
For the first time since the Elder War, the full power of a Great Elder lashed out into reality.
Everything between Urg’naut’s palm and Calder’s ceased to exist.
Closer to the Great Elder’s hand, the effect was thinner. A line about the width of a man’s arm was erased from the houses in front of him. It extended down into the ground, a thin canyon revealing layers of cobble, stone, and pipes as though Urg’naut had cut through a cake.
The effect spread wider as it moved outward. Entire homes and the foundations beneath them were erased, scooping out the Capital like a giant shovel.
At the edge of the land, whole city blocks—and all their residents—vanished in a blink.
Water of the Aion Sea and most of the seafloor disappeared, leaving bare stone beneath. For an instant, water hung like walls in a wedge pointing back toward Urg’naut.
The entire half of the island in front of Calder was gone. He now stood on a cliff.
And the Great Elder’s Intent crashed into his hand like a rampaging bull slamming into a single solid post.
He met it with his own will and the power of his armor, and the wall of nonexistence that threatened the entire island was held back.
That invisible wall was marked by a line of water in the harbor. On one side, The Testament floated. Only yards away, the water was completely gone. Water drained into nothingness, creating a current. The Lyathatan strained to pull it away, but the ship was already listing toward the invisible wall that devoured the ocean.
Calder couldn’t help any more than he already was.
In his current state, resisting Urg’naut was all he could take. Sweat squeezed from his pores and his entire body braced itself as he pushed back against the attack. He raised his left hand, focusing with all his power.
In moments, he realized he had reached the end.
The thin veneer of Intent he had taken from the Emperor was not deep. It was draining away, leaving pure Calder beneath.
And he was still terrified. Haunted by the absolute void he had witnessed when he glimpsed Urg’naut.
As Calder came back to the awareness of his own body, he took on more of the burden of resisting the Creeping Shadow’s attack. And he began to shake in fear.
How could he stand up to a Great Elder?
He slid back several feet as the wave of power consumed another pace of ground.
As he pulled his own thoughts back together and the Emperor’s dissipated, Calder could now separate the foreign Intent from his own.
From the Emperor, he sensed boundless resolve. It was the same self-confidence and self-righteousness that had alienated the Emperor from his merely human subjects, but it was still an iron will forged in war. His confidence came from testing himself against every Great Elder and coming out the victor.
While the taste of that conviction still lingered, Calder made it his own.
Urg’naut might beat him, but not by frightening him to death. If he died, he would die on his feet having squeezed every drop of Intent out of himself.
His breaths were coming faster and faster as he resisted the invisible wave of power. His breaths echoed in the Emperor’s helmet, so he tore it off. He could no
longer see Urg’naut’s host, just a wedge of bare stone that had once been part of the Capital and a large stretch of ocean.
But he faced that direction and screamed, forcing the last shred of resolve out of his body. At his fingertips, he focused every fiber of his being.
Stop.
When the Great Elder’s attack finally vanished, popping like a soap bubble, Calder almost stumbled off the newly formed cliff.
He staggered backwards, breathing heavily, trying not to drop to the ground. The remainder of the island rumbled and shook, and the air was filled with the rushing sound of a thousand waterfalls at once as the ocean crashed back into place.
The next strike will come soon. Where is my daughter? She can…
Calder shook himself. He didn’t have a daughter. His own identity was creaking like a mast in high wind.
When he had a moment, he needed to spend some time sorting through his own thoughts. He had taken a mental beating today, and he was afraid some of his scars might be here to stay.
He staggered away, back up the hill, looking for the Optasia statue.
He couldn’t sense out to the Capital anymore, and he needed some way to check on Urg’naut. Although he hadn’t used the statue when he reached so far a moment ago, had he?
Which meant it was a question of skill, not power. Yes, he remembered inventing that trick, the same technique that had formed the basis of the Optasia in the first place…
Calder slapped himself.
Shuffles fluttered up and slapped him on the other cheek.
Calder urgently gestured the Bellowing Horror away. “Not now! I’m trying to save us all.”
“NOT,” Shuffles shouted.
Darkness gathered behind them, and Calder turned over his shoulder to look. Urg’naut had withdrawn his shadow into a twisting column over the city. It lifted until there was a black tower connecting the ground and the sky.
More specifically, the crack in the sky.
Calder ran.
When he started, he quickly realized that he hadn’t run flat-out since Petal had enhanced his body. He moved over the crumbling terrain like the wind, vaulting over half-destroyed towers and bursting through collapsed doors. He arrived at the statue’s chamber in seconds.
Half of it was open to the sky, and the head of the Emperor was gone.
He stared blankly at the space where the statue had been. Had Urg’naut’s attack destroyed it, or had it slid off the cliff when half the island had been erased?
Calder walked to the edge and looked down, but the ocean was frothing and churning as it surged to fill in the empty space that the Creeping Shadow had created. He couldn’t see a thing.
Despair gripped his heart as he looked up at the tower of shadow reaching into the sky. Now he couldn’t stop Urg’naut. If the Great Elder decided to unleash one more wave of power like he had a moment before, he could destroy the rest of the Capital.
Like everyone else for miles, Calder was reduced to standing and staring as Urg’naut turned all his attention against the ceiling of the world.
Without the Optasia, Calder was an easy target. All it would take was one more moment of effort from the Great Elder to destroy him and the entire island. But without Calder as a distraction, Urg’naut could focus on breaking free.
So Calder watched with dread as the thin tower of darkness pulsed with power. The sky quaked under the blow.
And more cracks spidered out from the first.
The Elder had withdrawn his shadow from most of the world, focusing his power, so the sky was blue once more instead of black or gray. But now Calder—and everyone in the Aurelian Heartland—was looking up at the inside of an azure bowl that was starting to break.
Through the holes in reality, he glimpsed the void.
Ozriel’s words rang in his memory. “But if they escape, I’ll have to do my job.”
Another pulse of power broke the sky further. This time, some shards of blue dissolved into darkness. Some of the slowly spinning fireflies that dotted the void were visible inside, like restless stars in many colors.
Calder felt a resurgence of the despair that had come when he’d looked directly at Urg’naut: an empty, hopeless dread that the end was coming and there was nothing to do to stop it.
He had failed. Every living human on the planet had failed.
What good was the throne now?
A third surge of dark power. The sky shattered.
Shards of blue fell like rain, dissolving long before they hit the ground. A few pieces still hung above, chunks of sapphire stained glass, and clouds still drifted below undisturbed.
But those were only a few remnants of their former world. The void was their sky now.
The infinite darkness could almost fool him into thinking it was the night sky, but these lights could not be mistaken for natural stars. They shone in fuzzy balls of red, green, purple, and they twisted in lazy orbits. They were of many sizes; some only pinpricks, while two or three looked about the size of the moon.
And only now could Calder see them clearly.
Those lights weren’t just stars. Nor were they planets.
A yellow light peeled back an eyelid, glancing into their world in the few seconds before it spun out of view. One of the green lights was a shining emerald tree locked into a transparent glass globe. From the shape of an orange spot, Calder suspected that it was a blazing flame carried on the back of a beetle that swam through the infinite black.
It was madness and darkness. The home of the Elders.
And now Urg’naut was free.
But there was one more thing in the void, and Calder’s eyes were drawn magnetically toward it.
A disc of pure, bright azure blue shone down like the sun. It wasn’t a remaining piece of sky; it was too vivid for that, too many different shades of blue layered on one another.
A man stood between that disc and the planet below. He was so far away that Calder shouldn’t have been able to make him out, but somehow he had no trouble. As though distance had less meaning than it once did.
His white hair hung behind him, his armor glistened black, and he carried a dark scythe the size of his body in a one-handed grip. With a cold expression, he looked down on the newcomer that rose from Calder’s world.
Dressed in silvered steel, the faceless man drifted into the void. Now that he was free, Urg’naut’s shadow stretched far beyond his host body. It blocked out the colored lights behind him, so Calder could make out the shadow’s shape only in silhouette, but it resembled a seething nest of twisting serpents.
Urg’naut and Ozriel regarded one another for a moment across the abyss.
Then the entire sky flashed.
Calder screamed and looked away, blinded for an instant. He saw it as a burst of white light, but he was certain that was only because his eyes couldn’t comprehend the battle between two celestial beings.
He blinked his vision clear, hurrying back down to The Testament. Every few seconds, light flashed from overhead like a thousand lightning bolts at once. Instead of thunder, he heard crackling, like a forest of trees burning. The air buzzed and trembled with each blow.
The ground shuddered and pitched like the sea in storm as the world ended around him.
He filled himself with a goal: he had to get to his ship.
He could see only one hope. They needed to get the two remaining Regents together with as many Guild Heads as they could call. Together, they needed to keep the remaining Great Elders sealed.
He knew where to find Loreli, but she was at least a day away on the Aion Sea.
Fortunately, he had the fastest ship in the world.
Just as he thought so, he reached the end of the path heading down to the harbor and saw The Testament running away.
Beneath the void-blackened sky, the Lyathatan waded through the ocean. It dragged the ship behind as though an afterthought, leaving the vessel to rock chaotically in the water like a toy.
The Elder had decided its cont
ract was up.
Calder’s heart fell lower than he thought possible. How could things get worse after the world crumbled to pieces?
‘When all is lost, that is the worst time to give up. After all, you have nothing left to lose.’
Loreli, the original strategist.
He slid his helmet back onto his head. He adjusted the saber in his sheath and patted Shuffles lightly. The Bellowing Horror preened and chuckled as though it were having the time of its life.
Calder sprinted for the edge of the cliff.
The Lyathatan had just cleared the harbor, so it wasn’t out of reach of the island yet. Calder pushed his new body to its limits and found the world blurring past. As the Great Elder and the divine executioner clashed overhead, Calder ran.
When he reached the crumbled section of wall still gripped by the cliff, he leaped onto the blocks of masonry without slowing down. The wall tilted over the ocean, and he ran out to the very edge.
Whatever the merits of the Emperor’s armor, it wasn’t meant for swimming. If he landed in the water, he would die to mundane drowning before the Elders or Gardeners could get to him.
In the split second before he kicked off from the edge of the cliff, Calder looked beneath him and saw that he was directly over the stretch of ocean between the Lyathatan and the ship.
He adjusted his angle the last moment, kicking off. His sword blazed orange in the unsteady light.
“FIRE!” he shouted in midair.
“FIRE,” Shuffles repeated. The Horror matched his speed, flapping its stubby wings as they fell together.
Foster stood behind a cannon, shooting-glasses perched on his nose. His gray hair and beard were soaked with spray from the churning ocean around him.
The Lyathatan heard Calder and turned to look over its blue-green shoulder. The row of three black eyes on one side of its head regarded the falling Calder, and it bared fishy lips to reveal the teeth of a shark. Spines rose from the Lyathatan’s back as it raised its fin, and it lifted one hand to seize Calder.
The cannon blast happened to coincide with another blow from the battle overhead, so the detonation came at the same time as the world was filled with the crackling sound of dead twigs.
