My heart squeezed with dread when I spotted tall buildings littering the gushing river. The water simply flowed between the buildings. As we ran downhill my perspective righted to its proper place, but it came with a price. Another wave of strange vibrations followed. My teeth chattered together forcibly. This time, I almost vomited, but I pushed past it. The kids were in my hands. Head for Kane.
"Is this really happening?" I threw my question downhill like an arrow at him, and his piercing gaze stopped me in my tracks. He lifted his hand to point behind me.
I turned to see a human family at the top of the ridge that hadn’t been there before, a slab of sidewalk resting beneath their feet. I stared at the mother and father as their hands immediately went for their children, two pre-teens clutching grocery bags with tears streaming down their faces. I could hear Kane's thundering steps behind me. The shock of the nuclear family in the midst of the Immortal Plane made me lose my grip on Chipper.
He floated forward like the ghostly creature he was. "Don't worry. Meld happening. Don't worry." He repeated it over and over, trying to comfort the other children. I sucked in an anxious breath, watching the family clutch one another in horror. The father extended his hand, as if to push us all back. Lightning and thunder interlaced above us all for a moment, casting sickly illumination over the scene. It looked like something straight out of a horror movie. The world groaned as it shifted beneath me. The sidewalk crumbled under the family. They scrambled backward like startled rabbits into a cluster of buildings that resembled the beginnings of a neighborhood.
A warm hand clamped down on my shoulder.
"Roxy," Kane breathed, and pulled me around to face him. I searched his face and brought up my hand to tap his sharp cheekbone.
He grunted. "What are you doing?" He was stupidly handsome, even in the middle of the apocalypse, but I needed to know if he was real.
"Is that you?" I demanded.
"Of course it's me." He grabbed my hand. The shock of his touch sent sparks down my arm. Oh, it was him all right. I recognized that grip from grappling and more.
"The world is ending," I whispered. "This can't be happening."
He rested both hands on my shoulders. "It is. I see it too. It's happening."
31
Lyra
I'd either gone blind, or the tear had snuffed out all the light. My head swam. Faintly, I heard Dorian calling my name.
Colors came back to my vision first, but I couldn't trust them, because I saw splashes of unbelievable green pine trees. Impossible. The treetops swayed in the corner of my eye as I heard the whistle of wind around us. When I looked up, I saw green mountains mixing with black rock. The sky was not gone, but Drigar was upside down. I smelled the pines in the air. Lighting cracked overhead—or underneath—and suddenly, I was right side up. After the Higher Plane, I never thought I’d have to experience something like this again. My arms dug into Dorian's side. I hadn't meant to squeeze the life out of him.
I loosened my grip. Drigar let out a frantic squawk, but he held steady. A ringing sound filled my ear with splitting pain. I placed a hand against my pounding head. The meld. My skin shivered as an unnatural breeze passed over me. Gone were the pines and the faint hint of the sea, replaced by brilliant clouds from a mesmerizing sunset. They were oddly beautiful against the ugly black mountains.
The redbill that Laini and Juneau were on began to screech. I heard Laini cursing over the wind. Confusion rocketed through our group as suddenly, the redbills rioted with ferocious shrieks. They careened toward the ground. I circled my arms back around Dorian as he tried to calm Drigar, but he could do nothing to stop the primal panic in his faithful bird.
Fear gripped me as we dropped. A gorgeous green mountain chain snaked through the black mountains we'd been chasing. I couldn't believe my eyes at the sight of power lines winding between the black rock mountains, rapidly approaching us as Drigar dove. Sen gave a shout of warning, but we couldn't control the bird. My body slammed into Dorian as we tangled in the lines, and then poor Drigar fell through the treetops.
Smoke filled my nostrils. My head pulsed with pain. Dorian had adjusted himself at the last moment to curl around me. Drigar managed a scrambling stop, although he’d nicked his wing in the crash landing. I jerked my head back to see Laini and Juneau stuck in the power lines. Their crash had knocked a pole down, and now angry flames licked at the trunks of the nearby pine trees. The electrical fire spread easily in the forest. I staggered over to our friends. Sen landed beside them, and Ruk quickly flung himself from her back. He was reedy in his robes, but he extended his thin arms toward the fire. The flames came to him as if he were a magnet calling metal home. He finished in moments and collapsed to the ground. He hung his head.
"Everything hurts," he croaked miserably. I rushed over to check him, but there was little I could do. Sen shifted to a humanoid form, stumbling into a half-burnt tree. The sickly expression on her face made me worry for them both.
"What the hell is happening?" I demanded, turning to see Laini gently untangling her redbill's feathers. The bird appeared to be okay but very shaken. Juneau snatched his hand back from a smoldering wire. Touching the electric current would’ve killed a human, but rulers were made of tougher stuff.
"What are these fire threads?" Juneau asked, nursing his hand. He recovered quickly enough to help Laini with the last of the wires. Their bird gave a grateful squawk.
I glanced at the ground, seeing that something more than Drigar had skidded into the forest. Inkarri and Sonia stumbled from the tree line, leaving the faint shape of the skimmer in the shadows. Inkarri glared angrily at our surroundings. Sonia grasped for an unburned tree. She pawed at it in disbelief.
This is worse than I thought. I remembered Arlonne snatching Bryce back as he almost fell from their redbill and off the cliff where the tear vanished the ground, but this was much more than that. Black immortal stone lay ahead of us, mixed in with a mountain range from the Mortal Plane.
"Is everyone okay?" Dorian asked. On that, we all agreed. The redbills and Ruk looked like they’d taken the worst of the journey. Sonia studied the trees with an analytical look. Somehow, we still need to find Alan in this mess. I scanned the landscape. Inkarri had only had a vague idea of where the underground lair was in the first place, and now, I was sure that it would be doubly hard to find in the chaos.
Ruk let out a dry, brittle sigh that sent a sickly feeling of despair into my bones.
"We failed," he muttered weakly. I stared at him in disbelief. Of all the people to break, I hadn't expected it to be him. Not after all this. He forged on. "The barriers are tearing. The loose energy is pulling the planes on top of each other." He snapped his sharp teeth and flung a hand toward the blended landscape around us.
I refused to accept failure. We had to try.
"There has to be something we can do. This isn’t over."
Ruk ran his hands over his bald head in frustration. "I'm not sure how much of my home is close to us, but it's not melded. Yet."
Dorian shot me a wary look. What were we supposed to do if the actual Gate Maker of the universe gave up? Sen took a wavering step toward Ruk.
"Calm down," she said sternly. Her scolding tone reminded me of their bristling competition when she’d volunteered to come with us. Her dreaminess was long gone. "It's just that our… senses are overwhelmed right now. The meld isn’t complete." She rubbed a hand over her tired face. Her furrowed brow belied her spoken confidence. Her aura of power appeared subdued. This might have been the first time something had ever hurt her. She stood next to Ruk but said nothing more as he collected himself.
If we were failing, then we needed to be doing it while trying everything we could. Zach's lifeless body flashed before my eyes, and I sucked in a sharp breath, setting the image aside with great deliberation. I had to concentrate on the world around me.
Laini stroked the ruffled feathers of her redbill. Juneau nursed his recovering arm as he glanced around with
wonder. As an Immortal, this was his first “trip” to the Mortal Plane, and for a collector of rare objects, it had to be fascinating in spite of the circumstances. He and Inkarri, as rulers, appeared to be okay. Their movements were slower, but the effect wasn’t as debilitating as the first time we brought Inkarri into the Mortal Plane.
“We’re close to failure,” Ruk said finally. His correction came far too late to soothe my nerves. He ignored Sen’s judging gaze. “There are trees lodged sideways. What am I supposed to say?”
I followed his gaze. Indeed, deeper in the forest, the trees were horizontal in several places. It made my head spin.
“So, that’s not normal,” Juneau muttered. Laini leaned against him, a fleeting smile crossing her face.
This was like a bad dream. I resisted the urge to bury my face in my hands. The universe would have to crush me before it stopped me, but it sure was trying its best to do so. I turned away from the group, unwilling to let them see me break. I couldn't handle this right now. This wasn't fair. The universe had acted like it was on my side in the Higher Plane. Were we truly helpless to stop this reckoning?
I forced myself to look at the landscape again. If we scraped together a plan, then we had a better chance than nothing. The first step of planning was no different, even in an apocalypse. We had to find out where we were, even while the crushing threat of the meld pressed down on our backs.
A herd of deer passed us on their escape from the madness as they darted down a well-kept trail. Their movements were frenzied, like they sensed the end coming. Okay, deer, pines, a mixture of landscapes, and a trail. We’re probably in a national park, if we’re in the United States. Although the landscape was hopelessly mixed up, I made out the sign of glacial lakes and gray stone mixed in with the evergreen trees. The jagged black mountains looked squat with the oncoming meld, like they were being squished between two plates. The contribution from the Mortal Plane made me think of Yellowstone, but it was hard to say. Gravity felt odd here. Standing felt like a chore. I understood why Ruk was still sitting on the ground. I leaned against a tree, surprised to find the bark rubbery instead of rough.
A shadowy creature darted through the forest. It was not a deer. The sight of seeing something dark and shadowy from the Immortal Plane among pine trees was only to be expected, but I hated it still. A hooting owl made me look up as it roosted on a partially destroyed powerline pole.
I saw sparkling lights above us. The soul-bright of the Immortal Plane was gone but left a faint haze of light in the sky, along with the achingly familiar Mortal Plane stars. I made out the shape of Cassiopeia, the constellation named after the mythical Greek queen. My parents took us on a stargazing trip right before my thirteenth birthday, where Zach made an improvised monologue about the queen and my mother lectured us about the importance of appreciating our world. The memory threatened to shatter my fragile calm. I bit my lip, using the pain to distract me. Large pools of oily dark matter stretched over the stars, leaving blank spots drifting through the sky.
Souls. They were among us. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw them floating in the sky high above. And that wasn’t all I noticed; the air around me was tinged blue. I sucked in a sharp gasp as a tendril of ghostly mist swirled around my feet. My hand instinctively rose to my necklace. Dorian glanced at me, surprised by the sight of something from the Higher Plane.
“I’m not doing it,” I told Dorian. Sen met my gaze with worried eyes. Energy crackled around us. Occasionally, streaks of lightning danced through the sky, illuminating our overwhelmed faces. My legs grew weaker as a wave of fuzzy sensations passed over us. The tree beneath my hand flickered away for a moment, causing me to stumble. Shadows danced around us. Sen groaned, clutching her temples.
Inkarri snarled and drove her fist into a nearby tree. It crunched unnaturally under her punch, crinkling like old paper.
“This is like nothing we’ve ever seen,” Dorian muttered. He had made his way closer to me. Even his broad shoulders had slumped in the face of the world around us, but his blue eyes focused on me. “But we can still move forward.”
A hard lump of mixed emotions collected in my throat. I couldn’t even answer him, because I was scared that I would question him. Ruk might’ve been right when he first spoke in despair. Everything we’d worked for was undone.
Failure was never supposed to be an option. I needed answers for how this had happened. Where had I gone wrong?
“Was it Alan?” I asked Inkarri. “Or had your father already set this melding in motion? The tear moved so quickly…” She shook her head and snuffed out my hopes.
“I have no idea. I don’t know what my father left in his hideaway, or if he planned everything before the trial.” She glared up at the souls drifting above our heads. “Perhaps he had something to speed up the tear, if he thought it would only affect the vampires in the mountains.”
Ruk let out a frustrated growl. “I never should’ve trusted him.”
The tree next to me flickered again. I turned away from it and leaned into Dorian, the only surface I could count on at the moment. Reshi had told us about all the revenants returning to the Immortal Plane at once. I wondered if their return had somehow managed to cause this. Could any of this madness be fixed?
Shadows gobbled up more of the evergreens in the deep part of the forest. The horizontal trees broke off at odd angles, yet the sounds never reached my ear. Souls dropped down lower and lower, until Inkarri could have touched one if she reached up. The singing bird next to us took off in flight, fleeing our area. Unsettled goosebumps erupted over my skin.
Was this… getting worse?
32
Lyra
“We have to do something,” Dorian said. The world around us was getting worse. We all knew it. I could tell, because everyone was on their feet now, watching the souls drop lower in the sky like lazy clouds. The atmosphere was heavy with tension, not just within our group. The effects of the melding planes had made the atmospheric pressure weighty. I envisioned the planes stacked one on top of the other, crushing each other.
Zach would have said something funny to break the tension. I sucked in a shallow breath to stop the despair from creeping in like a winter storm. Come on, Lyra, you can do this. Couldn’t I?
Ruk pinched the bridge of his narrow nose.
"Well, Irrikus's own daughter doesn't know what his plans were. He trusted very few people, obviously." He rubbed his temples as if his head pained him, but his voice sounded strong and steady. “Alan likely overheard him planning something, or perhaps Irrikus was careless because he considered Alan unimportant. He could've set something in place. Or, who knows? Maybe the revenants all moving at once caused a massive destabilization of dark energy." When he said the last part, another tremor shook the ground. More of the black mountains suddenly slid into view, the landscape groaning under the weight of the change. Fantastic.
"We should figure out how to move or where to go, at the very minimum," I said. "Alan's fortress should still be in these mountains somewhere.”
"This is all so unprecedented…" Sen muttered bitterly, with a shake of her head. "We'll have to get a good look, first." She looked better than before, her body no longer swaying. Without a word, she shifted to a tiny, fluttering hummingbird and shot into the air. Juneau let out an awed gasp as her blue form rocketed away from us and disappeared among the souls and stars. It was mere seconds before she darted back to join us. I raised an impressed eyebrow.
At least our arbiters are recovering. "Did you see anything?"
Sen shifted back to her humanoid form as she landed. The little frown on her usually serene face was a bad sign. "I went very high beyond your atmosphere," she said. "There's an edge to the meld, from the looks of it. It's still expanding, but the planes haven't completely collapsed. It's actually still quite a small area of your continent, thankfully. Maybe a few of your regional states. I saw the Immortal Plane stretching from the old vampire capital to Itzarriol. That’s how f
ar I saw the planes melding. We have some time—not much, but some.”
Small was good. We could work with small. I preferred a small start to the apocalypse over an immense one.
I pictured a map of the United States, trying to guess how many states the tear had swallowed up. If it started from the tear’s origin point, perhaps the meld had only affected the southern or midwestern region. "Only" was a precious understatement, but I’d thought the tear had rocketed its way around the globe already, from the sound of Ruk's dread. Reshi had said all the revenants were on the move. She said they went through the tear, but why?
Reshi. We needed to communicate with her. She’d been cut off after her warning, right before the planes started melding. I pressed on the comm, earning a light buzz in response, and tested the line for anyone. Dorian caught on to my actions and did the same. We waited for a response, but the lines were dead. The Coalition comms were far too crackly to transmit anything. When a sound did come over, it was like rocks in a tin can being shaken around. I let out a growl of frustration.
"Our connection is messed up," I reported to those who didn't have comms. "I guess it makes sense… Reshi only made these for use in the Immortal Plane." Somewhere deep in my bag I had a regular cell phone to try, and I hoped dearly that the meld hadn't zapped the battery somehow. As I dug through my bag, a voice finally broke through on the comm.
"The meld is happening," Roxy cried. "Lyra, I can see—a family. Buildings are in the river, and—Kane, what is that?"
Roxy was cut off in a terrible hiss of static that made me wince. It was so loud that everyone could hear it. My stomach dropped with despair. The meld was happening even as far north as the rulers’ dark energy farms, so Sen was right. Adrenaline rushed through my veins. My panic ripped away everything but the motivation to go, go, go.
Darklight 7: Darkfall Page 28
