by Eric Asher
“Gaia is not whole,” Alexandra said. “The innkeeper does not hold the strength of the Titan, nor does the soul in the Abyss, nor the body beneath that mansion. Your goddess has been dormant for millennia. She would not reward you for letting your coven die, Ashley. No goddess is that cruel.”
Graybeard bobbed his head. “Eh, maybe a few are.”
Alexandra scowled at the bird.
“But not yours!” the parrot squawked. “Of course, not yours.”
“I’ve taken lives,” Ashley whispered. “It all comes back to that.”
“We all have.” Alexandra kneeled in front of Ashley. “You fight for those you love. You do not kill what has not come to kill you. You do not kill what has not come to kill your family. Gaia has a great deal of blood on her hands. Every Titan does. Every god and goddess, every king and queen. You are not worth less because of it.”
“What do you want me to say?” Ashley closed her eyes.
“I want you to fight for those you love. That’s all any of us can do.”
Graybeard stared at the water witch, cocking his head from side to side. Apparently, those weren’t the words he’d been expecting to hear from the undine.
The parrot bounced up and down before speaking. “Talk to the innkeeper. She’ll set you straight. Or tell you you’re right. Either way, you’ll have answers.”
Ashley shivered, as if the very idea of speaking to any of Gaia’s forms terrified her. “What if she says I’m right?”
Graybeard hopped off Alexandra’s shoulder and bounded up the railing. “What if she says you’re not? Either way, we’re approaching Boonville. Make ready to set anchor, lads!”
Ashley took a deep breath and took the hand Alexandra offered, brushing her butt off as she stood up. The lights of the casino lit up the river and the bridge beyond. Just past that would be Rivercene, and Alexandra hoped the innkeeper would be able to talk some sense into the priestess.
CHAPTER FIVE
Elizabeth stared out across the expanse. Below them, not far from the stone village they’d walked through, waited an arena that dwarfed anything she’d ever seen in their own realm. At a minimum, she suspected four modern stadiums would fit on the relatively flat terrain at the center.
Surrounding that gray plain of stone and shattered rock rose seating that seemed as though it could house the entirety of the Saint Louis population. There were no words for it. Grand? Enormous? Everything felt inadequate for the sight that now greeted Beth.
The villagers continued down a rocky path inlaid with finely cut flagstones. It broke off into massive stairwells that could host some ten people standing shoulder to shoulder.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Sleeper asked.
Beth nodded. “So many seats. Why?”
“There were once a great many more of us in this realm. And, to be fair, there are still more than what you see in our humble village. But we are the last of what was a great city on the outskirts of the realm. It was torn down by a crawling chaos many cycles ago. The stars you see now were once obscured by marvelous towers of stone.”
Cornelius frowned and turned to Sleeper. “How long is one of your cycles? In our years?”
“It is a rough estimate, but I believe one of our cycles is near one hundred of your years.”
“What is it?” Beth asked when Cornelius grimaced.
“I wonder if that was the war of the Titans in our realm. If they’d been fighting these things before our recorded history.”
Sleeper inclined his head. “We are all one realm in many ways. And should the Eldritch prevail, no beings will remember us, for no beings will live.”
The floor of the stadium writhed, the far corner lifting up, stone growing translucent as a slithering mass pushed against it as though it was cellophane.
“The fuck is that?” Beth said.
“Your opponent.” Sleeper’s casual response caught Beth off guard. “Or perhaps I should say our opponent. This is the trial you face. Slay the Eldritch creature to complete the trial.”
“Rules?” Cornelius asked.
“Do not perish and you shall meet the sage of our village.”
Cornelius blew out a breath and then led the way down the long stairs that would take them to the floor of the coliseum.
The villagers settled into seats flanking the staircase. They didn’t spread out far, instead huddling close together as if this were more of a funeral procession. The thought made Beth’s skin crawl.
“This is the only chance you have to keep Ashley alive,” Cornelius said, jarring Beth back into the moment. “If you fail here, she’ll be lost. And you’ll have damned Damian and the rest just as surely as if you’d driven a knife into their hearts.”
Beth’s steps froze for a moment. “What the fuck, old man?”
Cornelius’s lip quirked up. “There’s my pupil.” He slid a blade free from the sheath at his waist. “Nothing is off-limits here. They’ll let us die on that ground. Don’t doubt it for a second.”
Beth glanced back to Sleeper. She didn’t think the words of the Shadowed Lands resident had been nearly so bleak as that. He’d said this was their fight, too. She didn’t think Sleeper would let them die without trying to help, and she intended to test his word on that.
Cornelius spoke again, drawing her attention to the arena. “There’s an old story from a time long before either of us were alive, Beth. More a saying, really. ‘The shadows respect strength and swallow the weak.’ I’m beginning to think those words meant more than I realized.”
“Meaning?”
He glanced up at her. “Don’t summon them. We beat that thing down with every ounce of our power.”
“They are our power, Cornelius.”
“Trust your mentor in these matters.” It was the last word he spoke before they stepped through the gate at the bottom of the stairs.
From the base of the arena, the highest seats looked as though they sat upon a distant mountaintop. This was truly a place of Titans, and Beth could scarcely imagine what creatures once roamed the shattered stone and broken obelisks laid out before them.
What had appeared to be a thin layer of rubble from above proved itself much more formidable at eye level. Things she thought had been a foot or two high instead towered over their heads. She couldn’t see directly across the coliseum without stepping around some of the taller debris.
“This is going to be a mess,” Beth said.
A bell boomed and echoed out around them, a serene note on a field of destruction.
She was about to ask Cornelius what he thought the bell indicated, but the slithering mass that erupted at the far end of the field answered any question she could have voiced.
The trial had started.
* * *
Blood flowed down Beth’s arm as the cold steel worked a new pattern into the back of her wrist. Always she was careful not to break the wards of protection she’d laid into her flesh to shield Ashley and the Coven. But here, she worried she might have to do worse than that.
The Eldritch thing was close enough to make out details in the writhing mass. Rings of teeth and fangs surrounded the gaping maw of thousands of worm-like tentacles. Each was large enough to swallow her in one bite. Of that, Beth was sure.
Cornelius sprinted off to her right, leaping up onto the slanted edge of a fallen obelisk. He finished his spell before she did, sending a streak of electric blue fire lancing out across the coliseum.
Fire incantations like that weren’t an ideal spell for the blood mages, taking more energy than a great many other arts, but she understood why he’d done it. They’d heard the stories of the lamprey-like beasts their allies had encountered in the tunnels near Nudd’s stronghold.
Beth had little doubt this was one of them, but it towered above the coliseum, unlike anything she’d heard described from Gettysburg.
Flames cut through the lampreys, sending wriggling trails of gore to arc away from the main body. But to say the attack didn’t have
the desired effect would be a gross understatement.
The lamprey’s core body split, masses of the serpent-like creatures barreling over obstacles, churning up clouds of debris and stone as half of them closed on Cornelius, and the others headed for Beth.
Cornelius shouted something, but Beth’s focused gaze didn’t leave the blade on her flesh. A chevron, crossed through with a horizontal line, bisected by two verticals until they were joined by an inverted chevron, and a final line dragged from her wrist to the pale scars of her protection ward.
Beth twisted her arm around, held it toward the Eldritch thing, placed the blade just below her knuckles, and crowned the symbol with a deep gash. Warmth poured down the back of her hand, and then ice as her lifeblood gave birth to a frozen wall.
Spears erupted from beneath the lamprey, one after another until the art had stacked on top of itself enough times to form a wall. Even cut off from most of its body, the lampreys continued on, closing the distance. And to Beth’s horror, the ice wall cracked, only to burst into bloody chunks a moment later.
She’d struck down countless lampreys with that attack, but still the masses surged toward her. Cornelius followed suit, summoning an explosion of icy spikes that towered higher than Beth’s. It wasn’t enough.
He reversed a cut across his opposite arm, the patterns obscured by a sheen of blood, and fire turned those icy stalagmites into shrapnel.
Beth cut a hole near the pocket of her jeans, slashing deep as she carved an intricate, jagged rose of lines and sigils.
“No!” Cornelius shouted.
But she’d done it before. She’d read the books Koda had found for Cornelius. What did he expect? For a curious student not to be curious when he’d banned her from reading them? To not employ the riskier arts when the lives of everyone she loved were on the line? Like hell.
She inhaled sharply through her nose, lined the dagger up, and plunged it into her leg. Done wrong, the severed artery would cause her to bleed out in minutes. Done right …
Beth drew the blade from her leg, inch after inch congealing until she no longer held a dagger, but a sword formed of blood. She slid the edge across the sigil on the back of her wrist, and ice ran down the blade, crusting up into a gory mass of shimmering crimson.
The sword felt almost as cold as the ice coursing through her veins. The lampreys surged over the nearest ramp of broken stone, arcing into the air as they made to fall upon their prey.
Images of Ashley flashed through Beth’s mind, memories of days spent with Alexandra at the water’s edge, and visions of the horrors the Fae had brought down upon her world.
Beth flexed her arm and slashed. A wave of blood and ice screamed from the sword in her grip. Lampreys vanished in an explosion of gore, the tide of the Eldritch things reversed as the power of that forgotten blade channeled a raw power like nothing she’d felt before.
An overhead strike sent another burst of power crashing into the Eldritch masses, and the lampreys screamed. The screeching clawed at Beth’s ears as though the sound alone could split her head in two.
She didn’t see what Cornelius had done, but a cube of electric blue power crashed into the lampreys he fought, pushing them back as he sprinted at Beth.
“There’s too many!” he shouted.
“I can kill them.”
He shook his head. “You’re dying. Drop the sword.”
That was nonsense. If she dropped the sword, they’d certainly die. But with the kind of power she held in her hand now, she could protect them both.
“Beth!” Cornelius screamed, drawing her gaze. “Drop the sword! Trust me!”
The panic in his eyes, something she’d rarely seen in all the years since she’d known him, called out to her. She released the blade and almost stumbled when the warmth returned to her. Blood from the sword slid back into her leg before the sigil glowed and vanished.
“We summon them now!” Cornelius said, looking back at the gathering ball of lampreys.
Beth thought she’d almost killed all the Eldritch serpents, but more and more rose from the earth into a towering goliath. She snatched her dagger up from the ground, Cornelius studying her every move as if he thought she was going to die at any moment.
But as the cold fled her veins, she began to realize he was probably right. The sword had been draining her life as surely as it had struck down their enemy.
“Four slashes,” Cornelius said. “On three.”
He counted down, and they made a cut of the triangle with each number, the intersections overlapping, until he said “Now!” And they both cut a horizontal gash through the center of the sigil.
The world stuttered around them.
Beth’s eyes widened as a hurricane of power threatened to blow them both off their feet. The shadow appeared first, looming in front of them like a Titan of old, reaching out to the lampreys.
Sleeper walked past them on the field of battle, his arms held wide as he stepped into the heel of the shadow, and everything Beth understood about the Shadowed Lands fractured.
The shadow they’d summoned solidified as Sleeper merged with it. The lampreys struck out at their latest target, but the titan caught the attack, crushing countless lampreys in its grip as it raised its foot and slammed it down on the core of the beast.
Screeches rose as the lampreys attacked the giant over and over again, drawing blood, but never slowing it down.
Cornelius stared up at the gray flesh of the shadow, and Beth gasped when its head turned, and she could make out the raw flesh that ran down from its hairline to its mouth. It looked like Sleeper, but larger, more primal, more … complete.
Sleeper punched down into the Eldritch thing, and something tugged on Beth’s arm. She twisted her wrist and found the ice sigil glowing on her left arm opposite the summoning. She glanced between it and the titan, then reopened the wound beneath her knuckles.
Beth screamed when power ripped through her, freezing the symbol, and Sleeper echoed her cry. Only instead of a cry of pain, the giant splayed its fingers, and a tsunami of ice erupted from his hand, burying the Eldritch thing in a titanic glacier.
Hands shaking, Beth rubbed the blood away from the sigil, cringing when her scars caught on the fresh wounds. She fell to a knee as her vision threatened to give out. She’d spilled too much blood. Given too much power.
Cold hands grabbed hers, and warmth flowed into her. She opened her eyes wide, looking up to find Cornelius, a healing rune etched onto her palm, siphoning his own power into her.
“You aren’t dying now, Beth. We won.”
With that, she closed her eyes, and let the shadows take her.
CHAPTER SIX
Ashley stood at the foot of the driveway leading to Rivercene. The majestic old mansion loomed above her in the evening hours, and her stomach did flips like it hadn’t since the first time she’d told Beth she loved her.
“Come,” Alexandra said. “Let’s go see our friends.”
Ashley nodded and followed in silence.
“Welcome, priestess,” a booming voice said from the corner of the mansion. Stump stepped into the fading light coming from the west.
Ashley glanced back at Alexandra, wondering if this was some ploy the water witch had enabled. Regardless, she didn’t want to disrespect the green man. She bowed her head slightly.
“Hi, Stump. Is … is the innkeeper in?”
“Of course. I suspect she’s still entertaining our other guests. You know Zola Adannaya is here, and even a death bat of Camazotz.” He turned his head to the side as if listening. “She awaits you in the kitchen. Please, go ahead.”
Ashley gave a brief smile to Stump before continuing down the path to Rivercene. She blew out a breath as she walked up the stairs and headed to the front door. Her first instinct was to ring the doorbell, as it seemed rude to just barge in.
“Stump said to go in,” Alexandra said, nudging Ashley a bit.
“Okay, okay.” She opened the door and stepped inside, onl
y to freeze when she found the innkeeper standing there with her arms crossed and a scowl on her face.
“So much doubt, girl. And yet that door would have vaporized you if you were half as bad as you think you are.”
“What?”
“This place is warded against threats of all sorts. You and your coven have never been a threat to us. You have always been friends, and always will be.”
“But I’ve killed so many.”
The innkeeper harrumphed. “And like most everyone inside these walls, you’ll kill more. Stump likes to say I’m the old and bitter part of Gaia. Tree might have a point. Look, girl. Gods know I’ve killed my fair share. Some against my will, and others much to my pleasure. But if you ever needed proof of the fact you are a green witch … a priestess … then look no farther than the threshold you crossed uninvited.”
Ashley shook as something broke in her chest. A weight, a burden she’d carried since she took up the Blade of the Stone to protect those she loved, lifted. And there, in the presence of the goddess she’d served for so long, Ashley wept.
“Come on, now. Let’s get you all some hot cocoa. Might even have some marshmallows left if the bat didn’t stuff them all in her face.”
“I heard that!” someone said from down the hall.
The innkeeper grinned at Ashley. The innkeeper hesitated, and then wiped some of the tears away from Ashley’s face. “Do not doubt yourself. None of us are perfect.” The innkeeper gave her a sharp nod and then led them down the hallway.
In the kitchen waited many of her friends. Vicky waved. Luna stuffed a handful of marshmallows into her face and grinned. Zola scowled at the death bat and snatched the bowl of marshmallows back while a great fire roared in the fireplace. Foster speared one of the fluffy treats with his sword.
Alexandra put her arm around Ashley and led her to the table.
“We’ll get the coven settled tonight,” the innkeeper said. “You can have the run of the second floor. You’ll want to be rested for the blessing.”
