The vision shuddered again. Damaged-Me blinked slowly, his eyes focusing a little more. He started taking steady breaths. After another moment, he spoke, finally sounding calm.
“He steps on our hand, doesn’t he?” Damaged-Me asked quietly.
“Yes,” I replied calmly, the memory repaired in my mind. “That’s exactly what happens next.”
“I die again, then,” Damaged-Me said, looking down at the boiling water. “I don’t even get to find out why he did it, do I?”
“That’s also correct,” I nodded, recalling everything that happened at the very end. Damaged-Me shuddered again, and began to hyperventilate.
“Well, what do I do, then?” he demanded. “What am I supposed to do, now that this is about to happen?”
“Nothing,” I told him, as the world shook again. “This is not our fault. Pain is not our responsibility to fix. That’s on time. Time makes things better. This memory,” I gestured to the shuddering world all around me, “Still hurts me right now. But it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did on the day it happened. If you have to do anything at all, it’s to understand that you—that we—are glorious. We are far more than what this memory tells us we are. And every new day we have is an opportunity to get just a little better, and to create new memories that are much better, that show us all the things our pain can’t.
The memory flickered, completely changing to a different picture. Damaged-Me still hung on a ledge, but instead of a pot of boiling water under him, Little Gabby and some other children I had rescued were chasing Breena around in a game of tag. The scene changed again, to Guineve rocking another child, another prisoner, slowly to sleep. The beautiful, motherly woman looked up from across the courtyard to make eye contact with me and smile, just as she had done in that memory. The scene flickered again, to Val looking up at me, laughing at something I had said, laughing for the first time I had seen in years. Again it flickered, to me talking about girls with Breyn, or sitting around with the Testifiers, swapping jokes and light insults. I saw Petalbell fly up, and heard her thank me, and tell me she was a soldier too, now, so that she could rescue others.
More visions and memories flickered into view. More people that were supposed to have been impossible to rescue, leaving the dungeons and graves of Avalon while dancing and shouting. Merada, crawling into my lap, her eyes smoldering from behind her brown hair and blue tattoos. Via’s dark eyes flashing as she stepped toward me, a delighted grin gleaming on her tan face.
Stell, putting her hand on my face as I trembled, stepping out of her brokenness to help me battle my own, reminding me that I was good and that I had a heart of gold.
The memory cracked apart again. Now my normal and damaged selves were hovering over an empty pit, as a foot descended toward Trauma-Me’s hand.
“Okay,” he said, swallowing, but keeping his eyes calm and focused on my own. “I can do this. I can just be me right now.”
“Right now, that’s more than enough,” I told him.
The foot crashed on his knuckles, breaking his grip on the ledge. We fell together, still calm, our fists sparking and burning with silver flame.
Use me, the voice said to us both. I rage.
As the black hole beneath us yawned wider and closer, we raised our burning knuckles, clenched the dark nothingness in front of us, heaved…
And pushed.
The darkness vanished. Trauma-Me had merged back into my own body, leaving me with only one self. A wooden deck had replaced the emptiness under my feet. A warm, soft sensation had replaced the ledge in one of my hands, and it traveled all the way up to the band on my arm. My other hand was gripped more fiercely, by a smaller, darker hand than my own, one desperate to announce that it would not let me go. Heat and brightness washed down my back and across my chest, from a tender, feminine figure that had wrapped herself around me from behind.
Five armed figures stood directly in front of me— Eadric, Karim, Weylin, Breyn, who had Petalbell hovering over his shoulder with her wand drawn, and Val, who stood directly in front of me with both short blades drawn.
“I don’t care how many cities you’ve eaten,” she said quietly. “If you want to claim him too, you’re going to have to get through every one of us first.”
She stood there, braced to receive the attack of something over a thousand times her size, but nothing answered her.
Because nothing was there.
The tentacles and mouths and ruined buildings had all vanished. Our ship had slowed to a complete stop, resting next to a stone dock that jutted out into the water. We were floating exactly where we needed to be in order to depart safely from our ship.
Claimh Solais was still in my hand, the one that still felt caressed by Merada’s invisible palm. It blazed brightly, but it was no longer needed. The foe in front of us had long vanished. The monsters may have never even been there to begin with.
“Everyone,” I said out loud, “thank you. They’re gone. Thank you. You did it.”
Val and the others blinked, suddenly realizing that they were no longer confronting a horde of impossible terrors in front of them.
“Where did they go?” my impossibly brave sister asked, looking around in confusion. “And where are we?”
“We’re at the place the Flood didn’t want us to reach,” I said out loud. “Which means the Flood wasn’t really the one guiding our journey.” I turned my gaze behind me, where Gabin and the Atlantean crew had all stood, armed and guarding my back. “Captain, I think we should leave the ship behind and go ashore. I’ll lead the way from here.”
“You know where to go?” He asked, narrowing his eyes in confusion.
“No,” I told him, lifting up Claimh Solais. “But Breaker does. Your old Lord’s blade, or more importantly, its handle,” I said as I returned the blade to its sheath, “Knows the way from here.”
It was no longer necessary to have the weapon drawn. The handle could give me impressions just as easily from its enchanted scabbard, and, as everyone was just now noticing, my body now had a light source of its own.
I had suppressed the power as soon as I had broken out of my memories to be safe, in case it somehow got out of control as I transitioned back into normal consciousness. Now, though, I relaxed my control, letting the silver light spark across my knuckles. Via and Breena both gasped in surprise, but the Soulcurrent was harmless to them. I gently pulled from their grips nonetheless, smiling at them in gratitude for their support.
“Everyone. Thank you again. Let’s go. We have a nightmare to end.”
They fell in behind me as we stepped onto the docks of the ruined city. Even with the Soulcurrent’s light, most of the world’s capital was still wreathed in shadow, letting us see little more than crumbling walls of limestone and blue cobblestones paving the streets at our feet. We walked onward nonetheless, letting Breaker guide our way. Through the link, I could feel everyone begin to notice the power they had just gained from my own Rise. My mindscreen worked to process the changes in a format I could understand, but I knew it would take a while to complete. I had crossed a threshold with my last Rise, and I could feel the power coursing through me, even if it was impossible to put it into words.
That wasn’t entirely true. My mind felt a hundred times sharper, with every detail much clearer to me. My senses felt a dozen times easier to process, and the information they sent felt maybe a hundred times easier to store and compartmentalize.
For instance, I could tell that we were being followed.
Every now and then, a stone would scrape at the edge of my hearing, just a moment after our own footfalls. Something was doing its absolute best to be quiet, to not let us out of its sight, which meant it was not sure where our destination was. The faint scent that drifted to my nostrils told me that the figures following us had ceased most normal functions, meaning the bodies themselves were no longer alive.
I calmly sent a warning to everyone through the mindlink, but I made clear we were not to respond. T
hey would have attacked us if they were confident in stopping us, and they would have obstructed our path or tried to distract us if they knew where we were going. Hunting our stalkers would be nothing more than a waste of time right now.
We turned onto a side street, still following Breaker’s pull. Here, the cobblestones gave way and led to actual dirt, a path over the ground that led directly to a cave nestled in a rocky outcropping in the middle of the city. Atlantis was a mobile city, but it had originally been part of an island, and whenever the city mobilized, it took part of the island along. The rocky hill actually took up a fair bit of the ground beyond the street, and from what I could tell, most of the nearby buildings had been built into the outcropping some distance beyond the tunnel’s opening.
This was where we needed to go, according to the blade at my side. But I could have figured that out even if I didn’t have a magic sword-compass on my belt, because whatever intelligence was guiding the actions of our enemies had apparently decided that this part of Atlantis was important enough to keep a guard over.
Two bodies that had the lower torso of a bipedal humanoid and the upper torsos of shelled hermit crabs stirred as we approached. They had hunched frames, with their shells forming breastplates and large, curling hoods rising from their backs, almost completely encasing their heads. They were dead, like everything else was down here, buy they loomed over us, each over seven feet tall, and with giant pincers each the size of Eadric’s shield. I raised my hand to signal a halt, and we took up battle positions as the two guards stepped in front of the cave’s opening. They opened and closed their giant claws, but came no closer, clearly under orders to stay in this one spot, this cavern system that Breaker demanded I entered.
But their actions baffled me. Neither the Flood nor the Nuckelavee seemed like they would bother to do anything like install guards, or there already would have been an army waiting for us at the docks. But that was because these monsters weren’t under the Flood’s control, something told me. Breaker hummed again at my side, and more impressions, more knowledge, flooded into my brain.
The sword of the Destroyer God had not been separated intentionally. Each piece had been carefully hidden in the most obscure places possible, and in many occasions, a single fragment had been recovered, then hidden again, by some force that did not want the pieces to be found and combined. The piece of the mighty weapon on this world was one such fragment, and during its last concealment, its obstructors had chosen to install guards, because hiding it in an ancient city haunted by a mind-eating, metamorphic horror was apparently not enough of a precaution. And that was it, I realized. That was who had broken the seal on this place a second time. Not someone who wanted to risk having this world and its neighbors devoured by Lovecraftian horrors. It was simply a group who had no wish for this current portion of Breaker to ever wind up in another’s hands, and felt that breaking the seal over said horrors and letting them loose was an acceptable price to pay.
More footsteps fell from behind us. I turned around and saw that the undead Hordebeasts and other monsters had finally gathered for a confrontation, to attack now that we were facing an additional threat.
They numbered in the hundreds, but now I had an elite retinue of magical warriors and over a dozen sailor marines from a legendary unit at my back.
“Handle the army behind our backs,” I told everyone, walking forward. “I’ll clear the way ahead of us.”
Gabin and my retinue nodded, because they knew they were more than enough to deal with the lumbering dead bodies. The two crab zombies just ahead were different, a little more agile and aware, their bodies and shells just a bit better preserved. They might possibly have more power, more intact vital guards, than all of the bodies behind my back combined.
But that was okay, because I could tell I could handle them.
I summoned Shard back into my hands, changing the weapon into a long pike that tapered into a narrow spearhead. The crabmen halted as my weapon changed in front of them. A moment ago, their claws had given them at least five feet of reach over any other weapon of mine. Now, though, I held a magically balanced weapon over fifteen feet long, with an enchanted blade shaped to get through the cracks in armor, or in this case, crab shells.
Speaking of cracks, I thought as the crab-man closest to me began backing away from my weapon warily, they could use a few more.
I summoned Toirneach, my other massively enchanted weapon, and threw it into the armored face of the retreating crustacean. The monster’s shell flared blue as my giant hatchet struck, then crumpled as the axe of the Woadlands overpowered whatever protective magic it had. A large piece of shell fell off from the monster’s face and revealed that the thing was still unharmed, but that wasn’t a problem, because the next moment I had charged forward and slammed Shard into the now-unprotected face with all of my strength. More blue magic flared as something resisted the push of my weapon, and then it gave way as over a foot of magical ice penetrated the crab-man’s head. I felt the magically animated creature’s version of a vital guard struggle to keep the body working, but then Shard’s ice magic channeled through the weapon and began freezing the undead arthropod’s insides. I pulled my weapon free a moment later, and the giant crab-man crumpled to the floor.
The other guard was lumbering toward me, but my new weapon’s reach had given me plenty of room to react. Two steps backwards gave me the space to thrust my pike at the second monster’s face, and the creature flinched backward as my spear glanced off its shell. Then I let go of my polearm with one hand just in time to catch Toirneach and throw it at the second monster. To its credit, the second guard raised a massive claw up in time to protect its torso. My magic axe landed just above a joint near the shoulder, cracking the heavy exoskeleton and making the creature leak some glowing-blue fluid. Toirneach fell to the floor, and I let it drop, gripping Shard with both hands and stabbing the pike into the monster’s newly fractured carapace. The leaking blue liquid froze over immediately, and I heard cracking sounds come from inside the wounded limb as well. I twisted my pike into the wound, pushing against the hulking creature with my supernatural strength, then yanked the polearm back with a sudden jerk. My movement tore the half-frozen limb completely free of the monster’s body. More cracking sounds followed from the mutant guard’s body, making its movements jerkier. For whatever reason, the undead beings had no defense against the icy power of my new weapon. I took two steps around the wounded giant and stabbed my pike into the joint its former claw had left behind. I felt the monster’s vital guard activate again, then give way as Shard’s icy power swam into the torso. It shifted and struggled, nearly lifting me off of my feet for a moment. But then I shifted my stance, pulled backwards, and hoisted the thousand pound crab-manoff of its own feet. It flailed in the air over my head for a few more moments until it finished freezing solid. Then, to make sure it was dead, I channeled my Outer Current spell up my spear and into its body. The shell held, but the rest of the body came apart in an explosion of icy chunks.
I turned back to see how my companions were doing. Three Atlantean marines were using their spears to dismember a pair of Hordebeast zombies that had come within range of my group, but other than that, the field was clear. Apparently, Eadric had used Earth and Shaping magic to turn the entire street in front of them into a pool of flammable mud, and the rest of the team had let their magic and missile weapons go to work.
Got the idea from your conversation about the Scaleling fight we had under that mountain, the dwarf informed me, as the last of the fires went out. Reminded me that you weren’t the only one that could control the terrain.
I took his reminder to heart myself. Maybe I should depend a bit more on others taking over some of my old battle roles, instead of just being upset that I didn’t think of everything myself.
As I looked past everyone, though, I saw signs of another problem. A building far off in the distance suddenly became a giant tentacle, waving through the air before it disappeare
d. A few blocks closer, another structure suddenly opened a large mouth to yawn at us, before melting back into the ground.
The undead had served to buy time for the Flood to regather in this location. I had driven it off by summoning the Soulcurrent and Rising at the same time, but it would have no choice but to try and return. That, or give up on its plan to devour the Expanse.
Breaker pulled at my hip, reminding me of my purpose for being down here. I had a plan for destroying the Flood completely, but I was going to maximize my chances for doing so before I tried. Having the entity draw closer would actually help, in the end.
So I walked into the open tunnel, and the others followed me. My knuckles were still glowing with the Soulcurrent’s light, and its radiance lit the way for us. Breaker guided our every step, but no traps or pitfalls emerged to halt our advance. Here and there, the ground would flicker and change, becoming a mouth or an eye or a clawed hand. But I trampled over all the images with indifference, and whatever monstrous phantasms my feet encountered dissipated back into normal rock on contact.
Eventually the ground rose upward, and the earth became worked limestone. We passed halls with vaulted arches and maddening black shapes hiding in every shadow, but we ignored them. I just focused on putting one foot in front of the other, letting Breaker’s pull continue to guide my feet.
All while holding onto the burning sensation promising to melt my knuckles off if I waited too long to use it.
Patience, the familiar voice said. I rage.
Patience and rage didn’t exactly go together as far as I knew, but that wasn’t important. What was important was the stairway just beyond the end of the hall, the one that wound upward, to a place the snarling, groping shadows did not want me to go. Yet they did not allow us to retreat, for they swarmed us on all sides, hemming in the poor, brave souls who had chosen to follow me. Who now had no chance to even pretend that they could do anything but follow their would-be king into one last, dark tunnel that crawled upward.
Lighting Distant Shores (Challenger's Call Book 4) Page 54
