Sora rushed in. It wasn’t a smart move. With her bar guai shattered and no weapon with which to draw blood, she resorted to punching the creature. Its hide was thick as a zhulong.
“Get off him, vile creature!” Sora shouted as she punched it again and again. The demon momentarily stopped gnashing at Whitney, turned, and regarded Sora with deep-set eyes so red they appeared to bleed. Its right arm snapped out, throwing Sora far and hard. She hit the ground with a grunt but didn’t let it stop her.
She rolled and stood, preparing to continue the barrage. As she started, she noticed something red out of the corner of her eye. Her arm was bleeding. The demon must have scratched her with one of its claws.
Focusing, she tried to call forth the fires of Elsewhere, but that familiar feeling wasn't there. Perhaps it was because she was now in Elsewhere, she wasn’t sure.
The demon set its focus back on Whitney, snarling gutturally in some demonic tongue. Spit showered Whitney as he scrambled to defend himself.
“A little help?” he shouted.
“I can’t!” she shouted.
“Do something!” he cried. "Anything!"
Sora tried again to call upon Elsewhere to bring forth flames. When there was still no response, she dug down deep to channel like a mystic as she just had when opening Elsewhere. No crackling power raced toward her heart from within, nothing.
“Aquira!” she cried, thrusting her hand out before her. Nothing happened. She shook out her hand, rolled her neck, and took a deep breath, watching as the demon’s bite grew ever closer to Whitney’s exposed face. He tried relentlessly to stab it, but the angle was all wrong.
“Aquira!” She tried the word that signaled her bar guai, desperate.
Whitney thrashed around.
“It’s not working! I... I can’t call fire!”
The beast’s razor-sharp teeth punctured Whitney’s shoulder, and he squealed. Sora conceded to charging it again, hoping to knock it free so she might be able to reach the sword.
“Kaaazaaamiiiiir.”
The name of the upyr who’d tried to devour her filled the air, a deep and cavernous bellow. The creature stopped gnawing and looked up, past her. She wasn’t sure what terror looked like on the face of such a monster, but she was sure it was there. It unmounted Whitney and scurried away.
“You better run!” Whitney screamed, flipping over and grabbed his sword. Then he too saw whatever was behind Sora and the color fled his cheeks. She almost didn’t want to look but did anyway.
Barrelling toward them was a blob of tentacles, rising tall as the Cathedral of Yarrington itself. It whipped a group of demons out of the way, swatting them through the air like flies. More massive tentacles unfurled, revealing a maw filled with thousands of teeth, above which sat two giant eyes, one scarred and calloused. The mere sight of them made Sora’s spine tingle.
“What in Iam’s name is that?” Sora asked.
“A friend of Kazimir’s,” Whitney replied. He tried lifting the sword with his good arm, but the wound in his shoulder made him grimace.
“Is he still here?”
“It’s complicated.”
“What do we do?”
The monster roared, making the very air tremble. One of its tentacles slapped down into the Shellnak, so tremendous it nearly drained the river. A deep furrow cut through the ground, fleeing demons tumbling into it.
“Run!”
Whitney took Sora’s hand, and they took off into the town. A tentacle slammed through farmer Branson’s house, crushing the roof. They ducked under the flying debris and veered right toward the town center.
“He’s not here!” Whitney shouted back at it.
Another tentacle crushed the Twilight Manor and sent them back the other way toward Mrs. Dodson's place. Two more landed with a quake and blocked off the road.
They found themselves cornered into the ruins of the old Troborough Church of Iam. They backed up against what was left of the stone wall behind the altar, nowhere to go. Torsten stood in the center of the aisle, stretching his hand toward a floating child who was within the center of a strange rift in the air that seemed to be following him. His face wracked with pain, he didn’t seem to notice them.
“Torsten, watch out!” Whitney shouted just as a tentacle came slithering over the broken walls. Then more.
Sora thought she saw the face of a familiar woman in the rift before the tentacles covered Torsten and it stopped before the altar. The hideous beast drew itself over the roofless church, casting them both in shadow. Sora and Whitney went to grasp each other’s hands at the same time.
“I can’t believe after all our years here together, Kazimir’s going to get me... whatever happens when you die here,” Whitney said.
“Years?” Sora asked.
The ground trembled as the beast drew closer, leaning down so she could look into its bulbous eyes. She could smell its rank breath like a graveyard with all the graves turned over.
“Six, in case you lost count. Some nights I worried you’d forgotten me, but that kiss... I’m glad I held out.” Whitney laughed nervously. His grip on her hand tightened. He talked when scared. He must have been terrified.
The great, tentacled beast tried to attack, but an invisible field kept it at bay, making its limbs stretch over them as if the bars of a cage.
"What the—"
“I’m here now,” she said, ignoring the thing that wanted them dead, not bothering to tell him it'd only been weeks on Pantego. She sandwiched his hands with hers. “I’m so sorry Whitney. I... I’ll never leave your side again.”
“I’m the one who left you. Besides...” Whitney nodded toward the monster looming over them. “Not really anywhere else for us to run this time.”
Sora turned from the monster and their impending doom and stared at him. He looked no older. Messier, yes, but he was still the young, dashing rogue she remembered. It was in his eyes that she saw it, however. That weariness she’d never seen there before. It pained her to think she was responsible for him being stuck for what, to him, felt like years in Elsewhere. All because the mystics decided not to tell her what she was until the time was right.
“I love you, Whitney,” Sora blurted out. “I have since the beginning.”
“Who wouldn’t.” She punched him in the arm, he grinned. Despite all the chaos around them. “I love you, too.” He looked to the sky as if seeing something beyond the horrifying monstrosity.
“See, you little whelp? It isn’t that hard to admit.”
He pulled her close, and she, him. The razor-sharp teeth of the beast above glinted, ready to devour them if not for the barrier. Even still, Sora decided there was no place she’d rather be than here, with Whitney. Everything that had happened, him leaving her, her exiling him—everything. None of it mattered now that they were together at the end.
“For Liam!” Torsten’s voice rang out. Then a burst of energy in the aisle sent the beast reeling back, stumbling through the front of the ruined Church. Stone crumbled as its diabolical screams had Sora’s eardrums ready to burst.
“You have stopped nothing... nothing... nothing...” the sensuous voice of a woman echoed.
Robed figures circled them as well, mystics and warlocks—denizens of Elsewhere’s magic—their chanting like a hymn on the air.
Sora searched from side to side as more of the church crumbled away, the ground too until she and Whitney stood upon blackness.
Torsten appeared again in the center of it all, faint like an apparition, holding onto the boy he’d been reaching for. The rift in the air hung over him again, faded now just like him. Mist rose from the chest of the boy, forming the most beautiful woman Sora had ever seen.
“Uh, Sora... what in Elsewhere is going on?” Whitney walked toward Torsten and waved his hand through him, unable to make contact.
“I… I don’t know,” she replied.
“Are those mystics?” Whitney turned to her, and a smirk crossed his face. Sora couldn’t fathom
how much she’d missed that smug look until she saw it. “I knew you’d find them. Whitney and Sora… even Elsewhere can’t stop uhh—”
His last word trailed off as the blackness gave way beneath him. The rift that followed Torsten engulfed Whitney now, both the ground and the air, sizzling with energy.
“Whitney!” Sora ran to him and grabbed his hand. She tried to pull him up, but something in the darkness resisted her. Torsten's silhouette was now below them, spectral as Aihara Na and the mystics.
“Sora, what is…” Whitney got his free hand up to try and pull himself free, but an invisible forced yanked him back.
Sora didn’t let go. The energy exuding off the strange rift surrounding him grew, so instead, she could feel it tickling her skin. Still, she held on. Then a hand, pale as winter’s snow, wrapped around her arm.
“Sora, I’ve been waiting for you,” Nesilia whispered. Her voice was the same as always, sensual but warm.
Sora’s stomach turned over. She recalled how she’d felt the last time she’d been in Nesilia’s presence and felt every bit the same. She wanted nothing more than to be with her, unendingly, forever. She fought it with all her being, but one of her fingers released Whitney.
“Uh… Sora!” he yelled.
“Why have you kept me waiting all these years?” Nesilia said. “Tell me, are you ready for your destiny?”
“Who the yig are you?” Whitney asked. Sora barely heard him, so enthralled she was by the goddess.
“We are the same, Sora, you and I,” Nesilia continued. “Connected since the day of your birth so many Dawnings ago. Can’t you feel it?”
The mention of that traumatic night with Sora’s mother and Liam snapped her mind back to the moment. She closed her hand tighter around Whitney’s and continued pulling.
“No!” Sora said. “I’m through being used.”
“We were both forgotten by those who once loved us," Nesilia said. "Tell me it’s not true. Abandoned by your own father to live underground. Underground, like me.”
“I’ve dealt with these Elsewhere tricks, Sora,” Whitney said. “Ignore her. Let’s run while we have the chance!”
Nesilia’s hand slid down Sora’s arm until it reached Whitney’s fingers. She unlatched one, and he yelped in fright.
“No, stop!” Sora shouted.
She unhooked another, and Sora couldn’t stop her.
“Don’t hurt him!” Sora yelled. “Please, don’t hurt him. I’ll do anything. Just don’t hurt him.”
“It’s time to let go of what makes you normal, Sora.” A smile played at the corners of Nesilia’s mouth. She leaned down by Whitney’s ear and whispered something Sora couldn’t hear. His eyes went wide with horror, then she tore his hand free of Sora’s, and Whitney plummeted through the darkness toward Torsten’s apparition.
The energy of the rift coruscated with bright lines of distortion. Sora heard his screams grow distant, then stop altogether. The air settled, blackness returning to the ground around Sora, and as she patted it, searching for a way through. Both Whitney and Torsten were nowhere to be found.
“Whitney!” Sora cried out. “What did you do with him!”
“It wasn’t yet his time,” Nesilia said, softly. “You know that. It was you who put him here because you lost control, but Sora, my love,” Nesilia said. “My sweet. Together there is nothing we can’t do.”
“Come back to us, Sora.” Sora heard the distant, familiar voice of Aihara Na again. Then, chanting in a multitude of languages echoed from her, and Madam Jaya, and all the others. She saw them surrounding her again, no warlocks present this time.
“Don’t surrender yourself over nothing,” Aihara Na went on. “Your future is bright as your fire.”
“They would keep you from your destiny!” Nesilia’s voice boomed. “Just as the Shieldsman bars me from returning in my own true form. He would keep me buried and forgotten. They would keep you trapped in a tower.” Her finger stroked Sora’s chin. “But together we can make them all bow.”
Another blinding, searing light shone, causing Sora to see nothing but white. A rush of energy made her heart feel like it was going to explode. Then came a tugging sensation. It dragged her backward toward the circling mystics. She clawed at the blackness to try and reach the spot where Whitney vanished.
“No!” Sora screamed. “Not again! Bring me back to him. Whitney!”
More magical chanting enveloped her. Sora tried to grasp onto the ground and tried to crawl forward, but there was nothing but smooth, black. Elsewhere began to tear around her, offering glimpses of the Red Tower throne room and mystics surrounding her.
“Don’t be afraid,” Nesilia whispered. Sora lost grip with one hand and her legs whipped up into the air. Nesilia kneeled before her, her face a thing of beauty, her eyes completely white and glowing.
“There is nothing for you here any longer,” she said. She lay her hand upon Sora’s. “It’s time to let go.”
Sora lost her grip, and everything zoomed past her. Both worlds, all through history, from the days of Liam to her terrible present. She gasped for air, real air, the chamber atop the Red Tower now surrounding her in perfect clarity. Aihara Na was on her knees before her, weak.
“By the gods, she’s still alive,” the Ancient One of the Secret Mystic Order wheezed.
Sora’s head turned from side to side. All the mystics surrounded her, palms outstretched in her direction, save for Huyshi who had only one. Madam Jaya breathed a sigh of relief.
Sora opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed Wetzel’s old knife glinting beneath the calm waters around the platform. A smile spread over her face, going all the way to her eyes.
XXXIV
THE KNIGHT
Torsten lifted one heavy leg after the other up the stairs carved into the mountainside which led up to the summit flattened ages ago in the God Feud. Statues of kings lined the holy walk, each of them leaning on a sword with two hands, eyes closed. At the top, stood an archway fashioned in the shape of the Eye of Iam, made from pure glaruium that would sparkle like glass in the sunlight.
Only now, the sunlight had faded, and an eerie twilight had fallen upon the realm as Pantego’s two moons drew closer to one another and threatened to cover the sun completely. Only dim torchlight showed Torsten the way.
No guards stood in his path. His legs were stiff. His lungs burned. He had to close his eyes and focus on every icy breath, so he didn’t inhale too vigorously. He’d already drawn Salvation to use as a walking stick, the sound of it scraping across rock drowned out by whistling wind and the distant voices.
Then, after what felt like an eternity, his foot possessed the summit. He opened his eyes. The driving snow dwindled around the clearing as if Iam wanted Torsten to see what waited there—the parting clouds, and the Dawning in all its glory.
Shieldsmen and Drav Cra warriors lined the edge of the plateau, alternating and staring inward. A vast Eye of Iam was etched into the icy surface as always, only this time it wasn’t alone. Within the pupil, a triangle, the symbol of Nesilia—her mountainous tomb—large enough for a man to fit inside, was painted in blood. At least two dozen Drav Cra warlocks encircled it, holding hands, faces aimed toward the eclipse. Freydis strolled around them, lighting small basins of fire with her blood magic.
Within that circle stood King Pi wearing his new Glass Crown, Wren the Holy, leaning on his cane with quaking arms, and Redstar, clutching Pi’s old orepul, still stained beyond recognition by Bliss' blood. Blood also coated each of their hands as if they'd been the ones to desecrate the summit of Mount Lister with the symbol of Nesilia. Torsten remembered the night before he set off to the Webbed Woods to find Redstar, when he caught Pi, mad and rambling, scribbling bloody symbols upon the walls of his bedroom.
“Redstar!” Torsten bellowed. All eyes snapped toward him. “Enough of this madness.”
“Torsten, my friend!” Redstar replied. “I was wonderin
g when you would arrive.”
“Do not act unsurprised!” Torsten shoved his sword into the ground.
“Surprised? I knew you wouldn't want to miss this.”
“You will unhand the King. Now!”
“The King is here of his own volition.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
“Remove this traitor,” Pi ordered. “He is a prisoner now, nothing more.” All the Shieldsmen and Drav Cra warriors drew their weapons.
Redstar lay his hand on the boy’s shoulder, making sure the orepul—that seemingly innocuous doll that had been with Pi when he rose from the apparent-dead, which had been there when they slew the monster Bliss—was visible.
“That’s all right, Your Grace,” Redstar said. “I think he should see. All those who doubt the strength of our unified faith should see.”
Pi raised his hand, and the guards took a step back, lowering their weapons. He still commanded respect as King, but it was like Torsten had always feared: Redstar led through him.
Torsten slowly edged forward. “Pi, you must listen to me,” he said. “He’s using you for… for whatever this madness is. He thinks he can bring his goddess back, but she is gone.”
“She helped bring me back,” Pi said. “After you allowed me to die!”
“You know in your heart that isn’t true! He filled your mind with visions and lies. Now he plays the part of loving uncle. I’ve seen what he did to your mother just for disobeying him. You cannot trust him.”
“My mother refuses to see reason,” Pi spat. “She got what she deserved.”
Torsten pleaded silently with Iam that Oleander not be within hearing. “Your mother loves you! More than anything.”
“My sister is a murdering shrew,” Redstar said. “She would see this kingdom and all its inhabitants crumble of her own foolish pride. But we, we seek to raise it beyond even the heights of Liam.”
The Redstar Rising Trilogy Page 115
