by Jeffrey Hall
The thug swept out, forcing Grey to back into Garp. The two huddled together, making their movements stifled. Garp tried to jab the thug in his stomach, but with a simple flick of his wrist, the thug turned the blow aside, pulling Garp out of a recoverable position.
The thug brought his blade back up and went for Garp’s exposed chest, and just like before, Grey’s club slapped the strike away, except this time the thug was ready.
He brought his sword in a round arc and slashed Grey’s arm. The club fell away and Grey stumbled back into Garp.
“You alright?” shouted Garp as he held his uncle upright.
“Get the trunks,” snarled the thug as he moved in to finish the two.
“Shit,” said Requiem. And before he could talk himself out of it, he stepped forward and brought Ruse into the thug’s belly.
The thug tilted his head slightly as if to ask him why, before crumpling to the ground, sliding off the edge of his blade.
“Bastard!” shouted Shint as he and another two of his cronies witnessed the defeat of their comrade. “I should have known Dash would have put a traitorous whore in our midst.”
“Shint! The trunks!” One of the other thugs pointed behind Requiem.
Requiem turned and saw a pair of soldiers dressed in Glimmer garb riding atop a pair of high-backs, their long white lances looking like sharpened rays of sun pulled from the sky. They sprinted along the sides of the stalled train, their mounts screaming like newborn children.
Something bounced in the narrowing space between him and the high-backs.
A fire bone.
He had just enough time to raise his blade as the thought ran through his head.
The rock burst, he went weightless, and when he crashed to the ground the whole world went dark.
Chapter 11
The Abyss seemed different this time. Thinner. Lighter. As if she could pass through it like a blade rather than the sail she often felt like in its presence, floating along with its whim, letting it choose where to send her, what to show her…
This time she ran through it, plummeting into its depths like she was running downhill.
She thought she saw cities in the distance, great rises made of odd materials like bones and plants and water. But she was going too fast to observe them close enough to be sure.
At last she felt her feet touch solid ground. She looked beneath her, expecting to see dirt or road or grass but instead saw only gas. Purple and blue and everywhere.
When she looked up she saw a figure approaching.
This is him, she thought. It has to be him.
And slowly as the gas dissipated it revealed his beard, a thing unruly and wise with its strands of snow-white hair. The bags beneath his eyes heavy and thick just like the sacks he would haul stone with when he’d climb up the walls of Outer Bothane to mine. Then there was his nose, a twisted knob of flesh thanks to the time he’d broken it in a bar fight, a squabble he would often remind Dash and Chendra he came out the better side of.
“Father?” she whispered from quivering lips. She had been searching for so long. Done so many things to keep that search going. Steeled her mind so heavily so that the hope she had of seeing him again would never leave…
And it was all worth it.
“Sweet girl?” he said, his own face sagging with relief, as if he too had been searching the Abyss to find a way back to her.
Dash rushed forward to slip her hands beneath his arms. Her skin prickled as she felt his warmth against her, a thing that often kept her away from the bite of the wind as it swept up from the hole beneath Bothane and into their small nook in the stone near the Red Spoke.
“I always knew I’d find you.”
“You never stopped looking, did you?”
“Never,” she said, and she squeezed him tighter, pulling him so close that she would never again lose him. And as she did, she noticed how skinny he felt. “We need to put some flesh back on those bones.”
“What flesh?”
Suddenly she felt his clothes slip away and the tickle of his hair as it fell from his face. She stepped back. “Father?”
He smiled with a hairless face, his skin pulling so far back that it started to slip away from him, dissolving like it was among acid.
“Father?” she said helplessly.
But her father was no longer there. In a second’s time the entirety of his skin was gone, all that made him him, disappeared as if it were dust beneath a wind. All that remained was a skeleton, cold and stained yellow as if it had been rotting away for years.
“Father!” she cried, tears streaming down her face, but no matter how much she pleaded with the Abyss all it gave her was his bones.
“Father!”
The words poured out of her like a fountain, coughing and sputtering in a hurry as if trying to reach him before he went away.
But when she blinked she saw him being sucked away along with the Abyss into a dark hole, a hole that slowly expanded to fill her vision.
When she blinked again she realized she was behind bars. Silvery constructs that were well polished and clean despite the rest of her surroundings.
The light was low. The stench fetid, like someone hadn’t removed their garbage for weeks. And it was cold. But worst of all, on the other side, there sat Chendra.
“Sister? Is that you?” said Dash lazily.
“It is me, unfortunately for you.”
She stood up from the small stool she sat on and folded her arms.
The fogginess of the nightmare wore off, and suddenly Dash realized she was imprisoned, and that the bars were immoveable. “Where am I?” she shouted.
Chendra tapped her chin, impervious to Dash’s yell. “I knew you were desperate when I saw you, but I didn’t realize just how bad.”
Dash went to the bars and tried to budge them, a comical attempt that made Chendra smile.
“First time in a cell? Surprising. I thought with all that time you spent in the Purple you would have been locked away for a portion of it and know that bars stay where they are.”
Dash looked the cell up and down, attempting to find a stone she could use.
“They’re plain steel and stone. Nothing you’ll find of use in a single inch of it. They were made to hold Geomages.”
“Let me out!” Dash screamed so hard her throat hurt.
“Why? So you can steal more of Old Bolliad’s remnants?”
Dash stepped back from the bars, her eyebrows raised.
“Did you really think you wouldn’t be caught? You’re lucky I found you when I did. The hag had licked your arm till blood.”
Dash lifted up her sleeve and found a bandage wrapped around her wrist. Now that she was thinking clearly she recognized how much it hurt.
“I’m afraid these will be going back to where you stole them from.” Chendra brought up one of Dash’s pouches and ran her hand through its contents, pulling up bits of the precious stone she had taken from the Ode’s library.
Dash looked at them shamefully. She wanted to say that the pouch wasn’t hers, but a voice in the darkness of the prison reminded her otherwise.
“You took them.” When it spoke it was a whisper, as if it did not want to interrupt the pain her sister was about to inflict.
“Look here,” said Chendra, pulling a piece of stone that was translucent save for the foggy green inside of it. “Frog’s tear. What were you hoping to do with this?”
Dash just stared, chewing her lower lip, fuming.
Chendra looked at the stone. “Bring forth a light? Dazzle a man into your bed?” She looked at Dash. “Paint a picture?”
“To the Abyss with you.”
Chendra brought the stone down. “This was us, Dash. Or has the black lens robbed you of that memory too?”
Dash didn’t say a word. She remembered it, though she didn’t want to. A time when their father was still with them. A time when Dash and Chendra had both started to explore the realm of Geomagery, both completing the pain
ful first step of infusing their blood with stone, both of them too stupid and naive to know that it could have killed them both.
That it should have killed them both.
Her sister had gone first, using the old book they had found abandoned in the street like a piece of garbage. Then Dash went, after seeing how happy her sister looked. After seeing the amazing things she could do.
It was the worst pain she had ever felt when she spoke the words on the first page of that book, frog’s tear in her hand, a stone her sister had given her.
But that pain eventually subsided and what rose from it was a joy. A limitless possibility. The result of an impossible outcome.
Two sisters had become Geomages.
Chendra and she would no longer just be the daughters of a miner, destined to follow in his footsteps or be the wife of one just like him. They would be powerful. They would be rich. But best of all, they would do it together. And the promise of that new profession stayed strong as they used their newfound powers to paint the drab interior of their apartment full of color thanks to the frog’s tear.
And best of all, it drew them closer. With the same stone in each other’s blood, they experienced what she would later learn to be geochanneling. The ability to communicate and link thoughts by just a touch, as if they were each stones and they were pulling each other’s essence from one another and giving it back.
Though they had always been close, it made them tighter. It made her feel not so alone, a feeling she often felt when their father was away and her sister was practicing her own Geomagery or working at the food stall nearby in order to support their family.
Those were happier times. Brighter times. Times that seemed to belong to someone else. Times that made her angry with the world for having given her them, only to take them away when their father fell and her sister pushed her away and dove deeper into her studies.
“That was us,” said Dash softly.
“It still can be,” said Chendra. She extended her hand slowly towards the bars.
As she approached, Dash could see another bag stuffed in the pocket of her sister’s robe. She knew the shape of it. The texture. It was the one that held her black lens.
Dash lunged and grabbed hold of the bag, but her sister brought down the jagged edge of the frog’s tear on her hand. Dash fell back, clutching her knuckles as blood ran from them.
“Damn you!” she shouted.
Chendra scowled. “Tell me, sister, was it worth it? Was ending up in a jail cell, bitten by a stone hag, a fair price to pay for this?”
She held up the bag.
“Please, you don’t understand. It wasn’t for that. There’s a girl in my store right now that needs the dadaline—”
“Do you hear the lies pouring out of your mouth like piss? Do you even realize how far you’ve stumbled? You were the better of us, Dash. You always knew your stones. Always knew how to push their boundaries to do something incredible. You were supposed to be the one that made our family into something else besides miners. You were supposed to be the mountain we looked to in the distance. Instead, this filth has eroded you to a pebble.”
Dash had to refrain from laughing. “Is that the story you’re telling yourself now? Don’t you dare lift me up to a pedestal that you already occupied. You never pushed me. You always told me my experiments were a fool’s errand. You preferred to keep me beneath your boot, out of your face, so that a king could see it and want to screw it.”
Chendra lowered her head. “Still blaming others for your lost potential, I see.”
“Still keeping your nose high above your own shit, I see.”
“And yet, here I am, in the bowels of the king’s own dungeon, trying to help my sister.”
Dash looked around in disbelief. “This is the Elder’s keep?”
“What? You think I have a jail in the basement of the Ode?”
“A convenient way to see him again.”
Chendra smiled slightly, a cover to her fury. She held up the bag of black lens. “This has eroded you. It’s turned you into a jealous, spiteful thing.”
“Jealous?” Dash laughed.
“Why else do you keep on bringing up my former relationship with Ardan? I’ll not be shamed for finding love. Nor will I stand by and watch my sister fade away into dust before my eyes.” She undid the cinch to the bag of black lens.
“What are you doing?” Dash came to the bars again, gripping them like she would pry them apart with her bare strength.
“Uh oh,” whispered the shadows.
“Something that should have been done a long time ago.”
“Chendra! Don’t!”
“This is to get you back.”
She walked over to a sewer grate in the floor and upended the bag. The black lens tumbled out like shimmering hail, rattling into the hole, falling into the darkness. Gone.
“You bitch!” shouted Dash, an unknowable anger rising within her, a rage that did not feel like her own, but came from the Abyss itself. “I’ll kill you!”
Chendra tapped the bag until even the black dust fluttered out of it. “From stealing to murder. It’s a good thing you’re behind bars.”
She tossed the bag down to the ground and walked down the hallway, Dash’s other pouch, the one that contained the stones she had brought, the ones she had stolen, and the strange stone from the girl the Scarred had given her, securely in her hand.
“That’s it! Run off! Run back to the boots of your king! Turn your back on your family again!”
But Chendra didn’t answer. And a moment later the only thing that could be heard in the dungeon was a drip of some liquid falling in the near distance.
“Chendra?” Dash became suddenly aware of how alone she was, how full and complete the darkness was. How concealing the bars before her were. “Chendra? How long am I going to be down here for?”
Once again, silence.
“Chendra! Chendra!” She screamed her sister’s name until her throat felt as though it might burst. She screamed to fill up the void of silence that swallowed her, until she could do it no more and threw herself against the walls of the dungeon and crumpled to the ground, her hands pressed against her face to black out the oppressive sight of her surroundings.
Only then, in the utter darkness created by her own hands, did she hear the voice of the shadows whisper to her.
“It seems you and I will be spending some time together.”
Chapter 12
“Wake up.”
Requiem blinked, trying to keep his eyes closed to avoid the feeling of nausea roiling in his head and the grip of pain he felt over his body.
“I said, wake up.”
He felt something hit him, a force strong enough to keep his eyes open for good.
And there, standing in front of him, was something out of a dream. A man, only a few years older than him, with long, full black hair, in a full suit of gold-tinted platemail. He wore the sigil of Glimmer upon his tunic, clean and neat as though it had never entered a single battle.
It was a man he had only met twice before, but it was a man he thought about often.
Commander Oric Glassius.
“Glassius?” said Requiem, wondering how hard the fire bone rattled him, or if he was already dead. That was only explanation for the absurdity of the sight standing before him.
“See? His memory is still intact.” He turned to a mixed group of soldiers at his back, a collection of irregulars, Bothanians, and even more from Glimmer. They all huddled about him like he was a species in a collection.
Requiem tried to move, but found he was bound to a tree, and even worse, he found out how much pain it caused him.
“The scar stone is making you pay for leaving her, is it?”
Requiem’s vision swam. He found the blade in the hands of a Glimmerian soldier about ten yards away. Just enough so it made all the scars on his body burn like when he’d first got them. But he didn’t want to give the man before him the satisfaction of being ri
ght.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine, Requiem. The last of the Scarred found attacking a royal caravan with a cult like a common thug.”
“Wasn’t attacking anything,” said Requiem.
“No? Then explain the bodies of soldiers now beneath the dirt.”
Requiem opened his mouth to speak, but found it difficult to think with the pain in his head, the one coursing through his body.
“My, how you have fallen,” said the commander as he paced in front of him, his hands clutched behind his back, his platemail creaking like a wounded animal. “You were once the Sword of Silver Hole. Bolliad’s Brimling Slayer. The one Old King Larken called upon the most… But I suppose Proth did more than break the world with his blade, he broke you and the rest of your kind.” He kicked his feet again. “Look at you. It’s gotten your neck. It’s only a matter of time before it comes for your head and you too can die off with the rest and we’ll be done with your kind once and for all.”
“Don’t think there’s more stones beneath the soil?” said Requiem.
“I don’t doubt that there are, but no one is foolish enough to touch one after they’ve seen what they can do to someone. What they can do to the people around you.”
Requiem looked up at him, his eyes teary as he suppressed the urge to vomit thanks to the light.
Glassius knelt down and whispered so the onlookers couldn’t hear him. “She’s here too you know.”
Requiem sneered. “What are you doing here, Oric?”
“I’m serious. She’s at the end of the train, tending to the wounded with the rest of our company. She knows you’re here too, but doesn’t want to see you.”
Requiem looked down the wagon train. He thought he could see figures moving at its end.
His heart picked up inside his chest.
“Why are you here?” said Requiem.
“The Elder’s taxes have been low. His deliveries, sloppy and oft prone to attack. The king has not been pleased.”
“So he sends his beast to see it safe.”