Anuit frowned at her silently.
“What?” Bryona drew back with a reproachful look on her face. “I can’t help how I was made, any more than you chose to be born a human.”
Anuit snorted. “Let’s go,” she said.
The sorceress leaned forward and poked her head out around the arch’s corner, scanning the room. It appeared empty. She turned back to tell Bryona to follow her, but the succubus was gone.
“Damn it,” Anuit muttered under her breath. “Bryona!” she hissed loudly, but there was no response. “Damn it!” she swore once more. The very air of Dis shifted reality against them.
Well, there was no place to go but forward. She didn’t know how she was going to find the incubus lord—what was his name? Kokhabaal—by herself.
She stopped for a moment and closed her eyes, still standing in the archway’s shadow. Think! she told herself. There has to be a way.
The answer lay within her. She focused on the idea of Belham. She had assimilated his power and knowledge when she had consumed him. He was a collector of information and arcane lore, and his knowledge of Dis had been extensive. Surely he knew—
Ah, yes!
She knew where to go now. And she felt the same sense of wrongness that Bryona had spoken of. Dis was somehow divided against itself.
“Anuit!” Arda’s voice called out from across the chamber. Anuit opened her eyes and looked up from her introspection to see the paladin standing in the opposite archway.
“We got separated somehow,” Arda called out. “Let’s stick together this time.” The darkling woman beckoned impatiently for her to come.
Anuit forgot herself and hurried across the chamber’s center.
Arda drew her revolvers and fired two shots at Anuit.
The sorceress ducked and tumbled forward beneath the gunfire. She crouched, assumed her demonic countenance, and stood. Her eyes flared in anger, but then she saw the two hellhounds knocked to the ground by Arda’s shots. They must have appeared in the room behind her after she crossed, and the paladin had saved her. Anuit mentally kicked herself for doubting her lover for that brief instant.
Arda sneered. “Did you really think I was aiming at you?” There was nothing loving in her tone.
The hellhounds were like Khiighun had been, only larger. Their mottled green-skinned snouts were split by toothy grins and countless rows of teeth. They scrambled to their feet and immediately leaped at her again.
Anuit responded with reflexive instinct. As the two hellhounds jumped, she thrust her arms forward and grabbed both of them by the throat. She lifted them and then slammed each to the ground on their backs. Their throats seemed strangely soft in her grip and she squeezed. Her own arms stretched taut as demonically enhanced muscles lent her unholy strength. Her claws slipped through their flesh, and their snarls cut first to short whimpers and then to nothing as she closed their windpipes. She released them and stood over their lifeless bodies, her arms covered in dark red demon blood.
Arda looked at Anuit with unexpected appreciation. The darkling holstered her weapons and walked forward. The sorceress stepped back, suddenly self-conscious of the dark shadow that covered her body, the hellhound scales on her arms, the clawed fingers and toothed mouth, and her own horns and wings she had gained from Belham’s essence.
“Don’t shrink away,” Arda said. “I like you better like this. The Dark makes you beautiful.”
This was too much. This did not sound like Arda at all; and it was the exact opposite of what Arda had said in the plains above the fissure. Anuit trembled in confused anger, unable to find her center and return to human form. “How can you say this, Arda?” she cried out. “You are not yourself!”
Arda placed her hands on Anuit’s waist. “Beloved,” she said. “I was wrong to doubt you, or your arts. I feel it in my darkling blood. This place—it is my heritage too, my home.” She laughed gaily. “I have never felt more alive and certain than I am now.”
“But, Arda,” Anuit protested, “I will lose myself if you go down this road. I need you and your Light.”
“The Light is for fools,” Arda responded. “There is power here, and you and I can rule together. I forsake the Light for the Dark, so I can be worthy of who you are becoming.”
Anuit shook her head and tears came to her own blackened demon eyes. “Oh, Arda,” she cried. “I am losing you to this place.”
Arda sneered and stepped back from her. “I thought you were stronger than this. I was sure you could feel it here too, but maybe I was wrong. I won’t let you hold me back.” The paladin turned her back on Anuit and walked away under the archway from which she had emerged, disappearing into the shadows.
“Wait!” Anuit shouted. She ran forward, but Arda was gone. An empty staircase was all that greeted her. The sorceress clenched her clawed fists and screamed in frustration. “Damn you, Arda! Don’t let Dis take you from me!”
But no one answered.
She still couldn’t calm herself and, after spending a few fruitless moments trying, decided it was probably safer in her demonic form should more hellhounds—or something else—find her.
“Wait, Anuit!” Bryona called out from behind her. Anuit looked over her shoulder. The succubus descended the stairs from where Anuit had just come, hurrying across the open circular room. “We got separated,” the demon said with concern in her voice. She stopped and looked at Anuit’s demonic form. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Anuit frowned. “Hellhounds. And Arda.”
“Arda’s okay?” Bryona actually looked relieved.
Anuit shook her head. “No, she’s not. She’s losing herself here.”
Bryona nodded, green eyes glittering beneath her curled brown bangs. “She’s a darkling. It’s in her blood, like it’s in mine.” The succubus eyed Anuit critically. “And yours, it seems.”
Anuit shook her head. “I know. I can’t come down from it.” She felt the Dark coursing through her veins, and the shadowy mist rolled off her indigo skin.
Bryona reached out and took Anuit’s hands. The sorceress tensed for a moment and then relaxed, accepting Bryona’s soft fingers in her claws.
“Breathe,” the succubus cooed softly, “and find your center.”
Anuit closed her eyes and allowed herself to be calmed by the demon. When she opened her eyes again, her demonic features had vanished and her skin had lightened to its natural brown.
“Let’s go find Arda,” Bryona said, “before you lose her for good.”
Anuit snatched her hands away. “What is this?” she demanded. “You’ve never approved of us.”
Bryona folded her arms across her chest. “I know you won’t believe me, but I want you to be happy,” she said. “I’ve told you this before.”
“You forget I’ve read the Legacies,” Anuit snapped. “I know what you’re after.”
Bryona sighed. “Yes, the only way I survive your death is if you give your life to me. A demon cannot be immortal unless you kill yourself. If you don’t, I die with you.” Bryona paused and turned away for a moment before meeting Anuit’s gaze again. There were tears glimmering in her eyes. “You forget that I’m a part of you,” she said. “In spite of everything we’d done to you, you found peace and love in Arda—and I can feel it too.” She gestured around her to the demonic room. “I don’t want to spend an eternity here if it comes at the expense of you. I can’t help I was made a demon, but I can live with you and die a mortal.” She took a deep breath, wings rising and falling with her shoulders. Her tail swished behind her cloven feet. “Everyone else dies at the end of their lives—I can live with the same. It can’t be that bad, right? Like going to sleep?”
Anuit touched Bryona’s soul through their pact-bond, which she could feel again with the succubus standing so close to her. She felt the oily slithering essence of the seductress, but amid the shadows she also felt a piece of fractured light, the piece of Anuit’s soul that had been offered up to the demon lords of temptation when she
summoned Bryona for the first time. Within that fractured light, she felt something akin to earnest concern.
“Let’s go,” Anuit said and turned to the descending stairs. Bryona followed silently behind her.
The two of them descended for what seemed like hours until finally the stairwell led them to the base of the tower. Its open path led through a doorless archway and out onto an empty city street. Arda was nowhere to be found.
Anuit stepped under the archway and out of the tower. She looked up and saw they had descended inside the steel sphere. Its surface was an apparently thin layer, and here she could see platforms and interlocking towers and bridges all meshed together, vaguely reminiscent of Artalon. The platform on which she stood—she wouldn’t quite consider it “ground”—spread from side to side, a suspended street that joined other towers together.
Suddenly they were not alone. A pack of hellhounds surrounded them and ran past. The demonic beasts ignored Anuit and Bryona, and the sorceress realized why when she looked to her right to see their destination. An equally large swarm of shadow knights—she thought of Thoknos—charged the hellhounds. The two forces met, and they started tearing each other apart.
Bryona sucked in a quick breath. “This is what’s wrong with this place!” she whispered. “Civil war. Dis is divided against itself.”
For some reason, that filled Anuit with even more dread.
“We can’t stay here,” Bryona urged. “We need to keep moving.”
Anuit nodded. She felt the sense of where to go from Belham’s absorbed essence. The trail to Kokhabaal’s circle of Dis felt so powerfully vivid to her she could almost see it. “This way,” she said, then ran across the suspended street in the opposite direction of the fray. Bryona hurried after her, cloven feet clacking over the street’s strange surface.
Four hundred yards away, Anuit could see their destination—a slight outcropping in the street’s edge where a small platform extended out and ended in the air over an open expanse.
“They see us!” Bryona shouted. She flapped her wings but still ran. “I cannot fly!”
Anuit stopped and grabbed Bryona, holding her fast. She looked over the succubus’s shoulders and saw a swarm of shadow knights descending upon them.
She looked ahead at the platform ledge. They wouldn’t make it.
Still clutching Bryona fast to her body, she channeled the Dark. A sphere of shadow burst over the ledge and a second shrouded Anuit and Bryona. She shadowjumped, pulling them through space, hoping it worked the same in Dis as it did on Ahmbren.
She dropped the channeled shadow and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw they now stood upon the outcropped platform. There was nothing beneath them on either side except the expanse of darkness. She couldn’t see the next platform below and wondered if they fell whether there would ever be any end to it. Yet this was where her instincts told her to go.
Then she saw it. Beneath them, maybe a hundred feet down, was another rift, a glowing fissure in reality.
She let go of Bryona, and the succubus straightened her dress. The demon looked down and nodded. “The entry to the next ring of Dis,” she said. “There are twelve such rings, and in Dis’s center is—”
“The Abyss,” Anuit stated, remembering what Arda had told her earlier. Belham’s knowledge confirmed it.
“Dis crystalized around Malahkma’s prison,” Bryona said quietly.
“That’s not our destination,” Anuit responded, pressing her lips together grimly. “That rift, however, is. We’re going to have to jump.”
Bryona looked back at the rushing shadow knights, quickly closing the distance. “We don’t have much of a choice,” she urged.
They looked at each other for a moment. Oh, Arda, where are you? Anuit thought.
Bryona’s green eyes shone with affection and the shared sense of danger. Arda’s not here. It’s just the two of us. I hope this is worth it.
Anuit reached out and took Bryona’s hand. The succubus nodded and intertwined her fingers around the sorceress’s. “Come what may,” the demon said, “we’ll do it together.”
Hand in hand they jumped into the expanse, rushing towards the glowing rift in reality.
26 - The Bloodstone
Graelyn spent her time waiting at the top of Taer Koorla. For the first time since Athaym had shut the other parts of her being away from her Dragon soul, something twinged in her heart—something very un-Dragon-like—and slammed at the periphery of her awareness. Athaym had guided her daughter to join all the troglodyte tower-mothers across the Underworld and then opened a portal to Dis. Graelyn’s mind shuddered remembering Naiadne step through the dark fissure, but she couldn’t make the connections through Athaym’s shadow barriers to the part of her that trembled.
In a passing thought, she wondered if the other parts of her mind, the Fae fragments and the elven mind, could see and witness her life over the last ten years, trapped and unable to act. Maybe the Fae, but not the elf. The elf was the amalgam of all of them together. Yet, something elf-like pressed on the edges of her mind. It was as if during this body’s life, the elf had distilled its own identity beyond the sum of its parts, shaped by the life she had led.
But Graelyn simply couldn’t remember her. Only the vague fleeting images that sometimes pressed through, enough to know that Naiadne was not Athaym’s daughter.
The Black Dragon’s shadow always lay heavy on her mind through the pact-bond. The pressure on her mind increased… her daughter… Naiadne… gone—
* * *
The Fae King reeled in the elven woman’s body. His—her—skin flushed solid red for a moment, and he was tempted to seize her mind. This flesh was formed from the fabric of his dead homeland, his sovereign land—no! That was not his purpose.
A wave of nausea overcame him, and he felt the other Fae shards pushing in, trying to slip into his—her—mind. He hated existing as he had inside the elf woman, broken and incomplete. At the same time, he knew the Dragon for who she was, that same dreamwalker who had sacrificed herself to Klrain’s torture just to distract him. The Fae King had stood by her side in the Otherworld and promised her he would keep vigil over her.
That vow still drove him. After her initial lightfall, the promise had been dormant in his being, forgotten, but over the years it had grown stronger.
Then Athaym had come and broken her being apart, peeling back her mind until only the Dragon remained intact.
But the Fae King had not slept. He pushed and he prodded, trying to weaken the barriers. The elf had an individuality now that was more than the sum of the fallen shards of lightfall, and he was determined to see her whole again.
He knew he had little time before the Dragon reasserted herself. Athaym’s shadow magic even now started to pull him out of the conscious center of her being. But before that, he—
* * *
The elf stood in a horrific chamber, blinking. The red disappeared from her body, and the light in her eyes faded. She fell to her knees, confused. The ground felt spongy and wet beneath her fingers, and she wore some sort of skin-suit made of… living things.
“I…” she murmured. Who was she? She was not whole, but she remembered faces. Loss. A light-green-skinned girl with moss-colored hair. A troll. A black-skinned human man with the countenance of light. A second baby, a child.
Nausea won, and she vomited on the floor.
A shhhhhffff and then a fissure of black opened, and a dark-skinned seelie man stepped out from it. The rift vanished, and he regarded her thoughtfully for a moment.
She snarled, lips pulling back from her teeth in a rictus of blind fury. She tried to—become a leopard?—but her body refused. She tried to—raise an explosion of thorns?—but the green life would not answer her call.
The elven woman uttered such an inhuman screech that the dark seelie man seemed taken aback for a moment. She launched herself at him, fingers grasping like claws and teeth bared. She would tear out his throat, she would—
H
e raised his hands, and dark tendrils slathered up from the floor and caught her, as solid as they were undefined. The elf fell to the ground, fighting and thrashing, and then the pain—
* * *
Graelyn blinked. What just happened? She was on the ground, writhing before Athaym. Pain slid through her body, but she accepted it, and it passed through her. She ceased struggling, and the shadowy tentacles dissolved into mist.
Athaym offered her his hand. She took it, and he lifted her to her feet.
“What happened?” she asked, confused. Shadows pressed on her mind, and her head felt thick.
“You forgot yourself,” Athaym responded. He stared at her intensely.
“Naiadne?” Graelyn asked.
“Three demon princes have pledged to her, and through her, to me. When she has a fifth, I may fully enter Dis. As it is right now, I can only stand at its edge.”
“And then?”
He presented his elbow to her. “Come,” he said.
She complied and took his arm, allowing him to lead her out of the brain-chamber and into the lower levels of the tower.
“Did you know,” he asked casually, “that dragons have returned to the world? Not all of them perished when your Champion assaulted Dragonholm.”
Another twinge touched Graelyn’s heart. “More life…”
“Indeed,” Athaym agreed. “It seems Eldrikura had some forethought after all. She stored eggs in Faerieholm. Once I have Dis and the revenant wizards secured, I will gather them as well. And then we will cleanse this land of hope.”
“I will not help you,” she told him.
“Oh, but you will,” he said. “I don’t need your consent for that. I’m going to make you a mother of a new race.”
“A new race?”
“You remember Seredith?”
“No.”
“Well, no matter,” he said. He stopped for a moment and turned to her, and then leaned forward and gave her a soft, chaste kiss on the lips. In her ten years of captivity, he had never done such a thing. Graelyn offered no response of either acceptance or resistance. She felt nothing.
When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 115