The pale form seemed almost weightless. Karen screamed in rage. Edric risked a look over his shoulder. She kicked high and just missed a flying shape. Edric flung himself flat. A darkly handsome young man with empty eyes bore down on him, riding a broom that trailed fire. The heat of it washed over him.
Henry Mason vanished through the doorway, seeking the stairs to the sixth floor. Karen aimed a second kick at the Dark Lord while stabbing at him with her staff. A lazy wave of his hand reflected her gravity pulse and pinned her to the wall, holding her there.
“Go, boy!” shouted Ardmoor. “Face me, Lord of corpses!” He drew himself up, and Edric ran for his life, carrying Nyctera.
In the stillness of the Headmaster’s Office, Edric saw the stair. It wasn’t any regular structure of wood or stone. A column of light set behind the headmaster’s desk angled downward at a forty-five-degree angle. The steps were solidified fog. There was no other retreat. Edric hurried down, Nyctera’s head thumping against his chest. Behind him, he heard a scream.
Then he was at the bottom.
Edric stood on a marble bridge suspended in the air. The sky, filled with clouds and bathed in light that came from no sun, stretched to either side and above. Far below, an unbroken sheet of clouds rolled. Before him, hovering on his broom stick, sat the boy he had always been taught was the Chosen, Henry Mason.
Mason just gazed at him, blocking one end of the bridge. His eyes flicked to the stair. “D’you think anyone else is coming?” he asked, lightly. It was the same voice Edric had heard in the halls of Porcinoma. The same face he’d cheered for at skyball games.
“You traitor,” Edric said.
A half-smile creased the famous face. “Traitor?” he said. “I never asked to be anyone’s hero. To fight anyone’s war. You called me the Chosen, but no one offered to help. You just stood about, watching the Dark Lord grow stronger, waiting for me to throw myself in his path and win by,” he spread his hands, “well, magic. Only magic isn’t all that simple, is it? So why shouldn’t I choose the winning side, if it’s willing to share power? I’m Henry Mason,” he said. “And I’ll choose for myself. Aphoplisei.” He waved his stave, and all four of Edric’s staves shot from his pockets and fists. They hovered before Henry Mason, and his face went white.
“These belonged to my friends. The only two I ever had. For that, you’ll fall forever.” And he charged.
Edric barely ducked out of the way. He regained his feet and ran for the other end of the bridge, Nyctera in his arms. Twice, he skidded, and once nearly put a foot out into the endless sky as Henry Mason tried to ram him off the narrow catwalk. Then he was running down a stone corridor with metal-bound doors on either side.
Behind him, Mason laughed. “Keep running! Run faster!” He punctuated his words with paralysis bolts. The end of the corridor loomed up. There was nowhere to run.
Henry Mason’s paralysis bolt hit him full in the back. Edric’s body collapsed into itself, and then he was falling, falling down stone steps, wrapped around Nyctera: a pain-filled boneless mass. He crashed to the bottom of the stairs, and everything went black.
Moments later, he came to. His body was flaccid and spread out. Painfully, he reassembled himself. With lungs and vocal cords came a voice.
“Please don’t be dead,” he whispered. “Please.”
He lay in a dark corridor of ancient stone overgrown with moss and fungus. He could still see, though there was no light. He had fallen through an illusory floor. Henry Mason flew back and forth above him, clearly wondering where he had gone. At the other end of the corridor, a strangely bent portal squatted, sealed in stone.
“Edric.” Nyctera’s lips moved.
Edric almost sobbed in relief. He didn’t know Nyctera. Hell, the person he knew best in all of Calarzat was the one who’d just tried to kill him, arguably. But he didn’t want to be alone.
“Nyctera,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”
“She cannot hear you,” Nyctera whispered. There was a strange timbre to the voice. It spoke slowly, as if struggling. “The Dark Lord has pushed back the darkness that is anchored in her. Pushed it back into her own mind. Even her thoughts are dark. But the rings we wear will let us hear each other through her for a little while.”
“Ardmoor?” asked Edric.
“Yes, Edric. I am nearly gone. The Dark Lord holds me at the very edge of death. Stripping my mind for what I know of the relics. And for fun. Only this little corner of my mind remains to me, but it knows the Dark Lord’s plans.”
“Sir, where are you?” asked Edric. “Henry Mason chased me into the seventh floor. I don’t know where I am…”
“Quiet, Edric,” said Ardmoor. “I know where you are, and because of that, we have a last hope. But there is little time. You have stumbled into the Chamber. You are at its outer gate.”
The Chamber. “What the Dark Lord has come for?”
“Yes. He believes the relic within will give him control of what lies within. It will not. He will merely release it, and destroy all of humanity.”
All humanity. “What’s in there?”
“A being of vast power, dormant since prehistory. Alien and pitiless. Released, it will consume the world. But he has also shown me what we did not know before: how to banish this thing forever. Go through the portal. Descend the steps. Then, atop the platform, place one of your hairs across the circle. If the ward's broken when he invokes the relic, the invocation will become a banishment.”
“What happens then…?”
“Hurry!”
Scooping up Nyctera, Edric stumbled toward the portal. The smooth stone slid aside before him, and Edric looked down into a nightmare.
Below him, bent and crazed stone steps led onto a gigantic, ring-shaped balcony. From it, a tongue of stone led out over a vast gulf, terminating in a crude platform. And at the bottom of the gulf, a vast mouth, ring-shaped and filled with thousands—no, millions—of spear-length teeth, opened. Vast tentacles of shadow rose from it, lashing mindlessly at the air.
The balcony surrounding it was bigger than Calarzat itself. It was full of creatures that crawled and shambled over each other. They had a dozen legs, and none. Mouths and eyes of all numbers and shapes. They gibbered and chanted an insane threnody. Every now and then, one of the shadow wisps would congeal about one and draw it down into the vast maw.
Edric’s knees shook so hard, he nearly fell. A hundred of the shambling creatures at least stood between himself and the platform. Some snapped teeth at him. At the bottom of the steps, a line of runes glowed white: wards, holding the creatures back.
“Hurry, Edric,” said Nyctera, in Ardmoor’s weakening voice. “The wards protecting the path will hold until you reach the platform.”
“What path?” Edric cried. “There’s no path!”
Then he saw it. Just where the tongue of stone jutted from the balcony. Two corpses, half-gnawed to bones. He told Ardmoor.
“Plumbgood,” Ardmoor said. “He broke the wards.”
Plumbgood. “You said… the professor, Urbanis. He said that Plumbgood died handling an expulsion.” Horror gripped him. “That was a student,” he said. “He was feeding a student to that thing. And you knew it. Why would you build a school here?” His hearts, all of them, began to race. “That’s why you built it here. So you could do this to us. This is what you do to us? This is what you brought us here for?”
“No!” croaked Nyctera. “We wanted you to live. To master your gifts. Your strange, agonizing gifts. But Edric, you saw the werewolves. What they had become. They couldn’t be allowed to go back out into the world. Not if they were eager to turn to the darkness. And those endowed with magic are difficult to kill, if killed they must be.”
Edric wanted to shake the man. His fingers tightened on Nyctera. “You have an execution chamber here! To use on us!”
“We knew we might have to. We couldn’t know what you would choose to be!”
“You think we’re monsters! I should join the Da
rk Lord, too!”
“I think everyone can be a monster! Look what the so-called Chosen and his friends became. No one is Chosen, Edric: everyone chooses! And now the choice is yours. You cannot hate me more than I do myself now, at the end. You cannot change what has happened to you. And you cannot save yourself by joining him. But if you reach that platform and prevent his victory, you’ll have died a better man than any of us!”
Edric looked across at the platform. Hundreds of shamblers stood between him and it. “It’s impossible.”
But Ardmoor did not answer.
Edric collapsed. His morphic field vanished, and his body, semi-liquid flesh, flowed down the stairs toward the waiting shamblers. Nyctera’s body sprawled on the steps. It might as well happen now. He fell, and fell, and flowed down the stairs and onto the balcony, waiting for unmentionable fangs and claws to rend him apart.
Nothing happened. For awhile, he lay there. The shamblers crawled over him, straining to reach Nyctera.
But they ignored him. Edric lay stunned, trying to assemble thoughts across his dissociated brain. Slowly, he assembled an eye.
I’m one of them. The thought burned through him. Here, amid the misshapen and chaotic forms of the shamblers, he had become unnoticed. Another monster.
A monster that could cross the floor.
Dragging himself by undulating, malformed limbs, Edric crawled toward the platform. Ropes of shadowy tentacles plunged down around him. He dodged one. Two. A shambling form with foot-long fangs screamed at him, and he scuttled aside. At last, he reached the edge of the balcony.
He was too late.
Above him, the Dark Lord strode on thin air, twenty feet up. In his hands, he bore Karen’s struggling form. Beside him flew Henry Mason on his famous broomstick, Nyctera’s limp body in his hands. Shamblers screamed in frustration and lashed out uselessly. They flung themselves at the tongue of stone, but like the stairs, it was warded.
The wards hadn’t worked on Edric, though. Carefully, he extended one of his arms… and it slid along a smooth, yielding wall.
The wards had let him in. The shining runes would not let him out. The Dark Lord and Henry Mason were descending, now, backs to him, paying him and the shamblers no more mind than they would to ants.
Edric stared, frozen. He could reassemble a human body. But would the wards let him cross even in that form? Or was he irrevocably inhuman? A gruesome vision painted itself across his vision, of himself ripped to shreds while hammering at an invisible barrier.
Or he could watch humanity die.
Edric concentrated on shaping a limb into his right hand. Slowly, he assembled it and pressed it against the barrier.
It slipped through. The runes dimmed.
Edric’s breath came faster. Quickly as he dared, he followed the hand with an elbow. A shoulder. His head was the hardest, and he pressed it against the barrier. It wouldn’t give until he got rid of all but two eyes. A growling sounded behind him.
Twisting his neck, Edric saw that his coalescing body had not escaped notice. He tried to speed up, pushing his chest through the barrier a rib at a time. Stalked eyes and quivering antennae examined him. Fangs glistened. His belly was through. His second shoulder. His right leg. His left knee.
The barrier caught around his left hand, and the serrated mouth that he couldn’t get rid of. Concentrate as he would, it would not go away. A tentacle stroked his left ankle. Edric pulled away with all his might.
The wards finally concluded that too much of him was on the other side, and it let go. Edric fell for a heart-stopping moment, coming down with one hand on the stone bridge. He looked up in panic, but Henry Mason and the Dark Lord ignored the shamblers’ howls of rage.
Not daring to breathe, Edric crawled across the wards and toward them. Ten feet. Twenty feet. He could make out their words.
“…kind of them to leave us sacrifices. It will make the ritual even easier.” He handed a knife to Mason. It was a glass knife, black and jagged. It glowed in the unholy unlight.
“I’d feel better if we had the boy, too, Master,” said Mason.
“Doubtless we passed above his remains,” said the Dark Lord. “Now, my student: remember: When we speak the ritual, there will be pain beyond imagining. You— – perhaps even I— – shall know fear. But together, our wills and knowledge shall master the Great One, and we shall be as gods. Beyond pain. Beyond fear.”
“Beyond pain,” breathed Henry Mason. It sounded like a prayer. Edric inched closer.
“Together, then,” said The Dark Lord.
He and Henry Mason raised their knives above their victims. They glowed black in the unholy light, and Edric was still forty feet away.
Time seemed to stop. Edric knew what Ardmoor would choose. The knives would descend, and in that moment, when they were in the middle of their ritual, he would strike. To save humanity at the cost of two lives. Two cursed, monstrous lives. He wouldn’t hesitate.
Edric willed all his force into his monstrous left hand, and struck.
His flesh flowed outward, flowering into a deadly tentacle. His needle-toothed maw sank into Henry Mason’s thigh. The older boy screamed and jumped, whirling to confront his attacker.
He stepped right off the platform and for an instant met Edric’s eyes. He lunged for his broomstick.
Missed it by a fingertip.
Then he was gone.
The Dark Lord turned, his purple eyes glowing white with shock. Edric whipped his arm back, but a nova of purple flame burst into being about the Dark Lord, and pain seared through Edric’s arm.
“YOU DARE TO RAISE YOUR HAND TO ME?” he screamed. “I SHALL FLAY YOUR LIVING SOUL FROM YOUR…”
An unearthly roar shook the Chamber. It was almost… satisfied.
The Dark Lord screamed, an inhuman sound that cut into Edric’s eardrums like a hot knife as his soul, spliced to Henry Mason’s, was consumed by the Great One. Violet fire screamed downwards, pulled by an irresistible force. The black cloak collapsed into a boneless heap.
And a sphere of blackness snapped into being about the Chamber. Suddenly, Edric found himself looking out of Nyctera’s eyes. They fluttered open, and he saw the platform with Karen’s bound body, surrounded by nothingness. The sphere extended.
“No!” Edric shouted. He reformed his left hand. The mouth within his palm had been burned away. He clapped it over her eyes. “Don’t look. You don’t want to see.” The sphere stopped. Contracted. Edric concentrated. From outside the darkness, he could see through his own eyes and hers. He crawled across the bridge to the two girls. He took his hand from Nyctera’s eyes and watched himself crawl face-to face with her.
“Edric?” she asked. “Did we win? Did we beat the monsters?”
He watched a tired grin spread across his own face.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yes, we did.”
G. Scott Huggins now lives in Wisconsin after sojourns in Kansas, Germany and Russia. He teaches history to high school students, many of whom learn things before going on to college. He is the author of Moon 2095: The Girl Who Wasn't There and has also appeared on Escape Pod and Podcastle. You can read his ramblings and rants at The Logoccentric Orbit.
Finals
Bernadette Durbin
Cast your mind back to those college days, where in your study-fogged brain it seems a good idea to go to club meetings at 10 PM despite 8 AM classes, or to declaim poetry to the Beat stylings of a brass player with a detached organ pipe.
If you’re below a certain age, cast your mind back further, before smartphones, nay, even cellphones; when email existed but professors were so confused by it that all assignments must be turned in with hardcopy, and woe betide the student whose procrastination led to a long line at one of the few printers on campus, or who had no computer of their own and had to fight with other last-minute students for a shared one.
Now think of a small college in the Pacific Northwest, where the weather has finally given up its confusion as to the season, and th
e glorious spring days are undercut by the desperation of studying for final exams.
There. You have it. That’s it exactly.
Well, except for the elves.
Finals
It was, as they say, bad study weather.
I pulled my gaze away from the Ultimate Frisbee players deftly avoiding the potential hazards of the bronzing sun-worshippers and back to the dense biochemistry book open in my lap. For the twelfth time in an hour. The view of the guys was infinitely more attractive, but I did have a final in a few hours, which I had to pass to keep my scholarship.
My cover was obnoxious, but never more so when the sunny weather allowed a game of Shirts versus Skins.
I once again drew my attention back to the book held open on my tartan-clad lap (thirteen) and passionately wished that Central had decided to send somebody else—or that they had chosen some cover other than that of a dweeby scholarship student. I mean, the ankle-length skirt and bulky sweater were acceptable within the parameters of certain religious groups, but the bottle-bottom glasses were just too over the top.
It might have been worth it if I’d gotten any breaks, but I’d been here for eight months without a hint. I was tempted to fail my final so they’d have to pull me out.
While contemplating this path, I realize I was once again watching tanned skin in the sun. I carefully avoided swearing and jerked my eyes back to the same page I’d had open for half an hour. Fourteen.
“Hsst. Maureen.”
I hate that name.
“Maureen.”
I closed the book on my finger and looked off the porch. It appeared that the pyracantha bush had sprouted eyes. “Chris, what are you doing?”
He looked around somewhat wildly. “I need to get inside.”
“What, did you forget your code again? Honestly, how you ever got in the Honors Program with a mind like yours…”
“C’mon, Mo…”
I glared at him for a moment and then stood to get the door open. Behind me I could hear an inordinate amount of muffled swearing as he extricated himself from the bush. I smiled at the yelps of pain – anyone who doesn’t know to keep out of a bush with thorns deserves what he gets.
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