Elder Shadow (The Reminiscent Exile Book 5)

by Joe Ducie

  Not so much a dud card as a dealer-breaker.

  “If I start slaughtering these mortals,” Oblivion growled, “your detective friend will show her face. She’ll face me, because she’s good and brave and everything foolish enough to die.”

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Annie would. But she’s like me, Oblivion, she’ll die first before giving you anything.’

  “Many say that before the cutting starts.” He growled. “Your son is on this world. He has to be.”

  ‘If he is, he’s one among seven billion. Good fucking luck.’

  “I am the Age Flood—endless and Everlasting. If it takes me the next thousand years, jumping from host to host, slaughtering the people of True Earth, that is nothing to me.”

  Oblivion stumbled into Riverwood Plaza, and just as described I saw the cavernous ruin of my bookshop across the way, where all this had started only ten days ago. Yellow caution tape was strung across the ruin, a paltry attempt to protect nothing worth protecting anymore. Just a few trinkets here and there that may have survived the blaze, enchanted as they were. I felt immeasurably sad, seeing my store so burnt out and hollow.

  Lot of memories in that place.

  Annie Brie and Tal Levy were seated on the rim of the marble fountain at the heart of the plaza. Between them, kicking his tiny little sneakers against the marble, was a young boy, a toddler, no more than two years old.

  So much for cutting down seven billion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HIT ME WITH THE GOOD STUFF

  ‘Can one mad king defeat one mad god?’

  So much for running and hiding.

  So much for carefully laid plans.

  Here we were, back to the start, where Ethan Reilly had died and where Oblivion had possessed me.

  And that boy, tiny jeans and white shirt, Nike-ticked red sneakers, windswept bushy brown hair and knowing green eyes last seen peering at me from the eyes of the goddess Fair Astoria, the boy’s mother, Emily Grace. Well, we knew who that had to be, didn’t we?

  I was as shocked as Oblivion.

  And infinitely more… afraid.

  My first thought was one of betrayal—from Annie and Tal, but how, why…

  My second was much worse. Not betrayal, but a bargaining chip. I had not thought Annie or Tal, two women I loved in every sense of the word, one who I had died for and one who had died for me, capable of such cruelty.

  That’s what you get for putting the objects of your affection on pedestals, I supposed, and decided if any time was less suitable to my reminiscences than this one, I would know it.

  My third thought was kinder, though no less terrifying: This isn’t what it seems.

  Then the boy, the toddler, waved at me, a broad grin on his face, and my heart crumpled at such innocence. But something told me, a sneaking suspicion, that this wasn’t just some regular kid. He had his mother’s eyes—did he have his father’s penchant for mischief? That wave wasn’t idle, it held purpose, almost beckoning. Intelligent.

  Oblivion limped across the cobblestone courtyard, crowds parting for him as blood leaked from my eyes. We wouldn’t have long before we were pestered by the local constabulary. Annie was here, though, and she was a card-carrying member of that constabulary. Loopholes, again.

  Sensing a trap, another deceit, and already a few points behind on the board, Oblivion approached Annie, Tal, and the kid cautiously, scenting the air, casting webs and nets of Will light out to hunt for hidden snares. His nets touched on a few of the enchanted objects in my shop that had survived the firestorm, but nothing else.

  The sun struck diamonds on the clear bubbling water in the fountain. Oblivion brought us to a stop about six feet from the marble edge, shoulders hunched, still expecting a trap.

  “How did you know… we’d be here?” Lord Oblivion asked. He looked not to Tal or Annie, the both of them on their guard, Annie with her revolver loosed and pointed halfway between the ground and my heart, Tal clutching a curved knightly blade flat against her thigh.

  The toddler sighed, another painfully adult characteristic like the wave, wholly alien on a boy so young. Again, things weren’t normal here. They were about as far from normal as things could get.

  “I asked them to bring me here,” the boy said, two years old and going on fifty.

  Once, long ago now, I’d been lost in the Dream Worlds with Annie, and we had encountered Scion of the Everlasting, posing as a young boy on a sandy purple beach, lagoon-blue waters, eating mangoes the size of watermelon. He had attempted to speak like a boy only about eight or nine years old, and had failed. Here now was a two-year-old, and only just two at that, speaking as if he were fifty years old. But not pretending.

  It unnerved me, to say the least.

  I saw that it bothered Annie, too, her cheeks pale and eyes flickering, not quite touching on the boy.

  “He insisted,” Annie said. “When we returned from the citadel, he was waiting for us, Declan. As if he expected us. We tried not to be here, but he…” She shook her head, vexed and confused. Mind manipulation, then.

  “You are speaking to Lord Oblivion, child,” Oblivion said. “Address not the Shadowless Arbiter.”

  “Now then,” the boy said and crossed his little arms over his chest. His green eyes sparkled, so much like Emily’s. “An argument could be made he has as much right to speak as anyone here.”

  The boy clicked his fingers and something… happened. My mind split, right down the middle, a tremendous tearing sound like the shaking of the earth in storm. I felt like I was being pulled apart, and I felt like that because I was being pulled apart.

  I stumbled and gained my feet, standing next to a mirror image of myself, to Lord Oblivion.

  The boy had wrenched me from my seized mind, left Oblivion in possession of my body. And I… I glanced down at my hands, noted with some concern that I could see the cobblestone lane through my skin. I pressed a hand to my chest and, thankfully, it didn’t slip right through, but I was, hell, I was disembodied.

  “My god, is he a ghost?” Annie asked. “What on earth?”

  “Much better,” the boy said. “Father,” he nodded to me and then looked to Oblivion. “Uncle.”

  I saw Oblivion tense, clench my muscles, put himself on guard well and truly. He looked awful—I looked awful—ragged clothes, jeans torn and shirt bloody, soaked with sweat and worse. Droplets of blood oozed through my skin. My face was a clown’s makeup mess of red and pale flesh. My hair hung lank and greasy against my forehead. Oblivion was chewing my lip—he’d bitten right through the skin and was chewing it raw.

  I turned away, sickened.

  “How did you do that?” Oblivion asked. “What are you, Born?”

  Born… the name Saturnia had given the boy at Astoria’s and Ash’s funeral. That felt like forever ago, as well.

  Born of the Everlasting, my poor son, shrugged. “I know things,” he said. “I see things. I don’t always understand the how of it.”

  “Convenient,” I said, my voice as disembodied, an ethereal chime on the air, as the rest of me. I stepped on the cobblestones and felt the step, as if my foot were flesh and bone and not… what? Soul substance? Ghost goop? But I felt as if a good breeze would send me spinning as atoms across the plaza.

  I glanced around Riverwood Plaza and noticed a strange thing. All the people, the proprietors of the restaurants and food trucks across the courtyard, their customers, my neighbours, were looking everywhere but at the fountain. Born winked at me and I guessed he had something to do with the distraction. We stood aside of notice.

  I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. At this point, I’d lost count of how many times I’d been in control and lost control since Oblivion’s possession. This didn’t feel like control. I tried to access my Will light, my arcane powers, and for a wonder found them sitting there as always, like a pool of energy in my disembodied mind. Huh… I glanced again at my broken and bleeding body, Oblivion’s vessel, and decided the flesh was just tha
t—a vessel. Even for us lowly humans.

  “How you been, kid?” I asked. “Eating all your fruits and vegetables?”

  “I desire not broccoli,” he replied. “Though I am partial to blackberries.”

  I nodded along, as if this were all normal. Hell, in my life, before the fire and death enchantments started flying, this was relatively normal.

  “You will come with me, Born,” Oblivion said, and a line of dark blood trickled from my nose, splitting over the rough stubble on my upper lip.

  “Someone get him a tissue,” I said.

  Annie, ever prepared, offered Oblivion a pocket handkerchief. He declined with a growl.

  “I want to,” Born said. “Yes, I do. A part of me, the god-spark in me, wants to go with you, uncle. Wants to take my place among the Everlasting.”

  “Do not resist—”

  Born clicked his fingers again and Oblivion’s words were cut-off, silenced. The Elder God looked flabbergasted, as if the sun had gone and set in the east. I began to respect my kid’s power on a whole other level.

  “The other part of me,” Born said, and here he looked at his palms. I sensed honest confusion. I may have been rent from my body, a vessel decaying, but I wasn’t the only one torn that bright afternoon. “The absurd, human part…” Born sighed. “Well, that part just wants to eat blackberries.”

  “You are not human,” Oblivion said. “Do not debase yourself so. You carry Astoria’s legacy, if not her true mantle. You were born into your own. In time, the humanity in you will fade. You will become wholly the Everlasting Born.”

  “I didn’t ask to be born,” he said, and I think Oblivion and I heard the word ‘born’ two different ways.

  I, as a father.

  He, as a piece of shit.

  “You needn’t ask, you simple are,” Oblivion snapped.

  “Your mother, may she rest in peace, loved you very much,” I said. “She sacrificed everything for you, for that love.” I considered, then knelt on my ghostly haunches so I was eye level with the kid. “Don’t feel any guilt for that. It was her decision, and she paid it gladly to see you born.” I wanted to reach out and touch his shoulder, but the wariness in his eyes gave me pause.

  “‘Your mother and father were very selfish to have you’”, Born said, an eerie mimicry of my own voice. “You said that, only hours after I was born, after you fled Emissary on Voraskel with me in your arms.”

  Christ, the kid had been aware that whole time? Aware when I’d abandoned him into Annie’s care? That explained the wariness, the caution and even suspicion, in his eyes.

  “True Earth,” he said with a heavy sigh.

  “Yes,” Tal said. “This is True Earth.”

  “The greatest piece on the playing board, where all stories are born, in a way,” Born said. He tapped his teeth together in thought—and that was something else that jarred. He had a mouth full of teeth, which looked so out of place on his young face.

  “Ten thousand years ago this world should have been mine,” Oblivion hissed. “Until I was betrayed, imprisoned.” He glanced sideways at me, almost pettily.

  I gave him a quick salute. I didn’t know how, yet, but given all the time travel nonsense so far, I reckoned I had my part to play in that imprisonment.

  “This must be resolved,” Born said, frowning to himself. “The two of you, Father and Uncle, must settle your conflict. Here. Today.”

  “We’re some little ways beyond reconciliation and handshakes, if that’s what you’re after,” I said.

  Oblivion grunted. “He destroyed your ancestral home, boy. The Citadel of the Everlasting fell burning from the heavens not half a day ago.” For a wonder, I watched a tear cut a track through the blood on my face. How about that. “There can be no resolution.”

  Born sighed. “So young, the both of you.” He considered and then clapped his hands together. “So be it, if it must be that way. Fighting, then.”

  Oblivion clenched his fists and I, rather than being worried, did the same. At what point had that happened? I used to be so afraid of this god. That was a lot of gods ago, I suppose.

  “Human or Everlasting,” Born said. “I know not which foolish side is right. Humans have such empathy, such capacity for love. Father, you are a fine ambassador in that regard, though you think so little of yourself. The Everlasting have a duty so ancient as to be divine, to protect the Story Thread from nightmares beyond reckoning, and this I cannot ignore. Uncle, you are brash but unwavering in that resolve.”

  “Dispense of this,” Oblivion said. “And take your rightful place upon the thrones of the Nine.”

  “He wanted to kill you not so long ago,” I added. “Devour your essence, I believe.” Declan Hale, ladies and gentlemen, king and snitch.

  “This can only be decided one way,” Born said with a sigh. “A battle, the final battle, between Shadowless and Age Flood.”

  I exchanged glances with Annie, with Tal, and even with Oblivion. “Pistols at dawn, then?”

  Born grinned—the most horrific grin I’d ever seen, perhaps solely because it did not belong on the face of a toddler. I tried to mask my disgust, but I reckon he saw it, yeah, I reckon he saw it. Poor kid.

  “Oh, I think we can do better than that.”

  He clicked his fingers again, on both hands, and we were flung across the Story Thread, True Earth receding behind us as a distant marble, as viciously and as relentlessly as arrows loosed from a bow across the length and breadth, the absurdity, of this vile creation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  JUST HUM ALONG

  ‘I asked you a question, were you paying attention? It’s OK. I didn’t really need you to reply’

  Had I thought Oblivion and Dusk capable of precise and effective Void travel? Able to bend reality to their will, slip sideways across the Story Thread with the ease of crossing a road? I had thought that, but they were nothing, nothing, compared to the talent of my son—to the talent of the Everlasting Born, though I hated thinking of him as such.

  The Void, inky blackness, parted before us like curtains on the stage of some grand performance—Shakespeare at the Globe, perhaps, Tempest at the Old Vic—and reality reasserted itself with such sudden clarity that my head spun about my shoulders, dizziness and nausea somehow still possible even as a ghostly, disembodied soul.

  When I cleared my head, blinked, and got a good look at our surroundings, I wasn’t surprised in the least to see where we were. Annoyed? Yeah. But then a lot of these adventures seemed to end here, the thematic close and familiar narrative comfortable in hindsight.

  “Welcome,” Born said and threw his hands up against the purple sky of an alien sunset, all three feet of him against the impossible landscape. “To the Lost City of Atlantis.”

  Born had brought only me and Oblivion along for the ride, electing to leave Annie and Tal back on True Earth, no doubt fretting and anxious. Good, they deserved a break from my nonsense and my grudge matches. It always came down to me alone, always. That seemed to be a fucking constant of the universe, a rule as certain as gravity.

  I needed to start making some better life choices.

  We stood upon the summit of the Vale Atlantia, of course, the plateau overlooking the rest of the city, where the remains of the Infernal Clock were burnt into the fused obsidian, the shards of the Roseblade melted against the black-glass, and where I had died, years ago now. I recalled the last time I’d been here, just before unleashing the Peace Arsenal and travelling back in time with Tal, freed from Oblivion’s control, to the city when it was alive:

  At the summit of the tower, a clear mile above the streets below, was the open courtyard that had sheltered the Infernal Clock. Four pillars, once at each point of the compass, marked the edge of the courtyard and the long drop to the city streets. I set the cruiser to hover in place and extended the exit ramp down onto the hard stone, just to the left to the spiralling staircase that led down into the tower. Given how long I'd been awake, and how weary I felt, I do
n’t think I’d have managed more than a handful of those steps.

  I exited the cruiser first. Sophie and Ethan followed just behind me, silent and fearful.

  The plateau was abandoned. The shards of the Infernal Clock protruded from the ground. Its crystal rose stem was dark and withered. The roots from that once-living miracle had hardened into black diamond all across the plateau.

  I'd killed the Clock to unmake the Degradation, and by doing so had released the Everlasting from their prisons, allowing the Elder Gods to touch the worlds again. I would be responsible for every death in the coming war.

  I'd made a choice for the greater good, lost Clare Valentine to have the chance to make a choice, and in the end, I’d done more harm than good. Story of my life, more harm than good.

  And my friends suffered the worst. Sophie had driven that nail into my heart.

  Rusty red stains from where I'd started bleeding to death after destroying Morpheus Renegade had dried into the marble floor. Dead cherry blossom petals from the storm during my last visit gathered in the corners, shriveled. Tal always loved the cherry blossoms… The sky overhead was peaceful, blue, and yet I felt unnerved.

  So, one could say that this place held a bit of sordid history for me.

  And Oblivion.

  I had died here.

  He had been imprisoned here for ten thousand years.

  I had severed the Infernal Clock here.

  I had destroyed the Roseblade here. Unleashed the Peace Arsenal.

  Born knelt and ran his hands through the rusty-red stain against the dark stone, darker than the stone around it, and licked his fingers. “Your blood,” he said, “my blood.”

  “It’s a helluva place you’ve brought us to, kid.”

  I glanced out at the ruinous city, the fallen and abandoned towers, the broken skybridges, and beyond—sheer cliff faces of purple rock. After the Voidflood had swept Atlantis away from True Earth, the city had washed up here… on a far and away alien world deep in the uncharted territories of the Story Thread. After ten thousand years, it had been me, me as a boy, who had found it again—my great quest, a desire to prove myself in the eyes of the Knights Infernal and King Morrow.