by Nazri Noor
“Holy shit,” Mason stammered. “It worked.”
I looked at him, my brow furrowed, questioning. “What worked, exactly?”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, his eyes hardening again, his voice serious once more, with none of the awe and wonder it held just seconds ago. As he held the sword out, the blaze running along its edge faded, then went out, leaving only a beautiful, gleaming golden blade. “Here. Take it.”
Again, like the others, I didn’t really have to handle the blade to truly claim it. The sword levitated towards me, the feel of its hilt familiar and comforting in my hand, its metal still warm from both Mason’s skin and the holy fire it bore.
For a moment I thought to ask Mason what the sword was called, but I suspected that he wouldn’t have been keen to give me an answer anyway. I nodded at him in silent thanks. Mason bit his tongue, his mouth in a flat line, but he nodded back firmly, just the once.
Carver grabbed me by the shoulder, pressing hard. “It is time, Dustin. Do what you must.” He gave me the smallest smile. “I will tell the others that you said goodbye.” I nodded back, wishing I could have set things right with Sterling. But that was how Sterling showed his friendship, anyway – through pigheaded stubbornness and tough love.
A hand brushed against my wrist, then locked fingers with my own. I looked up, surprised to see Herald standing so close to me.
“God, I hate you for this,” Herald said, his voice just above a murmur. He squeezed my hand.
“I know,” I said, fighting back tears. “I love you, too.”
Chapter 31
Carver nodded at me firmly, gripping me again by the shoulder. His eyes reflected the endless wave of spells the mages launched at the remaining Agatha Blacks. I was right about their dwindled numbers. The ten that remained were making up for their fallen sisters. The portal in the sky was still widening. We’d knocked down three of the pillars that held open the gate for the Eldest, but it had amounted to nothing.
“Now or never, Dustin,” Carver said softly.
I nodded. I squeezed Herald’s hand as hard as I could, then stepped away, working my backpack off of my shoulders. Then I laid it on the ground and spread my hands.
“Come,” I whispered. “Come to me.”
The opening of the backpack fluttered as the four remaining swords heeded my call. I heard gasps from around me as the fifth blade that Mason claimed left my grasp, floating with the others in a slow orbit around my body. I looked from my friends to the circle of witches. My past, and my future. I found myself frozen in the present. It felt as though I had unfinished business.
I couldn’t just leave it at that. I knew it was selfish, but walking away wasn’t a proper goodbye. I ordered the swords to stay at my side, so they wouldn’t be in the way when I walked up to Herald, when I grabbed him by the collar, when I kissed him full on the mouth. When I pulled away, I thought I could taste the salt of fresh tears.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” I whispered. “For everything that you are.”
He grabbed the side of my face, a tear slipping past the emotional neutral ground that his glasses offered him. “I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to. Go get ’em. Go save the world.”
I nodded, swallowing thickly.
Herald staggered away, his hand closing into a fist around thin air. “I’ll wait for you.”
My heart shattered.
But it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last time that hearts and minds and bodies would be broken by the Eldest. This was the little sacrifice I had to make, the small offering I had to give in exchange for the world’s safety. Everyone – Hecate, Thea, Carver – always did say that the circumstances of my first death and my succeeding bond with the Dark Room were only incidental, an unhappy accident. I still don’t know if I believe in fate, but I did believe in doing the right thing.
And that night, in that moment, murdering Agatha Black was the right thing to do.
“Every ritual demands a sacrifice,” Carver said. He lifted his hands towards the circle of witches. “In blood and in power. Go forth, Dustin. Pay your price. Claim your prize.”
I stared at the man who had been my mentor and father since the day I met him, and I thought of my own father, and how I lied to him through my teeth. It was better for him not to know. I scanned the faces of my friends, of the dozens of mages gathered for the battle. I wondered how many of them had any idea of what was about to happen.
Deep breath, Dustin, I told myself. I raised my hand, gesturing towards the witches, surprised to find my feet moving on their own, walking in a slow, steady procession for the heart of the ritual circle. It was instinctive, how the five blades followed my every beck and call. If I angled my hand one way, all five would slant similarly. If I moved my arm through the air, then all of them would fly in the same direction. It would be so easy to cut with all five of them at once. So easy to kill.
I reached out to Vanitas as I walked, but he didn’t answer. For a moment I considered that he had his own reasons for giving me the silent treatment, until I realized that his presence, what I normally felt in the back of my mind when we spoke, was dulled, missing. His personality was suppressed, our psychic bond possibly severed due to the link with the four other blades. Perhaps his power was in use in that sense, and he was keeping his silence even as he was helping me maintain my connection with the others.
They flew in a slow orbit around me as I moved, flashes of verdigris-green, white, scarlet, black, and gold. Vanitas, Durandal, Laevateinn, Duskfang, and the unnamed celestial sword spun about me, their tips pointed outwards, their hilts rotating around my body on an invisible axis. Each blade was the spoke of a sharp, unearthly wheel, and each hungered for Agatha Black’s blood.
Shouts of warning rang out from the army of mages behind me, but my feet carried me forward. The absence of fear in my chest surprised me. In fact, it was an absence of everything but a bizarre and abiding thirst for carnage. Without words, without voices, the swords told me their own stories, sang songs of their own conquests, showed me pictures and glyphs of the moments that had led them, that had led us to this very moment.
The haze of the murmuring blades vanished, and my mind was whole once more. Vision and senses came rushing back, and I realized where I stood: right in the middle of the circle of witches. I looked down at my clothes, seeing the thighs and knees of my jeans ragged and torn from spears Agatha had thrown, and finding scratches and drips of blood on my skin in the openings. Pieces of my shirt and my jacket were ruined, singed by Agatha’s fire. That jacket was special. It was from Herald, and it was one of the last things that bonded me to my humanity.
I lifted my hands, deaf to the shouts of my friends and the mages of the Lorica, of the Hooded Council, of an ungrateful earth. The five blades flew around me in a circle, slowly, at first, then gradually picking up in speed. Like a whirling dervish they danced, faster and faster, carving a larger ring, ever expanding as they reached hungry teeth and tongues for Agatha Black’s flesh.
This would be her nightmare. This was my Apotheosis.
My command was only a whisper. “Slaughter.” I parted my hands, and like a flower of knives, a thing of razors and petals, the five swords blossomed into a ring of death.
The mages, my allies, screamed at the sight of the massacre, but Agatha Black screamed harder. The five swords spun faster and faster, a circular buzzsaw meant to cut and kill and flay. I stood at the heart of the ritual circle, every spray of blood against my skin a blessing, every drop of the witch’s life force another small offering for the altar that was my mortal body. Still the swords weaved through their fatal motions, a ballet of blood, a danse macabre.
I lifted my head to the sky as I opened my eyes. The great eye and the portal it was peering through, they were gone, their terrible yellow and scarlet light no longer tainting the universe. All that remained were stars. I fell to my knees, laughing.
On and on the five swords danced, whirling eve
n when there was nothing left to cut, to consume. Every blade had been forged of a different metal, blessed or tainted in the fires of a different dimension, but each was now equal, slathered in the same red blood. The swords spun slower and slower, their hilts rotating methodically, as if angled and handled by five invisible swordsmen.
There they hovered in the air, still and silent, each sword pointing towards me, my body. This was the part that Hecate described with the least detail. This was the part I dreaded the most.
I spread my arms and pushed my chest forward, prepared to accept my fate. The stars murmured their curses, their accusations. I was only dust, they whispered, something that shouldn’t ever think to rise above its terrestrial station. I didn’t deserve to sing with the stars. Yet there I was, on the very brink of my ascension, of achieving the zenith of my arcane potential. My Apotheosis. I laughed again, from deep within my chest. I threw my head back, exposing my throat.
Five blades whistled as they sailed directly for my body, to cut away what was left of me, to reveal the truth of the soul that hid within so much corrupted flesh. Shrill sounds tore out of my throat, primal noises that shook the heavens, that joined with the music of the stars. Whether they were screams or peals of laughter, I may never know.
Chapter 32
Darkness. Total darkness, like I’d never known. I coughed, unsure if the thickness in my throat was blood or mucus. All this time spent with the Dark Room had honed my senses, made it so that I could see better in the dark. But here, wherever Here was? Nothing.
Was I dead? That had to be it. The Apotheosis hadn’t worked, my ascension failed. Well, I thought. At least Agatha Black was dead and gone. I turned in place, patting at my body as I did. Where there should have been wounds left by the five blades, there was nothing. Where there was blood, there was only unbroken skin. My clothes were still torn, but that was really the only evidence that I had died.
I walked. For how long, I couldn’t be sure, but if this was the Dark Room, then a pinpoint was supposed to appear sooner rather than later, a place I could use to reenter reality. But as my footsteps rebounded throughout the vastness of the dimension, it finally hit me. This was the Dark Room, only with one crucial difference. This time, there was no escaping.
My heart pounded faster. I’d agreed to this – I thought I was prepared for it, too. But suddenly I was no longer so sure. Worse, I was afraid. How long had I been there? How long had I walked? And as I moved I noticed, gradually, that my sight was returning, that I could vaguely see in the dimness. Yet the bizarre topography of the old Dark Room I knew was gone. I called on its shadows from deep in my heart, summoned on the soulfires I once stoked, fierce as the throat of a dragon, but nothing. No response.
Instead, I saw five shapes moving in the darkness.
I ran. Who knows how far, and how long, but I ran, away from the things that pursued me with relentless stamina, humanoid silhouettes that hounded me with the same pace and speed. When my energy flagged, so did theirs. When I stumbled, my shoe squeaking as it struck the ground wrong and sent me staggering, so did they. I slowed and came to a stop. The shadows followed. My mouth fell open as I took them in. These were my shades, actual manifestations of my self, formed out of the darkness. This was the consequence of the Apotheosis. My shadow had been split into five pieces.
It felt like the ultimate mockery, knowing that I had companions in that black dimension, only those that had no faces, no features, and no voice. I couldn’t rightly decide just then whether is was better that they were completely silent, or whether hearing five shadows speak in my same voice would have driven me insane faster than the simplicity of maddening solitude.
But I didn’t have to find an answer just then. Not just yet, as a familiar white face drifted from out of the darkness. Hecate. She was the last thing I expected in the Dark, and I told her as much, this time barely holding back my frustration.
“I thought I could handle this,” I muttered. “I’m going insane on my own in here.”
“This is your cross to bear,” she said, standing comfortably in the emptiness of the Dark. “To remain within these walls, simmering and stewing until such time that you gather enough power to step out on your own.”
“How long has it been?” I said. “At least tell me that.”
She looked down at her nails, gazing first at the backs of her fingers, then at her palm. “Days. Weeks. Perhaps months. What is time to you now that you are made immortal? How does it matter?”
I looked at my hands. Months? But I only just died. How could I have been out for months?
The shades watched her in rapt silence, unmoving, but showing her the kind of quiet reverence I might have reserved for her in the old days, when I still feared her, when I still understood the interplay of power between humans and entities. But what was left now that I was something else in between? What did I have to lose?
“It matters because the people I still love are out there,” I said, unable to contain the anger in my body. “I know that you care for nothing but magic and power and the politics of gods. But I still have those that I love, and every passing moment I stay here means I don’t know if they’re hurting, or sick, or dying.”
She blinked at me, and though her features kept shifting, I could sense her mock innocence, her sarcasm. “Why, of course they are hurting. They long for your companionship, but you left them.”
I tore my fingers through my hair. “Why are you taunting me? Why are you mocking me when you’re all that I have left?”
Hecate swept her great midnight robe about her, the edges of it swirling like tendrils of shadow at her feet. She seemed to grow taller, more menacing. “Because we mean to impress upon you the gravity of what you have done. Your tenure here is necessary. This is your second birthing. Is that not something to celebrate?”
I looked down at my hands. “So this is my gestation period.” I looked around. “And the Dark Room is my womb.”
“And your prison, as you clearly think of it. But it is also your home. We left you for so long on your own, and yet you have done nothing to change your conditions.” She swept her hand along the ground, as if to highlight the utter emptiness of the dimension. “We expected more from you.”
I threw my hands up. “I died a second time to get here, and in case you’ve forgotten, this is a temporary situation for me. Why should I bother doing anything to this place if I’m going to be out of here soon enough anyway?”
Hecate stared at me coolly, somehow seeming to grow even taller still. “We had such high hopes for you, Dustin Graves. This is the situation to which you must adjust. Until you understand it, nothing will improve. Nothing will change. Your lot is to remain within the Dark Room, forever and ever. You choose which doors to close, which to keep shut, and which to open so that you may go wherever you choose. This is your fate, to stand guard at the gates, to watch and to ensure that the agents of the Old Ones will never infiltrate your reality ever again. You are the keeper of the Dark Room’s many, many doors, godling. And until you embrace it, until you understand the fullest extent of your responsibility, you will always be a husk. Fallible. Worthless.” Hecate’s lips turned up as she threw me a withering look. “A god of nothing.”
I fell to my knees, my palms slamming into the ground, the solid darkness cold against my skin. I was very much aware that it appeared to Hecate as if I was kneeling to her, praying, worshipping, prostrate on the floor. “I don’t know what to do. I’m going crazy, Hecate, and I don’t know what to do.”
“You have always been resourceful, godling. We offered you this solution to your grand cosmic conundrum because we believed that you, of all people, would find a way. Look within yourself. Look to your friends.” I caught a glimpse of her face as she knelt to join me on the floor, as she cupped my chin in one warm hand. I shivered at the touch of another person, inhuman as it was. She smiled at me, her lips filled with the rarest traces of kindness. “Trust in Dustin.”
Then she v
anished. I fell to the floor, laying there, staring at the starless sky of my prison. Hecate had always loved her puzzles, her mysteries, but this was the worst possible time for them.
What resources did I have? What friends? It almost felt cruel for her to mention them, when I had nothing and no one left. A god of nothing, saddled with five unspeaking, unthinking copies of his incorporeal self, trapped within a dimension with no walls, but no exits. My knees came up to my face, and I felt for my shins, staring into darkness, into nothing.
Maybe madness would take me in time. Or I would fall asleep, then never wake again. That would be a mercy. Perhaps my five shades would rise up to throttle me, reaching for my throat with fingers like black talons, to tear what was left of my body into shreds.
I’d saved the world, killed Agatha Black, and sealed away the Eldest forever. But at what cost? I wasn’t ready for the Apotheosis. I wasn’t ready for so much silence, so much isolation. So much darkness.
Can you hear me? I wasn’t ready to go. I shouldn’t have ascended. I didn’t know what I was doing. The Apotheosis came too soon. I miss my friends. I miss the sun. I miss the air.
Can you hear me? Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Please, not you too. Don’t leave me. Don’t
Chapter 33
Days passed. Weeks, maybe months. For ages I searched for any kind of surface that I could mark, a way to scratch proverbial notches into the wood, to count out the units of time that comprised my imprisonment. It was solitary confinement, in essence, with a set of silent, faceless companions. I didn’t know if a truly solitary sentence would have been worse, compared to being surrounded by people who weren’t truly people, but just mindless extensions of myself. Really, just different parts of my shadow.
As for mundane concerns, other things that marked the regular passage of human time – sleep, hunger, bathroom breaks – none of that truly mattered. It felt like I could sleep forever if I wanted, but I never needed to. If a cup of Thai tea appeared before me in the Dark Room, I would have gladly sucked it down. But I didn’t feel thirst. For all intents and purposes, I was exactly as Hecate had described. I was something in between: not quite human, yet not quite divine, either. A godling.