by Emma Glass
Sabine shrugged. “Such empty words, Lord Craven.”
The rest of us looked at one another. Here we were—all of us united, those who still lived, facing down the servant of our incomprehensible enemy. Behind these doors sleeps the creature that will destroy everything…
The sorceress wandered back down from the stairs, out of the temple’s menacing glow. “Do you understand why I allowed you to come here?”
“You didn’t have any choice,” Valentine snarled.
“Forget your pride,” Svetlana replied darkly. “Whoever this sorceress is, she has greater power than any of us now. If she wanted to stop us, she certainly would have already done so.”
The elderly vampire angrily set her jaw.
I chimed in. “You wanted to draw us into a trap.”
Sabine looked taken aback, even amused. “Why would you have come if you thought this was a trap?”
“Robbed for options,” I remarked calmly.
The others shot me annoyed stares. I ignored them.
Sabine lifted her chin, summing me up with her glance. When she pointed, she spit her two fingers between Clara and I. “You were separated. You came back together. Nor, foolish Craven, has it been the first time? There is nothing I could do to meaningfully drive you apart. It has been foretold that you will be here at this time, all of you. The marks placed on your spirits have guided you here. All but one.”
I was surprised to see her stare at my sister.
“I had one chance to mark you… and I failed.”
Nikki smirked. “I’m not alone in my pretty little head. The one you got your dirty hands on doesn’t call the shots. You had the opportunity, and you blew it, didn’t you?”
Does that make Nikki a wild card? Is that… enough? It was certainly unusual that the sorceress seemed unfazed by the possibility. Either she was being overly confident—or there was something we were missing here...
“In the end, it is no matter.” Sabine snorted derisively. “The rest of you have acted as my master wills it. You have survived to witness the rebirth of the one who shall rescue these worlds from damnation. Despite all your misguided intents, you will see the dawning of the old era anew…”
“You speak too much,” Lord Krum sighed.
Sabine smirked. “Perhaps. Or perhaps I judge.”
“Judge?” Svetlana raised her brow.
“My master and I are not fools. We do not wish to end many lives—just whichever ones might be caught in what you call the Calamity. In our new world, my master wishes to simply restore the natural balance, leaving untainted as much as possible. There is no need to sweep away the new ways of doing things if they remain… compatible.”
“What are you saying?” Eyes-Like-Fire snapped.
“Us. The vampire lords. We’ve been assembled here so Sabine here—and her ‘master’—can decide for themselves if we are worthy to survive the Calamity. She’s saying that her master doesn’t want to reign supreme; they are happy to leave us in power over the world if there’s a, well…”
Sabine smiled serenely, encouragingly.
“An understanding.” I hid my disdain. Right now, it was not a useful emotion to keep in view.
“Is that right?” Valentine chuckled darkly. “Assuming you two get what you want—if that’s even possible—you still expect us to roll over and serve this secretive master of yours? That we would inflict your will across this world?”
“If you are deemed fit, you will all retain power. Not to the same degree as before, perhaps, but should it become apparent that your way remains compatible with ours, the old way, we can merge our eras together.”
“Our eras?” Chandra Song asked quietly.
Nikki pieced it together easy enough. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You two want to bring back the old era—the time of the Sanguine Ones…?”
Sabine snorted. “That is an oversimplification.”
Before any of us could retort, Clara spoke up—shifting away from her dazed, concerning admiration for the stone temple before us. “I have… been wondering about that for a while now. The era of the Sanguine Ones. That’s the time that our worlds were combined, wasn’t it?”
The sorceress placed her hand to the stone door again. “No. The old era, the time of the Sanguine Ones, is the era just beyond the Cataclysm that rendered our worlds apart. The brutality of those centuries is a blight upon history. We have no desire to see that chaotic bloodshed erupt over the world again. Our actions prevent it from roaring back. No, the time we seek is the time before… the unification.”
“Yes, we know that,” I replied in boredom. “So, why are you telling us all of this? Your great masterstroke plan—to what extent is it useful for us to be made aware of this?”
“For the judgment to work, it must go both ways.”
The vampire lords, I imagined, were curious over that. Nikki was not. With a snort, she replied: “Between the two of you, you’ve already slain vampire lords, and you expect us to assume the rest of us are worthy enough to meet this wonderful ancient creature? You can probably guess what my feelings are on the matter.”
“And mine,” Clara seemed to snap further awake.
“And my own,” I hissed, folding my arms.
“You simply do not understand yet,” Sabine smiled, as if she were coddling children. “Do you think, maybe, that I was so willing to serve at the very start? I was convinced. When I met my master, yes… at first, I resisted. But I asked questions. I kept an open mind. And I was shown so many things. A great many of them, brilliant. Not all. I have seen horrors that will engulf this world if we fail to act.”
“Enough to commit genocide,” Ooktuk Krum noted.
Sabine looked wounded. “Enough to do what I had to. Enough to put into place what must come next, if any of us mean to see ourselves alive—or our peoples.”
Barely stopping Nikki, I held a hand out.
“I’ve seen your sacrifice. I chased you down. I tried to stop you. I risked my life in the bowels of an enemy hold to try and save people who would rather see my head on a pike than listen to me—to stop you from killing them all! I did everything I could and it wasn’t enough, but bloody hell, I tried! Don’t you dare try to convince me that all those villages had to burn! That the few who dared to help me needed to die…!”
Everyone carefully listened to her declaration of anger and sorrow. Taking in the pain behind her words, I could only felt my heart continue to break for her. I wondered if I would ever fathom what these travels had done to her.
I wished Mattias was still alive to see her now.
The sorceress watched silently, listening intently. Either our old friend here is a damn good actress—and I’m not willing to put that beyond her—or she’s actually remorseful…
“That wasn’t me, Nikki,” Sabine finally replied.
My sister lifted her furious gaze. “Lies. LIES!”
“That was a shadow of a creature, one that wasn’t Lord Azuzi or I,” she tried to explain. “At a point, I was once in control, yes. Or trying to be. But we became entangled, his spirit and mine. We… bled together. And what we became when it was neither of our minds in power was…”
“An abomination,” my sister spat out.
“A mistake,” Sabine corrected.
I was taken aback. Even Nikki barely relaxed.
“What do you mean?” Clara asked. “A mistake?”
The temple pulsated—harder than ever before. I had to cover my eyes, so bright was the magic… or was it dark? It was impossible to tell now. But it glowed with an intensity that forced me to release Nikki from my grip, holding my wrist over my face. The others did the same.
All but Clara.
Sabine turned back to the gate, taking a couple of steps down, still standing within the column of light. In a face of blind ecstasy, the sorceress looked back to us again.
“You have other questions, I am certain. I am no longer the one to answer them…”
I grabbed onto
my lover’s arm. “Clara?”
The witch barely noticed me, enraptured once again.
“Clara? Are you listening? Can you hear me…?”
“It’s too late, Elliott Craven,” the sorceress spoke aloud. “The harbinger awakens. She feels a calling that she can’t ignore—the call of the abyss! Or a voice buried deep down within it…”
“Shut up!” I snapped, before turning back. “Clara?!”
The young witch threw her spine back—her eyes and mouth contorted into a scream as purple light poured out. I tried to cling onto her, but a force beyond comprehension repelled me from touching her now.
She floated onto her back. It terrified me.
“Clara?” Nikki tried to grab her too.
I barely turned. A couple of vampire lords attempted to wield any sort of supportive magic that could intervene in this disaster—Chandra Song, in particular, flung herself at Clara Blackwell with her hands wide, calling her name…
The witch’s body erupted into a dark glow, the same as the one surrounding the temple. Against the blinding light I struggled to grab her, to touch her, to do anything as the stone doors burst open.
The entire island trembled as dust enveloped us all. In our panic, I tried to cover my eyes and grab her again, hurt by the knowledge that I knew I couldn’t reach her. She was right here, floating serenely and beautifully, with her eyes barely open as she rested oblivious to the whirling chaos as the dust cleared.
The stone doors rested wide open, revealing a dark and bleak corridor that extended impossibly forwards around a curve. Of course, it didn’t have to make sense—this was a dream, or a place between worlds.
The laws of the reality meant nothing here.
“Clara?” I tried to hug her. The force pushed me back.
Sabine merely stepped aside. The column of darkness, I realized, slowly dissipated from around the temple now—retreating into the air and steadily breaking apart.
“Come, harbinger,” Sabine noted. “Your time is here.”
“No,” I snarled. “You can’t have her. You can’t—“
Clara Blackwell’s floating, glowing body shot right into the corridor as if pulled by a string—flying out of view as she met the bend. Suddenly, it was Nikki’s turn to restrain me as I tried to rush after her.
“What have you done?” Ooktuk Krum demanded.
“I’ve done nothing. She obeys the call of my master.”
“Who is your master?” Chandra Song snapped.
Sabine took one step further back into the fading light. “You’re welcome to discover the answer yourselves. Clara awaits inside—as does the one who brings salvation to the worlds…” We watched in stunned silence as her body returned to black dust; her dream form stepping fully into the beam of light as it drew together and vanished.
The rest of us were left with an open prison door…
Chapter 18
Clara
Blackness surrounded me. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see, or think, or breathe… anything. I couldn’t find anything to cling to—was I falling? Was I floating? Was I standing, or dropping backwards? Was there a down or an up? Did I have a body?
Did it even matter?
Here, there was only the blackness and me. Nothing in this place stirred; I felt everywhere and nowhere, like all of this was just me, stretching out, devoid of sensation or any feeling of relative space.
The blackness was warm. It comforted me.
I dreamed, briefly, that I was a girl.
Flashes entered my mind. Little… pieces, one at a time, like fragments of shattered glass. I couldn’t see the whole, but I could look at the pieces. The pieces were all I had left, and they flickered separately in my scattered mind.
A breezy overcast before a strong storm.
Bare soles against dry, crunching leaves.
Something tasting sour and crisp.
Tape, ripping free from a piece of cardboard.
The distant call of a crow.
I looked at each one, as if I sat cross-legged on the floor, flipping over facedown playing cards in rows. I forgot each of them as I turned them back over, one by one, and peered under the others. It was too hard to keep more than one in my mind at once. But as I randomly plucked at the grid of cards before me, all facedown at a time but one, I still found myself reaching back for the old favourites with a beaming smile on my face.
A sky so fragile that the stars shone at noon.
Colours whipping around me on the wind.
The taste of a handsome man’s lips.
My fingers sizzled at the last one. My body shuddered. I looked at my fingertips again, only to tilt my head at that curious card. None of the others had affected me that way. I reached slowly for it again, the tips tentatively dancing in the air near the card’s edge. I reached and flipped it over.
The sensations overwhelmed.
I wasn’t a girl on the floor, flipping cards.
I wasn’t a disembodiment in a black abyss.
I wasn’t falling, or sinking, or drowning.
I was alone, on my knees, crying into my hands. And I felt the comfort of a hand on my back, rubbing large circles between my shoulder blades. When I looked up, I saw one of the friendliest, most welcome faces in my life.
A face that had been in my dreams for a long time…
* * *
“…It’s you,” I whispered through my tears.
The kind old woman nodded, tears welling in her eyes. Her hand slowly retreated from my upper back; she folded it over the other atop her walking stick. “Clara, my child… you made it!” She cried tears of joy. “You passed the test! I am… so very proud of you, my darling.”
I glanced around. “Where am I? Why are we here?”
“We are here because it is time to face your destiny as a witch. A destiny, my child, that I have struggled to prepare you for—and for quite a long time, I’ll admit.” Her warm, wrinkled face beamed—and I felt relieved to see her, here at the end of my journey. Mischievously, her eye twinkled. “You’ve been without your answers for so long, my dear—and it’s high time that changed. Do you remember who I am, Clara…? Who I really am?”
“You’re my… aren’t you my…?”
“No,” she sadly shook her head, watching me lovingly. “I’m afraid that was a form that you chose for me. I needed to test the next one in line for this destiny. I needed to test you, Clara Blackwell, because you are set to inherit a great responsibility.”
I rose to my feet. All around us, the abyss between the worlds swirled—colours beyond measure, galaxies rising and collapsing in the midst. I felt we stood at the center of something phenomenal and beyond my comprehension.
“Where are we… Tzavos?”
The ancient witch smiled. “You do remember.”
“It’s… starting to come back to me now, yes.”
Tzavos Tzovac reached out her walking staff—her rod, I realized, a symbol of her power. In an instant, all of those amazing colours that whirled around us faded into a void. We stood at the edge of a great, bleak darkness.
“This is what awaits us all, Clara. Everything will end. The worlds you know, and many others, will fracture into nothingness—unless you can stop it. For countless years, I have struggled to hold this back… to be the glue that held everything I once loved together. But my power weakened within your amulet. I’ve steadily lost my strength. My fear is that the coming disaster will break all that exists.”
“The Calamity,” I whispered hopelessly.
“Your true enemy is not as sentientas you might think. From between the realms, I have long felt a great stirring—the coming destruction awakens. I’ve waited patiently in this place for eons beyond measure—desperate to meet the one who would cross between the worlds first. The one, it turns out, who was you…”
“But it wasn’t supposed to be me, was it?”
“No. There was another—a boy. Another inheritor.”
I feared the darkness. “Are t
here… many of those?”
“Inheritors?” Tzavos chuckled. Her free hand rested on my shoulder. “Oh yes, my child. Hundreds of them spread across your world! Possibly even thousands. It is not easy for me to know, not from where I stand. My visibility is limited. The descendants of the sorcerers and witches who called down the Cataclysm are still with us. All of them have a connection to magic… but so few of them feel it.”
“So… I’m really not all that special.”
“You misunderstand, Clara.” Tzavos gazed upon me as if I truly were her own granddaughter. As she squeezed my shoulder, ever so gently, the love beamed in her face. “Just because you weren’t chosen first doesn’t mean that you are not equally special. Whether you were the first, the fiftieth, even the thousandth…”
“But… my dream! The monster!”
“You were not the only one who had that dream. Many did—most couldn’t remember it! But the moment that you crossed the worlds, their nightmares stopped. That is how I knew you were the one to inherit the amulet, because you were the one who crossed first. And Clara, I am afraid that the dream you feared, from that point forwards, started to chase you and only you… until you finally defeated it.”
Colour began to swirl back into the abyss around us.
“So… I am special? I don’t think I’m following.”
“You are the one who stands here with me now. You are the one who rose to the challenge. There is a power in that, my child. A power that you have steadily manifested, just as I once instructed you to do. Your lessons are now over.”
“Of course they are. I finished my studies.”
Tzavos chuckled, her hand squeezing my shoulder one last time before she relinquished it. “No, not those lessons. I told you, even then, that you would forget! Such is what comes with learning through your dreams. So hard to keep the details… but your instincts developed, as intended.”
I thought back to an earlier dream.
“The beach,” I realized. “It was… my coma…”