The Prince of the Veil

by Hal Emerson

  The two forms atop the tower had taken to the sky.

  * * *

  The walls and floor began to shake.

  Leah was panting, breath coming in and out of her lungs so quickly that her throat and lips were raw and cracked. She knew no secret passageways, and the few glimpses of the future she could find through her Aspect did not include directions. Once she’d managed to pull herself onto the low-hanging balcony of the tallest tower, she’d been forced to take a huge central staircase that continued up and up and up, folding in on itself, circling around, doubling back, but always going higher. Doors and hallways branched off at every landing, leading to fantastically ornate apartments, audience chambers, and banquet halls.

  She’d met no one in these halls, and she wasn’t surprised. The whole structure of the Fortress had begun to shake even before she’d made it past the first staircase turning. Anyone of any sense had evacuated as soon as Raven had made his presence known. She’d seen his handiwork as she passed, and knew there were a score less Guardians for her to deal with.

  She passed a large window that showed the city of Lucien spread out below her, and realized she must be nearing the top.

  Please let me be nearing the top.

  The shaking under her feet changed, and suddenly the whole tower lurched around her. She fell to the ground, clutching the stairs to keep from sliding backward, only to be lifted completely off the floor and thrown upward as the distant sound of a roared Command rang through the floors above her.

  She shouted in alarm as she flew up and up and up, pulled by some relentless force, unable to make any sense of what was happening. She shot by a whole sections of stairs, and was only just able to maneuver herself around a stone landing before the forces just as quickly reversed and pulled her down again. Leah reached out and grabbed hold of a bannister as she flew past it, slamming into the side as gravity tried to pull her back down the several flights of stairs she’d just bypassed. She pulled herself onto level ground, and started up again, taking the steps two at a time.

  Whatever had happened, she was fairly certain it meant she was running out of time.

  A huge explosion rocked the floors above her, and she dodged pieces of dislodged stone and debris as they fell toward her. She turned one final time and found herself facing a final length of steps that led to a set of enormous carved doors, both bearing images of the Empress herself on either side, the Diamond Crown shining upon her head. Gold and silver gilding stood out everywhere she looked, and she was bombarded by the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flowers.

  I’m here.

  She heard a roar beyond the door, and a laugh that made her shiver uncontrollably. Rushing up the stairs, she heard what sounded like wings, and then the distant sound of crashing blades, but even as she came level with the throne room and the enormous doors, the sound began to fade.

  She ran through the doors, still trying to catch her breath, and unsheathed both her daggers, looking for the Prince and the Empress, but finding neither. The throne room was in tatters: the walls had been blown out by what looked like a huge concussive force, and only two blackstone pillars were left standing, the others lying strewn about the floor in collections of rough pieces that made the area look like a map room miniature of a mountain range.

  Where are …?

  She heard again the sound of wings and shouted Commands that shook her to the bone, and she turned her eyes skyward. Her mouth fell open.

  * * *

  Raven was in a nightmare.

  He was flying through the air of a black night illuminated only by massive flashes of lightning, borne on powerful wings he could not control, all while fighting for his life. She dove at him, hacking and slashing, shouting Commands and words of power that crashed into him, buffeting him like tempest winds. He attacked as well, flying at her, diving, trying to ride above her in the air, the whole of Lucien spread out below him like a hulking, black beast, but she turned aside every blow.

  They fought in spiraling circles, racing back and forth over all seven towers. She caught and threw him into one, and his impact broke the roof and shook the top floors so badly that the whole structure looked ready to fall. He recovered just fast enough to disengage himself and take to the sky once more, racing as fast as he could up into the clouds. She followed with her midnight blade.

  He turned and struck out, the air shooting over him as he fell, but she rolled to the side, and he crashed into the roof of a second tower. He gasped in pain as he pushed off from the broken tiles, drawing on his reserves of strength and endurance to heal the broken bones and torn ligaments he’d suffered.

  He rolled back into the sky once more, rushing for her, but she dove faster than he anticipated, and he was forced to roll awkwardly to the side, which only allowed her to swing back around over him, the midnight blade held high.

  She dove straight toward him, her sword extended and aimed right for his heart. He tried to turn and meet her, but he was too slow. He saw it all happen and knew he couldn’t stop it, knew her blade was moving too quickly, saw it racing down to claim his life –

  Two daggers flew out of nowhere and pierced her through the chest, slashing the front of her beautiful white gown.

  The Empress threw her head back, her golden hair spilling beautifully into the air, and shrieked in pain. She clutched herself and fell, spiraling toward the throne room at breakneck speed. Raven followed her, diving, shouting Commands downward, trying to force her into the blackstone floor, trying to bind her and stop her resistance.

  “Be thou still as stone! Be thou full of pain! Fall with the force of mountains!”

  But she rolled over, just before she hit the ground, and shouted back at him:

  “Be thou tied to me!”

  Raven felt a force attach to a point somewhere behind his navel and pull him forward as the Empress was pulled toward him. He rocketed downward and crashed into her, before they both shot down toward the throne room floor. In the back of his mind, he realized that the daggers must have come from Leah, that she must somehow have climbed the tower that they were about to crash into –

  “Be she safe from harm!”

  He crashed into the floor just as he finished speaking, the Empress following suit not five feet to his right, and the power of their combined Commands rocked the whole Fortress to its foundations. The tower shook beneath them, and with the sound of crumbling rock, the whole structure gave out. Suddenly they were plummeting through the air, the whole top section of the throne room floor crashing down into the level below it, and the level below that, not stopping. The walls bowed out around them and fell apart, smashing into the other towers and toppling them outward into the city. All Raven could do was hang on for dear life and hope that somehow his Command was keeping Leah safe.

  They continued falling, breaking through barrier after barrier until they hit the ground itself, splitting it open to reveal an enormous cavern into which the stones and broken mortar of the Fortress fell. Raven heard the Empress shout another Command, and something rose up from beneath the ground, protected from the crushing weight of the stones, but he couldn’t make it out. All other thought was driven from his mind as the throne room floor, somehow still intact, crashed to a stop.

  He was thrown sideways by the final impact, through clouds of dust and powdered stone, and the whole world shook around him as he grasped desperately at Aemon’s Blade.

  I have to find her – I have to kill her now!

  He knew he would have no other chance. She was more than a match for him, and only now, when the whole Fortress itself had come crashing down around them, would he be able to take her by surprise.

  “Be my sight as clear as day!”

  The dust before him parted like a thick curtain, and he saw her, pushing out from beneath a slab of blackstone rubble, and he ran for her as the world settled around them. He caught a sight of something glowing red to his left, but he pushed the details from his mind. He raised Aemon’s Blade and slash
ed at her.

  She saw him at the last moment and tried to rise, but it was too late. The black blade was struck, spinning, from her hands, and Raven held onto Aemon’s Blade with a clever backhand twist. He spun and hammered her in the chest with the pommel of the blade, and she fell.

  As the dust settled, he was revealed, standing over the Empress, white blade pressed against her throat.

  He looked down at his Mother, at Alana, and saw that the fall had dislodged the Diamond Crown. It lay just out of her reach, flashing brilliantly, and she extended her hand out for it, desperate, but he gave her no chance. He hefted his blade, summoned strength through his own Crown, and with one huge swing brought Aemon’s Blade down upon it.

  A huge wind rocked through the ruins of the broken tower, tearing at Raven’s clothing, pulling him by the hair and slapping his face. Lightning shot through the clouds and thunder sounded, and a force rose up in him, trying to overwhelm him, trying to force the Blade back and away, but it was too late, and he was now too powerful. The Crown fell apart, and lay in smoking pieces upon the ground, each stone Talisman with its sparkling gemstone cracked in two, their powers broken.

  He turned back to his Mother, and realized that without the Crown she had been unable to survive the fall unharmed. Her breathing came in ragged gasps that whistled in and out through broken teeth. Blood ran down her face in a web like rain down a window. Her eyes held him still with her strength, but her Crown was broken, her life was fading, and he had won.

  “After all this time,” she said with a broken smile that oozed and pulled, “after bearing seven hundred children, looking for the one to succeed me when I left this place … the perfect one was the one I cast away.”

  “Shut up,” he said, resting the gleaming white blade on his Mother’s chest, over her heart. “Don’t say another word.”

  “Why, Azraeloph?” She laughed, a hacking, wheezing cough of a sound that echoed without mirth, even in the huge empty space of the broken tower top; she still had power, even if it was waning. “Why, my son? Will you kill me?”

  She smiled again, and Raven looked at her with horror and disgust.

  “My name is Raven,” he said softly, insistently.

  “No,” she said, her voice ringing with power, even separated as she was from her Crown. Living so long with the power had changed her, had given her power of her own that she could not be separated from. “No – your name is Azraeloph. You are my son, my trueborn heir. I see it now. I should have known it was you all along – I never had the necessary ambition in the beginning either. I should have remembered. Yes … yes. It’s you. This is it – it has to be!”

  Triumph shown from her eyes like rays of tainted sunlight.

  “You are him – you are the Prince of the Veil, just as in the prophecy! You are, you always were. Prophecies cannot be unsaid, they cannot be false – it must come true! You will kill me, you must kill me, and you will end my agony and become greater than I ever was! And in death – yes, in that death, I will finally go home. You will send me there. I must return. That was the answer all along. Yes! Azraeloph, my true son! My true heir! KILL ME! FINISH IT! SET ME FREE!”

  “NO!”

  He recoiled, his skin crawling, rejecting what she demanded. Aemon’s Blade was flashing in his hands, and he felt something trying to worm its way into his mind, something on the edge of consciousness.

  “You came here to kill me,” she whispered, begging, pleading. “We want the same thing, we do! Come, my love, my only Child, come and complete the prophecy. The power that I pulled from the Bloodmages is still in me – you cut me off from touching it, but it’s still there. All of it – all of that power is at your command if you kill me. Use it – use the Raven Talisman – live up to your name! Devour my soul, feed off of it, and all the other souls, and become my heir!”

  She had pulled herself up now, the bone of her broken arm scraping against the stones as she maneuvered herself forward. She left blood behind her, flowing freely where she dragged herself.

  “Do it,” she said. “Please, my son. This was what you were meant for. Please … be my son again. Be my wonderful Azraeloph once more. I love you – I always have. This was all just a test – I see it now. We were both being tested – can you see it too?”

  Raven, rooted to the spot, watched in horror as she caught at his boot and pulled herself up along him, her ruined, wasted body clutching at his.

  “Do it,” she hissed. “Be my son … love me the way I love you.”

  She grabbed his hand, pulling Aemon’s Blade toward her.

  “No,” he whispered.

  He tried to stop it, tried to stop from killing her, suddenly knowing, knowing with an absolute certainty, that she was right. If he killed her, he would become her. He would fulfill the Imperial prophecy. Somehow, killing her would change him. Here, in this place where the world was thin, where the Veil was torn almost beyond repair, Raven would become Azraeloph, the Lord of Death, once and for all.

  “Stop it,” he hissed, pulling back.

  But there was still strength in her; too much strength. She fought him, pulling the sword forward, trying to bury it in her chest, trying to force him to kill her.

  Kill her, said a voice deep inside him. Kill her and damn the consequences. After all she’s done, after all she’s put me through, DAMN HER! DAMN HER!

  “No,” he whimpered. “No – I won’t do it. I’m not you. I’m not!”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “You are.”

  His strength failed as she said the words; the sword jerked forward, and sliced into her abdomen, spilling blood across them both. She smiled, her breath hissing out in a final sigh, and the Empress died.

  And for a brief, perfect moment, he was happy. It was the way it should be – the evil die, and the good kill them. He had done it – he was finally a hero.

  He, Azraeloph, was the conquering hero.

  No … no, I’m not –

  “That’s not my name,” he said out loud, stumbling backward. He shook his head violently, trying to clear it, and found he couldn’t. His name … no, what was his name?

  Azraeloph.

  “No,” he gasped. “No, that’s not it – that’s not it!”

  He heard movement from behind him and he realized that it was Leah standing up. She had survived the fall after all, though her armor was half torn away and she was bleeding from a heavy gash over her eye. She stumbled toward him, reaching out a hand.

  There was more movement, from the other side of him. He turned and saw what the Empress had tried to preserve, what she had Commanded saved from the falling ruin of the Fortress: the platform on which the Bloodmage crystals had been placed. They glowed with a bloody red light, and standing in their midst, only just coming to his feet, was the hulking form of Tomaz. His armor was blackened and burned, and whole sections of it had been completely obliterated. There was a body beside him, a body that Azraeloph recognized with a distant shock to be that of Lorna. But Tomaz was alive, and when he saw Azraeloph he began to move toward him.

  “I can’t remember my name,” he gasped at them both, and also to himself. He couldn’t – she had tried to take it from him, tried to turn him back to Azraeloph.

  “Your name is Raven,” Tomaz rumbled as he approached, his voice strained and exhausted. He continued repeating it, over and over in a litany, seeing Raven still couldn’t remember on his own. “Raven, Prince of the Veil. Raven, one of the Exiled Kindred. Your name is Raven –”

  “Stay with us,” Leah said from his other side. “Hold on. Don’t give in to her.”

  The memories came to him as if bidden by her words, and with them, the power she had siphoned from the three Bloodmage crystals. Reality split into two as power broke from him and rolled across the city. He saw the world through his Mother’s eyes, and through his own. The ground around him began to shake, and the city itself began to fall apart. Leah and Tomaz stumbled and braced themselves on widespread feet, still speaking to him, st
ill reminding him of his name, still trying to pull him back to them.

  The memories started slowly, like the first spray of water from a cracking dam. They were short and painful, almost brutally short, as if they’d been truncated, the offending limbs shorn away. But they were enough: he saw her kill for the first time, saw her fight Aemon, saw her become the Empress.

  “Tomaz! We need to get him out of here!”

  “Where the hell do we go?! The whole city is collapsing!”

  The huge mansions of the Most High cracked and broke apart, the beautiful arches and bridgeways crashing into streets hundreds of feet below. The destruction spread out, rippling away from them on all sides, shaking the earth beneath their feet. The memories intensified and Raven convulsed and vomited as his body tried to reject what was being forced into him.

  Her reign was steeped in blood. She reveled in it. The Visigony, her most faithful servants, were the same, and together they devised a means of pulling magic from the blood of her enemies. It brought her power, and it weakened them. She used it to extend her rule, conquering the disgusting savages of the land, all the while moving closer to the goal of finding Aemon in his southern refuge.

  The clouds above them spun and crashed into one another, forming into a wild maelstrom that ripped more of the city apart. Azraeloph found himself thrown away from the others, toward the center of the throne room. There was red light there …

  Azraeloph saw Aemon’s death, saw the bolt of lightning shoot from the sky and strike him dead on the hilltop that would become known as Aemon’s Stand. She smelled the burned flesh, the crackling feel of the power and energy, and elation rolled through her. But her power was spent, and her army in retreat. It didn’t matter; she would return another day to finish off the man’s disciples.

  The chemical lights of the city cracked and somewhere wood caught fire. The city went up in a blaze, and Leah and Tomaz both tried to make their way toward him again even as the ground bucked and rolled beneath them.