by Jon Hollins
Barph turned his attention, fixed it on the three of them, the intruders in his throne room.
Balur shook off Afrit’s arm.
“I am the god here!” Barph told them. “Not you. Never you. Only me.”
“The font, Will!” Afrit was almost screaming.
Will seemed to wake from the dream. “Oh shit,” he managed. He started to run.
“You think you matter to me?” Barph asked them. “You think you matter more than my own father? You think I won’t kill you?”
Balur looked into Afrit’s panic-stricken face. And through the pain he found he still had a smile left in him. “Be holding my beer,” he told her. “I am having this.”
“Your beer?” Afrit blinked at him.
He walked away from her. He walked past Will.
“Balur! No!” Afrit yelled.
He walked toward Barph.
Life. It made you strong or it made you weak. And if you were weak, it would kill you. And the only way to know if you were weak or strong was to test yourself again and again. To find the greatest challenge you could and fling yourself against it, discover if you were strong enough to survive.
There would always come an enemy who was your better. There would always come the thing that you could not defeat. The only question was whether it would be mighty or feeble. Whether your death would be glorious or laughable.
Balur had tested himself before. Balur had taken on a dragon head-on. And he had thought he would die that day. But he had been stronger. And ever since then, it had been harder and harder to find that thing to fling himself against. That thing that would make his death something truly spectacular.
But Barph … perhaps Barph was that thing.
“I am seeing you, Barph, kin slayer!” Balur called. “I am hearing your voice and your commands. And I am saying to you that you cannot compel me. I am saying that I will not be bending to your will. I am saying you are a god, but not my god.”
“No,” Barph muttered, rubbing at his temple. “No, you aren’t saying that at all.”
“Be hearing me!” Balur roared. “I am rejecting you! I am rejecting your divinity! I am coming to slay you! I am coming to bring your throne down around your ears! I am coming to bathe in your entrails and to be feasting upon your face. I am coming to defile your legacy and shit on your forefathers. I am coming to end you. I am being Balur of the Analesian Desert, and I am defying you with every fiber that I am.”
And then he started to run. The time for words was over.
“No,” Barph said again, his voice rising. “I don’t want you to say that.”
Balur thought of Lette as he ran. She would have understood this, he thought. She wouldn’t have approved. Definitely not. But she would have understood.
Barph stretched out his hand.
Balur dived right. Lightning smashed into the ground beside him. He felt shocks run up his tail, smelled his own flesh burning. He kept running.
He thought of Cois. Would zhe understand? He thought perhaps zhe might. And he wished now that he had not asked hir to stay behind in Avarra. He wished zhe could be there now with Will and Afrit, watching this. That zhe would know how he died. That zhe would know it was glorious.
Another lightning blast. He dived and rolled. Each landing sent pain splintering through his body, his wounds and broken bones screaming their resistance. He ignored them. He silenced them. He denied them. He was not weak. He would not give in to the glass in his side or the fractures in his tail.
He was Balur. He was forged in the Analesian Desert. He was strong.
“I told you to stop!” Barph screamed. “I said no!”
Balur was laughing. He spread his arms.
“Be coming on!” he roared.
He leapt. He committed himself utterly to this. There were no course corrections now. This was his path. He bared his teeth.
“No!” Barph shrieked.
But yes. Yes. Yes.
And Barph’s fist came down, blanking out the sky, on a path as firm and implacable as his own. A denial of Balur’s plans and his hopes. And it struck him down, smashed him down into the floor in an explosion of organs and skin and scales. It obliterated him completely.
But yes.
71
Why We Fight
Will watched Barph’s fist come down. He watched Balur disappear beneath it. He watched the fist come up.
And that was it. That was all it was.
Balur’s death.
Another death. Quirk. And Lette. And now Balur too. And Barph had killed them all, but it was Will who had supplied the opportunity. Over and over again he had brought these people, his supposed friends, his loved ones … He had brought them into these situations. He had told them he had plans, and they had believed him. Over and over and over again.
“No,” he said. He should have screamed it, should have howled it, but his voice was barely above a whisper. “No.” He just didn’t have the energy anymore.
“Look,” Barph was saying to his bloody hand. “Look what you made me do.”
“Move, you jackass!” Afrit seized Will’s arm, hauled at him. “Now!”
Will stumbled after her.
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
“No!” Barph roared. “No!”
What he was denying, whom he was denying it to … Will was incapable of understanding.
Afrit hauled him through a doorway. There was a ceiling above his head again. The space felt small and choking after the ever-opening expanse of the collapsing throne room. His feet clattered on the tiles.
Through another door. Barph’s howling growing more distant now, the pressure of his unexpected anguish on Will’s frontal lobes less obvious. But that relief just seemed to make more space for the grief.
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
He was stumbling over his own feet, over the rubble that littered the place.
The palace wasn’t attacking him anymore, he noticed. Maybe it was broken beyond repair.
Broken beyond repair …
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
They stumbled into a corridor. Or maybe it was a room that had lost its ceiling. There was the sound of water running somewhere. And Barph’s screaming was getting louder.
Then Will was falling. No. Afrit was pulling him down. They were sliding behind a part of the palace. He thought there was the beginning of an arch’s curve, a fragment of a carving.
Broken beyond repair …
“What do we do, Will?” Afrit had him by the shoulders. She glanced up over the edge of their makeshift cover, then back at him. She stared into his eyes. “What do we do?”
His eyes. What did she see there? What answers could she possibly hope to find?
“Will!” She was shaking him hard. “Snap the fuck out of it!”
“I …” He tried to get out words. His mouth was very dry. “I don’t know, Afrit. I have tried everything I can think of, and all I have to show for it is dead friends. Why in the Hallows would you ask me what to do?”
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
He was broken. Broken beyond repair. But at least he finally recognized it. At least he could finally take a step back from the fractured mirror of his own vanity and see how insane he was.
He was here to try to steal the heavens. Even after the death of ten thousand. Even after Quirk’s death. Even after Lette’s death. The woman he loved. He had still thought that he had a way to redeem himself. That his plan could somehow undo the hurt he had caused. What sort of person considered that? What sort of twisted piece of human wreckage?
“I need you, Will,” Afrit was saying. “I need you to help me figure this out.”
“No,” he said. “No more plans. Nothing else from me. I am an architect of misery, Afrit. That’s it. That’s all. And I can’t cause any more harm. I can’t watch you die because of my actions.”
“Your inaction is going to fucking kill me in a second, you arsehole!”
“Run,” he tol
d her. “That’s all I have. Run away. From me. From Barph. From here. Find your own way. Do something I wouldn’t do. I’m toxic, Afrit. I’m broken. I’ve broken everything.”
He kept waiting for a feeling like catharsis, but all he had was pain.
Afrit’s fear was coalescing into something harder and sharper. She glanced up again. When she looked back at him there was something of the fire of her dead, lost love in her eyes. “Have you ever considered, Will, that maybe it’s not you killing them, you self-centered shit-wit? It’s the fact we’re in a fight with a god. This is a fight in which people die.”
“Lette died!” he screamed at her. And gods, it was the first time he’d said it out loud like that, just bald and naked and frail. And it almost broke him utterly. He felt the edges of his mind fracturing from the pressure of the grief.
“Quirk died!” She let go of him, pushed him away bodily, raised a hand, seemed to hesitate, and then come to a decision. She slapped him full across the mouth. He found the taste of his own blood almost familiar now.
She leaned in close. “Quirk died too, Will. And do not think for a second that I do not hold you at least partly responsible for that. That I do not think that it was your hasty plan that was to blame. That I do not hate you for that. Because I do.”
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
“But—” The intensity did not die in Afrit’s eyes, not even for an instant. “I remember something else as well, Will. I remember leaving the Hallows. I remember being reunited with the woman I loved. I remember the nights spent in her arms that I should never have had. I remember the months of bliss that I should never have had. But I did have them. And I remember that I had them because of you. You defied death, Will. You planned our way out of the Hallows. You gave that to me. And I love you for that too.”
And somewhere, somehow, she had guided him into the eye of the storm. A moment of peace while chaos swirled all around him.
“I destroyed the Hallows,” he said to her. But he wasn’t on the verge of hysterics anymore. It was as close as he could get to openly begging for redemption.
“You did.” Afrit had dialed down her intensity, but the passion was still there. “You did awful things, Will. But you did beautiful things as well. And sometimes they were the same things. But that’s not special to you, Will. That’s not exclusively your domain. You’ve just done things on a grander scale than most people. That’s all there is to it.
“Life,” she said, “will continuously beat you down. Over and over and over again it will strike you in the face and smash you to the floor. Each and every one of us. Not just you. Not just me. And all we ever get to do, Will, is decide whether to curl up into a ball and give in to the beating, or get back up and meet it standing on our own two feet.”
Her palm came to his face again, not violently this time, but softly. Holding him. Supporting him.
“I really need you to get back up on your feet now, Will.” She managed a small, lonely laugh. “I think the whole world does.”
The ground was shaking beneath them. The air was full of the roaring of a god, the roaring of fire, the roaring of the palace as it collapsed around them.
“Please, Will,” Afrit said. “Whatever you have in mind … Yes, there’s a chance it will make things worse. But there’s also a chance it will make things better. And whatever that chance is … Well, right now I think it’s worth taking. So please. Get back up. Fight. Please.”
Quirk. And Lette. And Balur.
And ten thousand more.
Ten thousand who had trust in him. And one last one, sitting before him. And she had no reason to trust him. He had given her every reason to despise him. And she did. But she was still here. She was still asking him to help.
And he could throw that back in her face. He could point out that he was a charlatan, a fraud, a cheap con man, a …
A cheap con man …
Oh gods. Oh gods, he had a plan.
And Will Fallows stood back up.
72
Going Down in Flames
Piss and fire and blood and hate—Yorrax rained it all down upon the heavens of Avarra.
A thousand wounds had been carved into her flanks. A thousand holes had been punched into her wings. Their edges hung ragged. And each mark, each mutilation, each insult just strengthened her resolve. When she controlled the heavens, the very first thing she would do would be to tear the Summer Palace to the ground.
It had killed them all. All her dragon kin. A building had. A homicidal building. These fucking gods and their madness …
Blottax had been the first to fall, trying to force his way through a window. The frame had chewed him up, crushed his skull. Chessax had actually managed to make it into one room, only for the ceiling to send a beam through her skull. Gerrax had landed on the roof and been speared by eight lunging chimneys. Flerrax had been shot out of the sky by a vast roof vomiting up its own tiles. Terrax the coward had tried to flee, and an entire wing of the building had lifted up and crushed him.
And now she was the only dragon left in all Avarra.
And what was the point of that?
Who would do her bidding now? Who would crawl craven and low before her now? Whom would she deride and berate? What was the point of dominance if there was no one to dominate?
This bastard building. She would raze it to the very ground.
But she was tired and bleeding and scared, and her throat was raw from the gouts of flame she had hawked up. And the palace still stood.
A dormer window flared open at her, shot glass planes and the content of a room in her direction. She spun away, felt a chest of drawers crack against a back leg. She bellowed in flame, breathed fire.
Her flames lapped uselessly against uncaring mortar.
And then, suddenly, unbidden, against all sense, cracks appeared in the bricks she had splashed with fire. And a great hope leapt in her heart. And she poured more and more flames onto the buildings, and the cracks grew deeper …
But then she lifted her head, hacking and coughing, and she saw that the cracks were everywhere, and her fire had no meaning here. The central arch of the central hall’s ceiling was collapsing, a great shaking racking this building, and she was being denied even her desire to tear it down. And nothing, nothing was going to plan.
She screamed again, choked again.
But then, like a silent answer to her hopes, the face of her tormentor appeared in the midst of the collapsing ruins. Barph, staring wild-eyed as his home crashed to the ground around him.
Barph, the architect of all the dragons’ woes.
She swept up into the sky, and then, with claws extended, plunged straight toward his face.
73
Life Punches below the Belt
Will stood. Will stared. The Summer Palace was a shattered ruin, a broken jungle of masonry and sheared columns. Walls sagged, ceilings were absent, tiles were cracked. Flames ate through the ruins, consuming corpses with a ravenous hunger.
And in the middle of this stood Barph, still massive, robe torn, hair matted, half his beard torn raggedly away. And in his eyes he looked utterly and completely lost.
He was, Will saw, holding a dragon in his hand. A small one. One with blue and yellow scales. And gods, he recognized her. Yorrax, still here at the end of things, raging and biting and breathing fire, and utterly impotent in the face of everything.
Barph raised a fist, about to smash the dragon into oblivion.
This plan, Will thought, is stupid, and it’s going to get me killed. But at least it will probably get only me killed.
He hesitated. Just a moment. Just a fraction of a second to remember Lette’s face one last time. Then he filled his lungs.
“Hey!” he screamed. “Hey, you sack of shit!”
Barph shouldn’t have heard him. Not over the noise of it all. This collapse. This breaking. This ending.
Barph turned and looked at him.
“Hey!” Will screamed, and he grinned, a
wild manic grin. The grin of a corpse. “Look at all this!” he shouted, and waved at the destruction surrounding them. “You truly are,” he yelled, “the god of absolutely nothing!”
Barph was utterly frozen. Just for a moment. Just for a second. Then his face contorted with the purest, most divine rage Will could ever have imagined.
“You!” The word was a howl, a baying drawn-out wail. Barph dropped Yorrax to the ground, still whole, the killing blow never delivered. “Yoooooooooou!” Spittle flecked his beard and lips. “I deny you! I end you! I destroy you!”
“You do nothing,” Will scoffed. “You are nothing. You are a shadow playing dress-up in his father’s robes. You are a temper tantrum. You are meaningless. You are nothing, you mean nothing, you achieve nothing.”
“Will,” Afrit said, still hunkered down behind the fallen chunk of wall they had been using as cover. “What in the Hallows are you doing?”
“And that,” Will finished, voice rising, “is why you will always, always be alone. Why you will always be hated. Why you will always be rejected.”
And that, he saw, had done it. So Will started to run.
Barph’s words no longer had meaning. It was just an outpouring of sound and anguish. A barking, braying wail. And it was the only head start Will was going to get.
The gates of the heavens. He had to get to the gates of the heavens. Through the ruins of the Summer Palace. Through the wilderness of the gardens beyond. Past any surviving guards.
At a flat run it would take him perhaps ten minutes. Perhaps longer.
Barph started to chase him. Barph—thirty feet tall, with strides that ate distance faster than the flames ate wood, with all the faith of Avarra’s devout citizens powering each step.
Ten minutes to get to the exit, and Barph would be on him in thirty seconds.
This plan was stupid, and it was going to get Will killed.
74
The Lesser of Two Evils
Yorrax lay gasping on the ground. Her throat was bruised, her ribs battered.