by Azalea Ellis
Ahead of me, a faint image of Kris atop her marionette reached out and touched something I couldn’t see. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her eyelids vibrated eerily, but she quickly snapped out of it and stepped back, shocked, and didn’t seem harmed.
I stepped further into the room, blinking as space shifted around me. Slowly, I reached up and touched one of the nearby threads of light. I gasped, arching my back like I’d been hit with a charge from a defibrillator. My vision went black, along with the death of my other senses. I was cut off, alone with only my mind for an unknown amount of time. Then, things showed themselves to me.
I saw a vast planet, with colonized surrounding moons and futuristic sprawling cities. A darkness bubbled up and made something visceral and instinctive inside me want to scream in terror, or curl up in a ball and hide. People died in rippling waves, like slow-growing mold spreading over the surface of the planet.
The vision cut to a young man, watching this with the same sense of horrified understanding I felt. He screamed, as he was branded with the same symbol I wore in the skin of my throat. He walked beside a group of forms I couldn’t quite make out. He clenched his jaw in determination, and the scene skipped through time. I saw him speaking, always. Healing someone with a supplication, commanding an army to kneel, making a peer crumple and cry with his words, and a woman’s eyes sparkle with devotion. The scenes grew more disjointed and staticky as he continued to speak and twist the world to his will, growing ever-crueler as the madness of power overtook him. The gods rose up to smite him down, and then my senses returned with a suddenness that was overwhelming. The colors were too bright and eye-wateringly saturated. I could smell the metal of my armor mixed with my sweat, and taste the saliva in my mouth.
I stared at the strings of light, then brought my hand up to touch the crystal at the base of my throat. There had been another bearer of the symbol before me, though it seemed his Skill had been much stronger than my own. What did this mean?
I reached for another string, this time prepared for the disorientation. I saw people, a horde of them that stretched out as far as the eye could see. My perspective changed, and I stood among them. They turned to look at me as one, staring blankly like some creepy hive-mind robots. I frowned as that vision ended, too quickly. Perhaps Torliam would be able to help me decipher the symbolism of the visions after this was over.
I took a few more steps, the room shifting around me as I did so, and reached out for another strand of light. This time, I saw a man with hair like smoke. No. It was Chaos—rising from his body in dark-tendriled wispiness. He reached into the ground with his power and pulled out a tree of gold that unfurled before him and grew black fruit. The scene flickered, and I watched as he screamed before a giant, bigger than any god I’d ever seen, made of lava and smoke. Chaos devoured the man, even as he molded it into a flickering sphere of darkness that warped the world around it. The vision stopped, as quickly as it had started, and it left me dazed. Behelaino had spoken of a progeny before me, someone else she’d given the Seed of Chaos to. Was that him, or was I seeing a god, another physical manifestation of Khaos itself?
The next strand showed me another man. On his forehead was the same glowing symbol I wore at the base of my throat. He spoke words of the future, and his words were true. Then he spoke words that had not been true, and the future bent to meet them, but in doing so, his words erased his own existence.
I jerked back from the light as soon as it released me, feeling dizzy with the dreamlike understanding that had been forced into my brain.
The next strand showed me another bearer of the same symbol. A woman, her silver hair cut short to show the smoldering seal glowing golden from the back of her neck. She walked through raindrops, cutting them apart with daggers made of molten gold. She sliced the air and it shattered before her, as her blades cut through the bonds that held the pieces of the world together. Death followed her every step and her followers found death one by one. She walked alone, when there were none left to walk beside her, and then her blades found her own throat and cut the fragile bonds that held her own life.
I stumbled back and fell. How many others had there been, before me? I tripped into another thread. This one showed me a shadowed form, walking in darkness. With a wave of their hand, a universe bloomed. Another wave, and it died, morphing into glitter dust that fell from their fingers to the floor.
Once that vision had passed, I picked myself up off the achingly cold stone, and stood in a beam of light from one of the windows. It threw refracted rainbows across my skin as the guardians outside swam through the air. “This is surreal,” I whispered to myself. My words echoed around me, and I shuddered, though I wasn’t sure if it was from cold or the unnerving situation.
With a breath to steel myself, I reached for another strand of light. Maybe, if I saw enough of them, I would be able to figure out how they all fit together. The vision took over my senses, but this time it hurt. My eyes ached as I watched the shattering, the separation, the inky razor of the rift severing pieces of what was once a whole into what was no longer. I caught a glimpse of the void from the corner of my eye and jerked myself back, forcefully cutting off the vision and my connection to that particular strand of light.
I stared at it in horror, knowing that I didn’t understand what I had just seen, but that I never should have seen it in the first place. I raised my right hand to my cheek, touching the wetness under my eye, and drew away fingers tinged crimson.
The rainbow fractal light from the window drew my attention again, but this time the guardians had dispersed enough for me to see through them. On the edge of the horizon, as far as I could see, little moving dots were swarming. I activated Spirit of the Huntress, sharpening my eyesight even further as my claws unsheathed themselves from my hands and feet. The little dots on the horizon were monsters—tons of them—all different types, flying, running, skittering toward the tower.
The hair on my neck rose up in dread, then the quest Window bloomed in front of my eyes.
RUN
RETURN TO THE SHIP WITHOUT BEING DISCOVERED.
COMPLETION REWARD: AVOID ATTACK
NON-COMPLETION PENALTY: BATTLE
Chapter 6
The moon split in half
and the stars crumbled,
falling like fireworks
into the sea.
— Christy Ann Martine
I waved away the virtual display and leaned forward, thrusting my head out the tall tower window to look back the way we’d come. The monsters’ indistinct forms rose over the horizon from every direction and grew quickly larger. Some looked like huge bats, others, deformed, earth-bound dragons, others still, gigantic beetles that tunneled through the air instead of the ground.
I drew back and looked around for my teammates, who were still walking around experiencing visions of their own. I waved my hands in front of Adam’s face, but his eyelids were fluttering in the midst of a vision, and he didn’t see me. Instead, I sent a Window to the entire team, warning them of the danger.
Adam jerked back, and then blinked at the air in front of his face. He turned to me and nodded sharply.
Torliam didn’t have a VR chip, but when I passed my hand through the tip of his nose, I got his attention and, with pantomime and some faintly heard words, conveyed our situation.
I herded the others down the stairwell ahead of me and counted them off to make sure no one was left behind. I don’t know how long it took us to get down and out of the Spire, but every opening in the stone we passed showed the monsters grown closer.
We burst out the doorway at the bottom and threw ourselves down the steep mountainside, once again able to interact with each other and the world as normal.
I reached out to Gregor, and he turned to Shadow, climbed onto my crouching form, then resumed corporeality between my backpack and my back so he wouldn’t be left trying to keep up on eight-year-old sized legs. He clung like a monkey. “Hurry,” he said.
The fractal behemoths above swarmed like bees whose nest had been disturbed, some of them flying out to meet the oncoming wave of monsters.
One of the monsters slammed into a low-flying guardian from the side, ripping apart the lines of light and sending the being hurtling toward the ground in hundreds of glowing pieces. The monster fell to the ground, dead. But there were many more to take its place.
In the distance, the passenger ship struggled up from the ground, disturbed dirt swirling out and around it.
The ink construct Adam rode dissolved under him.
I saw him reach for an ink cartridge, too slow to save himself from a tumble. My toes dug into the ground as I attempted to swerve closer, but my momentum, augmented by Gregor’s weight, was too much for me to reach him on time.
Instead, Kris’ marionette snagged Adam by the neck of his clothes and kept him aloft.
He winced, white-faced at the pain being tossed around must have caused him, but nodded at her gratefully. However, when he poured out more ink from one of his cartridges, the dark liquid dribbled out onto the ground and took no form. He bit back a curse.
“Jacky!” I called.
“I’ve got him,” she said. She swung his arm over her shoulder, but was too short to lift him entirely off the ground.
Torliam stopped her, pulling Adam instead onto a misty blue slab, which hovered just over the ground. Torliam fastened him securely down and pulled Adam behind him like a dog with a sled.
We raced toward the ship, Birch creating a wind at our backs to push us on even faster.
The guardians flew around at seemingly impossible speeds, orbiting farther and farther away from the Spire, pushing their forms through the monsters and leaving their bodies outwardly unharmed, but motionless on the ground.
“None who are not the subject of prophecy may come here and live,” Torliam shouted over his shoulder by way of explanation. “The body will remain, but the mind is destroyed.”
Unfortunately, even modified humans aren’t built for real speed. Torliam was the only one of us who stood a chance at getting away, and he was purposefully pacing himself, not leaving the group behind.
The ship hadn’t yet reached us by the time we met the fastest of the monsters. Blaine had to avoid the guardians, too, and seemed to be having trouble maneuvering the ungainly ship around their racing forms to get to us.
A Window popped up in my peripheral vision, telling me I’d failed the “RUN” quest. I batted it away. No time for distractions.
Birch yowled, running next to Adam with his teeth bared. His fur was all fluffed out, and he extended his wings to make himself look even bigger as he screamed in threat to the monsters barreling toward us.
I translated my awareness into a map Window and broadcast it to the rest of the team. It would give them the location of every monster and human in my range, updated as fast as I could keep up with it. Greater battlefield awareness would make a big difference.
Some of the monsters ran past us without notice, but not all of them. A four-legged monster slammed its paddle-like tail into the ground, using it as a fulcrum to change its direction frighteningly quick. It shot straight at Sam, who was the slowest of us and thus bringing up the rear of the group.
Sam almost tripped when he tried to dodge, but he managed to stay upright, and ran a hand across the monster’s side as its speed carried it past him.
It slapped its tail on the ground again and spun back toward him, unaffected by whatever effect he’d tried to impart through skin contact.
Bullets flew through the air with a whoomp, as Zed turned back for a couple seconds and shot toward the monster. Two of his three shots hit, while the third flew harmlessly overhead. The rounds impacted against its side and exploded, tearing chunks out of it.
Blackened veins were visible across thick, pale flesh. The thing’s eyes jerked wildly this way and that, but it didn’t react at all to the pain, and I noticed oozing sores on its underbelly. It reminded me of the spider-monkey creature we’d seen when we first came to Estreyer with Torliam.
“Careful, it has the Sickness!” I shouted to Sam.
The monster snorted and tossed a look Zed’s way, but he was already running again. It ignored him, focusing back on Sam, who it had effectively blocked off from the rest of us and the safety of the ship.
Sam stopped. Even my Wraith Skill couldn’t decipher exactly what he was saying with all the other distractions going on around us, but he muttered something that might have been, “Oh, shit,” over and over again.
“He needs help!” Adam screamed, his voice breaking as he was jostled by Torliam’s makeshift stretcher.
Jacky slowed, turning back toward our trapped teammate.
—GO! I can do this.—
-Sam-
She hesitated, looking to me.
I nodded, and we continued on without Sam. My guts lurched within me, and I wasn’t sure if it was fear or something else making me feel so queasy. Sam may not have been a fighter, but he was deadly all the same. If I didn’t accept his assurance, and we went back to try and help him, it put the rest of us in even more danger. Still, it felt wrong, running while he stood still.
The monster seemed to grin, its blue-purple tongue, grotesquely swollen, lolling out of its mouth like a nightmarish dog. It sprang for him.
Sam didn’t evade quickly enough, and its mouth caught his arm up to the elbow.
“Oh, god, no,” I gasped.
He screamed, bracing himself on the ground. Then, Sam’s arm moved along its side as they moved past each other. At first, I thought that the creature must have completely severed his arm at the elbow. Then, the monster’s flesh sagged on the side he was touching, like a wax figure left too close to the fire.
A scream gargled out from the monster’s half-collapsed throat. Sam kept moving, till its entire side was sliding toward the ground in a goopy mess. Finally, he drew his arm out of the flesh of its hind leg.
Its other set of legs scrabbled and flailed uselessly, the horrific, gargling whine of pain never stopping for breath.
Sam’s skin was raw and bleeding where its teeth had first caught him, and he kept it cradled close while he resumed his sprint, pushing to catch up before another monster could attack.
More monsters turned, some of them attacking, some just running alongside our group.
Torliam, at the forward point of the group, smashed his fist through a bug-like creature’s carapace, barely breaking stride. A wave of his Skill knocked a tight flock of metallic birds out of the sky. He leapt through the air with Adam trailing on his slab. His feet smashed into the bulging stomach of a winged creature, and he used its broken body to bat aside another monster. He was clearing the way for us, but it still wasn’t quite enough.
The ground started to rumble, and the monsters running beside and chasing after us drew farther away, creating a circular clearing around us.
I stretched out my awareness. Another monster must be coming, something large enough to shake the ground, but I sensed nothing. I took the chance to look around physically, in case it was too far away for Wraith to reach. Nothing. Nothing big enough for what my instincts told me was coming, at least. The smaller pebbles on the ground jumped, like water droplets on a drum.
I slammed Wraith toward the ground, pushing it through the earth as a horrible suspicion burst in my mind. My senses barely reached the edge of the fast-moving creature before I was screaming out to the others, a Window reinforcing my words. “Scatter! Something’s in the ground!”
The earth bulged beneath us, a hill as big as a house forming as something pushed up through it, like a tongue through bubblegum.
I shoved desperately away from it, throwing myself toward the edge of the growing hill.
Gregor screamed in my ear, squeezing so tight around my neck I struggled to breathe.
The creature burst through, its cylindrical body stretching toward the sky. It had no eyes that I could see, only a single maw as big around
as its worm-like body, and full of rows and rows of pointed teeth overlapping each other all the way down its throat.
“Wyrm!” Torliam shouted, his voice barely audible over the crashing earth.
Most of us moved far enough away that the wave of dirt and stone facilitated our escape, pushing us outward and away. I rode the dirt avalanche, stumbling a few times, jumping to avoid being overtaken and buried.
Kris wasn’t so lucky. She was stuck on the mound as it rose, caught on the edge of the creature’s gaping maw. The earth crumbled beneath her marionette’s feet as it tried to push away, but it didn’t have the leverage to get her to safety.
Gregor screamed again in my ear, almost deafening me. I didn’t blame him. He could see what was about to happen just as well as I could.
I threw myself back up the cascading earth wall, trying to rise instead of escape. It was useless. I was too far away, and there was no time. None of my Skills could help me here. I yelled, Voice pulsing out of me and into the earth, through the side of the primordial creature. It changed nothing.
Sky-blue shot toward Kris from the other side of the crater, and my heart skipped a beat as I willed it to arrive on time. It reached them, spreading out below the marionette’s feet like a disk. The blue shield stilled in the air, and the marionette touched down, bending its knees to absorb the force of its landing without throwing her off.
She scrambled up to crouch atop its shoulders.
The maw rose around them, obscuring my line of sight, but not Wraith’s senses.
All my attention was focused on them. Kris gave a sobbing gasp of effort as she pushed herself and her Skill to the limit. The marionette heaved. Its joints cracked and popped, and it lifted them.
The maw closed in on them, thousands and thousands of stabbing teeth surging toward Kris and her marionette.
The marionette flung itself away from the grinding maw, and, as it reached the edge of its leap, Kris threw herself off, arms outstretched toward the sky. One of her legs scraped the edge of the maw as it closed behind her, tossing her sideways, out of control. The metal of her marionette shrieking as it crumpled and broke to the monster’s teeth.