by Phil Tucker
THIS CANNOT BE. WILL NOT BE, said the ur-destraas.
Yes, Asho whispered in response. It can, and it will. You are mine.
The ur-destraas shrieked as Asho sucked its essence into himself, destroying the demon utterly and absorbing its endless power into his battered frame.
His pain immediately disappeared.
He was a radiant spirit of endless authority. His might stretched out over all that he could see. His heart ceased to beat, his blood stilled in his veins, and then he felt it boil, felt his body incandesce from within.
Asho floated upright and revolved to face Erenthil.
“No,” gasped the Artificer. “This cannot be. How?”
Asho pointed at the man. “Because I will it.” A slender rod of ebon flame, perfectly cylindrical and controlled, extended faster than the eye could follow from the tip of Asho’s finger and speared right through the center of Erenthil’s brow. It emerged several inches out the back of the man’s head, then lifted up, curled around, and captured the circlet.
Asho curled his finger, and the rod of fire brought the circlet back into his hands.
Erenthil gasped, hands fluttering around his face, and then he collapsed.
The demons around them began to stir, shake out their wings, blink their eyes.
“What...?” muttered the Ascendant, the first to recover, gazing in confusion at his own hands.
There was no time to assess, to reason, to portion out. Asho lifted the circlet, and with the unfettered might of the ur-destraas singing through his soul, he placed it upon his brow.
A thunderclap went off in the depths of his mind. The might of the ur-destraas grew perfectly quiescent as a greater intelligence exerted control over that terrible power.
The Gate is open, the circlet said to Asho. The world is yours. Remake it as you desire. Apportion liberty to those who deserve to be raised. Grind your foes beneath your heel.
Asho felt his balance leaving him, so he lifted off the ground in flight.
The demons were a thousand flickering lights around him, the ur-destraas above a raging bonfire. They were growing brighter, regaining their self-control.
“Mine,” Asho whispered, and placed his will upon them. There were hundreds, but no matter. His will was a net that gathered them all up, a deed that was guided by the circlet’s wisdom and powered by the ur-destraas’ impossible power.
But there were more. There were hundreds here, but that was not enough, so Asho expanded his consciousness, sought out other flames.
Found them.
Thousands gathered around Aletheia. Hundreds more in hidden places. Packs coursing across the land. Scores upon scores hunting the ruins of Ennoia.
He gathered all of them into the palm of his hand and closed his fist.
They stilled. Fought him, and lost.
“Follow me,” he murmured.
He was immediately shown how foolish his plan was. How he was squandering power that no mortal had ever wielded in all the history of his kind. He could single-handedly raise Aletheia back into the skies and heal the wounds dealt to Starkadr. He saw the diagrams of power inscribed in the demon prisons within the bowels of each and was shown how to amend them so they would once more hold and power the stonecloud with demonic might.
Asho gritted his teeth, ignored the messages, and floated toward the Black Gate.
Madness, he thought. Rank madness. He could entomb demons wherever he wished, free them when needed, use them to bring a new age of enlightenment to this world. Their fires could banish the night; their Portals could connect cities great and small. All of it could be harnessed to better the lot of mankind, and at its peak, glittering and supreme, he would stand, dispensing justice as he saw fit, illimitable in his wisdom.
Immortal.
A god.
Asho turned his gaze to the Black Gate. It hadn’t changed in appearance; it was still a diamond of utter black, but he understood now its manifold dimensions, how it recurved upon itself so it was both the entirety of hell and also an entrance to it.
He understood how time slowed as one walked its farthest reaches, so that a journey of a day might take millennia elsewhere.
Wonders shall we work together. An elevation of your species. All that you ask can be answered. All that you desire can be provided. Simply stop. Do not pass through. The Gate is open. Think on…
Asho blocked out the voice.
Demons were appearing all around him. They blotted out the aurora above, which had begun to seethe with the Black Gate’s opening. As one, they watched him, and as one they moved to follow.
A figure stepped out before him. For a moment, he didn’t recognize her. He gazed at her face with mute confusion, and then something within him slid into place, and a name rose from his depths.
Kethe.
She was weeping. He felt his resolve shake.
Ecstasy, I promise you…
Again, Asho silenced the circlet. He floated down so he was hovering before her. The pain in her eyes wounded him to the core.
“A small house,” she said. “A small house by a creek with a swing beneath a branch.”
She reached out and touched his chest, and Asho placed his hand over her own. Even as he controlled and manipulated the thousands of demons, he allowed himself a moment to still, a moment to simply feel her touch through his torn clothing.
As if her touch had re-awakened him to his own body, he sensed what lay beneath her palm: the tearing that his abuse had inflicted upon his organs. The massive pooling of blood within his chest cavity. His stilled heart. His spoiled blood.
“I love you,” he whispered, but he wasn’t sure if she heard him, so he leaned forward and pressed his forehead to her own. “I love you.”
He tasted her tears as they kissed, and then he released her. Crying still, she stepped back, shaking her head.
Asho looked to the Gate, and his resolve grew certain. A wild and defiant cry fought its way free of his lips, and with that scream he hurled himself into the Black Gate and pulled hell in behind him.
CHAPTER 40
Kethe
Kethe screamed with him.
She ran forward a half-dozen steps and then fell to her knees before the Black Gate, staring into its ebon nullity as the demon host rushed past her. On all sides they flew, faster than she could make out, a cavalcade of wings and burning eyes, their screeches of protest endless as they dove into the Black Gate after Asho.
Buffeted by the wind of their passing, Kethe stared in shock and incomprehension at the Gate that had swallowed Asho whole. An image of his face hung before her as if it had been imprinted forever upon her sight: gaunt and noble, his eyes aflame with an imperial power, and with love and an illimitable sorrow.
The rush of demons continued unabated, a multitude of such variety and number that there seemed no end to them . From imps to ur-destraas they ranged, winged with fire or slipping through in clouds of their own innate darkness. Kethe swayed, rocking like a moored ship in a wild storm, but paid none of them any heed.
He was gone.
With that damned circlet upon his brow, he had passed through the Black Gate into perdition.
With a final, outraged scream of defiance, the last demon plummeted into the towering black diamond, and what followed was a silence so deafening that it seemed to throb in the air.
Kethe couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t tear her eyes from that black surface. People were stirring around her, incredulous and stunned, but she paid them no mind. She felt as if her mind had been riven by the blow of an ax, her very sense of self split in two.
He was gone.
A hand closed upon her shoulder. She knew without looking up that it was her mother, offering comfort and solace.
She shrugged it off.
“Kethe,” her mother said, her voice a reverent whisper. “Kethe, my love, I’m so sorry.”
Kethe straightened her spine. Pushed her shoulders back. Formed the sign of the triangle with her hands and cl
osed her eyes.
“Leave her be,” she heard Tiron say in a voice that was weary and raw. “Leave her to her grief.”
Iskra gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze and stepped away.
Someone raised their voice in surprised laughter, and a ragged cheer sounded from another angle. Kethe ignored them all. She gritted her jaw and screwed her eyes tight, trying to blot out the world, to ignore her own aches and pains. She focused, with all her mind, on the bond between her and Asho.
Whatever or whoever you are, she prayed, whether you’re the Ascendant or something unknowable, please, please hear me now. Show me that he’s still alive. Show me that he’s still out there somewhere.
A faint, vibrating line of silver appeared in her mind’s eye. It stretched from her heart and flew straight to the Black Gate, where it plunged into the opaque surface and abruptly terminated.
Kethe’s heart skipped a beat, a painful lurch of surprise and hope, and she bit her lower lip so hard, it bled.
“What are you doing?”
She couldn’t place the voice, but she didn’t care. Slowly, deliberately, she evoked the White Song, coaxed it as one might a slender tongue of flame emerging from a pile of kindling, fed it her essence, her emotions, her sense of self. There was precious little to be called upon, or perhaps she was too expended, but with grim focus she drew it out, its tenuous note rising from the depths of her soul, and then fed that white light into the conduit.
The power was immediately sucked through the thread as if it had been inhaled by the universe itself and drained into the Black Gate.
Kethe channeled the Song into the conduit, feeding it carefully, not wanting to overwhelm its growing power. The choral tones grew louder in her mind, and all that it promised to give her, she gave to the conduit, which drained her power away instantly.
“Makaria,” said someone at her side. “You cannot pull him back. You could die a thousand times over before you affect but a thousandth of the Black Gate’s evil.”
Kethe pushed the voice away and forced her breathing to remain steady and calm. She didn’t allow herself to think about what she was doing. Instead, she recalled her first memory of Asho, from when she was a headstrong girl galloping into Kyferin Castle in a welter of confusion and sound. There, to the side, lost amidst the other squires, was a boy with white hair, a face as pale as bone and a startlingly intense expression. A Bythian with a blade.
She’d been too caught up in the moment to pay him any mind and had forgotten him almost immediately, but here, now, she dredged that memory free and held his face before her. She considered the harsh cheekbones, the mouth slitted in determination, the defensive curiosity in the depths of his gaze.
Asho.
She inhaled deeply. If I’d known what our future held, I would have dismounted from my horse and knelt before you, my love, kissed your hands and wept for the pain that was to come.
White fire was coursing from her heart into the conduit, a growing torrent that fled into the Black Gate as quickly as she generated it. She took that precious memory and placed it in the fire, and the White Song sang all the more beautifully for it.
A hand took her by the shoulder and shook her. She could hear voices raised in concern but didn’t understand the words. She wanted to tell them not to worry, that she was doing this willingly, with all her heart, but she couldn’t allow herself to be distracted.
She remembered Asho, standing on the walls of Mythgræfen beside her as they awaited the demonic host of the Black Shriving to fall upon them, his hand in her own. Waking up in his arms during their climb to Skarpheðinn Range, both of them scrambling apart in embarrassment and shock.
Asho, flying down from the cerulean sky to save her, plucking her free of the Noussian dome moments before the kragh would have killed her with a dozen arrows.
She felt tears coursing down her face and hated her weakness. She needed to be strong for him, just as he had been strong for everyone else, despite the injustices, the abuse, the unfairness. He’d sacrificed everything for a world that had hated and mocked him, had told him he had no place in it other than on his knees. And still he’d fought on, giving ever more of himself, furious but always giving.
He needed her now, no matter what anyone said.
She would not fail him.
The White Song was a clarion call rising from her burning soul. She felt herself lightening, her very substance growing thin and immaterial, but she fed more and more into the fire. She thought of Akkara throwing herself forward to save her life, exploding into a ball of white flame that left the Consecrated Bythian a bleached, shriveled corpse.
Was that what was happening to her?
If so, then so be it.
The conduit was shivering and throbbing with the amount of magic she was pouring into it. Someone was shaking her, and she dimly felt a slap across her face. It had no effect.
Asho, she thought. Can you hear me? Are you there?
There was no response.
The White Song crested, a single, pure note rising to challenge the heavens themselves, and then began to fade.
Kethe struggled to feed it more of herself, but there was almost nothing left. She was reaching a point of no return, a point after which she could not walk away from this. The Song was dying because she was dying.
She’d received nothing back from the Gate, no hint that she was making any difference, no intimation that she could change the wisdom of Ascendancy. She could either cease giving of herself, or give the very last of her essence and follow Asho into the night.
“My love,” she whispered, and opened her heart as fully as she could.
The Song rose, fluttering like a wounded dove as it received the final influx of her power, and then once again began to fade.
A small house by a creek with a swing beneath a branch. The image was so vivid that she felt she could step into it – could open the blue-painted door and enter the cottage in which Asho and their children were waiting for her. She felt goosebumps pass over her body as she realized that in a way, she was going to open that door. Asho was inside, waiting for her.
“My love,” she whispered once more. “I’m coming. Wait for me.”
The White Song trembled and then stilled.
Silence surrounded her, and the conduit between them grew ever thinner. She could almost hear the stream’s tinkling, playful cadence. In the distance, sunlight was dancing amongst the viridian leaves, casting golden coins across the grass at the bank of the stream and diamonds across the water. Smoke was rising from the chimney.
It was time to go home.
Sourness flooded her mouth.
Kethe scowled, turning her head from one side to the other to escape the taste. She didn’t want a physical reminder of her body; she wanted to slip away cleanly. But the sourness grew more rancid, and with a shock she realized where it was coming from.
It was flowing to her through the conduit.
Darkness was emerging from the Black Gate and sliding along their bond to sink into her body. The sourness suffused her, caused her skin to crawl, and a headache began to pound as more pollution came through.
Desperately, fumbling and exhausted, she tried to divert it into the White Song, to cleanse it, to channel it through her and away, but more poison came through, and then, as if a dam had broken, a deluge of sickness came roaring up the conduit and slammed into her like a tidal wave of evil.
Kethe moaned. She was drowning in it. The more she fed into the White Song, the more darkness came through. It was too much; she was too weak. Flailing, gasping, she fought to keep her head above water, but she knew she was going to succumb.
Suddenly, a golden light appeared in her mind. A single chord sounded, reverberant and comforting, and she felt the presence of the Ascendant within her mind. She moved her thoughts into that radiance, and the darkness pursing her evaporated the moment it came into contact with that aureate glow.
Another presence made itself felt: Mixis, position
ed behind the Ascendant, then Synesis. Others manifested as pearls of white light. Dalitha, and more of the Consecrated, all of them opening themselves up to receiving the evil, taking it into their souls.
Fighting for breath, Kethe focused her attention on the conduit. It had swollen into a monstrous thing, warped and distended. Was this hell itself emerging?
Kethe, came a voice, feeble and terribly faint.
“Asho!” She could sense him now. He was using his power in some titanic struggle. The taint coming through was but a hint of how hard he was fighting.
Kethe opened her eyes just in time to see a hand emerged plunged out of the smooth surface of the Black Gate, grasping and clawing at the air.
“Asho!” She tried to scream, but all she managed was a croak.
To her great relief, Tiron was there. He grasped Asho’s hand and hauled him forth. Asho emerged with supreme effort, his pale body contrasting starkly against the Gate, the circlet burning cherry red.
With a cry, he fell onto the rocks before the Gate, then, in one final, convulsive movement, he tore the circlet from his brow and hurled it back through the Gate. Then he collapsed.
Kethe tried to fight free of the hands holding her upright as the taint’s assault dwindled and then ceased. Feverish, almost delirious, she reached for him.
She was borne aloft, carried to his side, and set reverently down beside him. His eyes were closed. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing, but she knew he was alive, that she had helped him heal, that his life force was flickering and fighting to hold on.
Emotion overwhelmed her. She caressed his cheek so carefully that she barely touched him. “My love,” she whispered. “You came back. You came back to me.”
His hand rose up and cupped her own. “I heard you,” he said softly. “You called me. You saved me.”
Asho nearly disappeared as she was blinded by tears. By instinct alone, she moved her head forward and touched her lips to his own before exhaustion and pain carried her thoughts away.
EPILOGUE
Iskra walked up the slope to where Tiron was kneeling alongside Draumronin. The black dragon’s great sides were no longer heaving for breath, and an ashen hue was slowly spreading over its ebon scales. Tiron’s head was bowed, and he didn’t look up when Iskra rested her hand on his shoulder.