by Nazri Noor
Bastion had coaxed Asher over to his side of the platform, and Vanitas hovered menacingly on the other end. At our fullest power this might have been ideal, with so many of us flanking Thea, but all we really had was a scared, damaged boy and a Hand who had spent the bulk of his power. This was up to me and Vanitas.
“V,” I thought. “Harry her.” Blade and scabbard approached, hovering in midair as if wielded by an invisible swordsman. Thea turned her head calmly from the sword, to me, and back.
“This won’t do,” she said, fixing me with the beetle-black of her eyes. “When did I teach you to play so unfairly, Dustin?” She curled her fingers to the sky, raising her palms upwards, and said a single word.
“Arise.”
And so they did, so many bulbous black sacs swollen with that same terrible fluid rising from all across the surface of the platform, each harboring another of the Eldest’s horrific abominations. The shrikes blubbered as they slithered out of their pods. They turned their headless torsos towards us, then uttered shrieks from their many mouths.
“Bastion,” I shouted. “Defend the kid.”
“On it,” Bastion said, his voice strained, but swelling with bravado. If there was one thing we could agree on, it was that we both shared the same idiotic, unreasonable notion that we could be heroes. Bastion would fight until all the blood ran out of his veins. He’d give the world and the Lorica nothing less.
The scabbard half of Vanitas rushed to Bastion’s side, as if sensing his need. The sword half could manage well enough on its own, already cleaving at the squealing, gibbering shrikes. In the midst of accounting for my friends I nearly failed to dance away from the hideous swipe of Thea’s talons as she leaned in to shred me once more.
“Stand still,” she hissed. “Stand still so I can kill you.”
“How many times have you failed now? How many more times can you take seeing me survive your bullshit, Thea? How does it feel to see your plans blow up in your face?”
“I should pierce your body clean through your torso,” she said. “I should lance you through your heart with my power. But this will be so much more satisfying. Ripping your head off with my bare hands will bring me so much more joy.”
She slashed again, stepping forward with every strike, her claws missing, but missing closer every time. The anger was gone from her face now, replaced by an alien impassivity. The carnage around her no longer mattered. All that counted was whether I lived or died.
“Insect.” Slash. “Vermin.” Slash. “Filth.” Slash – that one came far too close.
I had to quit while I was ahead. There was no tiring Thea out. Wherever she was drawing her power from – the Eldest, doubtless – it was giving her the fuel to continue. I couldn’t wear her down by dodging. Not that I wanted to. There was only one way to end this. I turned my sights over to where Vanitas fought. It was time.
She had murdered me, turned me into this thing that wasn’t quite human, wasn’t quite an abomination, and it was clear that letting her live would only mean she’d repeat the pattern, again and again, until she found some grand solution, some way to fulfill her crazed desire to bring her children back.
“Kill her,” I thought.
Vanitas didn’t even respond. The blade whistled through the air, verdigris and bronze and garnets glittering in the moonlight, the spike of his sword point sailing unerringly for Thea’s heart like a guided missile. She turned to meet him head-on. I commended her bravery in accepting her fate. Part of me mourned. A larger part of me celebrated. Justice.
Then it happened. So quickly, it happened. Thea raised her hand, her palm facing forward as she deftly sidestepped at the very last second. Her talons closed around the sword, snapping shut like the jaws of some great beast, each of her nails a glistening alabaster fang. The sword wavered in her clutches, Vanitas struggling to work his way out of her grasp, away from her sudden, monstrous strength.
How was she doing this? Cold sweat trickled down my back. The air whizzed as Vanitas’s scabbard flew straight at Thea’s head, but it happened again. This time, without even moving a step, she thrust her hand out, caught the scabbard, and held it at arm’s length.
“Vanitas? Come back.” I’d spoken those words out loud without realizing it.
“I can’t,” the sword said in my head. “Dustin, something’s wrong.”
Thea’s hands trembled as she fought to hold both pieces of the weapon, but her face was perfectly still and serene as she turned to me. Our eyes met, and she smiled. She clenched her fingers.
My head rang with a thunderous shattering. I clutched at my temples as a flash of green light emanated from Thea’s fingers. No one else could hear it, but the inside of my mind pealed with the agony in Vanitas’s screams. He had never sounded more human.
I crumbled to my knees as the broken pieces of the sword and scabbard fell to the ground. I couldn’t sense him anymore. Vanitas was just a pile of ruined, tarnished bronze, of dull and fractured garnets.
“Vanitas?”
Nothing.
A bead of something black dripped to the ground from Thea’s fingers. “Goodness,” she said. “It appears I’ve cut myself.”
“You killed him.”
Thea curled her fingers again, her knuckles cracking as she did, and she raised her head, stretched her neck back, sipping in the night air – savoring her kill. The blood simmered in my body. My scar ached. Behind it, the Dark Room clamored for release.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d bothered to learn any magic you might have used to hurt me. To kill me.”
Fuck. Fuck, but the burning truth of it only made it hurt so much more.
Her spine was loose, and she rolled her shoulders as she cocked her head, peering at me out of the corner of one obsidian eye. “When will you ever kill me, Dustin Graves? Does it upset you to see your plans blow up in your face?”
My fists shook at my sides, but I said nothing. Cold air rushed over my skin as my blood simmered under the surface. The Dark Room. All I needed to do was open the door. The shrikes, Thea, all of them, gone. But Bastion, and Asher. I turned to look at them, to find them quailing under the assault of the abominations that had risen from the tunnels in the spire.
“Curious, isn’t this? The blood, the blade, and the surface of this tower of vines I’ve created, it’s much like a circle. Very much like a communion, is it not? But nothing quite like the circle I cast around the city. The communion with my true gods that you ruined.”
“The Eldest can’t give you what you need,” I said, swallowing the thick lump in my throat. “No one can. You’re insane.”
She gestured at the far end of the pedestal. “He can. That boy. The necromancer.”
The what? I turned to Asher again, his face pallid, frightened, nothing at all like a – did she say a necromancer? Which explained why he could heal the sickly, speak to ghosts, and –
“Raise the dead. You need him to raise your dead.”
Thea bared her teeth. “They aren’t dead. My babies are sleeping. That’s all. The boy has dominion over the energies of vitality, of life itself. He doesn’t understand how to direct it yet. But I do. I can siphon his power, hollow him out like a piece of fruit. Then I’ll have what I need.”
She raised her hand, every talon pointed in my direction, as a bulb of white luminescence grew in her palm. Her wrist remained trained on me, her entire body a loaded gun.
“Give me the boy.”
Fuck no. She’d killed Enrietta Boules, and she’d taken Vanitas, too. Fucking Vanitas. No more.
“You’ve ruined enough lives, Thea.” I rose to my full height. “You’ll take him over my dead body.”
Her eyes flickered towards me. “Very well.”
The bulb of light shot out into a thorn the size of a dagger, ejecting from Thea’s palm so fast I didn’t see it. I didn’t have time to move, either. A wet, meaty sound thunked from the left side of my body, and I screamed as the bolt of light shot its way through my
shoulder. It hit bone. God, it must have hit bone.
The world wavered. The sweat on my brow felt like beads of ice, and everything seemed so much colder. Maybe she missed my heart, but I knew the more likely possibility. She wanted me alive and suffering, so I could watch while she killed Asher and Bastion. Then she’d finish me off. She held one hand up, closing the fingers into a fist. All around us the shrikes stopped, watching, waiting for her command, their bodies turned towards Asher.
“It’s not like in the movies, is it?” Thea smiled. “It hurts more in real life. And those lines that you think make you so heroic in the moment? I wonder if you regret that. I wonder if you ever thought you could amount to anything even resembling a hero. Over your dead body indeed.” She held her hand out again, another bolt already forming in her palm, her talons glowing, each of them a missile ready to tear new holes through my body. “Move aside, Dustin, or die.”
I needed time to think, to regroup, as if I could manage anything through the scorching pain in my shoulder. I fell to my knees again, and this time I fell into the shadows as well, melting into them, clutching my wounded arm.
“That’s right, Dustin. Shadowstep. Run like the overgrown child that you are. It’s the right thing to do, after all.” Thea’s eyes glittered, and this time she didn’t smile. “Embrace what you are: a coward.”
From somewhere behind and above me, as I vanished into the darkness, I could hear Bastion shouting my name, the accusation ringing in his voice. As if I would leave them. That’s not why I was entering the Dark Room again. Wasn’t it?
I couldn’t run away. I would never. But where was I even going to emerge? Thea knew me too well. I stumbled through the Dark Room, moving as best as I could with my injury, my head lolling as I looked about, the black mists shuddering, vibrating.
No. Let them out and I risked killing my own friends. Yet as agitated as the things in the darkness were, they seemed to approach me with such softness, tendrils curling around my ankles in caressing wisps, trailing along my skin with their cold, alien affection. For the first time I felt as though I belonged there, another denizen of the dark, someone who could call the chamber home. The thought gave me no comfort.
Neither did the hand that reached for my cheek.
I almost fell then, at the shock of seeing anything but the living smoke and mist that dwelled in the Dark Room, at the terror of seeing a single slender white hand reaching with delicate fingers for my skin. As far back as I retreated, the hand kept coming for me, finally resting its fingers on my cheek. The touch was warm, and familiar, and with it materialized the rest of the being it belonged to. The rest of her.
“Are you surprised to see us, fleshling?”
My mouth fell open. “Hecate?”
Chapter 26
“Then you remember us.”
The goddess of magic smiled sweetly, her beauty almost letting me forget how her presence in the Dark Room made no sense. But then again, little about Hecate ever made any sense. Even staring I couldn’t focus on her features, her face shifting as I watched. All I knew was that she was beautiful, and dangerous, and utterly mad.
“How are you doing this? Why are you here?”
“You ask us such foolish questions when you still need answers to problems you haven’t solved.”
“You’re right. But I also don’t have time for riddles.” I pushed past her, not really thinking that I would lose her in the darkness, and I was right. I hadn’t made it a few steps before she materialized just inches from my face yet again.
“Too true,” she said. “But wasn’t our wisdom precisely what you needed to defeat the madwoman you once called your mentor?”
She was right. I paused then, grimacing, clutching at my shoulder. It felt, through my clothes, like the bleeding had stopped, but I couldn’t be sure. The pain sure as hell was still there.
“Then tell me what I need.”
“Everything you need is already within you. You’re merely too young to control it, too unlearned. You must learn faster, grow stronger. We won’t always be there for you, fleshling. We only do this as a favor, because we like you so much. Because your corruption brings us much delight.”
Again with the corruption, just as Amaterasu put it. My ties to the Eldest, as if I even had any time to discuss that with her.
“It’s nothing you couldn’t have figured out for yourself, fleshling. When you first opened the door to the Dark Room, the result was a massacre precisely because you had no goal, no aim in mind for what you intended to happen. Tell me. What is your mission?”
To stop Thea. To hurt her enough to end her madness. I knew that from the very beginning, but I also knew that it was easier if it was up to someone else to do it, something that wasn’t by my hand. Vanitas – poor Vanitas would have made killing her an objective act. It made it distant enough, so that I wouldn’t need to feel remorse or responsibility. But I knew now what had to be done.
“To kill her.” With Mrs. Boules slain and the whole operation botched, I as was good as dead to Dionysus anyway. Might as well take someone down with me.
“Excellent. Then focus on that. Sharpen your mind so that it points to your purpose. Hone your senses and your intention into that singular result.”
The honing. That’s why Carver called it that all along, to fine-tune and distill the darkness into something I could pretend I could control.
“That is what you must do, fleshling. Direct the darkness towards your enemy, and draw on the desire, on the bloodlust you felt when last you used your power. Do you remember the glory of annihilation, the sheer joy of butchering and breaking, so much that the drool drips down your chin, that your blood sings with the very excitement of snuffing out life itself?”
I eyed her cautiously, but I remembered. Every time I opened the door, that was how it felt. The swell of power, of knowing that I could crush and rend and flay if I wanted.
“Then fulfill your purpose. Save those other fleshlings you hold such fondness for.” Hecate grinned. “And savor the kill when it comes.”
A thrill of anticipation ran up my spine, and I wasn’t sure whether to feel guilty about it.
“This feels wrong, Hecate. I don’t like that I’m enjoying the idea of doing this.”
“It is who you are, Dustin Graves. Embrace your darkness.”
I gritted my teeth, intent on pressing on, my eyes focused on the mote of light at the end of the Dark Room, the doorway back to reality. I needed to go back. I’d been gone long enough. But I needed to know.
“Hecate. The corruption. What am I? Do you know?”
Hecate lifted her hand to stroke at my chin, smiling as sweetly as a mother bidding her child a fond farewell.
“A monster,” she said as she faded into the darkness. “The loveliest of abominations.”
A non-answer. Of course. I didn’t wait for her to vanish, breaking into a run. Then Carver was right all along. I was still human, but part of me had changed. Yet according to Amaterasu, part of me had always been more – or less – than human. So were they both right?
No. I couldn’t focus on that. The answer I needed was the one Hecate had given me. I cringed at the pain in my shoulder, fully sprinting for the end of the tunnel, then sprang out of the darkness.
Moonlight returned, and I was on the platform at the peak of the spire once more. Bastion was sprawled across the center of it – winded, and spent, but at least he wasn’t bloodied. The shrikes were all gone, dismissed, or sent down the spire, because their master had what she wanted.
Thea was standing close to the edge of the platform where Bastion had previously held his defense, clutching Asher by the throat. He didn’t look like he had any breath left to scream, but the twitching of his limbs and the wracking of his body told me volumes about the pain.
I stepped towards them. Bastion noticed me first, and he coughed.
“I thought you ran,” he groaned. “You rotten piece of shit. She picked me up and threw me on the ground.”
“I came back, okay. And I’m the one bleeding out of a hole in my body.”
“Whatever,” Bastion croaked, attempting to push himself off the ground. “All right. Let’s party. Let’s do this.”
“Stay down,” I said. “Do you have enough power left to grab Asher if she lets go?”
He eyed me warily, but nodded. I nodded back.
I held one hand out, pointing it directly at Thea’s chest. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing, but it felt correct. It felt like she had taught me one last thing by blasting me in the shoulder.
“Thea,” I called out. “Put him down.”
She didn’t. Sickly green energy traveled down her arm as she continued to drain Asher’s power.
“Try and stop me, Graves.”
“You were wrong about me. I did learn one trick.” Her face remained still, but I detected the smallest tic in the corner of her eye. I learned two things, actually. The first was that I was a monster.
And the second was the importance of the magical gesture, of using the hand as a focus. I drew on everything I’d learned from all my mentors, from watching these men and women who could warp the world with a flick of the wrist. I motioned with my fingers, as if firing a spell of my own. Thea flinched, watching for the missile to launch from my hand.
She wasn’t watching the ground.
The mists formed so much quicker this time, the gap that I’d opened for the Dark Room in our reality so small and precise that the shadows emanated from it in a forced stream. Sharp and pointed, it burst from the ground like a lance, or a sword. I thought it a fitting tribute to Vanitas. The blade burst out of the shadows and lengthened fully, a gleaming, metallic stalagmite of solid shadow that was taller than a man, as sharp as a spear.
It staked Thea clear through her body, thrusting with so much force that it lifted her off her feet. Asher fell from her hands. but before he could tumble to the ground, Bastion reached and grabbed for him, pulling him to the center of the platform swiftly and safely. I didn’t know just how much Thea had drained out of him, but the color began returning to his cheeks immediately.