by Joe Ducie
I met her eyes and found them sultry. That night had been the very first we spent together. Tal was still a year away, and we’d been graduated Knights for only weeks. Already we were known for our skill and prowess in the minor skirmishes we’d had with the Renegades. That night was Clare’s birthday, and we’d all gotten together and rented a bar in Farvale on Lake Delgado, just over the mountains from Ascension City.
“Nothing,” I said. No one else seemed to give the dark arch or the pulsating light any mind. Indeed, the wraiths of my past stepped right through the arch as if it wasn’t there. They blended with the stone and emerged unscathed and unbothered.
“Come on, Dec.” Clare laughed and spun me around by the waist. “Dance with me!”
I laughed and fell into the moment. Clare had always been tiny, petite—and her ever-changing eyes, as I remembered them, had been wild and bright. Her blue and indigo orbs certainly were shining that night. With a wicked grin, I swept my arms under the back of her legs and picked her up, pressing our bodies together and lifting her just a head above me. She looked down, placed her hands on either side of my face, and kissed me.
The bar erupted in cheers and catcalls, wolf whistles and applause.
Clare withdrew her tongue from my mouth and pulled back, still a foot above me in my arms, and blushed beet-red in the dizzying lights and the loud music. She swatted my shoulder, and I let her down.
“It’s about time you two got it on,” Tia Moreau said, holding a fresh drink for Clare and wearing a devastating, sheer blue dress of her own. Never mind the warships, the battlefields, or the endless skirmishes—Tia could cut through the Renegades in that dress alone. “We all thought it’d happen weeks ago when we were stationed out at the Reach.”
“No fraternizing while on duty,” I said, and both girls rolled their eyes.
“How was it?” Tia asked Clare, a devious glimmer in her eye.
Clare smirked and gave me a wink. “Sloppy… but effective.”
Tia burst into laughter. “Declan’s never been anything else.”
I chuckled and looked across the dance floor again, keeping an eye on that arch of rippling light. I wasn’t sure, but I thought that maybe the light had grown a touch dimmer. A sense of distant urgency and unease settled in my gut. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing something else tonight? Wasn’t I—
On Voraskel.
—looking for something or someone?
“He’s not even listening,” Tia said. “Declan, we’re going to the ladies’. Watch our drinks, would you?”
“Sure,” I said, distracted. I’d forgotten something important. “Watch your drinks.”
Clare and Tia linked arms and wandered off in the direction of the washrooms. I watched Clare leave in her tight green dress, pale shoulders bare, and she made sure it was worth watching. I ran my hand down the buttons of my waistcoat and—
This isn’t real.
—couldn’t shake that feeling, like a maddening piece of gristle caught between my teeth, that I had somewhere else to be tonight.
“You can’t stay here…” I muttered to myself. “This was long ago, and most of the people here are dead or insane.”
And that’s the perversion of this particularly brand of enchantment, isn’t it? It makes you want to stay. The defenses protecting the Roseblade in the Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess were designed to be unfairly kind, I saw now. Memory could be pervasive. The enchanted defenses wanted me to stay, to get lost in the past—so much so that I was beginning to believe the illusion was real.
And therein lay the insidious danger of the tomb’s enchantments. I’d live in this dream world, flittering from memory to memory as my body in the tomb dehydrated and succumbed to an agonizing death that I would never feel.
The arch called to me.
Time slipped by, and Clare had returned from the washroom. No sign of Tia.
“Let’s get out of here,” Clare whispered, her warm tongue darting across my earlobe. “It’s your lucky night, Declan Hale.”
“It sure was.” I took a step back, grasped Clare’s hands in my own, and raised them to my mouth. I kissed the backs of her fingers, trying hard not to picture them as they were now—naught but rot and bones in the World Cemetery. Better to remember Clare this way, wasn’t it? I let her go and took a step back.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Everything,” I said. “And nothing, I suppose. Happy birthday, Clare Valentine.”
A few more steps backward, and I felt the heat of the arch at my back. I took a snapshot in my head of Clare in her dress, young and beautiful and—for a short while, ten years ago—mine. Then I stepped through the archway, giving up relatively Matrix-style happiness, and the whole shambles disappeared in a flash of hot white light.
My head spun, and the ground shifted beneath my feet.
Noiseless air rushed past my ears, but I was falling through a void of nothing. Not the Void, but a void—of pure white nothing. That nothing marked every direction, and I only knew down from up because I was falling.
Long minutes passed that way.
I thought on my memories of Clare and of Tia before her. Of Tal yet to come, and the heartache we had wrought in each other. Of all my friends and the best people I’d ever known.
After what could have been hours or minutes, I started to think on something else.
Somewhere else.
Someone else.
Let me out, I thought, speaking to the enchantment messing with my head. I didn’t yield. You couldn’t make me stay. My present may be dull and devoid of these people you keep flinging at me, but it’s real. These dreams are pale shadows of what really happened, how we really felt, and how much we mattered to one another while it lasted.
I sensed I was heard by whatever intelligence was in the enchantments, guiding me through my memories. Not so much alive but aware, and capable of vast and terrible understanding.
You could have all these lives, whispered a soft voice that sounded male and female and neither. You could live a dozen different lives here, and only seconds would pass in true reality. Declan, the voice said, kind and soothing. You could be happy.
This isn’t real. This does not matter. I wanted to slam my fist into a wall to drive that point home, but I could only fall. And what I have—what I lost—defined me. I can’t play pretend with all the ghosts of my past, you hear me? I could never live in these ‘perfect’ worlds. I need loss. I need cruelty and a hard slap in the face every now and again. It’s how I know I’m still alive. Now release me!
Like everything I touched, the void of nothing shattered in a blaze of reality, and the enchantment was broken.
Chapter Fifteen
Each Breath She Takes
The platform in the Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess, which had held me prisoner to my memories in a beam of light, shuddered and descended below the level of the floor as true reality reasserted itself. I took Tal’s hand, and she took a small step onto the platform as it fell toward the bowels of the tomb.
“How long was I caught?” I asked. My mouth felt dry and my throat sore, as if I’d run a marathon without water.
“You were only a few minutes,” Tal said. “I tried to rouse you, at first, but then I sensed the enchantment.”
“You didn’t see any of it?” I asked as the platform slowly spiraled down, grating against the stonework. A cylinder of dark stone encircled us now, and the chamber above had become a circle of white light.
Tal shook her head. “Your eyes grew distant and your face went slack, and you had your fists clenched as if you were fighting it.”
“I didn’t even feel it coming on,” I admitted. “I took a step here and then I was thirteen years ago… in the Academy.”
“What happened?” Tal asked, her jaw set hard and grim. I had a feeling she was being forced to ask that question.
“Nothing exciting. Honestly, I’m not sure what the point of that was. We were just… working on an assignment. Constructin
g a reality beacon, you know, and then I was running an obstacle course, after that at a bar in Farvale. I think the enchantment wanted me to get lost in the memories, you know. Blissfully live in the past as I died out here.”
Tal seemed to relax. “Is that all?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
She rolled her eyes. “An apology for what’s happened to me would be a fine start—but then, you’ve got nothing to apologize for, do you? Save perhaps acting when no one else would dare. Let’s keep going and see this done.”
*~*~*~*
The platform lowered us under the temple and came to a stop in about an inch of clear water, speckled with blue sparks of energy. Thick beams of light, coming from some unseen source, filtered in through yellow stained glass windows that reached up toward the ceiling in the cathedral-like space, which, I realized was actually the top step of a large spiral staircase. I could smell fresh rainfall and hear the trickling of distant streams from within the walls.
“Oh, this place is beautiful…” Tal said, a hand over her heart. “Like an old church in Rome or somewhere.”
“Flooded, somewhat, but yes, I have to agree.” The Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess was a work of art. “We’re fortunate to see this.” I looked at her sidelong and found half a smile. “Circumstances being what they are, and all.”
Water trickled down the spiral staircase, which was at least twenty meters wide and made of old marble and descended before us in a wide curve in dozens of little waterfalls. The staircase was lit well every ten feet or so by a narrow, tall window. I couldn’t glimpse just what the light behind the windows was—it certainly wasn’t sunlight, so far beneath the surface of Voraskel—but it provided more than enough illumination to guide our way.
On the sill of each window was a white rose—always white—and I leaned in close to get a look at one. The roses were real, but they had been dipped in some sort of resin to preserve the blossom. The stems were plated in gold, as were the thorns and leaves.
These flowers are likely older than the Egyptian pyramids, I thought idly.
The steps led us further underground, and I was expecting the air to grow foul from centuries of stagnation, but a warm breeze wafted up from below, carrying hints of wildflowers and spring rain.
“This is a peaceful place,” Tal said. “A shame it’ll be lost when Avalon finally pulls Voraskel apart.”
“Do you think she’s really buried down here?” I asked. “Fair Astoria? The Sleeping Goddess? What does…” I didn’t want to have to address the Everlasting again. “What does Oblivion have to say on the matter?”
Tal shook her head, uncertain. “If he knows anything, he’s not talking.”
I squeezed the grip on my shotgun all the more, feeling a touch of trepidation bleeding toward fear. An Everlasting snarling in my face I could deal with. One who was subtle and silent put me on edge.
The steps ended in a shallow pool of softly glowing water, just a few inches deep. White petals floated on the water, and in the center of the small chamber was a raised dais and a gray stone sarcophagus. Atop the tomb was a small, narrow pedestal, and sheathed in that stone was the Roseblade.
Tal and I stepped forward at the same time. I was shocked and a little surprised to actually have stumbled upon the sword without having to give up a limb or a piece of my soul to the enchantments in this place.
I felt the pull of something buried in the floor, unseen but just beneath our feet in the water, and grasped the significance of it a split second after Tal did. The pedestal was protected by yet another ring of star iron—hidden to trick any wayward Everlasting.
Tal’s words at the entrance to the tomb rushed back to me. But now, nestled away at the back of my mind, festering on my soul, he can retreat and pass these old wards so long as I’m in control. The only Everlasting with that abil—
So long as she was in control… Oblivion had to retreat deeper into her mind, relinquish a few inches of his leash, in order to pass star iron wards.
“Declan,” Tal whispered, far quicker than me to realize what was happening. “Run and get it—now! He’ll kill us both before he lets—”
Tal was flung into the wall, as if some unseen force had hooked her on a line, away from the star iron trap. She screamed—a sound of such hopeless, ageless agony that I stifled a gasp and ran toward the pedestal, even as she fell to her knees, clutching her head and clawing at her face.
I crossed the band of star iron a heartbeat before crimson devoured Tal’s eyes and Lord Oblivion stood, using her small feet.
Terror shot through me like a jolt of electricity. I didn’t hesitate to pull the Roseblade from the pedestal, pulling the sword up and over my head with a ring of crystal on stone.
Power surged through me, a torrent of water bursting over the dam of star iron, and I drank in the creation light pouring through my mind like water to a man who hadn’t known he was dying of thirst. I’d been right—not even star iron could eclipse the power in the sword.
I leveled the tip of the blade toward Oblivion. My other hand still gripped the shotgun, loosely and off to the side.
Had Emily known the cards would fall this way? Had she hidden the Roseblade here on purpose, to lure Oblivion in close and give me a chance—a split second of a chance—to cross the star iron band before the Elder God could reclaim his control of Tal?
I sensed the hand of some greater mind than mine at work in this game. It had been a simple trick to fool a being so old and sure of itself, a being that was probably expecting something a touch more clever.
“That sword,” Oblivion growled, “does not belong to you.”
“Deal with it, shithead,” I snapped, at the end of my very short fuse. “Now let’s have a talk about what you can do for me—”
Oblivion roared and threw Tal’s body through the air toward me, arms outstretched and fingers elongated into razor-sharp claws. Madness spun in the red orbs of her eyes and I—forgive me, songbird—didn’t hesitate to swing the shotgun up and open fire.
The Everlasting Oblivion took two shots of star iron-infused buckshot to the face, and his roar of outrage turned into a shriek of pain. Tal’s body spun back through the air and struck one of the stained glass windows, shattering the glass, and slumped down the wall. A trail of blood and ichor smeared the marble stonework.
“Broken quill…” I whispered harshly.
Tal lay slumped as if dead, her head lolling on her shoulder, as if two rounds from a high-powered pump-action shotgun point-blank to the face could kill a god. I took a step down off the pedestal, Roseblade in hand, and Oblivion snapped Tal’s head up.
He glared at me through a face torn apart. Tal’s lower jaw hung from her face. Her nose was gone, and one of her eyes had been obliterated. The other eye, as red as blood, seemed to dance with laughter and raw, insane anger.
Oblivion laughed. “You think you’ve won,” he hissed somehow, his voice more of a loud echo in my mind than actually emanating from Tal. Even as I watched, her jaw snapped into place and the ragged flesh of her cheek sealed over seamlessly. “You think I didn’t intend for this? I had ten thousand years of imprisonment to plan my resurrection, Declan Hale. You think this a victory?”
I shrugged. “It’s a point on the scorecard in my favor, at the very least.”
“Surrender the Roseblade!”
“How about I scatter you across the Void instead?”
Oblivion grinned with half a mouth of splintered teeth. “Follow me, if you dare.” He crossed Tal’s arms over her chest.
I took a quick step back as her entire form dissolved into thick, oily black smoke. Red lightning rippled through the cloud. One lashed out like a whip, and I caught it on the Roseblade. The tip lashed the back of my hand, drawing blood. I’d seen the cloud of mad smoke and terror before—it was Oblivion in his true form.
With a shriek loud enough to bring the whole tomb crashing down on my head, Oblivion fled back up the spiral staircase—shatter
ing windows and cracking stone in his wake.
Chapter Sixteen
Birth and Death
My shoes barely touched the floor as I hauled ass back up the spiraling steps, crushing shattered glass underfoot. I found that I couldn’t manage a steady pace with both the shotgun and the Roseblade, so I tossed the silver-barreled mosquito aside—it had served me well, but I had a god to outrun and outfox before Oblivion made me pay for swiping his prize out from under him.
And how will he do that? I wondered, with a dread conviction gripping my heart. He’ll hurt someone close to you, of course. They always do.
Right now, both in terms of distance and friendship, that was Emily Grace—alone in her secret grove, pregnant, and armed only with Myth to defend herself against the blight.
I ran. I ran hard and fast. When I reached the stone platform that had brought Tal and me below the tomb, I used the Roseblade to cast a quick invocation and flew up through the dark cylinder, back into the mosaic chamber. The oppressive weight of the star iron ring, which had restricted my Will, was now just an annoying, buzzing bee in the back of my head, silenced swiftly by the Roseblade.
Having a clear line of sight up the corridor, I worked some speed enhancement enchantments on my legs—at a cost that would leave me shaking and fatigued if I maintained the speed for more than a few minutes—and shot up the corridor, as if I were an arrow loosed from a bow. The walls and torchlight blurred in my wake and I leapt out of the Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess and landed in a defensive crouch next to that fallen statue with the familiar face.
“Ma’am,” I said, panting hard, and began the run back through the forest to Emily’s secret grove, already fearing that I was too slow, too late, too much of a fool to think more than five minutes ahead. I had to go slower, lest I slam into a tree or low-hanging branch at speed and snap my enchanted neck.
I scattered dozens of the floating snowflake spark creatures as I darted through the forest, mindful of tree roots and loose rocks. My arm grew heavy from hefting the Roseblade a few miles in under ten minutes, and I rounded the copse of old oak sentinels that shielded Emily’s glade from prying eyes.