by Joe Ducie
With my heart pounding in my ears and my lungs on fire, I returned, victorious and terrified.
Emily rested serenely against one of the boulders, her head held high. Just above her crouched Oblivion, eyes blood-red and bristling. Tal’s body was healed and unblemished from my shotgun blast.
And Oblivion was grinning wickedly and holding Myth to Emily’s throat.
“Fuck me,” I cursed. Too slow.
“One step,” Oblivion said simply, his voice an arrogant mix of Tal’s and a steel edge on grindstone, “and I’ll slit her throat.”
Emily’s white dress was stained with blood between her legs and over her stomach. Her pregnant belly looked as if it had shrunk.
If I’d been afraid for her before, that fear just strapped on a jetpack and burst through the atmosphere.
“Hello, Declan,” she said.
“Hello, Emily. Are you okay?” Her shoulders, which she had kept wrapped in her blue shawl since we left the bookshop, were bare.
“All is well in the world,” she quipped, and smiled as if a blade of celestial illusion to her throat was nothing more than a fancy necklace.
I’d caught my breath, but my legs still shook from the exertion of my mad run. I met Oblivion’s gaze and leveled the sword at him. “You kill her and there’s nothing to stop me ending you with this sword,” I said—and at least a part of me meant it—but what of Tal?
“She’s old, this one,” Oblivion spat. “But there is power enough in this dagger to end her life and repay her betrayal, once and forevermore!”
Her betrayal? “What’s he talking about, Em?”
“Oh, I’m sure nothing important.” Emily gave me a slow smile.
“I tire of our posturing, Arbiter. Perhaps I move this game along a few moves, yes?”
And then Oblivion did the unthinkable. He drove Myth into Emily’s chest, between her breasts, and into her heart. The knife slipped into her flesh as easily as if she were as solid as warm butter.
“No!” Without any rational thought, I raised the Roseblade and tore the Creation Knife from Emily’s heart and Oblivion’s hand with a quick, fierce invocation of intent. The knife flew through the air, and I caught it in my free hand. Armed now with two weapons of celestial illusion, I gritted my teeth and advanced.
“Stop please, Declan,” Emily said softly. Blood flowed from the stab wound in her chest, thick and steady, down her white dress and onto the forest floor. For her part, Emily seemed mildly inconvenienced by the blade to the heart. Her hands still cradled what I was sure had been a larger bump when I’d left her there a few hours before.
“How… are you still alive?” I managed. “Emily, how…?”
Oblivion chuckled, tone low and cruel. “How, indeed? You never did like revealing yourself to your pets, did you? What little of your self remains…”
“I’ve grace enough left for what must be done.” Emily’s voice, although faint, held a cord of unshakeable command. “Declan, Lord Oblivion has overstayed his welcome. If you could show him the door, my dear.”
Oblivion clenched Tal’s fists and glared, daring me to attack. Given the power I held in my hands, the combined strength of two blades of celestial illusion, I might very well have been able to unmake the Elder God—but by doing so I would also destroy Tal, once and for all.
And that I could never do.
Oblivion knew that truth. He probably considered my feelings for Tal a weakness, but those feelings were the only real strength I’ve ever had. I couldn’t destroy that strength, not even if the fate of the whole Story Thread hung in the balance—as it so often seemed to be.
Show him the door… A bulb lit up in my head, a way to survive, but it would mean sacrificing the Roseblade. No other option—at least, none I was willing to take.
I looked to Myth and was sickened by the sight of Emily’s blood dripping from the blade.
And something else was happening to the knife. The petals in the crystal were changing color. They withered, shriveled, and turned a deep, dark, midnight black.
I had no idea what had happened, but I sensed a corruption in the blade. From Oblivion… or from Emily? It didn’t matter, so long as the knife could still do its job. Quickly now.
With a thought, I carved a portal between worlds just on my right, six feet tall and three wide. The portal opened up on a world from the novel Auron’s Folly, atop a cliff overlooking a cold deep sea scattered with icebergs made of diamond. Clare Valentine and I had visited that place, more than once. It was a world about as far along the Story Thread as you could go, way beyond the Outer Territories. Before I could lose my nerve, I tossed the Roseblade through the portal and over the cliff’s edge.
The sword tumbled through the air and disappeared below the sea.
Nausea washed over me, and blood trickled from my nose. I didn’t pause to ask why, and I quickly turned to my left and cut another portal with Myth. That portal came harder, and I had to split my concentration—not entirely sure it would work—to carve a second gateway somewhere new while maintaining the first. Myth bucked in my hand, and tearing open the air felt like wrenching two pieces of Velcro apart—but I managed it.
“What are you doing?” Oblivion snarled.
Sparing him a glance of contempt and regret, I tossed my other hard-won weapon of celestial illusion through the gap in reality. I let that portal close as soon as the knife was through, but I maintained the first.
“There,” I said, dizzy from the strain. Why had the petals blackened? And what had using the knife afterward done to me? “Now you’ve got five seconds to step through that portal after the Roseblade before I close it, after which I’m all out of ways of opening it again.”
Show him the door…
Oblivion looked as if he were about to hurl himself through the air as he had done in the tomb, when I’d fed him two rounds of buckshot. I didn’t have the shotgun now, and I’d just tossed away my only real defense—gambling on Oblivion’s greed and machinations winning over his desire to lop my head from my shoulders.
“You kill me and the gateway closes—and you’ll spend the next ten thousand years searching the Story Thread for the sword,” I pointed out. “Leave us alive, Oblivion, and you’ll have your prize.”
I could see the creature behind Tal’s eyes evaluating the situation and swiftly coming to the same conclusion I had: We were going to have to settle our accounts at a later date.
With a snarl of suppressed rage and an unspoken promise of horrors to come, Oblivion stepped away from Emily and toward me. He came close enough to shake my hand, his expression on Tal’s face alien and cruel, and then took a step sideways through the gateway and after the Roseblade. I didn’t hesitate to close the path the instant he was gone.
Broken quill, but I had just done the unthinkable and armed the Everlasting with a weapon of celestial illusion.
Also rather stupid of me, I’d tossed Myth away to save our lives. Using its path-cutter enchantment had caused me a pounding headache and a bloody nose.
At least I knew where to recover the dagger, even if something had happened to corrupt the petals set in the crystal blade.
I rushed over to Emily and fell to my knees before her, placing a hand just below her breasts and trying to stem the flow of heart’s blood. I was no Healer and, indeed, I had no idea how Emily was still alive. Her poor heart must have been shredded. If Sophie were here…
“Across the stream,” she said softly, “in that tangle of old tree roots—you see where the sparks gather?—I left something important. Declan, my dearest, while there’s time, could you please fetch it for me?”
I nodded. We needed to move… It wouldn’t take Oblivion long to recover the Roseblade from beneath the waves.
I left Emily, waded across the stream, and approached the knot of thick brown tree roots. The roots belonged to the oak sentinels guarding the secret grove and were twice as thick as a man if they were an inch. I ducked beneath the overhanging roots, weaseled bet
ween the thinner strands, and found what I’d half-expected to find:
A newborn baby wrapped in Emily’s blue shawl, blinking up at me curiously with tired, half-lidded eyes.
“Damn it all…” I muttered, and retrieved the little bugger from his soft nest of foliage within the maze of roots. “I should never have left her here alone.”
I returned to Emily, taking careful steps back across the stream, and placed her son in her arms. Emily had paled, but the blood seemed to have stopped flowing from her chest. For a long moment I watched them, mother and child, and then knelt down on my knees before her.
“How is your heart?” I asked.
She smiled. “It has taken worse strikes than this in the past…”
“We have to go, Em, but please tell me who you are?” I whispered. What you are?
“Oh, Declan, you sweet man,” she said, holding her son in bloodied arms. He was so quiet, aware, fragile—and he couldn’t have been born more than an hour before. “I will always be Emily Grace to you. Please remember that. But I have had other names across the ages. The Immortal Queen, least of all. Once upon a time I was even known as… Fair Astoria.”
My heart leapt into my throat, and I forgot to breathe, to blink, for about half a minute. A startled deer in headlights had better reaction time than me in those thirty seconds. The look on my face likely would’ve made quite a good passport photo. But my thoughts and resolve were crushed under the weight of Emily’s revelation. Fair Astoria… The Sleeping Goddess.
Emily, my timeless Emily Grace, was one of the Everlasting.
“Oh…” I sighed softly. A million tiny pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t even realized needed putting together, tumbled into place. I was rocked by Emily’s confession, but I believed it. Wholly. She wouldn’t lie—she had never lied—and it made far too much terrible sense. “Oh, Emily.”
No wonder she had been able to survive a knife to the heart. Emily was… a god.
“Now kiss me,” she commanded. “Declan, you will kiss me once more before I rest.”
And I did just that, as the baby stirred between us, gurgling softly and perhaps the only other person on this entire planet save Emily who knew what he was doing.
Emily’s lips were hot and tasted of copper.
I saw things in that kiss—images of people I had never known and places I had never been. I saw Atlantis, alive and new, a city of True Earth before it was lost to imprison Oblivion. I saw war—the Great Everlasting War, and how one after another the Everlasting had been imprisoned, with Astoria’s help. Her betrayal…
And then I saw Emily and me alone in a garden, a place I didn’t know and had never been. Wildflowers were abundant under an azure, cloudless sky. I looked older, but not by much. I wasn’t wearing an eye patch, but the skin around the eye was scarred from the wound, and in that glimpse of a moment that hadn’t happened yet I felt a truth echo through my mind.
“He’s yours…” Emily whispered against my lips. “This child belongs to us both, Declan Hale.”
I broke the kiss and reared away from the Everlasting Astoria, falling onto my ass and panting as if ten thousand years of past, present and, indeed, future history had just been French-kissed into my mind by a goddess. Emily—Astoria—paler than ever, regarded me with that infuriatingly soft smile.
“We never…” I shook my head. “Emily… Astoria, we’ve never slept—”
“Not yet, we haven’t. At least, not yet for you.”
And I knew that to be true. The memories Emily had kissed into me, through some unseen and unknown enchantment—a part of her magic and, perhaps, the essence of who and what she was—had shown me glimpses of the future. My future and her past—which should have been impossible, for all save the Historian—but we had tired of impossible a long time ago.
A creature like the Everlasting—a woman like Emily—was not bound wholly to the laws of star iron or even to the known laws of Will and Origin. She had never been imprisoned with the rest of the Everlasting. She was timeless, ageless, yet older than entire universes. Fair Astoria, the Sleeping Goddess, lost in time’s tangled net, as the old schoolyard rhyme went.
And what of the woman I knew as Emily? Emily Grace was… as real, or as close to human, as an Elder God could have any right to be.
“I forfeited a significant amount of my power in Atlantis to see my brothers and sisters imprisoned by the founding members of the Order of the Knights Infernal,” Emily said, as if reading my thoughts on my face. “Oh, you would have liked them, Declan. I retained my immortality, some measure of grace, my power—which I just gave to you, to show you the truth—and command over Origin. For that, Declan, and for so much to come, I am sorry.”
“You’ve nothing to be sorry for,” I said, almost on autopilot, but I did mean it. Emily was dying, and I would not have regret or apology left unresolved between us. Whether that meant Astoria, the goddess she had once been, would die as well or continue to exist in some fashion… That didn’t matter. “Broken quill, but this is a lot to take in.”
“I have a lot to be sorry for,” Emily said. “Regrets enough to fill ten thousand years and ten thousand lifetimes. And this, my last. Leaving our child without a mother and with a father who must fight, and fight hard, at the forefront of the coming war. The final war against the Everlasting. Oh, sweet mercy, let it be over this time. Let us all die and return to the Void…”
I stared at the baby in her arms with growing near-nauseating trepidation. He was my son. Mine. The memories she had shown me, of events that had happened for her but not for me—yet—revealed the truth. I felt the truth, as if I’d known it all my life. Blimey, I can’t even take care of myself. A weary drunk with a million powerful enemies and the ire of millions more… What in the seven levels of hell was I going to do with a child?
“You… you’re going to die,” I said, surprised she was still alive at all, given her state.
“I’m weak. I am old and tired, and the Everlasting were never meant to mother children.” Emily was crying quietly, tears that followed the curve of her face and fell onto the baby’s blue shawl. “What we’ve done, Declan, and what you will do to bring this child about… Well, let’s just say that laws and decrees as old as creation have been violated. And there will be consequences.”
“Aren’t there always?”
“Would you hold him?” Emily asked. “My arms grow numb.”
On my knees as I was in front of Emily, I reached out, and she put the delicate bundle into my arms. He was lighter than I expected, something I hadn’t noticed retrieving him from amongst the tree roots, but given the life in his tiny eyes and what I knew of his parentage now, perhaps that wasn’t so surprising.
The blue shawl was warm from the bundle and the fire of his short life. If you live, what will you make of all this? Of your father?
“I waited a very long time for him, Declan,” Emily said, her voice the failing whisper of autumn leaves chasing the wind. “He’s someone that should not exist. Someone that the Edicts of Creation demand does not exist.”
“Do you have a name for him?”
Emily shook her head. “You will stumble upon a name for him, I’m sure.”
“Declan Jr.,” I quipped, but my voice was distant, distracted by the shiny new eyes blinking up at me. If your mother was a god and your father a shadowless mess, just what are you going to grow up to be? Something set to destroy the world, if whispered prophecy was to be believed.
Emily smiled at me and, with the last of her strength, cupped my cheek with a bloody hand. “I hope you find your girl at the bar. And peace or something like it, Declan Hale.”
Her hand fell away, and her gaze lingered on mine for just a moment before dropping to the bundle in my arms.
Emily sighed contently, and then she died.
I expected the ground to crack, the sky to fall, but then I remembered that had already happened here. Ribbons of burning light from the rings of Avalon were strewn across the sky, like pa
int splashed against a canvas. It seemed that Lovecraft had the right of it—even gods of death could die, after strange eons, and their dying was no different from any of the hundreds of other deaths I’d seen in my life. Some died screaming, some died so quick they were gone before realization gripped them—most died quiet, alone even if surrounded by friends.
Fair Astoria, my Emily Grace, had died human.
“What now?” I muttered.
I was alone and deep behind enemy lines, a thousand worlds away from anything even close to safe haven.
Worse, the Orc Mare and Emissary could not be far away. And Oblivion could return with the Roseblade, looking to settle old scores once and for all. I looked down at the newborn in my arms.
His curious eyes, sharper than rose thorns, seemed to look right back at me and through me. He gurgled, as if uncomfortable.
The dark, fierce wail of an Orc Mare echoed through the forest somewhere off in the dark—far too close. We were to be hunted, it seemed.
“Okay, little fella,” I said. “It’s cold, we’re hungry, and we’ve got no magical shotgun and only one very slim chance of getting off this world unscathed. Welcome to the party, son.”
Chapter Seventeen
Dragon’s Fire
I needed to move, but it didn’t seem right leaving Emily bloodied and on display. I took a moment to fix her clothes, to place her hands on her stomach, and close her eyes. She looked almost peaceful, alone in the grove, and if not for the blood on her clothes, she could have almost been mistaken for someone resting her eyes.
A Sleeping Goddess.
I realized with a grim smile why that statue back in the courtyard of Astoria’s—of Emily’s—tomb had struck me as familiar. Centuries of wear had weathered the pale face, but it had undoubtedly been Emily. I’m a blind fool. If I’d made the connection earlier… I never would have left her alone in the grove, but done was done.