by Liv Savell
“Yes, but how?”
Esha looked up from her thread-making. “With water and—”
“It is not for mere mortals to understand the warding of Gods!” Va’al’s words were a snake’s threatening hiss, but in his hurry to stop Esha, he had given Etienne an excellent bit of information. Wards. Of course, it made sense. Those who practiced the “old ways” in Thloegr had to have learned the art of making wards from the Gods.
“But how will we fight him when weapons seem to do him no harm?”
“We’re weapon enough,” Enyo sniped. What did she care what Mascen would do to the “mere mortals?”
“If you have nothing to fear from Mascen, why are you still here? Why are you working with us to stop him rather than storming Caerthleon’s keep?” Delyth glared at Enyo, flames leaching the blue from her eyes so that they appeared storm-grey beneath black brows. “Tell us how to hurt him.”
“You don’t order me around, priestess.”
Delyth snarled, and suddenly, her resemblance to Maoz was uncanny. She was the bear, the wolf—the dragon. “I am not your priestess, Enyo, because you are not a God. You’re all just powerful thieves. Lecherous intruders.”
Maoz’s spear landed point-down in the earth before Delyth’s crossed legs, and Etienne flinched away even as Delyth turned in preparation to attack. The other Gods did not react, and the winged warrior returned to her seated position when she saw that it was Maoz standing behind her.
“You injure Gods with Companion Weapons.” As if to prove his point, he ripped his spear from the ground, spraying his kin with dirt. For all that his actions carried the weight of real threat, Etienne did not think it was anger behind Maoz’s shifting-canopy gaze. If he had to name it, he would call the look ‘respect.’
Delyth just shook herself off. “What exactly is that?”
“Something made with old knowledge and extreme power.” Enyo stood, her face painted with shadows. “Something beyond your kin, Priestess.” With her last insult thrown, the Goddess turned away, marching into the darkness, but not before Etienne saw Enyo’s hand’s tremble.
“Calamity,” Maoz said as if in explanation. He lifted his spear again, holding it out for inspection. “Talon.”
Etienne pulled out his notebook and began to scribble once more.
Chapter XXIV
Eleventh Moon, First Quarter: Perimeter of Caerthleon
The wind sang her name, toyed with her hair, tickled her flesh. It rejoiced at their reunion and whispered secrets into her ear. Why was she trapped in a body made for the land? Why did she run when she could dance and fly? The Goddess smiled as she pressed her legs faster, faster down the road, back to Caerthleon. She could fly in this body. Fly on swift feet and across the rivers and lakes. Limitless. Whole.
Where had she been, the wind wanted to know. Where had she gone?
Away. But never again would they be parted, Enyo promised. The last obstacle to her permanence lay beyond the stone walls rising before her, and once she trapped Mascen, Enyo would be free.
With slowing steps, the Goddess waited for Aryus to appear with the mage in tow, Va’al coming to stand at her side. They followed the priestess, landing one after each other like dancers in a two-step fete. Before them, Mascen’s barriers loomed like cuts and bruises.
“Are you ready?” It was the boy, dim as ever. She turned to him to find that he hadn’t been speaking to her at all. He stood at Delyth’s shoulder, blood-tipped fingers tracing a complex rune into the skin below her ear. Esha was next. Then Va’al and Maoz. And Enyo. She would need to be marked as well.
As he approached, finger bloodied, Enyo smiled. “Not so afraid of blood now, are you mage?” Moons ago, he had often disputed the use of blood, disgusted and fearful of something he didn’t understand. Now, he wielded it as well as any priest might.
“This journey has changed me, Enyo. I wonder how it’s changed you?”
As his pale gaze met hers, the Goddess realized with a ripple of shock that he wasn’t afraid of her. Not anymore. Wary and careful, certainly, but he didn’t shrink back in fear. “Goddesses do not change,” she murmured, turning away from the mage as soon as he painted the rune beneath her ear, ready to start the attack on Caerthleon and Mascen.
“Shall we begin? Or are we going to stand around waiting all morning?” Va’al’s impatience hadn’t changed no matter what body he was housed in.
She grinned, her teeth sharper than they had ever been when trapped within Alphonse. Bright eyes scanned the expansive wall of rock before them and then down.
“I suppose I am the only one useful enough to do anything about this mess,” she crooned, preening as she readied to make a path for them to enter Caerthleon. Enyo stepped forward as the lava river started to bubble and pop, tossing globs of the dangerous magma into the air and ground around the river pit. Certain death for any mortal flesh that might befall the viscous liquids. But not for her.
The jagged rocks erupting from the earth beyond the river were an impossible climb for any foe who attempted to scale them. An impressive blockade indeed. Her son had done well in constructing his stronghold within Caerthleon, but he couldn't keep her out. Not for long.
Toxic vapors spewed from the lava river, and Enyo inhaled them as if they were a beautiful perfume. She walked to the edge of the river, peering down with a smirk before stepping out onto the roiling surface as if it were a sturdy bridge.
For a moment, the lava writhed and bucked beneath her, but then it settled and darkened in color. White-hot orange faded to red and brown and, finally, dark basalt gray. The cooling lava spread out in ripples at each footfall until Enyo had walked across the entire moat and made the magma sleep.
Steam vents let more of those noxious gasses escape, but the river was now a scabbed wound across the land. Safe. Or rather, it would be in a few weeks when the entire thing had wholly settled and cooled.
For now, it was enough that their party could cross it.
That only left the wall of rocks jutting into the sky.
This would be trickier. How to return them back to their beds without ripping open the earth?
Enyo strode alongside the line, head tilted as she listened to the opinions of the stones. Looked for a weakness. Of course, she could just force them, but then Caerthleon would collapse from the seismic activity, and Illygad had suffered enough already. There had to be a gentler way.
A mile down, she found the place—a collection of monolithic granite spires that had fought against the change more adamantly than the rest. Mascen was too flexible, too cunning, and changeful to understand a stone so rigid as granite or marble. He had simply manipulated the earth and water beneath these stones to raise them up, rather than command the rock itself. It would be simple enough to return the dirt and water back to their original places and let the boulders settle into their homes.
Enyo lifted her hands to the sky as though she were the supplicant rather than the God, but when she turned them over, pressed back towards the earth, it was Illygad that obeyed her. She pressed. And pressed. And pressed. She bore down on the earth, and it trembled. The stones groaned. The soft limestone in this part of the wall started to tumble and break. Chest-sized chunks broke off and crashed down around them, but Enyo persisted.
A fissure opened up at her feet, but the Goddess only laughed at the trick and stomped her foot. “You won’t distract me like that!” Her arms trembled, burning with the effort of overpowering Illygad. But she did have this power. She had raised the very mountains on this ungrateful continent. It had been hers and would be again. “Back. You. Go!”
With a final grunt of effort, she shoved her hands down past her hips, past her thighs. She pressed down until her fingers buried in the earth below her. With an alarming squelch, the boulders sunk below the mud. One moment there, the next gone. Rhosan quivered a moment longer and then steadied.
The ridge of stone still stood, though incomplete, a jagged-edged cut open before them wide enough f
or the group to enter abreast. Framed in that rock border, Caerthleon’s walls were visible. They had their way in.
Enyo’s fingers fiddled with the hilt of Calamity, where it purred against her skin. She didn’t want to be rid of the blade, but the idea of fighting her own child with it… It wasn’t right. She could remember the feel of another Companion Weapon, eons ago, wielded against her, pressed to her flesh. Enyo released Calamity’s hilt.
Delyth had no weapon, and she needed to be able to face Mascen. Calamity could withstand a volcano.
She held up Calamity with a vague nod.
“Don’t forget our bargain, Ba’oto,” she growled, shoving Calamity into Delyth’s limp hand. “She’s a good blade. She’ll keep you sharp.” For a moment, Enyo swayed, uncertain if she should say something more. Should she wish Delyth good luck? Bless her? In the end, Enyo sort of nodded sagely. “Fight well.”
༄
Delyth took the blade but did not reply. Of course, she remembered the oath. But she did not intend to fulfill it.
Turning, the warrior strapped Calamity to its familiar position against her spine. She lifted Etienne so they might launch into the air, over the stone walls of Caerthleon and towards the tallest building housed within. Belatedly, Delyth thought she ought to feel something of the sword’s presence, some urge for blood or destruction. But there was nothing. Perhaps it was sated from its time with Enyo, or else her own darkness outweighed that of the sword.
She set Etienne down among the gilded crenelations atop what must have been a temple before Mascen had taken control of the city. He looked strangely small among them, his pale skin wan and his almost white hair standing on end.
Delyth turned away. The mage might appear frail, but he would do fine. Already, he stepped towards the edge of his perch, searching the streets below for signs of the Gods entering the city.
“Delyth,” he said, his voice halting her when she would have leaped back into the air. Mutely she looked back at him. “Stay safe.”
She turned and dropped from the ledge.
And landed in a cobblestone alley, tucking her wings in. They lay in gentle folds against the sword, familiar rather than uncomfortable.
The streets were empty, and still, they felt too close, hemming Delyth in, towering above her. It would be difficult to take flight here with her wingspan without clipping the rough sides of stone buildings or tangling herself in the lines strung overhead, draped with clothing. In all her life, Delyth had never been in a place where she could not easily get into the air. She took a deep breath, then another. She had to start forward, to find Mascen and rid this land of him. She had to free herself from a life of service to a carnal savage. But even with that motivation, even knowing the importance of her task, Delyth struggled to take that first step with all the rock staring down at her like the perpendicular bars of some lunatic’s prison.
But she did take that first step. She gained speed until she was jogging through the streets in that old, familiar pace that had been drilled into her during the long days of training at Glynfford. She could run like this all day.
At the first crossroads, Delyth placed her hand on the rune Etienne had made. “Which direction?”
“Left. The Gods have made it to the gate.”
Delyth put the rising sun over her left shoulder and flung herself further into the city.
❂
The sky above Caerthleon’s gate was still mostly grey in the light of early morning. Enyo could see nothing else behind it: not the tops of roofs or temple spires. The wall was too tall, rising fifty feet into the air, with no entrance but the seasoned oak gate before them.
A sparkling rocket sizzled upwards from some point Enyo could not see, trailing streamers of white and blue flame. The mage was in place, and these gates were the only paltry barrier between the Gods and Mascen’s den.
Enyo pushed against one experimentally and listened to it groan, the wood of the crossbar petrified with age. Maoz’s hands came into view next to hers, blunt fingers square-tipped and calloused. Esha’s slender and shapely next to his. The gate crunched in protest as they heaved. Pale, ghost-hands braced on her free side, and Enyo knew Aryus had joined the breach.
With that last set of God hands, the gate buckled with the sound of shrieking hinges and splintering wood. They might have well wrung a ceremonial gong to let Mascen they had come, but it didn’t matter. Her son knew anyway.
The few mortals still in the streets when the gate fell scrambled out of sight and into their warrens. For all that the Gods had been gone from this world for three hundred years, the humans still knew enough to run. Buildings sprung up like weeds, branching off into neat little rows. Streets fanned out before them. It was time to start the hunt.
Without a word to the others, Enyo turned toward a street wide enough to fit two wagons abreast. Three hundred years ago, the largest, finest paths were carved to the steps of the temples. If she knew her son, he would have made his perch there, in the grandest seat of power the city had to offer. Even better if it had once belonged to an Old God. He would see it as an insult and a reclaiming both; anything less would be beneath him.
Despite the smoke choking the air, Caerthleon appeared mostly intact. Buildings stood whole, the smell of blood absent as she hurried across cobblestones. Mascen hadn’t been reaping fear and destruction exclusively, it would seem. Of course, he was clever like his father. Like those Overseers before. Like his kin. He knew pure destruction would only make the slaves rise up. Better to use just enough to keep them weak and subservient, not enough to make them defiant.
Enyo slowed her run to a walk as she came within sight of the largest temple, erected for Esha. The dome polished to a blinding silver, the steps swept by acolytes. Intact. “Mage?” she spoke into thin air, feeling the mark beneath her ear, painted in blood and herbs.
“I haven’t seen him.”
So Mascen was still lurking in his lair.
Enyo hissed and leaped onto the steps leading up to the temple. It took her three bounds before a bolt of lightning dropped from the sky, and all the world devolved into noise and pressure. The Goddess flew backward but remained on her feet, skittering to a stop in the shadow of the neighboring buildings. He must have been storing up his energy for that blast, to keep it hidden and ready. Not a cloud in the sky.
She laughed. A trick. Always a trick. “Mascen! Come out and face me with dignity!”
Instead of an answer, the earth shook in a concussive rhythm of one-two, one-two, one-two. Footfalls. Keeping her eyes glued to the entrance of the temple, she watched spiderweb cracks form in the stone floor.
When Mascen finally appeared, Enyo growled. Pitless eyes, poison-red hair, skull-white skin; the contrast only complemented his immense size and aura of power. The air around him rippled in visible heat. A volcano ready to erupt. Well. She knew a thing or two about volcanoes.
Without warning, Enyo struck, her hand reaching out as if to grab him, despite the distance of some forty feet. Stones flew at Mascen’s form, encircling him in a prison composed of the cobblestones and the granite the temple had been hewn from. It held him only for a breath, and then that too exploded, cloaking the streets and steps in debris.
She blinked, protecting her eyes from the dust, but that was all he needed. In that single instant that her gaze was shielded from the world, Mascen took off. Curse it all, he was as fleet-footed as she.
Flying after him, Enyo’s vision became a pinpoint, fixed utterly on her prey. There was a shuttering, a cracking in the air around her, and suddenly, she could see nothing at all. Wooden planks and squared stones piled atop of her, burying her beneath the entire second and third floor of the building Mascen had pulled from its moorings. He had wanted her to chase him, so he could drop his trap atop her.
It did not hurt; nothing did, anymore, but it took her long seconds to drag herself from the rubble. When she did, Mascen was gone, and Enyo’s scream of fury echoed after him.
⚀
Va’al watched Enyo race down the broadest street, and then he disappeared.
All around him, the Shadow Realm bloomed, flickering tongues of black like fire drawing over his sight. Caerthleon was still before him, though faded, greyed out as though less real than the darkness that lay in its alleys. The sky was atmosphere-less so that the stars and galaxies and nebulae of the universe above were clearer than any lens could make them. Va’al sighed, the motion peculiarly empty without air to push through his lungs. It was good to be home.
In truth, “Shadow Realm” was a misnomer, for this was not a world. It was a place between, a doorway leading to a hundred worlds, a million—a gateway from everywhere to everywhere else. The Cursed Realms called those who could slip into the in-between Drifters, but Va’al had not known he was one until they tried to destroy him. For centuries after that first headlong fall through the shadows, Va’al had feared being discovered by other Drifters sent after him to complete his punishment, but it seemed as though the sheer number of possible universes protected him. As always, he felt a slight, heady fear. The number of realities was so unimaginably large, infinitesimally stretching into the unknown. Never-ending.
It would be so easy to stray too far, to lose himself forever.
Va’al shook his head like a wet dog. He knew not to lose himself in thoughts such as those. Besides, there was work to be done if he wanted to once more live in total freedom. He took a small step, and Caerthleon blurred, buildings and streets melting into so much formless grey matter only to solidify a heartbeat later. Va’al now stood in the city center, a great stone plaza with stalls set on the edges, now abandoned. In its center stood a fountain, if it could be called such. This was no great stone sculpture like the fountains in Dailion, but a simple pool with four spouts in the center, facing each of the cardinal directions. Someone had left a pitcher on the edge, where they had been collecting water before the Gods began their attack.