Darklight 6: Darkbirth

by Forrest, Bella

  "We have to go after him," Dorian blurted. He surged toward the door, wrenching his hand from mine. I darted forward, sliding in front of him.

  "It could be a trap! He's not real, Dorian."

  Dorian let his hands rest on my shoulders, looking at me with hardened, pain-filled eyes. "It doesn't matter. I know this could be terrible, but I have to see where it leads. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t, and I already have too much guilt about my brother on my shoulders. I owe him this."

  I held his forearms, frowning as I realized Dorian still hadn’t completely accepted that the specter wasn’t Lanzon. That didn’t bode well if this was a trap of some sort, maybe laid by arbiters looking to gain some leverage over Ruk to force him to pay his debt. Dorian’s wasn’t his usual alert self. I’d have to go with him, follow him to wherever this path led. It was the only way I could be sure he was safe. Or, if things weren’t safe, that we were at least facing the problem together.

  I took a deep breath and set my jaw with determination. "Then I've got your back." Like always, I would follow him into hell or higher planes.

  We hurried after the apparition of Lanzon, who hadn’t waited and was already well down the stairway. I took the corner around the doorway so quickly that I nearly stumbled over Jia trying to get down the steps. The blue mist followed us, swirling ominously. I squinted to see through the muck, even more aware that Dorian's emotions were particularly volatile right now. There was no helping it. I gritted my teeth. Let's just see it through.

  I accepted the tension and worry, allowing them to dance inside me like a hot flame, using it to keep me focused. I kept my gaze on Dorian's broad shoulders in front of me, the muscles and bones shifting solidly beneath his thin shirt as he ran to follow the ghostly Lanzon. Skimming into the corner of my vision on occasion was Jia, half running, half hovering to keep pace with us. We must've been a strange sight.

  Lanzon darted out of the grounds of the ruined castle. No matter how hard I pushed myself, Lanzon remained in the distance, always seeming to blink out of existence whenever we drew close, only to reappear up ahead. It was unnerving. Dorian let out a frustrated growl more than once; dark red flecks spotted the mist with desperation. We swerved around a small tornado as we ran into the gray void. Lanzon ran this way and that, sometimes leaving us to follow a vague path of spectral footprints that glowed golden for a minute or two on the slightly reflective surface of the Higher Plane. When Lanzon finally stopped and turned to face us, I sucked in a shocked breath at what lay behind him.

  The gray floor and the mist abruptly ended; we’d arrived at what I could only describe as the edge of the world. There was no horizon, merely a break like the edge of a sharp, unforgiving cliff that plunged away. Beyond it lay a true nothingness. There was no color, no air, no life. It was just an absence. When I looked into it, my soul—or whatever was inside me that made me Lyra—hurt.

  The swirling silver mist of the Higher Plane drifted off the edge of the cliff. The fog spiraled and fell like ghostly waterfalls that dissipated into nothing. I studied the scene with a wary sense of awe. Was this the edge of the Higher Plane? The edge of existence?

  I studied the mist flowing down, watching how it sank into the void, but noticed that some tendrils of the silvery fog were being drawn apart from the rest, these wayward wisps struggling to rise. It was as if the light floating upward was fighting to maintain its trajectory but was instead being sucked down. Although the mechanics didn’t necessarily make sense to me, I couldn’t deny that it was a beautiful sight. The tendrils glowed, twisting and pirouetting as they were drawn upward and then downward. My vision tunneled for a second as it hit me that Dorian and I were almost certainly the only mortal creatures to have ever seen this sight. This was a place of metaphysical magic and mystery. We’d been drawn here by an apparition we had probably conjured ourselves, but that had then been taken over by the power of the universe itself. To think that only months ago, the strangest thing I thought I would ever learn was that vampires were not actually extinct. I had to take a breath and look away as a dull ache like the one I’d felt yesterday from being lost in the gray for so long formed in my head at the magnitude of it all. I closed my eyes for a second, fighting off a moment of existential panic. How had I, of all beings, been one of the two to end up here at what was likely the edge of the world?

  Dorian shifted beside me. He was focused entirely on Lanzon's apparition. Lanzon lifted a hand and pointed a translucent finger toward the edge that led to nowhere.

  Dorian tried to talk, but the attempt died in his mouth. He pushed on. "Tell us something," he cried. "What is it? What do you want from me? I'm listening." The blue mist turned as dark as stormclouds.

  Lanzon's ghostly form turned away from the edge and walked toward us, his steps leaving the same glowing footprints we had followed through the mist. He pointed again into the nothingness, this time with more insistence.

  "What do you mean?" I asked. “What do you want us to do?”

  Lanzon stared at us both for a long moment. Then he began to fade from the feet upward in a soft beam of amber light. His human form disappeared and shrank into something that resembled a yellow soul-light. Dorian gasped and lunged forward as if to grasp at what he was now convinced was his brother's spirit form to keep him here. But Lanzon, or whatever this thing was, drifted toward the edge. The amber light swirled into the silvery mist along with the rest of the matter from the Higher Plane, rising up for a moment before being sucked down into the nothingness.

  "Wait," Dorian cried, stumbling unthinkingly toward the edge. I rushed after him, Jia quick on my heels, both of us reaching out to pull him back. I fiercely yanked Dorian away from the edge as he pitched forward, his legs half collapsing. Like hell was I going to let him fall into a vortex of chaotic swirling colors and holes of deep nothingness. I pulled with all my strength, aided slightly by Jia’s grip on Dorian’s other arm. We all landed in a heap on our backs, Jia quickly jumping aside to stand apart from us. I gasped, my heart hammering at the sudden burst of action.

  “Thank you for helping me, Jia,” I said, still panting slightly.

  “I was merely fulfilling the directive given to me by my creator to safeguard you.” He said nothing more, staying silent at the side, face unexpressive.

  I shook my head, giving my full attention to the wrecked vampire I currently had clutched in my arms.

  "It wasn't really him," I said urgently, but doubt crept through my mind. I had seen what looked so much like a soul-light. But it couldn’t be. Lanzon’s soul wouldn’t be in the Higher Plane, and we hadn’t seen any other souls in our time here. It had been made very clear to us that this was not the afterlife. And Jia had said that it wasn’t a soul. So what was going on?

  Dorian sat up and buried his head in his hands. "I know," he admitted in a defeated tone. "I just lost it, seeing him again. It was a reminder of how I failed to save him before." He lifted his head to the dark blue sky and sighed. I studied the tracks of tears down his handsome face and wrapped an arm around him. He must be devastated. I know I would be.

  He shook lightly beneath my touch with a horrified shudder. "I remember it all too well. I remember him alive and happy. I remember watching him die on the ground."

  I knelt beside Dorian and stroked his hair, letting him sit in his grief for a while longer. He needed to mourn. In the dream, I’d relived the moment Dorian was remembering, and I realized that while it had been terrible to experience and see, it was a gift in a way. I was now able to better understand the horror Dorian carried with him. I rehashed everything that had just happened and decided it was worth mentioning. I spoke in a gentle, soothing tone.

  "I don't think Lanzon died thinking that you'd failed him. He died wanting you to live to fight another day." I paused, the strong emotions from the dream washing back over me like a wave. Dorian raised his head to look at me. "He died knowing that he loved and cared about you."

  "How can you know that?" Dorian's voice
was just barely a whisper.

  "I think the memories might be caught in the stone, and I’ve been able to… kind of relive them in a way, or at least see them,” I said. “Even if my mind is playing tricks on me, I know that the brother you love and miss every day loved you back just as much. I promise you that. You did your best. Grief is such a complicated thing, but it's okay to be upset. Let the clouds be blue. We can handle it together." I wrapped both arms around him and squeezed. We shuddered together in silent sobs, rocking back and forth with the kind of bittersweet love that carries all souls through tragedy.

  Dorian wept for his brother and his lost family. I wept for his deep pain and the fact that he'd tried for so long to keep these emotions beneath the surface because he had to in order to survive. We held each other tightly. My eyes closed as I breathed in Dorian's scent, just wanting to savor the moment. Even with my eyes closed, I could sense the area around us growing lighter. Our emotions had shifted the weather yet again. The power of the Higher Plane never ceased to astound me.

  We sat in silence for a moment. Dorian stared out at the scene, shaking his head but soaking it in. Maybe he’s waiting for him to come back. We both knew that was unlikely to happen.

  Finally, Dorian glanced up at me. His cheeks were wet with tears, but his eyes softened upon finding my face. He pressed his lips to my forehead gently. "Thank you."

  The strength returning to his face sparked a flurry of excitement inside me. It was the old Dorian. Just as I had returned to myself, I saw Dorian coming back in full force. We were both thawing into our true selves once again. I smiled, relieved and joyful.

  Dorian looked into the nothingness, clearly ready to shift the emotional tone and our focus. "Whatever that thing was, it wanted us to see this."

  I nodded. We got up and crept to the edge of the cliff. Jia trailed along, silent as always. I peered over the edge with Dorian, looking straight down into the vortex for the first time rather than observing from a distance. An immediate sensation of vertigo hit me violently. I pulled back and steadied myself before braving it again.

  The longer I looked at it, however, the more it felt fundamentally off. There was something incredibly wrong here, but I wasn’t entirely sure what. There was something separate from the emptiness of this place, something distorted around the edge. The cliff was unnatural. It was like the silver floor became thinner and more transparent, fading in strength until it was tugged into a black hole below. It caused a sharp edge to form, but I wondered if the vortex was slowly eroding the floor beneath us. Perhaps the cliff would grow farther away from it, though it was hard to judge in the endless gray.

  Still staring down, I angled my head different ways, attempting to judge how the thinning silvery floor and mist lined the edges of the vortex but feeling like I was looking at a reflection from an odd perspective. Something was distorting it like a funhouse mirror. There was a flash of an image where the swirl parted momentarily, almost like the dark, oily texture of the Immortal Plane’s sky. I made out crackling clouds filled with violent lightning. Familiar, but where?

  Something in my mind clicked into place. It reminded me of the tear at Moab when I saw it from the back of a redbill. I gave a startled gasp, causing Dorian to turn to me. I knew exactly what we were looking at.

  “Oh my God. That’s the tear.” I pointed at the edges of the vortex where there were definite flashes of something beyond. "That's the tear, Dorian! We can see the tear all the way from up here." I took a step back and grabbed my head, trying to process everything. I nearly tripped over Jia, who regarded me with those wide eyes. I stooped down to his level.

  "Is that the tear between the Mortal and Immortal Planes?"

  "Indeed," Jia said in a monotone. "What you see is the place where the barrier between the Immortal Plane and Mortal Plane was sundered."

  An electric buzz sizzled through my skin, and I was invigorated in a way I hadn’t felt since we arrived here. This could possibly be a way out that didn’t require Gate Maker or any arbiters. It was risky considering the whole… well, black hole, but the barrier looked like it was thin here. We might be able to slip through a crack caused by the tear. My excitement cooled rapidly as the possible secondary meaning of this discovery hit me.

  I had a vague idea of how the tear had been created, but now was the perfect time to get some facts. "Jia, according to your information, how was the barrier torn? And why can we see the tear from here?"

  The proxy paused for much longer than he usually did. I stared, wondering if it was like a computer processing my request and searching to see if he actually had the information in his database.

  "I will speak in terms of your human time scale for the ease of your understanding," Jia announced finally. "Around five years ago in the Mortal Plane, mortal beings attempted to pass between the planes. They were not meant to, but they tried to cross through into the Immortal Plane using one of the old portals designed by Ruk. They had a vampire with them whose presence triggered the portal to open, but then it would not allow the mortals or their large machines through. The mortals continued trying, however. They were so forceful in their attempts that their actions tore through the barrier. It sent out a wave of violent energy that tore the barrier between the Mortal and Immortal Planes, creating the tear you are already familiar with. Unfortunately, due to the interconnection between the lower planes and the Higher Plane, as intended by the universe, the blast also greatly damaged the barrier of the Higher Plane."

  My head reeled from the information. I glanced back to the vortex and pondered why Lanzon had been so insistent that we look at it. "So why are the mist and floor spiraling down like this? Is the tear causing it?"

  Again, Jia paused for a minute. Finally, he gave a crude nod.

  "The gathered universal energy, which makes up this plane, is unraveling on contact with the tear."

  My pulse quickened. Universal energy unraveling couldn't be a good sign. I would have said that the arbiters deserved this mess, but Dorian and I were stuck here, too. Not to mention that if it was draining down, that meant it was going to affect the Immortal and Mortal Planes at some point.

  "Where is that energy going?" I prodded, wanting to be sure.

  "To the Immortal Plane. It then travels to the Mortal Plane, as far as I can ascertain."

  Dorian swore and looked out at the tear. “Nothing about that sounds good.”

  The tears and haunted look faded. His composure settled back into place as he began analyzing the appearance of the tear. The weather around us had lightened considerably during my conversation with Jia without me noticing. The usual gray mist slowly returned, but at this point, I welcomed it.

  Dorian's better for the moment, but our tear situation is a thousand times worse.

  "This just doubled our problems," I muttered. "The danger is so much worse than we imagined." Every cell in my body buzzed with dread and worry for our friends and allies down below in the Immortal Plane. Zach, Gina, Roxy, Kane, Arlonne, Bryce, Morag at the VAMPS camp, the Coalition, the reformed Occult Bureau, the Hive refugees, and so many others—they had no idea what was actually happening. If we found a way to get out of this place with Gate Maker, our agreement was that he only needed to fix the tear between the Mortal Plane and the Immortal Plane.

  My stomach sank like an anchor at this depressing realization. That wouldn't stop the universal energy from slowly seeping out of the Higher Plane into the Immortal Plane. If the tear between the Immortal and Mortal Planes risked melding them, was there a possibility that the Higher Plane would blend with them, too?

  Three massive planes colliding in one absolute catastrophe. Nowhere is safe. Even if we fixed the tear between the Mortal and Immortal Planes, the problem extended beyond those realms now.

  My brain ached more as my burst of energetic excitement drained away. I rubbed my head, wishing there had been a chance to actually get a good night's rest here. We needed fresh minds to think.

  "What are we going to do?"
I asked Dorian, unable to keep the weariness from my tone.

  "I have no idea." Dorian's face tightened. He focused on the vortex—some part of the tear in its essence—with a concerned scowl. "At this point, I think it’s beyond our capabilities to fix the entire universe by ourselves."

  I couldn't disagree, but I gave a wry smile. “Two planes of existence we could fix no problem, but three? Above our paygrade for sure.”

  Dorian huffed a laugh, then warily glanced at Jia. "Are the arbiters doing anything about this? Surely they know what’s going on in their own plane, if they’re so wise."

  "I do not possess that information," Jia said. "I cannot read the minds of arbiters. I sense none of their energy signatures around the tear, which might suggest that nobody has been here."

  Dorian gave a scathing scoff. "They're utterly useless, no matter how much they praise themselves."

  "Absolutely," I agreed. "How could they have missed something like this? I know time doesn’t mean a lot here, but it must have been here for a while, right? And they’re obsessed with energy… Why haven’t they noticed a bunch of it just draining out of the plane?"

  "I wonder." Dorian rubbed his jaw. "Whatever the thing that led us here was, whether it was Lanzon or the universe or whatever, it wanted somebody to know about it, right? Something needs to be done, and it needs to be done soon."

  I nodded as I mulled over the implications of this. Why did it feel like our attempts to solve the problem only ever revealed that it was worse than we thought? I felt like I was running in a hamster wheel. I genuinely didn’t know if we could pull this off, which was a sobering prospect. I groaned and shook out my hair just to release some pent-up energy.

  "What a roller coaster," I said, tipping my head back. "At least we've got a clear idea of what the higher beings are doing… or rather, not doing."

  What the hell were they thinking? They said they had all the time in the world in their plane and relaxed easily, building their odd little structures to show off to one another. And yet the two planes, their sole responsibility, were on the verge of caving in on themselves and possibly dragging the Higher Plane along with them.