Lost Grace (The Reminiscent Exile Book 4)

by Joe Ducie

  Not a bird in the sky.

  OK, perhaps there was something to worry about. As painful as the trek had been, it was almost like someone—and we all know who, don’t we—had laid out the red carpet and the welcome mat.

  “Fix…” I sighed. “Ash.”

  In my current state, could I hope to stand against one of the Everlasting? Alone, broken, bleeding? Especially an Everlasting I had so effectively pissed off. I’d had worse odds, hadn’t I? None that I could remember just then.

  I’m walking to my death.

  Well, not for the first time, perhaps not even the last. Time would tell.

  A sheer cliff face rose on my left, and I limped behind a cascading waterfall of cool glacial water, which fell into a light blue pool—tainted by the shield—sixty feet or so below. Beyond that, I left the path behind and stumbled upward as best I could.

  About ten minutes later, I recognised something I’d last seen ten thousand years ago.

  On a sloping field of grass stood three obsidian stone pillars, bevelled toward one another, like the supports of a tent. Grim determination, what felt like excitement, rose in my chest. I was five minutes away, maybe more if the cave entrance had eroded or, well, caved in. Cross that hurdle when I stumbled into it.

  The obsidian pillars were warm to the touch, as they had been ten thousand years ago. Under the right circumstances—the purple shield being very much the wrong circumstances—these pillars could act as a waypoint for Road’s Fire, the network of portals that had brought Annie and me into the southern valley, what felt like weeks ago now. Had it only been the space of one night?

  I shook my head, rubbed the pillar for luck, and soldiered on, feeling all too exposed on the hillside. I chanced a look back at the city and saw a great army of deadlings—several thousand strong—were on the march. A mass exodus from the city, a crawling flood of dead flesh and shambling bone. Three guesses which way they were heading. The answer rhymed with forth-best.

  Cursing them all, dismissing the zombie army with a curt shrug and wave of my hand, I turned back to the bastard of a hillside and continued climbing. Minutes now, only minutes, but my legs, my shoulder, my ribs, every wound and bruise screamed at me to stop, just stop, lay down and die, you stubborn asshole.

  Plenty of time to die later. Right now I wanted to see what ten thousand years had done to my carefully laid plans.

  And that’s a joke, isn’t it? Nothing was carefully laid, Declan. Nothing. You were lucky, that’s all. As you were nearly seven years ago, in the ruins of Atlantis, when you ended the Tome Wars. You were lucky—and Tal Levy wasn’t. I didn’t know which ghost was haunting my mind with those words, the voices all sounded the same, mixed into one. Perhaps I was talking to myself.

  The song in my heart rose to a crescendo that was almost deafening, a shock of adrenaline flooded my system—most welcome—then faded away, as I rounded the hillside and reached the canyon between two towering peaks of ancient stone. Much had changed in the ten millenniums since I’d last been here. The canyon was wider, covered in green-yellow moss, and a small river trickled through the gulley, about three feet wide and only half a foot deep.

  I kneeled on my haunches, using the branch for support, every joint in my knees protesting the movement, and scooped up some water. The climb had been hard, my throat burned. The water was the best salve I could hope for, alone on that mountain, and more than I deserved.

  I felt better after a drink—though if the river had been flowing amber whisky I would have felt great—and hobbled further into the canyon, disappearing from the sight of the city. The rock overhead widened and narrowed, my progress slow, to the point of almost forming a ceiling pierced only by beams of rotten purple light through collapsed sections.

  About two minutes later I reached a dead end, a face of rock no different from the other billion tonnes of rock all around me. I smiled sadly and limped through the rock face as if it wasn’t there, because it wasn’t. Emily Grace, may she rest in peace, had cast the illusion a long time ago. The fact that it had lasted across the length and breadth of time between here and Atlantis was a monument to her remarkable talent… and the reactor of power fuelling the deception.

  Beyond the fake wall, I entered a natural cave and beheld perhaps the greatest wonder in the whole wide world.

  “Ah…” I sighed softly, blinking against a landscape of stunning, ethereal white light, glowing in a grove of pure celestial illusion. The most potent, most volatile, most powerful alloy in existence.

  Dread Ash sat waiting for me on one of the shards of celestial illusion jutting up through the earth. That shard alone, perhaps four feet wide and twice as high, was more alloy than had been discovered by the Knights Infernal since their inception centuries upon centuries ago. Ash swung her feet—Tal’s feet—back and forth lazily, each time her heels struck the celestial alloy ripples of white light shivered through the gemstone.

  “You should take up gardening more often,” Ash said. “Look what you have made here.”

  I limped forward, further into the cave, away from the entrance, and beheld the cavern at large. From the entrance, the cave dropped away downward into the mountain, opening up into a space the size of a soccer field, curved like a wok, and on average about two storeys tall. Between the natural stone of the mountain, around streams of trickling, sparkling water, the source of the river I had drunk from, grew a field of celestial illusion—shards, crystals, gemstones of raw power, move valuable than anything in creation.

  The sight stunned me—terrified me. Here was enough alloy to forge a million Roseblades. Enough celestial illusion to unmake the World Compass, to sever entire universes from the Story Thread. The potential in the cavern was limitless. Utterly limitless.

  At the heart of the cavern, on a scorched dais of stone, hundreds of shattered pieces of alloy shone from the ruins of a central pillar of celestial illusion, what would have been the largest shard had it not erupted… from within.

  “Were you… aware?” I asked Ash, not meeting her eyes.

  “Every moment,” she whispered, a quiver to her voice that couldn’t be faked.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “Fix… Ash… I am sorry.”

  She hopped down from the shard and stepped over to me, tears brimming in her eyes above a large grin. I hated seeing Tal’s face so corrupted by the ageless bitch, but it wasn’t the first time. If she could bear it as long as she had, then I could bear it a little longer.

  “I don’t want your apology. You’d do it again, you know you would, and laugh while doing it. You know what I want.”

  “Ten thousand years,” I whispered, shaking my head. “All that time, aware within that prison.” How much strength would it have taken to escape from that enormous crystal at the heart of the cavern? Only possible once I returned from Atlantis… once the link was re-established. I’d bought the world ten thousand years without one of the Everlasting. On reflection, the price for that peace seemed far too steep.

  “To the Everlasting, such a span of time is meaningless,” Ash said, and I didn’t believe her, not for a moment. “An hour, to me, to put it in a time frame you can grasp. Don’t get sad on me, Declan. We’ve still so much left to do.”

  “I’m a little used up, Ash.” I limped over to a low, flat boulder and took a heavy seat, leaning my walking branch against my leg and resting my head on it. I tried to make the effort look casual, my eyes focused on nothing, less she suspected…

  “You know, the Orc-Mare would have brought you here,” she said. “You didn’t have to struggle.”

  Orc-Mare? Oh, Mini-Batsy. “If you didn’t think I’d fight, then you don’t know me at all.”

  “Tal knows you,” she said idly, as if that wasn’t a dagger to my heart. “And I have her memories. My, the things Oblivion did to her. She never told you the half of it.”

  “I’ll do for Oblivion one day,” I said. “One day soon.”

  “He’s taken command of the Peace Arsenal.” Ash re
ached down and picked up a sphere of celestial illusion. A tiny piece, light and wondersome, worth more than entire worlds. “Which you helped him unleash, I understand.”

  “It’s usually my fault, yeah. I did it…” and here I laughed bitterly, “I did it to save Tal from being possessed by one of you nightmares. To free her from Oblivion.”

  Ash laughed, a clear sound that rang throughout the cavern. The light in the alloy responded, rippling and glowing. In its own way, celestial illusion was alive. “Even when you win, you lose.”

  “I was just thinking that on the walk over.” Seeing as how the conversation hadn’t yet descended into a fight, I pressed my luck. “What is the Peace Arsenal?”

  Ash waved the question away. “Armies, interstellar battleships, war machines, ancient and powerful weapons. Everything the Everlasting would need to subdue resistance to our rule, and prepare for the battle beyond the Void.”

  “There’s nothing beyond the Void. It’s just… more Void.”

  She shrugged, not willing to argue, and I wondered.

  The petal in my heart pulsed painfully and I rubbed at my chest, unable to suppress a wince. Can the power run dry? What would happen to my heart if the petal ended? I had one of my patented sneaking suspicions that the cause on my death certificate would read: ‘Massive Coronary Failure’, in polite words. ‘Heart Fucking Exploded Somehow’, in less polite words.

  Eh, Future Declan’s problem.

  “Ah, yes,” Ash said. She walked over and placed Tal’s hand on my chest. Her fingers were cold, so cold, even through my bloodstained shirt. Everything in me shivered against that touch. The Everlasting weren’t human, however close they could look, and I would do well to remember that. “This… annoyance. The ‘why’ of Declan Hale. My sister knew what she was doing, when she killed you.”

  “I may have given her the idea.” I laughed harshly. “Time travel, chicken and egg bullshit.”

  “For this alone, your stolen grace, I should kill you.”

  I blinked and met her lovely green eyes. “Ashaya,” I said, “if you were going to kill me, I would be long dead.”

  She pressed my chest harder, then scraped her fingernails across my skin, drawing blood. Ash turned away, licking my blood from her fingers.

  “Know what I think,” I said. “I think you’re scared—all of you, your brothers and sisters. You don’t know what will happen if you kill me. You don’t know what I’ve got planned, what I may have set in motion, and what will happen if you snuff out the petal of the Infernal Clock in my heart. You’re scared, for the first time in your lives, and that’s got to sting.”

  “Shut up, Declan,” Ash said tiredly.

  “Why don’t you ask Saturnia?”

  Ash spun so quickly my eye couldn’t follow it. She was facing one way, a blur happened, then the other. She moved in so close I could count the scattering of freckles on Tal’s cheeks, our noses brushed, her breath warm against my mouth. “Where,” she hissed, “did you learn that name?”

  “Oh no,” I said and grinned slowly, “something else a lowly human like myself is not supposed to know.”

  Ash slapped me. I fell back on the boulder, world spinning about my head, laughing and bleeding. Behind the boulder, I glimpsed the hilt of something last picked up ten thousand years ago.

  “How do I get out of here?” she screamed. “How do I escape the Atlas Lexicon?”

  “You don’t!” I spat a mouthful of blood onto the stone and kept my face neutral, less she suspected I wasn’t out of options just yet.

  “Then my degradation around the city will grow, will consume, and tear True Earth apart!”

  “Do what you gotta do, you spoilt brat.”

  She punched me in my dodgy eye, once, twice. I’d have quite the shiner in an hour.

  Ash stormed away, hurled her sphere of celestial illusion across the cavern, where it bounced and chimed, bounced and chimed, sending cascading ripples through the priceless cache of alloy.

  “You won’t let this world die,” she said, once an awkward moment had passed more awkwardly than most.

  “Check my résumé, bitch, this world wouldn’t be the first.”

  “This is different. True Earth is the heart of the Story Thread. If True Earth falls, the effect that would have… Eventually, all will be unmade, returned to the Void.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be long dead, and won’t care. Makes you wonder why no one else has come to stop you, though, doesn’t it? Why it’s just little old me standing against you, given how high the stakes are.”

  “It’s only been two days since the shield fell around the city.”

  “Or perhaps those watching know I’m more than enough to stop you.”

  “You’ll die here, Declan,” Ash said, and her tone suggested she’d just come to a decision. “I’ll tear your heart beating from your chest and cast it into the Void before the petal can wither. Any… fallout from the Infernal Clock will be consumed by the nothingness.”

  I nodded. “It’s a plan, if you think you’re quick enough. But I won’t die easy, Ash.”

  A smile touched her face. “Remember our date in that tavern ten thousand years ago?”

  “That wasn’t a date.”

  She frowned. “Don’t be cruel.”

  “Said the demon possessing the woman I love.”

  “You think yourself above affection for one of the Everlasting?”

  I shrugged. “No, but your sister’s hotter.”

  Ash’s nostrils flared, eyes narrowed to pure murder. I sat up a little straighter, convinced that perhaps I’d just gone too far. I must be getting old, even wise, if I had the hindsight to realise that.

  “There,” she said. “Those words there. When I devour you, Hale, know that it was because of those words.”

  I stood and drew my sword, swaying a bit on the walking branch. My ribs burned pain and I nearly fell. My shoulder didn’t want to support my sword arm for long. “I’m ready when you are.”

  The hate on her face lasted a few moments longer before fading again. Her eyes, Tal’s eyes, were drawn back to the cavern of celestial illusion. “Whoever controls this cavern,” she said, “controls the future. Let me go, Declan. Please. And it’s yours.”

  “It’s mine anyway,” I said. “I claim it on behalf of the Knights Infernal. Let all who would challenge my right stand against me. And you know what I want, Ash. What it’ll cost you, to escape the Atlas Lexicon.”

  “Like you’ll ever let me go,” she sneered. “You are a liar—a liar from the moment I met you. How did you imprison me here? Escaping this cavern should have been the end of it. I still don’t understand.”

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t me.”

  “Gods damn you,” she whispered, fighting back tears and failing. “I can escape in time. I’ll fashion a blade from the celestial illusion and use it to sever the tether trapping me to this city.”

  I tried to keep the worry from my face. Her words struck dangerously close to the final play. “Well, you better remove the degradation shield then—sloppy work, by the way, Oblivion’s was neater—because in a few hours it won’t matter. We’re all for the Void before brunch. You can sense that as well as me.”

  Ash bit her lip, slammed her fists against her legs, radiating frustration. “You’re an awful creature,” she said. “I can’t believe I ever loved you.”

  I limped over to the edge of the cavern, around the nest of boulders I’d been sitting on, over shards of alloy, and leaned back against the wall of the cave entrance. Soon now, soon…

  “You didn’t love me, Ash. It was as much a game to you as it was to me. I’m just better at playing it.”

  On the ground, the tip of my left boot pointing in the right direction, just three feet away, the dull-silver hilt poked out of the smooth, wet stone under the boulder. The hilt differed from the one I held in my hand, though the ruby secured in the pommel was the same—a twin, both forged in Axis’ starlight furnace a long time ago. My sword wa
s mostly untarnished, whereas the guard on the hilt in the stone was old, at least ten thousand years old, and carved with intricate, enchanted runes designed to do one thing…

  “Declan, please—”

  I dove for the sword and grasped the ancient hilt. Expecting some resistance, I stumbled back a step when the blade slid from under the boulder as if the rock and glimmers of celestial illusion were nothing more than soft silk. Perhaps, to something as enchanted as this blade, they were.

  Energy flowed down the twin swords I held, united again after an aeon, and flooded my system, masked my hurts and pains. I kicked the walking branch aside and stood tall.

  Ash, no fool, took a careful step back. Her hands clapped together, arcs of wicked purple lightning dancing between her fingers.

  “I knew you had something,” she said. “I knew it!”

  I advanced on the Everlasting, swords crossed in front of me, white light flaring up and down the silver-shined blades.

  Ash thrust her arms forward and cast a rippling beam of sick purple flame at me. I swung the swords down through the air, caught the point of the flame, and hurled it back at her. Ash’s eyes widened, she tried to dive out of the way, but the flame caught her in the face.

  She screamed.

  Oh, Tal…

  When the smoke cleared, Ash was back on her feet—eyes seething with rage, teeth bared at me. Half her hair had been singed away, the side of her head a blistered-black mess.

  “You…” Her lips trembled. “How could you?”

  As I watched, the Everlasting’s power healed the damage to Tal’s head. I’d seen that before, in the Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess. Oblivion had attacked me and I’d blasted a hole through him—through Tal—with my shotgun. That had slowed him down a good half a minute while he knitted the damage back together.

  “Surrender her to me, Ash!” I demanded. “End the degradation!”

  I stepped across the cave entrance and Ash retreated. She snarled at me then turned on her heel to run.

  Only she didn’t. She blurred, as she had done earlier, and something that felt like a sledgehammer hit me in the chest. I was thrown backwards at the same time I felt my sword—the one I’d carried since this all started—wrenched from my grip.