Immediately after briefing them, Artysaedra walked off, farther out into the moorland. She put a couple hundred feet between herself and the rest of the group, and once she had, she stopped. Then she began to transform.
Despite millennia of desperate practice, Kinrae had never managed a transformation into a second from, though neither had Draven. Their grandfather Drakoon had once told them it was because their blood was tainted with that of his wolf-bastard son’s, confusing their systems and stunting their abilities. Kinrae knew other mixed-bloods didn’t have the same problems that he and Draven had—his father was a mixed-blood and had a glorious wolven form—but he’d said nothing to his grandfather. Perhaps he and his brother were just broken.
Artysaedra’s blood had chosen the wolf just like their father’s had. It had been apparent from the moment she’d been born with a tail and furry ears perched on top of her head. Kinrae envied the certainty she’d been given every day of his life. Artysaedra didn’t have to stare in the mirror and search for animal markers that weren’t there. She didn’t have to search the depths of her soul trying to find a skin that never answered back. She didn’t have to wonder what she was capable of. Didn’t have to feel like a faulty cog in a machine. It had been no surprise to anyone when she’d managed a transformation into her wolf form before her first decade in the world had even passed. A normal demon presented by that age. He wasn’t normal.
Now, Artysaedra could transform into many other animals, including a dragon—and wasn’t that the biggest snub the universe could have given him. It had been one of the first of Artysaedra’s Guardian mimicking abilities that she’d practiced as a child and one of the first she’d perfected. Kinrae had seen her soar laps around Mount Drakis and dip down into the lowlands to skim over Lutana. The silhouette of her wide wings always made him ache for the opportunity to experience it just once.
Watching Artysaedra was the closest he would ever get.
Kinrae adjusted his senses so that he could hear and see every popping snap of Artysaedra’s bones, followed by her stifled grunts of pain. Her skin creaked, stretched, and ripped. Her organs grew with the gurgle of blood and bodily fluids, shifting in her veins and abdomen. Collapsing onto her hands and knees, Artysaedra dug forming claw into the ground with a growl, and Kinrae watched with longing fascination as scales pierced through the surface of her skin and three sets of horns emerged from her head. It took a few minutes for her to complete the transformation, but then there she was: a dragon.
Her scales glimmered in the faint dawn of the morning, like overlapping obsidian blades. Her wings stretched out over the moorland. Her horns were the same deep black as their mother’s but triple in number, and her eyes gleamed molten silver. From snout to tail, she must have stretched two hundred feet.
A deep, rumbling growl rolled out across the frozen ground as Artysaedra dipped her long neck toward them. The invitation was clear. Naliah led the way, Draven and Beaker followed, and Kinrae capped off the rear of their group, watching Draven’s bound hair sway with his every step. A stray breeze slipped underneath Kinrae’s bevor to prick at his chin, and he shivered.
The other two mounted Artysaedra ahead of him, stepping onto the forearm of Artysaedra’s wing and finding holds in her scales to pull themselves up. Kinrae took off his gauntlets and let them hang from his vambraces, then stepped up onto his sister’s wing. He’d almost expected it to squish a little beneath his boots, but there was no give. Standing on her wing was no different from standing on a stone floor.
He wobbled across her forearm to the slope of her upper arm, then wormed his fingers between her rough scales, which were larger than his hands. It was hard to keep his grip, but despite it, he half-pulled half-crawled his way up to the crest of her shoulder, fighting his restricting armour the whole way.
Naliah and Draven had already seated themselves cross-legged in between the ridges that spiked their way down Artysaedra’s spine. Kinrae followed suit. No sooner than he’d sat down with his back against one of the ridges for purchase, Artysaedra gave a great flap of her wings and they were airborne.
They climbed jerkily into the sky, Beaker barking the whole way. It was only after they were a couple hundred feet in the air that Artysaedra began a smooth sail forward. Kinrae could only see the ground when she dipped or turned, and the only thing he could hear was the whip of the air current against his ears and his sister’s wings. Eventually, he pulled the black cloth of his uniform back over his face just for the warmth of his own moist breath. His insides quivered violently inside his ribs.
Half an hour must have passed before Kinrae felt vibrations underneath him. He realized his sister was trying to communicate, but he only understood what she was trying to say when they began to dip: there was something ahead.
As they dove, Kinrae pressed his feet against the ridge in front of himself and held on. The new angle let him see what Artysaedra had. Dead ahead in the star-spotted, navy horizon were hundreds of multi-coloured buildings conglomerated at the center of a wide, sloping valley.
“We’ll stop there!” Naliah hollered back at them, his voice half-stolen by the wind. Minutes later, they landed.
Landing was as turbulent as taking off, something Kinrae discovered when he was almost thrown from his sister’s back twice during their descent. She hit the ground with a jarring impact that clapped Kinrae’s teeth together, and then they were settled on the outskirts of a nameless city. Naliah and Draven disembarked easily, climbing down Artysaedra’s wing. Naliah tiptoed like a tightrope performer, and Draven unabashedly sat down and slid with Beaker squirming in his grip. Kinrae took one look at the steep slope, though, and bit his lip. He didn’t want to chance falling on his face. Artysaedra would only mock him. Calculating a different path, he took a running leap off the mound of Artysaedra’s shoulder and landed in the grass dozens of yards below. Pain shot up his legs, and he winced. He was sure he’d just fractured some of his bones with that landing, but they must have been on their way to healing. The pain had already subsided.
“Graceful as ever, Brother,” Draven snickered from behind him. Kinrae’s cheeks went heavy with blood. He turned, shame-faced. Beaker was squirming in his brother’s arms, but Draven didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were locked on Kinrae, his lips quirked into a wide smile behind his mask. “I give it a solid nine on the Kinrae scale.”
“What is a ten on that scale precisely?”
“Probably you elbowing the Viscountess of Veira-ohn in the face during a waltz.”
Kinrae’s eyes went wide and his ears hot. “You said you would stop mentioning that, Draven! It was centuries ago!”
“I do nothing without proper incentive, Brother.”
Ahead of them, Naliah turned back from surveying the garish city sprawling the valley. The timbre of his voice took on a gruff, immoveable quality when he ordered through a thick Anavenese accent, “We’ll split into pairs to cover more ground. You’ll be with me, Your Highness. Draven, you go with Sae. Don’t wander off.”
Naliah jerked his head toward the city, and Kinrae dutifully stumbled after him. When he brushed past Draven, Draven said in a low voice, “Staatvelter, if you let anything happen to my brother.” The silence at the end of the statement spoke for itself.
Naliah stopped walking, but he didn’t turn around. “You have my word. For whatever it’s still worth to you.”
The street Naliah and Kinrae walked along was barely more than a tarred lane lined haphazardly by stout brick houses that had been painted bright indigos and yellows. Despite the chill, none of their chimneys was churning out smoke. There was wooden bat discarded in one fenced yard covered by a layer of frost. The leftovers of a gnarled bone were stuck in the grass in another. There were threadbare dolls forgotten in the dirt, rakes propped against houses, empty porch swings, abandoned bikes, and flowerpots in windowsills filled with the winter-ravaged remains of perennials.
The city reminded Kinrae of small towns he’d seen before in his trave
ls across the Realms, places of rapeseed and cornfields, of electric wires and crows. He’d seen many places in his travels. He’d visited naked tribes and shared meals in mud-and-stick huts. He’d been to villages-on-stilts, built over lakes, and had sampled specialty ales with locals who had more giggling children than teeth, people who had never treated him like anything less than a friend. He’d sailed with men who were part of exotic fruit trading companies, had ventured with them to obscure isles where the water had been so clear it had looked as though the ships were gliding through the air. Many of the memories blurred together, but they were still painted in more vivid strokes in his mind than the entirety of his childhood at Mount Drakis.
In time, I will take the throne and Mount Drakis will be all I’ll see for millions of years, he thought, sighing, until the very day I die and foist my role upon an heir.
There was a street sign up ahead hanging crooked and rusted from a metal post. It had three lines of text. The first line was the largest, comprised of foreign characters. The second read Xhi Hwougen, and beneath that, in tiny print, was Hwougen Street.
Kinrae wanted to trace the street sign with his fingers. “What do you think the name of this town is, Guardian Staatvelter?”
“Huh?”
“Surely it has a name.”
Someone lives here. This is someone’s home.
“I don’t mean any offense, Your Highness, but that isn’t really our concern right now.”
Silence fell between them.
Kinrae could hear Draven and Artysaedra walking a street over, their feet dragging and Beaker snuffling at their heels, but it took a moment for him to realize that that was all he heard out of the morning. Confused, he adjusted his hearing, but no, there wasn’t anything else to hear. There weren’t any scuffling feet inside homes. There wasn’t breathing or pounding blood. There wasn’t the low rumble of conversation or the humdrum chorus of daily life. All at once, it dawned on Kinrae what had been bothering him earlier about the field.
“It’s silent,” Kinrae said, incredulous. He listened for the chirp of birds or the skitter of mice through the grass—the smallest sounds of worms and beetles squirming through the dirt—but there was nothing. It was eerily silent in a way he’d never experienced before, as though the entire world around him was no more than a photograph. A frozen moment of a dead time. “I hear nothing. There aren’t even insects.”
Naliah was nodding at his side. His knotted hair bobbed with the movement. “I noticed that, too. And I don’t like it.”
They searched the city for over an hour. Houses were empty. Storefronts that ran down the brick-paved center of town were abandoned. Offices in the quaint city hall were deserted. They found unmade beds, sinks full of dirty dishes, registers full of paper money and coin, toppled stacks of incomplete paperwork, and even tepid cups of what smelled like stale coffee. It was as though everyone in the city had simply vanished.
Or at least, Kinrae would have believed that if there weren’t numerous signs of panic.
Dresser drawers had been rifled through and left open, clothes flopping out like guts. The contents of office desks had been knocked onto floors, pens skittered loose. Front doors gaped open. Pools of dried blood smeared vinyl floors. A stampede of footprints pockmarked the dirt on the north side of the city, heading off into uninhabited moorlands. Other footprints ran along them: eight inches wide, give or take, toes splayed and clawed.
They found a few bodies, here or there, throughout the buildings and side streets and wilderness, but Naliah and Artysaedra never let Kinrae get close to them. At the most, he could smell the victims, see them hunched over on the ground, lifeless.
After a while, they abandoned the town, venturing out into the wilderness. The sunlight, diffused through the overcast clouds, grew dimmer and dimmer as the day progressed. Evening set in, bringing with it cold. Moorlands turned to flatlands turned to plateaus, which hulked around them like giant elephant seals stranded in the desert. Their group travelled on foot and by sky to dozens more villages, their brick houses and adobe huts all ghost-like, the pastures and ranges surrounding them littered with dead livestock, their eyes glassy and tongues lolling, not a scratch on them to be found. Everyone in their group had begun to discuss the possibility that the towns were vacant because the demons of the Realm had reconjured away, to safety, even to another dimension, and that they had taken any human they could with them, but they’d abandoned the theory when they’d picked up the scent of mass groups travelling on foot through the desert. They’d started tracking it hours ago through the scattered plateaus and sandy flatlands, getting nowhere but never stopping. Kinrae knew from his basic compass only that they were trudging north.
In the end, their search led them straight to a set of caves, and what they found there almost brought Kinrae to his knees. There were thousands of bodies piled underneath the overhang of a concave cliff banded with red and purple rock. The bodies were stacked on top of one another in massive heaps that were taller than Kinrae by two or three times. The stench of blood and feces was so strong once the wind caught it that Kinrae could taste it through the cloth over his face. He had to dull his nose and tongue down to nothing.
He trembled. He’d never smelled so much death in his life other than inside a hospital or an amputation tent, but even there, he’d never seen so much open carnage.
“Masks up,” Artysaedra ordered. Her ears were flattened against her head. Her grip on her scythe was tight enough her gauntlet creaked. “There are humans here. Don’t let any blood get into your mouths. Got it?”
They split up across the piles.
Kinrae wandered off toward the starry east. The sandy dirt shifted underneath his boots. Though he tried to contain his trembling, the chill in the winter air was only making it worse, biting through his thin leggings and making his face numb. Empty eyes stared at him from the wall of corpses at his side. Some of the bodies still radiated heat like brick baked by the summer sun. There were men, women, and children alike—skulls cracked open, abdomens shredded with intestines slopping out from the butchery, severed hands, and gaping necks. Kinrae couldn’t hear a single pulse in the crowd of bodies. There was only the loud, echous void of death’s emptiness.
Stomach in his throat, Kinrae came to a stop when one of the bodies caught his eye. His hand shook as he reached out to brush the blood-matted hair from a little girl’s chubby face with his gauntlet. Her skin was already blue with death and the bite of desert night. Her glassed eyes peeked out from the sliver of her paper-white eyelids. He couldn’t handle the sight for long and averted his eyes. In the dirt were more strange clawed footprints that they’d seen before, and in large numbers here, too. But next to them were larger prints: about a foot in diameter, perfectly circular.
Kinrae could hear a conversation down the wall of bodies and adjusted his hearing.
“Hollowsouls,” Naliah was saying. “Years into transformation by the tracks. Mutation has set.” He sighed. “I suspected it earlier, but this just proves that— Sae, would you get down from there? It’s disrespectful.”
“It was a mass feeding,” Artysaedra said, and chuckled. When Kinrae glanced over his shoulder, she was walking on the tops of the piles of corpses. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a hollowsoul invasion. And it’s usually not as tidy as this has been. All these bodies lined up in one place. Like a child putting away its toys. And that’s not even the strange part,” she said, and waved toward the ground. “Those other tracks? Soul-eaters, fairly certain.”
“Soul-eaters?” Naliah asked.
“Pretty self-explanatory.”
“Then why’s it strange?”
“No— Their names are self-explanatory— Never mind,” she said with a put-upon sigh. “I’ve never seen a soul-eater outside of the Abyss. They don’t walk the living worlds.”
“Then what are they doing here?”
“Well, that would be the strange part, you idiot.”
Kinrae tuned t
hem out. Beaker was sniffing around at the loose, sandy dirt in the distance; Draven was trailing after her at a leisurely pace. He seemed to have separated himself and Beaker from the cliffs and was letting her root around in the open dirt field next to it instead. Kinrae was tempted to join them, but he found himself facing the wall of corpses yet again.
This time, staring at the bodies towered over him like a macabre painting, he wondered who these people had been. He wondered where had they grown up, who their friends had been, where they had gone to school, if they had liked summer days or winter days better, what their names had been, what their childhoods had looked like—but the more he thought about it, the more the mushy pink of their brain matter turned his stomach. The more the yellow of exposed fat made him sick. He swallowed against the vomit in his throat. His head was swimming.
He flinched when Artysaedra leapt down from above him and landed in the sand at his side. He hadn’t noticed her making her way over to him. She folded her arms over her breastplate and smiled behind her mask. The smile didn’t come close to reaching her beady crow-black eyes, but it pulled at the deep, sunken in scar underneath her right eye, which peeked over the top of her mask. “Oh, look at you. You’re practically pissing yourself.”
Kinrae clenched his hands into fists to hide any signs of their tremors, but Artysaedra’s gaze snapped down to them as soon as he did. Her grin widened.
“Told you,” she said again.
“I’m fine, Artysaedra.” She hummed, and the sound struck at his nerves, like a sour note sawed on a violin. “I’m no stranger to the tragedies of life. I’ve seen much in my travels.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, have you?”
“I have,” he said, quiet. “You know nothing of it.”
“If you’d seen half of the things I have, you wouldn’t be shaking like a pale-faced little maiden right now, Kinrae,” she said, matter-of-fact. “No, I take that back. I’ve seen maidens with better composure than you. You’re about two deep breaths away from vomiting your guts onto your boots.”
A Shard of Sea and Bone (Death of the Multiverse Book 1) Page 24