A Shard of Sea and Bone (Death of the Multiverse Book 1)

by L. J. Engelmeier

  When the third Guardian waved his hand, the portal closed behind him. The cracks in the multiverse mended themselves back into nonexistence, and then there was only night air and the field of stock once more. The cloaked figures rose to their feet.

  You’re traitors, Svahta thought at all of them. All of you. You betrayed the multiverse you’re supposed to serve and protect. What do you gain at the sacrifice of everything you stand for?

  “Keep the warding tight,” Nori-Rin said, and Svahta realized it was slipping. She tightened it back into place with iron thought. She was going to listen to everything these three of her comrades had to say, she was going to report it to the Saeinfinae, and then she was going to track them down and smash their skulls in with her flail. Then she was going to find every last one of these society members and roast them on the Council’s pyres herself.

  Death is not cruel where it is fair.

  The hooded figure with the fox mask stepped forward and greeted the Guardians. “My masters,” he said, “this universe is godless.”

  “Then the godless may rule it,” answered Robin Eisyedl with a slanted smile. Something about the grin sent chills down Svahta’s spine. It looked mechanical and false. “Nferf dok ankh dok.”

  “Nfer dok ankh doks. Fear the seven and seven,” the others chanted back. It made the Guardians grin.

  “After an eternity of warring, the day of our reckoning draws near at last,” Robin said, addressing the society. His voice echoed out over the field, silencing even the insects. Everything hushed for him—an amphitheatre to his words. He stepped forward and opened his arms wide, and his wings unfurled, feathers splaying, their tall arc shadowing the field. Their span was enormous, like a shield wall holding back the night. They made Robin a god in his own right standing there, a pillar of eminence, an existence to which the multiverse itself would kneel. “We gather this final time beneath a full moon. Before the next, we shall have our justice. For you, for us, and for our great beasts.”

  The members muttered their consent.

  “The anniversary of our attempted slaughter by the bloodline sons and daughters of the Council is nearly upon us. One hundred thousand years, waiting for this moment in which we could strike back. We survived against the Council’s will, and we hunger for our retribution.

  “Your pet autarch, who has deigned to steal the name of Saeinfinae, will stain the snow with his youthful blood, and the snow will fall red from the skies every day henceforth as a warning. His kingdom will topple beneath his ignorance, his ineffectualness, and his arrogance, under which corruption has only flourished. From his kingdom’s corpses, we will reap bones and build crowns of our own. Our thrones will be the death of deceit, of warring, and of the gerontocratic oligarchy that has plagued this world with its quasi-religion. The gods we construct will be not men, but righteousness and equality. This multiverse will burn and rise from its own ashes, for we will cull the corruption growing within it. We will claw the diseased seeds from this earth and sow it anew.

  “The blind sheep of the Order will suffer for their blasphemous, self-serving rule and for the worship they bathe in like milk and honey. The Eleven will burn for their trespasses and their hypocrisy, for genocide and murder they have swept into the shadows for centuries. Too long have we been chained beneath their weight. Too long have they answered to no one. Too long have we suffered indignity underneath a hierarchy manufactured to enslave us. It is no ladder we can climb. It is a lie. It is a dream whispered to children.

  “You are servants to vice-ridden, manmade gods. You were born beneath and will die beneath the same king and Council that dethrones you, that massacres your bloodlines to secure their own. We offer you your freedom. We offer you your power. You will feel no sting of a whip for harnessing your sovereignty. We have taught you to break this multiverse to your will, and you will break it beyond its own recognition on the night of our justice. You will restore it in your own image. You will cultivate it. You will root out the darkness that hides in flesh, the darkness men have convinced themselves is light, for they do not know what light truly is.”

  Robin reached up toward his face with both hands, but too late did Svahta realize what he was going to do for her to look away from it. He forced his fingers deep into his eye sockets and ripped his eyes free. Blood rivered down his cheeks and into his smile. Snapping the optic nerve, Robin lit his eyes on fire and dropped them into the field. Svahta could only stare, confusion and revulsion warring inside her. Confusion won out when light began to pour from Robin’s eye sockets and through the enamel of his crooked smile. The beams blazed through the night. Behind him, the other two Guardians followed his lead and tore their eyes from their skulls. Light beamed from their eyes and mouths, too.

  “We are the light,” Robin yelled, voice booming across the field. It sounded like a battle cry. “We are the sparks that ignited this multiverse into birthing itself—not the Council. We are the first and the last. We are the creators. We are the architects. We are the watchers of all.”

  “All hail the Watchers,” said the man in the fox mask, quiet, like a breath.

  Robin grinned that mechanical grin again. “Hail the Watchers.” He pulled his beaded belt free. The other Guardians copied his actions. He shed his silk asa next and the white robe underneath it, and then without hesitation, the three of them simultaneously plunged their hands into their abdomens. They twisted their spines and reached deeper inside of themselves, their arms elongating and forearms disappearing beneath their ribcages. There were sick, wet tearing sounds, and then the Guardians were pulling their hearts free from their torsos.

  A second lapsed.

  The Guardians collapsed in the flowers like marionettes with cut strings.

  Svahta could hear their hearts contract with a set of final, sluggish beats in their hands. None of them shifted where they were hidden in the flowers. They were dead—Svahta knew it with a vexed lurch in her heart—but whatever strange light had been inside them seemed to have burned out because there was only darkness now—

  Svahta jumped when the light returned. The beams pillared through the darkness with a new, blinding intensity. She squinted against it, her eyes watering, and in front of her, the light coalesced into three beams, slithering up from the flowers and hovering in the night. Svahta didn’t know how to describe them. She didn’t know how to comprehend them. They shifted before her eyes, again and again and again.

  They were cloaked beings made of molten sun—a thousand eyes without a face—winged fire—blazing wheels of fate—skin carved with every text in the world—a gaping void that gutted her in its holy image and made her nothing—intangible threads of time condensed in space, chaotic but certain—lost parents, herself their orphan—her birth and her destruction—a joy so painful she felt like her throat was being crushed and her eyes were burning from her skull. They were white fire in her veins.

  They were exactly like— But they couldn’t be—

  The three beams of light shot through the night in a blur and into the eyes of the three nearest cloaked society members. Blinking spots from her vision, Svahta could tell the moment the beings had taken root in their bodies. The cloaked figures jerked and convulsed, but then their movements smoothed out. They held themselves proud and quiet. No light leaked out from their bodies. They seemed normal, as though Svahta had imagined everything. The field was calm again, though now stained by the smell of ammonia. She deadened her nose against it.

  Wordlessly, the three society members winked out of existence, reconjuring somewhere into the vastness of the multiverse. The urge to try to chase after them boiled inside Svahta, but she stamped it down. The other members of the society were moving now, talking amongst themselves. She listened closely.

  “Killing them by ones and twos,” High King al-Loriaris was saying, traipsing down the rows toward the bodies hidden in the flowers. “This is tedious, is it not?”

  The man with the mask of ice was the one who answered him. “
We can’t fight the Order in open warfare. You’ve seen the extent of the power our masters possess. One Guardian alone could raze our kingdoms if they put their mind to it.”

  “Your ice may melt under their fire, darling,” High King al-Loriaris said flippantly, “but sand hardens to glass.”

  “And glass shatters.”

  The High King scoffed. He and the stranger fell into a tense silence. The fog-beast that had come through the portal was now soundlessly circling the Guardians’ bodies and hissing. After its third lap, it planted its feet in the muddy dirt, smashing flowers, and opened its mouth wide. Dozens of rows of teeth twitched in its mouth, and then the beast inhaled.

  The vortex of wind that erupted as a result ripped Svahta from her feet. She slammed down into the mud on her ass, digging her fingers and boots into the ground immediately to keep from being sucked into the beast’s mouth, but the force of the vortex was too strong. Her boots and claws tore furrows in the ground as she was sucked away. Frantically, she rolled over onto her stomach and reached out for Nori-Rin. Her su-lanah was braced in the mud over a yard away, but eyes gleaming with the light of the full moon, Nori-Rin threw her sword down and lunged across the distance. One hand caught Svahta’s sleeve and the other snagged the collar of her silk asa and jerked. It choked Svahta. The flowers around her and her partner snapped like whips. Concentrated on holding her warding into place, Svahta tried to remain calm even as her legs lifted from the ground, airborne. The mud was gritty under her nails as she buried her fingers deeper in the wet earth, pressing her face to it. She jerked at her Guardian magic, and the mud hardened around her hands like a shell. It held her in place.

  Glancing back over her shoulder, she watched as three misty figures, lit from within by glowing spheres blazing with holy light, were pulled from the Guardians’ bodies. They vanished into the fog-beast’s mouth, and then everything rushed to a halt. The vortex closed with the beast’s mouth, and Svahta flopped down to the mud with a grunt. The creature settled down into the flowers with a contented croak.

  Their souls, Svahta realized slowly, shocked. That was their souls. It swallowed them.

  She released the hardened mud cased around her hands and eased herself to her feet with Nori-Rin’s help. Her partner didn’t let go of her dirty hand afterward. Instead, she squeezed it tight. Svahta squeezed back. The warding around them moved in closer and increased in strength.

  On the sidelines of the action, the society members seemed unaffected by anything that had happened. Not a hair of theirs was ruffled. The man with the copper mask who smelled of blood approached the beast with a dance in his step, one of his legs ticking like a clock as he walked. “Until Masters come back to play, I’ll watch the beast and here I’ll stay,” he said happily.

  “Good,” said the woman with the fur mask and golden ringlets, her accent thick enough the word sounded like goot. Her nose wrinkled when she glanced down at the Guardians’ hidden bodies. “Another corpse to move. Ysetnya Nkusyovind yadtattat’phzorit.”

  The man in the copper mask gave a half-crazed, wheezing laugh. “A note needs ink; a horn needs air. A battle needs a large fanfare.”

  “Knt,” the woman snapped. “I know.”

  “Tired of the pageantry, too, darling?” High King al-Loriaris asked, but the woman’s painted lips pinched together. She took a step away from the High King and lifted her chin.

  “What is decided will be done,” she said.

  “It’s a war, not a five-act play,” he said. “I agree. I’d rather dispose of the bodies now, too. Posing them seems melodramatic.”

  “What is decided will be done.”

  “Why, you’re just no fun at all, are you?”

  “Questioning leads to doubts, Nelo,” the man with the mask of ice said, stern. “Doubt leads to insurrection. This is all part of the masters’ plans. Respect it. No kingdom was built in a day, not even yours. Have a modicum of patience.” He approached the three Guardians’ bodies and ice cracked out from his hands down into the flowers. “We’ll each take a body tonight.”

  “I dealt with Marette yesterday,” the High King said, huffing.

  “Do you think we’ve all sat idle since you’ve been gone, Loriaris? We each have our assignments. Do you know how many bodies I’ve delivered across the Infinity in the last day alone while you were slinking about your sand pit?”

  “Is that rhetorical, or am I allowed to guess?” the High King asked smartly. The woman with the fur mask shoved Robin’s body into the ether and then reconjured away. “How many other Guardians have our masters killed, pray tell?”

  “Seventeen,” the man said. “Our count would be nineteen if you had dealt with the two Guardians we sent directly to you.”

  Svahta froze at the mention of herself and Nori-Rin, but the conversation continued unhindered, as though they weren’t there. Nori-Rin’s grip on her hand tightened.

  “How was I supposed to accomplish that feat exactly?” High King al-Loriaris asked. “You’re lucky I succeeded in turning them away. They know what’s going on now thanks to that Council of theirs. We don’t have the element of ignorance anymore.”

  “The rest of us managed to snare our targets without suspicion. I don’t see why you had such an issue.”

  “I gather one of the masters was there with you then to subdue them,” the High King said pointedly. The lack of a retort was proof enough. “In the future, please inform me of all further plans that might get me killed, such as sending me into that Realm without a warning about the open combat I’d run into. Did you know our masters had planned to destroy the place with those beasts?”

  “It was part of the plan, a part I orchestrated under their orders. It was one of my assignments, Loriaris, and it wasn’t as simple as posing a corpse like all yours have been.”

  “So the hollowsouls—that was your idea, I take it.”

  “I bred them myself,” the man said, the anger in his voice growing. “A minor hobby, I admit, but no loose ends there, either. Don’t doubt what we do without you. The hollowsouls were fitted with tracers, and my tongueless dealt with their dead. They’ll euthanize the rest in a few days and burn the bodies, if there’s anything left of the Realm. Every element of the attack was calculated and carried out down to the smallest detail. I notice small details, Loriaris, which is why I’m concerned that there’s a sword lying in this field that wasn’t there five minutes ago.”

  All the warmth drained out of Svahta. She glanced over.

  Just outside her warding was Nori-Rin’s blade.

  A NIGHTMARE’S BLOOD

  _______________________________

  Mortaigne Bonnet: Guardian of Spirit, resident of the Low Realm of Crystal Trees, son of Mordecai Bonnet, lowborn drake, age 671, burnt beyond all recognition

  excerpt from Council records regarding Guardian deaths suffered while in the line of duty

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS

  THE LADRIS RIVER, DOWNSTREAM FROM ODD’S PORT,

  GANDER PROVINCE, SOUTHEASTERN NORMANY

  Breakfast for Draven was hardtack paired with water that Staatvelter pulled from the river and purified like a natural-born water elementus. After eating, their group took to the skies again and went north.

  For Draven, the long days of the Realm were disorienting. Though they’d made camp in the dead of night and rested for a full eight hours, it still took another five hours after their take-off before the sun rose in the Realm, Staatvelter informing them it was around eight o’clock in the Realm when it did. Clouds towered through the air like turrets and spires, set alight by the dawn. The sun swathed them in orange, burnished gold, blushing pink, and vivid purples—purple that reminded Draven of the Kjall’a decorations they’d left behind in Lutana. A short pang for home shot through him, which he quickly smothered the second he pictured his mother’s bitter face.

  The forests and hills below them morphed, first into miles of evergreens, then into mountains of brown rock capped with ice and
smothered with low clouds. After that, wide rivers with water as black as night cut through lands that were blanketed by thick snow, the air near-blind with a blizzard. They flew over somber cities as they travelled. The cities were filled with smoke stacks, formidable prisons, and sharp, stone towers. They found the cities empty or with streets and high-rise buildings full of slaughtered dead. They found no hollowsouls or any hollowsoul carcasses when they wandered the roads. They found no survivors, either, and so they left.

  In the far east, they found several hoofprints that were a mile wide, which none of them had any explanation for. The hoofprints were an epicenter of destruction, everything within miles of them left in heaps of rubble. Mountains had crumbled. Massive waves beat against shores, flattening trees. Their group didn’t bother to stop, flying north up the coast instead through sheets of rain that cut them down to the bone with cold, then with warmth that made them sticky with sweat.

  They soared along white sand beaches and cliffs, over warm lagoons and scattered islands. The glittering teal and aquamarine waters were littered with the bloated bodies of dead fish. Hundreds of them had washed ashore to rot, not a gull in sight to pick at their carcasses. The smell the bodies exuded was so overwhelming that Draven almost choked on it, even through his mask. They only stopped for a few minutes at the sandy base of a tiny island’s crumbling cliff, long enough for them to roll over the corpses of a few mermaids that were caught in the exposed reef. Their fins were tattered, their scales slimy and dull. Their eyes gazed back with a cloudy-blue haze. A few looked as though they’d been dashed against the rocks, their heads battered and pulpy; one or two had bite marks ringing their tails. Others were in pristine condition—not an ounce of damage to their grey skin, fangs, sharp claws, or the gills along their slender ribcages. It didn’t look as though they’d struggled for life at all. Instead, it was as though they’d simply stopped breathing. The group couldn’t find a cause of death, so stumped, they continued on their journey.