Helixweaver (The Warren Brood Book 2)

by Bartholomew Lander

  “Mark!” Barnaby shouted, voice shrill and bird-like. “You would dare to use the power of the Flames in such a manner!? After all the honor and privilege we have granted you!?”

  Mark stepped over the fallen bodies of the cultists and turned his attention to Barnaby. But as soon as he saw Annika, his eyes lit up with surprise. And just as soon as it had appeared, it was gone, replaced by rage. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Oh? What is the meaning, indeed. That is what we demand of you, child! This girl, this damned whore of the soil. What has she done to you?” The blade pressed harder against her throat, and she held her breath. She could feel the skin depressed by the edge, on the verge of splitting. Sweat beaded on the back of her neck.

  “Let her go right now,” the boy said, “and I shall permit you to die quickly.”

  A low rumble shook Barnaby’s chest and echoed through Annika’s skull. At once the blade retreated from her throat, and she could breathe again. The man grabbed her by her left wrist and barred her arm against the joint. She again struggled, but the chill that stung the underside of her forearm halted her resistance once more. She dared only a momentary glance out the corner of her eye. He held the blade point down, right at her radial artery. God, no, her mind choked. The throat would be better than that—anything but that.

  “Bastard. You killed Victor. In cold blood. What could have possessed you, selfish child, to betray the clan that nurtured you? What has this girl done to you? Has she bewitched you? Seduced you? What has she offered for your betrayal!?”

  “Barnaby,” Golgotha said from behind. “That is enough.”

  “No,” the man answered. “I care no longer. I will see this whore bleed out. That’s what Victor would have wanted, to see the look on his Chosen’s face!”

  Mark strode a step closer. His cult robe, open at the front, was soaked in blood. Hate blazed in his eyes. “I said to let her go. She has nothing to do with this. She has nothing to do with the Key.”

  “If she has nothing to do with this, and you are truly of your own sanity right now, then let’s see what truth is held therein! Open your eyes, brainwashed child! The spell is breaking—open your eyes and watch her die!”

  The blade of his dagger sank into her arm, ripping a cruel swath through her flesh. Fire raced through her nerves as metal scraped bone. She began to scream. The sharp pain splitting her arm drowned out all of her other senses, save for the sick vacancy as the blood began to run unimpeded from her opened veins. With each beat of her heart she felt the flood running thicker down her arm. Everything blurred. The only sound was her own voice ringing in her eardrums.

  There came a washing, or a streaking sensation, as though she had become a rock in the midst of a violent river. That river flowed around her and then vanished. The man was thrown away from her, and without his support her legs folded. She crumpled to the floor, dizzy, nauseous, screaming.

  Everything went black from shock.

  A few moments later, Annika reawoke to the sensation of a thousand frigid needles stabbing into her left arm. Her eyes fluttered, and her blurred vision began to clear. The boy was crouching over her, a ghostly glow between his palm and her injured arm. She was dizzy, her thoughts were scattered, but she was lucid enough to realize with some wonder that those liquid-nitrogen pinpricks were somehow mending the slash that split her radial artery. With her senses returning, she felt only a restrained awe.

  As the weaving needles healing her arm grew colder, the boy’s hand squeezed her wrist, and he began to groan. The phantom stitching doubled its speed. The moment the last of her flesh had been kissed by the cold, the boy broke away from her, holding his own left arm out away from his body. Annika gazed up at him, puzzled. He stumbled a little, drawing back the sleeve of his dark robe. He spat a quaking breath into the still air. Blood poured from his forearm. Again sick to her stomach, she was unable to look away from the sight. The wound that had appeared on his arm was exactly the same as the one the ghostlight had just healed. But why had it . . . ?

  The boy—Mark—bellowed an agonized cry, his right arm going to his left to protect it. “What is this!?” His feet shuffled, and for a moment it looked like he was going to collapse. Loose tendrils of flowing blood splattered against the floor.

  “Coming apart at the seams, child,” came Barnaby’s voice. Annika’s eyes darted to the side, and she saw that he’d ended up between the pews again. He had a fresh gash across his forehead, and his left arm was bent slightly wrong. “Arrogant child, your power wanes! This is the magic of the Chosen?”

  Mark snapped his head up toward the man. His balance wobbled again, and a look of utter hatred came over him. Annika watched as the blue-green flames sparked and spread in the palm of his right hand. There was a bright flare and an inhuman wailing sound, and then he drove his burning hand into his split forearm. He shouted in agony. The smell of burning flesh invaded Annika’s nostrils and brought her to the verge of vomiting. A baleful crackling sound punctuated his scream as the fire closed the wound.

  With the wound cauterized, Mark dropped his arms to his sides, his howl still wet in Annika’s ears. He opened and closed his left hand, balling it into a fist and then loosening it. Deep breaths warped his frame, and his stance widened.

  Barnaby raised the blood-covered dagger toward them both. “You have squandered your potential, damned fool. You were supposed to be the one to bring Y’rokkrem to bloom! But for all the power you have, you had so much more to learn.” He twisted the dagger, and the air about him began to shiver and warp. “I will show you, child, what true magic from the Heaven Tree looks like. In Victor’s name, I will kill you myself!”

  A burst exploded from Mark’s lungs. His torso twisted. He swept his hand in a wide swath, and the air cracked. A phantasmal shape filled Annika’s vision, a screen of melting tendrils of color and light, and then it was gone. A sick squelching sound echoed around them, and a fountain of blood exploded from Barnaby’s throat. He slumped backward, hands pressed against the wellspring. Another swipe of Mark’s hand, and a second invisible blade split the man’s chest from hip to shoulder. He crumpled in a pile, his last breath bubbling viscously from his neck.

  Panting, Mark lurched a step toward the altar of the church, where the old man still sat in quiet contemplation. “Now. It’s just you and me. Golgotha.”

  “Mark,” the old man said. “Why have you done this?”

  “No relics. No memories. When I’ve finished with you. Only embers and dust will remain.”

  “Have you been touched by the madness? What in Y’rokkrem’s name has possessed you so!?”

  His breathing grew heavier, as though his lungs were struggling to break free of his chest and escape. “You killed them. Loyal and unloyal alike. Innocent and believer alike. You killed Sylvia. You killed Ellie. And you have the nerve to demand answers of me!”

  Golgotha scowled, anger breaking in his dark pupils. “Open your eyes, Mark! Do you truly believe that I would commit to such pointless slaughter! That I could take the life of my own daughter! I have lost far more than you have this evening, and you think to murder those who remain? For what? Revenge? I have done nothing! It was the Weeping Man, Mark!”

  Those words rang off the ceiling and slid down the walls. Mark was silent for a long moment. “Weeping Man.”

  “You stood in the way,” Golgotha said. “You defiled the ritual. You spared the life of the girl ordained by the First Golgotha to die. You impeded the hunt for the Key. A vision from the Gate cannot be ignored without consequence, and now you are seeing that firsthand! Look not to me for revenge, for you have brought this all upon yourself!”

  “Fairy tales and lies!” The outburst shook the walls of the chapel. “If you are innocent, then explain why only your closest and most loyal were spared the blade! Transparent deception. If you are to lie to my face, do so with some pretense of intellect!”

  “Mark.” Golgotha’s voice fell low, pleading. The ribbons of smoke from his
pipe began to writhe and whirl around him. “Look at the death around you. Look at all these corpses. There will be nothing left after tonight. This is the night that the Lunar Vigil ends. But it does not have to end like this. It’s not too late. We can take the Key from her. We can use it. We can turn this bloodshed into the greatest of all offerings. The Feast of Harvest. We can at last awaken your latent power, and see the blooming of Y’rokkrem. We can burn away the impurities of this sinful world together, Mark. All you have to do is help me. What would Ariel have wanted you to do? Or your mother?”

  Another eternity of silence. “Awaken my latent power?” A sputtering, half-mad laugh rocked Mark’s frame. “This was all for my awakening? My ascension? You spilled the blood of an entire town, our own blood, just to tell me that? Well. It seems that I have not been forward enough with you. So let’s get it all out in the open air, then, father. This girl here,” he gestured toward Annika, “had nothing to do with the theft of your goddamned Key to Manilius. Sylvia and Laurence are the ones who took it.”

  Golgotha’s eyes bulged, and the helix of smoke-tendrils broke into chaos. “What!?”

  “That’s right. We kept it from you, so you couldn’t rupture the Gate. And now, Lily has it. And she’s running as far from here as her little legs will carry her. Whoever you had show her mercy . . . let us simply call it the last mistake of the Vigil. Because now, without the Key, I’m free to show you just what it is I’ve learned to do, just how powerful I’ve become when your back was turned.” His posture straightened, and he spread his arms. “You want my ascension so bad? So be it! I shall show you the power you have sought—the true power of the Chosen of Y’rokkrem.”

  The boy’s eyes flashed a brilliant green color, and the room began to hum with an otherworldly force. Colors blurred, and the humming dug right into Annika’s skull. Those flashes grew in intensity, sparking and birthing blue-green flames up and down the boy’s arms. Then the fire began to spread, creeping down his neck and around his shoulders. Annika watched in a dream-like stupor as his body was entirely consumed by the phantasmal fire. The figure in the flames began to flash. An unnatural wind blew in spiraling waves from the font of power. Annika could not look away; she was utterly transfixed as the blazing cocoon hatched into an even more brilliant form.

  What emerged from the energy chrysalis seemed to be made entirely of those strange, verdant flames. The outline of where Mark’s body had once been was now a glaring but amorphous approximation. The robe he had worn had been rendered into an ethereal sheet of boiling shadows through which his inner luminescence shone. His whole form shimmered, shifted in all directions at once, as though she were seeing him through a wall of flowing water.

  “Look upon your end, Golgotha!” the entity said, its voice booming from all around.

  The old man rose from his seat. His pipe tumbled from his lips and cracked against the ground. “Wh . . . what the hell are you?

  “I am the Chosen of the Gate!” the entity said. “This is the power that you thought you could control. This is the power of Y’rokkrem!”

  But Golgotha just shook his head, panic carved into every wrinkle of his face. “No,” he said. “This . . . This is not the power of the Chosen. It cannot be. This is . . . ” A desperate gasp spread his face into a melted wax caricature. “Is this the Starblooded?”

  Annika watched, fixated on the haunting beauty of the being as it began to walk down the aisle toward the altar. Each step he took sent an arc of phantom electricity dancing across the floor. The projected shadows that formed its flowing cape seemed to convect, breaking apart and reforming as though from nothing. Behind him, the air continued to waver, a lingering smudge staining the very space he passed through.

  The entity of light flashed, and a gust rippled across the room. A thick, viscous distortion began in the air. Mesmerized, Annika watched the pews on either side of Mark tilt, and then float up into the air. The arcs of green electricity sparking off him licked the wood of a pair of benches. A pair of pews, a pair of explosions. Splinters and oaken shrapnel burst from the spell, sending debris to all corners of the chapel. Annika crossed her arms over her face in shock, but nothing touched them. Two crude lumber beams, ending in sharp points, emerged from the cloud of floating rubble. The being made a subtle, luminous move, and the wooden shafts surged toward the altar. Two wet thunks, a cry of pain, and Golgotha was torn from his feet and slammed into the wall, impaled through his shoulder and arm.

  Mark began to move again. The curtain of spacetime distortion remained heavy in the air. As he moved, non-linear and ancient, the splinters and chunks of wood and pews around him began to smolder and burn, blazing to ephemeral life like dying fireflies. The entity stopped before the altar, looking up at the shrieking man crucified upon the wall. His cries were a hymn of agony. Mark’s form shifted, dispersed, before reconstituting itself in the air mere feet from the trapped cult leader.

  “Is there even a place in your mind capable of feeling remorse?” the entity said in the booming voice of a god. “All the innocents whose lives have fueled your ill-begotten ambition are stains on your soul. The lives you culled this night have sealed the collapse of all you have worked for! Look what your ambition has brought you.” More bolts of aquamarine electricity crackled off him as he spoke, striking the walls and floors at random. More ghastly flames flickered into being everywhere those bolts touched. “The Gate and those who were foolish enough to follow you in its service will vanish into obscurity.”

  The man’s voice had become a desperate choking. “Mark, wait, please—you, I, you can’t—! I didn’t, I swear that I didn’t—”

  “Surely you understand, now: your path leads only to ruin. I am the Chosen of Y’rokkrem. I am the Path of the Gate, and the Gate has passed its judgment upon you.” The electricity again sputtered off the creature’s glowing body. “The Gate is closed to you—the Void awaits!”

  Golgotha screamed once again, but a violent burst of light ripped through his torso, spraying a gaseous stream of blue wisps into the air. His tongue fell silent, and soon the dancing fireflies, too, vanished into memory. The wall beneath him erupted into green, slow-burning fire. Golgotha’s body disappeared beneath the prismatic shadows. That fire spread outward from his form until they covered the entire wall.

  Green light illuminated the chapel. The entity faded back to the ground, as though it had existed in both places the whole time. The burning pews and splinters fell at once to the floor, startling Annika with the sound of banging wood. The kaleidoscopic creature flickered out, and once again the boy stood there, silent. He only managed to take a few steps down the aisle before his legs gave out beneath him and his face smashed into the floor. Annika shifted in the opposite direction, breath becoming erratic. Mark’s hands clawed at the polished floor and he pushed himself up partway. His jaw chattered, and his eyes bulged in their sockets. “No,” he said. “No, please. Not that.”

  Annika blinked at him. For just a moment, her amorphous fear of what she had just seen departed. In that moment she felt nothing but concern for the boy doubled over on the floor. And once the door to concern had been pushed ajar, she remembered that this boy, horrific and beautiful though he was, had saved her life again. Shifting her weight across her knees, she cringed and then began to stand.

  The boy shook, tremors racking his arms. “Please, no. Why? Why have you forsaken me? Have I not suffered enough, why do you . . . Why do you . . . ?”

  She opened her mouth to call to him, but a sharp and desperate shout from the boy drowned out the sound.

  “God damn you!” he shouted. Seething, he pushed himself up to his unsteady feet. He turned back toward the altar, behind which the wall still blazed with those silent green flames. His face morphed into a visage of rage which would have terrified Satan himself. He threw his right arm toward that wall. The air cracked, and the flames seemed to draw inward. Then, those tongues of phantom fire flashed. The viridian blaze grew brighter and hotter until they bur
st into a violent yellow. A deafening roar and a wave of heat washed across the room. The silence of those flames was gone—a hungry, jealous crackling now laughed at the carnage, flurries of sparks rising from the ignited timber.

  “Nothing but embers and dust,” Mark said. “Embers and dust.”

  The fierce orange illumination painted stark shadows across the boy’s face, and Annika saw the end of the world reflected in his crazed eyes. He seized up, and one of his hands flew to his head. He made a low groaning sound that was almost inaudible beneath the crackling of burning wood. He turned away, with some effort, and began to hobble toward the door, muttering to himself all the while.

  Again feeling an awakened terror, Annika walked toward him. “H-hey, wait—”

  His arm flew up and he shoved her away. A stray plank of wood caught her ankle, and she fell to the floor. “To hell with you,” he said through his teeth. And with that, he limped out the door, clutching one of his eyes.

  Once the shock of the boy’s reaction had numbed, Annika felt the heat blazing against her skin and remembered the panic. There were more important things than ensuring some insane cult-kid’s well-being. The threat of the spreading inferno forced her back to her feet. And so she ran with a godless haste, out of the boiling heat of the burning chapel and into the cathartic chill of the night.

  Chapter 22

  Embers and Dust

  There was no sign of the boy when Annika stumbled out into the night. The cold air embraced her, soothed her burning skin. As soon as her feet crunched the trodden dirt path leading from the cathedral, she let out a crazed scream that ripped at her throat. What the hell was going on? Was this all some kind of coma fantasy? The fevered imaginings of a dying brain? She’d felt the man’s knife slashing through her flesh and veins, even scraping the bone. The hot, flowing blood running down her arm in torrents, too, had been the most vivid and terrifying feeling ever. But now her arm was perfectly fine. Moreover, that boy, Mark, had now killed five people in spectacular and impossible ways—and that was to say nothing of him transforming into some kind of omnipresent being of light. How? Magic? Magic didn’t exist, of that Annika had once been certain. But now the only thing she was certain of was that she had to get home.