Crowfall

by Ed McDonald

  ‘But how?’ Kanalina demanded. ‘With what? The Bright Order thought she was coming back, but there isn’t enough power …’ She looked to the fiend’s heart. ‘You can’t be serious.’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ Kanalina snapped. ‘You’re no Nameless wizard. You can’t shape these forces. If you attempt to use the power of the heart to break her from the light, the backlash will be impossibly strong. It will come down on you like a hammer.’

  I showed Kanalina my bared arm. The words still stood there, scarred into the skin.

  BECOME THE ANVIL.

  ‘Six years,’ I said. ‘Six years soaking up the Misery. Six years becoming part of it. I’m not just Ryhalt Galharrow anymore. I am the Misery. I am the anvil on which that power breaks.’

  She flung a hand out to point at the storm cloud of ravens as they came down towards us.

  ‘Crowfoot will eviscerate you for this. You’re Blackwing, you wear the raven’s mark.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But he’ll be too late to stop me.’

  Maldon’s body smoked with the phos. He drew light in glimmering strands, faster and faster, fingers a blur as he dragged power from the sky. A rippling heat distortion surrounded him and the loom. One of the lenses cracked, wild strands of phos spearing across the platform. Kanalina and Valiya threw themselves flat as a stray flare shot over them. One of the strands washed over me, deflecting and blazing away across the city. The sky itself grew darker, the light of the sun focused down upon us in its entirety.

  The iron contraption could no longer take the strain of the vast forces being worked within it. With a metallic tearing sound, the supports began to buckle. Wires zipped free, snapping and pinging, the glass components shattered, raining down over the heart. With a cry, Maldon ripped one final, tree-trunk-thick beam of light down into the heart. It blazed down upon it, writhing like an eel on a line, pure and dazzling. And then it was gone. Surrounded by the wreckage of the loom, the fiend’s heart glowed with a purplish cast.

  I looked from the onrushing birds to the prize that the Nameless all so desperately craved. Walked to it. Picked it up. It weighed little, for all the fury of the cosmos having been gathered inside it.

  I saw into the fiend’s heart then. I saw other times, ancient places where beings vaster than mountains had stepped across the world in its earliest days. I saw rivers of fire and forests that never ended, swirling storms that lasted for centuries. A primal world, long forgotten by all but these sleeping ancients that we now put to our own purposes. And within, I sensed the blazing power of the light. So much light, so much power. A world-ending force, resting on the palm of my hand.

  ‘I suggest that you run,’ I said. Valiya ushered Kanalina across to the stairs but remained on the platform, her pistol still trained on the Spinner. Maldon pried his burned hands from melted metal and staggered after them.

  Galharrow, Crowfoot’s birds whispered across the sky, We had a deal!

  ‘We did,’ I said. ‘But you’re no stranger to treachery.’

  What are you doing? he demanded, his words born in the shapes of the wings as they flooded the sky.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ I said. ‘I’m going to fuck this up.’

  I gripped the heart tight against my chest with one hand, and drew back the other. Punching things is not always a good solution to a problem, but on this occasion, it would have to do.

  I drove my fist into the ice fiend’s heart. I reached for the light. I reached for Ezabeth.

  The world disappeared in a flaring cataclysm of blinding purity. All the power of the sun directed itself outward to release, but it met the Misery head-on. The sky bellowed, a roar of utmost pain and fury as the power in the heart released, backlashed, all that immense energy directed not just against me, but against the magic soaked through me, and against the magic that lay all around us. Every force requires a counter force to keep it in balance, and the Misery and the light could never be one. The phos energy drove against me like a lance, but I held it tight, redirected it back into the light. Two worlds, the spirit in the light and the man of the physical world, unable to touch, unable to cross the barrier. More power than the Engine, more power than a god, a backlash that had to be contained so that it would not rip the world in two.

  The Misery speared back, and my body became the divide. The black veins of corruption bled from my skin, hissing and steaming in the air. I felt layers of me burning away, charring, driven out of me as the light strove to unmake the Misery itself, as the backlash sought to strike back against the light that had made it, and the Misery insisted on change, change and change again, on its ongoing existence.

  As the colossal force of the heart met the Misery anvil that I had forged myself into, I saw the wall that lay between them all, the barrier between the worlds. And into that, I hurled myself after Ezabeth.

  Into the fire.

  Into the brightness.

  Into the void.

  39

  I sat across a table from her.

  Just us. Just a table. Around us, a storm of fire as far as the eye could see. No floor. No sky. No walls. Nothing but the rush of blinding flame and behind me, a shadowed gap in the flame that led back into the true world. The table wasn’t a table. It was just the idea of a table.

  We were the only things that really existed, but then for me, perhaps that had always been true.

  Ezabeth sat demurely, her hands in her lap, back straight, a serious expression overlaying the sadness on her face. Half of it smooth, a woman in her prime. Half of it rippled, ridged, smooth, and scarred. She was as beautiful as she had ever been, if she even existed.

  Perhaps this was oblivion. The afterworld, if such a thing could exist. It was enough for me.

  Flame raced by on all sides, a swirling corridor of intensity. The essence of light.

  ‘I saved this part of me,’ she said when the silence had grown to a hammering crescendo. ‘I had to hope it was enough.’

  ‘Any of you is enough for me,’ I said. Too quickly. Too eager. Like a child.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘That isn’t true now, and it wasn’t true before. I’m just here to keep you company, and …’ She faltered and lost her words. She glanced away. ‘It isn’t easy for me, either. Even this part of me remembers. Holds to it. It was so bright.’

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘Love,’ she said. She smiled then, with the sadness the world must feel when the last of a great species falls to extinction. ‘It was glorious, wasn’t it?’

  The finality of it. The weight of her words drove down on me. The detonation of Crowfoot’s weapon couldn’t have hit me with such force.

  ‘It’s not over,’ I said. ‘It still exists. As long as you do. As long as I do. It still exists.’

  Ezabeth rose, stepped from river of fire to river of fire.

  ‘Love blooms bright,’ she said. ‘But it’s no more constant than the wind, Ryhalt. I had hoped you would have come to see that by now. It would have made this easier for you. But the wind changes. It lives only in moments, and when its roaring abates there is nothing left to show that it ever was. That doesn’t mean that the wind was weak, or that it didn’t matter. The world is changed for having known it. You see it in the movement of the seeds as they drift on, to make new life elsewhere. You see it bring down walls that have stood for centuries, wreck ships, or cool a child’s brow. We are no different, you and I. Just a wind passing through the world. We have left our mark, and left it well. But the wind changes direction. Clouds come and go, and the sun rises and falls, and nothing is as it was. You can no more cling to the passage of love than you can the wind.’

  She looked me dead in the eye, and in the power of her surety I felt the cracks tearing through my chest. My heart. Through everything.

  ‘This can’t be it,’ I said. I rose to
whatever my feet might have been in that place and leaned across the table. ‘I won’t let that be it.’

  ‘You have done great things,’ she said. ‘Great, and bloody and terrible. But all things must end. Even you. Even me. I was Ezabeth Tanza. But the wind has changed, and I must change with it.’

  I slammed my fist down against the blackness of the table and it shattered into shards of thought, carried away in the torrent. The flames around us quivered and rocked, swirling, raging.

  ‘Everything I did,’ I shouted, ‘everything I became. I did it for you. To bring you back.’

  The floodgates had opened and everything poured out. Everything that I’d held back those last ten years, everything that had made me, driven me onwards, let me do unspeakable things, let me become an anvil that would defy the hammer of a god.

  ‘This is not it!’ I roared. ‘I have broken reality for you. I have broken space, and light, and time, because spirits damn the world I deserve to have you back. You didn’t deserve to die. If I have to tear down the walls of the afterworld and rip every damn soul free, I’ll do it.’ I looked around into the endless, raging torrent of fire. ‘Do you hear me? Spirits or gods or whatever rules this world? Do you hear me? I’m taking her back.’

  ‘It wasn’t just for me,’ Ezabeth said quietly. Calmly. Like she’d known that this tempest would come. ‘It was for your friends. For Nenn, and Tnota. For your child, Amaira. For the children that were lost to you. And for Valiya, whom you love but cannot love, because you cling to my memory so tightly that to let it go feels like a betrayal. But there’s no betrayal, Ryhalt. And you’ll see that. Our story wasn’t the one that we wanted, but it was still a good story.’

  She moved closer to me. She was tiny and fragile, but there was so much power within her, so much more wisdom than I’d ever managed to accrue. She shivered in the inferno, eyes drifting to the dark portal behind me, smaller now than it had been.

  ‘It’s closing,’ she said. ‘The tear you’ve made between these worlds will not endure.’

  ‘Then I stay here.’ Ezabeth shook her head.

  ‘I will miss this part of me,’ she said. ‘The woman, Ezabeth Tanza, loved you so much. Oh spirits, so much. When we were young together, for all you did then, and everything you did after. But I have to go. I should have done it when I died. But I can’t go while my name still holds such power. You understand, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I refuse to understand.’

  ‘I have to let it go,’ she said. ‘I was Ezabeth Tanza, and then I had a chance to become something else. And I couldn’t … but I cannot be Ezabeth Tanza, not anymore. You know why. Don’t you?’

  Tears streamed down my face, hot and burning with the pain of ten long years, with the hopes and dreams that I’d stored deep inside where the light never reached.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  I screamed. I balled my fists and shook with the pain and the rage and the unfairness of it all.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said gently. She took my hand in hers and when I opened my eyes she met them dead-on. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered.

  ‘Because you have to ascend,’ I said. ‘You have to leave yourself behind. That is what it means to become Nameless.’

  I bowed my head in sorrow.

  Ezabeth leaned in and put her arms around me. I clutched her hard against me, held her tight, as if somehow I could drive back the passage of fate. It had always been building to this. Of course it had. There was no other way it could have gone.

  ‘I will be different,’ she said. ‘The wind moves on as it gathers strength. I will not understand love as I do now. But I have to let go. And I can’t, while my name still lives on in you.’

  The fire around us billowed and roared, rushing by in a hurricane of bright heat. It sought to dislodge me, to send me spiralling out into the fury. The portal shrank smaller, flame swirling around it in a torrent. It diminished further, nearly gone. I took a deep stance, breathed in fully as scorching flame flowed into me. The roar of the fire grew louder.

  ‘I know,’ I said. And it was all that I could say. ‘You have to leave. You have to do what you were unnamed to do.’ I looked around. There was nothing but the blaze, hazy through my tears. ‘I don’t know the way back. I’m not of that place either anymore.’

  My feet began to drag along the missing ground, losing purchase. My grip on this existence was faltering and the light was drawing me into its grasp. Part of me wanted to remain. Let Ezabeth and me dwell here in the blazing brightness as spirits or ghosts or whatever we were now. It would be such a relief to let it all go. I looked around into the torrent, but there was nothing. It didn’t matter.

  ‘There’s no way back,’ I said.

  A hand burst through the walls of fire, outstretched, the torrents of heat whirling around it. And upon the arm that followed it, words shone bright, and silver, and dazzling as they reflected the inferno.

  BRING THEM BACK.

  A second hand followed, clawing through the fire, splitting it apart, tearing the rift anew. Valiya stood framed there, head thrown back, a silent scream on her lips. She forced the tear open again. Holding the path. For me. For us.

  Nobody had ever smiled with such sadness as Ezabeth did then. The last of her, what remained of the woman that I would have died a thousand deaths for, still felt the hurt of it.

  ‘Humanity,’ she said. ‘It was what they never understood. The enemy, the Nameless; humanity. Humanity was always the key.’

  ‘Ryhalt,’ Valiya whispered. She couldn’t see us. She stood alone in another place, holding back the fire with nothing but strength of will. Tears burned as they rolled down her face. ‘Come back, Ryhalt. Please. I need you.’

  ‘Take her hand,’ Ezabeth said softly. ‘As you should have done years ago.’

  One final moment in her presence. That was all that I would have, and I felt it more powerfully than the raging maelstrom around us.

  I looked back to Valiya, shrouded in dark flame, risking everything – everything – for one last chance at a future. A future I had dreamed of but had never let myself believe was within reach. The fire was not my place. It was not my world. Valiya had carried me, kept me together as I did all that had needed to be done.

  I needed her too.

  ‘You had my heart,’ I said finally. ‘But I understand. You have to go on.’

  ‘We both must,’ she said. And the smile that lit her face was bright, and the sorrow melted away into the beauty of the love we’d shared. ‘Good-bye, Ryhalt.’

  ‘Good-bye, Ezabeth.’

  I took her hand, and through it I sensed the greater power beyond it, vast and filled with knowledge, and fury, and so much that would always be beyond me. Then I reached behind me, and took another hand, and it was warm and it snapped tight around mine, and with a strength greater than any magic, dragged us from the fire.

  40

  I blinked. I was sat up against something. I didn’t know where I was.

  Understanding returned slowly. There were arms around me, a weight. A chin, Valiya’s chin, nestled against my shoulder. Her hair was loose, grey strands fallen across my chest. I could hear her voice in my ear, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. My vision began to clear, and I looked down at my hands. The black veins were gone, burned out of me. My skin was raw and smooth, but it was also fresh and clean, the Misery’s colours no longer rooted through it. Burned out of me, burned away. I ran my tongue over my teeth, and found that they were just teeth. The same couple missing, but not sharp. Naked, clothing burned to nothing in the flame, I had absolutely no body hair left. It seemed a laughable thing to be concerned with.

  The moons had moved on. The world was still aglow with colour but it seemed somehow softer now, gentler, and the sky had ceased its howling.

  I eased myself up, and Valiya helped me right myself.

 
; ‘Did it work?’ I asked. My throat hurt, every muscle ached as though it had been hammered straight and reshaped, but my voice had lost its brutal rasp. Even that felt fresh and remade.

  ‘Ryhalt,’ Valiya said. ‘She’s here.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Ryhalt,’ Valiya said again, her voice a breathy whisper. ‘She’s magnificent.’

  I turned, weak and unsteady on my feet, to see the power that I had brought into the world.

  The Nameless wizard was looking east. She was small, but taller than she had been. Golden from head to toe, long hair streamed behind her, its tips licked with gentle flames. She was pure and whole, the scars of her life scoured away. She wore a silver-blue gown, elegant, modest. The face had the rough shape of Ezabeth’s, but everything that had made it hers was gone. The fire, the determination, the intelligence, and beyond all, her love for the world and her need to save it. She was no more Ezabeth than I was the Misery. We had uncoupled from our pasts, set them alight, and let them burn away in the conflagration.

  When she turned her head to look in our direction, I saw that her eyes were utterly blank, filled with a light that I didn’t want to look upon. She was silent, hands clasped before her.

  A shadow loomed over us, the rushing flurry of wings as a storm of ravens came down to alight on the low wall surrounding the platform. The largest of them, its feathers old and scuffed, fluttered down to the platform’s centre. It looked between us, one to the other.

  ‘So,’ Crowfoot said. The word held all the darkness of the night. Fury cannot begin to describe it. Human beings cannot feel the level of ire that he did, for what I had done.

  ‘Greetings, brother,’ the shimmering woman said. Her voice was deep, the resonance of a booming gong in pillared hallways. ‘You have come to welcome me to this world.’

  ‘You think so?’ Crowfoot snarled.

  ‘I am not asking you,’ she said. ‘I am telling you that you have come to welcome me. If you wish, you may watch as I lay waste to those enemies you have failed to destroy.’