by J. F. Lewis
“I need to mend the breach in the wall Uled has managed to batter open,” Kholster said. “It won’t destroy the dead who have already risen, but it should stop any more from rising.”
Should?
Nothing is certain, Harvester. What do you think?
I think that it is possible the action you desire will merely weaken the risen dead. I think you and I should slay Uled and deliver his soul to Minapsis before even considering this course of action. Further, I say that should you ever need me, sir—
“I’ll need this.” Reaching out, the Aern took the warpick, Reaper, from the warsuit’s back and smiled a wolfish grin.
Sir? Harvester asked.
Kholster? Vander thought at him.
You’re in place, Vander. The god of knowledge is restored as god of fact and fiction and is thus what he should be once more. War will be righted soon enough as well, recast as conflict and resolution. Now I have to close a circle of my own. But what that will mean for you and me—
It will mean whatever you want it to mean, old friend. Vander laughed. I’m too old to get used to another kholster, and I have no desire to take the reins myself.
Then it’s settled. With a single moment of intent, power shifted along the link between Harvester and Kholster. Throughout the realms, all of Kholster’s multiples vanished, leaving a single Kholster and a warsuit already bearing the correct name for his duties as death god in his own right. It was much more pleasant than the way Torgrimm had surrendered a portion of his powers to Kholster, but Torgrimm had lacked the true bond between a warsuit and its rightful occupant. Torgrimm’s Harvester had been a warsuit in appearance only, an affectation. Kholster’s Harvester and his Reaper were a true warsuit and warpick, and bestowing a measure of his deific might and responsibility to his own creations was as simple as leaving a piece of his soul behind.
*
Marcus Conwrath looked back from the edge of the eternal city, but Kholster, the one and only, was already moving, warpick on his back. If Kholster felt strange to no longer be connected to a warsuit, he also felt lighter to have surrendered the responsibilities that came with being Harvester. He wondered how the Changing of the Gods at Oot and at Castleguard would reflect the current state of the heavens when they reset at noon and midnight.
For a moment, he considered remaining without a warsuit, but decided that link, not only between himself and a warsuit, but through that warsuit to any of the other warsuits, was an advantage he did not wish to be without for long.
He walked not toward the forge he had created in Fort Sunder, where the bone metal anvil sat in place of the pieces of the Life Forge Wylant had destroyed all of those centuries ago, but toward a divine one and the one deity to whom he had not spoken, but then he paused.
“Balance,” he muttered to himself. “Of course. I almost made the same mistake Torgrimm made the first time.”
Turning in the air, he let himself flow toward Torgrimm as fast as he could, gripping Reaper firmly in both hands. A new warsuit would have to wait.
CHAPTER 5
THE CLOSING OF LOOPHOLES
Clothed in simple farmer’s garb, Torgrimm worked in an ethereal garden planting fruits and vegetables he did not need to eat; but it amused him to do so, and it was something to do in between births, now that deaths and the collection of souls no longer occupied his time. Births were easily his favorite part of life. The dead needed to be consoled, addressed, handled, but the souls of those yet to be born were uncomplicated.
To most souls, one species was as good as another, and so sending them along to the right parents was almost the same as sending them to any parent at all, unless they were particularly rare sorts of beings. The rarest souls could take tremendous deliberation. Kneeling in the dirt outside the small cottage / palatial estate (which depended on whether it was his or Minapsis’s turn to control the particulars of their shared living area), Torgrimm withdrew a glowing package from his seed bag.
Unwrapping the layers of silk, he lay the egg-shaped object and its covering out on the loamy earth, the ground beneath it growing alternately cold, then hot, as it pulsed. Light and bright and burning, cold to the touch, but engulfed by flames, the soul of Barrone’s last dragon presented a unique problem for the deity. Torgrimm knelt over it in study, still at a loss.
He’d been wondering what to do with Coal since the dragon’s death in its final battle with Hasimak, the Eldrennai Master of High Elemental magic, and the old elf’s apprentices: the four elemental nobles. The combat had ended with the death of the dragon and three of the elementalists. Kholster had sent the Eldrennai and the dragon to Torgrimm to be reincarnated. The elves had been easy, but the dragon . . .
A dragon’s soul would not fit naturally within a mundane body, but breaking it up into several smaller bodies did not seem like the thing to do either. The afterlife was out of the question, because Coal had long been banned from it in the aftermath of the ancient wrongs that had earned him the title “Betrayer” among his kind. Torgrimm could not send Coal to another realm, as had been done with so many of the others, because the Treaty of Star Preservation precluded the presence of more than one true wyrm in each reality, thus avoiding the same stellar depredations that had led to the construction of the Outwork and the barren emptiness that was the Dragonwaste beyond it.
And though the souls of all dragons were technically Jun’s flame, Torgrimm didn’t feel as if it were something that ought to be returned to the Builder. It was no longer the raw material of life, but a finished product.
Finished.
Yes. That was the root of the dilemma. Coal considered himself finished, as did Torgrimm. In the dragon’s own strange way, it had redeemed itself at the end by keeping its word to the Aern and dying in a grand fashion. Its morals would have seemed strange to a human, just as Torgrimm was sure the morals of the insectoid Issic-Gnoss Queen would have felt confusing to a Dwarf or an Aern, much less a dragon.
“Min,” Torgrimm called to his wife in the cottage. They had taken to playing at mortals when they were alone. When it was his turn to pick the state of the house, it was hers to pick whatever food they might eat. He could smell the sizzling meat from where he knelt, and he shook his head in bemusement. He preferred a meatless diet, and hers was a carnivore’s palate, but even deific marriages were built on comprise, and so they each met the other’s meal ideas with gusto and appreciation. And, in the same way, where he preferred most mundane modes of communication, Minapsis utilized more divine methods.
“Min?” he called again. A sense of being observed, of benign focus, came over him, and he smiled. The Horned Queen was not one to waste words.
“What do you think I ought to do with him?” He cleared his throat, standing, the soul cradled to his breast. “The dragon, I mean.”
“I’ve answered this.” Minapsis manifested next to him, clad in a silk garment embroidered with miniature likenesses of the many afterworlds that were under her domain. Her left half depicted punishment, her right reward. The crown-like arrangement of horns on her head held the crystalized souls of her most ardent worshippers, permitted to dwell with her directly for a time until they were returned to the tending of souls in various states of redemption. To Torgrimm, no being was more beautiful than she. “Give the soul to me. He is not the only elder wyrm whose after-ending I have overseen.”
“But what will you do with him?” Torgrimm asked.
As she arched her eyebrows, a second set of eyes normally concealed beneath them opened, the pupil-less orbs of violet rimmed white glaring down at him.
“I’m not doubting you, dear,” Torgrimm hurried to explain. The Horned Queen did not abide meddling in her work, even from the deities she loved. Her brother, even at the height of his powers, had wilted beneath the gaze of her second eyes, the eyes with which she stared into the core of any soul. “I am concerned for Coal’s essence, and I know you will do whatever is right and fair, but I can’t help wanting to know.”
; “You are no longer the Harvester, my love.” The eyes closed, and her expression softened, a feeling of love and gentle reproach washed over him in soothing waves. “And even if you were, you ask for knowledge that is not yours to possess. Either render the soul unto my care or do with it whatsoever you will, but I ask that you cease this dithering. It is unbecoming.”
“No matter what you do with Coal’s soul,” Kholster said, manifesting near them both, “we need to revisit part of that statement.”
“Dithering?” Torgrimm asked.
“No.” Kholster, armor-less and clad in his usual garb, sniffed at the odor of cooking meat in the distance. Torgrimm couldn’t quite place it, but his fellow god felt different. Some fundamental change had been wrought within him.
“What do you want?” Minapsis snapped, banishing the cooking smells with a wave of one set of arms. “It hasn’t been more than a few hours since—”
“Since one of me was here delivering souls,” Kholster said. “I know, but that was back when there was more than one of me.”
“Was?” Vision obscured as his wife teleported to a spot directly between Kholster and himself, Torgrimm strained his head around to look past her.
“Please, don’t.” Twin axes of bone appeared in her hands, a layer of dark metal rising like mist from her skin to form a suit of brigandine. “He’s so much happier this way.”
“I’m not tracking either of you, but—” Torgrimm said, only to find himself perfunctorily hushed by his wife.
“There must be balance,” Kholster told her. “I just figured it out thanks to an old friend, but I suspect you’ve known all along.”
“I did.” Minapsis nodded. “I hoped you would not.”
“Do you have a better suggestion?” Kholster asked.
“Yes,” Minapsis growled. “Reap the world. Cleanse it of all save the Aern and your damnable creator, then give all of the souls to me.”
“That would give Uled quite an army.” Kholster’s eyes glistened, locked on Minapsis, but he made no move to don his armor or manifest a warpick.
“Have you no faith in your daughter?”
“More than I have in most beings.”
Tense and electric, the air between them failed to fill with coruscating lightning or streaking streams of fire as Torgrimm felt they ought. A vague memory seemed to stir from a deep sleep in the back of his mind, some remnant from before he had been simplified and become Sower only. He could touch the edges of it, but the memory felt as if it were elsewhere, as if it had not survived the transformation he’d undergone when Kholster tore away half of his power.
“Why now?” Minapsis asked.
“Tell me a better time,” Kholster said, shrugging, “and I’ll come back then. After dinner, maybe?”
“No.” The Horned Queen shook her head. “I would not be able to enjoy it, and my lack would ruin things for him, too. You have all you need or—”
“Most of it,” Kholster said.
“Thank you for letting him have the time he did, Kholster.” With a sigh, she opened her second set of eyes and studied Torgrimm briefly, before reaching out and seizing a portion of his power. Without pause or explanation, she ripped it free, a writhing mass of energy.
“Ow,” Torgrimm yelped. It was hard to believe such a small portion could accomplish so much, but why would she take that piece of him away?
“Trust me, dear,” Minapsis said, “it was less painful for me to do it.”
“I don’t understand.” Torgrimm wiped his hands on his pants again, needlessly, then said, “Hey!” as she hurled the power to Kholster. “Min, why did you do that? I don’t understand any of this.”
You will, an echoing metallic voice intoned. Harvester manifested and engulfed Torgrimm entirely, reuniting the Sower and the Reaper, birth and death.
Balance restored.
CHAPTER 6
REUNIONS
Frowning in the morning light, Rae’en paced the edges of the balcony outside the room that had once served as the quarters for Kholster and Wylant when they had been stationed at the fortress, in the time when the Eldrennai had held the leash and her people had still been spell-sworn to obey their creator’s race in all things. Rae’en adjusted her shirt of bone-steel mail, wondering how something that had been so much a part of her less than a month ago now took getting used to when she was outside of her warsuit. The world beyond Bloodmane’s metallic embrace loomed too close, and she was too diminished to dwell properly in it.
“I’m too short,” Rae’en whispered into her hands. Best to try and get her mind on useful matters.
Coming along okay? she thought at Kazan.
A little unexpected detour, Rae’en, but we’re on the other route now, he sent back. Nothing to worry about.
Was there something furtive about his thoughts? Rae’en let it go, sucking in air between clenched teeth. She hated this. Not the responsibility, she’d been raised for that, but this . . . this . . . feeling.
The denim of her jeans felt raw and exposed, her thick boots too light and insubstantial. Though the cool morning air did not chill her, she still felt its touch against her skin and riffling her red hair. The scents it carried were muted and uncommunicative. With a short hop, Rae’en landed on the balcony rail, letting the connection between herself and the bone-steel hold her firmly in place despite the thin slick ice that coated it.
Rae’en growled in frustration at the scene below her, exposing the doubled upper and lower canines so distinctive to the Aern, finding fault with the chaos.
Sunslight fell on the battlements of Fort Sunder, picking out the pearlescent white of the bone-steel that coated the stone construction, and lending the massive structure that overlooked the Shattered Plains an air of unreality even greater than that which it had possessed in the all too recent past, when iridescent crystal barriers had encompassed the whole of the keep and the grounds within the walls of the lower fortifications. Frost left its mark upon the walls and on the thick grass of the training grounds, where drilling areas had been sacrificed to house the refugees from Port Ammond and from the nearby villages, whose people sought the protection of their king and, perhaps more importantly, the Aern.
Their tents, some all of a piece, others assembled from whatever materials they had managed to scrounge, were reflected in the amber-rimmed jade of her pupils, then more darkly where the irises met the obsidian sclera of her eyes. Pale white forms in worn-out clothes moved among bronze-skinned Aern and looming warsuits.
Rae’en should have been able to smell the stink of the Oathbre . . . No. Stump-eared or not, they were Oathkeepers now. Aiannai. Though, in Rae’en’s opinion, few of them deserved the honor of being spared, it had all been agreed upon. Oaths had been given . . . And though she did not know whether breaking one of her own oaths would unmake her people in the same way they would have been Foresworn if her father, Kholster, First Forged, and until his death the only First of One Hundred the Aern had ever known, had ever done so, she knew that she would never give any stump-ear, Eldrennai or Aiannai, the thrill of seeing her falter like that. She would not let them see her weak.
And yet they looked so weak, weaker still so close to the center of the Life Forge’s unmaking and the twisting effect it wrought upon their elemental magic. Cramped so close together, the stink and the noise of them wasn’t the clash of arms or the shouts, grunts, and laughter of real fighters, but the nervous emanations of the frightened.
They had every right to that terror. Enough Zaur and Sri’Zaur were coming to wipe every last elf from the face of Barrone. And that, she was now told, was the least of her worries . . .
Her army—her people still hovered at the edge of her thoughts as they should, reassuring by their very existence. Kazan and her other Overwatches could be called upon with utmost alacrity, but they respected the boundaries of the exercise.
The exercise you are attempting to ignore? Bloodmane asked.
It’s impossible to ignore, she thought back.
A glance at the candle burning back in her room confirmed what she knew deep down: she’d only been outside of Bloodmane for a hundred count and already she was stamping about like a caged irkanth bristling with displeasure.
It will get better. The armor’s voice interrupted her thoughts. The more you get used to going back and forth, spending time outside of me—
I know, Rae’en snapped. I even agree, but that doesn’t mean I have to pretend to enjoy it.
No, Bloodmane agreed. I do not enjoy it either, but I have had more practice. I’m sorry I distracted you, kholster Rae’en.
It’s fine. She closed her eyes. What was I thinking about?
The issue with the abnormal corpses, Bloodmane prompted.
Right. Dead were rising.
Rae’en had seen the sights viewed by Alysaundra, Teru, and Whaar, the Bone Finders kholster Zhan had dispatched to the now-obliterated capitol of the technically extinct Eldrennai to recover the bone metal of one of Glayne’s soul-bonded dagger. They had expected the slaughter and destruction they had found but not the army of risen dead crawling out of the rubble and forming up in neat formations around the dragon—or later the way it had been leveled utterly. Not even a dragon usually wrought such destruction.
Coal.
One cannot become friends with a dragon quickly, so Rae’en had never been very close to the ancient wyrm, but Kholster had grown close enough to the dragon over the centuries that Coal had been a regular advisor to him. Rae’en had wondered what kind of advice such a being might give until she had become First and Bloodmane had bonded with her. Whatever means Kholster had used to defeat Torgrimm, the former god of birth and death, to become the new death god himself meant his knowledge had not passed to her the way it should have. By leaving his warsuit behind, however, Kholster had granted her access to a great number of his experiences, even if they were from a more objective eye.
“What happened to his soul?” Rae’en whispered, the act of saying it softly rather than thinking it making it less likely she would actually fail the exercise and communicate with her Overwatches or her armor until the time limit set by Bloodmane had elapsed. “You could tell me, couldn’t you, father?”