by Sam Cheever
Pulling together every ounce of willpower I had, I stopped pushing at the lightning bolt that danced and hissed between us, burning a track in the floor and ceiling of that revolting room. I left the protective bubble in place to hold it off and threw my power in another direction. Beneath me, the souls of thousands of Nerul’s enemies lay trapped in the physical remains of their bodies, which consisted now only of a gathering of hair fibers, the rest of their physical forms having long since been sent to a cold, unhappy grave. I realized that if they were enemies of Nerul then they were friends of mine. What was left of those unfortunate souls waved and throbbed beneath my feet in helpless agitation because that was what Nerul had planned for them when he’d trapped their souls in that helpless state. But if I could I was going to release their souls and allow them to help me defeat the evil Rayanne.
I dropped my hands to my sides and redirected the power into the floor. I sent my senses into the horror beneath my feet and concentrated on melding them with the trapped souls there. Almost immediately a wall of angry, frustrated voices slammed into me, the voices of thousands of lost souls clamored and begged me for release. At first, terrified by the intensity of the onslaught, I fought against the angry voices and tried to push them down, but I suddenly realized that, rather than trying to force them into a manageable box, I would have more success letting them rage and using it. So that’s what I did. I opened myself up to the fury of those released souls and allowed them to flow through me into that room. In turn, they fed upon my power, taking it with them as they surged free and amplifying it as they merged into one, incredibly powerful and pissed off force. The result was catastrophic.
Almost immediately the floor beneath me started to rumble. The rock beneath the carpet shifted violently, nearly throwing me to the ground. I fought to regain my balance just as, above my head, the horrifying representation of Hades shattered and spat billions of shards of glass toward the ground. I felt the glass bouncing off me and saw it pile up around my feet, but I was so deeply immersed in channeling that I was numb and felt as if I stood apart from the physical world around me.
Rayanne’s shadow form wavered and looked, for a moment as if it would fade as the room imploded around us. But I reached out with the enhanced power I now shared with thousands of angry souls and grabbed her before she could disappear.
Her shadow mouth opened in a silent scream, which from behind me on the floor, was echoed by her physical form. Fueled by the anger in the released souls, I tore through Rayanne’s shadow form with razor-like tentacles of power and ripped her apart. I watched her chest cave inward and then explode into the room, casting a green haze like smoke into the roiling air around me.
Almost simultaneously I felt her body rise up off the floor behind me and I turned, carrying my anger-fueled power rush with me and smashing it into her before she had time to even move a finger to stop me.
Her face creased in an ugly scowl. She flew away from me and hit the stone wall with a sickening crunch. Slowly she pushed herself to her feet and stood, leaning against the wall, which was coming apart behind her in a spider web pattern that was quickly widening into cracks and spewing stone-dust into the room in choking waves.
I stood several feet away from her. My legs spread in a bracing stance and my face impassive. I was aware that my skin had started to glow with the combined power of a thousand angry souls. The rough material of the robe whipped around my legs, caught in a frenzied wind that raged around and through that cavern room, pulling my power with it and causing devastation everywhere it touched. My long, auburn hair whipped away from me, blown back by the sucking wind. As I stared at the evil Barbie, I slowly raised my arms to the sky, feeling the power pulse between my uplifted hands. Seeing her death in my face, Rayanne cringed back, throwing one hand up in front of her face as if to block my attack. At that point, even if I’d wanted to I was incapable of stopping the power. I was a renegade laser train speeding down a mountainside with no brakes.
Three inhuman steps brought me face to face with her. She dropped her covering hand and flew at my throat, her long, gleaming white teeth bared to rip my throat out. I felt her hit me and heard the flesh of my throat ripping. I was aware of something wet running down my throat and soaking warmly into the neck of the rough, brown robe, but I felt no pain or fear as she tore into my throat with those knife-like teeth.
I was like a mindless machine, with no thought for anything but killing the evil Rayanne. I reached up and pulled her from my throat, holding her off the floor before my face with a strength I’d never had before. Her lips and chin were shiny and wet with my blood, but already I could feel the hole she’d chewed in my throat closing and I knew that somehow I would heal myself. I smiled at her and finally saw the fear spark in her black eyes. That fear told me I had won. She was mine.
“Get thee to Hades fool, for God hath tired of you!” My voice boomed through the room, rising to vibrate against the quickly disintegrating rock walls. Rising even above the thunderous cacophony that the disintegration of millions of years of geological architecture wrought in those underground caverns. It was an inhuman voice, filled with the power of a thousand long-tortured souls and the combined hatred that had too long lived within them.
I threw the full force of my power into her, flinging her like a rag doll thirty feet away to crash against the far wall. Then something twisted in my heart and, before I even realized I’d had the thought, I’d sent hundreds of knife-like shards of glass from the shattered mural flying toward her. She had almost regained her feet when they slammed into her. The magic driven sheet of shattered glass pummeled her, ripping her flesh away from her bones and driving what was left of her back into the wall. The shards of glass hit with such force that, despite their fragility, they were driven cleanly into the rock at her back, pinning her mangled body to the wall.
I stood there for a moment that was collapsed in time, my heart pounding terrifyingly in my chest and my breath coming out in gulping gasps. My body started to tremble uncontrollably as, from somewhere amidst the jumbled mess that was my thoughts, I extracted the notion that I’d taken a turn toward my monster side that I would never be able to retrace. This thought caused me to fall to my knees in sudden, bone-melting weariness. The subterranean room continued to rumble and collapse around me. As my head drooped onto my chest I realized that I would soon be buried alive in debris. It was hard to make myself care.
Like a bolt of lightning through my benumbed brain, Emo’s face flashed across my mental screens, drawing me out of myself with a jolt. I felt adrenaline surge through my veins again. My gaze flew to him. With horror I realized that the wall he’d been hanging from was crumbling away rapidly and he was now lying on the floor, quickly being covered by flying stone, dust and glass. I jumped to my feet and rushed toward him.
I took the space between us at a speed that shattered any hope I might have had that I had retained my scrap of humanity after recent events. I scooped him up with my newfound strength and fairly flew from that room, praying that I’d be able to find my way out of that horrid cavern.
As I reached the passageway that led toward the ceremony cave, I realized the implosion I’d started in Nerul’s office hadn’t stopped there. Chaos reigned in that subterranean hell as rock walls and ceilings crackled and thundered and fell about the inhabitants in varying sizes of chunks.
Emo and I were quickly caught up in a slowly moving retreat and I soon began to fear that we’d be crushed and trampled by the onrush. Hooded figures swarmed around us, flinging each other down and charging toward what I assumed was an exit out of the court. I followed as best I could and prayed I’d make it out in time to save Emo.
After a few moments of the crushing retreat, we emerged into sunlight and I suddenly found myself with room to move again. I carried Emo into the dense underbrush around the face of the cave and laid him on the ground. He groaned as I laid him down and all of the breath left me when I saw how pale he was. His usual ruddy red skin tones had been r
eplaced by a kind of pinkish gray color. I could tell by his shallow and infrequent breathing that he was a hair away from eternal life. Panic welled in my chest.
“Hang in there, partner. I haven’t given you permission to leave yet. You’re still on the clock here. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!”
Although I knew I was avoiding the inevitable, I pulled several small slivers of glass from his chest, arms and legs before turning to the knife in his cheek. I remembered the gargoyle claw and my skin went clammy. I knew I would have to call the power to heal him or he would die. I also knew that what I had just done in that cave had scared the soul out of me. I was deathly afraid that I had gone beyond the point of return and my soul was lost to me. I had felt the devil take over in that horrible room and I was terrified to unleash it again. I’d barely managed to pull it back in there. I was afraid to let it out again. But I knew I’d have to. I had no choice.
Before I could chicken out, I laid one hand on the hilt of the knife and wrapped the other one around the blade, resting it palm down on Emo’s flesh. Closing my eyes I reached tentative mental fingers toward the core of my power and drew it forward reluctantly.
It slid smoothly from its hiding place, rolling into my hands enthusiastically and easily. I poured it into the knife that lay buried in my friend and concentrated on pulling it free and closing the wound behind it. The knife vibrated under my fingers and then slid smoothly and wetly out. I allowed it to drop to the ground beside Emo’s head and smoothed my hand over the wound. I felt the blood reversing its flow and moving away from the wound, back into Emo’s body. I felt the edges of the wound knitting together from the inside and I drove the power until it had completely closed the wound under my hands. Then I moved my hands to his chest and repeated the process there.
Once his body was whole again, I touched his forehead and shuddered at what I sensed there. I gently nudged my magic into Emo’s mind, prodding his brain to heal and pull him back to life, because I perceived a weakness there that scared me more than the knife had. It was a giving up. A letting go of life. It was death. He was grabbing hold of death instead of life.
After a moment I realized I’d done all I could do. I gently withdrew the power and sat back. Hot moisture stained my cheeks and I realized I was crying. As it had in that horror chamber inside the cave, my heart was pelting the inside of my chest in a panicked state. I was going to lose my best friend and there was nothing I could do about it.
He lay there barely breathing, although his color had returned. He looked lifeless and way too still. I wanted to grab him and shake him into consciousness but I was afraid to move him. Feeling helpless is not one of my better things.
I stood and started to pace. I suddenly realized that it had grown quiet in the cave. Dark worlders no longer spewed from its face and the ground beneath my feet no longer rumbled and shook. Other than a thick dust that hung in the air just inside the opening, the cataclysmic event might not even have happened.
Suddenly I remembered Nille and Dialle and Nerul and I wondered what had happened to everybody. I thought of the static I’d pushed away as I’d fought to drive off Rayanne and I felt a new level of panic rising in me. Dialle had been calling to me. I was sure of it now. And Nille. I’d pushed them away in there and now I didn’t know what had become of them. I suddenly knew what I had to do. I’d done all I could for Emo. I had to go back into that cave.
With a final glance at my friend I said a quick prayer, only momentarily wondering if my prayers would even be heard anymore after what I’d done and forced myself to turn my back on my dying friend. I moved toward that cave with a feeling of such dread that I wondered at my ability to keep my feet moving forward. I knew suddenly with an incredible clarity that I was about to face my greatest foe. And that one of us would need to die. I had a cold knot in my gut that told me I was afraid it was gonna be me.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A Battle Due
Into that cave our lady did go, to face the evil core,
And though she knew she’d meet her end, she’d waver nevermore.
The dust hanging in the air as I reentered the cave gathered in my throat and nostrils and clogged them, stifling my ability to take in the great gulping breaths I needed to set my fear aside. I pulled the rough material of the demon robe I was still wearing over my nose and mouth and tried breathing through it. After a minute I was able to take enough deep, calming breaths so that I could move forward into the thick air without coughing my guts up through my mouth.
The light, which had been dim before, was now almost completely obscured by the dust in the air. As I moved more deeply into the cave and lost the light that was filtering in through the entrance, I found that I had to rely more and more on touch. I walked close to the wall on my left side so that my right hand, which was clutched around the knife I’d found on the dirt floor just inside the entrance, could work if I needed it. A few yards into the passageway, I became aware of a strange whirring noise. I followed the sound and soon found myself emerging into the cavern. What I saw there was stranger than anything I’d ever experienced before.
The air at the top of the cavern was alive with something silvered and shimmery. I tucked myself back into the shadows and squinted upward. Although the shapes that floated above my head had a familiar feel, they were indistinct and moved much too quickly for me to recognize them. Like fireflies around a bright white light, they flitted here and there and shot away from the occasional fire bolt that flew at them from somewhere among the mass of bodies that littered the cavern floor.
The whirring sound I’d heard appeared to be coming from the fireflies in the sky. Now that I was in the cavern, I began to notice another sound. It was pitched low in both tone and volume, so that it almost blended into the background of my mind and ran unnoticed through my thoughts. But once identified, the sound brought my stomach into my throat. It was one of those entrancing chants that had left me helpless and as immobile as cement in my own home. It was the sound of evil and it wasn’t coming from those things above my head. It was coming from the center of the cavern.
As if touched by a fresh current of swiftly moving air, the murk at the center of the cavern cleared suddenly and I saw a tall naked figure standing upon the altar. His arms were raised high above his head and, although his back was to me, I suspected that the chants were emanating from him. As I squinted to see who it was, the figure turned toward me and I gasped.
Pale blue eyes pierced the dusty air and locked onto me in my hidden niche. The piercing gaze glowed through the murk like blue coals, pulling at me. It was like a siren song of old, drawing unexpected travelers to crash against a rocky shore. It sent a chill of cold apprehension down my spine.
Prince Nille’s voice carried through the dead atmosphere of that underground horror land and stabbed at my ears like needles made of ice. I wrapped my hands around my arms, momentarily forgetting the knife I clutched in one of them.
“So you return, lovely Astra. A pity your young Prince is dead. And even sadder that he called to you as he died. But alas, it appears that you were too preoccupied to answer him.”
Since it did me no good to hide in the shadows I stepped out and faced him across hundreds of slaughtered corpses. I stiffened my spine and dropped my knife hand to my side, but I didn’t drop the knife. I lifted my chin in defiance.
This was apparently it. I had been chosen for this moment. And although I hadn’t the foggiest what I was supposed to do against a creature as powerful as this very scary young devil prince, I knew it would be unveiled to me in due course. So, for the moment, I stood, if not tall then at least resolute before him. “I guess it’s just you and me then, Nille. Pity you don’t have more help.”
He laughed and with the sound the chanting dropped off and the air was silent. And very cold, I suddenly noticed. And it smelled like a butcher shop. “You are very small to be so cocky, Astra. And I am very big.”
“Yeah, yeah. And you have such big teeth gr
amma. I’m sure you’re gonna kill me, Nille, but I plan to take a chunk outta you before I go down.”
His smile stayed in place as he hopped lightly down from the altar. Watching him move toward me, I suddenly realized that the shimmery figures had all fluttered over to perch on the ledge above our heads, where Emo and I had first observed the goings on in that disgusting cavern. My eyes were immediately drawn to the figure at the center and narrowed on the golden-haired angel whose scowling countenance was all the body language I had to go on as a clue to her feelings. Take care, Astra.
Help me.
I felt rather than saw Myra shake her head. We are not allowed to affect the course of things that will be. Know only that, once that course has been determined, we will stand for you.
Gee…thanks a bunch.
Trust me when I tell you my heart is splitting in two.
Let’s just hope that’s all that gets split in two here.
Amen.
My eyes had never left Nille as Myra and I shuffled mental drawers. He was moving across the cavern on long, elegant legs. As his feet slid forward, bodies flew away from them to clear his path. He still carried the golden aura I’d noticed earlier, only this time I wasn’t nearly so taken by it. I recognized it for what it was now. This was one powerful and evil sonofabitch and he was coming for me. Shit.
I cast my eyes around the cavern for some ideas. Nothing came to me but I did notice a few dead royals I recognized. Dialle’s people. My heart did a quick jump that left behind a wave of nausea and I forced myself not to examine that reaction too closely right at that moment. Dialle. He’d called out to me and I’d blown him off. Now he was dead. Shit. Could I live with that?
Where was he? Was he lying somewhere on that cavern floor? My eyes scoured the cavern of cadavers, looking for survivors. The dead royals and many of the dead around them, appeared to have been sucked dry somehow. Their bodies, hunched and pale, had collapsed inward under gray, ashy looking skin.