by Laken Cane
Rune glanced up as the sky darkened, thinking at first a storm was approaching. But it was cold. There was no storm.
More crows were arriving.
Thousands of them.
“Yes,” she whispered. “My army of crows.”
As they zoomed from the sky, more of the witch’s armies stomped onto the burnt grounds.
And still more of them.
Legislators, men, other creatures Rune didn’t recognize.
“Carricorns,” someone screamed.
“What are—”
Before Rune could finish her question, she saw what could have only been carricorns.
Birds—sort of. Long, dull yellow, and featherless, they flew at Rune’s crows and attacked them with sharp beaks as long as their bodies, keeping the crows aloft and away from the fighters on the ground.
While her attention was on the birds, one of the legislators snuck up behind her and Snow and right as the women shot a lethal dose of fire at his companions, the legislator hit Rune in the back with one of his gigantic hooves.
She dropped, hard and fast, and for a long moment could do nothing but struggle to breathe. She felt nothing.
Her back was broken.
But Snow was there. She grabbed Rune’s hand. “Feel me. You found me in your dreams. Do it now.”
There was no time to think about it—legislators and unfriendly guards sprinted toward her, taking advantage of her injury.
Then the whip men joined the fray.
“Shit,” Rune cried, and felt her spine snap into place. Felt it strengthen, straighten, and heal—Snow’s power flowed into her body and made it whole.
“Good,” Snow said. “Now use what Mother Skyll gave you. I felt it there. Use it.”
“Yes,” Rune screamed, exhilarated. They would not lose to the witch.
She raised her hands as power, Skyll’s power, overflowed.
Snow, with her white hair and dark blue eyes, let go of her hand.
“My sister,” she said. “I’ve waited so—”
And a whip man, riding his foul kelper, cut her in half with his whip.
She stared up at Rune, her eyes still holding a fierce need, a lifetime of loneliness, and a desire to be loved.
As she lay dead upon the ground and Rune stared in shock, crawlers swarmed her body and began to fight for the pieces.
Two carricorns swooped from the sky and lit upon the fallen girl, stripping flesh from her bones in milliseconds.
Rune burned them to tiny, crispy bones, turning half of Snow to ash in the process.
“Fuck,” she screamed, and stood frozen, unable to think past the fact that she’d lost her sister just as she’d accepted the fact that she had one. “No, no. No, God, no.”
The witch’s killers, seeing her vulnerability, struck.
Damascus’s laughter cut through the air, wrapped around Rune’s brain, and tried to make her doubt herself.
Tried to make her doubt that she could ever defeat something like the witch or survive in a world like Skyll.
But the witch didn’t succeed in her attempts to defeat Rune with magic.
Because Mother Skyll was there, and she was mad.
She was furious.
Rune was about to unleash the true monster upon the world. She was the Mother’s instrument.
Once she set that power free, it wasn’t coming back. But that was okay, because she was about to take back from the witch what had been stolen from her.
Her monster.
Herself.
She wasn’t going to kill the witch—not really.
Mother Skyll was.
She just needed to use Rune’s body to do it.
Chapter Fifty-One
What would happen to her once she’d fulfilled her destiny?
The thought poked at her even as she strode—untouched—to meet the witch.
She kept her stare glued to Damascus, who, from her perch on the hill, still didn’t seem to notice that something had changed.
She’d realized Snow, her Shame, was dead.
She was no longer laughing, the pale oval of her face turned toward her fallen daughter. Perhaps she cared a little for the girl.
Perhaps.
A legislator stomped toward Rune and she pointed at him.
Just pointed at him, and he exploded into what looked like giant clods of dirt.
Rune swallowed the sudden earthy tasting lumps in her throat.
That got the attention of two more of the brutes. They broke from the group who were busy tearing the limbs from a half dozen guards, and they roared and ran at her.
The ground churned around them and then swallowed them whole.
Rune swallowed and then spat the nasty, spoiled meat taste from her mouth.
She was the ground. The sky. The trees. The water.
She was Skyll.
It was that moment that Damascus understood.
At the bottom of the hill, Rune stared up at her, then began to climb.
“I’m coming for you,” she muttered.
But a scream halted her single-minded run for the witch, a scream too full of despair to ignore.
She turned to see Cree Stark standing with a blade in each hand, backed up against a black tree, terrified.
“Fuck me,” Rune muttered. “How the hell…”
Four crawlers had battled their way past the mental wall Cree Stark had thrown up, had battered it down and were feeding upon her fear.
And her body.
Rune threw a quick look up at Damascus and then ran for Cree. She grabbed the crawlers and where her hands touched, gaping, bloody holes were created.
The crawlers lay on their backs, shrieking, as blood and organs squeezed through the holes and plopped upon the ground.
“Where’s Owen?” Rune asked. “Where the fuck is Grim?”
“I don’t know,” Cree whispered. “You called. We had to come.”
“Stay beside me,” Rune ordered, and headed back toward the witch. She hoped to find a relatively safe nook for Cree but if she couldn’t, the girl would have to stay with her. At least Rune could protect her from legislators.
Damascus bared her teeth in a furious, half-mad grin, and despite her power, part of Rune melted into a puddle of terror.
But only for a second.
The air was nearly too thick with sheets of blood to see clearly, too loud with screams of pain to hear, and too alive with horror to fear anything else.
But Damascus was something to fear.
Mother Skyll might be her match, but Rune knew the battle could be lost.
Despite the tales, despite the faith.
They could lose to the fucking witch.
The Rune zombies were there, a few dozen of them, and they fought and killed with cold faces and dead eyes. They worked their way to Rune and surrounded her in a wide circle of protection.
The witch’s monsters and men continued fighting—killing, really—but as long as they didn’t approach Rune, the zombies did nothing but wait.
Her guards.
Oh shit.
Don’t allow fear to control you. This is—
Yeah, yeah. My fucking destiny, I know. But she still scares the fuck out of me.
Damascus didn’t resemble anything remotely human.
A mass swirled around her, and Rune knew it held the trapped souls, caught in a sticky web of magic and madness. The witch had become a long ropy mixture of shit and blood and mucus, held together with strings of black evil and grinning doom.
The earth trembled beneath Rune’s feet.
“Rune,” the witch called, her voice cutting through the battle sounds like a power saw, “I never wanted you as a daughter. I wanted to rip the monstrous bitch from you and squeeze the life from her. I wanted to take her power and add it with mine. Why,” she said, sounding almost reasonable, “we could have had everything. Now, I will have it all and I’m not sharing.”
Rune said nothing and clenched her teeth together to keep t
hem still.
“Look,” the witch called, almost playfully. “Look behind you. Look around you.”
Her armies had grown. They stomped from the hills, from around the moors, from the outer lands.
They were many. So many.
Cree had disappeared.
Kill the witch.
The rest will take care of itself.
And as Rune climbed the steep hill of bleached bones, she heard a sound like a trumpet and glanced over her shoulder.
Flesh came.
Brasque Dray’s army was joining the fight. They no longer hid behind unbreakable walls, but rode in on hundreds of armored horses to add their fighting skills to the downfall of the witch.
“You’ve always known you were going to die by my hand, witch. That time has come.” Her voice was hoarse and little more than a whisper.
Still, Damascus heard her, even from her perch atop the beast on the hill. Rune’s words flew to her as though they’d been ordered to do so.
As perhaps they had.
The witch raised her voice and it boomed like thunder, freezing the fighters in their tracks. They stared up at her, blades and fists frozen in midair, as she screamed.
“Kill,” she ordered. “Die! Lose your worthless selves in the madness that swirls inside.”
They broke out once more into a frenzy of killing.
Rune raced for the witch.
“If you defeat me,” the witch called, “there will be no one left to care.”
She giggled then, and it was the scariest, maddest sound Rune had ever heard.
“I’m waiting,” Damascus called. “I’m waiting for both of you.”
And the faster Rune climbed, the taller the hill became.
She grabbed handholds in the piles of white bone. Her boots sent loose debris tumbling from the pile to the ground below.
The hill of bones grew, and grew, and grew.
Then the beast reared up, screaming, and turned to carry the witch away.
“No,” Rune screamed, fighting her way up the hill. “Don’t you run, you fucking coward.”
“The rebels,” someone yelled. “They’re coming!”
On horseback and beastback, rebel groups sped over the barren land, answering the call of the battle. Their own battle cries races before them, heralding their arrival.
And they weren’t small groups.
Some of the witch’s fighters broke off and ran to meet them.
The whole world was a war zone, and it was overwhelming.
Rune clung to the hill of bones and stared out from her high vantage point. Warriors covered the ground for what seemed like miles as more people, groups, and fighters joined the battle.
She couldn’t find Z or the berserker or Lex in the moving mass of people, but couldn’t let herself think they might have lost their fight.
Creatures appeared that Rune had never seen. Hideous, horrible things. Trolls. Hairy two legged beasts. Winged beasts.
Vampires, wolves.
“The end of times,” someone screamed, and Rune couldn’t have agreed more.
The witch might die. Rune might destroy her. But her death wasn’t going to change what came before.
Madness swirled in the air along with the blood.
Chaotic magic licked the ground and flew through the sky.
It was an impossible war.
They were all going to die.
They struggled like desperate animals, no longer thinking.
Just killing.
All of them.
Rune shook her head, dazed.
She’d leave the bloody battle to the maddened fighters.
Damascus was her responsibility.
And as she felt Mother Skyll’s approval, warm and heavy, she saw that the witch’s fighters had begun killing each other.
They’d gone crazy.
Even the crawlers had gone mad—they were biting each other, themselves, even the sharp rocks on the ground.
Rune could not worry about anything else.
Her only concern was the witch.
Killing the witch.
Freeing the world, freeing herself.
But that thought caused her to stumble.
Who am I?
She wasn’t Rune, not really, not then.
A series of images shot through her mind. Memories, emotions, realizations.
She was Skyll.
She was the ground that had soaked up rivers of blood and gallons of tears, the sky that had sheltered broken bodies and shimmerless wanderers. She was the blackened, gnarled trees that had canopied shocking secrets and tremendous bravery. She was the currents of air that had carried countless souls, wavering hopes and unspoken dreams.
She was the mysterious moon that cloaked and shadowed and watched over the sleeping land, and the glorious sun that burned through darkness and warmed cold hearts. She was the rain that washed away the stains of a hard, bloody day.
She was the one who’d gone on, the one who remained, and the time that had passed.
She was Mother Skyll.
Or, more precisely, she was the host of Mother Skyll.
“This is my world,” she yelled, “and I’ve come to claim it.”
Damascus shrieked, not from rage or frustration, but from terror and sudden comprehension.
She’d discovered she couldn’t leave the invisible walls of magic Snow and Rune had built. She was going to have to face Rune, and she was going to have to face her destiny.
Rune lapped up that scream like a crawler sucking in fear—lapped it up and wanted more.
For the witch had scorned the Mother. She’d scarred her, mistreated her, laughed at her. She’d done everything she could to destroy the Mother, and the Mother was going to make her pay.
Finally.
“I am magic,” Damascus screamed, jerking her beast in frantic circles as she sought an escape that did not exist. At last she leapt off him and with a single push, sent him tumbling over the edge of the bone hill to smash into the crowd below.
Then she bent her knees and jumped, rising twenty feet above the hill before she stopped to stare down at Rune. Her hair spread around her, black and long and waving gently, and the ends of the thick strands glowed red like banked coals.
More dead rose from the ground to offer their skills to the Army of Death and Darkness, and the witch’s dungeon keepers released shimmer prisoners to heed the call of the princess.
From all over Skyll, its people marched to battle.
Rune knew, because they walked upon her. They walked under her, through her, with her.
Each minute, each second she grew in power.
She had to.
“For my people,” Rune whispered, and she jumped.
There was nothing she couldn’t do.
She flew like a missile at the witch. The air lifted her with the strength and ferocity of a million arms, with the speed of a thousand master vampires.
No fear.
She rammed the witch so hard she nearly went through her, and for a moment she saw, and felt, the swirling mass of screaming, trapped souls.
She saw herself in there.
Her monster.
Her monster bit the invisible force that held her, clawing with her vicious claws, screaming in rage, her eyes wide and bloody.
Rune lost her mind for a second as she witnessed her monster—herself—trapped and full of murder and blackness inside the witch.
She saw that there was nothing…good in her monster.
She didn’t care. She wanted that part of herself back, because without it, she was incomplete. She was less.
“You cannot win,” Damascus screamed. “You cannot!”
“I can’t lose,” Rune said. “I have the fates on my side and the world herself guiding me.”
The witch released a stream of fire that Rune was too slow to dodge, and she felt her skin burn and melt before she shrugged off the pain and absorbed the terrible magic.
The witch’s eyes wide
ned and she quelled the blazing blue fire she’d been preparing to send after the first round.
Rune smiled. “Yes, Mother. Give me all your power.”
“How,” Damascus asked, floating backward. “How?”
“Give me back my monster.” Rune, carried on the smoke scented wings of Skyll air, floated closer to the witch.
“If you want it, you’ll have to come take it.”
Rune sent the witch’s fire back at her, and when Damascus was off balance and attempting to ward off the burning magic, Rune took her opportunity. Power coursing through her, she flew at the witch, then sent her stiffened fingers into the witch’s chest.
For one brief second, she held the witch’s pulsing heart.
For one brief second, she thought that yes, it really would be that easy.
But Damascus was ready for her.
Rune felt her mother latch on to her breath, her essence, her soul.
Damascus pulled back, and they remained connected by the magic stretching between their mouths.
Rune couldn’t tear herself away.
“You really thought it would be that easy,” the witch said. “Arrogance will gain you nothing and will give me everything. Everything.”
Rune could feel the witch’s contempt, her pleasure, her glorious satisfaction.
“You’re a baby,” Damascus said. “My pathetic little baby. Now I have you. All of you.”
She drew in a deep, deep breath, and Rune could feel her soul, clinging and screaming and fighting, begin to leave her body.
The witch was stealing her soul, and she couldn’t do one thing to stop it.
She and the witch twirled, high in the sky, inches apart, connected by a single breath.
“Rune,” she heard someone yell, a voice that seemed a thousand miles away, and she knew it was Z.
They were connected. They’d always been connected.
Even death hadn’t been able to keep them apart.
She’d found her Z.
And no matter what happened, the witch couldn’t take that from her.
As she twirled high in the sky, attached in such a hideous way to the witch, the sounds below slowly quieted as the remaining people of Skyll suspended their combat to watch the one battle that would decide their fates. The one fight that would change how their lives would be forever after.
The battle between good and evil.
Even through the madness the witch had showered upon them, they stood silent and still and watched.