Nethereal (Soul Cycle Book 1)

by Brian Niemeier

  “You’ll never leave here,” said Deim. “I’ll kill you first!”

  The walking void uttered a sigh that shook chips of stone from the platform. “Even so gifted a Factor will have difficulty killing a god.”

  “You’re no god,” said Deim. “You’re just common scum off the streets of Ostrith.”

  The self-styled god extended a hand as dark as smoke. “I do not ask blind faith of my servants, and I offer my friendship to any who seek it.”

  “I've seen your friendship,” Deim spat. He planted his feet at the platform's edge. “I'd rather have your hate.”

  Deim’s mind had never been clearer; his will never so focused. There was no need for the Compass. He fashioned the greater Working and loosed it almost simultaneously. Vaun burst into black motes an instant before the blast shattered the platform. The pressure wave expanded, hurling a lethal spray of stone shards in all directions.

  Deim perceived two sequences of events: one in which the cloud of stone scoured away his flesh; and one in which Vaun still faced him from the center of the dais. After a moment of torturous flux, the latter scenario asserted itself.

  “Favor and wrath are mine to dispense,” the deified necromancer said.

  Deim couldn’t speak. Vaun’s reality-bending paradox had left him struggling for balance.

  “I see now why my sister bid you to learn my art, said Vaun. The Words of Creation are deepest necromancy, giving life to death itself. She wished you to claim the First Working in my stead.” Silent laughter filled Deim's mind. “Her plan was bold, but you are unmeet for the task.”

  The fiery script etched upon the city below faded as a wave of darkness traversed the loop. Tzimtzum’s towers crumbled in its wake. When the tide of destruction came full circle, a shaft of sickly golden light flashed from Vaun's outstretched hand and into Deim’s midsection.

  Deim didn’t cry out as he fell, and not just because the otherworldly cold flooding through him had frozen his lungs. His infernal pilgrimage had burned away every passion but blind zeal for the ancient soul bound to Elena’s name.

  The steersman hadn’t fallen far when gravity shifted, sending him hurtling toward the ruined city in an ever-widening spiral. He gained speed with each pass, and when at last he struck the ground, the impact sent cobblestones spraying upward like golden sparks.

  Nakvin stood outside the temple with Teg and Elena, peering up at the distant speck that had risen from the spire.

  “What’s that?” asked Teg.

  “Some kind of platform,” Nakvin said. “I think someone’s standing on it. Wait. I see—”

  A sound like the pealing of a colossal bell shook the ground, which started sliding along the great loop.

  “This is new,” said Teg.

  Nakvin felt Elena clutch her arm. Before she could object, the girl ran for the middle of the square, practically dragging her mother behind her. Teg’s steel-shod footsteps followed.

  The sky turned from pale silver to golden red as waves of fire swept through the surrounding streets. The flames died as suddenly as they'd ignited, leaving the city under a pall of darkness incensed with burnt metal.

  Nakvin’s heart raced from exertion and terror. The conflagration had left the plaza unscathed, but she had no idea what was happening.

  The gloom lifted, revealing the city’s twisted ruin. Violent tremors followed the shadow's passing, attended by a deafening rumble that grew louder as the shaking intensified. Nakvin stared in mute horror as row upon row of towers and palaces; temples and mansions toppled like game tiles. The swath of destruction reached the square, reducing the majestic structures at its boundaries to piles of loose debris.

  Nakvin held Elena close as the quake surged along the bend of the loop. When it passed, she, her daughter, and Teg stood in an irregular clearing amid a featureless field of rubble. Only the high temple remained standing. The sky above had taken on a rosy glow.

  “Should I even ask what that was?” Teg asked between coughing fits.

  Nakvin cleared the dust from her throat and said, “Someone used the Working.”

  “Well,” said Teg, “let's pray it wasn't Vaun.”

  Deim didn’t know how much time had passed between his fall and his emergence from his cairn of gold rubble. Yet emerge he did, broken bones grinding under torn skin that shone with sallow light; his mind churning with shattered thoughts.

  Deim's clothing was torn to bloody rags, but one article remained intact: the small amber globe, slitted like a cat's eye, which adorned his belt as it had his father’s before him.

  Gladness penetrated Deim’s fractured awareness. The eye served its bearers by absorbing Workings loosed against them. It had siphoned a modicum of the fledgling god’s dark miracle, and it brimmed with the Void’s hunger.

  Deim shambled through the ruined city, driven by one desire. He turned his battered face upward and he saw the pale monstrous form of Elathan. A window had opened in the silver sky to reveal an expanse of rose-colored mists. The cruel god had already plunged into the ether, hastening to join those who’d gone before him.

  With a shrill cry, Deim stretched a mangled hand skyward and emptied his talisman, projecting an echo of the First Working toward the vile deity's heart. His final task done, the steersman collapsed upon a mound of broken gold.

  Nakvin saw the golden beam streak upward from the ruins to impale the fleeing god. Elathan’s great wings stopped beating. A fire kindled deep inside him that poured forth white light until his pallid flesh burst. Elathan died like a collapsing star, spewing fire into the ether.

  Five slender lines of fire traced their way down from the supernova’s heart and into Elena's back. She cried out as the cords that had bound her burned away. The young woman’s back arched, and she fell to her knees, her face contorted in pain.

  Nakvin knelt and gently touched her daughter’s shoulder.

  Elena screamed.

  “You’d think she'd be relieved,” said Teg.

  “Would you shut up?” Nakvin snapped.

  The young woman suddenly stood and faced the temple. After a moment she turned to her mother with pleading eyes. “It's not safe,” Elena said. “You have to go.”

  “What's happening?” Nakvin asked. “Is Deim all right?”

  Elena’s voice fell. “He was already dead when he loosed the Last Working.”

  Teg looked skyward. The raging fire that had started as a distant spark was rapidly filling the sky. “That's not our ether, right?” he asked. “You said Elathan was heading to another world.”

  “The ether surrounds the Strata, but it also leads to other worlds,” Elena said. “Tzimtzum is the gate between our ether and the outside, and now the gates are open.”

  Teg eyed Elena. “You said gates. Where’s the other one?

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “Can't you stop it?”

  “I can't hold back the power of a god.”

  Dread filled the pit of Nakvin’s stomach. “How many other worlds are going to burn?”

  “Just us,” Elena said. “Only our side is open.”

  “I wish Jaren had left a zephyr and three bullets,” said Teg.

  Elena's face became serene. “Run to the temple,” she said. “Go through the side doors.”

  Nakvin wrestled with the meaning of her daughter’s words, but faith overcame her doubts. “All right,” she said. She turned to run while keeping hold of Elena's hand, but her daughter didn't move.

  “What are you doing?” Nakvin asked.

  “I'm staying,” said Elena.

  “The hell you are!” Nakvin said. “You're coming with us.”

  Elena looked at the platform hanging over the tower. “Something terrible was born today mother,” she said. “I can't let it escape. If it does, you'll wish you'd stayed.”

  Nakvin hardened her voice to hide her anguish. “You said you couldn’t stop a god.”

  Elena faced the raging inferno and said, “Not yet.”

 
“Come on!” said Teg. “We go right now, or we lay down and die.”

  The sky had turned almost completely red. In that awful moment, the oracle’s words returned to haunt Nakvin. A door, she thought. And a terrible choice.

  “I was made to finish Thera’s work,” Elena told Nakvin. “She hated her father and killed him. I want to save you because you love me.”

  Nakvin clasped her daughter’s hand. “I do,” she said. “You’re what I’ve been missing my whole life. Please don’t leave me.”

  “I remember that girl from the Freehold,” Elena said. “You made me promise not to be like her. This is how I keep that promise.”

  Something snapped in Nakvin's chest. She’d always thought of the term broken heart as a figure of speech. She learned otherwise as numbness crept over her. Without another word, she turned from her daughter and ran.

  Elena watched her mother and her last living friend scrabble through the ruins. She’d expected to join Elathan in oblivion, but her life hadn't ended—at least not yet—and her connection to the ether remained. Divine fire flowed through her soul to burn the world. The feeling both terrified and exhilarated her.

  Sending forth a fraction of her rapidly magnifying power, Elena realigned the spaces beyond the temple doors. The Souldancer was relieved to see the fleeing pair pass under the arches. Her mother chose the left portal and Teg the right. They would be far apart, but safe.

  From Elena’s perspective, the onrushing flames slowed to a glacial crawl mere feet above the temple’s apex. Her thoughts accelerated to the point that she could have recited Gen epic poems between atomic vibrations.

  “I know you're there,” Elena said to the empty city.

  “Well done, my sister,” the Void echoed in reply. “Just as you've discerned my presence, so have I gained knowledge of you, in addition to many other things. I know that you meant to betray me. However, I have usurped power destined for you, so I will forgive your treachery.”

  “How kind,” Elena said, “but your mercy is worthless. We'll both be incinerated.”

  “Come now!” the audient darkness said. “The harpy and the swordarm are gone. You needn't feign pity. We both know you harbor no such weakness.”

  “True,” Elena said. “What are you offering?”

  “We are each halves of the same whole,” the Void entity said. “You possess Thera's soul and I her power. Fortunately, we are of like mind.”

  “Then tell me what Thera would do now,” Elena said.

  “She would gather the whole cosmos in her embrace! We can raise this universe from its ashes and fashion it into a realm of perfect order and harmony.”

  Elena motioned toward the temple's main door. The graceful, light-flecked interior gave way to desolate terrain under coal-black clouds limned with sallow light.

  A lean figure in a grey cloak suddenly stood before the door. He pulled back his cowl to reveal short dust-colored hair, took the white porcelain mask from his face, and cast it to the ground. Something like a ruby gleamed on its brow.

  “What need have I to hide?” the late Vaun Mordechai asked. “My name shall soon be hallowed by all. Our name, sister Thera.”

  The Souldancer walked toward the gate she'd opened to the Void. Her brother's smile never touched his lightless grey eyes as he offered his hand.

  “That's your domain,” Elena said in a deferential tone. “The nature of my realm makes visiting yours…uncomfortable.”

  “Why should it be? Yours is the ether.”

  “That's changing.”

  The god wearing Vaun's face nodded. “I see. The Well has acceded to you, while I control the Void. What perfect irony!” Laughing to himself, Thera’s usurper entered the gate.

  “Now it's perfect,” Elena said, commanding the gate with a gesture.

  The door to the Void became a vertical plane of blinding light. The god of Teth loosed a scream that drove his sister to her knees before the closing gate shut him out of the world.

  Kneeling before the temple stairs, Elena hugged herself to stifle a shiver. The new Well forming in the ether was supplanting her Worked body with raw prana.

  Elena opened her eyes as though for the first time and saw that she was alone. Once a patchwork soul lacking identity, she had become by turns daughter, murderer, deliverer, and now something without name or precedent. Though heir to the Void, she’d replenished the Well. Conceived to unmake the world, she’d spared a remnant—including herself.

  Elena weighed the possibilities before her as flames danced in slow motion overhead. Her expanding awareness traversed the ether and found a luminous domain all her own; sensed the utter darkness at its heart that only she could contain.

  I will meet you again there, mother, she vowed.

  Tzimtzum was empty when the fires rained down.

  Epilogue

  The city of Ostrith had stood for thousands of years beside a great sea. The sea's basin was empty. The capital of the Guild had straddled a swift river. The river had run dry. The jewel of the First Sphere had risen from a gentle, rolling plain. The land for miles around had faulted and buckled into ramshackle hills.

  Yet one of the city's former wonders remained. The Guild House of Ostrith still stood: an artificial mountain of polished black stone. The monolith ruled the silent ruins that sprawled away in all directions.

  The vast open space of Steersman's Square had also passed through the fire relatively unscathed, owing to its nature as a mostly featureless paved expanse. However, it hadn't entirely escaped the geologic upheavals that had wracked Mithgar afterward. A fault had shifted near the plaza's western side, tearing a deep chasm across the square's entire length in a nearly straight line from north to south.

  The Cataclysm had extinguished the city's every light, but not long afterward, a solitary glow kindled in the depths of the fault. The lonely light grew in intensity as its source slowly rose from far underground. A roar like faraway thunder echoed from below. Moments later, the guttering gleam vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.

  Someone standing beside the chasm might have seen the hand that rose from below and clawed the edge of the precipice. The hand was small and sheathed in sturdy black leather smudged with dirt. The slight fingers dug deep into the solid rock. A second, similar hand followed. At last, the rest of the climber’s slender form emerged into the cold night air.

  If any living thing remained in the ruins, it may have seen two points like distant blue stars shining in the darkened square. Those burning eyes looked upon the blasted city and beheld freedom long denied.

  New fires can start from the embers of the old. A writhing column of fire blazed skyward from beside the fault. The towering flame was accompanied by a singular sound; likely the loudest in the world at the time. It wasn't quite a voice, nor was it a crashing wave or a howling storm, for the ocean was dry; and the wind was calm. Whatever its source, the meaning behind it was clear. Bearing all the anguish, sorrow, and rage of a broken world, the agonized wail warned that the fire's work was not yet done.

  Glossary

  Adept: The title granted to those holding the highest Guild degrees. There are five levels of Adept in current usage. Rank increases in descending numeric order. Thus, Adept of the First is the highest Guild degree.

  Baal: A title derived from the old Nesshin word for “lord”. The style has been associated with a number of demons in various mythologies.

  Cardinal Spheres, the: Numbering four, these worlds are the wealthiest and most powerful planets within the Guild. In descending order of prestige the Cardinal Spheres are: Mithgar, Keth, Temil, and Cadrys.

  Ether, the: A universal medium through which light travels. “Ether” is used when referring to a quantity of this substance, while “the ether” refers to the region it occupies.

  The ether boasts a number of extraordinary qualities. It has practically no mass or viscosity and allows objects traveling through it to exceed the speed of light. Ether is also highly volatile and combustible.<
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  Ether-Runner: A ship built to travel quickly through space by traversing the ether. Almost all ether-runners are piloted using a sympathetic interface called the Wheel.

  Elathan: Deity belonging to many ancient pantheons under different names, though always associated with war, shipwreck, greed, and deceit. Most classical images of Elathan depict him as having one eye.

  Factor: The user of a Working or glamer; named for the act of fashioning prana.

  Gen: An immortal race of the Middle Stratum holding a place in the hierarchy of being one step above humans. “Gen” is the word for “people” in that race’s tongue, and is both singular and plural. The word’s pronunciation varies between Mithgarders, who render it “Ghen”, and Kethans, who prefer “Jen”.

  Glamer: A use of fashioned prana that directly affects or influences a living being.

  Guild, the: Properly, the Sublime Brotherhood of Steersmen. Though it is a private professional fraternity, the Guild acts as a self-appointed regulatory agency. Its primary functions are advancing the science of ether-running and regulating the construction of ether-runners and Wheels. The Guild’s authority is thought to rival the combined power of all current and former political bodies.

  Human: The race holding the middle position in the whole hierarchy of being. Called the clay tribe by the Gen, humans possess intelligence but have limited life spans.

  Kirth, Ebrim: a Factor from Mithgar celebrated as the first human to fashion a Wheel. Popularly called the Arkwright, Kirth is credited with pioneering human ether-running. A minority of revisionist historians claim that Kirth learned to fashion the Wheel from a Gen sage.