by S. M. Beiko
“When we first got here,” he admitted, “Phyr herself told me it would be best to kill you, take your Opal, and leave.”
Not like I hadn’t accused him of this a hundred times. “Why didn’t you?”
I wanted him to talk to me the way he always had with snide disbelief. Blunt arrogance. Mistrust. That way I could have walked away and said it was because I wasn’t ready. I trusted his opinion, I realized, more than mine; he’d spent a huge chunk of his life preparing to be a Paramount. Flawed or not, it should have been him, not me, taking the lead.
“You’re not so bad,” was all he said.
I looked past him to Saskia, who sat outside the circle. She was a glowing coal from underneath, and I thought of the man from table five, when this had all started. It was so long ago. I’d been cocky then. Now I was paying for it.
The bone hilt was in my face and I snapped out of it. My hand gripped it and slowly drew it away from Eli, the charred bloody tip pointed directly at his chest, where his own heart was.
The Moonstone awoke, sputtering a shine through the dull, darkening patina over it. His wings slid out from his back, wide and open, the tips brushing against the close space of the sea cave we’d trekked deep into, as far away from people as we could manage. I suddenly realized that after this, I might not see him again.
“You’re not such a bad guy either,” I said, throat thick. I was grateful that he could figure out what I meant without me having to spell it out. That might have been too much.
The space around his eyes tightened. He didn’t try to hide it.
When the blood from my hand dripped down the hilt, I squeezed it harder. Eli’s hands twitched at his sides, his eyes turning to molten gold. He opened his arms, and the wind in the cave picked up.
“I call upon the wind that has shaped this stone down from the moon itself,” Eli intoned, and the circles and the sigils we had incised together lit with a flash.
“I call upon the fire at the heart of me and the dark that is a part of me still.” I squeezed back my tears until they were just hot mist, never there at all.
“To the stones that we two bear, spirit to spirit, dark to dark, we make this appeal.”
Now our voices were one, the same, and if Eli was putting the words into my mouth with his mind I didn’t care. I was as desperate as him to see this right.
But then his mouth was still. He was still — frozen, shivering, eyes wide. I looked down, tried to move my feet, but the three crimson rings were overlapping now, and what came up from them was that dark oozing black, climbing up my legs, taking over what flesh I had left. And I let it. I looked back up at Eli. I grit my teeth, my hands still out in front of me — one holding the blade, and the other tight around the Moonstone. I saw my freckled, imperfect skin was no longer there; the dark was even eating up the chain-shaped scar I’d come to almost admire, and it was crackling like scales. Burning scales. Except not scales at all — sigils, symbols, matching the ones Eli had written beneath us both. Messages from hell.
“Speak my name,” I whispered, still looking at him, voice trembling. “So that I may hear your petition.”
Eli’s eyes constricted one last time, and then they shut, his wings raised, the wind higher still.
“Daughter of Deon,” he breathed. “Stonebearer. Child of the Bloodlands. Roan Harken.” He choked on the last word: “Friend.”
And the world fell away.
~
“It’s here!” Barton called to the others once they’d found the car abandoned at the footpath. Kita drew up beside him.
“How can you be sure?” The only people he’d told about this certainty of where Eli and Roan would be had been the Council, the Conclave, and Solomon. He wanted to protect Phae as much as any of them, but he couldn’t bear to tell even Kita. He’d already told too many people, and what if he’d been wrong, all this time?
There hadn’t been any fissures or tremors like last time, in the grove of the dead trees. Nothing to tell save for Barton’s dire stare down the beach. The rain came down harsh and sudden, drenching the lot of them, while he stared at what could have just been another cleft in the cliffside. They’d have to be quick about it; the tide was coming back in and might drown them all.
Hurry, Phae’s voice insisted again across a distance he couldn’t determine. “I’m just sure,” he said, even though he didn’t want to be. Kita took his arm and helped him navigate the huge, sea-strewn boulders, and the other Rabbits fell in before them in a rush.
Across Barton’s mind, from the island’s east coast, it was Solomon. I can see what you see, came the thought. Be careful. Barton nodded; he’d let the old man tag along inside his mind as a courtesy. I can feel Eli there. It’s —
A fizzle of uncertainty shivered under Barton’s synapses. Had that been Phae reaching out to him again? Or Solomon? “Wait!” Barton screamed, and he yanked Kita down to the ground, covering her just as the cliff exploded and cut off the first wave that had gone in ahead of them.
Barton’s hand trembled overhead, then cut aside the rubble that had nearly crushed them. The dust cleared, and what had been the cliff and the sea cave, still floating in the air, went out to sea at his and Kita’s command, the face of the land scythed aside to reveal just one person left standing.
“. . . Roan?”
But . . . it wasn’t. And it was. And not standing — she was floating inches from the ground, black flames ribboning off her. When the dust fully settled, she was holding the hand of a struggling little girl — a cinder child — and instead of eyes there was just a cruelly made mask of bone, like a fox’s skull. In the heart of the shadow blaze he glimpsed the Opal and something else bright, keen, on her shoulder.
The Moonstone.
Oh gods. Solomon’s thoughts crackled to silence since there were no other words to say, yet Barton could feel the heavy despair from the connection he’d allowed him. Beneath Roan’s feet was Eli, and he wasn’t moving.
“Fall back!” It was the Commander — suddenly Kita and Barton were up, and they were running, because the air was crackling with lightning and impossible, greasy heat.
They rounded the bend, narrowly missing another corona of furious black flame eating up the space they’d only just occupied.
“But it . . . it was Roan!” Barton choked as what was left of the contingent stumbled back to their vehicles. “We have to go back!” His promise to Solomon hung heavy, now impossible.
“Don’t you understand?” Kita whirled on him, yanking him down into his seat as the engine roared to life, and behind them the beach was just a sonic flare of brimstone and a rising, terrible storm. “She has taken the Moonstone. The Paramount is dead!”
It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t. They’d failed before they even tried. There was a grief there — as strong as the supernova that blasted across the sea, taking Roan and the stones with it. Solomon’s grief. Phae’s. Barton was sick with it.
“She is Seela’s now,” breathed Kita. “An enemy of Ancient.”
The beach shrank behind them, and so did Barton’s wretched, faltering hope.
Three stones gone of five. The chasm widened.
Part V
Calamity
A Shattered Sea
Aunty’s body shifted, changing into Ryk’s, her great, scaled face and crown of fish bones tipped towards the sea’s surface.
Maujaq, half of his white robes now black with Seela’s plague, was still beside her. “Will we rise, Empress?”
Ryk rested her hand, manacled in furs of her own, on the Inua’s head. He would soon turn into one of Seela’s spawn. Ryk perceived deeper trenches stretching wide across her vast ocean, and she longed for her sister Heen to close them up again. But her sister’s soulstone was lost, and Ryk was glad that Heen herself could not hear the earth cry out. Deon’s light in the world had, too, gone dark, and so had Phyr’s.
She shut her eyes. Fia would stand by and watch them blink out like stars. The Deer child may not have had a chance, after all.
Ryk was alone. Her fury was great, the core of it a stinging grain of grief.
But there was no use for grief in war.
Maujaq stiffened, then relaxed, and shut his eyes at last.
“We will rise,” Ryk turned to Natti, who emerged to take Maujaq’s place, his white furs clasping her body like a prayer. “You will lead the charge now. As you were meant to.”
Natti dipped her head. “We’re going to fight?”
“Yes,” said Ryk, who was Aunty and who wasn’t. “A fight to the last. A fight with our friend.”
~
Seela stood at the cliff, waiting, a statue of bone and flame and darkness. He could feel her approaching, could feel the stones she bore. Yet he could no longer feel the burden of her spirit, which had held her back so long and had also brought her to him.
She crested the horizon, moving in a torrent of ash and wind, travelling quickly, learning even quicker than Killian had when the darkness took hold of him, before there was something other than Seela.
She made landfall but didn’t stop. The tendrils of her body and its mass dragged itself like a lightning strike up the cliff, and Seela scuttled backward to allow her space to re-form. To rise.
The children fell in behind him, burning, longing, for their sister.
Saskia burst from the black mass into the grass, tumbling onto her wretched knees. Dark tears streamed down her crackling face. Seela clicked his tongue. “I could beat you for running away,” he snarled, “yet one shouldn’t harm the dog that has returned. And it’s a better punishment, I think, to see that I was right, and to kill that hope that has kept you alive all this time.”
Saskia looked up at him through her tears, and Seela dragged her to her feet, throwing her to the other children. Roan’s form materialized before him, standing tall. There, on her shoulder, he saw it for himself through the mask of bone: the Tradewind Moonstone.
Seela dipped his head in deference. “You’ve returned to us, Daughter.”
Roan’s face, obscured by the helm that was the fox’s skull, was blank; the mouth showed no joy, but she would learn that quickly, too. The Opal at her breast was alive once again, a shining beacon of painful dark light.
Her nine tails were spears. “Father,” she said. And the word made him soar.
“We must go back out to sea, child. Though you have felt it, too.” She nodded. “The Sapphire is at hand. And with us both, it will be easily taken.”
“Easily,” she echoed, drawing up beside him, facing the howling water. “And the Quartz?”
Seela’s smile was as sharp as the rest of him. “It will come to us.”
She took his hand. This must be what pride was. Then the black consumed them in one howling mass, and they split from the cliff, careening headlong for the sea.
~
“Your despair,” Fia sneered, “makes you weak.”
Phae pressed her hands into the rings, which were now quiet here on the summit of Fia’s great realm. She pressed and whispered and must have said inside herself too many times, No, no, no.
“Your Fox friend made her choice. She let the darkness in, and it was stronger than her. Your trust was for nothing. Now what will you and your allies do? How will they stand?”
Phae sat up stiffly. How could Roan have done it? There was so much Phae hadn’t been able to see — the fire, the black. Just Eli’s and Roan’s voices, the red rings, then nothing. Roan had taken the Moonstone. If there was anything left of Roan. What Phae had seen there couldn’t be the girl she grew up with. The girl she trusted.
There was no wind up here, just a sorrowful wind passing through the jungle below. What would happen to her if she flung herself off? Would the laws of physics also be wrong? How can you die when you’re already in an underworld?
“Your sister is going to fight,” Phae turned, and Fia’s face was the impassive antelope, nostrils flaring. “Ryk.”
Fia nodded, now with the woman’s twisted, gleeful face. “Oh yes. Another great battle on the calamitous sea. Yet another mistake that my sisters keep making — trust the humans with their very soulstones. Let them handle their own wretched destinies and leave us out of it. The Sapphire is as good as gone. And then what?”
Phae felt herself sharpening. “You tell me.”
Fia’s antlers flashed, and so did Phae’s, a high and heavy crown weighing her down, the tines growing too fast, too long, encasing her in a cage of bone and hair. She was pinned to the summit.
“In all of this,” Fia’s male face said with a sigh, “did you not stop to ask why the Families are divided? Because they must be. They are stewards for different causes. There is a balance. The stones represent that balance. That requirement of separation. You all think unity is what will save you. But it won’t. Unity will cave the world in and devour whatever is left.”
Only Phae’s finger was outside of the cage in which Fia had crushed her. Fia had to be wrong. There had to be something good from unity. We are stronger as one. If only she could master herself, her own crushing doubt . . .
“When the stones come together, their unity creates a vibrance. A power unparalleled. But it needs to be directed — pointing it through a prism will make a frequency that can shatter the targes from beyond the Bloodlands. Open the way for the darklings to rise.”
Phae’s neck quivered. She hadn’t yet felt pain, not really, but the image Fia painted was bleak, as if it were carved on the inside of her skull, inevitable. And that truly hurt.
Prism. She held onto the word, the feel of it in her mouth. “But there’s another prism. A prism of light. The . . . Quartz.”
Her finger found purchase in the ground. She felt a sensation, a crackling blue spark that came from Fia themself, a bald curiosity at the challenge.
Her head became lighter, inch by inch, as the flickering tines wound back down, until they were only hair, and Phae was breathless in the dirt.
“The Quartz can open a different door,” Phae said, tilting her eyes up to face Fia, their faces ticking around in turn, as if they didn’t want her to see their expressions, to guess anything else. “And if it can awaken Ancient, then that is the only hope we have.”
Their neck clicked to a stop between faces. Fia’s antlers glowed once, then the leaves in the tines shifted and were still.
“Ancient will not rise.” There was no doubt, just misery, in this admission.
“We need to try,” Phae pressed. “My despair makes me human. What does yours make you?”
Fia brought their hands around their body, pressing tight. As if it wanted to disappear.
“We will not give you the Quartz,” they said, and Phae was alone on the mountain.
The rings flashed beneath her. Her antlers rose. Please, she begged. Let me see. Let the whole realm see what happens next.
~
A world of waves and water. A bleak iron sky. A cataract of heaven cleaving open as the storm whipped up, and the force tore the air currents out of the stratosphere.
A tsunami. A hurricane. A monsoon. In the heart of the southern Atlantic, where no promise of landfall could be seen, Seela and Roan emerged from the dark heart that their intentions had stirred.
Rising from the waves was the army of Ryk, Empress of the Sea, and in her battle crown she bore the Abyssal Sapphire.
Once more into the breach. But only one side would come out again.
The thing that had been Roan Harken felt something creep across its face, beneath its death mask. A smile.
She and her father were fluid fire. But that fire had been augmented by its sister elements. Her father, Seela, had not only the command of fire but the earth. The Emerald saw to that. And while the sea may be vast and formidable, the earth was beneath the sea, bu
ried in the dark. And it would shift for them.
Seela worked on the tectonic plates. Trenches opened like gashes. The sea raged. Deep in the water, where the Seals banded together, preparing to fight back, the water warriors were not prepared for the earth beneath the waves to break. They fell back behind Ryk and her new Inua. These Seals had gathered from every ocean, throwing themselves into this last salvo. Tribes from the North, from the South Pacific, from the hidden places on coasts with weapons of rock and souls that hadn’t known the cities or industrial world that had brought them all here in the first place. The cities that would flood and burn, soon enough. And the thing that had been Roan Harken grew stronger just thinking about it.
But she had the wind, too. The Moonstone. Her wide wings gaped. There were no feathers, no galaxies of Phyr set in them; they were bone wings, but they ripped air from lungs, currents from skies, stirred up spirits that could not beat back against her. The earth heaved below. The sky fell above. And in between the sea, full of brave and doomed warriors shattering and dying. The cinder kids, alive and dead all the same, poured into the water, ready to fight until they were ash and nothingness. The Seals cried out, full of battle rage. They, too, were ready to die for their cause.
Above the roiling water, Seela and Roan physically intertwined, two strands of the same DNA. The sky cracked wide with black lightning. The sea pulled back like the moon had dropped out of the sky, waves now a curtain. And in the middle of it was Ryk, her huge jaws wide, her massive harpoon twice her size and covered in the black blood of the cinder kid army that had ripped their forces apart. She was lacquered with gore, fevered with the fight. She was flanked by her last fighter, her Inua in polar bear furs. The Sapphire in her crown gleamed with a threat.
Seela and Roan split apart, two darts of smoke and ash and burning, always burning, rocketing towards the Seal Paramount. Roan held back, watched as Seela and Ryk clashed in the raging seas, the water that had split apart now crashing down on them. Roan fell before the last Inua, and there was a twinge of horror, and recognition, on the girl’s face.