by S. M. Beiko
“Roan?”
Roan pulled the bone mask back as her body and form changed, spine-wings and spear-tail buoying her up. She tilted her head at the squat girl in the armour of fur — armour that reeked of death from its last inhabitant. Roan smiled.
“Natti.” The word was foreign in her stretching mouth. It had meant something to other-Roan, weak Roan. Friend and ally. Now it meant nothing.
“What have you . . .” Roan watched the girl’s eyes, cutting to the Moonstone she wore proudly. She relished that grimace — a comedic smear of fury. “You killed Eli.”
A twinge. Eli. Another wretched foreign word on her tongue. Roan spat it out. She didn’t want to consider it. Not just what it meant, but what sat underneath it. A question she couldn’t answer. Something she was forgetting.
“None of that matters,” Roan said, letting it come out in the voice this Natti Seal knew, all the better to hurt her with. “Nothing matters but the end.”
Roan’s bone blade, black and furious, was hungry in her hand. Natti raised her fists, and they collided.
~
“This is where it’s happening.” Commander Zhou winced for his broken arm as he hit a keystroke that enlarged a map. They retreated by air to a compound in Newfoundland, and Barton still felt a twinge from being back in Canada, after everything. I’m home, and since leaving it’s all gone to hell.
Zhou moved the cursor to the Atlantic. “We can’t get a visual. No equipment could break through the atmospheric disturbance. They’re on their own.”
The Council of the Owls and the last of the Conclave of Fire had joined them through a shuddering video feed. They could have been ghosts. The Owls’ Paramount and their stone were lost. The Fire Conclave’s Paramount had turned against Ancient. They were running out of things to say.
“So we do nothing,” Barton said.
Zhou exhaled. “There is something we can do.” Another map came up, populated by red dots. Too many red dots, so many more than the last time they’d checked.
Winnipeg was one of them.
“The breadth of these creature-risings has expanded. Again. It’s at the point now where there’s one almost every three hours, at random. There are Denizens on the ground, of course, trying to fight back. They’re the ones who need us now.”
“— Mundane interference,” Alena said, voice cutting in and out of the feed. “Now that the Moonstone’s influence has been lost, our ability to hide Denizens has been compromised. Governments have mobilized their own militaries. Denizens are rounded up now as the culprits for these attacks.”
Barton stood for the first time in several hours. He hadn’t had the heart to do so, not after seeing Eli back there on Skye, and Roan above him, the last person he’d ever thought to have given up, given in. There didn’t seem to be anything left to stand for. But from across the void he’d felt Phae. She was still hanging on. He could, too.
“Then that makes all Denizens fugitives,” he said, “but we’re the only ones who can beat Seela’s children back. So we’ll do what we have to do.”
The Conclave and the Council exchanged glances. All the Denizens on land could do was defend now, try to plug as many holes as possible while the ship went down, drowning them all in blood. And they would have to defy the human laws they’d tried so hard to live with. The world had already changed. There would be no going back.
“Very well,” said the Jacob Reinhardt. “Word will be sent out. The Fox Family will fight to the end, since it’s come to that.”
Alena nodded, too. “The Owls, too. To the end.”
Zhou straightened. Nodded. The feed went dead, and the ground shook.
He turned to Barton. Nothing left to say. No sense in hoping. One foot in front of the other.
Barton’s arms stiffened, cording with the roots of Heen — the only sign that the gods, however weakened, were still with them.
~
The sea bloated with the bodies of its defenders. The fight was bloody and terrible. And over far too soon for the thing that had been Roan Harken.
Seela had beaten Ryk and her last contingent to land — a barren one of cliffs and rocks and the touchstone of history. Newfoundland? What use did this creature have for the names of countries given by the animals that had no right to it? Territory claim had shifted. The age for land and sanctuary and home had come to a bitter end.
She dragged Natti onto the rocks, slammed her forward. Broken and bruised but still alive. The thing that had been Roan wanted that. Killing was a simple thing — but this girl was special. There would be those who needed to bear witness.
Roan’s head snapped up to a shuddering bellow, Ryk fighting to the final breath. Natti hadn’t moved, and Roan yanked her back up, held her aloft so Natti could get a clearer view through the screen of blood in her eyes.
Seela stood over Ryk, his body crushing. Then Ryk was still, just an old, spent woman, spirit fled. Natti screamed. Roan’s wings flexed, and in a teleported flicker they were now behind Seela. His great body was bent, and his blood hissed into the ground, onto the stonebearer’s body, as he tried to pry the Sapphire loose. His grip was slippery. He couldn’t hang on. Roan watched him struggle a while longer, his face contorted.
Then he jerked and saw her — his mouth twisted in joy. Relief. Then a twinge of fear.
“Daughter,” he said. “We have done it.”
Roan dropped Natti in a heap at her feet, moving to her father’s side, dropping a heavy black-blazing hand on his shoulders, which heaved from the effort. He had been weakened. Too weak to take the Sapphire, just as he’d been too weak to take the Moonstone the first time.
“Yes,” she said. “At last.”
He tried to reach for the Sapphire but Roan held him back. She had become stronger than him. His smile faltered.
“If you’ll lend me your strength,” he said, trying to sound convincing, “we can summon them. Our family. Together.”
The ground shivered. Seela looked down at the bald rock beneath them, shaking apart for the three red rings, and the black that seeped from Roan and took hold of him, climbing.
“What —”
Roan’s fingers bit into Seela, and she felt him knowing, felt his terror. “You are tired, Father,” she said, the brutality of her voice not attempting to offer comfort. “Your work is complete. It was never meant to be you. Surely you felt it before this.” She smiled again, and this time it felt right. “The child is always meant to surpass the parent.”
Urka split the ground behind Roan, pulling itself up, smashing its axe-hands together to make sparks. Its six eyes gleamed.
Seela peeled away from the human vessel it had inhabited, until Roan looked into the spent and stricken face of Killian for the last time.
“No!” he moaned, free too late of his curse as Roan took it from him. “Roan! Don’t do this! Stop!”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You still have a purpose. You always did.”
~
Natti managed to raise herself up on one weakened arm. She lifted a hand, tried to call the sea to her, to strike one last time as the monster that had taken her friend and her Family from her had its back turned. But nothing came. Her hand dropped. All she could do was watch as the black reared back, a trap of razor teeth, and Roan devoured what was left of the man that had been Seela, bones, stones, and all.
The air was still. Roan turned fully to face Natti.
The Emerald was now on her right shoulder, the Moonstone on her left. The Opal at her heart, and the Sapphire in her skull.
The blades of her wings flexed. Natti’s head dropped, and the last hope she’d been carrying went as dark as her vision.
The Horned Quartz
The beach had been silent when Agathe climbed down it. Even the wind had left, the wind that had sung this very island into being. You can hear her sing the best from up here,
her cousin had said. Demelza, Eli’s mother. That bright and beautiful gem of a woman.
Carefully, now. Agathe climbed over the rocks, one by one, counting them. Demelza had twisted her ankle down here once, but even then she had borne the pain. Do you think that the rocks were hurt, too? she had asked. She was not a child then — sixteen, maybe. Still in her right mind. But what a question to ask.
That strange, encompassing empathy had only made her vulnerable.
Agathe picked carefully around the bend. The tide had come in; though the wind had gone, the moon still had authority. It hung over the beach, a slender crescent, keeping vigil. Phyr’s symbol. Her seat of power. Her soulstone may have been gone, but her eye was still turned to them.
Its light seemed to be directed between the cleft megaliths to a figure in the rocks. Caught there like flotsam or rubbish, abandoned by the sea. Kept watch over by the moon.
He’s down here, Agathe called out with her mind, sending up a psychic flare. The others weren’t far. They’d be here just as she reached him.
A man came to the island, Demelza had said. He’s one of them, a magistrate. A keeper of the knowledge. He’s looking for the stone, the one I dreamed about. Agathe was not an Owl particularly blessed with strong power — but she could read a bad wind when it came in. She warned sailors and boatsmen off the water when she knew something ill was on the air. She warned Demelza of the same when Solomon Rathgar made landfall and made her feel more than just empathy for the rocks.
Agathe stood over Eli’s body, her hand over her mouth. She sucked in a breath, shut her eyes, but that was all she allowed herself to feel. His dark hair around his sharp cheekbones that had been Demelza’s. She bent down and moved his mottled sweater aside, which had been charred in the centre, leaving only an empty jagged scar behind where the Moonstone had been.
She touched his chest. It rose, weakly. But she knew it was just a body. The true part of Eli, the part that made him himself, was elsewhere.
When the others arrived, they bore his body up and took it back to land. Agathe knew she hadn’t imagined the night bird screech in the distance.
~
Phae ran through the Glen, to every aching corner of it. The light was going dull. The trees were coming down. The fabric keeping it together was unravelling. And Fia still had not shown any of their faces.
“Fia!” Phae screamed, circling the mountain, the valley, the jungle. No snakes, no bird calls, no mist. Even the water at the silver beach had peeled back and away. The horizon was a bleak black smear, bleaching white, crumbling inward, and the island fell away into it, devoured.
There was no way home. No one to send her back.
Barton! Her heart was in pieces. Are you there? Please!
A prayer. Phae had known, after what she’d seen, to pray. Should have prayed sooner. Only silence replied.
Natti? But that, too, was desperation talking. Something worse was wrong. This realm was breaking apart. Maybe its mooring to the universe was battered. Maybe the universe itself was shifting. There were no answers, only a deep and terrible knowing: everything had fallen. Everything would fall, just as every turn had predicted. But she hadn’t wanted to listen. There had always been another way.
Phae finally collapsed in the clearing. The trees shrank back from her, and she felt their terror. She slammed her fists into the ground, insensible, and her head, too, until the ground beneath her cracked with each impact, her antlers heavy and gorging the delicate, dying flesh of this otherworld she was trapped in. Would die in. And she thought of the precious world she’d been born to, the people that she loved, and she was raw with the impending loss of them.
Roan. Eli. Natti. Barton. Her parents. Winnipeg. Any future. The world.
Her antlers were immense. Her protective shield was a battering ram. She smashed straight through the crust of the island, as if it were just a thin ceramic layer and fell through to the heart of the Glen.
~
They laid Eli’s body in the cleft of the caer — the castle of rock at the Fairy Glen, where the wind might reach him, however little of it was left.
The Owls of Skye turned their faces to the setting sun. To the place the wind once came from. Phyr, they prayed, Mother of Skies. Please. There wasn’t much else to the prayer. How could there be? But these Owls knew that they would keep vigil over this body of their Paramount. The last Paramount of the wind. Whatever happened to it.
Agathe only watched the skies as they dimmed. A night of lasts. She shut her eyes and knew it wasn’t enough to pray just to Phyr any longer. The other Owls — men and women and youths — knew this, too, and linked minds, linked petitions. They called out to every realm of Ancient, and whispered those names like a spell.
Deon in the Den.
Ryk in the Abyss.
Heen in the Warren.
Fia in the Glen.
They all thought of Ancient. They all wished the impossible. They couldn’t fathom the breadth of that fell place, but they whispered it just the same. Ancient in the Brilliant Dark, they begged. Please do not let the world go dim.
Agathe turned. Eli’s body was gone. There was nothing left to do but to pray. And wait.
~
Phae opened her eyes to a splintered realm. Trees still held fast to the earth that once kept them, huge chunks of rock, literally the last of what had been Fia’s great mountain. Down here, in the depths, they floated like tiny islands unto themselves, the last of the Glen. And the thing at the centre of it all was great Fia themselves — body all cords and tendons, antlers hanging over them like branches, the eyes of all three heads shut. It hummed.
Phae got up to her knees. She didn’t have any fight left in her. Beneath them hung the world in Fia’s three shining rings.
“So that’s it then?” Phae said. Her voice was raw. “You’re gonna just stay here and watch?”
The antelope’s mouth quirked. “Our eyes are shut. We will not watch.”
But Phae wasn’t beneath that. She stared into those rings. She saw a city go dark with hope trees. She saw the sea go absolutely still. She saw Seela fall but Roan rise. She saw the Denizen Coalition, the last sign of union, preparing themselves. Somewhere in there was Barton, but she hadn’t the heart to try to find him.
They had come to the end.
“Have you ever been in the world?” Phae asked, voice echoing in the emptiness.
Fia’s six eyes moved beneath the lids as if they were dreaming, but they did not open.
“Have you ever experienced life? Not just transiently, through your Denizens. Not through that thin cable of power that connects you to them all and to Ancient and back again. You’re eternal. You haven’t ever left this place. Maybe you were in the world once, but you never lived. You’d never know what that means, because you can never end, can you? You can’t see beyond your immortality. And that’s why you don’t care.”
The eyes slid open slowly, dangerously. The rock that Phae perched on orbited close to those huge eyes, each one as big as a house.
“How sad,” said the woman. “She still thinks she can save it.”
“Even if I can’t,” Phae replied, “I’d rather be down there, dying alongside my friends, than trapped here with you forever, doing nothing.”
The antelope’s eyes narrowed. “And what would you do?”
Phae closed her eyes. She was back in the Assiniboine Forest. The air was muggy, and the mosquitoes were out, and her DSLR battery was low, but she didn’t care. She watched the deer scatter across the open field. Felt the true wind bristle through the trees. She knew she would go home and walk on eggshells to her room to avoid another argument with her parents. But she would appreciate that tomorrow the sun would rise, and there might be another chance to grasp that fleeting time left.
“Live,” she said, “however much longer that is. And count myself thankful I had the chance to
.”
Then something came up from the rings, from that fading reflection of the world. A hymn. Something terrible. But it was the same melody Fia had been carrying in the back of their throat. And the sound reached even up here — out here — and Fia couldn’t look away now.
They leaned forward, creaking and breaking, this god twined hard around the core of its world, of itself. Their ribcage cracked and swung open. Their beating heart was amber, harled, with too many facets to count. It was a prism. It was the Quartz.
“This is our heart,” the three faces said, clicking and switching with each word. “This is the heart of everything.”
“No!” screamed the woman, mouth a ruin. “Don’t take it! There are variables we cannot see. There is a balance. The inevitabilities run aground on each other as far as we can look. There are no guarantees.”
“There never are,” said the man, who no longer seemed pale with misery. His blue eyes flashed.
Hands of corded stone reached up, plucked the Quartz free like it was a fruit. It was too big. Too unwieldy. Something felt wrong. Then Phae remembered — there was always a test.
“No,” Phae said. “Don’t give it to me unless you’re certain. You can just send me back, and you can keep it here.”
Fia faltered. “You refuse it when we give it willingly?”
Too many questions. “Why do you give it to me now when you’ve refused all this time?”
The three faces took one last revolution, eyes askance, as if each set of eyes were trying to meet the glance of the other two.
The faces softened when they looked down at Phae.
“Even if there is only one of you there on that wide and fragile world who would think of it as precious, then we would save it just for you, dear daughter.”