by S. M. Beiko
The hands compressed the Quartz until it was a mist of fine stardust. The hands parted, and there was nothing there but the dust filling Phae’s lungs as they took in precious, mortal air.
“It’s time you left this place,” said the sad, doomed god. And Phae couldn’t reply, for her throat was hard as crystal, and the rest of her body was changing, hardening, into a shell. A tool. An instrument.
“Tell our sisters we miss them,” Fia called, as Phae fell to the fragile world she’d been born on, with a power she had chosen, to live or die as she pleased.
~
The black owl stretched its wings, golden eyes roving. The size of a large house cat, this owl belonged in the woods with its nesting fellows, not flying through the abandoned ruin of Halifax-Dartmouth. It wove between the quivering branches of fresh victims, past the leafless charred boles, and fluttered to the top of the still-standing bridge connecting the cities to get a better view.
The darkness had been busy.
The owl turned its small face to the spare, faltering wind. The wind whispered the path that the darkness had gone in — back to its stronghold on a hidden coast of cliffs and ash not too far away now. The owl knew the darkness would rest awhile there, confident in the next step, and the owl would relish breaking that confidence.
The owl’s head swivelled as a moth fluttered past. At its side was a hulking woman, great triangular wings wide, hundreds of needle-pointed hands folded as it surveyed the trampled city below the bridge.
“This has been a busy day,” the Moth Queen said with a sigh. She had seen it all before.
The owl, being an owl, said nothing.
The moths fluttered around its head, and it snapped its beak, impatient, snatching one and swallowing it whole.
If the Moth Queen could laugh, she would have. “You’re right. Not just yet. You’re still waiting for her to walk the path you put her on. But she is buried deep. What if she doesn’t rise?”
The owl levelled the mother of death with a hard golden stare that brooked no doubt.
Her shivering wings flexed, and she opened her hands, and she was gone.
Black Bastion
Natti sprawled at the bottom of the dark rock pit. She heard rushing water beyond the walls. It made the pain harder to bear.
There must have been other pits close by. She heard moans, voices crying out. Other Seals, maybe. Every tissue in her body was on the way to giving up. There was no saving her, and there’d be no saving the others.
The horrors were too many to count. She knew that however much longer she had left, there wasn’t much point in cataloguing them.
Everyone was gone. Was there some solace that her mother was, maybe, still safe on land? For however much longer that was. She’d lost sight of Aivik. The Seals were smashed to pieces. She was just happy he hadn’t been there to see Aunty. See Roan. See it all, as it played back, endlessly, on the wet walls of the pit.
“The Horned Quartz,” said the thing that had been Roan, her friend, with a voice like a jagged piece of metal dragging across rock. Natti and the other survivors had been dragged before this abomination, kept alive for what knowledge they had left. This was before the pit.
“What of it?” Natti had spat.
The thing that had been Roan was massive, all joints and sharp points and knife blades and sludge. No eyes, just that terrible mask. Worse to look at even than Zabor. “I have seen into the memory of the Sapphire. It sent one to the Glen to negotiate for the Quartz. But she’s fallen out of sight.”
“Phae,” Natti said. “Your best fucking friend, Roan. If there’s any of you left in there.”
The mouth was a gash, working methodically, like it was considering the answer. “No,” said the mouth. “Nothing left.”
Natti squeezed her eyes shut, the blood roaring in her ears as dizziness ricocheted. “I don’t know,” she said. And there was no lie. “She could be dead, for all I know.” When Natti opened her eyes again, the thing that had been Roan didn’t move. “Are you gonna kill us now, or what?”
The mouth widened into a terrible mimic of a grin. “I think I will put you away.” Little pinpricks of light filled the dark space — the burning eyes of those sick and twisted kids. “I want you to feel like you can still survive this. If the Bloodlands has taught me anything, it’s that nothing tortures more than hope.”
Some of the Seals had tried to kill themselves, then and there. Natti hadn’t fought when they put her down in the pit. She just lay still and waited for the pain to stop for good.
Something grated — like a door opening. Shutting.
“Natti!”
A hiss from above her. Only her eyes moved. It could have been a trick, the face pressing into the crack of light from above. Aivik.
The grate smashed open, but though it was only a few feet away, it could’ve been miles. Natti wouldn’t climb up there — couldn’t. She shut her eyes.
“And I thought I was lazy!” She cracked a lid. Aivik’s face was a mire of muddy bruises, and he smiled, though he was missing a few teeth.
“Go away,” Natti croaked. Her bones relaxed.
Aivik’s head whipped back, as if he was checking the space behind him. “Natti, please.” Any trace of humour, however hard-won, was gone. “We have to get out of here. Now.”
“Why?” Natti’s voice broke, and she let herself cry, after all the tedious work spent on keeping it in. “Where will we go? There’s nothing left. Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
Her head rolled. Climbing down from the grate was a cinder kid, a little girl, burning from the inside with a terrible fierceness. Natti was a dead weight as the little girl made her sit up with an impossible strength in her thin, twiggy arms.
“You’re one of them,” Natti said, the little girl wavering in her bleary vision.
“I’m still me,” said the little girl. “And I’m going to do what I should’ve done at the beginning.”
Suddenly Aivik had slid down into the pit, and though limping with all his massive girth, he picked his little sister up as if she weighed nothing, got her to her feet, and let her lean on him for every step.
“And what’s that?” Natti had given up much but not her bald curiosity. Aunty would be pleased.
“Be brave.” And the little girl scuttled up the rock in front of them, holding the grate open, leading them and the other battered Seals they’d brought with them out of the dark.
~
The fortress was an anthill of narrow passages, big halls, dead ends. Saskia navigated them with certainty.
“Why are you helping us?” Natti asked as the tight group of them limped along, constantly checking behind them any time they heard a rustling or saw a flicker in the shadows.
Saskia’s fists shook at her sides as she paced ahead. Ever since that night in the woods, she could feel the burns of the ropes as she dragged Albert towards the beginning of the end. “Because it’s what Roan wanted. She told me to do it, before she went away.”
Saskia heard Natti scoff. “You think the real Roan is going to come back and save us all? There’s nothing left to save.” But Saskia had promised: Get out as many as you can while we’re gone, Saskia. I know you can do it.
Roan had believed in her. Saskia had to return the favour.
Saskia stopped so quickly that Aivik nearly tripped over her, and she turned and looked Natti in the eye. “You’re wrong.”
The ground shook when they came to an impasse of corridors. At the end of one was light. The main knot of the fleeing Seals took off for it, but before Natti, Aivik, and Saskia could follow, the ground heaved, and Urka smashed through it.
“This way!” Saskia screamed, and she ran in the other direction. Helpless, Aivik and Natti followed, leaping over crumbling stone and dodging as it fell in their path.
“Little girl,” Urka
bellowed from behind them, gaining ground, “your time has come.”
The three of them burst out of the corridor into a huge antechamber made of glass that faced the sea. When Saskia checked back the way they’d come, Urka was gone — there was nothing left of the huge rock monster save a deep crater.
“You have to get out of here!” she said. “Go down to the water! The others will be down at the rocks — there are others like you, ones with powers. They need you —”
The floor shattered with a thunderclap and Urka reared in front of them like a shark, its hands serrated blades coming up before the dark furnace gaped in the belly beneath those six terrible eyes. The way was blocked.
Aivik helped Natti stay standing, sweat pouring from his battered face. “Any other ideas, small fry?”
Saskia stepped in front of them. “Remember what I said,” she repeated, jaw set. “People need you to keep fighting.”
Natti jerked. “What —”
But the chamber was filled with Urka’s sick, jagged cackle. “My masters are rising. There is no place left for you to run. I have tilled the soil for them. I have helped make it ready.”
Saskia felt herself getting hotter. Glowing. She shook all over. “And you won’t get to see it,” she said. “Not ever.”
Then she felt her bones separating. Her thin paper skin erupted in black and hardened as she grew, but her legs pumped, and she threw herself into Urka’s great furnace, growing faster, and as her branches pierced the monster’s body like a spear, she felt its rage, splitting it in half, until all that was left was the horrible tree where Saskia had once been. Urka’s last guttering wail shattered the glass and opened the way to the sea, to Natti and Aivik diving headlong into the tide.
~
The sound carried across the water, to the place where the thing that had been Roan Harken was waiting. She perceived the dark furnace going out. Urka has fallen. Her mouth twisted. His purpose was fulfilled. Hers had just begun.
But the sound carried something else with it. A word, in a little girl’s voice, almost snatched away on the wind but carried here all the same. The little girl’s call echoed into the Calamity Stones, into places that even the thing that had been Roan Harken couldn’t stop it from reaching. And once the sound died, the creature flicked away the thoughts like an irritating insect and turned to the task at hand.
~
Deep in the dark, buried alive in a tightly packed, terrible grave of my own making, I heard someone.
Wake up! Saskia cried.
I opened my eyes. Took a breath. And screamed.
The dark thing inside me had put me here. Put me away like a toy won at a grimy mall bowling alley that you hold onto for years but you’re not sure why. Sentimentality? Shame? Then it gets buried at the bottom of your closet until one day it’s rediscovered and, likely, thrown in the trash.
I pushed and slapped against the walls, inches from my face, pressing on my body — my spirit’s body. Then I stilled, realizing something else.
I was still here. I was alive. Whatever that meant.
I shut my eyes, steadied my breathing. Think. Where could I possibly be? This was metaphysical — it’s not like I was hiding in the corner of my own mind. I had been locked tight in somewhere. Something?
I felt a flash of warmth beneath me, like a beating heart. Like maybe, possibly, a flame.
Was I inside the Dragon Opal?
Suddenly the bottom cracked beneath me, and I went down. Not far — more like I’d stumbled onto faulty ground, into an abandoned mine shaft. The walls were still close. I’d had nightmares like this before, of getting stuck in tight spaces, no way to move or turn around. Nothing to do but to screw my eyes shut and force myself to wake up. But there’d be no waking up — not yet, anyway. That’s when I remembered that the dark thing hadn’t put me down here; I had.
Which meant tucked somewhere else in my memory was an idea. Maybe not my idea. Maybe an idea that had been put there by someone else. A distant name I couldn’t remember. The name of a friend.
I really wanted to wake up, but there wasn’t any time for that. So I grit my teeth — even though here I really didn’t have any — and I hunkered down, pulling myself through the muck, one twist of my shoulders at a time, not knowing what was ahead on the other side.
~
In the Bloodlands, the Darkling Hold split.
“We have been here so long,” Kirkald said, pressing his four hands to the ash-blood rock of his prison. “I am almost reluctant to leave it.”
Zabor tipped her scaly head up, narrow pupils the width of threads. Grey light crept in through the breach as it widened. “I have tasted free air,” she snapped. “I would have it all one last time.”
Balaghast said nothing. They sat still and listened, as they always had. The prison wasn’t the only thing splitting. The targe that bound them here, that small piece of green and gold, had cracked. And Balaghast thought of their mother, Fia, as they did every day, and they shut their eyes.
~
The narrow passageway widened after a while. Hours? Weeks? And by now I was at a crawl, the space above me mercifully higher. I could almost stand. Almost — but any hard-won victory down here was a small one.
I was following the voices.
They were voices I definitely recognized. A long time ago, in a lifetime far away, I’d hated every single one of them. They’d hurt me. They’d made me feel insignificant, like I was less important than what they were trying to tell me. I could pick out each one because the scars they’d left were still raw. The voices of the Opal. The voices that Seela had shut out, as if it had done me a courtesy.
Now they weren’t the panicked wall of blazing hysteria that had cut me down. I caught snatches, here and there — different languages, yes, but the tone was the same. Help us, they said, wary of me the closer I got to them. Help us, Deon.
The voices were praying. I joined them.
By the time I was able to stand, there was a light, too. Many lights. Foxfire. Fireflies. Little globs of incandescence floating close to me, so small, but I could pick out the shapes they showed, and the farther I went, the clearer they became. It was a gallery of statues, of the fox warriors — the Paramounts — that had come before. In that weak light I saw the mouths of the stonework move in those hushed prayers: I walked on.
I came to the end of the hall, that led to another, to the last statue there. She blocked the way forward. She was tall, and her hair went down to her waist. She was not wearing the armour. She did not have the blade. She was not a statue at all.
“Hello, Roan,” Cecelia said.
I stood there only for a minute, looking at her. Then I tried to dart around her. “I can’t,” I muttered, “have to keep going.”
She caught me by the arms, bending down, wavering. Then she gathered me close to her, and I felt her shaking. She was crying.
“No,” I struggled. “I have to keep going.” The urgency was manic. Where I was going still wasn’t apparent or even possible. I just knew I couldn’t stop.
She pulled away from me. She had blood on her face, and she wiped her eyes. “Can I walk with you, then?”
I jerked out of her grasp. “Fine. But we have to hurry.”
We walked on in silence. The statues went on, but there were more lights here, and I saw that the statues weren’t as freshly hewn as the others. They seemed older, eroded by time. We were going backward.
“I know I hurt you,” Cecelia started, “and that I hurt Ravenna . . .”
“That’s enough,” I cut her off. “I’ve seen it all. I know it all. I don’t need to hear it again.”
She was different from the last time I’d seen her in that bizarro dream. This wasn’t some portent of doom. I felt, deep in whatever was at the core of me right here and now, that this was the real, last remaining scrap of Cecelia, my grandmother.
“Then you see now. All the sins —”
“Yeah, yeah,” I sighed. “Every single one of them.”
There were wider and wider gaps between the statues. “Is there going to be one down here for me?” I realized maybe I was rushing for nothing, and I was heading for my own rocky platform. I’d climb up and turn to stone, adding my voice to the fading cacophony inside the Opal, repeating my past regrets for no one to hear.
“No,” Cecelia said. “We’re going to see Deon.”
Something prickled behind my nose. A suggestion of a memory. Déjà vu. You have to hide inside the stone, a man had told me. Deep deep down, where even the demon can’t feel you. And you’ll have to wait. That voice, too, I recognized, but it wasn’t a voice from the Opal. It had been outside it once. Just a voice on the wind.
“And what is Deon going to do to help us?”
Cecelia exhaled. “It’s not Deon whose help we need, Roan. It’s yours. Not far now,” she said, and we walked on.
~
The thing that was no longer Roan enjoyed this world as it was. Feeling the fresh air against its rotting flesh, sending out its tendrils of flame, its sickness. It had become what it was meant to be. It followed the red trail of its beginnings in an egg, sung to life, and it even remembered the slick feel of its mother’s womb, and her name, the monster that started it all. Zabor. It remembered the ashy ground that the Gardener had buried it in. So much promise. What a journey to get here now. What a trial. It had come to pass so nicely.
The sea beneath the creature that had been Roan boiled. It enjoyed the sea. The empty rage of it. What a strange sensation, all of these stones here as one, inside her — it — the dark with no name. The Great Hammer — that’s what they had called Seela. Seela was now a part of her. A hammer, yes, to drive the wedge that would crack the world and build the bridge and open the door and so on, and so on. So tedious. No more of that. It was time to go home. To come home. To be home.
The thing that had once been Roan Harken opened its arms, rearing back on its broken spine of needles, the flat planes of its empty wings. It opened its mouth and sang back the song that had made it, and the four stones awoke and resonated.