by S. M. Beiko
The End of the Narrative
The little black owl soared over land. It was getting close. It remembered the last time it had flown over the sea, where it was heading now, back then carrying two precious packages when it still had arms.
It remembered. As it got closer to the Moonstone, it remembered more than that. A cave safe from the tide. A hand around the stone when it had still been a part of him.
“It has to think it’s won,” Eli had said quickly, feeling time unwinding thread by thread as the darkness rose. “Show me into the Opal, and I’ll hide you there. With everything I have left. Got it?”
Roan’s broken face had twitched. One last sarcastic grin. “So damn bossy.”
It had been only an instant — but Phyr had perceived and dropped her pendulum, and for a moment time slowed. Eli’s mind splintered and wrapped around Roan with what little light was left. They shot down, down, into the dark, into a honeycomb. She was just a flame beneath him; he was just a snatch of wind. And the Opal and the Moonstone quivered with the effort, moment by moment the darkness pulling him back.
I am with you, Phyr had said.
She is strong, Deon had whispered. She will rise.
Eli hadn’t wanted to let her go. He was glad Roan was in a state where she wouldn’t know that. But he did, and Phyr pulled him out of that accursed place as the pendulum swung again, the dark closing the connection up like an infected wound as the Moonstone pulled free of Eli’s body, and his spirit was thrown out, and away, into a great sky of galaxies kept safe in the wings of his god.
The owl’s black wings grew.
His old body was near. So was the girl.
Roan, thought the owl, as the red song reached him across the void. Hold on.
~
“I know why you did it,” I said. “All of it.”
Cecelia had been slowing down. The statues around us were so old and corroded that their voices were the barest whisper, nothing much left of their carved mouths. We walked on, in tense silence, and I kept my head down. Anger boiled in me as Cecelia diminished.
When I finally looked up, the statues were gone, the last one fading behind us into the dark as I glanced over my shoulder. Ahead of us, firefly lights were joining together in one great comet.
“It’s the same reason you did all this,” Cecelia finally answered. Looking up at her, I saw that her great head of dark hair, almost the same as Ruo’s but more chestnut than black, had gone entirely white. “For love.”
“Yeah.” The comet expanded, releasing corona tendrils experimentally, like it was stretching old, stiff limbs. “I just didn’t want it all to be for nothing. Your sacrifices. Everyone else’s.” I frowned. “Even Killian acted out of love. Even if it was twisted. So did Saskia. So did Eli.” They’d all traded the purest parts of themselves for something higher, something outside of them, for the hope that the sun would rise and the chance it could change everything.
Cecelia staggered and I caught her, and she leaned on me as we walked the last part of the way. “I used to wish I wasn’t a Denizen. I used to wish them all away. I used to think that they all deserved whatever was coming to them, and that I had to be outside of it all if I was to preserve my family. The people I loved.” She shut her eyes. “Even I couldn’t outrun myself.”
We’d come to the end. The ground in front of us was now a path suspended high above a molten sea. The comet in front of us was revolving, speeding up.
“She’s here,” Cecelia managed, just as the comet collapsed inward like a dying star and grew into the Deon I’d seen in Cecelia’s memory of the Arbitration so long ago.
“You brought her the rest of the way.” Deon bowed her great head. “And now you, too, can rest.”
Cecelia turned to me, standing as straight and tall as she could manage. She held onto my arms tightly, and I realized I’d held onto her long enough.
“I forgive you,” I said. “I can go the rest of the way alone.”
“Never alone,” she said, and she bent down and kissed me, and in a rush of heat she was gone.
The whispers rose, the air filled with the petitions of the past Paramounts, Cecelia’s voice now among them. I turned to Deon.
“So,” I said.
Deon looked weary, too, but she grinned.
“You hid yourself well,” she said. “You needed the help to do it, and you were canny enough to take it when offered.”
I hardly knew where to start unpacking that, and I tilted my head. “But I figure that now’s not the time for hiding any longer.”
Deon flickered, faltered, just a bit, and in that tiny shift there was only darkness, and I panicked.
“The child of the Bloodlands has still corrupted this stone,” she sneered. “I have called you here to ask your help. You must burn it out.”
If I was panicked before, I was hysterical now. “Me? Burn it out? You’re a god! Why do you need me?”
Black lips peeled over shining, frustrated teeth. “Because this thing has wound itself around you, stonebearer. You must cast it out. You must take control. My sisters and I are fading.”
Three other voices — resonant, older than anything kept here in the Opal — and calling from outside of it. Heen. Phyr. Ryk.
This was worse than I thought, and I was almost too late. “Seela has the other Calamity Stones?”
Deon dipped her head. “It’s only because of you I can awaken now, as this memory here. You are now the last living Paramount in this world. And a ghost like me cannot awaken Ancient.”
A deep song rose from the dark. The cavern walls flexed around us. Like it was going to collapse.
Deon flickered again. “The song has been sung. The targes are broken.” There was an immense seismic shift when Deon looked to me, imploring. “This is the task you must do.”
I threw up my hands. “I don’t know what you expect me to do now! Every time I’ve got to pull a rabbit out of a damn hat, climb back up out of hell, perform, yield, bow. I’m tired! I don’t have anything left. And even if I do this — what then? You want me to wake Ancient? How the hell am I gonna do that?”
Deon shut her eyes. “Fia has sent us the Quartz. Phae is coming.”
Phae? My heart hammered. But I still couldn’t move.
“I just —” I suddenly felt like my chest was going to cave in. “I can’t do it. I can’t do it alone.”
“You won’t be.”
I turned. The sound of wings, the feeling of a golden light outside of the Opal, tethering into it. A thin chain reaching across the vast hopelessness.
~
“They’re not here.”
The first site the coalition had headed for was near their landing site at Newfoundland. It was the last place they’d felt the fissures, the same kind that always came before a city-wide attack. “I think it’s Urka,” Barton said. Zhao agreed that if that huge servant was so close by, it might be a chance to mount a surprise attack and stop any others before they started. Or, at least, find any survivors of the battle at sea.
When they arrived at the cliffs, there was no one there. Just a huge ruin of crumbled stone, ash, and glass. Always one step behind, Barton thought drearily.
But there was something in the rubble — a tree.
“It’s different than the others,” Zhao said when he met Kita and Barton there, as they were about to head back to St. John’s, which was still reeling from an attack of its own and was desperate for aid — Denizen or otherwise, despite the panic that revealing them had caused. Barton figured there’d be more time in the aftermath to go after Denizens, but the Mundanes had to survive first.
The tree was almost a storey high. At the base of its great, sprawling roots was a boulder, like it had very suddenly split it in two. Barton couldn’t shake the feeling that the boulder had once been alive, somehow, and was not from this world.
When he touched the tree’s bark, it was warm. It sent a shockwave into his heart, and he remembered something he hadn’t thought of in months. It was an image of him running a track, and Phae had been there, and a child. Their child. It filled him with longing. It was something he’d seen when he, Phae, Natti, Eli, and Roan had sealed Zabor away last spring. A tremulous connection. A promise of the future. But how could such a thing exist now? How could something so precious ever take root again in a world where he was always too late?
Don’t let go, he heard Phae say, and it cleaved him in two.
The roots in his arms shot out without warning, wrapping firmly around the giant black tree. Kita and Zhao leapt back, and Barton’s eyes went into the back of his head, and there was a thunderclap —
When Barton opened his eyes, and the air came back into his leaden stomach, there was something heavy in his arms. A body. A little girl. She raised her head, her hair cropped close to her pale face. Her brown slanted eyes cleared when they looked around, looked up at him. She was warm, and she took a breath.
She was alive.
“Hi,” Barton managed.
The little girl smiled. Something above them let out an ear-splitting screech, and they both looked up. An owl with black wings wheeled overhead and headed out towards a rocky chain of islands in the sea.
~
Margot had never heard so many evacuation sirens going off at once. Had forgotten all about them, really, since they’d always been silent and had just become part of the rusted landscape. They were originally put in for storm warnings, she’d overheard someone say at the Quik Stop down the street, where she’d been buying milk when the first wave went off.
Cell towers had gone down in the last attack. Major ones. The phones that everyone had become dependent on had been rendered useless. People were running out into the streets, threading through neighbourhoods, trying to make sense of what was happening. “Something went down out in the middle of the goddamn ocean,” was the word in Stella’s on Sherbrook, people communing there, needing community more than to run to their basements as the sirens blared louder.
“That thing was spotted in New York. They’re saying it’s the work of terrorists with abilities. Abilities! Like some goddamn movie! What the fuck do they take us for? Is this just global warfare dressed up as a stunt with wizards and shit?”
Margot would have been the last person anyone would have asked to weigh in on things. She’d been there, though, last week when that six-eyed mountain monster, burning from the inside, had split apart Portage and Main. Had seen it burning black from the inside out, wailing and calling its zombie children to it. She was on her lunch hour, just coming up from the underground pedestrian pass for some fresh air. For a cigarette.
Some goddamn smoke break.
Now those twisted trees littered sidewalks and made the roads impassable. The Canadian government mobilized the military, but more attacks crept up across the country. The world. Winnipeg had enjoyed its landlocked isolation, but it could no longer boast it was safe from anything. Nowhere was. And no help was coming. Margot had gone through as many smokes as she’d wanted. She’d earned it.
But Margot was pragmatic. She went back to her apartment, shut the blinds. The world had been spun on its fucking head. What else was there to do except go home and wait? People were reporting the resurgence of strange memories from last winter — from the major flood that hadn’t been just a storm or a fast melt. A shared dream of a demon in a river with thousands of angry, chittering children. And now they all had the horrible dreaded certainty that the monster was about to come back. Anything was possible.
She knew there was no point in turning on the TV. Cable was out, too. The prairie wind was high today, battering the windows. The potheads below turned up their music to drown it out, drown out the world ending, the images of people with magical goddamn powers ripping cities apart all over the news and YouTube, of children with that fucked-up plague tearing and transfiguring people into burnt husks. Into an urban forest of the dead.
The sirens suddenly died and the wind stilled. Margot got up from behind her couch and peeked out her third-storey window, down into Westminster Avenue.
The birds were frozen, mid-flight. The sky was red.
The world had stopped.
And then the earthquake hit.
~
When the targes broke from the resonance of their song sung back to the Bloodlands, it was like they hadn’t been there at all.
The walls of the Darkling Hold came down so suddenly, that in that deep canyon of ash, the three forgotten titans blinked like newborns. Out here, the song was a red, devastating call.
Zabor and Kirkald turned to their third sibling. It had no mouth, and yet it sang back the first chord. The red rings beneath each of them flashed. Above them, the Bloodlands were opening.
~
When the song had ended, and the crack across the sea went from shore to shore, the thing that had been Roan Harken opened its eyes behind its mask of bone.
~
The one thing Natti hadn’t lost in all of this, as she held tight to Aivik, was Maujaq’s bear claw and the power in it. It was pulling the sea around her and sending her into the fastest current. She was weak, but the water buoyed her up, made her stronger. Even in the Sapphire’s absence, the water was still telling her something.
It was telling her to turn around.
When she stopped, pulling Aivik back, his huge eyes were a single question.
It hadn’t been the water telling her to stop. It had been Phae.
The bear claw stung in her hand. She sent a message piercing through the water: We have to open the Abyss. But Aivik shook his head. We can’t! Not without the Sapphire!
Natti turned again, hearing Phae’s voice getting closer, and Natti grabbed hold of Aivik, and she swam in the direction of her friend’s call.
Beneath them a red trench was tearing at the sea. Fast as lightning. They would have to be faster. She put everything she had left into bending the water to her will, the will that Aunty had told her would get her into trouble one day. Maybe one day had finally come.
Something bright was coming through the darkness, and Natti heard Phae say hurry! The bear claw broke as she thought one last time of Aunty and the water admitted an amber silver light that swallowed them all.
~
So far from who I was, from who I loved. From who I wanted to be. Eli pulled my spirit up with the golden tether he’d cast around it, but even with that I didn’t know if it’d be enough. And I faltered.
I knew I was still inside the Opal, but it felt absolutely bottomless, like I still had so many miles to climb before I could surface. Any clear visual of it fell away. There were only sensations, a rush of brightness. I felt like I was being simultaneously crushed to death and pulled apart. You’re almost there, Phae said, her voice and her presence so close in this strange plane that I could touch it. An amber light . . . With the line of Phae’s voice came a sense of Barton’s spirit, grasping hold of her for dear life, and maybe even holding on to Saskia, with the ghost of the promise that Natti had survived and was out in the water, the water that swelled around my invaded body’s ankles as I pushed my way through.
Eli’s tether was firm, but I felt myself slipping free of it. I knew I’d still need him for the last part of this.
You’ll have to stick around a bit longer, I thought in his direction, still knowing there was no way I could finish this alone. If you’re still offering.
I could sense his wings opening wide — he was that close to me now — and finally the darkness parted.
~
The sea separated. The thing that had been Roan saw the huge crimson crack that her host’s visions had promised. She could smell the burning ash of the Bloodlands across time and memory. She felt these dark parents rising to meet the light and the sky they had dreamed
of making their own since they’d been made.
But standing over the crack was that Seal girl, and she had been the one to push the water aside. And with her a figure of crystalline, amber light.
The Quartz.
“I knew you would come,” the wretched darkling beast creature that was just the Hammer cried. “But the song has been sung, and the work has been done, and I will be reunited with my true family!” The pale blades of its wings snapped open, and it felt itself expand, ready to take and unmake this last shard of the one thing that could stop it.
You’re damn right about that, a voice said, and for the first time in its short, cursed existence, the thing that had been Roan Harken froze.
“No,” it said.
“Yep,” said the voice. Bright and chipper. Coming out of its own mouth.
The bone mask cracked. The darkling demon essence peeled away by inches. Wheeling in the sky above them was a black owl, which grew larger the closer it came, roaring more than wailing, and when the last of the demon didn’t yield, talons grabbed hold and pulled.
~
I took a breath when I reached the surface. It was cold out here, damp. I felt awake. I felt. Tired and beaten and fragile. But I was human. My eyes opened — a hazel eye given by a man who I had seen fleetingly in memory, his mouth forming an apology before his spirit fled for the last time. And an amber eye, given by Death, whose shadow hovered somewhere closer.
The black thing sucked off my body with a painful tear, but there was life in the old girl yet. The sludge-shadow tried to take down the owl, and they fought in the air for a while, and just as the dark thing and me dropped to the rocky exposed bottom of the sea by a trench between worlds, the wings came back for me and caught me in arms I hadn’t seen hidden there. The beak stretched aside, and Eli looked down at me.