The Reminiscent Exile Series, Books 1-3: Distant Star, Broken Quill, Knight Fall

by Joe Ducie

  “Huh,” I said. “We’re standing inside a soap bubble being battered by a storm the size of True Earth. We need to be very, very careful.” I ran a hand back through my hair and gazed at my dark twin. I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “The sun’s about five hundred million miles thataway, which means my shadow—if I had one—would be hitting the ground before me. You’re going first, buddy.”

  “The science on that seems sound…” Shadowman muttered. He picked up a sword of star iron from against the door, swiped from the armory on the Blade before we departed. “Very well. Let’s behead a god, find what makes this place so special, and be gone.”

  Hesitating only a moment, Shadowman pressurized the cruiser to match the fortunate atmosphere outside and lowered the exit ramp. The heavy door slid open, and a wave of foul air rushed into the ship. I tasted dust and the waste of years, a stench of stone so old the rock had petrified. All across the sky rippled bands of untamed lightning. The sound of the storm was strangely muffled, as if it were echoing down a tunnel and around corners.

  Shadowman stepped down the ramp, and I followed, half expecting the ground to give way beneath us and the temple to be torn apart by Jupiter’s fury. The temple’s a fossil. Old and brittle.

  “It’s stood for at least ten millenniums,” Shadowman said, doubtless mirroring my thoughts. “No reason for it to fade away now…”

  “We’re an uncertain element, after ten millenniums,” I said, but he already knew that. “Introduce uncertainty, and entropy has a handle to pull a jagged, rusted hook through our lips. I’ve been here before—not here, but in similar situations. Any move we make—particularly against Scarred Axis, since you’re so certain that son of a bitch is here—will likely result in conflicting enchantments, cancelling one another out. This temple will crack like an egg, caught in a hurricane. On the positive side, we’ll be reduced to atoms faster than we can feel it.”

  Shadowman chuckled and grasped my shoulder. “You and I are going to do big things.”

  His touch left a funny taste in my mouth, as if I’d been sucking on a copper penny. When he let go, my shoulder was numb with cold, but I wasn’t about to let him know that. I rolled it in the joint a few times to encourage circulation.

  The Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess had been a graceful monument to Fair Astoria, strewn with hanging vines, elegant marble, and statues of her beauty, albeit fallen. Of Scarred Axis’s temple, all I could say of it was that it was barren. Scarred is a good word for it, actually. The ground was uneven, patched together from misshapen, blackened stone. The temple walls seemed to change dimensions, depending on whether I looked at them head-on or out of the corner of my good eye. The dome of the great temple had collapsed, and the entire structure looked one good sneeze away from tumbling down, as if the supports were made of straw. Scarred, I thought again. Even Jupiter’s atmosphere above it was constantly cutting and sewing itself back together, but the temple was all cut, no repair.

  “He’s here, he’s here…” Shadowman whispered, clutching the hilt of his stolen Infernal blade, a good two feet of pure star iron. It was our only real weapon against the Everlasting, save celestial illusion, but I’d fucked up both of the known celestial blades, so star iron would have to suffice.

  “Careless.” I tapped my teeth together a few times. I was neither cold nor warm, but I shivered anyway. That place was wrong, impossible, and we were damned for being there.

  We moved under and climbed over broken keystone archways, the ground sloping toward an entrance entirely devoid of light. Trepidation rose in my gut at what lay ahead, but as always, I swallowed hard, acknowledged the fear, and marched on regardless. Whatever happens will happen… All I need to do is stay alive for as long as I can.

  I was beginning to see an end to this game of alien shadows, dying gods, and unexpected infants—perhaps an end I could exploit. It had been the better part of a day since Emily’s death and Oblivion had seized the Roseblade, and yet the Everlasting had done nothing with the sword. The Knights Infernal would have heard—and felt—the blade being used, like the shockwave of a nuclear explosion. That meant Oblivion was biding his time, for whatever reason. Or maybe he doesn’t have a clear move to make…

  “Declan,” Shadowman said. “Are you listening?”

  I fell out of my thoughts and blinked twice. “Yeah, I’m here. Just thinking on the steak special at Paddy’s. Blimey, they cook a good steak at that pub. Cooked a good steak, I should say.” The destruction of Paddy’s was another wrong I had to right.

  The archway into the darkened temple loomed before us now, making me think of some giant beast with its maw wide open to swallow us whole. Knightly work had put me in similar situations in the past. Following our mandate to protect the Story Thread, we Knights often found ourselves in places lost to time and memory, places and levels of existence that had been forgotten—quite on purpose, I imagined, and left to rot.

  The men and women of Atlantis, all those millenniums ago, had meant well by sealing away the Everlasting, but the evil of the Elder Gods was bubbling up through the cracks once more. Would’ve been better if the means the Knights of Atlantis had used to accomplish such a feat hadn’t been forgotten. But if I were hoping on better days, then better if someone else—someone a lot less inclined to the amber sauce and misery—shouldered the burden.

  Well, whether I liked it or not—and, if I were being honest, I kind of liked it—I seemed to always stand at the heart of such earth-shattering events. Hated or loved, I was never bored.

  Shadowman and shadowless stepped into the prison of the Everlasting Scarred Axis and were swept into the darkness and cold, lost in a bubble suspended within a planetary maelstrom.

  *~*~*~*

  Our journey through the temple had been swift and uneventful.

  Given that the dome had collapsed at some point in the distant past, the central chamber of the temple was actually fairly well lit by the gaseous clouds overhead. A dozen bolts of lightning tore across the sky every other second, offering a pulsing bright light in the otherwise dim chamber. The place was barren, empty.

  Almost empty, I corrected, my heart leaping into my throat. A quick scan of the central chamber with my one good eye quickly identified the only thing of any real interest.

  “Oh…” Shadowman whispered. “Look at that.”

  Chained to a spike of obsidian in the center of the chamber was a pale creature, thin and wasted, with skin the color of winter snow under moonlight. At least eight feet tall, suspended off the floor, the creature’s bulbous head was the size of a watermelon. The heavy chains carried millennia of rust and wear, yet they held the creature to the spike as tight as any bonds I’d ever seen. Its bulbous head slumped over its chest, wide jaw hanging askew, and its eye sockets were sewn shut in scarecrow scars.

  Very clearly dead, Scarred Axis had been nailed to the fucking wall and left to… rot… for the better part of ten thousand years.

  “Well.” I cleared my throat. This is good, isn’t it? “That’s one less of the bastards to worry about.”

  With Emily… Astoria… dead, too, that reduces their number to seven. Seven Everlasting, with Scion licking his wounds from our last encounter. I didn’t know why seven gods seemed more manageable than nine, but it did, and I’d take any sort of motivating news I could grasp.

  Something didn’t feel right about my count—another of those nagging thoughts digging jagged hooks in the back of my mind—but I couldn’t quite taste it on the tip of my tongue.

  “We’re too late,” Shadowman said, disappointed. He let the tip of his sword drag along the stone floors—bad discipline. I’d had wartime instructors at the Academy who would’ve beaten me sevens shades of shit for such carelessness. “I wonder if there are any old artifacts here…”

  The nagging thought slipped another hook in my mind, and I was certain something was amiss. Something I was missing.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Emily Grace, stabbed and dying in her secret grove,
but smiling at me with an ethereal calm.

  “All this way,” Shadowman said, sauntering across the chamber. The walls were bare, holding no mosaics or stories of long ago, and there was very little space for any old treasure or artifacts to be hiding. “I suppose we should be happy, eh? But I wanted to kill the son of a bitch myself… The Everlasting have taken too much from us, Declan.”

  That sentiment, I wholeheartedly agreed with. For Tal alone, the Everlasting would be made to bleed.

  Never fewer and never more… Emily’s words came back to me with all the force of a train hitting a soda can. Oh, bugger… “Never more than Nine,” I said slowly. “And never fewer. That’s what she said.”

  “What who said?” Shadowman asked.

  With a sense of wearied trepidation, I turned back to the spike and beheld Scarred Axis grinning down at me through yellowed teeth and staring into my soul with scar tissue where eyes should’ve been.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Voided

  Scarred Axis’s grin turned cruel, and he screamed in anger.

  The unholy soul-crushing scream seemed to suck the air from the chamber and howl in my ears, increasing in pitch until it was like the screeching of a thousand rusty talons on chalkboards. The weight of that noise forced me to my knees.

  A long minute passed as I took deep breaths, riding the wave of the scream. We were safe enough, as the Everlasting was bound to the obsidian spike, but I’d be hearing his scream in my nightmares for years to come. The scream felt like a weight around my neck, urging me to bow. Shadowman suffered the same—he’d dropped his sword and clutched the sides of his head as if his skull were about to rupture.

  They don’t get to put you on your knees…

  No, no the Everlasting didn’t. I lifted my head and stared into the crisscross scarring over Axis’s eyes. The strain on my neck felt liable to snap my spine, but I managed to straighten my back and then forced my left foot flat against the floor.

  Every muscle screamed as loud as Axis as I rose to my feet, hunched under the weight, and summoned a pool of smoky Will into my palm.

  Axis’s scream lessened into rougher bursts, and I realized, with a weary sort of fear, that he wasn’t screaming—he was laughing.

  “Declan Hale,” Scarred Axis said slowly, his voice rolling over each syllable. “The Shadowless Arbiter himself. Whispers of your deeds ripple through the ether, and the ether, Declan, is the only source of information that can leak into my prison. I know you.”

  “I’ve met a few of your brothers and sisters,” I said.

  “Yes, and our influence, whether you see it or not, has driven you quite mad.” Scarred Axis snorted, but his tone suggested sorrow. “After all, you think all this is a game, do you not?”

  That gave me pause. Ever since I’d left Riverwood Plaza, I had been thinking in terms of chess pieces moving on a vast board, but I’d been trained to think in such terms. Strategy and logistics had been hammered into me harder than thousand fold steel, at the Infernal Academy. And that training let me see the game a few moves ahead, now, as pieces of the greater puzzle fell into place. I knew where I could find Oblivion and mayhap recover the Roseblade. Back to where all this nonsense started, of course.

  “Yes, a game,” Axis said, dragging me back to the monster at hand. “You grin, you wink with what little sight you have left, and drink yourself to death between moves. Declan Hale—the immortal Declan Hale, creation’s only chance to avert untold catastrophe—thinks he’s playing a game. You see why I laugh—at the sheer absurdity of your fate!”

  I clenched my fists and scoffed, “All fates aside, I’m not the one chained to a fucking spike, am I?”

  “And this,” Axis said distastefully, his tongue slapping his parchment-colored lips. “This… pale shadow who bears such striking resemblance. An abomination. Oblivion’s work, unless I miss my guess. He never was much for creativity.”

  Shadowman found his feet and picked up his star iron blade. “I’ve come to kill you.”

  “Have you? That would almost be a pleasant change of pace. I suffer in monotony. The Knights who sealed me here all those years ago devised a most perfect prison, oh yes.” Axis rolled his massive head around, popping the joints in his neck. “Forgive me. I haven’t spoken a word in nearly three thousand years.”

  “A perfect prison?” I asked, keeping a safe distance between Shadowman and the chained Elder God, forming the tip of a rough triangle between my two adversaries.

  “Release me,” Scarred Axis commanded. “I was a scholar, in my time, and a great engineer—the greatest. I built vast engines, Declan. Planet-sized constructs that harness the wells of Origin, the very lifeblood of the cosmos. But my machines have been without maintenance for more than ten thousand years. My work is becoming undone, the gears miss their bite, and the belts are unraveling. And Declan, oh, Declan, the gift of Origin—your Will—will fade from all worlds unless I am freed to work.”

  The implications of Axis’s words boggled me.

  Shadowman didn’t seem to share my vexation. “He’s lying. We should chop his head off now,” he said lightly, as if discussing the matter over a spot of afternoon tea.

  “Hold on,” I said. Axis is saying that he constructed some sort of… engine… that allows humans to use Will. Shit. If that’s true, and it fails… I could feel my headache getting worse, forged by more than just my first hangover in three months and the fatigue biting at my very bones.

  Do you believe the Everlasting? whispered a voice in the back of my mind—the source of my impending headache, no doubt. They’ve deceived you before. Emily did so for years, and let’s not even think too long on Oblivion…

  “The watchful will have already seen my machines winding down,” Axis said. “Origin occasionally failing to work as intended, or the power—loose sparks from worn gears and cogs, you ken—jumping into humans not born with the predisposition to harness the power. Have you been watchful, Declan?” Axis grinned. “It can usually be seen in the eyes… Wild Origin alters the color in the eyes.”

  Annie… She wasn’t Willful, not a drop of talent in her, and yet once or twice I’d seen her eyes change, usually under moments of high stress and battle. Broken quill, I think I believe him… which means, if he’s not released, Origin will fail—and we’ll all be left powerless against the Void, the Orc Mare, and a hundred thousand other threats.

  But to release another of the Everlasting... would I always be their tool, their puppet?

  Axis was right to laugh at my blasted fate.

  “I won’t let you do it.” Shadowman had been watching my face and had doubtless guessed my conclusion. “Think of all the Everlasting have taken from us!” He spat. “All the wars fought in their name so long ago. Oceans of blood, Declan. The innocent and the young cut down by their rusted scythes. We need to end it, you and I, before the Story Thread is plunged into a new old war.”

  Axis grinned and licked his lips. His scar-tissue eyes laughed at me.

  “If I want it so badly,” Shadowman said, “then you must as well. Embrace that desire, Declan. You’ve killed before—oceans of our own, yes?—and destroyed creatures far less guilty than the monstrosity chained to this spike of dark stone.”

  “Well, when you put it like that… give me the sword.” And let me chop your head off…

  Shadowman gripped the hilt and set his jaw in a firm line. “That I cannot do.”

  “Then we’re going to have to scuffle, I’m afraid.”

  Wisps of Void-light curled around his shoulders, emanating from within his skin. His eyes dulled to a dead pallor, and the fabric of reality surrounding Shadowman dimmed. “The Void will take us all before I let you unleash Scarred Axis.” His voice was like a deep, hollow drumbeat. “We’re no longer the puppet of these creatures, Declan. I give you one last chance to join me on my great quest to rid creation of these beasts. If you decline, then I will kill you and assume your mantle as my own.”

  “You’re going to st
eal my ID?” I smirked. “You can take my face, even my name, but I’ll be damned if you’re getting my Subway card—not when I’m so close to that free sandwich!”

  Shadowman glared, and his shoulders slumped. The wisps of Void essence coalesced into small gruesome winged creatures, which dissolved as soon as they broke away from him. “You decline?”

  I clicked my fingers. “You sure are pretty, but I’ve already got a date, this dance.”

  Scarred Axis laughed.

  Shadowman howled, and a flash of wild murder swam across his blackened eyes like lightning on a dark night. He ran at the god, raising his star iron blade up above his head. Freezing waves of raw Void essence bleeding off him made me duck and shield my good eye.

  The best defense often included a helluva offensive hammer strike, however, so with my free hand I conjured a spinning golf ball-sized sphere and hurled it across the space between Shadowman and Axis. The sphere struck the floor and exploded in a dazzling array of light, splintered stone, and concussive force.

  I’d raised a quick shield, a simple static block of air, in front of me to deflect the blast. Shadowman wasn’t so quick and found himself hurled head over heels back across the chamber.

  Chips of stone peppered Axis, cutting into his wasted chest. The god didn’t bleed.

  I gained my feet and wished I’d been able to bring the shotgun from the Armory with me down here. The star iron shells would have given Axis cause for consideration—and may have dissuaded Shadowman, as well.

  I wasn’t entirely without weapons—the book I’d brought from my shop still rested in the custom holster inside my waistcoat. I drew the book now, an old travelogue to a hundred different worlds, and held it up before me, bent at the spine to a random page, as if I were toting a heavy revolver.

  The Knights had a unique skill, a terrible power that set them apart from the millions of general Will users. Not only could we use the written word to travel through the Void—we had weaponized it. A Knight could bind a living being to the world described on a page.