by Rin Chupeco
I would never have this chance again. This was my opportunity to kill one of the women responsible for sending the world to shit.
This was justice. That was all. But I wavered, lowering the Howler, and with my hesitation the chance for a preemptive strike was lost.
“It’s an aspidochelone,” she sniffled without quite looking at me, still pushing down.
“A what?”
“An aspidochelone. It’s a great whale, one of the largest known. People used to mistake them for islands. They’d land with their ships and take refuge on the creatures’ backs, only to realize too late they were standing on living animals.”
From behind the beast’s torpedolike head, she paused in her attempts at resuscitation to glance down at me. Only the Sun Goddesses had multicolored hair; hers was cut a few inches above the shoulders, and it floated around her head like it had a mind of its own. But her eyes were magnificent, and I drew in a sharp, quick breath at the sight: the sunlight glittered against bright, pale irises shining with tears.
Mother Salla had told us about the Sun Goddesses’ atrocities, but she’d never mentioned this.
“It’s dead,” I said, not sure what else I was supposed to say.
You’re a moron too, Arjun. You really think you can take on a goddess alone when armies couldn’t? If she were anything like her mother, you’d be a smoking pile of ashes by now.
But she isn’t her mother, is she?
“I have a theory,” she said softly. “I’ve looked through the old histories. I’ve learned the names of creatures long dead, researched places that didn’t survive the Breaking. It wasn’t the healthiest pastime, Mother used to say. There was no point in mourning what couldn’t be brought back. But one of my ancestors, a goddess named Nyx, did the impossible and resurrected a dead bird. She wrote her process down. We must channel all the gates at once, she said, for the Gate of Life to open. I don’t really know what that means—to channel them all at once is impossible. But I thought . . . if she could do it, then maybe I could. . . .”
I didn’t know what she was babbling on about, or why she was treating me like I wasn’t a danger to her, but that was one more factor to my advantage while she was vulnerable on the aspi-whocares. I was within cannon’s sight, closer than anyone from the Oryx clan had ever been to a Sun Goddess. But the Howler felt heavier on my stump than usual, the weight dragging my arm down.
She was crying over a damned whale. How the hell was I supposed to shoot a girl crying over a sand-damn-rocked whale?
She sniffled again and wiped her eyes. “You’re very polite, for someone who wants to kill me.”
I paused. “And you’re very frank.”
She nodded at the barrel strapped to my limb. “I try to be. How long were you tracking me?”
“I wasn’t. I was following the water.” The Salt Sea was a deceptive name—it was a toxic dump posing as seawater, more gray than blue, three parts corrosion to one part brine. It took four hours for any of the Mudforgers to squeeze drinkable water from it, and the portions grew smaller with every passing week. It’d been six weeks since we’d found any fish safe to eat, and two years since we’d found anything bigger than a mackerel. It was a miracle anything of this size had survived this long. “You can’t bring it back from the dead. No one can.”
“I can. I just need time. But you won’t give me that either, will you?”
She hadn’t planned things through. Even if she could summon the beast back to life, unless she could whip up an ocean of water to go along with it, it’d suffocate in the air and die all over again. I’d rather harvest it for parts—blubber for candles and wax, whalebone for weapons and utilities, everything else that wasn’t rotting for meat—and also probably get around to shooting her before I started.
“No,” I admitted quietly. “I won’t.”
I watched those magnificent eyes change color, the silver of her irises switching to green terra-gates as Earth sparked about her, replacing the patterns of Light. “Do you still plan on killing me?”
Sky and land, ripped in two. The heart of a goddess’s twin, eaten. A lifetime of wasteland.
“Sorry,” I said, and raised the Howler. My own patterns of Fire blazed into being around me, and I funneled them through the barrel, hearing them multiplying and ricocheting off each other inside the steel chamber until I’d worked them up into an explosive, furious heat. I pulled the trigger, and my fire-gates flared.
She threw herself to one side, and the shot screamed past, missing her completely. Her fingers dug into the whale’s rubbery hide, and I lost my footing as the ground rocked underneath me. I was a Firesmoker down to my bones, and as a Firesmoker I’d die. But Sun Goddesses could change their incanta, could shift from Mistshaper to Shardwielder to Earthshaker as easily as the rest of us changed clothes. Whichever way you looked at it, it was cheating.
But the small, short-lived earthquake was meant to knock me off-balance, not kill. She wasn’t taking me seriously.
I ripped off another shot before the ground broke my fall, and she leaped. The blast brushed against the dead whale’s side and missed her by a few inches. It was at least a fifteen-foot plunge, but she hit the ground rolling with an ease that suggested practice, and scrambled to her feet just as I did. I lifted my gun again, and the fire-gates in her own eyes flared. Hissing streams of Water spewed forth from her fingers—aimed not at me, but at my Howler. I felt the faint sizzle of acid striking the barrel, and with a grunt I jerked it back out of her reach.
My eyes flicked to the dead whale, saw her hand still braced against its side. An Acidsmith incanta—she’d drawn out patterns of Water through her fire-gate instead of the usual Fire, and the result was poison instead of flames. There was nothing in the dry, heated air for her to pull fluid out from, but the liquid pollutants still swimming around inside the decomposing aspidochelone were a creative alternative, albeit a disgusting one. I was wrong—she was smart. She was resourceful with her incanta. It was a good enough reason to want her dead.
“I don’t die easily,” she snapped, panting. The toxin had melted the Howler’s tip and part of its iron sights, which meant anything I fired out of it now would be sans accuracy. She could have just as easily flung the acid in my face; I’d be dead at the worst, and incapacitated at the least. She glared at me, reading the unspoken question in my eyes. “I don’t kill easily, either,” she bit out.
“You’ve already killed us.”
She shook her head. “You don’t understand.”
“There’s nothing to understand. We’re chasing a dying sea under an endless sun that kills us with a thousand little cuts every day. There’ll be nothing left soon. Nothing but sand and bone.” I jerked my stump, white and mottled from old burns and worse, toward the whale. “Your kind killed us the day your mother decided her revenge meant more than our lives, and you’ll both kill more of us before you’re done.”
She brought her hand down on the beast’s hide again, the angry slap echoing across the sand. “You don’t understand! If something as enormous as an aspidochelone could live this long, then what’s to say there aren’t more of them? That maybe there’s more of everything else? That studying how could mean a chance for the rest of us, too? I know we can’t bring things back to the way they were before the Breaking, but what if there was some other way to save the world?”
“And how do you propose to save Aeon? Create more water? Purify the toxins in the Salt Sea? Not even your mother could do that. Bring every creature back to life?” I looked up at the hulking carcass and sneered. “Yeah, I can tell you’ve done a fine job there, woman.”
She stared at me, at a loss for words. I gripped my damaged Howler and took a step forward. A few more, and I’d be close enough to touch her if I wanted to, wouldn’t have to worry about missing the shot. Of course, she could have cracked the barrel badly enough that the gun could potentially explode in my hand—not like I had a hand there to worry about. . . .
A new sound t
ore my attention away from her—a low, harsh moan. We turned to look out at the desert, where a figure dressed in black was staggering toward us.
He wore no armor, nothing heavier than a warm cloak and breeches, sewn in a style unfamiliar to me. He wore a cowl too thick for the weather, blue vertical strips lining either side of it. The closest thing to identification that I could see was a silver brooch—a star, from the looks of it—pinned to his chest. He carried no supplies and stumbled as he walked. Out here alone, he should already have been dead. I’d seen enough remains of kinsmen who hadn’t survived solar burns to know he could not have traveled any great length through the barren lands and still be walking. He was either an extremely lucky man, or . . .
The Sun Goddess took a step forward, no doubt intending to help.
“He’s not human,” I rasped.
She looked puzzled for a moment, before her eyes widened. “A mirage?”
“Looks like it.” Mirages were more than illusions. Mother Salla believed they were souls unable to pass over, doomed to wander until the world was either healed or utterly destroyed. They were dangerous more often than not; they attracted patterns in the same way steel attracted lightning, and they left natural disasters in their wake.
The being was pale, its arms outstretched. As it drew closer, I saw that I was right. Mirages had no eyes; empty sockets stared back at us, and the goddess cried out in horror.
Its jaw worked, the skin so thin that I could see the flesh tearing while it spoke, the voice loud in the stillness. A twin, it croaked, and I had the strangest sensation that although its mouth was moving, the words were coming from somewhere else. Already I could see Earth patterns dancing around it, working themselves into a frenzy. A twin. Many-haired twin. Haidee.
Crap. Mother Salla never said mirages could talk.
The goddess stiffened. “It knows my name.”
I raised the Howler.
“No,” the girl blurted out. “I want to hear what else it has to say.”
“I don’t answer to you.” But I lowered the gun all the same.
Aranth, it croaked, I felt, directly into my brain. Heal the breach at the heart of the world. The Cruel Kingdom hungers. Sacrifice overthrows chaos. Sacrifice heals the Breaking. Help us. Help us. Help us—his voice rose into a near screech, almost painful to hear—Help us help us HELP US HELP US HELP—
I fired. The shot went wide before I remembered the Howler’s precision was down to shit, and I swore.
And then I saw a rapid swirl of dirt-whipped wind behind him, bearing down on us, and the mirage promptly became the least of our worries.
My stomach clenched. The air was always motionless in the dunes, but sandstorms were a different story, sweeping in from the west ever since the world split, fueled by pockets of wild magic that had nowhere else to go. They came without warning, always seemingly out of nowhere, and the sharp, corrosive dust swirling within could cut you from the inside out, if you didn’t suffocate first. There was nowhere to take cover except beside the beached whale—and there was no way in a thousand infernos that the Sun Goddess would allow me near that. Few people could outrun these storms, but I cursed and turned, prepared to try anyway.
A hand closed over my arm; with surprising strength for someone barely half my size, the Sun Goddess dragged me toward the aspidochelone and shoved me against a cushion of blubber, up against the corpse’s massive jaw. I was stunned enough to let her. “Don’t move!” she snapped.
Already the storm was bearing down on us both. I gritted my teeth and curled up as much as I could, trying to fit into as small a space as my body could physically allow for. Arjun, the mirage wailed, a horrifying sound—and then it was gone, swallowed up by the approaching chaos.
When the dust storm hit, it felt like a punch to every exposed part of my body all at once, strong enough for the dead whale to rock on its base. The Sun Goddess shoved her hands into the soil, and the winds parted before her, just wide enough that they flowed swiftly to either side of us. She’d diverted the gale, but it wasn’t enough to prevent wayward slices of sand from nicking us, biting into flesh and leaving bloody cuts in their wake. My armor wasn’t made for sandstorms, but I had better protection than the girl beside me, who was making soft, choked sounds as the wind scraped against her unprotected skin.
I didn’t want to. No way, no hell. I’d no obligation to help her, not even when she . . .
I growled and yanked her into my arms, pressing her face against my chest while I buried my nose against her hair, pinning her between me and the whale. To her credit, she kept up the barrier, her whole form trembling from the exertion.
It took mere minutes for the center of the maelstrom to hit us, several more before we were out of the danger zone. The storm spun away, leaving us gasping for breath and up to our knees in stones and grit.
Everywhere itched. I could feel sand down the back of my neck, pooling around my waist, running down the backs of my legs. I groaned, trying to shift into a more comfortable position. A pair of hands pressed against my shoulders, and I looked down to see the girl staring back at me, wide-eyed.
“You didn’t need to do that.” She sounded exhausted. Up close, her eyes were even prettier; no longer flashing with an incanta gate, they were almost colorless. She was smudged in grime like I was, but her short hair continued to move independently of any gust of wind, running the gamut of colors from yellow to brown to even green. “I thought you wanted to kill me.”
Furious—at myself, mostly—I pushed her away. “Let’s not make any assumptions just ’cause I didn’t, woman.” More sand had gotten into the Howler, making it useless for anything until I’d scrubbed it out and repaired the metal, both of which would take hours of work. I stared at it as my mind worked frantically, trying to figure out what to say—I don’t owe you a goddamn thing despite this, maybe, or I was trying to murder you, so why spare my life? or even just What the fuck is going on?—but in the end, I opted for the simplest choice. “Why did you save me?”
She studied me, some of those wayward locks falling over her eyes. Even at the height of the storm, even when the sand had been at its thickest, her hair had smelled fresh, scented with a fragrance I couldn’t identify. “I don’t kill,” she said again, simply. Her gaze wandered back to the bloated whale-corpse. “The man. Where did he go?”
“I’m guessing when the sandstorm formed, it took the rest of the specter’s energies along with it.”
“He talked of a twin. A sister, and an Aranth. I—” Her voice shook. “But I don’t have a sister. Did he mean Mother? She had a twin before. . . .”
“Before your mother up and killed her, you mean.”
Her face flamed, her anger evident. “No! My mother had to kill her. Her sister broke the world, not us. But why would a mirage know anything about—why would it know my name—unless—” Her fists clenched, unclenched. “Why am I explaining this to you? You won’t believe me, anyway.”
She was right; I didn’t.
A new sound met our ears—this time it was a rumbling, ominous noise, and it sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside the hulking cadaver two feet away.
We moved on instinct, reaching the same conclusion at the same time. We tore across the desert at high speed, trying desperately to put as much distance as we could between us and the whale. The sibilating sounds rose to near-deafening intensity, like steam rattling out of a kettle spout. A very large, two-hundred-ton, hundred-foot-long kettle.
We managed about twenty yards before everything exploded.
I threw myself forward. The goddess did the same, and we lay unmoving in the dirt with our hands over our heads. I smelled more than felt the viscera raining down around us, the splat splat splat of entrails hitting dirt until there was one final goosh that trailed off into silence.
Once the worst was over, I snuck a quick glance back at the aspidochelone—or what was left of it. The blowout took most of its stomach, but the head and parts of its tail remaine
d intact. If it had been quietly decomposing the last couple of days, then the gases inside must have built up to alarming levels. The sandstorm had only hastened the inevitable outcome. If the girl planned on resurrecting the monster still, she was going to have to work doubly hard after this.
The goddess in question was a mess. Blood was caked down one side of her. Giblets and some pieces of innards hung around her neck—hell if I wanted to know what they were. She looked ridiculous. I could only imagine that I looked the same, from the way she was gaping back at me.
And then, irrationally, she began to giggle. The bits of blubber clumped in her hair slid down her face, and for some reason that triggered my own quick burst of laughter—like we hadn’t been trying to kill each other five minutes before. The comedy of it all, knowing we’d come out of both storm and whale intact, was a temporary relief.
It didn’t last long.
An invisible wind knocked me off my feet, sending me sprawling onto my back. I was up on my knees in an instant with the Howler inches from her face. The barrel was hot against my skin, a clear sign it was damaged. What happened after pulling the trigger would be unexplored territory, potentially of the fiery kind. My other hand twitched toward a knife I kept hidden in my boot, slow enough so as not to attract her attention to it.
To her credit, she showed no signs of fear despite the combustible cylinder planted against her cheekbone. “It’s broken.”
“Won’t know for sure until I test it out.”
She looked me right in the face, daring me with those beautiful silver eyes shining brighter than platinum, and I found myself staring again—maybe it was the ice water flowing through her veins that kept the sun’s heat out. “Do it, then.”
I pulled. The trigger clicked uselessly against metal. My other hand moved.
A whip of air and I was down again, the knife spinning away. “I’m leaving.” She wiped off what sludge she could from herself, looking royally pissed that I’d dared to fire. “Please don’t follow me.”