by S. M. Beiko
It was plugged in, somewhere, in the sea of wires and cables under her desk, but to what?
Then the screen went black, and the text had turned, somehow, red. A cursor blinked, straight, threatening. Then, letter by letter —
S A S K I A
Her fingers gripped the monitor. Maybe she was still asleep.
R
U
THERE
She involuntarily reached for a keyboard, but there wasn’t one. “Dammit,” she muttered, trying to find one in the clutter.
S A S K I A, the text went on,
I
CAN
HEAR U HOW
CAN
I
HEAR U
This was crazy. Was this computer hooked up to some network? But these models didn’t come with built-in microphones, let alone serviceable speakers, so how was she supposed to respond? She didn’t have any keyboards nearby . . .
“I . . . hello?”
The cursor flickered. The screen, for a microsecond, looked fragmented, then more text.
H E L L O
Saskia swallowed, trying to slow her breathing down. “Who are you?”
THE
SIGNAL
IS
FOR
U
Ice clamped her veins. The possibilities flooded through her, their relative chance variable attached to them like a toe-tag. A prank? An ETG trap? Some kind of system failure? Or, likeliest, just another nightmare.
It could be another message from the Moth Queen. But then why would she bother with old garbage tech?
You have heard the signal. Take comfort in your family, they will need you before the end.
“Tell me your name,” Saskia said, voice shaking.
There was almost a smile beneath the words:
MISSED
U
KIDDO
Saskia let out a strangled noise. “Barton?”
There was no way. She should’ve pushed the monitor off her immediately, thrown it out the window into the parking lot below, but instead she held it closer to her face. “Where are you?” she asked frantically. “What happened to you?”
The cursor blinked, then shivered like it was alive. The screen flickered again and shattered 8-bit afterimages flashed with it. Those same red sigils, becoming three-dimensional impressions in her mind’s eye, twisting around one another like burning snakes, stamping themselves in her vision. A red ring, a black smudge intercepting a disc of light, a flame going out, broken wings, roots going deeper than they should, but holding on, holding on so tight.
Barton at the bottom of a chasm, bound and a part of it, and beneath him, a darkness that moved.
S A S K I A, the text shivered, then the letters changed, folding on top of one another. The monitor was hot, sparking, but Saskia wouldn’t let it go.
“I’ll find you,” she promised. “I’ll save you!”
D O N T, the last word shivered, before the monitor went black, and suddenly very cold, in Saskia’s shaking hands.
Part II
Flash
These Many Broken Realms
Seven years ago
I woke up choking on cloistered, stale air in the dark.
I rolled over, wretched. Pulled that air into my lungs desperately and tried to piece together that I had still had a body I could control. I felt like I’d been struck back to life by lightning, and probably wasn’t too far off.
Which meant I was alive. Third time’s . . . wait, fourth? Ugh. Definitely lost count now.
And this waking was way too similar to the last time I’d been in the Bloodlands, barf and all. I scrambled to my feet, but I was alone this time, and my hand, which had just been holding someone else’s, was empty.
“Eli!” I shouted. There was only darkness and ash, and coming for me from the splintered black — teeth.
“Shit!”
I spun quickly and the snapping jaws missed my face. I put up my fists, readying for the next blow I couldn’t see.
The landscape on all sides was cloaked in grey and shadow, and the thing that had come after me had slipped back into the nothing. I jerked my hand out, automatically trying to summon the fire. For light. For protection. Anything.
But nothing came. Just an empty palm. A human palm. Nothing inside me, either, but the cold.
I didn’t have time to feel anything other than panic before the shade launched at me again. It snarled and yipped, and it didn’t move like anything corporeal. It was translucent, just a shadow, but when my hand came up to block it, sharp teeth sank into my skin, making my panicked cry echo harshly in the grey.
The creature landed in front of me, still snarling, and as we stood like that awhile, me hissing and clenching my hand, the déjà vu hurt more than the fading pain.
The thing in front of me was a Fox. A Fox with eyes like little coins that assessed me before it turned tail and bounded off. I shook out my hand, confused. I was alive, and I could still feel pain. Give and take, I guess. But that shadows here had teeth? At least that problem was delayed — for now.
The mist whipped up — if that’s what it was. The place reeked of sulphur and burning, as it did the last time I was in the underworld, and I covered my nose when the smell went down my throat. I knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere by just standing here like an idiot, so I wracked my brain, tried to remember . . . what happened? How the hell did I get down here? Where was Eli?
This had to be the Bloodlands. But that felt wrong — hadn’t we been trying to get somewhere else? Somewhere more important? I reflexively touched the back of my head to make sure there wasn’t some slimy sucking worm mouth feeding off it, but no. I’d just hit my head — hard. What had we been trying to do . . .
We. I clung to that. I hadn’t come down here alone.
“Eli?”
We’d done this song and dance before: a burnt place filled with shadows, me a dumb kid fighting monsters I didn’t understand.
That seemed years ago. The dumb kid part was still pretty much the same.
The images came flooding back into my skull, furious and insistent. A churning sea. A resonating chasm in the middle of it. Five stones brought together, and us leaping into the unknown, because it was the Brilliant Dark we were going to. The dwelling of Ancient, the godhead who could get us out of the mess I’d caused in the first place.
Had we somehow fallen down the wrong rabbit hole? And if this was the Bloodlands, what the hell had a Fox been doing down here? There was something strange about it, too — it had been tangible, but it seemed like it’d popped right out of the landscape, a shade of a Fox. Real and unreal.
I wasn’t going to get answers here, in the silent dark. And when the echo of my voice died in the silence, I did the only thing I could think to. Put one foot in front of the other and walked.
* * *
Eli’s wings were gone. And it was dark. He had no idea where he could be now — or how he could be here in the first place.
He touched the space between his shoulders, and was, for a second, glad he was alone, because the tears came up unbidden, and Harken would make it more awkward if she saw him lose his preciously cultivated control. It wasn’t that the wings were a part of him; it was that their loss just pressed all his other losses down on him, hard, crushing him further into the rock beneath his wincing face. Then he realized what it really meant, not having them, and he dragged himself up to sitting and touched his chest.
The Moonstone was gone. Then he realized he’d given it to Roan, who had acquired four Calamity Stones, and the loss of her now meant that both of them were in even deeper trouble than before.
Eli wiped his eyes, then tried to get his bearings as he stood shakily. We came down here together, he thought. But Roan was definitely not with him now. He didn’t bother calling out in case s
omething else was here with him, listening, and he took a step forward only to feel the other foot come down on empty air. He jerked backward quickly to avoid slipping over the edge.
The wind was bitter and the air was thin, and as he crawled back to that cliffside and looked down, he confirmed his current reality.
The Owls who trained him — in another life, he added bitterly — had painted the picture of the Roost in a way that Eli, even back then, couldn’t fathom. He’d had his own visions of the place. Of course he had — he’d borne the Tradewind Moonstone long enough, had one of the strongest connections to his Family’s realm than anyone before him.
But the visions he’d had were impressions of someone else’s story: a vast starlit sky, the only surfaces ones to perch from — trees, boulders, all floating in seamless harmony between ledges of white stone. Phyr’s perch was the highest: a rock carved from the moon’s shadow, where she could observe all below with her austere judgment from the top of the universe. The last way station at the edge of time.
But the sky of this place had been shattered. There was no moon in sight. And the rock Eli had ended up on hung in that broken sky above what he knew had to be the other Realms of Ancient below: the split mountain of the Glen, the caved-in underbelly of the Den, the ruptured woods of the Warren. The waters of the Abyss clung around them all, endless, maybe empty. No more divinity. Only hell.
“Shit.”
Without wings he was paralyzed, trapped up here with no recourse but to go from rock to rock — if he could see more than a foot in front of him. The black below was fathomless, so there was no telling how truly far that drop was. And here he was, in his body with all its limitations and fragility that would certainly kill him the longer he stayed here.
Something fluttered in his periphery and he jerked his head towards it, getting up clumsily and backing from the ledge. Shadows and sparks. The impression of wings in a dark that was slowly lightening. Dawn? The rock beneath his feet felt hard, tangible. The air he sucked into his pain-wracked lungs wasn’t poison. This place was real, not a Veil-tripping fever dream. Which meant it had its rules, and Eli just had to learn them to survive.
Even in the passing moments of taking careful steps around his newfound prison, the light increased by degrees, revealing a pale, dusty fog purling around his ankles. But finally, before him, it revealed a platform ahead, slightly higher than the one he was on, and another beyond that, and another.
A staircase. He tipped his head back, trying to see where it led, but the fog gave up little more than that.
Without looking back, he climbed.
* * *
It took me a bit longer than it should have to realize the Calamity Stones were gone.
The minute I did, my hand flew to my sternum where the cursed weight of the Dragon Opal had been stuck, boring into more than my spirit and burning me from the inside out. But there was nothing there now. I should have been relieved, but all I felt was emptiness. I checked the rest of my body — one shoulder, which, only temporarily, bore the Sapphire when the thing that had taken over my body took it from Natti’s aunt. I checked the other shoulder for the Emerald, which I’d torn off my own father. Then my forehead, where Eli had given me the Moonstone in the last bid to end this before —
I staggered and caught myself on a wall. It was warm, despite that it was made of rock. Everything was still dark; I had the distinct impression I was underground, that the earth was suspended above and all around me, because the air was moist and close. But ahead of me there was a light. I headed for it, punch-drunk and desperate for the hope that light promised.
We’d come to this place for a reason, and we’d failed. We brought all the stones together, wagered everything. This wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out. You checked off all the boxes and you still managed to fuck this one up, Harken.
So no Calamity Stones. No Opal. And no firepower. After everything I’d had shoved down my throat, the losses and the spent legacies — here I was, back at the beginning. Roan Bloody Harken, powerless, useless. Alone.
Human.
The light was still a ways off. I stuck to the wall to guide me, sniffed. This wasn’t the Bloodlands, but it smelled like burning and blood all the same. Eli would know. He always had the answers. If he’s still in one piece, I thought again. He’s alive! I retorted internally, trying to stab that first snatch of doubt.
Whatever alive means down here.
“Okay,” I said aloud, “think. We brought the stones together. They cracked. The Darklings got out of their hidey-holes. I can remember that thing hanging in the sky before Eli and I took the plunge: Zabor, Kirkald, Balaghast.” See? I know some things! But how the hell was that gonna help me now?
A snarl in the dark, the scampering of paws. I flattened back against the wall, reined in my breathing and remembered the teeth. More shades like the one that had attacked me earlier passed me by, not even sparing me a glance. Their eyes were little mirror chips, flashing as they dashed towards the light. Obviously they knew something I didn’t. Which could fill forty-two encyclopedias.
“Well, it’s a better sign than none,” I said under my breath, because talking to myself had provided at least minor reassurance. Even if it was also a sign I was losing my mind.
The shades faded, and with no answers of my own, I followed.
* * *
Eli tripped over an errant stone. He felt off-balance, like a piston had been taken out of his legs. He touched the space between his shoulders instinctively, as if expecting the feathered limbs to still be where his torn shirt and jacket promised they could be.
His hand fell back to his side, then to his eyes, pressing, kneading. He’d been climbing this path for days, this floating staircase of fog, rock, ruin. Hadn’t he? The decimated Roost, deadland of his forebears, high above the other realms of the four Families below. And if the lands below were anything like this one, he didn’t have much hope for finding answers . . . especially if it was he and Roan who had shattered them all in the first place.
Eli didn’t yet look down to judge the damage. He couldn’t bear it. He could only look up and ahead and keep climbing.
But even he couldn’t argue against exhaustion. He eventually collapsed in a brace of calcified roots.
His head went into his palms. Think! After all, he did that well enough without the stone, before . . . when he was young. When he didn’t know any better. When he was ready to be reckless and to rush in the very way Roan had, when he’d first taken the Moonstone. Her recklessness is what he resented most about her, because it was his same sin. But that felt like — and was — another life. Another Eli Rathgar.
He had to reason this out, but the gears in his skull ground to a halt. Why was his head as foggy as the soupy air? There was no playbook for what happened when you took your own body into the Realms of Ancient, though he and Roan had done it before, in the Bloodlands. This was different. This felt permanent.
A shuffle nearby. A shiver.
Eli leapt to his aching feet, tense, primed. He twisted as the fluttering came close, a shadow in the ash-air. A body was a liability — especially a weak, power-stripped body — but he couldn’t rely on his mind just now, so his body was better than nothing.
He gasped, spinning with the impact of the heavy shade when it caught him in the face. He tried to pivot but was broadsided from behind by another dark weight. Wings slamming against him, a screech. Eli remembered then that he’d fought bigger, worse things, and muscle memory was an asset. He stepped to, knocked the next three blows aside, but in the fluttering greyness he hadn’t taken stock of where his feet were, and he slipped over the edge of the floating rock.
With a scrambling reach. Eli caught the underside of a root knot, howling when his shoulder made a sickening pop under the pull of his body weight. Despite all that, he held on, grimacing he swung his other hand up to grip the dead wood. His leg
s kicked out, but there was nothing beneath him. He had to pull himself up.
Let go, Eli.
He tried to tune out the pounding in his head, straining to hear the voice between the beats. Let go, it urged again. Fall. It’s what you want. It’s so much easier than climbing.
A vicious indignance swelled in Eli’s chest like molten lava. “Don’t tell me what to do,” he seethed. He had become sloppy, letting down the walls around his senses and allowing this intruder in.
You’re tired. The voice inside was at once calming and a sneer. It was not Eli’s inner voice. Accustomed as he was to the voices of the Moonstone whispering to him, making their demands, overlapping one another and jockeying for supremacy, he knew this was different. It was one voice. A female one. And in his panic there was no placing it.
He wouldn’t hang around here any longer, vulnerable to ghosts. Eli’s arms lit up with pain when he tried to hoist himself up, and he dropped back, vision swimming.
He screamed as knife-sharp talons raked down his back, the blood spilling out of his aching flesh.
“Alive!” he heard, screeched on the low wind. “Alive!” Then there were more claws, this time going for his eyes. “Traitor! Stonebreaker! God killer!”
Eli fought to find a foothold again, but it was increasingly seeming like the cratered deadlands below were the only ground he could count on. Maybe sooner than he thought.
Let go, the voice whispered. Sobbed. Or was that Eli now? His lips parted. He did not remember the last time he’d been afraid. Even when Roan had gone deep inside herself to battle the demon in her Calamity Stone. Even when he’d faced down death when she took the Moonstone from him. There had been no fear because he trusted, for the first time in a long time. And when she’d taken his hand and they’d stepped off the precipice together . . .