by SM Reine
At least gravity had existed.
Nothing resembled gravity within the Pit of Souls. Marion crossed the boundary into open air and her whole body stretched toward the center of the pit. The dim lights of Sheol receded into a compressed sphere the color of balefire, and then a white pinpoint, and then nothing.
She struck down somewhere wet.
With a groan, she rolled onto her side. It took multiple attempts to shift even a few inches. Gravity had returned and she weighed thousands upon thousands of pounds. The gravity came not from underneath the muddy plane upon which she rested, but at an angle, as though she was on a steep hill.
Marion wasn’t on a hill. She wasn’t sure what it was, or where it was. Everything was too dark. Her hair stuck to the mud when she tried to lift her head to look around.
Something sharp dug into her knee. It was raining and cold, oh so cold, and all water flowed down that damn dark hill. There was balefire at the bottom. She needed to struggle halfway onto her belly to see it.
Rivers flowed from every direction toward the center of the bowl—the bottom of the Pit of Souls. Mud and ice water flowed over jagged white rocks, which looked as brittle as trees, and shot down the slope toward the light. The rivers began to spiral as they grew closer until the water vanished into a column of pure balefire.
It was the kind of gloomy, burning place where creatures like Arawn and Nyx had been formed. They were the mildew that grew in soggy crevices. Fungus yearning for the sun.
Mold wasn’t the only thing that grew in darkness.
What grew now was more like a shining crystal blossoming within the sunless core of a geode. It was a man greater than a man, a shadow darker than shadow. The gravity drew everything toward him because he was everything.
Marion tried to say his name but couldn’t.
Seth.
He was facing the balefire that consumed the icy rivers, oblivious to Marion’s presence near the rim.
But it was him. He wouldn’t look at her, and she couldn’t see his face, but it was him.
Marion lifted a hand to shield her eyes, making out as many of the details of the form as possible. Clearer vision only made him less distinct. She could see more of the rivers and the enormous gray slope that they ran down, but the man’s form warped.
He was there, but he wasn’t only there. He was everywhere.
The river surged. Her legs were sucked under, and the icy floe was a belt restricting her movement as much as the stone-skin.
Her feet sank into mud. Those sharp white things jabbed at her.
The water rose to her chest, and Marion tried to kick free of the mud, arms pumping through steely water. Hardness brushed her fingertips. She closed her fist on a bone—a human femur, if she wasn’t mistaken. It was fractured. The bone shards scraped her wounded hand.
Gods above!
The muddy rivers were flowing over a field of bones, and Marion was about to become another of the skeletons.
She needed to reach Seth.
The rushing water made it easier for Marion to move. She relaxed into the flow, allowing it to drag her legs through the aggregate. When gravity took over, she had nowhere to go except down—down toward the light, and the man standing beside it, gazing into a star so brilliant that he should have been blinded.
The icy water heated nearer to the epicenter. And it kept rising. It licked at Marion’s neck, and then her chin, and then bobbed along her nose no matter how hard she strained to escape.
Water slopped up her nostrils. Marion gagged and spat. In the last moment when the waves left her mouth exposed to oxygen, she inhaled.
The river took her down.
Even though it had looked muddy when she’d landed, the water was clearer from within. As Marion’s perspective changed, so did the water’s depth. It went from lapping her forehead to several arm’s lengths above in the span of two heartbeats. The crushing water was hotter, bluer, thicker, heavier.
The skeletons were more numerous and more fractured as she approached the core. There were hundreds of them. Thousands of them. All being dragged toward the same place as Marion.
An ending.
Marion twisted, squinting through the mist of her hair toward the place where Seth should have been standing. He was a shadow on the surface of the water a kilometer above Marion’s head. She was going to get swept underneath his feet, unseen. Neither of them would escape the Pit.
A determined thrust of Marion’s feet tore her free of the mud’s merciless grip. She kicked again, struggling against the weight of the merging rivers. Her lungs were aching, desperate for oxygen, before she’d climbed even an inch.
One bubble escaped Marion’s mouth. She lost her rhythm and slid back toward the mud.
The effects of Charity’s potion had evaporated. She had no air. And, worst of all, it was getting very bright and very hot.
As the world got brighter, approaching the event horizon of the incinerator’s flame, Seth’s shadow only got darker. He remained a fixed point no matter how the blazing waves battered Marion.
He was so close.
Marion wouldn’t die helpless in the tide.
She stopped trying to swim and instead pointed both hands straight down—not away from the light, but toward it. Her magic should have been impossibly remote in such a strange place, but she clawed for it anyway, demanding that it yield to her will.
Marion needed magic now.
The wind funneled through Marion. It punched from the heights of the Pit straight to its blazing epicenter. As the Pit was located in Sheol, that wind carried a deadly cocktail of infernal elements that scorched as badly as any fire.
But it pushed the waves aside, and it propelled Marion against gravity.
Marion hurtled toward shadow atop the turbulence of her wind, less like an arrow and more like a tornado-shredded tree. The wind crushed from one side, and the gravity from the other.
Marion reached her hands out, and she cried, “Seth!”
The shadowy form turned.
For the first time in all eternity, she saw his face—his true face.
And he saw hers.
Marion?
She plummeted toward him, soaring through darkness as though she, for the first time, had wings like any other angel.
The last thing she saw was his eyes, black and endless.
Then nothing.
For endless eons after Seth died the second time, there was nothing but the Cauldron. It was the light at the bottom of the Pit of Souls. Deaths were mixed into it and new lives were spit out.
If that had been the beginning, middle, and end of Seth Wilder’s story in his second tenure as Death, that would have been fine.
The problem with omnipotence was that there was no single, defining experience. It wasn’t a job where he clocked in at eight o’clock in the morning to wrangle souls, and then went home to crack a beer and watch football. Omnipotence meant limitless time, and it meant limitless experiences. Seth could only think of the worst of them as he stood there, alone with the Cauldron at the bottom of the Pit of Souls.
Seth shared lives with every soul that passed him. He got to see innumerable births and innumerable deaths. He felt the gunshot wounds, the bodies frail with age, the cancer withering his bones.
Billions of souls.
The worst of it was that Seth didn’t care about any of it.
The overwhelming pain? The death? The glimpses of happiness experienced vicariously without any true relief?
It didn’t matter, just as it hadn’t mattered before. If Seth had been cognizant enough to be honest with himself, he’d have realized that it hadn’t mattered when he was briefly alive either, but mortality made all those little things seem important.
Nothing mattered.
Until something changed.
In an endless night, there was suddenly a lone star brighter than anything Seth had ever seen. In the limitless lives he’d witnessed, he hadn’t seen anything as crystalline in its perfectio
n as that one star.
She fell toward him.
“Seth!”
He turned, and the entire universe shifted around him. Worlds bent to give him space. The planes parted.
And there she was.
An angel swathed in leather, her body crumpled from the grip of wind, her hair streaming behind her like the tail of a comet. Her hands reached for him.
“Marion?” Seth wasn’t sure the last time that he’d spoken with his own voice.
She was falling, and her eyes had shut, head tipped back at an awkward angle. Her descent was slowing. The wind separating the waters faded, and she was drawn back toward the light of the Cauldron.
If she entered it, she would be dead.
Seth took a step toward her—or maybe he pulled the universe toward him. He reduced the empty space. He filled the vacuum with himself, and he surrounded Marion.
Her heart slowed, just as her descent had been slowing. Her battered body showed signs of impact trauma. Her brain wasn’t firing properly, either. She had sustained a minor concussion, which was just severe enough that she couldn’t save herself now. She would die if he allowed it. He could live the entirety of Marion’s life with her, and he yearned for that closeness—the opportunity to truly see a woman who had left an impact crater in Seth’s soul.
He wanted her to die.
No. It’s not Marion’s time.
It had been so long since Seth had cared about anything that the immediacy of his fear overwhelmed him. It rippled throughout time, back to Genesis and forward into the infinite years that waited ahead. The only salve for that burning fear would be to return Marion where she belonged in the mortal worlds—and to follow her.
There was work to be done. Unfinished business to address.
Marion. Marion. Marion.
Her name was a heartbeat pulsing at his core, eternal as the stars in an endless night. The name was everything. The soul was everything.
Seth gathered Marion within himself and stepped away from the Pit.
For the first time in his rule as King of the Unseelie, Konig entered battle at the head of his army. Heather had made noises about leaving Konig behind, but he’d listened to none of them.
He was only moments behind the Raven Knights, and the full might of the Autumn Court’s army was only moments behind him.
They arrived hundreds of miles from Dilmun, at the edge of barren desert cloaked in night.
“With me!” Konig shouted.
He dispersed into fog.
Most of the gentry had talents of their own, like Nikki and her magical focusing. His mother used to have visions of the future. His father had been able to warp the universe depending on his mood—a talent that Konig had inherited to a degree.
Konig’s primary skill was in becoming semi-corporeal, and he loved showing it off so that he could make everybody acknowledge how strong he was.
For the first time, he was thinking more about traveling quickly than making a show of power.
He was the first thing that the demon encampment would see as the sidhe rolled toward Dilmun’s horizon. They’d perceive a shimmering thunderhead like a long-awaited summer rainstorm, until it was too late—and then the army would strike.
That was the plan, anyway, but the demons didn’t see them coming at all. They’d built a magical platform that bridged Dilmun with the surface. It obstructed the view, completely ruining Konig’s entrance.
They settled atop the encampment, Konig and his army. He held his position long enough to size up the settlement. There had already been battles in that area. Shredded bodies splattered blood across half the streets, and a few buildings had been knocked down.
Parts of the camp had matured enough that the demons had built permanent structures. Had Konig been an angel, he’d never have let demons build up a home so close to his territory, but that was a problem with angels. They were so arrogantly self-assured of their invulnerability that they missed the major threats under their feet.
Konig dropped his army atop the masses of demons collected in front of the gateway to Sheol.
The conflict was immediate.
Even a sidhe civilian army was still sidhe. The sheer mass of the hundreds of bodies would have been one hell of a blow on its own. Throw sidhe magic into the mix, and it was utter chaos.
Konig formed himself into a man and he attacked alongside them. He’d brought the six-foot-long bastard sword with a two-handed hilt. The sharpened edge cleaved through the carapaces of demons thrice his size with barely a touch.
He’d been trained to fight with that sword by the very best. He and Heather had trained alongside each other, in fact. While she’d released arrow after arrow after arrow, he’d been cutting magical forms until the motions came to him as easily as lovemaking did.
It was no different, killing these demons like this. The small demons were easy. Konig carved a route through them toward the center, where Arawn waited.
The Lord of Sheol grinned at the sight of Konig’s approach. His mouth was opening, stretching, becoming a chasm in the universe that led into an unending wormhole of jagged Hound teeth.
“Nikki!” Konig shouted.
She’d anticipated his need. She appeared the instant her name left his lips. “As you command,” she said, and she clapped her hands together.
Magic sucked out of Konig in a rope of power, drawing his innards out so that Nikki could feast. Her magic wasn’t prism-like, as Hooch had described. That had sounded so…pretty.
This was vivisection.
Nikki dragged the claws of her power through their spirits. The combined energy erupted from a point just above her forehead and drilled into Arawn. His mouth stopped opening. He collapsed into himself. Shadow folded upon shadow, flesh upon flesh, tooth upon tooth.
Arawn hit the ground face-first. Konig was on him moments later.
As painful as it was to sacrifice himself to Nikki, standing within the resultant waves was a heady high. He could see Dilmun above and the doorway to Sheol below, but it felt like he was at home in the core of the Middle Worlds, where nobody’s power exceeded his.
He descended upon Arawn like that, cloaked by the power of his army the way that deep-sea trenches were cloaked by water. “Where is she? What did you do with my queen?”
“Marion is dead.” Arawn cackled. “Gods, I don’t get tired of saying that!”
Konig’s fists relaxed. “She’s…what?”
“Dead.” Arawn spelled it out letter by letter, giving a self-satisfied bob of his head on each one.
Confusion slackened Konig’s muscles until his shoulders sagged and his vision blurred.
Marion couldn’t be dead.
The sidhe courts were matriarchal. If she were gone, Konig would have instantly lost his grip on Myrkheimr and Niflheimr, just as Rage had when Violet died.
“Marion can’t be dead,” Konig said, aloud this time. He gathered himself to his full height and lifted Arawn off of his feet again. “Tell me where I can really find her, you lying piece of—”
“There.” Arawn pointed at the door of Sheol. “I shoved her into a very dark hole. If she didn’t already expire because she’s an angel in the Nether Worlds, she’ll starve from tumbling into eternity or whatever it is that happens when people fall into bottomless pits.” His eyes sparkled with cruel mirth. “Would you want to chase her down?”
It was meant to be a joke, but that was exactly what Konig would have to do if he wanted to keep his kingdom.
“Take him!” Konig tossed Arawn to Nikki. She caught the demon easily, still glowing with power. It didn’t just feel like the Middle Worlds around her. She was the Middle Worlds. Arawn was tiny at her feet.
Konig waved to Hooch, who rose within the cascades of Nikki’s magic with practiced effort.
“Into Sheol!” Konig shouted. “Past the balefire!”
But Hooch only took two steps before stopping. His face went slack with surprise.
Konig turned to face the portal to
Sheol.
Something enormous and black and billowing was coming out, like a cloud of ink released underwater. It moved too slowly and too quickly all at once.
The entity that spilled out of the Nether Worlds was nothing mortal, but it also wasn’t a mere cloud. Even Nikki’s magic didn’t touch it. Where the shadow brushed, her effect withered.
For an instant, Konig feared that it would destroy them all. He recalled standing in front of the Genesis void, holding hands with a babysitter, and knowing that he was about to die. It felt exactly the same.
Unlike the Genesis void, this shadow began drawing in on itself after it came out of the doorway. It formed into the shape of a man with millions of arms and hands and legs and faces that expressed a million emotions.
Those multitudes of hands, formed from countless realities and possibilities, were cradling a single human—a woman with eyes such a bright blue that they glowed through her closed eyelids. She wore leather, much like the Raven Knights. Identical to them, in fact.
“Marion,” Konig tried to say, but he couldn’t seem to speak.
The hands holding her were gentle skeletons, rotting and newborn simultaneously. Seth Wilder dripped with power as he dragged Marion out of Sheol.
Because that’s who the darkness was. Konig recognized the faces now, even though none of them looked quite right. Seth was no longer merely a fractured avatar. He was a god.
Hooch fell to his knees. One by one, so did the others. The sidhe, the demons. Nikki followed, and it was discomfiting to see such a powerful woman cowed in the face of a higher authority.
Konig should have been that higher authority.
“Marion?” he said again. His voice didn’t travel through the air. There was no oxygen. Only Seth.
For the first time since Genesis, a god had delivered himself unto Earth, and everything had stopped to honor it.
The god seemed immune to the enormity of the moment. Despite all those emotions, all those bodies, and all those possibilities, every single version of Seth was focused on Marion’s blank face. She had a smear of mud on her cheek. Konig hoped it was mud.