Shadow & Light

by Stephen Ayer

  His hand and arm burst into ash. He dropped from the shadows and into the light, and she smiled when she saw his look of agony. Silvery veins of phosphorescent blue spread from his stump and reached across his face, the fruits of perfidy reaped in full.

  The sorcerer’s brutal crippling gave her just the break she needed. One final cast of shadow spiraled off her wand and detonated before the council in a blast of light devouring fog. She leaped off from her withered legs, numb and soft, her drained muscles craving of the sweet power that pulsed within its grasp moments before.

  Her heart shuddered when she saw her reflection in the chamber’s window. Instead of bright eyes and porcelain skin with the sweeping facial features of a sculptor’s dream, only a defiled husk of beauty remained. Multiple boils and blotches had spread across her face, a bent and ungraceful nose demarcating her features.

  Hazy cataracts of elder years stretched across the former brilliance of her eyes, which only served to incense her madness. Her bones and sinews surged with crazed power, unbecoming of her bent back and misshapen shoulders. She would not die a powerless crone.

  She would be remembered.

  The witch jumped through the stained glass mural of the tower and plummeted into the city below. Bits of mage glass cut into her gnarled skin, tickling her nerves as the shards raced through a spectrum of shades, desperately trying to hold onto the colors they had when they were whole. High winds played with her hair while Calanar’s lights and terraces shined like a vision of paradise, the hard death they promised upon looming edges an afterthought in her mind.

  The city had consumed as many witches and warlocks as it had produced. What was one more?

  To the witch that had defied the destiny the High Council had set for her, dominating the ceaseless pull of gravity was as easy as breathing air.

  “Vhind arreste!” she hissed while taking a deep breath. The wand in her crinkled hand burst within her palm, the enchanted wood shards embedding themselves deep within her skin while the arcane tattoos along her back swirled to life. They blazed like pale blue celestial snakes and cinched tightly around her parched skin, hungrily devouring any last vestige of manna left in her wilted flesh.

  When she exhaled her body grew as light as a feather and the fall became a float among the spires. From the city’s highest tower to its lowest, golden bells rang and great spikes of bright violet and silver pierced the sky, throwing an ethereal cast over the spire’s ivory stones. She glided into shadows, willing herself to descend faster.

  People scattered in the streets below as she came in line with the rooftops of spellworks and forges. Her overgrown nails hit the pavement first, scraping along the cobblestones like jagged black talons. Most were too caught in the commotion to see the horrid creature in their midst.

  Saliva frothed from her cracked lips, her eyes darting madly for any threat. She wrapped her fingers around one street lamp and sighed like an addict as magic flowed back into her veins. The orb of pale witchlight at the top of the stone pylon flickered like a lost soul before leaving the sidewalk in darkness.

  As soon as she had drained the thing of its manna she hungered for more, her hollow soul quivering to fill the void left by the High Council. All the world became a blur of glass, fire and screams as she scampered over barrels and dove through windows like a mad dog. Even through her gibbering she recognized she had to escape.

  Already she heard the horns of the Seekers, employing their fell divinations to find their fugitive. She continued on, her muscles burning and her knuckles bleeding. Her lungs heaved for desperate breath, and each gasp of the city’s air was both honey sweet and icy cold.

  She remembered the sensation of blood and magic traveling up her fingers, the crunch of another arcanist’s bones beneath her feet, but no more, not even his face. New pains bloomed along her wretched form as some hurled death, bright and fast, her way. Her mouth watered and her eyes dilated to flashes of burning cobalt and streaks of silver laced carmine, some of the colors exploding into shards, others poisonous vapors.

  Magic was more wondrous in those days. While its long retreat from the world below had continued unabated for ages, in Calanar, the arcane reigned eternal, and she was no more fearful or desirous of such flagrant power as now.

  She fled lower and lower into the city, back into the parts that survived when great tides sundered the world below. There the architecture was strange, the stonework like faded ebony with veins of dark emerald. Great edifices erected to the arcanists of old who thought themselves gods protruded from the ancient stones. They were the Wiccari, the zenith of her kind. Their sometimes stoic, sometimes rapturous faces, regarded her in silent judgment.

  The fallen witch kept to the shadows, weary of the odd hiss or wind, knowing of what entities had called the ruins home since time immemorial. Using her own blood, she drew her own ritual circle. Her feeble and bloodied fingers shook as she rushed her lines, her fractured mind reciting half-remembered spells from her youth in between phlegmy wheezes and coughs.

  She crawled into the circle, keeping her hand to her bloodied side and imagined the world below. The spell circle began to pulse in a certain rhythm, attuning itself to the thoughts of its subject in flashes of pallid luminescence. Her breathing slowed and her eyes closed. Sorcerous light enveloped her crumpled, hurting body like an arcane womb.

  Like the Morning Star before her, she was hurled from the lap of heaven, her exile heralded by the pound of thunder and the lash of lightning.

  Agatha’s eyes snapped open from her seance. The memory was the same as ever. She had beheld her banishment from every conceivable angle over the long centuries. Each retread of the events never moved her to think what could have been, only that it was meant to be.

  Each viewing kept the wounds of the past open. I need to see it again. And again. Memories and time can only gentle what they did to me. They’ll feel what I felt, bleed what I bled. They’ll know what it’s like to be without hope... without power.

  Wisps of incense coiled around Agatha’s body like a silken shroud, caressing her like unworthy hands, protecting the nakedness of their goddess. With each breath she took, the room seemed to breath in turn. The atmosphere was unnaturally dry and cold; the moon poured through her unshuttered, frosted windows and diffused around her pale form in a haze of luminescence.

  Hidden and forbidden tattoos materialized on her immaculate skin, tracing and weaving around her lush shape like spreading vines. They ran along her curves in ornate spiral and whorl patterns, punctuated by elegantly sharp and jutting symbols in black. With each deep breath, they spread faster and grew thicker, never overwhelming her body but complementing it with long and precise criss-crossed lines. Lines that were not drawn by mortal hands.

  She sighed as the designs pulsed and throbbed with abyssal shadows, contracting and expanding to the rhythm of her heart. Through closed eyes, she did not see darkness, but blinding light. It lanced past her obedient eyes and raced along her brain like a deluge of white fire. She had relinquished vision in one world only to be granted it in another.

  Possibility. Potential. Futures.

  A world built on the foundation of the past and laid out on inconstant, shadowy roads that grew more distinct yet opaque to the ebb of the present.

  The end game was near, this she knew. Many players had been kept in the dark and off the board, and those that were, were naught but pawns. But even pawns could take queens. She watched the two unlikely companions draw ever closer, their presences like one white gold orb and one ruby black star within the endless space of her mind. Visions of their boat sinking and the two dying at sea came to her, but were light and indistinct; the screams of the souls on board no more than a whisper in her ears.

  Other visions, more solid and vivid, showed the vampire charred into ruin after igniting the ire of the holy warrior. Charred but not ash. Even angels have their limits. More tangible still, was the vampire’s headless corpse, thrown into a bonfire with the bodies of
her followers he had taken with him. A crueler fate awaited the angel as Aphon broke his bones and dragged him to a section of the Appian Way, leaving him crucified and bleeding on rotten wood posts.

  Her gaze turned to the lupine hunter that carved his way across Spain and southern France, disappearing and reappearing within her mind like a cloud faded moon. Every time he reappeared, another one of her fates was shown to her, each one more real than the last. All started with him kicking down the door to her manor, setting her curtains on fire before felling the great mass of her followers and ripping the great demon Aphon in twain.

  From there her fate branched out, from surrender, to capture, to death. She shuddered at the real sight of being dragged before the High Council of Calanar. Beaten, in chains, kneeling before the very ones who betrayed her. Time had only made greater cowards of them all, none deigned to show their faces, keeping themselves veiled in shadow as their bodies were in robes.

  How far she had fallen, from their fine monuments and fine company. Betrayer, they called her. And yet to be left in this world of granite, iron and mud, and forced to consort with those who had as much spiritual spark as a mote of dust made her wonder... who betrayed who?

  She was a witch, more than that were she to frank with herself. Her kind of power was only seen in legends, the sorceresses of old. And so was that of the Council. And yet, for all their power, all their majesty, they sat passive in their crumbling city. The last bastion of true magic! They had the power to not only rebuild themselves, but the world below.

  A new Golden Age would dawn on humanity... if the Council had but the will to command. And for such ‘treason’, she was cast out. The heretics of the world had found their own to vilify. And in this vision, they threw her far down into the void, where gods once walked and where only death now tread. This time with more wards, more seals, more locks and bereft of her most precious possession.

  The Black Star... She felt for the thing around her neck, consoling that her vision had not come to pass.

  Yet.

  Still, as substantive as these visions of horror were, they paled before the previews of her glories. Long and magnificent vistas rushed out before her; tall gleaming spires rose out of the tattered ruins of mankind’s civilization. Golden clouds hovered low above the world’s denizens, framing the bright blue skies with their shocks of color.

  Vitreous arches and bridges swept and upheld the heavens where Man’s works once scraped and scarred the sky. Steel molded from the stars themselves and sculpted in the shapes of humanity’s new lords, shining in compound colors more golden than the sun and more azure than the sea, the heavens captured, the great glorified.

  Streams and rivers glowed like the sun, wrapping the planet in veins of liquid light. Banners framed with the sigil of the Black Rose fluttered where national flags once stood. The lesser witchbreed had their principalities, the greater families possessing greater swaths of what the Sons of Adam had the gall to call their own.

  And above them hovered the city that ruled them all. The lost city, Calanar’s twin, returned from the ether to return the place of magic in the world. Avosi.

  Such visions of glory brightened her heart, that they were more solid than her visions of failure pleased her even more. Other forces encircled her dreams. A prince of flames and something... of a far less definable nature. The silhouette of a tall and abyssal shadow, ruptured into an inky, ill-defined mass, spread over all her futures and crystallized like black ice, limned with maddening verdigris light...

  She snapped her eyes open with a start and coughed. Her skin glistened in a cold sweat and black bangs clung to her forehead. The foul, eldritch pantheon of the Outer Dark called to her, seeping into her dreams and aligning her vision to theirs. I’m still in control. All of witchkind had developed defenses against this ancient enemy. Though they did not know the names of these beings, they knew they existed, which was far more than the rest of the planet could boast.

  Witches and warlocks of great power were beacons to those seeking such power. Long had they dealt with the sly machinations of demons offering gifts, but more difficult still were the offers of these... things. They did not come bearing anything, indeed it was not their nature to offer but to tempt. A temptation of glorious service, to subsume one’s will in their own.

  When the azure domes of Avosi hold the sky and Man walks in our shadows, I will burn those horrors out of the darkness. She had borne their ghastly seductions for too long and even her mind, fortified though it was, was beginning to fray after the long eons of their madness.

  She grabbed the long, midnight pendant around her neck for reassurance. Her fingers swept along its swooped, claw shape. Reality wavered around her and power, sheer power billowed through her veins. For a moment, she saw lights of another world outside her window, the shadow of webbed wings and the smell of something that was like chilled forest wind. The whispers of the Outer Dark faded just as nature’s veil sealed itself once more.

  She inclined her head to another sound.

  Thundering footsteps echoed outside her door and with but a thought, the smoky incense that shrouded her body solidified into dark blueish black silk, hiding the pendant as much as her form. Her tattoos retreated underneath her skin so that by the time Aphon banged open her door, he found the witch in serene stillness, looking into his eyes with expectation.

  “Yes?”

  Aphon’s host was covered in sweat, but of a hotter sort than the kind that decorated Agatha’s skin. “The angel... escaped. Nine of yours. Gone like scythed chaff.” The demon host looked down, puzzlement on his face. “I knew Heaven’s chosen were no trifle but still...”

  Agatha rose up with languid grace, belying her old age. “That wasn’t the angel. That was one of yours... who it seems was not one of yours.”

  Aphon twitched and agitation rose in his voice. “Explain.”

  The witch sighed. “Your favored merchant. The one I sent my coven after. His other master claimed his soul before you could.” She said it matter of factly, and glided over to her desk before settling her long hands over her mortar and pestle.

  Aphon bristled and clenched his fists. He never liked how she toyed with him. “You knew he swore himself to another demon...”

  Agatha stopped grinding her herbs and exhaled deeply. She turned her head and fixed him with a cold glare. “Not another demon. Another force, one that could crush your master’s little brimstone fiefdom were it awake enough.” She turned back to her work area and threw a pinch of something in the bowl that created pinkish white sparks. “I kept my eye out, to see what of his master’s secrets he may loose, and then end him... but never did I see him... become what he did. Or the angel wander into his web for that matter.”

  The demon took a long, deep breath and came right by her ear. “When you are master of this world, and I of mine, we shall have a long... long... talk, on what we share. I’ll not humor your fox games any longer.”

  Remember where that tone got you last time, demon.

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t have sought me out, then.” She spared him a glance before turning back to her creation. He paced around her like a jungle predator, with the light from the hallway reaching him on one side of his face, and the shadow of her room on the other. His shadowed eye had the slightest glow to it, reflecting the light of the moon and realms more distant.

  “Perhaps.” the demon mused, stopping right behind her. “So now the angel is on his way-”

  “And the vampire.”

  Aphon smirked and began walking again. “Two did not become one after all... lucky for you, I’ve already instructed the acolytes to begin setting up wards and enchantments around the grounds.”

  Agatha poured her concoction into a vial, filling it up with warm, brownish blue liquid. “We’re not waiting for them. We’ll begin our ritual tonight.”

  The demon grinned and put his hands behind his back. “Of course, though there will be some consequences to enact it before the eve of
the new millennium...”

  Agatha popped a cork in the vial and hid it under her robes. “I’ll deal with them when we get to them.”

  “It’s strange, seeing you in a hurry, changing plans... it makes you seem almost... mortal.”

  She walked passed him briskly to her door and he walked from behind, eyes gleaming in her shadow. “Too many variables, demon. And I haven’t the strength or patience to see them all through to the end. Sometimes a little brute force is needed.”

  His smile widened. “A language I speak fluently.”

  ***

  As the two passed from the manor’s upper story and down the stairs the décor grew more rustic and less modern. Rectangular and windowed nineteenth century lanterns perched on rocky walls threw brownish yellow light across the stones and mottled veins of faded grout.

  By the foot of the stairs was the mansion’s front door. Its reinforced hinges, multiple layers of black iron and invisible arcane wards belied its ornate if dilapidated appearance from the exterior. Agatha traced her finger around a portion of the wall beneath the stairs, whispering under her breath with her eyes closed.

  A series of clicks preceded the wall pushing forward and then sliding to the side. Agatha smirked when she caught the demon’s look of surprise in the corner of her eye. A talented engineer could make a door seamless, only a witch could make one invisible.

  The witch traipsed into the shadows, her pale face like a ghost swallowed up by the dark. The two moved down the long spiraling staircases into the old crypts, always moving down, never going off into any number of arches or alcoves sprung from centuries of construction and reconstruction.

  She watched with a note of consternation how the torchlight deformed her shadow. It roiled and shifted, as if there was something within the shadow... but that was nothing compared to what Aphon created. His dark reflection seemed to linger a half-step behind him, and every few steps the shadow’s head would turn back, as if spotting or hearing something.