The spear winked out in Blays' hands. He was yelling something, but the whole world seemed to be yelling as well at that moment, and Dante couldn't make out the words. It occurred to him that it was probably something about falling to his death. Pulling his attention away from the nether he'd launched at the entity, he reached into the ground and softened it just as he'd done earlier.
Light strobed over Gladdic's face as he fired more ether up at the enemy. Blays shot past the glowing stream, falling like a rock. Just before he could splash down, he blinked out of existence.
Dante did some blinking of his own. The water rippled, then sloshed about. Blays materialized next to him on dry land, looking neither wet nor smashed to death. Too baffled to speak, Dante gave him a nod, then drew as much nether as he could and tipped back his head just in time to see the entity's arm tear in half where Blays had cut through it.
Immense clouds of blackness spewed from both ends of the rupture. The hand had pulled back from the Emerald Titan, fingers twisted into claws. The ether Gladdic had just rattled off plowed into the entity's forearm, spraying more of its smoky essence across the sky. Even so, Dante prepared another volley, but let it dissipate as the hand broke apart—first into chunks, then into fragments, at last into dust—and the rest of the arm did the same.
The purple light hovering above them went out like a snuffed candle. The night went completely silent except for the heaving of their lungs. They looked at each other in wonder.
"Larisse?" Dante called. "Are you all right?"
She made no answer. The upper leg of the Titan was cracked and broken and scaled, but other than a few missing chunks, the damage looked to be mostly on the surface, and he doubted it was nearly enough to have killed her, or dispersed her spirit, or whatever it was that it would take to make her no more. Even so, he reached his mind upward into the Titan's flank, softening the mineral there to patch the cracks and mend the seams. He liquefied the biggest pieces lying on the ground and sent them flowing up the side of the structure to rejoin their body.
He nodded up at it. "How did you even get up there?"
Blays shrugged. "Things are weird in the shadows."
"Not that weird. I've seen you climb cliffs, but nothing like that."
"Before that, I never had something that could pierce anything. Do you know how much easier it is to climb things when you can just stab them?"
"Larisse," Dante tried again. "Of the Emerald Titan. Are you…there?"
I… The word in their heads sounded like it was coming down a long tunnel or from under the floor. I.
"I'm repairing the damage the best I can. But you have to help us. Join the rest of the Four That Fell in stabilizing Rale against the entity's plagues and distortions. Do that, and we can push him and his legions back down into the abyss."
I…can't.
"You damn well can, because if you don't, he's going to come back, kill us, and then do whatever it is that kills a giant emerald statue-thing. So even if you want to be destroyed—if you think you've endured for long enough—your comrades in arms still want to live on."
You don't understand. Her words still came slowly, but Dante could feel the mustering of pure will behind them. I can't because…I have already done it. Nolost can no longer make this world tremble and fall.
Dante put his hand to his heart and bowed. "Thank you, Larisse. Once we defeat him, we'll return here to see to your condition in any way we can."
I have done what you asked…but it will mean nothing.
"Blays' life might be inconsequential and expendable, but I assure you, to the rest of us, what you've done means everything."
You don't understand. You haven't defeated him. He is still here. And he is far stronger than you know.
Something began to roll around in Dante's stomach. "What are you talking about?"
He's still there! There in the—
Her voice had become much steadier—her ability to think seemed to be clarifying, too—and rather than trailing off, she abruptly cut off. Dante could feel a great struggle unfolding, but he couldn't tell where or in what shape it took.
"To think that we ever allowed ourselves to hope," Gladdic grated.
Heartsick, already certain of what he was about to see, Dante turned in the same direction as Gladdic.
It was far worse than he feared. The shadow of the Titan was stirring again. This time, rather than a single arm, three arose from the darkness. Then three more. And three after that. Until all the sky was filled with the horror of the entity.
30
Two of Nolost's limbs ended in hands and were more or less humanoid. But the digits of another pair ended in long claws; another was a crushing pincer; another was a lithe tentacle; one was tipped with a long spike, and another by a round club; the last by a mop-like mass of squiggling tentacles.
Each one swam through the air toward the Titan.
"Good gods!" Blays extended his spear from its rod-form. "What do we do?"
"Can you climb back up the Titan?" Dante said.
"Nine times?!"
"There will be no need," Gladdic said. "For he will attack us and the Titan at the same time."
The entity extended its thicket of limbs, testing them against the laws and confines of Rale. Each one was long enough to reach from one side of a town to the other.
"We're not really going to try to fight that thing," Blays said. "Are we?"
Dante readied the shadows. "What's the alternative? Suicide pact?"
"We could barely deal with it when there was just one of them." Blays tilted back his head as the host of limbs climbed into the sky. "But we don't have to destroy them, do we?"
Dante's eyes went as wide as chariot wheels. "Just the doorway they're coming here through." He started forward. "That's the plan! Hold them off the Titan the best we can—and rip the portal out by its roots."
Four of the limbs broke toward the Titan, staying high in the air. One kept position where it was—keeping an eye on the field?—while the remainder floated silently toward the three humans as they advanced toward the shadow of the Titan. Dante groped through the earth with his mind, hunting for the portal, but it was beyond his range.
This is pathetic folly, Nolost said. I know that that is simply the nature the gods had to imbue you with. But no matter how many times I've seen it in these last days, it still disgusts me. Do you know how much of this world has already fallen to me? Yet even if I could show its ruins to you, you would still run towards me as you are, helpless before the strings your bodies are puppeted by.
"I suppose we just don't share your appreciation of being torn into absolute nothing." Blays leveled his spear. "But I'll be happy to let you experience it."
With a thoughtful frown, Gladdic unleashed a stream of ether, shaping it into various geometric patterns as he let it loose. It blazed across the sky toward one of the arms swimming its way to the Titan. Gladdic watched carefully as his attack made impact.
"There's a gap in the earth about fifty feet under that rock there," Dante said, pointing ahead of them. "It has to be the portal."
"You better not die before you dig down to it," Blays said. "Because I don't have a shovel and Gladdic's only got one arm."
Dante had been about to fling some bolts up at the limbs closing in on the Titan, but there was much more truth to Blays' words than he wanted to admit out loud, and he diverted his focus into the earth where he thought the portal must be, pulling it back and doing his best to shape a ramp down to it. While he worked, Gladdic arranged another bundle of ether into a complex design and volleyed it at the same arm he'd struck before.
"Right," Blays said. "Here comes the fun part."
One of the pincers drew wide as it approached them. Blays was already breaking away from it, as was Gladdic, but Dante had been absorbed by his work with the earth and only now began to run to the side, away from the pincer. It yawned further, reaching past him, and snapped together, ready to slice him in half. As the black pi
ncer closed around him, Dante yanked the ground from beneath himself and dropped into a hole.
The claw cracked together and pulled back. Dante threw himself up from the pit and rolled away from it. In front of him, Blays wheeled the Spear of Stars with quick flicks of his wrists, slashing into the pincer over and over again. Steam shot from it as Nolost drew it back.
I wasn't lying to you when I told you that, when I annihilate you, you will become delirious with joy, the entity spoke into their minds. The process of complete destruction is the only thing that can reunite you with the oneness of being you were separated from by your creators.
A spike-tipped tentacle whisked down toward Blays. Blays vaulted back from it, lashing the spear around fast enough to land a clumsy slash across the limb. The spike pounded into the ground and sank fifteen feet deep. Blays ran toward it, jabbing it while it was stuck, but another limb swooped in, spreading its mop of wriggling tentacles wide.
This is the exact reason the gods designed you to cling to life as you are doing now. Do you see? For if you didn't, then you would soon learn the truth of what was taken from you, and you would rush to return to the warmth of the oneness, until there was no one left alive. To prevent this, the gods forged your ability to suffer into the very core of your being—and built this world so that you always would suffer.
Gladdic launched his most complicated pattern of lights yet at the mass of small tentacles. It shredded into them with hair-raising fury, severing scores of them to frazzle away into nothing.
It hurts! Larisse said.
Running sideways from a massive hand that had put itself in his way, Dante shot a glance behind him. The four limbs had all reached the Titan. The tentacle had slid around its leg to squeeze it like a snake. While the club beat against it, and a claw grasped tight and twisted, the hand was merely caressing it—but wherever it touched, the emerald surface cracked and flaked.
For it was only through the process of suffering that you could be made to fear death and oblivion, Nolost continued. They made you to know pain every day of your life. And for that pain to grow unbearable if you ever got too close to death and its beautiful annihilation. They did this to you all in the service of hiding the truth from you.
As the entity went on—speaking words that Dante thought must surely be lies, but which fit together with compelling logic—Dante chopped at the hand in front of him with the nether, trying to drive it aside long enough for him to slip past it. It drew back, but this was just a feint, and its sudden charge made him fall back instead.
"Blays!" he said. "Get this thing out of my way, would you?"
"Sure," Blays called back. "Just as soon as you deal with these two."
From the corner of his eye, Dante caught Blays battling back two of the limbs at once, the Spear of Stars trailing light behind it as it stabbed and spun. Dante gritted his teeth and hacked at the hand with the shadows. It advanced on him regardless of the damage. He drew his sword.
They made not just your flesh bodies ripe for suffering, Nolost said, but your minds and souls as well. And do you think the gods know pain and suffering themselves? You have sought out the Four That Fell, so you must know of the War of the Forging. But I doubt in the heart of my being that you know why we fought against the gods. We waged war to save you—to spare you from the hell your creators had trapped you inside!
The hand grasped for Dante and he fell back twenty feet, pummeling it with black darts all the while. He opened a tunnel in front of himself and extended it past the hand, but it slammed itself to the ground, collapsing the tube. Dante screamed in frustration. He could hear the Titan screaming inside his head, too. Chips and holes scarred its surface as splinters of it thunked steadily into the ground around it.
The hand came at him again and he scampered back, swiping at the air with his Odo Sein blade as he drove a funnel of nether into one of the grasping fingers, shortening it by a third. Yet the hand remained firmly in his way.
A pillar of light beamed past him. Its interior was hollow and its surface was an eye-blendingly intricate arrangement of patterns within patterns, like a column stolen from a holy temple made not of stone, but of ideals. The beam slammed into the palm of the hand, spitting chunks every which way. It bored all the way through it before the last of its embers finally faded out. The entity clenched its hand and drew it back.
"What on earth was that?" Dante said. "Holy runes?"
"It is that which is most hateful to the tides of entropy," Gladdic said. "Order, and art."
"Whatever it is, do lots more of it!"
Gladdic was already weaving another hollow column. Dante chopped into the wounded palm with a flurry of black blades. It held position, thinning its forearm to draw more matter up to its hand, yet just as it started to heal itself, Gladdic threw his second salvo. The pillar of light seared into the closed fingers of the fist. As dark vapor spilled from them, obscuring the hand, Dante broke into a run, curving past it toward the pit that held the portal.
The ground shook behind him. A house-sized brick of emerald had been torn loose from the Titan to crash down at its feet. The entity's limbs hung around it like the rigging of some vast and awful ship. As Dante tried to assess how bad the damage was, he heard Larisse sobbing somewhere within his mind.
It is all futile, Nolost said. But I know that you have no choice. You are doing as your nature demands, as am I.
"The entity of getting all your limbs chopped off is a pretty niche position," Dante said, cleaving into the middle of the arm as he ran past it. "But if that's what your nature insists on…"
Gladdic plowed into the hand with a third column and it fell to the ground and writhed about like a snake whose back has been broken by a wagon wheel. The once-opaque limb thinned to where Dante could see the grass on the other side of it. He ran parallel to it toward where it emerged from the underground doorway, throwing his mind ahead of himself to follow the contours of the portal to see how he might best cut it loose from its moorings and banish the entity back to the Becoming. He didn't think he'd need to do so from the inside after all. He thought he could just—
A tenth limb rose from the pit just ahead of him. It terminated not in a hand or a claw, but in something more like the two-part shell of a clam, or the head of a squat lizard. It opened its mouth—if that's what it was—and spewed gray vapor toward him. This dissolved the ground in front of him with the same crackling sound the shadow-dragon's breath had made in the Becoming. Dante had to break hard to his left to stop from falling into the hole the extremity had opened in front of him.
He emptied his mind and filled it with ether, trying to craft it into something like what Gladdic was wielding, but it was like trying to write calligraphy with an arm that's fallen asleep, and the best he could manage was to arrange the ether into alternating squares. He slung this into the limb as it drew back and gathered itself for another attack. The ether knocked dark streamers from it, but with nothing like the ferocity Gladdic had inflicted.
Dante had come within fifty feet of the pit, but found himself stalled out again. Blays was still vaulting and darting about between two limbs, keeping them both occupied, and while Gladdic looked to be on the brink of destroying the one he and Dante had been assaulting, the only unoccupied extremity was soaring toward him at that very moment, tying him up again.
Frustration lodged in Dante's throat like a lump of beef. He threw a black bolt past the lizard-headed limb and down into the pit, trying to guide it toward the green edges of the portal, where it curved away into its unseen world beyond, but the nether slammed into the side of the pit. To sever the doorway, he was going to need to be right on top of it.
He made a break for it, but the limb stretched toward him, leveled its head, and disgorged more of the annihilating vapor, erasing the earth before him. He reached into the ground, pulling forth the surrounding dirt to fill in the hole. Before he could finish his work, the limb opened its maw and stabbed towards him. He scrambled back and lashed i
nto it with the nether until it pulled back to recohere the damage he'd done.
Dante broke to his left, swerving around the hole, making up the distance he'd just been pushed back from the pit. The Emerald Titan wailed again. An immense slab pounded into the ground at its feet as the extremity angled to cut off Dante's path forward.
It is almost finished, Nolost said into his mind. Would you rather watch as I destroy the Titan? Or would you rather be killed first to spare you of the sight?
"How about you?" Dante said. "Can you feel despair? You're about to be reminded how it felt the first time you lost a war against our world."
He made another run for the pit. Predictably, the lizard-headed limb moved to intercept him, breathing out its negating plume, taking away the ground between them and making Dante dodge around it as it expended itself.
But he still ran forward. As he neared the lip of the chasm the lizard-headed arm had just made, he shoved the earth forward and upward, building a ramp right over the top of the limb. He ran up it as fast as he could. The pit was just past the ramp's far side. To save time, he'd throw himself down it and catch himself in mud at the bottom. Then rip into the portal like it was his first taste of meat after a long trek through the desert.
The ground jerked beneath his feet. He reached down to stabilize it, but the entity arched its limb upward, breaking the ramp from below. Dante spilled forward, skidding and then rolling down the earthwork as it crumbled to pieces. He hit the ground, dirt pouring in behind him to cover his legs and waist. He kicked uselessly to free his legs before remembering that he had total mastery of the substance trying to bury him and stripped it from himself like a sweaty sheet. As he tried to stand, his ankle buckled and he dropped, grunting in pain.
He was covered in fresh scrapes and the nether galloped to him. He sank it into his ankle and washed away the sprain. As he did so and stood, the limb cleared itself of debris and snaked toward him.
Tell me when I am supposed to start feeling this "despair."
The head pulled back, then pushed forward. Gray vapor rolled toward Dante. He turned and ran for the pit, but it was much faster, and he pulled up haphazard lumps of dirt behind him in hopes the spray would exhaust itself on them. He was still twenty feet from the pit when the vapor overtook him.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 50