The Shadow Watch

by S. A. Klopfenstein

  The doors to Ren’s balcony flew open, propelled by the chancellor’s magic. The curtains blew in the wind, and the chancellor led her out. Outside the walls of the fortress, a herd of gargantuan two-headed beasts stood still as statues.

  “How?” said Tori, trying to hide the fear that was tearing at the last shreds of hope she had left. The might of the beasts was beyond comprehension. There were at least a dozen of them. Their massive necks plunged into the sky like war towers.

  “The greatest folly of the Old World was to mistake monsters for mindless brutes,” said the chancellor. “The Rulaqs are a race like any other. Their home was ripped from their grasp by a man—my ancestor—who thought them beneath his own race. I promised to give the Rulaqs back the Crooked Teeth, and in exchange, they agreed to ally themselves with the descendant of their greatest adversary.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Tori shortly. “How have so many of them remained hidden all these years?”

  The chancellor grinned. “I always did like your spirit, Astoria. The Rulaqs remained hidden because they weren’t here all these years.”

  “W-what do you mean?”

  It was then Tori noticed the woman walking amongst the beasts. Her face was as pale as the snow, and she wore a dark hooded cloak. She crossed the field of monsters, weaving between the pillared legs of the beasts. She glanced up at them, her eyes seeming to cut across the distance. Tori remembered Ren’s story earlier that night of the dark witch that the chancellor had been learning from, and she knew this must be her. The witch rose from the ground and flew to join them. Her flight was slow, and she landed on unsteady feet, gripping the edge of the balcony. Tori swore the air grew colder as she landed.

  “Astoria, meet Medea,” said the chancellor.

  The witch’s eerie gaze unnerved her, but Tori held her head high as the woman looked her over. It felt as though Medea were looking through her, to her soul. “Ah, the infamous Gallows Girl. Yesss.”

  Tori said nothing, but she felt her senses surging within her. The woman’s very presence made Tori want to lash out and fight. Medea reached inside her billowy cloak and retrieved a pair of shimmering emerald stones. She handed them to the chancellor, and he grinned, holding them up for Tori to see. Tori feared she did not have to ask what they were.

  Medea left them, then, without another word.

  “You asked how the beasts have returned to the world after hundreds of years,” the chancellor said, his fingers playing with the gems. “The answer: I let them in. Or rather, Medea did.”

  Tori felt a dark chill run across her skin. “Let them in from where?”

  “There is magic in the world far greater than that of the Watchers, Astoria. Believing that they were the lone wielders of the powers behind the world—the gods’ chosen saviors of humankind—that arrogance was what led to the Watchers’ demise in the Old World. The First Chancellor, for all his blunders, didn’t despise magic. He was a Watcher himself, and a devout follower of the Order. The problem was he couldn’t control the others. Magic doesn’t play favorites. Look at yourself. A slave girl who suddenly possesses the strength to cast a ripple in the pond of power. The lowborns of Osha would follow you to their deaths if they ever had the chance. Magic is the great leveler of the world in the right hands. And so, my ancestors banished magic entirely from our world.”

  The chancellor held the stones out for Tori to see. She had seen highborn ladies in Osha wear stones such as these around their necks. But as she eyed them, she noticed something subtly different. There was a glow to them, not like that of a flame, but more like the glow of primal life.

  “My ancestors ushered in our magic-less, monster-less New World with one final act of incredibly powerful magic.” Cyrus Maro held up the stones. “With the godstones.”

  Powerful magic, thought Tori. It was just like the draft, the way he used sterile words to describe the deaths of innocent people. It made her sick. “Sure, if you call slaughtering all of my kind a mere act of magic,” said Tori.

  The chancellor laughed to himself. “Ah, but he didn’t slaughter them, Astoria. Not all of them. That’s what people thought, of course. How else could you explain the disappearance of every magical creature, every savage monster?”

  “How would you explain it, then?”

  “The First Chancellor sent them away from our world to ravage another one.” Tori’s face must have borne the puzzlement she felt, because the chancellor laughed once more. “What if I told you that the New World is not all there is?”

  That made no sense to Tori. “What are you talking about?”

  “Would you like to see?”

  The chancellor did not wait for a reply. He pressed the emerald stones, now glowing intensely, into Tori’s palm. A swirl of mist engulfed them, until the valley and the Rulaqs disappeared. Tori was filled with the sensation that her insides were being turned inside out. Searing pain filled her senses. The stones burned through the skin of her hand, sending waves of pain through her bones.

  The burning spread from her palm to the rest of her body, as though she’d been set aflame. And then the pain changed. At first, Tori thought it was her body healing itself. But that was not this feeling.

  I feel… numb…

  The mists swirled around them, then dissipated, and Tori knew immediately that she had arrived somewhere else. Somewhere utterly different from the world she had always known.

  32

  Tori crumpled to the ground in a field of grey grass. The searing pain had become a throbbing ache that permeated her entire being. She lay in the grass and let the pain wash over her. Slowly, the intensity ebbed away, becoming a lingering ache that made her feel hollowed out. After a few minutes, she found the strength to sit up and take in the world around her.

  She lay in a meadow. There was a vast forest at the edge of it, but the trees were different from the ones in Osha. The snowpines and everwinter trees of the North were tall and slender and covered in needles. But these trees were broad and had leaves as large as she was. Tori had seen such trees in the Bay of Trium, but there was something different about this place, something that told her there was no way she could be anywhere near the Trium’vel.

  The trees were alive, but they were not green like trees in the New World. These bore a dull grey color like the grass. Though the sun shone bright, it seemed washed out, almost too bright. What’s more, Tori did not feel the warmth of its rays, nor did she feel cold.

  I feel… nothing, Tori thought dimly.

  The place stirred no sense in her at all. The world was utterly silent. There were no leaves rustling. No birds chirping. No rodents foraging. It unnerved her how quiet this place was.

  The chancellor stood, unfazed, a short distance away, atop a small grassy knoll, gazing out to a world beyond the meadow. Tori hobbled through the grass to him, and he turned and met her halfway down the hill, taking her arm. She only realized her body had been weakened from using the chancellor’s godstones when he aided her.

  “How is your hand?” Cyrus Maro said.

  Tori stretched out her fingers, and pain shot up her arm again. The skin was swollen and tender. Each movement felt like the skin was being stretched over a bed of broken glass. But if she held her hand still, the pain subsided.

  “Fine,” she lied. “Where are we?”

  “Come see.” The chancellor led her up the grassy knoll. From the top, they looked upon a great valley, and beyond, the ocean stretched out to the edges of the world. Yet the water did not flow in waves like it did in the New World. It stretched flat and motionless, like a great grey plain, reflecting the grey nothingness of the cloudless sky.

  On the rocky shore lay a vast city. At least, it had once been a city. It was now a field of bramble, shards of jagged stone sticking out in all directions like the bones of a long-dead beast, wrenched and splayed open at the chest. Tori had heard tales of the Necropoli of the Ruined Empire, ancient ghost cities that had fallen to ruin after the Elyan races a
rrived from the Lost Continent. The fair-skinned invaders had conquered the Faere Dynasty of the ancient world, and then gone on to take over the whole continent, leaving death and rubble in their wake. The Necropoli were said to be haunted, infested with plagues.

  Is that where the Rulaqs came from? Tori wondered. But then, why is everything so strange? Why does it feel so… otherworldly?

  Outside the necropolis, a horde of Rulaqs stood peacefully. There must have been a hundred or more. The chancellor had apparently only let in a portion of the beasts. Every one of them stared at an empty archway at the edge of the rubble.

  “Is this the land of the dead?” said Tori.

  The chancellor smiled, not darkly, but in an enduring way, the way mothers smile at naïve children. “This is the Old World, Astoria. Or rather, this is what’s left of it after the First Chancellor was through with it. A gloomy shade of our own world.”

  “What are they doing?” Tori said, pointing below at the statuesque Rulaqs.

  “This world is the most dismal place you can imagine. It echoes the beauties of our world, but with no sensation. Grass without color. A sea with no waves. Sunlight with no warmth. Eating with no hunger to satisfy. This place is worse than the land of the dead. It is nothingness. The Rulaqs lived in this nothingness for three hundred years, but one day, a door opened and took a few of their own away. These poor beasts are waiting, desperate for that door to open again and take them away from this wretched place.”

  Tori stretched out her hand again. It still hurt. The skin was raw from the searing godstones, and she thought she could see bone peeking through. It made her cringe, and she was surprised she was not in more pain than she was. Why aren’t I healing?

  “To open the door to this horrid world, the stones require payment,” said the chancellor. “A blood tithe. A Regenero is very handy for using the stones. Without your blood, I would have died after my first trip.”

  “That’s why you kept me alive—why you harvested my blood,” said Tori.

  “I kept you alive because killing you would have been a waste. I did not know how great a waste when I first drank your blood. You were not the first Watcher I spared. Once I discovered what could be done with Watcher blood, I began preserving them when possible. This was after my family died, of course. My father despised Watcher gifts. He got what was coming to him, I suppose.”

  The chancellor spoke of their deaths nonchalantly, as though talking of what he ate for dinner. It was his father’s Morphs that killed Mum, Tori thought.

  “But you were different than the others I collected, Astoria. Most died after a few months. But a few months went by, and you did not die. At first, I thought you were simply stronger than the others, but then I was wounded in a battle against Morgath. I should have died. I did not heal as fast as you, but two days later, I woke without pain. No wound. No scar. And I knew it was your blood. It explained your resilience during the bloodletting. That was when I realized it. You are a Mage—legend of the Watcher orders—a wielder of more than one magical gift.

  “I had been experimenting with the godstones, but I did not dare venture beyond our world until then. Oh, I sent a few Morphs to their deaths trying, but the tithe was too great. They could get here, but they could not get back without dying. It was the curse of the passage. But with your blood, though the pain was arduous, one could survive the passage. This discovery was what led your precious Commander Scelero to finally free you from my dungeons.”

  “H-he knew about the stones?” Tori asked.

  “No. He never knew quite how great a weapon I had. But he had his suspicions about my experiments, and he knew I’d found the company of a practiced sorcerer.”

  “Medea,” Tori said.

  The chancellor smiled. “Scelero suspected something awry about her, and he knew I was dabbling with ancient blood magic. He was bred to sense power, after all. Scelero knew what you really were before anyone. That traitorous bastard.”

  Tori did not know what to say. Scelero had truly known what she was all along, just as Ren thought?

  “You didn’t think he set you free simply because of you, did you?” The chancellor laughed. “Because he cared for one of his slaves enough to risk his own life?”

  But that was exactly why Tori had thought Scelero rescued her. That’s why he came to see me in my cell, wasn’t it? Why he hid my true nature during my years in his household? Why he chose me? Helped me escape?

  “You were nothing special to him, Astoria. Your blood was the key to a great new power, and he orchestrated your escape to prevent that power. Why do you think he let you bleed out in that cell for over a year?”

  Tori hadn’t let herself consider anything other than his care for her. Did he choose me for that very reason? To be some sort of magical pawn?

  “The commander left you to die until he realized you were a threat. But even in his rebellion, Scelero was weak, and he deserved the punishment he received.”

  Tori felt tears streaming down her cheeks, but she felt no sadness for Scelero, nor anger about the shattering of the image she had preserved of her kind master. She felt only enough to know that this dullness was not how she should be feeling, to know it was this place already having its effect on her—a feeling of nothingness that slowly seeped into her very being.

  “What did you do to him?” said Tori.

  “I brought him here, of course. And left him. Somewhere, Commander Scelero is wandering this abyss, desperately longing for a lost world from a nearly forgotten dream.”

  Tori shuddered at the horrible thought. And suddenly, she realized why the chancellor had brought her here. “You mean to leave me as well.”

  The chancellor did not answer immediately. He looked out at the great expanse before them, out to the edge of the world. Tori imagined herself trapped in this land of nothingness forever. But she did not feel the terror she knew she ought to feel.

  Already, Tori felt different. It was as though she had stepped into a dimly lit room, and her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. The grey world was growing less and less strange every moment she spent here. She wondered how long it would take for all this to feel like the real world—to forget how color brightened all things or how bitterness and passion burned inside her.

  Perhaps it won’t be so bad, Tori thought vaguely. I won’t feel pain or sorrow or regret again. Perhaps nothingness was not the torment the chancellor described. No! That’s this place poisoning your mind.

  The chancellor touched her shoulder and he smiled, almost sadly. “I am afraid I will not be leaving you here, Astoria. That would be too great a mercy, and too great a risk. You’ve spent too much time in the Crooked Teeth. You don’t know the problems you’ve caused since your escape. I made the mistake of letting you live once. But rumors have spread of your miraculous escape from my dungeons. Despite my victories in Morgath, the Council of Osha doubts my supremacy, thanks to you. Now, there are tales of a strange Witch Queen gaining followers in the Southern Isles. And with the slave uprisings across the empire… No, I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “You won’t kill me,” said Tori straightforwardly. “You need my blood. That’s why you brought me here.”

  “If only that were true, for your sake, Tori. It is true the harvest from your time in my dungeons has run dry. But I have another Regenero now. One who will be my queen, and whose devout love for her people will keep her in line, should she think of changing her allegiance.”

  “Vashti.”

  “I am afraid your usefulness has run its course, Gallows Girl. I will show the people of Osha, once and for all, what comes from hope in gods and Watchers. This time, it will be your body hanging from my citadel.”

  “What if I fly away?”

  The chancellor laughed. “If you could use your powers in this place, you would have done so already. Look around you, Astoria. There is no magic in this world.”

  That’s why my hand isn’t healing. The skin of Tori’s hand was ra
w and bubbling, making it look more like scales than skin, though the pain was fading along with all other feeling.

  The chancellor took hold of her hand and led her along, down the hill, toward the horde of waiting Rulaqs.

  “You are looking much better than Scelero did when I brought him here. Your body must already have been healing during the passage from the New World. But even if you wanted to resist, you will not.”

  “Why? What do I have to lose?”

  “You won’t resist because I hold the lives of all your friends in my hands. Mischa, Ren... even Darien.”

  Tori could not bear the thought of being responsible for the deaths of the other Watchers, nor for Darien’s. Despite what the chancellor had turned Darien into, the thought of him being dead…

  “Y-you wouldn’t! He’s your finest soldier! One of your Morphs.”

  “No soldier is too great to sacrifice. But since I am a gracious ruler, and because I despise the magical wastes of my ancestors, I will spare them all, Astoria. If you do not resist what is to come.”

  Tori did not answer. But she feared she had no true choice, and the chancellor had known it all along. She had no magic here. And even if she did, could she really risk the lives of everyone she cared about for one last attempt at resistance?

  The chancellor led her across the valley, and she followed without protest.

  They weaved between the massive Rulaqs outside the ruined city. Tori expected, at any moment, the beasts would notice, and one of the giant serpentine heads would come swooping down to devour them, and part of her wished it would happen. But the beasts were as innocuous as a herd of fawns that had lost their mothers, cowering in the tall grass at the edge of a meadow.

  When they reached the immense archway of the necropolis, Tori noticed the film that spanned the space. It was like a thin wall of water stretched tight in the air. From here, she saw blurred resonances of color. And she understood why all the Rulaqs were staring at the gateway.