Taryl Renivar grabbed Poe’s forearm just as the sword struck the right side of his neck; unlike the other wounds inflicted thus far, this did not heal so smoothly. It would scar, and served as an affirmation to the Dark Sword’s unique power, but the Living God would endure.
It was to Poe’s dismay and surprise that in his fury Renivar screamed and stood, seemingly unaware of the bindings that had for so long dragged him down. He did not loosen his grip on Poe’s arm, but instead caught the other and held him up by both.
And as his steely eyes met Poe’s, Taryl Renivar wept. “He was the best of them,” he said of Crescen. “There was a place made for him in the world to come, and now he will never see it.”
Poe strained to break free, his blades mere inches from the life they seemed destined to take, but he could not move. He glanced down at Crescen and saw, for a fleeting moment, the memory of a man who’d given his right hand to see an oppressed people free, and done so with a serene smile. He still breathed, but was bleeding heavily. He would not last long.
“For you, there was never to be a place,” Taryl told Poe. “But I had hoped you would find decency in your heart, and sympathy too for the plights of the many who could have been your victims in another life.” He shook his head, deeply hurt. “But that is not to be, for Rousow chose you too well. We can never be allies, Guardian Poe.”
“In that too, I concur,” Poe replied.
There was a light forming in Poe’s periphery, and it was growing brighter and brighter. Still, Poe tried to shake free, and still it came to nothing, save a realization that this light was coming from within, and was not something he wished to let out.
Orick Daimous had warned him, and he only now realized it. Taryl Renivar had shouldered some vestige of Poe’s divinity for centuries, and in his naïveté, he had placed the source of it right before the Living God. He would not be able to take it, but for a fleeting moment, he could master it. Space and time around Poe warped, and the only mercy came when Renivar’s hold on him faded, but when the light dulled, Poe had no idea where he was.
*
Flynn found himself lying face down on a road. It was cobblestone, and his fingertips found the uneven stone easy to grip as he pushed himself up. At first, he saw little more than billowing fog and a yellow-tinged light. He shook his head, tried to find his footing, and nearly fell.
At the edge of the road was nothing. It was oblivion, an endless night sky of purple auroras, but in a setting wholly unfamiliar. The fog passed and Flynn stepped back, craning his head up to see another road paralleling his own. This passage was caged off but crowded with people. They looked on Flynn with contempt and fear but said nothing of him, as they were too busy tending their wounded.
“Renivar’s worshippers,” he realized.
Flynn wandered down the road for some uncertain time to escape their judgmental eyes. He called out the names of his friends, but none answered back.
At last, desperately, he screamed out, “Renivar! Taryl Renivar!”
Flynn could sense him, still bound in one place, only the distance was impossible to determine. When Renivar answered, his voice was omnipresent, everywhere and nowhere at once. Flynn wondered if he was the only one who heard the Living God speak, or if their conversation was being broadcast to every living being in this strange void.
“You are here by your actions,” Renivar admonished. He had not appeared in any sense, but Flynn’s mind compensated, conjuring a face to put the voice to. They walked, side by side; Flynn hadn’t given up looking.
“Where are my friends?” he asked. “What did you do with them?”
“Some remain,” Taryl replied. “Some have gone. Soon, you will too.”
“What happened? Where is this place?”
“A space in between, where life may live but does not. It had a purpose once, but was abandoned before ever being put to use. All of Yeribelt is gone, for the moment. A great anger awakened within me, and I loosed some of the strength I’ve been reserving for so long.”
Flynn looked down at another road, bars protecting its occupants from his possible intrusion. “This is what will happen when you make a new reality…?”
“It is not more than a drop in the bucket, by comparison.”
“You should just kill us,” Flynn said.
“If I could but lay hands on you, it would be painless and swift,” Renivar promised. There was a rumble in the distance, and a few stones slipped from the road and fell into the nothingness. “I want you out of my house,” Renivar warned, and he did not speak again.
The sounds of this reality changing and shifting carried in the distance, but the path Flynn walked on was yet firm. That Renivar could not change Flynn like he’d warped his own castle suggested that Poe’s protection still held, and this realization tuned his senses to Poe himself, whom Flynn realized was both still in this realm, and very close by.
He ran, and the road bent and curved and seemed to go on forever toward the fog. Whether it was minutes or hours, the road carried him to an encircled cage, wherein stood Guardian Poe, his back to Flynn, his hood drawn.
“Poe!” he cried, reaching through the bars.
Poe glanced over his shoulder, but did not seem happy to see Flynn. “You still live,” he observed.
“As do you,” Flynn said with a smile. “Let’s get you out of there. We’ll find the others and regroup. Okay?”
Poe shook his head. “My journey with you has ended. I am changed for having known you, and perhaps made better. But you are not trustworthy, Flynn, and the matters to come no longer concern you.”
“Poe?” he asked, desperately clawing through the bars. “Poe, come back.” His friend turned his back and walked off toward a door on the far side of the cage; he placed one hand on it and the other on his sword. Perhaps to Poe’s surprise, the door creaked open, and he released his blade as readily as he’d taken hold of it. “Poe, please come back,” Flynn pled. If he could just get him to talk a little longer, they would sort this out and stick together.
But Poe walked on, vanishing into the fog.
“No, no,” Flynn said, shaking his head. He began to climb the bars and soon planted his boots unsteadily on the top of the cage.
The structure shifted as the stonework binding it to the road began to fall, and it bowed unfavorably forward. Flynn ran across it and leapt to another road it connected to, just as the circular cage fell to oblivion. The road Poe had disappeared down was too distant to reach and steadily disappearing beneath fog and decay.
Poe was lost to him. Shea and Jean, Chari and Zaja—any one of them might still remain. Flynn walked on, calling out their names as the world collapsed around him. The fog grew thicker and thicker still, and his voice grew hoarser, but Flynn continued to call out. As the destruction worsened, his pace grew more hurried, became a jog, and then a run.
And as the stones beneath him gave way and Flynn thought all was lost, someone appeared in the fog, too obscured to discern. He reached out, but grasped nothing but air. He called out, but had been calling for so long that he could no longer speak.
Flynn fell, and hope died in him. His arm was outstretched. The fog disappeared and darkness replaced it, and the roads above—an impossible, crisscrossing network—became thin as spider webs in the distance.
He could no longer see, but as his arm began to retreat, a hand clasped around it. He didn’t know who it was, nor did he care. Tears were welling in his eyes and he clasped his companion’s hand as tightly as he could, intent on never letting her go.
And together, they fell. It seemed like forever.
EPILOGUE: In Pieces
It was raining where Chariska Jerhas woke up, and had been for some time. Her robes were soaked, matted to her skin, but it was the familiar blinking of her rifle’s electronic display that caught her eye.
“Flynn…? Jean…?” she asked groggily, sitting up on her knees to clumsily examine the weapon. “Due for a reload.” She felt for her satchel o
f scrap, but it was missing; the munitions chamber would have to wait. “There seems no immediate danger,” she observed with a shiver, but the stone walls that flanked her provided little information. “Zaja? Alicea?” she inquired as she neared the end of the passage. “Guardi … an?”
Chari trailed off with better appreciation for her circumstances. There were people around, but none of them were friends. There were only a few, and they were hurrying back and forth, none noticing the priestess in the otherworldly garments.
“No,” she begged, shaking her head.
There were too many signifiers to ignore, from the garb the locals wore, to the city’s own priestess as she hurried by, to the very literal and legible writing on the walls.
“No,” she repeated as she sank back into the alley.
She was home. Not the city of Cordom, where her family home lay abandoned, but the world of TseTsu. Other realms had been at her fingertips, and they were gone now, as though they’d never been. The rain-slicked rifle at her side and the alien fabrics she now wore were the only proof she’d ever left. She raised her head to the sky and howled in mournful agony.
*
On another world, far from TseTsu, Jean also raged at her circumstances. It was desert, far as the eye could see, and she’d awoken on a great, flat mountain, her face half sunburnt and not a soul around for miles.
Still, she ran to the edge, darting back and forth and calling out their names. She knew it would do no good, but still she screamed out, “Flynn! Zaj!” then “Chari! Ali!” followed by “Poe!” and then, in a desperate, mournful cry, “Mack?” Zella’s name died on her lips, for she knew it was too desperate to try.
Frustrated at her circumstances, indignant over how she’d been cast aside, Jean clenched her fists and gritted her teeth. She was ready to punch the earth, with nothing better to strike, but opened her palm and slammed it down, and the ground beneath her cracked and split.
It was not enough for Jean, who struck the mountain repeatedly, shearing and shattering it until, an hour later, the mountain was rubble and Jean was choking on its dust. She crawled out, scabbed and sore, and began a weary march toward the empty horizon.
“Sorry ’bout the mountain,” she mumbled to no one in particular. “Just … want my buds back is all…”
*
Elsewhere, Guardian Poe was wracked with very different concerns. By purpose or chance, he’d found himself returned to the World Between Heaven and Hell, and little distance from the woods he’d once skulked in. These facts would be of little concern, were it not for the fact that they informed his current circumstances: the post he’d awoken bound to, and the flames blossoming beneath him.
“Let the fire take him,” a scraggly woman missing the better half of an arm commanded the mob surrounding him. She turned to the crowd and raised her good arm up, crying out like a mad preacher. “He who denies us Heaven’s call shall be no more! The gated paradise shall at last be ours to claim, for it has gone too long without new blood!”
“NEW BLOOD!” came the crowd’s mesmerized chant.
The flames were climbing up Poe’s legs, cooking his flesh. It mended just as quickly, but if the fire climbed long enough, it might eventually win out.
“You must release me,” he wearily implored. “I’ve not been Heaven’s Guardian for some time. There is no need for this.”
“He speaks only falsehoods!” the woman accused. Poe did not know her, but she seemed deathly familiar. “None who’ve approached the gates have returned. Nothing has changed.”
Poe shook his head, trying to clear it from the choking smoke as he sought a better argument. But he was distracted, as much by his recent failure as the disbelief that accompanied it. Had it all truly come to this? He had seen glimpses, moments ahead before—perhaps he peered further than he knew now, to an outcome where their battle met with failure.
No, he chastised himself. This moment is real. Do not delude yourself.
The past, then. Poe could will himself back—Useless. Nothing may be changed. Nothing can be changed.
He struggled against his bonds, but they were thick and hardy and would not burn away easily. But what was finding fire in his heart was a hatred for these fools who dared try to burn him, as if flames or kindling would be enough. He twisted his arms, trying to pull free. His blades had been taken, and rested on the ground nearby—if this mob had known better, they’d have raised his Dark Sword and impaled him on it.
As things were, Poe would live. But what kind of man would emerge from these ashes?
*
Zaja DeSarah, meanwhile, faced no immediate danger, suffered no threats, but had nothing to go on for. She had concealed herself and learned to hide quickly, for the Earth that Flynn, Jean, and Mack had hailed from was not welcoming toward those who were different, and Zaja’s blue skin could get her quickly killed in the wrong neighborhoods.
The city of Marghelzhet, at least, seemed ambivalent toward half-humans in the right places, and even if something slipped out, Zaja’s life was not always in immediate peril.
But there were no signs of her friends, and no evidence they’d arrived with her. Jean and Mack’s names only brought up stories of trouble, and Flynn’s accompanied ruin, so she had no references to seek help from. She’d been reduced to drinking gutter water and eating rats to survive; better meals rarely came. It was a relief, then, that her body needed little food, but the time she spent huddled over barrel fires offset that benefit.
It was not the shame of having to live like this that troubled Zaja the most, but the promise that nothing better could come. There was no industry here, no work she could find to make herself useful. In lands beyond, perhaps, but she hadn’t the means to safely travel.
“We were never gonna make it, were we?”
She was alone, staring into the flames. The rat she was roasting had blackened, its tail sticking to the spit that impaled it. She had hoped to do something meaningful, something grand before she expired, and here she was, hiding, feasting on vermin.
If there was a chance, however slim, that her friends were looking for her, that they would find her and hug her and share their relief, then she’d be able to smile.
As the hours passed, that hope dimmed. Weeks later, it was all but gone. They might never meet again, for even if they knew where she was and found their way back, she might expire long before then.
The clouds overhead seemed perpetually black but offered little clean rain. Today, however, they’d thinned, and sunlight poured through, and Zaja found it in her for the first time since Terrias to smile.
Whatever came, life would go on.
*
Tall grasses danced in the wind to the very edge of the horizon. There were no trees, no rivers, no mountains, though Flynn was certain he would find all these things if he walked far enough.
But it would be a journey made alone. Someone had clasped his hand, made the fall with him, but they must have separated. There was no one else around when he woke up and buried his fingers in the dirt to scream his frustration.
“You’re shouting at the wind,” she said with a laugh. It was not a person at Flynn’s side, but another memory come to haunt him. Airia Rousow stood across from him, the blowing grass passing through her illusory body. She was tall as he remembered, wearing red robes painted in white swatches. Like any memory, she hadn’t changed at all.
“It’s over,” Flynn told her. “I’ve lost everything. All the people in my life, all that I was trying to accomplish.”
“It’s not over,” Airia replied. “But you’re right. You have lost everything. Taryl Renivar took it from you, but if you’re here, then the others must be elsewhere. You can find them again.”
He shook his head, frustrated by the proposal. “Even if I knew where they were, it could take years. Navigating between worlds isn’t an exact science. That’s why we suffered so much danger: for a better way.” He let his shoulders fall as despair got the better of him. “For nothin
g.”
“It was not for nothing, Flynn.” She smiled, reaching out to touch him. “Great things have been accomplished, and many more have yet to be done. Taryl and Poe are but two parts of a trinity, I’ll remind you.”
Flynn sneered at her, and stepped back from her intangible grasp. “You’re just using me to work your revenge,” he accused.
“And you, me, in your selfish quest for absolution,” she replied. Airia’s smile radiated smug confidence, and he wanted to punch it from her face; Flynn wasn’t sure if this was her own arrogance, or something from his personality bleeding into her.
“Who you talkin’ to, mate?”
Flynn turned around abruptly, his hand to his chest. He nearly had a heart attack right there. Shea rose as though waking from a dream; she rubbed her eyes and yawned and stood there for a moment, dumbly.
He didn’t want to believe she was real. He’d been interrupted like this before, and quickly approached her, gently placing a hand to her cheek.
“Oi, oi! Watch the mitts.”
Airia Rousow was gone, but she’d been replaced with someone better.
“I thought I was alone.”
Shea, if she shared his relief, showed none of it. She drew her cigarette case from her pocket and gave it a shake, relieved to find one remaining. She placed it between her lips and struck a match.
Flynn remembered then, the feel of her hand holding on to his. “You reached out to me.”
“Bit of luck, really,” she replied abashedly. “Would have tugged anyone.”
“We’re all that’s left. The others are … gone.”
“That so?” Shea grew downcast at this news. “Just us then?”
“Just us,” he replied. “Not the best company, I know.”
With punishing timing, the smoke from Shea’s cigarette hit Flynn in the face, and he began coughing from its rude intrusion. The winds danced here, and he moved upwind.
Killers, Traitors, & Runaways: Outcasts of the Worlds, Book II Page 44