The blue-white blaze races up the mountain. It covers the dark stone and frost-tipped sagebrush with a firestorm that turns the air to a sea of choking white smoke. He hears it coming, and he feels the mountain growl beneath him. Something shifts deep down in the clefts of primal and molten rock.
He runs. His spirit is with him, cleaved to his core. Waves of glacial air sweep over them at the fore of the tide of arc fire. The cold turns the ground to ice, and it breaks stones that have suddenly turned brittle.
He runs for the doorway.
She is there, the melting silhouette. Her body is like a butterfly held in stasis before a blazing white sun. Whispers of things long dead surround them and slice the air open like a storm of blades.
Something looms over the trees, vast and dark and more ancient than the world itself. Its presence is overwhelming, an avalanche of shadow.
The doorway collapses in on itself like burning paper. Its light falls away in drops of pale rain.
Black fire explodes from the ground in whirling ebon pillars that scorch the sky. He chokes on the stench of funeral pyres.
He leaps through the door as the mountain explodes into flames behind him, and he falls into a place of dead trees, red water and black sky. It is familiar.
The forest in the Reach. This is where we rested after we found the Dreadnaught.
She lies on the ground, and waits for him. She lifts her head and watches his approach. Her body is bathed in blood and soot and covered with terrible scars. It is almost too late for her…but not quite. He trembles as he kneels down and picks up her fragile body. He holds her tight as the blood that slicks down her neck and arms makes his grip on her body tenuous.
I knew you’d come, she says.
He doesn’t know her. But he feels her pain, and knows that he has to save her, for she, in turn, will save him.
Cross drifted in and out of consciousness, and in and out of pain. He saw milk-colored chambers of icy steel and iron machines that churned steam and cemetery smoke.
They strapped him to a cold table. His skin was treated with pungent oils and powders that looked and smelled of grave dust. He was forced into a vat of crimson brine and black nutrients that soaked into his skin, and he was left to float weightless, somehow not drowning, like a fly trapped in honey.
Cross felt little of it. He could tell what was happening, but none of it seemed real.
He dreamed of the burning mountain, of escaping that dark shadow in the sky. He dreamed of the woman beyond the pale doorway, of her falling bloody into his arms.
Cross had become more cognizant in his dreams than when he was awake. The world was a vast and unstable haze of blurry colors and liquid noise. He felt detached, somehow, floating above himself as he was tended and healed by necrotic surgeons. He saw his own body revitalized with noxious chemical fluids the color of swamp water, liquids that were piped into his skin through metal tubes they inserted into his flesh.
He was drugged regularly. Cracked pills were forced down his throat by zombie surgeons, drugs were pumped into his bloodstream through hollow bone needles, and gases were released into the air around him to soak into his skin while he breathed through a tube. The undead that attended his body were unaffected by the fumes. Quiet and pale corpses with grim rotting faces tended to him, sometimes gently, often not. Cross was turned and poked and flipped like a piece of meat, a flesh doll. His existence had been rendered to a series of flashes: light and dark, color and sound, foul smells and pain. They leeched poisons from his diseased leg, only to replace them with different poisons, substances that would make him what they wanted him to be.
Cross had only a vague understanding of what was happening, but he knew that he was being healed. The vampires apparently understood that he was injured and malnourished, and even though they ultimately wanted him to fail in the arena, they also, for whatever reason, wanted to give him a fair chance. That part was Black’s doing, he was sure of it.
Maybe. Who can understand what a vampire thinks? Had it been us with vampire prisoners, we’d have destroyed the bastards, period. No chance to escape. Never.
Cross hovered between worlds. He saw cold fires in the operating room, and he heard the mountain as it growled from somewhere beneath Scar Tower. He felt the colossal breath of a ghost sky. The operating room was on the mountain. He was the fire.
Everything is bleeding. Melting together.
He grew stronger. So did his spirit.
Their bond was diamond-hard, but it was different than it had been before. That bothered Cross, but his head was already awash in senseless flashes. He couldn’t focus. She was different, their bond was different, and that was reason to be afraid, but in his confused and fatigued state Cross couldn’t determine why.
His spirit licked ethereal lips and violently swirled around him in a razorblade caress. She was a metal angel, and when she hovered close it tickled his flesh with a dangerous electric current, a pulsing and breathless aura that dripped with heat and tension. It was as if they were lovers: deadly, violent, uncaring lovers, bound by flame and lust, tantalizing one another with aggressive sexual promise, unheeding of the harm they could do.
Cross tried to pull away from her, but it was a half-hearted effort, and he knew it. He found this new form of contact with her intoxicating. He’d never been so close to anyone, even his old spirit.
Focus.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon.
He tried to keep important names at the front of his mind. He tried to remember why he was there, and why he needed to escape. He tried to remember who he was fighting for, and what he had to do. Sometimes he couldn’t recall what the names meant, or who they belonged to. Their faces had grown distant and hazy. But he fought to remember them, regardless.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Others. Black. Cole. Kane. Ekko. Graves.
He wasn’t sure if he spoke the names, or if he just remembered them. It was hard to even tell where he was.
Focus.
Follow and you will find.
He was ready.
Cross stood before a set of polished steel doors twice as tall as he was. Their edges were scorched, and the reflective face had been bent, hammered and scratched. They looked familiar. He had the vague notion he’d stood there before.
The walls around him were sandy steel awash with oil, dirt and blood stains. The corridor vanished into darkness behind him, a caustic web of shadows filled with cries and steam. The ceiling overhead was a cracked glass dome stained with pollutants and desert debris.
Engines roared over and around him. He felt the city change outside the walls, heard it fold and twist. He smelled blood in the air, and he heard a low dirge on the other side of the door, a throaty vampire song.
Cross saw his reflection in the dirty steel doors. He was lightly armored in black and crimson chain. A tight leather-and-steel gauntlet covered his left hand; the gauntlet was bound to a battery on his back through a thin network of sharp gold wiring. Traces of arcane oil sluiced out of the wires and sizzled when they struck the ground.
He looked paler than before. His eyes seemed darker. Something inside of them teemed with madness.
What have they done to me?
His spirit held onto him like armor. Her touch burned even as it soothed, and her ethereal claws tugged at his back. She mounted him like a steed.
Cross felt numb. He knew this wasn’t right, that he shouldn’t have been there, but it was hard to think straight. Tension coiled through his muscles and his tendons. A sharp and serpentine sense of pain wound its way up the ridge of his spine. He shook with anger anger at what? and his stomach knotted up as tight as his chest. The armor he wore felt unnatural and wrong. It smelled burnt and charnel, like it had been taken off of a dead man and placed on Cross’ body, which he reasoned was probably what had happened. Runic markings had been cast onto the backs of his hands and his forearms: serpents, eyes, ankhs, blades. He felt the weight of a weapon in a sheath on his back.
Strangest of
all, his leg had healed. He felt healthy and strong.
The doors groaned open, out and away from where he stood. His heart skipped a beat. His spirit swirled and tore at him in her excitement. He felt her pull and plead, and it took effort to rein her in.
Focus.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Black and Cole. Kane and Ekko. Graves.
An arena waited on the other side of the metal doors. It was not what Cross expected. Everything he had seen in Krul up to that point had been desert pale or earthen, dust and sand and blood and grit. Only the industrial blue steel of the submerged lower levels had been different, and those chambers were staggering in their monotony.
The arena varied from all of that: it was cast in cool whites and soft greys, harlequin banners and a floor that looked as soft as a pale sea. Frescoes of jagged cities and serpent angels covered circular walls wrought from smoothed granite. The arena floor was spotless, cool marble covered with a massive painting of a half-closed eye impaled on a crescent moon. The air was filled with sweet incense, which only barely contained the palatable odor of rot. The entire space was enclosed by a dome as dark as a midnight sky. Glittering silver flames held suspended in floating sconces bathed the arena in uncertain light.
The stadium walls were perhaps twenty feet tall. Spikes made from black bone lined the tops of the walls, and thick fluid sluiced down the spikes like black milk. Beyond the spikes was a seating area, made from dark wood and black leather, which circled the arena.
There were hundreds of seats, each of them occupied by a vampire. The depths of their ranks was impossible for him to make out – beyond those pale and withered faces was a wall of midnight, a black curtain of dismal specter bodyguards and angry war ghosts left free to roam the air in a ghastly cyclonic barrier.
Cross breathed in raw eldritch air. His spirit bathed in it, basked in it. Her form expanded and shuddered, and Cross shuddered, as well. The depths of magic in that chamber were staggering. It bespoke of the status and power held by the dozens of vampires in the audience.
He had been brought before the vampire elite. Cross would fight for his friend’s life before the noble undead caste, the aristocracy of the night. Dark eyes and monstrous pale faces regarded him pitilessly. Despite their number, the arena was utterly and deathly quiet. Cross heard his own breaths echo back from the two-hundred foot high interior of the dome. His skin felt brittle, and his blood ran cold.
Unbidden, he entered the arena.
He moved slowly, as if in a dream. He felt as if he had done this before. Bone fragments exploded into white dust beneath his boots. Nothing else moved.
A gaunt skeletal figure stood at the exact center of the arena floor. Black swathed and preposterously tall, the undead creature used a bone hand covered with razor blades to direct Cross to stand at the edge of the circle. Its elongated grin seemed mocking.
Cross did as he was commanded. He saw little to be gained from doing otherwise.
One by one, the other fighters came into the arena. They were all clothed in mismatched armor, patchwork steel plates and leather padding, chain mesh and bladed epaulets, faceless helmets and barbed weapons. Cross saw a pale-fleshed Vuul and an ebon-fleshed Gorgoloth; the smoking humanoid husk of a Regost, and a towering and muscle-bound Doj. There were more humans, puny when compared to the other monsters.
He saw Danica Black, her red hair pulled up into a severe top-knot. She wore a sleeveless armored vest and fingerless gloves, black pants and combat boots. Curved twin blades were sheathed across her back, and a draconic tattoo covered the entirety of her right arm, which pulsed with smoking purple light. Her eyes were dead and cold.
He saw Kane, entirely transformed from the joking moron Cross had met before. Kane was a blonde giant, his beard neatly trimmed and braided, his bare oiled muscles tensed and scarred. He held a crescent moon axe in his hands. Like Black, his eyes were unnaturally still. He gritted his teeth like an animal ready to hunt down its dinner.
Cross looked at the vampires in the crowd, and they were as stoic and as still as wax statues. They bore deep eyes like pits and moon-pale faces. Lips drew back to reveal gray fangs that dripped dark venoms. The vampires’ clothing was ruined finery, elegant hussars and gothic gowns all in dark shades – ebon and blood red, midnight and emerald – but the clothing was covered in aged flaws, dust and ancient stains and open tears. The undead wore silver bracelets and iron rings, bladed necklaces and bracelets of bone. They smoked black cigarillos and drank dark blood from silver goblets.
A creature presided over the arena from atop a throne of knives and bones. He was tall and dark, with his long hair pulled back half-up-half-down. His ashen skin was remarkably human, and his green and black armor was of the finest make. A dark-bladed katana rested in his spidery hands.
Talos Drake. Cross wasn’t sure how he knew who the vampire was, but he did. Drake had once been a notorious black market trader. Now he was the Viscount of Krul, and the acting leader when the military commander of the city, Morganna, was otherwise engaged.
Dead black lions with eyes like white fire and fangs capped with rusted steel stood to either side of Drake. Their rotted bodies were perfectly still, curled and poised. At the foot of the throne stood a Gol attendant, an emissary or speaker of some sort.
It was Tega Ramsey.
That son of a bitch.
Cross’ senses slowly returned to him. Rage welled in his soul. The Gol looked on calmly, not a vampire, but a traitor, a willing servant of an odious race.
Talos Drake stood up. His height was impressive. His long coat was decorated with gold trim and bone fetishes. Braids of hair that were obviously not his own dangled from chains wrapped around his wrists.
The other vampires all looked at their leader. Hundreds of pairs of vampire eyes trained on Drake, and waited. Talos smiled a toothy smile, and nodded.
A platform descended from above. It had been entirely concealed in the false night of the aerial dome. Eyes turned to the circular slab of rock as it slowly sank down. The loud clang of chains and industrial gears rattled as the stone made its grinding descent. Over a dozen gladiators cast their gazes skyward, worried, bitter, angry and confused.
Cross looked with them. He was afraid that he knew exactly what it was they would see.
It was an inverted altar, a chunk of layered granite. A statue protruded from the bottom of the slab, dead center, a manmade stalactite. The statue was of vague and dark sexual creatures with bat wings and fangs. The statue-creatures twisted together in an orgy of black stone, many made one, a molten amalgam of succubus angels.
Suspended around the statue were the hostages. They hung cruciform, and they dangled like meat on hooks. Each prisoner was fastened to an inverted wooden pole that jutted down from the stone slab, and they were held in place by ropes and chains that kept their arms pinned behind their backs. Their bare feet dangled helplessly over the arena floor. The stone came to a drastic and ear-shattering stop, and it hung suspended a good thirty feet above the arena.
The prisoners had all been beaten and cut. Fluids dripped down, a slow tide of blood and urine and drool. Even the stench of decay from the presence of hundreds of vampires could not mask the scent of the prisoner’s suffering and fear.
Not every prisoner was human. Cross saw a half-Doj with one eye sealed shut beneath a wound; a Lith, with crushed toes; a Gol, whose bonds looked so loose he might fall at any moment.
He saw Cole, her face bruised, her cheeks cut, and her neck bloody. There was no sign of Ekko.
But he saw Dillon. The ranger’s feet were bare, and blood sluiced down his legs and ran off of his toes in a thin stream that pooled on the ground far below. His face was a mess of cuts, and some sort of crude pattern had been carved across his chest, an idiot artist’s attempt made into his dark flesh.
Dillon met Cross’ gaze. Somehow, he managed a weak smile, and he nodded.
Cross, again, felt that he had seen this before.
Fight, said the gaunt skeleta
l being without making a true noise. The sound echoed inside of Cross’ mind like a sonic bruise. Fight, and win, or they will suffer even more.
The stone groaned upwards. Cross looked at the skeletal creature. His hands tensed, and his spirit crackled. Without thinking, he breathed her in. Her heat filled his lungs with fire. Blood trickled from his eyes and turned his vision red. His skin smoked as he fused his spirit into a lance of black ice that he cast into the skeletal being.
The spear pierced the abomination’s folds with a sound like metal scratching glass. White sparks erupted from its dark heart. A rush of dead air escaped the figure as it collapsed in on itself in a shrinking black cloud. Cross smelled foul meat.
For a moment, no one moved, even as the slab of prisoners slowly groaned its way back towards the vast darkness of the ceiling. Black liquid oozed out of the tattered cloak.
Sharp pain filled Cross’ head. He heard the sound of screaming metal. Explosions rang inside of his soul. His skin went damp as invisible claws raked across his nerves. He fell to the ground screaming.
Above him, suspended and immobile, Dillon screamed, too.
“No, no, no,” Talos Drake spoke. He was suddenly on the ground, looming tall over Cross’ hunched form. Cross felt as if he’d been beaten with stone clubs. He could barely lift his head to look at the vampire who stood like a pillar of shadow before him. “There are rules, warlock. You just broke one. Now your friend suffers, as well.”
Cross struggled. Every motion was wracked with pain. His muscles were on fire. He craned his neck and looked up at Dillon, whose desperate eyes looked back.
It’s okay, he mouthed. The raw meat of his legs was exposed. They’d carved into his thighs like he was a flank steak. Cross could barely breathe. He wasn’t even aware of the tears in his eyes until they ran down his face and neck.
You barely even know him, a voice told him. His voice. But that didn’t matter. He knew him enough. Dillon was in pain because of him. Any chance the ranger ever had of eating his sister’s crappy cooking or seeing his nephew (what was his name did he ever even tell me?) rested squarely on Cross’ shoulders.
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