by Danie Ware
Mael laid a hand on Selana’s shoulder, and spoke through the moss in his mouth. “Roderick. The Gods crafted us – made us first and favoured. Rhan knows this. We’ve strengths unrealised and potentials unknown. We’ve watched our prison walls for returns unnumbered. We’ve served our time. Should we not return home?” He turned his plea to Rhan. “You, my littlest brother, my estavah, you understand what it’s like to be trapped, sealed away from everything you love and understand. From your family. Please.” His mantled shadow flickered, paled and swelled. “We care not for anything that happens here – we no longer even wish you harm. Do as you please – heal the world if you can! We only want to go home.”
The word rippled back through the shadows of the others.
Home.
Selana raised her chin and her smile was cold as the rock at her feet.
Rhan said bitterly, “I almost believe you.”
“Believe us.” The girl came forwards, right to the fissure’s edge. “This is our final moment, little brother. And you can come with us, come home! Rhan, the world is gone, your mandate no longer matters. Unbend, join your family! You’re my brother, my defender and protector.” She smiled. “I’m the last child of House Valiembor and you owe me your loyalty, Seneschal.” The smile spread, all teeth, her face unholy with the light from below. She held out a hand to him and, even as she reached, the ash shook from her embroidered garments and the Kas behind her began to swell, untwisting, flashing through with deep blue flame.
E Rhan Khavaghakke.
As it did so, Ecko could see that its wings were broken – long-since torn from its shoulders.
Rhan stood with Amethea still in his arms, her body covered in moss, her eyes open and staring. He clung to her like some kind of talisman, but his brother consumed his gaze.
You owe me your loyalty, Seneschal.
He swayed, took a step forwards towards the fissure. Behind Selana, the others were moving, shadow upon shadow, each flickering with new strength and rising power. They reached for Rhan like a dark cloud rearing over him.
The sharp retorts of shattering rock filled the air.
But the Kas paid no heed. They were smoke, writhing, exalting, their broken wings reaching as wide as they could, their figment faces and arms outstretched. Ecko almost expected them to chant, but they were silent, only their shadows shifting.
You owe me your loyalty, Seneschal.
The rock cracked again.
E Rhan Khavaghakke. Join us, brother, we go to face Samiel Himself!
Rhan took another step. He was on the very edge of the fissure, a silhouette against the great rise of his brothers’ might and challenge.
The sunken sky began to rumble, thick and ominous. And there, at the horizon’s edge, the clouds were pulling down into a monster twister.
Like the wound in the world would suck down the sky.
Holy fucking shit.
Ecko was really scared now. They had to stop this – chrissakes, this was his gig, his world-champion shit, and he’d no fucking clue what to do. The Bard’s Powerflux bollocks was all very well – hell, he’d understood the theory – but how they were supposed to…
He realised he was snarling, “Chrissakes…!” but it was reflex – he didn’t even know why.
Roderick put his hood back, pulled free the scarf – if he could wield the very air, summon Vahl, or control him…
The Bard lifted his face to the rising wind, inhaled. His throat hummed.
He said, “We have to stop this. The more power they manifest, the more the hole will drink that power, and the wider the cracks will spread. They’re feeding it! We must stop this!”
Ecko almost screamed at him. “How? How do we—?”
Rhan moved, called out. “Vahl! Wait! I’ll come – I’ll come with you! Take me home, my brother, take me back to the skies! We’ll pull Samiel from his seat, together – we’ll cast him down!” His voice rose, was livid with light and power, crackling though the storm. “We’ll shatter his throne and we’ll tear him to pieces!”
The great Kas laughed, stretched out his hands. Come! Selana mimicked the motion like a puppet. The sky growled, lowering closer, lightning flashed jagged. The wind was clearing the ash and pulling at hair and garments, a taste of what would come. If this shit didn’t stop already, they were all gonna go straight the fuck down.
The Kas raised their arms, opened them to the heavens. “Then join me, little brother. We will be free!”
“How the hell do we do this?” Ecko’s shout went unheard as the ground cracked again, splintering and juddering. The twister was coming closer and the wind was harsh.
“Free!” Rhan cried with him.
“Stop!” Roderick’s voice was hard as a slap, clear as a scream. If he really was attuned to the air, then his words were loud as the sky and they carried the might of the storm. Their sheer force made Rhan halt at the fissure’s very edge, made the swelling Kas flicker and stare. “The power here has caught you, Dael Vahl Sashar. Has caught all of us. Understand it cares not for Kas or Dael, for good or evil, for order or chaos, for any such storybook definitions. What lies below us is an end of all things – a Kazyen, a nothing. It will suck your power from you regardless, and will spread its cracks until the very world shatters, spiralling out into nothing, into the void from which it came. And it will take all of us with it.” The Bard sank to one knee on the stone, ash drifting from the movement. “Vahl, I beg of you. This is not your way to freedom—”
“Enough!” Selana’s voice was a shriek, a final refusal.
Rhan shook, made no move.
The Kas rose again, but as they did so, the ground rocked hard enough to knock Mael from his feet. Ecko felt the shock, but didn’t know what it meant until the Bard spoke again.
“The cracks have reached the Great Cemothen River,” he said. “The Varchinde’s very lifeline drains away. Stop this, Vahl, I beg you. You cannot free yourself or Rhan with this power. This strength is an emptiness, all it will do is pull your existence from you. You dislike your prison – how will it be if you live an eternity in Nothing? In the void? In the grey that has no passion, in an emptiness bereft of all desire? All my life, Vahl, I have sought this world’s foe, and you are not it. What lies at your feet is as much your enemy and opposite as it is mine!”
Selana was screaming now, refusing to hear him. Her face was sliding, flesh and expression, down towards her chin as if the hole were literally sucking her skin from her body. The Kas behind her were flickering out, winking and vanishing as if they had been turned off. Mael was struggling to stand, and the edge of the fissure was close, so close.
“Please!” The Bard’s cry was pure storm – but the pull was affecting him too. His voice faltered even as he pleaded. “The harder you resist me, the harder I plead. And the more power is pulled from both of us! Vahl – we have to stop this!”
Something in the cry seemed to reach over the fissure.
Selana paused, lowered her arms. For an endless moment, she stared at the Bard with her face lit unholy and desperate as if searching for another answer – any other way out. At her feet, Brother Mael had his hands at his throat. He was gasping to get air into his moss-grown lungs, just as Amethea had done.
Then the ground shook again, and the sky roared, and the rising twister screamed fury.
Ecko watched Mael roll helpless, watched him grapple, cling for a second, and then he heard the cry as the old man fell down and down into whatever was below.
For just a second, everything was quiet.
Selana fell to her knees, her hands reaching – but whether it was the girl reaching for her friend, or the Kas for his brother, Ecko had no idea.
Roderick said, his voice faint now, “Please, Vahl… We can heal this – but you have to help us.”
Kneeling on the edge of the end of the world, Selana Valiembor, Kas Vahl Zaxaar, looked up, tears streaking her face.
Roderick said softly, like a chant, “You are the fire to Rhan’
s light, the two of you more alike than either of you know. We need you. We need you both.”
The mantled Kas had faded now, shrunk back to within Selana’s skin.
The ground shook, creaking ominous, as though it really would detonate, and the pieces be gone in the void.
And Kas Vahl Zaxaar said, “Then show me. How can we stop this?”
29: NIVROTAR
THE SOUL OF STONE
It was a gesture that defied the Count of Time himself, that healed rifts in worlds. Rhan rested Amethea gently on the dead ground and held out a hand to his brother, his protégé, to the last surviving child of the Valiembor line. He helped Selana cross the fissure down which Mael had fallen, his last words lost to nothing.
And she gripped his hand and came to him, her finery billowing, embroidery and ash.
E Vahl…
As if it stood still to witness the brothers’ loss and unity, the sky had fallen silent. Now, though, the air rose again, cold and dark and shrieking, gathering itself to howl its final breaths before it, too, vanished down into the emptiness below. The twister was a pillar of grey that stretched from rock to sky, sucking at clouds, tearing the air into spirals. It flashed with suppressed power, and Ecko could feel answering shocks of adrenaline shooting through his skin. He could almost feel its mottle rippling with storm-colour.
He was fucking terrified, and he was okay admitting it, and he didn’t fucking care. Maybe he was even more scared than the first time Thera had taken him down to see Mom…
The sky circled and screamed down at him, tiny as he was.
Under him, the ground shook.
“Okay!” Pushed beyond his limits, he shouted back at the shrieking air. “Shazam! Abracadabra! Magius fucking Stryke! Let’s break out the plus-ten magickal-whosit-of-doom an’ do this shit!”
An’ start the countdown sequence already, ’cause I reckon we got air for about sixty more seconds…
Despite the howling storm, though, the thought of Thera and Mom stayed in his head, spreading like enfolding arms and filling him with its darkness. It was rich and familiar, wrapping and secure. As it grew in his thoughts, it seemed to have a life of its own, seething in and out of itself, turning over and over. As clear as if she were there beside him, he could hear Mom’s soft tones, feel that towering, more-than-human presence. Her darkness was a part of him, had long ago sunk itself into his soul. It made him feel safe. If he opened his mouth, he could breathe it in, and out.
And in. And…
Her darkness. His darkness. Something he hadn’t damned-well lost.
Oh, yeah…
And there, in the midst of the madness, Ecko started to grin – his wide black grin that he hadn’t worn in days without number. Hell, he was a lotta things – but he wasn’t fucking dumb. And he understood it now, how the pieces fit, and the neatness of them. Rhan really was the light and Vahl the fire – and he, Ecko, he knew the dark, knew how it moved, and knew the things that lived in it…
Adrenaline thrilled, warm this time, a rush.
We can so do this…
They were here, all of them, exactly where they should be – they were on the biggest fucking ride of all, the last one, and it felt like they were hanging, suspended over the fucking great whooooosh! below…
Waiting, breathless, for shit to go down.
His adrenaline rose higher, pounding, choking, elating.
He was gonna do this. Sir fuckin’ Boss, he was gonna do this! Save the world, already, defeat the blight, be the champion.
D’you see me, Eliza? Is this where I was always meant to be?
Chrissakes, now his oculars were on the fritz – he could see lines there in the darkness. Maybe he was looking down the rift already, he didn’t know, but they were there below him, ahead of him, around him, flickering like laughter, like writing with sparklers in the dark. They were crackling through the rock under his feet, surging up into the twisting sky.
He turned, flicking his oculars, mode to mode, but the lines were unchanged, heatless and colourless, glimmering with energy unknown.
Holy shit. Then what he could see…
Those lines, they were the Powerflux itself.
He tried to open his mouth, ask the others, Do you… do you guys…?
But it took a moment for him to realise he couldn’t speak, had no words, no way to form the question. Hell, first overwhelming fear, now a sense of wonder like a fucking kid, awe that nearly made his knees fold – it’d been a long time since his emotions’d been this free…
Well, these ones, anyhow.
That thought made him grin wider, the black one, the one like the edge of the blade. Made him grin like he could feel that odd electricity in his skin, in his reflexes and adrenaline and blood. By every God, he knew this darkness, knew it like his own breath – he’d lived in it, fucking almost died in it, returned to himself in it, been recreated as Ecko. The dark was his cloak and his weapon, his home and his safety. And if he could use this crackle of power because of his own attunement to that darkness, then he was gonna fry the ass of this Kazyen Void Thingamajig and serve it up with a mug of tea.
Yeah, you jus’ bring it the fuck on, dude!
The flicker of the Powerflux was joyous, exhilarating. It flowed before him as reality juddered, teasing, at the edge of the drop. His belly did flip-flops, but they didn’t fall – not yet. The lines were still spreading outwards, ever outwards, and rising to a rage of surging power. Yet something about that surge felt wrong, as though—
His jubilant adrenaline flashed to sudden fear.
He turned to see them – needed to understand how they ran, element to element across the world, up into the clouded sky and deep into the ground. He could see how everything Eliza had created came from this network – sunrise, daylight, weather and season – hell, it even explained why the damned moons could be in opposition. It was like he was seeing the actual core code of the program itself, the very life of the world.
Hadn’t Amal said something about Eliza and the World Goddess being the same thing?
Ecko shivered, premonition and energy. Maybe Eliza really had made a world – a world that believed utterly in its own existence. Maybe that was the only way it could be complete enough for real interaction.
But then: what would happen to it when he’d gone?
He shivered again.
But as he looked further, searching for more power, more answers, more insights, he began to realise that the electricity was flawed – it was moving wrong. The lines weren’t straight, they shifted and eddied, and the power was increasingly uneven. It was being pulled one way, as if by some vast magnet – it was flowing in towards the fissure.
Sucked down by the Kazyen.
An’ that’s what we gotta fix. We gotta make the power run right. That’s why it needs all of us.
It made sense, all right. But hell, he didn’t have the faintest inkling of a shred of a motherfucking clue…
Like, who had the instruction book?
As his understanding had spread, though, he’d become aware of the others, there in the darkness with him, anchors and foci, part of the flow of the power. He could hear the Bard, his voice the sky, the storm, the rage of the thunder and the touch of the wind. He could feel the moss in Amethea’s flesh, the stone strength in her soul, the pleading life of the world. Rhan’s light and Vahl’s fire, merging at their edges. And—
You’re close now, aren’t you?
The voice was too gentle to be unexpected; it was cold and soft, there in his ear, in his heart.
Mom…?
But he wasn’t sure.
We come almost to the final hand. Be strong, my Tam, my Ecko, my little champion.
The words made his skin crawl. It was Mom, and it wasn’t. It was closer than that, insidious and rich with potency. There were layers in its tone like there’d been layers in Amal’s, and Selana’s…
Like she was Kas?
But no, her voice was too cold.
I
ce cold.
And then there it fucking was – the snap of the very last tumbler, the click as the box opened and the light bathed his face, that glorious moment when the last piece snicked into place.
The voice was Nivrotar.
When you come to the end, I will be there with you. Remember who crafted The Wanderer, who defended the Great Library…
It was the final corner of the Powerflux, its northern anchor, the Soul of Ice.
And it was Mom. It was Eliza. It was the fucking World Goddess herself, whatever the hell her name was…
It was the completed concert – all six elements fused at last, and melding together.
It was the brake coming off the roller coaster.
And…
Ohhhh shi-it…!
The front went up and over the lip and they followed it, all of them, their hands in the air and screaming as their bellies dropped and their teeth bared and their adrenaline surged. The lines were there, under them and round them and through them and they were a part of the Flux itself, sweeping round the routes of those lines, and utterly at the mercy of the Kazyen below.
It was pulling at them, pulling them down.
Around them was noise and juddering and the howling storm. The air with them twisted and screamed.
Through the pounding of his heart and ears, Ecko yowled, “You fucking bitch. You got us all here – now how do we finish this?”
That’s “You fucking bitch”, my Lord. Nivrotar’s voice was cold and amused, and right in his ears. It was a core of unbroken strength, a pure steadiness that underlay the screaming, the raging wind. Call me Cedetine, oldest mother. I came into the void and so began the Count of Time. The coaster jammed round a corner, throwing them all sideways. I bore three sons and I gave my flesh for the crafting of the world. The coaster fell again, throwing Ecko’s belly into his mouth. Call me Calarinde, manifest love. They gave me the yellow moon as my prison and my chariot. The coaster paused at the bottom of a drop, was carefully cranked to the top of a second, smaller peak. Call me Nivrotar, Lord of Amos. You, Ecko, you have your own name for me.