by Amanda Churi
The darkness turned itself inside out, flashes of blue and white detonating around us in a dazing ring. I was blinded, throwing my arms for Mabel as more and more rays surrounded us. I swung my head and eyes in panic, holding her as close as I could; I heard the crumbling of ice and rock, the screeching of electricity, but my eyes had still not recovered.
Images finally started to come forth through the curtain of piercing magic. Elites continued to activate, breaking from the cavern walls they were flawlessly implanted amongst. Haxors, in sleep, powered back on with a burst of life that was anything but their own.
And Mabel. She was there, inside my arms, stricken but protected.
My vision had almost entirely returned, but my body was conflicted. They were coming—their grapples and guns were gaining power, aiming, ready to steal it all, but I didn’t want to let go of her.
I had felt out of place in my own skin after that last meal—no. That had simply been the tipping point. Ever since I had reunited with Mabel, she had been drawing out the dead pieces of me—of him. She was that powerful without even trying… That strong and courageous, valiant and defiant, whereas I was here, bitter of it all… Soured at feeling sparks in chambers long deceased. Why did she care for me over three thousand years ago? Why did she still care, and why did I return such a strange, unexplainable sensation? Where was me, the one of strength and terror that I prided myself in? I felt flushed, drained, and all I wanted to suddenly do was protect her… Keep her for myself.
I was finally terrified—finally mortal. Finally human.
My clinging arms were thrown up and away, with them, the whirling, frantic flame flying free. The heat in my arms died, and the cold rushed in. The cords of my voice tore as I reached for Mabel’s arm, hair, anything, only to find emptiness. I screamed; the screech came from somewhere I had never spoken from, but Mabel never turned back as she sprinted to the crystal and spread her flaming arms wide.
Electrocuting saws and icy harpoons split dimensions and invisible worlds, flying over my shoulders and through my hair, through the universe to stop her before she went through with such a lethal embrace. Molten fingers latched onto the crystal first, an ocean of steam surging forth. Mabel’s face broke with agony, and she screamed, but she did not stop, holding on tighter as she threw her burning chest straight into the pillar.
My chest burst the moment the crystal did. “MABELLL—!”
Ice pierced my eyes. A mountain of mist hit my chest and launched me back into a pit of silent, unmoving black.
Thirty-one
Tumbling Down
She was used to being ignored within her village—ignored while knowing they saw her—but here, she became part of the desert, a mirage never more in place.
Tah always thought her village was hot until she was put amongst so many bodies. They shifted and ground in claustrophobic confinements, foreign skin catching onto her robes as she pushed through the crowd, holding Toboé’s hand and pulling him along while Maeve did the same to her. Tah was tempted to wipe her dripping face on the people who passed by; surely, they wouldn’t think of it as anything more than another person brushing shoulders. More people were squeezed within these streets than ants in a hill.
She glanced up while passing under the merchant streets, watching petals of sunlight fall from slivers of overlapping quilts and tarps arranged to block out the peaking sun. The sixth hour had gone into the seventh. There was no telling how much time they had left.
“Make haste,” Maeve pushed. “This city will not fall until their trumpets and bugles exhaust themselves.”
“But where do we start?” Tah wondered. “This city is so large… And I am sure no simple merchant has herbs of the strength that my father requires.”
“Do not worry, I know this city. Two more blocks down, there is a large market and a stand for the ill. It will be there or be nowhere.” She glanced back, her eyes glowing orange in the gloom of her hood. “But I cannot guarantee they will have it… And if they do not, I am very sorry.”
Simply imagining the consequences of failing almost brought Tah’s legs down. Her mother? No. Her father? Absolutely not. This quest, this was for her to prove herself as a hero, a woman, a human of worth. Coming back empty-handed was worse than not coming back at all. If she could bring nothing, she would not even bring herself.
“Where do you live, Maeve?”
Tah’s sudden interest in her personal life spiked Maeve’s brows. She quickly put her head back to the human sea she continued to part. “Nowhere in particular. I just roam, following His voice.”
“But your tribe?” Tah pushed. “They hold you so high… Why? You are female.”
Her snicker flapped the folds of her hood. “And?”
“It is amazing… I only wish my family would so much as glance my way… Maybe I could travel with you if they do not have the medicine. I could become respected—learn from you!”
Tah focused on the bouncing rags that covered Maeve’s hair, waiting for her to look back, to smile. The commoners swarming around them continued to push and haggle with merchants, even brawl just slightly off the road, but Maeve neither acknowledged them nor Tah. “Come,” she finally said.
Tah’s head dipped, her shoulders sagging with her sinking heart. She should have guessed… Why did she come off so strongly? She didn’t have the right to. In the end, Maeve was just helping out of the kindness of her heart, nothing more.
Tah’s beading eyes swung over the widening street and to the main plaza. The baked bricks and cobblestone charred her feet, absorbing the sun’s unrelenting violence, but its unobstructed rays made the city sparkle with earth. Structures of importance built from white and gray stone reached high into the sky, touching the sun’s bottom and making it teeter delicately at the top. Roads branched from the circular square, traveling up to the temple and down to the walls, into the shady slums and prosperous squares. There were no festivities, just the continued bustling of civilians, most all in one way or another speaking of the army that had started to march yet again. Some weighty men were spending their money on fruits and garnished scraps, handing them off to peasants who headed to the wall-walks, dumping the slop on the marching men far below. Others saved their petty coins and used far worthier ammunition, heading to the streets with buckets and filling them with the turd-braids that had accumulated in the alleys.
“Here.”
Tah stopped beside Maeve, pulling her gawking brother with her. It wasn’t much of a shop—not much at all, just a faded rug on the bricks and a little sail of shade swooshing from side to side. A woman concealed in torn brown robes sat on the mat. Crackling oils and incense built purifying fogs around her, stacks of reeds, herbs, and bones trapping her in. If she moved more than a scooch, everything was likely to topple and ignite, bringing down the city well before the Israelites could.
“Hello—” Tah had hardly made her introduction before Maeve’s arm was across Tah’s chest, barring her from the sitting woman who had yet to look up.
“Where is Samuel?” Maeve asked harshly.
“Hm?” The woman raised her bowed head from beneath the purple netting that covered her long black hair, looking up with clear eyes at her customers. Her skin was that of salt in color but not texture; it was unblotched, the purest cloud in the sky, and her eyes were from galaxies and gems, their violet hues clashing with an otherwise soft gaze. “He is sick. I am merely filling in today.”
“I have never seen you before,” Maeve pushed. “From where do you come?”
A wry smirk tugged at her lips. “Obviously, a foreign land you’ve never heard of. Now, are you going to buy? As you can see, a lady offering parts other than her body does not sell well, so I am at full stock today.”
Maeve did not answer—neither did Tah, following in the cautious trail of her guide. The woman definitely wasn’t from here… Tah had never seen skin so clean. How hard must she have scrubbed to turn herself white?
“…Medicine,” Maeve f
inally answered.
A chuckle bounced the shopkeeper’s hunched shoulders. “I could have guessed that. For what ail?”
Maeve’s orbs met Tah’s, still quiet, searching, but they did not protest. “Um… Fever,” Tah quietly said. “Terrible fever.”
The woman nodded, taking up a small pot and placing a few leaves in it. Her bobbing head pushed for more.
“Cannot stomach food; returns most everything he eats when he has the appetite. Dreariness… Dehydration…” Tah’s sigh used up all the air she had in the folds of her body; the merchant paused with a spoonful of syrup dripping into the bowl. “Dysentery… Severe.”
“Oh goodness… I may have just the thing. Lend me a moment to find it.” Her hands became pillagers, her inventory plundered and broken as haste betook her fingers, knocking piles of sticks, jars of saps, and bushels of tendrils across the rug.
Tah waited, and patiently, she thought, but the more the woman searched—and ultimately scattered—her merchandise, the stronger the anxiety bugs nipped at Tah’s toes. Breathe… Breathe… We have time. It has to be there somewhere…
“Tah!”
Toboé’s call spun her body, her hand twitching around an empty pocket of air that used to clutch his palm. Thankfully, her eyes found him quick enough, standing in the current of a growing, strengthening crowd.
“Toboé!” She rushed toward him in avoiding, light-springed skips until she had his fingers back in hers. “What are you doing wandering away?! Do you know how easily someone could—?!”
“I just wanted to see them!” he protested.
“…Them?”
“Yes!” He craned his arm and finger high, moving closer to those in front of him to get a better glance. “Them!”
She let his pointer lead her eyes, and she knew when they had reached their destination. There was no place like it within the entire world, no thing, no existence quite like the two marching into the square on a road cleared by fear of the unknown.
A humanoid creature veiled in blue and winter advanced first, sending the temperature bowing and trembling before her—one so low even the gawking onlookers caught her chill. Ice and snow immune to the sun’s power glimmered and danced around her ash-blue skin, and the rotten skull of a horse shielded the face of the treacherous creation, eyes of the hottest blue flames raging and swirling in the sockets. A javelin of seething ice, one twice her height, bled paralyzing mist, making the ground following her steps slick. Chains so cold that their melded iron fell white gorged her hips and reaped her shoulders with their weight, but they did not make her topple; she treated them as fragments of phantoms, toys that only heightened her ego and superior demeanor.
Behind the ice mage was the source of the shadow that fed her spirit to the heart of darkness. The creature’s height did not loom but lived above her. Eyes the color of space and muscles bursting through his scaly skin, he romped behind her, breaking her slippery path with hooking black claws reaching from broad, crushing feet. He wore no clothes, only a satchel far too small for his body, and his abdomen looked like it could crush stone with a single flex; every movement he took his body felt the need to show, to lay out every road under the skin and explain the many pathways he could take to trample a foe. Greasy golden hair slithered from his scalp to his blocky shoulders, a tail with the head of an ax whipping and lashing behind him—growling and snapping at bystanders who stared too long or moved too close.
Tah’s lack of nourishment came back to bite her. Her legs were draining with every beat, losing their capability to stand, but instead, she sent that strength to her brother, squeezing his hand as hard as she could. Toboé was so captured by their presence that he did not react.
Both figures stopped in the center of the market. Tah only latched on tighter, following the eyes of the ice woman. No… She was no mere being, certainly not a woman. Tah couldn’t get the name to her lips, but her brain was screaming it, again and again in disbelief. REEVE! THAT IS REEVE! SHE REALLY DOES EXIST! BUT WHY IS SHE HERE?!
“I know you are hiding!” the chilled spirit called, the tenor proof of her power. “Come on out, or I will start plucking the crop one at a time!”
Civilians shrunk farther back; they leaned with such sharp angles they nearly molded with the bodies of those behind them. The crowd had fallen so still that only the howling of wind circling above their mass of bodies spoke.
Reeve huffed. Her eyes carved into deceiving crescents. “Fine.”
Her arm whipped, and she hurled her spear through the crowd. A knife of blue pierced a wall of flesh; it went through the eye of the first and the skull of the second—one it got through the throat, and it missed a child in between it all, who watched the javelin spark over their head before severing the chin of her mother behind her. Its wrath that flew as a comet could only be stopped once bodies filled the entire length of the shaft, dropping them as a single dead weight.
Vines of horror lashed through Tah’s roots and uncaged a scream. Cries of terror billowed from those around her. Toboé’s hand was ripped from hers, people pushing and shoving to get away as Reeve’s spear shot back into her talons, the steaming blood of her prey freezing and flaking to the ground like paint.
Tah may as well have been on a pivot, hinged to the earth. She could not move her feet, knocked by a frantic body this way and then slammed back by another. It took all she had to not fall and be trampled; but standing, staying, that would have been worse. The Devil’s Land… She really had entered it! This was where Reeve’s spirit had been brewing all along!
“TOBOÉ! TOBOÉ!” Her cords were of liquid fire as she was thrown back and forth trying to find him in the landslide of bodies. Her eyes raced, her fears sparking flames inside her until she saw him being knocked around as his own pin a short while away.
“Toboé! Come!” She snipped her roots and leaped to him, swallowing his body with her chest. “We need to leave!”
“Tah!” he whimpered, loud and frail, not understanding. “Is that…?!”
“Yes!” she answered hastily, trying to split her attention between her brother and finding an escape route. “Do not speak her name, or else she may come straight to us!” She used her arms as ropes to keep him tied to her as she tried to shove her way out of the dangerous ring she had entered.
She could only move in a tripping shuffle, knowing there were writhing, trampled bodies under her feet, but she ignored her sins for the sake of their lives. Harpoons of blue kept streaking the outskirts of her vision before shooting back to Reeve’s fist, columns of fleeing citizens struck just as the first.
“COME OUT!” Reeve’s unmistakable voice unfurled. The spear launched again—came so close to Tah that a dart of blood splat across her cheek, but she didn’t dare to look at the person it came from. She couldn’t move fast enough, couldn’t push hard enough, couldn’t—
The ground came up in a wave beneath her, knocking the bound siblings down. Her shaking knees wouldn’t allow her to stand, and even if they had, the demon blocked her path.
His lips extended to the tips of his ears, a machine of a mouth made for consuming. His tail of consciousness lashed beside him as he eyed Tah on all fours, his pupils growing, a cat entranced by hunger.
“TAH!” Toboé screamed.
The demon bound to his hind legs and reared his claws back to strike, and then, he was gone—a shooting, whistling star of fire sent crashing into the foundation of a tower that fell around him.
A forest of fire reached across the world in front of Tah, its root being Maeve, now uncloaked, freed, and violently so. Her beautifully crisped skin burned in the sun’s rays, distorting and morphing with the power rolling off her skin that was clearly no imagination. Her blonde hair swirled in the air as a typhoon of red leaves and white winds, and her eyes mimicked Reeve’s, a blue so bright and striking it was cold.
Tah could not bring herself to breathe, watching Maeve in awe. She wasn’t respected by those men from earlier… She was feared.
Some stopped to stare at the changing tide of battle—the new opponent. It only made others run harder and faster as the four seasons came to show themselves inside of such cramped, lively walls quickly giving way to death.
Maeve looked at Tah once—eyes of sorrow and loss, forgiveness—before she met Reeve’s drilling stare. The ice spirit tapped her fingers against her spear and took a lunge to the side, ready for battle. “Nice to meet you.”
Maeve threw her arms down and sacrificed her palms to the hunger of her flames. “Likewise.”
The bloody spear launched, and the moment it did, Maeve spun and burst into a tornado of fire.
The surrounding air was sucked in and then thrown out, shooting Tah away from Maeve and rolling her through the mass of flailing limbs and bodies. Bursts of warmth and cold smashed into her eyes until she finally stopped flat on her face and chest, still tied to her brother that shuddered, sobbing profusely beneath her while fearlessly breathing in dirt in search of air.
She hugged him harder, curled her body around him like a shell, terrified to lift her head or eyes. The whining of flames and squealing of ice—she didn’t want to look. Didn’t want to be here. For the first time in her life, she wanted to be back home—alone and isolated in her hut, sad but safe.
The air puckered again and then spit, scattering the humans and sending Tah rolling again. Globs of fire splattered around and over her skin, tearing open her eyelids to the towers of smoke stretching higher than the city. She watched it burn, fall until she crashed back-first into a pile of stone. The air shot from her lungs so hard and fast her arms whipped back, releasing Toboé.
Her nerves were stunned; she couldn’t move to grab him even though he was just out of reach, crying, trying to get to his own knees that kept folding on him. A mixture of blood that was and was not his turned him from brown to red—every part of them both drenched, beaten, and bruised.
The prospering bazaar had been reduced to ruins, a storm of ice and destruction spawning from Reeve in the center as Maeve tore around her, veiled in a fire so thick and violent she could not be seen. The cyclone of fire consumed not just the city but the sky—it turned bodies that it spun across into a plume of ash, all as it punched with arms of lightning, shaving off Reeve’s icy force field bit by bit. Pikes of ice rained down, some slivers, no bigger than raindrops, but others were the size of statues—statues of idols that made craters in the city.