Vultures

by Luke Tarzian

  Vare grumbled as he sprinted through the darkness, half out of breath already. When I finally leave this place the first thing I’m going to do is go for a run. Celestials, but I’m horribly out of shape. Hiding left little time for exertion.

  Vare leapt toward the dot of light at the end of the cave. He tripped, then tumbled out of the darkness, met by a sky of ever-shifting colors and stars. At least it was pretty here. He couldn’t fathom being trapped in a place as horrible as this if it also looked like that shithole city Harbanan. Garden of Souls. Bah!

  The lake shimmered in the distance. Vare looked back at the cave, at the tiny white dots he figured to be Phantaxis’ eyes, then at the valley below. Please, he prayed, running, let my horribly out of shape spirit make it to the lake before he can eat me. The fate of the world kind of depended on it.

  * * *

  “WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU STAB ME?” Serece took a swing at her aunt, anger and frenzy be damned. “You could have killed me!”

  “But I didn’t,” Fiel said as they stood in a fog-ridden street. “In the physical world our bodies lie just outside the temple, buried in snow.” Snow provided the phantaxians with their wretched form of immortality.

  Serece glared. “So, the only way to enter The In Between is to be stabbed into unconsciousness?”

  Fiel nodded slowly. “Or meditation.”

  Serece’s nostrils flared and her eyes went wide. She pointed an accusatory finger at her aunt. “I could gut you right now. You could have warned me!”

  “I said you probably weren’t going to like it,” Fiel defended.

  “Who in their right mind likes getting stabbed?” Serece snapped.

  “I could think of a few people,” Fiel mused with a smirk. “All right, all right.” She held her hands up. “I should have warned you. I just thought…well, like you said: who likes getting stabbed?”

  Serece exhaled slowly. “Where are we anyway? Why is it so foggy?” She did a double take at Fiel, then looked down at her own hands and arms. “No plagued flesh.” Just smooth, sunset-purple skin. She looked at Fiel. “How…?”

  “A memory, mine to be exact. The Helveden of centuries past,” Fiel said and the fog began to thin.

  Serece frowned. “How am I in your memory? I don’t understand.”

  “Illumancy,” Fiel said. “To bind our minds.”

  “Right.” Serece had yet to comprehend just how exactly illumancy worked, let alone the fact her aunt was somehow able to practice it. So far as she knew there had only ever been one phantaxian able to wield illum, and he’d been dead a long time. “How do we find Yssa if we are all the way back here?”

  “We look for signs,” Fiel said. “Yssa was with us even here, so far from the mountains.” She started down the street, gleaming spires rising through the fog, glinting like jagged jewels in the strange gray light. “All we need find are the old phantaxian enclaves.”

  Serece trailed her aunt, the street gradually filling with people, with mirth. The scent of freshly baked goods, the perfume of flowers, and the metallic tang of… Illum. Of course. Her lip curled as she took note of the Illumurgist at the end of the block. Dark brown hair, stubbled jaw, gray eyes, pale skin: common amongst Ariathans to be sure. It was the thin, almost indiscernible threads of shadow twisting around his fingers though that marked him different than the rest. Was this Faro Fatego, the infamous Betrayer of Ariath, the human lieutenant whom Te Mirkvahíl had tasked with laying siege to Helveden?

  She slowed as she neared him, but her presence went unnoticed. She seemed a ghost here, as much a memory to these people as they were to her. How long ago had this taken place, how soon before the phantaxians’ exile? It was hard to tell from the look of things. Serece had heard stories of Helveden but she had never spent much time here; her mother had scoffed at the idea of living in enclaves. Enclaves, according to Artemae, were for cultural heretics like Fiel, “Who are blind to the prejudices constantly shown us by the Ariathans.” As a result, Te Vétur Thae was the only home Serece had ever truly known.

  She frowned, lost in thought as she hurried after Fiel. Te Vétur Thae…there was much Serece loved about the city: her father, the way the trees shimmered in the light like tiny stars, the… She chewed her lip. Was that really all she could find endearing? Her father and trees? Pick something, she urged herself. Pick anything. Anything at all!

  After a moment’s thought the answer became apparent: passion. The desire to walk and never stop. There were a handful of phantaxians who believed the immortality their plague had bestowed upon them was more of a boon than not, but Serece—and thankfully the majority of her people—thought otherwise. Yes, barring catastrophe their lives would go on and they’d watch the world around them evolve, all while tethered to the mountains their god Phantaxis—her father—had doomed them to. That was no boon; it was a life sentence. Freedom was illusory. The moment you left the mountains, the moment you grew out of range of the snow the clock would start ticking and the rot would set in.

  Anger roused in Serece. Her skin prickled with the heat of frustration, so she lashed out at the wall of the building to her left. Her fist met stone with a crack and she hissed as the force of the blow traveled up her arm and into her shoulder. She rubbed her knuckles gingerly. It was only when the rage began to subside that Serece realized Fiel was nowhere to be seen. Great. She stopped to survey her surroundings: a fountain in the city square just ahead; what she presumed was a church to her left, though the red, white, and black color scheme was a bit jarring; shops all around, people bustling to and fro, walking through Serece like the ghost she was, and—

  The man she assumed to be the Betrayer, making a beeline toward her position. Serece tensed as he neared, and he stopped just several feet from where she stood. She tilted her head and he smiled. “Fiel. My love, where have you been?”

  Serece blinked. Had he said what she thought he had? She glanced down at her skin, now a warm gold, then felt her hair, a collection of thin braids tied together. What in Perdition… Her ears twitched and she rubbed her arm, forcing herself to smile. “Faro,” came the automatic response. “My niece, she was ill.”

  Faro Fatego approached, taking her hand. “Is she well, now?”

  Serece—Fiel?—nodded. “Nearly.” She coughed. “…Something strange is in the air.”

  Faro tilted his head. “Strange how?”

  “I am not sure,” Serece said. “But…” She held her palm out, upturned, and winced. “Yssa fluctuates frequently.”

  “I see.” Faro stared over her shoulder, then returned his gaze, his pupils dilated. Serece glanced behind her but saw nothing. “The Keepers’ Wrath is nearly complete, Fiel. Tonight. If things go according to plan our hope to defeat Te Mirkvahíl will have finally come to fruition.” He leaned in to kiss her; Serece accepted it with a cringe, reminding herself she had not kissed the Betrayer, but actually her aunt.

  But why? Aunt Fiel and Faro Fatego? For a brief moment it made hardly a lick of sense, but then it did. Fiel was a “cultural heretic” of the best kind in that she refused to resign herself to the mountain realm her sister so fiercely swore by. Fiel had always seen there was more to life than the blood in her veins; there was an entire world she wanted to know.

  “I will come by the Hall later tonight,” Serece said, squeezing Faro’s hand.

  He grinned. “I look forward to it.”

  He stepped past her, though not quickly enough to conceal the fear in his eyes. Serece watched him disappear into the square. Strange, this memory. Faro Fatego and what Serece was almost entirely sure was the start of the phantaxian plague. But how did they all fit? Furthermore, how was any of this relevant to her locating Yssa? How was she supposed to escape a memory and enter Lea Mort?

  “There you are.”

  Serece yelped, starting at a hand on her shoulder. “Aunt Fiel? What—?”

  “Illumancy is a fascinating practice, don’t you think?” Fiel asked. “Sometimes a doorway to the past, and others a gl
impse of things yet to come.”

  “Terrifying, actually,” Serece said. She was quite comfortable to let the past and the future remain as such. No sense in worrying about things she couldn’t go back and change or those that might not actually come to pass. “I was you and…” She shuddered. “You kissed Faro Fatego and I had to relive it through your eyes. How does all of this work? How do we get to Lea Mort? What if Yssa is already dead?”

  “We finish the memory,” Fiel said. “The In Between is a means for confronting the past, either remembered or not.”

  “And this? This was something you repressed,” Serece guessed, and Fiel nodded sadly. “But why?”

  “This was the night the world as I knew it ceased to exist,” Fiel said, and the memory started to shift. Fog encroached, and when it finally withdrew Fiel had disappeared once again and Serece found herself standing in a garden. What she presumed to be the Hall of Illumurgists reared up before her in all of its pretentious glory, the figures depicted in the stained-glass windows excessively bright, though Serece thought it pretty.

  She started through the garden, blood eased, mind soothed by the perfume of the various colored flowers that lined her stone path. There were trees, too, all of which were in bloom, their blossoms scattered about the grass, some drifting through the air on a breeze. Serece couldn’t help smiling and was unsure whether or not it was a smile of her own or that of Fiel’s in this moment in time. She supposed it mattered little either way. As she neared the Hall, she felt a tickle in her throat, one that quickly turned to a burning itch. Her body tensed, her fingers curling, back arching as the sensation shot through her body.

  This was the night the plague came, she realized. Somehow Serece had forgotten the pain of this night, had repressed it, and it seemed that Fiel had as well, not that she blamed her. Presently it subsided and Serece made her way into the Hall and down the winding corridors, illuminated by wisps of pale light not unlike those she and Fiel had seen in Yssa’s temple. She sensed herself growing nearer to the chambers Faro had been working in, but as she continued on, delving deeper, descending stairways and turning corner after corner, the Hall grew less immaculate by the step. White walls of polished stone grew cracked, a strange membrane-like substance leaking out, and the tiled floors, once swirls of red, white, and gray were almost entirely black with mirkúr.

  Shrieks ripped through the Hall and Serece hurried toward them, the agony growing louder and louder by the second, the corridors more infested with mirkúr. Ahead a door stood ajar, tendrils of smoke seeping out. Serece—Fiel—ran toward the door without a moment’s hesitation. She reached out mentally to Yssa, and a moment later she felt her senses heighten, her body twitching reactively to the darkness around her. I thank you for this gift, Yssa, she thought. Gratitude where it was deserved.

  A wall of mirkúr rushed toward Serece as she pushed into the room. The door slammed shut behind her, and Serece crashed into the door, skull cracking as her head ricocheted off the surface. The wisp light in the chamber flickered erratically, making apparent the myriad corpses strewn about the floor, desecrated to varying degrees. Some were limbless, others lacked heads, and some were so horribly massacred it was nearly impossible to tell whether or not they had actually once been anything resembling a human, dissident, or phantaxian. In the center of the chamber knelt a figure wreathed in white, save the smoke trailing from his shoulders like a tattered cloak. In his hand he held a small glowing sphere, and into the sphere went threads of illumination, drawn from the bodies around him.

  Their souls! Serece groaned as she dropped to the floor, screamed as she felt her leg break from the impact. “F-Faro…?” she whimpered, and the figure in white responded to her voice. He looked upon her, eyes stark white, mirkúr webbing through his pale flesh. Serece felt the tears on her cheeks. “Oh Keepers… Faro, what have you done?” She felt a tug at the center of her chest, light at first, then violent as if something was trying to rip her flesh from bone. She shrieked as glowing strands of her soul leaked through her flesh and streamed toward The Keepers’ Wrath, held in Faro’s outstretched hand. She struggled against it. Her soul was hers and hers alone, but the effort was fruitless, and she could hardly move with her broken leg, not that there was anywhere to escape to.

  Her sight waned, though she kept her eyes fixed to Faro Fatego, the man she had loved the last two years of her life. The people of Helveden had always cursed him a pawn of Te Mirkvahíl for having been able to wield mirkúr, a sign of demonry, profound demonry at that when considering Faro was human and only the dissident should have been able to wield the demon smoke. But Fiel had loved him nonetheless, had believed, had known there was more to people than the blood with which they were born. Choice before blood as the Faithbringer Khar Am had said.

  What happened to you? she wondered as her world went black and her insides burned.

  Burned like the flames of Perdition itself.

  Burned like the summer sun.

  Burned as her beloved’s touch ripped her soul from her flesh. She drifted through the air, weightless, free of pain, drawn to the sphere in the distance, glowing bright as the moon did on nights when the stars refused to shine. She looked back at her body, crumpled by the door and wilting under entropy’s touch.

  I will keep you safe, a distorted voice whispered in her thoughts. My dear Fiel…

  The chamber exploded with light, and the light swallowed all. Only silence remained.

  * * *

  Vare dropped to his knees, panting. He had shirked Phantaxis for the time being, thank Celestials for that, and now found himself on the shore of the lake. The astral sky reflected off its surface and Vare couldn’t help admiring its prismatic beauty, made more so by the trees encompassing the lake. He settled back onto his rear and rested his arms on his knees. Any moment now, he hoped. Any moment the lake would shimmer and glow with a light bright as the sun and then he might be free of this wretched place. Lea Mort was part of The In Between, yes, but it existed separately, sealed away behind a myriad different doorways and gates. Doorways and gates that Varésh Lúm-Talé—presently known as Vare Tal-úlm—had been stupid enough to wander through in order to find a peaceful place for a nap.

  Serves you right, you idiot, what he assumed to be his conscience snarled.

  Indeed, Vare thought. Though you have to admit, I’ve done things far stupider than this.

  His conscience snorted. Is that supposed to make this better? We’ve been stuck here for Celestials know how many years, in your attempt to gain freedom you accidentally massacred half the phantaxian people, and now you’ve drawn the wrath of their corrupted god. Pray tell, what could be stupider than this?

  Vare chewed his thumbnail, then spat it into the grass. Well, um… Index finger next. Chewing nails, he found, helped him sort through thoughts and memories. Ah. This was a good one, a stupid one. That time I decided to make a planet. Really worked out well for all parties involved, eh? The Reshapers are dead, the world’s gone to shit, and who knows what the fuck else.

  The middle finger, first thrust at the sky, then chewed on for peace. Vare sighed. I would could I go back and fix things, but we all know that to be impossible. In Vare’s experience temporal alteration did little to rectify wrongs and instead seemed only to fuck things up further.

  Ring finger. What do I do when leave this place?

  What you decided to do long ago, his conscience said in a tone that suggested Vare was an idiot for having even asked.

  Vare groaned. Pinkie finger to ponder his options. Or, he thought, we could leave this place to implode by itself.

  You’re a moron, his conscience said. But if your goal is to accrue as much guilt as you possibly can then by all means, leave your planet to die.

  That did seem like a shit thing to do. Vare frowned. What do you suggest, besides the obvious?

  The only thing I’m going to suggest is the obvious, his conscience said. And the sooner you understand this, the sooner you can go about rect
ifying your fuck-ups, and Celestials burn me but there is a shitload of those.

  Vare clapped his hands together and stared at the lake. Right. The obvious. Restore balance. Temper Entropy while attempting to lift up Law. Do so before it was too late, and everything went to shit again. Vare sighed and leaned back in the grass, gazing up at the swirls of color and stars. Te Mirkvahíl and Ouran’an, Phantaxis and Te Vétur Thae. From here on out, no more immortals, Vare decided. One way or another they all somehow became corrupt, though not necessarily by any fault of their own.

  Just mine. Celestials but I think I take the cake for the planet’s worst parent.

  His memories drifted back to Ouran’an, to the last time he had walked the fallen city. What he would give to know the identity of Te Mirkvahíl. He had an inkling, a horrible suspicion, and he hoped he was wrong. He thought of the specter he’d encountered in those plague-infested ruins and prayed it hadn’t grown to become Te Mirkvahíl, that the words in the tattered journal he’d found hadn’t been some desperate manifesto.

  Hope to quell the plague that entropy had wrought. Back then there had been a handful of Reshapers who’d believed the plague to have come from the mortals. Given the lokyn wars Te Mirkvahíl had launched against Ariath over time, given the demon’s twisting of the mirkúr-wielding human Faro Fatego, it was easy to speculate the plague, to Te Mirkvahíl, was actually the mortals themselves. And that was a dangerous thought.

  Vare settled into the grass. All he could do now was wait.

  * * *

  It was dusk and the air smelled of vanilla and smoke. Serece blinked slowly, first listening to the buzzing of voices, then holding her hands up to her eyes. The skin was cracked and flaking, bruised with darkness that veined its way up her arms. It burned like Perdition and itched twice as much. She sat up, pushed away the blanket and closed her eyes at the sight. The plague. She had been right about Fiel’s memory, which she was apparently still experiencing. The last thing she recalled was a voice as her aunt’s soul drifted toward The Keepers’ Wrath. Who had it been? How had Fiel escaped the city alive?