Fairy Dark

by Adam Golden

  The Pyski banished his flight-form. Wings wouldn’t serve here, it was too confined, and speed wasn’t what was needed. He moved on light careful feet, sliding between the strands of midnight with slow, breathless care. The web hummed with tension, its strands radiated a danger Jogah couldn’t fully understand and wouldn’t risk. The webbing grew thicker, its weavings tighter and more convoluted the deeper the Pyski went. He felt watched, hunted, but there were no choices. Meical’s bedchamber was at the end of this gauntlet.

  Sweat poured from the Guardian’s brow as he contorted himself around one thick tendril and beneath another. He let out a long shuddering breath and froze, perched on one foot. There was nowhere to go. It was everywhere, a tightly woven lace curtain of menace with no chinks he could fit himself into.

  Enough,

  A shaft of brilliant white-blue Light burst into existence in his hands, flattening and broadening into a wide cleaver-like blade of crackling energy. Jogah lept forward, sweeping the weapon through the closest strands of the web. They broke with a violent ricocheting snap and flailed madly. Jogah worked the heavy Light blade frantically to keep the whip-quick tendrils from him, hacking deeper into the writhing net. If it had been aware of him before, it was focused now. The way before him closed like a tightened fist, and a thousand obsidian filaments flicked out to snag at him, wrap a limb, or trap his blade.

  The Light weapon still parted the dark, but not as easily as it had outside. The cutting became more difficult, and the barriers bounced back more quickly. Whatever the creature at the heart of this web was, it was powerful, and it was fighting back. Jogah dove through a rent he’d made in the wall of shadow and came up with his weapon ready. There was Meical’s door, not more than a half dozen paces in front of him, but it was sheathed in a tangled net of inky black vines so thick he could barely see any of the rough-hewn timber surface beneath.

  The Gaurdian threw himself forward, hacking at the dense dark. The light blade bit into the obstruction hungrily, spraying twin shocks of shimmering white and black sparks. The dark groaned and the weapon flickered alarmingly as the two forces struggled against each other. The Pyski Guardian sagged with each blow and had to force himself to straighten again. He felt the Dark pressing closer behind him. The path he’d cut was closing, the only way was through this door. He wrenched his weapon back and struck again, swinging the heavy blade like a wood axe. He’d take the shadow vines, the door, the whole wall if he had to. He was going into that room. Even if he fell dead on his first step inside.

  * * *

  A sharp gasp burst from his contracted lungs as the support under Meical evaporated. He hit the wooden floor hard and the air exploded from his lungs in a pained woosh. Writhing in suffocating agony, Meical O’Broin pushed and kicked at the woolen blanket wrapped around him, desperate for a breath but unable to catch one. Slowly his constricted, shocked lungs began to inflate, but his air-starved mind still couldn’t make sense of the madness around him. Halos of brilliant white blue light hung blazing before his eyes and didn’t clear when he blinked.

  His bedroom was in shambles. The door was thrown wide against the wall and hanging limp on bent and twisted iron hinges; his heavy wooden bookshelf lay on its side, splintered, its precious load of books spilled all over the floor. Tattered bits of paper and shredded pillow stuffing hung in the air, blown about by the banshee breeze that screamed through his shattered windows. In the midst of this cyclone of destruction, twin blurs swooped and dove, coming together and parting like warring raptors. The boy pulled himself into a tight ball as his eyes followed the airborne struggle. Whatever those things were, they certainly weren’t animals. They were too fast, too unnatural.

  The boy blinked again and again trying to clear his vision so he could really see. The flecks before his eyes wouldn’t clear all the way, but he started to make out tracers, looping trailers of black, somehow blacker than night, spun around a thread of brilliant twisting white . . .

  “Jogah!”

  The single word echoed through the chaos and, for a moment, the aerial combat stalled. The shadow-thing faltered and the blazing white streak that Meical knew had to be his friend flared with an intensity that hurt to look at. It moved too quickly to follow, a sliver-thin bolt of twisting, turning lightning.

  A high keening screech tore through the room. Meical clasped his hands over his ears and pulled his knees up close to his chest. The black thing batted at the Light with appendages like leathery wings, but it was being pushed back. It just couldn’t keep track of the racing, stinging form of its enemy. Jogah was winning. Hope surged in the terrified boy. Jogah would save him. He would.

  The bat-like smear of pitch wailed a frustrated roar that sent a shock of fresh shivers down the boy’s spine. A blast of force struck him like a hard shove and bounced Meical’s head back against the stone wall he cowered against. Tears filled his eyes, he was dizzy, and he thought he might be sick. The ringing in his ears replaced the furious rush of noise in the room.

  Meical teetered and had to brace himself against the floor to steady the spinning. He shook his head and winced at the pain that shot through it down into his neck. He dashed at the tears in his eyes, squeezed them tightly shut and then forced them open again. The room spun crazily. Meical let out a long shuddering breath and willed it to settle.

  Movement in front of him caught his attention and he latched onto it like an anchor. Something was moving through the chaos on the floor. The boy dashed at his wet eyes again, straining to see, but the fuzziness wouldn’t clear. Whatever it was, it stayed low, a blur of black scales and pale flesh slithering toward him. Meical pushed himself harder against the wall and brought his hands up to ward it off.

  Where was everyone? Why hadn’t anyone come to help him?

  He swung his crazily spinning vision toward the door and swallowed the bile that rose in his throat. Could he get there? Could he make it down the hall to his parent’s room? Maybe he could crawl.

  Something snagged the hem of his nightshirt and Meical screamed. A maggot-pale limb clawed at him. The boy flailed, kicking wildly. The creature lunged for him, rasping something Meical’s panic-twisted mind couldn’t make out. The boy screamed again, striking and twisting away as a nightmare visage cobbled from ragged shreds of flesh pressed closer.

  Something surged from a place deep in Meical. Something he’d never felt before. It rose up from inside him like a bubble of air trapped in his chest and radiated through his outthrust hands. It felt like fire in his veins, like the charge in the air after a lightning strike, and then it was gone, and so was the thing.

  Relief flooded through Meical’s stress-battered body. It was gone, it was over. He slid down fully onto the floor against his will, as though all of his bones had suddenly melted, and consciousness started to fade. He couldn’t keep his eyes open as a cascade of thoughts rattled off of each other drunkenly: ‘Tired, so tired,’ ‘Mother will be so cross about the room.’ ‘It’s over,’ ‘that . . . thing is gone.’ And the last tatters of alertness whispered through his fractured fragmented mind. ‘Where’s Jogah?’

  * * *

  The Pyski Guardian’s battered husk sailed out of the sky and skittered across the terrain like a skipped stone, cutting irregular pits and ruts in the dirt before it struck something solid and stopped. Jogah came to rest with a bone-crunching impact he never felt. A crippling numbness hung over him as he lay draped around the base of a shattered cedar tree.

  ‘He didn’t know me.’

  Meical hadn’t recognized him. He was afraid, terrified of Jogah. Nightmares had come to life and invaded Meical’s home, he’d been assaulted by monsters, held captive by living shadows, yet when the latent power of his Focal blood surged to defend him, it wasn’t against them. It was against him. Against Jogah. The wide-eyed rictus of dread on the boy’s face hung frozen in the Pyski’s mind, damning, accusing. What had he become? What sort of monster could illicit such a visceral horror?

  A thunderclap flare
d somewhere close. Very close. It hit with the force of a physical blow. A sucking force yanked at him, pulling against the dead weight of his husk, dragging him back. What fresh hell was this? Had the shadow-thing returned to finish him off? He didn’t care. At least it would be over then. Jogah groaned; his punished form was weak, too weak to move. He scraped a wide trail in the scoured dirt as he was dragged backward. He struck a buried rock and was rolled over it.

  A wedge of shock chiseled into the frozen stupor that encased the shattered Pyski as he realized what was happening. The Light bomb. This wasn’t the shadow-thing. It was him.

  A ragged fissure of white brilliance hung in the air of the shattered grove, a frozen bolt of crackling energy suspended in nothing. He’d cracked Reality itself.

  Tree limbs snapped and sailed through the air like cast spears, rocks skittered along the ground, soil rolled like waves pulled by the tide, all to be gobbled up by the dazzling cleft in existence. It sucked at everything around it, including Jogah, pulling like a whirlpool, and it was spreading. The broken Guardian could see smaller breaches spiderwebbing out all around him, dozens, maybe hundreds of them. They would spread like pulled threads in the weave of Actuality, each one weakening the whole until the entire fabric fell apart.

  Maybe the Court could stop it. Maybe they would find out in time and do . . . something. Jogah couldn’t make himself care. The terrible radiance of the break blazed against his ruined flesh. He let out a sigh. He should have been better.

  ‘Meical . . . I’m sorry.’

  He pushed the last thought out with all of the intention that remained to him, like a bottled message cast out on a hopeless sea as the blazing crack claimed him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Chapter 6

  One of them bayed in the distance and Bwgan jerked, looking back over his shoulder anxiously. Hands and feet already torn and bloody from a day and night’s hard climbing clawed at the blade-sharp stone as he scrambled across the scree. Loose stones fell in showers, threatening to pull him down. He bent, uttering a vile curse with the force of a prayer, and leapt for a peak he couldn’t see. They would be close, probably circling. If he’d heard one, they were close indeed and feeling confident.

  The Gwyllgi were silent, unrelenting killers who only announced themselves when they were feeling rambunctious, toying with their food. He could only hope against hope that the prey they’d cornered wasn’t him. That and keep moving, always keep moving. He scrambled up and over the steep cliff and landed hard on his stomach. The thin bit of half-rotted cloth that was his only covering snagged on the barbed stone and tore loudly as he dragged himself forward. He paid it no mind; he would have shrugged it off if the effort wouldn’t have cost him valuable time. He had to keep moving.

  ‘Never stop, bad things always happen when you stop. Of course, bad things happen when you don’t stop too.’

  A blast of high insensate laughter burst from him as he regained his feet in a half-crawling, half-sprinting lumber and threw himself down the cliff’s other side at a full run, arms pinwheeling wildly to keep his balance.

  Stones, roots and a hundred other obstacles flared up to snag at his battered, bruised and broken feet, but he weaved around the worst of them as if by magic. He was deep in the chase now and the primal, visceral instincts of the hunted thing had taken control. Duinn made those instincts second nature, or it burned away a man entirely until there was nothing but the running animal left.

  He cringed at that thought as he threw himself down the cliff and rode the wave of sliding sediment to its base. Was he more than the animal? More than the chase? He had been, long ago, very long ago . . . hadn’t he? He thought so.

  Something scraped against stone and he froze. A heavy wave of debris slid over and engulfed him. The blanket of loose rock made excellent cover, but the weight pressing at him brought bubbles of panic hiccupping to the surface of his fractured mind. He’d discovered the shredded smock he wore amidst a similar pile of slag. He’d been so grateful for the meager covering, ravenous for a few mouthfuls of tough, desiccated meat he’d been able to gnaw off of the bleached white bones. At the time it seemed a treasure trove beyond imagining, now the memory filled him with a quivering kind of dread. It was too easy to imagine the next runner coming upon his empty, staring skull, tearing the mangled shroud from his mummified corpse. He could all but feel desperate fingers and teeth questing for anything soft enough to chew.

  A long rumbling snarl snapped him back to the present nightmare. The warm spread of his emptying bladder brought the sharp acid tang of urine to his nostrils and plastered his filthy shift to his legs, but he was beyond caring. The Gwyllgi had him. He could just make out the haunches of one of the great pony-sized night dogs—that would be Bhargast, the Gwyllgi alpha. The great black monster always lead the hunt, always got the first meat. Stones rattled and shifted above him, and he screwed his eyes shut, willing himself to stillness, willing Bhargast to pass by the non-descript mound of stone.

  His body vibrated with tremors of horror he couldn’t contain. He wouldn’t escape, but perhaps the huge Gwyllgi alpha would pass him by. Just maybe it would be one of the others that caught him. They were all monsters, but Bhargast was a demon, a terror even among his own kind. He thrilled at his work, revelled in the slow kill, and the great red-eyed monster took a special sadistic interest in him. He’d drag it out for days. One of the others might grow overzealous, get too excited and inadvertently give him a quick death. Small chance of that, but it was the only chance he had.

  Gravel crunched close and a chuffing sniff like the pumping of a bellows sounded right above him. The demon dog had a scent, and the mingled bouquet of piss and sweat and dread leeched up through the stones to betray him. An eerie growl, like a cruel chuckle, ripped through the silence of the dead place, and a crushing weight settled down overtop of him.

  Bhargast was sitting on his back. His lungs compressed under the strain with a pitiful whining whoosh. A single swipe of a paw as wide as his chest dashed away the shroud of heavy stones over his head and shoulders. His cocoon of dark, oppressive safety shattered, replaced by the cold gray light and ever-present horror of Duinn.

  He couldn’t see the monster perched on his back, but the others were all too easy too spy. They loped a wide circle about the little hillock in a silent, coursing vigil, waiting to see if their leader would let them share in the hunt’s prize. Eyes like blazing coals burrowed into him hungrily, their long lupine muzzles worked, sniffing. Jaws wide and strong enough to take his head with a single bite snapped. Tongues he knew were as rough as rasps worked over long gleaming dagger-like fangs.

  A long low rumble like stones grating against each other sounded above him. He froze as something warm and thick plopped wetly onto the back of his neck. Bhargast lowered its great boulder of a head, displaying the rows of sharp teeth in its gaping jaws where his prisoner could see. He was close enough to make out the bits of rotted meat lodged between huge canines, and long strings of thick pinkish saliva that stretched between the yawning fleshy lips. Close enough that an oppressive blast of breath, sour with the stale reek of carrion hit him like a slap. The heavy paw on his spine pressed, claws as sharp as chipped flint dug into his flesh, and he screamed a long howling scream that made the Gwyllgi yip and bark like excited puppies.

  * * *

  The long gurgling screams faded into a pitiful wail of hopelessness as he came fully back to consciousness. The pain was already fading. It wouldn’t leave him entirely, but at least it dulled. The memories . . . those never did. Bhargast’s smug eyes watching him as he worried sloppily at the arm he’d torn inch by inch from its socket. The pack nipping at his stomach and thighs, playful nibbles that tore hunks of flesh from him. Bloody muzzles and file-like tongues digging at his viscera. A pair of them pulled at him, each at a leg, as though to tear him in half. Those memories and hundreds more would stay crystal clear and stiletto sharp forever. They’d come back when he slept. They always did.

  A
shuddering explosion of sobs erupted from him. His body spasmed. He struck his head hard on the stone wall and recoiled, wrapping his arms tightly around his knees. The damp, filthy little alcove held him like a clenched fist, too low to sit in, too tight to lie flat. He had to fold himself into the low, narrow entrance to get in and then curl around himself to fit. He could already feel his muscles starting to seize and cramp. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, hoping he might fall into unconsciousness before the spasms started. He never slept so soon after he returned, but maybe—

  “Bwgan!”

  Panic took him by the throat. He scrambled, unmindful of the series of scrapes and sharp blows that followed as he twisted and slithered out of his tiny cell. The mistress would not be kept waiting, not for an instant, never. He clambered out of the crack in the wall and scrambled clumsily to his feet, barely noting the chorus of pops and pinching agonies in his spine and battered joints. Hands thick with coal dust and filth raked through the thin sprigs of hair left on his head and straightened the tatters of his shift, adding new streaks of grime atop the old. The mistress always demanded he look his best.

  The mistress’s cave was wide and tall and airy. It made him want to stretch out, to simply enjoy the sensuous luxury of space, but he kept his head low and his spine bent. He knew his place now. He scurried over to the hearth and stopped just short of the lambent half circle of pale orange light it cast. The mistress’s light was precious and never to be sullied by having to touch him. He deserved no better than the dark, he knew that. He’d been taught.

  “Ah, Bwgan, you’ve returned. Good. Did you enjoy your exercise?” Her voice was high and sharp, like the wail of a violin in the hands of someone who couldn’t play it. It grated in his ears. How he hated that sound, loathed the smarming cruelty of it.