by Adam Golden
The Pyski’s nearly translucent wings beat too fast to be seen as she climbed higher to take in the destruction. She thought there should have been more wreckage, but as soon as she reached a high enough vantage to take the scene in fully, she understood. The ground beneath the tower had rotted away, caving inward like the mildewed flesh of a spoiled fruit. Most of the tower had likely fallen straight down into the yawning black pustule that dominated what had once been the O’Broin family’s main courtyard.
He’s down there. She knew it without question. He would be at the heart of this monstrosity he’d made, a spider in its web. Waiting. He wanted her here, he had all along. She understood in a way; after all, she was the living embodiment of everything he resented and hated, everything that had failed or harmed him. He wanted her to watch, to witness his revenge. Her hand brushed the pouch at her side, and she felt the hard edge of the drake’s talon resting there. He’d said as much in Kur’s grotto.
“I want you all to see,” he’d said.
He’d insisted that Airmed not take her life, despite the danger he must have known she’d pose to his schemes. He saw this as some sort of duel between them. She understood that, and that understanding opened a sinkhole of dread inside her.
“Not so different from them ya despise, are ya then?” another voice mocked from inside her, and Rhiannon wanted to whimper. Had Dewi been right? Were they the same?
The sword sent an impatient pulse up her arm, encouraging in its thoughtless, demanding way. Cut. It didn’t understand doubt or indecision, but it understood duels. It approved of duels. The Pyski pulled the blade in close, turned over on herself in the air, and plummeted downward into the rupture. Rocketing toward her destiny at long last.
Chapter 28
“We’ve stood here before.”
The voice ricocheted off of the dirt walls and Rhiannon spun, looking for their source.
“Do you remember, Niamh?”
“I am not her,” Rhiannon said distractedly as she peered about the chamber, searching through tangles and snarls of vines and brambles. It was true, Niamh was just a fraction of what she was now, but she did remember. She could recall the smell of his flesh roasting as a full Court of Pyski Elders tried to immolate him. “She never wanted that. She loved you. She tried to—”
“She tried to murder me!” His voice cracked and rose to a shrill screech at the end.
Rhiannon spun toward the sound, bringing the tip of the Twilight Sword to bear as the room’s shadows twisted and curled around each other, coalescing into the Bwgan’s long, gangly, maggot-white form.
“You left her no choice, you were corrupted,” Rhiannon said.
“No choice?” the shadow king sneered, “no choice but to murder her own, to order a genocide? Which of us was corrupted?”
The ragged, never-healing tears on his cheeks pulsed with the shining black of the Void, beating in time with the rhythm of the Dark inside Rhiannon.
“And now here you stand, her vengeance made manifest, come to exact her pound of flesh because . . .Why? Because I dared to live? Because I defended myself? Resisted being killed?”
“Your sack of Aos Si killed hundreds of Pyski,” Rhiannon cried, “and facilitated a civil war which has laid waste to whole Planes! You destroy everything you touch. You’re a plague. How many like that girl have you tormented for your own ends? You’re mad! A rabid animal!”
“And so you’ll cut me down,” the Bwgan said in a strange, musing voice as he slid around a column of interwoven vines that stood in the center of the chamber, a thick trunk of knotted tendrils coated in heavy bark that branched out everywhere. “For the Light? For the Pattern?”
“Yes,” Rhiannon said nodding. “For Life. To save existence.”
“To save . . . I see, ‘greater good’ is it?” the eyeless creature asked, somehow staring into her.
His left arm fluttered in a sort a palsied wave, and Rhiannon followed the shriveled, underdeveloped limb from the corner of her eye. It was nearly fully formed, the stubs of two fingers seemed to be blooming from the palm as she watched. Her attention shifted from the regenerating limb as its movement caused a cascade of activity in the thorn-covered net of vines that wrapped everything around them.
“What of them?” the Bwgan asked her. “Greater good for them as well? Once that sword of yours has had its fill of me, are they next?”
As the writhing growth slid away, it uncovered scores of rigid, tightly woven vine cages. They were set into the walls of the cavern in uneven tiers and shrouded in Darkness. She could just make out movement inside the plaited vine enclosures. The inky black made discerning detail impossible, but she didn’t need to. She knew what she’d see. Little bodies, dozens and dozens of huddled terrified bodies, trying, and likely failing, to avoid the inches-long thorns that surrounded them. Frightened, exhausted, fear-battered children.
Foci.
“Yes,” the monster said as though he’d read her thoughts. “The Court’s great dread. The nightmare that all Pyski society was formed to prevent. Focus children touched by Darkness.” The Bwgan gasped and fanned his face mockingly with his single intact hand. “Will you purge them as the Court who made you purged the rest?” he asked, effecting a tone of casual interest as his long fingers traced a whirl in the bark of his new Strief’s central nexus, petting the fibrous growth idly.
“Purge is a much nicer word than slaughter. Don’t you think?” he mused. “Much more civilized. Though, there was very little civilization about the act itself. Do you remember?”
Despite herself, Rhiannon’s head jerked in a negating shake, and the Bwgan’s tongue clicked in mocking surprise.
“No, you wouldn’t, would you?” he said. “No Elders in the trenches that day, were there? I’m sure you do remember wringing a great many sets of hands before you gave the orders though. Maybe a few tear-stained pillows, a few quiet sobs in the privacy of various palaces?”
Rhiannon tried to shake off a flood of memory. Focus. She did remember giving the order, and there had been tears, so many tears, so much doubt and second guessing. They’d been right. There was no choice!
No choice, there it is again.
She retreated from that thought, driving it back. This wasn’t the time for doubt. She couldn’t afford the distraction. Her focus was fractured; he was playing with her. The blade in her hand radiated something spikey and sharp. Irritation? Impatience?
Cut!
“This is why,” she muttered as her eyes ran over the cages. She could see without letting him from her sight. And then straightened and raised her voice. “This . . .” she exclaimed, waving an arm to include a knot of the shrouded cages, “is the fate those Elders sought to spare our charges. A life of torment and dread at the hands of some soulless monstrosity like you.”
Rhiannon exploded forward with a growl and leapt for her enemy’s throat. The dun sword split the air on its edge as it raced for the tall man’s pasty white jugular.
The Bwgan was a black blur, sliding back and around her, dodging cut after cut. He flowed around each strike, barely seeming to move at all. He moved like water around her thrusts and cuts. His good hand clasped the now almost fully regenerated one at his waist in a posture of calm attentiveness.
“A formidable weapon, that sword,” he mused as he slid back from a thrust toward his face and positioned himself behind her left shoulder. “In capable hands, of course.”
Rhiannon spun, pulling the blade around her body in a savage diagonal slash that should have cleaved the demon from his right shoulder to his left hip. A whip of barbed vine flashed out a blink before the cut landed. It snagged her right ankle, yanking her off balance and fouling the cut.
Rhiannon landed face down and rolled, and a tangle of snaking vines sprung toward her from every direction. Her battle sense wavered as fear surged up from where she’d buried it. Not again. She wouldn’t be caught again as she had in Airmed’s tangle! The dusky force inside her exploded outward, fueled by he
r dread as much as her anger. Vines shrank back and were cut down by spinning blades of hardened air. Others flashed to ash where they met a wall of invisible heat.
A cylindrical barrier of tightly woven tendrils rose up around the Strief core, closing the Bwgan away from her blade.
Rhiannon snarled with frustration. She made her will a hatchet and hurled it against the barricade with the strength of mad frenzy.
I have to end it. Now! Every second gives him another opportunity, another chance to trip me up, to pull me down.
The vines kept coming at her from every angle, lashing, snapping, testing her defenses without pause. The ache in her chest surged through the compress of power she’d packed around it. She stumbled. Her recovery was instant, but the hungry tendrils were emboldened by the slip. They came harder and faster.
They sense weakness.
Gritting her teeth, the Pyski champion redoubled her attack on the shield the Bwgan hid behind, desperate. Green ichor rained from slashed vines as her Power shredded them; thorns as long as her index finger rained all around her, but there was always another vine to slice, another shadow sliding into the cracks to shore up any breach.
She was panting. Power quivered inside her and Rhiannon felt as though a strong hand had her around the throat. She was bathed in cold clammy sweat beneath her armor.
There are too many . . . this is not the way.
She was tiring, wearing herself down. Eventually she was going to misstep and he’d have her. She saw herself suspended on her root again, dangling in the endless dark as the Strief tore at her insides. This wasn’t going to work. He was going to beat her. Again. He was going to snag her with one of these vines, wrap her up in her own little cage among the rest, and she’d be forced to watch in agony as he burned it all down. Everything . . . gone!
I’m going to fail.
* * *
The Bwgan sagged against the twisting fibrous pillar dominating the room. So much effort. The various Workings he juggled were drawing strength from him at an alarming rate. His shadow forms needed nothing beyond formation, true, but directing the Strief’s attacks, and now maintaining this barrier, was becoming a strain. He couldn’t afford to leech any more power away from his prime construct. As it was, his great jumble of a Casting teetered on the edge between fulfillment and ruin.
This should have been so much easier. The thought came as a snarl of frustrated rage. If only I had my charms.
How much easier it would have been to simply command and be instantly obeyed, but he’d ruled each of these creatures long before he’d ever held their precious teeth. The old magic, the magic of blood and bone, was incredibly powerful, but he’d long since mastered a power just as strong, in its own way. Was he not the Bwgan? Did monsters and nightmares not flee screaming where he walked? Dread was his consort, and enough fear could make people do just about anything. He reached deep into the midnight core of his power and latched on to the essence of what he’d taken from Ferdoragh all those years ago.
On the other side of the barrier the vine whips fell limp, shadow forms melted into inky pools or splintered like dark glass as the power that animated them was drawn away.
The Pyski’s desperate chopping grew furious as she tried to take advantage of what she must have thought was her enemy’s flagging strength. The Bwgan flinched with every impact, painfully aware of the precariousness of his position.
If she should get through now . . . He pressed more and more of the surrounding Dark down inside of him, compacting and compressing it even as he shaped it. One long, sharp talon cut a snarl of Glyphs into the Strief’s bark and the whole chamber shuddered. The core spasmed and writhed under his hands and the Bwgan stroked the rough bark soothingly. Sibilant syllables of long dead languages rolled off of his tongue, and slowly the jerking, heaving motions slowed as the great growth settled itself again.
“There now . . .” the Bwgan groaned, patting the trunk. The pressure inside him was agonizing, intoxicating. The Dark scoured his insides, rending and tearing, hungry and impatient, until finally he couldn’t contain it any longer.
Waves of raw terror emanated out from him, like the ripples from a cast stone. A single long blood-curdling scream rang in the chamber outside his shield, immediately followed by another. A chorus of warbling shrieks and piteous sobbing rose up from the cages. The Bwgan gasped like a thirsty man given a draught of cold clear water. Ahh, but didn’t his little birds sing sweetly?
He pushed fear out into the chamber and, where it met living thinking minds, it latched on, growing, amplifying itself before it rebounded, feeding him power in a self-sustaining loop. His body trembled with the shivering rush of it. The Dark surged, augmenting his sight, elevating his consciousness beyond the mundane as it reached, grasping greedily for more.
His shriveled arm plumped and his shortened fingers grew long, sharp and agile. A web of ropey black veins stood out on his slug-white flesh, pumping strength and corruption through every fiber. Lean, dense muscles grew stone hard, thrumming with vitality. All of that paled in comparison to what he saw. The Bwgan’s eyeless gaze looked beyond the shield, beyond the chamber and through it. He thought he could nearly see the boundary, almost make out the edges of the Pattern itself.
More . . . I need more! The Dark flexed, greedily drawing dread toward him. No! He thrashed at the Darkness in panic. He made a barbed goad of his will, driving the Dark down by force. This had to be done carefully, a heavy hand could mean disaster.
The steady chop, chop, chop of the Pyski’s assault was gone. He hadn’t noticed at first, but as awareness came to him the Bwgan felt a wide, predatory grin spreading upon his face. He flicked a newly reformed finger, and the barricade between himself and the rest of the chamber unwound itself. The vines retreated, pulling back to reveal the ovoid cavern, flanked on all sides by stacked vine-wrought cages and their crying, shrieking little occupants.
He turned in place, savoring the sight and feeling as the fear of his charges pulsed and beat inside of him. He raised long thin arms like a conductor saluting his orchestra, or a musician stretching before taking up his instrument. And then he began to play.
Blade-like fingers dexterously traced glyph chains in the air, straining reality with glittering-black Dark in a complex series of sigils.
A faint metallic rattle sounded behind him and brought the Pyski back to the Bwgan’s attention. He pirouetted slowly and, as he did, another rippling wave of fear pulsed outward from him. It struck her just as he turned to face her, and the Bwgan felt his wide shark’s mouth stretched to its limit as she cringed back, bearing down on herself as though holding ground in a high wind. Despite himself, the Dark creature was impressed. Not many creatures, Fae or human, could have kept their feet under such an assault. Yet the so-called champion remained upright, gripping that vicious sword for dear life, clinging to it with both hands.
“Quite a sensation, isn’t it?” he asked, turning his back on her to inspect one of his sigils. “The touch of a Fear Dorcha is . . . singular. I wept for days the first time I felt it.”
He spoke in the distracted but aimable way of a person who had unexpected but not unwelcome visitors in the midst of a busy working day. Happy to converse but still pressed by tasks that needed doing.
The Glyph chains filled the air around him now, each set of emblems coming faster and faster. A complex jumble of shining obsidian characters weaved and coiled about the shaft of the Strief’s central trunk, cutting into the bark, burning themselves into the rugged, twisted surface.
“Why?” The word, uttered through chattering teeth, brought the Bwgan’s egg-shaped, eyeless head around to look at the struggling warrior again.
“Why?” he asked, as though testing the word. He turned to face her. “You called me a plague, and you were more correct than you know, but not for the reasons you gave. It’s not what I’ve done that is my true crime, but what I am. What we are. It’s the Pyski that are the plague, child.”
* * *
Rhiannon gasped and wobbled sideways before catching her balance again. The tip of the Twilight Sword weaved and wobbled in her grasp, swaying drunkenly as she struggled to curb the quaking in her limbs. The room was hazy, her eyes unfocused and her jaw hurt from clenching it to keep her teeth from chattering. The pitiful cries of the caged Foci filled the room, but she barely heard them. The enemy advanced a step and Rhiannon yelped and hurried backward. That great jagged maw of a smile opened up and the Pyski champion groaned.
It’s a trick. A glamor. Just a glamor.
But in her pulverized heart she knew it wasn’t, it was real, it had always been real. She was looking at evil personified, and it was herself. Her form, pale as death, swathed in black rags, and moving with the Bwgan’s alien, boneless grace, swayed before her. Her face, gaunt and shredded by the Bwgan’s unhealed scars, stared back at her; her mouth, stretched wide and full of jagged arrowhead-shaped teeth, pronounced a sentence on her entire race.
“We’re a poison, a cancer. Everything we touch turns to ash,” the specter of herself declared as it floated about the base of the Strief.
“Look at the damage we’ve done in the handful of centuries since the Red Man’s folly let us bleed out into the community of planes,” the Bwgan said in the Pyski’s own voice.
Rhiannon shook her head, clenching her eyes shut tightly, trying to banish the vision. But when she opened them, she found them same thing. Herself.
“Dark Fae lived here for eons before the Sundering unleashed us on the Planes,” the Dark vision of herself told Rhiannon. “Ages beyond measure passed in relative peace . . .”
Rhiannon opened her mouth to speak and her doppelganger laughed her own laugh.
“I know, I know. I say peace and all of those grand personages buzzing about inside you have a tizzy. Pyski doctrine has always been that we are a necessary check on the Dark. That it is only through our efforts that the Dark is foiled from its aim of complete destruction. It’s a lie. I spent decades chasing down and cobbling together the histories of the races before our forbears first ventured through the cracks in the Red Man’s patches on the Pattern. It’s not an easy endeavor. Our ancestors were quite thorough in their . . . purges.”