Why was she here? What the actual fuck?
She was thirsty as fucking hell. When had she last had something to drink? And hungry—when had she eaten last? A human body could only endure so long without nourishment. The Blade would know that, right?
She sat back and studied her worn and torn clothing, the long tears in her cracking leather boots. The sand and grit covered her from head to toe like a powder, in her hair, in her ears, in her eyes and her mouth. It chafed her skin beneath her clothes. The sun’s sweltering heat was intensified by her black tunic. She needed to find some shade. But a part of her couldn’t help thinking that if she died here, now, the Blade would die with her. And the cycle would be broken. The people could rebuild. Suranna’s plans would be thwarted. No one would ever have the power of the Blade again. She could just lie down and die.
She held out her sunburned arms and watched the Blade heal her body while she slowly died of dehydration. Silver currents ran like bolts of lightning beneath her skin, flickering alive, healing the worst burns. But the Blade’s healing power, too, became erratic after a while. Was there a limit to how far it could push its wielder’s body?
She needed to get going, needed to get out of the blistering heat. She needed water.
She stretched out her legs and, groaning, rose to her feet. She walked through the valley toward the mushroom stones for several hours, figuring that west was as good a direction as any, and besides, she’d probably find some shade beneath the stony outcrop. The day stretched on forever, then suddenly dusk was upon her. The sun set fast in the desert. Darkness swept over her and it came with a breath of cold and stillness. No voices. No monstrous fractured things hunting her, no matter how often she turned to look over her shoulder.
In the final dying light, the gravel beneath her feet shifted, and a sharp-edged stone cut through the torn leather of her boots and gashed her heel. She hobbled a few steps, cursing loudly before she found a hard-baked flat stone to stand on. Balancing on one leg, she took her boot off, and saw the blood pearl up from the thin gash. It dripped onto the red sand that drank it up. A spark of silver, and the blood clotted. The gash healed.
Well.
That was good to know.
She could feel the pain, but she couldn’t actually be hurt.
Until even the Blade’s magic could no longer keep her alive. And how long would that be?
She stumbled the last few paces towards one of the large mushroom-shaped stones and crawled into the blackness under its cap, and fell asleep.
The cold woke her up throughout the night. Wind thrashed the thorn bushes around her and the chill bit into her toes. She needed a fire to keep herself warm, but had nothing with which to make one. Move, she had to get moving.
She crawled along the side of the stone to get out of the wind, but gave up and rose. It would be better traveling at night, wouldn’t it? If she found some shade in the morning, she could sleep during the worst heat.
This is just like the time in Suranna’s cistern prison, she thought glumly. She’d survived that. She’d survive this.
But Owen got me out of that, a small voice whispered in her head. It didn’t sound like the Blade.
She couldn’t do this alone.
Nora stumbled the first few steps, her muscles seizing up, stiff and aching. She fell to her knees, got up, walked a few more steps. She gasped as one foot stepped into a crevasse, the skin of her ankle scraping open on the jagged rock. She massaged her ankle, wincing in pain. That was a definite way to kill herself: breaking her ankle out here. Shit. She hadn’t come far. She could still see the mushroom stone outlined against the starry heavens.
“This is stupid,” she muttered. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
A faint silvery light pulsed beneath the skin on her ankle, mending the hurt. And for a moment, she could make out the next few steps before her. The desert sand, the rocks and pebbles underfoot. Just ahead, another bush looming in her way, stretching out its thin limbs as though to trip her onto its thorns. In the pale light, Nora saw the crack where her foot had been stuck, a slender fissure in the ground. She saw life, too: a fat black beetle at her knee. A small yellow scorpion ran from the dim light, and hid in the crack. She shuddered, imagining its barbed tail stinging her trapped foot. The light faded again.
“Hey, are you there?”
A sigh on the wind, maybe a rustle of the dead grass. No whispers. No chants. Where was the Blade? She heard something scamper across loose pebbles. Something hairy touched her leg and she jumped up.
“I could really use some magic right now. Like a torch or a fire or something?”
No response but the twinkling of the brilliant starlight above her. There was absolute silence in the desert.
She was talking to herself. She was probably going insane. Did mad people know they were going mad? Was this real? How could she tell? She had brought down the temple in Arrun. She had felt a power come out of her. A mere thought—a whim—had triggered the toppling of the tower and all those people had died. Because of her. That was the power of the Blade, and it had come to her readily then. But not now. Why not? What was she doing wrong? And where was that spade?
Her hands curled to fists. She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t wanted the Blade. She hadn’t wanted all the destruction that came with it. All she had wanted was to see Owen again.
Absolute silence.
“Well, fuck you too, then,” she screamed into the night. “If I die, you die.”
Her hand erupted in flame.
The fire danced across her fingers, seared her skin, and she gasped with pain. She started running, waving the hand to and fro to extinguish the fire. The flames came without sound and her vision swirled with orange fire, and while her hand burned, her feet were still freezing. She staggered back and noticed that the Blade’s silvery light was healing her scalding flesh even as the tongues of flame flickered on her palm and around her wrist. It was like the gash in her foot. She felt the pain of the burn but couldn’t actually be hurt. It was a lesson.
The flames guttered and sputtered and then died.
The cold of the desert night settled around her once more. The ache of the burn throbbed in her arm and in her hand for a few heartbeats, lingering as if with a faint glow, and then it was gone. Healed.
Her breath came in gasps as if the fire had burned out the air in her lungs. Her head spun with dizziness, black crept into her vision, hedging her sight in as she stared at her palm. Somewhere in the darkness, close by but far away, she heard Two-Faced Nora sneer. The wind whispered softly in the thorn bushes.
No. She heard the Whisperers.
She took a deep breath, concentrated on her hand, and willed the fire to come once more. A spark sputtered into life just above the center of her palm. It hovered there like a small candle flame and the pain was back. Her brain thrummed inside her skull, the screech of the Whisperers roaring their destruction chant.
break crack slash burn
Nora grinned, her gritted teeth flashed at the desert night. She started to hum quietly in the back of her throat in order not to gasp out with the pain, in order not to scream as she fed her anger to the fire and watched it grow.
She walked over to the thorn bushes and gently, as though it were a small creature, she set the ball of flame onto a bush’s dried, wiry limbs.
The bush crackled and snapped as it burned, giving off warmth in its death.
Nora spread the fire to the next bush, and the next, until she had a proper conflagration going. Alarmed, the desert animals fled and the night air filled with hissing, rattling, and howling in the distance. She danced before the flames in the desert, wild and free.
“I have made fire!” She cackled, waving her flaming hand high above her head. Between the flames, a shadow figure. A tall young woman with coal black hair falling over her face, a skull perched on the top of her head, both of them laughing, dancing in step with Nora. “I know how to wield this fucking thing. Nothing can stop us. We
can change the world with a desire.”
Us, we?
Change the world?
Nora’s laughter faltered, and the fire on her hand went out.
With a snarl, she struck out her hand, and most of the fire around her went out with a faint whump.
Two-Face was still standing on the other side of a burning bush. The flames reflected in the blackness of the skull’s empty eye sockets.
“We are always here, shovel girl,” Two-Face spoke quietly, her voice barely audible above the hiss and snap of the fire. “We are you.”
“I know. But you’re not all of me.”
Two-Face cocked her head and gave Nora a puzzled look.
“You’re me, but only the dark part of me.” Nora fumbled for words. “You’re the anger, and the hurt, and the nastiness. The Dark Twin. I’ve been her, too. All my life, people thought I was cursed. And it sucks.
“All these years, whenever you took someone, you tapped into that darkness, didn’t you? Because it’s easy for you to understand. It’s where you come from, all you’ve known. The human sacrifice. The violence done to others. That’s how you were born and you don’t know any other way to exist. Most of the time, there is no other reason for you to exist except to do more violence. It’s just another cycle. And after a while, your wielders give themselves over to the darkness, telling themselves it wasn’t them that did all the terrible things, it was the Blade. You’re the scapegoat.”
Nora gazed off into the darkness of the empty desert plain beyond the small circle of fire. She set about making a fireplace, arranging stones, snapping the burnt thorns into pieces, and throwing them onto her little, contained bonfire. She found a snake that slithered away, and she brained it with a rock. She tossed the long body onto her fire and the smell of chargrilled meat made her mouth water. The throb in her head dulled, its teeth not quite as sharp as before.
There was nothing out there for miles, she thought. Nothing except what she had carried with her.
The voices.
The Blade.
It was a tool made for ruin and destruction. That’s how she had brought down the temple. That’s how she’d killed the small girl in Arrun—because anger was a tool. And it had its use, for a time. But if you started using it for everything, it could swallow you whole. If you weren’t careful, you found a justification to lash out anywhere, at anyone. Everyone else was to blame.
Nora was here because the baker’s wife couldn’t keep her mouth shut … that’s what she had thought back when she had first gotten into this mess. It didn’t feel so true now.
“You think you won’t give in?” Two-Face sat down opposite her, staring at her with her two sets of eyes. “Everyone does eventually.”
“I … don’t know.”
Their gaze met across the fire.
“We will see,” Two-Face said.
Chapter 7
Midday, she was sick.
She threw up violently, and groaned, clutching her stomach, tears in her eyes from the heaving. She was dismayed that she’d finally eaten and yet couldn’t keep it inside. She covered the chunks of half-digested snake with sand and pebbles and crawled off to the side. Another day in the desert, another mushroom shaped stone. She lay on her side and tried to sleep for a while in the thin stretch of shade directly under the stone’s deformed mushroom cap, but rest was hard to come by when the cramps in her stomach woke her repeatedly. She had walked a few miles at night, lighting the dried wood she found along the way, practicing the ignition until the palm of her hand was raw despite the Blade’s healing power. Shortly after dawn, she had crawled under the stone to get some rest, but now the worst heat of the day assaulted her as the sun was in its zenith, and she felt miserable.
The thirst was misery. She needed to find water.
She hated this. Hated the heat. Hated this fucking place. She felt wretched, and hopeless, and very much like she had back in Suranna’s fucking cistern prison. Nora shifted, turning her face toward the stone, letting the sun beat down on her back. What was worse, though, was that she knew that Owen wouldn’t come to rescue her this time. This time, she’d have to rescue him. She knew he must be trapped somewhere within the Blade’s fractured self, but she didn’t know how she could find him among the many Whisperers. She seemed to have won a kind of truce with the Blade for now, but for how long would she be able to maintain control over it? See, Owen would know these things. He always knew things. She missed him, and the ache of their separation was just as bad as the heat. He was a part of her, and she was a part of him. And if she’d find Owen, she’d find herself.
She only realized that she must have fallen asleep again when a sharp, fresh pain in her side woke her. A second lance of pain in her thigh made her cry out. She heard the rustle of feathers, the scratch of talons on the sand, and sat up, rubbing her dry eyes.
Three vultures hopped away from her, their huge black wings unfurled and flapping. Bald heads, bent beaks.
I’m going insane, Nora thought.
They were carrion birds, but unlike any she had ever seen. She blinked rapidly, but the ever-present sand blurred her vision a little. The vultures were black like ravens, except for the wrinkled flesh-colored bald heads and necks. They had eyes like Diaz—black on black—and breasts like young women. Their caws sounded like language, as though they were expressing their disgust at her still being alive, or maybe plotting how to quickly kill her.
Nora scrabbled to put her back to the mushroom stone and flung pebbles at the vultures. One of them cawed at her indignantly.
“I’m not dead,” Nora rasped, her throat parched. She flung another rock at the leader vulture, but it hopped aside effortlessly. “Go away!”
It did no such thing, but came closer, one large black eye fixed on her.
“Don’t you dare! I’ll kill you.”
Nora saw a thick vein pounding underneath the wrinkled skin of the vulture’s shaft-like throat, the faint blue lines on the pale skin of its breasts, and she felt a dreadful thirst.
“Last chance. Get away, bird.”
The vulture woman cocked her strangely wight-ish looking head, and said something to its sisters who cawed and hopped anxiously on the desert sand. They stilled, all three of them. They spread their black wings wide, showing off their tits. The leading bird, closest to Nora, cawed something again, but the other two didn’t answer this time. They fanned themselves in the rippling air.
Nora was definitely going insane. They weren’t just talking to each other, she thought. They were performing some sort of ritual. The lead vulture shook its head, and made a hoarse noise as though it were trying to sing like a thrush. When it was done, the other two answered in like manner, bobbing their shriveled wight heads.
Then the three voices joined as one and squawked to a harsh crescendo. Then they stopped abruptly, and stilled again. Performance over.
The leader turned back to Nora, and it occurred to her that maybe she should have run. The creature stared at her with a hungry intelligence.
Then without a sound, without a cue, the three birds leapt at Nora and she was smothered in a cloud of black feathers, talons ripping her skin into ribbons, beaks slashing her face. She kicked at them, spat curses, batted the sharp beaks away. She fell on her back, and the birds pounced on her. She fought dirty, hacking and slashing, pinching and scratching, tearing out handfuls of feathers when she could grab hold of them. They bit at her face and her neck. She tried to roll over, but one of the birds’ talons ripped into her shoulder and pinned her down. In seconds, she was bleeding from dozens of wounds, and her strength was leaking away. The Blade healed her again and again, but the birds, relentless in their ferocity, simply gouged new wounds. She tried to concentrate enough to conjure the flame, but every time she thought she’d felt the lick of fire, it was simply another stinging wound.
“Oh come on,” Nora howled, but her breath faltered. A vulture hopped directly onto her chest, going for her eyes.
For a spli
t second she imagined spending the next days, maybe even weeks locked in this struggle, being torn apart and put back together again and again, and she felt like giving up. What would happen if the three carrion birds ingested the Living Blade? Would it die in their bellies and be shat out, a piece of waste after centuries, no, millennia, of power? Or would it adapt and take over its new hosts, darkening the world with the rise of three black-winged goddesses?
Nora rested her weary head against the ground. The leading bird, perched on her chest, moved in for the kill.
The world went quiet. The flapping beat of wings and frenzied screeching froze in midair, and the beak, just inches from her jugular vein, was open so wide she could see deep down into the black maw.
No.
She wouldn’t die like this.
She still had to find and free Owen.
Her hands clamped around the leading bird’s beak and wrenched it open. Its hot breath washed over her with the smell of foul rot as the vulture screamed—until the lower half of its beak snapped off. It squawked, blood spurting from its jaws.
Nora rose. She kicked one of the other two birds in its face with a sickening crack of a smashed beak. The other sliced at Nora’s stomach, hopped off to balance itself when Nora shifted, and it was rewarded with a vicious stomp on its head.
Nora kept on stomping the bird’s head until it burst under the heel of her boot, brains squishing out in gray mass. With the ripped-jaw bird still clutched in her hand, she whipped around to the one with the cracked beak, and grabbed it by the throat too. She shook them both angrily.
“I told you,” she rasped, like gravel shifting on a dried out riverbed. “I told you I’d kill you, stupid fucking birds.”
Their large black eyes focused on her face, and she smiled at them when she saw their fear.
The leader bird struggled against her iron grip, trying to squawk some kind of message to its sister. But without half of its beak, its tongue ripped out along with it, it merely hissed, the blood bubbling and frothing at the back of its mouth.
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