by Eric Asher
The sage pointed out to a distant star. Beth blinked, trying to understand why this one point of the light looked as though it was stretched, drawn out, almost falling from the skies above.
“What you see is the coming of an Eldritch creature that will be the death of us all. What is left of us now cannot fight what is coming. However, when you summon us with your powers, and the two halves of our being become one, that is who we must be to battle the coming tide.”
Something dripped from that star and crashed into the glass ocean, closer to the horizon. Another boom, a crash of thunder, echoed across the plane.
“With every day that passes, that passage has grown larger. We’ve journeyed out beneath it, and I’ve seen the damage it’s done to the glass. Soon it will break through, and shatter the barrier above. But you must remember this is the wall of the Seal. Once it has fallen, your world will fall with it.”
When the sage first told them of Vassili, Beth worried she was using them, manipulating them to her own ends. But now she was beginning to understand. It wouldn’t matter if they could save Damian if there was nothing left of the Seal. If the Eldritch gained unimpeded access to the Shadowed Lands, not even the Titans would be able to stand against them.
Cornelius took a deep breath. His brow set, and it was an expression Beth had seen on him more than once. “We’ll fight with you. What do you need of us?”
The sage smiled and reached into the cloak around her shoulders. She handed Cornelius a small square of paper. “This is a binding sigil. It is harmless in the hands of most. With the magic of a blood mage, it can change the world.”
Beth studied the paper over Cornelius’s shoulder. Three concentric circles sat in the center with the wide lines of an X stopping at the outermost circle. A shorter cross sat between each leg of the X, and the end of every staff was crowned with a perpendicular straight line.
“You must never use this in your own realm,” the sage said. “The powers it could draw would almost certainly kill you. But what you must understand is that the powers you wield come from our realm. Your blood has a magic all its own, but when you reach beyond yourselves, this power is what you are calling.”
“How does it work?” Beth glanced between Cornelius and the sage.
Cornelius answered, much to Beth’s surprise. “You carve it into your palm, and I suspect you place that bloody sigil upon every one of the shadow folk we can find.”
“No,” the sage said. “You need only place it on me. With your powers and my own, the glass will fall.”
Another boom echoed in the distance as something dripped from the wound in reality. Beth frowned. “If you only need to break the glass, why not wait for that to do its job?”
“Because if the Eldritch break the glass, they break the fabric of the Seal, and all my people will die with it. It is the difference between a carefully placed blade to amputate a rotten limb and a killing blow.”
Cornelius cursed under his breath and wrung his hands. “I’m too tired from the earlier fight. There’s no way I can do this.”
It was then Beth noticed the bandages around his arms, and the lack of the same around her own. “I can do it. I am … I’m not as hurt as you are, for some reason.”
“I was able to heal you,” Sleeper said. “Cornelius insisted on it over himself. You have a selfless mentor.”
“A selfless mentor who’s going to let her get herself killed,” Cornelius snapped. “If I realized what you had in store for us, I would’ve had you heal me instead.”
Sleeper glanced between the pair. “Perhaps if you rest here until tomorrow, my healing skills will be prepared for you.”
The sage turned back to the ocean. “I fear we do not have that time. Look.”
And as they watched, the crack in the sky grew wider, and something dark and oily slipped in through the shadows.
* * *
“Shit.” Cornelius pinched his brow. “You have to do this.”
Beth took the paper from her mentor’s hand. It was a fairly complex pattern, but no more so than others she’d used in the past. Carving it into her palm was going to be a bitch, but she didn’t hesitate as she held the paper between two fingers and practiced tracing the pattern on her left hand.
“Looks like we’re getting a bit more than a cale out of this,” Beth said. The knife bit into her skin, the cold familiar steel splitting apart the valleys of her palm. Blood welled up, threatening to obscure the pattern as she furiously worked to finish.
But as she carved the last line at the bottom of the sigil, the dripping blood changed. It fell into formation, evening out across the sigil, and dripped no more. “What the hell?”
“It is time,” the sage said. She turned to Beth, and across the sea in the distance behind her, more of the oily Eldritch thing slipped into their world. Tears glistened at the corners of the sage’s eyes. “Place your mark upon me, and let our people be reborn.”
Beth looked at Cornelius. She didn’t know why, perhaps looking for confirmation that she wasn’t out of her mind for doing this? But he’d felt the bond to the shadow folk too. This place was the source of their most powerful arts. They were bound to it as surely as it was bound to them. He gave her a short nod, and she turned back to the sage.
The sage’s forehead felt cool, a balm against the wounds in Beth’s palm. She pulled her hand away. The pattern remained on the sage, and the cuts in Beth’s hand were no more, as healed as if they had been done months before.
Blood wavered on the sage’s face before the pattern dissolved and her eyes turned a crimson red that nearly vanished amid the ravaged flesh. She turned to the ocean and looked down off the cliff. Without a word, she leapt to the glassy surface below.
Beth’s heart hammered in her chest, for surely no one could survive a fall like that. But instead of a horrible end met with a long fall onto a solid glass surface, the sage splashed down as if the entirety of what they saw was water.
Tiny ripples raced out from the place the sage had impacted the surface, like a drop of water in a wide bowl. And as that ripple radiated farther and farther out, it grew taller and taller until finally, closer to the cliffside, the glass gave way.
A series of fissures at first, from the center where the sage had jumped, until it all broke like an eruption, chasing the ripple toward the horizon. It closed on that oily Eldritch thing dripping through into their reality.
But the darkness of the Shadowed Lands changed, the stars around them brightened, and the Eldritch patterns beyond them faded. The colorful stains of tentacles and jellyfish-like things that floated above them slowly resolved into darkness.
Whatever was happening, it didn’t change the coming of the Eldritch thing over the sea of glass. But Beth’s attention was quickly turned away when Sleeper collapsed beside her, his right arm twitching as though he was having a nightmare.
“Step back,” Cornelius said, pulling on Beth’s arm.
She didn’t argue. She watched in awe and horror as a wave of shadows rose from the broken sea of glass. Tendrils of darkness slid over Sleeper, slipping into his nostrils and ears and mouth until the whole form of his body changed.
He grew so much as he shifted. Where those red trails of scarred flesh had been on his face, there was now gray skin. But the entirety of that grayed tone darkened until it became little more than a shadow itself. The tendrils fell away, while others surged deeper into the village, perhaps seeking out more of the shadow folk.
“What did we do?” Beth asked.
Sleeper’s eyes shot open. They were back to the cool gray they’d been when she’d first met him hours before. He held up shaking hands, staring down at his palms. Sleeper closed his eyes and tears welled up as he clenched his hands into fists.
“Thank you.”
The tendrils of shadow resolved into spinning clouds like tornadoes turned on their side. They thickened and shot down the paths that surrounded them. Beth heard the screams in the distance. What at first sounded
like terror broke into something else. Those panicked notes grew deeper and were soon drowned out by shouts of joy and surprise.
But still, the Eldritch poured through the portal. The earth cracked and shook below them as the sea vanished in earnest. Beth could see the bottom now, could see some of the titanic forms left still and dry.
“One half cannot live without the other,” Sleeper said. “The bodies of those we lost have been trapped for a very long time. Perhaps now they can find some peace, some rest.”
“What of the sage?” Cornelius asked.
Sleeper squinted at the expanse below them. “She makes for the invader. But she cannot defeat what has come here.”
Beth’s blade sang as she drew it from its sheath.
Cornelius’s hand flashed out and caught her wrist. “I’m not strong enough for this.”
“I can heal you.” Beth looked to Sleeper. “Can you heal him?”
Sleeper shook his head. “My powers need time to recover, regardless of my form.”
“You cannot heal me,” Cornelius said, grabbing Beth by the shoulders. “If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need every ounce of energy you have. I’ll help where I can, but we are outmatched.”
Even as he spoke, the last trail of the Eldritch thing dripped from the portal, and its scream cut through the skies like that of a lost god.
CHAPTER TEN
“Tell the sage to come back here,” Beth said. “I have an idea. I’m going to need both of you, and probably any other shadow folk you can gather.”
Sleeper nodded and closed his eyes.
Cornelius narrowed his gaze. “What the hell are you up to?”
Beth looked down at her hands and then up to Cornelius. “Remember when we summoned them in the coliseum? Even though we are here, our power still reaches them. Look out at that ocean, Cornelius. It’s gone. Even as we stood here, this place changed. So what happens now? What happens if we summon them now?”
Sleeper opened his eyes. “I’ve called to the sage. Whether or not she returns to us rests in her decisions.”
“What do you think?” Beth asked, turning to Sleeper. “If I summon her with the same magic we used in the coliseum, what will happen?”
“Now that we are whole again?” Sleeper looked off into the distance where the hunched form like a mountainous oil spill slowly gained its feet. “I cannot say. I am not sure if your powers could reach us when we are whole.”
Cornelius frowned. “You think the change will dilute our magic?”
Sleeper wrinkled his brow. “It is a possibility in this place. I do not believe it will affect you so dramatically on your own plane, but the sage could likely speak better to that idea.”
Cornelius pondered those words for a moment and then gave one sharp nod. “It’s worth the risk. If that thing comes this way, none of us will have to worry about it.”
Beth watched the creature’s form change. Its back straightened until it looked more like the shadow of a fire demon than the oily spill of an Eldritch thing. It was impossible to comprehend the thing’s size at such a distance. But Beth had little doubt it would’ve dwarfed most of the mountains in Missouri. Small mountains, yes, but to face an enemy that size was a terrifying prospect on the best of terms.
Her grip tightened on the hilt of her dagger. She flipped her left arm over so the healed palm faced her. Beth placed the blade against her flesh and drew it in a quick slash. As the blood welled up, she touched the tip of the dagger against her skin again and drew another line in the opposite direction, then connected the two at their base to complete a summoning triangle. She looked up at Cornelius.
Her mentor nodded, and Beth struck the center of the triangle, drawing a deep line across her flesh nestled in between the old scars of the protection rune she’d once drawn for Ashley.
The world tilted sideways.
Beth expected the hurricane of power like when she and Cornelius had summoned earlier to battle the lamprey creature. What hit her was an order of magnitude stronger. It felt as if her skin would boil away, as if she could feel every cut she had ever put into her body, every sigil, every rune, every ward.
Fire consumed everything she was, but then the pain receded, and her focus concentrated into one tiny vision. Everything before her changed. She could see the ley lines that ran through the world, could see the shadow folk around her as they were reborn into themselves, and far in the distance, looking back at her, stood a wide-eyed sage.
The sage had already been reunited when the barrier between realms shattered. Now the power that Beth had once used to pull the shadow creatures into her own realm flowed into the reborn sage.
The sage’s inner shadow, the being that fed off the power of the blood mages, the being that could step between worlds, pulled Beth’s power deep inside the sage, and grew into the dominant form of that shared body. The sage threw her head back in a primal scream, as though she was calling out to every member of the shadow folk, and the screams that echoed back told Beth they’d heard that call.
The sigil she had placed on the sage’s forehead channeled Beth’s power, and Beth suspected it was what was keeping her from being consumed by the raw energy racing through her. Brilliant blue lines of power lanced out through the shadow folk, tracing the path that those tornadoes of darkness had followed. As Beth watched, one of them reached Sleeper.
The shadow inside the man split apart from him for a moment, only to slam back together and grow in size. Sleeper had only been perhaps a foot taller than Beth, but now, with every passing moment, he grew. He stepped off the cliff, and by the time he should’ve fallen to the ground below, he stood some forty feet tall, and the earth shook beneath his every stride.
More of the shadow folk surged through the woods, hurdling trees and leaping into what had once been that glassy ocean. They raced toward the sage and the rising darkness of the Eldritch thing. As quickly as the shadow folk had grown, they were still dwarfed by the goliath bearing down on them.
Sleeper paused and turned back to Beth as she shook with the sheer wall of energy coursing through her body. “Hold on to it!”
Beth gritted her teeth, her body trembling as it teetered on the edge of burning out. Hold on to it? How in the ever-loving hell is that going to work?
For a brief, glorious second, the shadow folk crashed into that Eldritch beast, forcing it back a half step as they unleashed a volley of strikes and streaks of bright red incantations.
But the Eldritch thing continued forward, its pace increasing ever faster as it plowed through the field of combatants. Some of the shadow folk rose again to pursue the demon-like form, but others fell still on the stone.
Beth slowly turned her gaze to Cornelius. His lips twisted, but he did not speak. There was nothing he could do, and she knew it.
The Eldritch god roared, and it was close enough now Beth could see the tentacles streaming down from its face like some twisted beard. Its arms unmade themselves into a swarm of tentacles, firing forward, obliterating shadow folk before reforming into the shade that had been there before. Always its skin shimmered, a rainbow of color edging across nothingness like an oil spill on a quiet sea.
“They can’t stop it,” Cornelius whispered. “By the gods, look at that thing.”
One after another fell. They died to save each other. They died to protect their world. They died to preserve the Seal. But there was nothing of the shadow folk that could stop that rampaging god. Blood formed rivers below them, and still the terrible beast closed on the village, closed on the cliff where Beth and Cornelius stood.
“Cornelius,” Beth whispered through gritted teeth.
“We’re not getting out of this, kid.” He flashed her a sad smile before gently touching her cheek. “Remember what I taught you. Remember what we’re fighting for.”
Beth tried to scream as the fires bit into her. Tried to cry out Ashley’s name as the flames started to consume her, and the line energy she’d channeled into the shadow folk
blew back onto her.
The Eldritch god was only two strides away, a terrible looming shadow she could not turn away from. Its goat-like eyes focused on her, only to divide into a flurry of decaying worms before reforming.
It lifted its hand to strike.
Cornelius raised a dagger to his throat. “For all that we are. Tyranno Mortem!”
“No!” Beth screamed, her voice breaking as Cornelius dragged the blade across his throat.
The blood mage didn’t fall as his lifeblood spurted out from the self-inflicted wound. That fountain of gore reformed as the fist of the Eldritch god came to crush Beth and Cornelius. But it was laughter that met the god, laughter that rose from the corpse of her friend, her mentor, the man who had saved her when the world had shunned her.
And as that strike reached Cornelius, a shadow out of nightmare rose to greet it.
It was no sage. No Sleeper. Nothing like the shadow folk who fought for them here. This was a destroyer of worlds. A death god so old, so powerful, that for its shadow to fall upon a city could reduce it to ash.
The Eldritch god’s flesh crumbled beneath the touch of it, the tentacles of its arm falling away as if it had decayed for ten thousand years in an instant.
Beth’s scream pierced the sky as she broke the connection to the shadow folk. They stood together, the blood mage and the people of that place. Stood and watched as death consumed the Eldritch god. Watched as the sky turned to ash, and the blood of the dead filled the sea once more.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
For five minutes, the death god tore down the Eldritch god. It was a surreal thing, seeing that titan try to turn and flee, but it was denied. The shadow was far too fast for it.
And all that time, Cornelius’s body stood, propped up by that power until the last vestiges of the Eldritch thing had been devoured, and the shadow of the death god drifted away with one last inhuman laugh.