The Beginning After The End 08

by Turtle Me

  Letting out a chuckle, I focused my attention back on the dead relic in my hand. Except for the purple haze of aether surrounding it, the stone was bland and uninteresting. It was the type of rock a child might thoughtlessly kick out of the road.

  I pushed aether into the dead relic, the same way I interacted with the keystone, but nothing happened. Next I tried to draw the aether out of it, but stopped immediately. I could tell there was very little aether still contained within the dead relic, and I didn’t want to blindly destroy it for such a paltry amount of aetheric energy.

  Letting out a sigh, I took a glance at Haedrig, who was seated back on the bench beside the fountain in a meditative state.

  With a flick of my wrist, I tossed the relic into the air, watched it arc up until it nearly touched the low ceiling, then snatched it out of the air as it came back down.

  With no more straws to grasp at, I slipped the relic into my pocket, closed my eyes, and began replenishing my aether yet again.

  As I pushed through the purple wall into the realm within the keystone once more, I could immediately sense that something had changed. The previously completed shapes were still there, displaying the present and past within the mirror room. The remaining geometric shapes—my puzzle pieces—had drifted apart in my absence, as they always did.

  It wasn’t something I could see, but there was a static charge, a sort of latent energy suffusing the atmosphere.

  Quickly, I gathered and sorted the pieces, hoping the sensation I felt was some sort of unconscious understanding achieved by my efforts to revisit my own knowledge of aether. Yet when I had the pieces in front of me, I felt no new insight into the edict.

  Like when I followed the aetheric vibrations that allowed me to step through space, I let my mind unfocus and drift along in the wake of the electric hum. It seemed to fill the space, to fill my whole mind, but there was one small, unassuming spot where it was clearer, more present.

  Using aether like a pair of forceps, I reached into that node and pulled something through.

  The dead relic.

  Stunned, I watched as the unexceptional rock drifted through the air, just like the other shapes I’d found in here. Instinctively, I pushed aether into it, as I had tried while sitting in the dark in the hall of mirrors.

  The dull, rough surface of the stone shattered as if it’d been struck with a hammer, revealing a blazing diamond burning with white light. The diamond dissolved as it spread its radiance across the keystone realm. Wherever the light touched, I felt the dull ache of sudden growth, as if my mind were expanding to contain it.

  The field of geometric shapes seemed to absorb the light, glowing white hot themselves, and suddenly I understood. Just like when I was building the cube that became the window into the present, the pieces practically presented themselves to me, and I quickly began placing them together.

  In my excitement and the euphoric rush of understanding, I nearly missed it. An alarm bell rang in my mind, and my focus turned toward the cube.

  The mirror room was in chaos.

  Kalon was struggling to fend off Ada, who was free of her bindings. She clawed and bit at him with furious, barbaric strength, but he moved as if afraid to injure her.

  Haedrig was crawling out of the fountain, moving slowly as if dazed. A trickle of blood from his ear diffused into the water and stained his cheek and neck red.

  The mirrors nearest Haedrig and the fountain were nearly all shattered, now revealing only the void beyond.

  Ezra was running along the hall, dragging Riah’s dead body behind him.

  Regis was nowhere to be seen.

  Abandoning all thought of finishing the dodecahedron now, I tried to open my eyes, to leave the keystone realm, but I couldn’t. Whenever I approached the smoky purple barrier, my consciousness flicked back to the incomplete puzzle floating expectantly amidst the field of geometric pieces waiting to be placed.

  Damn it!

  Across all the faces of the cube, Haedrig had rolled clumsily out of the fountain and was on his feet, stumbling toward Ezra. The young ascender pulled back his arm as if to hurl his spear at the green-haired ascender, and Haedrig threw himself to the ground, but it was a feint.

  The ruse gave Ezra the time he needed to drag Riah’s body the rest of the way to the horned ascender’s mirror. My stomach dropped as I watched him yank the corpse around and press the dead hand to the mirror’s cold surface.

  Frantically, I began placing the puzzle pieces again, moving as quickly as my aetheric manipulation would allow. At the same time, I kept one eye on the battle happening outside of the keystone.

  In the mirror, the Vritra-blooded ascender was grinning malevolently. And then he was gone, and purple mist was oozing out of the mirror and flowing into Riah, just like when Ada had touched her own mirror.

  Riah’s eyes shuttered open and two black voids stared up at Ezra. With one hand, the boy was warding off Haedrig with his spear, and with the other he reached down to offer his hand to Riah. When she took it, Ezra flinched, practically jerking away from her, but Riah’s puffy, dead hand tightened around his until it looked as if his bones had cracked.

  Haedrig dashed forward, grabbing the spear and shoving it back and up, cracking Ezra under the chin with the shaft and knocking him backwards over Riah’s body. There was an explosion of energy from Ezra that pushed Haedrig away and shattered several nearby mirrors.

  All three forms lay prone on the stone floor for a moment. Riah, or Mythelias in her body, was the first to move. As he rolled over and began to push himself up, the flesh around the severed stump of a leg began to bubble and grow, forming a black, gangrenous club of a foot.

  Next to him, Ezra began to convulse with pain. Spreading from his hand, black boils were growing on his flesh, the skin around them turning gray. His face was twisted into a tortured, terrified scream as the pestilent growths rapidly subsumed his body… until nothing was left but a twisted, Ezra-shaped lump.

  And still, despite the chaos, Regis was nowhere to be found.

  While all this was happening, I had been working feverishly to finish the dodecahedron, unsure exactly what would happen when it was complete. I knew I couldn’t leave until I’d finished the puzzle; I only hoped I would be in time for the others.

  Suddenly Kalon flew past Haedrig, his spear blazing ahead of him.

  Rolling away from the attack, Mythelias came up to his feet with Ezra’s spear in hand, and immediately became a storm of cuts and strikes that forced Kalon to fall back into a defensive stance, and even then he seemed barely able to avoid the lightning-quick assault.

  Mythelias kept pressing Kalon, but this put Haedrig at his back. Whether he had lost track of the green-haired ascender or discounted Haedrig’s ability, Mythelias was focused entirely on the last of the Granbehls when Haedrig struck.

  The thin blade punched through Mythelias’s back, just to the left of his spine, then ripped outward through his side, half-severing his torso just below his ribs and leaving a horrific, gaping wound. Before I could so much as cheer, however, the flesh began to boil again, and a hard black scar formed over the gash.

  Spinning, Mythelias cut at Haedrig’s ankles with the edge of the spear-blade, then let the spear’s momentum carry it around his body, lining it up for a thrust to the heart that Haedrig just barely parried.

  Within the keystone realm, the last pieces of the dodecahedron were falling into place, but I was distracted by the scene playing out on one face of the pyramid, which showed the recent past. It seemed to be catching up to the present, and was now showing what had happened only moments ago.

  In it, Ezra was pacing up and down the hall, Regis prowling behind him like a murderous shadow. The boy had a nervous furtive look about him: his hands were jittery and he kept glancing around like he expected to be attacked at any moment.

  Haedrig was sitting on the edge of the fountain, his feet in the salt water. Kalon was checking the bindings on
the false Ada, something we had to do frequently to keep the phantom from injuring Ada’s body.

  As Ezra approached the fountain, his nervousness cemented into a look of dark determination. He suddenly took a sharp step to the side and activated his crest.

  My heart hammered as an explosion pushed out from him, slamming Haedrig across the water and head first into the edge of the fountain. Kalon was tossed backwards so I couldn’t see him anymore, and even Ada was jerked violently in her bindings.

  The mirrors around Ezra shattered, and, to my horror, Regis was thrown through an open frame, disappearing into the emptiness on the other side.

  305

  The Faintest Hope

  No, I thought, my heart pounding in my throat. That’s not possible.

  The explosion had broken the closest benches and wrenched Ada hard enough to loosen her bindings, and she was quick to rip free of the rope.

  My focus was drawn back to the dodecahedron as the last piece fit into place. Like before, it shimmered and glowed, the outlines of the individual pieces I’d used to complete the puzzle fading away, forming a solid shape.

  In the present, Haedrig and Kalon had fallen into a rhythm, working together to keep Mythelias on the defensive, but any time they scored a hit, the wound instantly sealed over.

  Half of Riah’s corpse was now covered with scabrous growths, but neither Haedrig nor Kalon had escaped injury themselves. Kalon was bleeding badly from a cut on his leg, and Haedrig appeared to have taken the butt of the spear to his cheek, which was swollen and already changing color.

  Finally, the opalescent shimmering on the faces of the dodecahedron smoothed out and stopped moving, and each face displayed a different moving picture.

  In one, the hall of mirrors had been obliterated. The entire end of the hall had been burned away, its blackened edges opening directly into the void. Every mirror was shattered, and most of the frames had been incinerated. There was no sign of life in the room.

  In another face of the dodecahedron, I saw myself standing with Haedrig and Ada, who was crying furiously as we pushed Ezra’s remains through an empty mirror frame and out into the void.

  The hall was scorched and blasted, the fountain empty, many of the mirrors broken, but it was overall intact.

  Haedrig pulled the girl into a tender hug, but I turned and walked away.

  My eyes were drawn to a third image. Mythelias, in Riah’s corpse, was stalking across the hall of mirrors toward me. Behind him, Kalon and Haedrig had been entirely subsumed by the dark boils; they were clearly dead.

  Ada lay unconscious near me. Mythelias leaned down over her and pressed one blackened hand to her cheek. I turned away, pushing the dodecahedron with aether so it spun, removing the awful image from my line of sight.

  The revolving dodecahedron brought different images into sight. Some were variations on what I’d already seen, but one in particular caught my eye.

  In it, I saw myself activating a godrune that glowed golden through my clothes. Purple motes of aether spun and swirled through the room like dandelion seeds, and everything they touched glowed with aetheric energy.

  I watched, awed, as the mirrors mended before my eyes and the pieces of the fountain flew back together as if time was being rewinded, the smoke and steam from the air literally coalescing to reform stone and water.

  When the purple motes landed on Ezra, the boils began to shrink, receding until they faded away entirely. The young ascender gasped and his eyes flew open. He was alive.

  Just before the glass of the shattered mirror through which Kalon had been hurled snapped back into place, Kalon himself drifted through it, settling gently onto the ground in the hall of mirrors. The wounds he’d sustained from his battle with Mythelias closed; even the damage to his clothes and armor was reversed.

  The terrified, heartbroken image of Ada in her mirror dissolved into pinkish smoke, which flowed out of the mirror, then moved purposefully across the hall until it found her unconscious body, returning her to herself.

  Where the floor of the hall was most blasted and burned, ash began to swirl, creating a miniature cyclone. As the ash condensed, a form began to take shape.

  Riah’s body, still missing one foot, hung in the air like a rag doll, lifeless and somehow incomplete. Then the gnawed flesh of her foot began to regrow, healing before my eyes. When her eyelids fluttered open, she stared around the now pristine hall with confusion and fear before drifting down to the ground where she was met with a running hug from Ada.

  Though the visions of the past and present had suggested the possibility that the third puzzle might show visions of the future, I hadn’t dared to hope such a thing might be possible, yet there I was, watching events that hadn’t happened yet.

  Each face of the dodecahedron seemed to show a different potential future, some showing our other failure, true, but there was at least a chance we could defeat the Vritra-blooded ascender and escape the hall of mirrors.

  Still, fear bubbled in my gut at what I had seen, or not seen; Regis was nowhere to be found in any of the futures I could see, even the one where I was somehow able to bring back the dead.

  What is this power? I wondered, still watching the potential futures play across the faces of the dodecahedron. It seemed too incredible to be possible. Was it an aspect of Life, of vivum? A way to bring the dead back to life?

  No, I thought, it seemed more like aevum, an aspect of Time. It was like the aether was turning back the clock on whatever it touched, undoing the damage done to glass, stone, and flesh alike.

  Excitement surged within me. This was it! This was the power I needed to defeat Agrona and end the war with Alacrya. Not only that, but I could undo the damage Agrona had done. I could save everyone: Buhnd, Cynthia, Adam, Sylvia… my father.

  I could bring them all back!

  As the dodecahedron revolved around, the panel in which Haedrig, Ada, and I stood alone in the wreckage of the hall came back into view. In that version of the future, I began using aether on any mirrors that were still intact and had an ascender trapped within.

  Like in the other vision, the cracks and chips in the mirrors began to disappear as if mending themselves. Then, one by one, the ascenders faded away. When they had all been released from their prisons, the light within the room shifted subtly, taking on a warmer tone, and a portal appeared within one of the empty frames.

  In that version of the future, however, the others remained dead.

  Why? I wondered fearfully. What is the difference between these two visions of the future? What do I need to do?

  Then the images of past, present, and future faded away, and the three shapes I had constructed within the keystone realm began to dissolve into streams of purple sand that eddied around me on gusts of wind I couldn’t feel. Soon I was looking out through the eye of an aetheric tornado, and the scouring wind and rough sand were scraping across all the layers of my mind.

  It’s too soon! I thought, panic taking hold of me. I don’t understand yet!

  The pain and pressure built and kept building until I was sure the storm would tear my mind apart, rip my consciousness from my body, and cast it into the void…

  Then it was gone. In place of the raw, tearing pain I felt a sense of freshness and calm, like I’d just stepped out of a cool shower on a hot summer’s day.

  I opened my eyes. My mental cleansing had been so complete that for just a moment I forgot what was happening around me.

  ‘Arthur!’

  It took a moment for Regis’s voice to sink through my foggy confusion. Was it coming from the past, present, or future? I felt as though time itself was meaningless, and wondered vaguely if this was how the trapped ascenders felt within their mirrors.

  The trapped ascenders… The thought nagged at me. I had seen them in the vision of the future… or was that the present now? And then there was the Vritra-blooded ascender, Mythelias… He had escaped—or he would escape? I couldn’t
tell the difference.

  The room shook as, across the fountain from me, Kalon released his voltaic energy spell, the arcing energy striking Mythelias from several angles at once, nearly burning Riah’s body to a cinder and imprinting jagged, fiery afterimages into my retina.

  I blinked rapidly, a creeping feeling that I should be doing something clawing through the confusion.

  Kalon leapt at Mythelias, attempting to use the aftermath of his catastrophic attack to drive his burning spear down into the Vritra-blooded ascender’s heart. At the same moment, Haedrig cut low, aiming to take Mythelias’s leg off at the knee.

  He was ready for them.

  The flesh around his knee bubbled outward then hardened, trapping Haedrig’s sword in a knot of gnarled black tissue. In Mythelias’s hands, Ezra’s spear swung with the force of a battering ram, catching Kalon in the air and batting him aside like a bug.

  A jolt of adrenaline hit me like a lightning bolt as I watched Kalon fly sideways, strike the frame of one of the mirrors, and spin out into the void. He was gone.

  Riah’s face sneered at Haedrig. “As if you lesser scum could truly fight back against me.” The words slithered out between her stiff, blackened lips, sounding entirely unlike Riah. “You can’t even understand the honor I give you. In my time, only the greatest warriors died by my hand…”

  ‘Arthur!’ Regis screamed again in my head. He was inside me, I realized. I could feel his debilitated presence, his mind, his wild panic. And I could feel the Destruction rune raging like a wildfire, begging to be unleashed and burning away the last of my confusion and uncertainty.

  Before me, Mythelias casually reached down toward Haedrig, who tried to throw himself backwards but slipped in blood and hit the ground with a grunt. To his credit, the veteran ascender seemed calm even in the face of certain death.

  As the bloated, puffy white fingers reached toward my friend, I raised my own hand and summoned the violet flame. Mythelias’s head snapped around as he sensed my power, and with astonishing speed he cocked the spear back and launched it like a missile aimed straight at my throat.