With a feral scream, Michael shattered his stone prison with a wild surge of the stonesong. Gasping for air, he crawled out of the gravel. “I can’t stop him, Blacksong,” he rasped. “He’s too strong!”
The crevice raced through the forest, exploding crystal trees and scaring up flocks of strange birds. In moments, it would be at the city wall.
“I will have the earthbone,” Equinox cawed madly. “I will have it all!”
“The Betrayer’s mind is lost to the stonesong, Awoken,” Blacksong said. “The earthbone will feed his power until it consumes him. Leave this place while you still can!”
Michael shook his head. “The city, the women and children…”
Blacksong lowered his eyes. “It is too late. You must flee, Awoken. Go, before the earthbone kills you as well.”
“No!” Gritting his teeth, Michael closed his eyes and tried to think through the humming inferno in his mind. There has to be a way!
“I will have it all!” Equinox shrieked, spitting flecks of red and silver from his lips. “The earthbone is mine!”
The earthbone. Of course!
Taking a deep steadying breath, Michael sent silver fire into the convulsing earth. The music called to him. He merged with the hum as never before. Sweeping down through thick veins of rock, he searched with invisible hands for one melody he knew so well. “Come to me,” he urged. “Come to me.”
Deep in the earth, the music answered.
Michael spread his burning arms wide. “Equinox!”
“Are you still here, boy?” Equinox asked. His face was alight with silver fire, and blood dripped from his nose and mouth. “I thought I’d killed you already!”
“You want the earthbone so badly, Equinox,” Michael said. “Take it!” He clapped his hands together, and the stonesong surged out from him. “Take it all!”
The ground split open behind Equinox, and a fountain of liquid earthbone erupted from the floor, covering him in the silver element.
Equinox’s incoherent scream of denial shook the mountains, shattering the bars of the dollmen’s cage and cracking the floor. Michael screamed as well, pain lashing his every fiber as he continued to draw the raw earthbone from the floor. He could feel Equinox’s clumsy attempts to stop him, but the scientist seemed to have lost almost all control of his power. Massive tendrils of silver fire ripped car-sized boulders from the floor and ceiling, the rock liquefying or shattering from one moment to the next.
Deadly rock raining down all around him, Michael used the last of his will to solidify the wet earthbone clinging to Equinox, coating him in a suit of pure silver power.
Equinox’s screams abruptly ended. The tendrils of fire dissipated as his body began to glow with fierce silver light. Blazing veins of liquid silver wept from his eyes, mouth, and nose. The flesh of his face blackened as burning holes appeared in his white lab coat, widening quickly to expose throbbing veins of silver fire, sizzling red flesh, and white bone. The scientist looked down at himself, and then at Michael, accusing the youth with eyes turned to twin beacons of silver light. “I was going to save the world,” said Equinox. He didn’t sound angry, only immeasurably disappointed, and a just little confused. “My destiny is to guide the necessary evolution of mankind. How can it end like this?”
“You’re one of the bad guys,” said Michael, surprised by the sudden well of pity he felt for the VEN scientist. “In the end, the bad guys always lose.”
Then, the light was too powerful to look upon directly. Michael shielded his eyes as, blazing like a supernova, the Betrayer—leader of VEN, and would-be creator of a new world—detonated in a flash of silver fire, showering the cavern with gory, flaming debris.
A silver tendril of light burst from Michael’s chest, connecting him to the earthbone still pouring up from the depths. He fell to the floor, writhing in agony.
“Mike!”
Through tearing eyes, Michael saw Diggs and Lina running toward him. In his heart, he knew they were already too late. But then, he’d known the cost all along. A bolt of fire bored into his chest, and he cried out against the pain.
Michael felt something cool pressed into his palm, and he clenched it tightly in his fist. “Be still, Awoken,” Blacksong murmured in the distance. “Your friends…your family is with you.”
His family? A drifter, a teenage dancer, and a city full of dollmen. His family, because he chose to make them so. Barbara had been right, after all. Suddenly, the pain was gone, and Michael smiled as gentle darkness claimed him.
Epilogue
The marble-white falcryn stood on its hind legs, glaring down at the twin VEN hounds with its eagle beak wide in a silent scream of challenge. The dollman rider was no less fearsome. Silver eyes narrowed in hate, he stabbed at the VEN with a lance of hollowed crystal. A steady stream of water spurted from the tail of the lance, covering the battling creatures in a shimmering umbrella.
Lina leaned up against the fountain, parting the falling water with her palm for a better look at the dollman rider. “You did a good job. It looks just like him,” she said. Stepping back from the fountain, she shook the water from her hand. “But don’t you think this is a little risky?”
Michael shrugged. “I came out here in the middle the night. No one saw me using the stonesong. Besides, Tallpath and the other dollmen died helping to save the world from Equinox and the VEN. I figure the least I could do was make them a statue.” He smiled, and tapped the elderstone at his throat suggestively. “Sure, people will wonder how it got here, and even what it is.”
“And what it is supposed to be,” added Lina. “It’s not like anyone around here has seen a falcryn or dollman before.”
“So they’ll think whoever put it here is a giant fantasy geek, or some kind of eccentric artist. Who cares? Statues are expensive. I doubt they’ll get rid of it. Besides, I owed the park a new fountain.”
“And a mermaid just wasn’t good enough? You’re still a showoff, Mike. Sometimes I wonder if you didn’t arrange the whole thing with Blacksong just to impress me.”
“You mean I planned on him giving me his elderstone right before the earthbone and the stonesong killed me?” Michael raised his hands in surrender. “Busted. Just for the record, though, I didn’t do it to impress you. I know you’re crazy about me already.”
“You’re an idiot.” Lina slugged his arm. “Hey, how are things at the new house? The Wiffles settled in yet?”
“Pretty good.” Michael rubbed his bicep. “Karl complains a lot about his old tools, but I think that’s just for show. Barbara is cooking up a storm in the new kitchen, and she loves all the space. The only real problem we’re having is with the nosy neighbors.”
Lina laughed. “I told you. New money is always suspect in my neighborhood. Maybe you shouldn’t have given the Wiffles that bag of diamonds.”
“Maybe not, but the diamonds did wonders smoothing things over when I got back.” Michael hefted his backpack onto his shoulder, starting toward the parking lot. Lina followed. “Besides, they’re just rocks. I can always get more. How about you? How did you explain your little disappearing act to your parents?”
“I didn’t,” Lina said smugly. “Mom and Dad are still on vacation and my nanny is old as dirt. As far as anyone knows, I was at camp all this time.”
“You’re a sneak,” Michael accused. “That story might not hold up when they see that silver in your hair.”
“We’ll see,” Lina said. She glanced back at the falcryn fountain, and her lips tightened just a bit. “Do you think it’s over, Mike? I mean, the elders promised to recover all the earthbone they could find and then seal the tunnels. So it’s done, right?”
“Well, you and Diggs did let Smiley escape into the crystal forest…”
“Give it a rest already,” Lina said. “We were a little distracted when Equinox tried to bring the cave down on our heads. So sue us.” Her expression turned serious. “Come on, Mike. We won, right?”
“I don’t know,”
answered Michael quietly. “The VEN camp was gone when we came out of the tunnels, so maybe they gave up after Equinox died. I hope so.”
Michael spotted Diggs standing next to his new pickup in the parking lot. The drifter waved, and he waved back. “Come on, Lina. We’ve kept Diggs waiting long…” He trailed off as a black crow swooped over Diggs’s truck. Circling twice overhead, it cawed shrilly before flapping away.
Lina touched Michael’s arm. “That wasn’t a—?”
“No,” he said. “It couldn’t have been. It was just a crow.”
But then his backpack rustled, and a pair of silver eyes peeked out from beneath the flap. “Beware, my Michael. Beware.”
THE END
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Trish Wooldridge, Vikki Ciaffone, Rich Storrs, and Shira Lipkin for all their encouragement, assistance, and excellent editing. Thanks to Lisa Amowitz, for the wonderful cover art. Thanks to my family, for all your patience and support.
About the Author
Timothy W. C. Miller was born in Wisconsin in 1974. He moved to the Green Bay area when he was eight and proceeded to shock his schoolteachers with his intellect, his lust for reading, and his seemingly insurmountable lack of interest in personal academic achievement.
He left home at fifteen, worked at a dairy farm, a meatpacking plant, a pickle factory, a casino, and a rowdy nightclub as a bouncer. At nineteen, he settled down as a repair technician for a telephone company. While repairing lines in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, he began including short stories in the letters he sent home to his eldest daughter. When he returned from Louisiana, he brought back a stuffed alligator and an irresistible urge to keep putting words to paper. He bought a laptop, learned to type, and soon found the course of his universe forever changed as worlds and titans rose and fell beneath his keystrokes.
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