“You lied to me.”
“Obviously. And you bought it. I can’t blame you. You had hope. For that, I do apologize. Think about it this way, though. You’re a mortal now, but Tristan could turn you into a vampire. Wouldn’t that be cool? You’d still live forever.”
“But then she might still die,” Tristan snapped.
“And die she will,” Hrista shot back with a cold grin. “She will never be a Reaper again. I’ve combined my knowledge with Spirit’s, and I have found a way to send a Reaper’s soul right into Purgatory, provided a certain set of conditions are met.”
“Let me guess. I’ve met them,” I sighed, lowering my gaze for a moment.
She nodded once. “Yes. Rest assured, it’s for the best. I’m keeping you alive because your voice can still reach the entire universe, Unending. Soon you’ll understand what it is I’m doing, and why it’s important that I do it. We have been tormented by stupid rules and restrictions for too long. You stay in your little square, and I will stay in mine. Heaven forbid I might like you enough to follow you elsewhere… No!” She slammed a fist against the steel bars, and the entire cell shuddered. Clouds of dust fell from the ceiling cracks above. “No. That’s not allowed. No feelings. No desires. No fraternizing. No, no, no! Order is making a mess out of Purgatory with her stupid rules… It was so easy to draw the Berserkers out of there. Death is making fools out of each of you on a daily basis. And don’t even get me started with the Word, that stuck-up, nonexistent bastard. We could do so much better without them. And I’ll make it happen.”
“You don’t have what it takes to topple the universe, Hrista,” I said, trying to stay calm and reason with her. She clearly didn’t understand the damage she’d already done to herself. But my words made Hrista laugh, almost hysterically.
“Oh, honey… you’ve been away for too long. I won’t be the one doing the toppling. It’ll be you and everyone else,” she said. “We’ll start with Death. I’ve already shown you what a self-centered hypocrite she truly is. The lies she has told you. The secrets she has kept. Not to mention what she did to the World Crusher. This is going to be such a fun ride.”
Tristan came to my side, glowering at her. “I get it, you’ve got a bone to pick with Death. I assume it’s got something to do with how she ended the Spirit Bender. But what’s your beef with The Shade?”
“You were complicit,” she growled. “You deserve to live out the rest of your days in misery, unable to ever leave the limbo I’ve built for you. Well, not you, per se, but your people. I almost thought I wouldn’t trap Esme in there, but hey… stupid is as stupid does. You were all so easy to manipulate in one way or another.”
“The GASP federation won’t let you get away with this,” my husband replied.
Again, Hrista laughed. “I’ve already taken over The Shade and they are none the wiser. By the time someone does figure it out, it will be too late. Besides, I didn’t bring you down here to share every stage of my ample project with you. I only want you to stay put and survive so that you may see what anyone can accomplish with enough ambition and desire to defeat the gods themselves! Death has already been dealt her crippling blow. The World Crusher is free… and that will prove a massive problem for the Word, too.”
It was here that she had me baffled. Part of me already suspected why, but I needed her to say it out loud. “Why?” I asked.
“The World Crusher cannot be destroyed. Not by Death. Not by the Word. I doubt even Order can do anything to her. Death gave her first Reaper way too much power. She’d probably envisioned making herself a partner, but she ended up treating her as a daughter, an underling. And just like neither Death nor Order can kill the Word, and just like neither the Word nor Order can kill Death, and just like neither Death nor the Word can kill Order… they cannot destroy the World Crusher. It’s why Death had her sealed in that book. Well, that and the indisputable truth that Death is stupidly sentimental and barely capable of destroying her own creation. Or is it pride? I could never really tell.”
Tristan scoffed. “She destroyed the Spirit Bender. We know she can do it if she absolutely has to.”
“Not with the World Crusher, she can’t,” Hrista said smugly. “Anyway, you two lovebirds settle in. Make this your home for a while. Feel free to make some babies too. I can have someone fetch your husband the vampire cure for that. This is the precious Shade, after all. We’ve found everything here. We’ve read and seen everything, too, including all that footage Isabelle’s clone hid. It was left behind in the Great Dome after the switch. For days, we’ve been pretending to be the real deal, and no one has figured it out. Even Nova, that undergrown Daughter—she has yet to catch on. You see, without actively searching for her sisters, she won’t immediately feel their absence. I have maintained a strict lockdown on this place, but I made an exception to let you two lovebirds back in. Seems like I made the right choice.”
“You’ve been plotting this for a long time, haven’t you?” Tristan gasped.
“Heh… You have no idea,” she told him, then looked at me with a pitiful smirk. “Enjoy the life I have given you, Unending. It’s the only one you will ever have.” She took a couple of steps back, the overhead lights casting metallic reflections over her black and white catsuit, split right along the vertical middle. “I will have someone fetch you when we reach the next stage of events. It’s going to be a busy week, I’ll tell you that much.”
She turned around and left, her figure shrinking in the narrow corridor. Kalon and Esme’s clones walked behind her, and the silence they left in their wake was too much to handle. I broke down. It was a miracle I had lasted this long.
Tristan took me in his arms and held me tight, but I cried and cried, unable to hold anything in any longer. Hrista had stolen everything from me. My immortality. My powers. My very spirit. She’d locked me inside a body, in a fashion worse than Spirit had on Visio. Death would not be my release. It would only leave my husband alone in this world, while Hrista went on with her sick revenge fantasy.
She’d had her heart broken. She had been disappointed. And just like the Spirit Bender, she was proud and vicious enough to believe she was entitled to a better outcome. I wasn’t sure how we were going to beat her, but… “We’ll figure it out,” Tristan whispered, while my tears trickled down his shoulder. We no longer had our telepathic connection, but we knew each other well enough to understand our common mindset. “We’ll figure it out, Unending.”
“How? We’re trapped here. She doomed me…”
“No. She put limits on you. Death is still out there,” Tristan said. “Whatever Hrista is planning, the rest of the world doesn’t know it yet. Taeral had no idea. The rest of GASP know nothing about this, for sure, otherwise this whole place would’ve been surrounded by now. I don’t care what Hrista can do as a Valkyrie, she’s not limitless.”
“Death is,” I murmured. “Sort of. We need to get out of here…”
“We need to gather our thoughts, first and foremost,” he said.
And he was right. We needed to take deep breaths and collect our thoughts. We needed to go over every event and decision that had brought us here, and we needed to assess all that we had learned so far. There was a way out of this cell. There was a way out of The Shade, too. Death was out there searching for the World Crusher, who clearly had a part to play, too. I would reach her, one way or another. I only needed my scythe back and the handful of death magic I still remembered to help us get where we needed to go.
But Hrista had my scythe. Damn it…
Astra
“This doesn’t make sense.” I’d said it before. Perhaps if I said it again it would make sense. But nothing changed. The truth was all around us—bright white and enriched with shades of gold, silver, copper, and bronze. I’d brought our crew to Purgatory, and I had no idea how.
Clearly opening shimmering portals wasn’t just about the actual splitting of space and stepping from one dimension to another. It was also about learning
to choose where to go, and I had left that part out entirely. No one else had thought it would be an issue, either, but how could they have? We weren’t experts in shimmering portals. Hrista was, and she had taken over my island.
“It’s wonderfully weird,” the Time Master sighed, staring at our sparkling surroundings. The hilltop was covered in a soft layer of coppery grass. A tall forest of odd trees skirted the mound, their bark chalk white and their leaves crunchy and bright gold. Their rustling sounded metallic in the delicate wind. “The sky seems made of diamonds.” Aphis, his ghoul, was stunned, his big black eyes getting bigger as he tried to take it all in.
We looked up, breathless for a moment and stunned by the iridescence. A sun wasn’t needed here. The sky shone vividly enough to illuminate everything. Myst smiled broadly, a warm familiarity taking over her expression. “It’s always daytime in Purgatory,” she said. “There are dark places, of course—like where the Berserkers prefer to dwell—but it is always day…”
“I’m so confused. What did I do wrong?” I managed, tears glazing my eyes. As wonderful as this place was, and as much as I would’ve liked to explore and make the most of being in this unknown and technically forbidden realm, I couldn’t. This wasn’t The Shade, and every moment we spent away from home, Hrista had free reign to do terrible things. We didn’t even know if the rest of GASP had caught on, or if the clones had, in fact, managed to fully replace the true Shadians. Sure, the originals had been marked, but Hrista had The Shade’s resources now. How long before it would be too late to stop her? And what was her endgame? These were questions we desperately needed answers to, and I doubted we’d get them in Purgatory.
On the other hand, I did notice the effect this place had on Myst and Brandon. They seemed… different. The Valkyrie appeared brighter, her humanoid features dissolving into solid light. The Berserker grew darker, the black mist seeping through his pores and coming off him in jet-black wisps. These were their true forms.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Brandon said to me. Even his voice sounded a little different. Lower. Thicker. Raspier. I liked it, judging by the pricks that tickled the skin on my back. “You just need to tweak your destination next time.”
“How do I do that? I have no idea how I brought us here!” I replied, exasperated. “How do I take us home?”
Thayen placed a hand on my shoulder in a bid to comfort me. “This isn’t so bad, Astra. We’re in Purgatory. It’s the one place that not even Reapers are allowed to enter, yet here we are… Surely, this is better, right?” he asked, looking to Myst.
“Absolutely,” the Valkyrie said. “We’ve been accidentally fast-tracked. We can find Order. We can tell her what happened. I imagine she’ll be the first to want Hrista back here and in chains.”
Brandon nodded his agreement. “This could prove to be an excellent shortcut. Why bother fighting clones and other Berserkers, not to mention psycho-Hrista, when we can just tell ‘Mom’ and she can spank the daylights out of that petulant wraith? It sounds like a clear win in my book.”
I wanted to believe him. I wanted to agree. But I’d been dying to return to the real island for days now. I missed home and the realms that were most familiar. The normalcy and the good times. I missed the days when I’d just been a Daughter-Sentry and a bookworm, not the one creature whose shoulders carried the responsibilities of today. There was no way of actually returning to those times, but I could still take us to The Shade. Brandon and Myst did have a point, though.
“You saw Order once,” I told Thayen. “How did she seem?”
He wanted to reply, but the Time Master beat him to it. “As bored and teeming with self-importance as Death and the Word. My guess is she will not be easy to find.”
“It’s like you’ve always lived here,” Brandon chuckled.
Jericho and Dafne remained mostly speechless, unable to take their eyes off the peculiar nature around us. The golden sheen of leaves was enough to hypnotize anyone—myself included. Except I was too frustrated about the missed destination to be seduced by Purgatory’s extraordinary appearance. “Is this what it’s like? All of Purgatory, I mean?” Jericho asked after a heavy pause in which the rest of us tried to gather our thoughts.
“Where the Valkyries dwell, yes,” Myst said. “Illuminated and vibrant. Glowing and sparkling. It’s meant to fill one’s soul with warmth and light. Where the Berserkers dwell, it is dark and dangerous, yet just as beautiful. Some parts of this realm are truly breathtaking.” She paused and frowned slightly. “Your presence here is wrong on many levels. I mean, it’s good that we made it, but Order will not be pleased when she finds out there are living beings present in Purgatory. Granted, there’s a good reason for it.”
Brandon scoffed. “Don’t you see? Their presence is a gift from the universe. The living are responsible for our return. For our spiritual regeneration! Every single spell or affliction we might have suffered outside Purgatory is gone,” he reminded her. “It purges everything. It purifies the soul. It’s a fresh start for both of us.”
And for Hammer, I noticed. The dire wolf’s coat was blacker than ever and yet shimmering in the diamond-light. His eyes beamed with sapphire flames, pink tongue lolled on one side of his jaw as he looked around, smiling his wolfish smile. Hammer was enormous, as big as a horse, his back broad with hard muscles beneath the thick coat, his ears flicking at the sound of every movement around him.
“He’s doing great,” I said, nodding at Hammer. He looked my way, as if thinking about his next move. A moment later, he closed the distance between us and licked the side of my face, his tongue soft, wet, and bristly. It made me laugh.
“I think that’s his way of thanking you,” Brandon replied, arms crossed as a grin stretched across his face. I ran my fingers through the dire wolf’s coat. He didn’t seem to mind, so I stayed close to him, honored and pleased to have earned his affection. “I missed this place too. Up to a point, of course,” he added, exhaling sharply. “Reaching Order will not be easy. Time here was absolutely right to raise the issue. He was also right in stating that Order is as complicated and as difficult as Death and the Word and every other universal force out there. She will present her own challenges for us to work through. Plus, at least one of us—mainly me—is on Purgatory’s most wanted list after Hrista made me skip this place. I’m expecting a crap storm, I only hope it won’t affect the rest of you, too.”
I understood his concern, but there wasn’t time to dwell on it. We were already here, and I didn’t have the juice right away to get us out. Besides, we were right where we needed to be.
“What’s that?” Thayen asked, gazing out into the distance. A bright spot approached us, a white light that trembled as it got bigger, its outline suddenly clear as it jumped over a jutting bronze root. It was a horse, a beautiful horse with a long golden mane and blue eyes like Myst’s. She cried out with delight and relief when she saw the creature.
“My Aesir… White Cloud!”
The Valkyrie and her Aesir were reunited as Myst threw her arms around White Cloud’s strong neck and held her tight. He was a gorgeously muscular stallion with a pure white coat. His mane and tail were silky gold threads, and I knew there were wings hidden in his ribs.
“Oh, I’ve missed you, too,” she whispered in his twitching ear. The horse was overjoyed, nuzzling her face with his. Myst climbed onto his back, and he trotted around with beaming pride while she laughed.
Brandon knew exactly how she felt. “They fill your heart with joy,” he said, resting his hand on Hammer’s head.
Myst got off White Cloud but kept him close, occasionally kissing his rounded jaw. “You look well. I knew you’d be fine without me.”
“I’m glad you two are reunited,” Thayen replied, smiling.
“Me, too,” she replied, but her delight soon faded. “We have some things to figure out though, and I don’t think it’s safe for White Cloud to stick around for much longer.”
The statement intrigued me. �
�What do you mean?”
“It’s a feeling I have. A feeling I haven’t been able to shake since Hrista left Purgatory. If White Cloud stays with me in these current circumstances, he’ll be in danger. We know Berserkers are still slipping in and out of Purgatory, but we don’t know which of them, or where, or when. We only know it’s thanks to Hrista,” Myst explained. “She used Hammer against Brandon. And now, I wouldn’t be surprised if she found a way to use White Cloud against me. Or Axe, Regine’s falcon, against her.”
“That makes sense. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what I’ve had to endure with Hammer,” Brandon replied, offering a faint and sympathetic smile.
Myst sighed and turned to look at her Aesir. “You’re not safe with me. Not for the time being.” The horse neighed, clearly upset by her words, but she caressed his head and scratched him behind the ears. “We’ll be together again, I promise. For now, however, I need you to go back to roaming through Purgatory. Stay away from the Berserkers. Stick to the light. And I’ll come find you when this is over.”
It took a while to convince the creature to leave, but in the end, we watched White Cloud give Myst a lick on the cheek and gallop away, his golden mane shimmering splendidly in the warm wind. I could only imagine how Myst felt about all this, but I knew she’d made the right choice. Brandon would certainly stop at nothing to keep Hammer now that he’d gotten his Aesir back. The dire wolf was more manageable though—White Cloud would’ve stood out, especially against enemy Berserkers from The Shade.
“That was so cool,” Jericho muttered, and I noted Aphis nodding his agreement too.
“Don’t worry, Valkyrie sister,” Brandon said after a long and emotional silence. “You told him the truth. You two will be together again.”
“I know.” She forced herself to smile, but it only worked when Thayen took her hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. The look they exchanged said more than they ever could in words, and I knew in that instant that she’d found comfort in Thayen, much like I had with Brandon. These were odd and complicated emotions we were dealing with, but ignoring how we felt would’ve only made everything much harder.
A Shade of Vampire 91: A Gate of Light Page 13