Reaper, p.32
Reaper, page 32
She had been using her soulfire to influence the aura of his mind. That was terrifying. He had never seen anyone use their soulfire to manipulate minds; at least, not as far as he’d noticed. But she couldn’t have been a dream artist. Not only could he feel her madra, but an Archlord-level dream artist wouldn’t have been bothered by Orthos’ pathetic soulfire.
Kahn Mala’s lips thinned further, but now his fury was fully aflame. “Whoever this Lindon Arelius is, I’m sure he’d rather die than receive your protection.”
He kept her eye as he leaned down and munched on another stick.
Little Blue popped up from behind his shell to lend a ring of agreement.
The Archlady snorted in annoyance and addressed her pair of henchmen. “Keep them contained. I will return if anyone else arrives.”
So began a boring period of waiting and eating sticks.
Orthos only knew someone else was coming when the Nethergate cracked again. The Archlady appeared at his side in an instant, barking orders to her pair of Overlords.
Mercy arrived, hair pulled back into a tail and Suu in the form of a walking stick. She blinked at the sight of the Redmoon Hall Emissaries arrayed before her.
“Akura Mercy,” Emissary Kahn Mala announced. “You are under our protection per the agreement between our forces and your mother. Please cooperate and confirm the identity of your companions so we can protect them as well.”
Orthos and Little Blue shook their heads.
Mercy beamed. “You found them already! Thank you so much!”
She rushed over and scooped up Little Blue and Orthos, carrying them into a hug that felt for Orthos like being lifted into the top of a tree. Only softer.
Kahn Mala looked over them all. “We know Lindon Arelius and Yerin Arelius are with you down there. What about Eithan Arelius?”
“Nope!” Mercy said cheerily. “I was just here with my friends Orthos and Little Blue!”
Orthos wasn’t sure he’d ever seen Mercy’s joyful demeanor irritate someone so visibly. “You should know better than this, Akura. If we were hostile to you, we would be using techniques rather than words. Since we are allied for the moment, you will show me the respect I am due and tell me the truth.”
Mercy’s eyes shimmered slightly, as they did before she called her armor. “You’re not calling me a liar, are you?”
Her tone wasn’t much different than usual, but Orthos shifted uncomfortably in her arms. She was weak after her time in the labyrinth, and he could feel that she was weak, but his spirit still itched like he was in danger.
The Archlady was less impressed. “You can’t use your mother to threaten me here.”
“I can’t? So you wouldn’t mind if I called her right now, then?”
“…sit by the others.” Kahn Mala put a trembling hand over her eyes. Her cobra hissed again, and Orthos got the strong impression that the Archlady wasn’t used to dealing with anyone without threatening them.
While the next wait was boring, at least it was less so with Mercy there. She chatted easily with them, and even struck up a brief conversation with their Overlord guards. All the while, she kept patting his head or stroking his shell.
That struck him as undignified. If he was his normal size, no one would think of him as a pet.
After time crawled on for too long, the Nethergate swung open again.
Yerin emerged, and she wasn’t alone. Eithan walked at her side. Yerin’s red eyes widened as she saw Redmoon Hall, and she put a hand on her sword.
Orthos began to laugh.
21
Iteration 119: Fathom
Spread out among the stars of Fathom, the seven Judges of the Abidan Court did battle with the Mad King and his armies.
Zakariel, the Fox, slid in and out of existence, dodging lightning-strikes that detonated stars and slipping past armies of half-real Fiends that clawed for her soul. Her dagger flashed, and ten thousand kilometers away, an ancient warrior wearing a silver crown grabbed at his chest.
Despite all the protections he could weave, despite oaths and promises and seals older than many worlds, his heart had been pierced by a hidden dagger.
The Silverlord died without knowing what had killed him.
Telariel, the Spider, spun invisible webs throughout the universe. Ten thousand lesser Vroshir sacrificed ten thousand Class Four Fiends to begin a working that would strike a deadly blow. They were confident in their stealth, hidden by shadows they had dredged from the end of time.
He saw right through them, and with a swipe of his cane, he disrupted their ritual. They slew ten thousand of their own kind for nothing.
A fleet of warships was conjured into reality from the stuff of dreams, targeting the population of a distant planet to weaken the world’s connection to the Way. Telariel misaligned all their engines at once, and the second they ignited their Void Drives, they all exploded into miniature suns.
The Angler used the chaos of battle to slip into a local stellar landmark known as the Heartbeat Star to steal a horn from the dragon that slept at its core, but Telariel tugged her away with a thread of order to let her know that he was watching. Sulking, she retreated.
None of this took The Spider’s full attention. He solved a thousand problems at once, in an instant, without moving a step.
Durandiel, the Ghost, faded in and out of visibility. She strode through a twisted reality that a Class Two Fiend tried to manifest, a warped world of distorted gravity and fleshy trees.
“No,” the Ghost said, and the half-formed reality collapsed.
One Silverlord controlled diamond chains with each link the size of a star, forged from the energy of a foreign world and refined in Fathom’s own system. The chain crashed like a train through a series of inhabited planets, only to slam to a halt on the end of Durandiel’s hand.
“Wrong,” the Ghost said. The diamond chain popped like a bubble, leaving the debris of the planets it had destroyed to drift through space.
A four-armed woman gathered up the collateral damage from one of the Mad King’s attacks, spooling up spatial cracks like thread, and wove them into text that touched something deep inside the world of Fathom.
Time froze around her. In that space beyond time, she began a subtle but far-reaching working, redefining the mechanisms of Iteration One-one-nine.
Durandiel rose up from behind the four-armed Vroshir and watched.
“Not bad,” the Ghost said.
The woman spun around, her backhand trailing energy that could annihilate entire populations, but it was all a function of will and energy, so it faded to nothing before the authority of the Ghost.
The slap landed normally on Durandiel’s cheek.
“Ow.”
The Vroshir flinched and tried to run, but space was still sealed. The Ghost grabbed her by the collar. “Why don’t you come work for me?” She folded the four-armed woman like a piece of paper, but this paper squirmed and resisted, so Durandiel let it unfold slightly and peeked inside.
“It’s that or execution,” she pointed out.
The woman stopped resisting, and the Ghost folded her up and slipped her inside a pocket. The zone of frozen time vanished as she strode after other rule-breakers.
Several galaxies away, the Mad King clashed in combat against Razael, the Wolf, and Gadrael, the Titan. The unstoppable sword of the Abidan and their unbreakable shield.
Every clash between them devastated star systems, setting even distant planets trembling. Civilizations throughout Fathom begged for someone to save them from what was surely the end of the world.
Suriel, the Phoenix, answered them. Her Razor removed toxic energy, hostile will, and insidious parasites even as she herself constantly renewed the Iteration, keeping it moving toward a state of wholeness and order. Corpses returned to life, shattered planets re-formed and drifted back into orbit, and the explosion of stars reversed.
Over it all, the Hound watched, directing each Judge from one decision to another, guiding Fate toward victory. Futures flashed, were chosen, and sprang into being at his command. In realms unseen, he steered causality around dead ends of nonexistence and pitfalls of chaos.
All passed in one blink of a mortal eye.
To the uncountable trillions of mortals who called Fathom home, this was an incomprehensible nightmare. Only earlier that day, across many thousands of inhabited planets, the universe had functioned exactly as it always had.
Then reality had begun to tear apart. A figure with burning eyes, in armor of bone, had appeared in the sky, somehow visible from every city on every planet at once.
He had unraveled their world. They had seen space crumble, time spiral in on itself. Unnamed horrors had sprung forth from nothing, and neither gravity nor reality were reliable any longer. Then the quakes in existence had ceased without warning, and all had been restored to normal. The warped rules had righted themselves, leaving everyone in Fathom to wonder if they had suffered a collective hallucination.
Until the stellar war had ignited. Then planets exploded and were remade seconds later. People were slaughtered, revived, reborn, repaired. Time twisted, slowed, sped up. Space was compressed, then stretched. Bloody lightning fell from the sky, followed by healing rain. Towers sprang from dreams while ruins bloomed into bustling cities that had suddenly always existed.
And Suriel knew that all this was only possible because of the presence of all the Court of Seven. Fathom was the lynchpin of Sector Eleven, with by far the greatest population and the most stable connection to the Way. The world was so stable that it helped steady all the other Iterations in the Sector, so it had to fall before any of the others could. The Mad King had spent great effort trying to destroy it, even with the Scythe of Ozriel.
Yet, without the seven Judges anchoring its existence, he would have succeeded. That the beings of Fathom remained to experience the battle was itself a stroke of fortune.
While Suriel reached all over the Iteration to correct disruptions and knit the fabric of reality back together, her Presence continually spat communications and warnings into her mind.
[WARNING: incoming attack.]
[Telariel has redirected attack; requests restoration at the following coordinates.]
[Sector Three Control reports an unusual spike in deviations.]
[Temporal deviation detected. Corrected by Durandiel, but requires Phoenix support.]
[Sector Zero Control requests an update.]
It was the Spider and his Presence that handled communication through the Way, so Suriel knew he was enduring a far greater deluge of requests and alarms, but she found herself overwhelmed anyway.
There was a reason the Judges never acted together. There were only seven of them.
While their greatest enemies may have chosen to stand and face them here, this was by no means an exhaustive list of the forces arrayed against them. While they were here, they would lose territory everywhere else. Even Sanctum was no longer completely secure, though it had powerful and ancient protections ready to deploy.
They would certainly win here, but they had to make it worth the price.
Suriel’s Presence blared with another alarm, and Suriel knew that this time, the Spider had passed this message to all of them at once.
[WARNING: Haven breached.]
It came with a vision of Haven, the prison-world that looked like an iron prison even from orbit. It flared red in her vision, indicating a spatial breach in the Iteration.
Suriel overheard as the Hound’s voice was transmitted to the Fox.
“Zakariel, go.”
The transmission was more than mere words; she understood that Makiel had scanned the future and found this course of action acceptable. The Fox was the only one who could breach the cordon around Fathom and return to Haven without being caught, and the one who would catch the prey quickly without letting them escape.
Her absence in this Iteration meant that some enemies would be able to flee, and increase the pressure on surrounding worlds, but this was less damage than a full breach of Haven would cause.
But Suriel glimpsed what they would trade for such an action, and her heart went cold.
“Makiel!” she shouted.
The Fox had already slipped out of Fathom and back into the Way, bounding for the prison-world. Only a few prisoners had escaped, those in the least secure layers.
Makiel never turned to Suriel. He continued watching the future.
“It was necessary,” he said, as possibility played out before Suriel’s eyes.
The Mad King clashed swords with Razael, and the stars quaked. At the same time, he struck with the Scythe at Gadrael, who took the blow on his shield.
A stalemate. Until the Fox left.
As though waiting for this very moment, the Mad King tore open a hole to the Void.
That was still extraordinarily difficult; the Way was powerful here, making it all but impossible to reach out to chaos. But Daruman had been capable of such feats even long ago, much less with Ozriel’s Scythe in his hands.
Suriel reached out to heal the fabric of space, and the void portal grew smaller. The Mad King struggled against her, as the portal swirled and flashed, fighting for stability. The longer she held him here, the more time she would give Razael to recover and strike another blow; the Wolf was already gathering power in her flaming sword.
But as Suriel took her focus away from the rest of the Iteration, a crack in Razael’s armor grew wider, a wound in Durandiel’s side festered, and a planet far away cracked and drifted into oblivion.
The moment of her decision seemed to stretch out before Suriel. She could keep Daruman here, or she could keep everyone alive.
Though it wrenched her heart, she stopped struggling against the Mad King.
Razael’s armor flowed back together, Durandiel’s injury reversed until she had never been wounded at all, and the broken planet drifted back together.
The Mad King met Suriel’s eyes as he drifted backwards into the Void, and though millions of kilometers separated them, she could hear the laughter of Oth’kimeth, the Fiend, echoing in her soul.
As the portal winked shut, his blazing red eye never left hers.
[Without first removing Fathom, he will struggle to completely destroy any other worlds in this Sector,] Suriel’s Presence reported, as though that would soothe her. [His removal from the battlefield will ensure our victory, and it is possible that we will win and escape long enough to preserve fragments of any destroyed world.]
Fragments. The pieces of a world that drifted through the Void after an Iteration had been destroyed.
Unless it had been completely culled by the Reaper’s Scythe. In which case no fragments remained at all.
What are the odds that he will change his target?
Her Presence was silent, and Suriel knew why. The Mad King’s target wouldn’t change. There were more strategically valuable worlds in range, like Asylum. With the state of the cosmos as it was, he could strike even at Suriel’s homeworld in Sector Twenty-three.
But he wouldn’t. He wanted a victory that was as symbolic as it was strategic, to conquer the Abidan of the past as well as the present. He would send a message by destroying the home of Ozriel, the birthplace of the Abidan, and the place that produced more Abidan-qualified ascendants than any other.
He was going to destroy Cradle, and Suriel was too late to stop him.
Lindon walked onto a chamber that shone with gray-white light that pulsed like a heart. It was another one of those massive rooms filled with flesh, where the truly enormous dreadbeasts had fused into one mass.
Faded off-white meat filled the entire chamber, spilling over the floor and spiraling up pillars. So far, so expected. But there were no other dreadbeasts here, no children or guardians.
The entire room was focused on one figure in the center. One skeletal, desiccated, six-armed man.
He sat half-melted into a growth that resembled a throne, and he leaned on the armrest with one elbow. His skin was dry and papery, and he had no muscle at all. All six of his hands were intact, but some were a slightly different shade than the others, leading Lindon to wonder if one of those was the hand he now held in a script-sealed container.
The man was dead.
Glassy eyes met Lindon’s. Largely black, with white irises, they had no life within them. And Lindon could feel the power radiating off the figure slowly dissipating, like the last wisps of smoke from a dead fire.
In the center of his chest, where the heart should be, was only a gaping hole.
[You were too slow!] Dross raged. [Reigan Shen has slain the beast!]
It had to have been Reigan Shen, Lindon knew. But there were no signs of battle. He was reluctant to expose the hand he had locked away—in this chamber, it might even bring the Wraith back to life—but he had already figured out how to tap into the authority of the labyrinth.
Focusing on the Void Icon, Lindon extended his awareness into the room nearby. He was looking for a familiar binding, a Forger technique embedded somewhere…
Dross contemptuously pointed it out a moment before Lindon found it himself. The technique that would create a hunger echo.
Without Subject One to wrestle against him, Lindon found this one easy to activate. He still needed Dross to help him sort through the dizzying impressions—the Dreadgod had fed on far too many people—but one presence was clear above all others.
Lindon poured pure madra into the technique. The more he fueled the technique, the more solid the echo would be. Before long, he managed to Forge a black-and-white echo nearby. It was still transparent, but it should be conscious and ready to speak.
It was little more than a ghost, but not just any ghost. This was the manifestation of the Slumbering Wraith itself.
The echo flexed all six of his arms, then looked at his own body that sat next to him. Rage and weariness and longing radiated from him.
“Betrayal is the nature of Monarchs,” the Dreadgod said.
Lindon glanced at the hole in his chest. “Pardon, but it looks like he held up his end of the bargain.”
