WINTER TURNED AWAY FROM the green blur of Astrid’s eyes as she streaked away in the darkness. She had Daemons to face.
Ghian came first, his visage torn between Azael’s terrible smile and Ghian’s own terrified, pale mask.
“You are doing the right thing, Winter,” Azael told her. Ghian whimpered, but Azael shut that down quickly. “This is how you become the hero the Sfaera needs.”
“Let’s get this over with,” Winter said. She didn’t look directly at Azael after that first glance. The dark, burning skull, even after all this time, still terrified her, although it also filled her with an immense sadness.
But now she saw more movement behind Azael-Ghian and their followers. Four more humans emerged from the trees: a short merchant, his eyes shifting back and forth, a beautiful woman with thick red hair, a hugely fat fellow, and a Cantic priestess, her robes soiled and filthy, her brown hair disheveled in a frizzy halo about her face. When they saw the priestess, the noblewoman and the tall, wiry man grabbed her by the arms, holding her tightly between them.
“What is this?” the priestess said, blinking, as if she had just awoken from a dream. Her eyes came to rest on Winter. “Who are you? Where am I?”
Her gaze must have taken in the lights of the city far below behind Winter, and her eyes widened.
“Goddess, are we on the Cliffs of Litori? Are you taking me to the Chaos Queen? Please, she wouldn’t want anything from me, I can—”
“That’s enough,” Winter said, stepping forward.
“I give the orders here,” Ghian said, but she ignored him and looked at the others, the seven who seemed to have no qualm with being here, atop the Cliffs of Litori, at night, with the Chaos Queen herself. She could guess who they were, pieced together from what her experience, research and spies had told her: they were avatars. The tall, elderly man would be Hade, defeated on the island of Arro almost an entire year ago. The mumbling woman was Nadir, defeated in Maven Kol only months before. Between the fat man and the merchant, one of them must be Iblin and the other Samann. The beautiful woman was Estille, and between the noblewoman and the Cantic priestess, one would be Bazlamit, and the other Luceraf, but she was not sure which.
“This is all of you?” Winter asked. She couldn’t help but notice there were only eight of them; perhaps Mefiston’s death had been final, after all.
“They are all here,” Ghian said, his voice hard, the echo of Azael’s running beneath it.
The priestess stared at Ghian. Perhaps she had heard the echo, too.
“Our mistake was taking people of power as our avatars, thinking to use their stations and abilities,” Ghian said, but Azael’s voice grew more and more loud as he spoke, the deep, harsh sound of fire. “We failed multiple times, for that.” His eyes darted to the remains of the War Goddess. “And now we need a place of power, such as that—endowed only recently by you, my dear. And, by your leave, tiellan blood, from a tiellan queen.”
Winter drew a dagger from her belt, and the noblewoman whimpered. Also at her belt was a pouch full of faltira, nine crystals to be exact. She hoped that would be enough.
Ghian looked at her expectantly. The old muttering woman could hardly focus on anything at all, while the old man’s eyes were completely unreadable, sunken into the dark pits below his forehead. Winter half-wondered whether Hade had eyes at all.
She closed her eyes.
Chaos was there, huge and black. A shiver ran down Winter’s spine. She tried to mask the quake it sent through her body.
When she opened her eyes, Ghian was no longer smiling.
“If you do not do this, we will find someone—”
“I’ll do it.” She raised the dagger. The priestess cowered as Winter recited the words Ghian had taught her.
“My blood for the blood of Aratraxia. My blood pays the price of passage, from their realm to ours.” She slid the blade across her palm. “My blood for the blood of Aratraxia.” She smeared the blood along the noblewoman’s forehead.
“Yes,” Ghian said, but the voice was completely Azael’s now, echoing over the cliff face.
Winter turned to Ghian, and ran her bloody palm along his forehead, too. She caught a flash of Ghian—just Ghian, not Azael—and saw his eyes darken with horror, but there was nothing she could do for him. She did the same for each person there, the looks on their faces ranging from anticipation to confusion, to terror.
Nine of them in total, including the frightened priestess.
The moment she smeared her blood along the forehead of the last person—the priestess—the air around her crackled and sparked, but with light and heat that she could neither see nor feel.
Bursts of dark light surrounded her, issuing forth from each person. The priestess screamed, a few of the others moaned, but the faces of the rest were silent, contorted masks. Ghian’s eyes pleaded without words, until blackness completely took them over. His mouth opened wider and wider, and inside housed neither tongue nor flesh, but a gaping, horrific darkness. Ghian’s jaw snapped and his mouth expanded, far past the point it should be humanly possible.
The darkness swallowed Ghian whole, and in his place towered the cloaked figure of Azael, the Fear Lord.
His cloak was of a deep, infinite darkness that consumed everything that came near it, absorbing the light that filtered down from the overcast night sky above and the city below. The cloak fell in long jagged torrents over Azael’s arms, spilling to the ground in a black mist.
When Winter had seen Azael before, his presence had been closer to a nightmare than reality. Now she felt the same unreasoning, unstoppable fear and knew it was real, a relentless weight threatening to crush her into the ground, into the cliffs below her, or an impossible heavy blanket that had just been thrown over her, dragging her down and down into the earth below.
“It’s about time,” Azael said. His voice still had that strange rolling, burning quality to it, but less penetrating, not quite all-encompassing in the way it had been before. He looked at the others, who were also beginning to twist and morph. “Let’s get this over with.” A beam of something shot up from Azael into the night sky; it was not light, Winter was sure of that, because it was black and dark, but neither was it darkness, as it dispelled and warped the night sky around it.
The hand that emerged from Azael’s robe was nothing but black bone, pointing one lone, skeletal finger at Winter.
“You,” Azael grated, his voice like fire, “have just saved the world.”
* * *
Astrid sprinted through the Odenite camp, knocking aside makeshift stools and scattering campfire ashes in her wake.
When she reached their tent, she shook Knot awake.
“Winter’s still alive,” she told him, “I let her live—” not entirely true, considering the fact Winter could have killed her easily, but still, “—but I think now she’s done something incredibly stu—”
“You’ve been up there? What in Oblivion…?” Knot growled. But he was already awake, alert, and throwing on his armor. He followed her out into the night, and they both looked up at the cliff face.
It looked… Goddess it looked like…
Eight strange columns of light jutted up into the night sky. Red, orange, gold, green, blue, violet, silver, and a dirty shade of white. And another column, darker even than the night sky, pulled the other lights toward it, around it, so that they began to lean inward and eventually spiral around one another as they rose upward.
White flakes had begun to drift slowly down around her. She held out her hand, and a tiny snowflake landed, perfect and unmelting on her palm.
The first winter’s snow.
“Come on,” Knot said, stalking away. “We need to find Cinzia.”
* * *
Cinzia and Jane were together, awake and fully dressed, when Astrid and Knot ran up to them. They’d been watching the spectrum of color on the cliff too, and the strange, dark light bending them all into itself.
Cinzia counted eight lights. Nine, including the dark pillar.
“It’s happening, isn’t it?” Cinzia asked.
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you mean,” Astrid said.
“I am sorry you didn’t, Astrid,” Jane said. “If you had, you might have prevented this.”
“And what is this?” Cinzia asked.
“This is the Rising,” Jane said. “The Nine Daemons are here.”
“How is Winter involved?” Knot asked, his eyes searching the clifftop as well.
“I think she’s planning to fight them,” Astrid said. “Or kill herself trying.”
Knot swore. “I’ve got to get to her.”
“I think…” Cinzia’s hand strayed to the gemstone in the pouch at her side. She half-expected it to shine through the pouch itself, perhaps even burn through it, but the pouch was as dark as ever. She could sense it, however, sense the connection between the gemstone and those lights on the clifftop.
“I think I need to be up there.”
Jane’s eyes widened. “Why on the Sfaera would you…?”
“I know how to use Canta’s Heart,” Cinzia said. She met Knot’s eyes. “The gemstone I procured at the Fane. I think I can use it to stop…” She glanced up at the lights on the clifftop again. “To stop that, I hope.”
“But you said you did not know how—”
“I’ve figured it out, sister. But I need to get up there, to where they are.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Knot said, shaking his head.
“Did you hear what I said?” For a moment she almost forgot Jane and Astrid were there. She took his hands in hers. “I can stop this.”
Knot scowled. “Then I go with you. To help you, somehow. And to help Winter.”
“If I can do this right,” Cinzia said, “I think I can help her, too.”
“Then let’s go!” Astrid was pacing back and forth like a jungle cat, waiting impatiently.
“There’s something else up there,” Jane said. Her face was an illumination of color, yellow and orange and green and violet. Each of their faces, Cinzia realized, was lit up in a rainbow of color. It would have been an incredibly beautiful sight, had the portents not been so dire.
A faint shimmer in the light show above them caught her eye. And then another. And then another, and another, and suddenly she realized why she had not been able to see what it was Jane saw. She had been looking too narrowly. In the sky above the cliffs, a massive, roiling blackness shimmered and twisted. A blackness all too familiar to her. And, if she squinted, she could see dozens of large, dark forms pouring down from the darkness, and onto the clifftop.
“Outsiders,” Knot said.
“There are so many of them.” Cinzia had only ever seen three at a time, at the most. Canta’s bones, there had to be a hundred of them up there already.
Astrid laughed nervously. “Maybe going up there isn’t the best idea,” Astrid said.
Cinzia squeezed Knot’s hands tightly. “It is the only way,” she said. “But how in the Sfaera am I going to make it past all those Outsiders?”
“I believe I can guide you, sister.”
“I’m coming with you both,” Knot said.
“Oblivion,” Astrid muttered. “If you’re all going to go, then I might as—”
Something thumped loudly to the ground behind them: an Outsider, twice the height of a human. Fangs the size of Cinzia’s forearm jutted at all angles from its mouth, and a half-dozen black horns and spikes ran the length of its head.
Astrid looked back at the others. “Go. I can handle this one.”
With a supernatural burst of speed, the vampire leapt on the monster, burying her claws deep in its neck.
Cinzia pulled Knot along gently. She could not imagine the conflict in him, but they had to move.
“Astrid can handle herself,” Cinzia said to him quietly.
Jaw set, Knot nodded, and the three of them moved toward the cliffs.
* * *
As the Nine Daemons formed, coalescing in rays of light around Azael, Winter could not help but wonder what in Oblivion she had done. She ducked back behind a pile of timbers, shielding herself from the monsters as they formed, unable to tear her eyes away.
It was too late to change her mind now.
Outsiders rained down all around her, falling heavily to the ground, their dark forms in stark contrast to the gently falling snow. Given what had happened when Mefiston took his form at the Battle of the Rihnemin, she had expected these Outsiders to appear. That was why she had sent her Rangers away.
But the Outsiders were the least of her concerns at the moment.
After Azael took shape, each of the nine people around him began to change. The fat man ruptured, his flesh exploding outward. Gore splattered everything around him, giving way to a hugely fat monster of a man. Bald, hairless, his skin pasty and pale pink and covered in the guts of his former host. The fat hung in loose folds, like a set of clothes several sizes too large. The man was naked as far as Winter could tell, but his rolls of fat kept him as modest as any item of clothing might. This was Iblin, the Daemon of Greed and Gluttony, standing at least four times her height. As Winter stared up at him in horror, she noticed for the first time the Daemon had only a single eye at the center of its head, bloodshot veins around an iris of sickly yellow.
The noblewoman appeared to be slowly melting, her skin sliding off her muscles, her muscles sliding off her bones, her bones melting into a viscous, slimy substance. The woman’s face was last to liquefy, even then not quite being absorbed into the horrific substance, her eyes, nose, and mouth elongating and warping, almost straining to escape the blob they had become a part of, but never quite succeeding.
The old woman, mumbling to herself all the while, began to morph into the Daemon Nadir, Insanity, elongating until she stood even taller than most of the Outsiders dropping to the ground around them, though not quite as tall as Iblin, or a feathered serpent Winter recognized as Bazlamit, both of whom stood at least twice the height of most Outsiders.
The old woman’s head split into three, like a flower blooming with three large petals. Her true face remained at the central head, but her eyelids peeled back revealing bright orange glowing eyes, red-ringed in blood. The heads that split to either side had all four eyes sewn shut with ragged, uneven stitches. All three of the heads converged at the mouth which had morphed into something like the center of a flower, though the mouth had now opened wide into a near-perfect circle, rows of sharp teeth lining the entire circumference’s interior. The scalp and top of the skull of each head was missing, as if torn away, revealing a mush of gray matter amidst jagged bone and bloody flesh. The noblewoman’s arms lengthened till they formed long, uneven claws that scraped the ground.
A chill ran through Winter as the rest of the Daemons formed. Each one sent a ray of colored light up into the sky: orange from Nadir’s horrifying visage; gold from Iblin’s corpulent bulging sack of a body; green from the huge werewolf Samann; blue from Luceraf, the feathered serpent; violet from Estille, the Lust Daemon, who was still a beautiful woman, but with curling horns, the leathery wings of a bat, and a long, barbed, swaying tail; the pile of viscous flesh that Winter now recognized as Bazlamit sent a silvery light up into the night sky, through the falling snow; and, finally, Hade, who had taken the most nebulous form of all, hardly more than a billowing cloud of crackling smoke, sent up a pale gray light, almost white, but lacking the purity.
“Where is the woman?” Iblin bellowed, his voice deep and booming.
“She is close,” Azael said, “but she is not our immediate concern. Our immediate concern is—”
“Solidifying our power,” Bazlamit hissed. “Claiming our true forms.”
True forms. Were these not the Daemon’s true forms?
Winter looked down at her pouch. The faltira that she had used when Astrid attacked her had faded moments ago, and she’d been stopping herself with all the willpower she had from taking more of the drug. Now was the time. She took two crystals. She needed all the help she could get, consequences be damned.
The frost took effect almost immediately, and power rushed through her. As the drug burned, the nearest Outsiders turned to face her, dark eyes staring.
Winter ignored them, and came out from her hiding place.
“Honestly, I’m insulted.” Her voice shook. She was terrified. “I thought I’d be just slightly higher on your threat list.”
She was minuscule in their presence. She was nothing.
She was a murderer, yes. She knew she was that.
But she was a tiellan woman, too. She was a wife, however estranged. She was a daughter, and a fisherwoman, and a huntress. She was a queen, now, too; a warrior. She was the Harbinger. She was all of these things, and yet she was one thing more.
She was a weapon.
“Let’s see if we can do something about that.”
With every tendron available to her—hundreds, so many she could not count them—she sought out the weapons she had ordered her Rangers leave behind. Axes, daggers, circular blades, swords, spears, sharpened shields. The tendra that did not find weapons found other things instead: a wooden beam from a shattered trebuchet, one of the stones from the War Goddess’s unused ammunition. With all of these tendra, all of these weapons, she moved forward, attacking, in what she knew would be her final battle.