All squadrons to the deck, all squadrons to the deck!”
Fire. Thunder. Bones breaking and metal crashing and songs rising and the screech of birds.
“The Imperial swine have breached the flagship! All ships, all ships, converge immediately!”
The reek of powder. The spatter of blood. The staccato song of guns bursting and wood breaking and the sound of pleas and cries to uncaring skies punching through.
“In the name of the Great General and the Glorious Revolution of the Fist and Flame, do not fail! The future of the Revolution rests in your hands!”
Fighting. Dying. Killing. Screaming. Bleeding. Weeping. Singing.
“TEN THOUSAND YEARS!”
And twisting through it all out of the blare of sirens, the sound of people commanding other people to their deaths, the foulest chorus in the world’s ugliest song.
Survive enough fights, battle starts to have its own harmony, its own chorus. Get into enough fights, it all starts to sound the same. I told myself that this was like that: just another tired song, just another dance I knew all the moves to, and all I had to do was pull them off and I’d be out of this. I’d survive. I’d be okay.
I told my ears this.
My eyes didn’t believe it.
The sky was painted with bodies. Revolutionary soldiers flew, coats flapping behind them like too-small wings as Siegemages and Graspmages hurled them aside like toys. Birds swooped from the sky to snatch targets from the deck and carry them to hell. Waves of fire, of frost, of twisted song and writhing doom swept across the deck as the mages marched forward.
“TEN THOUSAND YEARS!”
And were met.
The doors to gangways burst open. A river of blue and flesh and steel poured out, great Paladin engines spewing smoke as they waded among the tide of Revolutionary soldiers answering the Imperial challenge. Graspmages exploded beneath clouds of gunfire, gunpike shells chewing off limbs and great chunks of flesh. Siegemages were cut down by the rattle of repeating guns as Paladins waded forward with the great weapons, spinning barrels spewing severium charges. Bodies vanished under swarms of Revolutionaries, their mouths full of anger and hands full of steel, as they carved their foes apart.
Corpses. Blood. Noise. Anger. Hate.
I knew the notes, but not this song. Not something this bloody, something so utterly devoid of any meaning beyond people killing. It hurt my ears to hear, my eyes to see, my—
“Sal.”
Her voice in my ear. Her hand on mine. Her eyes—fuck me, her eyes.
Life isn’t like an opera. Not usually. Wars are fought for stupid reasons instead of noble ones, people are weeds instead of flowers, love doesn’t conquer all.
But it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to conquer anything. It just has to make things feel okay for just long enough to make you realize you want to live. For her. For us. For the world she wanted to build.
The world I was going to give her. Or die trying.
I tightened my fingers around hers. I slid my blade into my free hand. I met her eyes, those big brown eyes behind her glasses.
“No matter what happens,” I said, “don’t let go of me.”
She nodded. “I won’t.”
I glanced out over the deck. “You ready?”
I drew in a cold breath. I tasted my blood freezing on my lips. I felt the gun’s heat, seeping into my skin.
“By the way.” I paused to spit out something on the deck. “If we die here, I love you.”
She smiled. “If we don’t, I love you, too.”
I nodded, smiled a little.
Together, we ran into hell.
Head down, sword up, don’t stop moving. The old dance steps came back to me once I started running, instinct beating down pain and fear alike. Eyes ahead, keep breathing, don’t think about the blood.
Bodies fell around us, screaming and cursing and dragging foes down with them. Explosions lit up the sky, cannons erupting in gouts of flame. Clouds of severium smoke veiled the deck, broken only by the talons of attack birds swooping down from above. The Lady’s song rang out, an agonizing melody reverberating off itself, shaking my skull in my head, my bones in my body.
I didn’t care.
I didn’t have eyes for the dying, the suffering, the pointlessness of it—my stare was locked on the cabin across the deck and the iron door looming in it.
I heard no song, no explosion, no scream—all I listened for was the sound of her footsteps behind mine as I pulled her to keep up.
I spared no feeling for my wounds, my scars—everything in me was in my fingers, clinging to her with everything I had.
I cut when I had to. I leapt when they got in my way. I took a hit that had been meant for her. And we kept running. We kept moving. Through the smoke and the blood and the fire, we made it. The stairs leading up to the cabin loomed before us. I counted each one as we rushed up them. In my ears rang the sound of our footsteps, the thunder of my heart, the Lady’s song…
Rising to a single, crystalline note.
The air shimmered before me. A blade flashed. My hand shot out, shoved Liette backward even as I fell, steel narrowly missing my throat.
I pushed her behind me as I held my own sword up. And there, standing where there had been only empty air a second ago, was a woman as cold and sharp as the blade she held, staring down its length at me through amethyst eyes alive with hate.
“Every disaster,” Velline ki Yanatoril, Sword of the Empress, said simply.
I blinked. She vanished. I heard the air part behind me. I seized Liette and twisted us out of the way as Velline’s blade cut a path two inches away from my heart.
“Every ruin,” she said.
I couldn’t say anything before she disappeared again. I hurled Liette to the side, narrowly blocking the next bite of Velline’s blade as she appeared on my right.
“Every war,” the Quickmage said.
Her voice was seething, anger heated and quenched and hardened into a fine point. She vanished again. The air whistled above me. I tumbled back down the stairs as she dropped from above, her sword punching through the wood and cutting the steps in half.
“Every puddle of suffering that forms on this forsaken land, you’re there,” Velline said, her eyes narrowing. “How are you always there, Sal the Cacophony?”
If I had the time, I would have said something cleverer than: “Get the fuck out of my way, Velline.”
“All the Imperium, all the Revolution, every rancid soul to ever hold a blade has stood in your way,” Velline snapped. “Still, you wreak devastation. Still, you bleed the people of the Scar. Still, you have the utter gall to think, at the throat of the Imperium, I would step aside.”
“I’d ask you what the fuck you’re talking about,” I replied as I raised my blade, “but I don’t have time.”
Not quite a lie. I didn’t have time, it was true—whatever Two Lonely Old Men’s sigils would do to this airship was something I didn’t want to be around for. But even holding up my sword felt like agony, my entire body shaking. I’d gotten sloppy, careless, taken too many stupid hits. I couldn’t kill Velline. I couldn’t even fight her in the state I was in. All I could do was stall until I could think of something.
“Is there any way you could summarize this for me? Maybe a pamphlet I could look at later?”
Fortunately, I wasn’t too bloodied to be a dick.
“What did the Revolution offer you, Sal?” she growled, advancing toward me. “Money? Whiskey? Or are you so base and low that the mere promise of this much bloodshed was enough to lure you to their services?”
“I don’t work for the Revolution.” I took a step back. She noticed.
“You expect me to believe you simply happened to be aboard a ship poised to slaughter Imperial citizens?”
“Look, this shit just happens to me,” I said before squinting. “Wait, what do you—”
“Do not insult me. Do not insult the people you were meant to destroy,” Velline said, leveling her blade at me. “This airship is heading straight for the Blessing. Any fool can see that.”
“The Blessing?” Liette adjusted her glasses, got to her feet. “The Imperial villages? No, there must be some mistake.”
“There are many mistakes aboard this ship. If you ally yourself with the Cacophony, you are one of them.” Velline’s eyes flashed with purple light. “And I will remedy every last one of you.”
Her eyes drifted toward Liette. She vanished. I swallowed every ounce of pain and fear and exhaustion, choking on them as I lunged toward her. Liette shrieked, falling beneath a shower of sparks as our blades met over her. My arm snapped out, caught Velline by the throat. I couldn’t let her disappear again, couldn’t let her use her magic. She twisted in my grasp, pulling us closer so I couldn’t bring my blade against her. She knew what she was doing. She knew my arm was already tiring.
She knew all she had to do was wait.
She pressed, I gave. She leaned into me, my arms shook. Her eyes, hardened and sharpened to cold iron, stabbed a hateful stare into my skull, telling me to give up, that I deserved this, that I couldn’t beat her. My eyes…
My eyes were on the figure standing on the deck behind us holding a ridiculously large gun.
I leapt away, falling over Liette. Perplexity covered Velline’s face—of all the ways she expected this fight to end, that wasn’t one of them. Then again, I bet neither was the sound of a repeating gun whirring to angry, bullet-spewing life.
At the center of the deck, so bloodied and battered she might as well have been a corpse herself, Tretta Stern stood, muscles straining to hold a Paladin armor’s gigantic repeating gun. She narrowed her eyes as the barrel whirred.
“Ten thousand years,” she spoke.
So did the gun.
A scream of metal and severium filled the air as the massive weapon spewed its bullets. They raked across the deck, an implacable tide of metal and severium surging toward Velline. She disappeared, emerging a second away as the bullets shredded the staircase, but the gun kept tracking her. She continued to dart away, batting away shots where she could, fleeing where she couldn’t, but the hail of bullets was endless and Tretta refused to stop firing.
That gun was made to be held by a Paladin—without the suit of armor to brace it, it would shake her to pieces eventually. I supposed I should be flattered that Tretta would go to such lengths to deny Velline the pleasure of killing me, which she felt she deserved.
Torn between two women who both wanted my head. What was a girl to do?
Ha.
No, seriously, though, this was really bad.
“Come on, come on.” I hauled Liette to her feet, helped her up the stairs to the helm, and shoved her at the iron door. “Open it, open it!”
“Yes, yes,” she muttered as she took out a quill and an inkwell.
I glanced over my shoulder, saw that Tretta had chased Velline off. “What the fuck are you doing? I said open it!”
“I don’t have the fucking key!” she snapped. “I need to wright it open. Just hold on.”
She daubed her quill into the ink and began to scribe across the door’s hinges.
The roar of the repeating gun died to a shrill whine as its ammunition ran out. Tretta cursed and started reloading, slamming a canister of bullets into its chamber.
I glanced back to Liette. “Could you possibly maybe hurry the fuck up, please?”
“There’s a fast way to do things and a right way to do things,” she replied, not looking away from her sigil. “Why do so many women want to kill you, anyway?”
“There’s no time to explain it,” I growled.
“Do you… know them?”
“I SAID THERE’S NO TIME!”
The repeating gun’s chamber snapped shut with an echoing clack. The barrel whirred to life again.
“And…” Liette’s voice hung for a painstakingly long note as she finished the sigil. “Done.”
A faint light emitted from them. A heavy click sound emitted from behind the door. A blossom of gunfire emitted as the weapon started firing. I shoved the door forward, hearing it groan as Liette scampered inside. A hail of splinters fell over me as bullets raked across the deck. I ducked in, slammed the door behind me.
I held myself up against it, my eyes shut, my body wracked from the shudder of iron against my body as hundreds of bullets slammed futilely against the door. I waited until the song of the gun ebbed to a faint, discontented murmur.
Still alive, I told myself. Bloodied, battered, bruised, and with my skeleton vibrating inside my skin, but still alive. Once I told myself this enough times to believe it, only then did I allow myself to collapse.
“Sal,” Liette whispered. Her hand was on my shoulder.
“I’m fine,” I gasped. “Just need a moment to not puke my guts out.”
She guided my chin up from the floor. “Look.”
I looked.
Twenty empty eyes looked back at me.
I scrambled to my ass, fumbled for a weapon—I’d been so concerned with who was trying to kill me on the other side of this door that I’d forgotten there would be people on this side of the door waiting to kill me.
“No, Sal.” Liette took me by the wrists. “Look.”
The cabin of the helm was arranged sparsely into two levels. Upon the lower, tables for charting courses and mechanical apparatus for navigation stood huddled together. On the upper, dominated by viewing ports that showed the swirling gray beyond, stood the captain’s chair, the helm wheel…
The Relic. Bigger than three draft birds together, made up of impossible geometry, hovering in the air between a series of hastily arranged, spellwritten apparatus keeping it in place. It hung lazily there, as though defying gravity were something it did with such routine as to be mundane, pulsating with a faint light that brightened and dimmed with every heartbeat.
My heartbeat.
I couldn’t look at it—even trying to make sense of its shape made my head hurt. But I couldn’t not look at it. It was grotesquely fascinating, radiating the same morbid curiosity that makes you pull up a funeral sheet to see the body underneath. The longer I looked, the less I wanted to look away. And the closer I stared, the more I realized…
It was staring back at me.
An eternity passed before I noticed that I was still breathing. No gunfire, not even a blade drawn—surrounded by enemies and no one had bothered trying to stop us or even said a word.
That’s when I noticed the blood.
Draped across a charting table, lying on the floor, their blood spattered against the windows at the rear of the helm and their bodies splayed across control apparatus. Each one of them lay there, some with daggers plunged up beneath their chins, some with messy holes in their skulls from hand cannons long gone cold fallen from their hands.
“They killed themselves,” Liette gasped. “They killed themselves.”
Grim, I thought, but not surprising. I’d seen too many commanders who presided over losing battles choose to take the quick way out rather than see a more gruesome outcome. But… that didn’t make sense. This was the flagship. These were Culven Loyal’s soldiers, the Great General’s soldiers. The battle hadn’t even been going that poorly for them.
Why would they…
“Scions…” Liette invoked a power she couldn’t see. Which was what she always did when she was too distraught to think. She leaned over a body on the charting table, set her back into a chair, revealing the dagger plunged into her throat that she still grasped. “These were my… I knew them. What… why?”
The answer came as a faint thought, like a bad idea you’re trying to ignore. In my head, in my blood, in my bones, I could feel it. And as Liette’s gaze was drawn upward, along with mine, I knew she felt it, too.
We stared up at the Relic.
And Eldest stared back.
“Eldest?” Liette whispered. “You did this?”
“I am sorry. I had no choice.” Its voice came distant, ghostly, like a fading dream. “Time is more limited than you know.”
I cringed—that had to be the second worst thing I could have heard aboard an airship rigged to possibly explode.
“They are coming.”
And that was the first.
“Who?” Liette asked as she ascended the stairs to the Relic. “Who’s coming?”
“Forces beyond what you are capable of comprehending, let alone stopping.”
“Yeah,” I growled. “I’ve heard that before.”
Liette shot me a glare. I held my hands up. She was right, I knew—we’d come this far for her, I couldn’t very well waste what little time we had backsassing a magic piece of shit.
But, in my defense, it wouldn’t have killed it to show a little gratitude.
“We have to go,” Liette said, turning back to the Relic. “We’re going to get you out of here, Eldest.” Realization spread across her face, hastily smothered by despair, as the gravity of the task of extracting something of such a size settled upon her. “But I don’t know how…”
“Permit me.”
A crack appeared in the Relic. No, not a crack, no jagged natural hew—a line, perfectly even and spanning the Relic’s wild geometry. I stepped in front of Liette, blade out, as one line became a spiderweb. The ancient sound of stone grinding against itself filled the air as the pieces slowly parted from each other. A mist, reeking of long-mourned things and places long abandoned, came pouring out. First as a hiss. Then as a howl.
I pulled her close, draped my scarf over us. The mist slithered across the floor, writhing and twisting like a living thing, as it fled for the cracks and crevices of the helm, escaping out. If it was poisonous, it didn’t kill us. Yet. But that quickly became the least of our concerns.
When I lowered my scarf, the Relic had opened. Its vile angles had folded back on themselves to lay bare an interior that glistened like an open wound, mist weeping out of it to reveal… to reveal…
“Holy fuck,” I whispered.
And that about did it.
I didn’t know how to describe it. Him? They? I didn’t even know what the fuck I was looking at.
Flesh, twisted and knotted and the color of a long-dead tree, clung tenaciously to the trembling interior of the Relic. It pulsated, shuddered, breathed with a life that seemed ancient and unnatural. It coiled over itself countless times and, within the folds of its flesh, I could see… things.
Wings, insectine and shivering. Faces, eyes closed and mouths open in some ancient slumber. A woman’s arm, long and delicate. A child’s leg, chubby and nascent. An eyeball swirling madly in its socket. Organs that belonged in no monster I ever knew, let alone a person.
A great tumorous mass of… things. As though whatever had occurred within this husk had just begun growing whatever it wanted. And as the great mass of skin and sinew and bone trailed upward, I could see what crowned it. Or rather, what it had grown from.
Eldest. Whatever the fuck Eldest was. The left half of its body disappeared into the grotesque mass, but from it came an androgynous form, skin radiant and polished as bronze in a sunset, carved to the closest thing I could think as perfect. And its face…
Ethereal? Ancient? Angelic? Terrifying? All of those words were true.
Yet… words seemed altogether too limited, too trifling and insignificant, to encompass what looked at us out of the Relic. Alive. And aware.
“Could you…” Liette approached Eldest with a reverence she’d never offered anything before. “Could you do that the entire time?”
“No.” Outside the barrier of the Relic, Eldest’s voice reached deeper into me, its every word like the plucking of a vein inside me as though it were a harp string. “Not until this moment.”
“Why?”
“Because this was the moment… I would need you.”
“Yeah, uh…” I stepped forward, glancing over the horrific, tumorous mass as much as I could stand. “I’m not sure how”—I gestured vaguely toward the thing-that-should-not-be—“this is going to help us get you out of here. You didn’t get any smaller, just… squishier.”
“A body is a husk. Nothing more. I require it no more than you require clothes.”
I didn’t want to think too hard about that.
“All that is required is this.”
I didn’t want to watch, either. But I couldn’t look away.
With the one arm that wasn’t a part of the skin, Eldest reached toward its chest. Its skin rippled, liquid and meaningless, as its fingers reached inside itself. The great mass of its entirety shuddered, tensed, as if holding a collective breath. Slowly, it withdrew its hand and reached out to Liette, its fingers unfurling. She studied it for a moment before tentatively cupping her hands together as it dropped something into her grasp.
It was beautiful.
A light. Radiant with colors I couldn’t have seen in my darkest dreams. They swirled over each other, clashing against each other, a chorus of brightness that fought, lived, died entire lives in the span of seconds.
“Is it…” Liette’s voice fell. Words seemed too impure to describe it. “Is this your heart?”
“If you wish it to be,” Eldest’s voice resonated from the light. “It is all that I have ever been. All that I ever will be. All that I have ever wanted… and all that I have ever failed to achieve.”
Her fingers shook as they curled around the light. Slowly, its radiance softened, weeping out between her fingers, until all that remained was a perfect sphere: prismatic, polished, and tiny.
“You will…,” Eldest’s voice ebbed out from it, “forgive me… one day…”
And it fell silent.
The great knotwork of flesh and sinew that had been Eldest’s body stiffened, going from tense to rictus taut. The mass grew darker, its glistening vibrancy draining with every moment and being replaced by a cracking, calcifying sound.
That noise crept across the abandoned husk. In its wake, every limb, every face, every eye and stalk and wing and finger was left petrified in pristine stone. The ethereally beautiful face of Eldest fell limp on its neck and, in the moments before it was forever frozen, I wondered if it didn’t wear a look of sadness.
Then I let my breath go. And Eldest became just another ancient thing, like all ancient things: gone without answers, having left us too many questions and not enough time to figure them out.
What had Eldest meant? Who was coming? What had it failed to achieve? What the fuck kind of horror was out there that a fucking Scrath was afraid of it?
Maybe I was being unrealistic expecting an ancient horror that had been, up until a few hours ago, a flying turd to make some fucking sense, but still—
“Huh. So it was real.”
A voice. Thick with exhaustion and long-dulled pains. A perfect match for the man who met my eyes when I whirled about, gun in my hand, to see him standing on the lower level.
Jero Erstwhile, a thick knife in his hand and blood painting his face, stared past me, past Liette, to the calcified husk of Eldest.
“I had no idea,” he said.