sixteen

wastelands

 

 

 

Her vision stretches across skies of blood and fire. Drifts of airborne ash collide with the wreckage of unmanned dirigibles, floating coffins that litter the skyscape. Crumbling towers are cast headlong into the river at the valley floor, and blocks of sandstone tumble in slow motion. Shattered wires spark electricity against the snow banks.

Most of the city is flattened from within by a cold explosion of arctic flames that scorch the buildings white and blast windows away like sheets of brittle frost. Thick plumes of sick smoke twist into the air. The snow that falls is soiled and dark and smolders on the ground like cinder tears.

She drifts, a prisoner of the scene. She is a shadow, and she fades like the smoke. She melts and descends, is torn again from one reality to another. She cannot believe this is real, even as memories of the battle race through her ethereal mind, even as she sees the moments that lead to the blast, the winding heartbeat. The countdown.

Cross.

It was Cross, stuck in that shimmering mirror, that memory she’s forgotten, or else dismissed as a dream. A memory of a time that hasn’t happened, or is yet to happen.

She falls, desperate, to the ruins below. The shadows melt and rain to the ground.

 

Black fell to her knees. The ground was hard and jagged, and she sliced open her hand as she used it to stop her face from hitting the broken sidewalk.

She felt like she’d just stepped off of a fast-moving boat. Her stomach lurched, and for a moment she was so dizzy she didn’t dare try to stand up.

Danica grabbed her kukris from the ground. The muscles in her back ached as she stood and gazed into the wasteland city.

She had no doubts the ruins she looked upon were those of Thornn. She recognized the cobble streets, the rust-red lanes, the sandstone residences. But everything had been blasted apart, and the ruins were covered in dark scorch marks and drops of caustic liquid.

An absence hung in the air. A mage could always note the presence of other living beings, especially in an area as densely populated as Thornn. Even if no specifics could be felt, there was always a sense of life, an overabundant presence of energies.

Now, there was nothing.

Black slowly turned and looked around. She saw Ronan and Kane, both battered and bruised. Like her, they’d fallen hard, and their bodies were covered in scrapes and cuts where sharp stones had penetrated their clothing and armor. Ash and Maur had landed a little further away.

There was no sign of Jennar, or Cross.

But she saw Korva, off in the distance.

They’d landed in the center of what used to be Thornn’s city square, the junction between the residential Grange District and the Centertown business area, where everything from weapons and grammaphones to beer and bread could once be bought at almost any hour of the day or night. The statue of the White Mother had been blasted away – all that was left were her bare feet – and most of the shops Danica used to frequent had been turned to piles of stone, metal and rebar. Clouds of dust and smoke still clung to the ground, as if the devastation had just happened. The air smelled toxic.

Danica stumbled forward a step, and almost tripped on the severed limb of a gargoyle.

The smoking remains of an Ebon Cities warship lay in the middle of the square, and it had apparently landed on the howitzer that had shot it down. Fires still raged in streets she’d once walked. Cables and wires that had once connected the upper floors of buildings dangled and cast showers of smoking sparks.

“What the hell?” Kane coughed. “Danica, what’s going on?”

“Jesus,” Ash muttered. “Is this Thornn?”

“Bitch!” Ronan shouted, and he took up his MP5 and fired at Korva. She was several hundred meters away, bloodied and bruised but still alive. Danica saw no sign of the black blade as the former Revenger returned fire with an auto-pistol before she ducked out of sight around a fallen building. Ronan kept firing.

“Ronan, save your ammo, God damn it!” Black yelled. “Does anyone see Cross?!”

Kane shook his head. He looked like he was on the edge of panic. Ronan just looked like he was on the edge of sanity.

Maur moved close to them as he reloaded. Ash quietly stood nearby, as shell-shocked as the rest of them.

“What the hell…?” Black said.

“C’mon, we’ve done this,” Kane said, out of breath. “Danica, we were…we were here, weren’t we…?”

“Of course we were here,” Maur muttered. “It’s Thornn.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Kane said. “We…fought this battle. There were Razorwings and war wights…and something in the sky, some…”

“Portal,” Black finished, and she looked up and saw it in her mind’s eye.

A watery hole. A undoor. A slipstream to another world, and through it I saw Shadowmere Keep.

“We’re in the future,” she said. “But it’s a possible future. We can change this.”

“How do you know that?” Ronan barked. He dropped his MP5 and pulled out his katana.

“Dani?” Ash asked. She looked weary, and beaten. “How do you know that?”

“Think about it,” Black said. Her head buzzed with questions. Saying it all out loud was the only way to work through it. “This battle took place before we left Thornn to follow Cross,” she continued. “Remember?” She received half-hearted nods in reply. She knew how they felt – everything in her mind was inconstant, like she’d had too much to drink, but there was clarity hidden there, a certainty that her instincts were correct. “In order for us to have even left Thornn in the first place…we had to have survived. Which means that we came from some alternate timeline where this didn’t happen.”

She loaded her Colt Python and holstered it, then drew her blades. Her spirit soared out of the sky like an angry hawk, and her lungs cooled when she breathed in his essence.

“You lost me,” Kane said.

“We’re from a timeline, a sequence of events, where the destruction of Thornn never occurred,” she explained. “It couldn’t have, or else we wouldn’t have lived long enough to make it to Wolftown, or to that crater.”

“But we remember it,” Ronan said. “My memory of this battle is only vague, but…I do remember it. I remember…dying here…”

“That gate,” Ash said with sudden realization. “The Shadowmere. All of this…we’re living in fragments. We’re seeing other times, other worlds. We’re traveling through places where we don’t belong.”

“And I think that damn sword is the key,” Black nodded. “Korva had those avatar soldiers constructed so they could protect her from Jennar, because whatever that sword is, he wants it, too.”

“You didn’t tell me he was a friggin’ supernatural monster,” Kane said angrily.

“He wasn’t,” Danica said sharply. “His sword makes him dangerous…but not like this. I think he has traces of The Sleeper inside him.”

The look on Kane’s face was that of utter despair.

“Are you fucking KIDDING ME?!”

“Why are we standing around here?” Ronan barked. “If there’s even a chance we can save Cross, get back to a time where this bullshit didn’t happen, and kill that bitch, then let’s move our asses.”

“Yeah,” Kane said with a nod. “For once I’m in total agreement with Psychos R’ Us here. Let’s move.”

“Carefully,” Black said. “Ash, you’re with me. Maur, watch our backs.” She nodded at Kane and Ronan. “Go ahead, boys.”

“Jennar is mine,” Kane said plainly.

“You think you can take him?” Ronan chided. They spread out and started down the hill that led to the blasted and smoking remains of Centertown.

Danica expected Kane to reply to Ronan with some macho and smartass response, but he didn’t.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But he killed the only person I’m ever going to love. So I’m sure as hell going to try.”

They descended to a place of blood and wreckage. Stone and metal refuse covered the ground in an almost scale-like pattern. Smoldering bones and the burned husks of undead meat filled the air with vile fumes.

Several of the streets had actually collapsed into the shallow sewage system, and moving through the air near those crashed lanes was like walking through a film of melting fat. The half-shattered remains of buildings loomed overhead, and thin beams of light seeped through the cracked ruins and illuminated the dust and smoke. The air was hot and stale, and every step sent up clouds of debris. Their passage was anything but silent – everything they stepped on or touched shattered into dust.

“God,” Ash choked. “I…I can’t believe this…”

“Don’t,” Black said sharply. “It never happened. And it never will.”

Still, it was difficult to navigate the city without being reminded of nights spent drinking and carousing with Cross and Kane, or nights with Cole, even though the two of them had never spent that much time in Thornn together, as they preferred the rough-and-tumble criminal port city of Kalakkaii.

They saw shreds of clothing and broken dolls, shattered walking sticks and carts of scorched produce, collapsed storefronts and broken wheels, fragments of newspaper and torn shoes.

The ghostly silence unnerved Danica, the utter lack of whispers or voices or heartbeats, where before there had been so many.

Ash was crying. Danica wanted to round on her, tell her to stop, but she wouldn’t. It didn’t matter if she cried for the city or for her brother. It wasn’t Black’s place to tell the older witch what she should be feeling.

“Are you okay?” Maur asked from behind them.

Ash cleared her tears, and took a breath.

“Yes.”

The witches coordinated their spirits and conducted an arcane reconnoiter of the remains of Thornn. The spirits floated in and out of structures, drifted through collapsed buildings and into shattered bomb-shelters, moved through homes whose inhabitants had all been turned to dust, and then drifted up into the dark clouds gathered over the city.

“This way!” Black shouted, and she ran up what used to be Clock Street, towards its intersection with Halo Lane. The road was cracked down the center, like a seam had been split. Piles of shattered slate and broken bricks formed narrow paths.

“We have to hurry!” Ash said.

They were ambushed when they reached the intersection. Black’s spirit noted the presence of the war wights just seconds before they sprang out of the shadows, and she barely had time to lift her spirit and form a shield before the first claws came at her.

These were not normal war wights. Their flesh was blistered black and covered in thick white veins that oozed phosphorescent bile. Dark dust billowed out of their wide eyes and the pores in their cracked skin. It was as if they wore cloaks made of greasy soot.

Gunfire blazed hot and turned the air yellow and white. The wights threw themselves at the team with abandon. Kane gunned two of them down with his M4, while Ronan sliced one wight’s head clean away just moments before its claws would have found his throat. Maur blasted through another wight’s mid-section at point-blank range with the mini-uzi – his battle-cry was almost louder than the gunfire, and it took Danica by surprise – and Ash’s spirit pulled down another undead and sliced it in half.

Black’s spirit coiled around her katars and encased them in black ice. A wight leapt into the air and jumped against a shattered stone wall as it tried to disorient her and come at her from behind. Black turned and severed its claw at the wrist, then drove her second blade through its undead skull.

Once the wights were dispatched, the team moved on to the intersection at the top of the hill.

Those undead were summoned by the blade, Danica realized. They weren’t animated, but constructed, fabricated by the same energy that Jennar yields.

At the top of the street, in a ruined courtyard in front of the smashed and ruined remains of the hospital fortress of Thornn, they found who they were looking for.

Cross was on his knees. He coughed up blood that splattered all over the ground.

Strangely, Jennar was on the ground, as well, and he clutched a stomach wound that gushed black blood.

Korva stood over them both with the black blade in her hands. Drops of cold matter fell from the tip of the sword. Its meteoric face glimmered in the fading light.

The former Revenger turned and looked at the team as they came over the rise. Her eyes shone darkly, and an aura of malice surrounded her. Her smile was wicked, and her curly blonde hair lifted in the black breeze.

“You’re too late,” she laughed. “Not only will I end the war, but I will claim dominion over this world, and all worlds like it. I will no longer be an avatar, but the Goddess, reborn.”

“What’s this crazy bitch talking about?” Kane muttered. He stepped up and shot at Korva without hesitation. Black followed his lead and released her spirit in a phalanx of white spears laced with tendrils of dripping fire.

Korva raised the blade, and shards of darkness tore away from the crystalline face like an undulating wave of vaporous spiders. Bullets melted like butter put to a flame, and Black rocked back on her heels as her spirit collided with something that felt like an iron wall. The shield was nearly translucent, a film of petrified blood.

“Kill her!” Kane yelled, and he fired at Korva again and raced forward.

The sword hissed. Night’s veins bled at its touch, and darkness oozed in its wake.

Ghastly forms took shape in the darkness. Creeping vines of shadow leaked out of Korva’s body and covered the ground. Her veins turned dark, like she’d been filled with oil. A column of shadow formed around her body like a brittle cyclone. Licks of dark lightning danced away and stretched out like the tentacles of some oblique sub-aquatic marauder.

Shadows melted into the semblance of leering spectral faces, long-limbed visages with grim melting mouths that dripped ectoplasmic drool.

Within moments, a dozen half-ghosts surrounded the team. They were vaguely humanoid shapes with elongated limbs and pugnacious canine jaws hobbled together with bits of detritus and wreckage used as makeshift weaponry, glass and stone and steel fused into hammers, wedges and knives.

Blades met blades and magic tore through wraith-flesh. Sharp stones slashed open skin and gun blasts ripped apart carapaces of street armor.

Ronan and Kane fearlessly stepped forward and hacked their way through undead enemies. Ash cast her spirit around their blades to form thin layers of heat energy, a hellish vorpal sheen that gave the weapons unequalled sharpness. The two warriors slashed at undead golems with swords of pulsing flame.

Black hacked through battling corpses. Her weapons reflexively deflected stone blades and asphalt fists. Strong and fast though they were, Korva’s constructs lacked any true fighting skill. The war wights and Vath of the Ebon Cities were animated with recollection of the martial skill they bore in life, but these shadow constructs were made from the raw soul-matter of lost lives, and they bore no memory of anything they’d once known.

Black rolled between the shadow golem’s predictable attacks with ease, and she jettisoned sorcerous energies behind her that tripped the bulky physical aspects of the constructs and forced them to discorporate. They broke into unstable shades long enough for her to swing backwards and rend them into shards of spectral matter.

Danica charged Korva. The avatar waited, possessed by the magnitude of arcane power stored within the sword, the same power held by The Sleeper, dank and dirty, a corruptive mass of shadow filth and life-draining vapor. The light in Korva’s eyes was unholy, like burning pits of phosphorous.

Their blades clashed, and Black was thrown backwards and through the air. The world spun. She landed in a heap against the side of the hill, and felt something snap in her leg. Pain shot up her thigh and into her stomach. She screamed as a pulse of necrotic power hit her like a controlled tornado.

Danica’s vision blurred. The sky grew dark. Shadows bled through the clouds like poison.

Cross leapt up and stabbed Korva in the back with Avenger. Her scream ripped open the air. It was no human cry, but something that sounded like a thousand bats, or the call of a dread lizard.

The air grew heavy. Danica felt time slow. The atmosphere throbbed, and the sky rippled and pulsed. Everything shook, as if from the force of a vast footfall.

The world hollowed, turned inside out, vibrated.

The pulse came again, closer this time, sooner than the last.

The countdown.

But that’s impossible, she thought. The explosion already happened.

No, she realized. It hasn’t happened yet, not in this timeline. But it will. That explosion…it must tear through to the past. But where does it originate from? The sword? Korva?

Danica rose, and she nearly blacked out from the pain in her leg. Darkness swam around her vision.

Korva and Cross locked blades while the rest of the team battled the ghosts. Maur screamed when a stone sword caught him in the shoulder. Kane ripped through the spectral attacker with a howl. Ronan stood over Ash, who bled from both of her arms. The swordsman held a pair of undead warriors at bay.

Cross raised his blade. Korva’s defenses had dropped, just for a moment, but another pulse came. He fell back and clutched his chest. Waves of black and white heat rippled up and down his unstable body. He shimmered and faded before he regained control, and by then he was forced to deflect Korva’s renewed assault.

From Black’s perspective, Avenger seemed to be the equal of Korva’s black blade. They sparked against each other with deafening rings of power that exploded in bursts of ice and fire.

Cross was winded, and it seemed it was a struggle for him to even remain standing. Coal shadows clung and leaked from his body. He fought to keep something held within.

Cross, Danica realized. Cross is the bomb.

She saw something. Black pulled her spirit tight, and prepared him.

Korva turned to shove her blade into Cross’ exposed midsection, but he raised Avenger and countered with his own blow.

Danica’s spirit flew past Cross and slammed into Jennar, who’d come out of nowhere and aimed his nightlance squarely at Cross’ back. Black’s spirit was a jumble of crooked cold razors and jets of black steam that sliced Jennar open. Shadows exploded out of his body, a rapid mass of darkness that seethed with pain and fury.

Kane leapt forward and crushed Jennar’s skull into a pulp with a clean swing of his blade.

Cross and Korva battled on. Every strike of their weapons made the air bleed with metal noise. Arcane ghosts circled them like a pack of spectral wolves. The air was thick with shadow grit and explosive waves of light. The ground beneath them smoldered and turned pale.

Maur was down, Kane and Ronan were injured and overwhelmed, but they all fought on. Danica couldn’t tell if Ash was dead or unconscious, so she used her spirit to lift the other witch’s body to safety.

But a claw tore into Danica’s shoulder, and it pulled her back and into a mass of murderous shadows.