He feels the blast coming. The black matter of distant worlds races forward like an unstoppable engine. It burns inside and pounds against the shell of his flesh like a team of hammers.

He is a tunnel: a vortex. He senses the void buried in a hidden tunnel in his soul, a roiling black mass of destructive power. It burns like the flames of a thousand suns. In moments, it will find him, and everything will be lost.

He doesn't have much time.

He reels from another blow. Black metal scorches his skin and cleaves his spirit. He feels her pain and rage. The Soulweavers have tamed the disease inside her, but they could not eradicate it. As her sickness intensifies and the moment of his destruction draws near he feels his control slip. He is powerless to stop her, helpless, just a witness to the story of his own demise.

His team has come to save him. He'd hoped to resolve this without them, so they wouldn't be put at risk. He knew there was no way they’d let him march to his death on his own, even though he’d wanted them to.

I failed. Why should all of you have to die?

Ash is dead, or nearly so. Danica is dying at the hands of more of those bastard wraiths, half-shadow constructs formed from Soulrazor. Her spirit roars with hurricane force. It shreds dark bodies and lashes out with lightning tendrils that boil the ground.

He ducks beneath Soulrazor, and readies himself. His spirit grabs hold of him, cakes to his torso like a shell of shadow iron.

His body lifts from the ground.

Korva ascends with him. Swirling ebon blades follow in her wake: she rises on a stairway of knives. A shape takes form in the air behind her. It is a vast and dripping darkness, a ghost tapestry like a water-corpse continent. It is the firmament of pure night.

He sees through the cracked stars and glimpses the edge of the void. There is darkness, deep and cold and without end.

We come for you, the voices say.

He sees them. They are riders at the head of a vast black storm, undead gods with midnight hearts and cloaks of burning skies. Their scaly limbs are like the skin of dragons, and they yield blades made from behemoth black bones. Their size defies comprehension, stretches the limits of his consciousness.

We come for you. Your death marks the passage. You are us: you are the door.

He knows it’s not true. The Soulweaver has tamed the dark energies inside him

 

but that will not stop them from erupting only delays the effect so you have not died before now but he stares into their meteor hearts and feels the darkness roar inside him towards him at once worlds distance and yet there with him scratching the skin of his soul and he witnesses the truth of what they mean

 

I am the cause, he realizes. I am the detonation that tears through the worlds. I am what triggered The Black, a blast now that rips into the past the future the now God no!!!

He roars. His spirit howls with him, and their cries resonate across the face of the Earth in a fierce and violent wave.

Half-ghosts try to avoid him, but the earthen components of their bodies shatter into dust. Korva is thrown back. Soulrazor slips from her grasp. The midnight blade falls to the ground and lands hard in the stone, point down. The sky shakes when the dark edge slices into the rock.

He falls. His spirit abandons him, leaves him alone so he plummets and crashes.

His left arm takes the brunt of the impact, and he hears a sickening snap. He howls in pain. Dust cakes his face and blood clogs his raw throat.

Jennar comes at him. The Black has taken over that body that should have long since fallen. The ebon skyshapes bristle with glee as the nihilist mercenary raises the nightlance and brings it down into Cross’ thigh. Midnight steel sears through his muscles. He screams, but at that same moment he brings Avenger up and pushes it what is left of Jennar's shattered skull.

Still the madman won't die. Inky liquid leaks from his wounds. Jennar's eyes flash white. He rips the nightlance free from Cross’ leg, and Cross almost passes out from pain.

Kane grabs Jennar from behind and puts a knife in his back. The Black-infused warrior swings round and knocks Kane back and into the air. He soars for a moment, then lands with a crash.

Jennar’s face pulls apart like a slipping mask. Something black is underneath, so dark it pains the eyes to look at it.

A spirit circles Cross and pulls him off the ground. His leg and arm go numb beneath the vaporous touch of a male ghost. At first he thinks the spirit belongs to Ash, but after a moment he recognizes its signature.

Danica stands just a short distance away. She is covered in cuts and shadow blood. Her face is stained with darkness, and her eyes shine like arctic suns.

Ronan stands over Maur and pushes their foes back. Ash stirs behind them. She pummels Korva with her spirit’s power as the men rush to her aid.

Korva’s wings unfold. She has kept them concealed until now, folded like retractable claws beneath her leather armor. Each razor wing has been grafted straight through the skin and onto her bones. Her arms are laced with blade spurs and fused to strips of metal, like gauntlets bonded to her skin. Her wings shine sharp in the failing light.

Ash’s spirit strikes at Korva with a battery of ice blades.

Black’s spirit holds Cross aloft and keeps him safe from Jennar’s strikes. The crumbling assassin gives up, and turns for Soulrazor.

The blade stands at the center of the battle. The seven combatants almost form a ring around the sliver of meteor steel embedded in the blood rock. The dusk mist hangs low and still, and the ruins of the city seem to freeze in perimeter around them. They are all poised, all within reach of the sword.

Korva leaps forward to claim the dark blade, and Ash’s spirit explodes against her. Shards of ice fill the air with bladed snow. They are fragments of grey glass, knife stars embedded in the skin of moments.

Those bladed ice tears hang in stasis. The air is frozen plasma. Firmaments of debris lie embedded in the atmosphere like dead flies in honey.

Ash screams, and falls. She is sliced to ribbons by her own exploding spirit.

Korva flies through the explosion. Her face is a ruin of cuts, but her wings relentlessly propel her forward. She extends her armored hands so she can grasp the dark blade.

Ronan leaps at her, and Maur reaches for Ash.

Cross wills Black’s spirit to release him, to pitch him forward. His own spirit is still there somewhere, but hidden from him, taken by a sudden need that defies his own.

He flies forward. Air whips against his face. He feels like he has been frozen here for ages, waiting, poised to strike, ready to finally earn his freedom from this perpetual prison of moments.

Avenger slices Korva’s head clean from her shoulders moments before her fingers close around Soulrazor. Her eyes glaze as her head topples to the ground.

Black blood splashes onto his face, and he is back in that room, in the chamber of dead girls. He feels slathering wet jaws and iron tongues probe his submerged body. He feels grave-rot fingers and the kiss of dead fish as they suckle on his flesh. He falls into the waters, again and again.

Korva’s body crashes and slides across the ground. Her blade wings explode.

He lands hard on his face. Ash lies there with him, facing him, her eyes glazed and her skin so badly sliced and scarred he can barely recognize her.

You lost Grissom, he thinks sadly. I’m sorry, Ash. I’m so sorry.

Flaming black rock falls from the sky like lost stars. They leave wide trails of dark smoke in their wake. It looks as if some vast claw has torn open the night.

He lays there in pain, only half-conscious. He can’t move. His lungs are filled with ice crystal. Every breath makes him wince.

He stumbles to his feet. His legs can barely support his weight. He still holds Avenger in his hand. It is bloody and heavy, and the handle is slick against his skin.

Jennar fights on. His ruined face mirrors the animate shadow substance of his missing hand, a hazy cluster of darkness. Kane and Ronan battle him, but even injured he is more than a match for them both.

He is fueled by The Black. How can we defeat that?

Everything has slowed. Blasts detonate nearby, but they are muffled, as if they come from underwater. Broken rubble and glass shards glance off of him. He feels blood on his cheek.

He looks up. What he thought were meteors have landed. They surround the clearing and circle the dark blade as it thickens time and turns the air around it to sludge.

They are not meteors, but women, razor-winged women with blades.

Avatars.

A dozen avatars, come to claim the sword even though their master, their creator, is gone.

He feels the darkness rise. A black heartbeat tears at him from within. Dark matter like sick oil leaks out of his skin.

The avatar’s curved gray blades drip electric water onto the ground. Their hollow eyes cast the air in a ghastly green light, and their wings interlock and fill the air with a violent hum.

Jennar flees. His form ripples and vanishes into the folds of time.

The shadow wights are gone. The team faces a new set of enemies now.

Kane and Ronan, released from their battle with Jennar, turn and fire their rifles at the avatars. Most of the bullets bounce off of folded wings of reflective organic metal that wrap around the women’s bodies like shields. The few bullets that do find purchase rip away chunks of undead flesh, but the slugs don’t seem to do any real harm to the avatars at all.

The women move in unison. Their bodies exude silver dust. They use their blades to cut each another in the thighs or arms to prove the sharpness of their weapons. Dark blood flows from the wounds and sprays on the ground like hot oil.

The women hover, and draw close.

The pulse of that massive heart drowns out all other sound. He hears nothing but the pulse, and he sees nothing but the undead angels.

There are only moments left now. Seconds.

He feels destructive power burn inside him. It will break free at any moment. He feels forces of light and dark

 

light and dark

 

push against one another like rabid animals locked at the horn. The combination of those energies is vitriolic, venomous and toxic, a living bomb that will literally tear a hole in time when it goes off.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

He takes a step forward, and puts a hand on Soulrazor’s hilt.

The darkness in him swells, and the black whispers tear at his mind. His veins pulse and throb. His fingernails turn black, and his broken arm animates. The pain is intense, but the limb moves forcefully, possessed by a strength he has never known. Ooze darkness wraps around his skin. His flesh takes on a ghastly hue as he pulls the sword from the ground.

Avenger repulses Soulrazor’s energies. While Avenger has nowhere near the same level of power as Soulrazor, he senses something shift deep in his blade, some cleft of pale and primordial power.

The darkness inside him hesitates. It could overtake his body like oil spilled over a cloth, but it doesn’t. It recedes.

The avatars move in silence. Their glassy eyes and mottled blonde hair and blood-soaked limbs are rigid as their knife-sharp wings propel them through the air.

They ignore the rest of the team. Kane and Ronan wrestle one of the women to the ground and decapitate her, but not before the razor wings lash out in defense and cut them both. Danica impales two more on spears of dark ice and drives their bodies into the ground, where they continue to hover for a moment before whatever force it is that animates them finally expires.

The rest of the avatars come right at Cross.

He pushes the two blades flat together. Opposing magnetic energies tense and wrack his body with pain.

His eyes narrow. He thinks of the dead girls in the Spire, of what they must have suffered. He doesn’t want them to suffer any more.

His vision goes white. He sees everything through a ghostly lens. The world glows like fiery milk.

The energies within him coil and seethe like a reactor. He hears his own heartbeat, and he feels it slow. The lens of reality pulsates with every beat. The sky cracks and shatters.

The first avatar comes at him with her razor wings extended, and he destroys her with the unified blade. Avenger and Soulrazor are joined now, a harlequin sword. They breathe streams of black and white fire that sear the air. A cloud of flame encircles him.

The avatar falls, consumed by the blaze. She is a pile of smoking debris before she hits the ground.

Another avatar attacks. The beat is slower now. He counts long pauses between each pulse. He feels his life-force leak like water and steam. Avatars draw near and explode beneath the power of the joined blades.

This is a power that has created worlds, he realizes. Created them, and destroyed them.

Angels collapse into ash. He walks through drifts of divine dust and the scattered remains of undead goddesses.

His skin is soiled. Dirt and refuse turn his flesh grey.

A woman stands just out of sight, shrouded in darkness. Her cold eyes are filled with hate.

He draws a deep breath. Something inside him goes as still as crystal. A sound like exploding earth rumbles in his soul. The heartbeats have grown distant to each other. Everything freezes.

The avatars have all been destroyed. Nothing but a circle of pale dust remains. The blades smolder his fingers and burn his hands. Carbon smoke leaks into the sky.

He stops. Everything is still. He is held in stasis in the battered moment.

He looks to the sky, and sees the rip. It is not an actual hole, but a fold in the clouds, a wound through which he glimpses other worlds. Watery images bleed like blood rain.

He sees Thornn, and the keep. He sees the crater and the dark edge of reality.

Another beat. His body trembles. The sky buckles and folds. For a moment, he fears it will tear, but it holds firm.

It is time.

He steps away and uses the blade to cut a swath in the ground, a cold rip through which his body falls.

He plummets into a dark void of formlessness. He no longer stands at the border of worlds where his home can be harmed.

I did it. I will die alone.

He finds himself over a vast sea.

He falls towards the Keep.

It looks different now. Perhaps it is years since he has last seen it. It is still unmanned and abandoned, a place forgotten in the pages of time. The sea is turgid and thick. He sees the horizon, impossibly far away. The shadow mist recedes. He sees the ground, not as distant as he’d thought, cold grey earth covered with green grass. Stones mark the beach. A small cottage waits in the distance.

He falls through the sky. Cold wind ripples through his hands and freezes his skin. His breaths come in short bursts as he plummets toward the ocean. There is no sound.

He is just above the waters when the darkness inside him finds its purpose. He feels a moment of peace – a memory of Snow as they stand at the edge of Thornn and look at the white apple on the tree – before the energies soundlessly consume him. He feels a burst of pain, like he is cut from within by a cold blade, but then it is over.

The blast tears him apart. He sees it at a distance, a spectator to his own doom.

Black dust strikes the surface of the waters and scatters on the waves. Rolling clouds of smoke silently race to the horizon and turn the sea black with heat.

The sound comes then, a virulent explosive wave, a thundering detonation. The water boils and erupts. The air turns brittle, cracks, and falls like dark rain.

Blazing pillars of ghost flame blast open the sky.

In moments, everything is gone. Somehow he still sees it, this distended destruction, this remote view of an end.

He is content with the knowledge that it didn’t happen the way Jennar had wanted it to…that nothing more than this remote and forgotten place is destroyed.

Thornn is safe.

The thought keeps his soul warm as it is swept away.