48: THE DOOMSDAY SOLUTION
Senera’s story The Lighthouse at Shadrag Gor
After talking to Jarith
“Can we undo the glyphs?” Thurvishar asked.
Senera turned to him. “What?”
“Can we undo the glyphs?” he repeated. “The sigils you created that are binding Kharas Gulgoth and Shadrag Gor together. Presumably, you needed to paint the glyphs at both locations to create the link. If we removed the glyphs at this end, we could break the link—”
Senera considered the idea. “Possible.”
“No,” Talea said. “It would work, but you’ll kill everyone in the mindscape.”
Senera stopped to give Talea a gimlet stare. She hated that Talea was right. Senera chewed on her lip and considered their options. Nothing good.
Lost in her own thoughts, she hadn’t noticed that Thurvishar was also lost in his. Until at last the man raised his head and said, “What if we linked Vol Karoth’s prison to the Nythrawl Wound?”
“I’m sorry,” Xivan said. “The what?”
Senera felt the idea like an electric shock. “The Nythrawl Wound is where the demons first entered this universe. It’s the gaping wound in reality that Relos Var is attempting to close. Why he created Vol Karoth. It’s on the other continent—Nythrawl.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work, Thurvishar. Even if we had sigils at the site of the wound—which we don’t have a way to carry out—transporting Vol Karoth to the wound isn’t the goal. We need to transport Vol Karoth to the other side. To the other universe. And we don’t have a way to do that.”
“We’d need something that originated in that universe,” Thurvishar mused.
The four people stared at each other. Then Talea stuck her head out the door and looked down the hall toward the Lighthouse. When she ducked back, she said, “Um, isn’t S’arric originally from that same universe?”
“Xaltorath certainly implied that,” Thurvishar said.
Xivan leaned forward. “Are you saying we can rid the world of Vol Karoth ourselves? Right now? Just draw a few of those glyphs and banish him to that other universe forever?”
Thurvishar thought about it for a minute. “Yes?”
“No,” Senera said. “No, wait.” She inhaled. “We can remove the sigil link here that ties the Lighthouse to Kharas Gulgoth, but not the one at Kharas Gulgoth itself. If we send Vol Karoth to that universe, it will cascade. The Lighthouse will go too.” She paused. “We’ll all go. We’ll all die.”
Everyone paused.
“But the world will be saved,” Xivan said.
“Maybe.” Senera hesitated. “Probably. At least from Vol Karoth.”
“I suppose that is a solution,” Thurvishar said carefully. “Just not a very good one.”
Kihrin’s story Inside Vol Karoth’s prison
Vol Karoth had moved Kalindra.
Jarith threw an absolute fit about it when we reached the spot where he’d claimed Kalindra waited, howling, screaming, and tearing apart the nearby stonework. The pain of his open yearning for his wife was hard to be near.
I sat down on a nearby bench and let the demon get it out of his system. This was a good place for it. The city streets here were especially dilapidated and ruined, with cracked roads and diseased trees.
Janel came over and put an arm around my shoulders. “You okay?”
I gave her a smile I knew was probably far too thin and weak to ever be taken as sincere. “I’ll be fine. He was a friend. This … Oh, this hurts.”
“Yes, that was the whole point,” she said bitterly. “And it’s my fault.”
“Janel, it’s not—”
“Xaltorath didn’t do this to Jarith to hurt you,” Janel whispered. “Don’t pretend otherwise.”1
We both took a moment to stare at the raging demon. Teraeth walked up then and sat down next to me, legs touching. He didn’t say a word. He just wanted me to know he was there. I set my hand on his leg.
I checked to make sure Galen wasn’t in hearing range. “Can he be cured?”
“I was,” Janel said, “but I was much younger when it happened, and I had Relos Var as my own personal mind physicker.” She took a deep breath. “Jarith hasn’t forgotten, you realize. I’ll tell you that right now. Nobody forgets. But Xaltorath has almost certainly locked those memories behind associations so painful Jarith’s mind is refusing to go anywhere near them. You can’t blame a person for not wanting to put their hand in a fire after they’ve been badly—” She paused and blinked. A funny look came over her face as her eyes slowly took in the scene in front of her. She looked around as if she hadn’t realized where we were. “Burned,” Janel finished, so softly I only heard her because I was right there.
“Are you all right?” Teraeth asked her.
She pulled herself up, but her eyes were shiny bright. “Fine. Just—” Janel glanced at me. “I think … I think Vol Karoth’s doing something similar. Separating out the memories too painful for him to face. That’s what the gray spaces are.” A flash of heartbreak seared across her eyes, a low and torturous piece of agony and grief. Whatever she’d just remembered, it had been bad; Jarith halted his tantrum as if Janel had started screaming and stared in her direction.
She had to be thinking about C’indrol, about S’arric. It had never really occurred to me how much this must be like … I didn’t know. Being a widow, I supposed, walking through the corpse of your memories of the man you once loved. Still loved.
Janel stood, suddenly. “Jarith, enough!” she shouted. “You’ve had your fun. Now it’s time to find your wife.”
“You’ve got to be joking,” Teraeth said.
I exhaled as I took in the scene in front of us. “Yeah,” I said. “Agreed.”
When Jarith finally located Kalindra, she wasn’t trapped in a dungeon or locked away in a vault or hidden in any of the illusion, trap-filled lairs that we’d become so familiar with.
She was on a roof.
Now the thing to understand was that a lot of these buildings were really tall. I’d always thought the buildings in the Capital were the tallest anywhere, since it wasn’t uncommon for buildings in the city to be five, six stories tall in places. But Karolaen’s buildings? Some of them were easily a dozen stories tall or higher. It was like someone had decided to build on a sky tree but instead of using a tree had just built the structure that tall. I assumed magic and lots of it kept the damn things up.
So this may explain why we didn’t go rushing in, even though it seemed like Kalindra was all by herself, not tied up, and without a single guardian in attendance anywhere.
“What happens if we fall from this height?” Galen asked. “Nothing’s real, right?”
“Nothing’s real, and everything’s real,” Teraeth said. “That’s the problem.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” Galen growled.
“Belief is important,” Janel said, “so yes, we can die here.”
Everyone looked at the woman standing on the roof.
**Kalindra.**
Before anyone could do anything else, the world changed.
Xivan’s reaction The Lighthouse in Shadrag Gor
After discussing how to destroy Vol Korath
The room was quiet—grave quiet, sepulchre quiet—when Xivan felt it.
She didn’t know quite how to describe the feeling except that it was the opposite of feeling like someone was walking over your grave.
It felt like she was walking over theirs.
“Kalindra,” Xivan murmured. “Kalindra’s in trouble.” She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, or at least not loudly, but evidently, in the morgue-quiet space, it had been more than loud enough.
“Yes,” Senera snapped, “I think we all know that.”
“No, there’s something—” Xivan stood and found herself pacing, her skin awash with the prickling feeling of ghostly premonition. She felt like she could hear Kalindra screaming, crying, begging. And yet, Xivan knew she wasn’t hearing any of that. Not with her ears. Not with her body.
“No,” Xivan whispered. “He’s lying to you. Don’t you dare believe him.”
That silence stretched out, pulled tight.
Snapped.
“Fuck it,” Senera said. She grabbed her brush and the inkstone and ran out of the room.
Xivan felt a rush of dread. She knew exactly where the wizard was heading.
“Senera!” Thurvishar yelled out and went chasing after her. So they all went. There were only the four of them left, after all. Might as well make it a party.
Entering the Lighthouse was painfully difficult. Xivan watched as the wizards started casting spells—a lot of spells—to protect themselves. It was so cold Xivan suspected the temperature itself would instantly freeze almost anything left out. The whole area was pitch-black, and any mage-light created died in seconds.
Oddly, as they approached the doorway, Vol Karoth was still visible. The inky blackness surrounding him only made the delicate blue halo around his body more obvious.
Xivan felt certain that anyone stepping into that room without wards would have died on the spot.
Senera didn’t try to erase any of the sigils on the walls, but she knelt at Vol Karoth’s feet and started sketching out sections on the floor.
“Senera,” Thurvishar said, “you can’t.”
She leaned back on her heels. “How does this change anything? If we get rid of the sigils to escape this place, everyone dies, and we don’t even know for sure it will work. If we stay, we’re no closer to doing something about Vol Karoth, he escapes, everyone dies. This is the only choice where he dies too.”
“Along with everyone else,” Talea said.
“That’s going to happen, anyway!” Senera shouted.
Xivan cleared her throat. “I agree with Senera—” she said.
“Thank you!” Senera crossed her arms over her chest.
“Which means it’s the wrong thing to do,” Xivan finished. She shrugged at the pale woman’s glare. “Look, I know myself well enough to know I don’t make the right call about these sorts of things. And neither do you, Senera.” Xivan gestured to Talea and Thurvishar. “So what do you two think?”
“I think this isn’t a decision that we get to make by ourselves,” Talea said. “It doesn’t just affect us.”
“Finish everything but the last part,” Thurvishar finally said. “Then come back inside. We’re done with stories. I’ll contact one of the others, and we’ll find out what everyone thinks. And if everyone agrees—everyone—then we’ll finish this.” He wore a sick, ugly expression as he glanced at Vol Karoth, still locked in place. “We’ll finish this once and for all.”
Kalindra’s story Inside Vol Karoth’s prison
Kalindra ran. The broken stones of the ruined city lacerated her feet until each step left red footprints behind her. All around her, her sins crowded closer, while behind … something worse pursued.
To her left, a man whose throat had been slit reached out for her, words blowing wetly from the gash across his neck. “I had a child who depended on me.” To her right, a younger man, barely more than a boy, held his head under one arm as he said, “My mother killed herself after my death.” Next to him, a man and woman rasped through throats crushed by her garrote, “We were going to get married.”
Ahead and behind were more, hundreds more. She knew each face. She’d killed each one. And behind that front line, hundreds more, thousands more; the faceless hordes of friends, families, loved ones. Those who had to live on in the aftermath of her murders, most of them never knowing why—why did their friends and families and loved ones have to die? And she couldn’t tell them, for she no longer knew herself.
The whim of a fickle, treacherous goddess, who didn’t even care enough to Return the loved ones of her own servants? Maybe there was no reason at all; maybe Thaena just liked it when people died.
She stumbled, caught herself before she went down. A hand brushed her shoulder, cold and clammy from the grave. She wrenched free and ran. The dead—her dead—pressed in on both sides.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was what followed behind her, keeping pace. Whispering to her. “Kalindra,” it said to her in a horrible parody of her dead husband’s voice. “Why didn’t you have me Returned? Why do you run from me, Kalindra? Kalindra the assassin. Kalindra the murderer. Kalindra the betrayer!”
The one time she had glanced back, she’d seen him. Not as he’d been in life but pale and worm-eaten, clothed in the wrong uniform, half of his jaw hanging off, infinite darkness where his eyes should have been.
How long had he chased her? It felt like days. Days of hearing the dead call out to her for justice, beg her for the life she stole back.
“Just let me see my sweetheart one last time.”
“My momma needs me; she’s old and won’t survive the winter without me.”
“It was just a candlestick. Did I need to die for so little?”
“Please, my baby is crying for me. Can’t you hear him?”
She stumbled again at that last one: she did hear a baby crying. Worse, she knew that voice.
Nikali.
She looked and saw him ahead of her. A basket sat on a stone plinth ahead, and her son fussed inside of it. She redoubled her speed, bleeding feet slapping wetly on the jagged stones as she raced for him. If she could reach him ahead of the tide of dead, she could keep him safe.
She would …
A darkness swept over everything and then retreated.
She leaned back as she stopped suddenly. In front of her was a cliff—the cliff outside the monastery at Devors. Below, far below, the sea crashed against the tumbled stones. She looked around. Where was Nikali?
But all she saw were the hordes of dead. Then she heard the voice again. Jarith’s voice. Only it wasn’t his voice; it was deeper, harsher, and dissonant, like a thousand souls in pain crying out simultaneously.
“Where is our son, Kalindra? He’s gone.”
“He … he was safe!” she cried out. “I … I made arrangements!” She whirled to face him, tears blurring her sight.
He laughed, dark and bitter as he pushed through the throng of corpses. “A deal? With the Lash? With the new goddess of death? You never learn, do you, Kalindra? Thaena was willing to sacrifice her own son; you think she cares one whit for ours? No, Kalindra, you left him there, alone and scared, while you brought down the wards. While you let the Lash and Drehemia and all these dead people into the monastery. They didn’t care who he was; he was just another annoying mortal to them. They didn’t even notice when they destroyed him.”
With every step he took, he changed. Step, and now he was a peasant who’s crime was owning land a Brotherhood client coveted. Step, and now he was a woman who had thought to cheat Death by having the Blue House make her young again, over and over. Step, and now he was a fellow killer, sent to eradicate the same target as she, but the Brotherhood brooks no competition, so she’d eliminated him as well.
“No!” Kalindra screamed. “It’s.… it’s not true!”
“Do you think Drehemia’s breath cared about your ‘deal’ with the Lash? Do you think that a Daughter of Laaka, animated by an artifact created by Rev’arric, cares about our child? He’s gone, Kalindra. He’s gone, and you killed him!” Now the creature who pursued her sounded empty and hollow, echoing as if speaking from inside a dark, fathomless cave.
Someone cried out behind her. She spun to look and saw, far below, the nacreous, rotting form of the Lash holding her baby high in the air for a moment … and then plunging him underwater and holding him there.
“No!” Kalindra screamed again until her throat gave out. Arms outstretched toward Nikali, her heart, already cracked almost to the point of no return from her husband’s death, shattered. She fell to her knees.
No. Thaena’s voice sounded harsh but more tender than she’d heard in years. He’s lying to you. Don’t you dare believe him.2
“Thaena?” But no, that was wrong. That had to be wrong. Thaena was dead.
Wait. She blinked and looked around.
How much of this was real? Was any of this real?
**Kalindra,** Jarith’s voice said. She almost turned to look at him. But no; he was dead, Nikali was dead. Tears streamed down her face to be washed away in the driving rain atop the cliff on Devors. Around her, the dead shuffled, moving toward her. They began to push her over the edge.
A hand grabbed her arm.
Everything changed. Kalindra blinked and looked around, perplexed. She was on top of a building somehow, in a gray and broken city. She felt cored, sliced open, hollowed out.
A hand touched her face. Kalindra flinched, before she saw the hand was attached to a man clothed in shadows and wisps of darkness, his face hidden behind a ceramic mask with no eyes.
**Kalindra.**
“Jarith,” she said, knowing it was he. Somehow, it was really he. How?
She didn’t know, and right then, she didn’t care. “Nikali?” she croaked.
**Still alive, still on Devors. Our son is alive,** the voice said directly into her mind, but it was his voice. She would know Jarith anywhere. She collapsed in his arms, crying.
The demon held her.