Pain split Rosie’s head apart. An image of bright-edged blackness filled her vision. She couldn’t see or think. The world roared.
She became aware that the steel band around her forearm was Sam’s hand, that he was dragging her along with him as they ran for their lives downhill among a mass of moving shadows. A violent thunderstorm ravaged the sky. All around there were shouts and screams, snatched away on a tornado. Ferocious blasts of wind ripped branches from the trees, nearly swept them off their feet.
Rosie cried out as flying twigs lashed her. Something was coming after them. That was all she knew. The scar on her ribs was a circle of fire.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Through a jagged, blinding aura she saw humps that could have been rocks or fallen Aetherials. No rain fell; the atmosphere was heavy with electricity. Lightning drenched Freya’s Crown, making it jump between light and dark. The towering, burning shadow that was Brawth could not be seen clearly—it was simply everywhere, inescapable.
“… get off the hill before we get fried,” Sam was saying; she could barely hear him. Fleeing figures scattered like cockroaches retreating from light. She heard their fading cries of alarm. She recognized no one.
“Where’s Luc?” she managed to say.
“Don’t know,” Sam answered, breathless. “Couldn’t see Dad either.”
They stumbled downhill, bending low like swimmers against a current. Roof slates flew. The sky was full of thunderheads that glowed reddish black like plumes from a volcano. Rosie felt energy rushing up from the ground, heat haze or invisible flames. The wind screamed. It was a terrible noise, like machinery—trains roaring and the zing of overhead cables strained to breaking.
By the time they entered the tree line they’d lost everyone. Rosie fought snagging branches in a state of pure panic. The look on Sam’s face, she’d seen before only when they began to cross the Causeway; blank, suppressed terror. Pain knifed her skull. With it came fear, psychic certainty that the vast, unseen enemy was in pursuit. They were running in slow motion as it crossed the sky to claim them. Brawth, the great ice shadow whose destruction helped create the Aetherial race… who now came again to unmake them.
* * *
The moment Lucas felt the Gates open—felt all that massive resistance give in to his will—the wrath of the universe fell on him. A bolt of lightning flung his mind into Asru. He saw a huge basalt statue poised on a black mountain above the Abyss; saw it come to life, raising its head to hear Lawrence’s summons. He saw it rise up and come half-striding, half-flying along the Causeway, ponderous with menace yet weightless, as black as space and as blinding as multiple suns—a paradox that turned his mind inside out.
He saw the spectral ancients of the Spiral Court fleeing in panic, Estel in owl form perched on a branch of the World Tree, simply watching the end of the world as she’d watched the beginning, and Albin a streak of white on the darkness, head thrown back, screaming…
The scream was coming from Luc’s own throat. He came back to reality amid howling wind and thunder, to find his father pinning him to the ground. Lawrence’s face was contorted with anguish, his eyes crazed. Luc’s blind instinct was to run, but powerful arms held him rigid.
“It’s here.” Lawrence’s voice was a rasp of torment. “Now do I throw you into its path as a sacrifice, my dearest son? Will that appease it? A loss great enough to lay it to rest? If it consumes the last Gatekeeper, will that bring us peace? Can I do it?”
Lucas opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. Lawrence’s questions were unanswerable. He thought he was about to take the last plunge into the Abyss after all—and he rejected it. Screaming soundlessly, he fought with every atom of his will, but his body was pinioned. Pain racked his limbs as the madman that used to be Lawrence twisted him to face the Shadow in the sky, offering him up…
“No,” choked Lawrence. The words were savage sobs. “I can’t. Not you, never. I won’t let it take you! Go, Lucas. Run!”
He was released, almost thrown onto his feet. The sensory assault overwhelmed him. He fled, struggling through a sea of people, all stripped of identity by terror. For a few moments Lawrence was running beside him—then the writhing chaos separated them, and Lucas was fleeing alone, lost. It was the last he saw of Lawrence.
* * *
On the hillside, Sapphire had been squeezed to the edge of the crowd, no Aetherial caring that she was there. Well, they’d done it, forced Lawrence to his knees. Strange, she felt no sense of triumph after all. Her head ached. She heard the voices of Luc and Lawrence—the latter’s words raising the hairs on her neck, “Let them have their way”—but Freya’s Crown appeared only as a plug of sheared rock to her. What did they see that she could not?
Pressure built in the air, so powerful that even a human sensed it. She felt the static tension of thunder rising. She caught her breath on a thrill of terror as reality deformed around her and suddenly she saw. The landscape was bathed in reddish storm-light. In a rush of exhilaration she knew that Lawrence had misled her; a human could enter other realms, if only for a heartbeat.
The rock split, the storm broke. The effect upon the Vaethyr was astounding. They were crying out, clawing at their heads and eyes. Fleeing, they scattered in all directions as if a bomb had exploded among them.
Sapphire was almost knocked over in the rush. She dropped behind a rock and clung there, while lightning tongued the clouds and a humid gale snatched her hair. Although she couldn’t see what had panicked them, she felt something—an invisible freezing veil brushing over her, almost unraveling her sanity in a single touch—then gone.
Within seconds the hill was deserted. Between dazzling light and darkness, she couldn’t see, couldn’t stand up against the gale. The air whirled with flying debris. The creaking and ripping of sapwood sounded horrific. She sat tight, waiting for the storm to subside.
This was what it came to, dealing with Aetherials. Disaster.
She was looking straight at the pleated face of Freya’s Crown when she saw movement in the dip below. In dark intervals, she lost it, but when eerie light bleached the landscape she saw it again, each time closer to her, as if stop-frame animated. A big man, skin burnished red-brown, heavy eyebrows quirking up like goat horns, scruffy khaki shirt and shorts…
She stared at this impossible creature moving towards her. Where could he have appeared from… except the Gates? Time froze. She knew him. No.
He staggered the last few steps towards her, hands raised as if to propitiate the storm. She saw the bleeding bullet hole in his chest. Then he collapsed. Sapphire tried to shout, but no sound came.
When she reached him he was near death, eyelids flickering, a groan issuing from his lips. “Papa,” she whispered.
“My Maria Clara.” His voice was rusty. “My princess.”
“It’s all right, Papa.” She stumbled over the words in her urgency, knowing this was her one chance. “I did everything we planned. Ruined Lawrence, destroyed his family, draped myself head to foot in his wretched jewels. He killed you, but you took him with you. We won. We won!”
He was too weak to answer, but a smile broke on the dying face. He pawed at her arm, as if to say he understood. “Papa,” she said, her tears falling onto him.
With the next blaze of lightning, he was a corpse—no, a carcass, flesh vanishing from his bones as she watched. Lawrence’s monstrous enemy Barada, emissary of the implacable ice giant Brawth—meat for wild animals. When the lightning flared again, he was gone.
“Rest, Papa,” whispered Sapphire. She bent forward over her knees with her arms around herself to hold in the grief, hold his spirit to her. “We can rest now.”
* * *
Sam and Rosie broke from the trees and covered the last stretch of garden towards sanctuary. They glimpsed distant figures fleeing down the drive. Gaining the rear corner of Stonegate, they folded themselves into the back wall to find some protection from the wind. Rosie gasped for breath. Her mouth tasted of metal.
“Did you see where Luc went?” she said, when she could speak.
“No.” Sam spat out a leaf, wiped his mouth. “Everyone was yelling and running. That shock wave from the Gates was incredible. All I could think of was hanging on to you.”
“Did you see my parents?”
“No, love. Sorry. It was chaos.” He rubbed his forehead. “Feels like someone cracked a rock on my head. Can’t see properly.”
“Me too, and the spiral brand’s burning like hell.”
“I saw Brawth come out,” he said. “A moving darkness—like a piece of the Abyss that had torn itself loose. Now we know that my father wasn’t mad or paranoid. He was right all along.”
Red lightning cracked, making them duck into the shelter of each other’s arms. Surfacing, Rosie gasped, “I can’t believe Lawrence would do this just to tell Comyn, ‘I told you so’.”
“I’m sure he didn’t,” said Sam. “He wouldn’t. I think he was exhausted from keeping it back and this was the end of the road.”
“And where is… Brawth?” she said. Ragged cloud layers raced like smoke over their heads, swollen thunderheads towering thousands of feet above them. Around the edge of the garden, vegetation thrashed madly as if caught in a hurricane. A couple of deer burst from cover and bounded across the lawn, ears flat in terror. “I’m scared, Sam. I feel like we’re being hunted. I can’t shake it off.”
“Storms create an electromagnetic field that messes with your brain. Makes you feel ghostly presences and irrational terror.”
“I saw that documentary, too,” she retorted. “This is more than a storm.”
“I know,” he answered. “I’m saying that Brawth has the same effect. That doesn’t mean it’s not real. It means it’s making us very aware that we can’t escape, wherever we go. So it’s everywhere, like a hologram image, or a quantum field, or something.”
“We should get inside.” Rosie felt her way along the wall towards the kitchen door. The sense of imminent danger almost paralyzed her. She found the cold slickness of the door handle, but it snapped back into place, unyielding. “Damn, it’s locked.”
“Knowing Stonegate, it will be worse inside,” he said, grimacing. “We’ll wait it out.” They crouched against the wall, the force of the gale sucking their breath away. Sam’s warmth against her was the only reality. Even at the Abyss she hadn’t been petrified like this. When she closed her eyes, she could sense Brawth coming for them, a wavering, dazzling blackness. As mindless and deadly as a missile. She jumped, eyes flying open.
“What if it doesn’t stop? What if Lawrence has unleashed the end of the world a little sooner than expected?”
“At least we’ll go together, Foxy,” he said seriously. “We have to find Lawrence. This won’t stop unless we find him—but that’s the catch, we can’t look until it stops. And even if we find him, then what?”
“Sam…” She pulled his sleeve. There was a figure moving beyond the end of the lawn, half-concealed in thrashing undergrowth. He ran like a drunk; staggering, panicking, getting nowhere.
“Holy fuck, it’s him,” said Sam. He rose to his feet, against his own warnings, and yelled, “Dad!”
* * *
Lucas had no idea where he was going. His mind was blank, like a panicked animal’s. Anything to escape Brawth. Blood rushed in his ears as he ran. Instinct took him to Stonegate.
By the time he reached the front door, reason was returning. His lungs were bursting, but at least he knew where he was and realized he’d been utterly out of his mind for a few minutes. How could he be so astonished that Brawth had burst through? He’d seen it in a dozen visions.
His first clear thought was of Iola. He forgot that she’d vanished; he could only think that she was alone and terrified in the house at Brawth’s mercy.
There was a figure slumped beside the step, half-covered by stag skin. Lucas bent down and shook his shoulder. “Jon.” No response. “Jon. Come on, wake up!”
Jon groaned. He was unconscious; mouth slack, eyes closed. Lucas made an attempt to drag him towards the door, but fear had drained his strength and he couldn’t do it. He gave Jon a rougher shake. “Wake up, damn it!”
Nothing. Summoning a desperate reserve of strength, Lucas grabbed him, dragged him like a sack of wet sand across the threshold and dumped him in the hall. Panting, he forced the door shut and bolted it, left Jon where he lay and plunged into the great hall. The lights were off, the power gone. The air was shockingly cold, and the walls shifted as if full of ghosts trying to come to life. He shivered as the atmosphere frosted through his clothes.
Iola was in the center of the great hall. Lightning filled the tall leaded windows and she was caught in its strobing glare, an ethereal figure cloaked in the bronze ripples of her hair. She’d put on a long dress, one of Sapphire’s, endearingly too big for her. She resembled a bewildered dryad, wincing at the hard floor beneath her feet. He ran to her. She felt real in his arms, solid and warm as any human.
“Where were you?” she said, her slender arms strong around him.
“Where were you? You vanished!”
“I thought it was you, not me… I don’t know. The world isn’t stable for me, Lucas. I went into Dumannios without realizing.”
“And now we’re both there,” he whispered, understanding that the manifestations around them were just that; the fabric of Dumannios searing away the gentle surface of Vaeth and Dusklands. “This is my fault,” Lucas choked. “I’ve done this.”
“No,” said Iola. “It had to happen.”
“Brawth is coming. I couldn’t stop it.”
“It’s the darkness Lawrence always feared,” she said. “I might have helped him, but he pushed me away, and let it grow more powerful until it was too late…” She looked up at the high ceiling, which swirled with moving shadows. “It’s coming for you. For all of us, but especially for you, his son.”
When Lucas looked up, he saw it. A blinding silhouette; the Devil itself, roaring towards him from a very great distance. Cold pain pierced his head. He heard Albin’s voice, Its cold will sear the flesh from your bones… “What can we do?”
Iola’s golden eyes opened wide with despair. “Only Lawrence can stop it.” The house trembled as lightning clawed the windows. “All we can do is make a shield.”
“What do you mean?” he said. “Oh my god, my parents, Rosie…”
“You can’t help them,” she said, and called out a string of words he didn’t understand. He saw the four dysir appear as if from nowhere, darkening and growing in size. At Iola’s command, they went to each of the great hall’s four corners and took up position like four guardian lions, huge, glowing like hot coals.
“We can only protect ourselves.” She made him think of a goddess, standing in the center with four dark familiars at her command. Their defiance spun a fragile shield of protection. The amorphous power of Brawth surged towards the house only to be continuously repelled, like a stream of flaming oil pouring onto thin glass. The shield must crack eventually; but while it endured, Iola would not give up. And because she was so brave Lucas stood with her, resisting Brawth, refusing to let the burning arctic coldness or the fear take him down. The storm raged, shaking the chimneys. The fabric of Stonegate trembled, and all around them the world shuddered and crashed and dissolved like a nightmare ocean.
* * *
Dusklands narcotics had carried Jon far away from himself; he’d observed the pantomime of the stag hunt as if from a great distance before collapsing. Even the storm didn’t rouse him. It intruded upon his stupor, however, turning uncomfortable dreams into nightmares. Voices washed in and out like the tide. There was something wrong, horribly wrong with the universe. It came to him that he must run for his life, but his body wouldn’t respond.
A ghostly half-human gargoyle appeared before him, and its arrival was no great surprise amid the chaos. It fired a glowing arrow at him. Piercing white pain struck his hip. He thought he’d been hit by lightning and he tried again to rise, but a weight held him down.
There was a creature sitting on his chest. He saw it clearly against a vague landscape of pale grey stone; a beautiful youth with white skin, black hair, a huge pair of soot-black angel wings curving above his shoulders. He looked down at Jon with entirely jet-black, liquid eyes.
“Do you know who I am?” asked the youth.
“No,” said Jon.
“Everyone knows Eros.” The voice had a cruel edge.
Jon laughed, as best he could with this weight upon him. “I thought your voice would be more beautiful.”
“The voice of Eros is said to be lovely, it’s true. However, I am his brother, Anteros. The god of unrequited love.” The youth leaned down and covered Jon’s mouth with his. “This is what you could have had,” he whispered.
He spread his wings and covered Jon with soft feathers. At first the kiss and caress were delicious; a moment later they began to suffocate him. He was being crushed, choked. He was dying.
Gasping for his life, Jon came back to the real world lying in the entrance hall of Stonegate Manor, slumped in a pool of congealing animal blood, covered in a stinking deerskin, entirely alone.
* * *
Bruised and bleeding, lungs heaving for breath, Auberon and Jessica had fled home, but even Oakholme did not feel safe. They’d found it by blind instinct; wherever Auberon looked, all he could see was the migraine-dazzle of Brawth. Comyn and Phyllida followed, and Matthew was there too—he’d been already in the house when the storm broke. Auberon bundled them all into the front room and slammed the door. The walls, though, were like cobwebs. Intangible shapes tried to form in the ether. Wind and thunder deafened them, and through it all Brawth attacked without mercy, driving spears of black ice into their skulls…
Comyn stumbled and fell, lay on the floor with his face contorted in terror. “Lawrence did this,” he rasped. “He brought this on us.”
“And he warned us!” cried Phyll. “And you swore we could defeat it, but we can’t!”
“You can’t fight it physically,” Auberon gasped, holding Jessica to him, “because it cuts straight into our minds.”
Helpless against pain, terror and sensory assault, they couldn’t fight at all. If it did not stop, Auberon knew, Brawth would burn them to nothing, as it had already ripped away the surface world and Dusklands and stranded them in Dumannios. He convulsed with cold, trying to keep Jessica warm against him.
“I won’t let it take you,” said Matthew, his voice gruff and strange. Auberon felt himself being dragged to a corner, Jess and Phyll and Comyn being pushed in with him. Around the moving edges of the blind Brawth-spot in his vision he saw Matthew, transformed: seven feet high, a leonine beast with a heavy mane and thick black claws. And Matthew placed himself in front of his family like a bodyguard, as if to absorb all the horror of Brawth into himself.
* * *
Sam and Rosie fought the push of the wind to cross the sloping lawn. An airborne twig glanced viciously off Rosie’s forehead, drawing blood. Entering the rhododendrons at the other side was like plunging into a river torrent.
Lawrence, on folded knees, raised a ghastly colorless face to Sam. Rosie was horrified. She’d never expected to see Lawrence Wilder like this, broken. She’d never thought he would be even more frightened than she was.
“Dad.” Sam knelt, extending a hand to his shoulder. “What are you doing?”
“Brawth is coming for me,” panted Lawrence. “I can’t let it take Lucas. Must draw it away. I have to keep running.”
“No,” said Sam. “It’s all right. We’re with you now.”
“Why wouldn’t they believe me?” Lawrence’s voice was shredded raw with despair.
“Hey, Rosie and I weren’t part of the lynch mob. They didn’t let us in on the plot. I tried to stop it—really pathetic last-minute effort, I know—but I did try.”
“You couldn’t have stopped it. Nothing could. It was time. I must…” He lurched to his feet, took a stumbling step and fell. Sam caught hold of him. “Let me go!” He struggled for a few seconds, but Sam held on until he slumped to the ground, defeated.
“Dad, stop it. What are you trying to do?”
“I have to run. To draw it away. It’s coming. Can’t you feel it?”
“Yes, we feel it, but running isn’t going to help. You’re only in our back garden. You must have been going in circles.”
“I know.” Lawrence squeezed his eyes shut, his face all lines of pain. “It’s everywhere. Inside my head. I thought I’d be braver than this.” The wind took on a mourning note and the clouds grew thick and dark, lit from inside by lashing fires.
“No one’s feeling very brave, believe me. We’ll help you.”
“You can’t. I unleashed it. Now it won’t be satisfied until it finds me and I thought I was ready to meet it but I’m not—I must, but I don’t know how…”
Rosie knelt beside him. Her instinct was to console him but he was still Lawrence Wilder; she couldn’t touch him. “What will happen if you don’t face… Brawth?”
“It will rage until it’s consumed everything,” said Lawrence, “leaving only the dry husk of Dumannios behind. It will pursue me forever—I must face it or it will consume my sons to reach me. I thought I was strong enough but I’m weak. The fear disables us. That is its strength, using fear on us as spiders use poison—to paralyze us.”
“And if you confront it?” said Sam.
“Then… Brawth might be satisfied.” His voice was raw and broken. “If I could make it fixate only upon me, it might pass over my dear sons and all the others. If I dared to meet it—if I were strong enough—if it burned out its rage upon me, then this might all be over.”
“And you might stop being afraid,” Sam breathed.
“No.” Lawrence raised himself and pushed back his wild hair. “Although, in fact, my fear doesn’t matter. To stand and face it, that’s the important thing. The degree of terror I feel in that moment is irrelevant. To stand…”
“I’ll fight it with you,” said Sam.
“And me,” Rosie added.
Lawrence gave a short laugh. “You can’t fight it. I have to…” His hands, white claws, opened and closed. “Have to take a stand, but I don’t want it to take me without warning. I need to be ready for it.”
Rosie and Sam looked at each other. She saw that Sam, behind his composure, was completely distraught, but she knew he never shied away from hard decisions. Raising her voice above the thunder, she said, “Mr. Wilder, is there a place that would help you feel strong against it? Stonegate?”
“No, not there.” He gasped, shook his head. Rosie sensed any suggestion she made would be hopeless. “I need a place that would draw it to me yet slow its progress as it came, so that I could be ready. Somewhere that would bind us to each other, so that it can’t stop itself being drawn to me, but I can’t escape, either. I don’t know what I’m thinking of.”
“There is somewhere,” she said.
Lawrence grinned, mirthless and condescending. “You can’t help me, my dear.”
Rosie’s lips tightened. “The spiral garden,” she said, knowing with clear intuition that she was right. She described it. It was difficult to speak coherently against the roar of the wind but Lawrence seemed to understand. “My father said the spiral invokes the Otherworld. If nothing else, it’s a calm space. You might feel better there.”
“Why did you build it?”
“I don’t know,” said Rosie. “Inspiration. Compulsion.”
“You built it for me,” he said, almost accusing. “You knew.”
“No.” She drew away from him, unnerved.
“Take me there. Quickly.” He was rising shakily as he spoke. “Must keep moving, I can’t stay here.” They helped him down the hill as if dodging enemy fire. Lightning seared an oak tree two hundred yards away with a detonation that left her ears ringing. Flames leapt into the night. Sam urged them step by step down the bracken-lined tracks, supporting Lawrence between them. Still the black-bright image of Brawth pressed painfully on her vision. Rosie’s eyes streamed and she felt faint from pain and dread, but it was only a grim background to the urgency of helping Lawrence.
The wind was fearsome even in the valley, clawing at them as they fought through the gap in Oakholme’s hedge. A hail of twigs and leaves battered them. Within the spiral garden itself, however, the air turned absolutely still.
Their feet made a soft crunching on the gravel as they led Lawrence around the spiral path to the egg at the center. As soon as he was there he became calmer. He stood up straight and Rosie saw the terror fall physically from him. Her headache eased, and she even forgot to pay attention to her fear.
Lawrence sat down on the stone egg at the center and released a long, deep sigh. Above, the sky crazed with forks of liquid fire. “Thank you, Rosie,” he said. “This is where I need to be. You must have known.”
“I didn’t.” She gave an uneasy laugh. “Not consciously, anyway.”
“Still, this is why you built it, even if you weren’t aware. Thank you. Sam, I regret that you should ever have seen me like this. I’m so ashamed.”
“Dad, no. Don’t be ashamed.” Sam’s voice cracked. “No one said you weren’t allowed to fall off your pedestal, except you.”
“You can leave me now. I’ll wait here.”
“No chance,” Sam said. He knelt at his father’s feet. “We’ll stay with you.”
Lawrence smiled. He looked up. “Here I am, poised over the Abyss.”
The scene was colored dusty red and the wind circled ominously around the still eye. They sensed the unseen giant roaring its steady, inexorable way towards them. Rosie stayed on her feet. Sam reached up to clasp her hand where it rested on his shoulder.
“What is it,” Sam asked, “this shadow, Brawth?”
“It’s my fylgia,” Lawrence answered. “It’s part of me. When Aetherials have inner demons, they manifest on a cosmic scale.”
“Are you sure, though, that it’s all from you?”
A frown creased the high, pale forehead. “We can’t be sure of anything, but I work from that theory. If it’s more, it’s still my fault. My fylgia attached to Brawth, or absorbed it or woke it or became it… the result is the same.”
“So only you can control it?”
His father smiled thinly. “I can’t control it. That’s the point. It took me years to understand that it’s not separate but part of me, and that’s why it persecutes me and my blood.”
“Explain,” said Sam. “Quick, while we’re still alive.”
“When I left Sibeyla, part of me was torn out and kept hostage in the Otherworld.” Lawrence’s voice was rapid and faint. “It’s Albin’s revenge. Not that I hold him responsible; I only blame myself, because I spent years running from it.”
“Revenge for what, Dad?” He took his father’s hand. Rosie had never seen that happen before. “Albin resented Liliana’s power bypassing him and coming straight to me. He held the belief that Aelyr are superior to Vaethyr, that we degrade ourselves by leaving the Spiral. He wanted me to stay in Sibeyla, but I followed Liliana to Earth and he never forgave me. Before I left, he showed me a piece of Elfstone carved with spirals and symbols of binding. He told me that my soul-essence was trapped within it and would always remain imprisoned in the Otherworld. And it’s true; I have no heart, no soul, no core, have I? I never cared for my family as I should. I couldn’t love. But the essence is not the fylgia. The fylgia is the shadow-self. The essence is the part of me that would have kept the shadow in balance; but because it was missing, the shadow was able to grow monstrous.”
A piece of albinite carved with spirals.
Rosie’s free hand flew to her face. The Greenlady’s voice whispered like a lost memory, Haven’t you heard the story, girl, about the soul trapped in a jewel in an egg in a box in a bag in a nest in a tree… “Oh my god,” she said.
“Rosie?” said Sam, but she’d already torn her hand out of his and was running up the spiral—tempted to take a sensible shortcut, but knowing she must not disturb the energy—and across the garden and bursting at last through the back door of Oakholme.
The inside of the house was writhing. Walls were unstable, shadows moved, ghost forms of grotesque beasts thrust out of surfaces only to melt back again. Even the floor was treacherous, rising and falling in waves. Her breath condensed on the freezing air.
Rosie put out her hands to guide herself. This was Dumannios, she realized. It was the writhing horror that lay under the skin of reality, in the subconscious. It can’t hurt me, she thought, but couldn’t convince herself. Reality and the gentle Dusklands had been flayed off, leaving the raw ugliness of nightmares to break through, there inside Oakholme, which had always been safe.
Perhaps for humans none of this was happening. Perhaps their surface world was still intact, and it was only Vaethyr who’d been torn out of it. As she entered the hallway she wondered where her parents and brothers were—but there was no time to find them. Hall and stairs and landing tilted around her in flashes of lightning as she ran upstairs to her room. Although the walls moved like cobwebs, the bedroom was still the shape she recognized, her belongings in the same place. She explored her bedside table until she found the cold smooth solidity of the egg. It glowed as pink as a living heart in the gloom.
As she retraced her route, the stairs swayed and dropped under her so that she nearly fell, narrowly saving herself on the banister. The kitchen had almost gone, replaced by a roiling cavern of demons—images of Brawth in a shattered hologram. She struggled across like a sailor across the deck of a pitching ship. Sightless she groped her way to the door, found her way out and made another frantic, stumbling run across the lawns.
The whole world had become Dumannios, she realized. Fire and ice. She tried to shake off the chaos, to sidestep into the Dusklands or the surface, but there was no escape. The red sky cracked with terrible pressure.
Brawth was close. She felt it all around her, a sparkling blackness that deformed the air. She must reach the center of the spiral before it came. A lightning bolt detonated near the house and she ducked, her ears ringing.
Inside the hedge, she halted. She was too late. She saw the dark featureless form—flaring like an eclipse, yes, that was what it resembled, the inky center and the blinding corona—but the shape of it was humanoid, broad as a bull at the top, horned—a minotaur figure. Slow yet unstoppable, it drifted around the first curve of the spiral towards Lawrence.
Her heart threatened to burst.
“Lawrence!” she yelled. “Sam! Here—catch!”
And she threw the quartz egg.
* * *
Sam watched Brawth coming. He rose to his feet and stood behind his father with his hands protectively on his shoulders. Lawrence felt bony, and he was shaking. He remained seated, his feet planted and his spine straight.
“Go, Sam,” he said.
“I’m staying,” Sam answered.
“I have done nothing to deserve such a son.”
“I could take that one of two ways.”
“Then take it in the best way,” his father said quietly.
A muscular breeze began to buffet them, as if the eye of the storm had moved. It was like a hot wind from a bonfire. Ever-changing, the shadow giant came. Thunder rumbled, but Brawth itself was silent. Sam’s gaze was riveted to it. Flickering darkness and brightness. It was elusive, like spots dancing in the vision after a blow to the head. It was there and not there, hallucinatory, a weird artifact of the storm, the Devil conjured from Lawrence’s nightmares. His heart started to thump. He had nothing to fight it with but still, no one would ever say he’d left his father to face it alone.
Then he heard Rosie’s yell. Lawrence didn’t react, but Sam did. He turned, saw the flying missile, reached out and felt it smack into his palm. He had no idea why Rosie had fled or why she was throwing stones at him, but it must be for a reason. The moment he opened his hand and saw the rose quartz egg, he knew.
“Dad.” He shook him. “Look!”
Lawrence turned his slow gaze to the stone without comprehension. Sam found the invisible line around it and fumbled to twist it open. It wouldn’t shift. The vast silent black-flame entity came steadily curving around the spiral towards them.
“Fuck!” Sam yelled, and in desperation cracked the egg on a hunk of granite. It split. Sam plucked the tablet of albinite out of it and shoved it into his father’s hand.
“What is this?” Lawrence stared. The symbols carved in the stone shone. “Where did you get it? How?”
“Long story. Oh, shit…” The blackness that came rushing softly towards them was a door into the Abyss. Sunfire flared around it. Sam was abruptly, mortally terrified. “Come on, what do we do with it, for chrissakes?”
Lawrence said nothing. He opened his mouth and put the jewel on his tongue. He swallowed. Then he stood up, arms spread wide as if to embrace Brawth, and all Sam saw after that was two great columns of light, the second the negative of the first, a bright core within a black corona. Meeting, merging.
He felt his hair stand on end, the air vaporize around him. A millisecond later there was a blast of heat, a deafening crack, a spear of white fire. Then utter darkness.
* * *
The blast threw Rosie into the air and she hit the ground yards away. She landed with her hip on a rock. The pain was so excruciating that she couldn’t breathe.
Sight returned. She felt tears and dirt streaking her face. After that, she noticed that the red glow of Dumannios had dimmed to grey; and then, that huge drops of rain were beginning to spatter around her.
Groaning, she managed to get onto her hands and knees, and finally onto her feet, trying very hard to breathe through the pain so that she did not actually start crying. Clouds rolled thickly above her; lightning still glimmered but distant now, drifting away.
“Sam? Lawrence?” she called, picking her way towards the center of the spiral.
No answer. Only silence.
“Sam,” she sobbed, losing her breath.
Lawrence and Sam both lay where they’d fallen beside the stone egg. Rosie knew they were dead, even before she took Sam’s lifeless hand. Although there was no mark on the ground around them, the bodies themselves were blackened, the eyes slightly open in thin slivers of white against the soot. There was nowhere for Lawrence’s essence to have gone, Rosie knew, except into Brawth: into the Abyss. And Sam… he would never leave his father.
Rosie bent over their bodies with her head in her hands. The rain quickened, drops becoming rods, drenching the world, washing it clean.