Chapter 13

Chapter 13

When they got to the campsite, the sun was peeking over the top of the city walls, and all the gear had been packed. Ryan, Paul, and Brent were waiting for them. Ryan was fidgeting. Brent looked up at Michael with a sly grin. “So. What part of the world would you like to rearrange next, your show-offy-ness?”  Paul elbowed him stiffly.

Michael started to speak, but Ryan beat him to it. “Next we clean the deeps. We burn the darkness out of the homes of my people. She’ll feel it. And when they’re gone, she’ll come.”

Michael looked at Gryth. Gryth nodded slowly. “It’s as good an approach as any. We never intended to leave that mess at our backs, and confronting her there or on some remote mountain won’t really make a difference. The armies won’t, either, to her. But they might to us.”

Michael nodded. “I don’t have another portal in me. Or much else, really. I think we should stop by the house and rest for the night. Then we can use the portal machine to go to the reef.”

Gryth looked at him sourly. “And I suppose you want me to portal us there?”

Michael shook his head and pointed at Brent and Paul. “They can do it.”

Brean shook his head wildly. Paul bit his lip, a little apprehensively. Michael stood straighter and started to speak in a snappish tone. “Now liste-”  He caught himself and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. You two can handle the portal. You know all the spells. You know where we’re going. I know you haven’t had to do them, but you’re both perfectly qualified. And it’s not like the Archmage here (Gryth snarled) is gonna let you do it wrong. Just put us down on the lawn. We’ll all be fine.”

Michael, as he was in so many things, was right. Mostly. Gryth, Ryan, Paul, and Brent walked out through the portal on to the lawn without so much as a stumble. And then there was a tearing sound and a scream. The portal ran jagged, the edges dark and crumbling until it crumpled and ripped away from the air itself and disappeared. Brent collapsed with a scream. They were all so busy focusing on him it took a moment for them to realize Michael wasn’t there. Jo’s voice cried loudly in a rising wind.

A dark voice slithered across their skin, biting at the edges with cold. “Your champion is mine now. Leave my world, sister or I will take him for my own, ruin him utterly, and then cast him at your feet while I kill our father. Run, sister, back to your little planet, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

The voice let go, and grew quiet, and then darkness crashed in. Gryth stared at the sky, but he could barely see his hand in front of his face. “Lady?”

A soft whisper sounded in his ear, the smallest sound Jo had ever made. “She has her, too. It’s up to him now. Or all is lost.”

“We can...”

“No, old one. It’s time. Time for him. The time for us is past. All we can do is pray.” Her voice rose til it was barely audible to all of them. “Hold yourselves here. In the end, if he fails, it won’t save you, but until he does, some protection remains. Emperor, call your people. Tell them to fall to safety if they can.. Night has taken the sea, as well, and they are not safe at large. Hold to the reefs. Builders, tell the mages. Ancient one, warn the rest. Take the Hysthaal into the night, and keep the people as safe as you may. I must retreat. But I am always, always with you. And with him. Pray, children. Pray to my father, or to the lady, or to Michael, but pray. Give up no scrap of faith that he can use. Good-bye.”

When she stopped speaking, the world became eerily still, sheathed in utter blackness. Gryth cast the spell for light, and for a second there was a tiny glow, and then it was gone. Light was gone from the world. Darkness ruled now. And it had taken their best hope. Gryth howled a loud prayer to the invisible stars that Michael was still alive. He knew that it might be better if he were dead.

Michael didn’t wake. Not really. He hadn’t been asleep. He hadn’t been allowed the sweet surcease of unconsciousness for ...he didn’t know. Days? Weeks? It could have been years, hanging there in the cold dark. His skin, so recently healed and brought to a healthy glow, was cracked and raw from cold. If he could see, he would know the necrosis for what it was, and the virulent lines of infection that crawled across his skin would have certainly told him he was close to death. Tears ran down his face, salt burning against his inflamed and cracked cheeks, threading past dry, blistered lips to fall in shards of ice on the floor.

He tried to sob, but his voice could make no sound, his throat beyond dry. He tugged weakly at his hands and feet, but there was no give. The cruel, awful shards of stone that pinned him to the wall ran through them viciously, anchored to the frigid stone. Shreds of skin, frozen to the stone pulled off his back and clung bloodily to the stone instead. He gasped a little. Every breath was agony, a little worse than the one before. A horrible scraping filled the room, and although he couldn’t see he closed his eyes against the darkness.

He tried not to shudder. And then, as the creature started again to eat what was left of his remaining wing, he tried not to scream. He failed and his horse piteous wail filled the room for the briefest of seconds before a harsh whisper crawled across his ruined skin, and brought all sound to a halt.

“Ah-Ah, child. There’ll be no sound. No calling to my pitiful sister. There’s no song where there’s no sound, and you’ll never control a sound again.” It crawled across him. The words were less than a sound, but the certainty of them etched itself into him.

Deep in his mind, he said a desperate prayer. For a moment, he thought he saw a small glimmer of light, a faint piece of hope in the darkness. Something not even the empress could suppress. “Clever child. Yes. I keep the light. But you can’t have her. Never again.”  He knew, afterward, that for the rest of his life, he would wake screaming to the awfulness that followed, as the thing that took his wings stopped and ripped out his eyes.

Blood froze as it cascaded down him and if Michael could think at all beneath the pain, beneath the horror, and all the guilt of his own defeat, he would know that death was near. But all Michael could do was howl soundlessly into the eternal night.

Sanity crept back slowly, at odd intervals. Sometimes scraping slowly into his brain with the horrible creature that ate him, piece by piece. Sometimes crashing back with harsh silent words from his awful captor. Once, twice, it came back to him in a soft moment of calm and he imagined for a second that he could hear something other than the gnawing of bone and flesh. It never lasted long. He was spent ages ago. Crushed and beaten, his energy sapped and dripping on the floor, ripped from the marrow of his wings. Twice now, his sanity had lasted longer. Long enough for him to despair, and twice,impossible voices in the screaming echoes of his mind chased the horrid sanity away from him. Twice he slept and there was no horror. He knew he was insane now. There was no sound to hear. The mad dreams of soothing voices were just lies in his mind. Terrible phantasms of what couldn’t be.

So he hung there dying. And he waited for the universe to end. If he could weep anymore, if this shattered husk that was left of his promise still had the power, he would cry. He would cry for his failure. For the loss of billions of lives. For his arrogance and his weakness. For his friends and pack. And for his husband and his child.

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On the other side of the galaxy, Randall huddled against Ra’Cha, who had pulled him into a corner in the darkness, and he, too cried. His heart echoed slowly in his chest as he cried hot tears. He clung to her weakly. She murmured nonsense songs as she held him to her chest. Periodically she would ask if it was done yet, if Michael was dead. Randall shook his head, time after time, in mute refusal. So far, it had been 7 months.7 months without light, without song, without stars. Just the horrible echo of Michael’s pain and madness screaming in Randall soul.

Hundreds of thousands of people had died. Mages struggled to find their way through the world by sound, by heat, by pushing against the shapes around them. Because call as they would, light would not come. Thousands of mages exhausted themselves daily to create heat and every day, more of them collapsed, more of them died. And with them, thousands more of the people they tried to protect died with them.

A new pain wracked Randall’s body. Heat seared his wings, and screamed. He tried not to imagine what new torture this was. He almost believed for a moment that there was light. But they’d fallen for that before. Cruel illusions cast against Michael’s mind to keep his mind, once so keen and bright, locked in the terrible broken mosaiq it had become. There had been heat once, too. A brief withdrawal of the darkness, and the light pressed hot against the stubs of his wings until they flared with the lady’s light and bloomed into feathers once more, only to be crushed again by the darkness. Only to be stalked again by the slow scrape of their devourer as he once again set his teeth against Michael’s wings, against his soul.

Randall cursed the illusion of the light, and clenched his eyes tightly shut so he could not see the terrible things that somehow she forced Michael, blinded and torn, to see. Ra’Cha gasped. “Boy. BOY. It’s light. There’s Light!”

Randall’s eyes snapped open. Yes. there, at the corner of his vision, there was a soft glow. Just as he identified it as the star within his wing, it flared into incandescence, and his body cramped with pain. Randall screamed, caught by surprise. “What the hell?”

Ra’Cha looked at him closely. “I think we better get you to the med bay.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Because child. I think you’re about to give birth.”

“But...” He looked at he helplessly. They’d talked about it of course. How he wasn’t carrying a child of his flesh. How even if he was, he had no way to push it forth. He started to panic. Ra’Cha held him tightly.

“Don’t panic yet, child. Come. You’ve a child coming now. Time to let him out.”

“Him? You think it’s a him?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“It showed up at the wrong time. Just like all men.”

Randall snorted. “I think you mean he’s coming early.”

Ra’cha looked at him strangely, taking a moment to realize how beautiful it was that she could see him at all. “Isn’t that what I said?”

He probably would have laughed all the way to sick bay if a fresh hot pain hadn’t ripped through his wings as the bright star began to burn hotter and brighter against the firmament of his wing. In the end, Ra’Cha carried him, setting him down on the padded table with ease. She looked around and then shoved furniture quickly around the bay, until now there were 5 couches, side by side, just broad enough to hold both Randall and his half folded wings.

Ra’cha prayed, as she worked at an ancient communication console, prayed fervently to the Tribunal, to the lady, and to the song that they would both not die, that her ship would survive, as the medbay seemed to catch fire with fresh light and Randall screamed again.

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Gryth lifted his muzzle to the obsidian sky and howled as the ancient box in the bag at his waist finished speaking. He howled a prayer. Then he lowered his face to the task at hand, the thousands of dead that had to be destroyed before they turned again. The night was full of monsters. And they were eating them all.

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Brent gripped Paul close against him in their bed, deep inside Michael’s house, and hoped. Hoped for just a second that maybe, this time, they would be saved.

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Ryan leaned wearily against outer shell of the reef, listening to the mad scrabbling outside. It wouldn’t be much longer. Another few weeks at best, and the last of the great reefs would be breached. And the last of the keepers of the oaths would die at the hands of horrors made of night. He heard a faint echo, deep within his heart, of a howl, of an anguished scream. And at long last, hours later, of a newborn’s indignant cry against a new world. And for a brief second, a flash of light seemed to roll across the reef, and the dead terrible things cried out in pain. If they could have seen Ryan’s face in that instant, they would have fled. A bright smile, if there were light, stretched to the corners of his face, and a fierce glee overtook him. With a word, he opened the shell of the reef, gripped his trident tightly, and began, once more, to defend his home.

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Michael crashed back to a new moment of lucidity. Insanity clawed at him and for the briefest of moments, he thought he heard a child’s cry, indignant and strong, and full of melody. He almost imagined that he could feel the soft warmth of light against his skin for the barest tiny shred of a second. And then sanity returned. His head lolled forward on wasted twists of lean sinew, and he crashed into unconsciousness once more.

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Randall held his baby against his chest, eyes full of wonders, and somehow, once again, stars. The child was perfect and tiny. His soft wings were full fledged with real feathers, patterned so like Michael’s but with a spattering of constellations, soft markings of white against the feather’s raven hues. On his chest, unmistakeable, was a birthmark, a perfect inch across, the imprint of a glowing start. As he screamed, hungry, for a brief second it glowed.

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A father and daughter stood in the vast coldness of space, close to the center of the beginning, and watched. Soon it would be time. Anyone watching them would have had the same question: To whom do the gods of the universe pray for help?

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In a cave, deep below the bottom of the ocean where no light could be found a broken man tried to cry in pain. And in his madness, he answered a prayer. And from a ship, galaxies away, light and song began to cheat their way into the world. And although the broken man didn’t know, all around him, despite everything the empress could do, the world slowly began to glow.

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