AMETHYST 5.5: THE WHEELBARROW
“Do you understand the meaning of the skull? Do you understand why you fear it? It is because it is your true face.”
– from ‘Grandfather’s Open Arms’
“Direcrown’s here,” I said to the others. “Can someone link us up?”
There was no way I wanted a private chat with this individual.
“Spirit? Glancefall?” A moment later I tried, “Winterprince?”
“Well…?” Direcrown demanded, upper-class churlishness in his voice, as if he spelt it ‘whell’.
Damn it.
Something was blocking me. It wasn’t that the link wasn’t there – I could tell that much from the way my mind-voice was projected. I looked around at the ‘windows’, covered in the impenetrable bony curtains. No, that wasn’t it.
I couldn’t look at the sphere directly, but I studied the green rune-lines, the actual lettering – from the outside of the tower the ribbons were chaotic, but now that I was inside the full complexity of the force-matrix at its heart was laid bare to me.
Yes, the sphere could be to blame for depriving me of the link. It was snatching, snaring magic out of the air to fuel itself. No wonder I felt a bit wobbly.
Yes, there was at least a sliver of a chance this wasn’t something Direcrown had done deliberately.
I shoved another star inside my circle-shield just to be on the safe side (it did seem that I was within spitting distance of a giant magic sink, after all), and angled my wings so that I could drift towards the black stone floor.
“What’s there to discuss?” I asked harshly as I came to a stop, still hovering slightly. “You abandoned us –“
“You fled the same as I,” Direcrown demurred. “And that poor weave never would have withstood the deathknights’ charge. No offence intended, Feychilde.”
I hadn’t been intending on taking any offence, until he added that, as though he were pegging me as the cause of the weave’s weakness.
Seriously, twice in two minutes? And this time from someone who ought to know better.
“What have you been doing?” I watched him for any signs of hostility, but there was nothing; he seemed relaxed, even pleased in the way he padded from foot to foot. The fiendish mask hid his expression, of course. “You look like the cat that got the cream.”
“Did we not?” He turned, reached out for the nearest green cord and caught it between his fingers, halting its progress. “Have you not read this yet? Prepare to grow a tail!”
I frowned, and tried to copy his motion; the runes just slipped through my fingers.
“Has the wraith so addled your brains that you forget what it has done to your flesh?”
My frown probably deepened. I released the insubstantiality, and slowly felt the return of solidity – the sensation was depressingly familiar.
By the time my hand and sleeve were opaque once more, I could grasp the rune-lines without any hassle.
I held a trail up before my face, so I could keep the darkmage and his shield in my peripheral vision while I studied the words.
It took me a moment to realise why I was having a bit of a struggle. The lettering was that of an Etheric alphabet – matching the energy’s hue, as I’d expected – but the words themselves were from the Netheric lexicon.
A necromantic spell, written in fey characters?
“‘It is unspoken, but do not forget: only the chained know the meaning of struggle; only the dead can rise. Kaile, do not let this sorrowful sun set. N-N-‘”
I choked as I read the spiteful epithet; if I’d had to translate it for Jaid and Jaroan I’d have gone for ‘Equine Harlot’, and that was leaving out the other, even-more-distasteful half of the phrase –
“‘Nentheleme, bear my sword and my shovel. Lynastra, open my heart and my eyes…’” I moved my gaze to meet Direcrown’s. He was no longer padding between his feet but was standing as though rooted to the black stone, tall and still and stern. “Have you managed to derive some sense from these ramblings?” I asked him directly. “If you have, it’s beyond me. This is more like a prayer than a piece of magic, right?”
Throw him a bone. Better than him clamming up.
He bowed slightly and flicked his wrist in a mocking little gesture, indicating the massive green orb. “This relic of our craft,” he said grandiosely, “is designed to break the spell of undeath holding Zadhal in its eternal grip. Read on. I’m certain you shall soon be of the same opinion.”
I sighed.
“‘Now from the shadows we beckon and fail: love is the line to my memory’s dream. In falling we only hasten faster – on emerald seas we are to set sail. Here is the promised door, the ancient seam, the last grace of Mortiforn, our Master…’”
I fell silent now as I continued, going through the passages in my head, turning them over and over.
It does sound an awful lot like they were looking for a way out of undeath, doesn’t it?
“I’m afraid I simply cannot comprehend a single word of what you’re thinking,” Gilaela said.
“Nor I,” Avaelar supplied.
Sorry – that’s the Netheric. I quickly translated the thoughts for them. Do you think Direcrown’s right?
There was only silence inside my head. Then, after a few painful seconds, Gilaela said, “I don’t think this is really our forte, Feychilde.”
Direcrown had folded his arms across his chest. “In what do our assessments differ?”
“Little,” I admitted. “So this… this is designed to separate the soul from Nethernum, allow it to proceed?”
“The Gateway of Mortiforn permits the soul to continue on its way,” he said. “Or so goes the tale, in any case.” I nodded, and he continued, “Those whose spirits have been bound by the workings of undeath cannot transition from the shadowland to the otherworld, from the otherworld to what lies beyond… They cannot pass Mortiforn’s threshold. This text seems to support that perspective – is it possible that they have truly found a way to break the bonds?”
He used an eldritch power to float into the air – it was jerkier than the wind-spells of wizards, and it only then occurred to me that he must’ve been using something to keep himself warm, too.
He soon came back down bearing another glittering trail of green runes in his hand. “Read this part.”
Our shields crossed with no issues as he reached out and passed the sorcerous thread into my hand.
I read it twice to myself, then looked back at him. He’d retreated but stayed facing me, so I could meet his eyes, meet them as though I could read his thoughts behind them.
“’In Kultemeren, so shall it be done,’” I repeated the last pertinent line. “That’s not trivial, is it?”
Direcrown was shaking his head. “Very good, Feychilde. Well done. I believe you are well caught-up.” He gestured to the windows, still encased in the bony shell. “Have – are the others nearby?”
Did I detect just a trace of concern there in his voice? Was it concern for the others, or just concern for himself, that he might be in trouble for his disappearance?
I nodded cautiously. “The link isn’t working here. The sphere –“
“Drains the words as you cast them,” he finished for me. “This truly is a curious creation. Have you heard of its like?”
“Not ever.”
“I thought as much.” He sounded thrilled rather than disappointed to have the object’s mystery reconfirmed by my ignorance. “I shall have to pen a treatise, once –“
“Are you forgetting why we’re here?” Then I realised he didn’t know. “Erm – the others are fighting the Prince of Chains, actually…”
“What?”
“Yeah… Leafcloak… She was… well…”
“What?”
I quickly related what’d happened, putting the mystery of the sphere in its place; if there was anything that deserved a treatise, it was the appearance of an avatar. “So Shadowcloud’s missing, and there’s this, like, ocean of wights, and they’re even more-unkillable than usual –“
“And you came here? Left them with but one sorcerer?” He actually sounded mildly infuriated. “Come – you shall guide me to them, and together we will overcome the divine creature before returning.”
He turned aside to the wall, but I stayed where I was and shook my head. “Shields don’t work. Timesnatcher’s got a plan – I think it has something to do with Lightblind; she went back to Mund but he said something about her. We need to fix this, this thing,” I caught another green cord, ran my eyes across the runes, “and fix this city.”
Direcrown seemed to regard me curiously, head slightly askew on his shoulders. “You’re a strange creature, Feychilde. Very well. We shall remain.” He righted himself, glancing up to take in the myriad green trails.
I wasn’t expecting to hear such fervour in his voice as I did when he concluded:
“And we shall fix it together.”
* * *
“It’s designed to be brought into the ‘very crux of the crossed planes’,” he pointed out, passing me another ribbon of energy. “This surely implies that we’d have to bring it to the avatar in any case.”
I necked another vial of water from my demiskin as I fixed the lines together to form a glyph in the air. “That thing is a decoy, I swear it. The wights were as surprised as we were – look, just trust me, okay? The appearance of the Prince is just a… a chance occurrence. Sure, maybe we should’ve thought of this ahead of time – or Timesnatcher and Zakimel should’ve, anyway. I bet Zadhal is the god’s biggest centre of worship in the world – there was no way he was just going to take us invading this place lying down!” I gestured out at the towers around us – the bone-armour and bone-storm had fallen still a few minutes ago, settling back down to the ground. “But that doesn’t mean he’s behind it all.”
Direcrown grunted agreeably, then nodded at the fiercely-glowing green weave in my hands. “Focus. You’re tangling them again.” He went for the next one, drifting across near the trapdoor beneath which we’d had no chance to properly explore.
I’d taken a quick insubstantial head-poke down there to scan about, check there were no immediate threats. It was silent and dark on the floor below us, which was an empty space but for the black pillars, a five-storey room of identical proportions. Unlike the sphere-chamber, the walls were windowless, and it was colder down there. A single narrow set of stone ledges were fixed to the wall beneath the sphere-chamber’s trapdoor, like steps, and there was another identical trapdoor nearby, presumably leading down to the next floor. There couldn’t be more than four floors in total, given the height of each chamber.
I focussed. He was right – I had tangled them.
“Sorry.” I fixed the mess, applied my power to the next shape, then let it go again and sent it whirling off around the sphere. “How much work do you think there is to be done here?”
“We make progress.” He indicated the glyph I’d just allowed to slip from my grip, and I could see it, replicating itself across the trails it touched, the shape slowly multiplying across dimensions. “Those who think chaos stronger than order because of the ease with which order is dismantled, transformed into chaos, miss this simple fact: that chaos longs for order, cannot be without it, cannot fill its belly on its own tail. Order is its own end but without it, chaos is nothing. Chaos is alone in the night of its own making, while order flourishes in its brief, beautiful lifetime. Let us hope that this time it might achieve its goals ere it is snuffed out once more.”
We’d only been at it for fifteen minutes – I had popped out briefly to give Winterprince the all-clear and repair his shield; he was now bearing the news of Direcrown’s discovery back to the others. Fifteen minutes, and I couldn’t help but think the darkmage was right, watching the transformations our simple work was bringing to bear.
It was the weirdest thing. These drifting ribbons of runes were simply broken sentences; it wasn’t hard to see how to reconnect them, and apply to them the proper patterns. My sorcerous instincts knew what they were doing, even if I couldn’t consciously draw from my memory the exact shapes of the sigils of Nentheleme, Glaif, Mortiforn… My hands moved, and the shapes appeared in living lines of green fire, more vibrant and true than the sensations any memory could supply.
“What happened to them?” I wondered aloud.
“To whom?”
“No – I mean, the spell-lines…”
“Ah.” He drew a breath, then said, “They were cut. Deliberately. See here?” He held another ribbon, just like all the others, and indicated the very tip, where we were fastening them together once more. “This is a neat divide, no? An act of tremendous violence would leave fraying, here, and here, where the runes drift. No, these were snipped with scissors, so to speak.”
“What sorcerer would do that?”
“A lich, no doubt, whose continued existence rests upon unbroken connection with Nethernum. We might call this stuff antinether.”
I frowned, but not because I disagreed. No, if anything it was that I was disconcerted by the candour with which the darkmage had treated me so far. The lore he shared with impunity. I’d come to expect this of Netherhame and Shallowlie, but from Direcrown?
A little voice in the back of my head murmured, What if Timesnatcher is wrong about him?
The more-sceptical side of my mind retorted, Let’s test the sharing-lore-with-impunity bit, then.
I looked across at my colleague. “Do you know much of the war?”
He just chuckled snootily. “So thou art a believer too! Ha! Do you know how similar to Dustbringer you are? And yet, how dissimilar…”
“I… I have it from the lips of an eldritch,” I said.
“Do you? Do you now?” The dark eyes in the fiendish face sparkled terribly all of a sudden. “That is very interesting to me. Do you speak of a bound eldritch?”
“I – well…” I didn’t want to mention Zel, really – especially when I couldn’t pull her back without having a psychic argument right here in front of Direcrown. “I had it from a wight-lord in the courtyard, actually –“
“These lords retain well-formed thoughts, speak willingly?” The arch-sorcerer sounded incredulous. “My boy, we must away! This sphere will wait, fix itself as we soar with greater purpose! Come!”
I couldn’t deny that it looked more and more like he was right. The more we toiled, the swifter the changes would come about, complete the sphere’s magic and allow us to activate it – but beyond a certain point, it was a waste of our time. It would deal with itself. My fellow champions – some of whom I’d come to think of as friends – were back there.
I nodded, following him to the open window.
“Reinforce your shields,” he murmured. “I suspect the defences shall awaken again the moment we breach the boundary of this wall.”
“Agreed.”
I drew on my wraith again and, as expected, the very instant we set off from the precipice the bones reacted once more, coating the tower, lashing out at us. Direcrown’s flight was slower than my sylph-wings or wizard-flight, so I allowed him to take the lead until we were clear of the sickening storm of gleaming body parts.
“Which way?” he asked.
Once we were in the clear and I moved just ten yards in the right direction it came through, the burst of telepathic resonance:
Timesnatcher roaring;“-ancefall! Back, fifty feet! If –“
Glimmermere panting; “– he won’t come back to me, Fang! Can you reach –“
Spiritwhisper muttering; “– Twelve Hells are Feychilde and Direcrown –“
“We’re coming!” I cried. “Direcrown’s with me – link him, then I can come faster –“
“I’m on my way,” Winterprince grunted, “I’ll bring him ba-”
“No, you’re needed here!” Timesnatcher berated him. “More fire on his left side, or he’s going to break away again!”
Damn it.
“Straight a hundred yards, then turn left, look for the purple mist!” I yelled to Direcrown, before putting everything I had into my speed.
Each beat of Avaelar’s wings was a moment I wasn’t there and I picked up just how bad things were over the link. Glimmermere and Fangmoon were trying to save Dimdweller, and it sounded like they were in a very difficult situation. I could imagine getting there too late to do anything, anything but feel the guilt – I’d left them behind, and hearing Spirit complaining about my absence had cut me, sliced through nerves I didn’t know I had. All I knew was that it hurt to disappoint him, to have abandoned them like this – what if the spell-sphere in the Green Tower came to nothing? What if it was all a waste? What if Dimdweller died while I dallied with playing arch-sorcerer?
I wasn’t too late.
I plunged into the purple mist, into the same unending battle as before. My shields went before me, and I pushed a huge area clear, sent my blades spinning. Timesnatcher directed me to a point near the centre, a little towards the south-eastern edge.
It wasn’t long before I sensed the shapes within my farthest-flung shields, the wight-lords reborn like pillars of angry, animated ash – Khikiriaz launched himself into one of them even as I passed by. And it wasn’t long before my shields started winking out, connecting with the black-armoured deathknights, standing strong against my force-barriers, some even extending their purple-burning blades to more-easily pierce my defences.
I ignored them, soaring on, even as they gave chase across the smoking, lava-riddled courtyard; I saw as Starsight descended at the nearest deathknight, robe gleaming as he blurred through the purple mist, like a smear of luminous paint across my eye.
Then I was there. Vaahn loomed in the fog.
Dimdweller was caught, moving through the air with the effigy as it stumbled about, blasted this way and that by searing rays of flame.
The dwarf was screaming, covered in a green radiance; part of the palm of his hand was attached to one of the bony struts extending from the avatar’s knee. Fangmoon and Glimmermere were both flying beside him in their humanoid forms, holding him, trying to pull him away, each of the druids larger in frame than they ought to be.
Someone had suggested tearing the arm off, and they’d found it impossible without dropping the anti-nethernal healing-effect they were using – they were trapped between the flood and the cliff, unable to stop the regeneration-spell without giving him to Vaahn, but incapable of tearing him free while the spell was ongoing.
Above the three of them floated the other dwarf, the wizard’s bearded jaw clenched as a sunbeam emanated from his clasped hands, pouring up into the godling’s right arm. Winterprince was on the opposite side, and between the two of them they were preventing the creature from reaching down, using his huge carcass-hands to grab the diviner and druid, sending them all to join Leafcloak in her terrible fate with his touch of death.
I could see Mountainslide was tiring. I wondered how close to his reinvigoration-limit the young dwarf was.
Timesnatcher, Starsight and Shallowlie were embattled on every front. The diviners were everywhere and nowhere, less than phantoms on the air as only a streak of colour left clue as to the fact they’d passed me by yet again; what they slew was dead for less time than it took for them to return and slay it a second, third, fourth time. The sorceress’s ghosts were the only eldritches she had left in the field, and they couldn’t deal with the deathknights for her.
One of my bintaborax was dead, the one that’d been wounded earlier – the one I’d obtained from the Cannibal Six, if I was right.
It all looked rather desperate, truth be told.
I went to three wight-lords and reintroduced them to my pointy forehead, then grabbed a hundred or so wights trying to penetrate the edges of a shield, sending them back at their fellows behind them, tearing with teeth and cold grave-fingers into the bodies of their brethren.
“Now’s the time for sharing, Timesnatcher!” I mind-shouted. “I’ll tell you what I found – but first, what about this god-on-earth situation?”
“She will be here in a moment! Honestly, asking questions won’t speed things up – trust me, I’m an expert. Tell me – what did you find, Feychilde? Other than a Direcrown.”
I gritted my teeth, and did my best to compose a response in my mind before speaking it psychically – a response that wouldn’t be quite as biting as the first ten or so retorts that came to mind.
Then Direcrown beat me to it – someone had linked him while I was focussing on the wight-lords.
“My dear Timesnatcher, that is a matter for arch-sorcerers. It would be hard to put into layman’s terms.”
He was one hundred percent talking out of his backside, but I didn’t want to contradict him, not when Timesnatcher was being at least as much of an ass.
“Try me,” the arch-diviner said.
I spoke up. “Stop treating us like children! If –”
“Look – here she comes now. East.”
He had been, at least up to a point, correct. It wouldn’t have been quite as perplexing and exhilarating, if he’d explained what was about to happen beforehand. But the argument had taken all the thrill out of it.
I still got to stare, dumbfounded, as a wheelbarrow shot out of the purple mist at a ridiculous speed, an old robed man half-seated, half-lying inside it. His lined, unshaven face was petrified in a look of soul-sick terror, eyes and mouth thrown wide open like he was apple-bobbing.
Killstop was holding onto the handles behind him, weaving with death-defying lurches across the lava-cracked plaza. Even when moving with such ferocious haste she was able to evade the deathknights in her path, and her speed only assisted her when ash-wights got in her way – she simply headed right for them and ploughed them under.
Not that the old man she was ferrying to us looked happy about that particular part of the arrangement.
She skidded to a stop thirty feet from me, near Glancefall inside my hexagon, not fifty yards from the godling’s stumbling feet.
My enhanced hearing caught the murmured words as she bent her masked head to his ear: “You remember what you promised me.”
As the old man focussed on the effigy wreathed in spell-fire, reeling and recoiling across the smashed ground, the druids and diviner seemingly glued to his knee in a daisy-chain of champions, something in him changed. The expression of terror didn’t vanish completely, but it receded, hardened, the thin colourless lips pressing together in a grimace of determination.
“I remember,” he said in a flat monotone.
As I moved closer, studying Killstop’s plus-one, I produced a wave of glitter from my horn, then flew over them to loose it at the deathknight trying to creep up on them from behind. Hard to creep when you clank with every step; even with the mist and general clamour of the battle – Dimdweller’s incessant screaming – my senses had no trouble identifying the threat.
The old man wasn’t one of the Knights of Kultemeren – he didn’t wear their armour, and clearly he’d sworn no oath of silence – but he was a priest of Kultemeren all the same. The sigil of the gavel in the centre of the silver medallion about his neck, coming loose of his white-and-grey robe as he straightened up, proclaimed his position as one of the senior clergymen.
In a flash Killstop had circled the wheelbarrow and set him down on his feet.
“Link her up, Spirit, be-“
“I’m already linked, Cradle,” she cut off her fellow arch-diviner a little derisively. “Both of us are. It’s go-time.”
“It is,” I heard the priest respond aloud. He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the avatar, the statue-like amalgam of a million discrete body parts that was now the Lord of Undeath made manifest, an unholy intrusion into our dimension.
When he continued to speak, removing his medallion and wrapping the coldly-gleaming chain about his hand, those eyes never blinked, his gaze never wavered.
“You trespass, Son of the Chain-Maker. In so doing you grant me only greater strength. Flee. Take these spirits and begone. Three times will I deny you, and then you will be reft away, your name never again to be spoken openly in this city.”
It surely had to fill a man with faith, to be a priest of Kultemeren and to make a vow, a promise to render assistance – to know that such a thing would be thereby made not just a possibility, but a certainty…
“I – ah – hello? Can someone let me fly?” the priest enquired telepathically.
Flight or no, he was nonetheless making his approach, striding towards Vaahn with his fist encased in the silver chain, the gavel-icon across his knuckles.
I was powerless to do anything else but keep up with him, maintain the shield about him that was even now protecting him from a number of wights – I was too busy fending off wight-lords and deathknights to physically carry the priest. At the same time I was captivated by his demeanour, his confidence, and wished I had the opportunity to take a closer look into those implacable eyes of his.
I could see what he was getting at, though – bubbling streams of lava separated him from getting closer to the avatar. The wizards had set spells to carry off the fumes through the purple fog – the divinely-powered fog that the wizard-winds couldn’t budge – but such secondary spells were good for nothing more than keeping the air clean. The currents weren’t anywhere near powerful-enough to lift a man, and our two arch-wizards seemed to be diminishing in reserves by the minute; there was no telling when those spells might fail, the air turning noxious. They couldn’t spare a flight-spell, and there was nothing that would help the old man get closer to his target.
Not that getting closer seemed to necessarily be the best of ideas, but at this point we just had to trust that he knew what he was doing, didn’t we? We were dead any other way. Sooner or later, Mountainslide would give out, and there’d be no more juice left in him for Fangmoon and Glimmermere to keep him going – then Winterprince would follow and we’d all get swallowed into the dark god’s substance…
At least Zel would be happy…
“Push the abomination east!” Timesnatcher was ordering. “To his right, and forwards! Glimmer, Fang, be ready to back up!”
The very moment I resolved to send Avaelar out, to hoist the priest over the obstacles – it was then that Shallowlie appeared, streaking down from the north. At her gesture a group of ghosts surged beneath him, buoying him up.
Kultemeren’s envoy strode the air as implacably as he’d strode the courtyard. Vaahn was still being buffeted by attacks, funnelled in the priest’s direction.
“Higher!” the old man thought. “Take me to this mockery’s face.”
Shallowlie complied, bringing him up to thirty-odd feet while, aloud, the priest cried:
“Your time is come, and that of your followers. The time of ending and unmaking. The breaking of the spell that holds these poor, lost souls in thrall.”
My own soul swelled up in response to these words. Did that mean we were going to be successful in restoring the natural order in Zadhal?
I smashed another handful of wights, staying behind and below the priest, but close-enough to him to keep a careful watch over him.
“Shallowlie, can you help me with the shield on him?” I asked.
Together we spun my lines into a weave. It couldn’t hurt, could it?
My outer shields broke like breadsticks against the effigy’s titanic body as it surged towards us, blinding fire pouring all around its upper sections. The huge skin of Mund’s chief arch-druid, his cloak and hood, was impervious to damage like the rest of his disgusting composition – but the force of the spells was still driving him, bringing him to meet his doom.
The sphere of melted skulls beneath the iron crown appeared, swinging.
With the sorceress’s help, the priest put on a final burst of ghost-flight –
“In Kultemeren’s name, begone!” he roared, and raised his medallion-wrapped fist to deliver the blow.
* * *
He punched Vaahn, square in the skull-face.
The resulting detonation sent everyone not covered by a shield spinning through the air.
Warm, yellow energy exploded where his fist made contact, a nimbus of sunlight that pierced the purple mists through, rays that struck other wights and deathknights in the crowd, transforming them into smudges of light on the wind.
I could no longer sense those killed in this manner. They were gone. Hundreds of them.
And an inconceivable shower of skulls and shattered bone soared into the sky, falling like hideous rain, the shards of Vaahn’s face deanimated and inert.
The priest of Kultemeren lowered his hand, floating away and turning back to us as the avatar teetered on suddenly-weak knees, bending over backwards. The holy-man’s smile was grim, his medallion still glowing faintly across his knuckles.
The remaining undead faltered, watching as their god’s spine curved, snapped, his upper half toppling towards the ground –
We floated, silent within and without, as though we were all waiting for the moment he actually crashed down, the moment to burst into cries of triumph –
But Dimdweller still screamed. The druids still tugged at the dwarf, kept their healing hands upon him, the green radiance suffusing him.
The teetering continued, went on, and on… The godling’s arms hung low to the earth, what remained of the head thrown back, crown and cloak hanging precariously, almost set to swing loose…
The priest’s smile slowly became more grim, unsettled. At last he swivelled his head around to look back over his shoulder –
The moment his eyes met the avatar once more, a rasping voice seemed to rise from the very ground all about us – the god’s, menacing in inflection, no less sure and certain than any sound the priest had uttered.
“Thrice thou hast spoken, and nary a lie; while all thy paltry exhortations only show unto the Judge the Truth from which he hath hidden his face. For the Prince he is not. It is not given to him to command my Powers. Spells thou hast broken – ten score and some. No more.
“For thou speakst True to mine ear: my Time arriveth! My Time, and that of my followers. The Time of Ending. Unmaking. The Last Hour and the great new Beginning! My name shall never again be spoken openly in these walls – it shall be sung! And thou shalt be the first to sing it, in sweetest sacrament, the Lamentunto the Shadow Mountain… a threnody of shrieking unending.”
The gloating of the Prince was a terrible thing to undergo. Like the wet, crawling sounds of worms wriggling in my ears. The beating wings of a million swarming flies, congealed into a single will, a single, unimaginably ancient and evil purpose. I saw the priest’s face turn ashen as he floated there, not far from the avatar’s half-obliterated face.
I felt my own flesh drain of colour just the same. I felt Gilaela and Avaelar recoiling.
Vaahn’s voice wasn’t something you perceived. That would be to imply there was the chance to not perceive it, but it was nothing like that. Vaahn’s vile expulsions were immanent, a fact of the world in which we existed, every bit as vital and real as the air we breathed, the weight of our bones. I very much had the impression even the deaf would’ve heard every word, and not just because his voice struck earth and air like a tremor, a tornado.
It wasn’t just the voice of the god, or the fact he was still here, still with us in this courtyard, despite his toy being broken at a single strike from another god’s chosen-one.
No, it was the fact that the Prince of Chains had interpreted the words all wrong – no implication of ultimate failure, no suggestion we would be successful in our attempt to repair the Green Tower’s secret and set it loose…
We had to try again.
But the staggering malevolence of that crawling, rustling voice had never really halted, and it was only as the elongated, protracted sounds came towards their end that their structure was made plain:
“M-y… b-r-i-d-e…”
Skulls came whipping through the air, clinking back into place, many of them marred, blackened and caved-in.
When they reformed the idol’s face and it jerked back to its full forty-foot stature, it was plain to see there was not a single skull missing.
The implication was obvious.
“Get him back!” I hissed into the stunned psychic silence. “He’s our only weapon against it!”
Shallowlie drew in her ghosts, the trembling priest in tow, but it was too late.
Like a revolting echo of that night, that worst night of my life since donning the robe – like a shadow of the Incursion, a homage to the Mourning Bells: a sound came from the western edge, drowning out Dimdweller’s screams.
The clock tower was ringing.
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