Cross collapsed. Dillon and Cole had already fallen; Black was only barely conscious, just like Cross.
Lucan’s eyes were open and clear. Hot white lightning danced on his open palms.
Cross smelled ionized wind, and he tasted ozone. Everything shifted around Lucan, like he was a bubble of pure air that moved through polluted waters. The darkness split around him and recoiled. Lucan walked without hesitation straight onto the black lake and towards the massive humanoid that had formed out of the steel hard shadows.
Lucan is the weapon we were meant to find, Cross realized. His ancient and primal spirit is what we need, not the Woman in the Ice.
Why were we sent to find the Woman, then?
Cross hauled Black to her feet. Cole and Dillon were slower to rise, but they seemed to be all right. Everyone was dazed and weak. They looked pale, and their clothing and hair were covered with dust.
The darkness receded, and left them. It focused on its new enemy.
Lucan and the Dra’aalthakmar battled on the lake. It was a constrained melee, a bottled maelstrom. Cross felt the lick of hex energies and the ripple of arctic flames. He smelled acetone and heard dull explosions issue from the inside of a fog made of alternating light and dark.
They saw little of the actual battle from their vantage. Everything was a storm of white shadows and black dust.
No one spoke. Even Cross didn’t fully understand what it was they saw.
They were so distracted by the fighting that none of them noticed the vampires until it was too late.
Shadowclaws — Ebon Cities elite soldiers — flew at the group on Razorwings, large flying reptiles with bone spurs that jutted from their leathery skin. The beasts had huge hinged jaws, like those of a piranha, and their oily flesh smelled of turpentine and smoke.
A dark net weighted with black spheres caught Dillon and Cole and brought them to the ground. Danica fired her pistol and readied her spirit, but whatever she planned to do was interrupted as a bone spear pierced through her shoulder. She fell, screaming.
Cross watched the riders approach. He hadn’t realized it was dawn. The wine-dark sky bled orange with the rising sun.
His spirit exploded out of his hands in an arc of blue fire. She incinerated two Shadowclaws and their Razorwing mounts, and they dropped from the sky like meteors.
A whirling black chain flew at him. Cross saw only a blurry line and heard the clank of metal as the weapon coiled around him. He collapsed with his arms painfully pinned against his body. Bladed hooks pierced his flesh.
A dread ship made of bone floated into view. Its turbines blasted necrotic exhaust that smelled of brimstone and that burned the ground white. Black sails curled in the wind, and bloody chains dangled down from the deck. The pale hull was covered in spikes and bladed cannons.
Cross tried to move, but he couldn’t. His strength was gone. He felt his spirit, weak and torn and as sundered as he was by the dismal energies storied in the black chains.
The Ebon Cities warship descended to claim its prisoners, while a battle between primordial forces raged on at the center of an ancient and frozen lake.
Steven Alan Montano
Black Scars
Blades of light and dark crash into each other and send polarized sparks through an air turned brittle and raw. Tendrils of steam twist away from an icy ground made black by the touch of cold fire. Ice melts beneath them and shatters like dark glass.
It had not known that its old enemy had survived this long, or in this new world. It should have sensed it upon awakening.
It has lived for this chance to destroy the servant of its jailor.
Obsidian skin folds into a diamond hard edge that cuts through soul matter like smoking hot meat. The air is filled with a haze of flaming dust. Bone vapor engulfs the battle, a necrotic unguent that catches in the wind and makes storms from razor-sharp fragments.
The souls of lost ages entangle on the lake. They pierce and twist against one another. They strip away shadow flesh and carve through arcane limbs.
The battle rages on. The combatants reform themselves. They become liquid and uncertain. Their multifarious bodies collapse into one another in a hail of broken darkness and white crystal. Their bodies lose dimension as they struggle on, ignorant of the damage caused to their surroundings.
The land folds and ripples away from the epicenter of their destructive struggle. The sky browns and cracks. The ice ripples and sinks and collapses in on itself.
Blades of white and ebon steel pierce each other’s forms. Oil and lightning explode as they grapple. They have fought this war for eons, and will fight if for eons yet to come. Their conflict is their prison, and their demesne.
They weaken. The sky is bleached white from the touch of their soiled power, sucked clean of its life by impure energies. The ground smolders. It is a scar of pale ash.
The primal warriors weaken, until at last the Sleeper lands a devastating blow. The enemy is no longer distinct: it dissipates and spreads into shards. The fragments of its being sink and fuse into the living mages nearby.
White energy bleeds into them, an ethereal transfusion. The Sleeper’s enemy becomes a refugee hidden in human souls.
Weakened and suddenly alone, the Sleeper withdraws. Its enemy has gone.
The battle has fused the land into karsts. The devastation is frozen in a shattered epitaph of melted ice and fused black rock. They have destroyed the lands around them in their war of dust.
Victorious, the Sleeper disregards the mere human shell left behind by its enemy. Its jailor has escaped, scattered like ice crystals in the wind.
The Sleeper sinks into the earth, and rests.
Soon, it will hunt again.
PART TWO
EIGHT
Cross woke. He sensed that he’d woken before, but that might have been a dream. He had only vague memory of what had happened after he’d witnessed the battle between Lucan Keth and the Dra’aalthakmar.
He remembered razor claws and barbed chains; leering vampire faces and black laughter; a grey room with dark scratches on the walls; cages made of bone; falling through skies filled with blood clouds.
Cross had seen the frozen city in his dreams. Something waited for him there.
That memory faded, and he was left alone in suffocating darkness. His body ached down to the bone. His wrists were bound behind his back. The air was hot and moist. Cross was on his knees, on top of something cracked and sharp. Dank wind washed over his body, and for a moment Cross felt weightless.
He felt his spirit. She was weak and hovered just out of reach, like a firefly held in a glass jar.
Something tore away his hood. Hot air stung his face and his eyes, and the bright sky temporarily blinded him. For a few seconds Cross thought that the blazing crimson sun would crush him.
He knelt on top of a steel city wall. A bitter rot taste clung to the air and turned Cross’ stomach sour. The roar of arcane turbines filled his ears, and waves of heat pushed against him as low flying warships passed overhead.
Cross gazed into a metropolis of chains: tall and crooked buildings made of metal and bone, bound together in a massive web of iron links. Everything was the color of blood and rust. Every surface in that steel jungle of towers and parapets and jagged bridges was dented and browned from the touch of desert storms.
Endless drifts of ochre sand surrounded the city. There were hills and mounds and ridges of crimson rock and dust. It was as if the world had been trapped in a stain. The hot and dry desert wind carried grit that clung to the eyes and teeth.