Cross passed bladed reliquaries and filthy operating rooms with stained floors. There was a chamber where the pieces of a dead giant were being grafted together to form a titan zombie, a tower of shambling armored flesh held up by scaffolding and dark iron ladders. Cross walked on bridges that spanned pools of bubbling acid fuel. He walked through open courtyards populated by bone trees that grew in blood soil. He smelled decay and human fear in exercise yards, where prisoners were forced to leap over swinging blades and duck beneath oversized claws. Chambers grew long with shadows as the sun descended. The air turned as dark as wine, and the sound of chains rang like song through the approaching night.
The air turned pale as they approached the arena, and it was heavy with the tang of sweat. Cross wondered if the cold feeling inside of him was still fear. He should have felt more apprehension as he approached those doors. His limbs should have shaken, and thoughts of doubt should have plagued his mind. But all he felt was the cold, a gnawing chill that encased his heart, as if in armor.
The doors groaned open, and the arena waited for him. He was once again the last fighter to arrive. The prisoner slab had already started its descent, and it filled the air with stone and metal noise. The fading desert light from outside was overwhelmed by the burn of floating silver torches. The predatory bone serpents passed nearby as he entered the room, and he smelled their dead breath. He ignored the undead eyes that glared down at him. His own eyes were cast ahead, locked on his opponent.
Danica Black waited for him. Her armor had been discarded in favor of mobility and speed. Her dark-bladed katars shone with a wicked crimson light, and her dark clothing made her fade into the shadows. Pale and tattooed skin was exposed at her neck and midriff, and her bare and serpent-inked arms ended in dark fingerless gloves. Her hair was the color of blood, and her black lips were sealed in a determined scowl.
Cross had never beheld a woman as beautiful as she.
He drew his blade as he approached the arena floor, and with his other hand he removed his armor coat and dropped it to the ground. His eyes never left Black's, but at the corner of his vision he saw movement near the commander's chairs in the stadium seats, likely a gesture made by Drake or Morganna to indicate that they approved of the match.
Only when he'd reached the pale killing floor did Cross allow his eyes to go up, to look upon the dying. Cross knew he would carry what he saw there with him for the rest of his life, whether he wanted to or not.
Dillon looked withered. His skin hung loose from his bones. His one eye was sunken and dark, and his mouth hung slack. He looked feverish, but he was so devoid of strength he couldn't even shake in pain. His legs had been stripped of much of their meat, but they’d been expertly bandaged and tended so he that would not die quickly of his wounds. The skin where his wrists and ankles were bound was raw and dried with blood. One of his feet was gone.
He looked nothing like Dillon. He was some dying old man.
Cross caught his gaze. It was a bead of glass. There was no recognition. Whatever part of Dillon had been holding on to hope and life for all of that time was now gone. The ranger was still alive, but only on the outside.
Cross took a cold, deep breath. He felt like a tear should have come, but nothing did, and that itself made his despair even more.
I'm sorry, Dillon.
Cross tried to remember his childhood, some piece of innocence he may have once felt. He wanted to remember a simpler time, when he wasn’t surrounded by all of this madness. He hoped there was some piece of him, something locked and buried away deep in his soul, that remembered those better days, because his conscious mind could no longer find them, and he doubted it ever would again.
Danica started the fight. Cross expected the attack. Her spirit roared towards him in a tidal wave of black fire, an ocean of pure necrotic force and raw male power. Cross split the attack with his own spirit, who shone with diamond light. Black’s defenses cracked wide open, and for a second Cross saw his chance: a hole in her spirit’s power through which he could strike.
He didn’t.
Cross charged forward and aimed his bone blade at Danica’s exposed stomach. Her katars swept in, crackling with her spirit’s power. Cross’ arm snapped back in pain as the twin blades converged and shattered his bone sword into pieces. He fell onto his back, his arm alight with dark fire. Cross made a backhanded motion that swept Danica up and off the ground. She landed with a hard crack on the stone.
The air fled from his lungs. Cross felt the bones in his broken arm shift and re-knit. The pain sent daggers of hurt through his body. He was on the edge of passing out. Cross clawed at the ground, desperate to rise.
Black soared at him, her face bloody. Her katars smoked with dark frost. Cross grit his teeth and pulled his spirit around him so that she could cover him with armor made from glittering black crystal. Ice cleaved to his skin.
Cross threw out a hand and took Danica Black by the throat.
Hatred chewed through his soul. His eyes narrowed as he looked into Danica Black’s panicked face, and he saw inside of her. Her spirit clawed at him in desperation and panic, but his shield was fused by his hatred. Memories of weeks spent at Dillon’s side wouldn’t leave his mind. His friend had never wanted much, had been as unassuming a man as any Cross had ever met. He just wanted to see his sister and nephew again.
Memories of Snow cracked through the sinews of Cross’ mind, unbidden. He felt his grip tighten. Every torment he’d felt those past two years were suddenly embodied in Danica’s pale and beautiful face. He saw Red in her eyes, and he saw Morganna, and the Sorn. He saw every evil that had ever been visited upon him, and it would have been so easy to breathe out, to release all of that anger, and with that breath his shadow-wreathed fist would crush her neck.
Tears ran down his face. Cross hesitated. He wanted to kill her so badly he knew it couldn’t be right. Some part of him, something locked and buried deep inside, told him that it was wrong.
He loosened his grip, just for a moment. It was enough.
Black's spirit pulled away from her body. It was a risky maneuver: in the split second it needed to reform itself he could have killed her.
Danica sent her spirit spiraling down as a midnight lance that punched through the meat of Cross’ shoulder like a massive and bloody nail. Pain eclipsed his consciousness, and his vision went white.
Even as the darkness took him, he felt Dillon's life slip away.
They sit at the edge of a wide river. He hears the echo of cold and dark water as it crashes against the low wall. Their feet dangle over the side.
Wires cross the air over the river to the south, a music sheet without notes. There are rocks just below them, littered with sticks and stony debris. A feather floats by, not far away. A bridge is to the north, squat and ugly steel made serene by its surroundings. Wind-tossed waves lap against the stone and send up splashes of water that tickle their legs.
He is there with and Snow, Graves and Dillon. They smile with him, and they sit beneath the warm sun with their feet dipped in the sun-dappled waves. Cross feels at peace.
Cross woke to the moon. It hung low and huge in the sky, an immense isle of platinum in a midnight sea. He was in a different cell than before.
He'd been hog-tied to iron loops bolted into the stone floor. His broken bones had mended, but pain still gripped him in a vise. There was no ceiling, just a hole overhead that was closed with thick metal beams. Clouds that were rust red and as thick as stones cut across the massive lunar face. The air was thick and meaty. The night bled like an open vein.
His spirit clung to him, weak and restrained. Cross felt darkness at the edge of his soul. It held her away and clawed at his mind like a boat that had run aground in narrow waters.