LIV
Emre
“LOJEN, NO! STAY back!” Emre cried as he backed his way into the statues, leaning against one that depicted a drakken. Fitting.
The drakken wardkeeper must have heard him, because Lojen disappeared into the protection of the Temple as a barrage of aethecite-powered wheellocks and aether ping-ping-pinged the stone all around.
Lu Har’s daemonic firedrake deposited him upon the Temple’s porch, where the Fallen stood with hands coated in onyx aetheurgy. The drake reared its fiery head and roared a defiant outburst borne of the Pit.
As aether barreled toward him, Emre tumbled twenty feet from the porch, landing forcefully upon a scourge who had ringed the stairs below, his engraved wheellock pistol bouncing from his grip, his wind knocked from his lungs. Luckily for him, the scourge took the brunt of his fall, and nothing seemed broken except the scourge’s neck. But despite his shock, Emre pressed the aether-induced wound closed with a hand, could feel his back slick with his lifeblood, drenching his suit coat.
He picked up the scourge’s fallen wheellock rifle and held the barrel to his forehead, eyes squinted, he breathed deeply, hoping that his final moments would see it done to the end. Steel it, Benld. You knew this was the path. For Brynn.
Burning all aetheurgy reserves at once, golden fire in his veins. Silver glow showed and felt everything in the surrounding canyon. White-hot inferno filled his body with strength of the Pentax. The wound in his gut was the harshest of fires. No amount of burning could stem a wound already made such as that. It was unlike any fire he had ever felt. This was something else. Something sinister. Something forbidden.
Of the void.
“You cannot hide from me, Emre Benld.” A crackle of aetheurgy pinpointed Lu Har’s location from within the Temple above. “You’ve made yourself worthy of my attention, but now is the time to end you. To end what you have sown in Drenth. Your stunt with the communication to the people will be handled effectively. I will raze your city to the sands. All that blood will be on your hands.”
“Go to the Pit,” Emre yelled through clenched teeth.
Laughter from the Fallen. “I have already seen it and know of its majesty. Untapped its power remains. What you’ve seen, what this world has seen, has been but a pinprick of what Noctis can do.” Lu Har began chanting in a language Emre could only describe as grim. A coldness settled over the Temple grounds. “I’ll give you a taste, Emre Benld.”
He could feel the raging flames of the parch coursing through his body, but as it neared the wound, the world, his world, felt like he was standing upon the sun. Pain, nothing but pain. The hurt flared into his bloodstream, into his muscles, gnawing away at the parch, stopping and quenching. Snuffing the enhancements on its own.
“Shit.”
What had Lu Har done to him? It felt like a siphon. He could feel the siphon destroying the reserves in his body, eradicating the parch serum he’d swallowed, aiming for his soul. It was rendering his aetheurgy null. And worse still, the pain felt like fire. Liquid fire.
All his aetheurgy snuffed out, leaving him a mere man.
How is this possible?
“Do you now see what Noctis is capable of?” Lu Har sounded closer to where Emre hid. “A scratch at the surface of what is possible. Let it consume you. Let it consume all those you hold dear. This is what awaits your daughter.”
Black-red lightning bolts cratered into the sandstone, sending shards of rock flying in all directions, sand and dust misting as the ground became churned by the corruption of Aere. The mist of the Sea came rolling down the canyon walls, but it was black as the abyss, denser than he had ever seen. The sable fog circled the Temple grounds like a shroud, almost as if the Forgemistress was struggling to keep it at bay. Was this the true horror of Noctis?
Mustering all he had left, Emre barged around the column and fired the wheellock in the direction of Lu Har. The Fallen had his hands out to the sides, palms up. Emre’s bullet stopped in a wall built of black mist, the projectile dropping to the sandstone at the Fallen’s robed hem.
From behind, shots rang out. Emre ducked and he dove between a set of columns, grunting as he hit, hard. The sky was lighter now as dawnbreak fully broke over the desert, its wonderous rays fighting through the veiling haze of Noctis, which made his eyesight lag in adjusting under the blinding sunlight and the vastness of the emptiness. It was as if Life and Death were meeting in a grand battle with Gargantua and the Temple of Mother Marrow at the center.
Lu Har’s laughter echoed. “Escape, you cannot. This is where you meet your end, Emre Benld. I might even leave you alive long enough to see your daughter break the Seal.”
More gunfire and black-red lightning bolts all around him. Emre half-shuffled, half-dragged himself away from his precarious resting spot into the surrounding statues. Nestled between were benches and altars of sandstone, of pedestals and rock-hewn vases. He tripped, falling, his wheellock rifle bouncing away. Emre reached for it, but there were bullets thudding-thudding-thudding into the earthen creations, the ground, and canyon dunes. He curled into a ball, his gut wound on fire, hands covering his head in protection.
“Emre!”
Partially visible through the hazy mist borne of Noctis, Lojen crouched behind a stone bench that was pocked with bullet holes, the horns upon his head magnificent.
“I told you to stay away,” he croaked.
“Bugger that.” Lojen crawled on his belly the distance to where Emre was huddled, keeping head low as bullets whizzed all around. “Lu Har has this place surrounded. That mist is evil, it’s very touch stings. The Hymn of War is weakening.”
Emre forced himself into a kneeling position, trying to keep the wound tight, but it was a losing battle. He coughed and blood trickled out the corners of his mouth.
“You don’t look so good.”
“I’ve felt better.” It hurt to crack a smile.
“You prolong your death, Emre Benld.” The Fallen stood calmly at the top of the stair, his all-onyx eyes glimmering like ebony in an inky statue as the black mist swirled around him.
Stone erupted, flinging shrapnel as the Fallen unleashed a blast of black-red lightning. Emre took umbrage, but all around him were the sounds and seeds of destruction. Predators and human-driven drones stomped into the Temple grounds as Lojen and Emre squirmed through the debris, avoiding gunfire and aetheric sparks alike. Blood left a telling sign of his passage. Lojen was practically carrying him now, his arm slung across the drakken’s shoulder, the seven-foot-tall draconem bent nearly in half. He was weakened, body ready to go into arrest at any moment. Lojen carried the unloaded gun, his fingers without strength.
The drakken dragged him deeper into the labyrinth of columns, but Emre had no idea to where, he just focused on putting one foot in front of the other—troublesome as it was. A crash nearby, a column exploding and ground shaking as stone masonry broke and lurched like a tree felled in the Forest of Calibrath.
Emre slid off Lojen’s bracing arm, falling to his face. He rolled over, eyes blurry. “Too far, Lojen. My time has come.” A coughing fit full of blood balled him up, knees up to his chest. “Save yourself.” Final thoughts flit through his foggy mind: I don’t regret my choices. For Brynn, it was worth it. For Tevun, Val. For Wick, O my friend, I’ll miss you. And for Finn, I’ll always love you. For you, Cad.
Lojen’s claws pulled Emre’s underarms. “Like void I’m leaving you. You’re my ward. The Dark God of Death will take me first. Hold on, Em.” Lifting him as if he were an infant, Lojen carried him on through the forest of columns and brush of stone.
Emre’s head lulled. In one of the rare times his eyes were open, Gargantua was all he saw above the blackened mist. The quarter mile-wide flying fortress suspended a mere hundred feet in the air, a giant blotch in the sky as if bobbing atop the Sea. A thousand or more aethecite lights shining about the fortress.
Gods, it’s beautiful…
He thought about the day the fortress of the Fallen had come to Drenth, but the memory was fleeting, the pain in his wound drowning out his questions. He knew why he loathed everything about Gargantua, of what he had planned. Planned it all, even his...wait, what did he plan?
A chill ran through him. No, he realized, not a chill, but Death. It was the icy fingers of Nocturne coming to claim him.
“Almost there, Em. Hang on.”
