At first, seeing Evander had been alarming. His body must have been altered using Void Form. The once luscious curls no longer remained, leaving only a smattering of new scars on his barren pate. His face was stronger, craggier, and scarred. His eyes, though, were his, even though they were ink.
But seeing him there in the flesh, she didn’t know what to feel.
Ashe supposed she should have hated him, but she really didn’t. Dregs did whatever they had to on the streets. Death was the only constant. In a perverted way, she was amused he had survived over his bastard brother Elian.
The tunnel opened into a chamber. A colonnade held up an arched ceiling with inlets that reached upward to where the statue of Mother Marrow resided above ground. It was musty and dark. There was another passage on the opposite side of the colonnade, one that held sputtering torches.
Evander smirked. “You wouldn’t understand, Snow Eyes.” The voice was still his, at least. “This world wasn’t meant for people like us. We are but shit the rest of the world wipes from their asses.” His fist clenched. “Such power. Aetheurgy. Death and destruction. You don’t und—” Evander’s words were cut off as his body jerked forward, blood gushing down the back of his skull as he slumped to the ground.
“For Amaranth,” Cyan said, hefting his aetheric axe, the one that had cleaved Evander’s head. Harlequin limped into view, carrying her axes, red curls matted with sweat. “Sister-friend, you alright?”
“Snow Eyes,” her one-time companion sputtered through bloodied lips. “What… sorry… forgive…” His voice left him, and his eyes glazed.
“I always hated that stupid name.” She was too tired to come up with something punchier. To Cyan, “Where the void did you come from?” The mist at Ashe’s feet warned her. Danger, it said. Solanine was still somewhere ahead. “Stay here,” she said to the vicars.
Ashe summoned the Meadows. That elegant cut in the fabric of the real world and that of the dead. The rend shimmed, almost liquidly, non-light of shades faithfully recreating the Temple’s innerbelly. Ashe stepped in. The wails of the dead grew, then faded when they recognized her.
A scene similar, the colonnade, the portico, the dome of inlets. Real but not. No Evander, nor of Cyan or Harlequin. The place was still and unmoving, even as the walls rippled like a slight breeze upon a lake. She sniffed the non-air, focusing on the trepidation within the mist.
There, across the colonnade in the mouth of the dark passage, something waited for her. It was then the daemon lunged at her.
Ashe fell backward, tripping over her feet, landing in a ball outside of the Meadows, thrown from the land of the eternal slumber. The daemon bounded into the world of Life without a sound, standing tall as Ashe scrambled to her feet.
The daemon was twice her size, black in color, as if wearing naught but a cloak. The head was hooded, the outlines of horns left little tents of shadowy fabric. A flat nose within, almost pig-like. Red eyes, beady and lucid, piercing. It was the same daemon who had chased her in Gargantua, of that she was certain.
She heard the vicars gasp behind her, the red-haired sprat praying to Justice while Cyan groveled to the entire Pentax.
“YOU’VE GROWN STRONG, MORTAL,” the daemon rasped, like gravel grating against a boot. “YOUR SOUL FORM IS CLOSE TO COMPLETE.”
Ashe tilted her head, trying to peer into the red eyes. “My life’s been thrown upside down since that ratfink who summoned you flew into my life. So, let’s just say I don’t have time for this shit, asshole.”
Daemon claws shot out of the cloak of shadows, Ashe raised her hands to block as her aetheurgy came alive, but she wasn’t quick enough. The back of her head slammed into a column. The mist rose all around her like a geyser, separating her from the daemon.
Vision blurry, she spied the vicars swinging their holy axes at the daemon. Cyan unleashing his canistered mist. Harlequin leapt with both axes raised, bringing downward, her mist canisters popping in the tune of a steaming sinfonietta. The daemon bellowed as the blue iron struck. Cyan shouldered into the creature of the Pit, knocking the hulking thing over.
Ashe’s mind told her to act now or she’d not get another chance.
She summoned aetheurgy, her innate aether wrapping around the daemon as she screamed, binding it in dense bands as strong as steel. The creature writhed, claws tearing in an attempt to free itself. In her mind, Ashe dragged the daemon toward the veil of Life and Death, rending at the edges of the Meadows as she sought to contain it. The daemon fought her pull, shoving Ashe back with fingers of Void Form, her feet almost giving way. But the mist—and the aether borne of the Crystal of Life within—urged onward, struggling against the frenzy. The behemoth flailed, ripped from the ground in a font of black mist, lightning sparking, leaving the beast hanging, still.
“YOU CANNOT BREAK US. YOUR HYMN OF THE SOUL IS NOT YET COMPLETE. I AM LEMURES AND WE ARE LEGION.”
Ashe sought the calm within, drawing forth the connection between the daemon and that within the Meadows. No, not the Meadows, Nocturne’s Pit. She screamed, head thrown back, arms out, mist vortexing. Her pulmo grew like hellfire, blood and globules of gods-knew-what swarmed up and out in her call, sprinkling throughout the mist. That only added more fuel.
Finally, the bond holding the daemon’s link gave way, the body beginning to fade. A sallow red glow in the center of its mangled form pulsed and waned. Its beady eyes were the last thing Ashe saw before it was gone, sent down into the farthest reaches of Nocturne’s Pit.
The Meadows oscillated around her, as the mist sewed up the gateway.
The tunnel beyond the chamber where Ashe had defeated the daemon was empty, down further into the desert it went, to the very core of the world it felt.
With a hand to the rough-hewn walls, Ashe made her way down the slight decline, the two vicars close behind. Dark as a moonless night, tepid with shadows. Mist rolling in waves at their waists. A singular irradiance in a chamber at the far bottom.
“Lilia, you certain about this?”
“I need to end this, Cyan. And Lilia is not my name.”
“Then what is it?”
Ashe snorted. “That’s what I need to fucking find out. Let me do all the talking.”
Cyan nudged the red-haired runt. “Then we’re buggered.”
Harlequin mocked the elder vicar. “Language, Vicar Cyan.”
Solanine stood in the center of a small room, cloaked in a white robe laced with red runes, reminding Ashe of streaks of blood. The aetheurgist’s hair was wild, all-onyx eyes narrowed as the three entered, standing behind an altar made of emerald crystal shards.
The altar of crystal glowed a verdant emerald, leaving the chamber a pulsating green. The altar seemed alive, the pulse like that of a heart. There was life within, Ashe realized. And not just a small lifeforce, no, this was something enormous. The entire place buzzed with Terris, the essence of Life and Creation.
“Come, child of Nightingale,” Solanine said, beckoning her forward with a bloodstained hand. “The Seal awaits you.”
“By order of the Scattered Shards, I hereb—”
The aetheurgist’s fingers moved and Cyan’s mouth froze. Same with Harlequin. Neither moved, neither blinked. Ashe rolled her eyes; she did tell them…
“That’s better.” Solanine’s hands motioned over the altar and Ashe saw that a circular dent was atop the faceted crystal, as if something was missing. The Seal? “It is time, Godsblood.” Solanine drew a wickedly curved blade as the linen robe fell. An onyx gemstone with ruby runes hanging over the bloodied runes between breasts. “Let’s see how strong you’ve grown.”
With the curved blade, Solanine carved a rune into pale flesh, aetheurgy creating a slice in reality that was coated in blackened mist. The aetheurgist stepped through.
Ashe called forth her aetheurgy and entered the Meadows.