It was an angel of razors and scars. The man was tall and broad of shoulder, with short dark hair peppered with streaks of grey. An iron cowl covered his lean and angular face just below the icy eyes. His body was covered with leather and metal – razor spurs and short spikes twisted from his forearms, shins and shoulders, and in between were patches of oozing blood. He was the color of burnished steel and old wounds, and a silence surrounded him, a cold presence that made the air frigid.
Sharp iron wings held him aloft, ragged pieces of metal that were cruel and crude, uneven and laced with blood which sluiced down his body every time they creaked. The span of those wings was so great he could have used them to envelop both Dane and Ijanna.
“Goddess...” Dane whispered.
“Another way?” the angel asked. “That is not for you to find.” His voice rang through Dane’s head like a blade being sharpened. “You should not have come here, Azander Dane. You are not welcome.”
“Who...who are you?” Ijanna asked, her voice filled with fear.
“I am Calladar,” the angel replied. Blood dripped from Dane’s ear. Every word the angel spoke sliced through his brain.
He knew that name: Calladar had been the Blood Queen’s champion, a general of her armies and her personal guardian. Stories told that when Vlagoth was killed a coup of sorts erupted among her armies, and many of her former forces and allies within the Arkan, Voss and Tuscars tried to take the Black Tower for themselves. Calladar held it almost single-handedly: the angel of razors sealed himself in the tower and had remained silent for three decades, but only after he’d slaughtered hundreds of the Blood Queen’s followers.
“What are you doing here?” Ijanna asked. Dane heard the terror in her voice.
“Watching,” Calladar said. “Waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Dane asked defiantly, but he already knew the answer. The angel kept its eyes locked firmly on Ijanna.
“For you,” he told her, and her body drifted closer to the bladed seraphim. “It is time to heal your shattered world.”
Calladar looked at Dane, and the milky eyes started to glow. Dane felt his muscles convulse. The sound of metal crashed through his skull, a tidal wave of iron shards and inhuman roars. His chest rattled, his stomach twisted in pain. Blood seeped from his nose, and when he wiped it away he saw with horror that it was black.
“Stop!” Ijanna shouted.
Pain shot straight up the center of his body, a splitting torrent of hurt that threatened to rip him apart. His throat constricted. He saw piles of corpses, dead he’d made, lives he’d ended. He saw himself alone in the cave, hoping to die, and he was back there again, curled into a ball, waiting for death to take him. He saw the boy that would become Azander Dane, full of hope and potential, then saw him fully grown, a grotesque mockery of everything he’d once held dear, his soul soaked in blood.
He coughed and cried in pain. He knew he was going to die, so he held his arms to his sides and drew a deep breath.
“I said stop!” Ijanna shouted, and to Dane’s surprise the pain ceased, at least for a moment. He forced his eyes open and realized he was dangling cruciform upside down in mid-air. Blood and sweat ran down his face, and he saw rows of spikes below, a forest of teeth.
“Why?” Calladar demanded.
Dane saw her float near the angel. She looked down at Dane, and doubt colored her face.
“Because no one deserves to die like that,” she said.
“Many have,” Calladar’s monstrous voice said. “Many by his hand.”
The blood was swimming to his head. Dane twisted and tried to shift, but whatever invisible force it was that held him was iron hard and absolute.
“Am I....being judged?” he managed. His own voice sounded strange to him, distant, like it was someone else speaking.
“We’re all to be judged at one point or another,” Calladar said, his voice as deep as the caverns beneath them. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“Enough,” Ijanna said. Calladar’s milky gaze shifted to her. His metal cowl leaked blood. “I’m here,” she said. “I know what I have to do.”
“Do you?” Calladar demanded. Ijanna doubled over, suddenly wracked with pain. Dane felt it, too, as surely as if he’d been kicked in the gut. “Do you understand the sacrifice you must make?”
“My...my life...” she said.
“Ijanna...no...” Dane tried to speak but the pain returned, twisting needles of hurt which lanced through his body like blades in his skin.
“Not just yours,” Calladar told Ijanna. “Only by her resurrection can the wicked be punished. Only then can his shadow be burned away.”
Calladar floated upwards, bringing them both in tow. Rigid and freezing air ran around their bodies as they fell up. Dane’s fingers curled in pain, and every time he almost regained his focus a new convulsion shot through his body and blinded him.
He saw light, ice-blue and bitterly cold, a shaft of arctic illumination that shone on a body floating in the air above. It was difficult to tell if he was alive or not, a brown-haired warrior dressed in soiled White Dragon armor and a tattered holy raiment, his dark face shadowed with blood and scars.
Gallaean.
The once-Jlantrian priest Dane had thrown through the
cutgate
was alive, suspended mid-air, his body contorted and twisted. Tendrils of light surrounded him, frost blue and sharp, and as Dane and Ijanna ascended Dane saw with horror that the aether bounds were tightening, squeezing the man’s skin and cracking the flesh so his blood dropped like rain into the darkness below.
“I was once like you,” Calladar said to Dane. Ijanna had stopped screaming, and Dane’s own hurt gradually subsided. Shards of light like dying stars slowly fell from Calladar’s iron-bound fingers. “Now I am a servant of the One Goddess, just as Vlagoth was. I have waited here for you, Ijanna the Skullborn, after my Queen passed the power of her bloodline on through the heirs of the men who’d killed her.”
They stopped floating and hung in the air near the light, a winter-pale lance which cut through the otherwise smothering darkness.
“I have to die...” Ijanna said. Dane heard the sadness in her voice, the tears.
“Yes,” Calladar said. “Carastena Vlagoth, child of Nazarathos’ incestuous God rape of Corvinia, must destroy the last vestige of her mother’s existence. Corvinia is a captive of her brother still, and he has twisted her into the Veil, made it so the world is slowly siphoning away her life energies while he steals her power. He rebuilds the world in his own image, and the only way to defy him is to take her away.”
Ijanna’s eyes glazed with light. She floated with her arms held to her sides, dangling like she was some sort of puppet. Calladar had taken control, and had her in his thrall. Dane tried to move but just floated there, upside down, his eyes growing heavy, every inverted breath scraping raw through his lungs.
“What must I do?” she asked.
“You must carry on her work,” Calladar said. “You will select your own champion, a servant and protector. With him by your side you will save the world, by destroying it. You will dismantle the Veil and allow life to be reborn. Malzaria must be purged, so it may begin anew.”
Dane tried to call out, but blackness spread through his mind, and with another pained breath he passed out.
Dane felt himself dissected. Every fiber of his being was slowly peeled apart. Memories, fears, angers, hopes. He was shredded into nothingness, turned about, hastily thrown back together. His eyes burned even though he couldn’t see, his flesh melted and was torn away even though he knew it wasn’t his flesh, not really, because whatever state of pain they’d put him in transcended physicality.
He was in a place where they scoured his soul, flayed it, ripped it from his bones. Every deed he’d ever done, every life he’d taken, every hurt inflicted swam down his throat like poison.
Dane was formless but in agony, in nothingness yet bound tight, thoughtless but still wracked with regret and fear. He clawed at the invisible walls of his black prison with arms that weren’t there. His mind had been broken like a brittle and bloody crystal. He smelled tears in the wind, tasted them in the thickness of the air.
Nothing existed but himself and the void. His life had been rendered intangible.
Hot and rancid pain like burning irons pushed against his skin. He was being stripped down, and born again.
Somewhere in the darkness of that new hell, Dane screamed.
Time passed. He couldn’t know how much. The past flowed through him like a black river. What was he?
Where
was he?
Dane was a little boy, chasing his cousins through fields of golden light. He was a teenager, enthralled by the majesty of the White Dragon Army as they marched down the streets of Ral Tanneth. He was lonely, sad, and misunderstood, just like all children. He was a paragon, the boy who’d aspired to greatness and found it. He was a soldier, wading knee-deep in the remains of those he’d killed. He was disillusioned and embittered, sick of mourning the death of an idealized vision of an Empire that had been nothing more than a lie. He was desperate and afraid and willing to do anything to make the illusion he’d grown up nurturing into a reality.
He was an outlaw. A murderer. He was a man seeking redemption, ashamed at what he’d done, unable to set things right.
His soul, peeled back. Dane screamed.
He woke in a room of white stone. Light dripped down rectangular pillars surrounding a raised plinth at the center of the chamber. Dane’s wounds had healed and he was wide awake. His skin was hot and flushed with sweat beneath his armor and helmet, and he stood there, disoriented, trying to gather his bearings. Everything was too bright, and the walls seemed coated with pure ice.
Dane stood, waiting, his nerves on edge and his muscles tense. He had no recollection of how he’d come to stand in that chamber. He looked himself over and realized he wore a new suit of Dawn Knight’s armor, black and gold plate and chain mesh lined with padded leather on the inside. Leaning against one of the pillars were a dark shield and a
vra’taar
with pure white blades and a central hilt bound in black cloth.
He didn’t move. The air was still and cold, and all he heard was the creak of metal and his own labored breaths.
He should have been dead.
Maybe this is heaven
, he thought, and he nearly laughed aloud. If there was such a place, it surely wasn’t meant for him.
Fear knotted in his stomach like a hunk of bad meat. After a time, Dane finally stepped off the plinth. The metal boots scraped loud on the stone, and each step sent hard echoes through the chamber. It was difficult to see the walls since they was so pure white, like stepping into the heart of a blizzard.
“Are you prepared?”
Calladar’s sudden appearance nearly made Dane jump out of his skin. He’d left the sword and shield leaning against the pillar.
The angel seemed a blasphemy in such a pale place, with his chiseled black armor and bladed wings, his scarred face and the stains of dark blood he left pooling on the floor. The sight of the creature chilled Dane’s soul. His frosted white eyes watched Dane without blinking, and the soiled metal wings folded and unfolded with an ear-grating scratch of steel.
“Where am I?” Dane asked. “What do you want from me?”
“This is the Sanctum.” Calladar’s voice pounded through Dane’s skull. “A place of healing, and preparation.”
“Am I still in Chul Gaerog?” Dane asked.
“Yes,” Calladar said. “And you will never leave.”
The sword was well out of reach, and Dane hesitated to Touch the Veil in that place, and in that creature’s presence. There was little doubt Calladar was the master of Chul Gaerog, and Dane had a sense that the bleeding seraph could have killed him whenever he wanted to.
“Where’s Ijanna?” Dane demanded.
“So many questions,” Calladar said. “She is safe. Safer than she’s ever been...and it falls to you to keep her that way.”
Dane felt something go cold inside of him. He sensed her at the edge of his thoughts, a smoky presence obscured by distance and stone walls. He couldn’t discern anything except that she was safe, and strangely at peace. They’d been bonded, somehow, joined together by Veilcraft the likes of which he’d never encountered.
“I see more questions in your eyes...” Calladar said. “The Blood Queen was powerful, but physically frail. She was, after all, only a child. The Janus Tree, conduit of the Veil, kept her alive, but the amount of concentration and effort required on her part to maintain control was demanding, and left her vulnerable. So shall it be with Ijanna.” Calladar closed the gap between them by gliding forth on a rush of burning air. “That’s why she’ll need you.”
“You were Vlagoth’s protector,” Dane said. Calladar stopped floating and hung suspended less than a foot away. Dane smelled oil and blood.
“Yes,” Calladar said, his tone softer, faded, like he spoke from a great distance. “I was not there with her from the beginning, which is how she allowed the Arkan and the Voss to take control of her. Had she had a Sentry then I doubt they would have been able to dominate her as they did.” Calladar drew a pained breath. “Had I been there with her from the start, the Rift War might not have happened.”
A beat of quiet followed. Dane listened as the angel’s black blood dripped to the pure white floor. His heart hammered in his chest.
“How?” he asked. “How did you become this?”
“I was chosen,” Calladar’s black voice said. “I was a prisoner, a captured soldier of Jlantria, brought here in chains by the Voss. She chose me. But even with me by her side she was still under their control. I was carefully watched, a toy that Carastena’s captors allowed her to keep.” He drew another deep and rasping breath, like that of a dying animal. When he spoke again his tone was darker. “I was not there with her when the Jlantrian breached the
cutgate
and slice her throat. But I found him before he escaped. And I made him pay for what he’d done.”
Calladar stopped talking, and watched Dane carefully. Dane felt himself shaking.
“Ijanna is meant to become the new Blood Queen,” Dane said. “Isn’t she? And you intend me to replace you. A new Sentry, for a new Queen.”
“Yes,” Calladar’s said. His voice was like iron claws. “Protect her, Dane, so she can fulfill her purpose.”
“And destroy the world,” Dane said angrily. “Protect her as she destroys the Veil and frees the One Goddess.” His fists clenched, and the chill of the Veil teased at the edge of his mind, gripped his spine with glacial fingers, begged him to reach out, to Touch, to summon enough power to push this monster away and reach for his sword. “She’ll die,” he said. “Everybody will die.” He inched closer to Calladar until they were nearly touching. The angel’s marble-white eyes bore into him, but Dane was unafraid. Rage had pushed his terror away.
“Yes,” Calladar thought. “That is how it must be. It isn’t a question of whether or not it will happen. It’s a question of whether you will be her guardian, or if she must choose another.”
Dane was ready to lash out, but he hesitated, not out of fear but doubt.
To cleanse the world of evil
, he thought.
To return a Goddess we never knew we’d lost.
He could think of worse things to die for. He felt himself back in the camps, knee-deep in blood-stained mud, listening to the screams of the dying. He saw the boy, dead on the path, still strapped to his mother’s back. He’d have given anything, including his own life, to take back that moment, and all of the moments that had led to it.
Is this what he was meant to do? Is this why the Veil had spared him, to protect Ijanna while she carried out this terrifying task?
No
, he thought.
I won’t condemn thousands of people to die.
“There has to be another way,” he said.
“You have doubts.”
“Didn’t you?”
“Of course,” Calladar said. “Your soul is tainted, Azander Dane, stained by the wrongs you’ve committed, by the blood you’ve spilled and the lives you’ve stolen. But it is not lost.” The voice was calm, almost soothing. “
You
are not lost. Not yet. And neither is Malzaria. But if the One Goddess isn’t returned and we continue to use the Veil, the world will ultimately be reshaped in the Unmaker’s image.”
“I can’t do this,” Dane said. “I don’t want to imagine what things will be like if Nazarathos succeeds...”
“No,” Calladar interrupted. “You don’t.”
Dane swallowed, hard.
“But I can’t condemn the lives of so many people.”
“If you fail to act,” Calladar thought, “that is exactly what you will do.” He paused. Dane felt a crushing weight on his shoulders. “Azander,” Calladar said, “this
shall
come to pass. Either the One Goddess will be free, or Nazarathos will win. There is no other choice.”
It was too much, too much for him to bear. There had to be another way,
had
to be.
He sank to his knees, and felt hollow inside. Again he was being given the choice to serve the greater good. All he had to do was spill more innocent blood.
That is my purpose
, he thought in despair.
To slaughter.
“She...” It was hard to speak, like his breath had left him. “She has to destroy the Veil.”
“Yes,” Calladar thought. “She must extend it all, and at once. It is the slow bleeding out of Corvinia’s power that grants Nazarathos strength. By draining that reserve quickly the magic can be channeled inward, to shatter the bonds of the deific prison.” Calladar put an iron hand on Dane’s shoulder. A jolt of cold shot through his body. “The One Goddess will be free, and the world will be reborn.”
The room seemed to be collapsing in on him. Dane’s head pounded, and his body felt miles away.
The Veil had chosen him for this.
Ijanna
had chosen him.
He saw the black face, the angel of death, and realized Slayne had never been the right man to don that persona. It had been Dane all along.
“I will be her Sentry,” he said, and the last vestige of strength drained from his body. Saying those words pained him more than all the lives he’d taken in the Razortooth, more than any wound he’d ever suffered. Cold air scraped down his throat like razors.
For long and silent moments Calladar said nothing. He kept his bleeding hand on Dane’s shoulder, and when he pulled his iron grip away the armor was stained with steaming black blood.
“Prepare yourself,” Calladar told him. “You must earn your post.” He stepped away. “You will face me in combat for the right to protect the new Blood Queen.”