Cross moved carefully. His eyes had trouble adjusting to the gloomy green light. Everything seemed distorted and distant, as if he moved underwater. His boots pushed through crusts of petrified basalt and frozen ash. The air tasted sick.
Slowly he made his way off of the ice and onto the far shore, near the small set of ruins that stood outside of Shul Ganneth, the ruins that Dillon had spied on his earlier reconnoiter.
A truck sat at the far side of the felled monuments. It was an old-fashioned M2 Army transport that had been painted black. Such artifacts were rare outside of the Southern Claw, and those that still existed were used sparingly in favor of the arcane airships, which didn’t require traditional gasoline, but instead were powered by thaumaturgic fuel. The truck growled with a low grinding sound, like a metal animal gasping for breath.
“
Damn it!”
The voice was Cradden’s. He sat behind the wheel in the truck cab. Blood ran down one side of his face. Maddox and Lucan, both lucid and unsteady, sat in the truck bed.
Cross didn’t hesitate. He sent his spirit forward in a rain of fiery nails. Smoke trailed the spiky projectiles as they seared through metal and glass. The air was alight with hundreds of incendiary ribbons.
Spirits tangled. Cradden raised a shield that deflected many of the missiles so that they exploded in a rain of sparks and steel shards.
A shadow flickered at the edge of Cross’ vision. He turned just in time to see Gregor emerge from behind a shattered stone monument. Gregor’s goggles reflected the fire of the arcane battle, and he aimed his shotgun squarely at Cross’ head.
Machine gun fire tore through the night. Vos and Dillon ran out of the darkness behind Cross, kicking up clouds of black dust and ice silt.
Vos gunned down Gregor with his MP5. Gregor’s body fell onto the ice lake, which cracked but didn’t break beneath his dead weight.
Something stirred. Cross sensed it more than felt it: a waking. The air shook. Something snaked out of the folds of night shadow and gripped the core of his being. Its touch was as icy as death. His spirit felt it, too, and she pulled away as if she’d been touched by something poisonous.
Cross ducked back behind a wall and looked at the ice. Dark steam escaped from the cracks beneath Gregor’s corpse. The air grew darker, soiled by a thick unguent like ghastly coal dust.
It’s hiding under the ice
, he realized. That presence, whatever it was, that same dismal and overwhelming entity that Cross had sensed the moment they’d drawn close to Shul Ganneth, was itself an alien there, an intruder. Its power was immense.
It’s at least as powerful as Lucan, and maybe more so. And it’s waking up
.
With horror, Cross realized what it was.
If anyone else sensed the Sleeper’s rise from the black lake, they made no sign of it. Bullets flew everywhere. Vos charged forward and sprayed the side of the truck with gunfire. Dillon, Black and Cole brought Kane and Ekko the long away around the ice, and they ducked behind the stone ruins for cover. The vampire floated behind them, still chained by fire.
Cradden’s spirit howled at them in a tidal wave of acid and frost. Cross shifted his own spirit up and formed a whirling shield, a blade of air that cleaved Cradden’s spirit in two.
Black’s spirit leapt forward and shattered her brother’s attack. Dark fire and steaming cold washed over them. The air exploded with noise. The backlash of arcane energy made Cross reel as force hammered into him. Black was stunned, and Cradden fell to the ground.
Maddox, the Doj giant, crashed into them with his sword. Cross’s spirit was weak, dazed from the battle, but he drew her up with both fists. Thaumaturgy crackled in his gauntlets. She formed another shield, a sheet of invisible steel that only barely deflected the massive blade as it came at Cross’ skull.
The world spun. Cross fell. He had only the vaguest sense that he’d been knocked off of the shore, or that he’d collapsed onto the smoking lake
no not there the shadows are leaking out
and next to Gregor’s body. He blinked, and he looked back towards the battle.
Vos screamed as Maddox cut him in half. Shots fired and bones snapped.
A fiery body flew over his head.
Danica Black used her control over the vampire’s chains to hurl the undead at Maddox like a feral missile. The burning chains exploded as the vampire and the Doj entangled. The vampire clawed and sank its fangs into Maddox even as they both burst into flames. The Doj tried to pry it off, but the vampire’s talons sank deep into his chest. Undead and giant wrestled in a flaming mass of blood, flesh and flame, a writhing tower of limbs and burning skin. They were a flailing skin torch.
Cross rose unsteadily to his feet.
Cradden Black turned and ran. He only made it three steps before the front of his face exploded as a bullet crashed through the back of his head. Dillon coldly chambered a round in his MK-14 and fired another bullet into Cradden’s body before he’d even hit the ground.
“
Nooooo!” Danica stopped, and pointed her pistol at Dillon.
Cross stood up, weakened from the pain in his leg. He stumbled onto the shore.
The ice smoked behind him. The steam flowed faster.
“
Danica…”
“
I said I didn’t want him hurt!” she shouted.
“
Dillon, Black, both of you!” Cross shouted. “We don’t have time for this…”
The Sleeper exploded out of the ice.
Great chunks of steaming hot crystal flew into the sky. Cross saw molten night burst skyward like a dark geyser.
“
RUN!” he shouted.
They clambered up the slope and took cover behind the felled stone monuments. Kane and Ekko ran straight away as fast as they could, still bound in chains. No one tried to stop them, and they vanished into the night.
A howl like a steam train pierced the air. It shook Cross’ bones and froze his blood. The sound rattled the very framework of the sky.
The shadows took form. Glimmering scales like steaming black gems shone in the light of the dismal moon. A semblance of limbs moved in a column of grey and black fog. Its eyes were white pits. Its breaths crystallized the air and turned it to gray snow.
The vast form was without true dimension or limit. It bled from the darkness of the night, and the night, in turn, bled from it. Its smoking husk oozed shadows like dust.
It was Dra’aalthakmar: the Sleeper. Cross and Dillon had been sent to find Woman in the Ice, the only known means of stopping the shadow beast, but neither of them had expected to face it.
It’s already awake
, Cross realized in horror.
It rested here.
Follow and you will find.
They’d been sent to find the means to stop this ancient creature, not to stop it themselves.
The air swirled with dark grit. The darkness in the area turned solid. Proximity to the shadow meant death.
They couldn’t speak. Drawing breath felt like swallowing sand. The night collapsed around them.
Cross looked around. The faces of his companions bled like watercolors. His spirit melted over his body, pulled him down as if into a tidal pool. He took hold of someone’s hand, but it was difficult to tell whose.
The Dra’aalthakmar’s form expanded. In moments, it would engulf them.
Ahead, near the truck, something that still held a solid form walked toward them. It was like a torch in the darkness, bright and clear, unaffected by the molten shadows.
Lucan.
Cross sensed the primal spirit. It was like standing at the head of a tidal wave. Most spirits whispered: Lucan’s screamed. It was a choir of desperate voices. The air was crowded with the souls of the lost.
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.
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.