He sees signs of wolves, his first indication he is close to the excavation. Their tracks are enormous and grouped intelligently – they travel in clusters to hide their numbers from those who would hunt them. He finds remains of past meals and skirmishes, things left to fester in the grey autumn chill.
Walls of mist block sight of anything beyond a few hundred yards. His spirit scouts ahead for him, begrudgingly. She is more difficult to control than ever, and he fears for the safety of any villages or patrols he might encounter. On the other hand, he isn’t nearly as worried about Bloodwolves as perhaps he should be, thanks to her.
He feels ghosts as they follow him. He sees things he shouldn’t be able to: arcane chains that span dimensional boundaries, webs of ethereal influence tethered between unspaces like strands of gossamer midnight, folded waves of distorted spectral voices that shimmer in the air like liquid walls. He walks carefully, not sure, after a time, if what he sees is real.
I’m losing my mind.
Perhaps sensing his alien nature, his instability, none of the Bloodwolves challenge him. They are attuned to things that humans can’t see or sense, some supernatural awareness that, it is theorized, explains their strange ability to bond with vampires.
Do they think
I’m
a vampire? Are they avoiding me out of confusion, or fear?
His body tires. He stops to rest, and he dreams of Snow.
In his dreams she is alive and well, but she won’t speak to him, because no matter how pleasant the dream is he can’t undo the past. He can’t make things right. There is no past.
When he wakes, he is even weaker than before. He hears whispers like raindrops and distant ocean waves.
The excavation looms before him. Sight of the crater chills his blood. He has seen this before, he is sure of it. The taste of fused metal and smelted rock forces its way down his throat. The air is so cold his skin burns. Dead forests stand to the east, and a pale sea lies to the west. Smoke curls into the sky. He hears the growl of machinery and the dirge of tainted sorcery.
He walks the perimeter of the crater, the place he has seen before, but at this point he can think of nothing else to do, and nowhere else to go. He knows the woman Korva is responsible for the dig, that some deal she has forged with the Ebon Cities has brought her to this place in search of something she feels is rightfully hers.
There is nothing more important to Korva than finding her prize. She has killed many, including men loyal to her when she was still a Revenger. Most of those lives were lost during her quest to dig up the bodies of these women, these avatar monsters.
He sees some of those avatars now as part of the crew that pulls dirt and stone from the earthen wall. They have made camp just inside a natural tunnel that leads into the side of the crater. Boxes of equipment and blankets are stacked near the camp.
The intruders operate machines that reek of dread electric thaumaturgy powered by dying souls, eclipsed life-forces held against their will.
Just like mine.
A juggernaut of bone and steel tears the earth as the mercenaries search for traces of arcane minerals in the soil. The vehicle leaks oil and chemical waste that saturates the ground. The unearthed materials look like shards of dark iron cast with streaks of red ice.
He smells age and ancient bones that sour the air with the stench of their presence.
Those smoldering metal shards are not truly metal…they aren’t even of this world. The fragments, the smelted iron remains, turn the air dark with frozen smoke. The walls of the crater are burned from cold and fused in striated patterns that tell an unknown history.
Until Korva and her diggers came, this was all covered. It was buried beneath destruction, hidden in the folds of history. But history is false, and the notion of it is an insult. Years are nothing but measurements, he realizes, and they are not true.
To say the year is AD 25 is ludicrous, because The Black happened long ago, just as it is
yet
to happen. It is not a measureable event. It is not a place, or a creature, or a storm or an event.
It is nothing, and yet that absence defines it. It is the antithesis of being.
He watches the angel women, the false avatars. They are the key, but he does not understand their function here. They stand vigil, stalwart, even though they are devoid of intelligence. They are flesh vessels, more weapons than soldiers. Their function is only to remain present.
Korva is there, along with others he doesn’t know. There are human mercenaries and two warlocks, a witch, two shock troop mercenaries dressed in pale body armor.
He has to move closer. He holds his spirit back. She senses something wrong, something in the air that tastes and feels sick.
Moisture hangs unnaturally in the sky. Black residue collects in the clouds, remnants of bio-arcane exhaust.
He looks at the crater. The black debris is what remains of something much larger, some vast apparatus made of grey smoke glass and fused edges. He imagines its shape. It was a black vessel, a dark ship, a metal-hulled craft that sailed in void seas beyond the dome of stars, a vessel chiseled from the black skin of some planet-sized giant, a shard of glass that once filled a hole in the walls of the universe, the edge of nowhere, the boundary that once staved off oblivion.
He has seen that boundary before, when he’d passed through the breath of worlds and entered the realm of the Woman in the Ice. The memory flashes back, darker and more powerful than before.
In that memory he sees vast reptilian appendages that dangle from multi-armed forms, elongated faces like spectral masks, claws of molten smoke and eyes like cold suns. They are impossible to count, just as they are impossible to define – their forms block out the notion of anything that might lie beyond. The strength of their nihilist gaze freezes the blood.
The end of all things lies in their eyes. They are formless, and yet close enough to reach out and grab him. They are The Black, or some part of it. The Sleeper, that creature that slept in some long-forgotten prison and awakened to threaten the existence of everything, was of the same substance as these creatures. It had been born of them.
That vessel crashed here. Is this where it – The Black – began? Was this the blast point, the origin?
He steps away from the memory and presses on towards the edge of the crater. He keeps his spirit coiled around his fist like a venomous snake. She burns his skin with anger. He fears they will not survive.
So long as I don’t take any of my team with me. That’s all that matters now.
The presence that has followed him returns. He wants to turn and face it. It moves closer, hangs at the edge of sight.
He sees a black-swathed male figure hover in the air like a hanged man. His spirit recoils at the arcane stench of this being, from the sheer power that rolls off its unnatural form. A long blade is slung across its back, and its cape dangles in the stale wind. Bits of shadow essence fall from the body like oil.
Something isn’t right. The figure moves towards him, but it takes so little effort to mask its presence the sentries in the crater detect it. Weapons fire fills the air. Arcane smoke coalesces into flame and sears the black-clad figure. The fires lick around its body harmlessly and recoil from its greasy shield.
He takes advantage of the distraction created by this intruder, and uses his spirit to mask his own presence as he slips down the slope. To a non-mage he appears as nothing more than a bend in the light, a shift of rock and pebbles that collapses down the side of the hill. He lands near a shard of the alien metal. The air around it is deathly cold.
That metal emanates the same stench as does the creature in the trees.
He presses forward while the intruder draws the attention of Korva’s forces. He goes unnoticed.
Korva and her consorts waste no time. He sees a flash of red light from within the tunnel as he approaches. The air bubbles and spreads, as if ready to burst. Smoke billows from the darkness. He passes sentries distracted by the new intruder, and he pushes his way through a camp littered with equipment and weapons.
A dark alcove beckons from the rear of the tunnel. Korva and the others have already passed through to the other side and vanished.
He moves towards the portal, but the cold presence behind him makes him hesitate. The air turns to a slush of dreams. Every motion is long and exaggerated. Something roots him to the ground.
Face me
, it says.
He clenches his spirit tight as he moves. He knows who it is, what it is, before he turns to look.
The man called Jennar is a nihilist, a fanatical member of the Black Circle, a group dedicated to the destruction of the world. They are harbingers of destruction, adherents to a twisted belief that The Black was meant to happen. Jennar was maimed by Danica beneath the frozen city of Karamanganjii, but they’d already guessed he’d survived.
What they hadn’t guessed was that he is now The Sleeper. Not as powerful as it had been, nowhere near as vast, but its identity is undeniable.
The smoke of lost souls seeps from Jennar’s glassy eyes. His black cloak is tattered and worn and burns from the presence of the murderous shadow within, a presence that once consumed cities with its mere proximity. The air bends around this new form, this Jennar shadow, and his mystical blade, the
nightlance
. The arcane weapon is the only thing that keeps The Sleeper’s dismal form stable.
It is mine,
Jennar says.
What is?
You know why I am here.
The Sleeper offers no other explanation. The nightlance whips out and catches him in the side, and he rolls backwards. Pain flashes across his body.
His spirit spirals out of his control. The air twists in a funnel of white fire. He smells kerosene and hot metal. It is all he can do to hold her in, to drag her back into his grasp before she kills them both and destroys the cave in the process.
It wants what
they
came for. It wants whatever lies on the other side of the portal.
He senses dimensional properties embedded in the rune-carved gate. The magic is ancient and dirty, not human magic, not even Cruj…something far older, far more alien. A fragment of the derelict vessel, that intruder craft.
The Sleeper’s home world. It is from the origin of the vessel that crashed here.
His blade comes to his hand before he realizes what’s happening. His spirit infuses the white bone shard with vast power, enough to repel Jennar’s cold weapon.
The dark orifice to the other world wavers and throbs at Avenger’s presence. He feels pulled, drawn towards the gate. Jennar’s face twists in rage.
Outside, the world is quiet. Korva’s sentries carry on as if ignorant to their presence.
He feels a spirit tug at him, search for him. A reconnoiter performed by an expert, so subtle that if he wasn’t familiar with the witch’s signature he would never notice it. He’s unable to mask himself before it finds him. It slithers around Jennar like he isn’t even there. He is invisible, somehow.
It’s the sword…the
nightlance
conceals him.
Jennar presses his attack. He pushes the warlock back against the gate.
Even as the darkness folds around him and the hum of ancient arcane steel fills his head, his mind panics with the realization of whose spirit it is that notes his presence.
Ash. Oh, God, they’re here.
He backs away from Jennar. Shadows leak from the inhuman body and creep like tendrils of night. They grow over every corner of the cave.
Mercenaries look into the tunnel and see nothing. Even
he
is invisible to them now. He fades, and feels the bonds of solidity fall away, the seams of the world tear. He is pulled into dust. Jennar turns, twists, folds into two-dimensionality and tries to push past and through the gate.
He can’t risk making a mistake. Avenger is the only thing that keeps him anchored to the mortal world.
He coils his spirit into the blade, charges the bone metal with arcane power that crackles with liquid flames.
The
nightlance
comes at him, and the blades collide. He wraps his spirit around Jennar and burns his unliving flesh. Caustic fumes turn the air to a bitter cloud. Their arms are entangled, and he grabs the creature around the throat.