Black as diamond, p.38
Black as Diamond, page 38
Threads wrapped around his wrist—tightened. His hand stilled, coated in various shades of red. It stung, but he barely registered the pain. It, or perhaps the possessor, commanded him forward.
Tense as a bowstring, Wren tried to fight it. He strained within the recesses of his own mind against the substance that strung all life itself. But it snared his being ever tighter like the coils of the sky serpent. A thread lashed his cheek. The substance rippled like a beast unbound. Wild and red as iron flames.
You wanted this.
You are a creature to be pitied.
You cannot escape the fate you made for yourself.
The senseless hands of possession held all of him but the deepest part, which screamed to take, take, take back control. He was very much aware, and that was the worst part.
He watched himself form a six-pointed star around the woman. Blood drenched the sand, and the sand drank it like bone. As the circle around the star was completed, a glow rose to cast his face in gaunt shadow. Part of him screamed. But the dread was suppressed with such speed, it had no time to blossom. An overwhelming pressure squeezed his mind into a cage. Aching, Wren watched in vivid, horrifying detail as he lifted the needle.
What did it need?
Sacrifice.
Why?
Because this is what you deserve.
What else is a point, a blade, an edge to do but whet its hunger?
The needle was a knife, and before he knew it, a red mouth yawned across the woman’s neck. He slashed his mother’s throat with careless ease, metal swimming through flesh like cloth.
Thread ripper. Life taker.
Ah.
He always did have a penchant for making a mess of things.
The needle was pulled out, blood weeping beneath the blade. Her chest slowed to a stop, breath leaking in waves as the threads surrounding her peeled away, like a scab from a wound. The threads surrounding him thrummed in agitation. A relentless buzz filled his ears, and red heated his eyes.
Was he crying?
There was no feeling in his face, so he wouldn’t have been able to tell.
With numb ease, Wren tilted his mother’s chin and cupped the side of her neck to gather a handful of her blood. His wound mingled with hers. There was power in blood. Heart lurching, he watched the atrocities of his body in dull horror. His hands did not tremble, though his mind screamed like the splintering of a mirror.
Stop. He needed to stop.
No. He needed to continue.
A scalding thread snapped at him. This was what he had to do. There was nothing more important than what he had to do. An unseen hand ripped away any opposition as it appeared, forcing him deeper under the steadfast control of the possessor. An innate compulsion guided him forward.
Twining their blood together, Wren connected the six points of the star and painted a spiral of sacred geometry in a series of concentric shapes, each smaller than the last. By the time the heinous deed was done, blood covered his hands to the elbow. The macabre fluid seeped into his skin as though it could soak through the flesh to mingle with his own. Insects crawled over his arms, invisible, untouchable, but present if only in his mind.
The spellwork resembled a web. All around and everywhere.
The satisfied curl of a warped thread raised his head. Nearly there.
Outside himself, he watched his palms press into the circle. Red undulated upward from the edges. Raw tendrils of khetry licked down his arms like hungry flames. A strange new power filled him—consumed him. More than he’d ever experienced before—Wren bloated with power to overheating. Hot blood fell from his nose and stained his teeth wickedly. He was dizzy with loss he couldn’t fully comprehend.
Quickly, quickly—quickly! screamed a disembodied voice made of white noise.
Gales whipped and whirled, and black spikes rose from the circle to cradle him. The false imitation of an embrace, too warm to be comforting and too tight to be loving. Thin cracks glowed up his arms. Brilliant light shone into blurred eyes, revealing to him knowledge of life itself, of death itself. Wren swallowed them both down—and they tasted like ashen regret.
Now, now, now—now! screamed the energy coagulating in his veins.
For a second, he felt like himself again, recoiling at the carnage at his feet.
See what your curiosity has wrought.
Demanding threads cinched breath from his throat, and unyielding fingers wrenched back control. Wren belonged to the thing that hovered at the edges. A silhouette with eyes the color of viscera splashed upon the walls of his brain, ripping him apart from the inside.
Blood dripped from his fingertips as his hands rose. In a sharp motion, the circle turned white, growing to entirely encase him and his mother.
It burned. Oh, how it burned with a passion. Worse than any needle, any knife.
The Red Web of Life hummed. The life with which khetry was animant. Wren wasn’t sure the two of them were separate entities any longer. Was he connected to the world, or was the world a living part of him? Maybe they were one and the same.
A single thought throbbed in his skull, and suddenly he knew the awful truth of what he’d done—what he was.
Weaver.
Everything happened like he was moving through water.
Wren was tugged to his feet. Crimson glowed down his outstretched arms to widespread fingers. A pair of golden eyes with stars in place of pupils blinked. In his bright vision, he saw the unusual detail woven into khetry like actual coils of rope, thousands of thin strands braided together to make something more than itself.
His body walked along the beach to the Sea Gate. Vaguely, he sensed three people on his left and another on his right. Through the web, he saw the thread that looped the five of them together, just one of many that made the world.
Those to the left were no ordinary people, though. Weavers alike. Their robes fluttered in the dying wind as a fervent spectrum of colors swam through their hair, green and violet and dusk blue. To the other side, Wren saw an umber-haired woman. In one hand was a tome that dripped to darken the sand, and in the other she clutched a necklace. The ruby pendant dislodged something familiar that fell to the wayside in his memory. But as much as he tried, he couldn’t hold on to it. It was painfully beyond his reach.
Wren’s head was tilted upward as his glazed eyes stared at the Sea Gate.
The barrier flickered to life and shimmered between streams of unforgiving sunlight. Below was a smaller gate formed of three distinct slabs that arched across the sand like a bridge. Carved into the silver-streaked ironwood was a constellation of symbols. Both magnificent and horrendous, it was the legacy of an ancestor whose name was lost to him. One thousand years ago, a queen stood on these shores and, with the southern drakes by her side, called for this gate to be built.
Four Weavers had raised it. Four were needed to fell it. To untangle the work and smooth the strands straight again. The possessor seeded this knowledge into the depths of Wren’s mind, made it such that what they knew, so too did he.
Commanded by their whim, he lifted his hands in tandem with the others. Red bands slithered up their bodies. Flexed fingers manipulated the substance delicately. From khetry, the Weavers pulled the spell that kept the barrier standing. Each of them was the limb of a horrendous whole. They wrenched their hands apart. And the spell ripped free in an explosion of scarlet ribbons.
Khetry shimmered as it pulsed. Power coiled in the caverns of his tremulous heart.
Wren tried to plead, but resistance was fleeting. He was forced to stand there, forced to watch as the Sea Gate crumbled.
It began with a shiver that stirred up sand in small clouds. Thousands of tiny hexagons raced across the curve of the barrier. A crack thundered as the gate split into two, and the jagged edges glowed until the sky was more white than blue. Water stirred around the smaller gate, quaking like cold bone. As it disintegrated, Wren heard it.
Whispering. The woman on his other side was speaking. Chanting. At first low, then rising like a bell chiming through soundless winter. Her fist glowed with waves of shifting iridescent light. The ancient words that left her mouth daggered through his ears.
A black rift slit the air. Ripping the gate apart and warping reality itself. Staring unblinking, Wren saw the void, saw darkness frothing inside that nothingness. Where the sky once was, there gaped a rippling tear. Red crept at the edges, curling like bleeding maggots.
From within, electric tendrils licked along the shuddering gate. Crimson tongues of lightning snatched at the remnants of ironwood, and the maw swallowed it all. Into the void went every single piece of the Sea Gate. Once the structure that had withstood a thousand years was gone, the rift sealed itself back up as though it had never been there.
Then out of the sea emerged a massive hand.
It slammed down and shook the surf. Another hand. Followed by a head. An enormous being crawled from the sea. Their dripping form blotted out the sun. The earth quaked, the rumbling of an ancient being awakening from millennia of slumber. Water cascaded from the hunched body, and virulent streaks of black diamond spidered up their arms. Shattered fetters hung from the hands clenching at the sand. Two wounds slashed the blades of their back, gruesome things riddled with grayed gold.
They looked over their shoulder at the floating island, then turned their indifferent gaze onto Wren. Through a colossal curtain of crimson hair, a pair of hazel eyes peered down at him, drowning in black, with a silver slit notching the center.
The presence in Wren’s mind tightened its uncompromising grip. Its claws pierced his tender head, squeezing until he gasped—until the possessor let him gasp. The pain of the realization was dazzling as a single name bubbled into being.
Oprekhet.
She reached out, enveloping him beneath a giant shadow. Terror shook through his immobile form. He couldn’t move, could barely think through the cloud that smothered his senses. At that moment, he was not a person, but a vessel of her will, whose only purpose was subjugation.
Her hand grew closer. The flat of her palm hovered above his head, and she paused. A chill crawled through Wren’s veins as a grin widened her lips. An open curve revealing a clustered row of twinkling shards. Malice wafted from her, dripping into him like an intermittent stream of tainted water. Slowly, she shook her head and pulled away with the hiss of sand. Dark tendrils snaked from the corner of her eyes, aglow with a cruel satisfaction. She spread her hands and vanished in a shower of sparks.
The moment she was gone, the possession snapped like an elastic band.
Dazed, Wren returned to himself, suddenly alone in his head again.
First there was silence. Then the screaming began.
It wasn’t his screaming, but he felt it boiling up his throat all the same. He clutched his face, his vision nothing but red. Blood leaked from the corners of his eyes and fountained from his nose, his tongue tasting of bitter iron. It crusted thick under his nails. He was stained, never to be clean again. The blood was as much his flesh as it flowed through him. Collapsing to his knees, Wren leaned forward, retching. Sludge swelled from his mouth and oozed down his chin.
Through a smear of color, he saw the other Weavers stiffen. A drawn-out death knell escaped their chests as their bodies swayed. They dropped to the ground in three haphazard lines. Their faces were frozen in horror, mouths agape in an endless scream. They died terrified. For the rest of eternity, that was all they would be. Wren’s heart trembled as he felt it, felt the call to join them in their endless stillness. There was nothing left for him. He was better off following them, because death would be kinder than the horror he glimpsed through blurry eyes.
Not too far away lay his mother, her gentle face cold with death. Scarlet jewels drew a path across her neck, bright and accusing.
Sacrifice.
Reality splintered into pieces. A guttural sob tore through him. It was all too much.
Why? Why? Why him? Why leave him to suffer the horror of being alive?
This was his punishment for all he’d done. He deserved the cold that burned in his hollow chest, deserved the ache of his panting sobs.
Was it fate? Destiny? Foul luck? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything anymore.
Wren’s mind belonged to himself, and it was the worst thing imaginable. Because being alive was the most terrible burden of them all.
Palenisa
Palenisa cut a weak line across a revenant’s abdomen with sunlight. Its bleached spine protruded from the eviscerated torso, soaked entrails spilling out as gray-gold blood poured from the wound. The upper half of the deathless slid to the ground. Blackened teeth snapping, it crawled across the sand with the single arm attached to its bisected remains.
She slammed a foot onto the revenant’s eye. Once its head was crushed, she kicked it aside and collapsed to her knees. The thing continued to drag itself forward. Skull caved in, eye hanging from the socket by a slick, sinewy thread—it just kept crawling. A grotesque line painted the sand from where it was halved.
That was the problem, wasn’t it? They were already dead. Arms and legs could be lost, heads chopped clean off, but they kept coming. Relentless. The best she could do was try to divide the unnatural creatures into so many pieces there would be nothing left to move. Try to slow them down to give the afflicted a sliver of a chance.
Panting and tasting iron, Palenisa wondered why she even kept fighting when the living were no match for the deathless. Thousands of deathless had descended to scour Aedyton. Inside, the temple was stained in bile, viscera painting the white walls, floor strewn with the bodies of the afflicted who hadn’t managed to flee. Very few had escaped.
The beach was a bloodbath. Littered with the living and the dead, the latter clawing their way to another fight. Embers flitted through the smoky air, blood trailed in multicolored streams. In the distance, pyramids crumbled to ruin. Past them, the sky no longer shimmered. It was gone—the rippling where light had hit the barrier across the burning horizon.
The Sea Gate was gone. She didn’t know when it had fallen. Likely somewhere between the massacre in the temple and the one outside.
Sand shifted unsteadily beneath her, and she blinked back tears of pain as her thigh throbbed. She clutched the injury Asaru had given her. It was bleeding heavily as a result of her recklessness. Adrenaline gave way to fatigue, and her muscles seized, her back bracketed in pain. The cuts along her side stung, shooting up to throb between her brows.
A boom rang out from above as eresh keyel manning manticora ballistae rained down ytterbium darts that detonated upon impact. From the ground, the deathless retaliated. They slung back fire and burned the warriors with their corrosive presence.
Another ear-shattering burst thundered.
Spirits, help me. Palenisa clenched her teeth, struggling not to hyperventilate as dismembered limbs landed around her. Hands and feet and the lower portion of a head twitched with inanimate life.
Her head rose to the source of her sluggishness. It was bathetic how pleasant the sky seemed. Save for the black mass of writhing bodies that blotted out the sun. A chill tremored through her as she pressed two fingers to her palm. The sunlight she produced flickered dimly as it appeared. With its blade she sliced the neck of a revenant whose spear aimed for her nape, and the body tumbled. Teeth gnashing, the head rolled down the beach.
Letting out a sharp cry, she curled over her knees. A chill scooped her core hollow, and she felt like she was dying.
The deathless flashed. Here one moment; the next, transformed into the men who murdered her mother. Her powers had been weak then too. This time Ada wouldn’t come to save her. It was the wishful dream of a foolish child so driven by vengeance she risked her own life to drown in blood.
What if she let it happen? What if she let the tide swell and the deathless take her?
Then you’d break your promise, whispered the Zodiac over the arch of her shoulders, sounding more real than they ever had before.
They were right. If she died there, she’d break her promise to Wren, as well as the secret ones, the prayers, made to herself. Her word would be dirt. And one’s word was a contract writ into reality. The ability to speak a thought and make it so. Breaking her promise meant living in dishonor. There would be no hope to regain her title, her emblem, the life she once knew.
The sudden cry of the earth pierced her skull.
The earth—it was in so much pain. Pain she felt as keenly as her own, filling her every vein with lightning. A scream ripped from her throat. Blood swam in her agonized mouth, dribbling from the corners. She trembled from the constant thrum of hurt, hurt, hurt in her head. Her senses overwhelmed her as the cry reverberated through her in successive quakes until her face was wet and her breath came in stuttered fits.
Blearily, Palenisa gazed beyond the beach. On the other side of the Phiari River stood Asaru. What was once Asaru. Crouched low, his right arm swept to the left and his left to the right. With each movement, black tendrils whipped through a massive rift. As the rift yawned into a crevasse, she realized that he was trying to carve the island apart. He was shearing it in half with a wide saw of black liquid. He alone was bisecting the atoll, and from the wail of the earth—it was working.
The Zodiac roared in her ears. More than just imagined, their voices were clear as the smoke that clung to her lungs. Earth, sunlight, ward, water, fire, air, mind, blood, spirit, chaos, dream—and starlight. They were saying one thing.
Save him from himself.
“Save him from himself,” Palenisa whispered. Again she said it. Repeating the words until they were her own.
There wasn’t a decision to be made. Only what she had to do.
She fought the pain and struggled to her feet. The muscles in her legs ached as she dashed across the beach, a strain pulling at her shoulders. So much was lost already. She doubted she would be able to stop him, but she had to try. This she would do, what little it mattered.
