Authors: Joe Ducie
“Against the Everlasting?” I asked.
“No! Well, yes, but also no.”
Emissary shook his head and slapped his knee. “The Everlasting are returning.
That is inevitable. Scion’s ascension is only hours away, and the rest of the Family
will swiftly follow, but they will war amongst themselves for control of
creation—you, humans, are just scurrying little ants to be crushed in the
crossfire.”
I took a deep breath, considered,
and exhaled slowly. “So the gods are going to war...”
“You broke the latch. You severed
the Clock. After ten thousand years imprisoned by the Knights of old, a brief
speck of time on the face of this forever war, the Everlasting have returned
and will make Earth their beachhead. The true world, the fallow ground on which
Scion’s legions will be raised to wage war across Forget!”
Emissary threw his head back and
laughed, high and loud and diabolically evil, startling the crowds moving past
us and drawing more than a few curious gazes.
“You ever regret whatever choices
led you here?” I asked the demon.
“My choices have kept me alive, kept
me strong throughout imprisonment. Regret? Regret is for the weak, as is
death.”
My turn to laugh—none too kindly.
“You’re afraid,” I said. “Afraid of dying. What exists after life for a monster
like you? The Void? Endless
nothing
? I regret my choices, a lot of my
choices. Regrets are forever, aren’t they? Death is easy, compared to that,
Emissary—living with mistakes, not so much.”
Emissary tilted his head and stared
at me with half a grin. He was still grinning when the bullet zipped through
his skull, puncturing his skin just above his ear, and ejected a whole load of
blood, bone, and grey matter out the other side of his head.
He jerked and fell into my arms,
resting his bloody and broken head on my lap. With a smirk of disgust, I hurled
him from the bench and onto the hard floor. Annie, standing just over my left
shoulder, the barrel of her gun hot and smoking, bared her teeth in a vicious
snarl.
I leaped over the back of the bench
as a wave of screams rippled out from the folk nearby.
“Is it dead?” Annie asked. “Did I
get—?”
I drew my sword as Emissary jumped
to his feet, doing a small flip in the air, and landed on his heels. He spread
his arms as if to say
ta-da
, and pointed a finger at Annie. He laughed,
tears streaking down his face as the bloody hole running through his skull
sealed itself up rather nicely.
“Caught me off guard, wildflower,”
he said. “Wow, that tickled something
fierce
!”
A gout of crimson-pink flame burst from
his mouth on the last word, and he rolled his head around his shoulders,
spraying the hot fire into the air. It fell, a rain of napalm, on the crowds,
and cries of pain quickly eclipsed the cries of shock.
The Lexicon panicked.
Tia, Vrail, Dessan, and Garner only
just made it back to us before the crowds rioted. Thinking fast, Tia created a
sphere of raw Will-energy around us, sealing the group in a protective bubble
and stopping us from being overrun.
Similar bubbles, smaller, appeared
amongst the crowd—the Willful protecting themselves—and somewhere amidst the
maelstrom, Emissary disappeared.
In his place, however, stood a cadre
of enemy soldiers, held within their own protective bubble, men and women
bearing the crest of the Renegade Dynasty on their uniforms. The crowds glanced
off our spheres, trampling over one another to escape the unlucky few who were
aflame and spreading Emissary’s fire in mindless, screaming agony.
“Renegades!” Vrail snarled. “Broken
quill, now there’s something we can fight!”
“There’s another group behind us.
They have us surrounded,” Tia said. A single tear rode the line of the scar
cutting down her face. Here there be bad memories for Miss Moreau—of just what,
I could not be sure. But the Void was never kind.
So I gave her a wolfish grin and
clenched my fists. “Those poor bastards.”
But the Renegade soldiers did not
attack—indeed, they seemed to form a protective ring around my wily little
group and herded the crowds in the Lexicon away from Emissary’s fire, toward
the arrivals hall and the departure subways beneath the Pillars.
Single Renegade soldiers broke away
from the pack and doused those aflame in conjured gouts of fresh water. Smoke
and steam swirled together within the scent of burning human flesh, mingled
with the cries of the dead and dying.
“Are... are they helping us?” Vrail
asked. Liquid-light coated his sword, rippling up and down the blade.
“They’re giving us a chance,” I
said. Just beyond the arrivals hall, out on the railroad concourse, I caught
sight of the monster—my ticket back into the ranks of the Knights. Emissary
hurled another beam of energy into the nearest skyscraper, attacking the
Pillars of Creation. Vast chunks of rock, debris, melted steel and plaster
rained down upon the railroads. “Annie, give me the knife—I’m going to drive it
into his neck.”
“He’ll tear you apart before you get
close,” she said, but handed me Myth.
“No, I don’t think he will, not if
you lot provided a distraction. Tia? With me. Garner, Dessan, Vrail... give him
something to complain about. Annie, stay close, and give him a few shots if you
get a chance.”
“Commander,” Garner said with a nod.
He exited Tia’s bubble and dashed along the concourse with Vrail and Dessan
keeping pace, fighting the thinning crowds, cleared away by the Renegade
soldiers.
Only one person would’ve sent
Renegades.
“What is that thing?” Tia asked,
glaring down at Emissary. “It is... far from human.”
“We’re going with ‘demon servant of
the Everlasting,’ ” I said. “Will-fire doesn’t seem to hurt it, bullets churn
right on through, so I’m going to go cut his head off with a weapon of
celestial illusion and see how far that gets us. You in?”
“Not one day ago, my biggest concern
was baking enough pies for the evening rush at my bar. You’re a catalyst for
change, Declan Hale.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you’re in.”
With the rough, bare bones of a plan
in place, things happened fast. As the only ones brave or stupid enough to be
moving
toward
the source of flame and misery, my Knights and companions
managed to follow me close—save Vrail, Dessan, and Garner, who were tasty
little goats staked out for the T. rex.
With Myth in one hand and my star
iron sword in the other, I dashed down the steps to the railroads between the
skyscrapers three at a time. Tia covered my left, her palms ablaze with
luminescent smoke, and Annie my right, her gun drawn and at the ready.
Working together, Vrail, Dessan, and
Garner crossed their streams of raw, Willful energy in a concentrated burst
that sent Emissary staggering back. Even above the sounds of chaos and
destruction, I heard the bastard laughing. But he was laughing with his back to
me.
Using the niftiest tricks from the
Willful stories, Garner levitated a chunk of debris from Emissary’s assault on
the skyscrapers and slammed it into the creature. Emissary bellowed a thick
gout of flame that absorbed the rock and forced Dessan and Vrail to split,
veering out of the path of the projectile.
Moving in close now, I dug a
distraction out of my back pocket as my shoes clipped a hurried beat on the stone
ground.
“Emissary!” I cried, tossing my
wallet—weighted with a good chunk of loose change—at the creature’s head.
He blurred on the spot, perhaps
recognizing my voice, and his jaw stretched wide to snap the leather shot out
of the air. Emissary swallowed my wallet whole, and my only regret was that it
hadn’t been a live grenade. Still, the split-second it took was all that I
needed to duck under his chin and drive Myth into his back, right between his
shoulders.
The knife plunged into his flesh,
and Emissary’s eyes blazed. He swatted me aside with a wave of his arm, but I
rolled with the blow and came up on my knees still holding my sword of star
iron. I’d left Myth embedded in the demon’s back.
Flame—red, raw flame—burst from
Emissary’s mouth and eyes and wreathed his head in a crown of fire. He clawed
at the knife in his back, down on all fours, laughing and screaming. His bones
were snapping and crackling, and his torso lengthening. I couldn’t believe my
eye.
“Is he... What the hell is he
doing?” Tia breathed.
Emissary’s head snapped around, and
a string of pink flame sprayed through the air. A dollop landed on my shoulder
and ignited my shirt, but Annie thought fast. She stripped out of her leather
jacket and smothered the flames before they could burn me. I was left slightly
scorched but whole.
“My god, his skin is changing...”
Emissary’s arms had thickened, and
his face was now covered in what looked like emerald-green scales. His tongue, blackened
and swollen, ran over a jaw of razor-sharp fangs and lolled out of his mouth.
Spikes, vicious and cruel, burst through his suit, alongside Myth, and he... he
grew a tail.
Whatever was happening, the process
sped up. Emissary burst from his suit, naked and scaled, and his body
lengthened a good twenty, then thirty, then forty feet. No longer even vaguely
human, and hissing between his fangs, he sprouted wings where his shoulder
blades should have been, just either side of the Creation Knife. With a crack,
his lizard-head snapped into place and he belched a torrent of hot flame at my
Knightly companions.
Garner was slow—and the flame burst
through his quick shield. I caught a glimpse of his face melting before he was
absorbed by the flame. Not even ash would be left of the poor bastard. I lost
sight of Vrail and Dessan behind slabs of rubble. I hoped they’d avoided the
maelstrom of fire.
“Tia, Annie,” I said. “Run—run and
hide right now.”
“Dec—” Annie began.
I didn’t wait to see if I was
obeyed, and it honestly didn’t matter. If Emissary wasn’t checked now, before
his transformation was complete, then none of us would be able to hide.
Clenching my sword, I ran toward the beast as his tail whipped back and forth
through the air.
I was out of time.
We were all out of time.
Emissary reared his head back, now a
creature out of the old fairy tales, and unleashed a jet of hot liquid fire
into the sky.
I came up alongside his head,
snarling, sword in hand.
The dragon looked at me, one golden
slit of an eye seemed to wink, and then he stretched his jaws wide yet again
and a glow of pink flame bellowed up from deep within his throat. I took a
staggering step to the side and brought my sword swinging up and around over my
head.
“
Bastard!
” I cried, slicing
at the creature’s thick hide.
The blade cut through the neck
scales as if they were butter, and a gout of thick, purple blood burst from the
wound. Pure white light shone from within the sword and seared the dragon’s
flesh.
Emissary bucked as if electrocuted
and roared in what sounded like agony, and spread his massive wings wide,
knocking aside chunks of rubble and sending half a dozen nearby Renegades
hurling ass over head. The rush of air and the swipe of his tail forced me to
my knees. The tip of one of the tail spikes caught my sleeve and drew a thin
line of blood across my arm.
The hilt of the sword grew warm in
my hands, and the dragon jerked its entire neck away from the blade. A loud
snap, like the chime of a broken church bell, echoed across the railroads, and
I was hurled back by the flapping of Emissary’s massive wings. I rolled along
the ground, over rubble, debris, and glass, and came to a sudden stop against a
slab of fallen skyscraper.
I’d be a sorry case of bruises in
the morning.
I managed to sit up. I was still
holding the hilt of my sword, but it was cold now, and the blade was snapped
jagged, leaving me about half a foot with which to stab things.
Blimey…
Three months of work and thousands of gems worth of star iron down the drain.
But I wounded it!
The dragon, what I had to assume was
Emissary’s true form beneath his human facade, took flight with a mighty roar.
A great gust of wind slammed me flat against the shattered concrete, but blood
and light still bled from the wound on the creature’s neck. The dragon flailed
in the air and crashed into one of the Pillars before gaining enough leverage
to kick off and rise through the sky.
Myth, the Creation Knife, the
world-cutter, was still embedded in the flesh between its wing joints. Of Annie
there was no trace, nor of Vrail or Dessan. But Tia ran toward me through the
chaos and helped me to my feet as Emissary reared high above the Pillars and
breathed a long stream of flame into the crystal spheres of the Globescape.
The beast spun in the air and fell
back toward the Lexicon. Emissary roared, and glass shattered. Wreathed in hot
flame, the dragon descended upon us with power I’d rarely seen unleashed. This
was a true dragon, not pulled from fairy tales but
real
, alive long
before the written word and the stories that made Forget.