Chapter Forty-Five: Between Worlds
In retrospect, it’s a very lucky thing that my transport into limbo killed Ben – cruel to say, but true. It was also lucky that Nargillis hadn't yet unstrapped Ben from the device. It meant that, while there was still the tiniest sinuous thread linking him to his own body, I could use my mana to activate the Crown of Stars from our spot in limbo and pop a portal between Alfheim and limbo and send everybody else back down along their own little winnowing soul-threads. I stuck my hand inside Ben's luminous body, which made his eyes bulge out… I'm not sure whether he felt anything or was just surprised to have a hand reach right into his guts. With a pulse of pure mana energy, I willed a luminous portal into being.
"Fly toward the light!" I shouted at the others.
Meliswe and Calivar gripped one another, kissed, and streaked through the portal. As she shot through the portal, Meliswe shouted back: "I love-" and then got cut off as she left limbo.
Presumably, she meant to say 'I love you' and not, say, 'I love rutabagas'. I'd have to ask her later, but I do not think Alfheim has rutabagas.
Ben's body jerked randomly - he still couldn't do directional flying, and he might never be able to. Fortunately, Gaelin had the presence of mind to stop him before he got very far because Ben was my ticket home. And, being a material being in some technical sense, I couldn't interact with the others the way they could interact with one another. And, since both of us were needed to maintain the portal, if we didn't leave at close to exactly the same time, one of us would be stranded.
"Stay tight until the others are out!" I shouted.
Ben nodded, and then he gasped, his eyes going wide. Something was moving in the infinite space (or perhaps non-space) beyond limbo. Something impossibly huge, impossibly dark, and impossibly amorphous, that nonetheless managed to have far too many tentacles. The demiurges sensed us leaving limbo, sensed their chance to claim our souls fleeing as we did, and they were not happy about it. A huge tentacle the size of a locomotive slipped out of the infinite gray, so black it seemed to negate the very notion of light. Whatever ur-being that was, it wasn't one I wanted to be caught by.
"Ben! Ben! Focus!" I shouted. He just stared dumbly at the thing, his eyes wide with terror.
With a pulse of mana, I sent him screaming and careening in the general direction of the portal. Then, just as the tentacle swept in to claim me (or perhaps simply annihilate me - I'm not entirely sure how these things work), I released the remaining entirety of my mana, which was about two-thirds of it. Which, if I've failed to be clear about it, is quite a lot. It rocked the ether of limbo like a munitions depot going up, and bits of black demiurge tentacle exploded as bright as the sun disintegrating further and further up the massive tentacle and into the abyss beyond. As my body rocketed away at inconceivable speed I heard a horrible, shrieking groan - anger, pain, and desperation filling the very fabric of that place. But, if that dark god survived my attack, it never got me…
I hurtled toward the portal, rapidly approaching the tumbling, screaming soul of Ben Boyd as he streaked toward the rent we'd torn in limbo. And, just when I thought I was about to pass him and leave him stranded there, something even more horrible occurred: I passed right into his spectral body and we both passed from limbo to Alfheim at the exact same moment… I had no idea what effect that sort of one-in-a-million event might have. I doubt anybody knew, since I don't think a million people have escaped limbo from the inside before.
It turns out, it wasn't so horrible after all. The instant Ben entered Alfheim, his soul winked out of existence, since his body was back on the Crown of Stars, stone-cold dead… well, not so dead anymore. That left me by my lonesome hurtling down toward the Blasted Field at hundreds of miles per hour. I deployed my wings and buzzed for all I was worth, dislocating something from the pure force of wind but buzzing away anyway until I hit the ground going about eight miles per hour and rolled to a undignified stop.
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Nargillis had perhaps thirty men in his retinue, which was plenty. However, they were understandably distracted around the time I arrived. The sky was going absolutely wacky with magical energies as the barriers between worlds wavered on the verge of utter collapse. And, if that wasn't distracting enough, Calivar, Meliswe, Gaelin, and Ben had all spontaneously arisen from the dead, completely healed (this is apparently how it works when you drop out of limbo with a boatload of extra mana trailing behind you - it takes the most efficient course of action possible and heals your deathly wounds to keep you from instantaneously dying again, which is, I suppose, a magical no-no). Since they'd just been dumped to the wayside without any bindings after being stabbed through their hearts, the three dead fae… the three who could actually fight and do decent magic… were suddenly healthy and free to beat the stuffing out of Nargillis and his men. So the general mood around the Engine of Change was confused and a bit worried. Then I came hurtling out of the sky.
"What the hell… one of them escaped!" a borderline-panicked taurin shouted.
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I prepared to fly away and lead them on a wild goose chase away from the Engine to give my lovers and brothers inside a better shot at victory. Then I realized I didn't have to. Even though I'd expended all my mana giving some dark demiurge the grandmother of bad afternoons, I was already brimming to overflowing with fresh mana. Maybe I absorbed a portion of that strange entity's power as it dissolved, or perhaps it was just from hurtling through a sparking magical storm from five hundred yards up. I didn't second-guess it because when your friends are in danger and you've got high-caliber magic at your disposal, you use it.
Lightning arced down from the sky and then arced down again, perhaps not as powerful as a bolt from my spellsword but not too far off. Mana channeled through me like blood pulses through veins, far more efficient than it ever had before. Part of me sensed four… no, five men charging me from behind. Not for long. I leapt into the air, wings buzzing, and cast propuls so hard it left a crater in the ground. I don't wish to revisit the grisly cracking sound that ensued… needless to say, that was five men down. I landed atop the hulking mass of the Engine of Change and called down one more bolt upon the survivors before landing at the entrance to that accursed, skull-shaped chamber and making my way inside.
My friends were already well on their way toward dispatching Nargillis's men inside. I suspect that Calivar had done most of the heavy lifting there while Meliswe worked to free Ben and Gaelin wrestled the much-larger Nargillis over the controls of the Engine of Change… though I'm not sure what he'd have done if he'd got control. I certainly had no idea what I was looking at when I spied the complex, grid-like array of controls. In any case, Calivar had just dispatched the last of the guards, but Nargillis was seconds away from killing Gaelin again. I would have to chat with my brother later about cultivating his survival instincts - possibly after awaiting his return from Elysheim. Nargillis brought his arm back, unsheathed a concealed dagger, and…
I threw the poisoned dagger at him. It is perhaps worth noting that I'd never let go of the thing or else it'd have drifted off into literal limbo. I certainly wasn't going to stick the thing into my dress's little belt, because one nick with the thing might be deadly, even to a fae. And that deadly dagger planted right into Nargillis's shoulder. His eyes bugged out and fury flashed across his face as he understood what had just happened. Gaelin pushed him and he staggered away… right toward the sacrificial basin…
"If… if I cannot rule… then the world… can die…"
With his last scintilla of strength, Nargillis spread his great, gawky frame to the conduction knobs of the sacrificial basin and died. The Engine of Change had received its fourth fae sacrifice… it pulsed with a horrible energy, roaring to life and shaking the chamber about us.
"We should probably leave," Ben said - Ben can be a sensible lad when it really counts.
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Obviously, we had to destroy the Engine of Change because, whatever changes it was bringing about they weren’t good. But the whole interior of the chamber pulsed blue, arcane energies crackled all around us, and the world was gradually tilting upward… we could destroy the thing from the outside just as easily as from within. I fled out with Meliswe and Gaelin while Calivar shrugged Ben over his broad shoulders and carried him out – Ben was at least as healthy as he’d been coming in, but he was still in pretty bad shape.
Outside, the sky was torn with great gashes of blue and violet, slowly-expanding tears in the fabric of Alfheim… perhaps to other worlds and perhaps to some chaos that undergirds creation. Whatever it was, it was bad news. And just as bad was the Engine of Change… when I said it looked like a ghastly skull-like countenance, I hadn't been exaggerating and I hadn't been wrong either. The earth cracked beneath us as we fled, and only Calivar's above-par flight muscles kept him and Ben from being swallowed in a gaping, growing crevasse in the ground. I looked back and gasped… the Engine was slowly rising from the ground, dirt, rubble, and stone sloughing off of it and clattering to the ground. And there was a lot more of it than met the eye.
As it rose, I realized there was a whole body under there. A huge, nightmarish beast of arcane metals, a humanoid torso purchased atop four clawlike legs, the whole thing rising to close to a hundred feet high as it scrambled out of its great and crumbling crater.
"We've got to take it down!" I shouted.
Calivar and Meliswe brought down sizable bolts of lightning on the thing, followed by Gaelin's, which was perhaps half as strong. Then came my strike - after the lightning did nothing (and why would it - I'd already tried zapping the chamber when I was bound and gagged inside the thing earlier), I tried something a little more substantial. I grabbed a stone from the barren ground, cast a heating spell upon it, and then leveraged that into a flaming meteor from the sky a yard across and streaking down like Thor's hammer from the heavens. It collided with the thing with the horrible sound of bending, crunching metal.
The thing turned toward me, its whole garantuan torso rotating. Its huge left arm hung limp and there was a sizable dent in the 'ribcage'… but, unlike a human, half of a crushed ribcage did not constitute a lethal blow. The beast's eyes glowed a blinding magenta and I felt myself torn out of the very fabric of space and time…
Rubble rained down around me and the pa-pa-pa-pop of machine gun fire cracked out far too close for comfort. The ground was wet around me and rain drizzled down from a darkening sky. I heard more shouting, and I tried to fly away, but something was wrong with my wings. Instead, I scrambled a slope of scree and rubble, crouching at the top to take in the desolated countryside around me, row after row of soggy trenches gouged across the countryside. My breath caught in my throat.
"Oh… oh sweet Gaia… no… it's not possible."
A bullet zipped past me, missing by mere inches. More gunfire. Somebody shouted from down the other side of the rubble slope, and I ran down, hopping over clods of muddy, upturned dirt, ruined concrete, and half-buried barbed wire. For some reason, when I brought my wings in they didn't quite retract all the way, flopping behind my back like a little gold-veined cape. A uniformed, soot-faced man watched at me as I slid down - a human - his eyes growing wide, as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing. He dashed forward to grab me and pulled me behind his little makeshift bunker as an explosion shook the ground not too far off.
"Que diable faites-vous ici, mademoiselle?"