AFTER PUTTING THE OPTIONS to the group, Harzune bade everyone get some much-needed rest. Momentous events. Shocking, to many. Allory hated turning her new friends’ worldviews upside down, but what could she do? For her, she explained to the Queen, it was an imperative that could no less be ignored than her body could ignore the necessity of breathing. What was the source of that imperative, its core and identity? That was the Queen’s question, one to which Allory had no answer. Perhaps the nameless Middlesun entity? Did it decide upon right or wrong for the billions of creatures beneath its beneficent gaze? Or did evil thrive for an everlasting lack of justice?
Heavy contemplations.
Finding her customary place at Yaarah’s neck, Allory burrowed deep before falling asleep almost at once. She dreamed ill. Nameless darkness, sometimes the seven shadows and sometimes another being altogether, hunted her through all the places she knew and memories she treasured, from her childhood to the present, tainting each and every one with their odious presence. Her Momfae became the one who hit her. Her pupae-siblings trapped her in an airtight bottle and took bets on how long she’d survive, mocking and laughing as she beat uselessly at the thick glass with her tiny fists. Yaarah became the Felidragon who had watched dispassionately as the Marakusian Slavers tore her colony apart. Zzuriel encased her in unbreakable shackles of ice, Xiximay burned her with fire. The shadows took on the features of Sabline, sinking their sabre fangs into her body again and again, chuckling in bestial amusement at their sport.
The Scintillant awoke sometime after midnight, aware of another psychic attack which had left her with a lingering headache, but not the usual talon quarrying beneath her cranium. She lay still for a while, wishing for sleep which eluded her.
Peering over Yaarah’s furry paw, curled toward her, she noticed that everyone in her line of sight was asleep. There would be guards posted somewhere. Harzune was a stickler for protocol, setting the watch schedules himself and oftentimes waking at odd hours to make spot checks. The Shapeshifters slept in close-knit family groups, the Chameleons all piled up in one formless heap – how did anyone sleep like that – while her fellow Scintillants all snoozed in a neat row, with one empty space between – Izrimy?
Her eyes jumped back and forth. Now what?
Comfort break?
Thwock.
Her ears pricked up. That sound did not fit the serene night. Everything here around the pond was lit by the bioluminescent water plants and the softly gleaming silver-green leaves above her – in fact, at night, the Suylas Deepwoods were wondrously magical. Why had no-one described its enigmatic beauty beforehand? Everywhere she gazed with a sense of welling rapture, the woods gleamed with a special raiment of enchantment she had never seen anywhere before.
Was this a manifestation of ariavanae?
Thwock. Thwock.
Odd. Could it be an animal making that noise?
Drawn by curiosity, Allory slipped between the gleaming trees to a small glade aside from the main sleeping area. Tracking the irregular sound by ear, she tripped lightly around the bole of a tree and found Izrimy flipping throwing knives at another tree on the far side of the glade, about nine or ten feet distant. Her aim was uncanny. She had always been talented with throwing weapons, but their Dadfae held the colony crown as the best of all the warriors in this discipline.
In this mood, she suspected, Izrimy would give him a run for his nectar.
Her sisfae flitted across the soft, lush emerald grass to pluck half a dozen blades out of the tree trunk. That injured foot of hers had healed as if it had never been crushed. What a delight to see her tripping along without impediment.
Allory moved into the open. “Izrimy?”
Her pupae-sisfae whirled, a blade ready upon her fingertips – but did not release the throw. “Allory! Don’t startle me like that. That could have ended badly.”
“What are you doing, sisfae?”
“Practising throwing. What does it look like? I couldn’t sleep.”
Weird.
A peculiar quality in her tone gave Allory pause. Izrimy approached but the smaller sisfae hovered in place, trying to pin down this creeping sense of unease, like unseen sugar ants crawling over her antennae.
Izrimy said, “Isn’t life strange? How can it be that the smallest and weakest of our colony has now become the strongest, the Scintillant with the greatest powers of all? Yet you have shared none of this with your kin. Ever. You let our whole colony be captured rather than lifting your smallest finger to help – aye, you say you were hiding in the bushes, but we know better. You’re a coward, Allory Fae.”
She made a wordless squeak of negation.
“You’re a cowardly runt who covets power so much that she’d sell her own family into slavery.”
“Izrimy, no! That’s not true.”
“Wasn’t it? The colony was betrayed but you were the only one who escaped. How do you see that, dear sisfae?”
Where did this attack come from?
Drifting backward as her sisfae continued to move forward, a strange gleam in her deep sapphire eyes, Allory spluttered, “I – I was ordered to go hide. I’ve always done what I’m told.”
“What a good little girlfae you are.”
Too darksap, that sarcasm. Too fey. Something was wrong here, but she could not put her finger upon the pulse of this sap.
“Izrimy, you can’t possibly think that.”
“Can’t I? You’ve powers no Scintillant Fae has dreamed of in over three hundred years, let alone displayed. Perhaps someone or something dark gave you that power – is that the reason for those nightmares you had? Tell me, Allory, what is your power over life itself? Share with your big sisfae. Tell me everything.”
Continuing to back up, Allory flinched as her wings brushed against a tree. Trapped. “Izrimy, don’t – don’t look at me like that. You’re scaring me.”
The night breathed peril. Shadows played in her sisfae’s eyes. That old, familiar feeling squeezed her chest, and with the sensation of being unable to breathe came a similar inability to reason, to argue, to do anything but hover in place as the awareness of impending calamity filled her mind.
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“You always pretended to be afraid, didn’t you, Allory? Demanding all Momfae and Dadfae’s attention – performing the role of the poor, weak, helpless little runt to perfection. Yet look at you now. Raising the dead. Twisting innocent Faerie, Felidragons and even Elves to your bidding. You’re a sly one, you are.” She played with a blade, shifting it back and forth across the knuckles of her left hand. “Tell your sisfae. Tell me what you never told our Dadfae, never in all those years.”
“I – I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
Allory wanted to flee, but the way the silvery metal glittering in Izrimy’s hand seemed to exert some phantastic power over her existence.
“You must have something … some source of all this power. What drives your scintillance? Do you control lesser minds as those Dragons were controlled? What are you doing to us, Allory?”
At last, her voice cracked. “I-Izrimy! This … these are crazy accusations. What’s wrong with you?”
“Don’t lie to me, runt!” her sisfae snarled, her eyes darkening with rage. Allory flinched as if she had been slapped. What was this uncanny presence she sensed about her sisfae? “You’re the one, aren’t you? So pathetic. Always hiding behind your supposed debilities. Such a tiny twig. No-one would ever suspect you, would they?”
“Izrimy, please.”
“Izrimy, please,” she echoed mockingly. “Do you know what?”
Suddenly, her hand flashed forward. Allory flung up her arm for protection. An argent wink in the forest’s faint light ended with a thwock! Pain speared through her right hand. It was pinned above her head, speared through by a knife lodged inches deep into the bark behind her back!
The Scintillant froze. So shocked was she, the pain barely registered.
Izrimy said, “Maybe I’m not Izrimy at all.”
What?
Twirling another knife in her fingers, her sisfae closed the gap, allowing the smaller Scintillant to peer into the void that blackened her eyes. Horror upon horror! What was this loathsome power that stirred behind her sisfae’s gaze, that consumed her confidence like acid poured directly into her heart?
In a new voice, she rasped, “Maybe I’m something else entirely.”
The abrupt change of tone staggered Allory. The voice was like nothing she had ever heard before, full of grating echoes, as if a dozen different voices whispered profane secrets behind the main one. The discordant sound turned her stomach.
Gripping the Scintillant Fae’s left ankle with bruising strength, the creature stretched her out, growling, “We will talk.”
“Izrimy!”
Thwock! With an underhanded blow, a second knife speared through her left calf muscle, buried up to the hilt in a second. Agony made Allory squeal and try to thrash her way free, but she was pinned like an animal in a snare she had seen the Marakusians use. Powerful fingers gripped her neck, throttling her scream until all the sound she could make was a broken whimper.
Mocking laughter beat about her ears, incomprehensible. What was happening to her? Why?
She begged, “Izrimy … please, don’t do this.”
“Silence, you shrivelling wretch.”
No more. She’s … she’s become …
Eyes deeper and darker than death itself bored into hers for the longest time. Allory could not breathe for the unimaginable terror that eclipsed even the pain that wracked her body, as the creature examined her like something nasty it had stepped in.
She recognised it. The Wraith was inside her sisfae! Worse, she knew that this was no nightmare. It was real.
To itself, it hissed, “How can this be? So contemptible! So fragile a mind. This worthless runt is the only one it can be, this one who has denied my purposes all these centuries, yet it is sweet and young and fresh, untwisted and untainted … it was broken again and again, only for nothing to be found. Nay, not a breath, not even a trace! Now I must inhabit this frail vessel, I must take it over, plumb its every secret …” Sucking in a ghastly, rattling breath, it cried, “You WILL give it to me!”
Titanic power slammed against her mind.
Allory surfaced from darkness.
She gave up nothing.
“YOU WILL YIELD!”
“No.”
She rode the billows of torment like a leaf lost in a flood but survived, as she always had. Times beyond number. Clinging to life, yielding no iota to this evil. Her power surged, pouring scintillance into her flesh in an abortive attempt to stem the agony.
“GIVE IT TO ME!”
Allory sobbed, “No … nooo …”
The creature plunged another knife into her flank.
White-hot agony flooded her body.
She faded, drifting like an itinerant autumnal leaf toward a source of brilliance. Light, yet purer and more beautiful than anything she had ever known. Eternally upward. Yet … no. This was not the time. She could never betray the source of all life. Despite that she longed with every iota of her being to make that final ascent, Allory deliberately turned her back and sensed her eyelashes fluttering as she came to. The metallic tang of Fae blood filled her mouth.
She wheezed, “Never.”
“WHAT? HOW CAN YOU YET RESIST?”
Anguish crushed her mind, her will, her very soul; yet what force in all Spheris could crush one who had been crushed and broken times beyond reckoning, whose mind had survived the ravages of years of abuse and amsinthe, who had plumbed the nethermost depths of suffering, depths that surely exceeded the ability of any mortal creature to forbear?
She came to once more, realising that no-one had heard the commotion and come to help. Not one. Despair crushed her soul. To fight alone … it was all she could do.
Resist. Deny. Protect those she loved.
Allory’s attention dragged back into focus. A mere foot from its victim, the creature muttered bleakly, “How can this be? It must be a mistake. I must search elsewhere. This absurd midget, this weed – how could she ever resist my authority? She wriggles like a worm, an insect, a contemptible grub. What have I missed? Where could it be hidden?”
Allory gasped, “I … I will end you … Wraith!”
“You? I will snap you like a twig.”
“You can never … break me. I know … the ariavanae.” She could barely speak, yet words rasped from her throat as though yanked out unwilling by a torturer’s red-hot hooks. “I sing my own melody.”
Spinning away to collect something she had not noticed lying in the grass, the creature hissed, “How very perceptive of you. You presume to see the Wraith? To defy one older and more powerful than time itself? I am more than you will ever be. I am almighty, a god to the likes of you.” Raising one of Ashueli’s two-ended swords, the creature whirled it overhead with strength impossible for a being of her sisfae’s size. No, this was no longer Izrimy. “You will not end anything, you sparkling flea – not if I end you first!”
Allory cringed but, pinned as she was, she could not hope to avoid the strike.
It felt like a hard punch to her ribcage.
Everlasting blink. A long blade sprouted from her chest, quivering grotesquely in her line of sight. Right through the heart. Buried over a foot deep in the solid heartwood behind her. Allory heard the tree scream, the forest shudder, myriad creatures near and far shrieking in mindless terror as they sensed this outpouring of the Wraith’s diabolical outrage. As the creature approached her again, licking its lips slightly in anticipation of the feast, Allory tried to speak but found she could not. Blood trickled warmly from the corner of her mouth. It tasted oddly sweet. Curiously, she felt no pain.
She would never feel anything ever again.
Despite that Allory realised her heart no longer beat, that this creature standing before her was an enemy of ancient, incalculable malice, her thoughts remained lucid – if only for a second.
She knew one thing for certain. It must never possess the soul locket.
This undying fiend must never possess her.
Turning the eyes of her heart to the place in Centresky where she knew goodness dwelled behind a shield of Shyraiama Dragons, she pleaded brokenly, I’m sorry I failed you, o Middlesun. I’ve carried this burden as best I can. Accept me now. Accept my soul.
She pressed her being toward the boneyard.
All that she was, she took with her. Never would she give over to the Wraith. Instead, she would die that another might be reborn in her place, and another and another beyond that, one who would be stronger and more capable than she could ever be and finish this work forever.
Allory recalled that voice saying, “This is the ariayaenvul. Keep it safe at all costs. Only you can do this. You are the Scinntarinae.”
What was this priceless treasure? And why only her?
She knew now that ‘all costs’ meant nothing less than her life and gladly, she would give it up to thwart this entity.
I am the boneyard girl. I will carry this trust beyond the grave. No … no Wraith will ever …
The creature swooped for her, its fingers strangely hooked and its mouth so far agape its chin rested halfway down its chest; all within that gape was darkness. Ravenous darkness.
Her being filled with light. Suffused with indescribable glory, even her scintillance faded from sight. An unnatural joy enwrapped the agony, a final soothing. This time, she did not try to stop the ineffable sense of lifting, of transport, of transcendence.
A cry of unspeakable rage chased her fading into eternity.