The cleric answered my question with her sudden appearance, blurring like an arch-diviner into the room through the broken doorway behind me.
If you drew a line between me and Netherhame, Kani would’ve halted right in the centre; her blessed mace was raised, her solemn expression fixed.
“Wythyldwyn says goodbye,” she said disdainfully, swinging her mace at the floor.
The resulting orb of yellow light exploded into amber, pouring across the floor, enveloping the eolastyr. It felt like fast-moving steam, a sun-warmed breeze, and within a second it had passed over us all, leaving all Kani’s friends and their eldritches untouched.
Leaving the eolastyr’s shield in tatters.
Where before it had been a shimmering curtain of crimson velvet, now it was a frayed pink blanket, thin enough to get a tan through in winter.
But it didn’t matter. The whip fell, the crack locking all of us into three or four moments of stupor.
She was right. We failed.
She used the time to ignite dozens of crimson portals, letting them spring up from every unshielded surface – between feet, on the wall enveloping someone’s head –
“You fools left them with Shallowlie,” the tigress said, before punching the ground at her feet in one deafening, oil-slick motion.
Stones erupted, spraying out in chunks and chips from the collision of her bestial paw with the floor; and the eolastyr moved to the floor below us as we gathered our wits, regathered our faculties…
The moment Kani came back to her senses she muttered something and disappeared in a flash once more – this time the cleric left a trail of amber light behind her, which from what I’d heard wasn’t supposed to happen when she activated her ring.
“The fiend’s going for the twins!” Killstop said.
“Stay on top of her!” Timesnatcher boomed.
While the diviners and wizards poured through into the chamber beneath, following her into the chasm she’d created, we hung back. Valorin and Ciraya watched on as me and Netherhame stepped up. Between us, we choked the red portals, siphoning off their power-sources to feed our own. It was simple – the eolastyr didn’t have the gates properly established. She didn’t have her throne room; she hadn’t had time to scry us out, develop a plan. She just had this – another last-minute diversion.
When we made our way down after them, seconds later, we emerged through the crevasse into a room filled with metal canisters, boxes, cages… And they had already taken the fight into the next arena of conflict: outside.
There was a solid thousand feet of (not-so-solid) open air ready to greet me as I plunged through the shredded tower-wall with the others. Even with the wraith-form’s benefits, it was enough to flip my stomach, especially as we were plunging straight downwards in a steep dive. The eolastyr had gone through first; my vampiric eyes could pick her out through the crowd, her distinctive patterned fur and gleaming white head, her long black hair streaming behind her, above her. The fractured red shield had been abandoned – instead she used her superb intuition to writhe out of the way of the attacks we launched down at her. Em and Mountainslide were just two of the various arch-wizards throwing spells, and me and Netherhame were flinging out spears of force with all our might – all to no avail. A crack rang out, and I saw the diviners who’d outpaced her fluttering off, stranded in the air suddenly.
“I’ve deferred the evacuation orders,” Zakimel growled. “The Constellation and Refined Timing are standing by. Archmages, anticipate a change of killing-ground.”
I estimated seven or eight seconds before the eolastyr’s clawed feet struck the roofs of the lesser towers clustered about the main spire. Five or six seconds before she’d essentially be loose in Mund, if Zakimel was right. She wasn’t falling lethargically this time – she fell like a thing of Materium, dropping like a stone – and just as we reached her, using our top speeds, another crack went out.
I was slowed for a little less time than before, and felt a little less stupefied. I noticed the magisters in the streets below, thick knots of mage-robes bearing the Magisterium symbol charging into Gilderow Avenue.
“It’s working!” Killstop cried. “Keep pushing her!”
Even as I recovered and renewed my descent, vampire senses let me pinpoint the source of the effect: I homed in on the gobbets of human meat dangling from the thongs of the whip. Only half of what had been there when we first assaulted her now remained.
I yelled: “The whip! We’re using up the flesh on it!”
“Exactly, genius!” Tanra muttered.
It was only as the eolastyr skipped off the edge of a roof and continued to plummet towards the street that I realised.
“We’re wrong – where’s Shallowlie?” I hissed, looking back up at the tops of the towers we’d left behind.
No massive ring of hyper-protective shielding surrounding the spires.
No twins.
“Shallowlie?” Netherhame seemed to shoot up into the sky – it was only that she was slowing to a stop as I sank past her at horrendous speeds. “Shallowlie, answer!”
“Kani?” Spirit was asking.
I craned my head up to watch as Netherhame barrelled back towards the spire in which we’d waited out the start of the fight – the place that should’ve been the centre of a huge sorcerous sphere.
I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted. I looked down, adjusting my trajectory.
A host of archmages hurtling in her wake, the demon struck the fine basalt paving outside the Tower of the Seven-Star Swords, landing crouched like a cat.
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Despite the fact that the impact buckled the street, leaving her in a crater and sending a shockwave of slushy snow and splintered rock rippling through her surroundings, she appeared uninjured, unslowed. She took off, leaping for a group of magisters in front of her who’d been charging up a wide stairway towards the tower’s plaza.
The five mages had screeched to a stop, and then simultaneously, as if compelled by a telepathic order or even just base survival instinct, they were suddenly shifting in posture, getting ready to backpedal down the steps –
No one had gotten ahead of her – Killstop and Timesnatcher were almost on her heels, but her powers interacted strangely with theirs; they couldn’t defend her targets as she sprang at the group of them.
The whip swept out in an arc, not cracking but used like a flail to bat at the brave, recoiling men and women.
She didn’t even hit all of them, but it didn’t matter. One mage was three yards from the swinging barbs of the whip, but the effect devoured him along with the others. Their robes were shredded, loops of fabric sinking to the floor, suddenly enclosing skeletons. The magisters’ remains dropped where they stood, tumbling to the ground and down the stairs as their flesh was reft away in a single awful instant.
Worst of all, I could tell they were still alive – dying from shock, yes, but still alive. It was predominantly the outer layers of skin and fat that she stole, leaving some of the musculature and all the internal organs intact.
A distraction for our druids, whose green light was already starting to stream from beneath the magisters’ coils of clothing.
We were already past her victims, sweeping out into the avenue itself.
In an effort to hide the crowds from her view and keep them from making attractive targets on the surrounding roads, the people had been diverted not away from the area but into the buildings themselves. The avenue was nearly empty of foot-traffic.
The speed, the sheer illogical slipperiness of our arch-diviners was our greatest asset – and our weakness. The moment Tanra got a hand on the eolastyr’s whip she brought it down, cracking again.
The tigress turned to face us, and this time it was as bad as the first had been… worse. I swooned, paralysed, looking on blankly as she swung the whip now at Killstop.
I couldn’t watch but I couldn’t help myself – the seeress fell apart, her multicoloured cloths helping to disguise the gore as she tumbled, stripped of every parcel of flesh. Her gaunt, staring skull was horrible to behold.
She wasn’t the only one. The eolastyr took advantage of the extended reprieve, springing towards Timesnatcher and Dimdweller –
Starsight and Doomspeaker came streaking in from outside the sphere of her whip’s influence, clutching again desperately for her weapon before she could let it fall –
Too late. Timesnatcher and Dimdweller were consumed.
She spun as the other two diviners reached her, striking them with elbow and knee, smashing Star’s ribcage and braining Doomspeaker.
They went hurtling to the ground, and I saw as Glimmermere landed in the road beyond the demon, the condor’s intense gaze falling on the dying champions.
As I shook myself back into action, throwing out force-blades, she erected her shimmering red shield once more. Perhaps it wasn’t quite as solid-looking as when she’d first raised it – perhaps…
“Ah, but you are a formidable one, are you not?” She reached through the dome of scarlet energy and sank her claws into the mess of fabric and pain that had been Timesnatcher, pulling his fleshless body across the boundary. “We can spare a moment, for the likes of you.”
Vampire-hearing could make out the strangled sounds coming from his ruined throat.
She held the clawed hand out over his body, light coalescing in her furred palm, and I couldn’t.
I couldn’t see this.
Couldn’t watch it happen again.
The disintegration. There would be no coming back. And for all that I hated him, I needed him. He was a part of Mund, a part of me.
He would not die.
Dozens of attacks landed on the crimson shields. Copperbrow and Stormsword worked together, pouring lightning on the infernal barrier as though it were water they were showering her with. Valorin’s demons included a bintaborax, and they pressed futilely against the bloody, shimmering circle. Even insect-swarms and plant-roots were being called upon, every last iota of power being brought into play.
I summoned Gilaela, a flood of crackling emerald energy flowing forth in front of me as I stepped up.
I heard the bitter neigh of hatred that escaped her lips when she saw our foe, and as I strode through her and joined with her, a motion augmented with a flap of my wings, I left the unicorn awake within me.
Her animosity suffused me, replacing uncertainty with indifference as I lowered my head, charging with my incandescent horn thrust out.
“Strike it down!” she screamed in my head.
Grinning, I clove through the eolastyr’s shield at almost full speed, head-first.
It broke like a dome of red glass, not wavering and evaporating but shattering, shards of pure infernal force seeming to wail as they gave way, layer after layer –
Yet another crack split the air, and everything stilled, everyone froze –
I was halted, coming to a jolting stop, all my irresistible forwards momentum killed in an instant.
It wasn’t just the sonic weapon stopping me. I flicked my eyes up, and she was there. The eolastyr, right in front of me, her arm extended up to hold me by the horn. My aim had been true, and she’d been forced to relinquish the spell she was casting on Irimar.
For the first time, I saw actual pain twist her already-twisted features; I could hear a faint crackling sound emanating from somewhere just over my head, as if it seared her flesh to grip the ethereal horn.
I floated there almost horizontally, paralysed in place. The way she held me, I was hovering over the sickening body of Timesnatcher on the ground below me, helplessly staring into my captor’s vacant eyes.
“A powerful eldritch, to be sure,” she said, grimacing.
She drew her arm back and I screamed, my mind splitting in half.
Gilaela was pulled out of me in her entirety, skittering on faltering hooves, shining eyes wild with fright. I floated in empty time-space, an untethered observer, tears obscuring my vision.
The eolastyr was tall enough at full extension to hoist the unicorn up by the horn, bringing Gilaela’s flailing legs into the air. I could see the smoking connection of furred paw with glittering bone. The sizzling sounded worse, now that the horn was substantial.
“Powerful, but not infinitely so,” the tigress murmured, twisting.
The horn didn’t come free, but under the grinding strength of the eolastyr’s hand it split and splintered, two branches peeling away from the core of the strange material. The golden light fractured into shadow and died.
Gilaela didn’t scream, but when I heard her shuddering gasp something inside me changed.
“This shall bring you closer to your goal, my child.”
Between one moment and the next, Gilaela’s pearly-white fur became inky-black. Out of the centre of each of her hooves, a single long, black talon protruded –
The unicorn’s wide, wild eyes rolled back in exultation, pure ecstasy –
Then, as the shockwave of the whip’s last reverberations faded, the eolastyr somehow hefted her by the broken, asymmetrical trident-horn. She hefted the dark unicorn, and shoved her back inside me.
“So much potential!” the demon said in a laughing voice. “Oh, my child. I cannot believe she failed to bring you to fruition.”
I screamed again.
The contact was excruciating; strange; alien; and as effortless as always. Rejoining told me certain things instantly. Gilaela was still fey – she hadn’t been transformed somehow into a demon. I could still feel her rage, her desire to smash the demon before which we floated. And she was, as far as I was able to tell, still mine – there wasn’t any of that slightly off sensation I now associated with Zel. Yet…
She was different.
Part of the horn extending from my brow was visible to me now. It was nightshade-blue, tiny black sparks of unlight trickling from the triplicate points. What was more, my index finger on each hand had been transfigured into a black dagger, as thin and long as a dirk.
Sharp as a dirk.
Wizards were lashing out, trying to drive her away from me and Timesnatcher – druids were working their healing – the eolastyr spun in place, and I looked into her black eyes. Looked into them, knowing I was outmatched, outclassed in every conceivable way. We all were.
I didn’t stop, of course, swinging my new talons at her unbearably-smug face. They passed harmlessly through her weird white skin and she even nodded slowly to me in acknowledgement afterwards, as though she were aware of my resignation, my sudden change of heart.
We lost the twins. We lost the element of surprise.
We lost.