The light touch of the wraiths filled Van with an absolute calm, a pleasurable sense of relief, the alluring release of death and endless peace. An end to pain, loss, and suffering with the promise of enduring happiness adrift in blissful nothingness.

All he had to do was give in, to join them in their embrace.

But he didn't want to. The truth is, he could, just as those many years ago. He'd not known Aleya then. The only thing that centered him was his sense of self, not pride, and it sure as hell wasn't duty to King and country.

No.

The best of him and the worst of him, the same fears the diablero sought to use against him, bubbled forth. The flames raged around his head, his flesh untouched and his hair aglow with energy. The golden mist of the wraiths darkened with the sea spray and clouds above. His vision of the past narrowed in a darkened tunnel.

Van's love of Aleya wasn't how he survived the Azov. A power was unleashed, connecting him to the spirits of the dead and endless Spirit World, a link to the Astral.

Light blazed around Van.

That's when Vargos screamed.

Her tentacles blackened and charred, Vargos' tentacles dropped Van as, twenty feet away, she leaned over and gripped DaFaca with one of her human hands pointing to the blazing body of Van. "That ancient soul hurt me more than this weapon burns me." Vargos shook her stolen Ouroboros blade. "What did you do?"

DaFaca held his mangled wrist, a spectral, clawed hand almost visible in place of his severed right hand. "You have stolen one Ouroboros, but I think that ancient soul will stop you from gaining mine."

Vargos dropped DaFaca and turned on Nico. "You were to bind the ancient soul. How is it he continues to move? How is he surviving the fury of DaFaca's blade? What is that nimbus of spirit flames burning around his head?" She shook the Ouroboros blade again. "How is he ablaze and alive while this weapon burns me such that I must constantly reform my arms?"

DaFaca, laying on the ground, coughed a wet and croaking laugh.

Vargos stopped, her eyes wild with realization.

Nico leapt back as Vargos swung the Ouroboros blade at him. "Drop your spellcaster!"

Nico stared at Vargos in utter confusion, understanding too late.

The binding web around Van connected Nico via his spellcasting gun.

The hawk-nosed gunman looked up too late as the flames destroyed the web around Van, snaking like a stroke of lightning into Nico, devastating his body.

As Van stood, ablaze and free of Nico's binding web, Vargos charged with a rage matched only by Van's.

*

Fierce winds tore across the plain as the atmosphere twisted around the Astral rift. Lightning cracked as tendrils of energy tore open the ground, spewing further debris suspended around Van and Señora Vargos. The Mascogo steeds reared and fought the scouts, refusing to ride any closer to the hole between worlds.

"Damned animals, don' know what they're more scared of." Day Long swept off his bucking mount.

Dismounting, Nathan shook his head. "Do you?"

"I ain't scared, Silver Hair."

Nathan scowled. "What's that saying about fools?"

"Oh I know fear, I'm lookin' at it."

Nathan ignored him, turning as both men sprinted toward the eye of the storm, followed by the rear force of the Mascogos.

Day Long pointed toward the rift in the sky. "Looks like the Astral is leaking ether through that hole an' feeding something in Van, birthin' them flames."

Nathan glanced at the kithla and Day Long running beside him and yelling out to each other in Gullah.

Day Long yelled a response back to the kithla. "Spirit energy yeah, but what's with Van's burnin' head?"

Nathan stared through the suspended, swirling debris and silver mist forming the eye of the rift. How was Van ablaze with that hideous halo? Nathan pulled his bandana up over his nose and charged into the storm.

*

Van deflected a savage blow from Vargos, and the horrendous sound of nails on chalkboard grated in his pained head as energy crackled across the crystal surfaces of the Ouroboros blades. The air hummed with power; dirt, dust, and rocks hovered within the eye of the storm as the two combatants struggled with cosmic weapons beyond their means.

Vargos snarled, her voice beastial. "How are you doing this, boy?"

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Van didn't know and remained silent, parrying each move the shapeshifter made. Van glanced at the ebon-clothed Watcher lying nearby, clutching his severed wrist, next to the scorched remains of the hawk-nosed gunman. Limited knowledge of the weapon flooded Van's mind; the link between the Ouroboros blade and its owner remained weak but present. Both Van and Vargos fought at a disadvantage; she was in pain and equally unfamiliar, but he gained more surety with each move.

Through his own intensifying pain, the all-too-familiar crush of his temples taunted Van, warning him of more than the evident danger surrounding him. He whirled away from Vargos, even as her tentacles erupted around him, hesitant of the unsettling black-tipped flames spewing from his shoulders. She appeared more fearful of the uncanny flames than of the Ouroboros blade.

Burning.

Vargos said the blades burned her, just as the black stone gauntlets protected Van from the searing touch of the crystal weapon's hilt. Did the gauntlets transfer the effect of the weapon's defenses into a sleeve around his body? The fallen Watcher showed no such display, perhaps because he owned the blade.

Vargos roared, lunging with the second Ouroboros bladed hilt point aimed to skewer Van. He deflected the thrust, pushed from his feet by the force. Chunks of limestone thundered down around him as Vargos took to weaponizing the landscape with her multitude of appendages.

Too late, pinned to the ground, Van recovered as the flames around his body ate through the limestone. Vargos drove the jagged crystal cone down on Van. He countered, and the two blades met with the impactful crush of glass against glass. Energy shimmered at the end of the deadly tips. Vargos pressed both blades down atop Van; her strength overwhelmed him, but his flames were lapping around the shapeshifter. She shrieked in anger and torment, crushing Van beneath the weapons.

Energy erupted from the blades, striking the etheric cloud in the eye wall around their private arena. Short of breath, Van's vision blurred and darkened, but for the flashes of lightning across the black crystal cones. The eye wall crept closer as the rift contracted.

*

Day Long followed Nathan as the storm winds buffeted them, and debris struck with harsh force to cut and tear at their bodies. Light flashed in the ripping twilight from lightning and etheric energies. Beside the scouts, the kithla sang protective invocations. Day Long cried out; his words ripped away, but he was already sweeping the kithla and Nathan off their feet. The three men hit the ground as a dark mass careened overhead. Laying in the dirt, with dust and rocks ripping through the air, the three men crawled headfirst toward each other.

Day Long gripped Nathan by the scruff of his neck. "This is all sortsa crazy!"

Nathan yelled back. "How are we to pull Van out of this hell?"

Day Long grinned and immediately regretted it. "Only Van could inspire a man to run into a damned Devil's twister."

Nathan grunted. "You sound like Teven."

The winds barreled overhead, sounding for all the world like a dozen locomotives steaming right over them. They stayed locked together, their faces beneath their arms and hands, buried in the dirt, shielded as best they could. Their bandanas caked in dust, their hair whipped about in the deafening howl of banshee winds.

Lightning flashed all around, rocks and debris battered the scouts and Mascogos as they struggled to draw a breath, the vacuum formed in the vortex pulled air from their lungs.

The ground shook as the thunderous rumble grew deep and predatory—a continuous cacophony of sounds. A deafening howl of anguish arose as if the sky cried out in pain from the hole ripped open by the Astral rift.

Minutes away from blacking out, Day Long found it impossible to breathe. He and the others bounced as the wind speeds increased, lifting the group, tossing them around the central eye of the rift.

*

The wall of the storm continued to contract, and with it came the incredible struggle to draw breath. Vargos seemed immune, but both she and Van succumbed to the pull of the vacuum and the rift itself. The lead shapeshifter sank six erupted tentacles into the ground with savage force, then risked great pain to ensnare the hilt of DaFaca's blade beside Van's stone-gauntled hands.

Van lifted off the ground, pulled by the etheric silver mists that once flowed out of the Astral rift. So close now to the door between planes, bolts of force struck the Ouroboros blades with increased and frightening intensity before an immense font of power hammered into the earth.

*

The cracked and broken ground ahead of the scouts smoked as the kithla motioned Day Long and Nathan from the crater's edge. The debris cloud dispersed like an unraveling tornado and the sky cleared in the twilight of evening.

Day Long, hunched forward, coughed with fierce spasms. Nathan outright vomited.

His head thrust back, Day Long laughed a wicked cackle. Nathan frowned. The Black Seminole pointed into the crater where the burnt remains of the lead shapeshifter's appendages sizzled.

"Missy done lost some of her pieces."

The kithla pointed at the sky. "That was no tear in the Veil, this was something else."

Day Long leaned into the kithla. "Where'd they go?"

Nathan shook his hands, bewildered. "Are they dead? There's nothing left. Are they in the Spirit World?"

Day Long gripped Nathan. "No, I think it's like what them East Coast mediums flannel-mouth people into."

"What?"

Day Long cursed. "Fleecin' people of their money. Flim flam from charlatans who ain't got a lick of what it takes to visit other worlds."

Nathan pulled away. "Oh! The Astral plane?"

The kithla called out to his fellow Mascogos, and the bulk of the rear force reined up around the crater. Battle weary, the wise warrior directed his people into positions.

Nathan stood by Day Long. "They working to return Van to us?"

Day Long shook his war hawk. "Or send us after him."

The kithla shook his head and pointed back a mile to where the Mascogos tended to Teven.

Nathan frowned. "What's he pointing at?"

Day Long rubbed his six day beard. "Teven."

*

Van and Vargos hurtled through a kaleidoscopic tunnel of reality—a refracted stratum of the Astral replicating worlds in simulacrum. The constant mimicry created a turbulence and surge that, at first, seemed to be a result of the rift, preventing them from tracking their point of origin. They hurtled along at a rapid pace, lost between worlds.

Van marveled at the vast etheric river around him. Vargos tumbled nearby, clutching her stolen Ouroboros blade. She shot her extended tentacles to recapture Van, looping them around his legs and torso. "You fool, without the protection of the Ouroboros blades, we risk becoming someone else, somewhere else!"

He didn't understand what she meant other than his knowledge of the Astral as Heaven's Eyes, the lens of the gods, a lenscape from which the pantheons observed the realms they sought to rule.

"You're a damned shapeshifter, what's it matter who you become? You can always change back."

Vargos pulled him close. "Your soul isn't worth this."

Van punched the witch in the face, and the black crystal gauntlet made contact with a satisfying crunch.

Vargos reeled back enraged, and as sudden, her face contorted from anger to shock, her eyes focused behind Van. He knew then—the piercing agony in his skull, the dangers mounting—that something hunted them.