The sword was light and easy to yield. It was nothing like a machete or the lighter bone blade he'd been armed with in Krul, and yet Cross instinctively felt that he knew how to use the sword, as if he'd spent a lifetime training with it. The weapon was long and unusually balanced, and the grip was much longer than what he was used to, carved from bone and wrapped in linen so that the entire weapon took on a ghostly hue.
Something was intimately familiar about the sword. It was not a sword, not truly, but he couldn't determine what it really was.
He saw glimpses of another life. He saw an encampment in the mountains; banners and victory parades in an unknown country; pain and loss that belonged to someone else, but that stung like they were his own. He felt pain from past wounds that weren’t his.
What is this place?
“ It is called The Fade,” a woman said.
Until that point, Cross had thought he was alone.
She stood at the center of the plain, at once right next to him and yet miles distant. Her armor and the dress she wore over it were as white as the blade was. Her pale flesh was almost unnaturally so, and her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, with two braids bound in black metal clasps. Her penetrating eyes were snow white and almost blank, and she radiated an immense level of power, power that Cross was sure he would have sensed even without his spirit.
It was the same massive and primordial magic that Lucan had possessed, that he had gifted to the three mages.
The same power as that in the sword.
“ Avenger,” she said. She smiled and nodded at the blade. “It's called 'Avenger'.”
“ Who are you?”
“ I am the Woman in the Ice,” she replied.
“ That's not an answer,” Cross said. “I've seen your likeness before.”
“ True,” she nodded. “You serve my sister. The White Mother and I are siblings, after a fashion. We are avatars of the same power. As is that blade that you hold in your hands.”
Something growled through the sky.
“ The power that Lucan infused us with,” he said. Cross was suddenly aware of a wind that hadn’t been there before. It stank of fear, hopelessness and death. “ That power is in this sword now, isn't it?”
“ It IS the sword,” she corrected. “Here, in this place between the worlds, all power takes on a physical manifestation.”
The ground rumbled, and the sky darkened. Thick onyx clouds spread like spilled black milk.
“ What is that thing? The Dra'aalthakmar?”
“ You know its name.”
“ But that doesn't mean that I know what it is.”
Cross felt something loom over him. That presence hovered like a dark star.
“ It was her prisoner. She held it captive for eons. It is a great evil. You call that evil The Black.” As if in response to hearing its name, the sky trembled again. Bits of flaming rock fell like charnel rain. “It cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered, and weakened. That is what you must do.”
“ Wait a second,” Cross said. The rising wind intensified. He had to shout to be heard. “Why me?! I came here to find you…YOU'RE the one who's supposed to do this.”
“ All I can do,” she said sadly, “is grant you the tools to accomplish your task. Your female companions are the power. I am the vessel.” Her features faded, sucked into shadow. Charred sky swarmed over the plain like a horde of penumbral spiders. Everything crumbled. “You are the pilot.”
He falls through maelstroms of screaming smoke. His eyes cast out to churning charcoal seas filled with glaciers of black ice. He falls like a teardrop through a deep and empty sky. The world divides behind him and refolds. A scar is left in his wake.
He falls without a body. He falls outside of time.
In the distance, beyond the boundary of what is and the fathomless realm of what isn’t, forms press against the outer shell of the void. Their visages are impossible to comprehend. Each one of them is as vast as a midnight sky. Their eyes are black pits.
He is a sailor on the ebon sea. Churning smoky waters lap and bite at him. He reaches for the edge of the void, and finds it.
On the other side are the ashen plains of the Reach. Ice smokes into the air and bitter frost crunches beneath his feet. He steps onto snow that recoils, blackened, away from him. He sinks with every step.
He is not in his own body, nor is he in any body. This is a new vessel, as the Woman in the Ice had promised. Just as she is the trapped avatar of a greater power, he pilots the avatar of the Woman. He holds control of a spirit machination: a construct of ghosts.
Avenger weighs the air around him. It's every motion cleaves the skin of reality. Its blade is so keen even time bleeds at its touch.
He moves through the sky. He is an avatar made of blades. The world moves beneath and around him. He is out of synch, neither faster nor slower. He moves according to different rules, stands in the folds between moments. His footsteps leave smoking shadows on the land.
Ahead of him, on the opposite horizon, is the Sleeper. He has never seen it clearly before now. It is not all that different from him. It is cloaked in dripping darkness. Vast drifts of its ebon form fall away and melt the transitional realm. In the physical world, possibilities are melted by its passage. It carries with it inevitability, a finality.
They approach one another from opposite ends of the spectral sky. The Sleeper yields a blade every bit as black as Cross' is gleaming white.
Pure flames dance in the air between them. Every step they take is a thunderous echo. The world shakes and rattles at their passage. Time blisters and peels away.
The Sleeper is night condensed into humanoid form. Its skin is a rich ebon field. The blade in its hands cuts the air, and darkness bleeds out.
All around them, everything stops. The universe holds its breath.
Cross steps forward in his unbody, in his armor and weapons of light.
He knows this blade. Avenger extends and shifts. It is fire and light and an edge that can cut through worlds.
Their swords come together in battle.
The weapons clash at the center of the sky. Metal and light explode. The ring of ancient steel cracks the heavens like a hundred storms.
Very quickly, the battle turns to the Sleeper's favor. It is the stronger of the two. Its attacks come at him like an avalanche of dark blades. It is all he can do to deflect them.
He can't launch an attack back of his own; he is too busy defending himself.
Its eyes smoke with histories of destruction. He hears plaintive calls in every strike of its weapon: lost souls made to suffer their own end, again and again and again, with every blow landed by that blade.
He falls. His phantom form feels pain. Terror seizes his bodiless heart.
No.
He springs to his feet. He sends a hail of strikes at the Sleeper, and one of his thrusts lands a cut that gushes forth a rain of shadows instead of blood, a black waterfall of soil and soot.
His rapidly deteriorating mind goes back to the arena in Krul. He is taken back to the battles, to the merciless drive to win. He had a cause worth winning for: to keep his friend alive.
But his friend is dead. He failed.
Dillon is lost, just a body now. All of his simple hopes, his love for his sister and nephew, his sense of duty, his strange dice and his notebook, all gone. Dead and lost, because Cross couldn’t save him.
Graves, and Ramsey, and Stone and Cristena. And Snow. Snow, burning, screaming on the train.
He sees their faces in the clouds as he presses the attack. Their accusing looks give him strength. Steel resolve pumps through the avatar’s veins.
With every motion his comfort in the unbody grows. Rage courses through him like fire. He recalls the taste of victory in the arena, the animalistic drive to destroy his enemies.
He does so now. He smells weakness, sees an opening, and he takes advantage.
Sparks fall onto the Reach like lighting rain. Steel grinds steel into smoldering splinters. Slowly, inch by inch, the light drowns out the shadow.