It should not have been so easy, Elspeth thought, and her heart hammered. She looked for the next assault, but heard only the distant shriek of that imprisoned aquatic monstrosity — as if it knew the locks were being undone. This cry echoed in her own bones so thoroughly, it was a surprise to feel a new blade against her throat, to look into the eyes of the archer Winseris and discover murderous intent.
Winseris had not changed so much as she had finally become herself — much as Basher before her. The regal costuming was discarded, Winseris’s black mouth overflowing with glassy, needled teeth running with blood. Elspeth pushed herself backward and away, nicking her throat on the blade, and scrabbling upon the hard, cracked ground as Winseris advanced.
Elspeth kicked a foot into Winseris’s chest, into her jaw, but the creature transformed under every assault. Winseris was as water, rushing past stones in its path, and if not around, then over. Elspeth could see nothing but crimson waves of changing flesh through which Winseris sank. Feymal struck, but did not strike true; everywhere Elspeth tried to counter, Winseris flowed in another direction. If she split around Feymal’s sharp bite, it was only to reassemble herself on the other side.
Gradually Elspeth became aware of the stark light of Holy Wood’s dust-clouded sky, visible through Winseris’s bloodied body. The sky was unveiled entirely, Nanrin standing at what had been Winseris’s feet, drawing her off Elspeth with hands cloaked in fresh blood. She fed their former ally into a conjured jar, the sides of which did not allow Winseris passage. Winseris pooled in the bottom as fanged and gnawing ichors, unable to escape. Nanrin sealed the jar with a spoken spell, Ghostsign lunging for the conjurer’s injured hands once she had finished. But it was another spell that eventually stopped the bleeding; Nanrin appeared to suck the blood back into her body, so quickly did her hands run clean.
Elspeth eyed Ghostsign and Nanrin, and they returned her stare. All was quiet, and Elspeth waited for them to turn on her, the way they no doubt waited for her to turn on them. Around them the dust swirled, the beasts having crawled back into the hole that was Holy Wood, and for long breaths none of the women moved. When Elspeth picked up Feymal from the dust, Ghostsign rocked forward on her knees, and Nanrin lifted her hands, though they shook with exhaustion.
Elspeth reached into the neck of her leather bodice to withdraw a sweat-soaked cloth. She wiped the sheen of blood from Feymal as she said, “You realize we have been betrayed?”
The breath seemed to go out of Ghostsign entirely, while Nanrin lowered her shaking hands. Elspeth let this idea sit with them as she cleaned her blade. The wind moaned low, lifting more dust, settling it, only to lift it once more.
“The dark man?” Nanrin asked. In her lap, within the jar, Winseris spun in furious circles, unable to escape. Nanrin slapped the glass side and Winseris sank into resigned stillness.
“Who else?” Ghostsign snapped, her expression as hard as Elspeth’s must be.
“Why would he place such a creature within our own party?” Nanrin objected. “He needs us to do his killing —”
“Does he.”
It was question and statement both, Elspeth confident she had the way of it now. “Who cut S’tya-Yg’Nalle from stem to stern?” she asked them. “Who rendered Shub-Niggurath into debris? Who decimated that vile serpent?” She pointed at the wreck of Yig only steps away from their present huddle.
“You?” Ghostsign spat the word, no question as to who she thought was the better fighter. “You think this is about y —”
Elspeth offered Feymal to Ghostsign, the other fighter sneering at the weapon balanced on Elspeth’s flat palm. “Take the blade.”
Ghostsign closed her hand around the grip, but rather than pluck it from Elspeth’s palm, found herself only able to knock the blade to the ground. It lay between them, a compass needle pointing toward the distant, churning sea. Elspeth looked at Nanrin.
“And you.”
Nanrin tried, but could not lift the blade. Magic made her hands glow, by turns hot and cold, but nothing she did would bring the weapon into her hands. It moved in the dirt, but little else.
“The riddle resolves within its name,” Elspeth said, wrapping her hand around Feymal’s hilt, lifting the blade as easily as she ever had since she had first found it in a heap of discarded weapons. “At the point of a bad death. It is about Feymal, said to have come from the very star that broke the world in this very place. And Lowenhold?”
“A prison made of those same star shards,” Ghostsign whispered. The hostility drained from her, but in its place rose despair. “Then we are of no consequence. Our abilities, in the end, are nothing.”
“And this dark man — he wants Feymal?” Nanrin asked.
Elspeth shook her head, a slight motion that sent dust swirling. “He cannot hold the blade. He wants what every man wants — power — and would wrest it from those who possess it.”
“And the treasure?” Ghostsign came to her feet, staring down at Elspeth and Nanrin, hands on her hips. “A lie?”
“How many have perished in this quest?” Elspeth stood alongside Ghostsign, studying the woman’s face. Her features were worn by sun and wind alike, by knife and fist and whip. The understanding was clear within Ghostsign’s eyes, Nanrin less quick to comprehend.
“What are you saying?” Nanrin clutched the jar to her chest, fanged and bloody Winseris rousing to flail at the glass once more.
“Treasure is of no consequence to the dead,” Elspeth said. Nor would a sister be, she knew, and ached for the loss of something she couldn’t fully explain. Was it truth or lie, that sister?
She turned, sliding Feymal into its scabbard. They had no choice but to follow her — they could die in this desolate place, or travel beside her to the underwater prison where the great slumbering god slept, where the dark man would ask that she kill it with the blade made of the stars.
The jar shattered on the ground.
Winseris flowed free and died in vicious flame.
One woman fell into step behind Elspeth, and then the other, and they walked away from Holy Wood as they had walked away from every other place the dark man had brought them to — in a single, bloodstained line, through a portal that swallowed them, that tasted and carried — and knew.
Elspeth felt the portal between this place and that as a living thing, a creature that knew what they were, what they meant, what they planned. The gate was old, older than even the stars that had birthed Feymal, and it reached without hands for the sheathed weapon — thinking to slip it from Elspeth’s side when it was not in her hand — thinking it could take, could... conquer? No, the gate knew it could not.
The gate —
— knew what had been —
— knew what would be —
The gate knew, and Elspeth curled her hand around Feymal’s grip. In that instant, the gate vomited them into the flooded lower chambers of Lowenhold Prison.
The air was cold as contempt, illuminated by the lingering gate. It shifted, no longer a doorway, but as great a beast as they had seen in the many worlds they had visited. Golden, malignant globs of light whirled in a storm of barely contained chaos. It did not advance, but stood as watchman, streaming its foul light into the drowned catacombs of the prison’s basement. The water gleamed with a slick sheen, while the star-stone caverns emitted all the colors of the night sky. Deeper within the stone sparked colors Elspeth could not name. The colors resembled planets in miniature, worlds she could scoop out and hold but never actually reach. As she watched these worlds, everything she had known about the outer world was blotted from her mind; the prison was the only thing she knew, the prison and its prisoner. No sister, she thought, there was never such a thing. The prison was all — the prison and its singular, solitary prisoner.