Gariath grunted, looked to Dreadaeleon and mouthed “who?” The boy offered a hapless shrug before the air about his throat rippled. They were lifted as one, a hand outstretched to either of them as the male’s eyes burned like fire. The sikkhun beneath him giggled, pawing at the ground in anticipation of fresh meat.
“I wanted to spare ourselves this.”
The words came slowly, the concentration needed to hold onto the spell an endeavor even as the red stone burned brightly at the male’s throat. Gariath could feel something groaning, threatening to break as the trembling air closed around him like a vise.
“And look where that got us,” he hissed. “Sheraptus was right. Sheraptus always has to be right. That’s fine. That’s entirely fine. We can end this-”
A sound filled the air.
Something long, something loud, something from a very deep hole filling up with stale water from a storm that had gone on for centuries. It rendered the din of iron and death in the ring a pitiful background noise, something easily ignored. It had to be such a sound that made the male’s concentration snap and sent the boy and dragonman tumbling to the earth. It had to be such a sound that made eyes look up to the thundering skies above in awe and fear and joy and panic.
In thick, sticky drops, red tears fell from the sky. A shadow of a mountain with a white peak appeared at the edge of the ring. A roar rose from it, the sound of existence groaning under a great weight.
“Tremble, heathens.”
A man from atop the mountain spoke. A tiny, pale figure made significant, a voice made loud by virtue of from where it spoke.
“The long march of the inevitable has led us here.”
“Daga-Mer. . Daga-Mer. .” a chant began to rise from the crowd of onlookers.
“The sky bleeds for him. The storms are his crown!”
“Daga-Mer! Daga-Mer!”
“The faithless are crushed beneath him! The blasphemers tremble before him!”
“DAGA-MER! DAGA-MER! DAGA-MER!”
“FATHER!” an Abysmyth howled from below, echoed by many more. The mountain stirred at the word, rose as a living thing.
“HE COMES!”
Life came to the mountain in an eruption of hellish red light. It veined the limbs that spread out from it, it pulsed with the beat of a heart that thundered in time with the storm, it burst from a pair of eyes, sweeping out over the penitent and the damned assembled in the ring.
The earth trembled as Daga-Mer raised a colossal foot and stepped onto the field.
Before the sound of him, there could be no words. Before the sight of him, there could be no blinking. He stood as an Abysmyth, tall and thin. But his head scraped the bleeding skies above, his thin hands were bigger than even his demonic children, and his jaws gaped open, void seeping out from between jagged teeth. Crude, rusted plates of metal had been hammered into his black flesh, a horned helmet to his skull from which the pale man spoke, rays of red light seeping out from between thin slits carved in the metal.
He said nothing. He made no movement. Circles of light cast from his stare swept slowly over the battle below and not a soul moved, none wishing to draw his attention.
The frightened whine of the sikkhun could have been heard for miles.
Gariath, however, was left with no miles. The sikkhun’s squeak, the shuffling of its claws as it backpedaled, the panicked whispers of its rider as he tried to calm the beast were agonizingly loud.
As was the sudden sound of his heart stopping as a halo of red light fell upon them.
A crack of lightning above illuminated Daga-Mer’s hand rising into the sky. The plates on his body ground and groaned against each other as his hand clenched into a fist. The sky, the earth and hundreds of small, insignficant bodies screamed in unison as it came down.
A sharp, terrified whine, the name “Qaine” screamed out, bones snapping, skin exploding, the earth breaking beneath a fist the size of a boulder. Everything was lost in the eruption that sent the earth rising up and sending Gariath flying, carried on a wave of dust and gore.
He landed somewhere, he didn’t know where. Cries rose up around him, fear and panic and calls to arms. He was without Shen, without humans, without anything but the colossus of light and shadow that rose above the dust and insects.
As Daga-Mer threw back his head.
And roared.
Denaos looked up and over his shoulder, back toward the ring.
“That’s funny,” he said, “I could have sworn I just heard the sound of us about to be horribly murdered.”
“What was that?” Asper craned to see over the heads of the Shen warriors who had accompanied them to the top of the stairs. “What is that?”
“We should go back,” Kataria grunted, arrow drawn and at the ready. “We left Gariath and Dread behind to die.”
“There is nothing back there but death,” Mahalar growled. His attentions were focused on the great slab of stone at the end of the walkway running over the pond, his skeletal hands searching its smooth face. “Shalake failed. You failed. We all failed and now-”
Somewhere below, a roar shook the stones and the sky.
“That,” the elder Shen muttered. “We have no other options now. We go forward or we die.”
“We go forward and Gariath and Dread die,” Kataria said. “The rest of us will follow a little later.”
“Not ‘we,’” Mahalar snapped. “We. You. Me. Jaga. Everything. Can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear her?” He stomped his feet upon the bridge. “She’s stirring. Her beloved is close. Her children are close. She is coming.”
Kataria narrowed her eyes at the Shen before turning to Lenk. “We can’t just leave them, Lenk.”
Lenk grunted in reply. Lenk was listening to something else. Lenk could hear it. Lenk could hear her.
Somewhere deep. Somewhere far. In the chasm. In the earth. In the utter darkness. Something scratched against the floor of the world. Something pounded against the door. Someone heard the screaming in the ring. Someone screamed back.
And in the dark place of his head, something awoke.
He shook his head, tried to ignore it, tried to dismiss it as anxiety and paranoia. That was what it was, he told himself. He left that part of himself back in the darkness, back in the chasm. He touched his shoulder, it seared. He felt flesh as liquid beneath it.
He was still dying.
Good.
Wait, no.
And yet, as he tried to fight it, tried to ignore it, the voice came to him anyway, came out of his mouth.
“She comes.”
“Not yet,” Mahalar said. “She’s close, she’s trying hard, but she can’t come unless called.” His fingers found a piece of slate, thin and barely recognizable from the rest of the stone. He pulled it back, revealing a jagged indentation in the rock. “We take that away from her, from the longfaces, from everything.”
“By doing what?” Denaos asked. “There’s nowhere to go but back down.” He glanced over the edges of the walkway. “Or, you know, in there. I mean, either way it’s going to be messy.”
“There is another way.”
Mahalar pulled from his shabby robe the sigil of the House of the Vanquishing Trinity, the gauntlet clenching arrows. Tearing it from its chain, he pressed it into the indentation and slid the slate back over. Something shifted within the stone, it began to rumble. It began to rise.
Albeit painfully slowly.
Lenk looked down as a sudden, familiar weight was thrust against him. The tome whispered to him, muttered a voice onto another voice, beckoning, begging, whispering, whining. Mahalar’s eyes were dire, his voice darker.