Her head caught in the vise of his hands, she stares down the curve of her cheeks, and somehow her gaze finds his manic glare, latches…
The Judging Eye opens.
She finds herself peering into something… inexplicable.
Contradictory passions roil through her, as if she were the scalper's lifelong mistress, the one most punished, the one who understood. For there is no sin without weakness, no transgression without want or suffering. She sees the cracks through which his infant nature bleeds. The father's cane, the brother's fists. The starving marches, and the need, to be admired, to be respected, to steal what he covets…
She loves him, and she despises. But she finds herself fearing for him most of all.
Often has she wondered how she could describe it, seeing the morality of things let alone lives. Sometimes it seems more a matter of memory than vision, like sighting a familiar treatise in the house of a friend. The object itself stews with significance, but all the passages-cherished and offending-are indistinct. Only the sum can be seen, inchoate and confounding. This is what she most often sees: the abbreviated mash that is judgment passed, the balance of a soul, good and evil, writ in a stick-figure scrawl.
But sometimes, if she concentrates, the tome of a lived life flutters open beneath the Eye, and the crimes themselves become visible, the way carnal images flicker about the glimpse of a long-absent lover.
And sometimes, more rarely still, she sees the particulars of their coming damnation.
The Columnary stares, his eyes wide with panicked fury. She clutches his wrist.
"Galian…" she hears herself gasp. "It's not too late. You can save yourself from… from…"
Something in her words or manner jars him from his intent-the trill of frantic sincerity, perhaps.
"Hell?" he laughs. "There's too many of them."
Such torment. Clenched and cringing, huddled in ways outside worldly dimensions. Prised and flayed, the innumerable petals of his soul peeled back in shrieks and sulphurous flame. Screams braided into screams, pains heaped upon agonies.
She sees it, his future, a gleam across his eyes, a fiery halo about his crown. His suffering disgorged like paint, smeared and stroked into obscene works of art. His soul passed from Ciphrang to feasting Ciphrang, dispensing anguish like milk through the endless ages.
She sees the truth of the Excruciata, the One Hundred-and-Eleven Hells depicted on the walls of the Junriuma in Sumna.
"Galian. Galian. You m-must listen. Please… You have no idea what awaits you!"
He tries to grin away his horror. He's strangling her as much as holding her now. "Witch!" he spits. "Witch!"
"Shhhhh…" she manages to whisper. "It will b-"
He slams her to the raw earth. She cries out. He thrusts apart her knees, pins her while fumbling with his breeches. Belts pinch her inner thighs. Twigs bite at her shoulders, her buttocks. Dead leaves press cold against her back, like reptilian scales. His breathing is ragged, his look unfocused. He smells of shit and rotted teeth.
The world spins and roars about the fact of his damnation.
She cries into his ear, murmurs, "I forgive you…"
Frees him of this final sin.
The beast had lain hidden, waiting for them to dig their way into the entrance antechamber, a dead end where they could not use the greater debris field to either flee or flank him. But it proved a treacherous trap. Had they not stood side by side, where the combined strength of their incipient defences purchased them the heartbeats they needed to reinforce their Wards, they would be dead.
Apparently Wutteat could not hear the distance between them…
Fire boiled over and around them, blinding them, ripping away the gossamer meanings they shouted against it. An inferno like no other, scorching some hard stone surfaces into liquid while exploding others.
Then the beast itself was on them, a crocodile falling upon sparrows. It clawed with feline savagery, tearing and rending, while the Gnostic sorcerer and the Quyan Mage sang in desperate tandem, slowing accumulating the glowing shells that preserved them.
The boom and crack of mountains breaking, and underneath, the rot of sorcery's unearthly murmur.
Roaring. Raging. Scales burnished, flashing as crimson as infant blood. Claws the size of wains swatting. The great saurian head ramming, snapping horns as thick as young trees.
Planes of spectral glass cracked and shattered, collapsed into aether. Rock rained down. Stone congealed like blood.
"It lives by its ears!" the old Wizard cried between thunders.
His eyes blazing, Nil'giccas nodded in immediate understanding.
The beast reared above them. Another incendiary eruption. The world beyond their defences became an amorphous glare. Wards cracked and burned…
But the Nonman King was attacking, howling in tongues as old as his race. Achamian could scarce see the light of his conjuring, just the faint blue of lines like parabolic wires, arcing into the heights…
The inferno lifted, streamed exploding across the scorched heaps to their right. The fire sputtered into a ground-strumming shriek, and they saw Wutteat, the dread Father of Dragons, flailing backward, smoke pluming from its eye socket.
"The head!" Achamian screamed. "Attack the head!"
They assailed the beast, Man and Nonman, as in days of old. They threaded the air with arrays of wicked, dazzling illumination. And it screamed, squealed even, like a pig doused in burning oil.
They stepped into the cavernous air and pursued him. Wutteat's wings kicked the ground with gusts, swept up sheets of ash and dust. Yet they could see him.
Geometries of incandescence. Geometries of destruction.
Like a moth in a jar, Wutteat smashed its shoulders into the cragged ceiling, tried to bring stone down upon them. Deaf and blind, it spat fire across hanging cliffs…
The Gnostic sorcerer hung above one of the two remaining pillars, striking the thing with scissions and concussions. The Quyan Mage sailed an arc about the beast, uttering Cants that burned. They struck and struck until the iron of its bone glowed, until Wutteat's head was smashed ruin, a charred stump possessing jaws.
The beast dropped, and Achamian rushed to jubilation, thinking they had felled it. But it crashed into a lurch that became a run, its claws kicking up stone middens. It raised its blasted snout, snuffing against a piteous growl. Unerringly it charged toward the remnants of the entrance.
"No!" the Nonman King cried.
Coursing like a snake, it bolted through the punishing gauntlet of their sorcery, smashed through the entrance into the pale-glowing hollows beyond.
They pursued it into the breach, climbed as if up the throat of a toppled tower. But the dragon was too quick: they could already hear its shriek score the faraway sky. Climbing. Coughing. Breathless, they found themselves within the ring of the Turret, squinting up at the jagged circle of afternoon brilliance. His heart hammering with mortal violence, the old Wizard finally gained the summit.
Wutteat thrashed in the light of day, throwing up trees and gouts of dirt. It caromed against the Library walls, crashed like a thing thrown into the forest beyond. Trunks and limbs cracked. Over the wall's dusty halo, the crowns of a dozen trees convulsed and vanished. The beast spat wild gouts of fire, uttered shrieks that drove nails into their ears.
And then, suddenly, the dread beast was flying, white and black and golden, its ravaged wings buffeting the forest as though it were wheat. Scales shining, the Father of Dragons soared heavenward, spiralling and smoking like a bird afire. Astounded, the man and the Nonman watched, until finally, moth-small with distance, it vanished into the slow-tumbling flanks of a cloud.
Cleric stood atop the heights of a shattered inner wall, gazing high after the thing. Brush fires raged beyond him, throwing lines of orange across his jaw and cheek. His nimil chain glistened in the dry sunlight, and for the first time the old Wizard saw the faint lines of filigree worked across its innumerable links.