Mark Chadbourn - Destroyer of Worlds

'What are you talking about? It's only been a few minutes,' Church said.

'It's been a week!' Ruth said.

'Time moves differently in that place, just like in the Otherworld, you idiot,' Tom muttered as he stirred a bubbling pot of aromatic herbs and hedgerow plants.

'We have been waiting here patiently for your arrival.' Shavi clasped Church's hand warmly. 'Despite what Ruth said, we never doubted you would catch up with us. Experience tells.'

'Yeah, bad news just keeps on giving, Church-dude.' Laura grinned at him lazily, hands behind her head as she lay in the shadows just beyond the firelight. 'Besides, you're the man with the plan. We couldn't move on because no one knows what's rattling around in that tiny brain of yours. Unless it really is just running away and burying your head in the sand. Which I still think has a lot going for it.'

Realising how hungry he was, Church sat between Veitch and Rachel and stirred the pot. 'You stayed in one place? With the spiders everywhere? '

'Do you think we're fools?' Tom snapped. 'We're on a major ley here. And we've seen no sign of them, or we'd be far away and you'd be damned.'

Church laid one palm on the ground. Reaching deep down, he could just feel the faintest hint of buzz. 'Not much of a ley. The Blue Fire is pretty dormant. Just like it was before the Fomorii invaded.'

'That is the job of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders,' Shavi said. 'We awaken the Blue Fire. They exert all their power to reassert the Mundane Spell and stifle the lifeblood of Existence so that it has little effect on the people who live here.'

'So that's us, right — pointless?' Laura snorted. 'We wake the Blue Fire. They shut it down. We wake it. They shut it down. We do all this suffering and get nowhere.' Underneath her irony there was a troubling bleak note.

'That's why we have to stop the Void once and for all,' Church said. 'That way we change things for ever.'

'Yeah, stop a god.' Laura laughed coldly, then rolled over so no one could see her face.

'You're all funny.' Rachel laughed. 'You talk about the strangest things!'

They all exchanged glances, but no one felt it necessary to illuminate Rachel on some of the harsh realities they had encountered.

'But you're good company, I'll give you that,' she continued. 'And you saved my life. I'm never going to forget that.' She wiped away a stray tear, the strain of her recent experiences still evident.

Her gratitude was touching, and only added to the warm mood that pervaded the campsite. With the soundtrack of the fire's crackling, the breeze in the trees and the calls of the owls, Church lay back and watched the stars amongst the branches. He would have been happy to stay there for ever, with his friends, and the woman he loved, in the beating heart of nature.

They'd all kept going for so long with the promise that such peace would finally await them at the end of their long, hard road, but perhaps this was the last moment they would ever have.

His lambent emotions must have played out on his face, for he caught Ruth watching him with concern. He gave her a reassuring smile. 'Let's make the most of this night,' he said to the group. 'What's out there isn't important. What's here is real, all that matters. Let's celebrate just being alive, being together. Because tomorrow everything starts in force.'

In the heat of the night, amidst the thick odour of petrol fumes and the regular buzz of traffic heading west along the A30, the Libertarian waited on the fringes of the stark garage lights. For every car or lorry that trundled in for refuelling, he carefully searched the faces of the drivers, filled with barely contained anger that he had no idea what he wanted to find, but convinced he would know it when he saw it, and that it was important. This time, this place. Why? His memory was increasingly and frustratingly patchy, at the point when he needed it the most. He half-recalled a distant memory of sitting around a campfire, and drove its unpleasant taint from his mind; too haunting, too destabilising.

A sleek, silver BMW rolled onto the forecourt, music blaring from the open window. The driver was slim, tanned, with well-cut, sandy hair, wearing an open-necked, light-blue shirt. At first glance, there was nothing out of the ordinary about him, but then the Libertarian caught sight of something subtle that was instantly recognisable: something in his eyes, perhaps, a hardness, too long between blinks, or the way the muscles of his face fell in an unguarded moment. He knew he had his man.

Marching over, he held out his hand. 'Simon,' he boomed.

'Scott,' the driver responded, unsure.

'Of course. Scott. You're looking for your girlfriend. Flighty type. Ran away, left you in the lurch.'

The information was so precise Scott was too taken aback to question the stranger.

'I might be able to help,' the Libertarian said with a tight smile.

At the first light of dawn, Church led the group across the rolling grassland towards Stonehenge. The landscape was still, the rumble of traffic that blighted the ancient site for most of the day not yet rising from the constricting network of main roads. The first light gave a silvery, new-minted sheen to the countryside, with a hint of the warm, golden sun that would soon follow. As they made their way down a slope, summer mist briefly turned the world back in time to the raw, poetic age when the stones were first erected. There was only the grass beneath their feet, sparkling with dew, each step muffled by the soft, drifting mist. For a while, no one spoke, their steady breathing and the gentle melody of birdsong their only accompaniment.

Shavi breathed deeply, peacefully. That moment held all the reasons for the joy he felt at being back in the world.

'Give you a bit of nature and you're in heaven, aren't you, Shavster?' Laura's tone was gently mocking, but her expression remained unusually solemn.

'There is heaven in every aspect of this world, not just in the countryside, if you look with the right eyes. In music heard from an open window on a city street. In the play of light glinting off the windshields of cars speeding down the motorway. In the rainbows of oil in puddles on a building site.'

'You're weird.'

In the long pause that followed her words, he felt she was desperately seeking something from him, though he had no idea what it was. Finally, she said, 'Are we just wasting our time here?'

'Given all I know of Church, I would trust him implicitly and follow him anywhere. What we initially see may not be the true picture.'

'That's the point exactly. Maybe we're just a bunch of deluded, woolly-headed losers and what we think we see is just us fooling ourselves. All this power-in-the-land, magic-in-the-heart bollocks. Say it out loud. Listen to it. It sounds like one of those rants you get from the cider-addled dog-on-a-string people you find sitting on the pavement begging for money in Glastonbury.'

'You have seen the evidence with your own eyes-'

'I've seen stuff, sure, but who's to say it's right? What if the Void is the right one for our world?' Her voice had a faintly glassy quality that suggested unrevealed stresses deep within.

'It is not right.'

'But what if? Just having a little peace, getting a tiny bit of enjoyment out of life before we take the dirt-nap… what's so bad about that?'

'Nothing. Except there is the potential for a lot of peace, and a great deal of enjoyment in life. The Void wins by giving people just enough to keep them content. A little less and they would all rise up and change things. A little more and they would see the true potential of what we have, and rise up and change things. The Mundane Spell is very skilful.'

'But why do we get to shake things up? Sometimes I feel like we're those revolutionaries who start out trying to make things better and end up consumed by the cause and blowing up babies on a bus.'