Bruce Cordell - City of Torment

Angul exploded in cerulean fire. A flaming blue sphere leaped from the razor-sharp tip. The blaze hurtled toward the ceiling as if hurled from a catapult. It dazed the eyes of flying and perching aboleths alike.

The fire arced high and pierced the haze of shadow clinging to the ceiling. In the light of the flare, something appalling was revealed.

A gruesome shape was lodged in the ceiling. No, Angul saw. That assessment was incorrect.

The thing was the ceiling. The flare's light revealed a bloated thing the size of a temple complex, one whose bulk stretched at least as wide as what should have been the roof. The creature's stony hide was as desolate as the dead face of a moon and seemed nearly as large. However, what moon ever possessed dead eyes for craters?

Thousands of eyes speckled the gray expanse of petrified flesh, some small as coins while others were large as houses. Most were closed, but some stared blankly like the glassy orbs of corpses. These gazed into the empty space beneath the creature, down upon the circling aboleths, and across the prophecies scribed on the floor.

It was the Eldest. It presided over its progeny as a statue might, without breath.

Angul comprehended what was happening within the chamber: the last of the recalled thoughts and memories distributed throughout Xxiphu were splashing upward and being absorbed. Before, a single thought turned over once every ten thousand years in the thing's gargantuan brain. But now, hundreds of new sensations quickened beneath its hard carapace.

Angul hesitated. The blade did not know fear. But the panorama of the throne room complete with the Eldest was beyond the blade's experience. Even Angul's arrogant belief that it was up for any challenge Anally slammed against stark reality. The Blade Cerulean's light dimmed. Angul recognized its strength alone could not hope to win the hour.

It needed to join its power to the Sign's. To do that, Angul needed Raidon Kane after all.

*****

Jagged shards scraped and punctured him. The world was a broken mirror, and he lay in its ruins. An image showed in each shard. Some revealed a man named Raidon Kane. Some were of a girl named Ailyn. A few showed the likeness of a different child named Opal.

If he didn't move, he felt hardly any pain at all. He'd learned that despite not really having a body, attempting to see the pieces as a whole was agonizing. When he tried to stand up to see more than a few splinters at once, pieces of him were flayed off by the crush of shards, each as sharp as a torturer's scalpel.

Better to just lie still and watch the events in the glass unfold. In some, Raidon laughed. In others he slept, ate, or walked. In several he fought. He didn't like to watch those. If he did so too long, he shifted his perspective so often in order to follow the action that he sliced himself anew on the images' sharp edges. Welcome, agony.

So he observed images other than his own, chiefly of the girl Ailyn. These were mostly idyllic. Mostly. A couple showed grave markers. When he turned his attention to avert his gaze from them, the shards cut more cruelly than ever.

Thus when the sky blue Are blasted into him, tumbling his perspective end over end through the shattered splinters of his mind, Raidon screamed like a lost soul. The fire roared, furnace hot, across the bed of broken glass. The shards wilted under the heat. They slumped into reddish goo that began to congeal. When the flame puffed out, the melted pieces had formed together in a lumpy, sharp-edged mass.

The mirror was reassembled, but crudely and with mismatched seams. Nothing reflected in its crazed surface would ever look the same again.

*****

Raidon heard music that he guessed was played on instruments forged of rotting skin and hollowed bones.

Unwept tears filtered everything through a quilt of fractured glints. The monk wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand and saw the throne chamber of Xxiphu. He saw the spiraling elder aboleths-and that which stared down with its ocean of eyes high above. The noise was the creatures' chanting ritual.

"I don't care," Raidon said. "Let me go, Angul."

All aberrations must be purged. You know this. Pull yourself together and join with me.

"I'm empty. I'm done."

Raidon made to throw down the sword, but the Blade Cerulean overrode his intention. Instead, the weapon pointed up at the ceiling.

Angul said, That is what we must defeat. Afterward you can collapse in upon yourself and embrace your weakness until death finds you..

"I killed her!" the monk screamed. His voice rang out into the throne chamber. "I cut her down! It is something that can never be forgiven!"

You did nothing that requires forgiveness. You did what was necessary. You cleansed an abomination, Angul offered.

"No!" This last denial was offered at such a volume that a few aboleths flying in formation overhead twitched.

Raidon briefly wondered why they weren't reacting to his presence. The effort of even that small question exhausted him.

You must call upon the Cerulean Sign and join its power to mine.

"I must do nothing."

Several aboleths resting in wall berths pressed to the edges of their moist balconies. They fixed their eyes on the intruder. The flying creatures overhead maintained their litany, but many now fixed an extra eye or two on the raving half-elf below.

"Time grows short. Will you compound your error by giving up now, rendering all your past actions a pointless charade?"

"Yes. Because that is what they were. The last futile gasps of someone who should have perished in the Year of Blue Fire." Raidon tried again to fling the sword away and throw himself into one of the moving furrows that slid along the floor. His heart wasn't in it, though. The Blade Cerulean easily checked him.

Four aboleths along the closest wall surged form their observation cavities, producing tiny waves of disturbed slime.

None of them had apparently been graced with a connection to Xxiphu's orrery, for they slid down the walls like slugs dropped down the side of a garden wall. When they reached the floor, they squirted forward on a layer of ooze.

The four creatures advanced on Raidon in a ragged line. Their tentacles gesticulated and lashed, as if doing so was the only way they could express their surprise at finding an invader in their midst. If surprise wa s even an emotion such creatures were capable of.

Raidon was only vaguely aware of the onrushing threat. So when an orb of pulsing goo flashed toward his head, his body betrayed his fractured intentions and slipped to the side.

A volley of similar attacks burst from the other three creatures. Already in motion, the monk whirled and rolled to avoid each attack. His somersaulting evasion melted into a charge, almost without Raidon's awareness. His trained muscle memory, once engaged, took over.

One aboleth had gotten slightly out ahead of the others. When he reached the creature, it tried to heave itself backward, but Raidon transferred his momentum into a high leap. He came down upon the creature with a slashing elbow that smeared two of the creature's eyes into so much jelly.

A hollow scream burst from its tri-slit mouth, and its lashing tentacles redoubled their frenzy. Raidon rolled off the creature's back to face its three siblings. Angul remained quiet and kept its power quiescent, as if it sensed that urging the monk to use its aberration- slaying edge could push the mentally unstable man back into his fit of apathy.

The half-elf s face hardened into an expression of feral determination. Whatever else came to pass, the aboleths before him would rue challenging him. Though if they could not feel surprise, sorrow was also probably beyond their grasp. Raidon didn't much care, so long as he stamped them into nonexistence.