Diana Rowland - Touch of the Demon

He turned and walked away. “If you have not yet taken in the view from the west tower,” he said without glancing back or breaking stride, “ask Safar to take you. It is not to be missed, and we depart on the morrow.”

I stared after him. Practice regularly and see the sights? Amazingly, I managed to bite down on the urge to shout after him, “Does this mean you’re not going to kill me in the morning?” Instead, I turned to Safar: “I guess we’re going to the west tower.”

Safar stood, snorted, and bounded down the corridor. At the end he turned back to me and bared his teeth. “Come!”

I smiled and trotted after him, down the central corridor of the west wing and then up a broad spiral stair in the west tower. I knew this stair, or at least Elinor did, but the eerie familiarity surged when we reached the seventh floor, where the chamber spanned the entire floor of the tower with huge windows all around. Eleven of them. I turned slowly, taking it in. Easels. Tables with paints, brushes, and a host of things I couldn’t identify. A bench with hammers, mallets, and a variety of chisels. A single wooden stool, unadorned and well-worn.

Several sculptures lay toppled to the floor, broken, and at the base of one wall lay a dusty heap of shredded paintings. The stone above the heap bore a splodge of crimson paint, as though splattered from a container thrown with force. My gut wrenched at the wanton destruction of brilliance.

“Who destroyed all this?”

“Szerain.”

My twisting anguish deepened. “Why?”

“After the cataclysm, after the last of the humans died, Szerain started to sculpt and paint but finished nothing. What he began, he destroyed. In time, he did not begin.”

A deep sadness tightened my chest. I crouched and picked up a severed stone hand. Slender fingers. A woman. The dream image rose of a shattered statue of Elinor, and I wondered if there was a connection. And if there was, what did that mean? The statues were broken after Elinor died so it couldn’t be her memory. My breath caught, and cold sank into my bones. From the floor in front of me, the half shattered face of a man stared in horror, mouth twisted in a scream.

I looked around, really seeing the fragments now. Each was as exquisitely crafted as any of the statues in the palace, but every face and twisted limb was the shard of a horrific story. I gingerly placed the hand back on the floor and stood, feeling as though I trespassed on someone else’s nightmare. I backed toward the stairs, scrubbing my hands on my jeans. “Let’s go.”

Safar huffed and bounded up the next curve. I followed, glancing back once at the testament of pain. Was this why I’d never seen Ryan show any sort of artistic ability? Did this agony still grip him? Or was it simply that Szerain couldn’t express it through Ryan? I found either possibility equally heartbreaking.

On the next level, Safar disappeared up, but I had to stop and stare. This too was the entire floor of the tower and, judging by the big bed, was likely Szerain’s chambers. Hundreds of foot-high statues in wood and stone lined shelves and niches in the walls. Mostly humans with a smattering of demons mixed in.

The tassels of hair, the paintings in the shrine, and now this. Did he grow attached to each and every human only to watch them age and die? How could anyone survive such repeated loss?

A tumble of books and papers overflowed a huge table and littered the floor around it, making Tessa’s library look as tidy as an evidence locker. Frowning, I took a step closer. Everything else in the room was in a modicum of order, but the table’s disarray had the feel of having been ransacked. I hadn’t seen any indication of that anywhere else in the palace despite its being all but abandoned. Not that there was anything I could do about it even if I wanted to. For all I knew it had been like that since his exile. Still, I made a mental note of it.

A draft of fresh air flowed over me, and Safar bellowed from above. I headed up the stairs and found him outside an open door that led to the top of the tower. He bared his teeth at me and bounded to the wall, bellowing again. I closed the door and followed, taking in the sights.

The tower rose above the palace roofline at the end of the west wing. To the west, wooded hills rolled, spiked with random fingers of stone, and mountains hunched on the horizon. To the east lay the courtyard with the columns, the other wing with its melted tower, and beyond that… holy fucking shit.

My steps slowed, and all sense of déjà vu vanished. Elinor had never seen this before, and I’d only had a partial view of it from the balcony on the first day with Mzatal.

In the distance, a crater the size of a small city dominated the utterly barren terrain to the northeast. From it, a great rift sliced across fractured stone, losing itself in a jumble of too-sharp, angular mountains. Gouts of arcane flame leapt and fell from the rift in an eerie dance of chaotic color. Blackened hills devoid of vegetation undulated southward in a widening swath as far as I could see. I had the sneaking suspicion that the odd rock formations in the forest to the west were shards from the disastrous event in the east.

I reached the parapet and spread my hands on the pitted stone. “It looks like a bomb went off,” I breathed.

“The cataclysm,” Safar said as he hopped onto the wall and crouched. “Very bad. Much destruction.”

I struggled to comprehend the forces that could have wrought such devastation. And I…Elinor did this? How is that even possible? “Is it like this all over the planet?”

“It is most evident near the domain of the Lords, where the ancient valves shattered,” he said, “though it is everywhere. The fire rain here was the worst.” His wings drooped. “The primeval forest is gone. These woods are young, reestablished only a century ago.” He tapped the mottled and pitted stone of the battlement. “Traces yet of the burning.”

Nausea roiled my stomach as I ran my fingers over the rough surface. “What about the groves? Were they destroyed as well?” A weird pang gripped me at the thought.

“Dahn. The groves retreated.”

“Retreated?” I asked, frowning.

“Retreated into the soil,” he clarified. “All survived intact save one that was lost to a chasm, though none could be used for near a hundred years.” He huffed. “And the one here closer to a hundred and fifty.” Safar gestured toward the crater with a claw. “That was the first valve to go. The rest followed within a day. That was a very bad day.”

“Gestamar said that the ways were closed and the humans all died.” I looked up into his face. “How many?”

He gazed out over the blasted landscape. “There were near six hundred here with the lords. Most who did not die from cataclysmic events died within a year. A few survived almost two.” He shook his large head. “With the ways closed so completely, the humans could not balance the potency within themselves and burned out.”

“Wouldn’t they go back to Earth? Make it through the void?”

Safar grunted and shook his head. “ Dahn . No. With the ways closed, there was no passage.”

I gripped the stone hard. I knew damn well why Mzatal had suggested I come up here—so that I could feel exactly how I was feeling now. But why ? What purpose did it serve in his game? I hurriedly wiped away my tears. “How were the ways opened up again?”

The reyza turned on the wall and resettled into a crouch facing me. “Szerain and some of the demahnk , the Elder syraza, worked for over two hundred years to correct the inter-dimensional ruptures and arcane distortions enough to reestablish a valve.” His eyes slid to mine. “In one nine zero eight on your calendar, in the area you call Siberia.”