C.E. Murphy - Truthseeker

Beyond that slash of daylight lay the rest of the world, bathed in comparative darkness and on the verge of never waking from that night. Lara knew it with a clear thunder of truth: they would defeat the nightwings here, giving all to do so, or something would tear in the fabric of her own world, and might never be mended again.

She didn’t know she spoke, only heard the words linger on the brilliant sunrise: “Changes that will break the world.”

As if she’d called them, the nightwings came to her.

They burned bright, their once-black shadows gray with distance from their own world and reflecting pale gold with morning sunlight. It made them worse somehow, made them seem more solid and more real than they had been when she’d wrestled one to the ground in the Barrow-lands.

The Barrow-lands were a place of magic, she thought, the idea unexpectedly clear in the face of demons swarming toward her. They were lands of mist and magic and insubstantiality, of illusion and impermanence. A scrying spell might open a window to another place, might permit people to speak to one another, but it lacked the physical presence of her own world’s telephones and video cameras. Those things remained, here, always ready for use, but another spell would need to be cast, another whole communications array built, for a second “call” to be placed in the Barrow-lands.

Reversed, that could mean the nightwings grew evermore material the longer they remained in her world. The short exorcism hadn’t worked on them. Maybe that failure was as much an increase in their reality as the brief exorcism being only the beginning of her world’s version of a spell.

Crystal thoughts, all of them, more standing out in her mind as sudden epiphanies than as any progression of logic. The nightwings were on her, vicious screeching bats whose claws tore her dress and, she was faintly aware, her flesh as they attacked. One hit her chest-on, driving her backward, and lightning exploded from the clear morning sky yet again, rupturing the thing that attacked her.

Sudden blazing anger ate away her fear. This was her home, and she wouldn’t surrender it to nighttime monsters from another world. Nightwings were ephemeral things in the Barrow-lands, but the idea that they could survive and breed in her world rang violently true. She swung with her crowbar, feeling satisfaction as it crunched into thin bone and cartilage. Somewhere nearby Kelly was shouting, the trooper was firing his weapon; somewhere there were screams, and she thought that all the nightwings hadn’t come for her, after all.

Lightning split around her again, crashing into the mass of demons. They fell, making a brief clear space around Lara: clear of demons, clear for thoughts, and only then, finally, did she realize where the attacks were coming from. She swung around in the little space of safety he’d made for her, voice breaking as she cried, “Dafydd, no!”

Too late: too late; much too late. Dafydd stood in a ring of crackling electricity. No, didn’t stand. Floated, as if the air itself was so ionized it had to lift him a few centimeters above the earth. He drifted in a half-circle, staff held tight in both hands, as though he drew power from it. He did: Lara was certain of it, and doubted even its power could sustain the Seelie prince for long. His hair, his fingertips, his very breath seemed alive with voltage, and as Lara watched, another burst of power erupted from him. He sagged, strength waning, and Lara ran forward even knowing there was no more chance she could reach him than the nightwings could; the Tesla cage surrounding him was too dangerous. But there were fewer of the monsters than there’d been: a few dozen now, where there had been uncountable numbers before.

It was enough, Lara whispered to herself, and willed it to be true. Dafydd had depleted their numbers enough: they could end it without his help. “Dafydd, stop! We’ll find a way to finish them! Stop!”

Song poured off her as she shouted, conviction in her voice turning the words white with power. Dafydd’s crackling electricity was puny next to her own relentless outpouring of strength; next to a determination so profound it made her courtroom demonstration seem like child’s play. She spoke the truth with the will to make it real, and her world, her own thick and slow home, whose own magic was so long-muted it barely existed any more …

… responded . Sluggishly, yes, but it responded, shifting to align itself with the command Lara laid out. Find a way to finish them . So vague, so terribly vague, but her world’s magic was so long-quiet that she felt that delicacy and fine-tuned requests would go unheeded. There was no time to cajole, not with her friends and the others losing the battle. Dafydd blazed where he hung in the air, coils of electricity still snaking toward the nightwings, but with each monster’s attack the cage that held him faltered a little. The trooper had run out of bullets and raced for his car with a swarm of nightwings after him. The paramedics, like the ranger, were down, but Kelly had a tire iron to match Lara’s crowbar. She stood within the safety of the Corolla’s open door, bashing every nightwing that came near.

Only Lara was out in the open and still standing. The nightwings were gathering; her power, blazing though it was, only needed to miss one of them and she would fall. She could feel something still changing in the world, acquiescing to her demand, but her heart’s acceleration beat a story that the world would answer too late. That was the price of old magic, of power called in a place that no longer recognized its own strength: it could only rise in its own time, and she had no time left.

She only saw it from the corner of her eye, the small gesture of Dafydd raising his head, and panic soured her stomach. She knew, she knew what he intended, because she would have done the same: would have gathered all her power to her with the same gesture he did, crossing his arms over his chest as he offered a brief, but not regretful, smile. He would burn himself out to save them, as Lara would have done in his position.

As she would have done, and in so doing, would have rendered it all meaningless.

Lara threw the crowbar at him.

Cold iron smashed into his web of lightning. Electricity crashed toward it, ionized air losing its tension. Dafydd fell, knees crumpling as he hit the earth and lost his grip on the ivory staff. The crowbar itself dropped to the ground a few feet away, not close enough to have touched him, but close enough to disrupt his power, to ensure he couldn’t use the last of what sustained him and die trying to save a scattered handful of mortals.

Relief ricocheted through Lara’s heart, then turned to dust as Dafydd ap Caerwyn collapsed into insensibility.

She barely knew she moved, and though she wanted to go to Dafydd, a different need sent her elsewhere: to the worldbreaking staff, lying alone and abandoned just out of Dafydd’s insentient reach.

Power cascaded through her as she scooped it up, turning her body rigid with pain and excitement. The staff sang , an unholy shriek of exultation: its very purpose was chaos, and it had been bound too long by an order. Released, that power could do what she needed it to: defeat the nightwings and save Dafydd. Save her world, perhaps, and the truth of that burned through her until she lifted the staff and drove it into the earth.

The world cracked, rivulets of light slicing out from Lara and bashing into the ground. She heard it more than saw it, an endless tumult of bells, as though she’d been caught in a tower as the church below tolled out a greeting to the first light of morning.

Asphalt tore beneath her, a long jagged line opening up. Music poured out, rising into the sky, and the rip followed it, splitting apart earth from heaven. It rushed toward a vanishing point, toward the ball of fire just over the horizon, like a road reaching for the roof of the world.