Steven Montano: Black Scars

For a brief instance, they are back at the ship. They see Lucan, and he kneels before them. All of his strength is gone. His life is ending. He raises his head and looks at them as they walk towards him in the still and silent air. He smiles.

I knew you'd come, he says.

Their spirits released their anger in a charnel blast. The air ignited into a roar of arctic fire, and it rent the crystal door apart. Chunks of ice melted into clouds of steam.

A tunnel of black ice waited beyond the smoldering remains of the door. The air smelled glacial. The smoke of ages past curled off the floor of the ink-dark passage.

Without a word, the three of them stepped inside.

They entered a world of glass. The tunnel was sloped and uneven, like it had melted. Black's arcane torch reflected semi-translucent walls filled with stony debris. The air was cold but dry, and exceedingly dark. It was as if something slowly sucked away at the light.

They moved as quickly as they could across difficult ground. Cross drew his HK45 and held his spirit coiled around his gauntleted left hand. Sweat ran into his eyes in spite of the cold. Every shuffle of their boots in that frozen tunnel sent violent echoes through the air. Ekko moved in the middle with no weapons except for her claws, and Black brought up the rear with an HK94 she'd received from Daye.

The three of them looked like they were close to death, all covered in ash and blood and soot.

The place was a labyrinth. After a steep descent, the tunnel came to a multiple junction that looked like the center of a galaxy. Icy corridors trailed off in multiple directions. Black's torch only illuminated to a radius of a few feet, so both she and Cross cast out their spirits and surveyed the area. The spirit’s wraith-like forms raced down smooth frozen passages, and they pushed back and forth against the walls like fish darting down a river as they searched for any presences.

They found something. The three hunters quickly caught up.

Bones were entombed in the clear ice walls, frozen in grisly dance. Skulls, some of them sideways or upside down, grinned at the three of them from the other side of the ice. Many of those bones clearly weren't human.

The corridor came to an abrupt end at the side of a steep underground canyon that ran for as far as they could see in either direction. The walls in the area were dark and jagged rock covered with twisted white roots that protruded from the stone like broken finger bones.

There was no apparent bottom to the trench: it was a deep cleft of impenetrable shadow. The tunnel continued on into a crack of darkness on the far side of the thirty-foot wide gorge.

Dank and surprisingly warm wind wound its way up from the subterranean canyon. It smelled of campfires and soot.

The floor around the canyon was littered with bodies. They were soldiers, from the look of it, well armed with automatic weapons and blades, and they were armored in hybridized versions of Southern Claw and Ebon Cities leather and chain armor. Two Gorgoloth and a Doj giant had been torn apart by what had appeared to have been a storm of razors. Their faces and torsos had been shredded. Smoke rose from their corpses as if they'd been burned. Two more bodies — a human and a Vuul — had been frozen half-in and half-out of the ice walls. The Vuul’s torso and face were bloody and cracked where he’d been trapped in the glasslike surface. The human had fallen into the wall backwards before it froze, and while his torso was entombed on the other side, his twitching legs still jutted out into open air.

The tang of power hung in the area like a powder burn. Cross sensed something primal and angry, very much like Lucan’s energies. He stepped forward carefully, his body tense.

Something didn’t feel right. Another power was held ready nearby, and it was poised to strike. Cross looked back at Black and Ekko, and saw that they felt it, too, whatever it was.

Cross looked at the bodies again, more carefully this time, and he ran through the catalog in his mind of the Black Circle members he’d seen pictures of back in Thornn. His mind collated data like a machine: his arcane studies had always come easy to him, and once he committed something to memory it never left.

The Gorgoloth were probably just compelled or hired muscle. The Doj he recognized as Ravus, and the Vuul was Synder. The human was a weapons dealer named Marus.

None of them was Jennar.

Just as he made that realization, Ekko sprang up and launched herself at a shadow. Her target was a fold in the air, an empty space that Cross had looked straight at and disregarded.

That was the spot where Jennar used the magic of his Crujian nightlance to mask his presence.

Jennar came into view the moment before Ekko reached him. Her claws extended like razor fans. Jennar was tall and thin, lean but muscled. He was dressed in black leather armor. His blonde hair was pushed back and his face was wrapped in black cloth, which left the scarred skin above his nose exposed. His brown eyes narrowed in hate.

He held the nightlance ready. It was an imposing two-handed weapon. A layer of cold blue flames rippled up and down a razor-sharp ebon blade forged from meteor stone. A second, shorter blade made from red diamond extended down from the base of the hilt. The entire weapon radiated pulsing black power, shadow energies that made the air around Jennar tainted and thick.

Ekko sailed beneath Jennar's wide swing and swept up at him with her sizable claws, but he was nimble, and he jumped backwards and out of the way.

Cross raised his gun and fired, but Jennar moved with inhuman quickness, and he spun and rolled the nightlance with the speed of a propeller. Bullets cracked and flew to the ground.

Black fired at him with the HK94. Dark fire leapt out of the arcane blade and incinerated the bullets, almost in slow motion.

Cross cast his spirit into a wide arc of burning white light that circled around the small canyon and then rushed back in like a frost comet. Black's spirit roared straight forward in a spear of ice. Ekko gathered herself, and leapt at Jennar.

He was everywhere, impossibly. Years of training and unnatural thaumaturgic bio-engineering, coupled with that dread Cruj weapon, made Jennar a demon in human skin. Twenty-nine Southern Claw officer's deaths were credited to his name. He'd never been defeated or captured.

Jennar moved in a blur. He spun round and sliced Cross' pale comet in two. White sparks fell to the ground as he finished the turn and met Black's spear, which he shattered into glittering onyx shards.

Ekko's claws sank into Jennar’s shoulders. He yelled in pain and rage as he sank his blade deep into Ekko's stomach. The flaming sword extinguished as it pierced her flesh, and Jennar kept pushing until he’d buried the sword up to the hilt. Purplish dark blood fountained from the wound and ran over his gloved hands.

Cross froze, and Black screamed. Ekko hung limp for a moment, but then she threw her weight forward and into her claws. Seven-inch steel fingers tore through the meat of Jennar's chest.

The momentum of Ekko's attack carried both she and Jennar over the edge and into the canyon. Ice and rubble trailed behind them as they tumbled down the slope, and out of view.

Mere seconds had passed. Before Cross or Black had even reached the edge, Ekko and Jennar were gone.

“ NO!!!”

He sees Cristena.

He sees Graves and Dillon and Stone and Ramsey.

He sees Snow, burning.

“ She's alive,” Black said. Cross turned round to object, but she was right. He sensed her there, a shard of the light that the three of them shared. She was faint, weak, and even less alive than she’d been before the battle had begun, but she was undeniably there.