Steven Montano: Black Scars

And there was something else. Something that hadn't been there before…or if it had, it had chosen to keep itself concealed until that very moment.

It was a thousand void souls trapped in a mountain of shadowy flesh, a darkness so utter and deep that the entire world seemed drawn towards its dismal core.

The Sleeper approached.

“ Cross…” Black said. Her eyes were huge with fright. Cross imagined he must have looked the same.

“ I know.”

It had not yet reached Karamanganji, but it was close. Crylos and his men would have sight of it at any moment.

“ I'll find her,” Black said. “You go. Go while we’re all still alive.”

“ But it has to be all three of us…”

“ It will be,” Black said. “What we share is more than physical. We proved that back in Krul.”

Cross thought about it for a moment, and nodded.

She was right. She had to be.

He looked at the dark tunnel on the far side of the subterranean canyon. A presence pulled at his mind. Black looked at the tunnel as well, and nodded.

Black took Cross into her arms. They pushed out, using Danica’s spirit to hold them aloft as they went. Cross held on tight. Their flushed faces touched as they drifted from one end of the void to the other, free-floating over the shadowy deeps. They moved weightless through a sea of frigid wind.

Cross grabbed the icy stone on the far side, and pulled himself away from Black. His spirit wrapped round him, glazed him with heat. Danica floated back over the rift and started her descent to go and find Ekko.

Cross’ heart hammered. Black looked at him as she sank, and for the first time since they’d met, her smile seemed genuine.

“ I’ll see you soon,” she said.

“ You’d better.”

Black held her arms aloft. She glowed hot and bright with the fires of her spirit, and she continued to glow as she drifted down into darkness.

Cross turned and looked at the cleft in the canyon wall. The space was narrow. Ebon steam leaked from the crack in slow and rhythmic bursts. The cold that issued out of that cleft was absolute, but Cross knew that his spirit’s heat and the protection afforded him by Lucan’s ancient soul would keep him safe. Any normal human would die the moment they stepped through.

His thoughts went back to the arena.

He sees himself step through the doors and into a room full of vampires who wait to watch him kill. He finds the coldness inside of himself, the dark and hardened shell around his heart that has carried him through uncounted nights of slaughter.

Kill or be killed.

Just like now.

There was no turning back. There never had been.

Without another thought, Cross stepped into the fissure, where he passed into the heart of night.

Cross passed through curtains of dust and ash. He felt his consciousness as it was squeezed and compressed. Geothermic pressure closed in on him from all sides. His soul expanded like air, and pushed out through a crack in a dome of stars.

He saw riders in a dark vessel on a dark sea, and they sailed beneath a vast night sky. Fumes from a distant age turned to wraith-like unguent. He saw black moons and red tides. Cities of crumbling shale waited on the shore.

Cross stepped onto an ashen plain. Thick iron clouds pregnant with dark rain clung to the sky. The earth was dry and cracked.

Every step that he took kicked up gouts of bone dust. Dead white trees hung weeping in the distance like lost children.

There was no mark of his passage, no doorway by which he came, or through which he could return. He had appeared at the middle, in the heart of a pale nowhere. Ebon mists, the precursor to an approaching black storm, surrounded the plains, which Cross realized were finite. The ground ended at those mists. He stood on a wide island of floating stone.

The air was chill and dead. There was no wind or life in that place, whatever and wherever that place was. A deep peel of thunder shook the sky to its very edge.

Cross checked himself. Nothing had changed, save for the fact that he now carried a weapon that he hadn't before: a shimmering white sword. Its thin blade was almost invisible when he turned it, and when held flat it was semi-translucent and transformative. He held his hand on the other side of the blade and looked at it through the metal, and his hand wasn't just gauntleted when viewed that way, it was armored in heavy white plate, like he was a knight from a story. Everything came to life when viewed through the blade: the plains were vibrant with life instead of dead and ruined, and the sky was cerulean instead of black.

The sword was light and easy to yield. It was nothing like a machete or the lighter bone blade he'd been armed with in Krul, and yet Cross instinctively felt that he knew how to use the sword, as if he'd spent a lifetime training with it. The weapon was long and unusually balanced, and the grip was much longer than what he was used to, carved from bone and wrapped in linen so that the entire weapon took on a ghostly hue.

Something was intimately familiar about the sword. It was not a sword, not truly, but he couldn't determine what it really was.

He saw glimpses of another life. He saw an encampment in the mountains; banners and victory parades in an unknown country; pain and loss that belonged to someone else, but that stung like they were his own. He felt pain from past wounds that weren’t his.

What is this place?

“ It is called The Fade,” a woman said.

Until that point, Cross had thought he was alone.

She stood at the center of the plain, at once right next to him and yet miles distant. Her armor and the dress she wore over it were as white as the blade was. Her pale flesh was almost unnaturally so, and her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, with two braids bound in black metal clasps. Her penetrating eyes were snow white and almost blank, and she radiated an immense level of power, power that Cross was sure he would have sensed even without his spirit.

It was the same massive and primordial magic that Lucan had possessed, that he had gifted to the three mages.

The same power as that in the sword.

“ Avenger,” she said. She smiled and nodded at the blade. “It's called 'Avenger'.”

“ Who are you?”

“ I am the Woman in the Ice,” she replied.

“ That's not an answer,” Cross said. “I've seen your likeness before.”

“ True,” she nodded. “You serve my sister. The White Mother and I are siblings, after a fashion. We are avatars of the same power. As is that blade that you hold in your hands.”

Something growled through the sky.

“ The power that Lucan infused us with,” he said. Cross was suddenly aware of a wind that hadn’t been there before. It stank of fear, hopelessness and death. “ That power is in this sword now, isn't it?”

“ It IS the sword,” she corrected. “Here, in this place between the worlds, all power takes on a physical manifestation.”

The ground rumbled, and the sky darkened. Thick onyx clouds spread like spilled black milk.

“ What is that thing? The Dra'aalthakmar?”

“ You know its name.”

“ But that doesn't mean that I know what it is.”

Cross felt something loom over him. That presence hovered like a dark star.

“ It was her prisoner. She held it captive for eons. It is a great evil. You call that evil The Black.” As if in response to hearing its name, the sky trembled again. Bits of flaming rock fell like charnel rain. “It cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered, and weakened. That is what you must do.”

“ Wait a second,” Cross said. The rising wind intensified. He had to shout to be heard. “Why me?! I came here to find you…YOU'RE the one who's supposed to do this.”