Steven Montano: Blood Skies

“ So…” Cross was on the brink of passing out. He felt a hand on his shoulder, soft and warm. “Why…why am I…?”

“ Alive?” Red frowned. “Well, just as the obelisk needed a sacrifice to become, it requires a sacrifice to be undone.” Cross looked up at her. It took nearly all of his strength. “We had a candidate picked out,” Red said playfully. “Things have changed, however.”

Snow stood over him. Her once beautiful face was bloodied and bruised. Deep cuts lined her pale features. Her eyes looked hollow and sunken, and innumerable wounds had been inflicted on her forearms and her chest. She bore ritual scarifications, fetishes, and brandings. She’d been tortured and marked.

“ I’ve changed,” Snow smiled. “Red was going to make me the sacrifice, but now it’s going to be you, Eric: a warlock cut off from his own magic. You’re just what we need. That’s why Red stole your spirit. You’d already lost her once on your own…back in the crypt…”

“ Snow…” he stammered.

“ So your spirit was still vulnerable,” Snow went on. “It was easy for Red to take her from you again.” Snow leaned close. “Margrave has secrets, Eric,” she whispered. “She knows how to do things that you and I will never be able to do. And now…” Snow stood up and smiled at Red, a cold and distant smile. “She’s made you into the perfect sacrifice.”

Snow had become something different. It was as if someone had stolen her skin and now wore it.

“ Snow,” Cross stammered. “Listen to yourself…”

She glared at him. There was nothing but darkness behind her familiar eyes. Cross felt his heart freeze.

They broke her, he realized with horror. She’s one of them, and she’s not coming back.

Cross could barely hold on. Tears welled up in his eyes. Images of Snow, young and bright and warm and alive with love, all flashed through his mind. His baby sister was gone.

“ I came here for you, Snow,” he sobbed. “Please…”

It was the last he thing he managed to say before everything went black.

Cross drifts over cyan seas. He passes through clouds of steam and drifts on crystal winds.

He stands in the glade, and he senses her on the other side of an iron fog. She screams soundlessly. He reaches for her, desperate, but she is pulled into the sky by unseen hands, straight towards the melting silver sun.

I’m sorry, he says, but she can’t hear him. She is well and truly gone, and Cross collapses in the waters, left alone to bear the weight of his failure. It’s over.

Cross woke to the metal screams of a train.

It was a Necronaught, an undead locomotive, a massive and ugly beast of a machine. It soared down an ethereal track, a rail that existed in a space between the worlds of the living and the dead. The train appeared to float above the ground and the dead rivers, as if it traveled through the air. It hovered just out of synch with everything else.

The vehicle was a horror to behold, a monstrosity of black iron. The behemoth was all spikes and bones and razor wire, gun turrets and massive wheels greased with human remains, growling engines that sounded of screams and smoke that colored the sky with its hexed black fumes. The train was twenty cars long, and each car was twenty feet tall and littered with impaled bodies. The Necronaught’s whistle cut through the air like a draconic war cry.

Cross stood waiting, a prisoner. His hands were bound in front of him with metal shackles that cut deep into the wrists of his gauntleted hands. He was weary and sick, terrified, resigned and withdrawn.

A pair of black clad undead attended him. Their claws were the size of knives and their lean ebon bodies were encased in leather and steel armor that left their elongated heads exposed. They had wide fanged mouths and oversized white eyes.

War wights.

They waited with Cross on the train platform. More war wights stood near the obelisk, which floated just inches above the ground, lifted by Red’s magic so that it could easily be pushed.

The Old One, Red and Snow were all there. The station was dilapidated and ancient. The platform was made of rotted wood that had been pitted by acid stains and termite attacks, and the main building listed sharply to one side, ready to collapse.

Cross breathed slowly. He had to shut out the pain of losing Snow, the pain of his own futility. He tried to calm himself.

I was wrong. This isn’t over yet.

Cold red dust blew across the ground. They were no longer on the island, Cross realized, but south of the necropolis, at what appeared to be the remains of a shattered frontier town overtaken with rust. The train tracks before them were ages old and had fallen to pieces, and the whole area had been consumed by weeds and red-white ash. The sky was the color of undercooked meat.

The train drew closer. It churned black smoke into the sky. Dead steam blasted from the engine. Cross watched as the foreword crenellation pushed dust and bone out of its path, stirring up a maelstrom of debris. The massive wheels cut like saw blades through the ground. The Necronaught ignored the physical tracks there at the station, and created its own. The air turned heavy as the train groaned to a halt in front of the platform. The world bubbled and swelled, and Cross was pushed back by an unseen telekinetic force.

The Necronaught was even more hideous when viewed up close. Its black iron skin leaked crimson fluids that steamed and stained the ground. The windows had been charred black by some forgotten explosion. Deep white markings, like war paint, had been cast on the exterior of the tank-like shell of the main car. War wights manned gun turrets at the fore and aft of the second and third cars: cylinder guns, nail launchers, ice cannons. The smell of acid stains and burning tar hung so thick in the air Cross nearly choked on it. The train came to a halt with a grinding snap. A final banshee scream wailed from within the unearthly engine.

The war wights loaded the obelisk onto the train, carefully guiding it onto a large car. Cross was forcefully seized by his bound arms and hauled towards another car that was closer to the engine. Great iron doors slid open with a bone-jangling groan. The interior of the car was outfitted with a wrought iron cage and a collection of twisted blades, razor chairs, chain straps and needle harnesses, all of which had been hung with disturbing precision on a weapons rack on the far wall. Cross was taken inside — he offered little resistance — where another pair of war wights waited, commanded by a thin lich with short-cropped, almost monkish hair. The lich wore fine silver and grey clothing.

“ Happy day,” the lich grinned. “I’m Jebedar Krannor. Your host.”

“ Great to be here,” Cross smiled. “You look pretty good for a lich.”

“ I take care of myself,” Krannor laughed. Cross thought it sounded almost like a giggle.

“ A foppish lich? That’s new.”

Krannor smiled, and then dealt Cross a backhanded blow that sliced open his face. Blood ran out of the painful cluster of sharp cuts, and Cross recoiled at the rotten smell of the lich’s hand. The war wight’s bone-chilling grip tightened on Cross’ arms and forced him into the cage. The door closed behind him with a redolent slam.

The train surged to life, and the walls shuddered. Cross heard dismal screams through the ducts in the train. He looked around. The screams issued from massive pipes that ran along the ceiling of the car, leading, it seemed, to the adjacent cars on either side.

Access tubes, Cross guessed, placed so incorporeal undead could pass through the otherwise magically shielded outer walls of the cars, which looked nigh impenetrable.