Нил Шустерман: Thief Of Souls

“And you intend to end it?”

The Bringer smiled cruelly. “With great pleasure.”

Suddenly the King’s form began to change. His par­ticular talent was the shifting of form. It was a formi­dable skill—something the Bringer himself could not do . . . But the Bringer had a defense against it. He had had thirty years to plan for this confrontation—and for once he would fit the name they had given him, for the murder of the King was indeed a premeditated act. He only hoped the King had become so arrogant that he could be caught off guard.

In an instant, Zeus had transformed into a white ti­ger that pounced in a single bound across the great throne room. The Bringer felt the animal’s hot breath, and then pain as its yellow teeth dug into his shoulder. He tried to reach out and devour the King’s soul, but, as he suspected, Zeus was far too powerful and strong- willed to ever be devoured. So instead, he forced an image into the King’s mind.

A peacock.

A vain, ridiculous bird. A useless creature whose colorful plumes hid its stupidity.

The thought entered the King’s mind through an un­guarded path, and instantly the magnificent tiger-king unwillingly transformed into the scrawny, flightless bird. It opened its mouth to roar, but could only squawk.

The moment the transformation was complete, the Bringer grabbed the bird-king by its long slender neck, and looked into its eyes. The eyes of the King, in the body of the peacock, no longer appeared wise. Just frightened.

“A fitting form for you, boy,” the Bringer told the King, for he still thought of him as the boy he once knew. Then the Bringer smiled broadly, and with a flick of his wrist, snapped the King’s neck.

He hurled the dying bird onto the throne, and the King reverted in midair, back into his white-haired self, before smashing down on the throne, neck broken. The light of his great soul left him as he released his last breath. Nothing remained of him but his broken body, slumping limply in the chair, his royal-blue robe now a shroud around him.

With the King dead, the Bringer focused his energy on the final deed to be done. He turned his thoughts to the center of the island, and spat forth all the energy he had collected from the devoured souls of the others, sending a shattering force to a single point beneath the island.

And something tore.

Although it could not yet be seen, the Bringer knew what he had done—he could see it in his mind’s eye. He had created a tear in the fabric of the world beneath the island—a rip he stretched wider and wider with every last ounce of his strength, until the entire erupt­ing island was poised above the hole like a stone about to fall through a sheet of cracking ice. The entire island rumbled with greater urgency, as it began to sink into the great abyss.

As the island dropped, the ocean began to spill back into the bay. The lush green lowlands were flooded first, swallowing man and beast. The many servants of The Twelve drowned as the sea washed over them.

There must be nothing left of them, thought the Bringer. No memory, no evidence. There must never be an artifact found, or a site unearthed. This place had to be cut out of the Universe forever.

With the palace collapsing around him, the Bringer dragged himself up the King’s private stairs, to the high stable. He was bloody and crushed from his battle with the King, but he knew the rift he had created be­neath the island left him little time.

He found the King’s mount in the high stable; a white, winged horse, kicking and neighing in terror. The flying horse was another one of Hephaestus’s cre­ations to amuse the King. With no other way off the island, the Bringer climbed onto the back of the Peg­asus, kicked it with his shackled feet, and the horse leapt off the ledge of the high stable, frothing at the mouth as it struggled toward the sky.

Down below, the size of the rift was clearer, and much more impressive. The island was sinking faster than the ocean could rush in to fill the void. It was as if a great sinkhole had opened in the ocean floor, and, as the entire island plunged through the hole, the Bringer caught a glimpse of the place he was sending it. Through the hole, he could see distant red sands far, far below. The hole had opened above a strange alien sky. A place of nothingness. An “unworld” that existed between the walls of worlds. This is where he had con­signed The Twelve, their servants, and their miscreations. He watched from high above as the island plummeted out of this world.

Now all that remained of where the island had been was a circular waterfall, miles wide, pouring down through the hole in the world, and into the strange sky of another. The hole quickly healed itself until the wa­ters met, becoming a whirlpool, and then the simple crashing of waves as the tear sealed itself closed. The ocean would rage for days from the cataclysm, and people on far shores would say that Poseidon was an­gry. But the truth was, Poseidon was gone, along with the King and the Queen, the Blacksmith and the Beauty, the God of War, the Goddess of Peace, and the rest of their accomplices. In spite of their vain pretensions, and their powers, they were not the gods they claimed to be. In spite of their luminous souls, they were hope­lessly human after all.

It was now that the Bringer realized his own folly—for the Pegasus, however beautiful, was a useless beast, like so many of Hephaestus’s creations. Although it had wings, its stallion’s body was too heavy to stay aloft for more than a few minutes at a time. Time enough to amuse the King, and to generate a host of overblown tales among humans, perhaps, but not enough to reach the mainland. The Pegasus flapped futilely above the raging sea, already exhausted. A few moments more and it lost the battle. The beast and the Bringer plunged from the sky into the churning ocean.

The Bringer might have found the strength to swim, had he not used everything he had left to tear the island of Thera from the world. He might have floated on ocean currents if he didn’t still have shackles on his ankles and wrists—heavy shackles that weighed him down like anchors.

The roar of the ocean became the muted churning of water as he sank beneath the waves, dropping toward the ocean floor.

The winged horse lost its battle as well, and drowned, its heavy mass sinking into the depths with him.

No survivors, thought the Bringer. Nothing left.

Perhaps there would be stories of this place, but nothing more. The legends would become twisted and confused, the tales divided and reformed age to age until not a single truth remained. The short reign of The Twelve would be remembered as curious inven­tion from an ignorant time—excised from history and dropped into the boggy depths of myth.

He had finally destroyed them, and his satisfaction was so immense, that it almost didn’t matter that he was sinking into colder, darker waters. The Bringer held his last breath of air until it was crushed from his lungs by the building pressure around him as he sank, and he felt the human body he wore begin to die. So he shed it.

Tearing free from the human host-body he had used, he struggled to create a rift in space through which he could escape back to the universe he came from . . . but such a feat would take more strength than he had left. As the body drifted away from him down into darkness, he fought a battle to hold on to life. He needed a new host—some sea creature large enough to hold his being—for he had no flesh of his own—not in an earthly sense—but survival in this world required a body to live in. It was inconvenient and impractical, just like everything else in this universe of matter.