Sixty-Three
Winter
The first step through Horrace's portal felt like diving into ice water made of broken glass.
Reality shattered around us, reforming into something fundamentally wrong. My stomach lurched as we tumbled through the dimensional tear, the sensation of falling upward while moving sideways making my inner ear scream in protest. Around me, I heard the muffled curses and gasps of nearly a hundred agents experiencing their first interdimensional travel.
Then we hit solid ground with bone-jarring force.
I landed hard on my hands and knees, black ash billowing up around me like dust. The taste of copper and ozone filled my mouth as I pushed myself upright, taking my first look at the Harbingers' domain.
The sky above was wrong. No stars, just shattered moons frozen mid-fall in the atmosphere, their broken pieces hanging like crystalline daggers waiting to drop. Floating ruins driftedoverhead, fragments of temples and cities from worlds the Harbingers had destroyed.
The ground beneath my feet was cracked obsidian, veined with rivers of blue light that pulsed like trapped prophecy energy. In the distance, the skeletal remains of what might once have been a beautiful city stretched across the horizon, its spires twisted into impossible angles that hurt to look at directly.
Reality behaved incorrectly here. I watched my shadow move a heartbeat before I did, heard echoes of my voice reach my ears before I spoke. A grove of dead trees bled silver sap that moved upward instead of down, while distant screams looped endlessly in the toxic air.
"Welcome to Hell's vacation home," Zane's voice came from somewhere to my left, strained but trying for amusement.
I turned to find him pushing himself up from the ash, his usual grace hampered by the disorienting effects of the realm. Blood trickled from his nose, his mismatched eyes watering from the dimensional transition.
Around us, Bureau agents were picking themselves up with various degrees of success. The werewolves seemed least affected, their supernatural constitutions adapting quickly. The witches were already casting protective wards, their magic crackling against the oppressive atmosphere. Several of the human agents looked green around the gills, fighting the interdimensional nausea.
Rook materialized beside me, his amber eyes scanning our surroundings with predatory intensity. "This place stinks of corruption. Old pain. Stolen power."
Milo appeared next, clutching Jeffrey protectively to his chest while his other skeletons formed a protective circle around him. "The necromantic energy here is insane," his voice held equal parts fascination and horror. "Death and unlife mixedtogether wrong. It's like someone took the concept of endings and broke it."
Understatement of the year, Milo.
Fenric was the last to reach us, his tablet somehow miraculously intact despite the rough landing. His usually perfect appearance was disheveled, ash coating his silver hair, but his eyes held determined focus.
"Casualty report," he called out, his magically amplified voice carrying across the assembled agents. "Sound off by teams!"
The responses came back quickly. A few minor injuries from the landing, some disorientation, but everyone had made it through. Horrace stood magnificent beside the slowly closing portal, his transformed bulk reassuring despite the alien landscape around us.
That's when I noticed where we'd landed.
Massive obsidian arches stretched above us, their surfaces carved with symbols that seemed to writhe when I wasn't looking directly at them. Broken statues lined what had once been a grand pathway, ancient Oracles and forgotten Gods decapitated and clawed apart, their stone faces weeping glowing tears that pooled in cracks at their bases.
The entrance to the Harbingers' stronghold.
"It's beautiful," I whispered, and immediately wanted to take the words back. Because it was beautiful, in the way that disasters and endings could be beautiful. Terrible and magnificent and utterly wrong.
The silence stretched for exactly seven heartbeats. I counted them, feeling the rhythm of this broken realm pulse against the Oracle's mark on my forehead.
Then bells began to ring in the distance.
Not celebratory bells or warning bells. These sounded like funeral dirges played by broken instruments, their tones discordant and mournful. The sound echoed off the twistedarchitecture, multiplying and distorting until it became a symphony of despair.
"Here we go," Rook growled, his claws extending as his wolf senses detected movement in the shadows around us.
They came from everywhere at once.
Cultists emerged from cracks in the ground, dropped from the floating ruins overhead, materialized from behind the broken statues. But these weren't the relatively normal fanatics we'd faced before. These were something far worse.
Prophecy symbols had been carved directly into their skin, the wounds never healing, constantly weeping blood that glowed with stolen divinity. Their eyes had been burned out and replaced with swirling galaxies of madness. Their mouths were stitched partially shut with silver thread, but they spoke anyway, voices overlapping in harmonies that made my teeth ache.
"The Chalice comes," they chanted in unison, their words distorting reality around them. "The vessel arrives. The choice approaches."
