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Vanitas stopped precisely as he made contact with my palm, and I clenched my fingers to grasp him by the hilt. The star-metal was rough, cold, and ancient within my hand. I fell to one knee, stabbing Vanitas into the earth.
I closed the circle.
The world around me exploded in blood
, wisps and whorls of crimson gushing from the circle that I had drawn with the traces of my own vitality. The red transformed quickly into black, blood turning into shadow, cascading wetly across the top of the circle to create a dome of midnight. I heard my friends shouting in alarm as my ritual came to completion. As the final threads and tendrils of shadow closed a gap somewhere in the roof of the sphere, I heard Herald call my name.
The White Mother stopped screaming, and even Other Dustin rose to his feet, glancing about in alarm. In the gloom I felt comfort, even with the cold of the Dark Room’s shuddering, hungering mists. This chill penetrated to the bone, but it was familiar enough to think of as home. I’d done it. By giving enough of my blood, by casting a circle, I had seduced the Dark Room back to me. And with that surge of renewed power, I had brought both Other Dustin and the White Mother to the very source of my dark magic.
In the darkness I could see the White Mother’s black eyes grow wet with something like fear. She glared around her, calling out in a sibilant, alien tongue as she pushed shrike after shrike out of her tainted womb, summoning more of her offspring. Glimmering pinpoints of white light appeared in the air above Other Dustin’s head. He’d reengaged the Crown of Stars, to call on its power again. But he couldn’t wrest control of the Dark Room from me, not anymore.
Here, within the Dark Room, I was home. And here, within the Dark Room, I was the master.
Voicelessly I called for the starving denizens of the Dark Room to clamber out of their black corners, to creep out of cyclopean corridors long forgotten within that shadowy chamber’s huge, twisting mazes, out of its tenebrous tunnels. And so they came, rushing, reaching out with spiraling talons, with jaws and fangs shaped out of smoke, these apparitions that had served me for so long.
Vanitas stayed silent as he witnessed the coming rush of destruction. Other Dustin whimpered. The White Mother screamed, and screamed, yet the shadows would not obey her.
But I knew that they would obey me. I gave them the simplest suggestion, hardly even a command.
“Feed.”
The White Mother screamed ever louder, the piercing, shrill howls of the shrikes blending with her suffering, an unholy dirge. And Other Dustin sobbed, the light of the Crown flickering as it went dead, the flames he was so desperately summoning between his fingers guttering out as the shadows came to claim the largest bounty of blood I had ever delivered to them.
Still on my knees, my hands both wrapped around Vanitas’s hilt, I watched through the darkness as the shadows slashed and fed on the White Mother’s yowling, quivering bulk, as they tore the shrikes apart. I couldn’t even imagine what they were doing to the homunculus. Vanitas said nothing, but I could taste his emotions in the back of my mind. It was a strange, dizzying mix of many things: of fear, of satisfaction, and pride.
The screaming finally stopped. I rose to my feet, one of my soles still bloody, and I grasped Vanitas loosely in the fingers of my right hand. For once he didn’t complain about being held. He knew the circumstances were extraordinary. This wasn’t a fight, after all, but an act familiar to him as one of the Eldest’s star-metal instruments. This was ceremonial magic, a true ritual, an offering to the Dark Room itself. It was a sacrifice.
My feet met with cold wetness as I approached what was left of Yelzebereth. The black sludge beneath me was a mix of her own alien blood and the remains of her shrike children. Huddled among the viscera, cradling the severed head of his beloved White Mother, was the homunculus.
I severed the connection to the Dark Room, and slowly the features of the forest beyond Valero took shape around us. What I’d removed from our reality the Dark Room returned in its defeated, destroyed form, and everything it had consumed – the shrikes, the blood, the desiccated husk that was once the White Mother – reappeared in the forest clearing. From around us I heard gasps. Someone very loudly vomited.
Vanitas hovered away from me as I released him, and with bare feet and bare chest both smeared and caked with my own blood I approached the homunculus. I knelt, and I took his shuddering, weeping body in my arms.
“Let go,” I said. “She’s gone now.”
With black eyes, weeping warm, wet tears that could have been almost human, Other Dustin released Yelzebereth’s head, letting it fall among the torn remains of her ruined carcass. It was strange, how much the homunculus was mourning. It made me think of my own mother, of how her murder at Thea’s hands was the very catalyst that had brought me to this exact place in my life.
“Nothing,” Other Dustin murmured. “I have nothing. The White Mother is gone.”
I wondered, for a moment, if he meant Thea, if he was confusing one mother for the other. “Do you think that the White Mother created you? Was it this creature, or was it the woman who made you in the graveyard?”
Other Dustin wept, and choked, grimacing. I looked down, only then noticing the severity of his injuries. The Dark Room had gone lightly on him, but that really wasn’t saying much. He was going to bleed to death soon enough.
“Doesn’t matter,” the homunculus sobbed. “Nothing left. You were always the lucky one. Always the best.”
I shushed him, still not understanding why any part of me was giving him pity. “Not the best,” I whispered. “I was only the first.” I stroked his hair, my palm meeting with matted blood, with sweat gone cold.
“You should have worn the Crown,” the homunculus said. “You deserve the power. Because they will come. Our fathers and mothers. The Old Ones. And they will keep coming.”
“I know they will,” I said. “And I’ll be here to stop them.”
Other Dustin smiled weakly, his skin seeming to go paler with each breath. “If you can.” His lashes fluttered as he searched the sky for something I couldn’t see. His eyes were like the smoothest onyx, like black mirrors. I could see the stars in them. “What now, brother? Nothing left for me.”
“Now, you can rest,” I said. “You’ll never have to fight again.”
The homunculus blinked, fresh tears running down his cheeks, washing through streaks of drying blood. “Was I good? Was mother proud of me?”
I held him tight, close to my chest.
