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“Come,” I whispered. “Come to me.”
The opening of the backpack fluttered as the four remaining swords heeded my call. I heard gasps from around me as the fifth blade that Mason claimed left my grasp, floating with the others in a slow orbit around my body. I looked from my friends to the circle of witches. My past, and my future. I found myself frozen in the present. It felt as though I had unfinished business.
I couldn’t just leave it at that. I knew it was selfish, but walking away wasn’t a proper goodbye. I ordered the swords to stay at my side, so they wouldn’t be in the way when I walked up to Herald, when I grabbed him by the collar, when I kissed him full on the mouth. When I pulled away, I thought I could taste the salt of fresh tears.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me,” I whispered. “For everything that you are.”
He grabbed the side of my face, a tear slipping past the emotional neutral ground that his glasses offered him. “I couldn’t stop you if I wanted to. Go get ’em. Go save the world.”
I nodded, swallowing thickly.
Herald staggered away, his hand closing into a fist around thin air. “I’ll wait for you.”
My heart shattered.
But it wouldn’t be the first time, nor the last time that hearts and minds and bodies would be broken by the Eldest. This was the little sacrifice I had to make, the small offering I had to give in exchange for the world’s safety. Everyone – Hecate, Thea, Carver – always did say that the circumstances of my first death and my succeeding bond with the Dark Room were only incidental, an unhappy accident. I still don’t know if I believe in fate, but I did believe in doing the right thing.
And that night, in that moment, murdering Agatha Black was the right thing to do.
“Every ritual demands a sacrifice,” Carver said. He lifted his hands towards the circle of witches. “In blood and in power. Go forth, Dustin. Pay your price. Claim your prize.”
I stared at the man who had been my mentor and father since the day I met him, and I thought of my own father, and how I lied to him through my teeth. It was better for him not to know. I scanned the faces of my friends, of the dozens of mages gathered for the battle. I wondered how many of them had any idea of what was about to happen.
Deep breath, Dustin, I told myself. I raised my hand, gesturing towards the witches, surprised to find my feet moving on their own, walking in a slow, steady procession for the heart of the ritual circle. It was instinctive, how the five blades followed my every beck and call. If I angled my hand one way, all five would slant similarly. If I moved my arm through the air, then all of them would fly in the same direction. It would be so easy to cut with all five of them at once. So easy to kill.
I reached out to Vanitas as I walked, but he didn’t answer. For a moment I considered that he had his own reasons for giving me the silent treatment, until I realized that his presence, what I normally felt in the back of my mind when we spoke, was dulled, missing. His personality was suppressed, our psychic bond possibly severed due to the link with the four other blades. Perhaps his power was in use in that sense, and he was keeping his silence even as he was helping me maintain my connection with the others.
They flew in a slow orbit around me as I moved, flashes of verdigris-green, white, scarlet, black, and gold. Vanitas, Durandal, Laevateinn, Duskfang, and the unnamed celestial sword spun about me, their tips pointed outwards, their hilts rotating around my body on an invisible axis. Each blade was the spoke of a sharp, unearthly wheel, and each hungered for Agatha Black’s blood.
Shouts of warning rang out from the army of mages behind me, but my feet carried me forward. The absence of fear in my chest surprised me. In fact, it was an absence of everything but a bizarre and abiding thirst for carnage. Without words, without voices, the swords told me their own stories, sang songs of their own conquests, showed me pictures and glyphs of the moments that had led them, that had led us to this very moment.
The haze of the murmuring blades vanished, and my mind was whole once more. Vision and senses came rushing back, and I realized where I stood: right in the middle of the circle of witches. I looked down at my clothes, seeing the thighs and knees of my jeans ragged and torn from spears Agatha had thrown, and finding scratches and drips of blood on my skin in the openings. Pieces of my shirt and my jacket were ruined, singed by Agatha’s fire. That jacket was special. It was from Herald, and it was one of the last things that bonded me to my humanity.
I lifted my hands, deaf to the shouts of my friends and the mages of the Lorica, of the Hooded Council, of an ungrateful earth. The five blades flew around me in a circle, slowly, at first, then gradually picking up in speed. Like a whirling dervish they danced, faster and faster, carving a larger ring, ever expanding as they reached hungry teeth and tongues for Agatha Black’s flesh.
This would be her nightmare. This was my Apotheosis.
My command was only a whisper. “Slaughter.” I parted my hands, and like a flower of knives, a thing of razors and petals, the five swords blossomed into a ring of death.
The mages, my allies, screamed at the sight of the massacre, but Agatha Black screamed harder. The five swords spun faster and faster, a circular buzzsaw meant to cut and kill and flay. I stood at the heart of the ritual circle, every spray of blood against my skin a blessing, every drop of the witch’s life force another small offering for the altar that was my mortal body. Still the swords weaved through their fatal motions, a ballet of blood, a danse macabre.
I lifted my head to the sky as I opened my eyes. The great eye and the portal it was peering through, they were gone, their terrible yellow and scarlet light no longer tainting the universe. All that remained were stars. I fell to my knees, laughing.
On and on the five swords danced, whirling eve
n when there was nothing left to cut, to consume. Every blade had been forged of a different metal, blessed or tainted in the fires of a different dimension, but each was now equal, slathered in the same red blood. The swords spun slower and slower, their hilts rotating methodically, as if angled and handled by five invisible swordsmen.
There they hovered in the air, still and silent, each sword pointing towards me, my body. This was the part that Hecate described with the least detail. This was the part I dreaded the most.
I spread my arms and pushed my chest forward, prepared to accept my fate. The stars murmured their curses, their accusations. I was only dust, they whispered, something that shouldn’t ever think to rise above its terrestrial station. I didn’t deserve to sing with the stars. Yet there I was, on the very brink of my ascension, of achieving the zenith of my arcane potential. My Apotheosis. I laughed again, from deep within my chest. I threw my head back, exposing my throat.
Five blades whistled as they sailed directly for my body, to cut away what was left of me, to reveal the truth of the soul that hid within so much corrupted flesh. Shrill sounds tore out of my throat, primal noises that shook the heavens, that joined with the music of the stars. Whether they were screams or peals of laughter, I may never know.
Chapter 32
Darkness. Total darkness, like I’d never known. I coughed, unsure if the thickness in my throat was blood or mucus. All this time spent with the Dark Room had honed my senses, made it so that I could see better in the dark. But here, wherever Here was? Nothing.
Was I dead? That had to be it. The Apotheosis hadn’t worked, my ascension failed. Well, I thought. At least Agatha Black was dead and gone. I turned in place, patting at my body as I did. Where there should have been wounds left by the five blades, there was nothing. Where there was blood, there was only unbroken skin. My clothes were still torn, but that was really the only evidence that I had died.
