377. Into the Black
With a shift in her intent, Liv re-aligned the infinitesimal particles of mana which made up her wings. A blush of gold spread out from the base of each wing, racing along the edges to outline each feather, then blooming inward until the entirety of both structures shone brilliant gold.
“It really isn’t so different from adamantine ice,” Liv remarked, letting the wings shake out behind her. A few motes of gold and blue mana drifted up from them, sparkling like embers that rose toward the top of the chamber. “Another thing I owe Caspian Loredan for - he’s the one who told me which rift Genevieve Arundell had gone to.”
Was it surprise, or fear that widened Ractia’s alien eyes? The goddess glanced over to the swelling orb of darkness at the center of the chamber, and Liv could imagine the thoughts running through the Lady of Blood’s mind just as if they’d been spoken out loud. How much longer before I can make a break for it and escape?
It was larger than one of those antique shields that Liv had ridden down the mountain with Emma, so many years ago – great circles of wood, banded with metal. If Liv had been exploring beneath Bald Peak, and found a passage through the rock of that size, she could have fit through it, if she’d been willing to crawl. It wouldn’t have been a choice she felt confident about, but if the only alternative was death...
Liv flicked the stormwand and sent her golden mana shield skimming through the air until it fetched up between Ractia and the growing black circle. Then, she took one deliberate step, then another, placing her body directly in the goddess’s path, with the shield at her back.
“You’d really rather fight to the death than let me flee?” Ractia exclaimed, as though she couldn’t believe it. “Step aside, and I’ll leave right now. You can take all of your little mortal friends and go home. Just let me through!”
“You really are a coward at heart, aren’t you?” Liv asked, though in truth she already knew the answer. “At every step of the way, you’ve used other people as your tools, because you couldn’t stand to put yourself in danger. Well, look around!” She couldn’t help but laugh, as she raised both arms to indicate the room. “There’s no one left but you and I. No one to do your fighting for you.”
“I’ve still forgotten more about how to use mana than you’ve ever known,” Ractia growled. Magic surged from the goddess, and Liv recognized the spell from Nightfall Peak. Limbs of black iron erupted from the Vædim’s back, forming into the support structures of her broad wings. Panes of gold mana shimmered into existence, shading toward orange or red at the edges, as if stained by blood, and Ractia launched herself into the air.
“Maybe you have,” Liv said. “Let me show you what I can do.”
Five words of power awoke in the back of her mind. Where once it had been a struggle to hold two at a time, now they vibrated in harmony, like a five-note chord struck by a skilled musician. With every breath, the ambient mana, wild and turbulent from the crushing power of the sun, spilled into her body. Liv sung her incantations as much as she whispered them, using words only where needed to support her soaring intent, and in response mana poured out of her again like a great wave.
Time stuttered.
Everything around Liv seemed to slow, much like when she used the enchanted boots Tej Mishra had given her so many years before. While the rest of the world stood still, half a dozen spells formed around her, like a constellation of magic, quivering for an eternal moment in desperation for their release. When the moment came, every attack exploded out from her at once.
The word of dreams pulled Ractia’s worst nightmares from the depths of her memories, and the word of cold gave them form. Strange crystalline entities, of an inhuman geometry that Liv had never seen before, and which it nearly hurt her eyes to examine, froze into existence and flung themselves at the soaring goddess. Cei whispered their name: Vidre. It meant nothing to Liv, but the Lady of Blood shrieked, throwing herself desperately away from the facsimiles as they came on.
The lightning which ran through so many of the Vædic machines, tamed and controlled, shot out, burning its way through the metal surfaces, scorching tubes and wires, filling the air with smoke. It all gathered together in the air, coalescing into a great winged wyrm, modelled after the First Clutch. Liv slipped a sigil-etched eggshell from out of her belt-pouch, allowing the mana barrier which had cradled it through all the fighting to dissolve. A squeeze of her left hand broke the egg, releasing not only the contingent spell within, but the dream she’d taken from Silica during her last visit, years before. It was a dream of fighting, and it settled into the lightning-wyrm, anchoring the magic and giving it a shadow of the desert-wyrm’s consciousness. With a roar more felt than heard, the conjured creature spread its wings and dove toward Ractia, who had to throw herself to one side, flying between banks of machinery, weaving in and out as she fled.
A dozen miniature bubbles of frozen time floated through the chamber. Where they touched the machinery, metal corroded to rust, and then to orange-brown dust that blew away from the wind of a goddess’s wings. One touched Ractia’s dress, and the fabric frayed back in an instant, leaving only a hole behind which exposed pale flesh. The Lady of Blood banked desperately away from the globes, choosing to let them destroy her machines rather than touch her body.
The temperature of the room plummeted, until Ractia, sucking air in through her lips, coughed up blood. It took careful concentration and balance to prevent the cold from reaching Liv’s friends, but the effort was worth it when she could deny the goddess air with which to speak incantations, by freezing her lungs.
Half a hundred spikes, evenly split between coherent mana and adamant ice, shot across the room in waves, sinking a foot deep into the stone walls of the cavern, the glowing machines, the textured metal floor and ceiling, as they pursued Ractia. The goddess’s wings were torn to shreds by a dozen impacts, and she fell out of the air, tumbling across the ground end over end for a breathless moment before she dissolved into a swirling vortex of bloody-petals, shedding her physical form rather than allowing herself to suffer actual wounds.
Roots and vines, all of frost, extended from Liv’s feet in every direction along the floor, thorned and twining about the delicate Vædic mechanisms. Steam hissed and glass shattered as the vines squeezed, crushing anything within their reach. Buds grew and then blossomed - not roses, but blue columbines, just as in a mountain spring. From each bud stepped an armored warrior of ice, until they were arrayed in ranks about the black orb, backs to the strange magic, weapons facing outward to defend against any attempt to reach it.
And still the mana burned through Liv’s limbs, scouring her lungs with every breath, inexhaustible and only half-obedient, like a wild, unbroken horse. Whenever Ractia tried to reform, the dream of Silica dove upon her, or the horde of Vidre, from which the goddess threw herself back in clear terror. When she lunged for the orb of darkness, Liv’s soldiers of animated ice thrust their halberds and poleaxes, their swords and spears, at her. If she tried to land, the frozen vines wrapped around her feet, thorns slicing into her flesh. There was nowhere in the entire chamber that was safe for the Lady of Blood to be, and with every passing moment more and more of her machines, assembled painstakingly over the course of decades, were crushed, corroded, frozen, or ripped apart by Liv’s magic.
Somewhere, perhaps on the surface of the moon or perhaps just beneath in the ancient ruins, a great sound came, all at once, like the roll of thunder or the pounding of siege engines. It reminded Liv of the violence a collapsing curtain wall makes, when the stones of enemy catapults finally bring it down, and the disturbance was so great that even the floor of this deep room shook. Machines rattled, and the pulsing light at each barrel died. Liv could feel them stop working, could feel how they were no longer sucking mana and all else away from the black orb at the center of the room. It wavered, no longer growing, but not collapsing, either, and it was that which must have forced the stymied goddess to resort to words once again.
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Finally, Ractia threw herself up into the air, toward the darkened ceiling of the chamber, and her petals of blood swirled into the semblance of a face, lips twisted somewhere between rage and desperate terror. “Enough!” the Lady of Blood wailed. “What do you want? What do I have to give you, for you to let me go? Name your price!” Her eyes flicked between Liv and the orb, her escape, as if she was wondering just how long it could last, absent the machines which had brought the thing into existence. The swell of roiling mana began to lessen, and Liv realized that someone must have destroyed one of the struts.
There is no price, the memory of the God-Eating Queen whispered in Liv’s ear. Take her power for your own. It was terrifying and a temptation all at once – with the power of one more god, the consumption of a third Vædim, Liv was certain there would be no one in all the world, from Varuna to Isvara, who could defeat her. That might already be true at Ractia’s death, but taking the goddess's power rather than letting it go to waste would make it certain.
“You’ve murdered,” Liv said, letting the language of the gods make way for that of mortals on her lips. “Milisant Loredan, at the very least – her life is on your head. You’ve given orders for hundreds, perhaps thousands to die. You’ve enslaved, now and a thousand years ago. You forced a man to give you a child by controlling his mind, giving him no choice in the matter. By the laws of the Alliance, you’ve earned a sentence of death a dozen times over. And you cannot purchase my mercy.”
Ractia dove downward again, one white arm outstretched, half-healed wings spreading out even as the bottom half of her body wasn’t even finished coalescing out of blood-petals, but the lightning-wyrm, cunning glinting in her eyes, swooped in and dug sparking claws through the goddess’s flesh. Blood sprayed across the room, and once again Ractia dissolved, thwarted in her attempt to escape.
From the entrance to the room, the clank of metal on metal drew Liv’s ear - but it was the touch, the caress, of a familiar Authority that made her turn her head. Keri, his armor battered, scorched black and bloodied, leaned against the doorway into the room. His spear was gone, and his arms were a ruin of burned flesh, but he was alive. But where is Elder Aira? Liv wondered.
Ractia’s face fluttered into existence. “You,” she spat. “Where is my son?”
“Dead,” Keri gasped out, and then spit blood down onto the floor. “I scorched his head clean off his neck. You can look for him in the blood sprayed against the wall of the next room.”
A thousand voices in a thousand languages shrieked, no longer a chorus but a cacophony, and for the very first time Liv entertained the idea that Noghis had been more than simply a tool for Ractia’s use. In her own twisted way, perhaps some small part of the Lady of Blood had actually cared for her dead son – even loved him.
The goddess’s Authority exploded outward, as if carried by her wail, and Liv flung her own Authority out to stop it. She was able to shield herself, but the soldiers of ice, the wyrm of lightning, the Vidre host pulled from Ractia’s own fears, the bubbles of time, all blew apart with no more substance than a cobweb on the wind. Every part of the chamber trembled in the face of the Vædim’s uncontrolled rage.
Liv could feel Arjun, Sidonie, Keri, even her father throwing their own Authorities against the savage, uncontrolled and violent despair of a grieving mother. Each one of them broke against the oncoming storm.
The first sign of what was happening was their veins blackening – then, spikes of iron, tearing their way out through the skin in sprays of blood and viscera. The iron and the blood twined together, hoisting all four of her companions up, dragging them to the center of the room and hanging them from the ceiling like bucks hung to drain.
Liv’s eyes darted between her father and her husband, their arms stretched up above their heads, their faces twisted in agony. A tendril of blood, wound with iron like a rope, lashed around each wrist, each ankle, and stretched their bodies taught, attached to whatever machinery could be found to serve as an anchor.
The petals of blood rounded on Liv, at first a face and then, shaken apart in a towering rage which seemed to forbid any elegance or fine manipulation, simply a raging mouth. “Let me pass,” the chorus demanded. “There is nothing left for me in this pitiful world. Let me pass, and I leave them to you. They are not so broken that you cannot save them. Stand in my way, and they die.”
With a flex of Ractia’s Authority, the strands of wound blood and iron yanked. Sidonie’s arm pulled out of her socket, and she screamed in pain. Valtteri gritted his teeth, refusing to show any sign of his own pain. Arjun’s lips were moving, and Liv was certain that her friend was preparing a healing spell – but he couldn’t actually cast it until Ractia let her Authority recede. Keri’s head lolled to one side, as if he’d suffered so much pain already that there simply wasn’t enough left of him to keep his eyes up.
Liv had never hated Ractia so much as she did in that moment. She licked her lips, swallowed, and looked from the face of her father to that of her husband, and in truth there was no choice to make at all.
“Fine,” she said, and the word came out so choked and strangled that Liv had to take a breath and repeat it again. “Fine. Let them down safely, and you can go. I won’t stop you. But don’t ever come back, or I won’t rest until I’ve killed you.”
Ractia’s petals fluttered in, tighter and tighter, until once again the goddess stood there, bare feet on the metal floor, dark hair wild and tossed back over her shoulder. One of her pale, delicate arms still wept blood from where it had been gouged open by the talons of the lightning-wyrm, and the flesh around the edges of the wounds was blackened and charred, with red traceries burned outward all along the rest of her limb.
With a wave of the goddess’s hand, three of Liv’s four companions were lowered down to lie on the ground. But the last of them - and of course it was Keri, the bitch knew exactly what she was doing - was swung over to Ractia’s side. The goddess placed a hand on Keri’s head – On my husband’s head! - and her ropes of iron and blood, dangling from some anchor in the ceiling, high above, carried him along at her side as she slowly walked toward the orb.
“Three released as a show of good faith,” Ractia hissed. “Three to show I keep my end of the bargain. I’ll let the last of them, the most precious of all, free at the moment I touch the gate.”
Ractia stepped forward, and Liv stepped to one side. The two women circled each other for a moment, eyes locked, each of them looking for the slightest hint of betrayal. The stormwand trembled in Liv’s fingers, but she kept it pointed down at the floor. Another step, and Ractia’s route to the black orb was unobstructed.
“You really don’t understand anything,” Ractia said, curling her lip. “He’ll be dead in a short few centuries anyway, and you’ll have given up any chance of following me. This is what comes of caring too much for people who won’t stay with you.”
“I just want him to live now,” Liv said.
“Take him, then!” The woven ropes of black and red flung Keri away from Ractia, directly at Liv, and at that precise moment, the goddess threw herself at the orb of darkness.
Liv rushed forward to catch her husband as he fell. He was so much bigger than her, and still wearing enchanted armor, and far too heavy for her to hold up. They tumbled down to the floor together, and she pressed her lips to his face, kissing his lips, his cheek, his forehead, anywhere that she could touch.
“I’m alive, my love,” Keri gasped, though he winced in pain.
She couldn’t even bear to look at his arms. “Arjun will heal you,” Liv promised, though she had no concept of what condition their friend was even in, himself, at the moment. “Or I’ll get you to the ring.”
Ractia let out a sigh of relief, and the sound drew Liv’s attention. She looked up to see the goddess’s good hand pressed to the orb. For a moment, the Lady of Blood flickered, with an expression of such relief on her face that it was like dawn breaking after a night of thunderstorms. A wave of something – of power -pulsed, and then the Vædim simply vanished - to where, Liv could not say.
“Blood and shadows,” Liv cursed. Before she could think better of it, she pulled herself away from Keri and got to her feet - but then she looked back down at him, and hesitated.
“Go,” Keri said, meeting her eyes and giving a nod. “Go and end her. But you had better come right back to us, Liv. We’ll be waiting for you.”
Liv wrapped her fingers tight about the hilt of the stormwand, strode across the room, and placed her left hand on the dark orb which still hung there. There was the slightest hesitation, as if the very world was taking a breath, and then she felt herself sucked forward, into the black.