Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4) (19 page)

He sees
the trees and the darkness, and nothing else.  He
stands
surrounded by a world of shadow, and it grows thicker as the curled howls of his attacker
draw
close.  Fear ices his gut.  He holds the blade ready, and calls his spirit. 
H
e remembers
that
she isn’t there,
and
his heart sinks.

Another blade-limb
erupts
from
the dark.  He barely rolls away before it slices by
him
and cleaves a
bone tree in two.  Another
limb
flies out
, insanely long, a bone needle
mounted
on a
pale and twisted tentacle.  He can’t see the source of the limbs
– they stretch
back
into the
vertical sea of darkness beyond the trees.

He rolls beneath the hacking a
ttacks
and ru
n
s forward
,
leaps over piles of skin and bones left to
wither and
freeze on the soiled forest floor.

The creature bleeds
into his vision
like a white wound
.  It’
s humanoid, but only
barely
, a pale and writhing mutation with an elongated torso that
twists
like an eel.  Its head is bald
,
with tiny black eyes and an enormous maw of razor teeth.  Its many arms are spindly whips of flesh dotted with bone
spurs
.

It
resemble
s the strange
creatures
he saw before
, back
at the edge of the forest
, only
this one
is
white
where they were dark.  It’
s somehow resisted the corrupting pall of the Whisperlands, only to evolve into something
much
worse.

It whips another bone-claw at him, but he
ducks beneath
it
and charges.  The creature
releases
a blood-curdling scream that rattles the ground and chills his blood.  He smells vomitous fumes and rot gases.  Its teeth are curved and black, stained with ebon
flesh
.

It can’t raise its limbs in time to defend itself, and even with its fearsome fangs he knows he can kill it, and he does.  Soulrazor/Avenger plunges into its skull and cracks it open like ice.  White blood sizzles
when
it hits the dark ground.

The hunter falls
without another sound
.  Its body melts into a
milk
pool.  He stands over its remains.

He finds its lair.  It isn’
t far away, a deep cave system built into the side of
a
massive hill, a dark orifice in a darker cluster of stone
that’s been
camouflaged
by the shadow landscape.  The forest continues
on past
the hill
.  He
’
ll scale the stone and
ascend to the
Shadow Lord’s
next
layer
of defense. 

The Eidolos
had
named the Shadow Lords
leader
:
the Witch Queen.  What
was
she
looking for?  Why
had
she
built
her
stronghold
t
here, in
that
dreadful place?

H
e feels
that
it
’
s
important
to search
the
hunter’s
lair
.  Something drives him,
a
base instinct
he can’t ignore
. 

The inside of the cave is dank and cold. 
He finds m
ore skins, some
of them
human, most not, all tainted by the ebon touch of the Whisperlands.  Tunnels lead off into deeper
chambers
.  He smells rot and ice.  Pools of neretic slime bubble up from the ground. 

There
are
tools and weapons, spears and shreds of clothing.  This thing has feasted on creatures in the Wh
isperlands for some time.  It’
s gorged i
tself on travelers and refugees and
natives and other mutations.  He isn’t sure how he destroyed it so easily, except that it seemed unused to direct confrontation.  It
normally took
its prey by surprise.

He wonders if
m
aybe it
hadn’t
wanted
to die.  Maybe it didn’t understand why it had
n
’t changed like the other
creatures
, and it couldn’t go on
living
in
a
land carved
from
nightmares.

In a way, he feels
sorry for it, even
after
he finds it’s young.

They
a
re grotesque.  They mewl like sick kittens and writh
e
like lampreys thrown from the water.  Their mouths have not yet fully formed, and their limbs
have yet to grow
their
blade appendages.  They are a mass, a pile of pale flesh and slime held in a bowl in the earth.  They look like they
’
ve just been born
.

They were
, he realizes. 
That wasn’t the mother I
killed, but the father.

He presses deeper into the cave.  He isn
’t sure how, but he knows he is
n
’
t safe
, not
w
hile
these creatures live.  They evolve quickly, and
they
will hunt him. 

The mother
i
s still weak from birthing the offspring.  Her body is bloated, not thin an
d flat like the male’s
but fat and bulbous.  She looks like a living egg-sack. 

Her limbs whip out at hi
m, but he’
s able to elude them
easily
.  Without thinking he charges into the room and slaughters her. 
P
art of
him
believes he is
meant
to do this.

That this family of hunters
is
not meant to be here, and that he is meant to
set them
free
.

He finishes the young quick
ly
.  His heart p
ounds as he
exits
the cave.
White
blood
covers
his chest.  His limbs shake, and he isn’t even aware of his
own tears until he’
s halfway up the rocky hill
side
.

His feet tread across dark stone.  The
hill
is steep and covered in drifts of black ice and frozen clay. 
Ooze clings to his boots
. 
Rocks
dislodge beneath his feet and tumble down to the forest below.

The trees grow thin
ner
as he climbs.  They stand at slanted angles, aimed
at
the blood sky like jagged spears. 

The forest beneath him
is
like a black ocean.  A dead wind
chills
his skin
. 
Shadows scramble just out of sight.  He sees child-like shapes and hears cackling laughter. 

Memories flash back at him, and it’s difficult for him to
hold them off
.
He sees ghouls in the darkness as they
chas
e
him across a mist-covered landscape.  He sees
a
dead city at the edge of the world.

He thinks of Snow.  He remembers her, burning on the train. 

It wasn’t your fault
, he tells himself, but he
’
s told himself this before, and
he
never
believes it
.  He tries to
convince
himself she was dead already, that the girl he’d grown up with was gone,
her identity
wiped clean
by the vampires of Koth well before he
’d
found her. 

It doesn’t help.  In the end,
he
’d
killed her, and that guilt has scarred him.  He will forever bear that wound.

Tears stain his face, but he pauses, breathes in air filled with grit and shadow, and thinks about wh
at he wants to go back to.  It’
s difficult, at first, to
remember
, and
for a moment
he feels
a
kinship
with
the hunter beast, a creature that had grown so confused and lost and desperate it no longer wanted to continue
living
in the nightmare it
was
trapped
in.

But after a moment
more
memories come to him, good memories, and they fill with him with light and warmth.  He sees Mike and Ronan and Maur and Grissom and Ash, and especially Danica, so beautiful, so much under his skin, and if he sees her again, he tells himself, maybe, just maybe, he’ll tell her how he feels, he’ll take advantage of the chance
he’s been
given
, he won’t make the
mistake again
of drifting apart from someone he cares about
, not again,
never again,
not like with Snow. 

He wants to see them…
all of them.  No distance or
obstacle
will keep him from going forward.

I have to try.  It’s all
that
I have left.

He
comes to the top of the massive hill and
steps over the ridge. 
A flat field stands before him.
 
B
lack skulls
on the ground
mark the
border
to
another
region
of the Whisperlands
.  R
ows of stakes protrude from the
earth
like broken
fingers.  Thin trails of
blood
smoke
rise
up from
shallow pits and
curl into the sky. 

A cold building
made
from black bones stands in
the distance,
right
at the edge of a
nother
dead forest.  The shrine is low and
built
in vicious angles, like something
reached down and crushed it into splinters and edges.  A pair of unmoving skeletons, their frames burned black and their eyes
fi
ll
ed
with cold fire, stand
s
vigil
outside
the twisted door.

He steadies himself, readies his blade, and
walks towards them
.

EIGHT

SEARCH

The skeletons are motionless as he passes between them and enters the shrine.  Their cold and burning eyes stare out
in
to the wastelands.  

Two
of the
arcane natives
wait
in
side
.  The
ir
oily black
bodies
are
so dark
it’s
almost impossible
for him
to make them out in the thick
shadows
. 

They a
re folded in contorted prayer.  Their fing
ers end in steaming frost claws
and their eyes
shine
like frozen moons.