I am staring down death — or rather, breathing it down. And it is nothing, not even the sting of a thorn, compared to the howling, aching emptiness at the depths in me.
Aching Monastery? Ha! Does it go down so far that the pit inside it reaches through the crust of the earth, through her roiling black veins filled with oil and water? Through the meat of her minerals and the bones of her rocks, down deeper still to the beating of her molten heart and through the other side to where there is no earth at all and only the cold, friendless darkness of howling nothing? Does it go to where the soul loses even the understanding of self? To the place where not even a memory of love can yet live?
If it does, then it is only beginning to ache as I am, for in every breath, every blink of my eyes, the demons I drew into my heart play with my mind, feed me on their dreaming, and their dreaming is barbed and drugged, shuffling me unwilling from one damning imagining to another. Each thing they imagine is more deeply wicked, more stained in dread, more ribcage-wrenching, more heart-shredding, more brain-smashing than anything I could conceive. Even if I reach into the most hellish horror I can conjure, it would not rival this.
Can I explain what it is like to be driven through that as cattle are driven through the press with hot irons? Can I explain what it is like to be made evil, dyed with guilt, stained to the marrow with desires you did not ask for and yearnings that make you ill? I do not wish to make you know. The knowing is too terrible.
Shame eats me as the brindled dog ate Owalan’s throat. Would that it consumed me entirely. Would that I never felt again.
And then pain flares in my neck and light pours in.
For the second time today, I feel the touch of the God. He sears me. He washes me in flame.
I drink it down, desperate, thirsty, convulsing with my need to be washed of this horror I have let flow into me. I know I am crying. Tears seep from my eyes like rivers overflowing their banks. It’s relief, thrown to me like a rope in a storm.
And then I come up, suddenly, choking on the precious burn of holy water, swept clean as the dry desert sands by the power of the God flowing into me. I am, for a bare moment, breathless.
To be in the presence of the kind of creative power that sets the bones of the earth is enough to crumble a man and make him a craving, trembling addict all at once. I am both. To have been just a little near the swirling life, the bright eye of the God as he looks at me and sees, sees, sees, and chooses to wash me rather than crush me, chooses to rip me from the dragging dark rather than watch me be clawed away — I could cling to this forever and never willingly let go.
It’s but a moment.
And yet it’s forever.
And I return a different man.
The light is gone. Pain laces every breath, a reminder of the holiness and death that swirled into my lungs where air should have been. I feel absently at my neck. If there is pain, it’s so minor compared to what came before that I hardly notice.
I find her eyes. And I’m slain.
In all fairness, I ought to be burned by her gaze, too holy to meet after who I’ve been these last minutes. But I’m not.
She catches my eyes and she’s tremblingly beautiful, wracked with the agony I forced her through. Her eyes are bright with tears and her shoulders slump with relief and her lip trembles as something that looks a lot like gratitude washes over her. Her hand still grips her sword and I love her for not bending. She’s like a moon to the sun of the God.
I love her for looking at me and not turning away.
I don’t know where the dog is. I know I should be looking for him. He’s taken into him all that was in me.
But a dark fist reaches for my lady paladin and I do not think. I leap.
I draw my sword as I leap through the air and it comes down hard on Suture’s clavicle, driving him back. I spin, grunting hard with the effort of moving quickly enough to dodge blows from two golems at once.
Sir Sorken is behind them. For the first time since I met him, he has drawn his sword.
“Enough of this!” I bark at him. “It’s over now. The demons are out of your grasp.”
“I’ve come too far, I’m afraid, my boy,” he booms out. “Too far for things to be ‘enough.’ I’ll just have to start the whole process again. Turn the room to the start. It can be done.”
I can see stains around Suture’s bone and rag mouth where he tried to drink down the demon cup. I know he took nothing into himself. I know because it was all inside me.
He swings at me one-handed, but he’s only bone. I deal his remaining arm a decisive blow with an overhead two-handed strike. It snaps his hand off at the forearm and he shudders backward.
“I told Coriand that bone was a poor choice,” Sorken grumbles.
He glances up to the man’s statue almost superstitiously. Beside it, Owalan’s statue’s neck has a dark shadow across it. I shudder.
He’s maneuvering backward, trying to draw me away from Victoriana. I spin just in time to thwart Cleft’s flanking action and dart between him and the fountain.
Her forehead is pressed against Brindle’s. She’s not paying attention to this skirmish. I can’t help my spike of anxiety at the sight of the pair of them. That should be me. This should be over and I should be dead and drowned in that holy water, having finally redeemed myself, given myself for the good of the world and the honor of the God.
“‘Rock,’ I told him,” Sorken says, lost in the story of his friend who we killed. “It might be heavier and less comfortable to ride, but it’s hard to destroy. You’d need a sledge to break Cleft into pieces. This whole place could come down on his head and he’d likely survive it.”
I glance back and forth between the pair of golems and Victoriana, and I see their game. I bite back a curse. Of course. They mean to separate me from her and then attack. But I don’t dare let them.
A sense of purpose and satisfaction settles over me. Mayhap my first plan is gone, but I can still keep them off my lady paladin’s back as she finds a new solution. I hope she realizes that if the dog took my place, then she must drown it as she had been about to drown me. I hope she’ll use the time I give her.
I leap into action, gritting my teeth.
Suture first.
I summon what strength I have left and I charge, channeling all my purpose, all my certainty into a series of quick blows to drive Suture backward.
One. Two. Three.
His stubs of arms try to deflect, but that’s not the point. The point is to get him off-balance. The point is to find my opening. There it is.
I put the full force of my twisting torso and sinewy grip into the blow and I smash his skull into shards.
