Chapter 7

  Anthea: two years BK

  She awoke all at once, in a flash of pain and confusion, gasping and gazing into the distant blue sky. A cool breeze washed over her, and all seemed strangely quiet. She remembered why the silence sounded so strange. A battle. Chaos, fire and death. The shouting, the explosions. Now, only the soft breathing of the wind.

  She tried to sit up, to look around, but white hot agony crawled across her shoulders and down her back. Something had broken, something worse than bones. She struggled to pull herself upright and see through the pain to the battlefield around her. She sat on stony soil. Scattered clumps of dry yellow grasses twitched around her in the breeze, untroubled by the violence. To her right, the bodies of fallen daimon lay like dull colored stones upon the plains. Here and there a wreck rose above the fallen bodies: a crashed aircraft, an upturned tank, a damaged exoskeletal weapons modification.

  She wished she heard noises, men and women screaming, calling out, shouting. But there was only the sighing, crying, weeping of the wind. Smoke stained half of the sky above, pushed east by the breeze. The stench of death remained.

  Tears clouded her eyes, not only because of the pain. She hadn’t wanted to be here. She should have at least tried to stop this. Who had died? How many? What a war. Out of all the wars which had been fought, did any have less purpose than this? Did people want to fight now because the world was ending? Was this how they wanted to die?

  She gritted her teeth and shifted her weight forward, intending to stand. The pain stopped her. Yes, her crystals had broken, at least some of them. How had that happened? She couldn’t remember.

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Released it slowly. Breathed again. And again. And again.

  The wind swelled and faded around her in sync with her breathing. It whispered on her skin; she felt the clouds moving overhead and the slow sweeping of vast rivers of air that made up all the surrounding atmosphere. Rain would soon fall. But her vision of the sky was blurred, shaky, fading in and out like a poor radio connection. She was half blind now with her broken crystals.

  She opened her eyes and scanned the horizons. She saw no one living, as though all life had deserted the area. The Grim King had done his work, and only those who had had an appointment with him remained. The scattered bodies of daimon before her lay still. It seemed the Darkness had not yet reached this far. But it would. That was probably why the field was empty; any survivors had fled. She had to leave, too. She should never have come in the first place. She had saved no one and perhaps had only made it all worse. Yes. No more of this. The task of the peace-maker, doomed from the start, no longer called to her. No one listened, and a voice to whom no one listened carried as much weight as an echo.

  She saw the scythe at her side—the scythe of her mentor. He had died here; she remembered now. He had died, and she had lived. This proved the meaninglessness of everything they had worked for together, if nothing else did.

  She seized the scythe. It was not a combat scythe, as she had seen some carry; this was the scythe of a farmer. A scythe for harvesting grain, and nothing more. He had carried it because it reminded him of the simple life he had lived, the kind of life he worked to protect.

  She planted the end of the scythe into the rocky soil and heaved herself up, blinking away tears of pain. No bones broken, it seemed, but her crystal wings had cracked.

  She had to leave. To where? She did not know. Back, maybe, to the place she had lived when she was small. With the eagles. The eyries of the mountains, where the winds made music.

  The sun began to set as she made her painful way to the nearest hilltop. She needed to see the lay of the land. She needed to find someone who could help. Even if her comm device wasn’t jammed by some insidious nearby machine, none of her allies were near enough to arrive in time.

  She reached the top of a low rise as the sun crept below the horizon and the western skies turned to gold, though the sweeping cloudbank seemed a ruddy murk through the smoky haze over the battlefield. When night fell, Anthea knew, the Darkness might come. Like a negative auroral sweep, one of void instead of light, it might creep over this field of death, drawn by the carnage. And if it came on this battlefield full of bodies, she would soon die and join it. She saw no one who could help, nothing but the open plains and the fallen daimon and the painted sky above.

  She did the only thing she could think of: she played her flute, calling to the eagles as the sun set. The winds carried her song far away across the windy skies, though she knew not how far they might fly.

  She faltered after some minutes and looked east as the sky faded. It all seemed so peaceful now. Where had everyone gone? She imagined the combatants fighting to the last daimon, and not one leaving this place alive but her. The thought made her sigh in vexation as much as sorrow. The futility of all this! The ridiculous absurdity of war at the end of the world.

  Her eagle eyes picked up movement down the hill to her right. A figure walked there, stumbling among the fallen. Her blood went cold; a chill trickled down her spine. Voidbound? Had the Darkness come already?

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  She stood and narrowed her eyes, shaded them against the fading brightness of early twilight. No. The daimon she saw there had grey spines, not black. Though a mile separated them, she was sure of it. Which side had he been on? She supposed it didn’t matter anymore. She would go and ask if he wanted to leave this place with her. It is what her mentor would have done.

  She stepped carefully down from the hilltop toward the lone daimon. The Darkness came as she went, attracted by the death, the pain, the fear, the loneliness, and the dying light of day. It came unseen and silent, and the blackened daimon all around Anthea, bit by bit, became possessed by something other than life.

  She ran, and although she knew it to be foolish, she ran into the depths of the battlefield, toward the lone grey figure. If she could not save one single life this day, she thought, then she had failed, her master had failed, and considering all else…she would not allow it.

  Those voidbound near the grey figure rose first, and they converged upon him. Anthea saw as she stumbled over re-animating bodies that he limped from some injury. Nevertheless, he fought well. Though the blackened voidbound came upon him in greater and greater numbers, he retreated in steady steps, and with precise strikes from his fists and feet he felled one after another. He seemed to be throwing something as well, and a voidbound dropped with each throw. Yet there were too many, far too many. An army of the dead.

  Anthea gripped her scythe as she approached. She crushed it as hard as she could in her fists as she summoned a gust of wind. The broken crystals on her back cried out; agony flared through her and obscured her vision. She screamed in pain and sorrow as she leapt to the side of the grey daimon, pushed the final distance by a powerful gust.

  She swept the farmer’s scythe in an arc as she landed; the grey daimon ducked low as she had expected him to. The scythe cut down three voidbound with an uncanny keen edge and flung the rest back with the tail end of the blast.

  The grey was bare-chested, slight of build yet quick and calm, and grey spines clustered thickly like patchy hair on his back and shoulders. He stood wordlessly behind her, at her back, and now the voidbound lurched toward them from all directions. She noticed that both of their left hands were bare, ungloved, their stars showing. But she was not embarrassed. Here at the end, such reservations all seemed ridiculous.

  “Was that…your music?” he asked, his breath labored. She could tell from his voice that he was young, like her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “It was beautiful,” he replied.

  Her breath caught. Had anyone said that to her before? He spoke so simply, so directly. But if there was any time for something like that, it was now when they were about to die.

  “Oh,” she said. “Th…thanks. You fight well.” She closed her eyes in chagrin at her awkward reply.

  He chuckled behind her. It turned into a ragged cough.

  The eagles arrived as the horde closed in. The noble birds snatched the two of them off the battlefield and flew away to the east as the last remnants of twilight crept after the fallen sun. Stars dusted the dark void above as the shadow-cloaked landscape swept below. Anthea gripped the scythe tightly, not knowing where the eagles took them. She looked frequently to the side to check on the grey. He remained alive, at least for the duration of the flight.

  The eagles took her to the place where she had grown up among them. It was a castle of cloud and stone, a high mountain in a remote place. They wheeled among tall, crooked fingers of rock that reached up to the starry heavens, among spires and arches carved by ceaseless wind. The eagles left Anthea and the grey on a cliff far over the valley, just by the entrance to her old cave, long abandoned. Her simple possessions were still there, untouched.

  The grey daimon turned fitfully in uneasy sleep, but he woke when Anthea dragged him into the shelter of her cave. She bound his wounds, which looked serious but not fatal, and they spoke for a while after he awoke. She learned that his mentor had perished in the battle, just like hers. She learned that he had been carrying an official offer of armistice. She learned that his name was Acarnus, and that he was one of the ones she was looking for, one of the last.

  Anthea watched him for a while after he fell back to sleep. And when she went to change her soiled and bloody clothes, she saw with horror that her hair—her beautiful, silken hair—was gnarled and ragged, stained with grime and blood. She spent a long time washing, brushing, combing. She very much wanted Acarnus, when he awoke, to see her hair as it was supposed to be. The activity distracted her from the crawling pain of her fractured wings.

  The pain prevented her from sleeping. At last, in the faintest pale of early dawn, she went out to look at the stars.

  “We are all the stars in the sky,” she said to no one in particular.

  She sat there on a ledge overlooking the steep valley and played her homemade flute as the eastern skies lightened and color stained the edges of the clouds. The winds changed; air howled in the tunnels, whistled across the fissures, moaned over the arches. The mountain rang with the sound of her music. It was painful, for her arda was cracked, her connection to the sky muted. Yet still she played.

  And then the dragons came, arriving with the dawn.