Author's Note: I just hope this isn't half as emotionally exhausting to read as it was to write. I was strongly tempted to go have a stiff drink and possibly shoot myself with a tranquilizer dart after I finally finished it. :P
54.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to be free.
Blackbird fly blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.
Blackbird fly blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.
- The Beatles, "Blackbird"
Power seethed through me, around me, into me, out of me.
Above. Behind. Beyond. Where am I?
Then I saw.
Ah.
I stood on a tower of glass, open to the sky, as the winds pulled my mind apart at the seams and then smashed it back together again, second by second.
It was impossible to concentrate.
Focus, said an echo of Xanos's voice, as irascible and sneering as ever. The sound of it snapped me back to earth. But my brother was dead, or was probably close to it, else he'd have made his presence known before now. It couldn't have been him who had spoken.
The wind buffeted me first one way, and then the other. All around me was the unbridled chaos of the sky, and I was afraid of what would happen if I let it draw me in.
Don't worry, Boss. That was Deekin. Or rather, it probably wasn't, but I barely even remembered who I was, anymore, much less where I was and what was real and what wasn't. It okay. Really. Deekin not afraid. You shouldn't be, either.
I turned to look behind me, wondering where his voice had come from, but I only saw more sky. Fascinated, I watched as the currents rushed over head, pushing and writhing and twisting around each other, re-forming and shifting their course with each collision.
Then came Drogan's voice, and I knew then that I had to have gone completely off of my rocker, because the old dwarf was most certainly dead. Think, lass, he counseled me in his gruff, patient brogue. Don't panic. Think about what needs doin', then do it.
Tentatively, I reached out with one spectral hand. A current purred through my fingers, cool as silk, hot as a live wire, and as I held it, it first writhed against my hand and then smoothed out compliantly, conforming to fit my grasp.
The pain was still there, throbbing beneath the ecstatic hum of power in my veins. I could barely feel it any longer, but it was there, anchoring me, dragging me back to earth even as the wind tried to pull me away.
I was tempted to laugh. Who knew? I mused. Turns out that Heurodis might have done me a favor, after all.
More curious than fearful, now, I reached out with my other hand, and took hold of another rope of air. This one, too, spun and spat, but it flowed through my fingers just like the other had.
I looked up, the wind twining like live snakes around my hands, and saw the storm.
It danced on the very edge of the sky, a swirl of crackling, eager dark. Gotcha, I thought with grim satisfaction.
Then, hand over hand, like a fisherman pulling in his lines, I dragged the storm in.
Dark clouds gathered. The wind rose, blowing sheets of sand across the glass.
I paid it no mind. I was in the storm. I was the storm, and I had too much momentum behind me to stop now.
With my second sight, I looked down, through the mythal's glow. Lines of power radiated like the spokes of a wheel, running from the mythallar to the circle of columns which surrounded it.
They seemed relevant, somehow – but, more to the point, though the outer shell of each column was made of glass, sheathed inside each column was a pole of silvery metal. The poles protruded from their columns, pinpoints of light in the sudden dark.
To the eyes of the storm, they looked an awful lot like lightning rods.
Electricity gathered, making the air tingle across my skin like a thousand tiny needles.
Then I saw Heurodis, trapped and fuming impotently behind a wall of wind, and I made myself smile at her.
It wasn't a very nice smile. Then again, I wasn't in any kind of mood to be nice.
The storm erupted.
Forks of lightning stabbed down in quick succession, one-two-three-four-five-six, and each strike was followed by the concussive boom and crack of exploding glass.
One column after another vanished in a glittering shower of pulverized glass. The air was filled with the tinkle of falling shards. The metal cores glowed, white-hot and making little tink-tink noises as they just barely began to cool.
It was, I decided, a very pretty sight. I was glad to have lived long enough to see it.
And then, as I turned to Heurodis, I decided that, no, the look on her face, the look that she wore as the fruits of all of her labors vanished in a puff of ozone – that was the most magnificent sight of them all.
Her lips tried to form words. Eventually, one came out. "You," she rasped, and the sheer hatred behind that one word was a balm to all of my grief.
"Me," I returned pleasantly. A part of me noticed that my legs were trembling. A lot. Actually, most of me was trembling, and my voice seemed thready and why was it so damned cold all of the sudden?
I shifted, leaning heavily on Silent Partner. A wave of pain slammed through my chest, momentarily blacking out my vision. Oh, I thought vaguely. Right. The dagger. Right.
Heurodis was approaching. Rage was an inadequate word for what I saw in her face. In fact, her hair seemed to be so agitated that it was biting itself, which struck me as a hilariously strange thing for hair to do, but she didn't even seem to notice.
Then, as the medusa drew near, it occurred to me that I hadn't really planned this far. I'd only gotten as far as destroy the mythal.
Yeah. Destroy the mythal – and then what? Let Heurodis wipe the floor with me, now that I'd made her really angry?
Oh, well. It wasn't as if it mattered. We were all going to be dead soon, anyway. I could already feel the ground tilting under my feet, the city wrenched from its smooth upwards flight with the destruction of the mythal.
I watched Heurodis advance. I was having trouble holding my arms up, even with Silent Partner to lean on. I felt like lead weights had been strapped to my wrists.
I didn't really know what I expected her to do. She could try to cast a spell, but that would've been silly, seeing as how I was still shielded. Maybe she knew how to take my shield down. God knew I didn't have the strength left to put it back up again.
Too, she could try to strangle me, which would have been a toss-up, seeing as how she wasn't very strong but I'd gone as weak as a newborn kitten, so it wasn't as if I could put up much of a fight, even from a withered old snake-fucker like herself.
The likeliest outcome was that she had another dagger hidden somewhere, or that she'd reclaim the one in my chest long enough to stab me with it again. Xanos might have been able to calculate the probability to the nearest percentage point, but I settled for deeming the possibility pretty fucking likely and leaving it at that.
My mind ticked over, examining the potential outcomes with an almost clinical detachment. It wasn't what I would call bravery, this total absence of any kind of emotional response. I was, I thought, just too damned numb and too damned tired to feel much of anything anymore.
Stick a fork in me, I thought. I'm done. I started to giggle, choked, and heard the asthmatic wheeze in my chest as I tried to catch my breath.
The medusa drew close, baring her too-long teeth. No more light was shining behind her eyes. No more light haloed her. She'd gone dark, just like the mythal. Lights out for all of us, I thought with black, delirious despair. All hands on deck. Down with the ship…
The medusa's gaunt hand reached up. It wrapped around the hilt of the dagger that she'd left stuck in my chest. "Have you any idea how many years of work you have brought to ruin, girl?" she snarled at me.
I smiled at her hazily. "Judging by your wrinkles?" I mused. "Lots." I raised a finger, a sudden thought striking me. "By the way, you know, they make lotions for that. I could hook you up with this absolute genius in Paris-"
I had a split second to see her fingers tighten around the dagger, and then agony overwhelmed everything as the blade was yanked out of me, hard. Whatever I'd wanted to say, it ended up leaving my mouth in a choked, inarticulate scream.
The place where the dagger had been felt hot, but the rest of me felt like ice, and when I tried to breathe, I heard a gurgling, sucking sound coming from the hole in my chest.
My knees buckled. My hand closed on Silent Partner, trying desperately to keep me upright, because I didn't want to die on my knees, but blackness was closing in at the edges of my vision, and it was getting harder and harder to keep it at bay, and god but it hurt, in a way that nothing had ever hurt before.
The medusa raised the dagger. "I would have killed you quickly," she said grimly. "But now-"
Pain-hazed and barely conscious, I waited. Confused, I wondered why she was taking so long. If she was going to kill me, the least she could do was get on with it.
Then I saw her fingers open, reflexively, and her mouth opened and closed, her eyes going wide with shock.
Heurodis's dagger dropped to the ground and spun away, leaving a corkscrew spiral of blood behind it.
Smoke, green and acrid and decidedly not pleasant-smelling, poured from between her parted lips.
Then, with a lot less ceremony that I might have expected, the sorceress gave a gurgling sigh and crumpled to the ground.
Her fall revealed the kobold standing right behind her, a smoking and bloody dagger in his hand, looking at me with a lot of worry and just a little bit of panic.
"Boss?" he squeaked. "Sorry, Boss, Deekin came as quick as he could, but first he fell down the stairs, and then he lost his crossbow, and then he had to wait for Boss to take the mythal down, and then he had to get a knife from green man, which took some doing, because he's…uh…he's…not…really…" The kobold's words trailed off. He swallowed, looking up at me. I thought I saw myself reflected in his glossy black eyes. "Boss," he said then, a plaintive whine entering his voice. "Boss…y-your lips are blue. That not normal…is it?"
I stared at him. Then I stared at Heurodis. Then, unable to quite understand what had just happened, my eyes went back to Deekin. "Deeks…what-" My voice didn't sound right. I stopped, and, seeing the direction Deekin's eyes were heading, reached up laboriously and twitched my cloak over the bloody hole in my armor, right above my right breast. I didn't want him to see that. He'd freak. "What are you-" I couldn't seem to make my brain work. Nevertheless, a few things penetrated. "X-Xanos," I gasped. "He's-"
"Hurt," Deekin finished for me. His inner eyelids scissored across his eyes, briefly. He fidgeted with the dagger, looked at it, saw that it was still smoking, stopped, and looked back up at me. "Snake lady…she aimed the spell right at him…Deekin dodged, but green man was right in the way, and he not that quick-"
I didn't hear the rest of it. "Where?" I managed to say. Spots were dancing in front of my eyes. No matter how hard I tried to suck in air, it never seemed to be enough, though at least it no longer hurt to inhale quite so much. Maybe my lung had finally finished collapsing. "S-show me."
My legs gave out halfway, unable to cope with keeping me upright across the listing, swaying ground. I crossed the last few feet to Xanos on my hands and knees, leaving streaks of scarlet on the glass.
Deekin had been right. It was bad. The sorcerer must have caught the brunt of that fireball, and while it hadn't killed him, he was probably wishing that it had.
I propped myself against the remains of a glass half-wall and leaned close to the half-orc's pointed ear. "Xanos?" I whispered. "Y'hear me?"
His head moved. His eyes opened to slits. "Idiot," he greeted me, uttering the word with simple, eloquent fervency. His eyes closed again. "She…is dead?"
"Yeah." I felt myself smile. With an effort, I slid my hand into his, careful to avoid the places where he had been burned - though at least, for his sake, his face was practically untouched. The world blurred. "Y'look…uglier'n usual."
He snorted a laugh, until a convulsion of pain made him stop. "So…d'you."
"'m not ugly. You are."
"Shut up."
"You first."
Someone else slipped their hand into mine. It was cool and dry in covered in scales.
"Boss," the kobold whispered tentatively, wriggling closer until he was practically sitting in my lap. His eyes were big and black and glossy and fixed on my face. "Boss, what's wrong? You don't look so good. You're awfully pale, and you gots blood all over-"
I braced myself against the wall as the city sagged to one side, like a sailboat catching a crosswind. I thought I felt a sudden skip of weightlessness, and wondered how far we were above the ground. Two thousand feet? A thousand? Less? How long would it take us to fall? "Nothing," I said, getting the words out with difficulty. "Don't worry." I didn't want him to worry. He had enough to worry about as it was.
Unfortunately, this was Deekin, and while I didn't know his last name – didn't know if he even had one – I was pretty sure that 'Worry' was his middle name. "If the mythal's gone," the kobold whispered. "That means…" He looked around us, at the listing city and the angry sky, and trailed off into a jittery sigh. "Deekin kinda hoped to have more adventures before he died," he mourned.
I looked at him, and I thought of decisions, and of whether I had any right to make them for anyone else, given my track record as far as my own decisions went. "I know," I said, and squeezed his hand. I didn't have much energy left, but what I had in mind shouldn't take much. A command rose up on my tongue. "Go t'sleep, now. 'K?"
The kobold's eyes slid shut almost instantly. He slumped against my side, cuddled there like a sleeping puppy – a very large, scaley, highly intelligent puppy, I'll grant, but aside from that, the comparison was apt enough.
I turned to Xanos. I couldn't tell if he was conscious or not, though his breathing was strained and uneven – indicating, perhaps, that he was still holding on, stubbornly, to the last shreds of consciousness.
Better for him if he wasn't awake to deal with this. I nudged my hand over until it was flopped more or less against his cheek, and, letting a wan thread of power into my voice, I said, "Y'too. Sleep."
Almost imperceptibly, the sorcerer relaxed. His breathing steadied slightly. "Sorry," I mumbled to him. "'s for th'best."
Then, weakly, I leaned back against the column. I wasn't sure if I'd done the right thing, but it was done – and at least the fall would be a lot easier on them, now that they wouldn't be awake to feel it.
I huddled closer to them both. They were warm, and I was so cold, and everything kept tilting and swaying, and I wondered, bitterly, just who was going to make the fall easier on me.
Gradually, the world stopped its nauseating swaying. The wind changed, acquiring a note like the whistle of a far-off flute.
From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a swirl of shadow. Something in the way it moved put me in mind of the hem of a long, dark cloak.
The sunlight dimmed. I felt someone kneel in front of me. "Rebecca," it said.
I looked up. "Hi," I said simply.
Shaundakul extended a hand. His eyes swirled from grey to blue to silver and back again, shifting through the entire spectrum of the sky. "I can save you from the fall," he said in his soft, resonant voice. "Take my hand."
I looked at his hand blankly. "Can you save them, too?" I asked. No need to say who 'them' referred to. He'd know.
He hesitated. "No," he said heavily. "I am sorry. They are not-"
"-one of your own." The pain had receded a little, in this moment in between moments, and it was easier to talk. "Yeah. I remember."
I felt his eyes on me. "You will not change your mind." It was more of a statement, a request for confirmation, than it was a question.
I raised my eyes to meet his. I frowned. "I thought you said you wouldn't force me into anything," I protested. "You said-"
He was already shaking his head. "No," he sighed. "I cannot. Your will is your own, my dearest child, and I will not take that from you – from any of you. It would do you too great a disservice." His hand reached up, his tanned and weathered fingers gently pushing my hair back from my face. "But I will beg of you to reconsider," he added, his voice rough.
I hesitated. "Answer's no," I blurted, before I had time to think about it. I lowered my eyes. "I'm sorry," I said, and I was, because I knew it'd hurt him if I died, just like it had hurt him when all of those others had died, back in the day, when Myth Drannor had fallen. "But…I wouldn't be able to live with myself, anyway, if I took the easy way out and left them here. So…" I trailed off with a sigh. "For what it's worth…I'm sorry," I mumbled.
The wind died down to a regretful murmur. "Do not be," my god said, brushing his thumb against my cheek. "Your choice does you credit."
A weak, shaky splutter of a laugh escaped me. "Shitty choice to have to make," I mumbled.
"They often are," he agreed with a sigh. Then, carefully, he clasped my head between his hands and leaned forward, pressing a sound kiss to my forehead. "I am proud of you, my Rebecca," Shaundakul murmured against my skin, his voice breaking. "So very, very proud."
I couldn't take it any more. My breath suddenly hitching, I closed my eyes and let the tears fall – the ones that I hadn't wanted Xanos or Deekin to see. "'m scared," I said in a very small, very childish voice.
He sighed into my hair. "I know," he said quietly.
I nodded against his hands. "Stay with me?" I whispered, my voice failing.
I felt him move to sit beside me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulders, draping me in the folds of his battered, travel-worn old cloak. "Always," he promised, and drew me close to him.
I couldn't see him anymore, but I could feel his presence enfold me. It was like the warmth of sunlight and the bliss of shade, and the sweet smell of a soft summer rain, and the glorious vastness of the open sky, and it comforted me.
Somewhere beyond the howl of the wind, I felt the floor fall out beneath me, and a sickening sense of weightlessness.
If it hurt when we hit the ground, I never knew it.
