Neutral Ending 1 (Lost In Time)
I'd taken one of the Corpsetaker's legs. Grevane was dead and his army had fallen. Cowl had matched me in combat, but I'd still managed to drop a building on his assistant. Every fight, we'd been on the back foot, been pushed back and forth and kicked by people who knew more than we did. And despite their best efforts, they still couldn't stop us.
I'd had enough of playing defense. It was time to show them their little ritual was pointless, especially with the Wild Hunt sent far, far away.
The Museum was closed, but the doors weren't exactly repaired after my showdown with Dr. Death.
"Are you sure about this, Harry?" Butters asked, shifting the huge load he was carrying on his back.
I shot him a terrifying smile, and he blanched. He followed me inside anyway.
"I've had a few memories push their way back to me about this. And the Corpsetaker chose to try stopping me right alongside Liver Spots before I could have my chance. They're scared I'm going to pull this off. That's sure enough for me."
Butters exhaled shakily as we approached my target, the same girl I'd felt so connected to earlier.
Dinosaur Sue, the pride and joy of the Field Museum, was leaned forward, her skull as large as a man, her spine level with the ground, like she was chasing down prey even so long after she'd died. If I was right, and I had no reason to think I was wrong, then she was ready for a fight once more.
Difference was, this time I hadn't read the manual.
"It wouldn't be too difficult for me to show you the spell, my host," Lashiel's form appeared beside the dinosaur's foot, leaning up against it. "It's rather simple, if you understand the basics."
"Get thee behind me, devil," I spat through my teeth, and Butters swallowed again. He'd leaned down to attach the wires of his mechanism to his feet, and he stepped down on them, left then right, THUMP, THUMP, as Lashiel disappeared.
"I'm ready if you are," Butters said, stepping left, then right again to work the huge drum on his back.
"Alright. Let's do this."
Evil Bob hadn't spoken with me for very long when we'd fought, but it had been an enlightening conversation. If I understood it right, then calling up a single corpse, no matter the species, size or age, should be mechanically simple. All I had to do was repair the body enough for it to be occupied a spirit, fill the insides with energy (probably necrotic energy), provide a pounding noise of some kind for the heartbeat and control (thank you, Polka Champion Butters), and finish up by calling a spirit to occupy the whole mess.
That didn't exactly mean it was going to be easy. A dinosaur like Sue was estimated to be at least 65 million years old, and the longer a corpse was waiting, the harder it was to call back. That's also ignoring the sheer size of the beast; according to the placard on the front of her display, Sue was 40.5 feet long, nose to tail, and even hunched over to sprint she was 13.5 feet tall at the hip. Her skull weighed 600 pounds, and was… resting…
"Crap," I said, and heard crunching glass behind me.
I spun, holding out my staff, and Butters flinched, putting his hands up. "It's just me," he squeaked, and I saw he'd stepped closer to the mobile glass display I'd shattered earlier.
I lowered my staff. "We have a problem," I admitted, then pointed at the balcony. "Her skull is up there."
"Can you lift it down?" Butters asked, stepping lightly. He was hunched over himself, preventing the drum from beating while we were sneaking around the closed museum.
"Probably. I'm just worried I might break it."
I waved Butters to hide behind one of the pillars in the room, then jogged around to the stairs and up to the second floor. Sue's skull, in all its glory, was waiting for me.
Normally, I'd work to be as gentle as possible, but we were on a serious timer. I took my staff in both hands and smashed the display, poking the extra glass away from the edges, then squared my feet and concentrated, pulling in my Will. My staff glowed with a faint whiff of Brimstone, and I glared, throwing the feelings of anger inward.
"It would help you to lift the skull, my host," Lashiel said calmly, appearing again next to the skull itself. "Or, if-"
"I'm not taking up the coin," I spat, continuing to gather my will. I concentrated harder, and the red glow on my staff faded back to white and the smoke coming off of it faded away.
"I wasn't going to offer," she said, annoyed. It took me off guard, but I managed to catch myself before I bled off too much energy in my surprise. "We've come through enough cycles for me to know better than to offer it casually. I was going to tell you that the other gifts I offer may be used freely. If you enjoy them, you may naturally come to wish for more when it becomes necessary, and then the coin may become your first choice. That is why I have offered my services, free of charge."
"Sure," I muttered. "I'll trust the devil to have my best interests at heart." Then I took a deep breath, and focused on the words. "Forzare minimus, ventas servitas…"
And the skull, with a continuous gust of wind underneath and the force to stabilize it, lifted slowly up, out, and over the balcony. Rather than try to land it perfectly on the other skull, I opted to just drop it slowly to the ground near the dinosaur's front.
I released the spell, but kept a firm hold of the magic, walking back down to the first floor. I moved to stand just next to where Butters was waiting. I took deep, slow breaths, setting the magic in my mind. First things first, the false skull was in my way.
I steeled myself, and readied to throw fire at the wires holding it suspended in the air.
Just a simple word, twice over.
The spell I've cast half a million times, no problem.
...Any second now…
"Having trouble, my host?" Lashiel asked, smug.
"Shut up, I'm fine." I spat, then swallowed the burst of anger and tried to get my focus back. Damned distracting fallen angel bitch.
A few more moments passed in near silence, with only Butters' and my breathing to interrupt it.
"In case you've forgotten, you have little time to waste, my host," Lashiel said, unconcerned. She appeared suddenly in a flowing white gown, standing on top of Sue's fake skull, right next to the left eye, and she waved a hand. A little bullseye appeared in the air right in front of the long cable I was aiming at. She appeared confused for a moment, tapping her chin, the suddenly brightened and snapped her finger. "Oh, I understand, you're trying to cast a spell of FIRE?"
The whole room burst into flames, all around me, and I screamed. I couldn't think, couldn't run in any direction. I collapsed in on myself, holding my knees close, and I screamed louder.
The flames vanished, and Butters was there, standing just in front of me. He looked like he wanted to crouch down next to me, but he wouldn't get closer. "Harry?" He asked, unsure of himself. "Is everything OK?"
"My apologies, my host," Lashiel held a hand to her chest, standing just next to Butters. She'd swapped outfits, and was now wearing a deep V-neck dress, and it shimmered gold and red, like a dancing little flame. "Before, when you were willing to work with me, I had tried to hold back your fear of fire. It seems that now, given your efforts to fight with me, rather than to accept my help, that I am unable to provide those protections any longer." She clicked her tongue a few times, shaking her head. "It is simply too bad. I suppose you must return to lighting your candles by another means, until you choose to trust me once more."
She vanished, and I spat obscenities and curses under my breath. Damn her. Damn her twice.
"I'm fine," I growled to Butters, then got my feet back under me and pushed myself up. "Just remembering a few troublesome problems somebody was covering up."
I took my staff back up off the ground, and pointed it at the bullseye, still floating where Lashiel had left it.
"Forzare!" I shouted, focusing my power into as thin a beam as I could manage. The power lanced through the cable, and instead of being cleanly cut in half, the cable's base was torn out of the ceiling. With two more shouts, two more cables were shot out, and the final cable holding up Sue's fake skull strained against gravity. The skull tilted, then fell off her spine and away, swinging free. At the bottom of the arc, it snapped as well, and the skull smashed into the ground, breaking in half. I took a moment to shudder. It reminded me of another skull I'd seen, but I put it out of my mind. I had work to do.
If what Evil Bob had said was true, then the only way to get close enough to the Dark Hollow to stop it was to be surrounded by necrotic energy. The energy of death. Now, so long as you weren't practicing on human corpses, necromancy was more of a legal gray area on the Council's list of no nos, rather than an executable offense. Or that's what I kept telling myself, at least.
I took in energy, but this time, I didn't just focus on the strength of my limbs, or on how much I was going to beat the crap out of those necromancers.
No, I thought back to that graveyard I'd fought Snakeboy in. I inhaled, imagining fresh dirt, stale grass, and the bodies in Butters' morgue. I remembered the clammy flesh of the zombies I'd fought, of the fresh, bloody throat wound of the recently-alive guard I'd fought off. I remembered the ghost army the Corpsetaker had called forth, the sickly feel of her black clouds of emptiness she had used against me when we'd first fought. All of these things, I accepted into myself.
Magic is about belief, and in believing you can do things, just as much as it is about your own skill and experiences. It's normally about life.
Not this spell. This spell tasted more empty.
On its own, that wouldn't be enough.
"Muerte de vida," I whispered, pulling the phrase from nowhere, Spain. "Muerte de vida. Muerte de vida."
Over and over, I chanted. And I added little bits of life into the energy, to fill that empty void, to give it substance even while the original had been focused on mere ghosts. I took that energy, and I shaped it to surround Sue's frame.
Ectoplasm from the Nevernever began to collect on the ancient dinosaur bones, shaping itself around her, slowly morphing into muscles, then skin and scales. On and on, I repeated the words, shaped the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of ectoplasm into working dinosaur.
I pointed down at Sue's skull, and the ectoplasm oozed around it. More glorped down from her neck, dripping until the connection was made, and I forced myself to keep my breathing steady as the deathly magic, my deathly magic, smoothly lifted it up onto her newly formed neck. More ectoplasm filled in under her chin, and slowly morphed into terrifyingly thick jaw muscles.
I shot Butters a look. He was so in awe of the transformation, he wasn't doing his part. Without stopping my own ritualistic chanting, I stomped my foot twice. The little M.E. jumped, then realised he'd forgotten, and quickly started stomping his feet, left and right, triggering the drum on his back to play a couple of deep notes. After a moment, he managed to get the beat study, and I felt the drum as it thrummed through my magic. I reached out to the noise, even as Sue formed, and I connected it to her dead, unbeating heart. Inside, I felt her pulse, matching the beat Butters was drumming for me.
Finally, the last step.
"Hunter of old, I summon thee," I ad-libbed; I'd forgotten to write up any lines for this part and just guessed at it. "Fury of the old world, I summon thee. Largest of lizards, I bid thee come forth!"
The spirit I was calling seemed to growl at me, like I'd said something wrong. I looked up at Sue, and my mouth fell open in shock.
Little plumes of feathers, like those on a baby chick, had started popping up on Sue's back. What the hell?
"Uh, largest of the old birds!" I quickly shouted. "I bid thee come forth!"
I called, and something had answered.
"ROOOOOAR!"
"It," I shouted, turning to my pale drummer, "is alive!"
Ten careful minutes later, we finally managed to climb up onto Sue's back, only slowing long enough to steal a saddle from another exhibit. The second floor had been extremely helpful, especially to actually mount the beast. So much so that I wondered how the heck we might have gotten up if we hadn't had access to it.
Another two minutes were spent searching around for a service entrance, doing our best not to crush the exhibits (and I was glad we managed not to have to smash our way out through the front doors, let me tell you), we finally managed to get ourselves outside.
From there, it was just a game of Follow The Dark And Ominous Clouds.
The streets were empty, and nothing stood in our way as Sue took to the blacktop with a vengeance. She couldn't corner to save several expensive sports cars (they really shouldn't have parked in those red zones), but on the straightaways she was every bit the terrifying hunter the world knew her to be. Without any observers, human or otherwise, it wasn't much of a challenge to get used to how she moved, parked traffic aside.
The evening was dark, with the power out, but we could still sort of see. I'm only mentioning that because those hummers had it coming. After that, I just bit the bullet and called a floodlight of magic into my pentacle necklace, shining it forward like a car's headlight.
Several more encounters with vehicles that seriously needed Mike's help to get moving again (why would anybody leave a crushed car on the street like that in the first place?) led us right to the ritual site, and wouldn't you know it, they had set up right in the middle of a leyline, one running through the University of Chicago. The sounds of battle overpowered the light scattering of rainfall, and we turned one final corner, bypassing the campus' parking lot to behold the magic flying in all its unholy glory.
The Corpsetaker was seated on a horse, the leg I'd taken from her conspicuously replaced with some kind of beast-like limb that looked like it belonged on a Loup-Garou. She was shouting something in another language, ordering forth a ghostly army of cavalry-soldiers, maybe from the civil war. Her Ghoul buddy, long dead, had been replaced with an enthralled Red vampire, the bat-like gargoyle features clear without its skin suit. The horsemen were clashing with some kind of stone golem figures, probably called up by that member of the White Council I'd neglected to get the name of.
Liver Spots was a massive figure all on his own, stamping around on anyone and anything close by, having apparently forgotten the massive club he held over one shoulder. I noted that in spite of Cowl's own efforts to order the madman around, the giant figure was doing just as much or more harm to his own side's forces, as opposed to the walls of force and mud the Wardens were holding him at bay with.
The whole area was seeded with figures of bone and blood, and with Grevane nowhere to be seen, that must have represented Cowl's own raised forces.
The spotlight I was holding winked out, and the field was awash in the Corpsetaker's darkness, cold and slimy all over, once more.
I reached down to Sue's side and Willed her toward the Corpsetaker, intent on ending that damned soul-sucking effect once and for all.
It was the only thing that got me out of the way of Cowl's blast.
"Uagh!" Butters screamed, and I turned and watched him tumble to the ground.
His torso disintegrated.
He was dead.
I snarled, and urged Sue forth. First the Corpsetaker, then Cowl was going to die.
Sue, without her heartbeat controlled by the huge drum Butters had been playing, tried to fight me, sought to eat whatever and whoever she wanted. She was a living battering ram, and if I fought her, I doubt I'd have any chance of succeeding in controlling her for much longer.
Furious, I poured more emptiness into her, connecting her heartbeat to my own, to the pounding sensation, and I felt it stealing away my heat and life, beat by beat. It wasn't going to matter for long, even if something in the back of my mind screamed that this was a bad idea.
Sue, now an extension of my Will more than ever before, surged into battle, and the Corpsetaker barely had time to blink in surprise before Sue ate her, horse and all. With her death, the unnatural darkness of the battlefield lifted, and something less like a sucking chest wound suffused the air around us. I turned my attention to Cowl, and with a grimace, he raised one hand and called out something like, "جدار العظام!"
The mass of skeletons exploded, and in their place, a wall of bones twenty feet high and I don't know how thick jumped up, separating Cowl from the rest of the fight.
Somebody screamed, managing to draw my attention to Liver Spots again. He had apparently remembered his club, and was taking huge swings at the little piece of the battlefield the Wardens were huddling around. I didn't know or care why they'd decided that little patch of land was worth fighting over, except that it meant they weren't focusing their efforts on actually winning. I kicked Sue's sides, urging her forward like the world's largest horse, and once more she answered me.
Liver Spots turned at Sue's ROAR, and he grinned a bloody grin, taking the bat in both hands and preparing a baseball swing. I hunkered low over Sue's back, ignoring the saddle's uncomfortable dig into my stomach. With a shout that jarred my ears half as badly as Sue's own, the massive man swung his bat into the dinosaur's teeth.
Force met force, and the club shattered alongside most of Sue's face; something, bone fragments or wood, bounced off my shoulder, nearly ripping my arm out of its socket.
The rest of Sue didn't stop just because she'd had her jaw broken.
Liver Spots shouted something unintelligible in frustration as Sue's bulk ran him down. He tripped, and that was all it took for Dinosaur Sue's massive clawed feet to get in range of his neck. She stepped on his chest, crushing it in passing, and faster than you'd think for a creature her size, her toes made a fountain of Liver Spots' throat.
If he had a death curse on his lips, it was ruined in the bloody mess his face became when she stomped on him again for good measure.
My head was pounding. I could barely keep things clear with all the blood in the air. It smelled like victory and dinner, and I was hungry.
I don't know if the Wardens were shouting something important at me, because I still had killing to do.
That tiny wall of bones was nothing before my power.
I turned and started picking up speed again, charging through the now-empty killing fields where the ghosts had either fled or departed and the skeletons had been repurposed as nothing more than an obstacle.
One that didn't hold up beyond a single word of power, added to my expanded bulk.
"FORZARE!" I roared, and my lower mass roared it with me.
We clashed with the wall of bones, and Cowl proved to be no Aurthor Langtry, Merlin of Wards, because his wall crumbled like it was made of sand. Just like sand and grit, being smashed with that much raw force turned the sharpened wall of death into a claymore mine, exploding outward to turn Cowl himself, and the campus building behind him, into little more than gelatin target dummies.
There wasn't a speck of the man who had killed Butters left.
Above us, the darkened clouds opened wide, and a rain of Death began to fall.
Below me, Sue hungered.
As above, so below.
I hunkered down, letting the rain pass by me to be leached up by the massive dinosaur, and at the urging of some small, almost forgotten part of my mind, I drew my heartbeat away from her own.
I was exhausted.
All I knew was that Sue didn't seem to mind me, on her back. Like a bird that might clean her crocodile teeth by eating the bits that would putrefy, she accepted my presence, ignoring me as she moved to eat Liver Spots' corpse.
I closed my eyes for a bit too long, under that heavy, heavy rain, and I ignored the cold long enough to catch a few winks of sleep. Just a few.
"Dresden, you lawbreaking shit, wake up, damn you!"
Morgan? Was that Morgan shouting at me?
"Five more minutes," I managed to mumble, then tried to rearrange myself on whatever uncomfortable mess I was laying on. That should piss him off.
"Ah, you are awake now," somebody else, a woman, called up. Blearily, I tried to open my eyes. They felt really crusted over, and I couldn't feel my arms. Or my legs. Or much of anything, now that I was thinking about it.
As my mind wasn't half as fuzzy as it might have been, that was seriously disturbing to realize.
My heart started pumping harder, and I took deep, panicked breaths. I couldn't move my limbs! I couldn't move!
It turned out to just be sleep paralysis, because a moment later, I shot up and started patting myself, looking for injuries. I even slapped myself in the face, then held my stomach with my good hand and used my less useful one to rub at my eyes. It hurt like I'd been laying on some kind of lump. I looked down when I could see, and sure enough, it was the front of a saddle, attached to something just a little fluffy.
I blinked.
I was riding on the back of a barely-feathered dinosaur.
She looked back at me, and I noted that she was missing the front half of her lower jaw, along with a whole pile of teeth. There was blood all over her face, and after I nodded to her, she turned back to the large, humanoid corpse she'd been eating.
Slowly, I turned to look down at Morgan. With him were a couple of white-faced kids, one of whom I recognized as Ramirez from some Council meetings.
"Uh, howdy there, Morgan," I called down. "Is my horse not allowed in this part of town?"
"You have five seconds to come down before I make you come down!" He shouted, and even from up here on top of a dinosaur, I believed him. You don't make second in command to the Wardens from collecting bottle caps. He might have just opened up the Earth until it swallowed the both of us.
"Uh, sure, one second." I leaned down over Sue, trying to ignore the pain in my legs from riding her around and the other pain in my stomach, and the- Ahem, trying to ignore how much I hurt all over. "Hey," I whispered to her, hand on her side, trying to channel just the tiniest of empty feelings her way. Or something. "Can I get down?"
With a growl, Sue lowered herself to the ground, leaving her face in the corpse. I carefully lifted my leg, allowing myself to collapse face first onto the ground in a move that was totally intentional. I picked myself up to the sound of bones cracking under a predator's teeth, thankful that I still felt kind of numb. If I hadn't, my intentional move might have hurt.
"How's things, Warden crew?" I asked them, pulling at my arms to try to stretch them and get some feeling back. "Did we win?"
"Perhaps you should explain first thing why you have brought this dinosaur to life, Mr. Dresden," the oldest woman there said quietly, not looking at my face. After a moment, I recognized her.
"Commander Luccio," I greeted her. I looked back at the huge wall of bones I now recalled smashing through, then back at her. Then back at the wall of bones again, because damn, that was way larger than I remembered it being from Sue's back. I pointed at it, or rather, behind it. "The ritual they were doing eat, or I mean, it ate life. Unless you have, or had, a necromantic working around you, to defend you from it? It was going to kill you. Rip your soul out for energy, or something."
I yawned, covering it with my gloved left hand.
"Besides, Sue's not human," I shrugged. "I mean, I'm not getting beheaded over this, am I?"
"I suppose that depends," The leader of the Wardens said, still quietly. "What did you do to control it?"
I opened my mouth to answer her, then closed it. I looked back to where Butters had fallen, and my heart sank. I closed my eyes and dropped my head. "Butters. He, uh, he had a drum," I motioned vaguely in his direction. "The drum beat controls the undead from a distance. Learned that from a nasty-" I paused, realizing I had no idea where Bob's skull was. "-from a nasty spirit," I continued. "No idea where it got to. After he… died," the word tasted like ash on my tongue. "After he died," I continued, "I… I guess I sort of possessed the dinosaur. Which isn't illegal, last I checked, the same way having a spirit animal isn't illegal. I think…" I blinked, looking up at Sue. She glanced back at me, then went back to eating. "I think I just turned a fifty million year old dinosaur into my spirit animal. Huh."
Ramirez, the hispanic looking kid, did a double take, looking back and forth between me and the dinosaur a couple times. "Madre de dios…" he whispered, then he starting chuckling, hysterically. "This! This is exactly the kind of thing they say about you, Dresden! Always crazy and powerful, and dangerous to the whole of the world!" He doubled over, probably working off the shock of adrenaline, or something. He was crying as much as laughing. If he'd only been laughing, I'd have probably punched him in the face. A man just died.
Hell's bells, so many people had died these last few days.
"Let her go, Dresden," Morgan growled at me. He pointed at the sun, just barely coming over the horizon. "The morning has come, and your spell has yet to dissipate. Even if your skirting of the laws is-"
Something shifted. I tilted my head, watching Morgan, frozen mid-word.
"It comes again, my Host," Lasciel's voice whispered.
"What comes again?" I asked her, but my mouth wasn't moving. Time had slowed down, but while my mind kept up, my body slowed down with it.
An arrow popped up, pointing to the edge of the battlefield, and I tried to follow it, my neck turning with agonizing slowness.
"You have succeeded, and in doing so, have reassured them that you will succeed again," she told me.
Finally, the arrow disappeared, and I saw Lasciel standing next to a young child.
It was Frisk.
Time resumed.
"Are you even listening to me-"
"Hold that thought," I ordered him, my voice brooking no argument. I don't know if he was stunned or what, but he didn't strike me down as I strode away toward the young child.
I actually heard their footsteps falling in line with my own as I walked. I had no wooden staff, so a staff of soldiers would have to suffice. Sure enough, every able bodied wizard had fallen in behind me, reading the mood in an instant.
I guess when I started taking things seriously, everybody else did, too.
"We won, kid," I told the child, keeping my voice steady. "This-" I gestured around, "is the cost of taking on the whole world. People die, and the survivors remember them, and they don't let it happen again. We all lost good people out there today. I lost-" I cut myself off, thinking of Murphy in her hospital bed. Of Butters. I sighed. "I lost friends, too."
"A hundred deaths don't equal the loss of even one of my own," Frisk's voice was layered, two voices speaking at once, and the Wardens behind me clutched their battle implements more firmly. "And I have lost a thousand. Most of Monster kind has fallen, because you weren't good enough."
I flinched.
"You promised me victory," Frisk's voices told me, holding up a shaking fist. "Is this what you call it?"
I didn't answer.
"It's hollow. Empty. Like every time I left them buried behind the barrier, only freeing myself."
"What do you want me to tell you, kid?" I asked, feeling as old as Ebenezar actually was. "If every victory was perfect, we'd have won the war by now."
The kid just shook his (her? their?) head. "That's not good enough."
"It's what we've got," I told Frisk. "It's all we've got."
Frisk frowned, deeply. "It's not good enough."
"My host!" Lasciel's voice cried out. "Kill them now, while you still can!"
"What…?" I asked.
The headache that followed threatened to split my mind into splinters, like Sue's jaw or Liver Spots' bat before me. I fell to my knees, feeling more than seeing the blasts of magic from the Wardens behind me launched at Frisk, and when I looked up, I watched the kid dance between the attacks like one of the most graceful of the Fae.
Like a black hole, the light around them was sucked in. Memories of past lives jumped forward, all crying out to be heard, and my eyes started to bleed. My nose felt wet, too.
Words, larger than life, appeared in front of Frisk, strange and alien, and they were burned into my mind.
CONTINUE _ RESET