Gariath watched the water rush endlessly out, sweeping down the stairs and onto the battlefield below. His eyeridges furrowed. Theoretically, this would be a good time to say something pithy.
But at that moment, he caught a glimpse of them. The humans, the tall ones, carried out over the water and down it. Alive? Dead? Irrelevant. He had only one course of action and, thus, only one thing to say.
He turned to Mahalar and grunted.
“Hold your breath.”
Voices without words. Screams without substance. Agony unending. He could hear them as though they were drops of liquid dripping into his skull from the tiny gouges the crown’s spikes dug into the tender skin of his brow. He could hear pleas, wails, individual terrors blended into a swampy soup of pain that could not be shaken.
The Gonwa. Screaming. As their lives fed into his skull, down his throat, into his body.
He looked at his hands and saw them tensed and strong. He could feel the disease burning away, the weakness sweeping into the stones upon the crown and being carried to someone else.
Dreadaeleon felt strong. Impossibly strong.
And this would have come with such impossible relief had he been able to disregard the screaming.
“They won’t stop, will they?”
Sheraptus was still smiling when Dreadaeleon turned upon him. Despite the fact that his eyes were a pale white and his body was fragile and weak, the longface was still beaming as though nothing had changed.
“It was difficult for me to get used to, at first, too,” Sheraptus said as he picked himself up off the earth. “Eventually, you learn to block them out.”
Dreadaeleon found that hard to believe with how long and loud they screamed, with how clear and crystalline their pain was. He would have torn it from his head and cast it upon the ground if not for . . .
Damn it, old man, he cursed himself. Not this way. You’re not supposed to feel this. It’s heresy. It’s treason. It’s against every oath you took and every lesson you knew. It’s . . . it’s . . .
“It’s power,” Greenhair chimed, coming up alongside him. “The power to end all of it.” She swept her arm over the battlefield. “The power to do what no one else could do.”
“In all fairness, I tried to do it,” Sheraptus replied. “But the people in the sky had a different plan for me.”
“Starting with him,” Greenhair hissed, pointing a webbed finger at Sheraptus as she laid a hand on Dreadaeleon’s shoulder. “He tried to kill you. He defied the Sea Mother. He served darker masters than even the Kraken Queen.”
“Shut up,” Dreadaeleon replied, rubbing his eyes. “Just . . . let me think.”
It was hard to do so. The sound of the Gonwa’s pain did not fade. Every ounce of their life that flooded into him, burning away his sickness, filling his body with life, came accompanied by a scream to a god, a cry to a mother, a wail to a brother to save them.
“I wouldn’t take too long,” Sheraptus replied. “She might grow tired of you and arrange for someone else to kill you, as she did me.”
“Don’t listen to him,” Greenhair said.
“Yes, don’t listen to me, little moth. Don’t listen to the only one here who’s had dealings with that creature. Don’t listen to the man who knows what she’s about. She proclaims to want peace, bliss, for the Sea Mother or whatever. But all she’s interested in is the power. Same as any sensible creature, really. I can’t fault her.”
“Lorekeeper,” the siren said, pulling on his shoulder. “Ignore him. All that I have done has been to save this world, to preserve it from Ulbecetonth, to serve the will of the Gods.”
“Ah, that’s where you’re wrong.” Sheraptus held up a finger. “Of course, you claim to serve the Gods. You get others to do it for you, naturally, to use their power to serve them on you wield. A liar’s power. One I hadn’t really appreciated until everything was made clear to me by them.”
He pointed upward, to the bloodstained sky, and smiled. He drew in a breath, let it out as a cold cloud of frost.
“And so, I do name you a pretender to their power and their servitude, and so honor their distaste.”
Dreadaeleon saw it. The gesture of the hand, the twitch of the lips that heralded the spell. He saw the ice crystals form in the cloud of frost and become a jagged icicle. He saw it fly past him. He felt the warmth of her life spatter upon his face as it struck her squarely in the sternum and carried her to the ground, pinning her there. He saw it, before it had even happened, as it happened, after it happened.
And he did nothing.
Greenhair lay upon the sand, eyes wide and reflecting the cold blue chill of the icy spear pinning her to the earth. She reached out a hand to him, as if to beg him to pull her up, as if there weren’t a jagged chunk of ice in her chest. She gasped for air through a mouth dripping red.
“Why?” she gasped. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“She has a point.”
When Dreadaeleon whirled on him, his smile had faded. The longface simply looked at Dreadaeleon, all the boy’s wide-eyed, jaw-clenched shock, and blinked.
“What?”
“You killed her,” Dreadaeleon said.
“Sorry, have you not been paying attention? I kill lots of things.”
“She . . . she helped you, though. She was your ally. You treated with her and you killed her like . . .”
“So? She helped you and you watched her die. You have the crown, you could have stopped me.”
“I was confused, the screams, they’re just . . .”
“Just more screams. No different than any you have heard before. You could have stopped me. You could have saved her.”
And Dreadaeleon was left with nothing more than a silence and Greenhair’s blood crackling as it froze upon the ice.
“You’re ashamed,” Sheraptus observed. “Afraid, perhaps. I felt the same way.” Now a grin began to creep across his face, as though whatever he were about to say he had been dying to say for ages. “The awareness of it all, how insignificant it all is, and then you realize it’s not insignificant by design, but by perspective. It is looking down upon the crab and marveling at how tiny it is without realizing just how very tall you are next to it.
“To summate: she died because you no longer felt it worthwhile to save her. Not with what else you could do with that crown.”
“Magic wasn’t meant to be used that way.” He cringed as another chorus of screams echoed through his skull. “This way.”
“This is where you fail to understand. Power, magic, nethra: all the same. It’s there to be used. As a concept, it’s worthless. Gods are the same way. They do not sit there and wait to be assailed with the whining of weaklings. They wait for worthiness. They wait for me, little moth. I am alive because I use their strength and the chances they gave me.”
Dreadaeleon hadn’t even noticed the lightning crackling on the longface’s fingers until they were raised and thrust in his face.
“Just as that power is not yours to wield.”
By the time the longface spoke the word and sent the forked lightning from his fingers, all Dreadaeleon could muster was a feeble hand raised in defense. But in the flash that it took, he needed nothing more. He could feel the electricity enter his skin as though it belonged there, snaking into his body and disappearing into his fingertips with a few stray sparks. It crackled inside him, settling into his body like a new home.
And the two shared a look of shock, neither having expected that. But neither had the opportunity to dwell upon it.
The distant rumble grew to a roar. They turned and saw the wall of water rushing down from the staircase, becoming a colossal wave unto itself. It swept away the living and the dead, the screaming and the silent, the faithful and the faithless alike in a pitiless rush.
“Ah.” Sheraptus sighed. “I see.” He clicked his tongue. “They really are fickle, aren’t they? It seems a little unfair.”
With that, the longface folded his hands behind his back and walked. Slowly. Toward the water.
“What are you doing?” Dreadaeleon demanded. “You can’t—”
“Enough with the limitations, little moth,” Sheraptus said, waving a hand over his shoulder. “They saw fit to give you the crown and give me . . . this. I suspect you’ll find that limitations mean nothing to those willing to recognize their insignificance.”
“But where are you going?”
The water rushed up to meet him. Sheraptus had but enough time to look over his shoulder and smile.
“I suspect we’ll find out.”
And he disappeared beneath the flood.
Dreadaeleon should have dwelt on just how psychotic that was. Or on how he could have saved Greenhair. Or on the fate of his friends. But desperation lent clarity to thought. He drew in a breath, spoke the words, and released.
The wall of force formed nearly instantaneously. Nothing more than a flick of his wrist, a wave of his hand, and the air became rippling, solid, parting the colossal flood as easily as he would fold paper. And in brief, fleeting moments of clarity, he could but marvel at how effortless it all was. How easily the power flowed from him, how he felt nothing burning or breaking inside him to do it, how swiftly the water carried the blood and the bodies and the skeletons around him.
But only in brief, fleeting moments.
The rest of him was dedicated to trying not to listen to the screaming as he heard the Gonwa’s voices rise to shattering and fall silent, one by one, until their agony was a candle flame flickering in the wind.