"Bloody Hell..." Vale breathed.
"Hell is right," I said in agreement.
Lightning shot from the half-sun, and an angry pulse emanated from it, dying the entire sky blood-red. Crimson beams of light ricocheted from growing purple thunderheads, smothering any remaining stars. Towers of smoke rose over After and joined the clouds above. Scores of distant screams filled the air as the city burned.
After's destroyer, the behemoth, let out another scream. It was like a colossal upside-down heart, pulsing and spasming atop a tangled thicket of enormous black arteries and veins. Vascular tentacles unwound from its throbbing dome of a body like whips and sliced apart skyscrapers as the beast set about destroying its own empire.
I ducked and covered my head when debris and shrapnel rained down. There came a roar like an approaching tsunami. Down the street from where we hid, buildings toppled and cars and hollows were crushed as a tentacle swept across the ground, coming straight for us.
"Shit! Run!" I pulled my two friends up and together we ran. The tentacle rapidly gained on us, chasing us away from the buried crystal.
"This way!" Vale shouted. She shoved Crow and I to the side, and we all fell into an opening in the ground; a crevasse carved by an earthquake. The tentacle slid by overhead, obliterating everything in its path. The rumble aboveground grew more and more distant by the second.
Then all I heard was whimpering. My eyes adjusted to the darkness. Next to me, Vale stood determined and strong, with hatred in her eyes as she glared upward at the tunnel entrance. As soon as the tentacle disappeared down the street, Crow offered his spear toward me. "Take this."
"Your spear?" I asked, taking the weapon from him.
"You need a weapon." He unloosed his two sickles from his waist and gave them an expert twirl in each hand. "I am familiar with these, too." He was already clambering out of the crevasse, following his crows. He shook dust from himself and pointed his sickles at the beast. "Come. We cannot stay."
Some innate part of my brain begged me to stay in the dark, out of sight, where it was safe. But Crow was right. We couldn't stay here. We had to wake the sun.
So Vale and I joined the blind ghost aboveground, and we ran. I could see the eyes of the behemoth peeking over the stops of skyscrapers, each one moving independently-all searching for one thing. One hollow.
A single pupil constricted as it locked onto me.
The beast roared, and the city shook.
Crow let out a growl. His eyes turned red. "Duck!" he hissed to Vale me. A whip of wind shot forth from him, striking the giant monster with the force of a hurricane. The top-heavy beast wavered, its tentacles writhing for balance, but to no avail. There was a thunderous rumble as the creature fell backward behind the high-rises. A twister surrounded the beast, keeping it trapped in a prison of wind.
Crow screamed and fell to his hands and knees. The winds weakened for only a second, but held strong.
Vale immediately helped him up. She had to yell over the sound of the whirlwind. "You should get belowground, mate!"
Crow shook his head, teeth bared. His lux-red eyes flared even more. "I will not rest until I avenge my people."
The flock of black birds joining us squawked an alarm call. The ground shook as another tentacle approached us. More skyscrapers fell.
Vale and I hauled our exhausted friend into a building, and we had to hightail up a flight of stairs to avoid the hissing shadows hiding inside. A wave of destruction screamed at our heels as Blackburne's tentacle swept through the building, decapitating all floors above us. And before us, the floor ended at a sheer stop where the entire face of the building had long sloughed away.
"Jump!" I shouted.
There were a few tense seconds when I grappled nothing but air. And there was a single second where I believed, to my horror, that I'd jumped too short.
But to my relief, my fingers found purchase on the ledge of the next building over, and I scrambled upward to safety, helping Vale pull Crow up with us. He collapsed on the ground amongst gargoyles, motionless and weak. The winds subsided.
Far away, across the burning city sprawl and through a cloud of rising ashes, I saw the red glow of the buried half of After sun. The glow grew dimmer as more and more debris buried it deeper.
And in between the sun and me, the behemoth rose once more. It toppled over skyscrapers and scaled entire blocks with each stride.
"He's coming for us," I said to my remaining friends through wisps of my windblown hair.
"Good," said Vale, her face grim. "That'll keep him away from everyone else."
Crow struggled to stand, growling, "Umāmu..." Then he doubled over, agonized and weak. Frost creeped across everything in his immediate vicinity.
"Come on," I told him. And I had to swallow a lump in my throat before continuing. "We're not losing anyone else."
Vale's hand that held her machete twitched, making her blade flicker as if it thirsted for blood. But before we could take another step, there was a terrible reverberating crack below us. The tower we scaled trembled and creaked. I cried out when it listed to the side, crumbling beneath us. We screamed as we slid down the sloping ledge.
Suddenly, there was no ground beneath me.
But a hand caught me by the wrist. I looked up with tearing eyes at Vale, who strained from the ledge, clinging on to a metal gargoyle with one hand and me with the other. Crow hung limply below me, hanging on to my other hand. I felt like I was about to be torn in two.
A many-eyed mass of flesh writhed hungrily stories beneath us. It throttled the building we desperately clung to some more.
I felt Crow's grip slacken. I held onto him tighter, digging my fingernails into his wrist. "Agh! Hang on!" I said to him through clenched teeth. "Don't let go!"
"You're slipping!" Vale screamed. "I don't know how much longer I can hold on!" Terror glistened in her eyes as her grip on the gargoyle slackened from our combined weight.
Crows flew around us, screaming in panic, but there was nothing they could do. There was nothing any of us could do.
The behemoth let out a rumble, but it wasn't a roar. It was more like the satisfied purr of a cat with prey caught in its claws.
"Skye."
Grunting from exertion, I turned my head to Crow, who gazed up at me as if he could see me. "Will you avenge Aḫ-ḫur?" he asked me. "Will you save After?"
Why did he sound so calm?
"I-Agh!" I dug my nails deeper into his branded skin, but he continued to slide. "What are you talking about?"
"Answer me."
Vale and I both yelped as the building we clung to trembled again. We all slipped further from the ledge. "Yes!" I screamed at Crow. "Yes, I'm going to save After!"
"Then I will leave you to it."
He let go of my hand. I gasped and grasped him tighter. "Whatever you're thinking about doing, stop!" I said to him. "I'm not letting go!"
"I know." The man just offered his crooked smile at me while he dangled. "Crows never forget a kindness, remember?"
With his free hand, he raised his remaining sickle and held it against the arm I hung onto, pressing his skin against the inside curve of the sickle, just below his brand. Then, in one quick movement, he severed his own arm.
And Crow fell.
"No!" I screamed, loud enough to taste blood in my throat.
Every crow in the air dove from the sky, following Crow the whole way down. Crow landed atop the behemoth and rolled to his feet. He held his sickle in his underarm so he could whistle with his one remaining hand. At that, every single one of the beast's eyes swiveled to glare at the hollow. "Over here, umāmu!" said Crow. Then he grabbed the handle of his sickle and twirled it skillfully, setting about slicing open every eye, following the caws of his crows.
The blinded beast shrieked. More tentacles unwound from the quivering mass of flesh of its body. They swept across its own flesh that now glistened with fluid that leaked from its ruined eyes. Crow laughed the entire time, only growing more manic as he carved into the beast's final eye. He didn't stop laughing even when a tentacle finally wrapped around him. The behemoth crushed the king of Aḫ-ḫur then tossed the broken ghost into the smoldering ruins of After.
I barely registered it when Vale pulled me upward and practically carried me as the building collapsed around us.
Rubble fell on us, blocking out the red sky.
But we were safe and out of the behemoth's reach, for now. At least there was room for us to maneuver around in the little pocket of rubble we found ourselves in. I patted myself, finding everything intact. "We made it?" I said.
My breath came out as a little white cloud when I spoke. Cold air coaxed crawling goosebumps across my skin. Next to me, Vale pulled a shard of lux-coated shrapnel from her chest. Even more cold air filled the chamber.
Panic made my heart pound, shooting even more ice through my veins. My friend slumped against me, muttering some stupid nonsense about leaving her behind. But, as always, I was such a terrible listener. Now it was my turn to carry her to safety.
I heaved rubble out of the way, and suddenly I could see the red sky once more. And in front of us, across a field of flattened buildings, I could see the fading glow of the half-sun.
We were so close.
"Skye..."
I adjusted her weight on my shoulder as I dragged her across the ruined expanse. "It's okay. You're okay. Just...just rest. We're almost there."
Almost there.
"Yeah..." Vale said, voice quiet and weak. "Just need a minute."
I cried out when she fell from me into the debris. In an instant, I pressed my palms to her wound, trying to hold it closed. But no matter what, Vale wasn't healing. She didn't move. Her half-closed eyes just stared upward at rising ashes through her lashes. Her skin was so cold.
"You know...I never wanted Webb to stick around with me back when I first found him...But he was like a leech." Her voice was so quiet. I had to strain to hear her words over the pained yowling of a blind monster in the distance. "I should've died alone in that fire. Christa would've been happier that way. And she'd still be existing..."
Her last words were little more than a tender sigh. I sobbed at her side. Was all this worth it? Did anything we did even matter? Blackburne continued his siege of his own city, crushing every hollow-and every memory of After. He'd build another empire, and we'd all go forgotten like Aḫ-ḫur without even shadows seared into the walls for any future ghost to find and ponder over.
Webb and Crow were gone-dead because of me. And soon, we would all be gone and no one would remember any of us. And our absence would forever go unnoticed. I wondered then, did it even count as a loss if there would be no one to perceive it?
I gathered my one remaining friend in my arms, and Vale leaned into me, too weak to even move. She kept staring at the red void above us.
"The sky really is beautiful," she whispered. "Glad I got to see it." Then she smiled.
I couldn't think of anything to say in return, not that my unceasing sobs would let me get a word out, anyway. So I just shut my eyes and kissed her as she stilled.
When I opened my eyes again, the light left Vale's eyes, replaced by a gray film.
I left her to rest, and, completely gutted, I made the last leg of my trek alone, limping beneath the bent and tangled heap of metal that used to be Vale's tower. So long ago, it had just been the two of us up there, laughing high above After.
Heat filled me because Blackburne had watched us the entire time.
A single tentacle slithered across the ruins in front of me like an anaconda, blocking my way. It lifted its tapering end and pointed it at me-right in front of my face-like a worm. It turned out Crow had blinded all of the beast's eyes save for one. A single orb blinked open at the tip. A scalding red pupil ignited in a coal black iris.
I raised Crow's spear and cut through the air, aiming to sever the eye stalk that stood between me and the sun.
The pupil bobbed and weaved, dodging all of my blows. I pulled my spear back, and with a scream, I thrust it forward, stabbing the eye right through the pupil. The appendage squealed as fluid bubbled around the point of the spear embedded in it. I relished that sound.
Everyone was gone. I still fought tooth and claw.
But it wasn't enough.
Another tentacle punched through my chest from behind. I dropped Crow's spear as my gaze fell to the gaping void cut into my chest. Coldness spilled from that black hole. Everything I was spilled onto the dirt.
He'd gotten me right through the heart, my one last shred of humanity.
Everything went silent and cold. My legs buckled beneath me.
I hit the ground with a morbid finality. I watched my own ashes trickle upward into the red void above. The half-sun still shined over After. But, for me, the Dark had returned.
Memories as heavy as a stone
Cain was angry
And he moved in a blood red fury
So now one brother's dead
And one brother's born
There's a ghost in the mirror
I'm afraid more than ever
My feet have led me straight into my grave
Oh Lord have you walked away from me?