The blade was falling, the muscles in my arm tight, my soul an inferno of untapped potential blazing bright and luminous in the dark of night. I felt like a dragon, like I'd swallowed a star and could taste the flames of a thousand distant worlds upon my tongue. It was so potent I could hear the heartbeat of every mage, witch, and human for miles around. I could hear Sara's soft, reedy breaths.
I was euphoric on the Absolian's power. As I'd breathed in what I'd thought to be my final breath, I'd held the spent remnants of the creature's aura—the essence of his spell—between my teeth, and I'd swallowed it on reflex.
It was akin to consuming a soul's mana. I shouldn't have been able to do it, as a Sin's broken soul required live mana to survive, not the spent mana infused inside a spell, but I ate the spell whole. Drank it like a drunkard guzzling fine wine. I was basking in the heady potential of an Absolian's deadly magic.
As I'd stood with electricity in my skin and fire in my bones, I'd realized my soul wasn't broken, which was why it'd been able to consume spent mana instead of live mana. My soul was...whole. Fully formed, and producing its own mana. My own mana. My own energy.
Sara had once tried to explain the difference between being remade and reborn. At the time, I hadn't given her words much credence, as I'd been preoccupied with my hunt of Balthazar and had passed her findings off as theoretically interesting, but worthless to my goal.
Now, her words made a certain sense, resonating in a way they hadn't before. One cannot become the same as they were before. You cannot remake what was broken. You must begin anew. When the Baal had first brought me back years ago, he'd done so in hopes of reviving an Absolian. He'd failed, and I'd been incomplete. Broken.
My shade, that sliver of my soul, had become human, and that human soul was made to be a Sin. It was made for this purpose, not for a higher one, or a lower one, and so I wasn't broken. I had not been hammered into a purpose I was not meant for. This was my rightful form now. I was whole.
I was the Sin of Pride.
Now, I was about to kill the last of my brothers.
The sword's poised edge grazed his neck—and a sudden, sweltering wave of darkness overcame the foyer, blinding me and the dazed Absolian. A large hand planted itself on my chest and shoved.
A cold not found in natural Terrestria ravaged the mages' lair, stealing through the wreckage and ruin as the shadows defied physical convention to slither across the floor and drape themselves from the splintered rafters. The darkness rolled like the waves in an untouchable abyss, and he appeared within the nothingness.
The Baal stood with a white scythe balanced against Aurelius' bare neck, holding the Absolian in place. It was not a vision, nor a trick of my mind. The bastard was here, in the flesh.
"What do you think you are doing?" I demanded of the King Below, fingers tightening about the sword's uneven handle. "How dare you—?!"
"Careful," the Baal whispered, pointing two straight fingers in my direction. A feeling like a large spike of ice piercing my side hit me, and a trickle of my overwhelming power was stolen away.
It was a warning. He could have me incapacitated in seconds.
The Baal was dressed in his usual military attire, the tails of his long coat caught in an unseen breeze of his own creation. Against the far wall, Cage was slumped and resting, his hands solidly crimson from the extensive runes he'd painted upon the floor.
My eyes narrowed. "He summoned you."
"In a way." The Baal leaned on his scythe, a permissive smile on his face as he bent nearer Aurelius' and his black talons clicked on the weapon's reflective grip. "I've come to collect a package."
I realized his meaning and snarled. "No!" I stomped a foot like a petulant child, but didn't dare approach. The Baal was not in a playful mood, as I could tell by the unforgiving slant of his brow and the wear beneath his burning eyes. "No! Move aside and let me—!"
"Kill him?" The King Below placed more pressure on the scythe's blade, and though the dull edge at the top was what touched the Absolian's flesh, I saw how Aurelius recoiled from the chilled metal. The scythe was not an ordinary weapon. "No, boy. I have plans for this one."
An unconscious need to defy the King Below must have shown on my face, because he increased the leeching effect of the spike lodged in my side, widening the area so more power escaped at a quicker rate. Sneering, I lowered my head, and the pressure abated.
"It took longer to open the way than I'd anticipated," Cage said, voice raspy with pain and exhaustion. He used the wall at his back to get up with tremendous difficulty, one of his hands held taut against his ribs. "Sorry about that, Vel."
"Your impertinence almost cost you your life, mage." The Baal's eyes took stock of the man's injuries with clinical objectivity as the black mage approached. Vel? For untold centuries, I'd not heard the Baal's name spoken, and now I heard it fall from a cynical mortal's lips without any ceremony or pomp? It couldn't be his full name, as that wasn't how Absolian monikers worked, but I was shocked all the same.
The Baal twisted his wrist and a torn shingle at his boot moved. From beneath it rose a colorless length of silk that I recognized as that ridiculous ribbon the black mage always kept about his neck. The ribbon hovered untouched between the King and Cage before the latter tentatively reached for it, seeming to ask for permission. He was visibly relieved to take hold of the thing and to wrap it about his throat once more.
"All this for what, Vel?" I taunted, unable to hold my tongue. The Baal's attention roved from Cage to me and the black mage shook his head, hard. "If Aurelius was what you wanted, why not retrieve him yourself?"
The scythe rose as the Baal's foot replaced its presence on Aurelius' throat, and if I hadn't leapt back from the blade's curve, my head would have rolled across the floor.
The King Below smiled, lips closed over his jagged teeth. "You needn't concern yourself with this longer. Is that not what you wanted all along? Freedom from responsibility? Your responsibility has ended, and I have what I wanted. Tend to the girl."
I turned my head for an instant, and the shadows dispersed in a burst of frigid wind. Aurelius screamed—and the sound was cut short. When I turned again, the Baal was gone.
I didn't envy my brother his fate.
Glaring at the suspicious black mage, I hurried across the rubble to where the women had taken cover in the melee. Cage retreated when Lucian began to make his way down the busted staircase with the help of one of his underlings. The man's shoulder was slumped, arm held at an odd angle, but he appeared otherwise hale and whole.
The witches able to move—namely Saule and a wounded Stavros—scattered when I approached. I ignored them as I knelt at Sara's side and passed my fingers across her neck, seeking the thrum of her pulse. It was thready, her skin chilled, and as I used my ability to dislocate her pain into myself, an answering sting emanated behind my eyes, sitting heavy upon my consciousness.
Gnashing teeth, I inhaled and washed my soul with what energy I retained from the Realm. Where I'd once had only a chilled, broken piece of myself now waited something different, something warmer and yet familiar. The room's temperature plunged and my flesh glowed, catching the breath of the onlookers as I pulled a tiny piece of my own soul away from the rest. I expected it to tear, to bleed, and was surprised it remained just as it was. Whole. Healed.
The nebulous scrap of my own being passed from my skin to hers, and I waited, immobile and uncaring of the terror around us, as my shadeborn took a shuddering breath and her eyelids fluttered open.
Her blue irises were steeped in bloody color for one anxious moment, then the red softened and dispersed like smoke in the wind. Her breathing eased, the pain in her head disappearing, and I lifted Sara into my arms as she fell into an exhausted slumber.
She would be fine when she woke up. Fine and alive.
"Mistress!"
Battered and bruised, Saule was crouched over Voronin, tearing bits of her own shirt in an effort to make lasting talismans or bandages. The hand the coven Mistress had braced across her belly was trembling and losing strength. From where I stood watching the tragedy unfold, I could smell the extent of the brutal injury beneath her red dress, and knew Voronin was not long for the world.
"Someone!" Saule shouted, tear-stricken and frantic, blood under her nails and in her hair. Stavros had been assisting but now sat back, resigned. The mages were preoccupied with their own wounded and dead, and thus didn't answer.
It was none of my business. I was free to walk away, as I had exactly what I wanted in my grasp—but if not for the miserable witchling now crying out for help, I wouldn't have made it to Itheria, and I wouldn't have successfully crossed the void. Sara wouldn't have been returned, and it was possible the witch wouldn't have lost as much as she had.
I didn't pause to further examine my own morality and its impact upon my behavior. I shifted Sara so she was held by one arm, her head lolling against my shoulder, and stepped forth. Saule moved as if to protect the dying woman and I granted her a withering look.
"Give me her hand."
Unsure but out of choices, Saule lifted Voronin's small hand and I leaned forward to grasp it, stealing the woman's pain. My nostrils flared and my bones ached, but the agony clouding the witch's mind lessened. She took a rattling breath, then another, and said, "Stavros."
The other Mistress stirred. "Yes?"
"Give...give her a blade. Act as witness."
"No!" Saule's voice was reduced to a terrified, repetitive shriek. "No! No! I refuse! It was never meant—I was not meant for this! It was never me! We need—!"
"We need time we do not have." Stavros produced a narrow dagger and forced it into Saule's unwilling palm.
"I cannot do this!"
"You must. For Baba Yaga. If you do not...where will your sisters go? Be strong, tutghik-iksk. You have grown so much. You have done so much for our kind and our coven. Do this now. There is no other way. Now, before it's too late."
Each new coven Mistress had to kill her predecessor, or the coven dispersed. If the bone witch wanted her coven to remain, there was only one option before her now.
Saule bawled, but there was nothing to do for Voronin now. The dagger's point was balanced on the Mistress's chest by the younger witch's shaking hand and I quietly urged her to lower it, to position it so she wouldn't have to fight through bone. It would have been simpler to slash the woman's throat, but I wasn't in a mood to torture the sobbing witch. If this eased the difficulty of her task, I would not interfere.
The dagger came down with a hard, fast push. Voronin's pain vanished after a final heartbeat, and I dropped the dead woman's hand.
Inconsolable, the bone witch wailed with tortured sorrow and Stavros fought to pull the woman away from the dead Baba Yaga witch. Saule was not an innocent woman. I'd seen her melt vampires with magic, and steal grimoires from other covens. At her heart, she was a scared homebody, a woman who enjoyed her garden, her shop, her tidy shelves, and the company of her extended family—but she was a homebody willing to employ violence in order to keep her life and the lives of those she cared about.
There was more to Saule than one would expect. One day, she might just impress me.
"Mistress Ozlin."
The necromancer raised her head when I addressed her with her new, proper title.
I met the woman's gaze and held it. "You and your coven have my gratitude. The Sin of Pride owes you a debt." I nodded once, allowing a dangerous heat to coil about my words as I stole what essence remained in the manor. Aurelius' assault left a vivid image in the place and it would burden this building for eternity. The Black Iris men should consider relocating. "Remember that debt."
Without another word, I left her there to her grief and the care of the Circe coven Mistress, directing my attention to the gaggle of black mages. None considered me as I passed through their ranks, their voices enshrouded by a confused deference. They'd seen history tonight. There weren't many mortals who saw the King Below and lived to remember him.
I reached Cage and didn't bother to ask the man a question. I curled my fist into the mage's collar and yanked him after us into the Realm, allowing the shadows and darkness to steal the syndicate and the city away. There was much unsettled there, but it was for others to understand and to sort out. I'd acted as an instrument of change, a catalyst, and I'd defeated the Absolian raining terror down upon the realm. Whatever came next was in the hands of the witches and mages.
My role in this story was complete. I was going home.