Cross passed through curtains of dust and ash. He felt his consciousness as it was squeezed and compressed. Geothermic pressure closed in on him from all sides. His soul expanded like air, and pushed out through a crack in a dome of stars.
He saw riders in a dark vessel on a dark sea, and they sailed beneath a vast night sky. Fumes from a distant age turned to wraith-like unguent. He saw black moons and red tides. Cities of crumbling shale waited on the shore.
Cross stepped onto an ashen plain. Thick iron clouds pregnant with dark rain clung to the sky. The earth was dry and cracked.
Every step that he took kicked up gouts of bone dust. Dead white trees hung weeping in the distance like lost children.
There was no mark of his passage, no doorway by which he came, or through which he could return. He had appeared at the middle, in the heart of a pale nowhere. Ebon mists, the precursor to an approaching black storm, surrounded the plains, which Cross realized were finite. The ground ended at those mists. He stood on a wide island of floating stone.
The air was chill and dead. There was no wind or life in that place, whatever and wherever that place was. A deep peel of thunder shook the sky to its very edge.
Cross checked himself. Nothing had changed, save for the fact that he now carried a weapon that he hadn't before: a shimmering white sword. Its thin blade was almost invisible when he turned it, and when held flat it was semi-translucent and transformative. He held his hand on the other side of the blade and looked at it through the metal, and his hand wasn't just gauntleted when viewed that way, it was armored in heavy white plate, like he was a knight from a story. Everything came to life when viewed through the blade: the plains were vibrant with life instead of dead and ruined, and the sky was cerulean instead of black.
The sword was light and easy to yield. It was nothing like a machete or the lighter bone blade he'd been armed with in Krul, and yet Cross instinctively felt that he knew how to use the sword, as if he'd spent a lifetime training with it. The weapon was long and unusually balanced, and the grip was much longer than what he was used to, carved from bone and wrapped in linen so that the entire weapon took on a ghostly hue.
Something was intimately familiar about the sword. It was not a sword, not truly, but he couldn't determine what it really was.
He saw glimpses of another life. He saw an encampment in the mountains; banners and victory parades in an unknown country; pain and loss that belonged to someone else, but that stung like they were his own. He felt pain from past wounds that weren’t his.
What is this place?
“ It is called The Fade,” a woman said.
Until that point, Cross had thought he was alone.
She stood at the center of the plain, at once right next to him and yet miles distant. Her armor and the dress she wore over it were as white as the blade was. Her pale flesh was almost unnaturally so, and her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, with two braids bound in black metal clasps. Her penetrating eyes were snow white and almost blank, and she radiated an immense level of power, power that Cross was sure he would have sensed even without his spirit.
It was the same massive and primordial magic that Lucan had possessed, that he had gifted to the three mages.
The same power as that in the sword.
“ Avenger,” she said. She smiled and nodded at the blade. “It's called 'Avenger'.”
“ Who are you?”
“ I am the Woman in the Ice,” she replied.
“ That's not an answer,” Cross said. “I've seen your likeness before.”
“ True,” she nodded. “You serve my sister. The White Mother and I are siblings, after a fashion. We are avatars of the same power. As is that blade that you hold in your hands.”
Something growled through the sky.
“ The power that Lucan infused us with,” he said. Cross was suddenly aware of a wind that hadn’t been there before. It stank of fear, hopelessness and death. “ That power is in this sword now, isn't it?”
“ It IS the sword,” she corrected. “Here, in this place between the worlds, all power takes on a physical manifestation.”
The ground rumbled, and the sky darkened. Thick onyx clouds spread like spilled black milk.
“ What is that thing? The Dra'aalthakmar?”
“ You know its name.”
“ But that doesn't mean that I know what it is.”
Cross felt something loom over him. That presence hovered like a dark star.
“ It was her prisoner. She held it captive for eons. It is a great evil. You call that evil The Black.” As if in response to hearing its name, the sky trembled again. Bits of flaming rock fell like charnel rain. “It cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered, and weakened. That is what you must do.”
“ Wait a second,” Cross said. The rising wind intensified. He had to shout to be heard. “Why me?! I came here to find you…YOU'RE the one who's supposed to do this.”
“ All I can do,” she said sadly, “is grant you the tools to accomplish your task. Your female companions are the power. I am the vessel.” Her features faded, sucked into shadow. Charred sky swarmed over the plain like a horde of penumbral spiders. Everything crumbled. “You are the pilot.”
He falls through maelstroms of screaming smoke. His eyes cast out to churning charcoal seas filled with glaciers of black ice. He falls like a teardrop through a deep and empty sky. The world divides behind him and refolds. A scar is left in his wake.
He falls without a body. He falls outside of time.
In the distance, beyond the boundary of what is and the fathomless realm of what isn’t, forms press against the outer shell of the void. Their visages are impossible to comprehend. Each one of them is as vast as a midnight sky. Their eyes are black pits.
He is a sailor on the ebon sea. Churning smoky waters lap and bite at him. He reaches for the edge of the void, and finds it.
On the other side are the ashen plains of the Reach. Ice smokes into the air and bitter frost crunches beneath his feet. He steps onto snow that recoils, blackened, away from him. He sinks with every step.
He is not in his own body, nor is he in any body. This is a new vessel, as the Woman in the Ice had promised. Just as she is the trapped avatar of a greater power, he pilots the avatar of the Woman. He holds control of a spirit machination: a construct of ghosts.
Avenger weighs the air around him. It's every motion cleaves the skin of reality. Its blade is so keen even time bleeds at its touch.
He moves through the sky. He is an avatar made of blades. The world moves beneath and around him. He is out of synch, neither faster nor slower. He moves according to different rules, stands in the folds between moments. His footsteps leave smoking shadows on the land.
Ahead of him, on the opposite horizon, is the Sleeper. He has never seen it clearly before now. It is not all that different from him. It is cloaked in dripping darkness. Vast drifts of its ebon form fall away and melt the transitional realm. In the physical world, possibilities are melted by its passage. It carries with it inevitability, a finality.
They approach one another from opposite ends of the spectral sky. The Sleeper yields a blade every bit as black as Cross' is gleaming white.
Pure flames dance in the air between them. Every step they take is a thunderous echo. The world shakes and rattles at their passage. Time blisters and peels away.
The Sleeper is night condensed into humanoid form. Its skin is a rich ebon field. The blade in its hands cuts the air, and darkness bleeds out.
All around them, everything stops. The universe holds its breath.
Cross steps forward in his unbody, in his armor and weapons of light.
He knows this blade. Avenger extends and shifts. It is fire and light and an edge that can cut through worlds.
Their swords come together in battle.
The weapons clash at the center of the sky. Metal and light explode. The ring of ancient steel cracks the heavens like a hundred storms.
Very quickly, the battle turns to the Sleeper's favor. It is the stronger of the two. Its attacks come at him like an avalanche of dark blades. It is all he can do to deflect them.
He can't launch an attack back of his own; he is too busy defending himself.
Its eyes smoke with histories of destruction. He hears plaintive calls in every strike of its weapon: lost souls made to suffer their own end, again and again and again, with every blow landed by that blade.
He falls. His phantom form feels pain. Terror seizes his bodiless heart.
No.
He springs to his feet. He sends a hail of strikes at the Sleeper, and one of his thrusts lands a cut that gushes forth a rain of shadows instead of blood, a black waterfall of soil and soot.
His rapidly deteriorating mind goes back to the arena in Krul. He is taken back to the battles, to the merciless drive to win. He had a cause worth winning for: to keep his friend alive.
But his friend is dead. He failed.
Dillon is lost, just a body now. All of his simple hopes, his love for his sister and nephew, his sense of duty, his strange dice and his notebook, all gone. Dead and lost, because Cross couldn’t save him.
Graves, and Ramsey, and Stone and Cristena. And Snow. Snow, burning, screaming on the train.
He sees their faces in the clouds as he presses the attack. Their accusing looks give him strength. Steel resolve pumps through the avatar’s veins.
With every motion his comfort in the unbody grows. Rage courses through him like fire. He recalls the taste of victory in the arena, the animalistic drive to destroy his enemies.
He does so now. He smells weakness, sees an opening, and he takes advantage.
Sparks fall onto the Reach like lighting rain. Steel grinds steel into smoldering splinters. Slowly, inch by inch, the light drowns out the shadow.
The Sleeper is desperate. It lashes out with an off-balance strike that catches him off guard. Avenger is deflected aside, and the dark sword pushes forward, finds home.
He screams as the shadow blade pierces his flesh. Something inside of the lunar armor screams out in pain. Everything begins to unravel. He is down on the ground. The Sleeper towers over him. Its midnight blade rises as it prepares to deliver the killing strike.
He reaches deep inside, and finds that part of the avatar that is dying. It fades like a star. It must be released, and even as he ponders the notion he feels it surge forward, feels it call out with a martyr’s fury, a grim resolve. It leaps out of the avatar, and into Avenger.
The white blade rises just as the black blade falls. Dark metal shatters like broken glass. Shadows curl off into shards of lost midnight. Umbra energies part and steam as Avenger continues up, straightens, hones in on its target. He can practically smell the Sleeper’s void heart, buried deep in folds of night armor.
Avenger punches through shadow flesh and dark possibilities, slices away ebon mail and drills to the Sleeper's core. White metal pierces the black and ancient heart, and the Sleeper explodes. Shadow rains down. Dark geysers of energy scream into the heavens like bolts of hot grease.
The Sleeper melts like ice in the sun. It's unmouth rounds into a bodiless scream. Its pale moon eyes shrink, dim, and fade. The clarion roar of a thousand cursed souls escapes into the vast sky. He sees worlds unfold in the shadows of their passing: places that once were, places that might have been.
For a moment, he feels that he can reach out and grab those places, hold onto them, maybe keep them from fading.
But before he even realizes it, the moment is lost, and he is left alone as the dust of time drifts over his body and washes him away.
Cross woke back in the cave, on the safe side of the canyon. His body felt like he’d been trampled by horses. His chest was raw, and he belched up acrid smoke. Cross slowly sat up. Dull pain pushed against the inside of his skull.
After a time, Cross stood up. Both of his arms trembled. Avenger lay at his feet, smoking and broken. Most of the upper edge of the blade had cracked off, and those shards melted like ice right before his eyes. The hilt had also snapped off at the bottom, leaving an overall shorter weapon, jagged, and steaming with frost. Cross gently picked it up.
Dazed and dizzy, he looked around. He felt like he had just woken from a dream. The bodies of the Black Circle agents were still there, lifeless on the rock shelf next to the underground canyon.
He looked across the rift. The cleft in the rock had sealed.
He saw Black struggle to climb up the inside of the canyon wall by the light of her own arcane torch. Ekko was draped across her back, unmoving.
Cross lost breath for a moment.
“ Danica!”
She looked up, exhaustion on her face. Her eyes looked red and weary. By her expression, he knew that Ekko was in trouble.
He found a coil of rope on one of the fallen Black Circle agents and tossed an end down. Black secured it around Ekko's waist, and between her spirit's levitation abilities and Cross pulling the rope they managed to get both women back to the surface. They collapsed on the ground from exhaustion.
Black had a cut on her arm that bled through a rip in both her armored coat and the shirt underneath.
Ekko was listless, and quiet. Cross couldn't tell if she was about to Turn, or die. Her eyes wouldn’t stay open, and dark blood dribbled out of her nose and mouth.
“ We have to get her topside,” Black said. “Quickly.”
“ Where's Jennar?”
Black let something slip out of her pack and onto the ground. Cross saw with some surprise that it was a gloved human hand. “The rest of him got away. He slipped out in the confusion. This entire place almost tore itself apart. I thought we were all going to die.” Black paused, and she looked at Cross. “It's gone, isn't it?”
Cross nodded.
“ It’s gone. For now, at least.”
They carried Ekko back through the ice tunnels and up to the shattered portal as fast as they could. The way was treacherous thanks to the ice, and despite Ekko’s waif-like form, Cross and Black were so exhausted that even their spirits proved little help in getting their fallen companion topside.
It didn’t matter. She was dead well before they made it.
The icy chamber at the base of the Bone Tower was filled with gunsmoke and bodies. Kane, Cole and the soldiers had been attacked by more Black Circle grunts — a band of Gorgoloth armed with automatic weapons and rock hammers. Daye had been shot in the arm, but looked like he'd pull through.
Black went to Cole and embraced her. Cole held her in return, but Cross noticed that she was the one to break away, and she quickly moved to help the others.
Kane was covered in Gorgoloth blood. His visage was grim. He’d been watching the doorway when they appeared, his eyes set and sad. He seemed to know what he would see even before they’d emerged.
Regardless, when he saw Ekko, the strength seemed to drain out of him. He fell to his knees and bent over her body, and he hovered there as if held by puppeteer’s strings. Tears welled up in his eyes. He pressed his head against hers, and spoke to her quietly.
Kane stroked her hair in his hands, and softly kissed her forehead.
They left the lovers alone.
Outside, the world was held in the grip of a frozen wasteland. The air was bitter, cold and raw. Cross shivered the moment he stepped into the street.
He looked west, and saw no shadow there. They’d won.
Then why doesn’t it feel like it? he wondered. Where’s that sense of victory you’re supposed to get when you win a major battle? Where’s the sense that’s it over, that everything is going to be all right?
Cross felt none of that. He felt like he’d been thrust into the middle of something he hadn’t understood, and that he’d taken part in a battle that wasn’t really his.
He thought about his childhood. He thought about his sister and his mother, of a life when everything made sense. He’d never really had a period of his life like that, and he knew it. But he felt better believing that he had.
“ What’s that?” Black asked. He jumped at the sound of her voice. She stood just behind him, staring with him out at the frozen city. Her eyes were red, like she’d been crying.
“ What’s what?”
“ That sword.”
Cross had forgotten it was even in his hand. It felt light, like a shard of plastic, and the magnetic draw it had held before was gone. It was just a blade now, incredibly thin, something like a piece of frosted sea glass carved into the shape of a predator’s tooth. It was made of magic, but it bore no magic of its own.
“ Just something I’ll carry with me,” he said.
They stood quietly in the cold wind.
“ Lucan’s power,” Black said after a time. “It’s gone.” Cross just nodded. “So it’s over.”
“ I guess so,” he said. He looked at her. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.
Black smiled. And then, unbidden, her tears flowed.
“ Cole is leaving me,” she said quietly. “We’d just split up before…before Cradden took her. I was ready to let her go, but…I didn’t want anything to happen to her.” She wiped away her tears. “After all I’ve done for her…she’s still going to leave.” She straightened herself. “I’m…sorry, about Dillon…”
Cross didn’t know what to say. He remembered the rage and the fury he’d harbored towards her. He remembered wanting to kill her — vowing to kill her — once it was all over. He remembered why.
He’d always remember why.
But he looked into her face, and he saw the truth of her pain. So he just nodded.
“ I’m sorry, too,” he said.
They both stood there for a while, waiting for something else to happen. When nothing did, they gathered themselves and went back inside to find Kane.
Ekko was dead and gone. She did not Turn, as they’d feared she might. Lucan’s power had somehow prevented that as she’d passed: it granted her a peaceful death.
Kane sat quietly for a long time, even after Cross and Black came and found him. He was hunched in the corner, watching Ekko’s body like he expected it to rise.
“ So,” he eventually said in a cracked voice. “Did we win?”
Cross and Black exchanged a look.
“ Yeah,” Cross said.
Kane looked at Black.
“ Are you going to take me back to Black Scar?” he asked quietly.
Danica looked at the floor. The air was still, and cold. Every motion echoed.
“ No,” she said. “Even if I was going back, I wouldn’t take you.” She looked at him, and then at Cross. “I’m sorry,” she said. Cross was starting to get used to seeing her vulnerable. He didn’t like it.
They waited quietly. The approach of the Bloodhawk outside rattled the air and shook the icy walls. Kane stood, and threw a blanket over Ekko’s body.
“ So what now?” he asked.
Cross looked at the wall. He swore that he’d seen a spider there, crawling across the ice.
He’d already been entertaining the notion since he and Black had talked outside. Now, he knew he had to go through with it.
“ Well,” he said. “I take it you two don’t have any plans?”
“ Does learning to live with a price on your head count?” Black said grimly. She’d be marked for death for leaving the Revengers: they all knew that. Even if she hadn’t hijacked a prison airship, commandeered men without authorization and stolen prisoners, the Revengers didn’t take lightly to its former members running around outside of Black Scar when they knew so many of the prison’s secrets. They also weren’t bound to appreciate the strains that Black’s capture and the subsequent destruction of Krul would place on Revenger-Ebon Cities relations.
“ I’m booked,” Kane said with a straight face. He’d been a laborer, a prisoner, or a gladiator all of his life. Being an escaped inmate from both Krul and Black Scar wasn’t bound to help him make many easy friends. Like Black, he had nothing left, and nowhere else to go.
Cross looked at each of them in turn, and took a breath.
“ Come with me.”