He is fugitive to a shadow world.
Nothing is constant. The sky bleeds red to dark to pale and back again. Clo uds like teeth grin down at him.
Day and night are indistinguishable. The sky is the same stain, the land the same matte darkness. Jagged hills and half-ruined structures protrude from the ground like scabs. T he world looks dipped in tar.
He roams like a carrion bird, p icking up discarded items, but little of what he finds is useful. He has n o need for food or water in that place. He is a living ghost.
The dank red sun is the only constant. The air reeks of caustic gases and decay. Iron clouds scar the sky. The dull light has pained his eyes for years.
Trees bend and twist into one another like drunken serpents. Great valleys rest in the middle of dry riverbeds. Dark water flows uphill, turgid and thick, like muddy oil. Massive skeletons litter the land, great tusked horns and shattered simian skulls, the remains of beasts from some lost age.
He’ s covered in black and red dust, a thin layer of soot that won’t come off his skin no matter how hard he tries. Every puddle and flow of water is tainted, filled with iron sediment and crumbling stone.
The world is covered in a film of grease and soot. Shadows cling to his flesh and the trees and the air he breathes. Flakes of it clog in his throat and nostrils.
He walks. Sometimes his curiosity is piqued by the landscape or its inhabitants, but he rarely stays in one place for very long.
He avoids contact with others. The creatures of the shadow world are dangerous.
He has covered hundreds of miles in his exile, and yet he has gotten nowhere. If there are boundaries to that dank reality he has yet to find them. Black deserts crumble into dead forests that give way to dry lakes. He hears the roar of a distant ocean, but he can never find it.
Every now and again he comes back to the crater, and to Shadowmere K eep. He always finds them in different areas than the last time.
He no longer knows his name. He forgot it long ago.
F or a time he thought the wastelands were just a prison of his mind. He feared he was still trapped with the woman from the keep (he can’t remember who she was, only that she’d betrayed him, and that she’d caused him pain). But the longer he roams the melting fields of rot and trudges his way across the broken earth the more he realizes he isn’ t the only prisoner t here.
Most of the other creatures are just mockeries of natural life. He sees bulls made of iron and birds that bleed acid, g iant reptiles wreathed in shadow vapor and lumbering hulks with oversized arms that drag their knuckles across the onyx soil. None of these creatures have discernible features: they are carved from shadow, ebon-skinned and pale- eyed form s that bleed off in to the darkness.
T here are humans, or at least things that are similar to humans. They travel in groups. They acknowledge each other, he and these natives, by keeping their distance. He has not deigned to approach them, and for their part they have left him alone. They seem to survive by staying together and keeping on the move. They hunt, out of some memory or instinct rather than a n actual need for sustenance.
Or maybe they do it out of cruelty, he thinks. This is a cruel land.
Sometimes he follows the natives from afar. Their groups vary from a few dozen to a thousand, mass migrations that ride shadow horses towards the blood horizon. He isn’t sure why he follows them — there is no esc ape from that place. If there was, those people wouldn’t be there. H e realizes this and breaks away, sets off in a different direction, or so he thinks. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell.
He moves a cross plains of dusk, t hrough petrified black forests and up shattered hills. The taste of metal sticks to the inside of his mouth. He breathes air that smells of coal and brimstone. He is so covered in dirt he can no longer recall the feel of his own skin.
He crosses bone bridges and walks through hollow and abandoned cities. He sees the skeletons of sailing ships. T oppled statue s of strange human-reptile hybrids litter the landscape.
Black clouds converge like stains. Trees, bone thin and sharp, prod the sky like knives.
He walks through fields of blood and oil. Dark nectar drips from skeletal branches. The spines of heavy brambles twist like daggers from the ground.
He walks until his legs are numb and his throat is raw. Shadows seep down to his pores. He drifts like a lost leaf, carried by a wind that smells of age and death.
S ometimes he feels the need to hunt.
He hides in deep forests filled with soot-drenched leaves, where black ash falls like charcoal rain. He skewers mangy shadow hounds and forest cats, skins them and cooks them, but he rarely eats their soiled flesh.
Sometimes instead of hunting, he is hunted.
Great beasts with canine skulls, pugnacious jaws and moon-slit eyes prowl th e black lands. There are Blood s h adows: avian and tentacled masses with bea ks and teeth and flailing limbs that rip open the landscape in their ravenous hunger. Snakes melt out of trees like burned trails of cinder. Pools of briny water camouflage the open maws of subterranean marauders.
H e i s forced to do battle with bizarre beasts, multi-limbed and black-bodied brutes like monstrous gorillas, lamprey-mouthed foxes, drooling two-dimensional humanoids with prehensile tongues.
H e proves more than capable of defend ing himself. He draws strength from the black-and-white blade in his possession. It make s his body stable and keeps him from being fully assimilated into the landscape.
H e tries to avoid contact with others, but sometimes it’ s inevitable. He stumbles upon people lost in the wastelands, people like himself. They are abandoned and adrift, afraid of the arcane natives, marooned from another time or reality. The se people are almost always mad. One refugee accuse s him of being a frog disguised as a man so he can lull people to their deaths. Another ru n s away from him so fast he kills himself tumbling down a dark gorge.
Once he comes across twins, blonde women not yet fully saturated by the taint of shadows. They take turns drinking from a vial of briny fluid that they found at the base of a dying tree, and they wager on which one of them will be the first to perish from the obviously poison substance. They wail and beg for him to jo in him, and their calls still ring in his ears long after he leaves them to their mad suicide.
The Whisperlands. That is the name of th e ebon- wracked lands, that bleak domain of shadow mud and endless dusk. He isn’t sure how he knows its name, but he does. Someone gave this grim reality that title long ago.
The Whisperlands. He has been there for so very long.
A cadre of warlocks rule s the Whisperlands. They, in turn, owe their allegiance to a powerful witch. They are just like him in that t hey have n’ t been fully corrupted by the soul-saturating substance of the realm, that black ash that drifts like debris from some perpetual explosion.
He ’ s never seen th e mages in person, but he sees evidence of their existence everywhere: t races of hex power left in the air, b lack fields blasted white, a reas of dark rock or red tide chiseled or cut with vorpal proficiency, t ainted soil, s moking ripples in the lands cape, c old iron shards and crystal and other effluvia of the arcane.
But the most telling sign of the mage’s existence are the whispers. He hears th ose voices in the wind, faint echo es like a distant memory. Sometimes they raise the hackles on the back of his soiled neck. I t’s difficult to tell how close they are. T hey scour the earth and poison the atmosphere with the force of their presence. They are legion, a horde of derelict ghosts fused together in a mongrel presence.
The warlocks hold a small army of these spirits at their command, mindless apparitions held captive, forced to shape and bend against their will. They are u nliving slaves tethered by ectoplasmic chains and cold iron bonds. He hears the pain behind their voices. The whispers sound together in an anthem of surrender, a dirge of loss. They sing to warn the black world of their fate.
He comes to understand the Whisperland ’ s geography, and by so doing he learns which areas are controlled by the mage warlords. The shadow world is not as random and as chaotic as he'd originally thought. There are patterns to the rippling dar k landscape. He learns where t he jagged hills melt into dark waters and where they turn back to solid gr ound again. He learns to anticipate the spread pattern of erratic fissures created by sporadic earthquakes.
The s ky is blood slate, petrified cloud and frozen dust. Everything appears burned or bleeding. The Whisperlands are so deeply and utterly black that treading the ground is like walking across a night sky.
He feels, sometimes, like the Whisperlands are sealed in a glass case, and that he is part of the gritty diorama held within.
H e stumbles across a black field littered with pale rocks and comes across something he doesn ’ t exp ect: a child, ungainly and hideous, with an enlarge d h ead and skin that is slowly being eaten away by va ricose veins of shadow. The child points at a distant mountain.
He can't be sure if either the child or the mountain is real.
That mountain, he suspects, belongs to the mages. He has n’t made any physical maps, but he doesn’t need to. He has committed the geography of the black lands to m emory, and he knows there is a region on the other side of the mountain that is empty on his mental diagram of the Whisperlands. That blank spot is a place he has not yet explore d.
That, he deduces, it is the mage’s home.
He’ s tempted to go to it, but he can’ t explain or understand why. They have n’t done any thing to him. He doubts they ’ re in any way responsible for his being trapped there. Likely they are trapped, as well, and th ey have chosen to band together rather than remain isolated.
He avoids the region. The mountain reminds him of something from his old life. Whatever it is, it’s painful, and he’ s glad the memory never really forms.
He walks on.
Time passes. He drifts through the ruins of cities. Some of them contain shadow people, while some are populated only by refuse. T he whispers are always there, a mournful sound like a forlorn wind. His boots crush stones into black dust. He smells burn ing fumes and c old smoke. His body grows weary, but it ’ s only a memory of fatigue.
With every step he becomes more of a shade. His skin has lost much of its natural color. His mind isn’t as focused as it once was: like the landscape, it become s darker and less distinct.
He travels through an ink stain. S ilhouettes follow him, the arcane tribals. Or maybe he follow s them.
The child.
It ’ s there, watching him. This time it isn’ t alone. A second child, a girl, is there with the boy. H er head is just as freakishly large, her eyes are bulging orbs. Filigrees of wet dust fall from their bodies. Their eyes and hands are barely traceable outlines of grey, vague underwater impressions. The bitter wind pulls away bits of t heir flesh and clothes.
Is that what I look like? Am I only a shade now?
He ’ s almost afraid to hold up his hand, but he does. It’ s hard for him to find it, to focus in the dust tempest. He watches bits fall away, pulled like sand into the funnel of sky.
The wind intensifies. His body is discorporating. He feels himself drift apart, but the sensation is surreal. H e feels so very, very old.
The shadow children motion. They want him to follow. H e does.
They walk to the remains of a city. Buildings lean in towards one another as if huddled against the cold. A low black wall surrounds thin black structures that have toppled like fallen matchsticks.
Dust flies across their path, and for a moment he worries the children have come apart and drift ed into the sky, but then he sees them again in the black windstorm. They move deliberately so as to keep him in sight. He follows them at a distance, his fingers near his blade.
He wonders if they ’ re associated with the mages, or if they are the mages.
The mages. I was trying to remember something about the mages.
They lead him through the remains of the crumbling city. Most of the buildings have collapsed. The earth underfoot is old clay. Wreckage lies everywhere, and he sees the lonely skeletons of the city’s long-lost inhabitants.
Up above, the clouds roil like a dark sea.
T he children enter one of the few standing structures. They pass through a crooked archway beneath what might have once been the leering face of a demonic lion, but now the stone is too dark for him to tell.
He hesitates. He feels fear like a lead weight.
The mages. I can’t remember. There’s something about them that I need to remember…something important.
Without another thought, he follows.
Steven Montano
Crown of Ash (Blood Skies, Book 4)
The inside of the tower was cold and dry. Cross knew who he was t he moment he set foot inside, even if he couldn’t remember much of anything else. The soot immediately started to flake off his skin. He felt his senses return, like he’d been stuck in a mental haze. His body shook from the cold, and he was able to move quickly again, unhindered by t he debris of the Whisperlands.
Cross had entered other structures in that strange world before, but this sense of clarity, this cleansing, had never before occurred. He’d never found himself shielded from the roar of the black w ind and the touch of the tainted world.
The inside of the tower looked like an abandoned outpost. Tattered grey flags dangled in air that reeked of age and tasted like soot. The floor was littered with drifts of cold ash and the charred remains of broken furniture.
Aside from the open doorway, which led to air so suffused with darkness it was like black gelatin, the only other way out of the stark room was a ricke ty wooden staircase leading up. He took it.
Each step rattled and creaked beneath his weight. M otes of dust floated down from the ceiling. The only light came from ambient worms clinging to the walls. For all Cross could tell they were long dead, but their bodies still shone with a phosphorescent shine that turned everything a shade of sick green.
He passed alcoves filled with the bones of unknown animals. Small slits in the outer walls grant ed vi ew of the black landscape.
His muscles tensed as he ascended the final few steps.
The upper floor of the tower was a single large room. The ceiling was drastically too high for the circumference of the chamber. The lightning worms were absent there, so only the barest details were visible in the light that spill ed in from the doorway behind him: shattered porcelain dolls, piles of shredded clothing, smoking ice strewn like shattered glass. The room was quiet, and all he heard was the tell-tale call of the stygian wind s.
The children waited for him. A boy and a girl, both dressed in rags. They weren ’ t as large as they’d been outside, where the ir appearance had been almost troglodytic, preposterous skulls on ridiculously small bodies. There in the tower they were much smaller, and while their flesh held an unnatural pallor they at least were the size of normal children, only with slightly enlarged eyes. T hey stood stone- still and stared at Cross as he stepped into the chamber.
They weren’ t alone.
A monstrous presence waited behind them, something t all and massive but entirely encased in pillars of roving darkness. He squinted to try and get a better look at the creature, but whatever it wa s it remained just out of sight.
“Hello,” the boy said. His voice was flat and emotionless. He moved robotically.
“Um…hello,” Cross said quietly. He took another step into the room, but he refused to wade too far in. The light behind him couldn’t penetrate the gloom. He heard something wet in the shadows, something sli thering. It coiled and tensed, and he smelled the musk of organic waste, vaguely sexual but putrid. “What is this place?”
“Shelter from the storm,” the girl said. H er voice was equally dead and distant. Neither of them moved an inch. Cross didn’t think they even breathed.
“Why am I here?” he asked.
“Only you can know that,” the boy said.
“We are not concerned with why you are here,” the girl said.
Cross stepped sideways, careful to walk slow and quiet.
“What are you concerned with?” he asked.
“How to leave,” they both said in tandem, their voices so effortlessly cued to the same frequency it sent shivers up his spine.
“Leave…this tower?”
“The Whisperlands,” they said, and then the boy continued to talk on his own. “I am a prisoner here, just like you. I have been here for a very long time.”
“What are you?” he asked. His fingers slid towards Soulrazor/ Avenger ’s grip. It had been some time since he’d remember the black-and-white sword’s name s. “Why are you talking to me through these…” He looked at the girl. It was difficult to see just how lifeless she was in the dark. “ Through these things… they sure as hell aren’t children. ”
“Your mind could not bear the sight of me,” she said.
“That’s a little judgmental, isn’t it?” he said with a nervous laugh.
I have no magic, he realized. He’ d wandered across the Whisperlands for what felt like decades, but in the mental mire caused by the black windscape the memory of his loss either hadn’t occurred to him, or else it simply hadn’t mattered. The blades might not have any of their arcane properties here, and I don’t have any other weapons. If the s e things want to kill me, I’m done.
“It is not a matter of judgmen t, or inclination,” the boy said.
“It is matter of what you can fathom,” the girl add ed. “And you cannot fathom me.”
“You’d be surprised,” Cross said grimly. “So what do you want from me?”
“You wish to escape,” the boy said. “That is plain.”
“I wish to help you,” the girl add ed. “But I cannot leave this place.”
“Of course,” Cross said with a nod.
“Do not doubt me,” the boy s aid. The voice was less human than before. It scratche d like steel and glass. The child ren ’s eyes we re black. Shadow veins bulged from their faces and ma de their false flesh paler. Their feet lift ed slightly off the ground.
T endrils attach ed them to the darkness at the back of the room. Flesh lines hooked into their backs, greasy appendages dripping slime in the rigid air. He couldn’t tell if the bodies were those of actual children or if they were just extensions, constructs. Flesh puppets.
“How can I not doubt you?” Cross asked quietly. He took a step back towards to the stairs. “You won’t show me what you are.”
There was n o answer. He felt the air breath e and tense.
And then it showed him.
Darkness peeled back. Tendrils of shadow ripped away like frightened snakes. The children’s eyes vanished into puddles of slime, a nd the bodies flattened like empty sacks a nd fell to the floor with sickening slumps.
The creature was made of soiled skin and shadow orifices. Its mountainous husk was the height of the room, a pulsating membrane of fish-like flesh and tinted veins. It had no visible limbs or appendages save the tentacle strands, which melted so seamlessly into its bulk they almost looked like shadows th emselves. The entire body had the semblance of a dark tree trunk, a living pillar of glistening black skin fused to the floor.
Cross’ s head throbbed as he look ed at the creature, not so much from the grotesquerie of its appearance as from the sheer force of its psychic presence.
Eidolos. Cross had heard of the dread race before, but only in rumor. They were one of the few creatures described in the Tome o f Scars he’ d never encountered firsthand. Once-allies (or slaves, or masters, depending on which story one believed) of the subterranean giants called the Cruj, the Eidolos were a bizarre earthen-organic race of rocks that had assumed flesh form and bonded with the arcane energies of the earth. The younger versions took on the form of humanoids, but the older they got, the more they evolved, and the less human they appeared. Possessed of vastly superior and alien intelligence s, the Eidolos were known for their incredible cruelty and dominant psychic powers, which, if the reports were correct, could literally crush a human’s mind if they spent too long in the creature’s proximity. Warlocks and witches were supposedly afforded some measure of resistance due to their arcane spirits. Which means I m ight be screwed.
His mind felt weighted down. H is limbs grew heavy. He wanted to sleep so he could erase the intense pain in his skull. His muscles ached and seemed to melt into the floor.
No. I’m stronger than this.
He didn’t remember drawing Avenger/Soulrazor, but it shook in his hand. Its stark power lifted him to his feet. It was a hybrid sword, a fus ion of black and white shards of once larger weapons born of opposing powers, the extractions or physical manifestations of the White Mother and The Black. Every time Cross had though t the weapon’s power spent, it reminded him that it was never wise to doubt the might of divine forces.
Unlight shone from the blade. Throbbing pulses of white and echoes of black shadow pulled away from the meteor steel. The tower shook.
The shadows warped, twisted and raced back to the far corners of the room. The darkness moved with such force Cross was nearly thrown back, but the subtle shield issued by the pulsing blade kept him safe.
You wanted me to show you my form, the Eidolos’ mountain of voices called. The words were less shaped than before, more erratic, l ike it had to learn how to form speech all over again.
The room returned to the same pit of darkness it had been when he’d entered. The child puppets remained on the floor, no longer needed. Cross could only barely make out the vaguest outline of the Eidolos’ s behemoth presence.
“Yes,” he said, not wishing to come to blows with the creature, even though his blade did seem to afford him a measure of protection. Even with the artifact held firmly in hand, his head still throbbed with pain. “Yes I did. Of course, y ou could have just told me what you were…”
And y ou could have accepted my word. I am a prisoner here, the same as you. But we can escape…provided you lend me your aid.
“You mean lend you my body,” Cross said. “ Because you can’t leave this tower.”
Yes.
“The mages,” he said. “Tell me about them.”
What would you have me tell?
“Are they in control here?”
Yes and no. The Shadow Lords are the most powerful beings in the Whisperlands, at least at the moment. But they are no more in control of this place than you or I.
“Are they the key to escaping?” Cross asked. He edged back towards the doorway and the light. He still felt like he hung at the edge of consciousness. Only the chill touch of the arcane blade kept him focused and awake.
They are. They have a way out.
“Who are they?” he asked.
Warlocks, led by a witch. They subjugate the denizens of this realm and craft them into armies. They take what they want.
“What is this place?” Cross asked. “ The Whisperlands…w hat is it, really?”
There is no knowing that, the Eidolos replies. You might call it hell. It is a place between worlds. Nothing is meant to exist here. It is refuse from The Black. We are shadow s. It is all we can ever be. But some of us remember what we were before… where we were before. We can escape our bonds, you and I. We can be more.
Cross ’s hands were numb with cold. He had no reason to trust this thing, this monstrous telepath. The Eidolos’ motives, their sense of reason, the very makeup of their utterly alien minds were well beyond his understanding.
But it still wanted to survive. That wa s a basic enough drive that almost any creature possess ed…which meant, Cross realized, that it was probably on the level.
He hoped his weapon shielded his mind from its powers. He didn’t like the notion of not even being able to mull things over without his thoughts being scanned.
The Eidolos waited patiently. The tower rattled from the force of the ebon wind. Cross wondered about the Shadow Lords, about how long they’d been stranded there…or how long the Eidolos had been stranded there. No one knew much of anything about the Whisperlands, but he’d learned that time passed differently there, that a year on earth might have been ten in that shadow oubliette.
He wondered how long he’d been there.
And then something else occurred to him.
The mages ha d a way out, the Eidolos said. That meant that maybe, just maybe, they c ould leave whenever they want ed to…and yet they we re still t here.
What are they doing here?
He ’ d always assumed the m ages were like he was: unwilling refugees stranded in the Whisperlands. He’d guessed that maybe they’d banded together to make the most of their new home, a place they quickly found they could subjugate and control. But years, maybe decades of madness had changed their minds, and now they longed for an escape. It all made sense.
And yet now he wondered if he was wrong.
W hat if they aren’t trapped here? What if they came here intentionally? What if they want something the Whisperlands ha s?
If the Eidolos read his thoughts, it paid them no mind, nor did it make answer to his query. It just waited, and the tower pulsed to the beat of the creature’s hollow heart.
“All right,” he said to the flesh pillar. “I’ll help you, because by doing so I’ll be helping myself.”
That is all that is asked, it responded in his mind.
He took a breath.
“What do I have to do?”