Black Halo

Then flew.

She shrieked, shielding herself from the thousand paper wings as the room was filled with bone-white cranes and the sound of tiny wings flapping. In a great torrent, they flew into Bralston’s coat pocket, folding themselves neatly therein.

She kept her eyes closed, opening them only when she heard the larger wings flapping. Opening her eyes and seeing nothing standing at her balcony, she rushed to the edge and watched him sail over the rooftops of Cier’Djaal on the leather wings his coat had once been. And with each breath, he shrank until he wasn’t even bigger than her thumb.

And then, Bralston was gone.

Four

‘Pretty,’ he whispered.

‘ Hmm?’ the voice replied.

‘I was simply noting the beauty of it all,’ Lenk replied as he stared out over the vast, dreaming blue around him.

The ocean stretched out, engulfing him in a gaping, azure yawn. A yawn seemed fitting, Lenk decided, for the sheer uncaring nature of it all. It did not move, did not ripple, did not change as the sky did. There wasn’t a cloud to mar his perfect view of the sprawling underwater world.

The sky had betrayed him too many times. It had hidden his sun behind clouds and sullied his earth with rain. The sky was a spiteful, wicked thing of thunder and wind. The ocean didn’t care.

‘The ocean … it loves me,’ he whispered. His face contorted suddenly and his eyes went wide, not feeling the salt that should be stinging them. ‘What did I just say?’

‘ I wasn’t listening,’ the voice said.

‘No, I said the “ocean loves me.” What a deranged thing to say. I said the sky was spiteful, it betrayed me.’

‘ You only thought that.’

‘I thought you weren’t listening.’

‘ Not to your voice, no.’

‘Then …’ He clutched his head, not feeling his fingers on his skin. ‘It’s finally happened. I’ve gone insane.’

‘ You didn’t stop to think that when you realised you weren’t breathing?’

Lenk’s hands went to his throat. The panic that surged through him left his heartbeat oddly slow and his pulse standing still. He knew he should be terrified, should be thrashing and watching his screams drift to the surface in soundless bubbles. But, for all that he knew he should, drowning simply didn’t bother him.

But it should, he told himself. I should be afraid. But I’m not … I feel …

‘Peaceful.’

The voice, or rather voices, that finished his thoughts were not his own, but they were familiar to his ears. Far more familiar, he knew, than he would have ever liked. He recognised them, remembered them from his dreams and heard them every time his leg ached.

It would have seemed redundant to call the Deepshriek by name, even as it drifted out of the endless blue and into his vision. Three pairs of eyes stared at him. The pair of soulless black eyes affixed to the massive shark that served as the abomination’s body was simply u

‘It could always be this way, you know,’ the one with the copper hair said. ‘Drifting. Endless. Peace. Lay down your sword.’

‘I can’t,’ he replied.

‘Why do you want to kill us?’ the black-haired one asked, her lips a pout. ‘We merely wish to deliver the peace you feel now to all who have been lied to by the sky.’

‘It deceives,’ the red one hissed. ‘Tricks. You are told to pray to it, to give your troubles to the sky.’

‘It gives warmth,’ Lenk noticed, seeing the beams of sun that even now sought to reach him below. It was warm down here, far too warm for the ocean he had come to know these past weeks.

‘Fleeting. When you need it most, where is the light? What does the sky offer then?’ the black one sighed. ‘Rain, thunder, sorrows. How can you trust something that is so fickle? So changing?’

‘It lied to you,’ the red one growled.

‘It sent you down here,’ the black one snarled.

‘But we embrace you,’ they both replied in discordant harmony. ‘We give you peace. We give you …’

‘Endless blue,’ Lenk finished for them. He narrowed his eyes. ‘I’ve heard that before.’

‘Have you?’

‘From every one of your demon servants, yes.’

‘Demons?’

‘What else would you call them?’

‘Interesting question,’ the black one muttered.

‘Very interesting,’ the red one agreed. It looked to its counterpart. ‘What would you call Mother Deep’s children?’

‘Hellspawn,’ Lenk chimed in.

‘Dramatic, but a bit too vague,’ the red one said. ‘Deeplings?’

‘A tad too predictable,’ the black one replied. ‘What are they, after all? Creatures returned from whence they were so unjustly banished. Creatures from a place far beyond the understanding of mankind and his sky and earth.’

‘They had a word for such things,’ the red one said.

‘Ah, yes,’ the black one said.

‘Aeon,’ they both finished.

Lenk felt he should ask a question at that, but found that none in his head would slide into his throat. He felt the ocean begin to change around him, felt it abandon him as he began to fall, his head like a lead weight that dragged him farther below. Above, the Deepshriek became a halo, swimming in slow circles that shrank with every passing breath.

It was getting warm, he noted, incredibly so. His blood felt like it was boiling, his skull an oven for his mind to simmer thoughtfully in. Every breath came through a tightened throat: laboured, heavy, then impossible.

Breath. His eyes widened at the word. Can’t breathe. His throat tightened, heart pounded, pulse raced. Can’t breathe, can’t breathe!

‘What a pity,’ came another voice, one he did not recognise.

This one was deep, bass and shook the waters, changing them as it spoke. It drowned the sky, doused the sun with its laughter. It sent the waves roiling up to meet him.

He tilted his head, stared down into a pair of glimmering green eyes that he knew well. They stared up at him from above a smile that was entirely too big, between long ears that floated like feathery gills, as a slender, leather-clad hand reached up to beckon him down.

‘But where we must all go,’ she whispered, her voice making the sand beneath her shudder, ‘we do not sin with breath.’

His scream was silent. Her stare was vast. The sun died above. The ocean floor opened up, a great gaping yawn that callously swallowed him whole.

*

After so many times waking in screams and sweat, Lenk simply didn’t have the energy to do it this time, even when his eyes fluttered open and beheld the eight polished eyes that stared back at him through a thin sheet of silk. His scream withered and died in his chest, but the dredgespider loosed a frustrated hiss before leaping off of his chest and scurrying away into the surf.

He stared up at the sky through the gauzy webs the many-legged creature had blanketed him in. Air, he thought as he inhaled great gulps. He remembered air.

He remembered everything, he found, between the twitches of his eyes. He remembered the Deepshriek, what it had said. He remembered Kataria … had that been Kataria? He remembered the ocean, uncaring, and the darkness, consuming. That had all happened. Hadn’t it? Was it some temporary, trauma-induced madness? His head hurt; he had been struck in the wreck, he recalled.

The wreck … They had been wrecked, destroyed, cast to the bottom of the ocean.

But he was alive now. He breathed. He saw clouds moving in a deceitful sky. He felt treacherous sunlight on his skin. He was alive. He forced himself to rise.

The pain that racked him with every movement only served to confirm that he was still alive. Unless he had arrived in hell, anyway. He doubted that, though. The tome had told him of hell. It had mentioned nothing of warm, su