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THE CATACLYSM
Nightingale began the telling, but Scarab took it over. The older woman was being too gentle, trying to downplay the horror of a story that was the essence of horror—as though she feared the warrior before her wouldn’t be able to bear it.
He bore it. He paled. His jaw clenched so tight that Scarab could hear the creak of bone, but he bore it.
She told him of the hubris of magi who had believed they could lay claim to the entire Continuum, and she told of the Faerers, and how the Stelians alone had opposed their journey. She told of the puncturing of the veils, how the chosen twelve had been taught to pierce the very fabric of existence, a substance so far beyond their ken that they might have been carrion birds pecking at the eyes of god.
And she told him what they had found on the far side of one far distant veil. And unleashed.
Nithilam, they named them, because the beasts had no language to name themselves, only hunger. Nithilamwas the ancient word for mayhem, and that is what they were.
There was no describing them. No one living had ever seen them, but Scarab felt their presence, less here than at home, but even now. They were always there. They never stopped being there. Pressing, leeching, gnawing.
Being Stelian meant going to sleep every night in a house where monsters ravened on the roof, trying to force their way in. But the roof was the sky. The veil, really, but it aligned with the sky, in the Far Isles where everything was either sea or sky, and so they spoke of it this simply: the skybleeds, the skyblooms. It sickens, it weakens, it fails. But it was the veil, made up of incalculable energies— sirithar—that the Stelians nurtured, guarded, and fed, every second of every day, with their own vitality.
Such was their duty. It was how they held the portal closed when the Faerers themselves had failed, and it was why their lives were shorter than those of their dissolute cousins to the north, who gave nothing, but only took from this world they had come to for sanctuary and then claimed by force.
Stelians bled energy to the veil that fools had damaged, to hold it against the mindless, battering force of the nithilam. The monsters. But they were greater than monsters, so vast and destructive that, to Scarab, only one word would do:
Gods.
Why else did such a word exist, if not to express an unseen immensity like this? As for the “godstars,” so long worshiped by her kind, to Scarab they were no more use than a bedtime story. What good were bright gods who only watched from afar while dark gods strove every moment to devour you?
She imagined the nithilamas immense black rooting things, and their great mouths—pulsing, cartilaginous suckers—fixed to the veil like glower eels to the flesh of a sea serpent washed up on a beach, pale belly to the sun, dire and dying while its parasites still pulsed. Still sucked. Frenzied at the end to drain every mortal drop.
She didn’t tell Akiva that. It was her own nightmare, what she saw when she closed her eyes in the darkness and felt the writhe of them against the veil. She only told him what the myth said, for in the myth was truth: There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.
And when she told him of Meliz, she saw the understanding sweep through him, and then the loss. It was an echo of what she’d seen a short time before, when Nightingale sent to him of Festival. Perhaps the older woman had meant to be kind. Or perhaps she was made blind by the grief of her own loss. It had surprised Scarab to be the one who saw what it did to Akiva, to have his mother given to him in a sending—his firstsending, and his mind would be scrambling to distance it from reality—and then taken away again so abruptly.
And now Meliz. Meliz, crown of the Continuum, garden of the great All. The home world of the seraphim, and all the grace of its hundred thousand years of civilization. She watched Akiva’s face as she simultaneously gave him the undreamable depths of his own history, the greatness of his ancestry, the glory of the seraphim of the First Age, and took it away. Meliz, first and last. Meliz, lost.
She reminded herself of what he was, and hardened herself to the waves of loss and sorrow working through him, each one seeming to rob something vital from him, leaving him… less than she had found him.
Was that what she wished? To diminish him? What didshe want with him? She wasn’t entirely sure. She had hunted him to kill him, but the answer, she knew now, was not that simple.
After the battle in the Adelphas, when she had scythed at life threads of attacking soldiers, gathering them for the begi
And maybe that was the answer. Perhaps it had been the end that Festival’s anankehad impelled her toward all along.
Scarab could wish her own ananketo be clearer on the matter.
On one matter, it was very clear. The nithilamwere her fate.
And she was theirs.
She was always aware of them, but it was when she lay down to sleep, and darkness arched above her, that she felt herself to be facing them across an expanse. Across a barrier, yes, but there had always been—even before there was any sane hope to support it—a… premonition of challenge. Of locking into place, might against might, and no more barrier. She their enemy, as they were hers.
She theirnightmare, as they were hers.
Scarab, scourge of the monster gods. Claimant to all the eaten worlds.
There still wasn’t any sanehope. Scarab saw that Nightingale sensed what was growing in her—not only the yorayabegun, but its purpose—and how she shrank from it in horror. And who wouldn’t?
The Stelians had built their life in this new era on the belief that the Cataclysm could not be defeated, but only held back. So they held it. They held it and died too young and without glory. Accepted a duty their forebears would have despised. Cowering and bleeding out their vitality, no thought given to meeting the enemy in battle because the enemy were world-devourers, and Stelians were no longer even warriors.
And because what they risked, if they failed, was… all that remained. Allthat remained. Eretz was the cork to a deluge of darkness that would meet no end. If the Stelians failed, every other world would fall.
None of this did she say to Akiva. By now she had told him everything but his own part in this story. It should have been easy for her to finish. Look what he has done.But her voice hid from her. Incongruously, faced with the bleakness she had caused in him, she flashed back to the way he’d smiled—at her but notat her—and she remembered the radiance that was in him then, and the joy, and how it had made her reel with discovery, like a novice introduced to the lexica, sensing, for the first time, an entire glittering, secret language. She’d seen it again in the bath cavern where he’d waited for… for what she had called, to Nightingale, “his appointment,” not wanting to use the real word for what it was. For what the lovely, blue-haired alien stoked in him, and the radiance that was born of it.
Akiva was in love.
It was a pity, but it wasn’t her problem. Next to the nithilam, it was as a footprint in ash, as fleeting, and as easily brushed away.
Her pause grew too long, and Nightingale, with great grace, tried to take the tale from her like a skein of yarn, to spin this final piece so that she would not have to.