City of Steel (Chaos Awakens Book 3) (38 page)

She bore down on the bone knife with all of her weight as they landed.  Xandrith’s right wrist dislocated trying to keep the blade from his chest, but there was nothing he could do.  He felt the knife clatter against his ribs as it slid upward between them and tore deep into his right lung.  The pain was horrible, and the shock was equally devastating.  Xandrith kicked at Kassa, trying to break her hold on him, but she refused to move.  She was adjusting her grip on the knife, getting ready to pull it out, but Xandrith punched her in the face with his good hand as hard as he could.  The hit knocked her back and gave him just enough room to build momentum and get to his feet, the bone knife hanging from his chest.  He took a breath and felt blood trickling into his lung.  That wasn’t good.  He staggered backwards into the Wellspring, his legs barely holding strong enough for him to keep standing. 

Suddenly Haley was in front of him, her axe in one hand.  She was standing between Xandrith and the puppet Kassa. 

“Don’t hurt him!”  She yelled, a fierce edge in her voice. 

“Haley, you can’t interfere with this.  I have the knife now.  I’ll be alright.”  Xandrith told her. 

“The knife is in your chest, Xan!”  Haley snapped, not turning back to him.  “That isn’t helping us.” 

A surge of cold swept through Xan and with it came a steady pulse of peculiar energy.  The area around the knife in his chest was beginning to tingle.  Xandrith wasn’t sure what was going on, but his legs felt stronger so he pushed himself to his feet.  As his hand lay flat against the Wellspring, another wave of power flowed into him, and with it came a sudden surge of profound knowledge.

The bone knife.   It had never been meant to be used to kill the troll god.  In fact, it probably couldn’t even do the job.  The knife was a conduit.  The other god-thing had known it would never be able to kill its own brother, but it had created a way that someone else might.  When Kassa had plunged the knife into Xan’s chest, she’d inadvertently connected him to the Wellspring the dead god had created.  He had locked the power away so his brother would have difficulty getting to it. Now that Shidsane was dead and unable to break the seals, Xandrith was open to the power and the troll god was not. 

Xandrith put a hand on Haley’s shoulder as more and more power began to flood through him.  A pulse of light flared around Xandrith. The Wellspring was making him increasingly powerful, and flooding his mind with knowledge and the terrifying prospects of what could be done with this new power. 

“Haley, go back to the room we were hiding in.”  Xandrith told her. 

She looked up at him in confusion, and then her mouth dropped open in shock. “Xan, your eyes are glowing.”

“It’s going to be alright.”  He told her and gave her a little press in the right direction.  He touched her mind with a small amount of the magic, just the lightest caress of reassurance.

Haley nodded, her eyes slackening.  She marched back to the side room, and Xandrith turned his attention on Kassa.  He could see the corruption riding in her, and the pool of existence that was once the woman he loved.  What was left of her mind was broken and fragile.  He didn’t have enough power or enough time to fix that yet, but he did have enough to set her free. 

Xandrith walked towards her and she drew a knife, ready to fight him again. He froze her in place with a single thought.  He stepped close to her and placed his hand on her head.  A pulse of power rippled through him and then through Kassa, and the darkness dispelled.  Her black eyes cleared up, fluttered, and then she collapsed to the ground. She breathed steadily, but was almost completely empty.  It pained Xandrith to see her that way, but he wasn’t finished. 

With a wave of his hand Xandrith dispelled the still fighting Templar across the pit, breaking their enchantments and rendering them unconscious.  That left only him and the god-thing.  It dropped the hood from its robes as he approached it. 
The god-thing was a four armed Cyclops, with a strangely wide mouth that seemed to take up far too much of its face. The assassin had seen its like before in the faces of the stone figures that had once guarded this creature’s long deceased brother. Apparently those things had been based on the gods that had created them, or at least based on the form the god-things had chosen to take in this world. Did they really have any definitive form? It had skin that was crystalline in nature and almost translucent, yet it was also textured like scales. Its eye was vast and red, streaked with a thousand subtle shades of the color that seemed to faintly glow as it observed the world. It was distinctly alien in every aspect. Even the way its limbs moved seemed strangely disjoined and unnatural, as though it had some form of musculature never meant for a real living thing. It was this obscene disregard for normal physicality that aided in the horror of its existence. By living it seemed to deny nature itself.

“You have stolen my power.” Its voice was deep and gravely, but emotionless. “I must set right what the other has broken. That which begins must end.”

Xandrith shook his head. “It isn’t our time.”

“It has been your time for millennia.  Only the interference of the other has kept this world whole.”  It heard Xandrith’s words, but it existed in a different place from Xandrith and humanity.  It couldn’t see the damage it had wrought, or that it intended to unleash, but only the unending cycle of creation and destruction.  There was a certain harmony to that process.  Xandrith could feel the pull on him to continue that cycle.  The magic of the Wellspring almost seemed to want to destroy as much as it wanted to create.  It was powerful and intoxicating.  The assassin could understand why the god-things had done all that they had done.   He knew that if he didn’t work quickly, he too would lose himself to the magnitude of this vast power and its strange will. 

“Now it is your time.”  Xandrith said quietly.  He held up a hand and placed it on the god-thing’s chest. 

“I am beyond time.”  It replied. 

Xandrith killed it the only way that it could be killed by something other than itself.  He unmade it.  He tore every piece of it from the fabric of reality, obliterating it so thoroughly that not even a residue of its existence would ever be found.  The power this took would have been enough to make and unmake the world several times over, and Xandrith spent it all in a matter of seconds.  In the end he stood alone, just himself, hand raised against nothing. 

The power was still strong within him.  He had two more things to do before he could let it go.  Two more things he had to do before he needed to give up the Wellspring before he became something worse than the troll god could have ever been.  He knew the darkness within himself, and it held far greater potential for evil than the troll god could have even dreamed of.  He worked quickly. 

A pulse of his will burned the trolls from the world.  He sent the fire after them to the very depths of the deepest hives and back to the surface.  Not a single one could be allowed to survive.  Their kind were poison, and humanity would never be safe as long as they lived.  The lack of effort that task took was terrifying to Xandrith, and yet it made his desire to hold onto the power grow even stronger.  With the Wellspring inside of him he could create a world of perfection and happiness that would fulfill every wish he’d ever held.  He could right the wrongs he’d committed and set all existence into harmony.

“No.”  Xandrith said the word aloud.  He had to stop himself.  Down that path lay the darkness he’d seen within himself.  One more task, and this one was harder.  He walked to Kassa and placed a hand on her brow. 

“I can’t return to myself without you.”  He said, and then he set his power to work.  She was broken, crushed, the parts of her mind that remained were damaged to the point that Xandrith wasn’t sure how he could repair it.  His power was vast, but the complexities of what had made her Kassa was far more so.  He pieced her back together, and wiped away the darkness that stained her mind. It had to include the things she’d done while she wasn’t Kassa.  When he was finished, he had something that might be her, but he wasn’t sure.  He wouldn’t know until she took control of her body again, and he couldn’t will that to happen. 

If he kept the Wellspring power longer, and something went wrong, he could try again. Xandrith cut that thought off immediately.  No.  He trickled a small amount of magic into himself to help him heal his chest wound, then he sat down next to Kassa’s body and tore the bone knife from his chest.

The pain of removing the knife was nothing compared to the pain of cutting himself off from the Wellspring. His hand shook on the hilt for a moment as he seriously contemplated shoving it back into his ribs. He took a few gasping breaths and then tossed the blade away from himself. He’d have to recover it later and dispose of it, but he couldn’t be around it yet. With it gone from his hand he let out a stuttering sigh and sank to the ground. He hurt everywhere, and he wondered if he could have given himself more power to heal his wounds faster. No, it was stupid to think about that. It was just another temptation of the power. He was suddenly too tired to care. He ran his fingers through Kassa’s hair, and waited for something to happen. She had to wake up. She had to.

Everything he’d done while under the influence of the Wellspring was slipping away from him.  He could remember the nature of his actions, but how he’d done it was vanishing from his mind. It was as though he’d opened his own memories only to find his thoughts in another language at the time.  He hoped whatever he’d done for Kassa had worked, that she’d be who she had been so long ago.

Epilogue: Shadows

Xandrith slipped quietly through the shadows, a ghost about an important task. The hallway he traveled down was so different in the dark, seething with the possibility of hidden menace. The silence of the night made it seem all the worse. After the sun fled the world for the night, everything became more sinister, even the quiet that he so enjoyed in the sunlight. As he wound his way through this strange world of shadow the assassin’s years of training took a firm hold.

A strange sound from ahead froze him in place for a moment.  Xandrith paused, counting to ten slowly in his head and waiting for it to repeat, but it didn’t.  He took a steadying breath and then proceeded again, this time more quickly but even more cautiously.  His feet made no noise as they passed over the floorboards.  He couldn’t risk making a sound.  He reached his destination and passed through the open doorway before him, scanning the shadows of the corners by instinct as he entered the new room. 

He stalked across the floor to the small cradle in the center of the room and peered down inside at the baby girl wrapped in a soft white blanket.  She lightly smacked her lips and stretched her small arms, but she didn’t stir any more than that. 

The tired father sighed in relief.  Since the baby had come home from the midwife’s house the night before, Xan had been unable to stop himself from checking on her constantly.  This was his fourth trip down the hall that night.  She was so small, and so breakable.  How was he ever going to get through her childhood?  It just wasn’t reasonable that children should be born so damned fragile. 

Xandrith slipped back out of the room as quietly as he’d come and returned to the bedroom. His movements were still soft and stealthy, but less consciously so.  He slid beneath the sheets and sank back on his pillow, staring up at the ceiling. 

“How was Lena?” Kassa asked from the other side of the bed, sounding tired but amused.

“She’s beautiful. Sleeping soundly.” Xandrith replied. “Too soundly. She should cry more so I don’t have to worry so much.”

Kassa chuckled.  “If she cried more you’d just worry about that too, Xand.  This is what being a father is about.  You’ll get used to it.” Xan smiled at the nickname. Kassa had come up with it on her own without any prompting from him, but it was still nice to hear her say it. It reminded him of the better parts of his childhood, and of Leahn Orthis, his first and only friend from his youth. He could remember that time now without all the pain, though he did feel a poignant heartache at knowing how she’d met her end.

“I don’t think I will.”  Xand replied bleakly. 

“You will.”  Kassa stated more firmly. 

“Hmmm.” Xandrith answered with a noncommittal grunt.

Kassa reached over from her side of the bed and gave Xan’s leg a firm squeeze. “Get some sleep while you can, love. The baby will be up and hungry soon, and tomorrow Haley, Merrick, and Tilda are coming over to meet her.”

“I’ll try.”  Xandrith replied, placing his hand over Kassa’s and giving it a squeeze.  In a matter of minutes Kassa had passed out again.  She’d been busy with Lena for the past several weeks since the baby’s birth.  The exhaustion was still weighing heavily upon her.  Xan was happy to have them both home, despite his constant state of worry.  He’d only wished he’d finished work on their home in time for the birth, but now that everything was done it was nice for them to have a place to call their own. 

He worried about Kassa a great deal. Most of the time she was fine, a wonderful and loving woman with bright eyes and an endless ability to love. Sometimes she was different. Occasionally she would go dark, her eyes slacken, and her expression becoming vacant and empty. Xandrith knew this was his fault. He’d wiped the blackness of the god-thing from her, but he’d failed in some small way to put her back together correctly. Most of the time she was the woman he loved, but sometimes she was broken and cold.  She never did anything harmful to herself or others when she got like this, though at times she would neglect to eat and take care of herself.  Xandrith wasn’t worried she would become dangerous, but he couldn’t get over the fact that she was like this because of him. 

Often times after an episode of darkness she would be morose for days, and was never able to explain it.  No matter what he did, he couldn’t help her out of those dark spells.  He knew that was a guilt he would live with for the rest of his life.  He only hoped that Lena wouldn’t be negatively affected by it as she grew up.  She deserved to have the Kassa that should have been, the mother that Kassa would normally be.  Xandrith put a hand on his wife’s shoulder.  She was alive.  She was mostly happy.  He couldn’t do any more.  Even as a god he hadn’t been able to get everything right, and it was really pointless to dwell on the dark times. He had a lot to be happy about, and he was looking forward to seeing the kids.