The Dark Remains (76 page)

A pile of small, purple pills rested on his palm, each one marked by a tiny lightning bolt.

Travis frowned at the pills. They seemed wrong, somehow. Sinister. But what did it matter? Whatever they were, they would do what they had to. They had joined Alice first, but it was his turn now. The shadow poured in through the door, pressing against the little yellow light, hungry. Waiting.

Good night, Big Brother
.

’Night, Bug
.

He wasn’t even sad anymore as he lifted his hand and took all the pills at once into his mouth.

Don’t do this, Travis
.

He clenched his jaw, holding the pills against his tongue, as the voice spoke in his mind. It was a woman’s voice, smoky and familiar.

Don’t swallow them. If you do, it will win
.

Confusion filled him.
What will win?

The shadow. That’s why it brought you here
.

No, I came here
.

The woman’s voice was urgent. He felt a presence, like a green-gold light.
No, Travis, you didn’t. It brought you to this place, to your past. I know because it did the same thing to me, it tried to destroy me with my memories, but I … I resisted. You have to resist, too. If you don’t, then everything is lost, everything we’ve fought for
.

Travis still didn’t understand, but the voice seemed so familiar. It was impossible not to listen.

Spit them out, Travis
.

The voice was harder, a doctor giving orders. It was so hard to move. The pills had begun to melt into a bitter sludge on his tongue. He must have swallowed some of it, for a heaviness descended over him. The shadow pushed deeper into the room, eating the light.

Please, Travis
.

The voice was fading. Travis’s eyes started to droop shut. The shadow coiled a dark tendril around his neck, massaging his throat gently, insistently. Travis started to swallow.

Listen to me, Travis!
The voice seemed to call from far away.
I know what happened—I can see it all. And she would never have wanted you to do this. Alice loved you
.…

Travis’s eyes flew open.

Yes, why hadn’t he seen it? The voice was right. This is what
they
would have wanted, not Alice. She had forgiven him even before she shut her eyes; she would never have demanded such vengeance. The shadow strangled him, shoved itself against his mouth, trying to force him to swallow.

With a moan of pain, Travis turned his head and spat out the pills. They fell upon the bedspread in a glistening mass. The shadow rose above him, drawing in all its mass to fall back down on him and crush him with its dark weight.

Silver-green light burst into being, tearing the shadow to shreds and flinging them aside.

Travis looked up, into the light. His breath caught in his chest. A small, slight figure stood before him, arm outstretched. A stone rested on her hand. It was from this that the light welled forth.

“Alice?”

She smiled, displaying crooked teeth. “It’s me, Big Brother,” she said in that voice that always seemed too grown-up despite the slight lisp. “Here. I brought you
this.” She held up the Stone. Its surface was a mottled gray-green. Sinfathisar.

He stared at her. “But how …?”

She shrugged thin shoulders. “Beats me, Big Brother. But I think you need this, so I brought it to you. Okay?”

Travis reached out a trembling hand, took the Stone from her. “Okay.”

He tightened his fingers around the smooth surface of the Stone. Alice looked just as he remembered her, with her brown pigtails, her blue dress that matched her eyes.

“You can’t really be here, you know.”

Alice smiled again, but the expression was quizzical, and sad as well. She tilted her head to one side. “I love you, too, Travis.” Then she turned and walked through the door, vanishing into the dark beyond.

Travis started to get up, to go after her.

You can’t follow her, Travis
.

The voice was close once more, gentle in his mind. Fractured memories began to shine in his brain, and he fought to fit them together.

“Grace?” he whispered.

It’s me, Travis
.

“I have to go after her.”

But you can’t. She was never really here. None of this is here. I think I finally understand what it’s been doing. It’s creating the illusion as a way to bind you, as a way to bind all of us until it’s strong enough to consume us. You’ve got to use the Stone to stop it before it’s too late
.

“Use the Stone to stop what?”

The shadow of the past
.…

And at last he understood.

Oh, Grace—help me
.

For a moment he was horribly alone, suspended in the void between past and present. Then a cool and comforting presence drew near, and green-gold light encapsulated him.

Travis woke. This was no illusion.

He sprawled on the floor of the Etherion, a howling wind tearing at him, pelting his face with small stones. A gaping hole had been ripped into the blue dome high above, and in places the walls had collapsed inward. Even as he watched, a nearby row of marble columns bulged and burst outward. However, the rubble did not fall on him. Instead, the chunks of stone began to spiral in a circle thirty feet above his head, like water going down a drain. More chunks of stone moved round the Etherion, drawing closer with each pass to the dark spot that hovered at the very center.

In sharp, painful jabs to his mind, Travis remembered everything. He had followed Sareth, Durge, and Lirith through the gate, and they had found themselves on a crumbling balcony on the edge of the Etherion. A wind had roared around them, tugging violently, and they had gripped what was left of the railing to keep from being snatched into the air.

The demon was there, in the center of the Etherion, and it pulled at every piece of inert matter—marble, wood, cloth—drawing it inward to the center. Each time something reached the demon, there was a flash of light, and the object was no more. So Xemeth had been right. The demon was still weak, waiting for its food to come to it—just as Xemeth and the Scirathi had used the gate to bring the gods to it. But with each piece of matter it consumed, the demon would grow stronger.

It was only when Lirith screamed that Travis saw the sleeping figures that floated on their backs amid the rubble. So it was not only inert matter that was pulled toward the demon. Melia and Falken, Grace and Aryn, Beltan and Vani—all of them seemed to be asleep as they floated around the Etherion, moving closer to the demon with each pass.

There was no sign of Xemeth anywhere. Maybe he had escaped. Or maybe the demon had already consumed him. Certainly the thing had not been bound again. And from the looks of things, Travis had known there were only minutes until the demon consumed the others.

He had turned toward Sareth, Durge, and Lirith, and that was when he had seen them let go of the balcony and rise up into the air, their eyes closed. He had cried out, reaching for them, but he had been too slow. The three had started their inexorable, spiraling trek toward the demon. Then Travis had felt a heaviness come over him. Too weary to resist, he had let go of the railing, and the shadow had wrapped around him, guiding him toward the dark remembrances of the past.

“But you’re here now, Travis,” he said through clenched teeth.

Alice. Alice had helped him. And Grace.

He stood up, searching for the others. For a terrible moment he thought they were already gone. Then he saw them, floating dangerously near the center of the spiral, their bodies still rigid. Melia and Aryn were the closest. Another turn of the spiral and they would reach the demon. The others were not far behind. But where was Grace?

“Travis!”

The word was nearly lost in the roar of the wind and the groan of fracturing stone. Then he saw her on the other side of the Etherion, staggering over the cracked and heaving floor.

“Grace!” he shouted, taking a step toward her.

Now her voice spoke in his mind.
Hurry, Travis
.

Before he could answer, invisible hands tugged at him with terrible strength. Across the Etherion, Grace flung her arms around a column, but in the center there was nothing for Travis to grab. He felt his body grow terribly light; the toes of his boots skittered on the floor. Then came another tug, and he was rising into the air.

The Stone, Travis! You must use it
.

This time it was a different voice that spoke in his mind—the voice of an old friend.

I don’t understand, Jack
.

You must use Sinfathisar against the demon. The Stone can complete it
.

Travis was rising beneath the center of the spiral. There would be no slow roundabout for him. He was hurtling upward, straight toward the demon.

What do you mean, complete it?

Do quit thinking and start listening for a change, Travis
. Jack Graystone’s voice sounded fiercely in his mind. Travis could almost see the elderly antique dealer’s blazing blue eyes.
The Stone of Twilight cannot destroy, not like the demon. That’s not its power. The demon is a paradox, a thing of nothingness bound in rock. Sinfathisar can resolve that paradox—it can make the demon one thing or the other. Haven’t you learned by now that’s the essence of the Stone? Water to wine. Lead to gold. Darkness to light. Possibilities, Travis, that’s what it’s always been. All you have to do is choose what it shall be
.

Choose what it shall be. That was what the fairy had said, why it had suffered itself to be brought to Earth to give him Sinfathisar. But what was he supposed to choose?

The wind screamed past his ears. He could see the demon amid the rubble, could see with his new eyes past the haze of shadow that surrounded it. It had no shape, but was rather a blob that roiled like a drop of liquid metal. Except that was just a shell, the thing the sorcerers
had used to bind it to Eldh. Inside the shell it was one with the
morndari
, the ravenous spirits that had pursued him in the void between the worlds: a hungry pit of emptiness that would never, could never be filled no matter how much it consumed.

He was ten feet away.

Do it, Travis!

Five feet. A sinuous strand of darkness spun outward from the demon to reel him in. Travis gripped Sinfathisar in his right hand. It shone with fierce light.

But I don’t know how, Jack
.

Nonsense! Of course you know how. You are a runelord—I made you one myself. The Stone must obey your commands. Now do it!

There was no more time. The tendril reached Travis, coiled around him. He felt his being start to dissolve as everything good that he had ever been was stripped away, leaving only the bare, blackened bones of his darkest memories. Trying to wake up Alice, her skin like ice. Fleeing the Magician’s Attic as Jack faced the wraithlings alone. Realizing Max had betrayed him to Duratek.

Finally, he understood. That was how the demon did it, how it drew people to it, and how it finally consumed them. It dug through the layers of their lives, excavating the pits of their souls, exhuming all the worst moments of their lives. And with only such dark remains left to them, who would not wish to surrender to the void?

The black tendril tightened around him, scraping away the last bits of comfort he clung to, leaving only calcified relics of pain. The faded clapboards of the Illinois farmhouse the day he left it forever. The look of madness in Max’s fevered eyes as fire took him. Beltan lying motionless in a pool of blood beneath Castle Spardis. The bare patch of freshly turned earth he could see from his bedroom window.…

No
.

The word was barely a whisper in his mind, but he
hearkened to it as if it had been a shout. No, he wouldn’t let that be his only memory of her—the tiny form flung into the damp, worm-rich soil on that gray Illinois day. Her crooked smile, her elfin laughter, her small body snuggled in the crook of his lanky arm as they read a book. No matter what had happened afterward, he would not forget those things. He would not.

I love you, Big Brother
.

I love you too, Bug
.

It was so terribly hard. His fingers were nearly transparent; he was already fading away. With his last spark of will, Travis gripped Sinfathisar, touched it to the dark tendril of the demon, and made his choice.

“Be rock.”

It was less than a whisper. However, Jack’s voice spoke the words in his mind, and a hundred other voices echoed them in a resounding chorus: the voices of all the Runelords who ever had lived, speaking now as one through him.

BE ROCK!

Brilliant silver-green light blazed into being, burning through his hand. There was a shriek that was not a sound—a shrill
unsound
of agony that pierced his mind before it abruptly ended. The violent wind ceased.

Then, along with a distorted chunk of black stone and everything else in the Etherion, Travis fell toward the marble floor thirty feet below.

“Hold!” called out a clear voice of power.

Invisible hands seemed to grip Travis, stopping his descent. Below him, countless tons of stone crashed to the floor of the Etherion with shattering force, along with all
the other flotsam that had been caught in the demon’s spell. A sound like a hundred peals of thunder combined into one echoed off the remains of the blue dome above.

The thunder faded, and a few remaining pebbles skittered on the rubble below.

Drifting in midair, Travis craned his neck. He saw the others floating as well, their faces as stunned as his own. Lirith, Durge, and Sareth hovered in a knot to one side of Travis, while some distance in the other direction floated Aryn, Beltan, and Vani, as well as Falken and Melia. Melia was glowing a brilliant blue, her hands pressed to her temples, her face lined in concentration.

Panic rose in Travis’s throat—last he had seen Grace, she had been on the floor of the Etherion. Then he sighed as he saw her drifting not far beyond Melia, awake and alive. The force of the demon must have pulled her into the air just before the end.