“Ah, the apocalypse,” he says. “You’d better make sure that stays averted. Close the hole, slayer, before more creatures slither out of it that you will have to kill before they eat your face.”
“Close the hole?” I ask, moving a step closer, despite the warning signs to keep back. “How?”
He smiles again and turns on his heel, twiddling with the coin again. “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” He stalks off and then vanishes. No puff of smoke, no magic, just simply walks off into nothingness.
“Great,” I mutter, lowering my weapon. “Close the fucking hole, slayer, but I’m not telling you how to do it,” I add, using a mocking tone that sounds absolutely nothing like his honey over melted chocolate voice.
A dark chuckle echoes around the graveyard, alerting me to the fact that he heard me.
I kick a loose stone, sending it skittering into the darkness. “Arsehole,” I mutter for good measure. My head is pounding, my ribs feel like they’ve been used forxylophone practice, and now I’ve got homework from a cryptic hot monster of an unknown variety.
Irritating doesn’t cover it.
There’s no point finishing my patrol now. Not with an open gateway to who-knows-where sitting in the middle of the cemetery. Turning on my heel, I trudge back towards the Blackfen crypt, my muddy trainers squelching a miserable rhythm on the wet grass. The fog clings to me, cold and damp, a miserable shroud for a miserable night.
Pushing open the crypt door, I scan the darkness, relieved to find it still empty of goddesses.
The fissure in the ground is still a gaping maw, but as I move further into the crypt, the runes on my blade light up again. This has never happened before tonight. Somehow, they recognise what this shitshow is.
Before I can form another thought, the blade shakes in my hand with a violent tremor, like a thing possessed. With a force that nearly makes me piss myself, it yanks my right hand over my left wrist, the cold steel pressing against the flesh peeking out from the sleeve of my hoodie. I swallow carefully, my throat clicking in the silence.
“Blood?” I murmur, voice barely a whisper in the dank crypt air.
It answers me with a quick slash downwards, and a sharp, stinging pain bites into my skin, hot and immediate.
“Fuck!” I hiss, more out of surprise than anything else. My blood, crimson-black in the wavering torchlight, wells up in fat beads before dripping from the fresh wound, falling in slow-motion droplets into the yawning blackness of the fissure. The moment the first drop hits, the fissure screams. It’s not an audible sound, but a high-pitched vibration that rattles my bones and makes the ancient dust on the sarcophagi dance like miniature sandstorms. Thejagged edges of the crack glow with a violent electric-blue light, pulling together like a wound being stitched by an invisible needle threading reality back together. My blade hums in my hand, the runes etched into the metal glowing so blindingly bright they sear my retinas, leaving ghost images when I blink. It’s drawing something from me, more than just blood. It’s siphoning my essence. A wave of bone-deep exhaustion hits me so hard my knees buckle like wet cardboard, and I have to brace myself against the cold stone wall to stay upright. I grit my teeth until my jaw aches, holding my wrist steady over the closing tear in reality, letting my lifeforce feed whatever dark, ancient magic this is, feeling it drain me like a parasite. With a final, deafening crack that sounds like the two worlds colliding, the stone floor seals itself. The light vanishes as if someone flipped a switch. The humming stops mid-note.
I’m left in the oppressive silence of the crypt, clutching my bleeding arm. The torch beam trembles in my hand. The floor is seamless, just old, dusty stone as if nothing had ever happened.
Inhaling deeply, I slowly exhale as the realisation hits me that I just used my blood, my mortal, yet slightly not quite all human blood, to close a hole in the ground that spat out a goddess after some madman’s ravings summoned her.
Why do I get the feeling this, along with the hot monster, is about to come back and bite me on my arse, good and proper?
Chapter 4
Dreven
Leaning against an old oak, I watch her stumble out of the crypt. “Good girl,” I murmur, seeing the blood dripping from her wrist. “Always blood.”
Her blood sings with a power she doesn’t understand. A faint, forgotten echo of a song I last heard centuries ago. It’s a dangerous melody in a vessel so fragile, and it smells of iron and old promises. She clutches the wound, her face a mask of exhaustion and fury, glaring at the silent crypt as if the stone itself has personally offended her.
The fire in her is amusing. A flickering candle fighting a hurricane, yet it refuses to be extinguished. She thinks she stabbed a goddess. She has no idea what she truly did, what she truly is.
The tear in reality is gone. The silence it leaves behind is far more satisfying than Aethel’s shrieking. Order, of a sort, is restored. For now. My part in this is played. I have nudged the piece; now I will watch where it lands.
I let the silver coin fall from my fingers, catching it in my palm before closing my fist around the worn metal. Theslayer starts trudging away, favouring her ribs, her shoulders slumped. But even in defeat, her head is up, scanning the darkness. A true predator.
This slayer is an anomaly. A variable I hadn’t accounted for. Her blood sealed a divine fissure that hasn’t been opened in more centuries than I can count. The ravings of a madman brought us forth to this mortal world we were cut off from so long ago, forced to watch as time passed us by, not able to cross over, even though we were a hair’s breadth from the veil. It has changed, and yet many things remain the same. The slayer is a mortal woman, not quite human, definitely not supernatural, one hundred per cent not a god. But that task, closing the maw that spat us back out, should have burned her to ash. Instead, she just looks exhausted and profoundly pissed off. She glances back at the crypt one last time, her senses still screaming, no doubt. She can’t see me, of course. Not unless I want her to. The shadows are my cloak, my skin, my kingdom.
I watch her trudge away, a solitary light against the gloom. My curiosity, a beast that has slept for centuries, stirs. I let the darkness claim me, dissolving into the ancient night to follow her home. I need to know more about Nyssa Vale, Slayer of Demons for this generation. I need to know more about why we are back, who and what that man was that summoned the Pantheon Realm to break the veil between our worlds.
But mainly, I need to know how it felt to kill Aethel. That goddess has been a blight on our existence since the dawn of our realm. She is the sole reason why we were locked up in the first place, but gods can’t kill gods.
It’s rule number one. Keeps the balance. I respect it, even though it pisses me off. I know more than one god I’d like to take down, but it remains an impossibility.
“Dre,” Voren says, appearing beside me and breathing in the clear, sharp air this realm has to offer. “Aethel is gone.”
“She is. I saw it happen.”
