Walestone raised his arms and spread them wide, gazing out over at the multitudes of ghosts, who were roiling and writhing with pent-up agitation. He bellowed at them, his voice somehow amplified and causing ripples across the rivers,The doors have been flung open! Your fury may now be spent! Fly free, my friends!As the ghosts stirred, staring skyward, he hissed,Make it hurt.
An earsplitting crash sounded from above the clouds, which parted to reveal a broadening fissure in a shape loosely reminiscent of a lightning bolt. As it extended, like a scar being pulled at the edges, Roy made out the skylight of the Orphic Basilica, through which amassed thunderclouds tossed and boiled with preternatural quickness. From what he could see, this tear in the sky seemed to be directly above where Percival had plunged Valusvar through the floorboards.
“Back! Back!” Roy screamed, scrambling away from the intersecting rivers, hauling Percival along with him.
Percival complied, twisting and burying his head into Roy’s shoulder.
Then chaos took the reins.
* * *
The ghosts poured out of purgatory, drawn by some gravitational force created by the rip between worlds, then shot through the fissure in the clouds and surged out into the Orphic Basilica.
They rushed out of the hole in the floorboards—left behind by Valusvar, which had exploded into shattered pieces that lay strewn about the carpet—as a roaring black cloud, the mass flickering and fluttering with the ruby glow that blazed out of their eyes like furnaces of Hell’s light. They screamed with untrammeled fury and passion and their ravenous hunger for retribution, the sound ringing and echoing throughout the library. Some of them zipped back and forth and up and down, their sense of direction warped after millennia kept in captivity. They bounced and ricocheted off the walls. They clashed into one another, seeing faces they could hardly remember, all of them frozen in the moments before their deaths—big, shaggy beards speckled with brains; gore-drenched snarls of hair; jaws and noses smashed to pieces. Some faces were more familiar to one ghost than the next. Some thought they saw a sibling or a parent or a lover but couldn’t tell for sure. Their memories had been twisted horribly out of shape, the meanings lost, the details watered down by time and torture.
Quite a few of the ghosts were not as eager to leave the Orphic Basilica as the others were. A couple drifted about, either despondent or panicked by their sudden evacuation, like confused children being towed out of their bedrooms by their parents during a house fire. Then they looked up, noticed the seething mass above them, and joined their companions, as though it had slipped past their fractured minds that they’d been let free.
After a few moments of wheeling around one another, forming a turbulent cyclone of deepest black and glistening red, the ghosts coursed through the skylight. The thick pane of glass smashed, and the blustering breeze and the wind-driven snow snuck in and added to the disorder brought about by the release of thanatological energy, tearing through the library and ripping books and scrolls from their shelves. The spinning typhoon of ghosts resumed their ascent, heedless of the obliteration they were causing. It was the last thing on their minds.
The first? Revenge.
They sped through the congregation of grumbling thunderclouds like a massive black spear, cackling and snarling and screeching. The crimson light of their eyes blurred together and whipped across the storm-darkened sky like comet trails. A great shadow spread across the snow-caked earth below in their passing, accompanied by a violent streak of red light. They soared past the Orphic Basilica, whose foundations were now quavering from the aftershock of the opened gateway to purgatory; past the outskirts of the library; and then they made for the grid of streets beyond.
There, ahead of the decimated town of Rasileus, the ghosts found a boiling cauldron of madness. There were throngs of humans huddled around the carcasses of their own, their hands and mouths covered in half-frozen blood and entrails. There were humans in big white coats and green felt caps, wreaking havoc across the streets with their instruments of war. Some of these weapons the ghosts could not comprehend, having come from an earlier age, but they understood what they saw—superiors beating inferiors, gore spraying through the frigid air in gruesome stripes. Indeed, they understood this fight, though it was not their own. They had another score to settle.
Past the villages and towns, all beset by those fearsome human soldiers, were the Old Ones. They stood nine to ten feet tall, their bodies completely sheathed in suits of black metal armor, red light streaming from their eyes. Families nestled together, soon separated by the Old Ones’ prying claws. They destroyed them all, scattering blood and bodies and detached appendages through the crowds in the jam-packed streets. The massacre filled the air with a sort of animalistic malice, fueling the Old Ones. Carnage was their feast, death their ambrosia.
Though the ghosts could not exactly recall their ends, they remembered the confusion, the turmoil, the rage. They remembered the seemingly endless years of anguish, the long stretches of time where all they could do was forget, where their memories lay just out of reach. No, they did not remember the details of their fate...
But they knew the culprit.
The legion of ghosts—millions upon millions of them, all killed by the Old Ones, all victims of the Blight—dove headlong into Rasileus. Not all the ghosts lingered in Northgard, though. Some had to get their long-overdue revenge on continents beyond the Hasdan Isles, in kingdoms and empires and territories that were unfamiliar to other ghosts. But before they did, they offered their assistance in Rasileus. They gathered in twos and threes, shot through the howling winds, and swooped around the Old Ones’ ankles, sending them crashing to the ground. They wriggled into the eye slits of the soldiers’ helmets, slid through the membrane-thin gaps around their eyeballs, and then into their brains, flooding them with hallucinations and suicidal compulsions. The Old Ones convulsed and writhed, snapping their legs and arms out in a strange death-dance until, eventually, their bodies went still and their gleaming eyes winked out.
Although, as the ghosts of distant lands soared off, spurred onward by the wind, those who remained in Northgard realized that some of the Old Ones were not so easy to defeat. After all, theyhadspent innumerable years subjugating the known world, across lands near and far, and so some of the ghosts’ attacks they anticipated. Their bulky black armor made them unsteady on their feet, hindering their ability to move with grace, but they had adapted to this. They swung their fists through the ghosts, slashing them into ribbons of shadow. The ghosts cried out in pain and horror, assaulted by memories of the Old Ones’ first incursion. The soldiers took quick advantage of the ghosts’ incapacitation. They clamped gauntleted hands on either side of their nebulous heads and squeezed. The ghosts’ eyes brightened like lanterns, then burst, and the rest of their forms followed, evaporating upward like smoke from a smokestack.
A collective wave of terrified astonishment rippled through the supernatural legion. Screams and wails came from those who had witnessed the tragedy. Those fortunate to have missed it were soon subjected to the same fate. The Old Ones clambered through the crush and gripped the ghosts’ heads, forcing them into submission. Some of their features cleared, revealing agape mouths and scorched eyes. They were agonized, confused.
None of them knew where they might go next, if defeated by an Old One in this form. Even if they wanted to fly back into purgatory, that cursed prison, the scholars—the mortals and Atticus Walestone both—had already determined that they would close the doors. They had no way back.
So where next?thought the ghosts.
The question followed them like some insistent specter as they fought on, as they barreled through the soldiers who had conquered their people, as they felled the Old Ones like collapsing bridges.
Where next?they wondered.Where do you go once you’ve been through Hell and back? Where do you go when there is nowhere else to go?
The ghosts kept moving.
The Old Ones kept falling.
* * *
Roy looked up at the spinning tempest of ghosts, cradling Percival close to his side, and marveled at the spectacle. It was strangely beautiful. He couldn’t believe he had once been afraid of these creatures. How? How had he feared his own people? As he watched them depart, the rivers now more flame than souls, he felt the stirrings of an emotion he’d thought he would never feel—self-acceptance. It scared him, yes, though maybe this fear was good, something he could grow from.
Once the last of the ghosts had left, the clouds smeared lackadaisically across the sky—still foggy, like an unfinished painting—grumbled and groaned, and the gash between the two worlds slowly slid closed. A seam lingered there for a moment, like the fading impression of a scar, then disappeared.
A long silence descended.
Roy regarded Walestone askance, wondering what must be on his mind, but he couldn’t make out the expression on the Elder Scribe’s ill-defined face.
