The roof caved in from the broken skylight. The impossibly large steeple, which jutted toward the clouds like an upthrust spear, listed forward with exquisite slowness then crashed down onto and split the gable of the seventh floor in half. A rumble went through the ground, deeper than Roy had felt moments before, and drove the steeple farther into the wrecked front of the building. The left and right facades toppled inward and slammed into the steeple with colossal force, crushing it, driving it farther into the widening, cavernous hole in the rooftop. The steeple tipped, slanted, then drilled through the seventh, sixth, and fifth floors, destroying the Observatory and the sitting and reading rooms where Roy and Percival had sat when they had started collaborating. Several of the curtains had been ripped away and torn apart by the storm, Roy noticed, showing dark chambers littered with damaged texts. A cobweb of cracks slithered down one of the limestone pillars that had held up the front vestibule, and when the steeple plunged down into the fourth floor, the pillar collapsed entirely. It leaned to the right, then collided into its counterpart, and the vestibule crumpled right after. The overhang bowed forward, fell, and crushed the platform at the head of the front staircase. The birdbaths resting on either side of the absent doors tumbled, too, crushed by the overhang. Once all four facades had plummeted, the rest of the Orphic Basilica’s downfall happened rather quickly. The storm wind gave a tremendous gust, and it all sank in and blew over.
As the breeze lessened, a haunting silence swept in around Roy. He stared unblinkingly at the rubble, his gut leaden with dismay and awe. The detritus of the library, a millennia-old accrual of countless outlawed tomes and scrolls, lay in heaps and piles. It looked so mundane, so bereft of the magic that had kept all those pages bound and unharmed for untold years. He could hardly believe it.
“Percival...” Roy whispered, his voice shaky with disbelief. “What have we done? What... What did we just do?”
“What we set out to do,” Percival said, standing and brushing snow off his knees. “And more.” He sounded put together, like he had everything in control, but Roy knew Percival, knew that his inattentive expression was from sadness, not exhaustion. Despite this, he explained, “This was always the plan. We meant to do this when we decided what the Governor would get out of the bargain. Maybe we hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but what happened is actuallyconvenient, Roy.”
“How can you say that?”
“Well, we hadn’t actually gotten around to how we’d tear it down, now, did we?”
Roy nodded with numb acknowledgment, and yet the sight of the Orphic Basilica stripped down to its bare bones flooded his heart with such despair that he could not help but turn his back on the damage. He clapped a hand over his mouth, tears running down his face and slowly freezing there.
“I know, darling,” Percival murmured, embracing Roy for a while, running the palm of his hand down his back, and then pulling gently away. “I know. But perhaps it’s for the best. Just think: If we hadn’t done what we did, if we hadn’t taken it down, the doors to purgatory might have stood open for years until someone else with one of those swords came around. And who knows how long that might have taken?”
“I know. Iknow.” And Roy did. But . . . “All those books, the Observatory . . . Briar’s carving . . .”
Percival brushed a knot of windswept hair back from Roy’s face. “I know,” he repeated, “but we’ll have time to grieve later.”
“Why? Where are we going?”
“I’m not quite sure,” Percival said, looking around, “but all I’m concerned with right now is getting out of the cold.”
They stood there shivering for a moment—bunched closely together, aimless and confused—then slogged to the left down the slight mound of snow on which the library, lying in ruins behind them, had once been erected. Percival led the way, despite evidently having as little an understanding of where they were going as Roy. There hadn’t been any inns or villages on the journey to the Orphic Basilica where they could ask for shelter, from what he could remember, but that had been almost three months ago, and his mind had not been as strong since Briar’s murder.
They walked onward, their boots leaving deep prints in the snow. Minutes trudged by, then became an hour. The landscape before them, whose contours and lights had once been hard to define, resolved out of the thick white haze. The outskirts of Rasileus were still quite far in the distance, but whereas months ago Roy would not have been able to make heads nor tails of it in this weather, now the numerous dwellings of Rasileus were clear. And as their slow trek resumed, he saw why.
Across the sky, from the isolated patch of snow-packed land solely inhabited by the destructed Orphic Basilica, all the way out to the heart of Rasileus and far beyond, the clouds were thinning—and with amazing speed, too, Roy noted. The large gray masses drifted away, taking with them the darkness that had cloaked the sky.
A brilliant beam of sunlight, the first which Roy had seen in over three years, sifted through a break in the clouds and illuminated the city in an aureate glow. Roy had opened a bridge between worlds with a sword of unknown origins, and he still thought that moment paled starkly in comparison to this breathtaking view.
The chill that had stubbornly clung to the breeze disappeared. There was no menacing bite to the wind, no cold that snuck under the layers of his clothing and seeped into his bones. Instead, a relieving and much-welcomed warmth hovered in the air. The snow on his clothes and hair began to melt, and a delightful thin film of sweat gathered on his palms. He brought his hands, clammy from the growing heat, out before him and tipped his head back. Then he grinned at the golden sunlight.
For years, rumors and theories about the beginnings of the snowstorm had floated around the city. Once, Briar had tattled to Roy that one of her professors at Rasileus Academy thought the unusually long season had somehow spawned from the fumes that emitted from the Governor’s up-and-coming military inventions. A sign not of foreboding and misfortune, but of success and modernity.
Roy still wasn’t sure on what side of the argument he fell. Science or mysticism? Coincidence or miracle? All he knew was that once the Old Ones had been unmasked, and the ghosts freed, the storm had gone from blizzard to breeze, and now, to breath.
A little while later, Roy and Percival were traversing a small valley covered in still-melting snow when they spotted a sled, drawn by two horses, gliding steadily toward them out of the white haze.
Once it drifted up to them, the sled came to an abrupt halt on Percival’s side. A Drove was gripping the reins in her black-gloved hands, a harsh scrutiny settling across her freckled face as she considered Roy and Percival. Roy searched for a hint of the Blight’s red glint in her hazel eyes, but there was nothing there.
They’re gone, he thought.All the Old Ones. And all of the Governor’s undead.
The Drove assessed them a moment longer, squinting, then sat back. “Hop in,” she ordered. “He’s waiting for you.”
* * *
Rasileus and the streets beyond were in a shambles.
Gray mushrooms of smoke billowed out from the remnants of flattened, burnt, and destructed tenements. The roads were carpeted with blood and scattered with the corpses of the Old Ones and the undead, unarmored Droves—whose ruby eyes had now returned to their normal, albeit lifeless, gaze—and the countless civilians whom they had slaughtered. Entrails littered the road down which their sled passed, and at one point, the driver had to bellow out of the window for someone to clean the mess.
It was at this instance, when he distinctly heard the squelching of guts being shoveled and dragged across cobblestone, that Roy looked away and had to concentrate on his breathing. Percival placed a hand on the small of his back, although he appeared equally horrified by the massacre, his face pale and his lips pursed with disgust as though he was trying his hardest not to vomit.
They sat the rest of the way to their destination in tense silence.
When the sled stopped about an hour later, at the tail end of which Roy had fallen into a pleasurable light doze, the Drove sitting opposite the two of them opened the door, then took Roy by the arm and pulled him none too gently out into the dazzling sunlight. He was still unaccustomed to, and rather startled by, the unforeseen change of weather, so he blinked several times, letting his vision settle.
Percival pulled himself out of the bruising grip of the Drove, who had deposited him beside Roy, and grumbled, “Careful.”
