Red stood behind him. Cross felt like he was stuck in a dream. His movements were sluggish, and the air stretched and twisted in front of his eyes like watercolors. Words sloughed toward him like congealed liquid.
There were two others with Red. One of them was Snow, beaten and bruised. She wore a grey cloak that had been cast over her like a shroud, but it barely concealed the scars and welts on her once beautiful face. Cross’ chest seized up in pain at the sight of her. She looked barely alive, and her eyes were blank, not willing or capable of meeting his gaze.
The other individual was a tall and lean man with eyes like white pits. His hair was silver and cropped short, and his bone-thin arms were covered in old military tattoos. He wore a purple and black cloak over an infantry uniform, and his rotted flesh had taken on the pallor of the north.
The Old One. Dane Knight.
“ It will kill you to touch it,” Red continued. “But I suspect you gathered that, didn’t you, Cross?”
Cross tried to pull himself together. His thoughts were forming too slowly, and he felt like he’d been drugged. Worse, he feared he might pass out at any second.
“ So you…tell me,” he struggled. Every breath was almost a gasp for air. “Why did I come here? You let me get through. Why would you…do that?”
“ I’d rather show you,” Red said with a smile.
The Old One nodded, but remained silent.
Something reached out to Cross. Black smoke emanated from the obelisk, a serpent made of vapor. It curled around him. Cross looked through the ebon murk and saw through the cracks of time. He fell into liquid clouds and uncertain storms.
The bullet tears the child apart, and her tiny head explodes in a spray of blood. Knight screams, not believing he did this, knowing, as they all did, that he had no choice. The girl is dead, and the cursed candles spaced around her on the floor consume her soul. Their fires burn bright.
The ritual, prepared over the course of days, has awaited this final sacrifice.
He doesn’t know how this part works, but he knows it should have been done before now. He’d wanted to find an alternative, wanted to find some other way. Before The Black, Knight didn’t believe in magic or in vampires. But the world is different now. The world he knows is gone.
The vampires came to stop them from making the sacrifice, because they knew it would change everything.
The air grows dark. The vampires and their grisly weapons force their way into the chamber and Cross realized he was in the remains of that chamber now, decades later, but the walls were now gone, everything was gone but the disc of stone by crashing through the door and walls. He sees a silver stream of smoke bellow out of the child’s ruined corpse. A voice is trapped in the fumes, something that forms there in the core of the sacrifice. Beams of unlight slice up from the ground and cut the air apart. The candles snuff out and the light solidifies and congeals into something that is invisible and yet more solid than steel. It is a prison. It is a weapon.
Black energies tear out of the sacrificed soul and fill the air with a whirlwind of shadows. Knight dies at that moment, but he also remains, and he screams in terror as he witnesses the apotheosis. He is flung through the unlight, bathed in a maelstrom of darkness that spills out of the breach he has created.
He has made a hole, and then sealed it up again. He has created a prison of souls — a cage without bars, an endless source of unwilling power. Humankind has searched for it for centuries, but until The Black they never understood what had to be done to acquire it.
The sacrifice is complete. In order to combat hordes of undead invaders, Knight has opened a doorway to an even blacker power.
“ Now,” he utters from his newly undead lips. “We have magic.”
Cross fell to his knees.
“ Magic…” he coughed. “You… you made it possible?”
Yes, the Old One spoke without speaking. Its voice was a vast echo, a howling wind from the depths of a great pit. A weapon was needed. When conventional means of survival failed, we turned to the supernatural, the very thing that was destroying us. We consulted religious and so-called arcane texts. There were many failures and many lives lost before the answer was finally uncovered.
“ And…this?” Cross looked at the obelisk. His body grew weaker by the second. Life leaked from him.
It is the anchor. The prison. It tethers the souls of the departed to this world so that they cannot escape to the next. We use them — they are the fuel that powers our magic. Without the exploitation of the dead, humankind would have been lost long ago. They are our saviors, and our weapons.
The glade, Cross realized. The glade is inside the obelisk. “How are they…tied to warlocks, then…and witches…”
“ No one really understands that part,” Red interrupted. “ You know that. Even the greatest arcane scholars understand just enough about magic to make it work.” She smiled. “Until I came along, none of us even knew where it came from.”
Cross was on his knees. He struggled to keep himself from falling onto the midnight stone. He could barely breathe. Pain flared at the base of his spine and wrapped up his back until it reached the crest of his skull.
“ This is it, isn’t it? Magic is our only hope…without magic…Christ, it’s the only thing that’s kept us alive…”
He could almost hear the Old One smile. Cross fought off unconsciousness even as it swept over his eyes like a welcome warmth. He saw faces in the obelisk, distorted and half melted, smeared against the inner walls of the translucent stone.
It is my promised gift to the Ebon Cities, the Old One said. I created it, but as you surely saw, I didn’t know much about it, nor did I know how to destroy it. I am the only one left of that doomed expedition, and by the time I made the sacrifice the rest of the ritual had already been prepared. The act of killing was all that remained. The secrets of the prison were lost, consumed with the souls of my squad.
But Red found those secrets, Cross thought. Somehow, in her tenure as Thornn’s leader and while acting as the voice of the White Mother, Margrave Azazeth had uncovered some vital details about the obelisk, probably buried away in some obscure text or noted in an elliptical reference in a forgotten calculation book. Knight was no mage, and no scholar. He didn’t know the first thing about how to destroy the stone. Everyone else in the expedition had died, and only Knight had been brought back to undeath. He probably hadn’t known where to look for the information, and, more importantly, he hadn’t needed it. By the time he wanted to know how to destroy the obelisk it was too late for him to find it… until Margrave Azazeth came along and handed him the secrets he’d been looking for.
No one knew, Cross realized. People assumed that humankind’s mastery of magic had been just another byproduct of The Black, another shift in reality to accompany all of the ancient cities and dread races. No one knows about the obelisk, or the glade. All this time, the key to our survival, the source of what’s kept us in the war for so long, has been held in this bastard’s hands, and we never even knew it.
Cross felt sure that if Knight had known how to destroy the obelisk before Red had come along, he’d have already done so.
“ So…” Cross was on the brink of passing out. He felt a hand on his shoulder, soft and warm. “Why…why am I…?”
“ Alive?” Red frowned. “Well, just as the obelisk needed a sacrifice to become, it requires a sacrifice to be undone.” Cross looked up at her. It took nearly all of his strength. “We had a candidate picked out,” Red said playfully. “Things have changed, however.”
Snow stood over him. Her once beautiful face was bloodied and bruised. Deep cuts lined her pale features. Her eyes looked hollow and sunken, and innumerable wounds had been inflicted on her forearms and her chest. She bore ritual scarifications, fetishes, and brandings. She’d been tortured and marked.
“ I’ve changed,” Snow smiled. “Red was going to make me the sacrifice, but now it’s going to be you, Eric: a warlock cut off from his own magic. You’re just what we need. That’s why Red stole your spirit. You’d already lost her once on your own…back in the crypt…”
“ Snow…” he stammered.
“ So your spirit was still vulnerable,” Snow went on. “It was easy for Red to take her from you again.” Snow leaned close. “Margrave has secrets, Eric,” she whispered. “She knows how to do things that you and I will never be able to do. And now…” Snow stood up and smiled at Red, a cold and distant smile. “She’s made you into the
