ridiculous detail and fact about himself, to hold onto them, to place them somewhere and keep them there without having to even try. The memories blasted through his brain with staccato rhythm. It was difficult to keep up with them.
Soon, he lost track of everything but his mind.
He felt his spirit as she struggled. She stayed close, tied to him like a drowning swimmer in a pitch black sea. Cross couldn’t call on her for much more than fending off his pain, and even that strained her. He felt her whispers, so quiet they were like rustling leaves in a soft wind, completely out of place in the grime and stink and eye- numbing darkness.
Easy. Easy, I won’t let them hurt you.
It struck Cross as mildly insane that this was the first time since he’d acquired his new spirit that she wasn’t driving him crazy.
The light faded to a blur. It was hard to see even his own hand in front of his face.
Hours passed, or maybe days. There was no way to know.
Dark waters churned and chains rattled in ghostly echo. Cross stumbled in and out of awareness. He soon had no sense of where he was. He focused his mind and forced himself to remember things. Sometimes, he couldn’t do it.
He is trapped in an eternal midnight. Dry twigs are in his hair. He stands, shaking, and feels the bitter mountain air as it courses through the dead trees. Churning fires and distant howls fill the night with grim noise. His muscles are stiff. His feet crush twigs frozen in muddy ground as thick as tar.
He looks between the trees, and he sees a sliver of dead sky. Drifts of molten copper clouds lay smeared over the horizon like metallic stains.
The forest burns in the valley below. Cold smoke drifts up through iridescent rain and forms an ocean of cobalt cinders. Blades of dark ash, like smelted leaves, float dead in the air.
Behind him, the air twists into a funnel of translucent ice. Dirt and debris form a solid wall of choking haze. He sees a portal through the drifting fog, a pale passage that hangs there like a white scar.
I'm not here, he realizes.
There is a cold-throated scream. He doesn’t realize the absolute and utter silence until the cry rings out. He sees that silhouette, a vague female shape, a shadow that comes undone. The form dissolves like a shard of black ice in pure white water. Limbs fall away from the core. The doorway is too bright to look at.
Wait.
He feels a presence there, weak and distant. Fragile. It is known to him, familia r.
Help me, says the voice from the doorway. A voice he knows, or should know.
The mountain growls beneath his feet. He looks into the trees, and he sees eyes and teeth that fill the black void of shadows between the leaves. Black flames leap up the mountainside behind him. Cold fire rushes like waves, a blazing inverted avalanche.
Help me, the voice says again.
He turns to run, and is engulfed.
At some point, Cross was shackled. He didn’t remember it happening. Heavy gauntlets made his fingers feel as thick as sausages and dampened any hope of channeling his spirit. Barbed chains ran from his wrists to his ankles, and they scraped against his knees and cut him as he walked. His wounded leg blazed and throbbed with pain.
Everything was a haze. His senses were dull. The world was shades of dark and light, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. He felt separated from his own body, distant.
Cross was led down a hall by a pair of black-clad vampire guards. They wore moon-curve blades and blank white masks. It had been so long since he’d been out of water that he almost forgot how to walk, and he stumbled as he moved down the dry steel corridor. The chains didn’t help: the shackles gave him sharp cuts that sent thin rivers of blood down the insides of his already-soaked pants.
He was pulled into desert sunlight, and his eyes burned. Everything went white. He tasted sand and felt unbearable heat that cooked his skin. The sounds of the chained city filled his head in a catastrophe of metal noise.
Cross fell painfully to his knees. He couldn’t rise. His left leg was so wracked with pain he couldn’t summon the will to try.
He slowly and painfully regained his vision. Images bled into view. The world was uneven and unstable, like he saw it through a crooked lens. He was pulled to his feet. Cross rocked and swayed in place.
They’d brought him to some sort of prisoner’s commons. His shackles were removed, and he was left standing on a floored metal area surrounded by spike-topped walls the color of rusty nails. The commons was the size of a baseball diamond, wide and open, and the walls curved where they met the ground at sharp angles. There were no doors. Grey-skinned gargoyles with thick and stony wings hovered overhead.
The sky was vast and bright. The iron clouds seemed translucent, and they receded away from the blood red sun. Sticky air coursed up and over the wall, and Cross felt the slightest shudder in the ground when the wind blasted with its gale force. They were on top of a tall structure, he guessed, some open courtyard at the apex of one of the city’s tallest buildings, which explained why nothing but the sky was visible from within that bowl.
The commons was filled with prisoners. Each one of them was dingier than the last. Greasy inmates, most of them human, shuffled across the yard in packs. A few half-Doj towered over the others, their broad and chiseled jaws painted with desert soot. Cross saw some Lith, a handful of Gorgoloth, and even a Regost, the so-called Hollow Men, whose smoking spectral breath could be smelled across the commons. Cross spied a pale-skinned Vuul, whose translucent flesh had been rendered opaque with grime and dried blood. He briefly saw a Gol, who quickly vanished behind the taller prisoners.
The prisoners moved like zombies. They shuffled along as they walked, seeming to lack the strength or the will to do anything more. Their eyes looked forward, listless and dead. Their clothing was torn and shredded and soaked, but it dried fast beneath the blistering heat of the sun. Everyone looked like they’d lived through a bomb blast, or worse. Fingernails had turned black. The gray film they wore made them all siblings.
Cross smelled heat and sewage and sweat and piss and fear. The air was a miasma of body stink and hot metal. It burned just to stand in it.
There were a few women, Cross noted, and they were as caked in cuts and filth as the rest. Cross didn’t want to imagine how life was for them here, with so few females compared to the number of men.
Panels in the floors slid back to reveal shallow recesses filled with thick brown gruel that was vaguely the color of beans. The prisoners ate the stuff voraciously with their hands, the only option available.
Cross felt as if it had been days since he’d eaten. The sludge was thick and oily, and it felt like cold clay in his trembling hands. Worse, it tasted like some sort of congealed lard, and he fought to get it down his throat and keep it in his stomach. He was so ravenously hungry it was difficult not to shovel more of the stuff down, but he knew that if he ate too fast he’d choke and be sick.
No water was provided. That worried him.
They were watched by gargoyles, mindless and violent brutes who could sit still for days on end without having to move, obedient lackeys from the shores of Rimefang Loch who would serve either vampires or humans without discretion, so long as they were paid. Cross saw no vampires, but that didn’t mean they weren’t close by… he heard their guttural calls just on the other side of the walls, low growls and throat songs that sliced open the air like knives. He heard the slurp and smack of vampire feedings even over the sounds of the prisoners gorging themselves, and the roar of the city’s vast chains.
Several of the prisoners couldn’t handle their food, and Cross guessed they were as new to the prison city as he was. They vomited noisily onto the ground, sometimes right back into the feeding troughs.
A new series of sounds assaulted them. He heard babies being hurt, children screaming, sounds of torture and pain that came from just out of sight.
None of it is real, he told himself. They’re just screwing with our heads.
Some of the prisoners looked around, afraid. Others didn’t seem to notice, or care.
Cross needed something to drink. Again, he didn’t seem to be the only one. The gruel dried painfully in his mouth. He smelled and tasted basalt and corn.
“ Just take it slow,” the Gol said. He was short, which was normal for that race, barely four-feet-tall, with diseased looking skin that was riddled with scars and pores. He kept most of his face concealed beneath a heavy
