He tried to keep important names at the front of his mind. He tried to remember why he was there, and why he needed to escape. He tried to remember who he was fighting for, and what he had to do. Sometimes he couldn’t recall what the names meant, or who they belonged to. Their faces had grown distant and hazy. But he fought to remember them, regardless.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Others. Black. Cole. Kane. Ekko. Graves.
He wasn’t sure if he spoke the names, or if he just remembered them. It was hard to even tell where he was.
Focus.
Follow and you will find.
He was ready.
Cross stood before a set of polished steel doors twice as tall as he was. Their edges were scorched, and the reflective face had been bent, hammered and scratched. They looked familiar. He had the vague notion he’d stood there before.
The walls around him were sandy steel awash with oil, dirt and blood stains. The corridor vanished into darkness behind him, a caustic web of shadows filled with cries and steam. The ceiling overhead was a cracked glass dome stained with pollutants and desert debris.
Engines roared over and around him. He felt the city change outside the walls, heard it fold and twist. He smelled blood in the air, and he heard a low dirge on the other side of the door, a throaty vampire song.
Cross saw his reflection in the dirty steel doors. He was lightly armored in black and crimson chain. A tight leather-and-steel gauntlet covered his left hand; the gauntlet was bound to a battery on his back through a thin network of sharp gold wiring. Traces of arcane oil sluiced out of the wires and sizzled when they struck the ground.
He looked paler than before. His eyes seemed darker. Something inside of them teemed with madness.
What have they done to me?
His spirit held onto him like armor. Her touch burned even as it soothed, and her ethereal claws tugged at his back. She mounted him like a steed.
Cross felt numb. He knew this wasn't right, that he shouldn't have been there, but it was hard to think straight. Tension coiled through his muscles and his tendons. A sharp and serpentine sense of pain wound its way up the ridge of his spine. He shook with anger anger at what? and his stomach knotted up as tight as his chest. The armor he wore felt unnatural and wrong. It smelled burnt and charnel, like it had been taken off of a dead man and placed on Cross’ body, which he reasoned was probably what had happened. Runic markings had been cast onto the backs of his hands and his forearms: serpents, eyes, ankhs, blades. He felt the weight of a weapon in a sheath on his back.
Strangest of all, his leg had healed. He felt healthy and strong.
The doors groaned open, out and away from where he stood. His heart skipped a beat. His spirit swirled and tore at him in her excitement. He felt her pull and plead, and it took effort to rein her in.
Focus.
Snow. Lucan. Dillon. Black and Cole. Kane and Ekko. Graves.
An arena waited on the other side of the metal doors. It was not what Cross expected. Everything he had seen in Krul up to that point had been desert pale or earthen, dust and sand and blood and grit. Only the industrial blue steel of the submerged lower levels had been different, and those chambers were staggering in their monotony.
The arena varied from all of that: it was cast in cool whites and soft greys, harlequin banners and a floor that looked as soft as a pale sea. Frescoes of jagged cities and serpent angels covered circular walls wrought from smoothed granite. The arena floor was spotless, cool marble covered with a massive painting of a half-closed eye impaled on a crescent moon. The air was filled with sweet incense, which only barely contained the palatable odor of rot. The entire space was enclosed by a dome as dark as a midnight sky. Glittering silver flames held suspended in floating sconces bathed the arena in uncertain light.
The stadium walls were perhaps twenty feet tall. Spikes made from black bone lined the tops of the walls, and thick fluid sluiced down the spikes like black milk. Beyond the spikes was a seating area, made from dark wood and black leather, which circled the arena.
There were hundreds of seats, each of them occupied by a vampire. The depths of their ranks was impossible for him to make out — beyond those pale and withered faces was a wall of midnight, a black curtain of dismal specter bodyguards and angry war ghosts left free to roam the air in a ghastly cyclonic barrier.
Cross breathed in raw eldritch air. His spirit bathed in it, basked in it. Her form expanded and shuddered, and Cross shuddered, as well. The depths of magic in that chamber were staggering. It bespoke of the status and power held by the dozens of vampires in the audience.
He had been brought before the vampire elite. Cross would fight for his friend's life before the noble undead caste, the aristocracy of the night. Dark eyes and monstrous pale faces regarded him pitilessly. Despite their number, the arena was utterly and deathly quiet. Cross heard his own breaths echo back from the two-hundred foot high interior of the dome. His skin felt brittle, and his blood ran cold.
Unbidden, he entered the arena.
He moved slowly, as if in a dream. He felt as if he had done this before. Bone fragments exploded into white dust beneath his boots. Nothing else moved.
A gaunt skeletal figure stood at the exact center of the arena floor. Black swathed and preposterously tall, the undead creature used a bone hand covered with razor blades to direct Cross to stand at the edge of the circle. Its elongated grin seemed mocking.
Cross did as he was commanded. He saw little to be gained from doing otherwise.
One by one, the other fighters came into the arena. They were all clothed in mismatched armor, patchwork steel plates and leather padding, chain mesh and bladed epaulets, faceless helmets and barbed weapons. Cross saw a pale-fleshed Vuul and an ebon-fleshed Gorgoloth; the smoking humanoid husk of a Regost, and a towering and muscle-bound Doj. There were more humans, puny when compared to the other monsters.
He saw Danica Black, her red hair pulled up into a severe top-knot. She wore a sleeveless armored vest and fingerless gloves, black pants and combat boots. Curved twin blades were sheathed across her back, and a draconic tattoo covered the entirety of her right arm, which pulsed with smoking purple light. Her eyes were dead and cold.
He saw Kane, entirely transformed from the joking moron Cross had met before. Kane was a blonde giant, his beard neatly trimmed and braided, his bare oiled muscles tensed and scarred. He held a crescent moon axe in his hands. Like Black, his eyes were unnaturally still. He gritted his teeth like an animal ready to hunt down its dinner.
Cross looked at the vampires in the crowd, and they were as stoic and as still as wax statues. They bore deep eyes like pits and moon-pale faces. Lips drew back to reveal gray fangs that dripped dark venoms. The vampires’ clothing was ruined finery, elegant hussars and gothic gowns all in dark shades — ebon and blood red, midnight and emerald — but the clothing was covered in aged flaws, dust and ancient stains and open tears. The undead wore silver bracelets and iron rings, bladed necklaces and bracelets of bone. They smoked black cigarillos and drank dark blood from silver goblets.
A creature presided over the arena from atop a throne of knives and bones. He was tall and dark, with his long hair pulled back half-up-half-down. His ashen skin was remarkably human, and his green and black armor was of the finest make. A dark-bladed katana rested in his spidery hands.
Talos Drake. Cross wasn’t sure how he knew who the vampire was, but he did. Drake had once been a notorious black market trader. Now he was the Viscount of Krul, and the acting leader when the military commander of the city, Morganna, was otherwise engaged.
Dead black lions with eyes like white fire and fangs capped with rusted steel stood to either side of Drake. Their rotted bodies were perfectly still, curled and poised. At the foot of the throne stood a Gol attendant, an emissary or speaker of some sort.
It was Tega Ramsey.
That son of a bitch.
Cross’ senses slowly returned to him. Rage welled in his soul. The Gol looked on calmly, not a vampire, but a traitor, a willing servant of an odious race.
