He sees himself step through the doors and into a room full of vampires who wait to watch him kill. He finds the coldness inside of himself, the dark and hardened shell around his heart that has carried him through uncounted nights of slaughter.
Kill or be killed.
Just like now.
There was no turning back. There never had been.
Without another thought, Cross stepped into the fissure, where he passed into the heart of night.
TWENTY-TWO
Cross passed through curtains of dust and ash. He felt his consciousness as it was squeezed and compressed. Geothermic pressure closed in on him from all sides. His soul expanded like air, and pushed out through a crack in a dome of stars.
He saw riders in a dark vessel on a dark sea, and they sailed beneath a vast night sky. Fumes from a distant age turned to wraith-like unguent. He saw black moons and red tides. Cities of crumbling shale waited on the shore.
Cross stepped onto an ashen plain. Thick iron clouds pregnant with dark rain clung to the sky. The earth was dry and cracked.
Every step that he took kicked up gouts of bone dust. Dead white trees hung weeping in the distance like lost children.
There was no mark of his passage, no doorway by which he came, or through which he could return. He had appeared at the middle, in the heart of a pale nowhere. Ebon mists, the precursor to an approaching black storm, surrounded the plains, which Cross realized were finite. The ground ended at those mists. He stood on a wide island of floating stone.
The air was chill and dead. There was no wind or life in that place, whatever and wherever that place was. A deep peel of thunder shook the sky to its very edge.
Cross checked himself. Nothing had changed, save for the fact that he now carried a weapon that he hadn't before: a shimmering white sword. Its thin blade was almost invisible when he turned it, and when held flat it was semi-translucent and transformative. He held his hand on the other side of the blade and looked at it through the metal, and his hand wasn't just gauntleted when viewed that way, it was armored in heavy white plate, like he was a knight from a story. Everything came to life when viewed through the blade: the plains were vibrant with life instead of dead and ruined, and the sky was cerulean instead of black.
The sword was light and easy to yield. It was nothing like a machete or the lighter bone blade he'd been armed with in Krul, and yet Cross instinctively felt that he knew how to use the sword, as if he'd spent a lifetime training with it. The weapon was long and unusually balanced, and the grip was much longer than what he was used to, carved from bone and wrapped in linen so that the entire weapon took on a ghostly hue.
Something was intimately familiar about the sword. It was not a sword, not truly, but he couldn't determine what it really was.
He saw glimpses of another life. He saw an encampment in the mountains; banners and victory parades in an unknown country; pain and loss that belonged to someone else, but that stung like they were his own. He felt pain from past wounds that weren’t his.
What is this place?
“ It is called The Fade,” a woman said.
Until that point, Cross had thought he was alone.
She stood at the center of the plain, at once right next to him and yet miles distant. Her armor and the dress she wore over it were as white as the blade was. Her pale flesh was almost unnaturally so, and her blonde hair hung just past her shoulders, with two braids bound in black metal clasps. Her penetrating eyes were snow white and almost blank, and she radiated an immense level of power, power that Cross was sure he would have sensed even without his spirit.
It was the same massive and primordial magic that Lucan had possessed, that he had gifted to the three mages.
The same power as that in the sword.
“ Avenger,” she said. She smiled and nodded at the blade. “It's called 'Avenger'.”
“ Who are you?”
“ I am the Woman in the Ice,” she replied.
“ That's not an answer,” Cross said. “I've seen your likeness before.”
“ True,” she nodded. “You serve my sister. The White Mother and I are siblings, after a fashion. We are avatars of the same power. As is that blade that you hold in your hands.”
Something growled through the sky.
“ The power that Lucan infused us with,” he said. Cross was suddenly aware of a wind that hadn’t been there before. It stank of fear, hopelessness and death. “ That power is in this sword now, isn't it?”
“ It IS the sword,” she corrected. “Here, in this place between the worlds, all power takes on a physical manifestation.”
The ground rumbled, and the sky darkened. Thick onyx clouds spread like spilled black milk.
“ What is that thing? The Dra'aalthakmar?”
“ You know its name.”
“ But that doesn't mean that I know what it is.”
Cross felt something loom over him. That presence hovered like a dark star.
“ It was her prisoner. She held it captive for eons. It is a great evil. You call that evil The Black.” As if in response to hearing its name, the sky trembled again. Bits of flaming rock fell like charnel rain. “It cannot be destroyed, but it can be scattered, and weakened. That is what you must do.”
“ Wait a second,” Cross said. The rising wind intensified. He had to shout to be heard. “Why me?! I came here to find you…YOU'RE the one who's supposed to do this.”
“ All I can do,” she said sadly, “is grant you the tools to accomplish your task. Your female companions are the power. I am the vessel.” Her features faded, sucked into shadow. Charred sky swarmed over the plain like a horde of penumbral spiders. Everything crumbled. “You are the pilot.”
He falls through maelstroms of screaming smoke. His eyes cast out to churning charcoal seas filled with glaciers of black ice. He falls like a teardrop through a deep and empty sky. The world divides behind him and refolds. A scar is left in his wake.
He falls without a body. He falls outside of time.
In the distance, beyond the boundary of what is and the fathomless realm of what isn’t, forms press against the outer shell of the void. Their visages are impossible to comprehend. Each one of them is as vast as a midnight sky. Their eyes are black pits.
He is a sailor on the ebon sea. Churning smoky waters lap and bite at him. He reaches for the edge of the void, and finds it.
On the other side are the ashen plains of the Reach. Ice smokes into the air and bitter frost crunches beneath his feet. He steps onto snow that recoils, blackened, away from him. He sinks with every step.
He is not in his own body, nor is he in any body. This is a new vessel, as the Woman in the Ice had promised. Just as she is the trapped avatar of a greater power, he pilots the avatar of the Woman. He holds control of a spirit machination: a construct of ghosts.
Avenger weighs the air around him. It's every motion cleaves the skin of reality. Its blade is so keen even time bleeds at its touch.
He moves through the sky. He is an avatar made of blades. The world moves beneath and around him. He is out of synch, neither faster nor slower. He moves according to different rules, stands in the folds between moments. His footsteps leave smoking shadows on the land.
