Ahead of him, on the opposite horizon, is the Sleeper. He has never seen it clearly before now. It is not all that different from him. It is cloaked in dripping darkness. Vast drifts of its ebon form fall away and melt the transitional realm. In the physical world, possibilities are melted by its passage. It carries with it inevitability, a finality.
They approach one another from opposite ends of the spectral sky. The Sleeper yields a blade every bit as black as Cross' is gleaming white.
Pure flames dance in the air between them. Every step they take is a thunderous echo. The world shakes and rattles at their passage. Time blisters and peels away.
The Sleeper is night condensed into humanoid form. Its skin is a rich ebon field. The blade in its hands cuts the air, and darkness bleeds out.
All around them, everything stops. The universe holds its breath.
Cross steps forward in his unbody, in his armor and weapons of light.
He knows this blade. Avenger extends and shifts. It is fire and light and an edge that can cut through worlds.
Their swords come together in battle.
The weapons clash at the center of the sky. Metal and light explode. The ring of ancient steel cracks the heavens like a hundred storms.
Very quickly, the battle turns to the Sleeper's favor. It is the stronger of the two. Its attacks come at him like an avalanche of dark blades. It is all he can do to deflect them.
He can't launch an attack back of his own; he is too busy defending himself.
Its eyes smoke with histories of destruction. He hears plaintive calls in every strike of its weapon: lost souls made to suffer their own end, again and again and again, with every blow landed by that blade.
He falls. His phantom form feels pain. Terror seizes his bodiless heart.
No.
He springs to his feet. He sends a hail of strikes at the Sleeper, and one of his thrusts lands a cut that gushes forth a rain of shadows instead of blood, a black waterfall of soil and soot.
His rapidly deteriorating mind goes back to the arena in Krul. He is taken back to the battles, to the merciless drive to win. He had a cause worth winning for: to keep his friend alive.
But his friend is dead. He failed.
Dillon is lost, just a body now. All of his simple hopes, his love for his sister and nephew, his sense of duty, his strange dice and his notebook, all gone. Dead and lost, because Cross couldn’t save him.
Graves, and Ramsey, and Stone and Cristena. And Snow. Snow, burning, screaming on the train.
He sees their faces in the clouds as he presses the attack. Their accusing looks give him strength. Steel resolve pumps through the avatar’s veins.
With every motion his comfort in the unbody grows. Rage courses through him like fire. He recalls the taste of victory in the arena, the animalistic drive to destroy his enemies.
He does so now. He smells weakness, sees an opening, and he takes advantage.
Sparks fall onto the Reach like lighting rain. Steel grinds steel into smoldering splinters. Slowly, inch by inch, the light drowns out the shadow.
The Sleeper is desperate. It lashes out with an off-balance strike that catches him off guard. Avenger is deflected aside, and the dark sword pushes forward, finds home.
He screams as the shadow blade pierces his flesh. Something inside of the lunar armor screams out in pain. Everything begins to unravel. He is down on the ground. The Sleeper towers over him. Its midnight blade rises as it prepares to deliver the killing strike.
He reaches deep inside, and finds that part of the avatar that is dying. It fades like a star. It must be released, and even as he ponders the notion he feels it surge forward, feels it call out with a martyr’s fury, a grim resolve. It leaps out of the avatar, and into Avenger.
The white blade rises just as the black blade falls. Dark metal shatters like broken glass. Shadows curl off into shards of lost midnight. Umbra energies part and steam as Avenger continues up, straightens, hones in on its target. He can practically smell the Sleeper’s void heart, buried deep in folds of night armor.
Avenger punches through shadow flesh and dark possibilities, slices away ebon mail and drills to the Sleeper's core. White metal pierces the black and ancient heart, and the Sleeper explodes. Shadow rains down. Dark geysers of energy scream into the heavens like bolts of hot grease.
The Sleeper melts like ice in the sun. It's unmouth rounds into a bodiless scream. Its pale moon eyes shrink, dim, and fade. The clarion roar of a thousand cursed souls escapes into the vast sky. He sees worlds unfold in the shadows of their passing: places that once were, places that might have been.
For a moment, he feels that he can reach out and grab those places, hold onto them, maybe keep them from fading.
But before he even realizes it, the moment is lost, and he is left alone as the dust of time drifts over his body and washes him away.
Cross woke back in the cave, on the safe side of the canyon. His body felt like he’d been trampled by horses. His chest was raw, and he belched up acrid smoke. Cross slowly sat up. Dull pain pushed against the inside of his skull.
After a time, Cross stood up. Both of his arms trembled. Avenger lay at his feet, smoking and broken. Most of the upper edge of the blade had cracked off, and those shards melted like ice right before his eyes. The hilt had also snapped off at the bottom, leaving an overall shorter weapon, jagged, and steaming with frost. Cross gently picked it up.
Dazed and dizzy, he looked around. He felt like he had just woken from a dream. The bodies of the Black Circle agents were still there, lifeless on the rock shelf next to the underground canyon.
He looked across the rift. The cleft in the rock had sealed.
He saw Black struggle to climb up the inside of the canyon wall by the light of her own arcane torch. Ekko was draped across her back, unmoving.
Cross lost breath for a moment.
“ Danica!”
She looked up, exhaustion on her face. Her eyes looked red and weary. By her expression, he knew that Ekko was in trouble.
He found a coil of rope on one of the fallen Black Circle agents and tossed an end down. Black secured it around Ekko's waist, and between her spirit's levitation abilities and Cross pulling the rope they managed to get both women back to the surface. They collapsed on the ground from exhaustion.
Black had a cut on her arm that bled through a rip in both her armored coat and the shirt underneath.
Ekko was listless, and quiet. Cross couldn't tell if she was about to Turn, or die. Her eyes wouldn’t stay open, and dark blood dribbled out of her nose and mouth.
“ We have to get her topside,” Black said. “Quickly.”
“ Where's Jennar?”
Black let something slip out of her pack and onto the ground. Cross saw with some surprise that it was a gloved human hand. “The rest of him got away. He slipped out in the confusion. This entire place almost tore itself apart. I thought we were all going to die.” Black paused, and she looked at Cross. “It's gone, isn't it?”
Cross nodded.
“ It’s gone. For now, at least.”
They carried Ekko back through the ice tunnels and up to the shattered portal as fast as they could. The way was treacherous thanks to the ice, and despite Ekko’s waif-like form, Cross and Black were so exhausted that even their spirits proved little help in getting their fallen companion topside.
It didn’t matter. She was dead well before they made it.
The icy chamber at the base of the Bone Tower was filled with gunsmoke and bodies. Kane, Cole and the soldiers had been attacked by more Black Circle grunts — a band of Gorgoloth armed with automatic weapons and rock hammers. Daye had been shot in the arm, but looked like he'd pull through.
Black went to Cole and embraced her. Cole held her in return, but Cross noticed that she was the one to break away, and she quickly moved to help the others.
Kane was covered in Gorgoloth blood. His visage was grim. He’d been watching the doorway when they
