The door buckled again. The growls grew louder. He glimpsed back, but Kyver and Vala faded into the dark ness behind him as he ran.
He didn’t have much time.
The hall emptied into a sort of amphitheater. Wide and rounded steps led up to a platform covered with large cages and slabs of ice turned grey with age. Multiple halls led away from the chamber.
Each cage held the skeletal remains of a creature, and not all of them were human: he saw Gol and Vuul, Gorgoloth and thin and mouthless Lith.
W hite-grey illumination bled down through dirty skylights in the tall ceiling. Thin sheets of grease ice covered the steps and the upper platform, and old gnarled bones and rocks littered the floor.
Cro ss looked down the hallways and saw nothing but shadows. He heard the growl of monsters in the distance.
The air tasted like smoke. With Soulrazor/Avenger in hand he crossed the chamber. His boots felt like they were ready to come apart. He looked down at himself and saw that his rotting clothing was brown and black with dirt and shadow y filth. He looked like a beggar.
It felt strange not having his spirit with him. In the confusing atmosphere of the Whisperlands it was easy to forget he was so alone because everything there was always in flux, and the unintelligible spectral voice s in the black wind never ceased. Here, the isolation struck him, and he felt naked. He had no ability to scout ahead or determine what lay down the corridors short of investigating them himself. He couldn’t sense if anything approach ed. He was just Cross, barely armed and alone.
Which means I don’t stand a chance.
All he had was the arcane blade, which, though powerful, remained something of a mystery. He was still unsure of its full potential. It could heal him, and it seemed capable of shielding him from harm. It could destroy powerful creatures, and it grant ed him more sword fighting skill than he actually possessed.
Still, it decided when it did all of those things. He had little control over the blade, and little notion of what it wanted. He sensed intelligence in it, a dark and powerful presence, but he couldn’t communicate with the weapon. It frightened him.
Cross stopped to cat ch his breath. His body shook all over. Now that he was back out of the black winds all of his aches and fatigue caught up with him. His muscles were sore and his bones felt bruised.
He remembered his old life, back with the team. He felt like he’d just seem them, like no time ha d passed at all. M aybe he’d just wake up from th at nightmare and be back in the manor, ready to eat eggs made by Ash’s homunculi and try ing not to trip on Grissom’s damn ed giant cat. He’d listen to Ronan and Kane bicker, and he’d watch Maur tinker with explosives at the dining table. A nd he’d see Danica, and maybe, just maybe, he’d tell her how he felt.
But that’s not going to happen on its own. You have to get there first. You have to earn it.
He steeled himself. He’d get nowhere standing around.
Cross made his way across the room. Drifts of dust and floating ice crystals hung in the air.
A sense of dread overtook him, and h e stopped in his tracks. Something else moved in the chamber.
He looked up at the ceiling and saw a massive white spider, easily the size of an automobile. It nest ed on an iron web, and its behemoth stomach stretched like it was ready to burst. Hundreds of milk — pale eggs pulled taut against its cadaverous sack. Diamond black eyes shone dark ly in the grey-white light.
The spider watched him. Cross stared up at it, petrified. Dozens of his reflections looked back at him, one from each of the spider’s many dark eyes, and each image was slightly different from the others. H e was a different man in every one of them.
The spider sat as still as a stone. He knew for a fact he’d seen it before.
It can’t be. It’s just another hallucination.
He ran.
Cross found himself in a maze of halls. There was no sound. He moved through crypts and pas t archways made of antler and bone. Razorblade tapestries and iron mirrors lined the corridors. Some areas were bound in darkness so thick it nearly suffocated him.
Eventually he slowed his pace. His heart raced, and his skin was flushed with cold sweat. G rime covered him, a layer of muck so dense he’d never shake it off. He felt dirt beneath his fingernails and around his eyes.
He looked around.
Dark murals covered the walls of a wide and long chamber, a sort of meeting hall or assembly area. Blood- red carpets lined the floor, but like everything else in the Black Citadel they ’d been eaten by age, and were covered with moth holes and frayed edges. A long table made of silver and stone took up the middle of the chamber, but it, too, had been ruined by the passage of time.
Things didn’t seem to last there. That was the Whisperland’s curse: nothing went untarnished. Decades passed in that realm while only weeks went by in the solid world, but the darkness of the Whisperlands corroded everything, living and otherwise. It decayed material things, caked the brain, and soiled the soul.
He cautiously moved deeper into the chamber. Blood welled up beneath his feet when he stepped on the thick carpet. He stepped away. Even w ith everything else he’d been through, for some reason he didn’t want that crimson filth on his boots.
H e approached the murals. They all showed a spider — the spider, his spider, an enormous a nd pale monstrosity ready to burst with young. She devoured cities. Mounds of humans fell before the creature's onslaught. In the murals she wa s vast, a legged insectoid moon. Buildings and monuments collapse d beneath her. People, their faces pale with horror, fe ll into dark rips made in the earth by her monstrous razor limbs.
It can’t be, he thought.
He stepped away from the murals and moved on.
He went deeper into the Black Citadel. Nothing challenged him. He had the feeling nothing would.
Cross passed through cold chambers filled with ice wells and shattered bone masks. He saw blood runes on the walls and floor, half-completed sculptures of man-beast symbiotes and gigantic insect skulls.
The inside of the Citadel was vast, much larger than it should have been, but he’d learned long ago not to trust anything he saw in the Whisperlands.
He knew he was near the Carrion Rift, the place where the obelisk had fallen. He could feel it.
Only the living are lost. That was what the Eidolos had told him, the knowledge he’d need once he breached the Citadel and faced its masters. It had told Cross he’d understand what it meant wh en the time was right, and that it c ould mean the difference between failure and success. Only the living are lost.
The air was colder the further he went. He walked through drifts of grave dust, and the stone halls grew darker. T he muted light from the hanging braziers dimmed. B urning fog covered the floor. Cross walked slowly, careful to keep his distance from the bladed walls.
Everything was deathly still. He tightened his grip on his sword as he passed crossroads that led to bone-dry rooms. Everything was cold and dead. He selected a corridor at random, and walked down it.
I can’t have escaped notice, he thought. They know I’m here. They’re toying with me.
He’d made a mistake. He had no idea how to find the entrance to the Carrion Rift, or if he could be sure the Obelisk was truly in the Citadel.
Maybe I should have circumvented the Citadel, and looked for the Rift itself.
Only the living are lost.
Cross pressed on. He passed hanging cages filled with cadavers long sucked dry of their blood and fluids. He tasted arcane fumes in the air; they were intoxicating, and he shook with need. Bodies had been submerged in pools of formaldehyde, and he saw workshop chambers populated by half-constructed automatons. There were rooms filled with sarcophagi and swords.
Cross’s anger mounted the further he went. He was nothing to the masters of this place. Azradayne and the Shadow Lords had no fear of the man who wandered the halls of their lair. He was insignificant, not even worth challenging.
The shadows deepened. After a while he could barely see. He held his blade steady, ready for something to leap out of the darkness at any moment. H e used it to probe the ground and the walls.
We search.
Only the living are lost.
Cross walked on. He was not afraid.
