“You didn’t have to save me just now.”
“You’re my friend, Ōbhin.” The thing pretending to be Bran stepped forward. “I—”
“You killed my friend!” The resonance blade hummed to life, emerald light flaring from the pommel.
Bran’s face fell. “Avena said the same thing. Perhaps I am not allowed to have friends.”
“Who are you really?” Ōbhin had to know. “Did Dje’awsa make you?”
“I’m No One,” Bran said after a moment. He raised his hands and backed away into the darkness. “I will keep my distance. I know you need to keep Dualayn alive until he fixes Avena. You won’t hurt him. I’m not a threat. For now.”
The thing calling itself No One fled into the swallowing black of Koilon’s ruins. Ōbhin’s entire body trembled. Rage suffused him. He would find a way to put down Dje’awsa’s foul creation. Next time. When he hasn’t just saved my life.
*
Avena burst out of the building onto the steps. The lantern light shone around her. She scanned around, struggling to gain her bearings. The last image of Ōbhin she’d received from the artificial mind seared in her thoughts. Terror lashed her heart to painful ribbons.
“You did it!” an excited Miguil shouted. He and Dajouth stood twenty cubits or so away over a collapsed crystalman.
“Where’s Ōbhin?” she demanded.
“Went that way,” grunted the weary voice of her father. Fingers trudged into the light, breathing heavily, sweat cutting streaks through the grime coating his face. “Chased by two . . . of those . . . Black-cursed bastards.”
Avena looked in that direction, clutching her hands tight together. She opened her mouth to shout when green flared in the darkness to her right. Ōbhin’s sword.
She darted in that direction, the glow of her earthen gauntlet spilling enough light before her to see where she stepped. He stood by himself facing the darkness. She cried his name as she ran. He turned to face her. She caught a glimpse of his face spreading with joy.
Then his blade went out. He became a shadow flowing towards her. They came together. Arms went around the other. She clutched him with desperate need. He was alive. He hadn’t fallen like she feared. She’d been in time. She pressed her face into his leather jerkin and trembled.
They had found each other in the dark.
He kissed her forehead and whispered comfort to her. In that moment, she knew everything would be fine. They would find the antenna. She would adjust to the cursed thing shoved into her skull. Just like her brain had adjusted to the artificial mind’s broadcast.
She would make a life.
Avena wouldn’t let the butchery Dualayn had committed stop her from moving forward. She had a second chance at love. That hollow pit in her heart was almost filled. All that remained was the absence her dead loved ones had left in her life.
Evane was the largest, but she realized Chames had dug his own place in her heart, and even her mother was there. Not the woman who’d been driven mad by the Black, but the smiling woman she’d been most days. The bright woman her father had loved.
She had lost too much in her life to lose anything else.
*
As Ōbhin held Avena, he felt the black gloves around his hands. A prison he donned every morning. A declaration not only to the world, but to himself, that he was worthless. Today, he had wanted to do more than just protect.
He had wanted to live.
He’d been willing to die to save Avena, but he found he would rather live with her. Ōbhin had found value in his life once more. The last time he’d gone underground, he had believed himself to be a noble man. A proud warrior. He had emerged a murderer. A broken man.
That dark, twisted version of himself had entered this darkness and died. The old one reborn. He was ready. Finally ready to remove these gloves and wear proper ones. Purple gloves, the color of protection, of a man who wanted to protect those he loved. And with circles on them the color of flame. A declaration of his love, his burning passion for someone else.
The person he wanted to protect most of all.
Avena had promised they would escape the grime and darkness. She’d kept her word. As he held her, he whispered the three words burning in his heart. The three words that had transformed him once more.
“I love you.”
Avena’s faced lifted. Her lips met his. He wouldn’t be a coward this time.
*
Avena felt a great deal of energetic joy as they resumed their search through the ruins. The crystalmen were gone. The only dangers left to them were collapsing debris. The impostor, No One as they settled on calling it, lurked out in the dark. She could feel it watching, but it stayed away.
It took hours yet, but they reached the Hall of Communications. The building, like many others, was half-collapsed, crushed by whatever cataclysm had buried Koilon. As near as Dualayn could tell, the destruction of the Wave Transference Station had unleashed the ruby transformation. That appeared to have unleashed the invasion of the strange demons with their still-warm bones. Perhaps they were birthed in the destructive energies unleashed at the moment of the Shattering. They were different from the ant-like demons she’d witnessed in her dreams of the White Lady’s past.
Different breeds of demons? Are darklings one? Are other monsters among them?
At some point, someone named Ozsor had sealed the Ruby Nodule which might have meant setting up a Warding. It was the last event chronicled in the Recorder. The Warding must have buried the city, perhaps banishing the living demons back to wherever they’d come from.
Maybe she would never
