Onslaught

EPILOGUE: JOURNEYS END AND BEGIN

Akroma flew above Topos and sought signs of Ixidor. Her paws dragged over the fronds of the forest and startled birds, red and gold among leaf shadows. They darted away, their cries silencing the howl of monkeys. Akroma spread her wings and soared out above a trampled trail.

A deathwurm had passed here, heading toward the lake.

Akroma followed the path. In two strokes, she reached the shore.

Once the lake had been sky-blue, but now it was gray, its bottom torn up. In the midst of the tainted waters, Locus rose. Its arches and towers gleamed despite the gray ooze that draped them, despite the failing mortar and crumbled ramparts. The deathwurm had climbed all across that glorious palace.

Akroma had never noticed how beautiful Topos had been.

Rising on heated air, she soared along the front gate. The slime trail led her up the wall, around the central tower, and to the master's balcony. With a final surge of her wings, Akroma vaulted over the dripping balustrade and landed.

The balcony was crossed with stress fractures. Beyond shattered glass doors lay a bedchamber in utter ruins. It seemed a gaping mouth. Ceiling, walls, and floor ran with gray ooze.

"Did you die here, Master?" wondered Akroma.

Never before had she allowed the thought that he might be dead. She knew he was gone, yes, but dead? It is a very different thing to serve a departed god than a dead one.

Leaping into the air, Akroma followed a second slime trail that spiraled down the wall. The path led through a ravaged garden, across rooftops to a shattered rose window. Akroma dived through the circle of shards and into a long gallery. Her breath caught. In the carnage of toppled statues and torn paintings, Ixidor was everywhere. His head lay here in stone, his arm there on canvas, his spirit throughout the chamber.

Lighting on the runner, Akroma took a deep breath. "This will be a shrine to you, Master. I will clean it and save every fragment of you, so that future generations will glimpse your face in the pieces."

The far wall of the gallery had been shattered by the wurm. Akroma winged through. The trail led across more rooftops and then precipitously down a wall and into the gray lake. A black hole lay in the bed below.

If the wurm had gone there, it must have followed Ixidor.

Akroma tucked her wings and dived. Air shrieked across her pinions, and then she clove into the water. The impact was like thunder. Waves opened around her and then clapped closed.

Akroma swam to the bottom of the lake and into the pit that the wurm had dug. It was a cold black throat. As she descended, walls of sand gave way to walls of mud, then to rock.

Akroma entered a wide, flooded chamber, its magic lamps gleaming eerily through the gray water. The place had been ravaged, ruined furniture trapped against the ceiling Someone stood there.

Master!

Akroma swam toward the silhouette of Ixidor, shimmering in the murk. As she neared, though, she realized it was not the creator but an unman. He was the doorway to where the creator had gone.

Using her wings like fins, Akroma propelled herself to the unman, and through him.

She spilled with tons of water out the other side and into an upper chamber of the palace. It was half-flooded. Its furnishings had already washed out the door. Water rushed into the corridor beyond and down the nearby stairs.

Ixidor was not here, nor the wurm. The unman would have closed if the creator had made it safely through.

He was gone. It was a certainty. He was dead. Her god was dead.

Akroma stood amid the shoving waters and wept.

Your journey is done. Mine only begins.

Jeska had said that. She was wise-wise and damned.

Kamahl sat in the ravaged ziggurat of Krosan. No one else ventured here, so near the rapacious heart of the forest, but to Kamahl, this spot was sacred. He came here to think.

His journey was finished and his wound only a healed-over scar, a testament to all he had done.

Kamahl had slain his former self and saved his former sister. He had even saved the forest, pouring the darkness from his own soul into the Mirari sword.

How strange. His salvation had come by emptying himself of evil. Jeska's had come by filling herself with it.

He glanced toward the thistle wall, beyond which General Stonebrow waited. The giant centaur guarded his master and wished for more wars.

Let him wait. He could learn something in waiting.

Kamahl had a waking dream: A deathwurm chased him to the edge of a cliff. He climbed halfway down it and clung to a tree that grew there. Another deathwurm waited at the bottom of the cliff. Death above and death below. As Kamahl held onto the tree, he realized it was an apple tree. It bore a single huge apple, the roundest and reddest he had ever seen. He reached out and plucked it and ate.

Life was no longer about running from death. It was about eating apples.

Poor Jeska. She could not run from death, for one can't run from oneself.

"My journey is done. Yours, Sister, only begins."

"Behold the glories of the Nightmare War!" the man shouted. He was not Braids-no one would ever truly replace Braids, leaping like a manic goat around the rim of the coliseum. But she had not returned from Topos, and the show must go on. The man's shout reverberated among a hundred thousand spectators. They avidly cheered the reenactment.

On the sands below, a dementia summoner played Phage. She brought giant, undead serpents from her mind and piled them in a coiling mound at the center of the arena.

"Behold, the deathwurms!" The crowd loved the gnarly pile. "Remember, all bets on individual warriors pay three to one for survival! Who will live? Kamahl? Ixidor? Braids? Phage?"

The true Phage did not fight this time. She was too grand a personage to engage in such vulgar sports. She sat where she belonged, in the royal box beside the First.

Black robes and black silk, seats of iron and the best views in the coliseum-Phage and the First stared unblinking at the battle. In their eyes, the whole deadly drama played out in miniature.

An undead serpent attacked the summoner who had created it. The beast ate her to nothing, to the delight of the audience.

'That would never happen," said Phage quietly.

"Of course not, my love," replied the First. He reached his hand to hers.

She took that killing grasp and squeezed.

"We are the eaters of death," he said, eyes still on the melee.

Phage nodded. "We are the dreamers of nightmare." ***** In the belly of the beast, Ixidor finally found Nivea.