The Mirrored Shard

18 The Vastness of Stars

THAT NIGHT I slept the first real, deep sleep since I’d lost Dean, but when I woke I found myself standing and staring down at the same gray spires, the same terrible configuration of an ancient city that I’d visited far too recently.

“It’s a terrible sight,” Crow said, as if he’d been summoned by the wind to stand next to me. One moment he wasn’t there and the next he was, his robe swirling around both of us like errant smoke.

“It looks just the same to me,” I said. “And I really wish you’d stop showing up in my dreams. I didn’t give you permission to invade my sleep whenever you want.”

“This is no dream,” Crow told me. “Look again.”

I sighed but looked back at the unfamiliar city. I saw that the tall spires were crumbling, that many of the odd angles of glass had shattered, leaving jagged mouths where windows used to be. Shoggoths and nightjars crept among the ruins, and strange, many-winged birds flapped from place to place.

Again we were in the cold, and I felt it in my bones. Crow took off his robe and put it around me. “It’s a cold place, the bottom of the world.”

“Outer space is colder,” I said.

Crow sighed and looked up at the darkening spot in the sky. “They want to speak with you, Aoife.”

I also followed the spot, which had grown a bloodred corona as it got larger and larger, the Old Ones boring through space and time to reach the Iron Land.

“I did what they asked,” I said. “I used the Elder Sign to take Nylarthotep. I’m not doing them any more free favors.”

“They gave you safe passage when you left the Deadlands,” said Crow, “and they must be repaid.”

I glared at him, even though his face was as guileless as a child’s. “Is this coming from you or them?”

“I’m merely their voice,” Crow said. “I’m the aethervox for things so old they were created before voices.”

“I didn’t ask for your help,” I told Crow, even though I was really speaking to the Old Ones. “I released you because I was desperate. I never asked you for anything.”

“We require the way prepared,” Crow said, his eyes going blank and rolling back in his head. “We require a Gateminder to resurrect our ruined city, to make us whole again and give us a place to dwell while we bless the mud-crawling humans with our presence.”

I took a deep breath. This time, I wasn’t backed into a corner. This time, the lives of people I loved weren’t hanging over my head. There was only my own fear, my own feeling of helplessness in the face of something so vast.

For the first time, I knew I had to fight that feeling with everything I had.

“No,” I said, raising my chin. “I’ve done enough to help you come back. More than I ever wanted to. From here on out, you make your own way.”

“We are old and vast beyond imagination,” Crow croaked. “We will return, and we will gift the humans with our knowledge and humble them with our incomprehensible power. We ruled once, and we will rule again, Gateminder. Do not test us.”

“I’m not much for being ruled,” I said. “And neither are the rest of the humans. This world isn’t yours. You may have laid the foundation, but humans built it up. They made the world. Tesla discovered the Gates. Not you.”

I straightened my spine and looked into Crow’s vacant eyes, raising my voice so it echoed back from the terrible spires that rose like skeletonized fingers from the city of the Old Ones. “Go back to the stars,” I said. “I released you because I had no choice, but I will not stand by and let you conquer my homeland.”

Crow started, his face composing itself into its usual lines. “Oh, Aoife,” he sighed. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

I looked up at the spot in the sky and felt a curious vibration through my body, as if something were reaching across the aether, tapping the frequency directly into my mind. I looked back at Crow as the sensation grew and grew, building to a shriek inside my skull. “Yes,” I said. “I do. And I’m not afraid.”

We will not be swayed, the Old Ones’ voice rumbled inside my head. It was a voice before there were voices, the sound of an eldritch thing born of star fragments and the vacuum of space, of a place beyond space, beyond dreams, beyond all matter and reason. I knew such a voice should break me, turn me into nothing but a gibbering shell of flesh racked with madness, but I stood firm. I would not be bowed, not this time. Not threatened. I was the Gateminder, the protector of the ways between the worlds, and not even the oldest power in the universe could move me.

We will come, the Old Ones shrieked. We will come and we will have your world. We will come and you will tremble at the sight of us. We will live again.

“Someday I’m sure you will,” I said. “But this isn’t your time. It’s ours. Go back to the stars until the humans have vanished and the earth is yours again.”

It will not be so, the Old Ones whispered, a sound a thousand times worse than their screaming. It will be in your lifetime, Gateminder, and we will make sure you meet us face to face.

I looked at the sky, which burned out as I watched, atmosphere going up in flames to reveal the vastness of the universe—not empty, but full of a million stars, a million worlds circling, a million other places that only I could visit.

“Come, then,” I told the Old Ones as I watched them unfurl their bodies and blot out those stars one by one. “I’m ready.”