The moment we stepped outside of the museum the situation went from bad to worse. A beam of pure energy smashed through the roof, emitted by that untouchable crystal, and summoned forth a swirling mass of red clouds over the city. The cold touch of the Veil dripped from every pore, making my entire body shiver. I shut down my magic sense and tried to focus on the main problem.

  It wouldn’t be long before lesser demons were attracted to our location by that crystal. They would rampage through the streets and kill thousands of people, who would try to fight back with whatever weapons they could get their hands on. Everyone was armed and ready for a fight – but those preparations were meant to be for human foes, not demons. I had little faith that the makeshift barricades made from discarded furniture would do much to stop them.

  “We’d better get back to the others.”

  Adrian, Cude and Max weren’t far from our position, hedging themselves close to the danger zone and sharing their anxieties about how the operation went. Terribly! But they didn’t know that yet. We’d have to catch them up on the entire problem first before we could make our next move.

  We found them hiding underneath a wooden awning out back behind a bcksmith’s shop. It seemed as if they understood the value of staying unseen, unlike the goons in the atrium who did everything they could to attract the King’s unwanted attention.

  “What the hell happened in there?” Adrian hissed, “One minute there’s a riotous gunfight happening, the next that horrible monster comes flying through the roof with some poor guy clenched in one hand!”

  “That ‘poor guy’ is Landon Sloan,” I expined.

  “And where’s Frankfort?”

  I looked to Veronica who just shook her head and delivered the sobering news, “It killed her.”

  “It killed her?”

  The three onlookers had spent a lot of time with Frankfort while I was away from the safehouse. It wasn’t long enough to call them friends, but the death of an acquaintance was still going to affect them. Cude and Max looked extremely uneasy about the news.

  “That thing is incredibly dangerous. All it took was one gnce and it assumed control over the blood in her veins. Then it did the same to the men who tried to kill it. I don’t want to estimate how many lives it could take if Landon orders it to murder indiscriminately.”

  “He will,” I murmured.

  “What did Landon do?” Max asked.

  “What am I supposed to say about him? He’s lost his mind. He’s made some kind of infernal crystal and inserted it into the Etherscope, and used it to lure a mad beast from the other side. He could kill every single person in Walser if he wanted, for certain if it’s more powerful than the one we saw at the fort.”

  As we spoke under a low awning he was flying across the city and killing anyone who dared get in his way. This wasn’t a summoning circle made from sacrificial blood and hard feelings. Landon applied his forward-thinking abilities to the ‘art’ of summoning Cath from the Veil. He was a scalpel, whereas the cult was a sledgehammer.

  It was safe to assume that his modified Etherscope was significantly more effective than the traditional method of summoning them. The secret y within the crystal he brought and inserted into the device. The King acted to prevent me from destroying it, and my attempts proved ineffective at shattering it into pieces and ending this madness.

  No matter how close I got, the crystal moved further away.

  It was a physical and mental attack. It felt like the King was purposefully screwing with my depth perception, making it impossible to target the area where the crystal was located in three-dimensional space. Hemomancy was the least of my worries given that type of reality-bending magic. How far could it take this? What was it really capable of?

  “We’re screwed. Frankfort’s dead, and we’re no good at fighting demons!” Cude panicked.

  “Cool it!” Max barked, “Honestly, panicking now isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  Panic was an appropriate response from where I was standing. I didn’t have the faintest idea of how we were going to entrap that thing and successfully kill it. It could fly, seemingly alter reality at will, and was actively avoiding me for fear of my abilities. The King could sughter us without worry if he avoided me for long enough to achieve his goals.

  He wanted that crystal.

  “Is Genta still in the city?” I asked.

  “I think he is. We’d better hurry and speak with him though. I don’t know what we’ll do if he dies before we get there,” Veronica confirmed.

  “Then let’s move. Stay out of sight.”

  Veronica led the way to the hotel where Genta was still staying. She was keeping him close in case we needed his expertise, and that pnning was now proving prudent. I could hear the profane wingbeats of the King as it soared across the city skyline. It would hover in pce, endure a round of gunfire from the citizens below, before killing them and moving on.

  We stopped and ducked beneath the front of a restaurant before it could see us. There was no sign of Landon now. He must have found a good vantage point to stand and watch the carnage unfold. We moved on when it was safe, mounting and climbing over a barricade erected by protestors.

  I peered around the corner just in time to see a group of four rebels firing into the air.

  “Is that a bloody half-hawk?”

  “Demon! A demon!” one of them cried.

  They responded by aiming upwards with their rifles and shooting at the King. A second ter they all froze in pce, before dozens of blood-forged spikes erupted from their veins and killed them instantly. The morbid statues were left to stand in pce as a warning to anyone who attempted to harm it. It was obvious that conventional weaponry was completely ineffective.

  There were signs of simir incidents everywhere we looked. A group of royalist soldiers still eating their evening meal before being killed, one was frozen in pce with a cup of tea halfway to his open mouth. The stench of blood and everything else that exited the body upon death lingered in my nostrils.

  “Goddess above!” Max muttered under his breath.

  “There’s not gonna’ be anybody left to save at this rate!” Cude seethed.

  “What’s he trying to achieve with this? It belies rationality.”

  “He’s shing out. He just wants to hurt the people whom he thinks hurt him,” I whispered.

  The totality of his hatred expanded far beyond the nobility and the people in his personal orbit though. This had started to fester since the very moment he learnt of his son’s terminal condition. Why was he ‘burdened’ and forced to suffer under such circumstances? Suddenly, he could only view the events in his life as extended punishments atop the rest. All that combined with a raging desire to be remembered and it was easy to see where he was going.

  We arrived at the hotel and hurried inside. A group of civilians were hiding by the front windows and observing the destruction from inside. We stormed up the stairs and knocked furiously on Genta’s door. The bespectacled scientist emerged soon after, and he looked as stressed as ever.

  “Everyone! You’re okay?”

  I pushed past him and entered the room; “We need to talk. I’m afraid there’s no time for pleasantries.”

  “I can see that much from my window! Come inside, quickly.”

  With everyone seated and the curtains drawn shut, we had a brief moment of peace amongst the abject anarchy on the streets. I took a deep breath and succinctly described the entire ordeal at the museum to the best of my memory. Genta’s brow furrowed deeper and deeper with each additional detail. He understood full well why we had come to him for answers.

  I asked the million-dolr question first, “What in the Goddess’ name is that crystal he made?”

  Genta held out his palms and tried to cool us off, “Please! Rest assured, I’ll expin everything I know promptly. Let me begin by stating that this is all theoretical. I don’t have enough information to make a firm judgement.”

  “He must have gotten hints from one of the surviving cultists about the process of summoning.”

  “Indeed. That was the case, but those cultists could have never created a system as efficient as the one you’ve described. He’s combining theoretical principles about the intersection of our world with the Veil, and bypassing the traditional manner in-which those Cath are summoned using the Etherscope.”

  “There was a circle there. He needed to bind the Bloodcrowned King to this world, but I don’t know what the terms of their agreement were. Perhaps his grand prize is that crystal. It prevented me from destroying it using my magic.”

  “Cath are attracted to thin areas of the wall that separates us. Those are locations with high magical concentration. They desire human emotion and energy. It’s how they feed and grow stronger. Utilising the Etherscope and that crystal as a beacon is a mad pn indeed.”

  All I was getting from Genta was that letting the ‘King’ get its hands on that crystal was going to be super bad news. Landon must have been using it as part of the contract. He’d cracked the code and figured out how to control one of those things. Find an intelligent one and offer it a reward it really wanted.

  The entire building rattled as an explosion echoed across the city. I didn’t want to think about what Landon was doing while we were trying to figure out a way to stop him.

  “Did you try to destroy the Etherscope?”

  “Yes, but the Veil is already pouring through the gap he made, and the crystal seems to be the key component that keeps the reaction going.”

  “I’ll need to study it in-person to have a better idea. Is it safe to go there now?”

  Veronica ughed, “No. Not at all! It might be crawling with demons at this point.”

  “It’s a risk I’m willing to take,” Genta said resolutely.

  “You should go with him, Veronica,” I suggested, “He might find a way to break that damned machine before it can get any worse.”

  She nodded, “Will you two be alright on your own?”

  “We have to be, or else that demon is going to rampage endlessly across this continent until there’s nothing left to kill. Running away now only deys the inevitable, and I’m not one to go down without a fight. As for the rest of you...”

  Adrian, Max and Cude were not chomping at the bit to come along this time, but I wanted to make sure that they understood what was at stake. I couldn’t have them rushing headlong into this and making the situation more difficult.

  “Please just stay here and hide. I know that Cude can’t help himself, but that demon really will kill you on the spot if it sees you out there.”

  Adrian smirked, “I bet you’ll take care of it anyway.”

  “Don’t do anything too reckless,” Max warned.

  “Fine! I’ll stay here and cover my ears,” Cude said, rounding out the trio.

  “Good. Time to fulfil our destiny, I suppose.”

  I grabbed Samantha’s shoulder and led her out of the hotel room so that we could begin our pursuit of Sloan and the demon. No answers about getting them out of the sky were forthcoming, and Samantha was showing doubts about how effective we could be in killing it. She resisted my pull and stepped away as we reached the now-empty tavern on the ground floor of the hotel.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You need to be yourself. Durandia chose you for a reason.”

  “I can’t fight like you. The only things I’m good for are mucking out stables and working fields.”

  “Don’t give me that crop of bullshit, Sam. You’re one of the smartest people I know. You never subscribed to this pin-speaking country-girl stuff before, so why the hell are you doing it now?”

  “I’m worried about this.”

  “I get that, but talking down to yourself isn’t going to help.”

  “But we don’t have a pn. You always have a pn.”

  “Then we have to come up with one. It must be connected with the powers that Durandia gave us. I have the ability to turn something into nothing. Durandia made us two sides of the same coin, so perhaps you have the ability to turn nothing into something.”

  “That doesn’t make much sense...”

  “None of this does! The powers that she gave us are almost completely beyond our mortal comprehension. They operate entirely on our ability to understand the symbolism behind them, not any natural or scientific principles.”

  “Symbolism?”

  I had a theory. I tried to expin it to her as best I could.

  “This is irrational magic. It’s the same kind as what the Cath uses. It doesn’t subscribe to how things normally work.”

  “I understand that much.”

  “But we can’t ‘train’ to use it better. Our ability with rational magic comes from our understanding of the natural ws. We can manipute the natural environment around us to cast spells. What separates a talented mage from an inexperienced one is their understanding. Ask yourself this; how do you ‘train’ to remove something from existence, in direct contradiction of the ws of conservation of mass?”

  My initial nihility spell abided by those ws. It operated by breaking the bonds between molecules and causing the structure to enter a high-energy state, at which point it would disintegrate. Theoretically you could search the area and find those scattered molecules all over the pce. It didn’t destroy them.

  Samantha nodded along, “You can’t?”

  “Exactly. The King feared my ability to ‘remove’ the space between us, the medium by which it used its magic to kill everyone. I can create a barrier of ‘nothing’ that protects us. It may extend to the ability to annihite it completely. I believe that your powers, despite ostensibly giving you the benefit of healing, could be equally destructive when applied from the correct perspective.”

  “And what does that have to do with art?”

  “Like I said, we cannot train ourselves to master these powers. It is up to our imaginations to draw these associations and innovate in turn. The more we come to understand the scale and nature of the universe, the greater these abilities become. When you merged those empty shells together – where did your mind wander?”

  “I felt like I could reach out and... grasp both sides of the world in my hands. Like I can mend any injury or cross any distance.”

  “That’s right. Keep that feeling in mind. We can do this. If Durandia has anything nasty in mind for you, she’s going to hear from me, and she’s not going to like it.”

  Samantha smirked, “I could say the same for you.”

  “Really? You already know I’ve been lying to you this entire time.”

  “I can tell that you’re a good person. That’s all I need.”

  Her nose hadn’t led her wrong before, so why would I give her shit for sticking to her guns now? Still, I disagreed completely with her assessment. I was a rat trying to escape from a sinking ship. I was looking out for myself, and hoping to earn favour with Durandia to get a stay of execution.

  It was a very utilitarian way of viewing things. The outcomes I created were ‘good’ or ‘better’ then what they would be otherwise, so by extension Samantha saw me as a good person. As I thought it over I realized that this line of thinking was how I tended to operate too. What good was interrogating someone’s motives if they weren’t willing to share them? All Sam saw was a repentant sort of person trying to save the world.

  Maybe a selfish person would stand back and refuse to stick their neck out...

  I couldn’t fall on either side of the fence. The threat of being killed at the end of this ordeal was still hanging over my head. My motives were compromised the moment that I figured out what was going on. Durandia saw that coming when she scoured the future using the Red Tree, she wanted me to face that question in my own way.

  Bad people got away with a lot, even more so in a world where the legal system could easily be swayed by money and influence. The modern day I came from was no different.

  “Do good people solve all of their problems with violence?”

  Samantha frowned, “You don’t always use violence. You even complied with what I wanted when I asked you not to kill anyone that time...”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It shows that you aren’t reliant on it. You don’t fight because you find some type of enjoyment in it. You could have done a lot worse than what you chose to do, and I bet that if you were given the chance you’d use all of your knowledge to help in a less gruesome way.”

  My brow furrowed, “Help?”

  “You’ve got a lot of money and influence, and you always say that those are the easiest ways to make a difference. Why not use that and leave a more... positive legacy behind?”

  I’d never considered it. Not even once.

  I was so focused on surviving the challenges in front of me that it seemed insulting to imagine a future where I took advantage of my new privileged position. That was why I felt so strongly that Durandia intended for this to be a temporary arrangement. Veronica would have to shed a few tears for the daughter she never had the chance to meet, and I’d be sent back into the void to drift endlessly. Samantha’s eyes narrowed.

  “I can’t believe you never thought of that before.”

  “Who says I didn’t?”

  “You’re doing that thing with your hands again.”

  The face-off ended abruptly, with Samantha cracking and ughing at my reaction. The tension that was building was momentarily lifted. My mind wandered back to the time we spent together at the academy. I couldn’t say that I hated the experience.

  “Use some of that brain power to help me come up with a pn, please.”

  She grinned at me, not feeling guilty in the least.