Elder Shadow (The Reminiscent Exile Book 5)

  ELDER SHADOW

  The Reminiscent Exile: Book Five

  JOE DUCIE

  Copyright © 2017 Joe Ducie

  All rights reserved.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  THE FIRST INCONVENIENT FUNERAL

  CHAPTER ONE - BY THE LIGHT OF THE STARWAYS

  CHAPTER TWO - WAKES & ACHES

  CHAPTER THREE - HALLOWED DUSK IN THE CITADEL

  CHAPTER FOUR - THE EVERLASTING BORN

  CHAPTER FIVE - THE WHISKY REMINISCENCE

  CHAPTER SIX - FIRE AND BLOOD

  CHAPTER SEVEN - THE SUGGESTED DAILY DOSAGE

  CHAPTER EIGHT - MARCH ON THE FAE PALACE

  CHAPTER NINE - THE RIGHTFUL KING OF THE KNIGHTS INFERNAL

  THE SECOND INCONVENIENT FUNERAL

  CHAPTER TEN - WAITING TO BE TAKEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - KING DECLAN THE COWARD

  CHAPTER TWELVE - THE ASHES OF TRUE EARTH

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - LONG LIVE THE WAR KING

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ATTACK ON THE CITADEL

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - THE PEACE ARSENAL’S RESOLVE

  THE THIRD INCONVENIENT FUNERAL

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - A TIME TO RUN, A TIME TO CRAWL

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE END OF EVERYTHING

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - ANOTHER CRAZY DAY

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE MADMAN’S MEDICINE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - HIT ME WITH THE GOOD STUFF

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - JUST HUM ALONG

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - THE WIELDER OF THE SPEAR

  THE FIRST INCONVENIENT FUNERAL

  The 3am drunks of the world are keepers of secret knowledge. The drink-to-forget folk hear the chimeless bells. They sip spirits to raise their own, bartering tomorrow's happiness for tonight's oblivion. They know which bartenders pour thrice on a double, and which benches are safe to sleep on. They know that scotch exists to cope with and dull the knowing of many things. Or that you can fit an entire bottle of red wine in a medium McDonald's cup if you drink half the wine first.

  ~ Billy St. Claire

  CHAPTER ONE

  BY THE LIGHT OF THE STARWAYS

  ‘Used to the spin’

  I had been given a twist in my sobriety.

  From the burning remains of my bookshop on the coast of Western Australia, Lord Oblivion of the Everlasting—my greatest enemy—an elder god that had existed as smoke and flame and hate since the dawn of time, possessed my form and hurled us both, he in inarguable control of my body, my mind merely along for the ride (but aware, oh so aware), across the Story Thread.

  Oblivion had me in his thrall, my body his puppet, and I was disembodied, furious—painfully sober.

  The blood of my young apprentice, Ethan Reilly, hadn’t even had time to dry on my hands. Oblivion’s first act in control had been to tear the head from Ethan’s shoulders. That stung, that felt all kinds of bad, even though the number of deaths on my hands could be counted in the millions.

  The Story Thread was the title of the vast multitude of worlds that existed within books. Every book ever written, and even those not, exist as worlds of the Story Thread. From True Earth, the real world, the focal point and nexus of all reality, the Willful and the restless, the young and the dumb can travel the World Compass, flinging themselves across the Story Thread and across worlds.

  Between those infinite number of worlds, like stars hanging against a pitch-black canvas, midnight on the ocean’s floor, a night with no moon, was the Void. An emptiness, an utter lack of anything. The Void was the sewer of creation, the drainage pipes of reality, antithesis to anything living, and it held horrors completely at odds to the rules of existence. Voidlings—eldritch monsters, heralds and sirens of annihilation.

  Lord Oblivion, if nothing else, was an expert at navigating the Void. Nothing and no one survived unscathed, traversing the Void as untethered as we were—bypassing all safeguards, capsules, and inter-dimensional train stations that made world-hopping relatively harmless. But Oblivion, the nasty entity that he was, was an old hand at this sort of mischief.

  He navigated the Void as if heading down to the corner shop for a pint of milk and a packet of gum.

  Even in my hate, my fury, I had to admire his technique—and commit it to memory. I was learning a lot, despite my status as his puppet. The way he influenced the Void, slipped around the unseen pitfalls, silently casting spells and enchantments, was nothing short of divine.

  ‘Well,’ I said aloud in my mind—speaking to Oblivion directly. ‘You are an Elder God.’

  “Impressed, Hale?” Oblivion asked, using my mouth, my voice, my grin.

  I lurched forward from the back of my mind and tried to seize control, visualising a control console with Oblivion at the helm, one of the crystal columns on the bridges of the battlecruisers I had flown in the Tome Wars, as commander of the Cascade Fleet. The representation of my mind under siege was an apt one—I’d done my darkest work, achieved my cruellest victories, at the head of the Knights Infernal interdimensional warships.

  I had no purpose in seizing control, no desire, save to throw Oblivion off course and cast us both into true oblivion, into the mirkfyre oils of the Void. One trip, one slip, and we’d be obliterated. My life would be a small price to pay, and I’d pay it gladly, to unmake another of the Everlasting.

  And my tally there was already fairly impressive. Two of the nine, dead in my arms.

  Lord Oblivion snorted and slapped me back from the controls, barely taking the time to blink, and I fell so far and so suddenly from the front of my mind—a strange, utterly alien sensation—and kept falling. A thousand needles stabbed pain into my nerves, punishment for getting so uppity, so soon.

  I hit the back of my mind, fell into a prison constructed by Oblivion, hard enough to rattle the teeth in my head. Not my real head, of course, which belonged to the elder god up on the bridge, but the representation I saw of myself within the maelstrom. I was a passenger, a prisoner, merely along for the ride. The cell he’d stuffed me in just now looked remarkably like the brigs on those same starships I’d once commanded. Well, we were in my mind after all.

  When he had seized control of my body after I had lost the protection of the Infernal Clock, Oblivion had told me what he intended—shown me the future, as he saw it. If I couldn’t stop him, if I let him use me unchecked, the Story Thread was in for a whole universe of trouble.

  But right then I couldn’t move.

  Could scarcely breathe within that prison. I didn’t know how I could still feel pain, still have any senses at all. It was like everything had been doubled. I could still hear, see, smell, touch, and even taste with my actual body, outside of my mind, though it was all under Oblivion’s control, and I had those same senses within my mind. I could hear myself think, as I could hear Oblivion think. I could hear his voice in my head, as I could hear him speak with my mouth.

  The effect was nauseating, a doubling up of senses. The back of my mind, where he’d cast me so effectively, took shape and form for me, my possessed prison. It looked like the brig on the Dawnstar, the finest of the ships I used to command. The memories of that time were fuzzy around the end of Voraskel and the closure of the Tome Wars, but I seemed to recall that this ship ha
d been destroyed in dark fire. Odds were good if something had gone down around that time, it had ended in fire.

  I shook my head, fighting the nausea, and failed. I threw up in my own mind, the stink and taste of bile as real as if I’d done it with my actual body and not this ghostly representation.

  Couldn’t even catch a break there.

  I heard Oblivion laughing as if from a great distance—and vowed to fight the bastard any and all ways that I could, no matter what it cost me in health and sanity.

  Such things ran cheap ‘round these parts anyway.

  *~*~*~*

  Some time later, and I wish I could say it had passed as a blur, as a nauseated haze, but unfortunately, I was aware and awake for the journey, staring out of two sets of eyes—my own, and my own as host to Oblivion—the deep blackness of the Void gave way to a glittering jewel of the Story Thread, a shining world and universe of the living and the lawful.

  The Void sort of lightened as we approached the point of egress—one of the manhole covers on the sewers of creation. Lightened wasn’t the right word, more of a sense of reality imposing against the Void. A world was close, is what I was trying to say—and being a Knight, born and bred, I could sense such things.

  I realised as we approached the world, somewhere unfamiliar to me, that Oblivion had bypassed the pathways of the Void entirely and chosen instead to fly, as if through the air—or the space between worlds—like it was the most natural thing in the world and not an offence, an abuse, against everything the Knights held true about travelling through the Void.

  I felt like a child, an infant, and wondered if I’d ever truly gotten the best of Oblivion and the other Everlasting in the past, or if they’d just let me think so a few times, let me dance on invisible strings through a few paltry victories. I couldn’t afford to think like that, like I was already beaten, but seeing Oblivion’s power in its infinite complexity made me shudder. Made me doubt the simple rules I’d held true my entire life.

  After all, I had unleashed the Everlasting in the ruins of Atlantis, and years later I had unleashed their Peace Arsenal—the weapons, artefacts, ships, and minions they would need to wage war across the Story Thread and Ascension City, the homeworld of the Knights Infernal. My homeworld. Surely they couldn’t have planned for Fair Astoria and Dread Ash’s deaths. I hadn’t planned for them. Ash alone, dead only a handful of hours at this point, on the mountains surrounding the Atlas Lexicon in Switzerland, had been pure luck.

  The petal of the Infernal Clock in my heart had been stabbed into her vessel—into Tal Levy, a woman I loved and the woman I hurt more than any other. She had died afraid, had Dread Ash. And while I felt a little bad about that, my main feelings stretched toward bitter relief that there was one less elder god fucking with creation.

  Lord Oblivion punched through the Void and a whole universe sprang up around us, pushed away the darkness of that foul sewer. An oppressive weight, the sheer ugliness and malice of the Void, fell from our shoulders as an actual physical burden would fall. I stood a little taller, both in body and mind, on the curved tip of a crystal bridge overlooking a monumental ocean of stars cascading like waterfalls through clouds of interstellar gas and dust. The bridge reminded me of a spear, thrust out into the heavens.

  ‘Oh… wow,’ I managed, and for the briefest of moments something other than anger eclipsed my thoughts.

  Lord Oblivion grinned and moved my head from side to side, taking in the view, affording me the expanse of perhaps the greatest wonder I had ever seen—and I’d seen my fair share of wonders.

  The crystal bridge stretched over a region of space that looked like something out of a Sci-Fi movie. We were encased in some sort of invisible, massive sphere providing atmosphere, though I doubted Oblivion would have been concerned even if we’d been in the depths of vacuum. He didn’t live or die by the rules the rest of us mortals had to abide. He was an offence like that.

  For about a mile the bridge stretched, the translucent crystal a ‘run with white sparks of energy, raw Will (magic, for the uncultured) flowing through the structure, heading toward a plateau in the distance, a mountain of purple rock, like an island hanging in space, covered with amazing, alien trees and colourful foliage.

  I was reminded of rainbow-coloured ice cream, some absurd flavour like ‘bubble-gum’ or ‘sherbet sugar stroke’.

  “The Citadel of the Everlasting,” Lord Oblivion said. “Our ancestral home. You are fortunate indeed, Declan Hale, to be here.”

  ‘Just one scoop for me…’ I muttered.

  I felt far from fortunate—and considered just how big of a bomb I would need to wipe the beautiful island from the heavens. Bombs, plural. I couldn’t identify the webs of protection shielding the citadel, but I sensed they were intimidating.

  “We’re within your original universe,” Oblivion continued, “at the heart of what your species named the Milky Way galaxy. I was born here… as were my brothers and sisters, at the dawn of moment.”

  ‘The dawn of…’ I’d heard that before, but couldn’t recall when and where. ‘You mean the beginning of time?’

  Overhead, and indeed to the sides and below the bridge, flowed blazing clouds of interstellar vapour—ice and dust and spheres of priceless gemstones the size of mountains—stretching to such distances that a man could walk in any direction for a thousand years, ten time ten thousand years, and not cross even the smallest sliver of those clouds.

  Within the clouds, stars.

  Hundreds of burning suns, their radiance dimmed by the clouds, but also igniting those galactic glittering ice fields and gemstones like fairy lights strung across a dark night sky.

  ‘How does this island exist?’ I asked. ’The gravity alone…’

  “A wonder of engineering, the greatest marvel in the universe,” Oblivion said, and began to walk, slowly and casually along the crystal space-bridge toward the citadel, his ancestral home. A place of great, perhaps greatest, power. “The stars, they are a harmony, a symphony of elemental forces, keeping all in balance. We are in the heart of the galaxy, Hale.”

  Take away the stars and the whole thing would tear itself apart, I thought, and only to myself, in that second, secret mind within my head where Oblivion couldn’t hear me. It was like a vault, a space reserved just for me. I knew, instinctively, that my thoughts here were mine and mine alone, like hitting mute on a conference call. Great, all I need to do is destroy an ocean of stars…

  I put annihilating the ancestral home of the Everlasting on my to-do list—with an open-ended completion date, given my current predicament.

  ‘You’re gleeful,’ I said. ‘I can feel it.’

  Oblivion laughed and clapped his hands together. We were still dressed in the board shorts and tee-shirt, the beach shoes, I’d been given in the aftermath of Dread Ash’s death at the Atlas Lexicon. We looked absurd, more fit for a stroll along the beach than a stroll through the heavens.

  Give me a good black shirt and waistcoat any day.

  “I am considering the sensation we are about to cause,” Oblivion said. “I return to my home triumphant, Declan Hale. I have enslaved the Shadowless Arbiter, the mortal who murdered my sisters, and who aided me in unleashing our Peace Arsenal. This will place me above my brothers and sisters.”

  I paused, licked my lips, and considered. ‘In whose eyes? Place you above the rest of you parasites in whose eyes?’

  “Why,” Oblivion said, “my parents’, of course.”

  Oh.

  Oh shit.

  The Everlasting were the greatest blight in creation, creatures of complex and intricate power, as old as the universe—and as cruel as that indifferent, cosmic bitch. I had met their mother once, Saturnia, briefly, in a bar in Atlantis… I had no desire to meet their father.

  Especially considering I was responsible for killing two of his daughters.

  CHAPTER TWO

  WAKES & ACHES

  ‘Low down and gritty, feeling a little shitty’

&nbs
p; I had to admit, the Citadel of the Everlasting was a wonder for the ages.

  Perhaps the last great wonder from the Dawn of Moment, as Oblivion called it. All that had survived the heat and chaos of creation in its terrible-two’s phase. Where did that put us now, I wonder? I thought on all the wars and rebellions, everything always feeling like the end of the world, and realised that creation may have been going through its grunge phase as a moody teenager.

  That certainly put some things in perspective.

  The Everlasting had created something truly unique here, beyond the minds of the architects back home, the greatest builders of all—the alien race known as the Vale—but it existed in cruelty. Some of the prettiest people I’d ever known had been rotten beneath the surface. I got the sense this place, this attractive blister on the face of the universe was, while undeniably striking, still a blister—one to be lanced.

  The island-citadel was further away than it had appeared from the spear-tipped end of the crystal bridge stretching out into the galactic clouds and starfall. What had seemed like a mile became two as Oblivion and I walked the bridge. The deceptive distance had come from the sheer size of the floating citadel. Great cliffs rose before me as we drew closer, covered in forests and rivers falling away into space, an endless stream of crystal-clear water being swept beyond the atmosphere. White spires, other buildings of impeccably polished marble, dotted the forests, hidden among the alien trees like holiday homes on the Spanish coast. The leaves of the forests were as blue as a summer sky… and as purple as the degradation shield that had surrounded the Atlas Lexicon. A balance again, between light and dark. Symmetry—it was important, I knew, but why?

  “Yes,” Oblivion said, when I asked about the leaves, “the citadel is in mourning for my sisters. The blue leaves are Astoria, her lost grace, the lilac for Ashaya, may she find peace in the next creation…”

  ‘You killed Astoria,’ I said.

  Oblivion slapped me, which again was as disorientating as it was painful. I rattled about my own head, rode the wave of pain into the shore clinging to the edge of a piece of splintered driftwood.