Elder Shadow (The Reminiscent Exile Book 5) Read online

  Oblivion’s raw shock, his hate, even a touch of fear, was finer than any glass of scotch. For a moment, just a moment, he was at a loss. If I died right then, that moment of bliss would have been enough to sate me in this life.

  The Blade of Spring crashed into the Citadel of the Everlasting and was consumed by fire and crushed under the bulk of its own weight and speed. Alongside that, as the countdown ticked to zero, the missiles in their tubes, unfired but armed before we abandoned ship, detonated simultaneously.

  Five hundred glorious explosions, each one enough to annihilate a city, swept across the citadel in a wave building on itself around the island. Whatever archaic protections and ancient shields protected the citadel, if it could survive this chain reaction of destruction then I had no business being here in the first place, but already I could see my work was bearing fruit.

  The shuttle shook from the detonations, we were battered around space—the various controls and dials swept up into the red, splinters and cracks spread across the hull, but the shuttle held. Grand chunks of the crystal bridge shot past us—pieces of the citadel. The thousands of ships in the Peace Arsenal could only watch, stunned and afraid, I hoped, as the citadel crumbled and fell away.

  “You burned my house,” I said to Oblivion, thinking of my poor little bookshop in Joondalup, on True Earth. “Fair turnaround, I’d say.”

  Great swaths of the citadel held together once the light and fire from the explosions faded, but only for a moment, a desperate grasp on the edge of the cliff, but that hold was slick with blood, and the whole cacophony had ruptured.

  It happened almost in slow motion, the island-citadel crumbled, split into chunks hundreds of metres across, and along those fracture lines burst white light, a deathly radiance from within.

  I checked the small kitchenette at the rear of the shuttle and found a bottle of relatively cheap and nasty vodka—a bit of in-flight entertainment for the king. It didn’t matter, so long as the percentage on the bottle was north of forty. I cracked the seal and took a long, healthy swig, saluting the destruction. Both Annie and Tal helped themselves to a gulp, partly to stop me from necking the lot of it, I imagine.

  “This is insane, Declan,” Annie whispered. Her hand hadn’t left the hilt of her revolver. “I think I’d like to go home now.”

  I nodded. “Tal will see you home safe. This shuttle can jump back to True Earth easily enough.”

  Tal eyed me askance. “Are you OK?” She shook her head and answered her own question. “Well, no, you’re not. But are you… sure?”

  I retrieved the bottle and gulped more vodka. What had to happen next was going to hurt. I didn’t want to be sober for it.

  “I’ve got a plan,” I said. “It’s a shitty plan, probably won’t work, but I’ve no other options.” I held up the star iron manacle, wholly white now like broken rock candy. “He’s about to get loose. Minutes, I’d say. You can’t be here when that happens. He’ll…” I sighed. “He’ll take your heads from your shoulders and eat your hearts.”

  Out of the forward window, a chunk of the citadel fell past the shuttle—half a mile across, marble columns and alien trees aflame with irradiated fire. I raised my bottle and saluted its passing. Two salutes for a job well done.

  “We did something good here,” I said. “Something… the Story Thread may never see again.”

  “The Everlasting should never have made an enemy of you,” Tal said, and gave me a kiss goodbye. Softly, her sad smile to my lips, and that was farewell. After everything, after it all, we parted in love. I liked that.

  Annie punched me in the arm. “You’re not giving up, are you?”

  “No, not in the least.” I hugged her and let the bottle of vodka fall to the floor, let the poison spill across the fine carpets in the shuttle. “But this next bit, I won’t be me.”

  Tal crossed her arms over her armoured chest. “How do you want to do this?”

  The world spun a bit about my head, a little hazy at the edges. Fatigue and drink and the general onset of an Elder God about to overtake me in the fast lane. I’d given him a helluva race, though, even in this beat up old 4-cylinder ‘87 Astra I called a soul.

  “I’ll step into the airlock, you hit the button and eject me into space,” I said. “Then don’t wait around—once Dusk knows I’m out of harm’s way, Astoria’s mantle safe, he’ll destroy the shuttle. Make the jump, True Earth or elsewhere, it doesn’t matter, just don’t be here.”

  “When will we know if your plan…” Annie didn’t finish. She swallowed hard and then forced a smile onto her face. “Steak special at Paddy’s on Wednesday? They rebuilt in the months you were away in Atlantis, you know.”

  Paddy’s. My favourite little Irish bar in Perth, just around the corner from my shop. “It’s a date, Brie. Wednesday at eight. I’ll wear that little red dress you like.”

  Never one to drag out the inevitable (said the drunk who didn’t admit he had a problem for a decade), I nodded once to my friends and stepped to the back of the shuttle. Here I entered the small, three-person air lock, and sealed myself away from Annie and Tal in the main compartment. Behind me, the panelled and porthole’d door looked out on the vastness of the vacuum, deep space full of enemy craft and blazing pieces of their stronghold.

  I pressed my palm flat against the interior door and then made a fist. Both Annie and Tal bumped it, and then Annie looked away as Tal gave me another sad smile and hit the ‘Eject’ button on the panel next to the door.

  I was sucked out in breathless silence into the arrogant cold of vacuum. I spun without purpose, without shield or hope. If I died out here, drifted endlessly, would Oblivion be trapped with me? Somehow, I doubted it.

  As I spun, gentle cartwheels, five seconds became ten, the capillaries in my eyes bursting, a rime of ice settling on my clothes and skin. As King of the Knights Infernal, the Shadowless Arbiter, the Everlasting’s Bane (no, that last one didn’t work), I saw the shuttle veer away and then disappear sideways into an interdimensional tear, into the Void—Annie and Tal, safely away.

  Only then did I concentrate, focus on the near-defunct band of star iron around my wrist. Here I considered, brought my free arm around and touched the cracked manacle. It only took a touch, a delicate tap of my index finger, and the manacle shattered and fell away in a thousand splintered pieces.

  Oblivion did not hesitate. He surged forward across my mind, the walls of his prison disappearing in an instant, and sent me spinning back into the brig, taking control anew. As the Peace Arsenal swarmed around us, his home falling from the heavens, Lord Oblivion saved my life.

  I was, after all, still of value. I was heir to Fair Astoria, father to her child. I was also, assuredly, if I hadn’t been already, top of the Everlasting’s shit list after this latest awesome insult. Word would spread across the Story Thread—the Knights Infernal, with Declan Hale as their king, had dealt a sure and devastating blow against the Everlasting.

  More than that, I’d proven them real—proper, damned evidence in the form of their home. If that didn’t get people to sit up and notice, then nothing would and let the Void claim me.

  That proof alone would secure my reign on the Dragon Throne, though with me gone and no one to defend it, I imagined Jon Faraday would reclaim it in the next day or two. Should’ve chopped his head off, though I don’t think we’ve an axe sharp enough to get through his thick neck. So be it. I hadn’t wanted the throne the way I had gotten it anyway. Tainted by the Everlasting.

  Oblivion cast quickly to save my life, tangents of Will and light to protect his vessel. He shielded us against the emptiness of the vacuum and then set his sights on Dusk’s command ship, hovering a few thousand kilometres away above the ruin of the citadel. That bastard with all his power and ships only able to watch, helpless and, I hoped, afraid.

  ‘He’s not going to be happy to see you,’ I said. ‘Look what you let happen.’

  Oblivion slammed me back hard into the deepest, darkest corner of my m
ind. He turned off the lights, shut away all sensory input, cast me deaf and blind in to the cavernous, endless emptiness of my own mind.

  So be it. I’d earned a nap.

  THE THIRD INCONVENIENT FUNERAL

  Words on the page have always been the cruellest way humanity wounds itself. Fiction, worst of all. Stories with narrative, with a plan and meaning, structure and resolution. Stories so well ordered and consuming that they evolve into dark realisations against the great god Delusion. Realisations that cripple the very core of human nature and glimpse at the rampant, cold indifference of the universe.

  Such a glimpse can be sobering—far too sobering for the mind to confront for long. So best we read these stories with bottle in hand and an active shield of spirits to put our delusional perspective right again. The canvas of reality is nothing but a single, frayed thread of story suspended above a void of apathy. And the masses pray at the Altar of Single Malt because the core edict, the promise, of faith in Delusion is as persuasive as any god or religion of man: the belief that we can be loved in a loveless universe.

  ~Billy St. Claire

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A TIME TO RUN, A TIME TO CRAWL

  ‘Walkin’ through this world all alone, just me and my six-string, hustlin’ pool and earnin’ my crust. Almost sounds romantic, when you put it that way’

  The time I spent alone in the utter emptiness of the darkest corner of my mind, a space devoid of any sensory input, merely an anti-space, a glum nothing akin to the Void itself, gave me time to think, which after the week I’d had, was more than welcome.

  How much time, I couldn’t say, as minutes could be days in that space, hours turned to weeks, and weeks to years. An exponential awareness of time passing in a space entirely devoid of something so petty as time was a tough one to get my head around, and I was trying to get my head around it inside my own head as a bundle of thoughts and something resembling consciousness… bah, fuck it. If there was a point or rhyme to the reason, I couldn’t figure it out, and I had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t supposed to figure out—that some things, some moments, are averse to such introspection.

  Keep it simple, stupid. KISS.

  I floated in a dark room without a light switch.

  As usual, I made the worst of a bad situation and stewed on my regrets, my vices, the multitude of mistakes I had made and great swaths of the Cascade Fleet destroyed, all the women I still needed to tell that I loved and so ensure their destruction.

  I thought about winning the lottery and retiring to my own private island.

  I thought about getting in shape for summer and hitting the beach. Girls in their bikinis, man.

  I thought about writing a novel, and wondered if it was ever possible to get the words on the page as shiny as they appeared in my head.

  I spent some time plotting the future, should I survive, and working on my dark and terrible plans for the Everlasting, for the Knights and the Dragon Throne. I thought on Atlantis, the route through the Void that led ten thousand years into the past, my home away from home, a place infested with the Everlasting before they truly knew me. So much that I’ve still got to learn, I thought. They were vulnerable there, but most of them were still around in the here and now, which meant long plans needed to be lain in such a way that I could attack them ahead of now. Such plans had, fortuitously, destroyed Dread Ash—but that was more luck than planning, more surprise than circumstance.

  Hell, I had more success when I didn’t know there was a plan—such as with the surprise manacle in the Dragon Throne.

  My wrist, the mindful representation of my wrist, felt bare without the star iron manacle I’d only worn for the best part of thirty-six hours. If I was to believe the note, the manacle had been planted in the Dragon Throne by me… in the future, which meant I still had some living to do, didn’t it? Or could the canvas be torn a new paradox and send this whole sordid adventure spinning into the could-have-been? I feared it could. The Story Thread was elastic, it could bend, it could twist, and at the last—it could snap.

  All my life, the wars and battles, the enemies and challenges, it was all connected around that worn elastic. Through time and circumstance and the machinations of people and gods who thought they knew better, every moment was connected to the past and the future. To those who arguably did know better. None more so than myself, it seemed, and who better to hate for my choices than myself? None. No one.

  I was responsible. Keep it simple, stupid.

  In that empty space, that dark room with no light switch, I created memories. Illusions and visions, those memories, but frighteningly vivid and real. I strung my thoughts on the vast blackness like moving paintings in an art gallery. Here I pieced the puzzle together, in perfect, undisturbed stillness, a chance to reflect. Here I recalled the horrendous and the absurd, the kind and the lovely, the strongest and most suspicious memories in my life, and looked for patterns.

  There’s nothing I can do, I thought. But see it through.

  Death wasn’t even a guarantee, as I strung the memories from the ruins of Atlantis, dying with a piece of celestial illusion, a petal of the Infernal Clock, in my heart, next to all that had followed, the adventures and the trials—my fights against the Everlasting, the blades and weapons I had used to terrible effectiveness, and all those that had fallen for my doing what I believed to be right.

  When placed in order, when looked at from within and without, abstract, as if searching through old photographs, patterns did emerge. Some of it seemed far too convenient, like the most poorly written of stories, a deus ex machina or two here, one over there, a lazy relic from lost Atlantis to save the day…

  And the star iron manacle in the Dragon Throne.

  I kept coming back to that, again and again. It was a broken pivot upon which the rest of this mess and maelstrom swung in the wind, like a rusted old garden gate.

  The only conclusion I could draw from the just-so-happens and the luck-would-have-its of my life, was that someone, perhaps myself from the future, perhaps not, wanted me alive for something—some unimaginable final battle, no doubt, fought across the breadth of the galaxy and on such a scale as to be utterly meaningless. And the Everlasting mere hurdles, speedbumps in the road, of getting me there alive—not necessarily sane and in one piece—but alive, to that final destination, that apocalyptic endgame.

  Am I arrogant enough to think myself so important?

  After everything, the answer to that was easy: Yes.

  Everyone liked to think their life had meaning, some sort of purpose. Maybe I was wrong, but I didn’t think so—too many coincidences, too many contrived and easy narratives, rife with love interests and witty sidekicks had followed me across time. Hell, as a character, I was just flawed enough to be interesting without getting overburdened with sadness. A touch of the heroic, a dash of alcoholism, regrets and resolves, and it was almost, when angled right, compelling enough to be read. The cover art would have to be good, though.

  The Story Thread was just a collection of books—every book ever written happened, every story ever told exists—was I just one more in the mix? That was a consideration that could spiral forever, chicken and egg bullshit, living in a simulation… It didn’t help me now, didn’t change anything. And rang false. Not entirely false, but not overflowing in truth either.

  Entire worlds, countless cities and lives, fleets of ships lost in my wake… and for what?

  I was still missing a lot of the puzzle, grand pieces of the future. I’d been given glimpses: from Emily playing pretend to vague hints, and outright helping hands, of my future. But nothing certain.

  Creatures beyond the Void, I thought. The Everlasting believed it. Believed there was more to this existence than even our wildest imaginings had conceived. I’d been in their minds and they in mine. The Everlasting believed in some threat beyond the Void, which was a corruption of everything I held true about the nature of reality, and, in this case, the not-reality of the Void.

&
nbsp; But the hell of it was, I could believe it. It was all too easy to believe. But accept… that was something else entirely. Show me the eldritch and Lovecraftian horror from beyond the vast empty nothing and I’ll accept it as real. Not before.

  Which was the same thinking the Knights Infernal had used against my claims and yammerings that the Everlasting were real and loosed upon creation. But, hell, I’d had the scars to prove it.

  I sighed and put that aside for now. I didn’t have enough information, enough memory pictures or old reels of film, to draw any safe or sure conclusions there—just vaguer than vague guesswork.

  I could use a drink, I thought, and for a wonder a frosty glass of foamy beer appeared next to me in that dead space, a golden lager like something out of a fairy-tale. I reached out with an arm I hadn’t had a moment ago in that empty space and the glass was cold against my palm and fingers. I shrugged and took a long sip, the foam forming a moustache on my upper lip. Above me, immeasurably distant, a crack appeared in the darkness. A sharp lightning strike of white light. Something sure and certain and… just a feeling, dangerous.

  “Nice beer,” I said, to see if I had a mouth and ears in which to speak and hear. I did. The endless black nothing solidified a touch more, became a simple chamber much like the quarters in the Fae Palace I had spent all of about five hours in as king.

  A comfortable couch appeared beneath me and I sat back into it, lager in hand, the memory pictures reverted to a wall interface screen, jumbled pictures like a presentation board. I sighed against the leather couch, a warm breeze blowing in through the open windows—and beyond the window, golden fields of white roses at sunset. The scent of those flowers helped me relax.

  Was this my mind’s eye? My idea of a place to relax? If so, it was nice. I felt at home—better, I felt at ease, which was rarer than a blue moon in my line of work.

  Here I spent the next few hours, for time became much more certain with context, with a setting—and the old grandfather clock, pendulum swinging away, against the wall helped, too. Hours to me, anyway. Given the depths of the mind, hours in here could still have been seconds or minutes out in reality, where dark work was underway. Oblivion may not even have boarded the Peace Arsenal mothership yet. We could still be all kinds of vacuum-fucked.