Chapter 14 #2
The minutes blur. August loses count of how many undead they've put down.
Dozens, certainly. Maybe more. The flow from the rift is relentless, the void producing fresh horrors with each pulsation, and August can feel the effort accumulating in his body.
The corruption is creeping back. He can feel it in the faint sting behind his eyes, the tightness in his chest. Not dangerous yet. But the clock is ticking.
A surge of holy fire from Cassidy clears the left flank. Knox's mace shatters a skeletal warrior that had been flanking Vale. For a moment, brief and fragile, the platform is clear.
"Now!" Vale calls. "August, the rift!"
August is already moving. He sprints toward the rift's edge, shadows gathering in his hands, ready to cross the threshold and begin dismantling the anchoring points.
He stops.
The void stretches before him. Thirty feet of abyssal darkness separating him from the rift's entrance on the far side.
The rift itself hovers above the center of the void, a vertical tear in reality pulsing with green-black energy, its anchoring points visible to August's senses as nodes of concentrated power.
But the platform beneath the rift is gone.
The ground is gone. There's nothing between August and the rift but the void itself.
A drop into the underworld that isn't a threshold to be crossed but a fall that goes down and doesn't stop.
Every previous rift had been a tear in the air. A doorway, a threshold. August had stepped through them the way you step through a door. But this one has consumed the ground itself, and the only way to reach it is to drop into the abyss.
"I can't get in," August says, and the words taste of failure. He turns back to Vale, and he knows the desperation is visible on his face. "The void. It's not like the others. There's no threshold to cross. If I step into that, I don't think I'm stepping back out. I'll fall into the underworld."
Vale is at his side in seconds, assessing the void with the tactical clarity of a man who has been solving impossible problems for three centuries. His jaw tightens. August watches him calculate distances, angles, trajectories.
"The rift entrance," Vale says, pointing. "It's hovering above the void. There's a ledge, the old platform edge, on the far side, directly beneath it. If you can reach that ledge, you can enter the rift from the other side."
"There's thirty feet of abyss between me and that ledge."
"I know." Vale turns to him. "I can throw you."
August stares at him. "You can what?"
"Throw you. Across the void. To the far ledge.
" Vale says this with the absolute matter-of-fact certainty of a man who has apparently been calculating the aerodynamics of launching a necromancer across a chasm and has found the mathematics acceptable.
"You weigh next to nothing, I have three centuries of enhanced strength, and the ledge is wide enough to land on. "
"And if you miss?"
"I won't miss."
"And if I miss? If I don't stick the landing?"
"You'll stick the landing." Vale's hand grips his shoulder. His eyes are steady. "August. Do you trust me?"
It's the same question, in different words, that Vale has been asking. Do you trust me. And every time, August's answer has been the same. Not because the fear has diminished, but because the man asking has proven, again and again, that the trust is warranted.
"That's a dirty question and you know it," August says.
"Is it working?"
"Unfortunately." August blows out a breath. "Fine. Throw me across the abyss. Just don't tell anyone about this. Ever."
"Knox is going to tell everyone."
"Knox is twenty feet away fighting skeletons."
"Knox has exceptional hearing and zero discretion."
"I hate you," August says, and turns toward the void.
Behind them, the rift pulses, and a fresh wave of undead begins to emerge. And behind the undead, pulling itself from the void with a grinding, deliberate menace that makes August's blood freeze, a guardian construct.
Bigger than the one at the railway station. Fourteen feet of fused bone and black iron, skull-face blazing green, bladed arms swinging with killing intent. It hauls itself onto the platform edge and turns toward them with the patient inevitability of something that has all the time in the world.
"Go!" Cassidy shouts, already charging the construct with Knox at her side. Her longsword blazes. Knox's mace connects with the construct's leg with a crack that echoes through the station, his coat streaked with dust and gore from the earlier fighting. "We've got this. Close the damn rift!"
Vale doesn't hesitate. He grabs August by the waist, one arm, effortless, and positions him at the edge of the void. "On three. Tuck your legs for the arc, extend for the landing. Aim for the center of the ledge."
"I'm a necromancer, not a gymnast."
"One. Two. Three."
Vale throws him.
For a single, suspended, absolutely terrifying moment, August is airborne above the void.
The abyss yawns beneath him, an infinity of green-black nothing that pulls at him with a gravity that has nothing to do with physics, and every instinct he has screams that he is going to fall, that this is how he dies, thrown across an underworld abyss by a Templar he's been sleeping with.
His feet hit the ledge.
He stumbles, catches himself, and his momentum carries him forward into the wall of the far platform.
His palms slap concrete. His knees buckle.
But he's on solid ground, and the rift entrance is right above him.
The vertical tear in reality pulsing with power, its anchoring points visible and reachable.
"August!" Vale's voice carries across the void.
"I'm good!" August calls back, and turns to the rift.
He enters the threshold.
***
The underworld is worse than ever.
The death energy inside this rift is concentrated to the point of near-solidity.
A pressure that doesn't just surround him but inhabits him, filling his lungs, his blood, his bones with cold so intense it transcends sensation and becomes something existential.
The corruption surges in response. He can feel the dark veins racing up his arms, his neck, his face, reclaiming territory that Vale's touch had liberated.
He moves fast. There's no time for precision.
This rift has been growing unchecked for days, and the anchoring structures are massive, deeply rooted, reinforced by the absorbed energy of three closed rifts.
August tears into the first one with everything he has, death magic and will and the desperate knowledge that every second inside this space is costing him months he doesn't have.
The first anchor shatters.
The rift screams. The void below him surges, reaching upward, and August has to throw himself sideways to avoid the tendril of darkness that lashes toward him. The platform beneath his feet, what's left of it, the thin strip of reality between the rift space and the abyss, cracks ominously.
Second anchor. August's hands are shaking, the corruption thick and dark on his skin.
His vision is narrowing, the green haze of the rift space pressing in from the edges.
He can hear fighting on the other side. The clash of blessed steel, Cassidy's war cry, the grinding of bone against iron.
He holds onto those sounds. They're the only evidence that the world outside this rift still exists.
The second anchor breaks.
One more.
August can barely see. The corruption has reached his eyes, dark threads creeping across his vision, and the pain in his chest is a living thing with claws and teeth that's trying to pull him down into the void.
He reaches for the third anchor with hands that are more shadow than flesh, and he pulls.
It doesn't break. It's too strong. Reinforced, layered, Voss's most sophisticated work.
August's power slides off it without purchase.
He pulls harder. Pours everything into it.
Feels the corruption surge in response, the trade of years for power, the familiar bargain that has been killing him since he was twelve.
He thinks of Vale. Of steady hands and amber eyes and I won't miss.
He thinks of Knox's laugh in the tunnels. Of Cassidy's fierce, honest declaration of conditional trust. Of people who showed up. Of not being alone.
August tears the third anchor apart.
The rift collapses with a sound that reverberates through August's bones, the void below him contracting, the green-black surface rushing inward. He is thrown out of the rift space and onto the far ledge with a force that sends him skidding across concrete.
He's up before he stops moving. The rift is closing, the void shrinking, the abyss contracting, and he has seconds before the ledge he's standing on is separated from the main platform by a gap he can still cross if he moves now.
August runs.
Three strides. The edge of the shrinking void rushing beneath his feet. He can see the main platform ahead. Vale's blazing sword, Knox's mace, Cassidy locked in combat with the guardian construct. He leaps.
He clears the void. His boots hit the platform. He stumbles, catches his balance.
The construct turns.
It moves faster than something that size should be able to. One massive arm swings in a wide arc, and the bladed appendage catches August across the chest. Not cutting, but shoving. The force of it lifts him off his feet and sends him flying backward.
Toward the void.
The shrinking abyss is still open. Smaller now, maybe ten feet across, but deep and dark and hungry, and August is sailing toward it with nothing to grab and nothing to stop his momentum.
"AUGUST!"
Vale's voice. Raw. Shattered. The sound of a man watching the only thing that matters to him fall into an abyss, too far away to reach him in time.
August hits the edge of the void and goes over.