The Gray World
K arigan did not know if it was she who screamed, or Shawdell, when the window shattered. The expanse of the heavens and the ballroom, with its little hanging skeletons, were sucked away to nothing, leaving only a gray world. Gray, sandy ground and gray sky. It deadened all other color.
After the exertion of throwing the chair through the window, she dropped to her knees on the verge of blacking out. Neither the window nor the chair existed.
Illusion and deceit.
Shawdell’s soft laughter carried to her. She focused on it to prevent herself from succumbing to unconsciousness.
“Throwing the chair was your decision?” he asked. “I hope destroying my little tableau has made you feel better.”
It had not. The effort cost her.
Dark Karigan shook her head in disgust at her.
This desolate gray world was a land of dusk. Was it forever unchanging like the white world?
Another layer of the world.
Did bridges allow people to cross in and out of this gray place as they did in the white world? Did whisper wraiths drift about the plains seeking magic to feed on?
Salvistar’s beating heart had followed them out of the illusory ballroom and floated above the sand. It might be her imagination, but gold light leaked through parts of the pulsing organ.
The cordlike energies attached to Shawdell flowed unabated in opposite directions, but to where, she still did not know. Perhaps they were infinite.
Shawdell carried the sword of Telagioth, its blade bright despite the deadening quality of the gray world.
Karigan remained on her knees too exhausted to stand. “Do what you’re going to do.”
He swept the sword through the air. “I am generous. I will give you one last chance to taste the god-being’s heart.”
Do it, said Dark Karigan.
Karigan ignored her shadow. “Don’t bother,” she told Shawdell. “If I did as you ask, you wouldn’t make me a partner. You’d use me and discard me when you’d no further use for me.”
“If that is how you feel.”
She knew Eletians were swift, but she did not remember how swift. She barely rolled away in time, crying out at what it did to her arm. Before the blade could fall again, she called on her special ability to fade out and crawled away.
“Not playing fair,” he said, “but you should know that true Eletians have excellent senses beyond sight and we are not so easily fooled.”
She stood and staggered away as he spoke.
His head tilted, listening, and sword ready, he tracked her movement, or nearly so.
He swept the blade where she stood, but she pivoted and it cut within a hair’s breadth of her.
He tried again, but all her evasion training with Drent now served her.
As he attacked, she ducked, stepped back, leaned to the side, whatever she needed to do to not get sliced in half or stabbed.
Her injuries, however, slowed her reflexes.
She was weak and shaky, practically teetering over.
The use of her ability worsened the hammering in her head and it grayed her vision in an already gray world. He would have her before long.
Shawdell knew it, too. He paused, nostrils flaring and his eyes wild. “I can hear your breathing. I can smell the blood on you. You may be able to elude me, but soon you will be too weak to move.”
Her special ability, however, made certain objects and energies more vibrant.
The heart of Salvistar, still afloat in the air, shone as a golden light.
The cords that streamed to and from Shawdell sharpened in her vision, as well.
She needed to make a move before she no longer could.
She wanted to go home to her horse, cat, friends, and, not least of all, Zachary.
You should have accepted the Gray One’s offer, said her shadow. You would not be in this predicament and you could go home and have your king.
Shut up, shut up, shut up, Karigan thought back at her, too tired to speak aloud.
While Shawdell carried on and boasted, she moved behind him. Watching him slice through the air at nothing might have been amusing under other circumstances, but he could easily turn on her and that would be the end.
He was made of glass, and glass could be broken, but it couldn’t be that easy, could it?
When he’d come to her in the real world, he’d no substance when she attacked him.
Here in the gray world it was different—she was sure of it.
In the hazy vision of her special ability, smokey wisps of magic bound his mosaic form together.
If the glass turned out to be illusion and unbreakable, well, at least she had tried. She grasped a sizeable rock.
He spun around, the blade scything toward her. Victory filled his expression. She stepped inside the blow and smashed the rock on his sword arm. Glass shattered. The sword fell to the ground.
A string of exclamations in Eltish flowed from Shawdell’s mouth as his arm disintegrated into tiny pieces and dropped onto the gray earth. Whether expressions of anger or agony, or both, she did not know, and it did not matter.
She swiped the sword off the ground, and just in time because, to her horror, his smashed limb was already reassembling itself. She positioned herself between him and the floating heart.
“You cannot kill me,” he told her.
“I don’t have to,” she replied, and she hacked at the umbilical cord of energy that flowed to his chest.
“No!” he cried. “Let us discuss this like equals we—”
There was not much substance to the umbilical cord and severing it was easy.
The other cord of energy that clung to Shawdell snapped him backward.
He flew through the air back and back and back, diminishing to but a speck in the distance and his cry fading into nothing until, at last, he vanished beyond the gray horizon and mortal conception.
Karigan panted. Her knees buckled, but the energy of the retracting umbilical cord lashed around her and flung her through a blur of grays. Salvistar’s glowing gold heart rushed in the slipstream with her, only to hurtle by and vanish.
Eventually the force that carried her along waned until it sputtered out entirely and the fulgent starscape of the heavens resolved around her.
There she hung suspended in the ether, for how long she did not know, perhaps moments or years or millennia, before she plummeted.
The stars changed from sharp pinpoints into luminous streaks.
Falling, falling, forever falling.
She plunged into a white world, but not the white world. A starlit world of snow.