fifty #2
“I might not make it out of this, but I can’t go with you. I have to face my father. I’ve been sent here from another reality to… I don’t know what I’m set out here to do, but I must follow the path before me. You’re human. Let me get you off this planet while I still can. It’s not safe here.”
“I’ve been in plenty of unsafe situations before! Believe it or not, I got myself out of them a lot of the time!”
“And the rest of the time,” Sonall interrupted, “I got you out of them. Do you think you’ll stay safe here? Like this? Let’s take her offer and go.”
Mira shoved her stave between them. “Promise me,” she said to Sonall, while Sulim stepped backward and cursed, “you’ll keep her out of trouble.”
“I’m not going anywhere!”
Sonall curtly nodded. “I always do my best.”
Mira had made up her mind to save them, to get them off Cerilyn, only for a blinding light to flash in the inner sanctum and nearly knock her down to the floor.
She barely held on to the stave as it whipped back with her hand.
Sulim dodged it coming right for her, hand in front of her face as she and Sonall shouted in alarm.
Only Mira looked toward the flash’s source. There, where her mother’s statue once stood, was a tear through that reality.
She had never seen such a thing before, but she knew what it was in the marrow of her bones.
Mira erected a new shield as she stood before the two humans she now didn’t have time to teleport away from trouble.
Nor did she think much of them brandishing their weapons again.
You can’t shoot a tear in reality. Any other time, and Mira would be amused by the human need to shoot something in the wake of no sorcery.
“I should have known,” Mira said, lowering her shield when she saw her father standing amid the tear.
Dark, deep violet and crimson swirled around him, and the blinding light from before retracted to the periphery.
The Mira of another world was taken back to those moments when she saw the End of All Things alongside her mother as she Ascended—of the giant eye that saw all, everything, here, now, and into the untold future.
I looked into one eye of the unknown creator and realized that nothing scares me anymore.
Well, almost nothing. Mira glanced back at Sulim, whose arms shook, before addressing her father. “What have you done?”
Nerilis had a Relic in each hand. Around his neck, tight against his throat, was the necklace Mira had given Sulim.
He dropped both Relics. Despite neither being made of glass, they shattered into thousands of pieces upon the altar.
The earth rocked. The lights swung. Pieces of the ceiling fell.
“Get off this planet while you still can,” Nerilis told his daughter. “Get your people and leave. This is your last chance.”
What she hated most? How concerned he sounded, as if he truly were her father, and this was about a planet under siege instead of outright genocide.
At least Sulim and Sonall had the good sense not to attack—and not only because Mira stood before them, the stave leveled horizontally before her.
It won’t make a good bit of difference. For all Mira knew, her father would kill her.
Her own father. He would kill me. He would look into his own daughter’s face, see her mother, and murder her.
The fact that she knew that as intimately as she knew his desire to destroy this planet in the next few minutes was all it took for her to hold her ground.
“No,” she said. “My mother brought me here for a reason. Perhaps it was to stop you.”
“You cannot stop me,” he said with a sigh. “I will accomplish what I set out to do. In fact, it is already done. All that is left is to use the trigger that will set afire this world.”
“You can’t!”
“Do you hear yourself? It is already done! Look around you!”
Mira glanced up, the air clogging her throat as she witnessed a host of golden butterflies dancing near the ceiling.
As the golden light from the tear expanded through the room again, she saw them: the people who had been ripped from their bodies and were now sent back to the Void, following the most unlikely shepherd in the form of Nerilis Dunsman.
“We did our best,” Olma said, dropping lower than the others, “but it’s time to go.”
“I wish I had more time to explore what it means to be alive.” Kema attempted to drop, but the lot of butterflies pushing against her kept her back. “Goodbye.”
“No fucking way,” Sulim whispered behind Mira.
“Ah, shit,” Eyne said. “This is the dumbest way to go!”
“Everything beyond this room is gone,” warned Giselle. “He’s right. Get out while you still can. We have to go.”
“I’ve got the worst feeling about this,” Sonall grumbled.
Mira took a step toward her father. “You’ve killed these people! Do you know what that makes you!” She didn’t wait for his pithy response. “You would kill me, too, wouldn’t you? Your fucking abomination!”
The more steps she took forward, the more he took back, until he was almost swallowed by the tear to the Void. “I don’t desire to kill you,” Nerilis said. “I take no pleasure in any of this. Like you, I am tasked to fulfill my duty. It was what we were born to do, my daughter.”
“Ba!”
Before he was consumed by the tear, Nerilis cast his hand forward. Although Mira could not see the storm of sorcery heading their way, she knew it was coming, and she erected a final shield that might hold against her father’s talent.
It was not lost on her that he had aimed at Sonall. Nor was it lost on Sonall that Mira had saved him with her cracking shield.
“Shit!” she cried. “I can’t hold it!” She channeled everything through the stave, using it as a pillar to keep the ward constructed, but every passing second only made her arms shiver, and her chest tighten as she was reminded of what it was like to get her ass kicked on the Academy practice field.
Even though only her father’s arm remained through the tear, he was as strong as ever.
And Mira wasn’t anywhere near his talent, despite being her parents’ daughter.
“Mira!”
That was the last thing Mira heard before she was knocked down to her knees. And the last thing she witnessed was Sulim clinging to her, offering what little human strength she had before they even made it to the End of All Things.
Sonall knelt as well. Mira’s shield was shrinking. Soon, they would all be hit by a wave of fatal sorcery.
“Damnit!” Mira had many more curses loaded and ready to go, but the tremors in her arms and the sagging of her body kept them at bay. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Gravity pulled her down. Yet how could it? Gravity no longer existed on Cerilyn. “Get behind me!”
Mira had one last trick up her sleeve. She centered her strength on the stave and prepared to expel as much of it at once as possible. It was her only opening to teleport out of there with both humans, and even then she wasn’t sure she had the pool of talent to draw from after this.
She was about to push against the barrier when a crack of energy appeared above her claustrophobic dome.
It crashed into Nerilis’s sorcery, exploding both into a bright, painful light that made Mira lose her concentration.
As Sulim grasped her midsection and pressed her face into Mira’s back, the sorceress grunted in infernal damnation.
Her shield broke. The bolt of sorcery above her continued to battle with Nerilis’s, and the man himself reappeared from the tear, his face pale and wild with disbelief.
“Now!”
Mira had never heard that voice in the waking world. Not so clearly, and not so loudly. Yet her eyes did not deceive her. That was Rahara, standing on the other side of the battered room, her hands in prayer stance above her head as her clear, human-like eyes stared straight into Mira’s soul.
“Go! Now!” she commanded, as if she were a real person whom Mira could reach out and touch right there. “Into the doorway!”
Nerilis took up the entire archway, imposing but not impassable. His menacing mien of recognition settled on Rahara, and in that split second, it was like two ancient companions saw one another for who they were in the present day.
“Go!”
Her voice alone was powerful enough to raise the chorus of the Harmony thrumming through the air.
The butterflies dispersed from the ceiling, some tumbling through the tear while others flew toward Rahara and surrounded her.
The walls slowly faded away. Between Rahara and Nerilis existed the final remnants of Cerilyn.
Us. Mira, a julah who had Crossed between realities, and two humans who never guessed they would see the end of the world.
They had to go. Now. While her father was distracted.
She grabbed Sulim’s arm with one hand and held her stave with the other. Sulim, in turn, grabbed Sonall, the three of them lurching forward. Rahara used the opening to thrust her might at Nerilis, who stumbled long enough for him to take the hint and retreat into the tear.
Mira went after him.
That was it. Her chance to teleport Sulim—and Sonall—to safety was gone. I couldn’t have, anyway. It was too late. The moment her father destroyed the Relics, it was over.
She half-expected to see him in the antechamber to the Void, which was the only way she could describe where the three of them now stood on the other side of the tear. Behind her, glimpses of Rahara faded as she waved her hand in front of the tear and said something that Mira could not hear.
“Who was that?” Sulim asked once they were alone in the quiet of the abyss.
Darkness tainted with purple skies and golden stars reminded Mira of what she had seen the last time she beheld the End of the All Things.
When we danced away, Sulim. She gaped at her soulmate now, suddenly seeing Sulim with the light out of her eyes and blood covering her body.
She had been a butterfly, then. And Mira had bade her to go quickly to the Void before she became a Shadow.
“That was…” Mira cleared her throat. Still, adrenaline pumped through her heart and kept her on high alert.
Even Sonall spun in a slow circle as he took in their surroundings, one hand always near his firearm.
It won’t do any good here. He must have known that, for he never touched it.
“That was the only person who knows what’s going on here.”