Shadow Magic (Darkling Mage 1)

Something – I couldn’t tell you what, exactly – shifted in the air around me. Which was strange, because the only physical change I noticed came from the ground. A crack in the center of the circle grew larger and longer, at a speed alarming enough that I stepped back. The pigeon, the raw lamb chop, the biscuits, all of it slipped into the earth as the slit grew bigger, then formed into a shape that was all too familiar, and eerie. A mouth.

Black lips, black teeth, and deeper in the hole, a snaking black tongue. The faint sound of humming faded as the bizarre, oversized ebony human mouth yawned silently, then opened wider. Then it began to scream.

Dozens of voices, all discordant, issued from that same chasm. I whipped around to check, but no one outside the alley seemed attracted to the horrific noise, and from the leaves and debris tumbling in the streets, I saw why. Without warning a storm had whipped up again, ripping through the city once more, the roar of wind and thunder mingling with the black mouth’s screams.

Lei Kung might not have been one of the big guns, as Prudence put it, but the world was prepared to grieve for every entity it lost. It brought the pressure of properly doing this communion bearing down on us even harder: we needed to set things right.

The storm sent one last gentle reminder. Cracking like the end of days, a flash of lightning seared the streets as it struck a utility pole. An explosion to match the thunder rumbled through the block, and the resultant shower of sparks was the last light in the vicinity as the power went out. Yeah. We had to set things right, and fast.

The mouth kept on singing its terrible dirge, voiced by a choir culled from hell itself. One voice sounded like a man being skinned alive, another, a child crying, and another, a woman mourning. They wailed all at once. I grimaced as I turned to Bastion and Prudence, both of them gritting their teeth against the noise. Only we could hear it, then, the shrieking portal, this mouth from hell.

“That’s the doorway?” I shouted over the din.

“Get in,” Prudence yelled back.

“Ladies first.” I’d never seen Bastion afraid. He was still making every effort to look unruffled, of course, but I could tell by the lines in the creases of his eyes that he was at least deeply unsettled.

“Fuck’s sake,” I said. I don’t know what came over me then, but I like to think that it’s part of what makes me such an unpredictable and wildly attractive individual. I soldiered forward and stepped into the portal myself.

I already told you how it feels to shadowstep, how it can be cold, and to a point, somewhat suffocating. And I told you how entering Arachne’s portal was slow, laborious, like swimming through molasses or, quite literally, walking through spiderwebs. This? This was so much worse.

Traveling through Hecate’s portal was like jumping down the spit-slick throat of some colossal beast, sliding further and further down this steep, pulsing tunnel. It felt as if I was smothered in saliva, even though my skin and clothes remained dry. A hot wind blew up and down the tunnel, like something breathing. The worst was the darkness, the total blackness of it all, of not knowing where this infernal gullet began and ended.

Then it came to a stop.

I blinked, and the gloom was lifted. Bastion and Prudence were standing to either side of me, as dazed as I was, but none the worse for wear. We were in a meadow, the tall grass of it rustling in a gentle breeze, under a massive field of stars in a night sky as black as ink. It was so idyllic that it felt all the more unnatural. Wrong.

It didn’t make sense, for example, for us to be surrounded by so many chains dangling from out of the sky, suspended, it seemed, from the stars themselves. They drifted lazily in the breeze, as innocuous as vines, yet clinking ominously as they moved.

Around us, where the sound of the wind should have been, came an unnameable, wordless chattering of so many voices, just loud enough to make out, yet never loud enough to understand. And from far afield, or sometimes, from the sky itself, came the playing of pipes, here discordant, there melodious, alien and distant. And then she stepped out of the darkness.

Statuesque. That was the first word I would have used to describe Hecate, and not just for her height, either, but her sheer majestic presence. Her skin had all the color of a marble statue, pale in the starlight. She wore a cloak as black as the night itself, now shifting in the breeze, but at times moving as if of its own accord. What looked like beads and gemstones sparkled from the folds of her garment, but I blinked again and knew that they were stars.

Small lengths of chain clinked and dangled from her cloak, the end of it hemmed in what looked like emerald green thread, but I recognized it as the grass we were standing on. Her robe was a miniature of our exact surroundings, a microcosm. I squinted and saw the figures stitched onto it, little effigies of myself, and Bastion, and Prudence, and among them, a copy of Hecate herself, wearing her own cloak made of stars and sky.

“Stop looking,” Prudence whispered. “Not the cloak.”

I blinked and looked away, with some grim knowing that if my gaze lingered I’d be staring closer and harder, forever, that it would drive me mad.

Hecate fixed us with glassy eyes, both of them in complete blackness, the whites of them missing. She was beautiful, but there was nothing specific about her that I could remark on, nothing to remember her beauty by. It felt as though her features shifted with every passing second, my mind struggling to keep up with every form her face assumed. Again I wondered how long it would take before one of us went completely insane just from standing there.

“Three of them approach,” she said, one mouth speaking in many voices. “Three, like us.”

They weren’t there before, and then they were, two exact duplicates of the entity, flanking the original. I rubbed at my temple with one hand, as if that could stave off madness.

“They come seeking answers,” said one Hecate.

“Yet they do not know the questions,” said another.

“Dude.” Bastion elbowed me in the ribs. “Say something.”

I cleared my throat, stepped forward, and puffed out my chest. “Hecate. We’ve come to bring justice to your kind. Your brothers have been murdered. Help us, and we will ensure that this will never happen again.”

“Help you. Yes.” The three entities raised hands to their chins, cupping their elbows in the palms of their free hands. “And if we help, we suppose your precious Lorica will be our armor, your assurance that we will be unharmed in future.” Their shadows lengthened against the grass, though they didn’t grow any taller. “But what help,” she said, her voices trembling, “does a god need? What can a fleshling like you possibly offer for our protection?”

I stammered wordlessly, hating that I was intimidated by her display of power. It was just the Wizard of Oz, as far as I could tell, her posturing, with her booming voice and her shadows. But I had to remind myself: that was all from a movie, a book. This creature before me wasn’t a man behind a curtain. It was a deity, a goddess of magic, and without having to be told, I knew she was the most dangerous thing I had ever encountered in my life.

“Hecate, please,” Prudence said, her voice imploring. “We need to stop the murders. We’ve given you your offerings.”