“You have to let go, Dust,” Herald said.
“It is time,” Izanami said. “Surrender the breath of the dying.”
“Mom?”
“You’ll always be my little boy. I’ll always love you, Dust. Always.”
Her fingers rushed away from me, her eyes and her smile the last features I could make out before she faded into nothingness. And just like that, with a long, slow sigh, like sea foam vanishing on the shore, she was gone.
“It is finished.” Izanami closed her fingers, and the light dancing in the center of her palm winked out. “The circle is complete.”
The pendant at my chest glowed with its crimson fire, this time stronger, brighter than before. And it kept on burning, the light of it building into an inferno that rose from the garnet itself. But I could feel it burning inside me, a wreath of flame whirling around my heart.
And with it came the pain. The sheer, white-hot pain of my heart being thrust into boiling oil.
I threw my head back, and I screamed.
Chapter 33
The world around us was shattering. Fine hairline fractures were appearing everywhere: the walls, the floors, even the strange, roiling sky of the Dark Room. And out of those cracks came trickles of light, as if from some outside source. Herald and I were in an earthenware box, and it was crumbling – fast.
Izanami was nowhere to be seen. Fair enough, because I’m the kind of stupid who still would have wanted to exchange one or two very choice words with her. But all that would have to wait, not that I was looking forward to seeing her again so soon.
We had much bigger problems, like the huge chunks of obsidian masonry tumbling from the vaulted ceilings above us, the Dark Room’s architecture finally truly revealing itself in its imminent destruction. The pillars supporting the five rifts at the Dark Room’s heart were tumbling over as well, falling into so much worthless debris.
Into dust. Dust. I chuckled to myself, then choked on a mouthful of blood.
“Dust?” Herald’s eyes were huge with terror, with concern. They flitted towards my chin, where I could feel my blood dribbling.
“I think I’m fine,” I burbled, lying through a mouthful of red.
“We have to get you out of here,” he said. “Which way? Tell me, which way?”
Bad enough that the entire world was quaking around us, but my vision was getting blurry, too. Everything was spinning. “Doesn’t matter,” I said, somehow confident in my answer. “You see all these cracks? Every one of them will bring us back to Valero.” I fell on my ass, threw my hands up, and laughed wetly, the taste of metal coating the inside of my mouth. “Doesn’t matter. We’ll get home even if we just sit here and wait.”
Herald lifted his hand, his teeth gritted as he conjured a shield of solid ice, deflecting another falling chunk of debris. “Well if we don’t make a move right fucking now, you and I are going to get home flat as pancakes. Move your ass, Dustin. Now.”
I chuckled as I stumbled to my feet. “Ass,” I said, my chest still awash with fire, my mouth a mess of blood. I spat out a mouthful as I ran, as Herald tugged me through the crumbling corridors of the Dark Room. I sighed as purple tendrils of magic crawled from his fingers around my wrist. I wasn’t sure what the spell was meant to do, but it cleared the delirium from my head, and I think it stopped wherever I was supposed to be bleeding. I think.
“Come on, Dust,” Herald shouted. “Through that gap. We’re jumping, okay? One, two – ”
Three. It was like the ultimate scene in one of those action movies, where a massive explosion, one you’re not supposed to look at, triggers behind you in an enormous fireball. In this case, it was more like an implosion, really, the cracks and fractures in the Dark Room contracting, the broken pieces of its puzzle slipping back together as it spat us out into the real world, shortly before it compacted into nothingness.
We sprawled headlong into Latham’s Cross. I coughed as frigid air entered my lungs in huge gulps, wet blades of grass sticking to my face. Beside me, Herald lifted his head from the earth, his glasses in disarray, grave dirt on his cheeks.
“Dust,” he said. “Look. It’s working.”
The edges of the Overthroat’s portal were sparking, like something failing, a technical fault. And the Overthroat knew it was happening, too. It looked around itself, shrieking its eldritch scream. Shtuttasht pushed itself out of the portal, finally finding the strength and will to move its heaving bulk into our reality despite the endless onslaught of the mages.
Then it happened. The portal’s whirring noise stopped, leaving only the Overthroat’s panicked cries. The borders of the rift wavered, then all at once snapped shut, the portal shrinking to absolute nothing within the span of a second. The gate sliced cleanly through the Overthroat as it closed, like a guillotine, severing half of its monstrous body. Shtuttasht yowled, then shuddered. Then its body fell motionless.
Scores of black, wriggling things crawled from out of the Overthroat’s ruined corpse, glistening slugs the size of a man’s forearm. They looked very much like the White Mother’s larvae, the precursor to the shrikes themselves, huge black maggots that sped for various corners of the graveyard. The Lorica showed no mercy, stomping, burning, slashing at the abominations wherever they appeared.
The Overthroat’s serpentine neck wavered in the air before its head finally came crashing to the ground. A cheer went up from the mages. I thought I saw Sterling with his arm draped over Royce, the two of them thrusting victorious fists into the air.
Yet it wasn’t over, not exactly. As the Overthroat’s h
ead collided with the ground, it snapped right off its neck, then came rocketing through the air. Shtuttasht’s screaming skull raced towards me like a cannonball, just one, final “Fuck you!” to me from the Eldest. Easy enough to dodge, I figured, as I knocked on the Dark Room to let me enter, as I allowed my body to sink into the shadows –