“Well, well, well,” she says, the musical lilt in her voice striking a strange, discordant tone in my chest. “If it isn’t our little intruder. Tell me, young one…Just how long did you think you could get away with this?”
“Get away with what?” I ask slowly, tongue thickened by the effects of the daemon’s ichor. “Please help, I’ve been injured—the daemon?—”
“The only fiend who currently concerns us isyou,child,” Elura responds, as another Aetherborne approaches her side and chuckles darkly.
“Even now, she will deny it,” the less familiar immortal murmurs, bearing a crystal orb between both of her honey-brown palms. “As if such an existence was not already prophesied.”
The Oracle.
“But it is written,” another Aetherborne speaks. Alexei—I recognize the voice and the rich mahogany tones of his skin. “It is known.” The Archivist nods toward yet another approaching god, a grey-skinned male with a terrifying presence and striking orchid eyes.
“And it shall be confirmed,” the most frightening Elder of them all growls as he steps forth.
“Between you and me, Ark, I can’t say I’m afraid of the Aetherborne. Not all of them, anyway,”Kieran once told me.“Not because they’re not powerful—they’re just placid. Peaceful in nature. But the Overseer? That’s one scary son of a bitch.”The Overseer could read—and manipulate—both your present waking mind and your every last memory.
Which is the last thing I recall before my head explodes, pain bursting like an aura all around me as vicious tendrils of the Aetherborne’s arcana spear through my mind. I canfeelit, viscerally, as my oldest memories are torn to shreds with ruthless aggression. Such brutal torment is there and gone in an instant, leaving me gasping, my mouth agape.
The fearsome, grey-skinned immortal bears his fangs in my direction before he gives Elura, the Speaker, a single curt nod.
“As we had surmised, then,” Elura says, looking disappointed. “You wicked, monstrous thing. Did you really think you had us fooled? That we did not detect your…aberrationfrom the start?”
“I don’t understand,” I whisper, fighting my own body for consciousness.
“It was simply a matter of waiting. We had hoped you might reveal yourplans,not just your weaknesses, you know. Thankfully, there are all too many. And to think what you might have become…”
Another Aetherborne steps forward, copper eyes gleaming, the aether behind them alight. “The prophecy shall not come to pass. Justice will be served.”
Her slender, tan fingers beckon to the female goddess at her right—this one deathly pale, and unlike the other Aetherborne, her eyes do not glow. They are simply milky white, pupilless, and opaque.
Only one of the gods is blind.
Justice herself steps forward, a greatsword of pure aether glowing at her back. She reaches for the hilt.
“Indeed,” Elura agrees, “The Harbinger will now face the judgment of her predecessors.”
The Harbinger?
“I’m not—I don’t—” I stammer out weakly, my words lost to a sea of overlapping, ethereal murmurs.
“We shouldn’t have allowed her to enter the city, knowing what filth she harbors.”
“She cannot be allowed to wreak her havoc upon this realm, or any other.”
“That power was stolen! It is not hers to claim!”
“She threatens the balance with every second she draws breath.”
“Enough!” A single, sharp word from the Speaker leaves them all silent as she beckons to the goddess wielding her massive blade. “Eunomia, proceed. This fractured soul has been weighed in the balance, and we find her wanting. A Harbinger cannot be suffered to survive.”
The Oracle beside her begins to hum, her expression strangely placid. “Born of Wanderers, and eternally so too, she shall,” she sighs, voice gentle like a song of riddles. “Yet only the Beginning and the End can mete out true judgment against those who have been star-split…Only punished or rewarded by that which never dies. But how does one wander between life and death?”
“May we never know. We deny you your fate, Harbinger. May you wander the Abyss!” the Speaker proclaims with zeal. “Return unto the void, Source-damned. May she have mercy, for we do not.”
As Justice approaches and lifts her shining sword to deliver judgment for sins I don’t understand, I hear the echo of a familiar rasp call out through the clearing. The ghost of a smile tugs at my lips with what little energy I have left. At least I get to hear his voice, one last time.
“Arken, no!”
I somehow feel nothing and everything, everywhere and nowhere all at once as the Convocation’s god-blade pierces mychest. In an instant, the sharpest pain and the most splendid euphoria exist in terrible tandem. It rends me apart, flesh from soul, and then the world goes black.