Chapter Thirty-Eight

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

THEY brOKE the surface, soaring into a world that hummed with the lament of the dead. The Leviathan lifted him high, high above the water, through air tinged red, as though somewhere a great fire burned. Silas blinked through watery eyes, seeing a lake far more beautiful than he'd imagined. Crystal clear, mostly, save for another hint of red, this one far distant, upon the surface; like a lone rose sought to bloom.

He wiped at his eyes, as the Leviathan's arc reached its zenith and the downward plunge began. The creature had a slow movement, like the dragging shift of a great ship. Silas took in the spread of stark white coral that lay beneath the water like fine lace.

He saw it for what it was and felt its enormity grab at him.

These were bones. An astonishing numbers of bones. Ringing out their notes in one impossibly wretched song of the dead. Most lay beneath the surface, with only mere tips poking forth–like perilous caps of icebergs–save for one huge pyre, far in the distance. Beyond the spread of red.

His pulse raced. The scythe grew tight and fixed.

He could see no sign of a golden-haired daemon.

The Leviathan spat him out. Sending him like a man shot from a cannon, soaring him towards the shallows. Silas landed amongst the bones, crashing through them with such speed he feared he would sink right back down to the depths. He sank into the haphazard assembly and was buried in a hard sea of white. Covered by Blood Lake's long-dead. Caught beneath the bitter, tepid waters.

But Silas was exacting; purposeful and unafraid. He'd spent enough years being fearful of the water. Now he shrugged it off, like an uncomfortable coat that pinched at the neckline.

The ring worked fast, eager for the command, shaping itself into a familiar, and unexpectedly calming, bandalore. Silas punched his hand skyward, crashing through bone, the cracking amplified beneath the water. The boxwood flew from his palm, humming along the long, long length of its string; unsullied now by their arduous journey with a thin thread of silver replacing the stained white string. Shooting up through the surface. Finding an anchor point.

Silas pulled at the silver string, testing the steadiness of the bone. Finding it strong, he hauled himself upright. His head cleared the shallow water. He spat out the liquid and shook his head, spraying it from his hair.

The water buffeted him as the Leviathan's wake reached him. There was no sign of the creature but out where the waters were a deeper shade with depth, white peaks sat atop turbulent waves; a thrashing about in the water showing a distant turmoil.

Silas pocketed the bandalore and kept on, towards the largest of the protrusions of white bone, seeking some height to view this world. The bones shattered beneath his feet. It was like walking through a field of sharp mud, each footfall needing to be dragged from the depression it made. He frowned at the strange conglomerate of tangled bones. So many were shaped in confounding ways, as though fused together, or from a creature so foreign to him, it was unrecognisable. Silas climbed atop a massive piece, thick as an oak, but puckered with holes. These were not creatures of the purebred world. That much was plain. And he did not know what lay beneath the sublime skins that the angels and daemons wore.

Perhaps Pitch lay here.

Silas reeled at the vicious doubt. And the cries of the lake lunged at him, hammering at him harder, seeing a fault in his resolve. But he was no stranger to the devastation of their laments. He knew far better how to deafen himself to them.

‘Pitch.' His bellow rang out like a war cry; as cool and consuming rage settled on him.

Only the dead whispered back. Circling him, like wolves frightened of a campfire, but ready to lunge should the light fade.

‘Pitch, are you there?'

Despite the openness of his surrounds his voice echoed against the reddened sky, and bounced off the endless sea of bones. What he'd not expected of this place was its quietude. The souls were there, of course, with their endless downtrodden sorrow, but the lake itself held a stillness, an utter absence of life that unsettled him far more.

Silas spied a greater viewpoint, and made his way there, unrepentant as he stepped upon the bones. He found a rounded piece, a perfect dome to stand upon. And undeniably a skull. He sent the scythe back to its ring form, seeing the easy footholds, there upon a massive jaw, and another in an eye socket so large he could have huddled in it. Grand dimensions he did not linger upon, for he knew this was no angel nor daemon; he knew giants well enough. Silas pulled himself onto the dimpled crown of the skull. He stood at full height, hiding from none.

‘Pitch!'

The rattle of bones was his only reply. Silas glanced down. Rattle of bones, indeed. Where he had tread, breaking a path through the bone bed, there had been depressions of shattered bone marking his path.

There were none now. No trace of his foot path. The bones had re-knit, mending the damage made. Silas narrowed his gaze. Here were his wolves, showing a hint of themselves in this unnaturally sterile world. A rattling began, like the shaking of coins in the poor box.

The bones moved beneath the water, as though buffeted by a current. But the surface of the shallow waters was utterly still. The rattling came from behind and to his side. The reef was shifting. Gathering in.

Surrounding his lookout upon the skull.

The Watcher King's legions were on the move once more.

‘Shit.' Silas fingered the scythe, mind racing. To use the scythe as a kite once more was impossible. For all the movement in the water, there was none in the air. Blood Lake held a dead calm.

He braced, searching for sign of where the first attack would come from.

The bones gathered thickest behind him, pushing themselves up into a rough wall, a crescent shape around the skull, their pieces grinding and snapping as they rose. Blocking his path.

‘You fool, Silas.' He hissed at himself.

Beyond the rapidly rising wall was the tall pyre he'd spied earlier, and that bloom of red; quenching the thirst of a lake parched dry of blood.

Realisation was brutal.

Bile pressed at the back of Silas's throat.

He was a fool. An oaf. A dolt.

He'd stood here, shouting at the sky, while the lake bled Pitch dry.

Silas's rage was instant. Consuming. Twisting him up inside till the pain was unbearable. The sky darkened with his fury. And the ache behind his eyes flecked his vision with white. He took a step, intending to jump. The skull shattered beneath him. Fragile as a bird's egg. He barely stumbled before his feet found the thicker bed of bones that formed the reef.

Silas glowered down at his buried boots. They seemed oddly distant. The sharpness of his pain could not blind him to the strangeness here. The bones that covered his feet were not so sturdy as he recalled, and smaller; dwarfed by his shadow.

A shadow that stretched far out across the bones.

A brittle laugh hiccoughed from him.

The bones were not smaller. Silas was larger. More aligned with the fallen giant whose skull he'd just crushed; a Nephilim who had not escaped the Flood. Whose disadvantage came with not having a brother who despised them, feared them, and killed them; before the Lord's Wrath could do so.

Silas's laughter was askew, as broken as the pieces that fractured and rattled and gathered around him. They stacked their pieces, one atop one another, rising in a wave that sought to bury him.

Him! The Pale Horseman, Death's Messenger. Child of Samyaza.

These miserable minions of failure thought burial would stop him from reaching the prince?

They were ignorant, then. Wishful. Silas may be part angel, but he was all too human; a race who were weak and pitiful, capable of great cruelty and vice, but uncontested in their propensity for deep, unreasonable, insensible love.

The shift within him was like the buckling links on a train carriage cranking into place. With a roar worthy of the greatest of giants, Silas let go the mortal coils that bound him; opened himself to the shadows that made him.

He stepped into the darkness willingly, so long as it drew Pitch into the light.

The suppression of lifetimes fell away. The fissures that had appeared when he brought down the goddess Morrigan, now cracked wide open. Silas rose. High. Higher still. Not merely with a hint of great shadow, but growing with substance. Stretching high above the death bed that surrounded him. Their tiny peaks and troughs were pitiful against his emergence.

The past tore away from him, the ties that shackled Silas to his goddess snapped free with the titanic release of thousands of years of restraint.

His time drew ever nearer to its close. Let it end with the greatest deathnote he could summon.

‘Pitch, I promised you.' Silas need not shout anymore. His voice could carry across worlds. ‘And I am here. It is not over.'

The scythe formed itself once more. A mace emerged; wooden handle thick as a yew, a spiked metal ball, big as a carriage wheel and a thousand times heavier, hanging from a fat chain. A perfect fit, no matter how monstrous his hands had grown.

He drew back his arm, his long shadow stretching further, the move stirring the deadened air. Silas landed the mace with all his fury behind the blow, his ears closed to the onslaught of dejection and penetrating grief the lake threw at him. He was too furious to be forlorn.

The impact wrought a crater in the reef and lifted a storm of white shards as the scythes pummelled the anguished bones to grit.

But the lake was not cowed by him. Not yet. No sooner had he forged a way, than the unending bones moved to fill the void, building the reef anew, this time tinged red. Great waves of crimson rose. The howl of the destitute, the regretful, the enraged, filled the air as Blood Lake sought to claim him as one of their own.

Let them try.

With great swipes of the mace and adding his own kicks in for good measure, Silas ploughed his way across the massive cemetery. The Blight played its forlorn notes for him. At him.

But he'd learned to listen and be unafraid. Untouched.

He strode through the shallows, through the piles of bones that whispered their misery, and clamoured for him to succumb. He'd done so when the Herlequin found him clueless and vulnerable. It had nearly cost him the prince then.

Nothing could fool Silas into that mistake again.

He moved on, towering, impossible, dark and raging, the twisted melodies of the Blight's birthplace glancing off him. It was a graveyard, and a terrible one at that, but Death had long ago fled this place. Silas understood, being in its midst, what the Blight's true power was. How it drove those who fell to it, mad and twisted with grief. It was not fear of death it goaded them with, but fear of being the one left behind. Caught in the agony of endless bereavement.

Silas's long strides ate up the distance that kept him from his daemon. The quake of his footfalls shattered bones to mere dust, but no sooner had he lifted his feet than the shallows were renewed. The hint of red was everywhere now. And the only source of colour lay with Pitch.

Bloodshed had given rise to this place, but it had been starved of carnage for centuries. The lake had drunk itself dry; now blood flowed from a fallen prince, sating a timeless thirst.

‘Pitch.' Silas's breath stirred whirlwinds in the stagnant air. ‘Hold on. Do not dare let go.'

He'd sought no answer, and it shocked him when it came.

The weak glow of embers. The hint of flame amongst the stain of flowing blood; a precious, gut-wrenching glimpse of life.

The lake saw it when Silas did. The bones were raucous, their mad dance growing more manic. They came for him.

But Silas went blind to all else. Barely feeling the clamour of the dead upon him, their skeletons seeking to burden him; clawing up his legs, digging their broken pieces into his body. A body thick and large and solid enough to endure their assault.

He quickened his step, and the barriers rose. Small mountains standing in his way. Hastily assembled walls that echoed back at him; a symphony of despair. Silas shouldered his way through every one, struck out with the scythe, time and time again, and using his body as a battering ram. The bones moved like sand-hills buffeted by desert winds, shifting their position, appearing in front of him before he'd had a chance to catch his enormous breath.

Fatigue was raising her unwelcome head. Silas over-extended himself. He knew it, felt it in the ache that came to his arm with each raise of the mace. He was stealing from his Nephilim origins, drawing on his angelic blood; all lost long ago. This transformation could not last.

Silas was neither man nor monster: not as weak as a purebred, but not so strong as a living giant, either. That could cost him dearly here.

He wore a cloak of bones now, piled upon his shoulders, dragging at him, lumbering him with their ancient sorrow. Seeking to drag him back, and down, into a grave that Silas would not escape this time.

He growled his defiance, and the sky rumbled.

Just a few more steps. A few more behemoth strides and he would take Mr Ahari's place; rescuing another from their grave.

Silas burst through a cliff face of bones, and into a wall of heat and fragile orange flame.

Pitch was a terrible vision, and yet beauty personified. He lay impaled in too many dreadful places, held aloft like a macabre trophy. His golden curls were darkened where his head hung low and touched them to the bloodied water.

Silas's heart clenched, and his own blood fired, seeing the state of this creature he loved. So still and terribly wounded, and so desperately close to the halo.

The pile of bones, the pyre Silas had seen from afar, was but an altar. And now, as he loomed over the lake and all those imprisoned in it, Silas saw the halo.

Its hilt jutted from the stacked and melded remains of the slain. So close, Silas might have reached out and touched it. But the halo was not for his hand. It was not his to take.

Silas went to his knees carefully, for fear of causing more pain with the shift of water. He leaned towards the one whose fate it was to end Blood Lake's painful legacy.

The bones came for Silas, swallowing his lower legs as he knelt, climbing the heights of his body, marching ever upward, ever determined.

But none were so determined as Silas to tip the balance. And steal this goodbye.

Pitch lay in a shadow of Silas's making. The prince was more terribly petite and fragile than he'd ever seemed. But Silas fixed his gaze on the strong glow of fire at his fingertips, turning the water gold, hiding the seep of blood from so many wounds.

Silas reached for him. The maelstrom of mournful cries reduced to a whisper. Pitch's slender fingers twitched, movement stirred behind translucent lids.

Silas took his hand, ignoring the flames, careless of their burn. It would not be long before Silas felt nothing of this world's pains, and he would weather far worse for this last touch.

Pitch was warm. Not cold and lifeless. A subtle clench of muscle came; a frail clutch of the hand. Pitch knew he was here.

Silas smiled, his heart twisting and his soul lifting. ‘Rise now, my love. Show them how magnificent you truly are.'