Weight bore down upon me. The broken earth cut into my flesh. Were it not for the pain, I would have thought I had perished, crushed beneath the rock. Absolute, impenetrable darkness pressed in all around.
I could feel Khalim’s chest rise and fall against mine. Each breath was a struggle. I tried to speak, but found I could not—there was no air, and I had not the strength. He gasped once and then was still. I could not move to rouse him again. As my consciousness faded, I took some small comfort in being with him at the end, though I had failed this final time to protect him. Perhaps on the other side, in whatever realm would accept a soul like mine, I would find him again.
Then, in the void, I saw a point of light. It brightened and resolved itself into a human figure, though I could not discern any features. Was this a god, come to decide my fate? Or was I dreaming in my last moments?
But it was not me that the figure addressed. I saw Khalim, his coat wrapped around him, looking very small and very lost. He looked around, but he did not seem to notice me.
“You have done well, my child,” the figure said, and his voice was the voice of Khalim’s strange god. “Your labors are finished, but there is yet work to do.”
Khalim looked up at him. The bright shape towered above him. The terrible weight of those words fell upon him, and he dropped to his knees. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m not ready.”
He looked back, and this time he saw me. There was sorrow on his lovely face. “Please let me stay,” he whispered.
“If I had any other choice,” the god said, “I would leave you to live your life as it should have been, but this is one final sacrifice you must bear. But fear not. You will not suffer, and I will take you into my own.”
I cried out, but I had no voice; I tried to run across the expanse of nothing, but it stretched out before me and I could go no closer. I had one last look at the despair in my beloved’s dark eyes before everything went white.
Pain returned to me, and then brightness. The weight lifted from my back, and I took a shuddering breath. Khalim’s body glowed with a blinding light. I felt him rise in my arms and gently move me aside, and then he was gone.
When I opened my eyes, I found myself lying in a small hollow in the rubble. The ritual chamber was gone, as was the arena. Nothing remained but shattered stone and dust. Some distance away, my companions picked themselves up out of the debris. Between them lay the husks that were all that remained of the Ascended.
Khalim’s god, still aglow with magic light, hovered in the air above my head, his hair and clothing whipped by powerful winds. He touched down lightly beside me and surveyed the wreckage.
The city was all but gone. Smoke poured from where the streets once lay. The outer wall remained, penning in a massive wall of pale flesh that churned and writhed, crushing the stones beneath it. The worm raised its eyeless head, showing a circular maw lined with a spiral of great fangs, and roared with a sound like the end of the world.
“Andam was right,” said the stranger. “I left them too soon. This is a mistake that must be corrected.”
He turned to me. “I will need your help.”
At my feet lay the Sword of Heaven, unmarred by the ordeal it had just seen. I bent and picked it up. Jahan was dead, and now the weapon had fallen to me. It was heavier than I remembered it.
Aysulu cried out behind me. I turned and saw her horse picking its way over the rubble. She ran to it, stumbling over the rough terrain, and threw her arms around its neck. After checking its legs and its harness, she climbed into the saddle.
She came up beside me, and Hualing, Jin, and Heishiro climbed out of the ruins to stand with us. Led by a god, we marched against the worm.
The end of its tail had not yet emerged from the mountain, and it had already nearly encircled the city with its length. My people had a legend of a serpent that held the world in its coils, but this was nothing like the majestic creature I had imagined as a child. Its flesh, pale pink and sickly-looking as a Northerner who had never seen the sun, moved in ungainly lurches. Earth and gravel collected in the folds of its thick hide. As we climbed over the rubble beneath a sky darkened and choked with dust, it turned its great head toward us. It could not see us, but it knew we were there, and with a primordial malevolence it began to advance.
The stranger walked lightly, and an aura of sunlight hovered around him. He raised a hand, and a great beam formed and darted across the space that had been the arena, striking the worm in its cavernous mouth. The skin burned and sizzled, and an otherworldly screech emitted from the depths of its throat, unlike the sound made by any natural creature.
I raised the Sword of Heaven in both hands and ran, Jin and Heishiro on either side. Hualing climbed atop a pillar, broken in half with the jagged edge offering a precarious platform, and loosed her arrows into the sky. They arced down into the top of the worm’s enormous head. To my left rode Aysulu, her sure-footed steppe horse picking its way through the fire and the jagged rock, and her arrows lanced into the horrible mouth.
The worm screamed again, but it did not slow down as it dragged its bulk ever nearer.
I went around, climbing over a toppled wall to escape its teeth. I plunged the sword into the side of its head and drew it out again. Though the blade cut through without resistance, the worm paid me no heed. It raised its head up, blocking out what little sunlight reached through the smoke.
I scrambled backward. The head slammed down with an awful crash, and the ground shook beneath my feet. I looked back in horror, thinking that the stranger in Khalim’s body would have been crushed, but a shield of light formed around him. The worm’s head rolled aside, and he stood unharmed.
Heishiro ran up the slope of the fallen wall and leapt into the air. He held his sword in both hands, the blade facing downward, and landed point-first onto the worm’s fleshy side.
His blade snapped neatly in two. With a cry, Heishiro fell back to the ground. He landed and rolled to his feet, and cast the broken hilt aside.
Another beam of light from the stranger held the worm in place. It tossed its great head from side to side, screaming in agony and turning the stones around it to dust. The length of its body began to gather in great arches. Arrows still showered upon it from either side.
“Now, Eske!” came the booming voice of Khalim’s god.
I glanced at Jin. He gave me a brief nod and dashed away, down the left flank of the worm’s writhing head.
The smell of burning flesh was almost unbearable, like sulfur and meat gone bad, but I was too full of terror and the blind instinct to survive to think of it. The worm raised its head once more, with a screech that left my ears ringing.
To get clear of it and reach the opposite side, I would have to run almost the distance of a longship. If I failed, the worm would crush me with the weight of a mountain. I ran into the shadow dark as night, and with all my fear and hatred and anger and the hope that if I succeeded, Khalim would return, I willed my exhausted, painful legs to carry me forward.
I emerged into the dim light. The worm’s head came down behind me with a terrible, reeking rush of wind, and I was thrown to the ground.
Blood seeped from my knees and the palm of the hand I had used to catch myself. I dragged myself to my feet and turned to the worm’s unprotected neck.
I plunged my sword into the expanse of pale flesh. Leaving it buried to the hilt, I pulled myself up onto the worm’s side. I found a fold above my head to climb higher, and one to fit one foot into, and as I left the ground I took the sword out and stabbed it in again at a higher point.
Every muscle howled in exhaustion and pain. Step by agonizing step, I climbed up the height of the worm. My hands and feet were bloody, and my arms shook. I dared not look down, nor up to see the distance I had to go.
The worm bucked again. I held onto the hilt of my sword and pressed myself against the filthy hide, cold as the grave, and waited for the worm to fall back to the earth again. I could not even form a prayer in my mind.
After what felt like an eternity, I saw the worm’s back curve away, and I saw Jin’s hand reach up on the other side.
I knelt on the great curve of the worm and drove the sword once more into its skin. With the last of my strength, I gave it one more push. The elegant hilt disappeared into the wound, and a strange black fluid covered my hands. I held on, my knuckles white and my muscles trembling, and let my weight fall.
The worm’s hide separated under my blade. More of its foul-smelling blood gushed out over me. I turned my head and closed my eyes. My ears ached with the sound of the worm’s monstrous agony. It tried to shake me off, but my sword held fast.
My feet hit the ground, suddenly and painfully. I was aware of light again, bright as the sun. There was another earthquake as the worm flailed, and a final, deafening shriek, and then, at last, stillness.
I wiped the blood from my face. My eyes burned, and I blinked to clear them. As my vision focused, I could see Heishiro helping Jin to his feet, and the glowing form of the stranger approach the worm’s colossal bulk.
He reached out, touching the rim of the gaping mouth with one gentle hand, almost as Khalim would have done. All was silent.
From deep beneath the mountain, the ground began to shake again. Inch by inch, and yard by yard, the length of the worm receded into the pit from whence it had come. The head twisted as it was dragged along, crushing more of the city beneath it.
Then it was gone. All that remained was a black chasm, and around it, the ruins of Phyreios.
The stranger looked up, and spread his arms to the heavens. Clouds gathered from all sides and converged overhead. There was a roll of thunder, and rain softly began to fall. The light faded around him, even from his eyes.
Though each step was torturous, I crossed the hollow the worm had left behind and looked him in the face.
He looked so familiar, as he always did. But where Khalim’s soft, dark eyes had been, there was a golden gaze as hard as metal.
“Well done,” said the god. “Come. The day is not yet finished.”
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