Episode 7 Silent Sentinels

  Part of the curtain was thin, the flitting creatures within it plainly sick. At the bottom, I saw the problem. From the pocket of my trousers I fetched a chalk stick. I fixed where the symbols were malformed, following the pattern that the men had used to create the spell. A simple pattern, really, but the execution of the symbols was at times lacking. The work helped me to calm my mind and not panic. Once the symbols were corrected, the moths gleamed and fluttered within the curtain of their spell.

  “Never seen a newbie so useful,” Lowe said.

  “I know,” Wraithbane said. “I'm waiting to find out how the universe will balance out my good fortune.”

  The men didn't precisely laugh, but it was close enough.

  I realized it had gone quiet, no more ramming of glass or screeching of claws on a hard surface. The revenant was pushing his way through, his arm and head on our side of the partition, his other arm dragging slowly to join us.

  “It's here,” I said, tapping Lowe on the shoulder. Sweat dampened my fingers and he was all too pale, his clothes soiled from the bleeding ear.

  The revenant had both hands on the glass, he strained, and slid the bottom half of hid body out into the surgery. It hung there, suspended in midair, for a second while it formed its claws into sharp little daggers again. Wraithbane lifted his gaze and stared at the thing while it stared back down at us, making me wonder if the man had been brought out of the monster just for a fraction of a second, long enough to recognize us and know what was going to happen. It was like I'd seen this a hundred times before.

  A dozen questions raced through my mind, old questions haunting mind and memory, old questions which had to be from my recurring nightmares. How fast was the human mind lost to this plague? When were they completely gone? How could these things be prevented? What caused them?

  It streaked for me first, startling me out of my reverie. I rolled to avoid a seeking hand. Wraithbane shouted something and a spear sailed through the air, impaling the revie in the leg. It reeled, screaming in pain, and Lowe threw another spell which slashed across its back.

  I saw that the effects of these spells soon fell away into nothing and the enraged revie continued its attack.

  Wraithbane dodged an assault, by chance smearing the lines of the containment circle. It immediately dimmed and the moths fluttered in pain then became listless. I ran to the smudge and redefined the marks.

  Time passed us by, a near meaningless blur of dodges and sweeps, of spears and screams. Twice we almost forced it into the circle and twice we failed. The revenant focused his attacks on the men at first, thinking them the threat with their offensive spells, but it soon realized that every time the symbols making the circle were scuffed or damaged, it was me who fixed it. That made me the target to eliminate. I shamelessly hid behind either man. As time wore on, it became clear I was the least physically fit and that my shuddering body wouldn't keep up this dodging and dashing for long.

  Wraithbane fended the revenant off, and I realized suddenly that Lowe was no longer attacking with him. When I raised my gaze, Lowe exhaled dewy, black fog and stared at me with mottled red-white eyes. I realized where I was, trapped between a revenant and a revenant to be. And Lowe saw this realization on my face.

  He rose and darted towards me. I stumbled and fell, then braced myself for the impact of his body on mine.

  It never happened.

  Instead he sailed over my head. In a whirl of motion, he grabbed the revenant by the neck and hauled the both of them through the mauve curtain, into imprisonment where they would remain for eternity together. The other revenant screamed, but he could do nothing to his cellmate because at that instant Caleb Lowe faded into a transparent shadow with long sharp claws.

  I couldn't bear to look at them as they paced their confines, the mauve curtain whispering with the faint fluttering of hundreds of moth wings mirroring their every movement. Silent sentinels shackling their souls to a world which was lost and gray, a void in the world which had once held meaning and life and hope. Theirs was an existence which was merely presence, a physical manifestation of what had once been and now was no longer. Within the confines of the closed curtain whispered their lonely lament, “Remember, remember.”

  When a blank and shapeless shadow passed beside me, I touched the thin curtain. Words echoed back to me, words from another era, a promise to a face long lost to time, “I will never forget.”

  A revenant shrieked and slammed the spell, jolting me back to the present, reminding me that we were not done for the day.

  “That's it, then,” I said to Wraithbane. “What do we do, try to find where they contracted the blood vine?”

  Wraithbane spoke very quietly, “No.”

  “No?”

  He stretched out his hand. Illuminated in the glow of the migrating moths, I saw across the center of his palm a long ragged gash. The blood seeping from it was black, spider-webbing through his veins.

  “No. We go to containment in the Marina Center.”