“No,” he said.
She’s lost to us.
Barlow checked the runes again.
You’re lost to me.
They needed to be perfect.
Satisfied, he cut into his own thumb and rubbed blood into the runes, tearing Alyssa’s anchor away from the dead thing under the forgotten rocks and binding her finally, forever, to that small, delicate bone.
Alyssa was gone in an instant. The wind died. The thunder moved on. Barlow trembled, heart racing, mouth filled with grit and shame and contradiction.
He stared at the bone. Wiped tears from his eyes that he hadn’t known were there.
“It’ll have to do,” he said.
Karen didn’t answer.
Barlow held the delicate bone in his fist. Made the call.
Sheehan didn’t believe him at first. There was harsh laughter. “No one else is buying them for this kind of money. You’ll kill your reputation.”
“I can’t,” Barlow said. “Not anymore. Not ever again.”
Sheehan growled frustration into the phone. “You don’t have a choice, here. We’re already in the middle of this. If you back out now, I’ll find you and take them anyway. You don’t want that, Barlow. You don’t want me as an enemy. Don’t be a fool.”
“I’m sorry,” Barlow said, but he wasn’t. Not really. Not after everything he’d seen.
Threats were replaced with a rising plea in the man’s gruff voice. “I’ve made commitments. Karen vouched for you!”
Barlow hung up on him and pulled the battery out of his phone.
The bridge to that world was burned. Sheehan would find him eventually. Make good on his promises.
But by then, who knew what the world would be like?
I’m doing the right thing, aren’t I?
More silence in return. Karen didn’t answer.
Barlow drove into the hills of Los Angeles as the sun came up in the east. It would already be bright and warm and golden over her cairn in the desert. Night was gone.
The bungalow he shared with his wife was small, but in an expensive area. The job paid well—when he didn’t bail out of a sale—and there was a certain acidic queasiness in his stomach when Barlow thought about how badly Sheehan would come after him. Not that it mattered.
He could never do it again. For years he’d sold bones to faceless men like Sheehan for incredible amounts of money.
Not bones. Souls.
He had to swallow hard to keep from screaming. He couldn’t let himself think of all the others in his collection. Not yet, anyway.
There was too much that needed to be done.
He held out the new bone. Beside him, in his home, Alyssa took it warily.
She’d been quiet on the ride back, away from the dark of the desert. She’d had her feet tucked up and she had stared out the window at passing traffic, at glowing billboards, and at the pocket havens of light and life off every exit. She never asked to leave, and never tried to run.
She had asked, once, where they were going.
Barlow had answered as honestly as he could. “Home,” he said. “I need your help.”
He led her into a back room with a view of the encroaching desert—a wilderness waiting to reclaim Los Angeles when humanity finally leaves.
Alyssa turned away from the view, and Barlow led her to a figure in the shadows.
“Darling,” Barlow said to his wife. “This is Alyssa.”
He read disappointment there, in the tilt of his wife’s head as she slumped in her chair and the way her lips were curled back, turning her once-lovely smile into a rictus snarl. She never talked to him anymore. Not really.
“Things have changed, my love,” he said.
In the hollow, empty sockets of her rotting skull, Barlow imagined his wife’s eyes filled with judgment.
He held his wife’s flayed and broken hand—the talisman he wore around his neck had been an integral part of that structure—and he readjusted her wedding ring. The worst of the smell was gone after so much time, but he would need to change her clothes again. Something foul had sloughed off underneath and had stained them.
Barlow had tried to take care of her. She’d done it to herself, cut out the metacarpal of her own hand, and she made him go step-by-step to finish the binding ritual. But he had screwed it up. Left her trapped in this husk. Tied to her anchor for eternity.
Karen had never wanted that. She’d never wanted to die.
The cancer hadn’t cared.
Barlow pulled the talisman from around his neck, looking at the amateurish way he had tried binding his wife’s soul. The way he had tried to trap her inside that consequential bone. It was a dead thing. He let it go.
“Are you sure you can?” Barlow asked.
With lightning in her eyes, sending flashes across the walls of the dark room and across the face of his wife’s dead body, Alyssa nodded.
“First we save her,” Alyssa said. “Then all of the others.”
She stared at the corpse, and held her hand—clutching the last anchor Karen had to this world. Alyssa hesitated only a moment, then said, “Hello, Mrs. Barlow. Why don’t you join me?”
Alyssa pulled, and the room was filled with light.
Obsidian Spire
written by
Molly Elizabeth Atkins
illustrated by
Aituar Manas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Molly Elizabeth Atkins grew up in a small university town in the heart of Texas. She learned to read early and devoured books voraciously, leaving her parents at a loss as to what to do with all the teetering stacks of paperbacks. She spent most of third grade in time-out for reading under her desk instead of listening to her teacher. By high school, she was banned from the local libraries for checking out too many books at a time and failing to return them. Though she knows this is a cardinal library sin, she would like to point out that she was young and reckless, and anyway the books were so good she was too busy re-reading them to realize their due dates had come and gone. At some point in those formative years, Molly discovered fantasy and science fiction. The incredible worlds those authors created set fire to her imagination and kindled within her a desire to write.
Molly spent many years thinking of writing and plotting stories in her head. She finally picked up the pen at the ripe old age of thirty-three. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her ever-patient husband and two rambunctious young daughters. She gets out of bed at 5:00 a.m. every day, no exceptions, to write before her family wakes and chaos takes over the house. This is her first publication.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Aituar Manas was born in 1988 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan.
He first started digital drawings in 2013. Inspired by the amazing artists of the Golden Age, he also began to study on his own. He devoured all the knowledge he could from the Internet, while constantly searching for guidance from excellent, modern professional illustrators and from very responsive art communities. In an effort to raise his skills, Aituar started to learn photography, storytelling and filmmaking.
Aituar continues self-improving, learning new techniques and software available nowadays. He combines traditional drawing techniques with 3D and photobashing. Aituar is confidently moving toward his goals to break into the AAA video gaming and film industries.
Obsidian Spire
Varga strode down the churned-up road, putting as much distance as she could between herself and the village. On either side, barley whispered in the autumn wind, golden heads bent low under the weight of ripe kernels, waiting for the sickle. She stopped and glared back at the village. At this time of morning people should have been in the field cutting and shocking the grain and stacking the bundles to protect them from the autumn rains. But the fields lay untouched as the people huddled in their houses, heedless of the starv
ation that faced them if the grain rotted on the stalk.
She marched on. Above her on the mountaintop, the abandoned mage tower brooded over the valley, its glossy black spire reaching into the sky like a beckoning finger.
“There are lights in the tower,” the frightened villagers had told her. “The mage is back from the dead. He’s raising a horde of glass beasts to kill us all!”
She snorted. In the deep mountain valleys, superstitions ran strong. Her father, Lord Ulvran, had sent her to investigate the tower and reassure the villagers that they were safe. At harvest time, he could not afford to have his people hiding, quaking in their homes. She’d come to help them, but not one villager had answered her call for a guide up to the mountaintop. There were hunters aplenty, familiar enough with the terrain to keep her from getting lost in the deep woods that cloaked the mountain, but when she’d asked them for aid, they’d avoided her gaze. No one had volunteered. Her father had finally offered her a chance to prove herself, to show she could lead, and she hadn’t even been able to recruit a guide. She cursed under her breath.
“Lady Varga, wait,” a young man called.
Varga turned. A lanky figure jogged toward her.
“Please, can I come, too?” The young man skidded to a halt in front of her, his brown eyes wide and eager. A rusted kettle helmet pushed the tops of his ears out, and he carried a long fishing spear over one shoulder.
The leather joints of her armor creaked and the weight of the twin blades strapped to her back pulled at her shoulders as she crossed her arms and stared at him, trying her best to appear as imposing as her father. She had pulled the bulk of her hair into an intricate knot that ran along the crest of her head, leaving a bundle of thin braids to hang down the back of her neck past her shoulder blades. The silver beads tipping the braids clinked as she cocked her head to assess this would-be companion.
He continued to smile.
“Aren’t you scared? Everyone else is.”
He shook his head vigorously. “No, Lady Varga. Not scared.”
She gestured to his spear. “Can you fight with that?”
“I … um … I think so, ma’am.”
She wanted a guide to show her the way and watch her back, not a scrawny upstart. Still, some help is better than no help at all, she thought.
Varga kept her expression stern and gave him a sharp nod. “Fine. Let’s go.”
He trailed down the road behind her, and as she walked the voice of her father intruded into her thoughts. Lord Ulvran’s favorite saying was: Know your soldiers. Know their strengths. Use your assets. She glanced back at the young man. He appeared at least as old as she was, but with his floppy feet and fish-belly complexion, he seemed less like an asset and more like a liability. She couldn’t imagine what help he could give her, but she supposed she ought to take her father’s advice.
She slowed to allow him to catch up. His moony eyes widened, and he wore a grin as lopsided as his ill-fitting helmet.
“Tell me your name.” She tried to sound friendly, but the words came out as a command.
“Fiske, ma’am.” He paused, waiting for her to ask another question. When she didn’t, he went on in a rush. “I hunt up here most every day, ma’am. And I saw the lights, too. Twice.”
Varga studied him. “What did they look like?”
Fiske trod silently a few paces, expression thoughtful. “Like … flickering. On the side of the tower. Kind of … yellow maybe?”
Varga nodded. “The harvest moon was up. Maybe the reflection on the glass when the clouds passed in front of it.”
He gave her a dubious look and opened his mouth to reply, but she turned away before he could disagree.
By noon, they reached the path up to the mountaintop. The trail was so overgrown that Varga would have missed it if Fiske hadn’t pointed it out, and for the first time she felt glad she had allowed him to come. The shrubs on either side were bent and broken in places, and Fiske pushed the bracken aside to reveal a hoofprint in the mud.
“Looks like we might find something interesting up there after all. Relic-hunters probably,” said Varga.
Relic-hunters were a dangerous lot, but dealing with them should be easy enough. Keeping Fiske alive in a fight might be more of a challenge. This is going to be a mess, thought Varga.
She shared some bread and dried venison with Fiske, who ate it eagerly. When they finished their meal, Fiske led the way up the steep trail. The undergrowth snagged at Varga and hampered her progress. Low-hanging branches tangled in her swords and plucked painfully at her hair. For all his lack of muscle, Fiske set a hard pace, and when Varga stopped for breaks to catch her breath, he barely seemed winded.
Eventually, curiosity got the better of her. As she brushed the leaves out of her eyes for what felt like the hundredth time she asked, “Do you come up this far very often?”
“Sometimes. The hunting’s good up here.” He ducked his head and added, “Lady Varga.”
“Just … Varga,” she said. “But if you hunt here on the mountain, why do you have a fishing spear? Is there a lake?”
“It’s on account of my name. Fiske.” He shifted his weight and his face reddened.
Varga furrowed her brow and shook her head. “I don’t get it.”
“Fiske. It means fish. Give the fish a fishing spear? The men in the village thought it was funny.” He hefted it. “But it works on rabbits just fine.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She stretched and they continued up the path.
Varga knew immediately when they crossed into the tower’s old territory. The hair on the back of her neck stood up and her skin tingled as the decaying magic that warded the tower brushed over her. She glanced at Fiske. The grin had disappeared from his face.
“Do you really think people came up here?” His voice was low in the silence that filled the area around the tower.
“Ugly things attract ugly people.” Another saying her father was fond of repeating. She pulled out a strip of leather and wrapped it around the ends of her braids, tying them tightly so the beads wouldn’t clatter. “You saw those tracks down by the road. Any idea where a group might make camp?”
Fiske turned off the trail, gesturing for her to follow. They headed around the side of the mountain, and Varga was surprised to see that Fiske’s body carriage had completely changed. Here in the woods, he used his thin arms and legs to his advantage, edging through gaps in the underbrush and picking his way between the trees with a grace that Varga never would have suspected. Several times he had to stop and wait for her to catch up.
They headed west around the mountain, then circled back to the east. Varga was about to ask if he’d taken a wrong turn when he dropped to his belly and motioned for her to do the same. They crawled forward as quietly as possible until they reached the edge of a clearing. The thick bed of pine needles muffled the sound of their movements, but they jabbed at Varga’s skin through the joints in her armor. She peered through the bracken and grunted in disappointment.
“Empty.” She stood up and felt the early afternoon breeze on her face. She turned to Fiske. “You brought us around so we’d be downwind?”
“They might’ve had dogs.”
Varga raised her eyebrows, impressed.
“It’s too rocky and steep to camp anywhere else,” said Fiske. “Where could they be?”
“Is there a way inside?”
“What, inside the ruin?”
Varga nodded and kept her expression serious to hide the thrill that went through her at the thought of exploring inside the ruined walls.
“There’s the place where they knocked down the wall during the war, but—” Fiske wrinkled his nose. “No one goes in there.”
“I’ll wager they did,” said Varga. “Let’s go.”
Fiske opened his mouth to argue, but closed it
again and plunged once more into the undergrowth.
The breach in the wall was blocked by tumbled pieces of broken stone and choked with creepers. Crushed vines and fresh scrapes on the stone beneath told her someone had passed this way not long before. Varga led the way up the mound of rubble and paused at the mouth of the gap to allow Fiske to catch up. As he caught his first glimpse of the courtyard below, he sucked in his breath. Varga turned. His eyes were even wider than before, his mouth open in dismay.
“Is this your first time to see one of these towers up close?” she asked.
Fiske nodded, and Varga felt a pang of sympathy, remembering the shock she had felt the first time she’d seen a tower.
In the center of the wide, circular court, the needle spire of the tower rose up unbroken to stab the sky. It had no doors, no windows, not even any seams where stones had been laid on top of one another. The wall curved out of sight around the far side of the tower, and wide, black stones paved the interior court, scored and cracked by battle generations before. Where the forest was a riot of green and brown, the inside of the ruin was ash-black and devoid of life.
Like the other towers dotting the land, it had been grown, not built. The mage had pulled it forth from deep beneath the ground, an obscene deformation of the bedrock below. The late-afternoon sun gleamed against its western side, reflecting in the glassy black surface.
Varga picked her way down to the courtyard below. She didn’t look back, but after a few moments a scrabbling behind her told her Fiske was following.
Inside the wall, the air felt stifling and a sulfurous stench wafted through the air. The mages had placed their towers where the earth’s blood ran closest to the world above, and heat radiated up through Varga’s boots.
They found the camp almost immediately. What was left of it. The tents lay in a jumbled pile, the canvas shredded. Clothing, gear, and other detritus was scattered across the ground as though someone had tossed it about.
“Someone did our job for us.” Varga nudged the corner of a tent with the toe of her boot. “But this explains your lights. Campfire reflecting off the glass tower.”