The silence of the canyon was a lie. It was the pause between the thunderclap and the rain, the breath before the strike. Arrion felt it in the marrow-deep hum of the Verdant King's thorn, which had gone from a warning pulse to a frantic, panicked vibration. It wasn't just fear; it was a shriek of metaphysical wrongness. The creature approaching wasn't just a predator. It was an aberration, a thing that violated the composition of the world.
It emerged from a side-canyon not with a roar, but with a low, chittering scrape that set the teeth on edge. And then Arrion saw it, and his mind struggled to reconcile the parts into a horrific whole.
It had the low-slung, armoured body of a gargantuan scorpion, plates of chitin the colour of dried blood and granite. From this body sprouted not eight insectile legs, but six massive, mole-like forelimbs, ending in broad, shovel-like claws capable of rending stone. At the front, where a scorpion's head would be, was the bloated, hairy cephalothorax of a spider, dominated by eight hateful, black eyes that held a chilling, alien intelligence. And rising from its back, arching over its body in a lethal curve, was not a scorpion's tail, but something worse: a segmented, fleshy stalk that ended in a nightmarish, lamprey-like maw, ringed with concentric rows of rotating, bony teeth. It dripped a clear, viscous fluid that sizzled where it hit the stone.
It was a Chthonic Delver. A creature born not of nature, but of the deep, lightless pressures where the borders of reality grew thin, a scavenger that fed on the leavings of greater planar breaches. It didn't belong here, but it had made this graveyard of giants its home.
It saw him. All eight eyes fixed on the spark of life that dared intrude on its ossuary. It didn't charge. It flowed forward, its mole-claws digging into the rock with terrifying ease, moving with a speed that belied its bulk.
Arrion had time for one action. He threw the bone javelin.
It was a perfect throw. The sharpened femur streaked through the air and struck the creature directly in the centre of its spider-head with enough force to punch through a castle door.
It shattered. The ancient bone exploded into a thousand white fragments against the impervious chitin. The Delver didn't even flinch.
Nightshade. It was his only hope. He drew the water-grey blade, its smoky patterns swirling as if agitated. He fell into the Fisherman's Gate stance, his Adept's will hardening around him, a shell of focused intent.
The Delver closed the final distance. One massive mole-limb swept out in a casual, obliterating arc. Arrion leaped back, the claws missing him by inches, tearing a furrow in the ground where he'd stood. He darted in, Nightshade flashing, aiming for a joint in the chitin. The blade bit, shearing through the alien armour with a shriek of protest, drawing a gout of black, ichorous blood.
The creature shrieked—a sound like grinding tectonic plates—and its fleshy tail-strike lashed out faster than thought. Arrion twisted, but the lamprey-maw didn't aim for his body. It struck the ground at his feet. The rotating teeth drilled, not biting, but boring. The stone itself seemed to liquefy and vanish into the maw. The ground beneath him collapsed.
He fell, catching himself on the edge of the newly created pit. The tail reared back for another strike, this time aimed at his head.
He rolled, the maw chomping the air where his skull had been. He came up inside the creature's guard again, driving Nightshade deep into the soft tissue where a forelimb met the body. Black ichor fountained. The Delver convulsed, one leg going momentarily limp.
But it was learning. It scuttled back, putting distance between them. Its spider-mouth parted, and it didn't spit venom. It spat gravel—a hyper-accelerated blast of stone shards it had swallowed and compressed in a gizzard of unimaginable pressure. Arrion raised his vambraced arm. The impact was like being hit by a siege hammer. The black iron held, but the force hurled him backwards, skidding across the bone-littered ground, his breath knocked from his lungs.
He staggered to his feet, his vision swimming. The creature was already on him. A claw clipped his side. He felt ribs crack, a hot, bright pain lancing through him. He retaliated with a desperate upward cut that sliced through one of the lamprey-maw's segments. The tail recoiled, shrieking.
But he was losing. He was fast, he was strong, but this thing was a force of geology and hunger. Each blow he landed was a pinprick to its monstrous vitality. Each of its strikes was catastrophic. His Adept's energy was draining, his body screaming in protest.
The end came swiftly. A feint from the claws drew his guard low. The tail struck, not with the maw, but with the heavy, muscular stalk itself. It wrapped around his chest with crushing force, lifting him from the ground. He felt his armour buckle, the air crushed from his lungs. The lamprey-maw descended, the rotating teeth whirling an inch from his face, the sizzling drool burning his skin. The eight black eyes watched with cold, digestive interest.
This was it. He would be bored into nothing, consumed into the void of that otherworldly gut. The thorn at his chest flared one last, desperate time.
In that fraction of a second, suspended between life and unmaking, Arrion's mind did not go to Borryn, or his mother, or the Weald. It went to the lesson of the lightning-giant. Dominion Over Self. The Unbreaking Vow.
His vow was protection. Of his family. Of the forest. Of the quiet ones. This thing was the antithesis of all he vowed to protect—a consumer of worlds, a blight upon reality itself.
And in his death-throes, with the last shred of his Warden's will, he did not try to break free. He did not try to strike. He reached out, not with his hand, but with his bloodline. He reached for the threshold-sense of his father, for the authority over borders that was his inheritance. The Delver was a creature from elsewhere. It existed here because of a crack, a thinness.
If he could not kill it in this world, he would send it home.
With a final, silent roar of effort that tore something fundamental inside him, he focused every ounce of his pain, his will, his fading life, through the lens of Nightshade (which he still clutched in a white-knuckled grip) and the anchor of the King's thorn. He didn't open a door. He identified a door—the infinitesimal, frayed seam in reality that this aberration had crawled through. And he punched it wide open.
Not to the Aetherial Veil. Not to the Elemental Keystones.
He punched it open to the Plane of Unmaking, to the hungry, silent void of the Abyssal Fracture that lay at the edge of all things.
A soundless, black rift tore the air behind the Chthonic Delver. It was not a hole, but an absence. It drank the light, the sound, the very concept of form. The Delver froze. Its eight eyes swivelled to look at the void behind it. For the first time, Arrion saw something in them besides hunger: recognition, and a primal, cosmic terror.
The void had an appetite too. And it was older.
The gravitational pull was instant and absolute. The Delver, a creature of immense mass and will, was yanked backwards. It scrabbled with its mole-claws, digging great trenches in the stone, but it was futile. The void was hunger incarnate. With a final, silent shudder that vibrated through the hills, the aberration was sucked into the black rift, which snapped closed with a concussion that had no sound, only force.
The shockwave was physical and metaphysical. Every bone in Arrion's body, already stressed to breaking, shattered. Not broken. Shattered. A million tiny fractures from his toes to his skull. The pain was a white, total universe that swallowed him whole. The backblast of the planar recoil tore outwards in a expanding ring. The canyon walls around them vaporized into fine dust. The hills for half a mile in every direction simply disintegrated, flattened as if by a god's palm, the bones within them pulverized into a blanket of white powder. The very landscape was erased.
Then, silence. A deafening, empty silence. Dust, fine as flour, snowed down from the sky, coating the newly-created, flat, featureless plain.
---
Kestrel and Briar had run as ordered, the panicked horse's speed fueled by terror. They had made it perhaps a mile through the twisting canyons when the world ended behind them. There was no sound, just a sudden, violent pressure in the air that knocked them off their feet. A wall of dust and debris rolled over them, then past them. When it cleared, she looked back and saw nothing but a rising, settling cloud of grey-white dust where the hills had been.
Her first thought was that the creature had won, and that was its final act.
Her second thought, colder and more certain, was that it was him. The giant with the impossible sword and the king's thorn. That final, desperate act had been his.
She should keep running. That was the deal. Survival. The carter would take the children to safety. Her debt to the giant was for guidance, not martyrdom.
But she stood there, Briar trembling beside her, and looked at the settling dust. He had given them time. He had faced the unfaceable so they could live. He had, in his own stubborn, thunderous way, trusted her with the children.
Cursing violently in every gutter tongue she knew, Kestrel turned Briar around. "Come on, you great lump," she snarled, pulling the reluctant horse back towards the apocalypse.
They picked their way through the new, featureless wasteland. It was eerily smooth, like a sheet of settled ash. In the very centre, she found him.
Arrion Haelend lay on his back in a shallow crater of his own making. He was covered head to toe in fine white dust, making him look like a marble statue of a fallen titan. Nightshade lay beside his outstretched hand, its blade dulled by powder. The Verdant King's thorn on his chest pulsed weakly, a faint, fading ember of green light.
He was not moving. She approached, dread a cold stone in her stomach. She couldn't see him breathing.
But as she knelt, her ear near his dust-caked lips, she heard it—the faintest, wet, rasp of air. He was alive. But the way he lay, utterly limp, the unnatural angles… he was broken. More broken than any person had a right to be and still breathe.
Briar nudged Arrion's shoulder with his nose and whinnied, a soft, distressed sound.
Kestrel stared, her thief's mind, used to assessing value and risk, utterly blank. He had wiped half the hills off the map and banished a nightmare to the void. The cost was written in the utter ruin of his body. He had saved them. And now he was a sack of shattered bones, dying in a desert of his own creation.
She had no healing magic. No potions. Just a boar-tusk dagger, a few coins, and a desperate, furious will.
"Damn you," she whispered to the unconscious giant. "Damn you for making me come back." But her hands were already moving, gentle for the first time in years, brushing the dust from his face, checking for a pulse in his neck. It was there, thready and weak, but it was there.
She had gotten them into this mess by stealing his purse. He had gotten them out of it by nearly ending the world. The ledger, she supposed, was balanced. But the account wasn't closed. Not yet.
Somehow, she had to move him. Somehow, she had to keep him alive. The hills were gone, but the Marches still lay ahead, and Ralke's eyes were still watching. And she had a feeling the world wasn't done with Arrion Haelend. Not by a long shot.