Dante

  Christopher’s gauntlet glows, white-hot plasma crackling in its palm as he points it towards our strange visitor. “Stop.”

  The man stops. “I am sorry for what must be taken from you now. But it would far worse if we did not.” A smile touches his lips. “Would that you could remember that.”

  He raises the glittering black orb and sigils in silver and shadow swirl in a sphere surrounding it, starting several spans from the core and expanding outward to wash over us. I feel a bone-chilling cold pierce my bones as the signs sweep past, and my gaze darkens. They form again, a second sphere, and flow outward in a second wave, even as a third forms behind that.

  A beam of pure incandescent white flashes from Christopher’s gauntlet to the orb in the stranger’s hand, and with a sound like sparks and splintering glass, the sigils in the air flare and shatter.

  The man falls. Or rather, a bit of cloth strikes the ground, and a black half mask clatters to the earth next to it. The man himself is simply gone.

  The orb continues hovering, unharmed but inactive.

  A moment of silence follows. I can feel the stillness seeping into me.

  For a moment, I can say nothing, and feel nothing.

  “You didn’t mention the gauntlet,” Anton grumbles. “Could have said something before I tossed all my umbrellas.”

  “Prototype,” Christopher replies. “Didn’t want to use it.”

  Anton glances from Christopher to Andrea. “Perfectionists.” He sighs.

  “Really? Could have exploded.” Christopher reaches out a un-gauntleted hand to Andrea as she rises to her feet. She gives it a squeeze of reassurance.

  “March of Science, man. March. Of. Science.” Anton waves the objection away, then picks up the wreckage of the skycycle, looks it over and sets it gently to one side. “You good?” he asks me.

  I brush off my knees and glance around. “Better than I have any right to be.”

  “You guys okay? Caduceus?” Christopher asks.

  “No critical injuries detected,” a man’s voice says in a calm, even tone, emanating from the phone in Christopher’s pocket.

  His medical AI? I wonder distractedly. Wait. What’s that?

  The black orb still hovers in the air while we all ignore it. The others still seem to, as I stare at the sphere mutely. A shell of glittering, silver-black runes slowly forms just above its surface.

  The voices of the three behind me grow more distant, even as they stand there. And the clearing grows darker.

  Whispers fill the back of my mind, and I find I’ve gone unmoving, barely even breathing as I lock my gaze on the orb. The silver layer of runes mutate and move hypnotically as I watch.

  Instinctively I pull my mind back from it, and then desperately tear my gaze away. But somehow the patterns are already behind my eyes.

  I feel a sting like an electrical current and chill icewater running over my feet, and glance at the ground.

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  A glowing, silver-white mist is gathering over the grass in front of me. Swirling like a whirlpool, the faint fog begins to gather and thicken in one spot. A tiny point of light shines there, enveloped almost instantly by a shell of mist and light and runes spinning clockwise. Followed by a second over that, going counterclockwise. And then a third, clockwise again.

  And then a dozen more, spinning faster and faster.

  A blazing white orb, maybe 3-inches across, shoots up from the ground, and incandescent sigils ignite in the air all around it. Reminding me of Ghost’s orb, only composed of pure energy. The twisting, nonsense runes of cognitive counterhacking sweep out in wave after wave from the sphere, fighting the darker runes of scorched silver stealing through the night all around them.

  I can’t make myself look away again. Or rather, stop looking altogether, as the sigils fight each other everywhere – not so much against each other as against the mind of anyone who gazes upon them. Struggling for dominance, or at least a foothold.

  The voices of the Aspects fade, but they’re already a distant memory.

  For a moment, only the two orbs remain with me in the forest. The orbs, and their warring runes.

  Then, I have a sense of two great spectral armies gathering, one behind each sphere.

  Then, all at once, they come for me. And from every direction at once.

  A storm of shadows tears at me with fire and fangs, nocturnal nightmares given form and fury. Cold darkness sinks into me, and whispers fill my skull. Then threads of light and fire pierce the dark and sear their way into me, burning back the cold freezing my bones. Igniting my nerves and the channels of my chi with more power than they can contain.

  Echoes of distant song drive back the whispering. Light and fire push back frozen darkness. But I feel like my body and soul have become a battlefield for warring energies clashing within me. Both greater than anything I can possibly survive.

  I realize the sigils flaring in the air all around have long since overtaken my mind. And that if they are warring, then they can only be fighting in the one consciousness that can perceive them – my own.

  All else fades away, even the forest itself. I am alone.

  I wonder if this had been how it was for the Circle – for everyone consumed inside out by their mindwarping technology. I wonder if the faces I see are all screaming inside, some vital piece long since torn from them by a ruthless desire for domination. Something colder than the ice in my veins finds my heart.

  Something more than light and dark rages within me, now. Wrath surges within me.

  I have a sudden, terrible sense that if I fall here, this power will claim the others, one by one, until nothing can stop it. If I can not be free then no one will.

  With a mental kiai shout I call upon the depths of my chi, and find it rising with greater power than it ever has in my life – somehow fanned into a conflagration by the forces intruding into the core of my being. Instinctively I attack, but not with fist or blade or spectral rage.

  Rather, floating in the strange empty darkness, I envision my core blazing up with a warm, brilliant light of its own to match the burning light and colder darkness pouring into me. With each breath, I imagine it blazing brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter, as my own lessons in chi teach me it should.

  Not a shield, not a barrier. Just raw, limitless light and heat arising from within me. A light so powerful it does not oppose the darkness. But simply a radiance in which no trace of shadow can survive.

  My own strength, my own will are being tested here. Whether I can stand on my own or simply be held upright like a puppet. Each breath of fiery chi pushes back against the powers numbing me to their intrusion. Each inhalation draws in living power from the universe around me. Each exhalation blows out dust and debris within my system – destructive noise igniting as I exhale it and burning into free, life-giving energies. Under normal circumstances, I could do this forever. Now, though…

  I can feel things being torn away from me already, and realize my invaders are almost done.

  I clench my fists and release them, draw in his breath like a bellows, and in my mind’s eye… blaze brighter than the Sun. Either my soul will reign supreme inside me, or nothing will.

  Moments stretch into eternity.

  I can feel a great wind rising around me, one which touches the war of light and darkness, and myself, and nothing else.

  And then, as if by mutual agreement, both powers release me at once.

  I blink, still drawing in white-hot breaths of chi, taking nothing for granted as the trees at last begin to sway and the leaves to stir in an unfelt wind.

  The sigils are retreating. I can see the orb of darkness to my right, the swirling sphere of light to my left, and their runes flowing back into each. And all of them are being drawn into the wind, falling back incrementally into the woods, as not a leaf around them trembles.

  Then, with a strange pop, both are gone, the windstorm fled, and I am kneeling in the grass, alone in a silent clearing.

  Finally, I force my eyes closed, but new visions blazed up even brighter behind my eyelids. Dreams take form and fight back and forth across my imagination – one unreal world pushed aside by the next, one nightmare vision driven back by an angry utopia only to give way in turn.

  Then my core blazes up again, and the dreams flee also.

  I know I should do something next, but all thought has left me. And all memory.

  I stare into space, empty of everything.

  A distant voice echoes beyond my consciousness. It begins.

  Another answers. It does indeed.

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