Song of the Day | Have You Fallen Out of Love? By Paul Dempsey | Spotify | YouTube
A bird wheeled overhead, crow-like but sleeker, with a narrow beak and white patches. The currawong let out a piercing cry and dove sharply, dodging a streak of red light that burst fruitlessly behind him. The air around him was heating up, thick and sparkling with the secret colours of magic only animals can see. Fires clawed along the fence line and tried to spread, reflecting the deep red bruised sky. He surveyed the seething mass of chaos below and tried to figure out who was winning.
There were three distinct groups in the fray: the shining silver of the special ops chainmail worn by the Enforcers of the Covenant, the most powerful of the Grabbers. They swung impossibly long, thin blades, and where they cut, all magic (and some heartbeats) ceased. Then the void-black tactical gear of the Brigade, sucking in light and magic, sparking as hexes bounced off. They fired brutal handguns with bullets that tore off limbs or applied terrible mutations, victims collapsing and writhing on the ground. A scattering of apparent civilians, some panicking and flitting about, others in their own bubbles of magic as they battled with all their will.
Then one last small knot at the crest of the hill, arms locked tightly together around a single figure, barely visible through a kaleidoscope of colliding spells. She was leading a chant, and it was growing heavier and heavier, increasingly blocking out all other thoughts.
Suddenly, the sky itself split with a great lance of lightning. It didn’t extinguish but hung in the air, too bright to look at, a crack that started below the horizon and shot vertically upwards further than even his enhanced eyes could see. A terrible realisation struck him so hard he lost his composure and transformed, tumbling towards the ground.
“Darren!” He was caught at the last moment and dropped roughly to the ground. He stumbled to his feet and grabbed at his mentor, his knuckles whitening.
“It’s a door!” He shouted, almost hysterical. “It’s opening!”
“Yes! Soda’s spell is working! Apprentice! Report!”
Lune’s stern tone shot through his fear and he straightened up.
“Sorry boss! Looks like the Silvers have the edge at the top of the hill but I couldn’t spot Evangeline yet so this is likely just preliminary Brigade forces. Didn’t see Mwangi either.”
“Get up there and reinforce the ring around Soda until we can find that idiot and convince him to help us!”
On the other side of the hill, the Queenslander house heaved like a living thing, its peeling weatherboard twisting at the edges like angry snakes, the decking lashing upwards, catching and trapping figures dressed in all-black and silver alike. The gardens joined the rebellion, winding angry vines around unsuspecting attackers, sword-sharp grass blades slicing exposed flesh, roots erupting from the soil and catching at peoples’ feet. The tight quarters of the backyard had reduced the fight to an incomprehensible crush. Big Red bounded over heads, leaping off shoulders and ducking away from blades and blasts, cursing. He bit a Grabber’s hand with a burst of red sparks, making her drop her sword and shake out the little flames he’d left behind. He finally found Rowan inside a defensive ring of Bougainvillea vines.
“Ow! Those things are a fuckin’ menace!”
“That’s the idea! Did you find him?”
Rowan was always at her most radiant when she was fighting. Her hair fizzed and floated, her eyes glowed, her teeth flashed. No one on this field was even coming close to her.
“No, I don’t think he’s here! Typical! He’s a coward, always was! Haven’t seen Evangeline?”
“You know how she loves an entrance. I don’t think anybody will be missing her arrival. But by Fate’s dirty pillows I swear if Rene Mwangi doesn’t help us I’ll—”
“You’ll what, cause the end of the world?”
Red started violently as the Patron appeared silently, as though he had just been out for a smoke and had stepped back in. He raised a hand, but Rowan dropped the vine defences and put both palms up in supplication.
“Listen! Please! Please, Rene.”
He paused.
“You’re right about Evangeline and I. We’re messy. Toxic. Dangerous.”
Mwangi opened his mouth to interject, but Rowan rushed on.
“But Soda isn’t! You spent time with her, right? She’s a good girl. She’s trying to do the right thing. Do you believe that?”
He scowled deeply, exhaled hard through his nose, then faced the battle. He raised both hands as though he was lifting something very heavy, and as he did, everything around them slowly ground to a halt. The sticky, fizzy air of dense magic was lifting like a fog, and peoples’ arms were going limp, their eyes unfocused. The chanting grew louder in the sudden quiet, its stanzas banging like a war drum up into the night sky and towards the vast, impossible doorway that continued to edge open.
Lune and Dawn both seemed unaffected by the sleepy daze, and rushed over to stand protectively at either side of Rowan and Red.
Mwangi raised an eyebrow.
“You two also believe in Soda Jones then?”
He looked at each of them in turn, and received firm little nods.
“Where’s Evangeline?” Rowan asked.
“While I think you’re an inveterate liar, I am a cautious man. I locked her up as tightly as I could before I came here.”
“Great! Nice one!” Red yowled. “Now call off the Silvers and help us finish the ritual!”
“I have information you do not, as usual. We cannot finish the ritual.”
“What? But the Void—”
“We cannot finish the ritual in its current form. It has been altered.”
Everyone spoke at once.
“What does that mean?”
“Who-”
“-altered how exactly?”
“Evangeline has been using Artificers to change the nature of the Book of the First.”
That stunned them into silence.
“That’s actually possible?”
“So it would seem. I like it about as much as you do. According to my sources, the ritual will add lines to the Covenant itself. They are designed to create an end-date after which the Covenant will dissolve. However these Artificers are not scholars of the Covenant and therefore their wording is poor. This will not create a smooth transition. It will create an eruption.”
“Well, what do we do instead then?”
“Remove the extra lines from the spell and finish it properly.”
“Great! Let’s—”
Red didn’t finish, because Loup appeared with a pop and muttered something to the Patron, whose eyes widened.
“She’s out! She’s coming!”
***
A huge storm front was blowing in off the ocean. It barrelled over the city, twisting and ripping at trees, lashing the skyscrapers and stately riverside mansions with daggers of rain and hail. The fighters were all shocked out of their stasis by the stinging rain, shaking themselves off and milling about in confusion. The black-clad commandos recovered first, nasty smiles spreading across their faces. Long thin figures made of oily smoke oozed up out of the ground, seething into the nostrils and open mouths of those standing nearby. Whoever they consumed rapidly turned blue-white and collapsed, their skin papery. There was a lupine howl, and huge shaggy shapes loomed in the firelit darkness, their teeth dripping. Porcelain faces with slitted eyes and dagger fangs appeared in the smoke haze; the vampires fell upon the unwary silently. Other nightmare creatures oozed and slunk, hissing, squelching, laughing.
Mwangi’s voice boomed across the battlefield, impossibly loud, even louder than the ever-present drum of the chant.
“ENFORCERS! THE BRIGADE HAS BETRAYED US! PROTECT SODA JONES!”
Chaos returned as everybody scrambled to form up in their new alliances.
***
“Ah fuck! Keku!”
“What’re keku?”
“Demons and shit right?”
“Pretty much! Where did you learn so much about this stuff anyway?”
“Youtube!”
“Really? That is… a bit concerning if I’m honest.”
“You three shut up and keep chanting or we’re all going to fuckin’ die!”
Mick, Kitty and Darren strained against their linked arms, buffeted by enormous magical forces and cyclonic winds. Darren looked down and saw their feet were now being swamped by waterfalls of rain sluicing down the hillside. Shadow figures raised up right in front of them and Kitty screamed, but as they reached for her they caught fire and burned away to nothing, little wisps of golden ash in their wake. The ground glowed beneath them and molten gold pushed out the water, sizzling and steaming, driving away the rain and clouds until a widening circle of clear sky appeared overhead.
Darren glanced back and saw Soda standing over the chest with her hands pressing hard into the pages of the Book, her eyes filled with gold and unseeing. As the sky cleared he could see the doorway was still widening, but its progress had slowed. He chanted harder.
***
An eldritch screeching split the air, and Rowan’s head snapped up just as the vampire she’d been fighting collapsed to ash at her feet.
“Oh no,” she said quietly.
The temperature surged until it was barely tolerable, a humid sticky mess that was hard to breathe. It coated the lungs, clawed at the throat. Dread pressed against all with hearts to feel it. On that fetid tide, Evangeline swept in. She was recognisable only by her pale face peeking out of slippery black darkness that cloaked and distorted her body into a terrible writhing mass. Death and decay followed its oozing black progress, swamping everything it touched, human and keku alike. She was surging towards Soda, letting out a gloating, gurgling laugh. Rowan and Rene exchanged a glance then wordlessly both raced up the hill.
***
Captain Flintlock was a bit drunk, because he was always a bit drunk, but he was also as sober as a judge as he crouched behind a potted palm tree on the back deck of the house and tried to take stock. His team had taken heavy losses and had retreated to the front yard where the healers were stationed. The entire suburb was crawling with Feds, with more flooding in to retrieve the dead and wounded, and replace the losses. But the keku seemed endless, tireless. Worse, he knew they were just a distraction. He forced himself to look at the unholy mass of shadowy tentacles and claws that wore Evangeline Lorenze’s face like a mask.
She was tossing people like they were empty bottles, indiscriminately blasting the area with sticky red magic that befouled and mutated. Her body seemed to leave a poison oil-slick behind. There was a wall of gold she was battering against, and the chant, which had been an ever-present heartbeat, began to falter. Cursing, he leapt over the railing and dropped into a roll, coming up into a run towards the desperate ring of chanters. A shadowy hand caught his ankle and he came crashing down hard into the ground. His two pistols were out in a flash as he rolled onto his back, two bright holes appearing in the shadow and dissolving it into the night. He launched himself back up into a run and didn’t see the dripping skeleton until it was too late.
“Murdererrrrrr…” the creature hissed, and Flintock felt a strange hotness in his chest. He looked down and saw a bony hand with a sword hilt.
“Oh,” he managed, then dropped to the ground.
***
Captain Esther Pereira felt the warm glow spread inside as she efficiently dispatched the wretch in biker leathers in front of her. She hadn’t felt the same sense of righteousness since she’d first been shown the way by Vincent, all those years ago. Things were simpler then. You would never have seen Outsiders team up with Grabbers against liberators like her. The real enemy was crystal clear. Mwangi’s true victory hadn’t been all those useless computer systems, it had been convincing people the Enclave was not even good or evil, it was just infrastructure. As immovable and morally neutral as stone.
Well, she was going to smash it all to rubble. The clarity felt good. She conjured a series of blades of finest metal that sliced through the necks of three different Silvers before they had even noticed her. Their eyes turned yellow, then black, then they keeled over. Poisons were Vincent’s favourite weapon, and she’d learned well. This new generation were all about the latest spelltech; they didn’t learn the fundamentals any more. But last time she checked, you still died when you got stabbed in the neck with poison blades. She grinned as a projectile glanced past her face, leaving a fresh laceration. Another one for the collection. Grunting, she shoved and pushed her way towards her mistress.
She had almost reached the top of the hill when she felt a sharp pain in her leg and looked down.
Big Red had bitten her, setting her clothes on fire and tearing out a chunk of her calf. Enraged, she swung a kick in his direction, but he dodged it nimbly, taunting her and trying to trip her up. All her resentment for him, for his cowardice, for his unwillingness to see the only real way to make change, filled her chest with a scream. She rained a great arc of white hot metal slag from her hands, splattering everyone nearby, sending up a chorus of screams.
“You fucking traitor! You faithless pig! You useless waste of the God’s greatest gift!”
She’d caught him in the flank, and he was stumbling now. She landed a vicious kick right in his ribs and felt them crack. He slumped to the ground, wheezing. She grimaced and spat on him, gave him one last stomp. Then a fist-sized hole opened up in her chest, perfectly round, lilac sizzling around the edges. She looked down, surprised, and died.
Rowan lowered her gun, glanced around, then crouched by Red and put a hand near his nose. She very carefully lifted him into her arms and made for the golden wall.
***
Soda was flagging. She felt like she’d overdosed on painkillers, all sweaty and erratic, heartbeats irregular. The chant was barely reaching above the noise now. She’d had to divert resources to repelling Evangeline, but there wasn’t enough! Not even with all the fiery golden strength of the Stone, and the ring of chanters around her. The Evangeline-thing oozed and pressed and wriggled around her mind, her defences, her friends. She felt it gaining ground. But then there was a great release of pressure: the monster had been sucked physically backwards.
She couldn’t see much outside the circle, but she could feel the unmistakable slippery magic of the Patron. He was helping her, both feeding her strength and holding Evangeline off. The chant surged again, pouring from the mouths of the circle of its own accord, writing itself into the air, getting bigger and bigger.
Then Evangeline was laughing that cracked, gurgling laugh again. Soda saw her nightmare form burst upward into a towering figure, then come slamming down with a crash that shook the earth and smashed apart the back fence and half the neighbouring roof. It tore through Soda's golden wall, burst apart the linked arms of her defenders, and left her wide open.
In the gap, she saw two things: one, was Rene Mwangi on his back, hand raised up in defiance. Loup appeared and wrapped the Patron in his arms, then disappeared again as another great glob of black crashed right into the ground he’d just vacated. The second was Rowan, struggling towards her, a lump of orange fur all streaked with blood and filth in her arms.
“Red!” She screamed, and the chant broke down altogether.
***
“This is not good,” muttered Dawn to his sibling, as the defensive ring burst open. “Should we leave?”
“And go where?” Huffed Lune, shaking skeleton-muck off their hand. “That thing Evangeline’s wearing craves only the thrill of destruction and the inevitable Void.”
“Maybe if we were freed from our prison, we could be more helpful in times like this. Who knows!”
“Nobody knows how to free us any more. I think that much is true.”
“Soda Jones would free us, if she knew how.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re feeling optimistic again.”
Dawn gave them a long, cool stare.
Lune heaved a huge sigh. “Then I suppose we should intervene…”
***
Soda didn’t notice Lune and Dawn arriving, closing the circle back around her and Rowan and the chest. She had stopped chanting, stopped casting spells, stopped breathing. All she could hear was the thump-thump-thump of her own blood in her ears as she put her arms out in slow motion, and Rowan gently lowered Red into them.
“What happened?” Her voice echoed from far away.
“Pereira. I killed her.”
“Is he…”
But Rowan had already turned away, and was pushing back through, back out to face Evangeline.
A little wheeze fluttered against her chest and she gave a little involuntary hiccup.
“Think I’m done kid…” came a gurgled whisper. “Better… avenge me… or I’ll haunt you… so bad…”
The Dark Forest had replaced the leafy suburbs around her. The sky had closed in. Only black canopy hung overhead.
***
Rowan straightened herself up and tugged at her jacket so the shoulders sat right. Her gun hung loosely in her hand by her side. Evangeline’s face loomed overhead, but when she spotted her, she lowered herself, sucking the black mass back inward until she was almost at Rowan’s height.
“Angie, what is all this,” she asked sadly.
Evangeline’s face remained haughty, but the black goo fizzed and bubbled and tried to surge. “We were supposed to do this together, but you abandoned me.”
“I was always by your side!”
“In your heart!” Evangeline hissed, lashing out with an appendage. “Why won’t you just admit you fell out of love? Is that so hard?”
Rowan flinched as the tentacle snapped towards her, shooting the end off and ducking into a tight roll. Evangeline hissed and rained goops of black down. Rowan threw up a hasty sparkling shield from her hand.
“It’s hard because I never stopped loving you. That was never the problem.”
“Then what! Tell me!”
Rowan fired a few shots towards the centre of the mass but they just gooped in uselessly. “Because it was never enough! Nothing was ever enough. It was like a bottomless pit inside you. There was no amount of money, fame, power, love, adoration or respect that could fill it.”
Evangeline surged upwards, her bulk quivering with rage. “That’s not true! You never stayed committed! Always leaving, taking lovers, wandering back when you were bored!”
“It’s healthy to have an independent life sometimes!”
“Oh, that is such a weak excuse. You promised me forever!” She lashed out with black daggers, which bounced off the shield and sizzled into the ground.
“Well, maybe I’m not the same person who made that promise.”
Evangeline’s face fell, briefly twisting with grief. Then she nodded decisively. “Yes, that’s true, isn’t it. You just didn’t have it in you after all.”
“Your plan won’t work. The modifications you made to the spell will destroy us.”
“Oh? Who told you that? Mwangi, getting it wrong again?”
Rowan looked briefly uncertain, and Evangeline’s chin tilted with triumph.
“It won’t dissolve the Covenant, despite what poor Doctor Carter thought. That won’t even be a problem when I’m done. I’ve got bigger ambitions than that.”
“Do you still think you can fight Fate Herself?”
“Yes! The First did it and I will too!”
A howling gust of pure chaos magic tore across the battlefield, warping reality into strange unpleasant shapes and co-mingled dimensions. Rowan’s shield dissolved in the onslaught, and she squinted, leaning in—
But it stopped abruptly. There was a figure standing to the side of Evangeline, bellowing some heavy-hitting curses, throwing them out with all his might. He had big hands and, Rowan realised, a bull’s head. Evangeline looked annoyed, then hurt.
“Carter! What are you doing?”
“I heard what you said! You lied to us. You need to be stopped.” He was shouting through gritted teeth.
Evangeline looked deeply sad, and crushed his body under a huge limb. He crumpled to the ground and didn’t move again. She hadn’t noticed Rowan’s body filling with glowing light and the beam hit her full-on, spontaneously sprouting a lush carpet of wildflowers and grasses. The greenery spread rapidly, swamping the black ooze and beating it back, until Evangeline was more or less human-shaped, cloaked in a tangle of goop and plants.
Rowan raised her gun again. Evangeline reached out a hand in supplication and defence, frightened and panting. Rowan hesitated, then looked down. There was a very long, thin blade lodged deep in her chest. She slowly dropped to her knees, then keeled over.
***
The waking world returned. Soda was hunched over the chest, Red still held tight to her even though he’d stopped breathing some time ago. Little sobs kept trying to escape and she kept sucking them back in. She heard Evangeline’s triumphant laughter from a long way away, and thought about letting it all go. There was a coolness flowing from the Stone into her body, and she saw everything laid out before her in a moment of perfect clarity. She was dying, she realised, paying the price of using the Stone, the Dark Forest mere seconds away. So many dead, so many wounded… she’d failed. She’d failed everyone. The Stone gave a little hum. Well, there was one last thing she could do. It probably wouldn’t work, but it was better than doing nothing.
Rowan’s death sent a ripple of dismay through the surviving fighters. Evangeline tossed Lune and Dawn out of the way like unwanted toys, crashing them into roofs nearby. Some of the black-clad commandos had changed sides to fight the keku, some had run away. The Enclave seemed to be in chaos, with no leaders left on the field, and the backup squads surrounding them torn between evacuating survivors and containing the magic that was freely bouncing everywhere.
Evangeline cackled with glee, restarting the chant. Her voice became a chorus, then a buzzing hive, as the keku with mouths joined in. With one last triumphant shout, she completed the new lines of the ritual, causing the crack to become a gaping, blinding maw in the sky, splitting the very ground in half in a great glowing schism that ended precisely at the base of the chest. The door had been blown open, not shut, and everywhere the light touched, reality bent and distorted.
Soda grimaced as Evangeline oozed forward and reached out too-long fingers, tipped with black talons.
“I’ll be taking my things back now,” she said silkily.
Soda glared up at her, face dirty and tear-streaked. She said nothing.
As her fingers connected with the chest, she smiled, then blinked rapidly. There was a hissing noise, and a strange electric friction buzzed from the chest. All around them, magic started sucking inwards. It cemented Evangeline’s hands to the chest even as she screamed and lashed about. It hummed and slurped, big gouts of sticky red magic falling out of her and into the growing multi-coloured swirl between Soda’s hands.
“What trick is this?” Evangeline howled, struggling with all her might.
“You know it, you were the one who warned me about them,” mumbled Soda, barely audible. “Penny helped me.”
“A Device! You sneaky little bitch!”
“Shhh…”
Soda was concentrating on the two things she had to do. Her body was a furnace, every nerve ending afire with trying to contain the sheer amount of magic pouring in. She thought very hard about what she wanted it to do. Summon… shape… release. The jagged crack in reality began to glimmer gold at the edges. And across the battlefield, bodies started to gently glow. Soda glanced down and saw Red had started to shine. And was he… expanding? The light was so bright it was hard to see anything at all.
“No! You won’t take this from me!”
Evangeline’s hands finally broke free from the chest and she lunged at Soda. At the last possible moment, just as she felt her body ready to release her spirit, Soda leapt to meet her, knocking the book and the chest over and crashing into her distorted form. Soda, the Book, the chest, and the Evangeline-thing all went toppling into the glowing crack in the ground. With one final surge, Soda threw the last of the gathered magic behind her, slamming the great doorway shut.
Chapter Twenty-one: The Battle of Brisbane Pt 2
Having faith, falling out of love, opening doors best left closed