Chapter Thirty
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Falling Stars
Music Man’s brown and orange eyes seemed to light up the dark cell, with an air of comprehension, like he knew exactly what must be done.
Cinder kneeled at his stockade (a new one, built of reinforced steel) and held her palms against his cheeks. Wynne kneeled behind her and placed his hands on top of hers.
“Work to be done, eh?” Ira said. He clicked his tongue. “S’about damn time.”
Sven’s valor in battle outshone all others when he made his next move. A frightening war cry was its precursor, every single weapon in his armory, almost innumerable, hung in the air for miles above and behind him as they were summoned. The glittering dust shrouded the sky below the clouds. A swarming ocean of enemies was visible, churning within the ravine.
Sven raised his arms.
His entire armory rose with them, with a collective clattering and din of metal, firearms readying.
He threw his arms down, and the chaos descended, a crusade of every weapon imaginable plunging into the sea of opponents.
A clamor of death blew across the wasteland as Sven commanded his inanimate army, circling up, and swooping back down, throwing his body into the motions.
From yards away, to Ira the scene was full of promise, a kind of meaning no one else felt. Wide-eyed, and free once again, he felt a rush of emotion staring at the storm of blades dancing in the gorge.
“My brother.” He whispered before breaking into a sprint toward the bank. He took off without thanking Cinder for porting him out of prison, thinking of nothing else but reaching out to his brother.
Wynne and Cinder watched after him. Unfortunately, his dash was intercepted and he was forced into combat.
“Why don’t you stop time, Wynne?” Cinder cried, grimacing at the discord and death all around them.
Wynne answered decisively. “No. I must wait, for precisely the right moment.”
And at that moment, many things seemed to happen at once, and Orphenn, who watched over as a sentry soon became overwhelmed. The following events, only lasting a few minutes, felt like years.
Eyeing the onslaught, he took flight and soared over the battlefield, evidently just in time.
A wicked-looking missile dropped through the air beside him. It was like it fell in slow motion, staying adjacent to him in the air slightly longer, as if it paused to say to him, “I dare you.”
Orphenn watched it plunge for a millisecond, until he spotted Eynochia, engaged and clashing below, in its path like a silver bull’s eye.
Like a bird of prey he dove, and snatched her up like a fish from the water, heartbeats before the missile met its target, and left a deep, yawning crater on the bank.
She squealed in his arms, cleaving tightly to her own guardian angel. Then she shrieked, a more painful noise.
Orphenn followed her gaze to the bank where the dance of weapons had disappeared, back into arraigned dust. Each faded without the command of their summoner, for Sven had been caught in the missile’s blast.
Ardara rocked back and fourth in her lonely throne, crazed and shaking violently in a fit of panic. She bit her nails savagely, her knees huddled up to her chest. She had no one, and nothing was going her way. She had nothing left in her favor. Electricity blinked and flashed everywhere, even lightning in the clouds outside as a result of her uncontestable wrath.
She began to whimper, knowing her army’s numbers were dropping rapidly, and already aware that all her castle guards were dead.
She had woken to the wretched escape of Cinder and Wynne. Not long after, a soldier came to her with a message.
“All our colonies have fallen,” he’d said, gurgling from the poison that Dacian had dealt him in battle. “All of them, burned to the ground….I came as fast as I could to relay this….” Then he had fallen over, dead. His body still lay there, and she stared at it, thinking, It’s all over…The battle and the war will be lost, and with the colonies gone…I will never be able to rise from the ashes.
Her face contorted with desperate tears, breathing in short gasps.
Suddenly, her twitching, back and fourth movements abruptly ceased, and she held her breath, her face blank and far away.
She was seeing something else.
A vision; she saw Denoras rebuilt, a woman again at its head, a lady of light. Everything about the woman was white, to match the city she led. She was young, yet her hair was a shining shock of white, as were her fantastic robes and pale skin, even her eyelashes bleached like snow.
Cira blinked the premonition away, sure now of her own defeat. Denoras would rise again.
“Face it!” She argued schizophrenically with her own thoughts. “There’s no way you’ll ever possess the power those God-Beings had those years ago. That Mother Sun, and her daughters that came to the aid of the mutants…Shut up, it’s your own fault! And now you’ll never be immortal! Cinder is gone, and it’s all because of you!” A gasp. “Cinder…”
The woman she had been shown, she now realized, had her face. Cinder, Cinder was that amazing woman in white that she had seen. How it would come into being, she would never be certain, but she was determined, despite her imminent defeat, to prevent her vision from passing into truth.
“Cinder is immortal.”
Ardara clutched a bulky metal contraption between her vicious fingers. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t steal what her life is worth.”
She smiled.
Orphenn could not contain the dread swelling in him as he and Eynochia were sent rolling on the bank upon his rash landing.
Frantically, he crawled as quickly as he could to where Sven lay face down in the dust.
The man wheezed as Orphenn turned him over. He was hurt badly, struck with shrapnel and covered in his own blood, his eyes glassy and wet.
“Dad!” Eynochia wailed.
Orphenn wasted no time. In seconds, light entombed Sven from the boy’s palms, and was gone again just as swiftly.
Sven blinked several times and took a deep, grateful breath, all afflictions healed by Orphenn’s light.
“Whew…” He breathed. “You had me scared there for a minute.”
The three had no time to rejoice, thanks to Cinder, there for only a second, when she used her gift to take them to shelter behind a huge steel panel, leftover from the destruction of an Ardaran ship. Xeila, Jeremiah, Dacian, and Wynne were already there, and did not greet them when they arrived-they only stared beyond them into the sky with tears in their eyes.
It was only when they looked skyward that they saw her reason for porting them to shelter. Their great behemoth, the beloved Day Star, had been shot down, and was falling to her doom.
The boom resonated in their chests and shook their bones when she met land with a colossal mushroom cloud. Sorrow filled their hearts, not from one loss, but from two.
Dacian mourned. “Nyx.” He whispered.
Ira parried with a sword he swiped from a corpse, fighting back diligently, when out of the blue, he looked directly in the other’s eyes, and started to sing.
His opponent froze.
The voice he heard was layered, sweet, and golden, with an unreal harmony that echoed in the ears. He wanted to follow it to the ends of the Earth, as long as he could keep hearing it.
The Ardaran slit his own throat and collapsed.
Then Ira began to sing a different song, that only his enemies heard.
His voice split the air, their thoughts, their souls were his.
Like the pied piper, they danced to his tune, his velvet words filled their every fiber.
“Move the skies I do
Walk for me, children
I am within you…”
The whole battalion proceeded to exterminate each other, and soon all of them had either taken a comrade’s life, or their own.
When the song ended, still more enemies came forth.
Ira ran, until he was backed up against a giant slab of metal. They started to charge, when before him the first line fell one by one to the dirt, stone cold.
The lines behind slowed to a stop, timid. They too began to drop dead little by little, then a few at a time.
Thus encouraged, Ira charged and attacked any that did not die mysteriously on their own.
Orphenn, still a bit stricken, peeked out behind the edge of the steel panel to see a man pressed back against the other side, about to be butchered by an entire battalion.
He was shocked at the realization that this was the man that he had helped free from Ardara’s dungeon when Cinder had been kept there. It seemed so far away now.
His head snapped around and he yelled over the noise, “Eynochia! Hold me!”
“This is hardly the time!” She scolded.
Though he did not hear her, his body had already fallen limp across her lap.
Eynochia, the only one able to perceive him in the Halo form, gawked as the glittering entity separated itself from the flesh and lingered in the air in front of her.
He bore into her with those molten eyes of gold. She felt a circle of warmth on her forehead when he touched his spirit lips to it.
“Orphenn, what are you doing?” She never said it out loud, but he heard her.
His mouth moved slowly, but the words came quickly, from several different places, repeating in echo, each one different tone and volume.
“I know….”
“…We’ve just lost the Day Star, and another….”
“Comrade, but…”
“And the enemy is foolishly…”
“Courageous. They think they…”
“Still can win….But they….”
“Forget….”
“We are Enma.”
“Are Enma.”
The words were still in her ears when he left her, floating like a phantom above the battalion. He softly descended and placed his ghostly hands on one Ardaran’s jaw, and twisted his head with a crack, snapping his neck, and the soldier fell.
In this way, and many others, he commenced to invisibly kill off the battalion.
“We are Enma.” Eynochia whispered. She looked at her sister. They had matching looks on their faces.
“We are Enma.” Xeila nodded.
Eynochia cautiously laid Orphenn’s body down in the lee of the metal and stood, the others following suit. Jeremiah encircled the boy’s body in an adamant barrier, cracking and crystallizing into a dome around him, protecting him indefinitely.
“We are Enma!” Sven roared, and soon they all had run into the battle, abilities raging.
They forget.
We are Enma.
The words stayed and would not be let go, for it kept them going. With those words, they would survive.