Avi Marie's Arc

Chapter 8 of 30

The dead beast cooled on the stone. Avi Marie stood over it, but her mind was below, chasing the councilman who now held the hollow weapon. Malphas cleaned his shard. Then he lifted his head. "He didn't run far," the goat said. "The horn calls to me. It's close." He pointed his hoof past a broken shrine, where a stone stair dropped back into the dark. They rode down. At the bottom stood a ruined archangel of stone, one arm raised, a crystal scepter still clutched in its cracked fist. The crystal glowed faint blue. Beside it, the councilman knelt in the dust. He smiled up at them, calm, unhurried. In his open hands sat a small black object, no bigger than an egg. The air around it looked wrong, like heat over a fire, but cold. "The hollow weapon," Avi Marie said. She slid from the horse. Its light pushed the cold back a step. She had no shield against the thing itself. One touch would empty her. She knew it and stepped forward anyway. "Careful," a voice said behind her. Azrael Darkwing walked out of the shadow, wings white, hands loose. Avi Marie had bound him and dragged him this far as a prisoner. Now his rope hung cut. She spun on him. "You freed yourself," she said. "I want it destroyed too," Azrael said. His voice was flat. "I watched it empty someone I loved. I won't touch it. Neither can you." He looked at the glowing scepter in the stone angel's fist. "But that can hold it. Old relic. Light against the hollow. Bind the weapon inside the crystal." The councilman's smile did not move. "You'd trust him?" he asked Avi Marie. "He herded souls into a chapel for me." "He did," Avi Marie said. "And you sent him." She looked at Malphas. The goat gave one short nod. Trust him. She moved. She wrenched the scepter free of the stone fist. The crystal flared. She swung it down at the councilman's cupped hands. He tried to pull the weapon back. Too slow. The crystal light struck the black object. It shrieked, a thin high sound, and the cold pulled inward. The hollow weapon cracked and drew into the crystal like water down a drain. The scepter went white-hot, then dark. The councilman screamed. His hands, empty now, had touched the edge of it. The skin went gray and thin. He folded and did not rise. Avi Marie stood breathing hard, the dead scepter in her grip. The weapon was sealed. The councilman was down. But he had not run this far to kneel in the dust. Someone had sent him here, to this stair, to this shrine. Azrael looked at the gray body. "He was a courier too," he said quietly. "Not the top. The one above him blinded you. And he's still up there."