Saturn's Arc

Chapter 9 of 4

Malacaww slept three steps inside the passage. Its sides rose and fell slow. Saturn knew the sound would fade. He had hours, maybe less, to find the one who had built this trap. But he did not know where to look. The demiurge had no name he could speak and no door he could reach. Lilith watched him pace the cold stone. "You chase a shadow," she said. "You need someone who has stood near it." Rollesio lowered his pipe. "The old dragon," he said. "Obloe killed the rot at its source. He crossed into the decay realm and came back. If anyone has felt the demiurge's hand, it's him." Saturn found Obloe at the mouth of the passage, hunched against the hill. The elder dragon was small for his kind, purple-scaled and sour-eyed. He did not rise when Saturn approached. "I helped your allies," Obloe said. "I did not come to help you. I remember the hound you set on me." His voice was a low grumble. He kept one eye shut, as if sleep mattered more than the dead god before him. "You went into the void," Saturn said. "You destroyed the knot at its center. You saw what fed the rot." Obloe snorted. "I saw dead light. A cold seed hanging in the dark. It did not make itself." He opened both eyes now. "Something planted it. The same hand that planted your queen, I'd wager. The light pulled toward one point, far below the broken lands. Like water down a drain." Saturn leaned close. "Then there is a place. A center." "There's a doorway," Obloe said. He jerked his snout toward a ridge beyond the trees. Stone framed a ring of pale fire there, carved with runes, humming low. "That gate opens onto many realms. The rot came through one of them. Follow the dead light back and you'll find your maker. But I won't take you. I've burned enough of myself." Lilith lifted a torch from a bracket in the passage wall. Its flames curled into small dancing fairy shapes, bright and warm. She held it toward the gate. The pale fire of the ring bent toward the torch, leaning like a plant toward sun. One rune on the gate flared brighter than the rest. "That one," Obloe said. He was awake fully now, grudging and sharp. "The torch knows living flame from dead. The rune it wants is the road the rot came down. That's your door." Saturn fixed the glowing rune in his mind. He had his answer. The demiurge waited beyond that gate, down the drain of dead light, and the way was marked. His borrowed hours still bled away. But now they bled toward a destination, not a guess. "Rest while you can," he told Lilith. "When the beast stirs, we go through."