Mourning Cloak

She cleanses my blood, the way she did back in Highwind, half a world and an eon of time away. She clears away Sera’s poison, and slowly I come back to consciousness.

I am outside, lying upon something hard. A razor slice of sky, intense with heat, glares down at me. I turn my head toward a rock wall and screw my watering eyes shut. I must’ve slept the night and half the day away.

“He’s awake. Lift him up. Let him see.”

Stone and sky spin and suddenly, I am upright. Cloth-wrapped iron bands lock my body in place. The valley of Tau Marai slashes deep into rock in front of me. The gates are bigger than I remember. They dominate the scene, locking in who knows what?

Then Sera is beside me, sheathed in metal, something shiny and sleek, unlike my plates of iron. Her armor is silvery-blue and fluid. It begs to be touched to see if it would offer resistance or not. Sigils float across it in lazy circles, and I remember them glowing in Flutter’s cloak.

Sera had always been interested in arcana. I should’ve recognized those symbols from her books.

She notices me looking and the corner of her mouth quirks up. She almost looks like the old Sera. The movement is the same, but her eyes no longer have that ironic playfulness. Instead, her amusement is secretive, almost sinister.

Or perhaps that is just my perception.

“I created a new alloy, just for this purpose.” She runs silver fingers over her bluish arm. The metal ripples, but smoothes out behind her fingertips. “Light, strong, easily shaped. Much better than being cobbled out of scrap metal parts.”

My voice comes out thick and raspy. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what it’s really like.”

“What it’s like is wonderful. I am strong. I will never be weak again.” She stretches her arms to the sky in exultant—and misplaced—joy.

“I felt that way, too, at first, if you remember.” Those half-remembered memories sit like acid in my stomach. “But you’ve never let the transformation progress all the way, have you? It’s not enough to have pretty armor, you know. It wants to change—”

She snaps her fingers and blades spring out from all over her, their sharp points at my eyes, my throat, my chest. “Enough. I will not be poisoned by your self-defeating talk again. It should have been me that first time. I had the will, the drive, and I knew it at the time. Though”—again she caresses her armor—“it was probably better to have waited for the upgrade.”

“So it was all about power for you, after all. All about you and your ambition and your greatness.”

For a moment, I think she’s going to attack me. Her armor roils all over her and I wonder if it will be whips or hooks or a blast of heat. But she controls herself and her armor smoothes itself over her body.

“No,” she says. “It’s about my people. Our people, preyed on by the golems. Every time we grew and spread, they came out and wiped out most of our fields and half our population. We never achieved the science and progress of Highwind because they destroyed every third generation. We could’ve been a great people, if not for them.”

“We can still be a great people.” I’m straining against my bonds in my urgency. gn=my urge“Destroy the golems and the Garguants, if you wish. But the gates must stand! They lock the Dark Masters in, not protect them. If you open the gates, you’ll let the horrors of the Shivering back into the world.”

She casts me a look of mingled dislike and contempt that twists my soul. “Still listening to that eilendi bitch, are you? That’s what she cried out to me while we melted her bones and ripped out her organs. She can’t face her own betrayal, nor you your failure, Kato.”

So. Sera had done that to Flutter, and enjoyed it, too. Parts of her soul are black and dead.

But so are mine, but I can taste hope on my lips. It doesn’t have to be this way. “You are angry, but then so was I. But what if she is right. What if Tau Marai is a prison for dark creatures we no longer have names for…”

“Then I will crush them, and we will no longer have to worry if Tau Marai is prison or stronghold.

“I loved you once.” Sera’s mouth crooks, her eyes soften. “I loved you when I married you and I loved you when we fled to Highwind. But you lost the will to fight. You were content to sink into obscurity and let our people live in fear and oppression. Nothing mattered to you anymore.”

“You’re wrong,” I say past the ache in my chest. “You mattered to me.”

Sera shakes her head. “You didn’t care for the things I cared about. The fire still burned in me, but it had been quenched in you. Our minds no longer met, and, in the end, neither did our hearts.”

“I hunted cloaks for you. I fought with Toro over your burial rites. I wrote the hardest letters I ever have to your family. Your heart might have changed, but mine did not.” I draw a deep breath. “Is it really too late for us, Sera?” I wish I can reach out and touch her.

“Stop it.” The disgust on her face strikes me like a blow. “You want to stop me, don’t you? Because you are afraid of victory. You’re afraid of things changing.”

She’s close to drugging me again. I shut my mouth.

“Watch, Kato,” she invites. “See how it’s done.” And with that she turns and strides away. Her hand brushes against my leg. She doesn’t notice, or care.

But I do.



Sera’s army is ragged and motley from a distance, certainly not the neat, disciplined squares of men that we had trained in earlier days. Yet each member of it is capable of inflicting far greater damage than a single soldier. Eerie men growl and pace off their nervous energy. Night walkers root themselves into the dry soil and stand still as trees. Cobble crunchers lounge and cloaks are pale patches against the ground, half-there and half-not.

Sera strides to the front, drawing my gaze. She is strong, confident. It bubbles out of her every springing step, every swing of her arms. Well I know that feeling of limitless power.

And of the fall that waits at the other end.

Sera throws up her arm, and her army advances. Deliberately she steps upon a line cut in the earth and filled with dirty chalk, then kicks at a boulder. She wants the golems to know that she is here.

They come.

Up here, from the vantage point, they aren’t so terrible—clockwork toys that have seen better days, slow-moving compavanmoving red to the lupine bounding of the eerie men, the spreading mist of the mourning cloaks, the flashing movement of modified, earthbound wind swifts.

I can see right away that there aren’t as many golems as there were that last time. So perhaps Flutter is right, that they had spent themselves repelling my army. Guilt gnaws at me anew. I should’ve stayed to finish them off. No matter what Flutter says about the gates, I should’ve hunted the golems down in their caves, destroyed whatever process they use to replicate themselves, so they could never march upon us again.

The golems fall to the hybrids of Sera’s force, cut by the night walkers’ blades, electrocuted by the eerie men’s whips.

Movement near the gates. No, from the gates and all along the walls. Protrusions that might have been taken as embellishments move, uncurl, and push away from the vertical surfaces. They fall, plummeting several feet before their wings snap open and catch the updraft. They glide, beasts of silver and obsidian, part-bird, part-lion, part-reptile.

The Garguants are back.

Pressure builds in my ears, behind my eyes. I feel them suck in the air, taking in so much that I am dizzy from the lack.

And then they exhale.

Even from up here, I cringe away from the droplets of acid brought in by a hot and dry wind, churned up by the Garguants’ flight.

Down in the valley, Sera’s creatures bear the brunt. Their cries are tiny, but no less shrill and pained. Even the mourning cloaks cannot dissipate fast enough.

And then the Garguants breathe again, and this time it’s the fire, setting aflame the acid, followed by a dose of toxic smoke.

Sera’s armor hisses all over her, covering her hair and face, then snaps out into wings at shoulders, back and hips. She’s outlined in blue light and heat shimmer.

She can fly.

My armor—my old scrap-metal armor—can’t do that.

Sera shoots up into the air like a Highwind firework. She turns into a speck I can barely follow. I strain against the bands, feel for my spiders.

Come on, Flutter! Where are you?

And then Sera’s back, this time above the Garguants. One of them turns and rolls onto its back. Its claws rake empty air. Sera’s inside its reach and she hits it like a catapult-flung stone. The tangle of Garguant and armored woman wheels across the sky. When they finally come apart, Sera zooms away and it’s the Garguant that crashes to the ground, squashing several eerie men. Its death throes take out again as many of them as died by its breath.

Sera flies for another, but they’re warier now, grouped and working together to deny her an opening. She shoots a beam at them, but it skitters over their armor and scatters in a spray of light. Garguants are hard to kill, even with the transformation to aid her.

And Sera is slower now, up in the air with nothing for her spiders—my spiders—to replenish her energy with. Bereft of the advantage of surprise, she barely misses a spray of acid. Would her super-alloy protect her if she were caught between all those Garguants? I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out.

A Garguant claw clips Sera’s wing. She tumbles in the air, nearly crashes to the ground. Her flight away is slow, zig-zagged.

And the Garguants are upon her.

She should’ve have practiced. She should’ve waited. She may have the better armor but not the experience. Hurry up, Flutter!

And then it begins, deep in my belly, that acid churning, that roiling as tissues and nerves and veins are twisted and torn. The cloth wrapping of my bands disintegrates into ash. The metal itself is coated with chromatic salts, but Flutter’s there too. It dissolves into my skin.

My torso and abdomen are a furnace, a factory of parts and pistons. I become the armor, not merely coated in it. Different from Sera’s silvery shell and her fancy weaponry.

Gates and golems, Dark Masters and Seeings, be consigned to the nine hells. Sera’s my wife.

She needs my help.

I bellow as I push off the slab and the sound of it echoes off the rocky walls and reverberates in the valley. My transformation is not complete and my armor cannot fly, but there is power in my roar and strength in my heel driving into rock. The eerie men Sera set to guard me—just a pair of them—spring up on my periphery. My enhanced vision notes them, my hands flick out and catch their electric whips in mid-arc.

The current jolts into me and the spiders redirect it into the furnace in my belly, my fuel source, the thing that powers my transformation. I pull, without breaking stride, and the eerie men fly into each other behind me. I drop their whips before I hear the smack of flesh meeting flesh.

I barely touch the ground, moving like a skater on ice. I bound over boulders I’d have to clamber across in my unarmored body.

My sword leaps into my hand, molds itself to my grip. Sera disdained it as old and obsolete, but she has never known what it felt like to be part of this triumvirate of sword, armor, and me.

I reach the battlefield, bull past the graceful knife-dance of night walkers and scatter cobble crunchers with every step. I bugle a challenge to the knot of Garguants above. They note me, but before they can swoop and pin me to the ground with claws and beak, I leap high into the air and catch myself on wings and talons. Right into their midst, where their longer reach is not an advantage, the place where Sera didn’t dare come.

It was never my way to dance at the edges. I close in. I attack. I face the Garguants head on and take them by the throat.

I throw one down, and latch myself to another. My sword stabs and slashes. Greenish blood spatters my visor. The spiders are on it—translucent and crawling, they wipe the smear clean, absorb the blood as they scuttle back into my body.

The flesh and blood of my enemies is, literally, fuel and food for me.

Sera’s right. They need to die, the golems and the Garguants, these mindless defenders of Tau Marai, these ravagers of the southern lands. Once they’re gone, Sera will see I’m on her side. Will listen to me. Will agree the gates need to stay shut.

This time I don’t hold back. This time I let it go. This time I give myself up to the transformation. I get stronger and faster and more accurate. Bone and muscle and tendon turn to steel and cable and spun glass. Sparks replace brain signals. Light flashes through me and every part of me responds to that blinding, brilliant pace.

I dismember a Garguant, turn and catch another’s claw on my arm. If I had been bone and flesh, I’d have broken, but I’m not.

I’m Transformed.

The Garguant I stand upon dives and twistn="es and s, throwing me off its back. I ram my sword through its exposed underbelly as we fall, then wrench it loose, spinning away. The Garguant’s body smashes to the ground, scatters stone, raises dust. I catch myself on stiffened ankles, but even so my feet drive several inches through rock. I leave indentations as I stagger out from the impact zone. My sword flies out, reflexively, and stabs at an oncoming Garguant. I follow up the thrust with a bone-crushing punch that hurls the Garguant into the canyon wall.

Numbers fly past my vision and for once, they make sense. Great Taurin, I understand the equations of velocity and force and angles.

The spiders have taken over my mind.

The Garguants come at me and I stand in their midst, a widening circle of their blood and flesh around me. I laugh, and a thunderous sound, deeper than I’d ever made, comes from my chest.

The last desperate bird-creature dies at my feet, its wings shredded, its head slammed to pulp. Acid covers my armor and as I shake blood from my sword, an intense brightness catches my eye. I cringe away as it overloads my senses. My visor darkens. Glowing green numbers flicker and count at ballistic speed down the sides.

It’s Sera. Sera at the gates, glowing. Her armor’s attached to the gate at her torso, her back and head are arched away. Her wings are gone, sucked down into the rippling flow of her armor. I watch in horror as the alloy pulls from her body and toward the gates. The brightness of their joining is almost too much for me.

“Sera, no!” My words echo weirdly back at me. I start to run, but the ground has turned to sludge, to hardening concrete. Sera’s form—arched back, legs and arms dangling, head thrown back—is etched pitch-black against the glow.

And then her armor erupts in a flare of light and she’s gone.

Dissolved into light. Vaporized into pieces so small that they’ve spiraled away.

I’m still moving, though there’s nothing left of her.

And the gates are opening.