Warrior from the Shadowland

It
started with a single microbe, carried by a small gust of wind that no one even
noticed at the time. The first death occurred two hours later, when Besell,
King of the Water House, let out his final, rasping breath. The sound would be
echoed thousands of times over the next week, as the disease tumbled through
the Elementals like a row of dominoes knocked over by some careless child.

By
the third day, every House had been stricken and existence itself began to
waiver. Since the beginning of time, the Elemental Phases had glued the
universe together. They controlled the countless, interconnected processes
that balanced nature. The Water, Fire, Earth, and Air Houses stood as the
central fulcrum of life, with other Houses controlling everything else from
Shadows to Time. Without the Elementals, nothing could survive. And now the
Elementals were dying.

Phases
everywhere began whispering that it was the apocalypse. A plague sent to wipe
out everything in one broad eraser stroke.

The
Fall.

Panic
spread as quickly as the disease. Doors were sealed shut with Phases still
dying inside. Friends and relatives abandoned the sick, hoping to save
themselves. Parents buried children in unmarked graves, already piled high
with the dead. Everything from radiation to Oreo cookies was tried as the
Phases searched for a cure.

Nothing
worked.

Nearly
everyone was sick. And the sickness invariably brought death. It was said
nobody recovered from the Fall once it caught hold of them. A tell-tale grey
cast colored the flesh of the dying, their skin shrinking against the skeleton
as if the Fall sucked the life out of them from the inside.

All
across the Elemental realm, the Fall struck with a pitiless intensity. Too
fast and too big to escape, it swept over every House. When the source of the
disease was finally discovered, it was too late to stop it. Parald, usurper of
the Air House, had released the microbe, but the Fall spread much further than
he’d intended. Even the Elementals left to understand the betrayal could do
nothing but watch as the dominoes continued to fall around them.

By
the fifth day, the dead outnumbered the living ten to one. The survivors grew
horribly immune to the bodies, barely noticing that they were now crowded
around them. There were too many dead Phases to bury and no one left to dig
the graves, anyway. The Fire House built pyres so large that the remaining
Phases in the Elemental realm could see them burning from every direction.
None of the other Houses had the energy for even that much. Rumors festered as
society crumbled.

That
Parald had somehow survived his own terrible creation.

That
Job, of the Earth House was the oldest Phase still alive and trying to re-form
a Council of All Houses.

That
Tritone, Princess of the Water House had nearly been killed by an enraged mob,
who blamed her for Parald’s treachery.

As
official communications went dark, the survivors in each House struggled just
to keep going. Fewer Phases meant more work for those left behind. Usually,
balancing the elements in nature was an automatic process, like swallowing or
blinking. All the Phases in a House shared the burden of sustaining their
element.

Now,
with the remaining Elemental population so very, very low, each Phase had to
carry more of the total weight and it was dragging them down. The
interconnected processes of nature fed into each, creating a symbiotic whole.
As blocks were pulled from the bottom of the pile, all of existence threatened
to crumble.

Tears
and prayers were useless. No one knew who was in charge or what they should do
now. Hatred grew in the hearts of many survivors. Some wished that the Fall
would just take them, so the nightmare would end. Others stood in the middle
of the chaos and screamed for what they had lost. Most were too traumatized by
what they’d seen to do anything but sit quietly and wait for whatever came
next.

Six
days after the Fall’s arrival, Cross, of the Shadow House knew that he’d just
watched the extinction of his species. The universe passed the tipping point
and there’d be no coming back for any of them, now. Bodies covered the
Shadowland. More Phases than could ever be replaced. The shifting darkness of
his homeland hid most of the shrunken expressions and sightless eyes of the
Fall’s victims, but nothing could disguise the smell. Or the relentless
silence.

The
world was over.

Cross
was fairly sure that he’d die soon, too. He’d somehow survived the Fall, but
now the weight of all the Shadows would kill him. It was only a matter of
time. The struggle to maintain every drop of darkness in the universe was
crushing him. He couldn’t think straight from the pressure in his head. He
rocked from the pain of it, his teeth clenched together in agony. Where before
there had been hundreds of Shadow Phases to carry the burden, now there was
only one.

Cross
was the last Shadow Phase alive.

No
one could sustain a House alone. He knew that in the small part of his brain
that wasn’t overcome with pain and exhaustion. It was pointless to even try to
hold on. If he just gave in, he could escape the hurt, and despair, and scenes
of death. But, if Cross let go of the small ledge that he clung to in his
mind, he’d take the rest of the universe tumbling into the abyss with him.

If
the Shadow House fell, so did all the others. The darkness was too important
to too many other Houses. No night meant an endless day that the Light House
would have to try and sustain. It meant the Wood House’s plants would be
burned by the sun and die. That the rivers would evaporate too fast for the
Water House to counteract. And so on, into infinity. No one would be able to
stop the entire structure from instantly caving in like wet cardboard.

Cross
wasn’t sure why that mattered to him. The Elementals couldn’t recover from the
consequences of the plague, anyway. Even the survivors of the Fall were
nothing more than a genetic footnote, now. There were too few Phases for them
to find Matches and successfully breed. Extinction had them in its grip. It
was a simply matter of time. Besides, it wasn’t like Cross had ever been
particularly thrilled with existence. He didn’t care enough about anything in
the universe to mourn its passing.

But,
for some reason, he still fought to balance the load inside of him.

If
the dead Shadow Phases had been given a vote, Cross probably would’ve been the
unanimous
last
choice for sole survivor of the dystopia. Certainly,
he’d always been the least popular members of his House. The bastard son of
the Queen, Cross had been hated and abandoned from the day he was born. Yet,
while the Fall had killed all the Phases around him, he’d been left untouched.
Adults and children, rich and poor, men and women were indiscriminately cut
down. But, Cross remained immune for some reason that even he didn’t
understand.

One
of the king’s last acts before he succumbed to the Fall was to order Cross’s
execution. His stepfather had been enraged that Cross was still healthy while
so many of the righteous members of the Shadow House fell. Unfortunately for
King Vice, no one had been healthy enough at that point to carry out Cross’s
beheading for him.

Asshole.

After
the king died, a few sick Phases came after Cross in a deluded fury, blaming
him for the Fall. His resistance to the plague somehow convinced them that he
was in league with Parald. They tried to burn Cross’s home down as he slept.
Then, when he stalked outside to ask what the hell their problem was, they’d
come at him with knives. In the end, all three of his visitors wound up heaped
onto the stacks of abandoned bodies. If any of the remaining Phases noticed
that their missing heads didn’t exactly match the symptoms of deaths from the
Fall, they didn’t mention it to Cross.

That
had been two days before, when there were still a few Shadow Phases clinging to
life. The final victim of the Fall, an older woman named Mally, had finally
given out that morning. Cross was now alone in the land of the dead.

It
hadn’t taken him long to discover that he should have gone for the beheading
plan. His death was going to be even worse than the Phases who’d perished in
the Fall. Not that he was surprised. It wasn’t like he’d ever done anything
worthwhile or particularly deserving of mercy. As usual, it just flat-out
sucked to be him.

By
the process of elimination, Cross was now the King of the Shadow House. His
stepfather would roll over in his hastily dug grave if he knew who’d inherited
the crown. Cross was too tired to appreciate that happy image, though.

Cross’s
home was little more than a shack, on the outskirts of the community. By law,
he could now rightfully live in the palace, just as he’d always wished to as a
child. Except, he didn’t even have the energy to pull himself onto his cot,
let alone move all the way into his stepfather’s dreary castle. Instead, Cross
just rocked back and forth, with his arms cradling his pounding skull, and
fought the inevitable.

When
his grip on the Shadows finally slipped, Cross actually experienced a terrible
sort of relief. He felt his control falter and the entire universe begin to
topple. Cross closed his eyes in fatalistic acceptance as the darkness faded
around him. For one eternal moment, there was nothing but the hot glare of
light. It grew and grew; burning away all the formally cool, shaded places,
eroding the Shadows like the waves of the ocean ate at a sand castle.

Cross
collapsed face first onto the dirt floor, his breath coming in short pants. As
the Shadows escaped his power, he knew he would die and he didn’t particularly
care. He could rest now.

It
was over.

Panic
and terror echoed across the Elemental realm as the other Phases sensed the
Shadow House fall. Cross felt a few of them attempt to stop the implosion and
somehow hold up the Shadows themselves. He wondered why they even bothered to
try. The world had ended. In their hearts they had to know it, just as he
did.

The
epicenter of the apocalypse swirled directly over him. It spun faster and
faster, tighter and tighter. Everything, everywhere was being pulled towards
it, about to be swallowed by the black hole of oblivion. A strange calm
overcame Cross as lifted his head and watched the universe prepare to disappear
into nothingness. Maybe it was time for someone to hit the reset button and
start again. Maybe the next world would be better for whoever lived there.

And
that’s when Cross felt her.

As
all of existence circled him like water heading down a drain, he felt the
woman’s presence in his mind. A soothing flicker of darkness in the relentless
glare of destruction. Not the impersonal, cosmic peace that the abyss offered,
but something real. Something just for him.

His
Phase-Match.

Cross
froze, his brain going blank with shock.

Years
of solitude, of being nothing, faded away and left him with the absolute
knowledge that he had a Match out there. That she’d survived the Fall and was
waiting for him.

And
she was about to be destroyed forever.

He
felt her sudden sadness, her belief that she’d been abandoned.

Her
fear.

Cross
didn’t stop to think. He just lunged for the Shadows that he’d been so
grateful to release. Grabbing, desperate, he fought the light, frantic to save
her. Slamming every bit of power he had into the battle, he shouldered the
entire weight of his House and pulled the Shadows back to him.

Cross
hadn’t prayed when the Fall spread over the Shadowland. Hadn’t worried that it
would kill him as it ravaged his House. Hadn’t cried at the thought of so many
dying.

Now
he prayed and worried and cried.

Tears
of pain glittered in his mercury eyes. He chanted Gaia’s name over and over in
a litany as he struggled, even though Cross had never believed in anything
divine. Blood poured from his nose and his head hurt so badly that he worried
he’d pass out and loose his grip. He couldn’t drop the Shadows. If he lost
control of them, he’d lose the woman. Cross would do absolutely anything to
hold on to his Match, now that he knew she was out there. If that meant that
he had to save the whole shithole universe in the process, so be it.

Slowly,
nature restored its equilibrium. The horrible vortex vanished and Cross was
alone, again. He lay on the ground, dazed and barely alive. But, barely alive
was enough, apparently, because the last domino didn’t fall.

The
end of the world… stopped.

Cross
crawled to his hands and knees. He was supporting the entire Shadow House
through sheer effort of will. Even as agony pierced through his forehead, he
realized that he was somehow balancing the load. He was using so much energy
just holding the Shadows together that it physically drained him, though. His
brain ached and throbbed, feeling like it was straining at the seams of his
skull. Blood was coming out of his ears and continued to stream from his
nose. His body shook and dots danced in front of his eyes. But none of that
mattered.

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