A Shard of Sea and Bone Read online

  A SHARD OF

  SEA AND BONE

  BOOK ONE IN THE DEATH OF THE MULTIVERSE SAGA

  L.J. ENGELMEIER

  Copyright © 2018 by L.J. Engelmeier

  Cover design by L.J. Engelmeier

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

  Wayfinding Press

  313 East Mill Street

  Carbondale, IL 62901

  To my readers

  It is the mute, those who see life in dreams, who know the truth. It is you. You, utpereijeinfinae. You who breathe death and stars. You who walk the wind and tongue its fissures. This book is dedicated to you, ankh te manef. Asae Infinae. Ma sereneSu’ne. To you, peace.

  Song of the Infinity

  I.

  Life pulled it from its caul to nurse,

  still fraught with innocence,

  to first the firstless multiverse:

  the Realm of Infinite.

  And in its throat, a flame was borne

  to end unending night,

  which stretched from the beginning’s horn

  to fall at this first light.

  This Realm of firsts was born and bred,

  and time crawled from its womb,

  and if you listen ‘tween its breaths,

  you’ll hear time’s empty tomb.

  Grey rock, and rose, and water, too,

  the Realm of firsts did spawn,

  and with it came eldest of all:

  the Eleven, who rose the dawn.

  This Council moved the seas with tongue

  and moved earth with their minds;

  they pulled dimensions from the air

  and there new life did find.

  The twenty-four High Realms they birthed,

  with breath and blood—life bloomed;

  one hundred Low Realms then they earthed,

  but not the Multitude:

  no Realm the same,

  to each a name,

  and with them came

  humans and demons, too.

  II.

  The multiverse did give a gasp

  as ruled the Council what they wrought,

  until they saw it would not last,

  traversing lands that they had not.

  Born on their own, dimensions new,

  each second, in vast droves

  until, at last, the Council knew

  the chaos that this posed.

  Sequestered in a Realm they made—

  the last they ever would, they vowed—

  the Council there together weighed

  who’d govern their multiverse now.

  Pass down, they would, the Realm of firsts,

  down to their own offspring,

  so ov’r the whole great multiverse

  now ruled a queen and king.

  Beneath those two, the High Realms reigned

  and monitored the Low in full;

  then they—the Low Realms—did maintain

  the Multitude, a great handful.

  III.

  There was, a while, order and peace,

  but few men to uphold them both;

  no saints proclaimed for good we seek,

  and so that order soon was broke.

  Then from their souls, the Council culled

  their magic great, and sacrificed

  in that which they were unequaled

  as gift and boon and utmost prize.

  They posed in all Realms far and wide

  grand competitions for the strong,

  of hearts, and wills, and bodies tried—

  invited all to come along.

  Those pure of blood and soul they sought

  until it came to just a few.

  With mighty hands and granite hearts,

  they their new deities did choose.

  The demons were encumbered with

  the task to keep the Realms all whole;

  five hundred was the Order kithed,

  each bound to magic new and role:

  then birthed they each

  a Realm for peace

  that can’t be breeched,

  a place where evil cannot go.

  —Princess Arielle Penthoseren, Guardian of Light

  Prologue

  STONE-STILL

  _______________________________

  Beware the Beasts of Sin, but beware above all else the Beast of Wrath. Her very touch courts death.

  excerpt from The Complete Record of Creatures of the Infinity, Vol. XXVI, penned by Lady Vayala Illianthe of the Infinite High Council

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF SKYEMOUNTE

  THE PRENDERGAST FAMILY FARM,

  OUTSKIRTS OF RONAFELL, PENTENSHIRE

  The last thing Magnus Prendergast expected to find while out checking on his winter wheat fields this morning was a dead body.

  “Boys, get back inside,” he ordered over his shoulder at his sons while slipping his hand into his pocket, gripping the solid weight of his pocketknife. His two boys laughed and slipped through the snow in the dirt lane that ran between his fields, brandishing the handles of their shovels, the shafts clacking together. The sound echoed out across the silent wilderness. “Boys,” Magnus said again, and when the two continued snickering and parrying, he snapped, “Rnıka!” At this, his boys perked up with wide eyes. “Pøna, tus vaïdda!” he hollered at them. “And get your ma while you’re at it.”

  The boys dropped their shovels into the dusting of snow in the lane and raced off toward the stone farmhouse hovering on a distant hill. The house was chugging out smoke, the Skyemounte hanging in the grey horizon just beyond it, the mountain disappearing the closer it got to the earth in an illusion. Furs were piled so high on Magnus’ boys’ shoulders that the two of them looked like running haystacks. It took them a few minutes before they were nothing but dots on the horizon. Only when they were out of sight completely did Magnus turn back toward the source of his troubles.

  Lain out meticulously in the country lane, sprawled like a dead doe, was a woman with no eyes, a gaping chest, and a chunk of heart in her hand. Her body was surrounded by frostbitten crocuses, their petals a pale cerise.

  If it were earlier in the year, Magnus imagined the girl would already have flies laying eggs in her eye sockets, but instead, she was almost blue, crusted with ice around the edges, covered in a crystallized veil of snow. And if it weren’t for the hole in her lower chest, then Magnus might have thought she was just sleeping. There was little blood on the woman beyond the dried coat of it stretching from her right elbow down to her hand, the one that was holding a torn heart with gaping ventricles—her heart, he registered, looking back at the hole in her torso again with a fair amount of surprise.

  Removing one of his wool gloves and tucking it into his fur boot, Magnus crouched down next to the girl and prodded her hard, dry lips apart. Gleaming back at him were two pairs of fangs, interlocked like the canines of a wolf. Demon, Magnus noted. Enough of them lived in town that he could recognize their kind.

  Her teeth were freezing and as dry as dust. Didn’t die here. Ain’t been dead long. She wasn’t bloated, her skin wasn’t loose or bruised with pooled blood, and she didn’t smell like anything—though that could have been because the cold was biting at the insides of Magnus’ half-stuffed nose. Cold made everything smell like nothing, just sharp.

  He pushed back the girl�
�s loose eyelids and dipped his finger inside her sockets to see if her eyes had been pushed in or pulled out. Pulled out was the verdict. Magnus brushed her tawny hair out of her face to get a better look at her. She still seemed asleep.

  “Sorry about your luck, hun,” Magnus said. “Going to try to figure out who you belong to.”

  He looked down at her body. Her silk gown was pulled open so that her flat breasts were bared, areolas small and dark brown. Right where her ribcage ended was the large hole in her abdomen. The skin around it was stained with a paper-thin layer of blood that looked as though someone had tried to messily wipe it away before it had dried. Magnus knew that that hole had to have been how her heart had been ripped out, but the wound was ragged, like the skin had been torn, not cut.

  He took a closer look at her frogged gown. The longer he looked, the more it seemed like a bell-shaped robe instead of a dress. It was made of fine purple silk, the kind Magnus only saw on the nobles in the capital at the Skyemounte’s feet. It was cold to the touch, and his calluses caught against the fabric. At the girl’s waist, the gown was fastened closed by a wide belt. Magnus touched the tiny silver beading on it and on the belt drape that ended in a point near the girl’s slippered feet. There was a symbol at the center of the belt drape formed by the beads—something that almost resembled a wagon wheel.

  “Who are you?” he asked her, flexing his stiff fingers to get some feeling back into them. He tried to grab his glove from his boot to put it back on, but he lost his balance in the process. Overcorrecting, he fell forward. As he caught himself against the girl’s body, he apologized and eased himself back up into his crouch, right knee twinging, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he heard a crinkle.

  There was something peeking out from the clenched fist of the girl’s other hand. It looked like—

  “Paper?” Magnus said. He reached for it, tugging at the edges of the crumbled ball, working it out of her rigid fist a little bit at a time. When it was finally free, Magnus could see it was, in fact, just a ball of paper. “Leaving a message for someone?” he asked the girl. “I’ll make sure—”

  “Step away from the Guardian,” snapped a cold voice from behind Magnus, and he jumped. He fell back into the snow, the cold eating through the seat of his pants, and then he scrambled to his feet. He jerked his fists up into a half-forgotten brawling stance from his youth.

  Standing between the fields of green wheat and their deep, weedy ditches were two demons, neither of whom Magnus had heard approach him. The first was a man as white as the snow was, with sharp cheekbones and thin lips that were turned down into a cutting grimace. His ankle-length white hair was tucked behind his ears, and ivory horns corkscrewed up from his hairline. They were decorated with dozens of thin silver chains. The dark olive-skinned woman at his side was just as tall as the man was, but she was slender, like an aspen tree in the winter. Her hair nearly dragged the ground like the man’s did but was the sort of black Magnus had only seen on a crow. Her polished horns were the same colour. They curved up and back from her head without fancy adornments, though she wore a gold circlet across her tall forehead like some sort of royalty.

  Like the dead girl’s clothes, the demons’ robes were bell-shaped, but instead of purple, they were parchment-coloured and embroidered in black to match their frog fasteners. At the thought of parchment, Magnus remembered the paper in his brandished fist. He wasn’t giving it over to these strangers. He moved it discreetly to his side as he eased out of his fighting stance and hoped the demons didn’t notice it. He knew demonic senses were strong—strong enough to see, hear, and smell something over a mile away, he’d been told at the pub before by some other farmers who lived closer to the capital and its demonic population—but he had no idea if that was true.

  “Sorry to be in your way,” Magnus told the two demons. “Just came out to check on my fields and found this here girl.”

  “Girl? Girl? You insolent little cretin. You address her as girl?” snarled the pale man, and Magnus blinked in surprise. “You stand before a Guardian of the Infinite Order, not some mere woman, cofr faene Na. And you will bow before us, your makers, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “He cannot exercise respect for that of which he is not aware, Drakoon,” the woman said. Her glare, levelled at him, could have melted the snow. “You cannot fault him for not knowing of the Order or of the Council any more than you can fault a man for his inability to see the air.”

  “Why must I permit him concessions for the stupidity bred into his kind? Ignorant, barbaric, greedy little monsters with the lifespan of botflies. Put a deity in front his people, Vayala, and what does this one do but prod her corpse. What would you have done with her next, cofr Na?” the man—Drakoon, it seemed—asked, and rounded on Magnus so quickly that the chains strung between his horns jangled. “Would you have buried one of the most omnipotent beings in the multiverse in an unmarked shallow grave, or would you have made further use of her? Would you have carved her up for a stew to feed that scrounging family of yours, the one I can hear squabbling about in the flea-bitten hovel of yours in the distance?”

  Magnus puffed up at the mention of his family. He could feel the weight of the pocketknife in his pants anew against his thigh. His fingers itched for it. “I don’t know who you are, tu janas, but you leave my family out of this.”

  Drakoon’s colourless eyes cut into Magnus like icicles. “You dare challenge me, Drakoon Veiyel, the Great White Drake? I have breathed Realms into existence, you snivelling pup—”

  “Drakoon,” the woman barked. The shout was like a gunshot through the field. Everything went still and silent. “Now is not the time to entertain your prejudices. We have found Maluviahl, so I suggest—nay, I command that you gather the rest of the Council. Tell them they’re to call a meeting. We need to inform the Order of what’s been occurring within their ranks.”

  “We need not tell the Guardians anything regarding—”

  Fast enough to make Magnus jump, the woman grabbed Drakoon by the front of his robe and pulled him close. When she spoke, flames licked the air with each of her words, something Magnus had never seen before. It shocked him. It seemed to shock Drakoon, too, going by the look on his face. “I bowed to your decisions earlier, but I will not now, you loose-tongued snake. Our mistakes are an axe that should fall on our necks alone, and we will start taking responsibility. Contact the others. We’re telling the Order.”

  Drakoon gaped at her. Then all at once, his severe face collapsed into a snarl. He shoved her hand away and, between one blink and the next, vanished.

  Magnus startled, staring at the spot where Drakoon had just been. “What the—”

  “Do not concern yourself with this matter,” the woman told Magnus, drawing his focus back to her.

  “But he just disappeared—”

  “I do not often give advice,” she interrupted, “but I will give it to you now, bauqeti: go home. Hug your family. Tell them nothing of today, and put it out of your mind every morning before you leave the warmth of your bed. Do this until what has happened here is but the faintest of memories of which you cannot even grasp the tails. You will not find peace in ignorance, but you will find death in truth. If something compels you to search further into this incident and something comes after you as a result, something that endangers you and your loved ones, something that would leave you like her”—the horned woman glanced down at the dead girl’s body—“then send your prayers not to the Council but to the Guardians. They watch over you forever and always, and they will die in service to you.”

  With that, she turned away from him to cover the girl in the snow, undoing the top layer of her own robe to drape over the girl’s body. Then the woman went to her knees, bowed her head over the girl’s shrouded corpse, and whispered something Magnus couldn’t hear.

  It was at this point that he remembered the paper in his hand, a hand that had lost all feeling in the cold. As quietly as possible, he opened his hand and
peeled the paper open like an orange, his fingers clumsy. The paper crinkled and cracked the entire time.

  Once it was opened, Magnus could only stare down at the note inside it with confusion.

  “What is that?” the woman asked him. Magnus heard her stand, and the paper was ripped from his hands. The woman frowned down at it. Her dark brows drew together as her eyes darted over the message there again and again. Then her eyes grew wide. Her hands shook. “They have returned,” she said quietly. And then with a pained smile: “We shall soon pay for our transgressions.”

  Magnus didn’t know what she was talking about, but he knew what the paper said. It was hard to forget. It was only five words and a symbol:

  FEAR THE SEVEN AND SEVEN

  Part One

  To the Call of a Wolf

  RIPPLES IN THE WATER

  _______________________________

  It is difficult to assert whether it was demons or humans that came first into this multiverse. One will always claim the other was the aberration. What is certain, however, is that, between our species, peace will never be found.

  excerpt from A Theory on the Creation of the Infinity by Dr. Gillian Craw, published posthumously in the Guardian Realm of Seasons

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS

  BAY ROW STREET, WESTERN LINDENNACHT,

  COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE

  Oliver pulled the trigger of his father’s old five-barrel pepperbox revolver without hesitation, and an ear-ringing bang shattered the chaos of the night.

  He watched as the bullet punched a hole through the snarling face of the disfigured monster standing in his front doorway. Head snapping forward with the shot, the wolfish creature collapsed into the kitchen.