Chapter 97: Now That’s a Final Act

With everything at a standstill, the entire square held itself in a single image.

The line of soldiers no longer existed, broken open in several places, and the people had come through it, frozen mid-run toward the platform, arms raised, mouths open around cries that no longer came out.

One man was caught leaning forward halfway across, one foot off the ground, stopped in the middle of his charge.

A stone hung at head height above the crowd, motionless, the hand that had thrown it still open beneath it.

At the upper windows, the people leaning out over the sills weren’t moving either, nor were the children on their fathers’ shoulders, nor those standing at the edge of the tiles.

The soldiers weren’t holding anyone back anymore.

Some had stepped aside, shields lowered along their legs, others had simply let the crowd through and stayed where they were, blades half sheathed, faces turned toward the platform.

One knight was frozen with a hand on the shoulder of one of his men, his mouth open around an order, and the man in question was looking somewhere else entirely.

The priest in white robes was caught with one arm still extended in front of him, the dust from his robes hanging in the air around his legs.

And every gaze, or nearly every one, converged on Aldric, and on what he was charging toward.

He was still in the air, golden light clinging to his armour, the two wings of light spread out behind him across the whole width of the square, his sword pointed forward, his face frozen around a cry that had never made it out.

The wind carrying his charge was stopped along with him, the dust thrown up by his launch suspended halfway between him and the platform.

Up on the platform, the baron was smiling.

He held the executioner’s sword in both hands, his back bent over the kneeling woman, and the blade was already resting against Freya’s neck.

In the middle of all this, a woman was walking along without a care in the world, a smile on her lips.

She had been given a mission, a mission only she could carry out.

According to Freya’s own words, even Aria couldn’t do it, so that left only her, the one everybody was counting on, even her Big Sister.

Kaguya walked, not on the ground but on the air itself, bending space beneath each step, and she passed above the crowd one stride at a time before arriving over Aldric, whom she studied for a moment.

"So he’s the funny man Laïa told me about? What was his name again?"

She raised a finger to her lips, searching for the name, coming to a full stop in midair.

"Mhmmm..."

Then she struck her fist into the palm of her other hand, the way she always did.

"Oh right! It was Fenrir!"

She looked at him before saying it.

"Hi, Fenrir!"

Then she resumed her walk and reached the platform, coming down onto it step by step, as though descending a staircase through empty space.

Arriving beside Freya, she remembered her words.

"When the sword is at my neck, stop time, and press down on the blade with your finger, please."

She hadn’t understood, as usual, why she was doing this or what it was for. Wasn’t it pointless, if the sword was already coming down?

But her Big Sister had sighed and said something like this.

"The problem is that the man holding that sword is far too weak to take my head off. Do you follow?"

"No?"

Because it made no sense. Whatever the thing was, if you had something to cut with, it cut. At least that had always been the case for her, and it had been that way from the very beginning, so why wouldn’t it cut?

Freya had sighed again and simply told her to press down on the sword, adding that it was an important Good Mission.

"So I suppose I just have to do this?"

She lowered her finger onto the blade, which sank straight into the neck, just a little.

But at that, a black aura poured out from the direction of Baron Frarken’s castle, an aura so murderous that she knew exactly whose it was, and she couldn’t hold back a small "eeeep" before vanishing into the distance at a ridiculous speed.

"Why is she angry? I only did what Big Sister told me to do? Is she crazy? Anyway, I can’t wait for Big Sister to praise me! Good Mission!"

And by the time she was well away from the scene.

CLAP—

Time resumed its course, and everything that had been held back set off again all at once. The crowd finished the surge it had begun toward the platform, the cries came back out of the open mouths, the stone completed its arc above the heads and came down somewhere in the mass.

The soldiers finished the gestures they had left hanging, and the knight bellowed his order at a man who was no longer listening to him.

The sword came down in the same motion. With the force Kaguya had left in it, it met no resistance at all, passed clean through Freya’s neck and bit into the planks. The head rolled along the platform and came to rest against the edge.

Aldric, for his part, could no longer stop anything. His charge carried him forward with all the golden light still clinging to his armour.

Where his blade should have done no more than take the baron’s arm, the man was lifted by the force left in the blow and toppled sideways. The edge went in beneath his arm and travelled upward to the opposite shoulder, taking the upper half of his body and his head with it, and that rolled too, until it came to a stop against the block.

The blood from Freya’s body spread between the boards while the baron’s ran alongside it. In the silence that followed, there was nothing left to hear but the sound of it dripping beneath the platform.

Then white flowers appeared. They pushed up between the planks and along the block, coming out of the wood itself and opening in a matter of moments, while Freya’s body came apart into particles that rose slowly before vanishing.

All that remained of her were her clothes, bloodied and filthy, fallen onto a bed of white flowers whose purity nothing on that square deserved, as though her body had been called back to the goddess Gaïra, as though she had finally been taken away from this impure world.

Nobody moved.

Not those in the front row who had reached the foot of the platform and who stayed there, hands still resting on the planks. Not the soldiers who had let them through. Not the priest in white robes, arm still held out in front of him, as though he hadn’t yet understood there was nothing left to stop.

Someone let out a very short cry somewhere at the back, and swallowed it immediately.

Aldric had landed a few paces away, sword still in hand, the golden light dying off his armour in patches.

He was looking at the place where she had been standing.

His blade was red. He hadn’t meant it, he’d had no choice, he couldn’t have stopped that charge even if he’d decided to, and none of that changed what was in front of his eyes.

He thought of the evening lessons. Of the notes he had taken a few days earlier without writing down a single line of the last case.

He opened his mouth and no sound came out.

That too... did she know about that as well?

Then the baron’s blood reached one of the white flowers and touched its stem.

It turned red.

As though the purity of the goddess of life’s flowers had just been soiled by that man’s blood, corrupted by it, as though what he had done here could never be washed away.

And every flower around it took on the same colour, from stem to petal, in the space of a few heartbeats.

Across the entire square, the ones people had been wearing for weeks turned as well, the ones pinned to collars, the ones tucked into hair, the ones laid on the ground in front of doors. Then it was the turn of the streets of Evangel, of the gardens, of the window ledges, all the way into the districts nobody here could see.

Then the sky deepened, until the whole city was bathed in the same shade as the petals.

"The sky... look at the sky!"

"What in the... what is happening, in the name of the gods?!"

The priest in white robes dropped to his knees and began to pray aloud, and thirty or so people did the same around him.

Then the world tore open.

The crack opened above the platform and ran through the air itself across the entire width of the square, with nothing behind it, no wall, no sky, no darkness, simply an absence the eye refused to follow.

And the first things came out.

They dropped from the tear in clusters, caught themselves in flight on four black wings and spread out above the square, misshapen bodies with limbs that were too long, joints bending the wrong way, some with no face at all, others with far too many.

There were a handful at first. Then dozens. Then it became impossible to count them.

One of them dove straight at the crowd, and Aldric was already there.

His sword came up from below and opened the creature along its entire length, the two halves falling away on either side of him and spattering the cobblestones with a black fluid that smoked where it touched the stone.

"SOLDIERS! DON’T RUN!"

He spun his blade and ran the next one through before it reached the ground.

"THESE ARE YOUR NEIGHBOURS! THEY HAVE NOBODY BUT US!"

Some fled. Many, in fact. They threw down their shields and vanished into the streets with the rest.

But others stopped.

One knight turned around in the middle of his run, came back and took up position near Aldric, blade raised in both hands. Then a second. Then enough men to hold a line.

"SHIELDS AT THE FRONT! Shoulder to shoulder, and the evacuation at our backs! Spears behind, points up!"

The line formed across the square, and the first creature impaled itself on it, thrashing until a knight split its skull open.

Aldric didn’t stay behind it.

He went out into the open ground, and what followed was like nothing any of the men who saw it had ever known.

A creature came at him from an angle and he dropped to one knee, blade up, and it opened itself along the whole length of its belly as it passed over him.

He rose in the same motion, pivoted, and took both wings off another one climbing away. It hit the cobblestones, dragged itself along on its front limbs, and he crushed its skull under his heel without so much as looking at it.

A third slammed into him full on and carried him back several paces, talons closed around his breastplate. He let go of his guard with one hand, grabbed the lower jaw and pulled until something gave with a crack, then drove his blade up under its chin.

He worked himself free, breathing hard, and killed two more before he’d even recovered his balance.

The creatures were avoiding him more and more. They went around him, passed over his head to find something further off, and Aldric understood very quickly that they hadn’t come to fight.

They had come to eat.

One of them landed on an old man who had fallen in the middle of the cobblestones, pinned him with one limb and opened his stomach with a single stroke of its talons before burying its head in it. The old man was still alive. He was still alive when it started.

Aldric cut it in half at the thorax and bent over the man, but there was nothing to be done and he knew it before he’d even knelt.

Further off, a mother refused to let go of her son when the talons closed around him, and she was carried up with him, clinging to his clothes until the creature lost patience halfway up and dropped them both.

The priest in white robes was still praying, on his knees in the middle of the cobblestones, his voice rising above everything else. A creature landed behind him.

He didn’t stop praying, not for a second, not even when it closed its jaws around his shoulder and lifted him off the ground. They could hear him going on until the distance carried the sound away.

Aldric made it back to his line, his right arm soaked to the shoulder, killing several on the way.

He grabbed the first soldier he came across by the collar.

"And the adventurers?! Where are the adventurers?!"

The man shook his head, his voice cracking under his helm.

"Word came that they’re holding the other districts, my lord! There are monsters all over Evangel, they’re cutting down everything that got through!"

Aldric let go of the collar and gave a single nod.

"Good."

He turned back toward the square.

"Good. Then we focus on here."

He raised his sword.

"IS THE EVACUATION STILL HOLDING?!"

"IT’S HOLDING, MY LORD! THEY’RE GETTING OUT!"

"THEN WE FALL BACK WITH THEM, STEP BY STEP! We bring up the rear, nobody gets ahead of them!"

The line gave a pace.

Then another.

And for the first time since the tear had opened, the square stopped losing ground.

A knight shouted something that sounded like Aldric’s name, and several voices took it up.

That was when something came slowly out of the crack.

A claw closed around the edge of the tear and drew it aside the way you might draw back a curtain, and what came through unfolded four immense wings at its back, towered over everything standing on that square, and carried on its skull eight eyes set in no order whatsoever, each rolling off on its own, none of them looking at the same thing.

The weight came down on the entire square the moment it set foot on the platform.

The knights buckled, several dropped to one knee without having decided to, and the line broke open in places.

Then the noise stopped.

The creatures ceased their shrieking all at once and drew back against the walls and the rooftops, flattened, motionless, heads low. The ones that had been feeding let go of what they were holding. The ones in the air came down.

Across the whole square, nothing moved but the dust and the blood.

Aldric could hear his own breathing, and the scrape of a shield some man behind him could no longer hold straight.

The thing did nothing for several seconds. It simply stood there, in the middle of the split planks, letting its eight eyes wander each on its own over what surrounded it, unhurried, like someone taking in a room they’ve never set foot in before.

Aldric felt his legs shaking and gripped his sword hard enough to break his fingers.

Damn it... That thing is nothing like the others. Nothing at all.

Then all eight eyes fell on the baron’s body at once.

"Ah."

The voice didn’t travel through the ears. It resonated straight inside the chest of everyone who heard it, all the way into the streets where people were still running, into the cellars where others had shut themselves in.

"So you’re finally dead."

It bent down and lifted the baron’s body by what was left of it, holding it out at arm’s length in front of several of its eyes, head tilted to one side.

"Nine years, Frarken. Nine years in the dark behind your crack, listening to that little voice of yours recite what I was permitted to take."

Its jaw opened far wider than a face that size should have allowed, and it swallowed him.

It then picked up the head and the upper half of the body left near the block, held them a moment in front of two of its eyes, and put those away as well.

It swallowed, and four wings snapped open at its back, throwing out a gust that swept the dust across the entire width of the square.

Then it threw its head back and laughed.

It was an immense laugh, one that climbed the façades, rattled the shutters on their hinges and forced those who remained to press their hands over their ears even though they weren’t hearing it with them.

The eight eyes opened again and settled on Aldric, one after another, down to the last.

"LET THE FEAST OF THE HIGH HELLS BEGIN!"