Ahriman: Gates of Ruin Read Online Free Page B

shards of song tinkled and giggled from behind me. I turned and everyone turned at the same moment. All looked in different directions. The sound moved, skittering just out of sight. Every weapon in the chamber came to life. Ozone filled my nose. My own mind shifted, changing focus as I summoned the secret words of fire. Ahriman’s mind contracted, until it was a hard point of total focus on the edge of my senses.
    ‘Hmmm… emmm… hmmm…’ Silvanus hummed, the smile on his face still drooling stained saliva.
    +Open the shutters,+ I sent. I felt Astraeos’s question and objection form, and bit them off before they became words. +We need to see what we face. Open them.+
    He hesitated and then nodded. A finger of telekinetic force shimmered through the air, and the controls on Silvanus’s throne clicked as switches flicked over. There was a clank, then another and another. One by one the shutters covering the viewports folded back, and what waited beyond looked in.
    I admit, I should have known. I should have anticipated that it would play out as it did. Daemons can lie even when they tell the truth. I had asked for a way to find the Antilline Abyss, and so leave the Eye of Terror. The daemon I had bound had told me that the Gates of Ruin lay at its beginning, and then had given me the means to find them. And I had taken what it had given me and followed the thread to its end. It could not lie to me. The bindings on it forbade that, but the truth it had given me was more lethal than any lie. Even after all the millennia that have since passed, I still wonder why I made that mistake. Perhaps it was fatigue, or arrogance. Or perhaps it was because some deep and unseen part of me did not want to leave the Eye which had become my home and sanctuary. Perhaps that impish part of me wanted us to fail. The daemon had done exactly what I had demanded; it had led us to the Gates of Ruin on the edge of the Antilline Abyss, and it had given us to our doom.
    Dead ships floated across a black abyss. Clouds of turning green light edged the dark, spinning and merging like the clouds at the defining edge of a hurricane’s eye. The corpses of warships spun laxly, the bones of their structures glinting through the ragged skin of their hulls. Mountain-sized chunks of debris hung like irregular moons. There were hundreds of them, thousands of designs and origins I had never seen.
    And around them the daemons circled like schools of fish around already stripped bones, turning as one, their skin glimmering as it caught the light of the storms around them. If there were thousands of dead ships, there were more daemons than I could count.
    My thoughts were speeding past, as time slid to treacle slowness. We were dead, and I had killed us. I had led us to a feeding pool and plunged us in. Ignorance was no excuse.
    +The Gates of Ruin…+ sent Ignis, and his flat sending was like the falling of an axe.
    The sending reached my mind just as a shape swam into view on the other side of the view port. It was a body of sculpted muscle and pale skin. Two circular eyes of black glinted above a slim face. The graceful line of its arms reached down to wet-edged pincer claws. It skimmed through the warp-saturated void with the slow movement of a shark cutting through water. Its mane of hair trailed behind, each strand flowing between colours. It was beautiful and revolting, and utterly terrible. I knew what it was. I had bound its kind many times before.
    As I looked at it more slid into sight. More and more. I heard Silvanus rise and take a step towards the crystal viewport.
    ‘I heard,’ he moaned. ‘I am here.’
    I began to turn, but even as I did one of the daemons twisted and its eyes met mine. It grinned, perfect lips splitting over glass needle teeth.
    The song was so loud now that it invaded my sight as well as my hearing, with the taste of bitter nectar on my tongue.
    +We need to go! Now!+ shouted Astraeos.
    And the world shattered into