Twilight of the Gods (The Harbingers of Light Book 7)

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Free Gift Offer

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Epilogue

  Free Gift Offer

  What Now?

  Copyright © July, 2016 by Travis Simmons

  The Harbingers of Light Book Seven:

  Twilight of the Gods

  ISBN 978-1479218288

  Published by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Cover Design by: Najla Qamber Designs

  Formatting by: Wyrding Ways Press

  Editing by: Wyrding Ways Press

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means—by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without prior written permission.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either are the product of the authors imagination or are used factiously. Any resemblance to actual places, events, and people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Get eight original tales of dark fantasy FREE by clicking this link: http://bit.ly/1TZSxun

  Abagail existed in light.

  Her ears still rang with the roar of the rainbow road crumbling as the mortar between the bricks loosened and tumbled into the fiery expanse beneath the road. She could see the opalescent light of the road shimmer, flicker, and go out leaving nothing but a darkened trail behind.

  The darkling gods—Hilda and Gorjugan—had crossed the road, killed Heimdall, and brought their plague to Eget Row. Abagail hadn’t made it to the road in time. She hadn’t been able to stop Hilda and Gorjugan before they’d released the monstrous wolf, Anthros. That had been her quest, right? To stop the darkling gods from bringing about the Twilight of the Gods? Stop them from starting the cosmic war to end all wars?

  A great tide of light had rippled through the Void, shattering worlds and stars as it came. Moments before the tide of light had claimed her, Abagail saw dust where the cosmos had been before. Dust where planets and stars should have been. All of those lives, lost. All of those hopes and dreams, all the love and despair, gone. No stories left to write, no songs left to sing, no potential harbingers left that would discover the joy and the terror their wyrd could bring them. Nothing left of humanity, only dust.

  Now there wasn’t even dust. Now there was only light.

  Abagail was without form. Without a thought of her own. Instead, she held many thoughts, many voices that she could hear in the light like a chorus of insects chirping at the warmth of spring. A ripple of heat shivered through the light, and she felt it scatter the last remnants of what used to be her body. She floated in the abyss, and she was one with it.

  Scattered images joined the thoughts. She saw the Fey Forest stretched up before her, its branches barren from the long winter it had endured. A place where all creatures of the fey had once lived had grown cold and became home to something else, something . . . dark. It had become the home of the darkling tide, and its evil had threatened to consume them all.

  And then she saw a staff unlike any other staff. It was slender, clear, as if made of glass though resilient as any blade. It stood in the ground, the tip of the staff opening like a flower, silver light glimmering from within as if the moon itself had come to rest at the apex and shown through the forest.

  The elven staves had been opened. They’d been opened to chase back the darkling tide, and their power had ripped through the worlds, sundering them and destroying all that had lived before.

  She’d been told before that the Fey Forest was one of many places where the veil between worlds was thinnest, allowing darklings to slip between worlds without having to use the Rainbow Bridge, and therefore free of Heimdall’s blade. Because it was a place where darklings could slip through, it was a place where the energy to destroy the darklings could transition through all the worlds. The elves had wanted to cleanse the nine worlds of the darkling tide, and they’d set their sight on the Fey Forest to do it.

  There was much opposition to opening the scepters, because there was no telling if it would only destroy the darklings, or if it would destroy everything as it went.

  They’d done it anyway, and now there was only the light of the staves making.

  As Abagail took stock of what had happened, she became aware of a tingling sensation. It was as if her arms and her legs were feeling again after a long slumber. Pain prickled through her as her mind became aware once more of her form.

  She relished in the pain because it meant she wasn’t dead. It wasn’t until that very moment that Abagail realized she wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t ready for everything to end. She wasn’t ready for Ragnarok.

  And then, all at once, the light was gone. She crumpled to the velvety grass of Eget Row, her ears picking up the sound of water rushing nearby; the sound of birds starting their morning call to the sun; the yip of wolves in the distance as they readied to bed down for the day.

  She was aware of the pain too—the pain of being physical once more. After having been nothing but light for however long it had been, Abagail didn’t realize that being physical actually hurt. But the noises were too loud, the sights too harsh, and her body too constricting. She gasped for air, and felt it burn through her body as her lungs throbbed open. A tear trickled down her cheek, sorrow at the loss of the light.

  “Abagail?” Skye said, kneeling down beside her. His hand touched her back, soothing against the pain she felt. With his touch, the aches and pains of muscles strengthening against the onslaught of sensation, began to ease. “Abagail, are you okay?” His voice was soft, as if he understood the pain she felt, and why wouldn’t he? The elves were able to merge with the light of their staves at will. He likely had experienced this same pain every time he reemerged from the light of his sun scepter, and into the physical world once more.

  “Did you feel it?” she asked. “Did you see the light?”

  “Yes,” he answered. His hand stilled on her back. It no longer felt like a reassuring presence, but more like he needed her comfort as well. It was likely they were the last living people in all of the Void. It was a thought that made Abagail’s stomach rumble, and she had to take several shallow breaths before she got sick all over the ground.

  “They did it, didn’t they?” Abagail looked up to the Void, hoping it was all a mistake, that it had just been a vision and hadn’t been real at all. She hoped that she would still have time to find the God Slayer and lay waste to the darkling gods before they could bring about the end.

  “The staves have been opened,” Skye confirmed.

  He hadn’t needed to confirm it. When Abagail looked into the Void, she was greeted by the destruction of the staves. Before the Void had shown with the light of stars, of worlds too numerous to count, some of which were too far away to be connected to the rainbow road. If they still existed out there, she couldn’t see their light through the haze of dust that clouded the Void.

  A movement in the debris caught her eye. It was a shadow, a cloud of blackness deeper than the Void c
ould ever be, even without light. The cloud billowed through the dust, streaming toward Eget Row, careening right for her.

  “Darkling,” she said, pushing herself away from the edge of land that looked off into the Void. The darkling came on, dust of planets swirling in its wake, stardust scattering in billows of clouds, like curtains blown before a heavy breeze.

  When the shadow reached the limits of Eget Row, it didn’t rebound against a shield, as she expected, but came on, through the shield that had kept them out before, and straight on past her. She turned to watch the cloud stream higher. It was then that she noticed all of the shadows she’d missed before. They converged at the top of the Tree at Eget Row, gathering to the light of the Ever After. Thousands of darklings swirled around the orb.

  One darkling streaked forward, crashing into the light. It shivered, puffed into gray mist, and rained down like ash to patter against the leaves of the great tree. Where the remnants of its body touched, leaves discolored and crumbled beneath the toxic power of the dead darkling. The mass of darklings churned like a vortex, eddying around the Ever After, looking for a way in.

  “What are they doing?” Abagail asked.

  “I don’t know,” Skye said. “But whatever it is, it’s not looking successful.”

  Abagail looked to her father for an answer, but Dolan wasn’t there. “Where did he go?” A moment of panic seized Abagail. What if the pure blaze of white light had killed him? He was a birth golem—an entity formed from the afterbirth of a god. What if the light had saw the darkness in him and burned it away? But that didn’t make sense, not when there were darklings storming the Ever After. If they hadn’t been destroyed, then why would Dolan have been?

  Besides, it was said the only thing that could kill a god—even a darkling god—was one of the legendary weapons known as the God Slayer. Abagail had one, but she’d lost it to Hilda. She let out a relieved breath knowing her father was still alive, but where was he?

  “Abbie,” Skye said. His hand gripped her arm, turning her to look at something new appearing on the ground at their feet. “What is that?”

  Abagail shook her head. She couldn’t be sure—at the moment it only looked like red mist trailing over the ground to gather before their feet. There was a feeling about it that this mist wasn’t just mist. The color was off, for one thing, and for another she could almost feel another consciousness floating with the mist, brushing against her mind . . . warning her of something.

  The mist halted before them, and as the trails of fog gathered together, a form took shape.

  “It’s . . . a rooster,” Skye said, an incredulous look on his face. He itched the back of his head.

  The mist had finally resolved into the crests, feathers, and wattle of a rooster. But it wasn’t like any rooster Abagail had ever seen before. This rooster was scarlet from the tips of his toes to the crest on his head. Even his eyes glowed a dark pink.

  “Darklings storm the Ever After, and we are greeted with a rooster?” Skye wondered.

  Abagail couldn’t find any humor in his words, however, because the rooster filled her with a dread she couldn’t explain. It cocked its head to look at her with one pink eye, shot through with veins of white, and it opened its beak.

  But instead of a trumpet, the noise that came forth was like a chorus of women singing a lilting, mournful song. It closed its eyes, straightened its neck out, turned its head to the dust-strewn void, and its song drifted away from them, over the hills of Eget Row, through the rivers and trees and over the banks of Elivigar.

  Tears filled Abagail’s eye. She dashed them away, but more came. The song was filled with such sadness, such weight of prophecy that she could barely breathe through the revelation of what was about to happen.

  No, the crying didn’t strike her as odd until she realized tears only came from her right eye instead of both.

  “What the—” Skye gave a start and held up his hand that clasped the horn of winter. From where she stood, Abagail could see the curved, bronze horn shivering with the rooster’s song. When the vibration became too great, Skye dropped the horn. But it didn’t fall. It drifted through the air to hover inches above the rooster.

  And then its doleful tone filled the air, shaking Abagail to the marrow of her bones. She felt the call of the trumpet through her, quivering over her mind, calling to an ancient place that had existed long before she’d been born. It called to the part of her mind that was the All Father.

  “Ragnarok,” Abagail breathed.

  Helvegr, a voice whispered from the Void at her back, and then fire raged from the deep spaces of the Void to crackle along the edges of Eget Row. She turned to watch the fire tower higher and higher, like waves crashing against the edge of the land. Where the flames licked, the grass blackened and smoked. Something was coming, she could feel the weight of power riding the fire. Something was coming, and Abagail was terrified to know what it was.

  The first of Leona’s sensations to return was hearing. She heard a song comprised of mournful swells and lilting cadences. The song swept over her as if an echo of wind, stirring her other senses to life. Her eyes fluttered open to see strange, dark clouds trailing overhead. It took only a moment of staring to realize the black clouds weren’t clouds at all, but darklings trailing through a dust littered, inky abyss above her. To her right, a great white light shined, illuminating the edges of each darkened being that streamed toward it.

  I thought they were supposed to be gone . . . and the thought brought memories to her mind, memories she’d rather not have occupying space in her head. Blood covering trampled snow. Her old home in Haven destroyed. Darklings rounding up harbingers to blood them over scepters of light to open the weapons against the darkling tide in the Fey Forest.

  Rorick missing, and most likely dead. One of the only people who’d understood her, gone. She couldn’t imagine what he must have endured. She knew all about how the scepters worked. In order to open a sun or moon scepter, it had to be bathed in the dying blood of a harbinger before they’d committed to the light, or had been swayed by the dark. She could almost see harbingers of darkness infecting people in order to kill them, and use their blood to open the scepters. Leona shuddered to think of Rorick going through that.

  She closed her eyes against a swell of tears, but before she could settle herself into a proper melt-down, another sound made her sit up straight.

  The trumpet call carried a coldness with it, a call to battle, the sound of a hunting horn—the horn of winter had been sounded, and that could only mean one thing.

  Helvegr, a voice called from the inky expanse of the Void to her left. What had happened to the Void? When she’d been on Eget Row before, she’d seen stars and distant planets attached by portals to the rainbow road. Now none of that existed. Now there was nothing but dust as if a giant hammer had smashed all of that to bits.

  Hammer! She looked to her right, and there rested the God Slayer, safe within her hand, ready for battle, ready for the carnage she was sure was to come. Was this really the end? Was this when the gods fell, and the darkling tide ruled the cosmos?

  There was little time to think of that, however, because just then a great crackle of fire sounded from far off in the Void, in deeper regions beneath Eget Row. Light flared in orange hues, and screams rose with the light, cries of horror and pain coming from countless throats until it was less screaming and more a harrowing, senseless noise. Covering her ears didn’t stop the sound. It wasn’t a sound of this world or of another, it was the sound of the Otherworld, the domain of Hilda.

  Fire surged around the edge of Eget Row, as far as she could see. She wouldn’t doubt the fire completely ringed the land, cooking it from below, carrying the screams higher.

  Red mist gathered around her, blotting out the sight of the light coming from the rim of Eget Row. The mist was so great, so dense, that Leona could see little else. She stood, ready to make her way through the mist to see what was riding the flames to the edge of Eget Row, but
she never got the chance.

  Figures formed in the mist, shapeless at first, and then resolving into humans . . . at least mostly humans.

  The first to step from the mist and gather her into her arms was Muninn, one of the twin ravens that were the thoughts and memories of the All Father. Muninn was crying, clutching Leona to her chest. She was clad in black from the hair on her head to the pointed boots that peaked out from her voluminous skirts. Her skin was white as snow, and the tears she cried streaked trails of gray over her skin.

  “It’s starting,” Muninn said. No sooner had she spoken than her sister, Huginn, stepped from the mist and caught them both by the arm. She tugged at them urgently. Leona had never seen emotion in her black eyes before, but she saw it now. The murky depths of her eyes reflected a fear that Leona felt just as surely as the raven. In fact, seeing the fear in Huginn made Leona’s fear greater. She never realized until then that, while Muninn made her feel safe with words and embraces, Huginn’s complete lack of worry on all things comforted her more. But all of that shattered when she saw the fear in Huginn’s eyes. This was something far greater than them, and the raven knew it. The raven knew this was the end.

  “It’s starting, and we shouldn’t be here!” Huginn, the thought aspect of the All Father, gently pushed them from the rim of Eget Row.

  “But what is this?” Leona asked, gesturing to the red mist the ravens had just stepped from. She still wanted to deny the signs, everything she’d seen to that point. This couldn’t be…the end. It didn’t make any sense that this was the end. She’d just been standing on Agaranth and now . . .

  “The Twilight of the Gods,” Huginn said. “The horn of winter has sounded, calling all departed souls to the final battleground.”

  Leona broke away from Muninn, bent to retrieve her hammer, but froze when she stood. “What do you mean, calling the departed souls . . . does that mean we’re . . . ?”

  Muninn nodded.

  “Yes,” Huginn said.