Chapter 3
Julius grabbed Marci and dove, rolling them both out of the way just in time to avoid the hunks of splintered wood. The dragon came in like a meteor, shooting straight through the attic and the second floor right above their heads before landing with a crash in the gravel driveway out front. It was still rolling over and over when Julius felt the familiar burn of Marci’s magic snap like a broken rubber band. The ward, he realized numbly. The ward protecting the house had been broken, which meant…
“Ghost!”
Marci screamed the name beneath him, and suddenly, the spirit was there, but not as Julius remembered. This was no fluffy transparent ghost cat. It wasn’t even the shadowy figure of the faceless Roman legionnaire that seemed to be the Empty Wind’s preferred combat form. This was a giant. A mountain of a man eight feet tall who blew in on a wind even colder than Svena’s ice. His dusky flesh was still dark, but it was no longer shadowy or see-through. Quite the opposite, the spirit now looked even more solid than Julius himself. With so much magic crammed inside him, Ghost had a weight to him that no living thing could match. Julius could actually feel his own magic bending toward the spirit like metal shavings toward a magnet as Ghost held up his hand to stop the flood of iridescent power rising up to swallow them.
He also stopped the collapse of the house, which, now that there was a dragon-sized hole blasted straight through the middle, was no longer structurally stable. The chimney fell over as Julius watched, leaving a gaping hole in the side of the living room. He was looking up to make sure the roof wasn’t about to follow suit when he saw Marci’s spirit looking down at them.
As always, the Empty Wind’s face matched his name—an empty helmet with two blue-white glowing eyes floating like fireflies inside—but here, too, something was different. It wasn’t just shadows in there anymore. This was a deeper darkness. Staring into it, Julius could almost feel himself being forgotten, as if his bones were already crumbling dust. It was horrifying, but he couldn’t force himself to look away. He was trapped in the sudden realization of his own mortality, the truth that even a dragon like him would eventually die and be forgotten. They would all be forgotten, and—
Marci reached up and slapped her hands over his eyes, breaking the spell. Julius collapsed into her the moment the darkness let him go. He was still gasping when he heard her yell at Ghost. “I thought that only worked on the other side!”
“So did I,” replied a thousand empty voices.
“Well, can you tone it down or something?”
There was a long pause, and then the freezing wind began to slack off. “Sorry,” Ghost said in a far more normal—but still incredibly creepy—voice. “It’s just… I’ve never had this much magic before. It’s incredible.”
“I’m sure it is,” Marci said, dropping her hands from Julius’s eyes. “But as a wise man once said, ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ I don’t mind you stuffing yourself full of magic, but please don’t send Julius into an existential crisis. I just got him back.”
“Sorry,” the spirit said again, and then his voice brightened. “I stopped the magic.”
“I saw,” she said proudly. “And caught the house! A-plus job on both, by the way. Just keep up the good work until Myron and I can reestablish the ward.”
“I can hold it for as long as you need,” Ghost said, his empty voice a bit too joyful for Julius’s comfort. “It’s just like it was back in the Sea of Magic, but even greater. I can fly here, Marci. I can feel the dead all over the world. They call to me, and I can help them now. I can help them all.”
“And we will,” Marci promised as she helped Julius back to his feet. “But right now, we have to focus on the immediate concerns, like what hit our roof.”
She turned to look through the shattered front of the house, glaring at the giant dragon that was still lying in the long gouge he’d put in their gravel driveway. From the feathers, it was obvious the culprit was a Heartstriker, but Julius had never seen one so colorful, aside from Bethesda herself. Even covered in insulation and drywall dust from the house he’d just destroyed, the dragon looked like a giant bird of paradise. His feathers were a riot of tropical greens, reds, purples, golds, and rich blues. Heavy bone gauntlets encased the delicate scales above his clawed feet, the transformed evidence of a Fang of the Heartstriker. Despite all this, though, it wasn’t until the pigeon swooped down through the hole the dragon had left in the spiraling Skyways overhead that Julius finally realized exactly which Heartstriker he was looking at.
“Bob?”
The beautiful dragon shook the dust from his feathers and rolled over, pulling himself out of the crater to smile down at Julius. “In my defense,” he said, “that was not the entrance I’d planned.”
“Not the entrance you…” Julius trailed off as his hands clenched into fists. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to make a smooth recovery,” Bob replied, looking around until he spotted something in the dark. “Ah-ha!”
He reached out and snagged a backpack hidden under the edge of the on-ramps. “I stashed this here months ago, in case of just such an emergency,” he said, unzipping the bag delicately with his long claws to pull out a set of perfectly folded clean clothes. “I’d intended to fly in, of course, not crash, but I’m actually only a few feet from where I’d planned to—”
“Brohomir!”
The name came out in a roar, making even Bob jump as Chelsie stormed out of the broken house. She crossed the dirt in record time, stopping right in front of the bigger dragon’s enormous claws with a look of pure murder. “What game are you playing now?”
“At the moment?” Bob held up the folded clothes. “Attempting to get dressed so we can have a proper conversation. I can’t have my grand entrance spoiled by distracting nudity, and trust me, my nudity is highly distracting.”
“Distracting is all you do,” Chelsie snarled, but she turned her back just the same. Smiling down at her, Bob’s dragon disappeared in a puff of smoke and rainbow feathers. When he reappeared a few moments later, he was wearing a pair of ripped jeans and buttoning a Hawaiian shirt over his still-healing chest. “Is Amelia here?”
“Where else would I be?” Amelia called, picking her way through the debris toward them. “It’s good to see you,” she said, pushing Chelsie aside so she could hug her brother. “But seriously, how long were you planning to make us wait? I was getting sick of—”
Whatever she’d been about to say was lost in a squeal as Chelsie’s daughter—who’d been hiding with Fredrick in the kitchen the last Julius knew—burst out of the ruined house and charged full speed at Bob. She leaped on him a second later, knocking him back into the crater when she hit his chest like a rocket. He hugged her back with a laugh, keeping his fingers clear of her excitedly snapping teeth.
“Yes, yes, I missed you too,” he said as he rolled them back to his feet. “But this isn’t the time for games, little ratter. Now run back to your mother.” He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “You’re making daddy jealous.”
The Qilin did not look happy to see his youngest daughter, who’d only just begun to let him touch her, fawning all over the seer. His scowl deepened further when the whelp ignored the order, choosing instead to clamber onto Bob’s back like a monkey. He wasn’t the only one who looked upset, either. Svena and Katya had come out of the destroyed house as well now to see what the fuss was about, and the moment the White Witch saw the child clinging to Bob, her blue eyes widened in a look that made Julius’s blood run cold.
“Bob,” he said quietly, taking a nervous step toward his oldest brother. “I don’t think this is a good time for—”
“It’s the only time,” Bob said, the laughter leaving his voice. “This might not be the way I’d planned to kick things off, but everything I see says we’re still on course, which means this might be all the time I have left.”
“There is no more might, Brohomir,” replied a deep voice.
Julius whirled around just in time to see the Black Reach step to the edge of the now-roofless front porch. “I gave you more chances than you had any right to expect, but no more.” The oldest seer lifted his chin to look down his long nose at Bob. “This is the end.”
The finality in his voice made Julius’s stomach clench. “It can’t be,” he said desperately, taking a step toward the construct. “How is this the end? Everyone’s still alive, and we’re all here together. We can beat Algonquin!”
“I’m not here for what could be,” the Black Reach said dismissively. “I’m here for what will be.” He lifted his eyes, looking over Julius’s head at the taller dragon standing on the edge of the crater behind him. “This is your very last chance, Brohomir. Turn back now, and you may yet have a future.”
“If I turn back, there’s no future for anyone,” Bob said, his voice shaking for the first time Julius had ever heard. “I’ve looked down every possible path millions of times. This is the only way.” His green eyes narrowed. “And you know it.”
The Black Reach released a long breath, and Julius’s hand dropped to the Fang at his hip. He wasn’t even sure what he meant to do with it—if there was anything he could do against a power like the Black Reach—but he refused to stand by while his brother died. To his surprise, though, the Black Reach made no move to attack Bob. He just held out his arms.
“If you’re intent on destroying yourself, at least give me the next seer,” he said. “It’s too early for her to see the end that awaits her.”
It was a reasonable request, but Bob made no move to comply, and why would he? Even if he hadn’t adored the whelp clinging to his back—which he obviously did—it was clear he didn’t mean to give the Black Reach anything. The oldest seer had to know that, so why bother to ask? Julius was still wondering when a sheet of ice flew across the ground to bind Julius’s and Bob’s legs to the ground. That was when he understood. The Black Reach hadn’t made the request for the baby seer’s sake.
He’d said it for Svena.
The White Witch was standing in front of the porch with her infant daughter clutched in her hands. The white whelp was squirming, but her mother didn’t seem to notice. Svena’s eyes were fixed on the little girl clinging to Bob’s back. The human child who wasn’t actually human at all.
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, holding out her daughter. “This is the next seer.”
“No,” the Black Reach said. “What you hold is merely a child. That”—he nodded at the golden-eyed dragoness clinging to Bob—“is Estella’s replacement. Brohomir hatched her from a dud egg using Amelia the Planeswalker’s fire thirty minutes before you laid your clutch.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Svena of the Three Sisters. I’m afraid you lost before you began.”
His lips curled as he finished. It was a tiny motion, barely more than a twitch, but Julius had been watching powerful dragons all his life. He knew a pulled trigger when he saw one, and from the way Bob was struggling to free his legs from the ice, so did he.
“No,” Svena whispered as frost began to form in the damp air around her. “No.”
By the second no, a strange expression spread over Bob’s face. On any other dragon, Julius would have called it panic, but seers never panicked. He was still trying to figure out what it meant when Bob snatched Chelsie’s daughter off his back and tossed her at the Qilin a split-second before a wall of ice took him off his feet.
Standing right beside his brother, Julius felt the cold of the ice as it flew by, but he was miles too slow to do anything about it. The blow had already slammed Bob into the spiral of Skyway on-ramps that sheltered the house, sending his sword—the Magician’s Fang—flying off into the darkness. Julius held his breath as the cement guardrails cracked, waiting for Bob to pop back up to his feet as he always did…
But not this time.
When the ice released him, Bob fell hard, landing facedown in the gravel at the start of Julius’s driveway. When he finally pushed himself up, blood was running from his mouth. He was still wiping it away when Svena lunged at him, her hand already raised as the icy bite of her magic filled the air.
“Svena, stop!”
The white dragon froze, her blue eyes flicking to Amelia, who was running to Bob’s side faster than Julius had ever seen her move. “Back off,” she snarled, smoke curling from her lips as she put herself between the white dragon and her brother. “Brohomir is under my protection.”
“He stole my seer!” Svena roared at her. “My clan’s legacy! He played me for a fool!”
The killing rage in her voice was enough to make Julius cower. Even Amelia looked nervous, glancing warily down at the thick carpet of frost that now coated the driveway and everything around it. “I know it hurts,” she said, melting the ice from her own feet with a flick of her fingers. “But he had his reasons.”
“Reasons?” Svena cried. “He stole from us!”
“He did,” Amelia agreed. “But you’re just going to have to let it go, because the only way you’re getting to my little brother is by going through me, and we both know you can’t.”
That wasn’t bravado. Amelia was simply stating fact. Now that they were standing face-to-face, even Julius, who was terrible at judging dragon magic, could feel the power gap between them. But despite being hideously outclassed, Svena showed no fear.
“You see, this is why we’re not actually friends,” the white dragon said bitterly, glaring at Amelia with hard, hurt eyes. “A friend would not allow this crime to go unpunished. But it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to beat you to win.”
The Spirit of Dragons snorted. “How do you figure that?”
Svena’s lips curled in a vicious snarl. “I invoke life debt. You will not interfere with my fight until the Seer of the Heartstrikers is dead.”
Amelia’s eyes went wide, but it was too late. The moment the words left Svena’s mouth, the Planeswalker’s own blazing magic closed on her like a bear trap, binding her in place. After that, all Svena had to do was step around her to stand triumphantly over Bob, who was still pushing himself up off the ground.
“I suppose it’s too late to say it wasn’t personal?” he asked, giving her a weak smile.
Svena’s answer was to kick him as hard as she could, aiming her delicate pointed shoe right at the spot in his chest where Chelsie had clawed him. He shifted at the last second to avoid the worst of the damage, but the blow still sent him slamming back into the on-ramps. It wasn’t until the cement barriers cracked completely, though, that Julius finally realized Bob wasn’t faking. He was so used to the seer’s tricks, it hadn’t even occurred to him that this might not be part of his brother’s plan until he heard Bob’s ribs snap. When he moved to help him, though, an iron hand landed on his shoulder.
“Don’t get involved,” Chelsie growled, her green eyes hard as stones as she watched Svena advance.
“But he’ll die!” Julius cried.
“Better him than you,” the Qilin said quietly, stepping up beside them with his arms wrapped firmly around his youngest daughter, who was still desperately trying to get to Bob. “The White Witch is one of the most dangerous dragons in the world. Even I would not wish to tangle with her when she’s this angry.”
“Amelia’s the only one who could have done it safely,” Chelsie agreed, tightening her grip on Julius. “Now that she’s locked down, our chances of stopping Svena are nil to zero. Even if we could win, though, I wouldn’t get involved. Bob brought this on himself. He always knew she’d never get her seer, but he let her think she’d won for his own benefit.” Her eyes narrowed. “He deserves everything he gets.”
Julius couldn’t argue with that logic, but just because Bob deserved it didn’t mean it was right. “He’s still our brother!”
“And I was his sister!” Chelsie snarled, her voice shaking with old anger. “But that didn’t stop him from letting Bethesda make me a slave, did it? He put us all on the block, and for what?” She looked over her shoulder at the Black Reach. “His stupid plan didn’t even work.”
“Only because he didn’t get a chance to finish!” Julius said frantically, turning to look her in the eyes. “Are you really going to stand here and let him die?”
“He’s a thousand-year-old dragon,” Chelsie said with a shrug. “Let’s see him act like one for once. He picked this fight. He can finish it.”
Something was definitely going to be finished in the next few seconds. Svena had already hopped up onto the rim of the broken cement crater Bob had made when she’d kicked him, standing over him with painfully cold magic pouring off her like a fountain. The frost on the ground was arctic-thick now, transforming the drab dirt and dingy concrete of Julius and Marci’s hideaway into a pristine blanket of white save for the places where Bob’s blood had stained it bright red. There was an awful lot of red, actually, and Svena reveled in it, leaning down to scoop up a handful as she gloated over her fallen enemy.
“What’s the matter, fortune teller?” she asked, tossing the bloody snow in his face. “Forgot how to dodge now that I’m no longer handicapped by pregnancy and your horrible desert?”
“What is it with your family and grudges?” Bob muttered, his face tight with pain as he finally managed to sit up. “But surely you must see that this is ridiculous. I had the advantage last time. There’s no shame in—”
“This won’t be like last time,” Svena hissed as her ice climbed the broken ramp behind him. “I’ve cold and water in plenty here, while you have nothing. Even your pigeon has abandoned you.”
She was right. After the first chunk of ice had hit Bob, his pigeon had fluttered to safety. She was now perched on a tilting piece of the house’s roof, which was only still standing because Ghost was holding it up. Julius held his breath as he watched her, waiting for something to happen, but the pigeon just sat there cleaning her feathers as if she really was the dumb bird she’d always appeared to be. He’d always assumed Bob’s pigeon was special, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe his brother really was just crazy.
Either way, in that moment, two things became painfully clear: Svena was going to kill Bob, and no one was going to stop her. Svena’s grievance was running the hottest right now, but every dragon here, and most of the mortals as well, was someone Bob had used terribly. Even the Qilin had been played, ramped up by Bob and his mother and then broken to weaken Algonquin and empower Amelia. As for Julius, he’d been a pawn too many times to count. From the moment Bethesda had kicked him out of his room, he’d danced on Bob’s string. He’d been a tool, a puppet, a domino Bob had knocked down and set back up over and over and over. He should have hated his brother for that. For using all of them with no care for whom he hurt. And yet…
And yet…
“Here it comes,” Chelsie said as frost began to gather in Svena’s raised hand. “Look away, Julius. This is going to be—”
But Julius was already gone.
He’d never been a particularly strong dragon, but he was a fast one. Julius used that now, darting out of Chelsie’s hold before she realized what was going on and sliding across the thick sheet of ice to throw himself in front of Bob, flinging his arms around his brother seconds before the avalanche of razor-sharp dragon magic crashed down. He squeezed his eyes shut, clinging to Bob as he braced for the death that never came. Instead, the freezing air went still, falling into a silence as deep as midwinter before Svena’s frustrated voice growled, “What are you doing?”
Julius’s heart was pounding so hard, it took him several seconds to form the words. “Saving my brother.”
Without releasing his hold on Bob, he cracked his eyes open to see Svena staring down at them through a haze of frosted magic with a look that was half fury, half utter disbelief. “Are you out of your mind?” she cried, grabbing Julius with a hand so cold it burned. “Get out of my way!”
The order was laced with magic that hurt even more than her grip, but Julius bore the pain and clutched Bob more tightly, looking her right in the eyes.
“No.”
Svena’s lips curled in a frigid sneer. “If you think I am soft like my sister, you are fatally mistaken. I have no problem going through you if that’s what it takes.” She lifted her hand again, and the magic above them sharpened to a deadly point. “Last warning, little Heartstriker. Move.”
Julius had been threatened by enough dragons to know that wasn’t a bluff, but he still didn’t let go. He just sat there, kneeling on the ice with his arms around his brother’s neck and his eyes on Svena. It was a pointless resistance. His body wouldn’t even slow the ice before it crushed them, but that didn’t matter, because this wasn’t about winning. It was about Julius and the fact that no matter what Bob had done, he couldn’t stand by and watch his brother die.
When it was clear he wasn’t going to move, Svena shrugged and started to bring her hand down. But then, just as the glacier’s worth of frozen magic she’d gathered was about to release on top of them, another body appeared in front of Julius’s.
“Svena!” Katya cried, grabbing her sister’s hand with both of hers. “Stop this!”
Svena was so surprised, she actually took a step back. “What are you doing, Last Born?” she roared when she’d recovered. “Move!”
“No!” Katya roared back, planting her feet firmly on the bloody ice in front of the two Heartstrikers. “I don’t care what you do to the seer, but I will not let you harm Julius! He’s the one who saved us from Estella!”
“That debt was paid,” Svena snarled. “This is diff—”
“This is greater than debts!” Katya said angrily. “Julius is my friend and yours. Since we met him, he has done nothing but stand by our clan. Even after you broke the pacts, he was reasonable and fair. He could have branded you an oath breaker and thrown our whole clan down in shame, but he didn’t. He understood and accepted our weaknesses. Now he’s fighting for his brother as you once fought for me, and you’re too snow blind to see it!”
“Brohomir stole our seer!” Svena yelled, her voice echoing to the crumbling Skyways. “He killed my enemy and stole our legacy!”
“So what?” Katya snapped. “We all know you were never really going to kill Amelia, and you were the only one who wanted another seer in the clan anyway. The rest of us were looking forward to making our own decisions for once.”
Svena stared at her in horror. “So you’re just going to let him get away with this? Let him take what is ours?”
“It’s only stealing if we care,” Katya said, crossing her arms over her chest. “Way I see it, we dodged a bullet. You remember how crazy Estella was at the end. Brohomir’s not even half her age, and he has a complex emotional relationship with a pigeon. Why would we want to invite that lunacy back into our clan? Your daughter might not see the future, but she’ll still be every bit as clever, strong, magical, and ruthless as you are. Let that be enough, Svena! Take that blessing and go, because if you’re going to stand here and obsess over the Seer of the Heartstrikers, then you’re as bad as Estella. Especially when we’ve got such bigger problems.”
Katya lifted her arm to point at the hole Bob’s crash had left in the spiral of on-ramps that formed the ceiling of the hidden house’s urban cavern. Julius hadn’t had time to even glance at it during the chaos. Now, though, he followed Katya’s motion out of habit, lifting his eyes to the sky. Or at least, where the sky should have been.
Julius sucked in a breath. Being stuck in the house since yesterday, he’d heard a lot about the crisis they were facing, but he hadn’t actually laid eyes on it until this moment. Now, doom was all he could see. An endless expanse of it, complete with a black shell, beady black eyes the size of blimps, and writhing tentacles that filled the sky from horizon to horizon.
“Is that…?” He swallowed. “Are we seeing…?”
“We are,” Bob whispered, his body as still as the ground beneath them. “That is the Nameless End.”
There was no laughter in his words now. No jokes, no smugness, nothing that made him sound like Bob. The voice whispering in his ear might as well have belonged to a stranger, but Julius just shivered and clutched his brother closer. “You have a plan, right? You can beat it.”
“I have a plan,” Bob assured him. “But first…” His voice dissolved with a quiver as he nodded in front of them. “This is it.”
Julius had no idea what Bob was talking about. All he saw in front of them were Katya and Svena, but while Katya was exactly where she’d started—standing in front of Julius with her finger stabbed up at the monster who’d taken over the sky—Svena looked like a different dragon. Maybe Katya’s words had gotten through, or maybe she’d had the same reaction to the Leviathan’s new form as Julius had, because she no longer looked ready to kill. She looked terrified, her fair skin even paler than the frost on her fingers as she stared at the death floating over their heads. She was still gawking when Katya grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side, away from Bob and Julius. This should have been their chance to escape, but when Julius tried to get up, Bob pulled him back down.
“What is your problem?” Julius whispered frantically. “We need to go!”
“There’s nowhere to go,” Bob replied, clutching his brother. “Look.”
He nodded again at the space in front of them. This time, though, when Julius turned around, Katya and Svena were gone, leaving nothing between them and the Black Reach.
The oldest seer hadn’t moved an inch since the fight began. He was still standing on the steps on the ruined porch, watching silently. Julius was trying to figure out what had changed to make Bob so spooked when the shattered light above their front door miraculously flickered back to life. It was very bright—security grade at Marci’s request—but due to the damage, the bulb was hanging down by a wire, dangling from its fixture directly behind the Black Reach.
With the bright-orange light behind him, the Black Reach was now little more than a dark silhouette. The glare did funny things to his shadow too, throwing it out like a dagger across the white frosted ground, down the frozen driveway, and over the bloody, cratered ice to touch the tips of Bob’s shoes. A simple shadow, that’s all it was, but between the ice, the dark, and the Black Reach’s height, it looked as though someone had painted a line on the ground. A long, black arrow, pointed directly at Bob.
“Julius,” the seer said, his voice little more than air. “Do you remember when I told you that a seer’s first vision is always their own death?”
Julius nodded, scooting away from the shadow’s edge.
“This is it,” his brother whispered. “This is what I saw all those centuries ago. The ice, the shadow, you and me. This moment, right now.” He looked up at the monster in the sky and swallowed. “My last moment.”
The air changed as he spoke, growing sharper. Final. It was a little like when Julius had used Dragon Sees the Beginning’s black chain to beat Estella, only now, instead of every chance miraculously working out in his favor, Julius felt like a train car on rails. There were no more choices, no more chances. Every detail—him and Bob, the Black Reach, Marci and the others, Ghost holding up the collapsing house, even the spirals Svena’s frost left in the air—was part of a static picture, the backdrop of a stage where every line was scripted. Every moment that passed was just another dot on the line leading to this moment, and now that they were finally here, there was nowhere left to go but forward to the end.
“I’d hoped Svena would kill you,” the Black Reach said as he walked down the steps. “There was a high probability, but once again, you skate through on the most unlikely of chances.”
“It was never unlikely if you knew what I know,” Bob replied, his voice only shaking a little as he patted Julius on the head. “My brother has a very good track record for miracles.”
The Black Reach said nothing. He just kept walking through the snow, his steps crunching across the frozen dirt until he was standing over them like a sword.
“You should be proud,” he said. “In all my years as guardian, I’ve never been forced to act so directly. I much prefer to arrange things so that seers die from the consequences of their actions, as Estella did. But you have evaded every payback, sidestepped every threat that you created. No matter how many dragons you step on, you keep getting away with it.” He tilted his head. “If the situation were less dire, I’d be tempted to let you keep going, if only to see how long you could maintain this insanity. Alas, you have not left me that luxury. I am now the one left with no choice, Brohomir, and I cannot permit you to do what we both know you’re going to do.”
“What’s he going to do?” Julius asked.
Both seers looked at him, and Julius fought the urge to roll his eyes. “I don’t know the future,” he reminded them. “Bob’s not perfect by any stretch, but he’s always come through for us in the end. Now we’re up against an enemy we can’t understand who might destroy everything. Bob says he has a plan to stop it, but you won’t even let him say what it is. Why? What could Bob possibly do that would be worse than that?”
He pointed at the black shape of the Leviathan that filled the sky. When the Black Reach failed to answer, though, Raven filled the gap.
“Because Bob has the other one.”
Julius jumped as the spirit swooped down to land on the bloody ice beside them. “There’s more than one way for the world to end,” Raven said. “Algonquin was foolish enough to let herself be infected, but she wasn’t the only one. There’s another interloper here.”
He glanced pointedly at Bob’s pigeon, who was still perched on top of the wrecked house, but Julius was having trouble following. “Wait,” he said, putting his hand to his suddenly throbbing temple. “Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me this whole thing is about Bob’s pigeon?”
“That is not a pigeon,” Raven cawed. “I don’t know why it chose that form, but it’s no animal or spirit, nothing of this reality.”
“It is an End,” the Black Reach agreed, his voice trembling with rage. “The same End that ended our true home ten thousand years ago. The Final Future.”
“Now, now,” Bob said, holding out his hand to the pigeon, who immediately fluttered over to him. “It’s not polite to name the Nameless.”
Julius ducked as the bird swept in to land on Bob’s arm, scooting as far from his brother as he dared to get away from the pigeon who apparently wasn’t so harmless after all. “That’s a Nameless End?” When Bob nodded, his eyes grew wide. “But what—how did you get—”
“I wasn’t tricked into letting her in, if that’s what you’re implying,” Bob said, turning up his nose. “My ladylove isn’t a lawless glutton like Mr. Dark-And-Broody up there, and I’m not a fool like Algonquin. I invited her to join me here, and I’m continually delighted that she agreed.”
His pigeon cooed happily, but the Black Reach looked angrier than ever. “And that is why you must die,” he growled. “That thing you claim to love is the extra-planar monster who ate our race’s eternity! The ancient dragon seers fed her potential timelines in exchange for certain ones until there was no future left at all! I should have killed you the moment you decided to bring her in, but you had not yet used her power, which meant my hands were tied.”
“Why?” Julius asked, careful not to look at Bob. “Not that I want you to hurt my brother, but if he’d already brought in a Nameless End, well… that seems pretty damning.”
“Oh, it was,” Bob said. “If he made decisions like Chelsie does, I’d be centuries dead. But the Black Reach isn’t like the rest of us. He’s not even really a dragon. He’s Dragon Sees Eternity, a construct created by our ancestors to be judge, jury, and executioner. With powers that vast, the rules governing his actions had to be very strict, and the strictest of all is that he’s forbidden from killing a seer until they actually break the rules.”
“Why?” Julius asked. “I mean, that seems a little late.”
“Because the future is never set until it becomes past,” the Black Reach said firmly. “So long as there is even the slightest chance remaining that they will take another path, I cannot move against them. That is why I send every seer a vision of their death at my hands. I want them to know what is coming in the hope that they will choose differently and be spared.”
“But they never do, do they?” Bob said. “Because anything a seer decides to cross you over is something they’re willing to die for. That’s not a decision you go back on.”
“I’ve seen the future you’re willing to die for,” the oldest seer growled. “That’s why I’m here. It’s bad enough that you brought the death of our old plane into this one, but I allowed it because consorting with a Nameless End is not the same as using one. This, however, I cannot permit. I will not allow any seer to repeat the mistake that destroyed our world!”
That certainly sounded dreadful, but Julius’s original question still hadn’t been answered. “But what is he planning to do?” he pressed, frustrated. “You go on and on about how it’s the worst thing ever, but no one has actually explained what Bob’s supposed future-crime is.”
“Thank you, Julius,” Bob said, glaring up at the Black Reach. “At least someone has the decency to actually ask about my plans before condemning me.”
“I don’t ask because I already know them,” the seer snapped. “No one has time for your grandstanding.”
“But this deserves grandstanding,” Bob argued. “It’s the second cleverest idea I’ve ever had.”
The Black Reach growled deep in his throat, but Bob had already focused all of his attention on his youngest brother. “I saw this coming before anyone else,” he said, pointing at the Leviathan in the sky. “This scene was my very first vision. It took me a while to understand what I was looking at, but I was blessed with a very clever and well-traveled older sister, and together, we figured it out. A Nameless End was coming. Normally, that would be that. After all, how does one defeat an all-powerful being from beyond our understanding? Answer: with another all-powerful being! And I knew how to find one.”
“Because it destroyed our old home,” the Black Reach growled.
“It’s called learning from the mistakes of the previous generation,” Bob said haughtily, but Julius was shaking his head.
“I’m sorry, Bob,” he said, voice shaking. “But this sounds insane. You’re talking about making a deal with the force that destroyed our old home!”
“Technically, we destroyed it ourselves,” his brother said. “She didn’t make us sell out all of our futures. We did that. Leviathan’s current actions aside, Nameless Ends aren’t usually aggressive. They don’t plot to destroy planes. They’re scavengers, not hunters.”
“As a scavenger, I take offense at that,” Raven cawed. “They are the ends of worlds!”
“They are forces of nature,” Bob snapped. “No more good or evil than the rest of us. What they do have is power on a planar level, and that was what I needed.”
He lifted his head to the sky again. “I’ve spent my entire life looking as far as I could into the future, but no matter how many millions of potentials I examined, they all ended here.” He swept his hand over the broken Skyways, the ruined house, the Leviathan in the sky, and the Black Reach standing like a dark memorial in front of it all. “For centuries, this moment has been my event horizon. The hard line where all the branching streams of my future ended.” He ground his teeth. “I couldn’t stand it. I was determined to find a solution, but how do you keep going past something that ends everything by its definition? That was the question I had to answer, and like any good seer, I found it in the future itself.”
“But you just said all futures ended,” Julius said, confused.
“They did,” Bob replied with a smile. “For me. But contrary to popular belief, I am not the center of the world. Time continues after my passing, and though I couldn’t see it, I knew that somewhere in the infinite stream of the future beyond my death, there had to be a timeline where we survived the Leviathan.”
Julius’s breath caught. “Did you find it?”
“In a manner,” Bob said. “My original goal was to find a way to stop the Leviathan from coming into our world at all, but by the time I had my first vision, he was already on his way. Believe it or not, this timeline is the one where we had the most time to prepare, and you wouldn’t believe the hoops I had to jump through to get even these sixty years. I was practically helping Algonquin at times to keep her delusion going for as long as possible.”
“But you did find a way out,” Julius said hopefully. “A way we survive.”
“I did,” Bob said, his smile fading. “Though whether you’ll like it is another matter.”
The way he said that made Julius’s stomach clench. “What are you going to do?”
“What he should not,” the Black Reach snarled, lifting his hand, but before he could do whatever he was about to do, Julius put up his own.
“Please,” he begged. “Bob’s my brother, and I owe him my life. If he’s going to die for this, I at least want to know why.” He glanced over at the others, who were still hanging back. Well, Marci looked like she was trying to get to him, but Chelsie had a firm grip on her arm. Amelia was still bound by her own magic, but the Qilin, Fredrick, and the others were all behind her, watching the Black Reach with wary eyes. “We all deserve to know. All of us have been Bob’s pawns without knowing why. If he’s going to explain himself, we deserve to hear it.”
The construct cast a nervous look at the sky. In the end, though, he lowered his hand, motioning for the watching dragons to step forward. Marci was there in an instant. The dragons approached far more slowly, but eventually they gathered, forming a semicircle facing Julius and Bob. Even Svena and Katya came forward. Svena still looked ready to murder the seer of the Heartstrikers, but her curiosity at finally hearing what this was all about must have been stronger than her need for vengeance, because she stood with her arms crossed and her magic pulled in, waiting for him to speak.
“You really were my best decision, Julius,” Bob whispered, letting out a tense breath.
“Just keep it short,” the Black Reach warned. “If you can.”
It was a sign of how serious this was that Bob didn’t even have a comeback for that. He just turned to his new audience and began talking in a quick, intense voice.
“You’re all veterans of the seer game now. You know how we manipulate individuals into choices that nudge future events in our favor, but what you might not know is just how limited we are when it comes to seeing and manipulating futures not directly related to ourselves. That’s why Estella had to resort to using chains when she tried to meddle in Heartstrikers’ affairs. She was attempting to control pawns that were not within her purview.”
No one seemed to like being called a pawn, but Bob was clearly on a timer, so they didn’t interrupt.
“For this particular problem, I found myself in the same boat,” he went on. “It wasn’t enough to merely discover a future that didn’t end with the Leviathan eating us. I also needed the means to secure it, which were far beyond what I had available as a mere Seer of the Heartstrikers.” He glanced down at Julius. “Since it happened on another plane, I never saw exactly what Dragon Sees the Beginning told you, but I’m sure he explained that the exchange rate on buying futures is terrible.”
“He did more than explain,” Julius said. “He showed us firsthand. When Marci and I were in the dragons’ old plane, I had to buy a future where Estella didn’t kill us. It was just five minutes, but it cost a lot.”
“Certainty always does,” Bob said, nodding. “It takes an absolutely enormous amount of potential futures to buy even one guaranteed outcome. But Dragon Sees the Beginning didn’t actually sell you anything. He’s only a construct, a tool. He can’t actually trade futures. He merely used the knowledge of past seers to act as a broker for the one who could.” He nodded at the pigeon on his shoulder. “Her.”
“Wait,” Julius said, voice shaking. “So you mean when we were in the dragons’ old world, when I made the trade for a chain of guaranteed events to defeat Estella, I was actually dealing with a Nameless End?”
“There’s no one else who could have done it,” Bob said with a shrug. “That’s her End. She’s what remains when every choice is made, the point all the streams of the future eventually flow to, the end of time itself. And before you ask how the end of time can be here now, know that our way of seeing time is very much limited by our perception. We experience time as a line because that’s how we live it, but Nameless Ends aren’t bound by such strict measures.” He smiled proudly at his pigeon. “My lady exists simultaneously in all times at once. That’s how she’s able to trade one future for another, because from her point of view, all possible futures are already done. If we want one instead of another—say, survival instead of death—she can find that possibility, pluck it out of whatever hole it was languishing in, and shove it in front of us so that—from our limited perspective—that future becomes the only path. But this sort of heavy lifting requires an enormous amount of energy. Energy that she creates by consuming other timelines in bulk, until—”
“Until there’s nothing left,” Julius said angrily. “That’s what happened to our old world. The ancient seers were so bent on securing the timelines they needed to beat each other, they let her consume all of their futures.”
Bob nodded. “Ironically shortsighted, wasn’t it?”
“If you understand that, why are you repeating their mistake?” the Black Reach growled.
“Because it’s better than the alternative,” Bob replied, his head snapping up to glare at the construct. “There are futures where I don’t use the Nameless End, and you don’t kill me, but in every single one of them—every single one—I die. Sometimes I make it an hour, sometimes I make it four, but every one of them is fatal, and not just for me. Everything in this world dies when the Leviathan wins, which he does in every future I can see where you don’t kill me. That means if there is a way we get out of this, it can only happen if I ask the Nameless End for help, because I’ve seen every path where I don’t, and they all lead to the end of the world.” He cupped his hand gently over the pigeon’s wings. “Given those odds, I’ll take my chances with her.”
“And do what?” Marci asked, stepping forward. “What future are you buying?”
“The best there could be,” Bob promised. “I’ve been studying the events leading up to this day for nearly all my life. I knew that if there was a future where we lived, I’d have to buy it, but I couldn’t see past my death, which meant I’d have to make my purchase sight unseen. But unlike us born seers, my lady isn’t limited by chance. I can only nudge the events back and forth between likely possible futures, but she sees everything. Any event that could happen, she can make happen, so since I was going to be bringing the Death of Seers down on my head anyway, I figured I might as well go for broke and buy the best future I could possibly imagine. One where everyone lived happily ever after, including me.”
“How is that possible?” Julius asked. “You just said that every future where you lived culminated in the end of the world.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Bob said. “It wasn’t possible by everything I could see, but again, I can only see what’s partially likely to happen. There are billions of practically impossible futures I can’t see simply because they’re so unlikely, but she can.” He stroked his pigeon again. “She sees every way time can bend, no matter how impossible. All I had to do was tell her what I wanted, and she found it. The only downside was the cost. As you might imagine, turning impossibility into certainty is ghastly expensive, and with only the futures of Heartstriker to work with, I simply didn’t have enough. I needed more. I needed everyone, every single dragon that exists. There was no way to get all those futures under my control through the usual ways—no dragon has ever united all the clans in the history of our kind—so Amelia and I hatched a plan to do it magically.”
He smiled at his older sister. “As the Spirit of Dragons, Amelia is now intimately connected to every dragon’s fire, and I’m connected to her as her beloved brother.” He swept his hand at the gathered dragons. “The moment she became a spirit, you all became part of my matrix, and your futures became mine to trade.”
Svena began to growl deep in her throat, but Julius was too shocked to pay it any mind. “That’s why you killed Amelia?” he cried. “So she’d be the Spirit of Dragons and give you the ability to sell our futures? What about restoring our race’s connection to the native magic of a plane? What about giving us a home?”
“Oh, well, that was good too,” Bob said. “But eyes on the prize, Julius. Everything I’ve done—hooking you up with the human who would become the Merlin, placing you at the top of our clan, reuniting the Qilin with his old flame and then breaking him to weaken Algonquin before restoring him so Amelia would have the luck she needed at the right time to claim her place as spirit—it was all a play to bring us to this moment. This one particular crossroads in time where every dragon’s future is mine to manipulate, which should be just enough sway to purchase the one future in which we don’t die.” He held his hands up with a flourish. “I will now accept your praise and adoration.”
Silence was his only answer.
“I can see why the Black Reach wants to kill you,” Svena said at last. “You’re worse than Estella. At least she only sold her own future. You’ve sold us all!”
“Considering that every other path led to death, I don’t see how you have cause to complain,” Bob said testily.
“But she has every right,” the Black Reach said, his normally calm voice shaking in fury. “Death is not the only end, Brohomir. You and I would have no quarrel if all you’d done was bring all dragons under your influence to manipulate the species toward a beneficial future. That’s just good seer work. But that’s not what you’ve done. For all your machinations, the future you’ve chosen is still so unlikely as to be functionally impossible. To ensure it, you will have to feed every other potential outcome to the Final Future, which means that even though lives will be saved, they will not be lived. By trimming every branch of the future but one, you will destroy our free will. Dragons will live on, but our choices will mean nothing. No matter what we decide, there will only be one path forward. Yours.”
Silence fell again, harder this time. “Is that true?” Julius asked at last, looking up at his brother.
“It’s not a perfect solution,” Bob said, his confident smile slipping. “But what else was I supposed to do? I’ve spent my entire life looking down millions and millions of futures in my search for a way to beat Algonquin’s Leviathan, and every single one ended in death. My death, your death, the death of my family and friends. Everyone I knew or cared about, including me, had no future past this point unless I did something, so I did.” He looked up at the Black Reach. “I know I’m breaking your rules, but I’m doing it to save the future of the race you were created to protect. That has to count for something.”
The eldest seer shook his head. “Good intentions do not excuse the crime. Every seer I’ve ever killed thought they were doing what had to be done. You are no different.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Bob argued. “I’m not Estella, trading my soul for petty vindictiveness. We’re talking about the end of the world. Our world, right now. The scale alone should—”
“No different,” the Black Reach repeated, pulling himself to his full impressive height. “Selling potential futures was how we destroyed the only true home our race has ever known. It does not matter if you are buying one life or millions, the mistakes of the past must not be repeated.”
“So you would let us die?” Bob snarled. “You would rather let Algonquin’s tantrum destroy us than bend on this one issue? Have you even looked at the future I chose?”
“I have,” the construct said. “And I can admit that it is good. Far better than I expected of you, to be honest. But a lovely prison is still a prison, and yours only saves dragons.”
“Dragons were all I could control,” Bob argued. “Even I couldn’t get my claws in the futures of the entire world.”
“But what are we without the world?” the Black Reach asked. “In your future, we survive, as does Amelia as our spirit, but everything else gets eaten down to the bedrock. Humans, spirits, plants, animals, they’re all gone. We’ll be stranded in a wasteland no bigger than what remains of the dragons’ old home without even the free will to choose how we will rebuild.” He bared his teeth. “Can such a future really be considered better than death?”
“Yes,” Bob snarled. “Because we’ll still be alive. There will be new problems, but at least we’ll be around to worry about them. If we stick to your hard line, everything we know will end.”
As if to prove him right, the ground began to rumble. Deep in the magic, something was shifting. Thanks to Amelia’s new connection, Julius could feel it in the base of his fire. Marci must have felt it too, because her face turned ashen.
“Hoo boy,” she said, shaking her head. “I think Big and Ugly up there just bit into something critical.”
“He must be reaching the end of Algonquin’s physical water,” Raven said, flapping up to the shimmering barrier where Ghost was holding the magic at bay. “I’m going to check the Sea of Magic to see how much time we have left. Phoenix?” Emily snapped to attention. “Get our forces into position. If we get a chance to move, it’s going to have to be fast. And as for you…” Raven turned his sharp beak toward Bob. “Our bargain still stands. Do what you must, but don’t forget what you promised us.”
Bob nodded, but the spirit was already gone, vanishing with a shimmer into the dark.
“What did you promise him?” Marci asked Bob.
“That I would save his world,” the seer replied with a smile. “Raven is very civic-minded. He’ll do anything to save his plane, even if it means working with a dragon against his fellow spirits.”
“Then he was cheated,” the Black Reach said bitterly. “You sold him something you knew you could never deliver.”
“I knew nothing of the sort,” Bob replied, staring his death in the face. “You’re right that this ends in a wasteland, but a wasteland is still better than no land. If dragons survive, some part of this world must as well, because otherwise we’d have nothing to stand on. And if the land is still there, there’s a chance the spirits will rise again. A chance, that’s all I promised, but when you’re an immortal spirit, a chance is all you need. We mortals aren’t so fortunate. If we don’t take the future into our own hands, we’re doomed.”
“We are doomed either way,” the Black Reach growled. “Better to die with this world than repeat the fall of the last.”
“How can you say that?” Bob cried. “You’re the Construct of the Future! You were created to do exactly what I’m trying to do: preserve our future.”
“You can’t preserve the future by repeating the past.”
“I’m not repeating the past!” Bob shouted. “I might be breaking the letter of your law, but when it comes to the spirit, our goals are the same! You’ve been working for ten thousand years to protect dragons from themselves. You’ve fought as hard as you could within the limits of your purpose, not just to stop rogue seers, but to make us better as a species. You’ve bent over backward to foster peace and end the in-fighting that has torn us down for so long. The future I mean to buy does all of that, and it keeps everyone from dying! How can you kill me for it?”
“Easily,” the Black Reach replied, his voice final. “You knew the price, Brohomir. You were warned countless times, but no more.”
He lifted his hand, which no longer looked like a hand at all. It was a dragon claw, an enormous one every bit as huge and deadly as Dragon Sees the Beginning’s. But where his brother’s talons had been as white as bleached bone, the Black Reach’s claw was as dark as the shadows that surrounded them. And it was in that moment, that second that seemed to stretch on forever, that Julius finally realized the Black Reach had never been more than a shadow himself. He truly was a construct, a carefully pieced-together mask created to hide the truth of what he was. Death. The final end no seer—no matter how clever or justified or righteous—could avoid.
“You have made up your mind, Brohomir,” the construct said in a deep, sad voice. “And I see no more futures where you change it, which means the time has come. Now tell your brother to move aside and accept what you have made inevitable.”
Bob took a sharp breath, his hands tensing on Julius’s shoulders, but whatever he was working up the courage to say never made it out, because Julius spoke first.
“No.”