Page 141 of The Death Wish

‘Pitch.’ His bellow rang out like a war cry; as cool and consuming rage settled on him.

Only the dead whispered back. Circling him, like wolves frightened of a campfire, but ready to lunge should the light fade.

‘Pitch, are you there?’

Despite the openness of his surrounds his voice echoed against the reddened sky, and bounced off the endless sea of bones. What he’d not expected of this place was its quietude. The souls were there, of course, with their endless downtrodden sorrow, but the lake itself held a stillness, an utter absence of life that unsettled him far more.

Silas spied a greater viewpoint, and made his way there, unrepentant as he stepped upon the bones. He found a rounded piece, a perfect dome to stand upon. And undeniably a skull. He sent the scythe back to its ring form, seeing the easy footholds, there upon a massive jaw, and another in an eye socket so large he could have huddled in it. Grand dimensions he did not linger upon, for he knew this was no angel nor daemon; he knew giants well enough. Silas pulled himself onto the dimpled crown of the skull. He stood at full height, hiding from none.

‘Pitch!’

The rattle of bones was his only reply. Silas glanced down. Rattle of bones, indeed. Where he had tread, breaking a path through the bone bed, there had been depressions of shattered bone marking his path.

There were none now. No trace of his foot path. The bones had re-knit, mending the damage made. Silas narrowed his gaze. Here were his wolves, showing a hint of themselves in this unnaturally sterile world. A rattling began, like the shaking of coins in the poor box.

The bones moved beneath the water, as though buffeted by a current. But the surface of the shallow waters was utterly still. The rattling came from behind and to his side. The reef was shifting. Gathering in.

Surrounding his lookout upon the skull.

The Watcher King’s legions were on the move once more.

‘Shit.’ Silas fingered the scythe, mind racing. To use the scythe as a kite once more was impossible. For all the movement in the water, there was none in the air. Blood Lake held a dead calm.

He braced, searching for sign of where the first attack would come from.

The bones gathered thickest behind him, pushing themselves up into a rough wall, a crescent shape around the skull, their pieces grinding and snapping as they rose. Blocking his path.

‘You fool, Silas.’ He hissed at himself.

Beyond the rapidly rising wall was the tall pyre he’d spied earlier, and that bloom of red; quenching the thirst of a lake parched dry of blood.

Realisation was brutal.

Bile pressed at the back of Silas’s throat.

He was a fool. An oaf. A dolt.

He’d stood here, shouting at the sky, while the lake bled Pitch dry.

Silas’s rage was instant. Consuming. Twisting him up inside till the pain was unbearable. The sky darkened with his fury. And the ache behind his eyes flecked his vision with white. Hetook a step, intending to jump. The skull shattered beneath him. Fragile as a bird’s egg. He barely stumbled before his feet found the thicker bed of bones that formed the reef.

Silas glowered down at his buried boots. They seemed oddly distant. The sharpness of his pain could not blind him to the strangeness here. The bones that covered his feet were not so sturdy as he recalled, and smaller; dwarfed by his shadow.

A shadow that stretched far out across the bones.

A brittle laugh hiccoughed from him.

The bones were not smaller. Silas was larger. More aligned with the fallen giant whose skull he’d just crushed; a Nephilim who had not escaped the Flood. Whose disadvantage came with not having a brother who despised them, feared them, and killed them; before the Lord’s Wrath could do so.

Silas’s laughter was askew, as broken as the pieces that fractured and rattled and gathered around him. They stacked their pieces, one atop one another, rising in a wave that sought to bury him.

Him! The Pale Horseman, Death’s Messenger. Child of Samyaza.

These miserable minions of failure thought burial would stop him from reaching the prince?

They were ignorant, then. Wishful. Silas may be part angel, but he was all too human; a race who were weak and pitiful, capable of great cruelty and vice, but uncontested in their propensity for deep, unreasonable, insensible love.

The shift within him was like the buckling links on a train carriage cranking into place. With a roar worthy of the greatest of giants, Silas let go the mortal coils that bound him; opened himself to the shadows that made him.