Page 142 of The Death Wish

He stepped into the darkness willingly, so long as it drew Pitch into the light.

The suppression of lifetimes fell away. The fissures that had appeared when he brought down the goddess Morrigan, now cracked wide open. Silas rose. High. Higher still. Not merely with a hint of great shadow, but growing with substance. Stretching high above the death bed that surrounded him. Their tiny peaks and troughs were pitiful against his emergence.

The past tore away from him, the ties that shackled Silas to his goddess snapped free with the titanic release of thousands of years of restraint.

His time drew ever nearer to its close. Let it end with the greatest deathnote he could summon.

‘Pitch, I promised you.’ Silas need not shout anymore. His voice could carry across worlds. ‘And I am here. It is not over.’

The scythe formed itself once more. A mace emerged; wooden handle thick as a yew, a spiked metal ball, big as a carriage wheel and a thousand times heavier, hanging from a fat chain. A perfect fit, no matter how monstrous his hands had grown.

He drew back his arm, his long shadow stretching further, the move stirring the deadened air. Silas landed the mace with all his fury behind the blow, his ears closed to the onslaught of dejection and penetrating grief the lake threw at him. He was too furious to be forlorn.

The impact wrought a crater in the reef and lifted a storm of white shards as the scythes pummelled the anguished bones to grit.

But the lake was not cowed by him. Not yet. No sooner had he forged a way, than the unending bones moved to fill the void, building the reef anew, this time tinged red. Great waves of crimson rose. The howl of the destitute, the regretful, the enraged, filled the air as Blood Lake sought to claim him as one of their own.

Let them try.

With great swipes of the mace and adding his own kicks in for good measure, Silas ploughed his way across the massive cemetery. The Blight played its forlorn notes for him. At him.

But he’d learned to listen and be unafraid. Untouched.

He strode through the shallows, through the piles of bones that whispered their misery, and clamoured for him to succumb. He’d done so when the Herlequin found him clueless and vulnerable. It had nearly cost him the prince then.

Nothing could fool Silas into that mistake again.

He moved on, towering, impossible, dark and raging, the twisted melodies of the Blight’s birthplace glancing off him. It was a graveyard, and a terrible one at that, but Death had long ago fled this place. Silas understood, being in its midst, what the Blight’s true power was. How it drove those who fell to it, mad and twisted with grief. It was not fear of death it goaded them with, but fear of being the one left behind. Caught in the agony of endless bereavement.

Silas’s long strides ate up the distance that kept him from his daemon. The quake of his footfalls shattered bones to mere dust, but no sooner had he lifted his feet than the shallows were renewed. The hint of red was everywhere now. And the only source of colour lay with Pitch.

Bloodshed had given rise to this place, but it had been starved of carnage for centuries. The lake had drunk itself dry; now blood flowed from a fallen prince, sating a timeless thirst.

‘Pitch.’ Silas’s breath stirred whirlwinds in the stagnant air. ‘Hold on. Do not dare let go.’

He’d sought no answer, and it shocked him when it came.

The weak glow of embers. The hint of flame amongst the stain of flowing blood; a precious, gut-wrenching glimpse of life.

The lake saw it when Silas did. The bones were raucous, their mad dance growing more manic. They came for him.

But Silas went blind to all else. Barely feeling the clamour of the dead upon him, their skeletons seeking to burden him; clawing up his legs, digging their broken pieces into his body. A body thick and large and solid enough to endure their assault.

He quickened his step, and the barriers rose. Small mountains standing in his way. Hastily assembled walls that echoed back at him; a symphony of despair. Silas shouldered his way through every one, struck out with the scythe, time and time again, and using his body as a battering ram. The bones moved like sand-hills buffeted by desert winds, shifting their position, appearing in front of him before he’d had a chance to catch his enormous breath.

Fatigue was raising her unwelcome head. Silas over-extended himself. He knew it, felt it in the ache that came to his arm with each raise of the mace. He was stealing from his Nephilim origins, drawing on his angelic blood; all lost long ago. This transformation could not last.

Silas was neither man nor monster: not as weak as a purebred, but not so strong as a living giant, either. That could cost him dearly here.

He wore a cloak of bones now, piled upon his shoulders, dragging at him, lumbering him with their ancient sorrow. Seeking to drag him back, and down, into a grave that Silas would not escape this time.

He growled his defiance, and the sky rumbled.

Just a few more steps. A few more behemoth strides and he would take Mr Ahari’s place; rescuing another from their grave.

Silas burst through a cliff face of bones, and into a wall of heat and fragile orange flame.

Pitch was a terrible vision, and yet beauty personified. He lay impaled in too many dreadful places, held aloft like a macabre trophy. His golden curls were darkened where his head hung low and touched them to the bloodied water.