Kei

  If a thing loves, it is infinite.

  --William Blake

  A giant falls from the sky, wreathed in searing sunlight and wrapped in coruscating crystal. Crystal somehow similar to the rising walls all around us yet overflowing with a fiery light.

  Crystal in the shape of wings. They unfurl and slam down in a single, thunderous wingbeat, then spread out past his shoulders, gently catching the wind as he plummets.

  The immense angel crashes through the invulnerable walls above us, his blocking forearms taking the blows as he breaks each one thrown up in his path as we watch.

  There’s the faintest ring of shattering glass as he charges through them. The slightest shiver passing through our bodies and souls as he breaks the unbreakable.

  He’s falling sideways. If there were ground beneath him, he’d be laying face first on the grass, but instead he’s outstretched upon the air, falling carelessly, yet razor focused on everything happening around us.

  He flings out his arms to either side, palms facing outward, and a globe of light begins at his hands and feet and expands in all directions around him.

  The Vitruvian Man made flesh. Or at least light.

  I feel the barest whisper of it on my skin, almost lost in the howling gale sweeping past us as Hammersmith’s mech roars skyward from the Labyrinth-filled abyss.

  Yet that delicate globe of radiance hits the walls rising around us like the silent shockwave of an apocalyptic explosion.

  Translucent shards in every color fall past us, but somehow in the brilliant column cutting a pathway to the Maze above the chaos does not touch us. The razor-sharp fragments flutter past, some launching like arrows, others drifting like snowflakes and some spinning like my samara.

  We’re in a place where I could die in a fingersnap, but while my Gift still brings its touch to everything around us, my personal power that comes with it is still blatant in its persistent absence.

  The deadliest place I’ve ever seen, and I’m still my too-mortal flesh. I should be shuddering in fear, but maybe I’m just not smart enough to fully grasp how doomed I am.

  Or maybe I’ve forgotten fear for anyone but the people I put in mortal danger, just by drawing breath. The taste of that terror is still in my mouth. But there’s so much happening I still struggle to feel frightened.

  I take a deep breath to steady myself, and stare around at this catastrophe in motion.

  I look up at the descending titan, and realize radiant wings are unfurling once more from his back, this time to brush aside the crumpled remnants of a crimson wall. His lips part as if to say something.

  And I wonder, as the jets rumble, the winds shriek and the lightwalls shatter, how he could possibly make himself heard in all this cacophony and confusion.

  As if to answer my doubts, he speaks, but not to me.

  “Arden,” the being says in a deep, resonating voice which vibrates every bone in my body. “You need to go.”

  The mech stares up at him, the glowing mechanical eyes somehow reflecting fierce defiance. Yet somehow she pitches her own immense voice lower.

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  “Stop calling me that!” Hammersmith snaps.

  He pauses in whatever he was about to say, and nods. “Are you ready?” the angelic stranger asks, his voice somehow softer yet more penetrating.

  “My jets are white-hot, my scramjets’ve kicked in and other than shielding my hand all I’m doing is running!” the mecha says, exasperated. “Of course I’m ready! Just step aside.”

  I notice, finally, the quivering bubbles of light which keep forming around the gauntlet Hammersmith has clenched around my body.

  Forming and breaking, almost instantly, in a continuous flutter of futile shielding, even as her fingers shift to offer shelter. I’m not taking the brunt of the winds, but I suppose I must still have some strength, because the mecha is definitely rising faster than a car can drive. The angel matches pace with us effortlessly.

  Then I look up again, and realize there’s a kind of slipstream sliding over us. An envelope of air sliding through the storm like a knife.

  Something is protecting us. And not just this giant archangel. Something so subtle it slips past our sight and senses, even as it saves our skins.

  Hurry, a silent voice urges, strange yet familiar, echoing inside my head yet not arising from inside of me. You’re running out of time.

  And even as the silent words are spoken, every moving piece of the labyrinth around us abruptly pulls away, then flows past us like a river dividing around an island.

  The flow turns into a tidal wave, and a sea of supersolid light rushes toward the spot where we’d seen the dark Dragon emerging.

  The glowing shards form a rainbow sphere miles across in the distance, rippling as though fighting an unseen tide.

  “Almost there!” Chris shouts.

  I look up, and the gaping gateway to the center of the Maze is almost upon us. A slender obelisk of crystal, shimmering with its own inner light, hovers just above the portal, and I feel thoughtful eyes upon me.

  I’ve never seen it before, yet it feels… familiar.

  A rumble shakes the sky, and on the horizon I can see the many-colored orb of the Labyrinth’s gathering walls is shivering, as though shaken by some immense, immeasurable force.

  We flee to our world, and salvation.

  Andrea and Chris pass through first, being smaller and lighter than Hammersmith’s gigantic mech. But we’re mere moments behind.

  I take one last look across the infinite sky. Taking in the Nexus, and the distant battle between light and darkness.

  And the globe of walls freezes into a single piece, as though it were forged that way. As though it had ever been that single, perfect gemstone. That single, perfect prison.

  And then, magnificently, it explodes.

  I stare, transfixed, but Hammersmith doesn’t take time to sightsee. She’s through the portal in a heartbeat, shouting down to the angel, “Come on!”

  He pauses to glance up, just once, staring at the face of the mecha holding me in her hand.

  Then the angel folds his wings into an impossible sideways dive, and hurtles towards the Dragon of darkness arising from the ruin of the Nexus’ defenses.

  I leap from the mech’s gauntlet down to the earth of the earthly Maze even Hammersmith turns and hovers just above the portal, staring after the shining figure.

  “What?!” she calls out. But he does not hear or heed.

  A single brave figure against the gathering dark, the speck of his light is almost lost in shadow.

  Seeing him against that towering blackness, slipping past the star motes accompanying it, I can finally get a sense of perspective.

  The final Dragon is the size of a mountain yet moves as supple as a breeze and as swift as a thunderbolt. One moment it is free of the last chains of light fashioned by the Labyrinth.

  The next it is a striking serpent, it’s jaws slamming shut around the distant spark of our guardian angel. The sound is like a thunderclap. And carries the finality of death.

  For a moment there is silence.

  And then I hear a wordless cry of pain from the steel giant floating beside us, her hands reaching out in desperate denial.

  Chris and Andrea rush to the lip of the Maze’s gateway, looking stricken. Andrea clutches her faintly glowing crystal like a talisman, and the shimmering obelisk floats silently just behind her, watching.

  I sense something changing in the mecha’s internal mechanisms as she shifts her stance, as if about to plunge back into the chaos behind us.

  And then, within the Dragon’s clenched jaws, something glows impossibly bright, shining through a head the size of a hilltop.

  The light expands into unbearable splendor, burning too brightly to look upon, and all of us flinch away.

  When we look back, it’s as if a small Sun has appeared within the Nexus, filling the space once held by warping spacetime and the breach of a new wormhole to some strange reality. Now where once there was darkness there is only light and fire.

  Without a word, Hammersmith drops. She slips through the gate and roars away again, giving all her power to her engines. Her gaze is fixed on some distant point.

  Perhaps the Sun itself.

  A voice speaks, calm, wise and gentle. Familiar. From the obelisk itself.

  “The Gate is failing. She must come back soon, or not at all.” The obelisk has no eyes, yet I swear she just gave us a significant look.

  Then she seems to give me another one. “Reign in your power, Kei, if you can. You’re feeding this chaos with your life’s blood. If you bleed your power away, you may be the only who can survive the consequences.”

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