Eaters of the Light Read online

  Eaters

  Of the

  Light

  J Edward Neill

  Cover Art ‘Last Light’ by Amanda Makepeace

  Tessera Guild Publishing

  Copyright © 2018 J Edward Neill

  All rights reserved.

  The Eaters of the Light,

  Breathers of darkness,

  Builders of tombs, vast and empty, in which to bury all life.

  …forever.

  Our war against them continues.

  The stars will fall, one after another.

  Their last light will be an echo of everything that could have been, but now fades out of reach.

  - Maliah, High Calipha

  Contents

  The First Immortal

  From Sunlight to Shadow

  Glass Houses

  The Hermit’s Daughter

  Death # Forty-Eight

  Baby Steps

  Dead But Dreaming

  Deep Breath

  The Calipha

  Sufi’s Hope

  Zephayus

  Thoughts and Prayers

  Hope for Hermes

  Two Worlds

  The Thirty-One Year Dream

  Grave B-7 Black

  Forty-Nine

  The Dead Know All

  New Religion

  The Forever Evil

  No Home but the Stars

  Message in a Bottle

  111

  The Night is Darkest

  Heart of Hades

  The Shadow Hall

  Digging Graves

  A Girl Divided

  Sacrifice

  The Heart Chamber

  The Catacomb

  Chasing Death

  Ghost in the Machine

  Mina

  * * *

  For a fun Eaters of the Light glossary, go here.

  The First Immortal

  I walked the streets of a city I hadn’t seen in two-hundred years.

  And I felt thousands of people watching me.

  If Sumer’s crowds were passionate, it felt easy to forgive them. They knew me only from the stories they’d read, the outlandish tales their parents had told, and the exaggerations their schools had taught. In their eyes, I was something well beyond human.

  ‘Callista—Bringer of Light,’ the banners at the light-train station had blazed.

  ‘Callista—the Savior.’

  I’d learned long ago to ignore such things.

  Behind glass partitions, amid lush gardens, and atop silver towers, the people cheered me. An entourage of black-suited men led my way, pushing through the crowds as we neared Arcadia’s tallest tower – the Grand Spire.

  The people wanted more than my fragile half-smile.

  But then, they knew nothing of the horrors I’d faced.

  I crossed white streets and meandered through a courtyard made of glass. At the bottom of the Grand Spire’s white-marble stairs, I halted. High above, a long line of glass doors remained shut.

  “Is all this necessary?” I asked the man beside me. He was young—at most twenty-five years. He’d never left the planet of Sumer.

  He’s never even left Arcadia.

  “Pardon, m’lady.” He looked nervous despite his black suit and dark sunglasses. “It’s protocol. President Hephast and the Congressional Court want to welcome you in style.”

  I sighed.

  I’d known his answer before he’d said it.

  But I’d been hopeful for something other than cheering crowds beneath the midday suns.

  I stood in the entourage’s center, tugging at the collar of my deep blue dress. I hadn’t wanted to wear the sleek, ridiculous Arcadian fashion, but I’d allowed the heralds who’d greeted my landing to convince me otherwise.

  “The people will love you,” they’d promised.

  “It’s best to look as though you’re one of us.”

  I miss the war already, I thought.

  And I forgot how warm this planet is.

  A dozen times since last I’d stood beneath Sumer’s two suns, I’d died and been reborn. My newest body had only ever known the cold of interstellar Rings and the deep dark of planets long ago murdered by the Strigoi.

  And now the light hurts me almost as much as my enemy.

  I looked over the bronze-skinned Arcadians surrounding me. To them, my discomfort must’ve seemed strange.

  “M’lady, are you well?” the young man in sunglasses asked me.

  “I am. And please don’t call me m’lady.”

  “As you wish, m’la— Madame Callista,” he stammered. “What shall I call you?”

  “Cal,” I said. “I prefer Cal.”

  The glass doors at the Grand Spire’s bottom swung open. Out stepped President Hephast and seventeen members of Arcadia’s Congressional Court, all of them decked in garish Arcadian suits. They were old, many well over a hundred years. I must’ve looked childlike to them.

  Yet I’m far older than anyone here.

  “Callista Lightbringer.” President Hephast boomed across the courtyard. The amplifiers on his collar projected his voice loud enough for everyone within a half-kilometer to hear.

  The crowds fell into reverent silence. The entourage of black-suited men knelt all around me. I stood alone among them, the only soul in Arcadia gazing up at Hephast and his assembly.

  “Please, Lady Lightbringer,” Hephast called to me, “come forth.”

  With a sigh, I climbed the stairs. My heeled shoes clicked on the glass, and my dress’s train dragged behind me.

  Why all this in the middle of the day? I winced against the light. Why not at night?

  Symbolic. Must be.

  I arrived at Hephast. Standing just one step above me, he looked older than I’d expected. His bald scalp was tanned to a golden shine by Sumer’s suns. His shoulders were narrow, his fingers long and thin, and his eyes hanging in his sockets, busy yet so very tired.

  Humanity had found many ways to extend their lives.

  But only I had managed immortality.

  “The light, it bothers you?” Hephast saw me wincing.

  “It’s been so long,” I said. “And this new body…it’s never been to a sunlit world. It hasn’t yet adapted.”

  The old man peered beyond me. I followed his gaze, and found the crowds still kneeling, their eyes averted.

  “Wave to them,” said Hephast. “Wave and then join me in my tower. The people have waited so long for you to come. They want to see you happy.”

  Happy?

  I can’t remember happy.

  I faced the crowds and waved to them. A few dared to look up at me, and within moments they all stood and roared with applause. I’d never heard such a noise before. The sound of such overwhelming humanity felt powerful, but empty.

  I waved for a full thirty seconds, and then faced Hephast again. All at once, I felt the Congressional Court’s eyes fall upon me. The line of elderly men and women smiled down at me, but not because they loved me.

  They smiled because they needed me.

  Soldiers clad in powered white armor emerged from the Grand Spire and held open the giant glass doors. Hephast beckoned for me to lead the way, and so I did. Behind me, Arcadia trembled with the cheers of thousands, and then I vanished into the tallest tower humanity had ever built.

  Inside, I breathed. The midday heat fell away, and the crowd’s roars went silent. I stood beneath a spinning silver fan whose blades ushered cold air across my face. I closed my eyes and pretended I was still aboard the Sabre, still gliding through the deep darkness between the stars.

  If only…

  The soldiers stepped aside. Hephast and the seventeen Court members swept toward the Grand Spire’s central hall.

  “Come
,” Hephast called to me.

  I followed.

  In a vast white chamber with pale carpets and sharp lights, I settled into the chair they offered me. They put me in the second highest seat, just a half-step below Hephast’s throne. Below us, some hundred chairs sat in a great ring around a table carved of circular glass.

  Every seat was filled.

  All eyes were on me.

  As I looked into the room, I considered my audience.

  These people have never seen me before. They know my stories, but not the truth.

  The lights dimmed. Only two still shined.

  One above Hephast.

  And one above me.

  “Welcome to Sumer’s high assembly, Lady Lightbringer,” announced Hephast. With his amplifier still active, his voice spread throughout the room like thunder.

  “Thank you.” I gazed forward without expression.

  “Before you sits the Arcadian Congressional Court.” He waved his skinny arm. “Also here are delegates from the city of Mercuria, emissaries from Iona and Venya, and members of the Far Court from distant Plutari. They come from all corners of Sumer to hear you speak.”

  I gazed at my audience. Their faces, shrouded in shadow, looked shapeless in the dark.

  “Forgive me,” I said, “but most of these places…I’ve never heard their names. When I left Sumer more than two centuries ago, the planet hadn’t been fully colonized. Now it seems—”

  “We’ve come a long way, Lady Lightbringer,” said someone in the darkness.

  “Callista,” I corrected him.

  “Pardon?” He sounded confused.

  “My name—Callista,” I replied. “No one calls me Lightbringer. I am…I always have been…Callista.”

  Murmurs spread throughout the chamber. The Court’s discomfort hung heavy in the air.

  “Callista,” Hephast said my name. “So be it. We’re told you have a full report. If it pleases you, we will hear it now.”

  My report arrived years before I did, I wanted to say. You already know everything.

  “As you wish.” I nodded.

  I reached into my bodice and withdrew a slender silver capsule. I motioned for the nearest attendant, and a nervous young woman took the capsule from my fingers.

  “Slide it into your holo-viewer,” I said loud enough for everyone to hear. “You will see what I last witnessed.”

  “Wait…” said someone in the dark, “is it—”

  “Yes. It’s a vid-capture from Strigoi hive XV Prime,” I said. “From their home-world. Or should I say — the home-world that is no more.”

  The Court collapsed in a sea of whispers. I heard their voices, faint and full of disbelief, and I allowed myself a smirk.

  “…it’s true after all,” one woman said.

  “…XV Prime? Their last stronghold in the Milky Way?” said a man in the seats below me.

  “…she has a vid-capture? We’ll get to see the dark planet?”

  The attendant girl looked to Hephast for guidance. He nodded, and the young woman scurried to the projector machine beside his throne.

  She slid the silver capsule into the machine.

  And we watched the battle unfold:

  * * *

  “They’ve nowhere to escape,” the young pilot beside me shouted.

  “Which means they’ll fight all the harder.” I shook my head.

  From the cockpit of my scythe-winged warship—the Sabre, I saw everything:

  To the left, the star we’d just created blazed with brilliant yellow light. Even at ten-million kilometers away, the infant sun hurt my eyes to see.

  To the right, the bloated Strigoi world XV Prime shuddered beneath the impact of the two-thousand string reprogrammers our fleet had just dropped on its surface. We’d sequenced the string reprogrammers, or S.R.’s, to turn the black substance composing XV Prime’s surface into glass.

  If the new star we’d made didn’t kill the dark planet, we’d shatter it instead.

  We knew most of the S.R.’s would be overwhelmed and reversed by Strigoi weapons.

  “…but they can’t stop every last one.” I grinned in my cockpit. “And when the chain-reaction starts, we’ll break this planet. You’ll see.”

  The young pilot stared at XV Prime. The planet’s coal-black surface teemed with Strigoi death-machines, the dark towers housing billions of our enemy.

  The poor kid shivered.

  He sees them.

  They’re coming.

  I ignited the Sabre’s quantum engine. I felt my chair vibrate and the universe move around me. XV Prime became a blur as we accelerated to twenty-thousand kilometers per second. Anything slower, and the Strigoi warships would’ve carved us to tatters. Anything faster, and we’d have moved too far from the planet to fight.

  “Joff would’ve gone faster.” I grinned.

  “Who’s Joff?” my co-pilot asked.

  That’s right, I thought.

  He doesn’t know.

  I seized the cockpit control stick, guiding the Sabre between webs of Strigoi death-beams. They weren’t firing at us, but instead at the bigger, more powerful ships in our fleet. Red lights flared on the vid-screens, each one indicating a friendly ship’s extermination.

  “God, they’re killing us!” the pilot screamed.

  Should’ve left him on his home-ship.

  No. I saw another twenty red lights illuminate the vid-screen. If I had, he’d already be dead.

  With me, he’s got a chance.

  I pulled, pushed, and spun the Sabre’s control stick. We weren’t moving through space so much as space spun around us. Whenever I pulled the trigger, streams of missiles tore into the darkness. The Strigoi scythe-ships, their hulls like black, cadaverous bone, dove out of the missiles’ paths.

  Not a single one hit its target.

  Not that it mattered.

  I pulled a second trigger, and all at once the missiles erupted into spheres of light. Spanning a few hundred kilometers each, the spheres burned only a few seconds before collapsing back into shadow. The blazing lights made ashes of the Strigoi ships. By the hundred, they collapsed into clouds of glimmering dust.

  The Strigoi were made of nightmares, but they’d yet to find a way to survive our newest weapons.

  Darkness overwhelms light, they believed.

  No.

  Light destroys the dark.

  “They’re almost out of ships,” I said to my co-pilot. I looked at him, and I saw the sweat on his forehead, the color drained out of his skin. He looked like a Strigoi had touched him.

  But it was only fear that paled my young friend.

  “We have to get closer,” I said. “Fire the beacons above their largest city. We’re going in.”

  “We’re going down there?” he gasped.

  “It’s the same as every other world,” I told him. “Now fire the beacons before it’s too late.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them.”

  He hammered a sequence into his half of the Sabre’s console. Nervous wreck though he seemed, he pulled himself together long enough to launch a wave of nearly a thousand light beacons from the compartments beneath our wing.

  The tiny spheres burst out into space. Soaring through the darkness behind them, I cut our speed to a few hundred kilometers per second.

  Below, XV Prime awaited us.

  Seas of black towers stretched to the end of all sights.

  Oceans of oil lapped against shores of bone and metal.

  In the shadows, the Strigoi swarmed. They knew I was coming.

  But they can’t stop me.

  Can you see, Joff?

  Are you watching?

  The light beacons formed a web a few hundred kilometers above XV Prime’s hugest, blackest city. All at once, they ignited. The Strigoi fired at us, but their death-beams died in the beacons’ light-storm. They launched swarms of black satellites, but the light soaked up every shadow, melting the dark devices into nothing.

  I b
linked and saw clouds of ashes.

  I almost pitied my enemy. Their planet had never seen such light before. Thousands of years ago, the Strigoi had stopped XV Prime’s rotation, guarding their cities from the star blazing on its opposite side.

  They’d killed the star.

  And thrived in the shadows remaining.

  “We’ve taken no damage,” I said to the young pilot. “There’s nothing to stop our primary S.R.”

  “Then can’t we turn around?” He shivered. “The other S.R.’s should be enough, right?”

  “No,” I grimaced. “We have to be sure. This will be our only chance.”

  I keyed a quick sequence into the Sabre’s console. A last few death-beams smoked and curled upward from the Strigoi city, but I seized the control stick and swerved just in time.

  “Release primary S.R.,” I commanded the Sabre.

  And she did.

  Somewhere in the Sabre’s underbelly, a door slid open. A slender silver projectile, no taller than me and only half as heavy, leapt into the planet’s orbit. I couldn’t see it, but I felt it in my bones. It was the most powerful weapon we’d ever created.

  ‘…strong enough to turn half a planet into whatever we want,” the scientist had told me.

  ‘…hydrogen, helium, anything…’

  No. None of those, I thought.

  Glass.

  I want the Strigoi to be glass.

  And so it was.

  At the moment the silver missile hit XV’s surface, we were already on our way out of the planet’s atmosphere. The last of the light beacons’ glimmers shielded us from the death-beams, and we soared out into far orbit.

  A graveyard awaited us.

  Clouds of dark powder floated in the void, the remains of thousands of Strigoi ships.

  Metal spun through the emptiness, sprinkled with the remains of the humans who’d died.

  “Look,” I said to my co-pilot. “No, not at the dead ships. At the vid screen. See XV Prime? The S.R….it’s working.”

  Together, we gazed at the screen. The planet’s surface, already cratered from other, weaker weapons, began to change color. From black to translucent silver, it went, and from hard, inflexible bone to brittle glass. Towers once black and mighty collapsed under their own weight. A full quarter of the planet shattered.