The Gates of Winter - Mark Anthony [261]
Except they were, and Beltan was right. Sometimes the only way to save something was to destroy it first.
A shadow streaked toward Travis: vast, malevolent, unstoppable. The wind verged into a shriek. Trees burst apart in deafening explosions. The darkness was complete, save for the glow of the Stones. Silhouetted by their light, Travis saw a figure: tall and powerful beyond mortal imagining, a single, blazing eye staring from a face both beautiful and terrible. A maw opened, revealing fangs like daggers. Hands reached out, extending talons toward the Imsari.
Mine, intoned a voice as deep as a midnight ocean.
Travis looked up, into the one fiery eye, and a sharp smile cut across his lips.
“Too late,” he said.
The blazing eye widened. The talons lashed out, only too slow. Larad was right. Despite an eon of exile, this moment had come sooner than Mohg had expected; he was not prepared.
Travis was. He lifted his muddy hands from the ground, pressed them on top of the three Stones, and cried out the word with all his being.
Reth!
Travis braced himself for terrible thunder, for a blinding flash. He waited to feel the ground buckle and crack beneath him, for fire to rain down from above, to feel his body being ripped to shreds. Instead there was . . .
. . . nothing. Nothing at all.
It didn't work, Jack, he called out in his mind. You were wrong—I'm not the Runebreaker after all. It didn't work.
He tried to laugh, only he could make no sound.
Jack?
Travis heard nothing, not even the beat of his own heart. All was silence. The forest was gone, and he drifted in some sort of fog. Was this the mist that bordered the Twilight Realm?
No, it was different. Even then, he had been able to see different shades of gray swirling in the mist. Here, everything was the same color, though exactly what color it was, he couldn't say. It was neither white nor black, neither light nor dark, neither warm nor cold. It was nothing.
And it was everything at once.
He had always feared the end of the world because he had imagined it as a violent happening: a time of boiling seas and crumbling stone, of screams cried out in pain and fear, of blood and mayhem. Of death. But he had been so absurdly wrong.
For when it breaks, the world shall end, and in that instant all things will cease to be. . . .
The words were a whisper in his mind, though whether they were spoken by a voice or a memory of a voice, he couldn't be sure.
Jack?
Again there was no reply. He was alone. Truly alone. The world was gone. Eldh was no more. He was the very last being in all of existence.
Or the very first.
That was when he sensed it, like the first whisper of a wind in the stillness. It made him think of Castle City, of standing on the boardwalk outside the Mine Shaft Saloon and turning to face the wind as it raced down from the mountains. Waiting to see what it would blow his way.
He felt it now—the sweet ache of endless possibilities. The old world was no more. The new world was yet to be. And it could be anything he chose to make it. Joy filled him, and power. Like a billion doors, the possibilities opened before him—a different world beyond each one. What should he choose? A world without hatred, without fear, without violence?
Yes, there was such a world. He reached toward it . . . then recoiled. The people in that world huddled in mud huts, staring with listless eyes at smoky fires, their bodies filthy and covered with sores. They spoke no stories, sang no songs, made no music. They had no fears, no cares, no worries. And no hopes, no desires, no dreams.
Did such things have to go hand in hand? He had chosen the wrong door, that was all. Travis moved toward another, toward a world without hunger, without pain, without sorrow.
He saw a modern city, not unlike Denver, but its lines