No Return

Kit cursed under his breath as his back collided with the far wall of the observatory and his retreat was brought to a halt.

The nightmare looming above him said nothing as it regarded him with pitiless eyes and pushed his axe to one side with the flat of its sword. Arms weak from overexertion and the residual draining effect of the monster’s last feeding, he let the weapon drop, exhausted.

It was all the boy could do to bore holes in his erstwhile captor’s skull with his eyes. Given his sister had demonstrated this place to be a dream of some sort, he thought, he could only hope that the thing standing over him could feel the burning of his gaze.

If it could, it only smiled, adjusting its tattered attire with the arms along its back, and raising its other sword to deliver the coup de grâce.

***

The spear lancing into the nightmare director’s back – elongated point slicing through its body and emerging out the other side – was enough to halt its final strike on the boy at its feet.

‘Hallward!’ Dorian yelled, sword tip grinding against the stone floor as he dragged it along beside him.

‘A fool and a liar…’ the creature told Kit as the boy took the opportunity of distraction to clumsily scrabble out of reach of the monster’s sword. Turning its head over its shoulder to regard Dorian, the nightmare’s face twisted into a grimace of pain-driven fury.

‘You killed my friend,’ Dorian spat, coming to a stop just past the centre of the room. Hallward growled as he turned fully, two of the arms on his back taking full grip of Zoe’s spear before wrenching it from his body and snapping it loudly in two.

‘And now you think you’re going to kill me,’ the monster rumbled. Dorian kept his sword beside him, whilst Zoe – trailing behind – pulled another copy of her spear into existence and rushed over to help her brother as the younger boy collapsed off to the side.

‘Oh, no,’ Dorian chuckled. It was a laugh bereft of mirth, and brimming with contempt. ‘Killing you is just the first step. Once I put you down, I think I’ll follow what’s left of you back to wherever you keep your own twisted realm.’ He inhaled deeply, clearing his mind and raising his weapon.

‘Every time you reform, Director,’ he explained, ‘I’ll be there. Waiting. Ready to cut you down again before you’ve even found your bearings. And I’m not going to stop. Not until the starvation and the endless cycle of death pushes you too far to recover. That “point of no return” you spoke of?’ He shook his head.

‘That’s what I’m going to do to you,’ he told the creature. ‘For Faust. By the time you and I are through, you’ll be just another mad abomination, shuffling mindlessly through the streets like all the rest.’

Clearly riled by the brazenness of Dorian’s threat, the nightmare director let out a loud, barely-human roar as it re-levelled its swords and lumbered toward him.

Sparks flew as the two clashed, the director’s twin blades crashing down against Dorian’s claymore with a bestial fury. Although hardly a professional himself, Dorian had had far more time to grow accustomed to swordplay than Kit ever had, and, as such, he was able to put up a much better fight against the nightmare creature’s advance.

Steel scraped over steel. At first, the monster bearing down on Dorian tried adding the threat of his many grasping arms into the mix, but soon rethought the strategy as it found itself parted from more than one of its hands by the young man’s blade.

A poorly-timed jab at the nightmare’s chest left Dorian exposed, and the pain as he felt one of Hallward’s swords rake across his ribs was enough to send him reeling back. His fall was broken by the painful introduction of his wounded side to the workbench beneath the telescope’s eyepiece, and he found himself half sprawled out with his face next to the delicate mound of pale ash resting at the bottom of Faust’s cage.

Grimacing, the young man rallied just in time to lift his sword and catch the downward swing of one of Hallward’s blades. The follow-up jab from the other blade – aimed squarely at Dorian’s heart – faltered mid-lunge as a flash of metal caught the flesh of the monster’s arm.

Zoe’s blind spear thrusts into the nightmare’s side had only landed by virtue of having caught Hallward off-guard. Still, she managed two additional stabs at the creature’s flank before one of its surviving arms swept mercilessly into her and threw her back halfway across the room.

All the same, it was more of an opening than Dorian had anticipated, and the boy managed to dodge the incoming strike, twisting away and rolling onto the floor before Hallward’s attention was fully back on him.

The nightmare director didn’t give immediate chase, merely watching Dorian scrabble back to his feet as it brushed the dusty black mist away from the wound on its side. Once the both of them had sufficiently recovered, the creature spared a glance over towards where the Lucas siblings lay collapsed on the other side of the observatory before resuming its slow, thunderous advance towards the last combatant standing. Dorian raised his sword back into a defensive posture.

As he went to reposition his feet, though, he soon found his ankles obstructed. A quick, panicked glance down revealed that he had strayed back to where the wall between the observatory and the specimen room had used to be. Presumably under Hallward’s command, the stone bricks that had once constituted the wall had begun to reform out of the air around him. They started at his feet, more bricks emerging from nothing to form a supportive structure before building up to ensnare his legs.

‘No more cocoon to guard your sleep, boy,’ Hallward rasped as he drew near. ‘So perhaps you ought suffer one last death for your insolence. I will simply retrieve you once I’m done breaking the minds of your little comrades down into their constituent parts.’

‘How is wanting to live insolence?’ Dorian snapped, trying to keep the thing talking as he desperately tried to will the stone blocks at his feet to move. Theoretically, it was as simple as wanting them to release him – believing they would – more than the nightmare wanted them to hold him fast.

Unfortunately, if the creature’s tolerance for pain was anything to go by, Hallward appeared to have quite the iron will. Add onto that the fact that it had recently fed on Kit’s essence, and that Dorian was exhausted, and the stones became harder to move than they would have been even in the waking world.

‘We granted you life for a single purpose,’ Hallward replied, coming to a stop before Dorian and inhaling deeply as he seemed to take great satisfaction in having the rebellious boy fully at his mercy. ‘Your birth was merely an investment towards an eventual return. Anything counter to that is insolence.’

Dorian felt the steel blade brush against his neck, and closed his eyes as it drifted down towards his chest, and then his sword arm. He gritted his teeth: Hallward wasn’t going to make this quick…

A grunt of unexpected discomfort met Dorian’s ears, and his eyes flicked open again as he felt the nightmare’s sword falter against his arm. Despite its apparently superhuman pain tolerance, the monster was still badly wounded, and it couldn’t help but stagger to the side as something impacted it from behind.

As Hallward’s grasping arms found purchase on the half-reconstructed wall to Dorian’s side, the young man got a good look at what had caused the nightmare’s last-second falter.

Bloodied and panting hard, the golden-haired boy’s grip on his axe was barely firm enough to keep the heavy crescent blade more than an inch above the wooden flooring. Kit gritted his teeth, putting all his strength into once more hefting his weapon, even if he probably knew the monster wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to bury it in its back again.

But that didn’t matter. The strike had weakened Hallward’s concentration, and the unexpected appearance of an ally had bolstered Dorian’s resolve. The stone built up around his leg shifted as he made to pull himself free.

Hallward roared in frustration at Kit’s interruption, swinging wildly at the boy with his closest sword in a savage strike that Kit had no chance of either blocking or evading.

As it turned out, though, Kit’s inability to defend himself was unimportant. A single, clean motion from Dorian’s blade separated Hallward’s sword arm from its shoulder and sent it flying across the room on a plume of dark, dusty fog.

The moment the nightmare’s attention was back on Dorian, it was once again knocked off-balance as Kit wasted no time in planting his axe back into the monster’s side.

Overwhelmed by its injuries, the nightmare director collapsed onto one knee, soon after falling wholly to the ground as Kit wrenched his axe back and swung again.

Dorian let out a shaky breath, watching with some degree of understanding as the other boy laid strike after strike into the tangled mass of limbs on the ground, flooding the flooring around them with a roiling, rot-scented pool of dust and black.

Zoe – less injured than her brother, but slower to recover – skidded to a stop a few feet away from Kit’s side, regarding him with a far more worried expression than Dorian’s, and putting a hand on his shoulder to stop him as it became apparent his exhausted strikes were too weak to finish the nightmare off.

Stepping in as Kit slumped back against his sister for support, Dorian looked down at the firmly beaten monster lying defeated at his feet. He crouched down and reached over to forcibly wrench the remaining ceremonial sword from the creature’s hand.

‘You may have made me to be docile,’ he told the thing, voice no louder than it needed to be, ‘but it was my mother that taught me to be honest.’ He dismissed his own claymore and turned the nightmare director’s sword around in his hand. ‘You should know from experience that I follow through on my threats.’

He got back up to his feet and gently placed the tip of the blade to the creature’s rasping throat.

‘Sleep well, Director,’ he said, giving Hallward a final, resolute smile. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

With that, he pressed the blade firmly down and pulled it to the side, letting out a long, cathartic sigh as the nightmare at his feet finally went still and began dissolving in its entirety to mist.

Casting the monster’s sword to one side and listening to it clang against the stone of the half-remade wall, Dorian met Kit’s gaze, the two of them sharing the sense of righteous conquest with a mutual, silent nod.

Taking a small pouch out from within his coat pocket, Dorian stepped through the shrinking pool of dusty mist and walked over to the empty cage by the telescope. Fiddling it open, he gently poured the ashes within into the pouch, before carefully tying it shut and sliding it back into his pocket for safekeeping.

‘Try to ignore the pain,’ he said, letting his voice carry over his shoulder to the siblings behind him. ‘It won’t exactly heal, but it’ll go away if you can keep your focus on something else.’