He turned around unhurriedly.
“You’re early,” he said. “I like that. Punctuality is a dying art.”
The mask’s painted eyes were empty. Something looked through them anyway.
“Three of you.” He tilted the bull’s head to consider us, one at a time. “The dead one’s clothes still smell like all of you. Tell me, did he scream? I always wonder if the priests scream.”
“You knew the robed guy,” I said.
“I know all of them. Part of the job.” He sounded almost bored by the question. “I’ll admit, I didn’t think he would lose to a bunch of kids.”
On your guard.
Azazel’s voice had lost every trace of its usual dryness.
This is not the priest from your alley. It is not anything close.
I knew that. I could feel a pressure building behind my eyes before he had even moved.
“What are you?” Nox asked. Flat.
“Wrong question.” He sounded pleased that Nox had asked anyway. “But I like that you asked instead of running. I’ll be generous.”
He reached up and unclipped the mask without ceremony, using the same motion as taking off reading glasses.
The face underneath was younger than the voice. A sharp jaw, ginger hair, and an old scar running from one eyebrow into his hairline. Nothing about it looked wrong except the eyes. They had the specific stillness of something that had stopped being surprising a very long time ago.
“I’m the one your dead friend answered to,” he said.
Lisa made a small sound, not quite a word.
“The spear,” she said, mostly to herself. “Tell me you don’t have a barbed spear somewhere on you.”
His eyebrows went up in genuine delight.
He reached behind his back and drew something out of nothing at all.
Crimson. Long, wickedly barbed along the entire length of the shaft. The metal caught the grey morning light and made it look like something else, something older and hungrier than daylight had any business being near. Every barb curved backward, built for one purpose.
Nothing that went in on that spear was ever meant to come out clean.
“Gáe Bolg,” Lisa said. Her voice had gone very thin. “You’re Cú Chulainn.”
“There it is.” He sounded delighted, spinning the spear once in his hand like it weighed nothing at all. “A girl who reads. Most of you just die confused.”
“You’re supposed to be a myth.”
“I’m supposed to be many great things.” He turned the spear again. “A hound. A boy who killed a smith’s hound and served in its place as punishment.” A slow, easy smile spread across his face. “A warrior who became something impossible to recognize the moment the fighting got interesting.”
“The finest thing this world’s stories ever produced,” he added, “and I say that as a fact, not a boast. I’ve met every other so-called legend your kind still whispers about. None of them could hold a candle to me on my worst day.”
“You sound very sure of that,” Lisa said from somewhere behind me.
“I’ve earned the right to be sure of it.” He said it lightly, stating an old fact rather than bragging. “There are exactly two beings in this world I respect. One wears a bull’s mask heavier than mine. The other doesn’t wear one at all.”
Something flickered behind his eyes, there and gone.
“Everyone else gets this version of me,” he said. “The version that doesn’t have to try.”
I felt it before I understood what was happening.
A crushing weight settled onto my body.
“Nox,” I tried to say. My mouth worked. My feet didn’t.
None of us moved. Lisa’s hand froze mid-gesture. Nox stood locked with his weight shifted for a step he never got to take.
He has not even attacked you. This is only him existing near you.
“That’s better,” Cú Chulainn said, conversational, as if we’d just quieted down for a lecture he was pleased to finally give. “Now you can actually listen. I do hate showing off.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He crouched, patient, and let the spear’s tip touch the grey dirt without sinking into it.
“Heroes were never anything but people who woke up one day and found a gate,” he said. “People who got lucky, lived long enough for someone to write a story about it.”
He looked up at me. “You think this is new. It used to hide better. People called them labyrinths, lairs, anything but what they actually were, because nobody had the word for it yet.”
“Why are you telling us this?” I managed. My voice came out small.
“Because it changes nothing whether you know it or not. I knew exactly what I was agreeing to, and I’d do it again.”
His smile had nothing kind in it at all. “That is the part that should actually frighten you, rather than the spear.”
The weight lifted.
“Now,” Nox said, moving.
There was no plan behind it. There hadn’t been time to make one.
Nox went low and fast toward the blind side. Lisa’s hands were dropping to the earth. I came in high with Nadir dark. All three of us converged on him from three different angles at once, relying on nothing but instinct and the desperate hope that three directions at the same time might mean something a single direction never could.
He didn’t even choose which of us to deal with first. One movement from his spear, and the opening rush came apart before any of us had covered half the distance.
Nox took the first of it. He tried the trick that had worked on everything else that had ever come for him: the afterimage.
Cú Chulainn caught the real Nox by the throat before the copy had even finished fading.
“Oh, that’s cute,” he said, and he meant it, like a man complimenting a child’s drawing. “Genuinely. Best version of that trick I’ve seen from something your age.”
He slammed Nox into the dead ground hard enough to crack the dirt underneath him.
Nox didn’t get back up.
“Nox!” Lisa’s voice cracked on the name.
Cú Chulainn half-turned, looking for whoever was still standing.
It was the opening Nox had been counting on. He peeled off the ground like smoke.
Blood ran from the split above his eye. By the time it reached his jaw, it had stopped moving like blood at all, drawn out taut between two fingers into something closer to a wire, an edge on it that hadn’t been there a second ago.
Cú Chulainn caught his wrist without turning around, without even looking.
“Interesting trick,” he said again, and kicked him.
It didn’t look like a hard kick. Nox left the ground anyway and flew fifteen feet, and the tree that stopped him didn’t stop him gently.
Cú Chulainn turned toward Lisa, spear rising.
She didn’t run. She put both hands flat on the dead earth and said nothing at all, which frightened me more than screaming would have.
Grey fingers broke the soil in a ragged line. A dozen half-formed skeletons hauled themselves upright, putting themselves between him and Lisa.
“Oh, now this,” Cú Chulainn said, delighted. “I haven’t seen one of these in longer than I’d like to admit. Necromancy. How wonderfully out of fashion.”
He swung the spear in a flat, lazy arc. The first three skeletons came apart like wet paper. He walked through the wreckage and took out four more without breaking stride, bored, clearing brush he hadn’t wanted to deal with in the first place.
“Adorable effort,” he called over, not even looking at her. “Truly. If I were grading this on a curve for your species, I’d almost be impressed.”
Lisa circled through the bone dust, low and fast.
“Entomb.”
The ground closed over his boots. Solid bone locked around his ankles and calves in a single crushing grip.
“Noah, now!” Her voice cracked with the effort.
I was running. Nadir was dark before I reached him.
“Shadow Sword, First Form: Eclipse.”
The cut came up from underneath and the crescent went with it, both of them landing dead centre. Dust and grey dirt kicked up violently around both of us. For one full second, I let myself believe it had mattered.
The dust settled.
He was still standing where he had been. The bone restraint crumbled off his legs like it had never held anything at all. A single thin line across his chest knitted itself shut before I’d even finished exhaling.
He looked down at the closed wound, curious.
“That one I felt,” he said, and he didn’t sound angry. He sounded pleased. “Good. I was starting to worry you’d make me feel bad about this.”
I didn’t stop to be discouraged. Azazel had spent three years teaching me that the answer to a form that didn’t work was the next form.
“Second Form: Nightfall.”
Both hands overhead, carrying everything the Umbra could pull down out of the air and into the steel. It came down with four times its weight, aimed directly at his skull.
He caught it on the shaft of the spear. One hand, held out level, his feet unmoving because they didn't need to.
“Better,” he said from underneath a blow that should have gone through him and the ground beneath him. “That one has some weight in it. Who taught you that?”
I didn’t answer. I went sideways off the bind, and the third form was already moving.
“Third Form: Severing Dusk.”
The sweep went as wide as my arms would carry it. The edge kept going past where the steel ended, out into the air for two metres on either side. There was nowhere in front of me it didn’t cover.
So he stepped inside it.
He blinked forward through the arc and past the crescent, close enough that I could smell the robe burning where the residue had caught the hem. The cut passed harmlessly behind his shoulders and took down two trees that had done nothing to anyone.
“Ah,” he said from about a foot away. “There it is. You lot always build the big one wide.”
Noah, break contact.
“Wide is fine for a crowd.” The spear hadn’t moved yet, which frightened me more than if it had. “It’s a very poor argument against one man who’s willing to walk at you.”
Noah. Get back. Get back NOW.
I didn’t get the chance.
He raised the spear and released a fraction of its power. The ground answered like an earthquake.
A shockwave turned every remaining skeleton to fragments in a single heartbeat and caught Lisa at the edge of her spell, throwing her twenty feet into the dead grass. Something pale flickered along her ribs a half-second before she hit, there and gone before I could be sure I had seen it at all.
She didn’t get up either.
I was alone on my feet when he reached me.
“You first,” he said, almost kindly. “You’re the interesting one. I’d hate for you to miss it.”
I got Nadir up. It didn’t matter.
Something pale caught at my ribs a half-second too late to matter, there and gone the same way hers had been.
The spear went through my side before I understood it had moved.
The sound I made wasn’t a word.
Everything went white, then very far away. I heard Lisa scream my name from somewhere that felt like the other end of a long hallway, and felt myself hit the ground without ever getting back up.
NOAH.
I am taking over right now.
You just rest.
Everything went dark.