Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 866: The Shutter

"What is it?" Almond asked her.

The old woman held her arms tight around herself.

"He called it the Shutter," she said. "He told me about it once. He said every door has to close one day, and he’d made one that knew how."

Big D was already moving.

"Everyone to the west stones," he said. "Anyone who can fight. The rest go east, by the Door. Lily, that means you. Ainen."

"I’m here."

"Keep the pot on. Keep her with you." Big D nodded at the old woman. "And keep your hand on that thread. If the Door starts to go, I want to know."

Ainen put one hand flat on his chest. His face had gone pale.

"It’s already thinner," he said.

They saw the Shutter at sunrise.

It came over the western grass like the shadow of a cloud. It was long and flat and wide, dark brown and dull, and it moved without legs.

It slid. It lay close against the ground and rippled forward, the way a cloth moves when someone pulls it across a table.

In the middle of it ran a seam. It was a long pale line, pressed shut, like two lips.

Where it passed, the grass flowers closed.

They closed in a wave ahead of it, white and yellow, folding up their petals as if night had come.

A flock of small brown birds lifted out of the grass in front of it. They got ten feet up, and then they folded their wings against their sides and dropped.

"Here it comes," said Corvin.

His mouth shut.

Almond saw it happen. Corvin’s teeth closed with a click. He tried to open it, and his face went red, and nothing moved.

Then Almond’s own eyes closed.

He did not tell them to. They shut the way a door shuts in the wind, all at once, and he could not open them. He put his hands up to his face.

His fingers would not open either. They had curled into fists, hard and tight, and the more he tried to open them, the tighter they shut.

He tried to call out. His mouth was shut too.

All around him in the dark, he heard people stumbling. Someone fell. Nobody screamed, because nobody could open their mouth to scream. There was only the sound of bodies hitting the grass, and of hard breathing through noses.

He did not have his eyes. But he had his orbs.

Unclosed.

He had made it from the Lull’s eyelid, back when the whole party had lain down in the grass to sleep forever. Nothing can close your eyes.

His eyes opened.

The light hurt. He blinked, and he could blink, and his eyes stayed open after. He could see.

The whole west side of the ring was on the ground or swaying on its feet. Two hundred fighters stood with their eyes shut and their fists clenched at their sides.

Corvin was beside him, face red, mouth locked, white hand jammed into a fist against his chest. Sevrand was down on one knee. The wanderer stood still with his eyes closed and his hands in fists, and for once he was not smiling.

Beyond the white stones, the Shutter had stopped.

It lay flat against the grass, right up against the line, the way the Sunder had lain like a dog by a door. It did not try to cross. It did not need to. Its seam was pointed at the great Door behind them.

Almond turned his head and looked.

The light on the Door was narrowing.

It had been wide and bright a few minutes ago, coming down from the top in the color nobody could name. Now the bright line in the middle was thinner. It was closing slowly, from both sides, like two hands pressing together.

Ravengard was on the road behind it.

Carry.

Almond reached for the people around him. He did not reach with his hands. He reached the way he had reached for the whole party in the Lull’s sleep, for everyone he could hold.

Corvin. Big D. Sevrand. The wanderer. Rudra. Hessa.

He took them, and he carried what Unclosed gave him across to them.

Corvin’s eyes opened.

Then Big D’s. Then Rudra’s, and Sevrand’s, and the wanderer’s. Hessa’s eyes opened last, and she turned her head at once toward the Shutter. She did not need eyes to see it. But now she could see Almond too.

Their mouths were still shut. Their hands were still fists. Almond could not carry what he did not have.

It was enough.

Big D looked at the Shutter. Then he looked at the Door. Then he looked at Almond, and nodded once.

Hessa grabbed Almond’s arm with her fist. She could not open her hand, so she knocked her knuckles against him instead. She pointed with her whole arm at the Shutter’s middle, at the long pale seam.

Then she knocked twice, and pointed at the edge of it, on the north side. A small dark ridge ran along its rim there, thicker than the rest.

Almond did not know what it meant. But Hessa was looking at it the way she looked at things she had found in the dark.

Rudra stepped forward.

He could not speak, so he did not try. He turned his body until he faced the Shutter, and set his feet.

True Heading.

Almond felt the pull of it. It was not a voice. It was a direction, and every one of them could feel it. That way. Forward, at the thing on the grass.

They went.

They went over the white stones in a line: Almond, Big D, Corvin, Rudra, Sevrand and the wanderer, with Hessa at the back. Nobody could open their hands to hold a weapon. They went anyway.

The Shutter felt them come.

The seam in its middle twitched. The dull brown skin of it rippled, and the pull from it grew harder. Almond felt his eyes try to close again and fought it.

Unclosed held. But it held like a man holding a door against a wind, and he could feel the wind getting stronger.

Big D reached it first.

He did not try to open his fists. He brought them down together on the Shutter’s rim, like a hammer.

Endure.

The rim buckled under the blow. The Shutter heaved up off the grass. It was thin, as thin as leather, and under it there was nothing, only a darker shadow on the ground.

It lifted its far edge and swung it at Big D like a blanket thrown over a bed.

The wanderer stepped into it.

He did not block. He did not raise his fists. The heavy brown edge came down on him, and it slid off him, and went back the way it had come.

Return.

It came down on the Shutter’s own seam.

The Shutter jerked. The seam clenched tighter. For a moment, Almond felt the pull on his eyes go slack.

Behind him, the light on the Door flickered.

He did not look back. He did not have to. He could see it on Big D’s face.

Sevrand was on his knees beside the Shutter’s north edge.

He had one fist pressed against the ground. In the other, he held something. Almond saw him force it open. It took everything he had.

His knuckles went white, and his arm shook, and his face went dark red. But one finger at a time, his hand came open.

In it lay the small gray stone from the Sunder.

Sevrand looked at it. Then he looked at the long pale seam pressed shut in the middle of the Shutter.

Almond saw him understand.

The Sunder had parted things. It had made everything that was held together come apart.

Spear.

Sevrand pushed the imprint into the stone.

The stone folded in on itself in his open palm. It went round and hard and white, with a thin gray line down the middle of it, like a crack in ice.

The words came to all of them at once.

[Power Orb created: Parting Spear]

[Quality: C]

[Whatever this spear strikes comes apart from whatever holds it shut.]

[Life Rank: F → C]

Sevrand closed his hand on the orb. The spear came into it.

It was not the thin shaking spear of light from the camp. It was long and white and steady, with a gray line down the shaft, and it did not hurt him to hold.

He stood up.

Hessa knocked on Almond’s arm again, hard. She pointed at the dark ridge on the north rim, right in front of Sevrand. Then she pointed at the seam.

Almond understood at last. The ridge was where the seam began. It was the knot at the end of a stitch.

He grabbed Sevrand by the shoulder and pointed.

Sevrand looked. He did not need to be told twice.

He drove the Parting Spear down into the dark ridge at the end of the seam.

The seam opened.

It came apart from the north end, like a stitch pulled out of cloth.

It ran open all the way down the Shutter’s middle, one long pale line splitting wide, and the brown skin on either side of it peeled back. The whole thing came open like a book falling open in the wind.

There was nothing inside it. There was only the grass under it, and the sky over it.

Then it was only skin. It lay flat on the grass in two halves and did not move.

Almond’s hands opened.

All around the ring, people gasped. Mouths came open, and eyes, and hands. A soldier on the grass behind the white stones let out a shout that went on and on, because he could. A child somewhere was crying, loudly, at last.

The wild grass flowers opened in a wave going out from where the Shutter lay.

Almond looked for Lily. She was at the foot of the Door with Kayla, standing, with her eyes open and one hand on her stomach. She lifted her other hand to him.

Corvin sat down hard in the grass and worked his mouth open and shut.

"Never," he said, "do that to me again."

"I didn’t do it," said Almond.

"I’m telling everybody."

Almond turned around.

The Door stood behind them in the morning light. The line of brightness down its middle was thin. For a long moment, it stayed thin, and nobody breathed.

Then it widened.

It opened from the middle, slow and steady, the way it always had. The color nobody had a name for came pouring down it again.

At the foot of the Door, Ainen sat back on his heels with his hand still on his chest, and let out a long breath.

The first of Ravengard came out of the light an hour later.

They came stumbling and frightened, carrying each other, and most of them were crying. They had felt the Door close around them on the road. They had felt it start to squeeze. They did not know why it had stopped.

Nobody told them to go east.

When the last of them had come out, and the light on the Door went quiet and dim, every person in the ring heard the voice.

It was the voice that had weighed their souls, the first day. It had not spoken to all of them at once since then.

[All who climbed have crossed.]

[The Door rests.]

There was a long pause. Then it spoke again, and this time Almond thought it sounded different. It sounded almost careful.

[A Sovereign walks.]