A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

those ghosts were
doomed to an eternity trapped within that murky prison.
    The naked creature that traversed the rough path formed
by the fallen dragons was a match to their mass, yet bound
to the earth, and it walked on two bowed legs, the thighs
thick as thousand-year-old trees. The width of its shoulders
was equal to the length of a Tartheno Toblakai's height;
from a thick neck hidden beneath a mane of glossy black
hair, the frontal portion of the head was thrust forward –
brow, cheekbones and jaw, and its deep-set eyes revealed
black pupils surrounded in opalescent white. The huge arms
were disproportionately long, the enormous hands almost
scraping the ground. Its breasts were large, pendulous and
pale. As it strode past the battered, rotting carcasses, the
motion of its gait was strangely fluid, not at all lumbering,
and each limb was revealed to possess extra joints.
    Skin the hue of sun-bleached bone, darkening to veined
red at the ends of the creature's arms, bruises surrounding
the knuckles, a lattice-work of cracked flesh exposing the
bone here and there. The hands had seen damage, the result
of delivering devastating blows.
    It paused to tilt its head, upward, and watched as three
dragons sailed the air high amidst the rolling clouds, appearing
then disappearing in the smoke of the dying realm.
    The earth-bound creature's hands twitched, and a low
growl emerged from deep in its throat.
    After a long moment, it resumed its journey.
    Beyond the last of the dead dragons, to a place where rose
a ridge of hills, the largest of these cleft through as if a giant
claw had gouged out the heart of the rise, and in that crevasse
raged a rent, a tear in space that bled power in necrous streams.
The malice of that energy was evident in the manner in which
it devoured the sides of the fissure, eating like acid into the
rocks and boulders of the ancient berm.
    The rent would soon close, and the one who had last
passed through had sought to seal the gate behind him. But
such healing could never be done in haste, and this wound
bled anew.
    Ignoring the virulence pouring from the rent, the
creature strode closer. At the threshold it paused again and
turned to look back the way it had come.
    Draconean blood hardening into stone, horizontal sheets
of the substance, already beginning to separate from the
surrounding earth, to lift up on edge, forming strange, disarticulated
walls. Some then began sinking, vanishing from
this realm. Falling through world after world. To reappear,
finally, solid and impermeable, in other realms, depending
on the blood's aspect, and these were laws that could not be
challenged. Starvald Demelain, the blood of dragons and the
death of blood.
    In the distance behind the creature, Kurald Emurlahn, the
Realm of Shadows, the first realm born of the conjoining of
Dark and Light, convulsed in its death-throes. Far away, the
civil wars still raged on, whilst in other areas the fragmenting
had already begun, vast sections of this world's fabric
torn away, disconnected and lost and abandoned – to either
heal round themselves, or die. Yet interlopers still arrived
here, like scavengers gathered round a fallen leviathan,
eagerly tearing free their own private pieces of the realm.
Destroying each other in fierce battles over the scraps.
    It had not been imagined – by anyone – that an entire
realm could die in such a manner. That the vicious acts of
its inhabitants could destroy ... everything. Worlds lived
on, had been the belief – the assumption – regardless of the
activities of those who dwelt upon it. Torn flesh heals, the
sky clears, and something new crawls from the briny muck.
    But not this time.
    Too many powers, too many betrayals, too vast and all-consuming
the crimes.
    The creature faced the gate once more.
    Then Kilmandaros, the Elder goddess, strode through.
    ***
     
    The mined K'Chain Che'Malle demesne
after the fall of Silchas Ruin
     
    Trees were exploding in the bitter cold that descended like
a shroud, invisible yet palpable, upon this wracked,
devastated forest.
    Gothos had no difficulty following the path of the battle,
the successive clashes of two Elder Gods warring with the
Soletaken dragon, and as the Jaghut traversed its mangled
length, he brought with him the brutal chill of Omtose
Phellack, the Warren of Ice. Sealing the deal, as you asked of
me, Mael. Locking the truth in place, to make it more than
memory. Until the day that witnesses the shattering of Omtose
Phellack