[Water and Earth to fight Air and Fire,] said that voice in my head when the pain finally began to recede. [A weapon for a champion. In this battle: that champion is you, my child.]

The weapon was light in my hand, and I felt it was a part of me. I swung it, experimentally, and it sizzled through the air, glowing with power. Knowledge also became mine: knowledge of weak points, places that were vulnerable, and how those vulnerabilities could be exploited.

Hmmm… I thought, putting it all together. We’ve chopped them up before, but we’ve never done it quite so… thoroughly.

[The weapon will indeed make you thorough. We already know dissecting the beasts is not enough to contain the enemy,] the creature warned. [They have learned to call too effectively, and too many are willing to risk themselves putting my cousins together for the power they offer. We must make their inevitable destruction more permanent.]

I nodded, understanding. Nothing could kill the children of Air and Fire. But that just meant we had to be ever more creative in our approach.

Hefting my axe, I strode forward. I could see both the King and Queen—Red and White—at opposite ends of the battlefield. Siblings and lovers, they used humans and supernaturals alike to stage their deadly games of chess. Creating strife, fueling wars, whispering in dark voices of plots despicable and weapons obscene, the spawn of violence begat the violence that was their nature. Always on opposite sides of the battle, they would come together at the end to fuck over the carnage they’d inspired.

Let’s see how powerful they are without a torso, I mused, feeling my labrys pulse with my own strength, my own determination. Then I cut to the left, towards the King. He was the weaker of the two, and I’d seen the Queen tear one of my best friends apart with her bare hands.

I was saving her for dessert.

CHAPTER THREE

I, Jane True, came back to myself with a gasp. Crowded around me, all with a hand on Blondie’s bare back, the others also came to themselves one at a time.

“Bloody hell,” rasped Magog. “You took on the Red and the White single handedly?”

“Hardly,” Blondie said. “I had help.”

“The labrys was yours,” I interrupted, feeling like a thief.

“It was,” Blondie said. “But I gave it up centuries ago, and gladly. You are its champion now, Jane.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You just gave it up?”

“It’s got a life of its own, in many ways. You’ll see. When I needed it, and it thought I was what it needed, it was there for me. Then, one day, it wasn’t. The Red and the White had been defeated for so long, they’d become only stories to frighten children. I guess the labrys thought its time was over. Now that it knows its not, I guess it needed a new champion.”

“But why?” I begged, suddenly seeing an out… and it was an out I desperately wanted. “Why can’t I give it back to you? Why can’t you be the champion again?”

Throughout my pleading, Blondie had been patiently shaking her head. “Not how it works, Jane. It chose you. Which tells me that this war doesn’t need me, at least not in that capacity. Besides, it’s not mine to give away or to take. It’s the creature’s, and he gave it to you.”

I started to argue with her, ready to remind her that the idea of me with an ax, fighting the forces of evil, was patently ridiculous. It was like arming a wiener dog with lasers. Before I could start, however, Anyan’s elbow nudged me in the ribs. Only then did I look around to see Gog, Magog, and Hiral staring at me with rapt attention.

“So the stories are true,” Gog rumbled. “Another champion has arisen.” The coblynau gave me a speculative stare, his striations pulsing darkly.

Then he stood up and bowed.

To me.

And then Magog followed him.

I stared at their bent heads, horrified.

“What are you doing? Get up!” I demanded. The sight of them genuflecting before me was terrifying.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Magog rasped. “You are in our stories. You have been foretold.”

Panicking, I looked to Blondie for help. The Original merely shrugged.

“It was pretty obvious that someone, sometime, would manage to cobble together the Red and the White. And at that point we’d need a new champion. It wasn’t exactly divination to put that together,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, Gog and Magog’s strange behavior abruptly forgotten, “what do you mean by cobbled together?”

Blondie began talking as Gog and Magog took their seats again, exchanging long looks with each other.

“You already know, Jane, how there are relics of dead Elemental beings that have enormous power.”

I nodded, remembering what I’d seen in Blondie’s tattoo of the Great Schism—the moment when the humans originally gifted or mutated with the ability to use some of the elemental forces around them had been split up into the factions we now knew. She’d used the horn of a dead Fire elemental, the fossil of a being that had been pure elemental force.

“Yes, I know their bits can pack a punch. But you said cobbled together. Are you saying that if we put together enough parts of those creatures, they’d live again?” I hazarded.

“In the case of the Red and the White, yes. Think about it,” Blondie said, wearily. “Those creatures were not… us. They’re not necessarily organic. They’re born of the powers that shaped life; that shaped our planet. And they’re elementals. Does fire ever truly die? Can you kill a breeze?”

I shuddered.

“So is it just the Red and the White, or can all remains come alive again?” I asked, horrified. Because if so, we were fucked. Our every waking minute would be spent on an endless hunt: Jarl and Morrigan trying to uncover and awaken various bits of dead things, while we tried to stop them.

“Thankfully, it’s just the Red and the White,” Blondie said, much to my relief. “Most are really dead. For the children of Earth and Water, death was always final, even if their remains carried power. As for Fire, eventually even the fiercest blaze can be tamped out.”

“What about Air?” Anyan asked.

“That’s where it gets tricky. The bad news is: it’s impossible to kill Air’s children. The good news is: it doesn’t matter. They all sort of dissolved of themselves, eventually, joining their mother in the wind.”

What Blondie said was sad, but also poetic and rather beautiful, and I could see we all thought it so. Except for Hiral.

“Don’t look relieved,” the little creature squeaked in his horrible voice, his long nose bobbing obscenely. “What Cyntaf is about to say is, ‘Well, almost all.’ She likes to do that, you know.”

Blondie gave Hiral a dirty look, to which he responded with a backwards peace sign, his long, blue-clawed fingers almost as long as his forearms.

“Well,” Blondie said, her voice laced with sarcasm, “almost all, indeed, when it comes to the Red and the White.” Then her tone grew serious again. “They’d be destroyed, but—like air feeding a fire—they would rekindle. So we tried imprisoning them. Always, inevitably, they got free. Usually by convincing some human or supernatural to help them. Even the few times we’d managed to sort of chop them up, before I had the weapon, they just dissolved and reformed somewhere else in a few decades time,” Blondie said.

“Cyntaf, we don’t understand,” Magog rasped, interrupting Blondie. “Our legends say you destroyed them, as the champion…”

“The legends lie. I didn’t destroy them,” Blondie corrected. “The labrys just gave me the power to chop them up into so many pieces, so quickly, that parts of them were like slurry.”

I grimaced at that image, imagining a Slurpee of Evil.

“So why innit that destroyed? It sounds destroyed to me,” Gog said.

Blondie shrugged. “The ax was the most effective weapon we’d ever used, but still there were parts that wouldn’t be… slurried. And even some of the destroyed parts kept coming back together, like in a modern-day horror film. Something about the ax kept them bound to that cut up form. So we divided them up and hid the pieces, as far and as wide as possible.”

“What happens if they get put back together?” I asked.

“That’s the thing,” Blondie said. “I don’t think they can be. There was enough that we really did destroy, and that couldn’t reform. I don’t know how they can be put back together. But someone’s looking for those pieces, anyway. And the pieces like to help.”

“Help?” Anyan asked.

“Yes. That’s the problem with the Red and the White. Well, that’s the other problem besides the fact they’re pure evil and they enjoy bloodshed and carnage—even cut up they can still speak to people. It’s like they send off vibes that make people want to help them, oftentimes without knowing what they’re doing or why.”

“So you cut them up a while ago, but they’ve still been able to get people to do stuff for them?” I asked.