Arcane Exfil Chapter 92: No Sin Too Great (Patreon)

Several weeks ago

Where did it all go wrong?

Mack had asked himself the same question dozens of times before, but never beneath the light of a ring galaxy.

It faced him head-on, dominating the sky through wisps of his own galaxy’s band, its ring structure unmistakable from this angle. The outer rim burned bright blue, fading inward to a faint red bullseye.

If he remembered his astronomy right, a ring like this meant another galaxy had gone straight through the disk and sent the gas surging outward. And given the angle, his own galaxy was the likely culprit. Even if it was just a satellite that had wandered too close, the fact remained the same: this was a beautiful sight.

He had first seen a ring galaxy in an astronomy encyclopedia as a kid, in a pretty picture that had stuck with him ever since. A few years later, he’d upgraded to YouTube and Syfy. He’d assumed that was as close as he would ever get to one outside a documentary, or something like Star Trek.

Beauty like this wasn’t meant for a man like him. So why did he, of all people, get to enjoy such a privilege?

The kid at the docks had only been there to work – to earn a living for himself and his family. Even if there really had been no other choice, it didn’t change the outcome. The same went for all the doctors who had told him there was nothing he could have done to change what had happened to his son, but that was all platitude bullshit.

There was nothing he could have done at that moment, that much might have been true. But that moment never would’ve happened if he had simply vacationed in a city, somewhere they could have gotten to a hospital when things went wrong. And if that counted, then why stop there? The kid at the docks might not have gotten possessed if only they’d gotten there earlier, or pushed faster, or swept the place differently.

Same with Al-Jadira. By the time everything went bad, maybe there really hadn’t been another way out. But there had no doubt been a hundred ways not to get there in the first place.

He was guilty, through and through. Not only in what he’d done, but also in what he had failed to do.

“Hard to sleep beneath such a sky.”

Mack recognized Melnar’s voice before he turned. “Sky’s not usually the problem.”

“Aye,” Melnar said. “I suppose it seldom is.”

Mack looked back toward the ring. “It seems... wasted on me.”

“The birds neither sow nor reap. Nobody’s yet called the harvest wasted on them.”

Mack closed his eyes and sighed. He couldn’t argue – not logically, and certainly not with the energy left within him.

“Would you mind if I sat?” Melnar asked.

“Go ahead.”

Melnar lowered himself down onto the stone beside him. “I have not slept well in some years,” he said. “A consequence of age, I am given to understand.”

Mack kept his eyes on the galaxy. He wasn’t in the mood to be comforted. Then again, he wasn’t in the mood for much of anything, least of all running off an old man for being kind.

“Figured a country full of mages would’ve fixed that by now,” Mack said.

“One would think so. It has remedied a great deal. My knees are not among its triumphs.” Melnar shifted on the stone as if to prove it. “It is said there is no remedy for time. Whether that is the truth of the matter, or merely what we are told, I have never determined.”

Mack didn’t really have a response for that, so he just nodded.

Melnar sighed. “Humor an old man. Suppose there were such a spell. Suppose a man might have his years returned to him, as far back as he cared to go. Would you take it?”

Mack finally turned from the sky.

For a second, he let himself wonder if it was real. This world had already shown him more than enough things he’d have called impossible a year ago, and maybe this was one more. But if Celdorne had a spell like that, they would’ve used it a long time ago. God knew they’d had reason to.

But if it wasn’t real, then why did Melnar ask – let alone like he truly meant it? Mack didn’t have it in him to brush that off. So he went along with it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d take it. Don’t know anyone who wouldn’t. But I’m guessing you didn’t come out here just to mess around with hypotheticals.”

“I came out to see the sky, the same as you.” Melnar let that sit. “Though I’ll grant it’s an old question with me. The captain under whom I first served put it to me the night before we marched on the Khagarians. I answered as you did, and thought little of it.”

Mack wasn’t sure whether that was supposed to make him feel better or worse.

“He had put it to a great many men before me. Soldiers, for the most part. But thieves also, and deserters, and men awaiting the rope. Publicans and sinners. Men of whom the worst was said, and of whom, in some cases, the worst was true.” Melnar looked up at the night sky. “He told me he had never in all his years received a different answer.”

Mack could guess where this was going. Some version of there still being a little good in everybody, no matter what they’d done. Maybe that was even true, but he didn’t see what difference it made.

“There they stood, every one of them, wishing it undone. The good that they would, they had not done, and the evil that they would not, that they had done, and every man of them knew it. I confess it troubled me. If a man were truly wicked, one would expect him content in his wickedness, or at the least indifferent to it. I came no nearer to an answer for it than that, and I had a great many years to consider the matter.”

Mack said nothing.

“It was not until I had a great transgression of my own that I understood him. A man cannot wish a thing undone unless some part of him knows it ought never to have been done. That knowing is a light, and it is that which the dark has not yet snuffed.”

Melnar looked Mack in the eye. “It is that light which leads a man to repentance, though not every sorrow is repentance. It is not the cost of the thing that must grieve him, for a man may weep over a bad bargain and be no better for it, but that it was done at all; and in one so grieved no hardness abides.”

That much was probably true, and Mack could follow the rest of it well enough. Not all the way, though.

Because when it was taken to the extreme, it meant the worst men who ever lived had the same spark.

“The real bad ones, the monsters,” Mack said. “People who hurt kids. How could someone like that ever be forgiven?”

“By asking,” Melnar said.

Mack honestly expected a much longer answer. There wasn’t a lot to argue with in two words. Once more, he didn’t have anything to say.

Melnar studied Mack for a moment, then added, “There is no sin too great to forgive. Only hearts too hardened to repent.”

Mack let that sit for a while. He’d expected to find the catch in it by now, but there was none. The premise really was that simple. Insane, unbelievable, offensive, even, but simple nonetheless. Repenting, he could just about picture. Asking was the part he couldn’t see.

“Say I did ask,” he said. “A guy like me. You’re telling me somebody’s actually on the other end of that?” He shook his head. “That’d take a miracle.”

Melnar didn’t answer right away. Instead he drew a breath and looked down at his hands. Only after clasping them together did he begin: “Your friend Walker tells me you have received the Gospel where you come from, or something near enough to it. I have not asked after the particulars. But if it is the same, you may know this one already.”

Mack wasn’t much of a believer, but he knew enough to at least be familiar with the general story. He gave a nod.

“There were men in a boat once, sent out ahead onto the sea, and they had been at the oars all night against the wind. Christ came to them walking upon the water, and one of them, called Peter, asked to be brought out to him.”

Mack couldn’t tell if that was the man’s name here or if the old man was just using the one Walker had given him. He decided he didn’t want to know badly enough to ask.

Melnar continued, “And he was told to come. So he went out upon the water, and had gone some way before he looked to the wind and began to sink.” The old man turned his head slightly. “Now, a man might expect a prayer to be a fine thing, composed and reverent and of some length.”

He gave a small laugh.

“He said only this: ‘Lord, save me,’ and was caught before he had finished saying it.”

He looked back up at the galaxy.

“Miracles may exist, Mack. I have seen one or two things I would call by no other name. But I have come to think the greater wonder is that we so seldom ask.”

***

Present Day

Everything hurt.

Mack came to on his back with blood in his mouth and a fair amount of the plaza on top of him. Even through the numbness all around his body, he could tell he’d broken quite a few things. He didn’t know how long he’d been out, but it must not have been long, going by the sound of things.

The look of things was even worse. Cole lay crumpled on the stairs with one leg bent the wrong way, reaching out for Elina, who had gotten herself onto her elbows. She crawled toward Cole, leaving a trail of blood behind her. Miles and Ethan he couldn’t even find from this angle.

The situation couldn’t have been more FUBAR.

As hopeless as it looked, though, there was actually a way to kill the Vampire Lord for good. Theoretically, anyway. It was a spell Mack had worked out some days ago as a means of putting down possibly even the Demon Lord itself, but he had never once had the chance to test it.

The underlying theory was sound, at the least. By pulling enough moisture in overhead and forcing an updraft through it, he could build a charge in the column and run it down into a plasma lance. Whether he could actually hold that lance together was another matter, and one he had no way of knowing.

Never mind the mana it would take. Hell, he could barely even feel his own wand.

There he was, then – flat on his back, holding a solution he couldn’t execute. All he could do was watch.

He’d been there, done that before. Something he couldn’t stop, happening to someone he was supposed to keep alive, and him with a front-row seat. His son, then. His team, now. Between the two of them, that was about his whole life.

The whole hopeless mess reminded him of a line Melnar had left him a few nights after the first, once the talks had become a regular thing.

Come to me, all you that labor and are burdened.

It dragged the first night up with it – what Peter had said when he started going under.

That was enough to get him moving. He got an arm under himself and shoved the rubble off. It felt like lifting a car off his own chest, even with physical enhancement running through his body. The rubble ground off him and cracked against the floor, more than loud enough for the footsteps across the plaza to change direction.

“Rise, then,” K’hinnum said, somewhere in front of him. “Let hope bear you up once more, that I may cast it down with you.”

Mack couldn’t be bothered to respond. It took most of what he had just to get back up, never mind snapping back. He got a knee under him, then a foot, and came up with the wand already in hand, if only because it was the one thing he hadn’t let go of.

His arm shook getting it up. There was no spell to put behind it, so he put the only thing he had left, and let the mana go. Its warmth evaporated outward like water off a hot stone.

“Lord, save them,” he said, barely a whisper.

He stopped. That wasn’t all of it, and he knew it.

“And me,” he forced out. “I know what I’ve done. I’m asking anyway. Save us. Please.”

The hair on his arms stood up. Overhead, the sky had begun to flicker.

There was one more line he knew, from a prayer he’d rattled off every Sunday as a kid without really understanding it. He sure understood it now.

“…deliver us from evil.”

That final word took the last of his mana, and with it, his ability to stand.

His legs folded, dropping him onto his side with the wand still in hand. His head started pounding almost right away. He knew that one – it came with mana exhaustion, and it usually meant he was about to be out for a while. But not quite yet. He still retained enough consciousness to keep his eyes open, long enough to see the end.

Dust crawled across the floor past his face, all of it headed for the base of the column – toward K’hinnum. A blast of heat soon followed, like somebody had opened an oven over him, before suddenly dissipating. A cylindrical barrier shimmered into place around the Vampire Lord, rising from the floor straight into the base of the storm.

The Vampire Lord didn’t even have the time to react before everything went white.