“So this Toland was your master?”

It had been still when she first surfaced in the green glow of the castle, but now the wind was furious; Eris had to shout to hear her own voice.

“No need to shout, Eris.” The vibration of the voice in her mind was a comfort against the howling storm. “I can hear your thoughts better than you. A whisper will suffice.” They stole furtively from hallway to hallway, past larders filled with slimy bones, through Banquet rooms empty as new coffins. Outside the gale tore past the windows, screaming in through narrow arrowslits and whipping through the gates of the fortress.

“Toland was a great collector of artifacts and arcana. The Hive appealed to him with their insipid tomes and languages.” The ghost was weak, his breath a rasp; he vibrated, warm and fragile, in her hands. “He beguiled you and your comrades with tales of impending danger and convinced you all that your might would be enough to crush the arms of Crota; we were all deceived by his lies.”

Eris paused at the gate leading out over the battlements; the gale rifled across the rampart with terrific force, and she was certain it would blow them from the parapet, over and down to the twisting oblivion below. She turned back, and froze.

Gliding, ethereal and lithe, the translucent green form of a giant apparition paced between the doors of the long hallway behind her. She stuffed the ghost into her cloak and shrank into a corner of the doorway, hiding as best she could in the jagged outcroppings of the wall. The vibrant form floated listlessly, immune to the terrific force of the wind, seeming to fade in and then out of reality; its crowned head besotted with 3 vibrant green jewels and immense horns that fluttered like moth wings; its hanging jaw slung to its waist; emerald blood seemed to ooze from its wounded loins, leaving a filthy trail in its wake. Its enormous head was filled on all sides with eyes, perhaps fifteen or twenty in number; as though, like a fly, it could see on all sides. But the creature, sloughing on hunched legs, with scaly arms dragging behind it on the floor, was seemingly blind. It appeared to limp through the walls, vaporously fading and folding into nothing and back again.

It drifted away from her, down the long central hall where she was hiding, than halted; lifting its face to the ceiling, it stood up, erect, towering 30 feet in the air, ostensibly sensing the ether with some strange nostril; then turning to look directly at her, its glowing eyes turned black. She caught her breath up and froze, but it seemed as though the creature could see through the walls of the nook she hid in: she felt paralyzed, naked before its hypnotic gaze.

Suddenly the air around her exploded in the sundering howl of a wounded god. The wind blasted into the fortress, and around her a thousand candles blazed in sudden emerald fire. She spun around and stumbled out the door.

The wind was ferocious and wicked; she clung with her cracked fingers, feebly cloying at the short parapet of the causeway, and scrambled along the spindly rampart. The suspended trail she clambered down led to a guard tower at the fortress entrance; from there, the fortress lay on the peak of a chain of suspended mountains, jutting up from the abyss. The bridge to the fortress led out into a barbican; from there, into the façade of an even taller mountain, dwarfing the fortress and barbican both.

The horrible howl of the apparition was nearly drowned by the wind as she reached the far guard tower; she looked back to see the castle bathed in a blazing inferno of green flame. The dead planet above her was exploding in black negative, and the halls of the sky’s vaults were aflame in blinding jade. The walls of the castle were moving; she realized now they were crawling with skeletal forms, climbing over each other and scrambling towards the rampart.

“Thrall!” shouted the ghost. “Hurry!”

She reached the guard tower, wrenching free a lever to the portcullis to slam it shut as the skeletal creatures massed on the causeway beyond; the wind blasted many of them off as they attempted to cross. In the far gateway, the phantasm bayed, its enflamed being growing inside the burning fortress.

“To the gate, Eris! They will try to raise the bridge and trap us here!” She turned, down the spiraling staircase, flying as fast as she dared; the screams of her pursuers echoing up and down the hollow shell of the tower. With every sundering break of the phantasm’s howl, her eyes burned, and the horrible glow of the castle grew brighter.

She reached the floor and raced out into the giant arch of the castle gateway. The bridge, out of the courtyard of the castle and down towards the barbican, glowed with green torches; she sprinted, through the howling inferno of flame and wind, out across it. Below her the abyss opened out into the horrible void of a netherworld, impossible to comprehend: like a giant maelstrom, it seemed to constantly swallow castle and mountain alike, as if the entire foundations of the world were forever collapsing into its firmament. The dizzying drop and blasting wind nearly carried her off into that abyss; and as she reached the last paces of the bridge, the entire castle collapsed into itself behind her, disintegrating into the void and leaving a great cliff face on the edge of the barbican; as it did, the dead star turned black, and with it, Eris was engulfed in darkness.

She ran, out of the wind and into the silence of the gate-fortress, and immediately the thundering echoes of her footsteps arrested her flight. Behind her, in the suddenly distant howl of the gale, she could still discern the scream of the apparition. The dead, lightless halls of the barbican were tomblike.

“Ghost,” she whispered, afraid to move in the darkness, “What was that monster?”

“I fear I can only contemplate at what my master has said of the Hive’s pantheon.” The ghost, too, seemed to whisper, the darkness so entire she could not even see its light in her hands. “Crota. Oryx. Perhaps something more terrible. We should not loiter here.”

Fine.

but Destiny had the most nonexistent story of all time. This is gold I tell you. Gold!

I am really really enjoying these.

Please don't stop writing them!

You writing style reminds me of Janet Fitch. Kudos!!

CC