Prologue
The world ended in less than seven days.
It started with a single microbe, carried by a small gust of wind that no one even noticed at the time. The first death occurred two hours later, when Besell, King of the Water House, let out his final, rasping breath. The sound would be echoed thousands of times over the next week, as the disease tumbled through the Elementals like a row of dominoes knocked over by some careless child. By the third day, every House had been stricken, and existence itself began to waiver. Since the beginning of time, the Elemental Phases had glued the universe together. They controlled the countless, interconnected processes that balanced nature. The Water, Fire, Earth, and Air Houses stood as the central fulcrum of life, with other Houses controlling everything else from Shadows to Time. Without the Elementals, nothing could survive. And now the Elementals were dying. Phases everywhere began whispering that it was the apocalypse. A plague sent to wipe out everything in one broad eraser stroke. The Fall. Panic spread as quickly as the disease. Doors were sealed shut with Phases still dying inside. Friends and relatives abandoned the sick, hoping to save themselves. Parents buried children in unmarked graves, already piled high with the dead. Everything from radiation to Oreo cookies was tried as the Phases searched for a cure. Nothing worked. Nearly everyone was sick. And the sickness invariably brought death. It was said nobody recovered from the Fall once it caught hold of them. A tell-tale grey cast colored the flesh of the dying, their skin shrinking against the skeleton as if the Fall sucked the life out of them from the inside. All across the Elemental realm, the Fall struck with a pitiless intensity. Too fast and too big to escape, it swept over every House. When the source of the disease was finally discovered, it was too late to stop it. Parald, usurper of the Air House, had released the microbe, but the Fall spread much further than he’d intended. Even the Elementals left to understand the betrayal could do nothing but watch as the dominos continued to fall around them. By the fifth day, the dead outnumbered the living ten to one. The survivors grew horribly immune to the bodies, barely noticing that they were now crowded around them. There were too many dead Phases to bury, and no one left to dig the graves, anyway. The Fire House built pyres so large that the remaining Phases in the Elemental realm could see them burning from every direction. None of the other Houses had the energy for even that much. Rumors festered as society crumbled. That Parald had somehow survived his own terrible creation. That Job, of the Earth House was the oldest Phase still alive and trying to re-form the Council of All Houses. That Tritone, Princess of the Water House had nearly been killed by an enraged mob, who blamed her for Parald’s treachery. As official communications went dark, the survivors in each House struggled just to keep going. Fewer Phases meant more work for those left behind. Usually, balancing the elements in nature was an automatic process, like swallowing or blinking. All the Phases in a House shared the burden of sustaining their element. Now, with the remaining Elemental population so very, very low, each Phase had to carry more of the total weight and it was dragging them down. The interconnected processes of nature fed into each other, creating a symbiotic whole. As blocks were pulled from the bottom of the pile, all of existence threatened to crumble. Tears and prayers were useless. No one knew who was in charge or what they should do now. Hatred grew in the hearts of many survivors. Some wished that the Fall would just take them, so the nightmare would end. Others stood in the middle of the chaos and screamed for what they had lost. Most were too traumatized by what they’d seen to do anything but sit quietly and wait for whatever came next. Six days after the Fall’s arrival, Cross, of the Shadow House knew that he’d just watched the extinction of his species. The universe passed the tipping point and there’d be no coming back for any of them, now. Bodies covered the Shadowland. More Phases than could ever be replaced. The shifting darkness of his homeland hid most of the shrunken expressions and sightless eyes of the Fall’s victims, but nothing could disguise the smell. Or the relentless silence. The world was over. Cross was fairly sure that he’d die soon, too. He’d somehow survived the Fall, but now the weight of all the Shadows would kill him. It was only a matter of time. The struggle to maintain every drop of darkness in the universe was crushing him. He couldn’t think straight from the pressure in his head. He rocked from the pain of it, his teeth clenched together in agony. Where before there had been hundreds of Shadow Phases to carry the burden, now there was only one. Cross was the last Shadow Phase alive. No one could sustain a House alone. He knew that in the small part of his brain that wasn’t overcome with pain and exhaustion. It was pointless to even try to hold on. If he just gave in, he could escape the hurt, and despair, and scenes of death. But, if Cross let go of the small ledge that he clung to in his mind, he’d take the rest of the universe tumbling into the abyss with him. If the Shadow House fell, so did all the others. The darkness was too important to too many other Houses. No night meant an endless day that the Light House would have to try and sustain. It meant the Wood House’s plants would be burned by the sun and die. That the rivers would evaporate too fast for the Water House to counteract. And so on, into infinity. No one would be able to stop the entire structure from instantly caving in like wet cardboard. Cross wasn’t sure why that mattered to him. The Elementals couldn’t recover from the consequences of the plague, anyway. Even the survivors of the Fall were nothing more than a genetic footnote, now. There were too few Phases for them to find Matches and successfully breed. Extinction had them in its grip. It was simply a matter of time. Besides, it wasn’t like Cross had ever been particularly thrilled with existence. He didn’t care enough about anything in the universe to mourn its passing. But, for some reason, he still fought to balance the load inside of him. If the dead Shadow Phases had been given a vote, Cross probably would’ve been the unanimous last choice for the sole survivor of the dystopia. Certainly, he’d always been the least popular member of his House. The bastard son of the Queen, Cross had been hated and abandoned from the day he was born. Yet, while the Fall had killed all the Phases around him, he’d been left untouched. Adults and children, rich and poor, men and women were indiscriminately cut down. But Cross remained immune for some reason that even he didn’t understand. One of the king’s last acts before he succumbed to the Fall was to order Cross’s execution. His stepfather had been enraged that Cross was still healthy while so many of the righteous members of the Shadow House fell. Unfortunately for King Vice, no one had been healthy enough at that point to carry out Cross’s beheading for him. Asshole. After the king died, a few sick Phases came after Cross in a deluded fury, blaming him for the Fall. His resistance to the plague somehow convinced them that he was in league with Parald. They tried to burn Cross’s home down as he slept. Then, when he stalked outside to ask what the hell their problem was, they’d come at him with knives. In the end, all three of his visitors wound up heaped onto the stacks of abandoned bodies. If any of the remaining Phases noticed that their missing heads didn’t exactly match the symptoms of deaths from the Fall, they didn’t mention it to Cross. That had been two days before, when there were still a few Shadow Phases clinging to life. The final victim of the Fall, an older woman named Mally, had finally given out that morning. Cross was now alone in the land of the dead. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that he should have gone for the beheading plan. His death was going to be even worse than the Phases who’d perished in the Fall. Not that he was surprised. It wasn’t like he’d ever done anything worthwhile or particularly deserving of mercy. As usual, it just flat-out sucked to be him. By the process of elimination, Cross was now the King of the Shadow House. His stepfather would roll over in his hastily dug grave if he knew who’d inherited the crown. Cross was too tired to appreciate that happy image, though. Cross’s home was little more than a shack, on the outskirts of the community. By law, he could now rightfully live in the palace, just as he’d always wished to as a child. Except, he didn’t even have the energy to pull himself onto his cot, let alone move all the way into his stepfather’s dreary castle. Instead, Cross just rocked back and forth, with his arms cradling his pounding skull, and fought the inevitable. When his grip on the Shadows finally slipped, Cross actually experienced a terrible sort of relief. He felt his control falter and the entire universe begin to topple. Cross closed his eyes in fatalistic acceptance as the darkness faded around him. For one eternal moment, there was nothing but the hot glare of light. It grew and grew; burning away all the formally cool, shaded places, eroding the Shadows like the waves of the ocean ate at a sandcastle. Cross collapsed face-first onto the dirt floor, his breath coming in short pants. As the Shadows escaped his power, he knew he would die, and he didn’t particularly care. He could rest now. It was over. Panic and terror echoed across the Elemental realm as the other Phases sensed the Shadow House fall. Cross felt a few of them attempt to stop the implosion and somehow hold up the Shadows themselves. He wondered why they even bothered to try. The world had ended. In their hearts they had to know it, just as he did. The epicenter of the apocalypse swirled directly over him. It spun faster and faster, tighter and tighter. Everything, everywhere was being pulled towards it, about to be swallowed by the black hole of oblivion. A strange calm overcame Cross as he lifted his head and watched the universe prepare to disappear into nothingness. Maybe it was time for someone to hit the reset button and start again. Maybe the next world would be better for whoever lived there. And that’s when Cross felt her. As all of existence circled him like water heading down a drain, he felt the woman’s presence in his mind. A soothing flicker of darkness in the relentless glare of destruction. Not the impersonal, cosmic peace that the abyss offered, but something real. Something just for him. His Phase-Match. Cross froze, his brain going blank with shock. Years of solitude, of being nothing, faded away and left him with the absolute knowledge that he had a Match out there. That she’d survived the Fall and was waiting for him. And she was about to be destroyed forever. He felt her sudden sadness, her belief that she’d been abandoned. Her fear. Cross didn’t stop to think. He just lunged for the Shadows that he’d been so grateful to release. Grabbing, desperate, he fought the light, frantic to save her. Slamming every bit of power he had into the battle, he shouldered the entire weight of his House and pulled the Shadows back to him. Cross hadn’t prayed when the Fall spread over the Shadowland. Hadn’t worried that it would kill him as it ravaged his House. Hadn’t cried at the thought of so many dying. Now he prayed and worried and cried. Tears of pain glittered in his mercury eyes. He chanted Gaia’s name over and over in a litany as he struggled, even though Cross had never believed in anything divine. Blood poured from his nose and his head hurt so badly that he worried he’d pass out and lose his grip. He couldn’t drop the Shadows. If he lost control of them, he’d lose the woman. Cross would do absolutely anything to hold onto his Match, now that he knew she was out there. If that meant that he had to save the whole shithole universe in the process, so be it. Slowly, nature restored its equilibrium. The horrible vortex vanished, and Cross was alone, again. He lay on the ground, dazed and barely alive. But, barely alive was enough, apparently, because the last domino didn’t fall. The end of the world… stopped. Cross crawled to his hands and knees. He was supporting the entire Shadow House through sheer effort of will. Even as agony pierced through his forehead, he realized that he was somehow balancing the load. He was using so much energy just holding the Shadows together that it physically drained him, though. His brain ached and throbbed, feeling like it was straining at the seams of his skull. Blood was coming out of his ears and continued to stream from his nose. His body shook and dots danced in front of his eyes. But none of that mattered. He had a Phase-Match. Cross always thought that he’d been forgotten or judged unworthy of a Match. But she was really out there. For the first time in his life, he felt hope. Felt blessed. Surrounded by death and wracked with pain, Cross smiled. She was the reason he’d survived when so many better Phases fell. She was out there and she needed him. Or, at least, he needed her. Desperately. Cross didn’t delude himself with the idea that she’d be thrilled to have him as a Match, but he didn’t care. His stepfather had been right about one thing: Cross was a selfish bastard. His Match was a gift that he didn’t deserve, but that he was going to take anyway. No one alive could stop him and, if they tried, they wouldn’t be alive for long. Cross forced himself to his feet. He’d just put the universe back together for that woman and now he planned to rip the whole fucking thing apart again, piece by piece, until he found her.
