Faerie Apocalypse

by Franks, Jason;

  “Oberon,” said the mortal.

  “Mortal,” replied the king. “What manner of evil have you raised around us?”

  The mortal frowned. “This place was here when I arrived.”

  “Aye,” said the King, “And it was not here before that.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Then you will die ignorant,” replied the King.

  “I am unarmed, yet you confront me with your lance and sword and warhorse,” said the mortal. “Will you not deign to fight me on equal terms? On your own two feet, with your own two hands?”

  The King said “No,” and urged his stallion forward.

  The mortal stepped aside and kicked up a clod of black dirt, which burst against the horse’s unarmoured neck. The King pulled on the reins and the animal reared, but it was already too late. The stallion’s shadow rose to meet it, separating from the ground and flowing up to devour the animal’s flesh.

  The King leapt from the saddle as his mount buckled beneath him, landed lightly on the black earth—but his feet sank immediately into the soil, and he, too, was consumed by his own shadow.

  “Jesus,” said the mortal. Of all the horrors he had witnessed, this one disturbed him the most.

  Light flared, and the mortal had to turn away and cover his eyes. When his vision returned, he found that another being hovered before him, suspended on a pair of gossamer wings. He looked up through the haze at her and knew immediately that she was a Queen of the Faerie.

  “Titania,” he said.

  She was as tall as Oberon; as fine-boned and slender as her husband was rangy and lithe. She had small, sharp breasts and long, pointed ears. A heart-shaped face rested atop the pillar of her neck. Her hair was as lustrous as mirror-glass. Her gown was spun from liquid gold and laced with naked fire.

  The Queen knelt down upon the black soil, where her husband, the King, had perished. Weeping, Titania reached down to the darkness, as she had once long ago reached for Oberon. A shadow reached up to her, and they were drawn together until neither of them remained.

  She was not the Queen he had sought.

  21. A Kiss Beneath

  the Tree

  The mortal passed out of the black forest and worked his way back along its perimeter until he spied the hills where the market village nestled. He went towards it until he spotted the river, and from there he was able to triangulate the location of the Tree of Indeterminate Species. He came upon it in the late afternoon.

  The mortal stood facing the Tree until the twilight sun bled. He considered all that had befallen him and all that he had done in his travels through the Realms of the Land. He considered the life he had led before he had begun his quest, when he had lived in the real world. He considered the Folk he had met here amongst the Faerie, and he knew that he was not like them, and could never be. He would be just as lonely here as he had always been.

  “Right, then,” said the mortal. “I give up.” He adjusted his burdens across his shoulders and walked around the Tree, looking for the opening in the trunk…but there was none.

  He jogged around it again, but there was still no way inside.

  The mortal circled a third time, more carefully. Previously, the tree had required three circuits before the entrance had manifested.

  He ran around the tree a fourth time, frantic, but there was still no opening. Staggering, gasping for breath, he turned his back on the tree and covered his face. The mortal wiped the hair from his eyes, smoothed his beard against his chin. Calm. He must be calm. There was a solution. Perhaps he would climb the tree a second time…

  “Hello, master.” The mortal whirled around so fast that he stumbled. It took him three steps to right his balance—three steps closer to the voice.

  The dog-man stood pissing against the tree. It glanced over its shoulder and grinned at him.

  “The exit is gone,” said the mortal, trying to regain some dignity.

  “You can’t go home until you’ve completed your quest,” said the dog-man, securing its trousers and turning to face him. “Or until you lie dead—which I suppose is a homecoming, of a different sort.”

  “I’ve already met you three times,” said the mortal. “Does this fourth encounter not contravene the…the law of the Land?”

  The dog-man grunted. “There are no laws,” it said. “Not really. It’s true that the various fates and powers favour certain patterns, but they are not stringent about enforcing them. Imbalances in those patterns must regulate themselves, if they are to be regulated at all.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You have encountered me four times; there is likely some other fated being whom you will encounter only twice. If you live long enough.” The dog-man drew its cutlass.

  The mortal dropped his backpack and the spent Uzi machinegun and backed away. “Here, take my possessions,” he said. “Most of them are worthless, but some are treasures. You saved my life; I owe you nothing less.”

  “I don’t want your bag of trophies,” said the dog-man, advancing. “I want your bones, to polish my teeth.”

  “Why are you suddenly my enemy?”

  “The not-falcon was my friend,” said the dog-man, “And you would not help him.”

  “You yourself killed and ate him.”

  “But you are the one who refused to save him.” The dog-man grinned as it continued to advance.

  “Is this because I would not be your master?”

  “You flatter yourself,” said the dog-man.

  “I’m sorry,” said the mortal.

  “Your apologies will not restore my friend,” said the dog-man. It pointed its cutlass and came on.

  The mortal raised his fists and wished for a weapon, but he knew that, armed or not, he was no match for his foe.

  The dog-man swung the cutlass in a lazy, overhand stroke. The mortal lurched out of the way, lost his footing, and fell. He rolled clumsily and came to a half-kneel; and raised an arm in a pathetic attempt to ward off the deathblow he expected to follow…but it did not. The clang of metal on metal rang in his ears, and the battle was joined.

  A warrior stepped between him and the dog-man. She had a loop of chain in one hand and a bastard sword in the other.

  “Well, well,” said the dog-man, “If it isn’t Dolly Dagger.”

  The mortal scrambled away from the combatants until his back was jammed up against the tree. It did not surprise him to hear the dog-man quoting Jimi Hendrix nearly as much as it should have.

  He recognized the warrior, now. It was she who had saved him from the lithophage.

  The dog-man laughed its growl-bark-laugh and closed with his opponent. The warrior’s chain flickered outwards and looped around its wrist. She swung it over the dog-man’s head, spun it and yanked it tight, lashing the dog-man’s captive arm to its side. The dog-man’s laughter ceased as the warrior reeled it onto her sword.

  She wrenched the blade free and spun the carcass loose of the chain. The dog-man did not resume its dog form in death.

  The warrior thrust her sword into the dirt and coiled the chain around her forearm with a flick of the wrist. “I just saved your life, pig-fucker,” she said, white teeth flashing behind her lips.

  The mortal smiled back at her. Her brown hair was fine and soft. Her skin was like silk, and the lobes of her small and unusually shaped ears were tender and unpierced and perfect. Her eyes were brown and plain, and they did not need to be anything else at all.

  He drew himself to his feet slowly, using the tree for support. He stared so hard he thought his eyes would shrivel and die in their sockets. His heart was lodged hard in his neck.

  She was the most beautiful thing in all the worlds.

  The warrior came towards him with her hands empty, and he said to her, “What’s your name?”

  “I am called Zelioli
ah.”

  The mortal took her in his arms, and he put his lips to hers; and gently, weeping for joy, he took the straight-razor from his pocket and opened her throat from one perfect earlobe to the other.

  When he laid her body upon the ground a doorway opened for him in the side of the tree. A doorway through which only three kinds of mortal were admitted: lovers, poets, and madmen. And he was most certainly counted amongst their number, for though there was neither poetry nor love in him, there was madness aplenty.

  He, who had come to the Faerie Realms seeking the most beautiful thing in the world.

  Book 2

  The Magus

  1. City of Angels

  The magus sipped his bourbon and watched the flock of demons circling above the smog-shrouded towers of Los Angeles. Dark-winged, dark-limbed beasts held formation above the looping expressways, waiting for the ground forces to take their positions. He slammed back the remains of his drink and grunted. The magus hated bourbon.

  The Conclave had carefully calculated the resources required to destroy him; factoring in his prowess, his power, his tactical aptitude, his temper. By their mathematics, the sum of twenty winged bloodfiends and a platoon of combat sorcerers was more than sufficient for the task.

  “Bunch of fucken accountants,” said the magus. He was not in the least bit afraid to pit his magic against their book-keeping.

  The magus poured himself another drink while the bloodfiends strafed his house with arcane incendiaries. A string of flat, concussive booms followed as the phalanx of sorcerers scoured the hillside with eldritch mortars. Burning gases blew the house to matchwood.

  The magus shook the ice around in his glass and took a couple of swallows. He grimaced and poured the rest of his drink onto the ground, where it immediately caught fire. The magus paid it no heed.

  His foes had him surrounded. Lightning crackled from their fingers; napalm guttered in their eyes. Their wings creaked in the scorched air and their scalding breath hissed and steamed from between their teeth. Guns and blades glinted in their gloved and taloned hands.

  The magus scratched an armpit and spoke a casual string of four-letter obscenities. He called for hell and perdition, for doom and death and bloody damnation, and for other things besides. They came smartly at his summons.

  The landscape warped and buckled as a wave of burnt darkness swept over it. When the tide receded, scores of hell-born soldiers had washed up on the blasted hillside. They clambered to their feet, shrieking and roaring, and set upon the Conclave’s troops with hatred and with glee.

  The magus watched the hell-tide ripple down out of the hills, surging towards the glittering city below. He did not know how long it would take the Conclave to stop the destruction he had loosed.

  There was no chance for an armistice, now that he had attempted to consign the City of Angels to hell. Los Angeles was only his latest residence, but he hated it as much as he hated every other place he had once called home. The magus spat. It seemed like a good time for him to take a permanent vacation.

  The magus turned his attention to a new spell. Twice he tore the working down, unquickened, but the third time he knew he had it right.

  A Door appeared before him: an unframed, two-dimensional rectangle of light. The portal was opaque, for it was a door and not a window, but the magus knew what lay beyond it. This Door did not interface to a hell; it opened instead to a place of dreams and fantasies.

  The magus did not then understand how the differing planes lay in relation to each other. He did not know where dream ended and nightmare began; where joy and dread joined or became separate. It did not concern him overmuch. The magus only cared that he was going to another place, where magic flowed like water.

  He stepped through into the Land of the Faerie and pulled the Door closed behind him.

  2. In the Jungle

  The magus emerged in the midst of a verdant jungle. The trees were enormous; their boughs spreading a hundred feet above him. Humus lay thick on the ground. Lianas hung from the branches like intestines looped from a butcher’s block. The silence was as thick as the damp, still air. He judged it to be midday, though the layered canopy blocked the sun from his vision. Once the jungle had accustomed itself to the magus’ sudden presence the beasts and beings that lived there resumed their scratching, breathing rhythms.

  The magus took a moment to recalibrate his occult senses. There was magic all around; in every insect and animal, every bead of water and blade of sunshine. Wild and wasted magic, without a will to direct it.

  Once the magus had tuned the distracting wavelengths out, he discovered that a small sorcerous construct was located nearby. He conjured a machete and struck out towards it. The going was hard, but the magus relished the heft of the blade, the bite of its edge; the way that severed vegetation fell behind every slice. Sometimes the simplest pleasures were the most satisfying.

  The construct was a spherical silver cage that hung suspended from the trees by some invisible force. The mangy, purple-furred creature imprisoned within it had been there for so long that its bones had warped to accommodate it to the space. Its face was drawn with misery, and its spiked and spiny joints jutted uncomfortably from between the bars. The purple thing turned its head towards the magus as best it could and said: “I beg you, sir, free me from this prison.”

  “Why should I?” the magus replied

  “If you must ask such a question, you yourself can never have been imprisoned so.”

  The magus grunted. His father had learned most of what he knew about parenting in the Japanese POW camp where he was interned during the Second World War, and had been quite enthusiastic in his reapplication of that learning. The magus was no stranger to confinement.

  “Free me,” said the purple thing, “and I shall grant you whatever is in my power to grant.”

  “Power?” asked the magus. “What power?”

  “I can grow you a pelt of fine purple fur,” said the thing in the cage. “Replace that stringy yellow stuff you wear upon your head. No mere glamour! A true magic, that will not ever fade!”

  “What else you got?”

  “That is my only ability,” the purple thing admitted, disconsolate.

  “Have you got any proper sorcery?”

  “My master is a most puissant wizard,” said the purple thing. “Alas, he has confined me in this cage. I fear that my introduction will do you no service.”

  “What was your crime?”

  “No crime, sir,” said the purple thing. “I am here only by my master’s caprice.” It was lying, but the magus doubted that its crime was of any great magnitude. Most likely its incessant whining had annoyed its master.

  The magus examined the spell that kept the cage hanging from the trees. It was nice work. “Who’s this master of yours?”

  “I serve the Sage of the Sky City.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Look for his city, high in the skies. You cannot fail to find it.”

  “Ta.” The magus turned away.

  “Would you not like a pelt, like my own?”

  “Nuh, mate.”

  “Will you not free me, as a favour to one less fortunate than yourself?”

  “Fortune is relative,” said the magus. “I learned the best lessons of my life strapped up in a bamboo box in my old man’s back yard.”

  “What could you possibly have learned from such misery?” asked the purple thing.

  “I learned that fear makes you weak and hate makes you strong,” said the magus. “And I see that you have plenty of learning still to do.”

  The purple thing had no answer. It lowered its head and slumped against the bars of its cage. But the magus did not see its despair, for he had already turned his attention to the wild magic of his surroundings. He had spent his own reserves opening a Door into the Realms, bu
t he could surely channel the power that pulsed around him.

  The magus spoke some words in the tongue he had crafted for such workings, and quickened it with a rune of his own devising. The magus rose into the air and ascended through the canopy, and gave no further thought to the purple thing or its captivity.

  3. The Sage of

  the Sky City

  The simple spell that bore him aloft was causing the magus a number of unexpected problems. The ambient magical field of the Faerie Realms was rich and easy to tap, but it pulsed through the circuit unevenly. Sometimes the power levels surged enough to warp the logical fabric of the spell; other times they felt so weak that the weave started to fray. The magus had to attend to it constantly or risk falling back under the power of whatever force approximated gravity in this Land.

  The sky above the jungle was milky-green and streaked with white vapour. The Sky City was easy to spot, although naming it a city seemed to be overstating the matter. It was more like a village: two-dozen squat, bulbous buildings blown from coloured glass, huddled together upon a platter that bobbed in the air like a moored vessel. Its shadow lay spread across the uneven green carpet of the jungle below.

  The lattice of baroque spells that held the Sky City aloft was a clever bit of work: its shadow had been inverted, so that it reflected the shape that had cast it back towards the sun. Clever, but whimsical. The magus went on towards the Sky City, propelled by his own ragged, bleeding magic.

  A small shape rose out of the city and swooped towards him, its hair and beard streaming in the wind. The creature drew up in front of him, spread its knobby hands and said, in a sonorous voice: “I am the Sage of the Sky City.”

  “Owareya, mate?”

  The Sage clasped its hands and considered him. “What is your business here, magus?”

  “I come looking for you, actually.”