Faerie Apocalypse

by Franks, Jason;

  “I can hear you,” said the Warrior Queen. “And you will treat me with respect. Give me my due, or I’ll have your severed heads for my battle standard. I’ll use your guts to lace my boots. I’ll patch my armour with leather from your generative organs.”

  “That will not be necessary.” The Speaker for the Council of the Magi spoke aloud. “You have treated with the magus’ spirit, where none of us dared to. The seat is yours, Councillor-Queen.”

  The Warrior Queen made a gesture, drawing the first rune of a transportation spell in the air. “Good.”

  “Councillor-Queen,” said the Speaker.

  “Yes?” said the Warrior Queen, completing the second rune.

  “There is another thing you should know, before your task is underway.”

  The Warrior Queen was halfway through the third and final rune. “Speak.”

  “The magus has a son,” said the Speaker. “And he is abroad in the Realms of the Land.”

  27. The Malo

  Bereft of what reason he had once possessed, Malo wandered through the Realms like a wild beast; without any intention beyond finding his next meal and shelter from the elements. In that measureless, meaningless time, he roamed from one territory to the next, killing, and ravening, and screaming without cause.

  No one moved to end his depredations. Malo was but a single beast, these carefully anonymous forces reasoned, and his capacity for destruction was limited by his intellect. Moreover, he was the son of his father, whose intellect and whose capacity for destruction were not limited at all.

  The son of the magus was dismissed and forgotten by all who knew him for who he was. When his father was slain, he did not know it, and nobody thought to inform him. Thus forgotten, he continued to make his savage way in his wildness, and he grew from a boy into a man. And there, he remained, lost in the wastes, until it was time for him to be remembered again.

  The Warrior Queen tried first to scry the location of her quarry, but this yielded only pain and frustration. Her spells cracked upon Malo’s presence and their shards were turned back upon her. But the Warrior Queen learned much about him from this procedure. Malo could not be scried, he could not be ensorcelled, he could not be enchanted…but she was certain that he could be tracked and tamed.

  So the Warrior Queen set after him in the traditional way of her people: seeking with her eyes and ears, travelling on her own two feet, and armed to the teeth.

  The Malo was hungry.

  He hadn’t had a morsel to eat or a mouthful to drink for any of the days or weeks or months he had wandered through the badlands.

  The Malo was hungry. The Malo was thirsty. Aside from those two facts, the only other thought in his head was the knowledge that he should be dead. The Malo couldn’t survive without food or water. He knew this, though he did not know why.

  There was no food or water here; there was nothing but dust and jagged rocks and open, windless skies. There were animals about, but they were either too quick for his hands or too well armoured for his jaws.

  The Malo was hungry and thirsty, but he wasn’t lost, for there was nowhere he wanted to be. He had neither a home nor a destination. He had memories of other places, where food and water and shelter could be found, but he had not the wit to seek them out.

  When the Warrior Queen approached him, the Malo barked with delight and fury. Food, at last. Meat to chew and blood to drink. The Malo raised his sickle and screamed his hunting cry—and then fell, without knowing how he had been struck down.

  Malo awoke face down in the dirt. Chains secured him to a tree that was twice as tall as he. The Warrior Queen hunkered nearby, waiting for consciousness to rekindle in him.

  Malo rolled over and climbed to his feet. He cast his head about him, snorting and snuffling. When he saw the Warrior Queen he threw himself at her, snarling his rage. His chains snapped taut and his leap was arrested. He fell heavily to the ground.

  Malo picked himself up and moved as close to the Warrior Queen as his bonds would allow. One of the chains encircled his neck: the more he struggled, the more it choked him. Malo strained against it until he choked himself back into unconsciousness.

  When Malo again recovered his senses, the Warrior Queen drew her sword and approached him. Malo turned to face her, glowering and growling and twitching, his chains clattering.

  The Warrior Queen stopped in front of him, barely an inch beyond the reach of his gnashing teeth.

  “You are the son of the magus,” she said.

  Malo bared his teeth and exhaled hard through his nose. He was unsteady on his feet.

  “The magus from the mortal realm.”

  Malo’s breath hissed through his gritted teeth.

  “Your father is dead.”

  Malo threw himself at the Warrior Queen. The chains snapped taut, clenched around his throat. He fell.

  “The dog that killed your father is also dead, and its master has long since left these Realms…But I yet live, and so do you.”

  Coughing and bleeding, Malo rose to his knees, then, swaying, to a half-kneel.

  The Warrior Queen stepped close to him, grabbed his chin and turned his face up towards her. “I still live, and I would have a dog of my own.”

  The Warrior Queen fed and watered Malo, and tended to his wounds. Then she took up his chains and led him out of the badlands. Restoring him to some semblance of self-awareness was not going to be an easy task.

  Malo had forgotten how to speak. He had forgotten his own name. He had barely been rational when he had entered the Realms, and now he was wild as any beast.

  So she set about taming him as she would an animal: with the rod and the whip and with harsh words. The Warrior Queen beat him into compliance, and she rewarded him when he did as he was bidden. Soon Malo learned to obey her commands: sit, stay, heel. The discipline was good for him. Those three commands became ten, and then a hundred. Soon Malo could speak again, and understand some language, terse and broken though it was. He was not as damaged as she had first thought.

  The Warrior Queen taught Malo how to hunt, how to fight. She was not a healer. She could not make of him a human being, but by the time she was done with him he was a passable soldier and an excellent attack dog.

  At last, Malo came to properly understand that his father was dead, and that his thirst for vengeance could never be slaked. But now he had a new purpose: to serve the Warrior Queen. His loyalty to her was absolute, and that grew into something greater yet: a kind of yearning he had no prior experience of. It was not lust, though lust was part of it.

  “I’ll not lie with you,” the Warrior Queen told him. “I will bear you no dog-children. You will sleep by my feet and be grateful for it, for that is the place of a dog.”

  He knew that he was not truly a dog, but he was no longer sure exactly how dogs were different to his own kind. But it felt good to have a master. It felt good to have somebody who finally cared about him, however small the measure of that regard might be.

  28. Mortal Weapons

  When the Warrior Queen was satisfied with Malo’s progress she took him on a journey. They crossed the plains and trekked over the hills until they came to the juncture where the Ore-lands met the mountains and the forests. Together they reconnoitred the blasted territory that lay there. They climbed amongst spirals of rusted razor-wire, over the ruins of bunkers, between trenches that lay open and oozing. Landmines lay exposed in the dirt, though they did not detonate when Malo kicked them.

  The carcasses of some strange, extinct faerie race lay amongst the ruins. Malo and the Warrior Queen sorted through the corpses, finding those that seemed most intact and sawing off the unwieldy metal devices that had been welded onto their limbs.

  They laid out the salvage on a hide tarpaulin and sorted the items by size and shape. Malo crouched nearby and watched the Warrior Queen examine them. Sh
e went through the collection piece by piece, operating all of the moving parts: slides and levers, triggers and switches.

  “These are weapons,” she told him. “Fearsome, mortal weapons. But I cannot determine how they are supposed to function.”

  “Guns,” said Malo. He picked out an assault rifle with a barrel that was as long as his arm and popped out the magazine.

  “Yes, that’s it. Show me.”

  Malo snapped the banana clip back into place and braced the rifle weapon against his shoulder. He adjusted his grip, aimed it away from the campsite, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a single, loud click.

  “Bang?” said Malo, confused.

  “Machines cannot function in these Realms,” said the Warrior Queen. “The mortal who crafted them is dead, and his sorcery has long been broken.”

  Malo understood most of that. “Guns. Mortal. Dead.”

  “Yes,” said the Warrior Queen. She held out her hand and he passed her the weapon.

  The Warrior Queen took the weapon from him. “Most of the runes are still intact, but I cannot follow their logic. Give me your hand.”

  Scowling, Malo held out his hand. She put it on the breech of the weapon. “We will yet make these weapons function again, Malo,” she said. “You and I. Your magic and mine.”

  Malo shook his head.

  “Malo,” said the Warrior Queen.

  Malo glowered at the Warrior Queen, but he nodded his consent. That was all she needed to harness his power. Malo’s mere presence was a strange and dangerous thing.

  The Warrior Queen gave Malo a rifle. Once he had taken hold of it, she drew a sigil on the back of his hand, and then covered it with her own. She spoke a syllable that glowed in the air and then took the rifle back.

  The Warrior Queen swung the weapon around, looking for a target. About twenty meters away a fallen superstructure lay slumped over a bombed-out signals outpost. She lined up the sights and pulled the trigger.

  The weapon issued a staccato bray. Spent runes sparked and flashed in the air amongst the ejected shell casings. Two dozen smoking holes scored the crumbling concrete wall of the bunker. A ricochet zinged off a steel girder.

  The Warrior Queen smiled. Malo continued to scowl.

  “Come,” she said. “Let’s repair these others.”

  When the sun rose, Malo and the Warrior Queen took their cache of enchanted firearms and went on to their next destination. There was a new mortal loose in the Land, and soon they would have to meet with her.

  When the fated hour fell, the Warrior Queen and her man-dog would be there to play their roles.

  29. The Farm

  The mortal wandered the Realms of the Land looking for the dark tower, but her uncle had not seen it during his journey, and she had no idea where it might be. It did not seem to matter which way she went, or how fast she travelled; every path looped back to a place she had already been. It was becoming monotonous.

  After some reflection, the mortal determined that there were two places her uncle had described that she had not yet visited: the farm and the black forest. Perhaps she needed to complete the circuit before she would be allowed to search for the dark tower.

  The mortal followed the river back through the Ore-lands, avoiding the battlefield where the Tree Queen and the Queen of the Ore-Lands yet strove for victory. The skies lightened and the river ran clear, and soon she found herself in a rolling pastureland, where crops were cultivated and beasts were penned.

  The farm folk put down their labours and offered her their hospitality, which she accepted gratefully. They were quick and furry and grey; as strange as they were homely. They were just as her uncle had described them. Inside a low, thatched dwelling, they bade her take her ease. The eldest of them enquired as to whether she was hungry or thirsty.

  “I do not hunger or thirst,” she replied.

  “You must be tired from the road.”

  “I do not tire, either.”

  “That is most curious,” said the elder. “Most curious indeed, that one such as yourself should come here without any needs.”

  “The only need I have is for information.”

  “You are kin to one that was here before.”

  “Yes,” said the mortal. “It’s astute of you to perceive that.”

  “No,” said the elder. “It’s perceptive of me, and nothing more. Now tell me what you need to know.”

  “I’m looking for the dark tower.”

  “I know of several towers,” said the elder, “Some of them are, indeed, dark in appearance.”

  “It is the dark tower,” she said. “The darkest one. Not the darkest-looking one.”

  “I know of no tower which was erected for the purpose of being ‘dark’.”

  “It was raised by a mortal,” she replied. “An evil magus.”

  “I know of no such magus,” said the elder. “If such a one is abroad in these Realms, he has not found cause to visit his wickedness upon us here.”

  “He is long dead,” she replied. “But I am told that his tower remains.”

  “Is this your quest?”

  “I’d like to see it,” she said. “Whether that is my quest or not, I cannot say.”

  “If you know not what you quest for, you have no quest,” said the elder. “If you came to the Realms with no purpose, you will return home just as destitute—if you return at all.”

  30. The Black

  Forest

  So the mortal went from the farmlands and crossed the Ore-lands yet again, and then the Sinewed Forest, and then the plains of the Sea City. She passed through the mountains and back into the meadowlands, and then down past the village to the black forest that had risen to herald her uncle’s arrival.

  The mortal spent the afternoon gathering wood for a fire, although her avatar did not feel the effects of the elements upon it. She knew it would draw her uncle’s creatures from the darkness.

  The mortal did not know how to start a fire without matches, so she crafted a small program to do the work. As the last of the day drained away she flipped the state to ‘burn’, and soon she had an impressive blaze going.

  And sure enough, when the moonless sky was dark, the black things came forth, dressed—or perhaps bound—in leather that was dyed and lacquered and charred. They crouched and capered just beyond the circle of firelight, though they did not cross into it.

  “Speak to me,” she said.

  The leader of the black things came into the circle of light and squatted down across the fire from her. She could barely see it, so thick was the night and so dark was its colouration. The firelight gleamed in its blood-black eyes; glistened on its bleeding black teeth. It made no sound.

  “Will you speak with me, as you once did my blood-kin?”

  The black thing grinned at her for a while longer, stiller and blacker than the night sky. “Why?” it said. “Do you have anything to tell me?”

  “I just want to know what you are.”

  “Feh,” said the black thing. “I am more blood-kin than you are.” It hissed impudently and receded into the night.

  “Fuck this for a joke.” The mortal snatched up her greatsword, and strode out into the black forest in the dead of night.

  She walked in silence amongst the bare, black trees, her feet soundless on the dead black soil. The air was still and warm on her skin. The forest was utterly silent: not a breath of wind to stir the dead tree limbs, not a bird or a critter or an insect going about its nocturnal business. She was the only thing that moved there. She was the only thing that lived.

  The mortal reminded herself that her avatar had no physical presence, that she could not be harmed in this virtual world, but the reminder gave her no comfort.

  The mortal walked on, seeking some being, some presence, some sign, but she found not
hing but dying trees and dead soil. Though her avatar was invulnerable, she had not the courage to touch the dirt or the trees with her bare, virtual flesh.

  “Fuck!” she screamed. “Just, fuck you all!”

  She swung her greatsword about, hacking blindly at the forest. She felled three trees with as many strokes, but many, many more remained standing. No harm came to her from the splinters of wood and the clouds of dust her lumberjacking raised.

  “Fuck it,” she said. “I’m too fucking old for fucking goddamn fairy stories, anyway.”

  By the time the sun rose she was out of the black forest. In the distance she could see the Tree of Indeterminate Species.

  31. The Tree, The Tower

  It was high noon by the time the mortal came to the tree—but by the time she had reached it, it was not a tree anymore.

  She stood before a dark and jagged tower; so slimed with evil that it stained the very skies it broached.

  Gooseflesh prickled her virtual skin. She turned away and rubbed her eyes. When she looked again the dark tower was gone, and the Tree of Indeterminate Species was again where it was supposed to be.

  Cursing, the mortal strode up to the tree, keeping her eyes fixed upon it. It looked as weird and unnatural as she remembered, but it was definitely a tree and not a tower. She walked its circumference, looking for the opening that would permit her to return to her own world—but there was none. She circled it again, and again, but still there was no opening.

  The mortal sighed. Some further events must be played out there before she could return to her home, she supposed. Now her true quest would be revealed…or perhaps she would discover that she had unknowingly completed it already. She hoped for the latter; she was tired of fairy tales. She wanted to go home and have a nice cup of tea and a hot bath. She hoped she still had a job.