Seconds after I exited the water, there descended upon me a flurry of throwing knives—the type blindfolded magicians throw at beautiful women tied with brilliantly colored rope. Except these blades hadn’t found bright balloons or smoldering cigarettes, but the blood that surged beneath my skin. Yet I continued on my way, heading towards the smell of wet ashes and old wood. Upon seeing my family’s home before me, the Prince conjured back into life the fires that had once consumed it, again setting the charred remains alight. I plunged through the mouth of the flames towards the sound of my sisters’ weeping and the undeniable heat of my father’s rage.
From somewhere within the billowing smoke behind me emerged the wizard, hands filled with cold steel. I felt his knife pass through my neck and exit out the front of my throat. I fell silently to the ground.
“If it makes you feel any better,” the Prince of Smoke crooned, “I will certainly enjoy looking at your name, cut clean in half by a straight black line.”
I felt something emerge from the smoking ruin of the house and fill my hand. It burned as my fingers closed around its handle, completing an embrace I had for too long been without. A wrath that had been building for weeks consumed me, blinded me, nearly destroyed me.
I was lifted to my feet, my father held high in the molten grip of my hand. I turned to meet the Prince, this time the one performing miracles and he but a dumbstruck onlooker.
“You’d be dead even within a Red Dream,” the Prince sputtered, backpedaling away.
I fought past the rage to offer my opponent a wan smile. “I have an impressive mother and father as well, magician. And doing the impossible runs in the family.”
My father blasted into the ground near the retreating magician. The world tumbled and separated as dirt and stone barely resisted his will. A familiar and monstrous laughter exploded from my throat, rattling my teeth. I could still see the flagging killer through the debris, and I found myself charging forward, my forbear’s will filling me with the need to kill. Fire ignited around the Prince of Smoke as he attempted escape, but my father’s fury proved greater. I felt the axe cleave the plume of otherworldly power in twain, stranding the triplet out in the open.
The Prince proved a spry creature, sliding inside my father’s killing arc and slicing open my belly. Yet the rage that had become me had no time for bleeding, much less dying. My knee rose to greet the Prince’s chin, shattering bone. As he reeled from the impact, the butt of the axe found the spellcaster’s nose. Wet fireworks of teeth and blood pinwheeled from my enemy’s face, coaxing a storm of renewed laughter from my aching jaws.
Finally, my father collided with the body of the killer, sundering it in an explosion of wooden shrapnel. A decoy of the Prince lay in pieces all around me as his laughter echoed from all directions. The rubble of the house suddenly disappeared as I fell, the solid earth beneath me transforming into a dark pit. Pain rivaled rage as a floor of sharpened stakes skewered me like a wild beast. I had brooked my last insult from the Prince.
The Red Dream seared the air around me as I leaped from the pit, landing upon solid shadow and plunging into my servitor silence. I watched the Prince from the hollows of the world, waiting for my next opportunity.
As the revived fires continued to burn, the Prince climbed the snaking smoke like a staircase into the night. Lifted beyond the ceiling of the forest, the magician traversed the smoke as it curled in upon itself and raced sideways across the treetops. I kept pace, following from within a brook of shadow that fell thick and quiet from an ancient stand of oak trees. The magician circled around the glowing wreckage of my ancestral home, riding the smoke like a steed.
He called out to me through broken teeth and a stream of blood that poured from his left eye. “You know why I turned my talent to the stage, both in front and beyond the eyes of the world, Family Man? Because I wanted to flaunt the power that had been derided and shamed into magic hats and storybooks and myths. I wanted to show my audience the world, the better one, they themselves had destroyed—the world they mocked when they told their snot-nosed kids that nothing but hollow imagination lurked the spaces beneath beds and behind closet doors. I wanted to see their faces when they realized too late it was not all a clever illusion. That is why I’ve let you live this long—because you know what I know. I can see it in your eyes.”
Of course, he was right. I had an intimate awareness of the powers of which he spoke, and a nearly boundless wonder for what that awareness could never hope to comprehend. What little I might have understood only suggested an infinity of mysteries that lay beyond me, never to be resolved into solidity, and I was glad for that ignorance.
Yet I still desired to plunge deeper into the darkness of that wonder—by winning a game set by a god. And now, as so many times before, I would be forced to kill a kindred spirit. But unlike the majority of previous killings, this one I would enjoy.
“I’ve dedicated my life to that spectral world, Family Man,” the Prince continued. “I’ve become its vengeance, I suppose you might say. And like any good avenger, I must show my victims the error of their ways before I dispatch them. Yet that justification can hardly contain my actions tonight, can it? Tonight, I kill to invite the lost world back into our midst, to realize my own Red Dream. On that count, you and I might be brothers, I feel. It is with this in mind that I offer my thanks—and my apologies for the dirty tricks that must take place.”
“I accept,” I said, appreciating the truth of his words. Another surprise rose from beneath the burning debris as I was about to strike. Two surprises, in fact.
My sisters broke through the remains of my old home, riding the art-forms of my first family, inside of which they had buried their glittering smiles. First came one sister in the wondrous piece my father had created from my mother and brother and sister, titled My Family, Divided. It was a beautiful sight, my sister joined with my first family in death and vengeance. Then, hands—sculpted from their original shape by my father, well beyond the design nature had reserved for them—reached up through the smoke that bore the Prince and tore him from the sky.
Then came my other sister, piloting the masterwork I had made from my own father—The Red Ouroboros. They rose as a single creature, terrible and new, like the black dawn that breaks upon the newborn monsters fresh from nightmare. They might as well have been father and daughter. The Red Ouroboros fell upon the struggling shape of my enemy. My sister’s smile cut through the darkness, glowing with the darkened crimson of deep sunset.
I watched my beautiful sisters, now joined with my first family, throw the plump organs of The Prince of Smoke at the yawning black sky. Smiles like sickle moons played above the Prince’s screams, bobbing in his shrieks like burning paper boats set upon rough red waters.
I walked to where my family, all of them, had gathered around the still dying magician of murder. His bleeding eyes met mine. I wrestled with my father’s mounting laughter, trying to produce coherent speech. “My dear, dying prince. You should never have crossed us so coarsely. To employ a crude but appropriate phrase—you fucked with the wrong family.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was time that my first father be known to the world. I unearthed the rest of his works and placed them upon the burning stage of my former home. I took one last look at the family that could never have been, then replaced into sleep the family that had taken their place. Of the Prince of Smoke, there was nothing left save perhaps the stuff of his namesake. I had given him over to the fire, and his bones I had smashed to dust.
Throughout the Shepherd’s Game, I’d endeavored to maintain the dignity and vision of those who had fallen to me. Never had I reveled in the death of a single artist or hunter or Wolf, and never had I the desire to do so. This competition did us all the kindness and decency of placing its boundaries beyond the world, and as such, I believed it was our obligation to strive to exhaust those boundaries—not to settle on keeping
the ball, so to speak, in the mud of the physical realm. I resolved to show no consideration to those who played the Game for the sake of solidity and namesake, especially those who would disrespect and malign its players. Those sorts I would destroy, utterly. And so the Prince of Smoke’s name was struck from my list and from the world, as completely as could be managed.
My mood improved once I recalled my next destination—Willard, where dwelt the skin-switcher, Mr. Hide. I was relieved to know that my next opponent had both feet firmly planted in wonder—even if he was a bit caught up with his own physical immensity—and was as excited as I to see our contest resolved in the corridors of a city carved from untamed madness. Wasting no time on one so undeserving, I took my leave of the Prince and quickly made my way to the City of Madmen.
As was my custom, I made my way across the most haunted environs as I could put between myself and my destination, wandering and wondering as I went, willingly lost in dreamy reflection. Soon finding myself in new surroundings, I drifted with even less direction, simply aiming myself at the cardinal points that would bring me, eventually, to my terminus.
My journeys were filled with all manner of wonderful weirdness, as I often encountered some scrap or other of Obscuruum. Either standing lordly and alien over the prosaic fields of the dead earth or squatting within the hidden margins of some grotesquely resolute slice of reality, such contrasting aesthetics always made for delightful dreams. They informed and imprinted my nocturnal visions with the works of artists beyond the world, their canvases nothing less than the stretched and dried skins of the Deadworld.
This particular journey was no different than any other, and in short order I stumbled upon a dream—or so I believed.
A pearl-white stream flowed through the woods, apparently killing any flora that neared its crumbling black banks. It reflected the moonlight in a way I had never seen, almost shattering the pale illumination wherever the moon sought to touch the albino rivulet, creating a kind of visual debris from the cold lunar light.
I moved to the edge of the water, careful to search for any untoward presence as I went. There was nothing save for the strange water itself. I looked for my reflection upon the surface of the flowing stream, yet found nothing—only endless, empty white. I became keenly aware of a certain familiar feeling, but could not put clear memories to it. There was also a tremendous artificiality to the scene—a deliberate and immutable falseness. I realized the stream held no relationship to the moon, the night, or even the forest through which it unfurled. It was an alien.
The darkness refused the stream its enshrouding touch, creating a thin film of light above the water where the night was left incomplete. The revenant light was sickly, holding a coldness that reached beyond the skin, a strain of radiance that failed to illuminate its surroundings. Instead, the light seemed only to solidify its immediacy in a way that removed the fear and wonder of unseen things, all while not visibly disclosing them. Within moments, I felt utterly alone, without dream—purposeless. I was as bleached and bottomless and indistinct as the whited brook. I sat down beside the water and stared into its infinite, pointless depths. It was then that I realized what was happening to me—who was happening to me.
I had encountered the White Gaia, the Queen of the Deadworld. I had only once before felt her presence as keenly.
I was but a child roaming the back roads of the world with my new family. One afternoon, as we lay in the darkness of hidden places, my mother woke me from sleep and requested that I walk with her into the nearby city. The place was horribly new and over-bright, a plastic corpse laid at the feet of the terrible yellow noon. We walked deep into the urban thickets of glass and steel. My mother whisked me into a ruined apartment building, up a flight of rotting stairs, and into the shabbiest apartment I’d ever seen. Before me, there was a double-pane window, its lowest pane filled by a sheet of white-stained glass. Gently, my mother brought me to kneel before the white aperture, and told me to gaze through it. As I peered, I could see outlined in the white fog of the window the undead mother of the world—The White Gaia. She spilled upwards, thousands of feet, upon the skinless ragged bones of her bent legs. Her body was corpulent and heaving, with breasts like rotting moons. Her arms were as naked as her legs, terminating in crooked, skeletal hands. Her head was deathly yellow and hollow, and her eyes shone like open graves.
“There stands the enemy of all enemies,” my mother whispered. “You will come to know her and her works. She already knows you well.”
As I recounted my first glimpse of the Dead Queen, I hadn’t noticed the white waters rising above my waist. Unseen currents tugged at me, and I heard a summons spill from the rotting lips of my greatest enemy. “I would speak with you, artist.”
After being pulled beneath the white waters and feeling that I had sunk to an impossible depth for such a small stream, my hands found the bank and I pulled myself back onto dry land. The world beyond the waters seemed too bright, yet the darkness of the benighted woods had not lifted, as per the hour’s dictate. The trees seemed locked into their soils like saprophyte statues, the moon appeared rusted to the night, the darkness fell empty and dead from the open grave of the sky. Everything had changed, yet everything remained the same. I wasn’t even wet. More than likely, I had been abducted into a deeper stratum of the Deadworld—its calcified spirit—where the pretense of a living breathing world was neither asked nor supplied.
Before me stood a nearly solid wall of dead trees, behind which lingered equally dead earth. The land was entirely denuded of thickets, and no animals stirred. The trees were uncommonly tall, standing stronger and fiercer than any dead thing had a right to. They were completely without blemish, apparently unbothered by both insect and beast during the entirety of their lives and deaths.
I approached the barrier without hesitation or caution. This was a special place to the Queen of the Deadworld, so I would not waste time thinking I could prepare for what was ahead. I could feel an unclean power leaking out from the line of trees, pooling around the weakest parts of me, seeking entrance. Of course, it found me an impenetrable fortress, dressed in silent armies and burning moats. I smiled openly and victoriously at the unseen places behind the corpse-trees. At last, the ground began to shudder beneath the ungainly shamble of the Dead Mother. She approached.
I held fast only a few feet from the barricade, waiting to be addressed. I was not made to wait. “How long we’ve know each other, artist, and yet only now will we exchange words. Strange, yes?” Her words were immense, filled with a poisonous, vaporous warmth—the kind of heat that rose from fever dreams born of plague. Although I could not see her for the trees between us, I sensed her size was beyond the reckoning of numbers. Her appearance, even further beyond conception.
“Strange indeed,” I said, “as I feel we have spoken often, if only through our actions. Perhaps our conversations would be best characterized as an ongoing debate. Though I feel you’ve heretofore dominated the argument, I’m currently working on my greatest rejoinder yet.” I thought to get to the bones of the matter, as it was the contest that concerned her, and we both knew it.
“Yes,” the Queen replied, “about that rejoinder of yours—you haven’t much of a chance with it, but I think you know that. As a being familiar with all its enemies, I know only too well which are most deadly. You are not the greatest player in the Shepherd’s Game, artist. You are the tragedy of all contests—you are second best. I needn’t say the name of the fated winner, as your fear spells it out for you, in words of coldest fire. Your death lives in Autumn City. It always has.”
I smiled. “I have made a living—and a killing—from being underestimated, Queen Mother. I have no reason to expect that tendency to abate any time soon. I will defeat Jack Lantern, and then I will destroy you.”
The Queen continued, unperturbed. “While I have quite the mind to laugh at your bravado, I will not. I’ve not come here to belittle
you, but rather to help you. I am no admirer of the Shepherd’s Game—this one, the countless ones before it, or the countless others yet to come. I would see them stopped. Forever. You might help me in that regard.”
My laughter echoed through the dead trees. “I’m afraid I can’t pay you the same respect, you foolish thing! What are fools for, after all, if not for laughing at? You think I would help you? I would sooner let Jack Lantern carve my head to resemble a jack-o’-lantern than to dream of helping you. You’ve wasted your precious props and omens to bring me here, creature. Although, despite the wretched feel of this place, I am rather fond of this immured forest of yours. It gives me hope that one day it will be filled with the appropriate darkness, replacing this inferior brand you employ.” I turned away in disgust. “I take my leave of you, you hopeless, thoughtless thing.”
A monstrous creature barred my way. It was terribly mouth-heavy, its many eyes gleaming with a singular hunger. I sensed I was not the creature’s preferred food, yet its rapacious state would likely find my flesh an acceptable substitute.
“This is my son,” the White Gaia informed me. “One of them, anyway. He is called the Eater of Idols, and he wishes very much to join you at the Shepherd’s Game. One way or the other, he will do just that. It is my hope that we can strike a somewhat civil tone for the remainder of my offer. Shall we continue, or would you rather fight without even knowing why?” She had locked me in a cage of sparkling curiosity. I would hear the Queen out, so I turned to face the dead trees.
“Excellent,” she continued. “You see, since you have no chance at winning the game—your ridiculous boasting aside—I thought to make you an offer that would benefit the both of us. My son and I would like to give you a chance at achieving more than just winning the Shepherd’s prize. We can offer you the pleasure of killing a god. Imagine what marvelous art you might make from that kind of clay. But, even more importantly, you would be entitled to a share of the spoils—a share of that godhood. It would make you fat and drunk with power, power you could use however you decide. Why, you would be so much more of a threat to me with such potency. Of course, you would certainly be less of a threat to me than would be the Shepherd, if he should be left alive to continue with his wretched tournaments. Either way, it’s a chance I’m willing to take for an immediate, appreciable result. How say you, artist?”
The Red Son Page 26
