by David Moody
“What can he do for us?” Arridon asked.
“What can’t he do? Weren’t you listening? He can shift dimensions at will, for starters. He’s ancient, powerful, and can bring an army of demons to bear on a whim. Little stuff, really,” Tim explained.
“What’re the odds he’ll lance us with a giant demon spear and eat us like a stick of teriyaki when the urge strikes him?” Derrick mused.
“You can talk all the shit you want about devils, demons, and things that are allegedly evil, but my father, Kalandar, is a being of his word. Once he says he’ll do something, he’ll follow through on those words, regardless of the opposition or whatever whim might strike him.”
“That’s good to hear,” a reassured Arridon said.
“Besides, it’s been at least fifty years since he tried to kill me,” Tim added. “To be fair, I probably deserved it.”
“And you certainly deserved it,” a stern voice said from the shadows beyond the portico that led to their secluded spot on the balcony. A massive being, human seeming, yet so much more, wearing a plain white robe and a golden diadem atop his brow stepped into view. At least an arm’s length taller than either Arridon or Derrick, the metahuman god cracked a smile that was equal parts charming, and threatening. Arridon and Derrick stood from their chairs, and faced the man approaching, riveted.
“I hoped you’d take less of an interest in this, Oldros,” Timtar said, stiffening against the glass balcony wall.
“I have such a fondness for the dimensions that cultivated intelligent life on the planet Earth, or whatever it’s called,” he said with a deep, sonorous voice.
“And by fondness, you mean it’s the collective planes of existence you’ve decided to feed like fresh meat to the Bleed,” the half-demon spat at him. “Traitorous, that. Sacrifices aren’t helpful with the Bleed.”
“I disagree,” he said. “And fortunately for me, and all the lives my work has saved, my opinion changes the flow of time and space.”
“Your opinion wouldn’t make my bowels move,” Arridon shot at him. “If any harm comes to my sister because of something you’ve done, I will find a way to hurt you.”
“I’ll help,” Derrick added.
“You two are just so damned cute,” the being named Oldros said to them with that same smile. “Your pluck, and verve is just…charming! It’s the stuff of legend, really. I might remind you, though, that legends can be cautionary tales, not just litanies of maddening heroics and sharp, pointy swords. Many heroes confront the gods, or go counter to their will, and wind up tied to a rock, their guts feeding the vultures. Don’t be so naïve.”
“I’ll kick a fucking vulture,” Arridon said. “Let us rescue our sisters. What do you have to lose by letting us?”
“I’d be going against my word.”
“Wait… What did you promise it?” Timtar said, stepping forward. “What? Did you make a pact with the Bleed? Did you give it your word?”
Oldros waved his hands about, and shook his head to dismiss the accusation. “Pshh. What does it matter? I am a god, and what I choose to do is beyond mortal reproach. Souls by the trillions are lost in every flickering moment, and it matters not if I decide on the loss of a few billion of them, or if they fade away all on their own.”
“If you pay a tithe of life and space to the Bleed, to buy even a moment of reprieve…you’re a worse monster than it ever has been, or ever will be,” the half-demon hissed. “The Bleed, at least, has cause for its hatred. It’s almost justified, after the Rift. But for you to then try and buy its aggression off? The other gods won’t approve.”
“The other gods don’t understand, don’t need to find out, and certainly don’t need to approve,” Oldros whispered, and all heaven and hell broke loose.
31
EO
Oldros wasn’t alone. Despite his shadowy comments about secrecy, he’d come with a retinue of slick-armored, closed-helmeted guards that looked like a combination of medieval knights and modern day Earth para-operators. They pressed into the contained balcony, threatening the space ahead of them with a mixture of firearms and melee weapons that crackled with otherworldly energy.
They didn’t hesitate to begin the violence. A loud, buoyant snap of Oldros’ invisible energy surrounded them, containing the noise and chaos about to happen, and those attackers with firearms let fly a lethal hail of god-forged bullets.
Timtar crouched down, lifting his leather duster over his face as if it were impenetrable armor. Derrick stood, frozen stiff from the unthinkable, murderous treachery. Arridon reacted, fueled by fear of his own death and anger over the entire fucked-up situation.
He slapped his hand defensively at the rushing attackers in the split second that they shot, and as he bellowed his rage, his magic erupted in a lightning-fast wall of translucent energy. The barrier caught the storm of tiny metal hornets that would’ve killed all three of them and continued on, smashing into their plate and plastic armor. Arridon’s invisible force hit them like a crashing ocean wave, stirred up by a deep and angry storm.
The black-clad enemies were smashed into the walls, and into Oldros’ massive frame as if they were no more than driftwood on that wave. Their screams caught in their throats as their bodies gave way before the walls, and they were crushed. Bones broke, tendons and ligaments snapped, skulls collapsed under the strain of Arridon’s eruption.
“Parlor tricks!” Oldros screamed at him. The giant god’s fists came up, each mitt the size of a person’s whole head, and all three of the ambush victims felt a pulsating wave of scorching heat emanating in their direction.
“Jump!” Tim screamed at them as he grabbed Derrick’s arm. “Over the ledge!”
Arridon turned and watched as the slight half-demon covered with crazy gadgets muscled his friend with a shove to the edge that overlooked the sea of massive, connected city-clusters floating over the bottomless stars. Where Arridon was from, going over the edge was the worst possible fate; you went into the Void, where the demons lived. A leap into literal Hell.
But now, after it all, after all the fear and strife, when he finally went over the edge to whatever Hell he deserved, he would at least have a demon on his side. Arridon ran from Oldros’ magical fury, clasping his friend Derrick’s hand as the unconventional trio went up and over the glass wall of the balcony.
Graceful, they were not.
End over end they plummeted down the length of the tower, away from the balcony and straight down towards the flatter levels at the base of the gear-shaped city cluster. Skyscrapers of indeterminable size rose up from the fast-approaching city’s base as their world-view spun round and round.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!” Arridon and Derrick both screamed at full volume as the end of their life rushed up to meet them.
At their sides, as their deadfall continued, Timtar patiently fastened the buttons shut on his duster. He assessed their position relative to the floating citadel’s bottom, and then twisted a few dials on the brass plates mounted in his garb. As they blew down through a hurricane of wind, he tapped gently on a black screen, illuminating a full book’s worth of scrolling text. He looked to the ground, looked to the plummeting humans, then tapped the screen. Tim reached out and grabbed both their arms, pulling them close as the horizon of the city’s edge grew wider against the backdrop of the perpetual starry night.
“Hold me tight,” Tim yelled at them, pulling them to his chest. “Tighter!”
They did. So tight the half-demon struggled to breathe. As soon as he felt like they were holding well enough, he set off the machinery in his jacket with a telepathic trigger.
Two vertical splits formed in the leather, running down his back from shoulder to kidneys. Out of the slits, blade after blade of gleaming golden metal erupted, each linked along its long edge to form a graceful, strong wing. The twin wings expanded outwards and upwards until he had sprouted enough lift area to halt their spinning tumble and slow their descent at a rate that wouldn’t rip the two
humans from his body and send them to a bone-liquefying death below.
Bursts of white-hot light seared the air near them as Oldros rained down constant, hatred-filled blasts of sun-bright magical fury. Timtar deftly adjusted his mechanical wings, setting free the sounds of gears and mechanics whining to keep up with the strain. They dodged, left, right, up and even down again as beam after beam rained down at them. This display of might surely proved the merit of calling them gods. After descending another few thousand feet, they were in amongst the top floors of the dark glass, and dark stone buildings that made up the lowest, largest level of this section of Eo. The frequency of the blasts diminished, but when they passed, they destroyed windows, stone, and steel with equal ease. Debris rained down out of sight.
“I thought this was just a flat ship hull,” Derrick hollered over the sound of rushing wind. “This place is massive.”
“Over a billion souls call Eo home, gods and monsters alike. It has forests, deserts and oceans. It’s still not big enough to hide from Oldros and his wrath, however. Not now, not ever.”
“Won’t others protect us? Gods that oppose Oldros and what he’s done?” Derrick asked.
Timtar laughed. “Ancient beings that live for millennia and are hard to kill are loathe to make enemies with the likes of Oldros. I said gods and monsters are here, right? Well, now, we’re closer to monsters than gods.”
“What do we do?” Derrick asked as they screamed down and past a gleaming obsidian spire as large as the Shard they’d departed London from. Lights showed rooms of all style and period inside the glass.
“Time to run. Unfortunately, they have your metaphysical fingerprint. Hounds of the gods will always be able to find you unless we cleanse you of your scent, you see, and to do that, we have to find some very specific help, and get the fuck off this plane of existence. Only one safe place for us to go.” He scanned the area below with his goggles. They screwed in and out, focusing on distant objects.
“Where’s that?” Arridon yelled into the wind.
“Straight to Hell, chums. Straight to Hell.”
Another lance of bright white light split the black air above, and tore down through their clutching midst. It struck Derrick in the legs, shearing his right leg off just above the knee. As he shrieked in agony, the dismembered limb and a rain of blood fell from him. His eyes rolled up into his head and he went limp. Blood streamed down into the gap between buildings, running like a faucet.
“Derrick!” Arridon screamed, grabbing his friend with one hand to try to keep him from falling. There was so much blood.
Tim reached down and grabbed hold of the kid’s pants by the belt line, but his grip was tenuous. He’d fall, and within seconds. They were still over a thousand feet up. The half-demon looked through his goggles at the simple metal plate mounted on his jacket above his heart. Wires and connectors ran through the coat then through his reddened, demon skin and muscles and up to the pulsating organ in his breast. There, the device drew strength and power from him. He couldn’t reach the arcane contraption, and it alone could save them all.
“Arridon,” Tim said in a stern, clear tone as he fought to level off their descent. “Flip the lid on that small box right there and dial each knob until the colors go red, or pink.”
Arridon looked confused, but he wrapped a leg around Tim’s and reached over his shoulder to awkwardly flip up the lid. The hinged brass plate on the box swung up and clicked open, revealing four small transparent knobs. With shaking hands the half-god twisted the round, clear controls and as he did, they changed colors, and even illuminated into patterns with shapes and ghostly images that seemed to look back at him.
He spun the top knob all the way around until it turned the color of Derrick’s flowing blood. He turned the second knob just a bit; it went to a deep orange-red almost immediately. The third knob had to go all the way around twice before it turned to the color of table wine, giving both the half-demon and the half-god heart palpitations as Derrick continued to bleed out, and slip from their ever-weakening grasps. The fourth knob—no matter how much Arridon spun it—would not turn anything remotely red. Not like the color of Derrick’s emptying blood.
“They’re fucking closing me off,” Tim said with a laugh. “Of course they would.”
“What?” Arridon screamed, trying to adjust his hold on his dying friend.
“I can jump to a few planes of existence without a room. Function of my lineage and diplomatic status,” Tim explained. “But they’re not letting me go exactly where we need to go.”
“What do we do?”
“Just like the balcony above, we jump, and we see where we land. Anywhere is better than here. Hold on. This will be…strange.”
Timtar imagined the symbol that would trigger his dimensional transporter at the exact moment Oldros struck him square in the back with a burning, smashing crash of energy. Their transition—from the plane of existence Eo currently called home—to where he needed them to go was disrupted, and when they disappeared and reappeared, Tim experienced terrible pain right down to the cellular level. He felt the burn all the way down to the tips of his toenails and the ends of his individual hairs. Judging by Arridon’s screams of pain, he too felt agony of reality-warping proportions.
The city of Eo, with all its splendor and endless, three-dimensional clusters of star-shaped islands, disappeared, and the trio of pain-wracked refugees appeared over the dust-covered, dimly lit ruins of a fallen society. Electrical storms flashed and thundered out of sight, beyond the enormous, smoke-obscured buildings in their presence, but before the imposing mountain range that encircled them. They were only a few dozen yards above a wide street, and Tim quickly put them down. They crashed far harder than he’d intended, knocking the wind out of the group.
“Derrick,” Arridon pleaded as he rolled his still-bleeding friend over onto his back. “You’re okay. Hey Tim. Tim, you gotta help him.”
Timtar shrugged off the damage to his metallic wings and knelt. He assessed the wounded boy. “I can save him. You must stand and keep guard. Anything that comes near, use your powers to protect us.” Tim produced a small leather pouch from under his duster. He opened it and started to pull out the gadgets and trinkets inside.
“Okay,” Arridon said, wiping at a wet streak on his face where a tear had cleared the dust away. He stood and walked into the middle of the dead, gray street and scanned it up and down.
“Arridon,” Tim called. The boy turned. “This world has been scoured by the Bleed. Long ago. Anything that approaches us, you destroy. Spare nothing and no one, until we are stable and know where we are.”
He set his jaw and nodded at his new friend, the demon.
Tim got to work on stopping the now weak flow of blood. In the distance, storms grew angry in the sky and rained down flashes of blue light. The ground shook and thrummed as each beam of cyan hit the ground.
Arridon ignored the spectacle; his only aim to defend against any and all denizens of this dead world. He kept watch on the too-high doors of buildings, and wondered what kinds of giants built this place, only for it to fall utterly to the Bleed.
32
EO
In a firelit room with a hundred-foot-tall vaulted ceiling, deep in his stronghold on one of the many realities that made up what some called Hell, Kalandar sat atop a throne made of melted bone, gilded with gold and encrusted with diamonds made from the ashes of heroes.
Heroes Kalandar had put to death for their limitless arrogance.
In a nearby alcove, four slave musicians played something approaching Arabic music as he sipped thick, sweet mead from a crystal goblet big enough to hold five hives of honey and watched idly as lesser demons flitted around his loincloth-covered body. With claw-trimmed hands, the bat-like creatures massaged his corded muscles, applying poultices and magical remedies to the dizzying array of small injuries he’d sustained during his time with the humans. Their ministrations soothed his conflicted mind as much as they helped his b
ody.
Just out of Kalandar’s reach, a long table made of wood harvested from transparent trees held the carnage from his rejuvenating feast. The moment of his return to home, he ate rich foods made to his exact specification until his stomach threatened to pop like a rotten melon. He slumbered then; hours of delicious, power-replenishing sleep. He awoke, came here to his throne, and allowed his most basic of servants to attend to him as he debated his next move.
He turned his attentions to the scenes depicted on the tapestries he’d collected and hung in the room over many centuries. There were ten. Five were the bread and butter nightmares of fearful mortals: blood soaked scenes of torture and carnage, endless in scope and consequence. These lush illustrations made Kalandar smile. These were the sport of demons, and they were celebrations of tragedy.
Four of the tapestries were landscapes. Tall visions of worlds far from the Mephistophelean creation he’d been born to, and chose to live on. He had one landscape depicting the four seasons typical to worlds on which humans and creatures like them lived. Kalandar looked at fields of snow and flowers blooming under warm rains. He stared with soft eyes at sheep grazing in a summer meadow. His favorite, the tapestry he spent the most time admiring, was the one depicting autumn. Or fall, or harvest tide, or the Reaping. The season the living creatures needed to scoop up all they’d managed to get the land to grow for them.
The desperation of the season stood in direct dichotomy with the sheer beauty most worlds had at that time. The explosion of colors in the forests of the temperate regions left Kalandar with a delicious appreciation of the spectrum of colors in the universes, as well as a ripe and powerful feeling of melancholy.
He felt great melancholy in this moment.
