by David Moody
“Your response tells me my introduction still carries an awe-inspiring influence. Thank you for confirming me. Now, Timtar, you’ve gotten yourself into quite a predicament, haven’t you? First, you take a job working for those mongrels in their giant, hiding city, and now you’re helping a halfbreed who’s obviously gotten into trouble with them? Where did I go wrong with you?”
“You’re a demon, father,” Tim said with a knowing shrug. “And you weren’t exactly present for most of my adolescence. Had you gotten it right, would I be slaughtering the innocent on some hope-forsaken plains. Or might I be working in a clinic, giving medicine to the homeless?”
“Little of column A, little of column B, I suppose,” he answered. “I just didn’t expect you to work for them, doing their bidding. They’re not to be trusted, the things that call themselves ‘gods.’”
“You think I don’t know that?” Tim said to his father. “I don’t do what I do because I am in service to them and their culture, father. I’m learning everything I can so we can upset the so-called balance they’ve ‘achieved,’ and give this multiverse we call home some semblance of actual order.”
“You’re…then you’re acting as a double agent?”
“Well yeah. I mean, there are plenty of good ones, too. Citizens of Eo who want to stop the unending apocalypses. To quell the incredible loss of life and material. They want to see their kind rise to the occasion. I work with them.”
Kalandar stepped forward and scooped his fully grown, half-demon son up as if he were a toddler. The demon squeezed him with parental love, cradling him against the hard armor on his chest. Arridon heard Tim huffing hard to breathe under his father’s love, and stepped forward, raising a hand to alert the demon-dad that he was about to choke his son to death.
Kalandar held his son out at arm’s length like he was an infant and shook him, and beamed, smiling with his thick jaw, and huge, sharp teeth. The gesture was equal parts heartwarming and terrifying. Father admiring his son, or demon about to eat the head of its wayward offspring?
The dice rolled adoring father.
“I’m so very proud of you,” the monster said and sat his adult child down in the street on the dead world. “Your mother…might not feel the same way, but she was quite villainous when she and I had our sordid affair.” His lips curled up into a smile as he savored an amorous memory.
“You raped a human?” Arridon blurted.
“Whoa, human. There was consent on her part. She summoned me to her world using great magics so she could bind me and bear the child you see before you. I was happy to oblige. She was incredibly attractive, for a human, and she fed me well during our copulation period.”
“Copulation period?” Arridon muttered.
“Dad, enough. Your penchant for literalness makes my soul shrivel.”
“I like being submissive on occasion; there is a freedom in letting go of power,” Kalandar said.
“Dad,” Timtar threatened. “Enough. We’re gonna die here, and wherever Arridon and Derrick’s sisters are, they’re gonna die there.”
“Has anyone seen a human named Maddie? I left her here, on this very world, right near this very spot. It seems as if she’s run off.” He sniffed the air with his large nostrils. “Her scent is gone; perhaps she was retrieved.”
“No humans here when we got here,” Timtar said.
“A shame. She is resilient, though. A true survivor. Never once doubted she’d make it. One more puzzle for us to solve. Thistle and Sam are on an Earth’s moon, sealed inside a defensive barrier built after the fall of the planet itself. They’ve been under siege from a rather large nest of bogalites and are running out of options, power, and time.”
“You know where Thistle is?” Arridon’s fear abandoned, he strode towards the armored demon. “Is she okay? Has she been hurt?”
“I did just explain her situation, did I not? I also added information regarding her short term prospects; yes, I feel I was adequate in my information. Is your friend slow, Timtar?”
Arridon’s eyes went wacky with panic, anger, and frustration. He wanted to climb up the side of Kalandar and punch him to get more information, but instead he hyperventilated and balled his hands into fists.
“He loves his sister and wants to help her immediately. We need to get off this dead rock, get to a Hell to have their auras scrubbed so Oldros can’t track them, and get Derrick’s severed leg seen to. Then we need to rescue Thistle and Sam. The faster we do all that, the better.”
“Oldros?” Kalandar said, not even trying to hide his excitement. “A worthy foe. Has he gotten himself involved? If so, this truly has become a day of days for me personally.”
“Fuck you, asshole. This has been the worst day of my life. And yeah,” Arridon said. “He’s the one who hurt Derrick, too.”
“I cannot bring Arridon or Derrick to the Hells,” the demon explained. “And if you’ve summoned me here, then your wings have been clipped.”
“Oldros,” Timtar explained, “trying to keep us from escaping Eo.”
“The city in the stars. A ripe fruit I wish to pluck one day. Perhaps. Very well then, our only viable course of action is to ascend to the highest elevation we can and hope for a clockwork room to use. Can Derrick travel? Is his frail human body strong enough?”
“I’ll carry him,” Arridon said. “He’s not that heavy.”
“Excellent. That will free me to protect us, if we are attacked. Have you prayed to cause the storms to avert their course? Prayer seems to be effective.”
“I don’t pray. I know what prayer gets me, when and if it ever works,” Kalandar’s son said. “And from the sounds of it, Arridon hails from a world without divine influence.”
“My mother was a god.”
“Regardless, we must move. Let me fish this horse corpse out of the hole in the ground, and we’ll start the search for a clockwork room.”
“Why do you have a horse corpse?” Timtar asked his father.
“I didn’t bring food the last time I was here; I refused to make that mistake again.”
“I’ve never seen a horse before,” Arridon said.
“Exciting. They’re delicious. Let me show you,” Kalandar said, and jumped back into the hole in the ground to get his snack.
In the distance, the storms pushed on, blasting the ground outside the city with zombie-like persistence.
34
EO
Sebastian’s monstrous body grew into its new reality with the same slow build of pus erupting from a seeping wound. Only a few corners of that reality were still aflame with the fires of the Bleed’s purge. This was not one of those corners. This was a storm-wracked, empty-throned world of ash and ruin. The Bleed had already been here; it was a place where even the ephemera of memories had died.
Sebastian pressed through the miasma of birth-caul that encased him, tearing away at the fluid and rubbery, translucent flesh that wrapped him. Fresh blood, chunks of flesh and milky fluids rained down into the silt of the conquered world, piling up and running away from his numerous arachnoid legs. He rose up, stretching his two most-human arms at his shoulders in unison with the sprouted crab limbs growing out of his back. He’d grown; back at the Citadel he’d been a huge man, now, he was a monster of terrific proportion. Twelve feet tall, ten feet long, as wide as two ox carts—and covered in leathery skin and plates of chitin. His fang-filled maw was now surrounded by equally spaced tendrils of muscle and sinew, and those tentacles writhed in the pain of birth and the anticipation that soon they’d be dragging Thistle’s body into his mouth.
Sebastian looked around and sniffed the air, seeking out where his quarry might’ve gone to ground. Keen senses scanned left and right, always returning to the distant cluster of drafted spires that threatened to drown out the even more distant mountain ranges.
Lightning struck near to him, and he lashed out with a scream at the sky for daring to startle him.
“My dearest Thistle…I am on my way,” he w
hispered to the dead world.
Sebastian launched forward in the direction of the city, his army of angry legs stamping into the dead, dry soil over and over. With each of his many stampeding steps, he moved faster, and with more confidence.
“He’s going to eat me,” Derrick whispered into Arridon’s ear. The man missing his lower right leg rode on the back of his friend, held there by a few loops of rope the demon had produced from a hip bag. They walked with purpose down the wide street of the empty city, storms roiling in the skies above.
“He brought a horse to eat. Keeps saying he has to keep his strength up in case we’re attacked,” Arridon whispered back.
“What happens when he’s finished with the horse?”
“I figure by then our pants will be full enough of shit we can grab a handful of it and throw it in his eyes. Should give us time enough to escape.”
“I have no interest in eating you,” Kalandar said over his shoulder as they pressed down the street towards the tallest of buildings near the city’s center.
The two young men remained silent as their group made their nervous way past transparent building after transparent building. Each was as tall as a mountain in its own right, the empty city—dark as mirrors and windows on a moonless night, lighted only now by flashes in the sky—seemed to call out to them. It begged them to be seen, and, perhaps even remembered. Each building, marked with etched signs in a tongue that none present could decipher, were tombstones in a graveyard of unthinkable proportions.
This wasn’t the aftermath of a war; this was the resulting conclusion everywhere the Bleed went. This was the fate of all things.
They were in the future of all worlds, here, and now.
“That one,” Timtar said, holding up his left arm and consulting with a strange set of crystals arrayed on a leather band around his wrist. “Energy auras are emanating from there. They match the resonance patterns of typical god technology. Clockwork room, almost certainly.”
“Don’t call them gods. It offends actual deities,” Kalandar chastised.
“There are no such things as actual deities,” Tim shot back at his father.
Kalandar stopped and turned to face his charges. “Do not doubt that in this existence there are things greater than us. Things that we cannot understand, and powers so great that they defy all attempts at reason. Even beings as powerful and amazing as I am believe in them and fear for good reason.”
“If gods are real, why aren’t they stopping this? Why aren’t they stopping the Bleed?” Derrick asked Kalandar. These were his first words to the demon.
“Perhaps they are fighting already. Perhaps we are their weapons. Do you think it was random fortune that I met your sisters already? Do you think it was then a coincidence that my son met you? Are you so gullible that you can look at all this and think that it’s happenstance?”
“I don’t know,” Derrick said. “I can’t wrap my head around all of this.”
“Look,” Kalandar said, dropping to his knee to be at Arridon, Timtar, and Derrick’s level. “If you do not see the face of gods in what is happening to us, then you do not lack faith; you lack sense. Now, my son, lead us to the promised land of functioning multiverse technology.”
Outside the city, the storms rumbled louder.
Sebastian’s furious chase had brought him to the city’s wall. Built like the cities on the world he’d been born on, it was surrounded by a tall barrier, ten times the height of the body he lived in now and glassy smooth. He shot his head to the left and right, seeing no entrance.
“So be it.”
Sebastian used his claws and the sharp spikes at the ends of his many feet to try and climb, but to no avail. He smashed his hands and feet at the barrier, but no matter how hard he tried to pierce the substance, to gain purchase, or make the slightest headway, his razor sharp body parts did no damage. He hissed as his facial tentacles writhed with a mind of their own. They too were unhappy about being stymied.
Inside Sebastian’s back, amongst the roots of this new limbs, he felt a strange writhing inside his body. Sprouting from his hide like the shoots of a poisonous plant, he grew whip-like prehensile tails, each ten feet long. The narrow tips of the black cords whipped around, lashing the ground and wall with wet, snapping force. They slowed, and began to caress the wall, feeling it, touching it with perverse grace, and tenderness.
Along their length, tiny pores opened, and a viscous fluid seeped out. Where the cilia-like ropes touched the wall, burning acid remained behind, etching long lines. The acid burnt deep, eating ravines that Sebastian’s claws could dig into. He pulled his weight up a few feet using the new handholds, and of their own accord, the acidic tentacles reached up to create more. Slowly, he ascended.
Sebastian laughed, and the storms grew closer and louder. They seemed to try to threaten him away, and to drown out the sounds of his maniacal laughter.
Kalandar unsheathed a broadsword from his hip that Derrick thought could only have been made from the rotor of an old-Earth helicopter. Wide as a thigh and as long as a human was tall, the block, butcher-blade shaped weapon hissed free of its scabbard. Along its ugly length were even uglier markings etched into the matte steel. Symbols of dark power, uttered by long tongues in toothy mouths, and scratched into the steel with a rusty, blood-encrusted tool. The demon hefted the ensorcelled blade as if it were weightless.
“Forged in a fire of blackest cinder-peat, cured in the blood of a thousand Dund’aari saints. Sharpened by the monks at the Temple of Time’s End, and the weapon I have brutalized countless adversaries with,” he said, admiring the sword. “This blade has been the sign of apocalypse for more than one world. I call it ‘Foe Splitter.’”
“Notably more abbreviated than your personal introduction,” Arridon mused.
“The tool rarely deserves more praise than the artisan who wields it,” the demon answered. “Now, let me cut this building open, so we may ascend to the clockwork room at its top.”
The three others backed away as the demon put down the massive pack he had slung across his back. A horse leg fell out of the top to land on the dusty road.
The red monster with the massive teeth and heavy armor let slip a bellow of might and swung the blade in a whistling arc at the gargantuan two-paneled door that dwarfed the creature and its sword. The steel bit deep and sank into the clear material with a deep ringing sound. Kalandar grunted and wrenched the sword free. A hollow slash remained. He swung again, and again, and once more, carving a chunk out of the doorway large enough to shove his arm through. The automated system holding the door closed strained to do its job, but the writing was being hacked into the wall one slash at a time. He stepped back in approval of his own work, then returned to his vicious assault on the building’s entrance.
“We’ll be through in minutes,” Timtar said as his father raged at the machinery.
Above, the bright blue flashes and the thunder they cast off grew more frequent and intense, like white blood cells rushing to the site of an infection.
Sebastian jumped off the top of the city’s glassine wall just as one of the sun-bright blue bolts of power came down from the clouds. It hit where he had been standing with enough force to utterly obliterate the wall top. The explosion tossed the monster forward like debris in a hurricane, smashing Sebastian off the side of the nearest building. Several of his arms and legs snapped from the impact, and when Sebastian hit the ground, more of his body broke.
He growled in pain, but stood on broken limbs. They would heal—he could feel them knitting back together already, like itches deep within his bones—but he didn’t want to wait. He could hear…life. Over the roar of the storm’s wind, he could hear the sounds of someone trying to enter a building nearby. The loud grunts of exertion were followed by smashes and hollow ringing.
“Thistle my dear!” he roared into the nearing frenzy of the storm. “I come to feast on your flesh!”
He surged into the bowels of the necropolis, sure of
his prey’s proximity.
“Did you hear that?” Derrick asked. “Was that your sister’s name?”
“It was,” Arridon answered as he lowered himself down to his knees. He undid the knots holding the rope fast and let Derick down to the ground with care. “That’s the bastard who chased us to the portal. Sebastian. I thought we killed him. I mean…I watched him die.”
Kalandar turned in the direction of the howl, and set his feet. He raised his sword for battle, and snarled in eager fury. “Should’ve killed him a bit more, it would seem.”
“What do we need to know?” Tim asked Arridon as he produced a sleek weapon resembling a pistol, but made out of fine, deftly interwoven branches. Instead of a hollow barrel to point, the weapon had a flower blossom at its tip.
“He’s big, strong, has armor made of bone. His blood is infectious. Get it on you, and you’ll be turned into one of the demons of the Bleed.”
“Being a demon isn’t the worst thing that you can be,” Kalandar said. “There are fates far less desirable.”
“Then whatever it turns you into, is one of those shittier fates,” Arridon said. He produced his own weapon from his waist.
“The poison of his blood gives me no pause. Let him come,” the demon snarled. “And we will show this monster how to lose a battle.”
Lightning struck the building across the street high above, shattering the windows with a cacophony of noise.
35
EO
Derrick crawled on the ground to the entrance Kalandar had hacked open with his enchanted propeller. On hands and knee (just one knee, as the other leg ended in a stump just above where he’d had a second knee), he moved to get out of the way of the imminent, awful battle.
