by DJ Molles
Say something, Stuber. Say one of your annoying jokes about how fucking tough you are.
Toughness didn’t matter any more. Toughness has limits.
Death waits in the wings, and you never know when it’s going to descend on you.
Death and lies. Lies and Death.
But who was lying? Niva or Batu? They were as diametrically opposed as life and death. They could not both be lying, just as life had no party with death. And Batu was Death. Death and lies. That much Perry knew…
“Stuber,” he said—actually heard himself say it this time.
And why was Perry thinking all of these things as he stared at his dead friend? He didn’t know. Could only feel the thoughts swirling around him. Could only perceive something there. Something he kept trying to grasp, kept trying to make sense of. Some key that would explain things. Some sense of truth in the madness.
Niva or Batu? Life or Death?
Confluence. The flow of red that lived down inside of him. No longer red, though. Corrupted now. Turned to something different. Gone mad. Something that had once been good, now rotted and foul. Something that had once been true, now turned to lies. Life turned to death. Truth turned to lies. Friends turned to enemies.
I only ever wanted to be your friend. Stuber had said that once to him. When he’d been drunk, of course. Overly-truthful.
He’d come out to find Perry. He’d made a decision, and damned the consequences. Because he was Perry’s friend.
That was true. That was truth.
He grasped it. Like flailing in dark waters, and landing your hand upon a rope. A tether. Something to save you. Like he’d thrashed in the dark waters of the underground river, and felt the oar that Stuber had thrust down at him.
Something to save you. Something to give you life.
Truth and life. Lies and death. Niva and Batu.
Confluence.
Which was neither. It was simply a flow. And that flow could be pushed one way or the other. It could be pushed with truth. Or it could be pushed with lies. It could be used to destroy, to turn cities to ash and landscapes to glass. Or it could knit your broken bones back together.
Because Confluence was just energy. It was not good or bad until you decided what to do with it. Decided with your own free will. Life or death. Truth or lies. Which way would the river flow? Which way would the wheel turn?
Whichever way you choose.
A blast from Batu hit him square in the center of his back. He jolted forward, bracing himself over Stuber’s dead body, his hands on either side of the big man’s torso, staring straight down at his head, face all mushed into dirt, crumbles of it caking his eyelids, dusting his eyelashes.
The energy poured straight into him. The flow of Confluence raged, and begat rage, all going one direction, picking him up again, that little surviving part of his humanity that clung to its redoubt, and sweeping it into the flow.
Perry gagged on his own rage like a gummy chunk of gristle caught in his throat. But all he saw was Stuber’s dead face, and the rage seemed impotent now, not so powerful, just lashing out at nothing. Just purposeless destruction.
Death begetting more death.
Perry groaned under the surge of power. Felt another beam of it strike him from one of the other Nine. And another. Then a third, and fourth, and then all of them, all of the Nine, slamming him with everything they had, all their anger, all their madness, all their torment. Rennok, Halan, Batu, Nur, Vitan, Verus, Annad, Annan, Chak—none of them with an ounce of pity, an ounce of mercy, an ounce of sanity between them all.
He heard Lux’s voice: “Perry!”
He thrust himself up so that he was sitting back on his heels, a monumental effort under the strain of all that dark energy being poured into him. He saw Lux trying to move towards him, saw Mala doing the same. He saw arms raise up in front of him—realized they were his own. He thrust his palms out to them, trying to tell them to stay, but the power jumped, surged, wanted to leap from his hands and destroy them.
NO.
Mala and Lux halted, mortified by what they saw, and Perry knew what they saw: A man become a beast. Perry, become just like the Sons of Primus, armor plated flesh, and rage teeming in the cracks, blazing from his eyes.
NO.
He tried to pull against the power that wanted to pour out of him, wanted to explode out of his chest, consume all, destroy all, immolate all, and leave nothing but ashes and glass. It bucked against his efforts.
CHOOSE
He strained to look down at his friend’s dead body, desperate to feel the grief that he’d felt only moments before because it was his only connection to sanity. It was a connection to the choice that he wanted to make, but it was slipping away, everything good and true blotted out in the blazing desire for destruction.
His eyes drew back to Karapalida.
Burn it down rake them with fire slam their works to glass he couldn’t tell whose thoughts were in his head. They were from him, and they were from the Nine, and they were from Death itself.
Billows of dust. Emerging from the horizon line. From where Karapalida was barely a shimmer in the distance. Watery shapes at the bottoms of those billows of dust. Several of them, all in a line. Black outlines of rollbars. Spinning tires. Men hanging from every handhold.
Enemies all enemies destroy them before they destroy you
NO.
He felt fire burning in his throat like vomit. His jaw urged to open wide, and he somehow knew that if he did, destruction would pour out of his mouth like a geyser and consume them all, all the little people in their pathetic vehicles racing across the wastelands to…
Racing across the wastelands to…
To what?
To me.
Enemies!
No.
Choices.
Perry dragged a leg up from the ground. Confluence filling every fiber of tissue with an inestimable power, and yet they were heavy as boulders, resisting his every move, because the power that filled him wanted one thing, and Perry, in the last little bit of himself, wanted something else.
He got that foot on the ground. Pressed with all his might. Got the other foot up.
Standing now. Standing under the deluge of Confluence from the Nine, like standing beneath a massive waterfall, millions of gallons of hatred pouring over him, willing him to unleash, to smite, to crush, to break, to avenge some offense that wasn’t quite clear.
Turning. Like trying to orient yourself in the face of a storm-surged river, pressing, pushing, tugging, willing you to go one direction while you fought for the other.
He faced them. The Nine. All of them standing there, shoulder to shoulder, all of them with their hands outstretched, all of them beaming their darkness into him in crackling pipelines of green.
Arms. Move them. Up. Up. Hands. Open them. Open your clenched fists.
Limbs that were not his own. Flesh that was not his own. Feelings and thoughts that were not his own.
Fingers opening.
And all of the sudden that flow of energy was caught between his hands, rapidly building, like he’d erected some impenetrable dam in the face of the torrential river. Everything the Nine had within them, pouring into one spot, pouring into one massive ball of energy that threatened to explode, to blot out all life on earth. Balanced precariously on the very tip of a thought.
Life. Truth. Sanity.
Or Death. Lies. Madness.
Two forces smashing into each other in a headlong collision. But it’s never been a battle between good and evil. It’s never been a battle between life and death. It’s never been about forces beyond your control.
It’s only ever been about a choice. Not which way the wheel would turn. But which way would you spin it? Which do you choose? That is, after all, the power of free will. And it’s the only fucking thing you’ve ever got.
I choose to believe Niva. I choose truth over lies. I choose life over death.
Perry opened his mouth and drew in a b
reath. The growing ball of destruction between his hands, now burning white-hot, began to flicker, to dim. Trails of it like steam, leaking out of the orb, and into his mouth. He sucked it all back in. He took what was given to him, and made it something different. He made a choice.
One river meeting another. Two flows, crashing into each other.
Confluence.
Which would win? Which would overpower the other?
Well. Perry had made his decision. And that’s all it ever comes down to.
Everything reversed. The outward became the inward. The press became a pull. The explosion became an implosion.
The flow of Confluence, that red tide that had turned green in his mind—green with madness and insanity—that had only ever flowed one direction for his entire life, because it was always the direction of anger and destruction…it stopped. And for the first time in Perry’s life, it began to flow the other way.
Not green anymore. Not red, either.
Sky blue.
And everything changed.
CHAPTER FOURTY
LIFE AND DEATH
Here? There? Everywhere? Otherwhere?
Underwear.
And where the hell was he?
None of the above, and all of the above, all at once.
He’d gone someplace. A place without borders. A place between realities. A place that he understood, but still couldn’t quite articulate in any logical way. There really wasn’t anything here. It was no place in particular, and all places at once. It held the infinite potential to be any place imaginable.
He was in the Otherwhere.
Hard to understand the infinite. But, like his sense of Confluence, his mind perceived it, and created an image to go along with it. So it seemed to simply be a blank canvas. Just whiteness. Nothing and everything all at once. It was anything that you thought it could be.
He wasn’t actually there. But he perceived himself as there. And in that perception, his body took a form in the Otherwhere. He looked down and found feet. So he used them to walk.
He was not really sure how long he walked. It didn’t really seem to matter. Time was only a perception of entropy, after all. Entropy being death. From which is spawned life. The never ending cycle of evolution, somersaulting its way through the universe. Couldn’t have life without death. But that was the key—life always won. It always adapted. Always turned the death of one thing into the creation of something new.
Anyways, all of that was neither here nor there, nor anywhere.
Nor was he really moving, because you can’t move in a place that isn’t physical.
Nevertheless, he found something that he hadn’t perceived before. Maybe he came upon it, or maybe it came upon him. Maybe it had been there the whole time and now he was just conscious of it.
Didn’t really matter.
And what was the thing? Hard to tell. There’s not a lot of context in a place of infinite potential. Or perhaps there’s just too much context to do anything with.
It was a little pinprick. A hole in the blank canvass of infinite potential. Or perhaps a shadow. Something from which the infiniteness of the potential had been filtered, in order to create something actual. A subtraction of the infinite, to create the finite. Like how a screen filters the light from a projector in order to make an image.
He knew that little pinprick. So he went into it.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Perry blinked eyes that weren’t really there, and saw more. Here, inside the pinprick, there was darkness. Tangible darkness, though. So it didn’t seem entirely black. It had a texture. It had a certain reality to it. A seething, clenching, grasping, clawing reality.
“I’m not really sure,” Perry answered, though he didn’t have a mouth to speak, or ears to hear a voice, but he imagined them, so there they were. More subtraction. More finite from infinite.
The darkness surged against him. He pushed it away. Massive waves upon a massive cliff. They could only break and wash around him. It made the darkness angry. Or angrier. It was already angry. Furious, really. Enraged. Completely illogical. Vengeful. Spiteful. Prideful.
But, in the end, just a pinprick.
WHAT IS HAPPENING?
“Which are you?” Perry felt like he was frowning, a tad confused, but he didn’t have a forehead, so he made one up. Felt it wrinkle.
I AM VITAN, SON OF PRIMUS, AND I AM A GOD, AND YOU CANNOT—
“No more.”
And Perry pushed back against the flow of that darkness. It swept over him, and consumed him, and took tiny pieces of him, and put them to death. But Perry still flowed in the direction that he’d chosen—the direction of life. And from the death that the darkness brought to him, he made more life. Just like evolution. Because life always wins in the end.
It could have been decades. It could have been eons. Could have also taken no time at all. But the process went on and on, until the darkness was too weak to flow against him, and then it gave up, and Perry pushed it with his own flow, reversed its direction, and made it flow in the direction of life.
And the pinprick went away.
Well. Not exactly. There was still a pinprick. But it was a different pinprick this time. Perry had jumped to another one. Because here is there is everywhere.
YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE
Anger and rage. Getting a little boring, if Perry were being honest.
“And who are you?”
I AM CHAK AND YOU CANNOT BE INSIDE OF ME
“No more.”
A push. A flow. Life against death. And death took its toll, but life eventually won.
And the pinprick dissipated, and Perry was in another.
HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS
“This could take a while,” Perry muttered. It had already taken hundreds of lifetimes, he thought. He dreamed up a hand to scratch his imaginary temple with. Why did he have to go into one pinprick at a time? Why not all of them at once? They were all connected, after all, all a part of the big, blank, infinite potential. And here was there was everywhere. So why not be in all of them at once?
So then, he was in all of them at once. And they were in him, as well. All mixed together like a poorly-thought out soup. Lots of clashing flavors. Lots of confusing concepts. Lots of butting heads.
They crashed into him all at once. But there was no power in any of it. They pelted him like flying bugs. But not even the bad kind of bugs, with stingers and mandibles. Just clumsy old beetles, tumbling into him, ineffective.
They changed him, it was true. They were death, after all, and death always changes things. When they pelted him with themselves, they moved through him, carved out little paths through him. Bored holes, one might say. Kind of like you had to let the fear bore holes in you. But on the other side, they didn’t come out the same.
They raged on. Always flowing one way. But Perry was always flowing the other way. He’d made his decision, and his decision was final. That’s the special thing that humanity had. Free will. Choice. The power to make decisions.
Perry had chosen to flow a different way, and while they pummeled him and tried to continue their flow in one direction, he flowed in the other, and he could not be stopped, because his flow was the flow of life, and life always wins.
Really not all that complicated when you get right down to it.
He was in them, those Sons of Primus, and he pushed his flow against theirs, and they took many pieces of him, but ultimately, they could not withstand him. Maybe, if they had been more human, they could’ve made a choice and saved themselves. But they’d given themselves over to Death. They’d embodied it so purely, that when Perry finally managed to push their flow in the other direction, there just wasn’t enough left of them to exist.
Just little balls of ash, he imagined. Nine little balls of ash, and he took a big breath of imaginary air and blew them into puffs of dull gray powder that wafted off into the great big whiteness of infinite potential.
***
The wh
ole thing took several million years. Perry was pretty certain of that. But then, he wasn’t sure if he could live that long. So maybe it hadn’t been that long at all. It felt like he’d grown old though. Ancient. Beyond ancient. And then died. And was reborn. Gone through the whole process again. Over and over. Conscious of each and every transition from death to life, and back again to death.
Then again, maybe it only took a fraction of a second.
Because when he opened his eyes again—his physical eyes—he was standing in the same place, a torn up piece of wasteland. He blinked to make sure this was real, because he’d spent so long in the Otherwhere, it was hard to realize that he was back here in this place, right back where he’d start. And for a brief moment, he thought that this moment could be any time in his life. That he might look down and see that he was a young boy, or an old man, or perhaps someone else entirely, somewhere else in a strange timeline of human events, looking out across a desert.
But then he smelled smoke.
Looked behind him and saw a crater in the dust, and the smoking ruins of a skiff scattered into pieces. Two tall figures, one man, one woman, standing there, staring at him, and he realized that he knew them. He remembered them from that life so long ago.
Mala and Lux.
Rapidly, the sensation of so much time having passed, all the memories of all the transitions, all the death, all the lives, faded. Fuzzy dreams born of a certainty that would grow hazy and then gradually slough off of you like so many dead skin cells.
A moment of alarm, as he remember who he was, and what he was, and what he was doing, and who was trying to kill him—or twist him into insanity. His well-tuned animal brain sparked a medly of fresh stress hormones through his otherwise calm mental state, and cemented him firmly to this reality.
His eyes shot forward again as his spine tingled and his hands twitched as though wanting for a weapon. He scanned the horizon. He scanned the sky. But the Nine weren’t there.
For a moment, he thought he perceived a slightly darker bit of dust, like ash, wafting in the air where the Nine had stood. But then he realized that it was just smoke from the wreck.
