The OverLord gestured to one of the chairs across from him. “Sit, titan.”
Van was not quite ready to move closer to the monster. He walked over to the window. He was inside a farmhouse. The view was of the dead, desiccated remains of crops. The grey landscape beyond the fields was flatter than other parts of the rocky Nether. Mountains loomed in the distance. The air felt thin. He walked back to the titan, slid into a chair across from him.
The OverLord’s boots rested on the low table. Van got no sense of pending violence from the titan. Instead, he felt like the OverLord could sit there patiently for an eternity, waiting as the world aged to dust around him. Finally, the OverLord cleared his throat and spoke again. “Titan, I would have a word with you.”
Van nodded cautiously.
The OverLord removed his hat and pinned Van to the chair with his white eyes. “This chase proves tiresome. Thrice I have come to you and thrice you have defied me. You occupy attention better paid to preparations for war.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Van asked, “You send me a few bad memories and suddenly I’m supposed to join your side? You think that’s all it takes to break me?”
“I do not seek to break you, titan, though I certainly will if necessary.” He shook his head slowly. “No, I seek to open your eyes. You walk forward in a narrow valley, blind to all that lies over its sides. I am offering you a clear view of the truth.”
“What truth?”
“The world above is not yours. You are an intruder as much as I am. The puny, spiteful men above do not want you. Nor do they deserve your loyalty. Why did you come to the Nether, if not to search for answers? You do not seek vengeance, or you would have attacked me when I first showed myself to you.”
A series of smartass answers darted through Van’s mind, but the solemnity of the OverLord’s voice made them all seem pointless and out of place. Van gave one slow shake of his head. “You said I was meant to follow you. Maybe I am.”
The OverLord snorted. “You set a strange path for a follower. No, I think that is not your intention. I will add you to the ranks of the titans who will form my army, perhaps in the innermost circle, but that is not why you are here. And you are not ready. I do not know why you arrived at my gates, bested my gatekeepers, and followed my trail.” He removed his boots from the table and leaned forward towards Van, the sofa creaking beneath him. “If you seek to destroy me, you will find me a far greater opponent than any you have ever faced.”
“Maybe I’m ready to join your army. What’s in it for me?”
“Freedom from lies, for one. Like the lies you speak right now.” The OverLord leaned back again. “You are unlike other titans. They know only domination. And what they cannot dominate, it dominates them in turn. When they see I can neither be hurt nor bested, they bow to me. And I bring them down here and show them the truth of the world above.
“If I had more time to teach you, titan, to help you understand what you’ve already been taught every day in the world above, then you would learn it, whether you seek it or not.” He sighed and shifted the hat in his hands. “But time moves swiftly, for once. For thousands of years I craved freedom from its grip, now I find it lacking. I have not enough of it to send you back to your lessons again and again and see if they find purchase in the shallow soil of your mind. So instead I would tell you something of my story. Will you hear it?”
Again Van nodded. He’d come to this place looking for Kyle, but with the return of the Titan Wars looming, with the cold will of this monster before him threatening the world Van called home, he’d take any information he could get.
The OverLord rested his hat in his lap and folded his hands over it. “Some say I was the first titan. It is not true. But it is true that I am from an ancient time, a time when giants roamed the lands, shaking villages and leveling forests with a single step. I have watched civilizations rise and fall.” He cleared his throat with a sound like thunder on a mountain. “Most stories begin with a childhood. Mine does not. I have no recollection of the past before I met my one true love, a human, a perfect beauty, if not to others, to me. I came to her village to trade. I, the only titan her lands had ever known, lived alone in the mountains not far away. I lingered in her village, and love befell us.”
He frowned at Van, then returned to his usual grim visage. “Perhaps you disbelieve love could find someone like me. But this was before I became a monster that strikes fear in the hearts of all who cross my path. Our love was shared and true. In spite of, or perhaps because of that truth, it was not tolerated in her village. They feared to directly defy me, so instead they banished her from her homeland. I waited for her where the last houses held their backs to the high plains. When she arrived, I folded my arm over her, and we walked away from humans forever.
“I took her to a new land on the edges of the places where giants roamed.” He turned his head towards the window, gazed at something with those unchanging white eyes. “The stories of the giants have been twisted over time, but even back then they were not understood by men. There were only three who fell from the skies, expelled from their lands above. Jugor, Ergoth Sintan, and Malachisin. They did not belong in our world, and none was happy to be left behind in this strange place. They roamed the mountains with little purpose. Men told stories of Jugor’s sorrow, and how he could be heard weeping in the night, longing for the lands denied him. Stories of Ergoth Sintan’s great rage, how she tore mountain ranges to pieces and set wildfires to blaze across hundreds of miles. Stories of Malachisin’s cruel cunning and how he never stopped trying to cheat his way back to their home in the sky.” The OverLord broke off and looked back at Van. “But for most the giants were simply occasional rumbles in the dark night. They did not bother with people, and one could live near their mountains so long as they did so quietly so as to avoid drawing the giants’ curiosity.
“In those days, the skies were grey and endless. At a place that was rumored to be the edge of the boundaries of the giants, I found flat land to sow in the shadow of two mountains. We built a home, my loving wife and I. The image of the home we stand in now. She birthed two titan boys. The first birthing went well. The second took her life.”
He looked down at the folded hands in his lap and his voice hardened. “Perhaps if she had been in the company of other humans, rather than forced from their world, she may have survived. I know not. I buried her under the only tree on our land, an old and twisted oak. Her death was the first part of mine, but, though I did not know it at the time, a larger tragedy awaited.
“I continued to sow and reap as the boys grew, toiling through my great sadness. Soon I had two strong titan boys to help me pull sustenance from the land. To weed, and plant, and harvest in the shadow of the two mountains. But it was not to last.
“My younger son was prone to nightmares, so haunted in the night that he would wander off. Many a morning I would search for him and find him far from home. One night he wandered from a mountain path. I found his body in the morning. His older brother and I hauled him back to our home. I burned his body and scattered the ashes at the base of the oak and among the fields he helped work. After that I slept little. The nightmares that plagued him came to me in his stead and denied me rest.
“My elder son and I continued to work the fields, pretending I did not scream out every night, pretending that the ghosts of his lost mother and brother did not hang over our heads like storm clouds. We toiled. There was naught else to do.
“Then a storm came. In those ancient days true storms were rare and feared. They rocked the lands, such that even the mighty giants hunkered down for shelter. The storm brought a rain of dust, winds that shook our home. The winds threatened to lift our home from the ground and dash it into the mountains. We rushed outside so we were not carried away with it and could survive the storm from the fields. We were separated immediately.
“The next morning, as the winds quieted and the dust that covered the fields settled, I was finally able to
open my eyes. The house had survived. My son had not. I found him dead, face down, half buried in the dust that choked our crops. His body I also burned at the base of the oak. I scattered the ashes that same morning, still hot enough to burn my hands.
“With the weight of three deaths upon my shoulders, I planned for a fourth. I returned to the fire, fed it the bones of my cursed house in the center of my cursed land in the flats between the two mountains. When the flames grew high enough, I walked into them. And they consumed me.”
The OverLord looked up at Van, his white eyes glassy. “Many fear death, and they are right to. Dying is not for the weak. It is an opponent unlike any I have ever faced. To feel your body perish is horrifying beyond my ability to describe. But when it was over, I was free.
“I drifted away, upwards, towards a sky less grey than usual, brighter in the wake of the storm that had roiled it so. I thought I drifted towards a reunion with my sons and my lost love. But that was not meant to be. For as I cast one last look upon my blighted land, I saw there were not two mountains on the horizon, but three. As I watched from above, the third mountain stirred and shook and rumbled until a great avalanche of dirt, trees and stones fell to its foot. The giant Malachisin emerged from the rubble, opened his great white eyes, and stared down curiously at my body burning on the pyre.
“He leaned forward and reached his massive arm out across the fields. He crushed the pyre and my remains in a pinch of his great fingers. He lifted the dust into the air, and with his other hand, he took an impossibly small item from his belt, so small it looked like a grain of sand in his enormous hand. It was a copper urn. And into that urn, he put that pinch of ash, my ashes. He closed his fist around it. With an enormous finger, he poked a hole into the dirt near the oak tree. When he removed it, a chasm long and filled with darkness was the result. Then, as a farmer might carefully plant a seed, he tipped the urn into the hole and let it fall.
“This I watched, as a spirit from the sky, destined for the next world, but as the urn plummeted into the hole so did I fall, and soon found myself back in my titan body, standing on the broken ground before the giant. I no longer felt the burning of the funeral pyre. No longer felt the agony of accumulated toil or aching back and knees. I no longer felt the despair of losing my sons, my love. And that was far worse than any pain I have ever suffered. To be robbed of that which had been a part of me so long was infinite suffering.
“‘Release me from this vile bond,’ I demanded once I could speak through my shock. Malachisin looked at me as you might look upon an ant. I felt the weight of his gaze, the horrible force behind it. He frowned at me, the creases in his brow like gorges in the earth, and simply said, ‘BE THAT WAY.’ The mountains trembled with the thunder of his words. In the silence that followed, he reached down a finger thicker than the greatest oak and pushed me into the black hole.”
The OverLord looked out the window again. Van turned to look, too. He could see the oak tree, at the base of which the OverLord had buried his wife, and scorch marks where he’d burned the bodies of his children. He couldn’t see if a pit was there as well from his sitting view. Van’s back was tight from the hard chair, but he was reluctant to shift and break the silence. He’d never expected to feel anything like sympathy for the OverLord, and he wasn’t sure that was what he was feeling as he sat with him in silence, but the hardship the titan had faced was horrendous. Van gnawed at his bottom lip and watched the OverLord stare out the window as if he could see the entire scene playing out under the oak tree again.
Finally, the OverLord continued. “At the bottom of the hole I found this place, which I have shaped over the thousands of years I have been trapped here alone. Thus was born the Nether, and I as its OverLord. Never dying, never aging. Never feeling pain and unable to grieve. Never feeling anything. From time to time I forge an entryway to the world above. I look upon the living, the uncursed. At first I imagined I felt envy for the love they could feel. I did not forget how I blamed them for my wife’s death. But truly I felt nothing.
“Soon the emptiness inside me started whispering from the shadows, telling me there was only one way to be free of this unending torment. And so I began visiting the world above. I sought children in the grips of nightmares, stealing them away as they struggled against their dark fears in the night. I came with the storms, finding the lost and alone, bringing them here and leaving them to wander this empty, forsaken place. The Nether slowly filled. I was drawn especially to titans, my lonely brothers, and soon I had an army.” He looked at Van. “You know what happened next.”
“The Titan Wars,” Van croaked out. His throat felt lined with dust.
“Yes. My army surfaced. I had tired of prowling the shadows. Why should I not walk under clear skies? Surely my purpose is not solely to suffer alone down here. I have done that and saw no relief on that course. Perhaps if I forced a change upon the world, made it bend its knee to me, even a giant could not ignore such an event. He would again turn his gaze upon me and I could again petition for my release. And if not, if he never returns, at least I will no longer endure knowing that others feel what I no longer can. Perhaps if I end all life, I will be free.
“The titan warriors above formed an army to oppose mine. The battle was like nothing the world ever saw before or since.” His white eyes seemed to brighten. “The Great General Grand Reffe led his troops into battle. He was the mightiest of the titans, and the only one to ever best me. I lost and my army was torn apart as we retreated. But my will did not change. And in the short years since, I watched the titans grow divided. I watched the nations come to hate each other, even as they pretend to unite. I saw the birth of the Headlock, where each titan sets his strength against all others and so precludes any opportunity for an army like that of the General’s to stand in my way again. The General himself, I stood at his deathbed, but even in death he refused to follow me. It is no matter. No living titan can replace him. The opposition crumbles and weakens while I bide my time, patiently waiting for the right moment.
“And now”—he swung his gaze back to Van—“my final harvest is nearly complete. The Headlock lined up the best, the strongest of titans to fill my innermost circle. I want you in that circle. You have journeyed into your own mind. You have relived the life men have forced upon you, the way they have treated you. They will not change until they are made to. I will end the world. It is the only way to free myself. The only way to free us all. So I ask you, Van the Titan, Van the Beer Man, will you join me or be conquered by me?”
Van licked dry lips and lifted his heavy head. He stared at the OverLord a long time, choosing his next words carefully. “Where do you keep that urn?”
The OverLord’s jaw tightened. He pressed his hat back on his head, hiding his face in shadow again. “I assure you the urn is well defended.” He rose from his seat. “Then your choice is made. The choice of a fool.”
Van slowly stood. “Is this the part where you finally shut up and we fight?”
The OverLord stared at Van, white eyes gleaming out from under the brim of his hat, then he laughed. “I could defeat you a thousand times and then a thousand more. But I needn’t bother. Another of my champions waits for you. You will not survive him.” With a wave of his hand, the OverLord dismissed Van.
Chapter 8.
Van found himself face down in the dust, back outside, no sign of the farmhouse or the mountains in the distance. The storm had passed over but the skies, or whatever loomed above him in these flat lands, remained a dark, sullen grey. The rocky ground, as broken and cracked as dragons’ scales, still bore the scarred trail left by the coffins.
He shouted out the Patriot’s name, but his voice fell flat in the stillness. He was alone. He’d expected to make this journey by himself, had been prepared for it as much as he’d been prepared for anything down here. But the Patriot had proven a welcome distraction, a companion even, for the short time their paths overlapped. He was likely in the OverLord’s clutches already or being
dragged there by Jaygan. And Van was alone again in the Nether. At this point, he might even welcome Saint’s company just to have someone to talk to. Hopefully the little bastard was still trapped in the barrel, wherever he was.
Van sat with his arms wrapped around his knees for a time as the OverLord’s story rattled uncomfortably around in his head. He thought his own life had been hard and lonely, toilsome and unrewarding. The OverLord’s had been monstrous. Losing all that he loved, then being robbed even of his pain, robbed of his grief for his lost family. No wonder it had birthed a monster, one who in his suffering had determined that the death of the world would be his only relief. He would end the world Van called home. That truth was a heavy burden, too huge and powerful and unmanageable, for a simple, beer-swilling titan from the Uplands.
Van’s bruises and scrapes from the struggle with Jaygan’s pet dragon had returned. His head ached and his throat was dry. He felt no hunger, but his body was restless, ill at ease. He’d been down in this dismal place too long. When he’d last returned from one of the visions, or dreams, or whatever they were, Saint had joked that the wars were long over, that the years had raced past while Van was away. Now Van feared it could be true. He was no closer to Kyle, had seen no sign of her. No indication that he’d done anything other than throw his life away by coming down here on this futile journey across sharp stones.
Van stared off into the distance a long time before he finally rose and began plodding along the endless trail. In the calm the storm had left behind, the air hung heavy like a shroud. He expected a lengthy, featureless slog that would slowly wear down his body and break his sanity. He was surprised when he crested a small rise and saw a city just before him.
Squat and ugly structures sat outside in the shadow of the city walls. Beyond the gates, buildings stretched upwards in a skyline that rivaled Empire City. This city of the Nether was unnaturally quiet, however, with none of the hustle and bustle of a population working, breathing, living, loving. No smoke, no smells, no movement. It looked to be a city populated entirely by dust. Fitting.
The Piledriver of Fate (Titan Wars Book 2) Page 6
