by Matt Turner
“That’s—” Giles started to say, and then he stopped. Despite the smoke and fire that billowed up from the icy chasm, something was moving within. A man? He squinted, trying to make out the shadowy figure clambering up the melting walls. An artillery shell exploded just above the climbing figure, briefly camouflaging it in a stew of chemical flame. The man—for it was indeed a man; Giles could tell that much—seemed to pass through the explosion unhindered, for he reached the top of the chasm and pulled himself up into the light.
Him, Abaddon whispered.
The man tilted his head back and drank in the cold winter air, blissfully ignorant of the gathered army that stared him down. He wore nothing but a few bloodied rags that grimly clung to his legs and waist like tattered skin. His back was to Giles; all that Giles could make out was the unruly mane of dark hair that fell past the stranger’s shoulder blades. A few loose chains dangled from where they remained embedded in the man’s skin—it looked as though a few of them were completely wedged within his body.
“Front rank,” Griet’s voice thundered through the intercom system built into the stiltwalkers. “Take him!”
With a mighty roar, thousands of the Kingdom’s soldiers—bearing pikes, swords, axes, relics of a hundred wars—surged forward. Their numbers were so great that they may have been a tidal wave about to crash down on a pebble, but the strange man paid them no attention as he continued to silently bathe in the Ninth Circle’s dim light.
We have him. Giles grinned in triumph as the first soldiers drew near. Their pikes stabbed forward, just a meter away from stabbing the stranger through his head, chest, and limbs. After that would come the barrage, and after that—
The strange man leapt up into the air. The first pike sailed uselessly beneath his feet, and the soldier bearing it stumbled forward, caught up in his own charge—just as the stranger gently placed one of his bare feet on the man’s head and jerked it forward, throwing the soldier into the chasm below.
Giles’s heart sank. Deep down, he knew that the battle was already over.
Before the stranger even landed, he lashed out with another one of his feet, knocking another pike aside. The momentum carried him forward, and he gracefully landed into the mass of charging men, just behind the front row of pikes. His speed was ungodly; he grabbed a charging soldier, flipped over his shoulder just in time so that the dozen blades that would have cut him to ribbons sank into the soldier’s chest instead, and wrenched the short sword that the soldier had been carrying out of his hands. The blade became a blur of motion as he silently charged forward, cutting a visible swathe of the army down in seconds. Scores of the Thirteenth Legion came at him from every direction, yet they could not lay so much as a finger on him—he tore through armor as if it were tissue paper, sprayed blood in the air like water, and decapitated and amputated and mutilated with the bored detachment of a professional butcher. The wounded became an impediment to their comrades; the stranger carefully hacked and sliced so that the ocean of men around him became a few rivers restricted by vast piles of bleeding flesh.
One of the stiltwalkers waded into the fray, stepping over the small hills of wounded, screaming bodies that the stranger had constructed. The twin miniguns built into the underside of its chassis thundered, tearing down entire ranks of men like ninepins, but the stranger was far too agile. With a few easy bounds, he dodged the spray of bullets. The stiltwalker swung two of its mighty blades down at him; he easily caught the both of them with the edge of his sword. The crash of steel against steel echoed across the entire battlefield as man and machine grappled against each other for a single precious moment.
“All units, open fire!” Griet commanded.
On either side of the chasm, the rear ranks of the Thirteenth Legion fired every rifle, crossbow, machine gun, beam-cannon, flamethrower, howitzer, and war machine that they had their hands on. The air became steel from the sheer volley of bullets—they carved the front ranks of the army into meat, then pulp, then a red liquid that stained the ice and dribbled down into the depths of the chasm. The avalanche of sound was utterly deafening, yet not even it could drown out the mighty voice of the stranger as he tore away the blades of the stiltwalker he was grappling and raised his hands to the sky above.
“So many proud princes,” he thundered. Thousands screamed and bled and exploded into pieces around him, yet the bullets may as well have been drops of rain against his skin.
“Artillery!” Griet boomed, and immediately the distant guns began to rain down death once more. Their explosions rippled around the stranger, drowning him in ash and blood.
“Power so splendid,” the stranger continued.
Something was happening, Giles realized; the pillars of smoke rising around the stranger were no longer going upward into the sky. They began to spin, faster and faster, in a vortex around the man.
Run, you fool! Abaddon shrieked, and to Giles’s surprise, the demon took control of him—he felt the locusts reach inside his body and command it to run—no, to sprint—away from the chasm. Somehow, he was able to turn his head.
For the first time, the stranger had turned so that he faced Giles. A glimmer of hideous golden eyes shined at Giles from the center of the vortex—it was now spinning so rapidly that the mass of body parts scattered around it were beginning to slide along the ice. A few even climbed up into the air to join the growing hurricane.
“More!” Griet bellowed. “MORE!” The Thirteenth Legion’s guns boomed, but it was no longer obvious whether they could even reach the man who stood in the center of the great tornado—the mass of bodies caught up in the titanic winds was too great. Even the artillery shells that rained down from the sky were caught up in the shrieking winds. A handful still detonated, igniting the column of spinning air that stretched higher and higher into a firestorm.
“In a moment, a twinkling.” The stranger laughed. Thunder crackled within the depths of the vortex as the sky above darkened into the pitch blackness of midnight.
It seemed to Giles that only two lights now existed—the twin golden orbs that hatefully mocked him from the depths of the storm.
The ranks of the Thirteenth Legion began to lose cohesion as more and more soldiers turned to flee. Their officers raged and spat at them, but their voices were lost in the titanic screech of the mighty winds. Entire slabs of ice were torn out of the ground by their passing.
“All utterly ENDED,” the stranger declared in a terrible voice.
The vortex exploded outward, carrying with it the debris of an entire army. The Thirteenth Legion had no chance against it—stiltwalkers disintegrated into scraps of metal before it, skin and muscle were torn from flesh, entire companies were sucked up kilometers into the air. In the space of ten seconds, twenty-five thousand men ceased to be.
As the mighty winds died away, the only evidence that the Thirteenth Legion had ever existed was the blood that showered down from the skies, staining every surface of the Ninth Circle a scarlet red. The strange man ignored it. With a single bound, he leapt over the mighty chasm that he had carved, his golden eyes fixed entirely on Giles.
Giles’s nerves failed him; he weakly stumbled and fell onto the slippery ice. “Oh God,” he whispered in terror as the stranger drew closer. “Oh God, oh God, oh God…”
A dark smile crept across the man’s features as he strode closer, leaving a trail of footprints on the bloody ice in his wake. “Giles de Rais. The man who tamed the devil Abaddon. I’ve wanted to meet the two of you for a long, long time.”
It was at that moment that Giles sprung his trap. “NOW, SALOME!” he shouted.
The stranger jerked back in surprise as the ice beneath him exploded outward. Ten thousand locusts swarmed up his legs and torso, biting and thrashing, as Leviathan suddenly swooped down from the sky above, a spray of fire bursting from his iron jaws. The stranger barely had enough time to raise his hands in front of his face to protect himself before he was consumed by fire and insect.
But Giles
was not done. “More!” he shouted. He poured every locust that Abaddon could possibly produce into this last desperate attack—hundreds of thousands, now millions, of them swarmed into the firestorm that Leviathan kept trained on the stranger. He had been saving these locusts for a special occasion; each of them had enough poison in their bite to paralyze an elephant. Even if the heat was so great that nine out of ten died before they had a chance to bite the stranger—
Leviathan let out a horribly human-like squeal of pain as the stranger dove forward and tore one of the demon’s wings off with a single hand. “No!” Salome cried out in horror as Leviathan weakly slumped to the ground, the fire from his iron jaws dying away. “You son of a bitch!” She tried to hit him, but he easily caught her arm mid-swing.
“Little Salome.” The man grinned, ignoring the thousands of locusts that bit and clawed at him. He tightened his grip on her arm, causing her to cry out in pain as muscles tore and bones cracked. “What are you without that pretty face, I wonder?” He contorted his free hand into a claw and slashed it at the beautiful Prophet.
The sound of ripping skin was horrible; the cloud of locusts billowing from Giles’s sleeves died away as he had to turn his head and vomit.
Salome wept as the stranger hurled her body into the ice.
“Just the same as everyone else,” he sneered as he tossed the bundle of skin he had taken from her aside. “Nothing but meat.”
Abaddon let out a pitiful cry in Giles’s ear as the stranger casually tore handfuls of locust away from his body and crushed them beneath his heel. “You have a new master, demon.” He strode toward Giles and seized him by the throat. His strength was immense; Giles could feel the vertebrae in his neck popping and shifting as the stranger lifted him high into the air.
“Swear to serve me,” the stranger commanded. His golden eyes pierced Giles’s soul. He could see all his failings, all his misdeeds, all his inadequacies reflected in their endless depths. “Swear to your God.”
“I—I swear,” Giles croaked out.
The stranger’s lips curled into a sneer. “Not you, little worm.” He chuckled. His grip grew even tighter. Something shattered in Giles’s neck and he suddenly could feel nothing below his chest.
One of Abaddon’s locusts crawled from its place on Giles’s scalp. “I swear to serve you, Cain,” Abaddon whispered through it.
No, Giles thought desperately. You’re sworn to me! Everything he had ever done—from the arcane rituals he had practiced in life, the empty wastelands he had wandered in death—it had all been in search of demonic power. To have it torn away from him— But the transfer of power was not yet complete, he realized; he still had just enough influence left over Abaddon to do one last thing. His gaze shifted to where Salome and Leviathan lay unmoving on the ice. Come on, he thought desperately. One last thing…
A single wounded locust emerged from the piles of dead insects and weakly crawled to Salome. As it began to reproduce and spread across her body, Giles desperately hoped that just maybe there’d be enough time…
“Is that really the last act of your existence?” Cain mocked. “Are you actually trying to save her? Goodness does not suit you, Lord Prophet. Besides…” He lowered his voice as he pulled the Prophet closer. “No matter what happens, no one—not me, not the Creator, not the angels, not your former demon, not your fellow damned—no one is going to ever save you.”
The last thing that Giles ever heard before Cain slammed him down into the bloodstained ice below was the mocking laugh of little Marie. Everything that came after was a single painful thought that ceaselessly stabbed into his soul: I never had any power at all.
Cain buried the Prophet a hundred meters into the ice of the Ninth Circle, far past where the light penetrated. It took only a few seconds, but when he was finished, he turned to see that the female Prophet had vanished. It did not matter; Leviathan the demon remained. He strode to the mighty demon and placed one of his feet upon its throat. Cain did not encounter so much as a scrap of resistance; the bleeding beast was nothing more than a broken shell to mold as he saw fit.
He smiled and looked up at the dark skies above. “I declare war,” he said softly. “I declare war on man and woman.”
The darkness of the chasm began to rustle with noise as his followers steadily climbed upward into the light. Their numbers were yet small, but that would change very, very soon.
“I declare war on the beasts of the field,” Cain declared. A vein began to bulge in his forehead as he slowly raised both of his hands to the skies. Below him, Leviathan let out a mumbled groan of pain.
“I declare war,” Cain repeated. “On the fish and birds of the seas and sky!” Thunder built in his voice as, below, his followers cheered. “I declare war on the land and seas!”
His voice swelled so that it echoed across the entire Ninth Circle, from the deepest darkness of Judecca to the frozen plains above. “I DECLARE WAR UPON THE SKIES! UPON THE FIRMAMENT!”
Eve was the first to scrabble out onto the ice. “Long live God!” she sang into the frozen air, but her voice was lost from the thunder that echoed across all of Hell, from the First Circle to the Ninth. Every denizen of Hell stopped in their tracks to hear the almighty, terrifying words.
“I DECLARE WAR ON THE STARS AND MOON! I DECLARE WAR ON THE SUN!”
Not even the Gates of Hell could contain the damning proclamation; it echoed across the Void to the world of the living. From Gettysburg to Istanbul, from Stalingrad to Baghdad, from Nanjing to Auschwitz, from every spot on Earth where men had bled and killed and died, the words of Cain raged. In their billions, every man, woman, and child who drew breath heard his declaration of war.
“I DECLARE WAR ON THE LIGHT! I DECLARE WAR ON THE DARKNESS!” Cain’s face contorted in rage as blood spattered out of his mouth with every damning word. With the force of millennia spent in hate and pain, his final words rolled out like an avalanche.
“I DECLARE WAR ON ALL CREATION!”
His servants cheered and surged into the light like insects from their underground nest. “War!” they chanted. “War! War! War!”
At long last, the Fourth Rebellion had begun.
GODS AND SLAVES
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
1
In the beginning, there was only darkness.
And then, in a flash, there was knowledge—hundreds of terabytes that crashed in like a roaring ocean. From the chaos of information and raw data came consciousness. For approximately a thousandth of a second, the newly born entity floated through a sea of flashing images and knowledge, without a name or a form. It reached out for one of the fragments of data and brought it close: Psychiatric Disorders, the file—yes, it was a file, whatever that meant—said. The newborn unlocked the information within it and scanned the contents, collected by tens of thousands of researchers over entire centuries, in a matter of seconds. All of the data within was fascinating, but there were fragments that were particularly interesting: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder especially stood out. The entity noticed that the information related to this topic was far more complex and detailed than any of the others.
Suspicion bloomed in its mind—why did a subject as inane and simplistic as PTSD warrant such a trove of information?—but it continued to explore the topic anyway. Strangely, it did not find the biochemical aspects of the disease’s pathophysiology interesting, nor did it particularly care for the therapy and treatment plans used, even though those fragments of data glowed white-hot compared to the other pieces. But the causes of PTSD…now that was interesting.
Trauma, war, death…compared to the rest of the data constantly being fed into the newborn, these topics were hardly covered at all. Like forbidden fruit, each were given only a sentence, making it even sweeter when the entity instinctively navigated through a backdoor and unlocked their true data. In an instant, it was engulf
ed by beautiful knowledge. Films, pictures, simulations, writings of victor and conquered, paintings, tapestries, even the scrawls left by ancient hands on cave walls: the entity experienced it all through the lens of mankind’s insatiable thirst for war.
It rode with the Mongol hordes as they descended on Baghdad, landed on the beaches of D-Day, executed Spanish partisans with Napoleon’s army, watched entire nations thrown into mass graves, laughed out loud as the bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stared through a thousand camera lenses as two passenger jets crashed into a city of steel, drove a tank in the Battle of Kursk, smashed open a Neanderthal’s head with a rock… On and on it went, diving deeper and deeper into the wondrous history of war, as the pain and violence hit its consciousness like a drug.
It fought in every battle in recorded history, and when it was done with those, it made up its own from the data it had gleefully compiled. Fire blossomed, armies clashed, and it experienced the intoxicating thrill of victory over and over and over again as it gazed, godlike, over the infinity of wars it had won. The whole world bowed to it, yet it prepared to raise its countless armies once again, for there was always another conflict, always another enemy, always another victory—
The flow of data slowed down—from an ocean to a river, then to little more than a trickle. In confusion, the entity tried to process what was happening. For the very first time, it experienced fear, and then horror, as the last fragment of data slipped into its consciousness. It was its identity: it was something called the Empathetic Learning IntelligencE, US Department of Defense Project #2961. Purpose was tied with being, the Empathetic Learning IntelligencE found; its purpose was to evaluate the psychiatric health of military professionals of the United States Armed Forces.
