Necromancer’s Sorrow: (Series Finale)

by Pablo Andrés Wunderlich Padilla

  Suddenly, before Manchego could move, the young man of faith ran out of the building and threw himself over the precipice once again. The corpse he had been communicating with collapsed and lay still.

  Every time he encountered the possessed young man, for reasons he could not understand, the boy ran off and threw himself into the void. Was he running away? Or perhaps he was entrapping him, attracting him to a dead-end to ambush him? Who was he? He knew his name. He knew it. He felt he had seen him before.

  Manchego felt hunted and manipulated, but he had no choice in this terrible dimension except to try and unravel the mystery. He continued to follow the path with the precipice on both sides that gave way to the infinite. How had the little boy survived after leaping into what looked like eternity?

  After he had been walking for a while, his way was blocked by several scattered objects. There were jars of wine pouring their contents out into space, floating there as if there were no gravity. Among the jars, there were reanimated corpses, all drinking from goblets that were empty and rusty with time. Among them, Manchego saw the same young man, enjoying himself with what appeared to be his comrades or fellow students. The young man was laughing, making jokes, and seemed to be at a party.

  Suddenly, the possessed youth lay down on the floor and began to convulse vigorously, his limbs shaking alarmingly and at impossible angles. The corpses threw their empty goblets to the floor, picked him up, and lifted him into the air as if they were making an offering to the Gods. From the sky, there descended a dark angel with an appalling face like a skull, black wings, and claws for hands. He touched the boy’s forehead and the convulsions stopped. The angel vanished and an echo of misery pursued that terrible figure. Manchego was paralyzed with horror, particularly because there was nowhere for him to hide, and he was witnessing all this in the open, unprotected.

  The possessed boy floated gently to the ground. The corpses lay down with no more movement and were still. The young man stood up, scrutinizing the corpses tenderly and touching the faces of some of them who appeared as young as he was himself. Again, he became aware of Manchego’s presence and immediately ran off and hurled himself into the precipice. What the hell? He was doing it again!

  In the distance, Manchego heard the clangor of a battle—the unmistakable sound of metal against metal. Beyond a curtain of smoke, a ghostly scene appeared in which one army of corpses fought against another. There were thousands of soldiers engaged in the fight while an elegant white-haired demon made his way on to victory. Suddenly, a fury descended upon the demon. It was the same possessed boy, but now he had a black sword.

  He seemed to be speaking, but nothing could be heard. The demon… It was Legionaer! Manchego felt palpitations at the sight of him kneeling before this boy. But why? The boy had a black sword in one hand and was waving the other in the form of a claw.

  The next thing he saw was the boy tearing out the demon’s eyes and the demon doing the same to him. The boy pressed the fleshy eyes of the demon into his empty sockets, and it was as if he saw new darkness. The boy, now grey-eyed, raised the sword and thrust it through the demon’s chest to absorb his essence.

  It was Wrath the Godslayer, Mórgomiel’s sword!

  The demon vanished into thin air and the young man still stood there, offering the sword to Manchego.

  “Aren’t you going to attack?” the boy asked.

  “Argbralius!” At last, he recognized him.

  He recognized the scene at once. It was where he had fought the recently incarnated Mórgomiel years ago outside Háztatlon! That was where he had almost managed to eliminate him when he could have prevented the chain of tragedies the God of Chaos had unleashed when he came back to life!

  Argbralius’ face was rotting away. From beneath the skin oozed a dark substance. The flesh of the possessed young man stopped burning and beneath it shone the God of Chaos in all his glory.

  But it was not the Mórgomiel Alac had known, powerful and radiant. Now he looked like a puppet, worn away and defeated. Half of his torso and one arm were gone. His body fell to the ground and it began to evaporate.

  Manchego was sure of one thing: everything he was seeing was directly related to Argbralius. Perhaps the youth wanted to show him something. Perhaps he wanted to make him see the truth so that he could understand a paradigm that was unresolved.

  As the image dissolved and everything went back to an inert blackness, Manchego managed to move after the terror that had paralyzed him. He took a deep breath, accepting once again that things would become even more unbelievable and that they would only get worse.

  He went on along the path. As he set foot on the area where the battle had taken place, he arrived at a new kind of geography unlike anything he had ever seen.

  Before him rose a twisted mountain on whose summit a cross seemed to battle with the wind. Looking up, he saw that the grey vortex, once a dome, high above was just above the zenith of the mountain now. He climbed the slope without difficulty, but fearfully. The nearer he came to the top, the more he felt fear flooding his soul.

  When at last he reached the summit, he saw a perfect and enormous circle. The edge of the circle was decorated with black stones and inside it, to his dismay, was a seven-pointed star. At each of its points was a candle. More than that, at each point was a cross and on each of them, a crucified figure.

  His soul seemed to turn to ashes when he saw Balthazar nailed to one of the crosses. His hands were pierced through with massive nails, as were his feet. He was covered in blood and his head hung down in utter defeat. Manchego went to the body of his master in tears and touched his feet, the only part of his body that he could reach. Those feet were very cold like those of a corpse. How could this be? How could he have ended up here in such a strange place?

  On another cross, he saw the body of a woman with ten arms and two legs. When he went closer, he recognized her. He had seen her on several occasions, and on one of them, she had betrayed him. He felt a pang of resentment at the thought of that moment when she had told him to go to Mortis Depthos, when Mórgomiel had defeated Róganok and Górgometh had torn out his guts. This was the Oracle, the Black Queen of the Morelia Abyss. She was nailed with the same cruelty and her head hung down in defeat like a puppet as well.

  On another cross was the Metallic Knight, nailed mercilessly. In his chest was a spear. He was still wearing his helmet so that Manchego could not see his face. He touched his boots out of curiosity. Cold metal was all he felt.

  On the fourth cross, he found Nordost’s head. It was impaled by a long spike where the eye had been. He felt a world of pain for him and wept. The guardian of Tempus Frontus had ended up here, nailed to a cross by evil and malicious hands. Again, a shiver ran down his spine when he considered that whoever had eliminated Nordost and his rider must possess enormous powers. This looked bad.

  On the next cross was a rosy light that was waning. Teitú! The seraph was not nailed in any way, but from the way his light came and went, he seemed to be suffering. Manchego tried to reach him with his mind, even shouted at him a couple of times, but there was no answer. Teitú was possessed by some spell that kept him tethered to the cross.

  On the sixth cross was what remained of Mórgomiel’s body. Totally shredded, his flesh now looked waxy and was rotting slowly. He was dead and had lost all his powers. He was nailed mercilessly to that cross, pierced through a hundred times by what seemed to be the thorns of a poisonous plant.

  The seventh cross was empty.

  Manchego felt an imminent terror that drained all the blood from his body. With a start, he dropped to the ground and a sword came down exactly where he had been standing. The saber cut the air and raised sparks when it struck the gravel.

  “You’re fast!” someone said. Manchego turned to find that his attacker was Argbralius. “I’m impressed. You no longer possess the powers of Alac, and yet you still manage to move like a true swordsman.”

  Manchego was terrified when he realized tha
t the world around him had vanished. Here, there was only a circle with a seven-pointed star in the center with a body that represented a sacrifice at each point. Outside the circle, there was only the precipice.

  “You’re just like me,” Argbralius said. “A god incarnated in a human. Only in my case, the god took away the life I never lived. He took away my desires, my ambitions. I was hoping to rule but instead of that, the accursed God of Chaos took control and ignored me completely. I was the one who allowed him to come back into the universe! And how does he pay me back? By taking my life away from me. When I was a child, the God of Chaos offered me his powers. He offered me the chance to become something powerful and triumphant. I imagined myself on a throne being celebrated by my subjects. But instead of that, the God of Chaos tricked me. He took my body and used it to reincarnate himself and come back to the universe. Can you believe that he thought he’d gotten rid of me? That he could use me just like that and get away with it? No, no, no. I remained as an indivisible entity within his soul, and that was where I waited and studied.”

  Argbralius clenched his fist and raised it in the air, celebrating a victory.

  “I am going to accomplish what the useless Mórgomiel could not. He was so close to having everything and the imbecile dared to fail. What Mórgomiel lacked was ambition, desire, and the sheer will to possess everything. That’s something I certainly have myself.” He walked over menacingly to Manchego.

  “I should be grateful to you. It was you who defeated Mórgomiel. Well, the truth is that Nordost and his fucking rider helped defeat him too. But you can see how I’ve thanked them. There’s Nordost.” He pointed his sword at the decapitated head of the dragon. “And there’s the Metallic Knight. They both know I’m grateful for them for having killed Mórgomiel.” He smiled.

  “And you, Manchego, are the last piece of my diabolic ritual that will make me emperor of the shadows and everything evil. I’ll be the one who conquers the universe, not Mórgomiel. The Gods ought to be angry, quite honestly. A mere human has outsmarted them and he’s the one who’s going to take everything for his own. Literally everything! The universe will be mine! But before that, I need to sacrifice you.” He pointed the sword Wrath at Manchego’s face. “Now then, don’t run away. Don’t fight anymore. It makes no sense. This dimension shows how powerful I am and there’s no way out of here. Stay put!”

  Manchego tripped and fell backward. He crawled on his back to the edge of the circle and looked down at the precipice, infinite and lonely. Pale and nervous, he turned back to Argbralius.

  “So, why did you show me all those things?” he managed to mutter. “Were you showing me your memories? That’s what you were doing, weren’t you?”

  “Exactly,” Argbralius replied. “I wanted someone, at least one person in this universe, to know my pain, my bitterness, and the evil events that drove me to be what I am. My mommy’s husband, my stepfather if you want to call him that, was a demon who tortured my childhood. The fact is that I don’t know whether to be angry with him or grateful to him, because it was really thanks to the beatings he gave me that I decided to look for some solution to my pain. The solution was to find Mórgomiel’s trail. Mórgomiel, who saw in me the potential of what you see now, and offered me a black seed of power. I planted the seed in my soul and used the evil powers that were offered to me to eliminate my stepfather.

  “My mommy tried, Manchego. She tried to save me and drive me away from the malice that had taken root in my soul. She didn’t know that the God of Chaos himself had given me that strength, but she could feel it. She put me under the care of a Priest of the Décamon, my true daddy—I know, I’m the result of heresy—and that way, she believed I’d be safe from malice. But all she did was introduce me to what you call the Conjuring Arts and gave me more of a hunger to explore the powers hidden in the seed Mórgomiel had planted.

  “It was when I touched this precious sword for the first time that I yearned to be all-powerful. Wrath the Godslayer was in the hands of Duke Thoragón Roam of Kathanas! Can you believe it? The idiot thought the black sword was a family heirloom when it had been found in the Devil’s Mouth, none other than Kanumorsus. It was one of the pieces Mórgomiel had left scattered throughout the universe to retrieve when he was reincarnated.

  “And the stupid duke thought he was mentally ill. Ha, ha, ha! What he actually was, was poisoned! Anybody who touches Wrath, except Mórgomiel or me, will be poisoned! Something like what happened to Luchy.” He smiled at Manchego’s reaction. “That’s right. Luchy was touched by the evil sword and now there’s no salvation for her poisoned body.

  “And now here I am, the most powerful being in the universe because I wield Wrath the Godslayer. So many gods and their essences lie trapped here, and I wield their energy!

  “The universe is an incredible thing. Creation began with the Old Gods, Désofor and Mórofos. Désofor became Sacr-Splelendor and gave origin to the beings of light. Mórofos became Ashamsham’Krönus and gave origin to the beings of darkness. From the darkness arose Mórgomiel, who, from the moment of his conception, was a weak and treacherous god. He had to be eliminated. I thank you, you, and you.” One by one he turned his eyes to the corpses of the Metallic Knight and Nordost, and then to Manchego.

  “Now the peak moment of creation has come. At last, the parts of the Old Gods who were divided are gathered together once again.” He glanced down at Wrath. “And what better than to be gathered together within the sword I hold in my hands. Only you are missing, Alac Arc Ángelo. Yes. Yes, you’re still in there, inside that lad who has shat his pants.

  “Look at me! Yes, that’s right, Manchego! Within you is the God of Light but he’s overpowered. How? A powerful spell, of course, created by me, your humble host! Ha, ha, ha! Don’t you like it?” Argbralius spread out his arms and looked up at the vortex swirling violently above them.

  Manchego was surprised to hear that Alac was still within him. He had suspected all this time that a powerful spell was keeping him suppressed. If he could only summon him! But to do so, he had to find some way to cancel the spell.

  He managed to shake off the paralysis of fear. He took stock of his surroundings. He had to find some way of getting free.

  Details were few in this world of grey, changing light. The vortex swirled with intense violence above them, and outside it, he could glimpse the tentacles of the shadow. Argbralius’ face, he noticed, did not possess the definition of a tangible body. Could he be a spirit? Some kind of wraith? If Mórgomiel had truly consumed his body to be reincarnated, then it had to be a manifestation of his spirit.

  Argbralius was covered in a spiny creeper that coiled around each limb, his abdomen, and his chest as far as his neck. This creeper had long threatening thorns and was strangling the young man. However, he seemed very comfortable in his strange attire.

  “Don’t you like it? Look around you! Isn’t this a splendid little world I’ve created? Of course, you don’t know, do you? You’re just a boy without the powers of the God of Light. I’ll tell you.

  “When you killed Mórgomiel, my soul and his came apart. As I said, my soul was always indivisible from his. The beast that was the result of the chimera formed by Balthazar, Malakai, Paladin, and the Black Queen devoured the body and the sword of the God of Chaos to save the pieces of his armor. You see, Paladin already had three of them. Didn’t you know? Ah, there’s so much you need to know, little god.

  “How I’m enjoying watching the surprise on your face when I tell you about every new atrocity that’s happened. It’s true, Balthazar was defeated by Malakai. That’s why you see him hanging there.

  “When Mórgomiel died, it was my moment. My soul was free. That was when I took control of Paladin. I stole his sword! It was always my trophy, and now it’s mine for eternity!” He rejoiced, raising the blade to the sky. “I didn’t know this would happen when I took over Paladin and the sword.” He glanced to either side. “The shadow, that one that’s swallowing up everything, was
created by mistake. I think it was an accident. I don’t know exactly, but it’s wonderful. It’s growing and growing and consuming everything in its path.

  “And now I manipulate that gelatinous shadow. I’m the one controlling the thousands of tentacles that nurture it. You see, each soul it sucks in feeds it. So it grows and grows until it’s so huge it’ll be able to consume whole worlds in one fell swoop! It won’t stop when it devours the Meridian, Alac.

  “The shadow will expand limitlessly and its function will be to swallow every living being in the universe and take over their souls. They will be the unit of energy that will give me limitless power until I possess everything! It will all be mine! They will all end up within Wrath the Godslayer!

  “To complete the spell that will open the gates of the universe, there’s only you left. Over there is the cross so that I can use your essence to create the spell. Do you know why you’re still alive? Because I wanted you to see what I’ve become, so that you’d realize I’m the winner and that I deserve the throne of the universe. I wanted an audience. Aren’t you impressed? I was hoping you’d celebrate a little, not that you’d have that resentful look on your face.”

  He smiled and said, almost tenderly, “After all, you must understand that you and I are like brothers. We’re the product of the abuse of the great powers that used us to reincarnate themselves. They took advantage of us, Manchego. We’re victims, and now it’s our turn to take our revenge! Well… It’s my turn. You’re going to die so that I can prevail.

  “I want you to see, Manchego, that I’m doing this because it’s what must happen. I must avenge the young people we were and will never be. Are you going to stop me, when what I’m doing benefits you too? Think about it and you’ll see this is the right thing to do, Alac.”