by Zach Adams
The phoenix unleashed the ball of light in its beak. A blinding, crackling beam burned the topmost pair of spider eyes on its enemy’s chest. The monster’s mouths hissed and roared simultaneously in furious pain. Its spider legs stabbed and flailed at the air.
The red-scaled dragon portion of the beast gathered a mighty breath. The force of its inhalation tugged Isaac backward slightly.
As he came close to catching up with himself, Isaac’s path was disrupted. A pillar of stone erupted from the ash a step ahead of him, catching his feet as he crossed over it. It shot to the sky rapidly, and he was barely able to stop himself before running straight off it in a gruesome Wile E. Coyote impression.
As the pillar rose, the dragon released its breath. Fire hot enough to melt steel beams tore in his direction.
No! Jump, please!
Isaac looked down, searching the expanse of gray for his ghost, who was lost among it. He felt the blistering heat increasing against his back. He put his backpack in front of him and decided that he’d rather be taken by gravity than barbecued alive and prepared to jump.
As the firestorm hit the top of the pillar, Isaac felt several sharp somethings grab him by the side and yank him safely away. He tried in vain to crane his neck for a view at his savior. Isaac could only get a fleeting glimpse of the ground as the bird’s talons prevented his neck from snapping. He was painfully aware that this was the furthest from land that he had ever been, in any dimension, without something large and metallic to protect him. He promptly threw up.
The phoenix darted across the sky at speeds Isaac wished weren’t possible. Even the ugly, un-harmonized cries of the arachniwyrm were barely audible over the wind whipping past his ears. The great bird’s wings wrapped around Isaac; he could smell the smoke where its feathers had been burned. Its wings had their own natural warmth, something comforting like a fuzzy Avengers blanket soaked in sunlight. They kept his head from snapping off as their trajectory turned downward at a nearly perfect right angle.
A moment later, the warm white-gold wings opened along with its talons, dropping Isaac no more than his own height to the ground. He rolled a few feet away and was still dizzy but otherwise no more harmed than he had been before the flight.
Once on his back he saw the phoenix return to the upside-down sky and continue its battle. Isaac wanted to get up and do something for the bird, but his ghost caught his attention, waving at him from the opposite end of a wide stone wall.
Get around this corner, you can’t do anything for the phoenix!
Isaac joined himself and they ducked inside the broken castle. The phoenix had shown it could look after itself.
I think I came here before, but it’s fuzzy… We’re getting closer.
There was a space where a door had once hung, but now there was nothing in place keeping visitors out. The building had been small, by castle standards, with the remains of a single tower extending from the mostly missing top half of the structure. Rubble flooded the main chamber, drenched in moonlight. A double wooden door hung at an angle in a corner of the room, presumably leading to an underground level. Isaac cowered in a shadow on the opposite side.
You alright?
“I could use one or two of those painkillers I got rid of, but I’ll live. Sorry, figure of speech,” Isaac said. His ghost frowned at his choice of words.
I suppose that is more or less the point. You live, and I…
Isaac cleared his throat loudly, requesting for himself to kindly can it. Sharing the ghost’s memories and feelings any time he expressed them was an overwhelming experience he hoped to minimize until they were sure they had time to sort them out. The effort burned his already dry throat. He reached into his bag for his water.
“Just a second and we’ll keep on, Lilith doesn’t seem to be following us,” Isaac told himself.
The ghost told him pointedly to keep his voice down. He chugged the bottle down to its last drop. He began to toss it on the stone floor but stopped himself.
It’s not Earth, but it’s still littering, Both Isaacs thought. He dropped the plastic in his bag and zipped it shut. Ghost-Isaac climbed over the pile of rubble, and his fleshy counterpart started to follow suit.
“æ’géminë?” A wheezy voice asked from the darkness. Isaac nearly caught his skull on a heavy rock as he jumped. Behind him, someone was emerging from the slanted door. A hunched-over, sickly green figure hobbled into the light. What sagging, wrinkly bits of them weren’t visible were covered in a loosely assembled robe of feathers and dry, icy-blue leaves. Several strands of silver hung from the ghoulish creature’s head.
Ghost-Isaac reappeared on top of the rubble to see what was taking so long. He saw the creature and his eyes widened.
Run, before he -!
Before he could finish, the new arrival had pulled a poorly assembled bow from under its ragged clothing. They had an arrow in hand, readying it to fire at Isaac. The stone tip was small but had many sharp edges which could inconvenience several parts of Isaac’s interior.
Keep him there! a familiar voice, feminine and forceful, said from apparently nowhere. The hunched assassin cackled.
“Äkä the traitor!” The ghoul, whom Isaac assumed was named Äkä, cried as he aimed with shaky hands.
“Äkä the lesser!”
The arrow whistled through the air and missed Isaac’s throat by inches, lodging between the rocks. He resumed his climb.
“None can recall his master anymore, but Äkä remembers the promise his master made!” Äkä cried as he hastily fired another arrow, and then another. Isaac wondered where he was getting them from.
Wonder later! Climb!
Isaac approached the top of the pile. More arrows got stuck or bounced away around him. One caught the leg of his jeans, pinning him in place. The archer crowed hysterically.
“But Äkä could not Ascend! Banished instead!” Äkä said as he readied one final shot. Isaac yanked on his jeans, shaking the heavy stones but not freeing him. “Why should you?” He sent the arrow flying at Isaac’s head.
“Næ!” Isaac cried as he gave one last pull on his leg. The wooden shaft splintered as the stone beneath it came loose. He caught himself with both hands on the top of the pile, pulling himself sideways away from Äkä’s kill shot.
Several stones, not one of which Isaac could have lifted on his own, tumbled to the floor of the castle. One collided with the shooter’s shin, knocking him to the ground. Isaac pulled himself over the wall before Äkä could recover. The ghoul hissed and spat as his target fled.
Useless! The voice from nowhere roared. Seconds later, Isaac heard Äkä crying out in agony. Behind the wall, Isaac heard a feminine voice laughing briefly before choking. He recognized it as Lilith, but it was gradually distorting and deepening
The gift of the wolf is taking hold again, Lilith said. Stubborn child… You could have simply stayed out of the way.
Now it sounded like the modulated voice he heard just before he lost Donny.
At least, when I kill you this time, the strain of the redoubled paradox will burn this universe to its core. There will have been no need for the Remembrance. For Næ’zätæmém.
Isaac pulled himself to his feet. A short distance from the ruin, another forest sprawled out to eternity. This one was nothing like the blazing nightmare he had escaped before. The trees were dark like chocolate, with frosty blue-white leaves. The moonlight sparkled off of them brilliantly like a sea of jewels. He saw his ghost rush down a narrow path away from the castle, flickering in and out of focus, and followed carefully.
“Is that the elves’ forest?” Isaac asked. The shadow said nothing but broke back into a run. He tried to follow, until his other took a large step and suddenly dropped out of view.
Isaac approached the spot where his doppelganger vanished and saw a steep, smooth slope in the ash. At the bottom it faded into rich-looking soil coated with ice. Several yards away the forest, colossal now that Isaac was seeing it close, was blocked o
ff by a wall of roots twisting up from the ground. It was as tall as at least two of him.
Ghost-Isaac rolled down the slope and didn’t move for a moment. Isaac gently crouched down and stuck his legs out first, reminding himself of poorly conceived attempts at winter sports in his youth. On his hands and feet, he slid down the hill of ash to get his own attention. Before he made it to himself, the ghost began to crawl toward the root-wall.
The flickering got worse the closer he got - he would disappear for several seconds only to reappear closer to the barrier. When he reached it, he pulled himself up and slouched against the roots with one hand pressed to it, seeming to say something to the wall but no sound came.
Suddenly the ghost froze, broke into wispy pieces, and crumpled to the ground. An instant later, he reappeared at the top of the hill to repeat the performance on a loop.
The diverging point, Isaac thought. Where he ends and I begin. He adjusted the strap of his backpack on his shoulder and followed his former self to the wall. As he walked, he heard Äkä cry out again, truncated by a dull thud.
Moments later, Lilith appeared at the top of the wall.
“Except there will not be a new beginning this time,” The vampire said. Her head was tilted at a painful angle, as were all her limbs. As she approached, her muscles writhed under her skin and her bones stretched. Her voice was barely hers anymore as she became more animal than anything resembling a human. Her hair extended to cover her body and her face morphed into a long snout full of jagged teeth which Isaac had no desire to see up close.
“I must a-admit – ARGH!” Lilith said. Her body continued to break and mutate. Isaac could hear the sickening sounds of bones snapping and flesh forcibly pulling apart. “Tracking your timeline became rather – ungh – fun. As the dimensions fall, before I return to Lamia, perhaps I will sever the rest of your – GAH! – irritating family…”
Lilith lost the ability to form human words. Her eyes became purely black. Her manicured hands grew into massive claws and her knees twisted to canine back-joints.
Even with the face of a wolf, she was smiling hungrily.
Isaac ran for the barrier, but Lilith was faster. She bolted down the slope without losing her balance and swatted him with the back of one huge hand. He tumbled several feet away.
Get up! Fight back! Rage said.
No! Go home! Panic argued.
By the time Isaac shook the stars out of his eyes, the vampire was on him again. She had him by the shirt, held above her head. He kicked in all directions. The claws left painful, bloody gashes on his chest. Behind her, he could see his ghost still crawling to the wall on repeat.
Isaac kicked his heel as hard as he could into one oversized eyeball, and Lilith howled as she threw him down to the ground.
It took several moments, entirely too many, for Isaac to remind his limbs that there was an immediate threat. He stayed flat on the ground, wheezing and occasionally spitting up blood. His body didn’t want to go through anymore.
Isaac struggled to push himself up to at least his knees. From his head to his toes, he ached so severely that his brain threatened to stop processing sensations altogether and leave him numb as he died once again. His stomach and head had yet to recover from his rescue by the phoenix, and he wished even more sorely than his appendages were that the bird would give an encore. As he wobbled himself as upright as he could manage, the world spun so rapidly that he nearly hit the ground again.
Lilith shook her head, gave a deep growl and stalked back toward her prey. She was panting, but it didn’t seem to be from exhaustion. Isaac recalled what L’æon told him about vampires taking their joy from the suffering of others.
She spent a decade following one target, having her skills as a predator challenged, with complicated magic making her even more psychotic… She’s got worse obsession issues than me with superheroes, Isaac thought with a shudder. He pushed himself drunkenly to his feet and tried to get to the barrier where his afterimage was still approaching it pointlessly.
Lilith picked up her pace with another howl. So did Isaac, minus the howl. There was a sort of shrieking whine sound, but he won’t admit to making it.
I can’t get back the reality Lilith ruined, or the people she took from me, Isaac thought.
The vampire came within several feet of Isaac as he reached the wall. His ghost already had his hand on the roots. Isaac put his own hand through the flickering copy and felt a rush of warmth flood through his body, and the smell of old books filled his nostrils. The ghost disappeared underneath him. A wave of energy hit him as if he were surfing. In his mind, he could see himself using a curse causing a library book to vanish; then, causing it to materialize and smack Lilith’s pet moura in the face; finally, getting rid of his medication bottle to earn Chloe and Sarah’s confidence.
In another, adjacent corner of his brain, Isaac could see the remains of his ghost’s timeline. He was kneeling on the ice, his apartment building in flames; he knew Chloe and Donny were inside, with Gamora and Nikola. Tobias was nearby, wrestling with the moura, moving faster than Isaac thought he’d be capable, but the beast caught him at the base of his spine, and he flew violently into the side of his car.
Each scene synchronized in a blink, with his new experiences overwriting the old, and Isaac was back in the fight.
This time, the only one getting lost is her.
Isaac spun and aimed his out-stretched left palm at the beast, two fingers from his right hand pressed on it. Her claws were inches away. He summoned all the willpower he had left in him, and nearly blacked out in the process.
“Næ’chäb äl’mæ dä ægö säväním!”
Moonlight began to swirl around the beast, stopping her from advancing. She continued to howl, clearly enraged now. Then the shape of a large, translucent book appeared in midair between her and Isaac, a floating phoenix feather writing unseen words upon its surface. The vampire’s voice faded steadily into the distance as the cocoon of light dimmed, and her body with it. Soon there was nothing but a scar hovering in the air, and the vanishing cry of a wolf.
Isaac heard a wooden groan behind him. He turned to find that his ghost was gone, but a gap had opened between the roots. The glittering trees behind it shifted to the left and right, revealing a path in the dirt which followed a narrow, crystal-clear river. Before he stepped through, he glanced at the shimmer in the air, where Lilith had been, one more time.
Did I kill her? Or did she just go somewhere else? Isaac thought. Then he turned for the last time to the forest and entered. The sound of Lilith’s bestial voice hung on the air, barely discernible.
Tabloid trash, who gives a shit?
Chapter Thirty: Átrí Nä’lún
2018-ERR.
The deeper Isaac went through the forest, the more snow and ice crunched under his feet. Near the barrier, the trees had been smaller and simply shifted through the terrain a bit so he could progress. Now they were becoming larger, and some he couldn’t even see the tops of. Some of the plants midway down the path seemed to wave their leaves in his direction as he passed. The tallest, oldest of the lot turned toward him slowly.
Isaac felt like he was being watched. Not stalked, as he had become accustomed to, but simply looked at with polite curiosity. He came to another break in the trees where onion-shaped houses had been formed from the most ancient of them. Much of the plant-life had been shifted away so the path widened and continued among all of the buildings. There were dark, waving shapes in the wood which he guessed were originally artistic renditions of fire or water.
Isaac approached the nearest treehouse. A word in the elves’ language was carved above the door, and it changed as he came near. Once it became recognizable to him, it read “Mälä”.
Isaac knocked on the door gently. No one came to greet him, and he heard no sound on the other side. From the frost in the windows, it seemed that no one had been there for an age or three. He knocked one more time, with the same results, before moving on.
Every bulbous, wooden dwelling in the forest he came upon was empty.
“Hello? Anybody home?” Isaac called out. For a long pause, the only sound that came in reply was the echo of his question.
“Æ’géminë… Átríminë,” A soft, feminine voice whispered. It seemed to come on a breeze from the mountains past the forest-town. Things only appeared to get more frozen in that direction, and Isaac was already shivering.
Feeling a pang of guilt but waving it away as a necessary crime, he tried the door to Mälä’s house. Ice kept it shut, but he shoved into it with his shoulder and it broke free. His sore body protested angrily. Inside he found several partially assembled tunics coated in frost and dust. They looked like newer, sturdier versions of what Äkä had worn.
A wavy, dark shape similar to what he had seen outside was left in the floor. Upon closer examination, he realized they weren’t artistic designs – the waves were in the shape of limbs, feet, and hands. After staring at them for a few seconds he could almost hear the terrified screams of millions of elves in the back of his mind. He hastily pulled the most complete-looking garment over his bloody hood and returned to the path to follow the voice from the mountains.
The river led up the hills of the woods into the enormous, golden valley. It seemed to be the only path among them, and Isaac followed it until the snow reached his knees. Barely able to move further, he stopped to examine the area.
Like the forest town below, there seemed to be no one present. The buildings among the mountains were gorgeous, made from stone and marble taken from their surroundings. Some had pillars like in ancient Greece or Rome, while also having portions which resembled the Egyptian pyramids. Had Isaac come equipped with more than a passing familiarity with historical architecture, he would have seen elements from almost all the oldest Earth cultures, and even more from worlds he had never heard of.
