A Shade of Vampire 90: A Ruler of Clones

by Forrest, Bella

  I quickly recognized it as Mars of the Earthly Dimension. Death had been there, on Mars, bare feet sinking into the crimson sands. She walked among the dead, their souls wandering the emptiness that had once been their homes. I watched her through the World Crusher’s eyes as she touched the lost spirits with Thieron, turning each one into brilliant wisps of light before they vanished into the realm beyond.

  “Soon, I began to feel like I was ready to do this,” the World Crusher wrote. “To do what Death had been doing for so long. I was ready to guide souls into the next world. It was an honorable duty, something I’d had trouble understanding the value of for many years. Without having lived myself, my conceptions of life and death were theoretical, at best. But after plentiful observation and detailed study, I sensed that I’d acquired a certain taste for it. A grasp of things, if you will.”

  For a second, I had the feeling she was talking directly to me—that this wasn’t just a standard text. It was as if the World Crusher had crafted these pages for me. Around me, a strange new world unraveled away from the earthly plane. It was somewhere in the In-Between. It was like a movie playing, showing me the things that had happened prior to my emergence. The Fire Star glowed in the distance, red against the black sky. A brilliant ball of fire, Sanctuary of the blazing fae.

  “Death made me a scythe,” she continued, and I saw the weapon in my slender hand as if it were my own. It was a splendid piece, with a short handle and a long, curved blade. Made entirely out of steel, the scythe had deep dark veins of obsidian going up the handle and along the sharp edge of the blade. Whenever the light struck, the veins seemed to come alive, pumping black fuel through the length of it. “It was strange, but I fell in love with this object.” I could see why she’d think that. It seemed like the perfect illustration of what the end of everything might look like. “It made sense to me,” the World Crusher wrote. “I felt it like an extension of myself. And when I took hold of it for the first time, Death asked me what my name was.”

  I saw her standing before me with her ink-black hair and cherry lips, smiling with motherly love. I wanted to feel the warmth that the first Reaper felt, but I was furious.

  “The name came to me almost like a dream. It was what my scythe looked like. A weapon that would bring entire worlds to their knees,” she added. “Of course, such horrors were never my intention. But the name… it felt mine. The World Crusher. The harbinger of doom and eternal sleep. I would help souls cross to the other side, but I never saw myself as a celestial and serene creature.”

  Death left her to do what she had been made to do. In this world, a species of fae appeared before me. It didn’t take long for me to recognize their silky white hair and lilac or mint green eyes. Their strange white pupils. The World Crusher had been assigned one of the realms of the soul fae.

  “She thought I should start small,” the Reaper wrote in her pages, and I almost heard the nib scrawling across the paper, leaving trails of swirling and sometimes crooked black ink behind. “These creatures had wondrous powers. They could bend the spirits of others—the wills of their bodies and souls alike. A strong soul fae could convince another that a sickness had taken over, even though the flesh was healthy. The sickness would form, and it would spread. That was the full power of a soul fae. Personally, I was fascinated by their kind. Other species thrived in the meantime, in conjunction with the elemental Hermessi of each realm. Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Eventually, the first of the witches learned to open portals.”

  The soul fae’s society certainly thrived. The doorways into neighboring worlds brought visitors from beyond, and the World Crusher observed how this place grew into a metropolis of the Supernatural Dimension, as Tristan’s people had called it. She felt right at home, even though she never talked to any of these people. Death would visit once in a while, and the World Crusher would be happy to see her.

  She’d go about each day in peace, with no real concept of time passing. Gradually, the Reaper latched on to the rhythm of the living. She understood the years and the months and the days that went by. She watched the soul fae as they were born, reddish bundles crying in their mother’s arms. She watched them as they grew up, gliding through childhood with nothing but laughter and joy and scraped knees and funny tooth gaps. Then they grew old, and the World Crusher came to them when they died, cutting their souls with the sacred scythe, its veins glittering black as they were sent into the great beyond.

  “Eventually, the world around me began to lack sense. It was the same thing, over and over. Birth, life, death. Blossoms sprouting, flowers blooming then withering. I grew tired of the cycle. I became curious as to what else there might be,” she continued. “Death allowed me to visit other worlds, hoping that might keep me entertained. I did my fair share of reaping along the way. There was honor in this duty. What I did was important, I understood that. It just wasn’t the only thing I wanted for myself. And the realm of the living wasn’t the only place I wanted to see, either.”

  Her bare feet treaded through the empty blackness between the In-Between’s peculiar planets. She followed the pink and orange stardust streams, the celestial rivers that the Hermessi had learned to use as a form of navigation from one planet to another. I’d heard stories from Tristan and Esme about it, dating back to the Hermessi’s rebellion. Ironic, as traces of the Spirit Bender popped up wherever I turned—even in this Reaper’s memories.

  It hit me then that the World Crusher lived through everything at an accelerated speed. She never truly stopped to take a moment, to bask in a second, a minute or a day. She was always on the go, and as a result, the world around her shifted, the cycle of life and death becoming drab, meaningless and insufficient.

  “I wanted more. It didn’t make sense for me to be bound to a single plane of existence. I wasn’t allowed to interfere with the living, and I wasn’t allowed to leave Death’s dimension. It just wasn’t right. One day, I began to wonder… what if? What if I peeked behind the curtain?” the World Crusher wrote. “What if I looked beyond? I saw no harm in such an endeavor, so when a Druid died, I walked up to him and took his soul’s hand in mine. I had never done such a thing before, yet my scythe knew to do it for me. It opened a great doorway…”

  It was a slender, vertical gash in the fabric of time and space. It glowed white, and she and the Druid walked through it. I felt the warmth enveloping me as it had the World Crusher. For a moment, a sea of pure light surrounded them. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing except for this ocean of diamonds.

  “The Druid was just as confused,” the Reaper added. “He held my hand as we walked through the whiteness. He held my hand as Purgatory emerged before us with its glistening towers of silver and gold, its snow-capped mountains and its crystalline rivers. I knew right then and there that Purgatory was different. Yes, it looked like many of the realms I’d just left behind, but the very fabric of this side of the universe was odd. A faint glimmer persisted in every atom in this place. Everything shone. Everything glowed. There was beauty. Beauty as far as the eye could see. Tranquility. Peace.”

  Purgatory… I had never seen it myself, and yet the World Crusher had somehow walked right through. Unbelievable.

  But she was right. It was different, in every possible sense of the word. It wasn’t just the overall glow of the place that made it special. No, the shape of those glistening towers was strange, as if they’d been poured from molten silver and gold, then left to cool against the forces of gravity. Some slouched, and others were short but with massive, wide bases. A few were tall and pointy, but the majority were slender and wavy, like melting candles.

  The waters that flowed through Purgatory were speckled with diamonds, sparkling beneath a bright and powerful light of unknown origin. The woods were bold splotches of verdant and russet crowns, rolling downhill and around the stony mountains. It took no more than a minute to realize that the snowcaps weren’t snow at all, but white porcelain dust. The wind swept some of it up and carried it downw
ards, the powder eventually reaching my fingers. I felt it soft and smooth against my skin. It didn’t make much sense, and yet it existed.

  “Purgatory was not designed for the living to understand. It had been cropped from a different part of their realm, but some of its elements served different purposes. The fruits here tasted nothing like the ones in the plane of life. The apples tasted like plums, and the oranges tasted like strawberries. The water was sweet as milk, and the grass had the sharp tang of cinnamon. It wasn’t easy to adjust and understand these peculiarities,” the World Crusher said. As a Reaper, I had tasted things, if only out of curiosity, so I was able to find something to compare this experience to. Little-known fact about me—I’d had ages to taste and smell and touch everything around me, if only to understand what the world was made of. “Personally, I was fascinated. I wanted to know more. I wished to understand every aspect of this place, to meet the entities that called it home. I desired to know its purpose, for Death had never spoken to me about it.”

  Shards of light flew at her head. She saw the fighters coming, and she heard the Druid scream as he yanked himself out of her hold and ran off. Suddenly, the World Crusher was surrounded by gorgeous creatures with long blond hair like hers, but their eyes were made of blue fires. Her black and white dress was simple and made of silk, while these extraordinary beings were clad in steel and gold armor, a curtain of white velvet flowing from their shoulders.

  Their swords drank in the light, glowing like blades made from the sun itself. And she felt their aggression. Their anger.

  “I was not welcome,” the World Crusher said. “They told me to leave. They said I did not belong in Purgatory, but I dared to disagree. I defied them. They called themselves Valkyries, and they said I was lucky they’d been the ones to spot me first. Their brothers, the Berserkers, would not be as nice. Even so, I refused to leave. I’d made it this far, and I wished to see more. Naturally, my abilities didn’t work here as well as they should have, but I managed to disappear from their sight for a while.”

  The Valkyries were dumbfounded, but they didn’t stop searching. The Druid was taken to his appropriate place in Purgatory, though the World Crusher knew nothing of what would happen next for him. She went deep inside one of the giant mountains in a timid exploration. Darkness reigned cold and supreme here. Oddly enough, it felt like home.

  “The Valkyries had spurned me, and I resented them for it. They were beautiful and glorious and strong, and they had turned me away,” the World Crusher wrote. “It didn’t feel right. The Berserkers were worse. I’d found comfort in the darkness, but it was there that the punishers thrived. And while the Valkyries were the kind who menacingly drew their swords to warn me, the Berserkers only drew their swords if they planned to use them. They fought me viciously.”

  Their blades of pure darkness kissed the steel of her scythe. Black sparks flew angrily whenever their weapons met. These beings covered in shadows had the Valkyries’ eyes but none of their grace. They were violent and mean and vindictive, and they threw the Reaper out of the mountain. She tumbled down the ridge, dizzy and embarrassed. By the time she hit the hard ground at the bottom, she resented this world and the creatures in it.

  “I was angry and rejected,” the Reaper said. “And when Order came out to find me, I looked like a fool. She was an astonishing presence. Order was like Death, in a sense. You knew who she was. What she was. What she could do. You understood that this was one of the primal forces of the universe… there was no messing around with someone like her. Worst of all, she never cared for my reasons. She never cared to understand who I was or why I’d come here. No, Order decreed that I did not belong. Nothing else mattered.”

  Her face was the last thing the World Crusher saw before an invisible force yanked her from Purgatory and threw her back into her realm, where only Death and the Reaper truly existed.

  Only then did I truly understand how lonely the World Crusher must have felt in that moment. How utterly empty and isolated, to be forced to tread between the interesting realms but never be allowed to partake in any of them. Yes, I understood what had hurt her. and I knew a reaction would follow.

  A break was sorely needed; reading the World Crusher’s pages was a scarily intense experience. I dreaded going back into her story. Feeling what she’d felt on top of my own sensation was too much, even for someone like me, but I was too far in to turn back now.

  “This is so heavy on one’s soul,” I murmured, looking at my husband. He’d stayed by my side on the black marble lectern this whole time.

  “Can you take any more?” he asked.

  “I can’t stop…” I’d come so far, and the truth was literally beneath my fingertips.

  He pressed his lips against my temple. “Remember that I am here for you.”

  “I know, babe…” I took a deep breath, bracing myself for more of the World Crusher’s writing. “Round three, here I come,” I mumbled, thankful to have my husband’s unwavering support. The Ghoul Reapers were still lounging about, some dozing off, others drawing circles in the white dust that had settled over parts of the marbled floor. I found myself staring at their murals. What work and talent had gone into making them… Their souls wasted and forced to remain here on Biriane forever. It broke me. They deserved better.

  Maybe the World Crusher deserved better too. Either way, the more I read, the more I resented Death for having kept this from us. From me. More often than not, I’d been told we were much alike, but everything here was telling me the exact opposite. Maybe we looked similar, but our characters and our moral compasses were nothing alike. I would never have lied to my creations the way she lied to us. What had she hoped to accomplish by doing any of this? Surely, we would’ve helped. But her ego was just too big. Too toxic to allow her to think straight. It had to be her ego, for nothing else sounded anywhere near reasonable as an excuse.

  In the book, decades went by. Centuries. Millennia. Just more of the same. The World Crusher failed to see the colors of life. She only saw the black and white of time passing. Flashes of existence here and there. People being born, then growing up only to end up dead. It was a vapid and tasteless cycle, and she felt tiny tendrils of bitterness making their way up her throat and traveling slowly toward the tip of her tongue.

  Death had told her what her place was, and she couldn’t bring herself to accept that fate.

  “But as much as I hated it, I went on like I was told,” the World Crusher wrote, her bitterness flowing through me like hot water in my veins. “I moved on, and I kept reaping. A soul fae here, a Druid there… I watched the Maras develop their culture as creatures of the night and the moon. I saw the Daughters of Eritopia rising. They lived for eons before returning to their twin mountains’ lake, and other Daughters took their place. Daughters who weren’t even aware of their predecessors. Daughters who thought they were the first and the only, who believed they had witnessed the beginnings of Eritopian time. I went on…”

  One day, she sat by a volcanic river somewhere on Purgaris. It seemed to me like the World Crusher had grown fond of the In-Between. Granted, it was home to some interesting creatures, even now. I could see why she’d preferred it. Then an incubus escaped a nearby melee. His injuries were fatal, judging by the amount of silvery blood drenching his clothes. He could barely walk.

  “It only took a second. The tiny blip of a rebellious thought. I couldn’t shake off the rejection I’d suffered at the hands of the Valkyries and Berserkers,” she continued. “Order had cast me out like a cockroach, an undesirable. This incubus would soon leave this world, and it was my duty to usher him into the next. It was my chance to try again, and the mere thought made my heart soar. Every era I spent in my realm made everything look more and more like the nothingness from whence I’d come. But Purgatory… oh, Purgatory was strange and different and full of wonder. I wanted to go there again.”

  So she did. Holding the incubus’s hand, the World Crusher crossed over again. Once more, the Valk
yries and the Berserkers came together and pushed her away. She fought them hard this time. Her scythe responded to her emotions in a way I’d never seen other blades react. The black veins shone menacingly as she cast death magic spells against her opponents. Her powers were limited, but not harmless.

  Some of the Valkyries fell. They succumbed to dark curses, their bodies withering until they were reduced to shapeless masses of black shadow that scared even the Berserkers. The World Crusher was losing control. “Death had given me knowledge. Knowledge of her power. And I had learned to use it, harnessing its potential to suit my every need. With that much time on my hands, what else was I supposed to do?”

  Soon, Order intervened. The World Crusher was no match against her, and so she was cast out of Purgatory again.

  This time, however, when the Reaper got up and saw her reflection in the lake, she smiled a devious smile. I could almost hear the wheels in her head turning. For a while, she waited in silence. She thought Death might come to reprimand her again, but it didn’t happen.

  “I figured I’d gotten away with it. And I was eager to try again. The more they fought me, the more determined I became to carve my own place into that world,” she wrote. “I didn’t accept no for an answer, and I thought that maybe—if I was persistent enough—Order would eventually cave and let me pass. I was naïve.”