by J K Ishaya
“Now the other with a more defined face opened his eyes and stared back. These were brown eyes, still very human in appearance, and seemed vacant at first, clouded, and then clarity seeped in. What they had resembling brows lowered into scathing glares. The mass that had no human features rustled oddly with a sound like wet leaves sliding against each other. While I gasped and took a step back, Malorix remained transfixed and it became apparent that some kind of communication was happening between them. They were deformed and hideous, but their minds were as expanded as mine or Malorix’s had become. It must have been their quiet psychic voices that had been calling to him from within the barrier, given that he had been uttering that he heard something, and after nearly a hundred and fifty years, he also still recognized the huge door and its symbols from when he had escaped, but I do not think he was aware that they were still alive until this moment. Whether they held on to some fragment of their human wits, I still do not know. I theorized that, like us, they could not die, and that was why they had been entombed here, left to suffer, perhaps even hungering the way we did, but if they were fed or not I have no idea. Maybe the odd scatter of bones in the fore chamber indicated that occasionally they were dropped a morsel of flesh, but nowhere near enough to sate the three of them.
“When the distant rumbling started again and rippled through the entire foundation, causing the ropes to give out an especially alarming groan, I raised my voice to try to get through to him. ‘Malorix, we must go.’ He still did not reply as that glassy gaze remained on his kinsman.
“The single blue eye staring back was wide and tormented, a spec of vibrant color in a field of pustules and twisted skin. The mouth in the face bobbed open like a fish on land and worked to form words, and from it came a rasping voice that chilled me further.
“‘Malllllorix,’ it said—I could not think of it as a man even with what was left of a human face—and like a ripple effect, the other also whispered his name, and the third one with no mouth moaned, and the masses that had been their bodies appeared to shiver and the pustules bubbled larger from between them. I had already begun to back up, but now it was all I could do not to turn and run. My heal nudged against a long trailing arm that ramified over the floor, nearly tripping me and provoking a convulsion throughout the entire mass that was sickening to witness. On that sudden jolt, Malorix finally snapped out of his daze and also retreated a step.
“‘No… no…’ he stammered. ‘I did not know.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Albionix,’ he said the one name then barely managed to vocalize the others, ‘Sua…Suadurix… no… please. Croi… Croisis… I never knew.’ I did not know to which one each name belonged, nor did I care. Over whatever they were sending to him—and I gathered from his reactions that it was accusative and unpleasant—they all began to moan, the tones deep and pained and then raising into higher pitches reminiscent of the n’gai’s screeching rage. He reached up and clasped his hand over his ears as if that would shut them out. ‘I did not know!’ he shouted. Then with more emphasis: ‘I thought you were dead!’
“The rest happened so quickly that it is almost a blur to me now, but they began to grow, and long, slinking, glossy roots climbed up the walls and around us, bubbling and reaching and spreading rapidly around the upper and lower corners and closing over the ceiling. All vestiges of human faces sank within and disappeared completely leaving only an atmosphere of pure hostility, the whole of it becoming like one beast with a surface like black oil but crawling and reaching, gaining speed. One of the tendrils whipped around Malorix’s ankle and toppled him. It coiled up his leg and started to tighten but he flipped over onto his knees and hands, kicked it free, and braced himself to launch into a sprint.
“‘Run,’ he said to me through gritted teeth. ‘Zyraxes… run.’
“He did not have to repeat himself. I spun around and charged off, getting past the altars, sensing that he had gotten to his feet and was not far behind me.” I pause, feeling my chest tighten within as the weight of this memory sinks in, rendering a hard pit in my stomach.
“Irony operates upon such horrid timing,” I say. “That is when, with an especially violent rumble, a primary rope in the door’s mechanism finally snapped and the stone slab began to descend. I cursed and looked back, found that he had fallen further behind as the remnants kept reaching for him, tendrils grabbing. The great black masses of their combined beings rolled forward, crawled more rapidly around the walls and ceiling, covering everything in a passionate rage to snag their former kinsman. Was it revenge upon him for having escaped without them? Perhaps, but there was no time to dissect the situation. I shouted back for him to hurry and shot for the door at my fullest speed. With all of my inhuman strength I caught it with my arms stretched up and slowed its drop. The stone ground into my palms, still heavy as hell, but I knew I could hold it at least for a moment, but once I let go, it would fall into its bottom groove and no fingers would be able to pry under it and raise it again.
“With a groan I braced as it dropped almost onto my shoulder, and I positioned my legs for better support. Awkwardly I adjusted my stance to look back at him. He was racing with all that he had, but they were still upon him. Oily arms and hands and tendrils grabbing, tripping, tearing at him, until he was just within reach of the door and one particularly large and elastic appendage snared him around the waist, while another along the floor wrapped around an ankle again, leaving him straining to reach me.
“‘Come on!’ I shouted, sure that he could break free, not even considering that these lost souls were clearly as strong, as powerful, given that despite their misshapen and horrible form, they still bore elements of Azathoth, too.
“I groaned as my body weakened and then realized I was not only losing strength from the slab’s weight, but the symbols upon it were having an effect. Like those in an occult trap, they were draining me. I could feel strains of energy leaving my body, weakening one muscle after another. ‘Malorix!’ I groaned through my teeth. ‘Hurry!’
“He was almost there. Almost. His hands reached out, just far enough to touch my chest. His upper body, and part of a leg were mostly free, but the rest of him was being absorbed. I think I even saw, at each point of contact between him and his former comrades, that his own skin was transmuting, taking on that oily texture, but what I saw most was the look in his eyes: remorse… painful, painful remorse.
“‘I am sorry,’ he said as he pulled against his restraints just a moment longer. ‘I should have made you leave with your family.’ He gritted his teeth and strained harder and I swear there were tears welling up in his eyes. ‘I should never have involved you in this.’ Then he reached up and pried his fingers under his tunic collar and dug out the golden torc which he had worn since I had first encountered him in my childhood. He wrenched it free and pushed it against me, and then, just before he forced forward a solid, strong shove that would topple me from my stance, he said the thing that I have never forgotten.
“‘You have your mother’s eyes.’”
✽✽✽
Howard draws in a breath as I allow him a moment to ponder this. I track his thoughts as they race backward through my tale to search for clues, and in the end, it is clear that they were there from the beginning. “He was your real father?” he says softly.
I finger my chin and stare at the same cold tea tray that has held Kvasir’s attention for the last half hour. “Let’s be clear on something first. Decebal was what I considered, and still do, my father. I owe him that place in my memory.
“As for Malorix… That he had any interest in me at all since childhood was the first piece of overlooked evidence. That he looked a good decade younger than me, easily deceptive. That my blood was compatible with his was overshadowed by the fact that he was himself an anomaly from the start of Nyarlathotep’s experiment.
“But then to think of how he had paced with agitation when I lay dying of my mortal wounds, that brings more perspective. He knew he had the means to sa
ve me, even if it would leave me as damned as he. I had accepted with no question his excuse that he could not stand to deny me revenge against the Romans. It is what I would have done for any of my own men under different circumstances. Why would I have thought he did it to save his own child?”
“Did you get him out?” Howard asks and there is a tiny thread of hope behind it that is quickly quashed when I look at him.
“No.”
“What happened then?”
“He shoved me out of my place holding up that strength numbing slab, and I fell backwards with such force as to bash my head upon the floor. Right next to me, the torc landed and swiveled on its side before lying still, a brilliant gleam of gold in my briefly blurred periphery. I heard the great door come down and the last of his cries for me to get out of the mountain were shut off, completely sealed away. There were no telepathic sendings imploring me for help. Nothing. Just silence.
“I bolted to my feet with a cry and pounded on the stone, punched at the camouflaged depression again and again to no avail. The mechanism inside was broken, and as I had feared, I could not pry my fingers down into the crack along the bottom edge. Even if I could, at that angle, I do not know if, despite my strength, I’d have had the leverage or fortitude to raise the door again. With a miserable groan I turned and leaned back against it, staring hopelessly into the corridor and the piles of dead n’gai that we had killed together.
“His last words were still with me, but they had not completely sunken in. My mind still spun for a means to get him out, but then another rumble sounded, and I squinted through angry tears to see a figure emerging from down at the other end of this outer corridor.
“Kvasir had returned. He was staring in awe at the massacre before him, and then there I was, a quivering, gore-smeared mess. I was astounded to think that he had actually come back. He stepped closer, weaving around the n’gai, and then paused when he came upon the body of the witch lying with its neck turned at an odd angle and open, milky eyes in a face now showing its true age. He stared at her body, stunned, and let out a breath that came close to a bitter chuckle. Then slowly he looked up and now eyed the large barrier behind me, and the look of relief turned back to a grim mask. His mouth moved in such a way as reading to himself, implying to me that he knew what the symbols meant. Then he asked quietly, ‘What happened here?’
“‘I cannot get him out,’ I rasped. ‘Malorix is… is…’ For the first time, my mind touched Kvasir’s. It was purely instinctive, just enough to convey what had happened.
“‘Lost,’ he said softly as his gaze dropped from the slab to me, luminous eyes sympathetic if still cautious. Then he bent over and picked up the torc, looked it over curiously. ‘Are you coming? The others are almost out except for Queen Nara.’
“I stared aimlessly, my heart heavily weighted by the idea of leaving Malorix behind, but then the mountain shuddered again, and Kvasir was audacious enough to hand me the torc and slap my arm with the casual impatience I might have shared with my own kinsmen. ‘If you are coming, then now is the time.’
“I looked down at the torque, for the first time really seeing it and that it was of remarkable craftsmanship with two artistic bird heads capping its ends, then I tried to send Malorix a psychic good-bye and swore that somehow I would come back for him. I knew he could not die, but what his former comrades might do to him in there I could not estimate by any means. Would they tear him apart, let him heal and then do it again? Would they absorb his body into their own chaotic matter and his consciousness join with their own miserable, tattered psyches? One of our kind might succumb to eternal madness experiencing that. I looked down at the torc in my hand, turned it over, compared it to the ring of Decebal which was tarnished with dried blood in every crease. Then slowly I put the torc around my neck, feeling the weight of the gold settle, cool on my skin, heavy on my collar bones. Ahead of me, Kvasir had disappeared back into the corridor from which he had come, and I hurried after him.
“Beyond the slaughtered n’gai I found the bodies of more of the robed figures, all killed by the Boreans in their departure, and while I tried not to dither, savoring the smell of their blood, the rumbling in the mountain grew. I caught sight of Kvasir’s silhouette disappearing around a corner, and then a blast of blue light rippled ahead, casting his animate shadow upon the wall before the light doused then flickered again, and his shadow was then gone. I picked up my pace and turned that corner where I found the passage opened.
“He was there waiting, and when I joined him we gazed upon what looked like it had been a large throne room or similar. Its vaulted ceiling was supported by more rows of cyclopean columns, but at its head sat, I realized, not a dais for a throne, but an altar that now had a cracked top slab. There were overturned standards that still emitted black smoke into the air from their spilled coals along with the noxious fumes of some pungent incense. Upon the wall over the dais and altar was a carved, iconic monstrosity with a single large eye and long tendrils reached out from the bulk of an amorphous body and fanned out like the rays of a hideous sun, and I knew that depiction, for I had seen its likeness in person, staring back at me from a black burrow in the sky over the Dreamlands.
“It was a temple to Azathoth, and now I understood what had caused so much trembling and shaking in this mountain lair for that vast chamber was piled with rubble from a battle between two great powers. There were scattered bodies of more n’gai on the floor, many crushed under rubble, but some were still alive but, and perhaps in the interest of self preservation, they were now clustered in the furthermost edges of the cavern, the milk-white glow of their bodies betraying them against the darkness.
“Some of the thick columns had been taken out in their very centers as if a giant hand had swept through. Rock dust still billowed in the air and there was another flash of light that drew my attention, and upon one of those piles of rubble, I saw a woman standing, her feet wide apart for stability. She was clad in the same dark armor that the other Boreans had been sporting, but her face and hands, uncovered, were luminous as was the long shaggy silver braid that hung down her back all the way to her thighs. Her figure was small and elegant, but her face obscured from my vantage point. Her hands were thrust out before her, drawing sinuous patterns in the air, and as they moved I saw traces of light that built up into a magnificent glowing sphere, and then she thrust her hands forward and that power shot out and struck at the nucleus of a massive shadow on the far side of the chamber that was huddled between two of the last undamaged columns. A freakish roar rose and echoed under the rocky vault as the sphere struck it and light dashed outward, defining only parts at a time. A giant black claw clamped around one of the columns and tore back out of sight, leaving gashes in the stone. A whip-like protrusion curled out of the dark and undulated in the air. A long vertical mouth bled into view gnashing long, irregular but sharp teeth that gleamed as thick sputum dripped down. The long tendril dashed wildly at the ceiling and loosened more debris.
“I recognized these parts of the whole. I'd had a vision of that long, jagged maw before when in captivity and remembered how it had opened before me, threatened to swallow my senses. In this form, Nyarlathotep was a titan of grotesqueness but he was cornered between the columns. Cornered by a tiny woman who was summoning power from some unknown primordial source. As she wove symbols in the air, I briefly glimpsed them in light form—the outline of a star, then a fragment of a strange rune—before that power coalesced and speared toward its target.
“Beside me, my companion uttered, ‘Damn,’ to which I looked at him with questioning. He pointed toward a particularly huge collection of debris. ‘That was our way out. The others are there already.’ I frowned at this, but my attention remained primarily on the battle taking place. Kvasir noted my concern. ’She cannot hold him back forever,’ he said.
“I had to grimly agree. I didn’t know if Nyarlathotep could be destroyed or not but his connection to Azathoth made that seem unlikely. Then I ca
ught a scent that made me recall what Malorix had said about an air shaft into the mountain, that I could find it by the draft. ‘Fresh air,’ I murmured. The gust came from the passage behind where Kvasir and I stood, and it was an intense relief compared to the reek within the whole of the lair. My thoughts turned to deciphering what paths Malorix had taken when he’d tracked me down. He had known that the rumbling mountain was caused by this powerful queen embroiled with our mutual enemy. Likely the shaking had drawn him here where he'd had a moment to stand right where I stood now and observe before he continued his quest to find me.
“’Eh?’ Kvasir looked at me.
“‘I have an idea of another way out,’ I said then cringed as a new grating roar erupted from the Crawling Chaos as the giant whipping appendage retreated back into the hollow between the columns and then immediately snapped forward again, raking out a gash in the rock above that tore free whole boulders with a thunderous crack. They cascaded down directly over the Borean leader. I was already springing from the passage opening before I heard Kvasir’s voice behind me shouting, ‘My queen, above you!’
“My next actions happened in perfect synchrony as said queen was forced to abandon her next attack and dive out of the way. I bound across the rubble, springing from one pile to the next, finding foot holds on broken slabs of rock but clearing the distance rapidly, and just as she landed on her hands and cartwheeled off of a rough chunk that had been part of a column, I reached her. She landed in a graceful kneel and tucked her head, but I could already see that she was not out of range. I dropped down, arched my back, enveloped her in my arms, and shielded her with my body. What happened next was driven purely by instinct of a new kind. I released one long, agonized shout as I felt something under my skin move and crawl and expand, and without seeing them, I knew that there were new parts of me, my own appendages, arcing out from my body. I willed them into a fleshy tangle of a dome to shield us. Masses of sharp granite pummeled my being and tore gaping cuts, but the new matter held, and then I felt the now familiar skin-crawling sensation that came with accelerated healing. I gritted my teeth as my altered form jarred under each rock fall but held firm. When the dust billowed away and the immediate danger of that was over, I willed my body back into its humanoid shape. I did not take the time to check on my charge before I was already turning away and facing up into the darker regions of the cavern between the columns and the thing lurking there.
