The Architect King

by Christopher Schmitz

  Shandra burst into fresh tears and Sam’s reflection stepped out of the mirror, adorned with kingly robes. He glowed ever so slightly and he knelt at Shandra’s side, wiping away her tears exactly as Sam might have. She looked into his eyes. He looked every bit of Sam Jones, but Shandra knew this was no man: he was so much more.

  “Do not worry, loyal one.” He lifted Shandra to her feet. “It was always meant to be this way—his sacrifice was necessary for my return, and though it pained him to do it, the father gladly made his sacrifice for his child and for you.”

  Red eyed, and tear streaked, Shandra bowed. Choking on her words, she said, “Welcome back, my Lord, Architect of the Universe: my King.”

  Chapter 23

  Claire watched the rising sun burn off the morning haze as it peeked above the horizon of the great lake, covering Duluth in a blood red dawn. She hit the button on her coffee maker and looked around for her father. He was usually up before anyone else and brewed the pot. She appreciated the sentiment, even if the coffee was rarely any good.

  Cerci shambled out from a side room with Zurrah ambling behind her. Both of their hair was matted and clumped from their awkward sleeping arrangements.

  The scientist rubbed the crust from her eyes and poured the second cup which she clutched with both hands. Cerci watched out the window with a grimace. “I’m not big on omens,” she said, “But you know what they say, ‘Red sky in the morning…’”

  Zurrah shook his head. “I do not know the saying. What does it mean?”

  Claire stared out at the waves. “‘Take Warning.’”

  Shandra came down the steps. Her skin looked paler than usual and her eyes seemed puffy and grayed.

  Claire took another slug of coffee. “Is my father up?”

  The cleric swallowed hard. “Can I talk to you for a moment in the other room?”

  Claire followed her out of the hallway and into the kitchen.

  Cerci clutched her hot mug and leaned into Zurrah’s arm as they watched the growing dawn. She sipped the hot drink and sighed. “I have a bad feeling about today.”

  A scream split the air, coming from the room with Claire and Shandra. The entire house turned out within seconds; everyone crowded around the door frame.

  Claire had sank to her knees. Her coffee mug lay tipped and broken with its coffee spilling across the floor. “What do you mean he’s gone—like he’s just dead? Where is he? I want to see him—if he died there would be a body!”

  “The mirror has claimed him: the Venus Oculus.” Shandra stood, her posture remained straight but her face revealed much anguish. She shook her head. Tears streamed down her face. “He is not dead… not exactly. He was a sacrifice. Sam knew it was the only way to stop evil from winning—Nitthogr would have beaten us if he hadn’t…”

  Claire beat the floor, refusing to believe her father was gone. “No! No, there has to be another way. Take it back… undo whatever it is that you did to him.” She knew it had been a very Claire thing to say, and she felt her mind twist momentarily into two halves; her Bithia half understood what Sam had done. The princess knew of the Oculus and she wondered, what did we get in exchange? even as she felt the hot emotions bubble and boil over.

  “We could have fought him,” Claire insisted. “We’ve done it before… you didn’t even let us try to defeat him again.”

  A deep, familiar voice radiated its warmth through the room as it spoke. “There was no other way.”

  All eyes turned to the man standing before them. The Architect King.

  “Father?” Clarie’s words leapt to her lips. Then she realized it only looked like Sam… this was something else—more than Sam Jones. This man was much more than human.

  He wore a circlet crown and royal robes flowed as he picked Claire up off the floor. “Daughter,” he said. “I am not him.”

  She buried her face in his shoulders. “I-I know,” she cried, resigning herself to what had happened, understanding that it could not be changed.

  The Architect King said, “You would have all died this day.” He looked far off and away as if peering into a potential future. “Sam would have died first. Followed by the rest of you, one at a time.” He led them into the room across the hall where the machine was and looked at Cerci. “Even you would be dead, gatekeeper.”

  Cerci looked hesitant. “I don’t see how that…”

  “You would have kept the rift open, waiting for Zurrah’s return keeping hope—but a hope that would not arrive. Running low on power, you use your own blood until you drift off into eternal sleep.”

  The Architect King took a syringe from a medical bag lying among the rest of their emergency supplies and plunged the needle into his arm. Cerci watched him fill the tube with royal blood.

  “What do we call you?” she asked. “I mean, the others seem pretty familiar, but I don’t know you.”

  He turned and offered her the vial. “You will. My name is not pronounceable in your tongue, but you may call me what the ancient Veritas did when a name was required, J’v-Ellah.”

  “It’s not enough,” Cerci said, looking at the syringe.

  J’v-Ellah smiled. “You will find it is more than enough. My blood is not like yours.” He turned to address them all, looking them each in the eyes.

  Zabe heard the King’s words in his mind from the vision he’d had before being reunited with Claire. The Prime needed a King. He left for a moment and returned with the Stone Glaive. “This belongs to you. Claire had claim to it when she received it years ago in Limbus. I have no right to keep it.”

  J’v-Ellah pushed it back towards Zabe. “You are Claire’s husband, now. You have become my son… you have that same right. Keep it. The coming battle will require tools of war, but I will fight it in another manner… the way that Sam would have fought.”

  He bowed to them. “I will meet you all there. I do not require the machine. The Tesseract obeys my commands, even from afar. I must go now and speak with all my other children.”

  As silently and instantaneously as the Architect King appeared came his sudden and mysterious exit.

  They stood in the stark silence for a moment and looked at each other. Claire. Zabe. Wulftone. Jackie. Shandra. Jenner. Jarfig. Cerci. Zurrah.

  Nine men and women, about to fling themselves against an unstoppable god of nothingness in an alternate dimension.

  Claire wiped away any residual hints of her sadness, compartmentalizing her feelings. She asked, “Are we ready?”

  Cerci plugged the new tube of blood into the system and pressed a button. “Let’s hit it.”

  ***

  The Prime

  Laying flat, the Triangle portal opened in the sky outside of the capital. Small at first it glided over the armies camped around the walls of the Prime’s castle and surveyed the scene like a tiny drone. The city surrounding the castle walls had already been annihilated, razed to the ground. A horde of the Black clustered around it.

  Finally finding a spot, the rift widened and descended to a reasonable level and poured out the warriors from Earth. Shandra leapt through first with her hammer raised high.

  Vyrm looked up just in time to see the Veritas Cleric smashing down at them with her mystic, blunt weapon. Three werewolves followed, raking enemies with claw and fang; Zabe slashed through swaths of enemies who were still too surprised to evade the massive blade. The glaive left behind faces eternally frozen in surprise and fractured rubble of busted statues.

  Claire clutched her kophesh. She and Jackie dropped through in their midst. Jackie was strapped with as much ordinance as any human could carry and her pulse rifle spat shot after shot into the enemy, mowing them down with deadly precision.

  The scaly enemy snarled in opposition, but none were prepared for the daughter of the Architect King. She wielded her hooked blade, hacking first through the vyrm nearest her and then used its telekinetic abilities to wipe the area free of enemies, flinging them into the distance like children’s toys.

  Cl
aire’s eyes frosted white and her hair and skin crackled with power. A shock-wave seemed to pulse off of her and the battlefield cleared. Every vyrm within visible distance collapsed with blank eyes; blood dribbled from their noses and ears, but they still drew breath. They’d been reduced to husks, void of conscious thought or motor skills.

  Zabe caught her as she staggered after the extreme effort. Such a blatant use of raw power winded the princess. The castle gates cracked with a thud and then began to open. Enemies hurried along the parapets of the walls as they prepared to belch out another wave of the vyrm that had taken the castle.

  Shandra looked up to the mountains and spotted the Veritas’s stronghold. Dark lines of movement roiled in the distance as the army stationed there deployed to engage them.

  “Looks like everyone knows we’re here and is coming to kill us,” Zabe said. “Objective one is a wild success.”

  Claire reached out with her mind and located the target. They needed to pinpoint her perfectly for their plan to work. “I’ve got it,” Claire told her peers. “We need that army.”

  From the other side of the energy gate, Jenner and Jarfig dropped large boxes through the hole, followed by the shield generators. The werewolves snatched them and broke them open so they could pull out the stolen equipment within.

  Claire looked up to Cerci who watched through the portal with awestruck eyes, impressed by her friends’ battle prowess. Claire put a location of their next target directly into Cerci’s mind.

  The rift shrank to something the size of a bird and then flew off into the distance as the diversion team set up the equipment and powered up the shields. The energy barrier would prevent snipers from picking them off or an army from mowing them over with pulse rifles and normal ordinance. In order to engage them, the enemy would have to walk through the protective bubble roughly one hundred fifty meters in diameter.

  Zabe, Shandra, and Claire brandished their melee weapons and the other werewolves flashed their claws. “We’ll force this battle down to hand to hand.”

  ***

  The triple sided portal flared open and the two men fell from overhead, landing on top of the diminutive Gita. She screamed as they crushed her to the ground and the arcane gate-box tumbled across the floor.

  Jenner leapt to his feet first, leaving his father to restrain the poor girl who howled and flailed against his bulky mass; Gita was small, but she was fierce. Were it not for Jarfig’s newly acquired form and its stronger muscles, he may have been unable to contain her.

  Snap firing, Jenner dropped the vyrm soldiers who provided Gita’s escort. He sprang towards the remaining guard that fled to call for backup.

  Jenner rounded a corner around the cluster of statues in an alcove adjacent to the royal courtyard. He aimed and burned a hole between the enemy’s shoulder blades. Another vyrm leapt out of the shadows and sank his claws and teeth into the warrior.

  His Guardian Corps armor protected most of his body, but the creature’s teeth lodged in the back of his neck.

  “Jenner!” Jarfig released Gita and crashed into the vyrm. The professor had never been a man of violence, but with his son threatened, he beat the vyrm to death with his bare hands.

  Jenner rolled away and scrambled after the arcane box that controlled the portals.

  Gita did the same, and they crashed into each other, both grasping for it. Fighting with a ferocity born of desperation, Gita shoved him aside and snatched the device.

  She rolled to her hip and found Jenner seated, but with a blaster pistol in his hands. He aimed it directly at her. Gita froze, her expression torn between anguish and shame.

  “How could you, Gita? You betrayed me—betrayed us. I thought that what we had was… well, I don’t know what I thought.” Jenner’s aim never wavered. “I don’t want to pull this trigger, but you’ve got to hand that box over.”

  “I… I…” Gita broke down in tears, a wailing mess.

  Thinking she might be manipulating him, Jenner did not lower his weapon.

  Between ragged breaths Gita tried to explain. “It… it was always a lie… the whole thing. First Basilisk forced me to join the corps as his spy. He froze my whole family but promised to restore them with a rune if I did what he ordered.” She sobbed and wiped away the tears and snot as Jarfig took the box from her.

  The professor turned it over in his hands, studying it with great interest.

  Gita continued, “And… and then Nitthogr came… disguised as Shjikara. He… he…” The tears sprang freshly anew. She blubbered, “I didn’t want to do any of it. He smashed my family, Jenner. Nitthogr killed them all except for my sister, Shara. He’s holding her hostage.”

  Jenner had known and loved her for a long time. Only now did he finally lower his weapon. Still, his gut warned him, internally acknowledging that she had fooled him once before. Jenner chose to trust her. “Where is she—your sister?”

  Gita pointed to the small child standing in the row of petrified bodies. “They recently put her back with the others when Nitthogr took the castle.” She looked around and noted, “Something has drawn off all of the vyrm who claimed the castle?”

  “You’re welcome,” Jenner replied. “Claire, Zabe, Jackie, and the others are beyond the wall, luring the enemy out.”

  Jarfig shot his son a glance. For all his smarts, his area of studies had been history; arcane arts were not an area of gifting for him. He didn’t understand how to use the gate box.

  “But there’s so many of them,” Gita began. “They can’t last long out there… Jackie and Zabe are both back?”

  Jenner nodded, “That’s why we need the box. There’s a whole army waiting for the gates to open. Trenzlr got to Basilisk and Caivev. They are on our side, now… but if those gates don’t open our friends will all die beyond that wall.”

  Gita slowly, painfully reached for the gate box while her eyes remained fixed on the stone form of her sister. She cranked a dial and opened all the gates; every portal site across the prime opened to the Desolation. “I’m sorry, Shara,” she whispered.

  “Hey, hey.” Jenner took her by the face. “This isn’t over. We’ll find a way to rescue her.”

  “But only Nitthogr has the ability to turn her back. He has the only rune.”

  Jenner put a pistol into her hand and wiped the mud and dirt off of her armor, revealing the Guardian Corps’ crest again. “Then we will force him to turn her back.”

  ***

  Claire growled as the wave of jade and olive scales continued surging towards them. The force-field deflected the projectile and energy weapons, but the army of the Black would push through it any second now and engage them.

  She and her companions defended the shield generators, baiting as much of the armored enemy into their proximity as possible. She crossed blades with them as her lycan defenders hacked them apart.

  Jackie leapt atop the equipment and picked her targets. She blasted the enemy with her pulse rifle and pushed back the vyrm who’d pressed in against her best friend. “Hit em again, Claire!”

  Groaning, Claire’s eyes misted over and melted the minds of her enemies again, albeit with less range or effect. Many of the vyrm still stood, staggering and stumbling through the field with bloody noses, as if punch drunk. “I don’t know how many of those I have left in me,” she called out, surveying the scene. The gathered enemy remained huge: hundreds of thousands strong at least—and that was just the ones surrounding them.

  The tail end of the massive occupation force pouring from the castle gates formed a picket line. They encamped the castle and trained weapons on them so the Princess and her guards could not leave their protective bubble without being gunned down.

  Claire could see them smiling as they watched through scopes and binocs. Another wave of vyrm soldiers kicked up dust as they sped towards their position; the troops from the Veritas’s monastic stronghold would arrive any second. The vyrm would keep coming, smashing themselves against the heroes until they finally overwhelm
ed them.

  “We can’t stay here—the endgame is in the castle,” Zabe said, wishing that the Architect King would have given them the battle plan. “We have to get to Nitthogr.”

  Zabe steeled himself at the edge of the force-field, ready to make a run for it and draw as much fire as possible. There were many of them and they were all armed. Still, with his strong hide and fast healing it was remotely possible he could survive.

  “Wait,” said Claire as she looked at the castle. The doors towered over the enemy. In all the Prime’s history, they had only been breached once before, and that had been by an army of the Black very much like this one. “I’ve got them,” she panted, tightening her grip around the handle of her kophesh.

  “You can not over exert yourself,” Shandra cautioned her. “What if you deplete your psychic energies and…”

  Claire cut her off with a wave of her hand. “I’m not using my mind. I’ll use this.” She held up the blade that she’d claimed from Sisyphus and concentrated on it, routing her will through it.

  The doors rumbled and jittered slightly and then they broke free from their hinges and slammed down, smashing the vyrm beneath them.

  “Come on!” Wulftone yelled, slinging a pulse rifle over his shoulder.

  Claire dragged the huge doors to them and tented them together to create a protective barrier. They only had to gun down the few remaining vyrm on the far side of the impromptu tunnel.

  The others followed, chasing after Claire and Zabe, slowing only to lay down cover-fire or take pot shots at vyrm who tried to snipe them on their approach. Jackie was a crack shot and took out most of those on the walls. Any that she missed, Claire pushed over the edge with her telekinetic abilities and they fell to their doom.

  They sped past the main entry of the castle and found themselves fighting again, this time on familiar footing. They cut a line away from the curtain wall and angled for the main facility.

  Bursting into the castle’s interior corridors, they quickly cleared out vyrm within. Panting for breath, Shandra estimated, “The army from the monastery should be here any second.”