by Steven Novak
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FORTS: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
By Steven Novak
Illustrated by Steven Novak
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Published in the United States of America by Quiet Corner Press. Yucaipa California. Copyright © 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Quiet Corner Press.
Cover design by Steven Novak
www.novakillustration.com
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CHAPTER 1
ENDINGS
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For months the awful screams of the king echoed throughout the halls of the castle. He was sick. He was dying. Everyday his flesh pulled tighter to his face. Everyday the pigment lost considerably more of its once rich color. The sickness was turning him into something jaundiced and ugly, weak and frail – a barely there monster, undeserving of the pity of those around him, a far cry from the creature demanding the utmost of respect a year prior. With every passing hour one of the seven kings of the world known as Ocha was inching ever closer to his ultimate demise. Having never left his side, the only son of King Calador sat patiently beside his father, carefully watching as the elder Ochan contorted into a caricature of his former self. The king had transformed into something the young prince could hardly stand to look at – something that curdled his stomach and sent shivers of disgust down the ridges of his spine.
Were he not the direct cause of his father’s condition, it would undoubtedly have bothered him more.
For months Prince Kragamel had been quietly murdering his father. His chosen weapon was poison, and it worked slowly, ever so slowly, and administered in such small doses that the miniscule droplets of liquid lacing the king’s daily meals remained unnoticed by the finest medical minds Ocha had to offer.
It would be only a matter of days, a matter of days before the vile globules ate away what little of King Calador remained and forced him to take his final breaths.
If all went according to plan, by week’s end the young prince would take his place atop his father’s throne. Ocha, its resources, and its brethren would at last be his to rule. This moment had been delayed far too long as it was. This was his destiny. His father had squandered the power of the people. As it had been since Kragamel’s conception, Ocha remained a world divided and a world eating itself alive. For centuries the lineage of the seven kings had fought amongst themselves pointlessly, each unwilling or unable to do what needed to be done ¬ to take the necessary steps for fear it might result in the loss of even the most miniscule slice of their precious power. More than ever, Ocha required a strong and steadied hand to guide it. To reach its full potential, this world would have to be united. The nonsense of the past needed to conclude before things could begin anew. Ocha ached for a strong hand to guide it, and the young Prince believed he was that very hand. He could find the strength within him. It resided there, as it always had. The screaming, wretched masses were sore. They were weary, and tired, and begging to be healed. They required a leader. Even if he was forced to shove it down their gullets with his bare hands, Kragamel promised himself he would ensure the citizens of this once proud world were given their medicine.
Fifteen feet away, sprawled atop his enormous and far too comfortable bed, the prince’s father screamed in pain the same as he had for the previous month. Calador’s fingers pulled themselves into tight and ugly angles, scratching at the deep maroon of the sheets before recoiling again into jagged fists.
“My son! To my side, my son!” His voice was gravelly as he yelped though the spaces in what remained of his pointed teeth.
With a heavy sigh, Prince Kragamel dragged his chair across the stone floor in order to lean over his father’s writhing form. Though the slowly progressing, barely noticeable poison had been the key to his plan, the prince found himself rapidly growing weary of this game. His father had proven surprisingly strong, and was taking far too long to die. Kragamel understood all too well, however, that it was in his best interest to maintain appearances. A calculated patience was needed, and practiced hand necessary, if his treachery was to remain unnoticed. If even a single one of his father’s guards decided to enter the room, it was prudent they see the prince at the bedside of the king – anything else would arouse unwanted suspicion.
Fighting through the surge of pain before emerging breathless and weary, Calador lifted his pale, bony finger in the direction of his only child and motioned for him to draw near. “Closer…closer my son. Voice is weak…need you close…close enough to hear…”
Leaning near the breathy whispers of his father’s cracked lips and the faraway, glassy stare of his eyes, the prince recoiled for an instant. The smell was awful: molten steel and acid, like the partially rotted bones of Megalot corpses – the smell of death and failure.
Reaching forward, Calador cupped the rear of his son’s head in his paper-frail palm, his hand shaking uncontrollably as he tried his best to steady it. “Your…transgressions…I know…”
Overcome with a flurry of blinding pain, the king dug his frail yellowed nails into the flesh of his son and bit his lower lip. He was approaching his end – he could feel it. Soon there would be no more fighting. Cold and clammy, dank and bathed in deep elongated echoes, the moment was drawing closer. His insides felt as if they had been hollowed out and replaced with something that pulsated and throbbed and never stopped. Merely breathing required every ounce of strength he had left inside. At this point there were no further reserves, no point of retreat or alternate plan of attack. He had lost not only this single battle, but the war as well. Soon the sun would cease to rise and the wind to blow. Soon there would be blackness and nothing more. Working through the flashes of pain as best he could, the king lowered his head to his pillow once again and allowed the taut muscles in his neck to relax. The darkness was already beginning to take over, devouring what remained of his sight and replacing it with an unyielding, unending void. His chambers disappeared. The smug, annoyed expression of his only son was being slowly erased by the shadows of nothingness.
Through jittery, withered lips he whispered into the bosom of black, “I-I know what you’ve done.”
For an instant Prince Kragamel stopped breathing.
A wry smile stretched painfully across the king’s face. “Had I¬¬–had I discovered the truth earlier, I assure you my son, it would be you dying in this bed…rather than I.”
Rising to his feet, the surprised young prince stepped away from his father’s side. His hands coiled themselves into fists as his upper lip began to quiver.
“To grab for power in such a fashion…” The wobbly, skeletal dome of Calador continued, “How unfortunate. How very simple. I am. Ashamed of you.”
Suddenly overcome with the urge to smash his fist through his father’s frail head and splatter chunks of brain into the finely woven fibers of his sheets, Kragamel reminded himself of the guards outside the room and steadied his teetering emotions. Such an act would prove pointless. It would destroy everything he’d worked for. Acting on his emotions was exactly what his father wanted. The king was already dead. The thing lecturing him from the bed was little more than a corpse – a ghost whose words were as hollow and pointless as the body from which they spewed. Breathing deeply, the prince allowed his muscles to relax as his body calmly reclined in the chair at this father’s side once more.
In a frighteningly steady voice, he responded simply, “It is you who should be ashamed, old man.”
The breathing of the king was quickening, large beads of sweat sprouting from the f
lesh of his wrinkled, pale green skull, “I…I never resorted…to such tactics…my life…has been an honorable one.”
“The poison is clouding your brain, old fool. Claiming you’ve led an honorable life, and doing so while maintaining a straight face, is as preposterous a notion as has ever escaped your pathetic lips.”
The ailing king settled roughly into a particularly vicious serious of coughs. His young son smiled coyly before adding, “You have failed your race at every turn.”
Despite the growing fire in his lungs, Calador’s body straightened angrily in response to the words of his son as he attempted to sit upright and failed. “S-s-stay your tongue!”
Reaching forward, Kragamel shoved his father’s withered form to the sheets. “I will do no such thing. Under your reign we have become a stagnant house, a once proud race unwilling to take the steps necessary to achieve our full potential. You and those of your ilk have succeeded only at failing, and I cannot in good conscience allow this atrophy of the Ochan spirit to continue.”
A slight smile stretched across Kragamel’s face as he leaned in close to his father’s shivering form. “Not unlike the poison coursing through your veins at this very instant, you have quietly eaten away at the heart of Ocha. You are a cancer, you old fool–an infection–a gangrenous limb that must be removed, lest you spread to what remains of the body and destroy it from the inside out. I am the cure, father. I am the knife and the surgeon. I am the last hope for redemption. I shall do for Ocha what you were too weak and timid to dare undertake.”
Reaching forward, Kragamel placed his palm over his father’s mouth and held it firmly in place. Unable to breathe, the skeletal body of Calador began to thrash from side to side beneath his silken sheets. The prince not only held his position but tightened his grip. Punching and pulling at the beefy forearm of his son, Calador attempted to utilize what little strength remained in his body to wiggle free. Despite his wild thrashing, he accomplished nothing. The poison had taken too much of what he once was. He was simply too weak. In no time at all his angry defiance transformed into half-hearted putters and spits. His arms dropped to the bed motionless as the rapid heaving of his chest slowed to a crawl. He was now a fish on land, gasping for breath where none existed. Struggling was pointless. The end had arrived. Soon afterward the edges of his eyes began to blur, a soft terrifying white moving inward like water transforming to ice on the surface of a lake. With the world around him suddenly framed by the disgusting softness, the king gazed into the lecherous, determined eyes of his only child one last time. A very small part of him – a miniscule, barely there thing he wished not to acknowledge – understood why his son had chosen to do what he’s done, even if he abhorred the methods. An even smaller part admired him for it.
As the king’s eyes went blank and glassy, his head flopped softly to the pillow one last time and the edges of the young prince’s lips curled into a terrifying smile. As quickly as it arrived, however, the smile faded. He had done what he set out to do. The cancer had been cured. The head of the demon was successfully cut off, and the people of Ocha freed from its awful grasp. Now there was work to be done. There would undoubtedly be questions concerning his father’s death, but questions could be quelled with lies. Lies were useful that way. Dwelling even for a moment on a single ending was not only useless, it was foolish and would accomplish nothing. Endings were a fool’s game, useful only in bringing to light that with which they walk hand in hand. Endings lead to beginnings, and for Ocha this was exactly that.
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CHAPTER 2
MOTHERS AND SONS
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Her hand felt like delicate silk. Tender, uncommonly warm fingers traced the curves of his filthy mud-caked face, languishing momentarily on his cheek before continuing to the underside of his chin and lifting it upward in her direction. Breathing deeply, Tommy Jarvis closed his eyes and basked in the undeniable perfectness of this singular moment. He had his mother back. He didn’t know how or why, but he had her back. This was all that mattered. It had been years since he stood beside her, years since he saw her smile, and years since she made him believe everything would be okay when he could imagine only the opposite. Considering all that had happened to him, he needed this now – needed her now – more than ever.
From Tommy’s perspective, everything he’d ever loved had been taken from him. Following Roustaf through the doorway leading to Fillagrou was mistake enough. Allowing his brother and Staci to come along was undoubtedly the worst decision he’d ever made. Now they were both gone, gone to a place where there were no roads leading home, gone forever, and they weren’t coming back. Now he was alone. The Ochan named Krystoph led them into the middle of the ocean in search of a talisman he claimed was too important to allow the tyrant King Kragamel to get his hands on. It was a stupid plan dreamt into life by an untrustworthy companion. It was doomed from inception. Surrounded by a thousand Ochan warships, Captain Fluuffytail’s poorly constructed excuse for a vessel never stood a chance. Victory was as improbable as survival. Staci, Nicky, Donald, Nestor — more than likely they were dead, and essentially it was all his fault. When the debris of battle at last cleared, Tommy found himself alone among the vast blue waters of the world called Aquari, drifting aimlessly. Eventually the whims of the tides and the blowing winds brought him to the cave in which he now stood. In this tiny, unassuming hollow in the middle of a world covered entirely in water he found his mother, or at least something resembling the most important parts of her. The touch and the feel were the same, the loving expression on its face so eerily similar to hers that he could scarcely tell the difference. Her body, however, seemed to be made of a pure, unadulterated light, a light so bright it hurt his eyes to stare at it for more than a few seconds without blinking. Stretched against the blanket of white engulfing them both, she seemed almost two-dimensional. Warm, paper-flat fingers rubbed gently at the underside of his chin. A barely-there slit of slightly less bright whiteness, her mouth moved as if she were speaking, though no words escaped.
A moment later, entirely out of sync with the maturations of her lips, her voice emerged from the surrounding sea of brightness: “I’ve missed you.”
Tommy’s knees went wobbly. His heart stuttered and skipped, a puddle of salty warmth beginning to pool in the corner of his eye.
Again the mouth of his mother-thing moved, and again the voice emerged hauntingly from the depths of the glowing abyss seconds afterward. “It’s been so long. Look at you…you’re so big. You’ve grown so much.” She patted his head and ran her light-fingers through his hair. “I’m proud of you Tommy; proud of you for finding me. I’m proud of the young man you’ve managed to become. I know it wasn’t easy.”
Tommy lowered his head shamefully. What was she so proud of? Because of him, Nicky was dead. Because of him, Staci was gone. He’d done nothing for her to be proud of. In response to his drooping head, the flat fingers of his mother’s hand reached forward, slid underneath his chin, and lifted his face once more. The spaces where her eyes should have been were little more than incandescent holes leading to more white, and yet he could somehow not only sense her sorrow, but see it clearly in the bending and twisting variations of tone and contrast.
Though she wasn’t exactly his kin, seeing the boy in pain hurt the mother-light just the same. It always had.
Wiping a rogue tear from the side of his face, Tommy stared blankly into the soulful pool of creamy circuitous light making up her head. “Mom?”
Smiling tenderly, the surrounding pool again spoke for her, “Yes?”
Tommy paused briefly to lick his lips, finding it difficult to formulate the correct verbiage. “Am I dead?”
Constructed of a thousand subtle variations of her voice echoing inside its nonexistent walls, she chuckled lovingly at the innocence of his question. “Heavens no, Tommy. You are very much alive. Dare I say, more so than ever. And your work has just begun. There’s something I need you to do for me, something of great importan
ce—something only you can accomplish.”
Removing her paper-thin hand from his face, his mother slid it down to his shoulder and squeezed gently with muscles she couldn’t possibly have. “Your brother needs your help. So does Staci, and so does your father.”
It took Tommy a moment to respond. “What? What are you talking about?”
The crackly, glowing fingers of his mother moved again to his face, cupping his cheek gently and sending indescribable warmth across his flesh and into the nape of his neck. When she sighed, the pool of light in which she bathed rolled like the surface of the ocean. “Such a burden for one so young; yet, it is your burden to bear, yours and yours alone. And bear it you shall.”
Leaning in closer to his face, the shape vaguely resembling her face pressed against his cheek, the distance between its mouth and his ear barely an inch. So softly that only Tommy and Tommy alone could hear, she whispered something meant for only for the two of them. She spoke four words, four simple, measly words that would change everything, four words that would determine the fate of the universe.
After saying what so desperately needed to be said, her hand slipped from his face. The flat shape creating her body began to coil and distort, interweaving with the whiteness behind and evaporating like water turning to steam, “I have faith in you. I know you’ll do what must be done, no matter what it asks of you or how much it might hurt. Find the beauty in the ending, Tommy. Discover the importance of pain, because it exists. And it is…astounding.”
Realizing she was moving away from him and understanding almost instantly that it might be for good, Tommy reached for the glowing thing resembling his mother. Lunging frantically in her direction, his fingers passed smoothly through her two-dimensional shape as she continued to fade into the expanse of liquid light.
“No! Where are you going? No, wait!” Arms flailing wildly, he grasped with dirty fingers for anything solid, anything to keep her from leaving. He found nothing of the sort. In this bizarre void of white it would seem only he had shape. There was nothing to hold onto. She wasn’t real. Only he was real. Try as he might, his attempts to keep her from leaving ultimately proved fruitless. As it was the first time she said goodbye, he was helpless.
