Blue Hell And Alien Fire (Middang3ard Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  He was turned to face the Dark One.

  The Dark One did not walk. His body vibrated, and then he was in front of Suzuki. The first thing Suzuki noticed was the smell.

  The Dark One did not smell like anything he had a concept for. It was not that the Dark One stank or smelled beautiful. It was beyond those distinctions. He smelled like something ancient and foreign to existence.

  Suzuki struggled to get out of his bindings, as did the other Suzuki.

  The Dark one towered over both Suzukis, his body still vibrating. “What has brought you to the realm between places?” the Dark One asked, his voice burrowing deep into Suzuki’s skull. The feeling was unbearable. Suzuki wanted to scream, to do anything to keep the Dark One from speaking again.

  “Answer me, boy!”

  The command nearly sent Suzuki spiraling into madness. It was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to his brain. He felt sick to his stomach. “You know,” Suzuki muttered, “I had the day off. Thought it might be fun to check it out.”

  There was no indication on the Dark One’s face, but Suzuki knew he was smiling.

  He also knew it was not a mocking smile.

  There was genuine goodwill and humor in it.

  Yet that goodwill did nothing to undercut the atmosphere of violence that radiated from the Dark One.

  The Dark One’s body contorted briefly.

  It was as if there was another person behind him who had been shoved into his body and forced to move.

  The disturbing part was that it looked extremely natural. “You have hardly been of notice to me,” the Dark One said. “Yet it was you who destroyed my elder god. And it was you who realized my experiments. You who killed my Viceroy. Which makes me wonder, exactly who are you, Suzuki?”

  The Dark One pressed his finger to Suzuki’s forehead.

  Suzuki felt as if someone had run a thousand knives down his body, splitting him into thousands and thousands of versions of himself. He could feel them stretching back in an infinite line. As Suzuki’s body trembled from the strain, the Dark One practically waltzed around him. “Ah…a boy from Earth,” the Dark One said. “One of the Dragon-blooded now. Exceptionally normal. Is it you who has been destroying my best-crafted plans?”

  Suzuki did the only thing he could think of—he leaned forward and thought of his axe. He didn’t know the last time he had held it, nor did he know if his enchantments were strong enough to hold through multiple realms of reality, but he knew he was not going to stand there and be taunted by the Dark One.

  Even though Suzuki had not said anything aloud, the other Suzuki must have been thinking the same thing because they both surged forward at the same time, their axes flying to their hands, and brought the axes cleaving down on the Dark One’s head.

  The axes passed through as easily as butter, and the Dark One was gone. In his place was a large black petal sprout, reaching to the dark skies.

  Suzuki looked at his doppelganger. “Uh, that was pretty intense,” Suzuki said.

  The other Suzuki nodded as he rubbed his sore leg. “Always wondered what it would be like to meet another version of myself,” he muttered. “Would have thought we would have more to say to each other.”

  “When I thought of meeting alternate reality versions of myself, they never had to deal with anything like this.”

  “True. I guess I was thinking time travel or something like that.”

  Suzuki could see the other Suzukis walking around him, all of them approaching the threshold, their after images faint and hardly noticeable. “Do you think any of them can see us?” Suzuki asked. “I don’t think anyone’s acknowledged each other except for when I helped you up.”

  “That was you?” the other Suzuki asked. “I didn’t see you, just felt your hands around my arm. Honestly, I didn’t even know you were there until we were attacking the Dark One.”

  “Huh…maybe our alternate timelines aren’t that different from each other’s.”

  “You’d think that would hold for the rest of them too. Doesn’t look like any other version of us was stopped by the Dark One.”

  “I mean, if there are infinite timelines, then it would make sense that the odds of any of them being too similar would be pretty infinite too.”

  “You know what? I was wrong. We obviously have a lot to talk about.”

  The two Suzukis started to make their way to the threshold again, Prime Suzuki helping his wounded alternate along.

  After a couple of seconds, the other Suzuki assured Prime Suzuki that he was able to walk. As they proceeded, the world around them turned even blacker than before.

  The threshold was not visible.

  Deep in the darkness behind them, there was a rumbling, the sound of something awakening. Suzuki wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt. He also knew the only thing he could do was run. He set off, straight ahead, unsure if the threshold was still in front of him, but very aware he needed to get away from whatever was behind him.

  A roar shattered through Suzuki’s mind, and he wanted nothing more than to drop to the ground. He had to see what was behind him.

  He looked over his shoulder.

  In the darkness, there looked to be lightning.

  But it was not lightning.

  More like fire.

  Suzuki did not know how to describe what he saw.

  There were only images of things which he had seen, images that did not make sense with each other. What he believed he saw was a giant mountain. The ridges of the mountain were deep and formed what looked like a furious bearded face. In each of the ridges of the face marched thousands of people holding torches. Then, without warning, the thing opened its eyes, and within those eyes Suzuki could see a thousand of his deaths in painful detail. The face surged forward, its mouth opening, the deep maw taking up all the space in the realm between realms.

  The two Suzukis ran as fast as they could. Suddenly, there was a light. Suzuki wasn’t sure where the light was coming from, but it was enough to let him see where the threshold was. On his back, he could feel the heat coming from what he now knew was the Dark One. Suzuki threw himself through the threshold. As he slid across the ground, he turned back to the threshold, and his jaw dropped in horror. The other Suzuki’s hand reached out, and Suzuki saw black jaws clamp down on that Suzuki’s arm. The threshold closed, and the other Suzuki’s hand lay on the ground, bleeding.

  An intense feeling welled up in his chest as if he were having an asthma attack. His head suddenly grew hot, and he felt like he was swimming. The feeling passed quickly, though, and he sat there staring at the hand.

  Beth knelt beside Suzuki and tried to get his attention. “Suzy, are you okay?” she asked, her voice thick with fear.

  Suzuki nodded as he stared at the bleeding hand. “Yeah, yeah. How is everyone else?” he asked.

  “Fine. We’ve been waiting here for you for like an hour or something. It didn’t take anyone else that long to get through. What the hell was going on in there?”

  “I saw the Dark One. Really saw him. He’s not like what we saw before. That’s not him. He’s so much… How was he just in there?”

  Diana stepped forward and knelt across from Suzuki. She held out her wand. “Watch my wand, all right?” she commanded as she moved it back and forth in front of Suzuki’s eyes. “Doesn’t look like you have a concussion or anything. And you are right, he is something much larger than the military or MERC want to acknowledge. We can all play our war games, but whatever the Dark One is trying to do is going to be as vast and terrible as he truly is.

  “If you saw what you say you saw, it explains a lot of what’s been going on here. The Dark One is obviously using this spot for something, and he knows you’re here. You’ve piqued his attention. But he isn’t omnipresent. He can’t be everywhere at once. The ley line was his chance to get to you. It was an echo of him. But that was it, and that lets us know he’s not really here.”

  Suzuki pushed away
his fears and the questions in his mind. This was simple enough. “All right,” Suzuki said as he stood up. “So, we find out what the Dark One was up to here. If anything else is still happening, we shut it down. No matter how weird things start to get. You guys in?”

  The decision was unanimous.

  The Mundanes were going to get to the bottom of this.

  12

  Past the threshold, the nature of the volcano had changed.

  The psychedelic visions and feelings that had been plaguing the Mundanes before were gone, as was the suffocating nature of the tunnels. This new section looked as if it had been hollowed out by giant machines. There was a lot of open space that looked unnatural. There were no rock formations to be seen. Instead, there were stretches of empty cavern.

  The Mundanes were not certain what time it was but, judging by Stew’s embarrassingly loud stomach, they figured it was about time to eat. Chip and Beth went farther into the caverns to scout to see if there was anything else to be worried about. They returned after fifteen minutes, certain there was nothing remotely alive in this section of the cave. Suzuki was slightly unnerved by the fact there was nothing living in the cavern. Though with how things had been going since they started going deeper into the volcano, this was a little bit of luck. Also, it would give him a bit of time to recoup from his harrowing experience.

  Suzuki wasn’t one to sit and think about his situation. Most of his thoughts revolved around handling different battle or relational scenarios. In his head, he was somewhat of a background character. Trying to rescue Beth? That was about Beth. Watching the temperaments of his party members? That was about trying to make sure they were all in a space where they could work easily together. Now? It had been brought to his attention that the Dark One knew him by name, had noticed him, and picked him out. That was something big, and he was going to need to understand it.

  Stew and Beth worked together, building a small fire from the stores they had brought along. Just as Stew had said, none of the food they brought had been touched. Even though Suzuki had a few questions, Stew assured him it wasn’t anything they should be wasting time thinking about. Even if they did know where the food had gone, it hadn’t negatively impacted them. They’d been eating just fine. If the curse of the cavern was that their food inventory was never depleted, Stew let Suzuki know he would be completely fine with it.

  Suzuki walked away from Stew to speak with Diana. Stew’s personality change was still obvious, even if it wasn’t in your face. His generally immature attitude had almost completely vanished. Oddly enough, it made Stew seem much less like Stew. Or maybe it was just that Sandy was gone and Stew was worried. That would be another thing on the list of things to talk with Diana about: Sandy. She was part of the Mundanes. Suzuki wanted to know how she was faring.

  Diana sat away from the fire but still close enough to benefit from its warmth. She was working on her wand, balancing it on her fingertips, occasionally levitating it before splitting it into thousands of pieces and pulling it back together. Once Diana had reassembled her wand, Suzuki took a seat next to her and cleared his throat. “That’s really fucking impressive,” Suzuki commented. “Must take a shit ton of control.”

  Diana continued to levitate her wand as she nodded to Suzuki. “Yes, it does. Control is one of the highest principles of magic. It doesn’t matter how much raw force you have. Means nothing if you don’t have any control.”

  “Makes sense. Diana, I wanted to talk to you about some shit. If it’s not completely obvious, I am utterly out of my element. I know you and Chip are kinda expecting me to put on my big boy pants and everything, but I don’t even know where to start with this shit.”

  “What’s bothering you the most?”

  “In the threshold. I saw the Dark One.”

  Diana’s wand drifted down into the palm of her hand, where it stood up by itself. “Yes, you did. Is that confusing to you?” she asked.

  “Obviously, but I think that one might be beneath you. I don’t need to understand all the alternate dimension shit to figure out what I’m worried about. He knows who I am,” Suzuki answered. “He picked me out of all the chaos in that realm and came to speak with me. There are thousands of other people trying to take out the Dark One who are doing much more important shit than me, and he came out of the middle of fucking nowhere just to intimidate me. Why?”

  “What did you see in the realm between places?” Diana asked.

  Suzuki knew Diana was either trying to figure this out or she was intentionally making Suzuki answer his own questions. Either way, it was frustrating as hell. “I saw different versions of myself,” Suzuki finally said. “None of them could see me, though, except for one, and that was the one the Dark One could see, too. That was the one who got killed.”

  “I can see why you would be confused. That’s not an easy thing to explain.”

  “You wanna give it a fucking shot?”

  Diana’s wand floated up and stopped in front of Suzuki’s eyes. The tip glowed brightly, and a little bead of light floated up from it. “When I was born, this little light came into existence. From that moment on, every decision I ever made created another version of me.”

  Five smaller lights split away from the larger light. They were tied together by a string of light and floated a couple of inches apart. “Each miniscule decision,” Diana reiterated. “Down to how large of a step I would take getting out of bed. Whether or not I choked on my spit. Within a couple of hours, there were so many different variations of these versions of me that it didn’t matter. They got lost in infinity and have literally nothing in common with each other.”

  Now there were more lights stretching all the way up to the ceiling of the cavern. More than Suzuki could ever dream of counting, but each was tied back to the light that came before itself, going all the way back for the first light near the tip of the wand.

  “Now some people are not like that. It happens every couple of thousands of years. They don’t make unconscious decisions that differ much from the other versions of themselves. As a result, they don’t have limitless, infinite possibilities. The versions of themselves that exist in alternate timelines are very, very close to each other.”

  All the lights disappeared but the first. From that light came five more lights close to each other. Then more lights came from that one. Rather than stretching out like the bright lights Diana had conjured before, these lights remained close to each other and were more jumbled together. “An energy ties all of these alternate lives together, but when that energy is only split between a few thousand individuals, it doesn’t dilute itself. That’s what the Dark One is. An individual who could have had endless possibilities, and, for some reason, after some freak occurrence, unconsciously chose not to. Each version of the Dark One is going to be the Dark One. And he’s learned how to harness that energy to become whatever the hell he is.”

  “Okay, fucking great.”

  “And you, Suzy. You’re like that as well.”

  Suzuki’s jaw dropped open. The idea that he could be anything like the Dark One was hilarious. If it was not for how seriously Diana was watching him, he would have assumed she was playing a joke on him.

  Diana grabbed her wand and the lights disappeared.

  “If you could even see one alternate version of yourself, that means you have significantly less than anyone else,” Diana said. “All of us walked through the same unconscious chaos as you did, and none of us even picked up on the fact that we were walking in a sea of infinite versions of ourselves.”

  Suzuki heard Diana’s words, but he didn’t know what it all meant. “Are you saying I’m a chosen one?” Suzuki asked.

  Diana laughed out loud before noticing how confused Suzuki was. “Kid, it might feel like we’re in an epic fantasy novel, but no one out here is chosen. José had the same number of limited possibilities. I did for a while, until the whole god thing. Sandy does too. It makes you different than a few other people, but no one is de
stined for greatness. All it means is that you’re one of the few people the Dark One is going to take notice of. How great you decide to be is up to you.”

  “Okay, one last thing. The dragon blood. From Ashegoreth. She never explained to me what it did, and I haven’t had a chance to talk to anyone about it. I figured you would know as much as anyone else.”

  Diana scratched her chin with her wand as she thought. “Honestly, that might be harder to explain. Dragon’s don’t often share their blood. There aren’t a whole lot of examples I can think of, and in most cases, the person who had the transfusion died way too early on to be able to gather long term information.”

  “Died? Why did they die young?”

  Diana laughed again as she stood and ruffled Suzuki’s hair. “It’s because dragons always choose warriors. Anyone swinging a sword is liable to get killed by one. And MERCs don’t usually have a long life if you haven’t noticed. Now come on. Let’s get some food before something jumps out and tries to kill us.”

  The two MERCs returned to the rest of the Mundanes. Stew had finished cooking up a small meal of spiced meats and a vegetable that tasted like a cross between cabbage and broccoli. After they were done eating, Chip poured everyone a shot of ambrosia, and they toasted their fallen comrades and themselves. Then they packed up their camp and continued farther into the cavern.

  Chip was the first one to notice the massive shape looming in the distance. It looked like a giant man sitting on a throne of some sort, hunched over as if he were in a state of duress. The Mundanes watched the figure for some time just to be certain it was not going to move. Stew burped loudly and asked, “How strong is that ambrosia, dude? We only had one shot.”

  Chip shook her head as she pulled out a pair of binoculars. She scoffed when she held them to her eyes before passing them to Beth. “Fucking bonkers some days, as if my peepers need these,” she muttered as Beth took the binoculars and Chip fiddled with what could only be knobs on the side of her face. Beth took a look, then passed the binoculars down the line until they came back to her.