by A. J. Rand
The battle raged on between us––attacks, counter-attacks, ball, lines, and explosions of blue and violet energy all lighting the room like Fourth of July fireworks. I was hurting a lot, but I was also getting tired. The only redemption I found was that he seemed worse off than I was. It puzzled me at first, but then I finally understood.
I was used to dealing with this energy being flung at me from beings that knew how to use it. The creatures I had fought against over the years dealt me the same hurt. I was used to it. Ke, new to his human form, was not. I was actually winning the fight.
Once that realization hit me, I blasted him with everything I could. That was another advantage, perhaps for me. He was used to wielding the energy. I wasn’t. Instead of draining me, it was making me as power drunk as I was in the presence of most of the immortals. I was high on pure energy.
It was a struggle, but I knew that I would win. It became especially clear to me when Ke dropped one last time to the foot of the stairs and didn’t get back up. With a ball of energy in my hand, I advanced on him. My moves were cautious. I didn’t know if he was faking it, or if he was really in that bad of shape.
I reached the place where he lay crumpled on the ground, his breathing heavy and ragged. When I stopped, just out of his reach, he looked up at me. His eyes held pain, but that old look of longing was still there. It dawned on me that the Thrones had it wrong. I finally understood what Ke was trying to tell me earlier. His prejudice hadn’t been against my being a human. He loved me in either form. He kept himself from me because he hadn’t felt worthy.
The light in my hand flickered and died out. I was back to being lost again. What was I supposed to do now?
“Why do you not finish it?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to answer that one. “Why do you feel this is the best solution for humanity, Ke?”
“Because humans are the only ones with the strength enough to fight against the darkness, Yeshua. If Abaddon is released, no matter what else happens, it will be humankind that will have to turn back the tides of darkness. The angels are not prepared.”
I laughed, but the sound was hollow. “You don’t get it, do you? Have you looked around you lately? There is darkness all over the world. Humans give in to that darkness willingly. They are more likely to side with Abaddon at this point.”
Ke shook his head. “No. I do not believe that. They rise up against the darkness. It is what bands them together against a common enemy. The darkness makes them strong. They have the strength to fight this battle. It will come to them anyway, no matter what we do here.”
“Isn’t the Crystal City evidence enough for you that the darkness of humanity is taking over? The angels are beginning to act like the humans. Their darkness is coming out because they reflect what happens down here. Humanity isn’t fighting the darkness any more, Ke, they embrace it.”
“This will happen one way or another, Yeshua. I am only working to give us a chance in the upcoming battle. If we can control the breach, then we can mend it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. If Abaddon and his hordes pop through that Gate right now, who is going to stop them? You? You can’t even stand on your own two feet. Me? Not likely––I have no clue as to what I’m doing. It frees them, Ke. They will be loose on the earth, and Armageddon begins. Is that what you want for humanity? It seems to me that means their destruction, not their salvation.”
Ke was still shaking his head. “No. I do not believe that. They can win this battle–”
He was fading. I could see it. It hurt me to do so, but I turned my back on him. He had a lot more faith in humanity than I did. But he hadn’t lived among them. I had. Oh, there was strength to be found, he was right about that. But there was also weakness, corruption, and darkness. This could not possibly be won. Maybe Abaddon would break free from the pit some day. When he did, humanity would have to deal with it then. I was just buying them a little more time.
I started walking away. “It is finished for now, Ke. There will come another time to deal with all of this. For now, the battle is over.”
I should have been paying attention, but I wasn’t. Through the silence, as I crossed the floor, Ke’s voice was clear.
“This battle is over, Yeshua Star, but the war only now begins.”
I froze in place, turning slowly back to look at him. Ke had crawled up the stairs to the surface of the Gate. He gave me a silent look of pride, and sadness. I think it was his way of saying goodbye.
I started to move again, but it seemed as though time had slowed to a crawl. I watched in horror as Ke lifted his hand to the surface of the Obsidian Gate. Blue energy built at the center and spread outward from where his hand rested. I lifted my hand to stop him, but nothing came out. I shook it, trying to get the damn thing to work. Nothing happened.
The blue energy had barely reached the edges of the Gate, covering it in a pulsating glow when the whole surface bulged outward, and then erupted. For a moment, the room was still and quiet. Then a humming filled the air, growing in intensity to a throbbing, beating headache of a noise coming from the shattered surface of the Gate. My mind idly found the biblical passage, and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.
My eyes found Ke’s and stared at him in disbelief. He had better be right in all of his assumptions. Abaddon was headed our way and he was not alone.
Chapter 28
Ke stumbled down the stairs, backing away from the oncoming hordes. Without taking his eyes from the Gate, he kept scrambling backward, propelling himself on his hands and feet until he backed up against a wall and couldn’t go any further. The noise grew to deafening levels. I wanted to put my hands over my ears to shut it out, but I couldn’t afford the distraction of tying up my hands.
Then it stopped. Silence blanketed the air in place of the noise. Nothing happened. I raised an eyebrow to Ke, who continued to watch the Gate. But it wasn’t the kind of quiet that said “everything’s over here, folks, move it along”. It was the calm before the storm when even time seemed to hold its breath in anticipation of what was coming.
Black, oily smoke exploded from the Gate, pushing away any pieces left of the surface. The Gate was fully opened, with nothing to block the way of what had been held back inside for so many millennia. I recognized the blackness, if that made any sense. It wasn’t the recognition of sight, even though I had seen it so many times before in my dreams in front of a different Gate. It was more of a feeling––a feeling of something very, very wrong. The essence of wrongness flooded the room with tangibility.
In this lifetime, I have encountered dark forces. Hey––I had even come face to face with Lucifer himself. He was supposed to be the big bad and yet he hadn’t felt that different from any of the other Angels I had dealt with at that point. In fact, in some ways he had even been more pleasant, part of his overall mojo as the Great Tempter was my guess. But this thing called Abaddon? There were not even words to describe what the heart of true evil feels like. It was oily and dry at the same time. The dryness chafed at your very core, rubbing it raw, while the oily slickness filled up every part of you, encasing it in a suffocating feeling of malevolence, bringing every dark emotion attributed to the nature of humanity to the surface.
Abaddon was quick to assess the situation. I guess you have a lot of time for figuring out all the angles of a great escape when you’ve been locked away with nothing to do but think for thousands of years. He probed me for only a fraction of a second, before dismissing me as an unimportant first step. It was obvious that he perceived Ke as the greater threat. Maybe my first clue was when he lunged directly at the Angel bound in human form.
To give Ke some credit in all of this, he didn’t panic. He didn’t even flinch. His head came up with pride and he gave me a quick, parting glance that said goodbye from the depth of emotion in his eyes. It pissed me off. He had gone through all of the trouble to unleash this thing for the benefit of humanity’s s
urvival, knowing he probably wouldn’t be around to deal with the fallout.
That wasn’t going to happen if I could help it. I didn’t really stop to think about my motives. There were too many to really take the time to consider. I couldn’t let Abaddon destroy Ke. I flung my hand toward Abaddon with instinctive precision. The huge, oily form of darkness was thrown back toward the Gate.
His focus came back to me with furious intensity. I must have changed his mind about the threat assessment he had gone through. But his attention was no longer on Ke. It was for me alone. It was common for me to be flippant at this stage of a fight. I loved to throw in a little sarcasm to piss the other guy off, and to encourage confidence in myself I wasn’t really feeling at the moment. It wasn’t there this time. I was on my own without sarcastic wit, without any really back up, or even any clue as to what I was doing.
The warmth of Marduk’s amulet heated to greater levels at my chest. It suddenly dawned on me that the object had been given to me in the dreamscape. I had never even realized it had come with me from out of that realm and into the physical realm. The thought of the power behind that bit of work caught me so off-guard I almost missed the start of Abaddon’s first rush in my direction.
My reaction was instantaneous, although I’m not sure I can claim total credit. Both of my arms came up at the same time with power flaring at my hands. He was flung backward from me, landing to coalesce into more solid form at the foot of the Gate. Energy flared from the amulet, a violet energy with interweaving colors of the rainbow mixed in to strengthen and solidify the force that surrounded me.
My surprise was overwhelming, but I didn’t have time to contemplate the source. Abaddon’s scream of outrage filled the chamber. It wasn’t a noise to be heard by human ears, but it vibrated anger and hatred that resonated within me, bringing to life my own deep, dark feelings.
I was always the type to keep my emotions under tight wraps. Everything that had happened within the last couple of weeks had opened me to feelings I had never dealt with before. The feelings of my inner darkness being exposed had me really thrown. I’d never realized my capacity for such dark emotions. As a human, I had recognized the potential, but never imagined the primal energy this brought to the surface.
The big problem was that the feeling of it nauseated me and I lost control of the energy I was holding. It wasn’t for long, but it was time enough for Abaddon to make his move. He swooped in toward me with full force while I was at my most vulnerable. Before I could bring my energy up to stop him, I was launched across the room with the impact of his form against mine. I hit the far wall halfway up the height and slid down the surface to land in a dazed heap on the floor.
Stars exploded in my head and a brief image of the Angelic observatory flashed through my mind, the planets swirling around me in the misty fog of unaware pain. Okay, that had hurt. The breath was knocked out of me, and I was fighting for consciousness. There were definite disadvantages to fighting on the physical plane. I couldn’t seem to rally to force as quickly as I did when I fought on the dreamscape. This was not pain I could ignore and jump right back up again.
The medallion heated up on my chest and brought me back to awareness, feeding me a surge of energy. I dawned on me that the medallion had come from the dreamscape and was helping to fight the fight on the physical. What was so different between the two realms? They were both just as real as the perceptions you allowed. I knew the dreamscape was insubstantial, yet I fought in it the same way I fought in the physical. I just needed a little carry over in my thoughts. The medallion was that carry over, my reminder.
Abaddon surged toward me again. The time for thinking was over. It was time for action. Instead of thrusting him backward, I met him head on, force to force. We both fell back against the connection. I wanted to smile. Good. He had felt that. I tried to ignore the part where I had felt it, too––like running headfirst into a brick wall, but you do what you have to do.
The game was on. Abaddon and I met again and again, pushing, slamming, pounding, and battering each other with energy. I was getting tired, but he was, too. How can you tell what strength a big ball of yuck had left to him? Maybe it was only wishful thinking, but I’d take whatever I could get. He slammed me back against the far wall more times than I could count. I wonder if he was keeping track of how many times I pushed him back toward the gate? I doubted it. There was nothing but the essence of pure rage coming from him. You didn’t think clearly with that kind of raw emotion funneling through you.
Then again, he wasn’t human. Maybe he was beyond the blind spot that emotion brought. Me? I was hitting the zone of heightened awareness that comes from a struggle of life or death. There are no emotions attached to the zone, it just is. It wasn’t a matter of kill or be killed, it was a matter of fighting for survival. The only thing was that in this case, I wasn’t just fighting for my survival. I was fighting for the survival of the existence of everything I knew and had ever known.
At some point Abaddon seemed to get beyond blind rage. He sat in front of the Gate, gathering his forces, waiting, maybe thinking. I gathered the power to me, not wanting to wait. I don’t think I had the luxury of giving myself time, because I couldn’t give him time to think things through. I flung everything I had at him, striking for what I felt was the heart of the dark form that hovered at the front of the Gate. This time I wasn’t going for the push. I was going for the kill. But how do you kill something that isn’t in physical form?
It did work on one level. Instead of the kill shot I was looking for, I dispersed the form he did have through the room. It was like an explosion of smoke, shadowing the room in blackness. While Abaddon worked to coalesce back into a more solid shape, I pulled in the power again, drawing on every resource I could latch onto.
It finally dawned on me what the rainbow lines of color were that ran through my violet energy. The immortals had tied their own essence into that of the amulet, allowing me to draw on their power. But I knew it wasn’t enough. I was fighting against time. Abaddon was coming back together too quickly. I reached out above me, for the strength that had buffered me earlier, the strength at the core of humanity that was fighting its own struggle overhead, unaware of the battle that raged below their feet, not realizing the true fight was below the surface of everything they were already being put through on the level of reality that was in front of their faces.
My body flooded with light. It was like the dream, when Ithane became a creature of pure energy, of white-violet power. But it was different. The power that flooded me was not only my own, it was the light of everything and everyone around me I could connect into––the humans struggling overhead, the immortals sitting God only knew where, feeding me everything they had, maybe even the Angels. I couldn’t tell where it all came from, I only knew it was there, flowing into me, filling me and spilling into reserves I never knew existed.
Abaddon must have felt the sheer power of what I was holding, of what I was becoming. He hesitated, back to full form. I could feel him probing, and I could feel the frustration that surged through him at the moment he became aware that he couldn’t win against the force I had called into play.
I kept drawing the power, weaving it into form, ready to blanket him and send him back to the pit for another couple of millennia. I forgot the number one rule in a fight like this––a cornered animal makes for a more dangerous and unpredictable fight. Just as Ithane had done before me, I drew in the one last line of energy needed to complete the weave and lock Abaddon back into the Abyss from where he had just come. I pulled Ke’s energy to life to create the final part of the barrier.
That caught Abaddon’s attention, drawing it away from me. Hefinally realized he had been attacking the wrong opponent. I had been distracting him the entire time away from the one thing he should have destroyed first––Ke. Triumph rolled through the room on top of the other feelings surging from him. He lunged toward Ke, ready to finish what he had begun upon his emergence from
the pit.
Ke sat up straight, accepting what he knew now to be inevitable. I had locked him into human form, and he would die as one of those he sought to save. But that wasn’t in my plan. I threw the energy I had woven away from me like a net, sending it hurtling across the open space of the room.
To be honest, I couldn’t really tell you what my intention was at that point. My actions were based on pure instinct. The energy net struck Ke, encasing him in a protective shield. Abaddon bounced off the protective force. But he was ready to go again, with no hesitation in his actions. He lunged at Ke, ready to break through the barrier, as he had broken the weaves of the Gate. Without thought, I tied the energy off and pulled back to gather more. Ke was safe behind the barrier. Abaddon bounced off again, this time with a howl of outrage. He had felt the lock go into place. He knew the feeling of it––that lock had held him bound for thousands of years. Without the key, he would never open it. For the time being, Abaddon was stopped from destroying Ke.
My own energy was gathering again, and Abaddon evaluated the situation with quick, decisive action. He lunged at me before the power could be called to full force, and broke the new web I was trying to build. But it was only a distraction. The humming filled the air again, and while Abaddon stood over me, battering against whatever defenses I could call into play, the Gate filled with shadows, all emerging from the place of darkness that had held them for so long.
I couldn’t hold against them all. But that wasn’t what was planned. There was only a slight hesitation before the Gate, and then the shadows surged outward, away from me, away from the Gate. They headed toward the tunnel leading to the surface. There was nothing I could do to stop them. I was holding off Abaddon’s attacks. Maybe I wasn’t losing, but I sure wasn’t winning.
