by C L Walker
He seemed to vanish in the press, reduced to particles too small to see, burned to nothingness.
I released the shield to find his sword there, as though it hadn’t been touched.
“Stupid man,” Erindis said. Her voice came from the sky and vibrated from the ground, it was in my head and burning in my chest. “I gave him life. He is mine.”
Something miraculous and terrifying happened: the tattoos came to life. Not as they did when I fed them the life-force of the creatures I had hurt, but the way they once had. The way they had for thousands of years, when they fed off the power of an elder-god and made me more powerful than the gods.
I turned to face her. She hovered high in the sky, lightning cutting jagged lines in the dark from her eyes.
“Rise, my angel.” Her voice made the tattoos squirm, but they were mine, and they were now more powerful than almost anything.
I spun around in time to see Peter reform, the sword in his hand. He was in agony, but he was standing and he was healing.
“My god wills it that you die,” he said through half-formed lips. He staggered forward, then took a more steady step, then broke into a run. By the time he reached me he was whole.
The tattoos wove a shield and he rebounded from it. His sword sang as it cut the air, but when it hit the barrier it was deflected.
I was myself again, and he didn’t stand a chance.
“Destroy him,” Erindis said. Her words could have been for either of us, but it was Peter who reacted.
He dashed at me, faster than I could follow, but the tattoos were ready and they trapped him again. This time I was going to leave him in agony, and to hell with the hollow man.
He didn’t go down, didn’t twitch in pain. He roared, and the energy dissipated.
I had to get rid of him or I’d never get through to Erindis.
I threw another entrapping shield at him, and another. He fought them, always on the verge of escaping, but I kept adding to them, building more and more complex arrangements of magical energy. They encased him, obscuring him from view. Still he didn’t go down.
I raised my hand and he lifted from the ground. I spared my wife a quick glance to find her back in her original pose, her face turned to the sky and her eyes closed. She was smiling.
I ran with the trapped angel, heading for the nearest gate. I was going to drop him off in a small hell and set it adrift. If I could destroy the heartstone before he escaped then I wouldn’t have to worry about him ever again.
I made it through the first gate, stepping into a hell of jagged, pointed mountains rising above fetid swamps. We were near the top of one of them and the shortcut was waiting, just before us.
Peter tore free of the cocoon I’d built for him, screaming a battle cry I couldn’t understand. His sword tore through what was left of my work, and then he was on me.
He stabbed at me again and this time when I caught his sword I was strong enough to deal with it. I put both hands on the sharp blade and broke it in half.
He cried out, falling back, staring at the weapon he’d said was an extension of his body. I didn’t give the time to mourn its loss.
I hit him, over and over, moving faster than he could see. I pummeled him wherever I found an opening and the surprise of losing his sword and the ferocity of my attack kept him on the defensive. He couldn’t think to form a plan and he couldn’t block everything I threw his way.
I added magic to the mix, empower my blows while sending blood-red lightning at him simultaneously. He was struck once, twice, and I broke his ribs at the same time. He threw a weak punch in return, but the lightning struck his arm and charred it to a crisp.
“Help,” he cried out, looking to the heavens. “Help me, please.”
“She doesn’t care,” I said, landing what I hoped was my final blow. It had all my rage, all my strength, and all my power behind it. My fist collided with his chest like a bomb hitting a bird.
He exploded away from me, and away from himself, separated into particles again, and spread to the four corners of the hell. His sword clattered to the floor and slid to the edge of the cliff.
I grabbed it with a magical extension of my hand. I had broken it and now it was rebuilt. When I’d destroyed him before he had come back, good as new.
It was his vessel. Like my locket, it was what Erindis had bound him to. He would always be reborn to it, over and over for as long as the binding was alive.
I ran again, heading for the nearest hell gate. I stepped through, didn’t find what I was looking for, and kept going. Hell after hell, holding the sword and channeling terrible magic at it to keep it dormant for a few moments longer.
I stepped into a hell of fire and magma, of endless fields of intense heat and agony.
“I am sorry for this, angel,” I said. I threw the sword away, far into the sky and into the dark.
Before it landed I saw Peter reform, the sword in his hand. He was screaming as his flesh returned to his angelic soul. And then he hit the magma and he was just screaming. He raised his hands and his own tattoos started to glow, but he wasn’t as powerful as me, his curse incomplete, and the magma had ideas of its own. It grabbed him, sucked him down and out of sight.
And I was alone, my enemy dispatched, and only one thing left to do.
I stepped through the gate and headed back to confront Erindis.
Chapter 37
Erindis was getting ready to complete her ritual. She saw me coming and a barrier of red energy sprang to life around the mountaintop.
She had stopped hovering in the air and placed her feet in the blood. She was naked, her strange tattoos glowing in response to the mountaintop and its power, and I could see her eyes glowing behind her closed eyelids.
The skies of the hell were filled with tortured clouds, swirling and twisting in strange patterns, reacting to the magical currents flooding the mountain.
I could feel that it was about to happen, that her long ritual was about to complete.
I put my hand on the barrier and pushed. The tattoos glowed brightly, then grew even brighter, burning white hot as they channeled her own energy at her barrier. I had more than I could ever need, an endless supply as long as she was alive.
The barrier shattered and she opened her eyes, snapping her attention to me.
I held up my hands and stayed at the edge of the pools of her blood.
“I just want to talk,” I said. Thunder rolled across the heavens, so powerful that it shook the world. “I need to tell you something.”
“I thought you were dead,” she said. Her voice was soft, low, but it still came from everywhere, as though she’d become a part of everything, her power extending out and touching the universe.
“I had to come back. I know what happens here, what you’re about to do.”
“I’m about to claim what that bitch promised me.”
When she’d accepted Ohm’s offer and allowed herself to become a true vessel for the elder-god, Erindis had thought she would be wielding the power, that she would be the one to remake the world. I had thought this too until recently.
Instead her consciousness had been pushed aside and Ohm had taken control. She had used her body and suppressed her mind, and there had been nothing Erindis could do about it.
And she’d dreamed of the power she’d seen and held in hands that weren’t hers anymore. And now she was going to have it for herself.
“You can’t claim it,” I said. The wind was picking up and I had to yell. “Her godhood was stolen.”
“Alain.” Speaking the name rocked the world, tossing me off my feet like a child in the surf. I rolled down the mountain a ways before getting up and returning.
“Yes. He took it for himself. You can’t get that back.”
“I know,” she said, lowering the power in her words. “That’s not what I’m doing. I don’t want any part of her. This will be all mine.”
“It won’t.” I didn’t want to hurt her, and I didn’t want her
to hurt herself. If Ohm was coming back it was because of the ritual Erindis was about to finish, and I couldn’t think of a way to stop her without the truth.
And as much as I wanted to see the god who’d loved me, I didn’t want to see what she’d do.
“The angel saw the future,” I yelled, my voice barely audible over the storm brewing all around. “She saw Ohm return and saw her ruin the world. She saw the result of what you’re doing right now.”
“Liar!”
I was thrown again, tossed away and into the sky. I fell to the ground miles away, the tattoos working to arrest my fall and bring me down safely.
When I got back she was already speaking. “Don’t lie to me, Agmundr. I will know if you lie.”
“That wasn’t a lie. That’s why I came back. That’s why I didn’t kill myself, because it wouldn’t have made a difference. You complete your ritual anyway, and then she returns.”
Erindis sat in the blood, her naked skin absorbing the blood that had been spilled so long ago. It drained upward, seeming to leap onto her and disappear into her pores.
“Please, my love, don’t do this.” I was begging, and it was the only thing I had. She was a god already, and about to become more.
“You can’t take this from me.” She looked around, momentarily confused. “Where is my angel?”
“He won’t be coming back.”
“You cannot kill him. I can feel him. Where is he?”
“Gone, Erindis. Gone.”
She looked down for a moment and the blood that was almost all gone, then looked up at me, smiling.
“Never mind, I’ll just bring him back when I’m done. When I am complete.”
I took the dagger from my pocket and hid it behind my back. She had to be stopped, now, before it was too late. If it wasn’t already.
She looked down again, admiring the red on her skin, and I took my chance. I launched myself at her, as fast as I could go, faster than the lightning crossing the sky above.
She raised her hand and froze me in place, hanging in the air. She hadn’t looked at me, she had just known. I suspected she knew everything, now.
“You’re a bug,” she said. “An annoying insect who won’t go away. Agmundr, what do we do with annoying insects?”
I braced for it and the tattoos erupted in red fire, shields springing to life around me. It wasn’t enough. She crushed me, folding me in on myself, cracking my bones and tearing my flesh.
She still hadn’t looked up at me, even as she destroyed me.
She dropped me to the ground, apparently done with me. The barrier reappeared, pushing me away and back down the mountain. My broken body slammed into a rock and was held in place by my demolished neck.
But the tattoos had their power source back, and I was healed in a heartbeat. I was back before her a moment later, my hand on the barrier.
“Didn’t I kill you?” she said dreamily, lost in whatever was happening to her. “I did, didn’t I?”
The shield shattered again and I went to retrieve the dagger where I’d dropped it. She raised her hand and it flew away, out into the night.
“No,” she said. “I don’t like that.”
“Erindis, this ends badly for you. You give her what she wants.”
And what I want, I almost added. Because I did want it. Even knowing the consequences, I wanted Ohm to come back. I wanted the woman who had really loved me to return, and for us to be happy. She’d destroy the world and I’d help her, but dammit, it was what I had been craving for eons.
I didn’t say it, though. I didn’t like the desire. I knew it was wrong and I knew it was selfish. I had changed, and even knowing it was what I wanted didn’t make me stop fighting it.
“You’re wrong,” Erindis said. She lifted into the air, her legs still crossed. “I’ll show you.”
She raised her hands to the heavens and they split open, revealing the void beyond. It poured down on her, on me, on the hell surrounding us. It fell like the waterfalls in the heavens, a deluge of nothing.
And it washed away. We were fine, and her ritual was complete. I could feel it.
Erindis put her feet on the clean rock of the mountaintop and smiled at me. She was somehow too bright to look at, too hot to be near. She was every extreme, every feeling, every dream and every nightmare, combined into one being and placed before me.
“See,” she said, and now her voice was just her voice, simple and human. “Told you so.”
Ohm wasn’t there. She was just Erindis, the wife who hated me and who I’d cursed to eternal life. Just Erindis, with the power of an elder-god.
“I think it’s time you died, don’t you?”
She stepped forward, and the world warped around me, exploding away in a million directions and contracting in on me at the same time.
It was like the opposite of the void, like it was everything, all at once, consuming me and discarding me, burning me and freezing me.
And at the center, smiling her sweet little smile, Erindis approached.
Chapter 38
She walked through the kaleidoscopic chaos, the one constant in a frantic world I could no longer understand.
Everything changed, constantly; I saw other afterlives, heavens and hells crashing into one another, mountains thrown through the void to collapse around me and vanish. Cities, from my youth, my life, and the future I had been summoned into, rising and falling around me, an apocalypse at every turn, the end of a civilization with every heartbeat.
“I was so afraid of you.” Her voice, calm and beautiful, made the universe tremble. It made my struggling heart beat even faster. “Every time you spied on me I could feel it.”
I was everywhere at once, from the nothing of the void to the markets I had stolen from as a child. I was every person in every place, watching myself grow up into the demon I would become. I was my father, disappointed when I wouldn’t kill a man who wronged me, hating me when I said I didn’t want to fight.
“I knew you were out there, and the only thing keeping you from finding me and taking me was the curse that kept us alive. I wanted to die, but only to stop you from claiming your prize.”
“I loved you,” I cried out in the cacophony. My words were lost, spread across all of time, heard by everyone, and no one.
“You owned me. From the moment my father sold me to you for the price of safety, you owned me. I was your slave, your possession. That’s what you loved.”
It wasn’t true, but she showed it to me, the world we had lived in. The kingdom on the edge, enemies at the door. I was the slave in the corner, watching us fight, only we weren’t fighting; I was. She was quiet, accepting, terrified. She was angry, but she dared not show it.
Reality tore apart again, dismissing the memory from history. It hadn’t happened, now. She’d erased it, and I felt it drifting away in the constantly shifting views of my life.
“I can fix everything now,” she said. Her voice came from everywhere, from every cell in my body. “I can fix this unfair life, make it better. I can be what I was meant to be. What I was born to be, before my father gave away my birthright.”
She stood in the shifting universe, but she was no longer the only constant. Now she was surrounded by others: my friends, my enemies, everyone I had met since arriving in Fairbridge.
“You love these people, or hate them,” she said. “They have value to you, where nothing ever has before.”
Roman’s head exploded and his body fell, slipping into the maelstrom of madness surrounding me. I screamed, tried to reach out to him, but I had no mouth and I had no hands.
“Why do you care, Agmundr? They are nothing. Mayflies, doomed to die before you even notice them.”
Nikolette, standing proud, her eyes open and accepting of what was coming. She melted like a wax figure, and she didn’t scream.
“Even the most powerful of them wouldn’t have lived as long as you, wouldn’t have seen what you could see. Their perspective is so small, so narrow.”
Bec, standing before my wife. Calm, ready for her death.
I fought, harder than I ever had before, harder than I’d thought possible. Pain exploded from everywhere as the tattoos erupted with magic direct from an elder-god. I fought, and I moved closer.
“You would die for these people? Or just for her?”
The shields the tattoos erected were instantly destroyed, but they allowed me to make progress. They formed enough of a reality for me to inch forward, to approach her and the people she was killing to make a point.
“This world isn’t even real,” she screamed, destroying everything and leaving me in darkness. The only light was Erindis and Bec, beacons in the dark before me.
I pushed forward and I made it. I took Bec’s hand and tried to form the shields around her too.
She didn’t respond. She couldn’t. Erindis had created her from scratch. She wasn’t the real Bec, though she was as alive and aware as the woman I’d left in the city on earth.
“You want to see the real her?” Erindis said, her voice beside my ear, whispering. “Then kill the simulacrum, and I’ll take you to her.”
My hands were on her throat, squeezing. At first Bec didn’t respond, didn’t fight, but as her lungs began to scream she grabbed my arm and tried to tear herself away. This fake version of her, this being created to torment me, was desperately trying to survive.
I couldn’t do it. I let her go. She spun away into the darkness, screaming.
“Shall I destroy her for real?”
“No,” I said. “You wanted me, and now you have me. Kill me, if you must, but leave them alone.”
“I am a god, Agmundr.” She appeared around me, somehow everywhere at once, and only a few feet away at the same time. “I can do whatever I want.”
My head hurt, trying to make sense of the madness. It was too much for me, too much.
“I want you to know that you almost convinced me, before. I thought you were telling the truth, and Ohm was coming back. I could feel her in my head like an echo. I thought I’d made a mistake.”
