by C L Walker
“You did it anyway.”
She laughed, a million laughs, a billion, an infinite amount, echoing around me for eons.
“Isn’t that what you do? I learned it from you. Keep moving, do it anyway, and let the world work it out after.”
We were in Fairbridge but the buildings were twisted, like vines wrapped around themselves. People filled the streets, all looking up to the heavens. I stood in the middle of an intersection, following their gaze up into the clear blue sky.
Another city was there, the city I had ruled with Erindis. It was smaller, drabber, made of mud and wood, beside the steel and glass of the modern city. It hung in the sky like an ominous cloud. And then it fell.
Destruction everywhere, buildings toppling. People screaming, desperate for escape, but there was nowhere to run. The city ended at the edge of downtown; beyond that was the nothingness of the void.
The world froze so I could appreciate the horror on people’s faces, and then it dissipated like smoke.
“Just kill me, Erindis.” I tried to close my eyes and shut off my mind, but I had no eyes and I had no mind. I was formless, created and used by her, to be discarded when she saw fit.
“Not just yet. One more thing to do.”
The mountaintop. It was cold and bare. The void hung in the sky above, almost close enough to touch. I was on my knees and Erindis stood before me.
“I don’t understand why you care for these people,” she said. She looked down at me with something like pity. “It confounds me. I had none of your power and I knew them for what they were. Even as I tried to disappear in their midst, as I tried to accept the life I was forced to live, I understood that they were meaningless.”
“They’re not meaningless, Erindis.”
She wasn’t ever going to kill me. I knew it, could see the endless future stretching out before me. She could dedicate a part of herself to tormenting me forever, coming up with increasingly imaginative ways to hurt me, torturing my friends before me until I became numb to their suffering, destroying the few memories I cherished over and over until nothing was important to me. And then starting over, resetting me, and doing it again and again.
I had thought giving up might work, might end my suffering and protect my friends, but I could see that wasn’t true. She was stubborn and she was spiteful. It was my fault she had become this person, I knew that.
Which made it my responsibility to stop her.
“You’re not paying attention to me, Agmundr.” Her voice jerked the universe into focus around me. The mountain shook as the void…rippled overhead.
I looked up at her and deployed the only offense, or defense, I had.
“You’re pathetic,” I said. I tried to keep my consciousness aligned, tried to stop my fractured mind from wandering. “You’ve defined yourself by what you think I did.”
“What you did do.”
“No. I did what was expected of me, nothing more. It is my weakness, my failing. You said I run ahead, always, and to hell with the consequences. You’re right.”
“About everything.”
“I cannot plan because all my plans fail. I cannot dream because all my dreams turn to shit.”
“You are the problem.”
“No.”
I tried to stand and found I had no legs. But I could feel the tattoos there, burning on my skin. She could remove my flesh but she couldn’t remove the thing that bound us together. It wasn’t within her power.
“I am like you,” I continued, pushing myself up on the ghosts of my limbs. I stood on the impression of the tattoos and faced her. She was taller than me, now. “I blamed the world for my hatred and my rage.”
“The world is to blame.” Her eyes were bottomless pits, reflecting the void above.
“No, we are. You and I. We are the perfect couple, and it has taken me millennia to see it, to believe it. To understand that we are made for each other, you and I. I fight when there is no need, and destroy without thinking. And so do you.”
“I have a need.” She didn’t like what I was saying, or didn’t like that I was saying it. Her anger infected the mountain; boulders rose into the air and hovered, strategically placed to strike when she needed them.
“We are children,” I said. “We are to blame for all of this, and we won’t accept it. Well, I accept it now.”
I stepped closer to her. I had no body but I had the web of tattoos, burning, freezing, constricting around limbs that were no longer there. They were all of me, a collection of curses that defined me, and that I would get one more use out of.
“You’re projecting, husband.” She kept her place, so confident in her power.
“I am accepting, wife. I caused all the hurt in your life. I cursed you to an existence you didn’t want. But you cursed me too. You manipulated me, controlled me without thinking of what it would do. You needed me and you used me, as I used you.”
“I can see eternity,” she said, her voice still soft, still beautiful. “I can see into your soul, and I know you don’t believe what you’re saying.”
I reached out with my web of curses, my magical prison. I could see the tattoos faintly, like the ghost of a memory. I touched her, placed the impression of my hand over her heart. She didn’t stop me, didn’t even seem to notice.
I pushed, throwing all the power I could channel through the tattoos, forcing my hand inside her. I was desperate, powerful, and her own divinity kept me going when she tried to stop me.
I grabbed her heart and squeezed.
I was back on my knees, looking up at the goddess she had become.
“I wanted to see what you’d do,” she said. “I wanted to see if you could kill me after all of this.”
“You can’t do this, Erindis.”
She reached up, her hands penetrating her head and changing it. For a moment I could see into her mind, to the many rooms in the palace of her soul. It was dizzying, breathtaking. When she removed them and I could comprehend her form again, she held an orb, glowing softly.
“This is Ohm,” Erindis said. “Alain took her divinity but couldn’t fully kill her. She was an elder-god, and she could not die. Not really. She lived on in me.”
I believed her, and I knew what it meant. If this was all that was left of Ohm, of the elder-god who had loved me, then this was how she would have come back. This remnant would have taken control of Erindis. It wasn’t the real Ohm that returned in the angel’s vision, but this memory of her.
“She screamed for a while, after she was killed.” Erindis cradled the sphere of energy like a child, but her knuckles were white with the force required to grip it. “In the back of my head, all day. Just screaming and screaming in frustration. And now she’s gone.”
She held the memory of Ohm out before me and I ached to touch it, to try and save her from what my wife planned.
“Ohm,” I said.
I knew the future if Ohm returned. I knew what she’d do and the wasteland the earth would become. But if it meant Erindis was defeated…in that moment I didn’t care.
She was right; I attacked every problem without fear of the consequences. It was who I was, and who I would be for the rest of my short life.
“Ohm, my love. Come back to me.”
Erindis laughed at me, at the earnest words and the anguish on my face. She laughed and held the sphere tighter and tighter, until stress fractures began to appear around her hands. Until she had almost destroyed the elder-god.
The sphere cracked, and the world changed.
Energy erupted from it, red and angry, sweeping past me and heading into the sky, swirling all around. And then it seemed to notice Erindis. Its random movements became focused on her, and the contents of the strange orb flowed directly at her.
“You can’t,” Erindis shrieked. She erected a barrier, but the energy flowed straight through it. It flowed into her.
Ohm was coming. It was evident on her face, in the way she carried herself, in the way her hair moved in the e
thereal breeze. Ohm was coming and Erindis was furious.
“Bastard,” she screamed. She dropped the broken sphere and lurched toward me, fighting the endless stream of energy flowing into her. “Why? Why won’t you leave me alone?”
I couldn’t move and I didn’t want to. I wanted to see her end, even it was the birth of something worse. This was my true failing, my true weakness, and the reason I had survived as long as I had: I refused to be defeated, no matter the cost. It made me the bad guy more often than not, but it was who I was.
Erindis reached me, grinning, her mouth filled with magical fire. She grabbed my head and leaned in, as though for a kiss. She opened her mouth and let the fire out.
My body was incinerated in a moment. My soul took another few seconds. My world ended with a shriek of pain from the woman I’d always loved, a shriek so powerful it rocked all of creation.
And then the final dark, and peace.
Chapter 39
“Agmundr, return to me.”
It was her voice, calling me from the dark.
“Agmundr, return to me.”
Erindis, but she was different. Sad. Alone. Scared.
“Agmundr, return to me.”
I opened my eyes on the mountaintop. The sun was shining and the sky was a clear blue. My wife cradled me in her arms, looking down on me with tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Agmundr,” she said, and I understood what was happening.
This wasn’t Erindis, it was Ohm. This wasn’t the woman who wanted to be an elder-god, this was the memory of the elder-god who had possessed her and lived on in her mind.
“Ohm,” I said. My voice was croaky, my new vocal cords unused before that moment.
“You’re alive?” She sounded surprised. She hadn’t known it would work. “Is it really you?”
I nodded, licking my lips. My mouth was dry and my head hurt, but I was alive and she was there with me.
“Erindis?” I asked.
“Gone. I should have destroyed any trace of that bitch a long time ago.”
I had made the angel’s vision come true. But this couldn’t have been her vision, because in that future I was dead. Ohm had emerged on her own, had destroyed and changed the world without my help.
What would the future look like with me by her side? Would it be better, even idyllic? Or would we create something so close to a hell that even we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference? And would we care, either way?
“I thought you were dead,” she said. “When I came back, before, I thought you were gone. You were supposed to be there and you weren’t.”
“I’m sorry, my love.” I was feeling better, my mind clearing as feeling returned to my body. “I was trapped.”
“I know. I should have found you.”
She was caring in a way nobody else had ever been. She loved me as a man, not the demon who plagued history or the barbarian who could save her world. Just a man. She was more powerful than I could imagine, could see further and deeper than any other being in the universe, and she chose me.
It was mind-boggling, flattering, scary. To know that she was there and that she always would be was the answer to the only wish I’d ever truly had. I’d wanted violence and dominance, I’d wanted freedom and free will, but all I’d ever really needed was her love, and I could feel it radiating from her.
“I have to tell you something,” I said, cursing myself as I spoke. I didn’t want to tell her the angel’s words. I didn’t want to frighten her or anger her. I wanted this, her holding me, to continue forever. I could have it, but I had to keep my mouth shut.
“What is it?” She spoke in my birth language, a guttural tongue without poetry or nuance. It was simple and wholly unsuited to the story I had to relay.
I spoke in English. “I know the future, and I better remember the past. Do you want to hear it? You won’t like it. It’ll change things.”
Silently I begged her to say no, to say that she didn’t care about anything else. I wanted her to give me an excuse not to talk and ruin everything.
“Tell me,” she said, also in English.
So I did. I told her the entire story, starting with the battle with Erindis on the mountaintop and working my way back. I told her about the fate I’d sealed for Peter, her angel. I told her about Bec and Roman and Fairbridge and the battle across the heavens and the hells.
I told her about the memory the angel had of the future. When I finished that part I stopped, breathless, scared of what came next.
“You are a strong man,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“You are, or you wouldn’t have told me. You would have hidden it.”
I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She had the face of Erindis but none of the mannerisms, her expressions all unique to her. She could have been angry, sad, or anything else. Or nothing. I had no way of knowing.
“What are you thinking, my love?” I said. I put my hand on her face and thrilled at touching her skin again.
“I am not Ohm.”
Her words alone brought clouds into the blue sky above us. Her feelings affected the way the mountaintop felt, how cold the rock was under me and how strongly the wind blew.
“No,” I said, though she was right. “You’re you. I know it.”
She lifted me from her lap and lowered my head to the floor as she stood. I tried to follow and found I didn’t have the strength.
“Where are you going?” I said. She walked away without another word, heading down the path and away from me. She disappeared from sight and I wanted to scream.
I had ruined it, as expected. If there was a problem I could punch then I was the guy you called, but if it needed any thought then you were better off going elsewhere. I should have remembered that and shut my stupid mouth.
When she came back the sun arrived with her, warming me again. She held something in her hands before her belly, but I couldn’t see what it was at first. She walked up the path and all I wanted to look at was her sad face.
She held the dagger that had killed her all those years ago.
“Throw that away,” I said, reacting as though she held a deadly snake. “What are you doing?”
She returned to my side and put my head back in her lap. She laid the dagger on my chest; it felt like a mountain resting there, like an entire world.
“I’m not Ohm,” she said. “I feel like her. I know why she did the things she did, what she wanted and what she hated. But I’m not her. I’m a memory of her, an echo.”
“You seem real to me,” I said.
“I wish that were enough.” She put her hand on the dagger and its weight increased somehow, threatening to crush me. “Do you know why I…she did the things she did? Changing the world and disobeying the rules of the dark game?”
“Because they weren’t your rules. Because you wanted a life of your own.”
“No, she did it because she thought she knew better. And if the angel hadn’t seen how mistaken she was, I would have thought so too.”
“The other elder-god,” I said.
“Uhd. It is the purpose of the world to stop him, and my return signals the failure of that purpose.” She sighed, tired and heartbroken, staring into my eyes. “He cannot be allowed to return.”
“There has to be another way,” I said, though I knew there wasn’t. I could feel it in my soul. “I changed things. That future isn’t written anymore.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, like a long blink.
“I’ve examined the world and interrogated everyone. I’ve seen the angel, repaired her and asked her if the future has changed. She says it hasn’t.”
She lifted the dagger but I could still feel its weight. I was sure I would always feel it.
“Help me,” she said. “There can be no trace of me this time. No mortal remains for someone to recover and restore.”
“I won’t,” I said, more forcefully than I’d intended.
“You will,” she said with th
e force of a being older and more powerful even than I was. Her eyes bored holes in my soul and I knew I would do anything for her. Even this.
I put my hands on the dagger, wrapping them around hers. Her muscles were pulled tight and sweat had broken out on her brow.
“Make it quick, my love,” she said. “And destroy whatever is left.”
The tattoos had all the power they could need, because she was back. As I had when fighting Erindis, I could use that power against her if I needed to.
She looked down at me and all I wanted to do was tell her to delay this, to put it off for a day, a month. Long enough for us to be together for a little while.
But I knew where that led, and she was right; we did it now or we never would.
She nodded and smiled, and together we plunged the dagger into her heart. There was no blood, nor energy spewing from the wound. Only a flash of pain across her face, and then she fell to the ground beside me.
I wanted to scream, to cry, to yell, to destroy. I wanted to do my worst and make the world pay for what it had caused, wanted to destroy the other elder-gods for allowing such a thing to come to pass.
Instead I got up and walked away. Her power still flowed through the tattoos and I knew what that meant. She was still there, somewhere, still powerful. She was waiting for me to act, to fulfill her last wish before she changed her mind and stopped me.
I lifted from the ground, channeling that divine energy through the tattoos that had been designed for that exact purpose. I hung above the mountain she’d died on again, too afraid of what I’d do to look down on her lying below me.
I reached out with the tattoos, reached into the core of the little world. It had no heartstone because it wasn’t an afterlife, which meant it was a piece of earth, and I knew how to destroy that.
I spread the magic of the tattoos into every part of the world, channeling more than I ever had before, more than I’d ever needed or wanted to, until my will permeated everything.
I closed my eyes, and crushed the world.
When I opened my eyes again I was floating in the void and the tattoos were dormant. I had a moment of life left before it was taken from me, and I didn’t care.
