by David Burke
Kyle had been paying attention to the entire group, but especially to Kierra and Skrug. The half-troll seemed oblivious to their conversation. He was simply going to go wherever he was told to go. Kyle had earned his trust. The complaining would only begin if they ran out of food.
Kierra was a bit more complicated. He knew she had a sharp mind but clearly, she was culturally trained to follow the alpha. Since he was that alpha, she was basically waiting to hear what he had to say.
Kyle wanted to ask for her input, but realized that wasn’t the way things worked for her. Maybe he could mold those expectations, but that was going to take some time—time wasn’t something they had a lot of. It would have to wait for later. For now, he needed to be the strong alpha she expected him to be.
“It isn’t all bad news, though,” Kyle said.
Once again, everyone turned to look at him.
“We have more help here. She is going to reveal herself now, but I need all of you to keep calm when she appears. Okay, Hilde, show yourself.”
The air around her rippled and, almost like an invisible shell had dissolved, the fire celestial was suddenly visible. Everyone but Lash took a step back. Kierra’s claws came out and Skrug gripped his club. Gilthan just ogled Hilde in her diaphanous skirt.
“This is the fire celestial, Qua’ardet Flammaurorae, but you can all just call her Hilde. She is… well, for now let’s say she is a friend of mine. She will help us fight to the bottom of the dungeon, but you can’t reveal anything about her to the guards or mages waiting outside.”
Hilde seemed taken back when she heard Kyle call her by her proper name. “The war … er, Kyle is right about one thing,” she began. “There is a powerful artifact at the bottom of this dungeon. We need to recover it and can’t leave here until we defeat its guardian and secure it.”
“Are you his woman?” Kierra blurted out.
Kyle wanted to face palm. Of all the things that Kierra could take from what she’d just been told, it had to be that. He started to respond, but Hilde leaped on the question faster than he could.
She flew down next to the lycan and said, “Yes, I am. He is my alpha. But don’t worry, I don’t mind sharing, and he is attracted to you.”
The expressions on Kierra’s face were difficult to decipher, but then Hilde leaned in close and whispered into her ear. The lycan began to grin and then both women looked over at Kyle and giggled.
Now, he did face palm. A woman had been the end of him on Earth, and despite his best efforts, it didn’t look to be going any better here.
“You know it’s rude to whisper about someone where they can see you,” Kyle shouted in mock anger.
Of course, that backfired badly, as Kierra fell to the ground prostrating herself and turning her head to the side in obeisance to present her exposed neck. If there was ever a more abject showing of submission, he hadn’t seen it.
Hilde salvaged the situation by pulling the lycan girl up to her feet. “Trust me, I thought that was what he wanted at first, too, but it isn’t. Stick with me and I’ll teach you what he likes.”
On the one hand, Kyle was happy that Hilde had covered for his botched attempt at being funny. On the other, he was terrified that she seemed to think she had him figured out. When she winked at him, he couldn’t decide if he should be scared or just go with it, not that there was anything he could do about it.
“So, if we are done with the mating rituals, can we focus on what is before us? I agree with Flam… I mean Hilde, we have a good chance of clearing this dungeon, but you saw how powerful the Mor’dverg can be. It isn’t that they are particularly strong, it is that they require a tremendous amount of effort to kill,” Lash said.
“That, and their armor seems to be of epic quality,” Gilthan said.
“And weapons are sharp,” Skrug rumbled, rubbing at the cut in his chainmail vest. Kyle realized the weapon must have been quite powerful, for the half-troll with his regeneration to have been bothered by it.
That prompted him to walk over to inspect the axe that lay on the ground. When he picked it up, Kyle sent his expanded senses into it. At first, he received nothing more than a notification that he was holding a grandmaster forged epic quality weapon. He had held many weapons over the past few months, but this one was second only in quality to his soul bound weapon.
The crafting was top notch. The metal was perfectly smooth, as if it had been cast rather than smithed. There were none of the faint, telltale markings of a smith’s hammer. It was perfectly balanced, and it practically cried out to kill.
That was his first clue that there was more to this weapon.
So, he pushed into it further. Kyle tried to think of what he had started to call his essence sense as a microscope, peering down into the axe at the molecular level. He saw the structure of the bonded molecules that formed it. The axe was a unique alloy made from at least three metals that he didn’t recognize.
Of course, who was he kidding, chemistry had never been his thing. He was an overgrown child who played a game for a living. Or he had been. But he had also been something else.
Kyle might have been a ball player, but Krig had been the war god. More than that, he had been one of the gods who had created, or at least shaped, this universe. That had to have granted him at least a fundamental understanding of metallurgy, didn’t it?
Opening himself up to Krig’s memories was a risk, one which Kyle had been scared to broach. Lately, they had been leaking out more and more frequently. He was beginning to second guess himself. Was he cutting himself off from a source of power because of fear?
Before Kyle realized it, he had made the decision. If he were the reincarnated war god, he needed to learn what he could from that vestige of the old war god that resided within him. He pulled his senses back from the axe in his hands and pushed deep into himself.
It was like finding a tumor within himself. The part inside his mind that represented a vestige of Krig was small, yet clearly distinct from the rest of Kyle. It existed inside him, surrounded by a tight concentration of War Essence. The essence kept it separate yet still connected to him.
He used his power to probe at it. Forming the smallest filament of War Essence that he could, he pushed it at the memories, or what he assumed were Krig’s memories. The barrier around the mass reacted like armor, repelling his probe
Kyle supposed that wasn’t too surprising. This was the fragment of a god. It would be well defended, even if all it contained were some memories. That wasn’t what bothered him about it. Rather, it was the way that it resonated differently than the rest of his War Essence.
He could only equate it to two voices both singing the same song, with one singing in a different key from the other. They didn’t mesh. In fact, the more they came in contact with one another the more they clashed.
Instead of making him want to quit, the rebuff made Kyle only feel like he had to push harder. Either he needed to gain the knowledge contained here in this vestige of Krig, or he needed to purge it from himself. He had ignored it up to this point, but that was no longer an option.
An alarm bell had sounded when he realized the resonance of this part of his mind was different from the rest.
Rather than one thread of War Essence, Kyle formed half a dozen. His mind never would have been able to simultaneously direct so many if it grown recently with his increased integration of the essence in his mantle and his expanded senses. Now, he could think and function on more than one level at a time. It was this capacity that, more than anything, made him feel like there was truly something to him being a god—the conviction hit him even stronger than when he had forced reality to shift around him when he’d jumped the river with Kierra.
If power was a god’s right hand, then perception had to be the left. To Kyle’s way of thinking, becoming more than a mortal require something beyond an exceptionally long lifespan and a great deal of power. Power and experience would just make him the bigge
st toddler in the sandbox.
He needed to be aware of more, possess greater insight, and gain greater wisdom, to truly be a god. Thus, even as he warred with a fragment of his own mind, Kyle exulted in the expanded awareness he felt. The way his mind could now handle six different, delicate probes at the same time and still remain cognizant of what was going on around him, was well beyond anything that Kyle Hudson the baseball player could have done.
Still, he sensed that he had only touched on the tip of this iceberg.
He tried to settle into that calm space where his mind opened up to everything around him. It was the headspace that he had struggled so hard to obtain when at bat. When it worked, he was acutely aware of his body, the grain of the bat, but also the spin of the ball as it left the pitcher’s hand. It was a way of being aware of as much as possible, without focusing on any one thing.
Now though, he should be so much better, capable of so much more. His mind had fundamentally changed, and he hadn’t quite accepted those changes up to this point. He had tried to act as if he was the same Kyle, like this was simply a different world, but one where his old thinking was still sufficient for his current situation.
He realized that he had to push past all of that. He buckled down and committed himself to doing this. Then, one of his probes pierced the shell and a sudden surge of foreign power blasted through his mind.
Darkness consumed him.
Interlude 3 - Shadows in Heaven
The gleaming halls of Elysium glowed with a light from within as the Justice Essence they were infused with radiated form the walls. Gold and crystal were everywhere, a beauty that defied mortal understanding. This was meant to be a place of reward, a home for the souls of the just.
The secret, of course, was that very few made the cut to enter these sacred halls.
Even after reigning here for thousands of years, the lord of this place, Lige, god of justice, had only accepted a few hundred mortal souls. The souls of the faithful celestials who fell in service to their god, were always reborn. Those mortals who stood before Lige, with hearts full of darkness, were condemned to Dod’s realm.
For most, though, the stop here was little more than a temporary lay over. They were judged by Lige in droves, and almost all of them were sent back to the mortal realms to be born again. Endless reincarnation was the fate of all but the purest or the most corrupt of mortal souls.
Over the millennia, Lige had at times been interested in following the trajectory of a mortal’s soul. Most seemed to follow a path either up or down. This was fascinating to him. Because of the way their universe had been set up, a soul could never remember anything of its past lives once reincarnated.
It was something all the gods had agreed upon, albeit for different reasons. Lige found it to be the only fair way to test mortals, while some of the others had seen it as a new chance to corrupt and turn the mortals. Lige thought it ironic that it was one of the few times his brother, Krig, had agreed with him.
Krig had often been on his mind these past three years. His hand moved up to the patch that covered his now empty eye socket. It was a reminder of how dangerous Krig had been.
What they had done to him didn’t sit well with Lige, but it had become unavoidable. Krig always insisted on testing mortals. He refined them and had even taken the souls of some that he found worthy and turned them into his own fiery brand of celestials.
Of course, what Krig looked for in a soul was not the same thing the others did.
Krig had simultaneously held both the least concern for the mortals’ fate and the most respect for them, even allowing the mortals to have a say in their own fate. The constant testing, pushing for war, and calling it the crucible, that was what had pushed his kin to stand against the war god. Krig thought the void was still coming for them, but none of the others believed that.
They had all fought the old enemy, back before they’d created Verden. They had created Verden, in fact, so that they wouldn’t have to fight their ancient foe. They had created their little universe in a bubble, to protect them from the void.
The creation wars had raged for eons, and while Krig had excelled in it, none of the rest of them favored warfare. Many of their kind had fallen, so that it would be possible to create this universe. It was so rich in essence, that the inhabitants had a life better than was possible in many other universes.
Lige, for one, refused to believe that their work could be undone. If it were possible, then it would render meaningless the sacrifice of the fallen: Fire, Life, Wisdom, Space, Mercy, and the many others who no longer stood with them.
Only the eight were left. Because more of those who had died were of a lighter temperament, it had resulted in this universe becoming darker than originally intended. Still, Lige could feel the presence of his fallen siblings in the raw essence that was all that remained of their fundamental natures after they fell.
Therein lay the problem.
Three years was not a long time in the life of a god, but it should have been long enough for some of the war essence to dissipate into raw essence. Yet, it remained a distinct essence of its own. That shouldn’t have been possible with Krig’s passing, since he had been the embodiment of war. It should have faded away.
It was true that mortals found it harder to utilize war essence these three years past, but it still existed. The question that puzzled Lige, was why it had not dissipated when Krig fell. His brother was not one to stay gone this long. Even if he had fled to some pocket dimension, he would surely have returned by now.
Of course, perhaps that was the flaw in Lige’s point-of-view, for he tended to see things in terms of black and white absolutes. Gray was virtually unknown to him. He acknowledged it existed, but it had no bearing on his views.
“Pondering reality, brother?” A voice behind him asked.
Lige had been aware of her as soon as she had entered his realm but had waited for her to reveal herself. His other sister was still hiding, but he would let her. She didn’t like to operate in the open.
Lige turned to face Dod. Some saw her as his counterpart, but that wasn’t accurate. They were each just spokes on the wheel of reality, not opposites, not the same, just both… there.
“You are far from your dark plane, sister.”
“As if you didn’t know the instant I entered your realm. I am half-surprised you didn’t try to strike me down,” Dod said. Her voice was cold but mocking.
“Enough of us have fallen, don’t you think?” Lige sighed.
“Perhaps, I just didn’t expect you to be so passive about a dark goddess entering your halls of purity. Aren’t you worried I would steal some of your precious, worthy souls?”
“Hardly. You are no match for me. Not in one of the mortal realms, and certainly not here at the center of my power. Once perhaps, you were my equal, mine and Krig’s, but no more. Our fallen brother struck a mighty blow to your power that day,” Lige replied.
“I am hardly the only one he damaged,” Dod sneered. “Himmel is still broken. The storms come less often but he still can’t control them. The creatures of the air suffer from periodic insanity. Jordan’s body was broken and the surface of Verden reflects it, as things long buried have risen again.”
“I have reports that some Aekor somehow survived and were unleashed upon the surface. Hells, even you were injured. So don’t act like I am the only one who suffered on that day.”
“Bah, any Aekor that survived would be malnourished. The mortals will deal with them, in time. If it gets out of hand, the legions of Elysium will finish them off. But they are nothing without their masters, and we have both agreed for the longest time that the void would never find its way here.”
“As for my wound, it is nothing compared to yours. I have lost an eye. My ability to see the world has been hampered, but I still know the truth when I see it. You, on the other hand, lost your power; you had infused your divine essence into your scythe. You weren’t content
to create a soul bound artifact. No, you had to have a sentient reaper. When Krig shattered that, he fractured a part of your essence. You have gone from being one of the strongest of us, to being one of the weakest.” The anger in his tone grew as he spoke. “So, state your business or I will judge you,” Lige said.
“Fine. I feel him. It was only an echo, but I have felt Krig in the world. He is moving again,” Dod said.
“It cannot be. We felt him leave our universe. Even he could not survive in the void for all this time. And had he gone to any of the adjacent universes, the essence levels there would be too low to sustain him. No, if he were coming back, he would have had to do so almost immediately. We would have heard about him. Subtlety was never Krig’s strong suit,” Lige replied.
“Still, I demand that you call the others. We must work together again to find him. The threat is too great. If he returns, do you not think he will hunt you down, just as he will hunt me?” Dod shrieked. Her voice had risen to a scream at the end.
