by David Burke
“If such is my fate, then I will accept it. For now, I want to rest. Remember, that was why I finally agreed that Krig had to go. It is time for there to be peace, to let the mortals build and grow.”
“Argh… You are a fool. Ever the fool.”
“Who is the fool? Did you think to hide our sister from me when you came here. Did you think that her presence might influence my decision? I am no mortal to be swayed by passion,” Lige shouted back at Dod, before turning and waving his hand.
Their youngest sister, Begaer, goddess of passion or as she preferred to call herself, mistress of love and purveyor of lust, appeared. Dod growled but Begaer only laughed.
“I told you he would sense me. Even with one eye, he cuts such a striking figure.” The smaller goddess walked up beside her eldest brother and ran a hand along the side of his face, over his injured eye.
Lige batted her hand away. “How many times must I tell you that I won’t fall for your perversions. Take Dod with you, and leave my halls.”
“You can’t blame a goddess for trying. Hope springs eternal in an immortal soul, don’t you know. What you call perversion, I call passion. I’m like no other you’ve ever known. Just ask Bedrag,” Begaer purred.
“I halfway believe that degenerate gave in to your dark lusts. Or at least that he deceived you into believing he had,” Lige scoffed.
“Oh, there are some things that can’t be faked. It takes a god to make me cry out their name,” Begaer said, her juicy figure shaking with laughter.
“Eww… that’s just… No. Get away before you make an enemy of me,” Lige commanded.
“Fine, but use that fabled discernment of yours, dear brother. Dod speaks the truth. I too have felt Krig stir. He had such a unique essence, even amongst us. So firm, so rigid… unyielding.” Begaer licked her lips. “Be on the lookout. He is coming. We must prepare,” the goddess of lust said. As her last word faded, she jumped through the void to her own plane, bringing the crippled Dod with her.
Lige growled in frustration. He detested uncertainty. Krig had to be dead.
Perhaps his essence had been consumed in the void and lost to their universe. That would be a great loss, but what would be would be. Still, for both Begaer and Dod insist that they had sensed Krig…
Was it possible he had missed something? Lige moved to his throne and closed his one good eye to search their universe. He had to know.
Chapter 17 - Mantle of the Mind
As the darkness cleared, Kyle found himself standing, or rather leaning against a stone wall. It took him a moment to get his bearing. He realized, on the one hand, that he was acutely aware of every brick around him, the lush carpets on the floor, and the rich tapestries that hung on the walls; yet, on the other hand, it all felt foreign to him.
“That is because you are not worthy,” said a cold, commanding voice from inside his head. This voice was definitely not Hilde’s sultry purr.
He had a feeling he knew whose voice this was. With that knowledge came a sinking feeling about what was really going on. His agents had always warned him to steer clear of deals that sounded too good to be true.
Rather than ask about the identity of the voice, he responded with, “Why am I not worthy?”
Rich laughter followed. “You are an upstart mortal, selected only to be a placeholder. The greatest thing you ever created was something you had to look down at in a bowl of water before you flushed it away. You have no idea what it means to be a god.” The voice rang out like a shot in an echo chamber with that last word.
“It isn’t like you did a particularly good job of it, either. This world is a mess. The people who rely upon you live under brutal circumstances and your own siblings want nothing more than to kill you,” Kyle shouted back.
“Bah, the musing of a flea who knows not that it resides upon something much greater. Your little piss-ant view of the world does not afford you the right to critique me. As for my siblings, that is simply a matter of their shortsightedness,” the voice replied.
“Let me guess, you chose me to stand in for you. Your power helped me create a new essence-construct body for you here, and because I couldn’t access most of your mantle while it was hidden away in the void, you assumed that I would build back your power slowly while trying to get access to it,” Kyle sneered, “thus remaining beneath the notice of your brothers and sisters.”
“Then what?” His fists clenched so hard his knuckles popped. “When the time was ready, you planned to come back and claim your body? Except it isn’t your body anymore. This is my body. You may have been the war god, Krig, but that day is gone. I am the war god now. And I won’t give you back my body. I won’t let you take my life without a struggle.”
“I would have it no other way, but you don’t understand the scope of what it means to be a god,” Krig replied.
“Of course I don’t, but then like I said, neither do you. You think only of yourself. The power of a leader is displayed in how they care for those under their charge. I don’t need to be some ancient cosmic being to understand that right is right, and wrong is wrong. Sure, you were powerful—but all that power only left you isolated. You fought your entire family by yourself, and as far as this world is concerned, you died alone,” Kyle taunted.
“Not all my siblings,” Krig said, though not as angrily.
“Oh, what… the goddess of the sea didn’t challenge you? From what I heard, that’s only because she doesn’t care enough about anything to focus on it. Her mind is like the wild untamed sea that she presides over. No, the rest betrayed you and drove you from this place to your death. Even your perverted sister, Begaer, twisted your handmaidens as soon as you were gone. She tortured the ones who’d pledged themselves to you until they were either broken or dead, just because she wanted to corrupt a piece of you,” Kyle said. His voice rose as he spoke until by the end, he was shouting.
For the first time, Krig’s voice was softer, uncertain. “Begaer actually did that?”
Without waiting for an answer, he spoke again, sounding more like his arrogant self. “It matters not. They were pledged to serve me. Begaer shall pay the price for her arrogance. In fact, all of them will, if you don’t help me return.”
“Help you? Help you?! Now, not only do you want to steal away the only life I have left in a place that is starting to grow on me, but you want me to hand it over to you voluntarily?” Kyle was incredulous.
“Yes. Because without me, it shall be the end of all things. Verden and the associated planes shall fall, as so many others have before it,” Krig said.
Kyle couldn’t tell, but he was almost certain that Krig was telling the truth—at least the truth as he understood it. He thought for a minute, considering what to say next. Finally, he barked out, “Explain yourself.”
“Well, at least you show a bit of steel. Perhaps I did not choose so wrong after all,” Krig replied.
Then he continued. “You will need to walk all the way down the hall. Don’t be tempted by any voices that may call out to you. All of these doorways are traps in their own way. Only the throne room is safe, but safety will not show you what you need to know. Only when you reach the very end of the hall, may you open the last door, the first one of them all. Then you shall see. Then you will understand what my brothers and sisters choose to ignore.”
It wasn’t that Kyle trusted Krig. It was simply that he didn’t know what else to do. He needed to deal with this once and for all.
When two guys were trying out for the same spot on a team, you couldn’t win by ignoring the other guy. You had to study him. See what he was good at. See what his weak spots were. But most of all, you had to be better than him. So, Kyle began walking down the hall.
He recognized this place from before. It was the mantle of the war god, floating in the void. Yet it was darker, smaller, and much more ominous now. He wondered if that was because he had drained so much essence out of it before.
Well,
there was nothing for it now. He simply had to walk down the hallway. Except it wasn’t as easy as that.
Each door he passed, he heard sounds that tempted him to open it. From behind some of the doors he heard celebrating and the sounds of a party. He could always use a bit of that in his life. Behind other doors, he heard the sounds of combat and it stirred his blood. The hardest of all the doors for him to walk past though, were the ones from which voices pleaded with him.
These were voices that cried out for help, or behind which came the sounds of people in obvious agony—people that he somehow knew he could help. Krig didn’t say a word, even when Kyle’s hand started to reach towards one of the doors, so he knew the decision was all his. He steeled himself against the voices and continued onward.
As much as he didn’t trust Krig, he remembered Hilde saying that the war god didn’t lie. People might not like what he had to say, but he didn’t lie. Of course, in trusting Hilde, he was making the assumption that she hadn’t simply been in on this with Krig the entire time.
He didn’t think that she had, though. He had once had a committed relationship that he had screwed up, by focusing only on his career. It had been back in the early days, before he made it to the big time. She had loved him just for him, and was only too happy to see him succeed. It was that success, though, that drove them apart—not because she wasn’t his biggest fan, but because he was an idiot and pushed her away.
With Hilde, he felt that same connection. He had only known her for a few short months, but they had been through a lot together already. Sometimes, it is the quality of time spent together rather than the quantity of time spent that counts. He trusted her oath and believed that she was faithful to him.
How she would react upon finding out what Krig had planned all along, was another matter entirely. The more he thought about it, the more that he expected her to come down on his side. He’d bet his life on it.
When the last door came into sight, it was a few inches wider and a few inches taller than the other doors. It was made of a pitch-black metal that seemed to seal the doorway. The heavy hinges on one side showed no signs of use, but also didn’t have even the slightest bit of rust upon them. The large handle was solid and unworn, as though this door had never been opened.
As he got up to the door, he saw that it wasn’t black. It was the color of dried blood, just very dark. Dried blood? In fact, as his extra senses stretched out, he realized the door was not even metal, but was made from blood—blood which had somehow hardened into a solid stronger than any steel.
His essence sense detected microscopic bursts of power within the door.
There were pulses of power going off randomly within it, but the more he sensed, the more he realized that these were the faint echoes of once great powers. What shocked him even more though, was that these were not bursts of any of the essences that he recognized. Nor were they bursts of raw essence.
A truth struck him. The universe had been composed of more than just eight essences at one point, and some of those other essences were still in this door. This blood must be ancient. And for it to hold power like this, there was only one thing that he could think of. This must be the blood of gods, but gods who no longer existed.
Krig’s voice solemnly said, “That’s right. This door is the blood of the fallen. It holds back the memory that even gods forget. But I am the watchman. I will not forget. We shall not fall, so long as I have any might within me.”
Kyle reached out his hand to the door. Part of him wanting nothing to do with this, but he needed to know. He needed to understand. The longer he was here, the more he felt the power of the mantle collapsing into him. He couldn’t be sure that he would ever be able to return to this hall.
As the door opened, he felt himself swept inside. The tableau of space was spread out before him; he watched stars being born and stars dying. Vast nebulas composed of stars and cosmic wonders that his high school space science class had not prepared him for lay behind the door.
Still his view was pulled back further. And instead of single stars he saw galaxies springing into existence and dying out. It was an endless cycle that spread out all around him. Beneath that there was another layer and he instinctively willed himself downward. He felt reality peel away, layer by layer, in front of him and he saw that there was subspace beneath the physical space.
Yet there was more.
Each time he willed another layer to be peeled back, he wondered at the complexity of creation. There were planes of existence stacked up on top of each other. In some, he saw wonders too delightful for words to explain and heard sounds that no mortal tongue could echo. In others, he saw horrors to make his deepest, darkest nightmares seem like a pleasant walk along the beach. The depravity of it made him weep. And encapsulating all of the layers like a giant bubble, was the membrane that was this universe.
Still, he was pulled back further, and he saw that this universe was but one of many. Between the universes, was a gray nothingness that he knew of as ‘the void’. It wasn’t really gray but even a divinely powered mind needed a frame of reference and so his half and half mind had assigned it a color.
It was neither gray, nor space, nor empty. It was the void. And it possessed a metaphysical nature which was the anathema of all existence.
The numerous universes that he saw spanned out into bubbles beyond counting. Yet they weren’t isolated. Rather, like the suds in a bubble bath, they all clung to one another. And still, the void encroached upon them. Those bubbles that were closest to the void showed signs of its infiltration running through them.
The void had pierced their shells, and they were being consumed from within. The universes closest to those now doomed entities had once also showed the early signs of void leakage. In fact, as he peered more closely, he saw more and more of the bubbles had been pierced—not popped, but certainly no longer sealed away.
He called up the universe that was home to Earth. His mind focused on it and drew his sight down upon it. It gleamed with a golden barrier, and for the first time, he saw a universe that was not subject to the void. It was pure and unassailed, but then—as he looked deeper into it—he realized why. There was no essence in the universe that had been his home.
It was entirely devoid of the power men would call magic.
Feeling relieved, at least, that his former home was safe, Kyle turned his eyes to Verden’s universe. It was far from the void infected universes. It seemed to have those between it and the void itself, as a buffer. But just as he thought that it, too, might be free of the void, he noticed tiny threads of the void’s infiltration. It wasn’t much, but it had begun.
Understanding dawned on Kyle. This was the threat the Krig had been trying to prepare the mortal universe for. The problem was that he sought to do so through division. He sought only to take the strongest. It didn’t make sense, at first, until Kyle remembered the name of the door he had opened to enter this place—it was the ‘Blood of the Fallen’.
The fallen… but who had fallen? Kyle willed his consciousness to shift back through time. Millennia whirled past him until he stopped at a period many hundreds of thousands of years ago. There, in a fragmented universe, a group of champions sought to fight the void.
There were creatures of the void who appeared to be made of shadows, and nothing more. Beings who flitted through reality, shredding it as they went. Then he saw something familiar.
The Aekor that he had fought in the arena, he saw its kind. Thousands upon thousands of them stood assembled against these great heroes. Champions of light and champions of darkness fought alongside one another against the void and its monsters, for the void cared not for good or for evil; it only cared about ending all that was, or ever would be.
Kyle watched as one after another of the champions fell. Where once there had been hundreds, dozens fought; yet they continued to drop. Each was the match for dozens of Aekor, but against the swarm of children that burst f
orth from the void, they did not fare so well.
Three of the champions stepped forward. He saw a mighty warrior, in purple and gold robes, covered by armor. He wielded a hammer in one hand, while the other held a spinning weight. On his right, was a slender woman in black robes who fought with a great scythe. With it, she sheared Aekor by the dozens and even drove back the void wraiths.
On his other side, was a brute of a warrior clad in red and gold armor. It could only have been Krig. For just an instant, Kyle saw events from the past out of Krig’s own eyes.
He understood the sorrow that day had brought. It wasn’t a single day, not really, but a battle that had lasted for eons. The entirety of it was laid out before his sight as though it happened in mere moments, though.
As each of his fellow champions, nay gods, had fallen, Krig had absorbed a tiny portion of their essence. As had each of those who survived, Krig became much stronger than he’d been when this assault began. But always, there was loss.
