by Rex Jameson
Chapter 12
The Goblin Realm
Lucifer touched down on a planet within the same system as Arnessa but farther out and much, much colder. He rubbed his naked shoulders to regain some warmth, but at minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit, heating up was an exercise in futility.
He still hadn’t heard from Sariel, which was pretty ridiculous seeing as how Sariel could apparate almost anywhere in the cosmos within a month. Lucifer, on the other hand, had to rely on his wings—which was like mounting a turtle in comparison.
Overhead a line of spaceships zoomed by, and Lucifer pressed against a frozen rock formation and immediately regretted it. His hands stuck to the surface, and the only way to get mobile again was to rip part of the rock away and take it with him. He shook his hands mightily, but nothing would come off. He looked toward the sun at the center of the solar system and prepared to launch again. He couldn’t meet Elandril with rocks for hands.
“Where are you going?”
“Damn it, Sariel,” Lucifer complained, turning around to find his brother was already in a black suit with gray pinstripes. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“In my defense, you look more like a comet than my brother …”
“Mind giving me some heat? I’m fr … f … frrreezing over here.”
“Well, I don’t think we want to open up too big a channel to the primal unless you want them to know that we are already here …”
“I think a space convoy might have spotted me anyway.”
Sariel shrugged and reached beside him like he would go into his pants pocket, but then slowly opened his hands. A beam of pure chaos burst forth from his outstretched palms within a few feet of Lucifer. They both avoided touching it. Like zinanbar, it had the power to destroy an immortal.
Lucifer smiled as the warmth began to reach him through his crackling tomb. Within minutes, he was completely free.
“Where’s my suit?” Lucifer asked as he used some of the ice and water to scrub the impurities from his skin.
“What suit?” Sariel said with a straight face.
Lucifer summoned both of his six foot zinanbar blades and stared at him. Now was not the time for this game. He had been naked for four months.
Sariel made a throwing motion and a clothes hanger with a matching black-and-gray suit apparated in mid arc. Lucifer dismissed his swords, caught the clothing and tore the plastic away. Shoes, underwear, and socks made their separate arcs to him, and Lucifer dressed while his brother gave him a rundown of what he had found.
“I found it.”
“Found what?”
“The reason.”
“For the war?”
“Yeah.”
Sariel didn’t elaborate further. He just kicked some rocks around.
“Well, don’t be shy,” Lucifer said as he buttoned his collar and pushed his wings through the eight holes in the back of the jacket. “What are we dealing with here? Will it give us leverage?”
“You remember when Elandril told us he was leaving to become a celestial forgewright and was renouncing his claim to the goblin throne?”
“Yeah.”
“Guess whose idea that was?”
“Are you serious? Why would Elandril have listened to Eranos?”
“You remember Eranos’s oldest daughter?”
Lucifer stopped putting on his socks and thought hard. “No … wait …” A face materialized in his memory. Brown hair. Pretty smile. He remembered that they had slept together over a million years ago. Nothing serious. Just passing the time, all part of the politics of the system. “Yeah, Nina right? What happened to her?”
“She fell in love with the wrong man.”
Lucifer shrugged. “I’m not following.”
“A goblin man.”
“No crap? And that evil goblin Elandril didn’t accept her, I guess? That’s why Eranos was pissed?”
“Elandril renounced his throne for her. That’s why he left. Eranos told him that no goblin prince would ever marry his favorite daughter.”
“So, he left and Eranos hid her away?”
Sariel kicked a nearby ice formation so hard that it shattered the base and collapsed three stories of jagged, arctic rock to the permafrost. “No, he didn’t hide her away. Turns out she was pregnant. He killed her.”
“Nina? His oldest daughter?”
“There’s an orb. I’ve stored it within a pocket in the primal pattern, but we’re not going to use it unless we have to. If Elandril is flexible and takes our word for it, we don’t show him. You understand?”
Lucifer grimaced and then relaxed. Sariel wasn’t usually this serious, and he certainly wasn’t one to bark orders. He was more of the not-going-to-follow-orders type.
“You all right, man?”
Sariel put his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes downward. “I’ve just seen a lot of things I didn’t want to see. We were duped into that war, Lucifer. We killed millions of goblins and a surrogate father because some douchebag didn’t want to have a half-goblin grandson.”
“I don’t need more reasons to kill the guy.”
“Let’s just get moving. The more I think about Nina and our parents, the more restless I get. We should have killed Eranos before we left.”
“Hindsight, brother. Did they extend the anti-apparation barrier?”
Sariel grumbled. “Alurabum is off limits to me now, except for the Council, and Eranos doesn’t go there anymore.” His wings unfurled from his suit.
Lucifer put an arm around him. “We’ll get the bastard.”
Sariel nodded and closed his eyes. “Let’s go see Elandril.”
Ice reformed on their faces as they pushed themselves out of the cold planet’s atmosphere and into the vacuum of space. As they flew closer to Arnessa, the space stations and skyscrapers grew larger, the trees and lakes came into view, and hundreds of thousands of spaceships cruised past them. Surprised faces attached to slightly elongated ears peered back at them through thick acrylic glass. Some of the children made funny faces.
Lucifer chuckled noiselessly at the kids as he pushed his tendrils into uninhabited forests and oceans and slowed his descent. He marveled at the way the goblins immersed their technology, tall buildings, and industry into the forests and maintained a homeostasis over the ages. Demons had deforested all of Alurabum before they had even written their first recorded histories, or maybe the libraries describing those forests had been burned during a war millions of years ago.
Sariel joined him in a slow descent into the atmosphere and the warmer air melted the ice from their bodies and dried their suits. Space elevators filled with cargo zipped past them on thin carbon fibers toward floating merchant platforms. More goblin faces peered at them through the top floors of the tallest buildings Lucifer had ever seen. Coliseums with displays big enough to see from space popped up sporadically, and he found himself trying to make out the letters and images flickering across them.
The screeching vehicle horns and grating and clanking construction noises of civilizations in Chaos or on Earth were greatly subdued here and instead came in the form of a constant hum and cheers from the stadiums. The flying cars and cargo vessels were quiet as motorized fans, and the animated billboards covering hundreds of floors were not so much bright and distracting as they were accentuating of the various architectures. Some of the advertisements even seemed to involve actors inside the tall glass buildings, hundred-story Victorian homes, and artistic sculptures. But everywhere Lucifer looked, there were forests, lakes, parks, and the sounds of commerce, industry, and laughter.
Highways without asphalt stretched as far as the eye could see, and dedicated shipping lanes paralleled and intersected without collisions. As he marveled at automated vehicles avoiding each other in close proximity to crisscrossing pathways, a few ships dipped out of the shipping lanes and hovered beside them. Were they greeting the returning demons? Were they relaying information to the planet surface and requesting permission to fire?
Lucifer couldn’t be sure of their intentions or thoughts, but he could be sure of one thing: the Goblin Realm had risen from the ashes of its terrible war with Chaos.
