The Myth of the Maker

by Bruce R Cordell

  Of course, Hazurrium was lost anyway, scheming regent or no scheming regent, if they couldn’t pull victory from what was apparently a disaster. She wasn’t a pessimist, but she didn’t like their chances. If there was ever a time to sacrifice everything to achieve a goal, this was it.

  She hoped that when it was all over, perhaps Death would repay the favor and allow Elandine to retrieve her sister…

  But, no. Hope wasn’t what Death required to reap. Hope was Death’s antithesis. The end of all things brought all things low without fail, smashing through emotion. Hoping to avoid death was like promising to throw the moon. Empty words. And yet mortals hoped, and in doing so, somehow against all logic, kept Death at bay for months or even years longer before she finally, inevitably, arrived.

  Wishing didn’t make things so. The only certainty was dying. Elandine thought of her sister Flora, and her fierce hope to rescue her from death. It was a vain hope, a foolish hope, and moreover, a barrier that prevented Elandine from giving up her autonomy to Death. All things died, even her sister. And her hope that anything could ever be different.

  The queen released control to Death, without reservation. Then the queen was no more, not even a voice.

  The Incarnation of Death fully manifested for the first time since before the Betrayal, since before she’d melded with the mind of a living human named Melissa. The Incarnation had never really forgiven the Maker for forcing her, a manifestation of one of the Seven Rules, to make way for another. She assumed War had felt that sting even worse, which led to Betrayal. Not that it mattered now. Death was returned. And she vowed never to leave again.

  Though… Elandine’s idea regarding bolstering her strength remained. Death concurred. With a wave of her implement, she pulled the souls of all the dead humans who’d perished in the defense – a sum of some fifty spirits so far, and growing with each minute that passed. It irked Death that when War’s soldiers died they left behind no soul for her to claim. Their essence flowed back into him. The kray souls, too, proved resistant to command. She didn’t doubt with study and concentration she could bend those alien consciousnesses to her will. But time waited for no one, not even Death.

  She would have to confine herself to human and qephilim spirits. It would suffice.

  Death assembled five small squadrons of the dead, misty white and ethereal, but so freshly deceased they didn’t realize they no longer walked as living creatures. Their memories of weapons and armor were reflected in their appearance, and their abilities. They existed to do her will.

  Another large kray broke through the line of Peacemaker defenders, sending humans and qephilim flying. Reflexively, she sent one of her freshly formed deathless squadrons to take it down. The ghosts swarmed over the Stranger like ants.

  She grinned as the large kray shriveled under their life-draining blows. Her only regret was that it would take more time than remained to Ardeyn to slay every invading kray. Actually, the term “regret” was strong for what she felt. She was a philosophical Incarnation, and knew when the inevitable was upon her.

  Even Death must finally die.

  35: Acclamation

  Jason Cole

  The enemy charged across the glass with no regard for their lives. They raced into the embrace of blades, hammers, swords, and arrows of War, in his multitude. His army was equally fearless. When kray and his army clashed, neither flinched, even as blood and ichor sprayed, heads and limbs were relinquished, and bodies were ground beneath booted and pincered feet.

  The ability to overcome fear was a crucial quality in a soldier. His warriors, those he generated now as easily as speaking words, had no sense of self-preservation. Each one fought like a demon. Which was why the army he fielded today was so far superior to the sad homunculi his host had been reduced to using over the previous two centuries. The homunculi shared all the frailties and misgivings of the mortal from which they’d been copied: Jason Cole.

  War was disgusted at what he’d been forced to endure. Subsumed by a being of flesh, a weak-minded, grasping, bumbling fool – it was humiliating to remember. Why War had not risen up sooner and submerged Jason, he couldn’t imagine. Something to do with the will of the Maker, perhaps. He sneered, even as he smashed flat a kray that’d tried to bite off his ankle.

  The only brave thing Jason Cole had ever done was to slay the faux Maker, and force the alien pretender from the Land of the Curse. Of course, War had a hand in moving Jason to that decision. Without War’s subtle manipulation, they might all still be leashed to the pretender. Sometimes rule by the Sword was the only option.

  The epic conflict kept his irritation at bay. Despite the magnificent glory of it all, it irked War that, through Jason’s folly, he found himself allied with Death and, worse, the returned pretender! The only saving grace was that the pretender was far less capable than the first time he’d appeared in Ardeyn. He possessed a flickering spark, War sensed, of the Maker’s flame, but nothing else. The greater part of him was missing.

  Locked away, no doubt, in the Maker’s Hall–

  A chariot-sized kray rushed War, its open mouth screaming some high pitched roar. War snatched one outstretched pincer, spun the massive creature about, and flipped it thirty feet through the air. Its descent was broken by one of the bladelike glass splinters along the line Death defended.

  The Maker’s Hall, War continued his thought, where Jason had so badly wanted to go. Where they still needed to go, if the kray invasion was to be pushed back. If they found entry, War and everyone else in Ardeyn would be saved. And the pretender would again become the Maker.

  War called up Jason’s spark of consciousness so he could interrogate it about Carter Strange, but Jason wasn’t having it. The mortal, who’d sought so long to strip himself of fear by losing himself in War, had finally succeeded. The act of resignation was perilously close to suicide, which sickened the Incarnation. He let Jason fall back into darkness.

  He spared a glance over his shoulder. Carter Strange and his qephilim stooge were still there, but instead of continuing their efforts to enter the Hall, they’d been forced to fight for their lives against the thickening press of kray that had slipped past him and Death. Perhaps he hadn’t been as diligent as he could’ve been in keeping the kray away from the pretender.

  War laughed when he saw an even larger concentration of kray racing forward across the glass. These weren’t horse-sized or chariot-sized; they were large as houses. He sensed each would offer him a challenge worthy of any he’d survived during the Age of Myth.

  “Fight! Fight!” he roared to his warriors, expelling a dozen or more each second, for all the good it seemed to do. Half died, impaled on pincers or wrapped in dissolving webbing, within moments of their birth.

  Yet it was glorious. They died in the heat of strife, blood raging and exultant. For indeed, today was as good a day as any to die. Sometimes, wars are lost.

  36: Fervor

  Katherine Manners

  Following her tumultuous departure from Megeddon, the tiny vessel leveled out as it arrowed west. Kate stopped cursing after her heart rate resumed normal speed. Not long after that, she fell asleep, exhaustion pulling her down into gauzy nothingness.

  She must have slept most of the night through because it was dark outside the next time she opened her eyes. Red streaks of approaching dawn glowed through the portholes, which reminded her of submersible viewports. Not that she’d ever been in a submersible.

  She bent closer. The glass was cold on her cheek. Below, the ground raced past in a smear of darkness streaked with gray blurs. Above the horizon, the sky grew lighter.

  The interior of the craft was too small to stand, but Kate could sit up without grazing her head on the metallic ceiling. She rubbed her neck, and the sleep out of her eyes.

  “Hello?” she said. “Raul?” Worry struck her that she’d never see him again. Maybe without her awake, his spirit had slipped away for good. What if–

  Raul’s hazy shape materialized ne
xt to her. If he hadn’t been immaterial, he wouldn’t have fit. His body glimmered like an old night light, enough to light up the interior of their vessel.

  “Good morning, sleepy,” he greeted her.

  She was intensely glad to see him. She decided not to share her momentary worry. “Hi, yourself.”

  “You know, this thing is damn cool,” said Raul, gesturing around him.

  Kate was confused at Raul’s apparent surprise. “You should know – it was yours.” She stopped short before reminding the man she’d taken the cypher from his corpse.

  “Cyphers are plentiful,” Raul said, “if you know where to look. But the method for finding exactly the kind you want has eluded even Ruk scientists. And they’ve been looking into it for a while. I didn’t know for certain how this would manifest.”

  She snorted. “Well, it seems to be the right one for the occasion.”

  “I kept it back in case I ever needed to make a quick getaway. You’re lucky I like to be prepared.”

  Kate doubted he’d been prepared for death… Damn it, stop that, she silently remonstrated. Too late. She wiped a bit of moisture from her eyes.

  Raul inquired, “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Kate.

  “Never a good sign,” Raul replied.

  That particular exchange was one of their comfortable traditions. She smiled to hear Raul’s usual rejoinder. He was the same old Raul. She said, “If this Maker’s Hall is everything myth says, we should try to get in, too.”

  “After we stop War,” said Raul.

  “Yes, after we stop War,” agreed Kate. “But right after that, we go in, hopefully on Carter’s arm. Get him to show us the controls for ‘magic resurrection’ or whatever it’s called here, and put your spirit through the process. We can get you back.”

  Raul’s eyebrows rose in surprise and he stroked his non-existent chin. “Sounds great,” he agreed. “But it’s not the primary goal.”

  “But it’s a goal,” she insisted.

  “Promise,” he added, “that Jason comes first. Don’t be a hero on my account.”

  She grimaced. The idea of saving Raul had already pushed aside her concern over Jason-fucking-Cole.

  “Why not do both?” she said.

  “If you save me but lose the world in the bargain, I’ll only live as long as you and everyone else. Which will likely be only until the Betrayer – or Jason, or whatever that puta madre ends up calling himself – gets what he wants. He intends to bring the power of the Maker to Earth. That won’t work out well, probably not even for him, ultimately.”

  Raul had a point. The man could be single-minded, and sometimes wrong, but usually his advice was sound. This was one of those times she couldn’t fault his logic. “All right, I promise,” she said. She meant it, even though it felt a little like giving up on her friend.

  Raul’s specter grinned.

  Rather than meet his eye, she leaned to peer out the front viewport. They’d reached a height over Ardeyn that, although probably not as high as jets on Earth flew, was still several miles over the plain.

  “Would you look at that storm?” she said. Thunderheads piled together, one towering tier crowding the next, glittering with flashes passing between them. They marched in from what seemed like the edge of the world. The storm hadn’t yet covered the Glass Desert, over which she realized they must have been flying since before she woke. But the cloud system’s rapid pace suggested it would manage that feat within a few hours, and after that, go on to cover a much bigger swath of the landscape. For some reason, the idea made her uneasy.

  The craft’s nose dipped precipitously. They began to descend. Kate mentally traced an imaginary line of their course through the viewport. They were too high for her to make out much, but the area they aimed for seemed to be just in advance of the storm’s leading edge. Was that where Carter was? Had to be, unless their flying cypher was malfunctioning.

  “We’re coming down,” Kate said. “We’re heading right into the teeth of that storm, so…” So, that meant nothing to someone who had no physical form.

  Raul sat with her, his face also taking in the raging clouds. His head cocked. He said, “Katherine. That storm isn’t natural It is of the Strange! Where it touches, Ardeyn is being eroded. Perhaps consumed!”

  What the hell was Raul talking about? Kate narrowed her eyes in concentration. The sun rose in the east, directly ahead of them. She shaded her eyes with one hand. The light streamed over the lip of the world, sending illuminating shafts into the flanks of the storm. The storm didn’t care, but then Kate saw what Raul was talking about. The clouds of water vapor concealed something awful.

  Kray, whispered the part of her that had taken in Ardeyn’s context. Or maybe it was Desire. Either way, if kray in this incalculable number were streaming across Ardeyn, it suggested one reasonable and apocalyptic interpretation: the world was ending.

  She caught the hint of a kray taller than a skyscraper lumbering through the clouds after all the others. “Oh, no.” It was horrible. But it was wondrous, too. Like nothing she’d ever imagined before.

  “This can’t be happening,” Raul whispered. “Those things are going to eat Ardeyn to the ground. If they do, they could find a way to Earth. The big one is something that shouldn’t exist, even here.”

  Use me, a fervent voice demanded. This time, there was no uncertainty regarding its source. Desire still encircled her finger. The Incarnation wanted free rein once more.

  Last time she’d let Desire call the shots, Kate barely got her mind back. Letting Desire loose again was something she’d unconsciously decided to avoid. The last time Desire had possessed her, the personality in the Ring seemed reluctant to let go. It desired Kate. Next time, it might not ever let her go.

  But… the vision through the window was essentially a rendition of Hell. If Raul was right, a Hell that wouldn’t be satisfied with Ardeyn, especially not now that Ardeyn was freshly connected to Earth. Could she sacrifice her mind, her will, her life to help save everyone else? There was no guarantee that Desire’s aid would do anything to stop the disaster she saw unfolding below her.

  She dragged her attention away from the Godzilla-plus-sized monster. From the vantage of their approach angle, they’d plunged into the storm. They were close enough that a desperate fight on the glass’s surface resolved. A small army of human-sized figures faced off against a far vaster army of spider-lobster-monsters that came with the storm. Among the defenders, she sensed War, Death, and Commerce, her Ring’s siblings. Of the Maker, however, she wasn’t sure. But there was something…

  They all fought upon the image of a magnificent fortress reflected in the glass, which shone all the brighter in the glass for the storm’s gathering gloom. Its breathtaking grandeur put the walls of Megeddon to shame. Even though she knew it was only a likeness, the image was like a promise of the Maker’s Hall returned. It wasn’t manifest yet… But it would be, if she arrived in time.

  Damn it. She was going to do it, wasn’t she? Trust in the consciousness that inhabited the band on her finger. A personality that valued things only as much as it wanted them. And it wanted everything. Maybe even to save the world.

  Before she could give herself an out, she acted.

  Save Ardeyn; help the Maker! Kate instructed her Ring.

  Nothing happened.

  Something restrained the Incarnation bottled in the Ring. Part of her wasn’t even really surprised. That part of her that always feared to believe in the impossible, in case she was disappointed. To play it safe. To be cynical.

  “Kate?” wondered Raul.

  She looked at him. Her cynicism was what had kept them as friends, and nothing more, for years. The fear of disappointment had done that.

  And now it was keeping Desire from manifesting.

  Naming the thing meant she could master it, or try to. So she told herself that it was OK to believe, OK to want the impossible. It’s worth taking risks with your heart.


  Then Desire was smiling. It was an expression so dazzling that the tiny craft confining her dissolved in its radiance. The consciousness of Katherine Manners and her otherworldly haunt faded away in the same blast.

  Desire knew the exultant shriek of wind in her hair as she plunged, spread-eagle, toward the Hall’s entrance. She was a falling star, serving as a new sun in her brilliance. All beneath her paused to glance at her speeding descent. In their hearts, desire kindled, and her power redoubled.

  Even the kray, in their alien way, wanted her. Probably for food, but hunger was also aspiration, and it strengthened her. The sensation of being wanted was as intoxicating as it had ever been. She would never give it up again, Desire decided. In fact, in the warmth of that appropriation and her fast-dwindling view from on high, she decided that she would take charge of Ardeyn. The Maker had had his time. His time was done.

  Four Incarnations were required to form the key to the Hall’s lock. Three waited below, as did the one who had once been the Maker. Desire made Four.

  She plunged down like a fiery fist, punching the Glass Desert with the energy of a meteorite strike. Every erg of that power was channeled into the creation of a keyhole. The key created by the presence of the Four turned.

  The Maker’s Hall opened for the first time since the Age of Myth concluded.

  37: Exaltation

  The Maker

  A plunging star burned a descending arc across the sky, aimed right for me.

  Desire had arrived. The moment Desire’s aura snapped into existence as a blazing streak overhead, the grim brooding of Death, the brash challenge of War, and even the incoherent mumbling of Commerce were easy to put out of my mind. I could no more ignore Desire than I could shrug off my finger in an outlet. Only the hint of the Maker’s cognizance that I retained saved me. Otherwise I’d have dropped everything in favor of standing rapt like the humans, the qephilim, War, Death, and even, if just for a moment, the kray around us.