Never having seen a dragon, my conjecture had little grounding in fact but my fears did not need any sound reasoning or basis to run away at full gallop…down a rock-filled slope, on a bucking horse without reins or bridle, quickly approaching a sheer drop off a dizzying cliff.
The demons were big.
I was small.
They were searching for humans.
I was a human.
They wished to consume my soul.
I wanted to keep my soul.
The line of my reasoning was as clear and irrefutable as it was simple.
Keeping to the river’s meandering edge, I did my best to remain hidden.
“Maintain your calm, abide in the moment, and do not let your fears overcome you.”
I tried to let the import of Alric’s advice sink in, to distract me from my anxieties.
“Relax. Breathe. Be at ease.”
I tried.
My breathing was quick and shallow. The tightness in my chest reflected my stress and deep-felt apprehension.
“Focus on your intention, live your purpose. Dwell in freedom, abide in calm. Be the destiny you wish to achieve.”
Alric’s words were a mantra.
I did my best to listen.
“Believe in yourself, Saedeus. Your belief makes everything possible.”
Alric’s encouragements were well-intentioned, meant to reassure and guide me through a time of trouble, but they also came from a disembodied voice within my mind, the voice of one who had already died, one who dwelled in calm surety and did not live in fear of his body’s imminent end.
They were also his last.
A wall of concussive force blasted through the air, engulfing me in a shockwave so powerful, so loud I could not hear its passage.
Flung through the air, consciousness slipping before I hit the ground, I screamed out within my mind in a tumultuous mixture of desperation and concern, “Alric!”
Then, as was my lot in life, darkness consumed me and I knew no more.
Hunger without End
Light.
Form.
Flitting images I could not grasp or hold.
Unclear impressions.
Only the most notional sense of self.
Where was I?
Who was I?
What was I?
Floating in darkness, I knew not the passage of time or its content.
Hunger.
Need.
Earthquakes of sensation shook my world, the tremors of their excitation spiraling my small zone of relative stability into chaos.
I shuddered in fear and loathing at the awesome forces rushing around me, surging within me, seeking release.
Fleeing, shrinking farther into myself, I concealed my essence from the twisted malevolence giving those urges birth.
I was but a mote hiding within a wrathful god.
Vague images.
Hazy silhouettes.
A world beyond my own was gradually coming into focus…one seen distorted through a distant, watery gauze.
I could not touch or reach this outer world, but I knew it was there.
This realm was distinct from my own, the one that trapped me, the one I shared with the raging evil that wished to consume that exterior dimension, to defile it and subsume it, to drink its lifeblood dry.
I longed for that world.
Perhaps in that place I would find true safety from my imprisoner.
Perhaps there I could find surety and freedom.
I must reach it.
Cries of terror.
Victims fleeing.
Valiant prey fighting back. Falling.
Blood spilled.
Lives lost.
Carnage.
I was powerless.
Over and over my imprisoner unleashed its fury on innocents, never sated.
Its power grew with each life taken.
I could do nothing but wail at their loss.
I knew the true depths of despair—sorrow without bottom.
When would this torture end?
What could I do?
Trapped within a raging monster, unable to express my will, only able to experience loss, what was I?
Was I damned?
Had I been cast into the bowels of Hell itself, embodied within a soul worse even than my own, only to experience an eternity of torture and dismay?
Was there a way out?
Was I the antithesis of the demon that held me sealed away in its thrall or was I but a twisted part of its self that sought to deny the horror it inflicted?
Was I really so different from the monster that now imprisoned me?
Yes.
I was, am, a man.
I knew this in my core.
My humanity was a certainty I could not deny.
This truth resonated deeper, louder and louder, with each life I watched taken, each soul ravenously devoured by the beast animating the prison that locked me within.
Each death reinforced my fundamental difference.
Each death called for my release.
The demon must die.
There was a time before this hell.
My life was not always a disembodied nightmare seen through another’s twisted version of reality.
There was a life before.
I…had…a…life.
What was it?
Who was I?
Why did I not die like the others, the ones the demon consumed?
I hoped above all else to learn who and what I was.
Perhaps that would lead me to find a way out…
I…liked mushrooms?
Mushrooms?
Why did mushrooms of all things dance before my inner version?
How could mushrooms be my salvation from this living damnation?
Weren’t swords and angels the talismans of most heroes, the surest way to victory and the vanquishing of adversity?
Was I a great hero?
Or was I an unflappable farmer?
Who lived for mushrooms?
I…lived for mushrooms.
Saedeus lived for mushrooms!
I was Saedeus!
I am Saedeus!
Universes of experience opened to me then, many of them not mine, but made mine through the adoption of other lives, whether intentionally or inadvertently.
I was the coherence of many lives.
I was the future of these many tangled pasts brought together in one person.
I was the present, ready to actualize my will.
I was Djen’toth!
An abyss opened within me, one that had no limit or end, one that devoured and remade, one that was me and transfigured me, one that ate demons and shat out their filth.
Blooming like a flower of the apocalypse, the truth of what I was opened fully, hungrily.
Though the demon struggled mightily, its essence grown strong on the souls of multitudes, its strength became my own as I devoured its lifeblood from the inside and gorged my way to freedom.
Oozing infernal power, unholy lore, and the contents of a mind as alien as the gulf between the stars, I rose liberated by the powers that had once constrained me.
Return
I’ve done some pretty awful things in my day, but eating a demon from the inside out is one of the worst.
It was also one of the best.
I returned to the land of the living with clear eyes, feeling remade, born anew amid the fires of Hell itself.
The world around me was in shambles, xeric plains stretching to the horizon in all directions, desiccated vegetation clustered in forlorn hummocks with large stretches of cracked open ground between.
I did not care.
I laughed in joy and madness, rejoicing in my freedom, celebrating my rebirth into a world gone mad, a diseased planet far better than the one I had just abandoned.
My clothes were in shambles, tattered and dusty.
My boots were gone, cast off or worn out and tossed aside.
L
oer’allon was nowhere to be seen.
Lucius and Alric were no longer with me.
But I was whole.
And I was alive.
The time of retribution had come.
I now knew the natural order of things.
If demons’ natural prey was mortal man, then demons were the natural prey of Djen’toth.
Though humans had often inadvertently suffered under this natural order, I was here to put it aright.
I grinned wickedly, with only the slightest touch of madness.
I had not eaten in far too long.
I was famished.
Let the demons come.
I would consume their hunger in my own.
Clarity
In days long past, perhaps before the intervention of the Heavenly Host, Djen’toth must have arisen as humanity’s natural response to demonic incursion and predation, a means to protect the species from rapacious predators intent on drinking every mortal soul on Uërth dry.
The Djen’toth would have provided a powerful counter to demonic destruction, one that prevented mass planetary extinction.
After angels intervened, casting out the demonic interlopers and sealing them behind the Empyrean Gate, the Djen’toth became a solution without a problem, one no longer needed, one that turned against the very people their magical ability had once served to protect.
When the Djen’toth turned on their own, the cullings began.
And then the Djen’toth were no more.
With, perchance, one notable exception.
I liked being the exception.
I also liked being a solution to a problem almost as much as I liked mushrooms…especially magical ones.
Which, given my prior fears and concerns, I found to be something of a surprise.
But being helplessly imprisoned in your own body by a soul-devouring monstrosity and being subjected to its depravities can do wonders to alter one’s perspective.
“Alric?”
Nothing.
“Alric, are you there?”
Only the silence of my inner mind replied.
“Alric!”
My desperate screams went unanswered.
No matter how loudly, intently, or frequently I called, emptiness was my only response.
I could look back with supreme clarity on all our discussions as I wandered southward. I could envision everything Alric had imparted to me overnight in dreams while I slept at need, but of my erstwhile master, the teacher I had never accepted having until he was gone, there was nothing.
Only an absence I wished were filled.
Tears stained my dusty cheeks as I trudged southward, my purpose remaining as strong as my heart was weak.
I now journeyed alone.
All those lives that had once shared my own, however briefly, were now but memories, visions to be recalled but no longer lived directly.
I was an empty husk ready to be refilled.
Let the infernals descend upon me.
I was ready.
Whither My Weapon?
Loer’allon and Lucius, that pair of mighty heroes, were as noticeably, heart-rendingly absent as Alric.
Which is to say utterly and completely.
I remembered Alric saying that Loer’allon would come to me at need if summoned.
He had also said that she could exorcise a demon from me if one took possession.
Neither had happened.
What did that mean?
For that matter, what did Lucius’s absence signify?
Had my pet rock refused to tag along with my abominable hunting spree because he was unable to intervene without risking injury or death to my corporeal form?
Had he stayed behind to help Loer’allon wherever the Angel Sword now resided?
Had he met the same fate as Loer’allon?
Had Loer’allon refused my summons because our bond was incomplete or broken?
Had I treated her too lightly, as but a weapon or toy and not a partner in my quest, one that I was to discard in the end?
I had many more questions than answers.
But that was a situation I was comfortable with…one I lived in and made my home—the nimbus of unknowing.
I knew far too many know-it-alls. I knew far fewer who claimed in all sincerity to know nothing…at least of real significance.
I was of the latter category.
My paltry intellect could barely encompass the simplest fungal life cycles of common mushrooms, much less the workings of the heavens, the motivations of angels, the meaning and fate of man, or the totality of existence. Much less if everything truly was better with bacon.
Those were the questions that fried my brain and left puddles of drool dribbling from the corners of my mouth while I stared blankly off into space.
Or the ones that put me to sleep.
Whichever came first.
“Lucius!”
“Loer’allon!”
My voice disappeared into the vast openness of the desolate wasteland that was my new home, finding no purchase in the whipping winds and churning dust.
Memories of my demon-induced killing spree were too scattered for me to easily retrace my steps, to find where I had been and hope to find my friends.
I did, however, have an idea of how to find them.
I would cast a divination spell.
Not being particularly divine at the moment, the vile demonic taint still a noxious stain soiling my essence from the inside out, my hopes were not particularly high about the result.
But when did I let something as minor as reality or the possibility of success get in the way of my goals?
I hunched down on the red dirt, my toes sinking in and finding purchase where once my handsome boots had protected my feet.
I gathered my will, envisioning Lucius and Loer’allon, and literally cast a bit of my essence outward. This small part of me was the fuel that would seek out my friends and power the magic that would tell me where they were.
In theory.
Just like the theory that had led me to complacency, thinking I was invisible to the roving demons before being possessed.
Or like the theory that I could actually survive the journey southward.
A theory I still tried to believe in, no matter how unlikely it seemed.
With the completion of my spell, one I hoped would be more effective than my prior attempts at magic, I watched the energies I had gathered around me concentrate in a luminous, purposeful ball of force.
Which promptly disappeared.
Waiting patiently for some time, I watched carefully as nothing happened.
Even more nothing happened.
For some time.
Well, that was disappointing.
I had expected a bit more.
Maybe something like an immediate response.
Or a pillar of smoke and a disembodied image of Loer’allon and Lucius.
Or a radiant vision of how to reach my friends.
Or a voice echoing in my mind telling me of the quest I would need to undertake to find my allies.
But nothing?
Not even a fizzle?
Maybe that was not as unexpected as I would like to think.
Sighing, I refreshed my cloaking spell—for what it was worth—then settled onto the earth in a small plume of dust and went to sleep.
There was always tomorrow.
I hoped.
That word again.
I needed something better than hope.
Like certainty.
With something less than certainty and not much hope, I finally managed to sink into the boundless halls of sleep.
My friends were waiting for me there with open, loving arms…or rather heavenly bladed edges and polished elemental stone surfaces.
Sadly, they were joined by hordes of multi-limbed demons wreathed in the fires of Hell.
Those were the friends I would rather not revisit.
Dreams to Come
The nigh
tmarish dreams of early sleep soon disappeared.
Those dreams, though vivid and disturbingly disquieting in their subject matter, were but pale, weightless shadows of the surreal visions that followed.
I trudged across an open, expansive plain.
There was no relief in sight.
No vegetation broke the horizon.
No hills or valleys added relief to the beaten, hammered topography.
No birds circled overhead.
Not even demons bespoiled the skies.
I was starkly, utterly alone.
I had to be thirsty.
And hungry.
But I lumbered on.
How much longer I could go, I could not guess.
A week?
A day?
An hour?
I was exhausted, ready to lie down.
Ready to close my eyes and sleep.
Ready to lay my head on the hard-packed ground and rest.
Ready to give up…if only for a time.
Light shimmered on the horizon.
Blinking, I shielded my eyes from the light of the sun.
The light would not go away.
It began to grow brighter.
As I made my way forward, the light became blinding.
Still I persisted onward, eyes closed, hands blocking my eyes, but the light still found its way in. Its radiance scorched my eyes, scalded my skull, and etched its weight eternally on my memory, its burden evaporating thought and reason alike.
I screamed out beneath the light’s onslaught and tried to run but my feet would not listen.
My legs carried me relentlessly forward as the light continued to burn more and more of my essence away, what I felt to be the true and vital Saedeus, burnishing the surface of my body and mind to an incandescent mirror, one clean and pure but honed to deadly sharpness.
One that could reflect the light back upon itself.
One that could magnify the light to perceive clearly and without distraction.
One that could burn and purify at need.
No longer needing to close my eyes or cover my face, I strode forward dauntlessly.
Legacy of the Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 11
