Of The Dark and The Deep_The Cryptid Council Series Book 1

by Rink Wester

  But his consciousness grows stronger everyday. Soon I will be pushed out or tamped down and silenced to oblivion’s chamber. But Sihiosia has provided me a stringy alternative. There are two other children of the Gröötslâng here, now, in this time. Two from one. I will rethread the genetic needle, forcing the tread of their bodies to rebalance the wheel and provide a new home for me. While the Sky Father’s body is too powerful for me to commandeer completely my siblings will fold and sink down to echoing dust before me. With dagger and pendant reattached I will be remade whole once more. To this great mending I leave you all my succor and command. War together now and til Hiklorim come and let my will be done.

  Just like that an angry levy burst switching a flip in the mågÿckal ranks of that immortal assembly. Elves squared off with Pörø Wizards squaring off with BödhisåttvåDragon and Tåôtié demigöds all casting leading glances at the seven brooding Øgdöåd göds and their barking, silently vicious presence. Vickie and Victor twisted the air like opposing knobs, creating a barrier wall of spinning torrid spellwork. Aviating inside that barrier, Nänå and Tony-Aeyitria despaired, great black gödshaped outlines stenciled against dragonfyre and the starlit flames of Hiklorim’s doomed children. Elves and Pörø wizards fled before their face and that wicked barrier of Sihiosian menace, beyond which their war of all wars loomed.

  In a grape swirl of purple eyes, burnt smoke and the jinx mågÿck of rising armageddon, the Pörø wizards lashed out in a final death spiral. The world was in danger and they would span the breach and sacrifice life and history, losing all dreams of light and high beauty and a future lived, so that others may keep them. To those whose lives remember and forget in equal measure, death was fortunately only a small and passing thing.

  A sweet fragrance hung on the air and Grynn listened to the sound over the den of singing coming through the flora. That grey curtain of mist and melody turned all to mercuric crystal and rolled back the murder and bloodshed of that swift sunrise. Music played on a loudspeaker from a campground down the hill as Grynn dodged a blast of Tåôtié lightning and slammed a thumping anvil of power into the face of King Prifddinås’ son, Görûd Fist. She looked over at Brüücê Phillip, Sétanta Hvitsërk and all the other Pörø Wizards, wielding all the slayer tools that Abdourakhmane bestowed on them, and never felt prouder.

  Wizards of the Pörø hear me now! It is not our job to govern what tides shape the world, but to do what time and in what favor we are cast, recking nothing of strife nor of the bloodshed to come. We shall uproot the knowing evil in our lea and pasture, so that those who endure do so in the joy of new terrain. What weather and season come is not ours to rule but to bate. Now for wrath! For ruin and a red nightfall! Fight on to the last! We will settle up on the other side!

  Çåthÿ Liin turned into the black flame-availed shadow form of her Balrog other. Iron hot rage exploded down her alpine form. Like fire under blown glass she towered abover that elven regiment and spurred them on. All save one. Chÿnåriön. He stood there, unmoving and steadfast as a whittled image. He waited, silent and still on that mountain battlefield; he who alone among the newly freed elves of the ten kingdoms still endured the Sky Father’s terror.

  Çåthÿ Liin watched Brüücê Phillip disembowel three elves with a mechanical rabbit and clicking metallic Argentine dogo as farther down the curve of the hill the Tåôtié twins had Chÿnåriön’s son, Khæ’dîm Çåril, cornered, face bloodied and sliced through in Tåôtié mischief.

  Fools! she screamed, All of you, fools! This is my hour. The time of the Elves is nigh! Do you not recognize borrowed doom when you see her? Upon my chiseled brow look and see your lap of the göds! Die now your malison in vain! And with that she lifted high her Dread Sword as blue black flames of rent magma ran down its hilt.

  Çåthÿ Liin stabbed her blade into the ground. Her Balrog infused elven lifeblood passed through her weapon to live in the swaying blue ridges of the land under their feet. The earth moved and shifted, orcs of blood shadow and murk erupted from that foreign soil flooding the ranks of their enemies. She spread her hands at her side, palms up, as black fire surged around her, staining the air red.

  Vickie and Victor made solemn her effrontery, opting to meet her objection of earth and demon flame. Dim umbra surrounded them as Queen Çåthÿ Liin’s power raged. A staggering blast of Gröötslâng energy dimly echoed as different shadows rose around Çåthÿ Liin’s fire. The power of second generation Sihiosian gödhood covered that mountain pass, fire eating fire, storm and cloud removing the affront of elven flame and mågÿck. The divine will of Sky Daughter and Sky Son would not be seconded. Victor’s Gröötslâng powers merged with Vickie’s Mantis as the Balrog Queen of Mînåthrörn charged.

  Çåthÿ Liin lifted her hand and shoved her palm forward. Fire burned through the tree and ground matter, melting a cosine wave of burning tornado towards Ôlörûn’s offspring. Shadow orcs darted back and forth into her flame, feeding off the soil and dark malice of her attack.

  Vickie and Victor turned, tuning forks vibrating, echolocating their elven threat, mimicking the battle stance of the Balrog Queen. They swung their own hands forward as black and red star plasma raced towards her, slicing through her mågÿcks and crushing her jaw as she tilted and fell to one knee, razing a line of orcs and monsters trapped beneath her.

  Sweat and Gröötslâng-Mantis venom stung Çåthÿ Liin’s eyes like tiny ants, moistening the gore dripping down the smoking chimney of her shadowy lineaments. All around them swirled a whirlwind of disorder and violence. A blur of color and vicious motion confounded her already parched cataract as she choked on dust and iron rich pieces of her own dislodged flesh. Her chest and collarbone had also been crushed as she winced at the deafening flow of cardiac blood pounding in her ears. The drumbeat in her cranium was only slightly audible enough to eclipse the dying and mutilated wails of Cryptid beasts and demigöds attached like pussbumps to that battlescape, and the clanging roar of elven steel against Pörø mettle and dragon hide. The acrylic odor of fear and the fighting flight to live and defend herself barely registered beyond the merciless, throbbing ache of the shattered jaw which hung in lifeless carriage from the wreck of her smoking Balrog disguise.

  The blood of friend and foe flowed profusely in the Sky Father Body Thief’s’s campaign. Queen Çåthÿ Liin fell to both knees, her wounds answering oblivion and calling her home to the shores of her elven forefathers. Victor blazed in a lightning haze of Sihiosian sorcery, forming a massive ionic axe from particles of solid carbon elements in the air. Seeing his opening to deliver a final death blow to the Elf Witch Queen of Mînåthrörn, Victor raised that blazing axe in one final sweep of karmic deliverance.

  Blindsiding him in a raging tornado of nature mågÿck and elf glåmöûr, Chÿnåriön and Khæ’dîm Çåril blasted him, crumbling the sorcery holding the mågÿckal flecks of that axe tangible. They mauled and mollywopped Vickie and Victor in a harrowing display of elven haymaking, having twisted the Tåôtié twins in a blistering origami knot of Mênègröthan ingenuity, and rushing to Queen Çåthÿ Liin’s aid. Chÿnåriön hated Çåthÿ almost as much as he hated the Sky Father but when the ice caps of Mount Ëhÿl’hœrn melted down, that clear flowing Elf water would always be thicker than the mud of his Øgdöåd hate.

  Chÿnåriön licked his staff and slammed it against the pressure and atmosphere of that mountain pass, forcing an effort of will through it to focus the energy of the blow into the geographic field at the tip of his staff. It struck the mountainside, shattering an avalanche of wall stone the length and breadth of two football fields.

  Hiklorik ferocity striking the stone together, both Lêlwåni Ädår and Nänå turned rock and mountain debris to ash as they reached out telepathically and slammed Chÿnåriön and Khæ’dîm Çåril into a cavern higher up the mountain pass, already packed with pale deserters and huddled casualties, and sealed it with a Sihiosian ward against which none but Gröötslâng sorcery would prevail.

  Shrill a
nd clear, a siren fountained across their mindscapes. A psychic horn gaining in intensity until all but the most powerful psychic circuits were blown. Pörø wizards, demigöds and Cryptid helterskelter, those still breathing, all fainted in overwhelmed stupor where they stood, leaving only those of Hiklorim and of the Øgdöåd conscious to welcome the smell of death dealt and deferred coming on the dawn.

  Gærüt-Lêlwåni clapped shut that mental whistle, shutting off his psychic bell and pinning everyone and everything there in a regal, smiling stare of muddled joy. He hawkeyed the carnage of the mågÿck Cryptid world as his mind slipped gears. Nearly three quarters of the elves and Pörø were slaughtered, lying in piles of cracked and blackened armory and the smoldering charcoal of flesh and soot stained feather, hoof and horn. Smoke and dying leaf matter irritated his eyes cutting a swath through that revelry as he steeled himself and faced those waiting behind him in whispered silence. He slammed his hands together in a shock of thunder and Sihiosian mågÿcks as searing heat and bespelled white celled ladder of power connected and flooded the rune on Tony’s forearm wedding it to Vickie’s Mantis being. They floated towards one another, eyes frosted in that magnetic trap as Gærüt-Lêlwåni, before either Hiklorim or the Øgdöåd could act, brandished the dagger of Ädårønh Tir, a death fairy riding its crescent, and slit both of them across the neck, a similar jugular gash unzipping the flesh of Victor’s neck.

  Nänå screamed as everyone blinked in slow motion and that seconds long flash of lifetimes passed through them. She screamed in regret and irredemptive absurdity. For the welcoming death of her son and daughter and the complicit rage of fault digging the hole and swallowing her pride. She had left her daughter adrift in the world, absent all maternal compass. And her son, her poor battered son, she had forced him to betray and inveigle and obfuscate the Sky Father in what she now knew was futile and immediately so. The joint immortal and quasi-immortal frailty of her mind breaking through Tony’s dying psyche, Aeyitria laughed in triumph. The blood of the 19 and the 4 flowed and would soon meet her power recovered from the seven. The dark delegating ignorance of that Gröötslâng pirate, her boneless grandchild, had seized the day and primed the pump of annhilation. She would once again be free to feast on the world and the non-world and collapse the shimmering Star of Sihiosia once and for all.

  To the death of all good things and the dominion of what remains.

  82

  Vickie and Victor fell in an arc, the cureless mågÿck of moon and sun sharing the sky for the very last time. Their bodies meteored across what they mistook for heaven and exploded in a prism of cellular gödhood. Molecules now fetching the wisdom of renewal, their bodies liquified, smashing into one another, that puzzle of caterpillar pieces separated 4000 years ago finding the hook and curve of its former chrysalis. The imaginal cells of Sihiosian Gröötslâng and Mantis gödhead ran through that soup, its swirling DNA intelligence remembering the single-celled texture of their joined deity. In a sticky humid swullock of amniotic mågÿcks and hunger, the genetic code of their beating hearts exploded and quickened, no longer discretely individual but now a multi-healthed sublime organism. Pieces once ripped in two and lying dormant in forgotten clusters and clumps reconnected, the niggling curmudgeon of residual biology resonating now in new harmony. A göd was reborn.

  A moonbroch haloed around his head. The Dark Child of Nänå Baclou’s effort and fury was renewed. Vickie and Victor were no longer. Returned now, buoyed on mountain current and Sihiosian bedrock, The Puckish Prince Victœr Bååssë Lång, whole once more in glory and birthright.

  Gærüt-Lêlwånigazed down steadily at the transformation before him. He moved his hands together, summoning the Pendant of Ëhiå from Nänå’s neck and plunging the dagger of Adaronh deep into his sternum, whispering unintelligibly as he breathed out, a sharp, wet intake of air filling his lungs and cracking open his chest. His body squirmed and shuddered, touched by a palsy that now only the deep dark of Sihiosiacould mend. The starry miasma that spilled from his chest was soft and boneless, like a half-filled sack of reek and fetor. It gained speed and rammed into Prince Victœr Bååssë’s newly formed chassis like a silvery bulldozer of sentient smog. Pillaging once more the loyalty of flesh to bone, he filled Prince Victœr Bååssë’s frame to its psychic brim, plundering native mind and body, the hindmost ejection of Prince Victœr’s personna ultimate and complete.

  It is unmade! I am uncut and entire before the path of Lethe. I rode the Sky Father to undo Yemoja’s death. I alone freed this body’s lesser soul trapped in the Sky Father’s purgatory. Ever and Elven curse crumbled in the limbo of my touch. Now Father, you will watch as Mother drowns Mother and darkness reclaims what was! Perilous the balance of all, Dark Aeyitria come forth and let knowledge serve our need!

  Combining the joint blood of Vickie and Victor in this new form with the blood of Ôlörûn still left on the dagger of Adaronh and the mesmeric essence and life force of Nänåtrapped eons ago in the Pendant of Ëhiå, Lêlwåni wrought spellwork and sorcery in a furious torrent of mågÿckal nirvana as he opened the cavern of heaven and ushered through Aeyitria, the Progenitor of them all. Tony-Aeyitria seized the now unconscious bodies of 19 elf soldiers, warriors and enemies all to the High throne of Ôlörûn, crushing them, body armor and glåmöûr alike, into a foul elixir into which Lêlwåni injected his now stringy blood mågÿck. Clouds tumbled as a groggy Gærüt stood from where he fell when Lêlwåni exited his body, releasing gears and hard resetting the software of his muscles. He bellowed in rage, healing his wounds with a psychic flex of Sihiosian anger, hand already reaching out in a defense too late to change the course of river or fate.

  A shadow grew and raced across the firmament like stallions baying and chomping, the first flakelets of the Mother’s power idly circling and eddying to the ground. The Mother, buried claw deep within the Despoiler, glitched, compromising the stitch of heaven and that ceiling of stars in a blind smuir of thickish atmosphere as she exploded from Tony’s body and enveloped Nänå like a knot at the center of a thousand lines of raw ethnic power. The involuntary script and prophesy of the Mother fulfilled Aeyitria invoked her own supernature, infusing the Gröötslâng Queen with a windstorm of primordial mågÿcks plumbed from the stretched edges of the unconsenting deep. The remants of powers left adrift in the ether of she and Łöståghår, now gathered and strengthened in bone and blood, bowstrings drawn taut and shot through with the Hiklorik authority of a Sihiosian curse tightening the bond. She looked at Gærüt from Nänå’s eyes in triumph and laughed, How does it feel fell spawn? To know that Yemoja, your Queen, is no more and I am evermore! To this you have become this odious, feckless, clamoring shell of a göd I see before me.

  Gærüt frowned, mind racing past Aeyitria’s bait falling from Nänå’s tongue, as images of Nänå flickered brightly across his brain and just as quickly vanished into that growing night. He saw her millenia upon millenia ago draw on her tribal Longhi beaten copper and wood pipe, puffing smoke rings and laughing gaily with the Xhosa market women. He smelled her clean scarlet aroma, the scent of flaming coral trees and resin in Kaokoland hugging skin and dyed skirts, chasing her from the annually habitual Himba smoke dance. Her thick black hair glistened and her silver Ndebele earrings jangled loud enough to silence the göd Mükürü. He looked at her now and saw only Aeyitria’s malice reflected in the white and black of her gaze. At that moment, his hatred swelled beyond his banks and threatened to swallow him wholly, I am as you have made me, Dire Mother of Ghast. Rough hewn from your hilt and hate. Love corrupted is a love of sorts. When you cast a star dear Mother, you permit its shadow a break in the clay. To observe and record the very edge of what must be. Your Dark has always polished my Star. Nigh unto war is our inheritance. Birth taught me rue and ruin. Your death shall teach me otherwise.

  Aeyitria disappeared and materialized almost instantaneously inches from Gærüt’s face, lips puckered in a smirk that defied revolt, Dearest Ôlörûn. I am the essence of 19 enemies
and the blood of 4 Gröötslâng souls rejoined in the cauldron of your seven brothers offering of bone and curse. My dark art draws and has made me a göddess once more, thrumming our history in gnawing torment, leaving us supernatural and invincible in our ignorance; exiled from ever truly knowing the subtle myth of the other. We are enemies. True and eternal. That certainty is one prone to heartbreaks far more worthy than either tempest nor time can attest. I have long indulged in the growth of you; in the spanning damage of your sugar weather. Now I shall churn and break across your bow

  Before his corner of the known world went black in deafening rage, Gærüt thought once more of the woman whose body floated before him. Weeping fresh hurt in the iron core of his resolve, Sihiosia softened and grieved, piercing agony and the keenest regret of what was about to happen… again…nearly breaking him.