Hurriedly, I pulled on the dead ranger's fur, bending and placing a palm against his hard, frozen chest and saying a silent thank you. Then I rose and made my way over to the wreck of my suit to find the key to this whole thing. I didn't know why I needed it, but Ravanur had been very insistent. I would need the heart of a burug. Fortunately, the strange black heart I had lifted from the puddle of liquefied burug was still intact and undamaged. I wasn't sure what could damage it, since I had fallen onto the thing, and my armored weight hadn’t even scratched it. I didn’t have time to ponder its strange properties, however. I had a very long way to go. I stowed the heart in the pack I took from the ranger, hefted one of his spike-headed climbing axes, and set off into the darkness. I didn’t know where Barbas had gone, but that would have to wait. He had become something of a god himself- or at least he had been consumed by one. If I wanted to defeat what remained of him- I would need to earn my own divinity first.
...
Chapter Thirteen: Seeking Divinity
Joanna
The world beneath the ice was dark as a tomb and cold as the ninth circle of Hell. I walked the stone carefully, my only guide the indistinct, instinctual knowledge that Ravanur had placed within my mind. I knew where to walk to reach my goal- but how far I was walking, or what I was looking for, was a mystery. All I could do was walk in the direction that "felt right," and hope that this place I was being sent to, wasn't on the other side of Chalice. I had salvaged some parts from my ruined armor, enough to jury-rig a light that wouldn't die in the cold. The makeshift lantern dangled from the back of a billhook I had salvaged from the mass grave where I had nearly died. My light cast a swaying, electric glow in a ring around me, illuminating no more than a couple of meters in any direction. The darkness down here seemed to eat the light, and even the air down here felt close and oppressive, like the abyss could force itself into my throat and suffocate me by its sheer weight. I felt woefully unprepared, trudging along the barren stone in my stolen furs, and I found myself touching the torque around my arm every couple minutes, subconsciously making sure it was still there. After all, the magic it contained was the only thing keeping me alive in this cold.
I thought on all that had happened as I walked, but no answers resolved themselves from the morass. If I had been told just a month or two ago that one of my primary concerns on this world would be fighting the dark, dead gods and terrifying magic, I would have laughed in the messenger's face. There was no such thing as magic… or was there? After everything I had seen, could I really say that? "All technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic." Clarke's Third Law might have been meant for stories, but it sure as hell applied here. The image of that Stormcaller, wracked with raw grief and incandescent rage, flashed into my mind for a moment. I flinched, squeezing my eyes shut for a moment. When I opened them, I noticed that the light of my lantern was being reflected back at me from the side of what looked like a giant, smooth, building.
I approached the shadowy shape slowly, letting the circle of my light slowly crawl along it until it was fully revealed. It was a monolith of expertly shaped stone, polished to glossy smoothness, its edges sharp and perfect as they had been when it was made. I leaned in a little closer, and I could make out thousands of text lines, in a script I could not recognize. The foreign letters seemed to be comprised of various combinations of circles, arcs, and lines, and the overall effect was that of seeing a bizarre lunar phase chart. I reached out a hand and brushed the surface with my fingertips. It was not cold to my touch, as I would have expected. Instead, the stone was strangely warm, as if it hid a powerful reactor from me. Its warmth didn't seem to affect the surrounding air, which was still frigid beyond belief, but it actually felt almost hot to the touch.
I turned to leave and stopped. In the light of my lantern, I could see a faint black mist curling up off of the stone monolith, and faintly, as if from behind a thick wall, I heard several voices whispering. They weren't speaking in perfect unison, and I couldn't understand them, but the meaning still came to me as though they had spoken in Pan-American. Let us out. The whispers were sibilant, and the pitch of their pleas rose and fell seemingly at random. Let us out, Joanna. My blood turned to ice in my veins. They knew my name. I jerked my hand away from the stone, now completely certain of the purpose of that imposing stone. This was a sarcophagus for a dead dark god- though as Ravanur had suggested, it did not contain a particularly powerful one. Still, even this god, one of the weak ones not bound deep beneath the stone, could reach out and touch me, even imprisoned, even dead. Tendrils of black smoke snaked towards my head, and I took several steps back, making sure that they couldn't reach me. After a few meters, the tendrils collapsed, the whispers stopped, and once again, the stone was inert.
"Shit." I cursed under my breath. "Shit, how do I even begin to fight something like that? I can't just kill a ghost with an axe!" I wasn't sure I was ready to kill an Erinye with an axe either, but if I ran into any of them down here, I would have to do it. I wasn't going to be helpless again.
I moved on from the monolith, raising my light over my head again to stretch it out a little further. After just a few minutes, I saw another monolith emerge from the shadows, just as perfectly fashioned as the last one, but the smooth, dimly reflective surface of the polished stone had been marred by deep, intentional scratches. Something had clawed or chiseled away grooves in the rock. I drew a little closer, this time keeping a few feet between me and the stone, and I scanned the whole mess of carved marks. It wasn't a random pattern of vandalism. These were words, in a much different script from the circle-based language inscribed into the surface by its builders. I was about to turn away when something about the shape of one of the letters caught my eye. When I looked back at the scrawled message, I recognized a part of it.
Volistad hadn't taught me much of the written language of the Erin-Vulur, preferring instead to swap spoken phrases and ideas, so that we could more easily understand each other in conversations. But he had scratched a few words into the ice during his days at my camp and had been insistent that I memorize them. I had done so and thought no more on the subject. Now, however, those lessons were resurfacing, and I knew that word.
“Vathraqa," I said the word aloud. "Vathraqa means ‘monster.'" The rest was incomprehensible to me. But I wondered why this particular monolith had been defaced, while the other had not. They both contained monsters. So shouldn't vathraqa have been written on them both? There was something here. This was important. Throwing caution to the wind, I gritted my teeth and placed my hand against the defaced stone.
Immediately, a voice exploded into my head. This one was not whispering at all, and instead of many voices, this was just one. It was the growling, masculine voice of an Erinye man, and he sounded a lot like Volistad had. He was screaming, crying, pleading, in the tongue Volistad had used. But something about it, perhaps due to the direct connection to my mind, allowed me to understand what he was saying. He was saying the same thing, over and over again: I didn’t mean it! Please! I didn’t mean to become a monster! I didn’t mean to! Please! You have to believe me! I didn’t mean it! I yanked my hand back away from the stone, horrified, and stepped back until the trapped man’s pleas faded from my mind.
That was not an ancient demon trapped in there; that was a person! He was terrified and trapped forever, for what? I couldn't read the circular runes of the inscription, or the claw-mark letters of the Erin-Vulur language, but what crime could possibly warrant such a punishment? I reached out for the stone again, not sure what drew me, to do it. The instant before my hand touched the defaced rock, I felt a sudden rush of blood to my head, and a headache materialized out of nowhere, somewhere behind my eyes. I groaned and faltered, squinting through tears of pain, and when I finally managed to blink my eyes clear again, I understood the words scratched into the stone. For just a moment, the crude script was as simple to read as Pan-American. It read: ALL MONSTERS WERE ONCE MEN. Another spike of
pain shot through my eyes, and I stumbled, my hand slapping against the stone instinctively for balance.
This time, the voice I heard was not pleading. He was laughing, wildly, maniacally, the kind of full-throated, unrestrained cackling that I had never heard from the sane. In between his spasmodic gales of laughter I could hear words, but overlaid over his voice, were six or seven others, varying in tone and volume, so that the whole thing was a horrible, babbling chorus in my head. I CAN SEE! OH, I CAN SEE! I CAN SEE THE ONE WHO WAITS IN THE BLOOD! I HAVE TO FIND HIM! I WILL FIND HIM! KILL YOU ALL! Tendrils of smoke were all around me, and they started to twist about like tentacles, seeking a way into my head, aiming for my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears.
I yanked back from the monolith, and this time, it took a major effort. A new migraine abruptly slammed down on me, and I took three steps back, only maintaining my footing on the uneven stone by the assistance of my billhook. The lantern swayed around crazily at the sudden movement, and my whole world switched wildly between darkness and light for a few minutes as I caught my breath. When the light steadied, and the headache receded to a dull throb, I looked back up at the words, only to find that they were once again incomprehensible to me, but for the one word. "Vathraqa," I whispered to myself. "All monsters were once men." I could believe it. I remembered a moment long ago, recalled the sight of familiar blue eyes concealing the vile, scuttling monster within. Oh, I knew men could be monsters- but all monsters were once men.
Shaking off the growing feeling of disquiet, I continued on my way, passing the marked monolith. More of the great shapes loomed up out of the darkness, but I skirted around them, not trusting myself to get close. Most of them were as unmarked and undamaged as the first I had seen, but every so often, another graffiti message would appear, graven into the stone in the script of the Erin-Vulur. Several of them were the same declaration as the first. ALL MONSTERS WERE ONCE MEN. But soon, I found one in which my mind didn't recognize any of the words. This was not surprising, considering the limited nature of my vocabulary. Curious, I stretched out my hand to the stone, wondering if a headache would return and let me read those words again. This time, when I touched the stone, I didn't hear anything. No, that wasn't quite true. This was different than not hearing a new noise against whatever background sounds I could hear. No, when I touched the standing stone, I heard Nothing. There was complete and total silence, in my ears, in my heart, and in my mind. There was an abyss inside that pillar, a great, devouring emptiness, and I could feel the pool of that blessed, all-encompassing silence reaching into me. I could just stay here. I could just be still. I could rest and not worry about anything, and just cease to be. It would be the ultimate peace, the ultimate end.
I was leaning against the pillar now, my face pressed to the stone, and I could feel... not cold, but something like it creeping into my veins. I slid down the monolith to my knees, the spear slipping from my nerveless fingers and falling away in total silence. Rest. Sleep. Nothing. And then, somewhere deep inside my soul, a great cat roared. As suddenly as if I had been electrocuted, I snapped back into myself and tumbled away from the monolith, my eyes wide, my heart racing, and my mind alive with terror. Just as broke contact with the monolith, I might have heard the slightest, the subtlest of chuckles.
"Holy shit," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "What the fuck was that!?" I looked up at the dark pillar of stone, and the scrawled shapes in it resolved themselves before my eyes into Pan-American words. THE DESCENT IS ALWAYS EASY. I swallowed hard. Another hard truth. "The descent is always easy." A postscript scrawled further down the pillar read: IT BEGINS WITH A SINGLE STEP.
Now distinctly unnerved, I blinked until the graffiti turned back into illegibility in my sight, and then I retrieved my billhook and crude lantern. Neither was damaged, thankfully. I reoriented myself on the place where I knew Ravanur’s temple would be waiting. They were like us, you know, a woman’s voice spoke quietly within my mind. And we were not so different from you, before that first step. We made a choice, long ago, and we've been paying for it since your civilization was little more than up-jumped apes.
I looked around, but I knew no one would be there. It was Ravanur speaking, and she was speaking directly into my head. Some part of my brain became curious at this realization. Only Barbas had been able to do something like at with me. How could Ravanur alter my dreams? How could she speak to me in my mind? Did that make her like Barbas? Of course she could speak in my head. She was a god after all. But what did being a god really mean? If sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, then was all magic simply vastly advanced technology? Had Ravanur once been a woman like me, changed into an immortal dead god by some technology I could not understand?
I continued on my way, my skin crawling with unfocused fear at the sight of each new monolith. They were getting more numerous, spaced closer and closer together, and soon they were so many that it was like I was standing in a stone forest. I had to pass between some of the pillars sideways, squeezing through and trying my best not to touch any of the rock.
Ravanur spoke again, and this time, it was as if she was standing right next to me. The sensation was so strong, in fact, that I turned to look where my senses told me she was standing- behind me and to my left. There was no one there, real or illusory. Her voice was another hallucination, projected into my head like Barbas had always done. We found it, Joanna Angeles. We found the way to cheat death. We found a way to change the world to suit us, to make the universe bow to our will. Do you know how many worlds we saw? Do you know how many different people we came to know? We were the masters of the universe! But that wasn’t enough.
Through the forest of pillars, I saw another monolith rise, this one much taller and much broader than its brethren. It had been liberally defaced with Erin-Vulur graffiti, and in many cases, the scratched phrases overlapped others. The clawed writing was so dense, in fact, that as I drew closer to the great monolith, I could not see any of the circular runes clearly. They had all been defaced, every one of them ruined. "What were you?” I asked aloud. “What were your people?”
Ravanur did not answer. Instead, as I looked up at the great defaced monument, the carved graffiti that scarred it, shifted and changed before my eyes, and I could read it, just like the standing stones I had seen before. The first and largest phrase read: MAN WITHOUT LIMITS IS A GOD. A GOD ANSWERS TO NO ONE BUT A GREATER GOD. And beneath it, chiseled in stone by a different hand in smaller, but no less distinct characters: ALL GODS FOREVER HUNGER. Hunger for what? The next inscription read: ALL GODS FALL TO HUBRIS. And finally, carved from the stone as if by the strokes of some great blade: THE ONLY GOD TO TRUST IS A DEAD GOD. The rest of the graffiti was much the same, variants on the same core ideas repeated many times in dozens of different hands, and written on top of the previous scrawls until the whole thing was an illegible mess. Was this what the Erin-Vulur thought of gods? Or was this an old idea, lost along with all of this and buried beneath miles of ice? What was contained within these great monuments? Gods?
“You want to make me a god? And yet you show me this?” But Ravanur did not answer, and my voice only bounced off of the forest of stone and echoed back to me in a cascade of fading mockery. “Cryptic bullshit.” Without thinking, as I cursed, I kicked the base of the great defaced standing stone. This time, the attack was not subtle. It was not a whisper or a shout. It was not a black pool of nothing in which to drown, and it wasn't a screaming voice shouting into the abyss. This time, when I touched the stone, its effect was immediate and absolute. And I was in another place entirely.
…
Feral girl-child
I pressed my back up against the broken concrete that served as my current hiding place, my whole mind on the sharpened length of rebar in my hand and the people hunting me. They were hunting for me, but what they didn't know, was that I was hunting for them. It was simple. It didn't require thought. A voice came to me, spoken by a face I couldn't r
emember anymore. The face had once had a name, but it had been lost on the day that the sky had fallen, lost along with mine. "Remember. The best defense is a good offense." The face had not been talking about raiders. It had not been talking about stabbing and running and bleeding. But it still worked. It was the law of the jungle. Kill and eat. Or be killed and eaten. I didn't know much, but I wasn't going to be eaten.
Loud, brazen footsteps scattered gravel in the overgrown cracked lots just beyond my wall. Just one set of footsteps. They were arrogant. Overconfident. They were just chasing one little girl, they couldn't have been more than twelve. Still she had most of her teeth and most of her hair. Wild looking thing, but then that's what the boss man liked, right?
The footsteps came a little closer, and now I could make out the owner of those feet singing. I wished he wouldn’t. His voice wasn’t much worth remarking on, except that I wondered if I would die if I stuck the rebar in my ear. Closer came the feet. I did not move. Strike too soon and I would be dead. Your average bandit, even a starving bandit, could pick up my little boot-leather body and fling me into a wall. Done. The best defense was a good offense. A good offense knew how to pick its shot.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 51
