“Mere power is not enough Priestess.” All turned to see Farrow, moving slowly towards them.
“You are not welcome in this place,” cried Tobias.
Farrow stopped, smiling a thin smile as he spoke.
“Welcome or not, I am here. And I say again power is not enough. The Last Prophecy demands blood as well.” Selene spoke in a contemptuous tone.
“Perhaps you would care to provide it?” she retorted. Farrow laughed out loud and answered.
“With the greatest of pleasure!”
The loud report of a sawed-off pump shotgun followed. Tobias Mason’s head erupted, splattering flesh and brains in all directions, as five of Farrow’s Guardians rushed from hiding. Two held shotguns, the other three knives and machetes. The surprise attack disrupted Mac’s intended spell and panicked the members of the Order. Ten of them died before one of the gunmen erupted into blackened ash. Blood began flowing through the grooves in the floor into the cylinder, reddening and roiling the green water.
Selene began to cast another spell as the remaining gunman leveled his shotgun at her from behind. Suddenly he dropped it to the floor, howling in wracking pain as a spell blasted him. Selene looked toward Mac, his hands still glowing with power and nodded thanks. Santiago grabbed the shotgun as a Guardian came at Mac with a knife. Santiago blew him across the blood-slick floor. He looked to the Guardian still howling from Mac’s wrack spell, smashed his face in with the butt of the shotgun and swiftly turned it on the rest of Farrow’s brutes, killing them all.
Farrow had yet to take a hand in the fray but he did so now. With arcane gestures he sent a cloud of demon locusts toward the remaining members of the Order. The insects ravaged over them, stripping the flesh from their bodies in a matter of seconds. Farrow basked in their dying screams for a moment and then turned to face Selene, Mac and Santiago.
“Thus ends the last prophecy and the Order of the Radiant Circle,” he said.
“I still live,” replied Selene.
“And I would have you remain so,” said Farrow, “so long as Great Cthulhu continues to sleep.”
“Leaving your Brotherhood to rule the world in his absence,” said the Priestess.
“Just so,” Farrow replied, “but I offer you the chance to rule at my side.”
“I am consecrated to Cthulhu. I can serve no other, least of all you,” said Selene.
Farrow sighed and spoke. “A pity to waste such skill and beauty on a sleeping God, but if you will not serve me in life, you will do so in death.” Suddenly Santiago spoke but his voice was now deep and dark resonating throughout the dome.
“I don’t think so,” he said as his eyes began to glow with green light. For the first time he saw doubt creep into Farrow’s eyes.
“What trickery is this?” Mac answered him with delight.
“Cthulhu sleeps but his sword awakes.”
Santiago thrust his left arm out to the side. It transformed into a long curved sword, glistening with power. He stalked toward Farrow, a savage smile on his face. Farrow backed away, his hands making quick gestures as he spoke the words of a spell but Santiago leapt up and over him, the spell missing by a wide margin. One swift blow separated Farrow’s head from his body. It landed on the floor, eyes wide with surprise. And then it spoke.
“Foolish mortal, it is time to see who you really face!” His head and body shimmered and with a cackling laugh began to transform into something monstrous. Selene cried out, recognizing the form as the God of the Brotherhood.
“Nyarlathotep!!!” Yet even as the form began to take shape, the walls of the dome shook and cracks began to appear in the cylinder. A voice like the wailing of a thousand banshees spoke.
“The sacrifice is acceptable!” A horrid shrieking sound came from the still coalescing shape as a huge tentacle emerged from the cylinder, grasped Nyarlathotep and pulled him into it. Gouts of blood filled the green waters as the massive form within smashed through the top of the dome. The entire structure began to sway, sending large chunks of stone and metal to the floor. Selene, Mac and Santiago ran for their lives.
As they reached the exit, they heard a gigantic cracking sound as the entire pillar on which the dome rested began to topple. Selene quickly extracted a small statuette from her robe, spoke the necessary words and hurled it down onto the shaking ground. In a flash of yellow light, a dragon-like creature appeared before them. They clambered onto its broad back and flew upwards watching as New R’lyeh sank beneath the dark waters. Then their eyes moved to the sky where an incredible event was in progress.
Cthulhu, savoring the taste of his traitorous messenger Nyarlathotep, was now feasting on the attending gods after his long sleep. He first devoured Azathoth and all his pipers and drummers and then moved on to entire pantheons of Other Gods. Some fought, most fled and so the ravening continued for many days after, the only survivors being The Great Old Ones and Yog-Sothoth whose existence was necessary to the future designs of Great Cthulhu and his minions.
Every human being on Earth had witnessed the slaughter in the heavens and many had been driven mad by the sight. Thus it was no surprise that the citizens of Canyon Haven fled into their caves when the dragon-like creature landed. But when Selene, Mac and Santiago dismounted and the creature flew away, a few brave souls emerged. One of them, the boy Shige, rushed up to Mac and Santiago.
“Wow that was so cool,” he cried. “Where’d you get a dragon?”
“It’s called a Shantak,” said Selene. The boy’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the Priestess.
“Man, you are smoking hot!” Selene blushed a bit and Mac gave the boy a not so gentle rap to the head. By this time most of Canyon Haven’s people had gathered around the trio, welcoming them and asking questions. Then suddenly, a quintet of Guardians pushed their way in.
“Where’s Farrow?” said their leader.
“He’s dead and as of now the Brotherhood is too.”
“Says who?” the brute replied reaching for the butcher knife in his belt. Santiago clasped his wrist in an iron grip and looked into the man’s face, his eyes glowing green.
“Great Cthulhu,” he replied in a deep voice, as he snapped the Guardian’s wrist like a twig. The man fell to the ground screaming as the other Guardians ran in terror.
From that day forward, Selene, Father Mac and Santiago ruled Canyon Haven with a gentle firmness and a commitment to saving all survivors of the end. Selene’s magic proved valuable in tracking down other camps. Within ten years humanity thrived and grew strong. It was not the world they once knew but in many ways it was a better one.
Great Cthulhu, now worshipped by all, was not seen again, except in dark dreams. Some say he returned to R’lyeh and continued his sleep, others claimed he went back to the stars which spawned him and still others believed he would one day come to Earth again and start the cycle of prophecy anew.
End of White
Ekaterina Sedia
Coronet Kovalevsky had never expected to find that land was finite. It seemed so abundant to him when he was younger, something you could never possibly run out of—or run off of—that the very suggestion seemed ludicrous. Yet there he was in the summer of 1920, teetering on the precipice of the Crimean peninsula, with very little idea of what to do after Wrangel’s inevitable defeat and his own presumed tumble into the Black Sea. He had decided that he would not join the Bolsheviks—not so much out of any deeply held belief but rather because of his inherent disposition to avoid any large amounts of soul-overhauling work. He appeared committed and idealistic from the outside, even though inside he knew it was mere laziness and ennui.
So he lingered with the rest of his regiment in the small Crimean town (more of a village, if one was to be honest) named N., close to the shore, away from the invading Red armies and the dry, fragrant steppes that smelled like thyme and sun. At first, the officers kept to themselves, spending their days playing cards in the town’s single tavern, and waiting for the news from the front. The evacuation
s of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk had already started, and the British hospital near N. promised the same opportunities for salvation, if the things didn’t go the way Wrangel wanted them to. They waited for the fighting, for some way to end this interminable standoff. Kovalevsky hoped that his demise would be quick and, if not glorious, then at least non-embarrassing.
But the days were warm, the house he stayed in had white curtains on its tiny windows, cut like embrasures in thick clay walls—walls that retained pleasant coolness long into the afternoon heat. A split-rail fence half-heartedly guarded long rows of young sunflowers and poppies, with more mundane potatoes and beets hidden behind them, and a couple of chickens scratched in the dust of the yard. It was not unpleasant, if overly rustic.
The owner of the clay-walled, thickly-whitewashed house was one Marya Nikolavna, a small and disappearing kind of woman who seemed neither overjoyed nor appalled to have an officer quartering in her house; but nonetheless she frequently brought him homemade kvas and ripe watermelons, their dark green skins warm from the sun and their centers cold as well water, red and crumbling with sugar. She did not complain when Olesya started to come by.
Oh, Kovalevsky could tell that there was gypsy blood in Olesya—there was wildness about her, in the way the whites of her eyes flashed in the dusk of his room, the way her pitch-black braid snaked down her back, its tip swinging hypnotic as she walked. It took him a while, however, to recognize that it wasn’t just the wild gypsy fire that smoldered hot and low in her blood, it was something else entirely that made her what she was.
It was a cloudy, suffocating kind of day in July, when everything—man, beast, and plant—hunkered close to the ground and waited for the relief of a thunderstorm. Unease charged the air with its sour taste, and Kovalevsky, feeling especially ill-disposed to getting out of bed that day, watched Olesya pad on her cat-soft feet across the wide floorboards, her half-slip like a giant gardenia flower, her breasts, dark against the paler skin stretched over her breastbone, lolling heavily. She opened the curtains to peer outside, the curtain of her messy black hair falling over half her back. Her profile turned, silver against the cloudy darkened glass. “It’s going to rain,” she said, just as the first leaden drops thrummed against the glass and the roof, formed dark little craters in the dust, pummeled the cabbage leaves like bullets.
And just as if the spell of heavy, lazy air was lifted, Olesya straightened and bounded out the door, shrieking in jubilation.
Kovalevsky, roused from his languid repose by the sound as well as the breaking heat, sat up on the bed, just in time to see Olesya running across the yard. He cringed, imagining her running through the village like that, half naked—not something he would put beyond her—as she disappeared from view. She soon reappeared, fists full of greenery, and came running inside, her wet feet slapping the floor and the black strands of her hair plastered to her skin, snaking around her shoulders like tattoos.
“What’s this?” Kovalevsky asked, nodding at the tangled stems in her fist beaded with raindrops.
“This is for you,” she said as she tossed a few poppies, their capsules still green and rubbery, at his bed. “And this”—she held up dark, broad leaves and hairy stems of some weed he didn’t know—“this is for me.”
She found his pen knife on the bed table and drew crisscrossing lines on the green poppy capsules, until they beaded with white latex. Kovalevsky watched, fascinated—the drops of rain, the drops of white poppy blood... it made sense then when Olesya drew the blade along the pad of her left thumb, mirroring the beaded trail in red. And in this cut, she mashed a dark green leaf, closing her eyes. She then wadded up the rest of the leaves and stuck them behind her cheek, like a squirrel. She tossed the pearled poppy capsules at Kovalevsky. “Here.”
He wasn’t naïve, of course—he just didn’t feel any particular need for additional intoxicants. But under Olesya’s suddenly wide gaze, her pupils like twin wells, he drew the first capsule into his mouth and swallowed, undeterred by its grassy yet bitter taste.
His sleep was heavy, undoubtedly aided by the monotone of the rain outside and by the drug in his blood. He dreamed of waves and of Olesya, of her bottomless eyes. He dreamed of her wrapping his head in her white underskirts so that he became blind, mute, and deaf, and his mouth filled with suffocating muslin. He woke up, coughing, just as the moon looked into his room through the opened curtains and opened window. Olesya was gone—of course she was, why wouldn’t she be? Yet, he was uneasy, as he stared at the black sky and the silver moon. He imagined it reflecting in the sea, just out of sight, in parallel white slats of a moon road. It was so bright, the large fuzzy stars in its proximity faded into afterimages of themselves.
The opium still clouded his senses and his mind, and he lolled on the border between sleep and wakefulness, his mouth dry and his eyelids heavy, when fluttering of curtains attracted his attention. He peered into the darkness and managed to convince himself that it was just the wind, a trick of light, but just as he started to drift off, a spot in the darkness resolved into an outline of a very large and very black cat, who sat on the floor by the foot of his bed, its green eyes staring.
Now, cats as such were not an unusual occurrence—like any place that grew crops, the village was beleaguered by mice, and cats were both common and communal, traveling from one barn to the next yard, from a hay loft of one neighbor to the kitchen of another. They were welcomed everywhere, and their diet of mice was often supplemented by milk and meat scraps (but never eggs: no one wanted the cats to learn to like eggs and start stealing them from under hens). Yet, this cat seemed particularly audacious, as it sat and stared at Kovalevsky. He stared back until his eyelids fluttered and gave out, and he felt himself sinking into his drugged sleep again; through the oppressive fog, he felt the cat jump up on the bed and he was surprised by its heft—the bed gave and moaned as the beast, soft-pawed, kneaded and fussed and finally curled next to his thigh.
The next morning came with no traces of the strange cat’s presence—or Olesya’s, for that matter. Kovalevsky felt rested, and decided to visit the only drinking establishment the village possessed—indicated only by a faded and yet unusually detailed sign depicting a black goat with what seemed to be too many limbs, a fancy often found in rustic artists. The tavern was located in the same building as N.’s only hotel; it was a wide, low room housing a series of rough tables and serving simple but filling fare—borscht and dumplings swimming in butter and sour cream, then black bread and pickled beets and herring. This is where most of the officers spent their days—at least, those who had not been lucky enough to take up with one of the local sirens.
To his surprise, the tavern was quiet; the owner, a well-fed and heavily mustachioed Ukrainian named Patsjuk, lounged at the table nearest to the kitchen.
Kovalevsky asked for tea and bread and butter, and settled at the wide table by the window. The grain of the rough wooden slats was warm under his fingertips, a tiny topographic map, and he closed his eyes, feeling the ridges, willing them to resemble the terrain they had covered. There was just so much of it—on foot and horseback, on the train, sleeping in the thin straw, next to the peasants and lost children crawling with typhoid lice. The railroads and the regular roads (highways, dirt paths, streets) went up and down and up again, wound along and across rivers, through the mountains, through forests—and his fingers twitched as he tried to remember every turn and every elevation, until Patsjuk brought him his tea and warm bread, peasant butter (melted and solidified again into yellow grainy slabs) piled on the saucer like stationary waves.
“Where’s everyone?” Kovalevsky asked. His tea smelled of the same heavy greenery that tainted Olesya’s breath last night, and he wondered about where she went—to what Sabbath.
Patsjuk shrugged and leered. “Wouldn’t know. Your Colonel was by the other day, but he’s just about the only one who even comes anymore. I suspect the rest discovered the moonshiners, or some other nonsense abomination.” He spat.
Kovalevsky nodded—Colonel Menshov was just the type to keep to the straight and narrow, away from any shady liquor, very much the same way as the rest of the regiment were likely to do the exact opposite. Kovalevsky could only assume that he hadn’t heard anything of the matter due to his recent discovery of novelty intoxicants, of which Olesya was not the least.
One needed intoxicants at the times like these—at the times when one’s army was all but squeezed between the pounding waves and the impossible, unturnable tide of the Reds, and the matters of being compressed like that (and where would one go under such circumstances) seemed impossible to ponder, and Kovalevsky tried his best to let his gaze slide along the ridges and the valleys of the yellow butter, to distract his uneasy mind from things that would make it more uneasy. To his good luck, an outside distraction soon presented itself.
Colonel Menshov walked into the dining room, in a less leisurely step than the circumstances warranted—in fact, he downright trotted in, in an anxious small gait of a man too disturbed to care about outward appearances. “Kovalevsky!” he cried, his face turning red with anguish. “There’s no one left!”“So I heard,” Kovalevsky said. He slid down the long, grainy wooden bench to offer Menshov a seat. “Patsjuk here says they fell in with the moonshiners.”“Or Petliura got them,” Patsjuk offered from his place behind the counter unhelpfully.
“What Petliura?” Menshov, who just sat down, bolted again, wild-eyed, his head swiveling about as if he expected to see the offender here, in the tavern.
“He’s joking, I think,” said Kovalevsky. “Symon Petliura is nowhere near these parts.”“In any case, it’s just you and me.” Menshov waved at Patsjuk. “If you have any of that moonshine you’ve mentioned, bring me a shot of your strongest.”
Kovalevsky decided not to comment, and waited until Menshov tossed back his drink, shuddered, swore, and heaved a sigh so tremulous that the ends of his gray mustache blew about. “What happened?” he said then.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu Page 27
