by Lee Bond
Samiel screamed, then, a primal shriek of fear unlike anything else, as the pulley’s mechanism fell to Chezzik’s unbearably sharp sword. All thoughts of undoing Elteren vanished as the Overlord flailed awkwardly with one bloated, stretched arm, long, fat fingers too weak, too big, too disproportionate to grab hold of the leather straps. He continued howling, even as Chezzik’s blade sliced and sliced and sliced.
The incongruity grabbed hold of Baron Samiel, those long, slender tendrils of power that were always circling the eternal orb finally closing around the one thing they’d always hungered for, grabbed hold like an energy-spawned octopus and pulled the violator close.
Chezzik sheathed his sword and flipped Baron Samiel a farewell salute, though it was obvious that the bloated fat man had other things on his mind. The assassin stood there for just a second, eyeballing the slow path the once-mighty Baron was taking towards the thing he’d feared and loved every second of his damnably long life, shrugged as if to say ‘ah well, what can you do’, then trucked off for the nearest exit.
“I do hope I can get some fresh air before we all go pop.” Chezzik commented to himself. “This place is a wee bit whiff, innit?”
***
Bombatom and the other assembled Wayfarers greeted Chezzik with hesitant nods, the 'almost' rede spoken by their brave brother willing to sacrifice his life so that this eventuality would come to pass fresh in their minds.
How could it not be? From the moment they as a species had become aware of The Lines, of the burden laid upon them by Nickels, of the part that Elteren himself would play in bringing about the end of all things, they'd been waiting with bated breath for signs that they would all be given freedom from the burden of this false Existence that mocked them with every sweep of sun across sky.
"And so?" Bombatom asked, ethereal voice whispering through the crowd. Down below, in the Basin, Samiel's ancient stone Ziggurat trembled in place, unseen energy from the incongruity flooding outwards into the red Lines that crisscrossed the earth.
"Piss o' piece, mate. Easy as pie." Chezzik popped a squat beside Bombatom, who, sadly, was wearing his proper garb. "Back at it, hey?"
"Not for long, it seems." Tenth pointed a sharp-nailed finger at the Ziggurat. The trembling had become a quaking, causing stones older than time itself to collapse and tumble all down the sides to disappear beneath the canopy of trees. "What did you tell him?"
Chezzik pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket and lit up. He puffed with obscene relaxation on a full half of the slender tube before answering, much to the irate dissatisfaction of the assembled Wayfarers. Not that he cared for any of them save Bombatom, and then only when the being were dressed up in his artsy-fartsy fruity elf suit, because that were effing hilarious. One of the most powerful entities in this rotten, abscess of a fake future, pretending to be an elf from a fantasy book written well over five hundred years ago.
You just couldn't ask for better comedic relief, now could you?
Still and all, the pressure coming from Tenth and the others was swiftly moving from mild agitation to outright frustration, and while the end of the world was just as rapidly approaching, they were still the sorts of blokes that looked poorly on being treated thusly, so, "I spoke as I were asked, squires. From Master Nickels himself. To be honest, to this second, I'm still not really sure why I did."
"The rede." Bombatom confessed, all eyes still on Samiel's stone ship. What was happening on the inside, he wondered. "The one you imagined wasn't finished. It was, Chezzik, and from the moment you heard it, you were pushed down a very narrow path."
Chezzik puffed on his cig. "'ere now, if we is all not real, then that sort of begs the question, hey, of whether or not there really is a thing like destiny?"
The assassin stabbed the sky with the cherry tip of the last smoke he'd ever enjoy. "What d'you reckon is going on in there?"
"Nothing pleasant, I imagine." Bombatom settled back on his elbows. "You got another cigarette?"
"Got enough to go around, squire." Chez pulled the pack out and tossed them to his friend the 'farer. "Smoke 'em if you got 'em."
***
The temporal incongruity.
With him since the beginning of his time in this strange, never before imagined Reality. At his side, hovering just out of sight of normal men and women, filling him with power, enabling him to do what no man before or since -excluding Nickels, of course- had ever dreamed possible.
Giving him unexpected long life. The ability to recover from any wound. The power to see through the thin veil of Time, to see The Lines themselves, from every single living being from the beginning unto the end, a curious morass of light and life and right and wrong, stretching and spiralling around and through and between every other Line…
Breathtaking with abstract glory, those Lines were his to move, shape, twist and break.
The incongruity.
A splinter from the other place, from where he'd been less than mediocre, a shambling, shuffling drone living a life too mediocre and menial to bear. Imbued somehow with the power to do what needed to be done, here, in this other place.
The power to do what needed to be done, because this other place was so much better than the world he’d come from. The food, better. The drink, better. Well, when those things had meant anything to him. The air, better.
The potential … so much more.
And because he'd come with that splinter from there to here, they were inexorably linked. Two and one, one and the same, always and forever.
But ... not perfect. Never perfect, for inside the incongruity there was a hunger, an emptiness that had always demanded satisfying, an insensate, aching vacuum that was only fillable by a single thing...
Him. His life. His essence.
Samiel had known it all along, every version of himself, from the beginning until this undignified ending, stuck in a diminishing orbit around the moonlet that'd given him is power.
"So close." Samiel whispered, feeling the unadulterated, abrasive temporal energy trying to flay his skin and boil his blood the closer he grew to the incongruity. "So close to success. But not done yet, oh no, Chezzik. I am not done yet."
There was one trick left, one single last-ditch ploy available to him, one Samiel would have sworn was completely pointless to even work on, yet work on it he had, each version of himself during each iteration of The Line, diligently toiling to manufacture an escape plan should his shoddy efforts at keeping free of the incongruity's deadly radius finally prove unworkable.
Hundreds of thousands of experiential years spread out across hundreds of Lines, never had a moment like this befallen him. It was so shocking to Samiel that his efforts should become pointless, that his dreams of saving the Earth from the worst atrocities perpetrated on Humanity by the Invaders, and of the destruction wrought by Mankind itself, would just ... fail.
And so simply.
Samiel didn't want to use the escape plan. It was a terrible risk.
He could die. And painfully, and so far back in the past. All of his work, all over again, from the very first step. Plodding through a mind that had no awareness that what he was trying to do had already been done, over and over again, a million times over again, hurting and hungry and bereft of connection to anything or anyone.
"And," Samiel winced painfully as a vicious tendril swept across his broad back, delivering an eternity of glass barbed fibers into exposed skin, "there is no way of knowing if I'll ever be this successful again."
The deadly incongruity loomed closer.
A full reset. Right back into that useless old brain of his. Where the only thing on his mind had been himself, what he could get for himself, what he could do to better his own life, most often at the expense of others. They’d all been trained that way, of course, and so how could anyone expect you to operate contrary to your training, but still.
Removing himself from that original Line, manipulating other people into doing those things he’d done to get to the poi
nt where he could properly exist outside of The Line, beyond the reaches of Time, it’d taken so long. More than a few eggs had been broken in those earliest stages, and when the Invasion had come … he’d tried doing things the old way, using the methods and maneuvers that’d been drilled into his head …
Only none of those things had worked. At least, not for him. So he’d tried another way, using the incongruity.
“So long.” Samiel beat at his head and face with massive paws, ignoring the pain, dismissing the warm, wet trickling sensations springing up all over the place. “I can’t even remember how long it took for me to find Drake Bishop, or to realize how instrumental his future tech could be in dealing with the Invasion. Will I even figure it out again?”
Unbearable heat rolled off the purple incongruity now, feeling to Samiel’s already abused flesh like a hot, sick hunger, and it filled him with revulsion, forcing his eyes –still thankfully protected by the wide goggles- into bulging with absurd disgust. His innards, empty for millennia, nevertheless spun and turned inside the distended sack of flesh that was his gut.
To be returned to who he’d been. All over again. From the beginning, from the first step, from the first thought, from the first deed. Down through the days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia …
“Has to be done.” Samiel’s words were swept away, pulled from his mouth by the vortex spiralling around the incongruity, a fiendish, whipping wind made not just of temporal energies sleeting through the paradoxical material but of matter as well, for the Ultimate Line, that one, singular expression of History on Earth, passed right through the incongruity and … into nothingness.
Or so he’d always believed.
The full reset, though, worked on a different principle. The Ultimate Line passed through the incongruity and back into itself, an endless ouroboros to appear somewhere –perhaps even at the very beginning, right there at the Big Bang- else in time.
Samiel reached out and grabbed hold of the incongruity, aghast at how quickly and simply his hands and forearms caught fire with otherworldly flames; they lit up right away with multi-hued purple fire, singeing the hair clean off and digging swiftly through diseased, stretched flesh to reach hungrily towards blood coursing through swollen veins.
But Baron Samiel held his tongue. As best he could, he held his tongue, controlled the agony, dismissed the nerve-flaying virulence that sought to master him. This was it. This was the final test. If he failed here, if he gave in, in any way, to the lesson the incongruity was trying to hammer into his very flesh, then he’d fail there, in the past. He’d become a bumbling idiot once more, barely aware of anything beyond meek and fruitless mortal desires.
“Has.” Samiel hammered his will into the incongruity. “To. Be. Done.”
He might not be the God this realm wanted, but he would be the God it got.
He had faith in himself, enough faith to know for certain that when he woke up inside himself, alone inside a normal-sized skull, he’d eventually see the light once more, understand that what he’d been given was a chance at the kind of power and destiny that even the real Garth Nickels could never understand.
Baron Samiel sacrificed himself atop the temporal incongruity, powerful essence willing the chunk of protomatter to accept one final command, nay, a demand from the highest authority in the realm, an order that his life force be returned to the beginning.
But it was wrong.
It was all wrong.
Flesh bubbling into pale flakes of desiccated matter, left to waft and spiral into the temporal maelstrom screaming around him on all sides, Samiel grappled with the unruly beast that the incongruity had become, fading intellect trying to figure out what was wrong with it; the power was there, all of it still there, still capable and able of manipulating The Lines, but … it was diverted.
Outwards. Into … into … something else.
Samiel could see the edges of the vast machine on the other side of his crumbling Ziggurat, could feel vibrant handmade Lines drinking down the incongruity’s eternal essence and demanding more.
Demanding everything.
“No.” Samiel tried pulling away from the burning rock that was the incongruity, succeeding only in separating most of his skeleton from the abused, obese flesh that’d been his body for eternity; pulled loose, most of this excess skin turned immediately into more bits of lighter-than-air ash that was instantly pulled this way and that by the torrent of forces ravaging around him.
Baron Samiel howled, head stretching far beyond even the absurd limits to which he could push it if the mood struck him. He howled and howled and howled, head growing wider and wider until finally …
The vicious temporal tide and the unquenched thirst of The Lines outside his door grew to be too much.
Baron Samiel, self-titled Overlord of The Line, manipulator of countless, innumerable lives, destroyer of many more than that, human male from some other place, some other time, aspirant to Godhood …
… popped like a human shaped balloon.
And that was when shit got really weird.
***
Bombatom and the others flinched as the top of the Ziggurat blew wide open, raining concrete shards as big as people’s heads for up to a thousand miles away, then flinched again as an uncontrollable surge of raw temporal energy burst through the fresh hole, spraying into the atmosphere exactly like water from a fireman’s hose.
“Crikey.” Chez, who’d only just a moment ago been wishing for some nice port or other fine alcoholic beverage to sip on whilst he waited for the end of the world with a decidedly odd cast of characters, went to shade his eyes against the sudden, brutal illumination.
Then he took a long, slow look around him.
The whole world was covered in red lines. As far as the eye could see, and with his eyes, he could see very far indeed. And as he sat there in stunned silence –the collected Wayfarers positively oozing humbled silence- watching both the red Lines and the positively rude eruption of purple lightning boiling out of the Ziggurat, the former … blazed.
Bright as the sun. Then brighter still.
Then brighter still, until it grew so bright that not only did the luminosity pass through quickly clenched eyelids, but right through and into the skull itself.
“Crikey.” Chezz repeated second time. “Ain’t that a kick in the arse?”
“This,” Bombatom said, putting a friendly arm around Chezzik’s shoulders, “is how the world ends, my friend.”
“Aye.” Chez nodded, squinting against that end. “With a bang, not a whimp…”
***
“I say, er, Mister Nickels, if you’ve a moment…”
Garth turned from irate General Habercome, who was so angry and passionate about the insane levels of weirdness that’d just happened to look at the old English guy in the tweed suit; behind him, the General continued adamantly demanding access to the disintegrator ray or teleportation cannon or whatever had been used to destroy the strange man in the even stranger white suit.
“Yeah?” Behind the boring looking old geezer in the tweed suit, the quadronix began cycling up to the next level of power absorption. Garth imagined he could hear a heavy thrum filling the air, but of course that was probably his imagination.
Copious blood loss combined with ill-executed but necessarily implemented localized temporal skips would be bound to cause some kind of hallucinations.
Wood wrung his hands together in sympathy for the severity of Nickels’ wounds. He wasn’t quite certain when the man had received them, or if they were even related to the presence of the man in the white suit, or of the manner in which said man had been removed from the field of play, but they were severe no matter where they’d originated; he’d gone through the War in his early years, but as a matter of course, he’d applied his great intellect to the pursuit of codebreaking and other comfortable positions requiring little exposure to the actual dangers of the world.
Still, he’d seen his fair share of war-gifted woun
ds, from amputations in the field to sucking chest wounds and all manner of distressful things in the middle but this …
But this … this was … horrific.
And then there were the man’s eyes. If he wasn’t suffering from ODD, Wood was afraid he didn’t know what was wrong. Either way, the combination of blood and those nearly colorless eyes that seemed to be reflecting a hellish nightmare of painful red lights everywhere had turned Mister Garth Nickels into a ferocious-looking ghoul.
“I … I can have medical services here within minutes, sir.” Wood indicated the other man’s wounds by subconsciously tapping his own ears and eyes.
“You.” Garth pointed a bloodstained hand at the old guy. “What’s your name?”
Behind him, Habercome was reaching a fevered pitch. Beside him stood Special Agent Angela Devlin, methodically working her way through some speech written down on an official-looking document. From the sounds of things, the military was locking everything and everyone down until all this mess could be sorted, while the Federal Government was going to do the same exact thing.
They were both in the middle of a verbal footrace to see who could get to the end of their official duties first.
Wood blanched, ever so slightly. “Er. Alistair Wood, at your service.” A hand went out automatically, trained by decades and countless meetings with Westerners. Wood stared at the appendage, then tucked it away after catching sight of Garth’s wry expression.
“Do any drone piloting in the last few months?” Garth spun in a circle.
All around him, The Lines were vibrating. A massive surge of temporal energy was coming his way.
All their ways.
The end was coming. The charade was nearly done.
It was almost time for him to rest, to go home, back into the place he belonged.
He couldn’t fucking wait.
“Er, I’m … I’m sorry?” Wood stammered the question out, taking a few steps backwards; Garth Nickels was spinning rapidly in place, head held up, eyes as wide as they could go, behaving like quite the maniac.
Garth stopped his spinning, locked bloody eyes with watery blue ones. “TS Eliot once wrote a poem called ‘The Hollow Men’. Are you familiar with it?” Nickels snickered at Woods’ positively offended non-verbal response. “In it, he talks about the end of the world, and the hollow, empty, straw-filled entities occupying it. We are the hollow men, here, Mister Alistair Wood with the prying eyes and the busy hacker hands, shuffling about. He got it all right, Mister Alistair Wood, all of it except one tiny little piece.”
