by Lee Bond
Suspicion dawned on Fenris. This moment was too … opportune. There was simply no reason for Candall to rear his ugly head here and now, not unless … "What have you done to Stride?"
Again, pure Harmonic anger brushed against the walls of the command center, a heavy, throbbing rush of virulence that rattled stone.
Candall felt a poignant zing of fear at the sheer levels of control Fenris owned over Harmony; though he was fresh to the world behind the world, Candall existed solely within the plane originally created by the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and so he believed he knew a great deal about Harmony for being so young.
But this … manifestation? Breathtaking. And worrisome.
Fenris chuckled softly, and the wavelike power flowing through the Asteroidship responded eagerly. "Is that concern on your shadowy face, Saint Candall? You may live within Harmony, but my brothers and I, we created it. We gave it life, and we have grown along with it. We will always be better than you, and we will find a way to oust you. You are not wanted. Now." Fenris growled again. "What have you done with Stride?"
"I saved his life, you ungrateful asshole." Candall allowed some of his own power to flood the room, a searing brightness that played counterpart to the mounting darkness spilling from Fenris. "Which is more than what any of you assholes even bothered trying."
Fenris mulled Candall's connection to Harmony, dismayed to see that regardless of the man's lack of corporeality, he was capable. Too capable. Still, there was nothing any one of them could do about their Candall problem at the moment. "We simply chose the wrong man, Candall, that's all. I make no excuses and I definitely won't beg for your forgiveness."
"Haven't you heard, Fenris?" Candall smiled. "I'm either righteous or victorious. Nothing in me says anything about forgiveness."
"My brothers will be here soon enough, Candall." Fenris gestured to the Screens arrayed on all sides. On them, the respective Asteroidships were moving at accelerated speed. "Wait just a little longer, and we can test the limits of your endurance."
"Tell them to hold off, O Mighty Fenris, or your missing brother will never be returned to you." Candall truly didn't like bargaining like this, but there was no other choice. With Fenris' full unveiling, the disembodied essence wasn't nearly as confident about survival in a prolonged Harmonically-charged conflict as he had been.
He was one, they were many, and as much as the Goddies relied on his presence within their souls, they would by no means suffer from his absence. They were soldiers. They would mourn his loss in their own way before heading back out onto the battlefield. They might kill a few enemy combatants in his honor, but that was it.
It brought an ache to his heart that he was being forced to treat with Fenris this way. He'd been very hopeful that saving Stride's life would be a good thing for all sides involved, that a bridge of sorts could be built, but that hope was done for; the cold, calculating look in the Horseman's eyes said quite clearly that no effort would be spared in destroying him, moving forward. Better to see if the man would accept the onus of a debt so that at least one of those future times where his life was held in their hands, they would relinquish.
"Where is he?" Fenris demanded angrily, issuing a 'hold' command to his brothers.
Their disagreement bled keenly through Harmony, but here, the oldest Horseman remained committed to his orders; Candall was many things, but a liar wasn't one of them. The integrity with which he'd accomplished himself as a Reclamation Specialist would only have been amplified thanks to Harmony. If he claimed Stride was alive, that he was safe, then he was.
Here, Candall paused, no more liking what had to come next than he had the realization that he’d fallen prey to a kind of hubris about his equality when measured against the likes of Fenris Valeren. He licked his lips nervously, then cursed.
“He is not himself?” Fenris curled some power into his fists, pulling shadows from the walls to do it. “Is he dead?”
Candall held up a hand that was lit up like a beacon, using some essence to push the shadows back where they belonged. “He … he is alive, Fenris. I promise you that. Alive but … asleep. In a coma.”
Fenris was growing mightily tired of this. His brothers were just on the other side of their airlocks, waiting impatiently to roll in and see what they could finally do against the thing calling himself Candall, and their irritation was a flood through Harmony.
He counselled patience, but most of all caution; there was a significant amount of Goddies in the quadrant and they were all in the middle of dealing with their own fairly important situations. Hammering out the fine details of surrender was a round-table procedure that needed everyone to be as focused as possible.
A vicious, Harmony-fuelled conflict would be disastrous just then.
After having witnessed the surprising durability and strangeness of the Heavies, the last thing any of them wanted was a second conflict so swiftly on the heels of the one they’d just had. It was bad for business and Fenris wanted those Heavies –all the Heavies, on this side and the other side of Huey’s Shield- right there on the front lines, dealing with the first waves of Antal’s unstoppable Harmony soldiers.
The irritation from his brothers dwindled to a slow trickle, but it was there, still. Fenris cleared his throat, tried finding the right words to say that’d bring this whole farce to a quick and tidy end, but could discover only anger.
“Why,” Fenris cleared his throat again, clenching his fists tightly to keep them from spitting fire, “why is my brother Stride in a coma? Why is he not here, with us, in this room? How did you manage to save him from death?”
Candall reached softly into one of the portions of Harmony he’d worked diligently to fold into a kind of psychic duck blind; comprised mostly of unwanted and unnecessary old memories belonging to some of his staunchest supporters within the Harmonic community and a warping of the actual composition of that other plane, the structure was fortified against scrutiny. He could look through it all day every day and see everything that was happening anywhere inside Latelyspace, all without being caught.
It was one of many such boltholes, but after today, like as not, none of them would be available; with all the Horsemen sitting in the room –so to speak-, focusing all their concentration on localized Harmony, only a fool would like to believe that his little magic tricks were being ignored. A quick check on the first man to successfully be translated into Harmony in his corporeal body indicated that he was fine. In a coma, with next to no primary brain functions evident, but alive.
It’d be up to Fenris and his attachment to Latelyspace to discover a method of bringing Stride back into the light. There was nothing in all of Harmony that could render the Horseman conscious once more.
Candall caught the glint of steel and the quick smirk of smug satisfaction on Fenris’ lips and in his eyes and knew the game was up.
“Fascinating.” Fenris murmured, nodding against his better wishes in appreciation of Candall’s ingenuity. “We would have never found you. I can see that now. All your years of Reclaiming items from those who didn’t wish to part with them has no doubt given you an uncanny comprehension of how to hide yourself. But what’s this? Is that …”
Candall started pulling on Stride with an echo of himself forged out of pure Harmonic energies, a whirling, swirling, golden-lit dervish. Stride’s body began moving, firstly ‘towards’ their location in the physical world, and then through Harmony as well.
“Yes, Fenris. This is your brother. The only way to save him was to pull him through Harmony. In all likelihood, the coma is a result of profound psychic trauma. Out here, in the real world, your brains function as an organic buffer, automatically filtering out more than ninety percent of what occurs in Harmony. When you access it, you do so one step at a time, working your way through those very same filters. He was inside. No filters. It must’ve proven to be too overwhelming for him.”
Fenris said nothing. He was enraptured at Stride’s gritty, grainy, too real body flowi
ng unrestricted through the soft, brilliantly lit oceans of Harmony, pulled to the surface of the unkind, Unreal Universe by the gleaming golden body of a man who’d become a Saint.
The sight of it was –against all possibility- breathtaking. He stepped forward, both in the physical plane and inside Harmony, his psychic form reaching out darkened fingertips to brush against a leg.
“I … wouldn’t do that.” Candall cautioned at the last moment. In Harmony, Fenris’ fingers curled away, scant millimeters from touching Stride’s leg. “He’s tuned to me. Your … influence … might screw things up.”
“Why is this taking so long?” Fenris demanded angrily, evacuating Harmony altogether. “From the impressions gleaned from your escape, it took seconds to move Stride into Harmony.”
“Yes, well.” Candall struggled. “As to that.”
The set of Fenris’ jaw suggested he suddenly understood exactly why that was. “Go on.” He replied darkly.
“On your honor, Fenris Valeren, I will return your brother Stride to you. In return, you will allow me to leave this place unhindered, unhampered and free from harm for a period of thirty days.” Candall loved contractual agreements just as much in the afterlife as he had when he’d been living; as a Reclamation Specialist, agreements like the one he was offering Fenris right that moment had kept both clients and the afflicted from coming after him like rabid dogs.
Fenris allowed the airlock doors to pop open, caring little what Candall felt about the gesture. “And if I don’t?” he demanded warily. “What then? Will you kill our brother?”
A quick peek through the layers of the Asteroidship to where the other Horsemen were satisfied Candall that while Fenris seemed more than willing to turn the tables on certain disembodied Harmony-ghosts, the other three had come –more or less- to their senses. Passionate anger mingled with dire concern for fallen Stride burned quite brightly inside each of them, hinting that if things went poorly they’d fall right into line with whatever Fenris decided, but for the time being, they were … content … to let the spectacle play out all on it’s own.
“Hardly, Fenris.” Candall shook his head dismissively, emanating a tinge of disappointment that merely bounced off Fenris’ adamantine sense of self. “We all of us have our part to play in the Falling Dark, Fenris Valeren, your brother Stride included. It’s why I went to the trouble in the first place. No, no, I would never kill. Not unless it became specifically necessary.”
Fenris squinted. Was the air … yes. There was a definite … softening … of the air off to one side of the command center, a kind of … golden quivering right there, through which the Horseman was positive he could make out Stride’s heavy combat boots. This was –and here, Fenris really could not believe what he was seeing- a miracle. Never in a million years would they have considered the possibility of moving things through Harmony, but now that they were all seeing it for the very first time, they were taken aback by how obvious a trick it was.
Had not the Kin’kith and Kith’kin, not to mention their ancient forbearers, done precisely the same thing with the extra-dimensionality? The very same thing?
“What then?” Fenris inched towards the soft portal that was a direct link into Harmony, his great intellect trying to pull the threads of Candall’s work apart so that he might replicate it later on. The mass of threads and fibers were too great, though; under conscious scrutiny, the underlying weave of Harmony was a seething mess of wires too overpowering to make sense of right at the moment.
It didn’t matter, though. Now the imagery was fixed in all their minds. They would find the time to unspool what they’d learned and figure out how to use it for their benefit.
Candall turned and dipped his head to each of the Horsemen as they strolled calmly into the command center. Unlike their much-aggrieved older brother, Solgun, Nalanata and Lokken maintained iron control of their Harmonic presence. At least they had the presence of mind to worry whether or not their sinister effulgence would impact Stride’s ground-breaking journey.
Solgun whistled low at the sight of their brother moving slowly out of Harmony. “From one to another shall one come. Look, brothers, missing Stride.”
Lokken sniffed. “I would’ve thought of that eventually.”
Nalanata said nothing, but he did pull out one of his trusty fighting knives, which he then put to use by cleaning his fingernails.
“Quiet, brothers.” Fenris motioned for the three new arrivals to silence themselves. “Saint Candall the Multi-Faceted was about to tell me what will happen should we try to hurt him for a full month once slumbering Stride is free from Harmony’s warm embrace.”
Solgun nudged Lokken. “See? Our fair leader is no less prone to loquacious maunderings then I, yet when he turns to verbal prose, you all turn a blind eye and a warm cheek.”
“Because he’s not an asshole about it.” Lokken stage-whispered.
Candall ignored the quietly bickering Horsemen and kept his eyes trained on Fenris, who clearly wasn’t used to someone making eye contact without flinching so hard they pissed their pants on the way out the door. “Sas. Consider for a moment the efficiency with which I can move things to and through Harmony. Reflect upon the nature of my own intangible existence. Envision the translation of any number of things that go boom from any spot within Latelyspace to any other location and recall that, through my connection to all the Goddies, I know where everything you hold dear is located. I haven’t done so yet because as I only just finished saying, we all have our parts to play and I would prefer that it remain so until the Darkness Falls.”
“Could he do that?” Fenris demanded of Lokken.
“Brother, he’s moved a living being. A pile of bombs would be loads easier.” Lokken eyed Stride’s inert form; their sleeping brother was nearly free of Harmony now, faint tendrils of golden light flicking here and there across his entirely inert body.
Fenris silently plumbed the other three and their feelings on the matter, heartened to see that while they maintained tightest control of their emotions, they were nevertheless insatiably hungry to end Candall’s life.
Just not right then. And, it seemed, not for thirty calendar days. A small price to pay, then, for Stride’s return. Plus, it was thirty days during which they could pour all their free time into considering this new, unanticipated aspect of Harmony. It was imminently more preferable to engage in that kind of activity when you didn’t have to worry about whether or not any one of a million key facilities was going to explode into fireballs.
“So be it, then.” Fenris nodded. “Thirty days’ grace.”
Candall nodded as well, pleased they’d finally come to an accord. It was time to dispense with the theatrics. He clapped his hands and the golden portal popped out of existence. Stride thumped bodily to the floor, a feat which earned dry looks of disapproval from the Horsemen in the room. The Saint shrugged his shoulders but said nothing more.
Lokken and Nalanata moved immediately to where Stride lay, quietly whispering amongst themselves, determining the best course of action to bring their silent companion back into the light.
Fenris spared a look at Stride before turning his wicked gaze back to their unwanted guest. “Well? Why are you still here? What more could you possibly have to say?”
“One last thing before I go, if you please.” Candall knew he was pushing his luck, but the matter had to be settled here and now. When Fenris did and said nothing at all, the Saint took it as permission to speak. “It’s about Ute.”
Solgun chuckled, dry wind moving through soft grass. “The trickster in our midst seeks to inveigle himself into plans deep and dark. Careful, trickster. Down here in the dark, there are things with flashing teeth and tireless hunger.”
“Ute Tizhen is of no concern to you.” Fenris announced imperially.
Candall persisted, cautiously preparing an escape route. “He is of no importance to me, true, but to the Engineer’s plans, he is most precious.”
“Namedropping?” Sol
gun chuckled again. “Not even he would be impressed by that, Candall the Foolish.”
“How do you mean?” Fenris held out a hand to stay Solgun’s tongue.
“You seek to kill him because you fear what he’s become, yes?” Candall waited for agreement, growing impatient when everyone clammed right up. "You don't understand why you fear him, but it's there all the same. Would you like to know?"
Fenris sucked at a tooth. Being here in the same room with Candall, hearing him claim that he understood things about their own intentions, their own fears … it was nearly unbearable. Foolish, even, for they were the great and Harmony soldiers. They'd been alive for five thousand years, and had been transformed from the weak, pale things they'd once been into glorious and unstoppable beings of incredible power.
They didn't fear anything. There was nothing to fear.
And yet … Fenris ignored the inscrutable sensation flowing from Solgun. Of all of them, their verbose brother was the most conscious of the deep waters that rushed through their souls, so it was of course no surprise that Solgun seemed the least troubled by Candall's sly offer of illumination.
In the end, though, they would be the ones standing at the threshold, watching the Engineer's Reality 2.0 come into being. Them and no one else, and with that in mind, Fenris made his choice. "Not interested."
Iron determination flowed from Fenris. Candall saw he'd be wasting his time attempting to sway the Horseman and he would be even less interested in coming to grips with their unspoken need to hunt the Fivesie down.
"Very well." Candall nodded. "You don't need to tell me twice. But, Harmony demands I say something, regardless of what you might think or feel."
Fenris was momentarily distracted by Lokken and Nalanata's investigation of Stride's condition; he was pleased to discover that Stride was still inside the shell of his body, which was heartening. Less pleasant was the fact that their brother's spirit was severely affected by his journey into and out of Harmony, but that was something they could work on.
