by Lee Bond
Garth’s utter tranquility when faced with an impossible thing where the only impossible things that could exist were supposed to come from the other two guys in the room in no way calmed either of those guys down.
Now that the shadows were spinning tightly around a single area, this time more like a marauding horde of all-black crows than tatty flecks of darkness, they were a bit calmer, but that lasted just about as long as it took for them to realize that there was purpose behind this … holding pattern; in the center of the spiralling tornado of dark shapes, both Drake and Eddie could just barely make out a figure, a tall, angular, gawky looking figure that seemed to be formed entirely out of chipped alabaster marble.
Drake opened his mouth to say something, but subsided when Garth gestured with a free hand. He turned to Eddie, to see how his best friend was doing and the answer … the answer was ‘not really all that well’.
“What’s up, man?” Drake whispered into Eddie’s ear. “You look like you seen a ghost or something.”
Eddie dragged a trembling finger into the air and pointed it at the center of the mass inside the shadow spiral, sick to his stomach. Hot bile and other things squirmed in his guts.
“I know what that is.” He whispered back a second later. “I…”
Suddenly, and with no warning beforehand, the horde of midnight black shadows burst apart at the seams, sending blobs of light shooting into the air for a few last-moment seconds of obfuscation before their unexpected –and definitely unwanted- guest made his appearance.
It didn’t take long; the flares dissipated just as swiftly as the initial rush of darkness had arrived, revealing for all three men … something inexplicable.
Whoever -whatever- the … the thing was, it –he?- was just a touch over seven feet tall and so angular Eddie and Drake were left with the impression that the … yes, he was man-shaped, that the man wouldn’t so much as walk through the air but violently assault it, each plane, each facet of pale white, stony-seeming flesh literally scything the atmosphere into pieces.
From where the two Masters of the Incongruity sat, they caught sight of their guest’s eyes as the entity swept an imperious gaze from left to right; where the stranger’s flesh was a particular shade of alabaster white, his eyes … oh his eyes matched the darkness that’d birthed him.
Eddie and Drake both flinched as the thing’s imperial gaze drilled right through them, transfixing them into place much like an entomologist pinning butterflies to a wall, then flinched a second time as hollow, mocking laughter followed by pitiless applause filled the room.
Both men turned to where Garth sat, eyes bugging so far out of their heads it was a miracle the thing in the middle of the room didn’t trip on them.
Garth kept applauding, even though Aäl was magisterially sweeping his way, his living black robe flowing against the current. For good measure, he added a dismissive hoot. For the introduction, he opted for ‘Annoying Announcer You Hear in Every Strip Club, Everywhere’.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, things and thingettes, may I formally introduce you to an actual Ushbet M’Tai. Weighing in at a solid ten thousand pounds, most of which is actual marble because why the fuck not, the one, the onlllllllly Aäl. Yeah, no, if you’re going to go on tour out here in the big old Unreal, you’re gonna need a stage name. I mean, the entrance was badass, no really, but … a one syllable name with that umlaut thing … it just doesn’t carry. You know what I mean?”
Aäl bent down from the waist and stared directly into the Engineer’s eyes, black orbs glittering in the diffuse light. “You allowed things to become untenable on purpose, boy. You evoked this situation. You demanded my presence. Show respect.”
“Respect?” Garth snorted. “I’m not the one begging for scraps, Aäl. I’m not the one who forced me into that 'agreement' in the first place. I’m not …”
“Who the fuck is this guy?” Drake demanded belligerently, coming up around one side of the Incongruous machine. Eddie followed suit on the other side, though with considerably less enthusiasm.
“Like I said.” Garth made a shooing motion with his hands, then started up with a buzzing noise until the Ushbet stepped back a bit. “His name is Aäl, and he’s…”
“An actual Ushbet.” Eddie breathed the word out gently, softly, eyes lighting up with a mixture of admiration, greed and the infinitely more sensible emotion of fear. “A God from back home.”
“We were first.” Aäl intoned. “First, and best. Then along came you.” Here, the Ushbet pointed a savage marble finger at Eddie and Drake, causing both of them to flinch. “And the glory that was our quiet Universe filled with the noise and antics of an inferior race scratching their behinds and sniffing the results. Monkeys with brains too big for their skulls, animals intent on ravaging the only world they’d ever get. Over tangible things offering no true freedom, no great release. We watched as your world turned from green and blue to brown…”
“You gotta forgive the guy.” Garth cleared his throat. “He’s been … quiet … for a long time. Once they get going, it’s really hard to shut them up. See, Aäl and his pals, haha that rhymed, they really are Gods. Or Godlike. Really difficult to see a difference. And, well, as you could no doubt figure out from his impassioned speech where he called you butt-sniffing monkey-animals fucking up your homeworld, he really, really looks down on lesser species. It’s like racism, only not the really bad kind. You know, you’ve got that one uncle who keeps calling Chinese kids chinks? He doesn’t mean to be an asshole, and it’s honestly not that offensive coz you totally know he’s a fucking idiot, only it totally is racist anyways? Yeah, that’s Aäl and squad.”
Eddie looked around the room, heart hammering in his chest. “I’ve got no fucking clue what’s going on here.”
“You and me both, pal.” Drake flat out shrugged, then looked to Garth for answers. “What’s going on? The real, actual truth.”
“This one,” Aäl pointed that same death-finger at Garth, who quirked an eyebrow at the offensive digit until it disappeared from his face, “broke the Universe.”
“Well, shit, old hoss.” Garth scratched his arm. “No lube, nothing? Just … just bam. Fist right in the ass?”
“How do you break a Universe?” Drake regretted asking the question the moment it shot past his stupid teeth because asking it meant that Aäl –all seven foot alabaster marble formed, devil-eyed freakiness of him- shifted attention away from the only man in the room who seemed comfortable and onto himself.
A brittle smile flitted across Aäl’s cold marble lips. He pointed to the nearest wall. “Beyond the borders of this pathetic little realm you’ve carved for yourselves with stolen power, there lies what you call the Unreal Universe. On the other side of this Universe, there sits the extra-dimensionality, in which resides the M’Zahdi Hesh. This one is the scion of one of their …”
“They know all this, buddy.” Garth tapped the side of his head with two fingers. “Did the whole brain and memory scan bit?”
Aäl resumed without skipping a beat. “… of their warlords, the notable Kith Antal. During this one’s formative years, Antal undertook great effort to train him in the ways of all things war, so that when the time was right, he could be launched against the Heshii and their minions. Part of that training involved learning how to move through the oceanic plane called ex-dee. And thus it was that on the successful day, this one not only learned how to use his enemy’s domain to his advantage, but that he also fell through the Universe and into ours. Breaking it.”
“Ohhhhh.” Eddie said slowly. “He’s not talking about here. He’s talking about the Proto-Reality.”
“Yeah. They were kinda butthurt about the whole thing. My arrival really did fuck everything up. I tried apologizing, but they weren’t having any of it.” Garth gathered from the puzzled looks on his friends’ faces that they were still bogged down by the fact they were literally chilling with an actual God.
Time for an explanation.
<
br /> “Um.” Garth fidgeted for a moment. “See … uh. When I … when I broke through to the other side, I kind of … left … things …” he fought for the right word, “open? I think that’s the right word. I’m not too sure, to be honest. I don’t do a lot of thinking about this. Like ever. Anyways, yeah, I …”
Aäl reached out and grabbed Garth by the throat and hauled him up high over his head. Hostility and rage radiated outward, dissipating the chill effect swamping the room in favor of a kind of damp, bitter heat. “This one pulled Baron Samiel along with him. He is the root cause for all that befell our wondrous Universe. Somehow, some way, whatever Samiel was doing in this Universe linked him to this one’s trials and so when he fell, Samiel fell with him.”
Drake and Eddie exchanged a wordless glance, but it was Drake who broke the awkward silence. Well, not entirely silent; both men were certain they caught wind of Garth humming, which wasn’t exactly appropriate. “Samiel is from this Universe?”
“Look,” Garth didn’t even bother struggling because –unlike his friends- he knew he was in the exact opposite of a life-threatening situation, “look. Can we stop calling that other place an actual Universe? Because it isn’t. Hell, the one we’re in right now isn’t technically one either, but it’s a damn sight bigger. Let’s get … ouch! The fuck, Aäl! That hurt!”
Aäl continued tightening his grasp on Garth’s neck until the man’s face turned bright red. If there was one thing he’d learned over the years, it was to appreciate the festering hatred he had for the man’s long-winded, light-hearted treatment of things that were truly important.
“Silence, Kin’kithal! These monkeys need to know the truth. Yes, monkey. Baron Samiel is from somewhere in this Universe. I do not know where, I do not know when. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that when we found this one, full of power, full of arrogance, we did what needed to be done. We demanded he fix his errors.”
Garth booted Aäl right in the deity-pills as hard as he could, only nothing happened because of course a mostly-asexual representation of unlimited power from a pocket Universe would fail to see the reason –or fun- behind having genitals, so he opted instead for a few solid punches to the entity’s bread basket.
Nothing happened again. Well, Aäl did grunt, once, very softly, though that might’ve also just been the sounds of a fist brushing against fabric.
“Look,” Garth squeaked around Aäl’s grip, “you … you can’t kill me. You really shouldn’t even be hurting me right now. Put me down. Or the deal is off.”
“Deal?” Eddie demanded sharply. He didn’t like the sound of that, no he did not.
“Time enough for all things to become abundantly clear, talking monkey.” Aäl did as Garth demanded, though not because the demand had been made. He motioned for the other two men to come stand beside their friend, glaring vehemently at them, filling the room with dark dread and limitless cold until they did as they were commanded.
When they stood beside the other one, eyes wide as saucer plates, an inkling of how much trouble they were in brewing inside those thick, pointless brains of theirs, one of the Lords and Masters of the Proto-Reality deigned to allow the room to warm up, for the shadows to dissipate.
Aäl smiled the stoniest of smiles and resumed the narrative. It was, sadly, necessary for the talking chimpanzees to understand just what had happened, why it’d happened. Once that was done and out of the way, the other one could be informed.
As a Lord and Master, Aäl knew he shouldn’t be deriving any sort of pleasure from this, and under other circumstances, he suspected that would entirely be the case, leaving him with the suspicion that being here, on the verge of Unreal Universe, was the reason for it.
“What in the fuck is going on here, Garth?” Eddie demanded sternly. He knew he didn’t have the right, and from the quick look in Garth’s eye and the snicker from Drake’s side of the lineup, everyone else knew it as well.
“Wish I knew, bro, wish I knew.” Wasn’t that the truth? Their … agreement … stipulated that at no point in time until the very End should any of the Proto-Gods pop their ugly asses out of the woodwork. Garth wasn’t terribly keen on announcing any facet of the arrangement between himself and any such Godlike beings, but Aäl obviously felt differently, and here, in this place, there was nothing any of them could do to stop Aäl from doing whatever he wanted.
Aäl smiled again, this time, a wry, knowing smile that curled his marble-like lips into a grim caricature of pleasure; of all of them, the other one was the hardest to read, but after years of being a not-so-silent rider, he was also the easiest to understand. Nickels certainly couldn’t know everything, but he was applying that first rate mind of his to figuring out why this encounter –so risky, so foolhardy- was taking place.
And he was coming up with very few reasons, none of which would have a happy ending.
“This one,” Aäl gestured to Garth with a long, sweeping motion of his robed arm, “agreed…”
“Why’s he keep calling you ‘this one’?” Drake demanded, intentionally interrupting the towering deity. The being was fascinating, there was no getting around it. His insides burned with a thousand million questions.
How long had Aäl been conscious before the arrival of Humanity? What was the scope of their power inside the Proto-Reality? Why hadn’t they helped with Samiel? Why’d they let the Bruush do their thing? Why hadn’t they helped after the fact?
“Aäl really, really doesn’t like me.” Garth offered casually. “Out of the entire brood of guys, he was the one running around with pitchforks and torches, trying to convince his bros to burn me at the stake. He’s the one who tagged me with the M’Tai last name.”
“N’Chalez isn’t … something your father called you?” Eddie asked, eyeballing the God. For all his … it’s? For all his admonitions that they keep the conversational ball rolling, Aäl ran things pretty fast and loose.
Garth laughed. “No, man. Shit. A name like that, in those times? For most of my childhood I was Garth Smith or Garth Brooks … don’t laugh, stuff like that. When it got to be too difficult to stay on the grid, we went fully off. But no, N’Chalez is a full-on M’Tai name. When Aäl here couldn’t get the others to agree to my imminent death, he demanded the right to ‘name’ me. Still don’t really know why.”
“To mark you.” Aäl explained. “To warn any other deific species out there precisely how dangerous you are to their existences, to inform them that when you are about, the entirety of their planes run the risk of ruination.”
“Nice alliteration. ‘Run the risk of ruination’.” Garth poked at one of Aäl’s black cloak-fronds with a fingertip. The undulating black fabric darted this way and that like a fish in the ocean before continuing on. “Anyways, ‘N’Chalez’ means ‘Breaker’.”
“It means a great deal more than that.” Aäl was swift to correct the other one. “But you, like all organic life, lack the nuances. But yes, Breaker will suffice. More properly, Breaker of the Dream.”
“Wow.” Drake whistled low. “You just run around collecting the absolute worst nicknames, don’t you? Specter in the Stars. Engineer. Changemaker. Breaker of the Dream. Anything we’re missing?”
“Mmm.” Garth winked at Drake. “Also missing ‘asshole’, ‘motherfucker’, and ‘holy shit, he’s coming this way, let’s run the other way really, really fast and pretend we’re doing something unrelated to this war’. But yeah, it’s a talent. I never had a nickname in school, so.”
“If you monkey brains are all caught up on the subtle nuances of the Dreambreaker’s title?” Aäl waited precisely one second before resuming. He may not seem it to the mortals in the room, but he was desperately eager to get to the point where said Dreambreaker received just and proper punishment for all the things he’d done to their Dream. “Once the preponderance of evidence was displayed for this one, once he properly understood that the maniac ravaging the temporal continuity of the Proto-Reality was his fault, he agreed …”
“Reluctantly.” Garth added.
Aäl dipped his head. “Reluctantly agreed that he would deal with the situation as only he could. My brethren and I determined that you two,” here, when he pointed at each of the monkey brains in turn, he enjoyed their unabashed flinches immensely, “were primary focal points, we arranged events to include Dreambreaker into your lives.”
“Dreambreaker. I’ll allow it.” Garth stuck his hands in his pockets. “You wanna tell these knuckleheads why they were a focal point, or should I?”
“We arranged it.” Aäl admitted without reluctance. “Future versions of ourselves, detecting our involvement in the past, influenced Drake Bishop’s existence, forcing Samiel into devoting considerable amounts of his time and resources into prying into his life. Thus, when it became time to insert this one into your lives, future events were already prepared. This created tremendous temporal ripples up and down what Samiel referred to as ‘The Line’, for in the creation of space for this one to begin dealing with his mistakes, we perforce needed to manipulate all iterations of time surrounding Bishop.”
“So you guys fucked my … our lives up because of Garth?” Drake didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. One of the few things he regretted doing since coming into contact with the temporal incongruity was delve into the multiple iterations of his existence in the Proto-Reality. He’d viewed more than three dozen different versions of possible futures before finally giving up, distraught and worn down to the bone with the distressing directions his own personal life could take. “That’s some fucked up shit right there.”
Eddie held a hand up into the air, slightly cupped, as if he were actually gripping the concepts put forth by Aäl. “So, if I’ve got this right, before Garth arrived, everything was hunky-dory.” When the alabaster God bowed once, a mere fraction of an inch, the ex-Emperor-for-Life continued. “His spectacular arrival in the Proto-Reality allowed for the arrival of Baron Samiel, already in possession of the temporal incongruity. And, in the weakest meaning of the word ‘then’, ‘then’ he started messing with the timeline.”
