Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  It took but a few seconds for Torsten to know the entire truth of his situation. He would no more willingly serve Anhur than he would take up a new career in prostitution when he returned to the cities of The Kingdom. He shook his head.

  “A kindred spirit then, if not a friend or ally.” Kal spoke. “That I could ask such a question and that you could answer suggests we are free from their prying presence at the moment. Would you hear what I have to say, or would you finish this here and now?”

  “Sit and speak.” Torsten answered, pointing to a steel chair fixed to the floor not far from where the sorcerer stood. Out of reach of anything that looked like a weapon. “Then we may decide your fate.” He concluded.

  “And where do I begin, Torsten?” Kal spoke. “Would you care to know that my entire tribe has died so that a parasite like Mordechai could possess whatever useless trash I’ve collected across The Western Fringe and whatever might lay in this very room?” He pointed to the cooling pile of molten metal that he had just destroyed with the Demons’ Maw. Torsten raised one eyebrow, questioning.

  “Oh, it’s all too true. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead because of these things. For these things. And so many more. This, you might recognize.” Torsten twitched for a second as the sorcerer lifted the gleaming cube of polished steel he had taken from the warehouse in Fort Pleasant. “They call it the Nexus. ‘They’ being the Gods. I don’t even know what the fuck it is or what it’s supposed to do. But apparently it was worth the life of everyone who died while we sought it out. It was worth torturing and killing all of those defenseless people in that warehouse.” Tears shone in Kal’s eyes for a moment.

  “And preventing you and the War God from taking it was worth Mordechai destroying the entire city of Fort Pleasant and everyone and everything in it. I saw him destroy the city. He laughed while it happened. Laughed in my head. He thought he had killed you and the men you traveled with. It didn’t matter to him that thousands others died. Thousands others who were his own soldiers. Others who did nothing wrong but be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he laughed.” An angry twitch above his mouth.

  The sorcerer dropped the cube to the floor and remained seated. Torsten said nothing, but held the man’s gaze until Kal looked to the floor. He looked to Torsten like a man deeply ashamed. Nothing like the unrepentant swindler and murderer, Asher, who had died by Torsten’s hand on the volcanic island some years ago. The only remorse that one had felt was in the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to enjoy his money any longer.

  A deep breath again and a great heaving of Kal’s shoulders. He looked back up to Torsten.

  “I didn’t want any of this.” He began. “All I ever wanted was to give a better life to my family. My friends. My tribe. I wanted to travel east to your Kingdom and study. I wanted to see how you built your cities, how you fed them, how you produced such wonders. I wanted to take that knowledge back to my people in the Mountains and share it with them. I wasn’t the first in my family to try it. Or even the second or third. Four generations of the men in my line lived as scholars. I was even taught to read as a child.”

  That was a rarity indeed. Literate children were few and far between among the common people of The Kingdom, but it was unheard of from the Mountain Men.

  “My tribe, we lived higher in the mountains than the others. Near a Graveyard of the Ancients. We studied it, learned what we could from it. I found something there. A book. Between the lifetimes of my forbears spent in study and my own, we were able to decipher a good bit of the writing. It was a record of some long ago war. We’ve all heard the myths of the war between the Ancients and the Gods. But this seemed to be more than just a fictional account. It was as if someone was watching it all happen and keeping track of it. For posterity possibly. Though I doubt they thought I would come along in a thousand years and find their writings.”

  “The information there was fantastic. It named the Gods, as though they were enemy generals, not some supernatural beings for men to fear, but actual enemies that we could fight. It named battlefields where the Ancients had defeated the Gods and their armies. Where they had slaughtered them on the fields. There were detailed descriptions of the locations. Naturally, I had to find them. To see them for myself.”

  “The first I found had been something special. The Gods had tried to land in an area controlled by the Ancients in force. With something they called a ‘mechanized division’. The Ancients crushed them, obliterating the army sent by the Gods. I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. A vast plain littered with the wreckage. Twisted steel stood everywhere. The very earth itself was burned there.”

  “And that is where I found the Demon’s Maw. I didn’t think such a thing actually existed. Fairy tales and such. Until I held one in my hand. Such an incredible weapon. It was apparently forged to destroy knights clad in the heaviest armor. Nearly invulnerable to everything else. But it seemed to do the trick. As soon as I activated it though, something happened. My whole body buzzed like hornets were beneath my skin and the next thing I knew, Mordechai… that fucking parasite, was in my head. Controlling me. Making me do things I didn’t want to do.”

  “So instead of helping my people, I enslaved them. Performed his magic tricks to convince them to follow me. And I squandered their lives so that he could have things like this.” Kal put his hand into a pouch at his side and retrieved a small metal cylinder, nearly identical to the one Torsten had been sent to find.

  “Thousands dead. Many by my hand or by my command. But it wasn’t me. I was his slave the whole time, unable to even disobey him. There were brief periods when he was gone. But he always came back, always in control. The hermit with his goats. You must have seen them if you followed me here. The parasite was gone from my mind when I found that place. The hermit invited me into his home. Fed me. Offered me the shelter of his home and his hearth. When Mordechai returned he did…that…to him.” A disgusted motion with both hands followed the statement.

  Torsten knew all too well what the man meant. His relationship with the War God was clearly that of slave and master. Fodder to be thrown away on a whim if it meant Anhur got his precious trinkets. Perhaps it was more than that. Sometimes the God was acting through him. Physically using his body. He knew of no slave owner who could claim to be able to do the same.

  Possession. That was a more apt description of what had been happening.

  Kal ran his fingers through his hair, looking at nothing in particular. As he did so Torsten noticed a circle of scar tissue on the man’s scalp. Much like those he had noticed on his crew a few times since their return to the world of men. He had found one on his head as well while scratching at what he had thought to be a tick.

  Running his fingers along it, he didn’t remember when he had acquired it. Surely he would have noticed such an event. He’d heard it was possible to hit a man so hard that he would forget something, but he’d only seen men die of head trauma when it had been attempted.

  Something the Gods have done to me. To us, Torsten knew. There was more than one way to damage a man’s mind apparently.

  Kal looked at Torsten in silence for the space of a few breaths. No anger, no hostility. Just the look of a man resigned to his fate as a slave.

  “He will return. And when he does he will make me kill you. Or at least try.” Kal finally spoke. “I regret our paths having crossed like this,” he continued. “I’m no fool to think that scouts from The Kingdom would suddenly become best friends with Mountain Men. No, too loyal for that. But some day we might have met as allies against them. Against these fucking assholes that kill us on a whim like we’re some kind of pest damaging their crops.”

  “A mad dream it must sound to most. Fighting them. But the Ancients fought them and nearly won. Mortal men casting down Gods and treading upon their corpses. What a glorious sight it must have been. Can you imagine? Aye, the Ancients were strong in the ways of magic. But the Gods were much stronger then as well. There were far
more of them and their power was greater. Their armies were said to blot out the sun itself with their sheer numbers as they descended to the earth. What a triumph it must have been to see the Ancients lay low so many.”

  His voice trailed off and a look of surprise and then relief washed over Kal’s face as the life rapidly faded from his eyes.

  “I WILL NOT ABIDE SUCH FILTHY FUCKING LIES.”

  Anhur’s voice roared in uncharacteristic anger through Torsten’s mind and his throat simultaneously as the War God returned. The scream echoed throughout the hallways branching from the room the two had finally met in. Torsten pulled the blade from Kal’s sternum where it had entered and then pierced his heart. The fatal blow delivered from half a dozen paces away in less than the blink of an eye.

  Anhur continued screaming in Torsten’s head and something burned hot behind his eyes as pain washed over him. Roaring storm met roaring storm and the War God’s voice was drowned in the noise of it all. Torsten took a few shaky steps before dropping to one knee. His sword clanged to the ground and he gripped both sides of his head and screamed in pain as the will of the War God tried to batter its way through the storm and back into his mind. Torsten tasted blood and his vision blurred.

  A cool hand on the back of his neck cleared his senses and brought him to his feet, ready to fight. Modi stood before him once more, clad in the battered plate mail she had worn the first time he had seen her. She looked at Torsten and then at Kal’s body, still seated in the odd shaped steel chair.

  “I had hoped to avoid this. His knowledge of the enemy would have been a great asset in our coming struggle. But I was weak. I let the War God back into your head, and now this man is dead.” She looked apologetic as she spoke, turning her eyes back to Torsten and then looking down.

  Torsten opened his mouth to speak, but she cut him off.

  “There is no time now. I have exorcised the demon within you, but only for a short time. We must act before he returns. There is no telling what he might do. He might even kill you because you are beginning to learn too much. You need to come with me. Quickly.” Urgency filled her words.

  She turned and vanished, reappearing at the entrance of the hallway that had led from outside to this room in the shattered fortress. A kind of snow ran through her form, spots of white that blotted out the rest of her as she turned and began walking. Torsten followed, looking back once at Kal before he left.

  The sorcerer lay slumped in his chair, arms and head hanging limp. Blood flowed from his wound and down his abdomen before running off of his body and dripping to the floor. Their meeting may have ultimately ended in bloodshed, but it struck Torsten as wrong that the man had been struck down in such a manner. A dishonorable end.

  A moment of cognitive dissonance. He had killed men before without warning. Approaching them from behind and cutting their throats. Whether they had been sentries in an enemy camp or foreign agents picked by his superiors to be killed. Something about this one bothered him. As likely as their conversation was to end in bloodshed, perhaps Modi had been correct as well. It could have just as easily ended with a new ally.

  Torsten pushed the thoughts from his mind. No sense in dwelling on it now. What was done, was done. Someday he might answer for his actions, or the War God might even answer for his. But not anytime soon.

  “This fortress was one of Anhur’s, before it fell.” Modi’s voice drifted back to Torsten as he walked through the darkened tunnel, hands running against the oddly angled walls to avoid walking into them.

  “Before we destroyed it.” She continued. “He came to our world with his armies in all of their might to enslave our people and destroy any who would not accept their bondage. But we did not go without a fight. Tens of thousands of his warriors died as this fortress was struck from the heavens.”

  She spoke as if she had been there when it all happened, Torsten thought. Then again, she was a ghost, and appeared to have been a warrior in life. Though he found the idea of a female warrior a bit laughable. In all of his time locked in the struggle for life and death, he had never encountered a woman who was competent in a fight. Though many had tried. Some even managed to die heroically, but they still died.

  Theirs was the path of nurture. Not the path of destruction.

  His experiences aside, he supposed it was possible that some magic of the Ancients could turn a woman into a warrior. And what else was she if not the spirit of such? He thought on such things as he followed her through the tunnel, back out to the frozen, snow-covered plain bearing the Graveyard of the Ancients.

  Cold wind slapped him in the face as he emerged from the shattered fortress. The moon stood low in the sky, the clouds dumping their frozen cargo upon the land had cleared while he followed Kal’s trail inside. Now he could see the firmament unobstructed.

  Familiar constellations. The Warrior, called by some as the Knight. The Hunter. The White Witch. The King of the North, the point of the sword he held aloft always showing true north. A useful thing for a man in his line of work to know. And there, amidst them all, the Lost Star. Anhur’s home and the Hall of Iron perpetually tracking across the sky in the opposite direction of all the others.

  “He’s up there, isn’t he?” Torsten asked as he looked, tracking the slow motion of the Lost Star. Modi vanished then reappeared standing next to him.

  “We must go Torsten. We do not have much time.” She began walking, increasing her pace to a run. “But you are correct. He is up there. And he is trying to watch us.” He matched her pace. “But Vidar will not let him. Not now.”

  Torsten remembered the old man who had inspected him in the empty square. Something told him that the old man had not actually been there. That he had been in his mind.

  “And why is he called Vidar the Silent?” Torsten asked as he jogged along with Modi’s specter.

  “Because he does not speak.” She replied. “He has taken a vow of silence. Until the destruction of his world has been avenged.”

  There were no more questions as they ran through the deep snow. Modi left no tracks as she moved. Like she moved through the snow instead of over it. Torsten was not quite so lucky. The knee deep drifts slowed him down significantly, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle. Hard breathing and burning muscles in his legs, that was the only price he would pay to pass this obstacle.

  When they reached the edge of the ruined city the snow grew much thinner. Their pace increased significantly and Modi led the way, occasionally blinking in and out of existence. Once she was gone for several moments and Torsten began to wonder if she was coming back. She appeared a few paces from him just as he was considering leaving to find his crew.

  “Interference. From Anhur and the weather shield. Nothing we can’t overcome.” She spoke and turned to move again, leading Torsten deeper and deeper into the maze of ruins. Weather shield, he mused. A vision of a giant holding a huge shield over a city to block out unwanted rain and snow danced across his mind’s eye and he laughed to himself.

  They moved through an area of the Graveyard of the Ancients he had not seen with his crew. Here the buildings had fallen across the streets and deep craters pockmarked the area. The scene of intense fighting between the Ancients and the gray men no doubt.

  Modi seemed to become clearer in her appearance as they advanced. Like some fog was lifting from her and she was becoming more concrete. Torsten was tempted to reach out and touch her to see if there was actually something there. He stopped himself though, thinking no good could come from it.

  She led him down into one of the craters and pointed to a particular pile of rubble.

  “You will need to move that for me.” She said. A woman after all, he thought as he moved to the task. Shattered stones of the type the Ancients had used to build their cities scraped against his knuckles and fingernails.

  A fine time to be without gloves, he thought as he moved the rocks. A few small ones. A few larger ones. He could start to see an opening behind them. A few larger ones th
at could only be described as boulders. Before he had been taken by the War God there was no chance that he could have moved them on his own. Now it was merely a matter of putting his new found strength to work.

  When the last piece was moved, Torsten saw a corridor descending away from him into darkness. The edge of the crater intersected the corridor and buried what little of it likely remained in the other direction.

  “That way.” Modi said as she pointed. A second later she stood further down the corridor in the darkness, beckoning to Torsten to follow her. This is fucking insane, he thought to himself. Following a ghost into a cursed ruin. But no more insane than anything else that had happened to him in the past few months.

  He resigned himself to possibly being murdered and descended into the tunnel after her. The corridor was totally dark. Only the blue glow of Modi’s ethereal form lit their path. Motes of dust danced through the air, lit by the gentle glow that poured forth from her. She led Torsten through turns and twists and he started to lose track of the path. If she disappeared now, he might be lost down here for a very long time, if he could ever actually find a way out.

  She continued to lead him down a few flights of stairs. They were metal and clanged beneath his feet with each step. Something that he found entirely unnatural. A waste of good metal too, he thought. It could have been used to make weapons or armor. Of course if the stairs had been wood like he would have expected, they would likely have rotted to dust centuries ago. Perhaps the Ancients knew a few things about what they were doing, he concluded.

  A final twisting corridor came to a dead end. Torsten looked around him not seeing where they were supposed to go next. Modi looked at him and then disappeared, leaving him alone in the darkness.

  She seems to have led me a very long way to just abandon me, he thought. Or was it just a game? To see how far I would follow before enough was enough. An indeterminate amount of time passed. Perhaps minutes. Perhaps hours. Torsten began feeling along the walls near him for any sign that he might recognize. Some way of helping him find his way out. Nothing.