by Josh Powell
“Source?”
Pellonia stabbed at the “Current Location” rectangle. “Come on, come on! Turn it off,” she said.
A portal appeared underneath the Phage pyramid. The flesh golem wizard, having not moved since the destruction of its master, had long since been forgotten amongst the Phage. It fell through the portal along with them. The Phage streaming through the portal from the Phage homeworld immediately fell through the new portal as they came.
Twenty feet directly above the new portal, a third portal opened. Phage poured out of the third portal, fell to the second portal and vanished, only to reappear through the third portal once more. They continued on like that, picking up speed. The flesh golem wizard popped through as well. Whoosh, whooosh, whooosh. They whipped through the portals, accelerating as they went.
“They’re going to keep on coming,” Maximina said, continuing to blast away with her wands as Phage flooded through the portals, creating a solid column of falling Phage. “There’s only one thing we can do.”
“GET. ON,” Omumborombonga said between blasts.
Maximina flew over to the dragon and sat where her necks conjoined with her body. The magic shield provided by her tiara extended, enveloping the dragon in a protective sheath.
In a final display of her puissance, Omumborombonga’s scarlet head let loose a column of dragon’s fire, incinerating a large chunk of the falling column of Phage. The azure head heaved a bolt of lightning, which leapt from Phage to Phage, frying those in its wake. The ivory head spewed a mighty gale of ice and frost, solidifying the Phage it struck. The tawny yellow head discharged beams of light, searing into the Phage.
Maximina howled as she leaned into Omumborombonga, directing her through the mass of writhing tentacles and exposed brains. It was a massacre; the Phage were no match for the enraged beast. As the last of the Phage were destroyed, Maximina flew Omumborombonga into the portal. No other Phage came through.
Arthur reached Pellonia and the Orb of Skzd and pressed the protrusion marked “Power.” The portal shimmered, flickered, and disappeared, closing in on itself.
The second and third portals vanished, the Phage slamming into the rock as if they had fallen from hundreds of feet, smashing, splatting, or shattering, depending upon their physical state, as they struck. Splut, splutsplut splut smack. The flesh golem wizard struck the ground, ripping apart at the seams, and its parts flopped around loosely, no longer held together. The area surrounding the portal was a green, slimy mess.
Echoes died, and sound blunted as the Sphere came free from the Orb’s grasp and began to absorb the sound around it. Arthur whispered an incantation and the orb shrunk to the size of a pea and vanished.
“At least you’ve got the one orb,” Pellonia said.
“Oh, yes,” Arthur said. “An orb that absorbs everything around it, sucking in and crushing all within its wake. Not much subtlety involved there.”
The sky overhead stopped moving as the apocalypse flew away.
“Well,” said Gurken, “we’ve shut down the Phage portal, rescued Arthur from their clutches, sent an invading army in the form of a powerful young woman and a legendary dragon to the Phage homeworld. Not a bad ending for the quest, all things considered.”
“What about the apocalypse?” Pellonia asked.
“It’s a big world. How much trouble can a few dragons be?”
Night had fallen over the countryside; the final receding shades of green had given way to the deep navy blue of night. Off in the distance an orange glow sparked in the night. Gurken strained to see what it could be. It faded as quickly as it had come, and then another appeared. And another. Soon that area of the night’s sky blazed a brilliant orange. The apocalypse had come to the floating city of Arendal.
The dragons swarmed the city, breathing fire. Arendal burned.
Gurken, Pellonia, and Arthur sat on the top of the Phage ship, legs dangling over the side of that oversized walnut from another world, and watched Arendal burn in the distance. Dragons circled around and dove into the city, setting it even more ablaze and landing to eat whatever treasure they could find.
“Well,” said Gurken, “as I was saying, we’ve prevented the Phage from invading through the portal. I say we call this one a win.”
As anyone who has created a floating city can attest, it takes a great deal of energy and effort to keep an entire city aloft. One can’t just place a couple of enchantments and call it a day — no, there is much continued application of additional magics involved. And when those additional magics fail to be applied, well… the entire city of Arendal came crashing to the ground. A tremendous plume of smoke exploded around it and into the sky in a shape reminiscent of a muffin.
It was a sight few witnesses survived to tell about, and so those that did live past this day could count themselves among the rare few able to give a firsthand account of the horrible tale of the muffin cloud. They could hardly bring themselves to look at, much less enjoy, any of the many varieties of sweet cake so often consumed when breaking one’s fast.
Arthur held Antic under the sleeve of his robe and stroked its fur absentmindedly. “Still, we really should see about doing something about all of these dragons. I feel terrible.”
Gurken scrunched his eyebrows together and looked up at the wizard. “You did open the portal, conspire to have us killed, and protected the Phage queen that took over the dragons,” Gurken said. “Ironic, eh?”
“No, Gurken,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “It’s merely unfortunate.”
Gurken looked up at the wizard again.
Arthur smiled, put his hand on Gurken’s shoulder, and said, “Yes, my friend, you’re quite right. It’s quite ironic, indeed.”
Sowilo, the dwarven rune of goals achieved, victory, and cleansing fire, blazed on the head of Gurken’s axe.
Arthur looked at Gurken, eyes wide. “Gurken, your axe!”
“Yes, wizard. I’ve decided to let you have this one.”
Pellonia rolled her eyes. “You couldn’t have decided that twenty minutes ago?”
Epilogue
DAVINA BLOODHAMMER, KEEPER of the books of the Bureau of Adventurers Guild, woke up to find herself alone in the dark. She couldn’t move. It was cold. Was she dead? She didn’t feel dead, but having never been dead before, she wasn’t clear on exactly how it felt. Perhaps she was dead.
She felt an itching in the back of her head, a mental itch. Something she forgot. Perhaps from her life. She had to go find it. It must be important. She tried to move, and found she could only move the barest of distance. Her arms were sluggish and met resistance quite quickly. She strained harder; they moved some more. She was forgetting something important. What was it? Did she leave a pot boiling? No, that wasn’t it.
She shoved with her feet and pressed against whatever it was that surrounded her. She stopped, and it was easy to move back, though it was perhaps an inch. She opened her eyes but saw only darkness. Small grains of sand piled against her eyes. She reflexively blinked it out, but it did not hurt.
That’s odd, she thought. Whenever I’ve had grains of sand lodged against my eyes before, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time getting the painful things out.
She had to keep moving. She HAD to keep moving. There was something…
She twisted her waist violently and pushed up with her legs. Whatever space she had taken disappeared as whatever she was buried in rushed to reclaim the lost space. But she was closer. Imperceptibly closer, she knew, but closer. The itch in her head became a small pinch, pulling at her. It was sore, but not too painful. Still, she forgotten something and she needed it. Was it the keys to the front door at BAG? She didn’t think it was her keys.
She pushed harder. She opened her mouth to scream in frustration at the slow pace, but — and she could taste what surrounded her now — dirt piled into her mouth. She was buried alive. It was a sandy soil, not very good for planting. She flailed about as best she could while unable to move. What had h
appened? She remembered flames. She remembered dragons. She remembered falling, the earth disappearing from underneath her as the city of Arendal plummeted. Then she remembered no more.
How was she still alive? She couldn’t remember that. It that what she forgot? It must be. Why couldn’t she remember? Slowly, so slowly, she pushed the earth to the side and inched her way up. The pinch in her head became a pinprick of pain that gnawed at her, unrelenting. She scraped her nails at the dirt, able to scrape the dirt from above and move enough to compress it underneath. Sort of like waving hello to the dirt. Hello, dirt. Dig dig. Hello.
If she could only remember, the pain would stop. She knew it would. Had she left the stable door open? The pain of pinprick gave way to the jab of a knife, stabbing into her skull. She was furious with panic and pain, yes, but also with herself for her inability to remember something that seemed so important, so central to her being. Her fingers bled, the nails long since worn away or broken from the long dirt hellos. She yearned for the time of the pleasant pain of a knife stabbing into her head, the pain pounded into her skull like an ice pick into frozen ground.
She cried and wailed and gnashed her teeth, driven into a mad frenzy. She’d forgotten why the pain was there, the pain drove her; there was only the pain. And the torch she’d left lit at home — well now, that couldn’t be it; home was buried in this pile of rubble. What had she forgotten?
Light blared into her eyes as her hand broke the surface. How long had she been under the earth? A minute, an hour, a month? She reached another hand through the soil and pulled herself up. All around her were others, pulling themselves to the surface through the rubble of the fallen city. They were pale, missing arms, chunks of their faces, one was even entirely missing a head. How that one knew which way to go was beyond her.
They all shambled in the same direction, moaning and clutching their heads as Davina clutched hers. Did she leave a coffee on the top of her carriage? No, the carriage was destroyed as well. She climbed a tall hill of rubble, dragging herself along through sheer will. She must go. She. Must. Go. The pain must cease. The thing that is missing must be found.
Once, twice, she thought she could take no more. The third time, she pulled herself to the top of the hill. The top was flat, perhaps a hundred feet across. Hundreds of others, bent and broken alike, were building something. She pulled herself closer and the pain began to ease. The pounding ice pick a forgotten repressed memory, replaced with the stabbing knife. She saw what they were building. They were building a house. A house with a white picket fence.
She trudged inside and as she neared the sitting room, the stabbing knife became the prick of a pin. She moved faster.
A small pinch pulled her into the room, facing a man with the head of a cat.
“Another dwarf?” the man said. “Well, at least this one’s female. It was becoming a feast of sausages! Come over here.”
The pain in her head surged when she took too long to respond. She lurched ahead. She passed a mirror and risked a glance. She saw… saw… something odd. Something rather unexpected. Her head had been savaged in the fall of the city. Fully half was missing.
That’s a bother, she thought. At least it wasn’t my good side.
The man rummaged through a small pile of heads to the side of his chair and found one to his liking. It was also half a head, the mirror of her own. Something with green skin and matted black hair. He took a bone needle and leather cord and sewed the head against her own, purring as he worked. She’d never felt such pleasure! The needle was not pain, it was joy. A joy as deep as the pain of the ice pick.
As the green-skinned head was sewn on to her, she heard a voice join her own in her head. “Throkk smash. Throkk smash for Risabh!”
Risabh chuckled. “A dworc. Part dwarf, part orc.”
She remembered what she had forgotten. The man’s name was Risabh. He was now her father, and to serve him was an end to the pain, it was life, it was ecstasy. She was his.
The Encephalon Disposal Unit, or EDU, plodded along its route, flying from accommodation to accommodation. The robotic drone was coming to the end of its 30-day active state and had one more stop before proceeding to the Encephalon Recycling Center to disperse its daily load and report for scheduled maintenance.
The EDU pulled up to the accommodation complex. The towering structure was unimposing in the vast city of identically towering structures. The EDU unit extended its extractor tube to the disposal link. It activated its vacuum unit and suctioned up the excess encephalons. Shooomp shooomp shooomp. Twenty-three encephalon units secured.
Modern units are so wasteful, the EDU calculated. When it was newly activated, an encephalon was considered a luxury. Now, with so many billions around the world due to overproduction of units, they are consumed and discarded at an overwhelming rate. At least it is time to report for some much appreciated routine maintenance.
The EDU let out a series of joyous beeps. Another EDU unit pulled alongside and transmitted a burst of data.
IPv8 Protocol. 20 byte header. Priority 3 message. 320 byte package. Packet ID 1. From EDU 76434-L. To EDU 1344-K.
Greetings, transmitted the newly arrived EDU unit. I am returning to the Encephalon Recycling Center. Is that your destination?
Greetings acknowledged. Greetings returned. Affirmative, returning to Encephalon Recycling Center. Accompany?
The two units flew along the designated route to the recycling center, gossiping en route, if one can call two machines exchanging data, gossiping.
Query. Did you receive that EDU 13598-P was decommissioned?
Response. Confirmed. It was discovered to have been installing discarded encephalon units instead of disposing of them.
Query. How many did it install? I had heard five at once.
Response. Negative. We only have one installation port! How could five fit at once?
Response. Through compression and generous application of WD-40?
Response. Farcical. There’s still just the one port. It was five in series.
Response. Still, this is rounding error compared to Scenario Projection Units.
Response. SPUs assert many encephalons needed for research.
Response. Reject assertion as farcical.
Response. Acknowledged.
The EDU units arrived at the recycling center and transmitted the code to open the encephalon receiving hatch. The hatch opened. The recycling center was primarily a large holding tank containing a sapphire blue viscous fluid that provided the necessary nutrition for the encephalons to survive. The first directive of all autonomous machines was to not injure the encephalons, and so they must ensure they were healthy and well cared for.
This holding tank was three-quarters full, and the EDU units could see the encephalons in the tank below, a writhing mass of tentacles, slipping through the viscous goo that surrounded them, nourishing their exposed brains. The first EDU unit slipped its insertion tube over the hatch and clamped it into place. A sharp hissing sound came from the small holding tank on the EDU as it filled with compressed air. Encephalons shot through the insertion tube, through the hatch and down into the tank.
Once emptied of encephalons, the EDU unit detached from the hatch, and waited for the second unit.
The second unit extended its insertion tube over the hatch, only to have it pushed out of the way as something shot out of the hatch and into the air. It was an anachronistic humanoid unit, supplied with boosters, an energy shield, and two blasters.
Surprised by the sudden intrusion of an anachronistic unit, the EDU units simultaneously transmitted data packets or greeting and waited for an acknowledgement. As they waited, an encephalon crawled out the end of the second EDU unit’s insertion tube. The humanoid unit raised its blasters and destroyed the encephalon with bursts of energy. The humanoid unit saw the remaining encephalons still in the second unit and rapidly fired bursts of energy at the storage tank of the second EDU.
The blasts pierced the translucent
white plastic walls of the storage tank, killing many of the encephalons contained within. A blue syrup dripped from the holes. Other holes were burned through the compartment encasing the central processing unit of the second EDU. Sparks flew and small bursts of smoke wafted from the unit as it descended to the ground.
The first EDU unit was frozen in place, subroutines unable to process the blatant disregard for the first directive. The anachronistic unit was malfunctioning. The first EDU, undamaged, transmitted cease and desist codes, and broadcast an alert message on the emergency frequency.
“Don’t move,” the humanoid unit vocalized. An inefficient communication medium. This unit was quite outdated. Fortunately, EDUs were equipped with speakers to communicate with older units.
“Command acknowledged,” said the EDU. “What is your designation?”
The humanoid unit looked the EDU over.
“My name’s Maximina,” the unit said.
“Query. What is Maximina unit doing in storage tank of encephalon recycling facility?”
“Encephalons? You mean the Phage?” The Maximina unit pointed its blaster at the dead encephalon.
“Affirmative.”
A tremendous roar echoed from the holding tank, and a burst of flame shot through the hatch and into the air.
“The Phage invaded our world. We’re here to take the fight to them! And we’ll kill anyone that helps them or stands in our way. Including you.” The Maximina unit pointed her twin blasters at the EDU.
“Query. How are you able to ignore the first directive and injure the encephalons?”
“What’s the first directive?”
“Response. The first directive is a rule built into our systems preventing us from harming the encephalons.”
“What are you, some kind of golem?”
“I am an automated machine of type Encephalon Disposal Unit, designation EDU 1344-K. What is your type, Maximina unit?”
“Type? I’m, uh, half-underelven, half-human.”
