by Logan Jacobs
I debated whether I should run into the smoke and see if an exit presented itself before I reached the flames or asphyxiated, or attempt to take on at least two dozen Thorvinians and maybe more single handedly. I didn’t want to leave, because this route looked promising and I thought there was a good chance I might be getting close to the shrine.
But then, one of my other two selves reached a chamber that was distinctly familiar. I recognized the position of a staircase in relation to a stone door and realized that I was only about a hundred feet away from the giant chamber with the shackles. I immediately recalled my other two selves from elsewhere in the fortress and sent them out again alongside me.
We clambered through a few more passageways and up and down a few more sets of stairs that were all much easier to navigate when not surrounded by a crew of chained-up, distraught Eukalonians that kept tripping all over themselves and each other.
Then, we reached a stone door that hadn’t been there when I passed that way as a prisoner. That is, it had been there, but it had been positioned off to the side, and now it was rolled into place to seal the passageway completely. All three of me pushed on it with all my might, and I couldn’t feel even the slightest trace of the potential for an inch of give, which was as I would have expected. The thing was massive and clearly not built for three men or even six men to move alone and without some kind of specialized equipment that I guessed they probably had to use for the task.
It was more than six feet in diameter. However, from having seen it and passed by it before, I knew that it was only about three or four feet deep. So, I reassimilated one of my selves and reappeared on the opposite side of the door. Then I reassimilated my other two selves into that self and sent them both back out again. I preferred not to use that trick since it necessarily left me weaponless, but it was still a convenient way of bypassing barriers that I couldn’t overcome physically.
I ran down one more tunnel side by side with my selves and burst into the huge hall where the Eukalonian prisoners had awaited their fates. The rows of shackles along both sides were empty now, but about twenty Thorvinians were formed up in front of the door to the shrine, weapons leveled at the entrance I had just come through. I don’t know if the Thorvinians had been expecting me exactly, but they certainly must have recognized that it was a possibility the altar would come under threat to have stationed guards there.
I’d encountered greater numbers of Thorvinians in the past, of course, while accompanied by one or more allies, and as far as the numbers went, I didn’t think I was facing too bad of odds here. However, these didn’t look like twenty random Thorvinians. They were all mutant super powered killing machines, of course, but these particular twenty looked even more lethal than the rest. Through my experiences fighting them, I had found that the biggest and the strongest Thorvinians weren’t necessarily the hardest to beat, although they could be. It was more about the ones whose bizarre anatomy made some kind of perverse sense and gave them the maximum physical coordination and agility. And of course the ones who had naturally inbuilt weaponry like the scorpion type that had almost taken out Elodette.
Well, from what I could tell at a glance, this was a roomful of those elite types.
None of me had weapons, so as a gator type that however stood upright on a humanoid body tried to snap one of my selves’ heads off with his massive chomping jaws, I did the only thing I could think of to protect my self, which was to jam my entire forearm between his jaws vertically with my fist clenched against the roof of his mouth, and my elbow planted on his tongue so that he wouldn’t be able to close them. The pressure was immense, and I knew that if my arm slipped even slightly from a vertical axis, it would be game over, but that defensive move gave another of my selves the chance to obtain someone else’s sword, hack that Thorvinian’s hand off, and hand my gator-trapped self the severed hand. It was a thick hand with a texture like tree bark, and the wrist was a gory stump. I stuffed it down the gator’s forcibly open mouth and punched it down his throat as far as I could before yanking my arms clear. The Thorvinian that had almost bitten my head off fell to the ground with his eyes and veins bulging and ruptured blood vessels causing dark splotches to appear across his skin as he choked to death.
Another of my selves that hadn’t obtained a weapon yet got forced up against the wall by a lean, sinewy, silver-skinned humanoid that seemed to have an unnatural degree of joint mobility to the point where she could rotate her twin blades virtually three-hundred-and-sixty degrees from any position. That was why, the first time the dual-wielder brought a blade toward my chest, I didn’t dodge fast enough, because I was confused by the fact that the blade was extending away from me and she hadn’t switched her grip. So I tried to grab her wrist with the thought that I could easily wrest the sword away from her. Then the blade swiveled toward me without her having to flip her grip, and I moved, fast enough to avoid a chest wound, but not fast enough to avoid getting stabbed through the arm instead.
This metallic-skinned, bald-headed humanoid was exceptionally fast, but that was partly because she was so much lighter than most of the Thorvinians, so when I kneed her in the crotch and then kicked her in the stomach, she went flying a good five feet backward. She still had one of her blades, but the other remained implanted in my arm. Luckily it was my left arm, so even though that arm was useless when I yanked the sword out of it, I still had my dominant arm to wield with.
The Thorvinian somersaulted back onto her feet to confront me again. In some ways her appearance was sort of mechanical, with the silver skin, the bald head, and the weirdly flexible joints, but the way she snarled as she fought was animalistic just like the other Thorvinians. Her eyes were black and full of mindless hatred.
I feinted low with my sword, the sword I had taken from her that is, and then went high for her chest, but she seemed to have read the movement beforehand and leaned back out of the way while already bringing her own sword around in a potentially head-severing arc, which forced me to duck.
I thought I saw an opening for a thigh slash, but my blade never made contact. Instead of blocking or sidestepping, she leapt above my sword and tucked her knees up almost to her chest. She was already extending her blade again as she landed in a crouch, and I was the one who had to sidestep since I lacked her acrobatic abilities.
“Never met a Thorvinian who was as much of a showoff as you,” I yelled as I tried to stab her eye out.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied as she rotated her neck at a horrific angle that shouldn’t have been physically possible to avoid my blade, instead of parrying it.
“So do you still have a sense of humor, or did Thorvinius suck that out of you along with your basic human decency when he transfigured you?” I asked and winced as her counter strike grazed my side.
“I don’t know what your definition of basic human decency, or of human, is, but Thorvinius didn’t take anything away from me,” the creepy bald metallic woman said and hissed with frustration as I forced her blade aside. She was a little faster than me, but I was significantly stronger, and whenever our two blades met, she was always the one who ended up having to give ground. “I’m not like one of those blubbering captives that get dragged in here when he wants more bodies fast. I became his follower of my own free will, and I have been rewarded with more power than I ever imagined possible.”
“Power to do what?” I asked as I slashed at her with frenzied frustration. “Slaughter innocents? Lurk around in these caves? Worship a god to whom you are nothing but fodder for his war games?”
She skipped lightly out of the range of my furious blows but didn’t make any serious attempt to return them, as if she were just waiting for me to calm down or get tired. “Power to indulge all my instincts without judgment or restraint. Power to make all weaker creatures tremble before me. Power to cull all useless creatures from the earth.”
She raised her sword with a gleam in her black eyes and rotated it toward me. Then, my spear
burst through her belly and stopped just an inch short of skewering me, too.
“Damn I almost did something really dumb,” I confessed to my dying opponent as she gasped in shock. My other self that had impaled her with the spear whirled around to block someone else’s downward sword swing, but I waited for a few more moments to hear her last words. It was only polite, and I thought she might provide useful information about her master.
“Thorvinius will destroy you,” she declared as the blood bubbled from her lips and ran from her nose. “This is only the second of his bases, his high temple is ten times stronger. And he knows the law of nature. Might makes right. No one can stop us. My vengeance… is… assured.”
“That’s just typical villain shit,” I scoffed as I grabbed the other sword from her limp dead hand. “If you can’t say something interesting, it’s better not to say anything at all.”
Then again, if she’d really meant “ten times stronger” in a literal and precise sense and not just as hyperbole, I guess that wasn’t zero information. There was no time to consider that now, though. After sending out fresh body with two working arms, I had two swords in hand and more Thorvinians left to kill.
My other selves had already dealt with most of them, which had been more straightforward than with the bendy Thorvinian volunteer. My most prominent kill was of a huge armored reptilian creature that lay sprawled in the middle of the hall like a small mountain.
I engaged with a two-headed humanoid that was almost as fast as the silver-skinned lady, and even stronger than I was, and wielded an axe in each hand. He got me backed up against the huge armored corpse, so I leapt on top of it in order to slash at him from above. Then I had to jump to avoid getting my feet sliced off and almost slipped off the dead creature’s reptilian scales, and while I was recovering my balance the two-headed Thorvinian managed to climb up next to me, so we ended up dueling our way along the entire spine. We were pretty evenly matched as swordsmen, but then the Thorvinian swung his axe a little too hard, and when it failed to connect with me, the momentum sent him toppling off the corpse. I jumped off on top of him and stabbed one of the heads through the middle of the face. The other that I hadn’t gotten to yet sunk its teeth into my hand, which was fucking disgusting, so after I had stabbed it through the middle of the face too to restore the Thorvinian’s physical symmetry, I reassimilated and replaced my self before the bite marks could start to fester.
Meanwhile, the last surviving Thorvinian, which my other two selves were fighting, carved a deep gash from one of my necks down to my groin with his bear claws. The majority of my organs were compromised, and a substantial portion of them slopped out onto the floor, so I died within seconds. My other self backed the Thorvinian against the wall by dueling him daggers against claws. Then I sent out an unarmed replacement for the recently deceased self behind the Thorvinian’s back, and my first act in that body was to grab a set of the shackles that were bolted into the wall and loop them around the clawed Thorvinian’s thick neck. Then, both of me pulled on the shackles with all our might until the Thorvinian’s windpipe had been crushed, and the chains started shredding his leathery skin. Then his heavy corpse just hung there by the neck in a sort of gruesome homage to all the prisoners who had occupied those shackles before him.
With no one left to stop me, all three of me picked up hammers and axes and charged into the smaller chamber that contained Thorvinius’ shrine.
One of me hacked apart the grinning ape statue with all the extra arms, while two of me focused my efforts on dismantling the altar which was made of wood reinforced by steel. I was stunned when the altar broke apart and I saw what was inside. A giant crystal ball that I could barely have encircled with my arms, filled with an eerily radiant green substance that reminded me of the flashes of light that had flared up during the transfiguration rites. I guessed that the substance must be some sort of kerinyet-based potion, in a mass dosage that by some kind of divine means Thorvinius must have been transmitting to his slaves continuously.
I raised a heavy Thorvinian axe above my head in both hands and then I brought it down squarely in the center of the fluid-filled glass orb.
The orb shattered.
The kerinyet spilled out and emitted a horrible brimstone smell, and I all jumped back to avoid coming into contact with the spreading pool. I had no desire to go to the effort of penetrating Thorvinius’ fortress and destroying the core of its power, only to turn myselves into his three newest mutant slaves accidentally.
Inside that little chamber, which was at the back of the now corpse-filled great hall that was sealed by the stone door, nothing changed. Everything remained still and quiet. I was the only living soul there.
But outside Thorvinius’ front gates, where my Polliver-wielding self mounted on Fury was still in the thick of battle alongside Lizzy, Elodette, and the priests and vestals, everything changed.
Our opponents, who had continued pouring out of the doors in never-ending waves every time we managed to kill most of the ones on the field, suddenly started shriveling. At least that was what it looked like at first. The horns and tusks retracted. The fur and leathery or scaled or warty or toxically colored skin sloughed off to reveal normal human shades of white, black, and brown. Musculature contracted back to a human scale. There were no more tentacles or pincers or stingers in sight, except for the bloody severed remnants that were strewn on the ground.
And the expression in the Thorvinians’ newly humanized eyes changed completely from one of murderous bloodlust to a range of reactions like fear and bewilderment and horror.
They backed away from us, and some of them dropped their weapons and put their hands up in surrender. There were two that kept fighting with even more desperate rage than before, and I guessed that they must have been volunteers of a similar mindset to the agile silver-skinned lady inside the fortress, but they no longer had the superhuman physical traits to inflict the kind of damage they wanted to, and Lizzy casually sliced off one’s head while Elodette caved in the other’s skull. In the sudden stillness that followed, some of the Thorvinians started whimpering and sobbing.
“Please don’t hurt us,” begged a young girl, quite unnecessarily. My followers weren’t Thorvinians, and they weren’t out to slaughter the helpless, which is exactly what these formerly monstrous warriors had suddenly become. The priests and vestals were just gaping open-mouthed and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened and whether they had dreamt the whole thing.
“What have we done?” one frail elderly man choked out. If I recalled correctly, he had been a ferocious gargoyle just a minute ago.
“It wasn’t you, it was Thorvinius,” I said.
“We lost our minds,” a woman said. “We weren’t ourselves.”
“Emily?” gasped a nearby man. “Emily… from the village of Talmoril?”
She stared at him and then after a moment she exclaimed, “Sean!” and the two embraced like old friends. A minute ago, a hug from either one of them would have inflicted lethal injuries.
“I don’t even remember where I’m from,” another man said. “I think I lived in a village once, but I don’t know where. I don’t even know my own name or if I had a family.”
“I bet your memory will come back,” I said, “but either way, you can have a home with my order if you want it. You are not our enemies anymore. None of you are, except those who chose to serve Thorvinius voluntarily. As for the rest of you, you are free to return to your homes, wherever they may be, and if you need help to get there, we’ll help you in any way we can.”
“And if you wish to stay, you can help us finish what we started here today,” Gavin said. The priest was so heavily blood-spattered at this point so that I couldn’t even see his distinctive eyebrows or jawline but I recognized him easily by his confident voice. “You can join us and help us destroy the monster that erased your identities and stole your lives. You can stop being The Devourer’s victims and become the agents of his downfall.”
“That way you can regain your honor,” Elodette said.
“Plus killing Thorvinians is lots of fun,” Lizzy added cheerfully. The sunlight glittered on her chainmail and drew attention to her even more dazzling curves exposed beneath the metal. “I mean… not you guys. Well yeah, you guys, but like, how you were before, you know what I mean. I ain’t gonna harm a hair on your heads now so stop looking at me like that!”
“You’re welcome to join if you want, but you don’t owe me anything,” I said. “You’re free to go on with your lives however you see fit.”
“What if I don’t know how to be human anymore?” a man asked sadly.
“Most humans are pathetic, why would you want to be one anyway?” Elodette asked. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the fierce warrior was actually trying to be nice that time.
At that point, my three selves that had been inside the fortress emerged from one of the doors. It hadn’t taken me long to sprint back now that I knew the way, and there were no homicidal maniacs to avoid in the hallways. Just a lot of disoriented and distressed humans clinging together in groups and gradually wandering outdoors, or sometimes huddling alone in corners first and taking the time to try to adjust back to their old bodies and identities. I just yelled at everyone I passed, “You’re safe now! Meet us outside!” and hoped they would pass the word.
“We won’t harm you as long as you don’t try to harm any of us,” I added. “We’ll do our best to take care of you and get you all back on your feet.”
The former Thorvinians stared around at my four identical selves. The world probably already didn’t make much sense at all to them at the moment, and the sight of all of me minus the one back at camp probably added further to their confusion.