The Watchman erupted in a brilliant white light that ballooned outward in a sizzling orb of holy energy. It lifted and hung in the air momentarily, and then imploded with a sonic boom, throwing an energy wave and knocking the demon usurper prone.
She lay there, wracked with pain—Dekker was gone. The Watchman had fled this corrupt dimension under divine authority, joined to the godlike power of the divine engine.
Dione mustered every ounce of hatred in her heart and staggered to her feet. Walking like a drunkard she stumbled to her hidden speeder and managed to pilot it to the arbolean craft buried below the sands. Her legs barely functioned, as if she’d never used them before, she absentmindedly swatted a scarab as it lodged itself within a crook of her gnarled spine. Dione crushed the arbophage beetle and pushed ahead.
She stumbled forward, borne on the urgent wings of panic. Dione knew the consequences of delay—she knew what the reliquary’s power could do; as a former part of the divine machine, she understood the chain reaction that had been unleashed.
A craggy maw vibrated ahead of her. The Earth shook in her death throes as the demon crawled down through the opening, into the tunnel she’d discovered so long ago, before she was Dione, before Prognon Austicon—when she—he was still but a zealous human archaeologist. The residual memory clung to her like stink and she collapsed into the great arbolean ship where fragments of her former life still remained tied by strands of cosmic red silk.
The arbolean part of her intuitively understood the craft’s operation: the system’s programming language communicated via her alien genetic code. At the edge of her strength she programmed the coordinates and activated the machine.
Breaking beyond the crust, the damaged craft rose above the planetary surface, even as Earth’s tectonic plates splintered and crumbled. The surface roiled and bucked as the vessel broke orbit, leaving the damaged planet to her demise.
Dione lived only for her hate, and there were few now who she could poison with her vexation. But she could feel the notion sustaining her as she slipped beyond consciousness.
***
Dione’s alien body slept, but her malevolent baal-spirit was momentarily plunged into the outer darkness. The screams from the demon fell dead within her own ears. Nowhere to go in the nether void.
She saw all, felt all, was one with the destruction and the chaos. Her reality, the fractured timeline fell through the emptiness, disintegrating as reality fell apart, unknitting in the wake of the Divine’s grand withdrawal.
For the first time since that fleeting moment after she and her brother djinn joined the rebellion against the great engine’s presence, she felt abject terror: that kind of reverential horror that consumes the very soul. It shook her with its violence and coagulated, refined itself into steel resolve: a condensed strain of virulent hatred that drew her back inside herself—sustained the arbolean body where it lay upon the damaged starship.
Dione stood to her feet. Her hatred had put her back together and it pulsed stronger than ever before. The baal, borne on the wings of an ancient, interstellar craft kept one step ahead of the rapidly unraveling continuum.
***
The ancient Arbolean transport arrived in orbit over Rico. Her red glow had only slightly lessened with the absence of her dimmest red sun, the dwarf: a victim of DNIET harvest. Dione’s arbolean body had not recovered much in the time it took the ship to arrive.
Dione piloted the damaged ship to the doomed planet’s surface. Ancient reverse thrusters barely fired and the ship careened through the atmosphere at unsafe speeds. Dione scanned the sickly planet during her haphazard descent.
The patches of eggplant black which normally covered the landscape wore a diseased, olive hue instead. Dione’s plan had worked perfectly; the arbophage scarabs chewed through the planet with their voracious appetite at an appalling speed.
Crashing through the decaying vegetation, Dione’s ship plowed into a crevasse and finally ended its journey, returning to where it had all begun. Baal Dione crawled from the broken vessel and began the shambling trek to her target.
The creature of wrath had so little left to hate in this collapsing galaxy. With nothing left to fight, her purpose would cease, though she didn’t intend to expire until all existence did.
Even as she staggered towards her targets, she could feel the deterioration of reality; feel the disintegration of actuality all around her. Until that last second, her foes would feel the grip of her hatred.
She could also feel her body changing, continue to evolve, becoming more arbolean as she walked closer to the circle of the Verdant Seven. Dione walked into the ring of royal trees, those ones which had evolved ahead of their peers. One tree, their chief, still proudly brandished his red leaves towards the sky despite the patchy blight of arbophage wounds; the green leafed sisters stood silent; Dione could feel their terror, bathed in it.
Dione felt the buzzing of the air on the planet, the distinct whine of the scarabs. The end would come soon, either from the cosmic conflagration or the consumption of their lignins—what passed for arbolean flesh.
Standing in the center of the ring, Dione gloated over their hastened death. None of the drone protectors had survived the arbophage plague. The beetles were drawn in particular to the spore producing cranial spires—the softest and sweetest of the lignin material.
The demon walked to her floric parent: the withered tree. She grabbed the axe lodged in her parent’s trunk and yanked the tool free. Then, she swung the axe relentlessly, repeatedly, toppling the decaying sire.
Dione chopped down the five green-leafed sisters next. With one final swing she lodged the bladed edge into the base of the red-leafed leader. Dione’s feet festered with sudden growth while in the ring; pustules screamed for soil and she drove her appendages into the dirt at the base of the red unit. Her arbolean flesh reached out in thorny tendrils, wrapping around the leader’s roots like a weed, choking it, coiling around them.
The demon poured all her malice and wicked thoughts into them, shooting their poison into her enemy in a way that only the tree people could understand. A cloud of scarabs buzzed on the horizon and the sky darkened—one of the red suns faltered as the universe continued to fall apart. The foggy veil of beetles blotted out the dying vermillion light. For this reality, at least, this was the end.
A prequel/sequel adventure (Dekker’s Dozen #000A) is available for free download as an ebook! Go online to your favorite bookseller and search for Dekker’s Dozen: A Waxing Arbolean Moon!
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Christopher D Schmitz
About the author:
Christopher D. Schmitz is the traditionally published and self-published author of both fiction and nonfiction. When he is not writing or working with teenagers he might be found at comic conventions as a panelist or guest. He has been featured on cable access television broadcasts, metro area podcasts, and runs a blog for indie authors.
Always interested in stories, media such as comic books, movies, 80s cartoons, and books called to him at a young age—especially sci-fi and fantasy. He lives in rural Minnesota with his family where he drinks unsafe amounts of coffee. The caffeine shakes keeps the cold from killing them.
Schmitz also holds a Master’s Degree in Religion and freelances for local newspapers. He is available for speaking
engagements, interviews, etc. via the contact form and links on his website or via social media.
Discover other titles by Christopher D Schmitz
The Last Black Eye of Antigo Vale
Burning the God of Thunder
Piano of the Damned
Shadows of a Superhero
The TGSPGoSSP 2-Part Trilogy
Dekker’s Dozen: A Waxing Arbolean Moon
Dekker’s Dozen: The Last Watchmen
Dekker’s Dozen: Weeds of Eden
Wolf of the Tesseract
Wolves of the Tesseract: Taking of the Prime
Wolves of the Tesseract: Through the Darque Gates of Koth
Warrior: Gift of Sight
The Kakos Realm: Grinden Proselyte
The Kakos Realm: Rise of the Dragon Impervious
The Kakos Realm: Death Upon the Fields of Splendor
The Kakos Realm Collection Alpha
Anthologies No.1
Why Your Pastor Left
John In the John
Gospels In the John
The Indie Author’s Bible
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