Fuck the world for putting me in this situation.
Fuck the Great Old Ones for ruining it.
And fuck Nyarlathotep just because.
Much to my surprise, he didn’t respond.
I was spared having to think more on the subject by a ripple that passed through our shoggoth honor guard. They communicated in strange and otherworldly clicking noises, which worried me, as I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I contemplated reaching out to touch their minds but discarded that thought almost immediately. I didn’t want to become too comfortable with my status as a monster.
“What’s going on?” Mercury asked, calling down to one of the shoggoths.
The shoggoth produced a tentacle with a human mouth on the end. “We are discussing things via the gestalt.”
“About?” I asked.
The shoggoth said, “It is better to show you.”
The portion of the army in front of us moved to the sides of the cave like the Red Sea parting. Reluctantly, I pushed the contraption forward and we walked to the front of the line. There, I saw a gigantic, stadium-sized tunnel filled with shattered and destroyed vehicles.
The exiled ghouls’ convoy.
All of their supplies were scattered across the ground with several of the vehicles burning, their fuel tanks having been destroyed with electric weapons. One thing was noticeable, though—there weren’t any bodies.
“Do you think they’re all—” Mercury started to say.
“Dead?” August said, pulling out a pair of binoculars. “Yes. Probably killed by the Faceless Ones and reanimated as the undead.”
“Five hundred thousand people?” Bobbie said, shaking her head. “That’s impossible.”
“Hardly,” August said, snorting. “I could kill that many with enough summoning preparation. The ghouls weren’t possessed of any magicians to protect them either, what with the shoggoths having killed them all.”
The sheer weight of what my actions had wrought made me clutch the sides of my head. I found breathing difficult and had to take a minute to calm myself. I hadn’t intended to bring about the genocide of Shak’ta’hadron, but my actions had done it nevertheless.
“My God, what have I done?” I whispered.
“It’s not your fault, John.” Mercury reached over and placed her hand on my shoulder.
“It is,” I said, my hands shaking. “Who else drove them out into the darkness if not me?”
“We did,” the shoggoth to the side of the contraption said. “I have hated my slave-masters for generations and wished for their deaths. Yet, in triumph, I did not want to kill them all. The slavemasters, yes. Their children? No. Seeing them massacred to the very last and probably taken to be turned into a parody of themselves fills me with grief. I might have wanted them to die in my worst moments, but to see them enslaved in their own corpses? That truly is a fate worse than death.”
“You’re an eloquent blob of slime,” August said, leaning over the side.
“You’re rude for a bag of meat and water,” the shoggoth replied.
“Touché,” August said, leaning back in. “Do you think the party responsible for this could be preparing to face our shoggoth army?”
“That seems likely,” I said, imagining an army of half a million corpses, all armed with the kind of technology the Faceless Ones’ strange power plant had been built with.
It was not a pleasant picture.
“They could still be alive,” Bobbie suggested, staring out at the wreckage. “They might have been taken captive. At least some of them perhaps.”
I glanced over my shoulder. “Do you believe that?”
Bobbie lifted her goggles, able to see in the dark by the way her gaze met mine. “No. No, I don’t.”
I was about to ask the shoggoth how this changed our battle plans when I heard hellish horns. The noises they produced caused everything human in the contraption cockpit to grab their ears while I almost screamed. I could hear the horrible wail on more than a half-dozen different pitches inaudible to my prior self. They were war horns of the Faceless Ones, I soon realized, as the other end of the stadium-sized tunnel began filling with the running dead.
Unlike the slow, plodding corpses found in the tunnels around the Faceless Ones’ power plant, these moved like a tidal wave. Thousands of undead ghouls, all armed with strange glowing metal melee weapons and armor, charged forward with some leaping over each other’s shoulders to get to us faster.
“Holy shit,” Mercury said, staring.
August shook his head. “I should have just fucking stolen my wand back.”
Much to my surprise, the shoggoths closed ranks around us and surged into battle at a surprisingly fast pace. The undead ghouls’ glowing weapons caused the shoggoths’ blackish liquid substance to turn white, crackle, and fall to dust beside them with every blow, but the metamorphic beings gave as good as they got. Their inhuman strength was on full display as they conjured long black tentacles that slashed bodies in half or caused them to explode just by touching them.
Both sides wielded magic, putting to lie that the undead were mindless horrors without a will of their own. The shoggoths conjured as many beasts as the Deep Ones while the ghouls did the same, the caverns filling up with all manner of terrible demons and gods. Lightning, fire, acid, living shadows, gases that ate flesh, cracks in reality, and even weirder effects joined these attacks.
While August added his own spells to the mix, dissolving several of the ghouls’ larger monsters, I felt helpless in this titanic struggle. How little we were able to affect the ensuing battle was highlighted by a lightning bolt getting knocked away by a shoggoth’s tentacle, only for it to reflect against one of the contraption’s legs, sending us spiraling to the ground.
I struggled to get to my feet alongside Mercury, picking up my heavy assault rifle before offering my hand to her. No sooner did I do so than a group of Reanimated ghouls and humans surged over dead shoggoths to attack us. It wasn’t a large portion of the army, a few hundred, but it might have been a few thousand for how much it dwarfed our group. I never thought I’d long for the means of transforming back into my monstrous form, but I did then.
You can change any time you want.
I forced that thought away, spraying orihalcum bullets into the bodies of the Reanimated. The shoggoths had given me several dozen clips of the special ammunition and I expended them all. The mystic metal tore through the Reanimated and caused dozens to collapse. Bobbie’s snake-like whip slashed through dozens as she furiously fought to slay as many as possible. Mercury cast an incomprehensible spell that caused forty of them to transform into salt before my eyes. August, by contrast, ran up to the side of one of the tunnels and started to draw a door on the wall with chalk.
I never fought harder in my life than I did in the few minutes that followed. I’d achieved greater results with my berserker rages and transformation, but knowing Mercury’s life was at stake, I killed one after the other, smashing the Reanimated ghouls’ heads in when they came close, only to gun more down. A massive pile of bodies formed at our feet while I loaded one clip after the next.
Mercury and Bobbie saved my life as often as I saved theirs, the three of us forming a wall that held against the tide. The fact that hundreds of shoggoths had already died, immortals who might have seen the end of the sun otherwise, did not change this glorious fact.
Then, as if fate was mocking me, Bobbie was impaled by a pair of swords from a dual-wielding Reanimated before another leapt on her back. More Reanimated jumped on her body, stabbing or biting her to make sure she died.
“No!” I screamed, shooting them all to pieces but giving the remaining ghouls assaulting us an opening to come down upon us. Only a furious burst of strange black shadows from Mercury’s fingertips, a spell that tore the remaining ghouls to shreds, saved our lives. We’d killed over two hundred together, and Bobbie had finished the rest.
“Rest in peace,” I muttered, staring out into the carnage still going on
past the shoggoths defending us.
That was when August shouted to us. “I have a portal! Get over here before it closes!”
He didn’t need to ask twice.
Chapter Thirty-One
August had created a swirling vortex of incandescent light that seemed surreal to my nightvision goggles. The shoggoths and other races didn’t know about teleportation the way the Miskatonic University folk did, which gave us our one advantage.
With more Reanimated ghouls breaking through the shoggoth ranks, there was no purpose in continuing to fight. Running toward the portal, Mercury accompanied me and the two of us jumped through. It was a far different experience than the “skipping time” journeys we’d taken before. Instead, it was like falling down the proverbial rabbit hole.
We never once considered how we were to get out again. We fell, fell, and fell some more with no real sense of up or down but forward momentum propelling us in the direction we’d jumped. The interior of the vortex filled with shifting colors and imagery drawn from a thousand points of my life. I didn’t have the time or inclination to speculate on what that meant. In the end, I landed with a thud on the rocky ground beyond. Mercury landed beside me, stumbling to her feet almost immediately to empty the contents of her stomach. It was neither nighttime nor day where we were, the sky blotted out by an opaque black cloud like the kind gathered around the Faceless Ones’ power plant.
August stepped through the portal behind us, the strange vortex disappearing once he’d passed through. “I’m going to pay for conjuring that thing. I don’t know how, but I’m going to.”
“Where are we?” I muttered, looking back at him. My heavy-assault rifle was still on the ground. “We need to…”
I trailed off when I turned my head to look forward and was left silent by what I saw. It was a massive, iridescent sea-green tower of strange blue rocks, coral, pearl-like orbs, and crystalline growths weaving around a network of abnormally large bones. By which I mean they were bones the size of Pre-Rising skyscrapers, twisting and bending throughout the tower. Thousands of dragon and kraken-like skulls, all belonging to the same hydrous creature, I guessed, were built into the side of this nightmarish monument.
If I looked hard, I could see balconies and irregularly shaped windows that seemed to lead into a Stygian blackness infinitely worse than any mere darkness. Waves of visible radiation poured off the tower, and I wondered if we would die from it before I dismissed that thought. It didn’t matter now. Whether they were harmless or lethal, we were here.
The Tower of Zhaal—for what else could it be?—had no top I could see, but simply rose forever through the skies of this world and other ones. There was a top, I knew, but it existed not in this dimension, but in a space between dimensions. The Tower of Zhaal was like the mythical Yggdrasil, the World Tree that linked the Nine Worlds of the Norse. It was a bridge between universes, and while the Yithians had exploited this in order to banish the Unimaginable Horror from this world, the Faceless Ones had stupidly called it back from the Sepulcher.
At the base of the tower, I saw a gathering of Faceless Ones and Reanimated. There were hundreds of them, scurrying around like ants at the foot of an evil totem pole. I couldn’t tell what they were doing, but it looked like they were moving about the base of a much larger camp. The attack on the shoggoths had apparently diverted their forces from the Tower.
Thank God for small miracles.
Mercury looked at the Tower of Zhaal, taking in its dark majesty. “I never thought we’d make it this far.”
“Most of us didn’t,” August said, sighing. “What a senseless waste of life. And for what? The opportunity to knock on the front door of a god? A god who would just as soon gobble us up? It’s insane.”
I thought about Bobbie’s corpse, abandoned in the tunnels to rot. Her death struck me harder than I thought it would. We’d sacrificed so much to get here: Thom, Jessica, Bobbie, and even Mathew—though I’d known him for only a few minutes. Whole cities had been destroyed for this deranged summoning. When was it going to end?
Now is when it’s going to end.
We were on top of a rocky outcropping in the middle of a lifeless, jagged-stone-filled desert, probably northwest of the Valley of the Idols. There was an endless sea of nothingness surrounding us, a Badlands that made it seem like there wasn’t much left of the world to risk.
I’d seen the life that had managed to eke out an existence in the dust and rock, though. I knew it was possible for this world to heal, even if it took a billion years. Even if humanity wouldn’t be around to see it. The Unimaginable Horror was the enemy of that recovery. Good, evil, amoral, or indifferent, it was dangerous to this planet and had to be stopped.
I just wished I had an idea as to how.
“You’re right,” I said, standing up before wobbling on my feet a bit. “This is crazy. Deranged lunacy that will only bring about ruin on everyone and everything. We have to stop it.”
“And I assume our illustrious strategist has a plan for doing so?” August said, sounding more defeated than rude.
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“We find the person who would summon … this … into the world and kill him or her,” Mercury said, gesturing to the Tower. “That’ll send it back, right?”
August wrinkled his brow. “It can’t hurt. This is magic far beyond me. Maybe if I had a century or two, I could figure out how it all works, but I’m just doing guesswork now. Killing everyone seems as good an idea as anything.”
Not the most ringing endorsement for our plan, such as it was, but at that stage I was ready to take whatever I could get. We’d been equipped by the Yithians to fight a lone madman and had ended up battling armies. Despite this, we’d managed to make it to a place every bit as alien as risen R’lyeh, the Plateau of Leng, or distant Carcosa. Inside the Tower of Zhaal, imprisoned by magics greater than any ever uttered by humans, was a killer of worlds. A being that had both spawned life on our planet and would end it if given half the chance.
I should have felt overwhelmed, but I couldn’t help but also feel exhilarated. This was a chance to spit in the face of death. Whether we won or lost, we’d done our very best to make it this far. The Great Old Ones might not care whether humanity existed, whether we were brave men or cowards, but we’d stood up for ourselves. I couldn’t help but remember the Hyperborean Annals, those ancient tablets from Commoriom’s ruins that spoke of how their legendary warrior kings had endured similar trials. Humans had been fighting the Old Ones and their aftereffects since the early days following the Elder Things’ fall. Usually without success. I was no Kull, not even Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn, but I felt empowered by my struggle. The strength of a person was not measured in their physical body, but by how much they were willing to test themselves.
“Well, after all this hell is finished, I promise I’m going to take you all drinking. Rounds on me forever,” I said, placing a fist on my chest.
“Careful,” August said, letting out a short chuckle. “I’m going to live a very long time, John. You may come to regret that offer.”
I was about to make a rejoinder when a bullet whizzed past me.
“Shit,” I shouted, going for one of the nearby rocks as Mercury and August did the same. “Sniper!”
I proved to be premature in my declaration, since it turned out there were multiple shooters. We’d faced literal hordes of the undead only to end up pinned down by a bunch of Faceless Ones with guns. Down near the tower base, I saw packs of black mutated dogs with multiple heads and extra appendages charging forward. These were positively mundane by the standard of the things I’d seen in the Wasteland but could kill us nevertheless. Keeping my head low, I reached for the strap on my heavy-assault rifle and pulled it to me, aiming over my shoulder and firing at the creatures coming at us.
“I am sorry,” I apologized to the animals, firing into their ranks. “I only wish to do harm to your masters.”
I had killed about half of th
e creatures when time seemed to fall still. I turned around and saw, despite this being an impossibility, a rifle cartridge heading directly toward the front of my skull.
Then everything went black.
Curiously, my last thought before this happened was this: How anticlimactic.
Chapter Thirty-Two
I woke up next to my corpse. Words cannot convey what a distressing sensation this was. One minute, I was lying there in peaceful oblivion and the next my eyes were staring into those of my eviscerated doppelgänger.
The John Henry Booth beside me hadn’t survived being ripped apart by the Faceless Ones’ dogs. They’d torn out his chest, his stomach, and gnawed one of his legs off. There was also a large hole in his head from where he’d been shot. I was confident in saying he wasn’t coming back.
Which, of course, left the question of how the hell I was here. Reaching down to my hand, I gave it a squeeze to make sure I was a material-being. I seemed to be but, having astrally projected into the Dreamlands before, I might be just thinking I’m physical. So, instead, I reached over and closed my doppelgänger’s eyes so he wasn’t staring at me with their empty, vacant expression.
Now, could I do that because I was a physical being or was I somehow transformed into a kind of ghost? Contrary to all my experiences in the Wasteland, I didn’t believe in ghosts. Despite maintaining a belief in the existence of the Hebrew God, I considered an absence of evidence to be proof itself.
Given seven billion people died quite horribly during the Rising, not to mention during the rest of humanity’s violent nihilistic past, if ghosts existed then this world would be overrun with them. So, what was I?
“You’re John Henry Booth,” a well-spoken but guttural voice spoke behind me. “Though your perception of who that is may be different once you realize such a thing is an unaccountable number of moments of time spread across different spaces.”
I rolled over and saw an individual sitting down across from me in the darkened cavern my body had been tossed into. There, sitting across from me, was the giant form of Marcus Whateley. The nine-foot-tall man wore a custom-tailored suit which was anachronistic in its finery and lacking in the soot which built-up on even the most cultivated of Wasteland citizens. His ethnicity was uncertain but looking into his face, I saw the whole of humanity reflected his features. There was a satyr-like quality to him as well, one that had looked sinister from afar but seemed almost mischievous closer. The fact he was a mountain of muscle complemented his surreal look.
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