The first full on, blood spurting, body twitching, honest to god beheading happened right in front of him, as West wielded what looked like a femur which had been flayed and snapped off in jagged line. David had felt his stomach twist, and he wondered if he vomited in the hopper, would he actually vomit out in the real world. He managed to keep himself together though, at least until he watched another fighter ram the head of what could have been a dog, or perhaps a wolf onto the still writhing body of a man. Sickeningly, the wretched animal picked itself up off the ground seconds later, teeth all pearly white and red all over.
The rolling hills and forests surrounding the north of the city were filled with such monstrosities, lurching and ambling half humans, co joined with whatever beast of the air, land, or water had been unlucky enough to be close at hand when a body part was lost. Men and women, sprinting into battle with their torsos melded and woven into primordial terrors, the likes of which David could never have feared to be even remotely possible.
Where no tree limb, body part, or farming implement could be found to be put to use as a weapon, hands and teeth won out, and David closed his mind to the sights and sounds of West tearing at the throats of his enemies. It seemed inadequate to simply fillet or disembowel an enemy, because such wounds were too easily closed up, wrapped with care, the victim sent back into action by their delvers.
When he could bear no more, David willed for the whole thing to stop, and as abruptly as that, everything vanished from view.
After three laps of the empty apartment, panic stealing over him a little, it finally occurred to David that he was still under the thrall of the hopper. He waved his hand in front of his face, trying to grab hold of the material which he knew must be covering him, but he couldn’t feel it.
“Hello? Hey guys, I’m kind of stuck here.” No response.
He thought about his body, concentrated on the weight of his limbs, and tried lifting his hand again, “Seriously, can anyone hear me?” He cursed himself, sure that there must be some simple knack that he wasn’t getting. He imagined clicking his heels together, reciting the incantation to himself, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, no place … Suddenly he was plunged into darkness, and he felt the soft fabric fall from his face. Through half closed eyelids, he could make out that Stanwick was standing in front of him, leaning with one hand against the wall. She shook his shoulder firmly, “Dorothy. Dorothy, dear, It’s Stanwick. Did you sleep well?”
Blearily, David sneered a crooked smile, “No. No I did not. It was a fucking nightmare. I just watched thousands of people slaughtered mercilessly, and you were there,” he glanced towards West, “and you were there.”
West mused, “Do you understand what we’re capable of now? What you’re capable of?”
“Oh sure. You’re monsters.” David pushed off from the wall, forgetting about the metal brace behind his neck, which Stanwick rushed to catch. Jumping out of the way, David touched the wall to steady himself, and for an instant, shivers ran through his body, flashes of Charlene’s emotional state gripping him.
He felt awkward, like a child realizing that they finished an exam before everyone else, wondering if they’d maybe missed something. He looked guiltily at the jumble of cloth and metal in Stanwick’s hands, worrying that perhaps the experience was wasted on him. He tried again to interpret what he’d seen, “I don’t really know how else to say it. I’d love to say that it looked like you all were battling against those monstrosities, but in all honesty, there were freaks everywhere.”
Stanwick started laughing as she wrapped the cloth about the metal, placing it carefully on the floor, “That’s what you got from all of that?”
David shrugged, “I mean, my overwhelming impression? My take home was kind of that, yeah.”
Stanwick looked at West, then at David. She touched David’s arm, felt his turmoil, heard his internal monologue rambling on in embarrassment. She smiled sympathetically, “You’re not wrong David. I mean, not completely wrong anyway. There’s a lot of mythology that has sprung from our existence, racial memories of our presence, sightings of Leechborn in different states of unraveling hunger.”
West lay back down on the floor, staring at the ceiling, “Our abilities know few bounds. What you’ve seen David, you haven’t witnessed the worst of us, or the best, but I’m sure you can start to appreciate what might be possible.”
Stanwick took hold of David’s hands, playfully swinging them from side to side. She could feel it in him, David’s mind flashing briefly to the lurching half humans, “You saw the beasts of the Mythologue David, and I know the dark corner your imagination is shuffling towards, but there’s so much more.”
David shook his hands free of Stanwick’s grip, “You know, perhaps you should lead with the ‘best of.’ A couple of minutes ago, I was standing knee deep in bodies, watching men and women literally trying to eat each other alive, and I’ve gotta say, that doesn’t really instill me with feelings of warmth, or hope. I feel lost. I mean, I feel a little desperate right now. It might just be that this has been a really long day. It’s a lot to take in.”
Stanwick put a hand on his shoulder, and pulling him closer she kissed his cheek, lips soft, breath warm, “Go get some sleep. You can try it again in the morning.” David blinked slowly, his mouth open, then he walked unsteadily towards the bedroom where Stephanie lay sleeping. He scooped Stephanie up in his arm, and let himself out of the apartment without looking back.
Charlene crawled along the ceiling reliefs of the corridor, dropping to the floor beside Stanwick and Ahken, pushing savagely through groups of Dannustine guards, bones snapping, blood spraying as faces were mashed into masonry, elbows, or knees. She looked behind and realized that most of these men were up on their feet within moments, but the passageway had become so full of Leechborn that every surface seemed to undulate and sway with the motion of the Leechborn fighters, and she couldn’t imagine that any of the guards would survive.
Ahead in the darkness, everything had come suddenly to a standstill, Stanwick and Ahken rooted to the stone floor facing the hulking forms of fifty or more guards, their backs bent, arms hanging down low, legs ready to spring forwards in attack. Overhead, a flood of civilian fighters clambered across the ceiling and walls, each of them clawing at the carvings, launching forward in perfectly executed bounds. Hundreds, then thousands followed, with muscles pulsing, limbs thrashing in machine like determination, now keeping pace with West, Stanwick and Ahken who had begun their advance. Stanwick and West broke into a run, heads tucked towards their chests, the shuffling, grasping noises of the army building overhead to a thunderous roar. With West almost within pouncing distance of them, the guards calmly stood, turned about face, and retreated into the darkness, then all of a sudden they dropped from view.
There was nowhere left to run. The floor of the corridor dropped off only a few feet in front of Stanwick, opening into an expansive bowl shaped room. Seeing the peril they headed towards, West lurched forwards trying to catch the backs of Stanwick and Ahken’s clothes, but they were moving too quickly and all three slid down the sharp incline of the curved inner wall, where an army of thousands awaited their arrival. At first Charlene felt a terror of claustrophobia, the guards rearing up inches from her face, but rather than attacking, this front line of guards fell backwards, pushing against their comrades desperately.
The army of civilian fighters who had been following at a cautious distance now started to pour into the massive room, many of them leaping down into the fray, quickly tackling the guards to the floor. Overhead an army of hundreds clambered hand over hand, still clinging to ornate carvings which covered the entire expanse of the room’s ceiling. When they reached the apex of the room, these combatants started to drop from the ceiling, each of them falling with frightening speed directly onto members of the opposing force.
Charlene soared above the crowds and all about her people fought to the death, tearing at each other’s limbs, bl
ood drenched bodies falling to the ground. Detached from West’s perspective, she watched as he and Stanwick cut a swath in front of Ahken, neither one of them deterred by their enemy’s efforts. At the far end of the room, about 100 feet away, she could see a small archway which a group of guards appeared to be huddling about, adopting a protective formation. Before they managed to organize themselves properly, West had marshaled a group of fighters on their position, and had joined them in the act of decimating the guard’s ranks.
Charlene struggled against her instinct, which was to labor over ever detail of the fight; examine every cut and gash in slow motion, watch the rippling skin spill red as the delvers labored to mend their machines of war. She watched West, Stanwick and Ahken lead the charge deeper into the halls of the palace, but the big picture became less and less interesting to her. She was aware. They ran through narrower tunnels, the army followed, and Charlene explored a riotous sky of billowing fabrics, or else her eyes looped slowly about the hills and valleys of pulsing, thrumming muscles. Gradually corralled, the passageways became too close for them to run even two abreast, and Charlene reveled in the proximity, the chaos and calamity of confined limbs.
She had realized that for some time the tunnels had pushed ever deeper into the building, burrowing underground, and when the floor finally leveled off and the ornamentation of the walls gave way to flat seamless slabs, Charlene recognized the smooth surface of glardium that now surrounded them. The moment West’s arms pressed against the cool glittering rills, a surge of babbling and incoherent voices overwhelmed Charlene’s mind. She could hear the fear, taste it on the air, the panic of a thousand souls laid bare, every body tense, sharply aware that their king was close, that he could glean each dark and treacherous thought.
Stanwick took hold of West’s hand, pulling him faster, towards the narrow space ahead, falling through a small doorway. The opening swept into a sprawling space, lit here and there by bright shafts of light cast from deep recesses in the distant roof. Ahead and to either side, there was no discernible end to the space, the floor simply disappearing into a distance engulfed in foreboding blackness. As crowds poured in from the passageway behind, Charlene moved deeper into the space and she became quickly lost in a bewildering clutter.
At first, it looked to Charlene as if the cavern might function as some sort of living quarters. Everywhere she looked, the place was littered with an accumulation of hectic and disorganized objects, as if someone with a profound hording complex had been set free with an unlimited budget and a remit to fill an apparently endless space. Gradually, Charlene started to see a sort of order within the chaos; there was a large bed surrounded by soft furnishings that looked almost inviting and this arrangement was enclosed by several rows of bookshelves which were stacked with an assortment of paraphernalia. In the area to the right stood an army of manikins, each of them clothed in varying styles of Armour and everyday dress, some of them clad in smooth plated metal, others with soft flowing fabrics or animal hides.
To her left, Charlene watched as Ahken walked by the side of a large pool of water, Stanwick always staying fairly close by him. The further Charlene followed them into the space, the more it confounded expectations. There were sculptures and paintings huddled together, strewn amongst disregarded piles of parchments and books on the hard floor. Seating areas bore the signs of heavy wear but had lay abandoned for long enough to have attracted and then been abandoned by enough spiders to be left completely blanketed in cobwebs. Clothes, which Charlene thought must have been ceremonial in function, heavily embroidered and decorative lay folded on tables or simply scattered on the floor amongst the rest of the detritus and decay.
A voice echoed from out of the darkness ahead; cold, harsh and definitely that of a man. It spoke in a mocking tone of a lack of empathy for the scope of human existence and Charlene saw that everyone about her turned their heads frantically, looking for the source of the voice. This was what they had come for; this was the confrontation that they had sought. She felt West’s hatred boiling in her mind, the voice calling out, mocking them. As Stanwick pressed tentatively closer to Ahken, there was a soft clanging noise, and a faint glimmer of light broke the darkness of the cavernous void ahead of them. The glimmer quickly became a shining streak of light which came shrieking directly towards Charlene, a large disk, screaming metal scraping and crashing through the detritus around her, the spinning blade passing directly through the space she occupied. She turned in time to see a decapitated body drop to the floor behind her.
The voice spoke again but Charlene was caught off guard, confused, realizing with a profound fear that the confusion she felt was West’s. The voice spoke directly to her, in a tongue that West had clearly not understood at the time, “Child of the void garden, time will not bring you succor or security. My reign is infinite and my contempt will know no temperance. I am the light at the beginning of your universe, and the darkness that consumes as the worlds drift into my farthest reaches.”
Charlene felt her skin crawl as she heard the words, sure that they were meant for her, but now, the voice ran on again in the foreign tongue, mocking the gathered army for their frailty. There was a mechanical clicking, and a second blade sliced through the air ahead, cutting swiftly through another two bodies in the distance behind Charlene before slamming into a table. As the voice rambled on in guttural growls, Ahken threw Stanwick to the ground as he tucked his body into a neat roll, spreading himself flat to the floor while another blade whistled through the air which only a moment ago had been occupied by his head. Stanwick was on her feet then, jumping high into the air towards the darkness and curving her body into a beautiful somersault as yet another blade soared through the air beneath her.
The blade hung there, Stanwick’s hair brushing against the metal surface. Charlene moved closer to Stanwick, the distant details of the room obliterated by blackness as she left West’s viewpoint. The girl looked so serene, suspended upside down, smiling at her own reflection in the surface of the disk. Ahken’s face told a different story altogether; one rife with panic, his eyes fixed on Stanwick’s free floating body. As allowed the scene to unfold slowly, Ahken stumbled to his feet chasing after Stanwick but he was clearly off balance. He tripped, and Charlene watched his mouth contorted in horror as a blade scythed through the air ahead of him, a spray of blood describing a perfect arc, spinning out from the gleaming metal which sliced through the flesh of his shoulder. Wincing, Ahken ducked his head down and sprinted forwards.
Charlene’s attention was pulled to the right of the room, where West watched one of the men who had stood in the gathering in the courtyard of the palace. The man jumped high into the air, spinning a heavy metal bar in front of him, hand over hand. His path was deliberate, quickly covering ground as he bounded towards Ahken and Stanwick to join them in their charge into the darkness.
Stanwick pushed forward, ducking when it was necessary to avoid one of the spinning blades, or instead, flipping her body high into the air as they passed beneath her; it was as if she made game of the situation. Charlene marveled at her fluid movements, her awareness of her surroundings. Leaping from a table edge, Stanwick jumped towards one of the metal disks, spreading her body out straight mid-air so that her feet landed hard on the flat edge of the blade, slamming it to the ground.
West looked behind him, and Charlene could see now that hundreds of people had started to push forwards, all of them mimicking the actions of Stanwick and Ahken, ducking or jumping to safety when necessary, then dashing from cover to cover. Everyone moved in short and erratic bursts of activity, each of them making sure that they didn’t present a static target for more than a couple of seconds at a time.
Apparently alerted by the distant clicking and the metallic twang that had accompanied each of the disks launching into the room, West’s attention snapped back towards the man who was flanking right, heading towards Ahken. The man stumbled sideways, narrowly avoiding one of the lethal projectiles, but now Charlene
gasped as she watched a second blade span out quickly. The man’s body tipped forwards through the air, his legs arching behind him in a smooth line. Too slow. He hadn’t anticipated the trajectory of the disk, and as his feet swam upwards and his hands tipped towards the floor, the blade cut easily through his wrists, barely missing his head as it traveled on, severing both of his legs above his knees.
A blood curdling scream broke the air to Charlene’s left and she realized that Ahken was now running recklessly towards the fallen man. He fell forward and slid across the floor, lifting the man’s head in his hands and cradling his upper body, hugging him tight. West turned his head; a woman’s hand on his shoulder, another one of those five who had been with them in the courtyard. The woman’s other hand rose to her mouth, but her sobs had already erupted into a scream, and she ran forward, falling to the floor beside the man, moaning a single word repeatedly through her sobs, body convulsing as she pressed her arm to the man’s mouth.
Time stopped, Charlene halting the scene in stunned comprehension. She knew now why the other three in the courtyard had seemed familiar to her. Charlene had only seen the man a couple of times before on television. She hadn’t paid much attention to politics in recent years as there had seemed very little point. She was sure of it now though; the man who lay in Ahken’s arms was the new President of America, Lucas Miller and at his side, pressing her arm to his mouth was First Lady, Petra Miller. Although she couldn’t remember his name for the life of her, there in the air, hovering mid-fall above this bizarre grouping was the man she now recognized to be the deceased Russian President, Anatoly Vsevolod Abakumov.
Histories of the Void Garden, Book 1: Pyre of Dreams Page 21