by Rink Wester
She and her three brothers had hours ago flown back to their mob hideout in downtown Charlotte, NC. They had left China and come to this göd-forsaken country to help their grandfather and the Ájøgün locate a secret weapon. Something that would make even the Sky Father yield. This weapon was the key to a prophecy. A curse. A curse to cover all of mågÿck and rewrite the playbook for all of cryptid göd-dom.
She leapt up and ran to the red Buddhist temple decorated doors of their communications hub where her brother, Ti-ts'sang, stood holding a Tibetan scrying staff, searching the ether for any and all occultic clues, his right hand conjuring dead mystics and carving electric blue runes of a language long lost in the air of that small downtown lodge. It was the language of Aeyitria and Łoštåghår. The tongue of the progenitors. A language that spoke of overthrowing the Gröötslâng Lord and bringing the Mother and Father back from wherever he had trapped them so long ago in their great battle. It was rumored that they had not been killed, merely culled and enisled, their powers slaked and umbilically cut from them. It was tied to that Sihiosian Amulet Gærüt wore, the communion of Øgdöåd blood and the secret of the gröötslâng Queen.
There were those who knew the tale. Their grandfather had told them and hushed them to forelorn secrecy. He had drawn out their complicity and brought them to America to assist him. He had lied to the Ájøgün, knowing they were loyal to a fault to their Lord and master. Everyone thought they were there to help find some lost human female. As if.
It was a select few who knew their half of the story and even fewer not courting death who knew it all. Kuan Yin sat, smoothing out her red leather and yak hair warriors tunic, lamenting the loss of her brother. He was their first casualty in this camouflaged quest to unseat the Sky Father and unseal Hiklorim. His death was rent of all sense, she fumed, and would be avenged. It was unfortunate but expected, she whimpered, eyes turning white, grabbing a scrying staff and casting forth her own mystical nets, when monsters hunt and the shadows bite back.
To join the club, sometimes even devils have a due.
38
Vickie floated in and out of her vision. Mind’s eye wide open, she saw seven great beasts standing on a hill. She felt an absolute thrill of grim annihilation and certainty run through her as she spoke to them psychically. Theirs was familiar energy. Not them but someone else there. Attached somehow but absent. That essence lingered. The seven great beasts advanced on her, their expressions a scaled range of confusion, consternation and dread. One of them, the snide yellow skinnned pale one, hurled an insult. She bowed, raised her hand and smiled a snarl at him. She felt the mågÿck fly from her as she burned him and knocked him into the gravel, drowning that insult in schadenfreude. His pain had done the trick.
She tasted his flames, like blue cream Nehi, as he rose, a great magenta colored dragon, and tried to roast her, its heat tickling her and forcing her to change form. She felt the meat and bone tear of bear claws and antlers and tusks rending flesh before she had rolled over and burrowed deeper in the covers of her $140,000 Swedish Vividus by Hästens king size bed. She had kicked and flailed as that vision gripped her. She had jumped up in a mystical warriors haze and run from that lavishly appointed Tuxedo Park villa that Grynn and the Pörø Society had bizarrely purchased their “göddess come lately”. Mansions, clothes, gold cards and pampering beyond measure. Bizarre and moving at terrible speed, she had been overwhelmed by all of it. As they doled it out, however, she scooped it up by the raking handful.
Give and I will most definitely take y’all. Grandma Carrie Tyree said don’t turn down nothin’ but your collar!
Her vision claws now buried deep in the belly of an impossibly black panther, his sabred teeth biting through spleen and solar plexus, she had jumped on her Dodge Tomahawk V10 Super motorcycle and headed north on Interstate 85.
She reeled as those images played out in frightening technicolor in her mind, layering themselves over all sight, sound and touch sense. Her eyes bled liquid purple light as she sped down that highway passing in slow motion passengers too busy facebooking and instagramming to notice glowing violet eyes and a half million dollar motorcycle floating inches above the asphalt.
Three of the great beasts lay in a shockingly bent and crippled heap before her as she bowed and smiled and lunged at the great bull headed behemoth. She hit him like a wall of fur and fangs and horn, momentarily winded, her diamond and meteorite armor shorn from her chest, he found his opening and swung. Reverting to his golden orange eyed human form, white battle robes and mystical charms and chains clanging in the wind, he let out a battle cry, that drowned out the sun and his sickle plunged deep into the meat of her left shoulder. She howled in agony and staggered backwards.
That mågÿckal blade flooded her body with pain. Agony seized her consciousness and staggered her, making the world spin and tilt. She tried to stand but it was like making all lefts in a world of rights. Pain itself confused her. It was a sensation so new to her that at first she couldn’t register it’s name and that what she was feeling belonged to it. Her mouth could form no language but the tongues of agony. She could only scream so scream she did as her thoughts disappeared into retaliation.
I am weakened Great bull göd! You have matched my arrogance and replaced it. I can’t even pucker enough to put a “B” together. If I could I’d call you 55 bitches sir!
When Vickie looked up and the haze cleared, long having left all highway lights and street navigation behind, she looked down at her watch. She had been driving for almost 3 hours and was sitting at the Gâted pathway entrance to some ranch in the middle of nowhere. How had she managed to drive for 3 hours with no memory of even getting out of bed? As she dismounted she saw herself from behind. She saw the exhaust of her Dodge Tomahawk still smoking and vomiting exhaust. She wheeled around to meet the strangest pair of piercing horizon blue eyes staring at her from a face like living bronze. There was something about those eyes that scratched at her memory. The scar on her neck itched that Divåd had inflicted during their battle. She reached to scratch it as her power released crawling down and connecting in the shadows to something that felt almost like...home. Sihiosian home.
A naked man covered in welts and bloody patches stepped forth from the shadows of that ranch portal and bowed as he smiled, reaching to scratch an identical scar in the same exact place on his own neck. Vickie looked at him in rank horror, not because he stood unabashedly scarred and bloodied, nor because he was naked in the middle of a nowhere to which she had no idea how she had even arrived, but she was horrified that as he stepped into the silver clarity of moonlight she was looking into the face she had paid countless doctors and taken handfuls of hormones to remove. She was looking at herself. The face on her drivers license and every photo on Grandma Carrie Tyree’s mantle of her. She was looking at herself as Victor Basse before he became Vickie.
The boy now mågÿckally grown into a man, having siphoned droplets of energy and essence from the broken Øgdöåd beasts that lay in the field off to his left, stopped a few feet away from Vickie, etching out her silhouette with his finger as he bowed and smiled.
So you’ve come and joined the game beautiful stranger. You seem to have brought music to my noise. I know you and I know you not. Who are you?
Vickie looked into her own face staring back at her, the past crashing in on the present, making room for itself on the shelf of her mind. Grynn’s fear, those strange words of prophecy plucked from her molecular psyche and now her own jigsaw adding this piece to the puzzle, she bowed and smiled back.
Mental quarter inserting itself in the arcade slot, she stepped forth and kissed this man wearing her face on the cheek as they climbed on the back of half a million dollars’ worth of super bike and rode off into the darkness.
These games only end one way. At the beginning of a new game.
39
Detective Tony Mozee’s assistant, Arshan Mills, ran into his office, sweaty, out of breath and saltier than usual.
Tony blew Arshan a rose and followed him to the lobby where an klatsch of colleagues, perps and janitorial staff stood ogling the handsome figure of weirdly adorned woman. Even if Tony had not immediately known to whom those vine laden robes and forest glen tiara belonged, Grynn wheeled around, the miniature daggers at the bottom of her skirt scratching small grooves in the laminate flooring, and screamed his name for everyone in the entire precinct to hear. Every eye in the building trained on him, a deep earnest jealousy furrowing their brows and leveling recriminations whose answers he would never have the words to give.
Detective Tony Mozee. I knew not which office was yours or I would have come directly to your table. The time grows perilous and I fear you have a part to play yet sir. Vickie.
We must find her! Now! The prophecy has arrived and we are all in mortal danger!
Tony pushed past all the curious looks and scowling assistants and motioned for Grynn to follow him. Together they rounded the corner past the interrogation pens and made it to his office where his composure finally broke and he glared at Grynn. Biting his lip, anxiety clearing the path for his unrehearsed rant, he let loose a barrage of well placed expertly seasoned profanities before finishing with,
Now. See hear Grynn. Vickie told me about all this hocus pocus locus, göds and göddesses, temple of doom, Indiana Jones guff. I get it. I mean, I don’t get the shit AT ALL, but I get it. I get that there’s some otherworldly mystical shit happening here with you and Vickie and Gærüt and the whole Küqålä crew that is, even grading on a curve, still waaaaaay above my pay grade. I get all that! So what could you possibly want with ME? What good could I possibly do this “mission” of yours? Tell me. You need someone to carry your wands and fetch you poly juice potion, Hermione Granger?
Grynn Xanthopoulos loved those Harry Potter movies. She loved them even though they got mågÿck all wrong. She needed no wands and certainly drank no potions to make the universe bend and break. But what she did need was the man stranded before her in his incessant ranting, plumbing the absolute depths of obscenity to string together the most colorful litany of dirty profane language she had ever heard from any one human being.
Let me do you one better Detective. I won’t tell you. I’ll show you. And to be clear, I’m the Grand Dutchess of the Pörø. I carry my own wand.
Grynn stood and her entire body blossomed in radiant disco tendrils of mågÿck. Vines of energy cutting through and folding the space and time of that police office, she reached for him, finger touching his forehead, as they both disappeared, leaving every jaw in the precinct on the floor for some other janitor to pick up.
This one, along with everyone else, was clearly out to lunch.
40
Nänå floated in the ruins of an ancient city that mågÿck and memory had once again unearthed. Gærüt’s Sihiosian pallor changed, moving the earth layer by layer as slowly the Lost City of the Kalahari had risen again to greet her. The golden gilded expanse of Ife-Ile , first human city of the göds. Drowned in millennia of drifting and relentless sand, once again made forgivable in her dark emptiness, she knew this place. She remembered the grand theft of cultures and tongues mixing and building great human coops here. They worshipped the old göds of the Øgdöåd here. Worshipped them as real and tangible like soil and rot in a winter field.
They all knew the tale of Ife-Ile . Told in hushed hurried stories to the eager dwarflike Bilobo children of the Zambezi around the bonfires of their linked encampments. The legend held that the world was originally a marshy, watery wasteland. In the sky above lived many göds, including the supreme Göd Ôlörûn. These göds sometimes descended from the sky on spiderwebs and played in the marshy waters, but there was yet no land nor human being there.
One day Ôlörûn called his orisha-nla, brother, the great göd Obàtálá, and told him to create solid land in the marshy waters below. He gave his brother a pigeon, a hen, and the shell of a snail containing some loose earth. Obàtálá descended to the waters and threw the loose earth into a small space. He then set loose the pigeon and hen, which began to scratch the earth and move it around. Soon the birds had covered a large area of the marshy waters and created solid ground.
The Orisha-nla reported back to Ôlörûn, who sent a chameleon to see what had been accomplished. The chameleon found that the earth was wide but not very dry. After a while, Ôlörûn sent the creature out once again. This time the chameleon discovered a wide, dry land, which he called Ife, meaning "wide”, and Ile, meaning "house” and that dwelling place was revered forever after.
All humans lived deep within this new earth. One day, seven men, five women, a leopard, and a dog crawled out of a hole made by the massive worm of Hiklorim. Looking around them, the astonished people became terrified, but Adama Ogyinae—the first man on the surface—understood the world and its wonders. He calmed them and gave them strength by laying his hands on them. Adama Ogyinae took charge, teaching them how to praise their göds of this new Kalahari, and there around the bronzed baobab tree they built great temples and monuments to the göds of the Øgdöåd.
To the göddess Ÿêmøjá they chiseled stone and great slabs of diamond flecked granite to erect a temple in her name. No temple was greater save that of the Sky Father, Ôlörûn, because no göd was more feared and frightening than she. Save for her ûmÿèni ökö.
Above the entrance to her temple, written in great flourishes of white and blue diamonds set in ochre dusted plates of terra-cotta clay, were written in the various languages of her worshippers only three words. Words that struck despair and ensured ordered reverence from all who entered.
Imọlẹ. Paṣẹ. Ikun.
اینګینګ.برید.شکنجې.
Kuangamiza. Panga. Kuteswa.
ונהינגע.באַפאַלן.פּייַניקונג.
Unhinge. Torture. Annihilate.
Gærüt had returned her to the beginning of mankynd. A deal had been stolen and struck there, hundreds of thousands of years in the making, she now remembered. An agreement of one that her ûmÿèni ökö had uncovered and betrayed. An agreement to be the queen of nightmares this world deserved. How had he found out the full breadth of things, she wondered.
It was you Nänå. You invaded my mind. Invaded me. Like Łöståghår did Aeyitira of old. In secret dark and doom you stole the Amulet of Sihiosia and combined my essence with yours, your monstrous plan gestating until that day so long ago here in our Ife-Ile. Here it began and here I ended it. Ended you ümfåzi ÿåmi. My wife of guile and perdition. I wiped this city clean of your artifice and allowed the sands to reclaim it, resetting the clock of mankynd. This memory was but the first surrendered on that foul day of reckoning. Small by comparison. What comes next is far more unforgivable. It is a killing blow. Shall we continue?
Nänå narrowed her eyes and nodded. Unhinge. Torture. Annihilate. She remembered the mantle of her gödhead now.
This was her temple. He would touch her lamp and consume her sweets. His mantras now shed, she would bathe him in bloody ablution and reclaim all he stole from her mind. The halls of her temple would once again ring and her rites would once and finally be observed.
41
I’mma need you ta’ take yer’ cheeks and spread ‘em real tight and real wide for me baby girl, ‘cause’ I’m fixin’ ta’ fuck the bark right off’a you! Lack’ they says in them future moo-vie pictures, it’s time to stick some D’s in some P’s!
*****************************************************
Conceit and sex. In perfect accord there is nothing more galvanizing. If the sex is good enough explanations become secondary. In certain circles it’s the only currency truly capable of helping the grape find th
e glass.
And so it was in Hiklorim. She was millions of years old and still a virgin. She had just finished creating mankynd and overseeing the construction of the great city of Ife-Ile and yet something whirred and clicked incomplete deep inside her. She looked at Ôlörûn and hungers deep and hollow stalked her desires. Sweat beaded her brow and her heart beat wildly as she released mågÿckal gröötslâng pheromones she had no idea her body contained. Gærüt immediately responded, his body tightening and hardening like it had never done before. He too was a virgin Göd of Hikorirm. He grabbed Nänå in a sensual neck hold, his fingers playing along her clavicle as he kissed her so profoundly a bit of him disappeared in that kiss.
When Gærüt started to touch Nänå, awakening her body feminine, something had begun to ache deep in her mind. Looking up at the soft ebon cherub begging to worship her, she begged away the ache, begging instead to be worshipped.
Gærüt had laid her on her back and undressed her as slowly as he had allowed her to undress him. Nänå almost froze again when she looked down and noticed that his sweet chariot, like none she had ever seen before, did, in fact, swing low. And wide, she thought, chuckling and licking her lips. What should I do with all this , she whispered as he planted on her belly the lightest of kisses and she took the first third of him in her mouth. He fondled her thighs and fingered her mouth and sucked her toes. He planted his hands firmly on her hips and kissed her vagina. Pausing just long enough to celebrate the flavor of her rich, dark secret. His tongue was extremely eager, licking the edge of her creamy center inch by slow delicious inch. Willingly he seemed to worship the göds of her netherverse with lips thick in determination. This had to be his last supper. No apostles. No betrayals. Just communion. And “ My dear Sweet Lord Ôlörûn”, Nänå thought, how sinfully light was his cross to bear.