by Rink Wester
The Gâte of Gold was much like the Gate of Silver, except for the colors. The low wall was made of yellow marble and the six spheres upon it were made of a mix of yellow marble and gold from the shores of Nårgöthrônd. In the middle of the spheres was a golden pyramid and a parapet of red gold that bore the likeness of their step-mother, Mÿriån the Måiådian Sorceress. Çåthÿ Liin hated her step-mother but like all in Mînåthrörn all too familiar with her wrathful depravity, she had feared her.
The Gâte of Steel was the seventh and last of the Gâtes of Mînåthrörn and was wrought by the elven dwarf lord, Samlyn Maeglin, the half dwarf half elf henched craftsman of Queen Çåthÿ Liin herself. The Gâte was unlike the others because it had no wall, just two enormous round towers. The towers had seven stories that had many windows and tapered upward, surveying all of Mînåthrörn. On the top of the towers and between their towering height was a turret and a fence made of steel that never rusted. Evenly distributed along the fence were seven pointed pillars, each manned by a grand mage of Mînåthrörn. Above the middle pillar there was a likeness of Queen Çåthÿ Liin set with diamonds and an imposing countenance that even cast lead and mortar could not hide.
It was there under steel and diamond that Chÿnåriön stood, bypassing the charms of half elf half dwarf mågÿcks and the rabid threat of three traitorous queens. His chipped and barked body almost fully returned to normal, he looked up at the likeness of Queen Çåthÿ Liin and smirked. His son stood beside him crestfallen but at perfect heel. His arrmy now reclaimed he thought to himself, in the clarified burden of second chances, Why rule only one kingdom when you can rule them all. And who better to begin my imperial destiny with than the strumpet who had already thrown down gauntlet and challenge and her two harlot sisters. He had been far too weak in Ëvèr, he admitted painfully to himself, but here, back in the swollen hub of the living world, his power was renewed.
There are new truths to be taught and old scores to settle. Let the cleanse begin.
Humans liked to say nothing hurts like the truth. Chÿnåriön disagreed, editing all of elfdom down to that one idiom.
The truth never hurts, he smiled, when it shakes like the lie and wiggles like hope. Beyond all hope and statecraft he desired nothing more than vengeance against all his enemies. The Sky Father. Çåthÿ Liin. Prifddinås. He promised the wind and cloud of that morning that he would have every manicured mile of it.
His army marched through the cracked and splintered Gâte of Steel as Mînåthrörn shuddered and the Dread Wölf, Queen Çåthÿ Liin’s childhood pet and Mînåthrorn’s guardian, stepped off the path, knelt and submitted.
75
The Tåôtié twin albino lords Tan Chao and Tang Chao measured their Bödhisåttvå cousins and found them sorely lacking. Why their grandfather Xiao Yu chose them to lifework this operation against the Gröötslâng Emperor and Empress they would never understand. He licked his lips in lust, the therapy of hormones and sado-masochism bending his features, as he projected mental scenario after scenario with his cousin Kuan Yin. What he wouldn’t give to make her cream between her scales and suck down the frolic of her blue green fire while choking her to orgasm. He hated dragons but they could be made to serve far more playful purposes, he snickered.
For the Tåôtié, resentment was a way of life. They were one of the five Cryptid demigöd species from Yuhuang Dadi’s patch of the Field of Fæ. They had become the mafia underlords of China’s Northeast Dongbei Zone while the Bödhisåttvå Dragons controlled Southern Guangdong and Hong Kong and their Hündûn, Qiôngqi and Tæöwû cousins divided and fought turf wars over what was left of the central and western Chinese regions of Sichuan, Xinjiang and Tibet. China belonged to the Jade Emperor and all his Cryptid progeny and they were fiercely loyal and equally as frightful in their jealousies when it came to what they considered their piece of their grandfather’s kingdom.
It seemed to Tan that eons had passed since he and his Uncle Gærüt had last talked on Wechat, his memory bounced, grinding his foot harder into the chest of the Hündûn spy his Tåôtié soldiers had captured. He and Tang shifted forms in perfect twin sync to compliment the wild punishment and fear they happily nurtured in the Cryptid mafia world. In the northern winter climes of Dongbei their beast forms were usually camouflaged in white and black snow swirls of fur, but in mafia lord “point-to-be-made” mode, like now, their zoomorphic features tilted and mottled their skin like blue and orange cement and millions of jagged pebbles. Round swirling protrusions grew on their heads and around large protuberant eyes, their nose crest, and fangs lost in great knobs of lion mane the color of desert sand. Their street captains stepped back as they transformed into their Foo Ming Guardian Lion demigöd form. They became the Tåôtié of legend, their stone-like skin covered in steamy slimy flames the color of ruby embers enveloping each knob and twist of torso. Crimson smoke rose off them like the smoldering outline of a slowly bleeding corpse. This was their true göd form.
Never the brightest of creatures or beings of subtlety, the Tåôtié street captains followed the deadly orders of their twin generals, Tan and Tang, without question or fail. The twins, in response to this razor sharp devotion, shared a deeply jointed intelligence that belied the tight green primary school reputation their species usually engendered in other lesser cryptic circles. They were immortal and deadly and they knew it.
Tang flicked a toothpick from his curled leathery lips, reptilian eyes glittering with raptorial mischief. He pivoted on his heel and glared down at their captive as his men looked on, hunger gathered on the wind in craven thirst. His four-toed fist tightened and his jaw set as he bent low and wiffed rhe ingredients of fear and piss seasoning his prey.
You don’t frighten me, you Tåôtiésons of rice paddy sluts!操你妈逼呀！Cao Ni Ma Bi Ya! Fuck your mother’s cunt, the Hündûn drug czar spat at his captors. Beings of primordial chaos, the Hündûn were known to challenge blindly without call or cause and nothing more than a bacteria’s instinct to invade and populate guiding its deeds. They were the teeth of the Chinese Cryptid mouth with no care for what it chewed or what opposition they met strong enough to crack their crown.
Do your worst you rotting turtle cum, it yelled, blue and green head plates growing as it shifted into its humanoid kaiju form. Tan looked at Tang in a shared moment of twin telepathy and joint desire as they both spread their mågÿcks, clearing their palette and attacked. They ripped their Hündûn captive apart in a bloody pillow fight of organ and wet, greasy kaiju matter. When they were satiated and that mob lair was painted in the worst sort of puss and abstract art, they left to prepare for their trip to America to help their grandfather and bail out the dragons.
Three thousand and eighty two years, Tang anguished, washing Hündûn blood from his face and chest. , Three thousand and eighty two years have we waited to return the Dragons to their rightful place beneath us. Grandfather had finally called them to help repiece his plot against Uncle Gærüt’s children and we will not fail like our lazy dragon cousins. Tan lit his cigar and joined his brother on the heliport. Once one of the great Khans of all of China I will not be denied. We will fly to America and help Yeye Xiao Yu acquire whatever artifact of tremendous power the dragons had reportedly in spectacular loss of face failed to deliver. With it will once and forever sever the leylines that power the Bödhisåttvå’s Fæ reality-bending powers and once more reclaim our place on the top of the Chinese Cryptid heap.
You, brother, are Tan Chao, disgraced Khan of Perception. I am Tang Chao, the Khagan of Reality. We fly now to play with the usurpers in order to reclaim what is rightfully ours. To end the beat of dragon wing and realign the insanity of our Jade Emperor. We will thank and smash and flex until our promise is kept.
They flexed, as cold Dongbei winds tore icy terra cotta tiles from the roof, and all of the mafia world flexed with them.
76
ට්ජෙය් සෛඩ් ඉබ් තෙ බෙහතෙ බෙගින්නින්ග් ව
ස් ර්ස්ම්ඩ් ර්හෙර්ඩ් වස් හිඩ්ඩෙස්ස් අන්ඩ් ර්හෙ තෙනෙඔර්ඩ් එඅස් එඉත් ගිඩෙස්ස්...>
No...Wait...let me to the tongue of lesser beings admit these and set old tale anew..
They said In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was with Göddess. And the Word was Göddess. And so it was. I am The Göddess.
Hiklorim was mine. And so too that hibernating dominion that saw my Gröötslâng woe born. He was the first to eat the Dark and break our oblivion.
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Long before the word and the kith of humankynd there was The Dark and The Deep.
We spread out together like a vine across cosmic dots, comingling the filth of mother mågÿck and father thought. We were Aeyitria and Łöståghår, the cardinal mother and horned father of all. A trillion years before the first suns learned to warm the void, we were known and betrayed. A time before ritual and honor, before the bee learned to die from sting and queen’s oath, Hiklorim reigned swollen and eternal. Lonely in the challenge of unanswered, soundless omnipotence we grew, our gnawing pitch black power creating the syllable and design of the universe itself. Together we bound the nothingness and bent blackness into something tangible and sticky, as if night were smoke, and that smoke a breathing, writhing, unending vastness.
Hiklorim; the imagined realm of churning unfolded night, mågÿckally torn and shaped into being from sheer will and malice was our body of power. Where it was we were.
But after eons, with his nothing nursing my empty, Łöståghår grew weary of My company, wanting more than my Dark to keep,his sobering mind company. He wanted a child. A child I knew would be the ruin of us. But like a good mate and new to the crafting of such things, I spent a thousand years trying to give our mågÿck Fætal form. An impending sense of doom growing over time, I found ways to in secret manipulate the mågÿck of my Dark impulse, changing the Dark and remaining barren. In the final moments of that final year of woe, Łöståghår, the ever wise Göd of The Deep, being infinitely as wise and duplicitous as I, visited me in a dream as I slept and poured his mågÿck into me. Vile and depredatory, my fair mate of millennia raped and impregnated me, slamming his mågÿck into mine, force and will becoming the shape of a son. In incandescent rage at that permissionless quiet thing inside me, I soon grew fat and large, celestial stretch marks ripping across my heavens, the screams of my dark divinity bursting open, muffled only by Łöståghår’s joy. But Łöståghår had miscalculated. The folly of all men. That new thing scraping and mewling inside me, born of hateful and violent alchemy, had a foreboding foreign mågÿck of its own. It frightened us both. He frightened us. Frightened me.
When the immortal walls of my uterine envelope broke, we both shuddered. Beings to whom consent was new, we found ourselves afraid and heavy with a gnawing power that would not heed. Beyond that place of horror and fear, screaming inside my own mågÿck, that primordial amnion swam and convulsed and in its place our Gröötslâng son, Ôlörûn, took his first breath.
He was an abomination. He was living horror to behold.
His eyes were as large as enemy galaxies. Seeing for the first time all of Hiklorim laid before him he cried out, the cholic of havoc the first syllable of his communicating rage. In his yawning, monstrous embryonic state the first stars danced and played on his skin, darting in and out of his cratered pores. Creations now inate to and because of him, his light offended the Darkness and beleaguered the well of Łöståghår. His skin was infested in golden scales and empyral diamonds knocking together vibrating so fiercely where he stretched and unfurled, we screamed in his infant newness and shrank from him. His solar growths and protrusions offering insult to our injury we begged one another for succor and tried to run away. In hunger our grotesque Gröötslâng aberration lashed out with his mågÿck so different from ours and drank down the milky tar of our murky empyrean abyss. His fangs and 6 tusks latched onto my dark tit. He fed on us, digesting our mågÿcks with his own.
He was alive and soon his war in our heavens would rage. My firstborn of the infinite dark. My beautiful bane.
His brothers held one of the many ciphers I placed to Ôlörûn’s defeat but were not the passcode themselves. They were merely the first tumbler to the lock. In the dying embers of my Hiklorim I spread myself out, coating the latchkey of my children with my curse and the map to my resurrection. I died so that I might live again.
The universe was always rigged. A zero sum game of mågÿck and dictators. Rape and filial hate had taught me as much. Ôlörûn and I were always destined to be two adjacent faces of the same chess clock, neither face running simultaneous, the one allowed breath only while the other is presssed in slumber. In our game of blitz chess, moves and countermoves were made not in five minute intervals but in centuries.
My gullible and predictable elven grandchildren, The Łöå, created in Łöståghår’s achingly vain image, had delivered my messages on cue and that craftily choreographed Bôkör snowball had already met slope and hill. The fools. I AM the ether. Nothing escapes my unseeing eye. Not even The Eye itself. The 19 enemies now gathering at Ôlörûn’s borders and The Despoiler born of seven sons and seven messages hidden and combined would very soon reunite the 4 of broken bond and destiny. There I’ll be. Waiting. And all will once again be what reports of my exaggerated demise had always intended. I win.
Why is life the lucky strike when death has far more fortuity.
77
If humans tell fåîrÿ tales what false confessions do we of the Fæ make? In the end our what-if’s are only fantasies. Loose truths upon which we hang our hats. The living world was once destroyed by water and fire. This time I will be the calamity. The inevitable storied result of Noah and Moses redefined.
He rubbed the slowly subsiding throb in his temple, exiting the blackout as he watched the mountains part and the elven coastline come into view.
Instead of a fake promised land, a plastic folding Hiklorim, I’ll take back the home in front of me. The home Ôlörûn stole from me. I will miss this body but when madness is your purpose you must commit to it completely. I will miss the ironic joke of his reflection staring back at me from the mirror.
The reeds in the marsh sang in the wind as he walked the beach psychically exploding seagulls and electrocuting baby turtles as he meandered aimlessly. The sound of the waves hissed and cajoled as he neared that elven citadel.
Let me show you how destruction is done. I have arrived to bring sedate ruckus to you all. Especially to Ôlörûn. The great schemer. The grifter. The con. The Mack daddy. The bag bitch. He has presented his ass to the cosmos to be kissed for the last time.
Crabs darted in and out of sand pits dug beyond the tide line as he swallowed the last bit of his pineapple turmeric smoothie and pitched that polystyrean cup into the sea.
My heart is ornamental at this point. I feel nothing for any of you. Human, göd or other. I yearn only to burn and devour all in my path. I am the dry heat that bakes and makes ready the seed to burn and flame. I am the glacier that scrapes the face of the tundra raw. The elemental göd of chaos upon whose cross the Sky Father shall hang and bleet. The monogamy of his sacrifice and my redemption once again making me the vulnerary ointment.
Sounds of battle peppered the peace of that early evening air as he neared a series of commanding gates manned by small elven patrols.
Doctors in the human realm would no doubt say I present classically. Persecutory delusion. They would see me for what and who I am and know that this is not my body. Literally. They would level me out with neuroleptics and leave me drooling to piss myself over and over in the corner. The presumption of all who die at the hands of something greater.
The ground shook as skulking rock and stone rumbled together and became a raging beast golem quickly attacking three harrowing elf maidens, grinding them into the face of the adjoining mountain wall.
>
There is nothing saner than the quiet number count of annhilation. The silent neutral countdown of 3-2-1 boom. Few things offer more comfort to a primary mind. Such is every göd’s true romance with brutality.
He had arrived, hovering above a deluge of elven glåmöûr and maddening warcraft. It was time for him to separate the kiddies and make them share their toys with him.
Who could have predicted I’d arrive at a time where 19 angry elves would shape the fortunes of the göds. Lives like deaths would intermingle in his new caste system and a fourth age would sweep them all away.
What’s the opposite of martyrdom?, he thought, unsheathing the dagger of Ädårønh Tir and slinging it with the force of a hurricane slicing through the advance and retreat of those he had come to enslave.
Let’s find out shall we?. All aboard.