Each of them had feared the worst so they were prepared to hear this but not quite prepared to really face it. An army with no fear of death was a cold machine. They knew that machines were a great part of Myceum’s armies, and they were at a disadvantage there. They did not use machines or guns of any kind and they would need a lot of magic to stand against that kind of firepower. However, the technology for machines and guns was still in infancy and they had plenty of issues with malfunction and energy. Rienna was not ready to count their army as better by any means—not after she had seen the amazing work put into Melchior’s hand. It was obvious that Chevalle was no novice and was probably a damn sight better than most prodigies even.
Melchior had caught Rienna glancing at that hand, covered now by his gloves and gauntlets, but when their eyes met, he knew that she was beginning to understand how dangerous they were.
Most young boys liked to run and play and climb trees and come home covered in mud and blood and grass. Actually, ALL young boys like to do that, but not all could. Gren had been born paraplegic, his legs useless and no more than dead weight. He had wanted nothing more than to run with the others, to not see their eyes focusing on those useless limbs, to not see everyone looking with humor or derision or disgust or pity. He didn’t want any attention for those useless stumps, good or bad, but no matter what he did, they always stole the stage. It didn’t matter that everything Gren did, he did perfectly; he could do any math formula in his head, paint anything he saw with photorealism, sing any song better than any jongleur, but because of those damned limbs, it was all anyone really saw.
Sometimes when Gren’s nurse took him out to sit in the woods, he would catch small animals that passed; frogs or anything he could that had legs and he would put them in a box to take home. The woods by his home were full of green snakes and he would pick them up and let them hang around his neck. It was so common an occurrence that boys would call him Green Snake; it was not lost on Gren that snakes did not have legs (or arms for that matter) but they were crafty creatures so the joke was on them.
The ones without legs he would watch them, but the ones that he caught with legs, he would dissect them, sometimes while they lived so he could see how legs worked. Gren was fixated on having his own working legs and it became his obsession, no matter how much his stupid parents insisted he focus his genius elsewhere. He loved leg muscles and bones when he laid them out on his table; how the body was this intricate pulley system and how aggravating it was that his brain just wasn’t able to get his to work.
Gren would really put his nurse through the paces, making sure those useless legs stayed strong and didn’t atrophy; useless as they were, if there was a way to get them to work he would find it. When he was 12, he built his first leg braces. He had been able to use tables to lift his body into a standing position. However, his muscles were not prepared to balance and the knees would sometimes collapse so Gren had worked hard on a lock mechanism that he could use to hold himself in a standing position and then release him as needed. Of course, the release would be too sudden and he would end up in a heap then too so he had to build a kind of hydraulic system to ease him down into his chair.
After all of his hard work, Gren had still only managed to be able to stand, which was satisfying in its own way, but he wanted to figure out how to use robotics to automate movement. It was not an impossible feat for a hard-working genius and Gren would use his rich parents’ money and his own experiments to build them. His first ones were very heavy and he needed a wired controller to make them stop and go. They weren’t very fast; horribly slow in fact and no turn radius at all. Still, he pushed himself and by the time he was 14, he had managed to build legs that were lighter, could allow him to turn and back up, could keep up a decent walking speed and could be controlled by a wireless remote.
However, it was still not satisfactory and he wanted more. It wasn’t enough just to work in robotics, Gren wanted to be able to use his legs as effortlessly as others did. Gren discovered with nanotechnology that he could use wires and electrodes and sensors to respond to brain signals, but no matter how he tried, the robotic legs that encased his own were still too bulky. He had been able to send signals that would make his hips and even upper leg muscles move but he just could not get the impulses to move his legs properly.
For years, Gren had tried to refine the technology, the impulses, the brain readings, the dissections. Gren had even managed to find human orphans rather than animals that he would cripple and attempt to operate on to see how his experiments would work on live subjects. If the orphans did not die right away, a chain of painful risky surgeries would eventually take their toll.
In frustration, he realized that unless he was able to get the impulses to move his legs, he would be stuck with the bulky cases. He met Chevalle in his late teens, a woman who was from a nearly extinct tribe in the north of Vieres, which was a long, long way from Myceum. He discovered she was neither squeamish nor stupid. He had lured her into his lab to frighten her and then sedate her for experiments, but she had been amazed by what she saw and seemed to know a little about both anatomy and mechanics. Gren had been unsure at first, but had decided an assistant would come in handier than a test subject and was again amazed by how quick the strange woman caught on and even contributed ideas to his work. She would even lure in more test subjects without any moral objection.
In two years’ time, Gren and Chevalle had come far but still neither could seem to get further in solving the dilemma and Gren was no longer so stubborn about his plans. On impulse, Gren had grabbed a bone saw and removed his own legs half a foot from the hip joints, screaming with the intensity of pain, forcing Chevalle to attach the cybernetic legs they had been working on or let him die.
The surgery had taken a very short time, only 4 hours. Chevalle had only needed to put him under, stop the bleeding, send the smart wires into the legs to attach themselves into the spinal and sciatic nerves and adjust the dangling legs both by height and then to attach the legs to the living tissue correctly. While he slept, she had used electrical impulses to correct for movement. They weren’t yet certain if nerves in the living tissue would activate correctly, both in the paralyzed portion of his living tissue and in the false parts themselves. Chevalle had not seen the use in having nerves at all, that he could correct his movements without the weakness of pain and pleasure, but Gren had been adamant. He wanted to be as close to a normal biped as possible.
When at first he woke, it was clear the nerves were quite sensitive and in incredible pain but he would not take pain relief —for the first time he knew what legs had felt like and he even felt his member stirring in the parts that had awakened. Despite the pain, he had convinced Chevalle to mount and fuck him and the pain mixed with pleasure had been almost too sweet to bear. Still, the legs and connections held fast no matter how rough the sex and after a few weeks, the pain had been bearable enough to walk on the legs.
At first he had been reluctant, having fallen so many times being reckless, but the legs felt strong and sure and within minutes he was running and laughing and by the time he had stopped hours later, he was gasping for air and laughing maniacally at having done it.
Chevalle had been waiting in the lab when he had returned and she was amused and smug that their experiments had finally made a huge breakthrough.
“After all this time, I still don’t know your name,” Chevalle pointed out to him. “The ones in the village call you Green Snake. They say your parents died in the past year but you never told me.”
“My parents were weak and foolish. Green Snake,” Gren scoffed. “I guess it’s close enough. I doubt anyone remembers my real name anymore.”
“So I should call you Green Snake?” Chevalle asked incredulously.
“Not very fierce, is it?” Gren asked with a frown, removing his pants to watch the miracle of movement in his clear plasticine legs.
“Why not Viper? You do have those long sharp canine teeth…” Chevalle
offered.
Gren looked at himself in the mirror; the strong muscled body that he had made his nurse help him achieve, pale from his time spent in his lab. Pale green eyes and hair so platinum it looked white and cut close to his head but spiky like the scales of an albino viper. It was a name that suited him and he smiled at his reflection, feeling pride and anger and lust building in him all at once.
“Viper… It suits,” Gren affirmed, looking at her in the mirror and feeling his cock harden again.
Chevalle and ‘Viper’ had taken their technology to the King of Myceum, a weasly fat man with more ego than courage, and the King had funded their research. The King had not known the mad genius of his new scientists; they had done well in building his mechanical armies and technologies, but their practices were inhumane. In time, Viper had let his ambitions grow to a feverish height and he had used the armies and machines to murder the King openly and take his throne. Despite his new power, limitless and far-reaching, he took no other name but Viper.
As time passed, Viper had begun to run out of ideas; he could enslave the unwilling, build machines with all of a man’s strength and none of his weakness, even machines that could simulate life and self-replicate, and when he ran out of ideas, he simply wanted one thing. He wanted all of it to disappear. Every fucking molecule of it.
Viper had learned all he could about the old gods and the elementals and his machines could do a lot but it would take the old gods and the elementals to completely unmake themselves. The beauty of it is that he had to do very little other than defend his city and make the morons do all the work. Let them think he was the threat and watch them wake the old gods before the Dream. He would be the catalyst to the biggest ‘fuck-you’ the world would never see. Even his clever Chevalle did not know what he was after; she knew quite a bit as one of his generals but the bulk of the intel was his. She had been content to keep to her machines, blissfully unaware that her old gods and elementals were the thing she had to fear from the most.
He knew she was a twisted little creature; he had watched her from a distance as she had lured one of the few survivors of her tribe into the city and enslaved him to lead the attacks that would piss off Vieres and stir the elementals. He had felt the earth shake as the Soulless man they called Wellbourne ended the Soulless and stirred an old god. There were a few other things happening just as he had wanted that were falling into place; he planted the seeds and he watched them grow.
The end was near and Viper loved every moment of it. He could not live forever, but he would take the world with him.
Melchior did not know what Viper had really been planning at the end, but he was a good judge of character and he knew that Viper was bat-shit crazy. Myceum was probably the most dangerous place to be but there were still some spies brave enough to steal Viper’s secrets; however, there was no stealing the ones in the madman’s own head. Melchior knew that the Viper and Chevalle both wanted him back; he knew not why exactly, but right now, the only thing protecting him from them was being inside this hidden city, a city that no machine could sense or undo because no one knew about it but for those who were set against Myceum.
Once he had said his piece, what he knew about Viper’s past and his own guesses, his friends had been pale with concern and silent with thought.
“Melchior…” Rienna had started. “How can we be sure that whatever we do won’t fall into his plans? What if he wants us to attack? We really need to look more into what he thinks will wake the old gods. What good is revenge if there is no one left to enjoy the peace… when there is no one and nothing left at all?”
They had all nodded numbly and one of Ghyliad’s apprentices had stepped forward, listening and waiting to be of service.
“Pardon me, my friends, but if there is any library that can shed some light on the old gods, it is the late master Ghyliad’s. All of the wizards who do not have a duty will pore through the archives for you. Perhaps we can… avoid the Viper’s trap with knowledge,” the young wizard offered.
Melchior had clapped the young wizard’s shoulder, a bit too soundly from the wince on his face, but it was all the confirmation the wizard had needed to hurry out and get started.
Chapter 13: Dominoes
She did not have a name, but She watched. She saw the Soulless man become the All-Souls and she watched the Barri crumble. She also watched the great tidal wave it created that passed south of Myceum towards the Terra Massif. She watched that wave wipe out the sinful city of Windbreak before it calmed, sated in its appetite for wickedness as it swallowed even the highest flier in its thirsty maw. She had seen many events that would swallow wicked cities and they rarely left men to tell the true tales.
She wondered that humans could be so clever and so foolish in the same moments and even the Soulless that had not been limited by emotions were not without their naïveté and stupidity. The old ones had not been able to create a perfect being, but the old gods were not perfect beings. Perfection was not about infinite standards but by the highest standards of the being viewing it. Perfection was not possible so all of them were foolish, even She who watched and knew and waited was not a perfect being.
She was prisoner, unable to move, unable to interact, only watch. When the time came, She might be free—either the gods would free her or all would cease. Even She was not sure which it would be. She did not know how close the Dream was to being done because She was not privy to the minds of the dreamers. When they woke, the world would heal and change or the world would cease, She knew that much. She knew the thoughts of the humans, the animals, even the plants and the elementals. She knew what the madman was plotting and She knew that his adversaries were seeing through him, but She also knew that they were still stirring the gods no matter how much they tried not to. The madman was trying to wake them and they were trying not to, but still the gods were disturbed.
Even so, She hoped the Dream of Undoing would come. She had watched this world for so long and had so longed to be a part of it and She did not give up hope that her time would come. There was nothing She could do but watch and whisper and hope that her voice maybe reached the ears of those who could grant her desire.
Pierait had not been looking forward to the ceremony, had hoped that he and Lyria could have snuck out of the city undisturbed, but their jolly friend, Iric, had caught Pierait by the arm outside of the hotel. Within moments, the crowded city was drawing around them and the procession was no less resistible than the rapid currents of Fate he had once been fond of talking about and they had no choice but to go along with it. The crowds of happy people celebrating the change was a contagion but it was hardly unexpected in a city that always clung to the idea that death was not about finality but change after all.
Lyria was not as grim as Pierait and had clung to his arm laughing giddily. Even dressed like a cheerless Valkyrie, Lyria was hardly the image of what you would expect from the Chosen of Death itself. He tried to be unhappy, but with her contagious smile, he ended up being swept up in the celebration that carried him towards the Hall of Founts.
Iric had told Pierait (shouting over the voices) that the King of Sorrow (soon to be the King of Abundance, when the city itself took on that name) was waiting in the Hall of Founts to praise him as the All-Souls, Pierait of the Wellbourne and savior of Wellspring Valley. For a man that only ever went by one name that few ever used, having so many was making his head spin. He had the feeling that everything the rest of the world had taken for granted would be a celebrated miracle in this place; the first tree to sprout could very well be named and isolated and honored and the first babe born after this Naming Day may just have the first new settlement named after him/her. Pierait was glad to be celebrated but did not wish to be around so much excitement too much longer. Adrenaline pumping through him was a fairly new feeling for him and he was sure that too much of it would make his heart explode. He was not yet versed in what was normal to feel and it was overwhelming to him.
The reality fo
r Pierait is that he had undergone a bigger change internally; he felt like a babe freshly born with a host of adult memories and a body untried. He had been hoping to try a few things promptly and a citywide celebration was far less important to him than nursing his brand new case of sexual interest. Although, Lyria had made it clear that she hadn’t been quite ready and knew he wouldn’t force the issue. He caught himself wondering how grateful the women in the new city of Abundance really were. In that same moment, he wondered if he could get away from Lyria long enough to find out. All this thinking turned into exasperation when he realized that he didn’t want to hurt her. Pierait had been around very few women in his life; women like Rienna and Lyria were the stronger sorts, but his mother had told him once that women and feelings were more complicated than he knew and strong women sometimes hid the softest hearts. He knew what not to tell women even when they insisted on the truth and he also knew that no matter how cool they seemed on the outside, they were often chaotic within. Humans sometimes said one thing only to mean another and he never understood that until now. He certainly wouldn’t dare to be honest about everything he was thinking now even.
Lyria noticed that Pierait had gone silent, letting the current of the crowd push him along as emotions were flickering across his face. She couldn’t imagine what he had gone through and was now sorry they hadn’t attempted to slip out unnoticed. She watched his face contorting openly with emotions, not quite sure how to control them as he wrestled with possibilities. She had realized that she had cut off their intimacy before, seeing an opportunity to do so when he had gotten lost in thought before. It wasn’t wrong to say she had been conflicted too. With Pierait, there was a kind of awkward affection she wasn’t sure how to handle and when he had come back very much a different man, it had left her frozen and disbelieving and unsure of what to do. In the same turn she didn’t want to lose him. He may very well be the only man on this earth she could have an easy intimacy with. Would he stay with her once she gave in or would he get bored with her? She had wondered something similar when Pierait had left for the Wall. She had wondered if when he came back from the Wall without a soul if he would have politely sent her away, having been done with her. Her life had been much easier before she let a man get under her skin. She was woefully unsure of how to protect her heart, but she had been given a man by fate that did not frighten her with inner thoughts, a man she could touch, and she knew she would be a fool to let fear stop her from taking a risk. Any way she looked at it, there were risks, but what regrets could she handle?
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 47