She watched the friends reunite, one comrade short, and broken from Elcarim’s hard lessons, but still they were not giving up. It warmed her heart to see the one called Melchior get that kiss he had pined after for so long. It wasn’t their first, of course; the first had been wonderful and they had kissed rather lustily when she had set about making a lesson of Ashe’s wandering eye, but this had been different still. This was the kiss he had spent so long wanting and spent even longer telling himself he didn’t.
It felt silly that the end of the world was here and all She could think of was this soap opera moment She had witnessed. The old gods stirred though and this was going to be all She had before all was nothing. Their stirring now was no longer tearing the world below asunder; their Waking had split Stoneweld from east of Myceum to the bottom of the Walk, much like the one that had filled in where the Wellspring of Souls had once been only much larger. Worse yet, She knew that the Dream of Undoing had never come; the elementals could not be undone so the world would be forfeit. One was not enough—they would all have to be Undone. She wept in the only way She could; in her existence, because she had no eyes, no body, no tears to do so.
Chapter 6: Are You Sleeping?
Finn was not the only one who could hear the world trembling below now and the others wore grim looks as they guessed at what was happening.
“It all seems anticlimactic now, doesn’t it?” came a bored voice and they spun to see that Viper had taken Finn’s place on the ruined head of the machine. Viper was not guarding himself or even showing any concern for them drawing their weapons as he was squatted down and inspected the ruined machine. He hardly had need to be concerned, with his machine army at the ready around them. Viper stood slowly and he was a chilling sight to behold.
He would have been considered beautiful once; that long white hair, pale green eyes, but the only thing that was flesh was his head and torso, his legs and arms entirely what Melchior’s hand was. He was mostly limbs of see-through plasticine with clean, clever gears and systems whirring inside but there was a faintly glowing greenish light inside of them. The light was clearly for show since Melchior had no such light in his own clear arm. He wore only a pair of loose white cotton shorts as if he wanted them to be sure they knew he was more machine than man. He smiled down at Rienna, not bothering to look at the others.
“I knew the one you called Redric,” Viper told her now. “It’s a shame he was so easy to kill or your little band of heroes might not be after me now. You could have been Mrs. Belias, fucking your little band of lovers and living happily ever after.”
Rienna was far past the temptation to take the bait now and just returned his smile. She had learned to mourn quickly and not let it bite her again. This man knew nothing about her, for all his smugness, and he would have to do much better to get under her skin.
“I should be flattered you spent so much time trying to break me. I may have never known how strong I could be without it,” Rienna replied silkily, the others trying not to betray how impressed they were with her calm. Rienna was a creature of another kind when backed into a corner and had more than proven that battle rage made her damn near unstoppable.
The bravado had done exactly as she hoped and Viper had puffed up with foolish pride, shrugging as if she need not thank him.
“It doesn’t matter at this point; we’ll all be gone before long. Still, none of us could figure out exactly why you wanted this. Why destroy a world when it could all be yours?” Rienna asked now.
Viper seemed confused by the question, a frown on his handsome, doll-like face.
“But I did have the world and I must say it was terribly dull,” Viper told her as if she were daft to not have known.
“You just give up too easily. Like you did with your legs. Was that the fate of your arms too? They didn’t satisfy you either? What else is missing on that imperfect body of yours? Your manhood?” Rienna asked, her voice sweet but her words challenged. Melchior held his breath, knowing she was treading in dangerous water now. He supposed they all were but he didn’t want to spend his final moments watching her die. The agony of the darkness dying in him was enough. Nuriel’s power burning to live inside of him was making him feverish and struggling to comprehend anything beyond pain.
Viper laughed and this actually comforted her rather than made her uneasy as he had intended. He was livid, there was no mistaking it, and he would punish her for saying that, but there was method to his madness at least. His eyes stabbed at hers as they suddenly grew cold and humorless.
“The girl does her homework. This world is ultimately full of dissatisfaction, a thing that cannot be fixed and should be destroyed,” Viper told her with chilling boredom as if he had repeated it a thousand times over.
“Cannot? Or maybe you just cannot. All this for your impotent rage,” Rienna taunted him now and the others knew without prompting that the battle had begun.
At some point, Rienna had realized that Viper didn’t have any insight, any answers, any real strategy, and no knowledge of what woke the old gods. He may have had a stack of half-baked theories and been happy that others had suffered, but that was all. He was a cold, broken thing, a boy that had gone well past repair tragically young and there was no great mystery, no great reveal. They fought in their last moments of such sad short lives because a boy got frustrated that his legs wouldn’t work, that with all his genius and talent, there were just some things that couldn’t be fixed and that anything that couldn’t should be discarded.
The battle haze Rienna felt now was so familiar to her that she flowed into it without hesitation. She barely registered that the elementals remaining had come without summons and battled beside them now and their powers were not the faded things they had been. She did not know, as she hacked and slashed through the metal, if this was because the world’s end was at hand and Elcarim was losing power over them or if the elementals had been holding back for this moment.
In slow motion, she had seen Zephyra slicing through the metal with unchecked rage, swearing she could see trails of tears on the elemental’s stormy cheeks, but then she guessed it could have been the storms under her skin. She did not doubt though that Zephyra did not relish losing her champion.
Elcarim seemed to be waking around them as the old gods did; the winds blustered, the sun pulsed, the waters chattered nervously. After so much silence, it was confusion to the senses but it did not slow them from their task. It was more about avoiding being grinded into meat, but still they were hacking through the impossibly huge army of machines nonetheless. There was one thought they all shared silently and it was that there was simply nothing left to lose.
Rienna noticed as she trudged on that they were actually rather close to a cliff; the kind that signaled the end of the continent. It was a surreal feeling, a battle for the end of the world on the edge of the world.
It was hard to say how long the foray had gone on, but at some point, she realized she still swinging and there was nothing around but shining heaps of scrap metal. She glanced around and saw that all but the machines were still in one piece, some of her friends were bloodied and dirty but they were amazingly whole. Unfortunately, even Viper still stood, but he did not look perturbed. She noticed that they all seemed to be looking behind her and when she turned it became obvious as to why.
They hadn’t taken down the army of machines on their own; the old gods had disabled them and stood there in the tense trembling air as if they had all the time in the world. To Rienna, they were the most terrifying things she had seen yet.
They were easily 8 foot tall, all nine of them. Five were female, four were male and they were humanoid but far from human. Their skin was stone grey and textured like a dry river rock; their sweeping togas were snow white and looked like poured milk frozen in space. The men had close-cropped curling hair, the women the same coiffed updo, and they had all the expressiveness of a statue. It was their eyes that caused her the most fright though, shiny black holes in
their sockets with these tiny red/yellow marble-like orbs hovering in the empty holes. They moved and tracked like a regular pupil but the mockery of human eyes was more unsettling that anything.
She could not bring herself to move, either to sheathe her sword or even blink. They held her in an unbreakable thrall. One of the males tilted his head, with slow deliberation, at such an unnatural angle that she thought it would just roll off of his shoulders.
“We did not dream,” the old god said, the odd voice echoing over the island, deep and booming, made more unnerving by the fact that the lips of the others moved with his in perfect sync. It was an androgynous sound and it reverberated inside each of them, competing with their heartbeats. It was a sound that could keep their hearts beating or stop them instantly.
Rienna felt her courage return and she faced the old god closest to her squarely and held herself up proudly.
“Then this is it,” Rienna grimly shot back, sheathing her sword.
“All must end,” the old god said and Rienna was suddenly angry again, that everything was ending in such a stupid way. It was then that Rienna noticed that Melchior stood on the edge of Elcarim, looking down into the ocean far below, his hair buffeted by the wind and he turned to look back, his wan smile melting her heart.
“I’m not dying on this stupid island,” Melchior told them and before Rienna could react, Melchior had simply stepped off of the side.
Her heart stopped and for several moments, she thought it would not start again. It was not her heart she heard first but her own terrific scream piercing through her veil of recognition. She had crumpled to her knees, her friends rushing to her side, as the elementals started to scream for a different reason: the old gods were tearing them apart.
She had watched it all; the old gods’ proclamation, the start of their sentence on the world, Melchior jumping to his death… and Viper throwing a strange glowing ball up and catching it in one hand over and over as he watched. Suddenly, She saw Viper facing her as if he could actually see her.
“Are you ready for a new world order, sweet one?” Viper seemed to be saying to her. “It’s your call.”
Viper threw the strange ball at her and he self-destructed as She caught it between her hands. She had to double take on that fact; she could actually feel it and had caught it in her hands. The strange word Kalhmera was inscribed on its surface. A sound of jubilation rose up from her new throat and She reveled in it, a sound that was beautiful, indescribable in its joy and sorrow. It was known that this was the end and She had little time to enjoy her new form before it would all be over. The last thing She let herself enjoy was her new name; the one on the object that broke her prison: Kalhmera.
Kalhmera did not dare drop the ball and charged forward as the gods were turning on the humans. Elcarim was quaking and falling apart and she now had to wonder if the world was following suit. She had lost the ability to see all, being isolated in her wonderful new form. Still, Kalhmera did not hesitate and began effortlessly tearing the old gods apart. The humans watched her in a state of awe; she could not see herself, but if she could, she would see this odd combination of distortion and magic, grace and deadly force as she destroyed the things they were always told could not be destroyed—the very creators of all were always told could not be destroyed—the very creators of all foot-tall god, but she was easily 20 feet tall now and she tore the gods like paper dolls, the powers of the gods and elementals alike flowing through her.
When it was over, none of them had time to register as Kalhmera gathered them up, cradling them in her arms like precious gifts and flying off of the colossal crumbling chunks that were once Elcarim. They did not know where they headed but they watched the jagged, torn world below heal before their very eyes in the magic that pulsed from the strange being that had saved them. When they finally landed in Uzhuak Forest at the foot of Yggdrassl, Finn had stepped up to the tree, sad that it would be an empty thing.
“Hello, my children,” Yggdrassl said cheerily and the others stared in confusion, sure that the old gods and elementals were gone. Finn turned to Kalhmera, who was shrinking to human size and levitating.
“How?” he asked her. “What has happened here?”
“I wasn’t sure at first either. Life and Death are not playthings of the gods and will always exist, I believe. I used to be called She, a presence that the old gods had not bothered to name, but I have since been named Kalhmera. I knew all, saw all, but I could not interact with any of it. I was so sure I knew all anyway, though I am ashamed to say that I really knew so little…”
“I had no idea, no idea at all that hope was always there, right under my nose and I didn’t know until it was nearly too late…” Kalhmera told them sadly, a small worn book appearing in her hand now that she handed to Rienna.
Rienna reluctantly took it and opened the book to the marked page and read from it.
“ I know I am twisted, I am mad, and I hear and see the things that no one else can. These voices that drive me to do the things I do, even they do not like how I will do them with no concern for the cost. I kill them all and I do not care if this world dies. It can all go; it is a useless world, a boring world and it can follow me into hell…
I made something new today; a green orb I named Kalhmera. I named it for the one it will belong to, my goddess of morning. My final gift to her shall be the end of the world, no old gods, no elementals, it will all be gone. To do it, I have to send my soul into it and die.
She is the one that no one sees, hears or loves but me. Yes, to the one who no one sees but the only one who had ever truly seen me. I give her all and nothing, my worthless heart is her salvation. I give her the world.
-Gren, aka Green Snake” Rienna could hardly believe what she had read aloud. The others seemed too awed to speak. Rienna’s throat was choked by the lump that formed but she had to speak.
“This is Viper’s… he… was talking about you…” Rienna said in a state of wonder. “That son of a bitch was only really planning to end the way things were…”
“He was a madman and a villain and this does not absolve that, but… I never once thought he was actually referring to me. He never acknowledged me directly until he gave me the orb… Before he exploded, I finally started to understand what I had seen him writing all those years ago,” Kalhmera explained.
“So… does this make you some kind of goddess now?” Krose asked Kalhmera, hesitant about how to address her.
Kalhmera smiled and shrugged effortlessly. Her form really was beautiful; slender without being bony, long wavy silver hair and silvery eyes.
“I guess so, but… I don’t really want to be worshipped. Will you promise to keep me a secret from the world? I will uphold its balance forever, but I beg you not to tell anyone,” Kalhmera pleaded. They were equally in awe that an all-powerful being was now asking them to keep her a secret.
“We give our word,” Finn spoke now and the rest nodded and mumbled their agreement.
“But… aren’t we going to die with the elementals?” Dinsch asked unhappily now. The others felt their hearts sink at that.
Kalhmera’s laugh was pretty and startling.
“No, no, children, the affinities are no more. Magic is no more, either, I’m afraid, at least not to where humans will be able to wield it,” Kalhmera explained. As if to drive the point home, their armor started to fade and they stood nude. It seemed the men were the only ones to not really mind it, but Kalhmera now used her own omnipotence to clothe them in the simple garb they had started in.
“Will you miss it?” Kalhmera asked them now.
A resounding ‘no’ caused quite a bit of mirth between them.
“I might miss Sea Star…” Rienna finally admitted, sitting on the roots at the base of Yggdrassl. “The healing came in handy too.”
“None of you will want for anything as long as you live, I assure you. There will be no more suffering, no more evil in your lives ever again,” Kalhmera promised.
&n
bsp; “As long as it’s not some boring utopia. I don’t think life should ever be too perfect,” Krose added and Kalhmera laughed.
“What would be the fun in that?” she agreed. “Is there somewhere you would like to go before I leave you?”
The companions looked at each other now and weren’t entirely sure if they were quite ready to separate. When Rienna spoke, the voice of her group once again with Melchior and Ashe gone, she truly spoke for them all. Her heart ached in sorrow and rage for Melchior’s suicidal leap. Had he waited only moments more he would have been here…
“I think we want to make the trip back on our own…”
None could say how the orb worked or whether Viper had actually intended it to work as it did at all. It could have been a knowledge outside of the old gods and elementals, a thing that was only possible with technology. Kalhmera tucked it in a fold of her robes and kept it warm with her aura, but already, she knew she had to know what magic gave her form. Was she really a Goddess at all or just the closest thing to it? She certainly did not feel all-knowing, all-powerful, but she was determined not to rest on her laurels. The new world deserved her best effort.
Stories don’t just end when there’s a happily ever after. If there is one thing that tales often forget to teach you about heroes or even villains, it’s that as long as they live, there IS no happily ever after. It’s deeply unsatisfying to end a story that way; a big climax, someone wins, maybe an epilogue, the end. And how many times have we had to roll our eyes with the “I love you”, “I will love you forever” endings?
The truth about heroes is that whatever led them to become heroes, fate, chance, dumb luck, whatever it was, there is more. As long as they live, they might have to contend with spoony bards or over-exaggerating storytellers mucking up all the details. This is how our heroes got into all of this messiness to begin with. The world can be a cruel place but it can also be a wonderful place and as far as this story is concerned, there is a world just beginning that still had adventures left for them.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 59