by C L Walker
“Have you seen this?” I said.
“Yes, before I fell.”
I still had the blade in position in case of a trick, but I now had something new to distract me. Something to keep me from doing what I was meant to do.
“Why did you fall?” I said.
“Because I saw what would happen here and I knew I had to speak to you. But I wasn’t supposed to. I am here anyway, and this is not what I am meant to be saying.”
“What should you be saying?” I asked.
She closed her wooden eyes and bowed her head. I heard the creek of a ship in her movements.
“Empty platitudes. Things that will do you no good, nor anyone else.”
“And what do you want to say?”
She looked up and I saw that her eyes were human, and brilliant blue.
“Your death doesn’t stop her. She ascends to godhood, and destroys the world.”
I dropped my hands into my lap, closed my eyes, and hung my head.
Chapter 32
The waves pounding on the rocks below had gained a malevolence I hadn’t noticed before. They would continue coming, smashing against the rock until there was nothing left. Until it had all become sand.
“Tell me what you saw,” I said. I put the dagger on the rock at my side and tried not to think about it.
“You came here and…” She had trouble speaking. She swallowed, took a breath, and continued. “You broke the heartstone and destroyed the link to earth’s cosmos. You killed yourself and your blood stained the rock for a thousand years.”
“A thousand years?” What could she have seen that was so specific that she would skip ahead a millennium and continue the story?
“Yes. Your blood never washes off, but your body is taken away by the sea. A thousand years later she comes back.”
“Erindis?”
“Ohm.”
Ohm, the elder-god who had possessed Erindis and reshaped the world. Ohm, she who had promised to return and usher in the end of days. Ohm, who had loved me more than any human.
“Are you sure?” I said. “It was Ohm, and not Erindis? They would look the same.”
She looked at me like I was being stupid. “I’m an angel. I can tell the difference.”
My breathing was shallow and rapid, my heart racing. Ohm, not some shadow of her buried in Erindis and coming to light now that she had power. Ohm herself, returned to life.
“What happens?” I said, barely able to speak.
“She drags us back to her new vision of earth, adding us to the collective. I see a little of that world and the constant war being waged, but I am destroyed upon arrival when her enemy attacks.”
“Enemy?”
“I don’t know his name, but he stands astride the earth, commanding all who are not sworn to Ohm. The remaining elder-gods are dead and devoured, and it is only the two who remain.”
Erindis was going to bring Ohm back to life and she didn’t know it. If she did she would never do it; she hated the elder-god more than she hated me. If she thought for a moment that her work would help her oldest and most powerful enemy then she would have stopped.
“I need to go back,” I said as I sprang to my feet. “I need to tell her.”
Or not. The thought blasted all others from my head. I could let Ohm be reborn, and we could have the world we’d dreamed of. We could rule and I could help her defeat this grand enemy that we would know was coming. The dream I’d lived with since being cursed could come true.
Visions of the happiness we’d shared when we were last together danced in my head, but they didn’t look the way I remembered them. Before, I had reveled in the feasts in the grand hall, but now all I could see was the execution happening in the same hall at the same time. We had sat and barely noticed as an innocent man was burned alive for ambience.
I remembered riding across our world, marveling at the endless plain, but before it had been a glorious trip with my wife; now I could see the destitution on the faces of those we passed. The hunger and the acceptance of what we’d done. They had no power, no way of fighting back. Those who tried were strung up and beaten by their children for our amusement.
I saw the world the way it had been, not the way I had always remembered it, and I was nauseous.
“You cannot return, Agmundr. The gate leads only to the void now.”
“I’ve beaten the void before and I can do it again.”
She looked skeptical, but I wasn’t lying. After defeating Invehl I had stepped into the void to get home. I had drifted for an unknown amount of time and almost died, but I’d found my way back.
I’d been taken back, I remembered. Someone had plucked me from the edge of death and returned me to the heavens.
How had I forgotten that? The voice in the endless nothing, telling me it would only help me once. I’d blocked it out, or been unable to remember it until now.
“I have to get back,” I said, though I didn’t know what the angel was going to do to help me.
“Wait,” she said. “In a thousand years you will get your chance.”
I could wait another thousand years, locket or no. A thousand years was the blinking of an eye.
And then what? I reunite with the elder-god who loved me and we return to war? Assuming the angel’s fall didn’t change the future and she still came, what was I waiting for? At best we would recreate the kingdom we’d built before, and at worst I would be mad from waiting and we’d do something that would haunt my nightmares if I thought about it.
And it would be all I could think about, for a thousand years.
I wanted to do something, to move, to fight, but there was only the wooden angel and the endless sea, and gates that led nowhere. Nothing to punch, and punching was about all I was good for.
“You’re sure?” I said. “Your memory of the future is still clear?”
“No, but I made sure to remember this.” She was sad, fallen and trapped, and all I could think of was why she had told me. Why she had ruined the perfect end I’d planned.
I was angry, at her and at the universe. I wanted to lash out and she was the only one available.
I punched her face and screamed as she fell back. When she looked up she was terrified, a crack running through the wood of her features. I went after her, my fists curled so tight they hurt.
“Please,” she said.
I raised my boot and prepared to crush her. The tattoos on my legs glowed brightly as I brought my full power to bear.
“Don’t,” she said.
I stomped, and she rolled out of the way. The red rage had me, the uncontrollable force that had ruled my life since I was a child was in control. I ran after her as she rose and tried to get away. I grabbed her wooden hair and tore it from her head.
I would destroy this angel and feed on her blood. I would use her life-force to destroy the heaven and I would use that to strike at the void itself. I would have my revenge on cruel fate, and I would die in the process.
I stopped chasing her, stopped screaming, stopped breathing. I was the monster people told their children about, and whispered to one another in the shadows. I was the creature who closed the heavens and killed the gods, and I was letting myself become that person again. I was trapped on a tiny island in the middle of endless nothing, and I was killing the only person I could speak to, throwing a tantrum no different to when I was a child.
“I’m sorry,” I called after the angel, but she hadn’t stopped running. When she reached the edge of the rock she jumped. I didn’t hear a splash from the water far below.
I dropped to my knees and pounded the jagged rocks, breaking my knuckles and smearing my blood on the heaven. When the tattoos healed me I did it again, and again, letting my anger out on something that couldn’t be hurt.
Ohm was coming back and I wanted to help her. I wanted to join her, to fight for her, to be with her. And I knew I couldn’t. I knew I had to somehow stop her from returning. And it was the worst pain I’d ever felt.
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I stumbled to the edge of the cliff and retrieved the dagger. I had a suspicion I’d be needing it if I got back to the battle. I jumped off the cliff and let the tattoos work out the magic to save me and give me a soft landing.
The gate waited for me, flashing more quickly in the darkness of my closed eyes. It wasn’t normal and I knew why: there was nothing on the other side, no heaven and no hell. Just the void.
I could stay in the heaven and be fine until she came for me, or I could leap into the unknown and almost certainly die. But only almost; there was a small chance I could still help. A small chance was better than none.
I stepped through the gate, erected the most powerful shield the tattoos could offer me, and fell into the void.
Chapter 33
I’d been there before and nothing had changed. I was safe behind the shield, allowing me to examine the emptiness around me before I was lost to it.
The void was everything else; it was the space between the afterlives and earth. I was the endless nothing that waited just outside creation, a place that destroyed anything that entered it. And my shield was barely holding it back.
It appeared as an endless wall of beige static. It had a defined surface, as though an enormous television had been erected a billion miles away. But it all looked the same and my eyes couldn’t find a place to focus. They kept crossing and uncrossing, unable to remain still in my head.
I closed them and prayed, to the elder-gods who had made everything, who had formed the world and all the afterlives before abandoning them. Who had killed the love of my life and were doing nothing to stop her from coming back and destroying all that they had created.
“I know you’re out there,” I said, using what little air I had to reach out for the only lifeline there could be. “I know you can hear me. You can hear everything, see everything. I know you, and I’m calling on you.”
Nothing. Eternal silence. They had never responded to my curses and I didn’t know why I expected them to respond to my begging. But I had no other options, no way of returning to earth. They had helped me before and I prayed that they would do so again.
“You owe me,” I said.
My voice was a growl, a low, feral thing. The rage was on me, controlling me, and I wanted something to punch. I wanted something to tear apart because life wasn’t fair and it was their fault.
“Show yourself.”
I was getting louder, using more of my limited oxygen in what was probably a futile effort. But I had to. There was nothing else left.
“She’ll kill you. She’ll win and there won’t be anyone left to stop her. And you can defeat her by just letting me go back. Just do something with your power, for once.”
I was starting to hear things in the silence, snippets of conversations and low tones vibrating through the emptiness. It was in my head, a hallucination caused by lack of stimulus. I’d been tortured by a master once, locked in a room and told to be blind and deaf, to lose all feeling in my body and to think on how I had disobeyed them. They’d left me there for a month to suffer.
I had lasted hours before going mad. By the end of the first day I’d forgotten who I was, what I was. I’d imagined all manner of things, that I was the wind on a starless night, that the world was little more than a stage play and I was part of the scenery. I had imagined a million things, all before the sun went down.
I knew what to expect from the void, but it was worse than my expectations.
“Answer me!”
The shield was growing darker as more energy poured into it to keep the little bubble of reality I’d formed in place around me. I would run out soon, and then there would be nothing to hold back the end. And even when I died I wouldn’t see an afterlife waiting for me, nor even see the nether, the one place I’d left humanity when I shut the heavens and hells away.
Not that I would have received an afterlife anyway. Creatures like me never did, and I would be a fool if I thought I’d somehow get special treatment. Of all the beings in creation, I was the one who would get the least because I deserved the least.
“When you’re dying. When she’s eating you for pleasure, remember that you had a chance to stop it. Remember me, dying here in the emptiness.”
The void was everything. Despite the shield it was inside me, permeating every cell in my body. I kept my eyes closed but the static was there too, waiting in the darkness.
“I hope you remember me,” I said, my voice now less than a whisper. “I hope you remember.”
I gasped, my lungs crying out for air they hadn’t already tasted a thousand times. My bubble of reality stank of my fear and held no clean air for me to breathe anymore.
How long had I been there? How long had I drifted through the void, talking to myself? It felt like minutes, seconds. But it had to have been longer, much longer. I’d brought enough air for hours and the tattoos could keep me alive even when that ran out. And yet I was suffocating.
I prepared to release the shield. I’d rather die torn apart by the void than gasping my last behind a shield that was failing anyway.
“Cowards,” I wheezed. “Useless beings. Your world is forfeit and you can’t spare me a moment.”
The world grew small, dark. My brain was dying from lack of oxygen. It felt like when I was returned to the locket, like everything was folding in on itself and leaving me. Running away.
If I’d kept the binding to the locket then I might have been reborn there, when I let the void take me. I wondered if I would still. If the link between my soul and the prison that had held me for so long could really have been severed by a witch in minutes.
I was grasping at straws, desperate to find anything that might give me a way out.
I released the shield. The tattoos fought me for a moment, but even their quasi-consciousness knew we were done.
Nothing happened. No pain, no cold, no instant obliteration. Nothing.
I opened my eyes on the mountaintop, clear of blood and smothered in bright sunlight.
I gasped for air, clawing at my throat to try and get more in while I had the chance.
“I told you before,” the old man sitting on the rock said. “You only get one. But I can hear what you have to say.”
Chapter 34
He was a warrior, that much was clear. His shoulder weren’t as broad as they had once been and his muscles were sagging, but the ghost of who he had been was still there. He had shoulder-length grey hair, a short beard, and his eyes saw more than most. He wasn’t the cleric, but he wore the man’s dirty robes and he sat on the rock the man had been cursed to live on for thousands of years.
“Who are you?” I said, still dragging air into my lungs in great gasping lungfuls.
“Alain,” he said, offering no further illumination.
I staggered toward him and collapsed on the ground at his feet. I looked up as he looked down. He raised his eyebrows.
I was well, healthy and healed of everything. I was back to my best, ready to fight.
“Thank you,” I said. I got to my feet and scowled at him. “Now get me off this goddamn mountain and put me back where I’m needed.”
Alain laughed, a soft, friendly laugh. He was smiling and happy, as though the fate of the world didn’t hang in the balance.
“Stop wasting time,” I said. “Stop sitting there, and do something.”
“What would you have me do, Agmundr? Save the world, perhaps?”
“I don’t need you to fight our fights for us. All I need is to get home.”
“Home?” He barked a laugh at the idea. “That isn’t your home. This is, the mountain you created. This was left here for you, for when you inevitably died.”
“Listen, old man,” I said. I towered over him and stepped closer, blocking the sun from his face. “I don’t know who you are, but I need to get back to earth. Can you make that happen? Because if you can’t I’d rather you put me back in the void.”
“Careful, Agmundr. I can arrange that.”
He looked up after a long silence. “Let’s go somewhere more comfortable.”
We sat in plush couches in a crowded coffee shop. The people around me were speaking Italian and everyone was smiling. The sun was shining outside as cars inched past.
“Where are we?” I said.
“Nowhere useful to you. Explain yourself.” He sipped his coffee and waited patiently.
I was back on earth, back to where I needed to be. I was on the wrong continent but I knew how to get back to Fairbridge quickly. All I needed was a gate to a heaven and I could use the shortcuts to get back in minutes.
“No,” Alain said, raising his finger at me like I was a child. “No running away. This is a temporary reprieve, because that mountain was cold and I’m an old man.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m an elder-god, of sorts.”
“I’ve met the elder gods, and you’re not one of them.”
He put his coffee down and crossed his arms. He studied me, though if he was who he said he was he knew me down to the atomic level. If he was who he said he was he had created me.
“When Ohm returned before,” he said. “I was there when she was defeated. I took her power, her essence. I’m an elder god, but I’m a young one.”
I laughed involuntarily. The idea was so ridiculous, so unnatural, that I couldn’t help myself.
“I know,” he said, laughing with me. “Who would have thought? Anyway, you were saying? Something about begging for your life to go on a quest?”
“I think I like you, old man, whoever you really are.” I picked up the small black cup of coffee on the table. I took a sip, knowing it might be the last one I ever had. It was really good, better than any coffee I’d ever had.
“I added a little something to the coffee,” Alain said, picking his up again. “This place is good, but there are perks to being who, and what, I am.”
“If you’re an elder-god then you can see the future,” I said, trying to stay calm in the face of his ambivalence. “You can see what’s coming.”