by Greg Curtis
What had he hit? Sudden fear took hold of him as he realized he might already have returned to the lair and hit its walls, or worse still, one of them. A terrible dread took hold of him as he thought of having run into one of them. Of having run blindly straight back to his enemy. Of being caught again by what he feared most. Caught, trapped like a bug in amber, and finally devoured until not a single shred of him remained. And all the while their laughter would surround him.
Filled with panic he scrambled to his feet and ran on even faster, eyes still shut tight. Another impact and then another until his head swam, but still he didn’t stop. He couldn’t stop until there was nothing left in him to run on.
“I am a thief.” The mantra did him no good at all as he couldn’t concentrate on it, and yet still he knew it was the only thing that could help. He kept muttering the words over and over, as if hoping their magic would break him free of this inferno of pain.
Then there were voices. He heard voices, and suddenly his fear leapt to new heights. The demons. The demons had found him. He picked himself up from where he’d fallen after this latest impact and ran on blindly, frantically.
The voices followed him, sending more power to his legs, greater impact to his ever more frequent crashes.
The voices grew closer, and the last remaining shreds of his sanity began screaming at him. They told him he had no chance if he couldn’t see. The demons would catch him as easily as they would a mouse.
Knowing it was the only thing he could do to save himself he opened his eyelids with his fingers, and then tried to keep his howling down to tolerable levels. But at least he could see, sort of.
His vision was blurred at best, tears obscuring every detail, but he had enough vision and the presence of mind to see the trees. He was in the woods. He was outside. He was free. An hysterical laugh started in the back of his throat but got no further through his damaged face.
The voices echoed to him again and he ran on, finally realizing that even if he was outside that hell hole, it still wasn’t finished with him.
He ran on, long past the point of exhaustion, but too scared to stop, and all the while the voices followed him, toying with him. They were running him down like wolves did a deer. Chasing him until he dropped from exhaustion and then planning on devouring him live. Still there was no option. He ran.
A small river beckoned and without thinking he collapsed into it, hoping that the water would cool the burning. But it did no such thing. He could feel the burning still, even through the coldness of the water, and that seemed wrong, even to his tired brain. Surely it should help.
But least ways, as he lay in that river and floated he could recover some breath and maybe float past his torturers. Besides if they were hunting like wolves, with their noses, the water should mask his scent. He tried not to laugh out loud at the stupidity of the thought.
Suddenly the voices were louder, much louder, and he could see indistinct shapes among the trees as he floated past. They knew he was in the river. He panicked and started trying to swim for the other side, but his arms, his entire body was too tired to make more than a feeble splash. But worse, even that feeble noise was enough to let them spot him.
He heard splashing, several splashes, and knew the demons were coming for him even in the river. Was there no way to stop them?
“Sherial.” He called her name out loud knowing she was his only chance now, and that she couldn’t come this close to the nightmare of the demons’ lair. But there was no other hope in the world.
Almost instantly he felt her response, a wonderful warmth that ran through him, a wordless statement of love and passion, and for a single instant he knew peace again. But then everything was blown away as another nuclear explosion of pain tore him apart. The touch of the demons waging unrelenting war upon the angels.
He would have screamed but his vocal cords were simply too inadequate to express his pain. Instead he fainted.
**********
“By Myrran’s light, look at him!”
Voices again called him to life, and this time they were close, standing right beside him. Closer. One was touching him, holding something to his face. And yet, they weren’t demon’s voices. Even as he heard them he knew that much and knew relief. Infinite relief. They were human, and the one who had spoken was a woman.
“He looks like he’s been fighting Lea’s entire pack with his bare hands.” Light shone in his eyes even through his closed eyelids, and despite the pain he welcomed it too him. Any light was better than darkness.
“Look at the marks. The brand covers half his face.” There was a sense of horror in her words and yet he didn’t understand it. He understood very little at that stage. He heard the words but their meaning didn’t really register. The pain had subsided to mere agony, but exhaustion and confusion ruled in its place.
“But look at his back.” Another voice, this one male perhaps that of a mere teenager, speaking in as much awe as the previous one had horror. “The angel’s mark runs all the way from his shoulder to his tail. A perfect V.”
Mikel did nothing, since he could no longer do anything anyway.
“He’ll need stitches, and soon. Lots of stitches. He’s in shock, exhausted and hypothermic. He’s lost so much blood he may die anyway.” A man’s voice, possibly the one holding the cloth to his face. Calmer and more in control of the situation. This one wasn’t swayed by what the others saw. Was he more controlled, or simply colder?
“No. Iss strong. Not die easily. Not die at all.” Another man, but this time one with a voice so impossibly deep and an accent so strong he could just as easily have been a Kodiac bear. But above all there was a feeling of hope in his nasal tones.
“Hass fought well, fight tough. Iss why he so hurt. Never gave up. Fight even to death.”
“He’s also awake.” A soft man’s voice, but for all that, one that spoke with a certain surety; he knew something. “Listening to our every word. He’s in pain, he’s cold, tired and confused but still listening to every single word we say. As Abrax says, he’s tough.” Another man, this one also cool and controlled, yet not uncaring.
“Yet with all his strength, with an angel’s mark the size of an ox, he still got branded, and worse than the rest of us put together. He can’t be that great.” It was the woman again, her sarcasm and bitterness clear, but really only serving to cover her own deeper pain. The silence that followed her words was one of disappointment as they accepted her truth. One of more pain as Mikel realised they knew his failure. As he too remembered it.
“Lets get him back to the village.” Her sense of horror had clearly passed, to be replaced by resignation. This woman Mikel realized, had seen too much, been through too much. Nothing could rattle her for long.
He felt a sudden rolling sensation and then arms were under his back and legs. Two arms. In one fluid movement he was lifted as easily as a man lifts a child, and carried like a bag of groceries. That much at least penetrated his mental fog. What sort of man could lift a two hundred pound man and carry him effortlessly?
Against his better judgement he tried opening his eyes again, and wished he hadn’t. More agony, more fire, more pain filled him. And then there was the sight that greeted him. A face, really a grizzled mat of black hair and ragged flesh on top of shoulders larger and more muscled than any action hero he’d ever heard of. A man chiselled out of a mountain and covered with black hair. He smiled at Mikel, leaving him with an impression of yellow teeth, fangs and bad breath.
Around him the others walked, a man who looked more vampire than flesh and blood, tall thin and bloodlessly pale. Another a boy scarcely out of his teens, scared and hurting. A tiny woman, thin and spry with a nervous energy and a rage that barely stayed under control. She was carrying a walking stick larger than her, a twisted mass of vine and wood with spirals enough to make his head spin. Another man, average in height with a ponytail and silver circlet around his forehead. He had an expression of total defeat on his face.
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The last, another shape he couldn’t see clearly but walking on all fours. A dog, he wondered, but only briefly. Not when it came closer and he saw it, as it saw him. No dog by any stretch of the imagination. Not even a wolf, unless it be Fenris himself. For it was the size of a pony, covered in fur tangled and matted like a jungle, and it had a look about it that suggested it thought everyone there was little more than a tasty appetizer.
Mikel let the darkness take him again.
CHAPTER TWELVE.
“The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.”
~G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"
It was a village as Mikel found out over the following days and weeks. An abandoned village of stick huts which the five of them, - six now including himself, had taken over. It had no running water, no electricity, and was surely one of the coldest places on Earth, even though it wasn’t on Earth.
They slept on beds made of the leaves they gathered daily from the surrounding trees, their bulk insulating them from the cold hard earth beneath. They ate their food raw, and occasionally lit a fire for the comfort of light rather than for warmth or cooking. Toilets consisted of holes dug every few days and covered. Bathing was a dip in the ice-cold stream, something left for truly desperate times. For when the smell and the itch became truly unbearable.
The only food came from the fruit trees that grew in abundance around them, a wealth of wild roots, and the fish in the stream. Unfortunately, looking at the fish set out on that first evening, Mikel knew instinctively he couldn’t eat them. Even in her absence he couldn’t go against Sherial’s wisdom. He had failed her in so much, he wouldn’t fail her in that as well. Instead he found himself foraging for legumes, wild grains and anything with a protein component over the following weeks. It was not a good diet, but probably a healthy one.
Clothing consisted of what he had brought with him, the remains of his supposedly undetectable suit, and what could be woven from the flax like plants around them. It itched when it got wet and smelled, and it was cold, but again he could not find it within him to go against Sherial’s ways and wear fur like the others. He accepted the chill as his reward for failure and put up with it.
Yet for all its primitiveness, life in the village didn’t really bother him that greatly. It was the reason that they were all living in it that grieved him. For they were the failures. The ones the angels had recruited, and who had failed them. These were the ones Sherial had shown him that day she’d shown him Hell. And now he was one of them. The six of them were truly prisoners, for the brand prevented them going too near to the pit as Mya called it, yet geography conspired against their leaving. They were bounded on three sides by a massive mountain range, and the fourth was the black castle he’d escaped.
Yet even had the geography been kinder, they still couldn’t have left. Their own sense of shame and failure prevented them. No guards were needed to keep them in. This village of the damned was the only barely tolerable place between two forms of hell and a slow death.
And Mikel was trapped in here with them.
If the climate itself was bleak, the mood of his neighbours was equally cold. No one spoke, not really. They exchanged words, and greetings in the village’s own pigeon language, but even that only when there was need. They didn’t meet, they didn’t gather together against the nightmare that had been, they didn’t share conversation. Mostly they didn’t talk unless it was necessary. Seldom could they even bear to face one another, for the most part choosing to merely nod in the open area as they passed one another. Life for one and all consisted of doing the few chores necessary to continue living, and wallowing in misery for the rest of their days. It was not a happy place.
But at least it was an interesting one. When his pain allowed him to be interested. For his companions were as none he had ever imagined.
For a start there was Abrax, the barbarian as he thought of him. A man, a creature so large and powerful he made Conan look like a wimp. Seven feet or more tall, four hundred plus pounds and not an ounce of fat on him. He moved like a jungle cat and cracked small rocks with his hands for – fun? Yet he had not the brain of a ten year old. Still, of them all he alone was not afraid of Lea’s wolves and cats. In fact Mikel suspected, he looked forward to the challenge. Abrax too was the only one who found the conditions of the village acceptable. His only real gripe was that he spent too long in a single place. His people were normally nomadic. Being cooped up in this one place was a form of prison for the big man.
Abrax was also one of the two who most liked to spend time with him. For some reason the big man looked up to him, thought him the one who was so strong he would break these chains. Often he spoke of Mikel’s power, in his lilted doggerel, almost as if he were a mystic. Yet he was speaking of forces and strengths that Mikel couldn’t even begin to understand. Abrax believed he was in some way, the strongest of them all. That he was the one they had prayed for. Yet the big man’s faith in him, was if possible even worse than the others’ despair, as Mikel had no way of answering it.
Then there was Lea, the youngster. He claimed he was twenty three, but Mikel would have put him at seventeen, - a young seventeen at that. Average in every way, he could have been at home in any shopping mall across the Earth, except for his pets. The wolves, large as ponies, the lions and tigers larger still, and the things that looked like wild boars only the size of bison. He had sixty plus of them, all of which obeyed his commands, and for the most part stayed away from the village, which was a relief. They tended to be more than a little terrifying. For Lea they were pets. Too everyone else they were sudden death on four legs.
Lea; he thought of him as a kid, was a nice sort. Of all of them he alone wanted to talk, too young perhaps to understand that the others couldn’t stand to speak of what had been. He looked up to the rest one and all, as though they were his salvation and Mikel knew he was simply afraid. He too had met the evil and lost. He too had no idea how to overcome the nightmare that had become his life. But alone among them Lea had enough courage to hope that one of the others might be able to get them all out.
It was Lea that taught him most of the village’s pigeon language, though in truth he found he could understand what they said even when he didn’t know the words. The effects of having been so close to Sherial he guessed. He only wished he was closer still.
Grould was the vampire. Tall, white and impossibly thin, with a face that spoke of the living dead. Yet in personality he was anything but. He was warm and soft, kind hearted to a fault, and above all, filled with his failure. He was the type that wore his heart on his sleeve and yet said nothing, letting his gaunt face speak for him.
Perhaps more than any of the others Grould showed that he had a different origin from Earth. His skin wasn’t just pale, it was tinged blue. His teeth in the front were double fanged, his eyes slanted in a way that had never been seen on Earth, and he had only four fingers on each hand. Four glass clawed fingers. Yet for all that made him different, he too was the same as the rest of them; a failure.
Grould was a psychic, in every sense of the word. He could read minds, move objects with the mere touch of his thoughts, and even - so he claimed - predict the future. In that Grould was the village’s only hope, for it was he that predicted eventual success, though he couldn’t see how. His ability was limited. But Mikel knew that he like the rest, always would wonder if the psychic was simply trying to raise their spirits with a fairy tale.
Hermen looked to Mikel like a born again surfer. He had long platinum blond hair that he wore in a ponytail, skin that tanned golden brown, and the long slender physique of a beach bum. He would have fitted in on any beach on Earth except for his eyes, which were slitted like a cat’s, They were golden too.
He claimed to be a technologist, though the only things mechanical he had on him were the circlet around his forehead which he said was a controller, and a watch which seemed little more advanced than Mikel’s own. Hermen was perhaps the sorries
t of them all, for he had absolutely nothing left of his technology, nothing left to occupy his mind or lend him hope. Lea had his animals, Grould and Abrax their normal strengths. Mya had her magic staff. Hermen had only his knowledge, and no way of recreating his super science in this backwater.
Mya rounded out the group, a complete contrast to everyone else. Now there was a kettle of fish. A middle aged woman, tiny almost pixie like in stature, yet with a rage towering out of all proportion. She carried herself as though she was a princess, yet the bitterness that shot out of her mouth was in no way regal. Within her minute frame dwelt the chaos and rage of an angry tornado.
Mikel had to admit she had some power, though he had no idea what it was. When she pointed her staff, she could light fires and move things, and she could also set up a pretty good light show if she wanted. Still he asked himself, was it really magic, or simply science he didn’t understand? Whatever it was, it hadn’t been enough.
In his first few weeks here he had studied his companions, as they in turn studied him, trying to understand what made them tick, and underlying that, why they too had failed. It wasn’t easy with no one saying anything of substance. Few were even willing to say anything at all about their experiences inside the demon’s lair. Then again, perhaps they were simply unwilling to recall it, a feeling he could understand.