“What are you?” he said.
“I am Amhazrel,” the thing before him said, its voice weak but defiant, “I am the torment of ten thousand souls. I am the Lord of Haddath and the spaces beyond. I am Despair. I am Agony. I am Ap-Xas-Kuzao-Vuvetda. I am That Which Will Devour The Stars.”
“You torture people. You bring them here for no other reason than to torture them, and deny them their rightful death.”
“I am Victory,” it said. “They are my prize.”
“You tortured Amy. My Amy.” Howard was surprised at how calm he felt—but then he knew already how this would end, and there was nothing that could stop him.
“Be thankful I granted her as much life as she had. I could have destroyed her at any time. I didn’t. We could have eliminated all of you when we won the war you began. We didn’t. Taking the souls of those we choose is our prize.”
Howard looked down on it, slithering snake-like in the dirt before him, its life diminishing even as he regarded it.
“Not any more,” he said.
Then he held it in his mind and willed what remained of its life away, eliminating it as easily as if he was snuffing out a candle. A flash of terror, and anger, and betrayal, and it was gone.
With one final spasm the hell-space collapsed, exploding outward like a hurricane, and Howard was back in the quarry.
He may have left one hell behind, but the scene around him was a nightmare all of its own. Ardent’s camp was in ruins, the crystal structures, the tents, the bizarre machinery—all were in disarray, scattered over the ground. But in amongst them were the bodies—not Ardent’s men, who were currently staggering through the carnage in bewilderment—but the people from the hell-space. They’d been kept alive for decades, centuries—millennia some of them—but were now back in the real world: men, women and children who had lived the instant of their agonising deaths over and over for what must have felt like eternity, now at last able to die one final time. There were thousands of them, strewn through the quarry itself, and through the forest too judging by the extent of the screaming. For even the forest had reverted to normal; the jungle had disappeared, the normal surroundings having returned at last. And somewhere in amongst this scene of slaughter, somewhere among the burned, writhing bodies, Howard knew that Amy was lying. She was probably dead or close to death, but she was there somewhere.
He got to his feet. The screaming around him was deafening, but already some were dying and becoming still. He could see where they were going now though, he could see what lay beyond, and what he saw made him glad for them.
For he understood his own powers now, and those which the creature and others like it possessed; it was the power to create spaces, some as adjuncts to the real world, some as parallel strands of reality, with their own time and history. He could move between them, he could bring them into existence, and he could destroy them. And he could also see those spaces that had been created already, including the paradise—real in this case—that had been set aside for the dead. It wasn’t the heaven he’d learned about in Sunday School, but it was close enough. Even as he gazed into this space, more and more were dying around him, finally able to make the transition from this world to the next.
He however was alive, and in his current form unable to die. If Amy made that transition, to a place even he couldn’t go, she would be lost to him for good. For something even more powerful had made that paradise, something that even Howard, with his new powers, could only discern in glances, like when he’d first glimpsed the entity Ardent had captured. This one wasn’t horrific though; it was wonderful. But the idyll it had created was only for those who had left the mortal world behind. He was about to lose Amy all over again.
Just days beforehand he’d been a normal man, albeit a military aviator, skilled and accomplished beyond the dreams of most men, with the strength of character that came with that. Now though he was tantamount to a god. He’d exercised his mortal powers to keep order in the world—now he could rule whole swathes of it if he wanted. Yet the fear of losing Amy again, and the pain of losing her first time round which had defined his life up to that point—that trumped everything. It was still there, large as life, a uniquely human anguish mixed in among the power and enlightenment he’d just achieved.
A desperate resolve came over him. He ran over to where the centre of the rings had been; he’d been holding Amy’s hand when the illusion had collapsed, so that had to mean she was nearby. And sure enough, just ahead of him, among the dead and the dying, one of the figures was lying with its arm outstretched as if grasping for something. Its skin and hair were so badly burned as to be unrecognisable by sight, but the extra senses he’d acquired told him that it was her.
She was burned and disfigured, but when she looked up, her face contorted in the final agony of her death, he could tell that she recognised him. So he made a world, effortlessly, filling it with the products of his imagination. He made a river, and a forest, and a mansion-sized treehouse in the branches, but he also made an orchard, and an expanse of rolling countryside like the view from the village they’d grown up in. Everything he could think of, everything they’d ever need, he put in there. And it took only an instant.
Then he took her soul, held it delicately in his mind, and put it in there, into its new home.
He only had to take one step forward and he could join her. But this world still held one more duty for him.
He turned around, surveying the scene in the quarry. Ardent’s men were the only ones alive now; they had seen him, but were recoiling in terror—he didn’t know what he looked like to them, but whatever it was, to their eyes he’d been reborn from the fire in this form, and now held the very powers they had striven for so hard.
They’d done things though, in the pursuit of that power; they’d massacred people in their hundreds, allowing the burned bodies to pile up while using their tortured souls as bait. And they’d done this in full knowledge of their own barbarity, as had John Erebus Ardent, who even now was staggering toward Howard, his mouth hanging open in amazement.
“You did it,” Ardent was saying. “You made it happen. How?”
Then, as he got closer: “Give it to me. You can do it now. Give it to me as well, and we can reshape this world together.”
There was only one place Ardent and his men belonged. He took their lives as easily as he’d taken that of the dying Elemental. He didn’t bother taking their souls though; the laws of the universe would take care of those, and take every crime they’d committed into account. Their lifeless bodies fell like marionettes with the strings cut.
They weren’t the only people who had inhabited this place though. The three women Ardent had drugged and enslaved were blameless; Howard could sense a habitation several miles away, and could sense the threads joining them to the people who lived there. It was probably where they’d been taken from in the first place. Moving them and laying them gently among the village huts took only an instant, a simple matter of causing those spaces to align, then separating them again. There were other captives too, held for whatever purposes had suited Ardent’s plan, chained and drugged in the other tents. Howard did the same for them, sending each one back to those who missed them. The youngest were just children, some no more than babies.
It reminded him of the children he’d seen by the river, sick and emaciated, too young to even remember the war but still paying for its consequences. Did they deserve what they’d been born into? Howard had spent the last ten years enforcing The Levelling, but now, as the most powerful human being on the planet, he wondered if it was worth the cost. He had the chance to do something now, and he could either push this land further into the dark ages or elevate it to rejoin the developed world. Either choice had consequences.
He was still human though, he could tell that much; the new powers hadn’t changed him into a different person, or a different species. And being human, a man who lived by a code of honour with the aim of upholding order, he knew that in amongst his nea
r limitless power there was a narrow path to be trod, a line where decency and integrity lay.
He was understanding his new powers more as every second went by, and the subtleties they were capable of. He reached out with his mind, over every one of the thousands of habitations, every village or collection of hovels, and linked them to spaces free from pestilence and decay, so that even though nothing physical was transferred, the qualities of purity and wholesomeness would pass through. To the people who lived there their surroundings would look no different, except that clean water would flow, and food would grow, and starvation and disease would no longer blight their lives. It was enough to preserve life, and if the people here were no longer struggling to survive then they could live in contentment even if industrial prosperity was still denied to them.
It had taken just minutes. Then he drew his focus back in, back to where he stood. The quarry held only corpses now, and all souls were where they belonged. All except one—his own.
Howard turned to face the world he’d created for Amy, and stepped in. He could feel the warm sun and the cool air, he could smell the forest and the fields, and he could hear the birds and the cattle and horses and every other animal that inhabited this space. And most important of all, he could see Amy herself.
She was just feet away from him, back to normal health, looking round in amazement. She wasn’t dead, but wasn’t alive either, instead occupying the same kind of limbo the Elemental had kept her in. Here though, she would be happy.
She ran to him when she saw him, and he to her, and they held each other for whole minutes.
Now though he faced another choice, and if anything this was even more drastic than the last. He had powers at his disposal that had once led to people fighting the Elementals on equal terms, and almost winning. Yet now people lived as mortals, mere hairless apes with nothing but technology and language to their name. Was it fair, that men should live like this, if the knowledge of what they once possessed still existed? Was he being given this chance for a reason, to take the fight to the Elementals once again, and regain past empires? Or was that itself a path to disaster, a reckless gamble that Ardent had been about to make, with ruin and extermination for all mankind being the likely outcome? But by backing down, and not rejoining the fight, was he being a coward, single-handedly condemning humanity to yet more millennia of effective imprisonment?
He was with Amy now. After a lifetime of fighting, that was all that mattered. As cruel as the Elementals might have been he was not equipped to rejoin the battle with them, or even risk provoking them more. The end to mankind’s Levelling would have to wait for another day.
He let the powers go, making himself mortal again, knowing that he was now in limbo as well. He could have made them both immortal, but something told him that wouldn’t have been right. This new existence was a reprieve from what she’d suffered, but shouldn’t last forever. They would grow old in here, and die of old age in here, just as they would have done in the real world. And when that happened they would go the way of all souls. But for now, this world belonged to them.
Their new home lay ahead of them, and would be theirs for as long as they had left. They took each other by the hand, turned to face the treehouse, and began to walk.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM MITCHELL LIVES in East Sussex in the South of England, where he runs his own aerospace engineering consultancy. He is also an award-winning author, having had early success with various Horror and Science Fiction publications before winning the prestigious Writers of the Future contest in 2012. His first novel, CREATIONS, came out in 2014 with John Hunt Publishing.
His website is at www.wmfiction.com, and CREATIONS is available at Amazon.com.
Earth in 2040 is on the brink of environmental disaster. Meanwhile the rift between science and religion is growing as some turn to technology for answers, while others blame it for the catastrophe. And for biological engineer Max Lowrie, whose efforts to see evolution taught in schools have led to him receiving death threats, the fact his wife’s staunchly religious family also see him as the enemy only adds to the strain. So when Max gets the job offer of a lifetime it’s hard to say no. He’ll be halfway around the world, safe from any danger, working on a project which promises to pave the way for humanity’s future.
Then he hears what the company is planning: a fleet of self-replicating machines that can mine materials from the harshest environments, opening up as yet unheard of resources in the sea, on land, and ultimately on the Moon. As an ever-expanding machine population is unleashed, only Max realises what their creations represent: artificial life, a machine ecosystem, capable not only of evolving, but of redesigning themselves beyond all recognition to become fitter, stronger and faster than their human creators. The race is on to halt a new force of nature, and only Max has the knowledge that could stop them.
CREATIONS is available at Amazon.com.
Twenty years ago we went back to the Moon, this time for good—or that was the plan. The colony in the Mare Crisium lowlands was an outpost on the new frontier, a centre of research and development, where new technologies could be created and tested by any company willing to take on the challenge.
Now the Moon belongs to the machines, and a once-thriving colony lies in ruins.
The experiment into self-replicating systems was a disaster, and while those responsible try to shift the blame, the machines continue to spread. The infested region is now over two hundred miles wide and growing.
Reclaiming the Moon is a priority, and one man, the man who was coerced into designing the machines in the first place, is going to be central to that effort. But the world blames him for the disaster, and the first job will be to find him.
Yet even then the machine eradication mission won't be the only challenge. The destructive power that was demonstrated on the Moon is something that some powers would rather have for themselves. As the battle to eliminate the machines becomes a battle for who controls them, what started as a clean-up operation risks turning into all-out war.
ERADICATIONS is available at Amazon.com.
Jack Reiner has treated some messed-up people in his time. As a psychologist working for the US Military he’s encountered PTSD, behavioural instability, the works. His latest patient though promises to be his hardest: humanity’s first extra-terrestrial contact, a sentient space probe millions of years old, traumatised after seeing one race after another―including its originators―annihilate themselves in wars and global catastrophes. It enters the solar system begging for help in ending its existence, but the personnel at the listening station have other ideas. The probe knows things that could propel humanity to a new technological age, and Jack’s job is to keep it alive, and keep it talking. But Jack is soon thrown into a game of psychological chess, battling something far more complex―and dangerous―than anyone had anticipated.
MIND GAMES is available at Amazon.com.
After centuries of wondering, and searching, and hoping, humanity is now in contact with intelligences beyond Earth. The Alliance spans the whole galaxy, a conglomeration of spacefaring civilisations with millennia of mutual contact between them, and we are its newest members. Now though it is our turn to reach out, and bring another newly-discovered race into the fold―the Caronoi, peaceful and philosophical, and about to discover space travel for themselves. But when Jared Spegel, diplomatic troubleshooter, investigates a security breach at the research station where humans are preparing to make contact, he realises the job they’ve been given is not what they thought. They are leading the Caronoi like lambs to the slaughter, and any dissent could see humanity eradicated too.
CONTACT AUTHORITY is available at Amazon.com.
Veejay Seo has a death wish. When every high-risk high-adrenaline sport has left him unscathed he turns to spacediving: exo-atmospheric skydiving, competition jumping from partway up the world’s first space elevator. So when he survives yet another near-fatal accident, escaping with his life in ways no on
e can explain, he finds out the real reason for his inability to die―a quirk of reality where the laws of physics conspire to see him survive, time after time. And what is more, he is not alone. But to Veejay the gift of immortality is a curse. Raging against his inability to achieve the only thing he ever really wanted, he tries his most dangerous stunt yet―a space-jump so hazardous that no one has even attempted it. And his reward for pushing back against the forces keeping him alive: a glimpse of what really lies on the other side, the true nature of reality, and the world-shaping destiny that lies with him.
ASCENSION is available at Amazon.com.
“Do you remember what we always used to dream of? The discovery that would make your career? Make you famous? Well, I think I’ve found it. In fact I know I have. But I need your help to unravel it. Believe me though, this could be as big as the Pyramids. Or bigger.”
When linguist Jackson Petaine receives the invitation, it promises him the opportunity of a lifetime. The civilisation in the jungles of South America predates any previously discovered, yet the builders are gone, and their feats of engineering are all that remain. Now the citadel is home to the Uru, the silent caretakers who tend and maintain the site, but cannot—or will not—explain who built it, or where it came from. Only the carvings in a previously unknown language tell the story, a story Jackson will have to piece together for himself.
So when he discovers the true history of the place, why it was built, and what is really held there, the myths and legends he has been decoding become the key to his very survival.
LINGUA DAEMONIORUM is available at Amazon.com.
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