Cults of the Dragon Gods

by Brian McGoldrick

  The woman looks across the street and sees me. A look of disgust appears on her face. From the glint in her eyes, she obviously remembers me. I do not remember her name. In all honesty, I really do not give a fuck what her name is. She is nothing but a nasty cunt, and even as an eleven-year-old, I was already able to ignore her.

  I smile at the nasty bitch, and she shivers involuntarily. If I was still the fat pig that I was before the MMO incident, she would probably try to verbally assault and harangue me once again, but someone more than four times her mass, who is nothing but muscle, is not someone she has the courage to target. Elan's illusion only conceals my armor and not my massive build. Even though she would probably never admit it, that cunt is afraid of me. She is not cognizant of it, but subconsciously, she senses that I am more dangerous than anything she has ever come across in her pathetic life.

  After a few moments, the nasty bitch actually runs for the door of her townhouse. She will probably call the social police as soon as she gets inside and report me for racial intimidation. I have a slight urge to kill her, but she would not suffer enough. I do not have the time to torture her in a manner that would be satisfying. When I turn up as being officially dead and there is no camera footage of me, she will probably face some trouble for filing a false report. Hopefully, she will live, at least temporarily, in the aftermath of the nuclear apocalypse. She would be likely to experience far more suffering in the chaos following the end of the world. I want to see her die, but I want her to suffer first. I will not give her an easy way out.

  *** Arizona – Earth ***

  Return: Day 343

  August 6, 2078

  (Thorrin)

  Every ten or fifteen minutes, I see a security guard wondering about the property. The man is not particularly big, but he is armed. After all my years in the Battleground of the Damned and in the Lands Of Despair, I have seen a lot of dangerous men, a lot of hard men that were killers, and that security guard is without doubt a man who has killed.

  The second time I see the guard passing by, I point him out to Pancho. After staring at him for a few seconds, Pancho frowns.

  That man is a killer.

  Pancho does not reply, but a pensive expression settles on his face.

  Mostly in silence, more than an hour passes after Consuela leaves the room. Only the girl's occasional questions and comments and our responses to them are spoken. Any and all conversation between Pancho and myself is carried out in our party channel. I do not trust Poncho's ex, and whether or not he does, he is willing to humor me and not speak out loud.

  Maria enters the room with the blank smile of a professional servant. Her attitude and demeanor are not something you find outside of the homes of the wealthy. No matter what Consuela's beginnings may have been, she has clearly become one of the wealthy, the elite. Maybe my distrust for her is just my natural distrust of people with money, but it does not change the nagging feeling that something is definitely wrong with this household.

  "Dinner is ready. Ms. Consuela said to bring you to the dining room, and she will join you when she is free. Please, follow me." Turning to the door we entered the living room through, Maria leads us to the dining room.

  This home may be small compared to others in this neighborhood, but it is still a mansion in its own right. At a guess, I would say there have to be twenty-five or more rooms. The entire building is probably in the twelve to fifteen thousand square foot range.

  The dining room table could easily seat twenty or twenty-five people, but only three places are set.

  Pancho looks toward Maria. "Isn't Consuela eating with us?"

  Maria either cannot or does not bother to keep a condescending expression off of her face. "Ms. Consuela is still occupied with your supplication. She does not have time to entertain you."

  Pancho's frown does not appear to phase Maria. She has the blatantly condescending demeanor of an overly self-important servant of someone ridiculously wealthy or noble toward what she considers the lower class. She makes no attempt to conceal the fact that she is looking down on us commoners.

  When Pancho glances at me, I shrug and take a seat at the table. These chairs are sturdy, but from my point of view, they are rather flimsy, much more than flimsy, for a Dvergar. I surreptitiously reinforce the chair with an armor buff. Even so, I am still afraid that it will shatter underneath my weight.

  A dissatisfied frown on his face, Poncho sits down opposite me, and the girl takes a seat next to him.

  Without another word, Maria struts out of the dining room.

  From Poncho's expression, he might have slapped Maria if we were not on Earth. That snotty bitch's attitude reminds me of the worst of those pissant functionaries in those dozens of minor kingdoms that we plowed through during The Great Fuck Over.

  I do not reply. I am not sure what to make of the situation. Everything feels completely off to me, and it is keeping me off-balance. I know that there is something that I am missing and maybe, if I could figure out what it is, things would start to make sense to me again.

  Once Maria disappears from view, the girl looks back and forth between Pancho and myself. "Um . . . what is going on? This house gives me the creeps. It almost feels like I'm back in the Lands of Despair."

  Pancho's head snaps around toward the girl. His eyes are wide and his lips slightly parted in surprise. My own expression is probably a comical mirror of his. Since we entered this house, all the clues have been right in front of me, but I have not been connecting the dots.

  "She's right, you know."

  The frown returns to Poncho's face. "Yeah . . . though, Consuela did spend most of her legal career representing multinational corporations and the self-aggrandizing billionaires that think they're above the law and above everyone without money. Well, I suppose they really are above the law. No matter what you do, there's nothing you can do to them within the structure of the law."

  "I thought you said she was a divorce lawyer."

  Pancho shrugs and give me a sheepish grin. "She started as a divorce lawyer out of college, but after representing a few of those billionaires, she started a second practice that focused on corporate law. That's where she made her real money."

  I do not hide my own frown. "I still don't like the feeling here. Maybe, we should find someplace else to stay."

  Pancho looks down at the food on the table. "You're right. I suppose, we should find a motel. The vibe here just isn't quite right."

  No one says anything else, and we dig into the food on the table. There is enough here to feed three times our number of normal humans, but I can easily eat four to five times what I could as a human. Poncho can probably eat three times what he could when he was an Earth human. I am not sure of the reason, but I suspect that with our Power awakened, our bodies are converting the excess food into energy to fuel our Power.

  Even in the Dvergar writings that I have had access to, I have never seen a good explanation of the relationship between Power and normal matter and energy. I am not sure, but I think when you get right down to it, at the most basic core level, everything is really Trinity. That almost seems to be an underlying, unproven assumption for most, if not all, schools of magic. Makers are no exception to this assumption.

  I recognize some of the food. It is a typical fare that you will find in any Mexican restaurant, but that is only about half of the food. For the rest of it, they are all dishes that must be served south of the border but are seldom found in America.

  A little more than half an hour later, with our bellies full, the three of us are leaning back in our chairs. Neither Maria nor Consuela has put in another appearance. If I could not hear the occasional noises from Maria's activities, I would think that we were alone in the house. Wherever Consuela has disappeared to, there are no audible sounds to betray her location or presence.

  The girl's eyelids are drooping, and her chin keeps nodding towards her chest. Even if she is a nominal adult, being in a twelve-year-old give or take body, she
does not appear to have the resilience or endurance of Pancho and myself.

  I don't know what half of that was, but it was some good food.

  Pancho smirks. Authentic Mexican, it looked like mostly dishes you would find in the southern part of the country, near the Guatemala border. I may be American by birth and proud of it, but I still love the food from the old country. My grandmother used to make stuff like that. Well, not exactly like that, but it was close. My grandmother was from the Yucatán.

  I do not think I managed to keep the slight frown off my face. There was a time I was proud to be American, but America changed. This . . . place is not the America I grew up in. The country where people were proud to stand on their own two feet and achieve something with their lives died in the bloodbath of spineless Millennial nanny state politics. For more than fifty years, there was really no place in America for people like me. Or people like you.

  Yeah, I know what you mean. Even if I'm not an ancient Neanderthal like you, the America I wanted to live in was already dying as I was growing up. Once those crybabies that couldn't even hear an upsetting word without breaking down into screaming hissy fits came into power, the America I went to war for died. Once I got out of the Corps, there was already no place for me, either. Pancho stares off into space with a pensive frown.

  After a minute or so of silence, Pancho yawns and looks around the room. Damn, I didn't realize I was this tired. I've gone more than twice as long without sleep and not been this drag ass.

  Pancho's words and his yawn, make me realize that I am tired as well. I am a Dvergar. I should be able to go for a week without sleep and still be functional. Just being awake for thirty-six hours should not leave me feeling this run down. Is it some side effect from using the dimensional rift to travel from the Battleground of the Damned to earth?

  Pancho pushes back his chair and tries to stand up, but his legs collapse underneath him. He grabs for the table to support himself and drags dishes and cutlery to the floor with him. The girl is already out cold in her chair.

  I surge to my feet, but my knees feel a little wobbly. "What the hell?"

  I try to get an axe out of my dimensional storage ring, but I am too muddle-headed to activate the ring's transmission gate.

  This has to be drugs or poison. Why? What the hell is going on here?

  Consuela walks into the room with Maria and the armed security guard at her back. The guard has his gun in its holster and a sword in his hand.

  Steel is stubbornness. I barely manage to cast a pattern sight spell.

  Looking at the three of them, the guard and Maria have some kind of Mana based abilities active. They appear to be Adepts, but I cannot tell much about Consuela. She looks like a normal human, but it could just be that she is not using any Power.

  "Who in the hell are you? What in the hell are you?"

  While Maria glares at me, as though she wants to kill me, Consuela only frowns slightly. "You Dvergar do live up to your reputations. There was enough anesthetic in the amount of food you ate to knock out a dozen cattle."

  Dvergar? She actually knows that I am a Dvergar? How the hell can she know that?

  I bite my tongue hard, and the pain focuses me a little. It takes a few seconds, but I manage to draw my axe out of my storage ring.

  The guard's eyes narrow, and he moves between Consuela and myself. If it were not for the drugs, the guard would be laughable, both the state I am in, he could actually be a danger.

  A grey collar appears in Consuela's hand. Black runes are inset into the smooth hard metal. I may not know its origin, but I know its purpose. That is a slave collar.

  Consuela looks at me with a bland expression. "Put this on and there will be no need to hurt your friends."

  "Isn't Pancho your ex? I thought you liked him still?"

  Consuela's expression does not change in the slightest. "My feelings for him are immaterial. My only loyalties are to the Feathered Sky Lords. They are of no value to the Lords, but I have orders to capture or neutralize you. For some reason, they want to get their hands on you, a Dvergar. Put on the collar, or I kill them!"

  For fifteen or twenty seconds, I stare at the Consuela's eyes without doing or saying anything. I cannot get a read on this woman. I do not know if she will carry through on her threat or not. She could be a statue or a mannequin for all the emotion that is visible in her eyes.

  Without taking her eyes off me, Consuela gestures in the direction of Pancho and the girl. "Jordi, kill them both!"

  Jordi, the security guard, draws his gun and points it at Pancho. It is not the stun gun that I thought it was. It looks to be a .40 caliber semiautomatic, a Glock. That is not something that should be in the hands of any civilian in the United States of America any longer.

  More than thirty years ago, the Proglodytes managed to ram bills through the Congress that effectively outlawed firearms, even though, they did not repeal the Second Amendment. There was a few months long period of bloody gun confiscations. They made a media production out of the supposed rabid, ultra-violent, right wing, gun toting cretins and their resistance to the new laws. Tens of thousands of American citizens were murdered by the government because of their possession of firearms. At the end, most people were falling all over themselves to turn in their guns.

  Now, a normal citizen or the security guards for a normal citizen should never be in possession of a semiautomatic pistol.

  Jordi flicks off the safety and begin to squeeze the trigger.

  "WAIT! Give me the collar! I'll put it on."

  "Jordi, do not kill them!"

  Jordi lowers the gun but does not holster it.

  With a flick of her wrist, Consuela tosses the collar to me.

  "It looks like what they say about lawyers having their morals and ethics surgically removed is true. You're one cold-hearted bitch."

  Consuela's cold eyes do not reveal even a flicker of emotion. "Put the collar on, Dvergar! If you do not, I will kill them."

  With a grimace I cannot hide, I stare at the collar for several moments. It is one of the hardest things I have ever done to not let my hands tremble as I put the collar on my own neck and snap it closed. Memories of the dark years following the Massacre flood my mind, and it feels like someone has stabbed a cold steel dagger through my chest.

  "It is true what the Spymaster told me, you really are only a cowardly Earth human inside that rock ape body."

  A pair of shackles appears in Consuela's hand. The cuffs are almost three-quarters of an inch thick, and the chain links are as thick as my index finger, my Dvergar index finger.

  Consuela holds the shackles out to Jordi. "Secure his hands behind his back."

  "Si, Ms. Consuela." Jordi seems to have a thick Spanish accent. He takes the shackles and stares at me. Those cold, killer's eyes of his seem to be daring me to do something.

  "AAARRR!" I fall to my knees as pain worse than anything I have ever experienced rips through my body. I can barely stop myself from falling on my face, let alone do anything to fight back as Jordi secures my hands behind my back.

  The tip of Consuela's finger is on a small ring I do not remember seeing on her hand, previously, and her face is displaying a faint smile. "That collar comes from Taereun. It was made in one of the kingdoms that worship the Feathered Sky Lords. The same is true for those slave cuffs. They are strong enough that not even a Dvergar can break them."

  From Taereun? She has contact with Taereun? I suppose it should have been obvious when she called me a Dvergar. Without having some kind of contact with people from Taereun, there is no way she could have known I am a Dvergar.

  Buried Secrets

  *** Central California – Earth ***

  Return: Day 343

  August 6, 2078

  (Brand)

  Once the door closes behind that nasty bitch, I turn to my SUV and reach for the door handle.

  Crack!

  Subconsciously, without understanding why, I crouch and spin around. The arrow
that would've punched through my heart pierces the armor over my left biceps. My armor slowed the barbed head enough that it is stuck in the middle of the muscles. Without armor, the arrow would have gone clean through my arm and entered my torso. I barely notice this pain; I have felt so many that are far worse.

  Looking around, I cannot see any signs of the archer. I did not get a good look at the trajectory of the arrow, but from what I can tell, there were only a few places where the archer could have shot from. The arrow was travelling at supersonic speeds, so the Archer only had fractions of a second to get undercover, but I still cannot see him.

  Snapping off the shaft, I leave the arrowhead embedded in my arm.

  “Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!" The scream from the nasty bitch across the street comes as a delayed reaction.

  The cunt is standing in the open doorway of her house, but when did she open her door again? I am completely off my game. The bitch is less than nothing, but I should never have missed her opening that door again.

  As I expand my spatial awareness, it feel like someone splits open my skull and digs around in my brain with a drill. Gritting my teeth, I search the area as well as I can, but I still find no sign of the archer.

  I feel unsteady on my feet as I open the door of my SUV climb inside. Setting a random destination in the autopilot, I lean back in my seat and breathe deeply while the SUV drives itself out of the neighborhood. I do not see any signs of the archer in my rearview mirror. Since my spatial awareness is still not strong enough to see through solid objects, the body of the SUV will block it, and I cannot rely on my spatial awareness to search for him.