Of The Dark and The Deep_The Cryptid Council Series Book 1

by Rink Wester

  Hear me in the primitive and irrational! We are more than mågÿckal ritual or sorcery Vickie. More than gestures or language. We are the bud and bloom of the supernatural itself. Wake up sister and release it. Some dark haunt prevents me from locating you. It’s as if your body is scrambled across competing radars but your mind is my mind. I will not be denied! Now borrow from me sister and push!

  Vickie’s entire body and aura expanded and filled that space with powers ripped from an ancient cosmos. The engraved runes encircling the metal trapping her, clamping down her mågÿckal essence, pulsed and warped, the heat of their spells making way for a far older heat. That power knew it’s master and all threat would heed the göddess or fall prostrate underfoot. The entire length of those chains and that incised muzzle buckled and exploded as Vickie’s mind cleared and she screamed in violation and retribution.

  Now it’s my turn.

  P’u-hsein and his dragon half sniffed the air in a seizure of rage as his dragon roared shooting a stream of volcanic outrage at Vickie, its flames engulfing her in a ball of apoplectic fury. In a rampaging huff they merged and lunged at Vickie, blinded by the fireball searing all sense and reason there in that prisoner’s reach. Vickie opened her mouth and swallowed down dragonfyre and Bödhisåttvå enchantment, forcing the human from the beast as she caught the flying demigöd and his dragon endogyne around their throats and held them like a sieve of ancient supernatural force and malevolence. The göddess within wanted to feel bone splinter as muscle and skin ripped and laid bare its genetic distress. She needed the victim caught unaware to flex and remove all illusion. This was now her jungle and the patent of all creature law hers to judge.

  Do it sister! Do It!

  To that voice she nodded. To herself she relented. As her fingers flexed, digging past tendon and all reasonable owed restraint, she tore the life out of dragon demigöd and dragonet. Holding throat and bone and celestial gore in her clenched hands, their bodies slid to the ground covered now in immortal ichor and the final liquid history of them. She smiled a satisfied grin at their gaping neck holes, sputum and cellular code fighting a purpose lost, as she teleported away in her very own jell-o moment.

  Two birds. My stone. I am free. I wish I had a pudding pop. Göd I hate stress eating.

  When the boogie man boogies not even waistlines are safe.

  52

  Gærüt sailed with Nänå into the past as their finale spooled out before them. They were once again on the mighty shores of the Zambezi River which snaked its way through the eastern ranges of Ife-Ile. It’s raging waters carved a channel 450 ft deep and raced through the patoga gorge as it’s sheer cliff walls rimmed Gærüt’s memories and framed their past. The time for cog to once more become wheel was overdue and Nänå could once again sense his secret camouflage. What remained between them were truths that could hide in veiled innuendo no longer. He had wiped her mind clean hoping to never revisit the colors of their joint denouement ever again. He told her once again of the Hiklorim he had known long before any of his siblings had been created. Of The Dark and The Deep and grootslng son, their seraphic trio, in the time of early breath and starry newness. Aeyitria, Dark Mother of perdition with the Golden Ëgbë coin of perdition in her forehead and firmament, had come to him and taught him to fashion a daughter of the vast night from the shadows to balance the heavens. The secret and hidden malice of her words belied the benign honey of word and Motherly caress and Gærüt refused her. In the fullness thereof she thought to rend from him as Łöståghår had stolen from her. She came to him in a dream of violation and tasted his mågÿcks, one long lick down his astral core and he awoke in disgust and betrayal. There in that field of endless black and foaming nothingness the Star of Sihiosia lit and the war with the Mother and Father began

  .

  My brothers were born and in haste and frustration, the sound of all impetuous anger swallowing reason, I created you. The wish of the Mother had granted itself.

  But the spite of the Dark is long and patient and there in the long measure of her rage Gærüt was deceived. She had corrupted his mågÿck with her own and distorted the Sihiosian vein flowing through Nänå. She reached into the barren field of his creation and wrought a curse that would undo the universe. In that emptiness, Nänå’s female emptiness, she planted four seeds. Four Ëhiån eggs. The Curse of Ëhiå.

  Aeyitria and Łöståghår sewed into that spell a maledicrion to ensure anything born of gröötslâng blood would roil in madness and tear in great mouthfuls any firmament they created. While his brothers mated with any human crawling and fathered whole pantheons of cryptid beasts, Gærüt had jumped after that first conjugal release when Nänå had felt life stir within and stolen away to grow and blossom in preparation to give him what he thought never to have. A child.

  Ôlörûn struck the ceiling of heaven with a thud of joy and cracked loose stars and swirling nebulae in unconcealed bliss. In jubilee he cast long and wide the taint of Sihiosia and shamed the paint on the flower with his glee.

  But the curse had taken root and you too ümfåzi had fallen to the Mother.

  That curse immediately warping her mind, nurturing an insanity that rewrote the Nänå she would in tumbling madness forever become. Nänå had yanked from her growing womb that first sire and an unfertilized egg and with gröötslâng mågÿck and the cursed folly of Hiklorim she slammed together that egg and the zygote of the Sky Father, sewing together doom and umbilical majesty to create a Master child her maniacal mind reasoned. One powerful enough to rip the Star of Sihiosia from her beloved’s chest and reappoint the Mother and Father to the long seat of heaven. She reattached it all to her womb and in secret gestation waited. It was a fine horror that Gærüt recounted as Nänå’s eyes grew large and tears burned her cheeks. He had stolen all this from her. He had raped her knowing mind and left her soul ravaged and bereft. Her ûmÿèni. She now remembered the madness he spoke of, that fevered dream of motherhood born of cursed womb and fallopian mågÿck, but it was the hurt that planted itself firmly in her center and radiated outward, filling her until she thought she would implode from the sheer defeat of it. She now remembered their fist child and what Gærüt had done to him. Lêlwåni Ädår. The Bitten Sword. Her baby boy. She ugly cried, slapped him and clawed at his face, no longer göddess or gröötslâng Queen, but merely a woman in the heat of male betrayal and female hatred.

  Gærüt made no move to restrain her. He owed her that much. He had never told any of his brothers, save Örên, what he had done but he now told Nänå, the words tumbling forth seeding their own momentum. What he did to his own child and that mother that bore him haunted him. It was an immoral shame that would live far longer than the sinner. He looked at his beautiful sister, rapt in deadly communion, and he continued, caution cast to winds that no longer knew their worth.

  What rose ignores its stem and thorn?

  53

  Ümfåzi ökö, Our child was an abomination. He was Sihiosia’s ruin!

  Gærüt conjured for her dancing visions of the past as he showed Nänå scenes of a life he had forced her to forget. Light and sound played in the air of that Zambezi morning as her loss and the visage of her child emerged, that reel tearing great sobs from her as she grabbed her bosom and cried a mother’s lament.

  There, sailing across the firmament was her beautiful son, Lêlwåni Ädår. He had torn himself free of Nänå in woeful and grisly maternity. His entire being throbbed with hunger and a taste for a dark nutrition no mother’s milk would ever supply. In destruction and monstrous desperation he stretched, ripping the cowl from his gaping maw and introducing the light to his newborn senses. His first breaths explored with bracing immediacy the tragic sway of Gröötslâng family and the raw fate of bastard göds . His life was a psychotic symphony crafted by the two most powerful beings in existence. He fell from their plate on the floor of existence and blew himself off. His own five second rule cleansing his palette.

  Above him stood an imposing figur
e. Ôlörûn The Sky Father. Intrigue, imagination and that gnawing hunger made him reach out and grab that burly figure around the throat, seeking what infant affection his hardwon birth belied. The Father recoiled, his instant disgust mystifying and frightening Lêlwåni Ädår.

  He was born knowing and he knew that look was his reckoning. His mother gathered him in her massive arms and bathed him in maternal affection born of effortless intuition.

  His horned, spiked mouth agape, he was as tall as mountains, body jointed and covered in plates of meteor rock and the bones of unformed planets. In deformed embryonic gröötslâng mågÿck he had four arms, two clawed and dripping in venom while the other two were massive extensions of predatory intent, hooked in wait like some prehistoric mantis praying to its own mad delight. He was gröötslâng but something more. Something darker and deformed. He was what happened when the perfection of gödhood fell down to syndrome. Far too many divine chromosomes all fighting for supremacy. Gærüt had stared at his offspring with a father’s concern that quickly soured into retaliation as Lêlwåni Ädår, raking talons across his own face, howled and attacked.

  -The great Mother whispered that only when two of the gröötslâng lords offspring are combined and there find agreement in blood and bone, then that child would drink down the Gröötslâng Lord and restore the darkness that hungers and binds. Lêlwåni Ädår was an unfortunate miscalculation. But then you stole a horn from his body and fashioned out of it that Pendant you now wear. Your poured into it great ladles of your own corrupted power and With it, your body began to spontaneously create eggs on its own as you tried again and again to spawn deadly offspring to rue and to ruin. It was then I knew you had to be stopped. That dark lurking evil within would consume you and always deny the purity of its gröötslâng blood. It had driven you insane, leaving you haggard and faded, the madness within infecting the göddess without. You were tainted by Aeyitria’s lunacy and I knew the only way to end the Curse was to end you.

  So 4000 years ago when you had secretly taken my seed and lay gestating a new horror to wipe the universe clean and reawaken The Mother and Father I came to you and tore that infant plague from your body. Corrupted by the human skin we now wore, I could no longer bring myself to slay another of my children. I had already killed hundreds. So I severed that genital motive and tore the mantis from the darkness and secreted that malevolent scar of birth mågÿck away. The mantis göd I entrusted to the world of men and Pörø mågÿck to educate and rear in spell and secrecy. I set a marker in his blood so that every few centuries when the taint of Aeyitria threatened to overwhelm him he would molt and burn down to infancy to start life anew, a child of gröötslâng, mantis and phoenix power oblivious to his nefarious birth.

  The final cosmic joke was for Łöståghår to place a mågÿckal beacon in your blood that only memory activates. To think on any of our progeny is to summon them to a dark purpose and to the rue of all and I will die before I see that world dawn Nänå. For millennia I thwarted you. This is why I wiped not only your physical memory but removed it from the wall of time and space itself. Left only in malarial afterthought, a parasite marking that memory buried low in my thoughtscape and mine alone. I will die before I allow you to corrupt our children to serve Aeyitria’s pallid dementia.

  -Then die and prove it, brother. Die and prove it.

  Nänå smashed the remaining wall of her temple ruins and rose to kiss Gærüt full on the lips before teleporting away.

  She owed her ûmÿèni that much of an emotional headstart before she found her children and they came to break his fatherhood and shake loose the avenging tree of Hiklorim.

  *****************************************************

  Vickie and Victor both jumped out of sleep a world away and looked around their rooms in confusion. A siren call had awakened them and they now heard her voice whispering to them, beckoning them. With the coming of The Łöå their bedrooms were filled with the music of plans yet unfurled as they listened in tandem, minds locked in a shared wavelength of predetermined unity.

  The Other renewed, The Mother made whole,

  Returned to restart the engine of Old,

  With two halves of one child placed in the cart,

  Summoned be mantis and gröötslâng apart.

  For now you see the know and the why,

  Your Father and King of both Land and of Sky,

  He split you and tore you from one life to live,

  To steal away promise of Grandmother’s sieve,

  But now that your mother has regained the horn,

  Run to her now, repeat and be born!

  Freedom for all hangs loose on a thread,

  Your choice will decide the living or dead.

  Mågÿck dragged them down and they materialized at the same time in a place of beautiful Zulu and Ndebele architecture and a heat that seemed to climb from the very dirt itself. They had no idea where that mågÿck had brought them but standing before them, madness momentarily softened to a doughy, approachable consistency stood Nänå Båkløü. The göddess Ÿêmøjá. Gripping two Ëgbë swords, glowing in blue sand mågÿck, the Pendant of Ëhiå slight and red at her neck, she smiled as she said,

  Welcome children. Come to mama!

  54

  Örên opened his door and hugged Gærüt, ushering him in, taking a swig of caipirinha and handing his brother a fresh damp and sweating glass of his own.

  She knows.

  Those two words were all the warning Örên needed. He flashed himself away and returned with a box cut in lacquered Mesopotamian ornateness floating in protection mågÿck and older sorceries of Hiklorim that he had hidden away for his brother 4000 years ago and eons before that. That vessel had for thousands of years held a weapon that frightened legions. Cryptid gödlore had given it many names throughout the millennia but Örên and Gærüt knew it simply as the bone dagger of Ädårønh Tir. The Breathing Bone of Ädår.

  Gærüt had long ago entrusted Örên with the secret of the dagger and its dark birth and 4000 years ago Örên had entrusted one other person with its location. His brother Osänyìn. They had guarded that knowledge and kept it from the memory of the world until such time as Gærüt would have need. They had all prayed that would be the lighter side of never to come.

  There’s a power at play here brother...a malevolence to which even my far reaching eye is blind. Some force powerful enough to resurrect Nänå and break against enough of my strength to release my gröötslâng son from his prison realm. Nameless, it seeks to corrupt and thwart me. At this late hour, I need your succor and aid once again brother.

  The fear in Ôlörûn’s voice was more frightening to Örên than whatever beast hid in the actual shadows frightening him. This new development of old sin frightened them all. Gærüt had just confirmed what the battle and loss to that young gröötslâng in North Carolina had already painfully informed. Gærüt was a father and his son was an asshole. His sister had returned an unwitting mother to said asshole and her mind and malice were once again whole. The box labeled “Scary shit” would never cover this. You know your fear is airtight when “can’ts” resemble “won’ts” and they both stand around pissing themselves in long yellow brooks of shame.

  -But Ôlörûn…why? Why even reattach the spoke to the wheel and restore her mind? Why tell her anything at all?

  -There is madness in the methods of our sister and I’ve spent lifetimes fighting and scraping back that madness. She is my destruction and my undying love, Örên. Don’t you see? 4000 years ago I killed her and with her a morsel of my gödhood failed the peace of that act. Even death wasn’t expecting what happened. I did not survive. Neither of us did. Death turned her away and shut the door and someone somehow yanked her back from that doorsill. This time I mean for her to know. I need her to know everything. I need her to build the basket and put every egg she can into it. I looked into her eyes and I saw my Nänå. The mania has yet to fully consume her. In that hope and that hope alone I gave it all
back to her. The hope that together we will find a way to bring the curse of Hiklorim to its end.

  -Fuck hope brother. Where’s the vaseline? I say bring the stick, the sword and the belt buckle. Our sister is lost to us.

  -No Òrúnmìlà, despair not. I took from her the one sacred thing her mania had always held dear. Her motherhood. I assumed that would be the ruin of Aeyitria and Łöståghår. I see now that I was wrong. Our children will be the final tool. The nail to seal the wood and build the pyre. So dear brother, let her remember. Let her mind recover. We shall settle all bets at the end. And if not, I’ll once again take up the dagger and slit her throat. I’ll rip her skull from her shoulders and ride that horse through whatever deathly sunset comes.

  That made Örên smile as he downed what was left of his caipirinha and picked up that mysteriously carved box. He handed it to his older brother and nodded in tacit approval. Like the A-Team of the 80’s, he loved it when a plan came together.

  Gærüt looked down at the carvings on the vessel and thought back to what he had to do to create the dagger of Ädårønh Tir. The malice and shame that surrounded its birth long before he had had to use it against his gröötslâng queen. It was a shame that had nearly broken him and one truth he held back from Nänå. The one memory he had yet to reconcile.