The Awakening of the Gods (Forgotten Ones)

by M. H. Hawkins

  The thought sent chills up his spine and filled his belly with fear. It was all too much for the seven-year-old to bear, and all he could only focus on the dying part of it all. “What if… what if I don’t do it? What if I can’t… do it?”

  Asher let go a fleeting snort. “No one would blame you for not wanting to die.” Asher slid past Ryan then turned around. “And no one would know. It’s just me and you here. And I… I’m the one who sacrificed you. Who am I going to tell?” Ashe spun back around and moved towards the balcony before spinning around again. “Five. Nine… Four. Two. The door code. Remember it. Now… get your ass downstairs. Go be with your mom. You can… you can decide later about all that other stuff.” Asher smiled, and raising his knee, he opened the glass door behind him with a donkey-kick. “Take care, kid.”

  Ryan watched as Asher spun around again and stepped onto the balcony. Asher’s grimy clothes shifted with the shadows and became a black suit of armor. A black cloak spilled out of Asher’s shoulders and spilled over his back, down to the back of his knees. Asher’s hands floated out to his sides, and a swift grinding sound accompanied the appearance of his two black battleaxes. They disappeared, reappeared, and then disappeared again as Asher gracefully swung them around in front of him. And Ryan watched as Asher’s left arm (his injured one) buckled as he savaging swung his midnight-black axe around and unintentionally aggravated his injury.

  CH 29: Just the Two of Us

  Asher turned left and saw the storm dragon perched on the wall, half hanging from its claws. He slung down the axe in his left hand and flexed it, this time embracing the pain.

  The lightning flashed, and Asher looked over the balcony, down at the forest, far below and off in the distance, in the suddenly clear horizon. “Yeah, they’re still there,” he told the storm dragon. “Down in the forest, hidden.” Asher looked at Anna will sad, golden eyes—no longer emeralds, no longer green flames. He looked like he was about to apologize, but his eyes were the only evidence of that. “Do you know where at? Pikes Peak, Colorado.” He nodded towards the insides (east). “Over there, east of here, is the Garden of Gods—least that’s what they call it.”

  The thunder grumbled. “Scouts? Five of them—you got ‘em, right?” The thunder grumbled again. “Good. Still, it was smart of him, Blackwell, to pick the location. Fortified, hard to access. It’s a bomb shelter in a mountain.”

  Asher paused, and he and the dragon shared an uneasy moment of silence. Nervous at the awkwardness of it all, Asher looked around the balcony. Left, right, and above was all rock. Higher up the slope was snow. They were far from anything resembling civilization. That was smart of him, Blackwell, thought Asher. He took the southwest side. Less population, low traffic.

  Further below, where the snowy mountain turned to rock, and where the rock turned to soil, was a forest. Dense, trick, and packed with pine trees. Nested within the forest and between mountains, was some water—the Mason Reservoir, just west of the McReynolds Reservoir, if he wasn’t mistaken. That wasn’t a mistake, he thought. Blackwell, most certainly, did that on purpose, for Mea; The Golden Lion of Elysium, the Ice Queen of legends… ridiculous.

  The forest was noisy. When the thunder wasn’t grumbling, Asher could hear the Malick’s swarm rattling insistently, drowning out the brushing sounds of the forest. “Yeah, it’s not going to be long… not long at all.” He took a deep breath then said, “You should go… protect them, Ryan, Diana. If they… If they get past me, then fight. But until then… until that happens…” Asher sighed and licked his lips, trying to buy time and not let his emotions overheat. “There’s no reason why both of us have to die.”

  The thunder crashed, and lightning bolts exploded next to Asher’s foot. The storm dragon swiped at one of the mountain’s rocky ledges and took of it with it, tearing through the loose granite and batting away few stones off to the side. Asher had his answer. He nodded somberly and said, “Alright, yeah… until Mea returns.” IF she returns, he thought sadly.

  Looking around the balcony and the mountain it protruded from, Asher smirked. Leave it to Vincent Blackwell to build a doomsday shelter inside a mountain, and then go off and die… and then come back from the dead.

  He looked over at Anna then twisted his hand around, making a gold coin appear in his palm, one of his. One side had a pair of axes resting in front of a set of wings. The other side had the same ancient language, the language of the gods, traced along its edges, just like all the other other gold coins from the other gods. Staring at it for moment, Asher ran his thumb over the embedded golden symbols. Then he read the words aloud. “The Lord of Eagles. Let and your transgressions be forgiven, and as the wind carries the leaves, let the burden of your sins be lifted from your shoulders. Smile, for you have found favor with the gods and are deemed worthy in their eyes.” Though he didn’t look, he was sure that Anna was rolling her eyes and scowling at him, if storm dragons could do such a thing. Considering that he had betrayed her and killed her, he couldn’t blame her in the least. His golden coin was the equivalent to receiving a governor’s pardon from a crooked politician… forgiveness from a cruel, unworthy god.

  Asher snorted. “A little past due, but I think this is yours.” He flipped the coin into the air, and the storm dragon snatched it up with its oversized claw.

  Asher grabbed his axe and banged it against the glass partition, triggering the computer’s system. A wall of steel slammed down behind the glass partition. Another one slammed down in front of it.

  Asher heard a grumbling, and the moon rose higher into the sky. The trees came nearer, and the balcony collapsed beneath him. Axes in hand, he hopped onto the collapsing stone railing then leapt into the air. His satin cloak flapped wildly behind him. Its sheen fluttering like ocean waves at night. The shimmering cloak blurred into two blankets of oily-black wings, and after momentarily bouncing upwards, his wings slammed down and narrowed behind him, and he was shooting towards the earth, the field before the rattling forest of pine trees and, most likely, certain death.

  Anna, the one-time Nephilim and newly-reborn storm dragon, was a coin’s toss behind him, on the road to redemption and the final death.

  CH 30: Dog Eat Dog World

  Standing beneath a canopy of pine trees, its roof made of pine needles and tree branches, Malick stared up at the mountain, Pikes Peak. The sweet smell of pine filled his nose, and the endless rattling of his pets filled his ears. “Quiet,” he ordered with a curt whisper.

  His camouflaged pets obeyed immediate, and a slimy, self-satisfying grin came across Malick’s face. Silence, complete silence.

  As Malick’s pets had filtered into the forest and filled it, its current inhabitants fled… the ones that could flee. The slower ones were quickly devoured by the unnatural creatures. And Malick’s creations were not selective, and they consumed any insect, reptile, animal, or bird that crossed their paths.

  It had been an entire day before the creatures could pick up the boy’s scent. First tracking him to the Harris’s apartment, they had been too late. Bursting through the door and windows just as Asher escorted Diana and Ryan through the shadows, they tore the apartment to shreds as they looked for the boy. Then the trail went cold, lost to the shadows.

  It was almost sheer luck that they had found him so quickly. One of Malick’s pets had caught the scent of a wolf—a gray wolf, one of Fenrir’s deserters—and followed it to the forest. Then the unexpected lightning storm raised more eyebrows, and more creatures gathered, like moths to a flame. When they finally saw the storm dragon, and caught the boy’s scent, they were certain, and the search was over.

  While Anna had successfully eliminated the scouts, it only took one survivor, one survivor to alert the rest of the swarm… and that was exactly what it did.

  Malick smiled as he up the hard slope of the mountain. It had a strange familiarity to it, like it was whispering to him. Then one of his pets whispered to him. Leaping down from one of the hundreds of pine trees, the creature
landed in front of Malick. It shook off its bark-colored and pine-green camouflage like a wet dog shakes off water. Its matted coat of fur returned to its oily-black sheen. The teeth tracing its elongated snout chattered. Lowering its head, it looked up at Malick and omitted a low clicking sound. Sulking in shame, it lowered itself to the ground. “Oh, I see,” Malick said, nodding. “You had to retreat.” The beast let out another series of clicking sounds. “So the Wolf lives? Oh… that’s a damn shame.” Malick clacked his tongue against the roof of him mouth twice, and then he looked at the palm of his hand. “Damn shame.” Thrusting his palm forward, at his pet, a long golden spike shot out of his wrist and speared the creature. “Damn shame.”

  Malick yanked back his hand, and the golden spike disappeared back into his wrist. The resulting cloud of black smoke (from the now-dead creature) swarmed his vision, and he waved a hand in front of him to clear it. What the hell was that? “That was failure… well, it’s how I deal with failure. Survival of the fittest, right?”

  His other creatures were too busy to notice, too loyal to care, too busy attacking each other. The ones in the trees rained down on the ones slinking along the ground. Rocks came alive and bit into the rustling bushes. The bush-colored creatures thrashed around as the rock-colored ones chomped down on their necks while others bit into their tails, thrashing their clamped-down, meat-filled jaws from side to side as their teeth shredded their fellow creatures’ fur into squiggles of black smoke.

  Some of the creatures, the ones that failed to kill the wolves, took to the air to escape. Their camouflage faded as the two sets of transparent, dragonfly wings sifted out of their backs and began humming and flapping. Dart upwards between the pine trees and their pursuers, they soon met the same fate as the other failed creatures. On their own sets of dragonfly wings, some of the late-comers were still buzzing above the forest, but they had heard their master’s orders, all the same. Crashing into each other mid-air, the creatures’ jaws snapped at each other as they tumbled through the tree branches and pine needles.

  The would-be escapees didn’t last long and were now outnumbered three-to-one. Fighting and fleeing, the creatures flopped about, fought, and scrambled through the trees. And just when they thought they escaped, the jaws of fate clamped down on them, and one of Malick’s creatures would chop down on its tail or slam into it side. Other times, one would yank on the failed creature’s tail while another one slammed into its side, with its teeth clamped down on its neck. Others came trashing backwards, pulled by the harpoon-like tails reeling them in like a undersized fish on a fisherman’s reel.

  Malick’s inner voice called out to him, inside his head. Why’d you do that? “Why?” Malick answered, sounding surprised. “Why? Because they failed. They didn’t kill the Wolf—Look.” Malick nodded towards one of the creatures, the corners of his lips slowly creeping upwards.

  The creature. Anchoring itself on the side of a tree, it pulled its tail backwards, like a fishing rod. Yanking again, its tail whipped to the side again, reeling in its stretched-out harpoon-tail. At the end of it was another one of its kind. This one, it had a harpoon jabbed in his hindquarters. Tumbling over some shrubbery and threw the dirt as it was reeled in, it finally caught a snare—latching onto a protruding root of one of the larger pine trees. The snare was strong, and the hooked creature’s razor-sharp talons did not fail it, carving notching notches into the wooden root, even as the barbed hook pulled on its back.

  Another yank from the first creature (the fisherman) pulled the barbed tail free and sent whipping back toward it.

  The wounded creature did not fare so well. As the barbed rod pulled itself free, through a fog of black, the creature exploded into an even larger, blacker fog. Then thirty other creatures emerged, just as they had done with the wolves.

  “You see,” Malick said. “That is how I turn nothing into something.” More of Malick’s creatures did the same, and within a matter of minutes, Malick had eliminated his failures, and his ranks had swelled five times larger than it was.

  Looking back towards Pikes Peak, Malick grinned again. “Did you know that Pikes Peak has a very specific—Look.” The lighting flashed, lighting up the night and displaying the great mountain in all of its marvelous splendor. Though it was night, and dark, and obscured by the lightning’s tint; the mountain’s colors still shown through—a pink, cream-colored tone tinted with shadows. “See that,” Malick said, grinning and pointing at the mountain. “It’s from the granite. They call it Pikes Peak granite, not very original but, oddly enough, grossly appropriate, I guess. And its only found here.” Really? Why do I care?

  The lightning flashed again. Its tentacles stretched across the sky and latched out at the forest, shattering the shaft of an old pine and exploding into five more scouts lurking through the meadow, the one between the tree line and the mountains. When the lightning flashed again, the disdain on Malick’s face showed plain as day. Why should you care? he thought, because I’m letting you live.

  He narrowed his eyes. The soul that once-inhabited his body (the one he was currently possessing) was becoming increasingly annoying and bothersome, and Malick was losing his patience. “Why should you care? Because a very long time ago, something very important happened here… when it was called the Mountain of Bones. The old wolf-god died here, a long time ago, during one of the past Cleansing, and that was… about… about a billion years ago, I think, give or take.” Really? “Oh, yes. The old Wolf, he was a demon, that one, in a manner of speaking. He would tear through any-and-all living creature he could find—and he kept the bones, as tokens or memorabilia, or something—I don’t know. That Wolf… he was a beast, if there ever was such a thing. And the Cleansing—that Cleansing, after the Wolf died… After he died, it was just… then it was just… all fire and brimstone. The earth tore open, tore itself into half, and fountains of fire poured out of it—from here, from that very spot. I mean, it was just… a ghastly explosion, from the bowels of the world, deep down, from its very core… and it drowned the mountain, drowned the entire thing and its whole reservoir of bones… drowned it all in lava—molten rock. Melted down every glorious, mystic bone of every glorious creature that the Wolf had killed and collected. A damn shame.” Malick paused and sighed. “And anyways… that’s where its pinkish hue comes from, from the volcanic rock that was spit out of the earth… a billion years ago. And now it’s called Pikes Peak Granite.” Then what happened, after the Cleansing? “After that one? A billion years ago? Well… the world changed. The gods went back to sleep, the ones that were still living. The Mountain of Bones was lost to a river of lava—drowned and reborn, into this. Then the world was reborn. But, I think—if I am not confusing the dates—that after that one, the world lumped together, like a… a supercontinent—you know, like a giant landmass. The mortals, your scientists, even came up with a name for it. Oh… what was it again?” Malick scratched at his chin, mimicking the mannerisms of a thinking man. “Huh. Oh, what was it now?” Now snapping his fingers, “what—what was it again? What’d they call it? Rodinia! Yes, that was it. They called it, Rodinia, the supercontinent.” Huh. “Yes, and now it’s about to happen, all over again.”

  Malick scanned over his creatures. The newly reborn ones were still trying to find their legs, stumbling atop them while being nudged up by the older ones. As they rapidly blinked away the blurs from their fresh, new eyes; Malick could see that they were finally gaining their bearings. They’re almost ready. The older ones and some of the faster learners crept closer to Malick. Others slinked down the nearby tree trunks while others leapt down or across other tree branches before joining the others. Soon they were all crowded around him. Their hissing and rattling continued.

  So what’s the deal with the boy? asked Malick inner voice. “Him? Who? Oh, the boy, the one who would be sacrificed—to end the Cleansing. Let the one who would sacrifice innocence and bear the guilty burden not go unrewarded. While their wound may never heal, let their sacrifice grant the wor
ld a chance at redemption. ” A second chance? “Yes, the boy gets sacrifice, and the Tree of Life gets replenished. And bonus… there’s no massive extermination. You see, a second chance.” And you want to kill him? Malick huffed. “Yes, of course I want to kill him. And before you ask why? Again. Let me tell you why we’re going to kill him. You see, the boy has to die for a very simple reason, because you can’t sacrifice someone who’s already dead.”

  Malick watched as the lightning flashed again, and killed five more of his creatures—dumb ones that had once again crept too close. So stupid, he thought, shaking his head. It reminded him of moths kissing a bug-zapper.

  The lightning flashed again, and this time, he saw it, the giant storm dragon. Wings spread wide and floating in front of the mountain like the main sale of a pirate ship, he watched as the lightning bolts traced over the veins in its wings and between its giant scales. When the thunder cracked, he could hear the dragon’s hidden growl. Then, as lighting sprayed from its fanged muzzle and stretched across the Colorado Skyline and into the meadow before him—this time killing ten of his scouts, he smiled. “The Great Storm Dragon has risen… neat.”

  After sighing, Malick took a step forward. “Well,” he said. “Best we get on with it… before my swarm gets picked apart by their own stupidity.” He brought two fingers up to his lips, whistled, then pointed towards the mountain. Then, amidst a chorus of chattering teeth, hissing, and clicking; Malick’s creatures galloped forward, exploding out of the tree line and into the meadow, charging towards the mountain.

  Malick tried to take a step forward, to follow them, but couldn’t. His foot was suddenly stuck to the ground. Hmm. He went to scratch the back of his head, but he found his arm unresponsive. Frozen. “Mortal, what are you doing?” I won’t do it, his inner voice whispered to him, finally fighting back. I won’t let you kill the boy… humanity’s last chance. “You would save a world that would sooner see you die?” Yes, I would. “Why?” Because… because I may be a killer, a freak, a… monster, but I still know right from wrong. And it’s still my body. Malick grinned then sighed… then he scratched his head. “Well, that was certainly a passionate answer, but you are mistaken. This is my body.”