Canticum Tenebris (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 2)

by John Triptych

  Gyle turned and looked at where the boy had pointed to. There seemed to be a small pile of glowing dirt beside a gargantuan tree root. The radiant color it gave off seemed to be a combination of orange and yellow.

  “Firebird droppings,” the raven said. “That means it must be close by.”

  Gyle looked up at the tree branches that towered above them. “Do either of you have any plans to catch it if we find it?”

  Ilya smirked as he started to look up as well. “Not me, you. We don’t want to catch it- that might bring us bad luck.”

  Gyle stared at the boy. “If we aren’t going to catch it then what do we do then?”

  “All we need is a few feathers. It is said that the light from just one of its feathers can light a large room,” the boy said.

  Gyle sighed. “So you just want me to grab it and pluck a few feathers out of it? Why don’t we just wait till it drops some?”

  “We don’t have the time to wait for that,” Ilya said. “We need to get to the Dokkalfar kingdom as quickly as possible.”

  Gyle snorted. The kid was pretty bossy and annoying, but he seemed to know what was going on. Less than three months ago, he was a CIA field officer in Iraq before all hell broke loose. After the old Babylonian gods retook the region, he encountered the oldest man in the world, a man known to many as Noah, a survivor of the Great Flood, although he preferred to go by the name of Atrahasis, his original Babylonian name. When they escaped the clutches of a renegade Israeli rabbi, Atrahasis brought Gyle into the Otherworld for the first time. It was also Atrahasis who gave him the last petal from a magical flower that was once possessed by Gilgamesh, an ancient Sumerian hero. When Gyle ate the petal, it transformed him into a creature of great strength and speed, but he no longer looked human. He had sacrificed his humanity in order to fight against these old gods and perhaps be reunited with his family. Atrahasis then introduced him to the trickster, a talking raven who could very well be another god. They soon left Atrahasis behind in relative safety in another part of the Otherworld, but the wise old man had tasked him with retrieving two very special children in order to have allies in this final war. And now he was here, looking for a mythical bird in a forest that could not possibly be on Earth or even on another planet.

  As he stood there looking up at the trees, a flickering light seemed to reveal itself near the edge of his vision. Gyle immediately pointed in that direction. “There,” he said. “Is that one it?”

  Ilya turned and squinted his eyes in order to try and focus. At the far end of the trees was another bird. But unlike the black feathered raven that was with them, this bird had a very long neck and resembled a peacock, though it had vulture-like wings. Its tail was long, with paddle shaped fathers at the end. The animal itself was also glowing brightly, like a miniature sun.

  “That’s it!” the boy exclaimed. “Go get it, both of you!”

  The raven launched itself from Gyle’s shoulder as it flew on a parallel path towards the firebird. “I’ll keep it in sight,” the black bird said. “Just follow me, boy.”

  Gyle tensed his legs and jumped up almost forty feet into the air as he grabbed onto a tree branch the size of a pine trunk, before shifting his body towards the direction of the bird and then making another massive leap.

  The firebird instantly noticed them as soon as Gyle had made his first jump. It immediately flapped its wings as it flew off to escape, deeper into the forest. Gyle continued to leapfrog from one tree branch to another, hoping he could get close enough to make a grab at the magical bird. Just as he nearly got his claws on the firebird’s wings, the animal quickly banked right as it flew around a giant tree while Gyle had to swing using his arms on a lower branch in order to turn around.

  As the firebird flew in between a group of trees away from Gyle and on towards relative safety, the raven had flown ahead and was waiting for it. Without warning, the black bird flew right into the firebird’s path, startling it. Gyle seized his chance as he made one last leap while fully stretching out his body and caught the bird’s tail with his outstretched hand. The firebird let out an ear-piercing cry as Gyle’s weight sent them both tumbling down towards the ground at the last minute, Gyle used his other arm to grab onto a nearby branch and it was able to slow his fall enough, it enabled him to land on his feet onto the forest floor.

  Ilya was out of breath when he finally ran over to where Gyle was. The boy had to squint his eyes due to the intense light that the magical bird was giving off from its own body. The raven flew over and perched itself on a nearby tree branch as it watched the proceedings below.

  The former soldier was holding onto the shrieking firebird as the animal struggled in his grasp. Gyle’s eyes had nictitating membranes that shielded them against the firebird’s intense glow. “Come on, Ilya, hurry up and take your feathers! I can’t keep holding onto it for long.”

  The boy immediately got in front of Gyle and grabbed at the firebird’s tail. Although he was using all of his strength to pull some of the feathers loose, he was unable to. Ilya gritted his teeth and leaned back but the feathers still wouldn’t budge.

  Gyle was having a hard time trying to hold onto the shrieking animal. He was afraid that if he used all of his strength, he would end up crushing it in his arms. In desperation, the firebird lashed out with its beak and tried to gouge out his right eye. Gyle instinctively closed his eyes and looked away as the animal’s beak was unable to penetrate through his thick eyelids. However, the attack did distract him enough that he inadvertently loosened his grip on the bird.

  Ilya cried out as the firebird started to fly upwards and began to drag him along with it.

  Gyle quickly opened his eyes and reacted as he saw the boy being dragged aloft by the fleeing bird. He bent his knees and quickly jumped up almost twenty feet in the air as he was able to grab onto Ilya’s torso. Gyle had thought that the boy would have just let go of the bird by this time, but he apparently wasn’t giving up. As he noticed a nearby tree branch, Gyle twisted his body and made a grab for it. He was able to get his hands around the wooden limb just as the firebird made one last, desperate dive to try and shake them off.

  Ilya’s eyes were fully closed while he gritted his teeth and kept pulling at the feathers. All of a sudden, he could feel an intense pressure around his waistline as Gyle’s arm had wrapped itself around him and it had turned into a tug of war. He could hear the firebird shrieking as its wings flapped so intensely that the vibrations were running down his arms. Suddenly, the pressure had quickly died down as he heard something snap. When the boy reopened his eyes, he was thirty feet off the ground and being supported by Gyle’s sinewy arms. In his hands were three brightly glowing feathers.

  Gyle was able to get both of them back on the ground in just a few leaps. He noticed that the firebird had flown off and he started feeling his face for any damage. The former CIA field officer had noticed that every time he got hurt, his wounds tended to heal quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

  Ilya held the glowing feathers up triumphantly. “We have it! Now we can go to the elves.”

  The raven flew down from a nearby tree branch and landed on Ilya’s shoulder. The boy staggered for a bit before finally compensating for the extra weight on his body. “For a moment there, I thought that the firebird had carried you away for good,” the black bird said.

  Gyle walked over to them. “I’m surprised you just didn’t let go the moment that firebird started hauling you through the air.”

  Ilya smirked as he placed two of the feathers in his coat pocket. “You both think so little of me.”

  Gyle nodded. “Atrahasis told me you were special, looks like he was right. You’re a pretty clever kid with a lot of guts. I used to think that with all these gods around, we humans wouldn’t stand a chance. But if we had more people like you, I think we might just turn this whole mess around.”

  “Thank you,” Ilya said. “But we all did it.”

  Gyle looked at the raven on Ilya’s sh
oulder. “So what can you tell me about these elves?”

  “Ancient tales state that the Dokkalfar dwell in the land of Nidavellir, sometimes known as Myrkheim,” the raven said. “Their abode is deep under the earth in dark caves where there is no light. Their skin is deep black, like the color of night. These people are great craftsmen and the items they create are sought by the gods themselves.”

  “If these elves can create powerful weapons,” Gyle said. “Then it’s possible that human beings might want them too.”

  “Yes, like those magicians the Erlking was talking about,” Ilya said.

  Gyle nodded. “Do you think that these black elves and those magicians might be working together?”

  Ilya tried to shrug both his shoulders but only ended up doing one. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Gyle had been in a state of melancholy ever since the nightmare in Iraq but he couldn’t help but grin at the boy. For the first time in months, he felt that he was on the right track. “Lead the way, kid.”

  Ilya turned away as the transformed man grinned at him with fanged teeth. Although he liked Gyle, the man just looked scary. “Follow me then,” he said as he started along a nearby path.

  As the both of them started moving forward, the path in front began to get darker while the trees all around them began to fade into a solid black wall of nothingness. Within minutes, it had become so dark that Ilya had to hold a glowing feather in front of him. Gyle’s eyes could see in the dark since he could see into the infrared wavelength, but even he had a hard time trying to see what was around him. The grassy ground underneath them soon gave way to smooth stone.

  A short time later, all three of them were now walking along a massive rock cavern. The tunnel that they were moving through seemed smooth and circular, as if hewn by hand for thousands of years. The only light source that they had was the glowing feather Ilya held in his hand.

  Gyle kept looking over his shoulder as they continued onwards. The air was still but he could sense a thousand eyes hidden in the darkness just staring at them. “Any idea as to where we ought to be going?”

  “This tunnel must lead to somewhere,” Ilya said before looking at the raven on his shoulder. “Do you know where we’re supposed to go?”

  “These caves shall have many tunnels and each path will be different,” the raven said, “and each tunnel leading to a different fate.”

  Ilya snorted. “You are speaking in riddles again.”

  Sure enough, they soon came upon a twenty-foot tall cavern that had a half dozen intersecting tunnels that branched out in multiple directions. Pieces of black ore were all over the cave floor. As Ilya began to explore the cave, he noticed bits of metal strewn about. The boy bent down and picked up something familiar as he held it up in front of his glowing feather. It looked like an iron rivet, a kind of shaft that welded large sheets of metal together. The raven flew from Ilya’s shoulder before landing on a boulder.

  “Stay here,” Gyle said as he pointed to a nearby tunnel at the opposite side of them. “I’ll check out where those holes lead to. If there’s trouble then start hollering.”

  “Alright,” Ilya said as he kept poking around the cavern floor. “Do you want a feather so you can see?”

  “No need,” Gyle said as he started walking into a side tunnel. “I can see in the dark pretty well.”

  As he made his way down one of the tunnels, Gyle’s eyes soon adjusted to the darkness. He could see that the walls along the cave itself seemed to give off a phosphorescent glow, like tiny specks of light from a distant Christmas tree. Venturing deeper into the tunnel, he could hear some sort of faint clanking noises in the distance, like the sound of gears grinding together. Could these so-called elves actually create pieces of complex machinery?

  Gyle followed the sounds until they got louder. A few minutes later, he had come upon an underground chamber of some sort. The cavern itself was thirty feet across its width, and there was some sort of raised stage made of solid rock at its center. He could still hear the sounds of machinery and they seem to have been coming from underneath the stone platform. The edges of the stage seemed to have been embedded on the cavern floor. On the base of the platform, there seemed to be some sort of strange glowing hieroglyphs chiseled on it. Gyle leapt up on the stage so he could take a closer look.

  “Patrick?” a familiar voice behind him said.

  Gyle quickly turned around, prepared for action. The moment he saw who it was, his once powerful knees began to buckle. Tears that he never knew he could shed after his transformation, began to form in his eyes. His long, sinewy arms that he had held out in a fighting stance now hung limply beneath his shoulders.

  A woman stood before him. He instantly knew that it was his wife, Marie. Her long brown hair was radiant as it flowed down her shoulders. Marie’s high cheekbones accentuated her smile as she seemed to welcome him back from the nightmare that had begun all those months ago. He could see that she still wore the tight white blouse and the blue denims that they had purchased the last time they went shopping, just before he was due to return to the Middle East.

  Marie held out her arms to him. “Patrick, I’ve missed you so much.”

  Gyle had to concentrate in order to keep himself from breaking down. He could hardly move as he just stared back at her, unable to find the words. He had thought the worst may have happened to Marie and the children when the gods came back. Seeing her just standing there smiling made him forget everything. Perhaps, the whole thing about his unit in Iraq being wiped out, of seeing all those people being crushed underfoot by the demons of Babylon, perhaps all of that was nothing more than just a hallucination. Marie would make everything right.

  Then a blinding aura of light manifested itself behind him as Marie’s body suddenly began to shift and became blurry. The spell was broken as Gyle suddenly became aware that he had been looking at an illusion. His wife was nothing more than a simulacrum, and his mind was thrust back into bitter reality. Gyle whirled and realized that Ilya was standing at the edge of the tunnel, holding a pair of glowing feathers together. It was the boy’s presence and the bright light from the magical feathers that returned him back to his senses. A sudden rage washed over him, his feelings of tranquility and satisfaction were replaced by the heat of anger that was partly born of shame.

  At that instant, Gyle cursed aloud as he brought down his stubby fists onto the base of the platform. His first blow had somehow cracked the stone foundation as the glowing glyphs were now in disarray. Gyle continued to smash the floor, his multiple blows finally ripped through the stone base as the attack exposed the machinery underneath. When the upper stage finally gave way, he saw a multitude of grinding gears that were interlocked together, like the insides of a clock. Gyle drove his hands through the inside and pulled out large metallic springs as the rivets began to give way. In a matter of seconds, he had reduced the stage into a wreckage of metallic parts and crumbled stone.

  The raven had been perching on the boy’s shoulder as it surveyed the damage. “Well, it looks like it won’t be doing any distractions anymore.”

  Gyle heaved great gulps of air and exhaled a puff of steam as he walked off the ruined platform and stood in front of a wall. He felt a great humiliation at being swayed by an illusionary trap. Ilya walked over to the side of the stage and took out some bits of raskovnik with his other hand to try to get some sense as to the true purpose of the machinery.

  “Remarkable engineers they are,” the raven said. “Such complex machinery. I didn’t think the Dokkalfar would be capable of this.”

  Ilya closed his eyes as he used his other senses along with the raskovnik to examine the machine. “It wasn’t a trap. It seems this machine was built to experience past memories.”

  Gyle had finally cooled down as he walked over to them. “I-I couldn’t help myself. I was so pissed off that I just lashed out and destroyed it.”

  The boy put the magical herbs pack into his coat pocket. “The dark el
ves didn’t build this on their own, they were guided by humans from our world.”

  Gyle looked down and surveyed the wreckage. “What did they build this thing for?”

  “I don’t know,” Ilya said. “Perhaps as a form of entertainment. Anyway, I don’t think it’s going to work again until it gets repaired.”

  Gyle started walking towards the tunnel exit. “Let’s move on then.”

  For the next hour, they explored the other branches of the tunnel complex. Gyle kept trying to map the tunnels that they had already explored by leaving a claw mark on each passageway that they went through, but when they doubled back after coming upon a dead end, his marks along the walls seemed to have been removed. Ilya was sure that there were eyes watching them but every time he shined the light of the firebird feathers in a darkened channel, all they could sense were animal-like shrieks and the quick shuffling of feet.

  “We’re being watched but they haven’t come at us yet,” Gyle said as they started into another passageway. “I have a feeling we would have been fighting through hordes of monsters if it wasn’t for those feathers of yours, Ilya. Good thinking.”

  “Look,” Ilya said, pointing to a branching tunnel up ahead of them. “There’s some light coming from there.”

  “Where there’s light in this underworld, there must be creatures that use it,” the raven said.

  “Stay behind me,” Gyle said as he moved forward towards the passageway.

  Moments later, they came upon an ever-widening tunnel that led into a gargantuan cavern. Ilya put the firebird feathers in his jacket as there was enough ambient light for him to see dimly. Gyle could see that the cave ceiling was hundreds of feet high; the upper walls of the cavern were studded with great glowing gemstones that shone like stars in a subterranean night. There was heaps of phosphorescent lichen growing on large stalactites that were size of small buildings. As their eyes adjusted to the strange and wondrous sight, they noticed movement along the cave floor and the walls. Within minutes, they had finally seen what the inhabitants of the world looked like.