God of the Abyss

by Rain Oxford

  As Kseve and I were leaving the tavern, there was an odd chill in the air. Kseve opened the door and stepped out… and disappeared. Thick fog shielded my guard from me, but as I reached out for him, the fog didn’t dissipate. I heard a thud and my heart skipped a beat.

  “Kseve? Where are you?”

  No answer.

  Why can’t I be like everyone else? Why can’t I have magic that I could control and help people with when I needed it? I reached out all around me until my foot collided with something very solid. I got down on my knees and felt the fallen form. It was Kseve.

  I wanted to shout for a doctor, but I knew I shouldn’t. This strange fog was magic for sure, but it should have dissipated in my presence. There was only one thing it could have been. I had never faced demon magic before, but it only made sense that my void magic wouldn’t nullify the demon energy. Of course, the demon magic wouldn’t have any effect on me.

  It still left me without my guard and with no way to defend myself. The man approached silently, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up with surprising ease, but I didn’t fight him, for I was afraid he would hurt Kseve. He dragged me along down an alley and through a dark wooden door. I fell heavily on a thin cushion on the floor. Whether it was fear or horror that kept my mouth shut, I waited for him to start making ransom demands or just start beating on me. After all, why else would someone kidnap a king?

  No, it wasn’t fear. I was waiting to find out what he wanted before I decided on my next move. He better pray Kseve is alive if he wants to survive this. I wonder if void blood will work on a demon.

  He squatted in front of me and grinned maliciously. “You look just like your mother.”

  I opened my mouth, but had no idea what to say. The demon wasn’t exactly a terrifying figure; he had a tall, thin build, like Nano, and was somewhat frowzy. There was an uncomfortable familiarity with the features of his face, particularly his mouth and nose. He reminded me of Adre.

  “I had hoped you would take after her. After all, if you had taken after me, you would have fought me for the throne. Too bad your brother does take after me.”

  “You cannot be claiming you are my father. My father is dead.”

  “I am very much your father and very much dead,” he smirked. “Still, I am High King of Dios, for that is not a title that ends when you die. Don’t look so worried, my son, I’m not here to take the throne. It is your birthright, and I have much bigger things in mind.”

  “Bigger than being High King?”

  “Much. And you can help me.”

  “Help you do what?”

  “For now, all I need from you is for you to introduce me to your friend, Dylan.” He stood up and walked over to the door to peek out. “Dylan is very important to my plans.”

  “What do you want with him?”

  He gave me a sharp glare. “You may be High King now, but I am still your father; you will not question me.”

  “I will never betray my friend. My father, Dleso Atos, is dead.”

  “I have conquered death. I am far more powerful than you, your guards, or any of those Noquodi. You will do as you are told.”

  Chapter 10

  Dylan

  I opened my eyes when I felt Duran’s magic return to me. “I think you forgot something,” Edward said.

  “Mordon is going to look after his girlfriend while I go after the pantacle,” I said, pulling the crystal ball, map, Edward’s card, and the fire wand out of my bag. I spilled everything across the table, which was already covered with breakfast plates, Edward’s cards, and the other artifacts Mordon and I had gotten.

  “Mom left you?” Sammy asked. Ron poked him in the ribs and started cleaning up the plates and cups.

  “Mordon is taking care of dragon business, and I need to get these items before the Ancients get out of the void.”

  “I’m going with you,” Edward said. It wasn’t an offer or a question. I didn’t bother to be sarcastic or anything; Edward had been there for me since I became his apprentice when we first met.

  “Thank you,” I said. I considered the boys before going to the open door. Edward liked to leave it open in the summers for Hobble to run in and out. “Seimei and Ikiru,” I called. Both griffins stood to attention. “Come in here,” I said. They flexed their wings and elegantly leaped onto the porch before squeezing into the doorway. They were the size of large, fully grown male lions and they had heavy wings against their sides. Each of them took up next to the boys. “Edward is going with me, so you need to watch the boys. I don’t know if you obey them because they raised you or because they’re powerful, but if anything happens to either of them, I’m sending you both to the void. Do you understand?”

  For a second, I thought they didn’t, but then they both bowed their heads. I picked up the glass apple and held it to Edward. It probably should have been difficult to differentiate the time that I got from the map and the time that Rojan gave me to return here, but it really wasn’t.

  “Think of Dios. I already got the time from the map,” I said.

  Edward nodded. “I can do that, but give me a minute to get ready. I’ll be right back.” He went downstairs and returned a few minutes later dressed for a fight. He wore a dark maroon, long-sleeved, button-up shirt and black pants with heavy black leather boots. He also had a dark brown leather shoulder harness for two guns and a waist harness for his favorite sword. I knew his boots had two slots for daggers.

  I looked at my own red t-shirt, jeans, and boots and tried not to find them lacking. I had no need for guns or swords.

  Sammy regarded Edward’s attire with envy as my old mentor put his hand on the glass apple. I closed my eyes and focused on the time the map gave me and the study where the pantacle would appear. The energy of Duran disappeared and after a few seconds, I felt Dios. Between worlds, I could feel us moving through time. I opened my eyes when I heard Edward grunt.

  We were standing in the small library. Three walls of the room were lined with bookshelves and the forth wall had a doorway and large, old map. There were two dark red cushioned chairs facing each other. I felt personally that the room was missing a fireplace, but I figured those were dangerous underground.

  “Where is the pantacle?” Edward asked.

  “It usually takes a few seconds to appear. I think it only exists for one moment in all of history and we have to grab it before it vanishes,” I said. I went to the bookshelf where it appeared in the crystal ball, but after a minute, I got really worried. “It should have appeared by now. There’re no redoes on this.” Two minutes later, I started pacing. What did I do wrong?

  We heard the two creatures before they burst into the room, identical and grotesque. Light blue, with a general shape of a blob with two arms, it was creepy enough. It wasn’t the claws at the end of the arms or the sharp teeth in its mouth; instead, it was the goopy slime gliding over the folds of fat that made my hair stand on end. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. As far as demons went, I had to say they found the right form to scare me.

  The sound of Edward’s gun in the small room was startling. One of the demons went down with a hole in its head, but the other moved to attack. I threw an energy shield over Edward before the demon could get to him, but he couldn’t kill the demon either.

  “Grab it!” Edward yelled. I reached out as I turned and snatched the thick disk off of the shelf.

  The round, wooden disk was only about four and a half inches in diameter, a sixteenth of an inch thick, and as light as the fire wand was. Around the edge was about a centimeter thick ring of white. Inside the circle of white was a circle of four colors: yellow, dark red, dark green, and black, divided into four sections in the middle. Overlaying the colors was a white hexagon with lines that were about a half a centimeter wide. On one side, the outer ring was blank, but on the other side, there were Hebrew letters and sigils across the white.

  I held it up for Edward to see before slipping it into my bag. “Drop the shield,” he said. I did and Ed
ward was ready with his sword. In a blur of steel, my old mentor slaughtered the unholy beast. Unfortunately, the other demon got to its feet. While Edward was distracted by spraying the books with blood, the other demon was changing.

  The grotesque, slimy hide of the large beast dried and darkened as its body shrunk into a thin, four-legged creature. It only took me a second to recognize the hideous monster as the same I had seen in the air tribe. It was the dejeva.

  For the first time in the seven years I knew him, Edward froze, seemingly in panic. It was just like Mordon. What was it with sago and hairless, skinny dogs? The creature gave a growl, spittle flying, and Edward took a step back, putting himself between me and the beast.

  “It’s not a dejeva,” I said. “It’s a demon that disguised itself as one to scare you.”

  Edward didn’t respond. It seemed that even a two-thousand-year-old Guardian couldn’t ignore the ingrained fear that all sago shared. But it wasn’t a dejeva; it was a demon playing on that fear. And there was something I knew the demons had learned to fear.

  I reached through the fiber of space and tore. It was easy when the universe was unraveling, but in this case, I could do it because I had to. I opened a tear into the void, spilling the forsaken light into the room. The demon reacted like I sprayed it with acid.

  It tried to run back out the door, but I put an electrified energy field up over the doorway. As it recoiled, looking for another way out, I moved away from Edward and struck the beast with a bolt of burning-cold energy. It was easy to use nominal energy to make lightning, but everything in the room was made of wood or paper, so I had to be careful not to set the room on fire. It seemed I unknowingly found the perfect weapon; the demon writhed upon the floor pathetically.

  I watched calmly as the demon slowly stopped convulsing. It didn’t try to get back up, only waited for further torture. That was all the submission I needed from it. I crossed my arms and glared at it until it struggled to its feet.

  “Run,” I said. The creature turned and vanished into the void, which I closed behind it.

  The screaming told me I wasn’t done. We were both out the door in an instant, running towards the screams. We came to one of the small villages right outside the city. I knew instantly that we had arrived at a time before some of the population moved above ground, because the city was full.

  People were being terrorized by five demons, who all seemed more bent on causing destruction than killing. They demolished any structure they could, but only chased the people around and batted at them a bit, as if they were playing with their food.

  One of the demons turned and came at us, but it only took a couple of minutes for Edward to slay the beast. The biggest of demons attacked next, who posed more of a threat and took longer for Edward to kill. Without the concern of fire hazards, I fried every demon I could when it wasn’t next to a person. But more came. At least a dozen more demons attacked and when I almost struck a person who got in the way of my lightning, I knew I had to change my tactics. I needed to make a call to Janus.

  Then, right before I could open the void again, every single demon froze, turned as one, and fled. When it was quiet, Edward came up beside me. “What did you do?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “It wasn’t me.”

  Then my world tilted and I could see nothing but black. I heard Nila scream and felt overwhelming fear, pain, and suffocation. My friend was dying a horrible, painful death alone in the dark. In the darkness, though I couldn’t see where he was, I knew where I had to go. I grabbed Edward’s arm and pulled him after me, before letting go and running full out. I had to get to Nila.

  “What’s wrong?!” Edward asked behind me. It was a testament to my determination that I was able to run faster than him.

  I didn’t bother to answer, I just ran as fast as I could, faster than I ever had before, because Nila’s life depended on it. When I fell, it was extremely disorientating, like being hit with a wave of water strong enough to knock me off my feet… but there was nothing there.

  The burning inside me increased ten-fold. Nila was about to die.

  I got to my feet and took off again. Outside of Nila’s throne room, where the goblin guards scrambled around in disarray, I didn’t slow down, nor enter the throne room; I burst into the small study right next to it, kicked up the rug, pulled open the trap door, and jumped into the darkness without a moment of hesitation. After hitting the soft mattress hard, I was already up and running through the dark before I heard Edward grunt behind me. I found Nila in the old, abandoned kitchen, reading a book as if without a care in the world.

  “Dylan!” he said with delight.

  Edward rushed into the room next to me, panting. I pushed him towards Nila and got as close as I could without touching the young king. Then I created the strongest energy shield I had ever made in my life around us. The instant my shield covered us, the world groaned and the ground shook with ferocity. I fell to my knees, but managed not to touch Nila. In seconds the ceiling collapsed and the new kitchen, built on top of the old one, came down on us.

  My head pounded as my shield took such a hit, but it held strong. It had to.

  It felt like hours before the shaking stopped and when it did, there was no light save for the crackling energy in my shield. I knew if my shield gave out then, we would all be crushed to death. I couldn’t flash Nila, and I couldn’t leave him behind, so I did the only thing left I could do. My wife was a god, after all.

  Reaching through the always present connection with my book, I searched for Divina. It only took a moment to feel her warm presence. I need you, I thought, hoping my thoughts made it to her. After a few seconds, which felt like minutes when I was holding up two stories of rubble, the space inside my shield filled with bright light.

  I had a moment to panic for Nila’s life before the light cleared, leaving Edward, Divina, Nila, and myself in the throne room. Nila was alive if not scared. When he just stood there shaking, I hugged him. “Thank you,” I said to Divina.

  She smiled. “I will always come when you need me. Just tell me this is time travel and not something worse, because I was having a conversation with you over breakfast when you called me here.”

  “Yeah, just time travel and a glass apple with some demons sprinkled here and there and Mordon is dealing with a dragon poison alone and I just had a vision of Nila dying a horrible and painful death and---”

  “Dylan!” Nila demanded, staring at me. He wasn’t shaking anymore, but his pupils were huge. “Your rambling is scaring me.”

  “Thank you for your help, Divina,” Edward said.

  I desperately wanted to ask her how she was able to flash Nila, as even my own Iadnah powers wouldn’t work when I was in contact with him, but she seemed to be in a hurry. She gave me a kiss before disappearing, leaving only an echo of her sweet scent and the feel of her lips on mine. My wife was a goddess.

  “We have a problem we need to deal with,” Edward said.

  “I know,” I said. “All those people trapped in the earthquake… we need to find everyone still alive and help them.”

  “Most places are protected against such natural disasters,” Nila said. He waved his arm about. “My throne is still standing. I was unlucky to be in an old place that was never built to sustain quakes. I would have died if you were not there, but most places would not have suffered much damage. Those who are unlucky as I was could have protected themselves with magic.”

  “No, that is the problem. I think the tremor was just a reaction, the aftermath,” Edward argued. We looked at him. “There is no magic. That wave that struck before the quake stripped the magic. There is no nominal energy. The goblins outside were in a panic about it.”

  “I was more focused on getting to Nila than listening to the goblins.”

  “This must be what the demons ran from. They knew it was coming.”

  “I hope this is what they ran from. Really, though, I think the wave was only part of it. Stuff like that doesn’t h
appen without reason. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but I’ve watched a lot of movies and read a lot of books. I think the demons ran because something bigger is coming.”

  * * *

  Despite Nila’s assurance that the underground cities were built to withstand earthquakes, some places had not been maintained. Without magic, even wounds people could have healed on their own were life-threatening. One thing Dios did have right was a system in place for emergency situations. There was a medical station in every single city that people were mandated to report to in this kind of situation.

  There were medical records on people and where they were supposed to live, so when someone didn’t check in, search parties were sent out after them. The downfall was that those search parties were supposed to be able to heal using magic. There was an entire underground civilization of magic-users who just suffered a major disaster and now had no magic. People, goblins, and trolls everywhere were in a panic.

  I saw a side to Nila I never saw before. His sweet, goofy, juvenile personality evaporated at the sight of his people in danger. Everywhere we went, he directed people and delegated duties. He would walk into a room of panicking people and walk out a minute later with everyone calm and safe.

  I helped the people I could with bandages and cleaning wounds, but it was those who couldn’t make it to the medical stations that I worried about. Without magic, the doctors had trouble figuring out who was mortally wounded and who could wait, because they didn’t have medical equipment designed for detecting internal damage. Therefore, it took longer than it should have to send out search parties. When I told the doctors that I wanted to go on the search, they asked if I had any medical training. Edward put his hand over my mouth and told them I was a doctor on Duran. Nila gave him a look, but kept quiet.

  The doctors were thrilled and sent us on the first group to leave. Nila refused to stay behind and said he was more useful on the trip, so Edward, Nila, and I headed out with six other people, none of which knew any English.