Imperator

by Nick Cole

  The Master’s powers were great. Except it wasn’t… powers. It was just… a power. And it wasn’t even that. It was… something else.

  He had some of it. In time, he would acquire more. If he survived. Perhaps he would even have as much as the Master. But for now he had… some. And with that he would have to face the final lesson.

  He sensed the Goths on the road ahead, so he slowed, knowing they had heard the gutter-growl of the ancient muscle car’s rumble. He pulled off the road, well below the zenith of the forested hill, and stopped the car in the dirt.

  “Become what you are afraid of. Afraid you will not be anymore.”

  The Master had paused. There had been some pauses within the temple that seemed to last for years. He, the student, had waited for the lesson to drop. For the pearl to be revealed. Waited for the next clue to come.

  “Knowledgeable of the Crux you will be then.”

  The Crux, he’d thought when he first heard it. After all these years, that was what the power was. Yet the hearing of it didn’t stun him like he’d been stunned by the ships in the graveyard of the ocean beyond the temple. It was as if the word had always been there, right in front of his face. Which was what the Crux really was. At the center of all things.

  As if sensing this, the Master smiled a cruel smile.

  “The center of all things is the Crux. Not a power… but the ability to use power that is in everything. At the center… lies the Crux. Knowing… is power.”

  And now he understood. More and more since he’d been taught what it actually was. It wasn’t a power. It was the ability to convince powers to act on the user’s behalf.

  “Ancient orders used the Crux, long ago in the mists of time. Powerful they were,” continued the Master. “Ruled the galaxy. Brought destruction and chaos, claiming different. Bah! Nothing they knew of the hidden nature of the Crux. The Crux only is. Either good or evil, light or dark, is what you decide to become. The Crux is neither. With the Crux, nothing else is needed. Understand … know you will then.”

  And to know… knowing… was the real power. Knowing was the Crux.

  Casper undid the pistol belt that had once comforted him and placed it on the warm hood of the ancient muscle car. If this was the last test, then he would use only what he had learned. The Crux… would be enough.

  For what?

  For revenge?

  No.

  For power?

  No.

  To save the galaxy?

  No. Not even that now.

  Then what? Answer, Casper! some dying child screamed, reminding him for the last time that his name from long ago had once been Casper. Casper Sullivan.

  “Sull-” (bullet hole) “-us-” (bullet hole). Just like the grave marker he had carved himself. Placed over his father’s grave. Except someone had shot at it in the three days between eleven-year-old him burying it in the hard dirt above his father’s corpse, and two-thousand-year old him showing up just a little late for revenge but right on time for the final lesson.

  Sull-us

  Sullivan, Justin

  That’s how he’d marked the grave. All those years ago. No time, no date, no cause.

  And when he found it he found… Sull-us. A reminder that to him… with power… what good is good?

  The bullets had smashed away the “ivan,” the “J,” and the “tin.”

  Death had revealed Sullus.

  He walked up the road. Pushing away all the thoughts that tried to come for him.

  This is the test, he screamed at himself as he neared the sentries.

  Rechs had warned him once, “Go looking for it … and I’ll be waiting for you out along the edge if you come back. I may forget many things if I live a long time, Cas, but I’ll never forget that.”

  His best friend, Rechs. The meaning had been clear. Rechs would kill Casper if he ever went looking. Even then when, finally, toward what they both knew was the coming collapse of the corrupt Republic, when neither of them saw a way to save the galaxy from itself, when Casper told Rechs all he knew. Or rather suspected. That the powers the Dark Wanderer wielded could be found out beyond galaxy’s edge on a lost planet only rumors named. Casper had hoped that Rechs would come with him. Seeing that since they had not forged a coherent galaxy, or a military machine to respond to whatever the Dark Wanderer was… that becoming him was the only option left.

  Together they would have found some way to set the galaxy aright with the strange powers the prophetesses and the Dark Wanderer had used. They wouldn’t fall into corruption. And if they did, they would destroy themselves first. It had taken Casper years to work up the courage to approach then-General Tyrus Rechs, the T-Rex of the Legion, with a mere hint of his foolhardy scheme. And he’d only finally done it when everything seemed so hopeless and lost. So corrupt and dire. When finding the Temple of Morghul had seemed like the only hope to save them all.

  He hadn’t even told Rechs what Reina had found. Or what she’d disappeared to do. Because Rechs would have made the same promise to Reina he made to Casper.

  I’ll be waiting for you out along the edge.

  In his imagination, he’d seen Rechs grudgingly agreeing to the plan. Laconically realizing how much sense this plan to find the lost planet and the Temple of Morghul made. This was in Casper’s imagination, of course. He’d imagined a different outcome.

  But Rechs, ever Rechs, had simply held course and told Casper what the consequences would be if any one of them violated the pact they’d made after the Moirai. The pact they’d held as they struggled to build a fighting force, and a political entity, that could defeat the Savages… and the Dark Wanderer. One day.

  “It’s out beyond the edge, Tyrus. We can go there. Together,” Casper had pleaded.

  There had been a pause in which the emotionless Rechs stared into him like he was making some kind of promise to himself. Some chivalric vow that needed occasional reminding.

  And then his oldest and best friend spoke. Slow and steady. As constant as an ancient star that would stay lit until the heat death of the universe. This had been just before the last battle they’d fight in together. The defeat at Telos, when the Savage battle cruisers overwhelmed the Republican armada.

  “Go looking for it… and I’ll be waiting for you out along the edge.”

  Then… Casper disappeared. Knowing Rechs would never come with him. Knowing he’d have to confront him when he returned. Knowing that one of them would finally die.

  In the darkness he approached the handful of sentries guarding the hideout. They were clustered in a dirt parking lot that had once been a turnout out at the top of the hill that rose above the old dead seaside village of Santa Barbara. Out beyond this, on the other side of the rise to the east, lay a wide spreading valley of oaks and long pastures, made silvery by the ghostly moonlight.

  He could hear their wild tribal acid rock music in the woods farther up the hill. Densely clustered oaks surrounded their hideout and tents. But he could sense them all up there, reveling in the debauchery they’d chosen for the end of the world.

  “Lookee what we got he—” began the first sentry before the student choked off the man’s air with a mere gesture. He flung that dirty, leather-clad man into the side of a nearby dusty vehicle. Even now, using the Crux, knowing that it was not a power, but a knowing of how to use a power that clung to the center of everything, he could feel his facility with it increase. Given time… he would become more powerful than even the Dark Wanderer.

  The others drew their weapons quickly. Ancient slug throwers like the Savages had out there in the dark in the stars above, drifting through space in their spinning cities. The student had nothing but contempt for them and their feeble weapons. His fury sent them all flying before they could fire. Scattered across the chalky dirt and slammed into the motorcycles they used. They were broken in a sudden stunning i
nstant.

  Now the student spent a few moments killing them quietly. Driving rocks into their skulls. Rocks that lifted off the ground of their own accord and sped forward into unprotected skulls faster than speeding bullets. Blood spray and gore soaked the chalky dust of the lonely place.

  One managed to get his fingers around a pistol he kept inside a boot. He brought it to bear quickly, like a rattlesnake. And as if time were slowed, the student sensed all this even before it happened.

  Was this the one that had shot his father? Raped his mother? The fear came at him, calling “Goth” over and over at the little child he’d once been. He hesitated, and was too slow with using the Crux to cave in the man’s head, or crush his windpipe with a thought, before the man applied just enough pressure to ignite the round inside the weapon.

  The bullet leapt out at him, reminding the student that he knew the Crux of all things.

  The student held up his hand and stopped the slug from hitting him. Then he leapt forward, dark and furious rage suddenly taking over. He leapt from a standstill toward the biker who was about to die, farther than a human being could leap in just the blink of an eye. He landed just to the side of the pistol from which the man was about to squeeze off another round, and he pushed the hand that gripped the pistol up under the savage man’s chin just an instant before the biker pulled the trigger. The weapon exploded with a terrific bang, tearing up through the man’s chin and mouth and coming out the top of his skull in a small volcano of brain matter.

  The report resounded through the still night.

  All of them, all of the men at the student’s feet, were dead now.

  Up the hill their music was still playing inside their camp. But the noise of the revelers had died at the sound of the gun.

  Good, thought the student. Let them be afraid now.

  He went to them. Climbing up along the shadowy wooded path in the pale moonlight. They tried to ambush him with gunfire and knives, but he crushed their skulls and broke their bones with mere gestures. They fell like they’d been hit by ocean waves turned to steel.

  With each kill he grew more and more enraged. The raw power surged through him. He felt stronger with each blow. Each death. Knowing a little bit more how far he could go with each manipulation of this fantastic thing known as the Crux that lay at the center of all things. Even as held a shaven-headed man aloft, the man screaming and cursing, waving the machete he’d been about to cleave the student’s skull with, the student wondered at all the possibilities of the Crux beyond even this night.

  Was the Crux the quintessence of life whose existence so many philosophers had theorized so long ago?

  He slaughtered them. And then he slaughtered their women and children knowing this was just an appetizer for all that was to come. The fear was afraid of him now. It circled about the slaughter, waiting and biding its time, hoping for a chance to strike out at him, to strike him down.

  He listened as their minds screamed out in raw terror and fear. Read their paralyzed emotions. Even saw glimpses of them at other times before this. They’d been part of a government agency once. Paramilitary of some type. After the collapse, they’d organized and preyed on others just to survive. They’d lost themselves, as all such men do.

  They’d preyed on his family.

  And others.

  But there was one among them. Weaving in and out of the shadows of their camp, staying clear of the slaughter. And this one was different. This one was not afraid. This one wanted him to be afraid. He was their leader. MacRaven was the name that appeared in the student’s mind as he faded into the shadows, searching the last memories of the dead and the dying everywhere about the camp.

  This was the one he’d come for.

  The one he’d been afraid of all along.

  This one was their Crux. At the center of everything. The Black Dragon of this moment.

  “Come out, come out, come out and play… little boy,” howled the madman he could sense among the stolen booty of their lair. Christmas lights hung in the trees of the wide oaks that covered their camp. “Come out, come out, come out and die… little boy,” crooned their leader as though he knew who exactly had come for them.

  The student came to himself. He was sweating… not from fear, but from sudden hunger and weakness. He’d lost track in the killing, gotten carried away. But now, meditating in the darkness out of sight, listening to the killer run and scurry all around him, he felt suddenly weak and tired.

  He tried to meditate.

  He remembered the ice he’d lived in for years.

  The cavern of his blindness where he’d learned to truly see.

  Remembered all the lessons and so many more throughout all the years uncounted in the temple’s depths.

  The Crux was great… but the vessel is not, he thought to himself.

  He felt the killer coming for him as though somehow the madman sensed his weakness now. The man was coming at him with a massive sword. Like something from an old movie about barbarians and wizards. He could sense this.

  The student stepped from the shadows and saw the Dark Wanderer. Tall and looming, over eight feet tall. Carrying the sword and coming for him. Just as he’d seen him all those years ago on the Moirai. And the fear of this “other” being was the same as his fear of the Goths who’d plagued his childhood nightmares until he’d forced himself to forget them just to survive.

  “Stupid mortal!” laughed the Dark Wanderer from within his flowing shrouds. “I’ve come for you at the last!”

  The Dark Wanderer swept the gleaming sword in a wide arc. The student had just enough time to leap away. But not far away. The Dark Wanderer pivoted, dark shrouds twirling in the firelight, and raised the giant sword over his head to bring it down on the student with another strike.

  A final strike.

  The student tried to use the Crux… willing the sword to fly away or to stay where it was… but the power of the Dark Wanderer was great. Greater, because the Dark Wanderer had so much of it. Had had so much since so long ago. Since the beginning of time. Or so it felt like. To the student, what he felt in the picosecond that stretched almost infinitely out between them, was a battle of wills using merely the Crux.

  The sword slammed down into the dirt as the student shifted away, leaping on top of salvaged vehicle that had become someone’s home. The student sensed the vehicle and ripped parts from if it with the Crux, sending them to flying at the Dark Wanderer.

  Objects scattered away of their own volition as they came close to the tall and dark being from the other side of this reality. In that moment the student saw that the face of the thing was a void. A gaping void that only wanted to destroy and was never satisfied.

  This nightmare thing was the Goth. This was the very essence of the word Goth to the student as he leapt away yet one more time, this time to avoid an ancient engine the Dark Wanderer had torn away from some hanging chains and sent careening toward the student with the invisible power it wielded.

  A raider. A destroyer. A taker.

  Goth.

  There is no knowledge in this thing. It seeks only destruction, his mind reasoned. Connecting the Crux with the Knowing the Master had been trying to teach all along. Only now did the student realize the wisdom. The lesson. It all fell into place as the ancient greasy engine flew past him, missing by only inches. Destroying some ramshackle wall of the compound like a loose thunderbolt.

  “With the Crux, needed nothing else is. Understand… then you will know.”

  It wasn’t power. The Crux wasn’t power. It wasn’t the raw power that failed the galaxy every time. The Crux was the thing that convinced the power to do what needed to be done.

  Now the Dark Wanderer stood beneath the Christmas lights, gleaming sword held aloft in imminent victory. The small ramshackle salvage hideout littered with bodies was catching fire as runaway flames spread from a
cookpit.

  The student ran, not away, but to the side, hurling himself over the flying tornado of debris the junkyard was becoming. Not waiting to not be where the Dark Wanderer was sending flaming debris at him.

  One of the vehicles lifted up with titanic groan of rusty springs and immense weight. It was an ancient five-ton truck, outfitted with machine guns and spikes. Sand and debris rained down from it and scattered off into the whirlwind as the Dark Wanderer effortlessly caused the war vehicle to rise into the air of its own accord.

  He won’t even need to be close, thought the student as he circled out and away in leaping somersaults from one platform to the next. Staying out of reach of the immense and dark being from the void. He’ll crush me if he even gets it in the vicinity.

  “With the Crux, nothing else is needed.”

  And in that moment, the student learned. Learned all the lessons as they came together as one at the center of all things. The most important lesson was the last.

  It wasn’t power. It was knowing that touched all things.

  The student stopped. He cleared his mind as the storm tried to tear him away. Just as he had in all those other terrible lessons where he’d died a thousand times or frozen for a thousand years. Those things, the physical, meant nothing. Knowing was the only way out.

  The only way, in fact, through.

  He reached out and felt the massive and near-limitless power of the Dark Being from some otherwhen who’d come to destroy the galaxy. He sifted through the madness of the thing and found the key that unlocked the door.

  Was this what Reina had gone off to find, and in her own way to beat?

  The last message from her said that she’d found another way. A way other than what they’d witnessed on the Moirai.

  “But you can’t,” he’d told her. “Remember the pact.”

  Remember Rechs.

  Beware of Rechs.

  That was what he was really saying. Because in a galaxy of shifting values… Rechs remained constant. Even Reina wasn’t exempt from his vow.