Dagger 2 - Blood Brothers - A Dark Fantasy Adventure (Born to Be Free series)

by Walt Popester

  “I can’t believe it was not the Gorgors who started the conflict we’ve been fighting for…” Varg paused, his eyes staring vacantly. “We don’t even know how long.”

  “A little more than four hundred years,” the Poison Dracon offered. “From birth to death, we consider war an unavoidable reality, part of the order of things. But we were the ones who started it.”

  Angra nodded. “Nor did the Gorgors understand the reason for that extreme aggression. They tried to send emissaries to negotiate a peace, but when they realized your only interest was to search for the lost temple, and desecrate their holy city, the talks broke off abruptly. They took leave with a simple phrase: You have crossed a sacred boundary, now you will face the consequences. Adramelech belongs to Skyrgal. Since always. Its exact center is a huge stone throne from whence my brother would rule the world once risen again. Fervid imagination…”

  “Those shadows…” Varg said. “How could they build such a city? From the way you describe them, they seem almost human.”

  Araya bowed his head. “Gorgors were humans.”

  “What?”

  “They haven’t always been as you see them today,” the lizard prince continued. “They had dark skin—yes—and a physical size superior to ours. However, they became living shadows only after that.”

  Angra nodded. “At the end of that accursed war. Gorgors never gave open battle, knowing that you, armed with manegarm, would have definitely had the upper hand. That city had no walls and no defense. It had been erected in the middle of the desert to worship Skyrgal—a place of peace that my Disciples felt entitled to desecrate. The Gorgors let you walk right into the heart of the holy city, without offering any resistance. They watched as you erected a base camp at the foot of Skyrgal’s throne. Several teams of your engineers dispersed through all of the districts to start the excavations and look for the entrance to the temple. It seemed little more than a Test for novices—no resistance, no apparent risk, even the weather was sweet and at night you could revel and get drunk. Until one night the Gorgors began to fight the way they knew best: getting out of the dark, street by street and alley by alley, laying ambushes to cut off your supplies and trap your detachments. By dawn, your engineers were gone. You searched for them throughout the day without success. When night fell again, nothing remained for you but to retreat back into your camp. Only then darkness gave birth to Gorgors again. Singing in low, mourning tones, they built around you a perfect circle of gallows to torment the prisoners in unspeakable ways…tortures that would make the bizarre art of Tankars appear a natural death. Big drums resounded in the rhythm of death—Tum! Tum! TUM!—as agonized shouts preceded the sound of a blade landing in the naked flesh, tearing bodies, faces, genitals. They managed to amplify the sounds, so that you could hear everything. In the screams you listened to the prisoners’ prayers, grasping—without understanding—the nature of a torture always more cruel than that which preceded it. They were tormenting them, and you too, for what’s more cruel than death and pain if not waiting for them? Tum. Tum. TUM! On the next day, a team of brave men reached the gallows to provide a proper burial to what was left of your Blood Brothers, even if it was difficult to distinguish—and often separate—the remains of one from another in the cases of collective torture. They were caught too, but not to be tortured that night, nor the next one, nor the one after that. They made you wait a long time before condemning you to hear the pain again—terrible screams coming out of places that cold and darkness made inaccessible. Pain lasted all day and all night long, and the next day, and the one after that. Three days waiting for suffering, three days of effective torture. It’s their use, it’s their religion. On the seventh day there was a beautiful sunset, with the sky slowly populating itself with multicolored stars, and the two moons reigning supreme—the red and the yellow one, the bloody and the golden. That night, real war began. Gorgors didn’t hesitate to sacrifice themselves in insane suicide missions, coming to set fire to their own houses and entire neighborhoods to isolate you. From the fortifications around Skyrgal’s throne you managed to decimate them, yet Gorgors had numbers on their side and your defenses thinned with every passing hour. The hardest part was when new prisoners were taken because you knew what awaited them; you knew that death would only be granted as a last whim. Even I can understand why, today, you’re so cruel to the shadows’ ambassadors.” Angra paused for a moment. He looked drunk, a silent god who moved his eyes across the ghost mosaic, where his terrible memories still lived. “My Disciples felt responsible for the defeat. They were responsible for it—that massacre was the result of their worship of knowledge.”

  Dagger listened in silence, like everyone else. Against the background of his dark thoughts, shone the ominous shadow of the Spiral, the blood ribbon that bound the fate of gods and men.

  “As often happens in war, the attackers eventually found themselves in a giant dead end,” the force added with a trembling voice. “Embroiled in a desperate situation, you realized you would never prevail. Yet you could not retire, sure that Gorgors would take advantage of the situation and slaughter you to the last. A retreat is always a moment of weakness and disorganization. The enemy would have had no trouble crushing you and reaching Golconda itself—which had been left defenseless—marching on the backs of your corpses to avenge blasphemy with blasphemy. Driven by this suffocating responsibility, the First Disciple took what today seems to me the only possible decision, even if sacrilegious. He decided to march against the enemy one last time, wielding the most powerful weapon, the one that no one had ever dared to brandish until then: the Sword containing Skyrgal’s soul. It was he who, at the time, had the responsibility of it. Despite the sacred oath to never use it—oath sworn to me!—Aeternus marched with that at the head of my Faithful ones.”

  “He used Skyrgal’s soul against the Gorgors?” the Pendracon asked.

  “And they were all damned!” Angra growled. “Karkenos pretended the price that must be paid by anyone who has the audacity to disturb his troubled captivity. Oh, Gorgors were defeated, yes, but at what cost? Shining, slave and sovereign in the thin desert air, Skyrgal revenged the torment of the Disciples condemning his own people to embody, forever, what they had been for them during the long Adramelech nights: nothing but cursed shadows consecrated to the dark. A dense, black wind blew over the people of the desert and Gorgors became what they are today.” Angra bowed his face. “Then, came the turn of my Disciples—the beloved children in whom I had put all my trust. Skyrgal decided to claim them for himself, in a torment as close as possible to the eternal imprisonment to which I had condemned him. They became the Skinless, deprived of the last defense that’s given to every man against the world. Their souls trapped in mortal remains condemned to rot and regenerate forever in a state of perpetual and slow death. The only remedy? Let the heart, defiled by the Spiral, be pierced by a blade of virgin manegarm. In that way, their bodies would have the well earned rest, while the soul would be condemned to the eternal Exile. The detail that made their fate even more cruel is that my Faithful were well aware of that curse: it was written in the black book too, explained in detail in Benighted. The First Disciple, Aeternus, told the Guardians about it during the last Council of Five he took part to, after which the Disciples locked themselves inside the body of Kam Karkenos as hermits. They just wanted to be forgotten and became in every way part of Skyrgal, creeping inside the body of the god who had damned them for all times. But the living are always afraid of the dead, afraid of what they’ll become one day…especially if they keep on living. I still remember that night, waking up at the torches illuminating the thousands, grotesque flames of Skyrgal’s body, making them burn again. You smoked them out like beasts. Your Blood Brothers, the descendants of your founding fathers…you… you…”

  And you didn’t raise a finger to stop them. Dagger thought. Because a god never agrees to compromise. They were your beloved children, Angra, and now They want their revenge. I am their re
venge. Fuck it, I can even understand them.

  “You didn’t have mercy,” Angra kept on. “You submitted the First Disciple to an excruciating process to test his resistance to death. Right in here you burned him chained to his seat. When he raised again from the ashes, selfish and coward, you could only thank Skyrgal for not having claimed the lives of you all. To this day…I still believe he has pardoned you.” Angra took a few steps into the room. “You banned them. You wanted to forget them.”

  After having speared their tongues and popped out their eyes, so They couldn’t speak or see more. I know. I’ve seen it. Dagger thought.

  What do you think you’ve heard, if not the cry of stone? Angra finally answered. What do you think you’ve seen, if not what someone wanted you to see? “But now They are back, and They are powerful.” The god raised his face to look at them all. Then, as the final thunder of a storm, he revealed, “And the traitor who brought them back here is one of you.”

  All remained impassive to those words, as if they had suspected that too, or as if everyone felt called upon.

  The intuition of a god never fails.

  “They would have never come back without the help of one of you,” Angra explained. “So who has betrayed me, and why? Moved by what desire or pain I couldn’t intercept or relieve? They know the Fortress, its every nook and cranny. Perhaps They are spying on us this very moment, but I can’t perceive them. They must still lock their thoughts against external interference, as it’s always been. Just like the traitor among you has learned to do.”

  “Why don’t They come out? Why, if the boy is here?” Varg asked aloud, looking around.

  “Because now it would be useless,” Araya explained. “Moreover, there’s already an enemy who’s about to pounce on us, right?”

  The Pendracon slammed his hand down on the table. “I will bring my men to the Fortress, if it’s here the battle will take place!”

  “Even that would serve little,” Angra answered.

  “We can ask for help from Molok, from the Sanctuary, from Turisas itself!” the Warrior King said. “They won’t refuse their help, not after all the Sword Guardians have done to protect them from the Gorgors.”

  “Oh, thank you!” Olem murmured.

  The Messhuggah said, “The Sanctuary will not help.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  A long silence followed Varg’s question. Then the steps of the Mastodon vibrated again within the curved walls of the hall, until he stopped with his mighty ivory tusks suspended above the Poison Dracon. “Go ahead, Araya. Tell them why you think the Sanctuary won’t help us.”

  “A simple deduction,” the Messhuggah answered, hands folded on the table. “Molok owns the only source of mayem known on Candehel-mas: the hammer of Skyrgal, where the soul of Ktisis was imprisoned. The Sanctuary was erected around it like the Fortress and its structures were built to defend Angra’s Sword. Now, the Divine showed up in a suit of armor made of that metal, and the boy…” he indicated Dagger absent-mindedly. “…came to us with a precious gift, that distant day of thirteen years ago: a dagger of mayem.”

  “And I’d really like to know where it’s gone!” the boy said.

  “This is not essential, not now!” Araya retorted, and Dagger saw a clear admission of guilt in his response. “It’s easy to understand that the Sanctuary is now helping the Disciples, if it’s not entirely under their control. We can’t know, at the moment. Almost all the emissaries I’ve sent to ascertain the situation haven’t returned, and we’re talking about yellow agents of the Poison Guardians. Sometimes, it seems the whole world inside and outside these walls is in enemy hands.”

  “Did They already take possession of Ktisis’ soul?” Varg asked, amazed.

  The god’s dark laughter descended upon them. Everyone looked up to Angra.

  Ktisis is no longer there, Dag thought, trying not to show the tremor in his hands.

  The god continued, “Certainly, Ktisis didn’t fade away like a fire in the desert wind. He’s still a threat, and he’s closer than you think.”

  Stop playing with me, uncle.

  “And where is he then?” Varg asked.

  Shit!

  Angra smiled. “His soul was divided into three parts.”

  Dagger followed the path of the sweat drop running down his face. “Three parts?” he asked. Then he remembered what Skyrgal had said about Redemption, on the occasion of his second death, In there lies the soul of a key figure in your life. Perhaps the most important one.

  Son of a bitch of an exiled god! he thought. Isn’t everyone a key figure in his own life?

  “Part of Ktisis’ soul is inside the damned knife you call Redemption, and that Araya has wisely taken away from your possession,” the god explained. “Another part is inside the armor the Divine used to move around and hunt you down—that one too is kept in a safe place, now. The third one…” is you! Angra said in the boy’s head, laughing, yet no one but Dagger could hear him.

  You held back the key part of the story for now? Dagger shouted in his mind, clenching his fists. Do you enjoy playing with me? He turned to Araya, trying to understand if the lizard—that everything saw, heard and understood—had intercepted that communication between him and the god. However, the Messhuggah was closed in his inscrutable silence, a faint smirk displayed on his face.

  “…the third must be hidden somewhere; where, I do not know,” was the version the Lord of Creation gave to the Dracons.

  “So how does it all work?” Pendracon Varg chuckled nervously. “Really. To reassemble it you must combine the three parts, but how? Must we tuck the dagger…into the armor or what?”

  I’ll wear the armor and wield Redemption. So the soul will be reassembled and I’ll become Ktisis again.

  Not exactly, but you’d be really cool, you know Dag?

  Fuck you, my god.

  “Only two Disciples possessed the knowledge to accomplish such a…wonder,” Angra continued. “One of them should be in here now, enjoying this nerve-wracking wait before the fatal blow. I see it in his every move.”

  What are you talking about?

  About a singular coin elegantly rolling on your fingers, my boy. “If he came out of the closet now, he’d remain naked in the rain,” the god said. “First, he must find all three parts of the soul, which he’s lost control of due to the unpredictable blow of the wind of events.”

  “Or because some lizard is always a step ahead of everyone,” Dracon Araya intervened. “The dagger and the armor are being kept in a safe place, don’t worry.”

  “But if his soul will be one again, the circle will break,” Angra finished. “Ktisis and Skyrgal will reach Megatherion.”

  “Than nothing more,” the lizard added.

  “Nothing more,” the god repeated. “Like every man lives his life deceiving himself he’ll never die, for years you’ve walked on the razor’s edge, balancing on the ledge, while your numerous and fraternal enemies organized themselves, planned…or just dug. I’m a nostalgic soul, careless about the future, so the fault is mine too. What you need is more time—a luxury that mortals sooner or later can no longer afford. I won’t withdraw again into the privilege of non-decision, my divine right not to intervene when the whole world comes undone under my feet. Today, I decide for the compromise. I will commit the same mistake I accused my beloved children of, despite the consequences.” He looked at Dagger. For the mortals around us, this is a goodbye. For you, just a ‘see you later’. Everything is darkened in the long journey toward the light at the end of the world. Everything is darkened. Then he flew up to the roof and got out, raising a whirl so violent that the Dracons had to shield their faces.

  When they could see again, the god was gone.

  “What did he mean?” Varg asked.

  “Angra is going to leave us,” Araya answered. “He will destroy the portal in the temple of Ktisis while he still has the energy to do it. He’ll prevent Gorgors and Tankars from crossing it and breaking
into the Glade. This is the only thing that can give us time. Of course, we won’t see him ever again.”

  “But how will he do it? How can you close a portal?” the Pendracon asked again.

  “He will use the Sword,” the Poison Dracon muttered. “I will commit the same mistake I accused my beloved children of, he said. Angra will use his brother one last time, and this will kill him. He’s the only one who knows where that cursed weapon is, since the father of the little bastard, here, nearly threw us in absolute ruin with his folly.”

  “This was not necessary,” Marduk commented.

  The Messhuggah continued, “Without the divine supervision, the turbid broths that have seethed for centuries in the depths of these yellow, ill walls will come to the surface.”

  Olem stroked his sword, lost in thought. “If those damn Gorgors had never stumbled on that—”

  “Gorgors? Oh, not the Gorgors,” Araya corrected. “Judging from the reports I received from my infallible Agent Orange, Tankars unearthed it. The temple of Ktisis is located in a sector of the holy city under their control. Tankars have dug for centuries in the ruins of Adramelech searching for the treasures left by its ancient inhabitants, fled in the north after the curse of Skyrgal. When the news of the discovery reached Gorgors’ ears, they took advantage of the superstition and the naivety of the beasts to get back south and take control of an immense power. Watching the writings on the walls—and sensing their potential—they sought the help of those who could interpret them. They must have been more than happy to help.”

  “Whoa,” Marduk offered. “I need a resume.”

  “Mhhh,” mumbled the Pendracon.

  “You’re not following me, are you?”

  “Not entirely.”

  “It’s the report of my spy, what did you expect, sexual explicit scenes?”

  “Every living or dying being outside the city walls, and someone even inside of them, is desperately trying to rape our butt without being kind enough to use a lubricant that’s not our blood,” Olem summed up. “Here’s your sexual explicit scene.”