“Oh, Mr. Crowley,” Marduk said, his non-face purple and red in the dark. “They told you that Tankars kidnapped him on the orders of the Disciples to make of him the living container of Skyrgal’s soul. If you were really as smart as you think, you’d have already figured out this is not entirely true. But perhaps deceptions are so-called because…they deceive!”
Dagger looked at the yellow lights, where once there were the sympathetic eyes of his uncle. “You kidnapped him, you tortured him,” he said. “You put the soul of your god inside him!”
The Dracon Delta shook his head.
“There was no ambush for Crowley,” replied Aeternus, standing up.
Dagger saw his shining boots slowly advancing toward him, circumventing the desk. “No ambush?” he asked.
“Crowley wished for a meeting with us more than anything else. He knew that, with the dark knowledge unearthed from the desert’s depths, the Guardians were doomed. Smelling the sweet stench of an immense power, like all the great men of history, he weighed the situation and took the only possible decision. He betrayed the ones who were going to lose. He betrayed the Guardians, but perhaps this is not the correct term to use against a body of warriors who have always betrayed their people, god, and founding fathers. What remains of the order that protects the Balance, if not a jumble of special interests in conflict with each other?”
Dagger closed his eyes, blinded by truth. “He didn’t. He can’t have done it.”
“Why?” The First Disciple’s voice was warm and intimate. “Because you thought he was your father? Because he was the torn portrait you were fond of, that of the leader hard and pure until the end? Oh, boy…he did. Yes he did, after a simple and formal reasoning. If we had discovered the forgotten temple of Ktisis, if we were able to complete our immense knowledge integrating the Benighted Code with the sacred writings of the temple, this meant the Guardians were doomed. Crowley knew. Crowley was anything but a coward or a fool. Of course, he still had not realized that our goal was to revive both the gods and reach Megatherion, thanks to them. As any ordinary mortal, he still thought it was all a power play, a race for survival. He only judged to which side of the fence he had to jump to stay alive.”
Aeternus found in this something to laugh about. “Funny—he made the wrong choice! What cheats mortals, in the long run, is their lack of a long-term vision. None of them really cares about what happens after their death, or that of their children. None has a foresight, which becomes a necessity when you face the delicate issue of eternity, as happened to us.”
“That was not an ambush, Dag,” Marduk’s voice continued from darkness, as blood still dripped to the ground. “Together with his Faithful Twelve, Crowley marched to the gates of Adramelech, taking with him the sword that contained Skyrgal’s soul. Far enough from the Fortress to condemn truth to become lie, he killed, by his own hand, the Guardians who had escorted him there, sating with fraternal blood the sand and the ruins, silent spectators of a necessary massacre.”
Aeternus took another step. “In those ruins he waited for days and nights, without food or sleep, waiting for us Disciples to come as agreed. When I saw the dark homage that Crowley had offered in sacrifice—the lives of his most faithful brothers—I granted him the privilege to follow me into the depths of the temple. He wanted to see. He wanted to know what was hidden beyond the light at the end of the world, at the end of the tunnel, the unreachable light. Of his own initiative, he gave us the Sword and the soul that it contained. Everything we needed to revive Skyrgal—albeit in hybrid form, inside the body of a mortal. I smiled spontaneously when an intuition kindled in my mind. Who else would accommodate the god’s soul, if not the Warrior King of the Guardians? What clearer message of the impending death about to fall in the world at the center of Creation? He probably realized it too, when two Disciples blocked him with his arms behind his back. Under the guidance of the one Disciple who had studied the Immortal Rites more than anyone else, I, keystone of peoples, gods, and warriors damned forever, got Skyrgal back to life inside the body of Crowley Nightfall.”
“A turn of phrase a bit too long if it serves only to praise you!” Dagger growled. Marduk’s fist hit him fast, and his face slammed against the floor, breaking one of his canines.
“Marduk, leave him be!”
The Dracon Delta reluctantly let him go and the boy got up, seized by the yellowish light in their eyes.
“Skyrgal explored Crowley’s memories,” Aeternus continued. “He was impressed by the love he had for a certain woman. Angra had tried to explain to him, a long time ago, how attraction is one of the fundamental laws that move the All of Ktisis. So as a slap in the face, he decided he would use her for his most ambitious project—to succeed where his father had failed and reach Megatherion. But before that, he wished to mark the territory and leave a sign of his brief return to the Fortress, visiting the family and home of the man who was hosting him. The year was 3612.”
The year they all died, Dagger thought, remembering the epitaphs in the crypt.
“In the shadows of a moonless night,” Aeternus kept on, “Skyrgal got back to Golconda. At the break of dawn, not a single living heir still bore the name that had long guided the fortunes of the Fortress. The legendary Nightfall had been swept away by the white manegarm blade of his Warrior King, now red with the blood of men, women, and children. Skyrgal stuck it in the old throne of the Sword Dracon, in the Hall of the Five, as a warning to the Pendracons to come. Skyrgal had risen again, and even the Warrior King had decided to join him. Olem himself took it away from there on the day of his investiture. It’s curious that he gave it to you. I wonder what went through his mind.”
“But then Olem too has become one of you!” Dagger said.
“Yes. It just seems that sometimes he forgets about our agreement. He argues that I somehow lied, but I never lie: it’s people who are not always careful about what they want.”
“And Hammoth?”
Aeternus laughed. “Him? No, he was not needed. He just had to be replaced with someone who would serve the purpose—to break the order, make the Fortress defenseless against itself. I must say that the Guardians made our life easier when they elected that mountain of shit, Varg Belhaven.”
“Do you want me to believe that he jumped from that window alone?”
“Yes. Hammoth has always been a weakling,” the shadow in the dark continued. “He just chose the most unconditional surrender that exists. I admit I exaggerated a bit with him but, after all, you were not yet back and I needed a…pastime. He was a white blood, after all, a descendant of Santer Korpiklan, the Pendracon who decreed our exile from the Fortress, and my living rogue.” He was silent for a while. “A few hundred years tend to whet the thirst for revenge, you know? So I found it fun to play with his feelings, such as a cat with a mouse—create emptiness around him and find his weak point: the woman he loved above all else, fallen from that same balcony certainly not by…accident.”
The two fallen Dracons laughed.
“Pain is the key, Dag,” Aeternus said. “Knowing the suffering of a person gives you total control of him or her. Surround a man with nothing, put him in a state of emotional isolation, and he’ll become an empty shell, hard and tough, to fill and control at your will. Who is alone is defenseless, except for gods and Messhuggahs—apparently—whose minds are beyond our control. All the others have fallen under this principle—each pawn placed between us and our return to Golconda, to that Fortress that we wanted and erected, the house from which we were expelled. Remember when I whispered my story in your sleep, while you were still dazed by the drugs Araya had administered to you? I did the same with all of them, and yet you resisted the lure of the dark—the final evidence of your divine nature. Certainly not for us, who created you and know everything about you. But evidence for yourself.”
“That cursed room took them all away…”
“Curses don’t exist, my boy, but…air interspaces do!” The First Disciple ch
uckled again. “You have surely noticed how the Fortress seems a creature continuously grown and changed throughout history, with the most recent structures incorporating and devouring the older ones. This has left countless secret passages for those who want to observe unseen, hear without being heard, manipulate without being disturbed. We built it, we know them all, so we can move in the shadows and whisper, instruct, guide. We hold the keys to open every door inside the human mind, not that Messhuggah!”
The First Disciple moved another step.
Dagger could now hear the hiss coming from the depths of his armor. “You were afraid of Araya. This is why you killed him.”
“Bah, Marduk found that task too easy. You should rethink the respect you have for him. Spending centuries experimenting with all sorts of substances, to loosen the bonds constraining his mind, had weakened his body. I’ll tell you, the biggest concern I had were the novices, the kids, still so pure and uncorrupted, with their dreams and hopes for a better world still intact. Some had discovered the entrance to the body of your father, and were rummaging through papers and artifacts they could not understand. The mere presence of a destabilizing element such as the fervent spirit of youth can make all forms of authority tremble, but to retain control it was enough to put all sorts of drugs at their disposal and thus rule them, soothe them, make them malleable and, again, empty! Give them an easy escape from life’s pain, a controlled rebellion that satisfies their need for freedom, and you have them in the palm of your hand. That way you can easily squeeze from their fresh meat the blood on which the meat grinder of power continuously feeds…or you can link their limbs to your fingers to use them as puppets.”
Aeternus took a last step. When Dagger found himself caressed by the mayem glove, cold and electric, its irrepressible energy ran through him and united the armor, Redemption and himself as if they were one being. A black lightning exploded all around. He breathed air loaded with sand while terrible thoughts of death and destruction pierced his mind.
Then he went back to being just Dagger, oblivious of what he had once been. His eyes, contracted by the shock, generated twin tears that streamed down his cheeks.
“Oh, poor thing,” Marduk said. “Your stubborn struggle against pain reminds me of that of your mother. She, too, fought against tears as I did to her what I…did to her.”
“Marduk, don’t tell him,” Aeternus suggested. “It would be too much.”
“Maybe he really wants to know,” the Dracon Delta said. “After all, is she not the real cause of all his sufferings; all his loneliness?”
“You had to defend her,” Dag said. “You were her brother. You betrayed her.”
“And you?” Aeternus asked. “Were you able to defend your sister, as the blade opened her throat?”
Marduk laughed.
The boy didn’t answer and the cold, metallic hand brushed him a second time. “No!”
Again darkness and pain.
Again the wind loaded with sand.
Again the tears.
“Your mother was a woman who loved a man,” the fallen Dracon Delta began. “She and Crowley loved each other a lot and for those few years their love burned free and unfettered. Then came the war…war that overwhelms everything and everybody, making them nothing and no one. Skyrgal imprisoned her in the temple of Ktisis and arranged her womb so that she could receive you, instilling in her the corrupt seed that has made you hybrid between mortal and eternal. He did so under the complacent eyes of the Disciples and Gorgors, observing the fruit of their infinite labors. You could say that every one of them is your father. You are the product of countless ages spent fighting, dying and digging in that sand soaked with death. But she…she then decided to condemn you to the eternal escape from yourself.”
“She didn’t have the right to get in the way!” Aeternus hissed in anger, losing control for a moment. “You were my creature, not hers!”
Dagger shivered. “The chance that’s given to everyone,” he said. “You still don’t understand? I was something horrible, blasphemous. Inside me, you had hidden the end of everything…but I was her son.”
“Unnecessary details,” Marduk commented dryly.
“How could you?”
In a voice laden with resentment, the Dracon Delta replied, “When she told me that Arleb had died, I asked where she had hidden you, but she didn’t answer. At the time, I just wanted to fix my mistakes. I treated her like a queen for years, asking what had happened to you, every day, again and again. I waited patiently, but she hid herself in an obstinate silence masked with madness. Every word lost its meaning, the wall that stands between sanity and insanity breaking down brick by brick. What do you know of the groove that delves into your consciousness watching someone you love slowly let herself die, hour by hour, laughing before your helpless eyes? What can you, or anyone else, know of those ten years? She did it to protect you, but why did she have to protect you from me too? One night I grabbed her by the shoulders and screamed, Tell me the truth! But she just laughed in my face. I slapped her until she lost consciousness and both her eyes were closed because of the swelling. Pain became anger, affection became grudge. I walked through that portal and slammed the door behind me, locking myself inside with only my remorse for company. Why had she decided to punish me? I was her big brother! It was then that Aeternus manifested himself. He knew that I was ready, and that the contradiction inherent in any form of affection now appeared clearly to me, right before my eyes. The strongest love does nothing but prepare the way for greater hatred and suffering, abandoning ourselves to an endless pain when it decides to stop pulsing to the rhythm of our hearts.”
He just used your pain against you, Dagger thought. How can it be so easy to use the pain of you…humans?
“Once, his motivations would have seemed absurd to me,” Marduk continued in a whisper. “But after those ten, endless years in which I saw Aniah wither day after day like a flower in my useless hands, I saw an impeccable logic in his every action and word, in his private research for Megatherion and the eternal relief it brings as a gift. My mistakes, my sins, were those of a child left alone in a room who covers his ears to muffle the screams.” The baleful light in his eyes was lost in space, a lonely star in a chaotic universe. “The screams during those long nights. How could she think I didn’t suffer with her? Only in Megatherion would there be redemption for everyone, even for me. The eternal night that’s not followed by dawn…I just had to do as They said. I just had to get her to talk. So my tones became slightly harder. In every possible way.”
Hysterical laughter carried off the note of repentance that, for a moment, Dag thought he heard in Marduk’s voice.
“Many showed her affection, in those years,” Marduk continued. “Gathering around her bedside, even if deafened by her disconnected screams. I think I also saw your Kugar, with Moak who felt a sincere affection for her. I welcomed all of them and accepted their hypocritical attempt to console me, but they knew nothing of the remorse—those memories that the mad words of Aniah recalled. Those sank in me, just in me, as sharp blades. She did it on purpose—she liked to rub her tormented childhood in my face. So the door closed and the torture began again. Everything was for her own good, for the good of all, but she didn’t understand and she didn’t talk! She laughed at me, and the more cruel I became, the more she made fun of me. She deserved everything. Everything!” He paused. “They understood my pain. That’s why I helped them. She had to talk. Just talk.”
Dagger clenched his fists. “You…”
“Oh, don’t get mad at me!” the Dracon scoffed. “You must be proud of her. She protected you until the end. Beyond the portal where she locked herself up, in the room painted in white where her innocent memories lived, she still loved you.”
“I will stop you, even at the cost of stopping myself!” said the boy. “Can you hear me? I will not betray her! I will not betray her sacrifice!”
Aeternus shuddered. There was a change in the energy emanate
d by the armor. It lost control over the light. Darkness thinned out and time flowed again. For a moment, Dagger could see the metal face of Ktisis emerging from out of nowhere, the helmet forged onto his features. In addition, he noticed five shadows across the room, not identifiable in the blackness that protected them. The Disciples, he thought. They are here too, but not all of them.
“I will avenge those you brought on your path of death, even at the cost of paying the price with my own skin!”
“My boy—”
“Marduk, shut up!” the First Disciple ordered, as darkness returned. “Now you’re no longer alone, Dag. We are your family,” he added in a benevolent voice. “Your divine blood prevents me from digging into your heart and manipulating you like a mortal. You are powerful, so it was necessary to reveal the whole truth to you so that you can decide using your own initiative. Follow us to the place where everything will be fulfilled. You’ll see. Once you start, you’ll find everything easier.”
“Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me! Fuck you! I won’t do what you tell me! FUCK YOU! I won’t do what you tell me!”
Aeternus laughed at him. “Oh no, you don’t understand,” he said. Then everything was pain, pain and pain. “You don’t know how convincing we become when we get angry.”
Dagger brought his hands to the blade as it was being plunged into his neck.
Marduk slit his throat, killing him for the second time. “Well, after all, isn’t it what I promised you?” he said while everything vanished in a corrosive drowning in the dark.
* * * * *
Stone. Smooth and cold under his hands.
“I hate to die! I hate it every time! What the fuck!”
Dagger 2 - Blood Brothers - A Dark Fantasy Adventure (Born to Be Free series) Page 25