The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  “Asa is ready to host you, everything is done. From there we will hit harder than ever.” There was rush in his voice again.

  The First Disciple shook his head. “Marduk, relax, I will not kill you. Sannah and Baomani are still out there, so I can’t bring all the original Disciples to life.” Perhaps he smiled under the bandages. “It’s okay. I just need the Fabulous Seven, and Loose Dog. Do you know why we called him this way?”

  The Dracon barely dared to speak now.

  “Well, one day I’ll tell you a few stories about him, and the bizarre way he used to punish the Gorgors.” That last name—and a memory—wiped out the energy he had found again after leaving the Fortress, which had been his prison for so long. “And now the Gorgors have been punished forever. The Guardians are finished too, devoured by the cancer that is consuming this world. There’s only us and the crab now, in addition to an infinity of background actors. They all want to conquer our place on the scene. It’s up to us to remind them of the old school.”

  “What does Hanoi want?” Marduk asked, finding his voice and anger. “What does that cursed unknown god want? He doesn’t even look like a god, he follows a different logic.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “Of course I’m afraid,” the fallen Dracon replied. “But if he really caused the end of the Guardians, it’s okay for me.”

  The bandages on Aeternus’ face bent to follow his grin. “Ktisis. Your sister’s death did leave you bitter in your mouth.”

  Marduk didn’t answer.

  Aeternus grabbed Dawn, the first half of the Benighted code. “So,” he said. “Where were we left?” He opened the book and quickly slid the pages. He focused on one, then slid them again. He passed the index along the symbols he had once traced. “And now, a little help to get me through he night.” He produced a leather bag and slipped a wet finger into it. When he pulled it out, it was covered with ivory-colored powder.

  “Solstice!” Marduk understood.

  “Few keys can open the doors of perception. Only one opens the door to that of a god.”

  The hand made its way through the bandages, until a black and purple tongue appeared. The powder disappeared quickly from the finger, as Aeternus climbed the few steps dug into the Hammer heart.

  He sat on the Shadowthrone and rested his hand on the armrests.

  He threw his head backward, and that place forgetful of every light and god seemed to blow up.

  “Ah!” Marduk walked back, looking down. A bright spiderweb appeared in the floor as if it had always been there. The thin, straight filaments connected the Hammer to the armors. Some unstoppable energy seemed to flow inside them and pulse like blood in the arteries.

  “Your blood…” Marduk said, before yelling, “Master Aeternus! Break the seal! Command me!”

  The armors. The armors moved. A finger, an arm, a leg, a step, a breath, a scream of pain trapped by centuries in a metal prison.

  One by one, seven armors advanced out of the still circle they had been bound to.

  Marduk looked terrified. The claws of Ktisis, the fangs of Ktisis, and his irate, furious or patient facial expressions. These scared him the most, because the god seemed endowed with a will of his own—of feelings—in the multiple, blasphemous representations in front of him.

  The light dropped, like Aeternus’ scream.

  The total darkness was now broken by the yellow and green reflections on the mayem.

  Marduk turned to Aeternus, who cocked his head sideways. “Seven?” he just said.

  The Dracon turned again to count the monstrosities before his eyes. “Seven,” he confirmed.

  “Hmm.” Aeternus climbed down the steps. Infinite doubts resounded in his silence, until he reached the armor standing in the middle, looking up.

  A deep silence fell between them.

  Then, “Lord of all Disciples, you are back!” greeted the metal voice of the native-Disciple.

  Aeternus closed his eyes, relieved, and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Would I leave my friends alone, locked up in these lightning cages?”

  Another Disciple approached them, announced by the quiet ripple of his armor. “What’s lying beyond?”

  Aeternus turned to him. “What a refined talking. You should be Sheramox.”

  Sheramox bowed his head, his canines just exposed behind his thin lips.

  “Master,” Marduk said. “It seems that their expressions—”

  “Yes. The metal has molded on their personalities,” Aeternus explained. “I told you—you have no idea about what we are facing.” He turned to Sheramox again. “The world out there is burning, and surely there’s no way to get it back to the old times when we bathed in the light. We live in gray days, lost in the current, and we are alone.” He looked around again. “Seven. Only seven.”

  “The Fabulous Seven!” protested a voice that the metal resounding made even more impudent.

  “Right. The Fabulous Seven,” Aeternus considered, pleased.

  Marduk stepped to his side. “But you wanted to resurrect eight of them. So why—”

  The First Disciple raised a finger. “You should have studied it. The weave of the All, of Creation, doesn’t tolerate the presence of more than twelve Disciples, the same created by Skyrgal.” He looked at the remaining three armors. “You are here with me. Sannah and Baomani are still out there, but apparently there is still one more…somewhere.” He shadowed. “This was not foreseen.”

  Marduk understood the meaning of those words. “So you can’t bring Loose Dog back to life?”

  Aeternus laughed. Even the armors of the Fabulous Seven laughed, turning to the Delta Dracon.

  Marduk screamed, this time a short cry, abruptly cut off. The manegarm dagger in Aeternus’ hand pierced his heart, while his resuscitated, loyal friends imitated him with their chains, swords, hammers, and darts. They laughed and screamed with pleasure, giving vent to a murderous impulse that had slept for too long.

  Broken, torn and decapitated, Marduk’s body fell to the ground devoid of all life and death, vanishing into a last whirlwind of lights, shadows and slaughtered meat.

  Aeternus watched what remained of him. “Well. Thank you for everything, my faithful servant.” He looked up at the four armors still at the wall, one in particular: it depicted Ktisis in the full of his anger, his mouth wide open, the bow of his forehead so in tension that it seemed on the verge of breaking. His eyes were injected with green folly, his ears bent backward, his every muscle so contracted that, even if deprived of movement, the being in front of him seemed about to jump forward.

  “Loose Dog,” the cold voice of Sheramox said. “Are you really sure you want to bring him back, master? You could never control him, not completely.”

  Aeternus seemed to think about it for a while. “These are hard times,” he answered. “And time is getting short. So follow me. A leader’s duty is clearly to find a path out of the dark.”

  The seven living armors nodded in perfect synchrony.

  “But first…I think I’ll rest for a while. Awakening Loose Dog will require more energy than my battered body can dispose of now.” The First Disciple smiled. “Life is strange. So many times I terrorized this city, so many times…and here I start again.”

  Fourteen steps of metal followed the quiet, shadowy Lord out of the armors room, leaving the darkness behind.

  A beetle left the ground and crossed the room. It landed near the ceiling, on the edge of a grating, in front of the white eyes of a boy watching in silence.

  * * * * *

  Note from the author and boring thanks page part…oh, wait a minute. I nearly forgot that.

  Follow me.

  Hanoi, who had heard everything, couldn’t smile because the body in which he was couldn’t show any emotion. In the end, this was one of his great strengths.

  You’ll find out when you’re a father, he thought again. This is what Kam Karkenos had said to Konkra, in that corner of the Creation which Hanoi had once cut for hi
mself. He opened and closed his remaining claw and for a moment, just one, a laugh which was not of that world seemed to echo in the depth of the Fortress.

  Hanoi started a pulse along one of his white roots, through the belly of the mountain and then down a long corridor, up to the cave where she lay.

  In blood and pain, it was all in order.

  It was all ready.

  Certainly, Dagger didn’t know what son Skyrgal was talking about.

  * * * * *

  Note from the author and boring thanks page part four.

  Ask someone to talk about himself, and he will talk forever.

  I don’t like when writers talk about themselves, even because we belong to that restricted circle of people who have the privilege to do that through their books. When there’s a scene in Martin, Steinbeck or Stephen King that you perceive as particularly felt, the author is probably talking about himself, about something he hasn’t fully understood, or that he didn’t take anymore, something that made him happy, or laugh; the people he has loved and lost, those he had to say goodbye to and those he has betrayed, hated or regretted. He’s talking about when he was alone against all, when he got lost in the smile of someone he loved above everything or…well, I guess you got the concept.

  To put everything black on white helps us overcome the drawbacks of life, to metabolize them and make them become gold, and this is one of the great privileges of the art I chose. Essentially, the job of a writer is to have shit experiences and profit from them.

  Dagger was first published in the far year 2013, but it’s the final adaptation of a previous work written during my college years—I think from 2004 to 2008, or around. It was called Nightfall, and it was bad, badly written. It sold just three copies on Lulu.com, which ages before Amazon has been the pioneer website of self-publishing, yet it earned me the first seven dollars in royalties. Which changed my life. The idea of being paid to do something I loved so much seemed unreal. Real money: dollars, seven of them. When I went to buy groceries I thought, “Yeah, I’ll buy that with the seven dollars of my books.” The problem is that I repeated that every time I went shopping, so I needed to increase the rhythm a little.

  Even if—like all the seven dollars of life—they disappeared in the blink of an eye, those were the spark that made me understand how the only thing (thing, not person) about which I gave a fudge could become a real job, and full-time.

  Few scenes have survived unchanged, or almost, from that infernal first sketch. The scene in Dagger 2 where Olem meets Angra, for instance, is one of these. Even today it’s one of the passages of which I am proud, because it contains much of Dagger’s poetic: a long series of figures more or less divine, more or less shadowy, bad-tempered, introverted, with a past they are not too proud of, but who have an unbreakable intent of doing something right, just once, in their lives.

  Even the first encounter of Dagger with Olem and Kugar, on the ship, hasn’t changed that much, even if in Nightfall it was set on a sort of zeppelin, one of the least believable things I’ve ever written…and of which I hope no trace remain.

  To suck is the right of every beginner, in every field. Unfortunately we are creating a world where everything must be immediately exploitable and in the best conditions, which means death for art. How many early albums of an artist or band seem a bit weak, or badly-recorded, when with the fourth or fifth the give us a masterpiece? The denial of individual growth is to date one of the biggest mistakes I can find in the society I belong to.

  Nightfall sold only three copies (paperback) in its short but intense existence. If they still exist, I hope that one day they will be worth a fortune, or be buried.

  Dagger 4 is a novel which I loved from the beginning to the end. Writing it did well to me, and has helped me overcome some circumstances. Even removing the quotation-game, which I play as long as it amuses me, Dagger would still be complex and difficult to read, perhaps even more than I would like to accept. In the end, I’m a simple headbanger. I hear Dave Lombardo hammer his double bass drum and I raise my double horns. Dagger, in my humble opinion, talks about big and scary things, the beyond, the wide nothing which weighs on our little and insignificant, but also rare and precious, lives. Then there’s something more, always more, that I can’t grab. I mean, I run to it and I get a step away from understanding, but soon it disappears, so fast that sometimes I think this is its real aspect: its elusiveness. I can’t define it. If I could, it wouldn’t be there, but already a step beyond the threshold of perception.

  In the hundreds of rewriting (reliable figures) that divide Dagger from Nightfall, my biggest fault was being so irresponsible as to try to make the saga entertaining; to put pathos in it, and drama, epic, action, and the jokes, even the basest ones; that which makes a good piece an universally available Art piece. There’s no merit in not being understood. There’s no merit in the use of a difficult language, of that term that the reader doesn’t know and that will make you seem wise. The only fact is that when a reader has to search for it on his dictionary it breaks the reading, the rhythm, and you failed your job.

  Writing means to be responsible for people’s imagination, which is the most precious thing they have. If you put your hands on a pc keyboard, the first thing you must ask yourself is how can you give a show to these people who came here to hear a story.

  Mixing up colors and elements has been my way to open a breach into a genre that has been living on its own income for a few decades, handled often, but fortunately not always, by unbearable self-elected schoolmarms.

  I’ve always written that there’s no true genre for Dagger, or at least I never found it, nor did I try to give it one. I wrote the book I wanted to read, I wrote what amused me or made me feel a little less worse about things. Could I write it better? It’s possible. I could have delved deeper into the relationship between Seeth and Dagger at the beginning, for instance. There are at least twenty pages of deleted scenes about their miserable world of thefts and chases through the alleys of Melekesh; pages I even like, but I rolled the dice and decided to cut them to give the first novel a lightning start, that could keep the readers glued from the first paragraph, something that I always recommend to any beginner who kindly writes me to ask for an opinion. A reader will hardly get to page one thousand and two hundred, where the serious stuff is, if the first ten are a deadly boredom. Books must begin with an explosion, those that make people turn their heads to wonder what has happened. Sometimes it doesn’t matter what you do in any place. The important thing is how you enter and exit, the impression you give, the smell you leave.

  I often talk through symbols. I think it’s inevitable in fantasy—because Dagger must orbit around fantasy, I guess—or at least it should be, to take advantage of the noblest shades offered by the genre.

  At the beginning of Dagger 3 I write of pebbles in the path of Exodus, an image lent by Alessandro Manzoni which represents the unexpected instigating event about to fall on the problematic, yet somehow happy, life of Exodus. At the beginning of Dagger 4, the Tankars sleep unaware as all the power of the revelation is about to pour on Baikal, a scene somehow provided by Little Buddha of master Bertolucci. There’s an infinity of them, yet the revelation, the light, this is the symbol I used more often, and I believe in the most messianic possible meaning. Even if the present author is atheist ad nauseum. Again I invite you to reflect on what I’ve already written in the notes of Dagger 3, that spirituality brings people together because it presents inevitable convergences, all deriving from our common love for life and what makes it so (the sun, the light, happiness, love, the hell I know), while organized religions sow death and break families, being used from time to time by the sad, powerful men of earth to pursue a personal vision of Redemption, the escape from human condition, which is terrible.

  I read Dagger again and again. It helped me when real people couldn’t or wouldn’t hold out a hand in the dark. It brought me from the darkness of a metaphoric hold to know the best part of the wo
rld out there, the people that live, love, and hate. This is why I always invite you to tear down the wall and write me on my page: https://www.facebook.com/walt.popester/

  Right, the short thanks page. You don’t go anywhere without the right team, maybe Aeternus learned that too. I want to thank Sheryl Lee for taking care of Dagger. I’ve found some precious kind of equilibrium with her. Sometimes you need more than an editor, someone who understands that commas and columns are not the core of editing when it comes to a book with alcoholic gods and sensitive wolf men taking drugs.

  Thanks to Silvio Costa for drawing the noises in my head. The artwork on this cover was really something, it contained everything I’ve written about.

  Thanks to who held out a hand in the dark even if she had no interest in doing it, may Angra always watch over your steps.

  Family and friends, you know you’re all there.

  And then last but not the least—or how the Ktisis you say—thanks to all of you for stopping by to say hello, and especially for having patience. I’m aware that there are more…fast writers, let’s say like this. I like to mold the words after the initial sketch, to dirty my hands with clay as the book slowly takes form. I’m afraid this takes time. I fear, however, that this is the only way to write.

  Please remember to review: http://tinyurl.com/Dagger4Review.

  I’m working to give you a good ending, and I have almost everything in mind for Dagger 5 — The Darkness at the Beginning of the World. I just need to get the lights and soundtrack right.

  Life is too short for all the stories you could tell. My head is bursting. I want to write everything.