Trials of Trass Kathra

by Mike Wild

  She would be nothing soon, and her universe consisted of one endless, deafening scream.

  Then, suddenly, as one small part of her recognised the Hel’ss Spawn had worked its way up, was spreading now over her thumping heart, ready to take that, too, she felt another kind of pain. No, not pain, but the kind of red-hot, nagging insistence in her chest she had felt when almost drowned. This feeling was different, though, not the result of a desperate need to draw air from without, but the need of something to be released from within.

  Images flashed unbidden into her mind. The moment at the Crucible when Tharnak had told her she shared a legacy with him. Brundle, placing his hand on her in the tavern in Gransk, the gasp he had uttered thereon. Herself, standing in front of a mirror in the Flagons that one dark night she had told no one about.

  The night that she had become aware of the thing she believed made her what she was.

  The night that she had seen the thread within her glow.

  Oh Gods, Kali thought, as it began to glow again, brighter than ever before. What was this? What the hells was this? And then the pain of what the Hel’ss Spawn was doing to her was forgotten as her spine arched so acutely it seemed to snap in two, and she screamed with an agony she thought could get no worse as something broke from within her and the cavern exploded with light.

  Kali felt herself falling, released from the grip of the Hel’ss Spawn, remade miraculously whole. Instinctively, unthinking, she grabbed onto a strand of seaweed and swung there breathlessly as before her the Hel’ss Spawn roared. She had no idea what she had done but suddenly the entity – Redigor’s screaming face within it – was retreating from her and flinging itself about the cavern as though infected with some deadly toxin. Against rock after rock and wall after wall it crashed, each time breaking itself apart into smaller and smaller segments, and then, when there was little of it left, what remained of it collapsed into the waters and, bobbing on the waves, began to drift lifelessly away.

  Kali hung where she was, gasping, unable to believe what had happened, waiting for the Hel’ss Spawn, for Redigor, to rear up once more. But after five full minutes had passed, it, and he, did not.

  The Hel’ss Spawn was gone.

  Bastian Redigor was gone.

  Slowly, Kali lifted herself hand over hand up the seaweed strand and then collapsed onto the bridge above. She lay there on her back for a few seconds, her palm caressing her chest, feeling the place the light had come from. It was back within her now, that she could feel, but, despite what it appeared to have done, it was of no comfort.

  Gods, what was it? What was she?

  Was this a part of the Truth?

  Kali stood and stared ahead of her. The lightning column that was the Thunderflux waited no more than ten yards along the bridge on which she stood, and somehow she knew that this was the right bridge, her bridge, and that whether by accident or design of fate she’d been delivered to the right place. Whatever lay within was the end of the Path of Endurance, the end of the path of Kali Hooper.

  Her destiny.

  Kali took a breath and strode inside the Thunderflux. She found herself rising and then stopping inside a domed chamber, and she guessed she was inside the Thunderflux cap. The same energies that had danced in the column danced here, too, all around her, beating at the walls, but they did her no harm.

  The only shock she felt was when a face appeared before her.

  A woman.

  An elf.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “HELLO, KALI,” THE elf said. She spoke slowly and her words trembled in the air, as if they were the most delicate things in the world. “As I speak, I am separated from you by many thousands of years, and the civilisations I represent are about to end. They shall be gone from this world soon – taken by the entity you will already have encountered. The elves and the dwarfs and all of their grand achievements will be no more. But we leave behind us the seeds of a new race – the human race – whose origins lie in the depths of the oceans of this world, and not, like us, in the skies above... or on other worlds, far beyond your skies.” The elf paused. “I expect you have many questions. Please feel free to ask anything you wish.”

  “I, er, don’t suppose you have a towel?”

  The elf smiled. “No, I don’t have a towel.”

  “Right. Sorry about that. I guess I’m a little nervous. How about who are you? And how can we be speaking like this?”

  “My name is Zharn. And I am able to speak to you because I am trapped in a moment of time. A moment created when the Thunderflux was capped, that links the Trass Kattra that is now with the Trass Kattra that was then.”

  “You’re here on Trass Kattra. In the past?”

  “Not just the past, Kali. The End Time. Even as I speak, the darkness is upon us, and were it not for this moment, I would already be dead.”

  Kali swallowed. “Who are you, Zharn?”

  “One who tried to help save our world. One of four.”

  “Four?” Kali repeated. “You mean like the Four four?”

  “Yes, that is what I mean. I was of the kattra of this time. And it was I who was chosen to come to the Thunderflux to relate the tale you need to hear.”

  “Okay,” Kali said cautiously. “I don’t seem to have anything else on at the moment.”

  “We share a singular heritage, Kali – and a singular foe. One that will be difficult to explain because its history is ages in the making. But it must be explained if you are to succeed in what you must do. It is a tale of growing knowledge, of constant adversity, and, until now, of failure. Steady yourself, for we are about to begin.”

  What? Kali thought. But then the dome in which she stood was suddenly a dome no more. Its walls vanished and she found herself adrift in a void, floating, and somehow knew she was in the centre of the strange expanse she had seen when she had risen above Twilight in the Tharnak. This ‘space’ was as immense as it had been then, her confines utterly gone, and she felt that if she began to travel in any direction, she might never reach its limits.

  There was only one difference: where within this void she had then been able to see Kerberos and Twilight’s distant sun, marred slightly by the body she now knew to be the Hel’ss, here there was nothing. Nothing in the void. Nothing at all.

  “My gods,” Kali breathed.

  “In the beginning,” said Zharn, “there was night. Worlds without light. Rocks without life.”

  Kali found herself stunned, backpaddling as she might in water to keep afloat, as a number of blindingly bright spheres appeared out of nowhere in the space all around her.

  “And then, the gods came.”

  The spheres hung about Kali at various distances – unimaginable distances – illuminating the void and the lifeless worlds she could now see scattered throughout it. Each was also far more than a sphere, Kali sensed, because from them all she could feel the same strange and powerful sentience emanating.

  “They came to this desolate corner of the universe,” Zharn continued. “To this dead space. They were the Pantheon.”

  Kali swallowed. “The Pantheon?”

  “Twelve entities – creatures, powers, gods – call them what you will. Kerberos, the Hel’ss, Faranoon, Chazra-Nay, Rehastt, along with eight others whose names we might never know, for they are long gone.”

  “Wait. Are you telling me one of these spheres is Kerberos?”

  “As Kerberos was, when it was young. Like the Hel’ss, it shone brightly, then. It had feasted well before it came – as had the Hel’ss, as had the others.”

  “Feasted?”

  She gasped and began to drift through the expanse before her – or was it that the expanse drifted about her? – she wasn’t sure. She found herself directly above the surface of one of the spheres as it rotated beneath her, massive and filling her vision completely. But it was what filled the sphere that drew Kali’s attention – a swirling sea – no, ocean, entire world – of writhing forms that resembled Bastian Redigor’s Pilla
r of Souls. But there was a difference – where then she had seen only human forms, the dead of Twilight, here she was looking at what could only be the dead of other worlds, a multitude of strange forms that both awed and disturbed her at the same time. Octopoid things and serpents that were leagues long, pyramidal creatures and creatures of jagged contours, gaseous entities, distinct from that in which they were trapped, and dark, flowing shapes, like liquid shadow. There was nothing familiar about them, and Kali realised she was looking at the souls of another universe.

  “Gorged is perhaps a better word,” Zharn said. “Gorged until there was nothing left in their old domain. And so they came, came in search of new life, so that they might feast again.”

  Kali looked at the planets around her. “But these are dead worlds.”

  “All worlds are dead,” Zharn said. “Until their gods come.”

  Kali watched as each of the spheres – each of the Pantheon – began to move to one of the worlds and take up position above it, hanging there as Kerberos hung above Twilight. Though she could somehow see them all, she knew that billions upon billions of miles must separate them.

  For as she continued to watch, the spheres that were the Pantheon infused their individual dead worlds with life, life that from her heavenly vantage point she could see begin to spread across the worlds as their respective civilisations grew. What kind of lifeforms thrived beneath her she didn’t know, but thousands upon thousands of years of their history must have passed before her eyes, and when it had, the process that each of the Pantheon had begun was, it seemed, done.

  Each sphere had lost its brilliance now, each of the Pantheon became a different hue, and as Kali observed a barely distinguishable thread connecting each sphere to its planet below, a thread which pulsed upwards constantly, she knew from what that hue had grown.

  The fact that she was witnessing each member of the Pantheon feeding on its planet’s souls was somehow forgotten as her eyes were drawn to the sphere with a familiar azure hue.

  To the planet from which it fed.

  “Oh gods. Is that Twilight?”

  “No, Kali. It is not. For there begins the next part of this tale.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Zharn paused. “This is what the Pantheon were, and had they remained so, these worlds, these civilisations, would have enjoyed millennia of existence before their gods moved on. With this there was nothing wrong, for that was the nature of things.”

  “Something changed?”

  “The Pantheon changed. They were ancient beings when they came here, and now they were more ancient still, and some of them chose their worlds unwisely and fed less well than others. Across the vastness of space some began to sense their more successful brethren, became jealous of their conquests, and instead of moving onto neutral worlds the weaker among them began to follow in the wake of the stronger. For a while they were allowed to bask in the essence of those they followed but the worlds available to the Pantheon were becoming fewer, too, their resources scarcer, so that, gradually, the Pantheon were drawn into conflict with each other. They began to draw souls not only from the planets they had created but from each other. They began to consume themselves...”

  Kali watched as one of the Pantheon – she didn’t know which – hung above a world whose surface glittered with the light of campfires, signifying life, if a primitive form. Then she became aware of another of its kind encroaching on its space from afar. The second of the Pantheon gradually began to move towards the first.

  “What am I seeing?” Kali said. “Is this the Hel’ss and Kerberos?”

  “No, Kali. You are seeing the merging of Faranoon and Chazra-Nay. Witness, Kali. Witness the end.”

  It might not have been the Hel’ss and Kerberos that Kali was observing, but the similarity to what was happening above Twilight right at that moment was clear. As the Hel’ss was nearing Kerberos, so too was Faranoon nearing Chazra-Nay. But in this case drawing close enough to touch. As Kali watched wide eyed, the edges of the massive, gaseous spheres came into contact and then, slowly, Faranoon began to eclipse Chazra-Nay. Chazra-Nay did not disappear, however, remaining visible inside the other, like a nucleus within a cell. At least for a while. Then, at first in pockets and then in great spreading clouds, the atmospheres of both bodies became increasingly disturbed, as if each raged with unimaginably large storms – but if they were storms, they were storms of souls, the meeting and conflict of the life force of each of the so-called deities. Seething and roiling ever more tumultuously, the surfaces of the spheres changed hue and composition again and again, sometimes so rapidly that they appeared to pulsate in anger, and it was apparent that a great battle was being raged. Kali had no idea of the length of time that passed during this struggle but in the end Faranoon emerged the victor.

  The way that victory came would have made Kali stagger, had she something solid on which to do so. Because though Chazra-Nay vanished inside Faranoon, the size of Faranoon suddenly doubled, and as it did its hue changed and it enveloped the atmosphere of the world below.

  “This,” Kali gasped, “I’ve seen this. With Pim in Domdruggle’s Expanse. Kerberos was bigger, darker, more threatening. This is the End Time, isn’t it! This is the darkness!”

  “Wait, Kali,” Zharn countered.

  Faranoon was now enveloping the alien world like some giant membrane. Hanging there in space for what seemed an eternity, it seemed to be passing on a message to the cosmos. This world is mine. And then, from the surface of the alien world to the surface of Faranoon, countless strands of light began flow. Kali knew instantly what they were – souls – the souls of every living creature on the world being consumed all at once by the deity. She knew now why the elves and the dwarves had vanished so quickly from Twilight, seemingly unable to prevent their fate, because it took only a matter of minutes before the strands of light were fully absorbed into its biosphere and the world below was emptied of life. All across the surface of the world, the campfires went out.

  “That is the darkness,” Zharn said.

  Kali was momentarily speechless.

  “How many worlds have the Pantheon destroyed like this?”

  “Those it took to reduce their ranks. Faranoon was consumed by another as little as five thousand years later. Rehastt took two worlds before it was itself consumed by the Hel’ss. Ten worlds in all lost to their conflict until only two of the Pantheon – Kerberos and the Hel’ss – remained.”

  Kali hated to sound flippant about what she’d witnessed but it seemed relevant.

  “Kerberos didn’t seem to get the munchies.”

  Once more she was on the move, zooming through space towards the azure sphere and the world she had mistaken for Twilight. It was her longest journey yet.

  “No. Kerberos was the most distant of the Pantheon, here, on the very edge of this space. It had found a world whose own god it had subsumed and which satisfied its needs. Because of this and of the great distance between itself and its brethren, it took no further part in the affairs of the Pantheon.”

  “But Kerberos is above Twilight now, right? So something must have happened.”

  “The third part of our tale. Of the many races the Pantheon created, this was one of the few that developed the capacity for travel in space, and with it the means to escape Kerberos’ domination of their world. A band of refugees managed to leave the planet in search of a new home. What they did not know was that Kerberos, angered by their audacity, would decide to follow them. But what Kerberos, in turn, did not know, was that its passage across the vast void would bring it close to the realm of the Hel’ss.”

  Kali watched as the great azure orb that was Kerberos moved across space. There, perhaps billions of miles distant but close enough, it briefly eclipsed another orb, purple in colour, which also began to move. Very, very slowly, it began to close the gap between them.

  “The hunter,” said Zharn, “became the hunted.”

  The distance between the spheres was
so great, Kali realised, that thousands of years could conceivably pass before the Hel’ss caught up with its prey, but this was nothing to the two deities, and she knew from experience that the end of the pursuit was inevitable.

  She found herself following Kerberos through space, then floating around its axis, where she gasped. Below her hung Twilight. At least she thought it was Twilight. Because there was something about it that was wrong.

  “The refugees from the dead world eventually led Kerberos to this world, your world,” Zharn explained, “where they mysteriously vanished. Despite this, Kerberos had no choice but to remain, for the journey here had left it weak.”

  “Twilight looks different,” Kali said. “But I can’t work out why.”

  “Yes, Twilight is different. Because there was a fundamental difference between this world and any other that Kerberos had seeded.”

  Kali began to swoop down into Twilight’s atmosphere, at first soaring high above the clouds and then punching through them. She flew above an unfamiliar landscape, across which figures raced. No, not raced – pursued each other. She stared as the predatory creatures – strange, green-skinned hulks and short, vicious, rat-like things – then engaged in battle.

  “Oh gods,” she said. “Twilight was already populated.”

  “Indeed it was. But Kerberos was angry that the fugitives he had pursued across space had once more escaped him, and he was also desperate. For the first time since arriving in this universe, Kerberos chose to transform an inhabited world.”