Dagger - The Light at the End of the World

by Walt Popester

  “Can you translate?” the Dracon urged again. “You have studied anywhere in the world, you must be able to draw something out of this blood-shit!”

  Moak concentrated. “Only in a place I could study their alphabet, or at least participate in its translation, before I realized it is no ordinary alphabet. This is the language of the gods, it works differently from ours. You see the symbols inside the letters? Each of those gives a totally different meaning to the word, and the letters are all linked to each other, like the unbreakable links of a chain. It is a perfect language.”

  Dagger shivered. Looking closer he realized those were the same symbols he had seen etched on his skin when he was dead and in the presence of his father.

  “Let’s see…” the Guardian went on. “This seems to be a sort of warning.”

  “A warning?”

  “Yes. It says ‘If you want to conquer death, you only have to…’ ah , damn it! This part has been deleted.”

  “You are a really bad translator.”

  “Look here instead, ‘He will come and it will be as if nothing ever existed.’ But, thanks to the symbols in the letters, it assumes another meaning, ‘The eternal life that will come from nothing.’ And even more inside:, ‘The eternity of nothingness.’ More and more interesting.”

  “I’m glad you’re having fun!”

  Moak then frowned. Abruptly.

  “What is it?”

  He walked away from the wall, as if it were no longer a source of wonder, but horror.

  “Moak?”

  “Let’s go,” the Guardian said in a thin voice. “Some things should not be read.”

  “What—?”

  “I can’t read, I don’t know! I didn’t study anything!” He started walking again, lock-step.

  Following him, they suddenly came in the presence of a deformed and monstrous skull, imposing, high above their heads. This time it was not a sculpture, Dagger realized. In the dim light around him, he saw the huge skeletons crucified on the pillars of the temple. The skulls with four deformed horns were silently watching him with their black sockets, smiling with their sharp fangs.

  “Skyrgal?” he supposed.

  “No,” Kugar replied. “These are his brothers, or what’s left of them. Tortured and killed by Ktisis to obtain the blood he used in his rites.”

  He looked up. On the high vault he saw dark nailed skeletons, but these ones had wings. “And those are the Mastodons, right?” he asked in a faint voice.

  This time Kugar nodded. “The divine brothers of Angra, killed before his own eyes.”

  “We can’t go around it, right?” Olem noticed, talking to Moak. “We have to go inside it?”

  The Guardian observed the skull in front of them, a fortress of bones. “I’m afraid so,” he stated, taking the first step into the gaping Burzum’s jaws. They sank into the darkness in his mouth, among his teeth as tall as columns, under the grotesque white ceiling of the palate. They passed through the foramen of the head, beyond two horns planted on the ground as the colossal triumphal arch of death. They crossed the portico of the ribs, leaving the basin, partly collapsed as the ruins of an old, white palace.

  “Eaten and dumped by a god,” Olem considered. “That’s something to tell your grandchildren. Who knows how many metaphors are giving you an orgasm now, huh lizard?”

  Moak did not reply. He looked too nervous.

  They found themselves once again in the colonnade of the temple, decked out with skeletons of the Burzum, while the crucified Mastodons watched over their path as the angels of death.

  “Ktisisdamn,” Moak let out.

  Far away, in front of them, the colonnade ended in a colossal arch, supported by the skeletons of a Burzum on the right and a Mastodon on the left. Beyond, they just saw a titanic foot of stone. Judging by the size of that, Dagger thought that the head of the statue must have been so high that it wouldn’t be possible to see it. Olem motioned them to stop. He immediately unsheathed his sword and stood listening.

  Kugar sniffed the air. “Smell of trouble,” she said.

  They hid fast behind one of the vertebrae scattered at the base of the colonnade, shortly before the steps of two creatures were heard. Soon came a voice, “Yay, stupid Gorgors take long time arrive! They lost orientation, you wait and see!”

  “And if they dead dead?” the other one supposed.

  “They dead dead? No, who kill them on the world Beyond? Shadows do not orient themselves under the ground, this is problem. I wonder why master to trust them and not us!”

  “Gorgor stupid. Creatures stupid more servile and maneuverable. Master know this. We too clever and unwieldy, but better times arrive, my friend, you wait and see.”

  In the following silence, Dagger tried not to breathe but his heart was beating so loudly that he feared it would attract the attention of the beasts.

  “How still we wait?”

  “Better times?”

  “No, you idiot. Gorgor and their news! I want to know how much we have to wait before putting the world on fire. That boy cannot hide himself forever. I want humans to amputate their tender limbs. Look into their eyes while slowly prune them like trees.”

  “Yay! Human little endurance of pain, they always scream, right right? And the sound of their bones severed by an ax. Is there anything better?”

  The other one barked in agreement, before adding, “Shadows stopped in caves on the world Beyond, stupid creatures without blood, eating disgusting purple meat of their birds! Ah, master, master! Too much trust in them, little in us, yet we dug beneath desert and found darkness into the light. We found great knowledge!”

  “This I say!”

  “Yay! We found forgotten god and all things he wrote when mad! And we finally triumph, you wait and see!”

  Their voices grew louder and closer. Dagger got the hand close to Redemption, ready for the worst, his heart about to burst, every thought wiped out in the time to kill, as the old Sannah had taught him. You think about nothing when it’s the knife that’s given to speak. The instinct of domination fills the whole mind, killing is a pure act. He heard the footsteps getting closer and stood ready to emerge from darkness to sow death but, as soon as they transited in front of Olem, the two Tankars’ heads rolled on the floor, with no other sound heard except the one of the blade cutting short the vertebrae. Dagger found himself with Redemption in his hand, lighting his deluded face. The Dracon looked at him with superficiality, sheathing his sword under his astonished eyes. Even if he could not always reason in a very lucid way, there was at least one thing Olem could do, and also very well.

  He’s a killing machine, not a man! Dagger thought.

  “These were two big guys, look at how they are dressed,” Moak noticed, approaching the two Tankars. “We would have had problems if forced to face their opinions.”

  “You didn’t really put yourself to study how they dress, in that fucking library?” Olem roared, not minding the two bodies and walking on. “I’ll be castrated if I do get scared by two leaders of their clan, tribe or whatever the fuck organization they give themselves! We are close to the truth or death, or both, don’t waste time!”

  “Wait!” Moak intimated, bending down to search the two corpses.

  “What do you expect to find, their orders?”

  Moak stopped, when he seemed to have found something in the pockets of one of the two. He sneered, pulling out a rolled parchment with the broken seal.

  The Dracon snorted. “The usual lizards’ luck!”

  “There is little light, I can’t read,” Moak said, examining the parchment. “Hel-lo! It would seem the alphabet of–”

  “We are close to the solution of the whole fucking mystery!” Olem interrupted. “Don’t waste time behind a small clue, as Messhuggah always do!”

  Moak reluctantly nodded. He put the parchment in his bag and stood up. “There will be time to read it.” He turned to the path that awaited them. “If we survive.”

  “Failu
re is never contemplated. Fourth commandment. The Poison Guardians don’t study the seven commandments?”

  “Actually, they are six.”

  “Who cares!” Olem replied.

  They resumed the march.

  Dagger realized that their eyes, confused by the disproportionate size of the place, had been deceiving them. And were still deceiving them even now that, advancing, the foot of the statue seemed to move away, while the arc was growing tall and imposing above their heads together with its two skeletal sentinels, the Mastodon and the Burzum, mercilessly used as an ornament. Beyond the arc, the ceiling of the temple had collapsed and the warm glow of a setting sun could penetrate, tinging the walls of a uniform blood-red. The light flowed along the mighty forms of the statue that stood in the center, making it fully visible despite its size: it was Ktisis. Ktisis shouting his silent rage to the sky, cursing as the sunlight revealed his hideous features. The statues encountered up to that point were stylized, their poses unnatural. The dynamism broke with them. The contract muscles; the copious slime dripping from its wide open jaws; every detail gave the impression of being in front of a being who once lived, now petrified forever in that pose at the moment of death. When Dagger noticed the deep open wound in the titan’s chest, he began to have more than a mere suspicion they were not in front of a statue.

  Beyond the titan’s foot you went down into the temple’s immense hall, a cathedral where thousands of voices and cries echoed. The Dracon stepped forward with his sword held out in front of his steady gaze, but only Dagger found the courage to follow him at the top of the long staircase, leading straight down to their doom. The steps were high, too high for any mortal. Ktisis used them to ascend to his temple, he knew. Or maybe he remembered. Imaginations invested him and he had to close his eyes. That place was different once, covered with precious red and white and green marbles, the floor as the columns and the vault. There was a light, a strong light, and there echoed the footsteps of the Creator, to be lived through all eternity ascending to his altar. He could hear his voice, reciting blasphemous verses, and in addition to that the cries of terror of those who were to be sacrificed.

  Olem elbowed him in the side.

  “Did you hear what I said? Get down!”

  Now at their feet, in a vast but meager ambient, was a host of Tankars. Judging by the look on the Dracon’s face, he realized that it was the largest host he had ever seen. At the center of it was the Gorgors’ headquarters, made of black leather tents where a man could hardly get inside.

  Only a few of the shadows dragged themselves from a tent to the other, their arms outstretched along the body, heads cocked sideways. They looked like black nightmares made of flesh. The Tankars’ camp laid all around, spacious, ordered and well organized. Unlike their allies and masters, they drank and sang, fought and emptied their wooden pints, spilling their foamy content on the tables as much as in their mouth. They made love in front of everyone in a violent and wild way, never ceasing to drink and yell, in alcohol, sweat and blood. Not far away, a Tankar was slain for some trifling reason, while everybody laughed and cheered around his executioner. In comparison to the Tankars’ sinister vitality, the sense of death that prevailed in the Gorgors’ camp was even more amplified. Even if they were only savage beasts guided by bestial instincts, Dagger would much rather find himself in front of a group of well-armed Tankars, than one disarmed Gorgor. Maybe this was suggested by the mark, which advised him, with a slimy drop of blood, to get away from there as soon as he could.

  Hundreds of Cruachan, their winged steeds, had been tied in a makeshift fence. Others were brought in continuously, harnessed and submissive.

  “Look at that army,” Olem whispered. “Look well at that. Soon they’ll come looking for you and we won’t able to face them even with all our strength!”

  Dagger looked around, suddenly aware of how much they were exposed and vulnerable. A second drop of blood was the last warning of his heart. “It’s always nice talkin’ to you, but now think about our skin,” he replied in a whisper.

  They got back to the titan of Ktisis and hid beneath a stone claw along with Moak and Kugar.

  “We are facing their entire army. At full strength,” Olem described, sitting down with his back against the stone finger. “Far from home, far from everything. Even if we could go unnoticed through thousands of Tankars, we wouldn’t know how to get back to Golconda. There’s nothing left to us but backtrack our steps.”

  “And how do you suppose to do that?” Moak wondered through clenched teeth. “Getting here was easy, just a step into nothingness. The way back will be a little more complicated. You may have noticed that, if we crossed the portal from this side, we would be launched into the air just to come back here once again! It’s like a Ktisisdamn seal!”

  “And how do they?” Kugar asked.

  “The Cruachans,” Moak answered. “Of course! They fly through the portal riding their beasts. But we are… on foot!”

  Olem found something to laugh about in it. He looked up at his friend, with a grin on his face.

  “And now what are you going to do? Kill’em all to win our affection?”

  “Leave it to me. I can move in the dark.”

  “You? You are heavier and noisier than a drunk Tankar raping his hostages. You’re going to get yourself killed!”

  But, before he could finish, Olem was already out of their hiding spot, disappeared from their sight. “That’s what happens when parents pay little attention to their children,” Moak considered, yet he didn’t rush to stop him. Something in his grin, Dagger thought, betrayed a blind faith in the Dracon and friend.

  Time passed very slowly, and nothing happened.

  “Maybe we should go give him a hand,” Dagger supposed, unnerved by the waiting.

  Moak shook his head. “If he wants, he’ll manage to get killed even without our help,” he said. “Give him time. And keep ready.”

  Dagger was about to ask ‘For what?’ when he heard the shouting coming from the temple antechamber turn into a chorus of outrage, at first, and then anger. He could not resist the curiosity and crawled on the floor to the top of the stairs. It took some time to locate Olem. He had come a long way, climbing almost to the fence where Cruachans were kept. Between his teeth he was holding a black crossbow, taken from a Gorgor. Following the screams, Dagger identified the source of the racket, a Tankar lay dead on the table where he was drinking with his buddies, at least before the dart shot by Olem hit him in the forehead. Obviously, for the Tankars that was just a Gorgor’s dart, black and slimy like everything that concerned them, penetrating the brains of one of their blood and drinking buddies. The consequences were all too predictable: soon their anger was transmitted from ear to ear, mouth to mouth, involving the entire field. Some Gorgors came out of their tents to see what was going on, some just in time to lose their heads. In no time, a battle broke out. He watched the Tankar chiefs get out of their tents and try to quell tempers when they were already walking in their comrades’ blood.

  Only then did Olem grabbed two Cruachans by the reins, jumping on the back of one. With a kick in the side, he was in the air and everyone saw him. The massacre ceased little by little. Many Gorgors stood watching him, with a Tankar’s head in their hands or a blade protruding from their bellies. Howls of outrage echoed under the dome, when both beasts and shadows realized they had been deceived. Olem was targeted by darts in turn. However, he flied unscathed over Dagger’s head before being thrown to the ground and roll. The two rebel Cruachans tried to fly back to the camp, but Dagger grabbed their reins and was dragged into a flight. He managed to get on one of the birds’ back, but the Cruachan did not want to be tamed. Then he drew Redemption and brought it close to its eyes. The beast’s attitude changed of a sudden: it became docile, his flight regular. Dagger swore he could feel its emotions, in that moment, the unpleasant sense of imprisonment that had always characterized its short, miserable existence. He retrieved the second Cruachan and
returned to his companions, landing at the feet of Ktisis.

  Everyone looked at him amazed, his face lit by Redemption. Olem opened his mouth to say something when he was interrupted by the rhythmic scuff of one thousand boots. Behind Dagger appeared, weapons in hand, the Gorgors and Tankars who survived the fratricidal battle.

  Yet many, too many. They stopped in front of them, as if looking forward to the coming massacre and the just vengeance. Dagger held out his blade in front of their eyes and they seemed to hesitate. Then he heard the voice of Moak right behind him, “Son, do not pull the rope. I think it’s high time we took our leave.”

  To this time he could not object. They hopped on the Cruachans and soared to the portal. They were chased through the temple of Ktisis by two Gorgors, who managed to get on their Cruachans in time, preying on them with their poisonous darts. They went through the portal and were thrown back on the world Beyond, in an explosion of light waves. Dagger was blinded, like everyone else. However, that did not stop Cruachans.

  Once they emerged into the cave, where they had initially reunited, the Dracon yelled and stretched out his arm toward the rift, through which came the light of the sun. Dagger did not need to be told twice. They came outside, in the open air, as well as their pursuers. They fled on the trees trying to outrun them but, when these proved to be worthy opponents, Olem slowed and let them get near, leaving the reins to Kugar. He jumped to their closest rival, penetrating his chest and grabbing the Cruachan’s reins, while the former fell and disappeared among the foliage of the trees. The Dracon waited for their second pursuer, who did not back down. They flew toward each other, sword at hand, but at the last moment Olem reined to gain altitude and flew over the enemy, crushing his head with a single blow.