Konkra was blown away. “Wasn’t it you who hated bad language?”
“Yes, but those lizards have the rare ability to make me lose my patience.”
Konkra smiled. “You are afraid of him,” he said, as the light remained silent. “Yes. He scares the hell out of you.”
“See, my son. In many cultures and philosophies, of yours and other worlds, the lizard is seen as a symbol of wisdom for his unending search for light. A lizard would stay in the light even at the cost to burn.”
“I’m not following you.”
“Just digressing.” He paused. “Where did you meet him?” he asked then. “No, wait, don’t tell me: you have gone through that sick thing Messhuggahs built up to keep the two worlds separate, right?”
“The Death Pass?”
“Yeah, the Death Pass! Now sit down and tell me what he told you.”
Konkra sat in front of the eye of light and patiently, word for word, told him all that had happened since their last meeting. Only then, he remembered that the light had once said he could see everything through his eyes. He realized that, in that way, he was just trying to understand his point of view about the whole thing. His thoughts were impenetrable to him. Could he really lie to that entity? Could he keep something hidden, or was he just bluffing? Playing dice with a fellow in the guild was different; there were facial expressions, the subtle movements of the eyes to interpret, but with a light in the wind, the exercise a bit more difficult. Could he read in his mind even now?
“What was I before I was born?” he asked, concluding. “You don’t think of me as a son, only as a mean to achieve your ultimate goal. Getting back inside the body from which Angra kicked you out.”
Karkenos kept silent. “I appreciate the elegance of the lizard. He has refrained from judging you. Those you call Olem and Kugar, on the other hand, have talked about things of which they don’t understand. Do you really think they know about you more than me, who created you? I, who have crossed the abyss of time to get you?”
“What will happen to me once I—”
“You will die. You will die once I have used you. I will squeeze you like a juicy fruit to draw the blood needed to give new life to my body. I’ll leave you there, empty, and life as you know it will no longer continue.”
“And after hearing such a thing, you’re still expecting me to help you?”
“Yes. For many good reasons.”
“I’d like to hear them.”
“How many times did you find yourself wishing the end of this life more than anything else?”
Konkra was blown away. “This is irrelevant,” he answered. “Araya said that a real death is not what awaits me. He says I’ll become again what I was before I was born, so we’re back to the starting point. What was I before I was born?”
Karkenos giggled again. He hated him more and more each time he did it.
“To be born, to die! You’re still watching the whole thing with your mortal eyes. This is your problem, and mine. Asking someone to talk to about your mortal nature is like asking…” He stopped.
“You can’t think about a proper metaphor, right?”
“Well, it’s like asking someone something about which he doesn’t know a thing. You still don’t understand the fundamental element of the whole matter. You are my son. Only my son. The son of a god.”
“And the son of a god lives forever?”
“No,” the light replied. “A force that has lived through all eternity, even as you are, lives since forever. It has always been.”
Konkra felt a chill, as his father continued. “You still remember that feeling of having already been in the temple of Adramelech, in the depths of the desert? As if it was not the first time you were there?”
“I had already been there.”
“Yep.”
“And what happened, there?”
“A lot of horrible things, my son. I was there, and you too. We’ve known each other since before you were born, the lizard is right about that. But you don’t remember.”
“He never said that.”
“So I tell you. Your present memory is nothing but a grain of sand in the desert. It begins from the moment you came out of your mother’s violated womb. It’s really a shame. All those memories, all that knowledge, gone up in smoke. Don’t you worry. With time, everything will settle down. A force that has lived through all eternity has always lived, the name itself states it. You were never born, you’ve always been. Wait till you see the prison Araya and his friends are going to build around you. Wait to understand their real intentions. They are not going to do anything different from the Gorgors and the Divine, who wanted to pierce your chest with a Mayem knife and imprison you forever. The Guardians will do it differently, but the essence will be the same. Keep you away from what you were born to be. After all, haven’t you ever wondered what lurks in that dagger?”
“In Redemption?”
“Just as you called it. Don’t you wonder why it obeys only you?”
“It’s a living weapon. Someone is hiding in there.”
“In a way, yes.”
“I’m not that stupid, I realized that. Some weapons can—”
“Some metals, please,” his father corrected. “The Mayem, specifically. The same that composes the funeral equipment of the Divine.”
“Whatever!” Konkra impatiently replied. “Some metals may contain souls. Who is hiding in Redemption?”
“Someone about whom you care a lot.”
“Seeth?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously?”
“No!” Karkenos laughed again. “Come on, how would it be possible? No, in there lies the soul of a key figure in your life. Perhaps the most important. Now, you’ll ask what that has to do with what you call your death, or what will remain of you once I have used your blood. Well, you only need to know that, in that moment, only thanks to that dagger your real life, your divine life, will start again. What you have been, what you will be. One day, my son, we will climb once again the sacred stairs of the temple of Adramelech to meet our destiny, to finish what we just begun that distant day. Ah. I can’t wait.”
Konkra cocked his head sideways. “Uh?”
“You will soon discover the meaning of these words,” Karkenos went on. “Memory. We were talking about memory, right? It will be back. Because bringing you back to their goddamn Fortress, the Guardians have made the last mistake they could commit. They think they are smart, but they are not. They’re just desperate and desperate people make stupid choices. Soon my true servants will find you and it will be Them to show you the way.”
“Them? Don’t tell me the umpteenth dark knights in search of the predestined boy?”
Karkenos laughed. “I’m afraid not. It’s a promise, the promise of a god, that you can write in stars. I think Them will amaze you.”
Dagger knew that his time in the middle earth was again at an end, when the light at the end of the world enveloped him. He saw again the terrible face of Skyrgal framed by deformed goat horns. But this time he saw, reflected in his father’s eyes, even his own true appearance. His real appearance. He was not a Burzum like Skyrgal, nor as a Mastodon like Angra.
For a moment, he had the absolute certainty that reflected in those eyes was the malicious grin of Ktisis.
Then everything disappeared and the big blind was the premise of his next resurrection.
* * * * *
‘However, we have clear evidence that the first real meeting between Dagger and those who, out of respect for the reader, I will keep on defining ‘Them’, happened that night when the boy, or god, or vector of Skyrgal’s blood or whatever you agreed to call him, went to his mother’s grave in the Glade, to pay homage. We don’t know all the details of the story, but thanks to my inquiries I can safely declare at least two details. One. Dagger had already met one of ‘Them’ before then, in particular during the difficult journey that took him from the world Beyond to Candehel-mas. Only that he
still did not know. Second, everyone had lied about his true nature, some willingly, some not willingly. And this is a matter so delicate that it cannot be dealt so openly on a written text. Especially if you do not want to incur some inconvenience such as, for example, happened to my distinguished colleagues, the Guardians Reali and Popester, who have recently disappeared in mysterious circumstances after having argued that Dagger was the reincarnation of the god Ktisis.
I’m not advocating anything, nor moving any charges. I’ve never made enemies, I’ve always found it stupid and useless. But that freedom of expression in which I have always believed, and for which I have always fought forces me to report this thesis of theirs.’
Ismah Gordon. ‘Uncompleted works’, published post-mortem.
Note from the author and boring thanks page.
Many of the names used in this novel for characters and places have a double reference. Some refer to demons or evil forces belonging to different cultures (Adramelech, Angra, Marduk), others are inspired by characters from the sinister reputation (Crowley). At the same time, they are also the names, often deliberately maimed to improve readability (Candehel-mas, Melekesh, Tankar, Messhuggah) of heavy metal bands or songs that inspired the writing of this.
In fact, I think this is a work of heavy metal.
Finally, the shopping list that everybody put at the beginning of their work, but that out of respect for the reader I prefer to insert at the end, so those who do not want to put up with them can already close the book.
The thanks.
I thank my best friend, attendant to punctuation and enormous-pain-in-the-ass of a critic, Salvatore. With the benefit of hindsight, you must have the balls to have your best friend read your book and tell him to be sincere, with fear that he will hurt you, kill you, or set your house on fire depending on the quality of the novel. Balls that you must also have to criticize every conjunction used as a Kalashnikov in the book of your best friend, for that matter. Well, anyway, thank you. Thank you for being a friend, a drinking fellow, traveling companion, third or fourth reader, first editor and kamikaze press agent. Thanks also to his wife Sonia that somewhere, at some point, must have surely told him not to break so relentlessly my balls, mitigating the invectives of her husband on semicolons.
Thank you Daniel, equal pain in the ass and equal fervent blunder hunter, who has saved my career from untimely death in at least a couple of occasions.
Thanks Amanda at Progressive Edits for making the hell of a work with the editing.
Thank you Wirton, Wally and Ant for the last minute beta-reading, concy d’orazio for the informatics help, Vera for the graphic help.
And thanks to you, reader, whoever you are. If you arrived until here, there must surely be something wrong with you too, so I’m afraid we’ll get along well. You will find my e-mail address at the beginning of the novel for critical appreciation, death threats, marriage proposals, reflections on the meaning of Redemption and light for the various characters of the novel. Usually I don’t deny friendship on facebook, and in real life, to anyone who does not abuse of my unfortunately limited stock of patience for the human kind, moments of drunkenness apart.
The saga continues with ‘Dagger-Blood Brothers’. Currently under revision.
I hope to see you again, otherwise it was a pleasure to meet you.
That’s all folks.
Good night.
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Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Page 25