by Ramy Vance
Another thing about powerful beings: they tended to believe you wanted to serve them simply because they were powerful. That somehow just being in their presence was reward enough. In other words, they didn’t offer you power, glory or riches unless you had something they wanted.
Or they were afraid of you.
“Humph,” I grunted, trying to think of a way to get more out of them. “So do I get to see you three guys, or do we keep chatting in absolute darkness like some twisted game of Seven Minutes in Heaven?”
This doesn’t make sense, I thought (making sure it was in my head). As best as I can tell, the nio and shisa guardians were sent by these guys—and not to offer me an invitation. They were trying to kill me. But here I am, standing in some perverse version of Plato’s Cave (sans the roaring fire), being thanked by the very same gods who wanted me dead.
“Wanted you dead,” Izanami said with an inflection that implied that was no longer the case. “Now, we want you whole,” she continued, confirming my suspicions.
“Hold on,” I said, “I know I thought that in my head. How did you—?”
“We have your soul.”
“And the soul knows all,” Baldr boomed.
Great, I thought, it was bad enough that I often think out loud. But now even my inside-thoughts are being aired for everyone to hear.
“Not everyone,” Quetzalcoatl said.
“Just us.”
Creepy.
“OK.” I sighed. “I would still like to see you. You know—get to know your names. Basic etiquette for the master-minion relationship.”
“So you agree to serve us?”
“What choice do I have? Regardless, I would like to see you.”
“Then see us,” Izanami said, as if that explained everything.
I was just about to ask where the light switch was when I felt a pulsing, almost warm glow in my chest right where my heart was. And, to paraphrase the Big Guy, “Then there was light and it was … odd.”
THE DARK SIDE OF YOUR SOUL
T he room lit up. What lay around me was less Plato’s Cave and more Alice in Wonderland. Standing (or floating; I wasn’t really sure because I couldn’t see their feet) before me were three figures who towered above me tenfold. Because I was floating at eye level less than twenty meters away, it was hard to capture all of their details. It felt kind of like looking at the tip of an iceberg: you just know there’s a whole lot more below the surface.
Three figures—three dead gods—stood before me. At the center was Izanami-no-Minoto, the first and most obvious of the three. The gray, decaying flesh of her cheeks was peppered with giant holes big enough for minivans to drive through. Through those holes I could see the crimson-red lining of her gums, tongue and inner throat. Her left eye was being eaten by maggots the size of mountain lions and only patches of long black hair remained on her head.
She looked like an extra on The Walking Dead, but despite her zombie-like appearance, I could see the beauty she’d possessed before she died all those centuries ago. As she stared at me, she gripped the pendant on her necklace like a child trying to keep a toy from a playmate.
To her left stood Quetzalcoatl, his face more like a thunderbird you’d find at the top of a Native American totem pole than anything alive. Purple and gray lines framed his features, highlighting his eyes and nose. Where his ears should have been, two wings jutted straight out like the broken cowl on a Batman costume. If that wasn’t weird enough, the ancient Aztec god didn’t have a mouth. He had a beak—or rather beaks, as in plural. He had beaks. Hundreds of them. They were all normal-sized and belonging to all kinds of birds, from a long pelican’s beak to a tiny sparrow’s beak.
And finally there was Baldr, who was by far the easiest to look at because he just looked like a fat Norseman with a large, red beard and smile that betrayed uneven, off-white teeth. He looked quite … human. Well, if you discounted the fact that he was bigger than most skyscrapers and had an arrow sticking out of his chest. I guess that’s what it takes to kill a god … a magical arrow the size of the CN Tower.
“So,” I said, feeling very much like small Alice, “that wasn’t weird at all.”
Only Baldr seemed to get my attempt at levity, because he gave me a chuckle before booming, “Oh, my dear, weird is what we dead gods do.”
“I’m getting that vibe,” I said, taking a moment to look around. Other than the three gods, there didn’t seem to be anything else in the room except a faint glow far, far below me.
What wasn’t in sight was a jar holding my soul in it. But given how vast this place was and how little of it I could see, that jar could have been anywhere.
There was something else missing that I had expected to be here: my fear. Despite standing in front of three towering gods, I wasn’t afraid. If anything, I was bored and mildly frustrated that they were here. I’d been accused of being a brazen fool, too stupid to know what was good for me, but a complete lack of fear in such overwhelming circumstances was strange, even for me.
I should have been cowering in fear. Or awe. But I simply wasn’t.
Was this a side effect of not having my soul? I had been feeling empty—depressed, even. But my emotions hadn’t been so muted that I wasn’t able to care about things … it was just getting harder and harder to do so.
But caring about your friends and being terrified that you could be swatted down like a fly were two different things. And right now, neither really bothered me.
“So,” I said, fighting the urge to yawn, “now what?”
“Now we send you back,” chorused Quetzalcoatl. Having a thousand beaks was one thing, but seeing them move in sync as they all spoke the same words was something else entirely. Worst choir ever.
“Send me back and …” I let the last word hang with the hope that they’d fill in the blanks.
Baldr took the bait. “And you wait for us as we gather our strength and emerge.” As he said “emerge,” he lifted a hand the size of five cruise ships docked on a medium-sized island.
The force of such a large mass in the void sent ripples that actually propelled me backward, tumbling head over heels. Although it was disorienting to move with such force against my will, I wasn’t nauseated or dizzy. It was as if my inner ear was working overtime to make this feel … normal.
Normal or not, I didn’t like moving against my will and I stuck out my arms to stop. That didn’t do anything and now I was just tumbling with arms outstretched. Annoyed more than anything else, I thought about how much I’d just like to stop.
And I did. As soon as the word “Stop” fully formed in my mind, my body ceased moving, and I found myself hovering with my face pointed decidedly downward. And what’s more, I had that same warm feeling in my chest.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s how this works.” And focusing my gaze on the light beneath them, I shot down like an osprey hunting for fish.
↔
BACK WHEN I was a relatively young vampire—only eighty years old or so—I briefly dated a dark elf. There isn’t a lot about my time with him that I care to remember. We were in a romance of evil bliss, two virtually indestructible creatures doing as they wished in both the mortal plane and the UnSeelie Court, and we did a lot I wish we hadn’t.
And so, when I was floating in an empty void with three dead gods trying to hire me as their numero uno henchman (well, henchwoman), it felt somehow appropriate that I thought about him. More specifically, about what he’d taught me about magic.
You see, a vampire doesn’t have magic. Sure, there were plenty of powers granted by magic, but those were part of the package, not something we could manifest out of nothing.
This always puzzled him and he spent many an evening training me in hopes that vampires did, in fact, have latent magical abilities. “Magic is the intersection of desire, will and faith,” he used to say. “The desire to create an effect that isn’t, the will to see it through and the faith that you are capable of doing it.”
Despite
all the desire, will and faith in the world, I never did manifest that magic. And he ultimately left me because I wasn’t magical enough for him.
Well, if only he could see me now.
Staring at the light below, I formulated the desire to get closer as I focused my will on having it. And as for faith … well, three hundred years of battles and near-death experiences tend to be a confidence-builder.
I dove toward the light and as I did, I saw Baldr and Izanami’s hands reach down to grab me. But they were huge and slow, and given their size it was like they were trying to swat a mosquito flying at near supersonic speed.
I easily dodged their clumsy hands and then I did something completely natural that had the most unnatural of effects. I muttered, “I wish these guys would just leave me alone.” And just like that, they disappeared. I mean, one minute you’re facing off against three titans so large they can be seen from space and the next second—poof … gone. Top that, David Copperfield!
Completely unfettered, I approached the light below. I didn’t know what to expect when I got there; I was hoping it was my soul trapped in a jar and that all I had to do was pop open the lid and drink it back down into me like a Red Bull.
But Hope is a fickle bitch who rarely shows up dressed the way you want her to.
As I drew closer, I didn’t see a jar or a ball of energy that could be my soul.
I saw an angel nailed to a cross, floating in the void. What’s more, I recognized the creature from vids General Shouf had played for me back in the base on Okinawa.
“Shit,” I said, stopping my flight next to the floating crucifix covered in the same symbols I’d seen on the shell the futakuchi-onna had left behind on the plane over. Whatever this cross was made of, it was covered with the symbols of renewed life that Deirdre had told me about. “Gabriel?”
The archangel turned a weary head in my direction before his lips turned slightly upward. “You made it, Ms. Darling. I guess some prayers are still answered in this GoneGod World.”
WE ALL HAVE OUR ANGELS TO BURDEN
“I ’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head, “but you know my name?”
“I know the names of all, as I do their deeds, Ms. Darling,” the archangel said.
Oh great, I thought, his “thing” had to be that.
Every angel had a “thing”—a special ability or purpose for which they were created. For some, it was power and authority, qualities they had in spades. Others had mercy or healing, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a creature capable of more empathy than an angel. I’d even heard of one whose “thing” was to know every written word, including those written on one’s soul. Combine that with a supernatural memory, and that angel literally knew everything ever transcribed.
Up until the gods left, that was. After the GrandExodus, all the angels had lost their thing. But given that the gods had left four years ago, it meant that they weren’t completely up to date, but weren’t too far behind, either. Operating on Windows 7, so to speak.
And Gabriel’s thing was knowing all my deeds. Not my thoughts, mind you, or any of my inner conflicts or internal debates. Just the final action I took on every little thing I’d done during my three hundred years of life. Given that the archangel Gabriel was generally regarded as a force for good, I was surprised he seemed happy to see me.
Like I’ve said before: during my time as a vampire, I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. And by “not proud of,” I mean “spending the rest of my mortal life trying to make up for.”
Not sure what to say, I floated there dumbly, waiting for the angel to say something—anything. But Gabriel just looked at me with a pained expression. From the way his arms hunched down and his body dragged, it seemed that gravity was pulling him down, causing him immense pain. That was something I could remedy, and I angled his cross so that he was lying down.
He shook his head and between gasped breaths, said, “Thank you, but I’m afraid there is no position in which my body does not drag down against these nine-inch nails. That is the design of the cross: to inflict pain, no matter what.”
Well, that sucked. But given that I’d just vanquished three dead gods, I was starting to think I had unlimited power in this place. “Hold still,” I said as I focused on the nails, willing them to pull out. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t get them to move.
“The gods’ powers may be limited here, but they are not insubstantial. Only they can free me and I fear that is something they will never do. Not as long as I refuse to serve them,” he said. “And as clever as your vanquishing may be, they shall return, Ms. Darling.”
I looked around, but couldn’t see anything coming, and I felt like I was deep in the ocean, below the line of light, waiting for a shark to swim into view. “I figured it was too easy. But they don’t want to kill me, so what do I really have to worry about?”
“They only stay their hands because they do not know what will happen if a living body dies in a heavenly plane of existence.” Gabriel strained his face in obvious pain as he spoke. Given that I had seen—as in, actually saw with my own eyes—Gabriel die during a firefight with a human army, the fact that he was here before me, tangible and in pain … well, that was all sorts of weird. I knew a lot about mythology and creatures of legend, a lot about the heavens and hells, and my eidetic memory allowed me to recall things in an instant (kind of like having Google’s search engine for a brain—go nerdy me!), but even still, I had no idea how any of this was possible. Angels couldn’t die … could they?
“How is this possible? How are you here and not, you know … wherever angels go when they die?”
“The light,” Gabriel offered, letting out a long sigh. “But unlike humans, we do not go to the light—we become light. But that is not an answer to your question.”
Finally! I thought. An Other who actually acknowledges when they’re being cryptic. I waited patiently for the actual answer to the question I’d asked, thinking to myself that good things come to those who wait.
“For you ask the wrong question,” he said.
GoneGod damn it! So much for good things and all that crap.
“The dead gods will return soon,” the angel continued. “Even now I feel them gathering their strength as they approach. They seek to stop you and deny your claim to your soul. But they do not know how to stop your claim, and they fear killing you here will only strengthen that claim.”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do they want my soul so badly?”
“Because human souls power this place. And it is with human souls that they can raise themselves once again. If you don’t regain your soul and end their bid for resurrection, they will return and enslave the world. They only need time—seven days, by human measurement. Then they will be at full strength and unstoppable.”
“Seven days, eh? Plenty of time to slay a god or two.” I laced my words with as much sarcasm as I could muster.
If he caught my sarcasm, he made no indication of it. “You can end them today—this hour, even. Reclaim your soul and slay them one by one.”
“Well, it is my soul,” I said, a bit more childlike than I meant to sound. “And I do want it back.”
“Indeed it is. That is why I asked the EverPresents to do what they must to aid you in your journey here. They, like me, traverse the world of the living and the dead. We are always linked in that way. And even though they are of another … religion, when I told them of your mission they were eager to help.”
“EverPresents?” Why couldn’t Others use simple names? Everything had to be so damn cryptic with these guys. Still, the word “EverPresents” did give me a clue as to what he meant. “Do you mean the yokai that have been following me everywhere? The woman on the plane? The three ghost-kids in the parking garage on Okinawa? Do they have something to do with these symbols—which are Morrigan’s runes, aren’t they? You’ve been using the Red Queen’s magic to bring the Others back to life. Well, half-life.” I pointed at his cross.
Gabriel nodd
ed. “It was the only way for me to help you. You needed to come here and claim your soul before …”—he let the word hang, and then sighed—“before the gods use it to regain themselves,” he said, like that explained everything.
“You mean like coming back from the dead?”
“That is exactly what I mean.”
I wanted to probe more, ask more questions, get more insight into how this whole damn universe was built, but if he was right, we were running out of time and they would be back any second. “OK, then what can I do?”
“Your soul … it is a source of great power, especially here. And because you live, you have a claim to it, but not necessarily control over it. You must make them acknowledge your claim before they gather further strength.”
“Fine,” I said, “I want my soul back, too. I really do. But I can’t see it anywhere. I can’t even sense it. How do I get it back?”
“Izanami carries the Soul Jar around her neck,” he said, and I thought back to how she’d jealously gripped her necklace. Made sense she’d want to keep me away from that. “And the three gods share your soul and one other’s … harnessing its power to control this domain. You have claim over your soul and only your soul. And your claim is greater than theirs. Retrieve your soul and destroy them.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Retrieve your soul. Do it now, before their strength grows greater.”
“OK,” I said, flying backward in a loop—the floater’s equivalent of nervous pacing. “Let me get this straight. You want me to cut out my soul that has been consumed by three separate and very dead gods?”
Gabriel winced as he nodded.
“Not to curse in front of an angel or anything, but the expression, ‘There isn’t a hope in Hell’ comes to mind.”
The archangel curled his lips slightly. “Actually, Hell is built on hope. For torment can only work when there is hope. And there is hope, Katrina Darling.”
“How do you figure?”