by Ramy Vance
Charon is not built for flying.
Nor is he built for fighting.
But he understands the ways of the dead and living better than most gods, and instructing Pegasus to fly toward Izanami’s neck, he gets in close enough to sever the rope that binds the Rooh Ina’ah to her.
The jar falls—not that she notices; Izanami is too busy swatting away the nuisances that are the attacking Others.
The jar falls to the ground and so does Charon, leaping after it. Under the will of the shaking earth, the jar jumps around, flailing about until finally he manages to catch it.
Uncorking the jar, he coaxes the soul out.
But there is nowhere for the soul to go. And without his ferry, he has no means to guide it anywhere.
So the glowing essence hovers about the jar, waiting for instructions. He needs a carrier. He needs a way to get it to the girl below.
And just as Charon falters, unsure what to do next, he hears a voice ask, “Is that what I think it is?”
End of Brief Interlude
MORTAL KOMBAT … THE GODS’ EDITION
Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought. This is a trap. Of course it is. Take my soul outside, use the Raspy Man’s soul inside. Hobble the only person who could possibly stop them. It was exactly what I would have done in their place.
“Very good, mortal girl. One soul above, one soul below. Divide and conquer.” Quetzalcoatl’s thousand beaks laughed. Turning, at he and Baldr stood together, their bodies illuminated by an inner glow that I interpreted as their way of smugly relishing their victory.
Behind them floated Gabriel. The archangel was obviously in great pain, but it was more than that. He was nearly transparent, as in literally fading away. Whatever magic he had burned or powers he’d used to help us up above had cost him dearly.
The archangel tried to speak, the words coming out more like a crackling sound than anything coherent. Quetzalcoatl turned and put a shushing finger over his lips. “Shush, shush, shush. Conserve your strength,” the dead god said in a caring, almost loving tone. “We don’t want your essence fading into the oblivion too soon. After all, you are one of the great witnesses and it is only fitting that you are here to witness us rise.”
So much for a loving tone, I thought. Pointing my spear at them, I said, “OK … now what?”
“Now …”—Baldr snapped his fingers, and whereas before he had been floating several yards away, he was now on me—“you die.” He produced a dagger from only the GoneGods knew where and stabbed me in the stomach. “Painfully, slowly, eternally … you die.”
↔
THE BLADE DUG deep into my stomach as blood floated out of me like bubbles from a child’s toy. I watched the crimson orbs drift around me and knew that I had minutes to live. Minutes—if the dead god didn’t stab me again.
But from the obvious joy painted on his face, I knew that he was relishing my slow demise.
I tried to move, to fight. To use my last moments doing something useful, but I couldn’t. The pain was too great, the loss of blood too fast. I was dying and the only thing I could do was go with it.
I thought of Justin and one of our pillow chats before things got weird and bad between us. He had asked me what I would do if I knew I only had five minutes to live. “How would you spend them?” he asked.
“Five minutes isn’t a long enough to do or get anywhere,” I’d said.
“Play,” he admonished me. “Let’s say you could wave a wand and be anywhere, do anything, but you only have five minutes and then nothing. What would you do with that time?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I suppose I would want to see my father again.”
“But he’s dead.”
I gave Justin a look of mock surprise. “He is?”
“Come on, be serious.”
“I am. If I could do anything—you know, wave that magic wand—I’d want to see him again. Say I’m sorry. And tell him I love him.”
I coughed and I noticed that the pain in my belly was fading. That was a bad sign. I’d been around enough death to know that the body reaches a point of no return and usually that point comes with no pain. The body’s final gift: a peaceful passing.
I wondered how many breaths I had left. A hundred? Maybe less? And as the darkness of the nothing that comes next washed over me, I heard an old, familiar voice:
“Hello, Kat. It has been a long time indeed.”
↔
I LOOKED up and saw my father standing before me. He was wearing the old family tartan and the smile he gave me every time I walked into a room. It was my smile, his little gift to me for being me.
“Hello, my wee little Kat.”
“Father,” I said, my voice weak, fading. Was this the gift of death? To see the ones you loved most before drawing your final breath?
“Aye, it is me.”
“Oh Father,” I said, tears welling as they threatened to burst over. “I am so sorry. I am—”
“Katrina, enough of the self-pity,” he said, his voice stern, loving. Commanding.
“But I am sorry. Sorry for killing you. Sorry for all the pain I caused.”
“Aye, and pain you did cause. But seeing you here, seeing you now, I see that all you have done and all that has been done to you was perhaps for a grander purpose. You are about to kill three gods, are you not?”
“The gods … another item on my long list of failures. I’m done,” I said. “Done before I’ve done anything of worth.”
“No, yer nay done yet, my wee Kat,” he said. “Yer far from done. The road to atonement is long and hard and miserable. And, my dear daughter, yer still only at the start of it.”
“I don’t know that this is the start of anything. I’m dying. I’m dead. And now that the gods are gone, death is the end,” I said, surprised at the relief in my voice. I was ready to die. No—that wasn’t true. I was ready to rest.
“Yer nay dying,” he said. “Yer only beginning.”
I looked at him curiously, and placing a hand over my stomach, I drew my hand back and saw no blood. “What …?”
“Look,” he said, pointing at the abyss. There I saw two unmoving gods standing statue-still. And behind them, near the entrance to the void, floated Jean, his arm frozen as if he had just thrown something. Somehow he was inside again. Whatever claim he had over this place granted him access, just like my missing soul granted me access.
My father pointed at Jean. “That man has risked much to give yer soul back.”
“My soul?” I felt around me and knew that my father had spoken the truth. Seems that as soon as Jean entered this place with my soul out of the jar, I became whole again.
My soul wasn’t just into the void anymore—it was in me.
“Aye, and with yer soul, they dinnae stand a chance, my wee Kat. Now, go … do what ye must.”
I floated next to my father. “Is that really you? I mean, you you, and not just a conjuration in my mind?”
He laughed. “How can I answer that honestly? If I were a construct, I would say, ‘Aye,’ because that is what you would want to hear. And if I weren’t, well … me answer would still be ‘Aye.’ ”
I pursed my lips. He was right: I had no way of knowing if I had the power to actually call him to me or this was a lie that I’d created using my soul-power. Either way, I took what I could and gave him the biggest, hardest hug I could.
Some lies are best embraced.
“I love you,” I said. “And I am sorry. I will make up for the wrong I have done. I will make you proud. That is my oath. My promise.”
“Aye,” he said, wiping away his own tears. “You are already halfway there, my wee Kat, for I am already so proud of you, my darling, my heart. My daughter.” He put his hands out before him, and in them he conjured the mask of the Divine Cherubs. “Here, wear our family’s clan tartan and send those fiends back to Hell.”
“Aye, Father. I will.”
I put on the mask and, pulling the spear before me
, I searched for the spearhead of the Lance of Longinus. Having a soul in this place made the impossible possible, and I summoned the spearhead instantaneously.
Then, unfreezing time, I charged forth. Not for the world, but for the man who had twice now given me life.
↔
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT LITERALLY TOOK place in less than a second. I unfroze the gods before slicing them in half with the spearhead. Damn, now I get why Michael Bay does all those slow-mo fight scenes. There was way too much cool missed.
Jean floated down. Summoning him toward me, I drew him in like a tractor beam on Star Trek.
“How the hell did you do that?”
“Phenomenal cosmic power! Itty bitty living space,” I said, gesturing to myself.
I flew over to Gabriel and freed the archangel. But it was too late; he was so close to gone that we could hardly see him. But I had a soul in a place where souls were gods. And, knowing this, I did the soul equivalent of CPR, imbuing him with a couple pumps that brought him back to—if not life, then at least opaqueness.
The archangel, freed and whole, did not thank me, but rather floated to the door. “It is too late. She has escaped.”
“Then we use this,” I said, gesturing to the spear.
Gabriel shook his head. “That only kills gods who are dead or wish to die.”
“All I got from that is ‘No, not possible,’ ” I said. “So what do we do?”
“She has not fully escaped. Only part of her is outside.”
Confirming the archangel’s assumption, Jean said, “Only her upper body is out. The rest of her is in the hole.”
“So if we can close the museum and send this plane of existence on its way,” Gabriel said, “then we can—”
“No good,” I said. “Aki said the rotation won’t happen for a while still. Weeks, if Aki is right.”
“The tanuki is rarely wrong.” And with a heavy, un-angelic-like sigh, continued, “I fear all is lost.”
“No. I refuse to believe that. There has to be something in the museum. Some magical item, some weapon that—” I snapped my fingers twice, pointing at Jean. “What did Father Time say again?”
“Not all time is created equal. Whatever that means.”
“I think I know,” I said. “And we need to get out of the void. Now.”
↔
JEAN DIDN’T NEED to be told twice, and we left the void as fast as his karayushi-wearing ass could float. Thankfully I was there to help him along. At the entrance, I stood on the other side of the door, Izanami’s ghostly essence slowly pouring through the doorway.
Gabriel joined me on the other side of the doorway. It seemed that whatever I did had brought him back from the dead. As in, literally. He was now flesh and bone. Well, flesh and feathers and talons and whatever else angels are made of.
“You’re alive?”
“No,” he said, “I am something in-between. Not that that matters now. Tell me, Katrina Darling, what do you plan to do?”
Standing at the open doorway, I said, “You know, you Others always say things in mysterious, cryptic ways. But that’s not exactly true. What you guys really do is give us pieces of information and leave the bridging up to us.” I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out the hourglass that Father Time gave me. “Bridges—like how not all time is created equal. Time flows differently in this place than outside it. Ten days in our time is … what? A minute in there?”
I flipped the hourglass so that the sand started flowing. “Father Time said this hourglass will give us all the time we need. Crazy old bat. Still, not all time is created equal, right? So let’s see what happens when we force a minute of our time to happen in there.” I tossed the hourglass inside and watched the thing float into the void, sand pouring through its narrow sieve.
And as the final grains fell through, the void disappeared. In its place stood a rock face with a doorway that had somehow been built inside.
A loud, thunderous boom shook the cavern we were in, like something impossibly heavy—godly heavy—had just fallen and I knew what had happened. I had forced the void to move on, and because Izanami hadn’t fully exited yet, I had cut her in two.
No one survives being severed in two. No one … not even a god.
Looking at the rock face door, I also realized that I had forced the void to move on, but not the museum. That was still here, and that would have repercussions—not the least of which was the hallowed screams as the cages that once housed the worst of the worst mythical creatures rattled open.
The museum door stood wide open, its large, magical barrier hanging on the hinges. With wraithlike speed, spirits and Others that had been trapped for centuries, millennia or more—monsters that even the gods feared—poured out of the entrance and away from the museum.
I picked up Benkei’s spear, ready to pursue and cut down at least a few of them, but Jean put a hand on my shoulder to stop me. “You don’t stand a chance. Besides”—he pointed at his watch. Dawn was minutes away and looking through the open door I saw that Benkei was gone, presumably to pursue the worst of them—“they won’t be able to get far before the bombs start dropping. Think of it as a ‘when the gods open a door, we drop a bomb’ kind of thing.”
“That’s not the expression. What do you think, Gabriel?” I asked, turning to face the angel. “Will the bombs take them down, or have we just unleashed a—”
But the angel wasn’t there.
“Who are you speaking to?” Jean asked.
“Gabriel,” I said, “he was right here.”
“Gabriel is dead,” Jean said, giving me a curious look. Then he reached out his hand. “Come on, let’s get above ground. There’s a dead god up there and that’s not something you get to see every day.”
IN THE ARMS OF THE ARCHANGEL
Even though I had only been in the void for a couple minutes, I saw that hours had passed on the island. Whereas it had been the middle of the night before, now the early, crepuscular rays of sunlight illuminated a battlefield littered with the dead. Others of all kinds bled their sundry colors of blood.
But the gruesome sight of all the dead barely caught my attention, for in the center of the field lay Izanami, her massive body falling over the island like a mountain range. She was dead, and in death she looked beautiful. No longer was she a zombie-like creature infested with maggots the size of great danes. No longer was her skin graying and sagged. Instead, she lay like the visage of a radiant, beautiful woman, peacefully sleeping as she waited for dawn.
Dawn was approaching, and so were the human bombs.
Two very different kinds of light gonna shine down on this island, I mused.
“What?” Jean said, my out loud thoughts pulling him out of his.
“Ahh, nothing,” I said, “Any chance this changes anything? You know, dead gods and all.”
I turned to Jean, who stood with his tricorder in his hand. He shook his head.
“So, this is it?” I said as I headed toward the beach. “If I’m going to die, then I’m going to do it watching the sun rise. You coming?”
Jean chucked his tricorder to the ground and nodded. “I’m rarely up at dawn,” he said. “Seems it would be a waste not to.”
↔
WE FOUND a secluded place near the forest’s edge where we would watch the rising sun. It was far enough from where the main battle had taken place that we didn’t see any fallen Others. We didn’t see anyone except ourselves.
The sun crept out over the horizon, lying to us that today would be a beautiful day. In the distance I could hear a soft rumble, like a rolling thunderstorm miles away. Jets coming with their bellies full of death, I thought, and sighed.
Today was it, but somehow I wasn’t too troubled by it. After all, I’d gotten to see my father one last time. Apologize to him. And now I’d get to die like him … staring at the rising sun.
That was what I thought about. I stole a glance in Jean’s direction and saw the soldier sitting with a smile on his face.
>
“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours,” I said.
My words woke him from his daydream. “What?”
“That smile. I’ll tell you why I’m smiling if you tell me why you are.”
“Mine’s simple: I’m thinking about Bella. You?”
“My dad,” I said, breaking my deal by not telling him about what had happened in the void.
“You know that game you always play—how would you spend your last minutes on Earth? Turns out, you spend them doing nothing but thinking about the ones you loved most.”
“Humph,” I said, “there’s a poet in you. Comedian? Not so much. But a poet, yes.” Then, remembering something he had said when I first met him, I said, “You know, you lost your bet.”
“What bet?”
“That you’d make me laugh before this was all over. The end is nearly here and I haven’t laughed yet.”
Jean shrugged. “You can’t win them all.”
“I guess not,” I said. “But you could have won this one. You didn’t need to come here with Keiko and me … you could have stayed on the destroyer. Why did you join us, Jean? I mean, why did you risk your life today? You didn’t have to.”
Jean gave me a wry smile. “True, but if you’d failed, then it would have been the end of the world and, well … done that, been there.”
I frowned, and giving him a look that simultaneously said, “Oh, come on,” and “We’ve literally been through hell and survived. You owe me,” I gestured for him to go on.
His cocky smile dissipated as a solemn, distant look painted his face. “I’ve already told you: there’s this girl whom I love very much and promised to help. I keep my promises, Ms. Darling. And so do you, I suspect.” He shook his head as he stared at the shoreline. “Do you think he was right? Daniel, I mean. Are we really going to be a part of the end?”
“The end didn’t happen. And since we’re about to bite the big one, I think not.”
“Maybe. Then again,” he said, “there are still a boatload of overpowered Others out there ready to take up the mantle. Maybe this was just the kick-off. A kick-off we were a part of, and in that way Daniel’s ‘thing’ worked just fine. We are a part of the end—we just won’t be around to see it happen.”