by Daryl Banner
Baal and Baron had different approaches to finding the Goddesses. Baal hunted for them by studying the books that filled the royal library, positing where they might be, if they even occupied a physical location in our world. Baron chose a more spiritual method, taking to his knobby knees every day to pray. Three hours he spent day and night, wishing and whispering to himself in the privacy of a meeting chamber near the throne room. He would even sometimes bring an item of tribute to his hand as he prayed, offering it in the name of the Goddesses. “Hear my plea …” he’d moan.
Aardgar had a different tack entirely. He stood at the balcony of Cloud Tower, weary and bitter, looked off to the grey and churning sky, and cursed Evanesce by name.
“Evanesce, I spit on the world you’ve made,” he hissed to the stars of yet another nameless night sky. “You ignorant being. You fell fury. You jealous, jealous … demon.”
He seethed as he glared into that sky. His fingers curled at his sides in anger. He cast his resentment at the stars each night. He wanted Evanesce to feel his anger.
It was as good a bait as he could fathom.
“Aardgar.”
He turned. Baal stood by the opened door to the King’s chambers in a vibrant red robe with a purple silk sash. His tensed face was greasy with sweat.
“I heard you,” Baal said. “Are you angry?”
Aardgar sighed. “My relationship with the Sisters is … complicated.”
Baal strode slowly through the dark room, then came to a stop by the breezy balcony where Aardgar stood. “The Sisters Three wronged you deeply, I know. We seek them through worship. And you seek them … with your curses.”
It had been months. Many months. Perhaps even years that they had ruled, gathered others, secured the Keep, waited out the storms of fury at the feet of the Lifted City, and sought Three Goddess. Their food stores were nearly depleted, though Aardgar ate nothing himself, needing not a trace of sustenance to survive. Despite all that he and his brothers had been through, Aardgar still kept secrets from them. Would he ever trust another soul in this world? Perhaps it was because they still hadn’t found the Sisters. Perhaps it was because he felt he was running out of hope that they’d ever see them again. Perhaps it was just because he wanted his brothers to know everything.
But on that particular night, with his brother showing such concern, and Aardgar’s anger boiling over, he spilled a truth he hadn’t told a soul in over a thousand years.
“I curse only one of the Goddesses,” he confessed. “The one named Evanesce. The one who … took my heart.”
“Oh?” Baal appeared surprised. “Are you saying you … fell in love, brother? … With a Goddess?”
Aardgar’s eyes turned dark. “I loved her, yes, true. But it turned out that a wicked, golden creature could not love me back. She is incapable of it. No creature of her kind can love a human. She stole my heart straight out of my chest. It is no play of words, my brother. She literally reached right into my chest … and she …”
Aardgar’s body tensed as the words came out. The look in Baal’s eyes was confused—skeptical, if Aardgar dared say. So Aardgar did the only thing he could when words escaped him: He pulled open his robe and, with one tug upon a silk that was always wrapped tightly about his chest, revealed his secret.
Baal’s eyes grew double as they fell upon the hole in Aardgar’s chest. After years of tedium and calmness, his brother showed his first sign of utter fear as he backed away, mouth agape, then froze as he stared at the empty hole in Aardgar’s gaunt chest, speechless.
“My heart,” Aardgar then said. “She … took it. And anything that the Goddess holds, endures.” He met his brother’s eyes. “I am invincible not due to a Legacy, but because the golden light keeps my heart hostage.”
“Hostage.” Baal’s voice shook. “H-Hostage. She … You are a hostage of the Goddess?” Baal lifted his eyes to his brother. “You are immortal because … because she gifts you immortality?”
“It is not a gift. She forced this fate upon me. And when I see her, I will destroy the only thing she holds dear: my own heart. I’ll destroy it and make a once and final end of it all.”
“Dear brother, no.” Baal’s hand had crept to his lips as he continued to stare unblinkingly at his brother’s chest. “No. Don’t. Your immortality is the only thing—”
“You have not lived a thousand years. I have spent most of it in darkness, most of it in misery, most of it alone and deader than the actual dead. I want it no longer,” Aardgar stated, his words growing sharper and sharper as he spoke. “She wishes to own me and call it love. She plays at being a human, but she is no human and never will be.”
Baal’s eyes flickered with wonder.
“No,” Aardgar said before Baal could reply. “And I will not be convinced otherwise. My mind cannot be changed. It is settled. When I see her again, when I see Evanesce, I will destroy my own heart. I will watch all of her happiness die with the last angry beat of my heart. It is the only way to truly destroy her.”
Baal’s eyes turned and turned with thoughts and emotions. Then, with a curious tilt of his head, he posed the one dangerous question that remained: “If immortality is not your Legacy … then what is your Legacy, brother?”
Aardgar felt the bitter grip of protectiveness then, the bitter grip that would save him. One mouth closed, two ears open. “A … An insignificant power,” he answered flippantly. “A thing … of no consequence. A thing of no mind. Let everyone believe it is immortality, the foolish lot of them.”
Baal smirked, but he did the smart thing of holding his tongue. He did not push his brother further, not today; he must have known better than to even try.
Aardgar felt that to be the most comforting thing of all.
Their respective prayers and curses did not provoke the Goddesses. After countless turns of the moon, Aardgar had figured that the Sisters abandoned them completely. Perhaps they had returned to wherever they truly came from, bored with the predictable ebb and flow of evil in humankind.
The notion disappointed Aardgar.
It was one night when the full moon was covered by a mass of storm clouds that he remembered softly spoken words from Evanesce back during the times when they were happy. It was so long ago that Aardgar genuinely wondered if it was just one of his thousands of dreams he’d made up in his first darkness. No matter, he walked the Cloud Keep grounds with his eyes wandering along the hidden stars and clouds that didn’t yet let their heavy tears fall.
The words came like a kiss to his ears. “If you are in pain, if you are weary, if you need the touch of a woman’s hand,” Evanesce had said, “simply look to the skies and call out for me with all your human love. No matter if that sky is bright with morning or dark with doom, I will heed your call.”
The sky was dark, though Aardgar couldn’t yet say if it was a rainy doom that hovered over his shoulders or just another lonesome night never ending. He spoke his wordless plea nevertheless—a wordless, breathless plea to Evanesce.
It wasn’t answered that night.
It was on a night that King Aardgar thought for a moment the sun was coming up early. When he slowly approached the balcony of the tower, he realized the glowing red light came from a mob of angry men and women who had forced their way into the city from the slums below. They carried torches and hollered as they stormed the feet of Cloud Tower.
“Baal!” Aardgar called out. “Baron! Quick, gather our soldiers! Cloud Keep has been breached!”
His shouts were met with deafness at his back. He crossed his chambers and peered out into his hall, then opened the doors to each of his neighboring chambers where his brothers often resided. The large rooms were also empty. Even the dining hall, the kitchens, the commons, and the passageways between were vacant.
So he resorted to using his Legacy. The cold chrome walls kissed his opened palms, he shut his eyes, and then he saw his brothers fleeing downstairs. To where? He followed the convoluted stories and visions within the wall
s. It pulled him to the King’s Keeping where the walls’ whispers abruptly ended, and all signs of his brothers were lost.
The only soul he found there was Zema, former Marshal of Legacy, who was still imprisoned behind the unbreakable bars. She appeared like a skeleton of her former self, tired and thin and hardly able to keep her eyes open. Aardgar almost pitied her, if it weren’t for the fact that she and the others—Thad and Halvard too—had evil plans for him after he’d served his purpose. They planned to tear him into pieces and bury each part of him in a different corner of Atlas so that he may never walk the planet again and be long forgotten. His brothers showed him the truth of it; Zema had drafted the exact plan on the Queen’s official parchment, which the three of them stole after assassinating Queen Vivilan. The three of them, despite all the kindness of Thad or the curiousness of Zema, were malicious.
For five phantom heartbeats as he approached her cell, he thought she was dead. Then Zema slowly lifted her chin and rolled her glassy eyes to meet his.
“Zema,” murmured Aardgar stiffly.
She licked her dry, cracked lips. The woman was unrecognizable. “Your Keep,” she tiredly croaked back, “will not be yours to keep much longer, Fool King.”
Aardgar’s face hardened. He hadn’t any time for games, and no objects within reach could tell him the story he needed to know. “Where are my brothers? Have they been through here?”
“A curious family you do hold,” she spat. “With brothers who plot your end twenty times a day.”
It wasn’t the first time Zema tried to turn him against his brothers who had saved him. “You tried that before. Each time I pass through. Each time you open your fell mouth. It won’t work this day, for all our lives are now in danger. Even yours. Even mine.”
“They were always in danger,” she droned tiredly.
“The rebellion has made it to our doorstep, Zema. And this time, it threatens to take us. If you so value your life, tell me where my brothers have gone. If you know at all.”
Zema tilted her head. Aardgar didn’t realize that the months of frugal eating and inactivity in this cold cell had made her hair thin out. That, or the woman had gone mad and plucked strands of her hair out on the daily. Even as Aardgar thought it, the woman brought a hand to the side of her head, twisted a few grey curls around her finger, then gently pulled as she stared at her King with narrowed, challenging eyes.
“If you wish not to speak,” warned Aardgar, “then I’ll leave you here to burn with this tower, should the mob overtake us. And it appears it will.”
“Thadold had a … remarkably complicated Legacy that allowed him to find things,” she muttered. “I never knew its nature. I only knew its function. And it found you, did it not? Too bad you let your brothers kill him. He could have easily assisted you now … in finding your brothers.”
“Zema. My brothers. Now,” Aardgar snapped, impatient. “Where are they?”
“And poor, big, dumb, strong Halvard … well, he was something of a human shield. Big brute, not much in the head, but enough in the muscle to make up for it. Unless he was hit by a strong enough force, then he might as well be an Ancient with no power to speak of. Pity, pity. Mediocrity was both of their ends.”
“You will burn here with the rest if you don’t—”
“But then … there is my Legacy,” she went on, arriving at her point. “My Legacy, which you’ve, until now, clearly exhibited no interest in. And it’s a pity you never bothered with my power because mine is the only one of them that works with one hundred percent accuracy.” She brought a long, bony finger to her ear and gave it a little tug. “I hear things, my dear Fool King. I hear through others’ ears.”
Aardgar had had enough with the games and the manipulation. “Farewell, Zema. Farewell for good. May your end be quick and merciful.” He turned and made his way for the door, the chaos at the stone feet of Cloud Tower growing loud and his footsteps, louder.
“I hear your curses to Evanesce.”
The words stopped him at the door to the Keeping.
“Who is she?” asked Zema. “An ex-lover? A wife from ages ago? I hear you wish to … destroy her heart.”
Aardgar turned to face the withered woman who now stood at the front of her cell, gripping the mirrorstone bars.
“I hear the curses,” she continued. “Just as well as I hear your brothers’ prayers to the Three. I hear each of you every day. And … I hear much more.”
Aardgar stared at her. She had his full attention.
“Yes.” She smirked. “I hear your brothers plotting your demise. I’m afraid that neither of them, in truth, wish to aid you in destroying the Goddesses, Fool King. They intend to strike a deal with them. They want the immortality that you possess. Something to do with the bald one’s imminent and tragic demise. Yes, they both know their own ends, and they believe the Goddesses are the answer to stopping said ends. Their crusade is a selfish one, dear King. They covet you. They are the ones who have plotted what they will do with you after your use has expired. Not me, not Thadold, not stupid, unimaginative Halvard. The plans you were shown are their plans. We were the true ones. We were the ones you ought to have trusted.”
“You may hear everything,” Aardgar said to her, “but you can also speak whatever you wish.”
“They will take Atlas out from under your dead fingers.” Zema’s voice was deep and resonated with urgency. “As soon as they have touched the golden light, they will put you right back into that earth to live the rest of your existence in eternal darkness. I have heard them. Let me loose from here and I will aid you.”
Aardgar scoffed. “They’re my brothers. They toiled and suffered to find me. What have you done but question my integrity and stab me with a sword while I was blind?”
“You’re also no longer blind because of me. And you can speak,” she pointed out. “Much like you are speaking now. If I’d wanted to use you, I’d have had an easier time with a blind mute, don’t you think, fool?”
“Call me a fool one more time …” Aardgar warned.
A boom shook the walls. Aardgar and Zema stared at one another, alarmed. They were no longer King and former Council; they were a scared boy and a scared girl, both seeing a smirking, patient Death behind their eyelids.
“Please,” Zema begged in one short breath, all of her arrogance gone at once. “Let me go. Together we can find safety. I will protect you from your brothers. I can hear if they are coming. I can hear whether they hear us coming. I can protect you … Aardgar.”
It may have been the fear that flooded his system like a demonic substance. It may have been a trickling drop of doubt in his belly that was quickly turning into an ocean. Aardgar will never know the true reason, but he gave in.
He went for the locking mechanism at the end of the hall, pressed a soft, glassy button, and then the door to Zema’s cell swung open.
She didn’t take off running as Aardgar feared she might. The once-regal woman only stepped out, then turned her long, slender neck toward Aardgar. For some reason, that act seemed to earn his trust at once. They got in this mess together, and together they would break free from it.
They went for the stairs, starting on their long trek down the stony throat of Cloud Tower. The sounds of hollering that were outside suddenly burst below them, and the splinters of a door shattering met their ears. “No,” hissed Zema into his ear, clutching Aardgar’s arm with terror. “The rebels are in. If they find us, they’ll end us. We have to flee.”
“There is nowhere to flee.” Aardgar never knew fear this deep. If they tear me apart in an attempt to kill me, I will never know a true peace of death. I will be bits and bones for the rest of time, surely. I must survive this long enough to see the Goddess; only then can I finally be granted death—when my own heart is destroyed.
“The Iron Floor,” Zema announced at once. “It was an invention two turns of Queens ago. It seals the upper floors from the lower ones with one short drop of its weight. Once it is clo
sed, there is no way for the rebels to reach us, not without incredible brute force.”
Aardgar gave it but a second’s consideration. “Drop the Iron Floor.”
The pair of them chased their way back up the stairs with shouts and war cries nipping at their heels. Zema led the way into a chamber halfway to the King’s Keeping where large mechanical wheels and big gears lined the walls like some odd multidimensional clock.
“Quick, turn that wheel upon the wall as I turn this one over here,” Zema called out, not explaining a thing, yet shouting orders like bolts of lightning from a stormy sky.
Aardgar didn’t hesitate. He did as he was told, and as the great chrome wheel he held turned on its thick axis, a groan rang through the halls. Soon, the wheel began to turn itself without Aardgar even trying. He glanced over at Zema who had let go of her own wheel, which spun as whatever unseen thing beneath them slowly moved itself into place.
Then the wheels stopped short and the whole room shook with a deep sound that sent a crack of metallic howling through the air. After a few seconds, the noise settled, and the shouts and cries of rebellion was quieted to nearly nothing.
After twenty quick steps down the stairs, the pair of them looked upon an enormous iron plate that now prevented passage to the lower floors.
“It’s done,” stated Zema simply, lifting her anxious gaze to Aardgar. “And now we wait.”
“A siege,” muttered Aardgar. “I’ve … never endured a siege. For how long will the Iron Floor last?”
“Long enough,” she answered.
It was strange for Aardgar to think that just a thick iron plate on the floor now separated them from certain death by whatever a crazed mob of angry slumborn was capable of.
“My brothers may have left using Baal’s time-walking. If that is the case, they may return.”
“They may.” She let out a resonant sigh. “We must have a plan in place. And quickly.”
“We are short on options.”
“So what do you suggest? That we sit it out and … wait for salvation from your brothers?”