Malevolent

by David Risen

  Rider swung the abysmal spike after Aphrodite’s legs defensively.

  She stumbled backwards.

  Rider scrambled to his feet and sliced after her.

  She threw up her shield.

  Lightning surrounded him as his blade connected to the shield blowing Father Fury and Aphrodite backwards.

  After a moment’s pause, Rider sat up and peered in the direction that Aphrodite sailed to find her lying unconscious on the broken pavement with her head pointed back toward town square.

  He planted his blade in the soil using it as a staff to push himself up from the earth.

  He looked down at his chest. Smoke rose from his tattered, leather coat and soiled purple shirt.

  He cast his eyes back in the direction of his opponent to find that the blast had scorched the hair from the left side of her head and cracked the shield of Athena down the center.

  Rider scowled at her.

  “You ain’t got shit,” he growled.

  He traipsed across the road after her – still shaken by the two explosions.

  As he reached her, he cocked the Abysmal Spike over his head like a dagger, and thrust it down at the center of her chest.

  But just as he did so, her eyes popped open.

  She swung the sword of Athena after his stomach slicing through his purple shirt and cutting a swath in the skin of his abdomen.

  Rider stumbled backwards clutching his wound.

  Athena climbed to her feet and grinned – the burns healing on her face as she rose, and new blond hair sprouting and covering the left side of her head.

  “The difference between Love, Wisdom, and Fury is that wisdom anticipates your moves and tries to out-maneuver you. Love lets you think that you won and then zeros in for the kill. Fury hurls thoughtlessly after the kill without any strategy, fueled by savage rage. Therefore, you’ve already lost.”

  Merissa is so exhausted she can barely stand.

  The red auras surrounding her hands flicker and then disappear. Her eyes return to their normal shade of green.

  She turns slowly away from the ruined and burning gully, as ashes from the smoldering trees fall from the sky like rain. She staggers like a drunk back toward the ruins of the church feeling as though she might pass out from exhaustion.

  As she reaches the gate, she turns and looks back at the hill.

  The entire face of the chasm is now comprised of black rock. Black smoke billows up from the space the giant boulder smashed into, and periodically flickers of blue and red flames appear from behind the rock.

  Her hand finds the metal hasp on the wooden picket gate. She releases it, and just as she is about to return to the safety of the holy ground, the earth below her trembles.

  She frowns.

  “Aftershocks?”

  But just as she finishes uttering the word, the ground beneath her explodes.

  She sails up and then backwards – landing hard on her left shoulder. Her left collarbone snaps like dry twigs.

  She gasps trying to suck air back in her lungs.

  Something big and heavy lands on top of her and flips her over on her back.

  The menacing, scorched mien of the former god of hell glowers down upon her.

  His hard hands curl around her small, pale neck.

  She kicks and slaps at him, but the blows have little effect on the towering would-be God who appears to be at least twice as large as he was before she attacked him.

  “I will swallow you whole just like my first father, Cronos swallowed me and my brothers and sisters, and you shall become a part of my body for all eternity, but first, I’m going to violate you in ways you’ve never imagined.”

  Merissa can’t focus through the insurmountable pain in her left shoulder. Panic spreads like burning poison in her chest.

  “And then I’ll find that minstrel of yours,” he laughs. “Oh, the torments he will face before I make him my meat!”

  Merissa looks about frantically for something that she might use to protect herself. Her eyes land on the Platinum Warhammer of Hades that lies by his left side. The weapon still glows white hot from the intensity of the fire that accosted the God of the Underworld, and the bed of dry leaves beneath it burn like a camp fire.

  Merissa grinds her teeth and thrusts her hand into the fire.

  The skin of her right-hand bubbles and withers instantly in the flames.

  She screams a gagging scream as white-hot pain shoots through her arm.

  Hades grins broadly with satisfaction – mistaking the sound to be an expression of terror.

  Merissa swings the enchanted Warhammer of Hades after his head.

  As it connects with Hades’ left temple a blast of lightning and fire explodes from the blunt surface of the weapon throwing the God of Hell hundreds of feet backwards where he slams into the trunk of a tree, and falls limp.

  Merissa skitters to her feet, tossing the scorching weapon away.

  The pain she suffers is so terrific that she’s not even completely self-aware.

  As she stumbles back for the gate, she casts a fearful glance at Hades.

  The ferocious God’s eyes pop open. The left side of his head at his temple has a deep, bloody cave-in.

  Hades glares at her and rises to his new height. Now he stands at least twenty feet tall with a shoulder span the length of an economy car.

  The caved side of his head bubbles and then adjusts back to form. His red beard turns black and his eyes blaze red. He pats the top of his head, and a golden helmet adorned at the top by an ornate sparrow appears.

  He growls and reaches after her just as she crosses the gate. His fingertips catch the hem of the choir gown she wears and rips it free from her body.

  She plants her face into the dirt pathway before her.

  The pain from her broken shoulder and collar bone stabs through her, and she screams.

  She clambers back to her feet through the pain and staggers toward the open door of the church.

  Hades tosses her ruined and rotten choir gown aside and reaches for her again with his giant hands that are now almost a third the size of her body.

  But as his hand crosses the gate, his skin bursts into flames. The acrid odor of burning flesh fills the air. Gray smoke steams from his hand.

  He retracts his hand squealing, and his hand heals instantly.

  Merissa trips over the step leading into the church and falls forward then she curls into a fetal position inside shivering from shock and pain.

  She looks back out through the open doorway in time to see the giant step before the fence and retrieve his Warhammer. As he touches it, the weapon grows to scale.

  Aphrodite peered back at the failing Father Fury pensively. The expression on her face was almost one of remorse.

  Rider withdrew his hand from his belly wound and gaped, dumb stricken, at the dark blood on his hand.

  “Why do you fight me so passionately?” she wondered aloud.

  Something mischievous flickered behind her eyes, and her mouth curved in the sexiest Mona Lisa smile Rider had ever seen.

  She tossed the sword and the shield of Athena away and they clanged like metal garbage against the broken road.

  She stretched out her arms as if she were Christ on the cross, and her clothing disappeared. Before Rider stood the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen nude save for an ornate belt made of gold with a buckle that drooped just above her vulva roughly the size and shape of a honey bun fashioned to look like a knot.

  “Warriors die not on the blade of a sword but by the thorn prick of a rose.”

  Her voice lulled Rider into a hypnotic state. The glowing, spiritual abysmal spike rescinded, and his eyes settled back on their normal hazel shade.

  She stepped toward him and caressed his bristly cheek with a hand as soft as a newborn.

  “I can see inside you,” she all but whispered. “All that hurt. But I won’t scorn you.”

  Rider’s eyes fixed on her eyebrows. They were perfect soft arches
with each hair pointing precisely in the right direction for the contours of her head. They were obviously natural – even the most masterful cosmetologist couldn’t duplicate this level of perfection.

  And the architecture of her face was an undisputed masterpiece. Each of her features were the most becoming features of the world’s most radiant women.

  High symmetrical cheekbones.

  Soft but pointed jaw.

  Just the right amount of dimple.

  The soft, gentle curvature of her long but narrow neck into her shoulder muscles.

  Rider’s breathing slowed.

  The sword fell from his hand and clattered on the broken pavement.

  “Why?” he said, and he lost the rest of the question before he could finish it.

  She pressed her perfect index finger over his lips.

  “You’re a warrior. Oceans of hatred and indignity burn a hole through your spirit, but I can take all of that from you. And I’ll be your lover until the heavens whither.”

  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” Rider thought aloud.

  Aphrodite offered him a shy smile – looking down at the broken pavement as her mouth curved. She turned her back to him and took two steps before turning and giving him the most compelling bedroom eyes he’d ever seen.

  “I’m naked, why aren’t you?”

  Rider squinted at her. For an instant, an alarm bell rang in his chest, but then, his eyes found the golden loops of her ancient girdle or belt again, and the tension evaporated from his shoulders.

  She squared herself before him.

  His eyes gravitated to her perfectly symmetrical, apple-size breasts with their generous half-dollar sized areolas and perky nipples.

  “Your clothes are tattered and dirty. Take them off. I want to see you.”

  Rider stripped off his leather coat, and unbuttoned his shirt – wincing as the fabric peeled away from his blood-soaked lower abdomen, and as he did so, the hungry eyes of the goddess of love and beauty traced the lines of his form.

  And Rider was more aroused than he can ever recall having been before – even in puberty.

  He unfastened and removed his ripped and dirty jeans and boxers and tossed them to the dirt embankment on the side of the road, and then he stood before the Goddess of Love as naked as the day he was born.

  She smiled again, and stepped gently toward him. She pressed her hands against his bare chest and then traced the line of the scar on his left shoulder with her index finger.

  Her left hand found its way to the back of his head, she gently pulled his head toward hers and kissed him slowly and passionately, sucking on his lower lip as she drew away from him.

  And then she considered his eyes, and Rider found himself lost in the sea of purple blue that were her irises.

  She gracefully found her way to her knees looking up at him with a kind of admiration and respect and submission that Rider didn’t understand. She touched the gash in his stomach, and it healed over painlessly.

  And then she took him into her mouth.

  The God of Hell paces the black char and orange flames before the wooden picket fence in front of the dilapidated church like a caged lion. The entire area is on fire now, and ashes drift like molted feathers from the sky.

  “You can’t stay in there forever,” he growls. “I can smell your broken bones and burned hand. I’d wager that your pain is exquisite.”

  Merissa, still in a state of shock, trembles on the rotten wooden floor of the old sanctuary.

  Hades squares himself before the gates and turns his enormous palms up.

  “Why would you choose this level of suffering over surrender? Even the worst torments of the underworld pale in comparison to the agony you bear.”

  “Leave me the fuck alone,” Merissa snaps.

  Hades wags his enormous head. Then he looks down at his feet.

  “You’re right, you know. You are much older and much more powerful than I. A few hundred rounds of creation before, I was a trembling mortal, and you were still the Mother of Chaos. I would not have the ability to defeat you at all were it not for your grievous disadvantage. The massive and ever-replenishing spring of raw power inside you is siphoned off even as we speak by the sisters of divinity.”

  Merissa closes her eyes and concentrates hard trying to will her flesh and bones to heal.

  “If that were not the case,” Hades continues, “Your foe would be beyond any save the Great Creator himself. Not even the eldest and most virtuous of the archangels would hold up for a fraction of a moment against your ire. And my virtue....”

  Hades laughs.

  “Well, suffice it to say that it is not what it once was.”

  Merissa bunches her lips and curls her toes. The pain coursing through her body is unlike any other.

  “I understand your fear,” Hades says. “My father, Kronos. He ate all my brothers and sisters at birth, and I was no exception. I still wake up screaming from the nightmares. And do you know why he did it?”

  Merissa reaches deep inside herself now – searching for the well of power Hades spoke of – for the essence of the Mother of Chaos. The pain in her right hand and her shoulder tapers.

  “Because of an argument with our common Heavenly Father. Kronos and God disagreed about the nature and shape of mortality, and when it became apparent that Kronos would not bend to the will of the almighty Great Spirit, God renamed him and tossed him into mortality with a curse – saying that Kronos or Father Time’s own children would rise and enslave him.

  “My father was so powerful that he managed to thwart an entire age of mortality—the age prior to this one, in fact. The stink of it was so great that God himself turned his back on his children, and what followed for the younger brothers and sisters was a golden age in which there was no sorrow, for everyone acted fairly.”

  Merissa senses that she’s close to her own spring of power, but trying to find it inside herself is like bumping around with no light in a pitch-black room.

  He laughs nervously. “My mother. Her name was Rhea. She loved my father more than any mated soul has ever loved its other half. So much did she love him that she offered all their children to him, so that he could eat them and thwart the curse of God almighty. But then, Zeus came along.

  “Mother was so horrified and tortured by the continuous demise of her children that she sought the counsel of God himself from his heavenly escape. And God took my brother Zeus under his wing. What followed was a battle that destroyed the mortal realm my father hijacked, and when the dust settled, all of us were free and God Almighty created a new mortal realm to be presided over by my brothers and sisters led by my younger brother Zeus.”

  Merissa recalls the moment her marriage ended.

  Rhett sits in a chair across from her bed looking dejected. He’s not the heart throb now that he was when they met in 2003. His strawberry blond hair started falling out a year before, so he shaved it.

  Now he wears a wig made from his own hair wherever he goes. He’s about 15 pounds heavier, and he’s developed dark circles under his eyes.

  His look of frailty and failing beauty is exacerbated by pallor from lack of sleep, exhaustion from the road, and grief.

  “There’s a few things you don’t know about me,” Merissa says in a small, defeated voice.

  Rhett laughs assertively and as he does so, the corners of his mouth curve in a cruel smile while his eyes bulge with fear and regret.

  “There’s a newsflash,” he growls. He leans forward in the chair propping his elbows on his knees. His sharp, blue eyes cut her with accusation.

  “So tell me,” he says his mouth contorting into a sour expression. “Was that baby even mine?”

  Each word is like a throwing knife that sails through the air and sinks into her chest. Merissa wants to scream in sorrow.

  She swallows hard and looks down at her hands – the black fingernail polish flaking off.

  “Are we okay?” she asks, and instantly re
grets the weak and pleading sound of her own voice.

  Rhett reclines hard against the backrest of the chair. He sighs hard and shakes his head, and then pushes his Bridgeton Ford cap back taking his wig with it. His eyes glisten.

  “Rhett?” she says.

  He shakes his head again and stands and turns his back to her, but then he changes his mind and halfway turns back to face her looking up at the drop ceiling of the hospital room.

  “You knew about my ex-wife, Janie and how she led me to believe that Timmy was my son for almost ten years. You knew how bad that hurt me, and I didn’t even open up to her as much as I opened up to you.”

  He turns his palms up, shakes his head and wipes the tears collecting at his bottom eyelids with the white, thermal sleeves of the shirt he wore at his concerts that year.

  “I don’t even know what to do with the cheating and the drug abuse.”

  He looks at her. The look of fear and grief evaporates from his face replaced by an expression of fury.

  “I quit the band after kicking the shit out of Alex.”

  He shakes his head. Grief returns to his face and he turns his head toward the white wall on his left.

  “And I have absolutely no idea why I came back here.”

  He shakes his head again and turns for the door without offering her even a second to respond.

  And all of it is her fault.

  “The Great Spirit was so pleased with our victory over our father that he put us in charge of the new mortality, but our younger brother, Lucifer was not happy. He enjoyed the golden age in the previous mortality that Kronos created....”

  At last, Merissa found it.

  The beast rose.

  Mother Chaos climbed to her feet, and started after the God of Hell.

  Rider tilted his head up to the gray overcast dome of lost souls that blocked the view of the sky inside Skitts Mountain, Tennessee. He closed his eyes and as the familiar aching and ebbing sensations of oral sex coursed through his body, his eyes rolled back in his head.

  His knees trembled.

  The familiar foreboding sensation that indicated that he was about to blow it ebbs in his abdomen.