by David Risen
Rider scowled at her.
“What about Merissa? What about the former Grand Arch Sorceress who was placed here because of an unjust coup?”
She bunched her lips. “We protect mankind. We’re not perfect, and neither are you. The last three Grand Arch Sorceresses believed through revelation that it is our mandate to protect humanity from Apocalyptic events.”
Rider smirked. “Revelation from who? Because I can tell you right now, sister, that revelation didn’t come from God.”
She licked her lips. “I am not leading you to the matron out of contrition. I’m taking you there, because you’ve already cleared all of the trials which means that I do not have the power to stop you.”
Rider nodded and touched the scabbard on his belt.
“With this thing, I can tear a hole in the vale and throw you into hell body and all.”
She shook her head. “Fully-extended that is the least of your abilities. Should you desire to end me, you could destroy my soul with but a word.”
Rider’s eyes softened, and he pointed his eyes down at the concrete beneath his feet blackened with years of dust.
“I wouldn’t. The fact that you exist means that there’s a reason for you.”
A look of surprise filled her face. “This is not the Father of Wrath and Fury described in the tomes.”
Rider’s eyes narrow. “What I’m doing needs to happen.”
“What about the billions of people who will come to a sudden, screaming end?”
Rider gave her a sad look. “I’m not here to end the world. I’m here to release people who don’t deserve to be here and put an end to your little club.”
“And the only way to release the matron and yourself is to break the seals binding all the prisoners in the city here. Such an act will begin the apocalypse.”
Rider shakes his head. “The right thing will happen.”
She shook her head. “You can’t know that.”
Rider leaned toward her and smirked. “Then I guess you’re just going to have to trust me.”
She gave him a cynical look. “I don’t trust the malevolent.”
Rider glared. “I’m not. To one who is evil righteousness is evil.”
Merissa glares at the attacking giant. Her eyes burn. Auras of red light surround her hands. She thrusts her hands straight out before her pointing the glowing orbs at the giant eye of the Muse.
A beam of red light springs from her hands and spears into the eye of the muse.
Her Aura flares and turns into flames searing the skin of the muse’s hand.
She squeals in pain, dropping Merissa and clapping her hands over her ruined eye.
Merissa hits the ground running and shoots past the man calling himself Homeros.
Behind her, the Muse roars with hatred and fury.
Merissa stumbles over a large rock on the dark beach and plows, face first into the stony shore.
She rolls over on her back and casts fearful eyes behind her.
The muse, who has recovered somewhat from her injuries, glares back at her now with her one good eye. Blood dribbles down the right side of her face from the hole where her left eye had been.
Merissa scans hysterically about.
Her eyes land on an opening carved into the 20 foot, vertical embankment no more than two feet wide.
Merissa stumbles to her feet, turns, and charges toward the opening.
As soon as she takes off, she hears the thunderous footfalls of the muse behind her.
She reaches the opening and ducks down the narrowing corridor.
She feels the fingertips of the muse brush her back as she wiggles inside. Three steps into the passage, the opening narrows to no more than a foot wide.
She turns with her back to the stone wall and strafes along the rough rock – the hot stones beneath her feet tearing at her bare soles.
The popping of pebbles falling behind her causes her to look back the way she came.
She comes face to face with the tip of the Muse’s index finger and gasps.
Swiftly, she points her head back the other way and fast-strafes her way forward.
In a few moments, she looks back again to find that the Muse’s hand has disappeared, but she hears the faint breaths and toiling of a person traversing the narrow causeway behind her.
She turns her head right down the passage. It’s so dark that she sees nothing three feet before her.
She shoves herself along testing her footing quickly, and then, suddenly she springs out of the other end of the embankment.
Two torches ensconced on wooden staffs flare as soon as she bursts out of the narrow passage revealing a deep and black moat surrounding an island lit by torchlight. In the center of this island rises a building of many pillars made of lava rock built like the famous Parthenon in Greece.
A drawbridge of volcanic glass at least a hundred feet long leads across the moat to the giant structure.
Merissa charges across the drawbridge, her bare feet smacking on the smooth volcanic glass.
She gasps for breath and begins to slow, until she hears the smacking of more feet behind her.
Exhausted and out of breath, she dives across the drawbridge to the other side, and then she rolls over on her stomach and casts fearful eyes backwards in time to see the Muse charging after her – halfway across the bridge.
Frantically, she glances about looking for anything to help her.
Her eyes land on a wheel as tall as her body with multiple handles in its wooden surface like the wheel of a ship.
She climbs to her feet and stumbles over to the wheel, and spins it left.
The drawbridge retracts. The volcanic glass beneath the Muse’s feet slips out from under her and she plunges straight down into the black waters.
She coughs and thrashes at the water – eventually finding her way back to the opposite bank.
The Muse’s chiton made of gold cloth droops heavily from the water. She turns and scowls with her one good eye back across the moat at Merissa.
“This is far from over, morsel.”
Merissa watches the soaked muse pace the opposite bank for a moment, and then she climbs back toward the Giant Parthenon made of volcanic rock.
Dorothy led Rider between two shelves containing vaults each made of different metals and in different states of disrepair.
He gasped when he saw it.
She stopped before it and extended her hand.
The coin-shaped vault stood at an angle fastened to a metal, pivoting stand. It looked as though it must weigh over a ton.
Unlike the others Rider saw in the warehouse, this one was made of gold and silver. At the top of the vault, an attachment that was roughly the shape of an old tabletop regulator clock made entirely of silver and platinum. A large, glowing crystal the size of Rider’s head was ensconced in the tines of a golden bezel where the clock face would have been on a regulator. The jewel glowed with a spectral, red fire.
The makers of the vault – presumably the sisters of divinity – engraved numerous runes of protection over the golden surface of the vault in ancient written characters.
Rider turned his head to Dorothy who looked on with an uncomfortable expression.
“Why?”
Dorothy cleared her throat. “The Grand Arch Sorceress herself ordered her capture. The rest of us do not have the luxury of asking why.”
Rider gave Dorothy a look of disgust and shook his head.
“How do you open it?”
She gave him a helpless look and shrugged like a kid who forgot his lunch money.
“They welded it shut. You would have to cut it open with a very powerful cutting torch.”
Rider huffed. “Is there one here?”
She shook her head.
“Of course.”
Rider finds the glowing jewel at the top of the vault.
“And what’s that for?”
She sighed and looked away from him. “That’s called a soul stone. It’s wh
at we use to collect her power.”
Rider frowned at it, and the abysmal spike snaked around his arm.
He sneered at her, and then he swung the abysmal spike at the jewel like a slugger. The jewel razed to shards, and the force within threw both Rider and Dorothy off their feet.
Rider slammed hard into the concrete floor knocking the breath out of his lungs.
He gasped making a sound not unlike someone dying from emphysema.
Once he caught his breath he rose from the dusty concrete and looked about to find Dorothy climbing to her feet and dusting herself off.
“Are you crazy?” she said. “If Sister Teresa Joan hadn’t just harvested that, you would’ve blown the entire building up and leveled most of the city.”
Rider frowned. “Not interested in your problems.”
He stood and stepped over to the vault, and then he rotated it so that it lay horizontally before him like a table top, and then he narrowed his eyes at Dorothy.
“Might want to brace yourself.”
She opened her mouth to ask why, but before she could utter a sound, Rider sank the tip of the abysmal spike into the weld bead at the centerline of the vault.
Merissa gasps and hides in the shadows behind one of the gargantuan pillars made of lava rock – easily twice as wide as her body.
The giant Parthenon appears to be a temple from the outside, but now that she sees the inside....
A bonfire blazing least ten feet high cracks and pops in the center of the structure. Beyond, three great and thick chains made of platinum descend from the ceiling shackling a dirty woman by the neck and the wrists with golden manacles.
Long, hair that looks like strands of white gold down to her thighs wavy as if crimped.
A dirt-stained cloth wraps around her eyes and ties in the back of her head.
Her clothing – mere sheets wrapped around her body – is tattered and shredded as if someone whipped her with her robes still in place.
At the sound of Merissa’s gasp, the woman’s head snaps up.
“Who goes?” she says in a strange language that, once again, Merissa understands though she’s never heard it.
Merissa holds her breath. She points fearful eyes at the woman bound in the center of the temple.
A grimace of desperation contorts the face of the woman – the image is further distorted by the flames of the bonfire.
“I know you’re there. I smell you. You are not of this world for you are still alive. What sort of soul are you?”
Merissa doesn’t dare move. She doesn’t have the strength to fight another dangerous spirit just now. In fact, it’s taking every ounce of strength she has left to stay awake.
The woman’s face contorts in a sudden look of anguish.
“Please help me,” she said.
Her plea is so honest that Merissa doubts that she’s in danger.
She steps around the pillar.
“Who are you?”
The woman shakes her trembling head.
“No time for that. Should my punisher return....”
Merissa frowns. “Make time.”
“My name is Persephone. Now, please release me. You can scarcely imagine what torments await.”
Merissa’s eyes narrow to slits. “There are no innocent people here.”
Persephone shakes her head ardently. “The Gods have unjustly imprisoned many here. I am a daughter of mighty Zeus. I have seen the treachery of the Gods.”
Merissa shakes her head slowly. “I read the Odyssey in high school. I learned about the Gods and Goddesses of Mount Olympus in Elementary School, but all of that was presented to us like fiction.”
Persephone laughs bitterly. “It is no fiction. The only falsehood is in the way my father and his brothers and sisters chose to portray themselves to men.”
Merissa frowns. “If you’re such a good girl, why are you bound in chains?”
Persephone’s whole body sighs. “We have no time for that. My – punisher – will arrive in moments.”
Merissa backs toward the pillar where she had hidden before.
“No deal.”
“Please! The beast that comes to me is called Asterion. He is an abomination created by the jealousy of my uncle Poseidon – a hideous man-eater who will devour you, too.”
“No,” Merissa repeats.”
“As punishment for my affair with the father of wrath and fury, and conspiring against my father and his cohorts, my father banished me here inside the belly of his brother Hades, my former husband, to be devoured daily by Asterion.”
Merissa’s eyes narrow with interest. “Father Fury?”
She nods vehemently. “That was his spiritual name. When I knew him, most men called him Medraut, but he told me that his real name was Weiland of Venta.”
“How did you conspire against your family?”
The corners of Persephone’s mouth turn down as she bunches her lips and swallows hard. “The real God – the only real God – asked me to assist Weiland in tracking down and banishing my family from earth. I’m guessing that since you believed that the existence of my family was fiction that he was successful?”
Merissa looks down at her pale, nude body. Her dirty bare feet practically glow against the smooth, lava glass tiles on the floor.
“Mostly,” she replies.
A defiant smile curves Persephone’s lips. “What of Hades?”
Merissa looks back up at Persephone. “Aphrodite and Hades are the only two that escaped, but they were captured by witches and imprisoned.”
“Witches?”
Merissa shakes her head. “You’ve said nothing that makes me think that I can trust you.”
“Please release me! I’m one of few souls who has escaped Hades. I can show you the way out!”
Merissa gives her a look of disbelief. “And why would you do that?”
An inhuman roar reverberates through the cavernous mock Parthenon.
Persephone’s skin turns visibly white.
“It’s too late. You must hide yourself.”
Merissa retreats behind the pillar where she hid before.
A clop like a hoof beat rapports through the cavernous space followed by the smack of a bare foot and then again.
In a moment, the beast that Persephone spoke of appears from the shadows.
The abomination stands at least seven feet tall, and a look of terrible deformity mangles its appearance.
The right leg of the beast looks like the back leg of a bull. With course and short hair covering it in patches and disappearing in places revealing the poor creature’s bare, gray skin.
The leg bends backwards in the spot where a knee would be, but then it bends forward halfway down the shin at a second knee joint. A cloven hoof pounds the lava glass flooring where a foot should be.
The left leg of the beast looks somewhat human except for the course patches of short golden hair that sometimes give way to bare, gray skin.
The beast’s pubic area is covered with a cloth wrapped around his genitals and buttocks like a diaper.
The right arm of the beast is much too skinny and ends in with a deformed hand that has only two fingers and a thumb. The beast’s left arm is the arm of a body builder, and in the normal hand he holds an axe so large that no normal man could wield it.
The head of the creature is hideous. His mouth and nose jut forward from his face like a snout with two openings in a hairless pink area just above its gaping mouth of jagged rotten teeth that act as nostrils. His left eye is circular with no iris and black as night. His right eye is mostly normal accept for the silver iris. And a long set of horns like that of a prize steer jut from the top of its head.
It walks to the center of the temple and turns slowly to face the woman on the other side of the eternal bonfire.
“Good morrow, morsel,” Asterion says. His voice is shrill and mewling.
Persephone bursts out into tears.
“Please, just leave me be.”
Th
e great beast looks down at the lava glass, and then back up and approaches her with his one cloven hoof clopping and his bare foot smacking.
Asterion’s balance looks tenuous with his deformities. Merissa doubts that she would have trouble escaping him should she have to run.
The abomination reaches her, props his great axe against one of the giant lava rock pillars, and then reaches forward and caresses her left cheek with the two fingers and thumb on his deformed hand.
“You’re so fair l—like my mother. Hideous as I am, she loved me and nurtured me. When I was young, she fed me her own blood. Then she sustained me by bringing me children to devour, and later, she gave her own body to me.”
Asterion stops caressing her face and shudders visibly with the memory.
Then his hands find the bronze broaches fastening her rotten robes to her body. The rags fall to the dark, glossy floor.
Merissa’s eyes bulge, and her heart pounds as the ire inside her ignites. She feels the sensation of electrical current surging through her arms.
The abomination’s six-inch flat tongue slips through his jagged teeth and he laps her right breast leaving a film of slimy saliva from the bottom of her ribcage to her collar bone. His entire body shakes with arousal.
Something fundamental shifts inside Merissa. She feels more powerful than she’s felt in ages. Her eyes burn white-hot in their sockets, and she sees the air itself and colors that she’s never seen before.
She springs from her hiding spot behind the pillar before she even realizes what she’s doing.
“Hey, Ugly?” she says, but her voice is different. It has the tone of a little girl and an old woman simultaneously.
The beast turns slowly and gapes at her with his one good eye. His flat, pink tongue slips through his rotten teeth and swipes across his upper lips and muzzle.
“You smell...fresh,” he says.
The red light of the abysmal spike glowed on Rider’s sweaty forehead. He traced the welded seam around the sides of the coin-shaped vault slowly and laboriously – his arms shaking with exertion.
The tip of the blade melted the metal leaving a jagged chasm between the two plates.
Rider traced it all the way around the giant coin, cutting through the welded line and the hinges on the left side that once allowed the witches to open the vault.