Death's Mantle 3

by Harmon Cooper

  He took another swig from the large container, which hadn’t been enchanted. Lucian topped it off again with the enchanted potion bottle, more liquid coming out of it even though it was only partially full.

  Lucian wanted to keep the bottle that Yoshimi had given him.

  There was nothing that remarkable about the old whiskey bottle aside from the glass it had been tempered from, which was a smoky color.

  Lucian wanted to keep it, however, a reminder of his friend.

  After transferring the liquid into his new bottle, Lucian took what Yoshimi had given him into his workshop.

  With a wave of his hand, a metal shelf formed; Lucian placed the bottle on the middle shelf.

  He stood in front of it for a moment, not able to hide the bitter expression that came across his face, which came coupled with an overwhelming sense of grief.

  He had really liked her.

  He enjoyed going to Japan to see her, the meals they’d had, Lucian remembering how she had been there from the start, helping him tackle the South Wind, always hyper-aware of her limitations.

  Which was what Lucian had expected of her, and also why he was still reeling from what had just happened, that she hadn’t wanted to turn away.

  That she preferred to die.

  It was unlike Yoshimi, and yet again Lucian took this to mean that he could never really know a person, that people, living and dead, were always more complicated than they appeared to be.

  He summoned her geisha comb and set it on the shelf as well.

  Lucian had the notion of going out, back to his brother’s home, now that he could replenish his power, but he also thought it was smarter to lay low for at least a night, in case Azazyel was still floating around.

  A short smile came across his face as he realized he didn’t have to sleep any longer, not with these potions.

  But he probably still would.

  The human in him, what little was left, still desired rest.

  He turned to the big white bed in his workshop, wishing that he could speak to Danira at that moment, that she would return, forgive him.

  His robes disappeared and he crawled up onto the bed, Lucian looking out at the sky and dimming it, so that it was now night.

  Lucian reached for his game controller and was just about to start Zero Enigma when he paused, not feeling like playing for once.

  He didn’t feel like watching TV either.

  He sat there for a moment, which quickly stretched into a spell of twenty minutes, Lucian just staring off, feeling like he had all the time in the world yet like there was a timer floating before him, each minute heavier than the last.

  He had felt this type of anxiety before, back when he was alive, toward the end.

  Lucian was supposed to be dead, but he had continued living, and there had been a handful of nights that he’d woken up and couldn’t fall back asleep, wondering how much longer he had left, and what he would be able to accomplish in that time.

  A few of those nights spawned beautiful moments of self-reflection, nights in which Lucian was able to see all the parts of his life, lined up as if they were on a carousel, the joy, the pain, the redundancy, and what it was like when something new happened to throw life off its trajectory, like when he was diagnosed.

  Hugin zipped into Lucian’s workshop, startling him.

  “I spoke to your predecessor,” said his spherical creation as Munin collided with it, the second crow going up and over and dropping down to the ground, where it found Ezra.

  “And?”

  “He says that he’ll come to meet you tomorrow, or you can come to him whenever you’re free.”

  “Thank you. Now, talk to me,” Lucian said suddenly, looking to his crow as if it were a person. “I need someone to talk to.”

  “What would you like me to talk about?”

  “Change your voice to Danira’s,” said Lucian.

  “Is this better?” his crow asked in the angel’s firm, but sweet voice.

  Lucian bit his lip as he shook his head.

  “It doesn’t sound like her?”

  “No, it sounds exactly like her. Just…” He took a deep breath in. “It’s hard for me to explain.”

  “You find it odd that I am able to use this voice, is that it?”

  “I suppose. I know what you’re capable of by now, I created you, somehow. I don’t really know how you or the other things I have exist. Sorry for rambling…”

  “Would you like me to change my voice?”

  “No, I’d like you to tell me that you love me, that you are going to come back and we’re going to make up and have the first half-angel half-Death baby,” Lucian said jokingly.

  “I love you, and soon, I’m going to come back and we’re going to have the first baby that spans both Progenies,” Hugin said in Danira’s voice.

  “Spans both Progenies, huh?”

  “I thought that was how she would say it.”

  “Probably. I haven’t even thought about children. That can’t actually be possible.”

  “Why would it not be possible? You can create anything. You could even create her, I mean, me.”

  Lucian paused for a moment, considering what Hugin had said.

  “No,” Lucian finally told him. “I’m not going to do that. It’s not really…”

  Could he create something that was living? Lucian looked to the ground to see Ezra still playing with Munin.

  Of course he could.

  The only reason he hadn’t done it already was because Lucian was a child of the late twentieth century and grew up with mechas and video games, his worldview shaped by various sources.

  “You can create anything, Lucian. I believe in you.”

  “Change your voice,” Lucian told Hugin.

  “Is this better?” asked his crow, back to its androgynous voice.

  “Yes, it’s better.”

  “You have had me use other voices before as well. Your predecessor, Katy…”

  “Katy,” said Lucian. “I wonder how she’s doing.”

  “We could check.”

  Lucian considered this for a moment. “No, I told myself I’d stay here for the night. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”

  “Will you try to save Connor tomorrow?”

  “I would like to.”

  “Why is there some hesitation in your voice?”

  Lucian yawned. “My life grows more unpredictable by the day. I can’t plan for things any longer, if that makes sense. So while I would like to do that tomorrow, I don’t know what else will happen. It could be a normal day, or it could be one that, like today, ends up fucking me up in a way I could have never predicted. I also don’t know if I’m strong enough yet. I should be, but… I have a feeling I’m not. Anyway…”

  Lucian never finished that sentence; instead, he got more comfortable and shut his eyes, ready for the day to be over.

  To start anew, whatever that meant.

  Chapter Twenty: Unlimited

  Her car pulled up to the curb, and as it did Lucian slipped the surgical mask over his face. He waved as she approached, Katy in a pair of jeans and a thick turtleneck sweater, Lucian wearing the gloves that she’d told him he had to wear when they met.

  Katy was in a surgical mask and gloves too, a smile stretching the corners of her mask as he got in the vehicle.

  “Thanks,” he told her.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” she reminded him, which was something that she always did.

  “No one knows I’m out; I am sick of being cooped up in my place.”

  It was nighttime, a cold breeze rolling off the waters near Beverly and making its way inland, twisting through the neighborhoods that sat just behind the shorelines.

  The streets were empty, and as he came to realize that he was simply an observer in all this, he took the perspective of a camera mounted on the dashboard, able to see both of their masked faces, Lucian concluding that this was a dream.

  And he let it play out.
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  Katy pulled back onto the nearly empty street, talking to Lucian about her dad, his latest winnings and epic losses that he promised he’d recover from, then asking him what he was going through.

  “This,” Lucian told her, showing her his gloved hands and pointing at his mask. “Not great, right?”

  “We aren’t even supposed to be doing this,” she reminded him, her brow furrowing. “We’re supposed to stay at home.”

  “You play it too safe,” he told her.

  From his true perspective on the dashboard, Lucian could see that his human form had lost a lot of weight, that he had dark bags under his eyes, that something was off about the color of his skin.

  He was the complete opposite of how Katy looked with her curly brown hair, the light in her eyes, a determined look on her face even if it was partially concealed. She looked healthy, alive, a far cry from the dying man who sat next to her.

  Lucian felt for her at that moment, wishing that they figured out a way in the end to make it work, but also glad they hadn’t. She had come to his funeral, but mourning his death would have been a lot harder had they gotten back together.

  He had no doubt in his mind that Katy would have gotten through it, but it would have been hard and draining, and that was without the concern of her father.

  Lucian never told anyone about the drives they took during the spring of 2020, and he was pretty sure she hadn’t told anyone either.

  They had different reasonings, hers being the field she was going into, and his being a desire to forgo any family pressure or judgment. They took precautions, but the outbreak seemed to always find a way to spit in the face of safety measures.

  There was nothing they could do but wait it out, but it was hard to deny their desire for connection, however limited it may be.

  Lucian continued to watch himself speak to Katy, the two now talking about some friends he knew from high school, how one had never grown up and was still doing the same thing that he had done when he was eighteen.

  “You imagine what he’ll look like in twenty years?” she asked.

  “I’m already starting to see people like that,” said Lucian. “It’s like their bodies keep growing, but their personalities don’t. You know what I’m talking about. Ever seen those people who were teenagers before 9/11, or around that time, still dressing the same way now as they did then? Sure, they have to go to work, but then it’s a variation of their old wardrobes. We can’t really blame them.”

  “I guess you’re right…”

  “We’re expected to establish ourselves as people in our teenage years, and…” Lucian got lost his train of thought, something that the medication did to him from time to time.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Are there any updates from your doctor?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about that stuff,” Lucian told her with a wave of his hand. “No offense; it’s all I ever seem to talk about. I just want some relief. I already spent time in the hospital. And it seems like every day, or at least every couple days, I have to go in and they need to stick needles in my veins, poke and prod me. I’m just glad I’m out. I hated being hooked up to those machines, looking down and seeing plastic cables running into my body. It drains on you; I’m too young for this shit.”

  “It’s fine, I get it.”

  “Sorry, that’s… I shouldn’t think of it that way. About age. People can suffer at any age, young or old.”

  “It’s fine,” she told him softly.

  Lucian was suddenly back in his body, no longer watching the scene play out from a perspective on the dashboard, now uncertain if it had actually happened in real life or not. He saw that they were driving on the long bridge that led into Turners Falls, which would have easily been a two-hour drive from Beverly, not that it mattered.

  Things like distance didn’t matter in a dream, Lucian once again wondering why there was some part of him that kept showing him this bridge.

  What was it about this place that he needed to know?

  Lucian looked left to see Katy was gone, and glancing down again he saw that he was now in the driver seat, his hands gripping the wheel, the voluptuous hood of a white sports car in front of him.

  Lucian revved his engine, the wheels squealing as he took off, a morbid wall of injuresouls sailing in his direction, their faces bandaged, their jaws hanging open, a macabre sight that he had grown desensitized to.

  He drove the white sports car through them and awoke in his bed, back in Old Death’s world.

  As he sat up, he instinctively looked down at his arms, an idea coming to him.

  Before he went for a cup of coffee, his stats flashed before him.

  “Pizza for breakfast?” he asked Hugin, who had just risen from the pillow at the end of the bed.

  “If it brings you happiness, then I would suggest it.”

  “Definitely,” Lucian said as a pizza appeared. He looked from the pie to the cup of coffee, both of which were still floating in the air.

  “But it doesn’t go with this…”

  The pizza disappeared and Lucian was left with his coffee, which he kept in his hand as he made his way out to the lake, once again enjoying the view, the rising sun creating heavy-stroked Gohesque blips of light on the surface of the water.

  Lucian gulped down his cup of coffee, and then tossed it into the air behind him, the cup never hitting the ground.

  He spawned the workbench he often used in front of the lake, the legs and the tabletop growing out of the ground.

  He summoned his bottomless bottle of potion, once again creating another canister to make sure that it truly was bottomless. He used the small potion bottle to fill the canister, the bottle never depleting its source.

  Lucian wondered how he had been able to do this, but the previous day had been quite intense for him, and he was reeling after returning from his battle against Azazyel, Yoshimi’s death fresh on his mind.

  Perhaps that helped some.

  Lucian summoned his bone armor, the rigid protectorate emerging from his skin.

  He got out his smartphone and performed a quick search for the human vein structure.

  Of course, everything led to the heart, which he was more aware of than most.

  Since he technically no longer had a heart, Lucian would be able to put the reservoir anywhere he liked in his body.

  And for that matter, he could put more than one, just in case he lost a limb.

  In the end he put one in the back of his head, in his chest, his hips, and his ankles. He also put small reservoirs on the undersides of his wrists.

  Because it helped him visualize it, Lucian physically formed the reservoir within his bone armor, and from there he used his finger to trace a vein to various places on his body, poking his finger in when he wanted it to make skin contact. He then went back to the reservoir and transferred some of the glass from the bottomless bottle to it, turning it to metal.

  To make sure this worked, he took one of the small metal reservoirs and turned it upside down, watching a steady stream of potion pour out two, then three, then four times the volume of the reservoir.

  It was going to work.

  It took Lucian a little while to get everything made, especially as he wanted to give himself a good number of refill stations.

  But once he was finished, Lucian felt instantly charged.

  Checking his Soul Points, he saw that he hadn’t lost any.

  Through the lack of understanding the mechanics of his role as Death, Lucian had been able to do something that would give him an edge permanently.

  He would never run out of energy now.

  Once he equipped his bone armor, he would essentially be main-veining the potion that refilled his SP, which would theoretically make him indestructible.

  But he had to test it.

  Lucian called upon two of his replicants to come to them, his Grim Mechas landing before him.

  “Shoot me,”
he told the pair, both of them obeying his command.

  Shot after shot, their blasts hit him, Lucian watching his Soul Points lower and raise, lower and raise.

  It was fast too.

  As soon as he took damage, his Soul Points were already on the way up, as if he had a white mage in his group who had been assigned to constantly take care of healing duty.

  Once he was certain that it worked, Lucian told his replicants to stop, summoning his other mechas as well as his crows.

  He gave his crows reservoirs of the liquid as well, which would allow them to come to Lucian’s aid if every part of his body was somehow destroyed. He did the same to his Grim Mechas, storing additional reservoirs in their chests, which took a fair amount of time to get set up correctly.

  Wanting to test it once more, he turned to his nearest replicant and took a step back.

  “Cut my head off,” he told the mecha, Lucian also signaling to his bone armor to peel away from the quadrant that protected his neck.

  His replicant swung its bladed arm at Lucian’s neck, his head leaving his body, the world going sideways.

  As he laid on the ground, he saw that he had taken damage, yet his points were already starting to tick back up.

  His body crouched in front of him and returned Lucian’s head to his body.

  “What have you done?”

  Lucian turned to the direction of his predecessor’s voice to see the man, stepping out of the forest, dusting some twigs off his robes.

  “Have you been watching me from over there?”

  “I decided to take a walk in the woods when I came upon a mad scientist,” Old Death said with a grin. “Ho! That’s what you are, right? And don’t worry about all the things you’ve created to protect you. They know that I mean no harm, so they didn’t alert you to my presence. Now tell me, my boy, what is it that you’ve been up to?”

  “Start from the beginning,” Old Death said, a calming patience to his voice. “I know your little robot already told me what happened, but I want to hear it from you, straight from the horse’s mouth, or should I say, Grim Reaper’s mouth,” said his predecessor, chuckling at his own joke. “I’m sorry, my boy, but I am in a jolly mood today, so don’t take my tone to heart. It is nice to be retired and in the throes of love. Of that I’m sure.”