Death's Mantle 3

by Harmon Cooper

  A television floated down from the ceiling and Lucian called for Danira, who came down the stairs, a curious look on her face. “We can’t just start calling each other’s names out,” she said.

  “I didn’t know if you wanted me to float through the ceiling or…”

  “Take the stairs?”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll be civilized in the house. Anyway, I was planning on playing some games. I thought you might want to join me.”

  “I suppose I could do that,” she said as she sat down on the couch and eventually got more comfortable, laying her head in Lucian’s lap as she swiveled her neck toward the television.

  “You don’t want to play with me?” Lucian asked, looking down at her.

  “I thought you had some game you wanted to show me.”

  “Yeah,” Lucian said as he fired up Zero Enigma.

  He nodded along to the intro music, and then realized that his elbow was a little too close to Danira’s head.

  “That might not be the best place for you,” he told her.

  “Do you move around while you play?”

  “I try not to, but yeah, sometimes it happens.”

  “Okay,” she said as she sat up and flipped the other way, so her feet were now on him.

  “That’s better,” he said, just as the load screen finished up.

  Before anything could happen, he quick traveled to an expansive plain outside the city of Karonyoff.

  “There are lots of monsters here,” he explained as his character took shape, followed by his companion.

  “Is that supposed to be you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’s why I have a scythe,” said Lucian as he pressed the [X] button, which allowed him to perform a strike. “And with me, that’s you.”

  He selected Danira’s character to show that she had the same name as the now fallen angel.

  “You made me into a big-chested ghost woman with a magic sword?”

  “I mean, when you put it like that…”

  Danira shook her head incredulously.

  “Actually, I had a different companion for you, but then she died, so I had to get a new one, and I happened to be in this ghost town and well, this is the one that was available.”

  “I’m a ghost?” she asked, just a hint of playfulness to her voice.

  “Yeah, but a good one,” Lucian said as he started running, Danira’s avatar following behind him.

  It wasn’t long before they came to a rock creature, which lifted off the ground and began swinging its stony arms at them.

  “These things are such a bitch to kill,” Lucian said, trying to get around the backside of it, where it was most vulnerable.

  “Language…”

  “Please.”

  Danira’s avatar struck it with lightning, which did little to the stone except make it target her.

  “No, no, no…” Lucian said as the rock monster slammed its fist onto the ground, sending Danira flying into the air.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pressing the [R1] button, which allowed him to flee.

  And so they went, the two running off, and Danira silently laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You won’t stand and fight the rock giant for me?”

  “It was going be a waste of my time…” he told her.

  “You wouldn’t defend my honor?”

  “I came after you in the South Wind, if I recall. I’m trying to keep us alive here,” Lucian explained. “If you die, I’ll have to find another version of you. And I sort of like this one.”

  “And where do you find these versions of me?”

  “They are really anywhere, taverns, pubs, those sorts of places. They can be at inns, sometimes at guilds, weapons shops, maybe outside the castle wall.”

  “And what are the criteria for selecting who you would like to be a version of me?”

  “There’s only one criterion: she must be female.”

  Lucian came upon a pair of goblins who had been hiding behind a tree, waiting to ambush them.

  They cut through the duo, Lucian torching one of them much to Danira’s amusement.

  “I’m starting to understand where you get your fighting style from,” she said.

  “You think?” Lucian said as he continued on, looking for more enemies. “I never thought about it like that.”

  “Where else would you have learned to fight?”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Lucian said once he came to a floating spirit.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be able to kill this one with his scythe; instead, he quickly scrolled to a staff made of electric yellow energy.

  He twisted the weapon around his body and launched an attack, the spiritual being dying relatively quickly and leaving behind a pouch of mysterious dust.

  “Mysterious dust?”

  “Just some loot,” Lucian explained. “Maybe I’ll be able to use it to craft a potion, or sell it. That sort of thing. Usually, there’s more loot, especially if I equip an accessory that increases drops. But I’m not so interested in loot right now.”

  The music changed, Lucian’s avatar stopping, and his companion skidding to a halt behind him.

  He started to crouch and made his way up a ridge, where he was able to see a bandit camp. A small one, with only five or six enemies.

  An icon on the screen let them know that he had come across the enemy camp, Danira’s attention perking up.

  “So you are supposed to eradicate these bandits?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  Knowing that he was at a higher level than the bandits, and not feeling like going in for a stealth attack, Lucian charged right in with his scythe at the ready. He struck the first bandit and torched the second one, Danira’s avatar moving past them to engage the third, while Lucian quickly saw to the others.

  Arrows started firing at them from a raised perch, Lucian torching this guy as well, only to be broadsided by a man with an enormous club.

  He cut this guy down, and Danira’s avatar finished off the last bandit.

  A sound played, indicating that they had cleared the bandit hideout.

  “What now?” asked Danira.

  “Now we loot, and then we stay here until morning,” he said, noticing that the sky was starting to get darker in the game. “Bad things come out at night.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Sentencing

  A gust of wind lifted from the water and passed over the bridge that led to Turners Falls, Massachusetts, the wind carrying a few leaves with it which twirled in the air and settled on the railing of the bridge before falling off into the Connecticut River below.

  Lucian stood there once again, observing his environment, preparing for what lay ahead as he mentally soaked in the location.

  It made sense.

  It wasn’t even that complicated of a strategy.

  It would work.

  Once his trap was set, he pressed his thumb and pinky together and reappeared in Old Death’s world to find Danira standing before the window that looked out over the lake, the fallen angel in her gold and white pajamas.

  “We’ve got to get you dressed up,” Lucian said, a grin forming on his face.

  “Yesterday passed way too quickly,” she finally said, turning to him.

  “Let’s get you a cup of coffee first.”

  The coffee appeared in the air, her angel mug floating over to her. Lucian summoned his own cup and took a sip, enjoying the aroma, the nutty flavor.

  “I never thought there would be a day that I did something like this…” she said, now looking out the window again.

  Lucian could see her reflection in the glass, her battle makeup gone, a lightness to her eyes.

  “It’s only temporary,” he reminded her.

  “I really hope that we are able to see this to the end.”

  The angel took a long sip from her coffee and didn’t say anything else.

  After another cup for each of them, and a few pieces of chocolate for
Danira, the two of them floated out of the window, their forms solidifying in the air as they lowered to the ground outside, Danira’s cherub crows coming to her.

  “You two will have to stay hidden,” she said, her two spherical creations disappearing in a spark of energy. “All right, I suppose this is it.”

  Danira’s golden hair started to turn black. Her pajamas faded away, replaced by a dark corset with a long dress that hung well past her feet. The material on her shoulders bunched up, her breasts suddenly ample as the corset tightened. To complete her look, black high heels formed on her feet, each with a single skull buckle.

  “Is it too much?”

  “I don’t really know what to say,” Lucian finally told her. “Maybe the shoes…”

  “My heels are fine. They’re stylish. It’s my face, isn’t it? It still looks too heavenly.”

  Lucian tried not to snicker but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “What?”

  “Are you saying that Deaths can’t be beautiful?”

  “How’s this?” she asked as a blackened bar took shape over her eyes, Danira letting the makeup bleed some so it looked like she had shed a few tears, her skin whitening and her lips turning black to complete the look.

  “You look simply morbid.”

  “I never understood why your kind always went with the typical Grim Reaper look. You know, black hoods and that sort of thing.”

  Lucian shrugged. “Probably the same reason your kind all look like angels.”

  “Fair.”

  “Well, do I pass the sniff test?” she asked, floating up just a little to show Lucian how her dress hung, reminding him almost of a bridal gown.

  “Your eyes,” he said.

  “What would be a good color?”

  “Red. That’s very deathy.”

  “You don’t think that’s too much?”

  “No, I think it’s just enough.”

  “You are looking very grim,” said Hugin, who now hovered over Lucian’s shoulder, Munin nodding in agreement.

  “Thank you, Hugin,” Danira told his spherical creation.

  “Before Mastima gets here, we should confer with Old Death and Leliel,” said Lucian. “Just once more. I’m not going to lie; I also want to see Old Death’s reaction regarding your little outfit here.”

  Suddenly Danira was herself again, the angel hovering a foot above the ground, her wings batting in the air, golden sparks falling from their tips.

  “Come on…” Lucian told her. “You’re no fun.”

  “I don’t want to hear his comments; I’m not exactly proud of the disguise that I will have to wear.”

  “Okay,” he told her. “Then hang here for a moment, I’ll go there, catch him up, and return. Five minutes, tops.”

  Danira lowered to the ground, and as she did, she took her Grim Reaper form again.

  Lucian had the notion of going for his smartphone and taking a photo, but he decided against it after seeing the face she was giving him.

  He jammed his pinky and thumb together and appeared outside of his predecessor’s giant yurt. Lucian announced himself, reminded Old Death of the plan, got playfully yelled at for questioning the man’s memory, bid farewell to Leliel, and then returned to Danira.

  “How was it?” she asked.

  “Predictable. But they’re ready.”

  “When will Mastima be here?”

  “She seems to come when she comes,” said Lucian. “We could always go to the moon and search for her, but that seems tedious.”

  “The moon?”

  Lucian nodded. “We all have our ways of escaping; hers just happens to be a quick trip to the moon.”

  “I guess it would be safer there, no parasites, angels, Death Hunters, or injuresouls.”

  “I still haven’t cracked the injuresoul dilemma,” Lucian admitted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve seen some of our kind be able to take them down, but I haven’t been able to yet. Then again, I haven’t really tried since my most recent power upgrade. I remember Old Death telling me that an Indian Death, or someone like that, created them. I don’t remember the details.”

  “I actually don’t know much about them,” Danira admitted. “Only that your Progeny created them, and that they are incredibly strong. I wouldn’t worry too much about them though; we have much bigger enemies, and they have never been organized. They just appear.”

  An image of the injuresouls flashed before Lucian, their bandaged faces, the way their jaws broke free and distended. He remembered them coming for his predecessor, Lucian turning his gun on one of them and firing.

  It was still unclear to him how that worked; maybe it hadn’t actually worked, maybe it had been some trickery from his predecessor once he saw the spunk that Lucian had.

  But it didn’t matter now.

  He had much bigger things to worry about.

  His plans for today would either cause an all-out war, or swiftly put an end to one.

  A portal eventually opened up, Mastima appearing, the female Death looking surprised. It was only after a double-take that she understood it to be Danira, a smirk forming on the woman’s face.

  “Don’t get used to it,” said Danira bitterly.

  “You clearly got creative with the make-up,” Mastima told her.

  “I wanted to blend in with the other demons.”

  “You do seem to capture our essence quite well. It’s like you’ve killed hundreds of us and have been fighting us for several thousand years and know exactly how we look.”

  Lucian started to step between the two women, only stopping once he saw Danira smile.

  “So I got it right? It doesn’t look so bad?”

  Mastima shook her head. “No, you look fine. It would fool me; I’m sure it would fool even some of the Progeny of Darkness whom you’ve slain, if they were alive to see you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So we’re cool here?” Lucian asked. “Because the last thing we need today is another fight.”

  “We weren’t going to fight,” Mastima told him.

  “Don’t you know when people are giving each other…”

  “Yes?” Lucian asked Danira.

  “Hell?”

  “Ha! I just wanted to hear you cuss. All right, enough fun and games. Let’s get to the Congress,” Lucian said, not able to contain his grin, his affection for the woman who now had black hair and darkened paint smeared across her face, the fallen angel in soot-colored robes, nothing about her at all giving off an indication of who she once was.

  Mastima opened up a portal and the three of them pressed through it, appearing before the grand structure, the saber-like mountains in the distance, the green hue to the sky, everything about the location otherworldly, arcane.

  “It’s…” Danira cleared her throat. “It’s much larger than I thought it would be.”

  “It is intended for large meetings,” Mastima told her. “How big did you expect it to be?”

  “I had no idea,” she quickly said.

  A portal fizzled into existence behind them and a short man stepped out, horns on his head, his face covered in tattooed script.

  He strolled by the three of them and was quickly called away by another Death, a floating head draped in a black sheet, the woman’s body completely nonexistent.

  More Progeny of Darkness started to appear, Lucian once again having to suppress a notion to greet some of them, to hear more about their stories.

  He wasn’t like this with humans when he had been alive, but there was something else about the role he’d taken, something that made him feel special, unique. That, and he found his counterparts interesting, especially some of the forms they’d chosen. From the man who had gone for a completely skeletal look to the woman that was no more than a purple mist, all of them were unique, products of their times, their history visible in their clothing, their cultural nightmares on display.

  “It’s the twins,” said Mastima, leading them forward
, away from the pair that Lucian recognized as having been on the Committee of Luminaries.

  They slipped away before they could be spotted, Danira now with her hood over her head, Lucian doing the same.

  Not everyone wore hoods, but a majority of the Deaths did, enough that it looked like swaths of blackened silk threading into the arches of the coliseum. There were more Deaths than there had been the last time, the stadium almost completely full as Lucian, Danira, and Mastima took a seat at the back, Lucian seated between the two of them.

  “I hope they come,” he said under his breath, Danira hearing him.

  “They wouldn’t miss an opportunity like this. They may already be here,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “Look around, Lucian. Some of these Deaths don’t actually look like Deaths to me. There’s something too perfect about them, about their outfits…”

  After hearing Danira say this, Mastima stood, as if she were looking for a friend.

  She sat back down almost immediately, her black eyes wide now.

  “Is she right?” Lucian asked her. “I have no idea.”

  “Something is off,” was all Mastima could say as the floating platform began to appear in the center space of the arena.

  Golden chains extended from the far corners of the coliseum, the chains blackening as they neared the platform.

  Once they were in place, Gaspard’s form fizzled into existence, his hands and legs chained, the man looking a bit rough, but not as bad as he’d looked back in the desert.

  His hair hung in his face as he stared at the chairs before him. The five members of the Congress were suddenly seated as if they had been there the entire time, the man with dark skin in the middle chair.

  “Gaspard Marchand,” said the lead elder. “I believe there is no reason to draw this out any longer than it needs to be drawn out. For your blasphemous words, and spreading dissent among our kind, you have been sentenced to death by having your mantlecore removed and redistributed. Since you were at the beach in America at the start of this fight, we have decided, after a long deliberation, to also place the blame for the start of this war on your shoulders. You will go down in our history as the man who brought war between the two Progenies, and your name will be cursed through all eternity.”