Death's Mantle 3

by Harmon Cooper

  “I don’t think I would want to go back,” she said.

  “You’d be able to resurrect…”

  “Maybe if and when you decide to finally go…”

  “What do you mean?” Lucian asked, turning to her.

  “If you decide to finally give up your mantle, I will see where I am at that point. But until that time, I’m here with you. This is what I want. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

  “Life and Death are getting married, huh?” he asked, trying to be playful.

  Rather than put her guard up, Danira played along. “Well, Death hasn’t asked Life yet if she would marry him, so I don’t know. She may turn him down.”

  “I can get you a nice diamond ring. I mean, Death can.”

  “Diamond ring? You do realize that for thousands of years, marriages took place without diamond rings, that that was something that diamond companies created over the last hundred years or so to convince people that diamonds had always been the way to get married, right?”

  Lucian laughed. “Of course they did. And I did not know that.”

  “Get out your phone, look it up,” she said with a smirk.

  “It seems that so many of the things that I am familiar with or enjoy are simply feats of marketing.”

  Danira nodded. “That very well may be the case. That is one thing humans have become quite good at over the last several millennia.”

  Once they each had another cup of coffee, the two agreed that it was time to go.

  Lucian didn’t call forth his replicants, only his two crows. What he was planning to do didn’t require a standing army; if he really wanted his Grim Mechas, he could summon them anyway.

  “Ready?” Danira asked.

  And rather than say anything Lucian simply extended his hand to her.

  The two appeared in his brother’s backyard, snow starting to fall, the sky gray, a frigid breeze rolling in from the bay, a lost seagull soaring overhead.

  The house seemed more foreboding than it normally was, Lucian knowing what lay ahead, and that there was a high likelihood that this would not succeed.

  Steeling himself, he summoned Azazyel’s hefty sword and his armor, the bone pressing out of his skin and quickly coating his body.

  All he needed to do was provoke the parasite enough for it to balloon in size. Anything more, and it would grow so large that neither of them would be able to contain it.

  Floating forward, Hugin and Munin over his shoulders, Danira behind him with her two cherub crows, Lucian pressed through the back door to find his brother sitting in the dining room, his hands shaking as he sipped from a cup of coffee and scrolled through his phone.

  He looked just about as bad as he’d looked last time, his hair a mess, his beard stubble peppered with patches of gray, the man slouched over in a defeated way.

  Yet again, Lucian saw the parasite that was attached to the back of his neck, a tendril suctioned to the crown of his brother’s skull.

  One glance over his shoulder and he noticed that Danira had conjured her armor as well, the angel standing by with her enormous energy rifle at the ready, a golden halo spinning around the muzzle of her gun, a determined look on her face.

  “Yeah,” said Lucian as he brought his sword up.

  He shot forward, slicing into the parasite with his enormous sword, the demon bug letting out an ear-piercing screech.

  It felt it, and as soon as Lucian’s blade passed through it, its form pressed together and it began to grow in size, the inner space of Connor’s dining room suddenly twice as large as it had been, the planes of existence shifting.

  Lucian struck the parasite again with Azazyel’s sword, the demon bug looming over him now, his anger taking over by this point as he hit it three more times, Lucian momentarily forgetting his original plan.

  Danira called his name and he snapped out of it. “Lucian! It’s going to get too strong!” she cried, her weapon trained on some of the parasite’s tendrils, which were twisting in her direction.

  Remembering what had to happen, Lucian tossed his sword aside and bolted toward the demon bug, ripping through its flesh. He was quickly engulfed by the parasite, Lucian closing his eyes, and starting to channel all this power outward.

  He saw his Soul Points start to fall and rise, fall and rise.

  Lucian didn’t care what this did to his mantlecore as he summoned even more energy, his Soul Points dropping rapidly now, only rising a little.

  But he had plenty to spare, and even as the parasite started to squeeze his armor to the point that it was cracking, Lucian kept up his attack, his only focus on his SP.

  The armor shielding his legs shattered, Lucian’s form slowly being absorbed by the parasite.

  He pressed more energy out, a dazzling array of lights painting across his darkened pane of vision.

  All the sounds around him were muffled, but he could tell that the parasite was experiencing pain, that it was fighting him in a fevered panic, trying to smother him.

  Lucian pressed more energy out even as his lower half was absorbed by the parasite, his flesh and bones beneath completely crushed.

  His Soul Points continued to drop; Lucian responded by clenching his jaw shut and releasing more energy, enough that his points were now plummeting by a thousand a second, Lucian not giving up.

  He reached the ten thousand mark and concentrated even harder, even though he could no longer feel his torso, or his hands, or his arms for that matter.

  The explosion that followed brought a burst of light pollution, one stained by blips of black blood as he flew across the room and cracked into a wall.

  What was left of Lucian’s body, which mostly consisted of his chest, a single shoulder, and part of his neck and head, slapped onto the floor.

  “Heal yourself…” said Danira, who was now crouched next to him, her hand coming to Lucian’s cheek. “Heal yourself, Lucian.”

  “Did I…?” he managed to whisper.

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. “You did it. You did it.”

  Epilogue

  Lucian and Danira watched as the Tibetan monk held court over the dead body, which lay before him, covered in prayer flags. The dead man’s face was visible, his mouth opened, a plastic lotus flower placed on his forehead.

  The monk continued to speak in a low, guttural voice: “…Your consciousnesses are separating from your body and entering the Bardo. Appeal to your energy to allow you to see them as you cross the threshold and retain total consciousness. The vivid clarity of light without color and emptiness will appear and envelop you with a quickness greater than lightning…”

  Several of the family members watched the procession, their heads bowed as the monk continued to chant.

  “...Don’t allow fear to make you retreat and lose consciousness. Plunge into that light. Reject all belief in an ego and all attachment to your illusionary personality. Dissolve its non-being into being and be free…”

  Danira gasped as both of them saw a spirit suddenly hovering just above the person’s body, still tethered to it by tendrils of wispy energy. The spirit carried an exasperated look on his face as he tried to get back into the body, to live just a little more.

  “Don’t linger around those who have been your friends and family. Don’t strive to speak to them. Your voice makes no sense and they cannot hear it. Don’t contemplate things that have belonged to you. You no longer have the power to move them and carry them away. You have left them behind. They have left you. Don’t feel any attachment to them. Don’t seek to renew the ties that bound you to them. Detach yourself.”

  It was clear in the Tibetan monk’s tone that he could not see the spirit hovering above the body, yet he believed in his words he was saying, the older man’s voice growing deeper as he began the next verse: “Know that you have created a dream that was furnished by forms without consistency. Since you did not seize the liberation at the moment when light-reality enveloped, you will continue to drift through pleasant and unpleasant dr
eams. In the course of these dreams you will be offered opportunities of attaining awareness. Remain vigilant, remain alert. Now understand this: your physical organs will dissolve, but until they do, they will continue their particular activities until they have totally exhausted the energy engendered by past actions that kept them active.”

  The monk cleared his throat and reset his prayer beads, running his fingers through them again as he said the next lines, the man momentarily looking up to a hanging portrait of the Buddha.

  “Because awareness of forms and colors has come through your eyes, you see forms and colors. Because awareness of sound has come through your ears, you hear sounds. Because awareness of odors has come through your nose, you smell odors. Because awareness of flavors has come through your tongue, you taste flavors. Because awareness of tactile sensations has come through your body, you feel tactile sensations. Because your mind has manufactured ideas derived from these awarenesses, ideas come to you. Know that in this place these are nothing but hallucinations. None of the things offered to you are real. They are products of your past awarenesses. Don’t be scared by them. Don’t become attached to them. Contemplate them without aversion or desire.”

  And with those words, the spirit pressed away from the dead man’s body, as if the monk had finally gotten through to him. The spirit hovered over the body now, looking down at himself, almost reminding Lucian of a floating injuresoul on the verge of attacking.

  “This is too much,” Lucian finally said.

  “I feel the same,” Danira told him.

  “Let’s head out for a moment.”

  Lucian and Danira floated through the roof, where he found dozens of his replicants hovering in the air, standing guard. They were in Shigatse, not far from the South Wind, and they needed to be on high alert just in case they were spotted.

  Of course, Lucian knew the Grim Mechas hovering in the air didn’t really help them blend in, but it was a necessary precaution.

  “Well, we saw it,” he finally told Danira, after a long bout of silence.

  The fallen angel turned to him and offered a soft smile.

  It had been a month since his bold move at the Congress of Death, and he had yet to grow tired of being around her all day and night. They had spent days lying around the home she’d enhanced, Lucian listening to her stories of all the lives she’d led, the two cooking, gaming, enjoying each other’s company, and simply being free.

  Progress was being made in both Progenies, and the council led by Gaspard and consisting of both sides continued to hammer out a peace agreement. They were already charging those who had kept the lower halves at war, most not able to escape the joint angel and Death hunting parties that came after them.

  The tribunals had been quite a spectacle, Lucian and Danira going to a few of them. Aside from those few trips to the Congress of Death, they mostly stayed out of it, even with Mastima’s request that they get involved.

  Lucian was done with politics.

  “You’ve really never seen anything like that?” Lucian asked her.

  Danira shook her head. “I don’t understand how these people came to understand how life leaves a person’s body,” she said, her brow furrowed in a troubled way. “It makes me wonder if there was, perhaps hundreds of years ago, some sort of communication between one of our Progenies and the people that founded their doctrine.”

  “It just makes me think more about the things that connect us,” Lucian said, “and how we value them. Everything, really. Look at me, I’ve still held onto my family. That guy in there was told to simply let go. Maybe if there had been someone there like that when I was dying, I wouldn’t have taken this role. I really don’t know.”

  “And it was Cuthbert who recommended you see this, right?”

  “It was.”

  “Typical.”

  Lucian smirked. “He does seem to work in mysterious, mostly nonsensical ways. But really, I don’t know the lesson he was trying to impart, to be honest with you. It was definitely interesting though.”

  A few of Lucian’s replicants turned in the direction of the South Wind, their eyes blazing purple.

  “Maybe we should leave,” said Danira.

  “I’m surprised we haven’t already drawn attention to ourselves.”

  “We can stay and see if they actually come.”

  Lucian smiled at the fallen angel. “You sure are bold these days, aren’t you?”

  “These days? Since the day I was born,” she said.

  The two continue to loiter above the city, waiting to see if any of the Progeny of Light would show up. Lightning in the sky signaled a thunderstorm was imminent, Lucian assuming that watching a thunderstorm over the Tibetan steppe would be something worth seeing.

  Eventually, they did see two female angels lower from one of the mountains, both with golden spears.

  The two merely kept their distance, seemingly knowing that picking a fight with Lucian and Danira wouldn’t be to their favor.

  “It’ll be interesting once this truce is finalized,” Lucian said. “Then, in a situation such as this, we can simply wave at them.”

  “I’ve been optimistic about this thus far, but I do think it’s going to take quite a while. It could take them decades for all the details to be hammered out. There are a lot of grievances that have to be named and discussed. It’s the nature of these kinds of discussions.”

  “That’s exactly why I’ve stayed out of it,” Lucian told her.

  “And it is because of you that I’ve stayed out of it. This sort of thing used to be my cup of tea, really.”

  Lucian laughed. “I can see you now on one of the subcommittees going over details…”

  She turned to him, raising her chin a bit. “Can you now?”

  “Here’s this angel, with the blue bar across her face, wearing a pair of glasses as she reads through ancient scrolls looking for information, a golden pen floating in the air and taking notes on a different scroll. Something like that,” he teased her.

  “And sitting on my desk is this picture,” she said, joining in on the narrative, “a picture of a handsome man from Massachusetts who later became a demon who I had to kill. But I was still fond of him anyway, so I kept his picture.”

  “Wait, in this fantasy of yours you have killed me?”

  She smiled at him. “I still could.”

  “I’d be careful if I were you,” said Lucian, playfully gesturing toward his dozen Grim Mechas. “We do have you surrounded, at least last I checked.”

  “Fine, it’s a picture of both of us at the Taj Mahal.”

  “That’s more like it. Wait, is that the Taj Mahal now, or the first time we visited together?”

  “Either works for me.”

  Danira floated just a bit closer to Lucian. He placed his arm around her waist and kissed her cheek, almost daring the angels watching them to say something.

  “Now are you ready to get out of here?” he asked her, resisting the urge to give them the bird. Lightning cracked the sky, the dark clouds flashing.

  “Sure. Let’s go see how he’s doing.”

  Lucian and Danira appeared on the rooftop of Lucian’s old apartment complex.

  He took a look around, instantly familiar with the neighborhood and the nearby buildings, many of them built long ago and recently renovated. There was a line of smoke trailing out of a pipe on the rooftop near them, a glimmer of the bay beyond that, the moonlight reflecting off the surface of the water.

  Everything quiet, everything peaceful.

  Still holding Danira’s hand, Lucian started to sink down into his old living room, his replicants fanning out around him.

  There was just a smattering of new furniture in the apartment now, a Patriots foldable chair, a stool with a laptop open on it, nothing hanging on the walls. The kitchen was clean aside from the cardboard box of a recently opened TV dinner on the countertop, and there was a single potted plant on the linoleum floor, the tag still sticking out of the soil.

>   Even though he’d seen his old place several times now, it still struck Lucian as incredibly strange to see his home in such a stripped-down way.

  He also realized that this was something he would experience many times going forward, humans having a way of wiping away the past and replacing what once existed with something new, or at least something refurbished.

  As he always did, Lucian turned his attention to his brother, who sat in the folding chair watching a movie on his laptop. Connor had lost ten pounds over the last month, but he was starting to look better, shaving every day now, and still sticking to the recovery plan.

  Lucian focused in on his brother’s death date:

  Name: Connor North

  Date of Birth: 11/01/1980

  Date of Death: 07/19/2058

  The parasite hadn’t come back.

  Unfortunately, this didn’t mean that there weren’t other things his brother was forced to deal with, stresses that he probably should have seen coming. One of the main stresses was Samantha leaving him. She’d moved back into their home with Jen, which was why Connor had taken Lucian’s old apartment. Another was a series of bills that had started to stack up, Connor already working on a plan to get them all paid down. There was also his truck, which was having trouble starting up, and his lower back, which still gave him pain from time to time.

  Proving that he could overcome the addiction, Connor hadn’t started using again after the separation, the wedding called off, his happy little family torn apart.

  Those nights had been especially hard, nights in which Connor struggled to cope with just how badly he had fucked up. But he made it through, and he hadn’t fallen into another trap like alcoholism to cover the gap created through his opioid addiction.

  And it wasn’t all bad news.

  Connor had secured a job as an electrician through a buddy he knew in Beverly, who oddly enough had been friends with Katy’s father. His health had improved, and he’d gotten Lucian’s old apartment for a steal.

  Even if they still seemed dire at times, things were starting to look up, and Lucian was almost certain that his brother would make it through. And even if he couldn’t play a role in helping him get back on his feet, he checked on Connor every day.