III.
Vagari awoke with a wash of pain, a cold wave that made its way to the furthest points of his body in tune with his heartbeat. The coldness of that pain did nothing to ward against the heated gaze still weighing upon him – the midday sun, thankfully, instead of the titan of nightmare. Vagari shielded his eyes then staggered to his feet, now hunched over not by choice but by the chill of that pulsing pain.
Inquisitive fingers traced its origin to his left side just above the hip. There he discovered he hadn’t been quite as fast as to escape unscathed. The beam of light had cut through the girl and him as well as he tried to shield her, leaving an angry wound at his side, an almost perfect half-circle of charred flesh. Vagari’s head swam with every chilling pulse that radiated from it. “A fever…” Vagari told himself as he looked to the colossi in the distance: dead as ever, unmoved, and bound still in the floral chains sprung forth from the angel’s blood. “Just… just a fever dream…”
The night before felt far from his mind. It was muddled, and as dull as the pain at his side, as if it had happened weeks ago; an untruth that the thick veil of sand blanketing the charred remains of their caravan corroborated. Vagari knew the truth of it however, that that was simply just the way of the wasteland – there one moment and gone the next. There were bodies under that sand as fresh as the wound at his side.
It all felt far and that’s where he’d leave it, buried in the sand. There wasn’t time yet for the dead, not even to set them right, so unfortunately, where they lay would also have to be their graves. Soprano was still out there, still alive, still running for her life and that life took precedent. All he could offer the dead now was the promise of vengeance. Too much time had been lost to offer anything more.
Vagari took what supplies he could find, what wasn’t burned, and what wouldn’t weigh him down: a canteen of water, a few tubes of bio-paste to eat, and a small sample of Tradesman’s Bars that Packard had stashed away. It was a pitiful haul, but it would get him to where he was going alive. The bars were what passed as currency in the Tradesmen’s Guild – the group the caravanners fell under. They were nearly worthless to anyone else, but Vagari was confident they would buy him passage in the unlikely event another caravan passed by – if not by value, by proof of demise. Packard’s life may not have been worth much in the end, but hopefully it was worth that. “Home...” Vagari reminded himself as he stood solemnly at the edge of camp. He took a deep breath, turned towards the sun, and left that distant night behind. “Just hold on a bit longer, I’m coming.”
Time, however precious, was the only thing he had lost to the attack. The ability to sense magnetic North made sure he could never lose his way, not even to the ever-shifting sands that hid away all recognition of the world he knew. He knew which way to go, but wounded as he was, he didn’t know if he had the strength to get there in time – not if he followed the road. They had been nearly there, maybe a day’s more travel by the winding serpent they crawled upon – ticks clung to Jörmungandr’s back for the perceived safety of its company. If he followed the road maybe someone would pick him up, or maybe he’d just wander its length for the weeks that five-day trip would become
Vagari stared into the desert in white-knuckle deliberation, the dusty roadway seemingly writhing under his gaze like the world serpent of legend. In truth the five-day trip took only one if one were to go in a straight line from A to B, following the old roads through. But there was method to the madness, reason travelers risked the perils of the Eastern Wastes riding the serpent’s back. The old roads lead to forbidden places, forsaken places where only the most desperate dared to tread – places of no return. Forbidden, but not forgotten, at least not by Vagari. He stepped off the beaten path and onto the direct line, counting himself as one of the most desperate.
Vagari wandered the churning wasteland for six days, running out of food the fourth, and water late upon the sixth. Both had lasted just long enough to get him beyond the sands, with those rolling dunes soon solidified and greened into temperate rainforest and a moss blanketed highway. As in the bible old and said GOD above, on the seventh day Vagari chose to rest.
There at the forest’s edge Vagari fell under the shadow of a great oak tree, where he propped himself against the ruined bricks of its well rooted prey – the crumbling bones of some long forgotten roadside building. Vagari couldn’t say he felt truly safe there hidden in the gnarled roots and tangled vines, just safe enough to steal away an hour or two of sleep if he dared take his eyes off the road beyond. It was an ancient freeway, one that lead straight into the heart of the rainforest – a forest that, like the dueling titan’s own, grew upon forbidding remains: the bones of what was known to most as The Verdant City. Cracked and pitted, that road stretched out like the body of a rusted sword, one that’s edge Vagari would have to tread very carefully. “Soft steps,” the cloaked man cautioned himself in thought. “Soft steps and one foot in front of the other…”
The Verdant City was avoided more readily than the corpses of the dead giants. They knew what happened to those foolish enough to play amongst their bones. As horrific their deaths were, they often came back. The old road, however, lead only into tragic mystery. Their danger was a well-known unknown thanks to the handful of expeditions that vanished within. But they had gone in blind, not knowing the way; Vagari, however, did.
Vagari remembered much of that dreaded place: the shops, the streets, the parks, and all the hidden places that time forgot; even its true name – New Houston. He had spent most of his old life there, and all his new one avoiding it. More than mystery haunted the ruined city and neither of them he was keen on facing – but, he had to. He had promised Alto that he would do everything he could to bring his daughter back, so come what may, Vagari would face it head on. He had to. For her sake. For the world. He only hoped what he could remember still remained. Time had grown like the vines on the walls, long and obscuring. It was hardly the place of his memories.
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Two hours, that was all he gave himself before he decided to press forward and descend into the necropolis ahead. Vagari could hardly consider himself rested, but that wasn’t what mattered. All that mattered now was reaching Soprano and the book before the Tall-Man and his murderers did and he had to make every second count. Vagari pushed to his feet and arched his back with a pained hiss. He could feel the flesh at his side slowly knitting back together. It pulsed with a dull pain just like before but was looking less and less angry day-by-day. He knew he was well enough to move and move fast, if need be, but as not to tempt fate with a retorn wound, he started off with the extra support of walking in a quadrupedal manner.
Vagari’s arms, like his fingers and nails, were proportionately long compared to most, making this mode of travel almost easier than walking upright – if a bit humiliating. He figured he looked something like a bear in rags as he trotted down the time-scarred highway, hoping that whatever lurked there would take the visual as fact and stay well enough away. ‘Whatever lurked’ quickly turned out to be a surprising amount of life, he discovered. As the rainforest transformed into a jungle of concrete and steel, an entire ecosystem bloomed before him, and Vagari couldn’t help but pause to take it all in.
To either side of him the bones of the now ancient city still towered above even the tallest trees – skyscrapers that, before the construction of the Megacity, had been the tallest buildings in the world. Their skeletal remains were now home to great flocks of birds: bioluminescent things that glowed softly as they flew across the sky, looking like the will-o’-the-wisps of myth. They were lost souls, Vagari thought in poetic dourness, trapped in the purgatorial cage that city had become – no, always had been. No one really escaped that place, not even before the world’s end. It was no small part of him that remained trapped there, some part he did his best to ignore, to stuff down deep inside himself – some part of who he used to be.
Vagari quickly left the awe and beauty of it behind, choosing to focus on the road ahead instead of dredging up unwanted memories. It was too late; the surface of that murky pool had already been disturbed and now the head of the ugly thing below began rising to the surface. So many had been lost, so many had been abandoned, trapped in their homes as the world went to hell. If he had been there, then maybe – no… Vagari forced the thought out of mind. He hadn’t been there, he couldn’t have been, and that was the truth. That was the truth. Wasn’t it? “Shut-up…” Vagari hissed at himself as he ambled down the way, trying his best to look forward instead of back. “There was nothing you could do then or after… It was gone, everything was gone!”
But that wasn’t true – the city still remained. It was a mockery of its former self, overgrown and overrun by nature, and yet still stood as a testament to the strength and durability of what had been built there – a place he once called home. But home wasn’t those buildings, wasn’t the roadways, or parks, or gardens, no. Home was built on a different foundation – those unwanted memories bubbling up to choke him like an oil slick. They too still remained.
Vagari stopped and shut his eyes. He could still picture it perfectly: the evening drive, the sunset warm on his skin, and the wind in his hair; and then, when they finally parked, her lips upon his own as they gazed out over the lake. For a moment Vagari basked in the warmth of that memory before the coldness of how that night ended sunk in. He could still picture it perfectly, how he left her there when they came to get him, the look of defeat on her face. He had never gone back, and now Vagari couldn’t help but wonder if she had ever left. If the bones of so much laid about, would he find hers born on the shore of that lake – that piece of him, right where he left her?
A sound like grinding glass forced open his eyes, banishing the thought in an instant. All about him the illuminous birds began crying out, shrill shrieks of horror, as they blinked out of the sky like dying bulbs. The ghostly lights flickered out until all was dark, casting Vagari into a cityscape of dusk and shadows. He froze, waiting without so much movement as a blink of the eye. He scanned the way forward with a slow panning gaze but saw nothing. Then, the sound echoed out again, as harsh as before, but thankfully further off. A minute more and the avian lights began relighting the sky, flickering into existence once more with a cacophony of reassuring coos. “What manner of horror was that…?” Vagari wondered in thought. “A creature or… something else?”
Demons and vicious aberrations weren’t the only foul things to crawl forth from the pits when the world ended. Those were only the devils you knew – that you could know – and as the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you didn’t. Anomalies were the devil you didn’t – that you couldn’t. While some took on monstrous form, they were beyond monsters, beyond any living thing. Anomalies were stains, spots of unexplainable wrongness that haunted the world. Undetectable, untraceable, unknowable, and unkillable, they were more like a storm than a living thing, or maybe a virus in the bloodstream of existence. Vagari was beginning to wonder if whatever was hunting these grounds might be one of those viruses.
Mutants and demons, they were of flesh and blood, something he could fight, something he could kill even. They were driven by hunger, fear, lust – bestial things. Anomalies didn’t feel hunger, or fear, or lust, or anything at all. They couldn’t be killed, or hurt, or fought in any real way. Sometimes they couldn’t even be seen. In the truest sense, they were death – untouchable and all penetrating. Luckily, in most cases, like a virus they were designed to do one terrible thing, following a track that they rarely deviated from. What that one thing was, Vagari couldn’t say for sure, but now he knew one thing. “Be conscious of the birds,” Vagari noted in thought. “They can sense it… Green is go.”