LIV.
Vagari burst from the pool of green water, gasping for breath as he lurched to his feet. As he clutched at the pools edge, his senses were assaulted by the stench of rotting algae and chemical fire. He was surrounded by pillars of billowing black smoke that veiled the world in darkness, reminding him a little too much of his last trek into the bog. Great flashes of light lit up the darkness, momentarily lifting the veil like thunderbolts in a storm. Vagari could see it, the battle for the end, it had finally begun. But what had happened? How had he gotten there? One moment he had been sitting there in the back of the convoy, listening to Xu’s lies, and in the next… nothing. His head was as foggy as the world around him.
Vagari dragged himself out of the bog’s dark water and onto the land. He spun about trying to regain his bearings but only found himself more lost with each turn – lost, just like he had been on those words. Had they been lies? They had to be – they had to be. It made no sense, the chance of it, the strange fate! No… No, she died. His little girl, his sweet unborn daughter, she died! Her and her mother both. Said who? He had never confirmed it. He just assumed! Why was he so damnable sure?
Vagari spun and the world spun with him. He had never looked for them. It had been too long since what happened, twenty long years! He couldn’t look, the city had fallen! It was gone! They were gone! Gone like him, the husband, the father, gone like Eddy Valentino. “She always spoke of the father that never came home,” Xu’s voice ricocheted in his thoughts. “Would you like to know what she said?” Vagari had been speechless, struck silent by those few suggestive words. Xu raised a brow, realizing what cards he had to play. “No more secrets between us, right? Tell me, did you even know her name?”
Her name… What was her name?! Vagari screamed in thought, clutching his twisting guts as the agony filled that void within him. He felt chunks of mud and stone pelt against his body, and the heat of an explosion, the sound of it, however, was a pin drop a mile away. “She hated you,” Xu’s cruel words seeped into his mind, writhing like worms in his skull. “She hated you for leaving her, the father she never got to know. Ha – funny how similar we’ve become all of a sudden, innit? But, in spite of that…” Xu continued, pausing for a moment to think on his next words. The humor left his face, being replaced by a solemn stare. “She still loved you. You didn’t deserve it, but she did. It feels sharp, doesn’t it, that blade?” he said, that vicious half-smile returning to his disfigured mug. “How I want to just dig it in and twist…! But I won’t. I was half-tempted to take her name to my grave though. Just for a moment. How cruel would that be?”
How cruel would that be… Vagari strained on the words, eyes wide as he tried to piece together what had happened next. There was a line, red and as thin as a hair. It had danced between them and… A pulse of red light lit up the clouds of smoke around him, tinting the whole world crimson as the Angel’s ocular beam ignited. The sound its infernal engines made promised devastation, a hellish metallic wail of lost souls – the horn of Gabriel sounded at last. The horrific silhouette of the giant loomed over the battlefield, over him with such presence he had hardly noticed the dozens of fainter forms marching behind it.
Retaliating beams of gold pushed back against the crimson, hundreds of them, thousands maybe. The angel groaned under the strain and soon all color drained from the surrounding storm, that horrid color forced back to blackness. The ashen clouds were all-encompassing, clouds that both fogged his sight and his mind. The images of burning fields flashed in Vagari’s thoughts - memories and fears waned by time, but never distant, never forgotten. His heart quaked with the earthshaking steps of the colossi’s overlapping march.
Vagari steeled himself. He reminded himself of what was at stake, what was to be lost if he dared faulter further. He may have lost her, his daughter, her and her love, but he still had someone relying on him, someone he swore not to lose. That promise was pushed to the forefront of his mind. He couldn’t let anything else distract him, and that was all that was, a distraction – his lifelong wonderment, his shackling contrition, his ties to the past. Vagari had already sworn off letting the lure of the past deny the future he sought, the future that BP and so many innocent others deserved. He would not break that promise.
Vagari stood tall and unfurled his wings. Instantly they became an iridescent blur as he shot skyward. He knew what he had to do to make his mark upon the battle, to make a difference, maybe enough even to turn the tide. He flew above the veil of twisting smoke and looked down from on high. The angels were many, an army of titans plagued by ants, nipping here, stinging there, being slaughtered by the battalion. Xu’s reverse-engineering of angelic machinery was proving somewhat effective against the base of their design – far more so than most of their weapons prior. The golden-white beams burned through the alien armor as easily as it had Vagari’s carapace.
A rain of what looked like quicksilver sprayed over the battlefield and all those soulless things that fought there. Angelic blood, Vagari expected fully that the metallic ichor would kill them outright, but much to his surprise, the transmuting toxin didn’t so much as stall them. Whether it was the Synbio’s armor or perhaps something in their design that protected them, he didn’t know, but all the same, Vagari made a mental note to avoid that area entirely – now and forever.
As those deadly beams cut the world below him in twine, scouring it black once more in line with the dreams, the memories flashing before his eyes with each burst of light, Vagari shut his eyes and shut out the world with them. He knew what he had to do next: draw upon that power, that infernal engine that was the soul of the GOD of Man – Nintu. Vagari sought her light within him, sought not just her mind, but her power, her strength and indominable will. Like he had suspected, like a muscle discovered, that light was easier to find, easier to flex now that he knew of its existence within him.
Vagari reached out to that power, her power, his power and felt it bloom within him, felt those chains of humanity once more lift from his shoulders. The beating of his wings stopped, and that of his racing heart slowed to a steady rhythm as the peace granted by the eternal flow of power within him radiated to every corner of his body. The world had felt like such a heavy place, always weighing him down, crushing him, like the hump upon his spine, but now he felt as if he could lift it with ease – with but a thought, as he now lifted his body. Pneumatic energies danced within and without his skin, tracing invisible words as they shot up through the veins of his insectile wings – now four great swords of light posed upon his back.
Vagari opened his eyes and saw the lightened world from godly heights, with sight divine. Galaxies swirled in the darkness of his glare, a universal weight that crushed all it fell upon. He reached out with those eyes, with the palm of his hand. He saw an angel lurching forward beneath him. “Fall!” he commanded, his voice booming like a crack of thunder. The angel groaned under the weight of his mandate, straining to deny him as it stomped through the curse of marshland. It turned to face him; it’s one eye glowing brightly as it took aim. It fired, but for reasons unknown even to him, Vagari was not afraid.
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The heavenly sword cut through the fog of war below and the cloudless sky above, a bloody beacon of destruction. Vagari stared as the beam shot towards him, inch by inch, foot by foot, yard by yard, time seemingly slowed. Or perhaps his perception of it is what differed. Energy swelled in the palms of his hand, pneumatic pulses that took no sighted form. He reached out and wrapped his long arachnoid fingers around the beam, feeling it solid in his grasp, and then, like Zeus on high, cast it back down like a thunderbolt.
The pillar of hard light struck through the biomechanical being in the blink of an eye, pinning it to the boggy earth. As if on que, the Synbio soldiers focused their fire upon it, quickly riddling it black with scorch marks and holes. It too erupted with a silvery spray of its transformative blood, and once again it showed no effects on the beings it doused wholly. Now, however, in his heightened state, Vagari could see why – see that it, in fact, affected them all.
Each and every Synbio soldier the irradiant gore touched was rotting on the inside, being melted and mutilated by its corrosive curse. They, like the amorphous grotesque he had faced aboard the Tevat, were simply healing faster than it could dissolve them, all thanks to their Shassuru sire. Vagari would have been impressed, he thought, if it weren’t for the cruelty of it all – the unimaginable suffering they had to be experiencing. From on high, gazing down at all those who were fighting, he couldn’t help but feel pity. Like the Synbio, the Angels too were husks, soulless things made to fight with no alternative, no option but to choose death.
Vagari reached out to one, with his hand and with his mind, clenched his fist and crushed it – freeing it from the torment of autonomous suicide. It was so easy, so easy he couldn’t fathom why he had been so afraid before, so hesitant to crush ants. Ants, bugs, insects, that was what they all looked like from there, what the voice in his mind whispered to him. Vagari pulled his fists back and stared at his palms, somehow expecting to see blood on them. Those weren’t his words; they weren’t his thoughts… They were Nintu’s, the apathy of her soul shining through with its dead light. She had found her calling in war, but not him – not him. Vagari shut his eyes and tried to reassert himself, reassert his control.
He reached out in his mind, tried to take it in hand but the fire of her, those embers, that warmth that pushed away the cold, burned now as a raging flame, searing his hands as he took hold. Vagari screamed as tongues of fire licked raveningly betwixt the bars of his will, lashing lengths that punished his resolve with each searing strike. He focused that will and urged the inferno back down into the flicker of power he could hope to control, forcing the Goddess’s destructive will once more into the embers of wars past. There was too much at stake to let the grand breadth of her power take control, too much to be lost in the scouring of the world below. He would not destroy the world in his bid to save it – not again.
Vagari opened his eyes, his hold of the impossible energies flowing through him regained for the moment. He dove down to rejoin the fray, to give BP all the time she needed to overcome her own challenges of power. The heavens seemed lit by crimson swords as he fell to earth, as if all the eyes of the heavenly host were now upon him, their glares aimed to prevent his descent. He spun, pulling the vectors of death with him, until the helix of his fall tinted the entire field red. A foot above the ground he stopped abruptly, as if he had never been falling at all, and the ropes of light folded around him like the netting bodies of a den of snakes.
One of the First’s more alien colossi strode towards him, stampeding forward on equine-like legs that did well in carving through the marshlands. Instead of one burning eye, it had dozens of smaller ones – perhaps reminiscent of some ancient species it mimicked in design. Each set fired flechettes of light, bursts of beams that scattered like shotgun pellets, forming a sequencing wall of death before it.
Vagari drew them in, bent their light into his own, and in one fluid movement ejected them from their orbit as a crackling lance of pure energy. The centaur staggered in its charge before falling forward, carving a deep trench in the algae walls with the lower half of it that remained. Vagari then raised his palm, uttering words of power, unknown words that came to him by seemingly primal comprehension, “Steg-krewh-mehgh!”
Amaranth energies sizzled across his skin, jumping and crackling like bolts of electricity. When the silver rain came, not a drop of the bile could reach him. It was blocked wholly by an umbrella of aethereal force. He hadn’t known the words or their meaning, but something inside him told him they were the right words to say. Vagari could feel that sword of fire honing within him, each step forward a blacksmith’s hammer upon the molten steel of it. The fire of her, the soul of Nintu, was being reforged, transformed from the volatile thing it was, so full of hate, remorse, and a lust for conflict, into something new, something wholly him. Where hate had festered, now bloomed love; where remorse had shrouded all, now shone hope; where lied the dragon of her war, now stood all those who were lost to it, holding up that dream for a better tomorrow.
Vagari wondered how far this transformation would go. As the soul of her became his, would the body too? Hasn’t the mind already? No longer was he Eddy Valentino – already he made choices his former self never would have, never would have dreamed of. Would his body become a reflection of himself instead of the image of Abaddon? For the first time since he was a child forced to abandon his dreams for his father’s own, Vagari wondered what he would be when he grew up – when he pushed past the cocoon of his making and became himself truly.
His self-actualization was abruptly cut short when something struck him, some unseen force that sent him in all his awakened divinity tumbling skyward, tossed aside like an out of favor ragdoll. Vagari cartwheeled across the bog until he came to a sudden stop at a brick wall. His ears rang, his skin burned, and once again the world was spinning around him. Hastily he had to steady himself, stoke the fire lest it go out.
Vagari felt that power waning within him but managed to focus enough to rekindle the flame. He was unsure if he could do it a second time. The euphoria of might had faded, and with it sunk in the grimmer aspects of reality as he turned to face his attacker. The world had grown dark at midday as a great shadow consumed the land. Hundreds of red eyes burned through the darkness, all watching him in their slow march of destruction. Though Vagari had steeled himself for their onslaught, the edge of it was somewhat dulled by the hopelessness the fire had blinded him to.
For every red star plucked from the sky, a hundred white ones fell to darkness. They were losing. It had been predicted, expected even, but for a moment he really thought they had a chance. But there would be others, right? Others who would fight the horde when they fell? Tehom, himself, they weren’t the last – they couldn’t be! There would always be others to fight, as there had been since the dawn of that accursed war. Vagari sharpened the blade of his resolve on that hope, the hope that his dream would live on in others after they made their final stand. All the same, it was up to him to make it easier on them by taking out as many as they could – and that was exactly what he aimed to do.
Vagari’s wings once more ignited with that otherworldly light as he lifted himself off the ground and stepped forward. His soul and spirit were his own, they were Vagari, but as his wonderment keenly reminded him, his body was the body of Abaddon – of Nintu’s sword of blood, her angel of doom. He would be a fool to deny himself all the weapons at his disposal. Vagari reached behind his back and pulled free his eggs. He stoked that waning flame within him, whipping it back up into a conflagration. Perhaps he couldn’t control it, her raw power at its fullest, but perhaps he didn’t have to. Vagari set the eggs upon the ground and instilled in them his will, that divine power overwhelming. His ordain was hellfire, and his command was doom.