LVI.
The fire was gone from Vagari, replaced solely by mundane horror that spread throughout his body like veins in shattered ice. That was the feeling, the feeling of standing on a frozen lake looking down at the cracks spreading out around him. And all he could do was wait with bated breath for it to break, for him to fall through and drown in those icy depths. Everything the goddess had to spare had gone into his creature, with what little remained being burned up as a shield to protect himself from the titan’s combined radiance. But now, all that was left was Val, his mind, his strength, his humanity; none of which Vagari thought would be enough to get him through their next volley alive. He staggered to his feet, weak, worn, and wary. All the warmth in the land had faded, seemingly replaced with that bitter cold, that bone-aching chill.
He watched in quiet dread, staring at those pulsing red lights and silent explosions as bursts of holy hellfire struck fruitlessly against his shield. The colossi were desperately trying to break through with beam and fists, frantically scratching at the barrier of adamic might. Thankfully the shield held, but it was only a matter of time. Something told him that as impressive as the feat of magic was, it wouldn’t stand up to their insistence forever, maybe not even as long as he needed it to. Vagari sat back, the hump of his spine pressed up painfully against the mud mortared rubble that that boggy hell had half-swallowed. It was painful, but only half as painful as trying to stand. So, he sat and watched the beams of crimson light splash against his shield like water drops on one of the thousand surrounding pools.
Vagari laughed as that cold washed over him more and more with each second. With Abaddon’s memory lost to him, he knew not what horror his fire had brought into the world – but they sure did. That much was obvious. Fear – Vagari was glad that the Godhead was still that much human. Whatever righteous superiority, whatever assured victory they had divined, it had been stripped away as soon as his pseudo-life had been willed into existence. Something about it had raised a beacon that’s light had cut through the unchallengeable outcome of defeat like her titan’s burning eyes cut through flesh and bone.
It was no small part of Vagari that was afraid as well. It was a self-depreciating fear, the fear that he was about to bring in something that would only lead to more devastation. That fear, however, was greatly outweighed by the fear of failing those counting on him. BP needed all the time he could give her, and he was going to give her every second he could – damn the cost. His eyes shifted to the monolithic thing, the fetid spire of oscillating substance. What that substance was, Vagari couldn’t rightly say. It seemed chitinous, fleshy in the same way his other spawn had been, but not singular in that nature, just as the will placed into it hadn’t been wholly his own – wholly Vagari – but Abaddon and Nintu as well. Parts of it seemed drawn from the earth, appearing as stone, or metal even. While others seemed almost phantasmal, as if bending the space around it as his Ascended form had bent light. The spire itself, a pillar of obsidian-like matter, reminded him entirely too much of the creature he had encountered in the void, of its solid understandable form. It was a similarity that did nothing to negate his fears.
The Tevat was drawing near, minutes away maybe, and then he would have to face her once more – the Being of Light, the Godhead. There would be no running away this time, no escape for him or her. Vagari knew he didn’t have the strength left to fight her, but he still held out some small hope that perhaps there would be another way. Maybe, he hoped, that there was more of humanity left inside her than fear. What had sold him on the idea was BP and her taming of the amalgamation, a creature of fear, rage, and internal conflict. It too was a creature of melded souls. Was the Godhead really so different? Of all the souls of mankind bundled together, forced to coexist, cooperate, commiserate, none would sympathize with his plight? Vagari refused to believe that.
No, there had to be a war inside them, inside her, Elizabeth. But, in the end that was neither here nor there. If Ti’amat really was the outsider that the demon on Peter spoke of, there would be no breakthrough until the entity’s hold over her was ended. But how? How was he supposed to do that, break their hold, without first breaking through to Elizabeth? He was no psychic, he couldn’t just enter their mind as BP had. But he had to try something somehow. That was assuming he survived to get that far. Vagari cursed, not knowing what to do. Of his success he already had his doubts, as many doubts his shield of hard light had cracks, which now, under the angel’s relentless assault, were many.
Vagari was surrounded, encaged by living alabaster and murderous cyclopean eyes. There were so many of those red stars in the heavens above him, so many of those hateful things burning in the night, it tinted his bastion as gruesome as their intent upon him. That intent was beginning to seep through the cracks, beginning to be felt again, heard again, shaking the earth as a cacophony of war drums in his skull. The shield shattered like the face of an old computer screen, turning a solid milky white before suddenly not existing at all. The Legion of Heaven fell upon him violently, their fists raised, their eyes ignited. Vagari raised his arms to shield himself, shield that dying dream of his, protect it a moment more before both dreams and the future he saw in them were taken along with his life.
Their intent felt firm and hot upon his skin – his death assured. The fire erupted from their eyes, making their searing resolve manifest. Vagari watched, staring not in despair but in abandon as the heavenly spears inched towards him at the speed of light – enkindling a writhing worm of light into a cosmic burst of radiant energies. His thoughts turned to the dream he had that first night in the bog, the dream of the towering being edging towards him in the fields of yesteryear, burning away the Elysium he had resigned himself to. He had been happy there, happy to pretend the world didn’t exist, living in a place where he could pretend that who he was before was someone else, some far away dream. All dreams come to an end, Vagari had learned that day, all dreams and nightmares alike. He took solace in what hope still remained, the hope that BP would succeed where he failed. Vagari shut his eyes and awaited death.
But it wasn’t Death that came for him. “Key nehdheh, keħpbhuh, Seħgaino?” a voice, a feeling, an evocation of meaning echoed out, a childish giggle following cavernous depths. “This doesn’t have to be fate, precious thing…” Vagari’s eyes darted left and right, from the ground to the sky, to the falling fists, to the lines of hellfire – the world had stopped moving. Reality had frozen and with it: a stay of execution. Vagari felt a deep coldness wash over him, that flood of aversion that had haunted him since he first stepped foot in the Peter I base. Had that been the first? The last? Had it always been there? The Alpha and the Omega meant nothing in the Void, in the Abzu. Time and space were at the mercy of chaos, the unknowable ebb and flow of the eternal sea.
Vagari shifted his gaze to the crystalline cocoon of his monster, and saw one looking back at him, reflected in its obsidian surface. “You found me,” uttered the voice of a jovial child, as the twisted aethereal creature tapped on the surface as if it were a window. “Kedheh?” the beings voice resounded, deflecting off every facet of the bio-mineral structure. “Kedheh-kedheh-kedheh…” Each jarring echo was a psychic assault on his mind. Vagari fell to his knees, throwing up under the strain of the psychic invasion. The words came from everywhere and nowhere at once, from the highest heavens to the lowest hell, from within and without. They were words he had just learned, yet always knew, always understood despite being unfathomable.
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The pain eased with every eclipsing parallel, but that nauseous feeling, that paramount revulsion only agonized within him, thrashing and threshing at the heart of him. The unknowable aspect within the chrysalis flickered and changed shape with each plane of the stone it looked through – eyeless sight Vagari could feel probing him. Its gaze crawled above his skin and within it, over every cosmic brick of his construction. “It doesn’t have to be the end, precious thing,” it proposed. “Be not afraid… ħeme seħgaino…” The Outsider’s words were soft and kind, spoken in overlapping voices and languages both recognizable and wholly alien. But for every comfort the voice offered there came a taunting laughter like rolling thunder behind them, ghost of maliciousness that chilled him to the bone.
“Who… Who are you?” Vagari asked again, repeating his question from the void. He could hardly breathe under the strain of its repulsive aura, so the words came out as a stuttered drone. “W-what do you want? Why are you… you doing this?”
“Who, what, why?” the being echoed in a girlish singsong. The words bounced in thought, from ear to ear, before erupting into strange otherworldly cachinnation. “What I’ve always wanted – to help you,” the being claimed, its laughter cutting off abruptly, being replaced by mournful sobbing. “I want to help… Dhewghwembh, keħp khelb tuħ.”
“Dhewghwembh…?” Vagari repeated, translating the word out loud. “Daughter… You mean Nintu, don’t you? I’m not Nintu. Nintu’s dead. You killed her.”
The being only laughed at this, a sharp pointed laugh that wasn’t veiled behind any sweet-sounding voice. It tapped the glass and the image shown changed. “Your time here has blinded you, Val,” announced a familiar voice of Malcom, Eddy Valentino’s long dead friend. Malcom stepped out of the crystal as if he were simply stepping over a threshold, and maybe he was. He stood there for a minute, brushing his lab coat off before looking up with a wide warm smile. “You look like shit, man…” he said in a way only the best of friends could. Malcom looked up at the frozen beams of death and huffed. “Damn, isn’t that something!” He turned back and looked at Vagari, really looked at him, seeing the person behind the monster he had become. It brought such a pain to Vagari’s heart that he couldn’t help but scrunch his face and cry.
“I know, I know,” Malcom said, “I’ve missed you too, buddy. Things have been hard as hell for you, haven’t they? Before all this too, before Val, before Abaddon, before it all! Like I said… It’s this place, man. It blinded you. This is the end, you say, that Nintu’s dead,” Malcom mimicked, throwing his hands up with a laugh. “You’re so damned sure about it, sure of everything. Just like before. Just like always.”
“And yet, here you are,” said another voice, one stern and commanding, the voice of Carla Brooks. She walked out from behind Malcom as if she had always been there, watching over his shoulder. She always had been, in a way. “We know that isn’t the truth of it, is it? We know now that things are never so ‘is’ or ‘isn’t’, don’t we? I mean, look around you, Val! Do you really want to believe that? Truly? Is this the ‘is’ you’re resolved to see? It wasn’t then. Not as Val. Not as Abaddon. And not as Nintu. Not even as the dust you were made of. Since when did you bow to fate?”
“Right?” Malcom exclaimed with a toss of his hands. “Since when, man? Fate’s been dogging your ass since the dawn of time, and you – ha – you denied it every step of the way – until now! You’re everchanging, man, dynamic! Fuck fate. Fuck the duality of it!”
“What you ARE is proof of it,” Carla added, crouching down to stab a finger at him. “Proof that that yoke and chain is all in your mind, just like it’s always been. Look at you. WHO are YOU?! What are you? At what angle of your perception does this fit in the duality of Fate? You’re a contradiction of fate, aren’t you? Of GOD and Man, of man and woman, of life and death. Is this really where you want to draw that line?”
Vagari stared at them both with tears in his eyes. He knew it really wasn’t them, but it was so good to see them again he couldn’t help but pour out his soul to them, the remorse, the pain of betrayal, his love. “No,” Vagari answered, biting his lip to hold back a sob as he shook his head, “no I don’t… I don’t want to die. I don’t want to fail! I don’t want this! I don’t want this ending at all! I want to fight it! I want to see it… I want to see my dream come to pass! I want to live in that world, if only for a little while, and see it, see that all my struggles were worth it in the end! I want that end! I want… What I want…” His thoughts went to BP, to Trois, to Soprano, to her, her that nameless girl that he ran away from, that he abandoned because fate tore him away. His thoughts went to them; them and his fantasy that maybe, just maybe, they’d all be friends, were friends in some other world. “I don’t want to turn back time…”
“There’s no going back…” Malcom affirmed, dissolving away with his words.
“I don’t want to break the wheel,” Vagari continued, gritting his teeth in the pain of it all. “And I don’t want forgiveness!”
“You can’t…” Professed Carla, fading away with a smile. “There’s nothing to forgive…”
“All I want, all I’ve ever wanted,” Vagari wailed, fists clenched and his face in the dirt, “since I met her… All I’ve wanted was for her to have a fighting chance!”
“She will, body of my body,” decreed the Outsider dutifully. “Ħemetuħ bhendhayl komen nehsekh – our pact remains unbroken. You will have my help, Seħgaino…”
“I don’t understand… Why?” Vagari asked, daring to look up from the ground. “You, you killed Nintu. You corrupted the Godhead! Why? Why help me fight her?! It makes no sense!” That horrible grin of obsidian teeth spread wide across the crystalline facets of Ti’amat’s face once more. “Blood of my blood, see now my promise fulfilled,” Ti’amat proclaimed, wiping away the barrier’s cracks with a wave of her hand. “Time is my gift to you. Time enough to set your creature free.”
The chrysalis cracked; a sharp thunderbolt that split down its face, cutting Vagari’s dour reflection in it in two. He was alone again, alone surrounded by death that was slowly returning to life as time began to right itself. Vagari stared as one of the angel’s frozen beams fizzled out against his renewed shield, sending waves of energy rippling outward. Then, as without warning as the temporal abeyance had been, life exploded around him, slaying the ephemeral time-death the dreadful being of the void had set him in. The Angels discharged their swords of hellfire, set low their risen fists with destructive intent, and all the world heard their trumpets sounded as the earth shook under their heavenly might. Vagari could do nothing more than face it head on and wait, his death seemingly assured though momentarily delayed. The shield cracked again, with new faults spiraling outward like bolts of electricity. This was it, he thought, closing his eyes.
Much to his surprise, however, he never felt that deathly light burn away his skin like so many poor souls before him. Nor would he feel the weight of their fists crashing down to crush his bones. No, something prevented it, something protected him. The angels had been fast to make up for lost time, but his abomination, his child of doom had been faster. Vagari dared open his eyes. Looking up he was greeted by an immense creature of black chitinous plate and blood red flesh. It uncoiled its seven necks and brought high its horned crown of petrified shadow, obsidian shards that mimicked the horror of its cavernous maws. The great dragon let loose a haunting cry, as sepulchral as the primordial underworld the damned spirit of it had been risen from.
Its tail, a blackened length of pitted chiton and fibrous raw flesh, swung low and wide around it. With the sheer might of it, the beast pulled down all those surrounding stars of heaven, bringing their hateful red glares crashing down to earth. The abysmal thing sounded its apocalyptic cry again, a battle cry, a promise of doom. The earth shook now, not with angelic might, but with all the souls of Hell freed upon it. The earth shook, and the Heavens shook with it.