LVIII.

Vagari’s creature was, in every sense of the word, monstrous: a great hydra of obsidian plates over raw ruby flesh that pulsated with power, both physical and ethereal, with each earth-shaking step. It was an immensity Vagari hadn’t thought possible from something so small as his clutch of eggs, a disbelief that told him that this horrific being was another past life resurgence, just as his Reapers were – Abaddon’s instruments of doom. Vagari wondered what kind of person he was, Abaddon, but decided he didn’t really want to know. The mind required to design such horrifying things, things that didn’t just kill, but obliterate with vile intent and vicious means, wasn’t a mind he wished to know. The Reaper brought quick deaths, but it was a glimpse of hell all the same. Vagari stared up at the great beast and watched Armageddon play out, wondering what vicious means it would employ.

The angels hardly noticed him now, lurching by without so much as a hateful glance as they made their charge towards destruction incarnate. Vagari laughed as he sat there in the rotting bog, feeling blissfully insignificant for the first time since his journey began. Their apathy to him now upon the battlefield told him one thing: that killing him meant nothing now. Doom had come and he was its harbinger, but not its keeper. While that notion did terrify him, his demon was one of singular intent. Angelic blood poured down the great dragon’s unforgiving jaws as each head spread coordinated death across the forever tainted battlefield. Its faces were malicious prisons of no escape: Xibalban caves, silvered by the holy ichor; hellmouths of jagged incurving black stone, that lead into crimson pits of barbed papillae. Once one of the Legion’s dwindling many were trapped inside, its death was more than assured, it was a blessing.

Vagari’s dragon breathed erosion, an acerbic miasma that began eating away at its prey as soon as they came in contact with it. It was impatient however, and never let that slow digestive death be the end of them. Instead, it would lash out with one of six of its seven heads and crush them between those cavernous jaws. The seventh head, the middle, was different not only in mannerism, but design. Halfway up its neck the obsidian chiton turned red, as bloody as the ghastly twisting flesh beneath. The face of it, like the Reaper’s own, was uncomfortably human compared to the rest. It appeared anunnakian in shape and form – a bastardization of the GOD of Man upon her first resurrection. Its horns arched skyward, a sharply defined omega that made up the blackened brow of a waxen face – a near-human effigy seemingly made of angelic alabaster.

What stood out more than anything about this central face wasn’t the familiarity of it, but what was otherworldly. Where eyes should have been was only a jagged wound, a cruel divide that severed the angelic from the demonic above. Like the colossi’s divine engines, the wound bled profusely – a disgusting black cruor that fell in semisolid clumps wherever it shook its horrible visage. But not only blood flowed from the grotesque furrow. A psionic resonance could be heard emanating from it, a soft distant sound that reminded Vagari too much of despondent weeping. The monstrous thing raged and raged before him, acting out his instillation of doom with furor and without hesitations, and the angels poured upon it. They charged, firing their hateful beams in rapid succession until they drew in close enough to strike with fist and wild abandon. They fired, they struck, they clawed away at its glassy chiton armor, but it was all in vain. Nothing the swarming colossi did brought so much as a pause to the hydric archfiend’s holocaustic intent upon them.

Vagari watched with stoic intensity. Such power could have saved the world from the fire divinity wrought. Would it save it now? Or would their victory only be temporary – beaten out in the long run by the metamorphic nature of their undying engines, those rotten cores that seeded the earth with paradise forbidden. Vagari shifted his gaze to the spattering of argent bile upon his arms. He was covered in it and surrounded by it – the cherubim’s flaming sword that forbade Edenic entry. First-Matter, Tehom had once called it; the fuel of change; the universal base of life, and the blood of gods. Seeing it shimmering upon his skin, silvering gold, Vagari realized that this wasn’t the first time he had seen it so close. He could still see her face, Nintu’s, as she pressed up against his cocoon, pressed into him, the fear in her eyes, and the blood on her lips.

It was the same, but hers hadn’t befouled the earth with its drops. Was he simply immune to its effects due to the nature of his being? Or was there something else behind the scenes he was in the dark about. Either way, unlike the Synbio soldiers and those suicidal enough to breach into those forbidden gardens, he didn’t seem to be subject to its fatal rebukes. Part of him wondered if anyone ever really was. Tehom had never seemed to give his fears of it much thought at all, but never explained why either. The amount of divine blood spilled there that day would drown the world, a new deluge to wash out mankind for good – a true and tested threat, or so Vagari thought. Once more he was being reminded about how much he didn’t know – something that was often the best part of being a scientist but was now the worst part of being a messiah.

Vagari turned away from the future and returned to the now, to the chaos before him, and the sword of Damocles raised high, slowly inching towards the nape of his neck. Vagari wondered when that sword would finally drop, watching its growing shadow cleave in twine the sky above. The Tevat had shifted direction since he last looked – an almost unwelcome success in his mission. At long last it seemed he had drawn the full attention of their executioner. “We can end this!” Vagari shouted up to the ship with no real hope that she could hear him. “I don’t want to fight you! I never wanted a war! I never wanted any of this! And I know you didn’t either… Elizabeth! We’re both pawns against our will, aren’t we?! That much is true, isn’t it?! You didn’t have a choice, neither of us did! You don’t-…!”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

A light ignited on the ship as bright as the sun. At first Vagari thought perhaps the Godhead really did hear him, that she was appearing to answer his challenge of faith. Then, however, that light pulsed a familiar red and a hellfire beam as wide as the city’s ruined roadways finished parting the sky. The Tevat’s cannon instantly turned the whole world black and white as all other colors seemed drained in contrast to the blinding red beam. The world bloomed into a totality of white as the weapon of mass destruction seemingly burned it all away. Vagari could feel that that wasn’t truly so, that he was just blinded by the sheer radiance of it. By strangely continuing turn of fate, the doomsday cannon missed by no small margin. Sight returned slowly, slow for a battlefield at any rate, but when it did, he saw what would have happened to him if the Tevat had struck true.

Half of the ruined New Houston was simply gone – not just destroyed, not just burned away by the hellfire, but gone. Where streets and roadways had crisscrossed a moment before, where the skeletons of buildings yet swayed in the acrid wind of that abdominal place, all that remained were fields of diamond scales. Vagari couldn’t even imagine what kind of weapon it was, watching a haze of superheated air falling back down to earth to fill the void the blast had created, but he knew one thing – if it struck true, that would most assuredly be the end of him. That only meant he had to act quickly. The blast had hit an unoccupied part of the city, so he still had a job to do, the others were still counting on him.

Vagari uttered a silent prayer to BP’s expedited success then turned back to the battle royal still in progress. The angels had nearly covered the terrible hydra, neither of which had paused in their struggle to witness their near annihilation. Vagari spat and glared up at the ship, blissfully taking its time to ignite a second shot. “We’re out of time!” Vagari shouted to the demon, as doubtful it could hear him as he was of the Godhead’s ability to. “We need to finish this now, before the Tevat can fire off another shot!”

The immense demon craned over its seventh head, that mocking effigy of divine personage, seemingly attuned to his words after all. Suddenly it rose from crocodilian lows to serpentine heights, rearing up upon its tail like a cobra posed to strike. The great archfiend shook the biomechanical horrors from its body as it seemingly threatened to breach into Heaven itself. That despondent weeping intensified, sending out shockwaves of psychic energies, visible with the warping of space around them. The horrid creature’s booming sound of torment echoed across the battlefield, and with its call the dead began to rise. Fallen angels groaned and wheezed as their broken bodies staggered to their feet once more – the vicious wounds of their demise no longer gushing that silvery first-matter, but instead, oozing that black coagulated bile the great dragon cast upon them with its sightless gaze.

In a show of necromantic horror, the angels’ dead were risen and turned back upon them as corpses driven by the chthonic hydras parasitic blood. There it was, Vagari thought, the source of their desperation – why they had fought so hard to prevent its birth. He glanced down at his arm, back to that silvery toxin, and saw that its luster was gone. All that remained was a vile black crust, a mucus of crystalline shards. Vagari unfurled his wings and flew up into the air to get a better view of the battlefield. He was worn and weary, making the flight a challenging one, a struggle to even stay still against the war fueled winds rising from below. He watched as his monster fell forward, crushing dozens under its bulk as they tried to spear at its belly. watched those dozens rise again, crawling out from beneath it as crippled ghouls to gnaw at the legs of their former companions.

The Legion of Heaven was being decimated, soundly routed by its own might. From legion it became cohort; from cohort it became century; and from century only small defending units remained. Vagari watched with both hope and horror at how fast the battle turned with the rising of the dead. But that hope drained as the Tevat’s doomsday cannon burned to life once more – a golden brightness that would soon turn to red and drown the world in blood. Vagari didn’t know if he could outrun it, but he had to try. He dove into those gale force winds, using their currents to propel him forward, towards the city. He looked for the flame within himself, that last ember of power, but could only find himself – himself, which would have to be enough.

The light began to pulse, tinting the world crimson as it prepared to fire. Vagari’s heart was beating so fast, seemingly faster even than the wings upon his back, it felt still in his chest. He let out a shout as he felt the heat rising behind him and shut his eyes tight as the world turned red. The Tevat fired and this time it struck true. Suddenly those fateful words came to mind, after all that time, after all that spilt blood, as his wings burned, and the world came to an end – the words that had started it all. “SoPeth gwedh Ħeme,” shouted Vagari at the top of his lungs, “Nabu!”

“GEOGRAPHICAL COORDINATES MAPPED; LOCATION CONFIRMED,” a mechanical voice announced. “EMERGENCY RECALL ACTIVATED.”

With a burst of conflicting light, a jagged blue scar dividing that all-encompassing red, Vagari was thrown once more into a world of darkness, unsure if he had said the words in time or if this was the Hell he had always known awaited him.