XLV.
“In the year of our LORD 2408, the throne of GOD fell from the heavens. Upon Mount Zion it fell, torn free from prophecy, torn free from the destined will of GOD. The Hundred and Forty-Four Thousand first fruits of Earth, redeemed of the BEAST’s unholy corruption, fell once more into the Kingdom of the Dragon. The fields of Armageddon lay bare, the forces of the BEAST unchallenged, the HOLY choir of GOD silent, and their horns unsounded. Two hundred of the first fruit fled from the light back into the darkness of the BEAST’s kingdom…” Tehom slid her hands over the stone slates of the Book of Portals, seemingly reading words uncarved in its pages. “Does this sound familiar?” she asked knowingly. “Your visit to the dam should give you a hint.”
It did. It sounded an awful lot like the people of the dam’s origin story – the basis of their religion. “If I were to guess,” Vagari answered, “I would say it’s romanticizing the fall of the Tevat. The ‘First Fruits’ are the passengers, the First Seeds, they called themselves. The two-hundred, Xu’s group.”
“Very good,” Tehom confirmed with a nod, sliding the book over to him with it. “At least you can piece that much of a puzzle together.” Vagari stared down at the tome, the wretched thing he had been chasing for so long and saw not the hope he had instilled in it over the years, but the time wasted searching for it, and the lives lost because of it. His piercing eyes set upon the alabaster and gold relief of Nintu facing it, his eyes to hers. Vagari snorted and tossed open the cover unceremoniously. “I don’t know what you’re ‘reading’, but there’s nothing in here,” Vagari said flatly, not realizing how right he was. “Nothing I need…”
Thirty-eight stone pages, that was what lied within that cover, and they were all blank. He sorted through the tablets with knit brows. Gone were the schematics and designs for the infernal machine that had drawn Nintu from her eternal rest in Kur, and instead, in their place, were literally blank slates. “I don’t understand,” Vagari admitted in frustration. “The words were here. Everything was here! I read this, cover to cover, a thousand times over again. Is this some kind of joke?”
“No,” Tehom replied with a spectral chuckle. “Before, you saw what the artifact needed you to see, and after, what you expected to see. Now you are seeing it as it truly is, without expectation, without internal influences.”
“So, what?” Vagari said exasperatedly. “I believe it’s worthless so it’s appearing worthless? I’m sure there were plenty of people back then that thought it was just a hunk of rock too, but we all saw the same thing.”
“Is it truly surprising that human minds see what was meant for them?” Tehom uttered dryly. “Xu thought it was worth all the bodies he left in his wake,” she cruelly added. “So, why don’t we think a little harder on this puzzle? You were doing so well before.”
Vagari shot her a hateful look and rolled his eyes before staring back down at the blank stone. BP had once suggested the book had some kind of sentience to it, that it was almost alive. So, was its changing really so hard to believe? Vagari knit his brows in thought. “The book no longer recognizes me as human,” he said, more to himself than her. “It sees me as Abaddon, a Weħǵhekw.”
“There we go, effort,” Tehom confirmed with a slight tilt of her massive crown. “See what you can accomplish by thinking things through? The artifact is a Seħgaino, a…”
“A precious thing,” Vagari finished distantly, remembering the voice that had accompanied the alien feeling at times. Tehom glanced at him with an inquisitive side-eye. “Yes,” she said flatly, “that is one translation of the word. In this case, it’s meaning is closer to ‘Exalted Treasure’. You see,” Tehom continued with a wave of her nigh vestigial hand, “there is much more to this artifact than you can possibly imagine.”
“And I take it you’re going to illuminate me on that,” Vagari said flatly.
“You see nothing now in its pages because you’ve grown beyond what they previously had to offer,” Tehom stated as if it were common knowledge. “Perhaps it was your connection with your Shassuru spirit, your soħiwl, or maybe it was your coming to terms on who you are, who you thought you were – the ghost of Eddy Valentino living on.” Tehom said this with a mocking chuckle that felt like nails on a chalkboard. “Whichever the case may have been, the simple fact stands… For once in your new life, you’ve grown.”
Had he grown? Grown past being the haunting living ghost of Eddy Valentino? If he had, he knew exactly who it was to thank for that development. Vagari looked over his shoulder. BP was in the near distance laying flat on the ground with her toothy maw propped up on the palms of her hands. More to keep her from asking a barrage of questions as they worked than anything, Tehom had instructed the A.I. Nabu to grant her access to the Central Communications Network, the depths of which she dove into most eagerly. Between forum articles and security cam footage, she was hooked. “Oh wow, Vagari,” she exclaimed with a laugh, “this man, he just tried to rob some lady, but it was a trap, and he got robbed! Is this what it’s like every day here? Oh-Oh, the cops just showed up!”
Vagari couldn’t muster up more of an answer than a nasal sigh as he thought to himself how the last thing she needed was an addiction to trash T.V.. “There are far worse things the girl could be watching on there,” Tehom said darkly with a psychic chuckle lingering in his mind. “But I made sure everything’s relatively PG.”
“Stay out of my head,” Vagari stated firmly with a glare.
“Learn to guard your thoughts,” Tehom replied. “Or think quieter. The walls of your mind are stronger than most of those ants she’s watching now, but they’re still feeble… Weak for what your about to do.”
“And what am I about to do?” asked Vagari impatiently. “Something more meaningful than staring at blank pages, I hope. We’ve been here for, what, a week now? And you’ve done nothing but babble exposition and berate me for not knowing the entire personal history of a people that’s only proof of existence is the paperweight right in front of me.”
“Would you rather me talk in cryptic hooks and lures?” Suggested Tehom with a bony grin. “To prepare you to face what lies ahead, you must strengthen your connection to your soħiwl as well as your ‘men’, your mind or soul. It is beyond important that you will be able to effectively use your power against the ħrerseħwr and resist the imposing will of the creature controlling them.”
Vagari tapped the desk with a sharp nail, granting her words a moment of thought. She wasn’t wrong. The demon in the algae marsh had easily gotten into his head and nearly killed him, and Tehom again, nearly trapping him in his own mind in the Atlantic Wastes. If she were capable of such a feat from across the world, he hated to think what she was capable of up close. Vagari thought, maybe if his mind had been stronger, the Godhead wouldn’t have manipulated him into freeing her, using the faces of his lost and loved against him. He grit his teeth. He hated how easily he had been played, pulled along so readily on those strings. Of course there was no righteous savior, no hallowed hero coming to right his wrongs. Vagari felt like a fool to hope and more so to believe. “What do I need to do?” Vagari asked resignedly. “Do we light some incense and candles, sit cross-legged and chant?”
“Thematically appropriate, but no, that won’t be necessary,” Tehom replied with an almost kindly laugh. Hearing it felt more unnerving than her usual witch’s chortle. “First step is understanding,” she proclaimed, drawing the tome back to her with a wave of her hand. “What you so crudely translated as ‘The Book of Portals’ is so much more… The Libro ex Portarum – it’s true name is ‘soWreydbheħg Pent-monoghos’, or, rather, ‘The Book of Many Ways’.”
“At best that sounds more fantastical,” Vagari said with a huff, “but it’s the same difference.”
“It really isn’t,” Tehom uttered in an as-matter-of-factly tone before continuing. “Yes, it is all that those foolish men and women we were could hope for, but in a capacity beyond their wildest dreams. It doesn’t just connect us to two points in space, but to all of them, and beyond.”
“Beyond?” asked Vagari. “Beyond what?”
“Beyond the limited confines of our universe, our dimension,” Tehom explained. “This tome, this Seħgaino, connects us to the ebb and flow of the Abzu – the space between realities, and the very fabric of it itself. The river of existence leads to a great many places, many times, many realities – and leads all of them back to us.”
“Okay, that’s a lot,” Vagari uttered. “But how does that help us? You’ve had a hold of it a lot longer than I have, and it doesn’t seem to have helped you any.”
“Tell me, Vagari,” Tehom then said, ignoring his statement. “In all your years scrounging in the dirt, what have you learned about ħelalyos – or, as you likely know them as, anomalies?”
There was that word again: ħelalyos – outsider. Vagari leaned in, putting his elbows upon the edge of the immense desk. He propped his chin up against the knuckles of his left hand and whistled softly as he let the question roll across his mind a moment. “As much as anybody,” he admitted with a wave of his free hand. “They’re… a vastly varying phenomenon. Some appear as monsters, or demonic beings, while others can appear as just about anything, if you can see them at all. I heard of one that appears as a storm cloud that’s drawn in over a mountain by loud noises – festivals, parties, just like Grendel.”
“Very good,” Tehom mused. “What else?”
“It’s also believed that they’re immortal,” Vagari continued, “or not really alive – not in the same sense as demons or aberrations, or even in an anthropomorphic sense like an angel. You can’t kill them, can’t even harm them. You have to work around them or avoid them entirely. Knowing what triggers them or their loop is key to that, and survival. They rarely if ever deviate from their track. Best I can describe them is that they’re like programs that have specific reactions to specific actions.”
“Rudimentary as expected, but it will fit our narrative nicely enough,” Tehom said in such a dry way that Vagari quite loudly thought of throwing the book at her. A specter of laughter not his own haunted the back of his mind as she continued. “Programs that serve no purpose, to no end – where do they lie in the grand scheme of things? I’ll tell you now that the Great Mother’s machines, in all their utility and might, could never have brought them here. The human forge, despite the damage it may or may not have done to the biosphere, has no means to create such horrors. So, where did they come from? I’ve been plagued by this riddle since my awakening.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“And you think I have the answer?” Vagari asked with a snort. He shrugged haplessly and then said, “What about the beacon?” he reminded her. “The demon said a ħelalyos had attached itself to it, and potentially the Godhead after.”
“The beacon is no more than a means to contact the Weħǵhekw, the Blessed Mother’s Watchers – nothing more,” Tehom said shortly. “Without the Watchers, it shouldn’t have functioned at all.”
“And yet a demon and the Godhead destroyed it,” Vagari interjected. “That has to mean something.”
“Surely,” Tehom offered with another curt wave of her hand. “It means the Lamb has its filthy hooves all up in our pie.”
“The Lamb? Who’s the Lamb?” Vagari asked. “I’ve heard that mentioned before.”
“Who is the Lamb?” Tehom said in such a way that he could physically feel the roll of her eyes. “The Lamb, or Enki, is our eternal tormenter and one of our many foes in the great war of being.”
“Enki, the demon mentioned that name,” Vagari exclaimed. “Said that Enki used the forge to bind it to their service. I thought only Shassuru could use the forge.”
“The Lamb is a special case, one that I care not to get into,” Tehom firmly denied. “Just know he does us no favors – no matter the instance.”
Vagari knit his brows and eyed her suspiciously but didn’t press the issue. “Fine,” he said, “back to the matter at hand – the Outsider. Risking more ridicule, do you think… getting rid of it – if that’s possible – might solve our problems, or at least help our cause?”
“As much as I’d love to grind you down more, that idea is not a horrible one,” Tehom allowed. For a moment she seemed to linger in thought. “Ridding the egregor of its infection might give us an advantage not just in this battle but in the next. If it has been under the influence of the ħelalyos this whole time, it may suggest that it will be in a weakened infantile state if we remove that influence.”
“And that’s good?” Vagari questioned.
“Very,” Tehom answered, “especially for the survival of mankind. We could kill it and postpone the reaping until the next is chosen.”
“Until the next?” Vagari asked. “It doesn’t end with her?”
“There is no end to an egregor – only postponing the inevitable,” Tehom answered. “An Gweyħwos-Dheghom, a Living One, is the apogee of any civilization. It’s always been our goal is to delay that inevitability indefinitely. However, it’s the Lamb’s purpose to see that end through. Which makes its interference most vexing.”
“Do you think this Enki had a hand in Nintu’s demise?” asked Vagari.
“The Lamb is cunning, a worthy adversary,” Tehom offered reluctantly, “but even he has no means to kill a Shassuru. In our countless eons of fighting, he’s never once tried.”
“Then the Outsider then?” Vagari returned, tapping the desktop with a sharp finger. “It has to be connected.”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Tehom answered. With but a thought, she opened the book and pushed it towards him. Vagari looked down at the blank pages, unsure of what he was supposed to be seeing. “Focus your mind and read,” Tehom ordered. “What you’re looking for is our Outsider friend – an origin, their appearance, anything. We need to know everything we can about it if we wish to rid the Godhead of its corruption. Be it anomaly, demon, or another shassuru, we need to know.”
“Another shassuru,” Vagari repeated apprehensively. He had asked the question before, but never got an answer. “Do you think it could be? For some reason I thought they… I don’t know, co-existed.”
An audible laugh as dry as petrified wood escaped Tehom’s throat. “Why would you ever think that?” She questioned, again as if it were the stupidest thing she had ever heard. “Perhaps they shared an understanding once, but they have never co-existed. Most only really care about one thing: spreading the seed of True-Life. And, like most mothers, they will lie, cheat, and steal to see their spawn rise above the rest.” Tehom paused for a moment, her massive cranium pulsing as she thought it over. “The shassuru share no great love for each other. This was true before the war broke out.”
“The shassuru were at war?” Vagari questioned.
“Oh yes,” Tehom confirmed, “the only war that truly matters, the eternal war of being. There are two sides, two ideologies: the one that supports the natural order, the process of sowing and reaping, and the one that denies it. Blessed Nintu is of the latter.”
“The natural order… You mean the war against the First, right?” Vagari asked, recalling what the Goddess had told him in the frozen wastes of Peter. “Nintu mentioned it, and that it was the enemy of all life.”
“Yes, though I doubt it sees things that way,” Tehom said musingly before tapping an insistent finger upon the tome before them. “But that is neither here nor there. We have more pressing problems than the Great Mother’s eternal struggle against the status quo.”
“More pressing than a fight with GOD?” Vagari asked with a huff. “Isn’t the reaping what we’re here to stop?”
“It is our ultimate purpose, yes,” Tehom offered flatly before adding, “but this isn’t the same old battle – no. No, this time we’re not at war with Enki or the First, but something else entirely. What that something is is what we’re going to find out.”
“Right,” Vagari uttered with a slow nod. “We have to be sure of what we’re facing.”
“I am unaccustomed to being uncertain,” Tehom stated, her massive brain pulsing with agitation, a quiet rage that’s psychic echoes felt like needles prickling down Vagari’s neck. “An invading shassuru makes the most sense, and yet none at all… A shassuru wouldn’t release a mutagen upon the population or work to start the reaping early. She would purge and recycle the world for her own design. Invade with her own generals and war machines.” Tehom seethed. “It’s the best answer, but I know it’s the wrong one. So, here we are.”
Vagari stared down at the blank slates and focused, trying to will to being the words that weren’t there. After a moment he sighed – nothing. Nothing was happening, nothing was showing, and he felt nothing, no sense of power from himself or the book. Vagari let out a hiss and leaned back in his chair, throwing his arms up in defeat. “I’m sorry, I just don’t know what you expect me to do here,” he told her. “I can’t read what isn’t there. It’s blank, there’s nothing there! Why can’t you do this, anyways? You can read it, can’t you? It’s like your whole damned purpose. Why can’t you find out who’s behind all this? I – I just can’t. It’s blank.”
“No, you can’t,” Tehom uttered, her agitation turning from pins and needles to knife points along his back. “You’re still thinking with the limited mind of a human, not of a weħǵhekw, and certainly not of a shassuru!”
“Then you read it, Barbra!” Snapped Vagari pointedly. “Since you’re the ‘unrestricted connection to fucking time/space’ or whatever. If the answers are somewhere deep in those blank-ass pages, then why can’t you find them? Huh?! If that’s what you were made for, why do you need me?”
With both a psychic and vocal scream, Tehom lifted the immense desk between them with her rage and frustration made manifest, before then throwing it against the far wall. “You don’t understand at all, do you?!” She howled fitfully. “You don’t seem to realize what you have trapped in that wretched skull of yours, you whiney little thing! You have the mind of our Mother, of our GODDESS! Something that would take me a hundred years – Abaddon a thousand – a human eternity to find and draw from the countless and ever-flowing streams of the Abzu, to decode and understand, would take you mere moments! MOMENTS! You possess one of the most advanced minds in the universe, a biological computer that could calculate the course and development of entire galaxies worth of species and – and – and, like the idiot you are, you’re using it to play solitaire!”
At first Vagari sat in shock, ready to go on the offensive again and bring the physicality of his claws into the matter – to reach over and strangle the wrathful witch before she could toss him about next. But he couldn’t. A moment’s thought and all the shock and anger just fell away, swept off by the cosmic hilarity of it. She wasn’t wrong, and he could admit that. Every moment of his new life had been spent running away from the man he used to be, the man who had sold the world. He had become so willfully ignorant, unwilling to delve too deeply into anything in fear the darkness he gazed into might follow him back out. As reckless as he was diving into the ruins of the old world to recover lost knowledge, he had become overly cautious when it came to making a true discovery. He didn’t want to think beyond what he already knew, or what knowledge he could sell.
Life as a man living in New Houston, he had thought himself so damned special – brilliance unmatched, and truly worth the lives he cost. But now, now in this new world he had thought himself the cause of for so long, a world where he had wanted nothing more than to fix his mistakes and then fade away, he found exceptionality thrust upon him. The utter gall Fate had. What the actual hell was he supposed to do with the mind of a goddess? The soul of one? The power? He couldn’t help but choke out a laugh and wheeze as he pressed his face into the palms of his hands.
In a way, his prayers for the power to make the world a little better, to correct those past mistakes the best he could, had been answered; just on a scale Vagari could hardly fathom. So, he laughed, letting all the frustration and anger flow out with the tears pooling at the corners of his eyes. It was stupid! A stupid twist of fate that he had had the power within him the whole time, all those years running around searching for the damned book. It wasn’t even the book he needed, but to stop running and well and truly see himself, to reflect, and to let go. He was just so damned sorry that so many people had to die before he saw that.
Much to his surprise, as BP stared wide-eyed at them from the near distance, Tehom joined in. Her cackle starting as a confused huff before rolling into a deep resounding thunder that echoed throughout the room and his mind. It wasn’t taunting. It wasn’t wicked, or at anyone’s expense. It was just laughter; just two people expressing the utter strangeness of the road they found themselves sharing. “I understand,” Vagari said with a few quick nods and a deep calming sigh. “You’re right. I know you’re right. I have this… something inside me, and I need to use it the way it was meant to be used. I’ll do my best to follow your lead. We don’t have to like each other. I sure in hell didn’t like you when you were Barbra, why would anything change now? But… together we have the means to stop what’s coming. All the blood aside… we worked well before and we didn’t let contempt get in the way then, as devastating as that goal ended up being.”
“Our goals, this time, are much more aligned,” Tehom stated in a firm and composed manner, “of that, I assure you. Barbra played you like a fiddle and received the Mother’s justice in turn. I don’t plan on tempting fate so readily as she. So, you may not trust me as a person, and with good reason, but trust me as a colleague. I want the payout as much as you do. I strive for the same world as you. Our means may be different – mine, cruel, and yours are naive and overly sympathetic… But we want the same thing.”
“Well, what do I do?” asked Vagari, bending forward to pick up the book off the floor. Once more he stared down at those carven eyes. He saw now not a demon to fear, a harbinger of Mankind’s end, but what he must become, its guardian, its savior. It was a whole lot to swallow when he thought about it – the complex he had embraced in his past life becoming, to some extent, true in his next. But be it by choice or by necessity, those were the cards Nintu had delt him in her final moments. “And explain it to me like I’m a hobo who had wandered the wastes digging up trash for two-hundred years. Where do I even start?”
“I will take that into account,” Tehom agreed. “When I see your face, I don’t see you as you are – but as Abaddon, my brother. But he is gone. Perhaps the first of our kind to truly be gone…” for a moment she sat in contemplative silence before continuing. “Our battle may be with the Godhead, and our war, with the First, in the grand scheme of things… But we know now that there is another we must fight – a secret war that is just now coming to light after unknowable ages lurking in the shadows. As it is said, it is not the devil you know that poses the biggest threat, but the devil you don’t. We need to know who or what this ħelalyos is. Be they anomaly, demon, or shassuru, we need to know, and what their goal is. To what end do they control Enki’s champion? Why and how have they brought so many anomalies into our world, and how do we sever the connection of both? These are the answers we need firstly – a face, and a goal. With these two, I’m confident that we can build an offense to deal a deathly blow. To know thy enemy is to know it’s weaknesses.”
“Sounds good to me,” Vagari uttered, opening the book to the first page. It was time to try again, to focus his mind – not the human mind of Eddy Valentino, but the Shassuru mind of Nintu, the GOD of Man. “Let’s begin.” Vagari nodded to himself and reached out deep inside himself as he had before during their fateful trip through the Tevat. He felt for that power and found it, lying just below the surface, the living core of her that had once been walled off and entombed deep inside him. This time, it was easy, a flick of the switch. “See how easy it comes,” Tehom uttered, her voice grown distant to his ears while remaining a close whisper in his thoughts, “when you stop fighting and embrace what you are?” Vagari focused on the questions – who and why – and read the book. As the words blurred in thought, and the world around him, the way forward became clear.