XXXVI.
The trek to the Peter I base was a long one, but at least in the goddess’s company Val felt shielded from the harsh winds and freezing temperatures. They had followed the path the workmen had used – a vertical ascent, scaling the runic walls of the ancient cavern with but a thought and a curt wave of the goddess’s hand. Eddy’s stomach churned as he felt her psychic grasp take hold of him, knowing that hold, or a sudden lack of one could easily mean his death. Nintu floated effortlessly upwards, propelled by the same alien force that held her prisoner tightly in tow. Outside the cavern the world turned into a realm of swirling white as a storm battered the island. Val quietly hoped that that was the reason they hadn’t been able to establish contact with the base, but some part of him knew not to get hopeful. “This way,” Nintu ordered with a jut of her chin. “And do try to keep up the pace. If you get too far behind, I can’t protect you.”
“Of… course,” Eddy uttered with a shiver despite not feeling the chill in the least. He could tell that ‘can’t’ actually meant ‘won’t’. “I think the base is north from here,” he sputtered out as he lurched through the snow to her side. “But, I can’t see a damned thing.”
“You don’t need to, I know where we’re going,” the goddess said dryly. “I can feel the pneuma… and something else. This way, and stay close.”
Within the hour they found the defunct geothermal plant, if only by touch. They circled around it’s perimeter, Val dragging his hand along the concrete security wall for stability in the harsh winds. “Should we look for your friend…?” he asked as they rounded it to the front and the main road, for what it was.
“No,” the Goddess said bluntly as she looked back towards him, through him. Still, Val averted his gaze. “I don’t sense its presence there any longer. It was there, some time ago, but… no longer. Either the Udug has fallen, or has been taken beyond my senses.”
“I’m… sorry,” Eddy announced honestly.
“Not as sorry as they will be,” Nintu replied, her voice as frigid as the winds around them should be. “Follow. Time is of the essence.”
Two hours more and they neared the base. The storm broke with their arrival, but the veil of snow was quickly replaced by one of ash and cinders. Pillars of smoke rose from the facility. Val exclaimed in surprise clapping a hand to his mouth. “What happened here?” he asked in a course whisper as he stared wide-eyed towards the char stained buildings and still burning vehicles. He glanced back towards the goddess now in tow to see her usually stoic features twisted into something bestial and vicious. He hastily backed away, but only so far as the suddenly creeping cold would let him. “There is a foulness at work here,” Nintu growled, her voice deepening as she switched from English to Adamic in a most wrathful tone. “This place is befouled… A wrongness lingers here. Do you feel it, little one? A cold that seeps into your very bones…”
He did. It was different than the chill nipping at his spine, that he could recognize instantly. It felt unnatural, a cold that spoke of voidic and abyssal places. It made him sick as it seemed to wash over him in ebbs and flows, as if they stood in the lapping tide of some great forbidden ocean. Eddy crumbled to his knees as the feeling sunk into him, into every pore, into every vein and cell, filling him with the truest sense of aversion he had ever felt. He clutched his stomach and threw up. There was a power there, it seemed, one that countered the goddess’s own, one that intended to suck the very life out of the world around it. However, just as quickly as it had washed over them, threatening to drown them in its haunting disgust, the tide receded, pulling back into whatever alien ocean it had reached out from. “Jesus Christ…” Val uttered with a gasp as he struggled to his feet once more. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, still reeling from the assault. “What… what the fuck was that? Was that… was that the Reaping? Was that what we have to stop?”
His heart froze in his chest when he looked up to face her. Nintu, the goddess of mankind, the ageless being that could bend him to her will with a thought, was afraid. Her eyes were wide with silent realization, as if some dark secret had since become clear to her. It was one she didn’t deign to share with him. She steeled herself and started onward, offering only a curt “No,” as an answer.
The frontmost gate to the compound hadn’t been breached, but not for a lack of trying. A tower of bodies pressed up against it, some halfway over to freedom, some trying to force their way between the bars. All were burned. Val dared to walk ahead to investigate. He knelt down to inspect one further, covering his mouth and nose as he looked over what didn’t quite look human. “Something’s… wrong with them,” he noted loudly, glancing over his shoulder. “Maybe it was the fire, but they look… wrong, misshapen. What could do this? And… what killed them?” Nintu didn’t reply. Instead, she just reached out towards the gate with her hand. There came a loud groan of metal, Eddy’s only warning to get clear before she tore the gate clean from its tracks. Tossing it and the corpses clinging to it aside, she began forward once again.
“Follow,” she demanded in Adamic, a cavernous command that puppeted Val to his feet once more. “They were remade without design,” she added in English, letting loose her grip on him. “As you suggested, they managed to recreate the Forge, in some primitive fashion. Unsurprisingly it seems to have malfunctioned. I suspect it’s running now without end. We must find it and turn it off. Only a Shassuru can properly instill their will into the device, give it design and purpose. I don’t know how…” She paused, seeming unsure about her own words, “this has come to be, but we must shut it off.”
“Are you saying that this will spread?” Val exclaimed in horror. “How far? How fast? Are we in danger?”
After what had happened at the Gate, after the strange alien assault on what seemed like their very souls, and now this, all Val wanted to do was run and hide, cower in whatever shadow that would have him. He felt her grip tighten and the power of her command propelled him forward. There was no going back, despite how much the fear in him urged him to run as fast and far away as he could, to take his chances with the sub-0 temperatures, because even lost and afraid in the icy hell beyond was safer than going forward. Things would never be the same again, something he had so desperately wanted only a few hours prior, or thought he had wanted. But now he could only think of how much he wished he had never taken the job in the first place. Eddy cursed and dug his nails into his palms, cursing not the fear or the weighty blanket of guilt, but the lie of it. Guilty, regretful, shame, and remorse – that was only how he wanted to feel, how he knew he should feel. It was no small part of him that was excited, enthralled even, and not just by the Goddess’s undeniable word, but by the arcane knowledge his vile efforts had already granted him. Standing there at the gates, what was worse than the fear, worse than the self-loathing and regret, was the fact that he still felt as if, somehow, he could still come out on top, that all of it was well worth it.
Entering the courtyard felt like entering the aftermath of some great battle, one in which everyone lost. Shadows danced upon the printed concrete walls, swaying to the crackling tune of flames that survived the storm’s smothering winds. The fire rose from the torched engines and cabs of the base’s hovercrafts: two large cargo flatbeds and one bus meant to shuttle scientists between bases and the airstrip. Unlike the gate, there was no bodies to be seen within, suggesting they were burned beforehand to prevent any chance of escape. Whoever sabotaged the transports seemed to have known whatever happened would happen.
Val turned in a circle, trying to picture what had happened, to piece together the story, but couldn’t. He knew nothing of the Beacon, not really, and even less about the second base’s secret project – the Forge, Nintu had called it. Eddy cringed and stumbled forward with lurching steps as another wave of that foreign dread washed over him. The tide had come in it seemed. He grit his teeth as his head swam with its influence, with nigh irresistible fear and the urge to flee pressing against the Goddess’s command to carry on. Thankfully the feeling lasted even shorter than the previous wave, but all the same it left him gasping and shaking at the knees. “My god… fuck… Is this the Forge’s doing?” he asked quietly. “That… feeling, the cold, I mean.”
“No,” Nintu denied, though there seemed to be a certain uncertainty in her voice. “There is no coldness in the creation of True-Life. That feeling is… from another, a creature, I believe. What you might call a demon.”
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“A demon?!” Eddy exclaimed with a pause. “Like in Abrahamic myth?” He guessed that made sense, considering he was talking to what claimed to be GOD. “Monsters exist? But why? If you created life… why would you create whatever demon this is?”
“I gave you True-Life, breathed it into you,” Nintu corrected. “I did not create it. Not even the First can lay claim to that feat,” She said casually, aiming to leave the courtyard behind, “Life simply is.”
The main entrance to the hive-like laboratory didn’t spawn any hope or confidence that they would find any survivors below. The door itself was hardly more than a hole in the wall now, riddled with bullet holes and burst through from the inside. Val looked back towards the gate, torn from its railing, and the mutated monstrosity cooked to its surface. Why had it broken through a steel door only to try and climb the fence? Val watched as Nintu ducked into the darkened hallways and shadowed corridors of the laboratory. He stood there, quietly weighing the cold that was sure to come if he lingered against whatever horrible death lied within. He followed, if only to ask the question her statement had prompted. “If you didn’t create life,” He began, tiptoeing over the shredded metal, “who or what did? I never believed in Hell or Heaven, or… you… But, what’s the point to it all?”
“The point is up for debate,” Nintu answered flatly with a seasoning of resigned disgust in her voice. She sighed through her nose, her bare feet slapping the ground a little heavier now as they crept through the darkness. It appeared to be a touchy subject. “What isn’t, however,” she continued, “is the origin, I suppose. The Abzu: the primordial sea that lies between all things. Life is but droplets, sea spray from its unfathomable depths. Ma: the universe, the planets, the space of reality, it captures it. It grows the spores like mold, but rarely anything substantial comes of it. But, sometimes more flows through: a trickle, a stream. From that sea came the First – the enemy of all life. Like a drop of oil, it listed upon the waves of this reality – feasting upon what mold grows within it. For eons it drifted alone, wanting, unable to truly sate it’s perverse appetite until its desires grew so strong that they pulled forth from the eternal sea the Shassuru – me and my sisters.”
“The… Shassuru,” Val repeated softly, dissecting the word in his mind. “You mentioned that before. These things… We haven’t forgotten everything. Some words I recognize not as Adamic, but from old Sumerian myth – your name for instance. They were once thought to be one of our oldest civilizations, but we now know otherwise, thanks to the tomes. Despite this betrayer, and despite the flood, I don’t think we ever truly forgot you. Lost in time, turned fable and myth, maybe… But you remained.”
Nintu grew quiet for a moment, pausing on their journey through the lifeless hallways to seemingly contemplate his words. “Whispers and myths,” she said quietly, almost too soft for him to hear it. “Stories are all it ever was… The First’s lies… It, it hadn’t been alone, not truly. Even as mold, life was far greater than it ever would have been. The energies of the sea had spread out from it’s birth, like a tidal wave across the everything. Life, souls, spirit without body had spread to every stone, every world. That is what the Reaping is, little one, a reclaiming of that energy. The First, it never wanted companionship, loved one. It never wanted you or me. It was just impatience, bored! It used us, the Shassuru, to expedite it’s feast. It manipulated us to get what it truly desired – apotheosis! To return to wholeness, to thoughtlessness, to unfeeling! To die… To return to the Abzu. To it, you exist to ascend, to rise up imbued with that latent energy, to grow fat off of it, to become more… appetizing.”
So that was it, that was the secret to the universe, to life itself? To rise, ascend, to become the most a creature could be, only to be devoured. It was painfully ironic that all their advancements, all humanities hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow, that was what led them down the road to damnation. It wasn’t war, or hatred, or all the bestial cruelties of man, no, but the fight against them that would seal their fate in the end. “The brighter you shine…” Val uttered grimly, half in thought, “the faster you burn…” Val bit his knuckles and stared down the hallway into that darkness that seemed to go on forever. He stuttered in a breath and bit down hard enough that blood trailed down the back of his hand. It was more than a bit distressing, but he had to focus, had to keep himself in the now. There would be time to despair later when he and an actual goddess weren’t tromping down a demon-frozen hallway to stop a divine machine from destroying the world, so they could then stop an unknowable horror from eating it. Val felt dizzy and nauseous as the panic began leeching in. How very large his world had suddenly become donned upon him. He stifled a yelp as he slid up against a wall. “I can’t – I can’t… I’m sorry, but… I can’t!” Eddy whined. “I shouldn’t be here… I can’t be here! I – I’ve got to find my wife; I gotta get her the hell out of here! Go to the Mars colony, or fucking Pluto, somewhere not here! The next deep-space vessel… W-when is it? I can’t be here…”
Val’s heart stalled in his chest when he saw her eyes glimmering in the darkness, those expansive nebulas, those distant stars, and his outburst died instantly as his breath caught in his throat. Nintu’s features were as twisted and feral as they had been in her summoned form as she glared at him. “You forfeited all choice, little love,” She reminded him with a growl that pushed the air from his lungs in a sputtered whimper, “when you sought out to murder your fellowmen. Do not mistake this venture as one you can flee from. Not even death can save you from me. Your hands are stained, now and forever. And like the others whose hands are as bloody as yours, your fate is sealed. There is nowhere in your puny understanding of the universe that you can escape to – not from me, or your sins. You are marked. You are mine, forever an agent of MY will. My little destroyer.” She suddenly laughed and smiled, and with it all of those wrathful features faded away. The goddess chortled as if she had thought of something particularly humorous and equal parts nasty, before saying, “That’s the form I’ll give you: Dhrebh, Sugzag gu, Abaddon - my destroyer… I’m curious what influence you may have upon them.”
“What do you mean?” Val asked meekly.
“You will see, little love,” Nintu said darkly. “A great honor is bestowed upon you – much like your cohort. You will get exactly what you desired. Now, follow.”
As they traversed the twists and turns, delving further into the complex level by level, they didn’t seem to be lost in the least. They walked with purpose, the Goddess Nintu leading with direction beyond him. She knew exactly where she was going it seemed, though, in truth she appeared almost as reluctant as he was – despite the insistent that time was of the essence. The pair passed through the mess-hall, and to his surprise there was still food on some of the tables. It was all cold, like everything else, but not old. People were eating there recently, it seemed. Whatever had happened there hadn’t happened too long ago at all, but like the entrance, there showed signs of violence. A path bisected the room, one of tossed and turned tables. Some seemed to have been thrown, or trampled by some monstrous thing, while others had been purposely overturned to use as barricades. “What brought the demon here?” Val asked solemnly, breaking the silence between them as he stared down at a half-eaten meal. “Was it the Forge? Or the Beacon?”
“I can’t say which of my machines you call the beacon,” Nintu replied with a huff as she effortlessly tossed a barring table aside. It clashed noisily into another, sending forsaken dishes crashing onto the floor. Val flinched and hissed through his teeth, guessing they weren’t too worried about stealth. “But it is a definite possibility with a Forge, even a primitive one. Perhaps they tried to use it to recreate one of my designs… If that is the case, this will be simple. I will remake it properly when we reclaim the machine.”
“And if it isn’t the case?” he pressed, following her down the hall towards a set of double doors at the back. “What exactly is a demon? You say you didn’t create life, right, just advanced life?”
Nintu looked over her shoulder at him as she pushed the doors open. The look was almost sympathetic, but only almost. “I said Wehroshenh, True-Life, little one, is guided by a Shassuru’s hand,” she replied soft and slowly, as if she were worried any sharp word might set off a new panic attack in him. Val tried not to take offence, reflecting on how turbulent his last outburst had been. “I willed soħiwl into you – pneuma, as you call it – threading it through your entire being.”
“So, demons don’t have pneuma?” Val suggested questioningly. “I thought all things had it – rocks, trees, fish…”
“No, it is much more complicated than have and have not,” she answered shortly. “Demons are… malleable. All have parts of the trifecta that makes up True-Life: Body, Mind, Spirit, or Soma, Psyche, Pneuma, as your kind has adopted to call it. But none have all three without the interference of higher powers. My Udug is a combination of Soma and Psyche – the mind and body to act out my will, but no connection to things arcane. It cannot bend reality to its will with Perdngħwehs – words of power in the first tongue.”
“But, this one can, you think?” Val asked meekly.
“If it is a bastardization of one of mine,” Nintu began, seemingly thinking on her words, “then it can probably do much more. Demons are creatures drawn or ejected from the Abzu. They’re not purposeful, not designed… But my Watchers are much more than that – sculpted, forged. We must be careful. Even undeveloped and crude it will be a dangerous opponent.”
Val knit his brows and thought for a moment before asking, “What do we do when we find it? Will it listen to you?”
“Possibly,” she offered without any confidence to back it up. “But, as with the betrayer, loved one, not all things are inclined to bend to my will… And if it doesn’t, the path forward is clear. We will have to kill it.”