90 seconds. That’s all it takes for the frenosh to locate its prey. It is an axiom known by the travelers of the realms, and it is what makes the creature so feared. The entity, a hound born of the cosmos and the pet of gods, was mostly blind, with a brief burst of sight every minute and a half. In that moment, it could see where its prey was, no matter the distance, no matter what object or obstacle lay between them both. No matter where one ran, how far they traveled, the hound would always be privy to their location every 90 seconds.
70...71...72...73...
It had no legs, no arms, no hands or feet. And while it was traveling, it was little more than a passing fluctuation. Though it was massive, one could fly a shuttle past its body and not even know it was there. Only a telltale “flinch” of the stars indicated its presence.
74...75...76...
The frenosh careened through a system, tracking the essence of the fugitive. Where others saw empty voids and nothingness, it read stories formed of remnants. There were traces even in a vacuum.
It glazed the edge of a gas giant, dragging wisps along its body, separating the scent of its prey from the hydrogen and helium. It tasted hints of the alloy used in the target’s ship. But the traces were fading.
80...81...82...83...
It drifted away from the gas giant’s atmosphere, floating about in frustration, the universe lensing and warping around its body. This bending was not due to gravity, but due to the theurgies that enabled the creature to traverse at such speeds. It was a being of lore, unable to be understood by the mortal mind. The same lore rendered it blind except for those brief intervals of divine sight, an interval which was quickly approaching.
84...85...86...87...88...89...90.
The universe winked into existence for a brief moment before disappearing into darkness. But that window, shorter than a heartbeat, was more than enough. The frenosh saw where the fugitive hid, what it was doing, and where it was going. The hound, using no visible thrust, hurled itself in the direction of its target, on a planet known by its inhabitants as Earth.
---
“Oh, now what?!” John Morvin threw his hands in the air in frustration as he looked at the traffic ahead of him. “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”
Today was not his day. It started out rough from the very moment he dragged himself out of bed. First, he stepped in dog puke. Sometime during the night, their golden lab, Russel, yacked on the carpet and he plunged his bare foot right into the mush. Swearing profusely, he hopped on one foot to the bathroom to wash it off, only to stub his toe on the door frame. After rinsing off his foot, he went to work on his face, shaving away the morning stubble. He got dressed, making sure his tie was centered and his collar tucked. He made sure there wasn’t a ripple in sight. Then he went downstairs and noticed somebody had left the TV on.
“We are still getting strange reports from NASA about-” He picked up the remote and turned the television off. Then he went into the kitchen to make breakfast and start the coffee. Unbeknownst to him, the circuit breaker tripped. By the time he noticed the brewer wasn’t brewing, it was already getting too late to start it again. He was about to leave when he had trouble finding his keys. Apparently, his kid, Joseph, thought it would be funny to play with them and carry them off the night before, so he spent at least 15 minutes looking for them. And now he was here, late for work, stuck in traffic, staring at the idiots in front of him. Fire trucks and ambulances flashed in his sideview mirrors and screamed past him on the median strip.
Fuck this, he thought. He pulled his Corvette into the median, did a u-turn and cut cross to the other side of the road, a highly illegal maneuver, but screw it. He was late, angry, and he still needed a coffee. He took another route to his workplace. Occasionally, he glanced in the mirror to make sure his tie was still centered. Using the voice commands in his car, he called his secretary.
“Lucy?” he said, speaking into his earpiece, “Tell them I am going to be running late. The morning is fucked...no, don’t tell them I said that...just tell them I’m going to be late. Do not start the meeting without me...I don’t give a shit! Look...I’ve been planning this for 8 months now...8 months! No I don’t want to reschedule, are you out of your mind?!” The audacity of her...why the heck did he hire her again? “Listen, Lucy, it’s not difficult: You just tell them I am going to be late! Hold on...” There were people standing in the middle of the road, looking at the sky,
“Hey jackasses!” he hollered, honking his horn, “Get the fuck out of my way!” The pedestrians jumped and ran toward the sidewalk.
“Sorry, some morons were standing in the middle of the road! I swear to god, this morning is screwing me over! Make up whatever excuse you have to, we cannot lose this contract! I’ll apologize to them when I get there, just do your damn job for once!”
Fuming, John clicked off the call. He found a convenient parking spot right in front of a Starbucks and pulled into it. As soon as he got out, a panhandler came up to him. His eyes were manic and his tone frantic.
“You...” he said, “Hey, you!”
“I don’t have money.” John said, trying to ward the beggar away.
“I don’t want money, I want to give you something!” the man said.
“I’m not interested.” He tried to pass the beggar, but the man’s hand flew out and grabbed his shirt.
“Back off!” John swatted his hand away, “Don’t you fucking touch me, do you know how much I paid for this suit? Keep your grubby hands off me unless you want a bloody lip!”
He left the man pacing back and forth on the sidewalk, wondering what in the hell his problem was. When he stepped inside, there were two people ahead of him in line. Irritated, he crossed his arms and kept checking his watch. It took five more minutes for his turn to come up. When it did, the barista began to stare at the news on the TV.
“Hey...hey!” John snapped his fingers to get her attention. She snapped out of her trance, apologized, and took his order. While she prepared his coffee. A few minutes later, John had a warm cup in his hands and walked back out to his car. The homeless man hounded him again.
“Listen, I told you to back off-” John began, but the guy gripped his wrist with a strength that belied his appearance. There was an intensity in his eyes that froze him in his tracks. The irises were ice-colored and they seemed to pierce his soul.
“Friend...I’m sorry...but you’re the one.” he said, opening John’s palm and placing an object in it, a black stone, “I’m sorry...you’re going to see a lot of things you don’t understand...seek Almon...”
“W-what?” John pulled his hand away, holding the stone in it, “Buddy...you need help.”
“There is no help for me. I have been found.” After he said this, the beggar took a few steps backward, then began to run. His pace was normal at first, but soon it became uncannily fast, as though he were an Olympic runner. In seconds, he disappeared from sight, leaving John stupefied. Shaking his head, he threw the stone in a garbage bin and got into his car. His office was still a few minutes away, so he ruminated on the strange encounter, especially the intensity of the panhandler’s eyes. But he drifted back to the upcoming meeting, practicing his lines in the mirror.
Twice now, a hopeful deal had fallen apart, leaving him crestfallen and infuriated. He needed to pull this one off. The economy was going to shit and the chances of his son getting into a decent college were looking slim. The thought of his own child going into some blue collar job was intolerable. Joseph would not live in mediocrity like John did, he was meant for greater things and so was John himself. If this deal fell through, then he was going to lose his shit.
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He pulled up to the parking garage, scanned his card and pulled through the gate. After finding a spot, he parked, grabbed his coffee, and got out. Without even looking, he held the fob over his head, aimed it at the Corvette and hear it chirp. He stepped into the elevator and the door slid behind him. As the elevator descended, the lights flickered. Oh, please don’t do this... John thought. The last thing he needed was to be stuck in an elevator shaft. Thankfully, that did not happen.
He stepped out onto a catwalk as soon as it opened. Then the entire ground shook, causing him to stumble. He held onto the railing, wondering what the hell just happened. They were not near any fault lines he was aware of, so what the hell had that been? Suddenly, the entire world seemed to tilt, throwing him against the glass. Seconds later, a loud noise slammed against the passage, causing the glass panes to shatter. The shockwave threw him onto his ass. Disoriented and coughing, tinnitus ringing in his ears, he stumbled to his feet, brushing shards off himself. He shambled over to the railing and clung to it while he recovered.
Below him, chaos unfolded on the street. Cars crashed, creating geysers out of fire hydrants, newspapers drifted like leaves. People picked themselves up off the sidewalk. He saw a child screaming in terror, holding onto her mother. A man held onto his chest as a spot of red bloomed on it. Another shockwave sent everybody to the ground again as the world trembled. Car alarms wailed at the disturbance.
What in the hell is going on? he thought.
A helicopter flew above them, heading toward a disturbance in the sky. John, stumbling back to his feet blinked in disbelief as the sky in the distance appeared to “warp”, the clouds parting and stretching. Like a chameleon dropping its camouflage, the warping coalesced into wings, giant white feathers materializing out of the essence of spacetime. It unfolded like a lotus, an entity of wings and light. Tendrils of glowing theurgy radiated from its core, a giant glimmering eye, whose unfocused gaze appeared to drift. The wings continued to unfold, as if the entity itself were a timelapse of a flower blooming.
Dazed from the shockwave, John did not know what he was looking at. His mind was numb and his thoughts were blank. There was a geometric symmetry to its formation, an intention to its anatomy. Its scale was so vast, it was dizzying to look at. Earth seemed to cant under its presence.
A nearby clock, undisturbed by the chaos, continued to tick away the seconds. As sirens in the distance grew louder, it observed a countdown that the inhabitants of Earth were too young, too naïve to know about. Helicopters cautiously orbited the entity. Smoke from fires began to drift upward toward it. As John stared, the clock continued to tick. As the entity scanned the area with its tendrils, the mechanism within the device beat like a metronome. The red line on its face orbited in increments. 80 seconds have been ticked off since the entity’s unfolding. Then 85, 86, 87, 88, 89...then finally, 90. The eye suddenly came into focus and its iris dilated.
The fugitive has been found, a voice resonated throughout the minds of many, execution comes down from Xelos.
The entity folded its wings and dived toward the Earth. The ground shook and John was thrown onto his back for the third time. A wall of dust came careening his way. When it struck, he was knocked out cold.
He did not remember when he came to, nor did he remember how he got out of the building. He simply remembered stumbling out onto the streets, surrounded by dust clouds so thick, he could feel their dryness in his throat. He could feel the grit coating the insides of his mouth. Within the dust he heard crying and screaming. He took a step forward and felt his shoe step on something soft. Looking down, he saw the outline of a corpse, an old man with a piece of rebar jutting through his chest. His open mouth was frozen in a scream, red rivulets leaking from its corners. Flinching, John took a step backward.
Everywhere he walked, he found more death. People were crushed under bricks, others had been tossed like ragdolls against rubble. A mother rocked back and forth as she held her 5 year old son, his body limp in her arms. John was numb to all of this. With one hand, he clenched the front of his suit, feeling a coldness on his chest, feeling a wetness with his fingers. He was afraid to look down.
Metal whined as the foundations of the nearby structures came into question. Five story buildings had been reduced to rubble by the blast. Others either had their faces blown off or they rippled with shock, leaning precariously. His feet crunched as he stepped over bits of broken glass. Flashes of blue illuminated the dust intermittently as power lines arced and neon signs flickered. His hand ached from clenching his chest so hard, but he did not dare let go. He closed his eyes and braced himself for what he was about to see. Then he opened them and looked down.
Tinnitus continued to ring in his ears as he stared down in horror at the ugly brown splotch that stained his suit.
“Wait...I think I see somebody over here.” a nearby voice said. A man stumbled over the rubble and began to walk toward him, “Excuse me, sir! Sir, can you come help?”
It was stained...forever ruined. The blast had knocked the coffee out of his hands and it had spilled all over his two piece.
“Sir, are you all right? We could use some help! There’s an old lady trapped under a beam...”
“My suit...my fucking suit...” John murmured.
“She’s....you’re what?”
“It’s...it’s ruined.”
“...We could really use your help.”
John snapped out of his trance and followed the man. He was led to an elderly old woman who was trapped under an I-beam. Using whatever they could find for leverage, he and three other guys lifted up, while another freed her. Injured but alive, she was carried to her family and they waited.
“Thank you sir...” the man said.
Traumatized and stunned...the events of the day passed by like flashes. John continued to walk until he was clear of the dust. He made his way to the parking garage, which was amazingly intact, and sat in his car. His phone was lighting up with texts from his wife. He numbly called her and assured he was all right. He did not know how he got home. He knew the roads were crowded and the traffic was jammed, but he somehow managed to weave his car through the wreckage and make his way home as EMTs raced past. He pulled the Corvette, whose windows were shattered and body dented, into the driveway. Then he stepped out, trailing dust behind him.
His wife opened the front door and raced toward him, tears streaming from her eyes. She threw his arms around his shoulders and pulled him into an embrace, which he thoughtlessly returned. He spoke to her, he reassured her, but his mind was not present. His words had no meaning. Joseph stood at the threshold, holding his toy firetruck in his hand.
He was inundated with questions he could not answer.
“How did you make it out?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m all right.
“Was anybody else hurt?”
“I...don’t know.”
He was like a zombie, a dead man walking, his eyes avoiding looking downward at his ruined two-piece. But when he went to his bedroom later that night and saw his reflection in the mirror, the numbness began to fade away and he fell to his knees, feeling a scream building in his lungs. In his mind, he could see it happening in slow motion. The glass in the catwalk shattering, the shockwave knocking the coffee from his grip. He could see the lid come off and the cup, releasing the contents within, brine-like and thick. It splashed against the white, parched cotton of his shirt and tie. It would never be removed, not even with a dry-cleaning. The scream pounded at his ribcage, demanding to be let out.
“Son of a fucking bitch!”
He threw a paperweight at the mirror, cracking it.
“John?” his wife called. He heard her coming up the stairs and a few seconds later, sher opened the door, “John, are you all right?”
“No I’m not all right!” he shouted, hyperventilating, “My fucking suit!”
“Your...suit?”
“My suit! That damn thing ruined my suit! Look at it!” he fought with the tie, unbuttoned the ruined garment and held it out, “Look at this! I paid at least a grand for this!”
Sarah opened her mouth and closed it, then opened it again, “John...you’re alive...”
He was about to retort, but stopped himself. She wouldn’t understand. So instead, he calmed himself down and told her he was fine. It was a lie of course, he was anything but fine. She asked him if there was anything she could do, told him that his mother had been trying to get a hold of him. But he shook his head and sat at the edge of the bed. This seemed to sate her, so she left him alone to put their son to bed.
No, John was not fine, not one bit. That was his favorite suit and it was violated. He grabbed the remote and flipped on the television, switching to the news. He watched as replays showed the entity crashing into the city. A wall of dust bloomed at the point of contact and spread outwards. When they weren’t replaying the footage, they showed censored video of bodies being extracted from the rubble, children crying, families begging for people to keep an eye out for missing loved ones.
He froze the TV when it showed another image of the alien, its eyeball surrounded by wings. He did not know what the hell that thing in the sky had been, but it ruined a very nice piece of clothing. A seething rage began to fill his chest. From the moment he had opened his eyes that morning, life decided it wanted to screw with him, throwing one inconvenience after the other. He was done. The entity left the atmosphere after divebombing the city, but that was the last straw. He wanted it dead.
He flinched when he felt something jostle in his pocket. Confused, he reached his hand in and pulled out a stone. It was the same stone that the beggar had given him, despite the fact that he had tossed it earlier. Only now, lines of lambence ran across its surface like veins. It lifted from his palm and floated in the air, tumbling.
“Do you want revenge?” a soft voice asked.
“What?” John gawked at the thing.
“Do you want revenge?” the stone repeated, “If so...I can help you.”
He stared at the stone, unable to believe either his ears nor eyes.
“I...I...” John stammered. He wasn’t even aware he had uttered the words.
“I asked, do you want revenge? Because I can help you devour gods...”
Early the next morning, before the sun even rose, John stepped out into a changed world, one in which the existence of extraterrestrial life had been confirmed. He looked into the sky, seeing the last of the stars disappear as the vistas brightened. They seemed distant and unreachable, but perhaps less so now that he had the stone. It had spoken of gods and deities that lurked among them. He did not know how he would get up there, but he would have his revenge. Images of the stain stayed rent-free in his mind, driving a fire that thirsted for justice. He would find the gods that sent that thing and he would make them pay for ruining the best suit he ever, or would ever own.