////
We fought for our fucking lives. Once ancient enemies, the Spathians and the Tsardomites, now stood shoulder to shoulder to survive the endless flood of [Antediluvia]. I did not care for the Motherland’s hatred towards the ‘Southern Aggressors’ when humanity’s very existence hung on a thread just above the knife’s edge.
The edges of my soul were tattered and quickly fraying, my esoterica having wrung my mental energy dry. Whatever it was that sustained [Jörmungandr-Tincture], it was but a dying ember ready to snuff out from the slightest breeze.
Maybe it was because the adrenaline addled my better judgment or maybe it was because I just didn’t want to see them die.
I let myself go, the waters just beyond the threshold taking me with.
Shadow poured from my eyes in rivers of tar, smooth and uncongealing like the coldest arctic undercurrent. Insanity and unreality festered in whatever piece of earth that the tears fell upon, consummate in its gluttony for [Golgotha].
I was alone, the world melted away from me in boiling darkness. A gargantuan eye opened in the fathoms, yellow as sulfur crystal and utterly predatory. Its pupil was a mule born from a serpent’s slit bisected by the rectangle of a goat; and it stared me down to the bones of my existence.
It found something that it wanted.
This was not an alien yearning. This was not some ancient longing, unknowable to lowly mortals. This was a strangely human thing, the foul fuel that burned in every Tsardomite oligarch’s breast: dragon-greed, the want for everything that is not yours, to hoard a pile of gold while your fellow men died of thirst.
The [Leviathan] showed me a vast, unending sky.
All that it wanted in return was water—the spilt blood of my enemies.
And I sure had a lot of them.
Black-alabaster lightning struck my heart, racing up my spin and settling in my sockets. I had signed a pact with the Pyrite Devil and I would reap what I had sown because not all that glitters is gold.
////
Entity: [Omniglot//Typhon]
Sphera: [Golgotha], [Luna], [Lethea], [Akasha]
Para-class: [Red-White-Aphelion]
Reliquary: [Jörmungandr-Tincture], [Drought]
////
Esoterica: [Drought]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Drought} derives from the sphera of {Akasha} and {Lethea}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of staring and the platonic ideals of desiccation and dehydration.]
////
Hubris: [Asura]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Asura} derives from the sphera of {Golgotha}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of eye-strain and the platonic ideal of pressure.]
////
When I opened my lids, my eyes were like that of the [Leviathan], red scleric veins pulsating and burning amidst a sea of sulfur. Whatever my chimeric pupils were set upon, shriveled up into husks from the inside-out—flash dried in less time than it took to blink.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
As the water flowed through my soul, I felt it burn as it filled me up like leaded gasoline—intoxicating and astringent.
Razvahulah, the power inflated my ego until it almost burst at the seams.
My eyes grew heavier and drier the longer I held them open, their pressure increasing exponentially. By the time that some two-hundred veins popped, thrombosing under the strain, my corneas became the diving-suit glass that held back an ocean’s worth of water from crushing whatever lay inside.
I wept blood now instead of tar, the pressure instantly vaporizing the liquid into charnel smoke.
Didn’t even realize when I passed out.
////
Below, I saw Alexander collapse limblessly, the others not too far behind.
Not even a thousand-thousand-thousand years of social isolation could extinguish that little bit of empathy natural to most of humanity. It had dulled, certainly, but it was not a burnt-out and cold fire.
All it needed was a little bit of oxygen, not even half of a breath.
Instead, it got doused with an accelerant the likes of which there was no other.
[Zeroth] clad my finger-tips as I clawed through space-time. [Stygia] made my body aerodynamic to quantum field drag, probability wave intersections no longer strong enough to expel me back into existence.
Though for me a half second had passed, relative to consensus reality, only a planck-length of time separated me from the sky to the earth. My standard was not measured in caesium but instead in black body radiation.
I struck the earth like Jupiter, a black-alabaster corona of lightning trailing after me. Where before interplanar friction manifested as a relatively-mundane-if-massive electron exchange, now I played with the stuff that made up the boundaries of the cosmos itself.
In my wake, there wasn’t even ash left behind.
Instant annihilation scrubbed the face of the earth clean in a five-meter radius, taking with it the ground beneath my feet.
My conception of skin grew to encompass the air in front of me for a kilometer, brushing against some thousands of anomalies. I wove a net of antimatter, passing it through my enemies; a thousand-thousand edges of radioactive decay cut them into irregular cubes, anathema conceptions meeting only to cease to exist and produce the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.
Already, not even a blink after having decimated the Antediluvians, I saw their flesh begin to reknit. Unfortunately, my powers were not cascading in nature, meaning that I needed a flame-thrower instead of a surgical scalpel to excise these tumors from the face of the earth.
Some two-hundred meters behind me, I got what I wished for.
////
When I called out to him, I got nothing but an eyeless stare.
A skeleton of molten lead from which immolated flesh grew only to char away into oily gristle stood before me. Touching it was out of the question, so I just stared dumbly back at the husk of my friend.
Abject horror was too light a term to describe the feeling that came over me.
And then, the next feeling that passed over me made me vomit bile and saliva, my empty stomach at odds with the thought.
We were dying. We would die.
My grandfather had married a Vespuscian native he had become nearly instantly smitten with once his immigration boat reached shore—I was told of the stories of the wendigo just as frequently as I regaled with the Epics of Remean Heroes with a capital ‘H’.
There was a chance that Johnny could be brought back.
And that chance could cost us everything.
“I’m sorry, bud.”
No matter how much I tried to settle my legs in a stance, my knees still shook, rickety as a shantytown.
It wasn’t pretty; it was brutal.
I cried while I did it—crushing whatever remained of John McCarthy’s skull into a flat plane. He did not fight back—I wish he did, twisted as it was; then, maybe, I wouldn’t be saddled with such a black regret.
By the end of it, when a paradox-idol manifested from my victim—my friend—I was glad that I didn’t need to sleep anymore. The nightmares alone would have pushed me over the edge into ending it all after this.
It was a figurine of a lead skeleton, its aspect reminiscent not of Eiru-Catholic iconography but instead Aztecan. John McCarthy had been studying history, Native-Middle-Vespucian history at that.
And though Aztecans were far and away distantly-related to the Mohegans, it was like twisting the knife further into my chest. The lead idol’s molten eyes stared accusingly at me, even though they were without any affect whatsoever.
My right index finger brushed against the relic.
////