Monde’s transportation systems were mainly based in ground travel and the seas. There weren’t many who’d dare carelessly enter the skies of Monde, airships were used only by the powerful and only with heavy preparation.
Even those practitioners who used flight techniques or possessed flight based powers kept themselves at a certain range. Not daring to go higher lest they risk running into one of the many leviathans that ruled the skies and took the clouds as thrones. Getting swallowed whole before they even had time to scream.
The skies grew even more dangerous, as yet another monster joined their number. The beast was as long and wide as your average mountain range. Its form gracefully, serpentine. Swaying gently as it swam through the clouds. Six sets of delicate, feathered wings were accompanied by countless furling and unfurling tendrils. It’s maw was wide enough to swallow oceans. Its claws sharp enough to sunder mountains.
The creature’s face was covered with nine hundred and ninety-nine luminous green eyes. Three sets of sharp, branch like antlers and a crest of feathers and tendrils sat high upon its head. The southern sky bowed beneath its magnificence, the winds seeming to shift as it passed by.
Though it was far from the biggest or strangest, or strongest thing in the skies, most of the other creatures that drifted amongst the clouds hastily got out of its way as it passed. For all that it was high enough in the sky, that its gray coloring would make it hard for the little people below to spot it, its presence would not go unnoticed by the people and powers of Monde.
*****
Billy lay on his side, hunched over, and in some fairly intense pain, happy and surprisingly content. Elena sat beside him, sniffing, eyes watering even though ‘she’ was the one who hit ‘him’. Inexplicable as always since he was much different sort of entity than what he’d been before and therefore should have been far beyond feeling anything she did to him.
Five minutes ago Billy finally returned home after a six month absence. The good news is that he didn’t die, if he had the absence would have likely been far longer than six months. He wouldn’t have been surprised if it was sixth centuries or six millenia or even six billion years. But fortunately, ‘very’ fortunately that’s not what happened.
With his aether as a buffer and the world in his shadow as a shield and the girls as an anchor, His old soul was just barely able to take the beating and not let his body ‘completely’ burn out as it absorbed the power of the rust maiden.
“Don’t you ever...EVER...do that to us again, William? Do you hear!?” said Edna.
“Nh...Yes, ma’am.” said Billy.
He was being lectured. This was what came to greet him when he returned home. He’d walked through the door to the sound of shattering porcelain. Elena had stood, eyes wide, mouth ajar, a shattered plate of pasta at her feet. She ran over to him. Tackled him while sobbing loudly and then made good on the promise of violence that she’d made before Billy had sent her and Edna away. Delivering a solid blow to his gut before fretting over him like a mother hen, who’d lost her chick.
Edna would come home hours later. She’d just come home from a job, still keeping the Bone Tree Company in the black because there was still a need to pay for food and amenities and taxes and a need to keep things running, just in case that stupid, wonderful, idiot best friend of hers ever came back.
She slapped him and then she’d kissed him and then she sat him down for what was by now a three hour long lecture on how his decisions were selfish, and ‘he’ was selfish and all the terrible torments that would be waiting for him if he ever left them like that again.
“And...And...one more thing…”
She kissed him again, this combined with the slap and the lecture, were making for a very confusing, very mixed messages. He didn’t find it unpleasant, just very confusing. With the girl’s expressions shifting between tears and smiling and glaring at least three times times for each half-hour period.
“...You’re not allowed to go die on your own...Not without our permission...not before…” said her words becoming increasingly incoherent.
Not that Billy was anyone to be talking about another’s coherence. His head currently buzzing with the biochemical data, he’d picked up after having her tongue touch his. Her hormones effecting his hormones and sending his nervous system into a tizzy. It wasn’t like their angry blows actually carried enough force to hurt him and even if they had pain wasn’t anything he wasn’t used.
The kisses on the other hand were entirely different story. While he had ‘some’ experiences in his incredibly long existence, not all of them were fun or entirely consensual. The lawless realms of the cosmic sea were a terrible place for a small young soul and in all corners of the multiverse there were places where sex was just another kind of currency.
The girls’ kisses were….different.…. It wasn’t like it was anything mechanically different, there was just something magic about it. Something new. When you’d lived as long as he had, new wasn’t something you ever got used to. Immortality was a schtick of trying to live as long and as safely as you could meant building routines.
Even if you couldn’t die you ‘could’ suffer as there were countless ways to make a helpless soul miserable. Thus most long lived beings had a penchant for predictable.
Living predictable lives and following set patterns. Patterns that often lasted for billions of years at a time, until something killed you or you ascended to a higher plane, or you simply got bored, rolled over and either self-terminated or went to sleep.
“Nh?….Before what?” said Billy.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
A rich blush colored Edna’s cheeks after she voiced her plainly unreasonable demand.She looked away from Billy. Her eyes following everywhere but on the spot where he sat.
“For-..forget it. Also...I’m sorry.”
“What?! Why!?” said Billy. Alarmed for the first time since all this started.
“I-...I should have listened. You told me that something bad was inside that room but I made you go anyway.”
Billy startled, having forgotten that he’d tried to talk them all out of going in there.
“Oh...right...Don’t worry about it.”
In truth, it was for the best, never mind the opportunity he’d have been missing, this world was his and Edna’s and Elena’s. That thing would have broken free eventually and for the sake of saving them, there wasn’t really anything he wouldn’t do for them.
The Million-Armed maiden, or rather the metal parasite that was riding her, would try to destroy everything and as Elena and Edna were currently included as part of everything, there was no way Billy could let ‘that’ stand. In short, that little spat, between him and the rust maiden was as good as set in stone.
“Next time, I’ll listen...just please...don’t...Don’t just go and disappear like that again.”
“Nh….Disappear?”
Billy didn’t understand, he realized he was missing something, he thought about it and realized that something had changed. Whether it was Edna’s AW system or Elena’s horn, they both included a kind of metaphysical connection or at least they should have.
That was the only way to freely power them without causing harm to the user. A connection to the world within Billy’s shadow, the nothingness of the world that lay within him acting as a sort of heatsink. That same nothingness also serving as connection to Billy, as it was a part of him. He closed his eyes and looked within himself and saw what had happened.
“...Sorry.”
It was one of those moments, akin to realizing that you forgot to re-plug your cell charger because you’d had to move some things around.
Billy hadn’t died but for six months he’d been bringing some things back in order.
Never mind the fact that he was nine-tenths of the way out of this side of the mortal coil. There were other more drastic things that he’d had to deal with during the passing months. Then when he recovered things got even more distracting, requiring all of his concentration.
He’d been using the raw energies of the anomalous spaces within the tower and the living aether of the rust maiden and the rust maiden’s parasite to rebuild himself, pushed into a forced evolution because not doing anything with all that remaining power would have burnt him out.
“Sorry?” said Edna. Not really expecting the boy to be so sincere sounding in his apology. Most of the lecture being her way of working out the anxiety and fear and regret that had been building up within her. It was all the words and feelings she’d bottled up while anxiously waiting for his return. All of it spilling out of her, when he finally, miraculously, appeared before her eyes.
Billy sheepishly explained what actually happened and why he’d seemed to disappear, half-expecting the girls to go off on him again. Despite some very peeved looks they said nothing. Afterwards He gently reset their connection to him. Both of them jolted, eyes opening wide as they felt the flow of living nothingness that was mixed in with their aether, return.
“Oh...that’s...!?” said Edna. Familiar enough with her own being after all the cultivation practice that she could tell that there was a change.
Elena just smiled and kissed Billy again.
“Oh...that’s much better. There you are. I can feel you again.” said Elena. Wrapping her arms around him and pulling him closer.
Edna stared at Billy and then she simply just sighed feeling a mild feverishness rising and wondering if it was just her conscious mind catching up to what she’d unconsciously done. Kissing Billy, before she could even really think about it.
“Billy...there’s only one more thing you need to know. And you really ‘do’ need to know this.”
“Nh? Okay?”
“You can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” said Billy. Pretty sure he’d already made the impossible and likely instantaneously broken promise of never putting himself in any danger again.
“Facing things by yourself like you’ve been doing. Fighting on your own and sending us away like you did.”
Billy made a difficult face, unsure what else he could say, if they wanted his promise that he’d willingly put them in danger, that likely wasn’t going to happen. He might tell them what they need to hear, but it was possible that this would end up being one of the few times he’d ever lied to them.
Elena placed her hands on both his cheeks, holding his face in place and making her meet her eyes.
“You really can’t? Do you know why? Because it wouldn’t matter. Look at me, Will. You know me. You know Ed. You’ve known us since we were kids. If something ever happened to you...If you’d really died….. What do you think we’d have done? Or rather switch it around and make it so it’s us who send ‘you’ away and then one us goes and gallantly, stupidly dies all on our own. What do you see yourself doing?”
“I…” said Billy. He imagined vision of fire and blood. He saw himself draining every last drop of aether from the world’s flow of power. Causing natural disasters and death all for the pursuit of vengeance. Then losing his mind in the slaughter and just scouring the planet's surface with an endless tide of all consuming nothingness.
The planet Monde melting like paper mache on a rainy day. His dark reverie was broken as Elena continued to speak.
“Do you see yourself, just sitting idly by or do you see yourself trying to get even? I can see you Bill. If it was the old you maybe you could sit and mourn and maybe eventually find peace, but you’re not like that. None of us are like that. We’ve already been torn apart and enough bad things have happened that I don’t think any of us would stand for a world where one of our killers still walked free. So while ‘you’ might be fine. Fighting on your own for now...At least until one day you aren’t you get your stupid self killed, but I want you to imagine the most likely outcome of a world where you die and I try to get revenge.”
He doesn’t need to imagine. While it’s not his death she was trying to avenge, it was exactly just such a future that he’d come back to prevent. A broken battered Elena would walk through a empty house. Surrounded by blood and bodies. Passing walls that riddled with bullet holes. Making her own red carpet, because she’d been shot up quite thoroughly as well. The last dose of painkillers that she needed to keep herself standing having run out long ago. Just sheer will power holding her through.
A scared fat man would scramble back as she kicked down a door.
“Jones Augustine...It’s time to pay the piper.” these would have been her last words. Most of them lost as she choked on her blood. Her hands locked into a death grip that wrapped her fingers around the man’s throat. Suffocating him just shortly after she’d given up the ghost.
“I’m sure you understand, right?” said Elena.
He did.
“I’m pretty sure anything that would make you send us away like you did, would be something that’s just little too much for any ‘one’ of us to handle on our own. I understanding wanting to protect us. Because I’d probably almost definitely keep it from Edna, because as the one sane member of the three of us, I know she’d try to talk me out of it, or worse she’d want to go along.. So I’d sneak off, go alone and I’d die.”
“....” Edna sighed.
“I’d probably die too. There’s not much point in being the sensible one if there’s no one else to stop from doing something crazy. “I’d” probably go in with a plan but the best laid plans of mice and men...you know the rest….”
“So, you see trying to be all big and chivalrous and protective does none of us any good. We’re in this together...Till death. Do you understand?”
Billy nodded, all the fuzzy warm feelings inside him gone, lost to the sobering realization that the two women had meant every word. It was both chilling and comforting at the same time. Their history and personalities backing it up. Their voided deaths, in the timeline of things that would now never be, backing it up.
“Okay then...but in that case. I’m going to need something from you.” said Billy.
“Anything, love.” said Elena.
“What?” said Edna.
“If you’re that determined to fight my battles with me...The two of you are going to need to get stronger…..Much stronger.”