Memories of the calming scent of solid oaken pews and the joyful harmonic sounds of several hundred devoted believers singing their hearts out, took up just as much space as the actual sermons of my childhood themselves. Parables of properly handling money while giving a tithe to God framed deeper messages of sin, fire and brimstone, and the downfalls of man’s flawed character. None rang out more consistently from that preacher’s pulpit than the vibrant scourging of the sin of pride. ‘Pride goeth before a fall!’ the old man would rail, fervent belief giving him energy beyond his years.
And yet, it was hard not to be prideful as I stood on a wide pillar of conjured stone in the early desert light just as the brutal sun started ramping up, giving the air an almost molten quality as the unending waves of solar heat seeped into every crevice. Even with the hints of Arizona’s mirages trying to play tricks on my eyes, my army evoked the deepest pride a man could possess . . . success!
Watching a roughly thousand strong force of crystalline giants marching towards the gutted hulk of Phoenix, Arizona was enough to bring the tiniest tear to my eye. Glorious, simply glorious. Each magnificent beast, my finely crafted magical automatons, was packed full of enough condensed mana from days in the blazing desert sun to fight for three days without end.
[We going with Operation ‘Praise Baby Jesus’ or ‘Quake and Bake’?]
I laughed just a little, Kraken’s latest obsession with my memory of Talladega Nights had him renaming all of my plans and auto-mental background processes. “Quake and Bake baby!” I answered, chuckling even more. “Quake and Bake.”
At my command, Kraken broadcasted the plan to my army, specifically to the earth elemental sergeants in charge of their own mini-platoons. A thousand golems with an elemental sergeant assigned to every group of fifty meant that I had twenty contracted earth elementals ready to do my bidding. This particular plan was the brainchild of forcing myself to come up with a better plan than what I dreamed up and discarded last night. I could either storm each freaking skyscraper and then seal up the portals and then spend days wasting my time tackling the thousands of square miles of suburbia around Phoenix or . . . I could have my earth elemental sergeants shake the whole city down for me like a hungry bully robbing a rich nerd for his lunch money.
Two groups of fifty golems, each with their own sergeant, peeled off to the left and right respectively at Krakens command. They began the long task of storming and collapsing every bit of the suburban housing around Phoenix. They were under orders to capture and bring back anyone that wasn’t some kind of undead or evil creature but everything else was slated to be one with Mother Earth again. Forcefully. The other nine hundred golems with their sergeants started marching slowly on the city swinging outwards like deadly wings. The formations of golems were inexorable, marching in sync without a care given to landscape obstacles.
[I wish I could cry! I’d like to be human enough sometimes just to gleek out a bit of eye moisture with what I’ve wrought!]
Ignoring my over-dramatic familiar, I hopped on the shoulders of the biggest sergeant just before we went past the wide eyes of the Luneks staring at my procession. Acantha stood at the corner of a building, fearfully scanning the waves of crystalline soldiers.
“You too!” I called out, pointing at Acantha with Gungnir. “Get your lazy ass on a big one and let’s Quake and Bake!” I did notice that she looked much better after my healing and a night of rest.
The smaller corporate buildings and crappy strip mall areas barely put up a fuss. Creatures of the night tend not to be morning people, especially considering the desert environment on this particularly bright morning. Shadowy things evaporated under a single salvo of a golem’s solar flare cannon or disintegrated from a charged crystal bullet and the zombies were nothing more than cockroaches beneath their wide plated feet. Black and gray corpse juice burned away as my golems stamped out any and all trace of undeath.
I watched proudly as my army took each of the smaller buildings one at a time; the elemental sergeants used their own innate abilities to shake and sink the buildings into the ground, conjuring dirt and stone to completely fill up any and all cracks as my minions outside handled any of the fleeing monsters. It was pretty cool to watch the eerily coordinated movements, the sunstone golems moving in sync under the direction of the elemental sergeants. I couldn’t ask for a more efficient extermination force. No emotion crossed their flat faces. No pity held back the raw destruction. And I loved it.
Undead spiders the size of horses tried to run for it only to meet the waiting ranks of stone golems that almost seemed eager to test out their warhammers. With Kraken and the sergeants synchronously keeping everything in line, the silent communication made this slaughter efficient in every way. It was almost creepy. There were no yelled orders, zero screaming commanders, and no booms from old-school firearms. The only sounds were the initial roars and then the dying gurgles from the flattened monsters and the squeals of the buildings as their internal structures came apart under the onslaught of magic. The golems worked in absolute, decisive silence as they steadfastly executed their mission.
I watched it all with almost bored, dead eyes. It almost seemed like a joke, an irritating interruption to what I actually wanted to do. This was not my real goal. I did not want to be out here cleaning up a fucking city overrun with demons and undead and oversized insects. I did not want to be in this godforsaken desert burning and flattening any and all possibilities of future opposition. I wanted to be in my fucking smoothie jungle wiling the time away with roasted catfish from my river and a goddamn smoothie! My simmering rage at this grand waste of time that wasn’t technically a waste of time started to roll to a boil.
[Quake and Bake is too slow. Get to part 2!] I ordered, itching for some action. [Speed this shit up Kraken.] Sending my familiar what I had in mind, I felt his excitement spike.
[Operation Praise Baby Jesus it is!]
Instead of sinking and taking one building at a time, Operation Praise Baby Jesus took a more scholarly approach. It put physics to work for us. The smaller buildings and suburban houses had been sinking down through our efforts as we moved through the city but the taller edifices of the city required a better strategy. We were simply going to push the skyscrapers over like a felled tree and let the weight of their concrete and steel frames do most of the work for us.
[TIMBER!] Kraken screamed as the first skyscraper shook, its frame rippling from the sheared gash in the bottom put there by the elementals. We couldn’t even make out who used to own the building as all of the signage had been torn away. Thirty stories worth of derelict mass fell over into the next set of buildings, backfiring all manner of projectiles from the tearing metal that bounced off my and Acantha’s shields. As a cloud of dust exploded into the air from the impact, the round stone portal in the basement came into view in all of its purpley glory.
Three golems stepped forward and launched a slew of sunstone grenades through it just before two sergeants filled in the eldritch rune work, sealed the portal and then buried it two hundred feet deep. Having an army made this easy. Step one, knock over skyscraper with summoned elementals. Two, kill everything that comes out, especially if it resembles anything from a horror movie. Three, grenade/seal/bury otherworldly portal ASAP. Four, sink all debris deep into the earth and move on.
This crusade took all day but the process was easy on paper. I barely had to lift a finger as my army steamrolled all opposition. Turns out, even demons from another plane of existence can be flattened like errant crickets if you hit them with enough sheer determined mass. Mutant bugs, slavering zombies, burning demons, skeletal necromancers . . . all fell to Operation Praise Baby Jesus.
Thirteen hours later, I allowed myself enough mental room to banish the sense of dread that had hung around all day. “And that . . . is how you fucking clean up a city!” I declared, hopping off my ride and rounding on Acantha as I shielded my eyes from the glare of the setting sun. “Questions? Comments? Concerns?”
“I uh, how the . . .” she stuttered. “How did you expect ME to do what you just did? You used an army!? I work with fire but this is a desert!” She threw her hands up in the air. “Completely unreasonable!”
“Fine, fine,” I conceded, holding my hands up a bit even as I halfheartedly teased. “Not my fault you couldn’t handle one little task. I woulda thought that an alien witch would easily be able to take on one hellish pustule on the backside of a desert.”
The snap-hiss of a downed live-wire crackled through the air heralding the opening of a portal. Whipping around as several more opened up off the east towards the suburban part of Phoenix, insane laughter rang out much louder than any human had the right to be.
“So much light in these morsels! Feast my children! Bring me the shiny one full of power! His soul will fill me for centuries!”
I didn’t know where they came from simply because it didn’t make sense. One second I was reveling in the feeling of accomplishment and the next I was almost shoulder deep in swarms of feral zombies screaming for blood. Humongous beasts resembling badly reassembled dinosaurs roared as their off-kilter limbs pounded the dirt. Amalgamations of draconic skeletons sat at the edge of the city, their clawed feet sunk into the ground as their ribs opened up to form a giant circle where within that format a portal nested. At least fifteen of the portable portal skeletons vomited an unending stream of undead and demons. I tried to get a good look at the half-mummified freak floating above his rising tide of rancid minions but the horde had my full attention.
Over half of the hulking zombies were armored and the rest were misshapen as if the necromancer had experimented on them, adding extra layers of dead muscle and bone or combining several bodies together to form a sickly whole. There was no way I could actually count the number of enemies that appeared to take back the city.
I grinned. My golems really shone in this type of battle though. This is what they were truly made for. Unadulterated mano-e-mano slugfest warfare. The facts of the day simply wouldn’t work out in the other dude’s favor, but I knew that could change if I couldn’t get those main portals closed.
Waves of blackened, rotting undead flesh clashed with unyielding, magically reinforced crystal just before the backline of artillery golems opened up with crystalline bullets that completely decimated the shrieking hordes. Every salvo blew apart groups of tightly clustered enemies, the nature of the piercing rounds imbued with energy from the sunstone allowing each bullet to lance through multiple ranks almost as if they weren’t even there. The tightly controlled, very disciplined extermination bought me enough of a reprieve for me to glare at Acantha who overcame her shock at the sudden turn of events and jumped in to assist.
“Well don’t just stand there!” I yelled, letting Gungnir’s stores of bullets loose. “Let’s see some fucking fireworks, you crazy pyro!”
Acantha gathered herself, dense sparks racing down her arms before floating between her palms. As she furiously chanted from the back of the golem she was riding, a ball of eerie green fire raged into existence, spinning and glowing like a miniature star.
Just before she released it, I pulled on my stores of power and simultaneously softened the hard packed dirt in front of my army with my Earth Sorcery while conjuring incredible amounts of water and spraying it into the softened dirt, turning the area between the front line and the portals into a thick muck that hampered the advance of the horrifying undead. The hundred or so undead that had actually made it into the ranks of my golem army were quickly put down by a few smacks of an oversized hammer or a hasty crystal round but two of the insane zombies actually got near me.
Swinging Gungnir with my enhanced strength, the first zombie’s chest exploded inward as mace-form Gungnir flashed with power but the second zombie used the first as a springboard to aim for my head. A holy-water arm lashed out and bisected it in mid-air, saving me from the spray of rotting guts. The smell alone was enough to add fuel to the flames of my anger that had been stewing all day. Drawing on my power yet again, I focused on the giant portal skeleton thing and forced the earth beneath and around it to shoot up spikes of pure granite, skewering every part of the abomination and shutting off the portal.
Again and again, I focused my magic, slowly cutting off the supply of enemies even as the floating necromancer screamed in rage. His blasts of magic screamed in my direction but they never made it past Svalinn’s mana shield. I used Gungnir and my Earth sorcery, working in tandem with Kraken to stem the tide. My most powerful weapon spat crystal rounds faster than an experienced band geek rapping out a drumroll and my overcharged waves of magic played merry hell with the earth. I forced the dirt to roll and buck to the point that nothing could walk unless I allowed it. Churning grit and uneven rocks ground the opposition to a halt before Mister Evil Necromancer tried to open more portals and reinforce his dwindling armies.
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“Swat him,” I growled at Acantha who was still charging her fireball. Reaching out with a tendril of mana, I reinforced her personal stores of energy with my own and the raging fireball grew to the size of a beach ball.
“Wrath of Sol!” Acantha screamed, leaning back and launching the fireball straight up into the sky where it settled fifty feet above all of us. Opening her eyes, I noticed that they blazed the same scary blue and yellow as her floating ball of death. Screaming again, fully in the throes of exercising her power, Acantha pointed and the floating fireball lanced out hyper-dense spears of flame that completely incinerated everything it touched. Within the space of five seconds, every portal-bearing skeleton I hadn’t gotten to yet had been torched to ash.
[Focus!] Kraken reprimanded as I looked around in awe at the destruction my vassal had produced. I had to give her credit.
“Holy fuck that was cool!” I exclaimed, yet again supremely jealous and fighting more than a little self-doubt. Part of me still held onto the idea that I should have grabbed Fire Sorcery way back when. But Kraken was right. With a mental command, every single golem focused on the necromancer and as one, unerringly blew him out of the sky. Hundreds of sunlight infused crystal rounds and sunlight laster bolts were too much for his flickering black shield to deal with. I watched with a happy smile as the shattered body pieces fell out of the sky. Acantha leaned forward, screaming and pointing as her Wrath of Sol fireball spell rocketed into the falling remains, detonating the pieces out of existence.
[Good.] Kraken commented. I didn’t say a thing even as I noticed an unusually strong feeling of hate flare into existence in my normally staid familiar before vanishing.
Ignoring Kraken’s idle thought, I put the churning muck that used to be the street to good use. The wide field of mud swallowed up the evidence of the battle, sucking down anything that remotely looked or smelled of rot. Even the destroyed buildings with nasty ichor on them were pulled down below the surface of the earth.
[You missed a spot!] Kraken said, pointing out a few bodies behind a destroyed sunstone golem. [Shatter any and all necro bones you find! Don’t want that soul-stealer coming back if you can help it.]
I nodded, transmitting order for my golems and elemental sergeants to manually shatter every bit of evidence they could find and toss it into the sinking landscape serving as the area’s landfill. Anything I found that was too suspicious, I used the Nephilim holy water arms to purify just in case. The muddied area whirlpooled until the bodies vanished. When I was finally content with the lack of filthy carnage, I worked for another hour to return this part of Arizona back to its normal dusty scenery. Acantha collapsed as I pulled my mana feed back to myself, her stores of energy completely spent on that apocalyptic display of. Leaving myself an honor guard of a hundred golems and two sergeants, I had the rest of my army join the cleanup crew that was storming all of nearby suburbia while I made my way back to the crowd of Luneks holed up west of here.
Severak and his group of Luneks were not exactly excited to see me but their relief was apparent in the complete change of attitude. Apparently, summoning an army of humongous crystalline golems that can wipe out a freaking city engenders its own form of respect. Remy and Fernando, on the other hand, were ecstatic to see Acantha, who in all fairness had probably kept them alive and was only barely associated with the person that murdered their friend and unshackled their minds. Keeping my petty thoughts to myself as manly tears were shed, I kept myself busy off to the side by conjuring stone dishware and putting conjured water in the cups and Centauri meal cubes on the plates. After making sure Acantha saw me pointing at them to let her know that it was available, I walked off to my dome-icile, haha, not domicile.
Disappointment was all that I found there. This is the spot I had picked out for my golems to bring me the people or prisoners that they’d rescued or picked up from flattening the city and suburban area but there wasn’t anybody here. Other than the gaggle of people I didn’t recognize in the other building with the Luneks, nobody else was alive? Really? Walking into my dome, a voice I hadn’t heard in a long time greeted me.
“Power agrees with you, mortal.” Sitting in my house on my conjured stone chair was Hermes himself, or Himself with a capital ‘H’? Not sure how the pronouns work since deities are fucking real. Last time I saw him, he was an eight foot golden gymnast’s dream whose presence you literally couldn’t feel. This time he was quite a bit shorter and definitely more material around the edges, a bit less godly if you will. The way he wore his dapper, navy blue suit reminded me of a rich man chilling in a casino, happily gambling his money away while slamming drinks.
“I have less to offer in the way of refreshments,” I said cautiously, again conjuring stone dishware and filling them up with water and Centauri meal cubes respectively. The one plate in the middle I did put the last bit of my precious Taco Bell that I got from New Miami. “My apologies for the lack of comfort, I wasn’t expecting guests.”
Waving it off, he pulled out a cigar, looking at me for assent before lighting it. Giving a quick nod, I shaped the floor to form another chair and sat across from Hermes as I rested my head on my knuckles. Sitting across from a deity could mean any number of things, although mythos and experience would intonate that most of those possibilities were nothing good. My manners and encounters so far did pressure me to fashion my chair so that it was a little bit lower than his own but my pride did not allow it. In fact, I made sure that I could look the slippery bastard in the eye. I couldn’t tell why a little kernel of me couldn’t stand him.
“Worry not,” Hermes said, filling the air with a good puff of delectable smoke. His eyes twinkled and a big smile creased his face as he exhaled. “I’m not here on business and since you’ve clearly divined, I’m a bit uhm . . . less. But, since that gives me a bit more freedom, I thought I’d check up on the last mortal recipient of a gift from me.”
The smoke from his cigar swirled in the dying light of the day, forming strange images before flickering into symbols. I ignored them as he kept talking. “What makes you even more interesting is that you’ve survived encounters with both Flamel and Merlin, not to mention a few angels and demons. I’ve so enjoyed watching your tumultuous life but what bothers me is the simple lack of connection you’ve had! Numerous women, most of them incredibly beautiful, have walked in and out of your life and none of them so much as garnered a look from you! Why!”
I looked Hermes right in the eyes before giving my version of an intelligent response. “Huh?”
The almost incoherent rant continued. “What good is a mortal’s story without romance? Where is the fire of passion to temper the throes of combat? The softness to bend the steel? Adam and Eve, Cleopatra and Marc Antony, Ron Weasley and Hermoine Granger!”
“The last two aren’t even real!” I interjected only to get waved off again.
“Don’t beleaguer the point mortal! Your life is almost boring but would be incredible if you had some damn romance! AND . . . since I’ve been diminished due to my overt helping with one measly acorn, I have even more time to gaze at the temporary fleetings of mortality that come and go like glorious sparks! But you! You’re an ember with a potential for a fire! You can live so much longer than the rest of them!”
The stone cup cracked in my hand.
“It was your acorn that ate my woman,” I oh so quietly snarled.
“Another twist to what could be an epic romance for all time! Stolen love! Heartbroken hero finds solace in another, forever pining for his true love!” Hermes almost fell out of his chair as he leaned back. “His lovers fading away through the centuries as he endures past their mortal coil! Oh what fire!”
“What you mean to say is that you’re bored!” I squinted at the deity in front of me who’s eyes held an unhinged gleam. When Zeus was bored, he raped random women while in the form of a bull or a swan. I really don’t want to know what a bored messenger deity would do. His desire for entertainment ran aground on the beach of my don’t-give-a-fuckness right now. Sure, I could bang a couple forest ladies who were more than willing back home, or maybe spark something up with some hot alien gal in New Miami or a freaky one in New Richmond, but I don’t see anyone else getting ready to assault the holds of the undead. My concerns right now are so much greater than getting it on, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why it was different for this particular home invader.
“Look, I’m not here to threaten you mortal, I like you. Please don’t take this the wrong way.” Hermes paused to examine his cigar and bask in its scent before giving another puff. “But I’m not the only one around here, and you’re turning into a crux point. The more you involve yourself with the broader tapestry, the more you’re going to get noticed. Just a friendly warning from someone who’d like your story to continue, assaulting the Poles will put you on the map. That’s all I can say without another judgment.”
“Did you uh, did you ever watch the show Boston Legal?” I calmly asked even as my butthole was quaking in fear. “Not sure how up to date on mortal shows you are.”
“William Shatner is brilliant!” Hermes screamed, hopping up and pantomiming. “I object!” Sitting back down, he looked at me with a huge smile. “Oh the way he smacked asses in the office and then stole the show by pulling so many tricks over hard-line judges with sticks up their asses! Wait . . .” He paused, raising an eyebrow. “Why? What are you getting at?”
“Well, let’s talk about this like lawyers do . . . we can talk in hypotheticals,” I mused. “It was one of Shatner’s favorite strategies for getting around the law. Hypothetically, what might happen if I were to hypothetically continue on with my plans to assault the undead fortresses in the North and South? Only hypothetically speaking of course. I mean . . . it doesn’t sound like something I’d do, let alone accomplish.”
“Oooh, acting! Just like Shatner!” Hermes grinned, his cigar smoke framing his features, giving him a smoky trickster god look. “Let’s say, hypothetically speaking of course, if you were to hypothetically continue with your plans, then hypothetically, several hypothetical options might happen.”
The deity pulled out another cigar to replace the one he just finished. Counting on his fingers, he postulated, “Hypothetical one, you might be drafted into the Judgment Paladin Corps of Hyperion, the resident god of Light, due to your effectiveness at combating all kinds of evil. Hypothetical number two, you might trigger a greater war with the Lich Empire and their Vampiric allies. And third, hypothetically speaking of course, you might become the focus of multiple deities of the different flavors, like the hypothetical deity of love since you’ve lost your own loved one, the hypothetical deity of justice and light, the hypothetical deity of death and the underworld. If you hypothetically continue on your course of action, then the minions of those hypothetical subjects might just turn their eyes upon you.”
“Fuck.”
“Hypothetically speaking of course.”
“Fuck.”
Hermes offered up a spare cigar which I declined, allowing him to continue on. “And what woe would betide the mortal who hypothetically slew a fire dragon by drowning? Or murdered a guardian witch who was within her rights to colonize a scoured planet? Or what might happen if anyone learns that a certain sorcerer with incredible power is building his base on said scoured planet? Especially a sorcerer that is friends with a cultivator? Oh my, the drama!”
“Fuck.”
“What would the Sects think? Their own sorcerous slaves long dead and their enchanted items gone to dust as their own cultivating children grow up without such comforts or trappings of power? What a prize such a powerful sorcerer would be!”
“FUCK.”
“But hypothetically speaking of course, what might they all think if they learned that a sorcerer single-handedly cleansed his world, what power that hypothetical sorcerer must have to be able to take all of that on by himself! Who would dare bring such threats to a mighty being of magic when gifts might turn his benevolence on them with much less pain or loss?” Hermes leaned in closer to me, the smoke moving out of the way as his intense eyes locked onto mine. “Hypothetically speaking, mortal sorcerer, do you know why Merlin is untouched? Why does Flamel roam around and nobody dares to come near him except in pure supplication?” I leaned in. “Fear. Both Flamel and Merlin have immense power and are feared. Wild magic and poisonous alchemy can touch many from afar.”
“Is it better to be loved or feared,” I whispered, weighing the true results of my possible choices in my mind.
“In your case, feared. Much better to be feared.”
A cold shiver went down my spine as I considered my options even as a small question poked at the back of my mind. “Tell me, hypothetically, what’s in it for you? Why even tell me? What does one such as yourself have to do with a mortal like me? My slice of eternity does not conflict with your own and I can’t see any hypothetical benefits for you?”
“You call it life, but we call it a Game. And what better way to play the game then plan many, many moves ahead.” The sound of thousand falling feathers rushed by as Hermes vanished in front of my eyes leaving a small round marble on the plate where my all-too-precious Taco Bell used to be.
A trap. Everything in me screamed that it was a trap. That little green-blue marble resembling a miniaturized Earth calmly sitting on that plate. It didn’t even spin. It sat there as if it had alway sat there. Undisturbed. Waiting. Still. There wasn’t even a note next to it to explain to me what the fuck I was looking at. After a minute of arguing with Kraken about how to go about figuring this out, my resolve cracked and I touched it with a finger.
I’m not the deity of magic, but sometimes things get lost in the mail, sometimes, things like this.
The words rang through my skull but then vanished like smoke as a very condensed pack of information shot from the marble up through my arms and into my brain where Kraken caught it, redirecting to a quarantine container of Mental Sorcery. As we both slowly consumed the packet after many intense scans, it became clear exactly what it was . . . instructions on how to make a real-life, honest to all the gods Grimoire.