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Post By By the Hooded Hood and Visionary Thu Apr 07, 2005 at 08:54:27 pm EDT |
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Hallie and the Sepulchre of Destiny, the penultimate chapter 6 | |
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Chapter 6 Who were the fools who spread the story that brute force cannot kill ideas? Nothing is easier. And once they are dead they are no more than corpses. --Simone Weil Sunset over Lemuria was spectacular. Visionary had climbed up an embankment so he could watch the camp as it was washed in the rippling red light reflected from a crimson sea. “It is nice, isn’t it?” Miiri asked him. The former Caphan slave girl liked sunsets too. “Yep. We really should bring a few of these home to Parodiopolis,” the possibly fake man observed. He glanced to the beach. “How’s it going down there?” “Trickshot’s gaming debt to Johnstantine is now into the trillions, De Brown Streak has vanished into the jungle with Noona, Nats talked with Uhuna over Al. B’s communications contraption for six hours, but the link’s down again now and he’s screaming at Al to fix it. There’s a pool about when he’ll take a breath, Yo is giving rabbits to the children of the Refuge, and CrazySugarFreakBoy! is attempting to explain the difference between Gojira and Godzilla to Cthandra.” “A typical day, then. Er, the Juniors?” “Hatman is still lecturing them.” “And… he’s not combusted?” “Not yet. I notice he was wearing his fireman’s helmet on his belt.” Visionary glanced down at the silken tent set up at a distance from the rest of the settlement. “Kaara and Vaahir?” he wondered. “They have not come out of their shelter for two days now,” Miiri smirked. “I think our sister is making the hero very welcome.” Visionary settled back to look into the sky and enjoy the evening. Everything was finally going right. Hallie limped along the tunnel, leaning heavily against the cold stone wall for support. She couldn’t take more than a light breath without the stabbing pain of her broken ribs, but at least it kept her conscious step by step. She had bound her leg wound as tightly as she could, but even her untrained eye could tell it was far too serious to be stopped by simple pressure. Regretfully, she had to leave Fleabot behind to follow the silent but urgent call of the island that was driving her towards danger. She was running dangerously low on time. “You really are a mess” a voice observed from behind her. “You should see… the other guys” she managed, not bothering to turn around. She kept limping down the darkened path without hesitation. As she suspected, her current adversary chose to head her off rather than cut her down from behind. He wanted more banter… Apparently death made one excessively chatty. “So you’re part of the island’s mysterious defences?” he asked, melting out of the darkness directly in front of her… In truth he was little more than the darkness himself. Fields of star-speckled infinity stretched out within him, more horrifying than wondrous. “What is it that you do?” Hallie punched him in the nose by way of demonstration. “GAH!” the dark being cried in surprised pain. “I actually felt that!” He growled and his hand reached out towards her, moving in a way that seemed to make spatial distance meaningless. Instead of stopping at her chest, however, he reached right inside of her and encircled her heart with his cold fingers. “Your turn.” They both screamed in agony as he made contact. His hand tore back through space as if he had touched a hot stove, while Hallie nearly buckled and collapsed as her entire nervous system spasmed. She needed a moment for her vision to clear, and then she saw her assailant cradling a very mundane-seeming limb burned down to the tendons in the hand. “That was my squeezing arm!” he complained bitterly as he seemed to swell and draw more of the darkness into him. “You little…” She didn’t wait for him to finish. Instead, she lunged for his figure, but suddenly the distance between them seemed to quadruple. Undaunted, she caught her balance and stumbled towards him again, swinging her arm but making contact with nothingness as again he shifted through space. “So, you’re a physical threat” he noted, shifting away from her again. “Such a shame that you’re facing the Void itself, the screaming silence, the emptiness betwee… Hey!” he complained as he was forced to shift again in order to avoid her. “Didn’t you get the message? You can’t touch me if I don’t let you.” To prove his point, he shifted himself to everywhere around her and nowhere at the same time. Space increasingly lost all human meaning in the passageway as the dark ghoul showed off. Hallie reeled and desperately wished for some Dramamine, her mind repelled by the changing physics of the world around her. But still she kept up her fruitless assault, swinging blindly and stumbling back and forth like a hopeless drunk in her efforts to reach her adversary. His mocking laugh followed her everywhere, from all around, first near, then far, then from no place her mind could comprehend. It grew in a crescendo of insanity as reality began to fall apart and the last vestiges of her sanity began to slip away. And then, suddenly, it stopped and everything snapped back into place. Shaking with fatigue and stress, Hallie pried open her eyes to see a silhouette of a man torn in half, lengthwise, in a jagged pattern of burning edges. Nodding to herself, she began again to limp towards her goal, pausing as she passed the twitching remains of the ghoul, which fixed its one remaining eye on her in shock. “By the way…” she noted, leaning in towards him, “Ebony says that the dimensional eddies wafting through reality make it too dangerous to travel between space right now. Things should clear up in about four or five days, however.” She took a deep breath and began to shuffle off again. “Just thought you’d want to know.” Yo was just showing the Japanese girls how to care for bunnies, with aid and assistance from Dancer as translator (Yo’s Japanese was as good as her English, but the children seemed to be enjoying talking to the pure thought being). Then Dancer suddenly staggered. “What is to be?” Yo asked, catching Sarah Shepherdson as she almost tumbled. Dancer never tripped up. “Something’s wrong,” the mistress of probabilities warned. “Something’s… messing with time. Messing with everything. Something…” She stiffened then pulled free of Yo and pelted off across the sands. “Visionary!” Humbolt Vernold carefully finished the last stroke of his work, completing the recreation of the spell in perfectly drawn symbols. In acknowledgment of his mastery and acceptance of the condition of his work, the writing seemed to come alive, squirming and crawling about the canvas of the shroud on which it was written. Horrible and obscene to behold, it was a true work of dark art. He proudly fetched the tuft of purple fur and dropped it into the center of the writhing mass of black ink, then folded and rolled the cut of cloth around it, resulting in a small yellow cylinder which he tied off with a piece of his own (or rather Rasputatius’s) hair. “Such a small lever with which to shift the world…” he noted, turning his attention to the ragged figure at the entrance to the tomb. “Wouldn’t you say so?” The bloodied and beaten woman only managed to glare at him. “Who are you?” she asked dangerously. “And what are you doing in our house?” “Just the hero victorious at last” he informed her. “I know… you were expecting something more impressive looking for all the screaming your senses are doing about incursions. But you’ve come to the right place, misguided though your goals may be. This is where the past ends and the future begins, albeit reversed in your case.” He waved her in the doorway. “Come, let’s have a look at you. I’m curious to see what the site has devised for protection.” Walking over to her, HV circled her barely conscious form slowly, looking her body up and down with a critical eye. “A mathematical spirit cast in the form of a golem of flesh” he surmised in wonder. “An inelegant creation, though a thoroughly unique solution. Contact with you must have burned straight through all sorts of Elder magics. I wonder then, did the house create you specifically to oppose me? Or as a more general defence against, say, the waking of the Groper who sleeps beneath this very isle?” He tapped the scroll he had created to his chin as he pondered this question and returned to the great stone coffin. “Of course, interesting though it may be, it’s completely academic” he flipped open the lantern housing the probability flame and plunged the death spell within. “There’ll be no place for you in the new world anyway.” Spurred out of her stupor at last, the green woman lunged at him too late, grasping the sides of Rasputatius’s head between her hands. HV smiled at her. “The thing is, golem… I didn’t infuse this body with the magics of the Necronastycon. Now, my soul… Yes, naturally there’s some taint there. But just try grabbing hold of that.” He brought an arm around with surprising power to slash her with a dull, rusted swordblade, sending her spinning away from him to crash at the foot of the coffin. He held up the blade for her to see. “One of the expected accoutrements of a burial chamber prepared by knights” he explained. “Here now… you’ve overcome so much only to watch helplessly as Improbablus’s future burns. How marvellous.” His smile faded, however, when he turned to behold the yellow scroll only slightly smouldering within the probability flame that was meant to consume it utterly and fully activate the death magics. “By all the cursed luck...” he growled, snatching the remaining bits of yellow mantle up to examine the material. “Who creates a death shroud out of flame-retardant cloth?” Miiri was watching the last flare of sunset before starry night fell over Lemuria. “Your skies are very strange,” she admitted to Visionary. “So black. No colourful nebula shining its soft pinks and blues to bring romance and comfort to the night. But your stars are beautiful in their own way.” Visionary replied by crashing to the ground clutching his chest. “Visionary!” cried the Caphan woman, scrambling over to him. She wasn’t a healer. She didn’t know what to do. Dancer and Yo raced out of the undergrowth. “Heart attack!” cried Yo, who suddenly knew all she needed to about medicine. “Run and get Hatty,” Dancer commanded Miiri. “And the Shoggoth!” Miiri fled off through the jungle as if she was Luuma Swiftheels herself. “What’s happening to him?” Sarah Shepherdson demanded of Yo. “Vizh? Vizh!” Visionary stopped spasming. He stopped moving at all. “His heart,” Yo cried, pressing his/her ear to the fallen man’s chest. “It has to have been stopped beating!” Hallie hadn’t known where she was, or how she had gotten there. Only that her senses had screamed for her to pass through the doorway and stop the man inside from… from… In truth, she didn’t know what she was to do. But when the man thrust a small yellow cylinder into the flame, the sight burned through her mind like lightning. She had attacked him… How did she end up on the floor? The man seemed to shift in shape as he approached, taunting her. First he was just a rotting ghoul of a corpse, then he was Virtual Zemo, then Rikka Ulz Hagan, then Maladomini. They were taunting her… taunting her failure… her weakness. She knew her body was letting her down once again and that the loss of blood had addled her senses. She looked to the corner of the room, where Marie stood, tragically bound to the pile of bones heaped unceremoniously beneath her. Black, insane markings flowed over their surfaces, degrading her even in death. The sight offended Hallie considerably, but Marie’s grief was directed at some other injustice. “It will burn…” the man assured them both. “The magics seep out relentlessly as the fabric slowly blackens and cracks. And when it does, no force in the Parodyverse will be able to alter his fate. Improbablus dies tonight, his soul devoured in slow, twisting agony if not in a single burst of flame.” She was going to fail again. In her soul, Hallie knew this… She didn’t have it in her to go this last stretch, to overcome this last hurdle and stop this man. Her friends were going to die again and she was helpless to stop it herself. Still, she struggled to her feet one last time. The ghoul regarded her with cold bemusement as he protected the flame. “What do you intend to do, guardian? Bleed to death on me?” “No…Not on you.” Hallie assured him as she staggered to the side only to topple over onto Marie’s remains in a bloody heap. “Tag…” she mumbled as she felt the binding magic of the Necronastycon dissolve beneath her. “…you’re in.” She actually thought she felt a light brush of thanks on her cheek before Marie Murcheson turned on Humbolt Vernold and showed him the very definition of a soul-wrenching scream. She fluttered there on the edge of consciousness for who knows how long before the ghoul leaned over into her line of sight and gently lifted her into an upright position with her back against the sarcophagus. Her first conscious thought was that they had failed, and she was finally going to die again. “It’s all right child,” he assured her. “Marie’s sent old Humbolt packing… Unleashed that Celestial-backed keening of hers and hammered his spirit back down the corridors of history like a cork from a bottle. She’s had a lot of practice at that kind of thing in her time, though she’s obviously very impressed at your first showing.” “Who are you?” Hallie asked, rising out of her mental fog. The pain had faded to a dull ache, and now she was just very, very sleepy. “The Abyssal Greye” he introduced himself. “And I owe both of you my apologies. Xander and I believed that we had sufficiently cleaned up after the Necronastycon, but we actually underestimated Rasputatius over there.” He nodded towards the body of the other ghoul, plastered to the wall of the tomb from the force of Marie’s scream. “Usually, that would prove exceptionally hard to do.” Hallie nodded, though she wasn’t really following any of what the walking corpse was saying. Instead, she looked around the room, seeing it instead of the actions inside of it for the first time. In the light of the flickering lantern, the chamber had a soft yellow glow to it. The room was simple, without jewels or other ostentatious displays, but it was well crafted by caring hands. The only decorations were the writings that were carved into the walls in different languages and in differing fonts, creating an oddly compelling tapestry. “What is this place?” she asked. “What does it all say?” “I’m not sure there’s anyone who really knows what it all says” the ghoul admitted. “The site doesn’t seem to stop saying it, after all. The Abyssal Watsar once petitioned to transcribe and translate it, but he gave up after 70 years when he had circled the chamber 9856 times without recording the same writings twice. It tends to be a collection of philosophy, poetry, stories, myths… things shared freely in the world outside. Some have been disappointed that it doesn’t seem to contain any great secrets to the universe or powerful knowledge, but those people tend to miss the value in things.” He looked at her with a warm glint in his dead eyes. “A while back, it was decided that it would be a comfortable place for a hero to rest.” Hallie smiled. “It is nice, isn’t it?” she said softly. “Comforting… welcoming. But then maybe I’m just used to being surrounded by information.” “Maybe” he allowed, though he didn’t sound convinced. “Most people tend to feel that way…although I suspect you personally are especially welcome here. Ironically, I’ve only heard one person ever refer to it as “kind of creepy”.” He reached out a cold hand to gently stroke the green hair from her fevered forehead. “Now I think perhaps it’s time for you to rest. You’ve held on a very long time, but your promises are kept and the miles to go have been trod.” “I am tired” she admitted wearily. “Do you think… Would you read a bit of the writing to me?” she asked softly, embarrassed. “Just for a little while?” Greye smiled warmly at her. “Of course” he agreed, retrieving a pair of glasses to place on the end of his nose. “Let’s see…” He scanned the lines of text on the side of the sepulchre and began to read: “Love is the only way to grasp another human being...to see the essential traits and features, the potential which is not yet actualized but ought to be… Through love, the loving person enables the beloved person to achieve this potential.” “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” “That’s nice,” Hallie said wearily. Her t-shirt was almost completely red with her blood now. She could feel her biological functions shutting down. The tomb was getting darker. “Am I dying?” “Dying is overrated,” Greye told her. “Besides, all of us are only loaned these slabs of meat for a short season, to do what we must. The length of the season is not as important as how we fill it. You have filled your season with duty, and care, and love.” That didn’t sound like a bad epitaph to Hallie, and somehow the great hidden tomb where the mystery hero lay seemed a good place for her to end too. So she beckoned the scholar-ghoul close and whispered her final words to him. “I promise,” the Abyssal Greye told her solemnly. With that, Hallie leaned her head back against the comforting side of the sarcophagus, closed her eyes and willingly surrendered to sleep. Footnotes and Epitaphs: The writings read aloud by Abyssal Greye are paraphrased from Viktor Frankel and quoted from Kierkegaard respectively. |
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