Dagger - The Light at the End of the World (5 page)
Read Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Online
Authors: Walt Popester
Tags: #horror, #fantasy, #heavy metal, #dagger, #walt popester
them faded into a overwhelming whispering. “Aniah, light of my
life,” he began. “Where were you going, precisely? I think you’ve
got something that belongs to me.”
The bandages folds did not moved at all as
he spoke, as if that evil hiss was coming straight from the depths
of his decomposing body. The sound was produced by the mechanical
movement of the larynx of a dead man and what remained of his
diaphragm. Then, there was the echo that overlapped it, coming
straight from the realm of the dead. Sometimes Aniah had the
terrible feeling that the echo arose within her, merging with her
own thoughts and causing a nauseating feeling.
She observed that one eye, digging deep
into the fatal glance, and grinned. “I’m afraid the beauty
treatments you administer yourself are not giving great results,
Skyrgal,” she said. “You should try the sulfur baths of your loyal
Gorgors. They have softened the edges of my wound, you know?” She
put a hand to the scar on her face. “The one you opened on my face
as you laughed at my stupidity.”
The Shadow cocked his head to the left and
right, making his neck vertebrae crack. Then he looked at her once
again. “Sulfur,” he hissed. “Very funny! Irony, especially if drawn
out at less probable times, is something that has always fascinated
me in you. You mortals, I mean. Also Crowley used to make
completely out of place jokes and the more they were of a bad
taste, the more he found a dark pleasure in it. I have found him
irresistible since the beginning.”
Aniah smiled. “Oh yes,
Crowley had a great sense of sarcasm. Maybe that’s what made me
fall in love with him. I don’t dare think about how many jokes
would come to his mind seeing the state you are reducing
his
body. You’re making
him fall apart. It’s very rude of you. You used him only to
convince me to follow you and impregnant me with your…”
smile disappeared, irony disappeared, and she had to fight against
her eyes not to cry. After all that time, she could not still
understand, or nominate what she had given birth to. She shuddered
when she realized to have named him always and just ‘Sweet child of
mine’.
“
What can you do about it?”
Skyrgal added, amused by her sudden dismay. “A mortal body is not
made to accommodate a god’s soul for too long and you simply can’t
imagine how boring that can be. Do you think it was nice scratching
my nose and then finding it between my fingers? Oh, my dear. Inside
me, I feel infinite cavities filled with putrid liquid and gas just
waiting to get out by unnatural ways. It’s not a good existence.
Put yourself in my shoes. Well, they’re encrusted with all sorts of
dry fluids. So, let’s say, see it from my side,I find it of the
utmost importance that you come back home, together with what
belongs to me.” He raised his index to indicate the child. “That is
my blood and I need it. I need it badly.”
“
Where’s your other hand,
sweetheart?”
“
It must have fallen
somewhere. Where, I do not know. With the shortage of protein in
the local diet some beast must have already collected and digested
it, as time does with your stupid human lives, more or
less.”
“
What a subtle
metaphor.”
“
Thank you.”
“
That hand with which you
used to caress me,” Aniah remembered, as her eyes got lost. “Vowing
that you would protect me forever.”
his left shoulder moved, letting out a puff of fetid gas. “You
think you can still talk to him, don’t you?” he deduced. “Hidden
inside this rotting body, you think you can reach Crowley
Nightfall, Pendracon of Golconda, vicar of Angra and all that blah
blah. You think you can tell him, ‘Fight against him, love of my
life! Come out! I’m waiting for you with legs wide open!’ Oh.
That’s stupid, woman, very stupid, and technically wrong,the man
you loved is now only the skin I wear. You should have realized it
after what I did to you. He would have never done anything like
that, to you. He used to love you, he used to love you
deeply.”
“
Oh. Really?”
“
Yes I know. Because I also
have his memories.
Your
stupid memories.”
from me. Leave them to me, at least those.”
“
You know which one is my
favorite? The wild scent of the Glade of Golconda. If I’m not
mistaken, your first time together.” Now Aniah felt that
treacherous hiss born inside her. The bastard was doing it on
purpose. “What a romance, my little one. The invincible warrior who
had killed and fought and won his wars was so embarrassed to get
inside a woman’s body for the first time. He was no more than a
little kid, all red with shame. A fledgling with its willy. But you
were there, expert filly, telling him what to do, ‘Put your hands
here, push, bite me here…’ Ah! Worth dying in laughter! Well, since
you were weaned so young it’s no surprise you were a little more
experienced, honey. You gave him self-confidence. You didn’t make
him feel stupid when every other woman would have humiliated him. I
appreciate it, you know? You were even able to make him climax,
even though he didn’t reciprocate the favor. This man will never
know how much we enjoyed ourselves, instead. Oh yeah! I felt you.
Surely the
force that has lived through
all eternity
has some more experience,
sugar, you have to concede me that at least!”
Skyrgal shook his decomposing body in an obscene and slow imitation
of sex.
“
Yes, ride your favorite god
once again! To the stars and then down into the throat of hell!” He
stopped only when he heard her laughing instead of crying. “Oh, you
think it’s funny?” Now the voice was coming straight from the
sidereal depths of that mass of bandages. Skyrgal was genuinely
surprised.
“
I find another thing
funny,” she said.
“
What?”
She raised her head to look
at him, grinning through her tears. “Even now that you just got
reincarnated, you lost your left hand,” she said. “Just like the
one Angra tore away from you with his teeth, according to the
ancient scriptures! Remember how you felt weak as he cut you into
pieces? Remember how it was humiliating to scream in pain at his
feet, while you were exiled from your
true
body?”
courage she did not have.
“
Yes,” Skyrgal replied after
a long pause. “You’ll find a lot to laugh about when I’ll take care
of your torture again, bitch!”
“
Oh. Wasn’t it you who hated
coarse language?”
time, I’ll first chop off your hands and feet. So I’ll be sure you
won’t escape again. You’ll become a nice human larva, Aniah, naked
in a cold and damp cell. It will be nice to see you try to eat, and
crawl, and drink from the floor water mixed with the waste of my
faithful ones. Of course, I will let them vent all their most vile
instincts on you. And I’ll be there watching while you get
humiliated to your core. Totally to the core. Only then, will I
begin to administer your pain myself. I like to delve into the
turbid side of humans, more or less metaphorically. There’s no
greater suffering than that which I reserve to those who try to
escape from my grasp, nor longer than the one I reserve for those
who succeed.”
“
Apart from this smell of
rotten eggs? Did you far—?”
Aniah winced. For a moment, time seemed to stand still. Everyone
turned to look at them, yet the god kept silent. That terrible
silence in which she had seen him make the worst things. Even
inside her.
“
I hate to be observed in
these conditions,” he hissed. “If these beggars don’t stop looking,
soon they’ll no longer have eyes to do it.”
Every bit of irony
disappeared from her mind. No, it was no longer funny, if ever it
was. Perhaps only then Aniah remembered who, or what, she was
actually facing.
Kam Karkenos
the ancients called him.
The force that has lived through all
eternity
.
“
They are good people,” she
said. “This doesn’t concern them.”
“
I love vulgar displays of
power. You should read all those books that talk about
me.”
When she saw him bring the
hand to his scimitar, Aniah knew he was serious. A
force
, after all, was
always serious, so she stood up and shouted, “Well? What the fuck
you look at my brother for?” She looked around, trying to sound
convincing. “You never seen man devour’d by leprosy?”
tried to stand up with a knife clutched in his hand. “T’ man
bothers you, ma’am?” he stammered.
She pointed to the sword on her shoulders,
as if to say that certainly she didn’t need his help. The
background buzz arose again within the four tavern walls, but Aniah
drew a sigh of relief only when she saw Skyrgal rest his hand on
the table again.”
“
You’re too good,” he
pointed out, watching her as she sat back. “You’ve always been. You
keep on exposing yourself to save the lives of others, even though
I don’t remember anyone has ever done much to help you. Not when
you were a child and your father played with you in a… somewhat
unusual way, or when you were grown up. Men have always walked all
over you, Aniah, but you never learn,” he sighed, drumming his
skeleton fingers on the table. “Well, all of you mortals will die,
one day. It’s part of your nature. Then what’s this desire to
survive and save others from their fate?”
“
A Guardian lives forever as
long as the Guardians live,” the woman recited, looking him
straight in the one eye. “Sixth and last commandment.”
“
Oh. You don’t know how many
times I heard such a stupid thing in the course of eternity. And
where are they all now? Where are the people and their essential
wars fought in the name of non-existent gods? Scattered like dust
in the infinite abyss of the universe, a dust composed of beings
that in different times and places thought to be the center of
Creation.”
“
This one is nice, where did
you read it?”
“
But it could be different
for you,” the
force
continued, as if he had not even heard her. “Yes, it could be
different, as for all those who have served me well. If only you
stayed with me, you’d discover how beautiful it is to live after
death. I could make you an eternal being.”
The existence of your most faithful servants. I saw you rot, hour
after hour, and drag in your slow decline that one person, for me,
synonymous with life. From then on, yours was just a slow swim in
death’s murky black waters. Angra really killed you that distant
day, leaving you alive.”
The god did not answer this time, and he
did not laugh. Only hearing that name awoke in his mind sorrows as
old as time, rekindling a grudge never faded.
“
Your body. Angra kicked you
out of your body—”
“
Stop it.”
“…
when even a rat rotting in
a sewer has its own!”
“
Stop that!”
his weak point.
Skyrgal bowed his head.
“You’re right,” he allowed in a whisper. Then he looked up at the
baby the woman was holding in her arms and became serious,
impassive. A wild light of desire shone in his eye. “But sometimes,
in view of the ultimate objective, the moral quality of every
single action that leads us to that totally loses importance. We,
eternal beings, are not afraid to compromise, not even with death,
and those of you who want to become almost as powerful as we have
to learn this art among the less noble ones. If Gorgors had not
stumbled upon the sacrilegious knowledge preserved for thousands of
years by the desert sands, I could have never reach the world for
my second coming. Now that I have, I won’t just rot in a corpse, or
wander from man to man for eternity. I want my
true
body, kept on top of your
Ktisisdamn sacred mountain. It
belongs
to me!” He clenched his hand
into a fist, then seemed to relax, spreading it peacefully on the
table. “Yes. I just had to make my blood flow back into this mortal
world, no matter by what means. I was able to do so only thanks to
you. Thank you, woman, for giving me a son!” Beneath the bandages,
he seemed to smile. “His divine blood will give new life to the
colossal stone limbs of my body, allowing the end to this torment,
the end of my exile. The power, fruit of thy womb, is ancient,
Aniah. Where do you think you can hide a being like
that?”
“
I won’t hide him. He must
not live! I’ll take him to the Fortress so that my blood brothers
can kill him.”
“
Kill him?”
“
Araya will!”
“
NO!” Skyrgal bowed his
head. “No,” he repeated.
through the bandages that covered it. He exposed the black and
necrotic sternum where, as if composed of inextinguishable flames,
burned that red blood symbol that she knew all too well.
