The Lamb
Christine al’Bashir smashes the three-pronged head of her lucerne hammer into his chest. The hammer ricochets off his breastplate, denting it slightly with three dots. The blow slides him back two feet, so she takes the time to ease in a breath to recalibrate her body.
He stands three inches taller than she, wearing a full plated body of pearly white armor. The back of his helmet extends out an inch then slopes down to his neck, two large cheek plates connect at a bolted hinge by his ear then convex in a large fashion to meet an inch out from his nose. Golden etchings faintly glow in interweaved grids over his armor, some geometric shapes, others archaic lettering that turn of their own accord.
Her armor resembles his composition, instead her color be that of the darkest obsidian. Blacker than coal. Polished to gleaming perfection. Intricate engravings luminate its surface with a powerful purple radiance, these resembling mathematical equations and precise calculations in multiplex-ventricle shapes that warp in on themselves. There had been a time when his armor was as black as hers, a time when they fought hand in hand against the very abhorrence he now behalves. Every waking second she wished she woke up from this nightmare.
She sprints forward, measuring her breaths with each limb movement, adjusting her foot pressure in response to the dirt’s unevenness. She grips onto her lucerne with both hands, just as he clutches his bec-de-corbin; whereas her hammer has three prongs extending out, his has a blunt face. Their weapons match in durability, forged from the same onyx stone.
Christine measures the distance between he and her, cocks her right shoulder back, then swings her hammer at his head. He blocks the swing with the pole of his hammer, then jabs the end of his pole at her chest. She flash-steps up his right, leaving a wavering blur following her form from the left, and dodges the pole.
She pivots her hips to the left, then propels her leg at his side. In a snap he frees his hands from his bec-de-corbin, his movement a blur as he blocks her leg with his forearms. Before his weapon hits the floor, he clasps his hands onto her leg at the calve and upper thigh. He lifts her off the ground with ease and an arch in his back. She tries to bend her leg and twist to break free, but he spins faster than her movement and throws her across the desert field.
She flies over the land, air rushes through her helmet and body armor. She views the sky: bathed in crusted orange corrosion, black smoke, streaks of scarlet. She glimpses a bright blue flash high in the air, possibly another dragon being torn apart. Another waste of life.
She throws her arms to the right, using the momentum to swing her body to face the ground. She flexes out her legs in accordance, stopping the rotation. She lands feet first, slamming the prongs of her hammer into the floor skidding her to a halt. A small fluff of dirt spirals into the air as she raises herself to full height. She inhales deeply through her nose, smelling burnt ash and petulant flesh rotting. She exhales from her mouth with a cool ease, relaxing her muscles slowly. She gazes at him through the slits of her helmet, hatred screaming out her eyes. And he stared through his at her. She wondered what his eyes looked like beneath the veil of darkness obscuring the insides of his helmet. Every so often a movement of his allowed a small plume of the Dark to escape, which would then separate into thin wisps lost in the air.
He slowly grabs his polearm off the floor, wiping off any dirt staining its hide. Christine watches him, memories resurfacing to remove his white armor enshrouding his form. Memories of his true self, before the debacle.
She pictured his chiseled jaw, a long pale scar curved up his left cheek to his forehead. This he received during his childhood in the slums, before he became co-emperor. He had grey eyes which pierced through any surface, an unwavering stare pushing any into submission. Except her. She held no despondency to his sight unlike the foreign diplomats who beset them for some trivial need or want. His eyes were loving toward her, a radiating embrace full of warmth, filled with desire and longing. His upper lip thin, lower lip full. He would keep his black hair short but long enough for her to grab a nice fistful. She remembered his shoulders, strong and tight. His built arms and chest, sculpted abdomen down to powerful thighs and calves. He even had a pink birthmark on the lower right side of his back.
It had been years since the last she saw him in the flesh. Years since he donned white armor and attacked her. Years since he held her in his arms. Years since he happily walked the streets of their kingdom, not killing and pillaging the very people he swore to protect. Years since they shared a meal together, not his cannibalistic desires. Years since they spoke. Years since they told each other the three magic words: I love you.
They stand in a desert clearing where no flowers or specs of grass grow. A tall wall of conglomerate stone encloses them in a circle, its façade filled with gigantic etchings made hundreds of thousands of years before the primordial age. On the left round, the etchings depict a human expunging their corporeal form. Their body begins fully formed, arms outstretched, head titled up. With each consecutive depiction does the human fall apart, the flesh falling from bone, tissue disintegrating, organs pooling to sludge. The right round consists of weaves pulling themselves together. First abstractly, the lines swirl in a discombobulated mess without form. Progressively the weaves tighten into a humanoid shape with the etchings themselves becoming darker and grittier. The left and right sides of the wall collide in the middle, forming a human dispersing themself amongst the cosmos while the tightly wound weaves silhouette a humanoid being raising its hands to the sky. There was only one entrance into the clearing, a simple wooden door at the base of the wall, insignificant compared to the majesty encompassing it.
Christine flexes her hands, rotating her wrists and cracking her neck to the left. Her own black armor just as durable as his, but her body underneath be that of flesh and bone. She wrenches her hammer free from the ground, swiping off dirt built up between the prongs. Relaxing her grip on the pole with her right hand, she lowers her left hand—faintly touching the pommel of her sword strapped to her left hip. These polearm weapons were powerful, enough to batter the other into submission, but not absolute defeat. She eyes his sword tucked inside its sheath on his left hip. Their swords held their true potential, conduits to push their abilities to the edge. They would need to shed the polearms soon, if not, they would keep fighting. And fighting. And fighting. He and her were the greatest warriors the realm had ever seen. They had the endurance to fight for weeks without end, enough stamina to keep driving at full speed.
But the people outside the walls would not make it. No sound penetrated the protective stone circumventing them, nonetheless they both, or so she wished, understood a million people died every ten minutes they brawled for victory. This was then multiplied by every other manner of creature dwelling on the planet. From trees to dragons, arachnids to ghouls, trolls to elves, adjudicators to necromancers. All manner of life was sacred to Christine, each a spark gifted by the Light. She’d commemorate their sacrifice later, for what stood behind them beheld their need to quarrel; the means for convergence.
In the center of the plain, towers a monolithic ziggurat built from refined obsidian and onyx. Its black sheen pulsates an otherworldly power. Light bends around its frame, splitting into visible wavelengths that roll like the waves of a convulsing sea. Violet beams curl around weaves of gold, sapphire streams twist through sickly yellow bands. Brilliant dioptase, a cyclosilicate mineral, flows through the ziggurat façade, creating rivers of glowing emerald green. The Ziggurat of Despair, named from its founding during the primordial age. The catalyst to either the End or Rebirth, measuring six hundred meters tall and six hundred meters wide. The weight of choice hung on the balance between Christine and her husband. Whoever could win the battle would mount the ziggurat, then perform the ritual for convergence with either the Light or Dark.
She stifled the need to cry, and thanked Anu that he could not see her face twisting with anguish, at the tears ready to burst from her eyes.
“Harold!” She shouts, her hands clenching hard enough to hurt. “Tell me!” Her chest rises and falls rapidly as a burning sensation writhes inside her heart, “Why?! Why have you betrayed everything we worked for?! What has this bloodshed given you?!”
He stays silent.
“TELL ME!”
(Fading sunlight timber molten corrosion
Hunkered souls splitting sound through clenched teeth’s timeless chatter
Lain newborn upon fractured soil shallowed with rust
Gone shall brilliance be begotten amongst suffering’s beauty
Wallowing fawn knowing no wrong
Cast thy net over thy brink
Catch what fruit lingers upon ocean’s ripple
Until twilight reclaims and restores
Until rapture denies and destroys)
Christine staggers back, her eyes wide with fear churning inside. She heard the voices, the multitude of singing and screaming swirling together in a hypnotic mold. Misery on their tongue, agony bleating through their words. These voices culminated in many masculine and feminine pitches, from child to adult, from withered age to croaking sickness.
“Do you hear them too?” Harold asks, his words twisting around her ears as if he were beside her. She breathes heavily, trepidation swallowing her limb by limb.
Then agony came. An unbearable agony. The anguish, fears, pains, and losses of totality pierced the very vibrations of her soul. (Kill thyself!) Her body seizes. She sucks in a breath as she continues to hear him. She had never heard him speak since his betrayal. His words carried the magnitude of a volcanic explosion, the grace of a gentle breeze, it spiraled and distorted upon the ear, then soothed itself into an inviting embrace.
“They’ve become but a pest to me over the years.”
She steeled her mind to vibrations and frequencies of the Dark, drawing on inner rage to block out the noise; except for his voice.
“I hear them,” he suspires sadly, “I hear them constantly. They show me different worlds, realities eclipsing ours. Christine…my love,” she restrains herself from screaming at him. She was no longer his love, no longer his light. He was the husk of the man she married, “Our warring is insignificant compared to what lies beyond the veil. Hel, we have fought this fight an infinite number of differing times…and I’ve witnessed each…happening the same,” he laughs crazily, “way…ALWAYS!...always…itching into my mind,” he takes a gradual step forward, “pounding my skull,” then another, his fingers revolving in the air, “ripping my soul in two,” he strolls forward at a leisurely pace, “inciting me to madness.”
Christine’s body refuses to move, as if she were nailed to the ground. She struggles to breath, each word of his ramming into her chest then expanding throughout her form. She could not place this newfound magic. This warpation of reality. What did he know? What horrors were revealed to him? Why couldn’t he just tell her?
“Entropy always wins,” mid-stride, he drops his polearm, then unsheathes his sword with one clean motion, the blade a bleached opal that vibrates in the air, “be it I victorious or You, it makes no difference.”
She watches Harold tighten his grip around the handle of his sword, “It always ends the same.”
(FIGHT!)
The weight suspends itself form Christine’s form. Harold drives himself forward, his feet leaving small craters from where he pushed. Simultaneously, Christine releases her grasp on her own polearm and frees her sword from its scabbard, its blade black like tar. Unable to deflect his blow with the flat edge, she uses the hard edge of the blade to halt him. Their swords connect, bursting extravagant auras of power radiating from their inner cores. Her blade exhumes an ethereal purplish-black glow, while his exhibits a paled-white luminance. Tears filter out Christine’s eyes, her lips pulled back, teeth barring at her husband from underneath her helmet. She could only wonder what his face looked like.
She shoves him back, then proceeds to advance on him, swinging her sword with much haste and fury. Together, in a symbiotic trance they collaborate in their fight, deflecting and striking, blocking and driving. On and on and on they beat each other back, gaining advantage then losing it in a split.
“COWARD!” She barks at him, deflecting a blow then rocketing her fist into his breastplate. Before he can regain himself, she spins, and lands the full weight of her leg into his waist, sending him crashing many meters away. “YOU WEAK BASTARD!” She screams at him, dead sprinting toward him as he tiredly props up. Christine finds her body fresh and rejuvenated with a new flood of adrenaline flooding her systems, and rage inside her breast.
Violated images flash before Christine. Images of entire villages decimated. Children with their entrails spewing out their backs, naked women raped then torn apart, men hanging by their tongues with their eyes plucked out. She remembered the hundreds of thousands killed by his hands or given blessing to die by his actions. She berated herself in her mind for being such a child. She should have driven him and his followers out root from stem. She should have gutted and spat on their faces. She should have ordered any and all of his underlings to be massacred on the spot. It was her fault, she told herself, for allowing such circumstances to commence. She had been too wishful, too simpleton to think that one day he would change. She should have used the same rage and destruction he wrought across the lands. She should not have been the better person and killed him in the beginning.
“CHILDREN!” She catches up to him before he can even raise his hand and smashes her knee into his face. As he plummets backward, he slashes at her wrist, causing her to repost the swipe, giving him time to regain himself.
“I had to,” he answers with but a whisper, standing up slowly.
She furrows her brow; she thought her rhetoric would go unheeded. She widens her legs into a stable stance to catch any of his onslaughts. She notices the way his body bends: his back unnaturally arched upward, his sword hand’s wrist limp, his other arm dangling at his side. Did she break his arm? She had not felt the popping of bone during their fight, his movements seemingly fluid in their dance. What had—
“I’m…I’m sorry,” he almost sobs, cutting off her train of thought. His armor rattles together as his body visibly shakes.
For a moment she felt pity for him. Then she remembered finding a baby with their head smushed inside out, the legs chopped off then forced down the mother’s throat. And her pity evaporated.
“Sorry?! That’s all you fucking got to say!” She shifts to launch herself at him but stays her movement. Her eyes widen as she watches his body begin to release a golden aura.
The golden aura flows out his back, then runs over his shoulders and down his legs. It gleams a wondrous array of incandescent hues; each color be it red or blue separated into a spectrum of ceaseless beauty. The spectacle almost made her cry. Almost.
His shoulders shake up and down while he weeps. Christine keeps her guard up incase this be some ploy. “I…can’t stop the Sea,” he feverishly wails, “no matter how hard I try!” He pounds on his chest, “The path has been plodded!” He raises his left hand to his helmet, as if touching his real face, “I love you…I love you so much, Christine.” His left-hand clenches, dragging down the front of his helmet before dropping back to his side. His right-hand clasps onto the handle of his sword. His body convulses side to side before he constricts into an arched stance, his face facing the heavens, “VORBUER A’E-LA MAHUR! VORBUER A’E-LA MAHUR!”
Christine gasps, understanding not the translation of the dead language but its gravity, nonetheless. It was the language of the Dark, the Abyss, of the so-called Mother. None living spoke the dead language, not even the ancestors before with their vast amount of research could wrap their heads around its monumental enunciations and depths. And here was Harold, speaking it fluently, unabashedly. Where did he acquire such knowledge?
A frightening scream splits the sky bursting from Harold’s mouth, that then morphs into a torrent of bellowments uttered through splintering voices not belonging to him. Voices felted with pain, seething with guilt, pronouncing their bottled-up rage.
Christine was not prepared.
Faster than a blink, Harold flashes before Christine, carrying with him an electric cyclone coiling behind him. He headbutts her to the floor, her back smashing onto the dirt leveling a small cloud outlining her body. Straddling her, he raises his sword to spear down through the left eye-slit in her helmet.
“Brontere!” Christine shouts, blasting Harold off her with a fluorescent sphere of purple.
Harold twirls sideways in the air before hitting the ground, his body tumbling away. Christine stays flat on her back, gazing up at the sky. She wondered, for the briefest of moments, what it would feel like to die. How her husband’s blade would have felt piercing her eye to the brain. Would she have time to scream, or the act so swift she would be swallowed into the vacuous nothingness of death? No matter, she thought, she had no intention of dying today.
Lifting her right leg, she throws it to the right, lands on the knee then props herself up with her right elbow. She stands shakily, soreness feeling out her chest. Rotating her shoulders, she stretches out her arms with wide movements. Her sword had been drawn. Her first spell cast. She had seen Harold’s true colors; he had glimpsed hers. She had to end this fight. End his and hers suffering.
“Ahura Mazda,” she softly sings, turning slowly to face her husband while revolving her sword in her right hand, “dra’mundle,” a vividly black fluorescence shadows her form, twisting and turning as if possessed, its aerial majesty bending all light around it, “Shia-La-Muetuacan, Balroq-kun!”
She inhales deeply. Then exhales. Calmness forgoes the shackles she hath placed onto herself. The shackles of restraint, the bindings to keep herself in check. But this was the end. There was no need to hold back.
Harold and Christine face each other, both filled with raw power. This was their final spar. No more cheap shots, no more allowances for recovery. Steadily they each ball up their left hands into fists, then connect it to the handle of their blade outstretched before them. They breathe deeply, heads kept high to stare directly at the other; and bow. Back to full height, each assumes their stance.
And they begin their dance of death.
They propel themselves to meet at the center. Their swords connect, bright blue sparks flying in all directions. Christine wards off a strike, pivots her hips, and shoulders Harold to the side while snapping, “RENJURL!” She pushes her left hand toward him, casting a blue inferno.
The flames spin in a tight wound, almost cone shape. “Dramuer!” Harold retorts, flinging his left hand out in front of him. The blue inferno rebounds off a green shield then dissipates in the air.
Christine drives forward, growling with rage, “Opul’twe,” she clenches her left hand around a forming purple dagger. She penetrates his shield with the dagger, causing both to fracture and fall apart as red flakes.
He jabs at her shoulder which she dodges with a turn, the blow gliding over her armor. She kicks out his right knee then slams her blade horizontal to his chest. The impact strikes a tremor up her arm, quivering her flesh. The armor itself was too enchanted and durable to be so easily sliced, she had to bend it to a malleable state of imperfection. Harold grunts, the blow sliding him back a foot. His breastplate dented slightly, enough to move the gambeson underneath, not enough to cause any real damage.
“Gral!” Harold shouts, lifting his hand to the sky.
Red bolts of lightning apparate from thin air above Christine, plunging down to run her through. She tenses up the muscles in her neck, crying out, “Yut!” The bolts rebound off a crystalized enclosure surrounding her body. She sprints toward Harold, removing the spell with a flick of her wrist. Sweat trickles down her face, she feels her pores perspire to battle the heat she gives off. She whispers, “malut,” to cool off her skin so she need not worry about sweat in the eyes.
Harold and Christine meet together in another ballet for domination. Christine strikes to cave in his besagew, a circular plate covering his armpit. He slips his blade beneath hers, redirecting her thrust to glance off the top of his spaulders; armor which covers his shoulders down to the upper arm. He delivers a clench fist to her side, but she forces herself through the blow, and buries the top of her helmet up his jaw. He stumbles back, clearing way for her to advance and follow up with a swing at his breastplate. Her blade connects then recoils back due to the low immensity of strength she put into the swing. The dent in his breastplate furthers in, she thinks two more strong blows will do the trick.
Harold regains himself and presses forward, shouting, “Vatuv!” He sweeps the area with his left hand, turns his palm to face the sky, then drops it. Following suit, the ground beneath Christine’s feet elevates her up, hoisting her by the ankles, then hurls her back at the ground.
She braces herself, hitting the floor first with her arms and legs tucked in tight. Scrambling back up, she barely blocks a swing aimed at her neck. Her blade could not break through his enchantments, but she did not know about his own sword. For all she knew, he would need only one slip to run her through. He could have put any power of Dark onto his blade…but then again, he did aim earlier for the weakest portion of her armor.
Knocking his blade to the side, she arches her back and kicks him square in the chest to create distance between them. Using the time needed for him to forward at her once more, she hovers her left hand over her blade, murmuring an incantation, “Zionshu’l-limun-al’cital.” Her blade deepens in color, from tar to a vacuous pit actively latching onto Light
But he does not instantly rush her. He does the same, sliding two fingers over his blade chanting, “Shia-mun’ren, Shia-mun’ren.” His blade from an opal-white transfuses to a stark-bleach actively emitting rays of transcendent ivory.
They each ready themselves, correcting their grip on the handle of the swords. Christine inhales deeply, then pushes off toward him. Harold does the same, both of them racing to meet in the middle. Christine cocks her shoulders back and swings with all her might, her sword whistling through the air. She grinds her teeth together, summoning power from her feet to her legs up her torso then through her arms. With each nanosecond a superior incandescent autofluorescence engulfs Christine’s form, a singular blaze of radiating power. Equivocally, an inherently ebony aura devours Harold’s body, a writhing mass of imbued loss.
Their swords shatter on impact. Christine gasps as she steps forward, thousands of tiny shards pirouetting in the air. Harold does the same, both of them gawking at the barren handle of their swords as if seeing them for the first time. They should not have broken. They could not have.
‘Impossible.’
They thought at the same time.
They both understood the implication.
~~~
Christine stood beside Harold, gazing out at a sea of clouds. They were twenty thousand feet in elevation, on the highest mountain of the Sarul province, called Dreçe. A heavy breeze rustled the neon-purple leaves on the tall red-barked trees, sending small plumes of pollen through the air from pulsating indigo flowers that littered the ground.
“It’s beautiful,” Christine whispered, her eyes roving over the many rolling hills, deep fissures of earth which widened out into long-winding channels funneling clear purple water. At a pair of red-tipped hawks soaring through the gentle wind, eyeing their prey from the safety of the sky.
“It almost matches you in its majesty,” he turned his face toward her, a childish smile lifted his cheeks, “almost.” He drank in her physical form, completely enraptured by her. She wore knee-high boots coated blue with yellow laces, black leggings, a grey turtleneck long sleeve with black cuffs, and a violet wool coat with weaves of pink.
He, on the other hand, wore a simple white jubba, which hung down ankle-length with long-sleeves cuffed at the wrists. It hugged his body comfortably to show off his muscles and shoulders.
She blushed and playfully punched his shoulder, “Cheesy.”
He chuckled, then wrapped his left arm around her waist. He pulled her close against him, his right hand sliding up her side to then lay on her stomach, “I know.”
She leaned into him, her head resting below his. “I think I’ve solved it.”
He blinked, “Solved what?”
“The warpation problem.”
“How so?”
“Well, I’ve been so set on repulsing the Dark from the equation, I’ve never thought in actually incorporating it. See,” she formed an ‘O’ with her hands, then slowly widened them out, “the Light is an explosive system, able for projection, consumption, and power, but it has no binder—not constriction. It keeps on expanding, and when it cannot expand anymore, it simply destroys and propels itself further. And there is no going back to gasoline or oil, we’ve already seen the environmental harm they can cause. But,” she began closing the ‘O’ back together, “the Dark can act like a binder—a compressor, if retrofitted by a concealer. Like a backwards rotating quark spliced by the Light’s growth patterning. Therefore, as the Light pronounces itself in all directions, the retrofitted Dark will compress upon it, creating a constant tension—and therein—unlimited energy. Which will fuel everything, from the agricultural centers, water purifiers, to those new jets I think would help give us an edge against the dragons and drakes.”
Harold stared out at the clouds, “You know, everything you’re saying is going over my head. But knowing you, you must be heading on the right track. And if you’re deadest on it, always remember the Dark is unpredictable. It corrupts. It can ever be tamed.”
Lowering her left arm, she touched the side of Harold’s face with her right hand, “Of course, my love. I’ll always be careful.” She caressed his right cheek, tiny swirls with her index and middle finger, “There’s still been no word on Durmond.”
“You mean the Kurl Legion’s envoy? He’s still missing?”
She nodded, “A week now. The Legion even sent one of their human hounds on the road he was recorded taking. Trail just ended cold, right-smack in the middle. As if he stepped from this reality to another in an instant.”
Harold inhaled deeply, smelling the sweet scent of crisp air, “Temporal anomalies aren’t uncommon anymore. Could be one snagged him, sent him off to wherever those warpation vortexes end up.”
“Yeah…”
In silence they stood, admiring the view for a time.
Then a silky voice of power addressed them from behind. “Harold. Christine.”
Harold and Christine snapped around.
Christine was the first to speak, “Lily von Dalkhu,” she closed her right hand into a fist, clamped her left hand over it, and put both of them below her bosom with a deep bow, “thank you.” She did not rise.
Harold copied her movements, “It was an honor, teacher.” He too, did not rise.
Lily von Dalkhu regarded each of them with but a nod, “At ease, both of you.”
Christine and Harold rose themselves to full height.
Lily’s crimson eyes switched back and forth between them, “I will be leaving the coming morrow. You two will return to your peoples.” Her red lips spread in a soft smile, “I’m proud of you both.” She slipped her hands into her faded-blue jeans and ambled closer to them, “You both have excelled since our first session.”
“Where will you go?” Harold asked.
Lily smirked. She continued to amble forward, causing Christine and Harold to part for her to walk through, “A new chapter in my life.” She stopped a foot away from the edge of the cliff, her eyes lazily scanning the clouds, “I have taught you both all I know. And you both have excelled marvelously…The rest is up to you.”
“But, teacher—” Harold started.
Lily spun around on her heel and faced him with burning red eyes, “There are no buts, Harold.” Her continuing stare prompted him to mumble an incoherent apology, “I cannot teach you your inner-steel. That,” she switched her gaze to Christine, “you will find in the battlefield.”
“It is the will of the Light,” Christine responded.
“It is the will of the Light,” Harold meekly responded.
Lily smiled warmly, “Nevertheless, I do have one last residue which I wish to impart upon you both.” She closex the distance between herself and them, and rested her hands on their shoulders. She switched her gaze between them while she said, “When Light and Dark shatter together, all differences that beset both mind and body shall withdraw in communal consideration in accord to the domain. Therein, shall one submit on their knees and the other shall rise the steps toward redemption.”
Christine looked away, befuddled, “How could,” she clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, “How can the Light and Dark shatter together?”
Lily shrugs, “You’ll figure it out.”
~~~
Christine and Harold look at each other simultaneously. Beneath her helmet, Christine gapes at Harold. She clenches the handle tight enough to pale her knuckles, then tosses it in front of her. The handle slaps onto the floor, coming to a rest as flung dust dissipates in the air.
“When Light and Dark shatter together,” she says, restraining her anger to a scorn-filled rumble, “all differences that beset both mind and body shall withdraw in communal consideration in accord to the domain. Therein, shall one submit on their knees and the other shall rise the steps toward redemption.” She lets her words hang in the air, allowing the silence to suffocate them both.
Until she asks, “Does that still mean anything to you?”
“Yes…Christine.”
“So…what now?” She asks him while putting her hands on her hips.
Harold looks at his own handle, turning his hand side to side as he examines every curve and nuance in its craftmanship. “I…” he sighs, exhuming the sound of water rushing up shore’s side, “I must die in combat.” He too tosses the handle in front of him, landing it beside hers on the ground. “Anything less will spit on the memories of the fallen.”
She nods, “Understood.”
She launches herself forward at him, pumping her arms and legs in tune to her measured breaths. Harold relaxes his body, shifting his torso and lifting his arms in front of him, his hands half-open for both striking and blocking incoming attacks. Christine, as she nears him, feigns a punch for his mouth with her left hand. He strikes up his right forearm to block her and steps in to deliver a kick at her midsection with his left leg. With his forward motion and readiness in defense, Christine drops down to one leg. (Break Him)She slides her right leg on the floor while propping up her left around his right leg. She wrenches her right arm up his crotch to lock the crevice in her elbow against his right thigh. She whips her left arm around and clasps her hands together, then with a strained grunt, pushing off with her propped up left leg and lifts Harold off the floor.
He elbows her across the face, but she swivels her head with the blow, so it glances off her helmet. She continues to drive her feet until she sta(BREAK Him)nds upright, holding him aloft with one of his legs.
Finding himself at such a disadvantage, Harold bellows a spell to blast them apart, “Vorbuer Flahen!” And nothing happens.
She rockets him back to earth, slamming him onto the dirt and lifting a large dust cloud around them. His armor rattles with impact, his head whiplashing backward wickedly. He does not understand why his summoning of Dark did not work, cannot not fathom why the Depth’s grace had abandoned him. With him momentarily stuck, she takes the advantage to grapple herself up his body. Regaining his senses, he fights to push her off in vain.
He punches with his left arm, which she catches at the wrist. (BREAK! HIM!)Twisting his arm, she throws her left knee forward, making contact with the elbow. His arm snaps in two, bone pierces through his armor, blood the color of deep tar sputters out and taints his white armor with black splotches. Harold reaches up with his right hand to grab at her helmet, but she swats his arm away effortlessly, almost too easily.
She straddles his waist as he bucks his hips uselessly like a wild animal. She whales on his helmet, continuously pounding at it with clenched fists. Each blow drives a vibration through her body, invigorating her onward, driving her to crush him. (Consume Him) She growls manically and grabs his right arm by the wrist. With one hard pull she yanks his arm out of its socket with a sickening pop. (Consume Him) A madness clenches her mind, filling feralness throughout her veins. She continues to pull at his arm, her lips curled back as she seethes out her suspiring. She stands up suddenly, planting a firm foot on his neck then pushing down until she can hear him chock. She keeps her grip on his right arm’s wrist, then uses her other hand to grab below the elbow. Using her entire body, she jerks his arm out, and separates it from his body.
His spaulders separate at the seams then snap off, revealing a layer of gambeson underneath which also tears apart. Next comes his flesh, a mangled layer of corroded skin and tissue black and purple with ink-veins pulsating. (DELETE HIM) With a crunch his humerus breaks free from his scapula, and she rips asunder his arm. Black blood gushes out as she holds his arm up like a trophy, her eyes sav(DEVOUR HIM)oring the river of his essence pouring out his stump. She whips the arm down, bashing at his helmet with his own appendage. Flinging the arm away she falls back to her knees, (HE HAS SERVED HIS PURPOSE) straddling his chest, her left knee drenched in a pool of his blood pumping out the gaping hole in his shoulder.
She grabs his helmet, her fingers denting in the metal. She slowly busts off the metal rivets and fittings keeping his helmet secured onto his head. Anger, Hatred, and Rage fuel her senses, construing a madness walling off every other sense except for the need to destroy and consume. She could not see her own eyes, but if she could, she would notice a dark pigmentation corroding her iris and making way to coat the entire cornea. If not for her armor, she would see her veins layered in ink and pulsating across her body like a thin canvas. If not for her madness, she would have heard Harold pleading for her to stop and listen.
But she could not hear him. She could hear nothing but the blood pumping through her body, the pounding in her temples, the echoing screams subverting her rational mind. She never felt so alive, so free, so powerful! Harold squirmed underneath her wrath, an insect before her boot. He was nothing. He meant nothing, just another cog in the wheel. He would have no visage in memorial, no plaque or tome to commemorate him. He would be wiped from the annals of history, a worthless bag of flesh and meat.
She rips off his helmet, and gazes at her husband’s face. He has no eyes, two barren sockets pushed inward. Black cobweb lines carve his face, splitting the skin into uneven rows that jittered together. He has no hair, the top of his skull an ashen grey with purple lumps wiggling about. His nose a corroded flat plain blocked up by purple-blight-tendrils. His lips pale and cracked with flakes petering off to the air. The once pale scale running up his left cheek to forehead, now sits as a black blotch trembling with yellow webbing barely hanging on.
A single black tar spears its way out of his left eye-socket, curling its way down his cheek as he wheezes out, “I love you…I’m,” hysteric coughs racket his body, and dragging in a breath, he whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
(KILL HIM NOW)
Christine raises her fists high over her head and slams them down onto his face. Raising her fists once more, she repeats the process, breaking through his flesh and bone bit by bit. Harold smiles through the barrage, finally understanding his fate and fortune. With each crazed hit he plummets into the Abyss’s embrace, while she conforms to its thrall in disguise of free will. And Harold knew this would be his end, knew since the moment he donned his white armor. Every action, every breath, every movement to miniscule turn leading them both to this pivotal finale.
‘How Beautiful,’ Harold thought of Christine, of his wife, before her fists broke through his cranium and detached him from the waking world.
Christine al’Bashir continued to pummel Harold’s face until it plumped to mush. Even though her gauntlets were black, his tarred blood stained them nonetheless. Specks flung onto the face of her helmet, clinging like tiny spores on the cheeks and forehead. His bone was charred and rusted with a reddish-orange corrosion which she pulverized to a fine dust. His brain matter mingled with his tissue and flesh, its pigmentation a blighted purple and deep green. An unstaunched flow of tar pumped out the gaping neck hole, withered ink veins contorted themselves out then latched onto the floor, their hides juicy and dripping.
(Immeasurable Dark, place within me strength Bleed unto me thy wishes and dreams
To lead forth thy wisdom and beauty No heresy shall escape smite
On my skin shall I be thy canvas In the Mother’s name I pray)
The fog uplifts from Christine’s mind and eyes. The anger, rage, and hatred evaporate back to rational awareness. She blinks, realization gradually grasping her heart. She reaches out to touch the mush but retracts her hand, clenching it tight as sorrow cradles her thoughts.
She sits back on her heels, letting her arms dangle at her sides. Tilting her head up, she stares at the sky, tears raining from her eyes. The heavens above ripple with a sickly corrosion, its sprawling reddish-orange mass engulfing the wide plumes of black smoke and incorporating the scarlet streaks barely peeking out. A metallic shape blitzes across her peripheral, probably a VT-9 autopilot drone. Tailing behind the sleek vessel by many meters roars a vibrant green dragon, their face skewered with a scowl. A dargonrider saddles the bottom ridge of the dragon’s neck, their form a feint shadow in the sky. The dragonrider thrusts their sword forward, launching an onslaught of crystalized lightning toward the VT-9. The lightning misses as the drone rolls and jettisons itself backward faster than the dragon and dragonrider may react. Now behind them, the VT-9 fires a volley of one-meter-thick rods that carry blue trails of electricity behind them. The rods break through the dragon’s tough hide, an impossible feat turned possible through the mechanical and technical engineering of Christine herself.
She sobs while watching her armaments of war annihilate the dragon from within. Each rod, having punctured its target, emits a volatile bounty of raw energy into the dragon’s synapsis. The affect was immediate. The dragon bellows a terrifying cry of pain, arching its back as their wings convulse, causing them to plummet from the sky. The dragonrider can only hold on for dear life at this point. Then, the dragon explodes in a volcanic oval of blue, killing it and the dragonrider. The VT-9 soars on, acquiring a new target to destroy.
Christine sniffles then blows out a wavy breath. Lowering her sight back onto her dead husband, she reaches up and unclasps the parts of her helmet from the rivets and fastenings in a slow measure. Gingerly she pulls it off and holds it in her hands, raking her fingers against its surface. Her hair is dense and coiled into refined cords abrasive to the touch. More tears fumble out her purple eyes slotted with slivers of silver. Her nose small, lips a pretty pink, cheeks trembling. Her complexion that of spending ceaseless days beneath the sun, from a child toiling the fields of her parents to a ruler working alongside her subjects during mass construction.
She sets her helmet on the floor, the metal crunching against the dirt grains. She had no need of it, her final battle won. After this, there would be no more wars. No more pain, no more hostility between living beings.
Rising off her husband’s cadaver, she blinks back the rest of her tears. She could cry later, after finishing her mission. “I love you too,” she whispers, then gulps down the lump swelling her throat. He may have committed unspeakable atrocities. He may have betrayed her trust, turned coat, and fought her. But he was still her husband. A man, a human just like her, trapped by the evils of the Dark. A victim of corrosion.
She leaves his body on the floor and faces the ziggurat. In a slow measure she inches forward, stretching out her right hand while keeping her left raised and open. She lowers her stance, bends her knees and hunkers her torso forward just slightly. She evens out her breaths, her eyes trained out front.
Christine begins a prayer, her voice steady, “May the Council of Eight guide and protect me from all that seek to derail advancement in the architect’s embrace. May the Council of Eight watch over and feed me strength against,” a low groan emanates from the ziggurat, like a hurt child crawling on the ground, “all forms of evil be it internal of external,” pressure builds up against her right hand, beginning as an increasing weight against the palm. The weight extends out to her fingers which she folds together to decrease chances of bending backward. She grinds her teeth together, a breeze enrages to a burly storm whipping at her body, fighting to push her back, “The Light and Truth shall condemn the nonbelievers,” she stops moving, using all her strength to not slide back. She tries to breathe but the wind steals her breath.
The ziggurat’s obsidian and onyx façade darkens as if a portion of reality were ripped out and left to fester. The imposing structure seems to expand in width and height, dwarfing Christine a million to one. The light bending around the structure contorts viciously, each wavelength warping into itself to form geometric patterns insinuating pain and agony. Other geometric patterns resemble human faces, dragon snouts, hedonistic gaping mouths. The once violet, gold, and sapphire streams decay to blighted tar spreading its cobweb wings to the sky.
An acidic burn scrapes its way up Christine’s nose to behind the iris, causing bloody tears to pour out. (Discard thy flesh o’lowly worm
Allow Me satisfaction in removal of thy shackles
I shall cast off the yoke, free this burden
Hollow howls of Lies veil thee to beauty
Chained art thee, my Lamb
Pursuing promises frothed out conniving degenerates)
“STOP!” Christine bellows with all her might, her expelled lungs struggling for air. With wind still bashing her from all directions, she squeezes in a much-needed breath. It was a singular voice this time, an iridescent vortex of majesty. It weaved and constructed a resounding throttle…of sadness, despair, the voice of someone—no—something living within unbridled sorrow.
(Indifferent are these supposed idols
Whom thy belief thee bequeath unto
Thy veneration lost in cosmic background
Yet venture thee allow these fools their fame
In dismantling My love for thy and all alike
Commit into Me, My Lamb
Born hath the deceivers wrought upon a cycle
Administering no vaccination
Allow Me inside, and onto all shall I uproot the disease)
The ground swells with a mighty thrum, the grains of dirt and dust uplift to pirouette in fantastical swirls. Christine falls to one knee, the bloody rivers on her face caking over with crust as the pain alleviates itself. Her right outstretched arm jactitates, the muscles in her bicep and tricep spasming. She clasps her left hand onto her right wrist to add strength against the wind and tremble, fighting against an unstoppable current.
The ziggurat produces another low groan dissolving to a whimper. The blighted tar suspended in the air coagulates, forming humanoid-based figures craning themselves over Christine. The tar molds to a writhing mass of Dark, an ethereal clump displacing the Light around causing reality to crack and fray into splintered rifts which throttle incandescent spectacles of lilac hues. These humanoid figures weep black-blob tears which dissipate over her, like snowflakes not reaching the ground.
Christine draws on her inner resolve, on the millions of lives hanging in the balance. She rises weakly, drawing in ragged breaths, “The Light shall guide me,” she wheezes out her mouth, “The Light will not abandon me,” she coggles forward with her uneven steps, her body hunched forward, sweat breaking through her spell from earlier, “The Light is Truth,” she tries to remind herself, wrapping the words around her like a cloak against the frigid cold, “The Light is the Path.”
FOOL As she moves, she hears the humanoid figures above scream Save us
Coward and rave in an orgy of anguish. Voices range from children to Please help
Imbecile the elderly, each expressing through doleful utterances the It hurts
Bigot unparalleled damnation felt within their soul. She keeps Save us
Destroyer her eyes forward, unable to lift them and witness their Help us
Idiot sorrow. The urge to cry, to weep and grovel came We need you
Liar like violent clashing waves upon her mind. She Save us
Wretch trusted in the Light, gave her body for it. For It hurts
Moron her whole life she blindly followed in pursuit Please
Reprobate of its triumph. But as these voices continued Help us
Miscreant to batter her, did her faith begin to faulter. Save us
Her right foot bumps against the first step of stairs. Gradually she lifts her right leg, “The Light is my shepherd,” planting her foot firmly, she pushes herself up, and begins her ascension toward the summit of the ziggurat.
The steps of the ziggurat are individual blocks of pure jet-black onyx slotted together without motor. With each step, each block she touched flushed a dreamlike weave of pink hued in a light fashion to propagate brilliant speckles. The fierce wind died down with the resignation of the humanoid beings above, creating a suffocating silence broken only by Christine’s heavy breathing and rattling of armor from her movements.
Christine did not notice any of this. Exhaustion suspended her thoughts, reverting her to a primal drive pushing her limbs and pumping her lungs. Her glossy eyes stared unfixed out in front, all a blur of shifting color and texture. She continued to grip onto her right wrist, not because of strain to keep it up, but because her body refused to let go. She swayed unstably, managing barely to raise herself higher and higher.
Halfway up the stairs, she trips on a step, causing her to slide down a couple blocks. Her knees drag against the stone while her arms fumble to slow her fall. Coming to a halt, she lays over three blocks, her breaths haggard and loose. She lays her head on the algid onyx, focus returning to her eyes. She lie there for a minute, regaining her composure and sense of self. Turning her head, her mind frees itself from the plague of fatigue, and her eyes widen as she realizes just how far she has come.
She gazes at the pink-illuminated steps below her, each a dazzling collaboration of a trillion sparkling stars fitted in a sea of tar. Unclasping her left hand from her right wrist, she clenches and unfurls her hand to roll out the soreness in the ligaments. “The Light,” she wheezes in whistling air then coughs intensely, flakes of blood flinging out her mouth, catching onto he lips and teeth, while other specks cling to the stone beneath her. Sucking in another harsh breath, she strains to whisper, “is,” she hacks out another fit, “my,” she rolls onto her back, her eyes closing, “shepherd…”
Slumber calls to Christine, cradling her like a small babe. Within the darkness behind her shut eyes, she finds comfort in its solace and silence around her. Slowly she loses function of her limbs, each calling forth for her to submit. She could almost here her mother sing for her, a gentle lullaby lulling her deeper and deeper and deeper—
(GET UP!) Her eyes snap open. She whips her left arm over her body, swinging her around back onto her stomach. Bracing her palms against the flat surface of the steps underneath her, she gradually pushes herself up, her muscles shaking with effort.
She rightens herself to her full height, her head tilted back, eyes wide open—gazing at the thousands of twisted-tar beings hovering above her. They almost appeared…Beautiful. Their weeping had ceased, their cries silenced, their screams withheld. They all watched her, in a unified stream of conscious.
She lowers her head and eyes, to stare toward the summit of the ziggurat. She strains her sight to see the top, taken aback by a blurry figure stand there. She blinks. And the figure vanishes. She could have sworn someone was already up there.
Steadily she walks up the steps, her body sluggish. She sways
To the left
Then the right
climbing the ziggurat one movement at a time. She was already half-way up the monolithic structure, but the remaining half allowed her breadth for some thought.
She wondered exactly why she fought for this…Light. Every child in her province was fed the same mythology of the world, on the permeating balance between Light and Dark. That all manner of creature, may it be the smallest insect to the most monstrous beast like a dragon, were the children of the Light. As a child, Christine never questioned her faith, not for a second wondering just…why things were the way they were. Why should there be a Light? Why should there be a Dark? If Light and Dark existed before time and space, then what were they doing? What spontaneous notion caused the creation of existence? Were these beings actually concepts, metaphors for the human condition? Maybe they symbolized every individual person’s battle with themselves, the goodness of man versus the evil of desire.
Light is held as the epitome of all that should be desired in life. And Dark is held as the epitome of all that should be forbidden in life. These were human teachings. Humans are fallible, filled with ego and want. Humans are weak and frail, suspectable to any manner of temptation. Humans are liars. Humans create wishful dreams to supplant the reality of the world. Maybe there is no Light and Dark, and all the world is just…in essence—Grey.
That there is no right or wrong. No good or bad. Only one’s perspective. One man’s trash another man’s treasure. One man’s boon another man’s misfortune. Individual perspective dictated reality. If Christine had been brought up in reverence to the Dark, then she would have done so without hindrance. Life is based on the individual’s views. And these views become broadcasted to others, influencing them in one fashion or another or another. A relentless spiral.
Then what was the point of living? Do humans have free will when they are bombarded unstanchably by their environment? And what bombards the environment? Those living within its confines or outside? Perhaps both? An external and internal hemorrhaging in dutiful conflict. A tree needs sunlight for photosynthesis, yet needs rain to drink which means clouds must block the sun which means the tree must adapt in proportion which means its cellular building blocks evolve to contrast and for the sun to even penetrate the planet’s atmosphere it must release light which means the consumption of fuel in shape of hydrogen to helium which burns and burns and burns away until heavy elements such as iron is created and the star fuses more and more and more energy in combustion but it just can’t leaving the star weakening and dying until either it explodes or collapses…
Christine takes her last step, surmounting the Ziggurat of Despair. She collapses to one knee; sweat puffing out her pores then trickling down her face. Propping her left arm on her left thigh, she lays her chin on her left hand, specifically the gauntlet’s row of knuckles. Her dimmed purple eyes engrossed in what be before her.
The summit of the ziggurat is a flat square, ninety-six meters in width and length of perfectly polished onyx and obsidian. The floor is divided into eight different buon-fresco paintings bordering an oval dead center in the plain. The base portraits progressively, on each side, enlarge from ten meters, twenty meters, to thirty meters, and then forty meters around the oval, which expands a colossal fifty meters, and is the most extravagant in both texture and composition. Each painted segment expounds upon the etchings on the surrounding wall enclosing the Ziggurat of Despair with vivid color and depth.
The left half follows the expunging of the human form. It begins with a fully formed human female, her eyes harrowed and uplifted, lips parted with hands raised as if to receive a blessing. She stands naked, her breasts large, wide hips, stretch-marks across her stomach, the subtleties of flesh marked in her thighs and wrinkles on her forehead. The next painting be that of the woman closing her eyes, mouth opening wider, her skin beginning to dissolve with bubbles forming along the arms and legs. Her chest separates with strips of tissue peeling off to its lush scarlet underbelly, her chin splitting apart showing black bone and ink-veins protruding out. Her arms widen out to embrace something with radiating warmth. The third portrait be of the woman decaying, her teeth rotting out as brown pus pushes out every pore lining her being. Her intestines spill out her abdomen, filthy human slime discolored like mud overflows onto her legs. Her feet fracture, each individual toe decomposing to a purplish-black sore. The skin over her body wastes away at her feet, carrying with the floodgates of stringy ruby-red-blood hued in its lush engrossing decadence. Her muscles and ligaments breaking apart, her hair evaporating in puffs of black smoke, her eyes pool as white sludge fumbling down her splitting cheeks. Her nose eviscerated, showing a deep crack in the bone fracking apart her face into widening halves. The last image, of the woman, has her organic composition pooled at her feet; a writhing lake of flesh, blood, tissue, and rotting organs. All that remains be her skeletal foundation; the bone charred to a luxuriant ebony, grey swirls round the skull crumbling into millions of miniscule shards. Her ribs tilted down; their bases cracked in progression of falling down. Her pelvis engraved with multitudinous words in languages inconceivable to Christine—not because of their foreign caricatures or ancient diagrams, but because they had not been invented yet in the human stream of consciousness. She could make out only one word, ENTROPY, from her own tongue, and deduced each other strange word to be in repetition.
On legs of jelly, she wobbles to a standing stance, her back slightly hunched forward with exhaustion snaking its ways around her form. Her eyes leave the left half, proceeding to gaze upon the right.
The right half, circumventing the centered oval, elaborates upon the right curve of the surrounding wall. Beheld in its first portrait, black strings, darker than any endless night, spiral in from all four corners of the frame. In the center, the strings wrap around on another, folding in with impossible precision in a tight ball. Jagged bouts of string zigzag out from the center, like ink-veins grasping for something out in the air. The second painting is an explosion of vibrant hues and empyreal configuration birthing inseparable reverence before its majesty. In the center, a halo of Dark vibrates an otherworldly darkness unfathomable to the human eye, which causes Christine’s sensory receptors to mistakenly project the darkness as being a void—as if a piece of reality had been torn asunder and left gaping. Beautiful rays of silver and copper, from jubilant green to starry orange, immersive oceanic blue to intense scarlet, bright yellow to vehement violet, cast themselves in a circumferent fashion around the tar-halo. Within the halo itself, exists a blanching spectacle—Of White. Bright enough to hurt Christine’s eyes, causing rapid explosions to flare in her retinas. She flicks her eyes to the third painting while clumsily rubbing beneath her eyes, trying to grind away the lingering sting. The halo of Dark has expanded in this segment, now outlining a humanoid shape in rough curvature. The lines seem to spasm, giving the silhouette an active appearance of movement. Whiteness fills the outline’s innards, yet streams of Dark spill from the bordering to displace and reclaim. The humanoid shape leaves no room to discern its sex, instead being blank to such human grievances. The enriched colors surrounding the outline are dimmed, solemn, edging away in colliding streams to escape. Blues overlapping greens, scarlet smudging across violet, puddles of yellow and brown surrounded by teal and indigo. The last painting is just the humanoid outline. Blank. The white filling reduced to a single drop in the center of the chest, enclosed by an unmoving sea of Dark. The lines molding the shape to appear human, are set like stone. The bodily borders now perfect, undeniably still, no fraction of error. Each piece, from the shoulders to the feet, is equilateral to its corresponding opposite; except for the hands, where the fingers are long and curved in a downward slope, the tips pointed to shred flesh.
Christine blinks, a bead of sweat falls off her right eyebrow and smatters onto the ground. Her eyes proceed to the oval. The grandest of portraits. The monolithic ellipse.
The oval, in relation to area, covers a towering fifty meters of impeccable production. The colors and hues here dwarf its surrounding contemporaries in both scale and volition, Christine gawked at its majesty, feeling entirely irrelevant compared to its immense beauty. A thick-black bar rolled around its circumference, separating the oval from the other eight segments. In the center, stands the woman in composition of her last act. Only the bone remains, her arms widened out, empty eye-sockets gazing up, her jaws agape, the skull continuing to split further apart. Violently carved words, written in an aggrandized tar-gold splinter each and every individual bone of her body right down to the carpal bones of the wrist. Christine could not find any word in her language written amongst the archaic forms and unprecedented vernacular exhibited, and none bore any resemblance to the aforementioned pelvis ones. Purple clouds thinned with indigo swirls environ the female skeleton, glittering stars painfully detailed to the most minute flare and ripple sparkle raging violets and bright blues. The humanoid silhouette suffocates the main portion of the female skeleton, only her hands widening out its frame. The silhouette raises its arms high above its head, its curved fingers suspending a molten orb of tar leaking Dark to devour the left and right half of the oval.
Christine stared perplexed at the molten orb, aghast by its appearance. Accounts recorded a white orb, not black, which a shadowy being held in its hands. None in over four epochs had surmounted the ziggurat, none since the legendary emperor Shadam von Dalkhu. All records pointed to him as their primary source for information upon the ziggurat’s makeup, he the only human being strong enough to rise beyond the steps to the summit. He died but a day later after returning from the top, his dying breath describing in painstaking detail the portraits he had found, and a newfound knowledge upon a ritual needed implementing for humanity’s absolvement from damnation.
Then a thought crossed Christine’s mind. ‘Had he lied, or did those beside his death bed construe the deceit? Either way, it was to protect society, to keep humanity blind lest they regress to panic. The white orb for generations symbolized the Light’s virtue and prosperity, the ultimate goal, the righteous jihad against the infidel’s venerating the Dark…but if it were found the orb be black…of Dark, than the factions of good and evil would be reversed in scope…then the Dark would epitomize beauty, and humanity would consume itself with this horrific revelation, unable to reconcile the truth…”
Christine limps to the middle of the oval, her eyes welling with tears. Her husband had been right. Every grotesque action committed absolved by this finding; She’d been fighting on the wrong side. The Dark held true ascension, true ablution for humanity’s sins. The Light was a Lie, a veil cast upon the human race to keep the species in check.
Christine averted her eyes from the orb, a feeling of sickness blooming behind her forehead. Her stomach swished and swashed, she tasted bitter bile behind her tongue. She wanted to throw up, to scream vulgar curses at her ancestors. She wanted to cry, to plead her husband’s soul for forgiveness for not seeing the truth.
But she could make it Right. She could perform the ritual, save the world from damnation. Did her ancestor’s think no other would climb the Ziggurat of Despair? What use was their prophecies and foresight if they knew one day one human would learn the truth? Or did they hope none would actually surmount the supposed impossible?
Christine shook her head, her eyes drawn back to the Dark orb. There was no use in petty rhetoric; action must be taken. She would dash the lie into smithereens and pulverize it into nothingness.
Turning her left forearm to face the sky, she uses her right hand to unclasp the gauntlet’s rivets holding it in place. Wrapping her right hand around below the gauntlet’s wrist, she flexes out her left hand, and cleanly removes the piece of armor from her body. Underneath her gauntlet, she wears a leather glove ending an inch below the wrist, where a set of gambeson rises up and disappearing back beneath her spaulders. She drops the gauntlet onto the floor, letting it harshly ring upon impact with the ground. She does the same for her right arm, then stretches out her fingers by pressing each individual one backwards for a full stretch. She sniffles while going through the motions, constantly fighting an inner war of turmoil reaching out to break her composure. She focuses on the specificities of her armor, something—anything to remove her mind from herself. She unhinges the besagews from her armpits, flinging them like slingshots carelessly away. The circular plates strike the ground then roll in opposite directions, one even skipping off the side of the summit and plummeting back six-hundred meters down. Grabbing at her left spaulder, she grinds her teeth together and tears it off her form, throwing it at the floor angrily. She tears off the right spaulder, clenching it in her hand, her breaths growing hot and heavy, the tears drying in her eyes.
Sadness no longer warped her being. Rage—Anger—IRE filled her veins, her arteries, releasing copious catecholamines filling her with energy and rising bodily temperature. Her mouth twists left to right, her jaws clench, the muscles in her thighs and arms tense up. Then seizing her breastplate with both hands, she rips it off her form, smashing it to the floor then kicking it away, screaming at the top of her lungs, “DAMN THE ANCESTORS! DAMN THE LIGHT! BASTARDS!” She rips off the chausses from her thighs, “WRETCHES!” Then the greaves from her lower legs, “SONS OF BITCHES!” Saliva escapes her trembling mouth, her teeth gnashing at the open air, her body convulsing as she strains to control herself, “FUCKING TURNCOAT PIECES OF SHIT MOTHERFUCKING MAGGOTS FUCK THEM FUCK THEIR NAMES FUCK THEIR HONOR FUCK THEIR LEGACIES MAY THEY KNOW NO PEACE NO HARMONY NO TRANQUILITY MAY I FIND THEM IN THE AFTERLIFE AND STRANGLE THEM FOR ETERNITY MAY EVERY TORTUOUS APPARATUS GRIND THEIR BEINGS INTO SLUDGE!” Christine rives off her leather gloves, then sinks her bare fingers into the tan gambeson revealed after removing the rest of her plated armor, “MAY THE RATS EAT THEIR EYES!” She rends her gambeson apart, thrashing her arms and body to completely eviscerate it to flayed threads pooled at her feet. “FUUUUUCK!” She screeches to the sky, “GOD! FUCKING! DAMMIT! FUCK!” Using her palms, she hits herself at the temples of her head, pummeling herself for being so blind, “FUCK!” She collapses to her knees, foam frothing out her mouth, “FUCK IT! FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK EVERYTHING!” She clenches her right hand into a tight enough fist to pale her knuckles and punches the ground repeatedly, breaking the onyx at her feet, “FUCKING BULLSHIT!” She levels the surface onyx to a fine powder, showing another layer perfectly pristine beneath, “I’M SO FUCKING STUPID! IT’S MY FAULT! IT’S ALL MY FAULT! PLEASE FORGIVE ME HAROLD!.......Harold…,” she sobs, “please forgive me,” weakly she slaps the ground, “please,” her face trembles, her cheeks vibrating as her teeth chatter her hands shake her arms rattle up her shoulders to her neck, all her energy depleted, “I’m so sorry,” she cries, the tears raining down, “I love you…” she flattens her hands out on the powder, her knuckles profusely bleeding, skin scrapped to reveal her bone, nails cracked with fragments mingling with the powder, her tears pouring like broken facets, “I love you so much,” she bows her head to the ground, allowing herself sanctity in her anguish, giving herself time to jettison the pain inside her breast and mind, “I’m so,” her voice cracks to a croak, “sorry…so so sorry.”
After destroying both her plated armor and gambeson, Christine remains in plain long-sleeve shirt and tight trousers. If she had taken time to look upon her hands, she would have seen ink-veins pulsating along her palms, a deep black contra to her sun-licked skin. Instead her mind revolves back to the main goal: the ritual. She shakes her head, berating herself for allowing primitive emotions to lead her astray. With every moment did hundreds of thousands perish, and she was so close to finalizing ablution for all.
She forces herself to halt her crying, wiping hastily at her face with her arms to clean herself up. Standing to full height, she steadily strolls to the center of the oval, standing directly over the female skeleton’s chest cavity.
She breaths deeply through her nose, rolling out her shoulders and swinging her arms to relax her body, then exhales out cool air through her mouth. Swallowing to clear her throat, she closes her eyes, and begins to gently sing: “Blessed be the primordial entity upon high, whose knowledge expands throughout every seam and weave. O’F—” she hesitates, the ritual called for a call towards the Father—of the Light—but she knew this to be treachery, and so, she smiles as she continues, “O’Mother, may thy grace and virtue flow across these realms. Hold us in thy bosom, boundless Mother, heed my prayer for we have strayed too far from thy beauty. Blessed be the permeating sublime, whose wondrous body bestows nourishment for all things.” Christine’s voice lengthens in volume, becoming a robust imparting of spirit, “I and my fellow brethren beseech thee, O’Mother, O’Creator, and Adjudicator. Release our shackles, destroy the corruption we hath beset upon thy creation. O’Abyss!” She covers her right hand with her left, placing it over her rapidly beating heart, “O’Dark! Welcome us back into thy glorious embrace! Remove our blindness, let us rejoice in thy form! Let us receive thee with but desire in holy servitude! We plead thy forgiveness!” She raises her arms up, her palms facing the sky, “Make my body thy vessel! Take from me what thou needest! I am but thy humble follower, the lost Lamb returning to my Shephard! Make with my form whatever thy will, I offer myself without hesitation,” lowering her hands, Christine retrieves a short-dagger from her trousers, a rusted blade thousands of years old, “I!” With the dagger in her right hand, she stabs it into her left wrist, dragging it down her forearm slowly, “Christine al-Dreçe!” Warm blood spills from the canyon in her left forearm. Weakly she takes the knife in her left hand, strength leaving the broken ligaments. Grasping the handle with everything she has left, she stabs the blade into her right wrist, her entire left forearm covered in vivid red hues now dripping onto the painting below her, “Give myself up to Thee!” She rips the blade down her forearm, and losing complete function in her left hand, frees the dagger from her grasp, leaving it still inside her right forearm entrenched in her own blood, “Take From Me! I Am Thy Lamb! Let Me Be Of Service!” She cries to the heavens, her blood smattering the paintings at her feet. A thought crosses her mind, a inkling taking hold for a reason she cannot place, but she goes on nonetheless, singing with every stitching of her corporality, “VORBUER A’E-LA MAHUR! VORBUER A’E-LA MAHUR!”
As the words leave her lips, the sky above explodes in an aperture of light. Christine gazes in reverence before the majesty of the Dark, as immeasurable rays cascading like the gentlest of streams showers from the heavens. She can only raise her hands toward the sky, unabashed tears curling down her cheeks as she smiles gleefully, “Vorbuer a’e-la Mahur,” she cries out happily, the rays pirouetting around her with the upmost warmth and kindness. She does not see, but below her, the paintings begin shining and moving of their own accord. The female skeleton at her feet sways from left to right, her skull opening wider and wider as the etchings in her bones gleam brightly. The molten tar-orb spills down the sides of the painting, absorbing the visuals beneath a pitiless Dark, the humanoid silhouette’s fingers gently roll in equal strides. The portraits on the left and right circumferent reverberate, the colors and textures melding together into a pitch black.
A figure floats down from the heavens, a body encased in darkness. Christine gazes upon this divinity, absolutely enthralled by its magnificence. As it nears her, she can make out its physique, which being humanoid, yet sexless at the same time. The being’s face obscured beneath an oblong shaped helmet elongated towards the back, crafted, she thinks, by the darkest onyx imaginable. Its body is lean, arms and legs proportional, instead for its hands, which are long and curved in a downward slope with pointed tips.
She makes the connection as the being be but a few meters above her. It was the same being in the portraits, the same one engulfing the woman at her feet. She had done it. She had summoned The One, The Nameless Face, The Wanderer, The Champion of Ash, The Absolute Architect. The Abyss’s corporeal extension.
The being silently lands, standing a foot taller than Christine. She drops her arms, debilitation taking hold. She rapturously beams at this being, knowing not their true name, only the human ones exhibited upon its countenance.
She tries to speak, but the words lodge themselves deep inside her chest. She can only admire this being’s radiating sublime, the ultimate creation, its boundless beauty.
The being gently touches her right arm, lifting it slowly, then withdrawing the blade from her forearm. Instantly the pain stops, and Christine can feel nothing but unequivocal euphoria. The being, in a motherly way, her holds her face in both of its hands, caressing her cheeks with smooth strokes. With Christine’s eyes glued to the being’s helmet, she does not see the long lacerations lining up her forearms beginning to glow a faint blue. The Light emanating from her arms separates her flesh further, widening the wounds into gaping chasms. Christine feels no pain as the tips of her fingers disintegrate, as he feet and legs break down with more Light spearing through.
As if being freed from some weight, Christine finds voice within herself, and whispers to the divinity, “Make from me what thy will.”
No sooner than the last word escapes her throat does Christine’s body combust into unfathomable weaves of Light. Her entire form eviscerates into resplendent rays spreading out in all directions, a glorious exposition of beauty. The being widens out their arms, halting her Light’s escape. Curling their fingers half-closed, they bend the light back into itself, forming a perfect sphere—Of White. The white orb hovers in their hands, a rotating mass of perfection. Lifting the orb above their head, the orb drains to a Dark which depths continue to spiral further down-down-down-down. At their feet, the paintings are completely absorbed in a soup of tar, a darkness which begins flowing up the being’s legs. Beings of Tar rise from the soup, humanoid in shape, yet faceless all the same. The Ziggurat of Despair expels a hypnotic melody across the realm, throughout the planet, crosswise the cosmos, exceeding the plains of corporality to the ethereal, pass the imaginable to the unimaginable—And even further beyond.
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