Monsterworld, p.21
Monsterworld, page 21
part #1 of Monster Slayer Series
“Exp—what?” Vrill asked.
“Coffee?” Beat said. “You know, caffeine?” Vrill looked at her blankly. “No? Energy?”
“Ahh,” Vrill said. “Like rejuvenation. Yes. It works for me too. Temporarily. It doesn’t have the long-lasting rejuvenation power that se—”
“Good stuff,” I said, cutting Vrill off and munching some more of the leaf. The last thing I wanted these two women to talk about was sex, especially because I knew Vrill would bring the conversation around to the two of us. Beat would have a field day.
Beat looked at me with narrowed eyes, but then let it go. “Gimme some of that.”
Vrill passed a couple leaves over and for a while we all basked in the sensation provided by the raw leafrat foliage. Yes, this will keep me going for a while.
More hours passed, and finally I felt like we were making real progress. I could judge the distance to the mountains. One, maybe two, hours at most. We would make it just in time, meaning we wouldn’t have to face another Black out here on the plains. Then again, would facing a Black in the mountains be any better? For all we knew, the place could be swarming with monsters.
“You ever been here?” I asked Vrill, trying to use conversation to quell my growing nerves.
“Of course,” she said, shrugging.
“Of course? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Beat asked.
“I was a Seeker before…I left. Me and…the other Seekers would come here often. That was our job. To scour the ancient lands seeking valuable magical artifacts, charmed weapons, that sort of thing.”
And goddess hearts, I finished in my head. “What’s the coolest thing you ever found?” I asked.
“Coolest? Like cold?”
I chuckled. “Sorry. It’s another humanism. It means ‘best’ or ‘most awesome’.”
“Oh, Darcy used to say ‘awesome’ a lot.” She stopped, as if realizing that she’d spoken of her dead friend again. “I—we—found lots of ‘cool’ artifacts. This armor, for example. It’s thousands of years old and yet never shows its wear. It’s the only thing besides my blade I have left from those days. Except memories.”
“The Three took the rest?”
She nodded. “They have a trove of what has been found over the years. They stockpile it for their own use during the Final Black.”
“Final Black?” Beat and I asked at the same time, making eye contact. That didn’t sound good.
“D-Darcy called it Armageddon. She said humans had a similar concept on Earth.”
The pit in my stomach got bigger. “We do. It means the end of the world. Destruction. Chaos. Death. Pretty much all the worst stuff you can think of happening at the same time.”
“What is supposed to cause the Final Black?” Beat asked.
Vrill shrugged. The Three have never explained that to any of us, if they even know. It’s probably all—what’s that term you like to use? Ah, yes, bullshit.”
“Probably,” I said, not feeling confident at all. In this place, the end of the world seemed far more likely than on Earth.
“Friggin’ goddesses,” Beat muttered.
“What?” I asked.
“Hording weapons and shit. Making new Warriors choose from the leftovers. Unarmored. Wearing no better than bathing suits to fight monsters.”
She had a point. Unless there was some reason new Warriors—or any Warriors—couldn’t utilize the magical weapons and artifacts. Then again, Lace was allowed to use the magical bow and arrows, so that was something. But if there were more weapons like that, why not share them with the Warriors who were trying to protect them? I looked to Vrill for an answer.
She shrugged. “I’m not certain as to the reason. I never handled one of them until I Leveled up to Seeker. But I wouldn’t put it past the Three to deny their Warriors valuable things they could use. They are selfish and cold.”
I’d certainly seen that side of Persepheus, but I’d also seen a hint of another side. Or perhaps a clue that her coldness was all an act. And Minertha…she’d been nothing but warm, going so far as to grieve for Dravon when he was killed. I didn’t point all of that out to Vrill, however, because I knew she didn’t want to hear it. All these years later, she was still grieving for her lost friend. Grief made it hard to think logically sometimes.
As for Airiel, I didn’t even know for sure whether she existed.
Still, the goddesses needed to explain why they didn’t give us the magical artifacts—they owed us that much.
The area before us was growing darker, but not just because of the sun’s frantic descent toward the horizon. Because of the shadows. The mountains seemed to radiate darkness, even though the position of the sun was such that they shouldn’t have cast any shadows in our direction. It was freaking intimidating. “Is this…normal?” I asked.
“Yes,” Vrill said. “This is where the real Black lives.”
“Because of the Morgoss?”
“Yes. And those creatures beholden to them. Their spawn.”
“Wait…what?” Beat said. “The Morgoss gave birth to the other monsters? How is that possible? Each species looks so different.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Vrill confirmed. “The Morgoss birth their soldiers through dark magic, fashioning them from the mountain’s molten earth, using parts from other dead monsters.”
“Sounds Frankensteinian,” I said.
“It’s like we’re one person sometimes,” Beat commented. Apparently, she’d had the same exact thought.
Vrill wouldn’t have gotten the reference, but she ignored it and continued talking, gesturing toward the largest mountain’s peak. “Allomir. The place where the sky meets the earth meets the sea. Or at least where it once did.”
Before the ocean dried up and the sky turned to ash and the mountains to darkness.
“This was the Three’s kingdom,” I said. “Their palace. Their home.”
“Yes,” Vrill said. “It was. But that was a long time ago.”
We walked on, into the ever-deepening shadows.
~~~
I expected to have to fight through hordes of monsters, ten deep on every side. What I got was zero resistance.
“Um, this feels too easy,” I said. We were in the mountain’s foothills now. The Black was perhaps an hour away, but the shadows radiating from the earth itself made it almost impossible to see. Luckily, we’d found a few gnarled trees growing resiliently from cracks in the rocks. We’d broken three brittle branches off and smeared them with the demonblood still stained on our skin, before clacking stones together to generate a spark sufficient to light the flammable ichor.
“It always did,” Vrill said, a faraway look in her eyes as they flickered with demonlight. “Until it didn’t.”
“Could you be any more dramatic?” Beat said. Despite her attempt to show confidence, I could hear the nervousness in her tone.
“Truth is never dramatic,” Vrill said.
“I can see why you like her,” Beat said. “A barrel of monkeys wouldn’t contain more laughter.”
“What are monkeys?” Vrill asked.
“I’ll explain later. Where does this trail lead?”
“There are no maps for Annakor.”
“I thought you said it was called Allomir? And that you’ve been here many times?”
“The Morgoss renamed it when they overthrew the Three. Annakor means death of sky, earth and sea. And I have been here many times—that’s not the problem.”
“Then what is?”
“The paths change.”
“Change? How is that possible? It’s…rock.” I wasn’t such a dummy that I didn’t know that the earth could change due to erosion by water and wind and seismic activity. But that took years. The way she was describing this phenomenon made it sound like the changes occurred overnight.
“Like I said before…this is a place of dark magic. It just does what it does.”
Awesome. So we were navigating blind now. For all we knew, this very path could lead us off a cliff.
It didn’t. Instead, the path grew steeper and steeper, until we were forced to grip our torches and weapons with one hand so we could use the other to claw our way up. The Black was fully upon us now, and yet we still hadn’t seen a single monster. Or heard one for that matter, which was eerie as hell.
The path leveled out abruptly, moving forward a few yards before veering sharply to the right and out of sight around a large outcropping.
“We are close,” Vrill commented.
Her words felt true. But close to what?
We followed the path around the boulders, our three haloes of flickering demonlight creating a glowing Venn diagram, intersecting in a tiny area toward the center, pulsing like a beating heart.
Rather than continuing its path upward, the trail skirted the edge of the mountain, rounding the side and circling around behind it. Even if we wanted to, backtracking would be a time-consuming endeavor, especially if the path had already changed behind us. In my mind, we’d passed the point of no return.
Cliffs rose on both sides of us now as we passed between two competing mountains. If monsters surrounded us on both sides now, we’d have no choice but to fight through them to escape. Clambering up or down the hillside was no longer a possibility.
The end of the cliffs appeared at the edge of our torchlight, like a massive door reaching all the way to the black sky. Or at least so it appeared. In reality we couldn’t see how far the “door” stretched upwards, because it was swallowed by the Black.
“We’re here,” Vrill said, stopping just before the end of the cliffs. I craned my neck to see what was out there. There was only blackness, until we stepped forward and the cliffside no longer obscured my vision.
Whoa. That thought was the understatement of my entire time on this planet. Where I should’ve only been able to see darkness, there were hundreds—no, thousands—of stars, flickering in the distance. Not stars, I realized. Torches. Like ours.
Demontorches.
They rose from the ground, where they were the most numerous, into the starless sky, angling toward a central point, with fewer and fewer torches on each layer. Like a pyramid of lights.
No, I thought. Like a fortress.
“Welcome to the Blight of Annakor,” Vrill said.
“Looks more like motherfucking Mordor,” Beat said.
I couldn’t argue with that. There was nothing for it. “Let’s go kill Sauron and destroy the Ring,” I said.
TWENTY-TWO
A RIDDLE SOLVED
Vrill was still hung up on the whole Mordor-Sauron-Ring thing. “So this was a story? What does it have to do with Annakor and the Morgoss?” she asked in that innocent way of hers. It was endearing, if I’m being honest. She was the perfect mixture of innocence and complexity. I liked that.
“On Earth, it’s common for people to compare real life situations to popular culture,” I explained. “It breaks up the monotony of our boring lives.”
“Oh,” she said, though I wasn’t sure she really understood. Her world seemed so different to ours. I mean, shit, they used group sex—or maybe my man-brain was just fantasizing that it involved groups—to rejuvenate themselves, the same way humans ate food together. Or at least some humans did. I usually grabbed a frozen dinner and ate alone with my virtual friends and the colonies of aliens trying to eat my space marine’s face off.
“Shh,” Beat said. “Do you hear that?”
I didn’t at first, my mind still full of my own noisy thoughts. I concentrated, tilting my head toward what Vrill had referred to as the Blight of Annakor, that dark fortress lit with a thousand demonfires. There. A thumping sound, dull and distant, like the beating of a drum, or the bone-vibrating bass of a tricked-out car sound system.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Birth,” Vrill said.
“Birth of what?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out. Come on.”
She started down a twisting, turning path, leaving us no choice but to follow. The path narrowed, the terrain falling away on each side, until it felt like we were Olympic gymnasts on a balance beam. Beat used her spear to center herself, a tightrope walker’s pole. My giant hammer was less useful, and I had to lean to the opposite side to counteract its weight. Vrill danced along the narrow stone causeway like it was as wide as the Golden Gate Bridge.
I made the mistake of looking over the edge.
At first all I saw was abject darkness—not a surprise considering we were well into the longest Black yet—but then…
Eyes. Hundreds of them, as red as hot coals, burning deep in the abyss.
My mind spun and took a wrong step, one of my feet clipping the edge of the path. My leg buckled at the knee and I knew I was a goner. Whatever was down there was about to feast. On me.
Something hit me hard under the armpit, arresting my fall. With one foot on and one foot off the bridge, I looked at Beat. She stood like a female goliath, her legs slightly bent and even with her hips. Her lips were sewn together in determination as she held my bulk aloft with her outthrust spear. Then, inch by inch, she hefted me back to safety.
Something snarled from in the pit, angry at having its supper stolen from it.
“Thanks,” I gasped.
“You owe me,” Beat said with a grin. She turned and continued down the bridge without another word.
I took two deep breaths and then followed. My heart was still pounding in time with the “Birth” drums, but I wasn’t scared. Which amazed me. Back on Earth, with my limited experience—okay, no experience—in life-or-death situations, I would be shitting my pants right now, curled up in the fetal position and sobbing.
I barely resembled that guy anymore. In the short time since I’d landed on this planet, I’d gained a measure of courage I used to only have when I played A-Civ.
Don’t get cocky now, I reminded myself. The Black is young—you could still get eaten by something with three rows of teeth.
With that sobering thought battering around in my head, I made it to the end of the narrow, twisting bridge, where my companions were waiting. Beyond them was a door, or at least that was the closest comparison I could come up with. It was twice as tall as me, and thrice my wingspan. The barricade appeared to be made of heavy-looking metal, banded with long iron buckles that crisscrossed in several locations.
It was one big ass door.
“Should we knock?” I said, trying to overcompensate for the fact that I’d almost died.
Vrill looked at me like I was mad.
Beat sniggered. “First we should check for a doorbell.”
Vrill aimed her what’s-wrong-with-you-people look at my fellow Warrior. “It’s a door,” she said, enunciating each word like she was speaking to someone slow. “You just open it.”
With that, she dug her heels in and shoved against the right side of the massive metal door. For a moment nothing happened, but then, with a groan, the slab began to move.
“It’s a door, dummy,” Beat said, flashing a grin in my direction.
“I thought it might be locked.”
We joined Vrill, helping her shove the door far enough open that we could slip inside. When we were clear, the door sprang back as if on a spring-loaded hinge, slamming behind us with a thud that reverberated through my teeth.
The sound of beating drums stopped instantly, though I couldn’t tell whether it was because the door blocked the noise or because whoever was beating them realized we’d entered their domain. I shoved that thought aside and focused on the door.
There was no handle on the inside, and I couldn’t imagine any of us would be able to get our fingernails far enough into the seam to provide the leverage to haul it back open.
Which meant we were trapped. In a monster castle. Great. This night kept getting better and better.
Vrill said, “We won’t be leaving this way,” and marched off, thrusting her torch in front of her to chase away the shadows.
Beat said, “She’s a tough bitch—I like her,” and gave chase.
After staring at the door for another long second, I followed. I angled the light from my own torch to the opposite side, peering into the retreating gloom. A massive pillar rose before me, disappearing into a ceiling of darkness. The column was painted with scenes that once might’ve been nice. It was hard to even think that word—nice—in this place, but it was the only way to describe the scenery that previously filled the curved sides of the pillar. Horses roaming a lush countryside. Flowers blooming on hills painted with gold hemlock. In the distance, a white fortress nestled amongst majestic purple mountains.
I knew that’s what lay behind the current paintings the same way you could squint and make out the scene behind a frosted window in winter. Now, however, the artist’s whimsical landscape had been altered, limned with kohl-black streaks and red slashes that transformed the horses into winged monsters with eyes of fire. The blossoms bled from their petals, crying tears of crimson. The landscape was harsh, ash-covered stone with jagged edges. And the fortress, which I now realized was the transformation of Allinor to Annakor, was black, its trio of vaulted spires piercing the sky like the spikes of a thrust trident.
So the monsters are grim artists, too, I thought. I could just make out the original colors as they sought to pierce the stranglehold of blacks and reds.
“Hey, you coming?”
I glanced up, seeing Beat’s muscular form illuminated by her torch as she looked back at me. Unconsciously, I’d stopped to stare at the pillar painting while the others moved further away. I blinked and shook my head. I needed to be more focused or I could screw things up for all of us.
I was about to cross the gap between me and my companions when I noticed a pot resting beside the pillar. I frowned and stuck my torch in its direction to see what was inside. Is that…
Yes. Paint. It appeared to be white, though it was hard to tell in the fiery lighting, which tinted everything orange and red amongst the pressing shadows.
