Chapter 20-9 A Playground for Tyrants (II)

Chapter 20-9 A Playground for Tyrants (II)

There is no light but that which comes from the master.

There is no will but what is gifted to us by the master.

There is no life but what is allowed by the master.

By the act of the Godbreaker, we were damned.

Abandoned to the darkness of the old world, we were lost.

With the shrouding of the sun, existence ceased to shine, and the sea that was night swallowed the world entire.

Damnation was our fate.

But salvation was his offering.

From beyond the darkness, he came!

Yakozitrin, Lightbearer, Godborn, Master of the Remnants!

Salvation for us, the unwanted, the alone, the abandoned.

Through the master's infinite mercy alone are we able to continue. By his light are we able to live. By his will are we able to find purpose.

Praise be Yakozitrin.

Praise by the last true god in darkness.

For through his blessing, the dawn rises still.

-Enclaver Prayer

20-9

A Playground for Tyrants (II)

The pools shine! The master lives! The master returns! Hold true! The dawn rises still!

The dawn rises still!

The words left Aladons lip without thought, and what remained of his cohort chorused after, as if possessed themselves. Aches and bruises lined every inch of his torso. His arms were blocks of leaden fire, but his fingers remained fused tight to his shield and fang-axe. He broke his spear against the hardened shell of a gastavoid the transgressors used to shield their frontline, serving as a weaponized mount against the honor guard.

Slow though the gas slugs were, they still loomed over even the tallest of men, and the heated gases they spewed from the vents along their carapace inflicted lightness upon ones skull.

Of course, this was secondary to their true purpose in combat: to be detonated upon reaching shield walls, breaking formations by force, fire, and shrapnel.

A series of cracks sounded from above. Another dozen gleaming boltseach as long as Aladon was tallpunched into what few gastavoids the attackers had left. Blasts tore gaps in the pale masonry lining the Second Junction. Down the flame-lit paths, limbs and burning viscera joined howling screams, the noise long sounding as if ambiance in Aladons ears.

Bodies lay strewn along the second rung of the citythe last true city, by Yakozitrins grace. Writhing figures lay sprawled amidst the sea of dead and dying. Bodies of all shapes and sizes lay scattered. Red bled into fabrics of white and teal. As Aladon swept the streets for additional signs of movement, he felt bile lick at the roof of his mouth before he forced the sickness back down.

His faith in the master was absolute. Unquestionable. But he himself was not. He was flesh-in-passing and mind-in-diminishing. Loyalty notwithstanding, killing ones own people by the scores left wounds within just as without. His heart felt scarred and moist with tears to come, but that was for tomorrow.

That was for if he could survive this at all.

For now, the banner of Hand Urrins flapped still along the second rung, and the esteemed Pearlguard stood defiant. But though they were the masters chosen, though they represented the lightmost caste, the masses gathered under the false prophet named Dogmother seemed endless in their number. Worse yet, they filled with ranks of the night-touchedthe toilers of groundmostand the sin-bearersbreeders meant to produce children worthy of rising the rungs.

Children bearing the masters visage in every respect. Light of hair. Light of eyes. Light of skin.

To see them turned from divinely ordained purpose was sickening in of itself. But that was nothing compared to the act of actively cutting them down or ordering his gas-throwers to light their bodies aflame.

In the shadows of his mind, he could still see her, the breeder among the heretical vanguard. She held her half-light child aloft as if the wailing babe would prove a talisman from fire or blade. She learned of her mistake when Aladon called his gas throwers to ignite their tubes and see the rabble purged.

In the moment of her burning, both she and her child were closer to their master than they had ever been. It was a good death, to be clothed in dancing bright, and an eternal condemnation to be charred by the stain of black.

Aladon briefly surveyed his remaining forces and shot another look upward. The darkness of despair was parting with the shimmering of the pools. Dappled lights danced the vastness of the city, unmistakable even through columns of rising smoke.

The towers were alive againresurrected by the master's shine. The dark was parting. The long night was approaching its end. And deliverance would soon follow. A prickling sensation played at his skin. Horror. Elation. Exhaustion. Desperation. There was no end to how many emotions could burn inside a man at once.

Gasps and sobs escaped from his fellow Pearlguard. Of the twelve legions he was granted to hold the Second Junction thoroughfare from the Dogmothers masses, only half were still capable of fighting. The way ahead of them stood a narrow channel and their gas throwers held firm from atop the edges of the first rung.

For a moment, he thought he saw a series of cracks travel along the marble walls lining the sides to the channelarteries fissuring through the coral-made battlements he stood on. But the moment was gone in a flash, streaking out of his sight, there and then not.

The sensations passed. Aladon mastered himself.

Im going to find whoever made those rations and kill them, Kaiss said, announcing his own recovery with a quip of dry wit.

Aladon remained silent, however. Though the unnatural left his flesh, his heart was flooded with building dread.

He had felt the masters touch before once. Stood in his presence. The way light and life bent to him was perfection. Absolute. Irresistible. The weight that emanated from his being ineffable in sensation.

There was something about this that felt the same but

Greater.

Impossibly greater. Deeper too.

Aladon swallowed and barely heard the following cry.

Movement! One heretic rising. Third mound beside the lip.

His eyes snapped to place almost immediately, for he had been among those to stack those bodies, building them high during the lulls between so the heretics would have to crawl between the narrow channel of their dead if they wanted to process.

The emerging threat, however, did not come from the lip of the thoroughfare. No. Instead, bodies rolled down the mound of corpses as a shuffling form pushed free.

A unified expulsion of disbelieving breaths escaped from the Pearlguard.

Fuck me, Kaiss said. We have ourselves a hard unwhat in the masters will

Aladon saw it too: towering of crackling fire, both brilliant and uncanny as if the union between a raging inferno and coiling mist. It climbed forth from a translucent halo slipping out from the bodies, and a landslide of corpses toppled free, Aladon struggled not to recoil at the sight.

There, on the few bodies that remained, stood the breeder he ordered burned. Pockets of boiled fat still dripped from her heat-melted skin. Her skin, once divine, was raw red and midnight black, and her meat clung to her bones in hives of melted flesh. As every inch of the city was imbued by the masters light, shadows could not shroud her, and so Aladon witnessed her in detail.

He saw cooked tension struggling to tighten beneath patches of skin burned away. He saw the open socket of her eye with embers still sizzling from what remained of her eyebrows, cord hanging free. And worst of all, he saw the child he ordered to be burned along with her flame-fused and sunken into her chest, its flayed face half-exposed in a perpetual scream,

Impossible, Aladon choked. He bounced off Kaiss, and only then did he realize he was backpedaling.

Aladon? Kaiss said, eyes alight with a rare expression of concern. What? Whats wrong?

But the large man could not see. He hadnt the eyes.

And such was a blessing, for what followed next undid Aladon completely.

From across the sixty meters of space, she gestured at the burning halo surrounding her and summoned what looked like an apparition of her own form shaped from the flames themselves. Then, her ghostly twinunblemished in flesh and naked in her sorrowwept as pointed at the battlements, and him in particular.

A moment thereafter, the ghost faded, and the burned breeders ruined flesh began to peel.

It happened in an instant, and Aladon felt the weight of divinity pass through him again. A tide of blood rose from bodies below, drenching the woman in crimson. With a casual shrug thereafter, the blood then flung itself from her body, and she stood naked.

And unburned.

Yako-Yakozitrin, Aladon sobbed. The resolve within him was beginning to crumble. Beginning to break. Kaiss was holding from behind, whispering worried words while the rest of his cohort paled, never expecting to see him like this.

The woman took a step forward and looked down at her chest. Her infant was still boiled into her body. She tilted her head as if it were a curiosity rather than a dead babe. With a casual motion, she tore the conjoined infant free from her bosom and held it high for Aladonand all the legions to see.

Cries of dismay and horror erupted from all who held the walls.

But nights disfavor was not done visiting Aladon, for then the woman flung the child out at them, and it sailed out across an impossible distance, at impossible speeds. It came to an impaled halt torso-first against the jutting parapet. Several members of the cohort flinched back. A scream came from the left, followed by the crash of a falling body.

Through it all, cold terror just continued to flood Aladons stomach. Shivering, he looked at the slumped body of the baby, his mind unable to comprehend what had just happened.

This was when the infant lifted its head up and fucking smiled at him.

The sickness exploded within Aladon. His will gave.

He threw up all over Kaiss boots.

***

{Avo,} Calvino said, disappointment arriving in the form of a long, drawn-out sigh. {Was any of that necessary?}

The ghoul nested in the sheath of an almost-dead woman grinned and savored the flavors of minds breaking, morales shattering. +For my entertainment? Absolutely.+