We were back on the mountain.
“Don’t worry, that last part is still a while off. It took billions of years to make all of this, it will take time to reverse the process, but time is the one thing I have. I may despise order, but I understand the necessary evil of sticking to a schedule. Now that you know what I’m fighting for, what do you think?”
I was having a hard time thinking at all. Trying to understand the last part of that vision had completely unnerved me. It was like my brain had tried to shift gears and had broken the transmission. “What’re you going to do after that, just float around nothing forever?”
“That would be ideal. Sadly your masters keep creating worlds faster than my kind can unmake the ones that are already there. Only that’s big picture, far beyond the scope of our current conflict. Focusing on the here and now, first I’ll bring about the utter ruin of your world. I’ve done it to others before, and in comparison yours is already off to a fine start without me.”
My head hurt, and speaking only made it worse. “You’ll fail.”
“I forget sometimes just how difficult it is for you mortals to truly comprehend things. It’s like trying to explain calculus to a dog.” Asag was still sitting cross legged in front of the tree, only now, the hole over his missing eye had spread to cover the whole socket, and there were black veins visible beneath his skin. I swear that on the other side I could see stars. “The factions trying to stop me falsely believe there is a balance, as if they can control the pendulum that swings between order and chaos, between agency and destiny. The Great Old Ones desire total control, to shape everything in their unknowable image. I merely want to set pendulum free.”
“More like break the pendulum off and beat us with it.”
“Humans have a way with words. I will have to remember that.”
“We’re going to stop you.”
“Possibly, but that is what makes it so interesting! Speaking of which, I have a proposition for you.”
“Fat chance.”
“Don’t be hasty. Let me tell you what is at stake before I make my offer. After I leave you here to rot for eternity, I will return to the City of Monsters, beneath which a hundred thousand of my children and monstrous allies have gathered. I shall lead my great army, and in one fell swoop, eradicate many of the heroes who would stand in my way, since you gathered them in one place for my convenience.”
“Lies.”
“Let me drive your bleak situation home. Your child has already been born. Congratulations. You have a healthy baby boy. So I have dispatched an exceedingly foul, yet capable, creature to collect him.”
I roared something incoherent and struggled against the ropes.
“Now that you understand what is immediately at stake, time for my offer…” He reached inside his coat and pulled out the .45 I had loaned him. “I’ve been curious about you since you first woke me up. I’ve watched from afar, but that wasn’t good enough. In our time journeying together, I believe I’ve truly come to understand you, Owen. May I call you Owen? You have become the closest thing I have to a friend.”
Breathing hard, dizzy, I was inarticulate with rage. “I’ll kill you if it’s the last thing I do!”
It was hard to tell how much of it was an act, or if that had really hurt the demon’s feelings. “It is lonely being a force of nature.” Asag thumbed the release and dropped the magazine into his hand. Then he tossed the pistol at my feet. It landed with a clunk. “In a moment I will release you. I will only allow you a brief freedom, because after that I am going to bury you so deep in this realm that no one will ever find you. If you are the man I suspect you to be, you will take the opportunity to kill yourself.”
“You’re insane.”
“No. I’m Disorder. For the sake of your world, of your family and friends, think carefully about what I’m saying, Owen. Escape is impossible. You’ve seen what I can do here. Yet, if your life was severed now, your faction would still have the chance to pick a new champion. Who knows what other contingencies they might have put in place? How will the game unfold with you removed from play? You can’t stop me now, but maybe the next Chosen will. Plus, if you’re dead, I have no motivation to steal your child. Harming your family does me no benefit. I will call off my minion.”
I glanced down at my pistol. It had to be a trick.
“This is merely me granting you mercy, which is more than I can say for your masters who used you foolishly and abandoned you here. I am the one taking all the risks here, Owen. I like you. I’m making this offer because I truly do not wish for you to suffer…Believe what you will. Selfishly hold onto vain hope, or save your child and possibly let someone else save your world. It is your choice.”
The ropes suddenly released. Freed of the restraints I fell. My legs were numb, so when I hit the ground I collapsed face first into the mud.
“Decide quickly. I’ve got a lot of Hunters to kill.”
The pistol was right in front of me. The ridgeline was quiet except for the crackling of flames and the bubbling of the cauldron. The Asakku had stopped working and were all watching me, curious to see what I would do. Asag was waiting, giving me a patronizing smile.
I picked up my .45. There was mud all over the steel. The textured grip felt familiar and comforting in my hand. I couldn’t separate the truth from the lies, but this was real.
“There is only one bullet in the gun. I would suggest putting it in your mouth angled to destroy the base of your brain. It’s better to be certain. Trust me. This world has ways of making you linger.”
I was confused, weary, but I still had a choice. I could believe a king of lies, or do what I knew every good Hunter who’d come before me would have done.
I aimed the pistol at Asag’s forehead and pulled the trigger. It went off.
WHAP!
The bullet struck something invisible between us. A gigantic red hand appeared directly before Asag’s face, the bullet embedded in its palm. The clawed fingers immediately closed into a fist. Then the air shimmered as the rest of the creature revealed itself. The thing was a muscle bound humanoid, large enough to make Lococo’s body look small in comparison. Leathery wings stretched from its back. The legs were covered in coarse black fur, and instead of feet it had cloven hooves. Horns grew from its misshapen head. It was staring right through me with glowing eyes, including the third one in the center of its forehead.
“Disappointing, but not surprising,” Asag said with a sigh. “It is easier to die for your child, than it is to fight to stay alive for them. Since I can’t read your mind or see your fate, I actually didn’t know what you were going to do there. I suppose that uncertainty is why I enjoy your company so much.”
The demonic bodyguard must have been waiting there the whole time. How many times in the forest or the swamp, when I’d felt unseen eyes on me, had it been Asag’s errand boy watching us? From the description, this was the beast that had killed Management’s lawyer. The red skinned monstrosity casually tossed the deformed hollow point back to me. The bullet had mushroomed uselessly against his skin.
The monster spoke, its voice low and powerful. “It is time. We must leave, master.”
“Thank you, Prince,” Asag nodded at the monster. It bowed and moved aside.
“You had this big red bastard watching over you the whole time,” I snarled. “Because you’re scared. He was ready to step in the whole time in case I ever figured out who you really were. If you were as powerful as you make yourself out to be you wouldn’t need a bodyguard around to protect you from me. You’re no god. You’re a fraud. You’re vulnerable.”
“On the contrary. This body I’ve claimed may be fragile, but I am eternal. I’d explain, except your time is done. I’m afraid our conversation is over, Owen.”
The dirt shifted beneath my knees. Roots burst from the ground, moving like snakes, crawling over my legs, then up my chest, and over my arms. I pulled against them. Some roots snapped, but others quickly took their place. No ma
tter how hard I fought, more kept wrapping around me. I was encircled in seconds. Then all the roots tightened violently.
I was being pulled into the soft ground.
“I swear I’ll kill you, Asag!”
“You broke time to wake me, and for that, I will never forget you.” As my legs sank beneath the dirt, the demon stood up. He actually twisted Lococo’s face to appear saddened. “Goodbye, my friend.”
As dirt rose over my chest, Asag and the red devil vanished. I kept up my futile struggle as cold mud reached my neck. The Asakku watched, curious, as the roots dragged me under, but then they went back to their feast. I held my breath as dirt covered my mouth and nose. I was deafened as it covered my ears. Dirt spilled over my eyes. Everything went black but the roots still kept pulling me down.
The Nightmare Realm swallowed me whole.
Lungs burning, heart pounding, I held my breath as long as I could. Blind, deaf, encircled by hundreds of roots that cut like steel cables, panic began to set in. I strained as hard as I could, but the roots wouldn’t give. Suddenly the dirt that had turned soft enough to sink through, seemed to harden around me.
Frozen, I couldn’t move. Pain was growing in my chest. I was going to suffocate and die.
Don’t panic. Concentrate. Think. No oxygen. I’d be unconscious soon, dead shortly after.
I’d nearly drowned once. This was like that, but worse. A ghost had saved me that time. Only in this place, I was alone.
The pain got worse. I had to exhale, but there was nowhere for it to go, lips and nostrils buried. Lights were popping in my head. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t thrash.
I should have shot myself when I had the chance. At least that would have been fast. I was terrified. My heart was beating so hard that it was going to burst. My air ran out and nothing happened.
I focused on counting the explosive beats. Each time my heart pumped it was like being electrocuted. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. I should have passed out by now. Seventy. Eighty. How was I alive?
Calm down. Asag put me here. He didn’t want me dead, just removed. My thoughts weren’t fading. They were a panicked jumble, but coherent.
This place has ways of making you linger.
It wouldn’t let you starve. It wouldn’t let your wounds become infected. It wouldn’t let you die of exposure. So of course it wouldn’t let you asphyxiate.
Son of a bitch…
An unknown amount of time passed. It still hurt unbelievably bad, but if I wasn’t dead by now, I wasn’t dying any time soon. Something weird was going on, and I forced myself to be analytical about it. My heart was slowing now, but for those few minutes the Alps must have feasted on all the terror I’d provided. Those little bastards had probably thrown as big a party as the Asakku eating the Fey.
There had to be a way out. I tried moving every muscle in my body. If they were going to give me eternity, I’d scratch my way out with my fingernails if I had to. Only there was no give at all. I was so trapped I couldn’t even flex a muscle or bend a joint. I didn’t know if that was because the ground was hard as concrete now, or it just felt that way because I’d been weakened so much. This had to be some sort of weird magical stasis. It was like everything was shutting down except for my brain. I was utterly trapped, and would be completely aware of it the whole time.
Oh, this would be a miserable way to spend eternity.
CHAPTER 26
It was a living hell.
At first the pain made it so that I couldn’t think. It probably would have driven me insane, if I’d not somehow disconnected myself from it.
I don’t know how much time passed after that, but I spent all of it angry. Assuming that lying bastard was actually telling the truth, Asag was sending something horrible to steal my kid. It would still have to get through Julie, but the thought of them in danger filled me with dread. All of the Hunters on Severny Island were going to get attacked. Yet I couldn’t warn anybody about it, stuck here inside my head.
I had to think of it that way, because it turns out that when you’re artificially kept alive, laws of physics and biology be damned, it hurts so damned much that eventually you tune out the physical world and retreat totally inside your thoughts.
It was sort of like being disembodied, but without the perks. My spirit had left my body before, so I was probably better prepared for this than most. It was a little bit like being dead, and I’d done that before too. Only this time I couldn’t leave my body and go for a stroll. My consciousness was anchored to my flesh, and my flesh was being utterly useless.
I tried concentrating, praying, wishing extra hard, you name it. My limited understanding of magic had demonstrated it was all about focus and desire, but I wasn’t getting anything. I tried to think about nothing, but meditating never worked for me. I couldn’t even manage to clear my head when I was buried alive with nothing else to do, and this Chosen gifts thing had always been a crapshoot.
Supposedly a strong enough will could twist the Nightmare Realm to suit them, but I’d been here long enough to grow out my beard and I still hadn’t even been able to do anything about the obnoxious weather. Meanwhile, Asag could just twist reality and microwave Fey by thinking about it. Head to head, Asag would kick my ass, but I hoped that once he left the realm, maybe I would be the strongest will around and I’d be able to finally get something done. It was a small hope, but it was all I had, so I clung to it.
I wondered if the story about Lococo’s childhood and the juvenile detention center was stolen from the real man, or if the demon had just made that up too. It felt real. Lococo’s past had formed this one corner of the realm, and Asag had seen fit to leave it as a memorial. I was furious. After all we’d been through I had felt like I had really gotten to know him. Hell, we’d spent so much time together on the road that I’d talked to him about my feelings.
I was such a sucker.
We had even talked about my father’s passing. I hadn’t even really talked about that with Julie yet. She’d been too far away, but Trip, Holly, Earl, Milo, all my closest friends had all been there for me, but no, I had to be a stoic to them, and then go and confide in an ancient chaos demon about how Dad’s death had affected me instead.
Dad would never have gotten played like I had. Dad didn’t trust anybody. He knew the end was coming. He would’ve seen the con a mile away. If it had been him instead of me, he would’ve figured a different way out, and Asag would be the one buried. What would you have done differently, Dad?
Of course, I didn’t get an answer. Nobody else could hear me, so why would he?
But he’d taught me for years, so I didn’t need him an answer. I already knew exactly what he would’ve told me and exactly how he would’ve said it. You screwed up, son. You can either be a useless baby crying about it, or you can get your shit together and fix what you screwed up.
Damned right.
So I spent a long time thinking, concentrating, spinning in my head, and occasionally ignoring the agony long enough to go back into my body to see if I could move something. Asag had taken everything else from me, but from Auhangamea Pitt I’d inherited a stupid amount of determination.
There had to be a way to use them to get out of here. I tried imagining the roots falling away. I visualized myself bursting from the dirt.
It was pointless. You can only imagine something so hard.
Improvise. Adapt. Survive.
I’m trying, Dad.
A strong man knows to ask for help when he needs it.
I’d been doing that for a long damned time now, but nobody was getting the message.
* * *
Once in a while I’d drift off to sleep, only it turned out that Asag had been telling the truth about keeping the Alps at bay, because during that the nightmares pulled out all the stops. Everything I’d experienced before was nothing compared to the awful images they inflicted on me while I was buried. They were nightmares beyond my imagining, and my waking thoughts couldn’t
even fully recall them. Like some defensive mechanism obscured them to protect my sanity.
They’d done this to Mark Thirteen, trapped in never ending nightmares, until his sanity had broken like a dropped egg. They’d been forced to put him into a medically induced coma. Nobody was going to do me that favor here.
When I came to, all I could remember was vague terror and trying to scream for help. Either I was forgetting on purpose, or worse, maybe the Alps just wiped the slate clean that way so that when I fell asleep again they could recycle the same torments they’d cooked up and they would seem fresh. Alps struck me as lazy and spiteful like that. I’d been planted in the ground and now they were going to farm me like a potato.
In some ways awake was worse than the dreaming, because my imagination was worse than anything an Alp could come up with. What if Asag was gone, and my mind had finally succeeded in subverting this realm? Only not in a good way, and the forest had been burned away and above was a facsimile of the sanity rending awfulness of the Old Ones universe.
I needed to get out of this sensory deprivation hole soon, or I was going to lose my mind.
Maybe it came to me during a tortured dream, or maybe it was a long forgotten memory resurfacing—because with crushing despair I knew nothing could reach me here—yet I heard a voice in my head. It sounded like a little girl, only she didn’t speak like a kid.
Heed my words, Owen. You must stay alive. You must fight. This is not the end.
Where had I heard that voice before? It was so familiar, but beyond my grasp. A doppelganger had once taken the form of a child I hadn’t recognized, and it had sounded exactly like that. The creature had seemed surprised when its disguise had failed to confuse me. I’d had no recollection of who it had been pretending to be, so at the time I’d dismissed it as a trick, only this was definitely the same little girl.
Understand, the opposite of disorder is not order. It is messy, beautiful, creation.
I drifted back into oblivion.
* * *