David Dalglish - Blood Of Gods

It took him a half hour to trudge through the muck and snow to his pavilion, his heart beating out of control. He stepped inside, not bothering to remove his boots or cloak. He ignored his desk and bedroll and strode directly toward the chest on which he had placed the head of Donnell Frost. The onset of freezing temperatures, and the fact that Velixar felt no need to heat his pavilion, had done wonders for preserving the head. Though the one good eye had shrunken like a tiny white raisin and the flesh had taken on a brownish hue-as much due to the wax coating as to rot-no more maggots squirmed beneath the skin.

He hung the dragonglass mirror on the support strut behind the chest and knelt down before the head. His heart continued to race. The snow coating his cloak had frozen, and when he bent his elbow, it cracked and flaked away. Velixar brought his hands up, placing them on Donnell Frost’s cold, waxen cheeks. Almost immediately the fires within him were stoked. This was the time. He knew it. Years of planning, of practice, had led to this moment. It took every ounce of restraint within him to keep calm.

“Life is a hindrance,” he said, slowing his breathing. “The secrets of the universe do not dwell in the realm of the living, but of the dead. While the body corrodes, the soul endures. Only in decay can there be true knowledge. Bring that knowledge to me.”

He closed his eyes, focusing on the words now streaming into his consciousness. When they came to him, he said them aloud, his voice sounding strange to his ears, as if he were speaking through a pool of molasses. Donnell’s head seemed to melt beneath his fingertips, growing hot as magma bubbling up from a crack in the earth. His body felt suddenly weightless, and a strange feeling overtook him. His excitement grew. It will work this time. After so many weeks of trying, he was near success. The demon Velixar had commanded an army of undead elves during the great Demon War; it should have been simple for the new Velixar to commune with a single dead soldier.

Everything around him fell away. When he opened his eyes, he floated through a watery darkness. The skeletons of entities long dead floated past him, things that should not have been there but were, men and women and children and gods and demons, all wandering aimlessly through Afram in search of a place of peace. Only in this emptiness can there be true knowledge. In the distance, a small glow appeared, near and far at once, the conscience of the demon he’d swallowed calling out to him, though he could not move toward it. He had expected this to happen. A smile stretched across his ethereal lips.

“I seek Donnell Frost!” he called out into the nothingness. “I seek my guide through the land of the dead!”

The remnants of beings long passed parted, and a lone ball of light drifted forward through the murk. It had no shape, no characteristics at all, and the sight of its frenzied non-form nearly drove Velixar mad. The human mind was never meant to take in such things. This is the true kingdom of the gods, and gods create form from nothingness. He concentrated, and the twisting ball of light took shape, becoming the likeness of the man Donnell had been.

The apparition stared at him with hollow eyes, features flickering in and out of existence. “Donnell Frost, faithful servant of Karak,” Velixar said, “I call you to serve once more.”

It seemed to want to speak, but it could form no words. Velixar sensed a wave of hate emanating from it, however, as if Donnell was not happy to be torn from the afterlife he had been given.

Use that to your advantage, he told himself. It is a spirit, an afterimage. It wishes for only one thing. .

“Departed soul, in death you have been granted the inherent wisdom of the void. I seek the resting place of the demons of old, the discarded creations of the ancient Kaurthulos. Show me, and I will release you to the peace you knew.”

Donnell’s image seemed to nod. It did not reach out for him; it did not move in any discernable way. Yet Velixar felt invisible fingers prying through the miasma of his ethereal form as Donnell’s spirit tugged him through the black.

He had expected to be taken on a long journey and be privy to wondrous sights, but time seemed to have no meaning here. Instead, it felt as if he went nowhere at all. One moment the glowing phantom shimmered before him; the next a giant, iridescent wall passed through him, and the ghost he had called to his aid disappeared. Instead of a black void, he was now surrounded by great swashes of swirling color, indigo and purple and crimson and ochre; the shades of creation, of un-creation, of eternity itself.

Velixar did not hesitate. “I call on the Beast of a Thousand Faces!” He screamed into the swirls, his human voice like the squeak of a mouse beneath a crashing ocean wave. When nothing happened, he called out again, and this time the colors before him shifted, pulling apart and then drawing together in millions of patterns. Through the chaos an image came forth, that of a face with eyes that glowed as red as Velixar’s, concealed within an unearthly façade that shifted from one moment to the next. They were a multitude of faces, both elven and things different, darker, harder to comprehend, the molds never once repeating. The mouth didn’t move when the thing spoke a single accusatory word that stretched throughout perpetuity, its tenor shaking the fabric of the universe.

You.

Velixar gazed in wonder at the creature, and for the first time since he had cast aside its consciousness in the throne room of the Tower Keep, he felt a moment of doubt. The beast was so immense, so powerful; it was no wonder a mortal as tiny and human as Jacob Eveningstar would find it difficult to master all the wisdom of this demon.

Leave this place. You are not wanted here.

“I will not!” shouted Velixar. “I have come to commune with you, Beast of a Thousand Faces, the creature I admired for all of my short yet eternal life. I will not leave until you tell me what I wish to know.”

We have a name. You will speak our name.

The beast’s image wavered like colored waters mixing together, and Velixar realized it was frightened of him. He might have only been a man, but he had defeated the creature already. It was now dead, just as its brother Sluggoth the Slithering Famine was. It was a spirit, but not powerless; it was a creature of the void, whereas Velixar was but a visitor, and it still had its knowledge. A show of strength was necessary.

“You have no name,” he told the demon. “I cast you out. I shredded the cords binding you together. You are legion no longer. You. Are. Powerless.” He lifted an invisible, ethereal hand, ancient words of magic leaking from his visage and making the demon shrink from him. The thing shrieked, the sound like comets colliding. It was the most beautiful thing Velixar had ever heard.

Stop. We relent.

Velixar smiled, and he wondered if his true body, still kneeling with hands pressed against Donnell Frost’s cheeks, was smiling as well.

“I do not come to you out of malice,” he said. “I only come seeking knowledge.”

Then ask.

“Tell me the secrets of the dead. Once you controlled legions of them, yet I have failed in all my attempts. What spell was used? How did you control them?”

The demon seemed to mull this over, its shifting face swirling along with the myriad colors. You ask the wrong question of us. The dead are useless shells, merely vessels for the power that fills us. It is that power you must seek.

Velixar was confused. “Why must I seek that power? I consumed all that you were, consumed your very soul. I should have your power.”