James West - The God King

“The venom of some insects cause anguish,” Peropis advised. “Others can kill a man. Should that man, Kian , tread the world much longer, he will prove a formidable enemy.”

Varis tried to sit up, but only managed to flop a hand to the mud-slick rim of the furrow. He wanted her to bless him with the incorruptible flesh and indomitable spirit she had promised, but the tone of her words alarmed him.

“How could he be a danger to me?” he gasped. “He is but a man and I am … more than that, now.” He tried not to consider the incongruity between those words and the ruin of his flesh.

“There is little time to deal with our enemy,” Peropis said, sounding more troubled than ever. While he could not be sure, Varis felt sure that she had met an unexpected obstacle.

“What is of the utmost importance,” she added, “is that you heed my instruction. My time with you is short-I am weakening by the moment speaking to you, in this realm of living flesh. My spirit needs rest … and sustenance .”

Varis found it difficult to concentrate. The world seemed to be sliding sideways to his strange eyesight.

“Relax your mind,” Peropis commanded.

He expected her to speak further, but instead of words, a cascade of images flashed behind his closed eyelids, racing faster than thought.

She is in my mind, he thought, dazedly. He went rigid in alarm, but after a moment, he ceased trying to focus or resist. Rather, he laid back and absorbed what he was seeing. None of the images made sense. He relaxed further, for by any human measure, nothing he had experienced this day made sense.

I have become a god, he thought randomly, albeit a god trapped in the weak flesh of a man. It was wholly unfair.

The images began to blur into a lightless, incoherent blizzard inside his skull. Varis drifted in the void of his own mind, like a speck of dust on the swells of a warm sea. After long moments he understood, on some level, that the knowledge filling him was some measure of the lost wisdom of gods.

Then, all at once, a pulsing and amorphous force surrounded him. After a moment of consideration, he understood the sensations to be the presence of life. Clarity began to wash away confusion. Plants, he knew, had their own life, though even a mighty tree’s energy was miniscule compared to that of a worm’s. That power of life radiated outward from living things, like the fine strands of a spider’s spinning. The energy had always been there, but only now that he had taken the legacy of the Three into himself, breached the Well of Creation, and tasted the horrors of the Geh’shinnom’atar , could he take hold of that energy, use it as his own.

Tentatively, almost instinctively, he reached out with his mind to take that power, but the living filaments shrank away. He scowled in concentration, forcing what he wanted, stealing it into himself. Gradually, the power he craved and deserved drifted over him, lighting gently upon him like dew-covered spider webs. Some new part of his mind saw those threads glowing faintly, each so fine as to barely be seen. He began dragging them into himself. Distantly, he knew that if he were looking at himself, he would appear to be a man made of light. Within that cocoon, his hurts rapidly mended. Vitality swelled his muscles, thickened his skin, swept aside debilitating weariness. Varis gasped in ecstasy as the rejuvenating force of all creation filled his veins, surged through his heart.

“That is enough,” Peropis said sharply.

Varis barely heard the ruler of the Thousand Hells, and he was too enraptured with his own growing strength to heed her. He wanted to explore this gift, taste and feel it. He wanted to wield it. Although the strange knowledge Peropis had imparted in him explained much, the magnitude made his head spin. He simply could not conceive the whole potential of what was filling him, but what he did grasp was that no enemy, despite Peropis’s warning, would ever again stand against him.

“Enough!”

His eyes snapped open to a world that looked no different than it had when he closed them. But it was different, because he was changed, so much so. The strength of departed gods flooded through him, and where the life of the world had fled before at his attempt to grasp it, now it could not escape.

“Fool!” Peropis shrieked, driving a spike of agony into his mind. “You will destroy yourself!”

He winced away from the pain, angered. His thoughts raced with newfound knowledge. He could create life, and he could destroy it, on a whim. Nothing could stand before him. Not even Peropis!

Confident in his growing might, Varis ignored her, glorying in his strength. He recklessly diverted the growing life force into the roots below him, recalling now what he had done before. Roots twined together at his silent command into a woven, woody seat that conformed to his every contour. As his creation lifted him upright, the weave became more elaborate, grander, until he was raised up on a throne sitting high upon a still growing dais.

Darkness lay thick upon the swamp by now, but to Varis’s eyes all was lit by an otherworldly glow, the divine splendor of all life. It lay everywhere, was in everything … and it was his to take. He stood from his throne and threw his arms wide. Like a dry sponge doused with water, he soaked in the surrounding luminescence, drew it deep. Where life existed, he viciously ripped it away from its former possessor. By heartbeats, the swamp fell deathly still, quiet as the grave. In the death of many thousands of infinitesimal creatures, his own existence became greater, more vital and vibrant. He shone like the sun, like Pa’amadin himself.

Varis’s laughter filled the clearing, richer than ever it had been, reverberating outward through the dead swamp in crushing waves. At a stray thought, flames the hue of a thousand rainbows surged from his fingers, and in the joy of its creation he swept them around in a wide arc, destroying already dead trees. Where he ruined, he created again, and destroyed again. Drunk with the bliss of so much power, his laughter became a roar that shook the ground-

Then, without warning, the tide of life coursing through his veins became an uncontrollable flood. The elemental forces continued to pour into him, but the outflow became a mere trickle. He tried to sever the torrent, but it filled him further, bloating him like a carcass in the sun. One of his eyes burst and a wriggling surge of maggots cascaded down his cheek. Even as he frantically scraped them away, a tender green shoot tore through the skin of his palm, growing rapidly. The shoot became twining roots that burrowed through the meat of his arm and into his chest. A bulge grew on his belly, swelling and writhing, then erupted a wash of skittering beetles. They scurried madly over worms pushing out of his skin. He opened his mouth to scream, but a geyser of fire roared out of his throat and scorched a mile-long gouge through the tattered forest-

Then Peropis was there, faint and hovering amidst the flames of his making, an ethereal vision. For a long moment, she let him suffer, even as she suffered herself in the realm not her own. When it became obvious he would not long survive, she drew close. Her eyes swam before his, opening, growing wider, blacker, pulling at him, as if trying to drag his soul from his body. As suddenly as it began, the inrushing flood cut off, leaving Varis limp, his torn flesh oozing black blood, yet free of unnatural growths.

Pained though she was from taking her spirit from Geh’shinnom’atar , Peropis peered into his face. “Open yourself again.”

Near death, Varis did as he was told, though he would rather have not. As a result of his fear and caution, it took a long while before his ravaged flesh mended enough for him to stand on his own.