Alex Lee Martinez - In the Company of Ogres

He turned to her. “It’s nothing, an empty memory from a man who never was.” He looked at Rucka, still writhing in quiet agony beneath the Void, still struggling to remove the heart he’d so foolishly swallowed. All the light in the staff faded into a blackness that consumed the night in an ebony fog so thick that only the Void, Rucka, and the Red Goddess could still see.

“Are you a god who dreamed he was a man?” asked the goddess. “Or are you a man who dreams he is a god?”

The Void smiled grimly. “I am. And I shall always be. But these things beneath me will pass away. As will their world one day. Today or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, when does it matter to me? It is all but a moment in eternity.”

Rucka had nearly succeeded in extracting the heart. There was but a handful of seconds left for the Void to take advantage of the demon’s weakness. Otherwise, the titanic struggle would renew.

The Mad Void raised his staff to plunge it into Rucka.

The goddess leaned close and whispered in the Void’s ear.

“It matters. If not to you, Ned, then to them.”

The Void hesitated. Not long ago, by his measure of time, he would’ve destroyed Rucka, this world, these specks, and countless others, and the entire universe as well without a second thought. But things had changed. He’d lived as a man, as many men. The exact memories eluded him, and he could only recall Ned’s life.

Even measured by the insignificance of mortal lives, it had been an exercise in absurd futility, a complete waste of time, a struggle against fate to find a place in a world that cared nothing for one more mote crawling upon its surface. But there was some strange dignity in it, and in all these little things. And though they didn’t mean anything and their lives or deaths meant even less, the Void saw them as oddly beautiful in a way he’d never before imagined and couldn’t completely understand.

He lowered his staff. The darkness faded, and the night returned.

He smiled. At Miriam. At Regina. And Frank. And the whole of Ogre Company. The blizzard ended. The snow turned white, then faded away.

The Red Goddess held out her hand. “Give me the staff, Ned. You don’t need it. The power lies within you. It always has. You’ve chosen not to use it before. You can choose not to again.”

Rucka sprang. He threw the Void’s own heart at it, and the blackened organ wrapped around its former owner. Rucka knocked the staff from the Void’s hand, seized him by the throat, and before the Void could recover from the surprise, the demon reached into the Void’s head and plucked out his eye. The Void slumped on the ground. His body shrank into Ned’s proportions.

The Red Goddess moved to stop Rucka from inserting the eye into his empty socket, but his barbed tail sliced her into quarters. Rucka put the eye in its place and cackled.

“It’s mine!” he screamed triumphantly. “The power is all mine!”

“No,” said Ned.

The demon whirled on the little mortal creature below him. Ned looked completely normal except his eyes had grown back and his left arm remained red with its patchwork of blackened scars.

Rucka raised his heel to crush the speck. He slammed down his foot, but one touch of Ned’s red fingertips pushed the demon off balance. He crashed to the earth.

“But I have your eye!” shouted Rucka.

“But my power lies elsewhere.” Ned’s left arm sparkled for an instant. “You were looking in the wrong place.” He clenched his fist as Rucka tried to rise, and the demon fell as if bound to the ground.

“You can’t hold me forever!” said Rucka. “I’ll break free. Even if I have to tear the world apart to do it!”

“I know.”

“And I’ll come back! Again and again, I’ll come back! As many times as it takes!”

“I know.”

And he would. And each time he would fail. And each time Ned would have to call upon the Void’s power to defend himself. And a little piece of his humanity would disappear until it all disappeared, until he became the Mad Void again.

“There’s only one way to stop me! But you haven’t the strength for that. Because all these worthless mortals mean something to you. And to destroy me, you’ll have to destroy them all. They’re your weakness. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.” Rucka laughed anyway.

Ned gestured with his left arm, and still laughing, Rucka was raised into the air and shot up and out of sight.

Ned floated a few feet off the ground. He turned to Miriam, Regina, and Frank. “I’ll be right back.” He streaked after the demon.

The two hurtled out of the atmosphere, into the darkness of space, past the sun and planets of the solar system and onward. Physics twisted beneath Ned’s will, and a billion billion miles passed by in moments. They continued onward, out of the galaxy, past the next galaxy and the next, until they reached a portion of the universe that fit Ned’s needs, a corner filled with lifeless planets and dying stars.

Rucka whimpered, his misty breath visible in the airless emptiness. “No, no! I didn’t mean it! I submit! I surrender!”

Ned said nothing. Whether Rucka meant the words or not, it didn’t matter. He was too ambitious a demon to not try again.

“You can’t do this,” pleaded Rucka. “I have a purpose in this universe. I belong here. Not like you. What right do you have to destroy me?”

“I have every right,” said Ned sadly. “I’m the Mad Void. And you made me remember, so I don’t think you can complain.”

Rucka, seeing his pleas fail, came to his last resort. “But to destroy me, you must destroy yourself. Are you willing to do that?”

“If I could’ve destroyed myself, I would’ve done it long ago.” Ned laughed bitterly. There was only one thing the Void could not annihilate, and that was the Void itself.

Ned laid his hand on Rucka’s chest, and a galaxy disappeared in a flash. There was no death rattle, no final gasping spasm for this empty portion of the universe. It was just gone, winking out of existence, dissolved into nothingness and then beyond nothingness.

A lone piece of charred, blackened debris fell from the emptiness. It was a man, but not a man. Dead, but not dead. Supernatural guidance took hold of it and gently steered it across the cosmos to an inconsequential ruined citadel on an inconsequential planet. The comet streaked downward to strike the world with devastating force, but the Red Goddess cushioned the landing so that it touched the ground without disturbing the dust.

Ogre Company circled the thing, barely recognizable as Ned.

“He’ll come back,” said Miriam. “Won’t he?”

The goddess smiled. “He always comes back.”

Ned awoke in a tent. It was a nice tent, just large enough to hold a cot, a table, a chair, and a glowing heatstone. It was the wrong time of year for heatstones, and Ned wondered just how long he’d been dead this time.

“Just over five months,” said the Red Goddess, sitting in the chair. Her raven sat on her shoulder.

Ned pulled up the heavy blankets. “Took you long enough.”

“Don’t blame me,” she replied. “You were in the center of an obliterated galaxy. Takes a while to recover from that, and even I don’t have enough power for it. But I’m not the one who brought you back this time. I don’t do that anymore.”

“Oh, really? Who has the responsibility now?”

“You, Ned.”

“But I thought if I brought myself back, I’d come back as—”

“I think you’ve finally grown out of that.”

“But what about the Void?”

“What about it?” She stood. “You know it better than anyone. So why ask me?”

Ned concentrated. Deep, deep inside he sensed the ancient, unstoppable evil as it slumbered. This wasn’t the forced, uneasy doze of old, but a content, relaxed nap. The Void couldn’t change its nature, nor could it ever be destroyed, but it could sleep. And it might sleep forever, or at least until the natural end of this universe.