Cameron Johnston - The Traitor God

Nathair lapped it all up from inside my mind, drank in all my secrets and exulted in my utter betrayal and his complete victory. The bastard was distracted, out of his body and far from his home turf. It took a special kind of arrogance to enter the mind of a tyrant, even for a god. It was time to kick him in the balls.

I’d always held back. Always terrified I’d lose control. Lynas had helped steer me right, but he was gone. Byzant had tried to get me killed and Charra was dying. I loosed my rage and savaged the bastard’s mind, as brutal as I’d ever feared I would become – one last gasp of power shredding the soft underbelly of his mind. He screamed and squeezed my throat. Everything went black.

I woke sprawled on the floor, blood oozing from burst lips and a broken nose, but that pain was nothing compared to the rest of me. I groaned and flopped over, throat bruised and swollen. The god was still standing, arm outstretched, his face a rictus of horror. I had no idea how much time had passed.

Something was very, very wrong with him. Whatever damage I’d done went beyond the mental, as if his body was merely magical artifice, a glove he wore at whim. The Shroud shuddered and strained as ribbons of emotion burst from his chest in a spray of gore. A multitude of stars and swirling globes of thought drifted through the fabric of his existence. His body deformed, stretching and contracting into impossible angles that transcended physicality. Eyes, jaws, tentacles, wings, claws and other things and feelings I didn’t have names for erupted in endless variety.

I dragged myself away, inch by agonizing inch. His eyes flared into blood-red suns, bleeding enough power to turn a village to dust in an instant if it hadn’t all been focused on survival. He reconstructed his body like a disassembled blacksmith’s puzzle, but his flesh was all wrong: bone jutted from pulsing flesh, gaping wounds oozed blood and fluid and torn veins dangled like branches on a willow. An arm was on backwards.

“What… did… you do… to me?” the god gasped. “I have forgotten… things.”

I shook my head and almost blacked out, barely able to think through the pain flooding my body.

I crawled towards the merchant’s chair. What pit that thought came from in my fragmented consciousness I didn’t know, but I heeded the desperate impulse. I had one last, secret weapon.

Nathair’s breath came fast and ragged. Like a wounded beast he turned towards me, air whistling through holes torn in throat and chest.

I wasn’t going to make it. The merchant’s chair might as well have been leagues of rugged moor and mountains away.

A foot slammed down on my spine. Droplets of blood pitter-pattered onto my back.

“Well played.” He laughed, an executioner’s mirth. “To think you had that left.” His foot pressed harder, grinding down.

I prayed for somebody to save me as he ground his foot down, forcing shrieks of agony from me.

It made him laugh. “Your petty gods cannot help. And ah, such delicious irony, the Hooded God certainly would never help you of all people, for he is your beloved mentor Byzant ascended to take Artha’s place.” His foot lifted for a few moments, “I know his betrayal hurts, I can feel it’s delicious pain in you. It is his forte, however. You have no idea of the number of magi he killed on his path to ascension and the search for Artha’s god-seed.” The god chuckled and his foot slammed back down. “The ignorant, arrogant fool. He did not understand that to be a god of this accursed place is to be its servant and prisoner. I hope he is enjoying being chained in the darkness below. Now, what shall I do with you, hmm?”

Coughing, I tried to plead for mercy. “I–”

Crack , my spine shattered under his foot. My legs went numb. I blacked out.

Brutal healing ripped through my body.

“Not yet,” Nathair growled. His exhaustion was a palpable force emanating from his ruined body. “Let us just make sure we have scoured every shred of knowledge from you, then your indoctrination as my servant can begin.” He plunged his fingers into my chest and teased out a rib. I screamed as he snapped it between two fingers. Healing power gushed into me again as he tossed the shards of rib at my face. “You will not need that.”

He suddenly wavered, shaking his head groggily. He staggered back and barely caught his balance. “What did you burn from my mind? I will find out one way or another.”

Clumsy mental probes battered into me again, deeper and deeper, but I wasn’t in any condition to try to resist. It wasn’t easy for him. Even without conscious thought, the core of my mind was a devious, cruel creature. I’d long ago taken precautions against the very talent that I knew best. He wouldn’t enslave me easily. The weakened god groaned and sagged against the wall as the mental effort of twisting his power into my peculiar path took its toll. I tried to stand, to run, but my shaking legs refused to bear my weight. I flopped to the floor, screaming, arms clamped to butchered side and broken back that hadn’t fully healed yet.

“I see a part of your brain has been destroyed to keep the answers from me,” he said. “Those memories I cannot obtain, but I am confident we can piece together enough fragments from your dead flesh to grant me some answers.”

“Please,” I said, defeated and out of options. Whatever last desperate hope I’d stashed in the merchant’s chair was out of my reach. I’d failed and he knew it. “No more. I… I’ll talk. Tell you everything you want to know. Please…”

“Of course you will,” Nathair said, smiling at my abject defeat. Like all gods, he loved to feel superior. “The oh-so-witty little mortal reduced to this quivering slime. Pathetic. But you will still serve me well.” He limped over to the fine merchant’s chair opposite whilst worrying at the very last bastions of my mind. He collapsed into it, smirking, looking oh-so-regal.

The seat of the chair clicked, metal meeting metal.

Understanding hit us at the same moment. I realized what that burnt-out memory had been, and he was in my head, could see it all in my mind’s eye: the seat pressing down on the brass cone, the nose clicking, setting off the alchemic bomb I’d stashed inside.

His hatred stabbed into me. “You little–”

A wall of blood and flesh smashed into me. The world went silent. I bounced across the floor in a cloud of dust and grit, the flesh of my back shredded and burning. The back wall collapsed in eerie silence, stones noiselessly careering across the floor. The entire upper storey and roof of the building was missing.

I blinked away dusty tears, utterly confused that I was still alive. Of the Thief of Life’s ravaged body, nothing solid remained. A lightning storm raged in the space where he’d been sitting, bolts of incandescent energy arcing inwards to a single point of blinding light where his heart had been. The storm spun around a shard of glimmering crystal, spiralling ever faster inwards until it met a single point of brilliance that eclipsed that of the Magash Mora’s crystal core. His god-seed.

Slowly, sound began to filter back. The building creaked and groaned around me, the cracking of wood and stone, pitter-patter of fragments of ceiling, the drip-drip-drip of blood and minced godflesh, the fizz and crackle of lightning. Fires kindled of their own volition mid-air, churning upwards in spinning vortices.

Blood and god-mush oozed around the floor with a queer life of its own, began blindly flowing back towards the crystal. He was not finished yet and his body yearned to rejoin the god-seed.

My Gift flailed away inside, desperately trying to repair all the damage to my body. I shook, god-blood drenched skin sparking with unfocused power. My body sucked it in like a sponge. Too much power. It filled me, stretched me, threatened to tear me apart. My Gift didn’t have a hope of containing it: I wasn’t a damn god!