Zachary Jernigan - No Return

Kengon Asperis Dafes, the Necromancer of Bridgtul, fed Adrash a potion that paralyzed him for several minutes. While Dafes’s back was turned, the armor covered Adrash’s body and began filtering the poison from his system. Adrash watched as the necromancer attacked with magefire, enchanted blades, and corrosive liquids. He felt nothing, cocooned safely inside the impenetrable white material. When he finally could move, he moved swiftly, crushing Dafes’s skull between his palm and a marble autopsy table. The rumbling voice warbled and died, but its echoes resounded in his head for weeks thereafter.

Open Water, Full Chieftain of The Whal, Lord of Spearhandle, pushed an enchanted whalebone dagger through Adrash’s left kidney during an orgy the two hosted. By this time, nearly twelve thousand years after Adrash had first heard the voice, the armor had fused with his system to such a degree that he barely felt the wound—the kidney itself healed in the blink of an eye. He twisted, pulling the dagger from Open Water’s hands, and with the light from his eyes vaporized the chieftain before his closest allies and lovers. Those gathered fell to the floor and worshipped Adrash.

As time went on, the avatars of the voice ceased to be a challenge. Their acts became ever more aggressive, but depressed Adrash with their predictability. As his own power grew, he forgot his original goal, which had been to understand the voice. Like the elders, it too had proved a weak enemy.

But he wondered if the voice might one day be heard on a grand scale. What if it woke the elders and urged them to take up their glass war machines, if it persuaded mankind to gather its forces in alliance? Perhaps then he might be threatened.

Adrash discovered he desired this. Not entirely. Not yet.

Nonetheless, he could no longer bear to live in the world. With no enemies to fight and little inclination to continue policing mankind, he ascended to heaven. Weariness rooted deep in his bones. The cords linking him to mankind frayed and nearly severed.

He knew an illness had taken hold of him, but felt powerless to stop it.

He built weapons of destruction, and extracted frail promise from the minds of men.

He waited for the voice to return. Surely, it had noticed his absence. He imagined it, waiting in hibernation, gathering its power for a final confrontation. Eventually, it would announce itself. This time, he would leave it alone. Let it come to him.

He waited, and grew impatient. Impatience eventually led to weariness, weariness to forgetfulness.

‡

After three days of resting, reflecting upon the past, Adrash opened his eyes. The light of realization spilled forth.

The cratered surface of the moon sped by beneath him, bright as sunbleached bone. Adrash smiled within the divine armor’s embrace, and turned to regard Jeroun.

Four voices rose in concert from its surface with a clarity that made his bones shiver.

How he had not heard them before was a great mystery. That such souls had been hidden from him seemed nearly impossible, especially considering his first encounter with Pol. Alone, the elderman had moved one of the spheres. The act should have aroused Adrash’s curiosity, yet he had written it off as an unusually powerful spell, similar to the one the elderwoman had used to bewitch him. Certainly, the outbound mages had progressed a great deal.

As, apparently, had the voice.

Voices , Adrash corrected himself. Perhaps there had always been more than one, and his ears were simply too unrefined to notice.

Regardless of the number, whatever produced the phenomenon had evolved beyond his capacity to recognize. While he waited for a sign from below—or merely for his indulgence of mankind to end—his enigmatic opponent had altered itself to fool him.

Of course, the strategy had worked. His deafness had left him vulnerable to the elderman’s second attack.

Yes, the new god had stolen things from Adrash’s mind, had taken them as easily as a man takes a toy from a child. Pol now knew the secret of the Clouded Continent, the location of the nameless valley that contained thousands of elder corpses, and something of the nature of Adrash himself. He knew with sufficient power any man might be a god. Perhaps he had even discovered the other voices, well before Adrash.

Adrash’s cock stirred at the memory of the encounter. Such a beautiful creature, Pol Tanz et Som, composed of nothing but muscle and bone and anger. Such a vicious, self-serving mind, the fire of it leaking out of his left eye like smoke from a fumarole, the searing heat of it focusing like a spear point from his right. He would gather power to him and use it, turn good and evil to his own devices. But he was not yet ready, and so his voice roared in frustration from Jeroun’s surface. Clearly, his allegiance had shifted. He meant to unseat Adrash.

What he intended beyond this, Adrash did not know.

Turning his attention elsewhere, Adrash closed his eyes again, listening.

The second voice:

Brassy thunder, the ringing of a hundred bells, the rolling of a thousand metal spheres. The sound gained strength slowly, inexorably, like a mountain shuddering into the sea. Adrash plucked memories from Berun’s labyrinthine mind, marveling at the course of the creature’s development. Solidification had changed the constructed man, making him frailer physically but stronger mentally. How handily he had defeated the mage Omali! Adrash could not piece together how this was accomplished, which only added to his fascination. He felt an odd kinship with Berun, whose mind could be cold and uncaring to so many, warm and sympathetic to but a few. A mass of contradictions, not unlike Adrash himself.

One thing was clear: Berun would stand behind his friends.

The third and fourth:

Churli Casta Jons. Vedas Tezul. Looking upon them now, he experienced the tug of shared pleasure, the slip and tangle of two souls entwining. He let the harmony of their voices fill him until he felt on the edge of some great precipice, as if his own personality might be overcome, and then backed away. He did not revel in the sensations of their lovemaking, though he easily could have. To do so seemed almost sacrilegious.

Despite their physical weakness in comparison to Pol and Berun, Adrash sensed these two posed the biggest threat to his existence.

For all the secrets that lay buried within her, Churls saw the world with startling clarity. She considered Adrashi and Anadrashi to be the same useless creature. Experience had shown her that worship blinded men to the truths: Adrash is no redeemer. Adrash will destroy the world. As she thought of the faithful, her true voice rang like steel against steel. She would not flinch from the war her lover proposed. She would look straight ahead, because only ghosts stood at her back.

Vedas, on the other hand, had only recently found his conviction. He had not yet discovered the strength of his own will. He loved Churls. Oh, yes, he loved her, as strongly as he hated the hand that had molded the world—a place where young boys were defiled and then turned into killers. Even as he and Churls embraced, he thought of killing. He rehearsed the words he would say to the people of Jeroun. Words meant to incite deicide.

The man possessed abilities he had never dreamed of. He would become a leader of men, inspiring them to take up arms against Adrash. His words would thunder across the skies, waking the elders from their slumber.

As a result, there would be a war.

Adrash considered the prospect of his own death.

He knew he could extinguish this possibility, here and now. He could send his weapons down. It was what the elders wanted, certainly. They longed to see dust covering the earth, cleansing the world of man, assured that they alone would wake from the cataclysm. Even the Baleshuuk could not survive without the sun.