Mark Chadbourn
The Burning Man
THE FINAL AGE
My name is Jack Churchill, known to my friends as Church, and I am only a man. This is a story of gods, and powers higher than gods. I write these words in my head, and thus on a page, and thus throughout all Existence, as I stand here, at the end of the world.
From the first day that I accepted my role as a Brother of Dragons, I have struggled long and hard. At the time I didn’t understand the full nature of the responsibility thrust upon my shoulders. Now I do.
Looking back, I can at least begin to glimpse the great, hidden pattern and how apparently random events came together, all the mysteries and secrets gradually emerging into plain sight.
But at the start I had no idea of the bigger scheme.
In my past life, what I used to call my ‘real’ life, I was an archaeologist, but my days had been blighted by the death of my girlfriend, Marianne. I’d lost all hope. And then magic and wonder and terror returned to the world. The ancient gods of Celtic mythology — the Tuatha De Danann, who called themselves Golden Ones — invaded an Age of Reason unable to cope with their irrationality. Society creaked and groaned and collapsed in the face of such a supernatural force.
For more than two thousand years, Existence had always brought together five champions of Life to battle such threats, the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. I was chosen to be one of the latest group, bound together by the Pendragon Spirit, the powerful spiritual force that runs through the earth in lines of Blue Fire, and through all humanity. As a war broke out between the Golden Ones and their ancient race enemy, the demonic, shape-shifting Fomorii, I was joined by four others: Ruth Gallagher, gifted in the ways of the Craft; Shavi, a seer; Ryan Veitch, a warrior; and Laura DuSantiago, who was radically changed by the god Cernunnos to become a powerful force for nature.
We overcame great hardship to win a significant battle against Balor, the terrible god of the Fomorii, but we paid an awful price. Ryan Veitch was manipulated by the gods to betray us and we thought him dead. And I was flung back through the ages, separated from Ruth, the woman I loved.
As society attempted to recover from that Age of Misrule, five new Brothers and Sisters of Dragons took up the struggle. There was Mallory, who trained in the art of warfare in the new order of Knights Templar in Salisbury; his lover Sophie Tallent, who also learned the powers of the Craft; Caitlin Shepherd, a doctor devastated by the deaths of her husband and son; Hunter, a Special Forces operative employed by the Government; and Hal, a clerk working for the same Government.
But their struggle was even greater than ours had been. Beyond the edge of the universe, a devastating force had woken and turned its attention towards Earth. Known in ancient myths as the Devourer of All Things, or the Void, it was the opposite of Existence, of life itself, and it wielded the unlimited powers of the ultimate creator. It could even alter reality itself, twisting it into new shapes that would help maintain its rule.
The new Brothers and Sisters of Dragons could not vanquish such a force, even when aided by Ruth, Shavi and Laura. At the point of defeat, Hal chose to sacrifice himself and become part of the Blue Fire so that he could seek me out in time, and guide me back for the final battle.
Secure in its victory, the Void changed reality to a very familiar construct: the age-old prison of money and power, devoid of magic and wonder; and it locked the remaining Brothers and Sisters of Dragons into fake lives, denying them their memories so they would never again attain their true potential and threaten its rule.
At the time, I knew nothing of these events. I walked out of the morning mists into an unspoiled world more than two thousand years ago, a huge part of my memory missing. Members of a Celtic tribe adopted me in their village at Carn Euny, in what would become Cornwall, and I lived a simple life with new friends. But the simplicity and beauty of that rural existence did not last long, for the Void still saw me as a threat. It despatched through time its supernatural agents, the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders, to prevent me and the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons from challenging it again.
Existence, however, had other ideas.
At the great stone circle of Boskawen-Un, I encountered Hal in the Blue Fire, who set me off on a quest across two millennia to return to my own time. And in a brain-twisting paradox, I became the first Brother of Dragons, initiating the heritage that would welcome me into its ranks two thousand years in the future. My new friends Etain, Branwen, Tannis and Owein became the other four members of the first group.
Establishing the first of the Watchmen, a brotherhood that would grow over time into a network of spies who could help my cause, I felt ready to take on the challenge of the Void. But in that moment of initial success, tragedy struck. Etain and the others were slaughtered by a mysterious assassin, and I fell under the control of Niamh, one of the Tuatha De Danann, who took me back a prisoner to the Celtic Otherworld, known as T’ir n’a n’Og or the Far Lands.
Niamh was the cruel, capricious queen of the Court of the Soaring Spirit, and saw me as little more than entertainment. I became friends with another of her prisoners, Jerzy, the Mocker, who had been surgically altered at the grim Court of the Final Word to become Niamh’s jester.
Yet during my imprisonment I discovered the route back to my own time. T’ir n’a n’Og was essentially timeless. I could while away my days there while centuries passed in the real world, and eventually return when my own age rolled around again.
But the Void was not about to let me go without a fight. First I was attacked by Etain, dead yet alive, now a Sister of Spiders. And then I encountered the Void’s most lethal agent: the Libertarian, a sardonic, brutal killer with lidless red eyes who threatened to kill Ruth in the twenty-first century if I interfered with the Void’s plans.
There was nothing I could do to warn Ruth, but I found a way to see her during a visit to another of the twenty great courts of the Tuatha De Danann, the Court of Peaceful Days. A mystical object called a Wish-Post allowed me to see into the future, where I observed Ruth, Shavi and Laura, all living their miserable fake lives, lost without me.
When I returned to the Court of the Soaring Spirit, I discovered that Niamh’s brother, the god Lugh, had gone missing. I accompanied her in a search to the last place he had been seen — Roman York in AD 306. There I encountered the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons of that era: Marcus Aelius Aquila of the Sixth Legion; Decebalus, a Dacian barbarian; Lucia Aeternia Constans, a practitioner of the Craft; the North African seer Secullian; and Aula Fabricia Candida, an agent of the powers of the natural world. And in that encounter I began to understand the strange, repeating patterns that underpinned all reality.
As Niamh introduced me to her set of Tarot cards with its mysterious fifth suit, ravens, only available to the gods and used to contact higher powers, another mystery was unfolding. The long-lost Ninth Legion had returned under the control of the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders. As I rallied the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons to defend the city, I was captured by the Libertarian and Marcus was killed. In an attempt to instil despair, the Libertarian revealed that many powerful human leaders were now being controlled by a single spider embedded somewhere in their skin.
I escaped, but during the battle with the Ninth Legion Secullian was also killed, this time by Etain and her fellow undead Brothers and Sisters of Spiders. There were only four of them — I should have guessed one more would be necessary to achieve the magical number. It was Ryan Veitch, resurrected by the Void and filled with bitterness over what he perceived as his betrayal. Veitch had loved Ruth, too, and in his twisted perception, I had allowed him to be sacrificed so I could get Ruth to myself. He was wrong, completely wrong, but he’d been corrupted by the Void — manipulated once again. Now all he wanted was revenge. He was the stranger who had murdered Etain and the others, but now, in their afterlife, he had struck up some strange, perverse relationship with Etain, both of them united in their hatred of me.
The extent of Veitch’s desire for revenge was driven home when he vowed to move across the years slaughtering every Brother and Sister of Dragons he could find. He was going to strike a blow at the very heart of
