him full of holes and murdered him.
So, this is what hell looks like… Figures.
There was a rattle as the eye slit on the steel door slid open. A pair of black eyes appeared. 'Greetings.'
'You the devil?' Sullivan asked.
'Yes,' the voice answered. 'You could say that.'
Sullivan scowled as he got a better look through the slit. He hadn't expected the devil to be Japanese. Those black eyes were set in a handsome, strong face, but they belonged to someone far older. They were the eyes of an ancient. 'You're the Chairman, aren't you?'
'I have many names. That one will do for this place… The land where the dead come to dream.'
'What do you want?'
The cell in Rockville was gone, and he was standing knee deep in mud made from ground dirt and blood, his Lewis gun smoking hot in his hands in the dead center of no-man's-land. Coiled barbwire entangled thousands of mutilated corpses and the yellow cloud in front of the sunrise told him that the poison gas was coming again.
'I've come to witness your failure,' the Chairman answered. Sullivan turned to see the Chairman walking on top of the liquid mud. He was average height, wearing a fine black suit with a red sash festooned with medals and ribbons draped over one shoulder. He paused to pet a rising zombie's scabrous head as if it were a faithful pet. 'I want to see you burn.'
'Why?'
'It brings me pleasure. Few things do these days. I always come to see when someone tries to touch the Power directly. The Grimnoir are trying to save your life as we speak.'
The sensation of them mutilating and burning a spot on his chest seemed distant, somehow absent. 'How do you know?'
'I am closer to the Power than they are,' he said simply. 'I know when someone tries to steal my birthright. Their smallest spells are beneath my notice, but now they try the most complicated of links in desperation, but they are as children, toying with the things of adults. They will fail, as they always do.' The Chairman paused, studying Sullivan. 'Too bad… I can see that you are a man of character.'
The Somme was gone, and they were in a familiar bar in New Orleans, another place where he'd tried to build a life, and failed. Sullivan stood over the splattered mess that had been Sheriff Johnson. The other patrons were fleeing or hiding. The negro serving boy that he'd saved from the Sheriff's wrath was huddled in the corner, afraid of what he'd just seen Sullivan do. 'He was gonna hurt you 'cause you're an Active… Like me…' Sullivan tried to explain, but the little boy was too terrified of him to move. 'It's gonna be okay. I won't hurt you…'
'Here you have dispensed the same justice as I would have. Pathetic normals, afraid of magic, afraid to bow to their betters.' The Chairman strolled around the bar and kicked what was left of the Sheriff's skull across the plank floor with one polished shoe. 'They chained you for this? This was a work of righteous fury. They should not have imprisoned you for destroying this vermin. They should have rewarded you. What do you owe such a world, such a failed system? Especially after all you had sacrificed for them.'
He was back in France, in the final hours of Second Somme, the fiercest battle of the war. There were more Actives collected here on this day than any other point in history. Dirigibles and biplanes were exploding and dropping from the sky like a meteor shower. Lightning, fire, and ice danced back and forth, destroying like a reaper's scythe. Men leapt impossibly high through the air, screaming down into their enemy as demons erupted from the ground in geysers of bone.
'A great and terrible thing to behold. You thought that you could show the normals the goodness of the Active race. That you could be their champions, their protectors, but instead you gave them this.' He waved his hand at the carnage. 'You gave them fear. They did not see heroes, they saw savagery beyond comprehension, and understood that it was only a matter of time until their betters turned their glorious fury upon them. You are not men to the lesser normals. You are but tools. Dangerous beasts of burden to be kept locked away until needed, nothing more.'
Jake Sullivan held his little brother Jimmy as the blood pumped from the stumps where his legs had been and a dozen other lethal wounds. His other brother was trying to reach them. 'Matty!' Sullivan shouted, unheard through the artillery shells exploding all around them. 'Matty!' His older brother leapt through the shrapnel, heading for them, but a chunk of steel sheared cleanly through the right half of his face and he went down.
Jimmy stretched out his hand as Matt Sullivan crawled the last few feet toward them. Matt's right eye was nothing but a globe of blood. He grabbed his dying brother's hand. 'I'm here, Jimmy,' Matt gasped. 'I got you.'
Jimmy had been the simple one, the good one. 'We're gonna be okay… okay… Brothers are here. Nothing hurts us when we stick together. Right, Jakey? Right, Madi? Sullivans stick together…' Then he was dead.
'Your brother, Matthew, serves me now,' the Chairman said, walking between the deadly shrapnel to kneel beside Sullivan's only surviving blood. 'He relived this same moment with me as well, and he came to understand how our race has been mistreated. I showed him the way of the strong. Under my tutelage, he has been born again, stronger than you can imagine, a champion of righteousness. Never again will he allow the weak to soil our world. He has become one of my finest Iron Guard. He has taken the name Madi in honor of the fallen.'
Sullivan began to cry.
'Serve me and I will help the Grimnoir's feeble magic successfully link to the Power. You will soon join one brother or the other. Your decision.'
The battlefield was frozen in time. In real life he'd gotten up from this trench, thrown Matty over his shoulder and carried him back to the lines. Then he'd gone back out and ended so many lives that he lost track. Fueled by rage, he'd reached parts of the Power that other Actives only dreamed of. He'd broken the wall between Powers, and had gone beyond being just a Heavy. In a fever driven by blood and hate, he'd killed and killed until he began to not just feel the Power, but to actually see it, until he could reach out and take it for himself.
Sullivan looked up through the land of the dead one's' dreams, and saw the Power itself, a great glowing world that filled the center of the real world. It was divided into sections, each one a geometric shape, all of them linked together into a seamless whole. He could tell that the spell markings he'd seen were just representations of those geometric shapes.
'You can see it…' the Chairman said, following Sullivan's gaze upward from the battlefield. 'Fascinating. It has been so very long… I thought that I alone could behold its beauty.'
There was a faint line leading from the center of his chest where his own Power connected to the great mass above. It linked directly to one point of a shape that Sullivan understood was where the Power interacted with the laws of gravitation. He followed the shape to other sections-mass, density, velocity-until they formed one tip of a triangle. He rose from the mud, coated in his brother's blood, and knew.
Thousands of other glowing connections linked the Somme to the magic above, each line attaching a different Active to a different geometric area of the Power, until the thing draped down over the real world like a cloud of Spanish moss made of pure crackling energy. Sullivan could see the triangle he'd been born linked to. His line led to the gravity point. The next point pertained to the realms of electromagnetism, while the final point represented nuclear forces far beyond his comprehension.
There were other shapes inside the triangles, hundreds of them, each tied inexorably to the fabric of reality, all of them working together in a tight seamless mass. An artist's interpretation of all the laws of the universe, only this art wasn't imitating life, it was influencing it.
'Magnificent, isn't it?' the Chairman asked softly, standing at his side.
Sullivan's link was stronger, brighter, than almost all of the others at the Somme, and it was then that he realized that it wasn't a one-way street. Energy wasn't just coming down from the Power. It was also rising up in great clouds from the Actives that died. As they lived, exercising its energy, the energy grew, and when they died, a greater sum returned to its source. More links descended to the world, touching others, creating more Actives, increasing the cycle.
It's eating. That's how it grows…
'It's alive, ain't it?'
The Chairman nodded. 'Yes. It came here from somewhere else.' He saw that the Chairman's link was the brightest of all, and it played about, choosing between several of the geometric patterns as he saw fit. 'I was the very first it chose,' he said wistfully. 'It learned about humanity through me.'
