“Time to run. Unfortunately, they have your metaphysical fingerprint. Hounds of the gods will always be able to find you unless we cleanse you of your scent, you see, and to do that, we have to find some very specific help, and get the fuck off this plane of existence. Only one safe place for us to go.” He scanned the area below with his goggles. They screwed in and out, focusing on distant objects.
“Where’s that?” Arridon yelled into the wind.
“Straight to Hell, chums. Straight to Hell.”
Another lance of bright white light split the black air above, and tore down through their clutching midst. It struck Derrick in the legs, shearing his right leg off just above the knee. As he shrieked in agony, the dismembered limb and a rain of blood fell from him. His eyes rolled up into his head and he went limp. Blood streamed down into the gap between buildings, running like a faucet.
“Derrick!” Arridon screamed, grabbing his friend with one hand to try to keep him from falling. There was so much blood.
Tim reached down and grabbed hold of the kid’s pants by the belt line, but his grip was tenuous. He’d fall, and within seconds. They were still over a thousand feet up. The half-demon looked through his goggles at the simple metal plate mounted on his jacket above his heart. Wires and connectors ran through the coat then through his reddened, demon skin and muscles and up to the pulsating organ in his breast. There, the device drew strength and power from him. He couldn’t reach the arcane contraption, and it alone could save them all.
“Arridon,” Tim said in a stern, clear tone as he fought to level off their descent. “Flip the lid on that small box right there and dial each knob until the colors go red, or pink.”
Arridon looked confused, but he wrapped a leg around Tim’s and reached over his shoulder to awkwardly flip up the lid. The hinged brass plate on the box swung up and clicked open, revealing four small transparent knobs. With shaking hands the half-god twisted the round, clear controls and as he did, they changed colors, and even illuminated into patterns with shapes and ghostly images that seemed to look back at him.
He spun the top knob all the way around until it turned the color of Derrick’s flowing blood. He turned the second knob just a bit; it went to a deep orange-red almost immediately. The third knob had to go all the way around twice before it turned to the color of table wine, giving both the half-demon and the half-god heart palpitations as Derrick continued to bleed out, and slip from their ever-weakening grasps. The fourth knob—no matter how much Arridon spun it—would not turn anything remotely red. Not like the color of Derrick’s emptying blood.
“They’re fucking closing me off,” Tim said with a laugh. “Of course they would.”
“What?” Arridon screamed, trying to adjust his hold on his dying friend.
“I can jump to a few planes of existence without a room. Function of my lineage and diplomatic status,” Tim explained. “But they’re not letting me go exactly where we need to go.”
“What do we do?”
“Just like the balcony above, we jump, and we see where we land. Anywhere is better than here. Hold on. This will be…strange.”
Timtar imagined the symbol that would trigger his dimensional transporter at the exact moment Oldros struck him square in the back with a burning, smashing crash of energy. Their transition—from the plane of existence Eo currently called home—to where he needed them to go was disrupted, and when they disappeared and reappeared, Tim experienced terrible pain right down to the cellular level. He felt the burn all the way down to the tips of his toenails and the ends of his individual hairs. Judging by Arridon’s screams of pain, he too felt agony of reality-warping proportions.
The city of Eo, with all its splendor and endless, three-dimensional clusters of star-shaped islands, disappeared, and the trio of pain-wracked refugees appeared over the dust-covered, dimly lit ruins of a fallen society. Electrical storms flashed and thundered out of sight, beyond the enormous, smoke-obscured buildings in their presence, but before the imposing mountain range that encircled them. They were only a few dozen yards above a wide street, and Tim quickly put them down. They crashed far harder than he’d intended, knocking the wind out of the group.
“Derrick,” Arridon pleaded as he rolled his still-bleeding friend over onto his back. “You’re okay. Hey Tim. Tim, you gotta help him.”
Timtar shrugged off the damage to his metallic wings and knelt. He assessed the wounded boy. “I can save him. You must stand and keep guard. Anything that comes near, use your powers to protect us.” Tim produced a small leather pouch from under his duster. He opened it and started to pull out the gadgets and trinkets inside.
“Okay,” Arridon said, wiping at a wet streak on his face where a tear had cleared the dust away. He stood and walked into the middle of the dead, gray street and scanned it up and down.
“Arridon,” Tim called. The boy turned. “This world has been scoured by the Bleed. Long ago. Anything that approaches us, you destroy. Spare nothing and no one, until we are stable and know where we are.”
He set his jaw and nodded at his new friend, the demon.
Tim got to work on stopping the now weak flow of blood. In the distance, storms grew angry in the sky and rained down flashes of blue light. The ground shook and thrummed as each beam of cyan hit the ground.
Arridon ignored the spectacle; his only aim to defend against any and all denizens of this dead world. He kept watch on the too-high doors of buildings, and wondered what kinds of giants built this place, only
