32
EO
In a firelit room with a hundred-foot-tall vaulted ceiling, deep in his stronghold on one of the many realities that made up what some called Hell, Kalandar sat atop a throne made of melted bone, gilded with gold and encrusted with diamonds made from the ashes of heroes.
Heroes Kalandar had put to death for their limitless arrogance.
In a nearby alcove, four slave musicians played something approaching Arabic music as he sipped thick, sweet mead from a crystal goblet big enough to hold five hives of honey and watched idly as lesser demons flitted around his loincloth-covered body. With claw-trimmed hands, the bat-like creatures massaged his corded muscles, applying poultices and magical remedies to the dizzying array of small injuries he’d sustained during his time with the humans. Their ministrations soothed his conflicted mind as much as they helped his body.
Just out of Kalandar’s reach, a long table made of wood harvested from transparent trees held the carnage from his rejuvenating feast. The moment of his return to home, he ate rich foods made to his exact specification until his stomach threatened to pop like a rotten melon. He slumbered then; hours of delicious, power-replenishing sleep. He awoke, came here to his throne, and allowed his most basic of servants to attend to him as he debated his next move.
He turned his attentions to the scenes depicted on the tapestries he’d collected and hung in the room over many centuries. There were ten. Five were the bread and butter nightmares of fearful mortals: blood soaked scenes of torture and carnage, endless in scope and consequence. These lush illustrations made Kalandar smile. These were the sport of demons, and they were celebrations of tragedy.
Four of the tapestries were landscapes. Tall visions of worlds far from the Mephistophelean creation he’d been born to, and chose to live on. He had one landscape depicting the four seasons typical to worlds on which humans and creatures like them lived. Kalandar looked at fields of snow and flowers blooming under warm rains. He stared with soft eyes at sheep grazing in a summer meadow. His favorite, the tapestry he spent the most time admiring, was the one depicting autumn. Or fall, or harvest tide, or the Reaping. The season the living creatures needed to scoop up all they’d managed to get the land to grow for them.
The desperation of the season stood in direct dichotomy with the sheer beauty most worlds had at that time. The explosion of colors in the forests of the temperate regions left Kalandar with a delicious appreciation of the spectrum of colors in the universes, as well as a ripe and powerful feeling of melancholy.
He felt great melancholy in this moment.
He’d been presented with an opportunity, one he’d been presented with a multitude of times before, but one he’d never taken. The chance to fight the Bleed on the side of all things not-demonic. The two greatest evils in the known and unknown universe, turning against one another.
He’d left Maddie on a Bleed-scoured world so he could regroup. He had to leave her. She would never have survived the process of shifting between realities in the way he could. The strange, intelligent, storm-inhabited planet, formerly filled with giants, was harsh and dangerous to her. Water was scarce; food alone wasn’t ideal to keep her sustained, and there was no knowing what threats remained.
Threats beyond the fact that the Bleed had a taste for Maddie’s blood, and the blood of those she’d somehow united with from across the stars. Samantha. Sandra. Jenny. As well as two brothers who were lost to the winds of time and space. A motley group that had somehow managed to put up a fight in the face of an evil that they had not the slightest chance of defeating.
Or did they?
And therein lay Kalandar’s melancholy.
He couldn’t speak his thoughts aloud here; on this realm, his deity could listen in, and any rumination of war or treachery were sure to get that True God’s attention.
True gods.
Not the creatures that so many had come to call “gods.” False idols that happened to be a little bit older than other intelligent races. Prophets of prophecies they caused to pass through lies and falsehoods, and the omission of attentive care. These “gods” grew powerful because they’d pioneered not only science, but magic. Their true power was sustained because, for some reason, all of creation saw fit to intertwine them with the very fabric of what made everything.
They were more real than almost anything else that lived. Only demons were as real, and they, too, were worshipped like gods.
The balance existed for a very long time. The scales tipped when the gods’ home was destroyed. Ruined by a natural calamity that even all their power couldn’t prevent. They were forced to leave, and when they left, not all of their kind were able to go.
Those that remained through the apocalypse became bitter, obsessed with vengeance over those who’d left them behind, and who then made the choice not to return to rescue them. And they could have, make no mistake about it. With all their power they could’ve stepped back into the wreckage of their old world like the angels many thought they were, and scooped up those that were not a part of their first, original rapture.
But they were left, and by intention.
They became the Bleed, and their quest for vengeance was leaving nothing but carnage in its wake.
They weren’t evil anymore; demons rejoiced in evil. Vengeance can be just, but the Bleed had become something else. They had surpassed evil, and become an indifferent, power-obsessed force of cosmic nature, an anti-force, bringing catastrophe, violence, destruction, and the apocalypse everywhere they were able to bleed themselves into.
Kalandar had been forming an opinion for the previous century. He’d kept his counsel, but with the opportunity presented to him now…perhaps it was time to make a move against the Bleed.
“They are
