“He brought a horse to eat. Keeps saying he has to keep his strength up in case we’re attacked,” Arridon whispered back.
“What happens when he’s finished with the horse?”
“I figure by then our pants will be full enough of shit we can grab a handful of it and throw it in his eyes. Should give us time enough to escape.”
“I have no interest in eating you,” Kalandar said over his shoulder as they pressed down the street towards the tallest of buildings near the city’s center.
The two young men remained silent as their group made their nervous way past transparent building after transparent building. Each was as tall as a mountain in its own right, the empty city—dark as mirrors and windows on a moonless night, lighted only now by flashes in the sky—seemed to call out to them. It begged them to be seen, and, perhaps even remembered. Each building, marked with etched signs in a tongue that none present could decipher, were tombstones in a graveyard of unthinkable proportions.
This wasn’t the aftermath of a war; this was the resulting conclusion everywhere the Bleed went. This was the fate of all things.
They were in the future of all worlds, here, and now.
“That one,” Timtar said, holding up his left arm and consulting with a strange set of crystals arrayed on a leather band around his wrist. “Energy auras are emanating from there. They match the resonance patterns of typical god technology. Clockwork room, almost certainly.”
“Don’t call them gods. It offends actual deities,” Kalandar chastised.
“There are no such things as actual deities,” Tim shot back at his father.
Kalandar stopped and turned to face his charges. “Do not doubt that in this existence there are things greater than us. Things that we cannot understand, and powers so great that they defy all attempts at reason. Even beings as powerful and amazing as I am believe in them and fear for good reason.”
“If gods are real, why aren’t they stopping this? Why aren’t they stopping the Bleed?” Derrick asked Kalandar. These were his first words to the demon.
“Perhaps they are fighting already. Perhaps we are their weapons. Do you think it was random fortune that I met your sisters already? Do you think it was then a coincidence that my son met you? Are you so gullible that you can look at all this and think that it’s happenstance?”
“I don’t know,” Derrick said. “I can’t wrap my head around all of this.”
“Look,” Kalandar said, dropping to his knee to be at Arridon, Timtar, and Derrick’s level. “If you do not see the face of gods in what is happening to us, then you do not lack faith; you lack sense. Now, my son, lead us to the promised land of functioning multiverse technology.”
Outside the city, the storms rumbled louder.
Sebastian’s furious chase had brought him to the city’s wall. Built like the cities on the world he’d been born on, it was surrounded by a tall barrier, ten times the height of the body he lived in now and glassy smooth. He shot his head to the left and right, seeing no entrance.
“So be it.”
Sebastian used his claws and the sharp spikes at the ends of his many feet to try and climb, but to no avail. He smashed his hands and feet at the barrier, but no matter how hard he tried to pierce the substance, to gain purchase, or make the slightest headway, his razor sharp body parts did no damage. He hissed as his facial tentacles writhed with a mind of their own. They too were unhappy about being stymied.
Inside Sebastian’s back, amongst the roots of this new limbs, he felt a strange writhing inside his body. Sprouting from his hide like the shoots of a poisonous plant, he grew whip-like prehensile tails, each ten feet long. The narrow tips of the black cords whipped around, lashing the ground and wall with wet, snapping force. They slowed, and began to caress the wall, feeling it, touching it with perverse grace, and tenderness.
Along their length, tiny pores opened, and a viscous fluid seeped out. Where the cilia-like ropes touched the wall, burning acid remained behind, etching long lines. The acid burnt deep, eating ravines that Sebastian’s claws could dig into. He pulled his weight up a few feet using the new handholds, and of their own accord, the acidic tentacles reached up to create more. Slowly, he ascended.
Sebastian laughed, and the storms grew closer and louder. They seemed to try to threaten him away, and to drown out the sounds of his maniacal laughter.
Kalandar unsheathed a broadsword from his hip that Derrick thought could only have been made from the rotor of an old-Earth helicopter. Wide as a thigh and as long as a human was tall, the block, butcher-blade shaped weapon hissed free of its scabbard. Along its ugly length were even uglier markings etched into the matte steel. Symbols of dark power, uttered by long tongues in toothy mouths, and scratched into the steel with a rusty, blood-encrusted tool. The demon hefted the ensorcelled blade as if it were weightless.
“Forged in a fire of blackest cinder-peat, cured in the blood of a thousand Dund’aari saints. Sharpened by the monks at the Temple of Time’s End, and the weapon I have brutalized countless adversaries with,” he said, admiring the sword. “This blade has been the sign of apocalypse for more than one world. I call it ‘Foe Splitter.’”
“Notably more abbreviated than your personal introduction,” Arridon mused.
“The tool rarely deserves more praise than the artisan who wields it,” the demon answered. “Now, let me cut this building open, so we may ascend to the clockwork room at its
