The Creators Ch. 12

I looked up. A mile above me, I could see the dot of daylight. Julia was up there. Death was up there. All I had to do was ascend from my hole, and greet my end with open arms. I burrowed deeper, pulling the rock over my curled body, trying to become nothing in the void. She would come down here, but she would not find me. I would be safe, the wretch that I was, the insect that crawled deep into the mud, and I would wait for her to leave, then I would run away. Like last time, I would hop from caravan to caravan, traveling without destination, paying for my transport with my flesh, letting the caravanners use me until I was raw, until pleasure and pain drove away guilt for a fleeting, blissful moment. Maybe I'd let orc slavers take me again, but this time, there would be no Astrid to compel my escape. They would take me into the Gratoran Desert, and I could live out the rest of my days in the wildlands at the edge of the earth, unknown and uncared for, a toy to be used, a broken vessel to be filled, a life without purpose, without hope. Bliss. My identity would be raped from me until I was nothing but the receptive pleaser, the smiling slave. Willowbud would only exist as the occasional nightmare, a flashback of fevered dreams, and I would find comfort in the arms of my master, and he would convince me that it was all a lie. Yes. Yes, that is what I would do. I smiled, and felt some of the pain wash away. I wouldn't have to be me for much longer.

I created a tunnel into the earth, and walked parallel to the surface above, closing my passage behind me. I walked until I was sure I was beyond Drastin's walls, then I ascended. I listened to the rock as I neared the surface, and the rock confirmed my assumption. There was a barren plateau above me, and not a living thing for miles. That was strange; Drastin sat on the coast of Drastinar, which was the most fertile country on earth. There wasn't a square mile in Drastinar without soil. I emerged from the hole, and it was snowing. It fell gently from the blank skies, blanketing the ground and concealing the world behind a steady curtain of grey. I felt the summer heat on my skin, and I felt the snow dissolve between my rubbing fingers. Ash. No. No, no, no, no...

I peered into the grey curtain, and saw the faint outline of a statue. I walked toward it, then I ran toward, then I sprinted, coughing as I inhaled the acrid air, my flesh and hair growing grey with the powdery remains of life. Part of me refused to believe it. Part of me knew that once I got there, once that silhouette clarified, everything would be fine. I stopped. The statue of Astrid was nothing but legs that ended at the knees, the features of it worn and melted, the trunks of her calves turned to running columns like a used candlestick. My temple was gone, and Brandon's arboretum was the just the burnt stump of his maple. Only Julia's cathedral remained as a twisted, half-melted mockery of majesty, the dome caved-in, the towers drooping comically away. Of the rest of Drastin, there was only the singed foundations of buildings peppering an immense surface of glass. For that was what Drastin was now; black glass covered with ash. I dropped into an ash-bank, curled into a ball, and became a part of the desolation.

BRANDON

I blinked awake. There was a familiar face hovering over mine, but it was the last one I ever expected to see.

"Arby?" I asked.

"Aye, 'tis me," Arbitrus Gen said, inspecting my eyes. His kindly face was drawn in a dour expression; his wrinkles deep in the flesh, his pate shining above a thick beard. I glanced around, and saw that I was in his inn, the same inn I'd tried to pick up girls in throughout my unlucky teen years. I was in Towerhead. I was home.

"What are..." and then it came back to me. The shockwave, the fire, the heat. "Angela!" I bellowed, bolting upright. It felt like someone had driven in a spike into my head. Blinding pain shot between my temples, and I folded over. A familiar cool hand ran over my forehead, settled at the base of my skull, and guided me back down.

"Bianca saved us, Brandon," Angela said, her face clarifying.

"And she brought us here?" my voice was cracked.

"I told her to," Angela replied, running her little fingers through my hair.

"Where is she?"

"Outside, waiting for her brethren to come," Angela said softly.

"How many have?"

"Not many," Angela's voice became even smaller. I grimaced, touched a finger to my temple, and healed my concussed brain.

"What happened?" I asked.

"It's not obvious to ya?" Arby asked.

"Why did it happen?" I grunted.

"Her fire was blue, Brandon," Angela muttered. "Lucilla's gone."

"Oh," I breathed, and hoisted myself into a sitting position. I turned to Angela, "Willowbud?" I asked.

"She was at the Pit, and that's where it started," Angela said softly. "I'm so sorry, Brandon."

I nodded, numb to both realizations. Two women I'd known, one I thought I'd loved, the other I'd considered a friend, and with them, the greatest city in the world. There was no doubt in my mind that Willowbud had killed Lucilla, and Julia had lost it. Now that I looked back, it was the most predictable outcome there was. And I had let it happen, because I was too busy getting my dick wet to see the cliff we were all hurtling toward.

"Astrid," I whispered, my heart knotting. "Tera."

"Justina," Angela sniffled. "Oh my god, Brandon..."

"Where is Diamond?" Arby asked. "Last I saw of her she was walking into Sorrow's realm. Did she make it out?"

"What?" I asked, confused, "No, Diamond's not in the..." I trailed off. Sorrow's realm? Sorrow the Sentient?! I looked over at Angela, and saw her grief-stricken face elongate with shame.

"Um..." she gulped, and I could feel her trembling beside me. I took her hand in mine, and she linked her fingers. I turned to Arby.

"Just what in the hell have you two been doing?"

JUSTINA

Of the two-thousand Breytans who had come to Drastin, less than three-hundred remained. They were all solemnly silent as we emerged from the basement, and walked into the ash-filled dawn. The cathedral had melted partially, and its caved dome lent grey streaks of sun into the speckled air. When we stepped onto what used to be the mall, I could hardly believe what I saw. Drastin had become a plateau of black glass, occasionally interrupted by the foundations of buildings or the rare melted structure. Everything was smoothed-over and glossy, not a sharp edge or crumbling surface to be seen.

"What does it mean, Your Eminence?" Jade asked me. "Why did Her Holiness do this? Did she wish us to die in the inferno? Have we betrayed her by surviving?"

"No," I muttered. "Julia lost control. Something terrible happened."

"The Bound One."

"Yeah," I said, touching the astral gemstone in my ear. It had gone quiet after Lucilla had left, but now it was dead.

"This much power..." Jade said quietly, "...without the Bound One to provide it for her, such an expulsion would surely have been fatal!"

"We'll find her, Jade," I said, not sure if I wanted it to be true. Maybe it was better if Julia had burnt herself out.

The ash was over a foot deep in some places, and still falling freely from the sky. The wind blew it from the exposed glassy plane, and created banks along foundations, over glossed ruins and atop the melted columns of Astrid's statue. That's when it hit me. The Pit. Astrid. Mother. She'd been at epicenter; there was no way she survived. I went suddenly cold, my heart seeming to beat at a lower rate, my throat closing. I didn't shed tears for her. The loss was so great that all I could feel was emptiness, for the most important person in my life had been torn from me, and the void she'd left seemed to be me entirely. I just kept walking beneath grey skies that snowed the remains of Drastin on my shoulders. One of the flakes was my mother, and as they blanketed me, I felt an odd sense of comfort. That's when the tears came. They trickled, then they poured, then they flooded, and I became so crippled by my grief that Jade had to carry me.

"The losses weigh heavy on us all, Your Eminence, but we must keep our strength," Jade cooed as she cradled me.

"I'm not strong, Jade," I whimpered. "She was, but the bitch died before she could teach it to me!"

"Do not speak ill of the dead."

"They don't care," I sniffled. Then I sniffed. Then snorted. My head shot up, and I held my nose to the air like a dog, nostrils flaring, taking in the scents that surrounded me.

"What is it?" Jade asked.

I narrowed my eyes into the foggy void, focusing on the blurred outline of an ash bank piled at the base of Astrid's statue. There was a primal moment where I felt the instinctual fear of prey who has just spotted her stalking predator. That moment dissolved in the heat of my wrath, and before I knew what I was doing, I jumped out of Jade's arms, and sprinted. Mother was right; I was an athlete. I closed the distance in mere seconds, and the watching predator was too stunned by the turn of her prey to act. I grabbed Willowbud Autumnsong by the horns, yanked her out the ash pile, and drove her head against the glass, intent on bashing her skull in before she could react. Her body was a grey mask, and upon impact, the ash flaked away to reveal a caramel face of near-juvenile proportions, and wide, white eyes. I stopped, and gawked, and Willowbud gawked back. The real Willowbud.

"Hi... cousin," Willowbud managed to say, her voice small and shaking. It had her timbre and tone, but it sounded so different from the voice she used to speak with that it might as well have been from another woman. This was a stranger.

"Cousin?" I muttered, searching her face for something to hate.

"It's me... it's Willowbud," Willowbud attempted a smile, but it was a tortured one. "I'm back."

"I don't know you," I whispered, tightening my grip on her horns. "I only knew the woman who enslaved me, who used me, who forced my mother to bleed for her amusement!"

"I'm sorry," Willowbud just said, her voice so small it was barely a whisper.

"You killed Lucilla, didn't you?" I asked. Willowbud gulped her affirmation, an ocean of guilt in her eyes. But she was confessing to crimes she never committed, for this thing, this wretch was incapable of anything as brazen as murder. She was innocent, but I still found my reason to hate her. Cowardice. The same cowardice that I saw in myself, and we always hate in others what we detest the most in ourselves. I backhanded my cousin across the face, and her head whipped to the side. She cried out, but she didn't attempt to fight back. She didn't even attempt to run away. I hit her again, twisting her head the other way, and still, she only cried out, her cheeks red with my strikes, a trickle of blood running from the corner of a trembling lip.

"I should've killed you," I growled, grabbing her horns and forcing her face to mine. "I had so many chances to do it, but I kept giving you chances instead!"

"I'm sorry!" Willowbud blubbered.

"Sorry?!" I laughed. "Is that all you can say?! Where's Night Eyes, Willowbud? I miss her already!" I roughly pressed my cousin's head into the ash, raised myself atop her, and dragged my crotch over her mouth. My lustful instincts married with my hot wrath, my desire to humiliate and debase mingled with my need for release. I grabbed Willowbud by the horns, and forced her face to tilt, savoring the confusion, fear, and sorrow mingling her bugling eyes. I smeared my leaking lips over quivering ones, and smirked when her tongue compliantly did as I demanded. She pushed inside me, her wet member writhing frantically, desperate to please, desperate to avoid my punishment. Cowardly, docile, subservient; just like I had been.

"Slave," I sneered as I gyrated, hunching my shoulders over her, staring down from my curtain of black hair as she stared back, dutifully sucking from my folds. Her nose pressed into my hood, the clit engorging and teasing the tip of her wetted snout.

"This is what you made me do, Cousin!" I hissed. "I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!" Willowbud mewled a muffled tone, her muzzle glistening with my secretion as I rode her face. Her hands stayed at her sides, but I could tell by the smell of her that she was aroused; aroused and terrified.

"You can fuck yourself, whore!" I snarled. "Your Mistress give you permission!" And she did, almost confusedly so, as though her hands were acting against her will. Her hips rocked from side to side as I grinded front and back, the ash sticking to my glistening form.

"Do you want to eat Mistress's dirty shithole?" I growled, and not waiting for an answer, I angled my pelvis forward, swallowing Willowbud's nose between my blushing leaking folds, and silencing any protest she might've said with my winking star. Her lips compliantly wrapped around me, and her tongue pushed through the aperture, wetly dilating it before wriggling inwardly as she had done in my cunt, trying her damndest to please me, trying to keep my wrath at bay. I moaned and gasped atop her, never breaking my imperious stare, never once giving her the reprieve of my eyes. I savored the wide eyes watching me from beneath my dripping folds, the pleasure and the terror mingling within them. She sucked my rim to a swollen circle, cleaned my innards with a ravenous tongue, and when she curled that tongue along the wrong side of my vaginal floor, I came. I squirted my release onto her face and hair, coiled my heinous delight onto her tongue, and quivered with leg-shaking euphoria as I watched her do the same. When I slid my crotch from her, her lips were stringed with my lustful filth, her nose shined with my expulsion, and her eyes stared back, only fear, no shame from her violation. Willowbud had been raped before. This didn't hurt her like I wanted.

"Mom!" I screech, and backhanded the Earth Former. "Brandon!" I screamed, striking Willowbud again. "Lucilla!" another strike. "Astrid!" I made sure to savor Willowbud's tortured expression when I mentioned the valkyrie. "Angela..." oh my god, even Angela was dead. "Diamond..." my hands fell to my side, the rage washing from me. Beneath me, Willowbud whimpered and bawled, tears covering a face she vainly tried to protect with her forearms. They were all dead. I had only Willowbud left, and she had only me. I would go alone then.

"We tried so hard to save you," I whispered down at her, collecting my viscous lust from her lips with a circling thumb. "We sacrificed so much to get you back, and now I see that it was a fool's errand. You're not worth one Brandon, or one Angela, or one Lucilla, or one Astrid, or one... Mom." I choked out the last word. "You're not even worth one me."

I stood up, and looked one last time into the weeping eyes of Willowbud Autumnsong. There was only relief on her face; relief that it was over. She was a broken thing. Maybe she'd always been a broken thing. Maybe Willowbud Autumnsong had gone mad a decade ago, and Night Eyes was the sane one, for all I saw now was a whipped dog trying to lie still, cautiously hoping that I'd had my fill of abuse and she could scamper into the ash-filled void before I changed my mind. I spit on her, then turned away, and I heard her scuffling feet, then the dwindling patter of her flight. It was like she'd forgotten she was a god.

"Do you feel better, Your Eminence?" Jade asked curiously when I approached the Breytans.

"No," I muttered, then took her hand, and recommenced our trek into the wastes.

Interlude Two: Winds of Change

PETRANUMEN

"Joy was much like Vitanimus. The thoughts she brought to the winds were of the future; of learning, knowing, and mastering. I never had such proclivities; in my mind, the earth was perfect as it was. I believed that life was to be lived purely, and the thoughts I brought to the winds were of the present; of sensation, emotion and revelry. I feared the constraints that progress would place on the eternal now, for I believed that if life was always looking to the future, it would be blind to the precious present. But Vitanimus and Joy disagreed, and I did not have the strength or will to fight them.

I must pause my tale to teach you of another thing, Diamond. When the worlds were one, we did not have language, but we had understanding. Understanding is the communication of wolfpacks, lion prides, and great herds that move impossibly as one. It was the naked truth that we projected onto the winds of thought before morality came to be. For there could be no morality when man's baser nature was shown to all. Because of this, communication was always of the present, for there was no understanding of the future. Vitanimus and Joy wanted to create a different kind of communication, one that could speak in abstractions and hypotheticals. Of lies. They created language. They spoke in terms of numbers, quantifying by simplifying, labelling, but no longer knowing. For when you give a name to something, you can tell others of it, and they will know the name, but they will not truly understand of what you speak. The winds of thought were filled with abstractions that no one could grasp, and so understanding began to leave our people. Their minds had changed, and so did the astral winds."

I paused, collecting my thoughts. Diamond sat attentively, waiting for me to continue. I picked up the gemstone that rested on my bedside table, and its familiar contours soothed me. It was pure, beautiful rock, carved from time and heat, and it could never lie to me. I understood it completely. I looked at the window, where the passing face of a perplexed dwarf dwindled by, then faded into nothing.

"Death," I muttered. "Death is just the degradation of the vessel. The physical plane batters the vessel until it no longer functions, then the mind carries the soul. When the worlds were one, our fallen parents lived upon the winds of thought, but the winds began to speak nonsense, and our fallen loved ones could not cope with it. For the first time, the cognizant winds became as hostile as the world of flesh, and there was a new kind of death."

I looked at Diamond, her profile blurring with my tears, "We did not know where they went, or why they went. It was if the astral winds could only hold a volume of abstractions, and that volume was filled. Mankind's cognizance had changed forever, and the planes split. Vitanimus, Joy and I rushed to the astral plane to see what had become of the dead, but the astral plane was empty. We did not understand why at first. We, who were Elementals, born of the mind, could not comprehend why those born of the physical world did not simply continue to exist on a higher plane. We did not understand that they could not exist on a higher level, and that the body, mind, and soul always had to be connected. If only we knew. If only we understood..."

I sniffled, trying to hold together my emotions, trying to ignore the creaking of the spires beneath me that so precariously held me above the abyss.

"Our people panicked when we brought them the news," I whispered, "but there was nothing we could do. Vitanimus insisted that knowledge would save us, and in that time, stricken with grief and blinded with love, I believed him. We lost our innocence to the seduction of knowledge, and built sterile monuments of learning. We set laws based on the consensus of fear, and we lost the individual to the masses, and the masses to society. We forgot the ancient rhythms we once dance to, and all the secrets in the cosmos were not worth the sacrifice!"

And I hurled the gemstone at the window, and the bane of Vitanimus shattered to a thousand pieces. Diamond screamed and scrambled atop the chair, and I wailed and collapsed to me knees. Where do they go? Why do they go? A thousand years they are as one, like conjoined twins of the sun. You killed her. You killed her, killed her, you killed her, YOU KILLED HER! I felt the columns crack, their fractures sending booms into the void below. It called to me breathily, like a lover with two capsules of cyanide and a bottle of wine. No! NO! My body bent with the effort of expelling my guilt, but it had a hold of me now, and it constricted my mind, squeezing out all thoughts but panic. Then, I felt her. Arms pulling me into an embrace, legs surrounding me. Supple warmth, soothing whispers, and the heartbeat of another. I felt myself come back, felt my heart slow to a steady, light cadence. She pet my hair and held me close, singing softly in my ear.