The Creators Ch. 20

"Take Brandon and Daughter Justina and fly far away with Jade," I instructed Diamond. "Bring the Breytans with you."

"Fat fricken chance."

"You're no match for her."

"Good thing I have backup," Diamond snickered, and elbowed me congenially. "Come on, Mom, let's go kick some butt!"

"If you stay, she is going to kill you."

"Not if I have Brandon. Are you seriously going to ruin our hostage advantage?"

I glowered at her. "Brandon's life is worth less to her than your death. If she thinks she cannot beat me, she will do what she has to."

Diamond glowered back at me. "You're not very good at lying, you know. I don't even need Corruption to know when you're trying to hide something from me."

"You carry more responsibility than your own life!" I snapped at her.

"No..." Diamond narrowed her eyes at me, "...no, no, no... that's not the whole of it." She glanced down at the emaciated Life Giver, then looked back at me. The expression in her eyes was full of betrayal. "Maybe Brandon's life is worth less than my death to Willowbud, but not to you. Why?"

"We need him," I hissed.

"You need him! WHY?! What did he tell you when you were alone?!" She jabbed a finger against her temple. "What does it have to do with her?!"

I exhaled fire through my nostrils. "Take Brandon and Daughter Justina," I said tightly, "protect the Life Giver at all costs. We will talk when this is over."

Her lips quivered. "I saw your jealousy the moment you knew Corruption chose me, I saw your hatred when I made you get on your knees, but I never saw murder in your heart until now. What are you planning with Brandon?!"

I inhaled another deep breath, coolly exhaled, then donned a maternal smile. "If there is murder in my heart, it is for the woman who comes to hurt you. Do not fetter me with your love when I deal in death."

"I'm not the one who fetters you with love, Mom," Diamond whispered, and touched the patterns on my hands. "Just remember who holds the keys to these shackles." She glared up at me, and there was a terrible resolve in her black eyes. She grabbed Daughter Justina and Brandon, and blasted off upon jets of water.

WILLOWBUD

I was a pretender. Though my gait was sultry and confident, and my lips were curved into a sneer, it was all on the surface, painted thinly over my terror. Still, I walked. My ball of armor had been jettisoned for an obsidian shield I carried on my arm, and since Night Eyes was a wanton exhibitionist, that shield was the only thing I wore. I forced myself to be male—as Night Eyes would never be seen female in public—but every part of me wanted to shrink and hide in the tightest ball I could make of my body. Though Astrid had compelled me to do this, I wasn't putting on this suicidal show for her. Julia had chased me across the glass plane of Drastin, but the war we'd fought before that fateful day was between her and Night Eyes, and that match was even. Then again, this wasn't the same Julia. This was something else entirely.

She floated a hundred feet above the bedrock surface, black jets of flame firing from her heels. Her body was wreathed in the black patterns of her bind, and even from this distance, I could see the onyx sheen of her hateful eyes. We moved closer together, steadily and too quickly for my liking. I wanted more than anything to slow my footfalls and delay the inevitable, but any show of weakness was a death sentence here. So, instead of slowing, I stopped. Julia didn't break her pace even a little. She floated with a measured confidence across the plateau, melting the rock into molten puddles beneath her feet. When she was fifty yards away, she stopped. Her hands were clasped together before her as if in prayer, but her eyes were fixed on me. I felt my connection with the rock through the space between us, and I felt the immense void of it directly beneath her feet. There was nothing below her but liquified iron all the way down to the crust.

"Do you have any words for me?" she asked from across the expanse.

"You want an apology?" I called back. "You can have it when you kiss my sorry ass."

She cracked a small smile. "I want to thank you, actually. You cannot know the gift you have given me. You are the devil's champion, but you are still God's tool."

"You're the only person in the world Corruption could make more boring. Did you cut your cock off, or did it just run away?"

Now she giggled. "I gave it to Sister Tera for safekeeping. Perhaps she's enjoying it now in the kingdom above."

My smile stayed glued to my face. "So you finally killed her."

"The Holy Mother took her back."

"You are a crazy fucking bitch," I hissed, my words carrying across the plateau.

Julia shrugged. "Enlightenment seems like insanity to the ignorant. You of all people should understand."

"I never understood you. That's why I couldn't break you."

"I always understood you; that's why I called you 'sister.'" She opened her hands and showed me her palms. "Our scars are the same, only mine have healed, and yours have defined you."

"They define us both, Sister, only you pretend they aren't there."

She smiled pitiably at me. "You call me the pretender when you strut with the gait of a woman you never truly were. Night Eyes was the fiction you could never believe in, but I don't need belief; I have faith. Even when you held the holy spirit in your soul, you walked alone. I have never walked alone."

Black lightning shot from her hands. I raised a wall in front of me, and the bedrock exploded, sending me careening backward. I righted myself, dug my heels into the earth, and skidded fifty yards backward in a trail of deep grooves.

"The only god you've ever known is you, so you know no god at all!" Julia jeered from afar. "If there's no one above you, then who do you call upon in your moment of crisis? WHO DO YOU CALL FOR NOW, WILLOWBUD?!"

She sent a line of energy right at me. I raised a row of rock a hundred yards deep between us, and the line knifed through it like butter, barely missing my throat through the exit. Before she could deliver her pulse, I dove beneath the surface and burrowed as far as I could. I felt the explosion above me, the seismic waves cascading through millions of tons of solid rock, turning it to dust with each ripple. They dissipated with depth, giving me just enough time to outrun them. I was half a mile down before I was confident I wouldn't be rendered to jelly. The last wave resonated past me in a mild quake, and then all was silent. I listened through the rock. There was so very little of it above me now. The plateau had been turned to rubble, and the rubble had been turned to magma. I could feel her probing the molten lake, shooting lines of energy deep into the bedrock, piercing the very crust of the earth and sending her pulses after to excavate me. The shockwaves reverberated deep as she upended a mountain's worth of mass in a second, cratering the earth with each nuclear pulse. The silent depths turned into an apocalyptic cacophony, the waves crashing upon each other, driving me deeper underground until there was no air left for me to breathe. Still, she searched for me, drawing her lines into the ground and then plucking them like lute strings, playing the song of the rapture into the lowest resonances of earth's bowels. There was nowhere for me to go. Nowhere, but up.

I punched my fists into the rocks beside me, pushing as far as my knuckles would go until I was extended like a vivisepulture crucifix. I opened my hands and crashed them together above my head. The world inverted above me; the entire lake of magma turned to igneous jaws that slammed shut. I stood in the bowl of an immense crater with a million tons of earth above me, all compressed into a leaking slab that stood miles high between my closed hands. The subterranean air caressed my body, and I indulged in a single breath. The slab burst open, birthing the Heat Bringer in an infernal placenta. She scorched the skies with her plantar jets, and dove to meet me. I couldn't move fast enough to get out of the way. All I could do was swing the immense rock slab in my hands, and bat the firefly from the sky. She flew with such speed that the very air broke in waves before her, but my slab moved with her, the behemoth structure seeming so slow from so far, but its great pivot sent it barreling at several thousand feet per second. She couldn't outmaneuver a mountain, and she couldn't outrun it. Before it could splatter her, she stopped midair and became a black sun. Like a decaying giant of the cosmos, her sphere expanded interminably, blasting through my slab of rock, sending the meteors firing into the sky, the boulders crashing like shards of broken glass, the great central structure snapping cleanly in half. I released my weapon, collected the earth around me, and formed a domed blast-shield for the impending solar doom. The surface of the black sun struck me, the sound roaring through the thousand-foot medium of earth, incinerating through the first half, melting away the third quarter, and then turning the last measure of my shield into rubble. I shot back into the earth, closing the hole behind me as fast as I could, but there was no outrunning a star. Conjuring as much force behind me as I could, I moved laterally to the plane above, exploded upward, and launched from the hole just as it erupted like a volcano.

For a few desperate seconds, I was flailing manically at the air. The ground below me was so far away, and I felt so naked without it. Gravity assisted in bringing us back together, and I crashed into a mountainside, and clothed myself in its basalt. Below me, the black star died, leaving a perfectly spherical hole in the earth. Its diameter was miles wide, carving through the side of the Gratoran Wall like a cake. The glassed surface shimmered brilliantly in the fading sunlight, then bled lava from a million wounds. Julia floated at the epicenter, and looked around for me in the wreckage. She was but a spec from such distance, but I knew that miles meant nothing to her. Space, time, and matter meant nothing to her. Perhaps Julia gave fealty to the Holy Mother, but I was fighting God herself.

Interlude One: Truth

I watched Diamond and Petranumen's story playout. I watched it until the moment Diamond opened her gates, and let Guilt tear the screeching Holy Mother limb from limb. I watched the last memory Petranumen ever had. It was an image of her outstretched hand—the only appendage she had left—desperately clutching for the iron gates before she was ripped away. The echoes of her final pleading screams carried through the abyss of Guilt, distorting into a thunderous roar before dying in the depthless annals.

"And so my story ends in much the way it began: through love," Guilt said beside me. "She did it to save her mother, but Julia could never love her that way, and that realization was the genesis of Diamond's darkness. Diamond assumed Julia's death-rattles were the tones of love when she whispered the name 'Corruption,' but they were just the groans of an opiate junky looking for one more hit. It was her soul that created the bond, not her mind. If it was the latter, then I would still be alive."

"What are you talking about?" I whispered back.

"Julia loved the Holy Mother more than anything, but Julia did not know what love she felt when she saw me. She did not understand that the soul she bound to once wore God as its skin. Love is something done in ignorance of the mind. You do not know why your soul bound to your brother's, because it is not your soul. You are your soul's mind."

"That's not true."

Guilt smiled somberly at me. "I am living proof that it is. I am sorry to be the one to reveal this to you."

"You're not living proof of anything," I hissed at her. "You're nothing at all."

Guilt's smile receded, and she hunched her shoulders dejectedly.

I sighed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean it."

"I told you not to apologize to me; I deserve your scorn. I deserve all the world's hatred for what I've done."

I almost believed what Guilt and Corruption had said, that my soul was somehow removed from me, but I could see how Guilt's expressions were simplistic mimes of emotion, something she could not understand in truth. That observation gave me comfort. She was Guilt, but she could feel no guilt at all. Corruption could feel it. I had seen it in her eyes when she walked away from me. Though she did not carry the burden of the memories she had left here, she was the one who had experienced them; not this... thing. No matter what happened to my mind, I, the soul named Angela, would not become Silence. I could not. I refused to.

"So," I said, "Diamond's meld with Corruption is built on the truth."

"On a lie," Guilt corrected.

"Whatever it is, it's like a deal then. Diamond's darkness is the keeping of your secret. If Julia learns it, then the meld is broken, and so is the bond."

"Yes."

"Cool," I muttered. "So... I'll just... you know... tell Julia everything. Awesome-sauce. Let's head back to the physical plane and save the world."

"We will, Serenity," Guilt said, "but first, we have a deal of our own to seal."

"Yeah, after—"

"Now," she said with surprising resolution.

I glowered at her. "You can't meld with me; I don't have a body."

"We can still make the deal. It's always an agreement before the meld. No one is ever taken by force, but once the pact is made, it cannot be cheated." Guilt studied my eyes. "There is a place in your imperfect mind that I can inhabit. A flaw in your character that you cannot reconcile. You need to want me there."

"Who the hell would ever want you?"

"Nobody wants to feel guilt, but there are still those who choose to wallow in it. There is reconciliation in the suffering. We both know what you need to suffer for—who you need to suffer for."

I narrowed my eyes at her. "No."

She smiled her regretful little smile. "Your denial is its own admittance."

I glanced from her eyes to her outstretched hand. As I stood there in my moment of indecision, I felt a small tremor beneath my feet, then another, then another. Disturbed dust floated in the cold light radiating from our astral auras, then settled back to the ground.

"What was that?" I asked.

"The Destroyer," Guilt said softly, her voice tinged with something mimicking fear. "Her power is so great that it reverberates through the very planes of existence."

"What is she doing?"

"What the Destroyer does. The question is, to whom is she doing it to?" she stretched her hand closer to mine. "She won't last much longer, but of course, it wouldn't be the first time you abandoned her."

"Fuck you!" I hissed. "It was her fault!"

"Yes, it was. Why would you try to save her on that fateful day in Drastin, when Brandon finally looked at you the way he had looked at her? Why would you accept her back into the fold after all she'd tried to steal from you? Why wouldn't you sell her out to Diamond? She deserved it. It was her fault. It was all her fault."

I stared a hole through Guilt. "You're nothing. You're no one. You don't even exist."

"You're right," she said softly. "You're only talking to yourself right now, and your brother is dying."

A silence passed between us. I extended my hand and shook hers.

Part Two: Eruption

BRANDON

Mountains emerged and collapsed in an instant, stars exploded and died, black lightning clashed with walls of stone that stood so high I could not see their tops through the clouds. The sun set behind me as though to cower from the elemental battle that raged before it. A great obelisk grew on the horizon, taller than the crest of the Gratoran Wall. It was thrown like a spear and then exploded by a black burst of energy. The display was brilliant, but from such a distance, it was silent. For a while, anyway. It never occurred to me how fluid the air was until I saw it move in waves, picking up sand and dust in a horrific storm, then smashing into me, roaring like thunder. Diamond held us in her protective bubble and watched the display with awe.

"I want to do that," she whispered, caressing her aqueous window. "They call me a god, but I am barely a magician compared to them. That is the power of love." She turned and looked at Justina. "Bind with me now."

"You don't love me," Justina hissed, huddled against me and tending to my mutilated hand with the bandages from her mother's bag. She needn't bother; I couldn't feel it anymore.

Diamond scowled. "Darn it, you're right." She looked at me. "You can pretend I'm Angela."

I smiled weakly at her. "You can suck my cock."

Diamond laughed. "Is that what she would be doing in this situation?" She looked back at the deific show. "I must admit, all this destruction does give me a little tingle. I might actually take you up on that offer if I didn't think the blood pressure would kill you."

"Why are you keeping me alive at all?"

"Because we're friends," she said simply and said no more.

Justina continued to wrap my hand, unwilling to meet my eyes.

"It's not your fault," I whispered to her.

"It is," she sniffled. "I egged Julia on. I thought I was smart. Stupid, fucking—"

"It was working," I said, and laid my stumped hand on her shoulder. "You were right, Justina. Whatever it was, you figured it all out."

Now she looked up at me, her beautiful violet eyes glazed with tears. "What good did it do, Brandon? What good is knowing the truth if the truth doesn't matter?! If I had just kept my fucking mouth shut; if I had just not been such a goddamned coward—"

"You're the bravest person I know," I whispered.

She blinked at me, and fresh rivulets cascaded down her cheeks. "Shut up."

"I mean it."

"You're just saying that because you're dying."

"I'm saying it because it's true," I croaked. "Chasing the truth when everyone wants the lie is bravery. It's the very best kind."

She smiled with her wet cheeks. "I could kiss you right now."

"I sure could use one."

"No," she shook her head, and recommenced aggressively attending to me, "you need to save it for Angela."

"You just told me I was dying."

"Well..." she muttered, bandaging my stumped fingers, "...sometimes faith is better than the truth."

ASTRID

We flew close to the ground, taking a northerly arc five miles away from the battle. The wounded warriors who could still fly carried the incapacitated and dying with them over the mountains. Those who made it would spread word to the nations on the other side of what was happening here; as if it couldn't be seen for hundreds of miles. Even from this distance, the shockwaves buffeted us in gales that swept the sand from the rock, making the air coarse and the ground smooth. My patterns were so bright that I illuminated the flock around me as if I were a torch, and as the flashes of black light and shadows of rock played in my periphery, I focused my attention on the setting sun in the west and led the way. The one-hundred Ionans and thirty Ofanians flew in a standard attack 'V' pattern, and I was the tip of the spear. Our armor was light, our weapons were keen, and our enemy was in front of us. It was what valkyries lived for.

The Breytans surrounded a domed shield of water. Before it, the unmistakable outline of Jade Tao stood guard, and within it, I could discern three figures. The antlered silhouette of the Water Dancer stood at the forefront, her posture rapt and ready. Two other figures huddled together behind her, and with my ocular vision, I could see that the Life Giver had very little left to give.

"They'll focus on me," I yelled over the rushing wind. "I'll drive into their center. Bianca and Nona will bring up the wings!"