The Creators Ch. 20

We were building up speed now. I surfed across the lava, accelerating with the momentum of fire behind me, the jets beneath me beginning to sputter alive. She shot across the rock like the very earth was propelling her, sending a cloud of debris behind her. I launched a tornadic column of fire at her, and she intercepted it with a wall. The wall turned into a spear, drove through my vortex, and I incinerated it with a line of energy. Jets burst from my feet, and I rocketed into the air. The earth surrounded Willowbud in a sphere, and she rolled alongside me, building mass by the second but maintaining her rotational velocity, each rotation of her lengthening radius chewing up feet of space, then yards, then acres. I shot a line of energy into her core, and she returned with a mountain of rock that I turned into debris the size of houses. The molten rocks fell behind me and thudded to the earth as I fired off nuclear bullets that impacted her shell in deafening explosions, cratering the mass even as it built and built. Mushroom clouds rose behind us, volcanic mountains erupted, and as the world bellowed in agony, we accelerated side-by-side, wreaking destruction upon each other and dividing the space between us into an abyss of rock and flame. All the while, the deific sphere of water grew closer, and the lightning bug in the sky became clearer.

DIAMOND

My shoulder raged with pain, but my terror dulled it. The arrows buzzed around me, creating a porcupine of the sand, zipping between my antlers and whistling through my hair. I drew frantic patterns of water through the air to deflect them at the hafts, for I could not change their flight head-on. They speared through my sphere like there was nothing there, and only my reflexes and human shields could save me. I'd managed to corral Brandon and Justina in my arms, and I spun them every which way to deny the sharpshooters a steady target, but they were closing in. The Ionans and Ofanians formed a perimeter around and above me, steadily drawing closer with their bows raised, aiming down their hafts, waiting for me to make a mistake. Jade stood in their path, a forest of deflected arrows in the sand around her, her robe tattered with so many holes that the setting sun illuminated her knotted and scarred flesh beneath. She was faring far better than I was, and she would most certainly be dead in seconds.

That was when the thunder sounded. No one seemed to have noticed that the distant rumble had ceased. No one seemed to have noticed that the flashes of fire and silhouettes of mountains had paused their duet on the horizon. We noticed now. All eyes turned to the east. Another boom sounded, and then another. There was a black dot that seemed to suck the light around it. It was accompanied by a mountainous sphere that rolled with the lethargic inevitability of a bowling ball. From such a great distance, it seemed as if the two objects weren't moving at all; that's how I knew they were coming right for us. There was a silent crack of black lightning, then the low rumble of its thunder. A magmatic mountain rose to the heavens, then crashed mutely when an obsidian sun struck its surface. The noiseless explosion vaulted into the sky, forming a golden-black mushroom in the dimming twilight. The clouds above parted, and I could see the sound moving through the vaporous air from the epicenter. It expanded across the sky, accompanied by a great upheaval of sand and dust from the earth below. The upheaval became a wave, then a gale, then a sirocco of debris that barreled toward us in congruence with the vaporization of the heavens, not slowing or dissipating, but building to expend the energy of the collision until the earth and clouds were one, and a great wall of vapor and sand precluded the gods within it.

"GET DOWN!" Astrid screamed, and the valkyries shot to the earth, bracing on their bellies and folding their wings around them. Jade stepped into my sphere of water, and I bowed my head and pushed outward with all my might. The silent mass filled the world from horizon to horizon, then exploded around us. Darkness. Darkness, and heat. I felt the water of my shield evaporating, saw the jagged rocks pierce through it like arrows, heard the thundering boulders crashing around us. Justina and Brandon huddled around me, forgetting who I was. The lions and the buffalo all sheltered together in the storm. In the raging darkness, I saw the flitting shadows of valkyries being peeled from the earth and flung into the air, butchered into squirming pieces by the hailstorm of horizontal debris. A woman's wing was upended from her body and caught the wind, breaking the appendage clean off of her and hurling her to the mercy of the sky. A boulder struck her, and her blood misted the air before evaporating in the convection. Another woman tried to crawl tangentially across the sand to aid one of her brethren, and a spinning rock blew through her chest cavity and sent her gore splattering across my aqueous windshield. I screamed and struggled to hold the defense against the gale, but my arms were failing me, and my feet were being driven back into the sand.

And then it was over. The hurricanic wave expanded behind us in a great circle, carrying into the sunset, billowing to the north and south, and washing over the Gratoran Wall to the east. The remaining valkyries unearthed themselves from the sand and looked around. The landscape had changed drastically in mere seconds. The dunes and formations that had stood for millions of years were now leveled, replaced instead by fresh glowing rocks that were scattered about the desert as if they'd been haphazardly dropped from the sky. In the middle of it all, were two women. Mom stood before me, and Willowbud stood before Astrid. Their backs were bowed and their arms thrust forward as if pushing against each other, but they were a hundred feet apart. Spanning the distance between them, was a line of energy and mass. Willowbud forced her column of molten rock against Mom's spear of black energy. The fulcrum moved back and forth between them, seemingly propelled by the intensity of their exertion.

"Diamond," Mom hissed, her breath shaking with her struggle. "RUN!"

JUSTINA

The line of mass and energy burst and a concussive blast ripped through the air. The valkyries close to the explosion were sent flying in pieces, their armor ripping off at the chainmail joints. Halved women screamed on the ground, their guts ruptured and strewn, their mangled hands trying to hold in what was left. I knew some of those women; I knew some of them very well, but at that moment, they were like mannequins with vaguely recognizable caricatures for faces. Tinnitus rang in my skull, giving a fever-pitch to the horror as I took Brandon by the arm, and dragged him with all my might away from the chaos. The earth beneath us began to crack and sink, the newborn rock formations began to crumble, and the sand vibrated as if fluidized. I kept my eyes fixed toward the west, and tried to ignore the blasts of black light and the tonnage of boulders being thrown. I tried not to hear the screeches of the valkyries as they were mangled. Diamond scrambled after us step-for-step, and Astrid scrambled after her, all of us fleeing together, knowing that our only chance of safety was our mutually assured death. It hardly seemed to matter, for the destruction wrought by the gods of earth and rock was all-consuming. As boulders struck black fire, a column of debris surrounded them, and the silhouettes of their battle shown from behind the curtain of dust like apocalyptic shadow puppetry. All we mere mortals could do was run.

We charged up the lip of a dune, then jumped down it just as an explosion of fire and rock sent a wave of deadly shrapnel flying over our heads, pieces of living valkyrie screaming with it. We slid down the slope, scrambled to our feet, then rushed to the cover of an outcropping. I dragged Brandon over the top, Diamond and Astrid jumped after, and then Nona, Bianca, Jade, and seven other valkyries hurdled after; three Ionans and four Ofanians. For a moment, the fourteen of us just breathed heavily as the cacophony of disaster raged behind us. Then we remembered we were all trying to kill each other.

Diamond grabbed the facemask of the Ionan next to her and ripped the blood out of her body through her eyeballs. Jade leaped to her feet, swung her katana with a backhand, and decapitated an Ofanian through the chainmail of her neck. As the Ionans and Ofanians rushed into position, Jade snatched the limp Brandon from the ground and hauled him bodily into the air before her, and Diamond grabbed me by the neck and held me to her front. The valkyries quickly formed a circle around us, and our captors moved back-to-back so that Brandon and I were exposed to the threatening obsidian blades of our allies. Diamond surrounded us in a sphere of her water and huddled against Jade. I was quivering from head to toe, but I wasn't the only one. I could feel Diamond's terror through the tremors of her muscles, hear her labored breath as she negotiated the wound in her shoulder.

"Stop this, now," she hissed at Astrid. "If you take one more move, I'll drain Justina into a sleeve, and Jade is going to cut Brandon's fricken head off."

"And the next move, we'll kill you both," Astrid said simply. "Then Willowbud kills your mother, and the battle is over."

"Oh, that's how it is?" Diamond sneered venomously. "Bianca, if you don't kill Astrid right now, Justina and Brandon are dead."

"She's bluffing!" Astrid said sharply.

Diamond leveled her gaze upon Bianca over my shoulder. "Can you take that chance, High Guard?"

"I trust Astrid far more than I trust you," she snapped back, but her shoulder shifted slightly in Astrid's direction, and everyone saw it. Nona tactically positioned herself behind us, and the three Ofanians all changed their stances to match her.

Diamond chuckled cruelly and pushed her fingers into my mouth. "I'm going to count to three, and if the Ionans aren't dead by the time I hit 'one,' then Jade's gonna open Brandon up like a piggie, and I'm going to show you the brains Justina's so proud of. Three, two—" And I bit down as hard as I could. Blood spurted into my mouth, bones cracked, and Diamond shrieked. The valkyries launched forward. Jade dropped Brandon to intercept a blow that would've cut Diamond's head off, I released Diamond's broken fingers from my mouth, and she shoved me away without thinking. Metal clashed above me, feet pounded around me, and I snatched Brandon from the fray of stomping boots and dragged him through the frantic forest of legs.

WILLOWBUD

It felt like I had been winning before. It wasn't that I was more powerful than Julia; it was that I was more terrified than she was. Her sense of divine predestination gave her a confidence that worked in my favor, for I fought for my life with every breath, and she fought to kill me. Now she felt vulnerable, and that vulnerability made her ferocious. No longer did she attack me with the full brunt of her strength, but with strike after strike, desperately seeking my weakness, battering me relentlessly with no sense of grandiosity or pretense. It was a street fight now, and I'd been in enough of them to know when I was losing.

I barely caught one of her lightning strikes against a granite shield, then had to dive out of the way before a series of fireballs. They exploded in succession behind my flight, and I felt the heat of the last one before I countered with a spear of limestone aimed for her head. She split it down the middle in a burst of black flame, then sent a tornadic column of fire my way. Absorbing the inferno with a wall of rock, I turned the melting slab into a wave that rose above me, then ran beneath my outstretched arms in dual jets of magma. The two lines converged upon Julia, and she repelled them with a spheric shield before battering me with volley after volley of lightning. Each deafening strike crashed upon me, shattering the frantic barriers I put up until the final blow sent me sprawling on my back. Before she could incinerate me, I drove my hand into the sand, found a felled sword, and launched it at her heart. She shattered it with an easy deflection, but I was on my feet before her counter, throwing boulder after boulder at her, just trying to buy time as I retreated. She advanced with me step for step, the jets howling from her feet, closing the distance between us until I erected a mile-high wall in the void. She burst through it, I sent an anticipatory discus in the breach, and she melted through it like butter.

I scrambled in the sand, doing what little I could with the useless granules to obscure her vision until I reached an oasis of limestone. Forming it into an axe, I swung the one-hundred-foot weapon with all my might, and she parried with an infernal sword, chopping the head off. Another bolt of lightning came from her fingertips, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. It arced across the space between us, its fractal tendrils seeking me, its static charge raising the hair on my neck. There was a flash of white, then an explosion of red. All that was left of the Ionan who sacrificed herself was her pair of charred armored wings. Julia blinked, and that hesitation was all I needed to fire five successive boulders at her. She turned them to dust one at a time, but I was already on the move to the next outcropping, surfing across the sand on a board of granite. As I fled in terror, a strange seed of doubt grew in me. It had been prompted by the martyred nameless Ionan, but not by a sense of guilt. Diamond was immune to Julia's fire; Julia had every reason to go nuclear and wipe everyone out just to kill Astrid. Why didn't she do it? Who else was she trying to save?!

BRANDON

I was floating in darkness. I was bodiless, yet warm. It was comfortable in this void, and I found an unspeakable peace within it. I was eternal. The arms of time stretched behind and before me forever, and I felt a connection with it all. I knew nothing, but I understood it all. I was nobody, and I was everything. The feeling faded. I became aware of myself. I felt the coarse dust plastered to my parched mouth, the hot sand running along my numb arms and legs, the slow and sporadic drumming of my heart, the pain in my mutilated hand. I opened my eyes. The sky above was dark with the expanding head of a mushroom cloud. Explosions wracked the earth, tremoring beneath me. A great howl pervaded the soundscape, punctuated by a cacophony of screams and thunderous strikes. There was a woman above me, a fresh scar on her forehead. She dragged me through the sand as beads of sweat dripped down her brow. Finally, she found refuge in the underbelly of an outcropping, and after nestling me into the claustrophobic cold womb, she collapsed beside me.

"Run away," I mouthed to her.

"Shut up," she hissed back, piling up sand in the entrance of our small cave.

"You have a chance now."

"I said shut up!" Justina snapped, and continued piling the sand until barely a sliver of the dying sun shone through the top. She rested against the mound, and took a deep shuddering breath before staring at me with a piercing gaze. "You haven't given up on her, so I won't give up on her. I won't give up on you."

"I don't have a choice," I smiled horribly at her. "It's not bravery; it's cowardice. She's killing me, but I'd rather die than face the music that I failed her. Even if it costs all of you."

"All of us don't matter. You're the god. When you reunite with Angela, you'll tip the odds in our favor. Only you can stop this."

"I can't," I whispered. "Justina, even if she comes back to me, what will I bind her to? It took me weeks to make her a body with unbound power. I can't even stand up right now. I knew the moment that our bond broke that she was doomed, but I sacrificed all of you anyway. Don't die for a lost cause."

"We'll find a way," Justina muttered, and peered through the crack in the mound. "Angela always found a way."

"There is no way. Just run."

She stared through the crack for a long time, not answering me. When she finally looked back at me, there were wrathful tears in her eyes. "Just run?" she whispered. "Is that what you think I'll do? That's what I've always done, right? Just run; just hide and don't get in the way."

"That's not what I—"

"Fuck you, Brandon!" she snarled. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! You don't get to lose hope, you son of a bitch! Not after everything I've lost for you! You don't get to throw away my life—my mother's life—just for your own self-righteous self-serving self-pity!" She scrambled violently to me and stuck her face in mine. "I've given up on reason for you! I've seen with my own eyes the power of the irrational, so now that I've found religion, you don't get to lose faith!"

"I'm sorry."

"DON'T BE SORRY!" she screamed. "DO SOMETHING! Tell me there's hope! Lie to me, you son of a bitch, and I'll believe it!"

"There's hope," I whispered.

Justina nodded resolutely. "Good. Then keep fighting. She's coming, Brandon."

Interlude Two: She Comes from the Water

ANGELA

We stood before an enormous pool. The light from our bodies shined across the glassy surface, revealing the great breadth of its waters. I could not see the end of it in the abyss.

"This is your portal," I said to Guilt.

She nodded. "I used to travel through the delipidated realm of my daughter, but since my death, this thing has formed in its place." She raised her head, and grey light illuminated the expansive cave. Across the pool, there was an iron door. Its edges glowed red with the realm of Hatred, and ominous shadows played around the threshold. "Now I can never go back to her. I suppose it is a mercy, but I do not deserve mercy."

"We're not even melded yet, and you're already making me want to kill myself," I grumbled, and touched my toe to the water's surface. There was no splash, nor even a ripple. My foot passed cleanly through the water like it was nothing.

"This water is not of this plane of existence," Guilt explained. She pointed into the pool, and by her grey light, I saw that it was very shallow. At its bottom, was an iron door.

"Where does it go to?" I asked.

"Wherever there is water. It could go to an ocean in the arctic or a puddle in the desert. It depends on my memory of the world below, which, I am sorry to tell you, is quite awful. The world has changed so much over the eons, and I have hardly been paying attention."

"Holy fucking shit," I groaned, rubbing my eyes. "The whole reason I came here was for you to get me back to Brandon! Are you telling me that you don't even know where the fuck he is?!"

"He is in the Gratoran Desert."

"THAT REALLY NARROWS IT DOWN!"

Guilt nodded as if she'd been helpful, then furrowed her brow. "He is... he is by the Gratoran Wall. By Droktin's Pass. He is... hmm... I cannot see any clearer than that. My memory obfuscates it."

"Well, it's not like there's a whole lot of water there anyway," I muttered. "I guess let's just keep opening the door until we get close. I'll take us the rest of the way."

Guilt extended her hand to mine, and I grasped it. I was immediately disgusted by the cold clammy touch, and then I felt a crushing sense of shame that I was so revolted by someone who was helping me. I would've been overwhelmed by the sensation, but my resolve was stronger. Guilt gave me an apologetic look, then guided me into the water as she limply held my hand. When we were submerged to the waist, she reached down and opened the door.

Part Three: Between Heaven and Earth

ASTRID

There were chinks in my armor now. I felt the dry desert air whispering through the holes in my greaves and breastplate as I whirled on the sand, clashing my metal with Jade then fleeing before the advance of the Water Dancer. Diamond had hardly been a threat before, but now that our shells had cracked, she showed us all who she really was. She sucked the water from the air, spun like an acrobat between Gina Nightaxe and Abby Fjordgazer, then splashed the pair of them as they swung. Before their blades could strike her flesh, the water had found the cracks in their armor, and Diamond burst them from within. The women became hollowed suits of obsidian, their red and pink insides running through the sieve of shrapnel-cut holes. Diamond pulled their blood from the sand and shaped it into a sword just as Imani Surefoot engaged her. Imani was faster and stronger than Diamond could ever hope to be, but Diamond moved like water. She slipped under Imani's decapitating strike and rammed her crimson sword through a slit in Imani's chainmail. The Ofanian's eyes exploded from the front of her visor, and then her brains oozed out after. She dropped to her knees with a clunk, and fell on her face, spilling out what was left of her skull onto the sand.