The Blue Knight

1

Chapter 1

"Testimony of the Chronicler” Year 35,362,597 of the Age of Faerie, Year 1 of the Age of

the Fallen

I was there at the beginning, and at the Fall. This is my testimony and confession, forbidden until now. We are the dream of the Tao. Imagination is everything and everything imagination, the infinite potential of the Tao qi field permuting within the infinite expanse and endless duration of the Void. Possibilities realized enable or preclude others as Existence explores itself, seeking novelty. Anything that can be imagined, and there is little truly unimaginable by the Tao, exists in some form in some reality, though rarely exactly as envisioned. The central light casting shadows throughout Existence is Reality Prime. At its centre spins the world of Aldyryc. Nestled between the western Lantani Mountains and eastern Roof of Kaxxuun Mountains, lies the Shire Plateau where a large white fireball appeared between the two yellow suns on the stroke of noon of midsummer. High in the blue sky, it roared north, sonic boom echoing off the mountains. Streaking into the ground four miles south of the capital city, Hobbiton, it hit with incredible force, blasting rock, dirt, corn, and flame in a half-mile radius. Even the few Hobbits still left on Aldyryc then woke up and poked their heads from their holes to inquire about the noise. Evolved, naturally and intentionally, from Hobbits, Pündi rushed to the crash site in droves. Containing an unknown crystal, under a crust of adamantine void steel and melted rock, it was brought

Michael S. Fricker

2

immediately to Shire University. My father, Parsius, a PhD in Cosmological Physics, a third-degree master conjurer, and Head of the Metaphysics Department, led a team of fifteen in its examination. Consisting of ten scientists and four other sorcerers - practitioners of Enchantment, Necromancy, Magecraft, and Druidic Lore –, the team dated the rock to before the formation of the solar system of Aldyryc, perhaps beyond the beginning of the universe. Due the inability to collect a sample from the seemingly indestructible, light blue crystal and the extreme heat endured by the analyzable material, there was a large amount of disagreement on the last point. Father was its chief champion. As soon as they removed the crust, they discovered a one-foot diameter sphere of ultramarine crystal embedded in the surface of the eighteen-foot long egg, both perfectly smooth and, except for the dent made by the sphere, flawless. Both contained large amounts of qi, life force, as energy, the sphere orders of magnitude greater than the egg. The large piece, however, seemed to possess an intellect akin to a smart canine or pre-vocal child, and it could be made to grow. I, Sorvah, served as a student assistant while they used balanced qi to make it grow, negative qi to shrink it, and positive qi to make it reproduce by budding. Because of the vast energy requirements, most of the work was done within a circle of glossy, black monoliths, a Faerie Ring adapted by Pündi that collected, transformed, and focused the qi of the crossing ley lines upon which it was centred. This allowed Parsius to create the first three Maelstrom Runners, following the saucer layout of standard Pündi craft, with the same gravity drive and wormhole generator technology that helped spread the Pündi through the known universe as well as into the outer Telestial Realms and inner Celestial.

The Blue Knight

3

The Pündi had been encouraged to explore beyond their world. Aldyryc was into its second Age defined by the racial civilization created to displace the spawn of Tiamat. The Draconic Wars had raged for millions of years, everywhere but the Shire. Protected by mountains and steep cliffs the Shire Plateau produced Aldyryc’s only native, evolved race, the Hobbit, expert at remaining unnoticed by the larger creatures fighting for their world. Curiosity created the Pündi and pushed the young race out of the Shire, using advanced magic and technology known only to them. It was their advantage over the “great” races. They discovered a cosmos to explore. Pündi earn their surnames through their actions. The University gave Father that of Farwalker, for being the first to go into Outer Darkness, beyond Reality Prime, to explore the infinite realities spread throughout expanding Existence by the Chaos Wave that ended Ragnarok. He did this, with a team of ten that included a young woman named Anyah, in a saucer made of void steel through wormholes, from the Material Plane through the three nested Spheres of the Telestial Realms, keeping to equatorial planes of the Dream Time, Astral Plane, and Pandemonium. They crossed Outer Darkness using mere momentum, at the point where Reality Prime met one of its neighbours, the collision of conflicting spins creating the Maelstrom. Then they crossed that reality sphere, sampling each of its dimensional layers, and did the same into a third, a fourth, and then a fifth. In the first reality, Parsius joined Anyah’s kinky, black braids and let his black moustache grow below his dark brown lips to mark their marriage. I was born in the second reality, my brother, Pandis, some twenty years later in the fourth. Three years later, in the fifth, my mother’s death in a black hole ended the expedition.

Michael S. Fricker

4

Father promised her that he’d raise us safe at home. He’d done that, or at least tried. We were safe and I could raise my brother. Now he wanted to find her. It had never been possible before. She was lost, body and soul, inside a singularity, or in a random reality. Either way she was beyond the reach of even the gods that he knew. The crystal and Maelstrom Runners changed that – if Father’s theory about the Maelstroms proved true and the crystal could withstand their paradoxes and conflicting forces. Nothing else had. Even if they did prove to be one place, a sort of hyper-space, it was a place that had swallowed Atlas, most invincible of the Elder Gods, spitting out only his hammer, Mjölnir, and the girdle imbued with his strength. And, what if the ship survived, but didn’t shield the minds of the crew? But Parsius believed you could travel to any reality in a very short time, compared to years, maybe instantaneous. Worth the risk, at least to him. To his children less so, but we got swept along in his obsession, me out of shared curiosity and hope, Pandis for the rare time with Father in a shared pursuit. We weren’t alone. It became a racial project, followed devoutly. Billions of billions of brown-skinned Pündi, in shades from beige to burnt sienna with dark lines graining their features, watched the launch’s holographic projections or immersed virtually. Shining dimly in all but total darkness and able to see from the infrared to ultraviolet, their large, circular eyes lacked obvious pupils and irises, being a single, solid colour. Even the Hobbits, who usually stuck to gardening, farming, and cooking shows, couldn’t resist, or escape, the unending ubiquitous coverage. If it worked, the Voyage of Maelstrom One would change everything. If only it hadn’t.

The Blue Knight

5

It was I who discovered what the crystal sphere could do. Others had examined, touched, and handled it before me without it appearing as anything but a transparent blue sphere. Then Pandis got hold of it and, loving the attention, had to be chased, the sphere pried from his hands by me while my father held him squirming and giggling, like most pre-pubescent twenty-year olds. The moment I touched it, voices filled my head, some saying two different things at once, and a moving , three-dimensional image formed inside the sphere -- the a few moments earlier, chasing the laughing boy, blue-eyed like his mother. Parsius and I share yellow. “Holy Marduk,” I exclaimed. The scene in the sphere changed to three personages sitting on thrones, two above one. The largest, most ornate throne held a golden man with three eyes of different colours, four ears, two mouths and four arms, wearing a purple robe. Beside him sat a woman in a grey robe with a purple veil and long red hair, her flawless skin deathly pale, two ravens perched on the back of her throne above her shoulders. At their feet, sat a man with ebony skin and the head of a jackal, the golden yet deadly mace of office gripped across the lap of blue leather kilt. I recognized the scene from mythic descriptions: Marduk, Rawna, and Anubis, King, Queen, and Speaker of the Council of Powers, in session in Qohlahb , a place no mortal magic could view. <About time.> It was clearly the two voices of Marduk, one high one low, in my head. The God of Magic and Knowledge fixed me with his red, blue, and purple eyes. <Secure the Eye of Ptah. It is yours, alone, once you earn it.> Ptah was God of Space, Time, History, and Prophecy. One of the four Ancient Ones from the Age of the Egg, which ended with the sacrifice of Bahamut starting time and creating the early cosmos. Although Parsius couldn’t hear the gods' thoughts,

Michael S. Fricker

6

he could see the image over my shoulder and deduce what was happening. “With this we could locate Anyah. I’d pay the Raven Queen’s price, a life for a life, if I could just find her and bring her spirit back. Without it, or her body, all her experience since leaving Reality Prime would be lost to her if resurrected. Only a god can bring a past self to life, but it is said the price is a thousand years in service to Charon, Boatman of the Styx. Most gods are unwilling, and it can't be paid by another." It was something similar to what Pandis and I had heard him mumble many times when he was alone, late in his study with an empty glass and half a bottle of gin beside him. Not every night but enough often enough and always on the anniversary of her death, when the bottle got emptied. Pandis, not yet a toddler at two and a half when Mother died, never understood Father’s sadness and distraction. Entering puberty at twenty-three when it happened I tried my best as elder brother to look after the baby during the five-year journey back to the Shire and when my father was working, which was most the time. Pandis missed both parents although he didn’t really know either. So he fought grief for Parsius’s attention, acting out in every way that his active mind could invent and that succeeded in getting attention, negative or positive. Mostly he focused on torturing his Hobbit governess, Molly, with increasingly creative and cruel practical jokes, from filling her shoes with pudding, to sprinkling a powder stolen from Father’s study onto her hair from behind while she napped in a chair, waking to find herself appearing fifty pounds heavier and covered in acne, until she washed it off. Some caused embarrassment, some physical pain. One started a small fire in the kitchen. Once we learned what the crystals could do, Father forgot everything else, often including food and sleep, to

The Blue Knight

7

pursue his dream. Hope drove his heart and obsession. No argument or caution could dissuade him. For the first time, I understood how my brother felt his entire life. But when he with us in mind and body, he was happy and engaged. He even brought us into his preparations for the voyage. We couldn’t help but get swept along, infected with hope, feeling like a real family. Working together to help Mother. Pandis, at twenty, was just starting puberty while I was emerging at forty. Adventure was our moth's flame with father flying fastest. The rest of our race followed out of curiosity and the longing to reach out into the rest of Existence. “Pündi are an extremely virulent and destructive curiosity virus,” said Anubis, before pronouncing our curse. But that comes later, before the Diaspora but after the Fall. Both of us wanted to go with Father to find Mother, something he wasn’t discouraging. But first he had to test Maelstrom One, to see if hyper-space travel was even possible. If it wasn’t, we’d never see him again. We watched the day approach with helpless anticipation and anxiety. Before a massive crowd, including the team, academics, dignitaries, the social and entertainment elite, and media, two hangers of Clarke Field, the spaceport where the Runners were stored until complete, opened their doors and the saucers ships floated silently out, three feet above the tarmac. Pandis had suggested the name Maelstrom Runner. Side by side, Maelstrom One and Two slowly made their way, with the accompaniment of cheers and music played by live performers, to the spaceport’s central field where four similar dark blue, metal craft waited. The air around them shimmered and hummed from gravity drives. The electromagnetic pulses and micro-ripples in space-time given off by the singularity

Michael S. Fricker

8

generators could play havoc with unshielded electronics, objects and entities within a one hundred and eighty yard radius of each ship. The two maelstrom runners activated their gravity drive singularities, rising to positions in the middle of the diamond formation. A wing of a dozen jet fighters in v-formation swooped down in front of the lead spacecraft and, as if pulling them on an invisible leash, led the entire group towards the crater forty miles from the spaceport’s location on the north edge of the city. Hundreds of thousands of Pündi and Hobbits lined the route to the crater, ears pealed for the roar of the jets and eyes locked on the sky. If not for the outlying spacecraft, most would have missed the nearly invisible, translucent blue crystal disks as they passed overhead. Only the white glow forming five thin concentric rings on each runner’s bottom could be seen gliding from puffy cloud to puffy cloud. The pattern had appeared on its own as the crystal was harnessed, focused, and shaped. No one knew why. At this moment, no one cared. The hopes and dreams of the Shire’s two races travelled behind the runners in a palpable wave. Looking down via the video screen in Maelstrom One, Parsius couldn’t believe how many people had gathered. His mouth flopped open when the crater came into view. The six hundred foot-wide hole in the hillside looked like a dark whirlpool in the center of a colourful sea of people. Balloons and banners waved above them and the sun shone off countless video lenses. It seemed every eye on billions of worlds was locked on the One and her sisters – and their creator’s first flight. Would he become the first entity to return from the Maelstrom? The jets peeled away as the spacecraft and runners came to a stop over the crater.

The Blue Knight

9

Officials gave speeches about the unlimited potential of the Pündi mind and spirit, and the courage of those who risked their lives for the advancement of all. As one, the four spacecraft created large spheres filled with visually warped stars and darkness and entered them appearing to flip horizontally and vertically inside before the wormhole contracted shut. “Let the Pathfinder lead us!” The High Councillor’s cry was echoed by the crowd for a planned ten seconds before Parsius told his ship to open a gateway into the Maelstrom. Forming a dozen yards in front of the ship, the sphere wobbled and beams of swirling colour lanced out randomly, increasing rapidly in number and frequency until constant in all directions. Too bright to see clearly it began to spin and swirl in many directions at once, some conflicting. Metallic screeching became grinding, heard in the bones the bones of everyone outside the crystal ships. Maelstrom One threw electromagnetic and space-time pulses out for one hundred and eighty miles in all directions. Maelstrom Two tumbled more than thirty miles across the sky. Gale-force winds hammered the shaking ground raising stinging clouds of dirt and rock as light poles danced out of the ground and earth-quake proof buildings cracked. Circuits overloaded, causing electronics to spark, smoke and even explode. Communications disintegrated into snow. Time distorted. Unnatural voices rose through the howling wind. Screams, roars, growls, hisses, and frantic babbling seemed to come from everywhere, snapping and fighting with each other, filled with intense hunger. The eyes, nostrils, and ears of everyone outside the Runners streamed blood. Many expelled the contents of

Michael S. Fricker

10

their stomachs. Many fell unconscious to the ground. Many did both. Maelstrom One vanished with a boom that shattered windows for miles. The wind dropped to a breeze. The bawling of children rose through drifting clouds of dust. I picked myself up off the floor as soon as the ship, and then my head, stopped spinning. I crawled into the command chair and used the video controls to lock on the spot where Maelstrom One had been. There was no trace of it, not even wreckage or a wormhole trail. I linked with the ship to reach out telepathically to the One. The ships were all connected. Minutes crawled past, fear mounting in his belly. The High Councillor’s wizened face appeared on the left half of the view screen, dirty, dishevelled head and orange eyes wide. “Is anyone up there still alive?” I opened my end of the connection. “I'm ok. How’s everyone down there?” Shaken but alive. We’re taking stock of the damage now. What the Hell was that?” Sorvah shook his head. “I don’t know for sure. We thought there might be some side effects, but nothing like that. Some of the Maelstrom seemed to spill out.” The High Councillor nodded. “I’ll have the University put their people on it.” Her face turned to the side and gave a sharp, commanding nod to one of her aides. Then her gaze returned to his. “Any word from your father?” “Not yet, but there's a time effect differential of ten between the Telestial and Terrestrial Realms. Things seem to happen slower here. I'm going to try the ship connection again." < Father? Parsius, are you there? > Focusing most of his attention on transmitting the words to Parsius, he reserved the rest for listening to the

The Blue Knight

11

response. Planar conditions could weaken, scramble or prevent a response. Long seconds became agonizing minutes of mental silence. He knew from his metaphysical studies that though the length of the smallest unit of time, the instant, was universal, for every minute that seemed to pass in the Universe, it was possible that ten or more, or less, passed in the Maelstrom – if time had any meaning there at all. Then he heard it. <Sorvah!> The word was distorted by interference and sped up, but comprehensible through concentration. <Connection good. Still in one piece. Like inside berserk washing machine. Saw horrible, impossible things! Going to nearest edge now. Talk after. Love my boys! > Silence returned, and I opened my eyes, a broad smile leaping to my face as I slapped my knee. “He did it! “ My gaze met the High Councillor's. “Father’s alive and in the Maelstrom.” Her smile matched mine but she had more concerns. “What about his second theory? Is the Maelstrom this ‘hyperspace superhighway’, or not?” She used the term coined by the media, hope raising the pitch of her voice. I shrugged. “He’s testing that now. I have no idea how long it might be before he contacts me again.” The High Councillor pursed her brown lips for a moment in thought. “We’ll wait. At least for a few hours. How long will that give him?” “Three hours would give him more than a day, if I have the time differential correct.” “All right then. We’ll wait. Keep this channel open and let me know as soon as you hear anything.” I adjusted the form-fitting seat, called up a puzzle game on the video screen and settled in for the wait. Less than an hour later, Father’s voice was speaking in his head, undistorted this time but so faint he could barely make out the words he hadn’t already missed.

Michael S. Fricker

12

Such connections were limited to twenty-five words at a time. <…Edge! Or maybe top. One parsec, five-dimension reality with rainbow qi stream through center straight from Heart Following rainbow to gold.> My eyes sprang open. I leapt out of my seat and whooped. “He made it!” Falling back in my seat, I clapped loudly and enthusiastically, beaming at the High Councillor when she appeared on the screen. “He found the nearest edge of Existence. The Maelstrom must have taken him the entire way.” I paused to breathe and lower the pitch of my voice. “He found a single ring-shaped planet in a universe with a diameter about equal to the distance between Aldyryc and its suns. A stream of qi runs through the hole in the planet from the Heart of Existence and leads further into the Void. My father is trying to discover where it leads. Where Existence ends.” The High Councillor’s face was expressionless. She didn’t blink for a long time. “The Pathfinder has done it. No reality is out of reach for the Pündi.” Her voice fell to a whisper of awe. “Think of the exploration and trade potential.” She fell silent in contemplation as cheers rose from out of view around her. Even with hours until basic communications were restored, the news spread like an electromagnetic pulse energizing the trillions of Pündi in Reality Prime and threatening to overwhelm them with the possibilities. Existence had changed forever. Too concerned with their struggle for dominance to pay attention to the reclusive, insignificant Pündi, the other races continued fighting one the largest, bloodiest battles of the Wars. None knew it would be the last. They still believed there could be a winner. There were no further reports from Parsius that day so I flew the Two back to the hanger. Pandis joined me on the on the bridge, spreading out bedrolls to stay in the

The Blue Knight

13

telepathic field of the ship, but the night passed without event. After this others took over for periods during the day, but we two returned each night, hoping to hear a soft whisper in our dreams that might slip past the conscious mind. The next contact came five days later, near dawn, infiltrating my inner dreamscape. I sat on a large rock with waves lapping gently against its base, the suns sparkling on the surface and the sky a cloudless azure. Parsius was beside me, whispering, voice speeding up and slowing down at random intervals. “Found Edge. Uppermost reality. Crystal world. Demi-plane with demi-world sticking into Void. Rainbow Bridge from crystal world to hunger. Devourer. Annihilator. Demogorgan. Warn gods.” Then Father began to laugh, growing louder, higher pitched and hysterical, unconnected words and sounds bubbling from his mouth as voice and presence receded into silence. Everything went dark – not just the absence of light, but the absence of everything. He was utterly alone. Then IT moved. Hunger radiated from the darkness, growing more intense as the THING surged at me, its immensity beyond comprehension, formless but focused, coming not just for me, but for everything, consuming until only IT and the Void remained. I jolted upright, bedroll soaked with sweat, heart racing. Woken by my scream, Pandis stared across the bridge. Father’s coming home,” I said, panting. “He found a new race living on the Edge and something that dwells beyond, in the Void." For a time they remained silent. Another telepathic message arrived knocking me to my knees blinded by the sudden fire in my skull.

Michael S. Fricker

14

<“Help!> Parsius’s voice tried to expand my skull. <Ship struck something! Coming apart! Gravity drive offline! Need help! Must get out!> The words chased each other through the darkest parts of my mind unleashing a cacophony of internal voices and emotions that pulled in a million directions at once. I emptied my stomach until only blood and bile came out. Then it passed and Pandis was kneeling at my side. The terror of losing Father set me upon my feet. “Off the ship, Pandis!" My voice was strained and weak but solid with determination. “Father needs help and I’m not risking you too.” I hustled him off the bridge and through the central common area to the levitation shaft, where he shook free of my panicked grasp. He started to argue, but I put his hand over his mouth. “There’s no time to argue. If father and I don’t come back,” I grasped his shoulders, “Father would want the family to survive.” Then I stepped backwards toward the open bridge door. “Now get off my ship!” Although he looked like he wanted to argue, Pandis nodded. “Good luck brother!” he said before leaping into the zero-gravity shaft and pulling himself headfirst down the ladder built into the wall. Then he was gone and I rushed back to the pilot’s seat. As soon as the ship informed him that Pandis was clear, he had it raise the ramp and fly out of the hanger into the cloud-laden sky. Rain pelted the ship as it rose through the clouds into the clear sky, activated the singularity generator then opened a wormhole to the Maelstrom., entering the instant the sphere was large enough. A cacophony of screams, roars, whines and howls assaulted ship and pilot as the contradicting forces of the Maelstrom took hold. The ship bucked, lurched and spun in every direction at once in the constantly changing,

The Blue Knight

15

often conflicting, currents of energy, matter, force and qi. Chunks of rock and ice, along with random nuclear explosions, pounded the crystal craft. Paradoxes and contradictions tried to tear ship apart while impossible, horrible, and wonderful entities and environments tore at his mind. No words, no concepts rooted in reality could describe the unreality of the Maelstrom. Most, his reeling mind refused to accept or even acknowledge. Cause and effect traded places and disassociated completely as time slowed, raced and skipped from future to past to present – all simultaneously. Cushioned somewhat by the ship’s environmental adaptation, gravitational, and inertial dampening fields, I was still bounced from wall to wall to ceiling to floor. Rolling across the floor toward the pilot’s seat, I struck something invisible doing the same. Without thinking, I grabbed it with both hands. “You should have put some seatbelt’s in these things!” Pandis was barely audible over the noise as he became opaque. The brothers rose into the air and hovered for a moment. “What are…? How did you get here?” Sorvah yelled in angry confusion. Pandis smiled proudly. “A new mystical talent combined with and a non-detection potion stolen from the lab last year.” Pandis had been developing mystical abilities in the Fey Key since entering puberty, as was often the case for such. I shook my head, but let it go. “We have to find Father! Reach into my haversack. There's a Sense Location scroll on top.” Pandis reached into the small backpack, actually the entrance to a dimensional bubble about twice its size, and pulled out an ivory scroll tube, pushing it into my

Michael S. Fricker

16

hand an instant before the ship’s spinning sent us flying in opposite directions,. Clutching the tube in my left hand, I struggled to pry open its corked end. Parsius had purchased the most powerful location spell weave available for just this sort of situation. I prayed to Marduk that eighth-circle spell would be enough to pierce the chaos of the Maelstrom., if location meant anything here. I never got the chance to find out. <Gate this thing out of here.> Father's voiced exploded within my skull with pain that blocked that of smashing my back into the ceiling. My stomach churned and mind filled with mad echoes and wild emotion. <Don’t ask how I got here. Just get us back.” The desperate telepathic voice felt somehow strange, but I dismissed it as the Maelstrom's effect, immediately opening a wormhole and ordering Maelstrom Two through. As terrified of this place and the incompressible sensory data as its occupants, the ship's intelligence failed to mention the awful presence that it had felt appear in its hold, as it fought to fly into the unstable wormhole back to Reality Prime. Back home. I fell heavily from ceiling to floor as the ship came to a stop. Crawling to the pilot’s seat with Pandis at his shoulder, I called up our present location. It took a minute before the ship’s overwhelmed sensors and neural computer core made sense of the external data, placing them two hundred miles northeast and one hundred and eleven miles above the Shire. “What happened?” said Pandis, breathing hard in the silent calm. “Why are we back?” I swivelled the chair to face him with a huge smile. “Father’s aboard. He contacted me from the hold.” Then I vomited on his boots. Pandis didn’t care. With a cheer he turned, ran to the levitation shaft, and leapt in headfirst.

The Blue Knight

17

I shook his aching head and wiped my mouth with the back of my leather jacket’s sleeve. Then it hit. Father had returned from the Maelstrom. Nothing would ever be the same! Excitement sprang me out of the chair and into the levitation shaft feet-first, the shaft’s magic lowering me ten feet per second to the hold floor fifty feet below the command deck. Parsius stood in the center of the empty sixty-foot diameter circular room. Pandis stood with him, bent over with arms wrapped about the stunned elder Pündi and face buried A shiver of fear chilled my spine and I found myself watching my father and brother as I walked toward them. Parsius stood stiff in his son’s embrace, looking at the top of the boy’s head. As I came within five feet of the pair, I saw that Parsius practically glowed with health and vitality. He seemed somehow more real, more there, a presence so intense that it seemed to electrify the air. Awe washed over me and I nearly fell to my knees before catching myself. Looking away from Father for the first time since entering the hold, I noticed a long dark object lying on the floor a few feet from behind Parsius’s well-worn travelling boots. Almost seven feet long and made of a dark red crystal with a black heart, it was clearly a weapon, most of its length three blades, two curved and twisted around the longer, straight central blade, all three with sharp points. Its proportions were more dagger than sword, one made for the hand of someone. The crosspiece and guard were worked into the shape of a demonic horned skull with the hilt a collection of tentacles gripping a spherical pommel stone. Over Pandis’s wild shock of black hair, Parsius saw his elder son’s gaze lock on the gargantuan weapon and tilted his head. “That’s what hit my ship.” His voice was

Michael S. Fricker

18

toneless, as if he was repeating someone else’s words. “Came through the hold like cutting butter.” Casting a Sense Enchantment spell, I concentrated on the crystal weapon. Normally it would take a few seconds before I could tell much about the magic’s power or purpose, but the instant I completed activating the prepared cantrip, I had to stagger back from the weapon, overwhelmed by the intensity of the power it contained, and the chaos, and the evil. The three hit like the dagger's wicked points. It could only be one relic, Cthanic, Dagger of Destruction, created by the Great Old One, Cthulhu, eldest Abomination of Tiamat, and wielded against the Elder Gods during Ragnarok, First War of the Gods, in the third age, the Age of Fury. Cthulhu drove it through Rawna, its tip piercing the Keystone of Reality, causing the Chaos Wave that remade Reality Prime and sent unnumbered new realities throughout Existence, creating the Maelstrom as a side-effect. Cthanic had been lost in the Wave. “You found Doombringer.” I stared at Father in genuine awe. “More like it found me.” His dark brown lips twitched under his thick moustache in an attempted smile that went nowhere near his yellow eyes. They held the wonder and fear of a newborn struggling to make sense of everything, tightened at the corners by pain he didn’t appear to comprehend. “Cracks spread from the entry wound and the Maelstrom flooded in. I felt your presence just in time to teleport here before Maelstrom One disintegrated.” Passionless, he lectured liked the professors he and Pandis joked about. I stared at him, nonplussed. “I… guess that makes two things to bring to the attention of the Council of Powers.” “Two things?” Parsius cocked his head, absently patting Pandis on the back. “Council of Powers?”

The Blue Knight

19

I frowned, but attributed Father’s oddness to Maelstrom exposure. Because no mortal or immortal had returned before now, no one knew what effects it could have. I felt scrambled mentally and physically from my short time there and I hadn’t been directly exposed. “You said you had to warn them about the Demogorgan. And now we have Doombringer as well. We must take it to Qohlahb and give it to the Council of Powers.” Parsius frowned for a moment then lit up with double his earlier intensity of presence. The pain seemed to vanish. “Qohlahb. The Celestial City. The mid-point of Yggdrasil and location of the Cavern of Acheron wherein lies the Isle of Tranquility and the Keystone of Reality.” Passion warmed his voice growing as he reminded himself of things he’d been teaching for years. He locked his fervent gaze on me. “Surrounded by the divine fires of Phlegethon, the amnesiac cloud of Lethe. Only the gods and petitioner spirits of the dead may dimensionally shift to the City. No wormhole can reach it.” Doubt diluted his fervour. “How do we get through?” Pandis straightened, stepped back and looked at Father with a grin. “The ship can take us. It survived the Maelstrom. They can’t be worse.” He cast a glance at me. “Can they?” I pursed my lips, trying not to show concern over Pandis having to say what should have been obvious to Parsius the Pathfinder. I flashed the two what I hoped was a reassuring smile. “The ship should get us there in one piece.” “Then,” said Parsius, in a commanding voice that passed his excitement to us in way we couldn’t resist, “let’s get to the bridge and get this thing to Qohlahb!” I led the charge up the levitation shaft with brother and father steps behind. Once gathered around the pilot’s seat, I gestured for Father to take command but Parsius shook his head.

Michael S. Fricker

20

“This is your ship, son.” He smiled with warmth and pride that receded along with a measure of the vigour in his complexion. “Besides, I’m having trouble concentrating through this migraine.” I nodded and smiled sympathetically, though a sense of danger was building, then slipped into the chair and commanded the ship to open a wormhole to the Celestial Realms. The curving horizon of Aldyryc was replaced by a sky of the palest blue inside what looked to be a great green sphere. Blinding white light poured in from ahead, filling the translucent ship – Phlegethon, the divine sun of Faerie. From my metaphysical studies, I knew that it enwrapped the narrow mid-point of the great crystalline structure called Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life which stretched out beyond Phlegethon for ninety million miles upward and downward – the softly glowing upper branches surrounding the titanic, radiant sphere of Heaven with their moon-sized buds; the roots with their cold nodules surrounding the dark sphere of Hell. Shielding my eyes with one hand, I activated the warp drive and the ship leapt into the light. The internal temperature soared and would have incinerated everyone and everything inside except for the ship’s environmental field. Then the brilliance dimmed and dense fog appeared outside the ship. The light level continued to drop, along with the temperature, until equal to a hot summer’s day. The mists of Lethe parted and the shining, golden, megalithic buildings and monuments of Qohlahb came into view. Built as a ring seven miles wide around the narrowest part of Yggdrasil, the City of the Gods circled the ten-mile diameter trunk of sky-blue translucent crystal, which looked a lot like the crystal of Maelstrom Two. “Now where?” said Pandis, his voice soft with awe.

The Blue Knight

21

I shrugged. “We look for the biggest building. It’s bound to be the Council Hall.” Pandis pointed at the view screen where humanoids could be seen rising from the silver streets and golden rooftops by the hundreds. “Are those angels? We could ask one of them.” “If they don’t attack us first,” I said. “I don’t know how the gods feel about mortals entering their city uninvited.” “We have to get their attention.” Parsius’s voice was tight with pain causing us to turn and stare. “I think we already got…” My words died and Pandis gasped. Parsius hunched over, arms clutched around his stomach. His thick black waves were pasted to his head with sweat, his skin ashen, and the glow gone from his yellow eyes. “We’ve got to get to Acheron!” His voice came out as a hiss. “Why?” I couldn’t look away. Even as ill as he looked, awe radiated from Parsius, weaker than it had been over Aldyryc, but still enough that I found it hard to argue with him. “Everyone ignores the Pündi. We don’t even have a patron deity! No one will pay attention to our warnings if we don’t do something drastic.” Standing up straighter, he gave Pandis an intense smile. “We’re got to go into the Cavern of Sorrows and ring the cosmic bell!” Letting go of his stomach he punctuated his works by slamming his fist into his palm. Pandis laughed and cheered. “A prank that will get everyone’s attention!” Parsius nodded and patted his youngest son on the back. “The greatest prank of all time!” I tried to object, but a glance of Parsius’s dead yellow eyes hit like a physical blow. “That’s a great idea!” I heard my mouth say. “It might even stop the Draconian Wars.”

Michael S. Fricker

22

Huge flocks of immortal guardians flew toward the ship, their white, grey, or black feathered cloaks flapping like wings. I sent the ship racing around Qohlahb on its space-time wave leaving the angels, archons, and fiends far behind. In seconds, a dark spot appeared in the trunk of the Tree. Arranged before the opening, a semi-circular plaza lined with obelisks of void steel offered a good landing place. I brought the ship to within three feet of the crystal ground, five feet from the forty-foot high, thirty feet wide hole in the translucent, blue crystal trunk and ordered the ship to lower the ramp. An invisible chain of will, pulled me from my seat after Pandis and Parsius to the hold where we gathered around Cthanic. Only the tips of the blades were sharp, so Parsius gripped two just below while Pandis held the pommel stone in both hands. I grasped the six-foot, nine-inch weapon near the demonic guard at its mid-point and hurried down the ramp, across the hard ground to the gaping hole in the Tree. Three feet above the ground, the oval mouth of Acheron was surrounded by a raised rim bearing the same message in Celestial and Dark Speech, both familiar to me. “Abandon all hope ye who pass within. The words filled me with dread. I tried to let go of the dagger and stop but my muscles wouldn’t obey. They were being controlled by Parsius – or whatever Parsius had become. Father would never use Enchantment to influence, let alone enslave, another’s mind. Such spells were grey magic and fairly routine to most grey sorcerers but dark enough that Parsius wouldn't touch them, not considering Anyah's attitude about them. She had been a white sorcerer and believed even Friendship spells to be a form of rape.

The Blue Knight

23

Because the rim was nearly as high as we were tall, we slid the weapon into the cave mouth held above our heads, then climbed up. Outside a host of Celestial guardians landed in the plaza and raced toward the cave, rune-inscribed swords in hand. Returning to our positions on the dagger, we ran down the crystal tunnel. Pandis led the way, laughing, thrilled that his father was not only paying attention to him, but participating in a prank unlike anything he’d ever considered. Glancing sideways, I saw the angels, fiends, and archons stop at the cave mouth, unwilling or unable to enter. Parsius’s strained cackles joined Pandis’s giggles, the gazes of both locked on the tunnel ahead as they jogged on. After half a mile, the tunnel opened into a massive cavern, the smooth floor forming a beach a few hundred yards long and a hundred feet wide. Black, motionless water – if water it was – stretched out beyond sight, covered as high as the eye could see by motionless, thick grey fog. “Styx and Kokytos,” whispered Sorvah as they paused at the end of the tunnel, “the Waters of Hate and the Mists of Lamentation.” Legends said that anyone, mortal or immortal, that so much as touched the waters of the Styx became trapped within forever; nothing could free them, not even the power of the greatest gods. Kokytos was said to fill those within it with such sadness, remorse, and despair that even a god couldn’t resist plunging into the Styx. This deep in the Celestial Realms, only the weakest of spells were possible leaving only one way across the Styx As they hesitated on the edge of Acheron, a tall robed figure in a long, wide ferryboat appeared from the

Michael S. Fricker

24

mists and pulled up to the shore. Both floor and ship were made of the same translucent blue crystal as the Tree, a substance I started thing of as yggdracite. The boat made no sound or ripples as it slid through the motionless black water, propelled from the stern by a long yggdracite- staff in the boatman’s pale hands. The boat made a soft thud as its low prow bumped into the crystal beach a hundred feet from where they stood. Deep in the shadows of his raised grey cowl, the ferryman’s features were hidden from sight. “Welcome to Acheron.” The voice sounded like sand flowing down a deep dry well, sending eerie echoes through the mist. “All who step within must obey the laws of Charon or be taken by the Styx. Turn back now or pay my price.” “What is your price?” Parsius said between clenched teeth. “A life each to cross and a life each to return. Step aboard and you enter my debt!” Reminded that this was the son of Marduk and Rawna, I saw Parsius considering his two sons. I had to stop this now if possible. “How do we pay your price? We have but one life each?” Surely Parsius would come to his senses, if he could, if the true price was made bare. “The tale of your life, told without any untruths, pays the first crossing. A thousand years spent in Charon’s service pays the way back.” Pandis gasped, and then laughed. “A thousand years! Might as well make it a million! We’re not immortal Faerie.” “Age is not a factor. Nor is there need for it to be while you are alive. Charon chooses the time for the call and you must obey or face the Styx.” The last word boomed from the mist, fading as the voice rose again as a hiss. “No one crosses without paying the Ferryman.”

The Blue Knight

25

We looked doubtfully at Parsius, but his dead yellow eyes were locked on the ferry. “Everything will be fixed once we ring the bell.” It was almost a plea. I tried to object but smiled at Pandis and declared, “Then let’s go. The sooner the better.” We three entered the cavern, bringing Cthanic into Acheron for the second time in cosmic history. The entire Tree shook as Parsius stepped into the cavern knocking him to one knee, his grip locked on Doombringer’s red blades. Pandis rode out the quake with a smile. My body returned to my control, the looseness of muscles and the trembling of the ground almost dropping me onto my back. Acheron returned to still silence. Parsius spat two teeth and blood onto the crystal ground and rose to his feet, limbs shaking and breathing laboured. He seemed diminished, closer to normal, yet awe clung to him like fading celebrity. He raised his head with a series of loud spinal cracks and eyes faded to the same light grey as his skin. Several ropes of soaked hair dropped from his scalp onto trembling shoulders. Blood trickling from his mouth mixed with the sweat glistening on his skin and soaking into his clothes. Maintaining a grip on the sword with one hand, he tore off his knee-length brown leather traveller’s coat and tossed it behind him. Pandis stared at him, speechless, horror and worry struggling for dominance on his young face. I didn’t know what to do. Parsius grasped the blades and stepped toward the boat. “We’ve got to ring the bell!” Pandis nodded, desperation glistening in his eyes. “Then everything will be better!” He moved toward the boat, tugging weapon, brother, and father after him.

Michael S. Fricker

26

Approaching from the ship’s left, Pandis stopped dead at the beach edge, staring in into the motionless black water. Parsius moved his end to Pandis’s left and also stopped to stare into the Styx, leaving me little choice but do the same. Horror, revulsion, pity, and terror shook me at the sight in the Styx. A sheer drop into unfathomable depths, the water was filled with anthropoid and non-anthropoid bodies, each floating a few inches under the surface, motionless with face upturned and twisted by hatred and impotent rage. Most were races I couldn’t name, but a few were familiar. My gaze was pulled to the pale features of a young Elf woman, the serenity of her race replaced by a bestial mask of emotion. My heart stopped a moment when her feline, amber eyes opened and locked her ancient gaze with mine. Gasping and shuddering, I backed away from the water’s edge, pulling the others with me. The dry, deep whisper spoke from the mist. “Those who dare swear upon the Styx and break their oath, spend the rest of their eternal existence in its embrace.” The cowl of the Ferryman turned to regard them as a death-rattle of a laugh chilled their bones. “Now approach and pay the first price" The robed figure planted the butt of its staff loudly on bottom of the crystal craft. “One untruth and nothing shall be able to free you.” Our gazes turned to the Ferryman, but Pandis’s jumped in surprise to the large red crystal ball gripped by his small hands. After a moment, he looked at me in amazement. “I think this thing just told me that it can free them.” Almost whispering, his eyes darted toward the Styx. I frowned. “How?” “By doing more than ringing the bell.”

The Blue Knight

27

The voice rose soft from the mist. “It does not lie. But you must pay my price to face that choice.” They all looked at the Boatman. Pandis stepped up to its bow. “”I… I’ll go first.” He threw me a weak smile over his shoulder. “I have the least to tell.” He launched into his story, beginning with his birth on a starship in a distant reality, then moving to a childhood spent travelling from reality to reality, and on to his time alone with his Hobbit nanny, Molly. He jumped from place to place as details reminded him of other details, the tangents becoming so entangled that several times he lost where he was for a moment before dismissing his lapse with a joke and moving on. He made mistakes, particularly about the details from when he was too young to fully comprehend and remember what was going on around him. He even included things that he was ashamed of, which was very little, and went into intricate detail about all of his pranks. As much as I wanted to figure out what to do, I couldn’t help focusing on his words, fearing each might be the one to send him into the Styx, but, at last, Pandis reached their present moment and smiled at the robed figure. “And if I left anything out, or made mistakes, it’s because I don’t remember, and I’m a stupid kid!” His performance over, his entire body began shaking and tears rolled from his eyes as he glared at the Ferryman. “In a word,’ said Charon, “what is the purpose of your crossing?” Pandis frowned then looked at his father with a smile. “Adventure.” “You may board,” said the voice from the mist, "or you may leave. It is yours to choose.” Pandis almost fainted with relief and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

Michael S. Fricker

28

“Next.” The single quiet word hovered in the cavern with the promise of doom. I took a deep breath. ”I’ll speak my tale.” I wanted to be with my brother, however this turned out. Also starting at birth, but in a reality much like the Prime, I condensed my story with the skill of an adept illuminatus, using my bardic training to leave out nothing except embellishment as I covered the time before Pandis’s birth, corrected much of his yarn, and brought the tale to Acheron. I tried to betray no hint of my concerns about Parsius and managed to tell no lie. “In a word,’ said Charon, “what is the purpose of your crossing?” “Loyalty.” “You may board or leave, as you so choose.” Relief bubbled up in him, but it met the hard wall of his fears. “Next.” The voice betrayed no hint of disappointment or joy at the results so far. Parsius closed his eyes and his trembling stopped. In the practiced, clear voice of a professional orator. he began with his birth as the oldest of eight children of a spaceport janitor. His words swept his sons into the past as Parsius grew up to become an illuminatus, wandering the war-torn world beyond the Shire and spending time on several other planets. Driven by a need to see beyond every horizon, and finding every place in the Prime Universe already charted and occupied, he returned to the Shire to study the metaphysical secrets of Existence. While working on his doctorate and learning the art and craft of a sorcerer, he used University magic items to lead teams into nearby realities. One of his assistants, on the last of his pre-doctorate trips, was Anyah. They hatched a plan to explore Existence as far out from Reality Prime as possible. They

The Blue Knight

29

called it “the Quest for the Edge” and managed to assemble a party for the endeavour. Parsius took his audience from reality to reality, vividly describing each, and pointing out the increasing differences from Reality Prime. We felt our parents’ joy at the birth of their first child and experienced the closeness of the small family as they continued to explore. At regular intervals, they sent back a few of their party to report to the Shire. Eventually, only the three of them remained. The joy of their second son’s birth was dampened by the horrors of the interstellar warzone that they were travelling through at the time. Their starship entered a minefield, striking a gravity mine. With no more room in the escape shuttle, Anyah forced Parsius to squeeze in with the children while she took the next one. Parsius’s words brought back my horror at watching Mother’s shuttle dragged backward into the gravity well of the imploding starship, both crushed by the expanding black hole. Grief-stricken, we made our way back to the Shire, Parsius teaching me bardic and sorcerous skills while we travelled. Back in the Shire, Parsius returned to teaching and threw himself into researching a way to bring her spirit back to Reality Prime, where they could spend eternity together. The tale turned into an emotionless lecture from that point up to the appearance of the crystal meteorite, then Parsius became animated and intense speaking of the Maelstrom and the worlds of Asgard and Midgard with wonder. His description of the Demogorgan, much like my dream, came through naked terror. Then he came to the arrival of Doombringer on Maelstrom One, his voice fluctuating radically in tone and pitch with each syllable. “Then we found each other and were one.”

Michael S. Fricker

30

He slurped a little as another tooth fell from his mouth. “We didn’t know where or how, and then we did. But it hurt and we couldn’t get out.” He opened eyes gone pitch black and gazed at his sons with a smile that chilled our blood. “You rescued us but it hurt. The dagger told us where we needed to go and what we needed to do to make the hurting stop. We must ring the bell." The final word echoed through the fog until there was silence. “In a word,’ said Charon, “what is the purpose of your crossing?” He fixed eyes stretching into almond shape upon the god. “Relief." The word was a pleading hiss. “You may board.” The voice of the mist contained a hint of sadness. “Do not let the weapon touch the boat.” Not daring to annoy the Ferryman with hesitation, we stepped aboard and up the length of the ferry, which could easily hold more than fifty Pündi. The Ferryman watched without movement or comments, gripping his staff with hands that they could now see were bare bone. A white skull gazed back at them with empty eye sockets. Charon towered over them, almost as tall as we three Pündi put together. “Stay where you are until we reach the other side.” They stopped with a third of the boat’s length to go. The words whispered from the fog, the skull’s jaw never moving. “I tolerate no disruptions or outbursts. Such will send you into the Styx.” Charon turned and drove his staff into the still water without a ripple. The ferry moved away from the shore and fog closed in. Keeping one hand on the dagger at all times, Parsius tore off the rest of his clothing until he stood naked and sweating.

The Blue Knight

31

I watched him warily, but pretended to still be enslaved. The pieces were falling together in the form of a desperate plan. An entity of chaos had taken possession of Father in the Maelstrom. The further it went into reality, the more pain it seemed to experience and the less powerful it seemed to become. It could access Parsius’s memories and skills. It could kill us far more easily than I could kill it. I had to wait until Parsius was at his weakest and then act with surprise to drive the tip of Cthanic into his body, hopefully killing the entity along with whatever was left of his father. Or, just maybe, tearing them into separate entities gain. When Cthulhu tested it on his brother, Cronus, mightiest of the Abominations, the weapon tore him into Azathoth and Odin. Until then, I stood quietly, watching Parsius's continued transformation with as little trace of horror or revulsion as I could manage. Pandis gaped openly as his limbs and neck stretched, becoming thin and nearly twice as long. His legs did the same, reaching their new length just before his penis fell off. Parsius screamed as the top of his head expanded, pulling his nose into two flat slits as his eyes stretched into ovals twice their original size. The hair fell from his smooth grey skin. His teeth fell from his mouth along with bloody spittle that hung from his small chin. The light grey thing that stared back at us as the boat thumped against the shore of the Isle of Tranquility might be what Pündi would one day become. I hoped not. There was no emotion in its features, no spirit in the black depths of its eyes, only ancient alien intellect and pain. “You have arrived. My duty is done. Disembark or pay the price to return. We and the – the only name I could think of to describe the five-foot tall thing that had been Parsius was

Michael S. Fricker

32

– “Grey” hurried off the boat and onto the mile-wide, circular Isle of Tranquility. The mists of Kokytos avoided the Isle, creating a dome of clear air half a mile high. Ahead, the smooth, hemispherical ultramarine hill of the Keystone of Reality rose some two hundred and fifty feet into the air. An intense golden finger of energy jetted from its top into Kokytos, which diffused its light throughout the nine-mile diameter cavern inside Yggdrasil. Known as the First Valve of the Heart of Existence, it fed the Tree of Life light and dark Qi, the dark jet hidden below the surface of the Isle. Aldyryc’s two yellow suns orbited the Second Valve. Metaphysics sages theorized that the Heart produced and recycled the instantaneous temporal pulses that produced the effect known as Time. These built up in the Keystone, where they decayed back into the Heart. The Valves provided a release so that the accumulated temporal pressure didn’t overload and destroy Existence. But no one knew what they were for certain. <Ring the bell!> The alien voice that burned within our heads contained only the slightest trace of Parsius. We increased their pace, me afraid of disobeying and Pandis terrified of failing. As we drew nearer I could see that the hill seemed to be made of the same flawless crystal as the Eye of Ptah, but nearly opaque. This was supposedly the Past, the entire Past, stored until recycled as a new instantaneous temporal pulse composed of the light and dark Qi, with the bounded potential of the Future meeting the finite limitations of the Past in the constant state of becoming known as the Present. The Keystone was described as containing the layered entropic afterimages of reality. The Keystone slowed the Heart’s recycling enough to allow Qi in a potential state from Outer Darkness to be actualized,

The Blue Knight

33

building dimension upon dimension and preventing Existence from remaining a Qi singularity. Without retention of the Past no progress could be made. Pandis and the Grey ran toward it, holding Cthanic’s hilt and blade like a battering ram with me desperately seeking an opening, an opportunity to end the madness. I slipped under the weapon to join them on its left side, hoping to trip them up at the last minute and somehow impale the Grey. The last minute passed and we were upon the Keystone, Pandis yelling at the head of the charge. Inches away, the Grey altered course, swinging the tips to the right and towards the Keystone. I threw my weight upon the weapon a foot above the guard, forcing the Grey down, the tips digging into the yggdracite ground under the Grey and stopping dead, throwing Pandis and the pommel forward. The pommel stone contacted the Keystone with a soft crystalline click. Time stuttered. A ting rose from the Keystone becoming so loud our ears began to bleed. Cthanic vibrated on our skin like a thousand tiny needles. The Tree of Life matched the vibrations with its own, until it seemed reality would shake asunder. A ripple of red light spread from the contact point across the entire sphere to come back together on the opposite side. A lance of red light sprang forth from the meeting point, then more from random points around the sphere. All vanished an everyone stood in frozen silence, then a wave of red light exploded outward from the Keystone the front sweeping across and through the Styx and Yggdrasil with equal ease. Four bolts of gold leapt from the Keystone, three spearing the Grey, Pandis and me in the middle of our

Michael S. Fricker

34

torsos and blazing from our eyes, noses, and mouths while lifting us high into the air. The fourth disappeared into Doombringer’s pommel holding it in place where our hands were ripped from it. Thousands of exact duplicates appeared of us, the Grey, and Charon, afterimages stored in the Keystone returned to life, tracing our journey back across the Styx, each clearly visible despite the fog. Unstable, the duplicates transformed into random creatures and turned on their neighbours creating a cacophony of curses, shouts and bestial sounds. A mind-boggling array of vegetation exploded from the crystal ground of the Isle of Tranquillity growing huge, transforming into other forms of life then joining the general melee. Cthanic shattered into seven pieces with a boom that cut through the noise and mayhem, silencing both. Everything warped and twisted, ground, duplicates, monsters, and plants exploding randomly as the last of the light qi passed into us and the Grey and faded from eyes and orifices. Then the back of the red energy wave left the Keystone, sweeping everyone in Acheron with it through Yggdrasil and beyond; leaving me, Pandis, and Charon lying unconscious in the plaza outside Acheron's entrance, the pommel stone still clutched in my brother's hands

∞∞

I awoke in a colossal cell with three walls, floor and ceiling of pure gold, shining in the light of four glow spheres set under the twenty-five foot high ceiling. Cracked in places, there was dark blue void steel under the thin layer of gold. A wall of gold bars placed three inches apart, with a twenty-foot high, ten-foot wide door of bars set in its center, completed the room and

The Blue Knight

35

separated it from the golden hallway outside. More cracks could be seen in the hallway wall. A soft groan drew my gaze to the other side of the cell, where Pandis lay on his back, eyes closed. The boy’s hair was a solid shock of shining silver. The gods only knew how I looked. The sound of a door opening came from down the hall to the left of the cell. I scrambled across the forty-foot wide room to my brother’s side and patted the boy’s as yet unlined cheek. “Pandis. Pandis, wake up.” My soft words echoed in the metal cell. Two sets of footsteps, one heavier than the other grew louder in the hallway. Pandis’s eyelids fluttered open and silver light flooded out as his gaze locked upon his brother’s face. “What happened?” He took in our surroundings. “Where are we? Where’s Father?” He frowned for a moment and mumbled something under his breath before breaking into a crooked grin. “He was looking a little grey.” Giggling, he sat up and looked through the cell bars, lifting his hand to wave. “Hi!” I followed his gaze and gasped at the three personages outside the cell. The shortest, almost twice my three-foot two inches, wore simple grey robes, arms folded inside the voluminous sleeves and deep cowl raised. Within the shadows, long thick straight red hair framed the lower half of a face beyond perfection, the upper half concealed behind a purple veil. Deathly pale, the statuesque beauty floated a foot off the floor. A ten-foot tall anthropoid man dressed in a blue leather kilt stood to her right, his skin darkest ebony and head that of a jackal, the Mace of Judgement resting on

Michael S. Fricker

36

his powerful shoulder, golden eyes piercing me to the soul. Eighteen feet tall, the man on left was bald with gleaming bronze skin, four arms, four ears, two mouths, and three eyes set over a large hooked nose. The left eye was filled with bright red light, the middle purple, and the right blue. All three were focused on t me, the chiselled features contemplative with a hint of amusement. I recognized them from the Eye, stunned to see the two most powerful gods and the Judge of the Dead in the flesh. Though not as awestruck as I should have been, considering how the Grey had affected me. I should have been prostrate begging for mercy. “Where’s my father?” Pandis muttered between giggling, winking and grinning at the three gods as if having some kind of fit. I feared he’d become unhinged. It was Anubis who gave the answer and much more. "Pundi are a cosmic curiosity virus, an extremely virulent and destructive one. The actions of your race i exploring the Maelstrom have resulting in the Second Chaos Wave and the Fall. Your father was absorbed by creatures we call the S’Skahahn, or People of the Mirror, due to the few rules of reality the Council was able to force them to obey. The being your father has become is the Grey King, dedicated to collapsing reality into chaos, conflict and impossibility, like their home. They have no forms of their own, absorbing those of anthropoids to exist in reality. They are madness incarnate with the power of gods, limited by how deep into reality they go. They will start the final Existential War. You also managed to almost break all seven seals of the Demon Wall, releasing the hordes and armies of Cthulhu and his fellow Abomination. In addition, you shifted the centre of the Universe so that the Second Cosmic Valve collided with and is now the centre of Aldyryc. It took most of the Council acting

The Blue Knight

37

directly to keep the planet together. It will take constant effort and KI and Ptah's presence to maintain it as a living environment. You did end the Blood Wars, but by collapsing every civilization in the world. Trillions through the Universe died, most of them your race. The Fall also rendered the Faerie vulnerable to aging. It truly is the Fall predicted in both the Mortis Liber and the Vitae Liber. "These are the charges that were presented to the Celestial Court where Satanael served as prosecution and Athena argued your defense. She did so brilliantly, as usual, but due to the weight and expanse of evidence, I had no choice but to declare your race guilty on all counts. The entire Council was presented with the verdict for an appropriate sentence to be determined. It was not easy considering the unprecedented scale and ramifications. The obliteration of the entire Pundi race was considered and nearly came to pass, but for a single vote." "Mine," said Marduk from both mouths. "You exist at my sufferance, and I will make you earn it." Rawna spoke next. "The spiritual evolution of your races has been stopped. You will reincarnate as Pundi, or a lower creature, until your race can make amends. "When," said Marduk, "three come who are Pundi but not Pundi. Marked by the broken circle." "Broken circle?" "Working for me, you will become a race of secret watchers, an Existence-wide network reporting to me." Anubis nodded. "The number of Pundi on Aldyryc and in Reality Prime is to be limited. The rest must spread out through the rest of Existence. The Council has declared a moratorium on certain lines of technological development on Aldyryc to avoid more races following your disastrous path. You are not permitted to let your technology, magic, or knowledge pass to non-Pundi. Should this happen the offender has seven days to rectify

Michael S. Fricker

38

the situation or be killed and reincarnate as a lower creature. Then the responsibility falls to their closest sibling, then parent, then distant relative, and on until every Pundi has to spend a life time as a worm. This also applies should you intentionally interfere or otherwise involve yourself in the affairs of other races. But, you must do this willingly. Free Will is guaranteed by the Council Charter. You must swear an oath, personally and as representative of your people. Then you must get your people to swear. If one doesn't none do. As sign of the oath, all must display a circle on their foreheads representing the prison of reincarnation." Marduk took over. "Your network will extend the Council's knowledge beyond the limits of our reality, to this being, this hunger your father encountered. Demogorgan means 'Annihilation' in Celestial. With your help we will prepare for all that is to come." "How can I do all this? I'm just one Pundi." "Unfortunately, " said Rawna, “by the reckoning of many, your experience at the origin of the Chaos Wave has elevated you to the status of Powers. You are the first two of the Ascended "More," said Marduk, "will come." "What? Me and Pandis are... what?" Pandis muttered a unintelligible, rambling string of sounds and then coughed a harsh laugh. “As Powers,” the King continued, “the only way to enter the Universe within Divine Law is by creating an avatar. You may have one at a time and you must be careful for it can become free-willed if not carefully controlled. However, your brother will not be allowed to create avatars until a time of the Council’s choosing in the distant future. He will be confined to Qohlahb until it is time for him to make amends. As god of Humour, Laughter, Jokes, Pranks, Tricks, and Eccentricity, he will be certain to liven the City.”

The Blue Knight

39

You may regret that, I thought. A bored Pandis was never a good thing. “If he’s god of all that, what am I?” “You are God of Curiosity, Travel, and Wanderers, as well as patron deity of the Pündi. If you accept the terms, you’re race shall be spared for now. If you do not, all will be slain, body and spirit.” I to my feet with as much dignity as I could muster with Pandis rolling around on the floor mumbling and giggling. “I accept on behalf of my race.” What other choice 'was there? The three gods nodded as one. Then,” said the Speaker, “it is done and it is Law. The Oath is bond.” Sorvah considered it for a moment. “. I’ll call my avatar Parsius Pathfinder to honour my father. He’ll run things from the Shire. I can always make more if I need them, right?” I looked to her husband. Marduk nodded; his smiles welcoming. “We will have the guards let you out. They will take you to your quarters. Get some rest. You will be summoned before the Council in two Celestial days for the Oath-taking ceremony. And to assume your seats." Then the two greatest gods and the Celestial Magistrate turned to leave, but Marduk turned back. "One more thing," he said looking at me. "You will chronicle all that the Eye shows you. It will be your final duty, after which your Oath will be complete. “ I nodded smartly. "I will do my best to be accurate."

Michael S. Fricker

40

Chapter 2

“The Battle that Began the War” Ranyll, 48th day of Duvhynn, Age of the Winds Year

11,667 A pale white glow appeared in the darkness, backlighting a column of five in dark green robes with raised hoods as they turned a corner of a narrow, twisting crack in the basaltic rock, each with a black rat perched on its shoulder. A sixth clutched a glowing quarterstaff of dark red wood, holding it as high as the low ceiling allowed, a rat the size of a small dog walking at its side. Six Human children, dressed in cloth wraps and sandals, came behind, followed by six more adults in dark brown robes with raised cowls but no rats. This latter group stepped more gingerly than the leaders, their furtive glances at the darkness, close walls and looming ceiling as concerned as the children’s. “This place stinks!” “Where are we going?” “Are we nearly there?” “I don’t like the dark!” “I’m scared!” "I'm not. "I want a rat too." “I want to go home!” The man with the light stopped and spun around, his sharp olive face pinched as he glared at the children, ignoring the fact that at least one adult voice had joined theirs. “Shut up! Do you want to see what dwells below Arcanica’s sewers? You won’t like it.”

The Blue Knight

41

The fear on their faces brought a gleam to his black eyes. He smiled. “Don’t worry. You are Father’s chosen. That’s why I bought your freedom. I won’t let anything happen to you.” He had bought them from the city market over the last few months, the three five-year olds first – two boys and a girl – then the two six-year old boys and last the eldest girl. The seven-year old was always last and there were no eight-year olds. Eight was the Age of Agency among Humans, the end of innocence when the gods declared them responsible for their choices and actions. “Why are we here Brother Therus?” asked the eldest, her hair as dark brown and skin as olive as his but her bright blue eyes fixing him with the cold strength of the north; the other children huddled behind her. “I’m taking you to Father, Mina. Father’s kingdom is so wonderful that the way to it must be kept hidden or everyone would want to come, and there is just not enough room for that. There is a secret place down here that only Father’s children know how to find.” “Are you one of his children?” His smile warmed with nostalgia. “Yes, I am. I was freed and brought here just like you.” He gestured to the three men and two women waiting ahead. “So were they. We are all Father’s children.” “What about them?” Mina gestured with her thumb at the three men and three women waiting behind the children. He shook his head and gave a soft sigh. “No. They only wish to be his children. For them it is too late. They must wait until their next life, if they have one. Now hush! We mustn’t keep Father waiting.” As always, Father’s yearly summons identifying the appointed time of meeting came a few hours beforehand, keeping his “children” and most privileged followers on their toes. Having it on the magically powerful Night of Darkness turned out to be most unexpected since he

Michael S. Fricker

42

almost never chose it, preferring to subvert other holy days. Mina looked uncertain but hopeful, following with the younger children on her heels when he turned and the group resumed walking. Walking with careful, quiet steps, the party made their way down the twisting tunnel past places where it branched off into even narrower passages and a circular tunnel some ten feet in diameter made by one of Aldyryc’s giant worm species. The air grew humid and odorous as the tunnel levelled out and widened. A thick carpet of mosses, moulds, and fungi interspersed with pools and patches of slime in shades of white, green, purple, blue, yellow, red, and brown, covered the black, pock-marked surface of the walls floor and ceiling. Large cockroaches, insects, and larva crawled among the growths. The group stopped. In the lead, Sister Lucia gripped the silver metal disk hanging on a chain around her graceful neck with her left hand. With her right, she performed a series of precise rhythmic motions and complex gestures while pronouncing sounds that triggered and helped power her prepared spell weave. “Keep close.” Her hushed voice was muffled by her deep green hood. She strode forward, the others following as if on a line. Bloated black and green flies and huge brown rats scattered before them, filling the silent darkness with angry squeaks and buzzing that drew more of their kind until the passage ahead was filled by a black cloud hovering above a sea of black and brown bodies that parted before the lead priest. The tunnel widened to more than ten feet, the white noise of falling water echoing from the darkness. Sulphur, methane, ammonia, feces, and thick decay assaulted every breath, making several of the younger children retch.

The Blue Knight

43

“Breath through your mouth,” said Brother Therus, but that only made it a little better. To him it was better than expensive perfume. It meant safety and open expression of his faith, or himself. He knew that magic kept most creatures except Father’s children, vermin, and viruses from entering. However, the Undercity connected to the Underworld of Aldyryc and there were beings down there that even six powerful magicians like he and his fellow priests would be wise to fear. The tunnel opened into a chamber whose walls stretched out of sight, the staff’s glow barely reaching the ceiling. A five-foot wide stream of fetid water came out of the dark on their right, running a couple of inches deep among the floor growth to plunge over the edge of a crevasse on their left more than ten feet wide that separated them from what looked to be a ten-foot high grey stone wall emerging from the surrounding lava rock. The crack split the wall just ahead of them and disappeared out of sight. The crack was over five feet wide at this point, and the space in the wall not much wider. Ignoring it, Sister Lucia led the group right, following the stream back toward its source. They passed four openings in the cavern wall, the light of the staff revealing the first two to be the doorways to buried homes, the inhabitants petrified by the eruption of Arcanica’s twin volcanoes, Romulus and Remus, that buried the city of New Uruk over five thousand years ago forming the Undercity. The third opening was a narrow tunnel that stretched into the darkness, forming a fork in the stream. Continuing upstream the main passage widened along with the flowing water, the fourth opening carrying away the majority in a second fork. The echoing tumble of sewage grew louder as they approached a stone gateway big enough for a large wagon to pass through, framed by two fifteen foot high stone towers. Sewage running down the stepped sides of

Michael S. Fricker

44

a huge structure lurking on the other side had carved thick irregular pillars out of the lava rock while creating a ceiling that sloped upwards so that it remained about thirty feet above the surfaces below. A broad set of grey stone steps climbed from the water pooled at the bottom of the structure up the front and out of sight. At the foot of the steps, Brother Therus took the lead, ascending the ten-foot wide staircase with his black eyes locked on the top of what was soon revealed to be a sixty-foot high step pyramid made of five-foot cubic blocks of grey stone. There stood a circle of menhirs ten-foot high, five-foot wide, and two and a half feet thick, topped by similar-sized lintels, all of a grey stone that sparkled in his staff’s glow. Arcane sigils and eldritch patterns covered their surfaces. A square obelisk almost five feet wide and covered with magical inscriptions rose from the circle’s centre, its pyramidal top touching the ceiling thirty feet overhead. The far half of the thirty-foot diameter circle disappeared into the black rock of the cavern’s wall behind a ten-foot wide sheet of falling sewage pouring from a crack in the pitted black ceiling. Unleashed by Arcanica’s occasional tremors, it ran down the three exposed sides of what had been New Uruk’s central temple, dedicated to the sun-god Ra. The original altar still stood in front of the obelisk, but the Elder God’s radiant symbol on the rectangular stone slab’s glittering grey front had been reshaped with magic into Father’s glorious image. God of Corruption, Disease, Lies, and Vermin, Pazuzu’s tall, muscular humanoid form appeared in glittering relief with rubies representing the glowing, compound eyes set under the noble brow of his large head. Large, pointed ears flanked a leering, handsome face topped by a crest of feathers. Instead of a nose and mouth, his smile was managed by a vulture’s hooked beak filled with sharp teeth. Four feathered wings spread from his back and his legs ended in taloned avian feet. Naked, his bloated,

The Blue Knight

45

disfigured, diseased, rotting genitals hung between his legs. Brother Therus hardened and grinned in anticipation of the ritual orgy that would be tonight’s climax. But first, there were the children. “Come, Mina. Gather the others here by me.” While the girl did as she was told, the five priests spread out in a semi-circle with the six worshippers of privilege – a low-ranking noble, three merchants, a military officer, and a junior senator – arranged in a second arc behind them, all facing Therus. Standing with his back to the obelisk, he formed a line of five children and pulled Mina out before them. “Here’s what is going to happen.” He fixed her with a beaming smile. “I am going to open a portal to Father’s kingdom. He will send a spiritual guide to you and you will lead the others through the portal where you shall live with Father learning the ways of magic until you return to this world as adults.” The faces of the children lit with excitement, except Mina. She kept her gaze locked with his. “What are Father and his kingdom like?” “Wondrous, terrifying and amazing!” The awe in his voice was genuine. “Unlike anyone or anything you can imagine!” Seeing scepticism struggling with hope on her face, he grasped her gently by the shoulders. “Don’t worry. You will be able to see Father’s kingdom when I open the portal. No one will make you go if you don’t wish to. No one will harm you. You have been chosen to become one of Father’s children. You are no longer a slave. You are free.” She could see the sincerity of belief in the energy and excitement in his posture and expression, but she wasn’t experienced enough to sense the lies woven among the truths. Most people weren’t. She would learn better, if she survived.

Michael S. Fricker

46

He turned to face the altar, bowed before it with his head at the feet of his god and whispered, “My body and spirit are yours eternally, Blessed Father. Do with them as you will.” Standing, he raised the glowing staff above his head, gripped near the ends with both hands, arms straight, and began a dissonant chant in Dark Speech, his deep voice booming off the cavern’s back wall. The other priests joined in with the harsh, vile words of the language creates by Cthulhu for his daemons and now the common tongue of most evil races and organizations, as well as the Dark North and Underworld. As the chant concluded, Therus set his staff on the altar then drew his gold divine symbol from beneath his robes and a number of gemstones from a pouch on his belt. Intoning the vocalizations to begin the spell’s casting, he closed his fist around the gems. When he opened it, there was a flash of light and the gems were gone. Continuing his vocalizations, he performed intricate movements and gestures with his body, arm, hand and fingers to activate a prepared wormhole spell, one so powerful and complex only an archmaster could successfully and safely weave the required amount of qi. The still, humid air rose about the group into a breeze that blew toward the filthy waterfall. The centre of the sewage warped and twisted, the spatial deformation expanding and dimpling with a spray of mist. Then the centre bulged and ballooned into a sphere nearly ten feet in diameter. Inside, a distorted, upside-down, cobblestone road meandered up through blossoming coppices to just below a sharp peak of brilliant white where a marble castle, with many multi-colored pennants, perched on a ledge above a sparkling turquoise sea. Brother Therus turned and smiled at the stunned children. “Father’s kingdom awaits you.” He held out his hand to Mina.

The Blue Knight

47

Slowly, her gaze jumping between his smile and the shimmering sphere’s image, she raised her own to take it. Leaving the adults where they stood, he led the children around the right side of altar and obelisk to stand before the middle of the sphere. Letting go of her hand, he left Mina standing a couple of feet from its surface with the other five huddled behind her and moved behind them. “The children await their guide!” Now the waiting demon would emerge from the portal to possess the eldest child and lead the others through to Father’s dimensional bubble in the Abyss. Expectant gazes fixed upon the sphere. A Human man’s olive face appeared in the sphere, broad smile made clownish by the distortion. Then it vanished and a tall, handsome man, naked except for a knee-length loincloth, stepped from the sphere without causing any disturbance in its surface or image. Stunned by the appearance of their god, Brother Therus and the other adults dropped to their knees as soon as they recovered, bowing their foreheads into the flowing sewage. The children copied their elders. “No, no, no!” Pazuzu strode to the children and reached his hand down to Mina. “Only adults who serve us need bow.” The girl peeked up at the smiling man then at his right hand, large, open, strong, and steady. Rising a little, she placed a tentative hand in his and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Then he offered his left hand to the youngest child and the skinny, blonde boy leapt to his feet and wrapped his arms around the god’s leg. Pazuzu smiled and patted the boy’s head. Then he looked at the others. “Gather around.” The children rushed to his side, clustering around his thick legs. “Stand, my high-priest..”

Michael S. Fricker

48

Brother Therus rose to his feet but didn’t meet the god’s gaze. “Forgive me, Father, for the unacceptable reception. We did not expect your glorious presence.” “You are forgiven, this time.” “Thank you, Father.” “We have come in person because We bear knowledge known only to Us. The Champion of Order has been chosen.” Therus grinned. “We are to bring the Champion around to our way of thinking?” Pazuzu shook his head, but his dark eyes flashed red. “Normally that would be amusing, but for now there are larger concerns. We will send an agent to neutralize him. It is crude and uninteresting, but what our allies have requested. It is a favour of great promise.” Brother Therus nodded. “Yes, Father.” The god was well-known for appearing to those who spoke his name three times in succession and performing a service for one in return. Each time he helped, the return favour pushed the person closer to chaos and evil. Desperate paladins trying to save lives were his favourites. “Our agent requires a willing vessel.” “My body and spirit are yours, Father.” All six priests shouted in near unison. Pazuzu beamed at the children. “See how good children behave?” Then he looked to Therus. “As High-Priest, you are due this honour.” Therus swelled with pride. “Thank you, Father.” Pazuzu’s smile dimmed. “We trust you will not disappoint.” Then he shepherded the children into a group turn so that they all faced the sphere. “Come, children. Let’s go home,” he said and stepped forward, leading the six children into the sphere without disturbing surface or image. A second later all seven appeared on the distorted road and started walking towards the castle.

The Blue Knight

49

A large shadow filled the sphere before rising from its surface, a featureless, amorphous three-dimensional form. Roughly eight feet in diameter. Demons in possession, took forms from the imaginations and fears of victims and hosts. Brother Therus spread his arms to expose his chest. “I am your vessel.” The shadow flowed into his chest disappearing. Therus shook all over, then blinked and shook his head. Ecstasy lit his face, exposing the white of his eyes as darkness filled them. He threw his head back to give a long primal roar. Shock cut the triumphant exclamation. Horror gripped his face. Agony ripped a scream from his throat that grew louder until his voice broke. His flesh bubbled and shifted as arms, legs, and torso stretched with the loud cracking and snapping of bone. His shoulders and back expanded, tearing apart his clothing and leaving only his silent, screaming face exposed. His eyes clouded over with blackness and became multifaceted. Each arm split at the elbow into two forearms, the ends transforming into sharp, hooked, beak-like appendages that snapped at the air while the arms and legs became insectoid with a hard red-brown shell. Long avian talons burst through his boots. A long, white, maggot-like head exploded from each shoulder before red-brown armour closed over his long thin body, leaving the heads exposed, their circular mouths filled with sharp teeth and drooling black venom. Standing almost fourteen feet tall and around five hundred pounds, the demon turned to face the priests and worshippers. Two powerful wills struggled for control. At first overwhelmed by the physical agony and alien thoughts, Therus began to understand and relate to the Abyssal concepts. Unrestrained lust for pain and destruction mixed with the thrill of the power flowing through his new body.

Michael S. Fricker

50

<Who is our target?> He asked the demon in his head, unaware that his swollen, bloodless lips croaked the words loud enough to draw the gazes of the others. “Logosien di Lzander, a boy to be born this night to Argus and Tsinan.” The demon’s voice also came from his mouth, louder as it fluctuated through tones. He sensed that it didn’t know their exact location. “We must find them.” Ignoring the priests and worshippers as they dared to rise to their feet, he reached into a pouch on his enchanted belt, which had expanded along with his bracers. Noticing the beaks ending two of his forearms, he drew his extremity from the pouch and looked at it. The beak was open with a red-brown, five-fingered hand sticking out of its “throat”, one of his magic rings on the proper digit. He reached another hand below his embedded head to find the disk of his divine symbol still dangling on its chain. Sensing his thoughts, the demon filled his mind with its range of extraordinary and magical abilities. His training categorized its innate magic according to the spell weaves it could duplicate. Like mystics it didn’t require material components such as crystals, but it went two steps further, able to eschew three of the four standard types of components and wield its powers by the sheer power of concentrated intention. Its list of abilities was limited in number and uses per day, but covered a range of effects that could be most useful in combination with his spells and knowledge as a specialist magician of archmaster rank. Expending the gems in his hand while other limbs performed the required gestures, he spoke the predetermined sounds. His mind reached out, whispering the names of the di Lzander family to the thousands of minds in the city above and following any related thoughts that surfaced in response. It only took a few minutes for his practiced search to reveal people who

The Blue Knight

51

knew the names and that their home was entered from an alley off the major street that served as the Watch District’s northern border, but when he tried to pinpoint their location something interfered. Something powerful, most likely a god, protected them from location through remote viewing or telepathy. Unable to locate the people or even the house, he cast a spell to uses Father’s guidance to find the alley leading to the entrance of the di Lzander home. It was unprotected. He could feel it pulling him toward it. It wasn’t enough to shift there, but it would lead him along the swiftest path to get there through the Undercity and sewers of Arcanica. That was enough. It was at least three hours into the night; the brat could be born at any time. He needed to go. “But,” the demon and High-Priest said from the same mouth, “not before a little fun.” Bringing the staring priests and worshippers into his attention for the first time, he locked gazes with Lucia. Her eyes opened wide and she fell screaming to her knees, clutching a head filled with a painful cacophony of mental voices speaking madness. Her mental defenses fell before the unexpected onslaught leaving her lost to the world around her. The demon and Therus laughed and closed the portal to the Abyss, the sphere shrinking away to nothing. Then they dispelled Lucia’s protective field. Clouds of flies to descended on the five priests and six worshippers as a sea of rats, centipedes, cockroaches and other insects swept in and over them. Even their rat familiars turning on them. Three of the priests spoke sounds to activate dimensional shifting spells and vanished, vermin falling to the moving floor. The muffled screams of the remaining eight humans mixed with the laughing to make a most pleasing music until falling silent when the crawling anthropoid shapes fell over.

Michael S. Fricker

52

Their amusement done for the moment, the two minds focused on the pull of their destination and moved their body swift and silent as a shadow from the cavern. Once they fulfilled the mission, they would play in the city.

∞∞ The baby kicked hard, waking his mother. Tsinan di Lzander gasped and opened her eyes, her hands caressing her swollen belly. She lifted her head to gaze past her husband, Argus, whose quiet breathing on their straw mattress continued. A wooden chair sat against the sloped wall of the attic room, Argus’s grey-blue Watch uniform draped over its back, the Lieutenant’s bars on the collar glinting in the moonlike glow of the street globes that spilled through a small rectangular window a few feet from the stairs to the kitchen at the opposite end of the room. The hair on her arms and neck straightened. A floorboard creaked from their home’s only other room and exit, where her aged mother slept on a rough pallet beside the foot of the stairs. Something heavy stepped onto the stairs, chewing and crunching. Her almond-shaped, dark-brown eyes widened. She struggled to move or make a sound as what appeared to be black smoke billowed out of the staircase, filling the room with a cold, odourless cloud. Heavy, wet breathing as something – no, things – moved closer in the darkness. Her elbow dug into Argus’s side startling him awake as she sprang into a rigid sitting position in the bed. “What the Hells?’ he mumbled before being yanked screaming, from the bed and across the room. His screams grew louder, mixing with heavy, wet growls, snarls, an inhuman cackling. Something warm sprayed the bed, splattering her face.

The Blue Knight

53

“Argus!” His screams became a brief, horrible gurgling ended by ripping and the wet thuds of objects hitting the walls and floor. The black vapour dissipated and she screamed much louder. It looked like a cross between a giant cockroach and two maggots, roughly humanoid. Transfixed, she watched in horror as the thing came toward her. Long and emaciated, the armoured creature’s body rose from the stairwell to fill the far half of the attic, arms spreading and four beaks snapping, dripping blood. Gore coated the circular mouths of the maggot-like heads. A deep, growl of a chuckle rose from its boney chest but she couldn’t look away from those white, eyeless, segmented heads with their rows of needle teeth. Fortunately, its shadow muted the blood splattered everywhere and her fixed gaze kept her from seeing the body parts. The light behind the creature grew brighter and turned golden. The demon’s maggot head’s howled in surprise as the light flowed over its shoulders, wrapping around it from heads to talons like vines. The demon tried to rise, cracking the ceiling beams and falling back against the far wall. Most of it became translucent, revealing a humanoid shape with its head in the centre of the demon’s chest that screamed in most human agony. The demon writhed against its bonds, limbs thrashing cracks into the wallboards and smashing the window. Fading to almost complete transparency, it flickered in and out of the physical universe for several movements. Absorbing the golden light, it returned to full opacity, whirled about and exploded through glass, frame and wallboards into the soft white light beyond. The baby doubled Tsinan over with a kick, unlocking her muscles. She managed to roll out of bed and stumble to the stairs. Clutching her cramping stomach with one

Michael S. Fricker

54

hand and the thin, wooden handrail with the other, she descended as fast as she dared into the darkness of the windowless kitchen. Turning left on the landing halfway down, she took the last few steps. The cramp eased. To her left, her mother’s pallet lay beside and under the stairs. Her eyes filled with tears that she didn’t dare give in to. She took four careful steps. The fifth brought her bare foot down on a hand. Tsinan lost all reason, pulling her foot away and bolting across the room toward where she knew the door to be. The kitchen table stabbed her with a corner. Pain flared in her left hip and, knocked off balance, she bounced off the wall and staggered two steps. Her right foot slipped in warm wetness and she landed heavily on her back, filling her sight with roaming flashes. An intense cramp made her cry out and she struggled to get up, flailing about in panic. Rolling onto her side, she climbed to her knees and crawled through the pain toward where she hoped to find the door. Her head struck a hard surface and the flashes returned. She threw both of her hands against it, feeling up and outward for knob and latch. Trembling fingers closed tight over both, turning and pulling. The door popped open, knocking her to the side. Tsinan scrambled into the alley, a dead end ten feet to her left containing the closed door of her apothecary neighbour. Light spilled down the alley from ten feet to her right where it met Sword Street, the northern border between the Watch and Imperial Districts. The cramp relaxed. Tsinan pulled herself to her feet with the help of a nearby wooden crate and ran toward the light.

∞∞

The Blue Knight

55

Hovering outside the di Lzander home, the seven-foot tall humanoid with shoulder-length golden hair and silver flame eyes ignored the cloud of debris bouncing off his glowing body, but not the demon that burst out of it. Too fast for even an angel to dodge, the demon struck its foe, carrying the two into the middle of the sixty-foot wide cobblestone road in a ball of white, blue, gold and red-brown, rolling several yards before the angel jumped away from the biting, snapping fury. Dressed in a knee-length, sleeveless, blue silk robe bound by a wide black belt with a gold buckle, Lieutenant General Azrael of the Fourth Legion of Athena’s Heavenly Host, a Priestcraft specialist of grandmaster rank, threw his ankle-length white cloak off his shoulders and opened his robe to expose Athena’s striking owl tattooed in full colour on his sternum, wings spread beneath his collarbones. As the demon leapt to its feet and grasped its divine symbol, Azrael spoke the Celestial language with the full force of his faith. “I summon the power of Athena’s wisdom and wrath upon you demon!” Gold light outlined the tattoo, streaking inward and becoming a bolt of energy that struck the demon in its lower abdomen an instant after a bolt of green flashed from creature’s medallion, taking Azrael in the shoulder and spinning him. Its stomach blistered and smoking, the demon leapt at the angel. The angel completed his spin with his cold iron greatsword angled to meet its charge with a strike to its side that caused the chitin to smoke, bubble and split at the contact as it knocked the creature to his right side. Landing, it sprung at the angel. Snapping beaks and mouths came at him from seemingly every angle. His blade, bracers and robe deflected most, but one beak sliced his left leg from above the knee down the inner calf and through the crossed straps of his sandals, before he jumped back out of reach. He could

Michael S. Fricker

56

feel the cold of the dark chi in the wound, trying to get through the protective spell he had cast before approaching the house, until it dissipated moments later. Because no two demons looked the same, there was no way to predict what one could do, but dark chi poison was fairly common in demons and the undead. The face in its chest smiled at him, drawing his gaze to its black, compound eyes. A barrage of voices and bizarre images filled his head. Mind reeling, he yanked his gaze away before they took up residence. The creature pressed its advantage, driving him down the street as he struggled to fend it off. Behind the demon, a squad of eight Watchmen in padded leather armour – seven armed with crossbows, nets, clubs, and broadswords, and one in a grey cloak hemmed with arcane sigils, a gnarled quarterstaff in his hands – came around the corner of the next major intersection at a full run. Drawn by the sound of the explosion and battle, they skidded to a halt as soon as they saw the two combatants, forming a line of kneeling crossbowmen with the Watch warlock standing behind them. The magician blew his signal horn, its deep bellow echoing off the buildings lining the empty, night streets of the Imperial to the north and the Watch District to the south. The crossbowmen fired at the demon’s back, five bolts bouncing off its armour. The magician followed them with four glowing, yellow darts of chi that passed through the creature as if it didn’t exist, dissipating in front of it. Still reeling while struggling to block and dodge the demon’s unrelenting onslaught, and frequently failing, he feared he was just as ineffective. Failure seemed inevitable. He would not – could not – let that happen. Athena had commanded it. “The babe must live!” Azrael put all of his strength and fragmented concentration into an overhand chop that sank deep into the torso between the two maggot heads.

The Blue Knight

57

The demon went berserk, running its body along the blade and smearing it with hissing, smoking tar-like dark chi that vaporized after a few moments. Its beaks sliced the outside of his right thigh, his right shoulder, his left cheek and his left side just above the pelvic bone. Both maggot heads took circle chunks out of his shoulders, the venom burning in his veins as his body fought to resist it. The silver flame of his chi rose in his wounds, each streaming dark chi like black smoke, repelled by the Necromantic Shield spell he had cast on the way to the di Lzander home. Its beaks slashed and bit three more times, twice striking his flesh but not piercing his glowing skin and the third striking his sword’s hilt less than an inch from his face as he pulled it free. Azrael leapt back into the air, a beak’s curved tip catching him down his shin to expose bone through silver fire. Landing sixty feet down the street he drew back his sword as the demon charged. Dodging the angel’s swing, it landed before him, ripping its four beaks down his chest and maggot maws striking at his face. The angel rose high enough off the ground to put all of his power into an overhead chop into the deep slit in its armour between its heads, where black chi bubbled and smoked. The blow smashed the taller creature to its knees, sinking in a spray of black to the top of the head set in its chest. As he pulled back for a second swing, the demon became a blur of motion. The angel struggled to block strike after strike, managing to knock aside its snapping jaws with an elbow, before its lower beaks bit into his sides. Pulling back, he brought his sword up to block two upper slashes as the lower beaks sank half of their lengths between his ribs and ripped. Silver chi puffed from his mouth like winter breath. The demon pulled its upper right beak across his face, slicing his nose and opening a large flap of cheek. He

Michael S. Fricker

58

managed to dodge a slash at his throat and brought up his weapon just in time to stop the reverse slash. Then his mind recovered and he realized he was nearing the limit of his life force. He leapt straight up, taking a slash across his left thigh in order to get thirty feet into the night air. Activating one of his most powerful regenerative abilities as a unified soul caused most of his wounds to seal, but that didn’t lessen his doubt. In an attempt to prevent Armageddon from inflict as much or greater damage upon reality as the Ragnarok, the Council of Powers negotiated rules to guide the final struggle, including that it must be fought primarily through champions. The Treaty of Armageddon made it Divine Law that any direct intervention in the Terrestrial Realm by the powers of Darkness, Light, Chaos, Order, or Balance, could be responded to with an equal or lesser level of intervention by any of the others. Darkness and Chaos had sent a powerful demon to kill the infant. Light and Order had sent him. On paper they were roughly equal. On the streets of Arcanica it was another matter entirely. The demon could attack three times to every one of his. The odds were not in his favour. If he failed, Armageddon would be lost before it began. “If you can’t destroy the assassin,” Athena had said, “get the mother and child to the temple of Xondra. Above all else, the child must live!” He had memorized the temple’s location in the huge city and its relation to the di Lzander home. He glanced toward the house as the mother emerged from the alley and headed at stumbling run toward the line of soldiers farther down the street. Her arms clutched her extended belly, her face a mask of pain splattered with blood. Patches of red soaked her grey nightgown and it appeared from the wet stain between her legs that her water had burst. The demon dispelled the angel’s Necromantic Shield with its innate Unravel Weave ability and was about to leap

The Blue Knight

59

when it noticed the direction of his gaze and turned about. Spotting its victim trying to escape, it launched two thin lines of dark chi from its right hands that crackled through the air, striking Tsinan in the back and dropping her to her knees, spread-legged and head bowed. The demon followed the bolts through the air, crossing forty feet before the angel swooped in, slipping his right hand and weapon under her knees while wrapping his left arm around her back, and lifted her into the sky. The demon sped after them, rising over the heads of the amazed Watchmen and above the street globe poles into the moonlit night, Brother Therus’s profanity fading into the gentle by cool, autumn breeze. Azrael climbed above the low houses of the neighbourhood and headed west down the street toward the Temple District, on the other side of the Central River, flying as fast his chi could carry him. Tsinan screamed. Black veins multiplied and spread, robbing her flesh of heat and colour. Her eyes clouded with dark chi. A massive contraction left no doubt that the baby was coming, her body trying to force it out before the poison made her too weak. If he slowed, he could use a prepared Chi Surgery weave to purge the dark chi and return her vigour. But that would let the demon overtake them and wouldn’t stop her advanced labour. He had to reach the temple before he was forced to deliver the baby mid-air. At full speed, he could get there in around eight minutes. A shape came out of the darkness and pain erupted from his left shoulder blade, along his spine. With only time for a glance over his shoulder, he saw the demon plummet past head-first, its upper right beak trailing silver vapour. Cold spread from the wound, alerting him to the absence of his protection. That decided it. He pushed himself as hard as he could. He didn’t know how it had caught them, but if it managed

Michael S. Fricker

60

to strike the woman in her present condition, neither she nor the baby would survive. Buildings passed on either side, few reaching six storeys, the river creeping closer. Across the wide, dark water, the domes and spires of the Temple District rose behind the warehouses, taverns, and inns of the Western River District. This time, cackling preceded the pain in his left hip as the demon tore through the flesh near the joint and ripped along his thigh and calf. Fighting through the pain and cold, the angel struggled to maintain full speed and stay on course. Because their flight was innate magic, their speed was the same. The demon couldn’t be catching him through flight, so it had to be using dimensional travel to get ahead and then dive on them as they passed under. Azrael had to keep his course as true as possible, but that didn’t mean he had to be an easy target. Tucking the feverish Tsinan under his body, he swooped down a side street and between the three and four-story of the East River District, heading toward the river in a tight serpentine course down alleys and over the flat roofs of two-storey warehouses. A glance over his shoulder told him the creature was close behind so he executed a series of random, hopefully unexpected, turns near taller buildings. It worked. His next glance confirmed that the creature had fallen behind. Tsinan moaned, then started thrashing as a scream tore from her throat. The angel’s firm, gentle grasp hugged her to him. Ice crackled in the air behind him, a dark chi ray striking his right foot, chilling his entire leg, and causing his flight to dip. His entire body shivered and his grip slipped on Tsinan as she screamed again. Fighting the dark chi weakening his life force, Azrael clutched her thrashing body tighter, swerved around a peaked, four-storey

The Blue Knight

61

building and flew low over the flat roof of a three-storey warehouse near the river’s edge. Ahead, low barges dominated the line of boats docked along the riverside. The dim light of Isis the Matron’s full face lit the river in absence of the brighter street globes. The thick cluster of galactic phenomena in Aldyryc’s sky turned the surface into a wide dark ribbon of colour. A clear reflection in the river, the moon shone high in the equatorial sky in the Hexagram constellation, only a few minutes from reaching the exact centre at midnight. Signalling the beginning of the Night of Shadows, the Matron’s rise at sunset increased the power of grey magicians, peaking during the Witching Hour and decreasing to normal by sunrise. The Night of Light and Night of Darkness worked the same for white and black magic. They flew over the boats and over the river, Azrael searching the sky above and ahead for movement while Tsinan suffered through intense contractions coming closer together. He glanced down at her in sympathy in time to spot the demon hovering just above the water below them. A thin ray of dark chi crackled toward them. Azrael rolled, taking the blast in the centre of his back, his celestial resistance to the chaos inherent in magic dispersing it. Fire blossomed into a massive, yellow-red ball immediately ahead. Unable to doge, the angel curled around Tsinan, summersaulting as they flew full speed through its heart. Heat reddened the woman’s glistening face but the manoeuvre and his Ring of Flame Warding saw them through unharmed. Water raced underneath them, echoing with Tsinan’s increasingly frequent screams. Azrael spotted the demon’s movement against the sky soon enough to avoid it with two quick rolls.

Michael S. Fricker

62

In his arms, the woman’s screams weakened, but not her contractions. The well-lit warehouses, taverns and inns of the Western River District rose before them until they could see the small crowds gathered outside and the groups and individuals roaming the riverside docks. A few pleasure craft paddled their way upstream toward Lake Epadun and the Reversing Falls that plunged between the twin volcanoes separating Arcanica’s upper half, known as Northport, from Southport, where the Temple District lay. Azrael’ had flown past the large rectangular temple of Xondra on his way from the temple of Athena to Tsinan’s home. The demon appeared in front of him and he dove below. Agony spread across his shoulders and up into his head as a sharp beak tore into the base of his neck, narrowly missing his spine. His arms weakened, the woman seemingly ten times heavier. The horizon flipped and spun as his vision dimmed for a moment. Shaking his head, he swung back to the right and poured all his strength into concentring on flight. The temple of Xondra was less than two hundred yards ahead. Through bleary eyes he scanned for the next attack, almost missing the demon swooping up from below and to the right. Twisting in the air above the peaked roof of a three storey inn, the angel managed to knock the incoming beak aside with his sword, preventing it from hitting his passenger in the leg. One of the maggot heads took a bite out of his left thigh as they flashed past the creature, its venom spreading through his body. The yards crawled, each precious second making him weaker and bringing the baby’s birth nearer. Ahead, the temple’s squat, solid structure beckoned with the promise of stability, assistance, and the completion of his mission. Two hundred feet wide and long, the four-storey stone building was surrounded by a ten-foot high

The Blue Knight

63

stone wall with a fifteen-foot high tower at each corner and two flanking the bars of the front gates. Two humanoid figures, one in grey and one blue, stood atop each. A moat separated the outer wall from the main building, spanned by a wooden bridge leading to a set of large wooden doors with four barred windows above them. Around fifty feet thick, the main building formed a square inner courtyard with a shorter building tucked against its western wall. Both structures had tall, peaked roofs covered by ceramic shingles with upswept eaves in the south-eastern style. One of the Temple District’s secondary streets, forty feet wide, ran north-south in the front with twenty-foot wide tertiary streets on the other three sides, all presently deserted. As soon as he neared the street, Azrael dove toward the outer gates. Tsinan screamed. The demon appeared from ahead and above. Pain lanced through Azrael’s back, a silver cloud exploding from his mouth as the creature and he passed each other in the air, the demon’s upside-down, beak stab piercing the angel under the shoulder blade into his left lung before tearing its way out. A dozen feet above the broad cobblestone street, Azrael swung his legs down and forward, leaning back as he descended, cloak flaring like white wings, a panting Tsinan in his arms, he struck the ground before the gates hard enough that his trembling legs almost failed. Dressed in sandals, loose shirts and breeches bound by wide brown sashes, the two pairs of shocked guards recovered from the surprise of an angel and a demon descending from the sky and raised their crossbows. Dropping to one shaking knee, Azrael lay the delirious woman on the ground before the wrought iron gates. “Get her to a sanctified area!” His voice came out as a gasp.

Michael S. Fricker

64

He rose and turned to face the landing demon. The world dimming and blurring around him, the angel raised a wobbling greatsword to the right side of his head, point toward his foe standing in the middle of the street. Martialling his remaining strength, he poured his faith into a challenge that echoed down the quiet streets. “The baby will live!” The guards in grey rang the tower alarm bells while their partners in blue, Xondra’s golden dragon holding its orchid embroidered on their backs, let their crossbows dangle on the their straps and ran down the rear steps to the gates. The demon charged. At the last moment, Azrael dropped his sword’s weight backward, down and around, thrusting the six-foot weapon into the demon’s lower abdomen up to the hilt, the long blade erupting out its back with black gore smoking and bubbling on the holy, cold-iron blade. The demon jumped back and gazed down at the hilt sticking out of its armoured front, then at the wobbling angel and it laughed, deep and hearty in two voices. Its upper right hand reached down, grasped the hilt and pulled the sword from its body, streaming smoke and covered with bubbling, dark chi blood. Still laughing, it gripped the hilt with the opposite hand, locked Therus’s compound gaze with Azrael’s, and cut off his head with a single swift swing. Silver flame fountained from the angel’s neck. The body remained standing, the flames turning to vapour as the head landed nearby and rolled up against the temple’s outer wall, then fell forward to the ground with a thud, the light fading from its open wounds and eyes, leaving empty holes. Behind him the grey-clad guards had the black, wrought-iron gates open and were pulling the woman through by the shoulders. Four crossbow bolts, fired from the corner towers, bounced of the demon’s chitinous armour.

The Blue Knight

65

The demon Therus tossed the holy weapon from their smoking, blistered hands. Pain was the creature’s existence, feeding an irresistible urge to share it with everything it met, but Pazuzu’s Divine Directive forced it to focus on its quest. They roared from all three mouths. Even the Heavens couldn’t stop them! The blue-clad guards stopped ringing their bells and ran down to join their partners at the gates. Two more bolts bounced off the demon’s armour and two blue Chi Darts fired from each of the corner towers, passing through its torso without effect. Terrestrials were just inconveniences. The demon Therus spotted a figure in the barred windows above the main gates. An alarm gong began to sound and the heavy reinforced, wooden gates began to swing inward as unseen hands frantically turned a crank inside the gatehouse. The demon Therus charged the outer gates as one grey-clad guard tried to close them and the other passed the screaming woman to the two in blue. Jamming a forearm between the iron gates, the creature grabbed the young human man by the neck, crushing his spine as the demon’s weight hit the gates, bursting them open. They flung their victim high into the air, the body striking the second of the four gatehouse windows. Then it fell, head and shoulders striking the bridge, before disappearing into the twenty-foot deep moat and landing with a splash in the shallow water at the bottom. “Get her to the temple!” The female half-elven guard in grey grasped her divine symbol and stepped toward the demon. She thrust the silver medallion toward the creature. “Taste the glory of Xondra, vermin of the Abyss!” Blue light bust forth from the symbol, scorching a fist-sized circle a few inches below Therus’s chin. The demon Therus sneered and stared into her feline eyes, filling her

Michael S. Fricker

66

skull with mad voices and images before decapitating her with a bite from one of the their maggot heads. Tsinan’s scream drew his attention to where the second of the blue-clad guards was disappearing between reinforced wooden doors already closing, the human man’s strong arms supporting the thrashing woman’s back and shoulders. The demon Therus roared and pursued.

∞∞ Inside the temple complex, the archmasters, grandmasters, and masters sleeping on the third and fourth floors sprang from their beds. Less experienced monks and priests, and the forty-one orphans who called the complex home, began to wake up from the commotion. But that was not what awakened Nicodemos, High Priest of Xondra. “Save the child!” The whispered words in Xondra’s familiar voice propelled him out of bed. In his smallclothes, the sixty-seven year-old human grabbed his belt and component pouches from the small table bedside his bed and his most powerful shortsword from where it hung among various weapons on the wall of his sparsely-appointed bedroom. With his right hand he grasped the golden holy symbol whose chain never left his thin, corded neck, voicing vibrations as he passed his blade before his body and legs to activate a prepared spell that clothed him in an invisible sheath of chi equivalent to full plate armour. Only when he opened the door did the alarms and hallways full of urgent movement register fully. This wasn’t a drill. The temple was under attack. Frieda Darugsdotter said as much as she appeared around the corner to the left. All along the hallway behind her, monks and priests in their smallclothes crossed to the rooms with access to the courtyard

The Blue Knight

67

balconies. The Sensei of Monks had her platinum hair pulled back in a tight bun from her plain, angular face, her sharp green eyes taking in everything for calculations that never stopped. Nicodemos didn’t know what to think of his new counterpart. He had suspicions about the death of her predecessor, a rigid old twit that he didn’t miss, but this wasn’t the time. “Perfection demands that we save the child,” he said with urgency clear on his wrinkled olive face. Frieda ’s tight freckled brow twitched in a hint of confusion only an experienced priest of her faith could catch before she nodded and dashed out the external door beside her. Nicodemus exited the door across from his, stepping onto the fourth-floor balcony. Frieda crossed the ten feet between them and leapt down the stairway to third floor in the time it took him to reach the top of the stairs.

∞∞ The demon Therus launched across the stone bridge, wedging between the doors as they swung toward it and pushing them open with the strength of their six limbs working together. Filling the stone tunnel with roars, they charged into the passage after their prey standing before the doors swinging open at the other end. All but the middle three-foot wide cross-section of the fifty-foot long tunnel’s wooden floor fell away, opening into thirty-foot deep pits that met on the complex’s dungeon level. Catching themselves with the lower two hands and his feet pressing on the walls, the demon Therus thrust their upper hands under the iron portcullis rattling down in the center of the remaining tunnel floor. Wrenching it up, the demon Therus slipped under the metal gate, ignoring the sharp points that scraped his

Michael S. Fricker

68

exoskeleton and scuttling over the second pit toward the inner doors. Beyond the shutting gates, the two blue-clad guards carried the thrashing female across an open courtyard towards a smaller building that had to be the temple sanctuary. Yellow slime drooled from the demon Therus’s lips as they threw themselves at the doors.

∞∞ All around the city, the bell towers of the Arcanican Watch began to sound out midnight adding to the din of the temple’s alarm gong. In the courtyard, monks and priests lined the four levels of balconies forming its perimeter. Those on the lower two levels stayed where they stood as the two monks carried the thrashing pregnant woman into the courtyard at their best run, yelling in unison. “Demon!” Those master priests bearing weapons ran to the nearest stairs, descending from the third floor while master monks flipped and swung their way down the sides of the balconies to the ground. Nicodemos and Frieda reached the third floor balcony on the front of the sanctuary, joining the master priest currently on duty above the temple doors. A Dwarf man, Fergoth, sent by his people to learn more of Xondra’s martial arts and philosophies, his sapphire eyes glittered in his grey face as they locked upon the closing gates on the opposite end of the courtyard. Four-foot eleven and nearly as wide, the faerie’s expression as he turned to his superiors for orders said that he had seen his share of stronghold invasions living in the Underworld. As martial commander of the temple complex, Frieda issued her orders. “Commence defense pattern four.”

The Blue Knight

69

The dwarf turned and raised his hand next to his mouth. “Ring the Moon!” His voice boomed from the courtyard walls. Nicodemos pounded the balcony’s wooden rail with his sword. “Save the child!” Moving with practiced efficiency, the master monks formed two rows that curved around the north and south sides of the seventy-foot wide courtyard, forming a circle around the center with a path open between them leading to the temple steps. There, the grandmasters and archmasters formed double ranks, parted to allow the running monks and their screaming passenger a clear route to the temple doors, which they opened. Reaching the ground, the master priests took up positions behind the ring of monks, weapons and divine symbols readied. The two monks were twenty feet from the temple steps when the inner gates burst open and the demon Therus flew into the courtyard.

∞∞ Realizing that they couldn’t catch their prey before they reached the temple, the creature landed near the center of the courtyard, and threw their last crackling bolt of dark chi at the woman. Sensing the danger, the human man carrying her torso stepped between her and the bolt, taking it squarely in the lower back. Black veins spread through his skin, which paled and cracked as his brown eyes filled with darkness and he fell to his knees, nearly dropping his struggling, screaming burden. The rings of monks and priests closed around the demon as two monks took the stricken man’s place, lifting the woman and moving towards the stairs. Monks charged the creature from all sides, high and low, powerful kicks and punches enhanced with focused chi hammering it from every angle along with a flurry of

Michael S. Fricker

70

shortswords and other enchanted weapons. Over fifty weapons of blue qi – darts, axes, maces, hammers, and swords of all types – followed the charging monks, cast by priests lining the balconies while others blessed their allies or tried to curse the demon. The demon Therus ignored the majority of the attacks, most of the blows bouncing off while spells passed through without effect, but the sheer number of physical and magical attacks meant that some did get through. Each did little damage, but given sufficient numbers, ants could kill an elephant. The demon Therus was confident they could destroy these pathetic Terrestrials, but not until Pazuzu’s directive was obeyed to the end. Then they would teach these fools the meaning of terror. With a thought, they activated the demon’s ability to duplicate a Group Paralysis spell, dropping three-quarters of the surrounding monks and many of the priests, and took into the air. Those monks that could still move and reach the creature attacked, several scoring solid strikes that left wounds oozing black. Focused on the target, the demon Therus flew up forty feet then dove toward the open temple doors as the three monks reached the doorway. A priest helped lay the woman on the floor while another closed the doors. Blasts of flame, acid, electricity, freezing vapour, and sound filled the air. Hovering sheets of flame and invisible planes of chi barred the way ahead. Buffeted back and forth it flew through flames and chi into a more powerful barrage of chi weapons and energetic bursts, swooping in over the heads of the waiting priests straight at the closed doors.

∞∞

The Blue Knight

71

His spiritual sight fixing upon brilliant light of the powerful chi pattern of the demon and its host through the Fog of Existence, Nicodemos realized that few in the temple could hurt it. Even the most powerful spell, Supreme Reality Manipulation, had at best an even chance of affecting it directly, so he grasped his holy symbol, raised his magic sword, and prayed with swift words. “Dear Perfection, I sacrifice my most valuable possession to you and plead for your divine intervention to enhance your sanctuary’s Divine Fortification to penetrate the demon’s defenses for full expanded effect.” He finished as the demon flashed underneath and Frieda leapt over the balcony. The sword vanished from his hand.

∞∞ Diving over the heads of the mostly human crowd lining the steps, the demon Therus slammed into the doors, knocking the two priests inside to the sides before they could fix the bar in its brackets. The demon Therus executed a mid-air stop, touching down mere feet from where another priest and the three monks were delivering Tsinan’s baby. All three heads and roared in both voices. A blue nimbus surrounded the demon Therus as they tried to leap on their prey. The blue light grew brighter, burning away chitin as the demon inched forward. The city bells rang. The baby’s head emerged. Only the demon’s shape could be seen, completely engulfed in blue brilliance. Then the light vanished and Therus’s smoking, black, husk fell to the floor, head landing inches from the female human priest as she held up the infant and a male human monk cut the cord with a dagger. Stopping in the doorway, Frieda watched the three priests try to revive the mother with necromantic

Michael S. Fricker

72

Regeneration and Chi Surgery spells, but the dark chi and childbirth had pushed her body’s strength beyond exhaustion. The city bells and temple alarm fell silent. The baby cried. A soft golden glow drew Frieda ’s attention to the altar on the dais at the far end of the sanctuary. A fist-sized sphere of light rose from the top of the ornate rectangular marble. Making no sound, it floated to the center of the room where it intensified and expanded to form a tall, broad humanoid form before diminishing to its original softness, the colour resulting from shining through the leonine creature’s translucent golden skin and fur. A dark blue, silk robe hemmed in arcane sigils covered much of its muscular body and its clawed feet hovered two feet off the floor. Long, pointed ears topped its head in front of its think, gleaming mane above silver flame eyes. A mithral medallion engraved with the shooting star of Ptah hung on a gold chain around its thick neck. A clear blue, crystal shortsword with a curved, sickle blade lay across its upturned palms. Posture and expression filled with reverence, the creature floated toward the group before it, startling those busy with mother and child as it came to a stop, its burning gaze fixed upon the crying infant cradled in the hands of the female human priest. “Hush child.” The words rumbled and rolled from its leonine jaws. “You patron has brought your soul mate.” Grasping the crystal weapon by the blade just below its sickle-like curve, the creature lowered the weapon until the pommel touched the child’s forehead. The infant went silent, clear brown eyes fixing on the weapon and then its bearer. The boy smiled. “Behold, Logosien di Lzander, Champion of Order in the Armageddon to come!” Its roar rolled along the sanctuary’s stone walls.

The Blue Knight

73

It returned the sword to its palms and floated around the group to face Frieda , still standing in the doorway, her face an emotionless mask. “I am called Orycl, First Prophet of Ptah, Third of the Rakshiri.” It held the weapon out towards her. “This is the Champion’s Axiom and is his alone to wield. Take it and keep it near him always. They will grow together in power and wisdom. Teach him the Xen Way and, in his thirteenth year, set him upon the path for knighthood. Welcome him and guide him now and upon his return. He is Perfection’s weapon against Chaos. He must be strong enough to stand against it alone and wise enough to accept the help he needs.” Frieda stared at the creature for a few moments, calculating its possible vulnerabilities and strengths, the possibility of its words being true, and what that meant for her, the faith, and the world – but mostly for her. Alright.” She stepped forward and slipped her hands under the weapon between the Rakshiri’s long powerful arms. “I accept, but I determine the methods and subjects of instruction.” She gazed unflinching into the silver flame eyes. “Of course,” Orycl said. Then its telepathic voice spoke in her head. “According to the Way as interpreted by your priestly equal.” She nodded and then accepted Axiom from the Rakshiri, stepped back two steps and bowed at the waste. When she looked up, the Rakshiri was gone. She moved to where the baby lay and considered the squirming infant. “What I have gotten myself into?” she mumbled as Nicodemos arrived at her side. The High Priest sighed in relief at the sight of the healthy baby boy and then noticed the crystal sword lying across Frieda ’s palms. “What do we have here?” She gave a hint of a grin and a small shrug. “Nothing much. We’ve just become the parents of twins who hold the fate of the world in their hands.”

Michael S. Fricker

74

Nicodemos blinked in momentary confusion and the turned to the priests standing in the doorway. “Seal the complex! I want every inch of the complex and grounds Sanctified, with attached Chaos Ward effects, and covered by Divine Fortification spells at the highest rank we can manage. No one is to leave or enter the complex without my permission until further notice. And,” he turned to include those gathered around the dead woman and baby, “not a word of what happened here tonight. Consider the information sacred.” The priests in the doorway gave sharp nods, turned on their heels and began to walk away. “Close the doors behind you!” Pulled carefully from the outside by the two priests, the sanctuary’s large wooden doors swung shut on the world.

The Blue Knight

75

Appendix I: Time From Ptah’s “Astrology”

Ages of Existential Evolution

1. The Age of the Egg (>24 billion years before the Age of the Winds), before the beginning of cosmic time, the Age of the Ancient Ones 2. The Age of Creation (approx. 24 billion years before the Age of Winds to 20 billion years before), from the sacrifice of Bahamut to the declaration of Ragnarok by his mate Tiamat, the Age of the Elder Gods

3. The Age of Fury (approx. 20 billion years before the Age of Winds to 14 billion years before the Age of Winds), from the declaration of Ragnarok against the Elder Gods to the first Chaos Wave, the Age of Tiamat and her Abominations, the Great Old Ones. 4. The Age of Expansion (approx. 14 billion to 16 billion years before the Age of Winds), following the Chaos Wave the cosmos reformed to include a universe as realities spread into infinity, 5. The Age of the Council (approx. 16 billion to 250 million before the Age of Winds), the formation of the Council of Powers and the solar system of Aldyryc, the Age of the Young Gods 6. The Age of the Blood (approx. 250 million to 200 million years before the Age of Winds), from the spreading of life and the Draconic Empire of the Blood throughout Aldyryc to the rise of the Orcs 7. The Age of the Orc (approx. 200 million to 100 million years before the Age of

Michael S. Fricker

76

Winds), from the rise of the Murhkar Empire to the rise of the Faerie, the beginning of the Draconic Wars 8. The Age of Faerie (approx. 100 million to 65 million years before the Age of Winds), from the rise of the Faerie Alliance to the Second Chaos Wave, and the Fall, the end of the Draconic Wars 9. The Age of the Fallen (approx. 65 million to 15 million years before the Age of Winds), from the Fall throughout the Faerie Wars to the creation of the Bloodwood and the first Faerie Hold 10. The Age of Atonement (approx. 15 million years before the Age of Winds), from the Bloodwood to the arrival of the Numallean Humans on Aldyryc, the Age of Restoration 11. The Age of the Winds (From First Breath until the Chaos Wave in year 11,973), from when the Winds of Change, also known as the Breath of Yog-sothoth, deposited the first Humans on Aldyryc from the Old World of One Sun 12. The Age of Apocalypse (from the Chaos Wave until the Age’s 35

th year),

announced by the Third Chaos Wave, the End Times ending with the Tribulation and the Battle for Existence 13. The Unknown Age (Awakening, Madness, Nightmares, or Oblivion)

Days of the Week 1. Rayll (RA-ill) - 1

st day of the week, the

day of creation 2. Lokyll (LOKE-ill) - 2

nd day of the week,

the day of fire 3. Vulcyll (VULK-ill) - 3

rd day of the week,

The Blue Knight

77

the day of earth 4. Freyll (FRAY-ill)- 4

th day of the week,

the day of air 5. Posyll (POES-ill) - 5

th day of the week,

the day of water 6. Bachyll (BAK-ill) - 6

th day of the week,

the day of celebration and gratitude 7. Maryll (MAR-ill) - 7

th day of the week,

the day of meditation and worship 8. Ranyll (RAN-ill) - 8

th day of the week,

the day of rest and burials

The Months (based on six-week lunar cycle)

1. Shakrynn (SHACK-rin) - 1st

month of winter, the month of invention and family, the 1

st being the universal celebration of birthdays

and the New Year 2. Kelliggys (KELLIG-gis) - 2

nd month of

winter, the bleak month 3. Taalynn (TAHL-in) - 1

st month of

spring, the month of renewal and rebirth, the 6

th being the Night of Light

4. Taantrys (TAHNT-ris) - 2nd

month of spring, the month of passion and mating 5. Elrynn (ELL-rin) - 1

st month of

summer, the month of ease and comfort, Midsummer’s Eve on the 48

th.

6. Aurys (OH-ris) - 2nd

month of summer, the month of harvest and bounty, the 23

rd

being the Night of Shadow 7. Urvynn (UR-vin) - 1

st month of

autumn, the month of Tempests 8. Duvhynn (DUE-vin) – of 2

nd month

autumn, the month of darkness, the 48th

being the Night of Darkness

Michael S. Fricker

78

The Blue Knight

79

Appendix II: Pantheon The Council of Powers

Deity Incarnated Concepts Sex The Ancient Ones (Iggiggi) Bahamut Creation, Hope,

Sacrifice, Quality, and Generosity

Male

Lorril Shadows, Secrets, Deception, Illusion, Stealth, and Felines

Female

Ptah Space, Time and Prophecy

Male

Tiamat Entropy, Rage, and Abominations; Dragon Queen

Female

The Great Old Ones (Abominations) Azathoth (Cronus)

Chaos, Destruction, Madness, Massacre

Male

Cthulhu Darkness, Domination, Evil, and Doom

Male

Odin (Cronus)

War, Combat, and Berserk Rage

Male

Orcus Black Magic, the Night, the Undead, Terror, and Nightmares

Male

Pazuzu

Lies, Corruption, Disease, Sickness, Vermin and Vultures

Male

The Elder Gods (Zonei) Athena Wisdom, Strategy,

Valour, and Virtue Female

Freya Air and Wind Female

KI Natural Balance, the Faerie Queen

Female

Michael S. Fricker

80

Deity Incarnated Concepts Sex Loki Fire, Lust, and Mischief Female

Marduk King of the Gods, Knowledge, Magic and Reason

Male

Oberon Natural Wonder, Children, the Faerie King

Male

Poseidon Water, Rain Male

Ra White Magic, Light, Life, and Primary Sun God

Male

Rawna Queen of the Gods, Death, Sleep, Fantasy, and Dreams. The Raven Queen.

Female

Titania Queen of the Fey, Seduction, Rivalry, Revenge, and Cruelty, The White Witch

Female

Vulcan Earth, Artifice, Invention, and Craftsmanship

Male

Wicca Agriculture, Motherhood and Fertility

Female

Xondra Discipline, Order, and Perfection.

Female

The Young Gods (Anunnaki) Amon-Re Autumn, Harvests, and

Bounty Male

Anubis Law, Judgment, Justice, and the Dead, Speaker of the Council, the Celestial Magistrate

Male

Apollo Healing, Medicine, Mercy, and Secondary Sun God

Male

Artemis Hunting, Archery, Sports, Competition

Female

The Blue Knight

81

Deity Incarnated Concepts Sex Bacchus Happiness, Dance,

Celebration, and Wine Male

Charon Oaths, Crossings, and The Styx

Male

Furies Fury, Savagery, and Cannibalism (one per triplet)

Female

Hades Underworld, Toil, Despair, and Troglodytes, the Hermit

Male

Horus Protection, Retribution, Vigilance, and Vengeance

Male

Ishtar Beauty, Love, Romantic Passion

Female

Isis Gray Magic, the Moon, Cycles, and Canines

Female

Kali-Set Ruthlessness, Natural Selection, Serpents, and Chimeras. Grandfather of Assassins. The Merciless Mother.

Hermaphrodite

Lowyatar Hate, Malice, Pain, Torture

Female

Mercury Summer, Ease, Adulthood, Trade, and Wealth

Male

Merlyn Philosophy, Science, Magecraft, and Wizardry.

Male

Orpheus Forests, Flowers, Meadows, and Woodlands

Male

Osiris Spring, Dawn, Childhood, and Renewal

Male

Pan The Green Man, Witchcraft, Animals, and

Male

Michael S. Fricker

82

Deity Incarnated Concepts Sex Wild Passion

Satanael Oppression, Conformity, Slavery, Sophistry, and Politics

Male

Thor Strength, Courage, Victory, Speed, Messengers, and Horses

Male

Thrym Winter, Cold, and Old Age

Male

Xoll’X Intrigue, Plots, Ensnarement, Jealousy, and Arachnids

Female

Zeus Storms, Weather, Thunder, Lightning

Male

The Ascended Axvin Arvanx

Gambling , Good Luck, Adventure

Male

Hexxis Arvanx

Trouble, Accidents, Misfortune, Curses, Lycanthropes

Female

Shaykspyr Art, Literature, Poetry, Song

Female

Pandis Humour, Laughter, Jokes, Tricks, and Eccentricity

Male

Sirsyr Chivalry, Loyalty, Honour, and Obedience

Male

Sorvah Travel, Curiosity, and Wanderers

Male

Velkiri Equality, Emancipation, Freedom, and Individuality

Female

The Blue Knight

83

Appendix III: Map Key #

Land / Region

# Land / Region # Land / Region

1 Ahkracia 18 Cold Sea 35 Ganis

2 Aldyrrya 19 Crown of Marduk

Mountains 36

Gaxxidin Mountains

3 Aldwynn Islands

20 Crown of Orcus

Mountains 37 Gor

4 Anvil

Mountains 21 Dead Lands 38 Great Rift

5 Arcanica 22 Demon’s Reef 39 Grottar

6 Ash Desert 23 Devil’s Spine Mountains

40 Guardian Peaks

7 Assyrvia 24 Dragon’s Maw 41 Gulf of Kass

8 Barrier Peaks 25 Dunblannor 42 Gull Shore

9 Black Moor 26 Eastern Wall Mountains

43 Gyrrd’N

10 Black Sea 27 Ethernia 44 Heights of Eternity

11 Blood Marsh 28 Euphrates Mountains 45 Hermitage Peaks

12 Blood Sea 29 Fallen Lands 46 Horseshoe Mountains

13 Brilliant Sea 30 Fey Mountains 47 Howling Peaks

14 Burning Sea 31 Fiend’s Triangle 48 Innsmouth Sea

15 Caenyrvyn 32 Flame Wall Mountains 49 Island of

Terasques

16 Caltere 33 Freyan Heights

Mountains 50 Islands of Zur

17 Clouded

Peaks 34 Gaelland 51 Jade Mountains

# Land / Region # Land / Region # Land / Region

Michael S. Fricker

84

52 Kaankura 71 Murcia 90 Sorrvas

53 Kaldarian Empire 72 Murhkar, Northern 91 Spider Peaks

54 Kalvaala 73 Murhkar, Southern 92 Spires of Poseidon

55 Kassykoth 74 Necros 93 Spirit

Mountains

56 KI’s Circle

Mountains 75 Numallea 94 Straits of Fear

57 Konimbra 76 Ocean 95 Straits of Poseidon

58 Kordesh 77 Paholja 96 Straits of Thunder

59 Labyrinth 78 Plains of Kangg-Ara 97 Straits of Zur

60 Lake Avalon 79 Platinum Peaks 98 Stygia

61 Lake Fenrir 80 Raktargoth 99 Stygian Peaks

62 Lake Oberon 81 Refuge Bay 100 Summits of the

Kings

63 Lamzara 82 Rhokarga 101 Syrraqa

64 Lantana 83 Roof of Kaxxuun

Mountains 102 Tandros

65 Lyrnean Republic 84 Rovalla 103 Tangled Fens

66 Maldarvia 85 Salt Marsh 104 Tarkiztan

67 Misty Mountains 86 Sands of Silence 105 Tempest Sea

68 Mountains of

Absu 87 Shroud 106 Throne of Zeus

69 Mountains of

Anubis 88 Shrouded Sea 107

Thrym’s Fortress

70 Mountains of

Madness 89 Skull Hills 108 Thunder Island

# Land / Region # Land / Region # Land / Region

The Blue Knight

85

109 Thunder

Mountains 116 Valympur 123

Xanadu Mountains

110 Thurlund 117 Varlund 124 Yeti

Mountains

111 Tigris Mountains 118 Western Wall

Mountains 125 Ysstraka

112 Titan Lake 119 White Death 126 Zendar

113 Troll Mountains 120 Winterwaste 127 Zhyatis

114 Ull’s Mountains 121 World’s Edge

Mountains

115 Valley of Mysteries

/ Shangri-La 122 Wyrland

Michael S. Fricker

86

[Style = Normal Block]

IMPORTANT NOTE

The total number of pages (front matter, body, and back

matter) in your book must be divisible by 4. If not, the

printer will insert additional pages.

The final page (front and back) of your book must be left

blank. If there is any print on the final page, it will be

rejected for distribution.

THEREFORE, DELETE THE TEXT ON

THIS PAGE BEFORE UPLOADING

YOUR MANUSCRIPT!