The Wyrms of &alon

Of all the things I could say about what happened when I checked up on my wife and children in their bunker in the underground garage, nothing better encapsulated what happened or how it made me feel than this: I was now too big to fit through the bunker door. I could fit the tip of my snout in, and that was it. It was an unwelcome reminder of what I'd lost, yet, as painful as it was, it wasn't even half as painful as the tragedy playing out in that space I could not reach.

"What happens if they're not ripe yet?" Lark asked, in that innocent, insouciant way of hers.

"Why wouldn't they be?" I said. "It's been hours."

"Yeah," the singer said, "but… what if they're not?"

I stopped in place, curling my tail around one of the garage's support columns.

With everything that had been going on, I hadn't stopped to consider the possibility. But now…

Angel's mercy…

To my horror, I found myself worrying that my family wouldn't be ripe.

What a thing to say!

But, gosh and glory, the threat was real. Would I be able to keep my family safe if the Vyxit attacked again?

"You fended them off before," Mr. Himichi said.

"But what if they come back in even greater numbers?" I asked. "What then?"

My spirits stared at me.

I shook my head.

"No, I don't want to think about that."

I waved my claw at them dismissively and slithered forward. I had to see for myself.

Oh God…

The "good" news? Their conditions had worsened.

The bad news? They hadn't worsened enough.

I had to turn off my wyrmsight to keep myself from going into conniption fits as I thought of all the ways all the fungus spreading through Jules' and Rayph's bodies would make them suffer. They hadn't even started to lose their memories yet; I could see that the fungus' aura had yet to penetrate their blood-brain barriers.

They weren't ripe yet.

Not only was I yet unable to save them, I still had to look forward to watching my own flesh and blood sink into the indescribable terror of &alon's sick, twisted scheme, suffering in agony without understanding why, without any of the connections of memories and love that made human suffering even the least bit less unbearable.

But the worst part?

Pel.

She…

She wasn't ripe, either. Her mind was going. She was lapsing in and out of a comatose state, speaking in a half-coherent gabblement that, even now, is still almost too painful to recall.

Yet she still wasn't ripe, only almost there. Almost, but not quite.

I swung my forepart about, curling in frantic circles, huffing and puffing, knocking aside vehicles with swipes of my tail.

Even my kids could tell we were screwed.

Jules coughed. She shuddered, moaning in agony. "Dad…? What's wrong?"

I froze for a second, then darted toward the bunker's entrance and locked my eyes on her.

My baby girl…

I can't bear seeing you guys like this, I spore-wrote.

I couldn't bear telling them the truth, either…

No!

I shook my head.

"Dad?" Jules asked again.

I wrote the horrid truth.

You're not ripe yet. Not you, not your brother, not your mother. I don't know if there will be enough time for you to ripen before the Vyxit attack us again.

Slithering out of the bunker, I went across to the opposite corner of the garage where I coiled up like a stack of spoiled onion rings, with my lumpy head drooping into the shadowed pit at my windings' center.

Even without looking, I knew a small crowd of my ghosts had gathered around me, just as I knew what they wanted to ask, and why. The spirits stood in worried silence, watching me from the outside in.

"What am I supposed to do?" I muttered. The garage's concrete reverberated with my plangent solo.

"Genneth…" Mr. Himichi said, gently. "You still have time."

I shook my head. "No, I don't!"

"Ask &alon to do it!" Ileene said. "Maybe she can accelerate their infections."

To my shock, I actually did just as Ileene had suggested. As furious and disgusted by &alon as I was, my desperation was even greater.

&alon's response came quickly. I felt it as much as I heard it. The message seemed to reverberate down my spine.

Now you know why I'm sad, she said, in something beyond words. I can't save people fast enough. Now, we'll be sad together. Forever and ever and ever.

She was as heartbroken as I was.

Angel, it felt blasphemous. How dare she try to share in my grief!

Oh… who was I kidding?

And then, Suisei said something that made my body sing, like a chord. He stood with his arms crossed, leaning against a wall.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"There might be a way…"

I looked at him, and he looked at me.

"You're asking for a miracle, you do realize that, don't you?" Nina said.

Her timing couldn't have been better: a miracle was exactly what the doctor had ordered.

"The Sword." Suisei and I spoke the word in unison. After all, I had all of his thoughts at my disposal.

Suisei nodded. "Time dilation—well, contraction."

"What?" Ileene asked.

"Altering the passage of time," he explained. "Speeding its flow along, or making it slow to a crawl."

Nina stuttered in astonishment. "Can you even do that?"

"It happens whenever anything moves," Suisei said. "When an object—such as a person—undergoes an acceleration, the time around them moves more quickly. To everyone else, it seems as if time is passing for the accelerating object at a slower rate. This is called time dilation."

"That's ridiculous," Ileene said.

"But it's the truth," Suisei replied. "The only reason it seems absurd is because the time dilation caused by the physical forces we experience in everyday life is extremely small, effectively imperceptible. But if you traveled at a quarter of the speed of light? Then, you'd notice it."

"Doesn't light travel very, very fast, though?" Ileene said.

Suisei nodded. "Yes. And you need immense amounts of energy to travel at comparable speeds. For that reason, practical use of time dilation—pataphysically or otherwise—has been mostly theoretical. It's the stuff of myth."

"As is the Sword," I said, unravelling my coils.

"Yes," Suisei said. "Though it's purely conjectural, with the Sword in hand, you just might be capable of accelerating the passage of time around your wife and children, ripening them in moments."

"This is kinda crazy, no?" Lark asked.

"Not more than anything else," I said, with a shake of my head.

I exhaled, flexing my claws. "Well, that settles it. I'm going to get the Sword of the Angel. That's how I'll fix everything. Beast's teeth, if I have to, I'll use Kléothag's power to set things right!"

I slithered toward the entrance.

"Will that even work?" Ileene asked.

I glanced back at her. "I don't know, but… I have to try. The gods have failed me. All I have left is myself." I flexed my spines and looked up the exit ramp, toward the setting Sun. "I just hope that will be enough."

— — —

I took flight without much ado, considering what I was about to do. I could imagine the conversation playing out between Pel and I, had we still living the lives we'd once known.

"Pel, I'm going out to do an errand, I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Will you be going down to WeElMed? We could use more mouthwash."

"No, I won't be going to the hospital. I'm going to retrieve the Sword of the Angel."

Actually, you know what? Scratch that. No, I couldn't imagine it playing out.

I was just some guy; a dorky neuropsychiatrist with a messiah complex and a three-foot thick façade of forced optimism. But the Sword… it was the stuff of myth and miracle, the sort of thing that boiled banality away like dew before flame, until only the legends remained.

I'd slithered up into the air, and was about to rocket off toward the Sword's last known coordinates when Brigadier General Watterson came swimming toward me, eyes wide.

"Genneth!"

Fudge.

"What is it?" I asked.

She turned her head toward the horizon and tilted it upward. "Look!"

I looked up and zoomed in.

One of the Vyx motherships was firing its engines. Blue flames licked at its rear end, pushing the ship down toward the ground. Swarms of Vyx modules took flight. The spreading swarms glittered like tinsel in the dying sunlight.

I extrapolated their trajectory based on what I'd seen so far.

Fudge fudge fudge fudge fudge.

"They're heading toward us, aren't they?" I asked.

That, and/or Greg.

"That's what we're thinking," she said, glancing back at our forces in the ruined fort.

"H-How long do we have, do you think?" I asked.

She glanced up at the ships. "Maybe fifteen minutes, if we're lucky. Probably less." She shook her head and then turned back to face me. "Where are you going all of a sudden? We're going to need all the help we can get!"

To my everlasting shame, for a moment, I pondered running away. I could try to take Pel and the kids and flee, if only to protect them from being destroyed by the inbound carnage.

But what point would that serve? Not only would I be abandoning my newfound allies to face the Vyxit on their own, but I'd be forsaking the very safety in numbers that was my family's best chance of making it through the imminent battle in one piece.

Fudge me up the axe, I didn't just need to get the Sword to save my family; I needed it to save us all.

All the more reason to get going!

I shook my head. "I'm going in search of a miracle, Brigadier General. I'll be back as soon as I can."

Then I turned away and rocketed off, even as Amity called my name. She tried chasing after me at first, but I used my size to my advantage.

"Genneth!"

The bigger the wyrm, the stronger their powers.

I gathered a second layer of flight magic around myself, spooling its blue and gold threads. I let power scream through it as I pulled it taut. The magic whirled; it flared like a beacon.

I shot forward like a thunderclap, leaving sonicbooms echoing in my wake.

Using Suisei's memories as my guide, I cross-referenced what he remembered with the abundant details of the many maps of the region my wyrm memory had pulled up from all the maps I'd gawked at as a kid. I flew low to the ground, as close to the fungal tree line as possible without crashing into it. At my normal flight speed, it would have taken me the better part of half-an-hour to get to my destination, but with my supercharged flying powers, it took about six minutes before I knew I'd arrived at the right place.

It was just after passing over a range of hills desperately trying to be mountains that I caught sight of it. You'd think the "it" would be the Sword, but no, it wasn't.

I set blue and gold streaming out in two grand wings at either side of my body. Like sails, the sheets of energy caught the air, slowing my flight down from its super speed. Soon, I came to a stop, my arms loose at my sides.

"By the Angel…" I muttered. All my ghosts watched.

There was a hole in the world on the other side of those hills. A Pit.

Words barely did the thing justice.

Someone or something had speared a wound into the earth by. From where I was, a couple hundred feet above it, it seemed as wide as a third of the sky. It swallowed the cypress-woven hills, leaving a gap in the horizon.

I could see the sea through the gap.

Where the ocean met the Pit, the water spilled over its edge in a waterfall almost too wide to be real, and whose torrents exploded into steam the instant they passed into the darkness. The billowing clouds kindled like paper, eaten away in expanding spheres of softly glowing embers that burned and burned until even the light itself had burned away.

A shard of memory crossed my awareness. I pictured the wound in the air that had brought Yuta to my world and time.

"It's the same," he said. "Just… so much worse. Daikenja preserve us."

Of course it was. Just as it was the same as the window in the air that had appeared in the lobby of Ward E through which Geoffrey and the others had stepped into the future from the Lightsbreath of yore.

I had to close my third pair of eyes, as even looking at the Pit's darkness caused me pain. To look at it was to feel toothed threads rasp across my golden eyes. It was like it was trying to rip my eyes out, optic nerves at all. I pulled away from the Pit; the reaction was almost instinctive. Just being near the darn thing left me dizzy and vertiginous.

It didn't just want my eyes. It wanted my everything. Even now, it was leaching my vitality away. Daring to look through my third pair of eyes, I watched as the fibers of flight magic unravel and fray. They spooled down into the dark, like so much rope tossed into the abyss.

Much like the Darkness of the rising Night, the Pit was feeding on me.

"Once, I dreamed I was lost in the sea of worlds beyond the wall of Night," Mr. Himichi said.

"That was part of the dream that inspired you to write Cat, right?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "But… I never imagined it would become reality."

Within me, Dzrtk watched, silent and terrified.

"This Darkness," Ileene said, "it must make tears between worlds."

"Maybe, maybe not," I said. "I seriously doubt this Pit is here by accident."

"I agree," Suisei said. "The Sword is here; it's too much of a coincidence for the Pit to be here by accident. But… why did the Sword draw it here? Did the Darkness come for the Sword, perhaps drawn by its power? Did the Sword itself create the Darkness? Or did it make the Pit, only for the Darkness to somehow find its way through?"

"I don't know," I whispered.

"Genneth," Suisei said, "you have to get closer. You won't be able to reach the Sword from here."

"The Sword?" Mr. Himichi asked. "It's here?"

"Yes," Suisei answered.

"Maybe I can use my powers to get it from a distance?" I asked.

"No," Nina said. "You saw what happened when you tried to use your powers against the Shadows in Springfield. They just absorbed it."

I shook my head, agitatedly flicking my tail. "I guess there's no other alternative."

Aiming downward, I began my descent. I flew around the Pit's edge, moving counterclockwise, toward the sea.

I pointed at the beach as it came into view.