The Wyrms of &alon

Below, a digital billboard stood beside the Expressway where the Expressway curved away from the sand. It was the billboard Suisei had seen upon arriving in my world, though it was now advertising soda pop, rather than Monimega.

"There, that's the billboard," Suisei said.

But what I saw made me come to a standstill, leaving me hovering in the air like an oversized scribble.

Lark made mantras out of her expletives.

The land below us was… pristine. The trees, the grass, the wind sculpted stones; all across the world, &alon had corrupted intimate details like these, wiping them off the face of the earth, but here, they were intact, perfect and unharmed. It would have made for a lovely postcard photo, were it not for the narrow rifts of bottomless darkness scarring the ground. The same rifts had been present in and around Springfield, but there, they'd been scattered haphazardly, like so many claw marks. Yet here, there was an order to them: the logic of a shape: spirals; broken, broken spirals, traced out by the rifts, one segment at a time. The spirals converged at a single point on the beach, the very spot of the last piece of God still living on my world. A sparse crowd of candlelight ghosts floated around the rifts, flickering unsteadily

But why had they gathered there? Had the Darkness brought them, or had they come of their own will, if they even still had any?

I felt &alon's fear rake over my thoughts. Now that I understood enough to make some sense of what I was seeing, I realized she'd written her fear onto the very earth itself. The fungus-twisted lands surrounding the little patch of perfection came up to its edge, and went no further. Shamblers and fungal blooms lay in repose by that edge, silent and unmoving. Their bodies were gray and ashen, and half-crumbled, like sandcastles or cigarettes.

I slowed my flight further as I began my final descent. The landing was surprisingly gentle. Even with nearly half a mile between myself and the Pit, its unholy chill was still lapping at my back. It tugged at me, ever so slightly, though the sensation wasn't anywhere near as intense as it had been when I'd been up in the air. Wild grasses brushed my flanks and underbelly like the whispers of the waves that lapped at the sand of the base of the hill.

Sunset had risen. The sky was the color of alien blood, and the wind was unnaturally cold. Even the silence seemed to be watching my every move.

"I would get this over with as quickly as possible," Suisei said.

Obviously.

I slithered forward, nervously, like an inchworm, slowly scraping across the grass. I stopped the instant my scutes touched the first stretch of sand.

All of the candlelight ghosts had turned to face me. They were floating offerings of burnt souls, streaming up in many colors, pulsing, flaming, dissolving upward like silent screams. I stood there, frozen in terror; the spirits did the same. Then I crept a foot forward, and the ghosts responded, rotating in place.

I moved forward, and they turned. Their featureless faces followed me, compass needles turning toward their north. They never budged from their places, not even by an inch. They only ever turned. Turning and turning.

I slowed my slither to a crawl. I wanted to shut my eyes, but the thought of getting attacked by these dark sentinels when I wasn't looking scared me even more than their auroral forms' flickering presence. Fear twitched through my mane of spines. The phantoms' gazes scarred burning cold down my back.

More ghosts appeared as I approached the epicenter, flickering into being in between their brethren, my trepidation slowing my progress even further. But, mercifully, I made it through, tugging my tail free as I flopped into the bare, sandy clearing at the heart of the spiral. I had to curl my body onto itself just to have a chance of fitting inside it, surrounded as I was by the strange spirits. I started turning myself in circles, sweeping myself across the sand until a smooth, cold lump scraped against my underbelly.

All my spirits waited with bated breath.

With infinite caution, I pulled myself back, coiled around the lump, and ever so slowly lowered my forepart over the disk-shaped patch of sand until I was bracing myself on the grains with my elbows. And then, I dug. I used my claws, shoving sand out of the way. I was terrified of what would happen if I flicked any of the sand at the spirits.

I stopped as I saw-heard a metallic screech. Turning my hand, I brushed the sand off with the backs of my fingers to reveal a hunk of metal that had no earthly business being there.

Then again, neither had Suisei.

Dr. Horosha's tin dais was still embedded in sand, right where he had left it, though now with a deep scratch in it, courtesy of yours truly.

I dug into the ground beside the dais, gently pushing the sand out of the way. A couple of seconds in, my claw brushed against something hard. An electric jolt rocketed up my arm.

If I still had teeth, I would have gritted them.

I clasped and I pulled and the Sword came free.

I couldn't believe it.

I held it up, turning it side to side.

Scripture didn't do the Sword justice. Even the sight of it in Suisei's memories was a far cry from holding the wonder in my grip.

It was small in my grip, a knife of twining silver, or a burning diamond, and touching it had brought it to life. Yes, the silvery curls of its blade of twining, opalescent fronds were matted and tarnished, but, in my wyrm-sight, the Sword was incandescent, swathed in fractal flames that burned in colors the human eye could never understand. Just holding it made it hum, and its light was its sound, and its sound was its light. Legions of spirits within me chorused in prayer, beholding the Holy Sword through my unholy eyes.

Countless spells stuck out from its core like little pataphysical tabs.

"What are those?" I asked.

"They're the 'presets' I told you about," Suisei explained. "Don't touch the scary-looking ones. Those are… they're the powers of the gods."

"The rift-making ability?"

"Yes, and who knows what else," Suisei said.

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Now that was a sobering thought.

To my shock, the Sword grew as I held it, but only to my first pair of eyes. What was the now-giant Sword in visible light was merely an extension of its inner power. The blade itself—its true body—hadn't changed.

Without warning, agony tore into me from behind. An unknown force pulled me back, plucked the Sword from my grasp, and sent me toppling backward onto the sand.

I rolled onto my belly and reached out and grabbed the Sword off the beach. It greeted my touch with another electric jolt.

The supernal fire within it roared back to life.

I looked up.

The candlelight ghosts were finally moving. Their bodies reified as they approached, thickening and darkening until they were a horde of man-shaped holes in the fabric of existence, engulfed in impossible flames that burned in colors from somewhere over the rainbow.

The shadows…

To look at them was to stare down a sandstorm. Static danced across my field of vision. Every glance stung. The rifts' bottomless depths spread toward me, slicing through the beach and into the sea. Sand and water cascaded into the ravines, bursting in color and fire. My vision became a shower of radiation.

I took flight, and the shadows pounced. They stretched up and up, becoming impossibly thin; lances swathed in prismatic flames. I wove back and forth to dodge them. I tugged my tail through the air to yank myself out of a lance's path of a lance, evading it.

I roared.

Pain screamed across my hide, as if grazed off by a current of bullets.

How was that possible?! The lance hadn't hit me!

Dark fire and radiation snapped and cracked as the shadows countered my evasive maneuvers. They branched and split and branched and split, spreading, spreading.

A tree of fractal death reached up at the Night. Darkness dripped from some of the branches, forming pools that hung mid-air.

Flailing through the sky, I swerved like mad. I leapt and lunged and darted and twirled, roaring all the while. I held the Sword closed to my body, clutching it tight. It pulsed between my claws with a luminous heartbeat.

The dark dropped, falling like stalactites. Branches stabbed into my flank and tail. The falling thorns grazed away sections of my hide, shattering the earth where they landed.

My roar of pain boomed, sweeping sound waves across my wyrm-sight. Entire sections of my body crumbled and fell away, dissolving into rainbow flames that evaporated with agonizing hisses.

The Sword burned in my grip. I looked down and saw that one of the "tabs" had stuck out, as if demanding to be pressed. I flicked it with a mental push. Immediately, sharded, fractal clouds puffed out from between my fingertips and the space around me folded in on itself.

Lives that weren't mine flashed before my eyes. They were pulled away from me all at once, as if a neurosurgeon was doing scrimshaw with my mind. I had to speed up my thoughts just to understand what was happening, and once I did, I wish I hadn't.

Souls within me were being destroyed, fully and truly.

I felt Ileene and Babra's horrified grief as Mr. Jed Plotsky was erased from existence. But that was just a drop in the bucket. Hundreds of souls had been erased, and my thoughts were filled with the screams of their loved ones. Even with my mind running on overdrive, I could barely comprehend the magnitude of the loss.

Falling to the ground in shock, I let time speed back up. My long body smacked on dirt, brush, and sand.

CRACK!

The ground rumbled.

The Sword's burning cooled. My bodily tissues shifted around, moving to fill in the pieces I'd lost. The fractal smoke puffing out from between my fingers petered out.

I looked up to see a ravine racing toward me. I tensed my body, tugging it into a sharp coil and sprung off the ground like a fungal spring. I glided forward and then hit the ground slithering, scattering dirt as I bounced up again, scooped myself up in fraying pataphysics and hurried into the sky.

The fractal branches reached up and up like spreading wings. They liquified, raining their darkness onto the ground, where it gathered into a lengthening pool that unspooled into an abstract serpent, swathed in swirls of flame. The rifts around me flared, geysering nothingness into the air.

The shadow-serpent took flight. It chased after me, dragging afterimages of its movements behind it.

I pointed my snout to the sky and let my powers roar, rocketing me up at the Night. The serpent swept upward in a blur, blocking my path from above. I reversed my flight's polarity, bolting downward and then flipped the magic back again and zoomed across the ground.

All around, the ravines widened, spraying darkness into the air.

BAM!

BAM!

BAM!

I screamed as I slalomed. Left. Right. Zoom up. Zoom up.

The spreading branches arched overhead.

No! Down! Down!

In my grip, the energies in the Sword seemed to pulse faster.

In my head, I screamed: How do I work this fudging thing?!

"If I know how," Suisei said, "then so do you."

Of course! I had his memories, after all! All that time Suisei had spent plumbing the Sword's mysteries was at my mental fingertips. I called on his insights, and they answered in kind, flashing loudly in my memory.

It is a resonator, like a tuning fork crossed with a loudspeaker. Its signals cross worlds.

I dropped to the ground as suddenly as I could and darted through an isthmus of land in between two expanding rifts, even as the earth crumbled underneath me. I hovered closed to the ground, rapidly accelerating and then shooting off and away. The dark serpent veered in my direction. It flicked its tail and hurtled after me. Radiation bolted out from its body like lightning.

I rocketed upward. The serpent mirrored the move, and then took it one step further by fraying its forepart. It spread itself out as wide as a river delta.

The hand slammed down, to smite me, and it was too broad and too long for me to dodge, and in the time it would take me to weave up a speed boost, I'd already be dead.

Thankfully, that hadn't been my plan.

Turning, I looked up. I faced my doom. A great hand of shadow stretched up over me. Its million fingers crested down, collapsing on me in a giant wave.

But in my mind, there was music. I reached with that music, opening up to the Sword.

In my hand, it gleamed like a newborn star.

"Genneth!" Suisei screamed. "Ordinary pataphysics won't have any effect!"

I know.

For all its eldritch power, this was an evil I'd fought before. We'd clashed in the twisted lobby, not once, but twice, and I'd won both times. With &alon's power, I'd rotated the reality's loom, banishing the darkness to a space beyond space.

And, though I might not have had &alon on hand, I had another power, now, one I'd spent a lifetime waiting for. The God I'd once believed in had failed my world.

It was now up to Him to redeem Himself.

Between the falling milliseconds, I focused on the Sword. I retraced the acts and thoughts I'd used to twist space's fabric with &alon's power. I found that same power within the Sword, instantly recognizing it for what it was. Even without a wyrm's memory, it wasn't a feeling I could easily forget.

I opened myself to the power, and whatever goodwill still lived within it. Its energy tore through my body like torrents of sand. But I was not helpless. I grabbed the power with my will, and with the Sword as my instrument, I shaped it as I saw fit. I channeled it, and let it sing.

Gripping the hilt with both hands, I swung. The arc was enough to cut open the sky, and for the briefest instant, it nearly did.

Then it blossomed.

Glory.

The slash exploded forward, launching an expanding shockwave of fractal eddies that twisted space and falling shadow as it stormed through. It swept ahead, making a turnstile of the air that blew through the darkness like a great wind, folding it away into dimensions unseen.

It cleared a wide berth. Pulling my arms in, I reached up with one hand and grabbed the Sword by its tip while keeping my other hand tightly clenched around its hilt. I gathered a cloak of blue and gold and let it spin, and with a flick of my tail, I shot off like a rocket, blitzing through the fleeting gap, faster than the sound of my sonic boom could catch me.

I hurtled away. Wind brushed through my mane. Glancing back, I watched the geysers of darkness erupting from the ravine fall forward, collapsing into the rifts. The rifts reached for the Pit, as did the shadows, which coalesced into a tsunami that raged across the landscape, erasing everything in its path. It hit the Pit. The nothingness joined in a silent crash.

I flew away as quickly as I could, riding along my own momentum. The Pit's rasping tug flayed at my belly and tail with its touch of ice and fire, but with distance, the pain faded, until they were nothing more than a memory.

I looked back at the Pit one final time, right before it shrank into the distance. Sunset had ended. The last embers glowered and then sank away. And within the Pit's bottomless depths, the Darkness broiled.