Chapter 1740 – One who held up Heaven [Lorelei POV]
Lorelei solemnly took the circlet from the table in front of her. The ring of artfully shaped metal settled pleasantly over her head, hiding her eyes behind the broader front piece. A smith had provided it for her on her request. It had none of the magical properties of the genuine article, be it the circlet of the Order or one of those that her beloved had provided. Still, the presence of the weight helped her focus. The metal was no obstruction to her second sight whatsoever.
She turned her eyes heavenwards, towards the knot of divine energy that existed all around the Sanctum. A quiet thanks was given to the Lady that enveloped and enabled it all. The Lady that had blessed her with a vision this morning. The Lady that relied on her chosen instrument.
Lorelei opened the door. A skeleton covered in ornate robes awaited her there. The undead were peculiar, unminding of waiting long times. The servant stood there for days on end at times, responsible only to listen to her wishes. Once he heard her footsteps, pale blue orbs lit in the unnaturally dark, empty sockets of the blank skull.
“How may I help you, Lady Varnik?” The skeleton servant bowed deeply. Skeletons, she had found, greatly exaggerated their gestures to make up for their lack of features. It was an unnecessary art for her, she could see his patient gentleness written into the soul still lingering in the flexible ridges of his spine.
“I need to speak to the Grim Reaper,” Lorelei demanded. “As soon as he is able. It is urgent.”
The words had the skeleton’s soul twist in surprise. It was the first time she had made a demand during her one month stay. “He will return by nightfall; you can visit his cabin the-“
“It is urgent,” Lorelei reiterated, calm but insistent. “I am speaking with the Lady’s wisdom behind me. There must be no further delay.”
“…I understand.” The skeleton servant bowed deeply again. “I call upon the Shadow of Death, will he heed me?”
Under the steady light of magical lanterns, the silhouette of the servant against the wall stretched. It grew darker and as deep as the furthest reaches of the Abyss. From a mere shadow, it turned into a gap in even Lorelei’s sight. A fathomless chasm, out of which the embodiment of the fear of death emerged.
The Grim Reaper stepped from the shadow of his follower. Not a cloaked figure was he, but a worn old fisherman, with wrinkly, feather-marked skin and a back bent from hard labour. Practical clothes covered his form, strong muscles faded into a wiry but still mobile form. That was the disguise the god had chosen for himself.
Old and deep, his voice reverberated in the corridor, “Then Gaia has decided that it is time?”
“The Lady insists on the end of my inaction,” the seer answered.
“Come along, then.” The Grim Reaper turned around and stepped back through the shadow. Lorelei did as suggested, stepping into the absolute black.
It had been a long time since she had experienced it: blindness. She was enveloped by magic so thick and uniform that her second sight was overwhelmed and left her incapable of seeing. It had been a long time, but she remembered. She walked calmly, trusting in her sense of balance absent of orientation points.
When she emerged again, she was under deck in a small fishing vessel. Big enough to haul catches for a small town, it sailed through the calm waters off the Yucatan peninsula. Land was scarcely visible. To Lorelei, it rose like a distant nebula over the horizon. The sun was high above them.
It was just her and the Grim Reaper. The god had asked no one else to join him on this monotonous journey. Did he enjoy the peace, perhaps? The hum of the motor vibrated under Lorelei’s feet. The vessel drifted on.
The Grim Reaper entered the cabin with the steering wheel, Lorelei still behind him. “What do you see?”
Uncertain yet, the seer let her gaze drift. There was no vision from the Lady, no clear guidance. In the absence of such, she had to forge her own path. ‘All our blessed Lady does is nudge those receptive to her signals,’ she remembered the words of her mother. ‘As Varniks, we are deeply receptive.’
Lorelei stretched her second sight outwards. All of the might she had been granted by her darling’s touch channelled into casting a wide net. Any traces of auras, any oddities in the magical fabric of the world, any- there it was.
It was thin, so thin it could easily have been missed, but it was there, sticking to the top of the distant waves like an oily layer. It was of a sickly purple, the colour of a king dedicated to a selfish mission, wearing shadows as it pleased them. In it swirled a merciless grey. It was not a colour of good or evil, it was worse than that, it was the total absence of any such consideration.
“West and to the north,” Lorelei guided. “I see the remnants of a terrible fate.”
The Grim Reaper turned the steering wheel. In hallowed silence, they went on, until they had reached the edge of where they ought to be. “I will enter first. Wait until I get you.” The instructions were clear and so Lorelei waited. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Fifteen minutes. After twenty, she sat down. After an hour, the Grim Reaper finally returned.
“Come.” A singular order and Lorelei raised her hand.
The air was sickeningly sweet in its stench of rot. Lorelei would have stood ankle deep in purple mud, had it not been for the pathway of white, bleak bones that the Grim Reaper had carefully formed where they surfaced.
The island before her was bereft of any life, yet it crawled with it. Every plant and every bacterium had been reduced to sludge by the disease, which had in turn penetrated deep into the substrate. Apparently it had taken on a life all of its own, forming thick stalks of inactive matter while other parts of the Purple endlessly devoured each other. This was no singular disease, but a swirling pool of it, endlessly churning.
Chunks of creatures swam on the surface. Feathery monstrosities shaped from disease, dissolving into muck that they had spawned from, causing froths of disgusting rot to rise in the process.
This was merely the outer layer of the island.
Following the elevated walkway that the Grim Reaper had made for them, Lorelei kept scanning the environment. The god’s scythe had cut down many foes. Many more hid in the murky sludge, their half-liquid states allowing them to lay low even in the shallowest areas of the lake.
Out of the disease rose structures. Walls and obelisks inscribed with great warding spells that had failed a long time ago, allowing the Giant’s Puss to spread ever further outwards. Only the outermost defences were designed to assure none entered, every other of the twelve walls that followed was entirely directed inside. Every segment ran more rancid.
Vultures of plague circled above. Always five of them, always circling, always watching, but not daring to approach. They could see everything and report back to their master. “I have made a catastrophic mistake.” Lorelei met the words of the Grim Reaper with the silence of a priest listening to a confession. “Not all can be or should be governed by a gentle hand. Huitzilopochtli had the love of his people. His methods kept together a vast empire in relative peace and stability. I judged him worthy of a trade – of a boon offered and a boon received. I did not do my due diligence.”
They crossed through the final gate. The disease there was congealed, more of a jelly than a liquid. Under the stretching surface, unborn vultures wriggled their half-formed bodies through the muck like an unholy mixture of bird and maggot. Serrated beaks devoured filth by the mouthful, gathering it in bloated crops. Purple on purple, the unformed monsters awaited for their turn to join those circling above. They awaited their turn to be angels of this disease.
Every layer so far had seen the two of them descend. It was like going down the layers of a vast surface mine. Had it not been for the walls, acting as dams, the upper layers of Purple would have cascaded down. Here and there, rivulets managed to spill over the barriers in thick streams.
This innermost layer was flat. A final walkway led to an open seal, the same kind that had been used to contain Nahua, scaled up to an immense degree. Despite that, it was broken. There had been no permanent power source to keep it fed.
“See the sin that I have not sought.” The Grim Reaper stopped at the edge of the seal and gestured for her to step forwards.
Lorelei caught a hint of it at first, saw it through the broken magical mechanisms like catching a glimpse at something horrid through all attempts of censorship. Stopping at the edge, she peeked over the edge – and saw.
The giant’s corpse was sprawled out. It, or rather he, was well and truly dead. Unlike the island around, not all that he had been had yet been fully devoured. Purple crawled through empty veins, filling pale flesh with a malevolent pulse. A humanoid scaled up to truly immense size, ‘giant’ was not a word that fit the entity. All of the underground of the island had been hollowed out to place its corpse there, in a lake of the puss oozing from its many wounds. Indeed, the being could have wrestled with Nathalia in her old form like a man could have wrestled with a grown crocodile.
Obsidian weapons were still lodged in the skin all over, some barely more than needles, others large enough to serve as a harpoon for such an enormous being. Obsidian was the chosen instrument of the locals, so its presence fit entirely. What did not was the white cloth that covered the corpse, so heavily enchanted that even the disease had only managed to eat away and stain its edges. The white cloth was joined by a red sash, covering half of the giant’s chest – the titan’s chest.
“Atlas deserved a better end.”
“I thought the titans were legends,” Lorelei muttered.
“They were – living legends whose deeds their spoiled children scarcely remember. Shapers of the world and of societies and beings none understand to this day. Gods before gods, perhaps? More likely, they had nothing unifying to each other on a conceptual level. They were each their own being shaped of wild magic, before Prometheus spurned the advice of his brothers and imposed reason on it all.” The Grim Reaper shook his head, his dark cloak manifesting over the human form he wore. “It does not matter. They are all dead, save for your Lady.”
Lorelei felt the call of the light. “I must descend down there.”
The Grim Reaper regarded her with a long, abyssal look. Fully covered by his cloak, his head was once more a mass of darkness. Skeletal hands waved, manifesting masses of bones from nothing. The skeletal bodies formed an expanding staircase. “I, too, desire answers.”
Together, they descended down the steps. Lorelei could feel the disease crawl on her skin. She coughed once and then death imposed its will. The fumes around them turned grey and lifeless, a dust that fell around them like ashen snow as they descended deeper and deeper into the titan’s grave.
The head of Atlas was a grotesque thing. Half of it had been eaten away by the rot, the other half was bloated. Where the bones were exposed, the surface was marred by trenches and holes, the disease eating away unequally at the endless buffet.
“Arise.”
The order was not heeded. No, the order was not heard in the first place. There was no soul to call back in this corpse.
“A dark shame upon my being.” The Grim Reaper stretched their path the rest of the way. “Do what must be done.”
Alone now, Lorelei crossed the remaining distance. She felt like an ant before the titan’s eyes, their sky-blue colour striking even now, that were overflowing with endless tears. The clear water was a mere note in the lake of disease. Slowly, she placed her hand on the pale flesh. It was warm, feverishly so. The heat came from the buzzing of the parasites within.
Behind the metal circlet, Lorelei closed her eyes and gave herself to the pull of the vision.
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“What have you done, Brother?”
“What I had to, Atlas.” The brown-haired man was of sinewy muscles. Had he spent more time hunting, he would have appeared more like his twin. “The Abyss must be contained.”
“In the body of a child?” The titan bowed ever slowly forwards, inspecting the babe that lovelessly laid in the stone crib. Green hair and green eyes, the gold-marked embodiment of the world soul peered upwards.
“She will not be a child forever.” Prometheus sounded lamenting of the fact. “I hope she will be wise enough to follow my example.”
“I hope that your sacrifices will be met with success.”
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“HE WAS OUR BROTHER!” The titan’s voice split the skies long before his axe did. The gargantuan armament, forged on the back of the Alps, slammed against the solar shield of the Apex.
With the strength of many gods on his side, Epimetheus pushed aside the titanic axe, then shattered it with his raw power. Atlas was not dissuaded.
“Face me alone!” he demanded and his brother by oath obliged.
For six days and six nights, they fought, and on the final day they rested. Atlas wept, his tears forming new lakes in the great mountains that divided the peninsula from the mainland. “I acted in anger,” confessed the Godslayer, “but it had to be done.”
“You had to confine your very own flesh and blood to an eternity of drowning and reliving his life?”
“It was the only hope I saw.”
“Hope… hope…” Atlas shook his head. “If it is your goal to drag all that is back into the Abyss, then you must consider me your enemy. I will hold up the new heaven in his stead.”
“Brother…”
“I am your brother no longer! You who possesses only hindsight are unworthy of it!”
The titan stood. He turned. His back remained unstruck. He marched west.
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Thousands of years passed in busy work.
The divide formed and Atlas helped forge it. His hands pulled the great leylines into their places. His breath moved islands. His feet carried him from one pantheon to another, always trying to retain the spark that his brother had left behind. In the end, he failed and failed again, incapable of performing his many duties. The divide that he was building made the world too small a place for a titan.
He marched further west, to the last pantheon that Prometheus had made.
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“Welcome, great one,” spoke the five-headed vulture. “I have come to meet you halfway. Please, indulge in the many offerings of our people.”
Atlas smiled. The vulture always approached him at these times, offering great amounts of nourishment that strengthened him for the journey. As always, he devoured it all swiftly. The more he ate, the more he realized how hungry he was. “I thank you for your efforts.”
The vulture grinned. “Do not worry, giant, it is my pleasure.”
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It hurt.
His stomach hurt.
His blood boiled.
His thoughts swam.
It hurt.
His stomach churned.
His blood was thick.
His thoughts leaked from his skull.
It hurt.
His stomach tore.
His blood was gone.
His thoughts drooled from his chin.
Mixed with purple puss.
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Atlas was dying.
A last sober moment of regret at his own naivety. Was the vulture, too, a creature that his brother had made? Why had his brother forged such a thing? The five-headed monstrosity sat victoriously on Atlas’ shoulder, gazing down at the battlefield.
‘I killed them,’ Atlas thought and wept. Great tears, so great they drowned the islands forever. Tears that ended the days of myth. The last of the titans, the one who upheld the sky, knew the little triumph that those that did not know magic would not know the tyranny of the gods either.
The battlefield was covered in the corpses of men and gods that wished they were corpses. All the food that Atlas had devoured had burst out of his stomach and drowned all that had fought his maddened state in poison. As the last beat of his heart reverberated in his chest, as the gods were devoured by plague, the vulture shouted a triumphant roar.
“I DEDICATE IT ALL TO YOU, HUITZILOPOCHTLI!”