At the Crossroads
Faded Glory Jacket 100
Abercrombie and Finch, 2000
by Dark Alliances
By Jacob Malewitz
Iron Sword Games, OC
The light was golden and had an array of various colors to real to be a vision, to distinct to be a dream. I thought it was Ra again, or the demon within me that pretended to be Ra. If he was acting, then, he was very good with the details. Everything about him was ancient Egyptian, from the eyes to the lips to the tall hat and the braided beard. His eyes were what I noticed, that red glare in them, shaped differently than a man’s, more oval. Yet none of that mattered after he spoke. “You will die.” He stepped forward, floating on some golden sphere. We were at the clouds, and I could see sparks of lightning—it was Earth—but I didn’t care; I was angry.
“Who are you to say who lives and who dies?”
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t real. I yelled at him more, telling him as many curses and saying I’d been drinking too much the night before—and that was the only reason I had seen him.
I smoked. I drank.
The night before was a mirage of lighting and images of woman and bar stools and full ashtrays. Something had to be wrong in my system. I wanted to end the pain, yet every day I worked on making my pain greater.
It reminded me why I had been put in the ship, I saw everything in two ways—everyone died, everyone tried to escape the inevitable. Maybe gods, or demons, like Ra, lived eternally, yet, life wasn’t a pure joy for me and never had been, a peaceful ending would suit me, and death by unnatural phenomena wouldn’t be much different in the scheme of things.
The last piece of the vision came slowly, as though it were forced onto by something opposing Ra. There was man with a briefcase sitting, all I could see of his face was that it was pale white, and he was sitting in a chair in a cavern, holding off against a girl so beautiful that she aroused me just by a flash of her face. There was something evil in her, tempting, and I could see that the man with the briefcase was fighting himself more than anything. What was in the briefcase? I stepped forward. The vision broke.
What was in the briefcase? My mind jumped from point to point, trying to connect the dots but no understanding came, just more questions. The girl, who was she?
I understood Ra, I had those visions often, but the man with the briefcase was a new addition. Visions might seem sublime to some but I took them earnestly; made my days around what they told me. It was like telling a lie and never escaping it, these visions were. If I chose to put it aside it would wind up haunting me forever, wondering what would happen if I had acted upon it.
I shook my head. In the end, I wanted to see more, yet I had done that before, and the moments approached a madness I couldn’t live through. So, I had to drop back to the real world where things could be felt, touched. I was returning home, like a bird due north, and that was pleasing; with or without Ra I would be happy and find solace.
We had gone to Andromeda, on some technology taken from barren moons, something to do with a dead race; suffice to say they made long travel possible, though dangerous as ever. It felt like gravity, with a hint of chaos, being forced into sole beings.
The group I traveled with, were as divisive as they were unique.
The twins, Lara and Natalie, who spoke in unison, and were said to be psychic. They didn’t look like twins: Lara always wore sunglass goggles over her plain white face, and she was more apt to say things I really meant but intended to hide; then, Natalie, a tanned girl who was more attractive in a way yet was prone to bursts of violence—which Lara said was a result of psychological conditioning. The twins as a pair could have formed a rock band and sold to many albums to count, and likely knew their appearance drew interest from others and thrived on the attention for looks instead of their powers.
The ship altered course, and the girls jumped in glee. So young and these girls were like queens of the future, standing fast at the crossroads.
I looked over to the Space Marshal. He always kept his cigarettes close and his gun even closer. He was used just in case things went hectic, drank more than me, smoked more than me, and from what I heard killed more than me; he was a class act. And to further this, he was a former politician—and he was probably friends with my father, the greatest of politicians,—and not a hero. I thought of him as a hired gun.
The space engineer stood next to him, gloving some math book called Mars Prime that said divinity couldn’t be found at the crossroads of civilization, but in the search for other civs through math. A sketch of him might show the narrowed eyes (Japanese), the muscles worked so hard their were stress marks showing under the edges of his sleeveless sports t-shirt. He looked and acted more like a real marshal than Quentin.
And that was the crew.
I was more of a Keats poet who journaled too much than a space man. But society demanded things of me, too. No mistaken word good describe me, but I had asian eyes from a wedding my father never went through, guns of arms that showed my workmanlike heritage, spots of an angel in many ways, or the perfect Arian soldier if Hitler ever saw one, but I drank too much, hated too little, and hated living like the plague.
My thoughts on the mission, were that we were doomed. Our mission was a last stand, against the coming wars over humanity for possession of the small system we inhabited. These people I told you have compromised all that was right in society, all that was wrong on the roadways of thought, a confusing group to synthesize, so my father put me up there as I’d always been a universal type of person—and I would think of things they wouldn’t.
And I did.
Once in the Andromeda system, I made sure we left a beacon for the future colonists to find, if civilization were to fall, then, this would show them what they missed. Perhaps it would be thousands of years before civilization returned to space travel. My thoughts were that we had already gone through a dark age. Nothing new was invented. Babies kept being born with diseases that wouldn’t have scared any doctor, before, now the diseases were killing more people than the wars, as though we were back in the times before the great wars.
“Thinking?” I ignored him. I had been thinking all day. It had been the marshal who said it, but I wasn’t sure. Let me explain more.
“I was talking to you.” It wasn’t the Marshal, it was the girl with the goggles and the cool way of walking: Lara.
“Sorry.”
“Chaos is strong in you.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Depends on who you are. Anyways, who are you?”
I stepped back from myself for the moment, looked at the stars, and looked to the people around me, and I found my answer. “I am nobody. Chaos is the absence of God. And I think he’s been absent lately.”
“He. In the clips it’s a ‘She’.”
“Feminist bullshit.”
“Is that right.”
Let me say, Lara always turned me on, but our conversations were like lighting a candle in a barn, they didn’t show much in terms of importance. As I was saying, at that moment, and after we had hit Andromeda, the transmissions from Earth Central (which used to be NASA), stopped. Our deep space scans showed that something big had happened but it wasn’t still happening. We were looking at damage light years old. We weren’t sure what processes to take, I went with the philosophers like Nietschze or Kant, in that we had to think on a different level when looking into time’s scope.
We tried to use a radio signal, to send messages back but it was just a protocol, it had never been tested and it would never work—and mainly because the messages were like looking back at our solar system, they couldn’t communicate fast enough. So, instead of chaos, I enlightened them on the philosophers who were worth a damn. I tried not to rush the stories, the books I read instead of doing homework, but it wasn’t getting any true points across. They wanted math, probabilities, time travel, something to get us back faster.
My failed attempts at philosophy, grew even more grim when I took to the drugs we had been equipped with. I stopped journalling and wrote more madness on the pages than anything else. I couldn’t grasp that it was all gone, all the 401K’s and insurance agencies and governments were like a fly standing next to a mountain, they didn’t exist anymore.
The smoking came first and then drinking. I wasn’t sure which made me more violent. I dreamt of recreating mankind, like the monster Frankenstein, we would leave traces behind.
“We have to leave it behind,” I said to Lara, “so they’ll be like the monster Frankenstein finding those classic books and learning the language in a high form. We can leave testaments of civilization. And we can lie about its purpose.”
“Your either short on oxygen or reading that philosophy again.”
The marshal stepped between us. “I get what he’s saying, it just isn’t needed, yet.”
“And what does the mathematician think.”
“I think your right. But you’re assuming its all gone. We don’t know what happened, yet.”
The view of Mars came closer. We had stopped the exit plan and went to the closest colony. I could hear Ra laughing within me. He is winning, I thought to myself then, I am losing it.. I had the distinct urge to direct my next message as something from Ra. I didn’t understand what I was thinking—if that’s possible—so I went to the page and transcribed a list of thoughts, mainly on what we would find on Mars.
The computer lit up, we were closing in, but it was finding specs of solar damage all across the planet. “It’s like it was toasted with the suns rays, striking through the atmosphere.”
“And quickly.”
“Like a dream.”
Again the faces formed one, the first thought came from the twins, speaking in unison like they did in that odd way. Who said the others words I can’t be sure, though, I can tell you they said it with a pain under the visceral words.
We hit Mars atmosphere, the ship rocking, more and more computer generated close up images. “It went nova but only for a few seconds.” Someone asked if Lara meant the sun, and she said it was obvious she did.
No more money on Mars, it was funny, I would miss the gambling ventures to be saved by my father at the last second. I was reminded of Twain, losing all the money he had earned from Huckleberry Fin on some printer scam.
No more money to be earned, no more dominance by a hominid, no more absolute power.
I ran over to my notebook, filled with ideas, ideas too good to be wasted. I sketched an image of Lara and Natalie coming to the conclusion. The sun went nova, but only for a few seconds, could humanity have survived?
We hit the atmosphere. The magnets recoiled, finding something moving in the atmosphere, following us. “We’ve got a tail.” It was the marshal. “And we have no weapons systems.”
“I’m sure you can figure that out,” I said. “And why would they shoot us down?”
I looked back to the ship, a newer brand of technology, with the colors of silver formed over a cylinder shell.
“There are no people in that ship.”
It made sense. Robots were used widely on the arid plains of Mars. But where were the people. I looked at Lara. “How much would it take for you too check the whole planet?”
“I already did. It put Natalie out but we found no minds. No people.” It was Ra’s doing, but I couldn’t tell them of my visions, and if it was, if the sun god had destroyed humanity, I would find him, and end him. How does one kill God if he is already dead?
The tail stayed with us, we communicated, found they were the only survivors, and if robots could be excited I saw it in them.
We landed—waited—and through it all I was planning out how it would go, every fine detail, and I wouldn’t say anything about Ra being the culprit. We waited longer. The ship finally landed, next to us.
Natalie was still out, Lara seemed on the verge of going out as well; the marshal was armed, the engineer tense, and me, well I had my notebook of thoughts and ideas and planned to mine the robots for all they had for my essay. An essay? Civilization on the verge. No audience? Yes. A superman would do it.
When the robot left the craft, I could see it was an old Nexus model. The company had been founded by a game designer, who thought that the humanizing of robots, was the best way to leave a legacy. “We expected you. The Andromeda mission. We have waited a generation.” The robot explained it to us, a long story cut short, that, indeed, a nova had wiped out most of humanity. “We tried to send a ship to Earth, a patched together craft, but it was shot down my the Moon base.
The robot spoke like a man, his language had a touch of that Midwestern through-the-nose speech. “And it was lost.” He said a disease had wiped out the survivors on Mars. “We will die here, without man, without technology. We have tried to communicate but we fear that all that is left is a remnant. If man still exists at all.”
We went to their main city, a monolith of recycled metal and stones which kept the robots busy. We stuck with the same robot through the process, our mission had changed obviously, and we all had families on Earth to find. And we had to try and save what was left of mankind. I was reminded of the beacon we had left on Andromeda—and how long it would take before we could go there again.
“We have plenty of rockets. Only no ships capable of using them. You are welcome—“
“Would you like to return with us.”
“My systems wouldn’t last the trip. We will all die here.” I looked out at the mechanical city, no one had seemed surprised by our presence, by man, and it was obvious they had planned a strategy for our return. They had detailed files on how we could get past the moon base.
“I have one question.”
“Happy to answer.”
“How long did it go nova?
“3.2 seconds.”
I could feel the laughing coming within me, the crazy thoughts, and as we entered the ship, our destination earth, I couldn’t get my father out of my head. I had planned for man’s inevitable fall, but I assumed it would be wars, not the sun, and by taking the philosophers trade I had made myself a presence in time after time. He had planned it out that we would survive, that politicians would have a place, who was right was beyond me, and didn’t matter, so, I let it pass over me.
On the ship, the conversations were full of chaos, all in unison like the girls. Natalie had regained herself, and the toying words her sister Lara spoke were obviously influenced by her sister’s thoughts.
“—We have to find Earth Central’s new base.”
“—Why didn’t they want to come with us?”
“—The mission was pointless. It’s all pointless if its all gone.”
Who said what, on the ship, was a different question. The engineer determined that the math didn’t add up. Something else had happened. But, I said, why would the robots lie? Was it even in their capacity to lie?
The marshal. He was the stronghorse of the group, if we all went mad he would still fulfill his mission. What I didn’t know, was what his mission was. They had talked of anarchists and assassins and not trusting the UN group sent, America had lost its voice, it had found it in the western gunner. “We don’t need to know. Any of it. We need to bring technology back, we will have to lead.”
“You don’t tell a herd of horses not to run off the cliff. They won’t understand. We’ve been gone to long. The sun cleaned up the mess mankind had created.”
“It wasn’t a mess!”
“It was.”
The argument went more towards my style, a glowing euphemism of what mattered about man, what it had lost. “You guide them off the cliff so that they die with dignity.”
“That’s madness.”
“It’s the truth.”
The engineer. He explained the planets would realign, the robots would find a way to survive, it wasn’t about surviving, it was about continuing. “The ‘bots survived. If they could then humans could. A disease may have wiped out a small population, but it couldn’t have scorched an entire planet in its wake.” He went on, more on why math was involved, to the remainder, and the nova was inevitable but early in its course. He looked to be taking it well; he was stoic.
I let my pain show, if he was burying it then I would reveal it. The situation I found myself in, we found ourselves in, couldn’t be told through images and likenesses, even the robots would have taken an eon to tell. It required an understanding of what was really happening on Earth. Power. That’s what it would be about on Earth, a strange new legion would rule. And I couldn’t get it out of my head: the visions—Ra—and whether he was man or animal, god or deity. It was like playing chess without looking at the board, and jumping off a cliff into a pool of water, you wanted to take a peak, to check for the looks of it before you made a move.
The notebook. It wasn’t complete, might never be, but when trying to escape pains I found a solace in it, crafted notes on how the Great Wall of China might be affected by the nova, wondering what societies had been created, what had been unleashed. Did the animals rule again? Was man deformed? The robots could be the last breath of mankind, hoping against hope something survived, I was hoping, yet, it seemed the chances were slim, and if something had survived it wouldn’t be recognizable.
Ashes. As we sailed into the light of the moon, before we altered our angle, the missiles became apparent, and the lasers followed. My father had been a proponent of the moon base, but, no one had said it would be armed. Who did they think would attack us? What did they know they weren’t telling us?
The missiles came in fast, the marshal and engineer were screaming something. I think beyond the curses they blurted “This is it!” And when one of the missiles bounced off our ship and the other sailed right I thought we had been blessed, then the missile that missed turned around, it was keying on the rockets. “Lose the rockets!” I yelled, and the marshal ran over to controls, proceeded to disengage the rockets, and ran back to the screen where we were watching the events unfold.
“A dream within a dream,” the twins said. I looked to them. We were on the verge of destruction and they were reciting Poe? However, the words clicked, reminded me of my visions, was Ra right? Would I die this way?
The explosion rocked us, and we thought we were in calm waters, until the engineer yelled something about lasers striking against the hull. “How is it holding?”
“Those aren’t lasers. Something has changed.”
“Your saying they’re alien?”
“No. They just changed.”
The lasers rocked the hull, how it held, I don’t know, but, I could see what they were saying about the lasers being different. Had humanity survived? The space stations were gone, I noticed as the lasers shot around us in a fury. They had fallen out of the sky when the nova came, or something different had happened, perhaps shot down or maybe something beyond a philosophers understanding.
The marshal ran to the other side of ship, past the empty crates of supplies, stepped over my notebook, and to part of the ship we had never used. He hit a button and a shield went over our entire ship. At that same second, warning lights came on throughout the ship. The ship had lost pressure, in one of the cargo holds. I looked to the comp screens and saw warning lights throughout the ship. I wasn’t sure we would make it.
“You will die.” It was Ra, speaking from a golden bird ten feet from me. The others didn’t see; likely didn’t want to, there was no need to share the pain. A philosopher sees death in many ways, the loss of sanity being one, and I was on the verge just because of these damned visions. So, I decided to ignore the words, not to lash out as was my customary response. “You were a thief.” How did Ra know that? I stopped thinking in that mindset, I wasn’t insane, I was just special.
“What you know of my past, matters not.” He was right, I had been a lost thief in Paris for many years, so long ago it was like a lucid dream. I could remember every day, being down and out and not knowing where I could steal my next meal.
“Who are you talking too?”
“We are not alone. I can’t explain it. But something big has happened here, and it wasn’t just the nova.”
“You’re losing it.”
The words knifed through my heart. I was a philosopher, though, weren’t we all mad? I was put on the ship because my father pulled the right strings. I had been writing essays for a Parisian journal for a year when he found me. I drank. I smoked. It all went into my discourses.
The shields held, but every eye on the ship was on me. I tried to explain it in short, but it didn’t make sense—even I could see that—so I went into the story. “Ra was an Egyptian god of the sun. I didn’t start seeing him until our mission. He was more of a mirage in a dessert at first, a blimp on the screen of what I was dreaming. Soon, he took over my dreams, to the point where I wouldn’t sleep, yelling at me in some language that sounded Nubian. I translated some of the words, while we were going to Andromeda. He is me. That was all he was saying.”
“When were you going to tell us you were mad?” it was the marshal.
“He isn’t mad. He speaks more truth than you, marshal. What are you hiding?”
“Stay the hell out of my head.”
I looked outside. “I didn’t know we had shields. Were you expecting something?”
“I expect you to know who the authority is here. I don’t have to answer any questions. The only reason your still breathing is because of those shields.”
We continued our discourse. I was surprised the twins understood my plight. I engaged them in a conversation. Sometimes they would nod their heads, “You’re right,” other times completely disagree, “You’re very wrong.” I noticed there faces, so perfect, the marks of makeup which I had to wonder how they acquired, the lines on them which aroused me more than anything. And they noticed my voice was becoming an advance unto itself, and backed away from where I was leading them. I could see myself with them, then, I remembered Ra and all the other reasons I should stick to flying solo.
When we landed at the Nasa base, it became apparent there would be no warm greeting. Before, our sensors had found traces of solar light across North America, but it couldn’t see signs of life, and the twins were still healing from their last psychic check for survivors. We had hope. But, hope in the hands of a philosopher can elicit dark knowledge: Did we want to know what happened to mankind? Were we all that was left?
Again, I remembered the beacon we had left at Andromeda. All that was important in humanity over a few hundred blocks of info disks. Ra was watching. I could sense him when we landed at the Earth Central base in Texas.
The land was devoid of life. The white buildings held strong, still standing, and when we left the ship, which had seen better days from the damage it had received from the moon base. I heard the beating of the wind against the doors of the base, which showed little that was inside. We went in, through the computers, all the files, anything that would shed some more light on what had happened. It appeared the ‘bots were right, all the clocks showed a stopping point of a few minutes past three, the computers were gone, all we had to go on were the files. As the wind continued to search through the place, papers flying everywhere, it became apparent I could be of some use, when the twins almost fell. I caught them, laid them on the floor, as they spurted out verses I couldn’t comprehend. “What’s wrong?”
“There is much death here.”
They continued to say weird things, then I realized they were giving times, then, they started reciting names. The times were the same exact moment when the nova affected everything on the planet.
“Did they all die?” I asked them.
“No. But, many did.”
We left the base, began marching to the closest sitting a few miles up. The ground was different, an odd yellowy substance covered most of it, and whenever we stopped the ground would crackle around us, showing signs that I had been cooked. Then, I wondered what the other side of the planet had done, it was becoming apparent the Earth was only hit for but a few seconds, so half of the planet didn’t get assault with the rays as hard.
We found the taxi driver, dieing of wounds to the head, and it became apparent some people still roamed the barren plains of North America. He was a black man, big and tall, with blue eyes, and had been crying for some time when we found him. His face showed that he had been grimacing in pain for quite a while.
“I knew you’d come,” he said, “my father told me the story of the great explorers again and again.” He spit out some blood, and Lara put her hand to his face. “I never forgot it.”
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Europe. Africa. China. Lots of places. Not many people left on this continent. My grandfather told me it killed half immediately. The rest left these lands, calling them cursed.” He put his hand to his mouth, then touched Lara’s hand.
The marshal spoke: “What happened to the cities?”
“Gone. All gone. They were destroyed in the last war. People were hiding from him.”
“From who.”
“We don’t know who he is—“
“What war?” It was the engineer.
“You will find him in Sparta. The car still works, I just don’t. I can take you pretty far. I suggest you leave me—“
“We’re not leaving you,” Lara said, her hand still consoling him.
“I will die soon. One of his men attacked me for speaking my mind. There are still some people here. You have to go to Greece, find him, stop him. He controls them. The one eyed men. There is magic in the world now, honing the power of the sun and moon, using light; no tricks.
“I, can’t say anymore.”
“We’re not leaving him,” Lara and Natalie said as one, “we can’t just leave him here to die.” They looked back. Lara put her hand on his mouth. His eyes were closed and the sound of breathing were absent. “He’s gone.”
We were so used to looking at the stars, that driving a car looking at nothing seemed to leave us at a loss for words; we were as quiet as a lion hunting. We drove until the gas ran out, talking about what the man said. I found a small notebook in the back, a sort of history. It chronicled the rise of magic on Earth. He had been a blacksmith by trade, and his sketches were an insane amalgam of ideas to be honed into metals. Metal contraptions to fly on magic. Older broadswords that had a hint of Roman in them but were held together with magic rubies at the handle.
Magic.
There were spells to illicit visions from the other side, how to call warrior angels, it read more like a treatise on the occult than a thinking journal. Nevertheless, I took notes on what the man had said.
When the gas ran out, after our conversations on splitting up, it became apparent no city on this side of the world was where we wanted to go. The engineer had ideas: “We have to rebuild civilization. This is our duty.”
“Not anymore,” said the marshal, “now we survive. I’m not to walk into my own death. We rebuild we catch attention. We show we know something we get killed or taken prisoner. And the last place we’re going is Greece.”
“I am,” I said.
When I went on my own, I had no food, a little water, and a hand drawn map in a notebook that said the best route to the other side was to get an old preacher’s help. The preacher would take me there, I just hoped the map would help me find him.
The sun was beat read, the wind catching against my dirty clothes, reminding me that I wasn’t going to fit in with a style a century old. Walking. It wasn’t something a philosopher should do. Soon, thoughts turn, hopes rise, visions ensue. I saw this as they were, at that moment, traveling alone, and could see that Ra was going to visit me soon. I was going to face him, that was certain, but one eyed men and Greece? I didn’t add up. I could see the books on greek mythology sitting on my desk; it had been uttered that anyone interested in the arts should first go with the classics of Greece.
The flying machine coming towards me, reminded me of something out of a foreign film that made no sense in a translation. How could one fly in these times? It would draw attention, for one, and wasn’t all technology gone.
The flyer closed in one me, and thirsty, I saw Ra image at a throne room. The image of the Egyptian man was gone—and I never believed it anyways—and this image showed a massive man who could have been mistaken for a beast, had he not had a helmet and armor on. A sickly king was sitting at a throne, next to Ra, and there were all the white eyes showing under the helmets. Ra stepped forward, saying an incantation. I looked, saw I was holding a staff, and not knowing what to do I threw it at him, and the vision was gone.
“You from round here? You don’t look it.” It was the priest, he had landed right in front of me but I was so lost in the vision, that I had missed it. He was tall. A cast on one hand. One hand was behind his back. He was dressed in civilian clothes, but had the mark of a catholic priest with the white collar.
“I was.”
“You’re him. Aren’t you. The one old Dale talked about.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You look hungry. Let’s go back to my home.”
I walked forward and extended my hand, not to be polite but to see if he would show me was behind his back. He didn’t show what it was, extending his hand, in turn. “You’re a priest. Not a preacher.”
“I go by what the people want to call me. Religions aren’t strong anymore. Before they all left, my congregation were mainly Hugenaughts, Protestant types.”
I looked to the contraption, that obviously ran on some form of magic, perhaps inspired by the dying taxi driver we had found. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Time heals all wounds. Lets go.”
I walked into the metal frame that looked cobbled together from car frames. It even had windows.
But, I didn’t notice until we were in the air that he was holding a rosary behind his back. As we flew through the red skies, I decided to get his take on what happened. He said, magic was the new religion. “It gives them power. It used to be the drugs. The gangs. Now its magic the kids want, magic means power. In all my years, it never occurred to me we might find it outside the realm of a story. No one could have predicted it to be like this.”
I asked him who the most powerful man was, “a shadowy figure,” he said, “not on a pale horse, this one, more like a ship, and I won’t tell you what I really think.”
“Please do.”
“I think its an ‘it’, not a man. I don’t believe in aliens but nothing would surprise me with him. They say, he came out and attracted all the young men, deformed them, made them each inhuman. Evil.”
We continued our flight. “I want to go here.” I pointed on my map, noticing he was moving the rosary more with his hands, and said I intended to go to Greece.
“That’s Sparta. You seek to meet it?”
“I do.” I shut the book with the map in it. “What can you tell me of the magic I will face.”
“Not much. But you won’t be able to get across the Atlantic without me.”
The church. It looked like it was brand new. The paint had to be fresh, the stones weren’t even dirty, and the doors were solid oak without a hint of weathering. I asked him how he had built it, and he pointed to his hands. He said it was used during the last war, as a hold out shelter against air raids.
“How did the planes work.”
“The same way my flying contraption did. Magic.”
We went inside, he laid the rosary down next to a cross with Christ, and I noticed that though the outside looked new the inside hadn’t been used much. The chairs were all collecting dust. I could hear something, asked him what it was, and he said it was his fan. A fan with no electricity? I asked.
Magic. I was getting used to that word; it seemed to explain everything.
We didn’t stay long, he went into his room, I could hear him talking to someone and it took me a second to realize he was addressing God. He came back, went into a small back room, and handed me a bag full of canned soups. “These aren’t very good, and they’re cold, but they might help you in the short term.” I looked at the variety of soups, I was so hungry I had been moving my tongue around in my mouth for hours. Food. It wasn’t high on my list when in space. We could have ate three times our rations a day and still would have a healthy supply.
Magic. I wondered if it could solve world hunger.
We made out for Greece. It was too long, the process of blending the flying blades with some magic, so they would last the trip, and odd. He said things, while he slowly worked his hands over the blades, things that sounded funny to me, but likely were natural for him. When we were ready to take off, I watched him take the rosary out of his pocket, and hold it in his hands. I can’t imagine how he worked the controls, it was like looking at a keyboard in another language, yet he made it look easy. We flew up into the air. He adjusted the controls. Within seconds, we were shooting towards Greece.
“Tell me, do you still believe in the golden rule.”
“I have it pasted over everything in my house, son.”
“Oh. Are you joking?”
We continued to banter, me trying to find the words, the priest answering like he was sent from heaven to do so. I could recall being a major proponent of questions growing up, so much that my father would call me the “question man.” It described me best, if anything did. Life was an unending question.
So, I took advantage of my curious nature, asked him to teach me some basic magic. Take this, he tossed me a bag, “it is filled with the lands of America, the strongest of magic is found there. There is too much to teach you, but next when you are in need of help, hold that pouch up with your fist and sprinkle it across your body. It will form a temporary shield.
We were in the air for hours, before I saw the first glimmer of lights. “Are there cities?” He said there was. What I was seeing wasn’t a city, it was a ship, and he said we had to alter course in order to find it.
The ship reminded me of the great wall, man’s single achievement viewable in space, then, I thought of all the pain that went into building it, the achievement of a lifetime and most never saw it through to the end. If I could go back to any point, even to a time when Ra was king, I would go back to when they built that wall.
The statistics. They were against us making it across the ocean, on a ship of magic. I thought of the engineer, what he would have told us, “You’re just going to rush in there and chat!”, or maybe something from Ra. “You will die.” It was as damning as a poet who had fallen for his own words. I thought of it again and again, as we went through the ocean full of dead fish, somehow I thought the ones down deep were the only survivors. I told the priest we had to go higher, the smell was rancid.
When we passed over Paris, I saw a bustling city. “Magic is strongest here,” he said, “next would be London, then, maybe Rome. But, here magic reigns.” My curiosity was peaked. Yet I was bored, nothing compared to my visions—and no matter what magic was in the air and what people were doing I would find my answers.
I ate soup. Drank from a warm flask. Though of finding my father, after all this occurred. I hated the man in many ways. Yet, he was still the one who fed me during my childhood. Still the man who pushed me to do schoolwork.
Perhaps he had survived. His office was in D.C., but that didn’t mean he wasn’t on another of his safaris. He was high enough on the ladder to have been president, to have been the man with the black briefcase in the vision. But how did my destiny factor in? It was like calculating God mathematically—it didn’t work so easily. My father was likely dead. He wouldn’t have lasted. His type never did.
When we passed over Rome, the smell worsened, the smell of death. A century had passed yet the death continued. The black death had nothing on this Nova. Rome It was still holding strong. It broke all the rules in architecture, reminding me of why the Romans had lasted so long. The aqueducts could be seen, were in use, and the city was empty. What had Ra done? Where were the rest of the people? I asked the priest. He was reliable.
“They left. Too close to Greece. Too close to the one eyed Spartans.” He continued, telling me all I needed to know of the army I would face. “They fight old style, with blades, spears, the weapons of your time are all gone. There is no religion except the praising of him.
Over the seas, through the clouds, we continued on course, and I was starting to get sick on the soup and the motions of the flying machine. I thought of the ‘bots on Mars, and how their ends would come, and I hoped for an ending so peaceful. Though, part of me knew I was going to be at great risk.
I had questions. “Tell me more of the one eyed Spartans.”
He continued, whilst flying the craft, saying they were created by mages, men with power, but all the mages were killed so the secrets of the Spartans never came out. It was said they had a weakness. “But I wouldn’t know where to start. Except the eyes.”
“Why the eyes.”
“In the bible, the key to any demons power lies in the eye, cut them out—“
“Or stab them.”
“And you free its tortured soul.”
Greece. It was a land ripe with changes, it looked like pictures of Germany when the wall was still up. It was covered in them. Smoke billowed out into the skies. I asked the priest what they were building. “Machines of war.” I thought that machines didn’t work anymore. But, he said machines like his flying craft, were built every day. The Spartans weren’t smart enough to use them, or build them, they had enslaved much of who survived the nova.
We landed in an orchard, covered with grass and weeds, there was no real food. We waited. For a moment, I thought that maybe someone spotted us coming. None came. It was, then, that I thought of Ra. I felt the priest had gained my trust. I told him of my visions. “Great men have had visions, Paul was one, so did Abraham, it was natural. If this man communicates with you, he has a purpose. Look for the clues, the other forces, look for god while walking down the road, you just might see him.”
We shook hands. I put the pack he had given me with the soups and journals inside, over my back. After he said a prayer in latin over me, he left. I looked to the sky. Watching him rising into the clouds, and my last chance of giving up leaving me. I began my march to Sparta. It wasn’t far, maybe ten miles down the road, and I had no idea what I might find. Perhaps the visions held something. As I walked across the stone road, noting the trees all being dead and that there were few signs of life, I thought again and again of the vision.
Magic. They would use it against me, and no matter how fast I learned, I would be a novice, and I would lose. Every great man fails at some point, yet, I wasn’t planning on joining the ranks of the dead. Too much was at stake.
I came across a body on the road. He wasn’t much to look at, with his face the way it was distorted. I imagined him, holding off against the Spartans and losing. I found two colt pistols on his body, an odd occurrence. Why wouldn’t they take the guns? They didn’t fear them. I left the guns on the ground. Then, I remembered what the priest had said about the eyes being the hearts of the Spartans. I went back, picked up the guns, placed them in my pockets, and doubled my pace down the stone path.
The guns still my pockets, my pack weighing heavier with every passing step, I came to the first post one mile into my journey. It was odd, made of iron chains, as though they would use them on people, which I came to the conclusion they did. It wasn’t a post. It was a torture chamber.
The first one eyed Spartan I ever saw, came at me from behind the chains, at me on a dead sprint with his spear. I shot him once but it missed. The guns worked. The second shot hit him in the eye and he hit the ground. I quickly rushed behind a tree. There would be more men, they would have picked up my trail be now, soon I would be surrounded with nothing but no ammunition and a few cans of soup.
Two more of them came at me, faster than the first, and I immediately knew no shots would be in time. I sidestepped the first one, who had horns on his white helmet, and started talking. “I came here to see Ra.”
They both stopped. There eyes stared at me for a precious few moments. “I bring tidings from a great king.” I shot the one with the horns on his helmet in the eye, and he hit the ground. “And he seeks war.” The other one just stood there, confused, I had shown them they were mortal, that they existed, and it must have disturbed him. What it was, it was thinking.
“Tell him I’m coming.”
I let him go. They understood Ra. So, the visions weren’t madness. I kept my guns closing, calling myself stupid for letting him set a trap ahead of me, yet part of me knew they didn’t want to die. Even demons had the drive to live. I would have killed him. Likely, I still would.
The blinding light never came, the visions did. I was in the throne room again, a woman was standing next to the sickly king, and past the wall of spears was Lara and Natalie. I could see the heads of the marshal and the engineer. Gone. And so would Lara and Natalie.
I snapped too. Began sprinting, reminding myself of the stories of the great runner who had warned Athens of its peril as three hundred Spartans held off against an army of Persians a hundred thousdand strong. Why? I’m not sure, yet I took the idea and ran with it, thinking I would save them, knowing I could never get past the wall of spears to Ra. I would have to think of something else.
The roads were empty. I passed post after post, while running, but no souls were there. There were plenty of chained, lifeless bodies. One looked like some magician. I stopped. Looked at him. He was still breathing.
He looked like a man who hadn’t shaved in his lifetime, the beard sprawling down to his chest, and I could tell he had been poisioned and chained up by Ra. “And he came. And he left none in his wake.”
“What? Here, have some water.”
“Yes, water.” He drank from my flask, while I looked at him.
“My name is Gideon.”
“I am nobody. I am gone, Gideon.”
“No your not.”
“I tried to stop them. I was with them, with Ra, then he started enslaving everyone to build his great works of war. The king. They all follow the king. Reach the king and you defeat Ra.”
“Take the water. I have some friends in trouble.”
“The one eyed ones won’t let you get to him.”
“If I fail, I can at least say I tried.”
I left him, hoping the water would help. Lara and Natalie. That was who was on my mind. How had he gotten to them. He had always said I would die. I intended to show him why man wasn’t to be toyed with, chained up, exterminated. I didn’t understand everything that was going on—it was just too much—yet I did understand he had to be stopped.
The king. That’s who he said was the key. I would reach out to him.
Marching was old, I wished I could fly again, not thinking of anything but moving forward. My father was right. I was an explorer. The stones began to stop giving to my boots, my feet were used to a different form of gravity, and my hips began to ache.
I didn’t relent. I marched.
At the gate, which I assumed was Sparta, was a girl. She looked just like the one I had seen tempting the man with the briefcase, if she had been holding an apple it would have been biblical, instead she was dancing. Dancing. I thought it odd enough, I was seeing a figure from my vision. I figured I would have to get used to that. I didn’t slow. When I was close enough she disappeared, like the tempting mirage that she was, and I passed through the gates to the city. The buildings. More like large blocks; they weren’t made with any design intent. The palace. It was covered in gold and had guards all along it. I didn’t think I was important enough for them to allow me so far in. Something was amiss, perhaps I needed to run while I still had a chance of living.
The twins. That’s what kept me going, and maybe to show the demons of my mind I could do it. I had put it together, I was expected, and it the scene when I entered the throne room wasn’t one of surprise. There were the wall of soldiers with their spears, some with regular greek styled iron helmets, others had the horns on them. Beyond that, was a king, and a large warrior. He was the one I assumed was Ra. Could it have been the girl I saw? I approached, spears were raised, but the one eyed Spartans did not approach me.
“Bone, fire, rock, and ice. You know none of the magics,” it took me a second but I could see it was the sickly looking king, “and yet you challenge me.”
“I don’t challenge you. You are just another face. I challenge the creature next to you.”
“Creature? He is a man.”
“Then why does he look twice the size of a man.”
“A freak. True. He may be. But all the gold in the world couldn’t create another. This is a land of magic—“
“I wasn’t addressing you.”
“You disrespect the king. Should I gather your head?”
“You have no power. Don’t you get it? Your just another of his pawns.” He seemed taken aback by these words. I pulled out the punch, threw it to the ground. “I need no magic to face you. Come out and fight me.”
The cursed king reached for something, brought out the head of the marshal. At the same time, I could see a girl approaching me from the side. I heard footsteps behind me as well, and I hit the ground with my guns ready. “It won’t be that easy. Your head is worth twice theirs.”
It was a Spartan behind me, though he didn’t look like he was going to attack me. I looked for the girl. She was gone. I turned my back to the Spartan behind me. “What did you do with them?”
“They still exist. The other two gave quite a fight. Found them in New York. Bad neighborhoods there.”
“Release them.”
“As you wish.” The king snapped his fingers and the twins were brought out. “I am no villain. I wish to be friends. You can work with me. Ra speaks to you. He once spoke to me.”
I told him off as best I could. Lara and Natalie came over to me, the chains still connecting their wrists, and I could feel their minds, and could tell they were broken. What had he done to them? I challenged Ra again. “Ra is not someone to be challenged,” said the king, “why not join us. The power. It is incredible.”
I didn’t know what to do. Their was one Spartan behind me, the twins were chained, and my feet were already throbbing from the walk to Sparta. I had to make a stand. So, I holstered my weapons. “If Ra isn’t willing to challenge me, I challenge your best warrior.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Gideon. You know how powerful those twins are? I could find every deceitful agent within my empire. I could find out where ever secret base harboring my enemies would be.”
I pulled the pack of magic earth out of my pack, recited the one incantation I could think of, and placed the dirt onto the ground. Nothing happened. I shook my head. Some mage I was. But, the king seemed disturbed by this. The creature standing next to him approached me. I could see the golden light eminating from his two eyes. The arms covered in black earth. Was he Ra?
I drew my weapons, shot him in the eyes, a burst of green came out of them, yet, no signs of pain. “She speaks to me too, Gideon.” Was he speaking of the girl?
Then, right where I had placed the magic dirt, a tree soared out of the ground, knocking the creature back almost ten feet. All the Spartans were knocked over as well, I turned, shot the one Spartan behind me in the eye, and then tried my best to break the chains on the twins. I looked into their eyes. They knew what I was thinking: It wasn’t going to work. However, I couldn’t leave them here to the likes Ra.
“You will die.” It was the creature. It was Ra. I couldn’t face him alone; I needed help. I had to try. I drew my weapons and fired at the king. The tree had surprised them, but, only bought me time. I fired, again and again, until the bullets were gone, and without a weapon, I decided to charge the creature.
“No, Gideon,” the twins said in unison.
“I have to. Run.”
“Self sacrifice isn’t needed.” They focused on the chains, speaking under their breath, and suddenly the chains broke. “We were surprised. Drugged. But we still,” Lara fell to the ground and Natalie caught her head before it struck the stone floor.
The Spartans began to advance, and Ra, too, found his footing and came towards me. Killing them wasn’t the answer. I had to find a way to defeat him. I thought, looked at Natalie, came up with something. A spear was thrown at me, before I could act on my decision, and it cut through my side, burrowing into my stomach. I fell to the ground, pulled the pouch of magic out, placed it over my wound. I didn’t have the strength to pull the spear out. Natalie came to over, calmed me with her touch, her eyes, and I pulled the spear out of my stomach. My vision went black for a few precious seconds, I stood up, with Natalies help, blood rushing out of the wound. Then it sparked, the earthen magic had worked with no spell. Then, I felt Natalie’s hands over it, and I heard her reciting.
“How could you know?”
“It’s mine to know and yours to wonder.”
I knew the magic wouldn’t defeat them; neither would brute force; I would have to be precise with my plan. “Show me your true face.”
The creature stopped moving, held up its hands, the Spartans stopped moving towards us, too. He took of his helmet and, as the mirage disappeared, I saw his true face. It resembled what I feared most, I realized it was an illusion, he was still playing with me. The one eye was the only thing that was real about it. I was looking at my own face. “Your nothing but a chameleon.”
“Ra sparked the sun,” the king said, “Ra is all. Ra never ends.”
Suddenly, someone struck me from behind. I was gone. I was in a different throne room, the man with the black tie, the briefcase; the girl with the red hair who was dancing naked in front of him. I tried to stop the vision; I had seen it enough. I saw, then, that it was my father holding the briefcase, fighting against himself more than anything.
I woke. The room was full of bodies. The armor had only slowed the killing, yet, there was no smell of death, this had been done cleanly. The king and Ra were gone. Lara and Natalie stood over me. “What happened?”
“She thinks she can turn you. She was disappointed in the others. ‘He holds the key’ she said to us.”
“Can I defeat her?”
“No.”
“It’s my father isn’t it. He’s the man with the briefcase. If its what I think it is, he holed himself up, in a mountain to stave off the devil.”
“You must face him. These were pawns; you aren’t. You don’t have to face her. You will lose.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What am I supposed to do?”
There was no answer. We talked more. They told me how it all happened, the girl coming out of nowhere and knocking me out, then being ruthless against the Spartans, stripping them of their powers, killing them; beheading the king, the only one to scream; but they didn’t see what happened to Ra. He was there one moment and gone the next.
It was all happening to fast. I tried to think of calming words, philosophy came to mind, just sitting down and putting the thoughts together so fast they would be foreign days later. The superman. Nietschze. What would he do. I realized God wasn’t dead, if there was a devil my belief system needed to be altered.
I left. The girls just sat there amidst the death; scarred for life. I Went towards the mountain of Olympus. That was where my father would be, the man with the black tie and the suit hoping against hope someone would relieve him of the pressure of holding the whole world in one briefcase.
The roads were empty. I went miles. It was like a sprinter being told he had to go a long distance—I was spent after the first mile. I had to go past Athens, past empty checkpoints, past the slaves who didn’t understand what happened. Some would stop me. Try to speak to me in dialects I couldn’t grasp. Some thought I was a mage; others that I was a Spartan. When they saw my face, most understood I was neither. The woman would touch me, their husbands long dead, in provocative ways, and I would push them away, I hadn’t the desire for sex on this day.
Olympus, on the map, was a simple post, a crossroads where trade traveled through to point in Europe. It was near the Delphi, a place where prophecies were told, lies made out to be fact. I studied the map. Looking for safe points, from which to make my way to where my father was.
I couldn’t use magic this time. The twins had told me I would lose. I wasn’t sure they weren’t in a state of shock when I left, and I wondered what they had seen, and whether I should have left them behind.
I stopped many times. Never slept. I couldn’t risk it. The father I went, the more I saw the devastation reaped on the lands of Greece, how broken the people were. I never saw another Spartan.
After a week of travel, I made it to Olympus. I climbed the mountain, stopped at the first cave, searched it, found the bodies of dead animals, a few images made in blood on the walls, but nothing else. The images made of blood, were disturbing to look at, but I didn’t have the time to stare at them too long.
I saw a flash of red at the next cave. Went inside, saw a figure sitting on a throne with a briefcase, walked towards my father. She was dancing around and, though I tried to rob her of her power by ignoring her, she caught my attention. She continued to dance around in circles. I went to my father. He was covered in dust, holding the briefcase with a deadly grip. He was dead, had been for a long time, yet, had never let go of his briefcase. I tried to take it from him, but he wouldn’t let it go.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “He tried, you see, to ignore me, but no man can.”
“He’s dead. Isn’t that enough?”
“I didn’t kill him. Exposure. That’s what killed him. Now you must take it.”
“No, I don’t. I will leave it here. Live. I don’t need any of it.”
“Don’t you know what’s inside.”
“I have an idea.”
“If you don’t take it, I will have to kill your friends, oh, what are their names? Lara and Natalie.”
I went to my father, put my hand on his forehead, slowly ripped the briefcase from his death grip. It took a lot of goading to open it, and thought It had been sealed shut, and had a lock on it too, I was able to open it.
She looked inside. There was a note. I smiled. “What is this!” she yelled.
I picked up the note.
Son, she thought the whole time I had it. I knew you would find me, you always had a sixth sense like that. Perhaps if the demon had known it was a note to you, it would not have stared at me for so long. I smile at you from above.
I looked at her, those eyes filled with surprise, and I could tell the anger was building. I had no magic, no guns, nothing to fight her. If she wanted, Lara and Natalie could be ended, I tried to think.
She disappeared. I could sense the eyes of the twins on me, and they were alive, for now. I looked to my father, smiled, the best joke someone could ever play was misdirecting the devil, the king of lies fooled by a lie. The fight wasn’t over, I could feel the Ra’s eye on me, the coldness of a ghost, but in the short term I had one, and though the cost was great, I felt I had one for the first time in my life.
I looked at the grin on my father’s face. It was a fitting end for my him. One day, there would be an end to me, but not today.
Faded Glory Jacket 100
Abercrombie and Finch, 2000
by Dark Alliances
By Jacob Malewitz
Iron Sword Games, OC
The light was golden and had an array of various colors to real to be a vision, to distinct to be a dream. I thought it was Ra again, or the demon within me that pretended to be Ra. If he was acting, then, he was very good with the details. Everything about him was ancient Egyptian, from the eyes to the lips to the tall hat and the braided beard. His eyes were what I noticed, that red glare in them, shaped differently than a man’s, more oval. Yet none of that mattered after he spoke. “You will die.” He stepped forward, floating on some golden sphere. We were at the clouds, and I could see sparks of lightning—it was Earth—but I didn’t care; I was angry.
“Who are you to say who lives and who dies?”
He didn’t answer. He wasn’t real. I yelled at him more, telling him as many curses and saying I’d been drinking too much the night before—and that was the only reason I had seen him.
I smoked. I drank.
The night before was a mirage of lighting and images of woman and bar stools and full ashtrays. Something had to be wrong in my system. I wanted to end the pain, yet every day I worked on making my pain greater.
It reminded me why I had been put in the ship, I saw everything in two ways—everyone died, everyone tried to escape the inevitable. Maybe gods, or demons, like Ra, lived eternally, yet, life wasn’t a pure joy for me and never had been, a peaceful ending would suit me, and death by unnatural phenomena wouldn’t be much different in the scheme of things.
The last piece of the vision came slowly, as though it were forced onto by something opposing Ra. There was man with a briefcase sitting, all I could see of his face was that it was pale white, and he was sitting in a chair in a cavern, holding off against a girl so beautiful that she aroused me just by a flash of her face. There was something evil in her, tempting, and I could see that the man with the briefcase was fighting himself more than anything. What was in the briefcase? I stepped forward. The vision broke.
What was in the briefcase? My mind jumped from point to point, trying to connect the dots but no understanding came, just more questions. The girl, who was she?
I understood Ra, I had those visions often, but the man with the briefcase was a new addition. Visions might seem sublime to some but I took them earnestly; made my days around what they told me. It was like telling a lie and never escaping it, these visions were. If I chose to put it aside it would wind up haunting me forever, wondering what would happen if I had acted upon it.
I shook my head. In the end, I wanted to see more, yet I had done that before, and the moments approached a madness I couldn’t live through. So, I had to drop back to the real world where things could be felt, touched. I was returning home, like a bird due north, and that was pleasing; with or without Ra I would be happy and find solace.
We had gone to Andromeda, on some technology taken from barren moons, something to do with a dead race; suffice to say they made long travel possible, though dangerous as ever. It felt like gravity, with a hint of chaos, being forced into sole beings.
The group I traveled with, were as divisive as they were unique.
The twins, Lara and Natalie, who spoke in unison, and were said to be psychic. They didn’t look like twins: Lara always wore sunglass goggles over her plain white face, and she was more apt to say things I really meant but intended to hide; then, Natalie, a tanned girl who was more attractive in a way yet was prone to bursts of violence—which Lara said was a result of psychological conditioning. The twins as a pair could have formed a rock band and sold to many albums to count, and likely knew their appearance drew interest from others and thrived on the attention for looks instead of their powers.
The ship altered course, and the girls jumped in glee. So young and these girls were like queens of the future, standing fast at the crossroads.
I looked over to the Space Marshal. He always kept his cigarettes close and his gun even closer. He was used just in case things went hectic, drank more than me, smoked more than me, and from what I heard killed more than me; he was a class act. And to further this, he was a former politician—and he was probably friends with my father, the greatest of politicians,—and not a hero. I thought of him as a hired gun.
The space engineer stood next to him, gloving some math book called Mars Prime that said divinity couldn’t be found at the crossroads of civilization, but in the search for other civs through math. A sketch of him might show the narrowed eyes (Japanese), the muscles worked so hard their were stress marks showing under the edges of his sleeveless sports t-shirt. He looked and acted more like a real marshal than Quentin.
And that was the crew.
I was more of a Keats poet who journaled too much than a space man. But society demanded things of me, too. No mistaken word good describe me, but I had asian eyes from a wedding my father never went through, guns of arms that showed my workmanlike heritage, spots of an angel in many ways, or the perfect Arian soldier if Hitler ever saw one, but I drank too much, hated too little, and hated living like the plague.
My thoughts on the mission, were that we were doomed. Our mission was a last stand, against the coming wars over humanity for possession of the small system we inhabited. These people I told you have compromised all that was right in society, all that was wrong on the roadways of thought, a confusing group to synthesize, so my father put me up there as I’d always been a universal type of person—and I would think of things they wouldn’t.
And I did.
Once in the Andromeda system, I made sure we left a beacon for the future colonists to find, if civilization were to fall, then, this would show them what they missed. Perhaps it would be thousands of years before civilization returned to space travel. My thoughts were that we had already gone through a dark age. Nothing new was invented. Babies kept being born with diseases that wouldn’t have scared any doctor, before, now the diseases were killing more people than the wars, as though we were back in the times before the great wars.
“Thinking?” I ignored him. I had been thinking all day. It had been the marshal who said it, but I wasn’t sure. Let me explain more.
“I was talking to you.” It wasn’t the Marshal, it was the girl with the goggles and the cool way of walking: Lara.
“Sorry.”
“Chaos is strong in you.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Depends on who you are. Anyways, who are you?”
I stepped back from myself for the moment, looked at the stars, and looked to the people around me, and I found my answer. “I am nobody. Chaos is the absence of God. And I think he’s been absent lately.”
“He. In the clips it’s a ‘She’.”
“Feminist bullshit.”
“Is that right.”
Let me say, Lara always turned me on, but our conversations were like lighting a candle in a barn, they didn’t show much in terms of importance. As I was saying, at that moment, and after we had hit Andromeda, the transmissions from Earth Central (which used to be NASA), stopped. Our deep space scans showed that something big had happened but it wasn’t still happening. We were looking at damage light years old. We weren’t sure what processes to take, I went with the philosophers like Nietschze or Kant, in that we had to think on a different level when looking into time’s scope.
We tried to use a radio signal, to send messages back but it was just a protocol, it had never been tested and it would never work—and mainly because the messages were like looking back at our solar system, they couldn’t communicate fast enough. So, instead of chaos, I enlightened them on the philosophers who were worth a damn. I tried not to rush the stories, the books I read instead of doing homework, but it wasn’t getting any true points across. They wanted math, probabilities, time travel, something to get us back faster.
My failed attempts at philosophy, grew even more grim when I took to the drugs we had been equipped with. I stopped journalling and wrote more madness on the pages than anything else. I couldn’t grasp that it was all gone, all the 401K’s and insurance agencies and governments were like a fly standing next to a mountain, they didn’t exist anymore.
The smoking came first and then drinking. I wasn’t sure which made me more violent. I dreamt of recreating mankind, like the monster Frankenstein, we would leave traces behind.
“We have to leave it behind,” I said to Lara, “so they’ll be like the monster Frankenstein finding those classic books and learning the language in a high form. We can leave testaments of civilization. And we can lie about its purpose.”
“Your either short on oxygen or reading that philosophy again.”
The marshal stepped between us. “I get what he’s saying, it just isn’t needed, yet.”
“And what does the mathematician think.”
“I think your right. But you’re assuming its all gone. We don’t know what happened, yet.”
The view of Mars came closer. We had stopped the exit plan and went to the closest colony. I could hear Ra laughing within me. He is winning, I thought to myself then, I am losing it.. I had the distinct urge to direct my next message as something from Ra. I didn’t understand what I was thinking—if that’s possible—so I went to the page and transcribed a list of thoughts, mainly on what we would find on Mars.
The computer lit up, we were closing in, but it was finding specs of solar damage all across the planet. “It’s like it was toasted with the suns rays, striking through the atmosphere.”
“And quickly.”
“Like a dream.”
Again the faces formed one, the first thought came from the twins, speaking in unison like they did in that odd way. Who said the others words I can’t be sure, though, I can tell you they said it with a pain under the visceral words.
We hit Mars atmosphere, the ship rocking, more and more computer generated close up images. “It went nova but only for a few seconds.” Someone asked if Lara meant the sun, and she said it was obvious she did.
No more money on Mars, it was funny, I would miss the gambling ventures to be saved by my father at the last second. I was reminded of Twain, losing all the money he had earned from Huckleberry Fin on some printer scam.
No more money to be earned, no more dominance by a hominid, no more absolute power.
I ran over to my notebook, filled with ideas, ideas too good to be wasted. I sketched an image of Lara and Natalie coming to the conclusion. The sun went nova, but only for a few seconds, could humanity have survived?
We hit the atmosphere. The magnets recoiled, finding something moving in the atmosphere, following us. “We’ve got a tail.” It was the marshal. “And we have no weapons systems.”
“I’m sure you can figure that out,” I said. “And why would they shoot us down?”
I looked back to the ship, a newer brand of technology, with the colors of silver formed over a cylinder shell.
“There are no people in that ship.”
It made sense. Robots were used widely on the arid plains of Mars. But where were the people. I looked at Lara. “How much would it take for you too check the whole planet?”
“I already did. It put Natalie out but we found no minds. No people.” It was Ra’s doing, but I couldn’t tell them of my visions, and if it was, if the sun god had destroyed humanity, I would find him, and end him. How does one kill God if he is already dead?
The tail stayed with us, we communicated, found they were the only survivors, and if robots could be excited I saw it in them.
We landed—waited—and through it all I was planning out how it would go, every fine detail, and I wouldn’t say anything about Ra being the culprit. We waited longer. The ship finally landed, next to us.
Natalie was still out, Lara seemed on the verge of going out as well; the marshal was armed, the engineer tense, and me, well I had my notebook of thoughts and ideas and planned to mine the robots for all they had for my essay. An essay? Civilization on the verge. No audience? Yes. A superman would do it.
When the robot left the craft, I could see it was an old Nexus model. The company had been founded by a game designer, who thought that the humanizing of robots, was the best way to leave a legacy. “We expected you. The Andromeda mission. We have waited a generation.” The robot explained it to us, a long story cut short, that, indeed, a nova had wiped out most of humanity. “We tried to send a ship to Earth, a patched together craft, but it was shot down my the Moon base.
The robot spoke like a man, his language had a touch of that Midwestern through-the-nose speech. “And it was lost.” He said a disease had wiped out the survivors on Mars. “We will die here, without man, without technology. We have tried to communicate but we fear that all that is left is a remnant. If man still exists at all.”
We went to their main city, a monolith of recycled metal and stones which kept the robots busy. We stuck with the same robot through the process, our mission had changed obviously, and we all had families on Earth to find. And we had to try and save what was left of mankind. I was reminded of the beacon we had left on Andromeda—and how long it would take before we could go there again.
“We have plenty of rockets. Only no ships capable of using them. You are welcome—“
“Would you like to return with us.”
“My systems wouldn’t last the trip. We will all die here.” I looked out at the mechanical city, no one had seemed surprised by our presence, by man, and it was obvious they had planned a strategy for our return. They had detailed files on how we could get past the moon base.
“I have one question.”
“Happy to answer.”
“How long did it go nova?
“3.2 seconds.”
I could feel the laughing coming within me, the crazy thoughts, and as we entered the ship, our destination earth, I couldn’t get my father out of my head. I had planned for man’s inevitable fall, but I assumed it would be wars, not the sun, and by taking the philosophers trade I had made myself a presence in time after time. He had planned it out that we would survive, that politicians would have a place, who was right was beyond me, and didn’t matter, so, I let it pass over me.
On the ship, the conversations were full of chaos, all in unison like the girls. Natalie had regained herself, and the toying words her sister Lara spoke were obviously influenced by her sister’s thoughts.
“—We have to find Earth Central’s new base.”
“—Why didn’t they want to come with us?”
“—The mission was pointless. It’s all pointless if its all gone.”
Who said what, on the ship, was a different question. The engineer determined that the math didn’t add up. Something else had happened. But, I said, why would the robots lie? Was it even in their capacity to lie?
The marshal. He was the stronghorse of the group, if we all went mad he would still fulfill his mission. What I didn’t know, was what his mission was. They had talked of anarchists and assassins and not trusting the UN group sent, America had lost its voice, it had found it in the western gunner. “We don’t need to know. Any of it. We need to bring technology back, we will have to lead.”
“You don’t tell a herd of horses not to run off the cliff. They won’t understand. We’ve been gone to long. The sun cleaned up the mess mankind had created.”
“It wasn’t a mess!”
“It was.”
The argument went more towards my style, a glowing euphemism of what mattered about man, what it had lost. “You guide them off the cliff so that they die with dignity.”
“That’s madness.”
“It’s the truth.”
The engineer. He explained the planets would realign, the robots would find a way to survive, it wasn’t about surviving, it was about continuing. “The ‘bots survived. If they could then humans could. A disease may have wiped out a small population, but it couldn’t have scorched an entire planet in its wake.” He went on, more on why math was involved, to the remainder, and the nova was inevitable but early in its course. He looked to be taking it well; he was stoic.
I let my pain show, if he was burying it then I would reveal it. The situation I found myself in, we found ourselves in, couldn’t be told through images and likenesses, even the robots would have taken an eon to tell. It required an understanding of what was really happening on Earth. Power. That’s what it would be about on Earth, a strange new legion would rule. And I couldn’t get it out of my head: the visions—Ra—and whether he was man or animal, god or deity. It was like playing chess without looking at the board, and jumping off a cliff into a pool of water, you wanted to take a peak, to check for the looks of it before you made a move.
The notebook. It wasn’t complete, might never be, but when trying to escape pains I found a solace in it, crafted notes on how the Great Wall of China might be affected by the nova, wondering what societies had been created, what had been unleashed. Did the animals rule again? Was man deformed? The robots could be the last breath of mankind, hoping against hope something survived, I was hoping, yet, it seemed the chances were slim, and if something had survived it wouldn’t be recognizable.
Ashes. As we sailed into the light of the moon, before we altered our angle, the missiles became apparent, and the lasers followed. My father had been a proponent of the moon base, but, no one had said it would be armed. Who did they think would attack us? What did they know they weren’t telling us?
The missiles came in fast, the marshal and engineer were screaming something. I think beyond the curses they blurted “This is it!” And when one of the missiles bounced off our ship and the other sailed right I thought we had been blessed, then the missile that missed turned around, it was keying on the rockets. “Lose the rockets!” I yelled, and the marshal ran over to controls, proceeded to disengage the rockets, and ran back to the screen where we were watching the events unfold.
“A dream within a dream,” the twins said. I looked to them. We were on the verge of destruction and they were reciting Poe? However, the words clicked, reminded me of my visions, was Ra right? Would I die this way?
The explosion rocked us, and we thought we were in calm waters, until the engineer yelled something about lasers striking against the hull. “How is it holding?”
“Those aren’t lasers. Something has changed.”
“Your saying they’re alien?”
“No. They just changed.”
The lasers rocked the hull, how it held, I don’t know, but, I could see what they were saying about the lasers being different. Had humanity survived? The space stations were gone, I noticed as the lasers shot around us in a fury. They had fallen out of the sky when the nova came, or something different had happened, perhaps shot down or maybe something beyond a philosophers understanding.
The marshal ran to the other side of ship, past the empty crates of supplies, stepped over my notebook, and to part of the ship we had never used. He hit a button and a shield went over our entire ship. At that same second, warning lights came on throughout the ship. The ship had lost pressure, in one of the cargo holds. I looked to the comp screens and saw warning lights throughout the ship. I wasn’t sure we would make it.
“You will die.” It was Ra, speaking from a golden bird ten feet from me. The others didn’t see; likely didn’t want to, there was no need to share the pain. A philosopher sees death in many ways, the loss of sanity being one, and I was on the verge just because of these damned visions. So, I decided to ignore the words, not to lash out as was my customary response. “You were a thief.” How did Ra know that? I stopped thinking in that mindset, I wasn’t insane, I was just special.
“What you know of my past, matters not.” He was right, I had been a lost thief in Paris for many years, so long ago it was like a lucid dream. I could remember every day, being down and out and not knowing where I could steal my next meal.
“Who are you talking too?”
“We are not alone. I can’t explain it. But something big has happened here, and it wasn’t just the nova.”
“You’re losing it.”
The words knifed through my heart. I was a philosopher, though, weren’t we all mad? I was put on the ship because my father pulled the right strings. I had been writing essays for a Parisian journal for a year when he found me. I drank. I smoked. It all went into my discourses.
The shields held, but every eye on the ship was on me. I tried to explain it in short, but it didn’t make sense—even I could see that—so I went into the story. “Ra was an Egyptian god of the sun. I didn’t start seeing him until our mission. He was more of a mirage in a dessert at first, a blimp on the screen of what I was dreaming. Soon, he took over my dreams, to the point where I wouldn’t sleep, yelling at me in some language that sounded Nubian. I translated some of the words, while we were going to Andromeda. He is me. That was all he was saying.”
“When were you going to tell us you were mad?” it was the marshal.
“He isn’t mad. He speaks more truth than you, marshal. What are you hiding?”
“Stay the hell out of my head.”
I looked outside. “I didn’t know we had shields. Were you expecting something?”
“I expect you to know who the authority is here. I don’t have to answer any questions. The only reason your still breathing is because of those shields.”
We continued our discourse. I was surprised the twins understood my plight. I engaged them in a conversation. Sometimes they would nod their heads, “You’re right,” other times completely disagree, “You’re very wrong.” I noticed there faces, so perfect, the marks of makeup which I had to wonder how they acquired, the lines on them which aroused me more than anything. And they noticed my voice was becoming an advance unto itself, and backed away from where I was leading them. I could see myself with them, then, I remembered Ra and all the other reasons I should stick to flying solo.
When we landed at the Nasa base, it became apparent there would be no warm greeting. Before, our sensors had found traces of solar light across North America, but it couldn’t see signs of life, and the twins were still healing from their last psychic check for survivors. We had hope. But, hope in the hands of a philosopher can elicit dark knowledge: Did we want to know what happened to mankind? Were we all that was left?
Again, I remembered the beacon we had left at Andromeda. All that was important in humanity over a few hundred blocks of info disks. Ra was watching. I could sense him when we landed at the Earth Central base in Texas.
The land was devoid of life. The white buildings held strong, still standing, and when we left the ship, which had seen better days from the damage it had received from the moon base. I heard the beating of the wind against the doors of the base, which showed little that was inside. We went in, through the computers, all the files, anything that would shed some more light on what had happened. It appeared the ‘bots were right, all the clocks showed a stopping point of a few minutes past three, the computers were gone, all we had to go on were the files. As the wind continued to search through the place, papers flying everywhere, it became apparent I could be of some use, when the twins almost fell. I caught them, laid them on the floor, as they spurted out verses I couldn’t comprehend. “What’s wrong?”
“There is much death here.”
They continued to say weird things, then I realized they were giving times, then, they started reciting names. The times were the same exact moment when the nova affected everything on the planet.
“Did they all die?” I asked them.
“No. But, many did.”
We left the base, began marching to the closest sitting a few miles up. The ground was different, an odd yellowy substance covered most of it, and whenever we stopped the ground would crackle around us, showing signs that I had been cooked. Then, I wondered what the other side of the planet had done, it was becoming apparent the Earth was only hit for but a few seconds, so half of the planet didn’t get assault with the rays as hard.
We found the taxi driver, dieing of wounds to the head, and it became apparent some people still roamed the barren plains of North America. He was a black man, big and tall, with blue eyes, and had been crying for some time when we found him. His face showed that he had been grimacing in pain for quite a while.
“I knew you’d come,” he said, “my father told me the story of the great explorers again and again.” He spit out some blood, and Lara put her hand to his face. “I never forgot it.”
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“Europe. Africa. China. Lots of places. Not many people left on this continent. My grandfather told me it killed half immediately. The rest left these lands, calling them cursed.” He put his hand to his mouth, then touched Lara’s hand.
The marshal spoke: “What happened to the cities?”
“Gone. All gone. They were destroyed in the last war. People were hiding from him.”
“From who.”
“We don’t know who he is—“
“What war?” It was the engineer.
“You will find him in Sparta. The car still works, I just don’t. I can take you pretty far. I suggest you leave me—“
“We’re not leaving you,” Lara said, her hand still consoling him.
“I will die soon. One of his men attacked me for speaking my mind. There are still some people here. You have to go to Greece, find him, stop him. He controls them. The one eyed men. There is magic in the world now, honing the power of the sun and moon, using light; no tricks.
“I, can’t say anymore.”
“We’re not leaving him,” Lara and Natalie said as one, “we can’t just leave him here to die.” They looked back. Lara put her hand on his mouth. His eyes were closed and the sound of breathing were absent. “He’s gone.”
We were so used to looking at the stars, that driving a car looking at nothing seemed to leave us at a loss for words; we were as quiet as a lion hunting. We drove until the gas ran out, talking about what the man said. I found a small notebook in the back, a sort of history. It chronicled the rise of magic on Earth. He had been a blacksmith by trade, and his sketches were an insane amalgam of ideas to be honed into metals. Metal contraptions to fly on magic. Older broadswords that had a hint of Roman in them but were held together with magic rubies at the handle.
Magic.
There were spells to illicit visions from the other side, how to call warrior angels, it read more like a treatise on the occult than a thinking journal. Nevertheless, I took notes on what the man had said.
When the gas ran out, after our conversations on splitting up, it became apparent no city on this side of the world was where we wanted to go. The engineer had ideas: “We have to rebuild civilization. This is our duty.”
“Not anymore,” said the marshal, “now we survive. I’m not to walk into my own death. We rebuild we catch attention. We show we know something we get killed or taken prisoner. And the last place we’re going is Greece.”
“I am,” I said.
When I went on my own, I had no food, a little water, and a hand drawn map in a notebook that said the best route to the other side was to get an old preacher’s help. The preacher would take me there, I just hoped the map would help me find him.
The sun was beat read, the wind catching against my dirty clothes, reminding me that I wasn’t going to fit in with a style a century old. Walking. It wasn’t something a philosopher should do. Soon, thoughts turn, hopes rise, visions ensue. I saw this as they were, at that moment, traveling alone, and could see that Ra was going to visit me soon. I was going to face him, that was certain, but one eyed men and Greece? I didn’t add up. I could see the books on greek mythology sitting on my desk; it had been uttered that anyone interested in the arts should first go with the classics of Greece.
The flying machine coming towards me, reminded me of something out of a foreign film that made no sense in a translation. How could one fly in these times? It would draw attention, for one, and wasn’t all technology gone.
The flyer closed in one me, and thirsty, I saw Ra image at a throne room. The image of the Egyptian man was gone—and I never believed it anyways—and this image showed a massive man who could have been mistaken for a beast, had he not had a helmet and armor on. A sickly king was sitting at a throne, next to Ra, and there were all the white eyes showing under the helmets. Ra stepped forward, saying an incantation. I looked, saw I was holding a staff, and not knowing what to do I threw it at him, and the vision was gone.
“You from round here? You don’t look it.” It was the priest, he had landed right in front of me but I was so lost in the vision, that I had missed it. He was tall. A cast on one hand. One hand was behind his back. He was dressed in civilian clothes, but had the mark of a catholic priest with the white collar.
“I was.”
“You’re him. Aren’t you. The one old Dale talked about.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You look hungry. Let’s go back to my home.”
I walked forward and extended my hand, not to be polite but to see if he would show me was behind his back. He didn’t show what it was, extending his hand, in turn. “You’re a priest. Not a preacher.”
“I go by what the people want to call me. Religions aren’t strong anymore. Before they all left, my congregation were mainly Hugenaughts, Protestant types.”
I looked to the contraption, that obviously ran on some form of magic, perhaps inspired by the dying taxi driver we had found. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Time heals all wounds. Lets go.”
I walked into the metal frame that looked cobbled together from car frames. It even had windows.
But, I didn’t notice until we were in the air that he was holding a rosary behind his back. As we flew through the red skies, I decided to get his take on what happened. He said, magic was the new religion. “It gives them power. It used to be the drugs. The gangs. Now its magic the kids want, magic means power. In all my years, it never occurred to me we might find it outside the realm of a story. No one could have predicted it to be like this.”
I asked him who the most powerful man was, “a shadowy figure,” he said, “not on a pale horse, this one, more like a ship, and I won’t tell you what I really think.”
“Please do.”
“I think its an ‘it’, not a man. I don’t believe in aliens but nothing would surprise me with him. They say, he came out and attracted all the young men, deformed them, made them each inhuman. Evil.”
We continued our flight. “I want to go here.” I pointed on my map, noticing he was moving the rosary more with his hands, and said I intended to go to Greece.
“That’s Sparta. You seek to meet it?”
“I do.” I shut the book with the map in it. “What can you tell me of the magic I will face.”
“Not much. But you won’t be able to get across the Atlantic without me.”
The church. It looked like it was brand new. The paint had to be fresh, the stones weren’t even dirty, and the doors were solid oak without a hint of weathering. I asked him how he had built it, and he pointed to his hands. He said it was used during the last war, as a hold out shelter against air raids.
“How did the planes work.”
“The same way my flying contraption did. Magic.”
We went inside, he laid the rosary down next to a cross with Christ, and I noticed that though the outside looked new the inside hadn’t been used much. The chairs were all collecting dust. I could hear something, asked him what it was, and he said it was his fan. A fan with no electricity? I asked.
Magic. I was getting used to that word; it seemed to explain everything.
We didn’t stay long, he went into his room, I could hear him talking to someone and it took me a second to realize he was addressing God. He came back, went into a small back room, and handed me a bag full of canned soups. “These aren’t very good, and they’re cold, but they might help you in the short term.” I looked at the variety of soups, I was so hungry I had been moving my tongue around in my mouth for hours. Food. It wasn’t high on my list when in space. We could have ate three times our rations a day and still would have a healthy supply.
Magic. I wondered if it could solve world hunger.
We made out for Greece. It was too long, the process of blending the flying blades with some magic, so they would last the trip, and odd. He said things, while he slowly worked his hands over the blades, things that sounded funny to me, but likely were natural for him. When we were ready to take off, I watched him take the rosary out of his pocket, and hold it in his hands. I can’t imagine how he worked the controls, it was like looking at a keyboard in another language, yet he made it look easy. We flew up into the air. He adjusted the controls. Within seconds, we were shooting towards Greece.
“Tell me, do you still believe in the golden rule.”
“I have it pasted over everything in my house, son.”
“Oh. Are you joking?”
We continued to banter, me trying to find the words, the priest answering like he was sent from heaven to do so. I could recall being a major proponent of questions growing up, so much that my father would call me the “question man.” It described me best, if anything did. Life was an unending question.
So, I took advantage of my curious nature, asked him to teach me some basic magic. Take this, he tossed me a bag, “it is filled with the lands of America, the strongest of magic is found there. There is too much to teach you, but next when you are in need of help, hold that pouch up with your fist and sprinkle it across your body. It will form a temporary shield.
We were in the air for hours, before I saw the first glimmer of lights. “Are there cities?” He said there was. What I was seeing wasn’t a city, it was a ship, and he said we had to alter course in order to find it.
The ship reminded me of the great wall, man’s single achievement viewable in space, then, I thought of all the pain that went into building it, the achievement of a lifetime and most never saw it through to the end. If I could go back to any point, even to a time when Ra was king, I would go back to when they built that wall.
The statistics. They were against us making it across the ocean, on a ship of magic. I thought of the engineer, what he would have told us, “You’re just going to rush in there and chat!”, or maybe something from Ra. “You will die.” It was as damning as a poet who had fallen for his own words. I thought of it again and again, as we went through the ocean full of dead fish, somehow I thought the ones down deep were the only survivors. I told the priest we had to go higher, the smell was rancid.
When we passed over Paris, I saw a bustling city. “Magic is strongest here,” he said, “next would be London, then, maybe Rome. But, here magic reigns.” My curiosity was peaked. Yet I was bored, nothing compared to my visions—and no matter what magic was in the air and what people were doing I would find my answers.
I ate soup. Drank from a warm flask. Though of finding my father, after all this occurred. I hated the man in many ways. Yet, he was still the one who fed me during my childhood. Still the man who pushed me to do schoolwork.
Perhaps he had survived. His office was in D.C., but that didn’t mean he wasn’t on another of his safaris. He was high enough on the ladder to have been president, to have been the man with the black briefcase in the vision. But how did my destiny factor in? It was like calculating God mathematically—it didn’t work so easily. My father was likely dead. He wouldn’t have lasted. His type never did.
When we passed over Rome, the smell worsened, the smell of death. A century had passed yet the death continued. The black death had nothing on this Nova. Rome It was still holding strong. It broke all the rules in architecture, reminding me of why the Romans had lasted so long. The aqueducts could be seen, were in use, and the city was empty. What had Ra done? Where were the rest of the people? I asked the priest. He was reliable.
“They left. Too close to Greece. Too close to the one eyed Spartans.” He continued, telling me all I needed to know of the army I would face. “They fight old style, with blades, spears, the weapons of your time are all gone. There is no religion except the praising of him.
Over the seas, through the clouds, we continued on course, and I was starting to get sick on the soup and the motions of the flying machine. I thought of the ‘bots on Mars, and how their ends would come, and I hoped for an ending so peaceful. Though, part of me knew I was going to be at great risk.
I had questions. “Tell me more of the one eyed Spartans.”
He continued, whilst flying the craft, saying they were created by mages, men with power, but all the mages were killed so the secrets of the Spartans never came out. It was said they had a weakness. “But I wouldn’t know where to start. Except the eyes.”
“Why the eyes.”
“In the bible, the key to any demons power lies in the eye, cut them out—“
“Or stab them.”
“And you free its tortured soul.”
Greece. It was a land ripe with changes, it looked like pictures of Germany when the wall was still up. It was covered in them. Smoke billowed out into the skies. I asked the priest what they were building. “Machines of war.” I thought that machines didn’t work anymore. But, he said machines like his flying craft, were built every day. The Spartans weren’t smart enough to use them, or build them, they had enslaved much of who survived the nova.
We landed in an orchard, covered with grass and weeds, there was no real food. We waited. For a moment, I thought that maybe someone spotted us coming. None came. It was, then, that I thought of Ra. I felt the priest had gained my trust. I told him of my visions. “Great men have had visions, Paul was one, so did Abraham, it was natural. If this man communicates with you, he has a purpose. Look for the clues, the other forces, look for god while walking down the road, you just might see him.”
We shook hands. I put the pack he had given me with the soups and journals inside, over my back. After he said a prayer in latin over me, he left. I looked to the sky. Watching him rising into the clouds, and my last chance of giving up leaving me. I began my march to Sparta. It wasn’t far, maybe ten miles down the road, and I had no idea what I might find. Perhaps the visions held something. As I walked across the stone road, noting the trees all being dead and that there were few signs of life, I thought again and again of the vision.
Magic. They would use it against me, and no matter how fast I learned, I would be a novice, and I would lose. Every great man fails at some point, yet, I wasn’t planning on joining the ranks of the dead. Too much was at stake.
I came across a body on the road. He wasn’t much to look at, with his face the way it was distorted. I imagined him, holding off against the Spartans and losing. I found two colt pistols on his body, an odd occurrence. Why wouldn’t they take the guns? They didn’t fear them. I left the guns on the ground. Then, I remembered what the priest had said about the eyes being the hearts of the Spartans. I went back, picked up the guns, placed them in my pockets, and doubled my pace down the stone path.
The guns still my pockets, my pack weighing heavier with every passing step, I came to the first post one mile into my journey. It was odd, made of iron chains, as though they would use them on people, which I came to the conclusion they did. It wasn’t a post. It was a torture chamber.
The first one eyed Spartan I ever saw, came at me from behind the chains, at me on a dead sprint with his spear. I shot him once but it missed. The guns worked. The second shot hit him in the eye and he hit the ground. I quickly rushed behind a tree. There would be more men, they would have picked up my trail be now, soon I would be surrounded with nothing but no ammunition and a few cans of soup.
Two more of them came at me, faster than the first, and I immediately knew no shots would be in time. I sidestepped the first one, who had horns on his white helmet, and started talking. “I came here to see Ra.”
They both stopped. There eyes stared at me for a precious few moments. “I bring tidings from a great king.” I shot the one with the horns on his helmet in the eye, and he hit the ground. “And he seeks war.” The other one just stood there, confused, I had shown them they were mortal, that they existed, and it must have disturbed him. What it was, it was thinking.
“Tell him I’m coming.”
I let him go. They understood Ra. So, the visions weren’t madness. I kept my guns closing, calling myself stupid for letting him set a trap ahead of me, yet part of me knew they didn’t want to die. Even demons had the drive to live. I would have killed him. Likely, I still would.
The blinding light never came, the visions did. I was in the throne room again, a woman was standing next to the sickly king, and past the wall of spears was Lara and Natalie. I could see the heads of the marshal and the engineer. Gone. And so would Lara and Natalie.
I snapped too. Began sprinting, reminding myself of the stories of the great runner who had warned Athens of its peril as three hundred Spartans held off against an army of Persians a hundred thousdand strong. Why? I’m not sure, yet I took the idea and ran with it, thinking I would save them, knowing I could never get past the wall of spears to Ra. I would have to think of something else.
The roads were empty. I passed post after post, while running, but no souls were there. There were plenty of chained, lifeless bodies. One looked like some magician. I stopped. Looked at him. He was still breathing.
He looked like a man who hadn’t shaved in his lifetime, the beard sprawling down to his chest, and I could tell he had been poisioned and chained up by Ra. “And he came. And he left none in his wake.”
“What? Here, have some water.”
“Yes, water.” He drank from my flask, while I looked at him.
“My name is Gideon.”
“I am nobody. I am gone, Gideon.”
“No your not.”
“I tried to stop them. I was with them, with Ra, then he started enslaving everyone to build his great works of war. The king. They all follow the king. Reach the king and you defeat Ra.”
“Take the water. I have some friends in trouble.”
“The one eyed ones won’t let you get to him.”
“If I fail, I can at least say I tried.”
I left him, hoping the water would help. Lara and Natalie. That was who was on my mind. How had he gotten to them. He had always said I would die. I intended to show him why man wasn’t to be toyed with, chained up, exterminated. I didn’t understand everything that was going on—it was just too much—yet I did understand he had to be stopped.
The king. That’s who he said was the key. I would reach out to him.
Marching was old, I wished I could fly again, not thinking of anything but moving forward. My father was right. I was an explorer. The stones began to stop giving to my boots, my feet were used to a different form of gravity, and my hips began to ache.
I didn’t relent. I marched.
At the gate, which I assumed was Sparta, was a girl. She looked just like the one I had seen tempting the man with the briefcase, if she had been holding an apple it would have been biblical, instead she was dancing. Dancing. I thought it odd enough, I was seeing a figure from my vision. I figured I would have to get used to that. I didn’t slow. When I was close enough she disappeared, like the tempting mirage that she was, and I passed through the gates to the city. The buildings. More like large blocks; they weren’t made with any design intent. The palace. It was covered in gold and had guards all along it. I didn’t think I was important enough for them to allow me so far in. Something was amiss, perhaps I needed to run while I still had a chance of living.
The twins. That’s what kept me going, and maybe to show the demons of my mind I could do it. I had put it together, I was expected, and it the scene when I entered the throne room wasn’t one of surprise. There were the wall of soldiers with their spears, some with regular greek styled iron helmets, others had the horns on them. Beyond that, was a king, and a large warrior. He was the one I assumed was Ra. Could it have been the girl I saw? I approached, spears were raised, but the one eyed Spartans did not approach me.
“Bone, fire, rock, and ice. You know none of the magics,” it took me a second but I could see it was the sickly looking king, “and yet you challenge me.”
“I don’t challenge you. You are just another face. I challenge the creature next to you.”
“Creature? He is a man.”
“Then why does he look twice the size of a man.”
“A freak. True. He may be. But all the gold in the world couldn’t create another. This is a land of magic—“
“I wasn’t addressing you.”
“You disrespect the king. Should I gather your head?”
“You have no power. Don’t you get it? Your just another of his pawns.” He seemed taken aback by these words. I pulled out the punch, threw it to the ground. “I need no magic to face you. Come out and fight me.”
The cursed king reached for something, brought out the head of the marshal. At the same time, I could see a girl approaching me from the side. I heard footsteps behind me as well, and I hit the ground with my guns ready. “It won’t be that easy. Your head is worth twice theirs.”
It was a Spartan behind me, though he didn’t look like he was going to attack me. I looked for the girl. She was gone. I turned my back to the Spartan behind me. “What did you do with them?”
“They still exist. The other two gave quite a fight. Found them in New York. Bad neighborhoods there.”
“Release them.”
“As you wish.” The king snapped his fingers and the twins were brought out. “I am no villain. I wish to be friends. You can work with me. Ra speaks to you. He once spoke to me.”
I told him off as best I could. Lara and Natalie came over to me, the chains still connecting their wrists, and I could feel their minds, and could tell they were broken. What had he done to them? I challenged Ra again. “Ra is not someone to be challenged,” said the king, “why not join us. The power. It is incredible.”
I didn’t know what to do. Their was one Spartan behind me, the twins were chained, and my feet were already throbbing from the walk to Sparta. I had to make a stand. So, I holstered my weapons. “If Ra isn’t willing to challenge me, I challenge your best warrior.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Gideon. You know how powerful those twins are? I could find every deceitful agent within my empire. I could find out where ever secret base harboring my enemies would be.”
I pulled the pack of magic earth out of my pack, recited the one incantation I could think of, and placed the dirt onto the ground. Nothing happened. I shook my head. Some mage I was. But, the king seemed disturbed by this. The creature standing next to him approached me. I could see the golden light eminating from his two eyes. The arms covered in black earth. Was he Ra?
I drew my weapons, shot him in the eyes, a burst of green came out of them, yet, no signs of pain. “She speaks to me too, Gideon.” Was he speaking of the girl?
Then, right where I had placed the magic dirt, a tree soared out of the ground, knocking the creature back almost ten feet. All the Spartans were knocked over as well, I turned, shot the one Spartan behind me in the eye, and then tried my best to break the chains on the twins. I looked into their eyes. They knew what I was thinking: It wasn’t going to work. However, I couldn’t leave them here to the likes Ra.
“You will die.” It was the creature. It was Ra. I couldn’t face him alone; I needed help. I had to try. I drew my weapons and fired at the king. The tree had surprised them, but, only bought me time. I fired, again and again, until the bullets were gone, and without a weapon, I decided to charge the creature.
“No, Gideon,” the twins said in unison.
“I have to. Run.”
“Self sacrifice isn’t needed.” They focused on the chains, speaking under their breath, and suddenly the chains broke. “We were surprised. Drugged. But we still,” Lara fell to the ground and Natalie caught her head before it struck the stone floor.
The Spartans began to advance, and Ra, too, found his footing and came towards me. Killing them wasn’t the answer. I had to find a way to defeat him. I thought, looked at Natalie, came up with something. A spear was thrown at me, before I could act on my decision, and it cut through my side, burrowing into my stomach. I fell to the ground, pulled the pouch of magic out, placed it over my wound. I didn’t have the strength to pull the spear out. Natalie came to over, calmed me with her touch, her eyes, and I pulled the spear out of my stomach. My vision went black for a few precious seconds, I stood up, with Natalies help, blood rushing out of the wound. Then it sparked, the earthen magic had worked with no spell. Then, I felt Natalie’s hands over it, and I heard her reciting.
“How could you know?”
“It’s mine to know and yours to wonder.”
I knew the magic wouldn’t defeat them; neither would brute force; I would have to be precise with my plan. “Show me your true face.”
The creature stopped moving, held up its hands, the Spartans stopped moving towards us, too. He took of his helmet and, as the mirage disappeared, I saw his true face. It resembled what I feared most, I realized it was an illusion, he was still playing with me. The one eye was the only thing that was real about it. I was looking at my own face. “Your nothing but a chameleon.”
“Ra sparked the sun,” the king said, “Ra is all. Ra never ends.”
Suddenly, someone struck me from behind. I was gone. I was in a different throne room, the man with the black tie, the briefcase; the girl with the red hair who was dancing naked in front of him. I tried to stop the vision; I had seen it enough. I saw, then, that it was my father holding the briefcase, fighting against himself more than anything.
I woke. The room was full of bodies. The armor had only slowed the killing, yet, there was no smell of death, this had been done cleanly. The king and Ra were gone. Lara and Natalie stood over me. “What happened?”
“She thinks she can turn you. She was disappointed in the others. ‘He holds the key’ she said to us.”
“Can I defeat her?”
“No.”
“It’s my father isn’t it. He’s the man with the briefcase. If its what I think it is, he holed himself up, in a mountain to stave off the devil.”
“You must face him. These were pawns; you aren’t. You don’t have to face her. You will lose.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. What am I supposed to do?”
There was no answer. We talked more. They told me how it all happened, the girl coming out of nowhere and knocking me out, then being ruthless against the Spartans, stripping them of their powers, killing them; beheading the king, the only one to scream; but they didn’t see what happened to Ra. He was there one moment and gone the next.
It was all happening to fast. I tried to think of calming words, philosophy came to mind, just sitting down and putting the thoughts together so fast they would be foreign days later. The superman. Nietschze. What would he do. I realized God wasn’t dead, if there was a devil my belief system needed to be altered.
I left. The girls just sat there amidst the death; scarred for life. I Went towards the mountain of Olympus. That was where my father would be, the man with the black tie and the suit hoping against hope someone would relieve him of the pressure of holding the whole world in one briefcase.
The roads were empty. I went miles. It was like a sprinter being told he had to go a long distance—I was spent after the first mile. I had to go past Athens, past empty checkpoints, past the slaves who didn’t understand what happened. Some would stop me. Try to speak to me in dialects I couldn’t grasp. Some thought I was a mage; others that I was a Spartan. When they saw my face, most understood I was neither. The woman would touch me, their husbands long dead, in provocative ways, and I would push them away, I hadn’t the desire for sex on this day.
Olympus, on the map, was a simple post, a crossroads where trade traveled through to point in Europe. It was near the Delphi, a place where prophecies were told, lies made out to be fact. I studied the map. Looking for safe points, from which to make my way to where my father was.
I couldn’t use magic this time. The twins had told me I would lose. I wasn’t sure they weren’t in a state of shock when I left, and I wondered what they had seen, and whether I should have left them behind.
I stopped many times. Never slept. I couldn’t risk it. The father I went, the more I saw the devastation reaped on the lands of Greece, how broken the people were. I never saw another Spartan.
After a week of travel, I made it to Olympus. I climbed the mountain, stopped at the first cave, searched it, found the bodies of dead animals, a few images made in blood on the walls, but nothing else. The images made of blood, were disturbing to look at, but I didn’t have the time to stare at them too long.
I saw a flash of red at the next cave. Went inside, saw a figure sitting on a throne with a briefcase, walked towards my father. She was dancing around and, though I tried to rob her of her power by ignoring her, she caught my attention. She continued to dance around in circles. I went to my father. He was covered in dust, holding the briefcase with a deadly grip. He was dead, had been for a long time, yet, had never let go of his briefcase. I tried to take it from him, but he wouldn’t let it go.
She put her hand on my shoulder. “He tried, you see, to ignore me, but no man can.”
“He’s dead. Isn’t that enough?”
“I didn’t kill him. Exposure. That’s what killed him. Now you must take it.”
“No, I don’t. I will leave it here. Live. I don’t need any of it.”
“Don’t you know what’s inside.”
“I have an idea.”
“If you don’t take it, I will have to kill your friends, oh, what are their names? Lara and Natalie.”
I went to my father, put my hand on his forehead, slowly ripped the briefcase from his death grip. It took a lot of goading to open it, and thought It had been sealed shut, and had a lock on it too, I was able to open it.
She looked inside. There was a note. I smiled. “What is this!” she yelled.
I picked up the note.
Son, she thought the whole time I had it. I knew you would find me, you always had a sixth sense like that. Perhaps if the demon had known it was a note to you, it would not have stared at me for so long. I smile at you from above.
I looked at her, those eyes filled with surprise, and I could tell the anger was building. I had no magic, no guns, nothing to fight her. If she wanted, Lara and Natalie could be ended, I tried to think.
She disappeared. I could sense the eyes of the twins on me, and they were alive, for now. I looked to my father, smiled, the best joke someone could ever play was misdirecting the devil, the king of lies fooled by a lie. The fight wasn’t over, I could feel the Ra’s eye on me, the coldness of a ghost, but in the short term I had one, and though the cost was great, I felt I had one for the first time in my life.
I looked at the grin on my father’s face. It was a fitting end for my him. One day, there would be an end to me, but not today.
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