Dagger - The Light at the End of the World (26 page)

Read Dagger - The Light at the End of the World Online

Authors: Walt Popester

Tags: #horror, #fantasy, #heavy metal, #dagger, #walt popester

“
A
second
portal,” Kugar specified.
“Opened by Gorgors and on which we have no control. Here’s how did
they get here. This world is not our secret garden
anymore.”

“
And where does it
lead?”

Moak nodded. “There’s only a way to find
out.” He said no more, and took a step into the void, getting
swallowed by the darkness into the light. Caught off guard, Olem
joined him fast, followed by Kugar. Dagger looked at the Portal one
last time, far away at his feet, then he let himself fall
forward.
He felt buffeted by violent and opposing
forces of gravity, swallowed by darkness and finally spit in plain,
blinding light. He found himself rolling on the ground, in an
environment where air was hot and muggy and it was difficult even
to breathe. He tried to get up, but stumbled and fell to his knees
as the world continued to twist and turn.
The strong light still prevented him from
opening his eyes.

“
Where are you? Where am I?”
he asked.

“
It’s over!” said Olem’s
voice, somewhere. “Skyrgal be cursed, take him up!”

It was hot in there, very
hot, and he felt suffocated. Kugar helped him to his feet and
Dagger clung to her arms. He opened his eyes in a crack and saw the
shiny vortex from which he had emerged, parallel to the floor. Its
only view sickened him. Opening his eyes once and for all, he
realized they were in an ambient totally different from the one
they had just left behind. Two rows of colossal sandstone columns
lay in front of him, as far as eyes could see, supporting a ceiling
high enough to hide itself in his own darkness. Small water drops
fell against his face, because that place, although closed, was so
broad it had its precipitation. It was not built by mortal beings,
he thought, or at least not
for
mortals. When he saw that some columns were carved
in statues depicting anthropomorphic creatures, of which he could
not see the head, high as they were, he felt the anxiety of a man
in front of his avenging god. When he noticed the symbol on their
chest, fear took over concern. It was the same mark at the center
of his sternum.

∞

“
I’ve already been here,” he
softly said. “The smell of this place, of this stone, is engraved
in my memory.”

“
I’m afraid so,” Kugar
murmured.

“
You know where we are,
right?”

“
Come on,” Olem ordered.
Everyone followed him.

They walked between the columns, under the
hidden gaze of the ancient gods that were sculptured among
them.

“
Yes. I’ve been here
before.”

“
This is where you were
created, Dag,” Kugar explained, trying not to be heard by the two
Guardians ahead. “This temple is your home.”

Dagger squeezed his eyes, in
the attempt to sweep away the fragments of memory that were trying
to make their way to the surface of his consciousness. Farther
away, one of the statues had lost half of its head, fallen
shattered to the ground. As if emerging from the floor, a giant eye
now seemed to look just at him, giving him the welcome back. He
found it still hard to breath and he constantly turned, listening
to voices from the darkness calling him in a language that one
time, he was sure, he had known. He heard his name, his
other
name,
Konkra
, echoing among the
columns and the statues.

Something happened
here!
he thought.
Something horrible.

The monumental stone eye prevented them
from continuing, so they turned left. The Portal’s light, the only
one present in the temple, barely got there, but was still strong
enough to allow them to see. The columns became less impressive, so
that it was even possible to appreciate the shape of the statues’
heads.

Dagger realized that their
appearance was familiar to him. “Does
he
really exists?”

“
Who?”

“
Ktisis!”

Just hearing that name, Olem turned, but
said nothing. The statues depicted the lewd jackal god of violence
and sin that he had worshiped since he was a child, yet he was
portrayed in a way different from the usual: he was not
slaughtering the sacred pig, to flood the earth with its fruitful
blood, nor was he holding in his hands the two halves of a man
damned for all times to feed on his intestines, as new power
arising from death. The statues depicted the god seated, with his
left hand resting peacefully on the leg and the right one
contracted into an authoritarian fist. In his divine composure,
Ktisis kept his eyes straight ahead.

“
So it did happen,” Moak
recited. “Close your eyes and forget your name, step outside
yourself and let your mind go, as you go insane.”

“
Spare us this lizardries,
dammit!” Olem grumbled. “I’ve got goose bumps just being
here!”

“
The forgotten temple of
Ktisis has come back to light,” Moak revealed. “With all that it
contains. Needless to wonder who is guarding it now.”

Dagger slowed down, fatigued. He watched
the two Guardians confabulating to each other without being able to
hear what they were saying. The echo of their footsteps got lost in
space, while the sandstone divinities watched him carefully.

“
Who is he?” he asked in a
whisper, grabbing Kugar by the arm. “I don’t think it’s just the
god of alcohol and sin.”

The girl raised her face to look at the
rising darkness above their heads. “Ktisis is the father of all
gods,” she said, grimly. “Father of Skyrgal, Angra and all their
divine brothers. Somehow, he’s part of your family tree, can you
believe it?”

“
And where is he now? In
this place?” Kugar shook her head. “How can you tell? He is here, I
can feel it!”

“
What’s wrong with
you?”

“
I don’t know. I’m not me,
not in here. I’ve been here before!”

“
Ktisis does not give signs
of his presence even before we humans made our appearance in the
world,” she explained. “If he were still here, we would know, I
assure you.”

“
Who was he?”

“
This story does
not—”

He gripped her arm and she pushed him away,
afraid.

“
What the fuck!”

“
Kugar—”

“
Ktisis is the prime mover
of the universe,” she said, rubbing her wrist and looking at him
with suspicion. “The one who created and populated it with his
divine sons; Burzums, like your father, and Mastodons, as our god
Angra. In the first, he incarnated chaos and destruction, necessary
to the eternal regeneration of the universe. In Mastodons, he
embodied the equilibrium of everything that exists.”

“
The good and the
bad?”

Kugar sneered, shaking her head. “It’s easy
for us to identify evil in the Burzums and good in the Mastodons,
but it’s far too simplistic and wrong. Harmony plays the notes of
chaos. In them, Ktisis wanted to embody the two forces that rule
the universe. Destruction and Creation. You cannot have one without
the other. It’s an eternal cycle where only from death comes life.
Skyrgal and Angra are the only survivors of the two divine
offsprings and, in them, lies the very essence of Equilibrium, its
opposite poles. In the great All there’s no good and bad, as
there’s no day and night, before and after. Morals and ethics are
useless coordinates with which man deceives himself of being able
to organize the Creation, his logical necessities, but Ktisis has
made it incomprehensible to our eyes, devoid of morality in his
insatiable and destructive generating power. The truth is hidden
from us, always, and the more we run to it the more it moves away
from us, as a light in the desert, or at the end of a tunnel.” She
looked around, fascinated more than scared by what she was seeing.
“You may have understood that, coming through the Portal, you set
foot on another world. The world where you belong, Candehel-mas.
This land is called holy, because here all the events described in
Genesis took place. Here, Skyrgal and Angra collided. Here, his
soul was eradicated from his body; here, in this world defiled with
blood for which we all fight.” She raised her eyes to look at a
titanic face as they walk past it. “Some nightmares are never
forgotten,” she continued. “And this is one of them. Ktisis has
left indelible marks in history, before disappearing into thin air;
appalling evidence of its ancient power. Some of these were not to
be found, some knowledge should have not return to light. Above
all, not in the wrong, dark hands.” She pointed to a strange purple
paint on the wall to their right.
Dagger saw there were many others in
similarity, everywhere, even on the floor under their feet and on
the statues. They were not paintings, he soon realized, but letters
of an incomprehensible alphabet traced in long spurts of
blood.

“
The blood of the
forces that have lived through all
eternity
,” Kugar said, hovering her hand
over them, in amazement. “Millions of years old blood, that time
will never wash off, paid by the children who Ktisis sacrificed to
reach the
ultimate
power,
Megatherion
. The absolute abandonment to the great silence. The end of
everything that exists.”

She went forward and stopped a little
further on, reaching Moak and Olem, silently examining the unholy
scriptures in turn. The stretch of wall they were facing was
entirely written. The red and barbed symbols looked like sharp and
bloody blades, murderous words dipped in violence.

“
He must have gone mad,”
Kugar soughed. “Can a god go crazy?”

“
What’s written on these
walls?” Olem asked.

“
I’m afraid I know,” Moak
answered. “And I’m afraid that Gorgors can now translate these
ancient scriptures without any disturbance, while we still sit
locked up in our ignorance, waiting for the inevitable.”

Kugar snorted. “And if they were able to
open a new portal, then they are already well on their work of
translation.”

“
Can you translate?” the
Dracon urged again. “You have studied anywhere in the world, you
must be able to draw something out of this blood-shit!”

Moak concentrated. “Only in
a place I could study their alphabet, or at least participate in
its translation, before I realized it is no ordinary alphabet. This
is the language of the gods, it works differently from ours. You
see the symbols inside the letters? Each of those gives a totally
different meaning to the word, and the letters are all linked to
each other, like the unbreakable links of a chain. It is a
perfect
language.”

Dagger shivered. Looking closer he realized
those were the same symbols he had seen etched on his skin when he
was dead and in the presence of his father.

“
Let’s see…” the Guardian
went on. “This seems to be a sort of warning.”

“
A warning?”

“
Yes. It says ‘If you want
to conquer death, you only have to…’ ah , damn it! This part has
been deleted.”

“
You are a really bad
translator.”

“
Look here instead, ‘He will
come and it will be as if nothing ever existed.’ But, thanks to the
symbols in the letters, it assumes another meaning, ‘The eternal
life that will come from nothing.’ And even more inside:, ‘The
eternity of nothingness.’ More and more interesting.”

“
I’m glad you’re having
fun!”

Moak then frowned. Abruptly.

“
What is it?”

He walked away from the wall, as if it were
no longer a source of wonder, but horror.

“
Moak?”

“
Let’s go,” the Guardian
said in a thin voice. “Some things should not be read.”

“
What—?”

“
I can’t read, I don’t know!
I didn’t study anything!” He started walking again,
lock-step.

Following him, they suddenly came in the
presence of a deformed and monstrous skull, imposing, high above
their heads. This time it was not a sculpture, Dagger realized. In
the dim light around him, he saw the huge skeletons crucified on
the pillars of the temple. The skulls with four deformed horns were
silently watching him with their black sockets, smiling with their
sharp fangs.

“
Skyrgal?” he
supposed.

“
No,” Kugar replied. “These
are his brothers, or what’s left of them. Tortured and killed by
Ktisis to obtain the blood he used in his rites.”

He looked up. On the high vault he saw dark
nailed skeletons, but these ones had wings. “And those are the
Mastodons, right?” he asked in a faint voice.
This time Kugar nodded. “The divine
brothers of Angra, killed before his own eyes.”

“
We can’t go around it,
right?” Olem noticed, talking to Moak. “We have to go
inside
it?”

The Guardian observed the skull in front of
them, a fortress of bones. “I’m afraid so,” he stated, taking the
first step into the gaping Burzum’s jaws. They sank into the
darkness in his mouth, among his teeth as tall as columns, under
the grotesque white ceiling of the palate. They passed through the
foramen of the head, beyond two horns planted on the ground as the
colossal triumphal arch of death. They crossed the portico of the
ribs, leaving the basin, partly collapsed as the ruins of an old,
white palace.

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