Chapter 3: Intersections
It began with a very ugly jar.
Well not really (though the jar was ugly—a bit on the moldy side, with a large unfriendly eye stuck in the center).
It neither began nor ended with the jar. But the jar was very important. The jar and its owner changed everything.
Folklore called it the Hellmaster's Jar. It could hold souls the way Hellmaster Fibrizo could, little gold spheres with a personal universe inside them. In fact, the jar's original owner was probably just that mazoku lord.
It also (kind of) began with a disease.
Doctors called it the Durum Disease. And they scoffed at holy men and their futile efforts to fix it.
The Hellmaster's Jar and the Durum Disease intersected at a small, obscure, politically unfavored kingdom.
Maps and census officials called the kingdom Taforashia.
The scoffing doctors and the little kingdom did not expect Rezo Greywers and his Hellmaster Jar to visit.
Some time after the explosive argument with his great-grandson, Zelgadiss made a habit of going missing when Rezo wanted him to come with him on a healing journey. One such time, Rezo instructed Eris to care for Zelgadiss, left home, and passed through Taforashia. There he met the feisty, diminutive prince, who flung around the nickname Pokota, and the prince's friend and personal guard Duclis.
In the process Rezo sieved off a certain percentage of his own soul and placed it in the Hellmaster's Jar. He invited Pokota and Duclis to do the same. He transferred their infected bodies into the bodies of a rabbit and tiger beastman, respectively. Standing over a glowing, billowing Runic seal, Rezo spoke of a spell that would place the slumbering bodies of Taforishia's diseased masses into protective crystal barriers, until which point Pokota and Duclis could find a cure. When they did, Rezo would break the barriers and the people would revive, to receive their cure.
And then, quite unfortunately, Rezo, the world-famous healing Mage, died.
Impressive story. But what is the point of telling you all of this?
Simple. The shard of Rezo's soul placed in the Hellmaster's Jar ensured something. Something big:
At any point in time, Rezo Greywers, killed and caught in some limbo between Red Orb and the heavens, could be resurrected.
All because of a very ugly jar.
And before we discuss the first event, we left off at the second event in our last chapter.
Let's resume our story.
He woke up on a roadside screaming. His throat was like percolated sandpaper lit on fire, so hoarse with other screams that he could not remember emitting. "Am… I dead?" The question sounded absurd even in his hysteria. He tried to laugh, but instead his stomach heaved and he vomited into the dewy grass of the frighteningly new, fresh morning.
The last thing he remembered…pain, pain of indescribable magnitude and duration. The feeling of flesh rending like a tarantula's tentacles piercing out from inside a peach. The agony of organs twisting, grinding, and exploding. A nauseous squelching, thick dark red drizzling from the cruel alien appendages that violently sprouted from his neck and spine and shoulder blades and belly. Degrading, humiliating anguish, before the horrified eyes of his enemies, which no amount of begging could cease. Shrieking "I CAN SEE, I CAN SEE, I CAN SEE," desperate glee even while being devoured by the parasite that had raped and raped him.
Glee quickly snuffed, just like the bloody red vision, which offered just a glimpse of five pairs of revolted eyes.
The last thing he saw in those fifteen seconds of the eyesight that he had always craved, of the world that he had healed and walked through loving and longing to know, the last thing he saw….was a face in the center.
A beautiful boy's face, blemished by clusters of shiny hard things. And Zelgadiss's imploring, reasoning voice belonged to that face.
Rezo remembered thinking at that peculiarly still, serene instant in the swirling, torturous madness, Oh…that's my great grandson. That's my boy. I lost my boy. My boy.
Then all went black, and Rezo realized his mistake. His truly monumental error in judgment. His selfish myopia. And oh God. Damn. Damn damn damn. It was too late to reverse it. This was no chemical mixture in a laboratory test tube. This was the fate of the world, which he had forfeited for himself. The lives of the masses, which he had saved uselessly, all to die. The love of a kinsman, which he had brutalized.
He'd been blind in ways with no relation to his eyes. He'd been blind. Blind, blind, and incurably blind.
Rezo had asked an absurd question then, because he'd forgotten, really, why he had ever wanted this: "WHO ARE YOU?" Pressing his fingers to his eyes, squeezing shut the lids, as all the pain in the universe seemed to settle thickly on his retinas.
Shabranigdo had laughed, a deep mirthless guffaw like darkness itself shuddering, like the last shaking breath of life, like the stale air in a tomb. "I am the one whose rebirth you sought."
Had he? Had he really ever sought something so unspeakable? But hadn't he wanted to slay Shabranigdo with a Zanaffar the moment the ma-oh was resurrected? Hadn't he researched all the possible wrong turns for years? Hadn't he double checked everything?
When had it gone wrong, his stupid, quixotic dream? His maimed plan? How had he blundered into the destruction of the whole world? Idiot. Idiot!
Rezo had screamed then, probably the first scream of thousands, and the reason why his throat was so ragged now. A broken sob of "NO--" meant for no one but himself.
His skin was on fire.
And then cool. Calming placid cool. Peace, and after it, a sudden peak of bliss. Light. No form to the light, only infinite light. Light everywhere. Inside and out, cleansing, and Shabranigdo was no longer a part of him. No longer his master.
As though through the muffling of a closed door, Rezo had continued to hear the battle raging between his fellow humans and the monster lord. Nothing spoken seemed to register…he felt like he was lying adrift on a gentle, tepid tide. Resting at last. A part of him knew that if he drifted off, he would never return. But he didn't care anymore. There was nothing to lose by his departure.
Hours passed, days passed. Time became irrelevant.
And that was when the voices got louder again. He tried to ignore them…he just wanted to sleep, and forget how much he now hated himself.
But that was when Rezo heard Zelgadiss calling his name.
Zelgadiss, whom he thought he had lost forever. He frowned and forced himself to concentrate on the words uttered.
"Do you really wish to destroy the world you so longed to see? Rezo!" His boy. His boy…! Zelgadiss, with his sword swinging, strumming his guitar that Rezo gave him one Christmas and singing impromptu melodies with his pensive, lilting young voice, a child sternly ordering Rezo every evening to eat more, work less, while standing in oversized flannel pajamas, Zelgadiss plotting vast maps of territories around Rezo's research institute with his compass and going on ambitious long hikes, Zelgadiss eating warm thick oatmeal every morning with Rezo before Rezo left to heal strangers and maybe even laughing a little bit at some horrible nerdy joke Rezo made, Zelgadiss huddled in Rezo's library reading for his voracious mind, Zelgadiss whom Rezo loved.
Zelgadiss whose parents Rezo had killed, because Shabranigdo had willed it, to be awakened inside Rezo's eyes.
Zelgadiss. Rezo owed his whole self to this boy whom he'd robbed. Zelgadiss, who suffered the same fate as Rezo, because of Rezo: Isolating himself from the human race in order to cure a painful ailment, putting that cure above all else. No. He could not have his boy put through what he endured.
Rezo would not allow that. This was where their twin destinies would reach a fork, and part, for the salvation of Zelgadiss.
"He's hesitating!" came the braying voice of Lina Inverse. "Shabranigdo is hesitating! That means Rezo's soul isn't totally consumed yet!"
Oh? Rezo, lying on the cleansing sea tides of light, mused, almost idly. Huh. That so? Then I'm still here. How unexpected. I thought I would sleep…
And Zelgadiss cried out again: "Rezo! REZO!" Just his name, but every time he heard his boy say it, something long dormant in his chest fluttered, and swelled until it ached with urgency. "REZO!"
My boy. I'm coming.
And then Lina Inverse was railing on about choices, and making them swiftly, and pleading for Rezo's help, and then she was casting the incantation for something that was disrupting the entire fabric of the astral plane. Rezo felt himself pulled out of Shabranigdo by the navel, a lurching dropping sensation, but he embraced it.
I'm coming.
"GIGA SLAVE!" Inverse bawled.
Rezo emerged from Shabranigdo's chest…floating on a glowing white wave, confronting the ma-oh head-on. What to even call this monstrosity that he had exhumed? "Dark Lord," Rezo crooned, causing the repulsive black and red thing to recoil: in fear.
"Don't interfere!" the thing growled.
Rezo smiled, and opened his eyes. It felt like salvation. The Giga Slave blazed toward the both of them from behind. He didn't turn. "Oh no. I have chosen. You must be destroyed."
Because my boy called for me, and I must atone.
And the sublime warmth, the light, shot out from him, and that was when the Giga Slave, too, impacted, and tore asunder, Ruby-Eyed Shabranigdo.
And that was the last thing Rezo remembered.
And now he was at a roadside screaming and vomiting in grass.
Why had he returned?
Had his penance been insufficient? Was this some hell designed to be just like the living world he had never been allowed to see?
"You're not dead, if that's what you're thinking." It was the voice of a child, peppered with an incredible snideness. An amusement, almost a delight, in his suffering.
"…Who are you?" Rezo chafed at asking the same stupid question twice in so short a time period. Or had it been short?
"You've been dead for ten years," the sinuous kid-voice replied. "But your great-grandson is still a rock-person, which is kinda funny, and more importantly, you stole my jar. So I wanted to bring you back and yell at you for snitching it, because I could, after all."
A pause. Rezo remained dumfounded. Jar? What jar?
"Boy, you're a slow one." A snicker. And then the voice added, "My name is Fibrizo. Give me my jar. And tell me where father is."
