URBAN NOSGOTHIC 2 : CALL TO ARMS

Chapter 11

Disclaimer: Legacy of Kain created by Eidos.

"Did I go too far? If I went too far, tell me, and I'll…oh." - Vladimir Mikhail, Nexus Dreams.

I can't see its head.

Does it have a head?

Like some dreadful optical illusion – you remember those Magic Eye pictures that were all the rage a few years ago? Pages of repetitive patterns that if stared at long enough formed a 3-D image – the vast, tangled mass that is Raziel's Elder God emerges from the water.

Great. Not only am I insane, my eyes are playing up too.

Because it just isn't possible for anything to be that big. The tentacles reach up, fading to indistinctness against the paling sky, curling around the arch of the London Eye, and reach down, questing, into the unmarked depths of the Thames. I cannot see where the body (if it has a physical body that can be constrained by physical parameters) ends.

It's making my mind ache just to look at it.

Just like when I was eight, that thing, tentacles writhing and coiling malevolently like a nest of vipers, is now my world. No, no – it is a world in itself, and I am an unwelcome intruder. I remember – my face pressed to the glass, my breath condensing, and still that alien, slit eye stared at me from within the tank as if trying to remember my face for future reference.

I was so frightened, so unused to being that close to something so utterly unlike myself, but I could not move.

I am caught again, mesmerised, and it is only when Moebius, behind me, utters a bubbling cry as Kain thrusts the Reaver up between his ribs that I look away from the river and try and focus on the other problem.

The man slumps against Kain, his rubbery lips twisting into a forced smile. There is blood on his face, blood pooling at his feet.

He is dying.

Somehow I fail to have any feelings at all on the matter.

There seems to have been some sort of repartee going on between the vampire and his victim, but as Kain pushes the man away in disgust and he falls to the pavement, all conversation is over.

Kain stands and watches the corpse for a moment as if suspecting it will resurrect itself: then, when no miracle occurs, he puts his head on one side and gives me an unfriendly look.

"What?" he snaps. "What are you staring at, woman, or have you lost what little wit your kind possess?"

My eyes, which had been following the slow flick-flick-flick of a nearby tentacle in horrified fascination, are dragged reluctantly up to meet Kain's impatient face.

He doesn't see it…

Oh. My. God.

He doesn't see it.

I'm having hallucinations that even my other hallucinations can't see.

There must be a whole shelf of psychology textbooks just waiting to be written about me. What's happening? Raziel can see it, always has been able to.

Kain snorts, strides towards me (through a tentacle! my mind screams at me, he just walked THROUGH one!!) and peers over the edge of the parapet.

"Nothing," he mutters, and glares at me.

Moebius's staff is lying a little way off, having rolled away and come to a halt against a large litter bin. Kain's attention (easily distracted) turns to this and mercifully turns away from me.

Because really, I'm not feeling in any state to talk to him. Not when the whole sky seems to be alive with tentacles and every tentacle seems to sport pale, unhealthily milky blue eyes…

A boat chugs past on the water, straight through the centre of the largest eye I can see. It's almost as if…it's not real somehow, as if it came across this reality, took a slight step to one side, and now exists in that sidestep.

It is…truly horrible.

And then that one huge eye fixes upon me and a voice louder than any strike of Big Ben murmurs: "I can see you, little one…"

My heart stops, for one terrified moment. Then it jolts again, painfully hard, thumping, pounding. My body shudders.

For a moment there I thought he'd stopped it for good.

Can anything in this or any other world kill with speech alone…?

And that sounded like just a random thought. A passing comment on something unimportant.

I would hate to be near this thing if it ever got really worked up about something.

My head feels bad. Dizzy…the harmonics from that voice are turning my brain to jelly, I'm sure of it.

I clutch at my temples, trying to squeeze away the pain. My eyes covered, I sway to stop myself from falling…

"Rhianna," says Raziel quietly from behind me, "I thought you were dead."

I blink, and lower my hands. Green, grey, blue.

The world has changed. Kain is nowhere to be seen, and the Elder God suddenly more than fills everything, fills this world as if he holds all of it in his coils.

I clear my throat, which feels dry and sore. "I thought you were dead, too," I manage. Raziel is just a few feet away, perched on some rock in a half-sitting sprawl, his hooves tucked under his legs and his body propped up on one arm. "I – I'm glad you're not…"

Raziel regards me with his white eyes for a second or so. "If you would allow me to finish," he says, still soft, his tone devoid of all expression. "I thought you were dead – and now that I see you here I am sure of it."

The rock he is sitting on opens an eye and blinks.

Suddenly I have never been this cold, not even in Janos's Retreat. The body of Moebius lies on the floor before us, flickering and insubstantial. I reach out a trembling hand and watch as it passes through the Time Streamer's shoulder like smoke.

Dead.

This is the underworld, the spectral realm. Raziel is watching me calmly. Why shouldn't he be calm? After all, he's already been here for centuries. He has all the time in the world to wait for me to adjust.

Part of me wants to be relieved. Dead. Dead at last, after all those near misses. The other, larger part is screaming, but how did I die?

"I'm…not dead," I whisper. "I haven't died yet…I can't have done…"

Raziel looks at me shrewdly, and shuffles one foot a little.

"I've died so many times I've really forgotten what it feels like," he says, eventually. "But I suppose what the whole process has taught me is that there are many different ways to die rather than the conventional."

His tone is so matter-of-fact  and conversational that I feel that we ought to be holding cups of tea and having cucumber sandwiches or something.

"First," he continues, "mortal death. That was easy to distinguish. Mortal life – mortal death. Conventional. Then, when I had thought my cycle was over, I was brought back. Am I alive? Who can say. And then –" he shifts his weight, standing, so that his wiry, emaciated height towers over me. " – then, immortal death. Madness. My senses driven away from me, until I thought I could take no more." He seems to be regarding the hazy corpse at his feet. "So, then, what is death?" he asks. "It seems to me that you should not be questioning how you died – only what sort of death it was."

…madness…my senses driven away from me…

My skin crawls.

"I'm not dead!" I blurt out. Another one of those occasions where I wish my mouth would consult my brain before saying anything. I am in hell with a six-foot-tall wraith who has ten-inch talons. If he says I'm dead, I should have agreed with him. It would have saved time.

Raziel seems to heave some sort of sigh. His shoulders hitch, and then he reaches down and lays one claw inside the corpse's semi-transparent form.

"Very well," he says. "Then make your choice…and find something to hide behind."

The world comes alive with horrible abruptness. Raziel's form splits, vanishes, subsumes itself into the corpse at his feet: and then I get to find out, at first hand, what the Elder God sounds like when he is angry.

My hearing gives up after the first super-and-subsonic roar. All I am left with is a ringing, a hissing, the blanket of white noise that comes down over a damaged eardrum to protect it.

My eyes are so tightly shut against the anger of the God that I do not see the world change again.

"No! Raziel!"

And then I am very, very much aware of my vital status.

If I was dead, surely all the pain would be over…

…and as if in my mind, I hear Raziel say, sadly, No, no, not at all. When you die, that's when the pain starts…

My shoulder is a precise branding of agony. I scream, and am aware, behind me, of Raziel's gasp as the blade runs him through.

The Reaver has passed through my shoulder as if my flesh were no more barrier than cotton-wool, and into Raziel. In front of me, Kain, an expression of anguish on his face, holding the hilt and trying to pull the blade free.

"No, Raziel," he repeats, "this can't be the way…"

I cannot pretend to understand what just happened. Blood is soaking into my clothes. All the blood I have seen over the last year, my own, Gary's, the luckless thugs', the drunk on the stairs…all that blood suddenly flashes before me, fills my vision, and I feel hot and ugly inside.

I think I'm in shock again. Good. It will hurt less that way. I can't help dragging my rambling thoughts to a very similar scene, not so long ago: Gary, pinned like a butterfly to a card by the wraith-blade as Raziel asks me, reasonably, why he cannot kill him.

Talk about karma. What goes around, comes around.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I think I can hear an echo of the Elder God's laughter.

Join the Wheel, little soul.

Well, I never was much of a joiner. But too late, I think I'm going to have to become a quick learner.