In the Hall of the Mountain King
By Asso
Chapter Thirteen
(The Thirteenth, after the Prologue - The Fourteenth, counting the Prologue)
My friends, I realize it's been a long time since I posted the last chapter of this story, and I will apologize.
Anyway, here I am. Another chapter is here for you, if you want to be kind enough to read it.
I do not think it is appropriate to summarize in a big way what happened so far, but something, I think it should be said.
So, here it is.
We left our two heroes, Trip and T'Pol, finally together, for real, after that Trip was able to pass the first ordeal.
In fact, while Malcolm and Hoshi are trying to understand from His Excellency the boss of Bannerdas what the devil (Yes, the devil. Increasingly him) the two of them could do to save Trip and T'Pol, they, Trip and T'Pol, have finally managed to be reunited with each other, and with no small effort on the part of Trip (and a lot of suffering on the part of T'Pol).
But they have certainly very little, not to say anything, to be happy about.
The second ordeal is about to begin.
And, believe me, my friends ... it will be a hell of an ordeal.
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The silence lasts long.
The wait becomes unnerving.
Becomes spasmodic.
He reluctantly slips off from the embrace in which she has wrapped him. He stands up, turns around, looking for something. A sign. Anything.
"Trip."
His glance gets down over her, envelops her in the warmth of his love. "My treasure?"
She too gets up, slowly. She hugs him, nestles in the circle of his arms, trembling against him, enwrapped in them. His real arms, in the flesh, that finally she can feel for real, around her. "Do not leave me anymore, Ashayam. Whatever happens, do not leave me anymore."
He holds strictly her to him with infinite love. And infinite sadness. He well knows – and she too - that that won't be. It can't happen. They will be again separated from each other. "T'Pol..."
A noise. Dull. A rumbling. That slowly rises in pitch. That becomes stridency.
They turn, huddled together.
And they see.
And this time… he knows it… as well as she…
This time it is not an illusion.
He sees them, in the way He can see them, not with the eyes, but with His mind.
He feels them. Feels their fear.
He laughs. With His disembodied laughter. Gloomily.
*No, Human. No, Vulcan. It is not an illusion.*
He laughs again. Even more sombrely.
*You, Human, you, who are me, you shall experience what I experienced.*
His laughter dies in the deafening crackling of the flames.
Embraced to each other, they stare at the big breach that has opened in the rock wall over there.
Clung to one another, they watch beyond the great opening.
They watch the hell.
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"I told you where and how we have found that book. I have said that this book was, no, is, something that we believed did not exist for real, but that instead exists. And it is very important, immeasurably important, that it really exists and that we have been able to retrieve it, because our legends, that legends no longer are, say that in it it's not narrated, but described - this is the correct term - how the King, the… the Devil, was forced to sleep his frosty vigil, how his threat was averted, albeit at a terribly high price, and how he ended up being confined into this planet of wild forests, to live his life of chilly non-life. In that book, if what it is said of it squares with the true, there is the explanation of everything and even the way to..."
"To chase the devil back in the hell which vomited him."
The Bannerda stares intently at Malcolm, impressed. He nods. "Yes, lieutenant. Just like that. Or maybe it's better to say 'to chase the King back in the hell which vomited him in case he had managed to escape from this hell'."
My Mal nods in turn. I look at him, at the resolute expression that shows itself over it. I squeeze his hand with fierceness and pride. He took the lead. My Mal may be uncertain, doubtful, controlled to the point to appear made of ice. But when he decided to go where it's best to go - and rarely, not to say ever, he is mistaken about this - he goes there. And nothing and no one can stop him.
He gently frees his hand from mine and approaches the Bannerda with a determined air. He stops right in front of him. "Let's see, Your Excellency. It is clear that our beloved King - our good devil - didn't vanish in the darkness of night. In the darkness of that night."
His Excellency knits his eyebrows, clearly confused. He does not understand, His Excellency. That's evident. Well, understandable and, despite everything, I can not help but smile. If he wants, my Mal manages to be almost worse than Trip. And when they are together... oh my! Stuff to make lose the patience even to Job! Not for nothing, T'Pol and I agreed to make... a tight alliance against our two terrible sweethearts.
The smile dies on my lips.
Yeah. Our two sweethearts.
Mine. And the one of T'Pol.
Trip.
Lost. In the nothing.
Together with his T'Pol.
Our two closest friends. Lost over there, on that planet that seems to no longer exist. And... damned, as it turns out.
Doomed.
To be again what it seems they were.
The Devil.
And the bride of the Devil.
And... horrid, the thought grabs me... and if the devil finds a way to stomp with real feet, true, flesh and blood, the dust of the worlds of the universe, of our worlds, of the worlds that are our reality, our home, as it seems... as it seems that a time he did for real...
Oh Holy Mother! In this case, the hell will no longer be his home.
Hell will be our home!
And... and, if possible, this is even worse to be digested… and it will have been Trip, our Trip, to transform our world into hell!
And even more terrible to think about it... for love!
He will do that because driven by his love for his T'Pol!
The cause of the end of love, of the advent of the reign of hatred and terror, will have been the greatest of loves.
No, no and no!
Please, God of heaven! Please! If really You're there, do not let this happen!
Do not allow the purest of love become... become...
"Oh, I beg your pardon, Your Excellency." The words, harsh and scathing of Mal, shake me. "I realize that the Vulcan residing in you has some difficulty understanding sarcasm. I see to remedy. I mean it is very clear that the beast, into which the King got transformed that damn night, did not vanish forever into nothingness. It, evidently, somehow managed to continue his... mh, maybe it's better to say its fight."
The eyebrows of Bannerda get smoothed out. "Ah, I understand. Yes, Lieutenant, it is so. And..."
"And yet, somehow, it, the beast, came out defeated from the fight. It was reduced to silence, to the frost of a life non-life. But at a high price and with the risk that it could resurrect again, as, apparently, it's happening."
"Yes, it is so. And..."
"And that book is the manual."
"The manual?"
"Yes. Correct me if I'm wrong, Your Excellency. Substantially you said that in that book, or rather, I'm convinced, in the missing pages, it is described how it was possible to imprison the King on that world of forests, the price that had to be paid for this to be possible, and most likely even the way to repel him back in the case he had been able to rise again."
"Actually..."
"To be more precise and to move away, finally and thankfully, from the world of myth and legend and of gothic horror and regain at least a little of the solid reality, the point is that you think that in that book, in its missing pages, there are the scientific and technical basis of what for you has become myth. As to say the real and true report of what happened and the related technical notations. And the instructions to follow in the eventuality of a return of the King, as, it seems, it is happening now."
"A… actually, Lieutenant."
"Therefore, a manual."
I approach in my turn to the Bannerda, who is staring at Mal, with engrossed face, clearly impressed by the lucidity of the statements of my mate. I goad him. "Is it so, Your Excellency?"
The Bannerda turns his gaze on me. He hesitates a moment. Then he nods. "It is so." He seems for a moment to gather his ideas. Then he nods again, with conviction. "That was the night of our victory and of our end, the end of our innocence."
Mal and I do not speak. We look at the old and vigorous Bannerda, expecting him to continue.
"In seeing their Lord fall to the ground, pierced to death, terror gripped the warriors and monsters that crowded before our Monarch and his men. They broke up and fled screaming and when our Lord regained the exit of the palace that had been the abode of the Black Sir, he realized he had won for real. The hated enemies were fleeing by all parties, disbanded, as if they, all of them, knew what had happened and this was occurring everywhere. The Great Monarch was informed that wherever, in the night, sulphurous by the fires, the enemy troops were in chaotic stampede. And in deep space, the same thing was happening. The King's troops were scattering, even there. They fled, in the throes of the most insane of fears, but, in the chaos that had caught the enemy ships, they were falling prey to our fire with ease. All were destroyed. The spatial mighty army of the King ceased to exist."
We stay silent again, while His Excellency stops for a moment, his expression severe. "And then, the Great Monarch made his decision. And issued his orders"
It is as if, upon the face of His Excellency, it falls a mask of pain. "On that night and in the nights and the days that followed, the flames devoured forever the birthplace of the hated race of the King." He raises his eyes at us. They are hard, almost bad. "Our monarch ordered our victorious troops to wipe out any trace of that breed, there, on the world that was the world that had seen its birth. Men. Women. Children. All of them. And... also what was left of Lil. And also all the servants had to die of that evil race, those belonging to the breeds, including our own, who had fallen prey to the malefic enchantment of the King."
His Excellency takes a deep breath. "It was... a massacre, in which our race... lost its honour and damned itself to be not dissimilar, in the end, from the breed of the King."
The Bannerda recovers, stands proud. "But our monarch had a more than valid justification. He knew that it could not be left alive a single one of our enemies, on pain of the possible resurgence of their threat. And he knew that the King was not dead. He had become something awful and different, a mad Ghoul with the crazed brain of the man who had been the King, but he was not dead. And had to be found and wiped out. Destroyed. Annihilated. Once and for all. Definitely. But…"
"But it was not found." The words of Mal are ice.
"No." The voice of Bannerda seems broken. "It was not found. It was him – it - to find us."
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He remembers, as He observes the Human who is Him and his woman, the woman who is Lil, huddle together, in the grip of their fear.
He remembers.
He remembers His own fear.
He remembers while He speaks. Fierce and sarcastic. With his bodiless voice.
"Go, Human. Hell awaits you."
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"The victorious army embarked on the way back, but the hearts were anything but serene. That was a return devoid of joy. The delight that was supposed to indwell in all people's minds at the consciousness that after countless eons the victory had come, at last, the long-awaited victory; the delight that the threat of the wicked enemy breed, that evil, had been blotted out, finally, that it could no longer spread in the universe… this joy could not burst forth, could not mitigate the chill that everyone felt inside. Too much blood, too many deaths. Too much evil. Even… in them. It, the evil, just the evil they had wanted to destroy, had remained attacked to them."
The Bannerda has sat down, and we too have done it. We're sitting, I and Malcolm, in front of him. We listen to him carefully. We are to the point. We understand this.
"Lil." The voice of His Excellency is low and heavy. "A maiden of our own race. Bride, unforced... no, more, consenting and willing, of evil. And dead. Killed. By the hands of women belonging to her – to our - own breed. Dead. Like his father. Like those women. Like whole legions of brave warriors. And like all the components of the damned race that, from all along, stood to threaten the universe... and like countless of its servants, enslaved to it..."
The old Bannerda seems to bend on itself. "Everyone dead. By our hands. In the name of good." His voice gets horribly bitter and sarcastic. "Oh yes, of course. In the name of good. But dead. Slaughtered. All of them. By us."
His eyes rise suddenly, twinkling. They look at us, intensely. "Legends, stories, narratives, dramas, myths. Tragic tales." The eyes get hard. "Truth."
I feel the urge to get up, to go next to him, to comfort him in some way. I do it. I gently rest my hand on his shoulder. I speak softly. I try to appear slight. "Your Excellency, we are the heirs of evil, not you."
He looks at me, almost surprised. Almost affectionately. "But we have permitted evil to defile us. We have not been able to defeat it for real. We have allowed it to be perpetuated even in us, we loaded our descendants, and you too, of enormous faults, faults requiring to be atoned." He lowers his eyes again. "And we..." The Bannerda pauses for a moment, then continues in a low voice, without looking up. "And we have not been able to eliminate the root of evil, its essence. We have allowed it to find a way to resurrect. We have allowed the resurrection of the King. We..." His eyes rise towards me. They are veiled. "We have allowed the birth of the devil."
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He remembers the flames. The fire all around Him.
He laughs, without sound. Bitterly.
His human descendants, in the memory imprinted in their genes, had found a perfect name for the place in which He had found Himself. Completely alone. And changed into what He had changed.
That was the hell.
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Mal comes to us. He looks at us hard. But his voice is not harsh. "Come on, Your Excellency. Let's not waste more time."
The Bannerda sighs softly. "Sure, Lieutenant."
He gets up again, straightens up, as if looking for strength. "The Great Monarch could only hope that in the destructive flames that enveloped the entire planet that had been the abode of the King, he too, even the being into whom he had changed, had found the end. But it was not so."
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He remembers the flames. The flames that burned, torching His palace.
He remembers.
He remembers the pain of the fire as He tried to enter His palace prey to the flames, while He managed to penetrate into it.
While, crawling on His four paws on the blazing floor, under the collapsing vaults, He succeeded in reaching the secret door.
The door that led to His secret housings.
To His secret machines.
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"What happened, Your Excellency?"
The Bannerda folds his arms behind his back. He looks thoughtfully at us. "Time passed. The Great Monarch held the new order of the Universe. An Universe without war.
And unmoving.
Bated.
As in waiting."
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He remembers the pain.
The pain that He was forced to feel in those housings, ironclad, fireproof and shellproof and shielded in such a way as not to be able to be pinpointed, by the work of those machines, known only to Him and… to Lil, their builders conveniently promoted by Him to a better life.
His body of monster rebelled against the remodelling imposed by His machines.
Acquiring the standing position. With pain.
Changing His front paws into simulacra of clawed hands. With pain.
Changing His hind paws into simulacra of clawed feet. With pain.
But His body, His new body, obeyed. With pain.
He remembers all that pain.
He remembers it.
And the tremendous agony He was compelled to feel in forcing His ancient essence, pent-up in His new crazy brain, not to die, not to be overwhelmed by all the uncontrollable ferocious fury of the beast that now possessed Him.
The beast.
THE BEAST!
He remembers the pain… and the heartache.
The torment.
He remembers… the horrible face that He saw reflected in the mirrors.
His muzzle.
The not shapeable muzzle of a monster with red eyes in which glowed, deep, a tiny, fiery flame of blue.
He remembers.
And He remembers the furor. And the thirst for revenge.
And the fulgurating cognition, the understanding, that the means for revenge existed.
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"And one day..."
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He remembers.
The carrions. The charred and decayed flesh of the dead, be it that they were animals or not, which had become His food, the food, the only food, that His body of monster wanted and that His machines procured for Him.
He remembers those carrions.
They were what was enough.
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The Bannerda comes alive. Jumps up. It almost seems that he lives really what his ancestors, the Grand Monarch, had lived.
I squeeze Mal's hand.
"One day…" I feel transfixed by the eyes of the old Bannerda. He knows - he knows now, as we do - that he is not telling a story or a myth. He is telling the truth. "One day the space was filled with signals, noises. All wondered what was happening. All except the Grand Monarch, awfully old by now, of an old age that is no longer possible to reach today, but yet young and powerful in his mind and in his body, strong and puissant.
He knew.
Our warships took off in the sky at his command. Our armies prepared themselves. The warning and monitoring systems snapped on red.
They sought.
And they found.
Far away, light years away, they found what they sought."
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He remembers.
His was now the brain of a monster and what was most horrifying was that He knew he was a monster and that He could not help but be a monster.
But that monster had instincts and impulses, potentialities and possibilities horrible, yes, but immense, potentialities and possibilities that He did not possess before, that resided in His very nature of bloodthirsty and instinctual monster. The wild instinct of the monster was frighteningly enhanced and strengthened by the power of His superior thought, as much as this had to fight for not passing away.
He had become a lot less than what He had been, but also much more.
And He had used His new skills to the utmost.
That brain of monster around His old brain had no qualms of any kind.
That brain of monster around His old brain could dominate, by means of His machines, the bodies of zombies brought back to a pseudo-life by those machines.
Hideous carrions, back to a life without life, totally subservient to Him.
Things with no other will than His.
Hundreds, thousands, millions of things without conscious soul, neither alive nor dead, at His command.
Things that would have struggled and fought for Him, without any concern to remain in life, a life they no longer possessed.
Things that, guided by Him, careless of a fatigue that they could not feel, had built, over time, hundreds, thousands, millions of extremely tiny but extremely mighty war space ships, impossible to be detected from space, while his ancient adversaries, reassured by the dead stillness that hung on the dead planet that had been His home, lulled in the security due to the inert passage of time, retreated from the confines of the space that had been His, ceased to keep under surveillance, with careful attention, that dead planet, which, from a hell of flames had become a hell of dead frost.
And in whose icy and dead bowels was being born the Army of Darkness.
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"Myriads of tiny voracious ferocious unstoppable black locusts, in the shape of mini war ships, with the insignia of the dead Black Sir.
Of the King."
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And finally, all was ready. And it was time. His body, the body of the monster that he was now, had nearly reached the limit. It had begun to become corrupt. He needed another body.
But there, in the hell of his ancient, dead, birth planet, there were only carrions, dead carrions of metal and flesh falsely living without life.
He had to find vengeance.
Vengeance. And a new body.
He remembers.
He remembers when His new huge fleet of deadly tiny spaceships, replete of undead, rose from His old dead planet and put to the sea, into deep space.
He remembers.
He remembers when, on His own tiny ship of command, His eyes of monster saw the great fleet of His ancient enemies, of the Great Monarch who had defeated Him, materialize in front of His fleet.
He remembers the great fleet of the big war space ships of the Great Monarch.
Small thing in comparison to His fleet of myriads of tiny voracious ferocious unstoppable locusts.
In comparison with His Army of Darkness.
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"The Army of Darkness"
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He remembers the drool that oozed from his tusked mouth in foretasting His revenge.
He remembers the wild joy He felt, the wild scream, the savage roar, which burst out from between His fangs and which resonated on every vessel, on every deadly locust of His Army of Darkness.
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"The space was full of them. There was no direction where to look where they were not. There was no corner of space which was not swarming with them.
The deadly locusts of the again alive King.
Of his Army of Darkness."
End of the Chapter
TBC
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The Hell, the Devil, and now even the Army of Darkness. But where the devil (the Devil, precisely) have we ended up, my friends?