Chapter 64: Just a Matter of Pride
The Macros Biome, Macros' autonomous planet, floats between the many universal biomes. Its master, enigmatic as always, is working hard within his laboratory on his latest ecological restoration project.
Gazing at his strange tablet, he walks around a large glass aquarium as one of his curious crane hands drops into it, a small, gelatinous egg pinched between it.
"Hmm..." Macros looks at his tablet and sees a three-dimensional image of a large fish with bony fins, two rows of teeth, and long, flowing, retractable anemone stingers spinning around on it.
Each part of the body was flashing green, save for the ghastly, beady eyes, which flashed red. He shook his head and calmly knocked his knuckles on the glass, "This one's a dud, put it back."
The claw froze up, then quickly raised the egg out of the water, flicking it into an oversized trash can. Macros then continued to stroll past the aquarium towards a lavish muscle fiber chair rising from the ground.
As he turned and sat upon it, he continued to stare perplexed towards the tablet, "Just a little more fiddling around ought to do."
He tapped on the eye in particular and scrolled through the irregularities whose words would all be alien to human eyes. He then put the tablet on his lap as his machines grinded together in the background to produce another egg.
"Attempt number three. My craftsmanship is certainly...lacking lately." He craned his head back and the ceiling pulled back like eyelids, revealing the majesty of space to him.
A swirling nebula, mixing cloudy pink and peach colors together, was what his world was passing by. Gases of newly forming stars danced around the edges. This scene illuminated splendid on his eyes, he cracked a smile, and leaned back further into his chest.
"Marvelous." He murmured, offering more praise in that one word than theologians have spanning their entire career.
A few recollecting moments later, he sat up and pulled his tablet towards his chest, having drawn in inspiration from the collective cosmos.
"Alright, once the egg is prepared I ought to determine how many will be proper to repopulate the food supply of Planet Aquidos," He closed his eyes and filled in the blanks in but a moment, "Yes, an even one-thousand should do just fine. Once the babies reach maturity, little will be able to..."
He paused, furrowing his brows with a gaze lingering towards his door. Pulled from his chair, he laid his tablet down behind him and began to walk.
There was something astir in the air. Subtle, yet obvious enough for him to catch wind of. A calling card, wafting about with a sinister vibe to it.
He panned the move with a few hardened clicks of his tongue and made his way to the door the same way he approached it any other time: Calm, nonchalant, and with a welcoming smile.
As the door slid open that attitude hardly changed, even as a tidal wave of chaotic energy gushed over his body.
The air was ripe with pheromones of devilish descent, blending with the foul stench of adrenaline and blood seeping out of each and every clone of his visible for miles.
His clones had gone astray in their directives, choking, clawing and pounding each other like base savages. One clone grabbed the neck of another and dragged them right up to him shouting "HE'S MINE!", as if he'd been consumed by a depravity only the most baseless of loves could produce.
As said clone dragged and smashed the others head into the ground like a hammer, Macros tucked his arms behind his back and graced the violent outbreak with an amused smile.
Even as blood droplets splashed upon his body, he didn't flinch, only hummed.
When he closed his eyes, then came a prick on the back of his skull. If he had to wager a guess from the shape of the tip, it was an arrowhead.
Nevertheless, he saw fit to humor his attacker, "Am I being held up, or is someone very happy to see me?"
"Cheeky." Uttered a voice. A female, certainly. They were coarse, bitter, and a little vain. No, they weren't speaking like that all at once. Macros was simply familiar with their attitude.
The arrow was withdrawn from his head and he turned to greet his attacker.
Floating "preciously" in the air was a three-foot tall pudgy cherub slathered in pink from head-to-toe. Their skin, their lips, their hair, all of them a different shade of it. Their curly locks were the object of innocence, while a thorny rose sash adorned them from shoulder to hip. Kept aflutter by four blood red, feathery wings, the cherub carried a bow shaped like trident prongs, the middle one half the length of the other two. And their body was blanketed with a white toga dress slightly bigger than they were.
She smiled, a fake one at that, as they said to him with an air of familiarity, "Finally found you. You certainly went and made yourself hard to find for no good reason didn't you...'Macros'."
Macros gestured his hand up as the wailing of his dying clones echoed behind him, "I was just playing a game of hide and seek with you. I know how much you love to play games, 'Amor'."
The cherub's smile seemed to crack like marble as she scornfully remarked, "Aren't you about a few billion years too old for such...childish games?"
"Are you offended?" Macros snickered, "Oh I'm sorry if so, cause who wouldn't want to be in your lovely presence?"
He then turned his back to her and faced the sea of clone corpses strewn about him, "Now...I know you're not alone. Where is she?"
"Right...here...!" Growled bitterly the sound of a woman scorned.
Without a sound this "new" entity had made their presence known behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw a more...human woman standing behind Amor.
They were roughly his height with sharp, emerald eyes and three dotted pupils shaped as a triangle. They had short cut black hair and dark green bangs hung over the left eye. And if you'd believe it, those were the most normal things about her. She had long, ample goat legs and a small lion's tail with a snake head dangling behind her waist. One arm was white, the other was black, but they looked perfectly attached to her body. Her shirt and pants consisted of a patchwork job involving so many different clothes that he stopped really caring around the twentieth.
This strange woman draped their arms over Amor and glared fiercely towards him, her expression permanently stiffened with an unblinking scowl.
"Ah, I figured it was you...Ummm..." Macros turned and with a smidge of embarrassment remarked, "What are you calling yourself today?"
"Vyvy...!" Growled the woman, snapping her jaws bitterly towards him, "Damn you...! I hate how nonchalant you are sometimes...!"
He closed his eyes and sighed, "Appearances change but your attitude, it seems, has not."
"Shut up...!" Vyvy shouted, "Acting so familiar when we haven't seen each other in forever! I hate that about you too!"
"I'm really going to fall behind on my projects at this rate..." Macros gestured off beside his face and then began to walk past them, "As much of a party as this reunion's been, I have work to do. Feel free to see yourselves off whenever."
An entanglement of metallic rose vines rose from the ground and blocked his path to the door. He paused and turned to Amor, who had raised her stubby hand towards him still wearing that doll-like smile.
"Why the rush? Family reunions are so scarce between us anymore..." Her eyelids began to crease open, revealing them to be fully pink with hazy red triangles overlapping one another like a kaleidoscope, "Brother."
"..." Macros turned around, his expression shifted every slightly downward.
Amor smirked with arousal at the glare she got from him, "Ooooh there's that stare...That infernal, abyss dwelling fire, roasting in your pupils..."
"I admit..." She lowered her hand, "I thought you had lost your touch, brother."
"Amor..." Macros closed his eyes and smiled, "What possible, desperate reason could you have to seek me out?"
"You know why we're here!" Vyvy roared, "Don't try and play ignorant! I hate that!"
"Shut up, you mismatched oaf!" Amor turned and smacked Vyvy across the face, leaving a searing red mark on her skin.
Vyvy shuddered, rubbing the mark with drool coming off her lips, "Ooooh, I hate it when you do that...!"
"Ghhh...!" Amor clenched her teeth while Macros chuckled in the distance.
"Oh, how the mighty have fallen," He shook his head and clicked his tongue some more, "Though, you never were the toughest of us, Amor."
Amor spun back and continued to smile, though it was now on shaky terms, "Are you in any position to talk? Look at you..."
She gestured back to the piles of corpses in her wake, "Playing with dolls are we? And, dare I say the rumors aren't true? That you aren't...helping people, are you?"
Macros closed his eyes and kept his mouth shut.
"Tsk!" Amor's tiny body shuddered in pure disgust, "I will not mince words..."
"Oh dear. You? Not mincing words?" Macros chuckled, making Amor's eyes squint further.
"Shut up. Ba'al Zebul and Aava'ris are dead, and you're making jokes? Do you even KNOW which putrid, shitstain of a species was responsible?"
"Why, humans of course." Macros uttered.
"Humans, of-" Amor bit her lower lip and trembled, "You...!"
"I'm not ignorant to the going ons of the universe. Two of our brothers lie slain in combat, thanks to the current Elemental Overlord and his allies," Macros gestured out by his hip, "And now you're on a crusade of revenge, believing me to be the answer to your problems."
"Absolutely! You're so observant!" Vyvy bit her thumbnail hard and muttered, "Its so damn annoying...!"
Amor raised her hand, only to squeeze it into a tiny fist and drag it back down to her hip. She then eyed Macros and uttered, "Yes, it is as you said, brother. You are our best option, and loathe to admit it, our only option."
"How flattering," Macros replied humorously, "That I, of all people, would be considered a 'last resort' in your eyes."
"Don't get on your high horse, brother!" Amor shouted.
"Ah, you're right. It must be a bit of the old me slipping out..." Macros wagged his fingers at her in a taunting manner.
"Shame? Is that...shame I hear in your voice?" Amor's anger grew quite a bit in such a tiny body, "I don't have time to deal with this shell you call a body! Wrath has disappeared completely from our sight, and that heaping lump of scaly flesh Slogg'ith wouldn't accomplish anything but yawning the enemy to death!"
She raised her pointer finger towards him and exclaimed, "We need your crusader might to lead us again into the hellfire of eternal war! Naught is the worth of those pitiful hands that mold clay like a child! Shed your mortal shell once more and rally the charge of a million howling demons, laying the corpses of a trillion men in your wake...! Do. You. Hear. Me?! PRIDE?!"
Macros paused, and slowly raised a pinky to clean the wax out of his ears. Flicking it aside, he put his hand down and chuckled, "Loud and clear, Amor."
He then opened his eyes and uttered, "But I refuse."
"...Why?!" Amor uttered so brutally, so disdainfully, "You once led us against the heavens without hesitation! Your distaste for the holy was only surpassed by the joy you gleefully aroused from the slaughtering of your foes! You held your head high against God and sought to make him bleed with your lance! And now, THIS is what you've been reduced to? A neutered craftsman without a hint of aggression to his name?!"
"..." Macros softly closed his eyes and hung his head.
"You were so powerful! So majestic! The blood of your culled foes ran through space and dirtied the cosmos!" Vyvy exclaimed, "And it makes me SO MAD!"
"That's right. I was that man...Was. Though its been so long, I remember it all clearly like it was yesterday..." Macros drifted into a fond remembrance of the past.
"First, there was nothing. Then, there was war. I was the first-born child of a new universe...And the first soldier to be rallied to battle. I knew my name, my identity, my purpose, and my enemy...All from the start. I had no room to question why I existed, or why we had to fight. I grabbed hold of a lance crafted from the scraped up layers of nothingness that bound us in place, and led the charge against an insurmountable enemy...
First, there was nothing. Then, there were two. Futanji Shinryu, and his shadow, Akumu Jigokuryu. Two dragons of incalculable size smashing against each other, vying over the blank canvas of creation. They clawed and drew blood, whose pitch black form oozed out to make space. They breathed fire, and the flickering embers would linger to forge the first stars.
It was the beginning of life. And the beginning of death.
I was Pride, Templar of the First Sin, born of Akumu's will alongside my six brothers and sisters to turn the tide in our father's favor. But Futanji's will countered with the creation of the Seven Virtues, continuing the dreaded deadlock between good and evil.
The clash of wills lasted for thousands of years, as our actions bore the seeds of growth for the new universe. Every time our Sins matched the Virtues, angels and demons were born, the first of their kind. And through many clashes our armies grew, filling the ever-closing void of emptiness around us.
I remember when I first took life, how the wretched purity of these saints filled my hands like an overflowing chalice. I trembled, my roar seizing the hearts of the holy folk in fear.
Thousands of years more passed. Futanji and Akumu were in a never-ending cycle and life, so immature, knew naught the turmoil that shook their newborn worlds.
Still more angels fell to my lance, corpses pilled upon corpses, as a climbed of mountain of flesh, blood and feathers to ascend towards the feared dragon. I was arrogant, so very, very young and arrogant, believing I could make a God bleed.
So lost in the fervor of blood and battle washed over me like a tidal wave, I had failed to recognize the state I was in.
Our demonic horde was in retreat. My brothers and sisters, falling from the heavens, cursed to wander in shells of mortal design. The Seven Virtues remained dominant, their numbers untouched, as they stood in my way when I was at my most prideful.
I threw myself towards the legionaries of heaven with lance and the bones of my enemies in hand. As angels swarmed by the thousands, and cut through them in a blood swathe to scar the virtuous and prove my worth.
But I fell. Not in glorious battle, but as a fool.
A fool, knowing nothing but defeat, and failure.
My body fell from the void of creation, as the enemy delivered its final blow upon Akumu, shackling him as the spine of this newly formed, singular universe.
I fell, and fell, for what felt like an eternity. The streaks of stardust passing my eyes but a million times over, as I screamed until I could scream no more.
Because my head had finally hit solid ground.
When I awoke I did not rise to a feeling of grandiose size, with the forces of gravity struggling to pull me down. No. I rose quickly, feeling light as a feather.
I stared aghast at my hands, HUMAN hands, as the dread of what I had become hit me like the detonation of a neutron star.
I had been defiled. The majesty of my body stripped down to the bare minimum of what was considered life at the time. "Humanity", how much I utterly loathed them. Their...their feeble bodies, their frail egos, and their short lives...
I threw my head back and scraped my skin off the bone, but it always came back. Heaping piles of flesh laid at my sides before I came to..."accept" my curse.
I sat in the forest, the shambles of my divine garb laid over my naked form, spending every waking moment growling bitterly towards the formation of civilization on this world.
They were so young. So primal. While I could topple worlds, they could hardly even topple a tree.
I wanted to destroy them all. And I could, with ease...But they were so beneath me, and I had lost all motivation to do anything but hate.
They built buildings, and I hated them. They invented fire, and I hated them. They killed beasts, and I hated them.
There was no rhyme or reason. I hated them.
From the shadows of my self-imposed exile, I hated them.
Time passed, and I hate them.
Then came the invaders. An alien race whose technology outpaced humanity's advancements astronomically.
I smirked. Finally, I could at least enjoy some slaughter unfold, as this world would soon be burned to ash.
...But that slaughter never came.
Humans died. Cities were toppled. Civilization was on the brink of collapse...
But humanity won.
A fleet of a hundred alien ships lied crashed down on the surface, with the survivors of humanity standing over them, weary and battered.
They had proven tenacious, like cockroaches. Against all odds they fought, every breath, every march, pushing them farther from the throes of annihilation.
They fought with arrogance, stubbornness and pride...That which had been my bane proved to be their boon.
I watched them win a war. I...was intrigued by them.
From the death throes of conquest they scavenged the technology from the armada to rebuild their world. They didn't understand that technology, how could they? But nevertheless they brute forced it with more of their stubbornness and just a little bit of ingenuity.
And in a matter of decades, they had gone from the Stone Age to what'd be considered Modern Day progress...And thus came all the ills attached to it.
They had advanced too quickly. They couldn't keep up with the march of progress they themselves had set in motion.
That technology turned against them, and I watched as in the blink of an eye, the humanity of this world wiped themselves in one loud, fiery blast.
I was hardly fazed by the fire. The consequences of it, not so much.
When I walked the ashen lands alone, fire crackled in my ears, the embers of death laid atop hundreds of charred corpses.
I once waded through corpses for joy. Now, my heart sang a different tune. I looked into the eyes of one fallen body, a youth no stronger or smarter than a butterfly...And my heart felt heavy.
Pity? No. Mourning? No. The grip of black frost forever had its hold on my heart.
But curiosity, feverish and feral, gripped and clawed its way into being, clambering at a chance at life.
How could humanity's pride be both its ally and its enemy? How did it make them strong, yet I so weak?
This couldn't be the end of this story. A mystery had just begun, research had to be done!
No longer satisfied sitting on my laurels, I gathered together what technology I could uncover from the ash and used it to build myself a barely functional spaceship to leave this planet behind.
I kept thinking about them...humanity. So weak, so frail, yet also strong, and enduring? This was a contradiction, a logical improbability. And yet, that was how they functioned, as pure improbability lashing against a mighty sea of probability.
I was lucky to land upon another world with humans. But this time, curiously, there were demons mixed about.
Aliens were one thing but demons? Surely they would not succumb to humanity's irrationality.
Delightfully, I was proven wrong. Though humans could not match a demon's strength, they proved to have stronger hearts.
So strong, in fact, that it awoke one demon's heart to justice, and he allied himself with humanity against a tyrant.
Even a demon's black heart could turn soft. Was this humanity's true power?
We could look at humans as ants and indeed, they weren't much different in that regard towards each other. The truly exceptional humans, were those who cared for others without need of reward.
This was called "empathy", a most curious word.
I traveled to other worlds, searching for more "empathy" to study. My success rate varied, and sometimes I found myself under attack from the descendants of my former armies.
They would fall in seconds, and I would be hailed as a hero.
I had no attachment to the word...But I felt myself drifting away from any attachment towards "sinner" too.
I was toeing a gray line, no longer either Pride the Leviathan, or the Exiled Mortal...
More and more worlds I graced the presence of, and my studies started to take me beyond the purview of humanity.
Beasts, fauna, fish and ancient dinosaurs...I examined them all thoroughly and came to an interesting conclusion: That only humanity bared the weight of all sin on their shoulders. Aliens ranged from greedy, to gluttonous, to sloven...Demons were wrathful, prideful, lustful...But humanity was everything sinful, and everything virtuous, mixed into one flesh and bone package.
As my researched deepened, my curiosity continued to grow. I began to feel a thaw in my heart, a melting that not even the hottest sun could achieve.
I wasn't just becoming fond of humanity. I came to admire all creatures, big and smile, docile and feral.
I saw death in all forms, from a sudden, crushing death, to a slow, agonizing whimper brought about by fire.
I had gotten so ingrained in these world's lore that only upon seeing a world meet its finality did it hit me that no more pages would be filled.
And I wondered...Could these species not be preserved? Was it not possible, for new blood to arise and carry their legacies, their history, and start anew?
I began amassing knowledge across all worlds. Of ways to preserve life, recreate it from flesh and sinew. My body and mind became a complex to house this knowledge, a macrocosm of biology, if you would. And it was from that word I derived my new name: Macros.
It was with ease that I built this world I stand upon and devoted myself to this new task. And I shall remain here forever, long after the embers of life have been snuffed out...Watching, observing, never interfering beyond the missive I have assigned myself. Though I will admit...There have been a few nice folk I've become interested in recently."
Withdrawn into his thoughts for but a parsec, Macros rose his head with a chuckle and gestured towards the two sinners before him.
"Why am I the way I am now?" He deigned to answer, "Simple...because the universe is a vast, wonderful, and beautiful place."
Amor didn't accept this, naturally. He eyes gazed upon his with the utmost scorn, and she spat the word she hated the most with utter venom, "Beautiful?"
She scowled, "I was right...You've become soft, and weak."
"And why should that be considered a bad thing?" Macros softly smiled, craning his head back to gaze upward at the stars passing by, "I am happier now than I ever was fulfilling the whims of our misguided father."
"You think your Pride can be discarded?!" Vyvy yelled, "Bastard! You're such a disgrace, and it pisses me off!"
"Not discarded, no no no..." Macros waved his hand out pleasantly, "Simply...refocused. Now I pride myself on my work, and the satisfaction it brings to others. In embracing the positive side of my sin, I still embody it, and am none the weaker for it..."
He narrowed his eyes with a tense smirk Amor, "The same, cannot be said for you, can it?"
Amor's eyes began to slant as Macros laid into her with a calm, but brutal deconstruction of her arrogance, "Who stole your sin again? A human girl, was it not? The same type of human you loathe, now consorting with the enemy..."
He tucked his arms comfortably behind his back and closed his eyes, "It must really grind your gears, dear sister."
"I see now...The enemy must have poisoned your mind!" Amor tried to justify why she was getting completely destroyed in a battle of wits, but alas, it was to no avail.
"Hardly," Macros muttered, taking a somewhat more serious tone, "He is still my enemy, that can't change. But I must admit..."
He looked back up to the canvas of multicolored stars above him, "Even an impure one such as he can create masterpieces to entrance the heart..."
He then looked to these sinners one more time and humored them, "You should try and lay back, do a little stargazing. Maybe you'll come to appreciate the world a little more."
He narrowed his eyes sternly, "It'd be the smartest move you can make right now."
His smile then perked back up and he began to turn away, "Now if you'll excuse me, I must get back to work."
Without hesitation Amor angrily gripped her bowstring and raised it towards the back of his head, an arrow of disgustingly bloody light appearing on it.
"Yes...We have plenty of work to get done, brother." She fired the arrow post-haste.
Macros calmly reached for both his lens...and pulled them out of his eye sockets while uttering a loud sigh, "Oh, I almost forgot..."
The arrow disappeared, consumed by blue flames. The wall of metal vines suffering the same fate at an equal pace. It was not being burned, but rather, something else was happening...Something unexplained by any natural science.
Amor and Vyvy froze as Macros creaked his head back over his shoulder.
Blue embers glowed in the backs of his hollow eyes, as tiny, black, bony hands snatched onto the edges of his sockets, struggling to crawl out. And when he spoke now, his voice beckoned a powerful echo.
"If the stench of your foolish crusade comes within even one light year of their world, then I WILL remind you why it is I who was born to lead, Invidia, Luxuria."
As both the sinners' skins turned pale, Macros twisted his "eyes" back into their sockets and strolled into his laboratory in peace.
Vyvy's knees were shaking, and she tenderly bit her fingernails with a grin, "S-So cool...! I HATE him so much...!"
Amor grit her teeth and turned away in a bitter huff, "Shut up you genderless freak!"
The fires of war raged in her tiny body, as she grinned from cheek-to-cheek, "He's just bluffing. That fool's not capable of backing his threats anymore. But still...if that world is off limits...Then we'll just have to get our revenge through...the other target."
And they vanished from sight, the cherub's sinister laughter echoing across a sea of corpses...
Next Time: Titans of Dead Worlds