95
Musings
"I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness." – H. P. Lovecraft, "Dagon"
As soon as Hiraga woke that morning he remembered an unusually vivid dream, which was strange, because he didn't get the sense that he had just awakened from it. He distinctly recalled Sato Katsu's insistence that it had not been a dream. Did he believe that? He couldn't help but think of the nightmares his employers had claimed to have induced in the general public. He'd taken pains to verify for himself that some people were having an unusually long string of bad nights, but had only half convinced himself that it was due to supernatural forces. It seemed crazy – but then, so did monsters from another world.
Looking at the vision rationally, though, he decided that for the moment it didn't matter whether it was just a dream or not. It made sense. It was in his best interest to locate that cat Digimon, BlackTailmon, before the children he'd been trailing stumbled across her. He then debated whether he should go to Odaiba himself. If it had been a human he was looking for, he would have had a good idea of how to go about the search, but a Digimon that small and relatively inconspicuous would pose a problem.
He could recruit some help from those members of Sato's organization still at the base. Sato had been monitoring the Digimon from the Digital World. Why couldn't they be tracked from the real world itself? The question was whether he dared to call or go near the base now that it had been so nearly compromised. He thought on it for a while, as he ate a quick breakfast. Sato's words from the dream came back to him – You won't like it when we find you.
He believed that, dream or not. If it ever became a question of crossing Sato and the other psychopaths or getting caught by the police, his instincts told him for the first time in his long career to choose arrest. Wonder what Sato would think about that if he read my mind, he thought, smiling to ward off a shiver. Alright. He would return to the base, and start looking for that cat.
Anubimon moved silently down the lightless hallway, listening intently. As far as he knew, the Dark Man was still seeing to one of the Chosen Children. If that was true, he could make the most of this chance to liberate one of the others, but he'd had enough evidence of the Dark Man's abilities to know that there was no guarantee he wouldn't be interrupted. The Dark One's vision was far reaching, and dependent on neither eyes nor light.
But at the moment the problem was finding out where the imprisoned children were being kept. Though he had served as warden of the Dark Area for years beyond counting, Anubimon had never before entered it, and so had never before truly appreciated how difficult it was to navigate. He'd seen enough of this strange monastery to know that the stone walls were not always as solid as they appeared, and he had suspicions that they didn't remain immobile either.
Sato and the Dark One had kept him ignorant of the Chosen Children's locations, so now he was forced to wander through the dark in the slim hope of finding and freeing them. He came to an intersection and paused a moment. As at every previous intersection he had found, the probable futility of his goal was brought back to him. He drew a slow, deep breath, and let it out again. Closing his eyes and placing a hand against one of the walls, he stood there, listening, feeling for any vibration of the air or stone that might indicate the presence of life in this world of death.
There was no sound. No movement. But he did seem to feel something. Maybe it was only his imagination, but, regardless, it did not reassure him. Despite his constant nearness to the source of darkness, Anubimon drew his power from light. It seemed to him now that his perceptions were incomplete, as if there were a power here that impaired his faculties. Under this vague impression the silence took on a meaning. He could almost imagine the souls he had condemned to this world gathered in the air around him, deadening the sound and the sensation of everything but the darkness and the inaudible whispers they filled it with.
Hopelessness threatened to rise up within him, but he fought it down. No, he told himself. That's the easy way, and you've taken it too often lately. Those children, and the Digital World itself, are counting on you to persevere. If you cannot fulfill this duty, after standing idle for so long, you are not fit to exist.
He opened his eyes, and chose a corridor at random. But he had not taken more than a few steps before he heard the click of shoes advancing to meet him. Peering into the near blackness he saw two eyes and a smile materialize, but it was no imagined ghost. The Dark Man stood before him.
"I should put a leash on you," the Dark Man said, his feigned irritation failing to hide the snicker in his voice. "We're going out. It means cutting your expedition short, but I have somewhere to be, and I'm not letting you cavort around here while I'm gone."
Anubimon stared at him for a minute, not responding. All his hatred for the Dark One returned to him. But in the end, he knew that a show of resistance was not the answer. He was no use to the Chosen Children if the Dark One obliterated him.
"Very well," he said at last. "Lead on."
In a room of vast dimensions, the walls of which were hung with arabesque tapestries of red and violet, and the stone floor of which was enlivened by rich carpets of the same colors, five gigantic braziers burned. The flames that blazed in the high bowls were not constant in their hue, changing sometimes from angry red to deathly blue or purple, filling the room with oppressive heat and what just barely deserved to be called light. They stood atop a pattern of the carpeting, forming the five points of a star. On a dais raised just off the floor at one end of the room Demon stood, looming over the shadowy scene. It looked as if Satan himself had come to attend some unholy ritual. And, essentially, that was the case.
Demon spoke low in an unintelligible language. The words he growled did not fade away afterwards, but instead reverberated about the room, repeating and joining with new sounds introduced into the air by the Demon Lord. They muttered in the farthest corners, but for the most part the verbal discord was focused about the central space bounded by the pentagram, where the carpet had the pattern of a large, staring eye. Together with the outline of the star this was the Elder Sign, the crest of darkness. And like Wisemon, Demon intended to use it to open the path to another world.
By now he had no remaining doubts that something was causing the barriers between the Dark World and the worlds of light to weaken. The reason for it mattered little at the moment. Surely his visitor of the other day had something to do with it. Before long, Demon hoped to see how things stood for himself. At the moment he might have the satisfaction of incinerating Dagomon's minions, but he wouldn't get any useful information out of them, and his small store of patience was exhausted.
Demon had the ability to travel between the human world and the Digital World with ease. Gallingly, however, he could not usually break through to them from his place of exile. This current ritual and the weakness of the dimensional barriers would help to solve that problem. If he couldn't open the Dark Gate on this attempt, perhaps he could on the next. He was tired of waiting. He was more than ready to leave this prison and resume his hunt for the Dark Seed.
It was in search of the Seed that he had come to this region of space-time. Legends concerning the Dark Seeds and their properties had existed since time immemorial, though for the most part only those Digimon steeped in the power of darkness had ever heard of them. Their actual existence was insisted upon by some and doubted by others, but when Demon had heard the rumors concerning Millenniumon and his Dark Seed, he had immediately traced them to their source. It did not take long to confirm their truth, and since then he had devoted all his energy to securing the Seed for himself. If legend told correctly, and he had reason to believe that it did, the Dark Seeds were a source of incredible power.
Power was what Demon had spent all his existence in search of. Even before he had been cast down and given the hideous form now half hidden by his mantle, he had sought ever greater power and glory. As an angel of light he had sought to supersede God itself. Now perhaps true godhood was beyond him, but if that were so then he would become a god of darkness. He would wax ever greater, and exact his revenge. All who stood in his way he would burn into nothingness. No matter how much time passed, the fury born of his long ago defeat was ever with him – and it had a power all its own.
Not even the Chosen Children had been able to defeat him. They had forced him into a standstill, but before long he would be ready to break that impasse. He would not hold back this time. Nor would he hold back on any who tried to keep him from his purpose. Dagomon was plotting something, but Demon would not indulge the Priest of the Deep as he had Archnemon a year ago. If the Dark Man that had visited him proved an annoyance, he too would be wiped out of existence.
The ritual neared its culmination. There was a shimmering in the air over the great eye. Dimly, for a moment, Demon could discern a scene from the Digital World. But then it faded, and he ended his litany with a curse in the unknown language that shook the fabric of the darkness around him and sent the ghosts of damned Digimon into panic flight.
"Soon," he growled, as the flames in the braziers slowly took on a more natural appearance.
Patience, like most virtues, was not a strength Demon placed much value on. In addition to his desire to obtain the Dark Seed, he was drawn to the worlds of light by the prospect of exacting vengeance on those Chosen Children that had so inconvenienced him. When he had told them on that winter night that he would leave their world once he had the Seeds, he had not exactly been lying. Vengeance was his top priority, and it was not in the human world that he would find the implacable enemies that had cast him into the World of Darkness. The human world was not his concern at the moment. Afterward, perhaps, he would turn his attention to it.
Things had changed. The Chosen Children's resistance had cost him time and effort, and for that they would pay with their lives. He would exterminate them all, using his own power. There was a reason he had taken so few of his army of followers into the human world back then. Their strength should have been great enough for any normal enemy, of course, but aside from that there was Demon's personal approach to things. He would not share the fierce joy of killing with a multitude of subordinates.
He wondered whether it would be possible to obtain the Dark Seed before he was done destroying the Chosen Children. Wielding its energies against them would be a good test of its power. The original Seed was his primary goal, the one in Ichijouji Ken, but there were also the copies made by Vamdemon's servants to consider. Once the Chosen Children were taken care of, the hosts of the copies would be easy prey. Vamdemon had at least been useful in that one regard. Demon had several methods for removing the Dark Seeds ready to try, but if he didn't get it right the first time or two, he'd have plenty of test subjects.
He smiled deep within the blackness of his hood as he made his way to the throne room. All those Dark Seeds… All that power… Once it was added to his current strength, nothing would be able to oppose him. And suppose that he managed to find other Dark Seeds. He wondered where the one in Ichijouji Ken had come from. Had Millenniumon truly created it, or only found it? Demon's agents had not yet been able to track down whatever might be left of Millenniumon's data, but they had not stopped searching. His secrets could very well be as great a prize as the Dark Seed itself. Maybe Demon would learn something in the process of ripping the Seed from Ichijouji Ken's body.
He now stood gazing out of the throne room's arches at the lightless horizon, as he had when his unexpected visitor had arrived and alerted him to the coming fulfillment of his terrible ambitions. But his icy blue eyes saw beyond the Dark Area, to all the myriad worlds of light, the worlds so soon to be set ablaze by the hellfire of his final vengeance.