Sisters – Ch.30 – the dream of Victor von Doom

Victor von Doom did not allow anyone access to his sleep. Indeed, even his closest attendants doubted whether the body encased in the terrible black armour ever needed sleep. He disguised his sleeping times by activating life decoy models, enacting various security protocols, and even slipping sideways into different dimensions where time passed differently from ours. But that was dangerous: to leave one's body unconscious and asleep in a different place, where one could not be sure that even one's best protection spells and defence mechanisms would work as they were intended. So he only used them when he had used other devices too often, and risked having them discovered.

But the one thing he would not do was to go without sleep. It was possible, thanks to the interfaces between body and armour. But he had tested himself rigorously, and he knew that the artificial suppression of sleep, and even of weariness, would dangerously affect his reaction times and even his logic. He needed his sleep; and so he had no choice but to make sure it was as unthreatened as possible.

As he slept he would dream. And as a rule, he found his dreams meaningless and forgot about them. But there were several kinds of dreams – premonitory, configurate, phantasmatic, and so on – that came, one way or another, from the mystical dreams. He had trained himself to recognize them. He had studied the Lost Books of Artemidorus, the Insights of Siccardus the Wise, the Books of Lord Qisei, and several others. And to make assurance doubly sure, he had worn a weave of harmless diagnostic spells about his helmet, to show him when there had been a crossing from the realms.

Now, this night he did not need any such supernatural warning to tell hims that this was a dream of power. It opened with a vicious outburst of drunken, kaleidoscopic colours, that briefly made him fear that he had been blinded. But as the dazzle died down into what seemed to be a velvety darkness – but would turn out to be, in a minute or two, a mere ordinary light – a voice rang out and said:

"You are a sore loser, Balthazar."

And now Doom was dreaming consciously, and his dreaming self knew where he was. The lights that had opened the dream were the climax and conclusion of a sorcerer's duel, gone so far out of control that one or both fighting wizards had broken though the bounds of enchantment within which they were fighting. And he knew that if he percieved the mystical explosion, so must many of Earth's more powerful mystics, beginning with the Sorcerer Supreme. There was no point in trying to take advantage of the energies unleashed in the struggle. Still, he had to follow what he could of the confrontation.

"You are a sore loser, Balthazar." And now Doom's attention, in his waking dream, sharpened. He knew the name Balthazar. And if it was the Balthazar he knew who had been part of that exchange of pleasantries… that needed attention. That very much needed attention.

Another voice growled; a growls that grew into an inarticulate scream, and then died away. Doom had known Balthazar well enough once; his voice was recorded in his memory banks. But that ragged sound… it was barely recognizable. "Sore loser?" It carried a sense of frustrated rage, of despair, of helpless revolt against events and defeat, that even Victor von Doom found unsettling.

Meanwhile, his eyes had grown used again to normal light. His dream, he could now see, had placed him within an obvious magic chamber, devastated by the final magic blast. The windows were blown outwards; the ceiling, reduced to blackened beams. Stone, broken bricks, shreds of cloth and paper, torn books and unrolled and ragged scrolls, and everywhere wisps of brown smoke. At the centre, covered in rubble, a deformed human figure could be seen, crawling, trying to stand. As with the voice, Doom could barely recognize it.

"Your problem, Balthazar, is that you don't understand philosophy."

Doom did not recognize this voice, the voice of Balthazar's victorious enemy; not even in the disturbed and difficult way he recognized Balthazar's. It must have been a wizard of considerable power, but he evidently had stayed under the radar until now – at least as far as Doom was concerned. It came from nowhere in particular, making the air vibrate evenly across the room -the classic sign of magical communication. So that was Balthazar's own room, and his enemy was communicating from far away, even very far away, depending on his power level. The battle had been fought across great distances, and the victor might be anywhere. What had reached Doom's sleeping mind across the ethereal spaces, what had pointed it to this place, was the collapse of Balthazar's wards under his enemy's blows.

"Things always develop towards their fated ends. Each thing contains the principle of its end, and moves towards it. And so, battles and wars only prove the relative values of the opponents. They reveal their place in the world; they show that some men are slaves or meant for death, and others are meant to live and rule, to be masters… to be gods. I am well on my way to be a god, and I have been for centuries. Your opposition to my rise has only brought out the truth that lay in you from the beginning: that the essence of you, the truth of you, is a fat, decaying, helpless bulk of flesh."

The defeated body pushed himself up from the rubble, and growled: "Any murderous monster can call himself a god. And they usually do…"

Then something changed, and Doom realized that the apparently "helpless bulk of flesh" before him was unleashing a spell of immense power. To the complete surprise both of Doom himself… and of the enemy. Then he spoke, in gasping but controlled periods.

"The Slayer is... a resource... for the whole world. If you insist… if you insist… if you insist on making her your own personal bodyguard… I just made... sure that all the vampires and demons on Earth… make their way… will find their way to you… one by one. She will do her job… without doubt, without wondering. But you… everything that belongs to you… will be in danger… every day. Every day of your life…"

From the unseen enemy came a snorting noise of supreme contempt. "You still don't understand, do you? These are the last days of mankind. The destroyers are coming. All that matters now is my ascension. That is the fate that must not be stopped; and after that, let the destroyers come!"

Doom could have woken up at this point; but he kept his waking dream going by an effort of will, wanting to be certain that he had seen Balthazar die. He knew him well enough, and found it easy to believe that he could survive even the frightful blows inflicted by his mysterious enemy, by sheer obstinacy and those unexpected sources of power and endurance that Doom had experienced himself in the past. For he had fought Balthazar several times, and twice he had thought he had killed him. He viewed Balthazar as a kind of magical brute, powerful but unsubtle, who regarded himself as a hero, but who was rather less heroic than he conceived. He sought enemies out in order to unleash his need to beat and batter them into submission, and justified his violence by seeking out obvious villains.

Now, if he survived, he would carry his degrading and agonizing marks; marks left not only by his defeat in that terrible battle, but by that last, ghastly surprise blow, struck when both his enemy and the watching Doom had thought him finished. Victor von Doom knew enough magic to know that an enchantment such as Balthazar had cast, reaching across the world and affecting the whole race of vampires, could only be cast – battered as Balthazar had been – by dragging out of oneself the last resources of cohesion, power, even sanity, reducing oneself to a bleeding, agonized mass of blubber. He rarely felt pity for defeated enemies; but now, contemplating Balthazar's future, he did feel tempted to put him out of his misery.

AT that point, Doom realized that he had woken up. He looked around himself. He began to think of what he had seen, and enacted a spell to preserve in crystal the memory of each detail of his "dream". The stuff about the last days of mankind bothered him less than it would have most other people. In his career, he had met a few things that might have been regarded as a threat to all mankind. In a sense, he was one himself – not that he would admit it. He had dealt with one or two himself when he had found it necessary, and would do so again if he had to. This, after all, was his world – not theirs. But he wanted to know what manner of sorcerer was powerful enough to trash Balthazar like that, and why he was expecting to become a god. He was certain that, unless something or someone intervened, one day they would fight to the death; for he had found his so-called philosophy deeply offensive.

The Slayer. Whatever else Balthazar and his enemy had been fighting about, it involved the Slayer. It involved keeping the Slayer near him. Using her as his bodyguard, Balthazar had said; and he had said it in an insulting tone. And the enemy had not answered this particular insult. He had left it strictly alone.

As a Gypsy, and as a sorcerer, Dr. Doom knew a lot about the Slayer. She was one reason why he did not try to rule, or even to make deals with, vampires. And if she now was, willing or unwilling, in the neighbourhood of Balthazar's enemy, it should not be hard to locate them both.

"Activate the biological laboratory," ordered Victor von Doom.

….

Buffy had been off the plane for a couple of hours, and frankly she was beginning to feel sick of the air base. Its buildings – so to call them! - were all corridors, neon lamps, and flimsy plastic. They felt like a cheaper version of the clinic, except that the guards were scarier and carried guns. Thank God, then, that, just like at the clinic, there was an end to the corridors and the wall;there was a large glass door, and open sky and land beyond – and a golden, beloved head.

"Mom!"