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Stave VII:
Death
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It is said that at the moment of Robert Tercano's death, a meteor flew over his ancestral home in Mitis.
-from "A Children's Guide to the Great War" by Emerald of the Southern Priesthood.
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Bronze stood before a steel door bound in ghostwood. The gate to the Temple was clear of foes.
He raised his hand as if to knock, but the door swung open of its own accord before he could touch it, revealing a tunnel that turned into an ascending spiral stairway. There was a sighing voice: Welcome, Bronze, thee of Logaria. It was the Temple's voice. This edifice was not stone at all, although it might look like stone; this was a living thing, the Djinn's essence himself, likely, and the pulse he felt deep in his head was the beating of a black and twisted heart. Today he would make that heartbeat cease.
Come, Emperor. Come, come.
He stepped inside before the rest of his men. After they had followed him through there was another sigh. The door swung shut with a boom, but they was not left in blackness. The light that remained was that of the shining spiral windows, mixed with the glow of the corrupted sun.
"Emperor, are we trapped?" said Antarah, testing his strength and the endurance of six other guards by shoving outward against the black gates. They would not move.
"No," said Cobalion, standing between Terrakion and Virizion. "We could ferry you out through the windows. Do you say this because wish to turn back, desert-man?"
"A good Aredian marks all the ways for him and his foes to retreat," said Antarah, avoiding Cobalion's eyes.
"Now comes the Emperor," Bronze called out, and the words seemed to spiral up into infinity. "Thee Djinn, hear and make me welcome if you would. If you're my enemy, know that I come to destroy you."
"Bronze," said Jake quietly, "there is something I do not understand."
Bronze was looking at the walls, wishing Moon was here. The stones were carved with thousands of overlapping faces. Many he knew (one was the face of Emrett, peeping slyly over the top of an open book). The faces looked at him and he heard their murmuring.
Welcome Bronze, you of the many miles and many years; welcome thee of Logaria, thee of Arceus.
"What is it, Jake?"
"I have heard that a man from the Alliance sought to put a bullet in you after your triumph at the League," said Jake. "But if I was conditioned to kill you and Tess, then why would they spoil their work?"
"Who can know the mind of the Dark Lord?" said Platinum.
"If it pleases you, I think that assassin was not an Alliance pawn nor sent from the Association," said Bronze. "Might've been from the Kalosi Techno Guilds, or something worse. The Dark Lord thought to spite us by having our Company kill itself. But his power did not win, Jake."
"But if the Djinn didn't the Brick, then why did he wait?"
"I think he does. That's why I didn't bring it."
The Djinn was a creature of monumental slyness, full of evil wisdom, but in the end he had slipped and forgotten Tess's training, and now he would pay forever and ever. But why had that scheme been so careless?
Because it was his only way of killing thee, whispered one of the faces carved into the curve of the wall. This was the face of Eric, one half of its features whole and the other side burned to viscera-streaked bone. Bronze saw no hatefulness there now but only the lonely sadness of a man who knows that it is too late to run from death, and that the punishment that inexorably awaits him is just. That face was as lonesome as a train-whistle on a moonless night. There had been no Arceus for Eric, never in life, for Eric had never been a part of Arceus's Kingdom. No, not he.
Bronze walked over to the wall, saw a pair of violet eyes resting in the sockets of a depiction of Quentin that sensed him and rolled over giddily to regard him. That gaze was poisonous with fury and loss.
Come to the Djinn, Bronze! Come out and face him one to one! Man to man! An eye for an eye, may it do you fine!
"I think not right now," whispered Bronze, "for I have more work to do. A little more, even yet."
It was his last word to the projections on the wall. Although the lunatic screamed thoughts after him as Bronze turned away, he screamed in vain, for Bronze never looked back. He had more stairs to climb and more rooms to investigate on his way to the end.
"If any of this company wish to leave because their heart betrays them, tell now," said Bronze. "Our host out of three moves through the gates. We are going into the furnace. Which of you will stay?"
"Any man that leaves now will be hung from a tree," swore Antarah.
"Or let live, and given a manful task in some other place to redeem their honor," said Cobalion.
"We fight for God and you," said Yellow. "Both are supreme."
This will be a place of death, thought Bronze.
Yes, Emperor, said the Temple, but only because your life has made it so. Look.
His eyes went to the stairway but not the floor that it led to. Rather he saw the being standing at its foot. He had not seen this man before, but something about him seemed familiar. The man was tall, almost impossibly so, easily twice Cobalion's height. The man's entire body was wrapped in metallic plates, curving around his body as if they were fabric. Wires ran across the armor's surface and steel tubes down its back, and at first Bronze was not sure it was a man at all but a bot sent to slow their advance. But behind the sharp, sleek helmet lay blue eyes, human eyes, watching their company closely from the distance they stood across.
"Who are you?" said Robert.
"I am Purpose, the Djinn's Right Hand," the man said, his voice a powerful baritone that echoed off the walls of the chamber.
"If you're a demon, we might have thought you would stand alongside your comrades," said Cobalion. "I don't remember seeing you in the rebellion in Heaven.
"I am the will of the Djinn," the voice continued, "and it is here the Djinn resides."
Bronze didn't respond right away. The familiarity of this individual struck him, and there was something uncanny about the way his voice rang out from inside its metal cage. "Do I know you?" he said after a moment.
The figure did not move. "To know me is to know the Eclipse Alliance," said Purpose. "my words are its words, and my voice is its voice. You have met me before in many ways and many times."
Jake readied his firearm in one hand. "What happens now?"
"I have been tasked with protecting this Temple until the Djinn bids you enter. None shall enter without his word."
"So the Djinn isn't here?"
"No," Purpose said, seemingly without pause. "He is here." Without another word, the monolithic figure stepped aside.
"Does the Djinn want us to enter?" asked Ruby.
"Yes," said the giant Purpose.
Jake hesitated, his sidearm still locked into his fist. After nothing happened for a moment, and then another, he relaxed. The weapon slid back into its holster, and Bronze and the rest stepped forward. Each step he took brought him closer to the unwavering eyes of Purpose, but it did not move. It only watched, and stood aside. As he went to pass through the archway, he paused.
"Purpose," he said, his voice low, "will anyone else be joining us before we reach the Djinn?"
"No."
"Make sure they don't."
"As you wish."
"Purpose," he said in the same quiet tone, "there exists a room in this Temple where someone could unmake the world, correct?"
Purpose did not move. "Correct."
Bronze nodded. "It's below the antechamber, isn't it?
"Correct."
"Take me there."
"I am duty-bound by the Original One who lets me live to tell you," said Purpose softly, "that once you step to the next floor, there is no going back. There is only one decision to be made past this point, and it is not one that can be unmade."
"Oh, I know." He turned to look back towards the massive doors leading down to the courtyard, and beyond that the field where thousands of men lay dead and mangled. "It's time."
Bronze stepped on the flight of stairs, and looked into the eyes of his men once more. There was only enough room for one man at a time to climb. Part of his mind marveled that he should be here at all; that he had one by one surmounted the obstacles placed in his path, as dreadfully singleminded as ever, and still climb further into death.
I'm like one of the robots, he thought. One that will either accomplish the task for which it has been made or beat itself to death trying.
He bade his generals to follow and slipped into the darkness of the floor above. Before Tess could follow the deadly quiet line of Aredians up the staircase, she heard Bronze's challenge ring down.
"I come!" he called. "If you hear me, hear me well! I come!"
...
Ever sixteen steps they came upon another floor (for sixteen are the years of Bronze Tercano, does thee see?), and for the first fifty Bronze and his escorts sweeped through each one. Each flight's narrow hall had a door that led to an unfurnished sandstone room, its walls carved with Bronze's memories. Each of the figures of objects portrayed had their own significance, and each room had its special scent. Many times there was a room devoted to more than a single month of his life, but there was always at least one.
He passed the cradle that his mother had put him down to sleep in, and his first real bed. He passed the face of a young Jake, the figure's face half-covered by smooth sandstone cords that looked like trailing creepers. Antarah found a set of folded baby's clothes that Bronze had redoubtable worn when he was a year old. Phantom voices seemed to be speaking to all of the company, but when Robert saw the carvings on the walls, he looked like a man who looks at something that pleases him, pleases him more than anything else has or ever could.
Old times. Old times and old crimes, an endless litany of shameful and shaming thoughts that the company read in the orange torchlight.
Perhaps two dozen floors above a room filled with grammar textbooks was a scattering of loose wreckage from a Pokedex. On one section of the wall Bronze saw an Unfezant carved in flight, its stubby wings spread above all the gathered court of Old Logaria (Robert and Lily Tercano not the least among them). And to the left of the door leading onto the balcony, the Unfezant was carved again. Here its wings were folded as it fell upon a man in Eclipse garb like a blind bullet, heedless of the man's upraised gun. The kidnapping. They had reached the present.
Standing outside, Bronze had judged the highest spires of the Djinn's Fast to be six hundred feet high. There had been no mention of a temple staircase in the Legends of Arceus (perhaps the place's layout changed with time), and there were more floors than there possibly could be. Around the two hundredth floor they were reaching the distance that some called a mile. No Temple could be a mile high! But still they climbed, climbed in single file until they were nearly running, yet never did they tire. It once crossed Bronze's mind that he'd never reach the top; that the Djinn's Fast was infinite in height as it was eternal in time. But after a moment's consideration he rejected the idea, for it was his life the rooms were telling, and while that life had been filled with many things, it had by no means been eternal. And as it had had a beginning (marked by the cradle), so it would have an ending.
Not far from Unfezant was the laughing face of Linda, the Eclipse pawn dealer from whom Bronze had taken his knife. The smell in the room was her perfume, cheap and sweet. And he was shocked to remember his feeling of recklessness, and how that same foolish impulse had not really died. He glanced at the spiral that ascended ever upward and fled the room in fear.
He saw himself training with his father, bringing Jake on the quest. His meeting with Drake. Tess stopped and gasped around the two hundred and tenth floor; laying in a room etched with glowing symbols of the kind that covered Kyogre's hide was a glowing orb resting in a bundle of red cloth; the seeing stone that had been kept in the Rosecove lighthouse and the one that she had thrown at Eric's head. She smelt rain and fear, remembered the moments of helplessness and anger while Quentin kept her locked in the lighthouse. Had she known what she had thrown? Yes, she supposed that was the case, but it was well worth saving all their lives.
Old times. Old times.
"I must remember to ask Quentin about the seeing stone," said Bronze to her. "You could imagine the uses it would have in espionage."
The room after that contained the that Tess had been wearing when the three had first met, set below a golden mosaic of Bronze, Jake, and herself. Tess marveled at how her face seemed more grim and sorrowful than she could have ever imagined. They left that room behind and found others. Bronze saw the boat the three of them had used to cross the coast before setting out on the quest. The long stretch of brutality and agony that had brought him here. Bronze had a sudden sickly feeling. He saw himself not pushing forward as he had imagined at the time, but instead being pulled along, his body bound to one end of a long and fat string that stretched between where he had been and infinity.
Floor by floor and tale by tale (not to mention death by death), the rising rooms of the Temple recounted Bronze Tercano's life and quest. And after the three hundreth room, he wished to look no more. This one contained the velvet-padded chair to which he had been bound in Anthien. He did not delay, but he passed to look at the face of the very terrified and very human Jonathan Rowell Cypress on the wall, pictured as strangling on smoke. That much he owed the man. And, things owed or not, in the end he would burn.
Ending soon. Very soon, much likely.
The pulsing he sensed behind his eyes was stronger now, and did not seem so irregular. He passed a room containing a sping-pistol dart from an Aredian gun, recovered from the sands in Vahram Ravine. He passed a room containing the broken wine bottles from the encampment outside Floruma He climbed more stairs, paused outside a room containing the shards of glass from Aaron's fluid-filled tank, and by now the pulsing he sensed was much stronger and now completely regular.
He climbed on without looking into any more of the rooms, without bothering to smell the aromas of the past. The stairwell narrowed until his shoulders nearly touched its curved stone sides. No songs now, unless the wind was a song, for he heard it soughing.
He passed one final open door. Lying on the floor of the tiny room beyond it was a pair of violet eyes suspended in midair, their wispy optic cords trailing into nothing like balloon strings. They shifted and glared up at him.
I have reached now.
Sixteen more stairs and he would be at the top of the Temple. He took the stairs one by one, walking with his back straight and his head held up. The other rooms had been open to his eye. The final one was closed off, his way blocked by a iron door with a single word carved upon it. That word was
DEATH.
He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild violet curl of smoke around an eye. At last the last his heart misgave him when the voices of all his forefathers howled at once to turn back.
"Go on," said Tess, noticing his hesitation. "We've come this far."
"We'll have your flanks," said Jake.
Bronze breathed deep and turned the knob at the top of the Djinn's Fast.
...
The passageway beyond was not large, but it was ornately decorated with carvings into the rock face of its walls. In the low light he could only make out the faintest of shapes, but each seemed even more detailed and intricate than the last. He ran his hand across the smooth surface, his fingers feeling the hard edges of faces, buildings, gods. His footsteps were accompanied by whispers, voices that should have been too far away to be heard, but were just audible here in this place between places.
Neither Bronze nor his company was there long. Eventually they stepped out of the passage into another room, larger even than the long windowed hall that they had entered past the gates. Its focus was a circular pit of coarse dirt at its center, lit by numerous spotlights hanging somewhere far above it. Planted in the dirt was a withered tree with leafless branches, its limbs jutting out in crazed spiked points. Screens lined the walls, each flipping quickly between different cameras. He saw long hallways, bright overhead lights, and factory lines. Doctors and researchers sitting in laboratories. Security personnel standing guard by doors. And then monsters, nightmare creatures that lurked back and forth in glass-paned rooms. Demons that crawled into their own skin and then out again. Unmoving statues.
When thirty of so of the few hundred fighters that had trailed Bronze were waiting in the chamber, the door behind them slammed suddenly. Shouts rang and men jumped up to open it, but no amount of pulling or shoving would make it bulge, not even with Bronze's Charizard and all of Gold's Pokemon manning the door.
"We've been boxed in like fools," said Antarah, sweating even in the mild, musty air. "This is an evil place. We shall never get out! Never!"
"Hold!" cried Bronze. "Stay ready!"
At the other end of the room was a pair of doors that were overlaid with bronze. And in the space beyond them he felt the eye, the eye of the Enemy, an overwhelming will that made him freeze to a halt. He remembered that he had not brought the Bronze Brick, and thanked Arceus; for surely the damnable thing would have bolted out of the travel bag he carried it in and hovered into the open palm of the Dark Lord.
(he is waiting for you)
The doors did not open but a figure appeared before them. One moment he was not there and the next he was. It was Emrett.
"Stay ready!"
Bronze moved forward again. As he got closer he could see flecks of grey at the man's roots, but otherwise he looked alive, almost un-negated. The book in his hand was bound in leather with gold trim and looked ancient. Something was written in small gold type on the front, but neither Bronze nor anyone else could make it out. As they approached, Bronze spoke to the man.
"Are you Emrett of the Eclipse Alliance?" he said.
Emrett nodded.
Bronze took Jake's chandler pistol, leveled point blank at the man's forehead, and fired three shots. After the noise had echoed out of the space around them, Emrett raised his eyes up from the book to look at him. His face was clear of bullet holes or blood.
"Do you read, Bronze?" said Emrett.
Bronze tried to fire again, failed. He pulled the laser magazine out of the gun and flipped it into his pocket, pulling another from a clip on Jake's belt. "Many times," he replied, "though can't say I've had much time for reading recently." He cocked the gun and pointed at Emrett again.
"So Cobalion, what is this, some sort of incorporeal thing? Do I need sacred bullets to do the job, maybe something Ryan could give me? Or is it a projection?" He shot three more times and Emrett did not look away from him.
"Do me a favor and kill it," Bronze said to Cobalion.
Before the god could move, Emrett cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. His back arched and they could hear something snap along his spine. "It doesn't matter now. The Djinn is the keeper of the Temple. The Djinn knows of all things within the Temple. The Djinn is the Serpent. Does thee see it? I know of all things within the Temple. I am the Serpent."
...
It happened quick enough to last only three seconds, but long enough to remember in nightmares for the rest of their lives. They watched in horror as Emrett's skin began to split, starting at the base of his spine and creeping up his back. His eyes bulged in their sockets and blood began to seep out of him like water from a sponge. His mouth opened as if to scream, but instead a long, forked tongue appeared, and then the base of a fanged mouth. The long train of his robe thickened and grew solid, and seemed to be all one piece with the writhing green pillar of his interlocked legs. And that writhing green pillar was curving and swaying as if it had no joints, or else were all joints. His head was thrown far back and while his nose grew longer and longer, every other part of his face seemed to disappear, except his eyes. Huge flaming eyes they were now, without brows or lashes. Then with a thick tear the rest of Emrett's flesh flew off the body of the massive, writing serpent he had become. Green as poison, thick as Steelix's body, on the ridge of its emerald back were gemstones that dazzled in the cold light of the room. Floating above its head was a pointed silver crown emblazoned with a dark ouroboros.
The Serpent coiled around to face them, the edges of its mouth turned up ever so slightly in a horrific grin. It blinked, and when it did they could see the Emrett's laughing eyes again for a moment.
"There is one thing that nags at me," it said, lifting itself up to its full immense height. "It's how we haven't been able to get the Brick that you have in your pocket, Bronze Tercano. I should like to have it now."
Now, my good son, whispered the cold voice in the middle of Emrett's hot and melting brains. Now. Strike him down and make sure he never rises again. Murder him among the carvings, take it, and we'll rule together.
The Serpent's mouth opened wide, its fangs glistening, and it lunged at Bronze. He had only a moment to duck out of the way as the Serpent turned and came after him again, narrowly missing his feet as he rolled out of the way. He heard the familiar pop of gunshots, and looked to see Jake firing at the back of the Serpent's head. The snake turned, its eyes dark again, and brought its tail down, nearly crushing Calvin in the process.
"Ware!" he yelled. "Cobalion, Swords of Justice! Cut off its head!"
Three glowing blades came down at once on the Serpent's scales. There was a ringing clang, and for a moment Bronze expected to see its huge head sever from the rest of its wriggling body. Then the swords fell back and began to lose their blue, turning to a solemn, translucent shade of grey. Gabite shot an energy mortar that struck the Serpent's crown, which pealed out like an iron bell and made the air around them vibrate. The Aredians and Rorians were attacking and firing, but all their attacks rang off the beast's back.
Then it looped around and faced Bronze, its tongue darting out between fangs as tall as he was. The Serpent began to coil up before him, as if to strike, and he could feel the ancestral urges of his body begging him to run, to flee, to do anything to protect himself. But he did nothing but reach for his poke balls and knife.
Zeraora manifested and struck the Serpent on the jaw. It shivered and then leaped sideways at Bronze and he knew it was over. Perhaps Steelix could get off one shot, maybe two, but this mutant could take one or two.
Then there was a horrible scream of agony that woke him from his thoughts in a flash. He knew that voice, distorted by pain as it was.
"Father!" he cried, leaping forward. "Father, to me! To me!"
There he was, twisting in the snake's coils. Both of them were clearly visible in the light of the lamps. Robert Tercano wriggled furiously to and fro, shooting at the Serpent's body with his gun, foam flying from Emrett's jaws even as red marks appeared in the soft flesh under its scales. The thing squalled and its grip loosened. At that moment Robert might have gotten free, had he chosen to do so. He did not. Instead of jumping down and leaping away in the momentary freedom granted him before Emrett was able to re-set his grip, Robert used the time to extend his thick arms and seize the place where one of the wounds he had made oozed lifeblood. He jammed a knife in deep, bringing a flood of blackish-red liquor that ran freely down the side of the Serpent. Emrett squalled louder still. He had left Robert out of his calculations, and was now paying the price.
Somewhere nearby an Aredian guard shot a dart that buried itself halfway in the Serpent's left eye. It hissed and went on writhing.
"Put him down, Emrett!" Bronze shouted. "Put him down and I'll let you live another day! I swear it on God's name!"
Red eyes, full of insanity and malevolence, peered at him over Robert's contorted body. Above them, high on the curve of the snake's back, were small punctures in the scales, hardly more than pinholes. Its eyes stared at Bronze with a hate that was all too human.
He can't listen, Bronze thought with dismay, and then there was a bitter crack. It was Robert's spine, but in spite of this mortal injury he never loosened his grip on the knife, although the steely plates had town away his flesh in places. Then the snake twirled its coils upward and Robert arced across the fireshot dark, then knocked against and impaled on one of the dead tree branches of the plant growing in the center of the room. He gave an awful hurt cry—a death-cry—and then fell to the ground.
"Oh, no!" Lily screamed. "Please, not this! Have pity! Have mercy!"
"Ya hya chouhada!" Antarah cried, throwing himself at the Serpent. Emrett threw out a bleeding portion of his coil and bashed the charging man away. Antarah slammed against a wall and did not get up.
"There, there," the Serpent said, "let's not be so hasty. You didn't think I wouldn't see how this would play out, did you? I've learned everything there is to learn. I've seen things that would turn your heart to ice. Heard stories of horrors so terrible the very thought would kill you in an instant." Its eyes focused slightly on Cobalion, moving its tail to deflect another sword-stroke. Jake brought his pulsesword down, baring his teeth, sending a charge that rolled over the Serpent's curling body.
"Die!" Bronze screamed, his eyes never clearer than now, the chill that surrounded him in moments like these never deeper. He saw the floating crown and the eyes that were once a man's eyes, the eyes of the thing that had closed his father's eyes. He drew the knife behind him for a throw.
"I have lived a thousand lives and dreamed a thousand more," said the Serpent. "I've seen this world turned over time and time again, and dutifully recorded it all. Do you think there's anything you could do that I cannot foresee? Do you think there's anything that would stand between me and my duty?" It flicked its tail towards the knife. "Put that silly thing away. I've eaten the fruit of the Tree of Life. I cannot die, not now that I've-"
The knife flew and buried itself in the Serpent's skull with a sickening crunch, and the monster recoiled and screamed. Deep, deep, deep went the blade, cutting through scale and demonic sinew, piercing the skull and scratching the brain. Smoke poured from the gaping wound on its head as it thrashed, and Tess had to fall to the ground to avoid being smashed as the Serpent's tail swung around and flattened Absol.
Emrett stretched up to his full height, tottered, and for an instant Bronze could see the man's right eye peeking out of the abomination's sockets. Then the remaining was gone was gone in a spray of blood as Jake's first laser punctured it. The Serpent reared up, fangs clashing at the black ceiling. Jake's next two laser shots went into the revealed flesh under the scales that Robert had peeled away and exited through the back, pulling dark sprays of liquid with it. The Serpent slewed to one side, perhaps trying to run away, but then Gold, scowling bitterly, had his Typhlosion breathe a fume of red and orange fire onto its coils. The Serpent writhed in the growing blaze, the scales on its belly beginning to burn, and Magnezone shot it in the head again. The dying Serpent rolled over and over till the fire was put out.
...
Then horrible things began to happen. The snake's skin yellowed, coarsened, the scales falling off like clumbs of old hair and the flesh underneath blistering like rotting sheets of canvas. The fangs in the Serpent's open mount clunked to the floor, then shattered and dissolved. In another second the flesh was all gone and only the giant skull and spine remained; those too dissolved into dust. Bronze's knife rung when it struck the floor, then returned to his hand. And still there was no end to the Serpent's tenacious hold on the world: even the bone dust billowed and writhed in tiny dust devils. And then, suddenly, Bronze felt the passage of something that buffeted past him like a strong wind, making him shudder.
"Look out, Bronze!" Tess screamed. "Look out!"
There was a booming, triumphant laugh. Emrett was standing up amid the heap of dust that had once been the Serpent, those violet eyes flashing with hellish triumph. They locked with Bronze's, and he felt the will draining away from him.
With a mad, convulsive yell, he raised the blade over his head, charged forward, and brought it down in a whistling arc. Its razored point sheared through Emrett's robe and he felt it strike into the flesh beneath. Emrett screamed. It was an eerie, hurt sound, like the howl of a wolf. The force of the dagger slamming home drove him backwards onto the ground, Bronze on top of him. Emrett's hands rose in hooked claws, turning crazily from intangible wisps to flesh, transmitting again and again.
"He's mine!" Bronze screamed. "Don't move, any of you! He's mine!"
Bronze stabbed him a second time, and Emrett screamed again. One of his hands, as cold as the grave, seized Bronze's left hand, which was locked around the dagger's hilt. Bronze wriggled to stay steady, his knees planted on Emrett's knees. He stared down into the hate and pain-driven face.
"Let me GO!" Emrett cried.
"Here it comes, you bastard," Bronze sobbed. "Here it is, leech. Here it is for you."
He brought the knife down again. Filmy blood that reeked of chemical stench splashed upward in a cold gush, blinding him momentarily. Emrett's head lashed from side to side on the sandstone floor. "Let me go, you dare not, you dare not, you dare not do this!"
Bronze brought the dagger down again and again. Blood burst from Emrett's nostrils. His body began to jerk like a stabbed fish. The hands clawed at Bronze's cheeks, pulling long gouges in his skin.
"LET ME GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO—"
He brought the dagger down once more, and the blood that pulsed from Emrett's chest turned black. Then dissolution came.
It seemed at least that the long years of death within Emrett were revealed. The eyes faded, filmed white, fell in. The smooth black hair went white and fell like a drift of feathers. The body inside the heavy robes shriveled and retreated. The mouth widened gapingly as the lips drew back and drew back, meeting the nose and disappearing in an oral ring of jutting teeth. The fingernails went black and peeled off, and then there were only bones, still dressed with rings, clicking and clenching like castanets. Dust puffed through the fibers of the linen garments. The bald and wrinkled head became a skull. The undershirt, with nothing to fill it, fell away into a flat expanse of fabric made of black silk. For a moment a hideously animated scarecrow writhed beneath him, and Bronze stumbled backward with a strangled cry of horror. But it was impossible to tear the gaze away from Emrett's last metamorphosis; it hypnotized. The fleshless skull whipped from side to side. The nude jawbone opened in a soundless scream that had no vocal cords to power it. The skeletal fingers danced and clicked on the dark air like marionettes.
Smells struck his nose and then vanished, each in a light little puff: gas; putrescence, horrid and fleshy; a moldy library smell; acrid dust; then nothing. The twisting, protesting finger bones shredded and flaked away like pencils. The nasal cavity of the skull widened and met the oral cavity. The empty eye sockets widened in a fleshless expression of surprise and horror, met, and were no more. The skull caved in like an ancient Logarian vase. The robes settled flat and became as neutral as dirty laundry. The dust settled and then was gone.
A howl of outraged fury rose in Bronze's mind.
"My son! My son! You've murdered him! Come then! Come, son-killer, and look at the Great Djinn, but know this—you'll die of old age at the edge of the heart of Djinn's Fast before you ever so much as touch its door! I will never let you pass! The Great Darkness itself will pass away before I let you pass! Murderer! Murderer of your father, murderer of your friends—every one of them, for I will kill them all...yes, for Moon lies dead with her throat cut by an assassin of mine, all because you were not there for her!"
...
Bronze let that evil thought go and ran to the side of the tree, where his father lay, impaled by a piece of tree branch...but still alive. His face was turning white, his lips purple. Blood had pooled around his waist, and he was no longer crying out. The deep grey eyes, already beginning to darken, looked at Bronze with what might almost have been weary amusement.
"Father," Roland said, stretching out his hand, knowing he was crying and not caring in the least. He supposed that part of him—and not a small one, either—wanted to be seen crying. "Father, I say thank you. I say thank you, Father."
Then before the dying man could speak Bronze was overwhelmed by a black fury, a rage not at the Djinn but at some person or thing that had no defined object. He was screaming things, terrible things. He must have asked for Yellow because she was there, kneeling by his side with his mother.
"Heal him," he said, watching Yellow's eyes fill with hot tears.
"I've never done such a thing to humans," pleaded Yellow. "I'd kill him! Please do not—"
"Do it!" Bronze roared. "I am the Emperor of Logaria and you will do what I order!"
Grief is making him crazy, thought Yellow, putting her hands on the entry wound. It was small and black, hidden in the center of a pool of blood, like a flower's bud. Yellow grimaced. She never liked this bit. No matter how many healings she performed, she could never get used to sticking her fingers into Pokemon's insides. She lined her thumbs up, back to back, and slid them into the wound.
"Heal," she breathed, and the magic scurried down her fingers. Golden sparks hovered over Robert's wound, then disappeared inside, like shooting stars diving behind the horizon.
"More, Yellow," urged Lily. "Another shot."
Yellow pushed again, harder. The flow was thick at first, a roiling mass of streaks the color of summer sunshine; then, as her magic ebbed, the flow grew weaker. Robert bounced on the ground, like a bead in a rattle, as the magic reshaped his atoms. His pores vented mist as toxins were expelled from his system. The coating of blood around him dissolved instantly, causing clouds of steam and then red rain, as the water particles condensed on the ceiling. The magic was spreading up his spinal column and into his head. Robert's form began to thrash within a cloud of steam.
"That's it," Yellow panted. "I've barely enough energy to keep from falling asleep."
...
Robert's eyes opened and they were clear. He spoke in a quiet, labored voice.
"My body is broken," he whispered. "I go to God and shall not be ashamed. I felled the black serpent."
Tess sat watching Bronze, her eyes welling. This was where Robert could go no further, the place where he died. She watched as Jake brought Robert a drink of water from his waterjerry, heard the vertebrae in the man's broken back creaking.
Robert took Bronze's hand, wheezing. "You need to go on," he said. "I can't go with you. You need to keep going. You dont know what might be down the road. We were always lucky and you'll be lucky again. You'll see. Just go. It's all right."
"I can't."
"It's all right. This has been a long time coming. Now it's here. Do everything the way Arceus told you to do it."
"You're going to be okay, Father. You have to."
"No, I'm not," said Robert, feeling Lily take his other hand. "Keep your faith with you. You need to stop the Enemy but you cant take any chances. No chances. Do you hear?"
"Please stay."
"You can't. You have to carry Logaria."
"No," Bronze whispered, his voice choked with phlegm. "No, I don't know how to. Not anymore I'm supposed to be the good and wise king, but I am neither good nor wise. Is it even real?"
"Yes."
"Where is it, Father? I don't know where it is."
"Inside of you, maybe all of us. I can't tell anymore. Lily, Bronze, don't come after me. I can't let you. I can't hold my son dead in my arms. I thought I could but I can't. Both of you have my whole heart and you always did."
"It's almost over," said Jake, his voice crackling. "If there is anything you wish of me, my Lord, say it."
"I've something to tell both of you," said Robert with surprising articulation. The thought that had come to his mind struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain. "Do you remember the scared boy you once were?"
"Yes. I remember him."
"Do you think that he's still inside, that boy?"
"Oh yes," said Bronze. "I think he's all right."
Robert sighed and began to close his eyes. "Good. I'm scared that he was lost."
"I think he's all right," said Jake. "But who will find him if he's lost forever?"
"God will find the boy. He always has. He will again."
Robert closed his eyes and smiled.
"Father, please, no," Bronze said softly. "Don't go, please. Don't leave me here. Don't go. Please, I'm begging you, we can just run away. We can run away and never have to think of this ever again. Please, Lord, don't have him go. Yellow, please. Do something. Please don't let him go."
But Robert did not speak again.
...
Lily tried to wipe at her eyes, but her body was weak. Robert's body was utterly relaxed, in sublime and eternal repose, as if under his closed eyes he was seeing what no man can see without feeling peace. Data piled upon data, and it came to her: the sensation of terrifying loss.
"Mother," Bronze said.
"Yes?"
She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.
"My father is dead," he said.
Lily nodded, unable to speak. Sobs shook Yellow.
He turned away from her, looking out at the dust left by Emrett. Grief ran its own agonizing course but it had left for the moment. Why can't I mourn? he wondered. He felt that every fiber of his being craved this release, but it would be denied to him until his task was done. Grief was an inconvenience to all of them but he felt this inability to wail as a inhuman weakness.
Tess looked at Bronze's face, his eyes...the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters, on the faces of children who experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn. It was a face of one who has gained terrible awareness of mortality.
"Cobalion, Yellow," he said, "you know there was nothing to be done. Some men are meant to die. You understand that? You know I hold nothing against you?"
"I understand," said Cobalion wearily. Yellow remained silent, leaving Bronze to wonder for an instant what doubts ran in her thoughts, but then he saw that she was asleep.
There were two main branchings along the way ahead: in one he confronted an an evil old Djinn and said: "Hello, my lord," and bargained for the return of his father from death. The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.
"Shroud and guard his body," said Bronze, pointing at two frightened death commandos. "Wait till I return or the world ends. Gather the ashes of the sorcerer and scatter them."
"You don't mean..." began Ryan, his face ghastly in its paleness.
"We end this," said Bronze. "We end it and then I will mourn."
Yet even then he knew this would not happen, for he would never have time to mourn, not now, and for him there would be no time after the end. For Bronze Tercano of Logaria, last of Elrosi's line, the path ended at the Dark Temple. And that did him fine.
He rose to his feet. The others looked up at him with wide, wondering eyes. Bronze turned to the gates, drew in breath to the bottom of his lungs and let it out in a great cry.
"NOW COMES BRONZE TERCANO TO THE DARK LORD! I HAVE BEEN TRUE AND I STILL CARRY THE BLOOD OF MY FATHER, AND YOU WILL OPEN TO MY HAND!"
Tess watched him stride to where the gates stood, a black silhouette against the violet glowing from the door's serpent designs. She watched shivering as Bronze began to cry the names of his friends and loved ones and old mates; those names carried clear in that stuffy, evil air, as if they would echo forever.
...
"I come in the name of Robert Tercano, he of Logaria!
"I come in the name of Lily Tercano, she of Logaria!
"I come in the name of Tessa Woodhall, she of Rosecove!
"I come in the name of Jake Albans, he of Roria!
"I come in the name of the Swords of Justice, they of Deep Heaven!
"I come in the name of Yellow, she of Viridian Forest!
"I come in the name of Ryan the Wise, he of Aredia!
"I come in the name of Gold, he of Newbark Town!
"I come in the name of Lance, he of Kanto and the sky!
"I come in the name of Moon, she of Hisui, whom I love!
"I come in the name of Quentin, he of Rosecove!
"I come in the name of Erika, she of Johto!
"I come in the name of Drake, he of Hoenn, and the roads!
"I come in the name of Ruby, he of Hoenn!
"I come in the name of Tar-Silmathrim and Tar-Elrosi, they of Logaria!
"I come in the name of the Golden Company, they of Hisui, and will lay to rest the Djinn at last, as they were bid!
"I come in the name of Dialga and Palkia, they of Deep Heaven!
"I come in the name of Yanase, the brave, she of Hisui!
"I come in the name of Antarah, he of Aredia!
"I come in the name of Zeraora, he of Deep Heaven!
"I come in the name of Arceus, He of All, who I call my lord and savior!
"I am Bronze of Logaria, and I come as myself; you will open to me."
...
After that came the sound of a horn. It simultaneously chilled Jake's blood and exalted him. The echoes faded into silence. Then, perhaps a second later, came a great, echoing grinding: the sound of a door swinging open.
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Emrett's Reward
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He had no name here. No new name, not even the old names. There was nothing to distinguish him from anyone else. In fact, there was no one else at all. He felt like an isolated piece of litter blown helter-skelter on the fringes of a dump. His existence was arbitrary and pointless now. The powers he had worked so hard to maintain meant nothing here. It was no longer a reward, but a punishment.
Here is the House Below; dwell and be glad.
"Where is everyone?" He heard the loneliness in his voice, and the very presence of discernable emotion frightened him. He had gone great lengths to eliminate chemical reactions such as shock or fear, but that programming had failed. There had been a moment of rage and terror at the edge, and blinding pain as the preservant spells had all unraveled, and then he was amid illusion and salt and heat and bending feelings. Where were his old comrades who'd died? He knew they must be here, but where? What about his brother and cousin and that damned wife? They too had left the old world, but he knew instinctively they were not in this one. They'd chosen a different path while in the land of choice and opportunity. He would never see any of them again.
I'll never be able to return, he thought, locked behind the invisible bars of eternity. He could see occasional images, catch fleeting glimpses across the divide to the old world. He had done what he wanted, oh yes, killing that damnable man that they should have gotten rid of while they still had a choice. He saw their tears and grief, which he thought would sustain him, but like never before he was acutely aware of their comfort that Robert was where he could not go. Seeing it did not comfort him. The division of hearts he had sown among millions ruled here. Not just a division of philosophies and ideas and governments, but each man eternally segregated from all others. Utter isolation and loneliness. Parched and barren souls living alone, separate, unable to communicate with each other.
"What have I done?" Emrett clenched his teeth, hurting the inside of his mouth. He waited for the taste of blood. There was none. He was a bloodless man, able to feel pain but not able to destroy the body he'd be trapped in forever. Arceus, the White Father, had abandoned him. (He never gave much thought about why the Djinn had left him here.) How that hate raged!
There was no war here, no campaigns, no silk words. Only unending nothingness and uninterrupted boredom. The tedium crushed him already, though he'd been here only a short time. What would a million years of tedium do to him? He already glimpsed the wreckage he would become, smelt the stench of the human debris.
At first he tried to rehearse his deeds that earned him position and power. He now saw them for what they were: pathetic self-indulgent attempts to get recognition. No one was here to listen. Even if they had been, they wouldn't be impressed, only absorbed in their own self-centered misery. The things he'd done and boasted of he was now being punished for.
"What's that?"
Emrett cried out, cowering in fear at a horrid sight. He caught just a glimpse of a face, a terrifying face. Somehow he knew that in another place that same face brought endless delight, for it smiled with approval on its inhabitants. But here it brought unmitigated terror. He who by His presence made heaven delight, by His absence made hell unimaginable misery. And yet, somehow He must not be entirely absent, for His untempered holiness was the burning fire that had caked away the flesh of Emrett's soles, His attributes the sulfuric air that caused him to choke.
In a moment of insight, he realized the Holy One had been here once, been for him so he would not have to be here. Yet here he was. He saw the haunting image of the Terrible One, and caught a glimpse of the lion's face again. They repulsed him. The thought of touching those hands or being touched by them appalled him. With the demented will that still remained to him, he shut the bars on the door. The face vanished.
He remembered a crop of new recruits that surely lay dead on the field of battle, his words that that everyone was good by nature, that people were not responsible for the bad things they did, that the Djinn was love, and there would be no hell in the House Below. That he had said.
"You and I would not send people to hell, and the Djinn is surely more merciful than we."
Crimes...innumerable crimes...
The words had sounded so reassuring to those recruits and his own heart. But it was all a lie, Emrett realized with startling clarity. He cried out for the rocks to fall upon him, to obliterate him. But there were no rocks here. There was nothing here. Nothing familiar or comforting, no definite shapes that he could correspond something earthly to. Nothing much at all.
Daughters...sons...fathers...wives, your own among them. Millions of souls you've led away. Death is too good for you. How many souls are separated from Me forever because of you and the words that came from your mouth?
"So blind, so wicked, so wrong! Forgive me!"
You have chosen eternity in Sheol.
Here there was no opportunity to kill, no opportunity to die, no one to dare or boast to, no one to win over to steal from, no one to seduce, no one to serve him, no women to abuse. He no longer had dominion. Perhaps he'd never had it, perhaps his sense of control over the world had been an illusion all along. His mother had warned him, she had, aye, yes, tell on the mountain like you'd hear it in the valley. She'd told him about the Dark Arts and the White Arts. He'd never really made a conciousious rejection of "good", at least not on aesthetic grounds; he considered himself "good." When his life was in danger, he'd even prayed to gods other than the Djinn. But never had he accepted the only provision needed to escape Sheol.
There was no color here, no texture, no richness, no variety. The utter isolation meant there could be no value in words here. The chattering part of himself that had produced so many convincing arguments was a non-entity. Across the far reaches of this nothingness, others he'd known on earth now existed as shriveled souls, husks of humanity. On one of these desert islands of misery, a pathetic nameless man once known as Jonathan Rowell Cypress engaged in an unceasing litany of telling Arceus that hell was a violation of his love, that he had been a man of love and justice, that he had preached a message of love and acceptance, and God had no right to keep him here.
Oh eternity! eternity! How shall I grapple with the misery that I must meet with in eternity?
The smell was horrible. Emrett's stomach turned in revulsion. It was as if he were immersed in hot excrement, the sewage of sin and self. It was putrid. He wanted to vomit, but could not. He was held captive to the iron moment before relief. There could be no relief here. Only endless self-preoccupation, self-hatred, self-everything, and therefore nothing. Self stripped of its one reference point, the God who now tormented him like a burning worm, and therefore stripped of its worth, stripped of its humanity. The vomit continued to build within, but it could never be released. Was this Arceus's fury exploding upon him? Or was it his own fury imploding within him?
"No hope!"
Why? For the Original One is very merciful. Why no hope now?
He felt himself shrinking, the ever-narrowing man. In another House, he somehow knew, Robert Tercano was the ever-broadening man. The False One Arceus, if he had not been right, at least at won. Emrett had been wrong.
"Too late. It's too late!" he cried, hoping the words would travel far enough to be heard by some other soul, someone else to join the company misery loves. They found nothing. There was unlimited misery here, but there was no company.
The fires of blame and excuses and rationalizations and justifications scorched him. He experienced the corroded metallic taste of life without the divine. No, not life. Mere existence, stripped of purpose. No work here. What he would give to be able to perform even the most menial task. It would give some semblance of meaning. No rest here. How he longed to sleep. No sleep here. A structureless hell in which there was no hierarchy, no recruits, no admins, no dark lords.
"I had a choice!" he screamed at himself in rage and horror. Why had he chosen what any sane man would not? Why would he live forever like this when there had been a way out? The utter insanity of his choice gripped his soul. The False One's pardon had been offered repeatedly, every year and every day and every hour of his life on earth. Now it was too late, had been too late, to receive it. Eternal condemnation with no hope, no reprieve, filled with endless regret.
Everlasting stagnation, endless despair. His circle of influence had shrunk to nothing. His life had gone into eclipse for all eternity, erased as if it were no more than a stray pencil mark. He had no turf, no dominion. Those he'd tortured and killed and broken, he knew now, would reign over the universe as beings whose light would smear out his essence if it fell upon him. They would control the true dominion.
"I should have listened," he yelled, hearing not even an echo. "I should have listened!"
He heard a horrible nightmare of a scream. It sounded like a crazed animal crying out in agony as the lead of a shotgun riddles it. Terrified, he realized the bloodcurdling scream was his own. More horrible still, he realized no one else would ever hear it.
One glimpse of the old times sets things to rights.
But he could not look back at that. No, for the first time in Hell, he saw something new, something comprehensible. Then a black pleasure came to him: there was a way out.
He did not know where he was going in Hell or what he was about to do. For many years on Earth he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last decade or so—since he had been initiated—he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. Why a snake? Well, why not? His mind was a mere spectator.
As he approached the sight before him (for the rules of space had seemed to temporarily return in the dimension he found himself within), he realized he could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The memory of emotion began to fall away, leaving the nearest thing to a human passion that still existed in him as a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind.
There was no tolerating such an illusion. There were not, and must not be, such things as men. But never, until his entry into Hell, had he been quite so vividly aware that the body and its movements were the only reality, that the self which seemed to watch the body shambling around into the Tophet and feeling such self-loathing was a nonentity. Yes, that was it. How infuriating that the body should have the power thus to project a phantom self!
Thus the Emrett whose existence Emrett denied watched his body go to the precipice of a black pit filled with a monstrous lake of fire, watched it pull up sharply at the sight of a naked and bloodied corpse lying beside it. The chemical reaction called shock occurred. Emrett stopped, turned the body over with ghostly hands, and recognised Eric, though the skin on his face was all sloughed off. A moment later he turned away and stood looking down into the lake of fire.
(you have chosen eternity in the lake of fire)
He hardly noticed that Darkrai lay somewhere near, his bones and flesh regrowing in slowly-moving slivers. Still not asking what he would do or why, Emrett eased his burnt toes over the edge. The whole place was silent and empty, without even the sound of his breathing (for he no longer breathed); a sort of radioactive ash was thick on the ground (was it ground?) by this time. The bellowing inferno below him seemed as though a mountain of acetylene cans had been piled and then ignited, detonating perpetually in eternal silence.
Whatever it was that dictated his actions then compelled him to lean over. When he had pushed himself forward as far as his base of support could bear, he let go and fell into the lake of fire.
Rest well, oh Susannah; rest well, oh Anna; rest well, oh Jewel. He is beyond you forever.
He plunged into the blaze and reached up to the featureless sky, his hand solemnly held above his head till the rest of his body was submerged. That tiresome illusion, his consciousness, was screaming to protest; his body, even had he wished, had no power to attend to those screams. Like the clockwork figure he had chosen to be, his stiff body, now terribly cold, was absorbed into the fire.
Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that the lake of fire might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the endless burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that. With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion. In that attitude eternity overtook him as sunrise in old tales overtakes trolls and turns them into unchangeable stone.
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.
Things went differently for Robert. A rush of sound and fury awakened him, this time not to a scene of agonized confusion but to a glowing quiet vision of something like snow. Behind him lay a land of shadows, a gray and colorless two-dimensional flatland. Ahead of him lay something that no man can describe.
Its freshness was unutterable, its color and beauty outside the reckoning of the nations. He could not only see and hear it, but feel and smell and taste it, even from a distance. The light beckoned home to come dive into it, with abandon, as cool water beckons on a hot afternoon. He sensed intuitively this place he moved toward was the Substance that cast the shadows in the other world. If that place was midnight, this was sunrise. Up ahead was the twelve-dimensional reality of what his old life had been but a replica.
Memory returned in pleasant, sweeping degrees. Had his words been enough? Yes, they were, a voice both within and without him assured. The voluble self was gone. Now there was an infinite rainbow of colors to be concerned with, reaching as far beyond earth's rainbow as sunlight is beyond a match flame. There were stairs to climb and he was getting stronger.
"Here I come!"
Though he had not yet stepped foot on it, already everything within him told Robert this was the Place that defined all places, the Place by which all places must be judged. It was the prototype, the master from which all copies were made. He saw his reflection on the polished steps that led up to the gate. It showed Robert Tercano as things were when all was aright, when the marring of the evil years had stopped, even been mended. His smile was like that of a man who does not smile much but enjoys it when he does.
Behind him between the stairs and the shadows was a great river that ran on to infinity, and cold and smooth was its water. Robert wondered if he had crossed it on the journey, and if its wetness would be in his clothes (for he had handsome clothes indeed). He carried little memory of the river; but there are not any, save two to reckoning, Enoch and Elijah, that have been permitted to tread another path to the Golden Country beside the fording of the River Styx since the foundation of the world, nor shall until the last trumpet shall sound.
I sink in deep waters; the billows go over my head; all his waves go over me. Selah.
The place ahead, what did it mean? Was it not the Brick that had promised all might be well, all might be well, that all manner of things might be well? Aye, it was. He and his son and wife had made their stand and they had stood true in the eyes of God. Surely he stood before the great homecoming. Here the greyness ended and the celebration began.
Time to get moving.
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I can tell you that he walked up the stairs, and that he looked into the holy brilliance and found it was a gate. I can tell you that, come his entrance into the Golden Country, he looked at it again and saw that he was looking out on a far green land with no sea nor sun. But of Robert Tercano, last chief of Logaria, I can tell you no more, not what he found on the journey from the gate to the river that flowed through the green lands, not who met him as he found the path to the Hall of Arceus, not when he eventually came into the full light of Heaven. I can tell you none of these things, I am sorry, so we must return to Bronze. Here the darkness hides my father from the storyteller's eye and he must walk the road to God alone.