Sacrifices
8888
The man walked along the dusty road, towards the looming clouds of a storm. All around him was desolation, dust and ash swept around by a persistent yet not overwhelming wind. His leather jacket ruffled slightly against the wind. The crossbow was slung over his left shoulder, the quiver with the arrow slung across his back the band of it overlaying the ammunition belt that crossed his chest. Hooked to his pants belt was a small satchel.
"This used to be such a beautiful planet." The man mused to himself as he looked up at the gray sky of acidic clouds and around him, at rubble and dust and twisted burnt out trees. Even the air smelled of ancient loss and death and malevolence.
Onward he walked, slowly, determinedly. His boots crunched on the scorched soil, kicking up pulverized remnants of the once beautiful landscape. It had once been beautiful, the great vistas of the ancient rainforests, flowers the size of a person's head that flared in every color visible, and half a dozen that were invisible. The people were beautiful, too, sweet, peaceful, intelligent. The long boiled oceans used to support innumerable life-forms, flying squids, singing crabs, dancing fish. The double suns would blaze one red, one white, glistening off far flung mountain ice caps. Aliens birds would wheel in the sky, alien sand would comfort the bare soles of feet.
It was all gone though, lost long ago, when the war was only middle-aged, even before the man had come to fight in the ever broadening conflict. The man closed his eyes and remembered, the flash, creation being torn asunder. Giant holes punched in the universe. The Time Lords opened the vault, released the demons, the Shadow Dimensions issued upwards and the unnamed, unspeakable, inconceivable monstrosities washed into reality. Even one could've done incalculable damage but the Time Lords were never ones to a flare for the underwhelming. One such creature came to Thessolia, with its armies of under-demons and burned out the world, consuming the bodies, minds and souls of every Thessolian it encountered, sapient or not. It razed the planet in perpetuity. Not a single cell thrived in the crunchy scorched earth.
The man sighed a heavy sigh, patted the satchel hooked to his belt and continued onwards, ever onwards, towards the storm, broiling ahead in the foothills of the mountains. After some time, the horizon started to shift, and the foothills melted, twisted, morphed into spires of curling obsidian. Grand, blackened obelisks skewered the sky with unrecognizable golden lettering glowing angrily upon their surface. The signs of masonry that had been not so much constructed but willed into existence rose up as huge, impregnable walls of a castle of demonic scale and construction.
It was all artifice, merely the manifestation of a creature with no sense of context in this universe. It shaped itself from the nightmares and demonology of the minds it had ransacked and ripped and drained. It took form from fear and hatred and rage and twisted reality to fit that shape.
Lightning lanced across the sky as thunder rolled threatening as the growl of a lion. The man sneered, narrowing his eyes as he walked up to the giant portcullis. He walked forward and rang a bell. There was a snap and a crack, and the doors slowly open developing a deeper and more lonesome groan as the part widened. The grand promenade beyond the doors was silent. The man walked slowly forward. Piles of bones, and bodies and fetid remnants of a long forgotten orgy of death lay on the blackened cobblestones.
Onwards he walked to the large castle in the center of this civilization of morbidity. The doors were laid open for him when he climbed the stairs and entered the great hall. Even inside the hall death clung, unlit torches, torn tapestries, and death, no living breath shifted the air save the man's own, and even that, he would argue, didn't count. At the end of a torn carpet, up a small dais was a throne and upon the throne was a man, who was not a man. His skin was ashen, his hair was twisted and greasy, his frame was thin and the clothes he wore hung off of him like great glaciers of fabric. His head was propped up by his right hand which by extension of his arm was braced against the armrest of the throne.
"I will speak to the master of this world!" the man shouted to the hall.
"You have been expected." The one sitting on the throne replied, the man sat up. "I am the master of this world. Long have I waited for you to come, Time Lord."
"You are not the master of this world," the man said stiffening at the body sitting in the throne. "You are little more than a fleshy hand puppet for the master of this world. I will not speak to puppets."
"I inhabit this form, Time Lord." The body replied. "You will address me."
"No." The man shook his head and looked up into the abyss high in the rafters. "Show yourself to me! Show yourself!"
"What need have you to see me, Time Lord?" the body in the throne growled.
"I bare gifts. I wish to kneel to the master of this world and give him my allegiance and my soul." The man said spreading his arms out and turning in a slow circle looking to the darkness. "I have lost everything important to me; I wish to see this war end. It is said that holder of this world is the mightiest of the great creatures to emerge from the Shadow Dimensions."
"You can abase yourself to me at the throne." The voice replied, this time not emanating from the body sitting on the throne but from the stones of the castle itself. "I inhabit the cadaver on the throne that will suffice."
"Not for this, not for me." The man said with a grumble. "I have traveled a long way, and I am willing to give you what is needed for you to have ultimate power in this reality. I am willing to give myself."
The body on the throne convulsed, and laughter of the voice then followed, like thunder after lightning. The creature chortled and the darkness shifted in the rafters, undulated like a serpent or the mighty twisting of a tentacle, it was hard to tell.
"Time Lords are always haughty." The voice said, this time from the cadaver. It was staring at the man, the eyes long dead, and grayed over with opalescent cataracts. "I could smite the whole quorum of Time Lords with a mere thought, why should I presume to show myself to you, you are a speck, a grain of sand. You have come to me, Time Lord. You are in the belly of the beast. Here more than anywhere my power is greatest. If I wished I could strike you down now, and inhabit your festering corpse."
"And yet-" the man replied addressing the darkness. He took a deep breath and looked around, "-I find myself unmolested."
"I choose not to kill you yet." The voice came from the cadaver.
"Choose, or can't?" The man asked in a way that was more of a statement than a question. "I was alive when this place burned, when you came to Thessolia. You are powerful but in order for you to truly take someone's form they have to relinquish themselves to you. Now, you may have the power to torture them into saying it, you can devise any number of illusions and tricks, but in the end, the person has to accede first." The man walked forward. "You said I was expected."
"Yes, I have looked into the timescape." The cadaver said. "The Time Lord will come to me, and give me access to his TARDIS and with it I will have the power to infiltrate Gallifrey itself! From whence I will be able to burn across reality, jumping from parallel to parallel re-crafting the entire multiverse into my visage of paradise."
"Then you know who I am." The man said taking a deep breath.
"You are known to me." The cadaver sat straight in the throne. "The lost child, the renegade of Gallifrey."
"Then you must also know I never do deals like this via proxy." The man said, looking to the rafters. "Show yourself to me."
"If you wish it, Time Lord, pray to what deities you will that you do not survive the experience." The cadaver arched its back, the ancient bones and cartilage scratching and creaking.
The cadaver's face burst into black flame; the entire body then was consumed. The castle walls and floors warped and melted as the thing twisted into shapes not entirely possible. An eye, of sorts could be seen in the darkness as the storm above the now non-extant castle funneled downwards towards an increasingly twisting mass of squirming pieces of geometry.
The man squinted his eyes as the creature manifested in its truth. Even for his well trained eyes the impossibilities of the creature were hard to watch. His brain tried in vain to create logic in the chaos, tried substituting in more acceptable forms of winged cephalopod-headed creatures and colors from outer-space or even naked penguins, but the man refused to accept those false illusions as the creature continued to stretch and expand in every dimension, and seven which didn't really exist. Finally when it was done the leviathan towered over the man, expanding pan-dimensionally forever into infinity but bound in a single point. The nature of it was paradoxical, yeses that were nos, hots that were colds, right angles that were straight, straight angles that were right, circles with corners and squares that didn't have enough Skittles to make a bouquet of flowers. Superficially it looked like something you'd get if you crossed a gorgon with a Jabberwocky and then spun it in a centrifuge, poured the contents out, let it congeal, then melted it in a frying pan then put the drippings in the mold of the hive mind network of an army ant colony.
"You know I've never seen one of your lot up close in their true form before." The man said as he drew his cross bow, and pulled out an arrow from his quiver. "I have to admit, you're mildly unsettling."
"You will abase yourself to me now, Time Lord." The creature growled, its 'eye' glaring intently at the man, the fury of a small galaxy burning from it.
"I don't think so." The man said, as he sized up the arrow. "You see, you're not the only one to have been doing their research. I know who you are, as well. Or rather where you came from."
"I am the deepest darkness of the Shadow Dimensions!" The creature growled. "Do not trifle with me, Time Lord, I will smite you!"
"I've been smote by bigger, and badder." The man said, absent-mindedly as he looked at the arrow. "You came from a reality where the Carrionites ruled, they created you in some ill-fated psychic experiment utilizing pre-expansionary mathematics. You destroyed half their universe before they banished you to the Shadow Dimensions. All it took was the blood of a valiant hero and some well timed words in a language that never existed."
The creature laughed loudly, the haughty chortle of something immortal and perceptibly invincible. "That was then, Time Lord, I have cured in the Shadow Dimensions for an eternity; I have consumed so many of my lessers that I am infinitely more powerful than I was when I was born. Nothing in this universe could banish me back to the darkness!"
The man smiled a cold smile, and his hand slowly reached down to his satchel and opened it and slowly pulled out a vial of reddish brown fluid. "Do you know what this is?"
"It is blood." The creature snarled quietly. "Useless, Time Lord, I will not be banished by the same trick again!"
"Oh, I do not intend to banish you." The man said, calmly as he slowly uncorked the vial. "I intend on killing you." He slowly upturned the vial onto the head of the arrow the fluid inside oozing onto the arrowhead. "And this isn't just blood. It is the distilled essence of a civilization. A proud and noble species, their blood was spilt so I could do this. The entirety of the Trion species was murdered, sacrificed on an altar of death, the dagger clutched in my hands, demon." The man looked up at the creature as best as he could. "This arrow is all that remains of the Nemesis statue. The rest of it was lost to history a long time ago. But even this remnant has a lot of power in it, and with the power of the blood of an entire sacrificed civilization behind it, I image it would be just enough to finish you off for good."
"Lies!" The thing roared. "I know you, Time Lord, you are many things, trickster, illusionist, manipulator, you are not a murderer; you would not commit genocide! You are a good man; good men could not do this monstrosity. Their rules of decency prohibit it. You could not do this!"
"Oh, demon, you claim to know me, so well," The man said quietly as he slowly strung the arrow onto the crossbow. He lined the sight up to the creature, "but the thing is; good men don't need rules." The man put his finger on the trigger of the crossbow. "I have many rules, but let me show you how many I have broken to destroy you. I have done unspeakable things, to stop an unspeakable thing…"
The trigger clicked, the arrow flew. The man dropped the crossbow after he fired and took a step backward. The creature twisted and contorted, lightning flew but the Nemesis arrow was not to be denied its target. It struck the creature there was a pulse of energy and light as the arrow punched through what could most likely be called flesh or scales or chitin or chitinous, scaly flesh. The creature roared loudly, in all dimensions. It expanded in rage and possibly pain and then contracted to the size of a pinpoint singularity. Then it expanded returning to its so called grace and stature. It seethed as something analogous to blood or heme or some other circulatory fluid gushed from the wound.
"It is but a flesh wound." The creature snarled, its confidence growing slowly. "As I said nothing in this uni-…"
"Aflom-ictorum-hvla-nin-su-varum-traw-pos, HAVAINTARUM!" The man shouted loudly, spreading his hands forward.
The puncture glowed, burned with a phosphorus white flame. The creature roared. Its dimensions twisted in on itself. There was an ineffable gurgle as the creature spun and twisted and tweaked. The flesh convulsed and sinews spasmed.
Wind roared from behind the man as it was sucked into the gaping tear ripped into the creature's existence. The man held his hands up over his eyes shielding them from the burning light. The entire planet shook as the creature flailed in death and torment. Within minutes it was over, the creature after all the displays and rage and flails of its death throes simply blinked out of existence, it's willpower being the only thing keeping the universe from denying its physical presence. The man walked forward to where the creature had been. He climbed the stairs of the smoking dais. On the ground was an arrow, seared black, the arrow head twisted by the intense heat of a universe crashing down on it. The man knelt down in and lifted the arrow up. He scrutinized the arrowhead.
"Turned away the Black Guardian, became a noble man, enlightened." The man muttered quietly to himself. "And yet, still, became just another bit of cannon fodder for this war." The man turned and walked away from the smoking dais and picked up the crossbow. He continued to walk back over the ashen road that had led him to the shadow in the darkness. "War…this is not war, there is no nobility in this, no honor; this is death gone mad…" His hand tightened around the arrow. A sickly trickle of sunlight pierced the breaking ashen clouds. The man looked up, briefly took a deep breath and then looked back down to the ground and trudged onwards. "No more…no more…."