Chapter 77

“How do you do it?”

He asked her the question in what felt like a vacuum, the stars above serving as the only reminders that he was still on earth.

“Do what?” Mari replied, turning over on the grassy knoll to face him. “If this is about my looks, I wake up in the morning like this. And – yes – you are punching way above your weight.”

He rolled away from the stars to look at her, seeing the twinkling lilies that were her eyes gazing adoringly down at him in the midnight gloom.

“How do you make people believe in you?”

It was a question she would have scoffed at – he saw the beginnings of her nose twitching the way it normally did when he said something naïve or schoolboy-ish in her presence. She always did a great job of keeping him grounded with little more than a look.

But tonight, amidst their quiet stargazing, she didn’t bash away his complaint. Instead, she leaned across the grass and stroked his grizzled chin.

“It’s super easy,” she said. “I tell myself that doubt is for wimps.”

“Come on –“ he began.

“See?” she replied, cutting him off by rolling on top of him and giggling like a schoolgirl when he tried to resist. “Already you’ve failed, Marcus Graham. You’ve doubted that your impeccably intelligent girlfriend has the answer you want to hear.”

It was his turn to scoff, now, staring up at her as the blanket of constellations hidden above framed her face.

“It just comes so easy to you, doesn’t it?” he laughed, stroking her hair. “A Psychologist equally at home in the digital world as the physical one. Everyone loves you. Everyone listens to you.”

“Everyone listens to you, too, you know. They just don’t like what they hear.”

He chuckled at what he assumed was a joke, but when he looked through the mist that covered his groggy, sleepless eyes, he saw she was completely serious.

“You wanna know the deep, dark truth?” she smiled down at him. “People are simpler than you think. Think about how folk occupy their time – their lives are filled with all these big, horrible happenings. Parents dying. Lovers’ quarrels. War. Famine. Disease. Sure, we could talk about those things – the mainstream media outlets certainly do – but they ain’t the ones pulling in the big numbers, honey. Why is that?”

He sighed. Already he didn’t like where this conversation was going.

“You’re going to say that they don’t want to hear about the harshness of reality.”

“Correctamundo, baby,” she giggled, leaning so close that her voice dropped to a whisper. He was immediately taken in by the aroma of her perfume, the thin nape of her neck, the paleness of her skin as it caressed his own coarse, rough body.

“People want validation,” she whispered. “They want excitement. They want an escape. You think Vtubers catching fire during the Pandemic was a coincidence? Big anime tiddies sell, my young apprentice.”

“And yet you prefer to stay aw-naturale,” Marcus murmured with a cursory glance down her blouse.

“Because there’s something more to that desire,” she said, with such passion behind her words that he thought she might have gotten far more blasted than he’d initially thought when they downed the whiskey he’d brought with them on this little trip. She always was a lightweight.

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“At the end of the day,” she said. “People don’t want to feel alone. That’s it. That’s the big secret. That’s what every online bigshot has been able to monetize: loneliness. That’s why my clients listen to me, babe. Because I listen to them. But you,” she said, bending down to plant a wet kiss on his dry lips. “You’re the other piece of the puzzle. You actually have something to say. You have something worth listening to. A message.”

“Not as sexy as a buxom cartoon girl,” Marcus murmured into her ear.

“Anime,” she corrected with an air of faux defiance. “A sacred Japanese art, don’tcha know. Besides, passionate men are always more attractive. I might be a cooky Psychotherapist, but I love a man who’s crazy about a lost cause.”

“Hey!” he all but screeched as she bent down to kiss him again, pulling away only when he held her tight, and the stars seemed to melt into her like she was a titan pulling them into her warm embrace.

“Imagine what we could build together,” she said. “Imagine what we could do…”

He stared up at her, stroking the stray folds of her hair away from her pale face.

“If only you’d stop doubting,” she whispered. “If only you’d seize the power that’s always dangling in front of you, waiting for you to take it.”

He saw her eyes shift then – maybe it was just his own imagination. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. Probably more likely it was the alcohol running through his bloodstream – but he saw a change come over her. The lilly-pads of her eyes were gone – replaced by a set of four glowing amber bulbs with black slits drawn across them. Her pale skin grew thin hairs that ran down her body, and her thin hands now felt like elongated claws digging into the soft flesh of his cheeks, holding his mouth shut, keeping him from screaming out in pain. A set of six horns burst from the back of her skull and twisted into the night, each one a corrupted pike dripping with rot and bile.

“Come to me, Marcus Graham,” the thing that was once Mari told him. “Accept the Gift that my servants give you.”

It spoke with the voices of all those who had died to protect him. In its mad eyes he saw Gatskeek, Festicus, and Ix all adding their voices to its whisper-roar that boomed throughout his conscience.

“You are mine…” the creature said, its vicious horns bending down to rake his forehead, scraping away the flesh there and inscribing something in his own blood. “My General. My Shai-Alud. My progeny from the Place Beyond. Whatever comes next, remember: you shall always be mine.”

The last thing he remembered was the creature’s great yellow tongue that shot from its mouth towards his opened forehead, licking at the pulsing muscle of his brain and inscribing something there before its amber eyes burst open, and the dream-world of Marcus’s slumber gave way to a harsher reality.

…

He woke to pain surging up his every limb.

His eyes adjusted to the cloud of dust that blanketed his vision, and any movement he tried to make was hindered by the stacks of gold rubble that encased his body. He was buried. And he was dying.

Not even a carefree dream to…send me off…

He could feel his life running red down his arms and his legs, wherever they were beneath him. No muscle responded to his mind’s dull calls for motion, and no impulse but that which compelled him to scream in agony could be felt.

This…this is how it ends?

He tried blinking through the filthy dust that lay thick in the air, his ears starting to pick up sounds of furious combat nearby. Of swords slicing through flesh, ratmen screeching as Kobolds died.

He looked up at what was once Skegga’s great floating throne and found that it, too, had been reduced to rubble and cinders. Around its seat and hand-rests sat the remains of its once-host: the flabby, bloody scraps of Skegga that had barely survived the explosion.

He…He’s dead…

The thought was enough to bring tears to Marcus’s ashen cheeks.

He’s finally…dead…

So engrossed was he in this realization that he did not even hear the shouts that had started up nearby, nor even pay attention to the bricks and wreckage that were currently being removed from his position.

It’s over…

“Sire Marcus! Be waiting!”

There’s little else I can do…

He couldn’t recognize the voice as it drew closer, and the weight on his limbs began to lessen. He knew the bones in his arms were broken. He knew his legs were a mangled mess. How he was even able to stay conscious might have had something to do with the strange blessing he’d received when first he was spawned into this dark realm of war and filth.

Or maybe that dream was more real than he’d thought.

He felt himself being dragged from his position – his legs unlocking from their crushing prison beneath the crumbled remains of Grindlefecht’s main keep – what Skegga had appropriated as his temple. Now it was nothing more than a desolate, smoking gravestone. The final chapter in the great toad’s history had just been written.

And so has mine…

Marcus’s thoughts trailed off as he saw the dark ceiling of the Underkingdom above him. Only dust and smoke surrounded the crumbling wreckage of the temple.

Then – a feeling of weightlessness overcame him. What he assumed was death finally taking him after all this time.

I’ve cheated it enough, he thought. I’ve sent enough ratmen to their deaths to deserve this. And yet…I can’t leave Mari here. She’s up there.

This thought – and this thought alone – was what compelled him to grit his teeth and fight through the pain that was still coursing through him, begging his heart to finally give up.

“Be holding on, Sire! Be holding…”

“I’m…I’m here…” he said, coughing through blood and spittle, feeling his bones begin to crack back into place and his muscles contract as they began to function once more.

His vision was still clouded, his eyes were still glazed over, and his head felt like a weight was bearing down on him.

But he was alive.

“Sire,” the rat who had just saved him murmured. “How are you feeling?”

He turned to see Deekius panting beside him.

“Like shit,” he said.

The rat-priest smiled. “Don’t we all?”

***

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