‘Coup’ Part 4/4
I found myself outside a large building, a building that looked familiar. After a few moments, I realized that it looked like many buildings I had encountered in my life, especially in childhood.
The sun looked like the sun of my youth, also. I felt sure that I was not on my homeworld. Instead, the map was trying to communicate with me by using analogs it plucked from my consciousness.
The power source, in this representation, was inside the building somewhere. I could sense something in there. I needed to find it.
I walked through the generic but somehow reassuring door and into a long corridor. The building seemed larger on the inside, the corridor stretching quite far indeed, with other corridors intersecting it about every twenty meters.
The light was somehow dim without making it hard to see. It seemed dark, but I could still see quite far and wasn’t missing details.
I walked forward, determined to follow my sense of where the power source was. There were rooms between the corridors, but I had no inclination to go inside any of them.
I walked down the dark corridors, trying to angle closer to where I thought the power source was. The corridors felt endless now, and any outside realm a myth.
I walked.
I could still feel the pounding in my head, but I had some time.
I began to see a kind of light far ahead, a glow that shone through walls without making them unbearably bright. That must be where it is.
I heard a pattering, or skittering, behind me.
Whirling around, I saw a dog.
A monstrous, black, red-eyed, silent dog over two meters long charging right at me.
And behind it, another.
I dived to one side, and the first one went past. The second one jumped on top of me, knocking me to the ground. A quick but forceful magickal push sent it off me—but not as far as I’d thought it would go. It had a strange feel to it. I got up as the other one stopped behind me. I was between the two dogs.
I realized what I’d thought strange. I assumed that these creatures were guardians of the power source or the map. They weren’t. They felt like gods.
The gods hadn’t broken the barrier—I still had my headache—but some canny one amongst them had squeezed through a tiny gap in the forces making up the barrier. Not a large enough gap to let the god come through entirely, but enough to let some portion of him through. That portion became these dogs, bestial god-fragments that knew that I was their quarry, and my destruction their larger self’s will.
I was afraid. I didn’t have much time. I had to get away from these beasts. I had to follow the light to the power source. I had to make sure the gods didn’t reach me.
The dogs leaped. They hit me at almost the same time, one digging claws into my back, the other my shoulder. I fell again with them on top of me, all the rage of their parent self clear in those eyes.
There were magickal protections around my person, and these they proceeded to rend and tear as I struggled on the ground, trying to get them away. Their jaws sank into my flesh, not quite able to break it but almost, and certainly able to hurt me. Their stench was unbearable, and my headache worse as the gods continued their assault on the barrier, and the dogs’ weight crushing on top of me.
Breathe.
I had spent millennia on this plan. I had faced legions. I had faced whole gods.
Breathe.
A bubble of calm found its way to the center of my consciousness. With it, I gathered energy. I cast this energy out and around me, a lethal expansion of power. Livid purple flickered and sizzled, and the dogs yowled as they were burned by it and cast off. I stood, retaining a field of purple around me. Stunned, the dogs struggled to rise. My headache was still getting worse, but I ignored it. I let the field dissipate and instead created an almost invisible sphere, three meters in diameter, and absorbed first one and then the other dog into it. Waking now, they howled and lashed out. Their power was less than my own, and they remained trapped.
I could have left them inside, left them and resumed my journey, conserving my strength. But I did not.
Instead I made the sphere smaller. It shrunk a meter, and they were cramped inside it, and angrier. Then I shrunk it further, and their noises changed from anger to fear. I kept going, my anger fueling the implosion. I crushed them until there was only enough room for one, and they merged together in a bloody mess. I crushed them until they became liquid, and then that liquid burnt away. I crushed them so that their parent god would undoubtedly feel it, feel the extinguishing of that part of himself. I crushed them until the sphere was a small dot, and then I obliterated it.
I ran towards the light, my head pounding.
Down the corridor, with the light clearly seeping out of a room ahead and slightly to the right. I reached the doorway and entered, dropping my eyes and raising my arm to cover them, expecting to be blinded.
But the room was suffused with a soft light, and while strong, it wasn’t harsh. I walked towards the center, and there it was, a simple, glowing cube. Created by some nameless race, hidden by the gods, silent for untold years: a source of power like no other.
Could they feel it, those mighty arrogances clamoring for entry? Reaching out my hand, I hoped they could. Time for a change.