READ: Out of the Way 1

Welcome to the first episode of 'Out of the Way', an urban fantasy portal adventure. Audio fans can listen along in the companion podcast at servingworld.com. More chitchat soon, but for now: let's begin.

Prologue

In Another Place

A hot, angry wind keened around a circle of shattered towers where the ocean met the city. Once brilliant white, the cracked stumps had been fouled by the black smoke and gray ash staining everything.

The city was dead. He had helped to kill it.

The barest pinprick of dim sunlight glowed through a hellish red behind the clouds. Ash fell like snow over the broken barricades and fortifications. The angry wind flung it deeper still, obscuring signposts, spilling through destroyed windows and roofs to scour away or bury any signs of past life still adorning the city’s bones.

All along the horizon, the ocean boiled. Red glowing lava seared the surface in countless places. Black smoke spewed into the skies. An angry wind lashed the barren world again and again.

All along the steaming water’s edge, around the wreckage of the once-proud towers, stood the conquerors. Obediently they waited. Silently they stood watch, somehow seeing through eyes of milky-white, the pupils blinded beneath cataracted over.

The conquerors gave no voice to their victory. Their numb faces displayed no joy. They trumpeted no victory music. Their mindless slaughter had come from no hatred nor insanity of their own.

All that mattered, all they existed for now, was to ensure nothing stopped the arrival of the city’s new rulers.

As one, they gave unblinking, careful witness to the roiling waters inside the circle of toppled stone.

Chains, each link the size of the tallest of the witnesses, reached towards the center, disappearing beneath the surface.

Waves lapped the shore. The bodies of fish and other seafarers washed against the shore, boiled and sloughing apart against the stone.

Occasionally, suddenly, violently, the chains tightened against the columns unleashing a groaning cacaphony.

The witnesses would watch the far, submerged pillars tremble in time with the violence, and just as suddenly go slack once again.

The great trapped thing contained within continued its struggle, was not yet broken.

One witness stood atop the partially submerged wreckage of the pillar nearest to shore. There, he carefully observed any signs of the struggle hidden beneath the water.

Standing sentinel in water up to his thighs his face remained slack, expressionless. His eyes never wavered from the violent surges, his breath rose and fell slow and sure. He stood silent, as he had for many days, but prepared to cry out, to act at the first hint of any possible escape.

The chains above him snapped taut again with a ringing sound. A chip of stone shot down and cut his cheek below his eye. The chain held, and so too did this witness hold his gaze, and his tongue.

The sun fell and rose, weaker than the day before, while far off on the horizon a spot of green light grew that much brighter.

The great thing withing the circle of chain struggled unceasingly, but remained as surely trapped as when the witness and his kin first entombed it there.

The sun fell and rose again, and again. The balance of the world shifted, bit by bit, day by day, towards a moment the witne ss knew was inevitable… until one day the keening wind carried a new sound to the witness’s ears: discordant cries and screams of joy from all their kin.

Out on the horizon, where the green gleamed, the burning ocean heaved.

A vortex of water ripped into the sky. Dark clouds were sucked down to meet it. A fine, white mist rose from the water where the forces met, and spun.

The spot of jade-green light, brighter than the sun now, rose into the air within the whirling cauldron of mist and fog.

The witness’s heart flew into his throat and he staggered back, almost sinking to his knees. An explosion of love and joy shot through his body.

“They come!” the witness croaked through wind-blasted lips, heat-baked throat.

The world had been cleansed, the unbelievers purged and the great thing captured and chained where They had commanded. Finally, as foretold, as was destined to happen, as had happened on so many worlds before this one a Way was opening to bring Them through!

The great, imprisoned thing trapped beneath the waters sensed its end-time grow near. The chains whipped tight all across the circle. The ground beneath the witness’s feet shook, toppling him to his knees.

The witness smiled, tears spilling. “They come!” he screamed again, tearing his smoke-seared throat. He began to weep, oblivious to his boiling flesh.

A hum grew beneath the waves, rippling through his skin, through his bones. The man looked around, unsure what was happening.

As he watched, several length of chains tore free from the now-submerged stone and exploded out of the water. The solid, gigantic lengths sliced through the air with the whine of a blade freed from a scabbard.

Hundreds of feet of chain tore through the next ruined tower. And the next. And the next.

The witness’s compatriots struggled towards those shattered towers, heedless of the falling rubble that rained down, crushing some, paralyzing others and condemning more to sink beneath the waves. Those that survived the cataclysm crawled over stones the size of houses, hands spread wide, conjuring the energies imbued in them by their Masters, ready to spend themselves to keep the great thing in its place.

The witness looked up as a chunk of tower cast its shadow over him, preparing to end his servitude and existence.

He snarled up at the falling mountain. Green lightning shot from both hands and flew up into it. Thunder clapped as the bolts struck the enormous rock and shifted its course. It landed clear of him, but nature still extracted its due.

A powerful wave of displaced water slammed into him, driving him further into the circle of towers and deep underwater…into the reach of what was imprisoned there.

The thing found him.

There was no savaging by tooth or claw, only the gentlest of touch. Powerful muscles curled around his waist, again about his chest and finally its tip came to rest against the exposed skin of his neck.

A red glow suffused the water. An explosion of red welled behind his cataracted eyes. Slowly, the white covering his eyes began to burn away.

An explosion of pain wracked his body–not from any phsyi cal strike, but from memory.

His memories, returned to him. A gift, freed from Their bonds, returned to the witness. The pain that followed was his own, just as surely returned to him.

The green orbs hovering above each of his palms,Their energies, winked out as this new warming power enfolded him.

The white blinding his eyes and his heart continued to fall away. He spasmed with more quakes of pain, for reasons that had nothing to do with his impending death by drowning.

In a flash, it all came back. All the memories he had forgotten, all the emotions they had buried, all the lessons he had learned in his life… everything that made him who he was.

Everything he had abandoned in his pact with the devils.

It all came flooding back as the great thing returned to him everything he had done in the name of those he served.

The pain he had conjured.

The lives he had ended.

The worlds he had destroyed as their harbinger.

He remembered it all. Freed from the lulling whispers of green and white cocooning his emotions, he felt it all.

The green and white had pulsed immortal strength and surety and lies through his hands, all to work their will through him.

Memories of world after world visited and conquered flooded back. Then his first life, in his first world, his hom… his family – their fate – was unlocked and returned to him.

Love.

Pride.

Loss.

Shame.

Faces of loved ones. Lessons learned from the cradle to what he had hoped would be a grave–but alas, wasn’t.

He remembered his father’s face. The memory curdled, his father’s face changing as the man who had taught him what he could be…as if he could see beyond the grave…see what he had really become instead.

His father’s face twisted with sadness, pain, disgust.

He knew why.

At his darkest point he had chosen to numb the shame, to replace it with hate, with illusory purpose. To find reasons for the ugliness that colored his life.

There, submerged and gently held by the great thing, his lungs wracking, chest close to bursting, his body -kept alive by lies and magicks for too long- welcomed death and craved the oblivion it would bring.

He yearned, feeling the shame, for this final act of cowardice.

Not yet.

The voice blossomed in his head. Warm, rumbling and kind, where they were cold, cruel, uncaring.

This new warmth pulsed through the flesh wrapping around him, the very tip now resting against his heart and from there coursing into all of him.

Escape from this realm will not end your pain.

Images flashed through his mind, a succession of wailing mothers, tortured fathers, slaughtered innocents, over and over, world after world, atrocity after atrocity.

The dizzying chain of images continued, uncountable numbers whose lives he had decimated without pause or question.

Escape will but seal your legacy, the voice said.

Sensations joined the images. The heat of a home burning, the barred doorway aflame as the cries of those inside turned to shrieks of pain. Blood trickling down his hands. Little bones shattering beneath his boot.

He could feel it all now. The memories and feelings strobed through his head, lashed his soul, ripped at his festered heart. He screamed, bubbling the last of his life-giving air into the water.

Then the visions froze again on his father’s face.

Atone, the rumbling voice urged. Make right what you can.

The water darkened as the great thing brought him closer.

Buried beneath the disgust, his father’s eyes softened with forgiveness. He reached a hand out to his son.

Escape? The rumbling voice grew louder, demanding, shaking through his body, his bones. Or Atone?

In his mind’s eye, he reached out for his father’s hand.

Atone, he chose.

The world flashed brighter through his closed eyelids.

He opened his eyes.

Taller than his body, a cat’s eye of liquid gold blinked open again, reflecting what light was left in the word, adding more of its own, catching him in its gaze.

The voice came again, issuing a promise in his heart and mind. The contact was overwhelming, sense-shattering and also gentle and soothing.

There is still good in you.

His heart twisted in his chest. Could he make things right again? A searing pain pressed through his flesh into his heart, where the great thing held him.

Know this: we are not forever stained.

His blood pumped faster in his veins. New thoughts filled him. Not joy, but something good, and clean. Perhaps… hope?

A bolt of green lightning stabbed into the great eye, and it turned away. The thing released its hold on him, disappearing deeper into the water.

Cold fingers dug into him, tore him away from the thing’s reach, dragged him up to the surface. The fingers flung him callously against the white rubble of the tower he had been left to defend.

Coughing up seawater, he crawled to his knees and blinked away salty tears, blinked more against the searing heat of the air. His fellow witness stood just ahead of him. More approached from all sides, their hands raised wide and wreathed in crackling green energies.

He saw the world again… and for the first time. Volcanoes spewed poison on the horizon. The ocean boiled. Ash soiled even the great white towers, like yellowed and broken teeth.

And out on the horizon the vortex, the storm, the orb of green all grew larger by the second in the heart of the Way.

He looked at this through eyes no longer blinded with hate. He saw all this with a soul no longer numbed by magicks.

He saw what he had wrought and sobbed.

Without words, with mindless, insect-like coordination, more of his kind approached. He heard them chant, saw the energies between their hands grow.

As one, they sunk their hands into the water. A vibration shuddered through it, through his skin, through his bones: the great thing, roaring in pain.

No more! he thought, gathering power in his own hands and hurling it at the closest former kin. The one that had saved him from the grasp of the great thing stiffened, then sank, lifeless, beneath the water, red lightning still coiling around his body.

He stared at his hands, already glowing fiery red again, but wasted no time trying to understand: he loosed two more bolts into the soldier in the water to his left, then attacked the one to his right.

As one, all the others turned to him, pulling their hands from the water. The great thing’s roar of pain ceased, and wave after wave of immeasurable power surge through him, filling him up.

He splayed one palm wide and a thin sheen of red welled up in a half-circle between him and the others. He punched his other hand forward, roaring. A thick jet of flame arced across the water and slammed into the chain affixed to a pillar.

The stone exploded, decapitating one of the servants, crushing another against another tower, smashing a third beneath the waves, sending a fourth flying far into the sky.

Green lightning hit his wall of flame. The pain of it sizzled through, instantly charring his fingertips.

His fingers fell numb under the onslaught of energies. As one, all the servants turned and showered him with hate, pain and the promise of his end.

His escape?

Dimly, over the power coursing through his veins, through his thoughts, through his once-again-feeling heart struggling to defend against the blows of icy hate, he felt an indescribable wave of rage ripple out in atop the waves from the horizon.

A promised victory ble w apart like smoke.

A wave of unending hunger raged at being denied.

The Eldritch power that had been rising like a sun, began to fade.

Their Way was crumbling!

A small victory. A small atonement before his end. He smiled, feeling something like peace. It was worth the cost.

The servants wailed as one, staring out to sea in shock. Silence stretched, and then, one by one, they again turned their energies against him.

The warmth in his heart denied the cold and fury of the attack.

His body could not do the same.

He splayed both hands wide. They trembled with the effort. He turned his head away from burning, blinding, sparking green energies.

He did not see what caused the water to fill the air with explosive force.

He did not see what powerful form lifted another of their servants into the air, tossing him into the dead city.

He did not see what sprayed a torrent of flame into the servant that had been creeping up behind him.

He wished he had not seen the cruel knife in the attacker’s hand -the knife meant for his back- melt away beneath the onslaught of flame. He wished he had not seen the skin and bones of the hand holding the knife evaporate. The rest of the body blow away like cinders beneath the great onslaught of flame.

He collapsed on the rocks, his strength spent, the shock of this atrocity and the many others before this one settling on him, weighing down on him like a mountain.

Color bled from the world. Instinctively, some part of him tried to hold on, both curious and fearful of what awaited him in the next realm.

The air around him shook and for a moment the smoke was gone. He could breathe something clean. One deep breath, before his end. The air tasted cool, sweet. Was that because of the powerful frame climbing out of the water into the air on powerful wings?

Or because he had done one last good thing? He closed his eyes. His stand, his act of atonement, barely a drop in the ocean of his debt, tasted even sweeter than his last breath.

The world grew quiet. The lapping of the water lulling him as his body began to still itself.

There was no more pain. His body seemed distant.

Quiet now, and, soon, peace?

Escape would but seal your legacy, the voice warned again, in his mind. Would you have this be your final reckoning?

No. That thought was unbearable. His body shuddered, revolted against it.

He tried to move, but his savaged body couldn’t respond. Panic gripped him. “Please, help me,” he choked, his voice sounding as broken as his body. “Help me try,” he pleaded. “Help me me fill the ocean, first!”

The flapping of great wings washed cooling, clean air across his dying body. The ground shook as the great thing dropped to the ground. He felt himself lifted from the rocks, cradled gently.

Come, Lukan.

Powerful muscles tensed, and Lukan watched the world fall away. The ocean, waves already calming, black smoke dispelled, hurtled below them.

Only the storm of cloud and fog still churned ahead of them. They soared through the air towards the portal. Though summoned by his former Masters it now mercifully free of the eldritch green heralding their arrival.

The sacrifice of the great thing had been the key to that.

Lukan smiled viciously: when he had freed it, he had denied them their Way.

Soon, the mist crowded out the murdered world. Not long after, blackness took him as the great thing beat its wings and carried him towards the center of the the storm.

The great thing held Lukan gently, and its power filled him again, healing his body and feeding the hope now planted in his soul: the hope that each day forward was another chance to repay another measure of the debt he owed.

One drop at a time, for as much time as he had.

The world faded away completely, with Lukan’s last awareness carrying him the promise of the great thing.

Rest, now. Together, we will find a Way.