Chapter 48: Typhon

All great wars have names. The War of the Second World, the Thousand Years War, the Firmament Wars. But there is also a warring of the base matter of this and that. The War of the Rift, one could say, or the Polar Wars. It's not a war of nations or armies, but of one and the other, a war of disparity, or a war of twins. As a thing can be so cold it burns, so can a light be so bright it blinds. Tarthas is falling, a new world in its wake, but not because of time or reform or any sort of revolution. The shell is cracked because of a great syzygy, and I saw this gathering of spheres in the under city of Thieves' Gate. Jadus led behind his guard, and at his heels was Patches. Close behind Patches was Turk, walking side by side with Goth. Abdiel was behind them, spoiling for the assault on Blitzkrieg's roving fortress, and I brought up the rear, readying my wits for the raid on the stables of the great Lord V.

I readied myself because I remember being told as a boy that Lord V also bore the wraithkin brand, though his differed from mine in completion. While it would likely have meant failure for our mission if it were to happen, I harbored a hope that we would encounter him, and so I was working on quieting those thoughts as we made our way through bazaars and dancing circles to the audience chamber where Jadus would stand before an astral djinn, and by that djinn's power speak to all his realm of victory and plunder and the honor among thieves.

I caught myself feeling the slightest sense of envy as we passed through long bays of switchback stairs that led to the vast apartment complexes of the under city. These were the finer districts, nearest the palisades where the thief lords lived and ruled from.

I felt more like a shadow there than anywhere, though onlookers rested their gaze on me once they spotted my white skin and luminous eyes. But the company I travelled with could not have been less aware of me. I wondered why Turk bid me to follow them, when I would have been far happier to wait at the dock with Tomorrow Gives Her Hope and the other soldiers. Then we turned well before the signage indicated the docks would be, and entered a long tunnel of glass. Though I was within a stout structure, I was terrified. The bright lights outside us created once again a vivid picture of the enormity of the sea, and the impenetrable blackness beyond its minute reach seemed all the greater for it. I wanted to be far away from Thieves' Gate and any other coastal city. I wondered what had drawn me to such places, and if I was only now coming out of a mania.

The tunnel seemed to go on for miles, but somehow we neared its end in less than an hour. Thoughts rang in and around my ears, and I wandered to the edge of the glass, perhaps to face my fear, perhaps to answer a call. Lights flickered in the gloom, and I wondered what monsters made them when they turned to bronze and gleamed in the glass from behind me. It was Turk, come to put a hand on my shoulder. The others were a ways into Jadus's private airlock, and I'd been standing there long enough for people to wonder.

"Don't fret over him, darling," Jadus was saying to Goth as we strapped into our seats. "All Batch Boys are at least this flighty. Remember when we took V through the tunnel for the first time? He stopped at that exact spot. Tell me precious, what did you see?"

The King of Thieves was turned round, leaning against his harness to engage my eye. "Turk, glowering at me."

Jadus laughed.

The straps were definitely needed, as Jadus's yacht shot like a quarrel from his private dock. Bright lights shone from the common shipyards, and I told myself it was those lights I'd seen before, though I was not certain of my directions. I remember gripping the bar in front of me, slung around the back of Turk's seat for that very purpose, and if there was a shade lighter than white, my knuckles found it. Then I was locking my elbows to prevent my head from cracking against it when the ship suddenly slowed to turn, and it's a wonder I did not spew on Abdiel's lap. As it was he was glaring at me. His balance and strength were such that he sat motionless and undisturbed, and was not impressed by my dramatic shifting. Turk looked back at me and winked.

Once our course was logged and set, the vessel caught an even current and our pace was smooth. I was hardly aware of the speed, though the streamers from the running lights of our support craft and escort gave me the sensation of being in a pod of uncannily swift whales. Now and then a jet of bubbles so fine it seemed a silver rod indicated the firing of a thruster, keeping us smooth against the stout undersea currents. We were invited to stand and mill about, and Abdiel rose and went to Patches. Before I could get my bearings of the craft (I'd been quickly ushered to my seat), Jadus came climbing over the seats in front of me. I wondered if he would monkeyed over those seats if Goth and Turk were still in them. Probably. I got a good look at the gems adorning his large, white teeth and flared nostrils as he shoved dry meat into his smiling mouth.

"Here," he handed me a string of sausages, "you've never had such fare, I'll bet."

He was not wrong. It was delicious.

"Lord V rode in this vessel."

Jadus nodded. "Before it was mine."

"Did he help you steal it?"

Jadus laughed, then shook his head. "He helped me escape it. We were prisoners, precious. That whole rock where my dock is was once a supermax. We weren't goin' there, love. Not no way, not no how."

"So you and him were-"

"You're blood proved useful."

I furrowed my brow and nodded. "Good. I'd rather not give more."

"Right pain in the arse takin' it from you lot. And your skin puckered up worse than any others', says Murph."

I heard a soft rumble from outside and the cabin lamps flickered momentarily. "What did you want my blood for?"

"To make up for what you stole, child."

My brow more or less remained furrowed during the entirety of our talk. "And what did I steal?"

"Quite a lot, when you killed the doc."

Then I did change my brow's posture to allow for a rolling of my seemingly motionless eyes. "The man was-"

"Very useful."

"-deranged. And I don't take well to involuntary captivity."

"Welp," Jadus was lifting himself over the seats again, kicking both his legs up and swinging them over my lap to the isle, "don't volunteer for it while you're fighting for me."

He went to a small conflux of narrow hallways behind the cabin, and I could hear him telling Turk and Goth that I was boring. "V was so sinister," he elaborated. "This one just asks questions. Boring questions!"

It's true, I've never been an entertaining man. I don't regret it. I was not put on this world to charm people, but to drive them one way or another from the battering ram I called down from the stars.

It's just as well I thought Jadus a fool, or I may have felt dejected. Instead I stood a contemplative distance from the leaders and watched them in the combat planning room, the central hub of the vessel, pouring over maps and discussing contingencies. Jadus could not stop himself from blustering, though his boastful displays ate up valuable time and did not lead to one solitary improvement in our chances. It was a cycle of the others waiting patiently for him to be quiet before resuming the conversation, and I had a memory of a boastful boy demanding the attention of his older siblings and their friends, standing by his sister's chair at the oaken dinner table and inventing stories that grew more preposterous with each sentence, while the adolescents waited patiently, snickering to one another when the boy was so caught up in his lies that he did not see their mocking, wide-eyed smiles. The boy would soon be humbled, and I hoped then that I would see the same happen for Jadus. Amid those thoughts I was summoned.

"What's it take to make you disappear?" Jadus asked.

In lieu of an imperceptible eye roll, I raised a brow and lowered my head to one side.

"Your run can slip between." It was Patches who explained.

"My run?"

There was a moment of nervous glances, and again Patches spoke.

"I was told you met Belial."

I nodded.

"Megatheres were the first run, scaled down with human blood. They were strong, but couldn't pass between."

I was thoroughly lost. Turk then came to my aid, explaining that I had far less guidance than others of the Batch. I wanted so badly to ask them to tell me all they knew, as my own nature was beginning to become a greater concern to me than ever before. Perhaps I'd been distracted in past years, or perhaps it was the beginning of my meaningful steps that brought on a sudden shift in my thoughts. That oaken table bore witness to many a turbulent change; the birth and death of generations, the rise and fall of fusion, a city buried under dust and risen again, an arrow shot into the Sun and the fury of a bloodied sky, and through it all, so many first kisses and last goodbyes. And I was being asked what it took to make me disappear. I who have seen so much.

"When I was fourteen years old, the Dolomites began to severely break down, and I feared for my life as the most aggressive of the adepts stalked me in the bleak of night. I fell to the ground and his in the shadows, but a beam of torchlight streaked across my leg, and I feared being flayed and devoured whilst still living, as was their wont to do more and more as their days wore on. I felt a fear like none I'd ever felt, and Rouge Adept passed me by as if I were not there. Turk remembers something of that night."

"I do." He was very solemn then, as one is at a memorial for a dear friend. "My memories fade before the latter days of the Batch, I'm sad to admit, so I can only guess what might bring your greater gifts to the fore."

"I'm guessing he's useless," Jadus said. I pretended to ignore him. "Without his dads around he can't do a bloody thing."

"That was never the case," Patches argued. "Not with any of them."

It was a rare thing when Abdiel spoke, and when he did it was with a hushed snarl, as if condescending himself to speak with others pained him. "He needs to be afraid." One would think he'd swallowed a mug of broken glass.

Jadus then lashed forward with his left hand, and a long, thin blade shot from his sleeve. I caught his wrist and turned it, nearly snapping his hand off. I will concede that it was his own surprising strength that kept me from breaking his bones.

"Just trying to prove a point, precious."

His smile sickened me, as did the glitter around his eyes.

"We need to pass through V's surveillance," said Goth. He looked about the room with scorn, likely over the fruitless, roundabout way the topic was broached.

I nodded toward Abdiel. "He moves more quickly and quietly than anyone-" I stopped talking, having thought of Astus.

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"Your run is the only run who can slip between," Patches repeated.

"And only if you're frightened," Jadus chimed, "and seeing as you're nigh unkillable there's a fat chance of that happening."

"Aren't you a thief?" I asked him, sure that he could tell it was a challenge.

"No, precious. I'm a king of thieves. Kings don't go, they send."

Turk looked ready to speak, but Goth was too quick.

"You're on a thin line for killing Danders, Thirty-nine, so watch your tone. If what Turk says is true, then there's very little you're capable of that Thirty-three is not. We need to discover how to trigger your passing through planes before landfall. We all assumed it would be second nature to a grown member of the Batch, but you've shown us twice now you have no control of your own faculties."

I was confused for a moment, then remembered losing time in the glass tunnel, and the flickering of the ship's lamplight. But still, I had no notion what I'd done, or how, and felt a little angry with Turk for having sold me at so steep a price, when I had yet to even begin discovering my full worth. All I could think to say then was a question.

"Who is Thirty-three?"

All heads turned towards Turk, and not a one with any sagacity.

"He doesn't know a damned thing!" Goth shouted.

Jadus smiled and winked, and Patches buried his iron face in his gigantic hand.

"What was his guide up to all those years?" asked Jadus. "I mean, they were in Haven for years, after all."

Turk's head hung low, and in his still eyes was pain. "Caduceus did what his run was made to do. I was not there, or perhaps he would have done better. When I found Victor again, Caduceus was dead and he was living a quiet life." Turk regarded me with pity. "The lucien run was difficult to discern by their appearance. I'm sorry, Victor. It was never my intent to deceive you."

"Caduceus was my friend," I said.

"That may have proven to be a fault," Turk replied.

I asked again who Thirty-three was, and by the time Turk answered I had seen it for myself, as plain as day, or, rather, as plain as Thirty-third Day. I then told them the details of my encounter with Belial, and there seemed to be hope.

"Your proximity with another of the Batch strengthened you," Goth surmised.

"But we won't be anywhere near V," said Patches, scratching his chin, despite it being hidden inside his grotesque makeshift helm.

"We won't be far from him at all," Jadus said.

"Explain," said Goth. As always, he was angry. It seemed to me that Goth was a creature best suited to a cold climate.

"I can't, Sunshine. Also, I don't need to. King." Jadus flourished his hands astride his face when he spoke his title. "You'll all have to trust me. V's everywhere in his kingdom. Every time a toilet flushes there, that's him gargling. But there's still the matter of getting you scared." He then decided it was time to act like a stage player and sauntered to me in an absurdly flamboyant manner, his arms swinging wide and his hips swinging wider. I would see whores in certain districts of Thirty-third Day walk in this same way, and wonder if they learned the walk from Jadus, and not the other way around.

"What frightens you, little java dove?". Jadus had a finger pressed playfully over my brand.

"The condition of your soul," I answered, not entirely in jest.

He smiled. Not the reaction I wanted, but it seemed impossible to draw out any other.

"There's another option," I said, though I regretted the thought of involving Astus in anything dangerous. "One of the paiges can move as stealthily as I can."

"We need you to pass between," Goth reiterated, clearly irritated, "not move stealthily. Thirty-three's surveillance will detect any movement. Any at all."

I did not know why, but I was certain Astus could help, and my surety was enough to settle the matter.

And I was back in the cabin, in Abdiel's seat now, my head longingly pressed against the porthole, close to the abyss as I could manage. I imagined white specters passing each other in the black space, sapphire eyes aglow. Who were we? I wondered. I lost time again, and when I found it Jadus was in the seat ahead of me, turned backwards, his head resting on his folded arms like an obnoxious child on a long transit.

"You did it again," he said. He was chewing on something pink.

"I don't know what or how, and unless you do, please don't speak to me."

Then he was next to me, having vaulted like a monkey again over the seat.

"I'm going to tell you a story, little jewel."

"Perfect," I said, still looking out the port, rueing the reflection of this pompous man in the glass. I looked through ghost sight, hoping to see another world where Jadus didn't exist, but nightmares revealed themselves in the sea and so I reverted to the photonic spectrum, trying to forget how close we were to beasts so very far beyond us. I am not surprised I was slipping between on that voyage. The ocean is death to me, in that as a boy I was shipped off from the continent in such deep black waters, and it felt like being shut inside a tomb. That childish fear had not faded with the years, but merely slept, and was then yawning as it stepped out of its sepulcher. As Jadus spoke, I stood alone on one end of a long hallway, high ceilinged and empty save for tall, fluted pillars, spear thin and plentiful, standing in the place of walls, their long shadows angled like teeth to the other end of the hall where a child in a white robe stood still as the light that tried so hard to betray me to Adeptus Red.

"Once upon a time," spake the fool, "there were half a dozen kings, each with a piece of a bigger place carved out for themselves. Some of this lot was fair but square, the rest were wise but fit to be despised…"

Had he been seated a short distance farther, I could probably have ignored him to the extent I wished. But he was nearly on my lap, holding my captive with his teeth and breath while he recited a well rehearsed monologue. He went on about the thieving princes making war where the kings sought peace, and how the queens and princesses were no better, save one princess who was the worst of the whole bunch. I wondered with little interest if she were at any point attached to him, but as the story progressed through a period of war where one prince bided his time til the most wicked king won, then took his kingdom and his life in one fell swoop, the timeline of it all had me convinced that she was his mother, and that he rose by unwholesome means long after the clever prince had let down his guard. I would not be surprised if that prince were Jadus's father, dead by his son's hand. Then he surprised me with what could have been actual honesty.

"Then I got my lads together and we started a revolution. Been much better ever since."

"Started," I asked, "not fought?"

"Precious boy, of course I didn't fight. I haven't lived this long by fighting my own battles."

I began to form a guess at his role in our current excursion. "You'll be visiting Lord V officially while we do the heist."

"There's a shiny white pegasus with light blue lines. She's mine."

For the next hour he regaled me of the many improvements and reforms brought on by his rule. I cannot begin to explain why Jadus wanted so badly for me to view him in a positive light. But as I listened to him, viewing him as a child who told distracting stories to avoid admitting to his transgressions, I found myself in a deeper way than ever before considering what it means to be a man, and I ask you reader to do what I have been robbed of the time to do, and decide whether I owe Jadus for triggering such thoughts, or if I am blessed with a rare gift, that being the boldness to be self aware. Also, I think, if not during his tale, it was shortly after, that I began to see Goth and Turk as a sort of analogue for Anse and Whitman. And I, like Addie, have had ample time to contemplate my slow departure from existence by the virtues of what I left behind, giving only what I owed and taking in kind from those who laid their expectations on me.

The dock to the southern island was near, but the waters grew turbulent and so we chose a winding path, hugging for a time the shore of ruined Oaru, then swinging wide to the east and piercing Pegasus Bay head on. A smaller vessel linked with ours and I disembarked along with Abdiel, Zulu and Nord; two of the other Cataphracts who, like our surly winged alaunt, would not be welcome at Lord V's court. We then made our berth at a hidden port once used by the Devils (conquered discreetly due to Abdiel's intimate knowledge of Blitzkrieg's assets). Rising from the hidden dock to the ashen sands of the southern island, I saw the true warscape, and the true magnacity.

From atop the westing house at the Dolomite's sanctum, I would often raise a lantern and ingest the ruined and diseased world around me. Long before the magnacities, there were sprawling megalopolises, of a size which I've read were dwarfed by those on the continent, where the tens of billions of the old world heaved together for money, food and clean air. Thirty-Third Day was a relic of the time that came shortly after, when those who had gave to those who had not, building the massive structures that would be the sad face of Gaia for generations to come. The slow, prolonged death rattle that followed was surely the impetus for our wrathful strike at the sky, whose own wrath returned ten million fold, leaving in its wake a sea of stabbing wreckage. The pillars and pylons of yesteryear are very unlike the lonely stone halls of history long before our recent, degenerate age; those cyclopean mansions with edges worn smooth by the patient soothing of a green earth's wind. Rather, the Fates left our postmodern miasma scattered with immense caltrops and grease traps, so that skyfaring ettens would look down and pass us by, wary of the weaponized wreckage left by vengeful Jove.

Arguments abound as to where the epicenter of the Fall lay. Tomorrow Gives Her Hope's kin would have me believe their home country to be the spot. Perhaps it is. Having never been there I could not begin to speculate, however I do so abstractly, as I myself had always taken the Dolomite sanctum to be the first place pounded by Kali's fist. Here, a day's ride from Thirty-Third Day, that belief was strengthened somewhat, as the space around the sanctum was a field swept by a blasting wind, each broken spire angled outward in a radius. Here, the field was a maelstrom of wrenched steel, and the bones of the great war looked like they were still fighting, twisting toward each other in a panorama of perpetual pain.

This vista did much for my writhing mind. I could then look back to the sanctum as a place of peace, truly dead and long since put to rest. The vast bowl the sanctum was built under was an entire landscape in which the village of Ossary and many a mercenary camp had dwelled, reaching so far outward that its jagged wall could be seen like a distant mountain range from the compound of Doctor Danders. Where the breath of the wild sky first struck, surely the result was instant and irrefutable. Here, outside V's domain, our old ruined cities remained in argument, curling out of the ground like iron fingers and clawing desperately, some of them entwined as if they looked to one another for solace, and the crater, deep and small, was a mere fragment of what the Dolomites had claimed. This impact point had been so small and fast that its walls were tall and steep, the highest edge pressing into Thirty-Third Day and driving a wedge through the city. There the city had been rebuilt with shoddy scavenged materials that stretched around the edge of the wound like a newly formed scab. From my vantage outside the hidden dock I could only see the rust of that lesser construction, and it looked exactly like a thin line of dried blood.

The rest of the magnacity leaned westward in such a way that one would swear they could hear it groan. It straddled the horizon so that I had to turn my head to see where it ended and where it began. Its hips sloped begrudgingly upward, constantly cantilevering here and there in a looming sort of way, gradually forming a jumbled crook where a sheer wall emerged. From there it was dense and black, with no detail save a cluster of once defiant towers on its flattened top that were now crumpled into a blaspheming fist. Window light could be seen on the city's flank, orange and red and a purple so dark it was almost luminous black. The lit windows were sparse and scattered, with no two adjacent, and the floodlights on the ground pulsed in a slow cycle, giving the whole place the feel of a convalescent's beating heart. A lone red glare beamed from the crumpled fist, and along the towering brim were a few more floodlights piercing lazily through the ever present gloom.

I felt a sense of foreboding, as you could imagine anyone would, but in my mind I was looking at my own tomb from afar. This half sleeping monster kept only a few of its eyes open (whether confident in its might, or consumed by a sickness, I couldn't yet tell) and I felt a slight tremor through my spine as I put on my armor and gathered my weapons. There was a quiet pause after the infiltration team had all readied and mounted. Turk's and Jadus's soldiers alike sat in quiet awe, and I felt a tear escape after we finally spurred our steeds. All my past battles disappeared from my memory, as they would for a simple hunter who found himself toe to toe with a dragon. All I could do then was hope, as my reserectory curse gave me no comfort. I saw myself being captured and hung on meathooks in some forgotten cellar, killed repeatedly for the study of Lord V's maguses, or simply tortured for Ahz's sick pleasure.

Only the presence of Abdiel and Patches, who rode close behind me, kept me from breaking loose and fleeing. They had lived in the shadow of Blitzkrieg, walked the reeking halls of Pandemonium, and they did not balk at our current errand. So I rode on, and rode hard, with all the conviction I could muster, until we found the tunnels that would take us to the magnacity's sewers. The Destroyer slumbered unaware of the intruders slithering through the muck in its cavernous bowels. We stopped when we came to a landing with a wide ramp. There was a door, small and covered in a film of rust and putrefaction, its moldy lines shown by the piercing light of the sensor I was to befuddle. I took one step towards the Destroyer's inner eye and halted, spear in hand, ready for battle with all the clammy dismay of a conscripted farmer, and none of the courage or power of Jupiter when he faced his daunting foe.

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