Chapter 59: Now I Know Where Baby Earthquakes Come From

Turk was right to fight his war, and not await permission to go about it in the most efficient way, blasting at the rock one pebble at a time, eroding it however slow, a mountain amidst a turbulent sea will wear away in time, leaving room for the deep ocean to fill the vortex with clean waters and more of its wild bounty, and should that mountain's corpse still try to work mischief, let it fire it's arsenal from the grave and turn its own lingering fragments into slag, let Diyu collapse in on itself, I saw the means by which it could, ballista barrels a village could dwell within, tubes where enough fuel could be channeled to put all the land I've walked to the torch ten times over, rotary guns with a thousand muzzles chained together, and resonance chambers that if activated, could easily split an army into planck lengths, and there were missile tubes, pointed downward, within drilling apparati made of more segments than I could count, each half a dozen fathoms long. 

I wandered into this one-of-many-batteries while running from echoing voices in the endless hallways that offered me sanctuary from the eyes imbedded in Pandemonium's walls, and I was feeling a growing fear, a sense that someone, or an entire audience, was slowly working its way into my senses the way I worked my way through the planes, and I was increasingly afraid, losing my sense of mental direction, losing my sense- memories were changing. And I couldn't pass through walls after a while, or fade from view, or use my truesight, and so I worried that I might be susceptible to trauma and perish if slain in combat, so I ran on all fours eventually, slamming my back to the empty walls time and again, pulling hair I didn't have, thinking I did, sure that I did, long, straight locks of flaxen milk glass, from my round skull, down my back, I thought I had hair. 

I crawled and fell, then stood and fell, then sat and fell, then stood and caught myself as I fell, then fell the rest of the way, then fell again, the rolled and tumbled and writhed and oh Fates I was in that hallway for less than an hour but it seemed a lifetime, and I who've lived several, depending on whether you ask Neophilus or Neophilus, and one would say more than the others, and I would say I've only ever been me, Victor 39, Boy of the Batch, and lay no claim to any memories save those that deliver to me with vivid sensory detail, touch and taste and smell, sweat and sand and salt and blinding light in the vast warehouse where the unaffiliated were deposited, Labor Pool 9, so long ago, so long ago that it couldn't have been me, unless I agelessly slept, returning to that round wooden vessel that I was brewed in during the final days. More on that later.

 

I can't tell you when I found the port, but I had been in that tall, black walled hallway, with its scant white light gleaming from somewhere high above where it bent inward, for thirty, perhaps forty minutes, and I began pounding my head backwards against a wall, and I heard a loud, echoing clang, groped for a latch or scanner, found something like a lesser Gorgon, took a huge gulp of air, forced myself between the wall and the world, then collapsed on the floor beyond, looking up at the most brutal kollection of killing ekwipment I've ever seen. I stood and walked about in a daze, admiring what the Devils could do, and finding my curiosity sated on a number of accounts, and then I heard footfalls, so I frantically searched for a place to hide, and when I heard the door I passed through open, I simply dropped to the ground, chipping a tooth that grew back, and rolled underneath a cart laden with loathsome munitions. As I heard a Devil approaching, I heard a voice from beyond the open door calling the name 'Kharn'. The footfalls stopped.

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