A Monster Inside Read online

  He groaned, jaws clenched, fighting against what seemed like a raging river. If his concentration slipped for even a second, he would be swept away, burned to ash. By force of will, he made his Esoteric Creation stabilize. The dragon roared, unable to free itself from the vines.

  Erik stood, laughing in disbelief. It worked! It was the largest Esoteric Technique he had ever performed. A gust of wind caressed his ruined robe, and his knees trembled. He gulped and steadied himself.

  The vines snapped like pieces of twine, and the monster exploded forward, maw gaping.

  “STOP!”

  Inexplicably, the abomination heeded his call. It halted meters from him, towering above him surrounded by choking plumes of ash and smoke.

  Erik coughed. “I can’t die here! Do you understand? I sacrificed too much to get this far!” He gripped his thigh with an aching hand. “I will be the next king of Vindur. Me, not either of my brothers. Me! For my mother. For my. . . .”

  The massive creature exhaled, flailing Erik’s robe with its heated breath. It might have been a judge, listening to the testimony of the accused for all the emotion its hideous visage showed.

  “But before I can become king, I have to return to Vetur to attend the Grand Assessment. It’s the only way to become Prince of the Blood. My party leaves in three weeks.” Even with the terror surging through him, the wounds on his flesh stung and throbbed, cutting across his thoughts. “So you . . . so you see, I can’t die here. My plan won’t allow it.”

  Erik blinked, and teeth tore through his spine and punctured into his chest. His skull ruptured like an over-sized grape.

  ■■■

  Asbjörn led a group of ten grim-faced warriors down the pitted mountain trail into the forest. Bald except for topknots bound with red and blue silk, they walked with the casual swagger of men well acquainted with violence. They wore black coats and breeches, with longswords at their waists. Lightbenders, they were called in Daði. Men who fought with the strength of ten. Long-lived warriors bound by a strict code of honor. Across the Howling Sea, they were known as the Twice Born and ruled as nobles, but here they served willingly.

  Asbjörn moved through the gloom of the forest interior, uneasy with the worry that gnawed at his stomach. Erik was his student—no! Erik was much more than that, he was his son. Perhaps not of his blood, but of his spirit. Asbjörn helped raise the Prince into a young man. If something happened to him, he did not know what he would do.

  The Lightbenders tracked the hunting party on the ground. In the sky, a young boy on the back of a giant White Crane searched, barely seen through the gaps in between branches. Normally, he would never accept help from one of Ypse’s abominations, but the Air Scouts were one of Erik’s ideas. The White Crane enabled them to cover more ground, even as distasteful as it was.

  The impact site came into view, and air thick with the smell of burnt pine and flesh choked them. Half-vaporized trees and others scorched into white stumps surrounded the upturned earth.

  Asbjörn closed his eyes. His heart rose into his throat, and his hand tightened on the hilt of his longsword. No, anywhere but here. Why did the tracks have to lead here?

  He opened his eyes and scoured his surroundings. Near the edge of the crater, the body of a black-coated man was skewered on a jagged tree stump, next to a patch of dirt melted into glass. Blood, human intestines, and severed limbs littered the ground.

  He’s dead, the voice said with glee.

  No, he yelled at it. The Abyss within churned chaotically.

  Laughter.

  Asbjörn staggered forward, stumbling from dismembered body part to dismembered body part. Under the smell of burnt wood and smoke, the wind carried with it the foul stench of sweet rotting meat, excrement, and memories. The squad of Lightbenders spread out around him, weapons drawn and eyes alert for any sign of danger.

  Eternal Father, please not again!

  Warm tears blurred Asbjörn’s vision. Hot nails hammered into his chest, and he could not breathe without gasping. He could not breathe.

  Why must you take them all from me? All the ones I love? I’ve already lost one son, I can’t lose another. I can’t!

  “Cultivator!” a soldier yelled, peering into the crater.

  Asbjörn rushed over, heart racing, renewed hope surging. He skidded to a stop beside the warrior and looked down. Naked, Prince Erik Ito lay on his back, half out of the murky brown water trickling in from an underground stream. With sandy brown hair and the unblemished skin of a pampered prince, he conveyed the frail sense of someone raised in a palace. He looked nothing like a Cultivator should, having none of the warlike bearings of his father. Dirty water had soiled his woundless body.

  Asbjörn jumped down, splashing even more muck onto Erik’s skin. He pressed two fingers to the Prince’s swollen throat.

  No. He dropped to his knees.

  The Lightbenders stood like silent sentinels all around the rim of the crater, fixed in tragic reveries. More tears leaked from Asbjörn’s eyes. Sorrow tore at his heart like molten claws.

  Dead. Dead. Dead, sang the voice.

  “My son,” Asbjörn whispered, giving way to rage, his second, wicked heart. He drew from the Abyss and exchanged the prana he held within his Ethereal Body for the use of its power. Earth, Fire, and Air mixed without the aid of an Esoteric Sword Technique.

  The very earth trembled and thrashed in a twin song to his hurt, sending the black-coated warriors tumbling into and around the crater. Lightning exploded in the clear sky above, turning the air into liquid fire. Ypse’s boy on the White Crane fled.

  “Take me, too!” he begged the heavens, thrusting his sword upwards. For an instant, his eyes burned with motes of fire, and his world convulsed. He was a child again, in agony.

  A jagged lance of blinding light struck down, connecting the tip of Asbjörn’s blade to the liquid fire in the sky. It lasted a moment, a blink of an eyelid and ended with Asbjörn slamming into the wall of the crater, back first. He struggled to get up, gasping, groaning as his vision and consciousness left him.

  Chapter 2

  Smiling under the late-afternoon sun, Erik spun around in ritualistic circles with his arms spread open and his hands filled with sand. He felt odd. Insubstantial like a wisp of smoke or a ray of starlight. Eyes narrowing, he glanced at his right arm. It was a child’s arm, small and dainty. He could see the beach straight through his golden robe and limb as though through a crystal. A crystal that glittered with refracted light.

  Where am I? Why do I look like a child?

  He tried to remember how he came to be in this place, but the recent past was shrouded in fog; no matter how he tried, it resisted his best efforts. The sun flared hot behind him, and surging light ripped through him, making his frame pulse and twist like morning mist. He closed his hands into fists, and slowly he stabilized.

  I’m dreaming.

  The scent of the ocean tickled his nostrils. He opened his hands, and the pink and white granules slipped through his fingers. For an instant, they hung in the air, looking as if they had been set aflame by the orange half-light of almost twilight.

  No, not a dream. A memory. Erik remembered this moment. Next, she will tell me to sit.

  “Sit,” came a woman’s voice, sweet despite its tartness.

  With a soft sigh, Erik lurched to a stop so fast he almost toppled over. Wide-eyed, he gazed at the woman who had spoken: Lára Ito, his mother. She watched him from behind long eyelashes. He could only stare. She was even more beautiful than he remembered.

  Before, he had pictured her as old and sickly, the way she looked on her deathbed. Yet there was nothing aged or feeble about her now. Her eyes were dark pools of green that held him transfixed. Mother. The urge to weep rose up in him like an overwhelming wave of blackness. It had been so long since he had last seen her, and paintings were no substitute.

  Under the guard of a dozen nearby Lightbenders, she sat on top of a blanket next to a small hole dug into the sand. Even seated as she was, she exuded a stern elegance. It was in the straightness of her back and the way she held her chin slightly raised. Raven-black hair fell from her head, draping over a pink dress made of silk with golden leaves, flowers, and butterflies sewn into the sleeves. A necklace of fine silver links, supporting a small, sparkling green stone, hung around her pale neck.

  “Do you know why I’m angry with you?” she asked him as he approached her.

  Like a puppet, Erik sat down next to his mother in the swell of blooming shadows. Twilight edged ever closer. “No,” he said, but he did know. He had done a bad thing; he had taken a rock and smashed it over his brother’s pet turtle.

  “The greatest danger lies within ourselves,” Lára said. “Our souls are filled with both light and shadows. Each of us, Erik, is responsible for the night which we produce.”

  “I’m sorry.” What makes up the life of a man? If Erik stripped away all the things that made him who he was, the love for his mother would be all that remained.

  “This you’ve said before. Yet, here we sit . . . again.” Her eyes held an element of redness that made his own itch.

  Erik looked away from the repudiation in his mother’s eyes. They reminded him of green ice-fire. “Tell me a story.” He always liked it when she told him myths and legends from the Third Age, called the Age of Man. Her voice brought the tales to life with a magic that no one else had ever matched. His favorites all involved Jön Ito, who escaped the dark bowels of a Sorcerer’s breeding cavern to become the first King of Vindur. Jön was the reason the Royal House of Ito were called The Undying; he was notoriously hard to kill.

  Silence. Hostile silence.

  Erik’s bottom lip trembled, and he peered into the still waters of the hole in the sand, staring at his
reflection. His eyes brimmed over with fat tears. “One day I’ll make you proud. One day I’ll be king.”

  Something unknown lurked within the hole, hidden just below his reflection, something massive and unseen. His stomach churned with a sense of unease.

  This isn’t part of the memory.

  “Love,” Lára said. “Love is the only thing that will save you where everything else fails.”

  The water erupted, and he was yanked into the murky depths, howling, screaming.

  ■■■

  Memory Fragment - The Celestial Dragon

  Eons passed and it grew, trapped within its diamond prison that lay kilometers beneath the earth, surrounded by raging oceans of liquid magma. The heat and pressure aided in the development of its iron bones, composed of the dust of exploded stars.

  It thought in millenniums and the infinitesimal life-spans of quarks, and the Hunger plagued its every thought. The Hunger was a fundamental ache so old it predated the forming of the universe.

  It clawed at the shell of its prison, driven forward by the lamentations of its stomach. Soon. Soon it would break free, and then it would feed.

  Tap. Tap.

  The slow knock of claw against diamond lasted decades. Each knock was a promise of an end and a hope of a beginning.

  Tap. Tap—

  A flaw appeared where before there was none, a small fracture in an otherwise flawless, transparent piece of stone. Liquid magma rushed inwards, baptizing the interior with its unholy glow. Finally, it was free. It escaped the ruin of its former home and swam upward, surrounded by the red inferno of the planet’s inner core. The burden on its body lessened, and temperatures cooled as it climbed higher, motivated by instinct and a promise of an end to the Hunger.

  Like a torrent of molten rock, it slashed its way up through the planet’s mantle and crust. It erupted onto the surface with all the force of an active volcano. Under a cloud of gray ash, it unfolded its great wings and breathed in its first breath of air. Lava pooled at its clawed feet and rained down from the sky.

  It surveyed the land from the air and saw a city made of emerald spirals glittering in the distance beneath a blue sun. Its body roared with pleasure that was almost sexual. At long last, it would quiet the rumblings at its core.

  It descended from the heavens like the Harbinger of Death while the tiny-flesh-things that ran out of buildings made high-pitched mouth noises. Their lives were measured in half-steps, just so many centimeters until they entered its stomach. It crushed them by twos and threes in the hollow of its jaw. Blue blood squirted and splattered as razor-sharp teeth tore through soft flesh.

  It ate its fill then ate more; there was no end to the Hunger, only a lessening of its pull. The inhabitants of the city attacked it with weapons of light and fire that did little to stop its rampage. Emerald spirals melted like wax under its furnace-heated breath, and it hunted long into the night, basking in the aroma of charred bones and flesh. None of them would escape. It would devour them all.

  It rested within the corpse of the alien city as the first rays of sunlight touched its scales. The buzzing of machinery in the air enticed it out of slumber. Only half awake, it was unprepared for the annihilating power of the antimatter bomb that exploded against its back. The white fury sent its body tumbling through half-melted spirals.

  A growl of indignation filled the air. It was hurt, blood leaking from a gaping hole where a piece of exotic metal had lodged in its side. The pain of the Hunger it knew well, but this was a new sensation. It tried to stand but could not, so it lay on its belly, breathing in the stale musky air of the edifice that imprisoned it.

  Motes of emerald dust danced in the air and the ground in every direction trembled. Then it remembered something: it was not alone; it was only the first of many. It took courage in that fact and leaped to its feet as the ground shook with renewed intensity. All over the planet, its brothers and sisters were exploding onto the surface of the world, and every one of them was plagued by the same Hunger that haunted it.

  In its blood was the knowledge of all those who had come before it. Within that knowledge was a memory of a name that a long dead race had given its kin. They called them Celestial Dragons, Devourers of Worlds.

  ■■■

  Mud-slicked, Erik crawled up out of the hole and flopped onto his back. Under assault from the taint of the Celestial Dragon’s memories, his mind rang as if struck. He gasped, rolling onto his front to spew out the contents of his stomach, but nothing came out.

  His thoughts drifted through a confused haze. He understood none of what was happening. The last thing he remembered was hunting in the forest with a few Lightbenders when they were attacked by. . . . His eyes widened. I’m dead! No, that can’t be. If I’m dead where is this? The Pit. He shook his head, forcing down his fear and letting go of his questions.

  Erik drew himself up, and he held up a wet hand, a man’s hand. Unless he missed his guess, he had resumed his normal form. He dropped his arm, and noticed a little girl with her back to him, playing tag with the tide. She wore a cream-colored dress gathered high in her hands and had long, dirty blonde hair flowing down her back. A rolling wave splashed onto her tiny feet and giggles escaped her mouth.

  The sun was a fiery, blood-red orb, hotter than a furnace and bright enough to blind. But despite the heat, Erik shuddered. He spun away from the little girl as if the sight of her burned his soul. His heart ached, and for a second he thought he might cry. Then the sound of weeping drew him to a small green-eyed boy with sandy brown hair, seated by himself with his arms wrapped around his knees.

  The boy’s golden robe twisted in the breeze. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered with tears slipping from his eyes. “You believe me, don’t you?” His voice turned hostile. “Tell me you believe me.”

  Erik stared into eyes that matched his own. “I believe you.”

  “Liar!” the boy shouted. “You’re just like them! None of them like me. Not really. Not like mommy.”

  Erik enveloped the princeling in his arms and shivered. “Hush now. It gets better. Trust me it does. The pain never goes away, but when you get older, you’ll learn to grow strong in broken places.”

  The boy’s fingers dug into Erik’s back. “I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t mean to kill—”

  The sky darkened as if a hand had covered the sun. Erik spun back around and stared at the colossal wave billowing toward him. For a moment, two large wings made of water rose from its surface before collapsing back down.

  Erik’s blood went cold. I’m dead, and this is the Abyss. “Hold on,” he told his younger self. He closed his eyes and clutched the boy tight.

  The ocean crashed down on him, doing its best to scour his flesh, but it did not have the power he believed it would. He opened his eyes to find himself sinking into the unknown depths of a vast body of water. The princeling struggled at the end of his right arm, dragging him down faster. He sensed the foulness of the ocean stirring against his skin, trying to burn him to ash, surging to obliterate him out of existence.

  A single drop of the vile water slipped into Erik’s mouth, and images flashed through his mind, leaving a little interval between each new onslaught.

  . . . blue blood squirted. . . razor-sharp teeth tore. . .

  Erik struggled against the alien memories, but he could still smell the victims who had been burned, the blood of those who had been chewed, even the ones already swallowed, mingled with the aftertaste of raw flesh. He shuddered at the monstrous efficiency of the Celestial Dragon’s death-harvesting. Not even the Sorcerer-Kings of old had conceived of such a beast in their mad race to create ever more horrifying creatures.

  . . . and the accumulated filth. . . clung to its scales. . . glittering in the half-light of dusk. . .

  More water forced its way down Erik’s throat. The great floodgates swung open, and the onrush of memories turned into a deluge. Gagging, he swam upwards, but the weight of the boy stole any momentum he had. His heart thundered in his ears. He understood he was in a battle for his very soul. For the right to exist!