User:SilverCrono/10,000 Years


 * THE QUEEN OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS

01 He woke up gasping, screaming, raging against the return of the light, raging against the knowledge that he had failed. He was alive again and shouldn’t be. Life would be convulsive or it would not be at all.

Sunlight burned his eyes and his hands. Stimulus. The sun. The feeling of light on skin. His body started to twitch again and his mind raced once more. He had been asleep everywhere but the world was moving around him again. The silence was gone. He was still here. He was still here. He convulsed and screamed and breathed again.

The sword of the King still pinned him to the ground. His muscles were burning and collapsing with every movement he made, but he could feel them regenerating even as they withered and splintered apart. All this time and he still worked just as well. He couldn’t feel anything but the dull knowledge that cells in his body were working as hard as they could to revive him, but he screamed anyway, as if he could feel pain.

A single beam of light pierced him like a lance, then another, and another. His shoulders began to involuntarily twitch backwards as he pushed up against the rubble pinning him to the earth. Screaming, growling, and weeping, he stood, pushing up layers of debris as they fell around him, dully feeling ancient death scraping the flesh from his bones and grinding him to unending dust. The penetrating air was cold, too cold, and he shivered down to the core. One of his fingers snapped but the others still held. The sound of a falling crept down from above the sky, and another lance of light burned his shoulder. His long hair protected his neck and his face from the light, but it got stuck and tangled with each inch he rose, and he could feel every follicle get ripped from his scalp. Once he pushed the rocks off his back enough he started to feel his gut sliding through the sword through his chest.

Watching his own rotten innards slide out of himself was a sobering experience. His eyes were never supposed to open again. Instead of midnight-purple and fleshy burgundy his intestines were grey and discolored blue and little more than dust. They landed limply and leaked blood where he once lay. The blade quivered, but did not move. The same containment that had kept him from eroding had also kept the sword from rusting much; it ruined him coming out just as much as it had going in.

He was free of the hilt and almost on his feet now, and the tons of earth above him were shifting and yielding. For the first time he heard what sounded like fire above, on the surface, perhaps. His blood was black. He was weaker than before, and every nerve in his body wanted to stop, but now that he was awake again he was not content to rest any longer.

The climb up took days thanks to his body’s weakness and the small space he had between the rocks. For the most part he could not ascend without the smashing of his legs or his chest. When an advancement of a few inches in an hour or two broke another part of his brittle body, he had to hold himself up until his body was able to heal itself. The fingers of every hand were ground to nubs above his knuckles, and he resorted to pulling himself up by the vestige of his hand after forcing his wrist to snap, at least until his fingers grew back. The climb was slow-going and accompanied by his endless screams, more out of an effort to return life to his throat than to express any pain.

By the time he reached the world again the sounds of war were long gone. All around was devastated earth. He was wrong to imagine war; the razed plains around him looked more like a slaughter. Everything was burned and bodies lay scattered about, all of them seared and charred and broken beyond recognition. Only smoking corpses of buildings remained of any infrastructure. A low, pallid mist hung over everything he could see, like the sky itself was sickly, and the wind felt frozen. He had not smelled death in ages, but he could never forget its too-familiar stench.

He had crawled out, then pushed himself up on his knees when the functionality of his arms returned to him, then his feet. By the time he could move his neck again, his hair had stopped falling out, and he felt it tickling the back of his neck again.

The rate of regeneration of his body was always constant, and from it he could always tell the level of ruin that he had endured and for how long he had been crippled. He had been recovering for days now and was still not at his full strength which meant he had been incapacitated for some years. Judging from the amount of earth that had slowly buried him, and the intricacy of the ruined community around him, he decided that he had been dead for hundreds of years at least.

When he could taste again – the tongue always came back last – the sick-mist in the air, he realized, was the result of burning flesh and stone. A trident of lightning whipped down from the heavens some miles off, and he felt the resulting shudder of the planet beneath his shattered feet. When those returned he started off walking again, towards the trembling. One of the only things left around him that was not burnt muscle or melting bone was a long blanket stuck to a rod of metal and soaked with blood. He grabbed it as he walked and wrapped it around his naked shoulders, weeping as he went.

02 Language had evolved beyond his ability so he could not speak. That suited him just fine. After the first three he tried to talk to either screamed or ran away from him, he gave up on communicating. All he needed to know was where to go, and he figured that out himself by going towards whatever the mass droves of fleeing people were running away from.

He didn’t recognize anything of the planet, from the harsh curvature of its shattered ground or the discolored atmosphere of grays and pus-yellow. Every rock was dirty white, like they had all merged with thick, permanent layers of frost. The sun was brighter than the total darkness he had felt when buried, but in actuality it was quite dim and distant, thanks to the thick layer of smog over everything that could be seen. The people didn’t look like any he had seen before, in addition to their words being completely foreign to him. They were always screaming and crying out in pain; even when there weren’t any people nearby, he could hear their distant funeral wails, resounding and echoing from everywhere. They were too pale, with odd ears, longer fingers, thinner chests, different shaped noses, and eyes clouded with shades of colors he did not even know existed. Some of them had small bone-like structures barely protruding from beneath the skin of their calves; he observed that it let them move much faster than his own legs ever could, unless he pushed himself to the literal breaking point.

The physiology of men and the ways they spoke to each other had advanced. Idly he thought about this as he walked towards where the skies were assaulting the earth. With each lance of light that rained down or cut across the sky, he could feel the resulting tremor of the planet in his own tendons, and winced as if he could be pained from it. He recognized this paroxysm. He had nothing like desires left in his body anymore but if he did, he would hope against hope that he was wrong about its source.

The inner weapon of the lance had kept him jailed for much longer than he originally imagined, for every part of the world to change like this. (Though his exterior had healed, the inner effects of that wound were slow to disappear.) Not even the unmoving, gutted air felt familiar. For a language to change so radically in the area he had been buried, a time many magnitudes longer than a normal human life had to have passed, likely more than a few hundreds of years. And for the physiology of man to change, as well – for it to exceed his own body, endlessly reborn and pushed to its peak – a few thousands of years must have passed.

By his best estimates, he must have been beneath the earth for at least nine thousand years.

That would have made him lonely and sorrowful, once, but the man realized that by now all his emotion was gone. Perhaps it was the knowledge that he was so distant from everything he had ever known that suffocated his heart. The only sorrow he felt was from how ruined the earth was, and from the faint recognition of the fury of the heavens, as well as the confirmation that his curse was indeed unending.

Everything he had ever tried to stop it had failed. There was no longer a point in seeking a way to circumvent his curse. Now he could only gravitate towards what had caused him to be awoken. Instinctively he decided that he would strangle it to death, if ending the phenomenon was possible. The earth was already ruined beyond repair – that much he could tell just from his traveling. He could not fix that. Everyone else he had ever known was dead, long-dead, and it was unlikely that any of their descendants still existed. So he did not try to remember anything from when last he walked the earth. There was nothing he could do about the dead, nor could he help that it seemed people were dying around him at an accelerated, even extinctive rate.

Every canyon or crater he came upon was filled with bodies. The air was frigid at first but as he wandered more it began to grow hot. Before long he stopped passing caravans of people and instead passed haphazardly dug mass graves. The bodies were little more than broken cadavers of animals to him. They piled over each other and often were blackened beyond recognition. Most were not even whole, but rather just piles of ripped-apart limbs, inverted organs left scattered on the outside of their vessels, and masses of blisters and bodily fluids. At the bottom of every mass grave was a small soup of blood and black organic debris. Whatever god had sent them ruin was a hateful one.

Every step brought him more strength. His body almost felt youthful again, even if he felt wizened within. When the earth groaned so did his soul, but his bones had long since stopped their moans.

He had been wrong before: the stench of death was not in the mist. It was in the earth. He had always stunk of it.

It was almost satisfying to realize that he had forgotten almost everything. He had wept at first but the tears soon dried. Perhaps he could remember, if he tried to – his brain was just as endlessly repairable as the rest of his prison – but he did not even bother to attempt. It was better that way. He had tried so long to be free of everything that now he welcomed having no memories, no faces to remember, no goals and no desires. That would have made him awfully lonely once, but it did nothing to him now. His name, his son’s name, everyone’s name… it was all lost to time.

Peace. He was at a strange sort of peace now, millennia after everything had faded.

It took too long for him to realize that the earth he had been walking along for days had been razed perfectly flat. Nothing curved anymore, not even gently. Hills and mountains were shattered and their broken remains lay about haphazardly. The wells in the ground were unnatural results of the heavenly desolation, which had yet to cease. Early on he had passed a shore and the dead gray waters had been completely unmoving. The sun came and went dimly, and the moon looked broken. All structures were too ruined to be called ruins; nothing rose, nothing glimmered. Death-mist covered all like an embrace of love.

The earth was completely sundered as he arrived at what looked to be a massive crystal graveyard at the end of his days. In between graves magma bubbled up from fresh earth-wounds. For the first time there was a color other than ruin upon his eyes. He could see the destruction from miles away, even with his narrowed, old eyes. Shards of gigantic ice-blue glass stuck up from the earth like tombstones, each tiny shard many times larger than he was, even from a visible distance. A great darkness loomed above, taking up the entirety of what he could see in the sky beyond the death-mist, and from above that came the screaming arrows of light from the skies.

“Ah,” he whispered, weeping again. “So I was right.”

03 Just like he predicted, she was seated on a throne of crystal.

Her immediate response was to send lances of magic through his body, which he had not predicted. Of course he pulled them out and dropped them on the ground, unharmed, but immediately after two more spells impaled him with ten times more weapons, from above and from below. That took him much longer to free himself from, but luckily his healing had returned to its full capacity, and he was able to keep advancing toward her. When she realized that he was walking after a normal person would have been killed many times over, she prepared an array of traps on the makeshift stairs leading to her makeshift throne, just as she would.

He walked through them, of course – for what use did he have for caution anymore? – and advanced. It was slow going, waiting for his constantly decimated body to return to him, but it was a necessary show to prove to her that he would not be stopped.

By the time they stood a few paces away his makeshift cloak, just before many times too long and too wide, only barely covered his too-tall body, and it was full of holes and sears from the ethereal weapons. He was sure she recognized him now.

They looked at each other silently as the earth wept, he flat-footed and looking down at her beneath his messy mane and her looking up at him, silhouetted by the glow emanating from beneath her translucent throne. Somehow she looked just the same as she did all that time ago, save that she wore a form-fitting black dress that hid her feet, and that her hair much too long now. Her facial features were barely visible thanks to the backlight below her, but her eyes were lanterns of murderous golden, at once foreign and painfully familiar.

His heart hurt and he remembered what it was to remember again when he saw her.

“I know who you are,” she said, voice also familiar and not. It boomed and emanated all around him, as if magnified by the rune circle below, and it had a ruthless, spine-tingling creak of one not fully human. Yet it truly was her voice. “The Undying,” she continued, her mouth never moving.

“Yes. I have laid beneath this earth, buried and as close to a sleep of death as I could have been, all this time. But now I wake again, only to find you, still alive. Why is that? You’re not supposed to have lived this long. How?”

“I am alive again. I was not. For millennia.”

“You… are her, aren’t you?” He gulped. “My Queen.”

“I am Queen of all.”

“But you were mine before anyone else’s.”

“And who are you?”

“You know who I am.”

“Nameless. I know it well.” She shifted and crossed her legs. Somehow every movement was both alive and not. He had long since ceased being able to smell anything but death hanging off himself. “I have relinquished my name to still be able to rule. I have relinquished everything.”

“And this is ruling? After everything you did to sweep over this world… After everything we did… You would come back, defiling every law of your kingdom? You would destroy? You have never destroyed!”

Another weapon through his chest, splintering his neck as well. This time it was a gargantuan broadsword, glowing red and made up of tiny floating letters in another language he did not know. “Have you no love for me?” he lamented.

“I have nothing.” This time she pulled the weapon from his body for him, and did not wait for him to heal before impaling his throat and his thighs with thin glowing lances, forcing him to his knees, blood waterfalling down his body and the fragile steps below.

“I forget my place,” he croaked, after his tongue finally returned. “Forgive me for not kneeling earlier.”

“You have seen this wretched earth,” the Queen continued, ignoring his supplication. Ethereal chains angrily whipped and curled around her like serpents. “The people are hideously deformed. Their guttural throat-moans do a dishonor to my great home tongue. Reikravn. Somehow my thrones were tampered with. I was not supposed to return this late. It has been too long. My Empire has disappeared. Conryel an frietuvre. Everything I built has collapsed and been buried beneath the disgusting feet of these usurpers. All of it is dead. All of it. Heirovytkh. I felt it as soon as my eyes opened again and my magic rebuilt my body. I am too late. I will not debase myself to rule over these insects. I will not sit on an earth that is not mine. The world will be mine or it will not be at all.”

“Thrones? Too late?” He reached back, back muscles flexing and groaning, and pulled out the lances from his legs. They dissipated after he tossed them aside. He continued to kneel, though he looked up at the shadow of the queen. “You have changed. How do you still live? You are not the Queen I knew.”

She looked down at him, golden stars threatening to burn him to ash, permanently. The sclera of her eyes was pitch black. The writhing of her chains intensified. “You left me. Everyone left me. My mortal vessel began to falter. My work was not finished. If I perished, my empire would not be eternal. My people would not live forever. So I had to be eternal for them. It was the only goal left. With the strongest magic in the world I made seven thrones and prepared for my body to be reconstructed in a thousand years, when my descendants would falter again. When it was complete I relinquished my soul and let my vessel die. I was supposed to rule forever when my time came. I was supposed to rule my empire forever.”

“No,” he croaked, altogether remembering what it was to feel sorrow again. “No. You don’t want forever. If you did… I failed.”

“You left me,” she repeated, sitting too still. “You failed.”

“I let myself be trapped so that I could stop your enemy. If not for me, your world would have been destroyed with you in it. I died for you, my Queen… You gave me something to die for. You gave me life again.”

“And you swore you’d always live it for me. Then you died. That was when I knew I had to hold eternity myself.” She spat at him, and her chains screamed through the air as they pierced through his body. He did not feel pain, but he could tell the magic in these weapons was especially potent, for his body began to jerk and convulse against his will. “You left me. You abandoned me. You abandoned my dreams.” She spoke with the same calm, monotone volume, and her words lacked even the bite of anger that they once killed with, an age ago. Hearing the lifeless flat condemnation come from her of all people hurt more than any wound ever could.

“I’m sorry,” he tried to whisper, but a chain punched through his throat, then another through his left eye. They whistled around and inside him, piercing and exiting and re-piercing. He was held aloft in front of her, a broken, destroyed husk of a body. Then he would return, and she would continue. She was no longer human, he could tell, much like himself. She was no longer the same woman he had known. She was too merciless, too hurt. Whatever she had done to live again had ruined her. All that burned in those eyes was anger and hatred.

“I have torn down the tower keeping this planet from rending itself apart,” she announced, looking on as her own magic relentlessly severed him apart. “In less than an hour now, the half of this continent that rose will fall back to the earth, and everything will die. I grew impatient waiting on the slow fall. I have been razing this world myself until the time of end comes. It has not been amusing. The death of everything will be.”

“You will not die,” he croaked, before having the bottom of his jaw ripped out again. And neither will I, he would have continued.

“No,” she answered. That was all she had to say.

He couldn’t see her anymore, but he could still feel her hellish golden eyes melting his skull away. He would have wept if he still had eyes in their sockets. Of all people, he hadn’t wanted this curse to happen to her – and she did it to herself, all because of his own failures. He had always only failed. She had not forgotten everything like he had, and she likely never would. At least he had the solace of the burial.

He heard a sound like the Queen weeping before two lengths of chains ripped his ears and their organs from his head. The sound continued and he knew this variant of it was from the earth. The wailing of the dead and dying only continued to rise, and they all wept.

''Ah, but we will be together again. Finally.''