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[b][u][center]The Mad Gods 3

The Chronicles of the Damned

For DuskCypher

By Draconicon[/center][/u][/b]

To fall through Elysium was to fall through dreams, waking and sleeping. Every voice of every Sloth demon around him confused reality that much further, leaving Dusk unsure of what was up, what was down, and what was real and what was not. Being in the glimmering shimmer of the twilight part of the dream did not help. Pure darkness or pure light would have made it easier to discern what was real and what was not, but this mix of the two left him between worlds, screaming and howling as he tried to find a handhold.

There were none. The demons allowed him no chance to fight back, just as he wouldn’t have allowed them one.

The black cat gritted his teeth as he fell…and fell…and fell…

[i]And then jerked upright.

Dusk gasped for breath, his eyes wide, the room around him familiar and foreign. He remembered it as if in a dream, only for the all-too-solid walls to press in around him tighter than ever. The dark wood, the stained carpet, the old marks of his father’s habits and the curtains that kept out the worst of the noise on the road in the distance; it was all there. The heat of old Louisiana came through the paned windows, bringing with it the humidity and the undying wet of the summer months this far out from the city.

It was home.

It had been home.

He heard the sounds of old, the clatter of a door swinging open, the rough barks of dogs that didn’t belong in the house. Dusk’s heart fell as he remembered.

[i]This night…[/i]

He tried to throw himself from his bed, but he was no longer an adult. No coat rustled around him, just a pair of rough sweat pants that doubled as pajama bottoms. He stumbled, hitting the floor as the first gunshot went off.

He screamed as his father threw the door open. Another black cat, another sharp-eyed face, slightly red from drink but not gone.

“Get Dusk and get out!” a woman’s voice shouted from further off. “Get him out of here, now!”

“Dad –”

His father swept him off the floor so fast that it knocked the breath from his lungs. The older cat didn’t say a thing; he just turned to a window, checked his shoulder, and rushed right through it. Dusk curled tighter to his father’s chest as they landed on the other side, a few pieces of glass scratching at his arms as the older cat kept running. Blood dripped onto his head and he knew that the glass had done more to his parent than him.

In the distance, he heard the howls and shrieks of an angry cat, the bang of guns, the howl and whimpers of dogs. He poked his head over the edge of his father’s shoulder, watching as the flashes went off in the windows of their house.

He saw the first spark take light on the rooftop, and he knew that he’d never see it again.

He had never seen it again.[/i]

Dusk gasped for breath as he emerged from the dream, looking up to see his arm gripped tight by one of the demons of Sloth. It had snared him in his fall, and it had been trying to pull him into the wall of the sleeping minds.

“You dare to throw me back into that?”

“…”

“Damn you all…”

The black cat swept the Scythe through the demon’s arm. The Sloth demon screamed as it was claimed by death, and Dusk gritted his teeth as he grabbed hold of the hole in the wall that it left behind. His first handhold, and hopefully not his last. He –

[i]The older cat was dead.

“…Dad?”

Dusk was barely a teen. They’d been homeless since they’d left his mother. Argued about it, too. His dad hadn’t been enough after that; he’d been nothing more than a depressed drunk, someone that was drifting from bottle to needle and back again. They’d fought, argued over whose fault it was, whether Dusk had said something stupid at school or if there was something that the dad had done that would have gotten attention. Neither of them knew why the men had come, but they needed a reason, any reason, to explain what they had lost.

But they’d still supported each other in their dysfunctional way. Dusk went out to find food and beg, since people were kinder to children, and his father had made sure that they had an alley and a home to come back to.

Until now.

The needle was deep in his father’s arm, still half full. The older cat hadn’t even had the chance to take the whole thing.

Dusk’s legs nearly collapsed under him, the book that he’d managed to steal from the old shop falling from under his arm. He stared at his dad as if the older cat might come back to life just from being seen.

He didn’t.

He wouldn’t.

He was alone.[/i]

Dusk sucked in another breath as he stumbled over another bump in the dream, the memory that it was a memory throwing him out of it just as it had done the first time. Another Sloth demon, this one hiding in the hole, waiting to snare him as soon as he had reached in. Dusk glared down at the soft-eyed demon.

“Was it worth it?” he growled.

The demon didn’t answer. It was reaped as swiftly as the first.

#

The Road to Hell had been clear right to the point of the barrier, and then Hell screamed at her.

Baroness Samedi stepped out of the old-fashioned car that she’d called to her, the ghost of the ancient vehicle fading as soon as she took her hands off it. The road itself burned beneath her feet, an angry fire that made it clear that as wounded as Hell had become, it would not tolerate invaders.

Pity. She wasn’t in a mood to listen.

The black-furred cougar sashayed forward, her skirts slitting along the sides in a vague imitation of a dancing dress of a more modern time. She snapped her fingers to the beat of a dance, sensual and fast, no longer of the old stately world but of a bouncier, stronger quarter of a city that had long since lost its hopes.

“Come, come,” she muttered, huffing to herself as she approached the barrier. “Gods and goddesses, kings and queens come to you. You think that you can keep me out? You think that I’m going to listen to you?”

The barrier said nothing, but the realm screamed. It was a sound only audible to those that could hear beyond the voices of souls, beyond the sound that the dead and the living made. Oh, but it was a sweet pain to be filled with. Anger, rage, pain, a blind fury that would hear nothing in return, and would see none as a friend.

The Baroness might have been inclined to be kind, if Hell had a mind to receive her as she deserved. She didn’t want to fight it, didn’t want to rip it apart even further. After all, drama was fun, but she preferred to be an audience, not a participant.

But with what waited on the other side…

The black-furred cougar walked right up to the border of the barrier, laying her hand upon it. It flexed beneath her claws as she clenched her fist, and she rapped her hand against it once, twice, three times.

“I’m going to give you one chance, honeys. Let me in nicely, and I won’t rip a hole in you so big that everyone slips out.”

There was no answer, and there was no gap in the barrier. A snarl that twisted into a smirk at the very end sliced across her muzzle.

“Fine by me, darlings. Just remember, you made this choice.”

The Road to Hell ended at the barrier, but the barrier itself covered a vast swathe of space. It would take her time to find the right spot to break in, but that was time that she could afford to spend.

She told herself that. She didn’t entirely believe it. The cougar walked quickly, rapping the back of her knuckles against the barrier again and again, listening for the right response to know where she needed to be.

#

[i]It was past midnight, and Dusk leaned against the back door of an apartment building, a pistol in hand. It was not where he wanted to be, but it was where all ‘necessity’ had pushed him to be.

Food, money, shelter, it all cost money. The only places willing to hire a kid weren’t the sort that most people would look at with a kind eye, and most of those were going to do shitty things to a kid to begin with. Dusk was smart enough to avoid the worst of them, avoiding the pedophiles and the creatures of the night that would do things to him that he’d never recover from. He was smart enough to avoid the authorities, knowing that they’d put him somewhere that would stifle and correct him, making him forget the things that his mother had taught him before she disappeared.

The only other option, really, was crime. And he was good at it.

Petty thievery, being watch-outs for drug dealers, then being the get-away driver for different gangs, had finally led him here. The mafia were willing to take him on now that he was an adult, were willing to give him a chance, if he was willing to show that he could deal with blood on his hands.

They’d pay well, he told himself. They’d pay well, and he’d be able to keep going. The books, starting with the one he stole the day his father died and continuing with every new tome that he could get his hands on, were his only connection to the past. Even if they were nothing but lies, he could at least keep the memory of his mother alive through that.

But they were expensive. Too expensive for the small jobs to pay for fast enough. He needed this. Their connections, their influence: he needed it all.

“Just one night, and then I’m in.”

The clocks finished chiming, and Dusk pushed the door open. It was unlocked, just like the family had said it would be. He wasn’t here to kill the one stealing from the family; the mafia had too much use for the forger and safe-cracker. They wanted him alive, but they needed him to learn a lesson.

Death to the wife was Dusk’s order. He would carry it out. He would.

He climbed the stairs and walked down the hallway to the bedroom. A white-furred bear waited for him, her head sideways on the pillow, her chest half-uncovered. She slept without knowing the danger she was in.

He paused, but only for a moment. It had to be done. It was the only way out, the only way forward.

Dusk held the pistol to the side of her head and pulled the trigger. As the bang echoed through the house, he bit his lips, wondering if he should have put a pillow between the barrel and her head –

“Waaaaaa!”

His blood ran cold. A child’s scream? No. A baby’s. They had a child, and now, it would only have a father. And a criminal father, at that.

Dusk didn’t think. He only ran, beating feet down the stairs once more and trying to escape the horror of what he’d just done. It would only be the first –[/i]

Another memory bump, another knock from the dream that they were trying to push him into. Dusk cut the demon’s hand away before it could take him into another and buried the blade of the Scythe into the wall as an improvised grip. It was barely enough, and the black cat hung from the half as he gasped for breath and tried to recover from the shock.

It was one dream after another, more hells that they were trying to create whenever one didn’t actually work. They wanted him to be dead to the world, wanted him buried in pain or reminiscence or something that he never wanted to touch again.

All of this was buried for a reason. All of it was forgotten for a fucking reason.

“I will burn all of you fuckers…I will reap you from existence…I will show you…what it means…to try and punish me. Because nobody…nobody can do that as well as me.”

And yet, as he set himself to continue climbing, he felt as if Sloth already knew that. On some level, they probably enjoyed that little –

[i]The church was quiet in the sunset hours, the light coming through the stained glass as dirty as everything else in Louisiana. The poor knew how dirty the world was, and he was no exception.

The family was all but gone. The mafia were being taken down by the cops, hunted down, and he had turned evidence on some of them. All his guilt had come to a head, and he had tried to make good on what he had gone.

Tried.

Failed.

He still felt loathsome, still knew that he had done more than mortals could ever forgive. That was why he was here, why he was in this place that had always hated him, even before his mother died. He was on his knees before the cross, his hands folded over his lap.

“Forgive me…”

The black cat’s eyes were wet. A tear ran across his cheek as he lifted his head to face the cross.

“Forgive me. You’re the only one that can. Please…just…forgive me so I can be better…Let me just…be better…”

There was no answer. The figure on the cross was silent, and no great angel appeared to take the burden from his shoulders. There was nothing but the echoes of his own words around him, and the silence of the church pressed in on him with all the unspoken words of his guilt and shame.

And it was in that guilt and shame that the first spark spread.

He didn’t notice it, at first. Perhaps it had come from a piece of glass that focused the sun in just the right way. Perhaps a candle had been placed a hair wrong and it had caught some of the church velvet. It could have been a hundred things that had started the fire, but by the time he smelled it, it was too late.

Dusk spun around, staring at the inferno that had consumed the half of the church toward the doors. The blaze spread along the walls, leaping from curtain to curtain, pew to pew. All the old wood caught, and by the time that he thought about running out one of the stained glass windows, even that route was closed to him. The flames crept up the walls, hitting the roof and biting at it, chewing through it.

“…Even Heaven hates me…”

The black cat considered dying, then. The fire would choke him out soon enough if he just did nothing. He couldn’t get over the pews, couldn’t push fast the fire. All he could do was die…

Unless the books were true.

“You saved me before, mom…”

Maybe the books could save him again. If they were right, if they were true, if he had learned them well enough –

A cough wracked him, and Dusk fell to his knees, keeping his head under the rising smoke. A block of wood fell from a burning pew nearby, and he grabbed it, wincing at the heat that nearly burned through the sleeve wrapped around his hand. He used the ashy end to draw the symbols from the books, the circles and the sigils. He kept coughing, shaking from head to toe as he fought for enough air to stay conscious.

The old books, the black books, the pages written in silver and blood and so much more. He’d paid so much for them.

If heaven would not hear him, then perhaps they would.

He closed the circle with the burning wood and threw it away, and he tilted his head over the small, hand-sized circle. A tear fell, and they came.

The spirits rose with a wail, a shimmer like the heat-waves off a road filling the room. They did not need commands; they heard what he needed through the spell alone, and they did what they were told.

The pews flew away.

The burning Bibles filled the air.

The floor was cleared.

They could not put out the fire, that had gone too far, but they cleared a path for him. The black cat coughed as he crawled across the floor, the stones carrying the heat from the flames to him. His hands burned and his knees were scalded as he dragged himself to the burning door, every movement a defiance of fate.

He would not die here. Heaven could not claim him if it would not listen to him.

His last thought as he reached the burning door was that he wouldn’t be able to open it, but a heavy fist, ghostly as it was impossibly strong, broke it open. The black cat fell forward, sucking down clean air as soon as he was clear of the building. He would not touch them again –[/i]

“Fuck you!”

Dusk’s rage grew stronger with each demon that thought it could contain him, and he reaped yet another. This time, he had to fight, pulling his legs free of the wall. Each dream tried to pull him into the mass of sleeping minds. Another, and another, and another, and each time, they came a little closer.

His rage would not sustain him for much longer. Sloth, he was coming to realize, was far more powerful than any in Hell realized.

Another handhold.

Another.

Another.

Another –

[i]He wanted to die.

He’d wanted to die ever since the courts had found him liable for the church and taken away everything that he had. Every dollar, every book, every scrap of property that he had, and then held him responsible for more.

‘Malice,’ they’d called it. ‘Malice against the mother church.’

Apparently, that sort of anti-motherhood was good enough to get someone tossed in prison for life. They’d thrown him into another cell and all but forgotten his existence, save to trot him out with the other prisoners and deal with all the abuse that they had. The hyper-religious ran the prison, and anyone that didn’t believe as they did – that the world was filled with shitty people and that they should burn them, correct them – was at the bottom of the ladder, an easy target for inmates and guards alike.

Dusk waited outside the shower rooms for his turn, well-aware of the shanks and shivs that were passed around the prison with his name on them. They were aware of what he’d done to get thrown in. There had already been two trips to the infirmary, one from a blade to his shoulder, one that had nearly cut his throat. He’d survived that; he doubted that he’d survive a third.

And the only reason that he’d survived the second was Silas, a possum in the prison for being gay, of all things. Oh, there was some other charge, but they all knew that the tail-raising possum was there because some judge had taken offense at him being gay and wanted to make an example of him. They’d bonded over that, talking between cells, occasionally going further but never where anyone could see.

Not lovers, not boyfriends. They weren’t that close. But they were outsiders, and they understood each other.

Dusk wasn’t sure why Silas kept him from just giving up, or why the possum had jostled the hand about to slit his throat and kept the blade from cutting that critical vessel, but he had. It had given him enough questions to stay alive for a little while longer, enough hope to think that maybe he would go on.

But he never stopped wanting to die. He just stopped actively pursuing it. And now, he wondered if it would be better than just going through this every day, waiting for the next beating, wondering if the next man in line would have a blade with his name on it.

Any hope he might have had from the church and the spirits there was gone. They’d probably been a hallucination, something he’d never really seen. Just one more hope that had been dashed.

“Next.”

A cluster of prisoners filed out of the showers, and Dusk and a bunch of others stepped in. He stopped dead in his tracks at his stall, staring at the dead body that occupied it.

It was Silas. It was the catalyst for –[/i]

“RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”

Dream world and real world, real world and dream world. They were unified for a split-second, caught and magnified and bonded by a scream of rage and pain, of sorrow and despair, of pure, horrifying heart.

#

Baroness Samedi heard the scream and tapped the barrier with a knowing nod.

“There you are…”

Her hand quivered as she heard the scream again, the sheer pain in it making it impossible for her to stay calm. She’d thought them gone. She’d found one of them, and thought the other had been lost forever.

He wasn’t, and she wouldn’t lose him again.

The cougar flicked her fingers, claws popping free, and stabbed them into the barrier. It stiffened against her, but she was the Baroness Samedi. Hell was its own world with its own powers, but she was the Goddess of Voodoo. There was nothing that could stop her here, not anymore.

As Dusk screamed again, she screamed back, and through the barrier, she felt them. Her scream, a song of grief and rage as much as a wailing that came all the way from the depths of her heart, called out to those that lay on the other side.

She felt them stirring, but that wasn’t enough. They needed more.

And she had plenty.

#

[i]Another memory, and Dusk wasn’t able to just bounce out of it the way that he had with the others. This one was…

This one didn’t hurt. This one…this one was almost good. Bearable, even.

The dead were buried. The prison, its inmates, guards, and wardens, was gone. Those that weren’t burned to death were deep in the ground already, and there was no way that they were coming back. Pure, blinding rage and grief had done for them what they had wanted to do him. The spirits had come, wild and dark with his raging urges, and had taken them to a place where they would never be at peace.

It wasn’t long after that, as he wandered through the bayous, that one of the Chantry found him. Their talk had been quiet, brief, but sufficient to convince him that there was a place for him to go. There was a place where he could rest, and learn, and be himself in a way that the rest of the world would never accept.

He came to their chapterhouse on the edge of the city, well away from the people that gave lip service to the church and to the common good and forgot about everyone else. They were far from the torches, living in a place so wet that the chapterhouse wouldn’t burn, where they could practice their magics and learn greater sorceries. It was the place where he could be safe.

Where he could study.

Where he could live and remember…and process it all…

Dusk remembered the chapterhouse fondly, and even though he knew it was a dream, it wasn’t enough. Not this time. He had reaped so many, and he had climbed so far, and they had finally found the thing that he could live with.

No lovers, but he had been happy.

No family, but he had been content.

No power, but he had known it would come.

The fog of Elysium wandered over the dream-world, covering the wet grounds and surrounding the chapterhouse itself. He knew that it was wrong, knew that it wasn’t the way that it was supposed to be, but it was…calming. He was tired, so tired, and his anger and pain could be soothed here.

“Rest,” one of the other mages of the Louisiana Chantry whispered to him. “Come inside and rest.”

Dusk groaned, trying to find some memory that would drag him out, but the fog was consuming it as much as it was the world around him. He had gone so far, and pushed so hard, and this…

“This is your reward, Dusk,” another mage said. “You have to rest. You have to learn. Come inside and heal.”

Heal…

He remembered it. And yet…he was crying. He could feel the tears on his cheeks, and he knew that they weren’t falling from sadness, or grief. There was something else, something hotter inside, but the fog was smothering even that, reminding him of what he had once had and what he could have again.

All he had to do was give in, and he would be able to just rest, and the rest of the world would keep moving on. All he had to do was go to sleep.

He started to take a step forward –[/i]

#

“No!”

Baroness Samedi’s claws finally broke a hole in the barrier. It was no larger than her hand, no wider than the width of her finger, but it was sufficient for her voice to break through.

“No! You will not have him, or anyone else. Rise, oh unhappy dead! Rise, and break your chains!”

#

Dusk heard it in the distance. It was like a roar, a crashing of waves upon his happy sleep, and all around him, the figures of the Chantry collapsed, holding their heads as they fell to their knees. Blood came from behind their eyes as they tried to fix things, but fog was broken and the world was cracked. Dusk felt the Scythe between his fingers again and squeezed it tightly, grinding his palm up the wood until it touched the cool metal of the blade.

The chapterhouse disappeared, and he was once more in the hole in Elysium. All but his head had been pulled in, but the demons holding him had broken, screaming as the other souls all around him stirred and shouted and fought back.

He saw them, almost recognizing them from history, and would have if they hadn’t been a writhing wave of motions. Heroes, soldiers, warriors, poets, and a hundred other occupations were present, and the quintillions of mortals that had been sent here at the end of their life in their world had finally awoken.

In the distance, he could hear a scream, and in that scream, he heard power, the same power that had called the dead from their rest, and which even now dragged at him. It called to something deep inside, something that had been forgotten since Darith had ripped his soul right out of him, and now…

Now, it was coming back.

The dead stirred and the Sloth demons gathered themselves for a fight, but even in his sleep-drunk state, Dusk knew that the beginning of the end had come for them. For every Sloth demon, there had to be a million mortals pushing for their escape. They were not only awake, but alive, and filled with such vigor and vitriol that there was no way in hell that they would care about any losses.

The demons tried to stop them. Sleep spells, dream-shackles, and more were cast at the wave of ascending, revived mortals, but for every ten, every hundred, every thousand that were cast back down, one got through, and that was all it took. One mortal to slow the demon down, and then another million to rip them to pieces bit by bit. The Sloth demons were doomed if they did not retreat.

Dusk followed them up, a scream of life that he had almost forgotten ripped from his throat just as it was from all the others. He cut and sliced with the Scythe with abandon, reaping as many of the mortal souls as he did the demons and not caring in the slightest. It was a bloodbath, and only those most determined would reach the surface.

He climbed, and climbed, and climbed, pulling himself up by the bodies and souls of anyone that stood in his way. Higher and higher he ascended, following the call of that voice, feeling it thudding in him, restoring him, giving him something that Darith had taken away.

It was not the blended soul, but his own, one that he had forgotten, and yet, at the same time, something new. There was something…something better about it, as if it had been purified of something that he’d never noticed was there.

Finally, he reached the lip of the hole and dragged himself out. No sooner had he found his footing than he saw a blur of black fur darting for him. Before he could raise the Scythe, arms stronger than any bear and more powerful than any demon wrapped around him, hugging him close and all but burying him under a woman’s chin. He could feel her fur soft and gentle around him and –

And tears. Tears falling on his head as he was held close, and a soft whimper in his ears as she squeezed him tighter.

“My boy…my sweet boy…”

“…Mom?”

The smell. It was the smell that clued him in. Not the smell of the dead, or the demons, or any of the other scents that had surrounded him in Hell, but the soft smell of old parchment, sweet rum, incense, and the wet ink of tarot cards. It was all there, all combined in her, and it was exactly what he remembered from those days before it all went wrong.

“Yes…yes, it’s me,” she whispered, one hand behind his head holding him close. “Oh, honey…I thought you were dead. I thought you were gone, all gone…but no…you’re still here…and I’m never letting you fall again…”

It was impossible. His mother was here. She was gone, dead, but she’d come in here and raised all these souls from the dead? But that was…but she was…

His head spun, trying to find some central point of logic, trying to determine if this was safe, if she was a dream, if he had been just shifted to some other cruel torture, but it was like he was completely lost to the world. He was crying too, his eyes wet and his cheeks dampening from their passage.

He slowly let the thought of the Scythe fade, his hands shaking for a moment before he wrapped them around her. Dusk squeezed the cougar back, and for the first time in far, far too long, he cried.

No. He [i]wept.[/i] Even as Hell trembled and broke around him, even as the no-longer-dead surged and swelled through Elysium, he wept in his mother’s arms.

[b][u][center]The End[/center][/u][/b]

Summary: Dusk continues to try and climb out of Elysium, and someone else tries to find him in Hell.

Tags: No Sex, Prison, Memories, Trauma, Cat, Cougar, Various Species, Hell, Modern Fantasy, Series, Grief, Pain,