The Black Abyss

Kurux roused from black dreams and returned to himself from where his sleeping mind had wandered. He never seemed to fully sleep, not any longer. Instead his mind departed and ventured into vaults of nighted visions, and drifted through realms unseen by mortal eye. He felt great presences moving near to him in the dark, and when he woke they seemed to linger about him, like smoke from a slumbering fire.

He was cold, always cold now, and he rose from the bed and wrapped himself in his black silks. He had no need to command his servants with his voice, and indeed, they lacked the capacity to understand words any longer. He summoned them with the power of his mind, and they came silently. Blinded, their eyes sealed and their tongues cut out, they were pale, hairless remnants of humanity, existing only to wait upon him, to act as extensions of his great will.

They brought him his robe, and they carried the black-scaled train behind him as he went down the steps from his chamber to the shrine below. Here the walls were lightless and gleaming, and the smell of blood was intense and cloying. He detested it, but the warmth of fresh crimson was all that warmed him now. He passed down the wide hall between towering pillars, the walls lined with motionless guards encased in armor they could never remove.

The pool was deeper than he was tall, the sides cut into channels so the blood poured into it in dark streams. A hundred prisoners a day were sacrificed and poured forth to make his bath, and then their empty, pallid bodies were burned in the furnace beneath the palace. It made for a great, black plume of smoke that rose up high into the dark sky, and the smell of burning bones hung over the city of Zur like a curse.

The silent servitors drew off his robe and he climbed naked down into the blood, immersed himself with a quiver of revulsion as well as a sigh of relief. The warmth of life seeped into his flesh, loosening them and easing the pain that was always with him now. Sometimes he was certain that if he cast aside his bloody ablution, he would simply harden into a man of stone, cold and immobile.

When he climbed out, black with gore and dripping, the servants washed him with chalices of fresh water and silken cloths, and then he felt alive again, the pain simmering far beneath the surface, and as always he felt then that he was undying, and immune to the pangs of mortality, though he knew he was not. Not yet.

He proceeded into his armory, and there they girded him with his armor, draped him with his scaled robe, and crowned him with the ebon-spined crown of empire. He drew on his black gloves and looked at his hands, flexing the fingers one after another. He had dreamed he had no hands, or perhaps that he had a thousand hands – he could not now remember. The night seemed like vanishing smoke, and the previous day an aeon lost.

Smelling of blood and iron he took up his scepter and went forth to the throne room, passing between ranks of faceless guards. They had no will but to serve him, no purpose but to die for him, and he thought of them no more than he thought of the floor he trod upon. He passed through a curtain of black silk that billowed like lightless flame, and then he stepped forth into the vaulted throne hall, and bells sounded and a deep note was winded upon a horn to let all assembled know that the emperor had come.

There were thousands here within the great hall, and all prostrated themselves upon the crimson floor. The throne room was red at the heart of the black palace, like an ember at the heart of a dead fire. Often he thought it was the coldest, cruelest chamber that had ever been made, and he resolved to pave the floor with the bones of those who defied him. Then all those who groveled upon it would see those who had come before them, and they would know the fate which awaited them. All were but grist and mortar in the walls of his all-encompassing empire.

“Now all make reverence to the great emperor!” chanted his masked herald in a voice like a sepulcher. “Now all bow and know that their lives are his! You live at his sufferance, and you will die at his whim.”

Kurux seated himself upon the ebon throne, and was silent for a moment, staring down at the crowd. Then he made a small gesture, and his herald spoke once more. “Come forth you war-lords of the black empire! Step close that you may face the judgment of your overlord, who weighs and measures all life in his hands.”

He waited as his guards dragged forth three men from the crowd. They looked dazed and hollow-eyed, fresh from days of torment. They were not the commanders of any of his armies, but they would stand in place to pay for the failures of his war-minds. They had not escaped to be punished, and blame must be seen to be assigned and affixed. No one must believe that the emperor himself failed. That was unspeakable.

The herald called forth again. “You three have performed the unforgivable crime of failing to serve the emperor. You were given the finest armies in the world, great engines of war, and the authority of the greatest ruler beneath the broken sky, and yet you still were defeated. A rabble of barbarians and refugees defeated you, and you have caused the sacred lands of the empire to be trespassed upon by the unclean. Thus, you shall be punished.”

Kurux looked on them, knowing the full tale of the battle must never be spoken, that he could not even admit the name of the invader, for Shath the barbarian warlord was known to be dead, and that death must not be undone, lest the people begin to question the divine power of their emperor. Now he would demonstrate once more the futility of resistance to his supreme power.

He gestured, and one of the men went rigid, his eyes wide from terror. Kurux set his power upon the man and drew him to his feet. Trembling in the grip of an unseen compulsion he dug his fingers into his own throat, and though he struggled against the command that held him, he could not stop until his nails tore through his flesh and he had ripped his own veins open. Blood spurted forth as he screamed and gagged. He fell to the floor, trembling and bleeding while the other two looked on in horror.

“So should all who fail the divine emperor punish themselves for their weakness,” the herald said across the silence in the hall, and Kurux bathed in the fear he felt seethe within the great chamber like smoke from a fire. He held up his hand and saw the other two prisoners suddenly tight within his grasp, as though he held them with his fist. “Now, the two of you shall be punished for your lack of humility. Your companion was graceful enough to slay himself from his shame, but you waited, and therefore you shall devour his flesh until you choke to death upon it.” He gestured to the corpse within its lake of crimson. “Feast.”

o0o

After, he withdrew to his sanctum high above in the highest tower, and he dismissed his slaves and cast aside his cloak. He was angry, and even the spectacle of the deaths he had commanded did nothing to soothe him. Destroying three fools did nothing to reverse the fortunes of his war, and he felt the impending battle coming toward him as the army of Shath the barbarian approached. They would come to the city, and he did not know if he could stop them.

All the powers he had summoned against the enemy had been brushed aside. The sea-leviathans and their hordes of winged offspring had proven ineffective against the thunderlances of this new force of eagle-riders. It did not matter how many beasts he commanded if he did not have riders for them. He could enslave minds and render them subservient to his deep minds, but that turned them into servitors who lacked the quick actions and initiative needed for battle. His tactics commanded his massed troops with a single will, but they lacked flexibility, and once the minds were destroyed they scattered before the enemy.

Now the heart had been torn from his forces, and Shath would be before the gates of the city in ten days at the most, and he could mass men on the walls or even force the people of the city to stand and fight, but that would not stop a horde of monsters, armed with siege machines taken from his own forces. They would breach the walls, and once they flooded through into the city, all he would have to stop them was his own power, and he doubted it now. Twice Shath had called down some terrible fire from the sky. If he called it down again he could raze the palace of the emperors to the ground.

Kurux reached the chamber of the pool and he prostrated himself before it. Now he would be forced to call again on the power he served, the power that had made him mighty, had destroyed his elders and made him heir to the throne. He placed his hands on the cold stone, there in the black cathexis at the heart of his empire, and he debased himself before the void. He sent forth the awareness in his mind, the ability to reach beyond flesh and bone, and he touched the roiling blackness that was his master.

The pool rippled like water for all that it was not. He saw the reflections move across it, glimmering with the cold blue lights of the chamber, and then the reflections vanished. He felt the weight settle upon him, as if he were entombed deep beneath the black waters of the sea, crushed by a titan’s depth. He struggled to breathe, to live within that heedless strength. His mind was caught and whirled through black caverns, and he felt that if he so much as brushed the hem of his spirit-robe across the unseen boundaries of that depthless pit he would be undone.

The surface of the pool heaved upward, roiling and rising, and then it reared up, the fluid dripping down as if it flowed over something unseen. There was that terrible, oppressive sensation of the presence of the thing – the power of it all around him, cold and relentless and without mercy. It detested all life, and Kurux knew it only allowed him to survive so long as he served it as it wished.

Once more you come crawling to me, to grovel and to plead. I have given you much, and yet you have not accomplished what I demand. My patience wears thin, and my hunger grows. Kurux shuddered at the malice in that voice as it echoed both against the walls and within his mind. I have given you the gifts of my power and my knowledge. I have revealed to you the secrets of the ancient world so you might use them to conquer this one, and yet you have fallen short.

“It is the savage, Shath. He has returned from death and brought with him an army of deformed half-men. He has gained some power that allows him to call down destruction from the sky. My armies have been shattered and soon he will come against the city itself. I have no power remaining to stop him. I have not the time to recall the armies I have sent forth, nor to build new ones.” He held his breath, shivering with fear at the displeasure that coiled around him.

There was a long quiet, and then the presence of the unseen thing seemed to press in closer upon him, making their air seem heavy in his throat, bowing his head as beneath a great burden. And you think I have no power against what this barbarian commands? I can give you what you need, but there will be a price. You must come to me, where the dead city lies in the deeps of the sea. Come alone, and come quickly, for the gift I shall bestow is not gentle.

Kurux shuddered and then the power was gone, the liquid pouring back into the pool to lie there, quiescent and still, reflecting no more than his own pallid face as he looked down into it, and he trembled within from a dread he could not master.

o0o

The emperor went alone by night beneath the smoke and ruinous miasma of the city of Zur. No one saw him, for he clouded their minds and left them with only unease and lingering fears that would plague their dreams. He left the city by a hidden gate and then walked along the stony shore of the dead sea to where he had caused his iron-shod boat to be left. No rowers or sails adorned this craft, it was small and simple, as it had been when he took it to venture into the forbidden waters and sought the favor of a dark god.

He was older now, the boat seeming much smaller than it had then. He boarded it and sat down, closed his eyes for a moment and summoned shapes from far below the surface. As a boy he had bent his back and rowed across the open sea, now he would not sully his hands. He waited until serpentine forms coiled in the shallows, and then he cast a chain overboard and felt the boat move as it was taken and pulled, and the unseen beings pulled him away from land, into the low-hanging mists.

It was cold here, under the low fog and the faint glint of the stars overhead. The broken moon hung low on the horizon before him, like a bleared eye. He drew his cloak around himself and watched as he was drawn away from the land until the shadows and fires of the city vanished behind him. He passed over the cold, slow-rolling swells and into a world without boundary or line, made up of the dark waters and the haunted fog. The boat turned northward, away from the works of men, and into the black waters where ancient powers haunted the sea.

He had seen it once before, when he had come here as a young man burning with ambition and resentment. Now it came before him again. The sea grew darker, the surface heavy and glistening with strange colors that vanished and moved. Then he saw the first of the great towers where it thrust up from beneath, thick with sea-slime and growing with pallid life. Rust had corroded the beams it was made of, but could not destroy them utterly.

Another tower loomed out of the fog, and another. The water grew thick with slumped piles of wreckage and heavy with black scum that grew on the surface and clung to whatever touched it. He breathed the heavy, damp air and remembered the smell. It was a bitter, rotting stench, and it tasted foul. He traveled along a passage between rows of ruins, and he knew he was close to the heart of this most accursed place – The Black City.

Ancient beyond measure, it had once been a place of the ancients, a city so grand and immense no man could reckon the size of it. Once it had been the center of the world, but then the war had come, and the city had burned. The sea rushed in and drowned it, and then the land itself sank lower and lower, until all that remained above the sea was this fantastic ruin – the remnants of those few of the immense towers that still stood.

Unclean things moved in the water, pale and watchful. He felt himself the focus of many unseen eyes. This was the true city of Ix, for which his homeland of Ixur had been named, but it was only a sallow reflection of the degraded ruin of the true place, and though his bloodline bore a shadow of the ancient people of this place, only he had possessed the will to come here and call upon the Last Son of the Black City. The Being. The Remnant. The Son of Ix itself.

The boat slowed, and then the chain hung slack as his servitors abandoned it. The craft moved on slowly, drifting on the slack waters into an open place where once there had been some grand plaza open to a perfect sky, and now there was only reeking fog and stunted fungi sprouting on the ruins of a dead race. Kurux stood in the boat and sent forth his mind power, reaching for the touch of his patron, his master. He shuddered in the grip of his fear. The only fear he still carried within him.

He felt the slightest touch, and then the waters began to seethe and boil. He staggered at the closeness of the power that surrounded him, so much stronger than it was far away in his palace tower. In this place he was in the heart of it, where it was greatest, and he slowly bent down to his knees in the boat and bowed his head.

The water heaved up, and then something glistening broke the surface. He watched as a great, gray expanse of membranous flesh emerged into sight. There was the rude shape of brow ridges, and then two vast black eyes opened in the mass of nacreous tissue. A head larger than his boat emerged from the black waters, ad below the eyes was nothing of a face, only a knotted, braided cascade of cables and conduits slimed with mold and algae that trailed down into the water, connected below to some source of power no mortal mind could touch.

The vast shape heaved itself up, arms dripping with sagging flesh, hands festooned with misshapen fingers and hooked with cruel talons grasped the ruins and held the massive bulk up from the water where it dwelled. Its skin was covered with cables as thick as a man’s arm, channels that burrowed beneath the skin and emerged once more to extend down into the deeps.

That was why the Remnant needed him. It was all-powerful here, but it was fixed in place and could not leave the heart of the Black City without forfeiting its power. It was bound, not by any mystical link, but physically, its flesh grown over with the conduits of the dead city itself. It had to work through a servitor, and Kurux had become that years ago. It had given him power, it had made him emperor, and now it would give him the strength he needed to overcome his enemies at last.

You have come. I doubted you had the will to obey in this. Now, all weakness shall be purged away. The voice in his mind was immense, thundering inside his skull. He flinched away from it, then gritted his teeth and looked upon his master.

“I said I shall serve you,” he said, his voice shaking. “So I shall.”

The water around him moved, and then a dozen tendrils of metal rose from the sea, coiling and moving like serpents. He felt a tremor of fear, and he remembered when he had come here as a young man, he remembered the pain as the mind power was pushed into his skull. “So I shall.”

Remember your oath, the voice said, shaking his bones, and then the tendrils whipped forward and caught him, winding around his arms, grasping his throat, pushing through the joints of his armor to find his flesh. He felt the filaments sink into him and he gasped, struggling not to cry out. A coil pushed down his throat and choked him, and then pain began to bore into his body, through his chest and skull, and without a voice, he could not scream.