Back to GatefoldIssue #9 by Meriades Rai
March 2010 |
“We placed our faith in you, Mordo,” the shadows whispered. “Faith and power. And yet you have failed us…”
To look upon Dormammu, Emperor of the Eternal Dread, was to stare into the deepest, darkest abyss. This form he had adopted in the mortal world was mostly unremarkable – an unassuming body, clad in a suit of indigo and black silk – but in place of a man’s head there was only a swirl of mist and shadow and reflected light, like the glitter of dying stars as they were consumed by the whorl of a black hole. The Dread itself, a dimension of darkness and despair that no mind could truly comprehend and no heart could endure.
But Baron Karloff Amadeus Mordo knew despair all too well, and he was already insane. The Dread held no more terror for him than his present cursed existence.
“The first Order of the Faltine were destroyed, yes,” Mordo hissed. “But at the cost of one of them. A Defender fallen, the most potent of them, leaving the rest weary and forlorn. Gift me more flames of the Faltine and I shall raise a second Order with which to destroy the remaining - ”
Dormammu stretched out a languid arm and encircled Mordo’s throat with black-gloved fingers. Unaccustomed to any of his masters interacting with him in such physical fashion, and misguidedly convinced of his own worth, Mordo did not struggle. It was the last mistake he would ever make.
“You believe the potency of the flames to be infinite?” Dormammu breathed. “The conceit of fleshlings never ceases to astound me. We did not expect you to defeat our enemies for us, Mordo, merely to render them susceptible to our inevitable attack – and, more crucially, to separate them from the influence of The Ancient. To your credit, you achieved such a feat with surprising aplomb. But in turn you have damaged our grander schemes…”
Mordo’s expression clouded with confusion as Dormammu hoisted him effortlessly off his feet. Then bewilderment gave way to the first signs of panic as the dark lord began to transport him by the throat across the chamber where their exchange was taking place.
The five members of the Cabal were all present here, in the blood and shadows of the 9th Century castle on the outskirts of Curtea de Arges, in the Carpathian wilderness of Romania. This was where the Manifestation had occurred, where the flesh sacrifices overseen by Mordo had allowed Dormammu to take form along with his otherworldly companions: The Tatterdemalion, Satana Blackheart, Varnae and Morganna Le Fay. These haunted halls of stone and soot, soaked through with innocent blood, were now also tainted with the palpable evil of the creatures that called this place home.
There was a well at the center of the great hall and the blackness that rippled over the well’s edge and lapped at Dormammu’s feet was a living, hungering thing. Mordo could hear it, softly screaming his name. His mother, his wife, his children. All dead. All done there, in the black.
“No,” he said, tears brimming in his eyes. The first tears he’d shed since slaughtering his family in their beds. “No, please. I’ve served you, I’ve done everything you asked. I - ”
But in the end, just before Dormammu cast him out into the shrieking shadow, there was a moment of clarity in his heart and an accompanying voice in his brain. The voice said, Yes. Because this is what you deserve. And it was true.
Dormammu of the Dread watched Karloff Amadeus Mordo sink from view, dragged down into the stygian well, into the same darkness that stripped his flesh from his bones with invisible teeth, then turned upon his fellow demons. Satana Blackheart in particular warranted Dormammu’s attention, for her connection with the situation they now faced was all too plain.
“The remaining Defenders seek to aid their fallen comrade,” Dormammu snarled. “And the method they’ve chosen is… unexpected. The Ancient is a formidable foe, but old and frail. With him as their benefactor, the eventual destruction of the Defenders was guaranteed. But now…”
Satana inclined her head, her hair cascading about her beautiful and terrible face in strings of burnished gold and the rosy red of virgin’s blood. Her eyes burned bright, but were edged with fear.
“I know what you want of me,” she said, quietly. “There’s no other way?”
“None.”
Satana bowed her head.
“So be it then,” she whispered. “Henceforth, the Priestess of the Hellbound Islands… shall return to her place of birth.”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"CULMINATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
“I hope you understand, as a religious man I’m finding this all really difficult to deal with.”
Patricia Walker, the woman otherwise known as Hellcat, glanced up at the man who’d spoken. Eric Brooks, known as Blade, was standing on the cusp of a crag of blood red cliff – literally blood red, such a dark and shining scarlet that it made one nauseous to even look upon it – and was gazing out over a similarly hued landscape of twisted rock formations fractured with rivers of oil and lava that stretched out as far as the eye could see. He didn’t appear happy. Hardly surprising, really.
“All folklore has origin in some manner of truth,” Hellcat said. “Even more so in the case of latter-day mythological amalgam, such as Christianity and The Bible.”
“Are you trying to be insulting?”
“No more than usual.”
“Which would be a yes, then.”
Hellcat grimaced. “I’m not fishing for a theological debate, Eric. I’ve got more important things to occupy myself with, in case you’d forgotten. Suffice to say that the realm we’re currently standing in bears only superficial relation to your Biblical Hell, which is itself a modern adaptation of the Tartarus of Greece and the afterlife imagery of Ancient Egypt, among many others. This place is the reality that influenced those later interpretations, and the idiom Hellbound Islands doesn’t imply any specific connotation, it’s simply the closest translation in modern English.”
“But, in basic terms, this is another world,” Blade persisted. “A world of fire and brimstone.”
“A pocket dimension, to be precise,” Hellcat corrected. “One of thousands, millions, but one often glimpsed throughout the history of humankind through dreams and waking visions, and therefore uncannily familiar.”
“And not just fire, right?” another voice said. “I mean, there’s ice here too. And desert. And shadow. Because it’s a wasteland.”
This was the third member of the Defenders who now spoke. Samantha Parrington, otherwise known as Valkyrie, was standing a little way apart from her companions, further down the cliff path they’d been traveling for what seemed like days but which was likely only an hour, if such things as time even existed in this infernal dominion. Blade and Hellcat both looked towards her. Hellcat’s smoky green eyes were narrowed.
“That’s as good a summation as any,” she murmured. Valkyrie continued to stare out over the bleak landscape, her expression alarmingly serene beneath her frost-blonde fringe.
“It’s almost beautiful,” she said, quietly. “In the same way as some places on Earth, I mean. Those remote regions captured in satellite imagery, you know? The Australian Outback, New Mexico, Antarctica… even the pictures sent back from missions to Mars. If you could just look at it, it would be enchanting. But being here, that’s what steals the splendor away. Because the air tastes like pain and rust, and it stings the skin. Because it’s a scoured wilderness where nothing grows and nothing could ever survive. No grass, no trees, no fresh water, no birds, no animals. And because you feel on the verge of loneliness and despair with every breath, and because the weight presses in on your heart like gravity gone wrong…”
Hellcat’s gaze softened. She shifted uncomfortably, feeling Blade’s accusing eyes on the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For bringing you here. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“There was nothing any of us could have done,” Valkyrie said, simply. “It is what it is.” She hefted her magical sword Dragonfang against her slight shoulder and then turned and smiled, a smile so emotionless that, despite the prettiness of her features, was as chilling in its own way as the lifeless terrain around them.
“Were you born here?” she asked Hellcat, with careless indifference. The other woman flinched, then bowed her head.
“Born of here,” she muttered. “For all the difference that makes…”
# # # # # # # # # #
Just as the dimension of the Hellbound Islands was not Hell so the entity that the Defenders had traveled to meet here was not Satan. Hellcat would have debated the matter with Blade at some other place and time, but here and now she was understandably disinclined to do so, as was he. It was enough that they knew they’d been granted audience with the beast that had inspired tales of The Devil in so many cultural incarnations over the centuries; it was enough that, when they laid eyes upon his towering form of smoke and bone and darkness, rising from his smoldering pit, that they were cowed, and that even Valkyrie’s preternatural composure began to crack.
“Father,” said Hellcat, in a tongue that her two companions couldn’t comprehend. “I come, as promised.”
The beast lowered its approximation of a head, and something like distant eyes burned beyond a misty haze.
There were times when mortals dreamed of this terrible place, their spirits dislocating from their biological shells and wandering the narrow corridors between worlds through no true design or intent. It was just misfortune that carried them here upon breathless winds; that, and the intangible summons of those creatures that dwelt within the Islands, calling out through hunger or the need to administer cruelty. It wasn’t the souls of the damned or the dead that toiled in these fiery pits, it was the shades of those ill-fated rovers. The Hellbound didn’t punish for the sake of sin, for they didn’t recognize the mortal concepts of good and evil.
Patricia Walker’s mother had been neither sinner nor saint when she’d dreamed of the darkness one summer’s night many years ago. The darkness, and the beast inside it. A day later the woman had emerged from a sudden and inexplicable fever with a black seed sown inside her. Nine months after that she’d given birth to a girl, Patricia. She’d planned to gut the child with a breadknife and bury the remains in a plastic bag in the consecrated grounds of the local church, but gathering the babe to her breast she’d known instantly that she could never commit such an act, regardless of the reality of her conception.
And so the woman had raised her girl, and for six years she’d managed to convince herself that she’d imagined her dreams on that night long before. But then the darkness had come for her without warning, the beast reaching out through her soul and setting it alight from within. Spontaneous combustion, originating in the base of the woman’s brain and traveling the length of her body over a period of minutes, roasting her from the inside out so that in those final, terrible moments she was a sack of slowly blackened flesh with an inferno barely sheathed within, belching black smoke like an engine from her eyes and mouth and from tiny lacerations in her skin.
All because The Devil had been at a loose end.
Six years old, Patricia had cowered in the corner of the room and watched her mother burn and die. She’d heard her father’s laughter then, the creature that had sired her and which had returned to mock her and impress its power upon her. And then it was gone, back to its own world, leaving Patricia alone with a spitting corpse that glowed like coals in a black hearth.
The medics had attended, so too the police, and when the charred body had been ferried away there was just a chalk outline on wooden floorboards left to show where her mother had fallen.
Ten years later, Patricia Walker had breathed fire for the first time when three men had pulled up alongside her in the street in a blue van with blacked out windows and attempted to drag her inside. Patricia had roasted two of them alive, just as the beast had killed her mother, and had disemboweled the other with the black claws she’d grown from the tips of her fingers. Genetic gifts from her father, the devil from another world, symbolic of the Infernatra – the Hellcats – that patrolled the wastes of the Hellbound Isles.
Unlike her fellow Defenders, Patricia’s powers hadn’t been awakened by the magical artifact presented to her by the mysterious man known as The Ancient. Stefan Strang’s mystic prowess had been spurred by his gloves, Blade’s physiology had been augmented by his crucifix and Samantha’s transformation to Valkyrie had been inspired by the hilt of an enchanted sword. In contrast, Patricia had already possessed her supernatural faculties. The malachite ring on the middle finger of her gloved right hand had been gifted with a different purpose in mind.
Perhaps The Ancient had known all along it would come to this.
A short while earlier, Doctor Strange had fallen in battle with Baron Mordo’s Order of the Faltine. In response, Hellcat had reluctantly accepted the true function of her ring and had used it to slide back the curtain between the mortal world and the realm of the Hellbound, establishing a soul link between her and her father’s dominion and allowing her and her companions to traverse the corridor between dimensions. And now, here they were.
“I need something from you,” Hellcat told her father. “If you require payment for services rendered then you can name your price. I don’t care. But I feel obliged to point out that, considering you violated my mother’s spirit and then burned her to death in front of me and sentenced me to a childhood of state orphanages… you do probably owe me a favor, yes?”
# # # # # # # # # #
The man known as The Ancient sat, cross-legged, upon the ceiling of his parlor. Which isn’t to say that he was suspended upside-down, but rather than the parlor itself – along with much of the house it was a part of – had become inverted at some point when no one had been paying attention.
The Sanctum Sanctorum in Greenwich, London, was like that. His Defenders had found it all quite disconcerting, understandably, but The Ancient was used to operating within this realm of conundrum. In truth it hadn’t even occurred to him that he was upside-down, because all his attention was focused on the door in front of him.
Today the door was made of bamboo twined with the durable vines of the sapodilla tree rather than oak fortified with iron and rivets, or of an intricate fusion of quartz and marble, but it was still The Door. The door to The Void. Not so long ago, Stefan Strang and his companions had crossed the threshold and traveled The Void to Switzerland in a plan to rescue Strang’s onetime lover Clea Balsamo from some terrible fate, a fate that, tragically, had not been destined to be averted. They’d undertaken this mission without their mentor’s approval, or even deigning to mention it to him, believing that he would refuse their request.
The Ancient almost smiled, albeit a smile born in sadness. These humans. So reckless, so self-indulgent. So predictable.
This was how The Ancient had foreseen events, or at least it was one of a number of possible outcomes, none of which had been destined to end pleasantly. But what must be must be.
And it was time now. Time for the ending.
The Ancient made a gesture, as much with his mind as with his hand, and The Door – now constructed of ivory beads and alligator hide – opened slowly and with an aged creak. The darkness of The Void stretched out beyond, an infinite expanse of black blemished only by the distant form of the tentacled god, Shuma-Gorath, still tethered by a chain of ruby rings since its recent encounter with Doctor Strange. A thousand eyes blinked open and balefully regarded The Ancient, just as a thousand mouths began to salivate.
“Soon now, old friend,” The Ancient whispered. “Soon…”
# # # # # # # # # #
The desolate atmosphere of the Hellbound Isles, as observed by the Defenders, was deceptive. There were creatures inhabiting the hostile wastes, demons typically content to hide away and feast upon the misery of those souls that unwittingly visited their territory but also quick to rouse when summoned. Such a command was now broadcast, stark and cold upon the rust-tinted air, and the beasts emerged from their shadowed nooks and began to swarm in instant response.
At the heart of the rapidly gathering crowd there stood the mistress who had issued that summons: Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound. She still wore her human guise, the sensual body of a young female sheathed in nylon gauze and black leather and with a skin of scorched copper and hair of fiery russet and gold. Her long, slender legs ended in cloven hooves. Another of the old devil’s offspring. But, unlike Patricia Walker, she had been birthed and raised here rather than Earth – and because of this she believed her power to be absolute.
She was surprised, therefore, when she crested the rise of a blood red cliff to gaze out upon her father’s kingdom and set eyes instead upon her enemies, advancing to meet her with a steady purpose.
Satana’s eyes narrowed to black wounds.
“I should have annihilated you when I had the chance,” she spat at Hellcat, recalling their recent previous encounter at Chateau Noir, the Burlesque establishment in Soho, London where Patricia had been a performer. Hellcat smiled darkly and flexed her claws.
“Now there’s something we can agree on,” she purred. “Sister.”
Satana snarled and raised her arms high above her head, causing the air to thicken and ripple as she immediately began to gather the otherworldly magicks that permeated her realm. Her demons swelled beyond her, beings of fleshless, red grist and bone and of twisted limb, their misshapen heads punctured with random designs of black eyes and teeth, their backs erupting in skeletal wings. The fiends of the Hellbound Islands.
Hellcat, Blade and Valkyrie looked on, scarcely impressed. Something about their implausible courage caused Satana to hesitate. Dormammu had divined that the Defenders had traveled here in some desperate hope to gain audience with her father, and this was why he’d dispatched Satana to confront them. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider the fact that the arch-devil might actually help these mortal wretches. And yet…
“Perhaps we might skip the posturing threats and move on to the bloodshed?” Valkyrie suggested with a coy pout. “Life is short, after all.”
“For you, perhaps…”
Satana swept out one clawed hand, unleashing splinters of pure, red hate that lashed at her enemy like the stinging barbs of a cat o’ nine tails – but Valkyrie merely angled the nigh-invisible blade of her sword to deflect the deadly kiss of the whip, slicing through energy as surely as through physical matter. Satana screamed and recoiled, experiencing the disruption of her power like a blow. Valkyrie flexed her wrist and Dragonfang’s enchanted blade glittered with a hair’s breadth refraction of red light.
“Now then,” sighed the warrior who was barely more than a girl. “That’s more like it.”
She pushed forward then, shifting her balance left and right and brandishing her weapon with lethal elegance, eviscerating three of Satana’s demon throng before they’d even begun to react. No blood misted the air, for these beasts’ bodies contained no such thing, but they fell back howling and grasping at their wounds nonetheless. Satana whirled towards Valkyrie, reaching out with her other hand, but then another of her foes slid between her and her prey and slammed a fist into the demoness’ gut with such force that she staggered backwards with a breathless grunt and almost fell.
Blade stared on, hissing through gritted teeth.
“Like punching a brick wall,” he snapped. Hellcat drew alongside him and cast him a sly smile.
“Save those deadly weapons you call hands for any vampires you meet,” she said. “And Hellbound demons, of course. I’ve got the goat-lady here covered…”
Satana reared upon her hooves as Hellcat lunged for her, grabbing her half-human adversary about the waist and attempting to rip her in half with sheer, preternatural strength. Patricia was quick, however, and as supple as her feline namesake; she curled lithely in Satana’s grasp and pushed her knees up into the demon mistress’ throat at the same time as straining backwards, forcing Satana’s arms to pop in their shoulder sockets and for her grip to slacken. Hellcat then slashed her rival’s face with one set of black claws and then the other, shredding away strips of copper-hued flesh and perforating one of her victim’s smoldering black eyeballs.
Satana screamed and fell, but before she even sprawled across the red rock beneath her hooves she was engulfed in a wave of green flame, spilling forth from Hellcat’s open mouth. All around, the throng of demons currently pressed into service battling Valkyrie and Blade were momentarily stunned – and, lining the boundaries of the battlefield, other creatures of the Isles looked on as if mesmerized by the sight of their Priestess being challenged so forcefully. There were Infernatra out there, Hellcat knew, among the imps and the eldritch and all the rest. What did they see when they observed her? An envoy, representing their kind? The idea made her ill – almost as much as the knowledge that Satana Blackheart was rising before her, a blackened wraith in the green flames, her eyes dark as dying stars and her fingers hooked into wicked talons.
“You strike well, with the element of surprise on your side,” Satana hissed through the remnants of her face. “But what did you really hope to achieve here? You can’t stand against me and my hordes for long, certainly not long enough to engineer an escape with that magic ring of yours. Look around you, half-breed. Do you see? Do you see that I have thousands of Hellbound ready to attack at my call? We’ll tear you asunder slowly but surely, stripping away ribbons of flesh one by one…”
Even as Satana spoke so she was regenerating, repairing her human guide through force of will. She was correct, of course. The Defenders were valiant warriors, rampant with heart and vigor, but they could never hope to prevail in a battle against such odds – at least, not by conventional means.
Hellcat smiled a deep, red smile.
“Oh, my dear,” she purred. “We’re not attempting to beat you. We’re attempting to distract you.”
Satana’s newly reformed eyes flickered with doubt. “Distract? From what?”
“From me.”
The voice came from above. A man’s voice. Satana looked up, as did as her demonkin, and as did Hellcat, Blade and Valkyrie – three Defenders. And they were staring now at a fourth.
Stefan Strang, otherwise known as Doctor Strange, was floating in the air directly overhead, wrapped in a cloak and silken black shadow. He extended his hands, hands which didn’t truly exist unless sheathed in his enchanted gloves of gold and silver, and black runes cavorted wildly upon his out-turned palms.
“No!” Satana cried. “You were killed! Mordo reported you dead!”
Strange arched an eyebrow. “Well,” he said, “there’s dead and then there’s dead. And then there’s what’s about to happen to you. And, bitch, that is a thousand times worse than anything you could ever conceive of – and it’s exactly what you deserve.”
Satana moved to react, but it was already too late.
The runes danced, Strange began to murmur…
…and then, in a heartbeat, the spell was cast.
# # # # # # # # # #
Dormammu was brooding as he wandered among the blood-drained carcasses of villagers dangling from the ceilings of the castle corridors on the ends of iron hooks. So deep in thought was he that he neglected to notice a telltale frisson in the ether until it was too late – and by the time he roused to action there were already cries of alarm echoing throughout the castle. The ghostly blue flames that sparked at his throat now flared with his rage.
The Ancient’s disciples were on the offensive. Satana had failed.
And now the entire Cabal would pay the price…
# # # # # # # # # #
In the grounds of Baron Mordo’s ancestral castle, Varnae, the lord of vampires, was the first to vanish. One moment he was slicing open the belly of a pregnant wench with cruel fingers and drinking the blood of her unborn child as the mother screamed, the next he was fading, fading… and then gone.
The Tatterdemalion, prince of nightmares, was next. He was roaming further afield, twisting the dreams of peasants and animals alike into black, tuberous knots and feasting on imagined fears so acute that they cajoled hearts to bursting and spinal cords to warp until they snapped. In the space between one of those engorged heartbeats and another the nightmares vanished, and victims for a mile in all directions awoke in their beds of tangled, soiled sheets and in burrows and nests, still shrieking with their own dark memories.
Then it was the turn of Morganna Le Fay of the Faerie Realms, snared in the act of directing her dark imps to strangling young children with their own hair and carelessly extracting their teeth with spoons. The imps and the pixies and the elves and the boggarts, each and every one disappeared in a shower of black sparkles, swiftly followed by their mistress. And so, in the end, only Dormammu remained.
For a moment or two, no more.
And then he too was hauled from the Earthly realm like an alley cat by the stub of its tail, pulled out into the dark and icy soundlessness of –
# # # # # # # # # #
The Void.
Doctor Strange rose in the black, arms outstretched, his expression one of fierce concentration and no little anger. Before him loomed the monstrous behemoth that was Shuma-Gorath, a bloated mass of gangrenous green rubber and scale-flesh, its body comprised of a thousand slithering tentacles of diverse length and thickness. Each tentacle ended in a cluster of eyes, a central eyeball in every instance surrounded by twelve others, the pupils of which were split with needle-sharp teeth. These mouths snapped and chewed and whistled with hunger and the tendrils writhed with lust.
But it was trapped. Chained by the ruby rings of Strange’s magic – and also by the fact that, during an earlier encounter with the Defenders, the beast had been named.
Doctor Strange stared out into The Void. This was the linkspace between geographical locations on Earth – thus allowing travelers to journey from Greenwich, London to Switzerland, say, in no time at all – but it was also the conduit between Earth and the other places, the surrounding dominions from which the threat of the Cabal had originated. Strange observed apertures in the blackness now – doorways, or thresholds to be more precise – and he could discern the flickering of manifestation, spirit-stuff, passing through these gateways in a flurry of movement. The Void had become a waystation, helped no doubt by the captivity of its guardian. Strange looked back to Shuma-Gorath and opened the palms of his hands, along the silver runes to dance.
“We named you,” he said. “Now I remove that name, and in doing so I set you free. Free to revenge yourself, and free to feed.”
“What are you doing?”
Strange turned at the sound of Patsy Walker’s voice and cast her a faint smile. “Not entirely sure,” he said, breezily, “but probably something stupid.”
“Some things don’t change, then.”
“No.”
Strange grimaced, his eyes guarded. “I don’t know what you did,” he murmured. “To bring me back, I mean. I know I was dead – I was - but then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t any more. And that place I woke up too, the wasteland and the blood-red skies… well, it wasn’t Geneva or London, I know that much. Maybe Birmingham. So, yeah, all in all I can make some kind of guess. But - ”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. It does. Because it’s cost you something, I can see that. And you didn’t need to do that, not for me.”
Hellcat smiled, her eyes the color of smoke and absinthe. “I did it for the world,” she purred. Strange nodded.
“I know. And that’s what I’m doing too. But, before the line’s crossed, and for what it’s worth… I just wanted to say thank you.”
He leaned forward then, curling one of his gloved hands about the back of Patricia’s neck and threading his fingers through her cherry red hair as he pulled her head towards him and into a gentle kiss. There was no spark of instant desire between them, no erotic tremor, no moment of revelation. They’d both lost so much, and they both knew what was ahead of them. It just seemed appropriate, what with this being the ending of things.
Beyond Strange and Hellcat, also drifting in the blackness of The Void, Blade and Valkyrie exchanged glances.
“Just so you know,” Valkyrie told her companion, “I’m not going to be getting romantic in front of a gigantic green extradimensional fiend covered in eyes and teeth.”
Blade shrugged. “Wouldn’t expect it.”
“Right.”
“Yep.”
Valkyrie scowled. Then she sniffed. “Then again,” she sighed, “all things considered, I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the - ”
But it was. Because that was when Doctor Strange glimpsed their enemies advancing upon them through the liquid shadow and he knew that their time was up. Releasing himself from Hellcat’s soft embrace he turned back to Shuma-Gorath and spoke the single word of his prepared incantation.
Unnamed.
And that was the beginning of the end…
# # # # # # # # # #
It was dusk, and the advent of night was a riot of blood and pain and death.
There was a valley, and in the heart of the valley there was a forest, and in the center of the forest there was a citadel. The earth here was an enchanted thing, the soil and iron steeped in a magic more ancient than any human mind could comprehend, and the cool evening air was alight with a sorcerous glow. This was the home of the faerie folk, myriad clans of winged magicklings in their many forms, and those faeriebreed birthed in darkness had always been soulbound to their beloved WitchQueen, Morganna Le Fay. In recent times these shadowkind had happily feasted upon the potential for happiness that existed inside the human spirit, their gluttony nourished by Morganna herself as she strode the human world. But now everything had changed.
Morganna was home, the link to Earth was broken, and now the evil faeries were no longer the predators – they were the prey.
The WitchQueen staggered along a thorn-encrusted path as the ground shook beneath her, gathering her skirts with one hand whilst cradling her mask – a white faceplate upon a stick, blank save for the occasional winking of a black eye or infrequent, blood smile – in the other. She ignored the plaintive screams of her bloodlings, concentrating instead on outrunning the beast that was consuming them.
The tentacles of the Unnamed, now free and seeking retribution against those that had transgressed The Void, were slithering out of the forests like emerald snakes and devouring every living thing in sight. These tendrils were also spilling out of holes in the night sky, through the fabric of this reality itself, and it was all Morganna could do to remain one step ahead of her foe. She wasn’t downcast, however. This was a setback, nothing more.
The Cabal had been summoned back to their own splinter realms from Earth against their will, but no counter-magic – that of The Ancient, or his disciples – could achieve anything more than a brief delay to the demons’ overall plan. This was a desperate, last ditch ploy, nothing more. Morganna would repair her world and seal the Guardian beyond the threshold once more, then return to Earth via a new Manifestation and –
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Morganna heard the female voice at her shoulder. Despite the presence of those infernal tentacles she paused and turned towards her adversary: a young woman, barely more than a girl, tall and slender with broad shoulders and snow-blonde hair, dressed in an elegant outfit of black and midnight blue. Samantha Parrington’s cloak rustled in the evening breeze and her eyes burned bright in the shadows. In her hands she held her enchanted sword, Dragonfang. In this world, even more then Earth, that nigh-invisible blade glittered with lethal intent.
“You’re thinking that this is just a hitch,” Valkyrie said, with a wistful smile. “That it’ll be no time at all before you can try again. But you’re wrong. The Earth is not your feasting ground, witch of the fens, for you nor your goblins. It has Defenders.”
Morganna reared up, the mouth on her white mask twisting into a howl of rage and dripping tears of blood.
“You come here?” she hissed. “Here, to my realm? Know, girl, that such a transgression is intolerable and shall end in your eternal misery. There’s no way back to your world from here unless I will it, do you understand? You - ”
“I’m trapped here, yes. With you.” Valkyrie’s eyes sparked with momentary sadness. But then she flexed her wrist and Dragonfang sang like a golden harp sounding the first light of daybreak. “But I rather think The Ancient was aware of the sacrifices we’d each of us would have to make. Perhaps that’s why he chose us, four outcasts with no real future. We were lost, but now we’re found, forged in fire and with a holy purpose. And we’ll never stop fighting you. Do you see?
“The defense begins here.”
And with that Valkyrie lunged forward, feinting to her left and then shifting her balance and sweeping her blade down to the right, just as Morganna read her enemy’s attack and coiled to meet her with outstretched hand already broiling with a magical counter.
The two women clashed, and the sound of steel against sorcery rang out through the dusk and the trees. Perhaps the pixies and the goblins heard it and paused in their final moments before the tentacles of the Unnamed curled about them and swallowed their heads and burst their ribs out through their backs.
What’s certain is that the battle continued thereafter.
And it shows no signs of ending.
# # # # # # # # # #
In the stygian murk of the Seven Realms of Night, a patchwork of overlapping dimensional planes where sunlight was held in check by a complex process of cogs and mirrors and plaited ropes of salted human flesh, the Nosferatu had returned to their regulated bloodfarms after being unceremoniously banished from Earth. It was obscene that, after being allowed to gorge themselves upon free-range stock and being promised unlimited supply of the same, they were now forced to scrabble for their place at the trough once more. They’d been content with these limbless human torsos – bloodbags, grown from genetically engineered embryos placed into ironmoulds and cultivated solely for the sustenance of the vampire drones – for hundreds of thousands of years, but now they’d had a taste of real human blood, as enjoyed by their master, they wanted more.
Varnae, King of the Nosferatu, knew that he had a potential revolt at hand. Fortunately he also knew that this setback was only temporary.
“The path to Earth shall be re-established,” the master hissed, addressing his milling underlings from atop a black obelisk at the heart of one of the principal bloodfields. “I request your patience. And if you will not give that willingly, I shall order it extracted from you, yes?”
Flash-flash-flash.
The vampires flocked and skittered, agitated beyond measure. They were hungry and frustrated, they could hear a constant battering of… of something… beyond the edges of their realms, and they occasionally glimpsed sight of eyes and mouths and tentacles beyond the constantly revolving mirrors. It was the Nosferatu’s nature to be capricious, even in the thrall of their lord, and –
“You’re not getting back to Earth. Ever. Because this is where the filth and the darkness stems from, like some dimensional cesspool, and I’m on hand to make sure it stays here.”
Varnae looked up at the sound of the stranger’s voice, and below him his vampire legions shrieked in ungodly chorus. Eric Brooks, the man known as Blade, stared down at his enemies from his perch high above, in the crux of the great and infernal machine that powered these shadowed realms.
“You dare…?”
Blade regarded Varnae with contempt, this withered old husk of a vampire with his bald head and chalk white skin and scarecrow limbs, and then he cricked his neck and cracked his knuckles.
“What?” he snarled. “You think my friend Strange would cast his magick shtick to eject you from Earth and then sit back and let you Manifest all over again, or whatever the hell it is you blood-drinking dreck do? You fucking son of a cock.”
Varnae’s black eyes flared wide. Blade grimaced. He always got a potty mouth around vampires, an unfortunate side-effect of absorbing their latent powers whenever he was in their presence. He’d thought it was just Deacon Frost who cussed like a sailor, but apparently it was all of them. Or maybe all this just brought out the inner demons of Eric Brooks. He grinned ruefully. Whatever. Truth is as truth does: Varnae was a son of a cock.
“We shall kill you slowly, man of the cross,” Varnae seethed.
Blade touched his fingers to the silver crucifix at his throat, the mystic artifact gifted to him by The Ancient and which now glowed with inner power. He sighed, then clenched his fists and glanced up to where the cogs and mirrors of the Nosferatu machine toiled overhead.
“Yeah, well,” he murmured. “No offense, but I was planning something a bit more immediate.”
The vampires rose into the air as one, an erupting mass of fang and claw and leathery wing, and they were fast – but not fast enough. Blade thrust up both arms before the pack could engulf him, his hands transformed into lethal weapons by the energies coursing through him; however, whereas he’d used those hands upon the undead themselves in the past, he now employed them in the destruction of their world.
There was a shrieking cacophony of ruined metal and ruptured hide, followed by the splintering of black glass – and then, through the holes Blade had punched through the mechanized fabric of the Nosferatu’s realm, there spilled a thick, golden light like drizzling honey, bathing the vampire throng. For a moment there was no reaction, the beasts frozen in disbelief… but then a violent chemical response took hold, the Nosferatu burning and withering and screaming as the light melted away their colorless flesh and boiled their eyes in their sockets and their black tongues in their throats.
Varnae, Lord of the Undead, recoiled aghast.
“Not sunlight as such,” Blade murmured, ripping away more slivers of metal and glass. “Not in the Earthly sense. This is worse. This is the light of the universe beyond your world, the light shunned by both your dimension and the Void, the light you’ve worked so hard to repel. And it’s going to scour every last stinking one of you from existence.”
Varnae’s midnight eyes shriveled as he stared up at the man who had annihilated his people. “Then you die too,” he breathed, uncomprehending. “Here in our realm, absorbing our inhuman nature into your own… you’ve damned yourself as much as us.”
Smoke was beginning to rise from the blistering skin on the back of Blade’s hands. Eric Brooks scowled, his eyes sad as he looked away, out past a ceiling of mangled cogs and into the swelling light of a reality he’d never return to.
“I got the impression that was part of the deal,” he said, softly. “That’s why we were chosen. For me, this isn’t sacrifice or duty. It’s redemption.”
And then, in the next instant, the ruptures in the synthetic sky tore wide and light cascaded down in a glittering flood, and with one last, plaintive cry, the vampire legion was no more.
And in that final moment, before he too was consumed in the conflagration, Eric smiled.
# # # # # # # # # #
In the realm of Nightmares, the creature known as The Tatterdemalion to some – or perhaps The Boogeyman or The Shadowman or The Sandman or He Who Lurks, or any other name from a thousand such titles – stalked the stone parapet of a twisted castle made of petrified cerebellum, his cloak of fetid colors trailing behind him like a diseased rainbow. He stared down from beneath a hooked cowl as he leaned out over the edge of the nearest crenellation, and the sight that greeted him was horrendous indeed. Nightmarish, one might say.
The tower was as tall as Tatterdemalion could imagine it - one hundred feet, one thousand, one million – but as quickly as it stretched up into clouds the hue of mental hospitals so the darkness that gathered down there resolutely scaled the walls on a multitude of legs and tails and blood-licked bodyparts, in pursuit of their master. Spiders and centipedes, sharks and lions, ghosts and fire and old, abandoned cellars and loneliness and dead children and eight-fingered hands and cancer and crocodiles and needles and discovered secrets and razor blades and guilt.
In the human world, everyone had either awoken or was now sleeping soundly and peacefully. In a single instant, the nightmares had been exiled. And here they were in their immeasurable numbers, back in the pit where they’d been birthed and nurtured by the Tatterdemalion’s decaying hand. Their parent, their love. They were scared, these infinite, immutable, crawling things, and they wanted reassurance.
The tower grew and grew, but the nightmares were gaining. The Tatterdemalion was, for perhaps the first time in his ancient existence, rather concerned.
“Anxiety dreams,” a woman’s voice purred. “I was never partial to them, personally. But don’t let me distract you from the experience.”
The Tatterdemalion turned to see Patricia Walker, the Hellcat, standing alongside him upon the crooked battlements. He cocked his head, a scarecrow of filth and obscene odors. Hellcat wrinkled her nose.
You can’t exist here, the Tatterdemalion said without words, insinuating himself into his adversary’s head. You should be paralyzed with fear, your tiny brain bleeding out when faced with such horror.
“And yet, here I am. Moving freely. Shooting the breeze. I could use a pair of noseplugs, true, and maybe a handkerchief, but I’ll make do. Interesting, isn’t it?”
The Tatterdemalion stared up at the sky. Out there, in the delirium, the moon was licking salt and rust off its lips and hungering for more. It was scrutinizing the ever-rising tower with an avid gleam in its button eyes. The Tatterdemalion instinctively slowed his ascent, but that just allowed the flies and snakes and everything else to begin to swarm through the cracks in the flagstones beneath his rotting moccasins.
This is my world, he wailed, as he was consumed. It isn’t behaving! It’s not fair!
Hellcat’s eyes narrowed. “You’re just a child, aren’t you?” she murmured. “In the surrealist possible sense, but it’s true. Stands to reason, I guess. Only a childish mind could conceive of the horrors you’ve reared here like pets. But don’t think I’m going to show you any mercy because of that.”
The Tatterdemalion’s ragged trousers began to vanish beneath a swarm of baby tarantulas, and a faceless pink husk attached itself to his back and began to infect him with thin tendrils of poisonous silk. Beneath the shadowlord’s cowl, silver eyes suddenly flared bright with fear.
Is this what it’s like? he mewled. The panic. Being unable to move, unable to get away…
“Your first nightmare?” Hellcat asked. “I’d settle in, if I were you. Because some bad dreams you never wake up from.”
And then she turned away as her enemy vanished completely beneath the dark extremities of his own imaginings. Her green eyes were lowered and glimmering with tears, but not for the benefit of the accursed Tatterdemalion. These tears were for her friends, now lost. For Jacques. For her mother. And for herself.
Behind her, the nightmares swelled. They were coming for her. But they couldn’t have her. She belonged to another. That was her pledge.
There was a flicker of red light tinged with the stench of sulphur and desolation, and then a slender aperture appeared in the fabric of the dreamscape. Beyond lay damnation.
Patricia Walker breathed deeply as she thought of her father, waiting on the other side of the rift to accept her into the family after all these years, as she’d promised in exchange for bringing Stefan Strang back to life and thus enabling him to save the world. Then, however, she thought of The Ancient, and her eyes darkened to black smoke.
“Fuck you, old man,” she hissed. “In your own way you’re even worse than the monsters you recruited us to fight, or the beast that roasted my mother to death from the inside out. Because at least they weren’t pretending.”
And then she stepped forward, onto the path of fire, and it was done.
# # # # # # # # # #
“It’s done,” said Stefan Strang, floating through the darkness of The Void in the shadow of Dormammu, Emperor of the Eternal Dread. “That’s the last of them. It’s just us now. There ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”
Dormammu spiraled in the black, flames cavorting in the stump of his neck. “What?”
“There ain’t nobody here but us chickens. It’s an old swing classic,” Strange explained. “Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, 1946. Later popularized in the 90s musical Five Guys Named Moe, and paraphrased by Bugs Bunny in - ”
Dormammu reached out and attempted to circle the Doctor’s throat with one clawed hand, to dispatch him just as he’d disposed of Karloff Mordo back on Earth… but he was immediately knocked back by a slithering tentacle encrusted with eyes. Doctor Strange grinned and wagged an imaginary cigar.
“Just making conversation, doc.”
Dormammu shuddered as the enormous bulk of the behemoth, Shuma-Gorath, swelled behind him. He didn’t turn to stare upon that repulsive mass of seething tendrils; he didn’t need to. He was already all too familiar with the guardian of The Void, and he knew what fate the creature planned to visit upon him.
“For a damned soul you seem in remarkable humor,” Dormammu hissed. “Understandable. Human sanity can only endeavor to comprehend so much outside its sphere before perishing.”
“Madness is in the eye of the beholder,” Strange countered. “Well, many eyes in this case. But I think you’ll find that the appropriate term in this instance is gallows humor. What with us being about to die and all.”
“The Emperor of the Eternal Dread cannot die, Doctor, any more than the other members of The Cabal. You think them destroyed, my comrades? Varnae and his children will rise again from ashes, Morganna shall eventually prevail over her enemy’s blade, The Tatterdemalion will seed in some new nightmare… for we are immortal. Everlasting. The existence of you humans and other races such as yourselves across the dimensional strata necessitate it. So long as you fear, and lust, and dream…”
“You’ll be there to feed upon it.”
Doctor Strange grimaced, thinking of Blade and also of his other companions. “And you,” he said, quietly. “You’ll survive what’s about to happen, won’t you? I’ll die, because I’m mortal, but you’ll persist in some state or other. Because this, The Void… your domain is close to the fringe of all this, isn’t it? Maybe even some facet of it. The Eternal Dread.”
Dormammu said nothing. And now Strange smiled again, although his eyes reflected the sadness that afflicted his heart.
“You’ll Manifest again. There’ll be another Mordo, one day. But The Ancient’s still out there, isn’t he? He’ll be planning already, preparing for his next set of Defenders, be it fifty years from now, or a hundred, or a thousand. Last time you got the drop on him, had him imprisoned – because that’s the best you could do. You couldn’t kill him, any more than we can kill you. You just get to play your games of supernatural chess with us humans as pawns. But despite everything he still beat you, through us.”
“Not wholly insane, then,” Dormammu murmured. “Merely enlightened. But was it worth it?”
Strange frowned. “Of course it was.”
“Truly? Your own death, the deaths – or worse, exile – of your friends, the desecration of your lover, Clea. All for what? The continued propagation of humanity? How noble a species, devoted to pillaging your planet’s resources and visiting war upon one another in the name of government and spiritual faith, partial to the relentless butchery of all organisms including yourselves, to the torture and debasement of your own young, to mass victimization and abandonment. Us monsters, we don’t cause your misery, we simply take advantage of it and feed upon it.
“We shall return because the bloodshed and pain your kind revels in will give us the strength to do so. Surely, Doctor, the worth of a Defender equates only to what he or she is defending? You think yourselves heroes and us, the enemy, as the devils at your gate, because it suits you to do so. The truth is far less palatable.
“Enjoy your brief moment of triumph, Defender of mankind. How proud you must be.”
Dormammu turned away then, and gave himself to the waiting attentions of Shuma-Gorath. Strange looked on, his eyes as pale as glass. He’d believed that he’d engineered some kind of victory, by using his magicks to expel the various members of The Cabal from Earth back to their own dimensions and then sealing the thresholds, and by unleashing the guardian of The Void upon those that had transgressed its non-realm. He believed that his friends’ sacrifice had been worthwhile, watching them give their lives – or their souls – to deny their enemies, to render them dissipated or devoured. To protect the Earth.
But in his mind’s eye, Stefan Strange could still see the people of his planet, a race no longer overtly plagued by the manipulations of The Cabal. There were still atrocities being committed, on a national scale in full view of the public eye or in the rank secrecy of familial homes; there was still rape, still murder both senseless and premeditated, still corporate machinations designed to perpetuate the misery of poverty and squalor and to accelerate the geological distress of the world itself.
Today, in that instant, there were no otherworldly monsters to feed on the proliferation of human sin. But the sin carried on regardless.
This was no victory.
Shuma-Gorath consumed Dormammu, and then Doctor Strange, who had cast his final enchantment to seal the breach between Earth and The Void when banishing the Cabal, thus dooming himself to his ultimate fate. The guardian would digest its meal slowly, and the suffering of those souls in what constituted the behemoth’s belly would be great. Dormammu, eventually, would return. Stefan Strang would not.
That was simply the way of things.
Sometimes there are no happy endings.
# # # # # # # # # #
In Greenwich, London, the mysterious old man known only as The Ancient emerged from the shadowed depths of his Sanctum Sanctorum on a day of bright sunshine and took a seat on a park bench to watch the world go by. He observed schoolchildren, pretty women in spring skirts, businessmen buoyed by some successful financial deal or other, artists at work down by the river, and the effortless joy of dogs. He resolutely ignored the homeless man with the bottle of gin and the knife in his pocket who was hunkered down under the bridge, and the bespectacled gentleman taking a lunchtime stroll past the Greenwich Observatory who would, in the early hours of the following morning, befriend a drunken young mother named Mary and then strangle her to death in her bedroom, in front of her two crying daughters, before transporting her corpse out to Whitechapel in the trunk of his car and arranging her internal organs on the steps of a respected art gallery, all because he believed himself to be the descendant of Jack The Ripper.
And there would be more. There always was.
The Ancient had tasked himself to protect humanity, not to judge it. He was sure that Stefan and the others would have understood that.
The old man folded his hands in the lap of his olive green cloak, after patting his pockets and being comforted by the feel of the four magical artifacts that had returned to his possession upon the demise of their most recent owners. He took a deep breath and smiled, satisfied. All he needed to do now was wait, for however long that turned out to be, until he – and those artifacts - were needed again.
THE END
To look upon Dormammu, Emperor of the Eternal Dread, was to stare into the deepest, darkest abyss. This form he had adopted in the mortal world was mostly unremarkable – an unassuming body, clad in a suit of indigo and black silk – but in place of a man’s head there was only a swirl of mist and shadow and reflected light, like the glitter of dying stars as they were consumed by the whorl of a black hole. The Dread itself, a dimension of darkness and despair that no mind could truly comprehend and no heart could endure.
But Baron Karloff Amadeus Mordo knew despair all too well, and he was already insane. The Dread held no more terror for him than his present cursed existence.
“The first Order of the Faltine were destroyed, yes,” Mordo hissed. “But at the cost of one of them. A Defender fallen, the most potent of them, leaving the rest weary and forlorn. Gift me more flames of the Faltine and I shall raise a second Order with which to destroy the remaining - ”
Dormammu stretched out a languid arm and encircled Mordo’s throat with black-gloved fingers. Unaccustomed to any of his masters interacting with him in such physical fashion, and misguidedly convinced of his own worth, Mordo did not struggle. It was the last mistake he would ever make.
“You believe the potency of the flames to be infinite?” Dormammu breathed. “The conceit of fleshlings never ceases to astound me. We did not expect you to defeat our enemies for us, Mordo, merely to render them susceptible to our inevitable attack – and, more crucially, to separate them from the influence of The Ancient. To your credit, you achieved such a feat with surprising aplomb. But in turn you have damaged our grander schemes…”
Mordo’s expression clouded with confusion as Dormammu hoisted him effortlessly off his feet. Then bewilderment gave way to the first signs of panic as the dark lord began to transport him by the throat across the chamber where their exchange was taking place.
The five members of the Cabal were all present here, in the blood and shadows of the 9th Century castle on the outskirts of Curtea de Arges, in the Carpathian wilderness of Romania. This was where the Manifestation had occurred, where the flesh sacrifices overseen by Mordo had allowed Dormammu to take form along with his otherworldly companions: The Tatterdemalion, Satana Blackheart, Varnae and Morganna Le Fay. These haunted halls of stone and soot, soaked through with innocent blood, were now also tainted with the palpable evil of the creatures that called this place home.
There was a well at the center of the great hall and the blackness that rippled over the well’s edge and lapped at Dormammu’s feet was a living, hungering thing. Mordo could hear it, softly screaming his name. His mother, his wife, his children. All dead. All done there, in the black.
“No,” he said, tears brimming in his eyes. The first tears he’d shed since slaughtering his family in their beds. “No, please. I’ve served you, I’ve done everything you asked. I - ”
But in the end, just before Dormammu cast him out into the shrieking shadow, there was a moment of clarity in his heart and an accompanying voice in his brain. The voice said, Yes. Because this is what you deserve. And it was true.
Dormammu of the Dread watched Karloff Amadeus Mordo sink from view, dragged down into the stygian well, into the same darkness that stripped his flesh from his bones with invisible teeth, then turned upon his fellow demons. Satana Blackheart in particular warranted Dormammu’s attention, for her connection with the situation they now faced was all too plain.
“The remaining Defenders seek to aid their fallen comrade,” Dormammu snarled. “And the method they’ve chosen is… unexpected. The Ancient is a formidable foe, but old and frail. With him as their benefactor, the eventual destruction of the Defenders was guaranteed. But now…”
Satana inclined her head, her hair cascading about her beautiful and terrible face in strings of burnished gold and the rosy red of virgin’s blood. Her eyes burned bright, but were edged with fear.
“I know what you want of me,” she said, quietly. “There’s no other way?”
“None.”
Satana bowed her head.
“So be it then,” she whispered. “Henceforth, the Priestess of the Hellbound Islands… shall return to her place of birth.”
MARVEL 2000 PRESENTS
"CULMINATION"
Written by Meriades Rai
“I hope you understand, as a religious man I’m finding this all really difficult to deal with.”
Patricia Walker, the woman otherwise known as Hellcat, glanced up at the man who’d spoken. Eric Brooks, known as Blade, was standing on the cusp of a crag of blood red cliff – literally blood red, such a dark and shining scarlet that it made one nauseous to even look upon it – and was gazing out over a similarly hued landscape of twisted rock formations fractured with rivers of oil and lava that stretched out as far as the eye could see. He didn’t appear happy. Hardly surprising, really.
“All folklore has origin in some manner of truth,” Hellcat said. “Even more so in the case of latter-day mythological amalgam, such as Christianity and The Bible.”
“Are you trying to be insulting?”
“No more than usual.”
“Which would be a yes, then.”
Hellcat grimaced. “I’m not fishing for a theological debate, Eric. I’ve got more important things to occupy myself with, in case you’d forgotten. Suffice to say that the realm we’re currently standing in bears only superficial relation to your Biblical Hell, which is itself a modern adaptation of the Tartarus of Greece and the afterlife imagery of Ancient Egypt, among many others. This place is the reality that influenced those later interpretations, and the idiom Hellbound Islands doesn’t imply any specific connotation, it’s simply the closest translation in modern English.”
“But, in basic terms, this is another world,” Blade persisted. “A world of fire and brimstone.”
“A pocket dimension, to be precise,” Hellcat corrected. “One of thousands, millions, but one often glimpsed throughout the history of humankind through dreams and waking visions, and therefore uncannily familiar.”
“And not just fire, right?” another voice said. “I mean, there’s ice here too. And desert. And shadow. Because it’s a wasteland.”
This was the third member of the Defenders who now spoke. Samantha Parrington, otherwise known as Valkyrie, was standing a little way apart from her companions, further down the cliff path they’d been traveling for what seemed like days but which was likely only an hour, if such things as time even existed in this infernal dominion. Blade and Hellcat both looked towards her. Hellcat’s smoky green eyes were narrowed.
“That’s as good a summation as any,” she murmured. Valkyrie continued to stare out over the bleak landscape, her expression alarmingly serene beneath her frost-blonde fringe.
“It’s almost beautiful,” she said, quietly. “In the same way as some places on Earth, I mean. Those remote regions captured in satellite imagery, you know? The Australian Outback, New Mexico, Antarctica… even the pictures sent back from missions to Mars. If you could just look at it, it would be enchanting. But being here, that’s what steals the splendor away. Because the air tastes like pain and rust, and it stings the skin. Because it’s a scoured wilderness where nothing grows and nothing could ever survive. No grass, no trees, no fresh water, no birds, no animals. And because you feel on the verge of loneliness and despair with every breath, and because the weight presses in on your heart like gravity gone wrong…”
Hellcat’s gaze softened. She shifted uncomfortably, feeling Blade’s accusing eyes on the back of her neck.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For bringing you here. I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“There was nothing any of us could have done,” Valkyrie said, simply. “It is what it is.” She hefted her magical sword Dragonfang against her slight shoulder and then turned and smiled, a smile so emotionless that, despite the prettiness of her features, was as chilling in its own way as the lifeless terrain around them.
“Were you born here?” she asked Hellcat, with careless indifference. The other woman flinched, then bowed her head.
“Born of here,” she muttered. “For all the difference that makes…”
# # # # # # # # # #
Just as the dimension of the Hellbound Islands was not Hell so the entity that the Defenders had traveled to meet here was not Satan. Hellcat would have debated the matter with Blade at some other place and time, but here and now she was understandably disinclined to do so, as was he. It was enough that they knew they’d been granted audience with the beast that had inspired tales of The Devil in so many cultural incarnations over the centuries; it was enough that, when they laid eyes upon his towering form of smoke and bone and darkness, rising from his smoldering pit, that they were cowed, and that even Valkyrie’s preternatural composure began to crack.
“Father,” said Hellcat, in a tongue that her two companions couldn’t comprehend. “I come, as promised.”
The beast lowered its approximation of a head, and something like distant eyes burned beyond a misty haze.
There were times when mortals dreamed of this terrible place, their spirits dislocating from their biological shells and wandering the narrow corridors between worlds through no true design or intent. It was just misfortune that carried them here upon breathless winds; that, and the intangible summons of those creatures that dwelt within the Islands, calling out through hunger or the need to administer cruelty. It wasn’t the souls of the damned or the dead that toiled in these fiery pits, it was the shades of those ill-fated rovers. The Hellbound didn’t punish for the sake of sin, for they didn’t recognize the mortal concepts of good and evil.
Patricia Walker’s mother had been neither sinner nor saint when she’d dreamed of the darkness one summer’s night many years ago. The darkness, and the beast inside it. A day later the woman had emerged from a sudden and inexplicable fever with a black seed sown inside her. Nine months after that she’d given birth to a girl, Patricia. She’d planned to gut the child with a breadknife and bury the remains in a plastic bag in the consecrated grounds of the local church, but gathering the babe to her breast she’d known instantly that she could never commit such an act, regardless of the reality of her conception.
And so the woman had raised her girl, and for six years she’d managed to convince herself that she’d imagined her dreams on that night long before. But then the darkness had come for her without warning, the beast reaching out through her soul and setting it alight from within. Spontaneous combustion, originating in the base of the woman’s brain and traveling the length of her body over a period of minutes, roasting her from the inside out so that in those final, terrible moments she was a sack of slowly blackened flesh with an inferno barely sheathed within, belching black smoke like an engine from her eyes and mouth and from tiny lacerations in her skin.
All because The Devil had been at a loose end.
Six years old, Patricia had cowered in the corner of the room and watched her mother burn and die. She’d heard her father’s laughter then, the creature that had sired her and which had returned to mock her and impress its power upon her. And then it was gone, back to its own world, leaving Patricia alone with a spitting corpse that glowed like coals in a black hearth.
The medics had attended, so too the police, and when the charred body had been ferried away there was just a chalk outline on wooden floorboards left to show where her mother had fallen.
Ten years later, Patricia Walker had breathed fire for the first time when three men had pulled up alongside her in the street in a blue van with blacked out windows and attempted to drag her inside. Patricia had roasted two of them alive, just as the beast had killed her mother, and had disemboweled the other with the black claws she’d grown from the tips of her fingers. Genetic gifts from her father, the devil from another world, symbolic of the Infernatra – the Hellcats – that patrolled the wastes of the Hellbound Isles.
Unlike her fellow Defenders, Patricia’s powers hadn’t been awakened by the magical artifact presented to her by the mysterious man known as The Ancient. Stefan Strang’s mystic prowess had been spurred by his gloves, Blade’s physiology had been augmented by his crucifix and Samantha’s transformation to Valkyrie had been inspired by the hilt of an enchanted sword. In contrast, Patricia had already possessed her supernatural faculties. The malachite ring on the middle finger of her gloved right hand had been gifted with a different purpose in mind.
Perhaps The Ancient had known all along it would come to this.
A short while earlier, Doctor Strange had fallen in battle with Baron Mordo’s Order of the Faltine. In response, Hellcat had reluctantly accepted the true function of her ring and had used it to slide back the curtain between the mortal world and the realm of the Hellbound, establishing a soul link between her and her father’s dominion and allowing her and her companions to traverse the corridor between dimensions. And now, here they were.
“I need something from you,” Hellcat told her father. “If you require payment for services rendered then you can name your price. I don’t care. But I feel obliged to point out that, considering you violated my mother’s spirit and then burned her to death in front of me and sentenced me to a childhood of state orphanages… you do probably owe me a favor, yes?”
# # # # # # # # # #
The man known as The Ancient sat, cross-legged, upon the ceiling of his parlor. Which isn’t to say that he was suspended upside-down, but rather than the parlor itself – along with much of the house it was a part of – had become inverted at some point when no one had been paying attention.
The Sanctum Sanctorum in Greenwich, London, was like that. His Defenders had found it all quite disconcerting, understandably, but The Ancient was used to operating within this realm of conundrum. In truth it hadn’t even occurred to him that he was upside-down, because all his attention was focused on the door in front of him.
Today the door was made of bamboo twined with the durable vines of the sapodilla tree rather than oak fortified with iron and rivets, or of an intricate fusion of quartz and marble, but it was still The Door. The door to The Void. Not so long ago, Stefan Strang and his companions had crossed the threshold and traveled The Void to Switzerland in a plan to rescue Strang’s onetime lover Clea Balsamo from some terrible fate, a fate that, tragically, had not been destined to be averted. They’d undertaken this mission without their mentor’s approval, or even deigning to mention it to him, believing that he would refuse their request.
The Ancient almost smiled, albeit a smile born in sadness. These humans. So reckless, so self-indulgent. So predictable.
This was how The Ancient had foreseen events, or at least it was one of a number of possible outcomes, none of which had been destined to end pleasantly. But what must be must be.
And it was time now. Time for the ending.
The Ancient made a gesture, as much with his mind as with his hand, and The Door – now constructed of ivory beads and alligator hide – opened slowly and with an aged creak. The darkness of The Void stretched out beyond, an infinite expanse of black blemished only by the distant form of the tentacled god, Shuma-Gorath, still tethered by a chain of ruby rings since its recent encounter with Doctor Strange. A thousand eyes blinked open and balefully regarded The Ancient, just as a thousand mouths began to salivate.
“Soon now, old friend,” The Ancient whispered. “Soon…”
# # # # # # # # # #
The desolate atmosphere of the Hellbound Isles, as observed by the Defenders, was deceptive. There were creatures inhabiting the hostile wastes, demons typically content to hide away and feast upon the misery of those souls that unwittingly visited their territory but also quick to rouse when summoned. Such a command was now broadcast, stark and cold upon the rust-tinted air, and the beasts emerged from their shadowed nooks and began to swarm in instant response.
At the heart of the rapidly gathering crowd there stood the mistress who had issued that summons: Satana Blackheart, Priestess of the Hellbound. She still wore her human guise, the sensual body of a young female sheathed in nylon gauze and black leather and with a skin of scorched copper and hair of fiery russet and gold. Her long, slender legs ended in cloven hooves. Another of the old devil’s offspring. But, unlike Patricia Walker, she had been birthed and raised here rather than Earth – and because of this she believed her power to be absolute.
She was surprised, therefore, when she crested the rise of a blood red cliff to gaze out upon her father’s kingdom and set eyes instead upon her enemies, advancing to meet her with a steady purpose.
Satana’s eyes narrowed to black wounds.
“I should have annihilated you when I had the chance,” she spat at Hellcat, recalling their recent previous encounter at Chateau Noir, the Burlesque establishment in Soho, London where Patricia had been a performer. Hellcat smiled darkly and flexed her claws.
“Now there’s something we can agree on,” she purred. “Sister.”
Satana snarled and raised her arms high above her head, causing the air to thicken and ripple as she immediately began to gather the otherworldly magicks that permeated her realm. Her demons swelled beyond her, beings of fleshless, red grist and bone and of twisted limb, their misshapen heads punctured with random designs of black eyes and teeth, their backs erupting in skeletal wings. The fiends of the Hellbound Islands.
Hellcat, Blade and Valkyrie looked on, scarcely impressed. Something about their implausible courage caused Satana to hesitate. Dormammu had divined that the Defenders had traveled here in some desperate hope to gain audience with her father, and this was why he’d dispatched Satana to confront them. She hadn’t allowed herself to consider the fact that the arch-devil might actually help these mortal wretches. And yet…
“Perhaps we might skip the posturing threats and move on to the bloodshed?” Valkyrie suggested with a coy pout. “Life is short, after all.”
“For you, perhaps…”
Satana swept out one clawed hand, unleashing splinters of pure, red hate that lashed at her enemy like the stinging barbs of a cat o’ nine tails – but Valkyrie merely angled the nigh-invisible blade of her sword to deflect the deadly kiss of the whip, slicing through energy as surely as through physical matter. Satana screamed and recoiled, experiencing the disruption of her power like a blow. Valkyrie flexed her wrist and Dragonfang’s enchanted blade glittered with a hair’s breadth refraction of red light.
“Now then,” sighed the warrior who was barely more than a girl. “That’s more like it.”
She pushed forward then, shifting her balance left and right and brandishing her weapon with lethal elegance, eviscerating three of Satana’s demon throng before they’d even begun to react. No blood misted the air, for these beasts’ bodies contained no such thing, but they fell back howling and grasping at their wounds nonetheless. Satana whirled towards Valkyrie, reaching out with her other hand, but then another of her foes slid between her and her prey and slammed a fist into the demoness’ gut with such force that she staggered backwards with a breathless grunt and almost fell.
Blade stared on, hissing through gritted teeth.
“Like punching a brick wall,” he snapped. Hellcat drew alongside him and cast him a sly smile.
“Save those deadly weapons you call hands for any vampires you meet,” she said. “And Hellbound demons, of course. I’ve got the goat-lady here covered…”
Satana reared upon her hooves as Hellcat lunged for her, grabbing her half-human adversary about the waist and attempting to rip her in half with sheer, preternatural strength. Patricia was quick, however, and as supple as her feline namesake; she curled lithely in Satana’s grasp and pushed her knees up into the demon mistress’ throat at the same time as straining backwards, forcing Satana’s arms to pop in their shoulder sockets and for her grip to slacken. Hellcat then slashed her rival’s face with one set of black claws and then the other, shredding away strips of copper-hued flesh and perforating one of her victim’s smoldering black eyeballs.
Satana screamed and fell, but before she even sprawled across the red rock beneath her hooves she was engulfed in a wave of green flame, spilling forth from Hellcat’s open mouth. All around, the throng of demons currently pressed into service battling Valkyrie and Blade were momentarily stunned – and, lining the boundaries of the battlefield, other creatures of the Isles looked on as if mesmerized by the sight of their Priestess being challenged so forcefully. There were Infernatra out there, Hellcat knew, among the imps and the eldritch and all the rest. What did they see when they observed her? An envoy, representing their kind? The idea made her ill – almost as much as the knowledge that Satana Blackheart was rising before her, a blackened wraith in the green flames, her eyes dark as dying stars and her fingers hooked into wicked talons.
“You strike well, with the element of surprise on your side,” Satana hissed through the remnants of her face. “But what did you really hope to achieve here? You can’t stand against me and my hordes for long, certainly not long enough to engineer an escape with that magic ring of yours. Look around you, half-breed. Do you see? Do you see that I have thousands of Hellbound ready to attack at my call? We’ll tear you asunder slowly but surely, stripping away ribbons of flesh one by one…”
Even as Satana spoke so she was regenerating, repairing her human guide through force of will. She was correct, of course. The Defenders were valiant warriors, rampant with heart and vigor, but they could never hope to prevail in a battle against such odds – at least, not by conventional means.
Hellcat smiled a deep, red smile.
“Oh, my dear,” she purred. “We’re not attempting to beat you. We’re attempting to distract you.”
Satana’s newly reformed eyes flickered with doubt. “Distract? From what?”
“From me.”
The voice came from above. A man’s voice. Satana looked up, as did as her demonkin, and as did Hellcat, Blade and Valkyrie – three Defenders. And they were staring now at a fourth.
Stefan Strang, otherwise known as Doctor Strange, was floating in the air directly overhead, wrapped in a cloak and silken black shadow. He extended his hands, hands which didn’t truly exist unless sheathed in his enchanted gloves of gold and silver, and black runes cavorted wildly upon his out-turned palms.
“No!” Satana cried. “You were killed! Mordo reported you dead!”
Strange arched an eyebrow. “Well,” he said, “there’s dead and then there’s dead. And then there’s what’s about to happen to you. And, bitch, that is a thousand times worse than anything you could ever conceive of – and it’s exactly what you deserve.”
Satana moved to react, but it was already too late.
The runes danced, Strange began to murmur…
…and then, in a heartbeat, the spell was cast.
# # # # # # # # # #
Dormammu was brooding as he wandered among the blood-drained carcasses of villagers dangling from the ceilings of the castle corridors on the ends of iron hooks. So deep in thought was he that he neglected to notice a telltale frisson in the ether until it was too late – and by the time he roused to action there were already cries of alarm echoing throughout the castle. The ghostly blue flames that sparked at his throat now flared with his rage.
The Ancient’s disciples were on the offensive. Satana had failed.
And now the entire Cabal would pay the price…
# # # # # # # # # #
In the grounds of Baron Mordo’s ancestral castle, Varnae, the lord of vampires, was the first to vanish. One moment he was slicing open the belly of a pregnant wench with cruel fingers and drinking the blood of her unborn child as the mother screamed, the next he was fading, fading… and then gone.
The Tatterdemalion, prince of nightmares, was next. He was roaming further afield, twisting the dreams of peasants and animals alike into black, tuberous knots and feasting on imagined fears so acute that they cajoled hearts to bursting and spinal cords to warp until they snapped. In the space between one of those engorged heartbeats and another the nightmares vanished, and victims for a mile in all directions awoke in their beds of tangled, soiled sheets and in burrows and nests, still shrieking with their own dark memories.
Then it was the turn of Morganna Le Fay of the Faerie Realms, snared in the act of directing her dark imps to strangling young children with their own hair and carelessly extracting their teeth with spoons. The imps and the pixies and the elves and the boggarts, each and every one disappeared in a shower of black sparkles, swiftly followed by their mistress. And so, in the end, only Dormammu remained.
For a moment or two, no more.
And then he too was hauled from the Earthly realm like an alley cat by the stub of its tail, pulled out into the dark and icy soundlessness of –
# # # # # # # # # #
The Void.
Doctor Strange rose in the black, arms outstretched, his expression one of fierce concentration and no little anger. Before him loomed the monstrous behemoth that was Shuma-Gorath, a bloated mass of gangrenous green rubber and scale-flesh, its body comprised of a thousand slithering tentacles of diverse length and thickness. Each tentacle ended in a cluster of eyes, a central eyeball in every instance surrounded by twelve others, the pupils of which were split with needle-sharp teeth. These mouths snapped and chewed and whistled with hunger and the tendrils writhed with lust.
But it was trapped. Chained by the ruby rings of Strange’s magic – and also by the fact that, during an earlier encounter with the Defenders, the beast had been named.
Doctor Strange stared out into The Void. This was the linkspace between geographical locations on Earth – thus allowing travelers to journey from Greenwich, London to Switzerland, say, in no time at all – but it was also the conduit between Earth and the other places, the surrounding dominions from which the threat of the Cabal had originated. Strange observed apertures in the blackness now – doorways, or thresholds to be more precise – and he could discern the flickering of manifestation, spirit-stuff, passing through these gateways in a flurry of movement. The Void had become a waystation, helped no doubt by the captivity of its guardian. Strange looked back to Shuma-Gorath and opened the palms of his hands, along the silver runes to dance.
“We named you,” he said. “Now I remove that name, and in doing so I set you free. Free to revenge yourself, and free to feed.”
“What are you doing?”
Strange turned at the sound of Patsy Walker’s voice and cast her a faint smile. “Not entirely sure,” he said, breezily, “but probably something stupid.”
“Some things don’t change, then.”
“No.”
Strange grimaced, his eyes guarded. “I don’t know what you did,” he murmured. “To bring me back, I mean. I know I was dead – I was - but then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t any more. And that place I woke up too, the wasteland and the blood-red skies… well, it wasn’t Geneva or London, I know that much. Maybe Birmingham. So, yeah, all in all I can make some kind of guess. But - ”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. It does. Because it’s cost you something, I can see that. And you didn’t need to do that, not for me.”
Hellcat smiled, her eyes the color of smoke and absinthe. “I did it for the world,” she purred. Strange nodded.
“I know. And that’s what I’m doing too. But, before the line’s crossed, and for what it’s worth… I just wanted to say thank you.”
He leaned forward then, curling one of his gloved hands about the back of Patricia’s neck and threading his fingers through her cherry red hair as he pulled her head towards him and into a gentle kiss. There was no spark of instant desire between them, no erotic tremor, no moment of revelation. They’d both lost so much, and they both knew what was ahead of them. It just seemed appropriate, what with this being the ending of things.
Beyond Strange and Hellcat, also drifting in the blackness of The Void, Blade and Valkyrie exchanged glances.
“Just so you know,” Valkyrie told her companion, “I’m not going to be getting romantic in front of a gigantic green extradimensional fiend covered in eyes and teeth.”
Blade shrugged. “Wouldn’t expect it.”
“Right.”
“Yep.”
Valkyrie scowled. Then she sniffed. “Then again,” she sighed, “all things considered, I suppose it wouldn’t be the end of the - ”
But it was. Because that was when Doctor Strange glimpsed their enemies advancing upon them through the liquid shadow and he knew that their time was up. Releasing himself from Hellcat’s soft embrace he turned back to Shuma-Gorath and spoke the single word of his prepared incantation.
Unnamed.
And that was the beginning of the end…
# # # # # # # # # #
It was dusk, and the advent of night was a riot of blood and pain and death.
There was a valley, and in the heart of the valley there was a forest, and in the center of the forest there was a citadel. The earth here was an enchanted thing, the soil and iron steeped in a magic more ancient than any human mind could comprehend, and the cool evening air was alight with a sorcerous glow. This was the home of the faerie folk, myriad clans of winged magicklings in their many forms, and those faeriebreed birthed in darkness had always been soulbound to their beloved WitchQueen, Morganna Le Fay. In recent times these shadowkind had happily feasted upon the potential for happiness that existed inside the human spirit, their gluttony nourished by Morganna herself as she strode the human world. But now everything had changed.
Morganna was home, the link to Earth was broken, and now the evil faeries were no longer the predators – they were the prey.
The WitchQueen staggered along a thorn-encrusted path as the ground shook beneath her, gathering her skirts with one hand whilst cradling her mask – a white faceplate upon a stick, blank save for the occasional winking of a black eye or infrequent, blood smile – in the other. She ignored the plaintive screams of her bloodlings, concentrating instead on outrunning the beast that was consuming them.
The tentacles of the Unnamed, now free and seeking retribution against those that had transgressed The Void, were slithering out of the forests like emerald snakes and devouring every living thing in sight. These tendrils were also spilling out of holes in the night sky, through the fabric of this reality itself, and it was all Morganna could do to remain one step ahead of her foe. She wasn’t downcast, however. This was a setback, nothing more.
The Cabal had been summoned back to their own splinter realms from Earth against their will, but no counter-magic – that of The Ancient, or his disciples – could achieve anything more than a brief delay to the demons’ overall plan. This was a desperate, last ditch ploy, nothing more. Morganna would repair her world and seal the Guardian beyond the threshold once more, then return to Earth via a new Manifestation and –
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Morganna heard the female voice at her shoulder. Despite the presence of those infernal tentacles she paused and turned towards her adversary: a young woman, barely more than a girl, tall and slender with broad shoulders and snow-blonde hair, dressed in an elegant outfit of black and midnight blue. Samantha Parrington’s cloak rustled in the evening breeze and her eyes burned bright in the shadows. In her hands she held her enchanted sword, Dragonfang. In this world, even more then Earth, that nigh-invisible blade glittered with lethal intent.
“You’re thinking that this is just a hitch,” Valkyrie said, with a wistful smile. “That it’ll be no time at all before you can try again. But you’re wrong. The Earth is not your feasting ground, witch of the fens, for you nor your goblins. It has Defenders.”
Morganna reared up, the mouth on her white mask twisting into a howl of rage and dripping tears of blood.
“You come here?” she hissed. “Here, to my realm? Know, girl, that such a transgression is intolerable and shall end in your eternal misery. There’s no way back to your world from here unless I will it, do you understand? You - ”
“I’m trapped here, yes. With you.” Valkyrie’s eyes sparked with momentary sadness. But then she flexed her wrist and Dragonfang sang like a golden harp sounding the first light of daybreak. “But I rather think The Ancient was aware of the sacrifices we’d each of us would have to make. Perhaps that’s why he chose us, four outcasts with no real future. We were lost, but now we’re found, forged in fire and with a holy purpose. And we’ll never stop fighting you. Do you see?
“The defense begins here.”
And with that Valkyrie lunged forward, feinting to her left and then shifting her balance and sweeping her blade down to the right, just as Morganna read her enemy’s attack and coiled to meet her with outstretched hand already broiling with a magical counter.
The two women clashed, and the sound of steel against sorcery rang out through the dusk and the trees. Perhaps the pixies and the goblins heard it and paused in their final moments before the tentacles of the Unnamed curled about them and swallowed their heads and burst their ribs out through their backs.
What’s certain is that the battle continued thereafter.
And it shows no signs of ending.
# # # # # # # # # #
In the stygian murk of the Seven Realms of Night, a patchwork of overlapping dimensional planes where sunlight was held in check by a complex process of cogs and mirrors and plaited ropes of salted human flesh, the Nosferatu had returned to their regulated bloodfarms after being unceremoniously banished from Earth. It was obscene that, after being allowed to gorge themselves upon free-range stock and being promised unlimited supply of the same, they were now forced to scrabble for their place at the trough once more. They’d been content with these limbless human torsos – bloodbags, grown from genetically engineered embryos placed into ironmoulds and cultivated solely for the sustenance of the vampire drones – for hundreds of thousands of years, but now they’d had a taste of real human blood, as enjoyed by their master, they wanted more.
Varnae, King of the Nosferatu, knew that he had a potential revolt at hand. Fortunately he also knew that this setback was only temporary.
“The path to Earth shall be re-established,” the master hissed, addressing his milling underlings from atop a black obelisk at the heart of one of the principal bloodfields. “I request your patience. And if you will not give that willingly, I shall order it extracted from you, yes?”
Flash-flash-flash.
The vampires flocked and skittered, agitated beyond measure. They were hungry and frustrated, they could hear a constant battering of… of something… beyond the edges of their realms, and they occasionally glimpsed sight of eyes and mouths and tentacles beyond the constantly revolving mirrors. It was the Nosferatu’s nature to be capricious, even in the thrall of their lord, and –
“You’re not getting back to Earth. Ever. Because this is where the filth and the darkness stems from, like some dimensional cesspool, and I’m on hand to make sure it stays here.”
Varnae looked up at the sound of the stranger’s voice, and below him his vampire legions shrieked in ungodly chorus. Eric Brooks, the man known as Blade, stared down at his enemies from his perch high above, in the crux of the great and infernal machine that powered these shadowed realms.
“You dare…?”
Blade regarded Varnae with contempt, this withered old husk of a vampire with his bald head and chalk white skin and scarecrow limbs, and then he cricked his neck and cracked his knuckles.
“What?” he snarled. “You think my friend Strange would cast his magick shtick to eject you from Earth and then sit back and let you Manifest all over again, or whatever the hell it is you blood-drinking dreck do? You fucking son of a cock.”
Varnae’s black eyes flared wide. Blade grimaced. He always got a potty mouth around vampires, an unfortunate side-effect of absorbing their latent powers whenever he was in their presence. He’d thought it was just Deacon Frost who cussed like a sailor, but apparently it was all of them. Or maybe all this just brought out the inner demons of Eric Brooks. He grinned ruefully. Whatever. Truth is as truth does: Varnae was a son of a cock.
“We shall kill you slowly, man of the cross,” Varnae seethed.
Blade touched his fingers to the silver crucifix at his throat, the mystic artifact gifted to him by The Ancient and which now glowed with inner power. He sighed, then clenched his fists and glanced up to where the cogs and mirrors of the Nosferatu machine toiled overhead.
“Yeah, well,” he murmured. “No offense, but I was planning something a bit more immediate.”
The vampires rose into the air as one, an erupting mass of fang and claw and leathery wing, and they were fast – but not fast enough. Blade thrust up both arms before the pack could engulf him, his hands transformed into lethal weapons by the energies coursing through him; however, whereas he’d used those hands upon the undead themselves in the past, he now employed them in the destruction of their world.
There was a shrieking cacophony of ruined metal and ruptured hide, followed by the splintering of black glass – and then, through the holes Blade had punched through the mechanized fabric of the Nosferatu’s realm, there spilled a thick, golden light like drizzling honey, bathing the vampire throng. For a moment there was no reaction, the beasts frozen in disbelief… but then a violent chemical response took hold, the Nosferatu burning and withering and screaming as the light melted away their colorless flesh and boiled their eyes in their sockets and their black tongues in their throats.
Varnae, Lord of the Undead, recoiled aghast.
“Not sunlight as such,” Blade murmured, ripping away more slivers of metal and glass. “Not in the Earthly sense. This is worse. This is the light of the universe beyond your world, the light shunned by both your dimension and the Void, the light you’ve worked so hard to repel. And it’s going to scour every last stinking one of you from existence.”
Varnae’s midnight eyes shriveled as he stared up at the man who had annihilated his people. “Then you die too,” he breathed, uncomprehending. “Here in our realm, absorbing our inhuman nature into your own… you’ve damned yourself as much as us.”
Smoke was beginning to rise from the blistering skin on the back of Blade’s hands. Eric Brooks scowled, his eyes sad as he looked away, out past a ceiling of mangled cogs and into the swelling light of a reality he’d never return to.
“I got the impression that was part of the deal,” he said, softly. “That’s why we were chosen. For me, this isn’t sacrifice or duty. It’s redemption.”
And then, in the next instant, the ruptures in the synthetic sky tore wide and light cascaded down in a glittering flood, and with one last, plaintive cry, the vampire legion was no more.
And in that final moment, before he too was consumed in the conflagration, Eric smiled.
# # # # # # # # # #
In the realm of Nightmares, the creature known as The Tatterdemalion to some – or perhaps The Boogeyman or The Shadowman or The Sandman or He Who Lurks, or any other name from a thousand such titles – stalked the stone parapet of a twisted castle made of petrified cerebellum, his cloak of fetid colors trailing behind him like a diseased rainbow. He stared down from beneath a hooked cowl as he leaned out over the edge of the nearest crenellation, and the sight that greeted him was horrendous indeed. Nightmarish, one might say.
The tower was as tall as Tatterdemalion could imagine it - one hundred feet, one thousand, one million – but as quickly as it stretched up into clouds the hue of mental hospitals so the darkness that gathered down there resolutely scaled the walls on a multitude of legs and tails and blood-licked bodyparts, in pursuit of their master. Spiders and centipedes, sharks and lions, ghosts and fire and old, abandoned cellars and loneliness and dead children and eight-fingered hands and cancer and crocodiles and needles and discovered secrets and razor blades and guilt.
In the human world, everyone had either awoken or was now sleeping soundly and peacefully. In a single instant, the nightmares had been exiled. And here they were in their immeasurable numbers, back in the pit where they’d been birthed and nurtured by the Tatterdemalion’s decaying hand. Their parent, their love. They were scared, these infinite, immutable, crawling things, and they wanted reassurance.
The tower grew and grew, but the nightmares were gaining. The Tatterdemalion was, for perhaps the first time in his ancient existence, rather concerned.
“Anxiety dreams,” a woman’s voice purred. “I was never partial to them, personally. But don’t let me distract you from the experience.”
The Tatterdemalion turned to see Patricia Walker, the Hellcat, standing alongside him upon the crooked battlements. He cocked his head, a scarecrow of filth and obscene odors. Hellcat wrinkled her nose.
You can’t exist here, the Tatterdemalion said without words, insinuating himself into his adversary’s head. You should be paralyzed with fear, your tiny brain bleeding out when faced with such horror.
“And yet, here I am. Moving freely. Shooting the breeze. I could use a pair of noseplugs, true, and maybe a handkerchief, but I’ll make do. Interesting, isn’t it?”
The Tatterdemalion stared up at the sky. Out there, in the delirium, the moon was licking salt and rust off its lips and hungering for more. It was scrutinizing the ever-rising tower with an avid gleam in its button eyes. The Tatterdemalion instinctively slowed his ascent, but that just allowed the flies and snakes and everything else to begin to swarm through the cracks in the flagstones beneath his rotting moccasins.
This is my world, he wailed, as he was consumed. It isn’t behaving! It’s not fair!
Hellcat’s eyes narrowed. “You’re just a child, aren’t you?” she murmured. “In the surrealist possible sense, but it’s true. Stands to reason, I guess. Only a childish mind could conceive of the horrors you’ve reared here like pets. But don’t think I’m going to show you any mercy because of that.”
The Tatterdemalion’s ragged trousers began to vanish beneath a swarm of baby tarantulas, and a faceless pink husk attached itself to his back and began to infect him with thin tendrils of poisonous silk. Beneath the shadowlord’s cowl, silver eyes suddenly flared bright with fear.
Is this what it’s like? he mewled. The panic. Being unable to move, unable to get away…
“Your first nightmare?” Hellcat asked. “I’d settle in, if I were you. Because some bad dreams you never wake up from.”
And then she turned away as her enemy vanished completely beneath the dark extremities of his own imaginings. Her green eyes were lowered and glimmering with tears, but not for the benefit of the accursed Tatterdemalion. These tears were for her friends, now lost. For Jacques. For her mother. And for herself.
Behind her, the nightmares swelled. They were coming for her. But they couldn’t have her. She belonged to another. That was her pledge.
There was a flicker of red light tinged with the stench of sulphur and desolation, and then a slender aperture appeared in the fabric of the dreamscape. Beyond lay damnation.
Patricia Walker breathed deeply as she thought of her father, waiting on the other side of the rift to accept her into the family after all these years, as she’d promised in exchange for bringing Stefan Strang back to life and thus enabling him to save the world. Then, however, she thought of The Ancient, and her eyes darkened to black smoke.
“Fuck you, old man,” she hissed. “In your own way you’re even worse than the monsters you recruited us to fight, or the beast that roasted my mother to death from the inside out. Because at least they weren’t pretending.”
And then she stepped forward, onto the path of fire, and it was done.
# # # # # # # # # #
“It’s done,” said Stefan Strang, floating through the darkness of The Void in the shadow of Dormammu, Emperor of the Eternal Dread. “That’s the last of them. It’s just us now. There ain’t nobody here but us chickens.”
Dormammu spiraled in the black, flames cavorting in the stump of his neck. “What?”
“There ain’t nobody here but us chickens. It’s an old swing classic,” Strange explained. “Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five, 1946. Later popularized in the 90s musical Five Guys Named Moe, and paraphrased by Bugs Bunny in - ”
Dormammu reached out and attempted to circle the Doctor’s throat with one clawed hand, to dispatch him just as he’d disposed of Karloff Mordo back on Earth… but he was immediately knocked back by a slithering tentacle encrusted with eyes. Doctor Strange grinned and wagged an imaginary cigar.
“Just making conversation, doc.”
Dormammu shuddered as the enormous bulk of the behemoth, Shuma-Gorath, swelled behind him. He didn’t turn to stare upon that repulsive mass of seething tendrils; he didn’t need to. He was already all too familiar with the guardian of The Void, and he knew what fate the creature planned to visit upon him.
“For a damned soul you seem in remarkable humor,” Dormammu hissed. “Understandable. Human sanity can only endeavor to comprehend so much outside its sphere before perishing.”
“Madness is in the eye of the beholder,” Strange countered. “Well, many eyes in this case. But I think you’ll find that the appropriate term in this instance is gallows humor. What with us being about to die and all.”
“The Emperor of the Eternal Dread cannot die, Doctor, any more than the other members of The Cabal. You think them destroyed, my comrades? Varnae and his children will rise again from ashes, Morganna shall eventually prevail over her enemy’s blade, The Tatterdemalion will seed in some new nightmare… for we are immortal. Everlasting. The existence of you humans and other races such as yourselves across the dimensional strata necessitate it. So long as you fear, and lust, and dream…”
“You’ll be there to feed upon it.”
Doctor Strange grimaced, thinking of Blade and also of his other companions. “And you,” he said, quietly. “You’ll survive what’s about to happen, won’t you? I’ll die, because I’m mortal, but you’ll persist in some state or other. Because this, The Void… your domain is close to the fringe of all this, isn’t it? Maybe even some facet of it. The Eternal Dread.”
Dormammu said nothing. And now Strange smiled again, although his eyes reflected the sadness that afflicted his heart.
“You’ll Manifest again. There’ll be another Mordo, one day. But The Ancient’s still out there, isn’t he? He’ll be planning already, preparing for his next set of Defenders, be it fifty years from now, or a hundred, or a thousand. Last time you got the drop on him, had him imprisoned – because that’s the best you could do. You couldn’t kill him, any more than we can kill you. You just get to play your games of supernatural chess with us humans as pawns. But despite everything he still beat you, through us.”
“Not wholly insane, then,” Dormammu murmured. “Merely enlightened. But was it worth it?”
Strange frowned. “Of course it was.”
“Truly? Your own death, the deaths – or worse, exile – of your friends, the desecration of your lover, Clea. All for what? The continued propagation of humanity? How noble a species, devoted to pillaging your planet’s resources and visiting war upon one another in the name of government and spiritual faith, partial to the relentless butchery of all organisms including yourselves, to the torture and debasement of your own young, to mass victimization and abandonment. Us monsters, we don’t cause your misery, we simply take advantage of it and feed upon it.
“We shall return because the bloodshed and pain your kind revels in will give us the strength to do so. Surely, Doctor, the worth of a Defender equates only to what he or she is defending? You think yourselves heroes and us, the enemy, as the devils at your gate, because it suits you to do so. The truth is far less palatable.
“Enjoy your brief moment of triumph, Defender of mankind. How proud you must be.”
Dormammu turned away then, and gave himself to the waiting attentions of Shuma-Gorath. Strange looked on, his eyes as pale as glass. He’d believed that he’d engineered some kind of victory, by using his magicks to expel the various members of The Cabal from Earth back to their own dimensions and then sealing the thresholds, and by unleashing the guardian of The Void upon those that had transgressed its non-realm. He believed that his friends’ sacrifice had been worthwhile, watching them give their lives – or their souls – to deny their enemies, to render them dissipated or devoured. To protect the Earth.
But in his mind’s eye, Stefan Strange could still see the people of his planet, a race no longer overtly plagued by the manipulations of The Cabal. There were still atrocities being committed, on a national scale in full view of the public eye or in the rank secrecy of familial homes; there was still rape, still murder both senseless and premeditated, still corporate machinations designed to perpetuate the misery of poverty and squalor and to accelerate the geological distress of the world itself.
Today, in that instant, there were no otherworldly monsters to feed on the proliferation of human sin. But the sin carried on regardless.
This was no victory.
Shuma-Gorath consumed Dormammu, and then Doctor Strange, who had cast his final enchantment to seal the breach between Earth and The Void when banishing the Cabal, thus dooming himself to his ultimate fate. The guardian would digest its meal slowly, and the suffering of those souls in what constituted the behemoth’s belly would be great. Dormammu, eventually, would return. Stefan Strang would not.
That was simply the way of things.
Sometimes there are no happy endings.
# # # # # # # # # #
In Greenwich, London, the mysterious old man known only as The Ancient emerged from the shadowed depths of his Sanctum Sanctorum on a day of bright sunshine and took a seat on a park bench to watch the world go by. He observed schoolchildren, pretty women in spring skirts, businessmen buoyed by some successful financial deal or other, artists at work down by the river, and the effortless joy of dogs. He resolutely ignored the homeless man with the bottle of gin and the knife in his pocket who was hunkered down under the bridge, and the bespectacled gentleman taking a lunchtime stroll past the Greenwich Observatory who would, in the early hours of the following morning, befriend a drunken young mother named Mary and then strangle her to death in her bedroom, in front of her two crying daughters, before transporting her corpse out to Whitechapel in the trunk of his car and arranging her internal organs on the steps of a respected art gallery, all because he believed himself to be the descendant of Jack The Ripper.
And there would be more. There always was.
The Ancient had tasked himself to protect humanity, not to judge it. He was sure that Stefan and the others would have understood that.
The old man folded his hands in the lap of his olive green cloak, after patting his pockets and being comforted by the feel of the four magical artifacts that had returned to his possession upon the demise of their most recent owners. He took a deep breath and smiled, satisfied. All he needed to do now was wait, for however long that turned out to be, until he – and those artifacts - were needed again.
THE END