Chương 55: Not A Chapter — New Story Poll

Casual Blasphemy Blurb: Years ago, Antoq made a deal with a god.

Now his service is ended. Powers returned, oaths fulfilled, he no longer walks with conquerors and kings. Instead he is simply a stranger out of place, who wants to go home.

But home is a long way away. A long way to go without the prestige or ability he used to have, and with people who remember him when he came through with the fire and the fury of a god's chosen. The world looks very different from the shadows, and just because Antoq is done with the gods doesn't mean the gods are done with him.

Author's Comments: This is meant to be an adventure story, the back half of the hero's journey. There should be more character development for the protagonist than progression as such. It's set in a mostly low-fantasy world, but with some occult-style elements in the vein of Chasing Sunlight — though the world is more familiar than that setting.

Objects in MotionBlurb: Superheroes are defenders of law and justice, protectors of the meek. Supervillains are those who abuse their power for their own gain and terrorize the citizenry. To those on the ground, there isn't much difference between the two; the ant suffers when gods war. For Isaac Hartson, supers of either variety are violent, dangerous, and subject to no consequences to their actions. He's out to supply some.

While a metahuman himself, he's not anywhere near the upper reaches of power, so his desire requires more than just fists. It takes a little bit of caution, as well.

Author's Comments: In some ways this is in the same vein as Paranoid Mage, with a small skillset exploited to the utmost and a contest against The Power That Be. However, this isn't The Boys where everyone's a psychopathic murderer. Nor will it be like Callum where Isaac flat out refuses to work within the system. So, superhero urban progfantasy with more emphasis on fighting smarter than punching harder.

Body of WordsBlurb: Marcus and Cynthia, historian and linguist, are explorers of ruins – the ruins of civilizations thousands of years old, out among the stars. Arriving on a new world isn't unusual for them, but that world having magic certainly is. The goal is straightforward: get back home. The path there certainly is not.

The pair to contend with the native civilizations, which are powerful and dangerous in their own right, as well as the relic technology of the civilization that opened the way to this world in the first place.

Author's Comments: In some ways the protagonists are from the same world as SDE, posthumans with some flourishes. But unlike SDE, we're working with magic. This is a breadth-oriented progression fantasy with some scifi elements. The magic system is pretty discrete and relatively low-powered, to avoid some of the inevitable cultivation world elements it'd otherwise create.

Bootlegger LeviathanBlurb: Sam O'Doule was a bootlegger, rum-runner, and speakeasy owner — until some rivals murdered him and he ended up in the body of a horrific monster in a world that was very much not earth. Taking it not as a second chance, but as a challenge, he sets out to be better in his new life — though the fact that he has been put into the body of the world's greatest evil makes that a touch difficult.

Author's Commentary: This is kind of a weird wildcard. In a way this would be closest to Blue Core, in that it's a larger-scale kingdom-builder type. Progression elements for certain, as though Sam starts out in an incredibly powerful body, he lacks any of the knowledge that the original inhabitant had put together. In general, a high fantasy monster progfantasy.

Sam O'Doule died twice in the same minute.

The first time was those bastard Rambau Boys putting a couple dozen bullets through the front door of Sam's speakeasy. One got him right in the ticker, and that was it. The second time, his still death-addled mind found itself in the body of something vast and tentacular, floating in the blackest sea and facing a group of oddly-attired figures casting forth strands of light that gathered together into one vast and blinding sword that came down and cut him in two.

In the void that followed, Sam had to wonder what the hell kind of purgatory he'd earned for himself. Now, he wouldn't exactly consider himself a bad person, but flouting the law and operating a speakeasy in defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution came with a certain amount of gray. He'd never knocked over anyone else's place; never had the nerve for it, really, but playing at the same table as Brownie York and the Rambeau Boys required a certain amount of rough and tumble.

Truth was he'd always thought he'd have time to deal with the whole repentance and bettering-his-life thing later on in life, after he got out of the bootlegging game.

Accordingly, it made sense that the Almighty hadn't welcomed him through the pearly gates with a chorus of trumpets and angels singing, but Sam Jones was intended to end up in the Other Place, he would have expected a bit more in the fire and brimstone department. Maybe some pitchforks for flavor. Not whatever sort of nonsense he'd just gone through, which didn't make the slightest lick of sense.

Sam reached up with an arm he no longer possessed to remove a cap he wasn't wearing and got down on knees that didn't exist to do the only thing that made sense in a formless void after he'd gotten his ticket punched. Pray, and hope the Almighty had something for him other than weird nightmare visions of monsters.

The long nothingness had nothing but time to reflect. Not even reflect, not even dwell; he was given himself and nothing else, and in the clarity of hindsight there really wasn't much there to recommend. Aimless meandering through the criminal underbelly of New Orleans, and for what? He'd ended up nice and dead at the ripe old age of twenty-three, estranged from family and with so-called friends being partners in crime.

He'd been weak. That was the long and short of it. No excuses, no foisting the responsibility on others — he had known the kind of people he was getting involved with. He'd known the problems, he'd known who was being hurt. But he'd never actually turned aside and resisted the easy path.

How all that tied into the strange vision he'd been given he didn't know, but he was sure it would come to him in time. What mattered was in what came next – if there was a next – he couldn't be weak any longer. Couldn't give in to the easy path, to the dawdling and dithering that had put him into the live he'd lived of crime and alcohol. Not just think it, not just want to do it, but actually be different.

Light began to filter back into the void, along with sensations, but not ones that Sam Jones could fit to his experience. Then emotion smashed him like a wall and convulsed in a sudden panic, unable to move or breathe like he should have. But he'd been a Breaker Boy in the coal mine before his old man got them out and knew what things were like. If this was to be his purgatory, well, he'd better be up to the task. ṛ𝒶ΝỌꞖËʂ

"Am I…?" He spoke, or at least tried to, but the whole apparatus was different. Sam's anatomy knowledge was restricted to a few books from the high-class clientele that came by the speakeasy, the doctors who debated theories while sipping bourbon, but he was pretty sure the tongue was supposed to be involved. Not some bizarre organ located, well, somewhere.

He tried to pry his eyelids open, feeling like he'd gone overboard on sampling his own product, and the hazy light snapped into focus. A blurry sun shimmered and danced above, and it took him far too long – the brainbox wasn't exactly running smoothly for obvious reasons – to realize that he was underwater. Reflexively, he tried to hold his breath, but realized two things. First, he didn't know how, and second, he was breathing water just fine. He could feel it passing through his body, cold and sluggish.

Limbs – too many limbs – swept through the water as Sam tried to get handle on just what the hell was happening. Expecting punishment in the hereafter was one thing; just being confused seemed too damned unfair. He tried to ignore the profoundly wrong sensation of water running through whatever passed for lungs and strained to focus. If he was going to be better than the last time around, it wouldn't do to fall at the first hurdle.

Memory that wasn't his filtered. It wasn't much, but it was rancid and rotten with malevolence and spite. A him that wasn't him knew those figures that made the enormous glowing sword, and it hated them. It hated the world, it hated creation, it hated the fishes in the sea and the birds in the sky. It especially hated that no matter happened, it couldn't die and it couldn't beat the figures.

But it had a plan. A plan that dripped with dark glee as the originator of those memories watched the golden sword form above it. In the moment that the sword was created, it drew from regions beyond the world, beyond the sky. It opened itself to the stars and so, in turn, the stars were open to it.

There was a movement and sensation like air, like water, like lightning, something immensely complex aimed at a tiny point in space and time where here became there and then — Sam gagged, despite not even knowing what he had for a mouth or a throat. The feel of the memories was vile. Slimy, wretched, foul, and every other thing his mother had used to describe the seedy underbelly of New Orleans. Whoever, whatever the former inhabitant of his body had been, it was undeniably evil.

"That's just jake," he muttered, hearing the words click and ping oddly inside his head. The sensation made him shudder, an all-over vibration which was so alien that it disturbed him even more, and it was only by sheer stubborn will that he didn't go spiraling into a permanent panic. He remembered one man who'd come from the Orient and pontificated on the benefits of meditation, but Sam hadn't paid much attention outside of supplying the foreigner with bourbon.

With the grit he'd learned in the coal mine, and the fight he'd learned in the streets of New Orleans, he locked away the horrible swirling confusion and tried to actually think properly. He knew he wasn't being given a second chance; that wasn't how these things worked. He was being given a challenge. So what if everything was horrible and unfair? He sure hadn't earned the right for fair the first time around, not when he'd been part of the biggest criminal operations operating out of the South.

Sam tried looking around again, this time with some more care, and found the body he'd been given sure had a lot of eyes, ones that even seemed to work just fine underwater. He was floating near some kind of cliff, with the water's surface far above and a corrugated floor far below. The entire face of the cliff was packed with sea life, but not the kind he'd seen when diving in the Gulf and helping out the rum-runners.

A riot of reds and blues, greens and purples, even perfect blacks and whites covered the rock. Long spiny plants and short fringed ones, odd suckered things and vine-like growths crawling and waving and flowing with the currents. Fish of every shape and size, from the conventional schematic to half-moon things jetting around to what seemed like swimming crystals flitted in and out of the veritable forest.

Some of them would have looked exceedingly dangerous, with mouths full of teeth and wicked spines that practically glowed, but they were all so small.

Or really, Sam was large. He had tried not to think about it too much, but the body was a true leviathan, something out of the writings of Jules Verne. At one end, enormous octopus tentacles, dangling down toward the depths, connected to a body much like a shark's bearing many, many eyes. Something powerful, sleek, with massive fins extending from the side like one of the Wright Brother's creations.

At the front, massive ropelike tendrils coiled around his neck, yet both from the horrible memories and vague feelings from his own body, he could tell they were more than just decoration. One of them uncoiled, a long, waving thing that split, then split again, and continued until the end was a fine mass of tiny threads under his complete control.

He felt queasy just looking at it.

Just the movement sent some of the nearby marine life darting for cover, though it didn't last long. Sam kept watching the sea life as he tried to understand what the hell kind of body he was actually in, since it wasn't anything even slightly near human. Almost as bad, he had no idea what to do, as floating around in the depths of the ocean didn't get him anywhere. He hadn't arrived with any instructions, or even hints, save for his own death and that loathsome memory.

His pa had always said that first things came first, and Sam wasn't going anywhere or doing anything if he didn't know how to actually move his body. People had hands and feet, fish had fins and tails, but he had big, grasping tentacles that he could barely use. There were too many limbs, and he guessed that the body's brain could handle it but he sure hadn't had any practice.

The big tentacles felt immensely powerful, moving them like crooking a finger, only moreso. They curled in, and in, and in, folding around on themselves into actual coils, until he was forced to stop with another full-body shudder.

Far too strange.

At the other end of his body, the manipulator tendrils were no less strange, but felt more like hands than the tentacles did feet. The fins at each side of his body was a lot like wiggling his ears, stiff things that didn't have much play. He wasn't sure how long he was at it, his body slowly drifting long with the current, but eventually he thought he could move without breaking something. Except it felt wrong when he tried.

Fish had tails to propel them, birds had wings, men had legs. Dragging himself about with the tentacles didn't fit with the fins; he ought to be moving nose-first. Some clumsy flailing managed to move him from the vertical to the horizontal, and immediately his body seemed happier. Then he tried moving forward and something very strange happened.

That power of lightning, fire, water, and wind all combined, a strangeness he remembered from those vile memories seemed to run through his body, and he simply moved without actually having to make the movements of swimming. The experience was so shocking that he would have taken a tumble if it were an option. Since it wasn't, he just came to a halt in the middle of the deep blue, already a good distance from the cliff where he'd awakened.

"Never seen a clumsy octopus before," he grumbled to himself, hearing the bizarre clicking and groaning of the words bouncing off the bottom of the ocean — and the top, for that matter. He could see a distant shoal of fish flurry in panic as the sound of his words reached them, and wondered hazily what on earth – or more to the point, not on earth – Leviathans ate. He didn't feel hungry, but that wouldn't last. Or maybe it would; he had no idea.

He was still trying to get his metaphorical feet under him and literal tentacles behind him when one of his upward-facing eyes noticed something floating on the surface above. Dark wood and white sails framed against the sky. Now, most of the smuggling to New Orleans just used steamships, but he had seen enough of the smaller, older types, inherited ships and other such relics, to know what he was looking at.

Before he even thought about it he started upward, and then froze in place the moment his brain caught up with things. He was a giant sea monster, and whatever poor sod was sailing the ocean blue with nothing more than wind and stars wasn't going exactly welcome him aboard. Even as he watched, the surge of water from his movement rippled upward and practically hit the vessel square, sending it tilting precariously in otherwise calm seas.

Then some poor soul plunged into the water next to the ship, probably shaken from the rigging, and Sam found out just how good his eyes were.

The man wasn't a man at all, but some kind of green-scaled lizard creature in orange and red clothes, whose panicked expression was obvious even from a hundred feet below the waves. He hadn't much thought of it just looking at the keel of the ship above, but with the person – the clothes made it a person – he could see the details just as well as if it were an arm's width away. They made eye contact, or something like it considering the distances involved, and the lizard creature thrashed its way to the surface.

Sam just hovered, not entirely certain what to do. He knew how dangerous it was to fall overboard on a ship, but given a line it wouldn't be too bad in the current weather. At least, so long as there weren't any monsters in the water. Something like him, only less befuddled.

Fortunately someone did cast a line from the ship, so he no longer had to worry about intervening. Moments later, the poor lizard-man was dragged aboard what had to be something like a galleon, given the size, and Sam spotted a few other heads peering over the side as the wind swept the ship onward. Sam drifted after, considering the thought that maybe there were other monsters in the waters.

Obviously had no idea what, specifically, he was meant to do, but it sure wouldn't hurt to tail the ship and make sure nothing attacked it. He was pretty sure they weren't pirates; the ship looked too new and the lizard's clothing had been some serious glad rags. So just wandering after it wasn't much, but as his ma had always said, if you can't start big, start small. Which seemed about right, considering how small the galleon was relative to the new body.

Besides, it'd give him time to try and get a handle on things. He could move, but it was like an infant toddling about, and if he tried to grip anything he'd probably just crush it. A sorry way to go for anyone he was trying to help, and the absolute opposite of what he was trying to do. Good people didn't squish other people.

The waters were mostly clear; there were some fish here and there, nothing like the teeming masses back by the cliff face. No obvious monsters, at least, and a lot of the sea life fled at his approach anyway. At least the quiet gave him some time to think and practice moving around.

Now that he had some distance from the repulsive nature of the snippet of memory he'd been given, Sam realized that it said a lot about the kind of place he'd ended up in. Not to mention the actions of the prior inhabitant of the body. Reading between the lines, this was a world full of people who had reason to hate the monster, especially since it couldn't be defeated permanently. Clearly, that entity – Sam hesitated to even call it a person with so much distilled hatred – saw the place as hell.

So far, the ocean was weird and Sam was pretty sure he'd miss the little conveniences of civilization soon enough, but the memory was a cautionary tale about what could happen if he let it.

He stewed on it to one degree or another as he trailed the ship from far below, slowly working out how to operate the monstrous body as the sun sank and the sky started to darken. Uncomfortably, Sam wasn't getting hungry or tired. Or thirsty for that matter, but he figured that being surrounded by water, salt or otherwise, made that particular need irrelevant. It seemed churlish to complain about, but he did mutter aloud as he swam along, listening to his voice ping and click from somewhere in the massive frame.

"O'course I can't just go walking out and greet any of these guys. Who's gonna sit there and jaw with a million-ton octopus shark anyway?" A few heads poked over the side of the galleon, then vanished again. Sam had the urge to go up and test his question right away, but only for half a second. Maybe he needed to be a better person, but that didn't mean being a stupid person, and he'd worked with Brownie York enough to know the only way to approach something you didn't know was carefully.

"Heck, maybe I've already muffed the entire thing by getting spotted. I doubt those scaly folk are too happy about having me trail 'em. Not that I've got any better idea! Talk about needing instructions…" Sam's muttering trailed away as it got dark enough to show the stars — and something else.

Someone had clawed the sky.

Long, vertical slices of light lay atop the dusting of stars, parallel groupings in twos and threes at different angles. It reminded him of a chunk of wood he'd found out in the woods where some friends had spotted a big cat when he was a kid. He'd never forgotten the big gouges and what they said about the strength of the claws behind them, and he had to figure something strong enough to leave clawmarks on the very firmament was terrifying indeed.

Perhaps it had been the former inhabitant of the body. Clearly the fight that he'd been dumped into the middle of was some high-powered thing, heroes of legend and all that. Something out of the Arthurian tales, but pumped up so much higher. But he was pretty sure he didn't have claws, so maybe something else of a similar scale, somewhere else in the world.

Or maybe they came from without, a cat the size of a planet using it like a scratching post. He decided that was a worry that he could do without and left it for another day, trying and failing to find anything familiar in the skies. Not that he expected it; any old fool could guess that dying had left him somewhere other than Louisiana.

Even in the darkness he could spot the boat – his eyes were really good – and as the hours went on following it became an unconscious thing. At least until he thought about it, and then he lost control of everything and drifted askew in the leviathan equivalent of tripping over his own two feet.

"At least there's nobody here to see but the fishes," Sam grumbled, struggling to face himself forward again, tentacles thrashing against the open water as he reoriented himself. It took longer than he would have liked, the echoes of his meaningless muttering bouncing off of both the sea floor and the surface, but the white of the sail was not too difficult to spot under the light of the clawmarks, stars, and the sliver of a crescent moon.

As he trailed after the ship, he realized there was another source of light somewhere up ahead, something he couldn't directly see because he was so far underwater. He could guess though, as the seafloor started to rise, that it was somewhere on the shore. A city, perhaps, though if it were a port he would have expected to see more than just the one ship.

His thought was a few minutes ahead of reality, as he did start seeing the blobs of other ships on the skin of the ocean ahead of them, and the orange reflection off white sails grew brighter. Bits and pieces of ship became visible on the seafloor, as the ocean became shallower and the waves became more prominent, but what really made him twig to the problem was the smell.

So far he hadn't really noticed any particular smell in general, and hadn't even thought about smelling things in water, but the scent and taste of ash was impossible to ignore.

"Gotta see what's going on," Sam sighed, and for the first time since he'd arrived he aimed to break the surface. He could easily 'stand,' the water was so shallow, the big octopus tentacles braced against the seafloor as the front, toothy part of his body broke the surface. That was probably not how he was supposed to do it, but if he tried to surface with the bizarre, invisible propulsion he'd probably end up causing a tidal wave.

What he saw was a city on fire, with brightly-colored buildings of an odd, spiraled, around design crowded close together around a river. Sounds of distant fighting reached his ears, and from somewhere deeper on the shore there came flashes of light, followed by echoing reports. Sam goggled for a minute, reminded of his old man's occasional stories of the Great War, a nightmare of gunfire and artillery.

The sounds prickled his own mind, the crackling of tommy guns just before he'd gotten it, but frankly the whole death thing had happened too quick for him to build up any great dread of it.

The sight of great, blue-and-green glowing bolide arcing over the city stirred him to action. He'd never been much to stick his nose in before, but just avoiding problems wasn't going to cut it anymore. The problem was, in a war there was no telling who was good and who was bad, or if that even applied. The lizard-people might be upstanding folks, or cannibalistic savages, and he wouldn't know the difference.

While he was staring, the ship he'd been following pulled into the harbor, shouts echoing over the water as what were obviously troops disembarked and ran into the city. Alas, Sam couldn't understand a word of it, and he heaved a big bubbly sigh before putting it out of his mind. Sufficient unto the day were the evils thereof; he was just going to start by trying to figure something he could do that wouldn't make things worse. Wanting to help was one thing, but the road to hell was paved with good intentions.

He couldn't just go in half-cocked.

If it weren't for the vastly improved eyesight of the new body, he wouldn't have been able to discern people getting into a series of smaller ships in the harbor — and not just people. Smaller lizard-folk, some of them in fancy clothes and others in less, being shepherded by a few larger ones. Kids, Sam would guess, getting evacuated, and seeing that a tension he hadn't been aware of eased.

That was unequivocally something he could get behind, no matter who was fighting and why.

He drifted a little closer, pulling himself along with tentacle 'feet,' not sure how he would help but ready to at least try. At the same time, there was something about the fighting that seemed a little odd compared to what he was familiar with. Fewer gunshots, more sounds of steel, but also odd hissing and crackling and other, less identifiable sounds. The distant mortars lobbed glowing balls of light in different colors, rather than actual shells.

It was when a circle of grey and white light blocked one of those bolides that Sam had to admit he had no idea how war was waged in this new place.

The gaggle of corks or frigates or whatever it was that the small passenger ships were called started pulling away from the harbor, catching a breeze he could only barely feel on exposed skin. It seemed to be brisk, given that they were making good time, but not brisk enough as the mortar shells began to land in the harbor. One arced toward the escapee convoy, and without thinking he reached out hand to bat it away.

Only, it was one of those weird tendrils and reached out, out, way far out and smashed the blue-glowing sphere as if he were batting away a fly.

It detonated in a frozen burst, stinging a bit like when he stuck his hand into the ice bucket, but he doubted a ship or a person would come off quite so well. And if there were as many flying into the harbor as onto the city, he'd hardly be able to deflect them all. He was pretty surprised he'd managed the one without tangling the tendrils up somehow, or missing entirely.

Sinking back beneath the water, he unrolled the other tendrils, focusing hard enough that he'd be squinting if he could still squint, and used them to grip each of the half-dozen refugee ships. He was very, very careful, afraid that he'd crush them, but after a minute or so he had them all cupped like holding a wine bottle in his hand, times six. Then he began moving.

So far he'd been metaphorically crawling rather than walking or, heaven forfend, running. But even at that speed he could easily outpace sailboats, so he basically just picked up the ships and moved. Water churned as he sped away from the harbor and along the coast, trying to ignore the screams from the ships. Even if he couldn't speak the local language, those translated just fine. But it was all in good cause, and he let them down once they were out of sight of the harbor.

He didn't know where they intended to go, but whatever direction it was, at least they were away from the attackers.

Sam still had no idea what he was doing, but a small glow of pride for helping someone warmed what passed for his chest. It hit better than smuggling drinks and running a speakeasy, for sure. He figured it was a good enough start and sank back beneath the waves, turning around to return to the city and lurk some more. Hopefully his intervention wouldn't cause any real trouble.

"You're absolutely certain?" Saint Misele of the Floating City narrowed her eyes at the messenger. Normally she wouldn't impugn a fellow atril, but she had been opposing Nemesis her whole life and she knew its habits. After its defeat in the far north, it shouldn't have appeared for another hundred years at least. Merely twenty was very strange. The heroes who had suppressed it last time were even still alive!

"I went and checked the eyewitnesses myself," Captain Corocol said.

"The memory magic confirmed it. I'm not sure what about the Tashkali's current civil war attracted it, but several people saw it strike a siege frostlance in midair. Our diplomat was in time to see it pick up several ships of refugees and leave."

"Those poor people," Misele said heavily, slumping in her chair, feathers prickling as she considered the dire fate of the tashi who had been in the way of Nemesis.

"Well…" Corocol shifted uncertainly.

"It's not in the written report, because the diplomat wasn't supposed to leave the embassy. But he did, and the ships were just taken some twenty miles south and left there. No damage, no casualties."

"What." Misele stared."

Why?

Are the tashi in league with it?"

"That was exactly what I looked into before coming here," Corocol said, the vibrant orange feathers atop his head bobbing as he nodded emphatically.

"But no, there were no summoning rituals, no cultists, no blood sacrifices anywhere in the city. Plenty of blood; it is a war. But just the normal kind of thing."

"That's not how Nemesis acts," Misele said, standing up and incidentally towering over Corocol. She flexed the wings on her back, golden feathers shimmering as she paced her office. Her talons thumped on the blue crystalline wood of the floor as she tried to puzzle out what could be behind the sudden change in behavior. The early return, showing itself without doing anything to accumulate power.

It wasn't like the Church of the Floating City had ever managed to completely purge the fragmented cults Nemesis put together. There was always some tiny seed for it to build from, but she trusted Corocol and besides, it had never shown mush interest in the tashi before. Its preferred servants were actually her own kind, glorying as it did in the subversion of the Saint's people.

"Was the last battle some kind of feint?" She wondered aloud.

"Everything it did, even up to being defeated — was it just to appear there, out of expectation, and draw us into a trap?"

"That seems depressingly possible, Saint," Corocol said.

"Though it's obvious if it is such an inducement, and that by itself…" He trailed off, shaking his head.

"I believe you have told me before not to try and read into the twists of its mind."

"Else you'd go mad," Misele agreed.

"But we cannot refuse to move simply because we suspect its plans. Get my skyship ready, Corocol. I need to get the heroes back together."