CHAPTER 2. LORD OF CHAOS

CHAPTER 2. LORD OF CHAOS

The black mountains

Shadow whinnies and bucks as I struggle to keep her under control. I feel faint, barely holding her down by the bridle. She almost pulls me off my feet.

“Shadow!” I yell.

She rears up on her hind legs, her hooves fighting the air. I fall on my back as the reins slip from my sweaty palm.

She gallops away, disappearing into the night.

“Shadow!” I call after her. She does not heed my call. I can hear the sound of her trotting hooves becoming fainter and fainter as she trots further and further away.

I hear a spine-chilling growl from somewhere disturbingly close. I turn suddenly, looking around for this howling devil in the night. I swing my torch around, hearing the growls grow louder, but I still can’t see the vile creature.

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I stop, frozen on the spot. I’m holding the torch with both hands in front of me. They’re shaking.

“Stay away!” I yell into the darkness. “Stay away! Come any closer and you’re dead!”

A figure steps forward from the shadows. It has the form of a hunched man, his head bowed and cloaked in black. He slowly lifts his head, revealing a grin of razorsharp teeth hidden behind a wolf-like snout, with red eyes that glow bright in the darkness of the cave. I gasp, my hands trembling. He is standing upright, even though he has wolf-like legs. The creature’s arms are of rotting skin and flesh, with the bones peeping through. Dropping my torch in terror, I begin to crawl backwards, unable to break away from his gaze.

The creature pounces onto me like a wolf, grinning and growling. I clench my eyes shut, feeling its hot moist breath on my cheek. I try pushing it away, but my efforts are in vain. Death is upon. My last and dying thought, “Demauglers are real!”

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THE STREETS OF NOTTINGHAM

The village

Mera and the god-king are sitting together on a rock in the sacred cave, sharing a weathered smoking pipe, passing it back and forth casually.

“Not too shabby,” the god-king remarks as he passes the pipe back to Mera.

“It’s my best batch yet,” she replies.

They watch over Marika’s body, lying there in the middle of the Sacred Pool. The silence of the cave broken by the dripping water falling onto Marika’s pale skin.

“So... you can’t get her out either?” Mera asks, raising an eyebrow as she leans toward the god-king. He ignores her comment.

“I just thought you were the creator... ‘All powerful and all knowing,’ that’s all. ” Mera shrugs her shoulders, taunting the god-king. She purses her lips.

The god-king continues ignoring her. An uneasy silence falls upon them. “Would you mind if I tried?” she

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asks, gesturing a motion that suggests pulling Marika out.

“I do not know what would happen to you if you entered the pool,” he replies. “…I could not undo it.

“The idiot boy came out okay, though.”

“He did, maybe... but still, the waters are sacred. I did not make them that way.

Mera, chokes on smoke. She coughs while passing the pipe back to the god-king, but the god-king gestures no. Mera nods. She takes another puff and starts coughing some more before continuing with her testy interrogation.

“The mother, then? Whoa, is she angry! Never before have I stood in the presence of rage that burned so bright it singed the air…. but then, I saw something else in her eyes, a sadness so deep it would put out the sun. Maybe that is why she came. I’ve heard of mothers who were so sad they’d smoulder their children in their sleep. I’ve never looked in the eyes of such a mother, but I’d imagine they have the same look I saw in the m…. in Rain’s eyes.”

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“I haven’t heard that name spoken out loud since before the breaking. I suppose it’s fitting. She isn’t the mother anymore. I have pushed my daughter into darkness, and now she has become death …a destroyer of worlds.

Mera carefully weighs her response. After a long pause, she asks the question that has been haunting her,

“Could you defeat her…If it came to it?”

The god-king stands to his feet, clearly agitated. “She is like a child throwing a tantrum,” he mutters under his breath with noted irritation. He paces back and forth between the rock and the pool. Coming to a halt in front of the pool, his gaze disappears into the waters.

“She cannot be beaten. Unless she chooses it to be

so.

A long silence falls between them.

“And what of Adam?” Mera asks, “Can he find him? ...can he find the healer?”

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The god-king walks back to his seat. “Have you heard the story of the man from Nalolo?” he asks in reply as he sits beside her.

“I have heard all the stories! There is no such man.”

“His story isn’t much different from Adam’s. He too sought us out in Nottingham. He found us at war with each other and caused us quite a bit of trouble.”

“He made it then? How can that be? Nobody makes it to Nottingham... it is known.”

“He came before the breaking of the world,” the godking replies.

The black mountains

I awaken with a start, feeling disoriented. There is a fire crackling beside me. I notice a curious looking man tending to the fire and instinctively withdraw into a corner. He ignores my presence, chuckling to himself. He seems familiar, but then again, not really, like a man I met in a dream. His hair is messy and visibly dirty. He looks …unwell.

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“Soup?” he asks in a low, gravelly voice, pointing to a bowl of soup next to the fire. He has a surprisingly casual manner about him. Surprising in that he appears almost sleepy. His movements slow and purposeful. And yet, there is something scary about him. A wild look in his eyes, perhaps. As if he may lose his mind at any moment.

I offer the only response I can master, “Who... Who are you?”

The man coughs and smiles. He seems to disintegrate a little as he does, fading. Obviously that cannot be. I must still be disoriented. I rub my eyes and watch the familiar man. He coughs again, more violently this time, bending over and turned away from me. The room appears to fade and reconstitute in tandem with the cough.

My eyes widen for a split-second. I thought I witnessed an explosion and felt the whole world come apart. Its fragments flew away from us, bursting out and disappearing, but then everything seems normal. I

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realised I have a huge frown across my face. I must be losing my mind.

“Me?” The strange man chuckles. “I am ….not me.”

He coughs again, a hacking cough that turns into loud, cackling laughter. The man composes himself. He leans over and refills his bowl of soup from a large pot beside the fire. He then attempts to inspect me closer, and I curl back in response, feeling uneasy. He then sniffs me, causing me to lean away, almost cowering.

“And what madness brings you here?” He interrogates, apparently convinced his answer was satisfactory. I decide to play along.

“Nottingham!” I reply. “I’m going to Nottingham. Do you know it ….do you know the way? They say there is a healer in Nottingham. I need to find him.”

“Nottingham,” he says before going quiet for the longest time. The silence breaks when the stranger pokes the fire, animating the flames. They take the form of a rolling storm, the clouds folding onto themselves.

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“Have you ever wondered how this world came to be? Have you ever wondered about the things that come from nothing? ….Once, nothing is all that there was. But even nothing falls apart eventually...”

I see thunder and lightning in the flames amidst thick clouds violently turning in onto themselves. In there, the sky is a violent rush of colour, brewing and bubbling.

“The nothingness was at war with itself. It wrestled itself, came apart, and formed chaos.” He laughs subtly. “Not me Chaos, though that is my name. I mean chaos, chaos …insanity, you know,” he says gesturing wildly, “uncontrollable things.”

Chaos! I remember him from the drawings in the book. The other half of the god-king entity. That’s where I recognised him from. Chaos isn’t paying any attention to me. He continues his narration.

“Inside the chaos, there was a will. A will to be... something. The will fought the chaos; it fought itself...”

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Animated in the flames, inside the violent storm, entangled within itself, is a human form, barely visible, wrestling with the elements. It fights the elements, even as they simultaneously form him. He becomes more distinctly something that could easily be mistaken for a wizard or a master from the east.

“The god-king,” I shout out, louder than intended. My voice echoes in the mountains. Chaos continues talking without pause.

“The will became god-king, or maybe he always was it, a will to be. He was all that is; he became all that is and Chaos, myself,” he whispers wide eyed, pointing to himself. “I became all that he wasn't.”

He grins widely. I hear a voice coming from the fire. I can tell it is the god-king screaming incantations into the wind.

The wind in the flame forms into a ball in the darkness, splitting into worlds that fly apart into what looks like sky. They crush into each other, sending sparks of stars scattering all around. Inside the first ball of wind and fire, a form that looks like Chaos is visible

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but only made of fire and air. Black smoke billows out of the orb in all directions as a hand grabs him from within the swirling ball. It grabs him by the back of the neck and pulls him back in, holding him in a stronghold. The godking form climbs over chaos, forcing him away from himself.

As he emerges, the winds turn into waters, sizzling in the fires. The two beings wrestle in the waters. The god-king hits Chaos forcefully in the chest, sending him into the air and causing him to crash into the water. The impact sends a cascade of sand into the air, forming a mould of land that is distinctly some kind of continental landmass with islands scattered around it. Chaos rises onto his knees, the waters almost waist high.

The god-king grabs him at the shoulders as Chaos grabs the god-king by the hair. He pulls god-king facefirst into the water, creating a wave that breaks apart the continent mass. Chaos’ foot bores deep into the sand, pushing against and compressing the sands, forming another landmass.

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I watch Chaos as he tells the story, the storm swirling in his eyes. He stares off into the distance with an empty gaze.

He suddenly snaps out of his daze, shifting his attention back to me. The animation dies as suddenly as it started.

“So, you survived a demauglar attack!” he mocks. “The stories must have been false then?”

“...What?” I ask, frowning again.

Chaos waves his hands in the air to demonstrate, his eyes widening as he does.

“‘Do not look a demaugler in the eyes. You will not survive it.’ But here you are. Alive and well.”

I remember the demaugler coming at me. I can almost see it on top of me. I can smell its breath. My eyes widen in fear as I edge away from Chaos.

“You are the Lord Chaos…. right?” I ask, just to make sure. Or maybe it’s just a feeble attempt to steer the conversation away from demauglers.

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Chaos pokes me with the stick he used to tend the fire.

“Focus, boy! Why didn’t your spirit freeze inside you? That is the question...”

I refuse to let him off the hook so easily. He knows the way to Nottingham. This strange god is my only hope. “Tell me the way to Nottingham,” I demand. “You lived there. You must know how to find it.

Chaos can barely contain his amusement. “So do you. You know the song; the song is the map.”

He chuckles again.

“Tell me, boy. How many days have you been lost in these hills? Do you even remember the number?”

He draws on the ground as he speaks. He draws a map in the sand. He illustrates a dune. The sands turn, for a moment, into Caelemon, swinging a blow. A sand form that looks like me dodges the blow.

“‘Nottingham lies embraced by one who brings light,’ Is that not what the song says? ‘Oh what a treacherous guide he shall prove to be.’ Sounds like the sun to me.

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Suns in the sky most of the time, except when it’s in the east or west.”

Chaos shrugs his shoulders.

“I’d go with east. East into the black mountains. That is how you came to be here, is it not? You already know the way to Nottingham. But you were not listening, were you?” he says condescendingly.

Chaos begins to cough uncontrollably. He tries to continue his story but instead completely disintegrates with the coughing, disappearing into the air. I can still hear his voice, though he’s nowhere around. I jump to my feet, waving the torch around, looking for the strange god.

“Three dark nights it said.” His gravelly voice booms, echoing all around the cave. “You have been here too long. You’re a part of the mountain now. Nobody makes it to Nottingham. You were not listening.”

I put the burning stick close to where Chaos had been drawing. On the ground, the map is fully drawn. He's drawn a path through the mountains to a bridge labelled, "Caravans Pass.

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I trace a route on the sketch map, backwards, through the dark mountains, through the plains and back to the village.

Excerpt: 5th scroll, verse 7-9; the great book

In those days, they shall kneel before the mother. Their faces to the ground, they will chant and sing before her image, but she will not hear them.

Her black stone skin will turn to dust before their very eyes. She will crumble upon them, spreading like ash into the wind.

And they shall remember the words of the poet, “Behold, I saw the hands of the mother falling to the ground. They shattered into a thousand pieces. I saw a sickness spread into the air, and all who were caught in the fragments of her shattered as she did.”

Without a home to go back to, they shall press their foreheads to the scorched earth, but no one will answer them. The trees will long have withered, their temples lost to fires in the night. Women shall mourn for their children. Children will mourn their mothers.

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On that day, a man will lift his head to gaze upon her, but shall behold only ash in the air. He will break as she did. They will all shatter as she did. They will flee in terror, scurrying like rats before their doom

The black mountains

I hear a scream coming from somewhere in the mountains. It echoes back and forth through the hollow passageways, so I cannot tell from where it is coming. But I recognise the voice. And somehow, I know what it means. I can feel the confusion in that voice, in Chaos’ heart. I can see him, wide-eyed and frozen. The world around him is frozen and turning distorted; like a child’s drawing it’s all so unreal. It feels unreal. I can’t help but feel sorry for him. He tries to move, breaking apart the air in his path, like frozen waters, creating black chasms of nothingness in the cracks. The chasm begin to suck the fragments of air and stone into themselves. The mountains begin to break apart, sending cracking lines through the air toward me.

I want to run, but I cannot. I stand there, as wideeyed as Chaos, unable to move. I feel a spine tingling

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chill as I too begin to turn distorted. The sound of a hundred-thousand scurrying insects fills my skull, though I am sure there are none, only cubes of broken world spilling over the hills, coming at me. I begin to fall to the ground. Slowly, like a feather caught in the wind. The air breaks apart around me. I can feel myself cracking.

I see some distorted being that I know is Chaos walk through a void in the rock wall beside me. His movements are fractured. The air continues to break as he forces his way through. He leans over and grabs me by the neck, choking me.

“C-Chaos.” I cough, unable to defend myself.

It’s all so surreal. The mountain disintegrates around me as its fragments are pulled into the black voids. I force my palm into his face and stiffly attempt to push Chaos away.

Suddenly, I stumble onto the ground. My hand almost breaks with the force of me pushing so hard against nothing. Chaos is gone. The Mountain is gone. The whole world is back to normal. Better than normal in

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fact. Without warning, the day has turned cheerful and sunny.

I seem to have stumbled into some kind of rocky desert plain. I jump to my feet and check myself for holes or something, sighing in relief when I find I’m quite intact. Spluttering and coughing, I glance around the plain and notice what remains of the black mountain disappearing into itself just over the horizon.

Shadow stands tied to a rock beside me and looks at me sheepishly.

“I’m okay.” I tell her reassuringly. “Are you okay?”

She whinnies a reply.

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