This Holy Light...

...shall take...

...NO MORE FROM ME!

I roar with the strength of the ocean. My war cry blasts my enemies across the theater and expels Diesel’s wretched knives from my flesh.

…No. These beings are not my enemies, for that would mean they actually posed a threat!

They are just children! Humans, demons, and spirits alike! They are scared little pups lashing out at their lord and master!

And they are in my world.

I close my eyes and pray to the Ten-Headed Lord.

I pluck an arrow from my ribs, draw it back on my ivory bow, and shoot it toward the sky.

It flies up and vanishes in the night. The stars in the night sky shimmer and tremble.

Like droplets of water or jewels in a loose mountain, the stars fall free from the firmament and rain glorious destruction upon the main theater.

The elementals, pixies, imps, and gnomes fall like wheat before a scythe, torn apart into clouds of blue pixels as the stars strikes the earth and detonate.

One star falls toward the young Fortuna, descending at the perfect angle to turn her curly hair and face to ash.

Before the girl has a chance to react, Cookie the Pit Bull Spirit tackles his mistress out of the way.

Three balls of cold blue flame detonate against the dog spirit’s hide, baking him alive.

“Cookie!” Fortuna screams, scrambling to her feet.

The Pit Bull locks eyes with Fortuna, whimpers once, and dissolves into digital fragments.

Fortuna looks at me. “You…” she whispers, her body trembling. “Stop it!” She cups her hand, summons hellfire, and hurls it at me.

I catch the fireball between my teeth, gargle loudly, and spit it back her way.

Fausta flies in front of Fortuna, spreading her wings around her child to absorb the blast. Brilliant white feathers char and wither, flaking away to ash.

The theater’s pillars crumble, walls shatter, and wooden theater boxes break from their mountings and crash to the ground.

Diesel barely manages to stagger out of the way of a collapsing struts and falls onto his rear next to the prone Mandrake Kayne. He yelps, clenches his teeth, and points a finger toward the sky. Swarms of fallen daggers soar upward, swooping like falcons as they slice falling stars out of the sky.

Diesel looks down for a moment as his blades go to work. “I don’t suppose you’re about to wake up and slay some demons?” I hear Diesel ask the prone Kayne.

Kayne doesn’t respond.

“Fair enough,” Diesel says, an expression tantalizingly close to despair coming across his face

Across the room, Felix Lynn stirs and picks himself off the ground. Blood trickles from a cut in his temple. He steps forward, stumbles, and leans against a dented theater chair to prop himself up.

Quicksilver alloy drips down from his fingers, flowing over the cushioned seat, chewing away at the brass-steel frame.

Felix straightens his stance and pulls harder. With just one arm, he rips the theater chair from the floor with the ease of a monkey plucking fruit from a tree.

“Give him back,” Felix whispers as he approaches me. The chair he drags behind himself melts and reforms into a long cleaver-like sword. “Give him back.” The sword in his hand swells in size as his nanomachines consume and absorb more metal from the chairs he passes. “Give me my son back!” He roars, turning his waist and whipping his sword at me like a cricket bat.

I leap back from the sword block, dodging as gracefully as silk–.

He nicks my ankle. He makes a cut. The wound burns like acid as microscopic machines chew at my meat.

Enough of this!

I shape another arrow from my flesh and knock it. “Thotsakan,” I whisper. “Aid your servant.”

I draw and loose my arrow at the theater floor. The arrow flies fast and strikes true, splitting carpet, wood, and stone before vanishing deep into the earth.

Felix blinks.

“Huh?” Fortuna blurts out loud.

Only Diesel and Fausta know what is coming, judging by the hollow looks in their eyes.

The earth rumbles.

The theater’s floor splits open at three locations. Cracks spreads across the velvet carpet floor, cracks that widen into deep, deep fissures that lead down, down.

At the bottom of these fissures lies a vortex of chaos. Swirling smoke and lightning and rain and sulfur-scented lightning.

Chaos. Pandemonium. A hungry Hell where even demons fear to tread.

From this abyss, rising through the gashes in the floor, come long, slender fingers…attached to long, ink-dark hands…attached to long, rubbery arms.

These shadow hands reach out, seize my enemies, and drag them back to their home.

“Freaks,” the hands whisper as they tangle themselves around Felix Lynn and Grobach the Changeling. “Freaks—Freaks—Freaks—”

“Heretic,” the hands rasp, coiling around Diesel and the mortally wounded Kayne. Diesel’s flock of flying daggers swarm and cut and stab, but the hands don’t care. “Heretic—tic—tic—!”

“Traitor!” the hands shout, grappling Fausta’s wings, arms and legs, pulling her away from a screaming Fortuna like a glutton splitting a wishbone. “Traitor! Traitor! Traitorrrrrr….”

They scream and struggle to no avail. They are powerless—powerless!—to stop the hands of shadow from dragging them to an infinite, unending Hell!

And there’s no one who can rescue them from their fate…!

Wait.

Where did those other two go? The bookish theater clerk and the woman with the antlers?

I search the room and spot them crouching behind an overturned pillar. I strain my ears and listen to their murmurs.

“Mac,” Sarah Mankiller says. “I’ll distract that thing. When I do that, I need you to run and find me some help.” She grimaces. “I swear to god, if you leave me to die in some kind of heroic sacrifice, I will be so nettled!”

“Are you sure about this?” Macintosh Crate asks.

For a moment, I assume they are talking to Sarah. Then I realize they are staring at the dinosaur puppet on their hand.

Sarah shakes Mac by the shoulder. “Dammit, Mac!” she hisses. “Talk to your  friend after you get away!”

“If we do this, Theo,” Mac tells their puppet, “everything will change.” They gulp. “They’ll start to notice us.”

Theo’s felt head bobs up and down in complete silence.

Mac chuckles and closes their eyes. “Dammit, Theo,” they say. “You don’t play fair.”

I reach into my flesh and tease a new arrow forth from bone and sinew.

“Mac,” Sarah pleads. “You need to go! Someone has to survive this...!”

“Sarah,” Mac says, rising and climbing on top of the fallen pillar. “Whatever happens, I need you to trust me.” They hesitate, and then add: “Trust us.”

“Thotsakan,” I pray. “Grant me marvelous venoms that chew and feast.”

Macintosh Crate looks up at my trembling like a twig in the breeze. Their bright blue eyes glisten with terror.

I loose my arrow. It flies across the distance.

The dinosaur puppet reaches out and catches the arrow between its stubby felt arms.

I lower my bow and star at this scene in disbelief.

A plush, cuddly puppet caught my arrow.

No: the whelp called Macintosh caught my arrow by pinching it between their thumb and ring finger.

I shake my head. “An impressive feat, human,” I tell them. “It seems I underestimated you.” I smirk. “Alas, you would have been better off dodging.”

The arrow in Macintosh’s puppet hand ripples and dissolves into a mess of slithering, poisonous snakes. Hides of red and blue and green slither down and around the theater clerk’s arm, opening their mouths to bite and fill their victim with venom.

Macintosh blinks once. The color of their pupils changes, going from the pale blue of the clear sky to the bright, brilliant gold of the sun.

The serpents on their arm instantly wither into dried-up husks, husks that fall and shatter upon hitting the ground.

What is this?

What is going on!

...No.

No!

Macintosh Crate takes a step forward. I take a step back.

“Impossible...” I say, tongue flaps wildly around the inside of my mouth.

Macintosh Crate raises an eyebrow.

I struggle for words. “You’re a mere human!” I tell them. “You’re just a shadow, a flea, a speck of dust! How did you…?”

Macintosh Crate smiles cruelly and slides the felt puppet off their left hand. They speak to me in a voice not their own:

“If my friend Mac is just a mere human,” Theo says in a rich, lilting voice, “then what does that make you, god of humans?”

This insolent insect!

They point to themselves. “I,” Theo says, “was worshipped long before your race bonded themselves to the dreams of bipedal apes.”

“You’re lying,” I say.

Macintosh Crate’s lips curl up into a cruel smile. They hold out their hands like a weary traveler teasing warmth from the fire.

Pressure pours off their body. The world around them begins to revert. Jagged stone transforms back into red carpet. The dark ocean and silver sand turns back into a dark city square. The wet, glistening maw behind them turns back into an ordinary door and hallway.

The fissures to hell close up, while the shadowy hands shiver and collapse into sickly black sludge.

With just a whisper of intent, Macintosh Crate—no, the thing inside Macintosh Crate—wipes away the distortions my existence had inflicted upon the world.

“What are you?” I ask the being inside Mac. “Name yourself!”

Macintosh—no, the being called Theo— meets my gaze. Behind their round golden eyes I see the gulf of eons.

I see coniferous trees reaching toward the sky, vast branches filled with the buzzing of dragonflies and the flap of feathered wings.

I hear the echoes of herd cries, brassy symphonies sung through crests of bones, the hiss of raptor clans stalking their prey, and the whip-crack of enormous tails swatting threats to their young.

I feel the thud of their giant steps, rhythmic footfalls that shake the earth.

I see a second sun streak across the sky, coming to end their final age. And to the end, their honks, cries, and hissing roars all paid homage to one deity.

“You can call me Theo like everyone else,” the entity says, using Macintosh’s lips to give me a disappointed frown. “Stop throwing this tantrum, young one, and I may be patient enough to teach you my true name.”

Next Chapter: Episode Twenty-Eight: Magic Trick (Revised)