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Save Point: The BattleField

Aftertime

Death has finally arrived in person, no longer afraid, waylaid by twisted fate but now returned, again in her favourite form, an intriguing young goth girl in black denim. There are swirls around her eyes in dark kohl, and a silver ankh medallion of the sort pretentiously affected by undead shining on pale breasts. Matters are serious, so she has left her black cap at home (it says 'death' in embroidered silver letters) and brought her umbrella with her instead.

Leaping around her in a watchful perimeter is a creature that cannot seem to decide whether it is a jackal or a werewolf or perhaps something even far more predatory, at least not until it makes up its mind. This is Anubisya, called guardian and opener of the way, he who lives out in his tent atop the great mound where the foundations are built, he who was slain so long ago as he tried to guard the door and save the dead gods of Khem from their fate. Now risen from the belief of multitudes, he has brought with him his daughter Kebechet, who still wears the bandages he tried to wrap her in to save her, but they are crisply white and laundered-clean now, and it is the blood of others they will spill this day.

Anubisya, here and now bodyguard of Death herself, bears his finest heavy full kilt of bronze and gold-engraven plates, of bronze also his torque, and weighty spauldrons and pauldrons borrowed from a much later culture. In his taloned hands there is still a weapon much like the swordspear he carried in life, yet this is no ceremonial blade but a sliver of meteoric iron, a pitted and much burnished natural thing turned blade, the opener of the mouth. Where the counterblade on the other end should be, there is now a polished and sharpened titanium ankh, the loop filed to razor sharpness and the crossbars flared out with wide, full arms to make in their totality something resembling a labrys axe, to match his mistress.

It is reasonably to be expected that Death and her companion love one another dearly.

Anubisya manipulates time to create an endless frozen moment, and Death herself steps forward into the instant, ever-present umbrella at the ready. With a strange circular flick of her wrist, the support struts of the umbrella swirl around and clash into one another, and she is holding the two-handed reaping scythe that is her ancient weapon. Two spare sacrificial sickles are already thrust through her belt, in case of the worst.

She shrugs her head, and the black leather of her collar somehow stretches to become a half-cowl and half-cloak, seething around her as though it is alive or has been bought back to life, clinging briefly to her flesh as it moves like some creature all her own. She raises her hand, and ravens condense from shadows all over the field, taking wing and flocking toward her through the high and empty spaces. From unseen pockets, like a dark magician, she pulls forth a succession of black silk scarves and casts them aside. As they ripple and fall, they twist into the shapes of huge black dogs, which form up into a pack and prowl around her, Anubisya at their head.

Her skin has turned the colour of winters without end, and her eyes are dead black, like the moon reflecting in a pool of tar, filled with the fanged skulls of dead predators. She grips her scythe with rigour-darkened fingernails, and the frozen moment collapses.

Anubisya strikes down the first of the dwellers in Shadow before they can even mass or draw close, blinking with lethal concentration as he creates lightless spheres of accelerated entropy. The creatures they intersect weather, go brittle, then snap and crumble under the weight of aeons in their tracks. The hounds spread out, to leap and rip as Anubisya holds the line, lashing out with his swordspear between castings as the creatures crowd near, thinking to overcome him before his powers can charge.

Death leaps like the nightmare of the invincible slayer, almost flying and swooping through the air like one of her ravens, always with her scythe flicking and spinning ahead of her. Her ravens peck and claw at the creatures of Shadow, taking them off balance as she sweeps them down with the blade. Shadow beasts are severed neatly in two at each singular strike, at every conceivable angle, their blood like venom forming a fine suspended mist like dark haze upon the air.

The rule unspoken that binds her is that she may slay any single thing, once, at one time. Which is how the dragon of shadow has eluded her these many years. But Death is faster than a thought, and she is bound only to the outermost limits of ancient predators no longer remembered, to break the heart of the antelope. And she is gaining.

Anubisya, bound only by his own nature and the very aeons he must summon to bring even the deathless down to dust, is able to destroy whole clusters of the incarnations of Shadow, but it is taking longer and longer to charge up between strikes. Kebechet, with her dagger and spiked wrist cuffs and collar, and piercings everywhere she could put them through, and an earring shaped like an arrow punched all the way through her left ear, stabs the shadows carefully one at a time with a studied psychosis. Getting dead has messed her up, but no worse than any other teenager. Every once in a while she disappears suddenly downward into the ground through a pool of her own red blood, to reappear abruptly somewhere else, confounding the Shadows.

The darkness falters, confronted by images created specifically to cope with the fear of the different and unknowable that is exactly what it is. The battle begins to turn.

~*~

(Text missing)

*~*

As the dead shadows flow inwards and are absorbed, the Dragon bears witness as it finds another repressed memory unfolding inside its mind.

Terrowne Kilroy finds himself remembering the time he awoke from a dream, in which a cat leapt at his chest and struck him in the solar plexus so hard he woke up, but was somehow absorbed into him at the moment of impact. He remembers seeing the signs posted up everywhere, "Have you seen our cat?" so pitiful, just a small thing, "Be careful, you're just little," with a kink at the end of its tail, "Frightened of everything, especially dogs," and knowing somehow that this was the cat in his dream, having lost its life somehow, finding its soul unholmed, and leaping for a safe place to hide. "All the little shadows find a home in me."

And he had wished, so very much, that things could have somehow been different, because he could hear the thoughts of the cat where it was curled up all small inside a corner of his soul, or at least one of the small empty spaces that cats like to curl up inside when they hide, and it was in its own way so very precious, and very beautiful, and worthy of being loved. And so the Dragon had spoken, and made it always have been different.

He remembers, too, the fragment of the original edition Tale of Fish and Dragon that Sethkill had found, blasted apart and burned to cinders, and had tried to translate for them in the absence of most of the necessary words. "You were never real," were the words Sethkill had tried, "but that is just a small thing, for I am a Dragon of Shadows."

He wonders just how far back Cleo remembers the events before her own birth, and whether perhaps this has on some level influenced the course of their strange and ancient relationship, a love that has never died. In fact, he is forced to ask himself just how much his own wills and desires, and those of the Dragon, have influenced the reality around them. A power to create change that is so great it becomes acausal, that it undercuts itself and prevents it own cause, like a snake or a serpent or perhaps a Dragon biting its own tail, just one of two.

"If you could change how it all turned out, would you?" His answer has always been, "Yes, I would change everything." But because he already has, he's okay with the outcome. Things are how they always should have been, and he can live with that.

The final fragments of the unborn shadows, resisting, are drawn in and find safety in the empty spaces in his soul. At long last, he feels full, instead of always slightly empty.

The Dragon drops its grasp on the manifold, the wings that are not and never were wings, and allows itself to fall backward, in what can only be described as a directly downward slow-motion crash, to strike the earth and strew the ash aside with an impact vastly disproportionate to its apparent size. It lies in the dust, full flat on its back, extremities draped outward, with the dreams of dead shadows playing across the insides of its eyelids.

Eventually, after a couple of minutes of rest, not long enough that Cleo might panic but just long enough to make her worried, the golden black-slitted eyes of the Dragon snap open. It's never been able to resist a certain flair for the dramatic. "Yes, I think we can handle that," it tells the new identities living behind its eyes. After a brief pause to listen for the answer, it gets up by the simple expedience of falling down in reverse, in defiance of whatever local conventions apply for gravity. This place, after all, is just a trap for the shadows, designed to get them to comply all unknowing with a series of preconceptions that would allow them to be interpreted, rendered comprehensible, and thus defeated. Inspiration has defeated expectation, but the Dragon knows better.

Cleo is watching with a certain wry amusement. She knows better too, and so refuses to fall for the dramatics even though he makes her emotions tug on her heartstrings, and she loves him for it. It's always fun to be made to feel so intensely.

"So, how do we get out of here?" she asks the surviving deified archetypes of post-humanity.

~*~

"This is why we brought Kebechet," explains Death. She's already starting to revert back to an abstraction again, becoming something slightly feline and predatory around the edges, something that died a long time ago in the dry places but still has pieces of desiccated skin that flutter gently in the warm breeze. "You know I'm a creature of many changes," she scolds, on catching Terrowne looking at her sideways. "Although you're still kind of interesting. I'll have my chance with you eventually, one of these days."

Terrowne is forced to consider, in light of the grin, that this is playfulness and not a threat. Cleo hides a slight scowl because she thinks Death may be mocking her.

"One of Kebechets divine epithets-" begins Death.

"-apart from 'that weird bitch'-" Kebechet interrupts.

"-is 'opener of the windows in the western sky'," concludes Anubisya, who has only just arrived after finishing cleaning himself up after the battle. He radiates a peculiar hot smell of sweat and dried spices just around his body, and has sewn up several minor cuts, slashes and tears with what looks like gold wire, repairing major damage with the aid of a staple-gun.

Cleo, who knew Anubisya when he was still alive, back during the zep-tepi, and went out banging pussy with him several times when he was off duty, naturally finds this quite attractive. If they weren't all busy, she'd spend a little while licking him better. An hour or two, tops. Honestly.

"Daddy!" yelps Kebechet happily, and throws herself into his arms. She's been adolescent forever, after all, and so if she wants to be a little child-like occasionally, no-one minds. Anubisya nuzzles the side of her face in an obvious gesture of affection. "I killed'em good," she reassures him.

("It hurts them," Cleo remembers Anubisya saying, "but it feels really good. And afterwards they go on about how honoured they are, and streak the blood you've drawn down either side of your muzzle with their fingers. Then you rub in some salve to heal them, and they come again. Their love for us is genuine in a way only love for a realised ideal could be.")

"It's derivative of my title, really," Anubisya continues to explain. "Since I am 'opener of the way' and she's my daughter, she gets to be 'opener of the windows in the western sky'. Which is quite handy, since it gives her far more specific abilities than mine. That's how she does that really quite disturbing trick where she disappears downward through an illusory pool of blood. Our myths and legends influence the shape of our powers."

Kebechet nods modestly, her many ear-piercings jangling as she does so. "Between us, we can return you to the start of the way. It would be impossible for anyone else to do so. Your return will probably constitute something of a surprise."

"Just to check," says Death archly, licking at the tip of her newly formed muzzle with a long pink hungry tongue, "you _have_slain enough enough shadows to power this little trick?"

"I did exactly what you said," insists Kebechet defensively. "Stay on the edges of the battle, slay enough shadows to charge up the dagger, don't waste power on splashy magical attacks. Like I would. I don't have many believers left, so I have to live on an allowance from daddy."

"We should probably get on with this," hints Cleo, thinking that the sooner they get out of here and back to wherever they were, the better. Shared alignments tend to fall apart rapidly after battles, and she suspects that the higher powers will soon be back to their usual interpersonal scheming and mysterious ways, even if some of them are old friends. After all, there's only so much belief to go around.

Kebechet stands back from her father, brushes clean a space on the ground in front of her with her extended foreclaw. She draws the dagger, determines west or a suitable equivalent thereof, presents the mirror of the blade to the sky.

"Do you still remember those physics lessons from your first life?" Anubisya interrupts, clearly uncertain as to whether his daughter has the dominions and powers required to pull this one off.

"Of course I do," sighs Kebechet, clearly exasperated. "For some reason they've been syncretised as part of my divine persona. Whenever I need to know stuff, there it is. Now stop hassling me and let me get on with this like the cat lady said."

Once silence has been established, and Kebechet has repeated the start of the ritual to regain her composure, she clenches her fist and draws the blade shallowly across her left wrist, sideways so that there will be plenty of blood but not too quickly. Then she lets her blood spill down into the dust, slowly and steadily, carefully drawing out the rough outline of a square, making sure that there are no spaces and the line is continuous. There is a certain amount of splattering, but the pattern is definite.

Kebechet begins to murmur and chant under her breath, gradually increasing in volume as she completes the figure. Once she has marked off the four cardinal points, she uses the sharp-edged dagger to cut off a length of her no longer pristine bandages, wrapping the linen carefully four times around her wrist and pulling the knot tight with her teeth and a sudden gasp. Resuming her humming and chanting, she takes the dagger, draws it through the blood to create a perfect and precise square with absolutely straight edges, which is, of course, harder than it looks.

As her song becomes more audible, Terrowne realises that although the words are in an ancient language, the tune is very familiar. "I think I've heard that song before," he notes.

"...and love will make a window in the sky, for you and I," sings Kebechet, switching effortlessly to a more modern translation. "Here's one for you two. I love music! Rock on!" she snarls hastily in place of a chorus, then keeps singing.

With the hand on her bandaged left arm, she flashes them the ancient desert gesture of horns against ill fortune, that also means to rock hard. She's smiling as she sings.

"You should buy her a guitar," Cleo suggests to Anubisya.

"She already has one. She can play anything. It was her idea to sing the invocation," says Anubisya proudly. "It seems kind of appropriate, under the circumstances."

Completing her song, Kebechet stands, then bows gracefully first to the left, then to the right. She has surprisingly sexy curves under her tight jeans, just on the far side of innocent. Once again, she faces to the west.