Chapter 13: And The Sky Wept

While Elaine Caldwell had been busy with her two teammates Prudence had spent her time monitoring the camp. Hanging out with Elaine and her squad had been fun. A little too fun, maybe. She'd gotten a little carried away. And after months of seeing nothing but grueling battle and stern faces, seeing a group of extremely attractive people scraping together all the happiness they could find had been comforting. Not to mention thrilling. The thought of a raunchy lesbian orgy happening between people she found enticing had been enough to give her some very naughty thoughts indeed, thoughts she'd then spent more than a bit of effort repressing.

It wasn't the same kind of repression her boss Jeanne had been up to. Prudence was true to her desires and had no problem indulging them. However, she'd come onto Elaine quite strongly and except for some appreciative glances the brunette hadn't reciprocated yet. And that was fine. She probably had a lot to juggle with her four girlfriends and one team member who was very pointedly not her girlfriend.

Until they had some time to feel things out, having naughty fantasies about these ladies felt... inappropriate. And so Prudence had done what she always did when indulging herself wasn't an option: She'd put extra effort into her job. She'd taken a Gospel out to check the surroundings. According to the Professor whatever Caulder had planned would happen that night at the latest.

And because of this Prudence was in the exact right spot when the other shoe dropped.

A flash of magic similar to what had brought the second wave rippled across the area. Except in its wake came a force an order of magnitude more powerful and perverse. It rippled across the landscape and changed it and she was sure everyone at the camp would be able to feel it.

She'd been near the giant crater Evelyn had created with her Vasavi Shakti when it happened. She'd assumed that Caulder wouldn't be stupid enough to send another wave there, if only because the slopes of the crater were too steep to traverse. Except the thing that appeared in the center of the crater wouldn't care. The thing was a red smudge upon reality, the kind that only happened when something that really should not exist walked the earth. And all around it reality bent and twisted, distorting to fit the being that had no place in it.

The most immediate change was the sky. With a massive cracking sound the sky shattered, large shards of it falling to the ground to reveal a baleful red starscape above, the sun an eye that cast its glare down on the world.

A red haze drifted down, coating the ground in a layer of mist a foot thick, and everywhere the mist touched it seemed to corrode plants, melt asphalt and twist the very earth. In the wake of all these changes however was something far less tangible, a tilt shift in reality that let her know that something utterly wrong had entered the stage, something that was beyond understanding.

Prudence had heard of occurrences like this, although from what she knew they heralded the arrival of avatars of the Outer Gods. If whatever that red smudge was was some sort of avatar, they were all fucked. As powerful as Elaine was now, and even with her and Jude and those super robot pilots along, they stood no chance against a Mask of Nyarlathotep.

As she stared at the smudge it resolved itself into a grotesque parody of a horseman, all glistening muscle and distorted features. The creature was horrifying to behold but, to her immense relief, it also seemed more grounded in reality than a true Outsider. Whatever this thing was, whatever abomination Caulder had managed to create, it clearly held a not insignificant piece of Outsider power but it was still of this world in some way. It wasn't a true Outsider Divinity. That meant it could die.

However, Prudence did know that if this thing could die, she alone would not suffice to slay it. She needed everyone at the camp. But going back to send a half-assed report wouldn't help anyone so she carefully monitored the beast, observing its capabilities. And what she saw chilled her to the bone.

The beast did look like a horseman, if vaguely, but it was far bigger, twenty or thirty feet tall and thirty feet long. And it had no problem scaling the slopes of the crater. Once it was out it headed straight for the refugee camp. It didn't hurry but it didn't dawdle either. However, as it moved the red mist began to twist around it, coiling around its hooves and sneaking tendrils outward. Every house along the highway was invaded by a tendril of mist and more tendrils poked into the ground.

Soon the beast was joined by beings Prudence had never seen before. The closest she could liken them to were zombies, except not. Of course she knew zombies, the lowliest, shambling servants of the King in Yellow. She even remembered the often vigorous arguments that had been led in Heaven on whether or not calling these shambling mockeries of life 'zombies' was appropriate or not, given that they had nothing at all in common with the entranced humans certain voudun witch-doctors could create.

But these things weren't like any zombies Prudence had ever seen. They were rotting corpses reanimated with Outsider energies, certainly, but that was where the similarities ended. Normal zombies were merely dead bodies reanimated by the foul witchcraft of the King in Yellow, shambling corpses dancing on the wire-thin strings of oily, yellow-black magic sent out by a Yellow Wraith or worse. These things, however, looked wrong. The red haze that coiled around them didn't guide them along like marionettes. It wrapped around them, coiling tight and solidifying until it looked as if they were tied up and strangled with bloody razor-wire. The bodies looked charred, as if the red haze that animated them was burning them up. Even worse, the razor-wire pulsed and squirmed languidly, as if in time with the heartbeat of something vast and terrible. Prudence hoped the heartbeat belonged to the horseman and not the eye in the sky. In fact, she hoped with all her heart that the eye was just an illusion conjured up by this awful being. Because if it wasn't then that would mean an Avatar of Ghroth had entered the universe and that might spell the end of everything.

Right now all she could do was focus on the problem before her. And as she looked from the zombies back to their progenitor she noticed something else, something she'd overlooked before as her eye had been drawn by the sheer awfulness of the red creature: An entire swarm of Yellow Wraiths was hovering around the creature, except even these were off. Yellow Wraiths were nightmarish creatures, each of them looking like a black man'o'war floating through the sky, covered by a yellow membrane that looked like a hooded cloak, but these had metal probes and diodes stuck into their air bladders. Normally these beings sent out hair-thin strands of necromantic energy to control nearby zombies but instead these beings were connected to the red rider, the thin strands that linked them to it wreathed in the red haze that choked the life out of the zombies. Whatever Caulder had done, it had apparently turned the one-sided control of the Yellow Wraiths into a connection that ran both ways. The nutcase had actually managed to place Outsiders, true beings from beyond the universe, under the control of his own creation.

In a certain sense this might be seen as an accomplishment. These were beings vile and alien and he had managed to subjugate them. Except, the way he'd done it felt even more vile than the influence of the Outsiders themselves. This was a madman who managed to be more evil than beings hellbent on destroying reality. And that took some doing.

**

“'And a red horse came forth,'” Leonardo quoted in the briefing room in a breathy voice, “'and to him that sat thereon it was given to take peace from the world, and to make them slay one another. And there was given unto him a great sword.'”

“Is that a quote from the Bible?” General Pennington asked and he was met with withering looks from Jude and Prudence.

“Revelations 6:4,” Jude said.

“Great, so this is the Apocalypse, I hadn't been able to tell,” the General said, his tone dripping with sarcasm.

Prudence wanted to open her mouth to argue but then decided to save her breath. No mortal would possibly understand the significance of this. Ideological fights had broken out in Heaven over whether John was a firebrand spreading defaming lies or whether his ramblings had truly been prophetic. John himself was an... opinionated person and to this day he stood by the words he'd written all those centuries ago. Prudence had always thought he was full of shit but now it was hard not to see the same parallels Leonardo had seen. Here was a red rider wielding a great sword and raising humans to fight against their former brothers.

But what did it mean? Were there hints that could be gleaned by studying John's ramblings? Or would it do more bad than good? Because while Prudence knew the descriptions of the four horsemen, looking at the description of War would never have led her to expect a nuckelavee stitched together from celestials and mermaids.

“Private Dupree,” Professor Stollos asked through the monitor, pulling Prudence out of her thoughts and focusing everyone's attention on the bashful redhead.

“Yes, sir?” Evelyn replied.

“Would you mind giving this beast a scan, so that we have something concrete to work with?”

Evelyn blinked, then nodded.

“What is that going to accomplish?” General Pennington asked. “We all have CARDs, don't we? If the scan function could show us anything useful then Miss Prudence would surely have told us.”

Prudence nodded. Naturally she had scanned the creature, to absolutely no effect.

“Private Dupree has a skill that significantly upgrades her scan function,” the Professor said. “If we are to formulate any plan of attack then her scans are our best starting point.”

The General nodded at the monitor, then looked over to Evelyn and nodded at her as well.

**

Evelyn looked back at the red beast. She'd seen the revulsion of everyone around her but she seemed strangely fine with looking at the creature. It was hideous, certainly, like someone had ripped all the bad things out of all her nightmares and then shoved them together into one ball of awful but she didn't feel the nearly visceral revulsion that seemed to plague so many of those present. She wondered why that was the case. Was she stark raving mad and no longer cared about such things? She thought about it for a good long moment before she remembered that she had a skill called Immunization that made her immune to effects that altered her perception. Could that be it?

Right then she didn't much care. She was just glad she could look at the thing without losing her lunch.

**

“Ouroboros Drive,” Leonardo said. “No, that doesn't sound ominous at all.”

“Do you have an idea of what that is, Stollos?” Jude asked.

Stollos felt somewhat annoyed that they would immediately assume he would know what that nutcase had built but this wasn't a conversation he needed to have right then. “Somewhat,” he said instead. “It was something he had been tinkering with right as we decided to go our separate ways. It was one of the reasons I decided no longer to associate with him, in fact.”

“It's that vile?” Jude asked.

“As I said, he had only begun tinkering with it back then so for all I know the form it ended up taking is something entirely different,” Stollos said. “He certainly didn't work with Outsiders back then or our falling-out would have been significantly more volatile.”

“Still, any little bit helps,” Leonardo said. “Call it a morbid curiosity but I would like to know how he made this abomination work.”

“Don't tell me you want to start looking into fleshcrafting,” Jude said with a groan.

“Not at all,” Leonardo said. “But it is a breathtaking perversion of everything my research has been striving towards. As I said, morbid curiosity. Nothing more.”

Stollos gave a small smile. He understood the sentiment. Leonardo and him had diametrically opposed viewpoints on a lot of topics but their enthusiasm for research was something they shared. “His original design for the Ouroboros Drive was a way to generate emotion. Strong emotions attract the Winds of Magic and one of the main difficulties of magical technology is that machines cannot feel and therefore cannot attract the Winds on their own. As most of us do he began experimenting with wetware.” Wetware being the clinical term for using brain tissue as memory in a computer system. “Except he wasn't satisfied by his results. He could stimulate artificial tissue but it couldn't attract enough Winds. So he began work on a perpetual motion machine for magic. Living tissue that could generate its own emotions. It began with rats. He stitched them together, a male and a female, locked in coitus.”

“What the fuck?!” Prudence hissed.

Stollos nodded. “Indeed. That was bad enough. It was the kind of thing I could only look past by pretending I hadn't seen him working on it. But his projects kept getting more and more deranged.” He paused, then took a deep breath and said: “Until eventually he started using human subjects.”

“And that's when you parted ways with him,” Leonardo said. It was clearly meant as a question, even if it wasn't phrased as one.

“Yes,” Stollos said. “It wasn't just because of this, however. That on its own would have been bad enough but it was far from the only vile thing he was working on at the time. And given what we know now he apparently improved the Ouroboros Drive to include Outsider forces, given that it apparently powers this abomination.”

“So, to summarize,” Jude said. “The Ouroboros Drive is, or is suspected to be, a piece of living tissue that functions as the heart of this creature. Destroying it is paramount. Is that correct?”

“Unless the current version deviates wildly from the original, then yes,” Stollos said.

“Then in short,” Jude continued, “we need to slay the swarm of Yellow Wraiths, break through the creature's personal barrier, damage its eye so it cannot use its most devastating attacks and then hit the beast as hard as physically possible in order to overpower its regeneration long enough to reach and destroy its heart.”

“It sounds so easy when you put it like that,” Leonardo said.

“Not easy,” Jude said. “Simple. There is a difference.”

ChrisLensman

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