The Darkness Before the Dawn - By Ryan Hughes Page 0,83
on top and bottom, and a single eye on a stalk protruded like a flower from the top. A round mouth below looked like a rodent burrow in the creature’s sandy brown hide.
The mouth spoke. “Worship me.”
Don’t laugh, Jedra warned.
Kayan tugged on the vines holding her in the air. That won’t be hard.
They needed to know more about this place and about this bizarre being who had captured them. Aloud, Jedra said, “We hardly know you. You’re Yoncalla, lord of creation, but who is that? Where did you come from?”
The furry blob expanded like a balloon. “I am the original being. I built this world with the power of my own mind.”
Kayan asked, “And you live here all alone?”
The blob shrank again. “There were once many of us, each with our own world. We crossed back and forth at will, and we fought great battles. But one by one the others grew frail and died, until only I remain. I am the last of the mighty conquerors, the last immortal.”
The blob stretched out again, growing arms and legs and a regular head until Yoncalla stood before them, a fifty-foot-tall, perfectly proportioned human. He was nude, and his skin was tanned bronze over his entire body. His muscles rippled as he bent down to put his head on Jedra’s and Kayan’s level, but then he evidently thought better of it and with a wave of his hands the trees holding them grew upward instead.
Now they dangled over an even greater drop, but that seemed to be the least of their worries.
“This was my original form,” Yoncalla said. “Pleasing, is it not?”
“Very,” Kayan said.
What? Jedra demanded. He’s a musclebound freak.
Kayan shrugged. I’m just humoring him.
Yoncalla said, “In this form, I was king of all Athas. I ruled the entire land with an iron fist.”
Kayan said, “Wait a minute. You know about Athas?”
Yoncalla’s laugh shook the ground. “Of course I know about it. I owned it, until my physical body could no longer be sustained. Tell me, how fares it now?”
Kayan looked to Jedra. Jedra shrugged and said, “Not very well, compared to this. It’s mostly desert, and your city is a complete ruin.”
The fifty-foot immortal balled his fists, and tiny bolts of lightning flashed in a halo around his head. “What! A ruin? How did that happen?”
“It was that way when we found it,” Jedra said. He neglected to mention that he and Kayan had finished it off.
Yoncalla shook his head. “My city. My glorious city. And the world is… a desert?”
“That’s right.”
“It was those damned mages, wasn’t it?” Yoncalla asked, but he didn’t wait for a response. “I knew they would get greedy. I should have crushed them all the moment they learned to power their spells with the energy of life.” He swept his hand through the top of a tree beside him, snapping it off with a loud crack of splintering wood. “Maybe I should do that yet.”
“Uh, that might be kind of hard to do,” Jedra said. “They’re running things now, and this world exists in a crystal no bigger than my thumb.”
“I know that,” Yoncalla said. He snapped his fingers and thousands of similar crystals fell out of the sky like hail. “New worlds, all of them,” he said, “but all are subordinate to mine. Just as you are now. I am the master here.”
He keeps repeating that, like he’s trying to convince himself it’s true, Kayan said. I’ll bet he hasn’t had a visitor in here since the cataclysm.
Probably not. Jedra tugged on the vines binding his hands. They tightened around his wrists with more strength than he could summon to pull them free. If he and Kayan were going to get free, they wouldn’t be able to do it with brute force.
“Sure you’re the master here,” he said, “but yours isn’t the only crystal left, you know. I found dozens of them in the ruins. They looked like they had all been tied together with wires on some kind of framework. They weren’t hooked together anymore, but I could still sense some kind of life in them.”
Yoncalla staggered back as if Jedra had struck him, his right leg snapping off a tree in the process. He didn’t even notice. “What? They still live?”
“Some of them,” Jedra said. “About half of them were dead.”
“Only half?” Yoncalla reached out to a treetop for support. “I thought—it has been thousands of years! Millennia, all alone. I was sure they had all perished.”