Chapter 208 - Uroboros part 9

Just a drop of my vampire blood, and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. I watched his pallid eyelids flutter, a rapid burst of motion, like the wings of a moth. His black tongue snaked out, slid across his lips. Then he opened his eyes and fixed me with his soulless gaze.

"A god of corruption, am I?" he hissed, echoing my unspoken thoughts.

Zenzele flashed a look of horror at me. Horror and despair.

"You would see mortal men rule this world in our stead?" he asked, though it was more of an accusation than a question. "You would serve them over us? Forsaking your own kind?"

"Yes!" I answered. What was the point of lying? He had tasted my blood, and through the blood: my soul.

"Mortals are weak, simple-minded, crude."

"Yes."

"Their lives are so brief. Better to spend your devotion on mayflies."

Zenzele opened her mouth to plead my case, but Khronos motioned for her to be silent.

"There is only one difference between mortal and immortal men," I said.

"And what is that?" Khronos asked.

"Their kings die!" I cried, and then I threw myself at him.

It was a desperate act. I knew that he'd found my soul offensive. Even more damning, I was glad. I wanted no part of his kingdom of filth. I had gambled my life on the slim chance that I might curry his favor, and by extension, protect my beloved Tanti, but I had lost. The only thing I could hope for now was to destroy the creature that threatened the lives of my beloved.

But how do you kill that which is unkillable?

"Gon, no--!" Zenzele shouted as I launched myself at the god king.

Khronos was close. I crossed the space to him in the blink of an eye. As the king's council rushed in to stop me, I seized Khronos's head. I could feel the terrible power pouring from his body, a palpable force, even more dreadful at this intimate distance. He was an Eternal, and so much more, but I had no recourse. I thought to tear his head from his shoulders and crush it beneath my heel. Perhaps surprise would give me the moment I needed to deliver the fatal blow, though I doubted even such a catastrophic injury could kill the fiend.

But their god king was fast. He threw me off as quickly as I laid hands on him.

As Khronos flung me to the floor, my nails raked across the flesh of his face, digging several grooves in his cold white skin. The black blood welled up out of the tissue to stitch the wounds back together almost instantly, and I brought my fingers to my mouth, hoping some of his Strix was imbedded in my fingernails. Perhaps I could divine some secret from his blood, something that might help me to vanquish the monster.

"You… DARE--!" Khronos thundered, outraged.

I tasted his blood on my nails, and then the whipstrike of his persona. His thoughts and emotions and memories flooded into my mind.

The force of the god king's psyche caught me off guard, and for a moment I was possessed. Alien images filled my vision: a world, a universe, foreign to our own, a nightmarish realm where even the fundamental laws that governed reality were antithetical to man's reason. There, all life was parasitic in nature, and the heavens were not some vast repository of far flung stars, but filled with a kind of living soup, an organic miasma. Coupled with these visions were the god king's human recollections, almost as impenetrable. I saw the warrior race that gave birth to him. I witnessed their never-ending battles. Grinding, unceasing warfare, even when he was a child. I saw him walking through fields of battle, crushing the skulls of his people's fallen foes, a boy with a large stone in his hands. I saw him as a young man, fighting with spear and blade. I saw his first kill, his first battlefield rape. I saw vast fields of war-torn corpses, the earth run red with blood while vultures feasted on the flesh of the dead and the dying. And then an Event. A terrific calamity. The long foretold Armageddon of his race's mythology. There was a flash in the heavens, so bright it turned the night to day. The ground trembled. Their forests were laid to waste. The god king set forth with a band of warriors to seek out the cause of the destruction. He found it. He found it and returned to his people a monster. But it was all too much for me, this terrible genesis, this fusion of man and not-man. It was as if I were seeing through the eyes of two separate beings, hearing two voices shouting in my skull at once, and I could do ought but reject them both, pushing them both away in an instinctive attempt to preserve my own sanity.

But before the visions faded, I saw his ambition, or perhaps the ambition of the alien thing that was coupled to his soul: to remake the world in his image, and that was perhaps the most nightmarish revelation of all.

"Bring me his head!" Khronos roared, and I was seized by several hissing blood drinkers. They had surrounded me while I was in the spell of his blood. They wrenched me violently in one direction, then another, cursing and snarling. In a moment they would coordinate their assault and tear me limb from limb.

"No!" Zenzele shouted. I saw her rise, and then she blurred across the chamber. An instant later, she was snatching a spear from a distracted soldier's hands.

"Wait!" Khronos said, stepping toward me with a grin. "I will do it myself!"

I lunged at him, but my captors held me back. They forced me to my knees as the god king approached.

He took my temples between his hands, his nails sinking into my flesh. "Your head shall adorn my cock," he spat.

His grin twisted into a scowl. Black fluid speckled my forehead and cheeks. He made a choking sound, and we both looked down simultaneously. Even as we looked, the spearhead that was protruding from his chest vanished inside his body, scraping against his sternum. It burst back through an instant later, just above and to the left of the first hole, a ragged chunk of his heart jiggling on the tip of it.

Zenzele swung the god king in an arc, lifting him by the shaft of the spear she had impaled him with. Lips peeled back from her teeth, she set her foot against his buttocks and shoved him into the vampires who held me down.

They fell away to every side of me, knocked off their feet by the impact of Khronos's body. I was free! I scrambled up, grabbed the first blood drinker I could get my hands on, and swung him by the arm into another group of immortals.

"Gon!" Zenzele shouted.

She had already retreated to the entrance.

I followed.

Bhorg and Goro and Tribtoc had encircled her protectively. So Zenzele's comrades intended to make good on their promise to stand by their mistress! I saw Bhorg shatter a vampire to shards with his massive hammer. Tribtoc and Goro were fighting hand-to-hand.

Where is Palifver? I wondered, scanning the room, but he and Hettut had retreated, or perhaps they were only lost in the chaos. The god king was flopping on the ground, his black blood jetting into the air. Tendrils of the oldest living vampire's whipping blood pierced the body of one of the T'sukuru who rushed to his aid, and the woman exploded into sparkling dust with a final despairing howl, drained of her vitality in an instant.

"Hurry!" Zenzele cried, and vanished into the corridor.