The wizard’s translator stood beside me in the tunnel mouth, watching her elder’s masterpiece perform. Thick ink dripped from the monster’s wounds as it soared through the air. And… it wasn’t falling right. It slanted and curved about, sliding on surfaces unseen and immaterial. It fell into disquieting patterns, forming orderly lines on the sand. Unease spread over me. The lines shifted at the edges of my sight, but when I looked to them they hadn’t changed. Slowly a black sigil came into existence, carving away the world it was engraved upon. At each vertex lay a dead gladiator, blood spilling into the sigil’s center.
The air over the symbol trembled. The thin shell of substantiality that gave weight to our world cracked. From within the hidden depths between things, a force of pure Prima Materia reached out. Tendrils of formless void spilled from the confines of the sigil, caressed the walls of the arena, and all they touched dissolved into nothing. A far section crumbled into a landslide of broken masonry and broken bodies.
The Colosseum erupted into bedlam. The free men and women of the Empire routed for the exits, trampling the weak underfoot. I stood, watching. It felt like looking into Titus’s eyes as he died, the same leap of joy in my chest. This well-deserved decimation would hide my disappearance when I fled tonight. I smiled as the screaming crowd rioted.
Except the antithetical force flowing from the sigil looked to be overflowing the bounds of three-dimensionality itself. It billowed out, an infinite hunger that would swallow everything and continue outward still. This was no beast. This was universal annihilation. Fear gripped my guts.
“The sleeper awakens,” murmured the barbarian girl beside me.
“When… when does it stop?” I stammered.
“Soon. Our reality ends when God awakes and shakes off this dream, chases the nightmare of this world from His mind.”
A jolt of realization. Finally comprehension, and suddenly I couldn’t feel anything but claws of panic piercing my body. I had done this. I dashed into the tunnels, sprinting for the chamber beneath the arena’s center, directly below the heart of the sigil. The wizard’s final summoning room.
The halls leading to the room were a charnel house of dismembered corpses and loose viscera. I couldn’t imagine what force had done this. I grabbed a spear from the body of a guard that looked to have been turned inside out, and bolted past a splintered door.
The wizard inside hung in the air, suspended by nothing. His skin had split along every line that had been tattooed onto him, turning him into a patchwork of flesh. I didn’t hesitate, simply charged and thrust my spear straight through his chest. It burst from his back, and he sagged to the floor. The ground shook as another section of the Colosseum collapsed somewhere above us. Screams continued unabated.
“You’re too late,” called the young voice behind me. I turned to see the barbarian translator slowly approaching. “It is time for God to rejoin His world. The real world.”
I felt the terror of the Aurelius from my dream, the one who didn’t want to be extinguished. Everything was ending.
“Why?” I demanded. I looked back to the wizard sprawled on the ground, spear jutting from his chest. “This world has existed for eons. We could have eons more if you let him sleep!”
“This world is broken,” she replied. “The root of all interaction is violence. The only law is the use of force. You try to hide it under a veneer of justifications and proclamations, but even civilization is just the most powerful deciding what violence to inflict.”
She stood beside me now as I looked down at the wizard. There was something about the lines of split skin on his body that warped my vision. I followed one with my eyes and it ran concave, but when I looked at it in whole it presented as convex.
“Every comfort and laugh is bought with the pain of others. Every meal is born of the flesh or the toil of the vulnerable. This world must end. May the next dream be less of a horror.”
The red lines in the dead barbarian’s skin came together to create an eldritch scrawl, and I realized they mirrored the sigil above us. They pulsed with a malevolent beat. I pulled my knife from my belt and crouched over the wizard.
“Fuck your theology,” I spoke. “I want to live.” I pierced the wizard’s skin where two lines met and slashed upward, deforming the sigil. Something in the substance surrounding us shivered.
“No!”
The barbarian translator tackled me, smashing me to the ground. Pain spiked through my rectum as I landed. An elbow dug into my eye, fingers clawed at my hand gripping the knife. I heaved my legs up wildly.
It was just enough to throw her off balance, and the elbow slipped from my face. I surged upright, or tried to — the crown of my head connected with something hard and I felt a crunch as the girl’s nose broke and spurted blood into my eyes. I yanked my head back, my skull blossomed in agony as it cracked against the stone floor. We were both worthless in combat, but her fingers had come loose when her nose had broken, and I at least had some idea what to do with sharpened metal. I jabbed wildly into her side, over and over, frantic and blind. Somewhere after the eighth puncture she slid from me. I rolled over, wiped blood from my eyes, lunged back to the wizard’s body. I slashed wildly at the red sigil etched into his flesh, breaking that blasphemous sign. The light in the room bent bizarrely, the darkness wavering. Slowly the solidity of the world began to return. The ground ceased its shaking.
To my left the girl hacked wet coughs.
“Only delayed… ” she gasped. “God cannot sleep forever. Why prolong this hateful… hateful… ”
I pulled away from the wizard’s flayed corpse, put my back to a wall, and slipped the knife back into my belt with shaking hands.
“We will find a way. With the right knowledge and magic, we can leave His mind.” My words rang hollow in my ears.
She gurgled. I watched the young girl I’d murdered twitch, and bitterness twisted my face into a grimace. She wasn’t wrong. The final arbiter was violence. How else could a physical world work? But I didn’t want to die. I crawled to her side, took her hand, and I did the only thing I could do.
“I am sorry,” I recited. “You had to die so that I may live. I don’t ask your forgiveness; this is the way of life. But know I wish this world was different.”
The Final Gift of Zhuge Liang
Laurie Tom
Zhuge Liang was dead, and with him, Shu Han’s greatest hope of a unified China. The prime minister’s star trembled in the night sky instead of falling to Earth with the death of the great sage. Zhuge Liang had promised that it would remain until the Shu army had withdrawn, so their enemies would not know of his passing.
But that was small comfort for Jiang Wei, who entered his mentor’s tent to pack Zhuge Liang’s possessions for travel back to the river lands. Outside, Yang Yi marshaled the soldiers in accordance with the prime minister’s final wishes. No banners of mourning would be hung, or the soldiers of Cao Wei in their fortress would know that the Sleeping Dragon now slept for good. The Shu withdrawal would be quiet, orderly. Once they were safe, then they would mourn.
The tent flap opened again and Ma Yun stepped inside. He clasped his hands and gave a slight bow. “I thought I would find you here.”
“Did Yang Yi send you?”
Jiang Wei outranked Ma Yun, but the two had become friends over the six years and five expeditions that had made up Zhuge Liang’s attempts to pacify the north. Though others were contemptuous of Ma Yun and his oddly light voice, the soft timbre of a eunuch, Jiang Wei knew better. Ma Yun had been born a woman, but considered himself a man.
“No, I am simply concerned about your wellbeing,” said Ma Yun. “My men are helping load the carts, and they do not need my oversight for that.”