"Before", Chapter 8: The Demon-King of Cerce

[Scott of Hyperborea]

"Before" or "Romance of the Three Duchies"
Chapter Eight: The Demon-King of Cerce
Chapter Eight Soundtrack: Epiphany (Once's Theme)

It was a little awkward. We sat in the entrance of our cave, eyes on the floor, while Quercia and Once did their business behind us. Quercia was not exactly shy, Once was not exactly all there, and we were not exactly looking at them, but there was still a sense of voyeurism.

"So..." said Rain, then fished about for a way to complete the sentence. "I take it we'll be looking for some sort of prison or something, where Red might be."

"Yeah," said Pupil. "That sounds about right."

"Do we know where in the city that would be?" asked Rain.

"Certainly not," answered Cloud. "No human knows the layout of the demon city of Cerce. It is a cartographic black hole. Nevertheless, it may be that Quercia's magic can locate it for us."

"Thought you were against magic," said Pupil.

"Well, in principle, certainly," said Cloud.

The conversation was interrupted by a bone-chilling scream from Quercia. Our shyness immediately lost, we turned to the back of the cave. Quercia wasn't shooting fire from her mouth like last time, but her eyes were glowing like two miniature suns, and she seemed to be in terrible pain. She put both hands over her mouth and bit down on her lip, as if to keep in the power.

"Magic," said Once, putting his shirt back on. "I saw strong magic once. Like that." His sanity seemed to have improved even further as Quercia drained more of his power. "We should...go."

"Fast," agreed Cloud.

Once picked up the quaking Quercia, and the lot of us hurriedly cleared the gravel and debris we'd used to block the cave entrance. Daylight came flooding in, but only the pale, sickly daylight of Dolor, stained an oily gray with the smoke of Cerce's furnaces. Still, it almost blinded us as we climbed out into the open air, Quercia last of all. The user was still covering her mouth with both hands. Her face was beet-red, all her limbs were shaking, and her eyes had rolled back into her head. She looked awful.

"Climb up the ridge," said Cloud. "Maybe once she can see Cerce, she'll be able to open the floodgates."

It seemed as good an idea as any, so in desperation we scuttled up the rock face into which our cave projected. From its top, we could see the black furnaces and iron palaces of the demon city.

Quercia took her hands off her mouth, and stared at it.

"Are you all right?" asked Rain.

"The power..." whispered Quercia. "The power...is like fire...and fire...likes...to...."

Then everything went all blurry, and when I recovered my vision the lot of us were in Cerce. Around us rose corrugated fingers of black metal, separated by filth-strewn and gore-spattered streets. A few half-dead slaves lifted their heads from the gutter they'd been left in to view us with dead incomprehension. A smell of oil and blood filled the air.

"...burn..." whispered Quercia, like a prayer. Her left index finger moved, just a little.

All of a sudden, the city was aflame. The metallic towers were melting, oily fluids were starting to rise from the street and burst into flame.

"...burn," repeated Quercia, with a mindless smile on her face. "Burn....burn....burn."

A legion of demon fish appeared before us unexpectedly, their route hidden by the city's confusing and inhuman geometry. "Burn...burn...burn..." continued Quercia, and they did.

We ran through the city, not sure what we were looking for. As we passed, everything around us burst into flame or crumbled. "Wait!" I said, after a few hundred meters.

In an alley, I had caught a glimpse of movement. It was a wretched slave, his bones broken and misshapen. I grabbed him. Too weak or scared to protest, he went limp in my arms.

"Is there a prison in this city?" I asked? "Somewhere they keep their enemies?"

"The whole city is a prison," said the poor man, "and the whole world is their enemy. Oh gods, please kill me."

"Burn...burn...burn..." said Quercia, and the man burst into flames. She was far gone now, too far gone to bring back. I could only pray she kept enough presence of mind not to light us on fire.

"Prison. It's underground," said Once. He pointed vaguely east. "That way." Then added, "I lived in Cerce, once."

A glance at Pupil, who nodded, and we headed east, dragging Quercia, who had stopped burning things and was now staring at the sun with a covetous look in her eye. I briefly wondered whether she could snuff it out, and hoped she didn't try.

It was Rain who found the passage. There had been others around the demon-city, but we had mistaken them for sewers, or for natural decay. But looking more closely, the blind hole contained handholds, a portal to the underworld at the foundation of this hell. Pupil took one look down, then led the way.

I can't tell you how afraid I felt, then. Somehow, even the idea of going up against this demon city in the first place paled against the thought of climbing down into this awful inky passage to whatever horrors lay beneath it. It was only the fear of being left alone topside, without my friends and without Quercia's protective magic, that led me to grit my teeth, put one hand under the other, and climb down the hole.

We ended in a pitch dark chamber. "Burn...burn..." said Quercia, and her hair turned into orange flame, which cast a dim light and apparently didn't bother her in the least. The light revealed, to our dismay but not particular surprise, that we were surrounded by demon fish.

"Sxiro!" shouted Pupil, and began hacking away at them.
"Sxiro!" shouted Rain, Once, and myself immediately after, and joined in the fight.
"Sxiro!" said Cloud after some brief fumbling, fired his artillery tube directly between the eyes of the largest demon.
"Burn...burn..." said Quercia, but her magic had no apparent effect.

Soon the fish were falling back through a hallway, and we pursued. The corridor led us to some sort of spectacular underground factory, filled with pipes and the whir of giant clockwork devices. There was no sign of what, if anything, it produced, but the raw material was horribly clear. A line of bound captives were being shoveled into a furnace by a demon who watched our battle with seemingly only minor interest.

One of the bound captives was Red.

When I saw him, I hollered his name, and bounded over a vat of foul-smelling liquid towards him. Three of the warrior fish we'd been fighting remained alive, and seeing that we were trying to free a captive, they decided to kill him first, and made a beeline straight towards the prisoners. If the furnace demon had shared their enthusiasm, Red would have been dead before I could have reacted, but he seemed intent on his work, unwilling to cut out of order in the strict queue of prisoners. I made it to Red a few seconds before the first of the warrior fish, and ran its gut through with my sword.

The second and third fish leapt on me together, but by this time, Once had caught up with us. With a huge swing of his axe, he bisected one of the demons, and flung the other against a nearby pipe. Once leapt after him, pinned the demon against the tubing, and smashed it with his axe. The pipe ruptured, covered Once and the corpse in oil and causing a leak that started to flood the room.

Meanwhile, Pupil had untied Red. "I knew you'd come," said our fearless leader as soon as he could stand up. "We've got to free the..."

"Burn...burn...burn" said Quercia, and the other captives burst into flame. Some of the fire came into contact with the oil, and the factory began to be filled by the conflagration, blocking the way we had come. The oil-covered Once ran to the far wall, unwilling the take the chance of contacting a spark.

"Let's get out of here," said Red, and everyone agreed. Rain pointed to the far wall.

"There's another door there," he said. "Maybe we could get from there back to the passage up."

"Once," asked Cloud, "do you know the way out from here?"

"I knew a way out once," said Once, but volunteered no further information. We rushed towards the door out.

Instantly, we knew we had made the wrong choice. Not that we could have stayed in the hellfire behind us; the muffled sounds of explosions and the searing heat coming through the door made that perfectly clear. There was just something horrible about this corridor, a hint of an oppressive evil presence that could not be resisted.

And it was drawing us forward. None of us made the conscious decision to walk, not even with the inferno behind us pushing us on. I only realized I was walking at all when I noticed Pupil walking and saw he wasn't getting ahead of me. We should have resisted. Every step forward brought another thrill of impending doom. But we didn't resist. We just kept on going.

And the corridor ended in a huge room, so big that the light from Quercia's fiery hair couldn't reach the end of it. Roughly cylindrical, the ceiling was only a few meters above us. But ahead of us, after a brief shelf, there was a sheer wall dropping down into a huge circular pit of black and brackish water. And from it, mouth open wide, rose the Demon Fish of Balgurd.

This was not some little fishling, spawned in the waters of Sxiro. This was the true and original, the first fish that rose from the caverns of the underworld to spawn here, the one that had met Cerce as a pleasant city of men, and then imposed its will until it resembled the hell from which it had come.

It was black mottled with darker black, and only its head peeked up from the pool in which it lay, hinting of immense depths beneath. Even that head filled the entirety of the pit, so that we could scarce see the water from which it had arisen for its gigantic maw. It laughed, and the scariest thing about the laughter was how human it sounded.

Then Quercia raised her hands high, and a stream of brilliant orange fire shot at the demon. The fire danced on its skin, reflected off its teeth, washed over its eyes and gills. But the fish showed no sign of pain or injury. It sat there, soaking up mage-fire as if it were sunlight, without a break in its laughter. Quercia strained and strained, until energy of all colors swirled forth from her fingers and battered the demon king. But after a few minutes, her stream grew weaker, and then failed entirely, until once again her flaming hair was the cavern's only illumination.

The fish king laughed. "THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU DIE," it said.

Then it sucked in air, pulling us to the very edge of the pit. We grabbed onto the rocky floor, holding on to the tiniest outcrop for dear life. Cloud reached for a stalagmite, missed, and got pulled over the edge, disappearing into the fish's giant maw. Pupil, too, relaxed his grip for the tiniest fraction of a second, and only escaped sharing Cloud's fate by grabbing on to me.

"THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU WRITHE AND DIE AS YOU BEG FOR MERCY", said the fish king.

"I writhed once," said Once. He alone, with his fantastic strength, was having no trouble resisting the pressure wave drawing us in to the fish king and his pit. He crawled over the floor until he was next to the prone Quercia.

"And I died once." He kissed Quercia on the cheek, a long, passionate kiss. Her flaming hair brushed against his oil-soaked body, and he ignited.

"But I never begged for mercy." Then he let go. The burning Elw was pulled over the side of the pit, and fell down, down, down toward his doom, down to the king of the demon fish.

"Not...even.........once!"

And then he fell into the fish-king's maw, still aflame. The fish king screamed as the fire burned at his innards, scorching him from the inside out. He began coughing and choking, a horrible sound, and the force drawing us towards him vanished.

"Run," said Red, without even looking back at the suffering demon. Pupil, Quercia, and I didn't need to be told twice. Rain just stood there, gazing down at the fish king.

"Cloud," he said. "Cloud's dead."

"And are you, if you don't fucking RUN!" said Pupil, and grabbed the boy by the hand.

So we ran. Having all the forces of Hell after you is a wonderful motivator. It gives one a certain clarity. I don't know quite how we found our way out of those underground passages or into the daylight, but we did. The city of Cerce looked in even worse shape than we had left it. Structures that the fire hadn't even touched were beginning to crumble. I wondered whether they might be magically linked to the fish king in some way, and whether his struggles were dooming the city.

We got out alive. I'll leave it at that. I won't mention all the demon fish we had to kill, because I don't like thinking about it. I won't mention all the horrors we saw, because there aren't the words for it, not in Praeta or Audente or any of the other languages. We made it out of Cerce, plus Red but minus Cloud and Once, and we returned to the cave where we had spent the night. It was a good cave, and we collapsed there, sweating and bloody and exhausted and full of horrors.

When I rose from that first collapse, I sought out Quercia. "Help me?" I begged, and she nodded. I saw that Rain was already sleeping beside her. So we slept together there in the cave, arm in arm, Quercia and Rain and I, and the sleep was without dreams, and when the morning came Quercia had regained some of her lost power, and my memories had lost the sharpest edges of their horror.

[Ryan]

The title of this reminds me of something from The Worm Ouroboros.