Angels Fall, Demons Rise; Extract of “Manifest Destiny”
{Written for @methsnake on Tumblr}
Part One: Angels Fall, Demons Rise
“Are you scared?”
Percy guffawed, an indignant frown on his face.
“Not like you,” he huffed, breathless from the sprint.
“Then let’s go!” Ariadne leapt over rocks like they weren’t there. They had been going into the woods for years, since they were children, well before they went to the Academy. Fringe was a small town, and everyone knew them as those who never gave up. Travelers. Most assumed Ariadne was destined to become one of the real Travelers, those who traveled beyond to the Continent and beyond, maybe even beyond Ingwar. As if that’s even possible. Just a scientist’s fanciful dream.
That was all well and good for her. Percy was happy to go along with her, or stay and take care of Moira’s fox farm and live with Pendragon forever. Even the thought of him sent a small electric shock down Percy’s spine. He smiled, the memory of that first time out under the darkling sea making his heart throb.
“Are you trying to go slow or are you just trying to piss me off?”
“Fuck off,” he called out. He started to run again, barely realizing that he had slowed to a jog.
They had been running for a couple of hours already. It was getting late, shown by the streaks of light permeating the sea above. Percy craned his neck towards the sky. Above, the sea was choppier than normal, rippling and swirling with grey, cerulean and sable. Between the canopy and the water were a couple of misty puffs, indiscrete clouds slowly breaking apart. Around Fringe, the trees could only reach a dozen or two dozen feet tall, but here, miles away from the town, they reached two hundred feet tall.
Something cawwed above. Percy looked up. A kestrel was being chased by a harpy eagle, uncommon in a boreal climate, but there all the same. A screech erupted as the eagle turned into a mess of feathers, an avian implosion of sorts. He tripped, regained his balance, and turned in circles, looking for the cause. A large, dark form was gliding away from the feathers with something in its claws. Percy squinted. With a start, he realized it was an owl.
Most owls didn’t grow to have a wingspan of twelve feet.
“Ari!”
His sister turned. “What?”
He nodded towards the sky. “Look…” She snorted. “Yeah, animals get bigger the further you go. Ancora once came back with a mouse that was three feet long.”
Percy shuddered. Everything about going deeper into the forest screamed bad idea, but they were already there. What harm could going a little farther do?
After the owl, it was another half-hour or so of running through darkness before they came upon what appeared to be a path. It was a single, warped metal rail sticking out of the ground, defiant in the face of impeding forest encroachment. A small vestige of humanity within an overwhelming scene of nature. He stopped and gently caressed the metal with his palm. It was corroded and quickly fell apart with the force of touch.
“What is that?”
“I don’t know, but Z will probably buy it.” Ariadne cocked her head to the side. She started digging around it, trying to unearth whatever piece of it was below ground. She didn’t succeed and sat back on her ankles for a moment. Her breath was visible.
“Well? Does it keep going?”
“You tell me, Perseus.” She only used his full name when she was well and truly pissed off. “C’mon. It looks like it goes to something over there.”
Percy squinted. There was a form, somewhere between a cylinder and a prism, off in the gloom. Ariadne was after it before he could get up, leaping over ferns and tree roots that he stumbled on. He had to break into another sprint, the fifth of the day, just to catch up with her.
“Wait up!” She didn’t answer, only slowed down mildly.
Whatever it was, it was large and far away. Nearing it, he could see that it had a tree growing out of it and had been practically sheered in half. It was metal, rusted and stained from the forest. It was a rounded-off prism, with large holes— windows— in two opposite sides, some pointing up, some down. On the left side was a dented sheer plate of metal covering it, while on the right were massive, rusted wheels, almost comically thin.
“What is it?” Ariadne jumped and tried to grab on to one of the wheels in the air, sending it spinning.
Percy frowned. “It looks like a train.”
“A train? Maybe.”
Her tone gave it away that she knew he was right.
“What’s a train doing in the middle of the forest?”
“Were they trying to go to the West?”
“Most of the forest isn’t explored. The Western Continent is thousands and thousands of miles away. You expect someone to build a train through that?” She pointed at the trees, which had grown from two hundred feet to over a thousand. The trunks were as large as their house, the branches a road between them that even humans could walk. Right as she pointed, a massive centipede moved on the trunk. It was five feet long. Percy had a stone sink to his stomach.
“Oh my—”
Ariadne was already on top of the train car, scrambling along the metal. He cursed and reluctantly followed her. The side said AMTRAK on it.
“What does that mean?”
“Not a clue.”
She didn’t even listen to his answer, instead jumped on a tree branch. An ash tree was growing out of the train, and she scampered down into the compartment. She resurfaced a couple minutes later, with a pamphlet and dirt all over.
“You can only go like three feet inside. Dirt the rest of the way down.” She handed him the paper. It was surprisingly well-preserved. “Found this, though.”
The paper read LONDON, MIDLAND AND SCOTTISH RAILWAY: CALEDONIAN LINE. NEW TRAINS, INCLUDING INVERNESS EXPRESS!
“The hell is that?” Ariadne was poking her head out of the dirt in the cabin.
“A pamphlet.”
“No shit. For what?”
“A railway company. ‘London, Midland and Scottish Railway.’”
“Where’s London?”
“I don’t know.”
Percy bit his lip and looked up at the trees. Between branches larger than Fringe’s main boulevard, he could see the darkling sea above, rough and choppy. Storm warning. It would probably start raining soon, though he doubted any precipitation would be able to muscle down through the canopy very fast.
“We should go back though—”
aaaaaaaAAA! Bang!
Percy whipped around, heart in his throat. It had come from a southeasterly direction, deeper into the woods.
Ariadne didn’t even pause before hitting the ground running. She tore off into the darkness without so much as a glance to her brother. Percy groaned and followed. The only thing on his mind was how much of a shame it would be to get eaten by a twenty-foot centipede before he could say goodbye to Pendragon.
The shout and the bang weren’t close, but it had been loud and high-pitched. After running for over an hour, he came to a stopped Ariadne, who was catching her breath— for the first time in their closing-in-on-four-hour-run.
“Alright,” he said, grateful that she was finally panting, “what the hell was that?”
“Don’t ask me, dumbass. I’ve never been out this far—”
The ground suddenly came up to greet him. A branch caught his ankle while a giant wooden knob near the root caught him under the ribs, a good hook to his stomach. His breath was gone, and before he could process being on the ground in the first place, he was lifted up and slammed back down. Little stars crowded around the darkling sea above, between and in branches. When he could, he dared look around. Ariadne was looking to her four o’clock. He followed her gaze and immediately flattened himself against the ground., praying his static-filled hair wouldn’t stand up tall enough to alert anything. The trees, while huge, were few and far between, providing little on the ground to hide behind unless you were directly around the trunk.
An elk was standing about one hundred yards away, which was good considering its shoulder was at least fifty feet in the air. Its antlers were at least that broad and reaching perhaps an extra thirty feet in the air. The trees were far enough apart that it could stand comfortably and move itself around— himself, from the antlers.
Then, it bellowed.
Percy had always been aware of that verb, an ugly word with too many ugly consonants for his liking, and had never found a use for it. Until, that is, he heard a sixty-five-foot elk scream. Every one of his bones vibrated, independent of the ligaments and muscles surrounding them. The stag lowered a foot, something of a graceful act, but one which made the ground tremble, but not like before. He thought perhaps it had pranced into position before or had run into a tree. Either way, his breath was gone.
At the same time as his sister, he scrambled up and flew over to a trunk. The elk slowly blinked, a black-brown eye probably three feet in diameter which shone in the forest twilight. They hadn’t been noticed.
“Okay,” she breathed, mimicking his tone,“what the hell was that?”
“A giant fucking deer.”
“Ancora couldn’t hunt that.” “Ancora is a hawk that’s the size of its hoof.”
“It didn’t make the noise from earlier, did it?” “No. No elk made that sound.” For, it had sounded all too human.
They did something of a grapevine over to the next trunk, and on, until they were safely behind the deer. Then, they continued to run on their original trajectory, both bizarrely energized from the encounter. There was no stopping now; if the elk were almost seventy feet tall, Percy had no interest in seeing the bears and the wolves.
Whatever had made the human sound and the bang decided to be silent, and the closer they got, the more he thought they were doing something of a shot in the dark. He decided it best not to mention this to Ariadne. Instead, he wiped his nose, hopped over a queer, blackened rosebush, and stayed silent as his sister trudged on.
Half an hour after the elk— everything seemed to come in hour or half-hour increments, like a clock ticking curiously slow— he dared look up in a stretch of rather flat green expanse with thin branching above, which only appeared to get thinner, as if the trees had been pruned.
The darkling sea was turbulent, more turbulent than he had ever seen. White, grey, navy and black intermixed, the shadows deep and dark as massive waves crashed into each other. It looked like a storm, but a storm only above. There were no clouds, and nary a breeze down below.
As above, so below.
Percy swallowed the saying and, for a brief time, surged ahead of Ari, dodging tree trunks a hundred feet ’round and roots the size of the the train car. The crashing of waves was a dull roar, spread out over miles. Soon, the canopy began to sway as well, and by the time the zephyrs reached the ground, no birds dared fly above the tree line. Instead, thirty-foot owls contented themselves with smaller prey closer to the ground, until they too were taken by a wind.
And yet, it never reached the ground, a phantom chinook hovering above, only daring the push the gentlest caresses towards the earth.
Percy suddenly hated the forest. Hated how Fringe was on the brink. Hated how the First Explorers dared to come to the Lesser Lands on the Outer Isles from the Continent. Hated how the wall, Parallel 55, closed off Ingwar from the rest of the world. Hated how even Pendragon’s name sent a storm through his spine and a throbbing in his body.
He lied to himself and said the throbbing was from the scars, not the love.
A sideways blast quickly turned into a circular gale about ten feet thick, before the air stilled completely. Stilled beyond still. Even the relatively small amount of humidity stopped moving, individual drops and molecules unmoving and unmovable. Ariadne started coughing immediately and backed out.
“And now you want to leave?”
“This is weird as shit. No. We’re not going farther.”
He was about to agree when a hunched over form, shivering as if from glacial cold, caught his eye inside the dead zone.
Oh my god.
It couldn’t be him.
Could it?”
And before he could stop it, the word Pendragon slipped out of his mind, through his lips, and out into the world. And the figure turned.
Before Ariadne could stop him, Percy was through the gale, stumbling through tears. He let out a shout, and the slumped shoulders shuddered with the effort of turning.
“Pendragon! Pendragon!” Hot tears streamed down his face. What had happened to him? “I’m here! I’m here! No…”
He tripped over a root and didn’t even notice. He was flying over the ground. If someone had hurt Pendragon, had done— done what? Anything.
He reached the dead zone and jumped the last ten yards to him. He slid onto his knees and held him tightly, daring to plant a kiss on his head, through a familiar shock of hair, now wet. He pulled away and kissed him again on the neck, a beautifully smooth and strong neck, one he had missed sorely. He helped him stand up.
Then, leapt back as fast as he could and barely downed a scream.
It wasn’t Pendragon. The boy standing next to him was some… version of Pendragon. The sandy hair was there, but shorter, closely cut on the sides and longer on the top. The build was the same, but the outfit was wrong: ripped and bloodied pink colored shirt, trousers that were charcoal grey and not ripped but dyed carmine as well and tattoos the same as Pendragon’s, but in different spots. The raven-in-thorns was on this boy’s back shoulder— Percy had seen it when he was still doubled over— and the amulet/ charm/ whatever it was was on the wrong wrist, the left. His collarbone housed a wound which had shredded more ink, this one some bat or constellation or something, now indiscernible. But the eyes, the eyes were what gave it away. They were pale green, lined with darker hues at the edge of the iris. His face was also more prominently freckled, cheekbones and jawline higher and sharper.
Percy stumbled backwards, all tears gone. He could only stare at this strange, bleeding, green-eyed boy.
Green eyes become green times. Watch out for those.
Any sense of urgency or love was gone. I sure as hell don’t keep love around for doppelgängers.
In the strongest voice he could muster, he screamed:
“Who the fuck are you?”
The boy couldn’t seem to muster a verbal answer. Instead, he just touched his scalp and neck where Percy had kissed him. He breathed a little faster, chest expanding a little more. Disgusted, Percy wiped the blood, sweat and water— wherever it had come from, it tasted rather brackish— from his lips and spat.
“I’m going to ask this again, who are you?”
Pendragon was smaller than him, and this boy was leaner than Pendragon, though taller. If he could take Pendragon, he could take this one.
“Tell me who you are.”
All the boy managed to do was look up at the darkling sea, massive waves reaching was high as the clouds below. He looked back to Percy before going back to the sky. He muttered something to himself. He cursed and grabbed the boy by the scruff of his rather-destroyed shirt.
“Listen, you, you—” he couldn’t find the word for a moment, “you duplicate, you aren’t Pendragon, and you won’t ever be, so tell me what the hell you just said, or you will wish you had never come here. Understand?”
Understand was exhaled, and anyhow by then he had lost most of his steam.
The boy made dead, ruthless eye contact. It was hard to stare into those pale green eyes, but Percy wasn’t backing down now. He waited, impatiently, as the boy formed words in his head before delivering them painfully slowly.
“Won’t you wake me up?”
“What?”
“I-I—I wanna feel the sun… Please… I didna’ expect…”
The boy trailed off. His accent, his clothes, his face, it was all wrong. There was only one word that was a match for such a combination. Queer.
“Who are you?”
“Whaur— where am I?” The boy appeared to have more control over his speech and clipped his accent as best he could. It was only when he did so that Percy realized, with perhaps the tenth startle of the day, that they were speaking Continental. Not Ingwarien, the dialect of Islander. The language was awkward, and it made Percy sick. Mustering his willpower, he asked:
“Do— do you speak Islander?”
The boy cocked his head to the side and furrowed his brows. Percy’s body betrayed how cute and Pendragon-like adorable he was. Stop. This isn’t him. His body didn’t listen. He ignored it.
“Islander?”
“Yes.” You know a thing or two. At least you know our language.
“You mean Latin?”
“Latin?”
“That’s this.”
It was Percy’s turn to tilt his head. “So what’s Continental? What is it?”
“English.”
English. Where had he heard that?
“It’s fucking Continental,” was all he said, “and this is fucking Islander.”
“I— sorry. I’m not from here.”
Not forgetting he was still gripping the boy by the collar, he tightened his grip. “Where are you from, then?”
The boy took a breath. “Inverness.”
Inverness Express. The Caledonian Line.
Coincidences didn’t exist, least of all in Ingwar.
“What’s your name?”
“Artemis,” the boy breathed in reply.
Percy’s heart slammed into his chest. No… This isn’t Pendragon. Stop. You can stop this. Stop being a fool. He let go, let the boy stagger back. “And you’re from Inverness?”
“Aye, sair.” He suddenly went red, vulnerable and submissive. “Er, etiam.”
“Why are you here?”
“You wouldn’t believe me—”
“Listen, boy.” You would never talk to Pendragon like that. “There is a train car about an hour that way. I found a flyer near it for the Inverness Express. Where is Inverness, how did you get here and why are you here?” And why do you look like Pendragon?
“Okay, okay. Er, Inverness is a place in a country— well, not really a country, but like a province? Maybe? It should be a country—”
“Faster.”
Ariadne had either run off by now or become entranced and he had bought himself a little bit of time. Either way, he needed answers rather rapidly.
“In a place called Scotland, in a nation called the United Kingdom. Inverness is near a river, called the River Ness, and there’s a loch there, Loch Ness. I-I don’t know why I’m here, but I think I know how.”
At that, Artemis let his eyes guide his head, slowly tilting upward, towards the darkling sea.
“Everything— everything up there…”
“Up where?”
He pointed to the sky. “Beyond the water.” Suddenly, Artemis’ body was wracked with sobs as he gulped for air. “Oh my God. Everything is shattering, it’s my fault, my mistake— Mairi, Ronan, Nanna, Aurora.”
The way he said Aurora made it clear that whoever that was, their death or pain was his as well. Like me and Pendragon.
“Okay, go on.”
“There was a fight for my family up there, and we were drowned, all of us, tied with silver fetters and sent to the bottom.”
“The bottom of what?”
“Loch Ness. They took everything from us—”
“Alright. How’d you get down here?”
Artemis seemed ready to let out a laugh, and he did, a deep, throaty, racking sound that turned almost into a sob. “I sunk and hit the bottom. Except the bottom isn’t the bottom, is it?” He laughed again. Percy became acutely aware, again, of the stillness of the air. “We were such fools. So close to Broadchurch, of course.” He smiled, a crooked smile that was somehow seductive, syndicatable and serpentine all at once. “It was right beneath our feet the whole time.”
“What was?”
“The Echo.”
The way Artemis said echo made it sound capitalized, as if echo was not a thing but a place, not unaware but cognizant. Confidence was restored to his shoulders, making him more of a dangerous shadow than a weak boy. Percy let himself take a breath to steady his mind, moving dizzyingly fast already, panicked by this show of tenacious arrogance.
“Your world…”
“What about my world?” No phrase in Islander to describe his confusion, at least none in Ingwarien.
In response, Artemis walked— strode? His poise was more than unnerving— over to a tree trunk. The tree seemed to almost shy away from him. The boy put a hand on the bark, which in turn stopped shrinking away and started to glow, faintly. A couple red-breasted cardinals, normal size, fluttered on a branch just above his head. It looked like a fairy tale, with all the animals crowding around a princess. Instead of a princess, though, it was an androgynous boy who had fallen from the sky and was now wearing a strangely crooked and provocative smile. He didn’t even whistle, only blinked, and the birds came to him, a triplet. One rested on his shoulder, one on the ground and one in his outstretched palm. He cocked his head again. The bird did the same.
Artemis crushed the bird.
The movement was so fast that Percy didn’t have time to finish blinking before the cardinal was reduced to… something. Ash and blood from the looks of it. Though the boy’s hands had already been colored rather intensely with vermillion. Artemis didn’t seem to notice that the wound on his collarbone was still bleeding, or just didn’t care.
Percy started to back up, right into Ariadne. The circular gale was gone. Her expression, her entire body, had gone glacially cold.
“Sic semper tyrannis,” was all she said.
Artemis didn’t bother to turn to the voice-bearer. “Astra inclinant, sed non obligant.” When he finally did look up, the smile had disappeared, and in its place was a neutral— yet somehow more dangerous— air, one that betrayed a childlike curiosity utterly similar if not the same as Pendragon’s. Percy struggled to separate the two. The boy is sadistic. No he’s not. He’s just discovering our world. He just killed a bird. Did he, though?
“Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo."
If I can’t move Heaven, I shall raise Hell.
“And where is Hell, exactly?” Percy demanded.
“We’re standing in it.”
“This is a godly world—”
Ariadne cut him off. “Oderint dum metuant.” Even quieter, her lips grazing his ear, she continued, “He doesn’t know this world. Let him believe his-his necromancy will help him.”
Percy merely nodded. “We should get back.”
“Wait.”
That boyishness again. It was more dangerous than the brief revelatory sadism— if sadism had truly been what that was— for it was just like Pendragon’s. The only piece that broke the spell was his pale green eyes, a color unknown in Ingwar.
“Take me with you. Please. I need— I need to see if anyone else landed.” He took a breath, as shaky as before. “The Echo… I’ve never been this far in. I need to see Broadchurch, to get back.”
Before he could object, Ariadne pushed in front of him.
“There’s a town four to five hours from here. If we move fast, we can get back before real-night sets in.” The phrase verior-nox sounded weird in the woods, echoing off of bark and leaf alike.
“‘Real-night?’”
“When the Sun sets below the horizon. Faux-night is when the sun is between apoapsis and periapsis.”
“What? That’s not…” Artemis shook his head. Percy smiled at his pain and confusion.
“Apoapsis is when the sun is in the west, precisely between faux-night and real-night. It looks smaller and dimmer, not by much, but enough. Periapsis is when it’s in the east, in the same position. It’s brighter and larger.”
“Okay,” was all he said. “Apoapsis was about two hours ago. We have another four hours of light.”
“If we’re lucky.”
Ariadne nodded to show he was correct.
“We should get going, then.”
And they started to run. The boy ran fast, somewhere between Ariadne’s and Percy’s pace. They made it to where they saw the stag and kept running, wary of the footprints. Artemis didn’t say anything at all, until they saw the stag again.
“That’s…”
Percy let himself smile a cruel smile. “This isn’t your world, is it?”
He didn’t offer a reply, instead stumbled and fell forwards as the ground trembled. The elk hadn’t moved.
Before he hit the ground, he saw another elk, this male larger than the last. They were near a clearing, somehow large enough to comfortably fit perhaps a half dozen of those creatures, but was still laced overhead with branches. Ariadne had time to shout “get down!” before the elk rammed into each other.
Their antlers crashing was the sound of buildings falling, the dirt they upheaved when they collided enough to fill a cemetery three bodies deep, the sickeningly loud cracks of hundred-foot branches ripping and tearing and splintering was the sound of when that earthquake struck Ingwar and Fringe, six and a half decades ago, and decimated the village and cities far beyond.
The larger male managed to whip around by leaping into the air. Percy braced himself, though not well enough, for the impact of a hundred- or two hundred- or more-ton animal hitting the ground forcefully. The elk slid a little, bringing dust and dirt in a storm in every direction. The larger one hooked part of the left antler underneath the smaller elk’s jaw and forced its head up, taking a knife the size of a small house straight into the other’s eye.
The blood that resulted from the fight, when it was over, was enough to fill a three-story building. Neither died, in the end, but the smaller one was forced to walk away, ashamed and without antlers. The ground shook for ninety minutes after, before they outpaced the little earthquakes.
Apoapsis must’ve come sooner than either Ariadne or Percy had known, as it was already dark when they were still about an hour out. The darkling sea was still rough-and-tumble above, a distraction that both boys paid for. First, Artemis tripped and threw up some sort of root or object that caused Percy to trip. He coughed and cursed the boy’s name, under his breath, before scrambling up to see what they had tripped on.
It was a welcome sight; most Fringe inhabitants threw things out into the forest no more than a couple miles from their home. This was an old flag, one from the times of the Federation, back during that earthquake sixty-six years ago. It was two twin crows holding the seal of Ingwar, long since considered a blasphemous symbol, with the phrase Corvus Oculum Corvi Non Eruit below— A crow will not pull the eye out of another crow. It became a rallying cry quickly, before the southron lords and forces came to take what was, apparently, theirs.
The rustle of the flag brought more than admiration from the three juveniles. It also uncovered something below, a small patch of mushrooms. Artemis was close to them, and they started to pulse, faster and brighter the close they were to him. When he bent down to touch them, they all lit up in beautiful blue.
And then, they released their spores.
The spores glowed as intensely as the toadstools. They swirled around Artemis, a zephyr suddenly picking up from the south and circling them, like a tall, invisible carrion bird. Percy shuddered. Artemis didn’t seem to notice a couple spores had gotten into his eyes; he didn’t even blink them away. The blue turned white-ish, and his irises suddenly glowed with a color that had no name nor description, something beyond the spectrum.
Percy was ready to believe Artemis himself was beyond the spectrum.
The spores danced on his fingertips and lashes, playful. The boy dared to smile slightly, then gasp quietly as he looked around. Ariadne, then Percy, did the same.
The forest was illuminated brilliantly. The mushrooms, clearly, had not been the only of their kind. Spores, once invisible, floated through the air, everywhere and nowhere at once. Toadstools on trees and branches and in the ground acted as a path, directing them home.
Artemis was all too content, it seemed, to follow them.
They ran home, faster, no one willing to slow down, the siblings out of anxiety, the boy out of awe. They reached Fringe’s fringe in no time, where wolves on flags howled and carved stags roared to the expanse above, that darkling sea from which the hellion that called himself Artemis had fallen from.