Reign of the Devourer, page 10
part #4 of Marvel Untold Series
“Do you wish to see, Doctor Orloff?” he called to her.
She hurried over to join him at the wall. It was just as blank as ever.
“It’s unmarked,” she said. Tentatively, she reached out to the wall. When Doom nodded, she placed her palm against the surface. It was smooth, like obsidian, though it had none of the shine. It seemed to absorb light almost completely. “What kind of material is this?” she wondered.
“One that I have never encountered before. Its name will be what we decide to call it, should naming it prove to be useful. My interest is in its properties and how to overcome them.” He gestured to one of the drill operators, who approached Orloff and offered her a face mask. When she had it on, Doom said, “Look closely.”
At his command, the drill started up again. It bit into the wall. Orloff saw it make a hole, and the hole vanish as quickly as it was created.
The drill stopped.
“The wall is remaking itself,” she said, awed. “Is it even stone?” She was trying to force this wall to make sense. Maybe it didn’t.
“It resembles stone,” said Doom, “but it is not. I do not believe it is matter at all. Not in the normal sense, at least.”
“I kept thinking of this as another veil.”
“Then you were right. The one you confronted fell. So will this.”
Doom ordered the drill pulled back and the area within the protective circle cleared. Orloff withdrew. On her way back to her tent she saw that Zargo was observing the process too. He nodded to her, and seemed open to conversation. She stopped next to him.
“How are you holding up?” she asked. He looked exhausted.
“I’m managing and doing what I can. I know that wall is going to be breached, so I’ll do what I can to make things safe.”
He was helping Doom to the full extent of his powers, then. Orloff wasn’t sure he would appreciate being told that, so she kept her thought to herself. Instead, she changed the subject. “I keep wondering about this cavern. Who made it? Who built that wall? The artifacts here are both too ancient and too new.”
“I don’t know if anyone made all this,” Zargo said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think a human hand touched anything we see here?”
“On the face of it, yes.”
“Except we know that isn’t true. That painting you picked up the other day, that wasn’t really a Turner. I think it manifested itself here, like everything else.”
“Including the wall?” Orloff asked.
“Maybe, though not in the same way. The artifacts seem like the results of the Devourer’s hunger, don’t they? They’re called to it. The wall is its prison.”
“A prison implies jailers as well as prisoners,” said Orloff.
“It does,” said Zargo.
They shared silent unease for a moment.
“What I’m sure of,” said Zargo, “is that the thing beyond the wall would not have willed its prison into existence.”
“You’re implying intention on the part of the Devourer,” said Orloff.
“I don’t know to what degree it’s sentient. You’ve felt it too. What do you think?”
“I can’t decide if the hunger is anything more than an instinct,” Orloff admitted. “But I do think it’s something more than a force like gravity.”
“I agree. So if there’s even a vestigial form of sentience, I don’t think it would trap itself.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” said Orloff. “Then who built the wall?” The question kept bothering her.
“Maybe the Earth itself,” said Zargo. “Its memories are here too. It was its scars that led me here. Maybe it defended itself in this way.”
Orloff thought about that. “I’m having trouble imagining how that could be.”
“You don’t feel the earth the way I do. The ley lines, the currents of power… It’s hard not to think of it as a living thing, at least as much as the Devourer.”
“If you’re right… If the earth somehow made that wall…”
“Then the idea of breaching it should frighten us.”
She didn’t disagree. She was frightened. But she still wanted to know what was on the other side.
She went back to her tent and lost herself in the work on the helmet. Time lost meaning quickly in the cave and its perpetual twilight aurora. Orloff was startled when she looked at her watch and realized it was after nightfall. She grabbed a ration bar for a quick meal, and barely got a mouthful down when the air seemed to change.
Something was going to happen.
She rushed out of the tent. Zargo was again where she had been speaking with him, halfway between the tents and the standing stones.
Doom had ordered a wider area cleared, with everything pulled back at least ten yards from the outside of the ring of standing stones. The drill now started up again, and the crew withdrew, leaving him alone within the protective circle. Facing the wall, he began making gestures. They hurt Orloff’s eyes, and she looked away. The air crackled with gathering power. The pulsing light of the cavern grew sharper, and it gathered around Doom, vibrating with higher frequencies.
The power in the air rushed suddenly into the circle. Orloff gasped, buffeted by the force of a tempest. Spirals of shifting light gathered around Doom. They turned around each other, faster and faster, and then suddenly they were gone, replaced by sorcerous beams that blasted out of his outstretched hands. They struck the wall where the drill ground against it.
Long seconds passed. The intensity of the power kept growing. Orloff wiped a trickle of blood from her nose. Beside her, Zargo shook uncontrollably.
The wall cracked, and there was a flash like there had been three nights before. Orloff jerked as if from an electric shock as something shot past her, another fragment of power escaping. The wards on the stones glowed more brighter, and she had a sense of a seal being closed. Nothing more would get out.
The cavern hissed. The crack in the wall glowed an angry red, like incandescent blood.
When Doom lowered his arms and stepped away, the crack remained, ugly as torn flesh.
“We have begun,” said Doom.
•••
For the first time since Doom had seized the throne and shattered her family, Krogh crossed the blackened threshold into the castle. She had dreamed of returning so many times, for so many years, but the demands of survival, of living in hiding, had forbidden it. The last part of her journey had been agonizing. She had feared discovery, and resented the fear.
From the other side of the mountains that overlooked Kroghstein came the deep rumble of work, and the sky flashed with unnatural lightning that shot up toward the clouds. Doom was not many miles from here. She knew he was, because it could only be his actions that had led to the stirring in the depths. She had been called because of him. He made the calling possible, but he was also a threat.
He doesn’t know I’m here. He can’t know.
But his eyes were everywhere. She would have to work quickly.
Krogh entered the castle, and all the memories were gone. All her family’s possessions, vanished. All their paintings, tapestries, carpets, furniture, busts. Everything. Only the walls were left, their ruin the trace and reminder of what had been. Ivy had overgrown the walls inside the castle as well as out. The roof was gone, and the rooms were open to the starless sky. The beam of Krogh’s flashlight played over stone blackened by fire.
Her breath became a low growl, a subterranean expression of the anger she felt at the desecration. Fury sharpened her purpose, and she swore retribution.
At the center of the ruins was what had been the chapel of the Kroghs. The lurid stained-glass windows were all shattered. Tree branches had begun to reach inside. They shook in the wind, scraping fingernails against the stone frames.
The altar had been stripped of its adornments. That bothered Krogh less than the other thefts. This altar had always been an ornament, nothing more. The real one was below.
At the back of the chapel were the stairs to the crypt. She descended them, and found less damage there. The mob hadn’t dared deface the graves of the Kroghs, and there was less to steal. She passed the tombs set into the wall, going deeper into the crypt, until she came to an iron door waiting in the gloom of a deep recess. It was strong and had resisted the assaults of the villagers. It was still locked.
Krogh carried its key on a chain at her waist. She had kept it as an act of faith, and as a mark of her will to return to reclaim what was hers. Even so, the prospect of ever being able to use it again had seemed more and more remote with every passing year that Doom remained on the throne of Latveria.
Beyond the door was a small, vaulted chamber. The walls and ceiling were unadorned. The Kroghs’ true altar sat in the center of the floor. There was nothing else.
The altar was more ancient than the castle. It was more ancient than the Kroghs. It was their foundation stone. Carved out of dark granite, it was circular. There was a depression in the middle, edged with points, like the mouth of a moray eel. The sign of the Devourer.
The Kroghs understood hunger deeply. They consumed, and the more they took, the more they hungered for power. And the more power they gathered to themselves, the more they consumed. That had been the way of things until the coming of Doom.
There was another, deeper hunger, though. It was one that even the Kroghs only half knew. The legend of the Devourer was passed down through the generations, losing its shape and detail. By the time Maleva Krogh heard it, it was barely a half-remembered rumor for her, a vague conception of embodied hunger. It was also as important as her family name. The Kroghs bowed down before it, and to nothing else. It was the true object of their allegiance.
The Devourer had called her, and she had obeyed.
Now what?
She didn’t know.
Krogh knelt and pressed her head against the altar. “I have come,” she said. “Show me what I must do next.”
The call was still there. The pulsing hunger and fury were still there, but nothing answered. She waited and she prayed, swearing her fealty to the thing that hungered.
She did not know how long she knelt. Her limbs ached, and the hunger of her soul grew. “I am here!” she cried at last. “I am here! What would you have me do?”
She jolted. Another strand of energy struck her, another faint but powerful touch of the Devourer. Her flesh burned, her breath came hard and fast, and the pain was the promise of transcendence, and she knew what she had to do.
Krogh stood up. She leaned over the altar, pulled back the right sleeve of her coat and lowered her arm into the darkened maw. “I am here,” she said. “I am yours.”
The darkness held her. Teeth bit her, though not through her skin. They sank deeper than that. She shuddered, and the withering of flesh and being began. It felt as if her blood were being siphoned out of her, though the loss was more important, and more profound.
Her self rushed into the altar, and something rushed to meet her. It was imprisoned except for this faint tendril, but it was enough for her being and the other to touch, and once they touched, the essence of the Devourer surged out of the dark and into her.
Her body changed. Her fingers lengthened. Her nails became claws.
Her teeth grew, sharpened and multiplied.
Held and captured, freed and rewarded, herself and Other, she screamed in pain and triumph.
She ended, and she began. She died, and she was born.
When Krogh ascended the steps from the crypt, she had gained another name. It was an identity, a calling, and a threat. It defined her hunger, which was greater now than she had ever known. It defined the power she had, to sate that hunger. The name had haunted Latverian folklore for centuries. It was the name for a feral nightmare, the undead devourer of souls.
From the well of the night, Maleva Krogh, first and queen of the returned urvullak, emerged to feed.
Part 2
The Withering Plague
Dear sister, close thy plumes over thine eyes
Lest thou behold and die: they come: they come
Blackening the birth of day with countless wings,
And hollow underneath, like death.
Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I.439–442
Nine
The process of breaking down the wall was slow, and it was exhausting. Doom had to draw upon sorcerous resources hour after hour, and that was draining. He had to stop for a few hours each night to sleep and regain his strength.
On this night, Doom did not sleep. Premonition, vague yet sharp, came over him as he stepped away from the wall. He recognized the flavor of the unease. He had felt it before, back in September, in the library of Castle Doom. When he had held Phantasmus.
This was a warning. Do not ignore it this time.
A warning of what?
Doom flew back up the shaft to his quarters. He sat down in the throne and called up the digitized reproduction of the book. He flicked through the pages, turning them with eye-blink commands. He read steadily, studying the fears and shadows of centuries past. Some lived on as superstitions in the present. Some had been forgotten, perhaps gratefully, in even the most mist-shrouded valleys.
There was no mention of the Devourer. There was no connection that Doom could see between it and the monsters that capered through the pages of Phantasmus.
Perhaps there is none. Perhaps the warning is of a completely separate threat.
That didn’t seem right either.
Every instinct, crying out with alarm, told him to read.
You must learn this. You must.
So he read. And he did not sleep.
•••
The storm began an hour before dawn. A crack of thunder jolted Nina awake. She lay there, eyes wide, heart hammering, breath coming too fast. She had come out of a nightmare of watching herself being sacrificed on a desecrated church altar. The image stayed with her, refusing to lose its clarity with consciousness. She kept seeing the hand raising the blade, and the blade plunging into her heart. She knew whose hand that was. She knew who was killing her. Because she knew, being awake was no comfort.
Maybe Ewald was wrong. He had to be. She couldn’t be back. She wouldn’t dare be so bold.
Nina glanced at Ewald’s sleeping form beside her. She almost reached out to wake him, to ask for reassurance, to get him to say that he must have made a mistake, and how could he have possibly recognized Maleva Krogh from that distance anyway? She left him alone and took deep breaths, working on slowing the beating of her heart. They had both had a restless night. Ewald needed what sleep he could get. And there was nothing he could say that they hadn’t already said to each other hours before. They had gone around and around with their fears, taking turns convincing each other that Maleva Krogh had not returned, and then losing all peace of mind in the next instance because… what if she had?
Lord Doom would protect them.
But did he know?
Doom knew all.
But he wasn’t here. And Ewald saw her.
No. Please no. She couldn’t be here. Nina couldn’t go back to that time.
That time of random terror. That time of never sleeping soundly. That time when anyone could be taken away to the castle. Nina’s elderly father had been taken away in the middle of the night. Not because he had done something to anger the Kroghs. He was taken, Nina learned later, because he had been chosen in a game of chance.
She wasn’t here. She wasn’t here. She wasn’t here.
The rain was hard. Nina usually found the sound of its rattle on the roof comforting. It made the bed feel warmer, more enveloping. Not now, though. The wind was strong, and the water struck the window with the brittle clack of nails. With every gust, she heard the insistent scrabble of something that wanted into the house.
Stop it. Stop being foolish. Breathe. Get some sleep.
The creak and slam from outside frightened her so badly, it took several long, gasping seconds before she understood what she was hearing. The wind had caught the barn door and was swinging it back and forth.
She listened to the long screech, and the angry bang of the door. For the space of a minute, she tried to ignore it. She didn’t want to go out in the rain. But with this wind, the rain would be driving into the barn, getting the feed wet. It wouldn’t take much to turn the floor into a stream.
She sighed. She wasn’t going to sleep anymore tonight anyway.
Nina got up, felt her way out of the bedroom and into the kitchen. She grabbed a flashlight off the counter, shrugged into her raincoat and shoved her feet into boots. Then she stepped out into the deluge.
The wind whipped rain into her face. She squinted and wiped water from her eyes. The rain came down in streaks through the flashlight beam. Nina shuffled forward through puddles, careful not to slip in the muck. She couldn’t see more than a couple of yards ahead. The barn was invisible in the darkness, the uneven rhythm of the shriek and slam of the door her only guide through the downpour. The water ran in torrents at her feet, and the sheep in the pen made petulant sounds at her as she passed.
In spite of her coat and its hood, she was soaked before she was halfway to the barn. Water trickled down her neck and under her nightdress, chilling her. The discomfort was almost welcome. The nightmare receded before it.
The flashlight finally picked out the weathered wall of the barn. Nina hurried over the rest of the distance, risking a fall to get this over and done with. She took hold of the door mid-swing, mentally cursing Ewald for having failed to secure it before bed. The wind hurled its own curse against it, trying to knock her off her feet for having dared interrupt its game with the door. She staggered and slipped, clutching the door to keep from falling.
