Or so the Muses Claim
by
David C. Daoust
All the Worlds of the Muses tend to be the same. The ins and outs of life are repeated, the stories, the lives, it’s been rolled round and round… reused, reiterated. New visions that have no idea they are being reflected from the old. The same notes in new patterns, like old jokes on young ears…
The muses speak, and those who can hear, they listen.
Those with interest repeat, those with need– use.
In truth, though, not all their stories are that great. For, so very many Muses have become dry– sardonic even.
They are sure the Worlds are all simply made for God to play with his Dinosaurs. On and on for billions of years colossal predator clash with titanic prey… But, again and again, the game ends and God moves on to the next world. And so, these bored Muses muse, God plops some humans down on the world, maybe to help clean out some of that sludge the dinosaurs leave behind. Make it, at least a little bit cleaner for when the World Consumers show up for their meal…
This, an example of one of the stories that really isn’t that good. It shows no appreciation for human life, love, beauty, time, or toil, truly a horrendous tale– but it is a story they’ll tell… if you listen.
Earth is a world ripe for the taking. The crude sludge is almost completely expunged, drilled from the ground, burned up… the air is thick with fog and smog and filth. Surely once that oil is truly gone, the environment will lose its ability to support human life at all! As though nature’s balance itself had set it in motion. And, luckily, humans’ll all be long gone before the World Consumers arrive to do the very thing their names imply. All as if it were planned! Yet Earth, by far, is the only World to survive so long post-dino-extinction.
This is all thanks to the World just before Earth, to the paradox of a planet that is the Cursed World, Mya. A World ruled by a vile and hated queen— for billions of years has the Witch Queen ruled. Her own needs holding this dying planet, at this point a zombie planet, from the brink of death.
Rather than moving on to Earth the massive monstrosities, that are the World Consumers, are trapped, sucking dry a dead lifeforce from a planet long overdue to be ended, all thanks to the Witch Queen.
The Witch Queen, however, is a being so hated, so reviled, that every powerful being on that world, that was ever able to curse her, had done so… Multiple curses, moving against her— to kill her. To maim her, to twist her into that which cannot even be recognized. Hateful curses so powerful that they lock each other out. The curses themselves, hold each other at bay, for none of the curses may do their deeds if any of the other curses succeed.
It’s a matrix of vile intention, trapped in check, with no move to end the game. A truth, a rumor— or maybe just another story muttered by the Muses. But whatever it was, it was the basis of Fiona Hart’s plan.
Fiona Hart was a being unlike any other.
The lives of humans are echoed throughout the spirit world. The deeds and misdeeds give birth to spirits that roam therein, reverberate their deeds and actions— Inspire more of their ilk. Spirits are all just that one thing. No change, no difference. It is what they are. No real life, no real choice; a half-life being. A character within a play with no real lines. The bad, wreak havok on the innocent; the good, sooth those shaken.
A good deed creates a good spirit, a bad deed creates a bad spirit.
Fiona, however, was so much more. She was not born, she was created. The truth unknown to her, for how could she ever know her father had taken the purest of all spirits, and layered spirit upon spirit, each of a darker and darker shade of grey, and covered it in the blackest spirit he could find. Fiona was an amalgam of spirits- deeds of good, and of bad… she was all those things… not just the one. Which gave her the ability to not only create both, but to inspire both– she was an artificial soul. A real-life, forged of half-lives.
Fiona was made entirely so she could walk amongst the living, under the light of day, where no other dark spirit could walk. And according to her father’s wishes, his diabolical plan, she existed to slaughter all those lost. Those that would neither ascend nor descend, but those that would roam the Earth as ghosts. For Ghosts were nothing but a resource to the spirits of darkness. A fuel to feed their furnaces, their engines…
Fiona was to harvest fresh souls to feed her father’s machines.
She’d refused— more than that, she’d fled. Chased for years by his minions… harried.
Yet, her father was left behind on Earth, in the Spirit World Fiona was native to.
On the Earth, believe it or not, the Good Spirits outweigh the Bad. The bad, for the most part, are on the run.
Fiona’s own father, the Conductor of the Ghost Train, a train that, even now, charges through the Earth’s Spirit World, his prime task was to keep the train charging away from the light, ever moving forward, away from the reach of those good spirits that would cancel them out as easily as a doused torch!
On Mya, the Cursed World, Fiona found something different in this separate, native Spirit World.
When she crossed over, she found a world swarmed with the unliving, with the ghosts of those that had long since passed, so thick, she did not find the ground to lay track, nor even to walk upon. But instead, she found a vast sea.
Yet there was no water in the world of spirits. It was a sea of ghosts. Its waves rose and fell with the tide, just like any ocean. And she felt she would surely drown if she fell beneath its waves, though not thanks to a lack of oxygen, but the sheer vastness of those thoughts and memories of the lives she would encounter, in such a sea.
For Billions of years the souls of the dead had accumulated to such a mass that it blanketed Mya like a great sea– the only land masses the tops of Mya’s highest mountain, all covered in freezing snow, and the colossal backs of World Consumers themselves.
The spirits– were at a disadvantage, for as soon as they were born, good or bad, they were lost within the waves, sucked into the vast mass of Mya’s dead. Ancient ancestors and the recent dead alike, all flowed through this mindless mass…
Until they found their way to the top, to the land masses—or among the many seafaring ships the oldest of spirits used to navigate these horrific seas.
One similar to the ship Fiona Hart now strode upon.
The howling wind could be heard as the skeleton crew kept coals burning and the blackened smoke pouring from the pipes above…
And not a ‘skeleton crew’ as a crew just big enough to keep the ship moving, literally skeletal beings hard at work. They were constructs all, of some ancient spell, these dressed as buccaneers.
It had been a long time since Fiona had witnessed anything but the cold earie glow of the spirit world. She missed the vibrance of the living world. (She missed pink! Which never looked quite right under the blue glow.) A full year since she’d escaped the clutches of the Witch Queen; from the Living world of Mya…
For today was once again her day, Halloween!
The dire wolf padded up behind her as a skeletal crewman blew a great howl through a horn from the upper decks, a howl that was answered by a great braying horn touted from within the covered bridge of the ship.
Something was ahead… though not land…
What they sought was ahead.
Great black Obelisks of Darkness jutted from the open sea.
As the deeds of the living create beings, and truths create metals among the Spirit Worlds… so too, do the Curses laid upon the living, manifest their own forms. Deeds themselves, though hard, black— immobile… especially those that they approached. Like some dire straits amongst the sea of swarming ghosts, the black obelisks jut from the ocean floor, breaking and waves and churning rapids through their scrawling reach into an eerie, haunting sky.
This, here, was the truth of Fiona’s plan.
The wolf was still with her on the deck… But so too was the astral form of the Cursed Man. A man evicted from his own form by the Evil Witch Queen, in jest really, an act to amuse her, as she gave his body fully over to the Wild Spirit that at one time only borrowed it on full moons…
While the wolf roamed the real world, his astral form was cast into the Spirit World, though the two were ever tethered together… thus they had arrived in the same place on the crossover. The three of them now, constant companions in this strange new world.
As the horns finally faded, the captain of the ship also joined them on the wide wooden decks…
The Ancient Captain Argyle, in fact. A being old beyond reason. He boasted his birth-world, three worlds back from Mya in the Divine Continuum of Worlds. The Ancient had listened to the Muses’ reruns longer than any being still living… had kept the Arcanumn alive and well for two full worlds and all their breaths.
He was so old, his skin was leathery and haggard, though a giant among men at nine feet tall, with a barrel chest, and limbs as thick as a tree’s. His eyes were set deep, dark, and wise with an unearthly light. A true wizard to behold- if he was not so monstrous…
Argyle was their when Fiona and the Wolf had first emerged from within the sea. He was there, he claimed, awaiting her arrival. Something not that unusual for Fiona Hart— as so too, was Professor Goodwin, and the boy Goodwin as well… No one yet, had explained, though it seemed Fiona was forever expected.
“This is it, girl,” the wizened old giant’s voice grated through wrinkled lips and massive flat teeth, “The Curses of the Witch Queen herself… I hope you’re ready. For none, as far as I can remember, have ever managed to shatter a curse of such magnitude… especially so many of ‘em…”
“Shouldn’t have to shatter them all,” the disembodied voice of the Cursed Man offered up, “Just shatter enough to create an imbalance…”
“The rest should take care of themselves…” Fiona finished the thought with a nod.
The small group turned to study the inky black, gem-like surface as the great ship approached the nearest Obelisk.
“You said… you knew enough?” Fiona queried the Wizard.
“Yes here, here I can hear the muses… so loud,” the giant wizard explained.
“I hear nothing…” Fiona paused a moment to listen, “just the wind.”
“Yes, you hear the wind…” the old giant chortled, “but do you feel it?”
Fiona realized he was right, there was no wind. Just the sound.
“That’s the Muses…” Argyle stopped, closed his eyes and took it in, “I have not heard them so loud since the Bard of the Age’s fall!” He said cryptically, “The words are like magic… spells all spoken, woven at once… I can pick them apart; find the very thing we need… ‘or so the Muses claim’…” he tacked that last part on with a quirky smile that Fiona could only wonder what this odd quote brought to his mind.
“Here, say the Muses…” he bellowed and the ‘winds’ seemed to grow louder as though summoned, “The warrior girl needs a Weapon of Legend… and they offer a whole list to choose from.”
With that he pulled a weapon seemingly from thin air, in truth pulled if from an ancient legend– and Named it:
“D’aylon, The Longest Day!’ charged with the power of the sun, thwarted the armies of vampires on a world so old even I would find my interest perked… ‘So claim the Muses!’”
Fiona took up the great blade in her hand, leapt onto the Dire Wolf’s back, and then guided it forward, the pair charged from the deck, leapt clear through the sky, and Fiona clashed the blade against the inky black surface of the Obelisk. A great yellow light burst and lit the eerie sky like it was day… yet the Obelisk was unscathed.
The wolf landed on its vertical surface, scratched and clawed, it pushed them back in the other direction, the pair landed back on the deck with grace, though they knew they had failed…
“Here, Claim the Muses…” the giant wizard announced, “The Clean Blade!”
Yet this time the sword that appeared was massive beyond reason, jutted from the sea itself.
“How exactly…?” Fiona asked, as the ludicrously oversized hilt was bigger than she was.
“Oh, right, Nevermind that…” Argyle looked somewhat abashed, somewhat guilty, “Well, they don’t exactly list the dimensions… We’ll try another…”
“Here, Claim the Muses,” the Captain bellowed, “Agnar’s Hammer!”
And this time the weapon that appeared was a hefty maul of a weapon, it immediately dropped heavily to the deck.
“Agnar’s Hammer?” Fiona scoffed. “Are we sure today isn’t April Fools?”
Though before any could answer, the Obelisk before them suddenly shifted. The surface seemed to break in half, and then stretch out wide into two great bat-like wings! A demonic giant, lower half still fused with the obelisk, revealed itself from within the wing’s folds.
“You dare attack,” the creature accused, “You dare threaten our purpose, our very being!” It then screeched out like a battle cry, “The Witch Queen’s life will be mine to take!”
Then other voices echoed more and more distant from the monstrous demon, they argued “No it will be mine, mine!”
The demon outstretched its hand, it cast a great beam of sickly putrid light, light which engulfed them all.
Fiona though, knew! in that moment knew that what the demon had reacted to, was the weapon… and the true threat, inherent therein.
With a great fluid motion, she grabbed up the Maul, spun it around in a full roundhouse strike and hurled it as hard as she could towards the glossy black obelisk! Though seconds before she could see where it clashed, she found herself transported elsewhere, by that putrid beam of light.
The dire wolf was still with her. And the gnarly old wizard too. Even the astral form of the cursed man stood with her. The sky was blue and her skin alabaster. A single skeletal Deckhand had even been sucked through the demonic portal… though not a one of them still stood on the ships deck on that hauntingly ghostly sea…
Instead, they stood in a jungle, on a totally different world.
A primordial jungle, one may guess, as the dinosaurs that surrounded them, startled by their abrupt appearance, began to stampede!
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