“They’re coming,” Casper thought. A sad, beautiful beach, lit up by the sun reflecting on sand. Casper runs his feet under the cool water, the foam licking in between his toes in gracious laps. He stares up at the big, round orange hole in the clear sky. “They’re coming and I’m not ready.”
Malik is standing in front of him.
“Hi.”
“Move, you’re blocking the sun.” Casper puts his hand up to Malik’s boney chest, gently pushes him to the side. He breathes deeply and welcomes the sun’s rays deep into his chest. Malik hits the beach facedown beside Casper with a desperate thud.
“I’m bored,” he huffs. “Take me somewhere.”
Instinctively, Casper reaches over and gently rubs Malik’s side, down to his stomach, stopping at the wire of a black thong, slowly working his finger under Malik’s bathing suit. Casper’s still staring at the sun. “Where do you want to go?”
A phone rings. A seagull lands on a rock just a few feet away, fluffs its wings. It turns on its spindly bird feet and raises its beak at the two men, lets out a squawk, lets out a stream of white birdshit.
“Hello?” Malik picks Casper’s meaty hand off of his crotch, flings it and then rolls over on his side. Hmmph. The sun is a bright, distant citrus dream. It looks like it’s a tangle of string, interwoven corona in a constantly moving sphere. Casper taps Malik on the side, points towards it like “look”, but Malik doesn’t look. Malik just sulks. Casper’s on the phone, “Yes, what’s up? Where are you guys? No. No. We’re on the beach.”
And then the sun disappears. A wave of purple and black washes over the beach, folding into a final, gestating grey. With a chill squeaking up his spine, Malik turns towards Casper and buries his face in Casper’s shoulder. The seagull launches into the air and is lost in a flock of them. “Who’s that?”
“Yeah?” Casper sits up. The synergistic grey and then a cloud or two, the fading sun; so sudden. “We were just about to leave.”
PART TWO:
On Roa, they made crystal sieves and mined the gelding stone. There was a great dance before they sent the men into the mines, they shook shackles and metal plaques and tied up ghosts in rituals and burned cages. They went to the highest mountains and started their shambolic soul dance at the peak, spinning and twirling there until sky reached its purple climax.
Little volcanic fissures in Roa’s surface sprayed a fine mist and they sent their men into them, one by one, towards their birthright.
“Roth. Get up.” Ragolos looked into the bamboo tent. His son was sleeping on a bed of grass. “Get up. It’s time.”
Young Roth without protest gathered at the edge of a long path. Saba was there with him, three boys down. They looked at each other. Saba was trembling, his upper lip bouncing furiously into his lower teeth.
Roth closed his eyes and tried to imagine he and Saba, running across quiet plains and chasing Mupquat Bugs, tying twine to their enormous tails and then sailing through the meadow with them as Roa’s two suns beat down on their bare skins. Roth tried to remember sneaking into the Novatt Temples and stealing small, sacred jewels, angering the monks who chased them with sticks. As Saba’s simpering got louder, the memory of Roth fighting back a horde of boys tossing rocks at the two of them swelled in his mind. The larger boy, Staen, put down his rocks, walked up to Saba, grabbed his grass-woven shirt and shoved Saba into the dirt. When Roth stepped in front of Saba to defend his friend, Staen and the other boys beat him to a pulp. One punch lifted Roth off of his feet and into the air sending Roth falling backward and landing on the rocky ground lifelessly. Roth’s vision was coated with wetness, a fish lens haze, but he could see, right before passing out, the feet of his friend Saba treading through the grass, getting smaller and smaller and disappearing over the horizon.
Staen was in the line of boys. He was smirking as usual, fighting to withhold a laugh. They all stood there, naked, their tar black bodies exposed. On one side of them, a line of chanting warriors; on the other a line of humble, broken bodied men from the mines; in front of them, the monks and praetors and scholars walked slowly, deliberately, casting flowers and lighting incense as they moved down the path. Women of the village looked on out of the windows of their huts, their day in the fields or on the hunting grounds or cleaning the vast libraries and sanitoriums and monuments on hold.
“Boys!” the praetor announced. “Today, you will walk through the mist! You will walk through the mist and emerge a warrior, a miner, or a monk! Today, you will be shown your destiny!”
A roar from the crowd. Birds lifted to the sky. All of the naked male children in a hushed silence tensed up. And behind the monks in front of them, a guyser of red mist shot up! And with this the crowd silenced.
“Come!” shouted the praetor, raising his skinny arms through voluminous robes. “Come and meet your destiny!”
And as the monks parted, the boys walked down the line and into the mist. Soon they would emerge with the distinguishing marks that chose their fate. Inside the mist, Roth felt searing heat. A soft glistening rain coated his body. The boys screamed! Their bodies racked with pain, then spiraling into ecstasy, and fading into numbness. When the mist subsided, Roth collapsed on the forest floor. His eyes slowly opened. There was Saba, his back torn into shreds, protruding with the wings of a warrior. Staen was curled up in a ball; his fingers long and pointy, skin etched with the elegant, esoteric design of the tattoo of a monk.
And then Roth saw his father’s boot. He followed up the length of the man’s torso until he met his father’s eyes. A solitary tear had escaped and rolled down the man’s cheek.
“Come, my son.”
But behind his father was a slowly burning light, a bright star expanding, just reaching over his father’s shoulder. As it grew larger, winds ripped through the village. Naked young men, now christened warriors and miners and monks, scattered, as rain poured violently into the atmosphere. Trees bent, houses unthatched, monks clutching their precious parchments ran for safety, crying to the heavens, their sacred ritual desecrated by some unforeseen force. And then emerging with a sonic boom from the light, a large vessel appeared! It was made of a strange platinum. It moved through space like liquid. It seemed like hours, but only minutes had elapsed as it hovered over Roth and his father, trapping them there in its path with an intense magnetism.
A hatch opened. Out strode a man in a tight, blue and black suit that seemed to swim over his body. His skin, that rippled over his taut, muscular frame, was a ripe purple. His hair was a long, flowing mane of starburst strands, glowing with a fire the people of Roa had never seen. And he spoke.
“Roth F’_iiosf of Roa!” he commanded.
Roth’s father held the boy tightly, his tears turning to firey determination. “What do you want with my son?” he screamed out in exasperation. “My family has suffered enough disappointment today!”
“Roth F’_iiosf of Roa! I am The Destroyer. You have walked through that mist! Rise and take your place with the true champions of this universe. For Roth F’_iiosf of Roa is no more. Now, there is only Black Mage of the Galactic Legion!”
Roth pulled away from behind his father. As the wind and light swirled around them, the boy took a step. He looked at his father; the man’s sad, crumpled and tattered face sunken and desperate for light. The sagging, tar pitched skin. The eyes etched on both sides with the three, tell-tell hatchmarks of a miner. And he took another step towards the Destroyer. And he remembered tying twine to Muquat Bugs. And he said, sadly, to his father, “I don’t want to be a miner.” And he took another step, then more, and followed the Destroyer into the vessel and disappeared into the black, shapeless void of space.
PART THREE:
There’s a bar Rob and Chris are sitting at. Its long, rickety bar stools seem to spill out of the large windows of the place and onto the street. They’re facing the television and talking over dance beats. It’s easy to ignore the monotonous Robin Thicke remixes, Chris thinks suddenly, when your excessively handsome friend Rob is unloading a fresh batch of college football stories in that wide, cavernous cadence of his.
“I was the best arm coach had, but he had me playing tight end,” Rob explains, thudding his beer on the counter in subtle protest. “Like, yeah, I was the biggest motherfucker with any kind of skill set he ever recruited, but damn man, I never wanted to play tight end! Got caught on a slant route with no protection—“
“No protection?” Malik has his caramel arms around Rob’s thick, black ex-football neck. “Sounds like my kind of game.”
“There you are!” Rob stands up, almost out of some strange courtesy, lets Malik steal his seat in the suddenly crowding bar. “Where ya’ll been?”
Casper is adjusting his belt, fumbling with his wallet. He pushes his glasses back onto his face twice before even reaching the guys at the bar.
“It’s not that kind of party,” Chris informs Malik. “We were discussing slant routes. Again.” Chris is wearing another striped polo shirt, drinking another Manhattan.
“Child please, I’d rather hear about any kind of route than about some ridiculous star war or green goblet for the thirtieth time,” Malik confides.
“Are you two together?” Chris asks, almost scandalously. Malik looks over at doughy, strange Casper, awkwardly shaking Rob’s mammoth hand. Casper, pushing up his glasses again, tiny hairs peaking out of his overworn Green Lantern t-shirt— in Malik’s mind they are piling into Casper’s Puegot, then they’re wandering some dingy comic book store and Casper’s talking to the guy at the counter about rare masks, and then they’re at Subway, the green and yellow blending synergistically with the smell of rancid banana peppers and dim lighting until Malik’s ready and nauseous. But they’re also in a tent on a moss covered rock, and they’re in a forest; they’re on the beach under a peach colored sun.
“No,” Malik says, a lilt of sadness or reflection in this voice. “No, we’re not,” he reaffirms, stronger this time and with a hint of sass.
“Oh.” Chris is a wise and average fool. His shoes are white New Balances, but, as Malik puts it when they’re all in the hotel room, his bank account is, essentially, black and gold Prada, to say nothing of Dolce and Gabana.
“Don’t worry about what shoes I’m wearing,” Chris says, taking off his cross-trainers. He holds up one of them, models it. Rob let’s out a roaring laugh. Malik clamps his nose with his fingers, tries to make for the door. Inevitably, Chris’s musty shoe ends up following Malik around the room. Casper sits nervously at the edge of the bed, fiddling with the remote, muttering under his breath.
Rob tries to make contact: “Cas. Cas!” Everything in the room stops. They’re all looking at Casper. “What are you doing, dude?”
“I’m trying to…it’s the television.” Casper explains. “It’s the television. Apparently, you need to be a Shi’ar tech sergeant of the Imperial court if you’re going to figure out how to work this thing.” They’re all looking at each other. Rob turns back to Casper.
“We didn’t come out this way to look at TV, man.” Rob walks over to his fidgety friend, puts his hand on Casper’s shoulder, then works the thick, mealy flesh of it underneath the shirt . “Let’s get loose.”
Casper runs out of the room, nearly knocking Chris into a nightstand. Casper beats on the elevator buttons, they all light up but the elevator doesn’t come in time. He sinks to the floor and covers his face with his hands. Malik gingerly walks over to him, stands there, mustering great patience. Casper looks up through a thin veil of tears. Malik is holding his hand out towards him.
“Come on,” Malik says, softly, sternly. “Let’s go back.”
PART FOUR:
A small, blue light flashed on.
A man with metallic skin is standing in the middle of a vast control room.
“Ion-1.” And the rest of the lights sparked to life, a trail or whirring electrons sweeping over the room. “Commence cryobirth. Stage 2.” Rising from the floor, an array of sleep champers, nearly twenty of them. Each one slowly opened in a cloud of frozen mist. Beings emerged from slumber, some gasping tasting the sterile air of the cryochamber, others feeling no real effect at all. Red Star was one of them, his hair cascading away from him as he flexed his awakening muscles.
“Fucking balls, mate,” said Spike. He was a tiny man, still covered in dirt and raw unkempt hair. “What a trip, eh?”
The being next to him, roguish, nearly 8 feet tall, with green, cratered skin, groaned, pulled himself out of the sleep casket.
“Aw, dreaming about those Crabgirls in the Nebulaar Sector again, Grok?” Spike quipped.
“*@***@*@****@@@*,” the large, green man countered.
“Crikey, Ion-1, we’re asleep in these stupid metal trashcans for god knows how long and you can’t find time to fix the bloody translators? I don’t know how you were picked to be a part of this ragtag outfit if you can’t do your one bloody fucking job, you pooz!”
“Ion-1 was chosen the same way we all were, Spike.” Void was standing in front of her, still groggy, still submerged comrade. As she spoke, her skin was coated with the living pixels and nano-bytes that make up her outer nervous system.
“He was chosen by the Light,” Red Star interrupted. That seemed to shut up the diminutive Spike. “Ion-1, forget the translators for now. We have a more pressing matter. Before we left the last quadrant, I felt a surge in energy. Can you play back all significant electroscans in the last three sleep cycles.”
“Christ, can we all get some clothes on before you start in with all the Star Trek shit, mate? I’m freezing me bloody arse off here!”
Red Star looked at him, first quizzically, then, after looking around the room, nodded. “Fine. All members of the Galactic Legion, convene in the chamber of darkness. Now.”
A robot, bent and distended, it’s sockets and circuitry exposed, lifted off of the gymnasium floor. It rose with a quirky unease, bracing itself on the wall behind it. From it’s hand, a shaft of solid, hard light, a photon, appeared. It roared to life moving impossibly fast, it’s sabre of light ripping through the atmosphere. It was sent hurtling back, smashing into pieces. Roth landed two feet in front of it, cupped his fist into his open palm, and bowed.
The door to the gym slid open, startling him. A women covered in ever changing pixels glided into in.
“Roth.” She surveyed the heaps of metal and scrap that decorated the gym floor. “You’ve been in here since we awoke from cryosleep. Why? What purpose does it serve trashing battle-bots in such a way?”
Roth, nearly breathless, closed his eyes, let the calming hand of his father wash over him. He was chasing Muquat Bugs. He turned to look at Void.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“There is nothing in the cosmos beyond my understanding, young one.” She looked intently at Roth, her eyes tracing his body as if he were merely a blueprint of himself. “Yet…” She spoke quieter, softer. “Yet, I feel that you are an enigma that can’t be solved with any postulate known to even my eternal databanks.”
“I don’t know. I guess I can’t just…” He moved closer to Void. He reached out his hand to touch her face. She didn’t flinch or twitch or make any movement to show that Roth had breached her personal space. So he touched her.
“What is this ritual, human?”
“How alone are you?” he asked. He could feel a slight burn as Void’s skin on his emitted a stinging warmth.
A red light flashed and the chimes of an alarm fell about them.
“Come, it is time.” Said Void, gliding across the gym floor again. When she looked back at him, her eyes seemed to have a sweet sadness to them breaking through their usual, medicinal stare, though he could have imagined it.
A large star map floated above the table. All 20 members of the Galactic Legion were assembled. They sat in front of their symbol, crude runes depicting each of their talents. Glassbird sat before crystal wings. Phaser sat before a swirling black hole. The Destroyer, a hardened menanced visage slightly cracked when Roth entered the chamber. And Red Star sat at the head of the long table, in front of a swirling, pulsing red, red sun.
“My friends, my greatest comrades,” he began.
“Here we go,” Spike mumbled, nudging Roth in the kidney.
“I’ve troubling news. It seems as if The Vanq have found their way to this sector.” A murmur gently trickled through the assembly. “I know, the Vanq even gives me pause. They are led by the dark lord, Apox, the demon who found the accursed Dark and with it rose through many hells to be birthed on this universe. His is a vast, dark evil. At his employ are some of the sickest mercenaries from the darkest galaxies. The Iduwanda, galactic pirates from Xon. Cyx the Unicorn Killer and his tribe of cannibal mercenaries. Dragon Deth, the beast wranglers from LV-21.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know all about these tossers,” Spike spat out, leaning back in his chair, his grimy boots planted on the table. “But what makes this so special, eh? Why the bloody Christ are we worried about these arseholes now? We put them in stasis before, we’ll put them in stasis again.”
“I’ll field this one, sir.” Ion-1 stood, proceeded to the center of the table, typing furiously on the touchscreen. “If we’re mapping the power surge that Red Star, our incorrigible leader, felt right before the last sleep cycle, and if we’re to believe that these are Apox and his forces using power heretofore unknown to them to traverse the stars, we can find out exactly where they are going.”
And with the touch of another button, the star map whirled and disappeared. Animated pixels rose in its place and coalesced into the shape of a small sphere. Enhancing, it was revealed to be a small, blue planet with nebulous clouds circling it’s stratosphere.
“They’re headed for earth,” Spike whispered.
“Not that shithole,” Grok protested through his gravely voice.
Something about the blue sphere hypnotized Roth. He stared intently at it. It was not unlike Roa in its appearance. The stories Spike told of it were entertaining, but mostly seemed to make the young man sad. He asked, “What makes Earth so special?”
“Not earth Not earth Not earth not earth not earth not earth” Spike was shaking his head, his eyes protruding dangerously out of their sockets.
“Earth is the nexus of the universe,” Void offered. “The prophecy of the Light. It ends on earth.”A silence etched over the room. “It all ends on earth.”
Red Star lowered his eyes. His hair swam to life. He stood up, mouth agape. And a large explosion blew a hole in the roof. The Galactic Legion looked up, almost in unison; the could see out into space! The explosion had ripped through the hull, tore down the hallways of the ship, and penetrated to the chamber of darkness. A swarm of armor clad mercenaries with advanced weaponry spilled into the room. They were covered in a strange slime.
Glassbird flew into action, her mighty wings ripping through her enemies bodies, striking down three of them. A large hand grabbed her face and, with all it’s might, flung her into the chamber walls. He was a snarling beast of a man, made of black soot. Steam and smoke rose from his eyes. Lava filled his mouth. Two creatures with the features of bees stepped out from behind him, raised the long prods they held in their hands and fired them at the still dazed Glassbird, sending an intense shock through her crystalline body. In seconds, the electricity spiraled through Glassbird in a near atomic flash, shattering her.
“No!”, Spike yelled. As the horde descended on the Legion, many of them being taken down by surprise, Spike jumped up on the table, leaped in the air. Two waves of electricity escaped from the bee creatures pods, one of them hit Grok who was being held down by space mercenaries. Another hit Red Star who had managed to tangle up a few mercs in his powerful, heat charged hair. He exploded, steam rising off of him. His costume was tattered but he remained practically unharmed, as the lifeless bodies of the mercenaries dropped to the floor. Grok was not so fortunate. His hollowed out husk turned to ash before their eyes. Spike leaped from the table. Two large, bony, sharp pegs grew out of his palms. He yelled in pain, but in mid air bounced off of the back of a mercenary and sent himself hurtling straight for the large man made of black soot.
“AAAPOOOXXX! DIE YOU BLOODY POOF!” he screamed, and wedge the pegs in his eyes. Apox stammered. His men were being cut down, now that the Legion had regathered and regrouped. For all his vast cosmic power, to be felled by a scruffy turd of a man from Earth? With a wave of his hand, he smacked Spike off of him, sending him hurtling through the air.
“Crikey, this is gonna hurt,” he whimpered. But before he impacted with the wall, possibly splattering across it, his spine already irreparably damaged by Apox’s blow, Void appeared in mid-air, teleporting him away.
“We’ve got to get that bastard out of here!” Spike yelled. “I put two charges on those spikes, no telling what kinda damage it’ll do mixed with all of that demon power!”
“Your request is inarticulate.” Void said, laying down here friend a few feet from the battle. “But I know what must be done.” And she teleported away.
Apox, still with Spike’s pegs submerged into his eyes, stood over Roth. He smelled of acid and shit and brimstone. Roth’s fists were bloody and caked with the pulp of dead and dying space pirates, of mercenaries from gutter regions of the universe. He’d at one time fought a Fan’gor Beast with just a stick and a stone, saving a village on some backwater planetoid from being devoured. He’d fought a gang of Angel Mob, fallen ones who attempted to gain control of heaven mafia style, all by himself in the slums of Cowanchee, the former prison asteroid turned space colony. But before him was Apox. The large creature leaped into the air and hurtled down towards Roth. Roth jumped. He didn’t know what to do. Aim for the eyes? Try to drive Spike’s spikes further into his head? He had an eighth of a second to do it. As the two met each other, there in the chamber of Darkness, a light flashed. Roth rolled right through the light and crashed into the meeting table. Red Star emerged into the room. They could see a similar light appear in space. Void was outside, holding Apox in her arms, floating away from their ship. A voice sounded in Roth’s head.
“We are never alone.” It echoed, sounding like Voids.
And then, in the black of space, amongst debris and craggy asteroids, an explosion that trailed like a falling star.
PART FIVE:
“What do you mean, they’re coming?” Chris snickers from the backseat of Casper’s Peugot , biting his quivering lower lip. “Who’s coming?” He can barely whisper the words without painfully fighting back a laugh.
Casper looks in the rear-view mirror, adjusts it, eying Chris. His stuffy green and white polo shirt, strangely combed and stiff blond hair, dangerously jaundiced skin, over-dyed Old Navy jeans shorts and dreadful white tennis shoes—“I’ve got bad feet,” Chris had said the other night when Malik was making fun of his “boring guy” uniform at Olive Garden the night before. “You’ve got bad everything, hon,” Malik reminded him, tossing a grape tomato at Chris, laughing. Always laughing.
Then Casper looks out and into the parking lot. A bird shitting on the curb impressed a bum so much, the bum stands up pointing and guffawing in barely contained delight, knocking over paper bags of glass bottles into the gutter.
A static hung in the air. Casper can feel it rise up and through his fingers somehow. Right? Can’t he feel it? Sitting there in the 711 parking lot, he grips the steering wheel, watches a newspaper swiftly levitate into the air and swirl around the dancing bum. He shuts his eyes and tightens his grip. “Come on, come on” he whispers, waits. There’s a sucked out silence, nothing.
When the door opens its like a wall of sound crumbling into the front seat. Malik and Rob are on the tail end of a bad joke. “I told him, I’m not paying for it. Those items were flawed.”
“But Malik, you put them on, wore them outside and everything? They can’t resell underwear after they’ve been all over your areas, man,” Rob informs him through a light chuckle. They fall into their respective seats, Malik settling into the front, gleefully sipping a slurpee, almost willfully oblivious to any emotion Casper could be conjuring; Rob in back careful not to let his leg slide too far over to Chris’s side, to touch the man’s denim protected skin, to brush up against his hairy knees. Before Rob could spiral into a sad trance of guilt, into the dark dread that arises when he’s near Chris, that strange doe eyed look as Chris’s lumpy body lay there as softly as it could after Rob had fucked him that night two years ago, a look that turned dry and somber with confusion when Rob, through a barrage of small talk and excuses, got up and put his clothes on and left— Rob looks over at Chris’s face now and sees another kind of confusion. He mouths, “what now?” at Chris who, wide-eyed, just shakes his head.
Cutting through Malik’s impassioned, complaint filled anecdote of retail horror, Rob asks, “Casper, you alright?” They’re already on the road. There’s a hushed, still blossoming twilight peaking over the horizon.
Is the air thick with electricity?
Malik shifts in his seat. He finally looks over to Casper, wordlessly pleads for his friend to say, “yes, yes, I’m fine.”
“And this is my Green Lantern collection.” They were in his room in his tiny apartment in University City. “You’ve got John Stewart,” Casper said, picking up a small, green clad figurine. “And this is Guy Gardener. This is Kilowog.” Before him, on this tiny IKEA dresser, stretched various miniatures of the entire Green Lantern Corps. There were red ones and yellow ones and orange ones, too. And posters of star-crossed barbarians in dragon-skin loin cloths, of men in long flowing capes and armed to the teeth with an irrational amount of guns.
“What?”
“No, nothing.” Malik looked for a place to sit and found a corner of the bed that wasn’t smothered in paraphernalia. “It’s just not what I’m used to.”
“Oh.” Casper said, his once assured voice turning more delicate as the conversation started to turn. “What exactly are you used to?”
“I don’t know,” Malik replied. He cleared another section of the bed. Casper almost gasped as a pile of comics tumbled onto the floor. “Here. Sit.”
A year later, they are going 85, then 95 miles an hour on the turnpike, flying recklessly around small surburban towns and making wild turns onto one way streets.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” Chris is a mess of nerves in the backseat. Rob is panicking and yelling for Casper to calm down. Malik has his eyes closed and he’s muttering something under his breath. Casper drives.
“Do something, motherfucker!” Chris screams at Rob. His face has twisted into a maze of frowning skin. “You’re always on about your great physical prowess, about how fucking brilliant you were on the goddamn field! When it comes right down to it, you’re a scared little faggot, just like the rest of us. Aren’t you? Aren’t you?!?!”
Rob sat there in stunned silence as buildings whiz by, as stoplights beg for that Peugot to stop. The road beneath them shrinks as their vehicle plunges into the oncoming night. 100mph, but nothing was happening for Rob, except the slow motion, distorted admonishing contortions of Chris. For this moment in time, Rob finally sees the man as a man. What is this person like? Is Chris just a shopping trip to Target every Tuesday? A man DVR’ing “Judge Judy” and “Young and the Restless”? Is Chris just a man sitting at a bar, laughing at bad jokes and hoping for a Lady Gaga song? He didn’t know. Rob reaches out and slaps Chris in the face.
Malik unbuckles his seatbelt. He turns to Chris, and, with thin wrists, wrenches the man’s grip from the steering wheel. The car swerves into a guard rail, flips over a ditch and rams, upside down, into a light pole. The wheels don’t even spin.
Malik’s eyes clogged with haze. He can smell the acidic aroma of iron and blood. Lights are flashing? Everything is black and white and upside down. He can see two figures walk towards him. Their boots are heavy, their walk is locked in and measured. They’re speaking in tongues so strange they sound metallic. The lights turn into a single, burning, sphere. It’s a white vortex cutting through the black night. Wind whips and everything around him trickles away as bits of a sand castle floating off into the hurricaning sea.
“They’re here,” Malik thinks. Whispers? Malik thinks he reaches out to casually tap Casper on his shoulder. He knows somewhere in his soul that he can’t move, but he reaches anyway. “They’ve finally come.”