from Legends of Perilisc

THE SECOND AGE

~120,000 Years Before The Escape

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A thousand gods warred, legions of them lined shoulder-to-shoulder in ranks that cast twisting shadows on the surface of the shattered land.

The sheer strength of their blows filled the air with thunder. The crunching of the lines, roaring against one another, displaced the air, and the seas sloshed. Like falling meteors, dying gods blazed from the heavens to collide with the ground in explosion. Some of the mightiest fell with such force they broke the crust of the world. Volcanoes raged and the world bled.

Tens of thousands of years ago, the gods had given me the chore of creating the First Age of humanity. I crafted them as commanded, and loosed them on the world. My creations were given lands and life, and they had begun to progress as a people. They built villages and towns. Slowly, the world filled with song and art. But the gods began their war for the souls of the humans. The world shook.

Andre had been my first creation. I built him for a single purpose: to aid me in my construction. But he quickly became a friend. Over eighty feet tall, he was able to pour the iron for the molds from which I carved the human forms. He bellowed their first breaths into them. He was a vessel that held the souls of each man and woman I would craft. Filling his chest, they looked like swirling lights, too infinite to count.

We were hiding, buried in a cave deep from the raging war. My First Age was trapped on the surface. I knew no living being could survive that chaos and devastation. So I had set about the work of creating the Second Age.

With a resounding crack, Andre opened the massive iron mold so I could examine the first two humans of the Second Age. They lay motionless in the bottom, calm and innocent. The male would be the first king of the first nation. The female would be the mother of this heroic race. She was already ripe with child.

He lay face up, bold and naked; she lay on her side, protectively shielding her daughter. I slowly inspected them, looking for any imperfections. The nostrils were slightly different shapes, and the skin around the eyes did not match exactly. These variations brought me peace. The First Age had been pristine, no malformations. The gods had aided in their creation enough to make my craftsmanship perfect. But this was better. These differences would give the Second Age diversity and character.

The first male possessed a heroic form. He was well-muscled and tall, strong and, I hoped, intelligent.

The female was wonderful, warm and soft in places, strong in others. The one eye I could see was blue, and I smiled. The eyes always surprised me; it was one element I had no control over. Her black hair was dry and curled. Her skin was lustrous ebony. Her belly was swollen and ripe for the delivery of her fatherless child. I struggled to think of a sight more beautiful than she, but none came to mind.

 I was again aware of the ever-present pounding and explosions coming from above, and I nodded.

“They are good. We can start here,” I said. “But close them up. Do not give them breath and life. We will wait until the others are finished.” I jumped down from the mold.

 “Andre,” I said to my companion, “What are their names?” He would give them their souls and start their hearts; he knew already what their names would be.

“He will be called Clark. She will be Moa.”

 I smiled as I realized a part of me, the part that had been entranced during their creation, had known.

My Second Age was suddenly real, and I wanted to see the world they would inherit. We went to the surface a few days later.

 My heart hurt for them. Andre held me protectively. As I looked through his glass hands, I trembled. I thought the horror would kill me.

Andre pointed to the objects hovering below the battle’s din. Seven moons orbited the world. Spike-like protrusions jutted from the surface of the moons. A dark, dead eye rolled within one of them, and the jawbone beneath it became clear. These moons were the remnants of the front line. The first gods into battle had collided with such force they had fused together. Their limbs were slowly eroding away as they rolled across the sky. The corpses of the battling gods would forever stain the heavens.

I was shaken to the very core, and for years I could create nothing. Andre tried, but could not pull me from my depression.

One day he said to me, “Her name will be Christine.” He spoke of the child Moa carried. “She will have a crooked smile that will make her look perpetually young.”

An intense passion gripped me, and I went into a flurry. I produced seven that year. My hands were bleeding with slivers of iron; my muscles ached from constant work. That year, I did not sleep. I only carved. I thought only of Christine, and the others she would need in her world. I loved her as I have loved no other. I had a daughter, and I worked in her name.

The cavern shook one day. The molds rumbled and stones fell from the ceiling. I did not want to know what had fallen from the sky, did not dare to look. A few hours after the rumbling had stopped, the wailing began. A deity was dying. The howls were like no sound ever heard by the ears of man. His pain filled the cave, swelling with a cacophony of agony. Divinity seeped from his body, as if magic in its purest form was the deity’s blood. Andre and I huddled in the tiniest corner his size would allow. We held one another and wept. Weeks later, the wind carried away the last of the death rattle and we could rise from our hole.

The ground had rumbled at the god’s falling, and portions of the cave had collapsed. We dug a few molds out from under the stone, but missed the hairline cracks some had suffered. The magic of the fallen god seeped into those places. The people from these molds would be different. They would possess the ability to grasp and wield the magic from the divine blood now staining the earth. They would be wizards and would pass that legacy on to their children.

Three thousand years passed before I saw the world again.

I still don’t know what made us surface when we did. Maybe it had been Andre’s suggestion. He was closer to godhood than I; possibly he sensed the approach of another deity. But why we surfaced does not matter. What I saw that night would never leave me.

Something circled above us, between the battlefield of the gods and the land below. Smoke hung heavy in the air. The creature hovered over a crater, the resting place of the god who had, centuries before, cursed us with the sound of his wails. The son had come.

This creature was Cupid, son of Vulcan and Venus. The immensity of his size distorted the scene, appearing as though he was within reaching distance.

A priest once told me other worlds had known Cupid as a child—an infant even—cute and fat and fair. But the infant had matured. This being was the result of war. He was lean now, and cruel, with long black hair, waist-length at least. His scorched skin was not the lustrous ebony of Moa, but dry and dull as coal. Thin, wired muscle twisted under his skin, like a bag of serpents, as he moved.

He planted his feet on either side of the crater and bent low to wrench an object from within. With a sick pop he pulled out a rib, brown and tacky with blood. Only then did we notice his other hand held wires of flame. They lifted into a wispy and beautiful dance on either side of his fist, strands of hair from his mother, Venus, the goddess of scorned women. Once, before her hideous scars, she was the goddess of beauty, even love. These strings of molten gold glowed like fire in the shadows that covered the land.

Using the rib of his father and the hair of his mother, the mighty Cupid created a new bow. He strung it before my own eyes.

He turned and looked at us. He was solid and real, but I could see stars in his skin—galaxies and constellations in his shadow. He seemed to be hollow, as if I could reach into him and his form would be a void. I did not understand. My mind could not grasp him.

He assessed us and became uninterested.

He bent his knees and launched himself into the air. Smoke poured from his body, not the soft smoke of a pipe, or the faint wisp of a candle. Oily tendrils formed into rancid wings. He pumped them once and was gone, back to the heavens, back in the hell of battle.

The years scraped by, and the war pounded on. Through it all, Andre and I worked. Christine was a constant in my mind. She became the avatar of the future, the symbol that carried me through the work.

We cast thousands of molds, created thousands of humans, but we woke none. We had decided to wake them when the war ended. Until the pounding ceased and the concussive blasts of raging gods had silenced, the humans would lay inert. We began to wonder whether we would survive. The gods could war forever. What force in existence could stop their will?

Our answer came thousands of years later. The din of battle stopped very suddenly one day. The world quieted and my ears began to ring with the silence. We waited with bated breath for some indication of what would come next. Which side had won—was it the side of darkness and evil or the side of light and hope? Had there been a victory at all? Was the war over, or had it paused? Were the gods regrouping and preparing for more?

Fear suddenly struck Andre. Creatures had assembled outside the cavern, waiting for an audience with me.

When I reached the surface, I saw two beings. One shined forth a warm and comforting light. The other’s aura was foul and disruptive. His very presence was horrid. He was tall, nowhere near the size Cupid had been, but huge nonetheless. His face was the bright yellow of sulfur, his eyes black. He had no mouth. His cloak, ripped to shreds, flapped around him like black bandages. He introduced himself as Blythe.

The other was Sotheous, a naked man, mammoth in size and beautiful to behold, with kindness in his eyes and a horrid pink scar under his jaw. He claimed to be the leader of an army called the Sentries, and Blythe the leader of another called the Demons. Their forces had stood together to end the conflict. They had jailed many of the gods, the Demons holding the dark gods, the light gods the wards of the Sentries. They had forced a peace. Never again would the gods wage war among themselves. They told me the world would belong to the Second Age and the survivors of the First.

“The First Age? The First are dead, made extinct by your war!” My anger was bold in the face of these superior beings. I did not fear them. Thousands of years had passed me by, and the beautiful people I had made for the gods had been wiped out by their selfishness.

The arch demon laughed, a hideous crackling wheeze. His mouth formed from crumbled rock. Yellow dust filled the air around it, like frost breath in a winter wind. “This one is soured.” He smiled, the corners cracking and rolling. “He is filled with judgment and hate. He will be mine. Watch as he continues down the path now laid at his feet. He will grow ever more bitter,” Blythe said. He jeered at the mighty Sotheous. “I will win the Bard in the end.” He cracked out his horrible laugh.

I wanted to tell Blythe he was wrong. I would not serve his darkness, but would bathe in the light. But I was furious, and my fury was justified.

Sotheous was unreadable.

“The war was not our war any more than it was your war. We saw and loved the first ones. We Sentries pleaded with the gods not to engage one another. But they could not be dissuaded. We could do nothing but wait for them to weaken themselves. The First Age still exists. We saw to their survival,” Sotheous said. “We gave them gifts. We gave them honor. We gave them family and taught them love. We gave them integrity and respect. With these foundations, they held on through the horror.”

“But we aided as well,” said Blythe. “We gave them the truly vital gifts. I, and my demon kin, gave the First Age hate, rage, and murder. We gave them lies, and taught them might makes right. We gave them the will to enslave those weaker than themselves.”

His mouth reformed to solid stone, then quite suddenly cracked and rolled. Yellow dust issued again as he cackled. “And they changed.” Blythe smiled at me. “The ones you crafted changed.” He laughed at me. It hit me like a drug, and threw me into a near murderous rage.

I looked to Sotheous. He frowned.

“Tell him,” Blythe said. “Tell him or I will.”

The Sentry lowered his head. “The blood of the dead gods stained not only the land, but the forms of the people themselves. Some humans have grown to exaggerated proportions. They have lost reason, forsaken it for might and brutality. These giants stomp the world. Other humans’ eyes have fused together. They are cyclops, large and brutal. They have harnessed the might of weapons and the tactics of war. They learned the art of crime and cruelty. Some humans blended with spiders and have developed extraordinary powers of mind control. They enslave weaker races and are worshipped as gods.” His eyes held deep sadness for me. “When the bull blended with human, it caused a level of insanity that can barely be comprehended.

“Man blended with other animals as well. They call themselves skinwalkers. They can hide themselves in the form of a normal human. Raksa and garq, they rule with force and blood.”

But Sotheous also spoke of creatures of love and light. Humans with three eyes had reached a level of consciousness that allowed them to rise above the din of the war. These trimerians had formed armies, and they wielded magic to protect the weak. Other humans had learned to fly with wings that sprouted from their shoulders.

These warped races would help soothe the world, now that the war had ended. But I hated them all. They had become twisted and malformed. They were not as I had made them. I did not want to release my Second Age into a world occupied by these. I would have destroyed my newest molds had it not been for my Christine.

As the Sentry spoke of hope, I began to believe. My Second Age could rule the world. They could change it, maybe even destroy these abominations and claim the world for themselves.

As these thoughts formed in my mind, Sotheous waxed on. “Do not give up hope on the First Age. You must guide your new race to peace with the others.” But the vision of a coming war between the races had stained my mind.

Blythe was laughing.

The world healed itself. The wind cooled fires and brought seeds to fertile places. Rain came and, with it, vegetation. Animals bred and the delicate balance was restored. During this healing, I woke them. Clark led the armies of the Second Age to a victory on the continent where we had hidden. Moa would nurture them. The monstrous races ruled the rest of the world, but in Clark’s land, reason and justice became the way.

The gods are still worshipped eons and eons later. This fact fills me with rage. But I wander my continent, watching as the Second Age struggles and triumphs. Their losses are mine, and their victories mine as well. I am trying to be the guide Sotheous asked me to be, but my heart is stained.

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