Credo: Antiope's Gloom

He couldn't have dreamed he'd let him go so soon, his faithful Cadens with the dashing mane of hellfire, now merely flecks of tossed orange fading. Six powerful legs, a sturdy back, and rotund hips had carried him far and fast, over the haunted tundra, through the dense witchwood thick with demons hatched from the murmurs of old hags. This was a signal peak, and despite the storm, they would see him. Despite the swirling sands and the glare of a setting sun, the sentries would see him as they roamed the desert below. They would call for reinforcements to flank the summit and they would flush him out as they ascended.

But he didn't care. He tired of stealth.

Kickspurred by the ache in his heart and a lush fuel seeped forth from his desire, he'd cross paths with his beloved sorceress sooner than later, and no one or nothing could stop him. Not the sandstorm. Not the fever burning at his core -- a random peculiarity that met him upon arriving on that dust-covered rock drifting in a dark queue.

One knot of the rose red scarf unfurled behind his neck, stormwinds whipping the ends out like a signal to come hither. The kid took a deep breath through the fabric covering his mouth, sucking in sand eddies for his lungs to break down into sulphur for later use. Every seven hours a breath. Every seven hours a new vision. This one of the woman he longed for at the other end of this God-forsaken stretch of bone and dust, standing on a summit much like the one he now sat legs folded upon, fists on knees like some traveling monk seeking solace within. She was there, barefoot in a gown of midnight pitch, her hair a long, flowing, abyssal darkness -- and this too, these perfect silken tresses, were whipped out to one side by the sandstorm winds; a signal, no doubt, to come hither.

Come to me, my love.

The kid roused, jolted. The storm had much subsided, but below, his pursuers were nowhere to be found.

He fingered the canvas pouches affixed to his belt in search of dry moss. He'd start a blaze there on the summit, one so commanding that every sentry for a thousand mesas would come running, thirsty for his soul.

Little did the boy know, while he lay drifting in the ether, one dozen sentries had already begun their ascent along the cliff. One dozen hunter-killers mounted upon beasts ten times his size, climbed cautiously. Quietly.

The boy snapped his fingers, striking the moss alight.

He pulled the scarf tightly around his face again, took the Stetson he had dangling from his neck by a loop of soft leather, and stuffed it on his head. He tipped the hat so it covered his eyes and walked out to the jutting stone once again, watching three sentries gallop through the desert miles away, kicking up long rooster-tails of bonedust adrift in the mid-gravity as they streaked toward the summit where the signal raged and popped like a dying sun.

They were only decoys.

He nodded. Sat again legs folded, fists on knees. The iron solar cross nestled in his palm pulsed like a tiny heart, expanding the vessels in his forearm, his bicep, his shoulder. His arm throbbed now like an engorged vein. Gooseflesh sprouted on his bare sunset chest. The chalkiness of soil and bone diminished the musk of dead blood wafting up from his tattered, dark blue jeans.

"Are you there?"

I am.

The boy blinked once, twice, fanning vehement red irises with feminine charcoal lashes.

"Why did you make me send my horse away?"

You were told not to question me.

"I was told you sought the best interests of this planet to begin anew."

You doubt me.

"My ability to perform at a certain level is paramount to the task at hand. My horse, in turn, allows me to perform at the level in question."

He fingered the cross, rubbing it hard between thumb and middle finger.

"I want my horse back," he said, but the words were lost amid something in the wind. Voices, he realized. Last pleas. Echoes of the dead owners of the bones ground to dust, settled across that stretch of emptiness like a blanket of everlasting reminders. Mothers wailing the names of their children. Fathers cursing the sky. He collected an ember in the palm of his hand with the cross and closed his fist on them. Almost immediately, a child's whispered prayer speckled his eardrums, tickled his throat. His lips parted and the words came forth so light and careful and innocent he pondered the miracle of tears, a luxury he would never have.

The kid clenched bloody crescent moons into the pad of his palm. No time for sentiments. No time for reflecting on the misery his life had become in her absence. Visions of flames brought him back to the present, if present is what it could be called. Memories of a deep and meaningful relationship with sulphur; of blackened bones; of all manner of skeletal frames impressed upon the tapestry of a long lost firescape. Fires that have raged since before the creation of man or beast, when the cosmos dripped thick with orange-skinned travelers such as he, carrying fate in their satchels, their hands, the tips of their swords.

"Archon, do you hear me?"

The boy sighed, fingered the pouches on his belt again, slipping the iron cross into a tight crevice. He produced a roll of sandworn linen, muddied and decaying, made lovely by a delicate stitchwork of crimson fauna from a far away field on a far away planet.

Far away and long ago.

He wrapped his left arm with the linen. Around and around, packing his bicep, the excess dangling at his elbow. A gift from the sorceress when she took her leave. "I'll always hear you," she'd said. "Through this, I'll always hear you, I'll always feel you." And he had graciously accepted it and packed it away with the rest of his tools to be used like a tool; to mend his heart when the ache was a distraction he hadn't the strength to endure.

Now he felt her. Now he smelled her. Sunset skin fresh and vibrant as seaspray from the hulk whales of Neptune. Her hair like tendrils of the breath of life coughed forth from the very lungs of the almighty. Now he saw her eyes, oceans of time trapped and coiling within. Now he felt her lips, plush folds between which the heat of the universe, the very spark of creation seemed to dwell. She kissed him again and again and in the bonedust swirl he moaned and writhed as if to escape the yearning. That stirring in his loins.

The lust.

The love.

But then the sulphur. The scent of it filled his lungs, permeated his core, made him whole. Memories of holding her miles above the surface of the planet on a balcony obscured by clouds man would call poison, serpent scales falling like snowflakes from a sky torn asunder, ripped through by red veiled mysteries of the elements. Worms interlaced with the canvas of a scorched stratosphere, pulsing organisms man would call maggots, and biting flies, and stinging wasps. All of these in harmony, perfect in their chaos. A circle of life in a realm where darkness is light and evil is good. Where the sorceress' black eyes swirl in a distress of thick charcoal eyeliner and midnight mascara, threatening to devour the stars, the planets, the vitality of his being.

The sulphur began to fade, absorbed completely into his coursing veins, and the visions of home diminished, leaving him at the mercy of a hideous cerulean sky. Worst of all, the sorceress was far from him again. Somewhere inside, throbbing for life, gasping for nourishment, for love, his heart withered. Determination subsided.

The kid rose to his feet, turning to regard the raging fire. It stretched by his command, fed by memories of screams, of destruction, of worlds reduced to scarflesh wrought by flame. It grew as he made his way to the rear of the cliff where a steep pathway led to countless mesas far below, each a dusty graveyard littered with faded reminders of a civilization that only needed a nudge to send it spiralling into self-destruction.

"Easy work," he said."This one was too easy."

He studied the pathway. Thumbed the Stetson back on his head. His pursuers had arrived. Six stonethrows away and advancing slowly, their shadows elongated and wavering under the might of a loathsome sun.

He knew the beasts they rode upon. He knew them well.

Head of a lion with ruby eyes seared by limitless hate. Flowing mane bleached by heat and light. Head of a man with a bushel of hair and a shock of beard cojoined with the mane; with cavernous sockets and a flat nose sliced cleanly up the middle, quivering with auburn light. The hindquarters and the front legs shimmered with an assortment of wet scales, a mosaic of earth and fire and water and jade, and the tailpiece danced -- a great serpentes viperidae -- the head switching like a pendulum to watch him, to size him up.

The snake's thin lips curled back, brackish gums from which two pairs of gleaming hollow fangs dripped with venom.

Chimaera.

The riders, he could sense, were not alive. Death seeped from their many wounds, blacklight plumes coiling about them like ghosts of the snakes reared and tensed and dripping above their heads. They were women. All twelve of them. Clad in the battle-scarred scraps of a raiment once feared by conquerors proclaimed fearless. Brown studded leather riddled with burns and bloody, jagged slits. Sabatons and greaves scuffed and scratched, and brilliant gold chestpieces molded delicately to protect their womanhood. They wore full helmets cut once up the middle with a crosswise cut for the eyes.

The warrior who brought up the rear, however, wore a lustrous steel helmet with a ridged neck guard and brass face, embossed with raised eyebrows and feminine lips frozen in mock distress. She looked up at the kid as they fixedly advanced, the light of the suns casting her mask aglow, and he heard a myriad voices in the sandswirl -- that of women chanting and dancing, and the chink and clatter of jewelry and bones amid the shiver and snap of a bonfire tamed by waves come to rest on a tranquil beach.

He fingered the pouches on his belt, palmed the iron cross and said --

"This is not the adversary."

No.

"She stands in my way. What is your command?"

Put out her light. The adversary will come.

"Septimus I've slain, and zealots. What distinction does this one possess?"

Certain rules must be followed. To find the adversary, certain beacons in this network of terrors must be extinguished.

They stood, fossilized, a deathly mounted circle around the masked boy and the coughing fire. Eleven warriors studied him, tendrils of vapor puffed from their tattered cheeks rippling with worms, their blue flaking lips. They breathed not because they needed to. They breathed because it reminded them they were once whole and proud and fighting for a cause; not there -- famished phantasms of a rock floating aimless in God-space, destined to be forgotten, then winked out of existence by the very deity who conceived of them.

The leader flicked the reigns of her demon steed, trotting to a halt not five yards from the boy, then dismounted. She stood strong and sure, chin raised, chest thrust out, blonde tresses flowing from the confines of her helmet to a thin waist and child-bearing hips that bore no spawn save hatred for all men.

He knew her fate. And when the sandstorm flit the name across his field of vision to settle between his eyes like a weightless spectre of a thought, it issued from his throat and lips with the ominousness of a man speaking the name of one whose name should never be uttered.

Antiope.

Below them, down in that scarred and festering valley, rooster tails adrift in the mid-gravity. Deathpale husks of translucent spiders bound to purify the stasis. The boy stepped backward to the edge of the summit and the circle of warriors followed, filing out as they came to the cliff to form a great horseshoe two rows thick. The dead queen with an arm outstretched summoned an extension of her hate and her rage -- the double-bladed war axe of Grecian legend now a cold reality in her calloused grip; right hand near the blade, left hand cupping the pommel with a perverse and fragile grace as if to issue the command for her own beheading. A half step forward brought an arc of light across her faceplate, false love and false holiness setting brass eye sockets and a perfect oval mouth aflame with goodness that simply couldn't be.

The kid raised his arms, hands held flatwise palms down, and he too summoned instruments of pain, of reckoning -- a fabricated pair of six-shooters, gleaming cold gunmetal destruction just shy of arm's length, with stocks of fabricated ivory and the countenance of an angry sun, also fabricated, also false; siphoned from the depths of a subconscious that held memories of harsh men dear; memories of men in boots and hats and rawhide gloves living adventures on high plains, dispatching outlaws to collect concubines with hearts of gold.

His fingers fluttered the triggers; two full spins of a dozen rounds to test his opponent. The muzzles flashed and smoked and the war axe spun in the woman's midst, shearing twelve slugs to steel shavings and slivers of fire tossed in the stormwind rushing over the summit.

Silence fell, save the cry of cyclones. Fabricated reports rebounded through the canyon. Eleven warrior women idle on beastback observed unflinchingly from the slits in their helms. In another time, with the breath of life and the grace of heaven in their hearts, they might have roared amid the clamor of the flats of their swords on the faces of their shields. They might have cried out to that twisted old hag, to Hecate, and to Black Persephone and Ares and Ephesian Artemis, the voids of mercy. They might have slit their thighs and punctured their shins to draw rivulets of blood, and smearing great handfuls of the crimson on their arms give homage to gods and goddesses of hatred and pain. But that time had passed. Glory was only a memory, faint and flitting about in empty ancient skulls. Here, now, the riders sat poised, their eyes pulsing black light in mourning souls lost to oblivion. And the enslaved creatures beneath them huffed and heaved their chests and arched their backs as the heads of men turned and craned and cracked, their eyes quick and seeking some elusive thing bound to the sky.

The boy tested the queen again, unleashing a clean double-barrel sentence of hellfire as she advanced. But the dead savage spun her axe again, and with such speed as to go unnoticed by mortal eyes. Only the dismantling of each bullet in blinding succession to dust could prove her preternatural dexterity.

The stormwinds picked up the boy's Stetson, tossed it tumbling behind him over the summit's edge. Ribbons of sand wound melodically through his hair -- rows of short serrated needles of some fireborne element not unlike obsidian. He squinted his eyes against torrents of grain. His lips pursed behind the mask. And a deafening blaze ripped out of the six-shooters like jagged flamewrought limbs, pounding the queen's centrifugal shield like the statement of a god.

His fingers, fatigueless, fluttered the triggers. He stepped back to the very crumbling edge of the summit and the queen advanced with much effort, the muscles in her legs bulging and pulsing with great veins as she leaned into the boy's river of crackling hellfire.

His eyes narrowed. And she came forward. The leather on her arms and legs stripped away in the assault, leaving only the gold chestplate and the brass faceplate and an iron buckle slapping against her womanhood. When she was within a leap's distance and the heated features of the faceplate began to swell -- the eyes and the mouth growing as if to scream -- he could smell her face cooking inside like meat in a tin, and he stepped backward off the edge, resolved that even the ruin of her eyes and ears and the last traces of her conquerer's mind would not stop her.

It seemed he fell a long time, and the sandstorm had cradled him like so many hands, keeping him buoyant and weightless, and now he looked down into the shifting swirl and saw indeed a great many long-fingered hands with too many joints, working to guide him safely through the air to the mesa below.

"I don't need your help!" he spat, and flailed his arms and legs to repel the aid, which altogether released him to the storm as he turned to look up at his pursuers. Indeed the dead woman followed, her limbs tucked in so that her form was like that of a gleaming red arrowhead, and when he turned again to regard his rapid descent, the mid-gravity was upon him suddenly -- six feet of an absence of air, of space, swallowing him shoulder-deep as surely as the sands that lay below. Immediately his arms thrust out of this cosmic void that rippled and boomed like distant thunder, the rawhide gloves gripping what little substance he could find near the surface, and he pulled himself up and pushed off into a dead sprint toward dunes in the distance where strange crumbling towers stood, fractured and dilapidated, engorged with sand.

It was time to run.

Dark energies rolled in great arcs toward him, and he knew the dead queen had touched down. The flutter of her feet as she took after him. The frenzied avian cry of the creatures that escorted her dead Amazon sisters. Thunder all around, swelled against his shoulders like the taloned grip of an oversized bird, and should his hunters by some preternatural grace maneuver the storm better than he, that grip would heft him upward and backward into a flurry of dust and screeches, blood and tattered flesh -- his own flesh -- as ten million years of training amounted in an instant to nothing. He couldn't look back, couldn't slow down. His legs and arms and eyes burned, and when a second wind bloomed balm-like from the sulphur inside him, his senses were renewed, and he pushed ahead harder, faster, bounding through the air now like a ghost weighed down only by the mere will to gain traction for each successive push.

Ahead, a tumbling speck of rich black came into view, and soon he was upon the thing now full-sized, snatched it up and flicked his wrist so that the Stetson set proper on his head. The return of this sentimental effect brought some new hope into his mind; some small bright thing that bloomed there for an instant in an otherwise headlong terrorscape of looming failure.

His chin raised. His legs kept the beat. And a sea of cattle was upon him, scores of their skeletons floating in all manner of death, their triangular empty socket faces tugging at his soul. Hurdling them, stretched out like some great and terrible mantis cloaked in molten swill, he let his thoughts drift to the sorceress at the other end of this accursed landscape, a rhythm unto herself, slung through the air by will, by spell. He saw her back to him, the long trail of her raven tresses and the red embroidered scarf of their kind tied securely around her face, slicing through the stormwind like a bleeding snake. It had been six hours. She may take a breath soon. By grace of the dark perhaps they would take their breaths together. Perhaps by grace of the dark they would connect in such a way that one or the other could cleave the space that separated them, fold it upon itself, step through the center of the halves conjoining to be together once and for all.

The mesa's edge fast approached. Ahead the mid-gravity broke off and fell away some three hundred phantom strides into dark knows where. The boy looked back to witness his hunters' approach, a writhing single file procession -- each Amazon hunched atop a mythical beast pulsing with muscles and veins, their eyes burning, their teeth gnashing -- where at the fore, like the head of some great spear alive with the very fibers of creation, Antiope charged toward him like a starving wolf absolving caution to the wind, the faceplate agape with cavernous eyes and a twisted, screaming mouth bellowing his name. At this, his heart sunk. Like a pendulum released from its hinge, tumbling into a cold place.

These things should not know his name.

He turned again, and pushing off the edge of the mesa, arced into a dive, one hand on the Stetson, the other at his side. The storm obscured what lay below, and so he closed his eyes and commit to prayer, requests to the dark, the nothing from which all things emerge whole and perfect. The dark into which all things dissolve. In his mind's eye he saw the ground coming up around him, and he opened his eyes and turned over once to set down on his feet, crouched like a gladiator come down from a pedestal in the sky, deployed by the stroke of a dark god's hand. The mid-gravity erupted under him, the gray crust of the planet torn through by spidercracks around the outline of the soles of his boots, and the miniscule organisms that toiled there in the dead soil and bonedust gibbered as they fled from his midst, their tasks interrupted. He strode ahead some forty yards to allow for his pursuers' arrival, grasped the slack of the long red scarf and pulled it taut. He thumbed the stetson back -- the better to see the women descend -- and watched the dead things file out like so many birds adrift on the wind, no effort spent that was not intentional, no muscle moved without purpose. They touched down, already in the horseshoe formation again with nary a sound, and the queen set there on the mid-gravity with all her weight on one foot, undaunted by it, one hip hiked up over the other like a mother expecting a report of what naughtiness her bad boy had newly commit.

The kid listened to muffled screams in the sandswirl, absorbing distant memories aching to be seen and felt. He gathered himself in the here and now to expand, merging with the screams, coalescing with the imprints of the souls bound to that cold, dusty rock; that cosmic failed endeavor. No attack would come as a surprise, no matter how swift.

The queen raised her chin.

A voice was heard. Disembodied as the voice of gods you've heard all your life. The voice you hadn't known was there until your own god grew tired of your complacency and sloth, resolving with a great sigh to cut off all lines of communication. It was everywhere, this voice, and all at once.

"Mere," it said.

Euphonious ribbons of sand flit in their midst. The hollows of the dead woman's brass eyes boiled like suns. The boy's eyes moved in their deep red sockets, sizing up a prison etched into the storm now so fierce the very air seemed to recede from its presence. This prison, brittle layer upon layer, lay headless in the dune, its ribs like holy white lancers slicing through a gods-wrought chaos. It was the fraction of a skeleton of a creature so large, the cattle strewn upon the path to its resting place had undoubtedly served as its food.

He would make a stand here.

The dead woman laughed, and what a chill that vileness set adrift. He looked to the oval mouth as if it would move, incited by his fear alone; fear not of death or damnation in an eternity of light, but of separation from the one he loved with no hope for their rejoining. That was hell. And this unbearable thought was deepened by the queen's howl, his very bones gone cold in a body that through absolution had known limitation decreed only by the need to rest. Love was a curse to travelers such as he. And there was no hope for him. Love had run him through like so many barbed and twisted spears, leaving him to fumble about, susceptible to mistakes.

Mistakes were not permissable in his line of work.

That brittle empty laughter no sooner broke apart into distant echoes before the kid floated up to settle upon the mid-gravity, resigned to this standoff. The six-shooters, each merely a humming gray outline, an elaborate blueprint against the shifting fabric of this stormwrought reality now, waited at his hips as he flexed his fingers. He looked around at the horseshoe formation of warriors, much more than their former selves could have ever dreamed to be, even through decades of the harshest training in the most wicked of wilds. They were better -- loyalty without traces of discretion or will, commands fulfilled through simple execution without the burden of questioning. Soulless. Their eyes throbbed with a black light tugging at his core. Had he no poise in this moment, those windows to the vacancies where passionate souls once dwelled, would have plucked his own soul and his own mind from the depths of his being to be devoured. These things gorged on life, the one thing they would never have. It called to them with an aroma unlike any primal urge or nourishment they had ever known, drifting in the omnipresence of impulses of wind.

Here, the kid was food.

He called out, over the storm, "Sisters of the horse, daughters of war, brave acolytes of the warrior queen, hear me."

Those fiendish heavies upon which the warriors sat stonestill became silent save for an abysmal growl stretching metaphysically between them like chain links, their chests barely moving, snaketails coiled heavy on the restless desert floor. The heads of men looked about, still puzzled, still seeking that elusive avian despite the storm that raged so fiercely at times a two-dimensional sheet of sand was all it seemed to be.

"We share the burden of an enemy," said the kid. "The adversary who keeps this world in transit has shackled you to this reality; a reality that is no longer part of the great chronology. If you look around you with new eyes, you will see proof of my claims. These are not the outskirts of the regions of Amazonia. This is a wasteland, a farrago of epochs past."

The kid raised a hand predictably, pointing behind the dead women.

"There," he said. "There you will see the ruins of places you called home. Ephesus and Paphos have been fused. The Palus Maeotis and the Maeotian Lake lie synthesized in poisonous decay. The crumbling Temple of Artemis is now the abode of the souls of your sisters, committed to wandering about in shame of defeat to please the adversary of whom I speak."

He paused, watched as the women's black-lit cavernous eyes throbbed cold. The one he would know later to be Tecmessa revealed a somewhat separate and aware sense of being. And though she never spoke, the savage slowly craned her broad neck from side to side, the report of her popping vertebrae issued keenly through the storm.

The kid stepped back as if to retreat from the sands swirling around him, and sized up his opponent all over again.Indeed, the queen had tripled in size, and the heavy axe she held limp in one hand at her side was somehow more fiendish, with a longer, sweeping bladecurve undoubtedly folded upon itself thousands of times by a demon giant of a smith in some volcanic place, for the edge was neither black nor red, but a flickering arrangement of both; a solid, profuse river of magma ignited afresh with every heaving breath its wielder took.

"Queen Antiope," the kid called out, "I know your plight. Even as we stand before one another, my employer, who seeks to give rise again to Amazonia, informs me of what you suffered. I know your story. I know the truth, your majesty."

Behind the swollen faceplate, a flat, deep voice replied, barely discernable from the low growl stretched out between the Amazons' mounts.

"Truth," she said -- no feeling, no emotion in that voice. Death was that language. The finality of fleshrot and wriggling worms clung to her every word. "There is no truth. There is only my pain."

"Your majesty, queen without fear, slayer of men -- it need not be this way. You can conquer your own pain and suffering to deliver your sisters unto greatness once and for all. Join me. Strike your captor down."

There was a deliberate rattling of bones then, and the kid looked to the mindful one who had raised a fist to the sky, producing a wreath of blackened, gore-slicked skulls. She shook the death-ring with wild conviction, then flung it skipping over the mid-gravity to rest under the kid's boot heel, a macabre adornment of familiar anatomy.

"We have found greatness," said the queen, "in the eradication of your kind."

The kid gazed at the sweeping curves of the eye sockets of his comrades, his people. He studied the angular noses and chins and cheekbones, the ruined mouthfuls of brittle teeth and the bedazzling obsidian tresses of space-time.

He looked up at the queen.

Though he had given no indication of it, she felt his mounting rage just the same; a sudden flux of white-hot hatred converged into a center of being, a solitary pinpoint of meteoric intent. And when that deranged cackle came forth once again upon the stormwind like a volley of leaden fire, the sunset kid was already throwing some manner of weapon, clipping the fiendish shrieking laughter short with a wet metallic --

-- thunk.

The dead queen regarded her breastplate and neck, the shivering gray outline of a black and silver hatchet now fully realized, splitting a viscous gush into twin hissing jetstreams of black blood.

She howled.

Slowly, foot over foot, the kid stepped back into the canopy of the beast's skull, a long-limbed shade of orange flesh and black glass into the darkness of a splintery maw. And within that wide and vitreous grin, a pair of black eyes flushed amber, blazing contempt for the foe upon which they so fixedly gazed.

Antiope took to the air, arms outstretched as if to gather the lift of that treacherous storm, but it was a demonic wind in league with that titan, an unholy current guiding her undaunted to the braincase upon which she crashed knees first, kicking through the brittle jaws and fangs with polished brass sabbatons to collide fist-to-fist with the sunset kid. Their fingers clasped, her giantess digits in titan gauntlets clutching his slender hands in the rawhide gloves.And now, arched over the boy like a gold crescent moon, she bent forward and pushed down into his palms with all her weight, a massive leaning tower of hateful efficacy. The kid pushed up enough to hold her, to keep that grunting faceplate dripping sweat and burning blood inches from his own face, the Stetson protecting radiant eyes and a gleaming white grimace.

"I know," said the kid through his teeth. "I know the pain of deception cultivates inside you like a sickness…"

"YOU KNOW NOTHING!"

"I know the legends are lies! I know the claims of philosophers and historians are cruel fabrications intent on burying all proof of the greatness of your people!"

"YOU KNOW NOT MY PAIN! NOT WHAT I HAVE SUFFERED!"

"I know! I know Theseus took you to Athens against your will! I know he held you captive and sought to break your fierce Amazon spirit that could not be broken and I know that all of this was part of an insidious plot -- "

"BE SILENT!"

" -- to weaken and in time reduce your empire to the dust in which we now stand! You and your sisters, your way of life, were a threat to them, Antiope, a threat! Evil does not sleep! Evil of that perilous ilk expands and it spreads to all corners of the earth and it lays waste to everything in its path!"

"BE SILENT!"

"I am not your enemy!"

The queen pushed and her arms rippled with unholy strength and the kid was given over to that cruel, unseen quicksand, submerged to his hips with the low thunderous boom reverberating in his legs and ankles, keeping him anchored like a ship resigned to the grave of an ocean floor.

"DIE!"

And that undead done-wrong grunted and slobbered approvingly like some beast shackled to a realm where depravity is revered and honor is reviled.

There was an ominous sound then, a faint clamor of earth, stones perhaps, and soon it grew louder, and louder until the cacophony was not unlike the shifting and colliding of great boulders. And when the kid looked up through the periodic lapses of sheets of sand, he saw the Amazon warriors heaving their chests synchronously. He knew then that the sound was their chanting, for they were given over to lust for his suffering, his blood. They wanted to see it flow, and amid this beleauguered commotion there came the crack of thunder, that brutish brass gauntlet, that shining fist come down across his face.

The kid swallowed, blinked rapidly, the paired glow of his eyes diminished in shock, echoes of pain so rarely occurring in a millenia had now bloomed bright as suns in each corner of his skull.

Again the fist came down. And again, thunder ripping through the storm as clearly as the report of a mountain cut in two. The sound was louder, heavier with each blow, and now she added the other fist to her onslaught, this one in a silver gauntlet, the two alternating efficiently and without pause or hitch, like a pair of well-oiled pistons stocked with fuel to last until the end of time. DIE, she screamed, and DIE and DIE and DIE until it seemed the sky itself would be gashed open by the force laid into that poor kid's bruised and bleeding visage.

But rage blinds the enraged, and weaker still was she, the queen of Amazons, for the sunset kid only had to wait for the right time to catch the black handle of the silver hatchet caught in her neck. He paused for a moment to apply the totality of a crushing grip, then wrenched the serrated blade free, sweeping around in a bloody arc with the woman's sopping mortal gore trailing a blackish crescent around him. The giantess reeled, hands clapped over the exposed trachea that bucked and quivered as she wailed. Black blood gushed freely out of the sucking wound, taken up fitfully in the wind to paint her body entire. The kid, hunched over with the dripping hatchet held out to one side, struggling to rear back, ready for another charge.

"Don't end your saga this way," he cried.

But when that undead royal looked down at the disgrace her body had become -- the quivering arms and legs honed to perfection, the intricate enchanted armor passed down from her sister that had failed her yet again -- all of it festooned in her own dead blood and blighted guts, she charged through the storm with the battle-axe hefted high and a scream heaved unfettered from her throat, descending upon her enemy to receive the full impact of searing double hellfire from those twin gunmetal apparitions upon her faceplate.

The kid sidestepped that black carcass as it crashed down, a thickening tendril of smoke curled up from the flaming head of molten brass, fed scattered to the storm. He turned to the horseshoe formation, pointing with one of the ghost pistols to the sky.

"Leave your bodies behind," he called out. "Leave them to this rock. You need only walk away from this to find your way into the arms of your deceased loved ones once again, with new bodies and freedom from sickness, age, and death. I will see to your queen's burial. This I swear upon the code that binds my kind to the fate of worlds."

The warriors came forward upon their demon steeds with Tecmessa at the fore, but the kid fired off a round from his pistol into the sky that bore thunder in its wake. At this, they stepped back.

"You must go now," he said.

There was a change in the air. The stormwinds were collecting there amid the skeleton, amassing a great cylinder, an oscillating tunnel that reached up into the sky, and now there was lightning, pulsing purple streams of it skipping out of the clouds to leave burning glass craters scattered across the desert plains. An outline appeared behind the Amazons not unlike the shape of a great bejeweled arch, and beyond its frame, the pirouette of galaxies abound.

"Go," said the kid, and as the storm spluttered and screamed, tearing now at their flesh, the daughters of Ares turned and made their way at a steady canter to the immense shadow of the gate that so warily took form.

The End

Bio: Copper Sloane Levy was born in Canada but grew up in the Midwest and Southern United States. He attends the University of Toronto, majoring in English and Religious Studies. His work most recently appeared in Fiddleblack's journal issue number eight, an homage to H.P. Lovecraft.

E-mail: Copper Sloane Levy

Website: 29 - AN ATOMIC NUMBER. CODE FOR A NAME

Twitter: coppersloane

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