Er?
I don't know. Struck by sudden inspiration!
Break the Sky
Prologue
The Devil Doctor
In Which we Meet some of the Principle Players of this Drama; we say goodbye and goodnight; a Treatise on Morality.
In so many ways, old age was like temptation. It never went away, no matter how much you might wish; it just went on, and on, and on.
Dr. Emmanuel Josephus felt the temptation in his heart every day. His feeble, aging heart. Tired, arrhythmic, temperamental. His sight grew a little dimmer every day, his joints bigged and stiffer and twisted inward. The hands with which he'd accomplished such wonders, such miracles in the long and seemingly endless decades of his youth were crabbed and swollen and all but useless, now.
It would be easy, so pathetically easy, to fix it all. To be young again, to feel new life coursing through his ancient hardened veins.
While he taught English Literature, an unpopular professor at a third-rate school, he could sometimes barely contain his fury at the young men, with their strong backs and their unclouded eyes and their damnable ignorance.
I could take it from you, he thought as he gazed at a strapping young man in the front row of the class. Thick hair, perfect skin, muscles clear-cut under his t-shirt. Handsome, smiling. A laughing baboon, a waste of life's grace. I could drain you dry of life and love and be young again, damn you.
Temptation.
He wrapped up his lecture fifteen minutes early; he just didn't have the heart or the patience for it today. He smiled vaguely as some students wished him a pleasant weekend. As though he wasn't completely aware of their hypocrisy. As though he couldn't smell their insincerity like musk.
Thou shalt not kill.
Oh, and he had killed. So often and so many he wondered if there was any point, any real point in denying what his education and experience had granted him...to refuse to use the power he'd wrested from books long forgotten, from people long mouldering in their unmarked graves.
But no. Rationalizations were not for him. He would find grace. He would, somehow, redeem the life he had lived. The masters he had served.
If only he had more time...
He walked stiffly, leaning on a cane, towards his office. The young man from the front row was standing in front of it. He had curly brown hair and an ingenuos smile. Another boy, taller and blond and wearing a thoroughly ridiculous coat, was standing with his back to them both, talking loudly into a cellphone about unspeakable things.
“Professor Smith?”
Josephus paid the voice no mind, and then remembered the whole pseudonym thing. This person, this gnat, was talking to him.
“Hello sir, I'm Jericho Loew,” the young man said with a smile and an extended hand, which Josephus didn't take “I was wondering if I could bother you for-”
“I have lab after my tuesday lecture,” Josephus responded, slipping into the persona of a crabby old man effortlessly. Well, he was a crabby old man.
“I know, and I'm really sorry, but see, my friend and I wanted to make sure-”
“Yes yes, fine, please come in, the both of you” Josephus replied irritably, just to cut the monologue short. He opened the door to his office, not looking directly at the boy, Jericho.
I could make you mine, he thought to himself mine to own and fuck and devour, at my leisure, beautiful boy.
No. Goddamnit, no.
“Now, what did you need-”
“I'm really sorry, Dr Josephus,” said another voice, with a drawl so thick it bordered on a speech impediment. The blond boy from the hallway slid through the door and shut it with a definitive motion “but that was a bit of a naughty fib.”
“Nephil bastard!” Josephus exclaimed in a hoarse voice, backing away with a speed he didn't know was in him.
It was a Nephilim, all right. It was so painfully obvious to Dr. Josephus he wondered how this man walked down the street without attracting the wrong kind of attention. He was vividly, poisonously beautiful, in a way humans simply...weren't. If you didn't notice the deadness of his brilliantine eyes. If you didn't see the promise of immaculate cruelty in his rich, slow smile. If the steady grace of his movements didn't remind one of a snake.
“Get out,” He said, in a fury. His wards, what about his wards-
“Now that's a bit of a mixed message,” the nephilim said smoothly “after all, you did invite me in, and everything.”
Damn it.
Jericho was smiling apologetically “I'm sorry, sir, but my friend felt-”
“Your 'friend',” Josephus spat with a venomous glare “is a goddamned monster. Or are you blind to what owns you?”
“He doesn't own me,” Jericho said, shaking his head with a smile.
“Renting is so much more practical in the current economic climate,” the nephilim noted.
“Shut up, Ashlan,” Jericho replied.
“He is a son of calamity,” Josephus replied acidly. He knew this creature. He'd met him before, with another face “an abomination. If you serve him willingly, you are worse than damned.”
“You'd know all about that, wouldn't you, Josephus? Or may I call you Emmanuel?” the nephilim said with a smirk, as he strode over to Josephus and gave him a mocking caress “you're looking a little seedy, old man. Health problems?”
“Do not address me, creature,” Josephus replied, shuddering under his touch. Feeling an unfamiliar stab of desire that the revulsion didn't quite suppress. The nephilim's hand was hot, almost unbearably hot, and Josephus had to fight the urge to lean into his touch. That was their power, after all. To lure, to subvert and seduce and destroy.
“Poor bastard,” Ashlan noted, his hands moving cupping Josephus's face. “I've come for information. Give it to me, and I'll leave.”
“I have none to give you. That is no longer my world.”
“That's...disappointing,” Ashlan said clinically, his hands moving down to the doctor's collarbone. It was like being in the maw of some vast machine “I suppose bribery is out of the question.”
“You have nothing to offer anyone, beast.”
The nephilim's green eyes went dark and cold, like outer space. His hands tightened, just the littlest bit. Josephus gasped from the pain.
“Does it have to be threats after all, old man?” he whispered in a voice that had wild sounds in it. The wind blowing over an empty plain, ravens in the woods. “do you want to meet what's waiting for you, face to face?”
“Ashlan.”
Jericho's voice was so quietly furious and so completely out of place that it broke the spell of Ashlan's voice and eyes and touch. Josephus shouldered out of his grip as Ashlan turned, incredulous. Jericho's jaw was clenched.
“You promised.”
Josephus wanted to laugh out loud. A human being, commanding a nephilim? Especially one of Ashlan's power? Now he'd truly seen everything there was to see.
“Jericho...” Ashlan said with a note of pleading in his voice.
“No, damn it,” Jericho replied “I said I'd help you, remember?”
Ashlan and Jericho stared at each other for a long moment. Jericho's expression was adamant. Ashlan sighed, sat down on the couch, and buried his face in his hands.
“There are nuances I'm missing here,” Josephus said to no-one in particular.
“Buddy,” Ashlan said, smiling up from the couch “You have no fucking idea. What am I supposed to do now?” he asked, directing the question at Jericho.
“Now you ask him. Politely,” Jericho said with exaggerated patience.
“But what if he says no?”
“Then he says no. That's his right,” Jericho replied “no coercion, no threats, no funky sex voice. Alright?”
Ashlan looked completely bewildered, but he stood and brushed himself off, and looked Josephus straight in the eyes.
“I need your help.”
It hung in the air. Dr. Josephus, who had a pretty broad world view as befits a centuries-old magician, felt like nothing quite made sense anymore.
“I'm trying to do something...good,” Ashlan said, puckering his lips as though he were sucking on a lemon and a collection of copper wires, all at once “and I...could really use your help. Sir,” He added as an afterthought, looking to Jericho with an expression of naked pleading. Jericho nodded encouragingly.
“What good can you possibly do?” Josephus asked, sitting down in his chair. In all his years of dealing with the damned creatures...
“Hey, listen you dried up old turd-” he replied heatedly. Jericho placed a restraining hand on his arm.
“You mistake me,” Josephus gestured impatiently “I wasn't speaking rhetorically. You are not a human, with choices. You were bred to destroy. For a thousand generations. You're living entropy. What good can you do the world of men?”
“I plan on killing a whole lot of people,” Ashlan replied, eyes glinting “I...just plan on...maybe trying to kill the right people. I want to topple the Underneath,” he said with finality.
“You want to wage war against the Underneath?” Josephus mused “interesting. Unfortunately, it would seem that somebody has beaten you to the punch.”
“I beg your pardon?” Ashlan blinked, his expression clearly expressing his outrage that someone would slaughter those he'd already targeted.
Well tough, Son of Calamity. Life's not fair.
“There's been some kind of ruckus. People in high places turning up dead,” he narrowed his eyes “your name was mentioned, in fact?”
“I, Ashlan?” He asked with an expression of innocent outrage.
“No, your real name, nephilim,” Josephus replied with a roll of his eyes.
“Raykael,” Jericho murmured quietly to himself, his expression drawn inward.
“No, I haven't been involved, yet...” Ashlan mused “that's...bad news. I want names and addresses. Dossiers. Whatever information you might have. I am prepared to pay. I want to know who's dead and who I need to make dead. I want your books and your knowledge. I want your weapons.”
“And if I told you to go to hell, and take your blood-cursed money with you?”
Jericho shot Ashlan a sharp glance; Ashlan gritted his teeth and recited, as if by rote: “I will respect your decision and not break both your brittle old-man legs.”
Josephus smiled to himself “come back tomorrow, then. I'll have to check the sources that will still talk to me.”
“Absolutely,” Ashlan said, standing “A word to the wise, however.”
Aha. Back on firmer ground.
“If you flee, or betray me, or try to work your smelly magicks on me, old man,” Ashlan hissed quietly, while the air around him seemed to waver like a heat-mirage “I will kill you, and send you to face the damnation you've earned. If you kill yourself to escape me, I'll suck your spirit back and make whatever torments you've experienced seem like goddamned schoolyard contretemps, got it?” without turning, he said “Shut up, Jericho,” and stalked out of the office. Jericho followed, after shrugging philosophically at Josephus and shaking his head.
Josephus hadn't felt this young in years. Or...something. He felt something he'd thought long dead, a torrent of deadly calm. Conspiracy had been his weapon, in the old days, playing between the great powers.
If Ashlan wanted a showdown with the God-Touched, then, by all means, Josephus would oblige him. Perhaps...if he manipulated them with a deft and precise touch, perhaps he could send them both to destruction.
That would count for something, surely. If he rid the world of those walking blights, that monstrous half-angel and those two heartless killers.
How many lives would he save, by consequence of this action?
Maybe enough. Maybe enough to be forgiven. Maybe enough to wash his hands clean of his abominable sins.
Every single one of his wards, from the wards of blood and salt to the ones of light and fire and fear and pain, snapped at once.
She was standing in his office. He'd heard nothing from the window, nothing from the door. His wards had simply failed, breaking when they touched her. Like all magicks did.
She was perky and pretty and incongruous, in her tight sweater and carrying a lacrosse bag, her hair bleach-blond and her skin glowing with a golden summer tan. She looked like a sorority girl with her wide, ingenuous blue eyes.
Stephanie, of the God-Touched.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said truthfully “I have something of import to tell you.”
She smiled warmly. “No doubt.”
He had exactly that much warning before she took two small steps and drove a knife into his throat.
There was no pain. How odd. He could heal this, of course...if he could just remember the words.
“You're so absolutely transparent, you know that? You were hoping you could manipulate events like you used to. Clear the playing field of the big players. You're an idiot, Josephus,” she said softly as he toppled to the floor like a rag doll. She leaned down and planted a soft kiss on his forehead.
He couldn't remember the words.
“My brother and I knew you'd interfere. All these years on the sidelines, and the first thing you do is attempt a triple cross. Bold. Stupid. Your hallmarks, really. We've been watching and waiting, fool. Or did you think we'd forgotten?”
He shuddered as she drove the thin-bladed knife into his heart; and twisted it, for good measure.
“Good night, old man.”
Yes...good night. It was so black, the thing closing over him like the wings of an enormous bird. So black and...comforting.
If he'd known all that was waiting for him was oblivion, why, he'd have died years ago.
So much was about to happen, he thought a little wistfully, as he faded into a nothingness he hadn't earned.
Shame to miss it.
<><><>
“Ashlan!”
“Christ, Jericho,” Ashlan seethed, eyes clenched shut “what have I done wrong now?”
“I thought I said no threats. I thought we were going to do this the right way. Browbeating a helpless old man...”
Ashlan turned, his face filled with helpless fury “ha! If you had any idea who what man is, what he's done...”
“That doesn't matter!”
“You know,” Ashlan said reflectively “I really don't get you. You, or your morality. That man is a monster.”
“So are you.”
There was a pause, and Ashlan seemed to collapse a little into himself.
“I know. But...I'm trying?”
“First rule of being a good person, Ashlan,” Jericho said. Ashlan collapsed on a nearby bench, and buried his face in his hands. Jericho sat down next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder “you can't control what other people do. You can only control what you do.”
“Technically I can make other people do things,” Ashlan observed “I merely point this out.”
“You're not doing that anymore either, damn it.”
“You're sucking all the fun out of my life, Jericho,” Ashlan snapped “is that morality too?”
“Not necessarily. But it's fun!” Jericho replied brightly, shooting Ashlan a thumbs-up.
“Cockblocker.”
“That's me. You hungry?”
“You paying?”
“I'm not a billionaire, Ashlan.”
“That's why the gesture would mean so much more coming from you, Jericho.”
“Gaaaaah, you're a fuckwit.”
They got up and walked down the street of the sunny little college town.
“He wanted to fuck you, you know. The old man. He thought you were super fine,” Ashlan said with barely suppressed glee, glancing sidelong to catch Jericho's reaction.
“Shut up, Ashlan.”
“You're like, evil shriveled bastard necromancer bait.”
“Hooray for me.”
“Jer?”
“Yeah, man?”
“I'm...doing my best. You know that, right?”
“Yeah. I do. You know I'm going to help you, however I can, whatever it takes, right?”
Ashlan smiled; it wasn't his deadly smile, but a smaller, crooked one. The one that almost made him look like a person, if you squinted.
"Yeah. I do."
READ OR DON'T!
Break the Sky
Prologue
The Devil Doctor
In Which we Meet some of the Principle Players of this Drama; we say goodbye and goodnight; a Treatise on Morality.
In so many ways, old age was like temptation. It never went away, no matter how much you might wish; it just went on, and on, and on.
Dr. Emmanuel Josephus felt the temptation in his heart every day. His feeble, aging heart. Tired, arrhythmic, temperamental. His sight grew a little dimmer every day, his joints bigged and stiffer and twisted inward. The hands with which he'd accomplished such wonders, such miracles in the long and seemingly endless decades of his youth were crabbed and swollen and all but useless, now.
It would be easy, so pathetically easy, to fix it all. To be young again, to feel new life coursing through his ancient hardened veins.
While he taught English Literature, an unpopular professor at a third-rate school, he could sometimes barely contain his fury at the young men, with their strong backs and their unclouded eyes and their damnable ignorance.
I could take it from you, he thought as he gazed at a strapping young man in the front row of the class. Thick hair, perfect skin, muscles clear-cut under his t-shirt. Handsome, smiling. A laughing baboon, a waste of life's grace. I could drain you dry of life and love and be young again, damn you.
Temptation.
He wrapped up his lecture fifteen minutes early; he just didn't have the heart or the patience for it today. He smiled vaguely as some students wished him a pleasant weekend. As though he wasn't completely aware of their hypocrisy. As though he couldn't smell their insincerity like musk.
Thou shalt not kill.
Oh, and he had killed. So often and so many he wondered if there was any point, any real point in denying what his education and experience had granted him...to refuse to use the power he'd wrested from books long forgotten, from people long mouldering in their unmarked graves.
But no. Rationalizations were not for him. He would find grace. He would, somehow, redeem the life he had lived. The masters he had served.
If only he had more time...
He walked stiffly, leaning on a cane, towards his office. The young man from the front row was standing in front of it. He had curly brown hair and an ingenuos smile. Another boy, taller and blond and wearing a thoroughly ridiculous coat, was standing with his back to them both, talking loudly into a cellphone about unspeakable things.
“Professor Smith?”
Josephus paid the voice no mind, and then remembered the whole pseudonym thing. This person, this gnat, was talking to him.
“Hello sir, I'm Jericho Loew,” the young man said with a smile and an extended hand, which Josephus didn't take “I was wondering if I could bother you for-”
“I have lab after my tuesday lecture,” Josephus responded, slipping into the persona of a crabby old man effortlessly. Well, he was a crabby old man.
“I know, and I'm really sorry, but see, my friend and I wanted to make sure-”
“Yes yes, fine, please come in, the both of you” Josephus replied irritably, just to cut the monologue short. He opened the door to his office, not looking directly at the boy, Jericho.
I could make you mine, he thought to himself mine to own and fuck and devour, at my leisure, beautiful boy.
No. Goddamnit, no.
“Now, what did you need-”
“I'm really sorry, Dr Josephus,” said another voice, with a drawl so thick it bordered on a speech impediment. The blond boy from the hallway slid through the door and shut it with a definitive motion “but that was a bit of a naughty fib.”
“Nephil bastard!” Josephus exclaimed in a hoarse voice, backing away with a speed he didn't know was in him.
It was a Nephilim, all right. It was so painfully obvious to Dr. Josephus he wondered how this man walked down the street without attracting the wrong kind of attention. He was vividly, poisonously beautiful, in a way humans simply...weren't. If you didn't notice the deadness of his brilliantine eyes. If you didn't see the promise of immaculate cruelty in his rich, slow smile. If the steady grace of his movements didn't remind one of a snake.
“Get out,” He said, in a fury. His wards, what about his wards-
“Now that's a bit of a mixed message,” the nephilim said smoothly “after all, you did invite me in, and everything.”
Damn it.
Jericho was smiling apologetically “I'm sorry, sir, but my friend felt-”
“Your 'friend',” Josephus spat with a venomous glare “is a goddamned monster. Or are you blind to what owns you?”
“He doesn't own me,” Jericho said, shaking his head with a smile.
“Renting is so much more practical in the current economic climate,” the nephilim noted.
“Shut up, Ashlan,” Jericho replied.
“He is a son of calamity,” Josephus replied acidly. He knew this creature. He'd met him before, with another face “an abomination. If you serve him willingly, you are worse than damned.”
“You'd know all about that, wouldn't you, Josephus? Or may I call you Emmanuel?” the nephilim said with a smirk, as he strode over to Josephus and gave him a mocking caress “you're looking a little seedy, old man. Health problems?”
“Do not address me, creature,” Josephus replied, shuddering under his touch. Feeling an unfamiliar stab of desire that the revulsion didn't quite suppress. The nephilim's hand was hot, almost unbearably hot, and Josephus had to fight the urge to lean into his touch. That was their power, after all. To lure, to subvert and seduce and destroy.
“Poor bastard,” Ashlan noted, his hands moving cupping Josephus's face. “I've come for information. Give it to me, and I'll leave.”
“I have none to give you. That is no longer my world.”
“That's...disappointing,” Ashlan said clinically, his hands moving down to the doctor's collarbone. It was like being in the maw of some vast machine “I suppose bribery is out of the question.”
“You have nothing to offer anyone, beast.”
The nephilim's green eyes went dark and cold, like outer space. His hands tightened, just the littlest bit. Josephus gasped from the pain.
“Does it have to be threats after all, old man?” he whispered in a voice that had wild sounds in it. The wind blowing over an empty plain, ravens in the woods. “do you want to meet what's waiting for you, face to face?”
“Ashlan.”
Jericho's voice was so quietly furious and so completely out of place that it broke the spell of Ashlan's voice and eyes and touch. Josephus shouldered out of his grip as Ashlan turned, incredulous. Jericho's jaw was clenched.
“You promised.”
Josephus wanted to laugh out loud. A human being, commanding a nephilim? Especially one of Ashlan's power? Now he'd truly seen everything there was to see.
“Jericho...” Ashlan said with a note of pleading in his voice.
“No, damn it,” Jericho replied “I said I'd help you, remember?”
Ashlan and Jericho stared at each other for a long moment. Jericho's expression was adamant. Ashlan sighed, sat down on the couch, and buried his face in his hands.
“There are nuances I'm missing here,” Josephus said to no-one in particular.
“Buddy,” Ashlan said, smiling up from the couch “You have no fucking idea. What am I supposed to do now?” he asked, directing the question at Jericho.
“Now you ask him. Politely,” Jericho said with exaggerated patience.
“But what if he says no?”
“Then he says no. That's his right,” Jericho replied “no coercion, no threats, no funky sex voice. Alright?”
Ashlan looked completely bewildered, but he stood and brushed himself off, and looked Josephus straight in the eyes.
“I need your help.”
It hung in the air. Dr. Josephus, who had a pretty broad world view as befits a centuries-old magician, felt like nothing quite made sense anymore.
“I'm trying to do something...good,” Ashlan said, puckering his lips as though he were sucking on a lemon and a collection of copper wires, all at once “and I...could really use your help. Sir,” He added as an afterthought, looking to Jericho with an expression of naked pleading. Jericho nodded encouragingly.
“What good can you possibly do?” Josephus asked, sitting down in his chair. In all his years of dealing with the damned creatures...
“Hey, listen you dried up old turd-” he replied heatedly. Jericho placed a restraining hand on his arm.
“You mistake me,” Josephus gestured impatiently “I wasn't speaking rhetorically. You are not a human, with choices. You were bred to destroy. For a thousand generations. You're living entropy. What good can you do the world of men?”
“I plan on killing a whole lot of people,” Ashlan replied, eyes glinting “I...just plan on...maybe trying to kill the right people. I want to topple the Underneath,” he said with finality.
“You want to wage war against the Underneath?” Josephus mused “interesting. Unfortunately, it would seem that somebody has beaten you to the punch.”
“I beg your pardon?” Ashlan blinked, his expression clearly expressing his outrage that someone would slaughter those he'd already targeted.
Well tough, Son of Calamity. Life's not fair.
“There's been some kind of ruckus. People in high places turning up dead,” he narrowed his eyes “your name was mentioned, in fact?”
“I, Ashlan?” He asked with an expression of innocent outrage.
“No, your real name, nephilim,” Josephus replied with a roll of his eyes.
“Raykael,” Jericho murmured quietly to himself, his expression drawn inward.
“No, I haven't been involved, yet...” Ashlan mused “that's...bad news. I want names and addresses. Dossiers. Whatever information you might have. I am prepared to pay. I want to know who's dead and who I need to make dead. I want your books and your knowledge. I want your weapons.”
“And if I told you to go to hell, and take your blood-cursed money with you?”
Jericho shot Ashlan a sharp glance; Ashlan gritted his teeth and recited, as if by rote: “I will respect your decision and not break both your brittle old-man legs.”
Josephus smiled to himself “come back tomorrow, then. I'll have to check the sources that will still talk to me.”
“Absolutely,” Ashlan said, standing “A word to the wise, however.”
Aha. Back on firmer ground.
“If you flee, or betray me, or try to work your smelly magicks on me, old man,” Ashlan hissed quietly, while the air around him seemed to waver like a heat-mirage “I will kill you, and send you to face the damnation you've earned. If you kill yourself to escape me, I'll suck your spirit back and make whatever torments you've experienced seem like goddamned schoolyard contretemps, got it?” without turning, he said “Shut up, Jericho,” and stalked out of the office. Jericho followed, after shrugging philosophically at Josephus and shaking his head.
Josephus hadn't felt this young in years. Or...something. He felt something he'd thought long dead, a torrent of deadly calm. Conspiracy had been his weapon, in the old days, playing between the great powers.
If Ashlan wanted a showdown with the God-Touched, then, by all means, Josephus would oblige him. Perhaps...if he manipulated them with a deft and precise touch, perhaps he could send them both to destruction.
That would count for something, surely. If he rid the world of those walking blights, that monstrous half-angel and those two heartless killers.
How many lives would he save, by consequence of this action?
Maybe enough. Maybe enough to be forgiven. Maybe enough to wash his hands clean of his abominable sins.
Every single one of his wards, from the wards of blood and salt to the ones of light and fire and fear and pain, snapped at once.
She was standing in his office. He'd heard nothing from the window, nothing from the door. His wards had simply failed, breaking when they touched her. Like all magicks did.
She was perky and pretty and incongruous, in her tight sweater and carrying a lacrosse bag, her hair bleach-blond and her skin glowing with a golden summer tan. She looked like a sorority girl with her wide, ingenuous blue eyes.
Stephanie, of the God-Touched.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said truthfully “I have something of import to tell you.”
She smiled warmly. “No doubt.”
He had exactly that much warning before she took two small steps and drove a knife into his throat.
There was no pain. How odd. He could heal this, of course...if he could just remember the words.
“You're so absolutely transparent, you know that? You were hoping you could manipulate events like you used to. Clear the playing field of the big players. You're an idiot, Josephus,” she said softly as he toppled to the floor like a rag doll. She leaned down and planted a soft kiss on his forehead.
He couldn't remember the words.
“My brother and I knew you'd interfere. All these years on the sidelines, and the first thing you do is attempt a triple cross. Bold. Stupid. Your hallmarks, really. We've been watching and waiting, fool. Or did you think we'd forgotten?”
He shuddered as she drove the thin-bladed knife into his heart; and twisted it, for good measure.
“Good night, old man.”
Yes...good night. It was so black, the thing closing over him like the wings of an enormous bird. So black and...comforting.
If he'd known all that was waiting for him was oblivion, why, he'd have died years ago.
So much was about to happen, he thought a little wistfully, as he faded into a nothingness he hadn't earned.
Shame to miss it.
<><><>
“Ashlan!”
“Christ, Jericho,” Ashlan seethed, eyes clenched shut “what have I done wrong now?”
“I thought I said no threats. I thought we were going to do this the right way. Browbeating a helpless old man...”
Ashlan turned, his face filled with helpless fury “ha! If you had any idea who what man is, what he's done...”
“That doesn't matter!”
“You know,” Ashlan said reflectively “I really don't get you. You, or your morality. That man is a monster.”
“So are you.”
There was a pause, and Ashlan seemed to collapse a little into himself.
“I know. But...I'm trying?”
“First rule of being a good person, Ashlan,” Jericho said. Ashlan collapsed on a nearby bench, and buried his face in his hands. Jericho sat down next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder “you can't control what other people do. You can only control what you do.”
“Technically I can make other people do things,” Ashlan observed “I merely point this out.”
“You're not doing that anymore either, damn it.”
“You're sucking all the fun out of my life, Jericho,” Ashlan snapped “is that morality too?”
“Not necessarily. But it's fun!” Jericho replied brightly, shooting Ashlan a thumbs-up.
“Cockblocker.”
“That's me. You hungry?”
“You paying?”
“I'm not a billionaire, Ashlan.”
“That's why the gesture would mean so much more coming from you, Jericho.”
“Gaaaaah, you're a fuckwit.”
They got up and walked down the street of the sunny little college town.
“He wanted to fuck you, you know. The old man. He thought you were super fine,” Ashlan said with barely suppressed glee, glancing sidelong to catch Jericho's reaction.
“Shut up, Ashlan.”
“You're like, evil shriveled bastard necromancer bait.”
“Hooray for me.”
“Jer?”
“Yeah, man?”
“I'm...doing my best. You know that, right?”
“Yeah. I do. You know I'm going to help you, however I can, whatever it takes, right?”
Ashlan smiled; it wasn't his deadly smile, but a smaller, crooked one. The one that almost made him look like a person, if you squinted.
"Yeah. I do."
READ OR DON'T!