Demon of the Black Gate

Rovinkar spun the bones. The tale of the doomed prince of Tenigra was the key. Illustrations of the nude dancing girls and endowed lovers held sigils and page numbers cleverly disguised. The centrepiece of the vizier’s tome, the spinning carved bones, were turned to the creation of the demon’s fire. Although capricious, voracious and destructive, fire was the weakest of the elements. It was dashed by water, starved by lack of air and smothered by the earth.

There was no accommodation for losing control of the demon. The ancient vizier had not encountered the situation nor accounted for the possibility. But the bones revealed the chant that initially had created the fire in the demon and discovering that, Rovinkar knew he could draw the fire back into the void. The void would inhale the gaseous nature of fire eagerly. The demon would be compelled to return, a victim of its essential weakness.

The fires of the encampment burned low. The sun had settled behind the Camelback mountains, the majestic tabled shelves facing the desert were near black in the late twilight. The constant murmur of the nearby Emerald River muted the idle talk of bored soldiers. The constant drillings and exercises during the day left them exhausted enough that sitting about seemed like the best thing to do.

Rovinkar lit the brazier in front of him. Once again, he stood on the jutting cornice of stone that commanded the panorama of the river exiting the Black Gate, its name never more appropriate than now in the last vestiges of sunlight. He wore the dark robes sewn with the runes of his protection and lit a hard crumb of incense, blowing lightly until the edge began to glow. He allowed a thread of the smoke to enter his nose and inhaled deeply before setting it in the brazier. Lying in front of the smoking ember was the ark holding the obsidian. Rovinkar opened the lid of the small chest, the black rock a bottomless ink in the waning light.

He stood behind the brazier. Holding his staff to the ground, arms before him, he let the smoke disperse his thoughts before exhaling it to join the tendrils of the incense that curled into the sky. Grey upon grey, grey upon black, black upon Black. The curling vapor bore a spark, a tiny jewel of fire like a dandelion fluff. It carried beyond the river and the Gate, lofted above the abrupt heel of the Granite Mountains and drifted into the Stands.

#

The demon had settled into the solidity of stone, its anxiety spent. The earth was solid and cool, and the rock slowed its thoughts, darting into the mineral blocks. It was no more than a pile of rocks anchored on a steep slope up in the spires of the mountains. The stone was comforting, its stolid energy moved in long slow waves that eased the demon’s mind.

‘What are you?’ echoed over and over as well as its reply ‘I am everything. I am nothing.’ The words rode the slow pulse of the earths minerals and salts. The inexplicable joining to the fabric of this world, the weave of its essence. Everything. The void had destroyed time for the demon. Memories had long ago compressed and absorbed the thread of his existence within its black embrace. Nothing. It was the fragments of that other life that struggled to find a place in the demon’s consciousness. The images that tore past were to fleeting to encounter or analyze. They disappeared in the wash of other scenes that struggled to coalesce.

’I see a man.’ The woman’s voice came like a soft bell through a mist. ‘A man … a man …’ reverberated softly in its decay until it matched the timeless rhythm of the stone.

‘I am not a man.’ The thought remained dark, stilled by the weight of the mountains.

It was a spark that broke through the shield of stone, an article of magma dropped from the heavens. The trifling brand touched the grit of the demon’s essence and lay smoldering. The demon felt the heat as the incineration began, the spark cascading and growing as it fell about the pile of stone. It was a welcome heat, a flicker of orange danced in the demon’s mind like a lure.

Suddenly the nested solidity of earth felt restrictive. Basalts and crystalline granites ignited with the memory of their forging. The demon was drawn up, standing, the fires churning in whipping currents about its blistering form. The beacon of orange danced ahead of the demon, drawing it forward. The demon felt its mood match the flickering enticement, growing lighter and disconnected, charring the visions of memory. The path of the demon was marked by fire loosed in the trees and grasses as it passed, a creature of molten metals and ignited gases. There were people in the Stands that evening with a clear view of the mountains beyond who would later tell tales of a molten storm jumping from ridge to cliff like a galloping horse. Those close enough to hear its thunderous passing claimed the face of the underworld god lived in the rolling fire.

The demon flared, flashes of exuberance jarring life through it. It stepped, rolled and leapt across the terrain, flying into the trees consuming and racing through the spaces of air, gasping for the oxygen that grazed its surface, consuming more. There was an elation to the fire, as the lure drew it across the mountains, and into the crevices above the prairie abutting the Black Gate.

Beyond, clearing the final crest, a frame of smoke hung on the far side of the river that glittered weakly in the starlight. Inside the frame was nothing. Its ink was an absence of the night, its edges obscured by the swirling smoke. The end of awareness. Peace.

Rolling down the mountain, the beacon lost its attraction for a brief space of time wherein the demon spied the campfires of the army below. The waves of their invitation flickered like tresses of wild hair, red flames coalesced to frame a face in the demons mad vision. The blind woman.

The echo of her voice rang through the ferocious crackling of the demons own fires. “you are a man.”

The vision broke the trance of the ember. The fires remained and the armies that fired his birth into this realm lay below him. The demon’s attention was turned and the momentum of the its coursing flow carried it down the cornices and cliffs of the last crag and pouring into the plains. Fear bloomed in front of scorching wave. The demon-fire trod and tore at the rush of men fleeing before it. Tents and canopys burst into flames, engines and trebuchets sitting in idle siege, were torched at its passing. The demon formed and reformed, a rolling fire, a maddened beast, a fulgent avatar that left the encampment blazing in its destruction. The exhilaration of the destruction was like a madness, a consummate joy. Standing at the center of the conflagration, the demon reared, the lightness of its being craving the air.

The gate to the void collapsed when the demon’s attention was lost in it’s mad rapture, the beacon useless and lost. There was no longer the void in the demons vision. It neither understood its presence or loss.

The comfort and surety of the emptiness tore at the demon’s mind even as the brilliant airs and gases of the fires invited it aloft. The demon rose in fiery smokes, shedding the scorching weight of its form with dripping magmas. The maelstrom of wind from the fires circled the blazing camp in broad sweep. A handful of survivors, who still had their senses about them, saw the demonic form with ember eyes glowing, rise in boiling fire and smoke until scattering sparks was all that remained.

The roar of the fiery assault was followed and filled in by the shouts of terror and cries for help. Calls attempting to restore order added to the din. The tumult of a decimated army merged with the bedlam of tents and machines of war still in blazing collapse.

The demon felt freed. The void had called and was nearly forgotten as the demon raced north along the spine of mountain, a whirlwind of smoke and vapor that crashed against the uppermost peaks as a wave, and floated out over the second plateau of the stands. The void lost its magnatism as an image from this place pulsed like a hot coal in its mind. Merging with the fires of the defeated army, the blazing red hair of the blind woman and the words that still resonated.

“You are a man.”

The demon needed no lure to draw it. It knew exactly where the woman dwelt. The earth and air about her house was permeated with her essence.