Ekron

The Parasite - 8

It was dawn near the crater of Lidya where Anubis and Maria waited for Szörnyet. Maria controlled Hoszusárnyu, favorite snake of Gog, with a keyboard and a mainframe. She had commanded the beast to hide in the Baltic sea. Maria wore a space suit, something that gave no reassurance to Anubis.

"You'll do fine!" said Maria and Anubis tried to smile but only showed his teeth.

The celestial beast first appeared as a small figure on the blue sky, as he reflected the light of the rising sun. He got close enough for his body to cover a fourth of the firmament, like a nightmarish vision. He was a little closer than Moon orbit but as it was much more massive, gravity in eastern Europe got reduced to a fifth of its normal value. People in Ekron gave three-feet-high jumps when attempting to walk. The beast in the sky had his tail bent to a side of his head, he moved one of its tentacles in an apparently meaningless gesture. Minutes later, a pair of huge aquamarine gems, of about three feet of diameter, fell to the ground like meteorites a hundred yards from Anubis; they had been expelled from Szörnyet's tentacle. This was relevant to Maria; as the Angels did not understand their own technology anymore, Astarte couldn't get any information from Vadállat's mind about their portals' mechanism, and Maria wanted to study them up close. The agreed signal for Maria, was Anubis kneeling before whatever came out of the portal. He approached the two gems; an electric arc between them formed a door in the air that became black, and a putrid air emanated from it.

In Llacme's castle, a reptilian creature passed by the dungeon pit and Irkalla asked him, "Where is her Holiness? She promised me mercy."

"Is in the woods, using her portal, no mercy for you."

"Neither for you."

That said, the Macsk blinked, and the reptile fell to the ground. Then Irkalla closed his eyes and whispered a song to a friend. Inside Irkalla's ship, in the armored container, the goat woke up and pressed a switch on the wall with a claw, opening the container's door. He jumped out of it and then off the ship through the hatch. At the shores of the Humner, a crowd of beasts and spirits shouted in awe at the sight of the goat. There haven't been goats in Sibara for at least a millennium, but the stories about the destruction they were able to inflict had become legendary. The goat jumped to the sky, and opening his magnificent vulture wings, he flew over the caves to finally land over Llacme's castle, impacting against a wall that disappeared into dust. The creatures crossed in his way found a quick and sanguinary death. He found the pit, jumped into it, and stepped over the blinded creatures shredding them. With his claws, the goat liberated Irkalla from his chains, the Macsk petted his head and mounted him. Making another hole on the castle's side, they flew back to the shore and entered the ship. To the aghast gaze of Sibara inhabitants, the ship took off, heading to the ocean and then to Dobruj.

From the portal before Anubis, Llacme emerged from the shadows looking at him with scorn, then she examined her surroundings and said in a contemptuous tone, "If you give me information about Cymra, you may not die today."

Anubis knew a rudimentary form of Qatra's language, as it was the tongue Gog used for most of his spells. He knelt before Llacme, and Maria entered a series of commands in her keyboard. The roar of ten earthquakes came from the Baltic as Hoszusárnyu raised its head seventy miles from the ground, into the ionosphere, aided by its fifty-mile-long wings, used as front legs against the shore. Its total length where three hundred miles and it looked like a horsehair worm emerging from its host. Then it buried its wings a little further, leaned its tail in the seabed and gave itself the impulse to take off the planet. The torque applied caused that watches had to be turned back five minutes. Hoszusárnyu flew from Earth to Szörnyet's face in eight seconds. The celestial beast tried to grab it with a tentacle, but it was already entering his eye socket, clinging to the optic nerve and then to his brain, deeper and deeper, until it found the gland it had to work with. Its modified proboscis nailed three electrodes in the gland and the snake nested.

Anubis closed his eyes, and in a Dobruj cave a black dog closed them too. The same did Agatha, the Osmógreh and the worm inside Hoszusárnyu. Szörnyet moved away from Earth until it wasn't visible in daylight. In the mountains of Sibara, the angel Szörnyet fell unconscious to the ground.

Anubis stood up and looked at Llacme's very unsatisfied face.

"I have different idea," said Anubis in a definitely not fluent Qatrian.

"Speak your mind beast."

"I am your Emperor now. I allow you to live and you pay me."

"Pay you with what?"

"Osmógreh, fifty."

"No, I have different idea too," said Llacme mocking his accent and attacked him with her tail.

Anubis jumped leaving a black oil blur on the ground, he became purely spiritual and entered through Llacme's eyes, she fell to the ground and convulsed, choked by something invisible, touching her neck with her upper legs until she stopped moving. Then the spirit of Anubis came out of her mouth, reached the oil blur, and regained physical form. Llacme breathed again and looked at Anubis with a mix of anger and fear.

"Fine, fifty Osmógreh, and you are now our Emperor."

"Good, and only for demonstration, we destroy one planet. Small one. Now go, before I kill you."

Llacme stood up, crossed her portal, and closed it behind her. Hours later, in Aqir, the Lord of Flies had to cross his portal back to Qatra as the beast Szörnyet appeared in the sky and destroyed the planet.

When night fell on Earth, Maria disposed herself to examinate the portal aquamarines, in absence of sun light to avoid electromagnetic interference. She placed a scanner in front of the gems, specially modified by herself to read their extra-dimensional composition. She found Llacme's portal gems oscillated at thirty-six Hertz, a different frequency than the signal from the Moon Base gems. She also found a diffuse figure embedded in the gem, that could not be analyzed in four or five dimensions, so pushing the scanner to its limits, she discovered a stable configuration on six dimensions, a Hexacross, more precisely a Hexacontitetrapeton, a regular polytope. She figured that with special equipment, to develop by herself, she could even replicate the structure from sand. Then the scanner gave a supplementary lecture, it had detected more hexa-dimensional objects nearby. Following the signal, she found two objects superficially buried eighty yards from the gems.

"These must have been under the snake," she thought and dug them out.

One was a black tiara with two broken gems in it, the other, a giant vulture wing transformed into a weapon, with long crystal covered metal needles. She put them in her bag and then hid them under key in a lab that she was preparing at the lower levels of Kish.

END OF "THE PARASITE"