Davan looked both ways before crossing the road. In fact, he looked up as well, just in case. Traffic was no longer such a concern...in the week since that spire smashed up through the capitol building, most things had come to a screeching halt. The city was cut off from the rest of the world, and things were getting pretty dire. Davan didn't like to think about why the streets were empty of pedestrians, and not just of vehicles. Unfortunately, he had to. He ducked back into the shadows just as something with far too many legs ambled down the road, its three heads swiveling about, questing for victims. The legs were a mix of sizes, but all had once been...he tried not to notice this...human. He'd seen a few of these monstrosities in the past couple days, and prayed he'd never meet one with a face he recognized. Once the creature had passed out of sight, Davan sprinted for the darkness of the alleyway across the street, clutching the precious bundle to his chest. He just hoped nothing with wings was perched atop one of the buildings, waiting for someone to come out into the open. Then he noticed someone slouching in the alley, and almost jumped back into the street. But he stifled the impulse. Whoever was in the alley had already seen him, and it looked more or less human. He held the bundle of food and medicine closer to his chest. "Hello?" he hissed. "Oh. Hi," the man sighed, straightening a little. It was definitely a human, and probably a living one at that. He was wearing a gray trenchcoat despite the fact that the clouds overhead hadn't rained once in the week they'd been piled up out to the horizon. "Come on, it's not safe here if one of those things finds us!" Davan whispered, starting down the alley. The man laughed, quietly. "What's so funny?" Davan demanded, pausing as he passed the man. His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, and he could make out the man's face. It was hollow and sunken, but not from privation. In fact, he seemed perfectly healthy, just terribly haunted. It was a look that had become pretty common in Topeka this week, actually. But it didn't often go with laughter, except the hysterial sort. "Unless you have some new definition of safe, it's not safe anywhere in this reality, not anymore," the man chuckled. Davan snorted. "You don't get out much, do you? We just have to keep our heads down, stay alive until some superguys come in and beat off this invader. At least the skies are dark gray this time instead of puce." The stranger shook his head ruefully. "The more superguys we get here, the faster things will go wrong. I've already...seen a few come into the Darklands being created here. They've joined the Gentle Gift of Crimson as his vassals. Eventually, Superguy himself will show up, and then it'll all be over. This world will be doomed." "The gentle what? Who the Hell (TM) are you, and how do you know all this?" The man smirked and turned to walk out into the wan light of the eternal overcast. "My name is Floyd. And I've seen it all before...." @>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`- \\ // -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@ .|,Coherent Comics Presents \\ // #8 - Terminus Defunctus --X------------------------- E }X{ ARCHS copyright 2002 by the '|` A Superguy Tale // \\ Dvandroid (Dave Van Domelen) @>-`-,-`-,-`-,`-,-`-,-`-,-`- // \\ -'-.-'-.'-.-'-.-'-.-'-.-'-<@ Two impulses warred in Anna. She wanted to leap forward and try to help Kat...not that there seemed much that she could do to help someone who'd just been crushed by a pillar ten meters wide and so tall that its top vanished in the darkness. She also wanted to run away as fast as she could, because the chamber was already shaking. The pillar had only dropped a couple meters, but architecturally speaking, that was more than enough to drop the whole thing around their ears. The hallway they stood in wasn't going to survive the collapse of the chamber it opened onto. "The Tarsus says we're ready to go!" Skysabre gasped incredulously. "I'd agree," Stan replied, looking at the falling piece of ceiling, "but what about Kat? I mean, she's probably not at all happy, but she might have survived that." Anna fended off a bit of rubble with her spear, its magically enhanced accuracy guiding it into just the right place at the right time. "I don't see what we can do, though!" she shouted over the rising thunder of falling rock. "I can't move that pillar...can either of you? No? And we don't have much longer before this whole place caves in!" "We have to do SOMETHING!" Stan shouted back, taking a tentative step into the chamber. Skysabre put a hand on his shoulder. "Wait. We have to think this through clearly. We don't have time to go running around half-cocked." "Well?" Anna demanded, smacking another bit of debris away. "Kat's the Exarch of Earth. Remember how the air and woods went wild when we touched our weapons, Stan? This may be less trap and more side effect. In that case, we just wait for it to die down, and then get out before things really DO collapse." Stan blocked a falling rock with the wooden armor on his forearm. "How the heck are you able to stay so calm?" "I'm not really sure," Skysabre admitted. "I'd like to chalk it up to the fact I have more experience in the net.hero biz than you two do, but it feels like more than that." [Stan (Cheez Arrow) and Anna (Rotanna) both joined Dvandom Force during the Evolution arc in Constellation #32-36, which marked their first serious foray into net.hero action. Skysabre (as Sig.Lad) was first active as a child in the Silver Age. - Ed, whew.] "Um, what's that sound?" Anna asked, staring at the pillar. "The falling rock sound, the cracking walls sound, or the..." Stan started to reply before being drowned out as the pillar shattered with a sound like a thunderclap. Amid the rain of marble, a figure stepped out from the center of the pillar. Rock fell all around her, but none seemed to be touching her. "Tarsus, give us a gate, NOW!" Skysabre shouted, just as the rest of the cavern imploded. * * * * If one were to go by a strict dictionary definition, a dead world and a lifeless world would be essentially the same thing. But dictionaries tend not to be written by people with a lot of out of the ordinary experiences. Well, a few are, but those tend to be dismissed as fiction. A lifeless world is defined by absence. Nothing lives there, and most likely nothing ever has or ever will outside of protective enclosures. The Moon is such a lifeless place. A dead world has a sort of dark presence to it. Death is not just the absence of life, it is the negation of it, the ending of that which once lived. There is an emotional resonance to a place where death has visited, doubly so if death has come to stay and moved in all its things. When death has set up its stereo, you can tell. And not just because of all the Cure records it plays. And then there's the physical presences. Death is more than just a concept, and the dead do walk in some places. They even fly, although never with the sort of exhilaration seen when the living fly. No, when the dead fly upon tattered wing, it is with less joy than the worst coach accomodations on the smallest airline, even if they ARE allowed to take their pocketknives into the air with them. But even a dead world can reach a sort of accomodation with reality, with everyone getting used to the concept and settling down for the long run. And when the entire altiverse is dead, well, things settle down even more completely, for there are no longer any among the living to upset the balance. In such a reality, it is the living who provoke a sense of unease, for they are the unnatural ones. Especially if they come flying out of a golden tunnel of blinding light, followed by several tons of marble and granite rubble. "Ooof!" Anna exclaimed as she slammed into the dusty ground, almost losing her grip on her spear. She rolled aside just in time to avoid being landed on by one of the others. "That was different," Stan commented as he levered himself up to sit on one of the chunks of granite. "Normally we have some time walking the Golden Path to wind down." "Normally we don't have a collapsing cavern coming along for the ride," Skysabre countered. "Well, I *tried* to keep that from happening," Kat muttered as she stood up. Her clothing was in tatters, and she seemed to be covered in marble dust. She brushed idly at her left forearm. The "dust" didn't come off. "Ummm, uh oh?" Kat ventured, tapping the fingers of her left hand on her right forearm. Rather than the muffled thud of metal covered in pseudoflesh that this usually generated, there was the sharp "tok" of stone on stone. Her body was now nearly-pure white marble, with a few veins of dark gray running in faint patterns up and down her arms and face. The Stone Catena was a contrasting gray of granite draped over her shoulders. "I'm trying to change back to looking human, and it's not working," she started to panic. "I'm sure it's just a temporary problem," Stan offered. "I mean, I didn't turn into wood. I'm just covered in it," he rapped his living armor. "There may be a local effect causing it," Skysabre added. "The Tarsus says we're in 970SUPERGUY. Sounds more like home, except..." "Except home isn't a wasteland," Anna finished. "I've had nightmares like this," she shivered, looking around at the desolate landscape. Kat started pacing, stalking like a penned cat. She stayed within the field of rubble that had come with them, however. "I don't like this. I don't like it at all. I'm a goddamn statue." "Well, at least you're a statue that can move," Skysabre replied as he cautiously walked away from the arrival point, scanning the horizon. "And it seems like, whatever the local conditions, we're in a net.hero reality or something like one. So any strange alterations may just be temporary. Trust me, I know about plot-driven body changes." [Seeking a cure for his uncontrolled shapechanging is what led Sig.Lad to the events of Dvandom Force #48, which in turn led to his presence in this story. - Ed] Anna edged closer to Skysabre. "I just don't like this place at all," she muttered. "Feels like I'm in a graveyard. Does the Tarsus have anything to say about the magic weapon we're looking for? Mine, I suppose?" Skysabre paused, communicating with the pinkish gem on his wrist. "It should be nearby soon, that's all I can get. I suppose it's moving." "Probably in the hands of something trying to kill us," Anna sighed. Then she turned to Kat. "Is there something wrong, Kat? I mean, besides all the obvious things...you look like someone put you in a cage." Kat glanced around nervously. "It's just...I think I can commune with the ground somehow now. And I don't want to be in touch with anything on this planet." To emphasize the point, she stepped up onto one of the larger chunks of rubble that had followed them. "There's a...deadness...that's reaching up through everything. I feel like being alive here is a terrible crime against nature." Anna nodded. "I feel it too, maybe I'm picking up the residual magic of this place. Kat...if you can talk to the ground, maybe you can find the fastest way out of this, this graveyard." "There's no wind," Skysabre announced out of left field. "The air is dead. Stan, can you feel anything?" "I'm trying my best NOT to," he had wandered back into the field of rubble. "It's like...not quiet, but anti-noise, if you can grasp that. Like you'd have to shout at the top of your lungs just to make it up to total silence. I mean, I haven't really had much chance to flex my new senses, the pulp traps place was pretty dead too. But this place is MORE dead." Kat shuddered, but stepped back off her rock. "Fine, fine...I'll try. This is SO not my day," she added under her breath. She brushed aside some dust and placed her palm flat against the native ground. And SCREAMED! * * * * A tower, a dark sword thrusting up through the ground, tainting the world's lifeblood. A red stain spreading across the world. Heroes assembled to fight the invader. Too few. Too weak. Scattered to the winds. A mighty hero rising to face the bleeding of the world. A mighty hero corrupted into the service of the darkness. The world falls. A stranger arrives, a fallen star to destroy darkness. The corrupted hero slain, the fallen star consumed by darkness. The world dies. The dark sword sweeps over all reality, snuffing out star upon star. All ends. HAS ALL ENDED? HAS FLOYD SEEN IT ALL BEFORE? These questions may be answered if there IS a next...Superguy! ============================================================================= Author's Notes: In case anyone reading this doesn't know yet, I have an Exarchs page up at www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/SG, with archives of the stories and a small gallery of drawings. As of this writing, Skysabre and Oakthorn (Stan) are in the gallery. Once I finalize a codename for Kat, I'll probably draw her and put her up as well. Also, while I took the name Davan from one of the main characters in Nee's Something Positive (www.somethingpositive.net), my Davan is not meant to be the same guy. If nothing else, Nee's Davan would have probably joined the service of the Gentle Gift of Crimson by now. }-> And Aubrey and PeeJee would have driven Crimson mad or just broken him physically.