My Hero. Zero

ZERO- He was once feared, adored, sought after… but war and magic have come again. What’s a drugdealer with ties to both the modern world and an ancient deadly queen to do?

(These are all exerpts from a larger work of fiction. Don’t mind the typos and the editing needs…just enjoy the ride.)

Zero- 1,2,3

This isn’t heaven.

there’s no redheaded primadonna disguised as a goddess here. There’s only stories of a laughing god brought down by a legendary huntress of a queen who in all reality should have been dead long before history was ever created.

This isn’t hell.

I’ve paid nothing for my sins. No retribution, no laughing devils or demons raping me for what’s left of the shards of my tainted, tattered soul.

This isn’t even pergatory.

It’s a hospital for the Legion. That’s the name they gave to the people who survived the short and bittersweet Nuian revoloution.

The Legion.

We are our own war heros, we are our own battilion we are the survivors. We’re the only ones left to tell the tale, we’re the only ones who know the truth… and we’re not talking.

I see them in the hallways, strapped to wheelchairs with IVs shoved into their arms, drip drip dripping the life back into them.

As if we had a life to begin with.

Most of them know me, they know that I know of past crime, addictions, maladdictions, perversions so they won’t speak out against me… not when I know as much as I do.

We all want fresh starts.

They all want fresh starts.

This isn’t heaven.

There’s no one here to talk to me, no one other than nurses and orderlies who search me constantly for signs of “magical malady”. As if something so disgusting could be so humorously diagnosed.

Magical Malady.

It’s when you find out that you can make things happen, burn things up, move out of your body, dissapear.

They send you back to Nuie then.

And that is when the hell begins.

Imagine, a world released from the tyranny of a jealous, dying and insane god into the hands of a forgiving queen with a penchant for passive retaliation.

Passive doesn’t mean it’s never bloody.

She just lets those whom you’ve sinned against, sin against you. And I’ve sinned so very much.

We were called the Godless and we were issued guns instead of bibles, given lists of names and addresses and one missive.

Kill.

That jovial, mindless, vicious god that ruled us all didn’t tolerate any diviation from his ever increasing restrictions. If you were caught, or even suspected of any crime against the state, against the moral right of the land, against your neighbor or even against yourself

I was one of the ones who would put you to sleep with one swift ounce of hot lead.

There are people with long memories. And the things I’ve done are nigh unforgettable.

But no one speaks against me here in Yein. We’re all dirty… in our own way. Speculation among those who talk to each other is that if our sins were too great we didn’t recieve a touch of the divinity from the queen, therefore we would never recieve magic.

It’s a quiet world I live in.

The sonds of beds squeeking, wheels of wheelchairs turning, beeping of a multitude of machines. People talking in low voices.

And the sound of my own breathing.

In and out.

This isn’t heaven, but hell is just one discovery away.

Breathe. In.

I haven’t been taking my sleeping pills, or my pain pills. I’ve stored them inside my mouth until the kind, smiling nurse leaves then I spit them into my hand and slide them into a little plastic bag that I’ve hidden inside my mattress.

Every night, when the moon stares like a swollen eye through my window I trace the outline of the pills and tell myself that I decide my fate. And other lies.

Breathe. Out.

Everynight the moon is full. Every night there’s a little more madness, a little more magic in the streets. This morning, before the sun crept over the horizon a fairy with dragonfly wings tapped tiny sticklike fingers against the window pane.

“You’re not invited.” I told the creature and it pulled faces at me before flitting away in a burst of shimmering light.

Yein used to be the home of the fey… before it turned the fields of flowers into car lots and apartment homes.

Breathe. In.

This isn’t heaven.

There are angels here.

Zero- HindsightThe charming nurse with the ever present smile entered the room on soft, stockinged feet. I watched her as she walked towrds me, there was nothing in her eyes. No intelligence, no warning, no anger or fear.

Part of me was afraid. To my bones afraid. She was either a mastermind or had been so traumatized by the things that she’s seen that there was nothing left inside of her to echo out of those dark mysterious and vacant eyes.

She placed my pills on the bedside table and restacked the books to make room for the dinner tray.

“You are reading more, it seems… soon out library’s stock of Nuian History will be exsausted.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and for a moment there was a spark deep in the wells of her eyes, something I could speak to …something I could relate to.

And then, like a shiver it was gone.

I wet my lips and nodded. “I…” Clearing my throat was an acrobatic affair. My voice had lost it’s smooth and cloying effects and in it’s stead was a nightmare of jagged edges and serrated tones.

“I’m trying to … learn?” I hated the way my voice rose at the end, in question, when her eyes met mine. It was there again, that chilling spark. I shrank back into the false safety of the bed’s pillows.

She smiled then, a wicked impish smile that caused me to shudder and close my eyes. “That’s good!” she chirped in those metallic tones that nurses use when cheer is too dear to spare.

I nodded when she did and stared unrepentantly as she turned to leave the room. My heart was somewhere in my throat when she turned at the door way and tilted her head, if possible her smile had gotten more pointed, more manic and cruel.

“If you continue to hide your pills, Aaron, I’ll have to force feed them to you.” I started, eyes wide and jerking violently.

I couldn’t even think of an excuse, just shock and terror.

——–
0,1,2,3 part 3
After the nurse left, I kept myself from screaming by shivering. Unmanagable shudders that caused to to gibber softly. Like a child caught in the cold, begging for mercy from the elements. Mercy that will never come.I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be invincable, untouchable… like they promised us. To be one of the Godless was to be feared, hated, envied, adored. But you could still fall prey to someone whose trigger finger was faster than yours. I was proof of that.I keep touching my face, what’s left of it… if I keep my fingers there, spanning the space between my left cheek and my hairline I can almost pretend that it didn’t happen. That one bullet ripped me from manhood and thrust me into the role of a gentleman monster.Looking into a mirror is chancy.My face is a garden of scars, every raised ridge was a memory, each inch of tight unmalliable flesh is a story in and of itself.I spend these long hours in this sterile room thinking about the events that got me here. No not those last hours… when nothing mattered but revenge and and hatred. Not those last moments when I stared into the blue eyes of the man who would kill me, not even those moments when I was lost in a dream of a blue haired queengoddess with ice in her veins.Give me a moment though, it comes and goes… recall and agony. Like vicious waves of some devious sea taunting me with complete recollection and mind shattering pain. I’m almost ready to take the tempting cocktail of painkillers and sleeping pills. Almost.But not before I tell you everything. Not before I ask, in this round about way… for some sort of understanding. Because I’ll be goddamed if I ask for forgiveness.Quickly I glance to the doorway, expecting that empty nurse and her full, villianous smile to be standing there… knowing. The doorway is empty of all save the soft sound of someone weeping and the sight of the glimmering white hallway.I am unwilling to think of what the nurse’s visitation and knowledge mean, I restrain myself from looking around the room for some tell tale sign of a hidden camera or microphone. I know there’s nothing hidden in the far corners or in the cushions of the chairs that are manditory for these hospital rooms. My eyes wander back to the chair, fixated for a moment. It’s material an illuminated blue. The color of the heart of a glacier, the color of the soul of the sea. In my re occuring dream the chair stands taller than a throne and glows brighter than any star in any sky.I jerk my eyes away.I am not ready to tell you of the dream, or the reason for my search through these dry and bland text books.Instead I’ll tell you of my earliest memory… a story of sorts. Of a boy. Not I, I’m too far removed from him, I’m too jaded by my actions to have any relations with this shivering pup and his love affair with dirty deeds.The boy lifted his dark eyes to the man on the stage. At 14 boy is thin, and small for his age with intense and impassioned eyes that will, in time, become smug and calculating. His white blonde hair is mussed, artfully, in such a way as to give life to that narrow, pale face.The man on stage was poncing about, giving directions… perfecting poses… instructing, teaching and above all bringing to life a story older than history. The boy knew the professor’s expectations were grand. This play was a direct score to the face of the encroching tyranny of the Nuian goverment. It had been decreed that all plays, tales, novels of the legend of the Ice Queen be banished. It hadn’t set well with the Nuians as a whole. While they were lacking in faith, they were rich in superstition. No goverment of wicked men could stand against a haritage of grandmothers and bedtime stories of daring men flying through an enchanted sky on the backs of mythical beasts.The boy sat in the back of the darkened auditorium until the last of the actors had left. Under his hand was a pad with a list of names, ages and addresses written in a precise and patient hand. Everyone who’d been there on this night had been marked.The boy had alot of work to do.It was quick, this command killing. Quick, artless, bloody.He had something to prove to those who could give him the one thing he wanted. He could see the flow of power turning towards the goverment and those who enforced.He wanted to be above the tide.He would do anything for it.Even hunt down, one by one, the children that had been conscripted to play the parts of a stage fable and …one by one… cut out tongues and pluck out eyes… to teach a lesson.Such tales are not to be beleived, there would be no fairy queen to save them, no mercy of a nameless god, no daring heroic dragon riders to come to their rescue. Nothing and no one.It was a job made easy by terror. There are those who wouldn’t fight you, too afraid for the lives of thier children, their kin, their friends. And I reveld in it.Whispering in the ears of weeping mothers, watching hate and defiance flair up in the eyes of the beaten… too late…too late to stop the bullet.Now I wonder… I preached, like a pastor of the damned, that there was no God of Light, there was no Green Goddess, there was no hidden, sleeping Queen. I didn’t believe in them… but they knew of and believed (oh how they believed) in me.Slowly I pull the covers to my chin, realising in a belated fashion, that i’ve been staring at the chair again.It’s growing late and the sound of weeping has faded, the sounds of this hospital at night are no diffrent than during the day. The squeeking, soft voices, beeping, the machines and every so often… from some shadowed hall… a scream.My eyes grow heavy and I snap awake without realising that I’d even fallen asleep. The dream is there, waiting just on the edge of my vision.I succumb to it because I have no choice. It falls upon me with an almost physical weight.The dream world becomes reality.I am here, in this bed, but not streached thin with pain, not devoured by a preditory fear. I’m sitting up eager, alert and expecting… watching the chair at the foot of my bed. It’s much larger now, unreal in it’s glamour and glow. I watch it, mouth slightly agape…and the fear comes.Insidiious, slow and creeping it flows into the room on the air currents leaving my skin cold and waxy. My breath comes short and my eyes seem ready to leap out of my skull as I fist my hands in the blankets.There’s frost and snowflakes spiral down from a ceiling that’s suddenly no longer there. The walls become rock, iced over and somehow malicious looking. The chair is the only thing that remains unchanged as the room seeps away leaving me stranded in a cavern sitting on my hospital bed.Then She is there. The Queen.The Assassin, Herself.She’s standing at the foot of my bed, beside the chair, staring at me with eyes the color and consistancy of smoke. Her expression is baleful.I wet my lips, but don’t speak…I know that my voice will only be grating and unwelcome in this audience. “Why do you call me here, of all places? Why call me at all?” She asks, as always.She moves to sit in the chair, and I watch as her skirts move. I expect the movement as on cue… sparkling mist and motes of ice dance across the surface of the chair, Her clothing is ice, Her skin is covered with a fine layer of it and it flakes off… it spirals to the ground.”I am not as frightening as you’re making me.” She says, her voice is warm and it vibrates the stelactites of ice that dangle from the dark above us. “Though…”She tilts her head and I mouth with her the words she says next. “I can understand your terror. You have much to atone for. I am looking for you, Aaron, where are you? I cannot feel you in my Nuie.”I shiver and feel the words press against my mouth, heavy on the tongue…but I cannot say it. I cannot tell her that I am here, in a hospital, locked into a bed in Yein. If I do, I know the terror will spill out into the waking world and She will find me. She will mark me, She will eat me alive.She stares at me, then purses her full lips into a thin line and nods once before standing to take Her leave. “As you will, then, Aaron.” Her voice contorts me and I struggle to tell Her, to not tell Her. To die here in this frigid dream.”I will find you, cousin dear.” She says, promise in those hemitite eyes, “We have something to settle you and I.”I awake, as I always do, cold and afraid. My hands clammy on my flushed cheeks, my eyes pinned to the chair at the foot of my bed. It’s cushions are wet with the ice that’s melting in the heat of the rising sun.
——

Zero One Two Three FourThe morning sunlight piles up and against the window before spilling into the room and pushing back the night’s nightmares and whispers. I lay there and steady my breathing and try to ignore my heart as it leaps up against my ribs.

I listen to the nurse making her rounds with my eyes closed. The nurses here are all eerie reflections of each other. The same expressions, the same uniform and white sensible shoes. As she enters my room I open my eyes and watch her move about my room. “Hello!” she chirps at me, not making eye contact as she puts a tray of food on the small wheeled table and picks up my chart.

I say nothing. I have a voice like a gremlin grinding rocks and I’ve startled these interchangeable staffers more than once with something as simple and monstrous as a simple greeting.

Instead I found myself staring at her as she closed my chart, something was off, something was different.

She glanced up at me, a quick eye flick. Up. Down. and I saw it. Her irises were too large, too dark. I swallowed and gripped the bed before sitting up. Slowly I looked her over again. Her neat short hair was shining and clean but it seemed to almost glow… she seemed to almost glow.

It was like looking at a banked fire through thick frosted glass. If I didn’t know what I was looking at I would have missed it.

She looked up at me again and froze. We sat there, staring at each other for more than a few heartbeats. “I…I won’t tell…” I told her in as much of a whisper as I could manage.

She almost cringed then she flicked her too large, too dark eyes towards the doorway. They were beautiful actually. Wide spaced almond shaped eyes that tilted up at the edge… and they were the color of midnight. Scared, so scared… I could taste it. I shut my own eyes and put a hand over them to block out the sight of those massive, liquid, purple-black eyes.

“What…what are you?” I whispered again and she made a small sound of fear and woe.

I opened my eyes and watched her tremble. “I didn’t know anyone…could tell…” she said softly, looking close to tears. “I’ve… been hiding…it…as best I can.” she swallowed convulsively one hand to her throat. As she grew more upset, her glow increased, it was like watching a moon rise behind the clouds.

I reached out a hand to her, silently telling her to calm down and she swallowed again, nodding almost frantically.

“They’ll send me…” she looked at the door. “if I can’t control it…” she looked back at me. She was clutching the clipboard to her chest, trembling so much that she looked to be caught in a high wind.

None of us were safe. This girl, this thin glimmering woman wasn’t Nuian. She had the clear bright skin of someone native to Yein, but the magic was infecting her as well.

She looked at me again, suddenly seeming to come to a decision. “You will not tell.” she suddenly growled, her face narrowed down and seemed to pull away from her mouth. Leaving her suddenly frighteningly able to bite me with those shimmering white teeth. Her eyes, already impossibly large and dark got larger.

I made some noise, and found myself pressed against the headboard, trying to make space between us. “I will not tell.” I promised, hating the grinding fear in my voice.

She gasped and covered her mouth. “Oh, oh god. I’m so sorry.” she whimpered and her glow disappeared, her eyes seemed to regain some degree of normality and she fled the room.

I listened to her retreating foot falls, listened as the sound of her trying to escape her own change was swallowed by the all pervasive sounds of the hospital.

I sat there, too stunned to shudder for longer than I care to remember. People tell tales of Yein-that-once-was, stories filled with fluttering fey and rings of toadstools. They leave out stories of things that hunt, the creatures that feed. Those stories are not suitable for children and are best forgotten.

But something remembers.

The magic recalls.

I looked around the room slowly, planning my escape.

Pipe dreams, all. Where would I go? A scarred cripple with a crumbling voice. I swung my legs out of bed and eased to my feet, grabbing automatically for the IV drip, forgetting it’s absence. I was deemed fit enough to not need the saline diluted pain killers only a few nights ago. In all honesty I prefer it this way. The constant ache isn’t dulled, I’m followed by a yellow cloud of chattering pain.

Walk with me out of this tiny, stuffy room and into the immaculate hallway. My slow heavy tread isn’t too clumsy for you, is it? peer with me into the rooms of my peers, they look back with dark and shadowed eyes.

To the end of the hall we’ll walk, see the woman in her wheelchair who sits facing the sun. Her mouth hangs open and there’s a thin line of spittle connecting her chin to the cheap blue fabric of her dressing gown.

Someones pulled her hair back from her face and into a high, tight pony tail. Leaving stranded the tattoo of a beetle behind where her ear should have been.

See the man with his head hung low, inky black skin ashen and sallow in the sunlight. His cobalt blue eyes are covered with whit bandages that compete with the absolute white of his hair. He babbles and blathers, naming gods long dead and whispering of dragons.

This entire end of the hallway is littered with those of the Legion who are seen to be too mad, too injured, too far gone to be a threat.

As if this malady is a sickening.

I watched over them, like a pauper king. My own crippled kingdom.

There was a ripple in the air, a shivering and the air turned crisp as autumn. Through the wall, crept in something like a lightening bug and touched the person nearest to the window. He stiffened a moment and I could see, with a sense beyond seeing that he was growing warm with magic it filled him like a cup and spilled over. I tracked the magic as it filled each one of them up and overflowed.

The air took on the tang of distant thunder, somewhat coppery and thick. It sparkled and sparked off metal surfaces, danced along the glass.

The man with the inky black skin looked up, finally quitting his selfish chatter and turned to the woman with the tattoo. He touched her hand and the magic between them arched, like a current. She took a deep breath and focused on him, wiping one hand over her mouth and smiling.

And then, with a lightening strike quickness, it turned bad.

The air at the end of the hall turned heavy and sour and the woman cried out like a kitten, mewling in pain as the man dug his nails into the back of her hand.

They couldn’t control it, this wild magic that slept in their bones and whored out their bodies.

He gave a choked and garbled cry, throwing back his head and arching his back as the magic got all tangled up inside. I could see it, like violent blue threads turning red and thick…like vines around his thundering, struggling heart.

By the time the nurses and orderlies separated them from each other it had passed, there was nothing to suggest that he’d been on the verge of healing them both.

Instead panic ensued as they struggled to restart his heart.

To no avail, I knew… in a way that goes beyond knowing that his heart had been crushed. I turned away, ignoring the nurses as they asked me if I knew what had happened.

I made my slow and exact way back to my room, breathing hard and trembling.

For a moment there, when the magic arched between them there was an answering spark within me that wanted to tangle and twine. I made it to my bed and sat down heavily, wheezing like an old man and feeling the stiff muscles of my face pulling up into a twisted sneering cramp.

I bit my tongue to keep from screaming, covering my hands with my face and falling backwards onto my bed, writhing.

Flashes, in my mind, of killings and goddesses the walls looked white and featureless to my screwed up eyes. I could feel tears leaking across my cheeks as my face contorted, muscles folding up on themselves.

I lost the battle with silence and screamed. Strange, queer and highpitched like a rabbit as the fox breaks it’s back.

The air around me surged blue and filled with sparks. I heard answering screams and the sound of breaking glass, but could do nothing make no reaction as the pain increased pulling across my cheek, neck and shoulder down to my hand I could feel my fingers curling up into claws rigid enough to break. I was no longer screaming, I could hear myself making choked gagging noises, grunting like a boar then squealing frantically.

Suddenly it stopped… froze. The pain didn’t cease simply hung suspended like a wave ready to crash into the shore.

I struggled to open my eyes, the room was filled with silence and twinkling blue light. I tried to breathe as an image floated before my face, HER image floated before my eyes.

She was smiling.

“Ah, there you are Aaron.” she whispered.

The wave crashed down, bringing with it the burning, lashing, clawing pain.

And the sounds of my own terrified shrieks.

Finally it subsided, forced violently aside as the drugs they shot into my veins took hold and I fell thankfully into a stupor dotted with dreamless sleep.

—–

Zero- SinnermanHis scars.

I turned my head away gritting my teeth and steeling my reserves.

“Don’t. Don’t fucking pity me Zero.” He laughed, twisting his face into a mockery of my memory. “We’ve been through too much together, bro.”

I nodded once, tight.

His. Fucking. Scars.

“Max.” I looked at him. “I need a favor.”

How fair was this? She healed me, erased it all as if I was simply a blackboard. She smoothed me clean and kissed the wounds. In a moment like a dream.

“Aaron…” her whisper was like ice. Like fire.

“Just do this… do this for me.” All promise and no threat. The threat was implied.

She could bring it all back. Worse, gods. So much worse.

“Max.” I said again and swallowed, mouth dry. “I want you to help me. Kill the Queen.”

—–

Zero-Onward to Glory”I wasn’t expecting you,” she said with a smile and I swallowed, mouth suddenly dry and the weight of the gun dragging me down.

“I—” I stuttered for a second then grinned at her. Who was the monster here? “I like to keep people on thier toes.”

She laughed and rose, her frumpy roabe closing around the cruves and valleys of her delicious body. I forgot for a moment that she was just a mark, just a meal ticket. Just a ruse to hide my real purpose here.

“Yeah?” she asked and suddenly she was all fierce motion. I got the impression of a laugh then she was on me, kicking and punching with the tie to her robe around my throat like a furry garrotte. “So do I.”

—-