[MV] The Super Wizard From Space #28: To Hell And Hell And Hell And Hell And Hell And Back Again, Part 4

[Wil Alambre]

A slow, thick consciousness leaked in as the Super Wizard From Space
opened his eyes. His thoughts were dulled, like he'd slept for far too
long. The ground he was lying on was rough and cold. The air was full of
gritty soot, making for hard, scratching breaths. There was a hanging
darkness that he could only dispel by allowing some of his captured
starlight to leak from his skin.

He was at the base of a massive stone wall, one that stretched higher
than his light reached. It was made of a dull grey granite, the same
sort he was lying on. He leaned on it for support as he stood, his legs
having almost forgotten how to support his weight. At the edge of his
vision he saw a bumpy change in the ground, the smoothness becoming a
lane of cobblestones. And where the cobblestones met the wall, a massive
gate of petrified wood.

There was something familiar about this place. That road. That gate.
Looking up, he saw the wall fade into dark shadows, some of which jutted
out chaotically, forming ancient towers or clumsy ramparts. But there
wasn't a sound. Just an everlasting quiet.

There must be someone. A fortress like this doesn't just appear, a road
doesn't lay itself. Hand sliding against the wall, he moved toward the
gate, intent on finding an entrance. Anything. His bubble of light eked
along with him, showing only more and more stone.

As he reached the gate, he saw an oddly shaped outcropping of rock in
the middle of the cobblestone road. It looked worn, eroded by wind and
time, but had a black charred patch at the top of it, like someone had
once built a campfire. And just beyond it, further down the road, a
large boulder with a fat hump on the top.

A flash of remembrance came to him. Then a sense of dread. A deep
breathe, then he released out a short wash of starlight, a wave of
brightness that swept over his surroundings.

He was in Double-Hell. The fortress wall and the massive gates and the
cobblestone road, this was the entrance to Double-Dis. The charred rock
was the Devil. The boulder was the car that had brought them here.

It had all become stone. And by their grounded, worn shapes, it has been
that way for a very long time.

The splash of light faded into the distance and the darkness swallowed
up the granite landscape, a thought struck him. Sharply. A sudden,
dirty, outside thought.

"Latterly, you vivify."

The Secret Living Language, nowhere and everywhere,

"Ingenuously."

"I doubt that," the wizard muttered. He had only his small bubble of
light again, and the blackness beyond seemed almost liquid now, an oily
slippery notion hiding in the dark. Everything else, everyone else, now
stone. As far as he could go, anything he could find, would be lifeless
motionless stone. All of Double-Hell and its twice damned citizens,
victims of

"Megadusa."

The wizard ground his teeth and waved a hand futilely at the darkness.
"Stay out of my head." He spat out. An entire universe transformed to
rock, and the only survivor was

"An idea. A concept. Bio-philosophy."

with had no form, no substance. Nothing material that could be
transformed. Not like the cab driver, Ron, who was

"Stone."

and the howling screeching creatures on the wall

"Stone."

"But not me," the wizard mumbled, trying to control his stream of
thought. "She left me be because"

"The significance apparently eluded her... or was *extruded* from her, "
was the answer, dosed heavily in satisfaction. "These exponentially
infernal universes are not fabricated of matter and energy, incongruous
to our own. The deeper our peregrination, the more transcendental they
become. The less material their existences are composed of. Abstruse
realities fashioned of philosophies and the hypothetical, where
objective things like you became recondite and undefinable. And where
ontology like myself are concrete, abundant, and plentiful."

"You did this," the wizard said, already knowing the answer.

"I could not countervail... an entire conceptual universe and I was so
famished," it replied unapologetically. It swelled with pride, so much
so that the wizard felt bombarded by the sensation. It was such a larger
idea now. It was so much stronger. "I *feasted*! I *gorged*! On the
unsubstance of this macrocosm, and let Megadusa petrify the corpus
delicti.

"But now we are obligated to perdure. Our companions and our conveyance
were mineralized before I commoved Megadusa's ratiocinations. Her
eradication will liberate them from their fictile restraints and evince
the consuetude into Triple-Hell."

It was right. Of course it was. Naturally, it made sense. Without the
others, they could not move on.

The wizard turned to face the massive gate. He placed both hands on the
petrified wood. It felt cold to his palms. Cold and empty. The hellish
gorgon within only needed a glance to do the same to him.

"You shouldn't speculate so inapplicably," was the hissing thought as
the Language seeped inside through the pores and cracks. "Once you are
intramural, you'll descry that her peculiarity have become self
deleterious. You'll encounter no adversity."

The wizard gritted his teeth, the skittering escaping thought fanning a
hot anger in him. He let the anger well up, a bright burning that he
pushed out through his palms. His hands lit, a crackling solar
electricity jumping from his atoms to the petrified wood. The angry glow
spread along the entire massive gate, spitting sparks and yellow blots
from the pores and gaps as it expanded. He waited for the critical
point, then bent his elbows and shoved.

A crash of fusion jumped from him into the burning atoms of the gate and
detonated. Slabs of old stone the size of hills burst away in violent
shattering collisions. He marched inside the fortress city while it fell
apart around him. Deafening booms of boulders crashing against boulders,
of mountains slamming against mountains, towers toppling against towers.

"Gorgon! Where are you?" he yelled into the darkness, overtop the
rumbling remains of Double-Dis collapsing apart around him.

He marched through the dark city following a random inclination that he
suspected wasn't very random at all. Any form the hellish city used to
have had been reduced to jagged piles of rocks, all sharp corners and
crumbling pieces and lifeless inanimate greys. Even the water in the
rivers had been turned to a fine powder, now scattered by shards of
broken towers or fallen bridges. But he unerringly found a direction
that felt right.

Down one twisted alley he saw a lone figure, facing a wall. The wizard
immediately recognized the tall thin form, the dirty toga-like dress
hanging off slumped shoulders, the writhing, lazy mass where flowing
locks of hair should be.

She was beating her head against the wall rhythmically. A shiny
stickiness was almost visible where her forehead and the granite met,
making a wet *thud* when she connected.

He approached slowly, trying not to make a sound. Ready to look away
should she turn to face him. But every time she seemed to consider it, a
glazed, depressed expression seemed to crossed her face as a glazed,
depressed thought crossed her mind, and she beat her head against the
wall again.

"I know what's happened. I know this..." the fury in the wizard's voice
wavered a bit, "...this all wasn't your doing. Not entirely. But you
*did* do it."

"Tell me, if you can, where your freedom lies?" she said in an
frustrated hiss. She caressed the stone wall, a gentle loving motion a
mother would use upon the cheek of her child. "These streets are now
fields that will never die."

"You were part of this. You are complicit. There must be justice.
Especially here." Orange fire sparked from his knuckles as he curled his
hand. The flickers curved around and back on themselves, a loop of
atomic flame that he rolled in his loosening grasp.

She gave a slow nod that rested her head against the wall. "Deliver me
from the reasons why," she said with a desperate whisper. "I'll never
cry. I'd rather fly."

The Super Wizard From Space snapped out his arm at her and the sparks
exploded into a solar flare, whipping out in a curving fusion burst that
vaporized everything in its path. The walls of the building burned like
paper, the cobblestones melted into red liquid rock, the atmosphere
caught fire. A thunderous noise blasted throughout the remains of the
city a second later as the air collapsed in the vacuum, the noise alone
cracking granite for miles.

Megadusa's shape turned to ash instantly. Where she stood, the fiery
magma of the road fell upon itself, burning through the bedrock of
reality itself. A hole opened, a falling stream of red hot remains,
pouring down into a lower universe. The ashes fell under their own
weight and floated down the lava stream into the pit.

He almost choked against an overwhelming urge to laugh, a sick amusement
that washed over him but wasn't his own. "Ha ha! Excessive and
unembellished! We could be exceedingly efficacious collaborators, you
and I!" exclaimed the Language as it abandoned the last flecks of
carbon.

He wasn't certain how long he watched the scene. He just tried to focus
on the hole and his own thoughts, tried to push out everything else. He
only came out of it when he felt a hand on his shoulder. A red hand.

"It shouldn't been this way," the Devil said. "It was scripted a
different way, but when the time came, we didn't act." The wizard turned
his head to look at the Devil and saw an expression of angry
understanding on the thin face. Behind him the cab was waiting, the
engine rumbling deeply.

"We can make this right. We have to keep moving forward. We have to see
this through."

.........................................

AUTHOR'S NOTES

The original intention was to release an issue every week, but around
December, I fell off the wagon (so to speak). This is my attempt to
get back into the habit. I have the disadvantage of having lost all
my previous momentum and having been smack in the middle of a story
arc, so I beg your indulgence.

This issue was about a third done months ago, with the wizard and
Megadusa in a perseusian battle, but when I finally picked up the
pen (keyboard?) again, I started from scratch. Above, I try to
acknowledge the gap and try to work it in. It gave me a better
chance to make the Language a more terrible adversary.

.........................................
Wil Alambre, follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wilalambre