Peeper part three

Peeper part three

The angle of view began to change as I was propelled upwards and shown a birds-eye view of the city. Like a scab upon a wound of the earth it lay there dark and malignant, totally opposing the nature of the ground on which it was built.

         The pyramid  rose as a monolith  from the congested sprawl of buildings lapping at it’s feet like a dark sea, the clouds hiding it's  peak were grey and heavy, churned ready to release the cargo of sour rain they held.

         The view moved beyond the city, past its outskirts and into the surrounding wilderness. The lands greasy feel did not abate as I left the city behind, but continued unfurling beneath me, rolling away in barren countenance. Plains expanded before me revealing the same deadness of nature, as if coated with watered oil. Winds battered these exposed flat-lands unabated and bent the feeble vegetation that embraced the sterile ground.

         A sea appeared defining the boundaries of the diseased land. Waves topped with foamy scum assaulted the beach, each one thrown from the sea as if it were trying to rid itself of its own foul pollution. I was carried across that expanse of contaminated, putrid water never seeing a dilution in it's corruption until land once again passed below me.

         Burnt and crushed shells that were once homes flickered in and out of view and once in a while decimated cities were shown, each one filled with battered, subdued forms that shambled their way through the ruins.

         The flow of these scenes seemed endless, each smashed area just as pitiful as the one before. The empire the child showed me was full of nothing else than the joy of destruction, of horror piled upon horror until horror itself became monotonous.

         The sky brightened as I drifted ever away from that dark city. Eventually sunlight appeared casting it's rays down onto a countryside that was rapidly turning lush and green driving away the dank atmosphere that cloaked the world shown to me. There was no doubt in my heart, this was the last outpost of free and non-oppressed life on this world.

         The city that edged into view was one unparalleled than any other shown to me on my journey across this shattered world. Spires of incandescent hues filled the horizon stabbing into the surrounding atmosphere and injected vibrant tints of ghost like colours. This was a direct negative of the child's capital. All around were dwellings that flowed and merged into one another giving the impression that the whole city was constructed of a single structure. Every wall, every roof, every door sent out a shine  from mother-of-pearl surfaces that softly gleamed, not enough to blind the senses but just enough to lull them into a coloured fantasy of warmth and belonging.

         No segregation of property was visible, each building melded into the next, an indication of how these people lived with each other.

         I realised that every smashed city I had seen had once been like the one before me, until the crushing arm of the child's empire wiped away their glory and dragged them into its domain.

         Although the city was serene its population displayed an agitation that didn't match its milieu. Panic and disorder ruled the gentle streets, the long and graceful figures that filled the roadways moved with an urgency that didn't become them, clamouring and bunching together in groups throwing up ramshackle barricades that blocked the avenues. Some away from these groups were prostrate, clawing at the ground and praying to their gods to deliver them from the evil that approached their fair city, the evil whose very stench forewarned of it’s advanced.

         The horizon rippled in a mirage like wave, undulating in massed movement, and from the crest of that wave rose thick, inky smoke that wafted onto the bright buildings smothering their sheen.

         I was moved forward to glimpse the surge descending on the beauteous landscape. There was a middle ground between black wave and golden city that shimmered and moved as if it were an area of chaos and as I got closer to it the violence of that chaos became apparent. The wave rippled with currents and eddies which transported it from building to building swallowing each erection in a ceaseless progress.

         Looked at from a distance I expected the wave of black to be the army the child had shown me in the pyramid and it was, but not in the form I assumed. I came close enough to discern how one-sided the battle was. The black wall that advanced through the city was the child’s battalions melded and fused into one great mass. Like a giant midnight slug it rolled and crushed everything before it.

         The substance of the wave altered constantly. An armoured arm grew from the surface to strike one figure, stood in paralysed horror, splitting it's skull from the top to the bottom in one savage sweep. The body fell and was absorbed as the wave moved over it, a helmet appeared leering as it glanced around and then disappeared back in to the bulk. Everywhere upon its exterior, appendages of the child's armoured might arose and receded only to be replaced by another.

         The wave rolled on, nothing capable of halting its progress was produced by the small forms that resisted it. Some were armoured, equipped with swords and maces, some were peasants armed with nothing more than sticks and branches. Each attempt was swept under and devoured by the unstoppable wall. None were spared, a small company of resisters threw down their arms when they saw the futility of their actions and fled. The wall quivered and several buds formed on it's surface, each bud gathered shape and organised itself to create an ironclad titan that hunted down the runaways, dealt them death and returned to the welcoming mass to be absorbed once again.

         The buildings that were left in its wake were a mirror of all the ruins I had seen on my journey here. Oily, sooty deposits embraced the once gleaming appearance of the city and dulled it. The deposits had a corrosive quality to them, the very substance of the dwellings coated with the residue were warped and twisted into shapes that slowly bent to the ground as if bowing in submission to the power that had conquered them.

         The wave left not only passive buildings in its wake but also small forms of former citizens were spat from its rear side as it cruised onward towards the heart of the city. These forms were a pitiful resemblance of their former selves, covered in the same cloying sheen that clung to the city. They writhed and spun in the grease sodden earth desperately trying to rid themselves of the curse upon them, until the overwhelming influence of oppression crushed their resistance and subdued them into the forms I had seen shambling around the ruins of the other smashed cities.

         From my viewpoint I could see the wave encircling the city, closing upon it in a fist like squeeze. The circumference of what remained of that fair city became smaller as the child’s might closed in. A district of the city remained and then a number of streets, dwindling down to  one  road  which  vanished leaving just one solitary tower shining like a lighthouse in a sea of night. The black waves nibbled at its foundations, until that as well started to topple.

         A woman appeared at one of the open windows that adorned the tower. As it began to crumble into the engulfing ocean she let lose a cry that was tinged with so many emotions that it seemed to come from many mouths each accusing, pleading, lamenting, raging but most of all was the shout of defiance that filled the air. It was severed from reality as the tower was swallowed and nothing but a dark sheet covered the ground where once the proud city had stood.

         The black layer that blanketed the surrounding earth undulated and shimmered gently in the absolute quite that filled the atmosphere, no sound living or non-living broke that silence.

         There was a hiss, like the sound of dry skin rubbing together. A small mound began to form in the tar like substance of the conquering army, the hiss increased in proportion to the mounds growth. As it multiplied in height its base swelled to take the weight. The mound stretched into a small tower and kept on growing, swelling until it dwarfed anything that had existed in the city. Finally the towers expansion halted and it stood there as if it were a column that supported the very sky.

         The top of the tower was out of my sight and all I could see was the base and the shaft reaching high into the sky, my eyes followed that shaft and I tried to discern the pinnacle without success. I was too near the shaft, it angled upwards as far as I could perceive became a thin black, line against the sky reducing in perspective until its altitude made it vanish from view.

         Every now and again the shaft let out a creak of pressure as it tilted slightly in the wind. Its surface reminded me of new leather buffed and polished to a wet gleam, reflecting what little light there was to be had.

         The only thing that broke the silence was the creak of the shaft there was no other sound that dared to be heard.

         I started to move upwards slowly at first and then gathering  speed as my climb became higher. The details of the shaft were blurred with the speed of my ascent and although I wasn’t physically there my stomach rolled with vertigo nevertheless as the ground receded at an alarming rate.

         My rapid progress upwards became slower as I neared the top of the gigantic tower, I must have climbed at least a mile into the sky. At that height I could see the curve of the  planet on the horizon, away in the distance  the edge of the continent met the brackish sea, in every direction I looked I could see  only one colour, black.

         This world had been conquered by the child's supernatural force, every drop of freedom and variety had been squeezed mercilessly from the land with an efficiency that made the force seemingly unstoppable.

         My attention was drawn from the sights below me back to the tower, whose top was looming into sight. The crown of the tower was a flat platform about thirty meters in diameter, it resembled a pool of liquid tar, as if the tower had been hollowed out and filled with a glutinous fluid.

         The liquid was still, it mirrored the  sky above and gave off a faint smell of decay and age. The reflection of the clouds on its surface became deformed and  contorted as a movement underneath disturbed it's glass like finish.

         I flinched with shock as a spike of intense blue light shot from the calm platform and pierced the air around me sizzling its way heavenward leaving behind a tang of ozone.  Another bolt followed and the  pool  started  to whirl in an anti-clockwise direction. The black fluid that filled the tower began to slosh over the sides and run downwards, solidifying  in huge drips, until the tower reminded me of a giant candle.

         The pool was sucked down into a dimple, whirls of force marked its surface as it spun outwards throwing even more material over the edges. From the centre of the dimple a small dome came into sight and rose from the cloying pitch, the dome  was joined by other forms and it wasn’t until it was a quarter way out that I realised I was looking at a being emerge.

         The form separated itself from the substance of the pool and levitated two meters above, spots of the black goo dripped from its body and fell back into the pool with a greedy noise. The figure could be nobody else but the child. Floating in a lotus position he raised his bowed head to survey his completed empire that covered the planet, his planet, from pole to pole.

         Close up I could see I was wrong in naming him a child, he had the stature of a child but his face was ancient, marked  with lines of age that ravished his countenance, crumpling his features. He took a deep breath and let out a mournful sigh. His face collapsed in on itself and ran like liquid remoulding into the face of a young child, this was the face I saw when he was sat in the pyramid. No sooner had it renewed itself the face began to age, again the youthfulness  giving way to age. As wrinkles crept over his skin, he shuddered and again let out a sigh that was more like a sob filled with melancholy and longing. “Sad that they had to resist this wondrous state of being.”

         His voice contained the impression of so much age it was like hearing a corpse speak. "That they had to run and hide from what I brought them a release from hardship and toil, a release from the pain, the pain of life. They were unwise to reject what I had to offer, for they all acquire the same at the end of their time, the same reward, don't you think?"

         He turned to face me and for a moment I was struck dumb by the fact he was addressing me, I had been an unnoticed observer for the entire journey across this world and it shocked me that he could see me. He looked at me with yellow eyes that announced his age and wisdom, his eyebrow arched above one waiting for an answer.

         He sensed my indecision and interpreted my silence as being stupefied by an idea so new it stunned me. "Did you never honestly think of it that way, life being nothing but an interruption of the original state of chaos? Try to realise that we all come from chaos and then from chaos into this existence. Our foetal matter, our beginnings being constructed from the chaotic soup of atoms that surrounds us now." He swung his arm in a theatrical manner indicating the world around.

         Only then did I notice that my body had materialised around me, not only had my mind been transported to this world but my form had now returned and was stood upon the surface of the pool, leaving no sign of it struggling to bear my weight for all it's liquid appearance.

         I couldn’t bear the gaze of those ancient eyes, so I answered. "But surely that is the way of things, how life begins is one of the miracles of our being here in the first place, from that we grow and learn and become independent intelligences capable of understanding and moulding the world around us and  if..."

         He cut me off with an amused chortle and a wag of his ink black finger as if correcting a buffoon with a childlike and biased view of life. "How can you preach such ill-informed nonsense when..." he was halted in his dialogue as his face once more collapsed into an aged ruin and metamorphosed back into the child like visage, he drew a deep mournful breath and began again. "My apologies, a curse inflicted upon my by one of life’s stauncher supporters, but I did not hold it against him I released him just like I do all others," the first wrinkles were already building up on his face.

         "Back to your misdirected view of life, until you have experienced what lies on either side of it,  you cannot comprehend the scope of your ignorance. I understood this paradox when I became the being you see before you. Oh I was not always this way, I too actively upheld the banner of life, but in changing into what you see now, I  was made privy to secrets that were out of reach to ordinary beings, secrets that would strip your sanity away from you before you could fathom their depths. Life is not an existence, but an interruption from the glorious state of chaos we come from and then go back to.

         "You say that life is not existence, then what are we doing now. We interact, we love, we hate, and we grow old and pass our wisdom onto our offspring..." He cut me off again.

         "Wisdom? Wisdom of what." He spat at me, his calm worldly-wise expression replaced by one of irritation and anger. "Wise enough to torture, wise enough to oppress your fellow beings, wise enough to live through this life a savage race and not realise that what lies upon the other side is so much more. Perhaps you have wisdom mixed up with ignorance." He mocked.

         "How can you say we are a savage race when you have slaughtered most of this world’s population and shackled the rest to a non-life of misery?”

         "I did what I did out of compassion, compassion for my fellow sentient beings. I could not bear to see them suffer an existence that was unnatural to the one I had glimpsed on the other sides, one that was so great in scope that it made this one purgatorial in comparison and as for the ones that continue to abide I release them now."

         He unlocked his legs and stood on the liquid surface, his feet joined the tarry skin without sinking, it  gave the appearance that he and the tower were one. He bowed his head, a litany escaped his lips, repeated over and over again each verse growing in pitch until the sound of it threatened to burst my ear-drums.

         A faint flicker of pale blue light emanated from his chest and grew in luminance until it filled his torso. He grunted  with noticeable effort and pain as he began to manipulate the glow that filled his body towards his shoulder and down his arm. As the energy passed his forearm it started to break away from the restraining skin leaping in arcs and coming to rest in the palm of his out stretched hand.

         Standing on the edge of the tower he elevated his arm to face height, the last of the arcs had finished flowing into his palm and he held a sizzling ball no bigger than the length of one of his nails, he manipulated the globe between his thumb and forefinger.

         "Watch, see the wonder and majesty of the work of the other sides." He spoke in a whisper, frightened to raise his voice as if his volume would desecrate the act he was performing. "See it bring the life upon this world back into its rightful place, see it and understand that you’re so called comprehension and knowledge of what you call existence, is nothing more than ignorance of what lies beyond it."

         With a flick of his finger he propelled the ball from his hand and into the air, instead of plunging to the ground it sailed onwards to the horizon and disappeared in the far off cloudy haze.

         I turned and looked into his yellow eyes, his expression  was one of reverence, a priest who bestowed on this world its last rites. I opened my mouth to form a question and he reached out and placed a gentle hand upon my lips to silence me, pointing with his other hand towards the distance where the ball of energy had disappeared.

         The distant clouds began to fill with a shade of pastel blue deepening in hue by the second, reminding me of the colour changes in the distortion. They started to move and encircle the tower in a pincer movement, rolling through each side  of the sky onwards and onwards until the separate heads met  and mingled. The shade of the clouds became darker and darker until they reached the point of blackness.

         I stumbled slightly as a tremor ran up the tower disturbing the pool of fluid causing concentric ripples to run across its surface. The far off clouds resembled a massive wall of darkness for they stretched from the ground to the heavens in an uninterrupted sheet that blocked all light from behind them. The tower stabilised, feeling solid once more beneath my feet, but I could see that where the distant clouds met the ground there was a violent change taking place.

         The clouds had started to move in towards the tower on all sides, the ground in their wake was smashed and pulverised as if the weight of the clouds was too much for it too bear.

         "Look beyond what you perceive as destruction and you may catch a glimpse of the rapture that awaits us all at life’s end." With a benign smile floating on his lips he indicated the massive ruination that was happening at the base of the clouds.


         The sound of the annihilation reached me in almost physical form. Every boom and smash carried a sound wave that made me  waver on my feet with its intensity, an intensity that increased as the encircling cloud-wall squeezed towards us. The being was totally unaffected by the buffeting din. He stood there hands on hips, feet planted firmly on top of the tower and in seeing my preoccupation with my balance nodded once more in the direction of the clouds. I read the expression on his face as one of chagrin, scolding me for worrying about physical matters when there were secrets out there that transcended all corporeal understanding.

         I looked toward the clouds, the circle around the tower was decreasing rapidly and the destruction at the thunderheads  feet became more visible the nearer they came. Huge chunks of earth and rock were flung skyward disintegrating as they ascended into the black leaden backdrop.  Where clouds met the ground there was the red glow of lava, which would every now and  again  send a spitting plume across the surrounding landscape, dotting it in splattered amber flecks.

         My senses were filled with the scope of the destruction acted out before me. Every hill, field, forest and lake disappeared in a glut of nullification, leaving nothing but the ever-increasing presence of the black tempestuous clouds,  and although they were miles away they projected a sense of claustrophobia which ate away at my nerves.

         The being told me to look beyond the destruction to find the answer and though I tried as hard as I could to pierce the veil, enlightenment eluded me. A jolt of awareness ran through me as the being clamped a hand around my forearm, the clouds were suddenly made transparent to my sight. I left the tower and fell into the transparency.
         
         The beauty of what lay beyond, of what the being called  the other sides was numbing. It was not sight that relayed the aching rapture to me but my senses, which danced and leaped at the signals which were thrown at me, filling me with dumb-struck awe that propelled reality to one side and sucked me into its presence.

         All around me were scenes of human joy and happiness. As one scene faded another took its place, each one filled with a vibrant emotional energy that flowed into me with overpowering sensations causing my senses to tingle.

         Most of the scenes were simple in representation; a woman chasing a smiling child, two lovers caught up in one another's gaze, a young boy stood upon a hillside with his dog taking in the view, and as the scenes differed so did the emotions that radiated from them. These emotions were of the purest happiness and contention I've ever felt. The being was wrong all the emotions were human in quality, each displaying a something that could be experienced in life.

         As I became more absorbed into the environment I became aware of scenes of sadness and mourning  interspacing the joyous ones, slowly taking over until every scene was one of despair and longing. One scene that imprinted itself upon me was of a small child alone in a darkened room except for two bodies he was knelt in front of, his eyes were raised heavenward as he clutched and pawed the latent forms. His actions were not rewarded the bodies still lay inert and his raised eyes began to fill with tears. The emotion that came from this scene was almost too much to bear and my heart went out to the child left alone in the world.

         Slowly the theme of the scenes altered to ones of toil, then ones of battle and then ones of lovemaking. The rate at which the scenes were changing quickened and the flow of emotions speeded up to a cascade which blurred through me until they were too quick to register.

         I had to shake my head to try and clear it of all these  sensations that spun inside of me making me dizzy. I looked around, everywhere was filled with scenes, from horizon to horizon, from top to bottom, and my whole universe was a montage of human life, each scene having no prominence other the other.

         "As it should be, how can one emotion be more important than another." A voice was directed in my ear and I spun around to find no one, the voice echoed in my head  as if I were listening to a noise just out of my audible reach.

         I was suspended in a cosmos of scenes and feelings. For a moment I was sure that the voice was the sound of my own madness, my mind having snapped after absorbing too much information for it to cope with.

         In front of me the scenes melded to form a mouth whose lips were a contortion of the pictures before me, each scene moved and bent as the mouth composed its words. I got the distinct feeling that this mouth was another intelligence, one totally unconnected with the black child.
         The mouth's action distorted the fabric of the space in front of me, figures that crossed or moved upon the lips were contorted to produce a three dimensional representation that  worked like the real thing.

         I had built up within me a wall of resistance to the past few hours’ events, a wall that told me that the happenings  were not really authentic, that they were just a fantasy I was exposed  to. This feeling had been at the back of my mind all way through my adventure -if you could call it that- it was that I just had not enough time to reflect upon the circumstances of my experience to realise this. The mouth's clear and calm voice pierced that wall and caused it to collapse and crumble to the ground letting reality pour into the protected part of my mind.
         
"We do not wish to cause you any distress, but time is short and we must move quickly if we are to stop Ismar moving onto another world, your world." As the mouth spoke all the figures that made up its image turned to face me and mimed its words.

         In the unreality of my surroundings I found my voice. "Who are you? Where...?"

         "We do not have the time for explanations." The mouth halted mid-sentence as if debating inwardly and I believe that the next line was directed more to itself than to me. "Very well we shall explain. It is our goal to help the human race evolve into something  more than it can ever know at this moment in time, as it flows  down the river of awareness humanity will realise that there is so much more for it to attain, more than it is biologically capable of. The body will restrain the mind's progress, we will contact them at that moment and show them the way forward.

         "We have attained this state of being but it took us centuries of hardship and toil for us to succeed. The scenes you see before you are a device that will help speed up that progress, easing humanity towards its higher goal, a higher goal that all intelligent races must reach in the end. We were the first race to attain this goal therefore we act as guides to the coming races.

         "However there are those amongst us who feel that there should only be one race in such a position, one race to control  and manipulate the rest of the lower states. Unfortunately for all our development we have not rid ourselves of our negative emotions and there is a moral faction of us who would like to play god. Although they are only a minute proportion of our species they have access to power which as you have seen can destroy worlds. By working through Ismar they intend to wipe out all life before it can evolve to its destiny. Ismar believes he is helping life by destroying it and projecting it to the other sides.”

         "How do  I know if he is not telling the truth?" It was a question I had to ask, Ismar was  sincere in his belief of his chosen role.

         "Ismar has been manipulated ever since he entered this  realm. He was the last of his race to cross over into our dimension, the child you saw in the scene that rendered your heart.” I remembered the child's face held  heavenward as he tried to resurrect the two dead forms before him, "That was Ismar, he  held on to his physical form as we transformed his race only letting go just as we closed the door. We were unaware of his presence which allowed the faction to snatch him without our knowledge and tutor him in their dark ways feeding him misinformation and corrupting his soul to believe their version of events.

         "The two forms before him were his parents who had died  before they had the chance to cross over, so you can imagine the state of mind he was in when the faction took hold upon him. Weak and disillusioned with life they were able to bend him to their will and make him believe he was doing what he wanted to do, relive the suffering of the masses of living creatures that fill your universe.

         "He has worked his way through his existence destroying every scent of life he finds in the false belief that he is helping the creatures he finds to transcend into their rightful place, when in fact he is stopping their only hope of progressing onwards."

         "Why don't you stop him? Surely with all your powers you wouldn't even have to blink to rid yourselves of him?" I asked.

         The mouth pursed itself as though swallowing a sour taste. "As we have said before we are physically transcended from your universe unable to shape events there. Although the faction is in the same conundrum as we are, they can use Ismar as a physical vessel, through which they can work their deeds, we were helpless to stop them until now. Ismar believes he can bend you to his will and make you his guardian to support his emergence onto your world, a procedure he has used well on the many worlds he has destroyed.

         "We have only now discovered how to break this cycle and contact his future guardian,” the mouth's speech had become speeded and jumbled together in the last few sentences as if Trying to cram in information before we departed. "You must be our vessel and stop Ismar before he succeeds in his goal."

         The surroundings became dim and blurred and I could feel a pull upon me, dragging me back into reality, Ismar's act on the world must be drawing to a close.

         "How do I stop him?" I cried to the mouth whose outline was fragmenting rapidly.

         "Your power matches his stroke for stroke, you must find a chink in his armour through which you can disable him before he can transfer to your world." With that they were gone leaving me sailing back to my place on the tower with terror in my heart and the burden of my world’s future in my hands.

         I was spat from that dimension of sensation into one of turmoil, as I formed on the tower once more, my senses were battered by the screeches of a dying world. The air which whipped and thrashed against my face was the first thing I was aware of, it was grit laden, forcing it’s way into my eyes half blinding me and clogging my throat with every breath.

         The dust storm cleared every now and again into transparent gaps which revealed the wall only mile away from the tower, looming over it blocking all the light apart from  the small illumination, which came from the disc of daylight directly above me.

         The sense of claustrophobia caused by the encircling presence of that massive enclosure was driven away by the incredible reverberations that accompanied the rending of the planet I was on. The deafening noises echoed in the bones of my head, each sound was a wave of pressure that crashed against me causing me to stagger under its influence.

         Ismar was  at one end of the platform with him was a form I could never forget, the distortion, his gateway to my world. As he spoke his age old voice rang clear in my ears as though he were stood next to me.

         "Quite a revealing experience isn't it," I couldn't see  Ismar's face through the storm, but the timbre and tone of his voice suggested that he expected me to have gone through the same experience as he and his many guardians were exposed to. "The beauty and clarity of the other sides lays bare life and shows it for what it really is a rift in the continuation of our real existence- life's a mistake, a mistake I'm here to halt." He reached out his hand and slowly unfurled his fingers, "Come join me in our crusade to rid our universe from this curse called life. Be my guardian upon your world and let me release your people from their burden."

         I drew closer towards him until we were face to face and even then I had to scream just to hear myself. "You've been deceived Ismar, everything you've been told is nothing but a falsehood, planted in you by a faction of..."

         Ismar's outstretched palm clenched into a fist and a bolt of blue energy flashed from it striking my chest and flinging me to the floor, his serene face changed into a contorted mask of hate.

         "Lies." he put his foot on my injured chest, pinned me to the tarry substance of the tower and pushed his face towards me so it was inches from mine. "But I knew of this, they warned me this would happen one day, that my guardian would be polluted by the falsifications of those who seek to stop me, those weak pitiful souls who preach that life is a steeping stone to a higher place."

         Ismar was ready from when he first set out on his quest for this moment. How many times had he chosen his guardian unsure in the fact that they may betray his trust. Each time this event occurred he must have been guarded and poised to crush any resistance as and when he met it.

         The contact of his foot on my chest brought a great lancing  pain that immobilised me. My fear of my own demise was mingled with that of fear of failing my world and dooming it to a fate such as this one below me.

         I reached out and grasped his ankle to relive some of the pressure on my chest, but try as I might I could not lift his foot in the slightest. A manic grin split his face as he saw my struggles.

         "What did they show you to turn your mind guardian? What did they offer you in reward for your betrayal? You are a great disappointment to me, my first guardian to be tainted by their lies."

         My voice would only come out as a rasp, I was unable to drag in any air to fill my aching lungs.

         "Don't try to justify yourself, you cannot expect me to believe any of their lies you care to regurgitate to me, so  save your breath. I should take a thousand years to slay you making each moment an eternity, but as you can see I'm rather pressed for time." He indicated the wall with his free hand, it was no more than a quarter of a mile away.

         My fear was turning into full blown panic as I tried desperately to free myself. Ismar was going to kill me and take the chance of arriving upon my world without a guardian. My vision began to spin as I dug my nails into his leg for one final effort. I failed and slumped back. Ismar's face still carried the manic, mocking grin, a mocking grin that I imagined he would wear when he wiped my world free of all trace of life, it was something I could not let happen.

         I clasped both my hands around Ismar's leg and heaved, it still remained planted firmly upon my chest. He brought his fist which crackled with blue energy slowly towards my face and I heaved again, my vision blurred and the pressure on my chest disappeared. I looked up, Ismar was laying motionless half way over the edge of the tower with his upper torso hanging in mid-air.

         A small residue of lambent blue light flickered along my arms and fizzled out. My whole arms from wrist to shoulder tingled with a fuzzy sensation that numbed the limbs in a cold sheath . The power the entities had implanted in me had saved  my life, the key to its use seemed to be emotionally linked.

         I crawled to my knees and stayed there for a moment trying to suck air into my labouring lungs, black spots swam before my eyes and my head pounded with the lack of oxygen. I could feel the crushing presence of the giant contracting wall as I knelt  there holding onto consciousness, its closeness was  a reminder of the urgency of my task.
         
Ismar was still prostrate as I dragged myself to my feet and stood there in the howling hurricane that accompanied the destruction of what was left of this world. I hesitated, unsure what to do next. I was no killer, but I did not have any other idea of how to stop Ismar.

         The distortion caught my eye. It hovered at one side of the tower, half a metre from the edge and glowed with  colours whose hues were indescribable. From this side of the gateway I could see a warped view of Bedmore's bedroom and of Bedmore himself.

         I was wrong in my original assumption that the distortion was a gateway from my world to this, it looked as  though it only worked one way. The parts of Bedmore that were in the distortion were being dissolved and absorbed into the fabric of its body. From my point of view it looked as though Bedmore's legs, lower torso and one of his arms were embedded in the meat of the distortion. Each limb was dissolving and dispersing with the motion of a paint laden brush swirled in water.

         I toyed with the notion of crossing through the distortion  and leaving Ismar on the tower to await destruction from the ever decreasing wall, but there was no guarantee that he would stay unconscious for that  long. The entities on the other side told me that our power was evenly matched, but there was no doubt in my mind that Ismar would win any physical battle through his experience of the use of that power. All my inwardly debating came to a stop, Ismar had come around and was at the edge of the tower shaking his head as if to clear it .

         His act of dazed confusion came to an end as he quickly sat upright and flung a crackling shaft of azure energy at me. In reflex I raised my arms and crossed them over my upper body in a gesture of self protection and braced myself for the pain to come. It did not arrive.

         Opening my eyes and looking through my interlaced arms I saw Ismar through a haze of blue, his ancient, ruined face twisted in a grimace of determination. In my act of preservation  I had inadvertently thrown up a screen of the same energy that Ismar possessed. My first use of the power was a short blast that was over within the second, but the act of trying to sustain a constant flow was already weakening me.

         "You will soon fail guardian, your experience and stamina  is so much less than mine." Ismar grunted through his effort to punch his way through my shield, his strained face and twisted cords upon his neck told me that he too was suffering under the strain.

         He was right in the respect that he would overcome me, the exertion began to burn into the fibre of my resolution. My breath became a series of pained sobs for air as I tried to ignore the pain in my damaged chest.

         Flares of spent energy stabbed into the air around me, each flash seemed to get nearer to me. The heat from their dissipation burnt closer to my skin by the second. Having nowhere to escape the barrage I took the only option left to me and leapt into him, my plan being to physically disable him.

         Two opposite sources of such immense power could not occupy the same space and as I crashed into Ismar the twin coruscations  of sky-coloured energy melded and flowed together sheathing us in a cocoon of sizzling, spitting force.

         Although small in stature Ismar was deceptively strong for his size and we were evenly matched as we rolled around the tarry surface. The cocoon that encased us bit into the exterior of the tower sending up great plumes of thick, blinding smog that became so dense it eventually blocked out the sight of Ismar.

         Sight denied me I could but only rely on my sense of touch as I clawed my fingers into Ismar's throat, copying the hold he had on me and squeezed with all my might.

         Through the sound of Ismar's choking I heard a sound familiar to me. My father’s voice sailed towards me carrying the words of a long lost conversation which took place when I was a child. In shock I relaxed my grip upon Ismar.

         The smog which surrounded us parted and revealed a scene showing my father looking as he did twenty years ago, every detail vivid and lucid. I remembered the scene, it happened when I was a teenager, a conversation that to me was an indication of being finally accepted as an adult in my fathers eyes. We were talking about what my career would be when I left school.

         The vision cleared and was replaced by another, this one displaying Ismar as a child in conversation with another male. Although I could not make sense of the language which they were communicating with, I sensed the emotional feeling from Ismar  -which must have been transferred by our link in the sheath  of blue energy. It was the same as my reaction to my memory, a sense of being accepted as an equal.

         I sensed the entities hand in this play of memories, perhaps they were showing me a way of how to defeat Ismar. This thought  barely registered in my mind, the scenes that were being revealed before me took up most of my awareness.

         Past memories flowed between the two of us, each one  depicting an important step in our lives and our development  as adults. For me most of these memories produced feelings  of happiness and nostalgia, but the emotions emanating from Ismar were tinged with an overpowering sense of sadness and loss for a life with his parents that were ripped away from him.

         My feelings of happy reminiscence were crushed by the sight of my father upon his deathbed, his face etched with  the pain that his cancer was causing him. I was just turned  twenty-five the year he died and I can remember receiving the  news that he was dying with a shock of denial.

         I had a four hour journey to get to his bedside and I was disturbed by his appearance as I entered the room where he lay. His metamorphosis from the healthy father I once had into this pain wracked almost skeletal creature, wrapped in blankets before me, rocked  me to the core. I had not experienced death, or the coming  of death so close before and the realisation that anyone I knew and loved could be taken away in death's strong grip brought a new fear welling up inside me.

         I was lucky enough to have made it to his bedside before he passed away. I sat next to him trying to make conversation with him but he was delirious and did not recognise me, often he mistook me for his brother who had died at least a decade before. There was one moment of clarity before he died and I took that opportunity to tell him how much he would be missed, two hours later he was gone.

         That moment in time evaporated and was replaced by one from Ismar's past, one which corresponded with my last vision, the parting from his parents.

         

End of part three