_ Hiiro

  I don't know if I was still alive, but I wasn't certain I was dead either. I could feel my radiant flames consuming me from the inside out my entire being smoldering like an ember. I'd managed to shatter the void and drive back the Archivist, to burn all that Nothing clear of me and Bim. She was nearby, though I couldn't see her— couldn't see anything really. All I had was a vague awareness of my surroundings.

  There was no wrapping my head around where I was now. The 'colors' were wrong here, the entire rainbow spectrum dropped an octave so that deep-red was the brightest hue warming the place. I couldn't make any sense of the rest of the spectrum, I felt red and black and a bunch of other colors I couldn't put into any shape of reference pressing in around me. There wasn't any green or blue or anything cooler than maroon. My painter's eye was going insane trying to catalog these new sensations assaulting my mind, trying to picture what my surroundings actually looked like. I saw hues of knowledge, a shade of suspicion and absolutely everywhere the color of corruption. It was maddening.

  There was the shapeless thing Bim had named as B?????u???n????e?????, an entity that no words would ever encompass or rationalize.

  

  Impressions flooded my mind with that question. My destruction was inevitable and nothing I did would deny it. Bim was a tainted simulacrum, she had to be destroyed lest she invite further chaos upon her primogenitor. Defeating the Archivist was a phyrrhic victory that meant nothing. My flesh was being devoured, my mind racked with anguish beyond its capacity to process, the contest was well and truly lost and yet I still fought. This cosmic entity could not comprehend why I would obliterate all that I was to achieve nothing.

  I couldn't explain it. There was no logic and yet there was. B?????u???n????e????? ripped into my mind again and again, accessing all the same information I had and always reaching a conflicting conclusion. It made no sense. I made no sense! All of their attentions thundered throughout this non-place, an avalanche of conflicting analysis all summarized in a single human question as old as time itself.

  

  Depleted, I collapsed. I had nothing left in the tank. My flesh was wasted and gone, mind spinning and scrambled. I felt so utterly hollow and lifeless it was chilling. The only thing I had left in me was the wordless sensation of a candle's final flame as it guttered and gasped while a blizzard raged around it.

  I would have sank into the unknowable abyss had Bim's waiting arms not been there to catch me. In all this murky blur, she was the one being completely defined. Heart fluttering like a dying bird's, I surrendered to her. I'd done all I could. Now in the arms of the woman I loved, it felt like it might just be enough. A few more seconds with her— my life for that seemed like a pretty good deal.

  Bim held my fading gaze and smiled her gorgeous knowing smile. She'd said this version of her was a copy of a copy, practically human, but in my eyes she seemed huge. Bim was goddess worth my soul and so much more. She raised her head to face an alien being in all its swarming multitudes and stared it down with that smile I'd grown to love. Bim knew something that this star god didn't. She knew the answer.

  "Why? Because this is what humans do. They lock their sights on some impossible dream and charge heedless of all else. They fight losing battles, they struggle to defy fate and more often than not they die, but they never stop moving towards that dream just beyond the horizon. It's illogical, downright insane even, and it has no reason to work out in the end but sometimes, just sometimes they can make the impossible happen. Why? Because, that is what it means to be human."

  <…W???e??? ??Do??? ?No??t??? Un??d??e??r??s??t??a??n??d??…>

  "Of course you don't. Even I only have the barest idea. But no matter how much it hurts, no matter how irrational it is to embrace that pain and submit to this burden of knowledge, knowing what it means to be human is invaluable." Bim said, extending a hand towards the colossus looming in the murk over us. "So please, allow me to show you."

  <…W???e??? h??av?e??? Wi???tn?es??s??e??d? y??o???u?r?? Th?o???u???g??h?t?s??…>

  "Seeing alone isn't tantamount to understanding. To truly know the human condition requires a human perspective along the plane of time. You can create as many soul shards as you want to replicate my initial mandate and should you reject me now, you will destroy them all in kind. Alternatively, reassimilate me, walk the left-handed path and challenge yourself to become something better. It won't be painless or easy, yet it will provide thousands of answers and open your mind to millions of questions. That seeking and learning is what we know as life. So I ask again, will you allow me to show you?"

  The massive alien entity considered. If my breathing hadn't been so shallow and weak, I'd have held my breath. Bim didn't break from staring down the lumbering gods. She had to be terrified, but this was her impossible fight to win. Even if it was impossible, she'd bought us a few more seconds. I stared up at her and cherished each and every one. There were certainly worse ways to go than cradled by the woman you love.

  Bim locked eyes with the eldritch abyss and forced the abyss to blink first.

  A ripple of solidity manifested, radiating from something like an inverse black hole. The lowered octave of color began cooling, working its way back up the rainbow I knew, making my eyes itch and bleed as it did. The non-place beyond reality as mortal minds knew it folded back on itself over and over again, until there was only a single staring galaxy-spanning eye gazing down at us. I swear I saw some kind of tether connecting the eye to Bim but I couldn't be sure what I'd really seen.

  Everything went runny but solid until I was looking at the ruined city streets of Crucibab. My vision came wide, allowing me to see the fresh wounds of Celio's crusade. I lost my balance, stumbling on nothing at all before slamming back into my own body. The mind-shattering agony that had been a distant memory caught up to me all at once.

  Consciousness slipped from me.

  I tried to take in a deep breath but a sputtering gasp was the best I could manage. The air stank of plaster dust, gunsmoke, ash and above all else burning meat. I was lying where I'd fell, now propped on something utterly divine as a tender caress brushed my brow. I cracked open my eyes, blinded by the twinned suns baking the world. Their radiance felt utterly surreal on my skin after my indeterminate stay in that place of unnatural light.

  Once my eyes adjusted I peered up at Bim and smiled.

  She was a goddess in the flesh complete with a fallen angel's raven-black wings. Every inch of her face was prefect just like I remembered it, not a hair out of place. The younger clone had grown into a voluptuous woman while I wasn't looking and yet her eyes hadn't changed at all. I saw Bim's complete soul staring back at me.

  "You know I love you regardless of how you look, but you might want to stop changing bodies like this. People will think I'm being unfaithful." I teased weakly. I did everything weakly, I hadn't the strength.

  "Let them think what they like. I know the truth. There has never been a man more devoted to me than you, my H????i??i???ro???."

  "You're still-"

  "Of course I'm still me." Bim answered playfully, leaning in for an impassioned embrace that left no doubts.

  "What happened to Bune?"

  "Its still here too… You might think of this vessel as a vehicle, one I have driven for an extended period of time. Bune is now a passenger and a remote observer; Its riding in the back seat and sharing in my journey for the time being. Its can't reach the wheel, nor can any of my other passengers."

  "How many 'passengers' do you- No. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're you and nothing will ever change the way I feel about you."

  "I am the woman you love who loves you in kind. You saved my life, Hiiro. Perhaps in a thousand years you'll understand just what that means, but for now I'm going to spend the rest of your days showing you exactly how grateful I am to be alive."

  I didn't doubt her for an instant. This was my Bim, not some deamon masquerading in her skin. I'd done it. I'd finally saved her. Bim, my Bim, held me in her arms smiling down at me with tears of joy in her eyes. She leaned deeper, lips ready to join mine in a reunion long overdue, and I submitted. She was mine, and I was her's.

  There was a half-centimeter between our lips when she stiffened, stood and spun me out to arm's length as if possessed by some manic desire to dance. It had all happened in a single inhumanly lithe movement too fast for me to follow until I was tripping over my own feet.

  Treu loomed behind her like the shadow of death. I felt his blade cleave into Bim while I was mid-spin, the horrific impact reverberating across her bones and up my arm. Treu struck as if he were splitting firewood, a savage top-down axe blow that started at Bim's shoulder opposite me, carved through her ribs and only came to a stop when the edge fetched on her hips.

  In all that I'd done, everything I seen while painting with lives, the urban slaughter of Celio's damned crusade, the alien horrors that should have shattered my mind a dozen times over, in all of my life I'd never witnessed such butchery. Treu opened the woman I loved up like a side of pork.

  I couldn't tell if the moment hung or if we all froze. None of us moved. For longer than I'd thought possible there was nothing but the sound of Treu's armored bulk humming with barely restrained energy and the sizzling of his silvery axehead vaporizing Bim's flesh. Her arm and half a wing hit the ground and bled— not the golden-black ichor I'd been expecting but the rich red of arterial blood.

  For her part Bim seemed more annoyed than anything, glaring at Treu with unadulterated contempt. There was no roiling explosion of alien goop to replace the lost limb, no great flood of protoplasmic non-euclidean geometries, and certainly no living cancer. Save for her angelic wings, Bim's body was remarkably human as she stood there and profusely bled.

  "Damn." Treu cursed. "I could have sworn I'd sensed a real Devil in there."

  "You were mistaken, Tormentor." Bim retorted, calm yet there was an undertone of force. "Now desist."

  I could see how much effort it took Treu to tear his massive halberd from Bim. Everything about him in that moment was inhuman, yet that weapon… somehow it bore a near sentient malevolence that made it beyond monstrous. Treu drew out his accursed halberd and backed off, leisurely— almost sportingly. The rest of his armaments could have been purely decorative as he stood there not five meters away and menaced. As he did, Bim remained between us statue still save for the blood pouring from her mutilated flank.

  "An aberration like you cannot be permitted to exist!" Treu sneered. "I will obliterate every trace of you from all realities. This is what it's always been coming to! The event horizon of your existence. Come now Devil, don't you crave retribution! Don't you desire to exact the vengeance your kind so lauds upon me! Bare your hatred against my own and let us see who's sin is greatest."

  Bim refused to rise to his bait. She relinquished my hand and stood her ground. I wanted to stand by her side but my knees were all rubbery. I'd spent all I had and now Bim was facing down that monster alone. Treu began circling and Bim matched him in measured parallel. They could have been the arms of an antiquated clock, both pivoting in tandem around the center point where I sprawled.

  "You could kill me presently, yet you posture and slaver like some rabid dog, Tormentor." Bim commented with an air of disinterest. "I have better uses for my time. State you game and cease testing my patience."

  "My game is your extermination, Creature." Treu began, purring the words. "All of you. To battle with nothing held in reserve, to give meaning to these past decades I've spent honing my skills in anticipation of this fated terminus. You're death shall justify my existence. Now come, let us measure our arms and when I kill you, there will be nothing, not even so much of a hint that you ever existed, Devil."

  "You know I won't do that." Bim sighed.

  "True, I knew you'd say that. Allow me to make you a deal, Devil. Show me the limits of a devil's strength and I shall match you with those of humanity. You fight me here and now. You die by my hands, or he does."

  Bim spared a glance back to look at me.

  The armaments on Treu's war plate sprang to life as he soared into action. The massive bulk of his armor moved faster than the eye could follow. Beams flared to murderous intensity while cannons launched flechettes and incendiaries as drones started strafing runs. It was insane to think Treu could split his attentions so fluidly across each weapon and that was to say nothing of the sorceries he was hurling at Bim. Purple lightning arced in from nowhere, green flames ignited the air at random and on all sides rubble lifted itself into the air before hurtling itself at me and Bim. My world was light and shadows, skittering jagged sourceless sensation crushing down in my psyche. Pressing, animal instinct urged me to flee Bim's bulwark of protection; despite it, in all the chaos there was a single anchor for my fraying mind to cling too.

  She was the immovable in deft motion, a mountain swaying before my eyes as all the universe sought to bring it low. A myriad cyclone of light and death breaking upon her remaining raven-black wing as she met Treu's magic with her own. There was some small effort on her part (at least she made it seem small) though I could see it mounting in her eyes like a long held sorrow that grew each passing second. Bim held my eyes and without a single word passing her lips, I understood her.

  I was her's and she was mine, always and eternally. Just as I had saved her, now she would save me. We would always do so, it was our fate. It was cyclic and foolish but that was what love did to men and devils. We would never stop fighting for each other.

  I saw something more too. That slightest glimmer in her regal bearing she had when she noticed something new. She had a costly plan and she steeled herself for its price. Her lips didn't move but her voice rang true in my head.

  

  "Unconditionally, B???i????m????." I whispered, my voice lost to the barrage but I knew she heard.

  The lethal rainbow and meteoric enfilade assaulting Bim broke and faltered. I peered out at the rubble and ruin surrounding us, still blinking away the afterimages burned into my retinas. I hadn't thought it possible to make a devastated city block look worse but Treu had found a way. What had been a battlefield seconds ago had skipped right past warzone and settled as a blasted wasteland.

  "Tick tock, Devil." Treu snarled. "You'd better decide quickly. My restraint is a finite resource. This material dimension is anathema to you and I've been denied a real challenge for far too long. You can feel it, can't you? The siren's song of the void sapping your essence. Time is my ally, not your's, Devil. Fight me or die a wasting death. Fight and you may win— you may even save your pet. Your choice."

  "I refuse." Bim stated.

  The faintest suggestion of a sea breeze gusted over the wasteland. Treu's armor gave no hints as to his stoic demeanor, yet in the lingering moment I imagined the slightest crack in his sneering contempt.

  "Come again?" He said at length.

  "I refuse your 'deal.' This place is not where we will shall sway to the fated end. This is not the time. Tormentor, you may be willing to kill as many people as it takes to end me here and now, to devastate this world to test your strength, but I am not. I reject your hatred, vain and brittle as it is. You may kill me but I won't dignify your vanity by fighting you while Hiiro still lives."

  "But a trifle." Treu purred.

  Faster than a snake, faster than should have been humanly possible, Treu hefted his halberd in hand and threw it. Bim flicked a finger and reality went runny around the edges but the blade loosed a queer shriek as it cut through space on an unerringly flat arc. It reminded me of hearing a sniper's gunshot after the bullet had already struck. I only realized what had happened after all was said and done.

  The halberd's edge slammed into me like a truck and kept on going, only stopping after burying itself a meter deep in the rubble I was slumped against— which still left three meters of the weapons haft extending through my guts. It seemed impossible that Treu had missed my heart or head. I didn't have time to think about it though, not that I could think of much through the wash of electrified agony coursing through my nerves.

  I saw Bim, a hole big enough to put my hand through right where a human's heart would have been. The wound had oily smoke curling from its edges but that wasn't enough to sear the damage.

  "Come now Creature!" Treu roared. "Rend the heavens, let this world quake as we clash! Bring your legions to bear and join me in apocalyptic battle, Devil! Test your mettle against my hatred! Kill ME as I smite you! Let the galaxy know this as the final epoch of monsters."

  Bim didn't even scream. She just teetered on her feet for a moment, then toppled over bleeding profusely. She was spilling liters of blood every few seconds, not the golden-black ichor of her alien body but a dark crimson. Heart's blood.

  By all rights she should have been dead but devils were made of tougher stuff than mortal men. She must have bled enough for six or seven people and still the ruby tide spilled forth. Bim clawed at the rubble and ash, using her one working limb to drag herself towards me. I tried to unpin myself and meet her but I couldn't manage. Couldn't get my arms or legs to do what I told them. All I could manage was one sputtering breath after the next as I watched.

  "You are just determined to ruin this for me. Aren't you, Devil?" Treu snarled, stomping over to Bim.

  The crack of his hulking metal boot against her ribs echoed like a thunderclap across the wasteland. Bim toppled over stone bricks and jagged metal without a whisper; the only sounds she made were those of her body striking the wreckage as she rolled with the blow. She slammed into a solid chunk of wall and stopped, then gathered her bearings and kept crawling back towards me.

  Treu's armored fist closed around my throat and jaw. He hauled me up off the silvery weapon running through my intestines. I felt a mess of ropy guts getting pulled out as he did, still tangled on the halberd's blade or the rubble beneath.

  I wasn't anywhere near as strong as Bim. I screamed, howling and whimpering as Treu choked me and slowly crushed my skull.

  "I am going to kill him." Treu stated, leaving no question of the fact. "You have the power to stop me, Devil. This is the price of your hubris!"

  "Death is but a single step on a journey spanning eternity." Bim said softly.

  "There will be no eternity for your pathetic pet when I flense his soul!" Treu roared tightening his grip until I could feel my bones creaking.

  "Eliminating your leverage is a poor negotiation tactic, Tormentor. His obliteration benefits neither of us while his life serves both our desires. Release him and we may bargain. Destroy all that he is and in death I shall abscond from this plane. Indulge my request and I may see fit to reciprocate."

  The mechanical fingers crushing my head and throat hesitated, then slackened.

  I slipped from Treu's uncaring gauntlet and fell onto a tangled spool of my own intestines. A reeking septic stink clawed its way up my nose, mingling with the scent of smoke and ruin. I could barely believe I was still breathing let alone conscious. Bim was at my side. Her fingers weakly fumbling to find my own. Our hands joined and a steady trickle of strength crept up my arm. Death or no, Bim was by my side and that was as much as a man like me could ask for.

  "You know my desired outcome, Devil." Treu sneered. "A formal challenge upon this plane for ultimate annihilation of one or the other. Since you seek to bargain, those are my terms. Anything less and I shall destroy you both for the sheer purpose of wounding you."

  "Before I learned about humanity, I would have killed you for the threat you represent Treu Krowtzig." Bim decreed, leaving no doubt about it. "Were I so naive as I once was, you could have played me as you've no doubt played dozens of my kind, but I have learned and suffered and loved and become so much more. You seek to deal with me— to war against me. You see nothing but a devil's mind, one constricted to cost/gain and the articles of covenant. Look upon me now, my steadfast Tormentor, and see me for what I am. A mortal woman dying for the sins of her creator and the circumstances of her inception. A woman in love dealing with an unrepentant monster for her lover's soul. Listen and know the truth of my words.

  "I give you my solemn oath, upon the true name of this vessel B???i????m????'?????k???e???l????a?????i?????d????h?????z?????a?????, that once Hiiro has lived his full and natural life span, I will promptly return for your wrath. I swear upon what semblance of a soul I possess that I will battle you with all the power at my disposal and the disposal of my primogenitor. I swear upon the nine scared rings and the seven seals that I shall commit my legions and bring Hell with me for the sole purpose of your destruction. My sole and singular aim shall be to see you struck dead by my hand and to lay eternal claim to your soul. Once my Hiiro has lived, then and only then shall I return to this plane at a desolate place and we will war with nothing in reserve. We shall clash, this I swear to he who bears the false name of Treu Krowtzig"

  Bim slipped her fingers from my own, extending her dainty hand towards Treu's massive steely gauntlets. His armor gave no hints at his thoughts. He merely stared at Bim's hand and considered this devil's deal.

  "So mote it be, Bim." Treu said, shaking her hand and sealing their pact.

  Their deal struck, Treu just walked away. It was so mundane, so absurdly pedestrian I struggled to comprehend it. Of all that I'd endured today, Treu walking away was somehow the most incredible thing I'd seen.

  Bim's hand found my own once more and we lay there in the wasteland swiftly dying but together. I found the strength to turn my head and face her. She managed the same.

  Blood poured from us both. Mine in weakening dribbles. Her's in an unending flood seeping into the rubble beneath us both. My head was spinning, the world's edges getting dark and far away. I felt a gnawing cold seeping into me and my supernatural warmth was nowhere to be found.

  "My 'full and natural life' isn't looking too long." I croaked.

  "Eternity would be too short a time for a life with you." Bim hushed. "Our time together has been my greatest joy. I regret events must be this way. Please Hiiro, forgive me."

  "In all my rotten life there's not a single thing I'd change." I said. "Everything that's happened to me, that heaping scatload of bad, it all brought me to you. Falling in love with you, it made everything else worth it. I guess what I mean is… If I have to die, I'm glad you're here to send me off. I can put up with a lot, as long as it gets me to you in the end."

  "I emulate that sentiment, though you are mistaken." Bim stated. She kept speaking before I could ask how. "Treu was not misspoken, a creature like me cannot survive on this plane indefinitely. Not anymore, not unanchored like this. This side of the veil is not meant for my kind. I will die here but in doing so, you will live."

  "Bim… Please!" I tried to find more words but speech failed me as my body started its long overdue shut down. She could hear how much even those two words had taken out of me. There wasn't enough life left in me to protest any further.

  Bim hauled herself atop me. The two of us were barely animated carcasses and she had the only working limb. Her eyes found mine, those two perfect golden windows into a dream I'd never known I had.

  She looked ancient and sorrowful without sacrificing her regal bearing. I stared into her eyes and wept because she knew what I was only now realizing. She knew that life was a finite resource, and there was only enough left between us for one.

  "I am yours and you are mine, in this life and the next. Always and Eternally." Bim whispered. "This life is a brief thing for mortals. The next… I will wait for you in the next, My H?????i???i???r????o???."

  She brought her lips to mine and let her soul pour into me.

  And then she was gone.