JUKA SERIAL
Part 4: Exodus

V.

At that moment, on every horizon, fire exploded into the sky.

The ground shuddered. Columns of pulsing lava thrust into the air, puncturing the storm clouds. Each new eruption thundered closer to Citadel Moonglow. The terrified Juka began to scatter in groups across the plains, thousands upon thousands of tiny lights fleeing the approach of giants.

Yet the lava that gushed forth did not fall back to earth. In the nearer pillars the Juka could see streams of magma forming into geometric shapes. It must have been a nightmare, for it seemed as if the molten core of the world was shaping itself into a machine made up of pipes and globes, rods and gears. As each pillar cooled, its radiance shifted from searing yellows to crackling blues.

Exodus had hatched from its incubation. It was time to harvest fuel.

When enough of its pillars had formed, Exodus began to carve up the land.

Darhim gaped as rivers of light poured through Exodus and lit up the dagger-tipped rods. The black hole they had gashed in the air now pushed farther into solid nothingness. The rods sliced a deeper wound. Then a pinpoint of color appeared in the center of the hole. It was a rich green hue.

Instantly the unearthly device pulsed with new activity. Glass components extruded toward the hole at a pace too quick to follow. Steel and copper supports sprang forward as well. The tunneling rods tore the green spot open and the living, alchemical artifice called Exodus began to inject itself into another world.

On the walls of the mechanical cavern the Overlords whirred and buzzed impatiently. Above the proceedings the Prime Overlord simply waited, lurking in a swirling fluid of light and mist and unholy alchemy.

After five quick parries Kumar felt Narah's foot hammer into his stomach. He collapsed backwards against the stiff glass components of Exodus. The echoing ring of sword against sword vanished in the cacophony of the Overlords' burgeoning Exodus.

His cry was strident. "Narah, stop! Fight for control!" Her bulging eyes told him that she was fighting, though, but that the battle was hopeless.

"It's the thralling potion!" shouted Darhim. "It steals her mind! Cut the center pipe!"

Though her will was not her own, Narah's skills were brutally intact. Kumar used his forearms to deflect three swirling kicks, then jumped over a sweep of her sword. He threaded his blade through the crook of her elbow and attempted to disarm her on the return stroke. She clamped onto his wrist, leapt over his arm with legs wheeling and then pirouetted. When she faced him again, she had two blades and he had none. Before he could dodge she stabbed one of them into his leg. He stumbled backwards, dancing atop glass and metal beams.

"Kumar, take this!" Darhim tossed his own sword end-over-end. In one motion Kumar plucked the weapon from the air and slashed at the center pipe that pushed into Narah's heart. It cracked in two and spilled a putrid ooze. He took aim at the remaining four tubes.

The old priest called out, "Leave those! They keep her alive!"

"She's not flushed with gratitude here!" Kumar clashed away her deadly swipes and ducked through the maze of Exodus.

"I put the antidote to the thralling potion on my blade. Stab her, Kumar, while there's still time to save her!"

To himself he whispered, "Great Mother, find me another way." But he pressed back at Narah, thrusting and slashing with furious skill. She parried using wide, arching strokes, twirling and dodging with characteristic grace.

Again she stabbed his leg. He felt it nearly buckle. At that moment he knew there was no way to stop her, except with killing moves. When the thought came, his stomach knotted and his limbs fell cold.

She charged him, flinging blades in a relentless attack. Kumar parried and ducked, unwilling to strike back. His head pounded hot with anguish.

Narah's wide eyes passed through a band of dazzling light. They seemed to read his mind. They seemed to beg him.

Kumar howled and vaulted past her, lunging with his outstretched sword. It was his slowest killing attack. Narah avoided it, despite herself.

Then she threw two quick slashes and spun. At the end of her clockwise turn she thrust at him again.

It was the attack Turlogan had warned her about. Her right flank was wide open. Her large eyes stared directly into his.

Kumar pushed the tip of his blade into her abdomen. When her face twisted with agony his own features mirrored hers. He shoved the short sword deep inside her body, wedging between bones and hard muscle. Still he had to duck underneath her strike. He left his weapon within her as he pulled back, then lurched forward again when she crumpled. Gently he guided her to the ground. Her expression revealed unimaginable torment. He forced himself to look until his eyesight blurred with tears.

Darhim stood before an unfolding cataclysm.

In a column of vertical glass Exodus extruded itself through the black wound in the air. The entire cavern throbbed with the raw flow of power. The old priest knew nothing about the bizarre tunnel through oblivion, but he did know alchemy. He deduced the nature of the potions that mixed in self-regulating permutations within of glassworks of Exodus. Their power was unprecedented.

Exodus required impossible amounts of energy. The citadel possessed no generators on that scale. Not even a dedicated Core Siphon could quench the device's thirst. When Darhim pondered what fuel Exodus might use, his face pinched with horror.

"What are you harvesting for power?" he shouted at the unmoving Prime Overlord. He cringed at the answer.

<<Exodus transforms this world into fuel,>> said the clacking, fiery mouthpiece, still perched at the entrance to the cavern. <<The sum of this land's base materials provides the energy for the move into the young world. Once begun, the conversion cannot be reversed. As I have said, this place will soon be depleted.>>

"You're burning the Juka to fuel your escape!"

<<The analogy maps well. Console yourself. Logic identifies this outcome as a victory for your revolt. It is the end of your slavery.>>

Darhim cursed the mechanical jaws as they spouted a series of hisses and clacks. It sounded unnervingly like laughter.

Kumar did not hear the pandemonium of Exodus and Overlords. He knelt over Narah's bloody form. Her agony had subsided and her face calmed as if asleep. When her eyes fluttered abruptly open, they looked hot as cinders. Kumar held his breath and tensed.

Her voice was cracked. "Get this Overlord out of my body," she growled, then clutched the pipes jammed into her chest. Roughly she yanked them out. Amber fluid splashed around them amid a sharp, tangy scent. The pipes carried some form of healing draught, which had kept her alive. The wounds from the pipes bled red and amber and sealed themselves quickly. She cried out when Kumar pulled the sword from her flank, but that wound, too, seeped with the healing potion that had coursed through her veins. The puncture squeezed shut and faded.

"I'm not dressed for immortality, anyway," she muttered, trying to sit up. "Posterity would be shocked by these rags."

Kumar's heart soared. With an eruption of energy he scooped her up, lifted her to her feet and then threw his arms in the air. "Darhim!" he bellowed, "we're leaving!"

"We can't!" barked the priest. "Kumar, look at it!"

The hole in the air was spread wide now. On the other side was a place more green than Kumar had ever imagined. The landscape beyond the tunnel was a bizarre, unreal place, yet somehow familiar. The earth was entirely emerald green, swathed in a lush blanket of what looked like plants, but for their abundance and luxurious hue. The sky was crystalline blue, populated by tranquil, milky-white clouds. A blazing gold light warmed the land with color.

It was a world out of myth. It was a dream Kumar had hidden away since he was a child.

It was a place no Overlord belonged. The foul presence of Exodus built itself purposefully atop that extravagant landscape.

Kumar turned his face up to the Prime Overlord, his eyes smoldering, his tears reflecting the brilliant chaos. "You can't go there," he growled.

<<Your protest is irrelevant,>> said the mouthpiece. <<It is done. Exodus cannot be denied.>>

"Wrong! You won't ruin another world like you have ours!" He lifted his sword overhead and brought it down upon the glass skeleton of Exodus.

The blade rebounded from the resilient material. The glass did not have a mark. He smashed down the sword again, with redoubled vigor, but the effect was the same.

The jaws of the Prime Overlord exhaled flame. <<Your interference is meaningless.>>

Kumar leapt toward the surging pillar of glass and metal and steam. Narah climbed after him. They reached the base of the pulsing shaft and searched it for handholds.

"In this world we're powerless," said Kumar. "On the other side Exodus looks small enough for two warriors to handle. Care to join me in paradise, Narah of Vesper?" He grinned wide.

Her eyes flashed. "With blade in hand, Kumar of Britain."

They began to scale the column of seething, steaming glass.

In the plains surrounding Citadel Moonglow, the lava pillars of erupting Exodus cooled until their surfaces were patterned with webs of flashing blue. From the peak of each column blasted streams of orange heat. These bolts of holocaust fire carved fissures through the brittle earth.

The desert landscape fragmented into thousands of polygonal shapes. Each shape in turn flared into a dazzling fountain of fire. Through some unthinkable, apocalyptic alchemy the pillars of Exodus sucked the flames into itself, leaving behind vast, yawning pits. The blackness within the pits was impossibly deep and strangely animate.

The petrified Juka on the broken plains could only scream as Exodus consumed the world.

Kumar and Narah climbed through thirty feet of smoke and blistering heat. Above them gaped the black tunnel in the air, through which Exodus was transmitting itself. The rich darkness had a material quality, as if oblivion was a tangible medium. It quivered with ambient tension. They realized that the tunnel was unstable. Only the ten glowing rods of Exodus kept it open.

Beyond it lay an emerald land of legend.

Kumar flipped the lever on Darhim's short sword. The blade hummed and began to heat. In seconds it sizzled with a white glow.

"Let's see what this thing bleeds," he muttered as he thrust the blade into the glassy works of Exodus.

Something cracked. A cloud of sparkling steam geysered at his face. He ducked aside with inches to spare.

Exodus howled. The wriggling, clanking hosts of Overlords screeched and thrashed over the walls of the cavern. The Prime Overlord belched a mushroom of fire from its gullet.

<<Forward, my brethren!>> it roared. <<Seize the young world! It is yours to devour!>>

With countless cracks the walls sloughed their mechanical denizens. In a grotesque tide the Overlords dropped to the irregular floor and oozed in a half-machine, half-organic swell up the flashing surface of Exodus, driven by swarms of pistons and gears and churning wheels. Bodiless eyes leered ahead from tubes carried in the flow. The monstrous sounds of the shapeless metallic flood drowned even the wail and thrum of Exodus itself. In seconds it would reach the tunnel.

"Sword!" screamed Darhim at the base of the pillar. Kumar looked down at the priest, a tiny shape in the smoke and glare. The warrior saw the old man's terror carved in the lines of his face. Yet Darhim reached up two hands, one clutching vials of potion, the other grasping not for rescue, but for a weapon.

Kumar threw down the white-hot sword. It streaked through the searing fog and impaled Exodus at Darhim's feet. Plumes of steam screeched out of broken glass.

The priest smiled unfettered relief. Kumar sensed an onset of calm in his expression. "Go!" shouted the old Juka, then shoved the vials of potion into the blossom of steam. He pulled back a gauntlet glowing with heat. With his other hand he unslung his static scourge

"Great Mother witness this sacrifice," he murmured, then fired a trident of electric charge into Exodus. Where the bolt met the potions of capacitance he had inserted, the network of glass tubes ignited white. The flow of steam spread the potion quickly. In a fraction of a second the entire surface of the giant device lit up and shattered, consuming Darhim and the horrible flood of Overlords that surged toward escape.

Overhead the Prime Overlord thrashed inside its translucent tube.

Kumar and Narah clung onto copper struts to resist the violent quaking of Exodus. The ten rods holding open the tunnel bucked and twisted and finally dislodged. Several of them tumbled away into the lush, green world beyond the blackness. The unbalanced tunnel shivered and began to collapse.

Exodus screamed. Scarcely a few cubic yards of the device had formed on the luxuriant landscape. As the tunnel folded, glass and metal spars severed, spewing plumes of colored, bitter steam. Yet the scent that wafted to Kumar's nose was sweet and clean and satiny. It was the glorious fragrance of a world out of myth.

He had time, before the portal closed, to leap through.

When he glanced back at Narah she had lost her grip. A holocaust wave of flame and fury rose toward her. Kumar did not hesitate. He lashed out a hand and grabbed Narah's wrist, lifting her farther into the black tunnel.

The portal to the green world folded, and was gone. The tunnel itself began to collapse. The uncontrolled power of Exodus flew at them like a wall of unbound hell.

Narah clutched Kumar's shoulder and murmured, "Surely this isn't the victory we wanted."

Something happened to the luxuriant blackness. A cleft formed upon it and quickly parted open. A pure light streamed from it.

Then a warrior appeared in the light. He was a slender man, clapped in armor of bizarre, fanciful design. His face was misshapen, pointed and angular. His smooth-skinned brow bore no horns. His demeanor was undeniably regal.

On his chest was an emblem depicting a silver serpent.

The warrior reached out a hand to them. Kumar turned a heavy glance to Narah, then took it.

They felt an avalanche of fire as the power of Exodus smashed into them.

In a symphony of flame and glass and metal and stone, the world shattered to fiery pieces and toppled away into the void. Time lost meaning like a shadow stripped of light. Oblivion took its place.

Eternity ceased to be.

Kumar awakened on a bedroll under a cloth awning. His ears rang with the echoes of something cataclysmic. It sounded as if he were underwater.

His body throbbed with pain. He knew what that meant. His wounds were not serious enough to merit a healing draught. It was sparse consolation.

Turning on his side, he gazed out from the hilltop encampment. The plains were a ruin of paving stones and scorched earth. Citadel Moonglow remained in the sky, though its glittering lights had died. Scattered fires marked the survivors from two armies.

The storm clouds were rent apart. A fresh rain was cool and silky.

"Welcome to the new world," said a familiar voice. Wrapped in a rainproof cloak, Narah stepped out of the downpour and knelt beside him. "Things look a whole lot like they did before, but that's the way of beginnings."

Kumar chewed his lip. "Was it a dream?"

"Not unless you and I and a hundred thousand others had the same dream. No, it was more like ... a very nasty earthquake."

He sat up, clutched his pounding head. "How did we survive?"

"I'm not really sure. It felt like we were sucked into a whirlpool. Everything was on fire. We were thrown out the catacombs, found a gyrofoil and here we are, by the mercy of the Great Mother and a fortunate mound of loose dirt to land in. That's where you got the knock on the head."

He touched a sore lump on his skull. "You were piloting, weren't you?"

She shoved him, grinning faintly.

"Darhim?"

She shook her head.

"Obden? Turlogan?"

Narah sighed. "Gone. In grand fashion, but I would expect no less. They were grand allies."

"Carve those words into stone." For long moments he stared at the tattered, rain swept plains. "The citadel is dark."

"After what we saw, I'm surprised it's still afloat."

"What did we see, Narah?"

She nudged closer and eased his head back into her lap. "I saw you turn away from paradise."

He closed his eyes. "I couldn't bear the thought of it without your scowl to keep me company."

"In paradise, you have to make your own scowls." She chuckled and softly stroked his horned temples. "You know, I got my Sanguination wish. So far, anyway."

Kumar furrowed his brow, then winced at an ache. "I thought you wanted to die before the rest of us?"

"That was a lie. What I really wished was to outlive you."

"All of us? Then you're one slit throat from achieving your goal."

"Not the Hand of Honor. Just you. Kumar, I'm going to watch you get old, wither away and die an old man in his bed, surrounded by glory and grandchildren."

He sat up a bit. "Narah of Vesper, that sounded like a preamble to courtship."

"I told you I'd get back at you for lying to me." She brushed an easy kiss over his lips. "Speaking of which, you still owe me. What did you pray for at Sanguination? You promised you'd talk."

Enveloped by Narah and a chorus of rainsong, Kumar cast his eyes to the sky above the citadel. Something was strange about the perpetual cloud cover. It grew darker in places. Less angry.

Then he recognized what he was seeing. It was a break in the clouds. A velvet blackness shone through, pure and unmuddied. Twinkling in that swath of night sky were a thousand tiny, luminous bodies. They flickered in a wild, heavenly dance.

Kumar blinked wet eyes and answered, "I prayed for an end to the war. Just a childish little request."

The rainstorm swelled again, drawing a veil of clouds over the glimmering stars. Kumar closed his eyes and settled into a deep rest.

History records several months of continued fighting after the Cataclysm. When scouts eventually reported how drastically the world had changed, the rebels abandoned their siege. The crippled Citadel Moonglow presided over their departure. Its skyborne defenses were never seriously compromised.

The last stronghold of the Overlords had become nothing more than a phantom of the past haunting a barren desert, tended by a smattering of loyalists. The Juka had no more cause to fear it. A new world awaited them, strewn with the ruins of the old, inhabited by peoples they could not have imagined.

The Juka had survived the end of eternity. They welcomed the next challenge.

DISCLAIMER: The prequel fiction contained on this site is copyright Electronic Arts and Origin and is used here for entertainment purposes only. 

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