Return to the Black Gate

By Joseph Sale

Clone Smiley has vanished. No one knows where he has gone. With the dark of the Origin-verse now awake, something moves across the multiverses, destroying all it touches. One by one, each universe falls, its defenders shattered. Soon, it will reach our world, and then there will be nothing left. From the far corners of the multiverse, a desperate group gathers, the only hope of saving existence itself now resting on the shoulders of killers, psychopaths, prophetesses, and a broken man. Return To The Black Gate is a story of loss and unlikely love, of the battles we fight to hold onto what little we have, and a vision of an end-times never-before-imagined. Where Gods of the Black Gate was a crime-thriller, and Beyond The Black Gate was a sword and sorcery epic, Return To The Black Gate is a harrowing war-story; a tale of despair and heroism in the face of unimaginable horror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780244559601

Book preview

Return to the Black Gate

Return to the Black Gate

by Joseph Sale

Copyright

thewritingcollectivetwc.wordpress.com

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by The Writing Collective. Copyright © Joseph Sale 2020

Joseph Sale has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author(s) of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-0-244-55960-1

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Lulu.

Cover art ‘Cyborg’ by Warpedgalerie. Cover designed by Joseph Sale.

Other Works

The Darkest Touch*

Seven Dark Stars

Orifice*

Seven Dark Stars: Blackness Absolute

Across the Bitter Sea

The Meaning of the Dark*

Nekyia*

Gods of the Black Gate*

Beyond the Black Gate*

Save Game

*indicates these books are part of the Sevenverse Saga.

Anthologies

Dark Hall Press: Technological Horror

Tales from the Shadow Booth Vol. 1

Exit Earth

13Dark Issue #1: Dead Voices

13Dark Issue #2: Cursed Crossings

Lost Voices (with Christa Wojciechowski, Ross Jeffery & Emily Harrison)

Epigraph

‘The few who rushed in the body to enter hell,

And there out-fiending all its fiends and flames

With superhuman inhumanities,

Long-famous glories, immemorial shames—

And crawling slowly back, have by degrees

Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—

Why speak they not of comrades that went under?’

–Wilfred Owen (1893 – 1918), Spring Offensive

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Christa Wojciechowski, Dan Stubbings, Ross Jeffery, & Steve Stred: who believed

And to my wife, whose love I feel,

even across the multiverse

PART 1: THE WORLDS FALL

1. THE PRINCE

(THE BUTTERFLY MAN)

He sees the image of a grave.

Souls flitter around him like thoughts. Though he has no eyes, he sees more than he has ever seen. The sockets in his face seethe like voids, but his inner eye roves, like a searchlight scouring marshland for hidden prey.

He is sat cross-legged upon the heath. Cold, British air lashes features which, if they were any more rugged, would be deformed. He does not look like a prophet: torn jeans, snakeskin boots, a leather jacket. Tall grass stirs with the ever-changing impulses of the wind, making a hissing sound, like a hidden serpent approaching. Around him, a morphing exuberance of butterflies, a thousand different colours, each wingbeat showing a blinking eye. These are the souls he freed from the pit of Nekyia. As he thinks, searches, sees, they respond, forming shapes that descry his meaning like letters.

His eye pierces the material to the beyond, showing reality for the insubstantial thing it is. The spirit is all that endures, all that has substance. The Prince knows this because he has been unmade three times. His body has been utterly destroyed, but his spirit, his soul, always survives.

With that thought, his eye is dragged to the past, like an anchor to the ocean’s sedimented bottom. He tries to resist for a moment, but knows he cannot. Besides, he learns as much from scrying the past as he does the future.

The butterflies form towers around him. The skyline of New York is glimpsed only for a moment before it disintegrates into chaos, the butterflies endlessly, obsessively, form circles that turn like the gears of the universe.

The world The Prince was born in is now dead. He destroyed it, reduced it to irradiated ash. He remembers the cold blizzard sweeping the city, his nemesis: Brian Mor, The Man In The Black Hat, the man who drove his fingers into The Prince’s throat and squeezed until every throb of life was excreted.

He was reborn into a new world, a new reality. That of Nekyia, the City of Lost Souls. There, he became king for a while, the Fourth Horsemen of Death reigning over a city formed from soul-stuff, built on the coagulated substance of the dead.

His fists clench. The butterflies swirl faster, as though willing him to wind time forward, gloss over the scenes which come next…

His foolish voyage to the edges of Nekyia, to escape the city. He commanded a ship upon a black sea, and was dashed by the gods. Drowning. His second death.

The third scene rises, and he openly bares teeth, shakes as though with sudden exertion to hold the vision in place. The butterflies form a moon-sickle, a dark smile.

Betrayal!

Dr Monaghan, the sorcerer Yin, the Taking Man – his lieutenants turned upon him and ripped him apart. They castrated and blinded him, left him dead in the arms of Fay.

Fay! He remembers the woman, the prophetess, the one person he could bring himself to… He stops the thought. His heart races in his chest. He is not worthy of her, the Fifth Horseman, the woman of magic and light and prophecy. Yet she wrought a change in him so deep it was like she had transmogrified the atoms of his being, performed alchemy upon his living flesh.

After his death, he became part of the souls of the city, and the souls of the city became part of him. He gained a kind of new consciousness, floating not in a space between worlds, but in a space between being and unbeing, between self and other. He began to lose his distinctions, his past, his anger. In his last moments he had cried out for forgiveness from Fay, and she had kissed him, such a kiss as to leave blemish upon the immortal soul forever – and how he would cherish that blemish!

At some point, he found himself once again acquiring being. It was agony. He hated it, wanted to remain part of the butterflies, the spirits, the beauty, drifting between – between everything. All his life he had known pain, an ache in his limbs, a pressure in his mind, as though his brain were slowly expanding like a tumour, pressing against the inside of his skull. As a butterfly, he was freed from that pain.

But it seemed he had no choice.

He came to, at points. In a hospital bed, next to a dying woman, he found form again, hovering over her like a fairy about to swap a tooth for silver.

In a dark forest, racing alongside a speeding vehicle.

Dancing upon a black ocean.

At points he was a cloud of butterflies. At points he seemed more human, though still bits of him felt like insect parts. His fingers like little antennae, his torso like a fuzzed thorax, his shoulder-blades the ghosts of wings.

Then, startlingly, there had been cold. A slap of feeling. Plummeted, dumped. He had arisen on this scratch of English heathland at the centre of a circle of old stones. Naked. Cockless and eyeless. Horribly human in shape. But he knew, now, he had never been and would never be truly human.

He’d wandered, drawn by the true-sight of his mind’s eye, eventually coming to a little market town. People didn’t scream when they saw him, just muttered and walked away. He heard their accents: British. Strange people, these limeys, he thought. If he had walked into an American town looking as he did, there would be screams and cops.

He’d felt cobblestones beneath his feet. Was this the past? No, he’d heard cars. His disorientation was tremendous. Hadn’t he burned this world to the ground? Or was it another world just like his own? Was this the future, where everything had been rebuilt? Or the past, before the dreadful thing was to be done?

He’d stolen clothes and left the town. He found a river, and washed himself, aware of the stink and muck of existence, a smell that clogged his nostrils. Then, he donned his stolen goods. He’d known from the feel of things he had grabbed at random, they were just like his old garb. It had been as though he were an actor, donning the costume of an old character once more after a long time. He could have wept then, had he tearducts. He hadn’t wanted this. Why had he been brought back a third time?

As suddenly as the beating of a butterfly’s wing, he is no longer looking into the past, but the future. He sees white light, unbelievable light that reaches even his sightless eyes. He lets out a gasp, pain shooting through his veins, like the onset of an aneurism. The butterflies disperse, suddenly losing cohesion, becoming just drifting particles. Was this the answer to his question? This light? This painful, painful light?

And he knew then, in his toxic heart, a heart that’d felt nothing as it condemned billions to burn, that the next death would be his last.

Look away! Look away! he thinks. He turns his mind, steering it away from the future and into the present moment. Look! Search! See! There is something he is looking for, something he knows he needs to find.

He sees the many worlds, a sprawling enormity. Some worlds are much like this one, a series of clones each subtly different from the last. But there are other worlds too, worlds as outlandish as anything found in a fantasy story, more wild than imagination.

He sees a city of lords, at the edge of mountains that bleed. He sees a Gloaming Sea made from the roiling stuff of broken dreams. He sees a world of prison-inmates, a universe of asylums and prisons and prisoners, where unspeakable acts take place in hidden cells far from any warden.

He sees a Dead Moon, hovering low in orbit, a Pale Keep crowning it like a wreath of thorns. He sees a glimmering mountain capped with a city of madness, its streets filled with peoples that make no sense to The Prince. He sees a woman, made of scar-tissue, her ferocity enough to make him shiver.

Then he sees a void, a blackness at the edge of the worlds.

And he sees something crossing it.

The butterflies reform, becoming themselves the emblem of an eye. An eye made of many eyes. Focus, see! Concentrate! He zooms in, pushing forward. The gulf is not insubstantial, a void only in appearance. It is thick and seems to carry a tide with it, like dark ocean water. Formless though his astral-projection is, he feels it pushing him back, as though he swims against a deadly undertow. Push! Push!

He follows the thing crossing the void, swimming after it. No longer a butterfly, but an ancient shark. The blackness is oppressive, blinding, numbing his inner eye like liquor numbs sense. The longer he swims against it, onward, the more he feels like he might fall asleep.

The Prince grits his teeth. Something kindles in him, an almost visible fire that clads his flesh. Here is a will that not even God had been able to break.

Forms disturb the blackness. They are half-finished, approximations of life. He sees something that resembles a person in all aspects except it is boneless, a deconstructed sludge that slithers through absolute unreality. He sees a thing that stalks with the jerky movements of a prehistoric bird, yet its face is a mass of octopean tendrils. The First Forms… He has come to the Place of First Forms. The Origin-Verse. It is less a world, a reality, and more a sketchbook. As that thought enters his head, he sees a thing made of nothing but white lines capering through the deep with a jester’s jollity. A siphonophore skirts below him, a series of cloned organisms latched onto one another, trailing through the sightless deep like an everlasting serpent.

He closes the gap between himself and the thing crossing this place and sees it for what it is: a bird-like creature. Its body is human, its head that of a crow. But despite these physical and recognisable attributes (welcome in such a place), The Prince’s deeper sight detects it is made of soul-stuff. Like Nekyia. The thought horrifies him. Nekyia was a living city, a city made of compressed being, and as such, it shifted and changed treacherously. But to make an individual being out of coagulated souls? An abomination! A sin!

What are you? The Prince asks, and his mind reads the heart of the thing.

The Last Child of Chaos.

He draws a sharp intake of breath. The One Bird. The Origin-Thing. Whispers of it had reached him, but he had never imagined such a thing to be real. And it was dead… dead… He scries the Child’s thoughts, like a scholar deciphering language from an older time. Though he knew how to understand it, comprehension was slow: the thing did not think like a person, its mind was not so easily read.

Chaos was dead! Smiley had killed it! The Prince cannot help but smile. Was there any limit to Smiley’s insanity? Then his smile vanishes. He did not manage to win Smiley over to his side. They needed him, so desperately needed him.

The Child flees across the void and The Prince follows, invisible. There seems to be an end to the darkness: a lip, an edge, a horizon. The blackness is formless yet flat, a two-dimensional plate that reaches a deeper wall of dark: infinity, perhaps? They approached the limit of it. Beyond worlds, now. Beyond the multi-verses and in some deeper, darker reality. A place not even The Prince has haunted in his long deathless wandering.

Suddenly, they come to the end. The end of all things. There is a flash of darkness that causes The Prince to cry out. Even though he is not there, though he is seeing it through a projected image, the pressing magnitude of the deep closes around him like fingers around a throat. He cannot breathe, is utterly suffocated.

Look! See!

Will forces him on. His inner eye threatens to collapse, like the towers of his world had fallen, swallowing themselves in maws of churned concrete and metal. But he wrenches the eye open, allowing in a flood of darkness that is now more solid than anything he has ever known. He can taste it, taste oblivion, and it is oddly sweet and syrupy, like a mouthful thick, hardened honey.

The Last Child reaches out. There is something there in the darkness beyond darkness. A casket, a box, a chest. The Prince cannot make out its true shape. There are no true shapes here. The Last Child is fading, becoming pinpricks like a diagram drawn in starlight.

There are things written on the edge of the casket, words in a language not even The Prince knows. The Last Child’s clawed fingers touch the casket, the black box, words leaving its rotten crow’s beak.

‘A world without gods is a world without meaning,’ it whispers. ‘I, the Last Child, give all my souls unto you, Sweet Lord. I stir you from the slumber of the seven. I bid you reclaim the meaning of the verses.’

No! The Prince thinks, suddenly electrified, struck by the lightning bolt of a terror. This must not be! The Prince considers transporting himself then, dismembering his body into butterflies, as he knows he can, and travelling the gulf in an instant. But somehow, he cannot. The darkness is too thick, too beyond reality. There is nowhere for him to go, because the place into which the Last Child has come is no place.

A slit appears, like a snake’s pupil.  Something slithers, jet-dark like an eel, a sinuous oil-form, disgusting, prehistoric, poison-mouthed. The Last Child screams, but the sound becomes an image, a vomited spout of rainbow that stirs the deep. Something has latched onto it. The eel bites; white foam spills, like galaxy-white curd. Star-stuff. The nameless eel tears, and tears, with each mouthful growing and growing.

The Prince withdraws, sweat-drenched, soul disturbed. He slams shut the lid of his inner eye like a man burying someone alive nails shut the coffin-lid. He collapses onto his back, twitching on the heathland. Above him is a blue sky, grey clouds. It looks like it might soon rain. But he cannot see any of this. Having no material sight allows him no respite from the visions. The images of his mind’s eye remain imprinted more deeply, like words tattooed into his brain.

He rolls over onto his side, breathing heavily. He runs his hands through the grass, the feeling of something natural and real calming him. He is now picturing the grass, or trying to, and not the dark thing he saw emerge from its cage.

It is coming, as he warned Smiley it was, but so much sooner than he thought, before they are ready. He scrambles to his feet. He must rally them: all of them. The damned, the broken, the lost. The touched. This is the final battle. The one that will end universes and start them anew.

Butterflies gather to him, settle on his arms, shoulders, legs, and head. He is a walking mass of eyes.

Despite the echo of terror still pulsing through him, a smile creeps across his face. It is a smile that glows like moonshine, like madness. Whereas Smiley’s smile suggests the things he might do, The Prince’s tells the story of the things he has already done: killed children, burned cities and worlds, been torn apart and re-assembled more times than he can count.

The reason for his smile is simple.

How funny, he thinks, that the destroyer of worlds is now the only one who can save them.

2. THE PROPHETESS

(THE FIFTH HORSEMAN)

She waits for him upon the Black Shore.

Her features are Egyptian, yet her skin has been bleached by Nekyia’s absence of sun. Even now, there is no true sunlight, as she had once known in Africa, another life. There are only intermittent bursts of pale gleams that break through the endless cloudscape.

Her skin has been bleached too by the corrosive nature of the air, which still contains a lingering taint of the darkness found beneath the city.

The city itself is dark. A skeleton place. Dilapidated skyscrapers, churches, ruins stretching across a blank, flat, scrub of land. Once, the city was crowned by a Black Pyramid, like a terrible jewel at its apex. Beyond that jewel lay the infinite silvenom woods. Her home. But now, the Pyramid is demolished, and in its place, a tree of multicoloured light that strobes the vacant, grey skyscrapers with rainbowing beams, like a strange lighthouse beacon. Larri’s Tree.

Underneath the city lie secrets. Mines for harvesting explosive amberfire, made by Dr Monaghan. And deeper still, a labyrinth. She has ventured twice into the domain of the mindflayers. The hallways of their sightless palace seemed inescapable, and even emerging to light again did not comfort her. Those tunnels were touched by something ancient and foul; the excrement of a chthonic monster. Even in their aftermath, they corrupted.

She comes to the shore every day, wanders along the black sand, stares out at the colourless ocean, hoping she will see a ship crossing it, and at its helm… Him. It is a fantasy that allows her to live, that has kept her going.

She saw the eye in the tarot cards, as she had done many times in the years since his departure. When she first met him, she offered to read his future, and found instead all her cards turned into eyes. His eye. He impregnated their meaning with his own. From that first moment she knew he was a higher being, something that mastered the world yet did not belong. A Prince, truly, in more than name. But, he was gone now, had died in her arms. Though she had brought her wrath against his murderers, demolishing their temple, blasting their army with her arrows of light, the wound was still there. An absence. He and her were meant to be, were two pieces that completed one another like yin and yang.

She walks along the beach. Her dress, a blood red, is carried by winds that have no origin. Nearby, she can feel her steed, the pale horse, waiting for her whistle. She carries her bow with her, though she has not had recourse to use it for a long time. There has been a kind of peace in the city since the events of the Great Fall. With the Four Horsemen defeated, Pike Malory, the Last Knight, and Hagga, have created a kind of community in the ruins of it all. This place will never be heaven, but it is no longer hell.

Fay does not interfere with them, unless she has to. She stays in the woods beyond Larri’s Tree. Her little home, Last Hope, is still as it ever was, a hidden home, though now that place is tainted by memories: it’s where The Prince died. And every day those memories drive her to come to the shore. She does not age. No one does, here. The city is eternal, and so is her loss. She does not move on, or grow beyond her sorrow. It is always there, festering.

The sand is cold beneath her feet. Cooling. It looks like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption, black glass that shifts, like the raw stuff of creation, ready to make new things from the desolation.

Something is changing, though. If she is honest with herself, she can feel it.

Like those terrible roses in the gardens surrounding Larri’s tree, roses formed from the twisted soul of Dr Monaghan. They’d vanished as though they had never been. There was only a dark stain where they had once bloomed.

Then there was the Fountain of Yin. The twisted sculpture had begun running with blood. The blood canalled down the twisted flesh and coils of limb that formed its base. It was as though the dead magician were weeping for something.

The cards had revealed oddities too. Not just The Prince’s eye, but other strangeness. She had once laid a hand of seven deaths. But there were not seven in the pack. Then she had drawn seven more cards, and their arrangement had been curious: The Emperor, The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Magician, The Empress, The High Priestess, and Justice. Then, she drew an eighth card. The card was The Lost Queen – not a card in her deck. The High Priestess turned slowly black as soon as she drew The Lost Queen, as though it were under a flame, decaying before her very eyes. The card was still blackened.

What did it mean? The fates were trying to tell her something, give her some forewarning. She could not help but think of herself as the High Priestess (who then were the others?). She had been a High Priestess, in the ancient days of the Zed Teppi, of Egypt, of structures built to animal-headed gods. Those days were faded memories now, but still, they came back to haunt her.

The Lost Queen… she wonders who that could be? The cards suggest she poses a danger to her, if indeed she is the High Priestess, but that does not make sense. She was told by a soothsayer in the ancient days, the greatest of their order, that she could not be killed except by her own hand. She had faced three of the Four Horsemen and vanquished them all. No, no-one posed threat to her.

A beam of light hits her and she pauses. The light is not warm, nothing is warm in Nekyia, but its brightness is dazzling. She has not seen such a strong ray in a while and she stops to admire it.

She blinks. There seems to be particles in the ray of light, little black spots moving and dancing. She squints, looking closer. Not spots, but eyes. Her heart shrinks in her chest, contracting to a tight fist. Her breathing becomes shallow and she feels a pain in her throat. Was this a vision? Please, let it not be a vision. Please let it be real!

Butterflies descend along the beam of light toward her. They flow in the non-linear way of butterflies, darting left, then right, then up, then down, but always finding their way. Suddenly, they are around her, enveloping her in a cloud of wingbeats and blinking eyes. She lets out a laugh that is musical enough to still the hiss of the black ocean, to momentarily calm even that chaos. The laughter is a noise of pure joy, of unbelievable healing. He is here, he is here!

She throws out her arms, as though welcoming the universe into her.

‘Michael! My Prince!’ she cries.

The butterflies hurricane about her, forming a cyclone with her at its heart, safe in the storm of colour. She can hear each wingbeat as though it is a syllable of profound language, reaching some buried part of her memory. The butterflies land on her arms