Ekron

The Fall of Ekron 4

Enormous delta shaped airplanes and black zeppelins, fast as rockets crossed the shores of the Baltic sea, as unnamed monsters peeked up from the abysses. In three days, a hundred and twenty atomic bombs fell over the exterior armor of Lydia, pit of plagues, home of a witch that nested in a bunker below Riga, during the Annihilation War. In the night of the third day, a shiny crater was opened over Lydia exposing its entrails and Achish went down to bring final justice to those responsible for the fall of Ekron. He flew with wings he had not used in a century, wandered on passages full of dirt, roamed in abandoned warehouses accompanied by his army of servants, Karl-11 included, to find nothing, not a witch, machine, or monster to explain what had happened. As radiation started to fry their circuits, servants began to die and collapsed on those dark halls, like a physical representation of Achish's hope for justice slowly vanishing. At the end, near sunrise, only Karl-11 and Achish still walked on that tomb. There were thousands of living and undead creatures in Lydia during the War, commanded by a witch whose dead was never confirmed. They seemed to have evaporated, as there were no signs of them ever abandoning that bunker either.

Suddenly, from the shadows of an alley, a single worm came out hissing pitifully, evidently affected by radiation, it crawled a little more and died at Achish's feet. Only one, not enough to explain or justify anything. Achish fell to his knees as Karl-11 staggered behind him. The King of Ekron turned off all communications, put the barrel of his automatic rifle to a side of his head, and pulled the trigger. A mix of blood and circuitry spread to the floor. Karl looked at the corpse of Achish and fell to a side of it, waiting for dead.

Then Karl heard the noise of wires unraveling and a door opening. Like in a dream, a little blonde girl came walking as she would have appeared from thin air. "Is Briella's spirit, my angel, that comes to say goodbye" thought Karl, but quickly realized that her hair was way longer than Briella's, it reached the ground and dragged on it. The girl had her left eye completely red, her right eye was a black crystal ball, she had two fingers less in her left hand, and she was barefoot. Around her neck she had a black spider necklace. Behind her, there was a man dressed in black rags and his head was covered with a hood. As sun started to rise, Karl was able to see a part of the man's face and recognized him.

"Gog, Sorcerer of Constantinople..."

Those were Karl-11's last words, as his eyes lost its shine and his mind died.

5

"Take his body, it may be useful as a replacement for you."

Said Gog to his little companion, so the girl took Achish by the neck and dragged him as they walked towards the stairs, and then out of Lidya. As Gog emerged from the bunker's entrails, monsters saluted him from the seas, and followed him across the shores in his journey to Ekron. Once at the entrance of the fallen city, the girl possessed by Anubis took a cable from her clothes, moved aside her blonde hair to uncover a black connector in the place where her left ear should have been and plugged one end there. Then she took the other end and connected it to Achish's head. The eyes of the vulture chimera shone again and the doors of Ekron opened for Gog and his company, as the clouds grew thicker in the sky and acid rain started to fall.

Inside, the place was transformed into a worm nest, where unholy creatures laid with each other in depraved and nightmarish ways. Gog took one of them, shredded it to take out its circuitry and sat by a side of the main central square. The girl unplugged herself from Achish, throwed it on the ground and sat next to Gog with the cable still hanging from her head.

Gog soaked the circuitry from the worm with black oil that came out of his clawed hands, said some words in a language that humans are not supposed to understand, and the circuitry changed in his hands. Then he connected that circuitry to the cable hanging from the girl's ear, and the worms stopped hissing. Silently, the beasts approached Gog and the foam stopped emanating from their mouths, then they started to whisper, like in a prayer, to their new master.

Gog petted the girl's head, and she looked at him. "I should allow her to grow now" he thought. For a moment she tried to smile, but instead she only showed her teeth, it was what a dog would have done if you could ask him to smile.

END OF THE FALL OF EKRON