Death by Cliché (34 page)

“Are you ready to die, Brother?”

“You can’t kill me,” Damico hissed.

“And why is that?”

The guards rushed in on Damico, who hit the ground and rolled between two of them, rushing straight into the magical erasing blast of the Artifact. Damico screamed in pain, but pushed through the effects of the artifact and struck out with one hand, knocking the eraser free.

They both collapsed to the ground, rolling into a bloody pile as the eraser bounced across the room. The impact drove the wind out of Hraldolf. The flies swarmed in, forming a close shield around his body, biting and crawling over Damico. His servants.

Hraldolf crawled out of the pile, Damico’s blood slick on his legs as he crept over the floor. Damico no longer tried to stop him. The Overlord scrambled to his feet, his eyes casting about the room for the eraser, not seeing it. Damico writhed, and Hraldolf couldn’t figure out why, and looked closer. The man faded before his eyes, the flies going straight through him in paths that seemed to cause him agony. His brother’s last statement made sense. Hraldolf looked down on Damico with pity.

Of
course
Hraldolf couldn’t kill him.

“You’re already dead.”

As Damico writhed, Hraldolf glanced over at the battle. The dwarf made good work of the guards, but there were still a dozen left. Arithian had dropped from damage. No threat there. Hraldolf looked back at Damico and saw nothing but a flickering image of the man. He smiled and walked toward the eraser.

He picked it up and considered it briefly, the cold rubbery feel. It fit comfortably in his hand. This was it. With this, he could unmake the world. He could finally know oblivion.

All his life, it had been as if this world were nothing but a prison. It had seemed like all his trials and agonies were hand-picked. It was as if all his trauma was geared toward making him into the ultimate tragic figure, as if some great god, be it Ralph or Savé Gamé, toyed with Hraldolf.
Made
him suffer. Hraldolf had never wanted anything more than peace, and all he’d gotten was carefully metered conflict.

Well, no more. Whatever god pulled his strings, tortured him for sport, it would all end now.

“No!” Damico screamed, his voice wispy as if carried away on hurricane wind.

“Yes,” Hraldolf whispered.

With one hand, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a comb. Better safe than sorry. He straightened his clothing and began to comb his hair. Enough of the tousled Hraldolf who enslaved. He needed the perfect Hraldolf, whose looks could kill.

The flies died first, falling out of the air one at a time. Damico seemed to figure this out quickly enough to look away, but he didn’t matter. Even now, Hraldolf could barely make him out.

And so Hraldolf raised his most prized Artifact, and stroke after broad stroke, he unmade the world.

“Heeelllllooooo, Kitty.”

Chapter
Sixty-Five

“And so it ends.”

—Bob Defendi

he moment you begin to die, a great peace descends
on your body. The pain that had seized your limbs so violently eases. Your toes, whether or not you can move them, relax. Then a great, final breath flows from your body, and this is the moment of truth. The heavenly choir and the demons of your awful nature line up in a crowd, tallying your sins and good deeds one by one. A hush falls over everything as they wait for that final score, to see if the weight of your sins will bear you down or your glory will lift you up. That moment of lifting comes as the supreme moment of love and release. It’s sweet like pure syrup, sweet like talking your way out of a speeding ticket, sweet like champagne licked off the nipple of your one true love.

It’s the big promotion skipping the asshole and landing firmly on your shoulders, the rich uncle mentioning you in his will. It’s realizing the decision rests on you to approve or decline the mortgage of the prick who beat you up in high school.

Damico experienced none of this.

He didn’t die exactly. He wasn’t sure if he even could die. Hraldolf had said he was already dead. Was that true, or did he still cling to a last scrap of life in some far away world?

Either way, he didn’t feel his body give out nerve by aching nerve. Instead, he just sort of faded away. One moment he lay on the ground, his erased chest throbbing with the pain of the wound. Then he was Marty McFly on a one-way trip to never-was.

Damico screamed.

His hand, his faded memory of a hand, fell, landing on an object, causing a blast of pain to roar through his arm. He started to pull away, and then it hit him.

Pain.

Pain, or just let go. Let go and maybe move on to his final judgment, maybe drift back to his body. Pain and live in this world forever. Let go and either find death or return to his former life.

And he could sense the actual path back now. Not dead yet after all. He could feel the connection to his body, smell the surgical plastic—hear the ventilator. Letting go wouldn’t kill him. It would take him home.

Home.

All he had to do was let go… let Hraldolf win. Nothing was real anyway. She wasn’t real. None of them were. They lived off his borrowed life. They fed on his fading soul. They were parasites, and nothing he did could change that. They had killed him. With each life he’d granted, they had weakened his soul, and now his body lacked the strength to continue. Let go. No more awful pain. Slow sleep as his body recovered. When he woke up, he knew even his head wound would be healed. Just let go. Let go.

Let go of Jurkand and Hraldolf and this stupid fictional family, of this world where clichés swarmed, of the pain and the responsibility and the constant strife, of a narrative structure that guaranteed he was constantly miserable. Let go of it all. Let go of her.

Her.

His hand twitched, still on that pain-inducing, life-giving object. It was hard. Long and slender. Cool. The pain intensified.

She wasn’t real. He created her. She was nearly his daughter, in spirit at least, and he didn’t feel like living his life as a walking testament to Doctor Freud. Just let her go. Let it all go. Carl’s game will end. He’ll go to jail. Let go.

Her.

His hand grasped the object. The pain flowed into his shoulder, across his chest. The pain burst into a need for his lungs to breathe, a need for his heart to beat. With a great gasping breath, he screamed, this time for real.

He writhed and flipped over onto his back, staring up into an open sky, rubble and half-deconstructed castle surrounding it. He rolled over in time to watch a large block of stone topple and fall. The pain became a promise of more pain, and he leaped even as the stone crashed where he lay.

He rolled and came up standing. Hraldolf hadn’t noticed, still excising the walls of the keep so he could access the hills and the mountains and the land. He’d already erased the sky, leaving… well, it made Damico’s eyes hurt to try to look at nothing.

To one side, all the guards lay dead, but Gorthander lay on the ground, his arms and legs erased, his eyes wide with panic. Arithian wept silently, his hands and mouth gone. Damico turned from the horror that had once been his friends and examined the object in his hand. The first Artifact. The connection between him and this item had brought all these people to life. This was it. The wellspring of creation.

A mechanical pencil.

Before, at a distance, the resonance between him and it had formed a connection between his life force and the people who he awakened. Now, in his hand, it thrummed, filling him with life. Aching, thrilling, laughing, effervescent
life
.

He considered Hraldolf and pulled up the pencil, feeling the energy pulse in his hand. A pencil in the hand of a game designer trapped in a game world. The proto-creative force burned so powerfully he feared he’d contract VD. The pencil would never feel this powerful in another hand. Perhaps there would be no power at all. Perhaps Hraldolf wouldn’t even be able to use the eraser if he hadn’t been so connected to Carl, to Damico himself.

“Hraldolf!” Damico shouted, sketching bars in the air around the Overlord.

They appeared as penciled lines, slowly growing together as if they intended to solidify.

Hraldolf looked down, erasing the bars quickly. Damico sketched a boulder in the air over his head only to have it erased. He sketched a sword only to have it vanish, sketched a rabid dog only to watch Hraldolf obliterate it, a spiked wall only to have Hraldolf wipe it clean.

“Hmm,” Hraldolf said. “You found the other Artifact?”

“A fish,” Damico said, because this entire thing had become as surreal as Salvador Dali drinking bong water.

“You don’t think you can win, do you?” Hraldolf asked.

Damico stared right into that perfect, deadly face now, but the creative force of the pencil in his hand must have protected him. He wanted to weep for the beauty of his brother, but he didn’t die like the carpet of flies.

“A little trite, don’t you think?” Damico asked.

“You
do
think you can win, don’t you?”

“I have to.”

Hraldolf shook his head. “My dear brother, it’s always easier to destroy than to create.”

“The law of entropy.”

“I don’t care if it’s a Z-trophy. You’re going to die.”

With that, Hraldolf took off Damico’s left arm with a swipe. Damico collapsed to the ground, furiously drawing, but Hraldolf took off his legs at the knees. The Overlord tried to take off the other arm too, but he couldn’t. The power of the pencil surged and the eraser had no effect.

Damico retaliated with sketched demons, his third grade teacher, and Jiminy Cricket. Hraldolf obliterated them all before Damico drew more than outlines.

The Overlord walked to Damico. Damico lay there with only one arm, staring up at his brother, his enemy, the core of the clichés. He stared up, and he
hated
.

“You are the alpha,” Hraldolf said. “I am the omega.”

“The yin and the yang,” Damico said. “I can never remember which is which.”

He sketched across Hraldolf’s body, but the Overlord erased the little wounds and horns and the mustache before Damico finished.

“You’ve lost, brother.”

“If you think destroying the world is winning, we’ve all lost.”

Hraldolf watched him even as Damico sketched on Hraldolf’s body. Hraldolf gave himself a swipe, clearing a couple doodles. “I have the eraser, Damico. You can’t hurt me. I
am
destruction. Just like I can do nothing more to you as long as you’re creation. Now, give me that Artifact, and I’ll kill you painlessly.

Damico shook his head. “You’re a fool, Hraldolf.”

“And why is that?”

Damico smiled. “Yin and yang. Nothing is all evil or all good. Nothing is all love or all hate. Nothing is all creation or all destruction.” It had all fallen into place now, and he understood. “If it was, then you couldn’t have taken my legs.”

Hraldolf squinted. “So?”

“So I couldn’t have done what I just did to you with those last marks.”

Hraldolf frowned and examined his arms as if he might have missed some of Damico’s drawings and then the first pain hit, sending him wailing to his knees. He shuddered and screamed again, even as Damico redrew his own limbs. They hovered in place as rough outlines before flushing with color like a Photoshop flood fill. They swelled outward, gaining dimension and shape and then fading from cartoon to computer animation to real.

Damico stood.

He walked over to his brother and considered him, the limbs already twisting, the eraser lying on the ground next to a distorted hand. Damico picked up the second Artifact and put it in his pocket.

“Yin and yang,” Damico said. “Inside destruction there is creation, and vice versa. You used my own desire for self-destruction against me when you took my legs.”

“What have you done?” Hraldolf screamed, the pain quivering in his voice.

“I used your creation against you. I wasn’t just doodling there. I was giving you a cold.”

“A cold?” His voice shrieked in disbelief.

“And an ear infection. And syphilis. Have you ever tried to draw a spirochete?”

“I don’t understand,” Hraldolf hissed.