Ashes to Ashes, 1/?
So, yeah... been awhile since I posted. Have been rather bogged down with school and stuff, but! That has not stopped me from writing. In fact, I've been writing a lot *because* of school as my friend Lynette has been pestering me to write for the school's publication ever since she found out I did short stories. Well, this is the story I've had floating around in my head for a few weeks now, though I only figured the original story would be one or two pages. Ended up a *bit* longer than that (7 pages so far), and I'm still not done with it. But, I will post what I have for you few people who read this thing, and for whoever else who might show up out of the blue one day. :)
Title: Ashes to Ashes
Author: Maren/rensong/whatever you want to call me
Rating: not really sure what you would call it. But, I will say that it would probably be rated R on TV for violence and a few naughty words. I'm gonna call it PG-13 with a few R possibilities.
Notes: All these characters are original, so please don't steal them. I love my characters. {{{hugs characters}} But, if you want to borrow them for some reason or another, ask and we'll see what happens. :D Also, this is a work in progress, so again with the not being betaed or anything. Will hopefully finish it by the end of the week and post the rest once I've gotten it betaed. Oh, yeah, and one more thing - I stole the idea of the whole manipulating the air thing from the awesome Rachael Caine, author of the Weather Warden books. I tweaked it a bit so it isn't quite as plagiarized, but I still thought I should mention that cause I try not to take credit away from those it's due. :)
Feedback: would make me love you forever and ever and ever, so pretty please with a naked actor/actress of your choice on top leave me some comments? ::puppy dog eyes::
Thank yous: Huge huge amount of thanks to Emily lostnyanko for giving me all those name ideas. Could have never come up with anything that cool without your help. ::glomps:: Also, to Lynette who will probably never read this but who I'm mentioning anyway because she was the one that pushed me to write something for the university's creative newspaper/magazine. This is the result of all that pushing. Might even get it in the paper if I can figure out a way to clean up some of the language (cause something tells me that even college papers don't appreciate the use of profanity in their material. :D ). I should probably mention sbbo too as she was the one that linked me to the website where I found out about Bolon Tzakab. So, thanks a lot to all of you.
~*~
My name is Lilith Kiskil. Daughter of Darkness? Maybe, but right now all I'm trying to do is keep my little corner of the universe from being overcome by it
Fire licked across the wood, glowing tongues of gold and orange and red and blue greedily lapping up whatever fuel it came in contact with. It was something I had grown up around, something I don't fear except with the healthy respect any smart woman should have for a force of nature. And over the years, I have come to appreciate it's beauty and all it can offer, especially on those cold winter nights when fire was the only thing that stood between me and the furious blizzard howling outside my window.
Fire was an amazing thing; it could nurture and comfort when tamed, offering heat and warmth in a world where such things seemed so short at hand. It could cook food and heat water, offer a barrier against the darkness and safety from the unseen. But unleashed and allowed to run wild as nature's fury, it could destroy everything in its path. Almost as a living thing, it would tear across the landscape, burning anything and everything that got in the way; as close to an unstoppable force there ever was. But even in it's fury, fire cleansed the land, burning away the old and leaving behind a fertile land to nourish the new.
So I wasn't afraid when I saw the fire in Bolon's eyes. Not a fire of lust or a reflection of the fire that burned the walls around us, but the fire one might see when looking through a window into the depths of Hell. He used to be the Mayan god of lightning and fire, hungry for power as all those would-be gods tended to be and using all the means he had available to him to get that power. He might have been a good guy once, but you know how the saying goes - power corrupts. I guess he pissed off a few too many of his supervisors, because once his people were wiped out, they stripped him of his power and his godhood, gave him a soul, and cast down to Earth as a lowly human. Problem solved, right?
Thing is, those who kicked him out failed to take into account the fact that giving a man a soul left him open to temptation. Good ol' Bolon Tzakab wanted power back, and power was exactly what the Devil offered him - after all, how often do you get the chance to sign a former god onto your side? Bolon could have his power over fire back, and all it would cost him was a soul he never wanted in the first place. He latched onto the offer like a drowning man latches on to whatever will help him stay afloat, and it wasn't long before he was the Devil's left-hand man, and he was pissed off. He wanted revenge, but he couldn't strike back directly at those who had cast him down. So he attacked their beloved charges instead - humans. Unfortunately for him, he chose to start his revenge in my back yard.
I had tracked the bastard all throughout the Midwest, following a trail of burned houses and devastated families. He used his fire as a weapon, soiling its purity with innocent lives. Fire was a force of nature, and yes, sometimes lives were lost when it escaped from the confines we placed on it. But when it was used solely as a weapon against those who trusted so much of their lives to it - when any of the forces of nature were used to such ends - that was like sacrificing a new born child and using it's blood to conjure demons. It twisted something innocent and pure into something evil.
I've hardened my heart over the years, trained it so that it might as well be made of stone, because if you let your feelings make the decision in this job, chances are you won't last a week. With all the horrors I've seen, it was a defense mechanism designed to protect what little sanity I had left. Oh, I still felt things. Perhaps I even felt things too much, but I had learned to lock those feelings away to be dealt with later once I had the freedom to feel them in solitude. I know it made me seem cold and heartless to everyone else, but it got the job done.
But even a heart of stone can break, and mine was as good as shattered when one of Bolon's trails led me to a mother covered in soot, kneeling in the ashes that had once been her home, sobbing into a burned and tattered blanket that held the remains of her eight month old daughter. Not even I could be heartless enough not to feel something when faced with that vision of suffering. No one should have to go through that, and after the initial hurt and horror at what had happened to the poor woman, it was my turn to be pissed off. There was no way in hell I was going to let that bastard live to ruin someone else's life.
That's how I ended up here, surrounded by flames and facing a demi-god. Probably not the smartest pass-time in the world, but what can I say - once I get my mind set on something, I can be as stubborn as a mule, and my mind had been made up long before I found myself standing here and staring into the burning pits of fire where his eyes were supposed to be. Bolon wasn't leaving this place alive, even if it cost both our lives.
The two of us were at something of a stand still at the moment, weighing our options. If you haven't figured it out yet, we'd been at the whole final conflict thing for quite a while now. Bolon was an impressive creature, I'll give him that. He can manipulate fire in all sorts of ways, from fireballs to lightning to throwing jets of flames from his hands - all of which he tried with me when I first showed up. He even managed a few firestorms when nothing else seemed to phase me much, whirlwinds of flame that he sent right toward me. And he was cute, too - all dark hair and chiseled frame, the type of guy I might normally go for if not for the whole trying to kill me and take over the world thing. And I admit, for a moment there I wondered what color his eyes would be if they hadn't been consumed by flame.
But I have my own little powers scattered here and there, one of which is the ability to manipulate wind and air. All I had to do was hold my breath for a bit as I created a bubble of carbon dioxide around me. Fire can't survive without oxygen to fuel it, and anything he threw at me harmlessly dispersed a few inches from my body. For the prolonged attacks, all I had to do was extend the CO2 bubble a few more inches and create an even smaller bubble of regular air in front of my nose and mouth and keep replenishing it every few minutes.
It took him awhile to give up on the whole throwing fire thing. The more he notices how it wasn't effecting me, the more frustrated he became, and the more effort he put into his attack - which was rather unfortunate for the warehouse we were standing in as the structure ended up taking the brunt of his assault. It was kind of funny, actually - there he was, launching everything he had at me and further diminishing his own power supply while I just stood there, standing with all the casually one might have waiting at a bus stop, trying to prolong the moment before he realized a physical attack would have taken me out in a heartbeat. I remain ever grateful that demons and demi-gods alike aren't exactly known for their brains.
He did stop eventually, though, and I took it as an opportunity to draw the sword from my back. Pure god-steel, forged from the fires of Hephaestus himself, nothing could break my Miakoda except another weapon created by the same hands. Handed down in my family for centuries, she has had many names. My grandmother called her Aysel - Turkish name for Moonlight; my mother always referred to her as Ilandere - Moon Woman. Kamaria, Neona, Sohalia... She fits her name to the soul of her barer, whispering it into your mind when she is first drawn from the scabbard by your hand. Miakoda - Power of the Moon. How my family came to be blessed with such a timeless treasure is beyond me, but it is a gift I am ever thankful for. Without Miakoda strapped across my back, I never would have survived this long, and I had a feeling she was the only chance I had to get out of this situation alive. And even with the sword, the prospects of that were looking pretty dim, because I knew it couldn't be much longer before the fiery inferno we were standing in turned into my own personal funeral pyre.
The fire in Bolon's eyes flamed to a new intensity when he saw me draw the sword, all the more proof to the fact that he wasn't human any more. Maybe he never really was. You can strip a god of his powers, give him a soul, and toss him down to earth with all the rest of us poor mortals, but all that means shit if he doesn't have a conscience. It's our compassion, our ability to care about someone other then ourselves that makes us human, and that was something Bolon never got a chance to learn. But at least that made my job easier. Even after 5 years of hunting demons and monsters that science couldn't explain and no one else wanted to believe in, the human ones were still the hardest to kill because I couldn't just see the monster they had become. I also saw the sons and daughters and wives and husbands they used to be. No one would mourn this guy; the Devil probably didn't even want to keep someone with such ambition around without a proper lesson in humility as he might one day become a threat to his power. And hell, those few humans who knew about him would probably celebrate his dissention back to eternal suffering where he belonged. All I had to do was hand him his one-way ticket back home, and I would do so gladly. He didn't seem very happy about the idea, though.
"Foolish child," he cried, and his voice was enough to vibrate down to my very bones. "You dare think you can win against me? I am a GOD!" Without warning he started throwing his fire at me again, so I didn't have time to prepare my little bubble of CO2. It was a reflex action more then a planned attack that had me raising Miakoda up in front of me to block the oncoming firestorm, and in the split second it took for the flames to travel across the distance between us I knew that it would never be enough. Why is it that time always seems to slow down in those moments right before you are overcome by certain death? Maybe its God's way of punishing us for our failures, one last hurrah on your behalf before the Powers that Be decide what to do with your mortal soul.
I saw the flames rolling toward me and knew that in a heartbeat I was going to be engulfed, and a few heartbeats after that I would be gone while Bolon would lived to ruin those very same lives I had promised to protect. It also gave me plenty of time to curse myself for my stupidity, for the overconfidence I had gained from our earlier confrontation, for letting down my guard. But mostly, I was cursing myself for my failure. It wasn't supposed to end like this.
Title: Ashes to Ashes
Author: Maren/rensong/whatever you want to call me
Rating: not really sure what you would call it. But, I will say that it would probably be rated R on TV for violence and a few naughty words. I'm gonna call it PG-13 with a few R possibilities.
Notes: All these characters are original, so please don't steal them. I love my characters. {{{hugs characters}} But, if you want to borrow them for some reason or another, ask and we'll see what happens. :D Also, this is a work in progress, so again with the not being betaed or anything. Will hopefully finish it by the end of the week and post the rest once I've gotten it betaed. Oh, yeah, and one more thing - I stole the idea of the whole manipulating the air thing from the awesome Rachael Caine, author of the Weather Warden books. I tweaked it a bit so it isn't quite as plagiarized, but I still thought I should mention that cause I try not to take credit away from those it's due. :)
Feedback: would make me love you forever and ever and ever, so pretty please with a naked actor/actress of your choice on top leave me some comments? ::puppy dog eyes::
Thank yous: Huge huge amount of thanks to Emily lostnyanko for giving me all those name ideas. Could have never come up with anything that cool without your help. ::glomps:: Also, to Lynette who will probably never read this but who I'm mentioning anyway because she was the one that pushed me to write something for the university's creative newspaper/magazine. This is the result of all that pushing. Might even get it in the paper if I can figure out a way to clean up some of the language (cause something tells me that even college papers don't appreciate the use of profanity in their material. :D ). I should probably mention sbbo too as she was the one that linked me to the website where I found out about Bolon Tzakab. So, thanks a lot to all of you.
~*~
My name is Lilith Kiskil. Daughter of Darkness? Maybe, but right now all I'm trying to do is keep my little corner of the universe from being overcome by it
Fire licked across the wood, glowing tongues of gold and orange and red and blue greedily lapping up whatever fuel it came in contact with. It was something I had grown up around, something I don't fear except with the healthy respect any smart woman should have for a force of nature. And over the years, I have come to appreciate it's beauty and all it can offer, especially on those cold winter nights when fire was the only thing that stood between me and the furious blizzard howling outside my window.
Fire was an amazing thing; it could nurture and comfort when tamed, offering heat and warmth in a world where such things seemed so short at hand. It could cook food and heat water, offer a barrier against the darkness and safety from the unseen. But unleashed and allowed to run wild as nature's fury, it could destroy everything in its path. Almost as a living thing, it would tear across the landscape, burning anything and everything that got in the way; as close to an unstoppable force there ever was. But even in it's fury, fire cleansed the land, burning away the old and leaving behind a fertile land to nourish the new.
So I wasn't afraid when I saw the fire in Bolon's eyes. Not a fire of lust or a reflection of the fire that burned the walls around us, but the fire one might see when looking through a window into the depths of Hell. He used to be the Mayan god of lightning and fire, hungry for power as all those would-be gods tended to be and using all the means he had available to him to get that power. He might have been a good guy once, but you know how the saying goes - power corrupts. I guess he pissed off a few too many of his supervisors, because once his people were wiped out, they stripped him of his power and his godhood, gave him a soul, and cast down to Earth as a lowly human. Problem solved, right?
Thing is, those who kicked him out failed to take into account the fact that giving a man a soul left him open to temptation. Good ol' Bolon Tzakab wanted power back, and power was exactly what the Devil offered him - after all, how often do you get the chance to sign a former god onto your side? Bolon could have his power over fire back, and all it would cost him was a soul he never wanted in the first place. He latched onto the offer like a drowning man latches on to whatever will help him stay afloat, and it wasn't long before he was the Devil's left-hand man, and he was pissed off. He wanted revenge, but he couldn't strike back directly at those who had cast him down. So he attacked their beloved charges instead - humans. Unfortunately for him, he chose to start his revenge in my back yard.
I had tracked the bastard all throughout the Midwest, following a trail of burned houses and devastated families. He used his fire as a weapon, soiling its purity with innocent lives. Fire was a force of nature, and yes, sometimes lives were lost when it escaped from the confines we placed on it. But when it was used solely as a weapon against those who trusted so much of their lives to it - when any of the forces of nature were used to such ends - that was like sacrificing a new born child and using it's blood to conjure demons. It twisted something innocent and pure into something evil.
I've hardened my heart over the years, trained it so that it might as well be made of stone, because if you let your feelings make the decision in this job, chances are you won't last a week. With all the horrors I've seen, it was a defense mechanism designed to protect what little sanity I had left. Oh, I still felt things. Perhaps I even felt things too much, but I had learned to lock those feelings away to be dealt with later once I had the freedom to feel them in solitude. I know it made me seem cold and heartless to everyone else, but it got the job done.
But even a heart of stone can break, and mine was as good as shattered when one of Bolon's trails led me to a mother covered in soot, kneeling in the ashes that had once been her home, sobbing into a burned and tattered blanket that held the remains of her eight month old daughter. Not even I could be heartless enough not to feel something when faced with that vision of suffering. No one should have to go through that, and after the initial hurt and horror at what had happened to the poor woman, it was my turn to be pissed off. There was no way in hell I was going to let that bastard live to ruin someone else's life.
That's how I ended up here, surrounded by flames and facing a demi-god. Probably not the smartest pass-time in the world, but what can I say - once I get my mind set on something, I can be as stubborn as a mule, and my mind had been made up long before I found myself standing here and staring into the burning pits of fire where his eyes were supposed to be. Bolon wasn't leaving this place alive, even if it cost both our lives.
The two of us were at something of a stand still at the moment, weighing our options. If you haven't figured it out yet, we'd been at the whole final conflict thing for quite a while now. Bolon was an impressive creature, I'll give him that. He can manipulate fire in all sorts of ways, from fireballs to lightning to throwing jets of flames from his hands - all of which he tried with me when I first showed up. He even managed a few firestorms when nothing else seemed to phase me much, whirlwinds of flame that he sent right toward me. And he was cute, too - all dark hair and chiseled frame, the type of guy I might normally go for if not for the whole trying to kill me and take over the world thing. And I admit, for a moment there I wondered what color his eyes would be if they hadn't been consumed by flame.
But I have my own little powers scattered here and there, one of which is the ability to manipulate wind and air. All I had to do was hold my breath for a bit as I created a bubble of carbon dioxide around me. Fire can't survive without oxygen to fuel it, and anything he threw at me harmlessly dispersed a few inches from my body. For the prolonged attacks, all I had to do was extend the CO2 bubble a few more inches and create an even smaller bubble of regular air in front of my nose and mouth and keep replenishing it every few minutes.
It took him awhile to give up on the whole throwing fire thing. The more he notices how it wasn't effecting me, the more frustrated he became, and the more effort he put into his attack - which was rather unfortunate for the warehouse we were standing in as the structure ended up taking the brunt of his assault. It was kind of funny, actually - there he was, launching everything he had at me and further diminishing his own power supply while I just stood there, standing with all the casually one might have waiting at a bus stop, trying to prolong the moment before he realized a physical attack would have taken me out in a heartbeat. I remain ever grateful that demons and demi-gods alike aren't exactly known for their brains.
He did stop eventually, though, and I took it as an opportunity to draw the sword from my back. Pure god-steel, forged from the fires of Hephaestus himself, nothing could break my Miakoda except another weapon created by the same hands. Handed down in my family for centuries, she has had many names. My grandmother called her Aysel - Turkish name for Moonlight; my mother always referred to her as Ilandere - Moon Woman. Kamaria, Neona, Sohalia... She fits her name to the soul of her barer, whispering it into your mind when she is first drawn from the scabbard by your hand. Miakoda - Power of the Moon. How my family came to be blessed with such a timeless treasure is beyond me, but it is a gift I am ever thankful for. Without Miakoda strapped across my back, I never would have survived this long, and I had a feeling she was the only chance I had to get out of this situation alive. And even with the sword, the prospects of that were looking pretty dim, because I knew it couldn't be much longer before the fiery inferno we were standing in turned into my own personal funeral pyre.
The fire in Bolon's eyes flamed to a new intensity when he saw me draw the sword, all the more proof to the fact that he wasn't human any more. Maybe he never really was. You can strip a god of his powers, give him a soul, and toss him down to earth with all the rest of us poor mortals, but all that means shit if he doesn't have a conscience. It's our compassion, our ability to care about someone other then ourselves that makes us human, and that was something Bolon never got a chance to learn. But at least that made my job easier. Even after 5 years of hunting demons and monsters that science couldn't explain and no one else wanted to believe in, the human ones were still the hardest to kill because I couldn't just see the monster they had become. I also saw the sons and daughters and wives and husbands they used to be. No one would mourn this guy; the Devil probably didn't even want to keep someone with such ambition around without a proper lesson in humility as he might one day become a threat to his power. And hell, those few humans who knew about him would probably celebrate his dissention back to eternal suffering where he belonged. All I had to do was hand him his one-way ticket back home, and I would do so gladly. He didn't seem very happy about the idea, though.
"Foolish child," he cried, and his voice was enough to vibrate down to my very bones. "You dare think you can win against me? I am a GOD!" Without warning he started throwing his fire at me again, so I didn't have time to prepare my little bubble of CO2. It was a reflex action more then a planned attack that had me raising Miakoda up in front of me to block the oncoming firestorm, and in the split second it took for the flames to travel across the distance between us I knew that it would never be enough. Why is it that time always seems to slow down in those moments right before you are overcome by certain death? Maybe its God's way of punishing us for our failures, one last hurrah on your behalf before the Powers that Be decide what to do with your mortal soul.
I saw the flames rolling toward me and knew that in a heartbeat I was going to be engulfed, and a few heartbeats after that I would be gone while Bolon would lived to ruin those very same lives I had promised to protect. It also gave me plenty of time to curse myself for my stupidity, for the overconfidence I had gained from our earlier confrontation, for letting down my guard. But mostly, I was cursing myself for my failure. It wasn't supposed to end like this.