The Four Heroes, Chapter Four

Joe and Dylan arrived at their sinister rendezvous. Behind them the circumference of Earth shone in space, while ahead stretched a ghastly cobweb whose strands were giant fungal tendrils and whose nodes the wrecks of a million battle-starships. From this obscene interconnected hugeness seethed the infernal tempest that still darkened Nottingham’s heavens, its roiling fury held for the moment in check, but which unleashed would be akin to a runaway star colliding with the planet such that no living creature could survive.

Before the two heroes on the toadstool-ship’s bridge, Empress Ungus’s life-sized image steadily swelled into focus like a vile vision glimpsed in cauldron-smoke. Through swallowing up half a galaxy’s worth of souls from the Solidity armada’s ill-fated crew, the mushroom-monarch had wrested herself back from the brink of sap-soaked demise and now was germinating again in all her horrid grandeur. The thick green creepers that carted her mass were a lusty squirming nest, and veritable cloud-formations of yellowish spore heaved copiously from her widespread gill-slits. From out of this rancid nebulosity peered the budlike head on its long stringy stem, and as was often the case with Empress Ungus, by far the most repulsive thing about her was her smile.

“Punctual,” she observed. “Then, without more ado…”

She thrust forth both her twenty-fingered hands with the palms pointing outward. Joe and Dylan, who had been prepared for anything, braced themselves as all but each other and Empress Ungus blew away before a roaring gale, bulkheads and windshield and deck of the spacecraft cabin vanishing at once. What sprang into existence in their stead was some eldritch projection like a holographic landscape, neither clear nor distinct as electronic technologies would have rendered it, but in its lurid flickering abstractions recognizable enough. They were standing amid a Nottingham in ruins, where rubble-strewn alleyways crawled with verminous gaping-mouthed beasts, and above whose cracked and truncated skyscraper tops steadily opened an orbital black hole.

“The day of Harbin’s triumph,” commented Joe, who knew the scene from hand-painted delineations made centuries in advance of it. “The day his intergalactic reign of terror begins. It is said that my second son, his sister, and other children who are to be The Four Heroes’ first torch-bearers will fall to my eldest at this time. But ordained likewise is our final reckoning with The Foretold One, and you may rest assured, Empress, that on that hour Harbin will face retribution for this and every other outrage.”

“Good, you’ve read the Prophecy since last we met. I’m amazed you had time,” returned the dowager, dryly salacious. “And I see you’ve already got everything figured out in true Four Heroes fashion. Because Harbin, of course, is just another problem you can solve by throwing some pyrotechnics at it. A nice big climactic battle, shot through with witty quips and stirring speeches. Then once you’ve saved the day you’ll go home for popcorn.”

Her tone was nothing but irony and contempt. Dylan remarked: “You weren’t kidding when you said you wanted to talk. And let me guess, you’re about to explain why Harbin’s going to be different to everyone else we’ve defeated that way, right?”

Empress Ungus looked at him. She was still smiling.

“The Prophecy of the Flame, and my perusal of it subsequent to the Fourth Dark Advent, gave me quite a taste for dipping into your species’ literature,” Ungus commenced. “Some of it’s quite interesting – or at any rate, the works directly inspired by the Prophecy are. Take your Arthurian Legends, for example. I just love the character of Mordred. Power-hungry upstart from the generation after, who successfully lays to waste an heroic world-order established by his forebears.”

She gestured briefly with one hand to remind her two listeners of the spectral scenery that surrounded them.

“Yes, he’s the King’s nephew not his son, artistic license,” Empress Ungus resumed. “But wrack those microscopic human brains for a minute. Whom do you suppose the long-forgotten originator of that myth based Mordred on?”

“I doubt you brought us here for a literary appreciation class,” Joe interjected. The Empress continued smoothly:

“Mordred, however, can barely be called a character at all. He’s more like a plot-device, a convenient villain who appears on cue just as soon as the author needs to bring his narrative to its tragic conclusion. The whole point of that story is that Camelot had already fallen. It was torn apart from within, when two friends suddenly discovered that what had come between them meant they could never be friends again. If you want to know who really destroyed the Knights of the Round Table, look no further than Lancelot and Arthur.”

Her forty fingers shot out once more, expelling from view the future disaster and conjuring in its place one which had already occurred. Dylan and Joe abruptly found themselves facing Empress Ungus across a black sky, one which whirled with the ashes of war. Beneath their feet and her tendrils, etched in the same witch-fire glow as that of the previous vision, Nottingham Castle was under siege. Farthest away from the spectators a mighty clash of stone spears and battleaxes raged throughout the courtyards, while somewhat nearer along the vertical distance, atop the battlements, a trio who were part of the illusion themselves berated one another in bitter dispute. The pair on the brink of open hostilities were all too familiar.

Joe and Dylan looked down on their likenesses with sinking hearts. This was the very same incident they had hitherto discussed, but by now both apprehended something of the terrible terrain to which their interlocutor was leading them, and it was far worse than they had guessed. She, meanwhile, was slowly shaking her tiny head from side to side, eyes shut.

“Poor, blinkered, flesh-framed fools,” was her dismal pronouncement. “Ever since the day you first encountered Harbin, what have you been told, over and over again? That he imparts a unique and unprecedented threat to your cause. That somehow written on his brow is the final and irretrievable downfall of everything The Four Heroes have stood for. Now, you tell me one way in which he’s different in implementation to any of the other superpowered enemies you’ve fought? What is there about Harbin that qualifies him above all the rest for such a lofty destiny? Why should he, specifically, be entitled to claim that esteemed position of ultimate foe to your most fundamental ideals?”

Empress Ungus’s glaring face was a mask of furious triumph and righteous incredulity.

“Because he’s got red eyes?” she demanded. “And wears a cape?”

From down below emanated a burst of off-colour flame and another of tainted magenta, as the slightly younger Joe and Dylan made to set down to it. The Empress continued:

“Harbin’s nothing more than a pawn in this. He’s Mordred. He’s merely the spark that lights the fuse on a bomb constructed and primed before he was even born. The downfall of your cause began in the moment you’re now watching. It began the first time two members of The Four Heroes summoned up their powers to turn them on each other.”

With a gesture she banished the phantom analepsis, planting herself and her listeners in hollow sensory void which more than matched the state of the humans’ hearts.

“You can hardly need me to tell you this by now,” Ungus concluded, “but at some future date, one of you chooses to ally himself with Harbin. That’s how your cause will face its direst crisis. That’s what will bring it to the greatest ever danger of crumbling once and for all. A divide between the original heroes who followed it. Harbin could never prevail if you stood together, but with one of you loyal to him, it might well prove a different story.”

From out of nowhere appeared a pillar of bluish-green fungal bioluminescence which dropped upon Joe.

“Forgive me for this next part, but I also like your game-shows,” explained Empress Ungus. “So now you’re wondering which it’s going to be? Well, this one here seems the likelier choice. He’s Harbin’s father, to begin with. What’s more, let the way he happens to be feeling become incommensurable with your cause, just once, and he goes and sires The Foretold One. You can’t imagine it’ll take much to get him to turn his back on his beliefs again. However, that said…”

The spotlight shifted across to Dylan.

“That said,” Empress Ungus repeated softly, as one starting to hit her stride, “remember the little boy waiting outside his house on the day of Nottingham’s creation, for the eloquent teen some years his senior to gallop up and fill his head with causes and heroics and dreams. Now that all of that’s been crushingly betrayed, what’s to say this one won’t start to see Harbin’s interpretation of things as the better option? A disillusioned disciple can be every bit as destructive as a knowing traitor. Oh, yes, and one last point that might bear consideration…”

She leered with malice, and her pinprick eyes surveyed Dylan with a greedy gleam of something like triumph. In tones of a debater whipping out some incontestable secret weapon to clinch the contest, Empress Ungus slowly declaimed:

“His children didn’t run with the rest of the Four Hero Kids, did they? And you’ve never received a definite answer on why that was. Maybe this miracle remedy waiting for you in my sector is going to restore you to full working order from the waist down, and the reason your resultant offspring weren’t there on the day you met Harbin is that you and they are on his side? Two generations of The Four Heroes, fighting among themselves while Nottingham burns. If that’s the way it goes with you crawling bags of meat, fine. But not in my home. Do you understand at last what I’ve been fighting to prevent? Do you see now why I must act? To save my galaxy from you, and the ravages set in motion by your accursed cause!”

Joe had heard enough. In a single colossal psychic deployment he blasted through the smoke and mirrors, washing his surroundings clean of everything that had never been there. Empress Ungus’s illusory backdrops and her own ghostly form vanished at a stroke. Dylan and Joe were alone again on the mushroom-ship’s bridge, looking out through its transparent wall at the giant mesh of entangled dead starships and seething diabolic energies, whilst the Empress was forcibly returned to her physical body which stood aboard what had once been her flagship and now formed the nexus of the web. Out in the real world under hard clear starlight Joe’s voice thundered forth, amplified telepathically so Empress Ungus could hear:

“This is what you call saving your galaxy? By dooming half its number? This is what you posit in preference to our cause? We will show you that of which you speak so much, and understand so little. For when lives are lost, worlds cast asunder, and the crimes of our enemies repeated, it is the Four Heroes’ cause that compels us to fight for a better tomorrow than any conceived of by one such as you!”

Working together, Joe and Dylan exercised their might upon the saucer-craft that housed them and blew its hulls to pieces from the inside. Up into the vacuum of space the two slender figures rose, not to perish there, but merely to stand amid the stratosphere and stare Empress Ungus down. Behind them on the rolling globe a sole scintillation beamed into being and held a steady ascent, as if some bright star were rising up from the planet’s surface to challenge its fuming shadowy twin.

“What are you doing?” the Empress hissed from her mothership. Dylan’s psychically-transmitted reply came back:

“Throwing some pyrotechnics at the problem.”

Soaring out of Nottingham and into the heavens, the last of the atmospheric cloud-cover whipping by them and falling away behind, were Neetra and Bret. They bore between them the temporo-psionic fluxball in all its terrible stark vastness. Parking this moonlike orb in a prominent position before the amassing web the duo began to circle its expansive curvature like satellites, Joe and Dylan joining them to complete this astral dance. The Four Heroes, light and shade phasing in turn over their limbs, hair streaming back in the cosmic winds and eyes alive, were becoming more than they were.

For the first time, Empress Ungus seemed uneasy. “Wait,” she protested. “I have vital secrets about the course of future events. You always used to let Dimension Borg escape at times like this.”

“You are the literature enthusiast,” was Joe’s response. “Tell us then, whether it is sound writing practice to repeat an ending?”

Both factions cut loose. Ungus unleashed every last vestige she had sucked down and hoarded from weapon-batteries and engine-cores and living essences, driving before her a howling apocalypse made to level worlds in its wake. But The Four Heroes each drew back an arm, and in one concerted swing flung the fluxball to meet this juggernaut head-on. Stars melted to horizontal bolts as the meteoric orb, growing stronger and larger still from that which it engulfed into its shining sides, proved equal to the onslaught and did not stop. It crashed down upon the heart of the web, and Empress Ungus shrieking and railing was consumed by white. Still the sphere pushed on, collapsing the whole of the monster-net backward and in on itself, for riding out such momentum would require an outfield measurable in light-years. As The Four Heroes watched, their projectile like a departing comet or a shooting star returning home streaked away to the glittering vaults, trailing behind it the last broken vine-strings knotted with Solidity wrecks. A twinkle from the galactic vanishing-point was the last of it our heroes saw.

With Empress Ungus’s occult stormfront swept aside, unobstructed highways of sun stretched anew over the cusp of the world while city and oceans and mountains below gave back the golden fire of victorious dusk. In the cool and calm now restored to the universe The Four Heroes bestrode gravity’s rim, their frames anointed in hues of gilt and ember, and looked out as one in the direction the future lay. About them darted radiant shafts of the sunset time that was now and evermore a part of them, while at their feet contentedly turned a world which their powers had made safe once again.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR