Eau And The Water Of Life
Part I of Eau's Retribution
Bolts of emerald electricity streaked across the blackened skyline, as machine guns fired wildly at the escalating rioting below. Pandemonium was going on, in every level of the city, from the bottom slums to the Eden high rises, elevated gardens not seen since ancient Mesopotamia were put to the torch.
Flames burst through windows, explosions set aflame the running gas, the waterfalls of sewage, and the factories that sent radiative clouds of poison into the atmosphere. Death was coming to Scion Bejin, the new utopia of the Free World. No matter the hundreds of thousands of live ammunition used upon the innocent and guilty, there never seemed to be enough bodies to pile up in the streets, and fill the sewer drains with blood.
On one skyscraper's roof was the launchpad for a fleet of aerial vehicles. Efa, an aviator for the Prime Chancellor, had seen her share of carnage. The extinction of the city was at hand, the nuclear reactors untended, ill-kept, and poorly managed were going to go nuclear in less than a day.
All the friends, family, and acquaintances she knew were massacred in their homes by the rioters and SWAT, all that she had was her life, and the keys to her fighter copter. Having retained ownership of it from her military days, the politicians had to use military vehicles to cut costs, as the city was going broke into its descension into Hell.
The seeds of this Armageddon started by a story that the media accidentally released, not consulting government agencies they let a three minute clip of Snippers be released. A deranged serial killer who for years people in the project housings have claimed is killing people indiscriminately, and who the government called an urban myth.
Photographs and live video of the maniac dressed as a filthy, black and red scarecrow, wielding gigantic pairs of novelty scissors, polished and sharpened to a lethal sharpness. Grips of the scissor weapon fit in his hands like iron knuckles, and the blade in the video snipped clearly even as it sliced open the abdomen of a pregnant woman and decapitated her unborn child.
The witness who caught it on video sent it to the press, he was charged with subversion, and was burned alive when the prisons burned down. Havok call started once the illusion of protection started to erode in the majority of the city's populace. Scion Bejin was almost a day away from total destruction, and no one but Efa took it as a chance to make her escape. Getting into her aerial craft, she managed to take off, just as a neighboring skyscraper collapsed under the duress of multiple explosions.
Lifting up into the air, the smoke had blackened the already night sky, and despite her fear of breaking the city's most enforced law against leaving the city, she started to fly away. Over the checkpoints that divided each of the districts in the circular city, looking how traffic, fires, and the growing mounds of dead bodies blocked all exits out of the city.
The trains even stopped shipping in supplies, the city survived on imports, and now it looked as if the massive explosion would be a blessing to spare the city much more atrocities. Looking down on a watchtower, Efa saw a child’s face, shaved, face painted with blood, and eyes swollen from the radioactive smoke, she looked as if she was waiting for something.
A moment later her body fell apart, looking as if she were shredded by a swarm of black wasps, two towering soldiers stood over her, their rifles still smoking from the recent kill.
“All air traffic is prohibited, this is an emergency lockdown, please return to your homes, any—” Efa shut off the radio on her console, the strict directives it espoused did little help to her loved ones.
Watching the stillness in their eyes, and the blood drooling from their mouths was enough to make her sick. Hate for the city's politicians made her growing resentment for any large group of people nearly unbearable. She wanted to crash her copter into the nearest building. Feeling the fire consume her body in an intense inferno that would eviscerate her body and plunge her soul into Blazes was a temptation she overcame. Flying over the outer walls of the city, she was nearly away with it all, all she needed to do was fly over the mountains, and by dawn she would reach the desert that surrounds the city.
Liberated by the smoke and the presence of evil that is consuming Scion Bejin, through the haze of smoke that spread over miles from the city, she thought she saw something running along the sky. Not birds, no flapping of wings, but the beating of hooves, a stampede that caused thunder to flash, as an incoming tempest was approaching the city.
Hooves of a thousand riders on beasts of gigantic sizes, ridden by skeletal riders with pale flesh, and grim, yellow eyes, and leading them was the palest one of them all, wielding a spear of black, upon a great bird of silver. Sounds of thunder echoed with each flap of its wings, such a sight was fantastically horrific for Efa to bear looking at, witnessing it nearly caused something to rupture in her sanity.
Flying on, it was hours later, she didn’t look back, instead she flew on past the storm, past the spreading clouds, and into the dawn, before in the distance behind her there was an immense light. Paler than anything she had ever seen in her life, it seemed to strip the city of Scion Bejin and all around it into the sky. Ascending those deserving to God’s side, and those of wicked hearts to the fire below, that burned where the city once stood for eons passed.
In the coming of the new day the storm dissipated as did the herald and his horde that flew along with it, leaving nothing but the toxic smoke that hung over the sky. Soaring high above the desert, Efa believed she was spared death, till she read the fuel gauge, she was almost out, and she was forced to land in the dead center of the desert flatlands.
***
Coldly she looked down at the sun bleached stone beneath her feet, as the sense of heat radiated over her red hair; even under the shade of the wing of her copter, the heat was immense and made her weak and listless.
Need for water ached in her throat, but she had none, none was in her vehicle, and she believed death would soon be upon her; so consumed with grief and thoughts of death she didn’t notice a shadow move at the corner of her peripheral vision.
“Excuse me child, do you have any water?” the voice asked kingly, Efa lifted her eyes to look at the speaker. She shook her head, not to say she didn’t have any water, but in disbelief at what she saw, for before she was not a human, but a humanoid of a different race. Remembering her of the propaganda of Scion Bejin, television ads, and PSAs warning of mutants, carrying a infectious disease beyond the city walls.
That man looked as if he were such a mutant, pinkish skin as if he were covered in a light sunburn, his upper body exposed to the heat, but his lower body was covered in form fitting trousers made of ebony scales. A creature with the voice of a parliamentary speaker, but the body of a caveman from a museum display, all muscle mounds built upon a thickened skeleton.
Teeth, sharp and can be heard hitting one another as he spoke, he looked as if he were an amphibian creature in mid transformation to a human. Shoulders draped with a sand dirtied stole, and wearing a mitre adorned with pearls and polished shells. Eyes as dark as rich red wine, and hair a snowy blonde, he would be considered handsome, but he lacked hair above his thick brow, human-like teeth, and ears that jutted out like two blades.
Despite his monstrous appearance, the man had a soft expression, as he asked the question again, this time with worry in his voice. “Do you not have any water child?” This question seemed more as if he was asking out of concern for her, rather than himself.
Efa scanned him for weapons, seeing he held only a staff of some kind, with what looked like a small needle covered sphere on its top. Again all she could do was shake her head, she was saddened and feeling her mind ache with the pains of an eroding psyche.
Without another word, he knelt down, and reached into a pocket on the inside of his stole, from there he retrieved a glass flask, and handed it to her. Inside it looked like it was water, and by some phenomenon it was cold as the frost of winter to the touch. Grabbing it in her hands, she undid the lid, and greedily suckled down all it had inside, her mouth felt a chill that she could blow out as cool air.
In that moment she realized her selfishness and bowed her head in contrite sorrow. “I’m sorry, please forgive me, I was just so thirsty—” she stammered over her apology and lost confidence in her words. A soft hand was placed on her head, and she heard what sounded like Latin being mumbled by the man-creature.
In her youth she recognized it as a prayer, Christians along with other religious practitioners spoke it aloud in the streets, acting as criers in order to protect against the ban on religion. Many people were shot or put in prison on heavy sentences, and by the time she reached adulthood Efa nearly forgot everything she ever heard about God and the faiths.
“What did you say?” she felt an easement come over her after the prayer was finished.
“A prayer of comfort.” answered the creature, who kissed his stole and rose to his feet.
“My name is Efa.” she introduced herself as she stood up to stand only a little taller than his waistline.
“And I am Eau.” he shook her hand, and together they went inside the copter to look for supplies.
“Nothing much here but empty canteens, and some dry provisions.” Efa sounded hopeless as she was unfamiliar with the territory outside the city.
“That is no matter, we shall take the canteens with us, we shall fill it at the lake.” Eau started to sling the canteens over his bulking shoulders.
“There is a lake near here?” Efa sounded surprised as she couldn’t imagine any body of water surviving such heat.
“I was looking for it when I came across you.” Eau hoisting nearly a dozen canteens over his shoulders, he left the copter with Efa close to his side, he noticed she was using the shadow he cast as shade, which he didn’t mind. “I was divining the source of the water, the vibrations of the water through the water, told me there is a source of water near here.” lifting his staff with two hands, he held it as if it were a golf club, and swayed it back and forth.
Then he stiffened it as he held it forward, then slowly started walking, allowing the staff's spiky top to tilt slowly up and down. As if it were slowly nodding with each step he took, it suddenly began to shake left to right, as if to say ‘No, you’re going the wrong way.’
Efa poked her head under his arms to watch him use the staff as a divining rod, to search for the water, and as if he cast some spell he filled it suddenly to his left, and as he did a pile of sand slid away. With the sand gone, an opening into the ground was revealed, and stairs carved by a long lost civilization eons upon eons ago.
“This used to be a church, a cathedral of wood and stone, built before the humans broke God’s Promise, and the Rupturing began.” Efa listened, her mind puzzled but entranced by the words she never heard before, the Rupturing, and God’s Promise seemed like mythical terms in a fantasy story, back before the politicians had all the books burned.
“What is it now?” Efa looked down into the darkness, but could see a waving light below, like light reflecting off of a pool's surface.
“Rivages Engloutis, the Sunken Shores.” Eau spoke as if he unintentionally discovered the doors to the underworld. Together he and Efa went down those stairs, to search for the water that would see them safely through the desert. Both unsuspecting evil was shadowing them, biding his time, to better savor the final deathstroke.
***
Rivages Engloutis’ walls were adorned with cyclopean figures of some alien civilizations, death and carnage mingled with the mysticism of dark, oblong shapes of unimaginable design. Arms, tendrils, and bizarre iconography were built into mosaics of shiny stones, in an array of colors from a sinister rainbow.
Light emanates from stones, oval precious things filled with energy akin to glowing radioactive isotopes. Efa could sense the light sources were filled with restrained death, as she followed her bishop guide into a circular opening in the walls. Doorways were round, and spread out into antechambers of grand, descending designs, that seemed as if they were inside the petrified remains of some great leviathans.
All around they heard the gentle sways of water, the foamy slosh of fermented water, and the smells of salty brine. High above their heads was movement, Efa didn’t notice it, she was startled when Eau swung his staff over her head, and smashed something hidden in the shadow filled ceiling.
On the ground lay a writhing, stiff looking creature, that snapped its claws, and glared out wildly from its head.
“Crab-Spiders.” Eau hissed the name as if he were a great cat warding away trespassers from sacred territory.
“What are they?” Efa was confused and scared, she never saw anything that mutated and monstrous before, it was larger than an adolescent child, and was covered in hard, shell covered tumors.
“As I said, Crab-Spiders, they cling to the ceilings of caves, closed to water, but they don’t drink it, they wait to drop upon some victim, inject them with venom, and crawl inside them, eating them from the inside out, then living in their skin.” The description was graphic and sent a cold chill of terror down her spine.
“I’ll be careful.”
“Doesn’t matter if you are.” Eau’s gentle voice had turned to a stern authority, he sounded as if he were scolding her as if she were a naughty child. “These things are just as smart as most humanoids, don’t be fooled.”
Both of them looked to the darkness, and saw in the shades of blackness, small reflections of their pearly black eyes, looking at them, slowly dogging them from one end of the cavern to the other. All the while making as little noise as possible, there were a couple dozen of them, spreading out, coordinating their movements, to force them into a choke point.
“Ignis Sanctus!” Eau spoke those words as if he were a giant calling out to the heavens, his voice echoed and spread in the air as an ethereal specter, calling to its command light. Sparks illuminated the ceiling, and from that light came a spark of flame that spread, consuming the darkness and all inside it, roasting the Spider-Crabs insides. Their hard shells cracked from the intensity of the heat, frantically snapping their claws, as they fell to the ground as charred husks to shatter on the ground below.
Those dark dwellers that weren’t burned alive, hid in small cracks in the walls and ceiling, daring not to come out again, even if their fangs dripped with foamy gluttony.
“How did you do that?” Efa’s eyes were bedazzled by childish wonderment, rekindled by witnessing such a fantastical feat.
“I did nothing.” Eau turned his head skyward, with a solemn look upon his face. “It was God who answered my prayers.” The bishop saw his words had a sour taste to his charge, whose face puckered into a doubtful pout.
“If God answered prayers, he would be really choosy. He chooses to answer.” Efa upon saying that had a harsh tightness grip her shoulder, as she was pinned to the wall, facing the condemning glare of her companion.
“Do not speak of such heresy, such things I cannot forgive, do you not see the power he gives in aid of his followers? Do you wish him an enemy?” Efa turned away from Eau feeling that the scolding was unwarranted. Expressing doubts about some divine intervention seemed as natural as rain falling from the sky.
Indoctrination of atheism was beaten into her brain with the regularity that it became normal, there was no God in her mind, just phenomena that was forgotten as soon as it was learned.
Despite not knowing her faithless upbringing, Eau began to suspect her skepticism has poisoned her mind against God, much like how a well poisoner kills an entire community. Death by a more insidious means had been implanted within her, and he feared that Efa would not see Eternal Paradise if her doubts held such a hold on her willingness to believe.
“I didn't mean to be so harsh.” Eau tried to make amends.
“I didn’t think you were, we just believe different things.” Efa shrugged, becoming apathetic to the whole drama.
“I don’t think we do, I just think you are just in denial of what you feel.” Eau’s words made her turn her head towards him, narrowing her gaze as if he spat in her face.
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore, let us find the water, and leave before we see more of those things.”
Just then a sharpness filled the air, both of them searched the darkness and didn’t see any sign that they were being followed.
“What was that?” Eau questioned aloud, as he spoke quietly a prayer to brighten the top of his staff.
“It sounded like scissors.” her voice was soft, as if she had reverted to a little girl. Legs shook, her attention was quickly distracted when she heard something, it echoed from an adjacent cave.
Splash.
‘Water!’ thirst came to her mind, a sorrowful want that needed to be sated. Following the echo, she left Eau who was deaf to the echo, and was alarmed when he turned to find she had gone.
***
Left and right, and down a somewhat steep, but manageable slope, and there it was, a pond of the purest, crystalline clean water she ever saw in her life. Just by standing on the sandy shore surrounding it, she could tell it was chilled, and was welcoming to its surface.
As she prepared to touch its surface she saw something in the water, something that was enchantingly beautiful, but her instincts warned her away from whatever was beneath the water.
Diamonds for hair, skin as smooth as river water, her eyes, each a brilliant sapphire, and a magnificent tale of blue scales.
“A mermaid!” she whispered excitedly, her mother told her of such stories, before the books were all burned, she loved to read of such magnificent creatures.
Despite the warning yelling in her mind, she ignored all her mental resistances and reached out to touch the outstretching hand of the mermaid. Once the sea maidens hand breached the surface however it chanced, and became a terrible, skeletal limb that clutched Efa’s arm.
A heart splitting shriek came out of her throat, as she was unable to pull away, and saw the once gorgeous fable, turned into a skeletal wretch. Two empty skull eyes stared at her, as her bony jaw fell down, she wore seaweed for hair, and despite looking as dead as anything deceased, it moved as if it were alive.
Trying to pull her into the depths of the water to drown her, the undead mermaid lets loose a wheezily, crackle exhale, as it slowly tries to drag its victim to her death.
Efa pulled back, and seemed to have the foothold, and leverage to free herself, but a large skeletal fish tail, with sharp ribs swept under her leg, knocked her into the water. Quickly the mermaid now to Efa’s drowning eyes looked as radiant and lively as she did before submerging, pulled her deep to the bottom of the pond, and embraced her there, till she would run out of air.
Thrashing against the unrelenting embrace of the deadly sea creature, Efa felt the strain force her mouth open, she looked up at the world above, and was relieved when she saw Eau come, his eyes looking at her with shock.
Diving into the water, the massive non-human torpedoed himself into the mermaid, before it could react, the weight of his body freed Efa who desperately swam up to the surface. Trying to reclaim its catch, the mermaid entwined Eau with its tail, trying to force him to put it, as it then tried to catch Efa’s ankles with its hands.
Despite appearing alive the mermaid’s ribs were still exposed, and one stabbed into Eau’s side, his dark blue blood clouding the water. Resolving himself against the cutting pain, he took his staff and slammed the needle covered top against the mermaid’s skull, shattering the bone.
Eyes popped out of the mermaid’s skull, as its face cracked away as if it were that of a porcelain doll, revealing a black vacuous interior. Turning its full attention to Eau, the mermaid wrapped its hands around his neck, and tried to strangle the air from his lungs. Unable to speak his prayers aloud, he couldn’t call upon God's power, but he had his own strength. As the rib bone dug deeper into his side, he let go of his staff, and reaching out with both arms, took the mermaid’s head in his clutches.
Straining his muscles, as bubbles of air flooded from his mouth, he pulled and squeezed, till the glass skin on the mermaid’s neck shattered. The head was torn off, and soon after crushed into fragments, just then a ghostly presence left the mermaid’s body, a spectral entity that floated up from the body, and for a moment as it however above the pond seemed to resemble a gorgeous mermaid.
Soul freed from the bonds of a terrible curse, the mermaid vanished leaving Efa to witness her eyes wide in amazement. With her help, Eau pulled himself from the pond water, as his side bled freely.
“Hold still, I’ll bind your wounds.” Tearing off pieces of her own clothes she dressed the wounds in fragments of her clothes that she wrung the best she could. “Should be due till we can find something to try to bind them with.”
“Thank you Efa, my child in God.” Eau took a dab of his blood on his forefinger, and placed it on her forehead, placing a small cross upon her brow.
“Gross.” Efa laughed, as Eau chuckled through the pain in his side.
Both of them then noticed the cavern was being filled with the sounds of draining water, as the pond was draining into the sandy ground. Freed from the curse, the pond turned to a small spring that wasn’t so deep, one could drink from it, and fill their canteen, from the now purified waters.
Anxious to drink, Efa and Eau went down to the water, and drank deeply the water, as it washed away all wants from their body. Sunburns gone from their skin, Eau turned from violet to blue, and Efa had a lovely snowy paleness returned.
“That water…I don’t know how to describe it.” Efa was dumbfounded by the taste of cleansing that washed over her body and mind.
“It is the water of life, this was once a sacred place, where travelers go to take their fill.” a longingness came over Eau’s face, as he thought all of him and his faith had lost. Retrieving his staff from the sand, he turned to Efa and spoke pleadingly. “Do you deny God's miracles?”
Efa pursed her lips, her head shook, but she stopped, then she smiled and parted her mouth to talk—then a pair of scissors were jammed through the back of her head, till it stabbed out one of her eyes.
Quickly retrieving his weapon, Snippers, dressed in his ragged scarecrow costume, slit the young woman’s throat, before kicking her into the water. Enraged as he was taken aback by the unwelcomed carnage, Eau swiped at the fleeing murderer, who dashed up the slope, and swiftly vanished from the cavern, before Eau could get to his feet.
The wound on his side was bleeding heavily, and his reflexes were slowed because of it, so he was unable to avenge Efa, whose body fell lifelessly to the sand.
The blood flowed too quickly, as life left her body before it even reached the ground. Crimson stained the spring, casting a new curse upon it, one of wanting bloodshed, making the waters sours thereafter.
“I’ll find you! I will bring the Lord’s fury upon your head!” Eau’s words echoed after Snippers, not knowing if he heard his cry for righteous vengeance.
***
Drinking the spring made Eau sated for weeks, enough time to carry Efa’s body to a safe place, on consecrated ground to be laid to rest. In a town bordering the desert, he had her laid to rest in the church's graveyard.
The priest took pity and gave the grave a stone marker with the name Efa etched into the rock.
“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” the priest recited from the Good Book, as he bowed his head in solemn grief for burying a woman so young.
“Bishop Eau, have you no words to give for the dead?” the priest’s old eyes looked at the younger, yet more distinguished member of their faith.
“Lord, if you are as just, kind, and merciful as I have believed, then take this woman into your grace. For you would not be a God worth following if you allow such a lost lamb to languish in the fires of damnation. And you would not be a God worth believing if I do not have sanction, to destroy the taker of her life, for blood must be paid for blood.”
“Bishop, stop such heresy!” The priest was bewildered by such talks of murder and doubt. “Vengeance is God’s and God’s alone.”
“His vengeance will come when I send that woman killer to stand before him in judgment. I will leave you now, and shall not return without avenging her death.” leaving the gravesite, Eau set upon a dark ride. As the sun disappeared over the horizon, and a deep darkness covered the land, the priest who still stayed at Efa’s grave worried for the soul of Eau.