Chapter 12-342: Ashes to Ashes (1/2)

His hands creaked on the wheel, and he didn’t know how long he sat there, feeling the emotions roiling through him, remembering the voices he’d never hear again, and the screams that were the last of them.

Amaretta sat next to him, feeling the waves rising off him, old and primal. They set off half-shadows of memories of her own, the sudden face of her mother rising in front of her so clearly she caught her breath to see it, and all the fear and despair of those years of running and fleeing.

Unlike The Mick, she’d had a family to cling to, a strong man who’d become a stronger dwarf, with a great heart for misfits and those who didn’t belong, and who had loved her more than the distant father she barely recalled ever had.

It had once been a disguise, but she held that Blakhamar name proudly now, and would until she died. It had been a new name for a new dwarf and his family, a new beginning, and she saw no reason to change it.

And if a Blakhamar took the Crown of Russia, it was only tribute to a great man and wonderful foster father who had made it possible.

The Mick turned off Bone Marrow, and got out of the car in silence, leaving his hat behind. Behind him, Burble formed himself a few sets of large elephantine legs, and smoothly glided after him with gentle pushes of his own, while Amaretta fell in at his side.

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The shoggoth’s thoughts were not those of people, but it was very sensitive on the psychic level, and could feel a storm of powerful emotions swirling around the Blooded who had given it that most incredible of gifts... stability.

The psychic signature of those feelings meshed into the powerful echoes stirring about this place, left behind some time ago, and it could feel the ties of this place to the Blooded.

Such emotions were not unknown to it, as hate, fear, and despair had been the catalysts of its life as a slave, driven down upon it, psychic pain lashing and chaining it into obedience, until those two terrible, wonderful moments when it had felt its masters’ minds shatter and fall, and it had been wildly, crazily free.

Lashing out at the things that had bound it and caused it pain had been instinctive, all those mortal things and their changeless changes, untamed emotions affecting it... until the cleansing wave as that impossibly strong and sheer Sword, brimming with lethal power that could shred its powerful body easily, had plunged into it and released The Blood in a wave of organic purity.

It had killed many humans before, sampling and analyzing their bodies as it ground and crushed them to mush, taking what it wished and simply disassembling the rest into something usable it might excrete as slime or gas.

There had been nothing like that wave of connections, of belonging.

In an instant, the shoggoth had felt a massive link, the power and heritage of unbroken bloodlines passed down over lengths of time even a shoggoth could be awed at.

Little changes, evolving and drifting over eons, advancing slowly and surely on the path to what they were today. Chains and ties and things born from unliving dust, rising into something that could think and know and feel and was free...

It was a programmed thing, made of psychoplasm and psychic energies. It had no heritage, woven out of the substances of reality and dream and weird sciences.

It was Burble, the First of its Line.

It, it could build a heritage of billions of years like that! The First of its Line!...

It glided along with quiet, gentle stomps after The Mick, watching, analyzing, and understanding things in an alien way, the false brain within it working, adjusting, and learning in ways a shoggoth had never been designed to. That brain was a guide designed by the inexorable power of eons of evolution to become something more...

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The Mick halted before the landing to the door of the once-grand house, standing on the great circle for the carriages and cars of those come to visit or pay their respects back then, the portals now cracked, broken, and uneven.

Aye, he knew now that those smiling, well-clad men and women had harbored venom and resentment aplenty. The underworld was a cold and ruthless place, where those who wanted power and wealth looked for all advantage, and knuckled under only until they could rise again and further, in bloody manner if they had to.

There could only be so many on top, and the struggle to get to that position was only nearly as furious and dangerous as the struggle to remain there.

In the end, everything fell, as had the Fynnachl.

The walls were shattered, the stone of the Georgian-style home blackened, burned, and tumbled. Posts still jutted up here and there, but the blazing of the fire, fed with some of the magic new at the time, and combined with the elements of nigh-eighty long years, had brought the once-magnificent manor low. Time and heartless neglect had made the ruins a silent thing of growing weeds and grass, of flooded basements and rotting moss over everything, cloaking what had been a place of quiet wealth and the work of artisans into tumbled and fallen memory.

He could picture it now: every carpeted hall, every polished window, every run of stained oak molding and the ancient wallpaper replaced every so often. He knew every room, even the lord’s own chamber, for someone had to dust and clean and move things about, even if under sharp eyes, so he’d been in every loft and cubbyhole of the manor over the years of his youth.

Ashes, dust, rubble, and gravel, now.

But this wasn’t what he was here to see, anyways, morbid and stabbing at the heart of his memories as it might be.