Warlords of Utopia

I followed the tracks. It was about the size of a man, a large man. As I continued to follow the footprints, though, their nature changed. In mid-step, one of the feet became four-toed, then, half a dozen steps later, so did the other. A score of steps later, and the creature I was tracking had two hooves, then it was wearing boots.

A man stood about twenty paces away, at the end of the trail. It wore dark clothes, and was large and pale-skinned. It had one orb set in the centre of its face. This eye shone with a golden fire, like the sun. Like the sun, I couldn't look directly at it, and had to avert my eyes. The man, or cyclops, or whatever it was, stepped towards me, its feet crunching in the snow.

'Thought we wouldn't find you?' it said, in a hissing, snarling voice that seemed to come from all around me.

The man was on me, faster than I would have thought possible. It was grabbing at my hand.

'Give me the ring.'

I tugged my hand away, tried to hide my ring behind my back.

The man pushed me over, onto my back, trapping my arm in the snow underneath me. This hurt, but I ignored the pain, reasoning that a cold, twisted arm was the least of my problems. The man grabbed at my shoulder-guard, and each of its fingers grew fingers in turn, and each of those fingers grew fingers, and they all began plucking away at the segments of the armour there. I could feel the shoulder-guard collapsing under this scrutiny. The fingers were now thorns, scratching the flesh of my shoulder away. Each touch was agony; sharp barbs each with its own unique, burning, itching or paralysing poison The man had grown wings, little leathery things sprouting from its shoulder blades. Watching it, I felt this wasn't a creature changing form so much as one gradually revealing itself to me.

'Give it up, old man.'

It thought I was the original owner of the bangle, I realised.

'You thought you could escape us?' it rasped.

'I'm not who you're looking for,' I managed to say. 'Look at me, I look nothing like him. I'm half that man's age, if I'm a day.'

The man swung its sun-face at me, stared at me. I managed to stare back.

'You killed the owner of this ring?' it both stated and asked.

'Yes,' I replied, simplifying the story a little.

'A rare pleasure,' it cackled. 'A pleasure you have denied me.'

It flipped me over, freeing my arm and pushing my face in the snow. I closed my eyes, and saw only the afterimage of the sun.

'The old man was hiding,' it told me quietly. 'He and twelve of his friends decided to remove themselves from the board. We don't know why. But we can guess.'

It had my arm in its grip. As I lay there, the fingers became teeth, and those teeth began sinking into my wrist. It meant to amputate my hand.

'They're plotting some illegal move against their enemy.'

'Let me guess,' I managed.

'Oh … not me,' it giggled. 'But you know what they say: your enemy's enemy. The point is, they are plotting something. And they need those rings to do it. Now, we could waste a century or two trying to work out what it is they have in mind. We could try to think like they do, get into their heads, as it were. That was what some of my brothers wanted to do. But I came up with a better idea. Track every last one of them down, kill them and eat them. Sic gorgiamus alios subjectatos nunc. Them and their rings. Your old man was the eighth.'

I pushed myself upwards, as powerfully and suddenly as I could. The move had the desired effect, and the man - or what was left of it - was thrown away from me.

The thing that faced me was indecipherable. It shuffled forwards on snake legs, unfurling bat-wings ten foot wide, covered with patches of tiny, broken feathers. It had a man's torso and head, but these rippled with scales and fur. It had the arm of a crab or lobster, and another like a lion's paw.

'You can't defeat me. Sigils and incantations from the depths of inner time encase me. I'm protected from anything you can throw at me. Unhappen my timeline, and I'll still be there. Bind me with ritual and you'll find it's you who's trapped. Seal me into a black hole and with one bound I'll be free. Drop me into a star and I'll suck it up and breathe its fire into your face. Kill my ancestor and I'll sprout two more in his place.'

It had to die. This wasn't just what I thought, it was what I knew, what every part of my body was telling me. This thing didn't belong here. Not in this world, nor in any world. I turned and drew my sword.

'Wait! Not fair! No-one uses swords any more.'

Its glowing eye was the beast's only constant feature, and it was there that I plunged my blade.

The head was the size of my own. The sword slid easily into the eye, and a foot of steel should have emerged from the back of the creature's skull. Instead, the sword kept sliding in, meeting little resistance.

I could have kept up my thrust until my whole arm was in there, instead I withdrew the sword. The blade had all but gone, and what remained had rotted, as if it had been dropped in a cauldron of acid. The hilt was freezing cold to the touch, and I dropped it.

The creature was reeling. It shouted obscenities at me as cracks appeared in its head and torso. Golden light poured from the cracks. […] The creature exploded, the ground shaking with the force of its death-throes. When I looked back up, it was gone with only a crater in the ice to indicate that it had ever been there.