Post by Barnaby Cuthbert on Dec 3, 2012 13:16:22 GMT -8
It was a battle at the edge of the world. Above the clouds were alight with green whorls of crackling lightening, black clouds and the roar and acrid scent of ozone. They heralded the ferry where the once-Kindred and his Fallen malefactor now waited for the creature called Harkness to die, and the rest of his companions as well, Tom expected.
Tom had seen these moments, but as the nexus of divergent possibilities grew closer they became a blur, a tiny aperture through which so few realities would emerge from an ultra-massive logjam of probabilities. Prophecy and prescience--How can they be put to the test in the face of the unknown actions? Tom considered: How much is actual prediction of the "waveform" and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the disharmonies inherent in the act of prophecy? Can the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he can shatter with words or decisions as a diamond cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife? Tom had never been sure about that part. Sometimes what he wanted to happen happened, and the rest of the time it just moved past him like an iceberg and could seem to care less about his opinion on matters. God might not play dice with the universe, but Tom did, and so far the house had exactly the kind of record you'd expect from such a crooked game.
The roar of the coast guard cutter was only felt beneath Tom's feet, the noise from the storm was overwhelming. The spray of the Sound was felt, but mingled with the rain. Tom was still not out into the full view of his prescient vision at the hands of his mistress, Seattle. Tom sensed himself trembling on the verge of the revelation of nowness that came when he approached the reality of a thing he had seen before. This was why he had awoken. His lover and jailer, Seattle had called him.
He shivered.
The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself ignoring the question of what caused this trembling awareness.
You must go and help the one called Harkness, even at the cost of your own life.
Tom had wept. He was a coward! Didn't the aged Spirit understand? This was not him! He observed, he commented, he influenced on a blue moon, but he was neither fighter nor anything like a hero. He was an old man whose life consisted of dulling the noise in his head with the blood of winos and drifters. Seattle had no call to ask this of him. It was cruel. Still Tom was here, like a puppet on strings, trembling.
Tom began assembling the rifle he'd bought from that arms dealer that had stayed in town a half-decade ago when he'd last been awake. It was in perfect condition, still well-oiled, fired only at the range. A marvel of modern technology. It grounded him, the clicks and weight of it. The trembling subsided. The gun was a weight you could use to hold down a whole mess of probabilities. Bullets had a tidy way of collapsing realities. The rifle finally put together, he noticed the veiled Kindred that had accompanied Harkness on the cutter, her lace veil fluttering like the shadow of dry leaves across her pale face, crouching behind the bulkhead opposite him on the deck. She had a similar rifle.
Tom reached out to her mind. She allowed it, shockingly, the trust of comrades in battle perhaps. Tom didn't know her name. He didn't think they had ever met, but he chalked her almost unreasonable trust up to the fact that there was a demon on that ferry calling down Hell on earth, so 'shit got real', as Miss Martine had observed in the past.
<Don't fire until the instant of Harkness' strike.> he sent. She turned, looked at him, a look partially of annoyance, partially of alarm, and then nodded. It could be that whatever flesh there was that made up the creature could not defend against two long-range, high-powered rifle shots and Harkness' katana simultaneously. If it could, they were all dead, but she seemed to see the wisdom in the attempt, or at least didn't argue with Tom about the tactic.
There was a commotion behind Tom as he began to ready a shot that kept him from peeking up above the bulkhead. In the hold some of the mortals were attacking the others. Jazz perhaps, and another one, her ghoul he thought, he wasn't sure. Tom chose to ignore it for now. A Kindred and ghoul should be able to handle a few panicking humans, he hoped. He turned to the Ferry, loading one of the three phosphorus rounds he'd saved for a rainy day into the chamber.
The target was close! Harkness had been driving it full out across the sound and the range between the cutter and the Ferry was rapidly dwindling. Tom lined up a shot on the most prominent figure. It was fairly easy, as the figure was cloaked in a nimbus of fire and electricity, the sky crackling and whorling above him like God had painted Tom a bulls-eye. He spared a glance at Harkness' veiled companion. She had taken aim, and was waiting as well.
Then Tom's barrel began to heat with supernatural rapidity. The thing, the demonic spirit that protected the creature on the Ferry arched a wriggling tongue of pure heat at Tom's weapon, and his dead flesh began to sizzle as he held it.
The phosphorus! Tom thought in panic. He had no choice. Tom tossed the rifle over the side of the ship. It hissed as it splashed, but didn't explode in white-hot fire. The phosphorus hadn't caught. If it had and Tom had held on to it, the chemical fire from it would have burned a hole through the gun and every deck of the cutter, and probably scourged the spot on the seafloor where it would have eventually landed, still burning like a flare.
Well damn... Tom watched the rifle sink beneath the waves as the cutter slid to a halt near the side of the ferry while crouched down beneath the bulkhead he'd been using for cover. But Tom was a survior. He'd thought ahead. He unslung the old Winchester he'd had since dirt was in grammar school and loaded the almost last round of phosphorus into the breach, then racked the round home. This old girl would have to do.
Tom waited until he heard Harkness leap from the cutter and land on the deck of the other ship, took a deep, vestigial breath, looked up at the moon-frosted flags whipping around on the cutter. Somewhere there had to have been enough of a momentary break in the storm that the moon shown through. Or perhaps it was Tom's own addled perceptions showing him an alternate view of that moment. And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced while asleep. He had seen this patch of Puget Sound. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless. Jean-Lionel was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now he is dead. There wasn't going to be any time to sit around and aim, that was how he'd caught the attention of Old Scratch the last time.
To Hell with that.
Tom knew he wasn't the hero here. He had no illusions about that. And that whole 'at the cost of your own life' thing was definitely not his idea. All he could hope to do was to distract the demon long enough for Harkness to get his hit in. If that didn't work, Tom had one round left, and no desire to be possessed. He wouldn't do that to Seattle. Not to his love, even though she was a bitch. He’d eat the last phosphorus bullet first.
There was shouting, from the demon-thing's host, a man that Tom thought he might have seen in Elysium once, and Harkness.
This is it!
He raised his rifle, aimed it at the head of the power-shrouded Kindred, waited for Harkness to draw back his blade... there! In the instant of the move to strike Tom squeezed the trigger. It was a near-perfect shot. It was headed for the Kindred's temple. Then something that shouldn't have been able to have occurred happened, and everything else happened at once.
In fully experiencing the present, Tom felt the massive steadiness of time's snapshot flickerflash movement everywhere complicated by shifting currents, waves of images, words, thoughts, rifle reports, surges of lightening and fire, and countersurges of remixed possibilities, like the surf against the prow of the Coast Guard clipper. It fortified his understanding of his prescience, but also drew into sharp relief the reason it was totally useless, with an immediate resurgence of that sensation of fear. The foresight was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed--at once a source of accuracy and hardly meaningful bullshit. It was how it was - ultimate indeterminacy intervened, oh and of course the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what Tom saw. And what he saw was a time nexus within this splat of water on the map at the edge of the world, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action--the wink of an eye, a careless word, an ill-timed droplet of water--moved a gigantic lever across the city's destiny. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern. The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences. The countless consequences--ripples fanned out from this soggy quadrant of the Puget Sound, and along most of these consequence-ripples he saw his own rapidly decaying body with ashes swirling into the air and salting the surface of the Sound.
Fear coursed through Tom. He felt suddenly alone and wet standing in dull yellow light and crackling fire within this bobbing boat in the middle of the water. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-goddamned-now. This instant. This snapshot of reality was where everything mattered. This was sobering Final Death hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances. Anything could tip the future here, Tom realized.
I'm fucking terrified, Tom told himself, maybe out loud, maybe not there was just too much noise in every sense of the word to tell.
The thing, black smoke tentacled wings and demonic horns and all hellfire nimbus roared out of the aura of the Kindred on the deck and grasped the bullet - he grabbed it! and redirected it like a rogue star away from it's target and off into the sea, while another tendril grasped the projectile of the second bullet.
Tom let out his held, useless breath.
Harkness' blade swam like a glittering fish in the arc-lit sea and carved the man-Kindred-host-thing down, and then the demon thing somehow flew backward as if thrown down by invisible linebackers. Tom felt as if there were a second simutaneous battle going on backstage where spirits and silver-corded astral travellers swam. There were unearthly screams, fire, bolts of power, and then, utter calm.