The Inevitable

The Marut moved with slow, inexorable purpose. Too long had this one defied the laws of the multiverse. Too long had this one lingered on and not suffered the chalk white hand of death itself to close their eyes as all beings must eventually. Years had stretched to decades, decades to centuries, and long centuries to millennia and still had this one not fallen into dust, but lingered on by will and unholy sorcery. But laws were laws, laws were everything, and all must bow before them. The Marut walked on.

Entering the shadow swaddled chamber there deep below the streets of the City of Doors, the Inevitable had wandered a labyrinth of shifting, twisting, magically rearranging halls and galleries for weeks before now reaching the heart of its target’s lair. Had it been a living being and not a machine, the Marut might have exhaled a sigh of anticipatory relief, its heart racing at impending closure. But no, its golden helmed face remained unmoved as its senses honed on the figure seated upon a gilded throne at the chamber’s rear. The man was sitting patiently, watching the Marut without seeming concern as it approached. When it had fully entered the chamber and passed beyond the halfway point unharried by spells or blade, the seated man spoke to it in the mellifluous cant of millennia old.

“I have been waiting for you. I knew you would come. I have lingered too long you say. Understand that I serve a higher law than yours godslave to the powers of Mechanus. I have betrayed greater beings than you, and yet I live.”

He smiled at the Inevitable, a slow spreading of his unaging lips to flash a row of perfect teeth, unsullied by blow or by age. The long, low brim of his dark colored hat dipped to obscure his face above thin, high cheekbones. His age was indeterminate, perhaps a man in his forth decade of life, but with the weight of time hung heavily upon his voice. The hints of a shaven beard cast a thin shadow over his slightly angular jaw line. The garb of nobility long vanished from the streets of living Sigil, its wearer retreated or banished here to the depths below for reasons unknown even to the forces of Mechanus that had sent for its death.

“Why do you pause golem? Finish your task that you were sent here to perform. But answer me this first before I submit to your judgment. What is your task, and what law do you uphold. Answer me and I will not challenge it.”

The golem paused momentarily, the waning light of the myriad candles reflecting from its golden armor and casting flickering shadows throughout the chamber. A rustle of movement, be it wings or scales against stone echoed dimly from the darkness-shrouded ceiling. The Marut grew still and rigid. An observer might even have thought it pondering the request. And then it spoke, a hollow booming voice that carried with it the weight of the grave.

“All that was mortal will one day die. A mortal body has but an allotted time before it must die. To cheat death is to violate this tenet of the planes. A brief respite is allowed, but to tarry too long is to invoke our wrath and be punished. To those who defy their own mortality we serve to carry out the sentence of this crime. And the sentence is always the same. Death. Nothing escapes death. It is as inevitable as the rotations of the great gears of Mechanus. You have tarried too long, and you will submit to your own mortality. I bring you not punishment, but release from your unlawful, unnatural existence here.”

He smiled once more and propped his left leg up upon the others knee, a soft leather boot shining in the light and his long greatcoat and robes shifting slightly with the movement.

“So true golem, nothing indeed can escape death forever. Eventually all things die; how poignant and how true. I follow this law just as much as you. And I shall prove it to you. Do what you will golem.”

The Marut surged forwards and raised one ebony fist and golden gauntlet over the seated figure. He made no move to escape or cast as the Marut cleaved into his form. But instead of splintering bone and pulverizing flesh the blow fell on empty air as the illusion grinned even wider with amusement.

“Do you know where you are Marut? Do you know what I am? Do you know what I was and still remain? Can you feel fear or only the cold, logical rationale of a machine created for a sole purpose. You are used to killing those who have turned to vampirism, lichhood, and other grim means of continuing their own life. Yet you know that none of those signs are present here. Is that a pause in your actions Marut? Surprise? Or are such things beyond you? I suppose that much is.”

The Marut withdrew from the mocking image and scanned around the expanse of the chamber, searching for its quarry. Overhead and behind it came once more the sound of heavy wings beating the air and something or somethings slithering across stone with sudden speed. The golden helmed harbinger of law ignored them and scanned for invisible objects and figures as the illusory image pulled a glass of dark liqueur from out of the air and sipped it.

“Trouble finding what you seek? I said that I would remedy that, and I intend to do so. My word is my bond.”

Again the Marut ignored the illusory projection, fully aware of the limited range of such magics. The sought after quarry was close and the golem wasted no time in calling it out.

“Show yourself mortal, death will tarry no more at your gate but rush within and take you willing or not.”

The same sounds again overhead, this time from another direction. The Marut took notice now, looking to locate the source of the disconcerting noises but the build of the chamber made the process impossible. The sound rebounded off over two dozen pillars and the shadows cast by candlelight obscured most any movement amongst the dark stony forest.

The sounds grew louder now and the golem turned full circle to stare out at the room behind it, putting its back to the illusory image of its target. The shadows seemed alive and something stirred in the darkness. Something of slithering scales and beating wings, something unseen and dreadful out there enveloped in the gloom. A flicker of movement as something swung past the Marut at the very edge of its vision before vanishing once more into the ebon canopy of the chamber. Each candle flicker filling the sanctuary blinked and shimmered like the eyes of some great beast and were it mortal itself the Marut might have sworn that the darkness itself was alive and staring at it hungrily.

The golem turned to follow the noise and it repeated now on the opposite side. The sudden stir upon the air of something suddenly and quickly moving out there in the darkness caused the candle flames to swing to one side and flutter in the air, all the while the sibilant slithering sound remained just beyond the Marut’s range of vision in the shadows. Once more the golem turned out to the pitch darkness of the chamber beyond the dim glow of the candlelight, leaving the figure on the throne at its back to sit, sip and smile as the shadows themselves seemed alive and animate with some fell creature, or possessed of life themselves.

The Marut bellowed a roar of rage outwards, challenging the origin of the sounds to fight it. And behind the golden armored, ebony skinned construct the man stood up from his seat as the sounds out in the darkness grew silent and the shadows grew still but for the flickering light of the candles like tongues of flame from the mouths of a demon’s children, all of them eager to feast. There behind the golem, forgotten as nothing, the man looked at the unguarded, unprotected back of his doom bringer and raised his face up from beneath his low brimmed hat and smiled the smile of a devil before a feast as the shadows trembled with something even darker and threatening than themselves, him.

The Marut began to turn at the feeling of something rushing towards him, huge and black as the night before it was struck a blow, pitched forward, pinned and struck again and again and again. Darkness and oblivion overtook it as the sounds of rending claws and snapping fangs was joined by a single tortured cry of metal tearing and giving way. A still occupied golden helmet clattered upon the stone floor, the unmoving face expressionless upon the torn head of the golem within. A pleasant sigh replaced the silence and the man returned to his throne with the soft footfalls of boots on stone, a pleased smile upon his face as his black eyes glittered and returned the flicker of the flames with inner ones of their own.

Days later the same figure strode out of a new chamber constructed there in the bowels of the labyrinth beneath his Palace within the City of Doors. He was pleased at this momentary diversion, and the irony in the result. The chamber was his latest addition to his own larger maze of diversions within the Great Below. Soon it would require more subjects to wander and die within them to satiate his desires for entertainment. There was never a lack of them from above in all the centuries, even forgotten as he now was by most but the Bladed Queen Herself, those he had betrayed once, and those who sought, to their own peril, to slay him. Only one of them, the first, required discretion on his part. He had left Her city of his own volition, removing himself from the ongoing, never ending game of leaders and fools above. To have lingered on would have been to invite Her mazes or more likely doom by Her shadow, the consequence of all who would rise too high and too strong within the walls of the city that could know but one ruler, Her Serenity the Lady of Pain.

The chamber behind his receding form was testament to the success of the tasks of vengeance sent after him by those who still knew of his existence, his blot upon history, and a wish to erase him from it, as still and quiescent as he had been for so many long centuries upon centuries. But the Marut’s laws had proven true, from a certain perspective anyways.

Within, the chamber was supported by three columns, decorated with carved scenes of war, strife and death. Each bore the image of the reaper, astride a Nightmare or skeletal horse collecting its allotment of the fallen, ushering their souls to torment or paradise. Bas-reliefs of battles, executions, plague, famine, and darker still, the hunt… But there in the center of the chamber, laying prone atop a slab of cold marble lay the broken form of the Marut. Its armor was broken, battered, and any other might have speculated it to have gouged and torn by the claws of some unknown wyrm. Pitting by acid and flame it lay in state. The severed head of the Inevitable lay next to the form, ripped and twisted from the body rather than cleanly cut. And there upon the slab and upon each of the three columns lay his lesson to the passerby, his message to the lords of Mechanus, and the truth of the Marut’s words, “Whether by age, plague, war, or the hangman’s noose, the inevitability of death waits for none.”