The tank before the shore, a standing weight of green iron at the cliff’s edge, where clouds cover the oceans from above, a dark and heavy mist. The air tastes of salt and struck metal; the rain has not come yet, only the cold smell of its coming. The pneuma of the shadowy woman with claws of a crab from the moon blows, her voice heard in the soul by those who can hear, a breath without a mouth. Below, the sea begins to turn: a whirling, spinning and circling, pulling itself inward upon itself, throwing, thrashing, tearing the fish from the dark and shooting them skyward in silver scatters.
The lowest pitch ever heard quakes up from below, a volcanic sound, elder hatred erupting through the floor of the world. It climbs the armor’s legs, rattles the plates, and settles in the teeth. Cold, fast, the beast slides up and out, and long into the air, the black slick of the abyss pouring from its scales. The serpent lets loose a hissing plurality, every dissonance at once, a choir of dying engines, its teeth taller than any structure that has ever stood near. The clouds unleash a hail of rain, faster and faster with the arrival of the demon, and the storms drown even the ocean. The waves, violently stirred by the spirit of darkness arrived, shoot up and into one another in ways that defy all time.
Samson, the brave warrior: his form is vitality, courage, and will. His temperament is hot and dry, a furnace with a pulse.
Antony, the guardian angel: his form is primordial, made of judgement, time, protection, responsibility, and endurance. His temperament is cold and dry, the patience of old stone, where anger escapes only as a last resort.
Leviathan: the prime evil form of empty darkness, bondage, hell, exile, and chaos. His temperament is cold and dry, the dead cold of a deep no light has ever touched, a hungry mouth made of grudges.
Up in order. Samson stands proud in his moment before the orders from the fullness, whereas Antony will release another grudge, long carried, in deserving judgement.
Samson starts. He matches the speed of the cylinder fires, releasing the clutch, and the drive bites: exhausts spraying flames, torque throwing him forward with intense power. Strides fast, stomps, each footprint’s force cratering the dirt and propelling him onward. He flies.
The cylinders tighten their beat, the throttle lifts, the clutch cuts, and flames spit from the exhausts as he shifts into another gear; the clutch bites, and he is jerked into another torque. Power rises with each rhythmic acceleration of faster shafts rounding, the engine screaming, then climbing onto another gear, and another, the exhaust heat shooting out from his large heels and wide back. The rain hisses to steam on the plates at the touch. He reaches the cliff’s edge above the shore and launches off it. The machine fires from above the feet and from behind, the jets screaming louder now, his visor covering in dark and grey-blue reflections and the scatters of raindrops.
The serpent looks dead on at Samson and lets out a nuclear high pitch, like a titanic boa snapping at its own reptilian vocal cords. Its eyes are large and fierce, an emptying blackness of the unknown, wells that have never reflected anything but what they have swallowed. The stretch of the mouth in that scream is enough to devour the world.
Flying up and into the direction of evil, Samson’s jets propel him into a higher gear, screaming at speeds incomprehensible to any normal vehicle. The suit thrusting still, he looses a long blade from both arms, long of steel and proven. Where he flies into the serpent, into its still-screaming blackness, he slides up its flank, a skyscraper of scale above the storms, the waves crashing below him over some of the jets. Then he lets the engines cut for a little while.
Now falling, down and into the length of the snake that arose from the sea, gravity pulls him as the blade glides into the serpent’s side. He drags it across in the fall, his armor’s feet glowing orange in friction sparks against the scales on the way down; the blade cuts like a surgeon’s through the underside of the head. The red blood stands in contrast with the blues and greys, mixing with the water on the amber visor, his face focused in the tunnel that is acceleration.
Waves erupt again, almost catching him in these long sets of seconds down. He fires the engine back to life before it is too late, the abrupt power shock bright against the waters and the wet scales, and the jets throw him away from the serpent and from its head, knowing he cannot test his time there.
The Leviathan screeches like a siren screaming emergency, and its back tail, so far unseen, shoots up late, casting what looks like tsunamis in parting from its gargantuan slither-splash of Demi God scale. The waves rise higher than any building ever seen as the beast plunges its head beneath the water.
Samson must fly further up and away from the water crashing high. He fires the slug shots from his arm at the tail on the way up and out, where the blood sprays out onto his visor as it strings out into fleshly strands and chunks into the seas, the gauntlet firing rounds innumerously with blunt pounds of lead.
He unleashes his jets to a heat never reached now, continuing the deep mine of slug rounds large enough to instantly put out a jet with one shot. He launches himself enough, where grey and white before he is thrown into the clouds, as the raindrops drag down against the visor. His body feels forces pushing the suit down into his bones. He goes to a throwing drift upwards still, past the grey, now over some of the clouds…
His mind wanders, accidentally, for a moment. A memory. He knows a girl just as the one from the flash drive… Her essence real. That woman, the one the lie implanted, is not unlike a soul he has known elsewhere before. Why can he not know her beyond the image of an angel? Why can he only know her as a lie, if not as an angel? Something is in the way. He would shake the Earth until she came falling out, just to know.
Escape… Wait…? Why do I feel it in the gut? Blinded and rattled, a realizing arrives.
“Samson!” Antony screams like thunder.
A Leviathan head passes through the clouds like a flying train in a dream, distant, but real. He does not notice.
Antony’s screams of thunder are lightning made material, shooting down and through the opening mouth of the Leviathan, splitting the split tongue into a complete half of itself, lightning even down the gullet, through the muscles. Blood sprays up and out from the throat, a now-dead Mars look across Samson’s face, faint as a dream far back in the soul. The rain picks up again onto his visor as he falls with the Leviathan. The suit now pulls around his bones with a force of the opposite direction.
Now the two fall as one, the beast as a tower torn from its foundation, its dead length unspooling behind it through cloud and thunder, the man a spent arrow passing beside it. It is the old fall again, the one rehearsed since the first of the angels was cast down, and so Antony isn’t estranged from it. Wind screams in the seams of the armor. The sea rises to meet them.
Samson drops into the shadow of the head, and the head rushes up beneath his boots. The slam rings through every plate, and the armor skids down the ridge of the brow until one chunk of plates is deadweight first into the eyeball of the goliath snake.
Warm. An obscene warmth in all this cold, the lid giving like frog around his steel, the black of the eye drinking every reflection until even the storm is gone from it. Then the head heaves, Samson’s legs coil, the plates lock, and he bounds off the great brow like a stone skipped from water, back into the air, through spray and thunder of the scent from reptile blood, falling again with the sea rising on every side.
Antony screams again, and the sky answers. Lightning shoots across the heavens in white branching arteries, tearing the clouds open from edge to edge, the thunder landing a half-second behind like a counterblow to the side of a puppet’s head.
“Fire the jets, Samson! Now!”
In a distant mind, he wakes. Once. Fast. No thought, no name, no why. The jets fire. The arms move stiffly, the legs stiffer, a puppet pulled on another’s demand, and the machine answers in a scream, and the scream is too much. Control slips; then goes. The armor tumbles end over end, sky and sea and sky, rotating about, the exhaust flaring in spirals, and they plummet in the wrong gear.
The sands of the shore rise like a wall. The crash is a blunt shock of sound, then none. Sand erupts around them in a great pale cloud of churned ground, the armor ploughing a trench as plates buckle and tear, one jet shearing away to spin off into the rain. The engine coughs, coughs again, and chokes. It does not start. The suit lies stuck and immobile in the wet sand, one arm bent wrong, the other pinned beneath its own weight, steam hissing where the hot metal meets the rain.
In the sound of hot metal vaporizing rain as the engine cackles in broken tape, the Leviathan bellows roaringly, the distance feeling its wounds without words. Blood sprays like a fountain from blown chunks at the back tail shot out by Samson before, as the gizzards of eye vomits red fluids in thick pulses of a heart’s blood speak rhythm.
Inside, Samson drains red from the blunt strikes of the armor itself: a gash above the brow, a mouth full of iron, the ribs a deep slow ache. The visor is cracked, the rain ticking on it, thin as the ringing in his ears. His fingers will not answer. Confused.
Broken shards. Cracks. Reflections, hypnotizing him. He stares deep enough to see a hallway, yellow, with brown carpet. Someone is running down it: himself. Running down a hallway that spins upward, while another reaches up into the feet he kicks with. Kicking at teeth that grab, at hands that bite. A feral brother possesses him. Satan.
“Antony!?” he forces out, past the gargle of blood.
His head falls faint inside the suit, blood thick from the nose, mixing with what pours from the swelling lips, and from a face gone blue-black. He whispers Antony’s name again, as if for help.
Kicking and kicking, helpless, he is crawled over like the floor he lies on, no matter how hard he stiffens his legs and arms to throw off the satanic tackle. His brother is like himself, somehow, and has had access to him for some time, by the timing of Leviathan’s favor. He sees the hallways in panorama vision as before. They are inside and outside themselves, built of their own recursion, shattering lights beneath darkening choirs that take turns in the hopelessness they cause.
Arbitrary words, made of predestined letters called lives, march in droves unlike themselves, their broken puppet smiles and skin reflecting hell-sweat down plastic and porcelain cheeks, some rosy, some dimpled, some freckled. Fake. Human faces that hide a suffering of contradictions toward a god machine. They shuffle in confusion at the behest of godly string pulls, certain of commands that are not their own. There is a brightness, a light that shines throughout the nightmare, darker than Leviathan’s eyes, and it is made of the outer darkness.
They march on stairs that defy gravity, in every direction, on every axis, in the colors of a children’s playground. The stairs lead nowhere but to themselves, and everywhere, in a glitch toward a direction void. Broken breaths, thin and whimpering hints of terror behind the joyful exterior always enforced; static in the soul and air; dissonant flutes without tempo or rhythm; a bellowing sea of words without reason; all of it quiet and afar inside a loud closeness that is not here. The space stutters onward toward infinity, jagged with the conformity of itself. The little ones reflect light from nowhere, from a lost source into nothing.
Smiling that hides death. Smiling that hurts at the face without stop.
Skinny arms, big stairs and little stairs, one step big and small, the next small and big. Hope shrinking in the head, nonsense growing, full of silent screams that tick inside bobbling nightmare faces wearing denial. The smiling ones beg for the death they live in, never born. This is the torture of this realm of creation, worse than the demiurge’s.
A screaming gasp, choked with blood, shoots red-thick across the curve of the visor’s round face. Boiling inside, like meat cooking in a tank.
“Antony! Antony! Help!” Low, passing out of the burial of choked blood.
“Give me the form. These visions aren’t you. I cast out familiar Satan by the power of the fullness,” Antony assures him.
A light worth embracing for Samson, a chance to find his lover again.
The lights echo down simple hallways, folding at the ends into mirrors that stretch toward their next corridors, ends of ends repeating the same. Bending long, with rectangular knots that have no body, only sight. Seeing into a blinding white light entering from every direction, stretching the vision beyond comprehension. Everywhere. Flashes again.
“In your next life, she will be there,” Antony tells him before his passing.
Then the machine is torn away. Plate by plate the green armor shrieks off the body, bolts firing loose like shaken teeth, pistons uncoupling, the shell peeling from the shoulders in sheets and falling into the sand with the sound of a bell dropped down a well, metal meeting metal. Steam spills out and hisses against the rain. The body rises out of the wreck, shaking off sand and wet iron, taller by a head. Along the new human back, the shoulder blades split and lift, and the wings reform: the spars first, long and white as the ribs of a drowned ship, then the vanes, then the feathers, one by one, wet, grey at their edges, heavy with storm water. The wings open anew.
He stands in a taller order, forged for judgement and discipline. He has waited so long for this moment, against the one who held the keys to his Tartarus prison.
He does not walk to the sea. He steps off the sand, and the wings take the sky in a single beat that scatters wet sand across the shore. He rises into flight with rain drumming on a face that remembers being stuck behind a machine mask for too long. Higher. The wind that nearly threw a man from a cliff is nothing against this. He climbs in a long ascension through cloud and thunder, and far below the ocean is a floor of red and black where the serpent thrashes.
“Leviathan!” The accusation of Antony echoes through the clouds above, and the clouds let down more rain than ever before. They are compelled in fear to obey, and they do. Blue jolts of lightning kick hard enough to stop every demon, above and below. The kicks break down and through every twelfth fraction of Leviathan exposed in the ocean, ripping his flesh in localized chunks, spraying blood to mix with the water.
The bolts thunder with the name of Leviathan, and each strike cycles another, and another. The serpent’s eyes search, in force of fear of the judgement, at every thunder of his name, left, right, left, and right. The storm spends his muscles more, and his hide rips in sharp explosions into the water. The rupture of violence leaves the ocean redder with every strike of the clouds’ blue. Twelve times did the lightning strike twelve at once, with one hundred and forty-four wounds, plus the lightning that cut his tongue into two permanent halves, even down to his throat.
The angel has been cruel in his fairness above, conjuring shocking strikes by willpower, and now he descends upon the Leviathan, preparing to land on its top, with cause. He folds his wings only a little above the enemy and falls onto the great back like a hawk onto a snake, his feet skidding on wet scales, his hands finding the seam between them. From the push of a finger through the exterior, Antony reaches effortlessly, his snake-eye glow lighting the wound, and begins a long, long-awaited violence. By forceful digs he ruptures and shreds an opening, a prisoner escaping the walls of twelve of twelve eternities, and the snake’s flesh hides a weapon of his own. Through deeper digging, the viper thrashes with a behemoth cry of its own, the cry of a rabbit in fear.
The capillaries rip like roots plucked finger by finger by death, before a spine is found… Fast, the angel digs faster, a drill through a mountain, a ravenous mole through flesh-dirt, enough to beat at the lumber of the spine, the nerve-way passage, throttling it with shocks like the clouds’. Thrashing still, the Leviathan tries to death-roll, throwing its head back like a freefall. The angel holds on to the spine, still beating it, and as the water throws a submersion of salt into ears, eyes, and nose, a moment of stifle comes, and he clings.
With Antony submerged, he holds the spine, seeing the red everywhere in the ocean, the pressure tight around his body, as the depth takes him far down in the singular of the roll. The forces pull him toward somewhere as all sense of direction is lost and the surface light has escaped. In blindness he grabs the spine in a death grip, his legs strung out along the axis of the centrifugal. Spun about in confusion still, the light emerges, and he realizes the encircling is bringing his head soon out of the water. The flat top of the water closes near, the pressure loosening, and saltwater and blood run out of his eyes, nose, and ears as he is taken out into air.
Antony screams the accusation once more: “Leviathan!”
The judgement is a command of the fullness above, and it is done. Twelve flashes more shoot across twelve parts of the beast again, the thirteenth of twelve, and the strikes done number one hundred and fifty-seven. The beast lets out no noise like life, only a vacancy of sound as death.
The angel wrenches loose his share of the spine. It comes up out of the wound with a long wet sound, slurping and slucking, a ladder of damage, a spear pike-long, each vertebra strung with shreds of lightning-burnt nerve, steaming where the rain strikes it. It is a spine for the one whose own was taken, and its size is too great for his grip, but his strength was forged to handle it.
The great head still sways above the waves, and its second eye, the unwounded one, rolls down in a slow colossal arc to find him. In it, he cannot find himself, only the blackness of Leviathan’s sight. He rises on the wings. The muscles ready. He draws the spine back over his shoulder, the whole spear of bone ready, and he drives it down into the eye with the full weight of the bone times twenty. The lens caves in crinkling flesh that sprays blood, and the spine is in, vertebra after vertebra, deeper still, as deep as torment, until it can go no further.
Dark fluid and blood geyser out around the shaft and rain over him. A cold mixing with the scent of an ocean shore storm and hemoglobin. The spear stands inside the eye like a splinter. The head stops. The ancient jaw limps open like a dead gate, its tongue in half showing burn marks, and the storm pours into the sinking head. Water encompasses the death, burying it.
The judgement is done, a body transformed into an angel’s, and freedom is granted unto Antony. The warden is dead. Sailing made easier.
Antony grieves the loss of Samson for a moment, before knowing they will meet again, somehow and someway.
In another age beyond time, in a darkness the same, a soul thereof, Leviathan is still real, and he now roams the outer darkness of the Kenoma, granting a spiritual prison beyond even the realm of the demiurge. The bondage of the demiurge is preferable to the pure chaos of the nothingness of this outer dark that Leviathan rules, and this abyss encircles even the heavens and the skies, ensnaring all of creation deeper with newfound evil, worse than before. What could the purpose of the fullness have been in doing so?
The Leviathan was also transformed, escaping his physical prison. The demiurge now has an equal. Even the chaos of the Ouroboros cannot compare to this behemoth of the unknown. Only Satan would be intemperate enough to wrestle the new Leviathan.