The Epone epoch

Cyran recoiled in stupefaction from a sensation that mystified him, and stumbled heavily into a megalith.
No way. That’s impossible. Not by a girl!
A kidney, left defenceless without the appropriate muscle tension, took the impact unprepared and winded him with a whoosh of escaping lung air and throat spit as he collided with the ancient upright. The collision badly augmented an already mounting influx of pain and started him coughing and wheezing for breath like a massive embolism had entered his pulmonary artery. Blood speckled his lips and a dizzy spell blurred his visuals. His colon twitched and almost released. He caught his breath and tried to focus, blending the ocular blur with details so he could attempt to understand the situation, and he discovered a world on pause surrounding him… frozen in time as realization crystallized across his face and widened his eyeballs, remodelling his features with surprise and irony in a bewildered expression. That bitch! She had stabbed him in the belly. Actually stabbed him! Puncturing his stomach and ruining his life expectancy with unexpected biological destruction. That fucking bitch! He was completely stunned as the reality of his situation dawned on him and extremely angry about its future ramifications in relation to his own prolonged existence.
Cyran didn’t want to die like this. Not by a fucking girl.
His knees suddenly buckled with electrical disruptions and manual processing errors like his leg tendons had been systematically slashed, and his arse squelched onto the dew-damp grass as his physical started failing from catastrophic malfunctions …and the world resumed play, continuing the pain.

Chapter One snippets:

Lullan-O was a hard bastard and knew it. He was proud of it, boasted about it, picked fights with it, but he was also an exceedingly amiable person to befriend if you could get close enough without prejudice. His sex was usually tribal or ugly or with some deviant exploring kinkiness in the abnormal, as the majority of women found his scarred and altered face unbearable to look upon and touch. His mouth was an asterisk of healed cuts and so were his eye sockets. His shaved head also displayed patterns of ritual self-abuse with hundreds of fine scar lines contouring his scalp and a raised triangular brand of neutrality in the middle of his forehead. He never smiled, grimaced or expressed much in the way of facial expressions, due to the constraints of the scar tissue. But when he did, his head looked segmented like it had been reassembled section-by-section after being chopped up - similar to a child’s toy to develop hand/eye coordination.

Mage Hingis-429 was a bony, emaciated stick of average height with bad teeth, bad gums, and liquefied shits, all attributed to his love and diet of apples. His transparent skin was hairless and contoured with blue veins that snaked like river networks through a muscle-less savannah of loose flesh and knobbly mounds of jutting joints. He adorned himself in a dark ruby robe that was self-cleaning, know-all smugness and a shroud of aloof disinterest in in-group interaction.

The Purple squashed its sphere into an oblong to negotiate the narrow neck passage, causing the ribs to ripple with internal movement and a collarbone to snap and pierce the skin. K-olun stopped and turned as people stumbled back from the Purple, announcing trouble with an increase of noise: shifting feet, warnings, expletives and gasps. He watched as the Superior-inner expanded and replaced a section of reality with its misty portal, destroying the world with its otherworldliness. There was a suck, a pull of antimatter, and then an absence of atmosphere as it took shape.

Chapter Two snippet:

“So what do you think then?” asked Sannain.
“About what?” replied Impi.
“The girls, silly.”
“Yeah, I know.” He gave them another visual inspection, undressing them with his eyes. “Well, they’re obviously interested in me. I’ve got it and you haven’t…as always, brother.”
“You reckon?”

Chapter Three snippets:

Coco felt the momentum escalating, heading towards paradise. Her knees were either side of a set of thrusting male hips that bounced her lower truck with the impact of excited penetration. Their pelvises met with the slap of bum cheeks and balls, and she could feel the tickle of pubic hair on her clitoris as they collided, stimulating her nozzle with keratin cunnilingus. Her eyes were shut, highlighting her other senses, especially touch. All she could hear was panting and the jamboree of sex, getting louder, faster and harder, and the smell of lungs and exertion as she tasted passion.

Mortals developed a belief system based on good so dying would be the greatest of all blessings, not the nightmare they made it out to be with the painful hesitation of limbo and the anguish of the never-ending nothing. With faith to fall back on and the knowledge of reincarnation proven to be true, sentience was able to release its thoughts from the permanent worry of death, discarding the obsession of one-day I will die and the insanity and mayhem it could unleash, and live life to the full. But although this worked fine when people were young and full of vitality, the first signs of decrepitude and old age always brought the issue back to life with questions and doubts. No matter what people believed, they were still petrified of having their personalities and experiences erased so they could be reincarnated. Death was a lonely journey without family or friends; so the Light filled this gap with his glowing radiance and natural goodness.
Welcome.
The Light was the father of all who were good and the arbiter of those seeking absolution. He was heaven and he never lied.
Trust me, I am the Light.

Chapter Four snippets:

Mage Hingis-429 disconnected his brain from the collective. As he travelled back to his body from the ethereal, he found something fascinating lurking behind a node in his cerebral cortex, peeping round a lump of grey matter. It was a baby thought, an idea, a possibility: an over-looked notion from his younger days as a child. He was excited about the discovery, cock-a-hoop in fact. It was new, unusual and inspirational, a rose in a field of weeds, a blossom of something wonderful. It had been a very long time since he had come across something so unique, something that held such potential for change. With controlled patience though, he decided to hold the idea and its exploration until he was more at ease and securely entrenched in his physical, and far away from the pull of chaos.

From this black gap in reality something began to appear ex nihilo. It started as a hint of a presence in the back of the mind, then as a feeling of company to the corporeal senses, and finally as an androgynous human figure of abnormal height and featureless expression like a faceless mannequin. Its body parts slithered like worms trapped in a transparent bag of skin as it stood to attention. It had the solidity of lightless air and was the colour of a whole night, from dusk until dawn.
And then it started to reform.

A hand grabbed his shoulder with male firmness. Heelies swung round to find a cyan coloured man with two tusks growing from a bald scalp. He smirked with sharp teeth, pointy nose and happy mischievous eyes, and his face exploded outwards, throwing his features over Heelies’ own, giving him a mask of bloodshed.

Heelies found himself on his own with the child of darkness. He was playing with a snake he had stolen from his father’s abdomen, tying it in knots and watching it uncoil itself, and then tying it up again, each time tighter until it snapped.
A door that was not there a moment ago opened into the room and the Shadow walked in trailing a dog leash. On the end was a naked woman on all fours, doggy style, with her mouth locked in a muzzle. He walked passed Heelies and sat down in one of two chairs that were not there a moment ago either, the choker forcing the woman on the lead to follow or die.
“Come. Sit.”
Whether this was to Heelies or the woman he did not know, but he went and sat all the same, and so did the woman after showing a token gesture of defiance before strangulation won her over.
He faced the Shadow while the dog-woman rested by her master’s side on the floor, all dominated and subservient; a fake tail protruded from her anal passage in a stick of sodomy. She was blonde and perfect in shape, not a dog but very desirable indeed. The Shadow egged him with his eyes as he gently stimulated the woman with her tail, stroking her inside. She whimpered with the lack of lubrication in a dog-like plead.
“Let me introduce you to Destiny.”

Chapter Five snippets:

After being starved of oxygen by the watery envelope, the fires erupted with renewed vigour with the air infusion, bingeing on the catalyst and overindulging in the chemical reaction. Several instantly sunk as they became overly debauched - magic unable to prevent self-harm of such proportions. Each conflagration was as hot as a miniature sun and as deadly as suicide. Smoke coiled into the limited space of the prevention, filling it up. From the outside of the dome a new island formed in an area with no volcanoes, but the phenomenon was a myth.
Time to impact…
Too late.
The fire ships ploughed into the mage-galliots in their thirst for more fuel, rams harpooning hulls in a flammable coming together, allowing the fires to infect decks by injection. The ones that missed found a home in the vanguard of warships, turning the frontline into a mass crematorium. The collective was disbanded for the safety of the physical, and the barrier faded, like glass returning to sand, scattered across a desert.

Terror-forming stations blossomed in the sky like expanding universes above both fleets simultaneously, and Hell-balls, Eureka-splits and Suck-rounds smashed into both armies with random accuracy. Impacts announced casualties in huge numbers. Wood filled the air in lethal style, men too. Whole ships were plucked from the sea and thrown into others as the swirling Suck-rounds engulfed them in their vortexes of rotating air and seawater. Planks were split into fragments as Eureka-splits drilled holes through decks and into the Divide, sinking tubs, while Hell-balls of flames ignited new fires, new infernos, laying the table for another animal kingdom feast. The weather clouds expanded wider, further, until they covered the sky with darkness, spreading the area for destruction with their terror forming properties.

The sun no longer penetrated the fog of burning wood and flesh. It felt like night, all gloomy and foreboding. Morning Dawn’s coin-figure was visible as a white disc behind the grey veil; she no longer had the strength to scar the retinas. The weather systems pulsed with electricity, strobing the surrounding details in-and-out of view and turning the action around the Wave-Surfer into a collection of still image, like someone was flipping through a picture book on warfare, but on a planetary scale. Other nearby ships were also damaged, some more than others. One suddenly disappeared in a series of Vacuum hits, blinking out of reality and into entropy in six easy steps. The order to abandon ship was announced somewhere near the elevated stern.
About time too.

The Creation-erasure turned dayglo white. The world suddenly faded to black as Morning Dawn disappeared. The rod increased the demand for energy: too high, too much. Mage Hingis-429 felt his innards sucking down the pipe, his skin folding in on itself like a grape to a raisin. His eyes saw nothing but radiation white.
Then red.
Mage Hingis-429 screamed until his mouth was drawn into the pipe and his vocal cords were disintegrated.

The force of a mountain hit the lifeboat. Wind accelerated to beyond reason buffeted K-olun’s face. Bodies were dissected into missiles of soggy mankind and were hurled out of the way. Warm liquid splashed his cheek. The boat lifted into the air, surfing the rip. Wood splintered, something stabbed his side, and then water was everywhere, even in his lungs.

Chapter Six snippets:

Near the ruined treeline a white man played with his own exposed bladder by a collection of dead friends, performing an ante-mortem post-mortem examination. He poked at it with a twig and fluid squirted from a perforation in a golden shower, bleeding his lizard through a timber catheter. He dropped the bag of piss in his lap as he died and joined his friends on the other side for another go, leaving behind a pair of open eyes and an empty mind that were unaware of the oddity that ran passed them.

Overhead the missiles continued to rain. Mage Hingis-429 was in the mood for war. His compatriots were confined to lasers and similar tricks of low physical risk. He was not. His eye sockets were dribbling blood down his face from the continuous stonk; a weak leak that wouldn’t deter his malevolence. The men of Fal-Lusan may be fighting for Fal-Lusan, but mage Hingis-429 was fighting for the Shadow. He demanded a higher price for loyalty.

K-olun, as leader of his group, had been given a sword. It was nice to be armed properly. The current warrior confronting him was without her breastplate and her abdominal and pelvic shield. She was heavily pregnant and had nothing bar her pubic hair to protect her bulbous belly. She seemed adamant that revenge was necessary; no life was going to stop her taking his. As K-olun parried a strike of some force her waters broke and a foot appeared between her legs, making them both stall - it was a breach.
K-olun assisted with a caesarean, slashing his blade across her stomach and opening her up. Half a baby fell from the wound while half dropped from her womb: no one was proud.

He glimpsed an angel loop-the-looping and looked up for identification.
It was her.
Venus.
She was flying alone again, enjoying her liberty but still diffident of companionship despite the safety of heaven. She looked very happy, hanging on a thermal at full spread, watching something the Light couldn’t see from where he was standing. He was curious. What was it? Who was it?
She hovered for a long time testing his patience, and then backflipped and dived towards her focus point, turning her aerodynamics into a streamline pod for speed.
The Light shifted to a better location: one second here, next second there. There were no side effects or lag or discomfort. All that changed was his perspective.
And there she was, talking with a Herald. What’s the big idea?

Chapter Seven snippets:

A bear was sat in their path. It was twirling a stick in a flower head and extracting honey instead of pollen for a little lick. It was obviously a patient bear because the amount of nectar removed from each bud was puny, making the energy-used to energy-replenished ratio unbeneficial; was it a treat, a pudding, or just a bonne bouche? The bear had avoided destroying the source in its hunger, preserving the sweet thing in life for future reuse - nature was becoming brighter and more self-sustaining, conscious of the importance of a varied diet: honey promoted the immune system. Its fur was clean and fluffy, and its outlook seemed at ease with its laborious task, passing the day in the lap of luxury, eating nature’s treasure.

His problem with cats were numerous and irrational, plus they aggravated his asthma with the intake of dander and could cause toxoplasmosis with their untutored toilet habits. He was sceptical over their motives too, why so friendly? What did they want, a stroke, some food, or world domination? It was the way they looked at him, with scorn and contempt in their eyes, like he was the only person on the planet who knew their secret agenda. They watched him from alleyways, rooftops, windowsills and doormats, tails up like antennae, broadcasting his location and miaowing behind his back. And why nine lives? What was wrong with reincarnation and a god?
He ran over and kicked the hairball off the mountain and waited while his shakes dissipated, taking deep inhalations and slow nasal exhalations to calm his jitters. He slowly counted to ten, resisting a psychosomatic asthmatic attack and subsequent respiratory failure by anxiety with mental tranquillity. K-olun knew cats were intelligent, probably more so than mankind, but what were they planning?

The spokesmonkey knew he was different, knew he was a substandard simian who was privileged to be alive in a species that persecuted difference. A brief pause in the oxygen flow at birth from a tangled umbilical had changed him for good, handicapping his life to a bad start with hypoxia. As a baby his clumsiness had been obvious but now it was more difficult to notice. If he kept his hands occupied with a task that demanded concentration his shakes disappeared and he was ordinary, just another monkey being a monkey, nothing special but nothing different. That was what he wished for when he saw a shooting star in the night sky, to be just another monkey. This dedication to concentration had developed his mind, furthering his intelligence beyond the general puzzle ability of a normal monkey brain. In a way he had a higher degree of self-awareness, making him a better, more well-adjusted monkey than his non-handicapped kin, despite appearances to the contrary.

Chapter Eight snippet:

She felt like she could tell him anything, fears, experiences and hopes, like a life-long friend whose shoulder was familiar to her tears.
Okay. Here goes.
“I’m barren, void of decent eggs to hatch a family with. You could pump me until I drowned and you’d still never hit the target. My ovaries are dead.” It was a paragraph she had practised for a long time, waiting for mister right.
Silence greeted it.
Shit. Why did I tell him? She stared at the scenery, listening to him breathing behind her, waiting…
“I can’t father children either,” the head-kid finally said. He sounded sad and full of ancient regret. They looked at each other. He wasn’t a kid anymore; she could see that. His eyes were now totally white bar the black outlines of his irises and pupils, and his teeth were red with a mouth full of blood. Physically, he was more of a man than when they had first met too, a fine example of maleness. Who was he?
“How do you know? Were you married once?”
“Yes, a long time ago.”
“But you’re so young.”
“Older than you think, my sweet.” He kissed her forehead, brushing her hair behind her ears. She traced his face with her eyes, trying to work things out.

Chapter Nine snippet:

The vulture/man saw Venus and reported her to the Shadow through a mind-link. The Shadow was pleased and rewarded the vulture/man with a good little slave girl to mistreat or destroy as he saw fit. The vulture/man ended his guard duty early and flew home on a promise; he was already erect with the thought, which hampered his aerodynamics like a badly placed aerofoil.
The Shadow was cruising along his border in an instant, leaving his tower like that. Destiny had accepted her roll as troublemaker and was busy tempting the democratic artic nation of Kaow into attacking the Federation of Understanding States - she wouldn’t notice his kerb-crawling. See you later, dear.

Chapter Ten snippets:

The group stood as a dirigible appeared over the treetops shadowing the track and dropping incendiaries onto the exiles. Great waves of people were propelled into the sky on orange eruptions like the supernovae of lots of tiny suns in an unhappy nebula, and were scattered like Navnid into disassembled parts for inspection. Other dirigibles came into view and the repetition of impact clouds multiplied and began pulverizing hundreds more to a premature afterlife, annihilating the column with systematic overkill.

He marched passed the merry-go-round and the parallel bars, and cut a rope from the tree-swing. The wooden seat tipped with the loss of a support guide, hanging limp and unusable: playtime over. He coiled the rope round his hand and elbow and then looped it over his shoulder, and began climbing the tree, arthritis twingeing his limb joints. He climbed to a suitably high branch and shuffled along, not for the view of the seesaw, sandpit and slide, but to conclude his pains, to end a lifetime of suffering with termination.
He sat with his feet toing-and-froing as he constructed a noose, head lost in thought as he converted the rope of fun into an instrument of death. He was remembering why, applying conviction, and confirming his decision.

Mage Hingis-429 heard the motor region stall and the cingulate gyrus fighting for survival. The intermittent transmissions from the auditory cortex were beginning to misfire and reroute. Pathways were becoming jumbled with chaos fallouts, anonymous jargon scriptures and warning loops. He could touch with his taste buds and smell with his optics. The opportunity was closing rapidly. He managed to download the boy’s persona psyche before the data feed terminated without being unhooked. Somewhere an upheaval had disconnected the link. He had to go now.
Or had he left it too late?
No…
Yes!
The fornix cerebri crumpled through the mammalian brain, ruining the hypothalamus and trapping the pituitary gland, which cut off his spinal escape route. Both the central and peripheral nervous systems were closed to him. There was only one way out now. He charged along the optic tract for the front door, looking for the sight relays.
Twice he was denied. Redundant software and predatory encryption misleading him with dead-end circuitry, prompting flashes of moment cells filled with nightmares to govern his ocular windows. He opened up another search program and began tracing links as the bad dreams faded. All were offline bar one. Somehow an eyeball tear duct nerve-line had survived. At last. He hopped on the visual waterway and left via the right retina terminal, returning to his body just before the frontal lobe hit critical mass and the entire brainbox broke up along its gyri.

Chapter Eleven snippets:

The sight that greeted the Shadow was the same as before: row upon row of killers lining his landscape in neat ranks of chaos. Their composition was diverse and deadly, from massive man-monstrosities and obese bastards, down to imps and bacterial infections. The main bulk of his forces were comprised of apostate infantry, souls that had renounced good intentions for bad actions.

The Light was also inspecting his gathered army of do-gooders before he ordered them to their deaths. They were on bended knee around his tower, praying for a favourable outcome with bowed heads of reverence to his holiness - none of them were crossing their hearts and hoping to die. Penitent men and philanthropists made up the core of his beneficent defence force, with a mixed blessing of angelic creations for divine intervention: cupids, angels, righteous dictators, Sleepers, immortals, moral sympathizers, sanctimonious figureheads, plus a congregation of other disciples.

Radical theologians and ascetic sects intervened the infidels on behalf of the Light, speaking with tongues, proffering wafers and pamphletting liturgy on how it should be. Their holier-than-thou stance was winning skirmishes and gaining ground, finishing off felons with faith and emblematic edibles, but it ended before it could proliferate into a major movement of reconsideration and absolution.
Hell had arrived.

Rats swarmed from sewer outlets throughout the battlefield towards the cupid archers in a black river of chattering teeth and twitching snouts, as whiny mosquitoes buzzed over in a misty rain cloud of bloodsucking mouthparts from some dark jungle netherworld of urban nightmare. They were through en masse, biting and contaminating the cupids with their infectious infestations. Contagious diseases proliferated socially and plasmodia caused fatal complications to their baby bodies, spoiling kidneys, livers, brains and blood functions. Some went yellow with jaundice and some convulsed, but they continued unloading rounds of arrows despite an epidemic of croup and dysentery.

The Light looked to the Renaissance men to revive his efforts.
They began boosting his troops with renewed interest and alternative thinking, introducing new styles into the battle as the Renaissance men sauntered from platoon to platoon offering revival. Their natural talents in the humanities made them perfect people persons with excellent problem solving skills that were proving rather popular with their audiences. An outfit of everyday worship infected with the heebie-jeebies relaxed and destroyed a squadron of flagellating poltergeists with hugs, and a marauding ogre was tamed by a Good Samaritan and comforted. Good was making a comeback.
But when a harem of salacious harlots duped the Renaissance men with aphrodisiacs and deep-throated oral entertainment, they had met their match; and the culture changed. A new era of ideas emerged, bastardized by fresh flesh elements and mucky ideas. One cheap slag gagged and vomited round a penis shaft but continued with her administrations, thrilling the Renaissance man she was pleasuring. He began a new way of thinking that was quickly adopted as the latest thing, and soon sick was spraying everywhere as Renaissance men pushed deeper into the enemy with emetic penetration.

Chapter Twelve snippet:

The Epone, on the other hand, was happy to sleep.

Chapter Thirteen snippet:

Doomsday had arrived.