The Showdown, pt 6
The Heathens gazed on in disbelief as their saint completed the sigil
Previously: Alexei enters the battle.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Brooklyn
Alexei weighed which adversary he should reckon with: Astra or Lenny?
A direct battle with Astra would be informative, but she was at a disadvantage. While he’d had months grasping how to hack this new world they’d created, she’d been imprisoned by his demon, wasting away. Alexei wanted Astra to evolve. If he directed his full force at her, it would overwhelm her rather than evolve her.
So Lenny it was. There was something he wanted to test with Lenny anyway. Could he turn the man’s own “egregore” against him? Time to find out: Alexei oriented toward the Heathens. They were spilling out from the other two mobs like liquids separating. He inclined them to surround the truck on which St. Lenny stood.
From his interrogations of the couple Heathens he held in quarantine, Alexei had predicted St. Lenny’s next move: spellcraft. So-called “magic” operated on belief: the more you believed that magic was real, the more susceptible you would be to its placebo effects. The Heathens had a particularly desperate need to believe in magic. (Their group was made of erratic misfits. Enchantments, hexes, and summonings were their only route to power.) So, naturally, St. Lenny would cast what the Heathens believed to be his most potent spells.
Alexei watched eagerly through his new pair of binoculars, appreciating for a moment the binoculars’ gyro-stabilization and AI-assisted ability to track a moving object (in this case: Lenny).
At first, St. Lenny held his ground. The hyena’s hallucinatory jaws went straight through him, ineffectually. Meanwhile, a torrent of Heathens climbed up the truck’s hood to storm his position.
But Lenny cast his famous love spell, squirting them with (real) honey and tossing (real) rose petals into the air. Alexei tuned into the Heathen frequency. Now he saw an avalanche of pink hearts cascade over Lenny’s pursuers. Heathens fell from the truck like heavy raindrops, holding their hearts smiling and imbued with a pink glow. Several, as they plummeted, were already kissing in one another’s arms. The ones who hit the ground alone immediately proceeded to confess their passion to whichever bewildered drivers remained on the highway.
But love was always one backstab away from hate. So Alexei refocused the Heathens’ attention on how Lenny treated them as pawns (a betrayal of the spirit of Freedom!). The love spell now backfired.
Lenny retreated across the truck’s freight box as the Heathens advanced with a hate equal to their love for him. The hyena’s massive jaws reached down and seemingly thrashed Lenny about, nearly flinging Lenny off the side of the truck. Alexei lowered his binoculars and then picked them up again. Of course, it had been an illusion. In reality, the hyena’s jaws corresponded to a group of Heathens throwing Lenny around.
Careful, I want him intact! Alexei reminded the psychofaun. One of the Heathens threw a knife at their former champion, which thankfully Lenny dodged. Intact! Alexei commanded through mindspace, the his amplification suit humming.
Lenny responded to this assault with a second spell: he stopped time. For an eternal moment, everything became perfectly still. The hyena halted mid-pounce. The Heathens froze in their postures of violence and rage.
Then Alexei, as a man lacking any magical beliefs, remembered that this situation was impossible. He broke away from the Heathen group mind for a moment and noticed that a plane still moved through the air above him, a distant boat still sailed through the East River, and, closer to him, the leftists still shouted at the riot police. In fact, these things had been moving all along. Fascinating! He now understood how the ”spell” worked. It drew your attention exclusively to unmoving features of the scene, making you believe that time had stopped. Very smart! Alexei decided to add it to his own “spellbook” before he would break it.
But then he noticed that Lenny had stayed in place.
Had Lenny been one to calculate his odds, the young man certainly would have fled by now. Instead he still stood at the back of the truck like a fool. (Alexei supposed that was his role in the Heathen “court,” after all – that of the fool.)
Yet in this moment Lenny’s face did not look foolish. He looked…what was the word? (Alexei often had trouble understanding the correspondence between facial expressions and emotions, so he inspected the diagram that he kept in his mind’s eye.) Lenny’s face looked melancholic––no, that wasn’t exactly right––Lenny’s face looked…wistful. St. Lenny stood there, staring at the frozen Heathens wistfully, as if he was a parent snapping the last photo of his child before they left for college. Wistful. It was the last expression Alexei had seen on the face of his old mentor, Papa Yuri, before Alexei had ended him.
Alexei felt a sinking in his chest. He consulted a different mental chart for internal feelings: Could this finally be the sense of remorse that people talked about? Maybe Alexei was already feeling regret about what he would do once he captured Lenny: essentially, turn him into a computer chip.
No, the emotion was not remorse. It was a different one: disquiet. There was something Alexei didn’t understand about this situation.
But Lenny might still flee at any moment, so Alexei broke the young man’s spell over the time-frozen Heathens: Since the spell worked by drawing attention to whatever was immobile, Alexei simply drew attention to all things that moved. As if someone had unpaused a video, the Heathens once again raged forth at Lenny atop the truck.
Alexei stood transfixed as St. Lenny whipped his own knife out of his duster coat and thrust it forward, sending his pursuers backpedaling. (Alexei hadn’t predicted that Lenny would physically threaten his own people.)
Another uncharacteristic expression grew across Lenny’s face: sadness. Lenny seemed to sigh as he drew a hallucinatory symbol through the air with the tip of his knife. A burning sigil. What did it do? Alexei tapped into the Heathen mind to find out. It was a banishing spell. Directed at what?
The Heathens gazed on in disbelief as their saint completed the sigil. The mark burst into a stream of blue flame that snaked through the air and into Lenny’s knife, enchanting the knife with an incandescent gleam. And then Lenny slashed sideways, cutting the now-visible cords that tied the Heathens to the hyena floating above them.
Alexei felt the Heathen egregore’s shock as it died, its internal contradictions tearing it apart from within. The Heathens’ love of all things wild was shredded by a realization, one that should have been obvious: that their magical society, founded by St. Lenny and his Prince, had never been wild to begin with. How could a society be wild while ruled over by an extensive court of marquises, barons, and cupbearers? Had they been idiots all along to ignore something so obvious? No, they had been fooled. They were living inside someone else’s dream. Hypnotized. Quite literally: St. Lenny was a master hypnotist.
Alexei was impressed watching the egregore unravel. Amazed, even. Normally, a well-established psychofaun took at least years to die – it dwindled in influence and was then forgotten. But Lenny had just shown Alexei a new way to kill a group mind: you force it to feel its own hypocrisy until it cracks down the middle.
The former Heathens looked around as if they’d awoken from a strange dream. Some took of their masks and stared at them. Others just stood there listlessly. Overhead, the hyena whined and yelped as it collapsed and dissolved, until nothing remained. Many climbed off the truck and walked along the highway, aimlessly.
Alexei psi-ed into those who remained. A new group mind was forming. They were desperate for something new to cling to, having thrown their lives down the gutters for a delusion. It had to have all been for something. A man at the front of the pack seemed to find that something as he pointed and screamed at Lenny. Yes, they had found a reason to reunite, a purpose: to rid the world of this great deceiver, the one who had called himself a saint. A young woman spat at him. A man threw his mask at him.
Lenny oriented toward Alexei from over a soccer field away. Alexei lowered his binoculars. As they met eyes, Lenny shrugged and waved goodbye.
“No…” Alexei whispered under his breath. Urgently, Alexei tried to influence the newly formed group mind from across the highway. The sensors across his suit buzzed as they worked to feed Alexei long-range neural activity from the group. The cooling fans near his shoulders whirred to vent heat from the processing units on his back. He struggled to hold onto a signal – but he was too far away and the psychofaun was too new to be classified.
St. Lenny said something to the angry throng atop the truck. For a moment, it seemed to stun them. The moment passed. The mob rushed him. Now the only thing Alexei could see was a mass of torsos attached to battering limbs.
Then they heaved Lenny over their heads. Alexei raised his binoculars again just in time to see Lenny look back over at him. Lenny’s smile was bloody, broken-toothed, and…(What was that emotion? Alexei checked his chart.)…sweet. Lenny’s smile was sweet. The young man winked at him. What did it mean?
Alexei did not get to ponder for long, because then the crowd tossed Lenny over the edge of the elevated expressway.
Alexei’s spine jolted. His hand had outstretched, as if somehow he could have caught Lenny on the way down. Alexei estimated the elevation of the road from the street below but he knew it was a futile action. He took three breaths to calm himself.
Then he found himself cursing in Russian, as he sometimes did when he was especially frustrated.
Why exactly was he frustrated? One of the biggest thorns in his side had just been plucked out. To introspect, Alexei used a technique that Astra had taught him one evening in bed. (She’d called it “belief reporting.”) You hold an absolutely unmoveable intention to say only true statements about yourself; then you speak.
“I am annoyed because I will not be not be able to add Lenny to our talent—“ No, that wasn’t it. (If you couldn’t finish the sentence then it conflicted with your intention to only tell the truth.)
He tried again. “I am annoyed because I have lost my most informative adversary.” Yes, that was true, but Alexei had a sense of incompleteness. Or paradox, even.
Alexei re-experienced the sinking feeling he’d had earlier as he spoke his next statement: “I am annoyed because Lenny has beat me to immortality.”
He looked back up toward where Lenny had been thrown. He saw a hallucinatory tentacle seize one of the former Heathens. Well, at least there was still a demon for him to tame.
—
Devi reveled watching Lenny fall. A false prophet vanquished for the god of Freedom. She looked down, off the side of the truck. Three fellow acolytes dressed in black, haloed in light. They looked up at her in their gas masks. The one with a red bandana has seen what she’d done: how she’d commanded the former Heathens to sacrifice their great deceiver. They looked up at her, asking her to finally fulfill her role. To lead.
She looked down at their haloed forms knowing that she too had been deceived. What had previously been tentacles now revealed themselves as tendrils of light.
On either side of them, her creations arose again. Butterfly-winged Elyrus growled affectionately with sharp teeth. Many-fingered Jakob stretched out its dozens of arms. Both were also luminous, swimming in tendrils of light.
She turned to the former Heathens standing uncertainly on the truck bed. Their jubilation at St. Lenny’s unseating had worn off. They needed something new. Something true. They were waiting…for her. They looked at her questioningly. Why did she still wear her devil mask?
Because the work was not done.
And so Devi began to preach. And as she preached, those who were once Heathens now knew the truth. And as they knew the truth, glowing tendrils reached out and entered their brows. Their third eyes opened and they saw visions – of Freedom.
A false idol of Freedom had just been destroyed. The arrival of Freedom’s new avatar was nigh: It arrived out of that formless realm that Astra had showed her. In a burst of radiance it appeared on the hood of the truck and climbed up toward them. At first it seemed to be a man covered in cylinders––no, thorns. Then its features shifted because they were unbound: it was male, then female, then neither; it cycled through ages: a teen, a crone, a baby; it grew eyes that were windows to unmeasurable depths, and then these disappeared, because it was not one thing and would never be.
The avatar extended its hands in welcome. Its entire body hummed. A new age was upon them.
—
Crowley stumbled as he ran alongside Astra. “Bollocks!” His head felt…blurry. Astra had told him…what had she told him? Right: he had a concussion. From the bottle that had smashed aside his head.
He heard the roar of the hordes behind them. Astra had needed to slow down for him and now the crowds were just on their tail. He stole a glance to his rear. The sudden turn of his head made him dizzy. He stumbled again. He fell. The mob caught up to him. Someone stomped on his ribs, sending the breath out his throat. He tried to stand. Another kick snapped his ankle. A slap to the ear sent his vision spinning.
“Crowley!” he heard Astra yell.
Through a daze, Crowley felt them stand him up. They lifted him and passed him over their hands. For a delirious moment, Crowley wondered if he was at an outdoor concert, and if he wasn’t a rockstar surfing the crowd.
He struggled to look around. In the near-distance things were happening. A woman was fighting two glowing giants like some episode of Power Rangers. Then she was sending contagious punches through the crowd; they zigged and zagged like lines of dominoes. Where mental attacks failed, she used physical ones. Crowley was awestruck as the woman spun and kicked and whipped her arms with a speed he’d only seen in his old friend, Emmett Ramsey. Oh, right, he thought, as the woman faded from view, that’s Emmett’s daughter. She was once a girl and now she’s a warrior. That made him sad somehow.
The crowd passed him along for what seemed like a long time, but time felt a bit funny at that moment. Eventually he was set down on the ground. Then a blurry face was above him. He squeezed his eyes and the face came into resolution. It was someone else familiar, with blonde hair and a smug expression. He was covered in little cylinders and standing next to that woman with the devil mask. Both of them were positively swimming in hallucinatory tentacles, which reached out for him.
Crowley had forgotten the man’s name, but he knew instinctively that he had never liked this man.
“Hi again, Crowley,” the man said. “It’s been a while.”
RIP St. Lenny
Next week: Enter the mind of the Instrumentalist