11. COUERANNA'S CURSE: "Dragon Joe"

For purposes of Kore-11 let's echo Tanith von Blut and call our latest batch of SOSers the Society of Suicides. They'd be Fisherwoman, Clair du Lune, Mr Brilliant, Dervish Furie, Silverhair herself and Aegis-Agate, as the ever-whimsical Cel-Spook had decided to re-christen herself.

With Delphi, Fish's be-winged but otherwise cetaceous psychopomp, providing between-space transportation, the Suicides have made it safely to Aegean Trigon. There they quickly encounter all three of the Annulises: Medea always Ararat (not yet in Ophiomedea mode), hubby Jason (Doc Jay, Freya's surgeon) and son Apsyrtus (Laodice's Cousin Scatterbrain.)

As noted in Kore-4, though perhaps not in its synopsis, the Annulises got away from the von Alptraums' Baltic Sea estate (Castle Nightmare) at around the same time Cybele St Synne and Freya did. (The real Valfreja Volsung, as opposed to the Strife-Hulga incarnation of same, that is to say.) Since they never showed up at the Dre'Aths' North Sea hospice you may have been wondering where they went.

And if you were then chances are you missed Doc Jay's appearance in Kore-9. (I know I missed mentioning it in its synopsis.) Suffice it to say he's a good part of the reason the Male Entity recovered such that he was able to masquerade as Unholy Abaddon at Castle Nightmare so persuasively. Of course it helps when a certain Miracle Machine is both devil and demon free and, therefore, altogether your boss cow to boss bull around again after virtually the entirety of your 11th Lifetime.

(Might as well know, now that Kore-9 and Kore-10 are offline, it was Machine-Memory who provided the Gypsium-Brainrock that activated the contents of the Aesgardian Tantalus, the selfsame Mnemosyne Machine that withdrew said-Godstuff once her Herr Hell Helios was out-of-danger and of course the no-longer-humanized Female Entity who brought Human Memory to the von Alptraums' estate from Scotland.)

All in all it's quite the reunion we're having on Aegean Trigon. Perhaps not surprisingly, since that was where he was the last time we saw him, Young Death, Hush's Gush, is there too. As one might expect from Kore-7, he's hardly alone. Should also mention at this juncture that Tanith Silverhair has rainbow eyes again. Which begs the question: Is that really Virginia Mannering inside the Aegis Armour?

Tanith squished a persistent bug between her hands. The figure that formed as a consequence was instantly recognizable.

"Good to see you again, mom. See you got my message." Auguste Moirnoir, Young Death, smoking cigar, torn tuxedo and all, materialized out of the air; the dead bug, more precisely.

"You!” exclaimed the Horny Ghost through her latest host. “You're the one who put the arrowheads under all our pillows."

"As Sigurd Lancz, yes," admitted the Male Trickster.

"Why?"

"Because I made him do it," announced Abe Chaos, growing huge out of the ground between SOS and the Annulises.

Appropriately, given who looked like, the Olympian God of Earthquakes, among other things, the ground rumbled as he did so. His growing stopped at about seven feet but the weapon he held, a trident, grew another foot or so then went from grow to glow.

Whoever had been playing at being Poseidon on the Argo Ghost Ship had probably been playing Triton, a lesser demigod of the Mediterranean Sea. This looked the genuine article. Also looked a trifle unsteady. Stank not so much of the bottom of the sea as the bottom of a beer barrel.

Skip forward a mite. The initial speaker is Unholy Abaddon.

"Who's in the Aegis?"

"No one important," responded that someone in a man's voice.

"Jesse!" gasped Murray. "Where's Ginny?"

"Still on the Ark, gruesome. Being looked after by Will Tombstone. Which is why he didn't come along for the ride." Tombstone, Grave's Head, Kid Cemetery, was one supra who did not have to shoot straight. All he had to do was pull the trigger. His bullets went wherever he wanted them to, -- even around corners.

"I couldn't put her in danger," explained Tanith in [Celeste] Mannering's voice. "The Minoans would definitely kill her."

So why have Young Death and the onetime Unity of Chaos gone to all this trouble to get the latest group of SOSers here? This time the initial speaker is Cel-Spook, through Tanith.

"Call me what you like, Chaos ... Fact is all my plans have just gone for naught thanks to you and Young Death."

"And what plans were they, my lovely honeysuckle?"

"She was going to infiltrate Agenor Heliopolis’s cadre inside of Tanith, you numbskull," said Moirnoir, almost as if he could read minds. "She wants to get hold of the Olympian talismans and no doubt attempt to destroy them. Only trouble is the Minoan maniacs aren't here and we've no idea where they've gone."

"And you think I can help you find them?"

"Actually, mom, the only one we're really interested in is Angelo Zeross. And we're not overly interested in him, truth told," explained the Male Trickster. "It's his rings. More precisely it’s one of the devils he holds inside one of them."

"Zuvem Nergalis," provided Abaddon. "The Mithradite scum who, when he co-ruled nearby Crete alongside the Utopian Sarpedons and the human Minoans of King Minos, called himself Rhadamanthys. Back where I come from he also once ruled the Elysian Fields as the Laird of the Laughing Lands. Devils know him best as Devil Doom or Gravedigger and I owe him one of his own; a grave, a death, a final death, -- his!"

"Glad you didn't say ours," remarked Brilliant.

"That can be arranged," grinned the ex-Unity.

"The bigger they are, the harder they fall," gnashed Dervish Furie, unable to stay Jervis Murray any longer.

"Really?" Abaddon clearly took that as a challenge. He began to grow. And grow. And grow. Soon he towered twenty feet above them; his Brainrock trident as thick as a tree trunk and glowing as brightly as Mr Brilliant now did as well.

"Want to play?" he boomed.

"Um," said Jason Annulis looking up.

"Double um," said his son looking even farther up ...

"What's that?" suddenly demanded Aegis-Mandam pointing into the sky high above even titanic Abaddon.

"That, Jess," cheered Cel-Tanith radiantly, "Is your father!"

Aegean Trigon is about to get a whole lot more crowded!

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13. COUERANNA'S CURSE: "Apis Isle"

Lest we forget our overall title, 'Coueranna's Curse', it's back to Sedon's Head for the beginning of Kore-13. We start with the Ninurtas, the family of Garudas headed by father Kermes and mother Akkipy. Akkipy, you'll recall, is Granny Garuda's daughter by Nimrod Falconiform. Kermes Ninurta is her husband. Their children are Kestrel and Aquilla, their Summoning Son, whom we last saw in Kore-9 acting as Machine-Memory's hands.

Granny Garuda, you'll also recall, is Kanin Nauroz. She's bodily dead but she still might Phoenix. The problem with that is Argiope 'Bright Face' Zeross has her feathers and a Garuda can't Phoenix without his or her feathers. Aquilla went looking for them, with the results first described in Odd-8 and recapped here, just in case you have forgotten. Now father Nimrod has called a Convocation of Eagles to take up the chase. As we discover, they can't find a way beyond the Dome. They also can't find Aquilla. We'll leave them to it.

Meanwhile, on our multi-named, chapter-titular island, Sedon's Human Eye-Land on a map of the Hidden Headworld, Master Kyprian Somata isn't doing too well. In truth her captor, Cruel Plathon, the Bull of Mithras, is more than a mite miffed at her deterioration. Like the Garudas he's particularly miffed that the tub of Cathonic Fluid containing Aquilla has vanished.

He'd secreted it in a Tholos Temple or Shrine dedicated to a long gone, nowadays nameless devil (actually Marutia, Marut Kanin, Kore-Eris, Kore-Discord or, as we know her best, Strife). The temple had been well-guarded so it couldn't have been stolen by anyone on Ap Isle; not in any ordinary way anyhow. So, who had the ability to spirit something that size away? More importantly, if they could do that, then they could easily do it to Kyprian as well.

The other troubling thing was that, if the tub was still around he could stick Kyprian inside it. He did that, he could at least preserve her life until Golgotha Nauroz (who was cloned from Granny's long dead brother Ubris, the thought-father of Augustus Nauroz, aka Auguste Moirnoir, Young Death or Hush's Gush) and his Trinondev Warriors Elite return from the Outer Earth. They went out there to locate the prison pod containing Kore-Concord, Divine Coueranna, she of the curse. They come back, they'll trade it to the Bull for the release of their Master. So long as she's still alive, that is.

We'll leave the Bull fretting and return to Scotland for the rest of Kore-13.

Something's happened. Well, something is always happening in a PHANTACEA web-serial but this particular happening hasn't been detailed in the usual way, either earlier on in this chapter or during any preceding chapter. In other words, whatever it was happened off-camera, as it were. Suffice it to say, Hush Mannering (Gush's Hush, aka Young Life, the female trickster, Jolene Callion or Joli Blon) is now in Scotland. To say the least she's in General 'Huff-n-Puff' Jollity mode.

Hush is joined by the aforementioned Golgotha Nauroz (Black Skull Face), Morgianna Somata (the White Witch), Demios Sarpedon (whose twin sister Melina has been acting as Max's nurse since leaving the Ark in Cairo), the Untouchable Diver (Yehudi Cohen), Laodice Atreides (Electra, Lady Lightning or Electrocretan, as the Diver dubs her), Mesmer Hent (Mr Attraction), Clair du Lune (Camille Dugas), Mr Brilliant (Immanuel Dark) and Wildman Dervish Furie (Gentleman Jervis Murray).

In short, whatever it was that happened off-camera was more like two happenings. One happened on Aegean Trigon. The other happened at Castle Nightmare. (NOTE: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that we'll probably find out what those happenings were next time up, but that could be just a wild guess. My excuse? It's 2006 when I write this; it was 1997 when I wrote 'Coueranna's Curse'.)

Here's the deal with the Family Dre'Ath. There's a lot of faerie about the lot of them, on both sides: Daddy Angus's Dre'Aths, including son Nathan and the 4 Skullians, and Mommy Goldie's O'Ryans, including sister Bonita (Bunnie now Galvin), whose children are currently lost in Africa.

There's also something called the Teind. It's a tithe the Dre'Aths and O'Ryans pay faerie folk such that the majority of their children can grow up human. It's paid in the form of the minority of their children, the ones who are stolen as babies, to be replaced with stocks of wood, no less. We meet one in Kore-13. Her name's Sarah-60.

We also find out that Sarah-61 has been stolen from those faeries who stole her. That would be Dana Maxwell, one of Elaine nee Dre'Ath's twin daughters by Jock Maxwell, who's also in Africa. As for Nate, well, it appears he's a potential Fir Doirche (Fear Dark, the chapter-titular character of Kore-12).

In that respect, here's a significant BLOCKQUOTE. The first person speaking is Dervish Furie (Werewolf in Shorts, one of the Society of Suicides, who was last seen in Kore-11):

"Shooting seals does not a legend make, mate."

"Yeah? Take a closer look, gruesome." Nathan Dre'Ath was proud of himself. He bent over the dog-fin's corpse, dug his fingers into the bullet holes, and began to pull away its skin. Underneath it, as dead as the seal appeared to be, was a human being, a man covered with red hair and powerful muscles; a man, he had to admit, who did look a lot like him.

"That's Fear Dark, brawn-for-brains. I just killed a living nightmare. Though you're no Johnny Handsome yourself, whatever you are."

"Furie, of the Dervish variety. But you're right. Are they all like that?"

"Some of them. Underneath the weather-proofing. Some of them are kind of pretty too, -- and not just the female ones either. One's my aunt."

Although Fear Dark is an Oannes type as well as as a Selkie, roane or merrow, the weather-proofing Nate's referring to is the Selkies' removable seal-skin. Sarah-60, who's a Banshee or Siren Songtress faerie type as well as a Selkie, has some other knacks besides hypnotic singing. As Angelo Zeross (1938's Ringleader, who also answers to Ringkeeper) quickly discovers when he sticks his de-bodied devils into them, then tries to do the same to her, she shares these knacks with most faeries.

"Ringkeeper, just the person I wanted to see," grinned Hush. "Got another devil-thrall to spare?"

"I'll pull one out," Angelo offered. "By the way, I think I'll stick with Ringleader if you don't mind. I'm the Pied Piper here."

"You do that. Do the other thing too."

"Delighted to oblige." Just as he had on Aegean Trigon more than a week earlier, Zeross fingered one of his myriad, now empty rings. "Hold on. Something's wrong."

"Who's possessing who now, trickster?" trilled Sarah. "As you should know even if your deviant pals don't, our kind has been dealing with devils for many millennia. They might be able to occupy us but that doesn't mean they can take us over. On the contrary, after centuries of putting up with their abuse we developed built-in reflexes such that we're the ones who hold onto them. Dense as they are, my Selkie pals won't let them go any more than I'll let your Diver out of me."

Someone zoomed across Siren's vision. Before she really knew what it was, Dervish Furie was standing beside Young Life, Morgianna and Laodice holding the Selkie Songstress's seal skin. "Am I right or mightn't you be needing this, nature girl?"

Sarah-60 and Fear Dark had a thing going. When she finds out Nate's killed him, she attempts to return the favour. With socks of supras, whom she refers to as deviants, on Roane's Reef (the non-Apis islet in Kore-13) she's non-lethally socked stopped. However, there's still no way to compel her to show the Saints the location of the Selkies' between-space link to the Hidden Continent.

Then Cybele St Synne, the two-toned redhead who prefers to be described as voluptuous rather than as overweight, has a bright idea. As we've known since Kore-4, Angelo (and now the Selkies) isn't the only one who has hold of a captured devil. That devil's captor, a Trinondev of Weir, defers to a Summoning Child who, if she was born Pandora Mannering, may in PHANTACEA fact be Hush's Summoning Child.

Morgianna Somata, the White Witch of Cabalarkon, did not hesitate. "Release Kore into the Banshee!"

Guess who will be going to Sedon's Head in the very near future? SOS may mean the Sorority of Sausages, the Society of Saints and/or the Socks of Suicides (actually, I just made that up) but it also means Save Our Souls. And the soul the Trinondevs came out here to save was of course that of Kyprian Somata, the Master of the Weirdom of Cabalarkon.

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15. COUERANNA'S CURSE: "Onwards, Inwards and More Innards"

Let's play pretend: 'Heliodyssey' is a trilogy comprising'Helioddity', 'Coueranna's Curse' and, starting in the Summer 2006 edition of PHANTACEA on the Web, 'The Volsung Variations'. Better yet, let's not pretend at all. Let's just come right out and say that. Then we can say that Kore-14 constituted Curse's finale while Kore-15 constitutes foreboding for Volsung.

Except that wouldn't be quite accurate, would it? Truth told, Kore-15 is more a matter of saying farewell to a bunch of characters who've been with us since 'The Moloch Manoeuvres'. I'm not saying any of them die, though it doesn't look good for Human Memory.

"He's gone!" crackled Machine Memory, whose digitized face shone out of the Kubla Cavern's exposed wall-space.

The Kubla Cavern was but one of the many hollowed-out caverns within Subterranean Trigon; a particularly comfortable one, true, a regular Xanadu pleasure-dome, and one, when she was humanized, this Memory often shared with her beloved. Now she, it, was reduced to being just a cybernetic peeping tomcat.

"Only for the moment," protested the devil-free, former Taurus of Apple-Apis Isle, misunderstanding the voyeur-wallflower that was Trans-Time Trigon's omnipresent Miracle Machine. "I'll be back. Soon too. Just you watch, Dame Digitalis."

"I will, -- but I'm not talking about you, diddle-head. I'm talking about him, your idiotic bird-manservant. Aquilla!"

"The punk-huntsman? Big deal. What's he going to do?"

"Kill you, -- before you're even born!"

"Good for him then. Right, Lovely Lady?"

Memory of the Grey was no longer breathing!

So, Mnemosyne D'Angelo is dead, eh. Do I sound doubtful? Recall the punk-huntsman, Aquilla Ninurta, is now something of a simpleton. Recall Human Memory's Circean knack. I'm thinking Human Memory's no more dead than Barsine or Tanith.

You've probably already figured out whose body they fished out of the Indian Ocean in Kore-14. As for Bat-Bait, well, we know who her Summoning knack turned out to be, don't we?

Here's more than enough foreboding for what's upcoming. The first speaker is Sorciere (Solace Sunrise). The second speaker is Fisherwoman (Scylla Nereid). Shahiyeda is Sorciere's 3- year old daughter by John Sundown.

Word has somehow reached both Fish and Sorry that Shah, as she's known, is currently being worshipped as an incarnation of Nergal Vetala. Whom, we aforesaid know, just happens to be who Barsine's Summoning knack turned out to be.

"The Auntie Ants'll ..."

"Protect Shahiyeda? How?"

"Great Byron'll stop her [Vetala]. Or the Moloch Himself."

"They wouldn't know their butts from their bottoms; haven't had feet for six millennia, either of them. Now might be our last chance to save any of ours. Save everything. Because, if the Head comes crashing down into the North Pacific, the Genesea'll finally fully happen and most folks don't have gills!"

"Aren't we a little young to save the world?"

"It's the young who need one, avian."

"There's that. Let's go!"

Delphi came out of the Grey, gathered up the amphibious anthropoid [Fisherwoman] and the Pocahontas [Sorciere]. Took them through Young Death [Auguste Moirnoir, Augustus Nauroz or Hush's Gush], through the Tholos Tomb, through the Cathonic Dome, after Abe Chaos, Barsine-Vetala Mandam-Nergal, the not-so-old anymore Mithraic Magus and Tanith von Blut, who definitely did appear to be alive.

"Tanith!" cried Jesus Mandam, spotting them go. Then he was fully silver. Then he had the Stopstone wings of an Aegis-Angel. Then he was through the Omphalos and onto the other side.

Which brings us to the casualty list.

"We lost some, sir," Ted Mayhew reported to the Great Man [Loxus Abraham Ryne] as dawn approached that morning in mid-February.

"Sorry to hear that, Ted. But your men were well paid."

"Not my men, sir, -- they get paid so well precisely because they're professionals. Pros don't go down easily. Can't say the same about some of your youngsters, though. I told you they had no place on a mission like this."

"Which ones?" demanded Sedon St Synne, the still slightly red-headed Franco-Ainu former Godling, already dreading the response. Although a Wayfarer in the Weird and a half-son of the ever-possessive Pauper Priestess, when he was fully awake he was pretty much just an ordinary, albeit fit, sixty odd year old satyr, -- non-cloven hoof variety.

"The Annulises, father and son, the Sundowns, Mister and Missus, one of the Germans, the Jewish guy with the big glasses [Yehudi Cohen], the Nereid gal [Fisherwoman], the little black boy you brought with us and, sorry to say, your nephew, sir."

"Jesse!" exclaimed St Synne and the Great Man virtually simultaneously. "How? Where?"

Not much of a casualty list, is it? Finally, just to confirm:

"Let me prove it," pleaded Ali Ars Markazi not much more than a couple of hours later. He did too. Shed himself. Off of Yehudi Cohen. And stood shakily before them as a narrow wafer of hair and skin with virtually no volume.

"You know," understated the Diver, in typical fashion. "This supra-shit really is for the birds."

"Tell me about birds," was all Sundown said.

Crows generally caw but, somewhere high above the Tholos Tomb for Pygmies, a Raven-Fetishim was cackling. Not unlike a witch. And not unobserved either. Aquilla the Hunter, nearly brain-dead simpleton that he was after not spending enough time in the tub of Cathonic Fluid, did not know what it was. Others did; one had even been inside it once. Barely a couple of weeks ago as it happened.

She [Mnemosyne D'Angelo] did not trance-send herself over to the Fetishim, though. Aquilla was the place for her. She had the same mission her Mnemosyne Machine counterpart did but was constrained by Heliosophos from accomplishing. Namely, -- to guarantee he got born in the first place!

What else? Quite a lot actually. The Emperor Mammalian and his Manimals are still out there. (There's quite a bit about them in Kore-15, although I have to admit most of it is purely for the sake of gratuitous violence.) Sedon St Synne unleashes the Silver Arrow Assassins on Valfreja Volsung. They do their job too. (The shame of it is Val's now Strife.)

The Garudas' Convocation of Eagles finally gets beyond the Dome. (They're the ones, once some of them return to the Hidden Continent, who're responsible for what's become of Jason and Apsyrtus Annulis.) We learn for sure what's become of Agenor Heliopolis, Clymene 'Mystery Might' nee Catreus, hubby Pelops 'Pops' Atreides, Argiope 'Bright Face' Zeross and the rest of the Etocretan Extremists. (They're in Djinn-Ghoster's Nebuland, between-space off Kato Zakros on the Island of Crete.)

The Smiling Fiend is with them, occupying Agenor. So is the Demon Child, Tralalorn, though she's occupying one of the Malanthean Maniacs children, probably Krista Udaeus, who's actually Daphne Udaeus's daughter of Sedon St Synne. (Both Smiler and Trala feature prominently in "Feeling Theocidal", which is set in 4376 Year of the Dome, the equivalent of 376 A.D. Send me an email and I'll instruct you how to order it such that I get most of the profits.)

We'll leave Bad Rhad with the last word:

No, Rhadamanthys was the problem. Agenor distrusted the Smiling Fiend. Distrusted him all the more because, when he was not in plain sight, Heliopolis felt certain he was inside him.

That was the thing about devils, Ant Clymene, Mystery Might, Pops Polyps' wife of over forty years, told him. Out here, even within the Nebuland, devils needed a shell to rest inside of once in a while. Which was also what made [Hannibal] Grudal's Warriors of Weir so restless.

Were they anywhere but a Master Deva's protectorate their eye-staves would have made short work of the devils. That was why their orbs were called Prison Pods after all.

"It's intolerable, Minotauros," Gibraltar was telling him [Agenor, the though-father of Kadmon Heliopolis, the Male Entity in his first life] at lunch that same Tuesday. "Find some subterfuge, some excuse, to go back to the real world. Say, I don't know, -- say Demonites and Baby Rom miss their mothers. Order Ghoster to track them down. Do that, the Dwarf and the Heliodromus are eye-orbed."

"Aren't you forgetting someone?"

"Who? They're the only two devils in here." Grudal said that quite a lot, so long as Rhadamanthys was not around. It was as if he could not recall the red-faced, forked-tongue devil when Smiler was not physically present. Which was the main reason Heliopolis figured the fiend hid out inside him. He could never forget him!

Bright Face, Argiope Zeross, breasts-bobbing openly in that way that so infuriated him, came crying up to them. "Someone's stolen my feathers."

"Good," was Agenor's first reaction. "I mean, who?" Argiope could not answer. Did not know. Someone else did though.

"Artemis!"

Sounds like I could write a whole lot more than just a 'Helioddity' trilogy. And I could. I just haven't yet.

As always, good reading!

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