For Ares, in honor of his 999,999,999th Birthday

As I rounded the corner I beheld the terrible source of the noise.

A Djinn, that I knew not, stood in the center of the parking lot, breathing fire and smoke out of every crook and crag on it’s stone-hewn face.

It’s tails continually whipped the pavement, making a terrifying sound as razor-shark superheated slices of manmade stone were kicked up and tossed into buildings and cars.

It’s hands clawed at the air in a swimming motion, as they are unaccustomed to the relative thickness of our atmosphere. Indeed, the Djinn was hovering ever so slightly due to the continual motion of it’s tails and weblike appendages.

My eyes were then drawn to the beast’s weapon, which was lodged in the side of a minivan. The family transport was afflicted by more than a large blunt object, however. Twisting, strangely congruent smoke trails rose from the point of impact, snaking up toward the sky and waving to and fro, as if they were the Hydra’s heads brought to life by the unholy alchemical reaction of minivan and studded iron mace. Then, they dissipated all at once as if their master called for them to return from their deific form to ordinary smoke trails, to be dispersed by an average day’s gentle breeze.

Something was bleeding. The minivan was not just a minivan. It had a sole human occupant, if forcibly plunging an occupant into the side of it using the bluntest of instruments counts as occupancy.

I understood then what had brought this, the last Djinn, up to the surface of the terrestrial sphere. This must be Ares, the interloper, the one they call Gatecrasher, Oreach lo karu, but none of those names hinted at what form this abomination took on.

He looked to be an average male human, a little shorter than average, much thinner, although his garments obscured his shape like the skin of a Honey-badger obscures the placement of it’s muscles and bones, so that it may strike from unexpected angles. He was gaunt of face and steely of eye.

In all recollections of him in battle, his hands moved constantly, adjusting his sword or short-staff to oncoming threats, so that his movements became hypnotic and forgettable. Anyone trying to discern a weakness or pattern would quickly tire of the game.

He wore a helmet forged from the darkest metals, with a visor of dark orichalcon which forge-workers would use to avoid going blind if their furnaces got too hot.

And yet, with this heavy masque, he was able to do battle in almost absolute darkness, according to minstrels’ songs.

Many a battle had been turned from assured victory to pathetic defeat after sundown, when a dark wind would blow from the west, and on it would ride the hoofbeats of some beast of unknown kind, and on it Ares himself, slowly dispatching wave after wave of enemy soldiers which saw and heard him not.