Episode 60: The King Beyond the Desert

The Return of the King! With the Black Door open, the King makes his return to Earth and destruction follows in his wake. At the same time all of this is happening, the Mother Witch stands triumphant, returned in all her glory. And the magic word Marks’ been holding onto finally comes into play. It’s the end of everything…and perhaps a new beginning.

Content Warning: demonic forces, strange music/noises, physical manifestations, physical decay/body horror, strange visions, black magic, evil entities, witchcraft

Host: Chris Estes
Writer: Chris Estes
Senior Investigator: Lucas Knight
Senior Investigator: Tom Wilson
Special Investigator: Megan Meadows
Special Guest: Mark Mercier
Sound Design: Chris Estes
Producer: Megan Meadows

Transcript

Malevolent Maine

Episode 60: The King Beyond the Desert

Malevolent Maine is a horror podcast, and may contain material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

INTRO: 

This is it. The Season 3 finale is finally here. Everything we’ve investigated, everything we’ve experienced, it all comes to a head. We want to thank everyone who’s been listening and following along with us each episode. We really appreciate all of your support. As a reminder, after this episode, we’ll take a little break as we gear up for future investigations, but there’s plenty of Malevolent Maine to tide you over on Patreon. By joining our Malevolent Mob, you’ll have access to our side stories, The Black Tarot, the recently completed Witch’s Mark, and the still on-going Cardinal Sins. Plus, we’ll be launching a whole new side story soon. That’s patreon.com/MalevolentMaine. Thanks again and stay safe out there, Maine.

A doorway, closed for centuries that was never meant to be opened, stands open before you and beyond it almost certain death. A terrifying dark force intent on destroying the world looms in the sky that suddenly threatens chaos and destruction. On the other side, an ancient evil, awake once more and ready to consume everything in its path. You’re stuck in between and there’s seemingly no way out.

This is Malevolent Maine.

TITLE SEQUENCE

All hail the king, MMers. Last time, Lucas, Tom, and I had gone to Crimson Valley Orchards to stop Katie Clark from becoming the final Hierophant of the King Beyond the Desert and opening the Black Door. At the same time, Mark was experiencing some spiritual… distress, and convinced Megan to let him out of the safe room at our offices. The two of them raced to Crimson Valley, convinced they needed to find us. At the same time, a transformed Katie Clark, well on her way to becoming the Virulent Muse, started her final concert, one that was for a gathering army of the King Beyond the Desert’s followers. The four Hierophants, the Gray Fool, the Enigma Scribe, the Ravenous Supplicant, and now the Virulent Muse all gathered together as the Black Door, the door that would usher the King back to our world appeared in the air. If that wasn’t enough, Mark finally succumbed to the Mother Witch, who had infected him and had been slowly possessing him since he disappeared almost a year ago. As we all watched in growing horror, Katie played the final note and the Black Door shattered.

We were too late; the King had returned.

[on location; the Final Note drones]

LUCAS: No, no, no, no.

TOM: Oh God!

CHRIS: We’re too late.

MEGAN: Mark!

MOTHER WITCH MARK: hahahahaha!

[the sound of the door exploding]

Shards of ebony wood flew in every direction but before they struck anyone they melted away like smoke. There, hovering six feet off the ground was a glowing open doorway. An intense dry heat blasted through the open doorway and through it we could see a harsh almost orange light, a vast, endless land of burning sands. Windswept dunes and large protruding clusters of stark white bone broke up the otherwise flat landscape. In the distance, hovering at angles impossible for our minds to fully conceive was an inverted black pyramid. With its paradoxical geometry, the Ebony Cenotaph seemed to vibrate and was difficult to focus on.

As we watched, the terror inside of us rising, a grasping hand suddenly appeared at the edge of the doorway and curled around the hole cut in reality. 

The hand was gray with dried black blood grimed onto it. The nails were black and jagged, crooked talons that seemed to tug at the open air. 

A second hand appeared on the other side of the open doorway, and a moment later they hoisted the King Beyond the Desert up into view. 

We had been studying tales of the King Beyond the Desert for over a year. We had read everything we could find on the man once known as Einar Ragnulf, the Viking sorcerer who had been exiled for crimes so egregious he had been all but erased from history. But seeing him now, face to face with the being who had haunted our dreams, was something none of us were prepared for.

The King wore windswept garments. They were brown or tan and he wore a cloak or some kind of hood that was pulled up over his head, though his chest was exposed. The King’s skin was a cold, dead gray, the color of morning fog. The veins in his arms were black, starting up by his elbows and running down to his hands, stained black with centuries old blood. His neck was similarly stained, with tendrils of black blood vessels creeping down just beneath the surface of his chest. His hair was white, though the King didn’t appear old. He didn’t appear to be any age, ancient and ageless all at once. His eyes were milky white, dead things that somehow still saw the crowd assembled before him.

He placed on foot tentatively on the threshold between the Beyond and the apple orchard. Then, with a malicious grin he stepped through.

[on location]

LUCAS: He’s coming!

TOM: Katie!

The black door hung about six feet in the sky, suspended in midair. But as the King stepped through, he seemingly had no problem stepping down to the grass of the orchard. We all watched this seemingly physics defying moment. It made no sense, of course but none of this did. Reality seemed to bend and ripple around the King and then there he stood, real and solid, back to the world he had been exiled from centuries ago.

The moment his feet touched the ground, three things happened at once. First, the grass beneath his feet blackened and died instantly. The assembled crowd, those who had been deemed loyal to the King, who moments before had been chanting his name, dropped to their knees, bowing before their leader. And Katie Clark, the last Hierophant, the Virulent Muse, collapsed on the stage, dead, the final prophecy fulfilled. 

As the King’s followers fell to their knees, that left only us still standing, and his strange, dead eyes fell on us.

[On Location]

TOM: Oh shit. He’s looking at us.

KING: Kneel. Or be forgotten. 

CHRIS: What do we do?

LUCAS: I’m not giving up. 

KING[begins chanting magic words]: Skornath velgrun. Blodvakt fyrgaald vithral skaldom. Valkrin dreksvar. Morkvis.

TOM: Uh…guys….what’s happening?

[sounds of a rising storm.]

The day had been sunny and relatively mild for autumn in Maine. Many of the people at the orchard were wearing short sleeves. But as the King Beyond the Desert began chanting, the air suddenly grew cold. The sun seemed to dim and a shrill wind picked up. Thunder rumbled in the distance and clouds began to converge on the orchard.

The crowd of gatherers, those that had in some way, pledged themselves to the king, weren’t as enthralled as they had been during the Muse’s song. They were still bowed in reverence, but they were aware of what was going on. Seemingly as one, they turned their gaze to us, seeing what we would do in the face of the all powerful, otherworldly King.

Across the crowd, Megan had been struggling to get Mark to us, when he had suddenly collapsed. When he staggered back to his feet, she saw that his eyes glowed an eldritch lime green, a color Mark himself often associated with the Mother Witch, and when he spoke, it was with her unearthly voice.

MOTHER WITCH MARK: Finally. At long last. This vessel is my own and I am once again whole upon this world. 

MEGAN: Mark? C’mon, Mark. Snap out of it.

Green energy, the sickly color of toxic waste, began to course up and down Mark’s arms, like writhing glow worms beneath his skin, crackling down his finger tips.

MOTHER WITCH MARK: This world - all of existence - is my play thing. Tremble before me, vermin. I will unmake you and rebuild your soul into my dark image. 

MEGAN: Guys!

Meanwhile, the sky above the King flashed with nightmarish forks of black lightning. The air around us filled with energy and our hair began to stand on end. The remaining Hierophants began closing in on us, chanting along with their master. Not far from where we stood a bolt of that black lightning shot down, blasting a divot in the ground.

[over the growing storm]

TOM: We’ve got to do something.

CHRIS: What?

LUCAS: If we stay here we’ll be fried. Or worse.

TOM: We gotta go! Run!

We pushed through kneeling people, knocking several of them over. As we passed by them, the King’s followers stood and began to slowly follow us. They moved like zombies and their features were sunken and hollow. Like we had seen with Cole Harrington, many of them began to spit out their teeth. Clumps of hair began to blow away in the growing wind, and fingernails fell out leaving bloody holes behind. It was like they were rotting before our very eyes, their life drained away in service to their king.

We crashed through the crowd, all the while the King chanting behind us, the dark storm he had summoned growing in intensity. Finally we pushed past a throng of worshippers and came upon an empty ring, where Mark, fully empowered by the Mother Witch, stood brimming with green fire that seemed to flow around him. Megan had fallen to the ground, helpless.

[on location]

CHRIS: Megan!

LUCAS: What are you doing here?

MEGAN: Guys! Something’s wrong with Mark? It’s the Mother Witch.

MOTHER WITCH MARK: You! You dared to imprison me! You thought you were a match for me. Your meddling ends now!

[green energy crackles]

TOM: Mark! Come on, Mark. You’re stron ger than her. Fight her! Beat it, Mark. Beat it.

MEGAN: Guys, what’s happening?

LUCAS: The end of the world.

It was at that moment, caught between the King’s dark magic and the Mother Witch’s green, that an incredible thing happened. For a split second the rising maelstrom grew calm around the five of us. Outside it had grown nearly as dark as midnight, the Black Doorway, the only source of dusty glowing light silhouetting the King Beyond the Desert as he continued to chant. His black lightning impossibly lit in the sky in flashes that showed the mob of his followers closing in on us, lifeless, hateful expressions on their faces. 

Inside whatever little bubble had formed around us, the air was still, and the darkness not as oppressive. The noxious green light had dimmed from Mark’s eyes, though the raw power of the Mother Witch still crackled at his fingertips. He spoke to us in a small, still voice.

[on location]

SMALL VOICE MARK: It is nearly time. Be not afraid.

TOM: What? Almost time for what?

SMALL VOICE MARK: The word that was given. The power that was promised. The end.

MEGAN: What is this?

CHRIS: I don’t know.

LUCAS: Mark… if you’re going to do something. You better hurry up.

[sounds of crowd snarling]

CHRIS: They’re coming for us!

The crowd pressed in, but for whatever reason they dared not break the circle around us. At least for the time being. They weren’t human, not anymore. Their faces had been twisted in leering skulls and the gnashing visages of jackals hungry for flesh. Bleeding and crooked fingers tore at the air, trying to slash at us as we pressed in closer and closer to each other. 

The face of the Portly Man, the Enigma Scribe swam into view behind the throng, his once grandfatherly appearance twisted into a savage, melted snarl. The Ravenous Supplicant, the thing that had once been Hannah Burrows but was now the Heart Beggar thrust herself to the front of the crowd, her bloody hands holding a tiny, child-sized heart out to us. Her eyes were greedy and her teeth were now sharpened to points, like tiny knives. Above it all, floating as if on invisible strings, the Gray Fool, the being that had started all of this so long ago, drifted over. His neck, bent at that unnatural angle made it so that he sneered down on us, his eyes twin pin pricks of blood red hellfire.

In the darkness, the corpse of Katie Clark lifted into the sky, suspended as the Black Door had been, by the King’s cruel magic. She hung there, lifeless, and then her skin began to ripple, like tiny waves beneath its surface. Then, and this is something we will never be able to forget, Katie burst open like a popped birthday balloon and thousands of spiders with bright electric violet hour glass shapes on their backs rained down on the crowd. If they even felt the venomous spiders in their hair and on their skin, they never showed it. 

All the while, the King Beyond the Desert floated above all of this, suspended by the icy gale he had summoned. His cowl had blown back and his pale hair billowed behind him. His lifeless eyes blazed with an unholy white intensity that pierced the darkness and locked onto us. Behind him the black lightning forked across the sky.

We huddled close together as the army of the dead and dying, not to mention the horrifying wave of eight-legged nightmares surged towards us.

[on location]

TOM: Mark?!

SMALL VOICE MARK: She cannot be tamed.

LUCAS: This is it!

SMALL VOICE MARK: She cannot be controlled.

MEGAN: Oh God! I don’t want to die!

SMALL VOICE MARK: She cannot be beaten.

CHRIS: Mark!

SMALL VOICE MARK: But she can be directed. Now. Now, Mark. Now is the time we’ve been waiting for.

The silver compass had fallen out of Mark’s shirt and it glowed with a white light that almost seemed blue. A comforting, safe blue compared to the electric green that had soaked Mark’s hands and forearms and was running through his body like small rivers of chartreuse fire. 

Time seemed to stand still as Mark looked at us one at a time. Since the bubble or shield or whatever it was had fallen over us, Mark’s eyes had lost the evil green glow, though there was a peaceful gleam to them, a serenity, like a sagacious monk might have. As he looked at us now, his eyes were his own. Then little crackles of green fire formed at the edges of his irises and began to spread inward toward the pupils.

The King and his followers, the hundreds that had been sought out and converted by the twisted spirits of those he had once corrupted, converged on us, threatening to drown us completely. Then Mark flared with the green light of the Mother Witch, like a sickly beacon in the dark

MOTHER WITCH MARK: Hahahahaha. The world is mine. I am unlimited power. The end of all things!

MARK: The word that was given. The power that was promised. The end of all things! [shouts] ELDARION! [electronic static]

When I say the world grew still, I mean that literally. Everything seemed to move as if in slow motion. It felt like someone had turned down the volume. Everything fell away until the only thing I could hear was the echo of the word of power Talbot had given us, carved on the back of a silver compass, we had sent to Mark on the unseen highways of magic.

[in studio]

LUCAS: The darkness - the King’s darkness - was physical. It was heavy, like a wet blanket. And it, manifested by all his followers, his storm, and all of his Hierophants was pressing in on us. Suffocating us. When Mark said that word… it was like that weight had suddenly been lifted.

MEGAN: Look, I know I’m new to all of this, but this was the most terrifying, fucked up thing - I can’t say fucked up, can I? - I have ever seen. The King. The Mother Witch. All of it. There were people falling apart, shriveling up and just falling to pieces. Like at the end of Beetlejuice, right? I was screaming. I know I was. I thought I’d just keep on screaming forever, or however long my forever was going to be, which I assumed was about three more seconds. And then Mark shouted that word and I… I can’t explain it, but it was like someone stuck a mug of hot chocolate in front of me. I could smell cookies baking. My grandmother’s cookies. And I…I don’t know…I just felt safe.

TOM: I wasn’t looking at the King when it happened. I was looking right at Mark. And I saw her. I saw her take him. In that instant her green fire, I think Mark called it the “Viridian Flame”? - I saw it consume him. He looked like a man on fire and in that green light he changed. He wasn’t Mark anymore. Not at all. He had become the Mother Witch completely. But by then the gun had been fired, so to speak, and it was too late. 

As Mark - the real Mark, for maybe the first time in a year - shouted the word of power, the silver compass, the protective talisman seemed to grow white hot, searing the darkness around us. Mark flared with the power of the Mother Witch, and in that moment she burned triumphant, returned completely, in all of her power.

Talbot had told us that the Mother Witch couldn’t be contained. Mark, or that still, small serene version of him, had told us the same. But the word, which we won’t say on this show ever again in order to maintain its power, could direct the Mother Witch, all of her essence, the Viridian Flame that burned at the core of her malevolent hatred. 

When Mark said the word he channeled all of that energy, first into the word, and then fired it like a bullet from a gun. A gun aimed directly at the King Beyond the Desert.

It’s hard to describe what happened next. Words seem inadequate and whatever we tell you won’t do what we saw justice.

But we’ll try our best.

The green fire that had been building in Mark, the Mother Witch, seemed to drain from him, first from his eyes, then his entire body, ending with the crackling fire at his fingers. It pooled into the talisman, then shot across the dark sky like a beam of eldritch light.

TOM: It looked like when Iron Man shoots the beam from his chest.

LUCAS: No, not exactly… but maybe close enough.

The beam or energy or whatever it was, the very essence of the Mother Witch shot over the heads of the King’s army and struck the King in the chest.

It’s important to remember that both beings, the King and the Mother are immensely powerful. The Mother Witch is a being supposedly older than the universe, perhaps the literal mother of all evil in the world. The King Beyond the Desert, though once a man, had transcended the mortal realm, becoming something far more sinister and evil. Both of them sought this world for their own ends. Both wished to destroy those who opposed them and rule over reality. 

It was obvious they could not co-exist.

When the Viridian Flame that was the Mother Witch struck the King Beyond the Desert, it punched right through him and sprayed out of his back. He stopped his chanting, but was by no means defeated. He latched onto the Mother Witch with his darkened talons and snarled. His milky white eyes burned with a new hatred and he ripped and tore at the Mother Witch, directing his full fury towards her.

It’s easy to imagine the battle between the two of them like those epic scenes where Godzilla and King Kong clash over some soon ruined city. It wasn’t like that. Not really. And yet, in a way, it was.

LUCAS: They weren’t huge. But they weren’t normal size either. These were two dark titans whose presence loomed over the orchard like dark gods in some ancient myth, and yet, there was a part of them that wasn’t there. Not really. It’s hard to explain and full of contradictions -

MEGAN: What we saw didn’t make sense, okay? It couldn’t be real. And yet it was. It was happening and it wasn’t.

TOM: It wasn’t in our minds. Not exactly. But…

But in a way what we saw might only be our fragile human minds’ way of comprehending the impossibility of what we witnessed.

Colossal forces, far greater than mortal man, fighting against one another, locked in a fatal embrace. It’s easier to understand as some sort of malevolent cosmic wrestling match, but it wasn’t really that. Not beneath all the metaphor and symbolism our brains cooked up.

In the end it was two opposing and seemingly unlimited forces tearing each other apart. For every wound the Mother Witch punched into the King’s undead skin, he tore an equal one into her green skin. For every dark spell the King hurled into the Mother Witch’s spirit, she cursed him with one just as deadly. Their attacks grew more and more furious, an intensity that we couldn’t keep up with.

TOM: You know the finale of a fireworks show? Where they’re just setting off a hundred different explosions? It was like that…except the fireworks were all green and black. And they didn’t explode. Or make a sound. And weren’t real. Except they were.

The King’s followers had ceased their press against us, and had fallen slack, staring up at the battle. Mark had collapsed to the ground. He wasn't moving. One by one, the four of us took each other’s hands, and stood, not daring to blink as reality tore itself apart in the sky above a small apple orchard in western Maine.

LUCAS: At some point their…”battle” grew too bright to watch. Or more accurately, it grew too dark. Like a black hole, it seemed to suck in all the light around it. It was painful to watch and I closed my eyes.

MEGAN: I did too.

TOM: Same.

In the end, there was no one to watch the final apocalyptic blow. We didn’t see it, but we heard it, a scream so terrible, so world shattering, it was like the death knell of a thousand wailing souls. A million.

For a moment a bright white light flashed across our closed eyelids, spiking deep into our brains. It lit up our minds, our entire bodies, and we felt we might get swept up in that light, carried away in its wave or burned to atoms by its intensity. The shriek grew louder, louder than the Final Chorus Katie had played, the Vespirim. It was the sound of whole universes dying, of existence being erased, of things that thought themselves gods finding out just how mortal they might be. And, we realized, it was in stereo. It wasn’t just one death cry; it was two.

There was an explosion. Or whatever the spiritual equivalent of that is. We’re all sure of that. Some sort of final, violent expulsion of dark energy, though whether this was real or metaphoric we don’t know. At the moment Mark uttered the power word all of our recording equipment fried itself, so there is no record of that final roaring death.

All we know is that the blazing white light behind our eyes, the raging inferno of supernatural death, dimmed, then died away completely. The intense white light was gone, but so too was the preternatural darkness the King had summoned. The world around us was silent, bathed in a warm yellow glow.

One by one we opened our eyes.

The apple orchard was empty. There was no trace of the hundreds of the King’s followers who had gathered to witness the return of their lord. The thousands of spiders, all that remained of Katie Clark, lay on the ground, dead husks, curled up black balls that turned to dust and blew away in the autumn sun. The Enigma Scribe, the creature that had preyed upon the populace as the Portly Man was burned to a greasy black pile of goo, like an oil stain on the dying grass. One lens of his round glasses sat on the pile, and something that looked like a melted hand stuck up out of it, before losing its form and melting into the vile puddle.

To our left, all that remained of the Ravenous Supplicant lay melting in her own puddle. But where the unearthly remains of Gary Milo were consumed by a fire like the one that took his life in a small college theater, the Heart Beggar had been turned to a statue of ice. As we watched, the half melted image of the woman, beads of water trickled down the icy surface, obscuring her features completely. The melting water pooled briefly at the base of the nearly gone sculpture, before the last remains of Hannah Burrow’s spirit soaked into the ground.

In the sky the form of the Gray Fool had once again become translucent. His edges began to lose their form, like some smudging the lines of a picture. Then before our very eyes, first one leg, then all of his limbs sucked up into his body, compacting until only his head and torso remained. From his broken-necked angle he watched us for one final minute before his entire body was compressed into a single gray dot. Then that too disappeared, collapsing under its own false weight.

Of the King Beyond the Desert and the Mother Witch there was no sign, but gray ash trickled down from the sky like dirty snow, catching and reflecting the sun’s light before settling all around us.

In the distance we heard the sound of car engines. In minutes dozens of white, unmarked cars tore into the parking lot, and a veritable army of men in dark suits emerged, first cordoning off the orchard, then descending on us. 

The Meat Suit Men had arrived.

The last thing we saw before being overwhelmed with the agents was the Black Door, still hovering in the sky.

Piece by piece, shards of the ebony wood flew back towards the doorway, stitching itself back together, like watching an explosion in reverse. Our last glimpse of that barren, lifeless desert was of the Ebony Cenotaph, the inverted black pyramid that was the home to all of the King’s infernal power, first crumbling, then tipping over and collapsing entirely before being consumed by the endless sand.

Then the Black Door was whole once more. Closed and locked shut firmly on both sides of reality. For a moment more it hung in the air, then it faded from existence as if erased by unseen hands.

Then we were surrounded by the men in the dark suits and succumbed to their barrage of questions.

That was a few weeks ago. Since then, we’ve had some time to process what we saw that day in the orchard. Each of us is going to get a chance to rationalize, to explain, to just get off our chests everything we’ve been through. We’ll start with Lucas.

LUCAS: The White Car People, or Meat Suit Men if you prefer, questioned us for quite awhile in the orchard. It was well past midnight by the time they let us go. By then they had erected huge light towers and were combing through the grass and trees, collecting anything and everything they felt necessary. They are… unsettling up close. And spending so much time with them made me realize how inhuman they really are. They look like people, in their own way, and move and speak in ways that are mostly human. But they’re like a bad imitation of what a person should be. Anyways… they questioned us, separately, then together, then separately again. They asked us the same things over and over again. What did we see? What did they say? What did we do? In the end, they let us go, but warned that they’d be in touch. 

I think… I think the King Beyond the Desert and the Mother Witch are dead. Or at least gone. They’re dueling power destroyed each other or trapped them Beyond forever. They’re gone, and whatever disaster they would have brought, we narrowly avoided.

MEGAN: That was…intense. I know I keep saying that. The Portly Man. The Dung Man. The silver compass. Now this. I know, I know…but…man, this stuff is crazy. You know, when I started working for the guys, I thought I would just be checking sound levels and editing out mistakes. The email said they were looking for someone to help make a podcast. I never signed up for this, but… look, I know I’ve said before that I didn’t necessarily believe in this stuff. Or I didn’t know if it was real. Well, I believe. I believe with every fiber of my being. What we saw that day in the orchard…there’s so much more happening in this world than we know. There’s no way I can turn back. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it terrifies me. I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep since I watched that poor girl explode into spiders. Probably never will, to be honest. But…I think… I think I need to know. You know? I need to figure out what’s really out there. This started out as just another job but now… now I don’t think I can ever go back.

They didn’t find any trace of Katie Clark. The authorities…the real ones, not those things in people suits, but police officers, think she must have run off. Turns out runaway is a lot more believable than burst into spiders. They did find her mom. Or at least her remains. They found a chunk of her skull with some hair attached and half of her lower jaw buried in the overgrown garden in the backyard. They still haven’t found any trace of her dad…

TOM: I think… after all of this… that I feel bad for her. I think Katie was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yeah, I know she chose to go with the King, but… she was tricked, you know? They all were. They were sold a pack of lies wrapped up in the guise of promises of power from a guy who only cared about himself. I wish we could have done more for Katie. She didn’t deserve that, you know? I don’t know…maybe it’s just rose colored glasses, or whatever, but she wasn’t evil. Not at first, at least. They covered up the missing people. I don’t know how. There were hundreds of people there. Hundreds of people who just - what? - vaporized when the King died? I don’t know how you explain that, but it never made the news. We never heard anything else about it. Oh, and Crimson Valley Orchards is up for sale after the owners “decided to spend more time as a family.”

What I still can’t fully wrap my head around is how Mark did it. Not the spell or whatever. Talbot explained that. And Lucas explained it to me again. I get it. No, what I don’t get is how he kept that in for a year. At the end there, I saw the Mother Witch, her true evil, or whatever you want to call it. I saw how terrible and awful and all powerful she was. It was like the worst hurricane you can imagine, except this hurricane is made out of evil green fire, and all it wants to do is eat you. How did he contain her, hold her back for so long? After… seeing him just lying there in the grass…it was like everything was gone. Like he was empty. I’ve never seen anyone like that. What he did? What he sacrificed for all of us…I’ll never forget that. 

In the end, our best guess is that the two beings canceled each other out, somehow. Everything connected to them, the Hierophants, the army of the decaying, the lingering infection, the Ritual of Blood and the Witch Tree, all of it was gone. The door to Beyond is closed and locked again, only this time there isn’t anyone on either side trying to open it.

There are still some lingering questions - there always are. The black pyramid, the one Ragnulf left behind with the King of Norway, the one Sanson de Croan eventually found that turned him into the Gray Fool, has never been recovered. It may still be out there. And that may mean that some last vestige of the King Beyond the Desert’s power is in hiding, waiting for someone else to come along and release it. 

We also don’t know how the Mother Witch’s death has affected the greater witchcraft community. The Five Covens, which we believe had disbanded after the failed Ritual of Blood, may still be active in some form, and may be looking for answers or maybe revenge.

And then there’s Mark. Mark who answered an ad in a local newspaper and signed up to answer the phones and maybe do some follow up interviews. Poor, poor Mark who somehow became an unwitting host to a most foul evil. He was sent across the country and was made to endure so much. The horrors he witnessed and were forced to be a part of, were enough to break any man. 

But he carried on. He found his way back to us, and when we needed him the most, Mark found a way to save not just us…but the entire world. Twice.

How do you explain that to a family seeking answers? How do you explain how special and important and… wonderful their son was?

Maybe you can’t. Maybe there aren’t enough words. Maybe it is just one of those unspeakable truths that can only exist within the group of people who shared  that truth. Maybe it can never truly be explained to those that didn’t witness it.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. And in the end, there’s only one person to attempt such a monumental undertaking.

MARK: I’m…home. Really and truly. I’m back home, where I belong. I don’t know why it had to be me. I don’t know why it went down like it did, but… I made a choice that night in the woods. A choice to do the right thing, the good thing. And I know my friends would have done the same thing. All of them. 

I don’t know what happened that day in the Orchard. Not really. None of us do. But I said the word that I was given. Given by my friends. And it…it took all of the Mother Witch’s power, all of her anger and hate, and it shot it right at the King Beyond the Desert. I felt it drain out of me, felt her drain out of me. It was like pulling the drain out of a tub full of water. And as that green…energy drained out of me, I could feel her infection going with it. It didn’t want to go and it was clawing to stay, but it couldn’t resist the power of that word. The word that sounds like Eldorado.

I don’t know why that poem came to me. It’s the story of a knight, a hero, out in search of the legendary city of lost gold, El Dorado. The knight spends his whole life searching for the city, but by the end of his life is no closer to finding it than when he began. He meets Death and asks if now, on the border between the known world and the next, if now he can finally know the way to Eldorado. And Death, the great Shadow, tells him that only in death, only once he’s shed his life can the knight truly find the treasure he seeks. Because it wasn’t gold and jewels, like the Norumbega was said to be made of, but knowledge, wisdom, understanding - the kinds of things that - hopefully - transcend with us when our time on this world comes to an end.

The Mother Witch was the opposite of Eldorado. She was all greed and hunger. She was the denial of all we know to be good and right in this world. Maybe I did ride through the valley of the shadow of death, caught in her greedy, green clutches, but through the kindness and love of my friends, I’m back… where I’m supposed to be. When she left, it was like a blindfold had been pulled away from my eyes, and for the first time in a long time, I could see clearly. 

There are bad things in this world. Darksome things. But Malevolent Maine is here to shine whatever light we can into those dark spaces. We’re not just here to report those stories. We’re here to do something about them. To try to help.

Well said, Mark. We’re recovering. All of us. We’ve been through a lot, but while the wounds are still fresh, they’re healing. We’re together again. We laugh more often than we did. And we often find ourselves smiling at each other when no one’s looking. The world nearly ended, our world almost surely did, and yet…just like that day in the orchard, with the ashes of the fallen evils falling around us, the sun also shines. 

There are dark corners of this world. There are things that can’t be explained in the rational light of day. There are things that are odd and strange.

And Malevolent Maine will be there to face them head on. 

We’re going to take a much needed rest. We’ve even talked about a vacation, just the five of us, but we’ll see how that goes. Mark for one isn’t too keen on leaving the state again for a long time. But rest assured we’ll be back. We promise we’re not going anywhere.

So until then…

Stay safe out there, Maine.