The sight of Roxanne Simpson-Blaze, revealed as the warrior within the green-enameled plate armor, left John Blaze thunderstruck.  From her feverishly haunted eyes to her cracked, unnaturally pale lips, her bellicose expression filled his entire being with numbingly cold despair, the exact emotional opposite of the roaring hellfire which was his natural element as the Spirit of Vengeance.  The paralyzing effect of recognizing that the love of his life was the thrall of Morgan Le Fay was so complete that, as the immortal sorceress hurled a lethal bolt of eldritch crimson at his skull, Blaze remained stunned and indifferent.

 

Yet Noble Kale, the third entity – in addition to John Blaze and the Spirit of Vengeance – of the triad that currently comprised the Ghost Rider, felt no attachment to his descendant's estranged wife, nor any desire to be decapitated by Morgan Le Fay’s dark magicks.  Kale seized control of Ghost Rider’s physical form and threw it to the ground, rolling down the far side of the small rise in the desert canyon floor where he had discovered Le Fay and her servant. 

 

Ghost Rider came to rest against the thick, scaly leg of an elephant-sized demon, but quickly recovered and rose to his feet to face the netherspawn.  The demon offered no face with which to meet the fearsome visage of the Spirit of Vengeance; its birdlike, twin-clawed legs emerged from a vaguely egg-shaped body resembling a gargantuan sea urchin, its entire rounded surface covered in stiff, slender spines.  Unfazed, Ghost Rider grabbed one of the nearest spines at its base and held the demon fast.  “Attend me!” Noble Kale bellowed as the demon attempted, unsuccessfully, to pull away.

 

Ghost Rider’s flaming skull cocked at an awkward, quizzical angle.  “Kale, what …?” the voice of John Blaze demanded.

 

“If it is demon-war which Le Fay wishes, she shall have it,” Kale growled in response, forcing his head upright again.  “I must rally my infernal subjects and lead the assault on the witch, and she may reap the whirlwind of bloodlust which she saw fit to inspire!”

 

“Are you out of your mind?” Blaze howled, twisting Ghost Rider’s head in a jerky semicircle. 

 

“No, boy, are you?” Kale countered, arching naked vertebrae and throwing his head back to roar at the sky, causing the spiny demon to sink involuntarily to its four scaly knees.  “I am aware of your human affection for the woman Le Fay has made her mock-champion, but it shall not stay my wrath!”

 

“This isn’t about me and Roxanne!” Blaze objected.

 

“Then the battle must be joined!” Kale proclaimed.

 

“Dammit, that’s exactly what she wants!” Blaze insisted desperately.  “Were you listening to anything she said up there?  Every demon that gets gutted in this valley is another dose of poison putting the entire planet closer to mystical system shock.  Do you think Le Fay cares much if the demons kill each other or if they all come charging at her under your command and get mowed down?  We can’t play into her hands like that!”

 

“Would you have the monarch of Hell do nothing?” Kale spat furiously.

 

“Absolutely not,” Blaze answered.  “We aren’t going to let Le Fay’s plan succeed.  We’ll stop her.  We’ll stop this.”  Ghost Rider’s hand swept across the panorama of the valley and the ichor-splattered charnel house horror of the demonic bloodbath.

 

Noble Kale snorted derisively.  “Nothing can stop this murderous revelry now.  That is why I sought to merely redirect it at the witch herself.”

 

“Which is still a bad idea,” Blaze pointed out.  “So we redirect it somewhere else.  We send it straight back to Hell, where it doesn’t matter if every solid surface in the realms of the damned drowns in demon blood.”

 

“It has happened before,” Kale mused darkly.

 

“As long as the demons go back where they belong, Earth should be safe and Morgan Le Fay won’t get her shortcut to absolute arcane power,” Blaze concluded.

 

Kale was silent for a long moment, as the shrieking wails of countless devils and abominations echoed chaotically across the canyon.  “The powers of Hell’s throne are mine by right,” Kale admitted finally, “but the power of banishment … is not among them.”

 

“Lucky thing we’re not in this alone, then,” Blaze replied.

 

“The Egyptian corpse?” Kale scoffed.

 

“I’m not sure where N’Kantu landed after Le Fay blasted him,” Blaze shook the Ghost Rider’s head.  “But I assume he’s taking care of himself.  The assist we need is up there,” he indicated.

 

“Your woman?” Kale rasped in disbelief.

 

“She knows a thing or two about banishment,” Blaze stated.

 

“And yet serves our enemy,” Kale pointed out harshly.

 

“So that’s the first thing we need to do,” Blaze explained.  “Get Le Fay off Rocky’s back.”  Turning back towards the elevation from which the sorceress observed her malevolent handiwork, the Spirit of Vengeance released the protruding spine by which it had subdued the demon.  The quadruped fiend lumbered away, beset a moment later by an abomination in the shape of a man but composed entirely of writhing maggots parted by myriad asymmetrical mouths full of gnashing teeth. 

 

Ghost Rider ascended the rise with slow, deliberate steps.  Finger bones encased in black leather clenched and unclenched around the void where a length of unholy steel chain should have stretched taut and ready.  At the crest of the barren elevation Roxanne remained alert, a grim green knight waiting to conclude a challenge, her enemy’s weapon still bound to her own.  The mystic chain remained wrapped around the blade of Roxanne’s longsword, and she tapped it expectantly against the enameled fauld armoring her right hip.  A few paces behind her, within an area invisibly but undeniably warded by the knight’s presence, stood Morgan Le Fay, still the very picture of exquisite pulchritude in her revealing emerald gown, still bearing a haughty expression of imminent triumph upon her face.

 

Through Ghost Rider’s gaze, John Blaze sought out the eyes of the woman he had married, searching for some flicker of acknowledgment that all was not lost, that both the physical world around them and the emotional world they had brought into being between them were not entirely forsaken.  With something like a precursor to the Penance Stare, Ghost Rider saw pain and rage in Roxanne, as well as a tumult of conflict.  He had no choice but to assume that the conflict represented an opportunity to win his soulmate from Le Fay’s side to his own.

 

As if reading his mind, Morgan Le Fay laughed, “Your beloved bride is my shield, and she will sooner die than allow you to harm me.  You cannot approach me without sacrificing her, you cannot rescue her without defeating me, and as for this dreary, dry reality about to give birth to my numinous new world … there is nothing you can do to save it at all.”  Le Fay smiled archly.  “Why do you even remain here, my lord?”

 

“I will remain until our business with one another is concluded, harlot,” Noble Kale proclaimed, as Ghost Rider thrust his arms forward chest-high.  Diabolic flames  rushed from both of his hands, meeting in the middle, fusing together, merging into an immolating cascade that fell to the ground and forked forwards and backwards, assuming the shape of a wheel in front of the Spirit of Vengeance and outlining a powerful motor, low-slung seat and wheel beneath and behind his splayed legs. When the hellfire cycle had fully materialized, it tilted backwards on its hindmost wheel, lifting Ghost Rider as it reared like an enraged warhorse, its infernal engine shaking the ground itself with a leviathan roar.  Then the fiery cycle slammed its front wheel down and shot forward. 

 

Roxanne lunged at the conveyance, swinging her longsword between the flaming handlebars to drive its point into Ghost Rider’s heart.  But the Spirit of Vengeance had slid off the back of the hellfire cycle just as it accelerated, and Roxanne stumbled when her weapon found no purchase.  The hellfire cycle screamed forward even faster, on a direct course for Morgan Le Fay.

 

Le Fay turned her head ever so slightly while raising a single hand to the cycle, as delicately as if she were rebuffing an ardent suitor’s request to walk at his side.  The hellfire cycle leapt at her, then rebounded violently off a mystical shield which glittered iridescently with refracted energies.  The supernatural vehicle arced through the desert sky with its calcining wheels spinning madly.

 

Roxanne recovered her balance and closed on Ghost Rider, smashing the chain-wrapped blade into the side of the Spirit of Vengeance’s exposed deathgrin.  Ghost Rider staggered away from the blow and looked back at Roxanne, who was once again smacking the captive chain against her hip, with greater urgency.  The gesture suddenly crystallized as a message.

 

Ghost Rider ran at Roxanne, who fell into a ready stance with her longsword upraised.  When he was within reach, she swung the sword downward like an executioner’s axe.  Ghost Rider threw his left arm into the sword’s path, and the blade slashed through leather and bone, running clean through and releasing gouts of dark hellfire from both sides of the wound.  Ghost Rider made no effort to pull his arm off the sword, instead embracing Roxanne with his right arm, pulling the two together in an awkward tangle.  Ghost Rider’s left arm was folded in half, hand to collarbone, with the end of Roxanne’s longsword wavering above his shoulder.  Both of Roxanne’s arms were pinned against Ghost Rider’s torso, her hands gripping the sword pommel tightly and furiously attempting to wrest it free.  With supreme effort, Ghost Rider took a step backwards toward Morgan Le Fay, and then another, holding Roxanne as tightly as he could with one arm.

 

Roxanne struggled as mightily as Le Fay had predicted, bucking wildly in the Spirit of Vengeance’s clench.  Step by painful step, the nearer the intertwined pair came to Le Fay, the closer Roxanne came to paroxysms which would tear her body to pieces against the sharp edges of her burnished jade plate mail.  Ghost Rider could see Le Fay observing the near-suicidal struggle with sadistic amusement.

 

While the sorceress’s attention was otherwise occupied, the hellfire cycle returned under Ghost Rider’s mental command.  Like an unholy red and orange shooting star, the ethereal two-wheeled steed fell from the sky, rushing toward Morgan Le Fay’s unguarded back.  Le Fay spared a perfunctory glance backwards as the din of the hellfire motor grew louder and louder, before dismissively turning again to the spectacle of theSpirit of Vengeance grappling with her own ensorcelled champion.

 

The hellfire cycle crashed into Le Fay’s mystic barriers and was rebuffed as forcefully as before.  The scorched metal frame that had been hidden within, carried by the infernal construct, penetrated the spell’s field before Le Fay was fully aware of what was happening. 

 

John Blaze had realized that Roxanne, within the limits of her magically constrained free will, had been trying to draw his attention to his otherworldly chain, or rather to its worldly substance, to force him to realize that steel, and the iron within it, could spell Morgan Le Fay’s downfall.  The sorceress’s faer-folk heritage imbued her with a weakness to iron, a fact known to Noble Kale and thus accessible to John Blaze.  Blaze had dispatched the hellfire cycle to the spot on the desert highway where he had first passed through the one-way Megiddo dome wall and skidded out on his bike.  The supernatural conveyance had wrapped itself around the battered motorcycle like a flaming second skin and borne it back to the heart of the canyon.

 

The hellfire had vaporized the rubber tires of Blaze’s motorcycle, reduced much of the engine’s chrome plating to black ash, and further warped the damaged metal frame.  The fuel tank had exploded shortly after the nested cycles had taken flight, the sound of the detonation lost among the tumult of demon battle, leaving behind only a shredded metallic inversion.  But what remained served its current aim: hundreds of pounds of smoking iron alloy catapulted at high speed through Morgan Le Fay’s defenses and into her body.  The force of impact hurtled Le Fay through the air before driving her to the ground near the bottom of the elevated rise. 

 

Le Fay was slow to rise to her feet, obviously in tremendous physical agony, yet her bearing was indignantly regal.  Despite trickles of blood running down her face from numerous head wounds, where the motorcycle’s ruined chassis had lacerated her scalp at the end of skidding up the length of her body, the sorceress shouted with a clarity that rose above the clamor all around, “You cannot slay me so easily, spirit!  You may deny me my moment of glory here and now, but I deny you your vengeance!  I retreat to tend my wounds.  Their healing shall be simplicity itself once this world’s essence is flooded with blackest magicks which I may command!  And once my flesh is whole again, my first act as all-powerful sorceress shall be your annihilation!  Farewell, my lord – lord of an empty Hell!”

 

Morgan Le Fay turned her back on Ghost Rider and Roxanne, revealing the devastation across her back that the motorcycle had wreaked with its initial strike.  Tattered ribbons of skin and muscle suffused with bright red blood snarled across the surface from her shoulder blades to her waist.  On her right side, a single splintered rib rose from the steel-butchered flesh like an accusatory finger.  A swirl of purple mist enveloped Le Fay, and she was gone.

 

Ghost Rider released Roxanne and, in John Blaze’s voice, said “Rocky?  Talk to me.”

 

Roxanne reeled away from the Spirit of Vengeance, dropping her sword and clutching the sides of her head.  She nearly collapsed but kept her feet in motion and gradually came to rest, standing very still and drawing deep shuddering breaths.  “I’m … all … right,” she insisted, one word per exhalation. 

 

“Le Fay’s control enchantment?” Noble Kale demanded.

 

“Gone,” Roxanne nodded.  “But when it broke, when she disappeared, I … it felt like my mind was falling through an infinite void.  The … sheer absence … was overwhelming.”

 

“But better now?” Blaze pressed.

 

Roxanne regarded him skeptically.  “Why?”

 

“Were I alone the incarnation of Vengeance,” Noble Kale growled, “your life would have been forfeit along with the witch’s.  But by my descendant’s faith in your own occult prowess, and the urgent need of it, you were spared.”

 

“I … I don’t understand,” Roxanne shook her head.

 

“All the demons here have to be sent back to Hell, and if you can’t effect a mass banishment soon,” John Blaze explained, “we’re all going to end up Le Fay’s slaves, forever.”

 

“No!” Roxanne protested, her voice tinged with echoes of a forsaken wail.  “No more!  No spells, I can’t let that dark side touch me anymore, I can’t, I can’t!”

 

“Look around you!” Noble Kale commanded fiercely.  Under the hooves and talons of the demonic horde, the sand of the desert canyon floor was slicked black with infernal lifeblood, and small stones were taking on the pale, pustulent appearance of blisters on the earth while larger rocks quivered in a transitional state between mineral and mystical existence.  From scattered dark cracks in the ground a greenish, rot-colored mist rose in infectious wisps.  “You have no time to refuse!”

 

Roxanne closed her eyes, shutting out the terrors.  “It won’t work, even if I could bring myself to try.  The Megiddo dome, it doesn’t just corral the demons here and prevent them from wandering off physically, it anchors them here and resists banishments.  Don’t you think Morgan Le Fay would have expected that?  I can’t match her strength.”

 

“Roxanne,” Blaze said in a voice as hushed as the susurrations of hellfire wreathing his bare skull, “do you honestly think I would ask this of you if I had any other choice?  And as for tapping into something to counter Le Fay’s power …”  Without another word, Ghost Rider whipped the coiled chain off the shining green blade and handed her the longsword, pommel first.

 

Roxanne hesitated, but after a few seconds accepted the weapon.  She braced its tip against the ground and began to speak softly, as if to herself.  At first her words sounded like an incantation of command, comprehensible as spoken expression, but as her voice gathered force and rose in volume, the sounds became a chanting drone.  Ancient evocations sounded across the profaned ground of the battlefield, “Isht Hogo Agam … Isht Hogo Agam … ISHT HOGO AGAM!  <b>ISHT HOGO AGAM!</b>”

 

The longsword glowed and the light intensified to a pure white cruciform of radiance.  The shining puissance pulsed faster and faster until it detached itself from the physical sword, rose into the air, and abruptly imploded, leaving a rotating puncture in the sky which began to draw all of the demons, living and dead, into its impenetrable depth.  The lifeless remains of fallen fiends flew into the banishing portal, silent and unresisting as so much flotsam.  Demons barely clinging to their lives screeched and chittered and keened horrifically, but were drawn in nevertheless.  Finally only the heartiest of the infernal denizens remained, defying the spell’s inexorability to the last. 

 

One of the demons had latched onto a nearby boulder.  The demon’s upper body took the form of half of an oversized human head, cleaved down the middle to reveal every bisected tissue, while its lower half was a nest of onyx scorpion claws that scrabbled for purchase on its improvised anchor.  The banishment portal exerted its effect and the fiend was ripped through the air, nearly knocking down Ghost Rider and Roxanne on its route to the gateway.  Roxanne and Ghost Rider flattened themselves against the top of the elevated rise, and another demon shot over their heads, an emaciated red-skinned humanoid with a beard of curved horns.

 

The portal grew more insistent, extracting more than demons from the valley.  Dust-choked air whooshing into the glowing mouth of the banishment spell rose to the pitch of a hurricane gale.  The smaller, blister-like stones and puffs of noxious gas were whisked into the radiant maw, along with what little resilient plant life had found niches in the desert valley to inhabit.  Soon Ghost Rider and Roxanne felt the portal physically beckoning them as well.

 

Roxanne was near enough to her longsword, which had been driven upright into the arid ground, to grasp the blade with her gauntlets.  But the casting of the banishment had sapped the weapon’s reserve of mystical energies, and the sword was now dull and brittle.  As it cracked in her hands, she cried out, “Johnny!”

 

John Blaze heard his wife’s entreaty.  Ghost Rider spun one end of his hellforged chain and threw it away from the portal.  The links at the end of the chain struck a face of bare rock at the bottom of the rise and buried themselves there, rooted to the spot.  He spun the opposite end of the chain and tossed it to Roxanne, just as the longsword shattered and she was lifted by the gateway.  Roxanne screamed and snagged the chain with one hand, dangling impossibly upward in the stream of the banishment portal’s intake.  Ghost Rider remained on his back at the midpoint of the flame-licked chain, holding to it with both hands and heaving against it in an effort to pull Roxanne down.  It was akin to trying to haul a mountain from one horizon to the other.

 

Roxanne managed to wrap her free hand around the chain, but could not escape the portal’s power.  Ghost Rider redoubled his efforts, until he felt a hideous severance in the depths of his spirit.  “Nooooo!  NNOOOOOO!!!”  The howl, uttered by the very essence of Noble Kale, began in the lightless recesses of Ghost Rider’s triptych psyche and escalated until it was forcibly torn from the sepulchral jaws of the embodied Spirit of Vengeance.  John Blaze suddenly became aware of every mystical bond between himself and his ancestor as each one snapped and frayed in violent dissolution.  As a wild vertigo overtook Blaze, he was dimly aware of the pale shade of Noble Kale leaving the Ghost Rider’s body as it was expelled from Earth, a gnarled and disheveled old man, a broken king.  Then Kale disappeared through the gateway to Hell.

 

Ghost Rider was shaken to the core, and the fiery willpower animating his mystic chain was rattled sufficiently to loosen its attachment to the earth.  Roxanne screamed anew as Ghost Rider was lifted off the ground by the portal’s all-consuming pull, and she slipped closer to the passageway between dimensions.  Ghost Rider kicked his boots vigorously but could find no purchase on the ground, rising ever higher.

 

The chain behind the Spirit of Vengeance snapped rigidly, and Ghost Rider turned his head to see what had snared the last links.  At the top of the elevation stood the Ba'ka Mumiya, with loops of chain wrapped around its arms and waist.  The Living Mummy’s funereal wrappings were bedraggled and discolored, its flesh scored with a thousand claw swipes and bite marks, but N’Kantu stood fast atop the rise and gripped the Ghost Rider’s chain even as the entire desert threatened to blast him from the spot in its surge toward the banishment portal.

 

A flailing figure spun upward into the sky, a bright green distended and serpentine body with nine similarly hued but human-shaped arms, the final demon to be ejected from its hiding place in the canyon.  The hellspawn struck the incandescent face of the banishment portal and was transported through it, and with that the spell had run its course.  The gateway blinked out of existence, followed by a deafening boom like the sound of a split sky slamming shut.  The random debris which had been borne aloft in the exodus fell unceremoniously from the air, and Roxanne and Ghost Rider collapsed onto the mound of sand and stone beneath them.

 

John Blaze was first to his feet.  The Spirit of Vengeance, almost utterly depleted, had relinquished Blaze’s body, returning to him his own grimy, unshaven face.  Blaze crossed to Roxanne’s side and helped her to stand.  As she rose, he turned toward N’Kantu and gave the Living Mummy a single nod of thanks.  The undead prince returned the gesture, then strode away toward the next point of his long-wandering fate.

 

Blaze looked at his wife again, cupping her chin in his hand.  Roxanne’s eyes were shut, tears streaming from them down her cheeks.  “It’s all right,” Blaze comforted her quietly.  “It’s all over.”

 

“But, John,” Roxanne wept, “oh, Johnny … what are we going to do now?”