by K. M. Hade
“Cut into me?” His hand doesn’t waver.
“Yes.” Atrament pulls out his small knife. He shoves Smoke’s sleeve up higher to expose his forearm, twists Smoke’s hand over, and slices a thin groove into the back of Smoke’s arm.
Smoke doesn’t flinch or resist.
Atrament smears his palm with the blood, then smoothes it down along the lotus strands. Stroke, stroke, stroke.
As he does, the strands wriggle, shimmer, twist, and tighten into a length of fine Fell thread.
“As I said,” he says, “Lotus comes together quite readily. It just needs angry or unhappy blood to cause it to bind.”
Smoke’s entire body seems to seethe and smolder.
Atrament continues to make lengths of thread, periodically re-slicing Smoke’s arm when the blood starts to clot. “This should be sufficient. We can begin.”
“That’s it?” I ask.
“Creeping lotus is very easy to turn into Fell thread.”
“Is this going to hurt her?” Rot asks.
“Of course.”
I laugh. Getting Aether put in is awful, I’m kind of curious if Fell is worse. I pull off my top. “Go get me a stirrup leather, Rot. I don’t want every living thing within ten miles to hear this. Where are you putting it, Atrament?”
“I am going to stitch it around your Aether over your heart. Like mine is done.”
“We don’t need a needle?” Usually the delicate Aether thread is done with a fat needle of consecrated platinum.
“The Fell thread is its own needle.”
Well, that’s terrifying. “Then I can go get ScatheFire?”
“You will need to rest a bit, but if this is what you need, the result should be immediate.”
“Really,” I kneel down on the dusty dirt, “like… instant?”
He holds my hand to steady me as I recline back into the dust. “I felt the change instantly. I was in extraordinary pain, but even through the pain, I felt different. It was like a film being removed from my eyes. Your experience, of course, may be different. To my knowledge, we are the only ones like us.”
I squeeze Atrament’s hand. “I’m ready.”
Rot kneels on my other side. “Open your mouth.”
“That would be sexy in another context,” I joke weakly.
“Sure, if you want a mouthful of dust.”
The grimy edge of a stirrup leather passes my lips and tucks into the corners of my mouth. I bite down.
Blood throws up his hands a final time, drops to his knees by one ankle, and growls at Smoke to get the other. Atrament shifts himself to kneel on my elbow, and Rot kneels behind my head, his big hands on my shoulders.
“This position definitely has potential,” I joke again, because Rot’s crotch is just behind my head. Usually this sort of thing is done on an inclined table with restraints and sedatives. The stitching, I mean, not the sex. Although maybe sex too?
Atrament leans over me. His breath is soft against my Aether-inlaid chest. His weight is uncomfortable on my arm. “Are you ready, Lady Crystal?”
I take a breath, hold it, fix my mind on ScatheFire. “Yes.”
The first puncture of the Fell needle isn’t that bad. I jerk and flinch. Acidic pain lances across my Aether and into my nipples.
When he pulls the thread through my skin…
It’s like a thousand thorny vines. My Aether howls in agony. My soul shrieks, and my physical body tries to fathom the pain. I clench down on the leather and strong, heavy knees and hands restrain my jerking body.
I have thousands of stitches of Aether in me. I’ve endured that huge needle hundreds and hundreds of times. It was like being moulded and shaped and pulled together. Like a broken bone being aligned.
This is nothing but unrelenting agony breaking me into pieces.
The second Fell stitch nearly breaks me. The thread’s little thorns rake and destroy my skin. They rake and carve holes in my soul, they rake and carve holes in my Aether. My Aether starts to fray and my soul tears like silk ripping.
“Three,” Atrament whispers.
I scream around the leather.
“Four,” he whispers.
I become nothing but sheer, ripping agony, torn over and over and over and over again. I don’t hear how many stitches he puts into me.
The pain doesn’t stop when the stitching stops. I drift on a cresting wave of agony as the Fell thread sinks and twists with my Aether, permeating all of me, pulling me together, ripping me apart. I am suspended by steel threads, held above the abyss at the same time I’m about to be drawn and quartered.
There is nothing but pain. I am nothing but pain. There isn’t even the possibility the pain will end. It is eternal, it is always, it is endless.
Water dribbles past my lips.
I sputter and choke and yank upwards and smack at whatever is nearest me.
Rot scurries backwards out of range. “Holy shit! She’s awake!”
Of course I’m awake. Of course—
I’m breathing hard.
Then the pain nudges me like hey, still here.
I look down at my chest. I don’t have a top on, my breasts are naked. The skin between my breasts is torn and raw, but between the raw, angry skin, and delicately mingled with my Aether, is a knot of Fell thread in the design of a snake. I touch it lightly and flinch. Atrament is not a Tailor, but the design is obviously a snake, coiled around the floral branches of Aether put into me years earlier.
There’s no signs of rejection.
“He was right.” Not that I hadn’t believed him, but… maybe part of me hadn’t.
“Just take it easy,” Rot urges. “You’ve been out for a few days.”
“I have?” I ask, not understanding. “Um, where are we?”
“Fresh camp. Kept moving for the hunting while heading west towards this mudwitch you want to find. We haven’t found her. Here. Drink this.”
I guzzle the water he offers. He shyly hands me my tunic, averting his eyes.
“I know you’ve seen everything.” I pull it over my head with effort.
“It’s different when you’re awake.”
Atrament crouches beside me. “How badly does it hurt?”
I flex my shoulders a bit. My skin is in great pain, but my Aether doesn’t hurt much worse or differently than the many times I had gone to be Tailored with more Aether. Embroidery is just painful business. “How many stitches is it?”
“Forty-seven.”
So a small amount, just like he’d promised.
He touches my cheek with his fingertips. Something sinks deeper into my skin, a strange silken caress that’s not unfamiliar but so much clearer than before. My Threads tug.
My heart beats hard and steady. He touches me with his other hand.
“I can see you.” It’s not see, but it’s like my vision has cleared. Like some layer between us has been removed.
“As can I, Lady Heart,” he says, then he withdraws.
Rot shuffles closer on his knees and touches my face. He’s raw and rough and burns a little bit. I crawl up onto my knees and touch his face with both hands. I study the lines of his unshaven face, but there’s more now. I pull my fingers back, expecting to see our skin peeling and stretching like taffy, but it doesn’t, except I can clearly feel something else between us. “Is this what it’s supposed to be like? Is this what it was supposed to be like with my Aethers?”
Because it had never been like this with them. I’d always felt like we were two hands grasping for each other. I’d always felt like they’d been slipping through my grip, and I’d only been able to hold on to them, just barely, and sometimes not at all.
But Rot is like holding the reins of a horse.
“Hold still,” I tell him as I feel along the connection between us. It’s much stronger than I expected, and it’s familiar. It is just like my eyes have focused. It’s like when your hand is half-asleep and all sort of floppy and derpy while it wakes back up, and now it’s woken up.
His eyes are wide with wonder.
I trace my fingertips down the side of his face. “Can you sense it too? My last team always said they felt nothing, or just groping. They hated it.”
“You’re just there,” he says.
“Am I like a Shard?” I ask.
“No, no, not like a Shard. Nothing like a Shard.”
“Is it uncomfortable?”
He shakes his shaggy head.
I brace myself on his shoulders and get to my feet. Blood and Smoke watch from nearby, tending to some more dead creatures over a fire. Smoke’s tense and pulling, braced against the connection, while Blood feels like he’s curling behind it, like a horse hesitant to accept the contact. Blood’s bone-white hair is still pale pink-orange from all the dust. They have three days worth more beard on their chins. A little dust devil flits between us.
It’s almost too much to try to process. Atrament drifts behind me, the long tendrils of his hair wrapping and dancing around my shoulders and arms.
Rot stands up as well. “She’s our Heart. Not a Shard. She’s not going to have to fake it, guys.”
Blood gives me his usual dour look, his presence shifting and moving like a horse shifting its weight, mouthing a new bit. “I’m not convinced.”
Smoke’s expression doesn’t change, but inside, he pulls harder, like he’s leaning against the ties.
“You don’t feel that?” Rot asks them.
“I feel she’s been altered,” Blood says.
“The fact you feel anything at all indicates the existence of a bond,” Atrament counters.
“No, it does not. She’s an Aether. We’ve always been able to sense her. All of us have been drawn to her. Because she is an Aether. You’ve never been drawn to other Aethers?” Blood asks, tone somewhat dry.
“Not like her. She’s different.”
“Obviously she’s different, and you’re not a pure Fell.”
I glance at Atrament. “We can figure out what any of this is later. I’m not leaving ScatheFire a second longer.”
My magic feels like I’ve found my seat on a horse: like finally I’m not jarring my teeth with every stride, or fumbling around. Like it all just works.
Atrament grabs my wrist. Some of his hair slithers around me like ribbons. “Wait. You should eat before you try to get ScatheFire back.”
I go to protest, but Atrament pulls on me. I cock my head and realize he’s not physically pulling on me, and that’s not his hair sliding over me: it’s something between us. Something familiar that I’ve felt before, but this time it’s clear and real.
He doesn’t speak as our eyes meet. His fingers loosen on my wrist like he catches himself.
I’ve always felt like I am wearing a scratchy, too-bulky wool sweater. This feels… beautiful. Like heavy silk, except I’m the heavy silk, and every beat of my heart sends a breeze through the silk, up and down my spine, across my hips and shoulders and breasts. Except for the small, burning, simmering knot that makes it all exquisitely real.
I feel beautiful.
I’ve never felt beautiful.
I breathe out.
“Food,” Atrament says firmly.
Rot shoves the leg of something at me. “Does it hurt?”
“Not at all. For the first time in years, I don’t hurt.”
Atrament says, “Your tapestry was not complete. So it was not fully attached to your soul. I know mine was very, very painful. Like little stones in my socks.”
“Mine mostly itched, like a wool sweater that doesn’t fit.” I chew as fast as I can. ScatheFire’s sitting with bag on head, obedient as always. It’s fucking ghoulish, and I’m going to put a stop to it.
Rot follows my gaze as I gnaw the meat. He rests his wrists on his knees and asks, soberly, “How do you think you’ll get him back?”
With my new thread, a bunch of new sensations are coming to me (or maybe it’s just now I can sense everything without the pain clouding it out), and if I force myself to stare at ScatheFire’s husk, it’s like I can see beyond him. There’s something that leads my awareness beyond him, like he’s standing on a very distant horizon, and I can just make out his shadow through distance, haze, and fog.
“I’m not sure,” I tell Rot. “But I’ve got an idea.”
Now Blood comes over and drops to one knee in front of me. “Pebbles, he’s been like that for weeks. You’ve been a sack too for the past four days. You should recover.”
“But I’ve been recovering.”
“Pebbles.”
I toss the bone back into the fire and wipe off my hands.
“You should rest.”
“I’ve been resting.”
“You’ve been passed out.”
“Same difference.”
“No.”
“I’m not leaving him… wherever the fuck he is… another moment. I’m going after him.”
14
CRYSTAL
I get up, dust off my hands again, then give up, because there’s dust everywhere, and sit down cross-legged next to ScatheFire. I pull the bag off his head. Long, shaggy beard. Rot’s been brushing it to keep it clean. Shaggy hair. Thinner. Still that awful, haunting vacant stare.
I take one of his hands and stroke his Fell thread.
I’m coming for you, ScatheFire. I am. I swear it.
I’ve never heard of someone getting lost before, but I have heard of Hearts having to reel in team mates from the grip of the Blight. Nobody provided much instruction on how to do that, except that it wasn’t always successful and you’d just know how to do it, if it could be done.
Like Atrament learned to be a Mage simply by growing up around the Old One?
Ug, I’m not thinking about his Luminous theory right now.
I sort through the ties to my heart. They’re both tethered to me and inside me. I feel along all the new sensations and awareness like I’ve been trained to do. It’s like sorting out a tangle of reins to a four-in-hand.
I find ScatheFire’s lead: stretched thin, tenuous, but there. The connection to wherever he is is through his Fell thread, and I feel it now, plain and clear and real, and I can hold it. I gather up my magic, and gently push into his Fell thread, like a vine seeking the next rung on a trellis.
I am coming for you.
I’m stretched thinner and thinner, like a spider’s web, and hook magic around the other ties in my soul, braiding myself to the Fells so I can find my way back.
I’m reaching through the dark along thin strands of Fell thread that make a tiny, tiny tangle somewhere far behind me. The spider-thread is thin, fragile.
I reach into the darkness. It’s oppressive, black, dark, dark here, but so very hot.
I’ve groped in this darkness a thousand times, trying to reach my Aethers.
My magic brushes against something else, like the brush of feathers.
I reach harder, touch something like rock. Sort of. My Aether’s tendrils brush the surface of something, feeling along it, along the diaphanous thread.
The darkness is hot, oppressive, full. It pushes back on me. Tells me to leave. Tells me I DO NOT BELONG HERE.
I ignore it. I ignore the fluttering and rushing and thousands and thousands and millions of eyes staring and poking at me. I am passing through the curtain of eyes and tendrils and gore.
I clutch that thread and push through.
Then I am on the other side, and my vision clears. Except it is still so very, very dark, but everything has a strange heat glow outline, like glowing coals, and the light from my Aether as my body seems to take shape, spinning itself back into existence around the knot of Fell thread in my chest.
The darkness is real; it is not empty; it is full. It does not watch me, though; it is not full like that. My light disappears into the darkness. Not consumed like Blight consumes, simply consumed. Taken and destroyed.
The tangle of sensations is nightmarish. I hold on to the thread and walk up a rocky hillside like a banked coal. It overlooks
a bowl valley of some kind, far, far below and extending for as far as I can see. There is a faint orange-red haze that clings low to the valley. It’s not light, it’s… well. Whatever it is.
The thread leads me to a single form, kneeling on the burning coal, seemingly made of the same dark substance that makes up this place.
ScatheFire is on his knees, and in his hands, he holds his familiar, in cat-form, like a baby, his cheek pressed to it, and its head pressed to his cheek in a frozen, eternal head-butt. The thread that led me to him extends from the void, through the curtain, and splays across his left hand, seeming to extend out of the Fell stitching on the back of that hand, like a web.
“ScatheFire,” I say his name. The void devours the word and the name. He looks like a statue. They are not moving. His eyes are closed. The familiar’s eyes are closed.
Not even this place, that takes everything, could take his familiar. And it could not take him from me.
I walk in front of him and kneel. There is no response. No movement, no life, except the love he has for that familiar exuding off him. I feel it in this place: he is not alone.
My familiar twists around my wrist, flicking its tongue. It can see better than I can in this place, sensing the shape of things with the pits on its snout, and it thinks this place is not Hell, but the playground of some unnamed god.
We won’t be naming any gods today. Especially not the one that calls this place home.
“ScatheFire,” I say again. I’ve brought his name into this place, and the place doesn’t appreciate it. I reach out. My hand glows yellow-gold-white like sunlight. I press my palm to his webbed hand. “It’s time to go.”
No response.
“Follow me out,” I tell him, pressing magic into his threads, along the ties between us. I weave a net around him, through him, braiding and re-braiding the thread that led me here so it’s stronger. “Follow me out of here!”
My words disappear into the nothing, torn away into something without meaning.
“I won’t let it have you!” My light increases as I weave more and more netting around him. I’ll haul him out of here like a damn fish if I have to!