by C H Chelser
She sensed the head of the cane tracing the small of her back. The darkness closed in, swallowing all but the dim light glinting off her nails and the net holding l’Autre.
‘I will show you, but first, release us from your shield.’
He snorted. ‘If the creature slips your grasp, it will escape. By any means. And then you would be unprotected.’
‘As long as you stay with me, I will not be unprotected.’
‘An uncertain condition,’ he growled.
‘Is it? I refuse to believe you will abandon me.’ In lieu of her hands, dark blue tendrils extended to embrace his arm. ‘I have come to trust you, M’sieur. What I ask of you now, is to grant me a modicum of trust in return.’
A low, animal growl rose from his throat. The next instant, his shield fell.
The tempest spawned by the demons’ combat had dissipated, leaving the desolate, dark grey emptiness of these planes extending around them. A small mercy. Any interruptions would only make her task more difficult.
Mercedes knelt in front of l’Autre, strumming the strands of her net to release its soothing energy. The hapless creature whined and thrashed nevertheless.
‘May I suggest you make haste, madame?’ drawled M’sieur as he stared into the distance. ‘Time is of the essence. That is, your time outside my shield is limited, as I recall.’
‘Indeed.’ True, but not her greatest concern. This had to be done correctly, not hastily. ‘I am sorry,’ she told l’Autre. ‘If I knew of an easier way…’
A moment’s hesitation, but only a moment. Then she plunged her golden talons deep into l’Autre’s skull.
Appearance was fluid, shape and size but an illusion, yet when she split the demon’s head, she did more than distort a chosen shape. The intense black of his energy was ripped to shreds in the glow of her claws, as if she was dismembering it strand by strand.
The demon’s sickening agony tore through her as she tore through him. Only weapons could break darkness this much condensed, but she willed a golden-green trail to fill every cut she made. The colours she injected faded quickly, but in their wake, the darkness weakened.
As a small crack would not break a marble, the first tears did little more than cause pain. Only when she cut more fissures did the black mass of coagulated anguish, anger, hatred, confusion and despair begin to fall apart. Countless strands surrendered their co-dependence. Memories revealed complex, interlocked clusters of expe-riences that had ulcerated into noxious parodies of the originals. She stripped every strand down to the thoughts and feelings that composed them. As she released them, bit by bit, each strand gradually revealed a different shade that was no longer an intense black.
Thus onyx became coal, which became tarnished metal. First only one sliver, but then the sliver grew, widened, and new slivers emerged. She stretched the darkness further, healing raw edges with the green trail. Tarnished metal became the colour of polished silver. And yet she pulled harder, forcing apart blacks and greys until l’Autre’s energy shimmered with as many shades as did the city of fog.
Watching her nails picking apart the darkest slivers, she thought of the black shackles around her wrists, and of the lethargy of grief and resentment that had all but consumed her years ago. Anne had pulled apart that darkness, spreading it until, strand by strand, she had regained her colours.
Painful, even torturous, but nothing else had been able to bring her back from the edge of the bridge.
L’Autre shrieked every time she opened a new fissure. Her net held him together with softly pulsating blues and purples, but even compassion could not ease the suffering of exposing such wounds of the soul. Untended sores that had compounded into a black, putrid growth until nothing more remained. Only by cutting open that abscess and giving it space could it ever hope to heal.
But that required bearing witness to one’s own dissection, confronting the bitterest pain imaginable. Nigh on unbearable. Small wonder that l’Autre continuously attempted to curl up, trying to condense himself and all his injuries into one black ball once more, as he had been used to for so long.
Should she stop for pity’s sake? A mercy now, perhaps, but leaving these festering wounds open and unattended? That would ultimately hurt far more than finishing what she had started.
Mad with pain, l’Autre lashed out with a strand of intense anger. Its sting missed her by a fraction, but she didn’t let it deter her. On the contrary: she hazarded a smile.
Because in the strand’s passing, she had caught a glimpse of red.
‘Just a little further.’
But not too much. Soon her talons lost their edges and retreated to let the green light heal the traces of her presence. Now the worst of his agony had been dismantled, l’Autre’s growls eased, too. As she had suspected, his violence was birthed not from malice, but from fear. His hunger was his means to grow, his desire to be better than what he had become. But like so many, he had sought redemption in all the wrong places, causing horrendous damage as he went.
A terrible fate that might befall absolutely anyone.
L’Autre stilled, panting like an exhausted animal but no longer fighting her touches. Under her hands, he resumed a semblance of the feline appearance she had first encountered. Even his eyes had gained a measure of light in them as they looked at her calmly. She had expected resentment after what she had inflicted on him, but then a rough tongue licked her fingers.
‘You did well,’ she whispered back.
Not all black strands had been undone, but the various greys lit up with vague hints of colour as she gently brushed them. A far cry from the darkness of the void and no worse than those who inhabited the fog. What happened next was up to him.
‘We are our own gaolers,’ she recited Jean’s words to herself. ‘Mercy, condemnation, that decision is truly our own.’
While she had worked, M’sieur had held back from interfering, but now his presence flared.
‘We are what we are,’ he raged. ‘Change dark into light, greys into colours, but that does not undo the damage of crimes committed!’
‘Nothing can undo the past,’ she agreed. ‘Like so many, I wish it were possible, but…’ She hugged herself, letting little green slivers heal the cracks in her core left by this realisation.
‘Exactly,’ he said pointedly. ‘Redemption is impossible. Most certainly for one such as he. Consuming a soul goes against—!’
‘He knows!’ Her cry broke on his coat, spilling her thoughts before he could overwhelm them. ‘He knew. Every soul he consumed satiated only briefly, because guilt ate him in turn. He was more than desperate to take as many as he did. And it cost him! As it must have cost you to feel that guilt every time you feed, no matter how small the morsels you take.’
‘Never a soul!’ He barked, baring his fangs. ‘Whatever transgressions I am guilty of to deserve exile in the outer edge, never did I commit that crime most vile!’
Her aura fluttered. ‘Then why assume you are beyond redemption? What, M’sieur, do you say makes a devourer, if he does not devour?’
‘Intentions,’ his mind replied without his consent.
He frowned, pausing to think. Was this correct? Actions were facts, while intention was fleeting. Was it not? Had he been wrong on that count as well? He had strived to serve the laws of existence, but perhaps that had been a losing battle from the beginning.
The bullet in his forehead ached. Yes, yes! Facts turning to quicksand and quagmires, which in themselves had been proven as facts. What good was his service if his shortcomings denied him understanding of this complexity?
He glared at their captured prey, meek and subdued in the woman’s net. The fly firmly caught in the spider’s web. A sufficiently satisfying outcome.
Yet more than ever, he felt hollow.
‘A just fate, you promised to deal it.’ He shook his head. ‘This? This is not justice! Murderers should be punished, severely and without mercy!’
‘M’sieur, please allow me—’
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‘No! You have been given too much allowance already.’ He snarled at the gulf of galling turquoise that rose around her. ‘Spare me your pity, madame! I will have none of—’
He froze, nailed in place as an undeniable influence of immense magnitude swept across the expanse, closing in from all directions. So soon? He had sensed their presence earlier, but had deemed them to be too far off. When had he lost track? Not that it mattered, now that the final reckoning was upon him.
Eight obsidian giants surrounded them, grotesque statues that observed with sightless eyes and passed judgement. On the rampant one. On the woman. On him. Like tigers lying in wait.
Chapter XXVIII
A terrific force disintegrated the peppermint ribbons dancing around her skirts as she quailed at the shifting atmosphere. The net around l’Autre evaporated, her lightning withered and scattered like ash. He whined and cowered behind her, but made no attempt to run. Instinctively, Mercedes turned to M’sieur, who seemed petrified, his dense coat as indomitable as the eight granite warriors that now encircled them.
‘Useless,’ he growled. ‘Telling how they arrive only now, after their work has been done for them.’
The sentinels loomed, silent and stoic. Each of them stood as tall as the bell towers of Notre Dame, more intimidating if not less regal than when she had last encountered them. Fierce armour and still fiercer weapons complemented this ferocity, but there could be no mistaking what they were. Or why they had come.
Beneath their gaze, Mercedes ached as they stripped her and revealed the dark streaks hiding among her dissolving colours. Judgement, clear and unadulterated, bore down on her from infinity, wrecking and rebuking all she had ever believed herself to be. Her own core echoed this absolute condemnation.
She did not belong here, it said. None of them did. But where else? And what of the demons? M’sieur had withdrawn deep within his shield, and l’Autre had curled up with the same intent. If the sentinels took them now, what option was left to them but fleeing to the deepest darkness?
THIS IS OUR PURPOSE.
The booming voices reverberated throughout. Mercedes lost all sense of self in the impossible span of frequencies that ran through her. Yet in their resonance, she discovered such intricate notions that conscious thought could not quite grasp them.
Chasing these elusive impressions, she roused too late when four of the sentinels stepped forward and spread their wings. Not the swan wings she had seen before, but rather shimmering auras that extended from their backs and melted together to form one impregnable shield around them all.
Once completed, the shield shrank at great speed. Mercedes braced for the instant it would trap her, but when it came, the shield flowed through her without the merest resistance.
Despite her presumptions, the sentinels had not come for her.
Isolate. Encapsulate. Protect.
As these notions filled her, the rapidly closing shield wrapped l’Autre in an impermeable cocoon. All connections of sense and soul markers were severed at once, yet somehow Mercedes knew that the creature she had called l’Autre no longer existed.
A cry of fire spewed from her mouth. ‘Why?’ she raged at the sentinels. ‘He no longer posed a threat! By what justice—?’
COCOONS BRING FORTH BUTTERFLIES.
The four sentinels then redirected their attention to the horizon and departed, slowly but decidedly, with the cocoon hovering between them.
Her outrage sputtered as vibrations she barely comprehended struck a peculiar resonance. Fearful after Jean’s warnings, her instinct had been to resist the sentinels’ probes for fear that they would throw her back into her body, or worse. To do otherwise terrified her, but still she willed herself to surrender her core to them and accept their verdict.
Neither reproach nor denunciation pierced her. No damnation from above. Only the whispers of her own soul casting doubts on itself: the ultimate condemnation brought to light.
What interest the sentinels had in her disappeared. Now she understood why. Their purpose was to enforce transitions, trans-formations a soul chose but could not effect unaided. Anne had aided her. She had aided l’Autre to the best of her ability. Yet four sentinels remained.
Colours of gold leaf and cornflower laced her energy as she touched the black fortification M'sieur had pulled up.
‘Ease your shield,’ she implored him. ‘They cannot assist unless you let them.’
So it had come to this. The hunter to be captured, strung up and dismembered like prey. To simply disappear, as had all souls that these gigantic gargoyles had scavenged from the planes he had roamed. Certainly the most reprehensible of severe punishments, however just it might be.
Nearby, the woman spoke, but the river drowned out her words.
The river…
He had failed.
He had failed to put a halt to his rampant kin, as he had vowed he would. For no justifiable reason. Every criminal made one fatal mistake. The other had made its share. And he? The idle vanity of permitting himself to hope that redemption was possible for one such as he, that had been his.
He had failed. Utterly and irreconcilably.
In his failure, he had also failed to prolong the universe’s tolerance of his existence. Thus he now found himself here, the spider caught in a web that far exceeded its own.
When he had faced such absolute failure in life, he had resigned in every way possible. Now, as the very guardians of what he had violated exposed the extent of his crimes in every detail, he had no option but to resign in full. Once and for all.
That, too, was just.
Around him, the sentinels started with jagged movements and spread their wings. Withdrawing was impossible, but rather than submitting to his imminent execution, he tilted his head back and let himself fall for the last time.
Endless planes blurred into a funnel that swallowed him, compressed his soul and spat him out into a darkness so cold and so heavy, it barely permitted movement. Although far from his haven, the same calm permeated him. Absolute silence reigned. Energy this compact had no frequency, no message to channel. His shield dissipated, meaningless. He knew his place, and so he fell still deeper.
His shape reverted under the mounting pressure. Teeth lengthened and limbs twisted, while acid and water soaked his fur and ate into his skin. All he was. All he had ever been. Nothing existed beyond himself. Nothing could; the talons sinking into his unprotected soul had to be his own. For some inexplicable reason, they vibrated.
‘What is here?’
‘A last resort.’
‘To what?’
‘To end the torment. At last.’
Such pressure! Emptiness surrounded her, limitless yet constricting. Time, space, self, light, none of it had any viability here. She had no shape apart from what her mind conjured up. This oblivion crushed her thoughts, reducing them to basic notions. Yet a vague impression of dark flames lingered long enough to retain significance. Clinging to this fleeting image, she willed her focus to find herself, as well as the soul she held on to. Only the burning sensation it emanated through her talons convinced her that it was there at all.
Not it. He. She couldn’t afford to forget that. He. M’sieur. And he was in pain.
‘What torment?’
‘Failuremercymistakesirreparabledamagemisjudgements—’ His howl thundered through her, along with raging blame and guilt. ‘—fallacies injustice confusion irregularities inconsistency compassionguilt— why did I fail?’
He collapsed, imploding. With tremendous effort, she arrested the collapse and prised open the compounding darkness, until he curled up around her instead.
‘How did you fail?’
‘Duty… I failed in my duty.’
‘What duty is that?’
‘To be just. Prevent injustice. Prevent… damage!’
His soul throbbed in her embrace. This last shred of resolve slipped, threatening to end him. Soon. But, she had promised.
‘How did you cause damage?’
‘I… violated.’ A shudder of horrendous anguish as a new fissure opened. ‘Laws define permissibility. Violating these laws violates existence… Violations must be punished.’
‘Without exception?’
From out of nowhere, spikes of cold hatred lanced through her. ‘No exceptions! Exceptions deviate. Deviations confuse. Confusion causes mistakes, mistakes cause damage, damage causes torment, confusion, a chain of mistakes that spreads like a disease – Intolerable!’
‘I understand,’ she whispered through her anchored talons, and carefully continued to dig deeper.
Crooked nails dragged at his core and the finest fibres of his soul. He fought the agony they caused, but he could not tear free of them. Not without unleashing exactly those treacherous notions he sought to quell.
Exceptions. A universal truth made untrue by circumstance? Irreconcilable! What is black, cannot simultaneously be white. What is forbidden, cannot be made permissible at a whim! By what right? By whose decision? His? Preposterous!
And yet…
He had let his prey go; he had helped the woman shift. He had discarded truths, broken laws, for no nobler end than to further his own interests. How was that justice?
And yet…
Who was he to judge the merits of an end? Noble, ignoble, that decision was not his. No one soul could comprehend the machinations of the universe. Noble acts towards ignoble goals? Not unheard of. Then, ignoble acts serving a noble end? Oddly conceivable...
That elusive thief, the fly who freed the spider. Its deeds had demanded justice, but which should prevail? Prison for theft, or freedom for saving a life already believed lost? What was just, should incite justice. Unless that justice carried within itself an injustice, which meant true justice could only come to pass through deviations. Through exception. Then exceptions, however detestable, were unavoidable. Even… necessary?
The nails scraped; sharp pain cleaved him. Again he looked down at the old thief surrendering. Again he weighed the crimes of his prey against its virtue of having saved a life, and again he faced the choice between moral justice and lawful justice.