by Azalea Ellis
I thought about cutting a door through the wall with Chaos, but decided against it. Instead, I dug my fingers and bare toes into the cracks and lifted myself. The lack of claws made it a little more difficult, and without my superhuman strength and endurance, I was panting by the time I made it to the top.
I stood, and looked out over the structure I’d created so long ago in my mind. The Sickness was here, too, though it had taken the form of a creeping mold that ate away at the grounds and structures like a particularly tenacious acid, reducing them to little more than dust and blank death.
Some of it was eating at the wall beneath me, and I let forth a wave of Chaos, hoping to disintegrate it. That didn’t work, so I urged my power to burn, instead. The stone burned, melted, and was eaten by the black flames, but the creeping mold of the Sickness remained, unperturbed.
I stood and watched as my mental world collapsed, knowing I would die along with it. A section of the sprawling, Victorian-style mansion crumbled and collapsed into dust. I thought I heard a scream, but I didn’t know if it was within my mind, or without.
There were splotches of darkness on my skin. I tried not to look at them as they spread.
I watched, still, as another section collapsed, falling in on itself with a poof of blackness, as the grey mold billowed out. This time, though, a tiny mote of light escaped. One of the last remnants of the unpleasant gift Knowledge had bestowed on me.
I realized then that the mold wasn’t mold, as it turned and swarmed after the mote of light. More bugs. Tiny, devouring bugs.
I threw myself off the top of the wall, uncaring for the way my ankle buckled or my joints screamed in pain at the impact all the way up my spine. I ran toward the mote of light as fast as I could, trying to keep the ankle from rolling beneath me.
The mote flew towards me, but the great swarm of bugs followed along behind it like the hand of death.
Before I could reach it, they swallowed it up.
I fell to the ground in despair as the cloud dispersed, more of the bugs landing on me in little patches of darkness. I brushed at them, but it did nothing. It was as if they were part of my skin, now.
A familiar sensation reached out to me. Torliam. He lent me his rage, as he had done once before. I sucked it up like I was made of thirsty earth, twisting and feeding on it till it became my own.
I screamed out my rage, my despair, my desperation, and scratched mercilessly at myself, wishing for my claws, for the scaled toughness of my left arm, for my strength. This weak, soft shell of a body wasn’t mine!
I looked out on the destruction of my mind, and, like an echo through mist, I heard a voice, maybe a memory. “Do you know how gods fight with each other?” It spoke in my voice, even though it was Knowledge’s construct that had said the words.
The thing that had been crumbling inside me as my hope and my willpower died… It stilled, and turned to focus on those words.
The Eve construct had been preparing me for this moment. I’d thought it just didn’t realize I’d already succeeded, but, on the contrary, it knew I hadn’t and was teaching me to fight Pestilence’s true nature.
I turned my mind to the memories of the dreams, reaching with desperation for any clue I could use.
In the first dream, I’d learned how to use Chaos’ black flames voluntarily, and healed myself.
In the second, I’d transmuted stone into air. She’d said the more important question was who I was. What I was. She’d said that even when I was dying, she still wanted it more than I did. She’d made the empty threat to take over my body if I kept dying.
In the third dream, I’d once again healed myself, created a sword out of stone, and caused an explosion. She’d said Chaos was more than some Skill. It was the tiny piece of the goddess of Khaos, living inside me. She’d asked me then, how gods fought with each other. She’d said I couldn’t beat her not because of her body or her Skills, but because she still wanted it more.
In the last dream, I’d wanted it more. I hadn’t been desperate, I’d been determined. Intent. She’d told me she was teaching me to win. She had created that bubble of death, and with a single word of conviction, I had popped it. I wished, now, that I’d let her finish that last statement before ripping her throat out. Maybe it was important.
Still, I think I understood what she’d been trying to teach me. Pestilence wasn’t a disease, it was a distortion of the world. The lance had acted as an extension of the Champion’s willpower, negating that distortion. It wasn’t healing. It was re-writing.
And I wasn’t a powerless human. Even Pestilence had announced it plainly. It had literally been in front of my face the whole time, if I cared to look. “I am a godling,” I whispered. “The progeny of Behelaino. Khaos.” I pronounced her name with the distinct “K” and “H.” “I am descended of the line of Matrix, and carry the blood of a god twice over.” Not a human. Not a human…anymore. I had power.
I let Chaos flow out from my body, feeling no need to bleed to access it. I let it burn black. It ate into my flesh, yet still seemed impotent against the black decay of Pestilence.
I gritted my teeth. The Sickness might be strong, but it was a lie that nothing could stand against it.
“This body belongs to me,” I whispered with burning lips and tongue. “It is mine. This mind belongs to me. You have no power here.” I burned the spreading growths away. “You will not win. I refuse.” I burned my own weakness away.
Then, like I had done before, in a situation not so dissimilar to this one, I turned the cleansing flames outward. They rushed to my command, unhesitating and gleeful, brutally efficient. “My will is like the ocean,” I said. My voice echoed, not needing any crystal to add weight to it. “It is like the void. It has no end to its depths, no banks to its shores. You will cease to exist,” I said, snarling at the creeping blackness, “because I command it so.” I set my mind to a belief so strong that either I would break, or the world would bend to my command. “You are no part of me.”
The world bent.
Chapter 40
They are all gone into the world of light, and I alone sit lingering here.
— Henry Vaughan
I burned away the Sickness, and the decay, and the gloom. When I was finished, I barely stayed to admire the gleaming beauty left behind. “I wake,” I said. It was a command.
I opened my eyes again, to once-sterile plastine walls. Now, some parts of the quarantine cell were covered with ash, while other parts were completely melted away. I rose to my feet, taller now, and used new hands to force the remains of the door open. My eyes caught a bit of my reflection in the melted-smooth plastine. The dark honeycomb scaling had spread over more of my body, leaving only a few sections of plain skin behind. The armor I had once worn was gone, leaving me protected by scales shaped a little like feathers. They overlapped my body almost stylistically, providing modesty and gathering thickest where I would have worn metal armor before. I flexed my new muscles and the scales shifted and fluttered, angling to catch the light.
My clothes and armor were burned away, but it did not matter. Humans were the only creatures who wore clothes. And I wasn’t really human anymore, was I? One look at my once-again remade body and anyone would know that.
I looked for the others, but did not see them. Except for the body. That was still there, but had been moved to the other side of the room and laid with her arms across her chest, holding Pinocchio.
The corpses of the other infected were piled in the opposite corner. My scales fluttered in disgust as the rank smell assaulted my nose, coating the back of my tongue and lingering. The sun still shone through the bullet holes in the ceiling, but the light looked different, now.
Had the others gone to find the Remnants? Were they even still alive?
Then a familiar rip opened in the world, and Zed stepped through, dragging Gregor’s body with him. No, not Gregor’s body. Gregor. The boy’s lips were blue, and his blackened veins stood out against pale skin, but
he was breathing.
“Hurry. We need to get them warm quickly, before the Sickness has too much time to progress,” Zed said.
“Isn’t this more cruel, in its own way?” Sam’s voice filtered through the rip, though I couldn’t see him. “They are dying.”
“Birch says Eve’s going to wake up okay. Just like she did with the God of Knowledge.”
“He is an animal, telepathic or not. And even if she does, without the lance, she can’t do the same for the rest—” Sam’s voice broke off as he stepped through, carrying Jacky over his shoulder. The black orbs that sat in his face in place of eyes turned toward me.
Torliam’s voice filtered through the opening. “He may be an animal, but I, too, feel her fighting. Have you not seen the power rolling off her? If there is any in this world who can defeat the Sickness, it is her.”
Zed turned to follow Sam’s gaze, while Torliam stepped through behind Sam, holding Adam’s unconscious body in his arms.
“Eve?” Zed said, staring up at me.
Birch burst out of the Other Place, hurling himself at me and forcing me to catch him in my arms. He let out little high-pitched sounds, both excited and whiny, and licked at my face, his tongue rasping against the faint scales on my jawline and at my temple.
I squeezed him gently, letting my fingers sink into his fur and feathers, their softness a balm to the jagged edges inside me. I set the cub down, then took two steps forward, and took hold of Gregor. The boy’s skin leeched the warmth from my own, so soft and malleable compared to me. I was careful not to hurt him, since I couldn’t retract my claws anymore. I pushed my awareness into his body. Without the lance, the Sickness wasn’t highlighted, but its effects were obvious throughout.
How was I to do this? How did the lance work? If the Sickness wasn’t an actual illness, but the effects of that thing’s influence… The lance was the Champion’s counter-influence. Negating Pestilence’s will. Still, I wasn’t confident in my ability to burn away Gregor’s entire body without killing him. In fact, that seemed impossible. He was a human.
“Ah,” I said aloud, as I realized the answer. I took a single claw, which tipped the end of a too-long finger, and sliced it against the palm of my hand. Blood flowed sluggishly, and the wound started to heal even as I watched, but it was enough. I pressed my hand to Gregor’s mouth and tilted his head back, then massaged his throat to help him swallow.
Where my blood flowed, so too did my power, for my life was in my blood. I flushed my power, my influence, and the tiny portion of the Seed of a godling through him. I enforced my will through it. The Sickness would be eradicated, destroyed. Its influence would cease to exist.
He returned to health, though his body was still morbidly cold. Dangerously so, if his vital signs were any indication.
“Warm him,” I ordered, handing him off to Sam, who stared at me silently, Black Sun filtering the weakness out of him. He turned off the damaging Skill and pressed his hands to the boy. “Being cold isn’t an injury itself, but I can make sure it doesn’t kill him. Birch, can you do that thing Eve does and heat a blanket or the floor tiles without setting them on fire?”
Birch, shivering himself, let out an uncertain mewl and then spilled Chaos from his mouth, carried like mist on a weak swirl of wind. It slipped into the floor, which glowed red-hot and then melted a little. He coughed, then hung his head, ears drooping sadly.
Torliam wrapped the boy in a cocoon of his power and held him floating above the spot so he could absorb the warmth without being burned. “Is he…healed?” Torliam said, the words almost a whisper.
“In a way,” I said, wincing as I bit my tongue. My teeth to the sides of my incisor seemed to have grown more pointed, and even my molars were sharp and almost jagged. “He was not sick. Rather, poisoned, or infested with a parasite, and I have removed the attacker.”
I turned to Adam, and then Jacky, and did the same. I knew this didn’t make them safe, truly. Keeping them healthy was a constant, low-level drain on my power, as Pestilence willed the Sickness to overtake them, and I willed the opposite. Pestilence could come after us again directly, and I didn’t know that my power would be able to stand against the full weight of his influence.
I stood, staring at Kris’ body. I walked over to her and tilted her face upward.
She was stiff. Intellectually, I knew it was rigor mortis, but I shied away from the thought. I cut my palm again, and forced my blood into her mouth. At first, my thoughts of rejecting the Sickness didn’t work. I changed tactics and just tried to heal her. It took a while, and I burned through much of my remaining strength. But though I was able to force her flesh to re-form and the obvious signs of the cause of her death to recede, it was not healing. I was only playing with meat, because there was no life in the body.
I stood and turned to the others, who were watching me.
Jacky had awoken, and, despite violent shivers, she stared between me and Kris with unblinking desperation.
“I don’t know how to bring something to life,” I said. My voice broke. “I’m sorry.” My hands hung uselessly at my sides.
Jacky let out a choked sob past her uncontrollably chattering teeth.
Torliam stepped toward me, hesitantly at first. He leaned forward and hugged me.
I realized I was as tall as him, now. The warmth of his body seemed to thaw something in my chest. I closed my eyes and tears ran down my cheeks.
Zed stepped up and grabbed my hand, holding it between both of his. “It’s not your fault.”
A faint sound of movement came from behind me, and I spun violently.
Kris’ hand had moved, falling away from Pinocchio.
The wooden, four-armed puppet wiggled again, and her other arm fell away. It crawled off her chest and then stood beside her, looking at her face. Then, it lifted one hand and wiggled the fingers experimentally, before turning to us. It waved.
Jacky’s voice was high-pitched and almost disbelieving. “Kris? Is that you?”
The puppet nodded.
Kris, in Pinocchio’s body, pantomimed how she’d died, felt herself blowing on the wind, or maybe dispersing, then tossed herself into the little puppet. She’d fallen asleep from the strain of the action and only now awoken. When we asked her if she could put herself back in her body, she hesitated, shrugged, then shook her head, which we took to mean that she didn’t know how, or maybe was afraid to try it.
Jacky cried, muttering “thank you” over and over to herself as she looked at Zed walking around perfectly fine, and Kris, not fine, but at least not…precisely dead.
Adam woke next, and then Gregor. Neither of them reacted well to the memories of what they’d done under Pestilence’s influence.
We were able to calm Adam with relative ease, with the assurance that Kris had housed herself in Pinocchio when her body was destroyed, and that he no longer had the Sickness or needed to worry about losing control of himself.
Gregor wasn’t so easy to mollify. The boy grew hysterical immediately upon waking, and didn’t seem to comprehend our words when we spoke to him, or maybe didn’t believe them. He flailed about with heart-wrenching sobs, struggling away from us when we tried to calm him or hold him, and beating his limbs against the floor until they bruised.
I was about to have Sam sedate him forcefully when Kris moved away from her body, shaking her head at him.
She walked over to her brother and punched him in the stomach with one of her four wooden arms. The blow wasn’t hard, coming from a two-foot body with little weight behind it.
Still, it snapped the boy out of his frenzy. He stared at her. “Pinocchio? Why are you still moving? Is Kris still alive?” He looked over her head to the corpse near the wall. His eyes brightened as he noticed the lack of outward injuries or signs of the Sickness on her body.
She crossed both sets of arms over her chest and tapped her foot on the ground.
“We’ve been trying to tell you,” Jacky said, kneeling beside the boy and gripping
his shoulders. “Kris put her spirit inside the puppet’s body. Eve healed her real body, but it’s still…” she cleared her throat. “Well, Kris is the puppet, now.”
Gregor stared at her new body, rubbing the tears away from his face. “Is Chanelle in another body, too?”
Jacky and I shared a look of dismay.
“No,” I said. “Chanelle is dead. Pestilence… Whatever it did, it got rid of her body, too.”
Adam cleared his throat, still a little hoarse from his mindless screaming as part of the horde earlier. “Was she…that thing, in disguise all along?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Maybe he was there a couple times, when she had one of her attacks, but she was just Chanelle most of the time.” Just a girl who’d done her best to seize the little moments of joy, despite the hopelessness of her situation. Who’d been so delighted to have a second chance to live. Someone who’d believed in me, trusted me. China’s sister, who I’d promised to save.
Torliam placed his hand on my shoulder, drawing my attention back to the real world. He didn’t say anything, just squeezed slightly.
My scales shifted a little under his hand, but he didn’t seem to care.
Suddenly, Gregor scowled at Kris. “How do you know for sure it’s her? What if Pinocchio is impersonating her!?”
The puppet’s jaw dropped open.
Gregor pointed at it dramatically. “I’m going to interrogate you. I’ll ask you questions only Kris would know, and if you’re trying to trick us…”
Kris made a writing motion, and Gregor ran off toward the other end of the room, uncaring about the putrid corpses piled up in the corner.
Kris tried to follow him, but, after a few meters, her steps grew clumsy and she stopped, clutching at her chest.
Jacky was beside her in a moment, hands clenching in useless panic. She picked the wooden puppet up gently. “What’s wrong!?”
Kris pointed back toward her human body, jabbing her finger toward it clumsily.