by Scott Hale
Justine’s quarters, much like the overly-locked gate that’d led to Penance’s rooftops, was guarded by a similarly fashioned gate. He started from the top, unlocking each lock—there were eight in all—from top to bottom, until after undoing the last one, the gate popped open and invited him in. Carefully, he closed the gate behind him, locked it back up. He’d rather be stuck in her quarters for hours, waiting for the right moment to escape, than to have her find the gate unlocked. It was better for everyone that way.
Even if he didn’t know where the door to her room was, he’d still be able to find it with his nose. There was a stench in Justine’s quarters that hadn’t been there before.
“Ugh.”
He recoiled. He pinched his nose shut. It stank, but it wasn’t Justine’s usual aroma of lilac and wine. Something was dead inside her room, or rotting; but it didn’t smell like death, either. At least, not the death of anything natural. Not that he was an expert on that stuff. It smelled… fake. What was the word? Chemical? Skinthetic. No, synthetic. And sickening, too. Like when he’d meet with the people in Penance to hear their requests and prayers. The way their breath reeked, when their gums were bleeding.
Making all kinds of overly dramatic sounds, Felix gathered himself, slipped the skeleton key into the lock, and pushed into Justine’s room.
Aside from the horrible smell, not much had changed. There were still pink, yellow, red, silver, white, blue, and green pastel sheets dividing up the room into what reminded him of the infirmary in Pyra. He didn’t notice any new furniture or documents, or even any new dresses, which Justine sometimes wove for herself from herself. It was weird, but now that he was here, able to have his way with the room, he didn’t know where to begin, and he felt kind of badly about it, too.
“Ugh,” he said again, rubbing the back of his neck. The Mother Abbess was his friend. This didn’t feel right.
Breaking out into a guilty sweat, Felix backed up towards the door.
This is a bad idea.
Then, he had an idea. If he went anywhere in her room, it should be her bathroom. That’s where he’d seen the mouth in her chest, talking to her. That… was messed up. He had to know more about that.
Felix weaved through the room, careful not to disturb anything. He avoided crossing into the areas sectioned off by the pastel sheets. He even looked behind him as he walked, making sure he wasn’t leaving dirt or footprints. He was being a bad friend, a bad partner-in-crime. He didn’t want her thinking badly of him.
The bathroom door was shut. He turned knob, put his body into opening it. It creaked, and he gasped.
Justine lay on the floor, naked. Her body was not one body but many—a pale mass of skin and limbs and tentacles thrashing against one another, spraying the walls and the floor tile with opalescent blood. In her chest, between her breasts, the hole that’d been burned there from wearing her own sealing stone for centuries had been torn open further. Inside it, beyond a nation of muscles and bones, a green eye stared outward—eldritch runes seared into its flaring iris.
Justine’s head and face formed at the top of the trunk. She fought against the rebelling flesh when she cried, “Don’t look at me!”
Felix shook his head violently. He reached for the sealing stone around his neck. It was always there, even when he thought it wasn’t. Crying, teeth chattering, he took the necklace off that the stone was attached to. He couldn’t let her live like this.
“No,” Justine said, squeezing her eyes shut.
With a colossal amount of effort, she began to rein in the appendages, stuffing them back inside herself and smoothing out the places from which they’d protruded. Her flesh bubbled. Ripping sounds rumbled inside her, as she willed the limbs back to where they belonged deep inside her.
“M-Mom!” Felix belted. He dropped to his knees, reached for the swollen knob that’d been a foot.
Justine sucked the leg into her pelvis. Like an octopus spilling over itself, the glistening Mother Abbess dragged herself towards him. She wasn’t fully formed, only her arms and half her chest. The rest was like a pile of noodles covered in curdling milk.
“What the… what the fuck?” Felix spoke, but no words came out. Then he managed: “Are you… are you dying?”
Justine heaved herself closer to him. Inches away, she rested, while the rest of her congealed into something more human in appearance. The gaping hole in her chest, however, stayed, and so, too, did the glaring eye within.
Felix squealed, “What the hell is that?”
“It’s Lillian,” Justine said, gripping the ground to stop herself from being flung around the bathroom.
“She’s dead!”
“No, she’s inside me. She’s been inside me ever since she summoned me after the Trauma.”
When Justine had knees, she brought them around and collapsed over the top of them. She sank slightly into herself, like a mold that hadn’t finished cooling.
“God’s awake,” Justine said, weakly. “My job is done, and now she wants out.”
“No!” Felix took her four-fingered hand; her thumb regrew in response and looped around his. “No! That’s not happening. No!”
She lowered her head and said, “I know. I know what we have to do.”
Hot, snotty breath in his mouth, Felix babbled out, “W-What?”
“We have to go to Eldrus and see King Edgar. The both of us. Did you find my box in the basement?”
Felix gasped, nodded.
“Audra’s plant is inside.”
“The Bloodless…” Felix whispered.
“Yes. Edgar killed Geharra with the Crossbreed. It’s only fitting we should kill Eldrus with the Bloodless, don’t you agree?”
CHAPTER XX
Audra had a garden nobody knew about. The shadows tended it when she couldn’t.
Ikto, Edgar’s supposed Arachne spawn, stared at Audra across the carriage’s cramped compartment. Heavy globs of drool dripped from his fangs. At seven feet tall, the albino man-spider was almost too large for the space, so he’d spun a web in the corner and collapsed himself within it. Where the webs had attached to the seat’s cushions or the wooden framework, there were dark marks and the smell of burning. The strands were eating through everything they touched. Audra knew that Arachne encased their victims in webs, to slowly melt them until their entire bodies were nothing more than pools of gore. Occassionaly, Ikto would launch a web at Audra’s face, just to see if she was paying attention.
And she was. Ever since Edgar came into her room that night he’d killed their family, she was always paying attention to violent whims of men.
Beside Ikto, and about as far from him as she could manage, Lotus sat in the corner of the compartment, wedged between the corner and the small window that kept fogging. Like Audra, she never slept; unlike Audra, it wasn’t because of the Arachne. Lotus didn’t sleep because she didn’t need to, it seemed. Years of living in the Nameless Forest would do that to a person, Audra figured. How much of a person was Lotus anymore, anyway? Shaved and scarred, the wild-eyed woman seemed stripped down to the barest of wants. She looked at Audra with starvation in her eyes, the kind of starvation where hunger, thirst, lust, and the need for power had become one unsustainable, unobtainable craving. Years of living in the Nameless Forest would do that to a person, Audra realized. She’d gone for so long with nothing, that now, she wanted everything, all at once, any way she could get it.
“I bet if we get to know each other, we’ll find we have a lot in common,” Lotus said, as if she were reading Audra’s mind.
Audra didn’t say anything. Instead, she turned her head to the window and stared out. Nyxis had come and gone. They were taking the highway, the Spine, to Eldrus, and it wouldn’t be long now. The countryside between Nyxis and the city-state used to be treacherous to travel through. The witch covens that’d sprung up in the area would capture merchants and sacrifice them in their rituals or infect them with sexually transmitted diseases and peddle them, like weaponized pro
stitutes, to “cull the herd.” These days, thanks to her father, the late King Sovn, the countryside was quieter, the merchants were safer, and Nyxis bore the brunt of the coven’s insanity, rather than Eldrus itself.
“Someone will always lose,” she remembered her father telling her once, when she and her twin, Auster, had been fighting over who had the right to the throne, should King Sovn and their other siblings pass away. “Because someone always has to win.”
That’d stuck with her for a long time, until Edgar got older, and his open mind began to open theirs. He’d always argued to the contrary. Whether or not he’d done it on purpose, he’d adopted the Night Terrors’ idea of balance, except taken one step further, beyond the scales of right and wrong, good and evil. He believed in social justice and the welfare of all. People didn’t have to win or lose; or be one way or the other. He’d believed that people could do good and be good in return—two perfectly balanced scales measuring the exact same thing, yet in completely different forms.
Her father had moved the horrors of Eldrus’ countryside to Nyxis’ streets, and he was praised for it. Looking out the window now, Audra saw his efforts, and more. Gone was the violence, the macabre madness. Stayed, the merchants and caravans did, and then came the vermillion veins. Out of the ground, in brambles and bushes and red swathes, like woods, they’d emerged and settled in this world. And changed the world, or at least this part of it, that was. There was no blood on the air, no discharge of spells stinking up the currents. There were no screams or clashing of iron. Riding the Spine, for her, made each checkpoint—the figurative bumps and depressions—like surmounting ridges into another place, another time. This world was less theirs, more Its. Reformed, refined, and redolent… of hope.
Like waking on an autumn morning to a cool breeze and a cooling sun, it felt right.
Ikto spat a web at Audra’s face.
She dodged it without even taking her eyes off the roadway. The illusion was dispelled, and out of her reverie, she did finally hear something other than the clap of the hooves and the groan of the carriage: Deimos’ screams from the wagon behind them, as the soldiers went to work on him.
The Crossbreed and Bloodless are from the same Deep, Audra thought. God and Its vermillion veins are the same. Everyone’s equal now, Edgar. We’re all losing.
“I love your brother,” Lotus said.
“That’s good someone still does,” Audra snapped back.
“He loves you.”
“He didn’t kill me like the rest of our family. That doesn’t mean he loves me.”
“We all have our ways of showing love.” Lotus bit her lip. “You’re going to try to kill him.”
Audra stared at her, hard.
“That’s love, isn’t it? If you’re saving him from himself.”
Audra shook her head. “Would you let me?”
Lotus glanced at Ikto. “Beside the time Edgar coughed him up, he’s never met his father before. Being Edgar’s son, Ikto has a little more pull than I do with the Arachne.”
“What do you want from him?” Audra asked.
“Representation for my people,” Ikto said, each word a slippery hiss of syllables. “Answers, for their slaughter on the Divide.”
Grinning, Audra said, “I’m sure it was all part of God’s plan. I wouldn’t get your panties in a bunch.”
Ikto spit out a loogie of webbing.
It narrowly missed Audra, and what little splashed on her shoulder, she wiped off with a smile.
“I love it,” Lotus said. “Fighting like family, already.”
The carriage hit a bump in the road. They each jerked and bounced in their seats. Up front, the horses whinnied. A heavy crack of the whip later, and the horses picked up the pace again. Then, Audra heard screams. They weren’t Deimos’, but someone else’s, and that’s when she realized the driver had run someone over.
“Always someone in the way on the road to progress,” Lotus said.
Taking a page out of Ikto’s book, Audra lobbed a glob of spit at her face. It hit her right on the cheek, white and yellowed with snot, like an egg. Lotus took her time wiping it off, and when it was on her fingers, she shoved them into her mouth, and ate it.
“That’s what I love your brother. That’s why I’m going to marry him. Not for land or titles or coin, but because he’s done what no one else could. He doesn’t let the ghost chase him. He embraces it.”
Audra had a garden nobody knew about. The shadows tended it when she couldn’t. Retreating into the soft soil of her mind, she could see its image there. Dark, vaporous coils covered in thorns, reaching up to desert light. Bulbs covered in orangish etchings that were, in fact, gateways from a place the shadows called Exuviae. That’s where they’d found the knowledge to unlock the potential inside themselves. Their own hell had become so much like Hell itself, that Hell had found them. It gave them gifts, and they’d given that same gift to Audra. When the time came, she’d open it, and share in it with her brother. Someone always had to lose; after having lost everything, at this point, Audra couldn’t help but win.
The words of God ripped through Audra. She recoiled.
Ikto came out of his web, but Lotus held him back.
Its message was becoming clearer. She could almost make sense of the words. And for the first time, she felt emotion in Its voice. And in Its voice…
There was trepidation.
CHAPTER XXI
Adelyn had always stressed to Vrana the importance of being a healer. She’d done her best over the years to teach her daughter how to name, identify, classify, and administer plants for a curative purpose. Most of the time, it was like pulling teeth. Vrana’s interests, from the time she could walk until the moment she walked out of Caldera to kill the Cruel Mother, had lain in the study of hurting and all the instruments that caused it. The only plants that she’d shown any attention towards were the mythological ones, like the Crossbreed, the Bloodless, and the Shadow Bladder. They were mysterious and dangerous, and far more seductive than the ochre stalks of Reprieve, the white coils of Solace, or the yellow-coated petals of the antibiotic Purity.
Back then, Vrana had thought all those lessons with her mother in the garden and the basement were torture. She could recount counting the seconds until she was able to get back to the sparring yard, watch the watchers come home from their hunts, or bug the crap out of Bjørn while he busted out another piece of weaponry. Her mother had seemed so lame.
She didn’t understand Adelyn’s efforts then, but she did now. It was one of those life lessons that don’t make much sense, until you’re picking out which flowers to leave atop your friend’s grave. Those rare, wrenching moments that exist outside of everything, as if time had plucked them like beads from a string and set them aside, away from noise and expectation. These moments can’t be changed, merely observed. They are molds, finally cooled after a lifetime of shaping. They do not bend or break or accommodate.
This realization hit Vrana the hardest when she laid R’lyeh’s dead body down in the center of the dead village of Alluvia. Adelyn had feared the Night Terrors’ past as flesh fiends and the Blue Worm’s assistance in her fertilization would awaken a bloodlust in Vrana that should’ve been bred out. Every step of the way, putting aside her own hunger for battle and danger, Adelyn had tried to steer Vrana clear of hurting. She’d given her plants in the place of weapons, the ability to heal instead of maim. The world and the people in it could be rehabilitated, not raptured.
With handfuls of the ashen flowers, Serenity, and the aquamarine ivies, Silence, the irony was not lost on Vrana. She spread the plants over R’lyeh’s body, the same way her mother had for the wounded after Pain’s attack on Caldera. You couldn’t heal the dead. Everyone knew that. But that’s what it felt like she was doing, putting Serenity, an analgesic, and Silence, an anesthetic, on R’lyeh’s corpse. It was like she was prepping her for surgery. Take two. Count back from ten. Close your eyes, and when you open them again, it will be as if it were
all a dream.
Vrana went to her knees and built up the dirt around R’lyeh’s body. The Earth would be the last bed she, or anyone else, would ever rest in. The rest was much needed for the girl who’d been through so much, and who’d gone through a little more on the Skeleton’s behalf with all the importance of an afterthought; because, after all, that shell in the Keep had only been her afterimage. R’lyeh had died the day Penance’s soldiers came to Alluvia. Everything afterwards had been just that: an afterwards.
Standing, Vrana evened out R’lyeh’s earthen shroud. She fiddled with the tentacles of her octopus mask, which she didn’t wear but kept over her chest. Her face was just as important as her disguise; neither one should hide the other.
Taking out the Red Worm’s necklace, she opened R’lyeh’s mouth, lowered the jewelry in until it hit the back of her throat, and closed her jaws. The Skeleton was right. She should have it. No one else deserved it as much as her. Someone might find it one day, when the little girl was nothing but bones amongst the grass, and try to summon the Red Worm once more, but in the end, objects of the Worms of the Earth would always be found. It was better for them to be discovered and discarded as useless trinkets, than on someone like her, fighting tooth and nail to stop anyone else from getting their hands on it. Sometimes, the best way to protect something was to make it unremarkable.
Vrana took a step back. She put R’lyeh’s grave in frame with Alluvia behind her and was pleased to find she fit. The empty village belonged to no one anymore. Grass grew where it willed. Trees obscured houses. Stuck for the longest in the deepest depths of Death’s shadow, it struck Vrana how green the village had become; how brightly it shone beneath the sun. There were no vermillion veins here, nor flesh fiends. Eldrus and Penance had not yet claimed the place, and the Scavengers hadn’t bothered to make the trip. For now, it was untouched, unspoiled. For now, it would be R’lyeh’s heaven, until a better one came about.