by Scott Hale
Audra had seen enough. “Okay.” She started back towards the portal. “Okay, let’s—”
A torrent of viscous fluids exploded out of the pouch. What it hit, it burned out of existence, the Abyss included. In an instant, the atmosphere was nearly gone, and the ground, what little remained, looked like a puzzle that’d lost most of its pieces.
More gurgling sounded from the pouch.
A stifling dread overtook Audra. How long would the Shadow Bladder be here, unmaking reality? She knew it could do that. Umbra had told her the Warden of the Worm Chamber had cultivated the planet itself, before God found out and stripped it of its autonomy. Erasing was its specialty. It was the vacuous beast to which all positive emotions flowed, for it hijacked them from the Deep’s trespasser. She could only hope the Shadow Bladder, without sustenance, would die soon, before it eliminated existence.
She backpedaled with Deimos, Yelena, and her three soldiers to the portal.
The amber fog bank from the pitchers crashed against the highland on which they stood. What it touched, it melted within its consuming vapors.
Audra heard others going through the portal. But part of her wanted to stay. To see what she’d wrought. Had she doomed them all? Wouldn’t that be fitting? No different than any other day. Third time’s a charm.
But the fog bank was closing in, and the residual vapors of it began to eat at her skin. And then there was Deimos, holding her from behind again; stronger this time, more determined. She gave in, went with him. As the portal closed around her, the final image she saw of the Void was the Shadow Bladder floating above it, and a massive leg, not unlike a spider’s, stretching out of the pouch.
With that imprinted upon her brain, Audra tumbled out of the Void, back into the torture chamber. As her feet cleared the gateway, it sealed up, thunderously.
“Oh fuck,” someone said, and their moment of reprieve was over.
Commander Yelena flew overhead, crashing into the wall, her body twisted up like a used rag.
Audra blinked the grime out of her eyes. She couldn’t believe it, but she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Edgar’s flesh fiend had broken through the wall of the room that’d housed it. What was surprising, though, was that it hadn’t done it sooner. It was far larger than any flesh fiend she’d seen. As wide as two full-grown men, and as heavy as several more. Its skin, too small for its elephantine frame, was stretched thin to the point of ripping, so that it resembled a dirty, tattered blanket. Beneath the flesh, exposed muscle and unset bone. The fiend looked like a newborn that’d been born too early—a harlequin baby that’d tried to kill itself through self-cannibalism.
It was horrible, repulsive, yet somehow… she recognized it.
Holy fuck, she thought. Vincent?
It couldn’t have been Vincent, but this thing… It had her brother’s face. Edgar had killed Vincent, but this flesh fiend…
Oh, no.
It was his offspring. Vincent had a reputation for fucking everything that moved. It’d only been a matter of time until he’d fucked a Night Terror, too. This was his baby, raised on the fertile meat stripped from the Skeleton’s bones.
Audra ran as hard as she could. Vincent’s fiend picked up one of the three remaining soldiers and tore them in half. Entrails splashed and slid across the ground. They caught under Audra’s foot. She slipped.
Before she hit the ground, Deimos caught her and shoved her forward. “Go!” he cried, one arm broken by her brother’s bastard.
Audra held onto one of his fingers. That was the best she could do. She knew what he was doing. Even if she wanted to argue with him, there’d be no point. Deimos was always right. She gave his finger a pathetic squeeze, pressed her chapped lips to his, and hauled ass across the torture chamber.
Digging into the Deep for one last ounce of shadow, she pulled a handful of the damned into her palm and spun, flinging the ball at Vincent’s fiend as she did so. It soared across the torture chamber, whizzing past Deimos. It hit with a splat on the side of the fiend’s distended gut, and went straight through, like a hot knife. It didn’t scream. It just kept coming.
Making it to the door, she beseeched the Deep once more, but not even Umbra answered. She slammed the door shut, locked it. And when she looked up to find Deimos, she found him dead, the fiend towering over him. The Night Terror was smiling.
Audra hurried out of the torture chamber. She could hear the fiend giving chase. She knew the door wouldn’t hold it, but she’d done her part. Now, she had to know. She had to know it’d been worth it. That she’d been worth it.
Something had been wrong. She’d known that twenty minutes ago, and she was sure of it now. The closer Audra drew to the ballroom, the more screaming she heard. And then it wasn’t just screaming but feet, running hard, slipping and screeching on tile; and glass shattering, and tables being overturned.
Rounding the final corner, she saw Edgar’s guests scattering through the keep, some drenched in blood, others holding their own teeth or fingers. Some were naked, their bare bloody asses with flesh fiend prints rising like welts from their reddening cheeks.
Instinctively, she called upon the shadows, but the only answer she got was God’s.
Fuck off, she told It. Fuck. Off.
Audra made it to the ballroom. The doors were flung open. The chandeliers inside were rocking back and forth, slinging waves of light, causing a dizzying strobe effect. She heard commotion inside, and moaning; and panting; and what must’ve been the living statues figuring out what to do with themselves.
I have to know.
Audra hurried into the ballroom. On cue, the chandeliers came to a stop. Out of the candle smoke-filled darkness, Joy descended from the ceiling to the middle of the ballroom. From the hazy edges of the dancefloor, Choir members filed in, going to her like nurslings. There’d been more—bodies here and there, amongst the rich dead and Felix’s power-hungry guard—but now, only five remained.
Eyes adjusted to gray dark, Audra spotted Edgar and Justine at the farthest end atop their pulpits. Commander Millicent stood beneath them, protecting them with, presumably, her life. A few guards remained. The living statues, no worse for wear, were far from the battlefield; perched up like carrion birds by the corpses.
All of a sudden, a door cracked open, and out of it ran Isla. She was… carrying Felix. They slipped out a back entrance.
“You little shit,” Joy said, grinning. “You stupid, little…”
Joy’s words trailed off. She broke eye contact with Audra. The Choir stood alert, like guard dogs, and then, to a sharp din that rang out from nowhere, fell dead at the witch’s feet. Joy was staring at someone else. Someone behind Audra.
Before she could turn around, a moth twice her size walked past. A moth with mottled brown wings and iridescent patches of fur; purple and pink, they were covered in white markings in the shape of skulls and eyes. Her hands were twitching. Four fingers to each, when they moved, they were accompanied by the sounds of slicing.
No one had to tell Audra what she was looking at to know what she was looking at. It was Death. She’d seen Her all her life, in every form and fashion. She was so intensely moving in Her presence, Audra wept, and she could hear the others—Edgar, Millicent, the guards, and even Justine—weeping, too. Unlike God, who, when she saw It, she wanted only to get away from It, she wanted to run to Death. She was drawn to Her, in the way the sea draws you in.
Joy’s hate burned hot in her eyes, like the center of Kistvaen. She raised a fist to Audra, vomited out eldritch words, but nothing happened.
“Heh,” Joy said, staring at her fist. “Well, that’s fine. I managed without the Void in the past.”
She moved towards Audra, the white satin dress leaving a trail of blood in her wake. She didn’t get a few feet before Death had Her arm out, barring her path. Immediately, the witch stopped, and her face turned a new shade of winter.
“Enough is enough,” Death said.
Joy f
aced the moth, her lips curled back.
“I gave a part of myself to form you. I thought it was joy that I gave, but I have no joy to give. Only death. And so tonight—” in Her hand, there was now a single flower—bone white petals, with an icy blue stalk, “—again, death is what I give.”
Staring at the flower, Joy laughed. She shook her head, covered her mouth. Her eyelids fluttered. She lowered her hand, leaned forward, eyes squinted. She started shivering. And now, she, too, was crying.
Death held out Her Dilemma.
Joy grabbed the sides of her white satin dress. She squeezed them, quickening the flow of blood. Glancing around the ballroom, at the corpses of the Choir, she laughed.
To Audra, she asked: “Is it really gone?”
And to Joy, she said: “All of it.”
Joy’s cheek quivered. “Isla?” But Isla was already gone; had abandoned her behind her back. “Edgar?” she cried, but her words fell on deaf ears. Again, she looked to her children, but they were still dead. She was alone.
“Will I see Pain?” she asked, a tremble in her voice.
Death clinked Her blade-like fingers together and said, “Haven’t you seen enough of it already?”
Timid, Joy reached for the flower, but didn’t take it. Inches away from its stalk, she said, “Was I a good mother?”
Death stepped forward, lowered her head, so that her antennae were pressing to Joy’s cheeks and asked, “Was I?”
Joy didn’t answer, nor think. She took one final breath, the first in her life that’d ever mattered, and took the flower, too.
As soon as her hand closed around Death’s Dilemma, hundreds of tiny, childish hands shot out of the dress. They sank their fingers into arms and legs, her neck and shoulders, and face, and started to scratch at her. Their fingers were weak but persistent, and their small nails, not sharp, but enough. They scratched and scratched, until her skin was red and raw. Soon, flesh was broken, and beads of blood were spilt. Joy howled, but she was paralyzed, awake entirely, forced to endure this karmic surgery.
Once the children were past her skin, they became more frantic. They tore into her muscle, jerked veins and arteries out of her body, as if they were weeds. She begged them to stop, and once, they had, too, and since she hadn’t listened, neither would they. They peeled Joy apart, and flung the pieces of her into the ballroom. All across her body, they were hollowing her, handful by handful, as if she were a pumpkin they were carving. She bled gallons, for within, she’d kept the blood of all those she’d slaughtered over the years.
Covered in bone-deep holes, plastered with her own gore, Joy finally collapsed to the ground. The white satin dress pooled around her body, which was moth-eaten in appearance. The tiny, crimson arms slinked back into the fabric, to leave her there. She rasped. She tried to scream, but her voice had given out. Then there was a churning sound, not unlike the Shadow Bladder’s. And all of a sudden, Joy’s body flattened, as her bones were sucked down through her body and expelled between her legs, splitting her vagina apart as her ribcage and skull smashed through. Finally, she’d given birth to the only child she’d ever truly wanted. Herself.
Beside Death now stood two women with leather hats and blond hair that obscured their faces. Both of them had shepherd’s crooks in one hand, and marked-up wrappings in the other.
Death raised Her arms. Joy’s dripping husk of flesh rose off the ground, her white satin dress falling away from it like ash. The shepherds tended to her body, wrapping it with the strange bandages that sparked with every pass. When the witch was completely covered from head to toe, mummified, the shepherds took hold of her, each one hooking a finger into Joy’s empty, flaccid eye sockets, and then disappeared within a nova of ice.
Death remained. She turned towards Audra, this time with another Dilemma in hand. She laid it before her and said, “I can hear It, too.”
Audra touched the side of her head. God’s will was latched onto her brain, like a tumor.
“This is all I can offer You.”
Death crouched and planted the flower in the pile of Her daughter’s bones. Standing, she nodded, closed her wings around herself, and disappeared into dust.
CHAPTER XLIX
It’s hard to take someone’s self-sacrifice seriously when you know they have a giant mosquito buzzing them on in their brain. It wasn’t that Vrana didn’t appreciate what Neksha had done. She did. God, how she did. If he hadn’t wrapped his bindings around the Skeleton, either the Warden would’ve taken the heart; or the Skeleton would’ve lost his shit and unleashed the Black Hour on them, or simply disappeared for good. No, what didn’t sit well with her was why Neksha had done it and who he did it for; and how she found herself sitting here, in the cold and ringing dark of Heaven, creating a backstory for a character in her life that’d never had the chance to develop.
Neksha and his race had been nothing more than pawns, each one taking centuries to move into place on a rigged board. Exuvians cast out from their unhinged homeland, asked to take pride and purpose in glorified slave labor. Had the others even heard Mr. Haemo’s commands? Or was it Neksha alone who’d carried that burden? If he was, he’d engendered his people with trust so that they were willing to be driven to dust for the sake of having a path by which Vrana, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton could tread. Whether it was for a god or to kill the God, all the violence and endless scheming always came back to just that: God. While that might’ve sounded like the opening statement to some edgy teenager’s treatise, it sounded right to her, and it was why she was here in the first place. This was why God had to die.
Vrana sat with the Skeleton and the Maggot at the second archway outside the Worm Chambers. She nursed wounds she’d forgotten were there. Though they were easy prey, the Warden hadn’t followed. It was bound by rigid rules that prevented it from doing so, according to the Maggot. The more Vrana heard about these rules and traditions the Vermillion God imposed, the more she realized it had nothing to do with lore or supernatural tropes. They were simply Its attempts to control, not only Its minions, but also Itself.
Feeling smarted, Vrana shared with the class: “What would happen if God didn’t follow Its rules?”
The Skeleton, leaning against the archway, ensorcelled by his new clothes, didn’t care to hazard a guess. Most of his bones were covered in Neksha’s wrappings. The only exception was his skull, where the bindings that covered his mouth came up around the side of his face at an angle, leaving both his eyes, nose, and the top of his pate untouched. The runes, normally looking like scratchy scribblings, were darker, also; activated.
But the Maggot perked up. “Without order, there’s chaos,” it said, roaming the caverns they’d found themselves in for a way out.
“What if that’s what the Black Hour is? A God that let go. A corpse that won’t stay buried.”
The Maggot gurgled out laughter.
“I could buy that,” the Skeleton said, interested again. He kicked off the archway and went to Vrana. “What’d you feel when you wore the wraps back in the desert?”
“Cold. Kind of like when you sit out under the night sky in fall.” She smiled, because she hadn’t realized it’d actually felt like that until someone had asked. “Why?”
“Itches. Kind of sticky. Hot, too, like a sunburn that’s taken a turn for the worse.” He scratched himself through the bindings. “Hurts like a son of a bitch, truth be told, which… can’t be right. Might be the Abyss, pissed, you know, because I skirted it all this time. Or the Black Hour, trying to get me to take them off, because I can’t actually… hear it anymore.”
That last part drew the Maggot in, the stench of worry spurting out of its folds.
He touched his chest. “I still have it. It’s not that. Probably won’t be long until the Black Hour chews through these bindings. I got to say, though—” he pointed to his skull, “—it’s nice and quiet up here. Wife used to ask what I was thinking about all the time. Used to say nothing. Never believed me. Goddamn how I missed thi
nking about nothing.”
The Maggot considered the Skeleton for a moment, those chevron eyes of its turning into slits, and said, “We’d better be moving. There’s no mumiya left to save you from another freak-out.”
Vrana looked around for the Red Death ax. Shit, she thought. She’d left it back in the Worm Chamber. For a moment, she considered retrieving it. That moment passed.
“It really doesn’t want us to use it on God. The heart, I mean,” the Skeleton said, still patting himself down. “Back there, sensing we were close to finishing this, it did freak out. Hell, I think it was scared.”
“You don’t think that’s because it’s afraid of what Mr. Haemo will do when this is over?” Vrana asked.
“No, it’s got no opinion on the bug. Whatever designs he’s got can’t compare to what we’re doing.”
“You sure?”
The Skeleton said, “No. Don’t matter. We chose our path. Can’t turn back now.”
It was a shortsighted statement, but he was right. They were hammers, pounding the final nails into God’s coffin. There was no stopping, not until It was six feet under. Mr. Haemo? Exuvia? There was nothing they could do but leave them for the sequels to come.
“Remember that you will die,” the Maggot said, out of nowhere.
They both stared at it, and both let out a hearty, “What?”
“It’s a quote. It’s Ruth talking now.”
“Aren’t you always Ruth?” the Skeleton asked.
It ignored the question. “If the Black Hour is God that let go, then making the Vermillion God face that is a reminder that It will die… That they will both die. The Vermillion God is order. It’s an engineer. Maybe It engineered Its own demise in the Black Hour.”