Mourning Cloak

by Rabia Gale

  And the Garguants are upon her.

  She should’ve have practiced. She should’ve waited. She may have the better armor but not the experience. Hurry up, Flutter!

  And then it begins, deep in my belly, that acid churning, that roiling as tissues and nerves and veins are twisted and torn. The cloth wrapping of my bands disintegrates into ash. The metal itself is coated with chromatic salts, but Flutter’s there too. It dissolves into my skin.

  My torso and abdomen are a furnace, a factory of parts and pistons. I become the armor, not merely coated in it. Different from Sera’s silvery shell and her fancy weaponry.

  Gates and golems, Dark Masters and Seeings, be consigned to the nine hells. Sera’s my wife.

  She needs my help.

  I bellow as I push off the slab and the sound of it echoes off the rocky walls and reverberates in the valley. My transformation is not complete and my armor cannot fly, but there is power in my roar and strength in my heel driving into rock. The eerie men Sera set to guard me—just a pair of them—spring up on my periphery. My enhanced vision notes them, my hands flick out and catch their electric whips in mid-arc.

  The current jolts into me and the spiders redirect it into the furnace in my belly, my fuel source, the thing that powers my transformation. I pull, without breaking stride, and the eerie men fly into each other behind me. I drop their whips before I hear the smack of flesh meeting flesh.

  I barely touch the ground, moving like a skater on ice. I bound over boulders I’d have to clamber across in my unarmored body.

  My sword leaps into my hand, molds itself to my grip. Sera disdained it as old and obsolete, but she has never known what it felt like to be part of this triumvirate of sword, armor, and me.

  I reach the battlefield, bull past the graceful knife-dance of night walkers and scatter cobble crunchers with every step. I bugle a challenge to the knot of Garguants above. They note me, but before they can swoop and pin me to the ground with claws and beak, I leap high into the air and catch myself on wings and talons. Right into their midst, where their longer reach is not an advantage, the place where Sera didn’t dare come.

  It was never my way to dance at the edges. I close in. I attack. I face the Garguants head on and take them by the throat.

  I throw one down, and latch myself to another. My sword stabs and slashes. Greenish blood spatters my visor. The spiders are on it—translucent and crawling, they wipe the smear clean, absorb the blood as they scuttle back into my body.

  The flesh and blood of my enemies is, literally, fuel and food for me.

  Sera’s right. They need to die, the golems and the Garguants, these mindless defenders of Tau Marai, these ravagers of the southern lands. Once they’re gone, Sera will see I’m on her side. Will listen to me. Will agree the gates need to stay shut.

  This time I don’t hold back. This time I let it go. This time I give myself up to the transformation. I get stronger and faster and more accurate. Bone and muscle and tendon turn to steel and cable and spun glass. Sparks replace brain signals. Light flashes through me and every part of me responds to that blinding, brilliant pace.

  I dismember a Garguant, turn and catch another’s claw on my arm. If I had been bone and flesh, I’d have broken, but I’m not.

  I’m Transformed.

  The Garguant I stand upon dives and twists, throwing me off its back. I ram my sword through its exposed underbelly as we fall, then wrench it loose, spinning away. The Garguant’s body smashes to the ground, scatters stone, raises dust. I catch myself on stiffened ankles, but even so my feet drive several inches through rock. I leave indentations as I stagger out from the impact zone. My sword flies out, reflexively, and stabs at an oncoming Garguant. I follow up the thrust with a bone-crushing punch that hurls the Garguant into the canyon wall.

  Numbers fly past my vision and for once, they make sense. Great Taurin, I understand the equations of velocity and force and angles.

  The spiders have taken over my mind.

  The Garguants come at me and I stand in their midst, a widening circle of their blood and flesh around me. I laugh, and a thunderous sound, deeper than I’d ever made, comes from my chest.

  The last desperate bird-creature dies at my feet, its wings shredded, its head slammed to pulp. Acid covers my armor and as I shake blood from my sword, an intense brightness catches my eye. I cringe away as it overloads my senses. My visor darkens. Glowing green numbers flicker and count at ballistic speed down the sides.

  It’s Sera. Sera at the gates, glowing. Her armor’s attached to the gate at her torso, her back and head are arched away. Her wings are gone, sucked down into the rippling flow of her armor. I watch in horror as the alloy pulls from her body and toward the gates. The brightness of their joining is almost too much for me.

  “Sera, no!” My words echo weirdly back at me. I start to run, but the ground has turned to sludge, to hardening concrete. Sera’s form—arched back, legs and arms dangling, head thrown back—is etched pitch-black against the glow.

  And then her armor erupts in a flare of light and she’s gone.

  Dissolved into light. Vaporized into pieces so small that they’ve spiraled away.

  I’m still moving, though there’s nothing left of her.

  And the gates are opening.

  I plow through the remnants of Sera’s army. Eerie men, exhausted and trembling, still try to stop me. A mourning cloak shrieks and dissolves as I clip her wing, cobble crunchers scamper into cracks and among boulders. The space in front of the gates is clear, a half-circle of bare rock, dusted with fine ash.

  Bits of those creatures unfortunate enough to be caught in the blast. Bits of Sera.

  My belly is made of iron now, or else I’d have to retch at that thought.

  The gates swing outward, slow but inexorable, on noiseless hinges. The gap between them is still narrower than a man when I reach them. I throw myself at the doors, grab each edge and try to force them back together.

  On the other side, through the crack, I see shadows. Despair. Rot. Death. Demon spawn. Every emotion, every experience, every entity taken and twisted and broken into something so awful and dark that even my mechanized body and glass-and-electric mind quake at the sight.

  Flutter is right. The city is a prison. A prison for things so terrible that a sob wrenches through my lips as I struggle with the gates.

  They halt, momentarily. I strain so hard that things pop and hiss inside me. The doors bite into my hand, then swing out once more. Inch by inch, they push me back, my feet leaving furrows in the rock.

  The creatures imprisoned within Tau Marai have noticed. Their malevolent attention focuses on me and the means of their escape. Their desire bludgeons me with its intensity, its craving for release.

  The desire to once more walk the world and wreak terror upon it.

  Sera died for what she believed was right. Surely I can do no less.

  There is one last step of the transformation, the point beyond which there is no returning. I can let the spiders consume me completely, like they did Sera. Let them turn my flesh into energy.

  Sera’s transformation opened the gates. Let mine close them.

  Flutter. Even now, I’m afraid. Afraid to die alone.

  Her presence, alien and cool, papery and fragile as a moth’s, brushes against me. I’m here. I’ll help you.

  I’m on my knees, and my arms are hyper-extended, screaming under the stress. No, leave me, now, Flutter! You won’t survive this!

  Monsters unknown to any mortal nightmares race toward me. Toward the gap. Toward freedom.

  Stay… keep you… together… I don’t hear her, because I’ve set the spiders lose upon myself. And as my battered arms finally give way, the furnace in my belly becomes a sun. Light flares out all around me, washing out even the abominations in front of me.

  I give myself up to it. The final transformation.

  The spiders don’t notice me, so busy are they cannibalizing Kato’s body. I burst out o
f my hiding place, pull myself together, and break for the outside. Out to Kato’s skin, to that armor plating now turned white-hot and shredding off him in layers. Out for the open.

  There’s matter here that isn’t Kato, isn’t sentient, isn’t a consciousness. The gates. His hands are fused to the gates and they’re made of more than just metal. They’re threaded through with all the building blocks of the world, arrayed in familiar patterns.

  And I see them. With nothing more than a quick prayer, a routine chant, I see them. Clear and shining, each gold strand waiting to be plucked and played. And as Kato burns and flares, turns to lines of energy in tortured flux, I channel gate into him.

  Taurin, let me not be prolonging the agony! Am I just fueling his pain, throwing more wood onto the fire of his anguish? The gates bend and twist under the raw power of his transformation.

  I stretch myself out, a faintly-glimmering thread all the way to where the Kato-essence is curled up. I can’t feel his pain, but the echoes of it reverberate through my particles.

  Control it, Kato, control it! Can he hear me through the burning?

  And then I feel the gates move. Feel his will ripple through the fire-knot that is his body. The gates are soft and malleable; Kato forces them back into place. Each movement of his ravaged body sends a volcano eruption of agony through him. I try to block it, but I’m spread too thin. I reach out a tendril to soothe even some of it away.

  And then a tentacle, made of shadow and acid, spikes and despair, lashes at Kato, through him, and into—

  I…

  Scatter…

  Fleeing…

  I feel Flutter disintegrate. The tentacle shoots through the narrowing gap of the closing gates, smacks me in the chest, slides off and tightens around my wrist.

  It’s almost out. They’re almost out.

  Spiders!

  They know what I want. In another instant, my wrist and my hand turns to light. My spiders, all crowded in that section, vaporize. A shriek, so high that only my enhanced hearing can make it out, pierces through my skull. The tentacle dissolves, like shadows evaporated in the sun. The energy from that burst clangs the gates shut, fuses them together. Seals the demons in.

  I close my eyes against the explosion, but it doesn’t come. There are too few spiders, too little fuel. I twitch and the fire in my belly subsides. Freed from the terrible pressure, my body returns to itself. The armor dissolves back into skin, my organs are flesh again, blood flows in my veins.

  My right hand is gone. My wrist ends in a stump cauterized by the same heat that took off the hand. I feel torn muscles, overextended joints, broken bones. Pain washes over me. Pain in my body, pain in my heart. I’ve lost Sera.

  My body lives, but my soul feels dead.

  Steam rises off the gates. A pale scar of new metal slashes down the inner edges.

  Flutter lies not far from me, a sprawled mess of hair and wing and pale skin. She twitches uncontrollably, fading in and out of existence. As I crawl toward her, her edges dissolve into the ground. She’s leaking away.

  “Flutter,” I call, hunching over her. I can’t touch her; I can barely move my own arms.

  Instead, I whisper the only things that can call her back. The Invocations. The Chants. The prayers. I say them over and over, in a ragged voice, my head sinking lower and lower until it almost touches her chest, till I’m almost dissolving into her now-here-now-not body.

  “Lalita vey. Itauri dia itauri. Eilendi dia eilendi.” Taurin’s child to Taurin’s child.

  One broken being to another broken being. One sick heart to another sick heart.

  Flutter. I need you to live.

  She wakes in the cooling twilight, the land softened by bluish shadows.

  I lift my head and she’s looking at me. Her eyes are not quite human, but not quite mourning cloak either. There are whites, but there’s something crystalline about the dark of her irises.

  The rustles and whimpers of Sera’s bewildered, hurting army fill the air. They stay away, have stayed away all the bitter afternoon. Something must be done about them.

  By me, I think, with weariness. But there is Toro to ask, if I can reach him, and now I have Flutter back.

  I wait for her to speak.

  “Why did you save me?” she asks.

  “Why did you save me?” I counter.

  She doesn’t even think about it. “Because you are worth saving.”

  And I say, “So are you.”

  Author’s Note

  This story owes its existence to a butterfly.

  On a family hike one May, we saw dozens of lovely, unknown butterflies. They had dark wings, with bluish spots and cream edging. Being the kind of person who carries an Audubon field guide to every encounter with nature, I looked them up.

  They were mourning cloaks, and my muse insisted that there was a story in the name.

  My muse was right.

  Butterflies inspired Mourning Cloak, but other people also had a hand in shaping it. Many thanks go out to Jo Anderton and Robin Cornett for offering comments. Thanks also to Ravven for creating the perfect cover image for Flutter, an arguably difficult character to portray. Kellie Sheridan set up the cover reveal, got ARCs into the hands of reviewers, and organized a blog tour—all things I'm very grateful for.

  Most of all, this book is for my husband, David, for his technical and moral support, and for our children, who leave us laughing, crying, wondering, shocked, delighted, frustrated—but never bored.

  About the Author

  I break fairy tales and fuse fantasy and science fiction. I love to write about embattled heroes who never give up, transformation and redemption, and things from outer space. In my spare time, I read, doodle, eat chocolate, avoid housework, and homeschool my three children.

  A native of Pakistan, I grew up in hot, humid Karachi. I then spent almost a decade in Northern New England where I learned to love fall, tolerate snow, and be snobbish about maple syrup and sweet corn. I now live in Northern Virginia.

  Visit me online at http://www.rabiagale.com or follow me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/rabiagale. I love hearing from readers!

  If you enjoyed this story, please consider mentioning it on Twitter or Facebook, or reviewing it on your blog, Goodreads, or the site you got it from. Thanks!

  More Books by Rabia Gale

  Rainbird

  She’s a half-breed in hiding.

  Rainbird never belonged. To one race, she’s chattel. To the other, she’s an abomination that should never have existed.

  She lives on the sunway.

  High above the ground, Rainbird is safe, as long as she does her job, keeps her head down, and never ever draws attention to herself.

  But one act of sabotage is about to change everything.

  For Rainbird. And for her world.

  Rainbird is a fantasy novella of about 31,000 words.

  Shattered

  Once upon a time, stories ended happily ever after. Or did they? What if the magic mirror couldn't decide on the fairest of them all? What if Beauty's kiss didn't break the curse? What if choosing a bride based on her shoe size was a bad idea?

  Shattered: Broken Fairy Tales is a collection of three short stories that take a turn into the dark forest instead of out of it.

  Wired

  A cybernetic Rapunzel in a post-apocalyptic world fights back against the woman who imprisoned her.

  Wired is a short story of about 4600 words.

  Unseen

  A Pakistani girl with a gift for seeing what no one else can incurs the wrath of a supernatural being. A pudgy accountant who sees far more than he wants to is chased by mysterious figures through the gloom of an industrial city. Both encounter what lies beyond the edges of the mundane world.

  Unseen is a collection of two previously published short stories by Rabia Gale.

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  Rabia Gale, Mourning Cloak