by Hailey Piper
Donna stared down, her expression an emotionless void. Blood had trickled and stained her cheeks, and fresh drops spat down on Monique’s face.
She let them dribble as she climbed onto the bridal chair’s seat. Soft wicker sagged underfoot, but there wasn’t time to be careful. Only four fungal stars remained in their wall, its edges giving way to the distant twinkle of the real thing.
Mimic hunkered at one corner of the table. Her sister-creatures seeped in and out of shadow.
Monique clambered onto the back of the chair, its narrow rim digging into her arches, and leaned against the bottom of the balcony. Her foot’s wound popped open, spilling a fresh red glob down the chair’s legs. She couldn’t keep stable for long. She reached one hand upward.
“Dee, help me,” she said, wincing in pain.
Donna was a statue. “Stronger.”
Her singers bellowed, and the song became a raging river. Every note tore at Monique’s gown, threatening to spill her back onto the table. She groped at the balcony, desperate for a perch to haul herself up. One fingernail pressed hard and snapped off the nail bed, exposing raw flesh to the cool air. Her scream was tiny against the song. Choral voices drowned her out.
“Someone, please.” She looked into every eye.
They didn’t see her, same as they hadn’t seen Phoebe or anyone else they’d sang to pieces. Each either wanted the world that Donna promised or was afraid they’d lose the one they had should the Worm find them wanting; maybe both. Monique’s life was a small price to pay.
She kicked off the bridal seat’s back and sent it clattering to the floor. There was nothing below now to catch her. One hand grasped the railing, but it was slipping. The other slapped at stone, desperate for a perch.
“Donna, you loved me!” she screeched, reaching for a hand.
But there was no hand to hold. Donna’s fingers splayed against the railing. “The Worm is grander than love,” she said. The choir thundered around her. “This is where you belong, Mon Amour.”
Monique’s muscles tugged around her heart. She’d searched for Donna, found her, traveled down here to save her. She didn’t deserve this. Donna didn’t deserve her.
Monique yanked hard, tearing at her shoulder, and hauled herself up. Her free hand clawed at Donna’s face. Overlong nails ripped into skin. Monique was sure it hurt, but still less than Donna’s betrayal. She could never bring Donna so low.
“Ooh!” The Gray Maiden swatted one vicious arm along the balcony and knocked Monique aside.
“Don’t!” Donna shouted, but she was too late.
Monique twisted half-cocked through the air. The throne room spun. Her lower back crashed against a hard, narrow surface with a sickening snap, and she crumpled between the arms of an open seat.
The world blurred. Blackened. Brightened.
She couldn’t pass out. There wasn’t time for sleep anymore, and the song was no longer an eerie lullaby. She tried to stand, but her lower body wouldn’t unbend. The pain in her foot was gone, replaced by strange static. A harsh ache shot through her shoulders and down one arm.
Donna was speaking. “What do you think you’re doing? Get up.”
Monique could move her left arm, having fallen on her right side. Donna’s blood coated her nails. Her right arm stuck out from beneath her. It twisted wrong at the elbow, and jagged bone now protruded from her forearm. She couldn’t move from the icy brass armrest beside it.
Where was she?
“Get up!” Donna shouted.
Monique glanced at the table. Her bridal seat had fallen on its side, one leg having snapped off. Mimic lingered beside it. Behind her, the table stretched to a jagged end, opposite where Monique lay.
This was the head of the table. She had fallen into the Worm’s throne.
The empty place.
It wanted her out. She wasn’t meant to enter as a solid body, only once the song had torn her apart and fed her to it atom by atom, stretched between tortured afterimages. She dug at the throne’s edge with her good hand, but every movement sent ravenous teeth through her nerves. Static filled her spine. She’d have cold fingers on her at any moment, clawing through her thoughts, always present, always needy. She needed to get out.
Yet she remained.
Impossible. The empty place had always dissuaded her. This had to be a mistake.
Mimic approached the table’s head and lay on her side, one arm jutting out, acting as Monique’s mirror. One mistake faced another.
Even the Worm could make a mistake.
Donna’s breath hissed through her teeth. She pointed into the throne room and glared at the Gray Maiden. “Do something! Get her out of there!”
The Gray Maiden glanced over the balcony and then waded through the choir and out the creaking iron doors. Heavy footsteps pounded through unseen corridors.
Mimic’s sister-creatures gathered together, three climbing onto the table’s head, two hunkering beneath its underside. Their eyes shined within their shrouds. Genuine starlight overwhelmed the wall behind the throne.
Mimic reached from the table. She couldn’t penetrate the empty place by force of will, but she seemed to want Monique’s hand. Monique tried to reach but couldn’t. There were no cold fingers at her back, only through her legs. Her spine was broken.
Mimic nestled her head against the table, her gown draping over its edges. It’s okay, she seemed to say. Or maybe that was just what Monique wanted to believe.
Donna looked wild now as she leaned over the balcony, her hair unkempt, her eyes alight with angry fire. “Stop singing!” she shouted. “Stop the summoning! It’s no longer pure!”
A few members of the choir stuttered and broke their notes, but the rest couldn’t stop all at once. Their song seemed to have overtaken them, and their choirmates had to nudge them or press hands over their bloodstained mouths to snuff it out. Even when they’d all stopped, the song’s echo rang through the throne room, a genie unwilling to be bottled once more.
The echoes sang from Mimic’s throat. She was beyond asking questions, and now belted out one arm of the Worm’s universe-piercing melody. Her sister-creatures took up the rest, their throats better-suited than the choir’s to bass, arias, and musical power. Nothing changed in the notes’ eerie dissonance, and yet when they sang, the song became the most beautiful sound Monique had ever heard. Melody and rhythm flowed inside her, filling her even within the empty place the way a song should.
She lifted her head and glanced through the spires of the Worm’s throne at the wall of stars. Distant suns roamed an unknown sky, lost in a wilderness of cold cosmic decay.
Talons scraped at stone as the Gray Maiden squeezed through the throne room doorway where Donna had disappeared once dismissed. “Ooh!” she threatened at the table’s cluster, and then turned to Monique. “Ooh!” Her long fingers reached for the throne.
Monique turned again to Mimic and her sister-creatures. They were bridesmaids at the Worm’s wedding, but never the bride. Monique wouldn’t be the bride either.
The Gray Maiden’s talons slid from empty air, repelled by an unrelenting wall. Monique had seen it a hundred times in Freedom Tunnel, felt it beside her in the night, crossed it in Empire Music Hall, in this room. The Gray Maiden reached again, shoulders hunched up, clearly straining, but no force of will could breach the empty place.
Only a mistake.
It had been a vacuous space awaiting its glorious monster, a pure and empty place fit for a god, but it wasn’t pure or empty anymore. A Monique-shaped drop of blood now corrupted its perfect ocean of stars. No longer wretched purity, it grew beautifully tainted by mortal body and soul.
The last fungal star vanished from the wall. There was no stone behind it, only freezing blackness that punched into the throne room. It had expected purity. Instead it flowed through the throne, around Monique, into what should have been an empty place, but was now her place. She was flesh and bone becoming the stars; she was a constellation that had pretended it was
flesh and bone. Already, she couldn’t tell which came first.
Maybe the difference was a matter of perspective. Starlight hadn’t meant to journey here, but since when did their intent matter? No one ever asked the stars what they wanted.
Her gaze swept across the vastness of infinity and then focused on the Gray Maiden, Mimic, and their sister-creatures. The throne room folded around them. The Gray Maiden stood dwarfed beneath collapsing shadows, a surviving fragment in an unfair universe. How had she ever seemed so tall? Her final “Ooh!” broadened into a foghorn’s scream as cloak and rot and talons sank into dark stone.
The sister-creatures sank behind her, less resistant, finding familiar black glass drinking their hearts and souls. Mimic clasped her hands beneath her head and waited. They were fading musical notes, but their song stuck in Monique’s head.
Table, seats, silver masks, and the Worm’s brass throne crushed against each other until they became a mashed conglomerate between flattening walls. Stone collapsed across patches of glowing fungi. Dust spilled down Monique’s growing shape. She imagined sifting fingers through the debris and learning everything the Sunless Palace had ever seen, but there was no need. This was the end.
The balcony sank beneath her. How had it ever looked so high up? Now Monique reached across its stone railing with ease, where she poured her enormity across the nearest nameless singer. Body and soul snapped beneath her.
One death wasn’t nearly enough. She unfurled across Israel in that same moment, and then another boy, and then the rest of the choir. She reached above them for Bouchard and his fellow onlookers, who had praised genocide and cheered death. Now their faces shriveled into leather and their skulls caved into red-white shrapnel. Their bodies flattened and fused to the palace floor until Monique could no longer tell the difference between blood and stone.
King Donna, the last alive, collapsed on hands and knees. “I swear fealty, great Worm! I’m your—” Her throat snatched her voice. Tears and blood streamed down her face. She sank not deeper into the room, but into herself.
She was too pitiful to crush.
Monique turned from her and burrowed up the palace. Had hours passed since she first came to Empire Music Hall or days? She couldn’t tell anymore—time was now someone else’s problem. The Sunless Palace buckled beneath her, its flower wilting. Someone might escape by crawling through its passages to reach the elevator, but none would worship here again. Graves should be respected, their ghosts left to mourn their lives.
She spilled across the subterranean lake and into the Chamber of Old Time. Shapeless starlight reflected in its black glass. If she still had a face, she didn’t want to see it. She folded the chamber against her, close to her heart. Corene lay dead within; Monique took her, too. The King of the Broken Throne with her pilfered womb sank into stone, fading from a world that was never hers.
There. The last precious treasure.
Monique climbed from the underground. The song that was stuck in her head pierced time itself and opened past, present, and future to her. There were other directions, but she wasn’t ready to travel them yet. A death called to her.
She sang across years—ten, twenty, fifty, she couldn’t tell for certain. They were such small numbers against infinity. She knew only the determined moment she meant to see.
Decades beyond the Sunless Palace’s collapse, Donna slept in a white hospital bed at the center of a gleaming room. Wrinkles and pockmarks coated her skin. Dotted scars traced her forehead and three parallel scars cast stripes down one cheek, the remains of an old wound that her decaying mind could no longer remember. Shining machines clicked and beeped to either side of her bed. One monitor traced her frail heartbeat. Plastic tubes fed painkillers into her bloodstream and oxygen into her wheezing lungs.
A much younger woman sat at her bedside. Monique didn’t know her, but she had been crying. That was fine. She would not be crying much longer.
Beyond the hospital room’s windows, the world burned. Wastelands stretched where forests used to grow, and brackish water flooded once well-traveled neighborhoods. Donna seemed one of the last who would reach old age.
Her heartbeat stuttered. Slowed.
Stopped.
This world held no further purpose. Monique sank deeper through time.
Millennia crumbled into soil around her. She looked ahead to a dying sun, billions of years old, its explosive final fate erasing all traces of Earth and its fellow planets. She remembered Pangaea. Across shadow eons of would-be and never-was, she swam black oceans and forgotten constellations until she found frailty between the stars. It was easier than most anyone would believe, but she thought it made sense.
Most of space was an empty place.
The song that was still caught in her head at last slid out in full force; she began to sing. Notes long unknown to the universe now roared across creation. No mortal creature understood this melody. It burrowed wormlike between dimensions imperceptible to mankind, thinning time and space to a hair, to nothing, the difference between human souls and the black emptiness of space then unknowable even to her.
The song’s bridge became physical, the kind she could cross. And she crossed it, first back 175 million years to unmake a mistake, and then ahead to prevent another.
Fields and forests swept beneath her. Beautiful black cities formed curving mountains in every direction, their ornate spires stretching skyward. They were lived-in flowers, and the world grew in lush violet around them. At the center of the supercontinent stood a palace that honored starlight, and inside, the old kings gathered around a table of black glass. The pregnant seer sat at one end. At the head, an empty brass throne awaited a god.
Monique poured into its vacuous space, nothing present to corrupt her, and her absolute will flooded the table. Never mind what she’d been about to demand. She needed no bride. She needed no daughters.
The grateful seer placed a hand over womb. A nearly-formed daughter might have come to be called a tall lady, Gray Hill, Gray Maiden, names given whether she wanted them or not. Now her mother might name her in her own singing tongue. Someday she might name herself if she pleased.
One of the old kings’ daughters mimicked the seer’s gesture, hand over middle, and the others crooned amusement.
They were all dismissed. Forever. Let the table crack to pieces as if it had never existed. Let the palace stand derelict until its old purpose was forgotten and its people found it a new one. There would be no more altars to starlight, no kingdoms to honor it. The seer’s people might resist such transition after long years of being used to cosmic worship, and the work to change that outlook would be hard and soul-breaking, but the world could do better than a carver.
They would never know their ruin. The sundering of Pangaea was Monique’s secret to keep. She sang a song of healing to hush screams from beyond the stars and those, too, were her secret. Every moment of human existence became nothing worse than a bad dream from which the world was finally awake.
On the far side of the bridge over which she had crossed infinities, reality cracked, and time seeped through its fissures.
Years crushed against each other as if jammed into a too-small container, every era united in death. Ancient magma flooded digital mega-cities. Dinosaurs migrated across Utah salt flats alongside woolly mammoths, and a Jersey radio station played all the hits for Paleozoic fish as they first found land inviting, a swan song for time itself. This Earth hardly knew its own face, its beginning and end slamming against each other and then becoming one. In a single unified moment, Donna’s dream came true—there was a world without hate.
And then there was no Donna, never had been, never would be. White blinding light overtook the skies, a memory of the Big Bang weaving into a premonition of the sun’s supernova. One death undone; a birth unmade to pay for it.
The cosmos shattered into glass shards, and then slivers, and then fading stardust, and a cold, empty nothing surrounded the vicious wound of a murdered univer
se.
A wormhole for the Worm.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Writing requires alone time, but nothing is created in a vacuum, and everything we make is a sum of everything we’ve experienced and everyone we know.
Working with Samantha Kolesnik has been an absolute dream. Sam has been hands-on with this project at every step, a joy to speak with and to work with, and The Worm and His Kings could not have wriggled into a more caring home.
Many thanks go to Karmen Wells for her keen editing, encouraging messages, and attention to detail, and to C.V. Hunt/Squidbar Designs for her haunting cover art. I also want to thank Laurel Hightower for her guidance at many times this year and for always championing me, often by delightful ambush.
There are far too many people to name without knowing I’d miss someone and regret it forever. I have the stellar fortune to have a vast support network of readers, reviewers, and fellow authors. We lift each other up. I have to highlight in special thanks Sara Tantlinger, Lisa Quigley, V. Castro, and Claire Holland for talking me through some monumental tough times and keeping me level when I was crashing through strange days.
I couldn’t write what I write, at least not the way I’ve chosen, if not for every queer author who paved the way ahead of me, and every reader who’s cheered the rainbow. We make none of this happen alone.
Lastly and more than anything, thank you to my darling J, who gave this book its earliest and most merciless feedback and her sincere critical eye, and still has time to give all the love in the world. She makes anything possible.
Hailey Piper is the author of The Possession of Natalie Glasgow, An Invitation to Darkness, and Benny Rose, the Cannibal King.
She is a member of the Horror Writers Association, and her short stories appear in Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, The Arcanist, Tales to Terrify, Monsters Out of the Closet, and Year’s Best Hardcore Horror, Volume 5, among other publications. A trans woman from the haunted woods of New York, she now lives with her wife in Maryland, where together they cast hexes, raise the dead, and summon the elder gods, sometimes all in one night. Find Hailey on Twitter via @HaileyPiperSays or at http://www.haileypiper.com.