Blessed Monsters

by Emily A Duncan

  He found a single black feather, blood staining the tip, and laughed.

  NADEZHDA LAPTEVA

  Nadya didn’t understand Parijahan’s magic, but every blow he tried to land, every claw grasping for her flesh, missed. She didn’t want to take the next step, better to fight him forever.

  Distantly, she knew Serefin had returned, a box in his hands, and it was time. There was only one way to do this. Pelageya had told her that it would hurt him, and he must be separate from Chyrnog for it to cling to him. And he had to want it.

  She caught Malachiasz’s hand, letting his claws dig into her palm. She pulled him closer. She had expected that when Chyrnog finally won, he would take the chaos god, the monster. But instead, he had taken the boy. Fitting, she supposed, as all Malachiasz’s atrocities were done when he looked his most harmless.

  “Dozleyena, Chyrnog,” she said, her voice soft. “It’s time we talked, you and I.”

  A slow smile stretched over Malachiasz’s face, but it wasn’t his. It never reached those haunted, murky eyes.

  “Are you ready, then, for oblivion?”

  Nadya had known oblivion. She had walked amongst the gods. She had died and been reborn. There was nothing this being could do to her that had not already been done. There was nothing she had not already lost.

  “Your power grows with each passing moment, but it’s not enough, is it? There are so many gods who would fight you. Willful, cruel beings who still recognize when one means true harm. You want me because I am all you are not. You are nothing but a sad glimmer of darkness in eternity.”

  “I am everything,” Chyrnog snapped.

  “Are you? You were locked away once, you can be locked away again.” Nadya grinned.

  She jerked him closer, slamming her hand against Malachiasz’s forehead and diving deep. If only she had known, when she had carved into his palm, what she would be creating. A way to know what was him, what wasn’t, a way to yank hard at the void Chyrnog clung to and separate it from Malachiasz.

  She took the relic and stabbed it into Malachiasz’s chest.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” she whispered in his ear at his little gasp of surprise. “I had to.” She twisted the blade a little farther, severing Chyrnog’s hold as much as she could.

  Malachiasz fell to his knees. Nadya knelt with him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Serefin?” she called, beseeching.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder. He fumbled with the box, opening it, revealing a single black feather. She let out a helpless laugh.

  “Always a Vulture at heart,” she whispered. She took the feather and pressed it past his lips, and pulled the blade from his chest, holding her palm over the wound as it bled.

  Another hand landed over hers. Brown skin and careful, long fingers. He shouldn’t be here. Rashid furrowed his brow, flowers blooming from his fingertips.

  “No, he has to die,” she said. “He has to die for it to work.”

  “Nadya?” Malachiasz’s voice, soft and weak.

  “Malachiasz.” She took his face between her hands. “Twice death-touched boy, this will work. Please trust me.”

  Serefin made a strange sound from behind them. Nadya glanced over her shoulder. There was an odd red light emanating from within the temple. Her vision split jarringly. The temple was a clearing—that horrible clearing—the altar in the center soaked with blood. Malachiasz let out a long, pained breath through his teeth and struggled to rise.

  “No, no, no,” she said, trying to keep him in place. Not the clearing. Not the place that had stripped him of his humanity and showed him as he truly was. Keep him here, keep him safe, set him free. “You’ll die for good.”

  He pushed past her hand on his chest, kissing her. His lips were soft against hers, leaving an ache that nestled beneath her ribs.

  “Maybe it’s time for that,” he whispered.

  “What? No.” She tried to cling to him, but trembling and bleeding, he stood and moved away from her. He gently pressed his lips against Rashid’s temple. He rested his forehead against Serefin’s and gave a sad smile.

  He’s saying goodbye, Nadya thought, horrified.

  He cupped Parijahan’s cheek in his hand. She knocked it off, shaking her head, saying something, but Nadya couldn’t hear past the rushing in her ears. Malachiasz stepped into the temple.

  “No,” Nadya breathed, getting to her feet. “This is not the time to be a hero.”

  Serefin closed his eye. “I can’t believe I’m about to do this.” And with a muttered curse, he followed.

  It was the clearing. It was that clearing and those statues and every dead and living god and they would all be unraveled. This would kill them.

  Parijahan glanced over her shoulder at Nadya and Rashid, and without another word, she went, too.

  Nadya didn’t let herself think about how she would be destroyed by this. She ran into the temple and let herself be devoured.

  48

  MALACHIASZ CZECHOWICZ

  Spiders poured from underneath Sofka’s door.

  —Fragment from the personal journals of Lev Milekhin

  “He’s torn free from you.”

  Malachiasz opened his eyes slowly, the light blinding. He winced, expecting his flesh to burn, but there was nothing. He sat up slowly.

  He was still in the temple. Snow covered the floor, but it was less a home for nightmares, and more like a place where there had been worship, once. Cool stone walls, an altar of polished marble, no blood anywhere.

  “Does that mean I’m dead?” he asked. He didn’t recognize this voice. It was warmer, less painful than Chyrnog. No damned singing.

  “More or less.”

  “It’s final, this time?” he asked, uncertain. He tilted his gaze upward to find a dark sky scattered with millions of stars. His breath caught in his throat.

  “Oh.”

  “Not my domain, those, and I doubt you really want to talk to the one who controls them.”

  Malachiasz glanced over, instantly recoiling.

  The figure had been impaled on countless spears and swords. He hunched over the weight of them, clearly once tall and proud, but no more. His face was impossible for Malachiasz to make out.

  “That you can see me at all means you’ve not much humanity left.”

  Malachiasz felt different. Anxious and thrilled and impossibly sad. There had always been a hole where his heart had been, but the void was a little less all-consuming now.

  He’d gotten his soul back, whatever that meant.

  “What’s your name?” Malachiasz asked.

  “Veceslav.”

  He recognized that name. But why? His bewilderment must have shown.

  “I am fond of the cleric. I have agreed to do one thing for her, though I don’t particularly wish to. But Chyrnog is free, and after he razes your world to ashes, he will turn to ours. Call it self-preservation. I give you a choice.”

  Nadya’s voice had always been fonder when she spoke of this god than Marzenya.

  “I don’t understand,” he said with a frown.

  “I was warned that working with a Tranavian would be particularly tedious…”

  “You’ve killed so many of my people,” Malachiasz said, crossing his legs underneath him.

  “Vulture, how many have you destroyed in your quest for knowledge?”

  Malachiasz didn’t have a number, but he knew the toll was high.

  “You’re the god of war,” he said.

  “I am. And you can claim that divinity you want so badly. Be like me. Godling that you are, it’s but a short step higher.”

  Malachiasz got to his feet. “What are you saying?”

  “Your mortal logic was flawed, but your path was right. It’s simply a matter of seeing it to its end.”

  He could do it? He could have the power to finally stop this? He had worked so hard and sacrificed so much and to know that it was only inches away, that he could finally have what he’d been looking for—
<
br />   But … was that what he was looking for? He had plotted the king’s death and that ritual because the king had wanted the power of a god and Malachiasz knew it would be better served in his hands. But the power of a god untempered by mortality? That was a very different thing.

  But he could put an end to Chyrnog. He could fix everything. He could bring peace.

  “Ah, an easy choice, then.”

  Malachiasz almost agreed, greedy for an end point to his years of research. Greedy for an end to all of this.

  He hesitated. “What is the other choice?”

  “Mortality,” Veceslav said with a shrug. “But mortality with my implicit touch.”

  Malachiasz recoiled. He couldn’t live like this forever, with his will constantly smothered.

  “I have no interest in consuming you,” Veceslav said. “I have little interest in you at all. I claimed a mortal once, and it ended badly, and I can’t imagine it won’t end badly here. But Nadezhda has asked that I offer, and so I am. Godstouched once is godstouched forever and if you succeed against Chyrnog you will leave yourself open to other horrors.”

  Malachiasz shook his head. “I tried to destroy all of you.”

  “You weren’t the first, you won’t be the last.”

  He pressed a hand against his chest. “What will happen to me?”

  Veceslav was unmoved. If he’d had a face, he might have lifted an eyebrow.

  Malachiasz said, his voice very small, “I don’t want to lose myself anymore.”

  “Anything you have done to yourself is your burden to bear. The chaos, the loss of control. If you were to take the next steps, I can’t tell you what might happen.”

  “But if I choose mortality, that’s it?”

  “You won’t have those vast swells of power you desire. You will keep what you stole, to take that away would be to rend time. The world is already crumbling from the rending that Marzenya had Nadezhda do. It will not survive another. Will you sacrifice those golden ideals of yours, to live? Or will you shed the final bonds holding you back?”

  Malachiasz didn’t know. “What if I don’t choose either path?”

  “Death.”

  Malachiasz didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. He wanted to take Nadya to Tranavia when there was finally peace and show her how beautiful his country could be. It wasn’t all monsters and swamps and blood, though that made up its beating heart and he loved that, too.

  But Malachiasz had worked so hard. He had bled and struggled to keep Tranavia out of the sway of the gods. Would he toss that aside? For what?

  Was life truly worth it?

  49

  SEREFIN MELESKI

  Valyashreva waits to rake her plague back over the land. One misstep and she will consume us all. There is no record of her death or containment.

  —The Volokhtaznikon

  Oh, I’ve been here before. Snow and ash and bloody footprints and songs and music and moths and stars. Serefin knew this place. He had never wanted to return.

  “Dead again?”

  “Dead again!” Velyos said. “It’s becoming almost comical!”

  “Huh.” Serefin had known following Malachiasz into that temple was a bad idea, but he hadn’t expected it to be that bad. “Well, that’s less than ideal.”

  “Walk with me,” Velyos said amiably, and Serefin, who had resisted this god—not a god—for so long, fell in step beside him. The tall cloaked figure with his deer skull head.

  “You chose to cross over by going into that temple,” Velyos said.

  “Ah.”

  “Thought you might like that cleared up.”

  “So, Malachiasz is dead as well?”

  “Oh, most likely. He’ll have a choice just as you’ll have a choice. Let’s make it a lofty one. One of big ideals and kingly necessity. Barely a king, you are, but it’s never too early or too late to start making the messy decisions.”

  Serefin didn’t like the sound of that at all.

  “There were four songs and I wanted all four songs; it would have been so easy with four songs. A quick break, for me, for those locked away, but perhaps not for Chyrnog, but who can say, I can’t see the future! I can only guess and predict how you predictable mortals will act. And you do always seem to act as I suspect.”

  “There need to be four of us to bind Chyrnog back into the earth,” Serefin said.

  “That will be more difficult now that he’s broken free of the boy.”

  That hit Serefin like a punch to the stomach. Somehow it had felt survivable when the old god was locked inside his brother’s head. Even when he thought about giving up, Malachiasz was still fighting. Serefin hadn’t had, well, hope exactly, but he’d thought maybe they would have a chance.

  “What will happen?” Serefin asked softly.

  “Why ask when you already know? Those friends of yours will be the first to go.”

  Kacper. Serefin’s heart clenched. No, he told Kacper he was going to return. He wasn’t going to die.

  He was … already dead.

  “Then, the rest of the world! And the next one! The gods will fall, Alena will be eaten, and the sun will go dark! Chyrnog will finally have the total destruction that has been his due since the beginning of time.”

  Serefin closed his eye. “What is my choice?”

  “Do you want the power to stop the old god? Stop all of this in its tracks?”

  Serefin froze.

  Velyos walked a few paces more before he looked back. “Seemed a simple enough statement. Are you denser than I thought?” The skull tilted.

  Finish … everything? Have the power to save his kingdom? It was too much, too good, it was …

  “What would that entail?”

  “Ah, ah.” Velyos tapped a spindly finger against the side of his skull. “That’s not the way this works. You have two paths and must choose the one to walk.”

  Serefin didn’t trust the gods. That he would be given the means to stop Chyrnog didn’t seem possible. As sweet as it sounded, as good as it seemed.

  He wanted to know with utter certainty that Kacper was safe. That Ostyia and Żaneta were safe. That he might go to Katya’s father and entreat him to begin the arduous process of coming together with Serefin to prepare a peace treaty. He wanted to know that his kingdom would have peace in his lifetime.

  He had seen so much death.

  He had killed so many.

  It wasn’t something that he ever truly allowed himself to dwell on, because he knew if he did, he would drown in it.

  Could Tranavia have a king like him? One so stained with blood? One who was battered with the echoes of the front every single day? One who woke each night from the death of a friend being played out in his nightmares? This would be how he lived for the rest of his life. Serefin Meleski of the scars and trauma and decorated military jacket.

  Was it an impossible choice, truly? How much he would love to wipe away everything he had done and everything he still had to account for; how easy it would be to turn the world away from the wartime sins of his people.

  How thrilling to be the one to finally stop this damn war on sheer power alone.

  But he didn’t like the catch that he didn’t know. The gods would ask for something in return that he would not want to give.

  Serefin shook his head. “No,” he said softly. “I want to stay me.”

  “You, godstouched, with your moths and stars and broken mind?” Velyos asked skeptically. “That could be fixed, easily. Your eye, too. You’ve kept such good track of it. We know exactly where to fetch it from.”

  Oh, it was tempting. But he didn’t know who he was without the scarred mess. Without the war trauma and the nightmares. They had been with him for so long, they were part of him. And that was trite, it was cavalier, but he couldn’t imagine a reality for himself like the one Velyos was describing.

  “If you choose the mortal path, it is very likely that everyone you love will die,” Velyos warned.

  “Likely,” Serefin
repeated. “But not a guarantee?”

  “Nothing in your world or mine is truly a guarantee,” Velyos replied.

  Serefin nodded slowly. “Then we fight back. Mortal and broken, as we are.”

  “Very well,” he said. “What a choice you have made.” And Serefin could have sworn that, somehow, Velyos was smiling.

  interlude vii

  PARIJAHAN SIROOSI

  “I’m not playing this game with you,” Parijahan said.

  She was quite tired of being toyed with by these Kalyazi gods. She had followed Malachiasz into this damn temple because she had a role to play in this madness, but she didn’t have to like it.

  “No?”

  She sat cross-legged, her hands folded in her lap. Eyes closed.

  “Do you think you have that kind of power? That you can deny my games?”

  “Who am I talking to?” Parijahan asked, begrudgingly opening her eyes. She closed them again with a shiver.

  The being was amorphous and fluid, a pale featureless mask over its face, talon-tipped wings that looked treacherously sharp instead of arms.

  Parijahan thought it better if she just didn’t see that.

  “My name is Bozidarka.”

  Parijahan inclined her head slightly. “And why is it you’re talking to me? I’m not one of your northerners.”

  “Do you think we only care for those of our territories?”

  “Well, yes.” Parijahan opened her eyes, she couldn’t help it. She winced at the visual assault of the goddess’s appearance. “That’s been the general consensus.”

  “And yet, here you are.”

  Parijahan frowned. She lightly pressed her fingers against her chest, finding no heartbeat. “Am I dead?”

  “What did you think was going to happen?”

  Fair enough. What had she expected? She only knew that she had wanted to help and didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to make this power she supposedly had work; she didn’t know how far Rashid’s magic could go, truly.