by Scott Hale
So Vrana took the woman’s head in her claws and bit it in half until it broke like ripe fruit in her mouth. The taste made her sick, but like her daughter’s death, it had been a quick one, and until Vrana was more powerful, a quick death was the best that she could do for these sad subjects of the Maidens’ rule.
“The neighbors will have a field day tomorrow morning,” Joy said behind Vrana.
Vrana spit out the rest of Flora’s mother and turned. The Witch’s sister stood there in her white satin dress, one hand on her hip, the other pressed to her mouth, as if she were somehow appalled by the scene. A puddle of water was spreading out from under Joy’s bare feet. The Witch and her sister used large bodies of water as a means of entering Earth. Unfortunately for Flora’s family, their village had been built around a lake.
“Let’s go,” Joy said, holding out her hand, “before the baby wakes up.”
It was three in the morning, and the village was already awake for the day. As Joy and Vrana went hand-in-hand from the woods and towards the lake, the villagers poured out of their homes behind them. They converged upon one another, shouting in incomplete sentences about screams and where they might have come from. While Vrana didn’t want to die, she had hoped that someone would see her and Joy. Like the Witch herself, Joy was significantly weakened outside the Void. Vrana couldn’t lay a hand on her, not with the Witch watching and controlling her every action, but maybe if enough people overwhelmed them—
Joy stopped, the lakeshore in view, and flicked her hand. As if slammed into by an invisible wave, Vrana flew off her feet and through the air. She skidded through bushes, bashed against trees; she rolled over, across the ground, a blur of black feathers like an overgrown tumbleweed, until the grass gave way to dirt, and the dirt to water.
Vrana reared back in the lake’s shallows. Joy was still fifteen feet away, casually strolling toward her, flicking her hand this way and that, parting the foliage so that it didn’t sully her dress.
“Slowpoke,” Joy said, smiling. Her hair, a faint yellow fading into white, swished around her face as she accentuated the movement of her hips and chest. Unlike the Witch, who might have been attractive once, Joy was still beautiful, and she knew it. Her problem was the hole between her legs, and the things she tended to push out of it.
Vrana ran the green, moon-infused water over herself, and the lake turned red around her. The village took their drinking water from here; tomorrow, they would be drinking a part of their friends and not even know it.
Joy stepped onto the shore. The water before her began to change, the moonlight it held turning gray and then black. The lakebed, visible here in the shallows, started to breathe. It heaved up and down like an asthmatic chest. Vrana held out her arms to keep her balance. Thick clouds of hot smoke poured out of the vents around her feet. When they reached the surface of the lake, the bubbles popped, leaving behind a foul patch of decay in their wake.
Joy crossed her arms. “Do you think I should go back for the baby? I hate to see it left alone.”
The patches of decay gravitated towards one another. Once touching, they stitched themselves together, forming a dark purple, almost black, net around Vrana’s thighs.
“No,” Vrana said. “You know what Pain will do.”
Joy said, “Yeah, you’re right,” and then finally stepped off the shore. Her white satin dress shot in front of her, creating a path for her feet on which to step. “Our family is growing enough here as it is, isn’t it? I shouldn’t be selfish.”
The decay climbed up Vrana’s leg, getting in between her feathers, filling in her pores. Back on the other side of the lake, torches and tempers flared—the angry accusations loud enough to hear even from the lake. “The Maiden of Pain. Who is the Maiden of Pain?” Such and such had heard this and that. Then self-proclaimed experts would eventually spout nonsense disguised as knowledge; while Doomsayers weighed the scales and salivated at the profits of this new misfortune. Vrana sighed. It was always the same. Promises of revenge, followed by debates on appropriate rituals and tributes. Fear devolving into devotion.
“Sister has more work for you to do back home,” Joy said.
The white fabric slithered forward and then upward until it began to wrap around both Vrana and Joy, like a cocoon. The dress tightened, brought Joy in closer, until her nose was touching Vrana’s beak.
The dark purple decay stopped spreading at Vrana’s stomach. It hardened into a wax. Sinewy strands of light, like a jellyfish’s tentacles, wriggled out of the patches and immediately shot out and into Joy’s body. The Witch and her sister were more than capable of entering and exiting the world on their own, but Vrana needed assistance, and an escort.
Joy sighed as the sinewy strands sucked on her flesh and channeled some of herself into Vrana. “Have you ever breastfed a baby before?” She reached out and squeezed Vrana’s nipple, of which there was little left. “One day, I’m sure,” she said, letting go. “Perhaps you could be our milk maid. Our family will be so large we’ll need all the help we can get.” Joy smiled. “Let’s go, my pet.”
The strands slipped out of Joy. They retracted into the patches of decay on Vrana. When they returned, her body temperature spiked. Her vision began to flicker; with every other flash, the cocoon and the lake gave way to black nothingness and gray Void.
The decay shot up her body to her torso and shoulders. Joy squeezed her fists. The cocoon constricted. The sinewy strands pushed out of the decay into her skin. Now infused with Joy’s power and drawing from a place called the Membrane, the flailing appendages surged forward and turned Vrana inside out.
The lake vanished, and so did Joy. The sinewy light pierced her like spears and carried her off this earthly plane. A moment later, Vrana saw a tunnel of flesh and a yawning Abyss, but she paid them no attention, for she had seen them so many times before. They meant nothing to her, and she meant nothing to them. She was merely passing through to the Void behind it all; that unreachable and unknowable place, forgotten and forlorn.
Wet and raw, her innards exposed, Vrana flew forward until she met gray gloom. The Void swallowed her whole, body and mind, and when it seemed things couldn’t get darker—
—Vrana woke in the Witch’s house, at the foot of the fireplace. Her flesh and feathers were back where they belonged, on the outside rather than in. The silver necklace hung from the mantelpiece, its gem casting a blue light into the hearth. Blue tentacles flailed in the fireplace, feeding off the bones there like flames would a log. Dense, bruise-colored smoke poured off the writhing appendages and filled the crooked chimney above.
Joy had been right. The Witch did have more work for her to do.
Vrana dragged herself across the floorboards to Pain’s bone-forged rocking chair. Using the light from the candles burning in the windows, she searched the house for signs of the sisters.
They weren’t at the table; that long, splintery slab of black wood which was set with dirty plates covered in fuzzy, Void-grown food. Nor were they in the kitchen where cold, hard sheets of flesh hung like laundry left out to dry.
She turned around, looked the opposite way, where the house stretched down a dilapidated hall to unused guest rooms. A few ravens were there, sleeping on the corpse piles that congested the hall. The ravens were the Witch’s new sentries; after Vrana had taken the Ashen Man’s place, the Witch had the millions of flies here replaced with birds, instead. For all her supposed carelessness, the Witch did appear to have some need for consistency. She had even redecorated parts of the Void to make them match the new species scheme, by making the landscape darker, more jagged, like feathers and beaks.
Vrana pushed herself off the ground and came to her feet. She went to the front door, which was closed but unlocked. It rattled in its frame, the wind of the Void rocking the door like it meant to tear it off the hinges. Vrana pressed against the door, slid over to the adjacent wall, and leaned over to look out the nearest window.
The windows were filthy, caked in s
oot and wax and Joy’s excrement. Vrana spit into her claw and palmed the glass until she had a clean spot to see through. The Void waited on the other side, an island of miseries in a sea of shadows. Her eyes darted back and forth between the black hills and gray mountains, the solid rivers and the boiling lakes. Where were they? She looked to the bands of ravens roaming the lowlands, and to the thorny gardens that choked the highlands. Even the plains, that desolate stretch of pale grass and broken pillars, were empty. Where were—
An angry shout shot like a missile across the Void. Vrana’s trauma-trained eyes zeroed-in on the source. There, near the valley, where the Witch kept a visual record of her victims and followers, Pain and Joy floated. They were yelling at one another. Joy had a child in her arms, a baby, most likely the one from Flora’s house. She had gone back for it.
Vrana turned away from the window and scampered over to the fireplace. In the Void, the Witch seldom kept control over Vrana’s mind. Even though she was at the height of her powers in this place, it was still too difficult to maintain dominance over Vrana on a constant basis. And besides, what could Vrana do? There was nowhere to run to, and if she did manage to kill the sisters, they would only be resurrected seconds later. It simply wasn’t worth the hassle.
Vrana went down on her hands and knees. She pressed her head into the fireplace, so that the blue tentacles were inches away from touching her beak. The Witch had finished the ritual of tapping into the Blue Worm’s power, but, without Vrana, she wasn’t able to go any farther. The Witch was capable of entering some people’s minds, but the network that connected the Children of Lacuna was closed to her.
“But not to me,” Vrana whispered. The bruise-colored smoke made her eyes water. “I want to know why that is.”
Vrana shoved her head into the tentacles. They wrapped around her and yanked her downward into the bones they grew out of. She lost her sight, and her thoughts went blank. At this point, she usually let the necklace guide her to a random Lacunan, but not today. Today, she had someone in mind.
Herself.
Show me, she thought. The secret organ in her brain swelled. A grip of agonizing pain closed around her skull. Slow, unfocused images played out across her mindscape. Whether the memories were hers or something else’s, she couldn’t be sure. But there was a reason only she was able to contact the Children, and she had to know why.
A hot spike drove through Vrana’s mind, impaling the new thoughts forming there. The Witch had begun to impose her will on Vrana once more. Any other time, Vrana would have stopped what she was doing immediately, but this was different. She was using the Blue Worm’s abilities to peer inside herself, to control herself. It was a force far greater than the Witch’s. Was this her means to escape? If she could just—
A memory finally came into focus. It was the image she always saw, right before she delved into a Lacunan’s mind. In it, there was a baby girl, Vrana, lying in a field of rust-colored grass, and standing over her was her father, Quentin, in his iguana mask, and her mother, Adelyn, in her raven mask. Mara was there, too, standing next to someone in the shadows; a large person who smelled and kept grunting, as if they were mad about something.
“We were wondering when you would get curious,” a strange voice whispered into her thoughts.
Vrana tried to move the memory, to see who was addressing her, but the memory wasn’t hers to manipulate. Instead, the memory moved on its own. The person’s eyes through which she was experiencing the scene looked down at their feet. There, a mass of blue tentacles throbbed and flopped over one another. Then, the person looked at their hands, which were the color of space—black and pricked with dying light. The memory wasn’t hers at all, but the Blue Worm’s.
“You were too young to remember, so I put this in your head for you to find later,” the Blue Worm said. It lowered its arms and gazed upon baby Vrana. “Did you ever wonder why you would have such strange dreams? Visions of things you couldn’t possibly know? That’s what they were, Vrana. They were visions, from your brothers and sisters and… myself.”
The Blue Worm turned its head, so that it was looking at Vrana’s father. “Your father’s seed was strong.”
An image ripped through the memory like a knife. In a brief, breathtaking second, Vrana saw her father descending naked into a milky pool, while the Blue Worm above him stretched its tentacles outward like a tree.
The image vanished. The Blue Worm then turned to Vrana’s mother and said, “Her eggs were not.”
A second scene forced itself upon the memory. In it, Vrana saw her mother in an empty shack, her legs spread open, pushing a screaming, worm-covered infant out of her vagina. Vrana’s father stood beside her, holding her hand, telling her something that sounded like, “It’s going to be alright. It’s going to be alright.”
The image vanished. The Blue Worm returned its attention to baby Vrana in the red grass. “It was good to see you again. I always liked you.” It laughed. “Did you ever find out what happened to your father?”
Vrana didn’t answer, not in thought or speech. The Witch’s will was driving through her subconscious, trying desperately to shake her from the memory and the Worm’s recollection. She could feel Pain’s hands on her shoulders now, too, tearing out her fathers and bashing the back of her head. Any moment now and she would lose an audience with her creator.
“I’ll show you,” the Blue Worm said, smugly. “It’s not what you were led to believe.”
The memory of baby Vrana in the field dissolved into gray nothingness. Then a third image formed upon that dismal stage, piece by piece, sound by sound. First, there were trees, then the sound of water, the ocean, breaking on a shore. A cliff appeared, followed by the sky. Vrana could hear leaves rustling, and… snarls.
The image wavered. Then Vrana’s father appeared. He was hunched over, drenched in blood; his iguana mask was torn apart and covered in strips of flesh. He howled—was it in pain or ecstasy? She couldn’t be sure—and crumpled to the ground, a massive gout of blood exploding from his back. Then behind him, a second person faded into the scene.
It was Bjørn. He was panting, just as filthy as her father had been. In his hand, he held an ax, the very same he had given Vrana so long ago. A hunk of meat hung off its blade, from the place it had opened Vrana’s father.
Bjørn stepped over her father and raised the ax over his head.
The Witch’s will flayed the scene from Vrana’s memory. In an instant, she was back in the Witch’s home, facedown beside the fireplace, bawling.
“The girl who keeps on giving finally gave too much, eh?” Pain said, grabbing Vrana by the scruff of her neck. “Teach you to disobey me.” She shoved Vrana’s face back into the blue tentacles. “I saw your friend R’lyeh when you delved into Hex, yesterday. Do it again,” she screamed. “Kill R’lyeh, then we’ll see if you disobey me again.”
CHAPTER VI
R’lyeh had a secret she hadn’t shared with anyone yet. It was an experiment that had started a few months ago, after Vrana had been taken, and before R’lyeh had wandered into Gallows for her reunion with the Red Worm. She had spent two weeks in the woods, and during that time, she had accidentally eaten a poisonous plant and been bitten by two venomous snakes. The plants were a deadly strain known as Deathshade, and the snakes a pair of malingas. Either the plant itself or the snakes’ venom should have been enough to kill her, but instead, she just had a bad case of the sweats and a quick, fiery bout of diarrhea.
After that, curiosity crept stranger things into her daily diet. She started to seek out plants and animals to test the limits of her natural immunities. Prior to arriving at Gallows, she put down several blight beetles, a handful of poisonbite berries, and let a few more malingas nibble on her, for good measure. Sweats and shits and maybe a minor hallucination were the only result of this otherwise ill-advised bender.
Now it was dawn, and the barracks were already empty. R’lyeh was free to wake and roam as she willed until called upon; so she wo
ke and roamed her way through the barracks to the staircase that led up to the attic, her hideout. She climbed the steps, while hunger pangs sank their fangs into her growling stomach. The first floor’s stretch of beds and bad smells shrank out of sight. She carried on past the second floor, which was an empty space, one window, and a whole lot of dead mosquitoes. Then, finally, she reached the attic door.
It was supposed to be locked, but Clementine had given her the key. The Skeleton’s wife said a girl like R’lyeh needed a quiet place of her own away from all the men.
She took the key out of her pocket, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. The unfailing smell of must and rat droppings greeted her. Beyond, the attic sat filled with bottles, broken beds, dirtied sheets, and a whole mess of Old World artifacts everyone seemed to have forgotten about. They were things the Marrow Cabal had gutted out of the lower floors back when it was Poe’s tavern.
R’lyeh shut and locked the door behind her. Just like back home in Alluvia, she was easily forgotten, but still, she didn’t want anyone walking in on her during an experiment. And now that she was thinking about Alluvia—most of the time she tried not to—she realized that was where the secret had started. When Derleth the Eel had given her a piece of the Crossbreed, and she helped him plant it in the village’s well to impress him. If the damn plant had just worked on her like it had everyone else, all that had happened, and where she was now… it could have all been ignored… or stopped… or have never happened at—
“Nope, nope, nope,” R’lyeh said to herself. “We’re having a good day today.”
R’lyeh crept through the attic. She kept most of her personal belongings at the back inside a fort made out of Old World umbrellas, computer towers, and a desk covered in dick drawings. Today, her poison of choice was a thick, gritty liquid known as Thanatos. According to her teachers, Thanatos was found in the discharge of the maggots that roamed the Ossuary, the gigantic desert that swallowed up most of the southern portion of the continent. Thanatos was rare, and Thanatos was deadly; as soon as it came into contact with someone’s bloodstream, they had seconds at best before the poison killed them cold.
