by Scott Hale
R’lyeh, sitting up, blanket and pillow in hand: “Where’d you get these?”
“From 2017.” The Skeleton looked over his shoulder and touched his chest. “Go back to bed.”
The Black Hour. Lying back down, she asked, “They’re not tainted, are they?”
“Not any more than anything else you or I touch.”
Fatigue forced another question from her lips: “Do you really want to stop the Vermillion God?”
“Eh?” The Skeleton knitted his boney fingers over his boney knee. “What do you mean?”
“You have the heart of the Black Hour.” R’lyeh bit her lip and pinched her skin to stay awake. “You… traveled to Lacuna with it. Killed the Red Worm. And these—” She pulled up a part of the blanket and pillow, and laughed. “We don’t have to go to the City to kill God.”
“Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“To kill God?”
“To go to the Dead City.”
“No, I’m—”
“You sure? Figured you followed because you had something to prove.”
R’lyeh stopped pinching her skin. The Skeleton was getting her good and pissed. She didn’t need pain to stay awake. “What?” She shot up. “What about you? You could end this now.”
“Doesn’t mean I should. You talked to Clementine plenty. Don’t you know I like to make things complicated?” The Skeleton sighed and shook his head. “Can’t use the heart, not for something like this. Heart’s never been in something living before. It’s shown me things. Spoken to me. The more I use it, the more it’ll use me. Understand? It wants something, and I don’t know what. If I reach into the past for something strong enough to stop God, I think something else might just come through with whatever I bring back.
“Humans stopped the Vermillion God before. What was good enough then should be good enough now. I’ll carry the heart as long as I can, because I can. Besides, it’s freezing—”
It was freezing. R’lyeh could already tell she would be sick in the morning. If her body had stopped hurting, it was only because she was too numb to feel much else.
“—and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to use it to give you something to warm you up. Something small.”
“Thank you,” she said, holding the blanking tightly.
“Yeah.” He grumbled. “Guess I could’ve conjured up a roaring fire, but in the heart, seconds can turn into hours. It was the best I could do.”
“I appreciate it.”
The Skeleton threw his hood over his skull. “I forget what it’s like sometimes, to have skin.”
“Do you miss it?”
“The skin?”
“Yourself.”
“Oh.” He tongued his teeth and gawked at the moon. “I’m the same.”
“Then… why aren’t you with your family?”
“Nothing’s changed. I don’t expect you to know that, not knowing me as long as the others.”
R’lyeh passed out for another half an hour. Then, waking up, as if it were seconds later, she pressed him with: “But you fought so hard—”
The Skeleton stood up. He had a sword now, somehow. His cloak fell from his body and, for the first time in a long time, she saw him unraveled. He was all bones, that part of him hadn’t changed. But now the dark growths spreading from the Black Hour’s heart had covered his entire ribcage, and a portion of his pelvis. At this rate, if he waited long enough, there wouldn’t be anything left of the Skeleton, or the remnants of the man once called Atticus.
“I’m s-sorry,” R’lyeh stuttered. “I… I—”
His hands became claws. Against the white moon, the blackening Skeleton was demonic. “Why aren’t you with your friend Vrana? What happened to saving her? You aren’t going to find her here.”
“Fuck you,” R’lyeh said through her teeth. “I know that. I just—”
“Needed to get away?”
“Yeah.”
The Skeleton picked up his cloak and put it back on. “Going to the Dead City isn’t for anyone but myself.”
R’lyeh sniffled her nose, said, “Me, too.”
“I gave everything to get my family back.” The Skeleton’s voice quivered. “And now I come up with every excuse I can to get away from them.”
“Yeah.” R’lyeh wiped her eyes. “I don’t think Vrana would like who I am.”
“Clementine and Will like me plenty the way I am,” the Skeleton said. “That’s the problem.”
“I don’t know who I am,” R’lyeh said, lying down.
“You’re thirteen. You’re not supposed to.” The Skeleton wandered over and looked down on her. “What’s my excuse?”
R’lyeh woke at dawn to a small fire and two skinned rabbits that had been roasted over it. Starving, she didn’t ask where the Skeleton had gotten them from. The gesture was enough.
It would take most of the day to reach the mountain pass. The highlands were comprised of sheer cliffs and heart-stopping plummets. Paths were luxuries this part of the world couldn’t afford. R’lyeh did the best she could, where she could, but often times, it wasn’t enough. She found herself sliding down slopes, knees first, and paralyzed with fear in higher places—that damn phobia she often forgot about finally getting the better of her.
“My best friend’s name was Gary,” the Skeleton said, urging her along the last of the many narrow, open-faced trails they’d traversed.
R’lyeh nodded, hearing, but not really hearing what the Skeleton was saying. If she stepped forward, she’d fall for a good ten seconds before splatting on the forest floor below.
“He was a ghoul. You would’ve liked him.”
R’lyeh shimmied sideways, gripping the cliff behind her for dear life. “Was he a-afraid of heights, too?”
“No.” The Skeleton prodded her side, making her pick up the pace. “Just wanted to tell you that.”
By nightfall, they made it to the pass. At that point, R’lyeh’s knees were covered in blood, bruises, and scrapes; and her hands had been rubbed so raw, they put most scullers’ mitts to shame. All things considered, she had made it out fairly well. The Skeleton had died twice on their journey from the lonely hill to the desolate cleave. Once from bad footing that sent him skull first into a boulder, and secondly, randomly. He called these random deaths ‘hiccups.’ Said they happened out of nowhere, and didn’t stop until they felt like it.
R’lyeh’s battle scars had cost them a couple of hours. The Skeleton’s death… about twenty seconds. When it came to who was burdening who, the choice was clear, and yet Bone Daddy didn’t bring that kind of talking up anymore.
Coming out of the mountain pass, R’lyeh fell against the rocks there and caught her breath. Besides all the bones the Skeleton had broken on the way here, it was the first actual break she’d had herself.
The Skeleton, ahead of her, stopped and turned to face her. “It’s not far.”
R’lyeh licked her lips and lifted herself off the rocks. He was right. The Dead City wasn’t far at all. If she stretched out her hands, she could almost grasp it.
At the farthest end of the lowlands, the Dead City looked to be about twelve hours away. In the dark, it wasn’t much. Just skyscraper after skyscraper at what most maps seemed to suggest was the end of the world. In the light, like most things, the city would be different. She would see it for what it really was, and at that point, she would have to decide if she really wanted to go through with what she had come here to do.
“Even from here, I can taste it,” the Skeleton said, doubling-back to her.
She could, too. The disease, the sickness. It was faint, but it was there, in the air—tiny morsels of temptation from Death’s unending banquet. Defiant as ever, R’lyeh breathed in deeply, filling her lungs with that infected oxygen, beginning the inoculation process.
“You alright?” he asked.
R’lyeh didn’t know if she was or wasn’t, so she played it safe, said she was, and took the lead. The Dead City was twelve hours away. She’d get them
there in ten.
Fifteen hours later, and on her last legs, R’lyeh stood trembling before the beginning of the peninsula that led out to the Dead City. The crooked piece of land wound across the ocean under a thick, green cloud of countless contagions. Whether or not it was actually land that connected the continent with the City, R’lyeh couldn’t really say. The peninsula wasn’t soil, but a thick, black, tar-like substance that shone like plastic garbage bags. It was as if something else had been built here at some point, but an intense heat had melted it down, beyond recognition.
Then there was the Dead City itself. She had spent the majority of the journey from the mountain pass to here staring at it, but it was so much easier to appreciate up close, in its diseased presence. In fact, it wasn’t until she was here that she could even make sense of it. The Dead City was unlike anything she had ever seen before. The height of the buildings, the intricacy of the architecture. The City was almost too dense for R’lyeh to fully realize. The streets, signs, and storefronts; the highways, advertisements, and neighborhoods; the cars, trucks, and toppled trams—all of it was there, on display, scattered or piled high. It looked as if a hurricane had hit the City hard and tried to drown it in its own excess.
There was no doubt in R’lyeh’s mind that whatever modern weaponry the Skeleton was looking for was probably inside the Dead City. But how he was going to find it—
R’lyeh stumbled backward, having blacked out for a moment. She gripped her head, where it throbbed with a sudden, monstrous migraine.
“R’lyeh,” the Skeleton said, touching her arm with his gloved hand.
She shook him off. Opening her stinging eyes, she saw the green cloud that blanketed the peninsula and City taunting her, testing her. Her lungs started to burn. Breaths became shallow. That was how it killed you, she’d heard before. The cloud attacked your lungs, and then you suffocated on your own blood.
“I’m fine,” she said, feeling anything but. “I’m ready.”
The Skeleton didn’t stop her as she took the lead. Walking alone into the haze of disease, R’lyeh wished he had. The green cloud swelled around her as she pressed into its sickly embrace. Carefully, so as to not ingest too much of whatever foulness was floating around her, she took small, measured breaths. If she gave her body enough time to process the cloud, then maybe it wouldn’t kill her. The Skeleton had said he had died so much he didn’t even really notice when it happened anymore. Like blinking, it became an invisible eventuality. If it worked for him, then maybe—
R’lyeh’s legs went out from under her and she hit the black ground hard. The tar-like surface rippled from the impact, like the water over which it spanned would. Sticky, she peeled herself from it and managed to get to her hands and knees. Her body was fire. Her lungs felt like two twisted rags hung out to dry in the heat. She was bleeding, too. Somewhere. She couldn’t be sure where.
No, no. Her heart was beating so fast she could hear it in her ears. A pillar of nausea exploded out of her stomach and rammed itself up her neck. Goddamn it, no. She covered her mouth, bit into her fingers to stop the pathetic sounds coming out of her mouth. She tried to take another breath, but the air caught in her chest and sat there, and she choked on the very thing she needed more than anything else at this point.
“Son of a bitch,” the Skeleton said, hurrying towards her from behind. “I told you!”
R’lyeh collapsed onto the ground. Her body twisted to the rhythm of its convulsions. Heaving hoarsely, she balled her fists and buried them in her stomach, because she was pretty sure if she didn’t, she just might cough it up.
I’m not dying, she told herself, and yet she could hardly believe it, with green death pressing in all around her. She tried to breathe again, and puked up blood instead. No, no, no. She buried her face in the trash bag-colored soil and huffed its virus-laced fragments. She ground her body into the ground; kicking and clawing, an indentation formed beneath her of her body—the only grave, perhaps, she could’ve hoped for.
“Get!”
The Skeleton yanked R’lyeh off the ground and into his arms. She writhed in his grip, kicking and screaming and spitting out chunks of stinking blood into his face.
“I don’t know why I let you do this.”
The Skeleton strengthened his hold on her and turned them back towards the mainland. But R’lyeh took him by the front of his cloak and shouted, “Don’t!”
She jerked out of his arms and, spinning, slammed back into the ground. The impact busted her chin, but somehow, had opened up her lungs. She gasped wretchedly. Digging her knuckles and toes into the black dirt, she went rigid and forced herself to breathe. Every breath was like surgery. Each one she took, she could feel her lungs tearing open, separating, as if the cloud and its diseases had fused them together.
“I’m…”
The spasms stopped in her arms and legs.
“I’m…”
She pressed her forehead into the ground and forced herself to vomit out the white foam that had been clogging up her throat.
“I’m…”
The migraine dispersed along her scalp, retreated behind her ears.
“I’m okay.” She stayed prostrated on the ground, because every muscle in her body was one movement away from cramping. “I’m okay,” she said, looking back, between her legs, at the Skeleton. “I told you… I’d be—”
“Get, goddamn it,” the Skeleton said. “We have company.”
R’lyeh, not moving, looked up. There were two… things standing ten feet away. They wore heavy, bulky, dirty white polyester suits that made them move as if they were underwater. Yellow tubes wrapped around the suits, from their backpacks and into their helmets, which were in the shapes of diamonds. The faceplates of the helmets, although transparent, were too filthy and scuffed to see into. The things looked like humans, but there was something wrong with their right arms. Those parts of the suits were engorged, as if something had been stuffed alongside their limbs. Lights, too; there were lights, blinking behind the fabric. Red lights, the color of Corruption.
“You are… alive,” one of the suits said. It was a woman’s voice. Her words were garbled, drenched in noise from the broken communicator she spoke through on the side of her mask.
The second suit: “Have you come to witness it?” This one was male, and his voice was even harder to understand. Not because of the communicator, but because it didn’t seem as if he had spoken to anyone in a long time.
R’lyeh swallowed hard, dipped her head forward. She sipped on the green death like a strong drink. Slowly, sweating, and cramping like she thought she would, with the Skeleton’s help, she rose back to her feet.
“Witness what?” the Skeleton asked gruffly, holding R’lyeh in place.
“The Putrid Prince,” the woman said, the tubing in her back vibrating as she spoke.
“As it rises to claim its kingdom in the stars,” the man added.
“No, we’ll pass,” the Skeleton said. “We’re just here to rob the place.”
The man in the suit shook his head. “Anything you take, you take a part of it with you. The Prince has filled your lungs, little girl, and yet you live.”
“Barely,” R’lyeh rumbled.
“And I don’t know what you are, skeleton—”
“Skeleton will do, actually.”
“—but if you’re here, then…”
The woman in the suit started to shake excitedly.
“…then maybe the world is finally ready.”
The Skeleton tugged R’lyeh backwards, closer towards him and the sword at his side. Carefully, she reached back and grabbed its hilt.
“Ready for what?” the Skeleton asked.
“I’m confused,” the woman in the suit said. “Aren’t you here to see it? Aren’t you here to bask in the glory of the great, Green Worm?”
R’lyeh eyes widened. “Green Worm?” She ripped the sword from the Skeleton and pointed it at the man and woman. “Another Worm? Are you fucking kidding me?
”
CHAPTER XXII
The mining town of Angheuawl was part of a trade route that ran through the backwoods of Cathedra and the foothills of Kistvaen. The route was meant to meet up with the trail, Adelaide’s Hollow, which connected Cathedra with the eastern chamber of the Heartland, but thieves and carnivorous trees saw that the expansion never came to be. If the two had been connected, Aeson had once read, then it would’ve brought enough prosperity to the Heartland to sever their ties to their benefactors in Eldrus. Several towns, along with Angheuawl, had been erected along the route, in preparation for the Heartland’s new age of independence.
Caldera’s Night Terrors let the Corrupted settlements build up in Kistvaen’s range, and then they sabotaged the route and planted the carnivorous trees to ensure no one would ever use it. The thieves that appeared later were just icing on the cake. Most of the Corrupted fled from these company towns, while those who stayed did so only because they had the Dismal Sticks’ special brand of stupidity weighing them down.
Forty miles from Caldera, in a basin, the first of the five settlements had been established. Older maps called the town Llyn, but newer ones didn’t even bother listing it at all. Because of its close proximity to Caldera, the Night Terrors took it upon themselves to slaughter every man, woman, and child in the town, several times over, until the Corrupted got the hint to stop populating it.
So when Aeson arrived at Llyn a few days later from the Garden of Sleep, he wasn’t surprised to find the town abandoned. What surprised him were all the freshly flayed and fucked corpses that littered it. Corrupted, Night Terrors, flesh fiends; all ages and sex; color and creed; and every beautiful trait and wretched imperfection—they were all accounted for, in every home and alley, on every street and dock. The Choir had already been here, and in the dead, they left their heavenly psalms.
He had to go around Llyn, rather than through it. Because of the area, it cost him some time, but saved him some sanity. The sight of the ravaged reminded him of his rapist; even then, convinced he had moved on, he swore he could still feel her following him and reveling in his taste.
