by Scott Hale
Don’t take your shit out on her, Aeson told himself, nodding at Vrana. You’re an Archivist. You’re an Archivist. Having started to become something else, he had forgotten what he was before, so it bore repeating. You’re an Archivist. Stop this. Stop acting like everyone else. You’re not. You’re better.
Outside the cave, night had fallen to the Earth with violent reluctance. Aeson couldn’t remember what things had looked like before, even though it hadn’t been that long ago since they’d arrived, but he was certain that, somehow, something was different. December was still a few days away, and yet it was everywhere he looked: in the bright sheets of snow reflecting the moon’s mourning light; in the slinking shadows leaving darkness like gifts for those shunned by the sun; in the way land was jagged silhouettes, as if the cave were a throat, and everything else was simply teeth and bone and tongue of the invisible, inevitable evil that had swallowed this orb eons ago. And just like his parents had tried to warn everyone, this beast, be it from the Deep, the Nameless Forest, or the Ossuary—whether it was the Vermillion God or something worse—was waking, and it was hungry. The world was different. This was the first time he’d ever seen it outside of paper, ink, and binding, and even he knew that.
Vrana came up behind him and pointed over his shoulder to the massive mountain in the distance. “It’s Kistvaen. The last time I was able to see it outside Caldera, it was when Pain attacked the village—”
“And killed the spellweavers,” Aeson whispered. “How? How is she there?”
Vrana ignored him, started batting her wings.
Aeson ran back into the cave, grabbed his bag with The Blood of Before, and his sword. “How is Joy already there?” he screamed at Vrana. “Why won’t this end?”
Caldera wasn’t close. At first, they went by wing, and then by foot, and then, by a stroke of luck, they stumbled upon a wild horse and Vrana scared it into servitude. They flew, walked, and rode straight through Kistvaen’s range, never stopping to eat, drink, or relieve themselves. They slept in shifts, and never for long. With Kistvaen looming over them, rest wasn’t something that came easily. Anything could be happening in Caldera right now; and if it could’ve been avoided if he hadn’t saved Vrana at all…
They ditched the horse the first of December; Vrana, fighting against obvious exhaustion, carried Aeson through Caldera’s outskirts, before dropping him in the harvested fields.
They had everyone’s attention the moment their feet hit the ground. An Archivist and a giant half-human raven would do that to a village. It was day again, and there were Night Terrors everywhere. They should’ve been at home, with their families, but they were outside, in the streets, and they kept looking at Kistvaen. The mountain’s illusion had been dispelled days ago, and yet the Calderans still seemed surprised.
Aeson searched everyone’s faces and masks for signs of distress. He looked past them as they gathered on the edge of the fields, to where the first symbol of the Cult of the Worm had been burned into the ground. It was still there, but it hadn’t been activated.
“Your mom has to be around here,” Aeson said to Vrana. “She’ll want to see you. Anguis, Faolan, and Nuctea… they have to be inside the mountain.”
Vrana told him, “No,” and with his hand in hers, they took off through the silent crowd, to the house of the elders.
The house was dark and empty, no different than it had ever been. Though it felt as if it had been ages since he’d been here, Aeson knew the ritual for accessing Kistvaen by heart.
“I don’t know if it’ll let you in,” he told Vrana, taking her to the room of perpetual, seamless darkness, where the obsidian boulder—the gateway to Kistvaen—was supposed to be. “I know how to do it right, though.”
“I know,” she said, following him into the room. “I trust you.”
Aeson went to the boulder and went through the motions as quickly as he could. He splayed his fingers and placed them into the five grooves alongside the boulder; waiting five seconds, he then pulled away, his fingertips covered in black, and plunged them into the pond beside the boulder.
“Used to be so scared of messing this up,” Aeson told Vrana. “After hanging out with Death, though, I guess it’s not so bad.”
Vrana, standing over him, squeezed his shoulder. “After you witness your Void, not much is.”
The black stains ran off Aeson’s fingers and colored the pond black.
“Eil’en’kul,” he said, the pond scabbing over with a volcanic crust.
“You’re amazing,” Vrana said. “This is amazing.”
“But if there’s any killing to be done—” Aeson pressed both hands against the boulder, and slotted each of his fingers into the ten hidden grooves, “—I’ll leave it to you.”
Vrana nodded, said, “You killed Pain. You’re the only person who ever did. Not a bad thing to retire on.”
“Yeah,” he said, his smile quickly falling into a frown.
“What?” Vrana asked.
The boulder… Aeson pressed his body against the obsidian boulder. “It’s hot, like it’s on fire on the inside.”
“Is that bad?”
“It’s never happened… Nyxannul.” He spit on the pond and made sure Vrana was standing on it with him. “Nyxannul.”
The surface shattered, and Aeson and Vrana fell through, straight down, until in minutes—not seconds, like it should’ve been—they were standing upright, upon the top of the same pond; except the transparent grass was gone and so, too, were the mushrooms, sprites, and the ceiling of sky. Now, they were no longer in the house of the elders, but a mile outside the village, deep inside the mountain, Kistvaen.
And there, in front of them, framed by the jagged walls and prismatic pillars, stood Anguis, Faolan, and Nuctea. They weren’t moving, nor were they speaking; they were simply standing in silent awe as Gisela the spellweaver paraded around the inside of the volcano, with spellweavers Enaar’s and Verat’s innards streaming off her body, like the red robes of royalty.
Aeson didn’t know why he thought it, but the line from The Blood of Before he couldn’t decipher came into his mind, and seeing Gisela doused in the blood of her brethren, he knew what it meant.
Tssnrt sa nrie su osri k.caiesheZ.
Disease. It always came back to disease. A fundamental flaw in the Night Terrors that the tribe was always trying to correct. Disease was the key to understanding the phrase, and with it, he unlocked its meaning.
“There is a sickness in our stars,” Aeson said aloud. He took out The Blood of Before and held it before him, its ancient knowledge now his only shield. “There is a sickness in our stars,” he repeated.
Anguis was the first to turn around from the sickening spectacle. “Yes, there is,” he hissed behind his snake skull. “Flesh, as you can see—” he glanced at Vrana, and then returned to Gisela, “—makes fiends of us all.”
CHAPTER XXV
Hebert North wasn’t a fan of this planet; never had been, and at this rate, the way things were going, never was going to be. From the day of his birth in 1870, to the day of his death in 2026, the bones of the Earth had, in most cases, never changed. A crack here, a fracture there; at times they broke, but at the same time, they were quick to mend. The framework was always the same; once you figured it out, even the unexpected became trivial.
As Gemma so often put it in her own snide, hundreds of years old adolescent way, “We all have the same Skeleton in our futures.”
He’d spent most of his living life hunting supernatural creatures, to prevent them from overtaking the world. Apparently, he hadn’t hunted them hard enough, because they ended up calling the shots, anyway. Perhaps it had been foolish to expect that his work who-the-hell-knows long ago would’ve meant something, but when Ruth Ashcroft finally found him and put him down for good in 2026, he had hoped, as his eyes dimmed and his unnaturally long life came to an end, that he’d made a difference.
Because he’d known monsters better than he did man. He’d even be
en one himself once (monster, not man; well, both, actually; whatever). The sum total of his friendships could be counted on one hand, whereas his knowledge of the occult, beasts, and the Membrane would take a couple of hours of hair metal and whiskey to get through (so it goes without saying, he’d never really bared his soul; the hair metal was generally a deal-breaker, and now, much to his dismay, extinct).
Ghouls, ghosts, and nethers; zombies, vampyres, and werewolves; mumiya, haunted dolls, and goredrinkers; marionettes, corpse collectors, and soul consumers; he knew witches like the back of his hand, and on the back of his hand, bore their scars, too; Argentos, they were a treat, and the Keeper of the Dread Clock? he was glad to be rid of it, even if another one seemed to have taken its place. He used to have books filled to the brim with entries and illustrations about these creatures and the hundreds, if not thousands, of others he’d come into contact with, or had heard about in passing.
The vermillion veins hadn’t been absent from his work, either; but like the man desperate to discover a cure, he mistook them, perhaps the most important species of all his encounters, as being inconsequential. He’d even had run-ins with their gardener, Amon Ashcroft, back in the day. They’d scuffled here and there, but not much came of it. If Seth had been with him, maybe he would have taken Amon a little more seriously; he might’ve followed the vermillion veins to their unearthly source and scorched them from the back of that Winged Heaven. But he hadn’t. He didn’t take anything seriously, ever.
It was a bunch of bullshit, if you asked him, which no one did, and probably because that was the answer they were expecting to get. He had devoted over one hundred years of his life to a world that went and fucked itself over, anyway. Was it too much to ask? It wasn’t like he had been a police officer, and that he had expected to rise from the grave to find the world rid of crime. No, he had been a supernatural investigator, spiriting around the world, closing doorways and chasing out the things that had slipped through them. It was hard work, but like philosophy professors, the demand wasn’t exactly through the roof. But… apparently, it was. So, again, bullshit.
Because here he was, in the thick of it again, everything exactly the way he’d left it. The skin was different, and the muscles were different, but the bones were the same. The old man in him (what was he? One-hundred-and-fifty-five going on oblivion?) wanted to break out that creaky phrase that everything had been better back in his day; that, goddamn it, monsters had class back then, and they weren’t running around with skin hanging down their asses; but he knew better. It was bullshit, all of it. The same bullshit, every day of the month, every month of every year, from here until the hereafter.
This fact hadn’t really hit him when the Skeleton pulled his kin and him out of the Membrane. Nor had it in the months that followed, when he was hanging out with the Marrow Cabal on a lake of blood governed by a giant mosquito he swore to splat back in 2020. Gemma was the first sign that something was fucky; but no, it wasn’t until today that he realized just how truly powerless he and those around him were to the forces that had ensnared this, quite literally, god-forsaken planet.
Today. Eight hours ago, to be exact. That’s when the shit hit the fan and he got his wake-up call. He and the Marrow Cabal had marched into Angheuawl on the Skeleton’s orders in search of a safe haven. What was the opposite of a safe haven? Connor had always been the writer. If he were still here, he’d know.
Hell. At first, Herbert had thought the Membrane was hell, but after a few stretches of seeming timelessness, he got used to it. At least, when he was there, he had a goal in mind. But no, the Membrane was hell as much as he was a heterosexual. He could look the part, but when it got down to the nitty gritty, most parties either ended up disappointed, or far more pleased than they would’ve expected. Needless to say (the epitaph of Herbert’s life), in a world so gray, Herbert still kept vigil for those fantastical, never-having-existed days of black and white.
“I’m older than you,” Gemma said, floating across the battlefield outside Angheuawl, “so how am I doing more than you?”
Hebert ignored the girl and kept his ass firmly planted within the confines of the Marrow Cabal’s guard. Because outside it, between here and Angheuawl, was a quarter-mile catastrophe. Eight hours ago, a foul abomination—some terrible combination of moth, bird, and grub—lifted out of the village and dropped four, ovary-shaped Horrors on top of the Marrow Cabal. The massive balls were like the aborted leftovers of some cruelly fertile womb. Comprised solely of children and their tiny parts, the Horrors were defenseless amalgamations. Two of them cracked open upon being dropped, dousing the Marrow Cabal in gallons of blood and amniotic fluid, while the other two Horrors sat, crying and shrieking, as the Cabal cut them to pieces. Because of their size and density, each Horror of the Womb took fifteen minutes each to kill. As for the Mother Horror, it died on its own. After dropping the ovaries, it ran itself into the ground, breaking its neck in a suicidal dive.
Herbert shook his head and waved off Gemma, as the vampyre was drawing closer, despite his insistence that she go away. Behind where he sat were the tents of Clementine, Will, and James. After the real attack, they had refused to come outside. And how could he blame them? Their husband, father, and best friend had sent them here. Nothing supposedly got past the Bone Man, except, apparently, the things that mattered.
“What’s wrong?” Gemma chided. “Bunions got you down? Hemorrhoids acting up?” She glided right up to and landed in front of him. Her green dress from the Orphanage was covered in blood. “You’re a lover, not a fighter, huh? Explains a lot.”
The Mother Horror and her despicable cargo didn’t count when it came to the attack. They were the shock before the awe. The attack started seven and a half hours ago; in small pockets of this cold mountainside, it was still happening.
It started shortly after the Witch, Joy, left the sky. That was a face he wasn’t expecting to see again. When she returned to Angheuawl, something happened. He could feel the change in the atmosphere, as if a great force had been released. Then, another shape took to the sky. Herbert had thought it was Seth, but then saw it was a raven, not a man covered in flies, and it was the greatest sight he had ever seen. He didn’t know when Pain had rid herself or had been rid of Seth, and no, he hadn’t been in the Membrane to find his friend during his descent, like he’d intended, like he’d meant to when he fought to stay in that place to begin with, but needless to say, he was moved to tears knowing that his love, his best friend, was no longer the bitch’s pet.
Whatever the Raven had done, she had tampered with the forces of hell in the process. Because out of Angheuawl, hell came; in a wave of flesh and blood, like one wet sheet of canvas torn from humanity’s depraved portrait, hell came. The cabalists called them flesh fiends, and the name made sense. But watching the monstrosities pour of Angheuawl in every direction, attacking one another and the poor cabalists and vampyres on the front lines, Herbert got to thinking about another kind of creature he’d encountered in the so-called Old World. What they used to call them, though, he couldn’t remember. But the resemblance, aesthetically and behaviorally, was damn near identical. God, what did they call them?
Gemma stopped beside Herbert. Slowly, she lowered herself to the ground, until her bare feet were touching it. The girl’s hands were stained; and the mouths in her palms were so swollen with blood, she looked as if she were developing an allergic reaction to the drink. The vampyrism had changed her in some ways, but not as much as one might’ve expected. The first and last time he had met her face-to-face, he had pulled her out of the Dread Clock, after she had gone inside it to save her mother and father. Even then, she’d been a rough child; no smooth edges—all cuts and bruises in a stew of simmering deviance. She was a girl who could handle herself, true, but his mistake was thinking that she could handle herself after the Dread Clock had its way with her and her family. It manipulated them to disown her, so she found a new family at the Orphanage, instead. Herbert should’ve se
en it coming. In his later years, he learned that was where all the children who’d survived encounters with the Dread Clock ended up, as if it were collecting them, saving them. And then, as irony would have it, it was they, the Orphans, who ended up collecting the Clock in the Nameless Forest.
“What’re you thinking about?” Gemma asked, childishly, as the stink of death rolled off her in a choking fog. She turned towards the tents. “James in there?”
“Leave him alone,” Herbert said, his breath fog upon the cold air.
Gemma huffed. “So, for real, what’re you thinking about?”
“Just—” he gestured the battlefield before them, “—all of this.”
“Yeah, I don’t think Atta-boy would’ve sent us here if he knew.” She flexed her hands, so that more blood would run into the mouths on her palms. “See any shepherds?”
“Not one since we left the Membrane.”
“That’s good.”
“I don’t know.” Herbert crossed his arms and pulled on their flab. “Don’t think I’d be too bent out of shape if one came for me.”
Gemma laughed; her eyes were back on the tent again, probing it for shapes of James. “What? You don’t like all this?”
He didn’t have any whiskey or hair metal, and as all the good cops in bad cop movies used to say, he was getting too old for this shit, so he wasn’t about to give her his spiel. But no, Herbert North didn’t like all this.
He didn’t like he’d left the comfy confines of the Membrane thinking he’d come topside and be the lovable curmudgeon some strange farming family had taken in because he’d done them a solid once.
He didn’t like he’d become part of some pathetic resistance group hell-bent on stopping the hell that was already here—a resistance group that was fronted by an immortal who couldn’t give two shits about it, but was, in fact, actually led by a batshit crazy, blue-haired woman who only wanted the best, and yet went about achieving it in the worst ways possible.
