by Scott Hale
One fiend took Vrana’s feet, the other went to her head. She kicked, smashing the fiend at her feet in the groin. She latched onto its cock with her talons, twisted; scrambled his scrotum. It reared back, gushing blood like a fountain.
The second fiend punched Vrana’s face, hitting her eye through the mask fused over her face. Time stopped while she lay stunned.
And then Aeson was being taken from her. The flesh fiend was jerking him out of her hold. It wanted him to eat, to fuck. Certainly, he would taste and feel better than her.
Vrana snapped out of it. She let go of Aeson—
“No, don’t!” he screamed.
—and spun like a tornado as she stood, splitting the fiend’s stomach open. The wound grinned like a mouth full of beets. It burst open, spilling entrails over Aeson’s terrified face.
Vrana wiped him off, picked him up, and kept going.
They hurried out of the woods, into the black field. She couldn’t hear Elizabeth, but she could still see her: that frantic, shivering shape silhouetted before the torch-lit outskirts of Communion.
Bells preceded them. The village knew they were coming.
“We’re going to be fine,” Vrana panted.
Slung over her shoulder, Aeson was silent. But she knew he was still alive. She could feel his heartbeat, not far from her own.
Elizabeth stopped short of Communion. She spun around. “I don’t… Vrana, they’re right behind you!”
A fiend hissed, inches from her ear: “Please, and thank you.”
Vrana panicked. She launched off the ground. Ice and snow swallowed her in the updraft. She spread her wings, flew as far as she could, until they finally gave out, landing her just in front of Elizabeth.
“Where… are we going?” Elizabeth asked, gasping.
Vrana didn’t answer. It wasn’t a decision she was proud of, but it was the only decision available to her. She readjusted Aeson on her shoulders and, with Elizabeth at her side, took off into Communion.
The bells grew louder and louder as they approached. In this cold, hellish air, their dins were deep enough to crack skulls. The bell ringer in the bell tower shouted something to the village below. Seconds later, more torches erupted. Doors closed and opened simultaneously. The weak and terrified retreated into their homes, while the strong and prideful hurried into the streets with spears, sickles, and wood axes. They held their ground at the center of the village, where a single trunk of vermillion veins had erupted some time ago. It arched over Communion, and from it, heretics hanged.
“Get back!” a woman shouted from the nervous crowd. “Get away!”
Communion’s Finest started rooting through the snow. They found stones and hurled them at Vrana and Elizabeth.
Vrana shielded Aeson’s body the best she could. Elizabeth yelped as stone after stone cracked off her arm, elbow, jaw, and knee. Despite everything, their aim was impressive.
But it wasn’t enough.
Vrana and Elizabeth stumbled into the village proper. The fiends were no more than ten seconds away. While the Communionites drew closer, Vrana let go of Aeson. Whatever daze he’d been in, he snapped out of it and caught himself against her. She had a lot of burdens to bear, but he was the heaviest, and she wasn’t so sure she could carry him like this much longer.
“What have you done?” a Communionite cried.
“Get back inside, people. Back inside!” another commanded.
“No, give them the Night Terrors. They’ll take them, and they’ll leave us be.”
Vrana snapped her fingers for the short sword. She threw the black bag at Elizabeth.
Elizabeth handed the sword over, not to her, but to Aeson. She caught on quick.
“You have to fight, if you have to fight,” Vrana pleaded to him.
Aeson held it limply. He looked not at her, but beyond her, into the shadow-swarmed distance, where death girded itself across God’s good domain—Its weapons the oldest weapons: wanting hands and gaping mouths; pestilent hard-ons and swollen lips; Its needs, the worst of needs: unfulfillable hunger, unsatisfiable desire. They were a swarm of locusts meant to rid the world of the human locusts that’d infested it so long ago. Aeson looked to God, and God did nothing.
Three Communionites converged on them. Vrana slashed her wing across a man’s face, temporarily blinding him with her feathers. Elizabeth dodged a spear, swung her black bag upwards into a nose, driving into the villager’s skull. The third Communionite fled.
“You’ve killed us…” someone said from the crowd.
And that was true. Vrana had, and knowing this, she and the others ran.
The flesh fiends from the woods poured into Communion. When the crowd broke apart, they broke apart, too. Each fiend targeted a villager, while others targeted houses. Windows were broken into. Doors were pummeled off their hinges. The villagers outside were reduced to blood-choked screams as they were thrown to the ground and torn into. The snow turned red, and in the heat of the slaughter, it began to melt, so that small streams of gore radiated outwards from the village.
Turning back, Vrana saw that a group of children had come out of one of the larger houses, to see what was going on, where their parents might’ve been. The flesh fiends found them quickly enough, and made adults of them with wild, selfish, moaning abandon.
More trees up ahead. There was the road, too.
Just a little farther, she thought, lungs on fire. Not much…
Aeson disappeared.
Vrana belted, “Aeson!” as she spun around.
A flesh fiend had him. A female flesh fiend had him down on the ground, encased in snow, like a coffin. The fiend looked like a Night Terror, though. It wore an animal skull over its head, which glowed red from the moonlight due to the hard chunks of congealed blood that covered it. In a few more years, maybe even without the help of a homunculus, this flesh fiend would be a Night Terror. The Cult of the Worm could be the next generation of her people.
She crawled on top of him, her nearly-nonexistent breasts covered by her dark, engorged nipples. She grabbed his crotch, grabbed her own. Aeson begged her silently to stop, but she wasn’t listening. She heard only what she felt—pumping blood and throbbing pleasure.
Vrana couldn’t move. She wanted to intervene, but something stopped her. And when Elizabeth, almost hysterical—screaming, “What are you doing?!”—tried to step in, Vrana stopped her, too. Aeson had a weapon. He had the sword. She couldn’t always be his.
The flesh fiend shoved her hands down his pants. His eyes rolled sideways in his skull, and those pathetic, pleading orbs met Vrana’s. His face went as flat as his affect. He resigned himself to the ravaging.
And: penetration.
Aeson reared up, screaming fiercely. He drove the short sword into the flesh fiend’s side. He sank it in to the hilt, pulled it out, and drove it in at an angle, straight through the beast’s lungs. The fiend gasped, and still fondling him in her final moments, fell off him and into the snow.
“You fucking…” Aeson scooted backwards and onto his feet. He threw the sword at Vrana, missing her. “You fucking…”
Vrana reached for him.
He shoved her comfort aside, shouldered past Elizabeth, and went alone into the dark.
Vrana, sickened with her actions, stared at the flesh fiend, and at Communion, where the sounds had died down, because everything there had died.
“Get us somewhere warm,” she told Elizabeth. “And then, the Skeleton.”
CHAPTER X
There were one hundred and eighty Night Terrors in Rime. Thirty flesh fiends were being held captive in the row house that once held Audra, before she escaped. King Edgar had issued a royal decree for the genocide of the Night Terror people due to their attempts to erupt Kistvaen. If Isla wanted to be rich, she could murder the entire town and turn in their bodies and masks, and never work another day in her entire life. But Isla didn’t want to be rich. She didn’t know what she wanted, actually, but to be rich, it wasn’t.
Besides, he was a rabble-rouser. He kept the Winnowers good and angry, and kept them from growing too fatigued and kind when it came to the daily torturing of the Rimeans. He wouldn’t be any good out here, in Gelid’s harsh tundra; and he certainly wouldn’t be of any help when they reached the lake and the burning headstone locked within its frozen waters.
“This feels good,” Isla said, wearing the heavy, hooded furs of a Rimean she’d killed before departing.
Joy walked beside her, wearing nothing but her white satin dress. She wasn’t cold. She wasn’t anything. She was Joy. Isla admired that about her.
“To do something worthwhile?” Joy said.
Isla nodded. Joy always knew what she was talking about, and she figured it was because of how similar she was to Lux. The two, Joy had claimed, were like kindred spirits; or Joy had suggested that Isla had even been the reincarnation of Lux. Isla had shrugged the suggestion off at first, but by the next day, she could see where she was coming from.
Gelid’s tundra was made all the more beautiful by its sparsity. Snow for as far as Isla could see, though it never snowed here; the snow was permanent, and if it wasn’t, maybe it rose up from the earth—this part of the world’s own form of grass. Where there wasn’t snow, there were dark, menacing rocks around which icy blue flowers were chained. Joy had told her the flowers were called Death’s Dilemma, and there hadn’t been that many here before, the last time she visited the area. And the odd thing was, Isla noticed they seemed to be growing at the same rate that she and Joy were making progress, as if something were covering the tundra in them; as if it wanted them to notice the flowers… to step on them.
“The Cult of the Worm is mine,” Joy said.
Isla nodded, held herself harder for warmth. She’d had her suspicions. The flesh fiends, the Choir as they were called, and the followers of the Cult of the Worm in Rime frightened her. But now that she’d gotten in good with the woman who ran it, she wasn’t so worried anymore. In fact, she was empowered.
“To do what I have to do, I’ll need more.” Joy changed their course to the patch of ashen trees, which sat smeared against the sky, like charcoal finger-paints. “I’ll need a bigger Cult to help you. We lost many.”
Isla nodded, said, “Take as many as you want,” somewhat regretting the offer.
“I will,” Joy said. “I want them all.”
At a glacial pace, they went for another thirty minutes until they reached the trees. There, in the sky, like a window left open and unblinded, a patch of golden red light shone. Amongst the clouds that passed through it, Isla could’ve sworn she saw what looked like the roof of a place. It reminded her of the churches from Penance. And when she thought that, it was gone.
But Joy didn’t mention the oddity, so neither did Isla.
The trees weren’t woods of any kind, but a circular barrier that, over time, must’ve been worn down by the elements. They crossed through them easily enough. When they came out on the other side, they found the lake—Onibi’s rest.
Isla looked at Joy for permission to approach the shore.
Joy gave it with a slight nod.
Carefully, as quietly as she could due to the crunching snow, Isla snuck up on the shore and leaned forward. She gasped at what she saw there.
Deep down within the ice, a massive headstone sat, fresh flames swirling violently around it. The inscriptions upon the stone were written in an abyssal ink, and they shone celestially, as if they were comprised of stars and galaxies.
This was Onibi’s rest. The spirit of the dead responsible for the Rime Rot the wind carried all throughout the Gelid regions. It wasn’t until a few days ago that Isla’s body had finally developed a resistance to the Rot. She had been getting very tired of plucking out spikes of ice from her flesh every couple of minutes and covering the bloody holes they left with their quickly dwindling supply of bandages.
“I need to find someone,” Joy said, gliding to her side. “Onibi hates the Rimean for defying the Rot and living here. If we give Onibi the Rimeans, after they’ve given me children, I will find who I need to find.”
Eagerly, Isla said, “And then… me.”
Joy smiled, put her knuckle to Isla’s cheek.
Isla nudged into it. Her pelvis tightened.
“Yes, and then you.”
“Are you sure King Edgar will put me on his council?”
“You rebelled against Penance, stole the Winnowers, and overtook Rime. He gave you a seed of heaven, and heaven, you grew. Yes, child, he will look fondly on you.”
Isla stared at Onibi seething in its rest. “But will he listen?”
“He’ll have to,” Joy said. “I did him a favor, and if nothing else, we are family.”
“But he killed his family.”
“No man will kill us, Isla,” Joy said. She turned to the lake, bowed out of respect to Onibi. “Now, let’s go kill us some men.”
CHAPTER XI
Felix didn’t see how beating the crap out of Ichor would bring them any closer to discovering the Disciples of the Deep’s secrets, but he didn’t dare tell Hex that. She was having too much fun abusing her brother in Cenotaph’s abandoned chapel. As far as Felix could tell, it was all she did, all day, every day; and she had been going at it for five days now. She ate and slept and relieved herself in the chapel. When she wasn’t torturing her brother or waiting for the vermillion veins he was made of to heal his wounds, she sat beside him, petting him, whispering to him—sometimes, even kissing him.
“If you’re going to watch, might as well get front row seats,” Hex said to Felix, who had crept into the chapel ten minutes ago. When it came to sneaking and subterfuge, puberty had robbed him of his grace. He always got caught.
Felix, wedged between two faceless, feminine statues, stayed in the shadows. His guard of Holy Children were somewhere else in Cenotaph. He’d dismissed them days ago. Justine had warned him against this, because more and more people were coming to Cathedra to see them: the conscripted soldiers who’d survived the Divide, and Narcissus, Penance’s main army, which was due at any time. Like every other occasion, he ignored her warning, and then thought of nothing else but it afterward.
Because he knew he trusted strangers too much. Except for Hex. He didn’t trust her at all. And he didn’t know what to make of that.
Hex limped away from Ichor, who lay upon the altar, quivering. His shaking made the vermillion veins threaded through him shake, and when they shook, they scratched at the altar, like frantic nails on the back of coffin lids.
“You don’t like me,” Hex said matter-of-factly. She said everything that way; that is, in that bored, southern drawl, like all she thought about these days were better days from before. Felix got that way sometimes. The problem was he couldn’t remember the better days. He was just sure he’d had them. He had to have.
She shrugged one shoulder. “You’re smart not to trust the Marrow Cabal.”
“What Marrow Cabal?” Felix said, the volume of voice quickening his heart in this quiet, foul place.
“What Holy Order?” Hex stopped halfway down the aisle, caught between Ichor and Felix. “None of us are making good on our promises.”
Felix squeezed the handle of the contrition knife in his pocket. It was a ceremonial weapon used for bleeding the sins out of people. He mostly used it on himself.
Hex kept coming. The blue, tornado-like tendrils of hair bobbed against her head and chin as she st
ruggled to walk—whatever wound she had giving her trouble. She didn’t look like a leader. Felix had tailed a lot of leaders. She wasn’t pretty enough. She wasn’t ugly enough. She wasn’t strong enough to fight, and she wasn’t skinny enough to scare people out of fighting her. Aside from her strange hair and the way her eyes sometimes glowed, and her two Corrupted arms, she wasn’t anything special at all. She didn’t seem to care, and as far as Felix had figured, Warren, James, Clementine, Will, and Gemma didn’t seem to care about her, either. Was she always this way, or only when the Skeleton wasn’t around?
The Skeleton. Felix couldn’t begin to imagine what he must be like.
Hex, only a few feet away, stopped at the last pew and leaned against it. Her bloodied hands left prints on the wood.
Felix showed her the contrition knife.
She raised an eyebrow, bit the inside of her lip.
“He’s your brother.”
“He is.”
“Why are you torturing him?”
Hex opened her mouth to answer; instead, she sat in the pew with her silence.
Felix stepped out from in between the statues. He went the long way around the pew to the opposite side. He walked towards her. Far enough away so that she couldn’t grab him, he sat. They didn’t make eye contact. Instead, they stared out into the chapel, to Ichor shackled like a sacrifice to the altar.
“It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done,” Hex said.
Felix made sure she could still see the knife. “You like it?”
“Very much.”
“Did he… hurt you?”
“He’s tried. We love each other. That’s what love is.”
Felix shook his head. That was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.
“No?” Hex slouched in the pew. “Justine loves you.”
“Mother Abbess Justine,” Felix corrected her.
“Don’t matter. She ever been ‘Mother Abbess’ to you? Just Justine for you, I think. She loves you. You love her. Think of all the shit she’s put you through.”
