by Scott Hale
“They think you’re a Lord animal,” Aeson whispered to Vrana.
Like the Cruel Mother… the Greedy Father. They think we’re the masks we wear.
“I get it now,” he repeated.
“Please, oh great Winged Lord of the sky. With your cunning and intelligence, hear our pleas.” The androgynous child drooled into the dirt when they spoke. “No animals will come near, not since the Skeleton has cursed us. He took our strongest. We have no food, and no one to hunt it. We beg of you, wondrous Winged One, to bring your kind for our bellies.”
Elizabeth mumbled, “Holy fucking Child.”
“I get it now. That’s what we were supposed to become.” Aeson smiled in a way Vrana hadn’t seen in a very long time. It upset her stomach seeing it. “Flesh fiends wore the skin and bones of humans, while trying to be better than humans. Night Terrors wore the skulls of animals, because they’d convinced themselves they were better than humans and didn’t have to wear their skin and bones anymore.”
He left Vrana’s side.
She reached for him, but he jerked away.
He took the severed head from the androgynous child and carried it back to Vrana and Elizabeth.
“We don’t have to grow old and go crazy, like the other people in our tribe,” Aeson said, “not if we become something else. Like you did, Vrana.” Cradling the severed head, he stepped back into the dark haze of winter.
When she heard the chitin being torn away, and then Elizabeth’s gasps of disgust, Vrana didn’t turn around to see what was happening. She knew what Aeson was going to do with the head. Instead, she went to the five of Formue and said, “Why not ask God for help?”
The androgynous child glanced up for a split second, then buried their face again. “God cannot grow here.”
It was true. There were vermillion veins in the winter surrounding Formue, but where summer had carved the land, the vermillion veins didn’t grow. In fact, they looked halted, as if they refused to go any farther. The Black Hour had stopped them.
“I’ll help you,” Vrana said, lying to them.
The five wiggled their slug bodies with sad excitement.
“I need to know two things. Whose head is that, and where is the Skeleton?”
The head belonged to the village’s sawbones and shaman, Rygg. One of the first to be afflicted with the Black Hour’s mutation, he was also one of the first to fall to the slug metamorphosis. His dying wish, according to the androgynous child, had been to sacrifice his skull to the first Lord animal to come across Formue. That way, the Lord animal would take the skull and eat his brains and know by absorbing his memories of all those he’d treated and befriended over the years that Formue was worth saving.
Vrana did crack open Rygg’s head, and she did eat his brains, but not to absorb his memories; rather, she needed a snack. Afterwards, she stripped his head to the bone, polished it with spit and feathers, and gave it back Aeson. With Elizabeth’s help and the odds and ends she carried in her black bag, they split the skull vertically down its sides. With straps and the help of some carving, Aeson was able to make of Rygg’s skull a mask, and he wore it now, while prominently displaying the tattooed Corruption on his right arm.
Vrana had become the Raven.
He had become a Man.
As for the Skeleton’s whereabouts, the five of Formue had pointed them eastward and told them with bated breaths he resided beyond Skygge, in the floodplains.
It was night, and the first week of March, and as they drew closer to Skygge, the snow turned to rain, and inside each drop, eyes. When the raindrops hit them or anything else, they broke apart and oozed like yolk before suddenly disappearing into a puff of smoke.
Under one of Vrana’s wings: Aeson; and under the other: Elizabeth. Their clothes were soaked enough as it was, and the wetter and colder they got, the slower they moved. If not for them, Vrana would’ve found the Skeleton by now, but she didn’t want to tell them that. Elizabeth would’ve understood. Aeson, on the other claw, not so much.
“There h-has to b-b-be somewhere to c-c-camp,” Elizabeth said, her teeth chattering.
Was there? It was too hard to tell. Dark clouds covered the sky. The moon’s light was only enough to see a few feet in front of them. And the road, if it even was a road, ran like a river beneath their feet, as the rain melted the snow that covered it.
Vrana veered them off the road towards the closest, densest grouping of trees she could find. She told them to stay there. Before Aeson could object or think to object, she took off, spiraling like a madwoman into the storm.
The rain lashed her body, leaving stinging marks, but she couldn’t have felt better. This was the first time since escaping Pain and Joy she’d actually been alone. Slowing her beating wings, letting the gnawing wind take her, she hovered there and slipped inside herself.
Goddamn it, Aeson. I don’t know how to help you. Goddamn it, goddamn it. God-fucking-damn it. Don’t lose your shit on me. Please, don’t do this. I’m selfish. I know I am. But, please, don’t. Don’t. I know it happened. I’m sorry. Just… Goddamn it.
Vrana spun around, caught the current, and flew with it over the swollen land. The woods stretched beneath her like a labyrinth; each wooded corridor filled with lurking traumas eager to trigger Aeson’s own. She climbed higher into the night sky. The horizon separated, grew larger as it went farther.
I don’t know what to do.
Thinking this wasn’t easy for Vrana. When she didn’t know what to do in the past, she still had something to do. Something to drive her forwards. Now, she had her mission—to reach the Skeleton and whatever else might follow—but every part of her was telling her to stop, to slow down. Aeson was wounded in a way she couldn’t just bleed out or patch up with a handful of potions. Adelyn hadn’t packed her bag with the words and emotions she needed to heal him. And Pain had never given those parts of Vrana back to her.
I’m a bad person.
Vrana had always wondered if she was a bitch; too stuck in her own ways, too concerned with her own concerns. She’d left Geharra without even second guessing the effect it would have on Aeson. And what an effect it had on Aeson. Then, days ago, when they’d been attacked by the flesh fiends outside Communion, one pinned him. And Vrana had done nothing. It was like a surgeon handing the knife to the patient and saying, “Have at it.” What the fuck?
He shouldn’t be with me.
Vrana beat her wings against the blackness, and let it take her where it willed. Aeson had gone so far and through so much for her, and the last place he needed to be was with her. She’d tried to convince herself the opposite—that he needed her—but what was she really doing for him? Putting him in harm’s way for the hell of it? He’d follow her to the ends of the Earth and fall where she’d fly. She loved him, and right now, he hated himself. She’d always been afraid he wouldn’t accept her for what she’d become, and yet here she was, thinking about the Corruption on his arm and the skull over his head—not much different than when he’d been Caldera’s Archivist—and finding it so… stomach-churning.
The deluge of eyes closed around Vrana and moved past her, leaving in its wake a clear view of the country ahead. There: Skygge; where the hills rolled into a small plateau beset on all sides by streams. There was something about the torches burning through the village that caught Vrana’s eye, though. It was the way they were placed. She climbed higher, and…
The Cult of the Worm. The fucking Cult of the Worm. The torches were arranged in the same double-headed stick figure symbol of the witches’ disbanded religion. The symbols were gateways between this world and the Void. If Joy had managed to keep some of the power Pain wielded…
Vrana dove through the air like an arrow, drawn to the site like it were carrion. Four miles out, she stopped, flinging her wings backwards, braking. Vermillion veins; they were here, too. They ran up the plateau, arched over it. Villagers were out tonight, too, and they were at the bases of the veins or their dangling tips, prostrat
e and praying.
The Cult of the Worm. The Disciples of the Deep. Somehow, here in the backwoods, the two religions had been twisted together. It was what Pain and Joy had always wanted. That wasn’t good. It meant more belief for Joy. It meant…
A great force, a stinking gale of rot and gore, rushed over Vrana. Taken aback, she dropped her wings, plummeted before catching herself. In the clouds, something gigantic moved. Its shape within them stood out amongst the night, blacker than black.
Vrana drew closer. Her wings ached, her muscles twitched, but she ignored them. The thing in the clouds shifted, lowered itself. It skimmed the bottom of the clouds, tearing them apart like bedding. She caught glimpses of it: fur; a talon; swaying, human legs; a wingtip.
Camazotz. The gigantic bat the Skeleton rode. It was here, surfing the waves of night, tens of Corrupted in its gnarled clutch. She emerged from the clouds. The Corrupted she’d captured, not dead but very much alive, howled in pain and fear. She shook them until they shut up, and then she went wide around Skygge, farther east, to where a darker dark, darker than even her, stained reality.
A bolt of lightning cracked like a snare to the simultaneous drumming booms of thunder. Camazotz caught the pale, killing light, but it was the place beneath her to which Vrana’s eyes were drawn. The place in the floodplains. The Keep.
Vrana hurried back to Elizabeth and Aeson. Struggling to find them, it suddenly dawned on her how long she’d been gone. Excitement souring to panic, she croaked, “Aeson! Elizabeth!” but no one answered, only Nature. The storm worsened; the rain came down in sheets, holding within it not eyes, but tiny hearts.
Landing on the road, Vrana beat her wings, drawing attention to herself, and shouted, “Aeson?! Answer me! Please!”
Rustling. A groan. The woods moved around her. She smelled something foul, and the stink of rotten flesh.
No. No, no, no, no—
Aeson and Elizabeth emerged from the woods like two wet dogs with their tails between their legs. Vrana rushed towards them and took them both like children against her breast. She wrapped them in her wings. They shook so hard, so weakly against her. They were so… human.
Is that why she wanted to find the Skeleton so badly? Because he wasn’t? Kindred demons cast aside, neither saved nor damned?
Vrana told them about Camazotz and the Keep, and suggested they should wait until morning before trying to find the Skeleton.
“No,” Elizabeth said, “I don’t think so, yeah?”
She didn’t care what Elizabeth thought, though. It was Aeson she wanted to hear from.
Despite his shivering and panting, Aeson, gripping his Corrupted arm, said heartily behind Rygg’s skull, “I agree. If Camazotz is there, he should be there, too.” He laughed. “I don’t think I can take another road trip with you, Vrana.”
Vrana looked at him as if to ask Are you sure? But her face was mostly beak and feathers. Unreadable. Inhuman.
And Aeson looked back, his face now bone. There were only his eyes in those borrowed sockets. They told her nothing. And might never again.
The closer they drew to the Keep, the more familiar the surroundings became to Vrana. The trees took on an ancient and harsh texture like petrified corpses. The light of the moon faded for good; in its place, a glowing mist meandered out of rain-eroded earth. The vapory tendrils climbed her and the others like formless spiders, nesting in their open mouths and burning lungs.
Then, there it was: the Keep—ravaged, raped; a crown upon the horizon, smashed to bits and put back together by mud and spit and something more; a substance unknown—red, laced with stars; a glue in the seams, fixing it from one world to theirs. The Keep, the seat of the Skeleton; the Black Hour’s new vessel.
“He’s a simple man,” Elizabeth said.
Vrana and Aeson looked at one another and started laughing.
“I’m not trying to downplay it, yeah?” She shook her head. “Atticus, that was his name. That is his name. He’s a simple man. I don’t think he ever wanted this to happen. He just wanted to save his family, yeah? And got fucked up in the process.”
Aeson nodded, said, “Yeah… Yeah.”
“I’m just here for Gemma. What you do with Bone Daddy is your business.”
“What happened to his family?” Aeson asked.
Thunder. Lightning. The rains picked up. They crowded next to one another under the petrified trees.
“He saved them from the Membrane. Then, I think, he thought, they came back messed up. He sent the Marrow Cabal to Angheuawl. Them, too, yeah? I think, he thought, he was no good for them. Like they shouldn’t be around him.”
Vrana closed her eyes and looked away.
“Angheuawl was hit by Kistvaen’s eruption,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t know what happened to the Marrow Cabal.”
“He probably thinks they’re dead,” Aeson said. “He went through all that… and then, when he gave up, stopped trying… He lost them.”
Vrana reached for Aeson’s hand, and almost cried when he took hers.
“Is he going to try to kill us?” Vrana asked.
“Maybe.”
“And we can’t stop him?”
“No fucking way,” Elizabeth said. “He killed a Worm of the Earth with the heart. If he’s lost his mind, we’re fucked, yeah?”
A sharp squeal shot out through the floodplains. Over the churning land and the raging streams, it hit them, building in intensity the further it traveled. They turned towards the Keep and saw amongst its parapets, Camazotz. She reared up against the lightning-scorched sky and took off, to find more experiments for her master.
“We just have to—” Elizabeth unsheathed her words, “—find a way in.”
Vrana rummaged through Adelyn’s satchel and took out the key the Skeleton had thrown to her in the Black Hour for the trapdoor in the Keep. “Let’s just hope, between this reality and all the others he’s conjured, he hasn’t changed the locks.”
CHAPTER XIV
Isla resented Lux. She wished she could have been born in her time, when social justice had been fresh and meaningful. This world needed Isla’s work, but it kept rejecting it, like a transplant. No matter how many times she forced her views onto the Rimeans and even her own Winnowers, they rejected them. The beliefs simply would not take. When she started killing them for this, they listened, but she knew, she knew they were laughing at her behind her back.
In Lux’s novel, A History of Hell, she had compared herself to a social surgeon. Someone who was willing to make cuts, to excise. If people wouldn’t move, you need only step over the bodies fallen to the scalpel.
Isla had a steady hand; steadier than most. And she had the right eyes for infection, for disease. Wasn’t that why King Edgar had gifted her a seed of heaven? He was a man, which was unfortunate, but he was a man with a vision, and he saw the same sickness in this world she did. He trusted her to use God to put Rime on the slab, and then, with her own sharp intelligence, take it apart, until only what was worthwhile remained.
The Demagogue, Joseph Cleon, had made a good point while going down on her one night two nights ago. He was three orgasms in (he had a quota of five he had to fill every day) when he suggested people didn’t understand her beliefs because she hadn’t written them down yet. She squeezed his head with her thighs, told him she shouldn’t have to write down what was obviously true, and then started working on the book in her head.
But when she sat down to begin the autobiography, which was what she was doing now, she found it difficult to articulate what exactly she believed in or why she believed in it at all. At first, she chalked it up to still being consumed by their visit to Onibi, but that was a lie. Onibi was Joy’s concern. Isla was just waiting for the two of them to figure out the details of their deal.
What should she call her book? My History of Hell? My Time in Hell? It all sounded so derivative of Lux. And what would she write about? Heteronormative values? Gender equality? Sexuality as a spectrum? Institutionalized racism
? The patriarchy? Cultural appropriation? Everything that she could say, Lux had already said, and better.
And when it came down to it, and she looked around when she thought this, she didn’t give a fuck about any of those things. She just wanted a world of Joseph Cleons, keeping tally of all the things they’d done in service to her. She’d have her own following given to her by Joy—The Cult of the Worm—and when she presented it to King Edgar, he’d give her a place on his council.
“They don’t have to know,” Isla said, pushing aside her parchments for A History of Hell. “Nobody remembers her but me.”
No one could say it or do it better than Lux. She had almost taken down Lillian in her prime. So, why should she try to be anyone but Lux? She could just copy her beliefs and pass them off as her own. Words came out more convincingly when they weren’t her own.
The door to her room opened behind her. She spun in her chair, nightgown swishing over her body. Joy waved and let herself in.
“Have you figured out how to fix the world yet?” she asked playfully.
Isla nodded and picked up Lux’s book. “Why fix what isn’t broken?”
“Millions of men and women thought the same thing in the Old World,” Joy said. “Lux’s mistake was she didn’t embrace togetherness. She wanted to do everything on her own. But family is everything, Isla. The Cult is the Family. Every time you empower someone, you demean another.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Doesn’t matter. Humans are stupid and entitled. No one is ever happy. You want to become part of the majority. When you arm the minority, it’ll be you, not them, who sweats.”
“What are you saying?”
“Be honest with yourself. You’re not saving anyone but yourself.”
Isla shook her head. “Why are you trying to talk me out of this?”
“I’m not. Lux was willing to go all the way, regardless. I need to know you’re willing to go all the way, like her; like King Edgar.”
Through her teeth, Isla said, “I don’t go any way but all the way, Joy.”
