by Scott Hale
Not sad, not angry—not anything at all—Vrana bowed. She never knew R’lyeh that well. Neither of them had really let the other in.
Something caught Vrana’s attention. She turned westward, towards the fields of Elys. There, behind the thin veil of rain, a lone horse stood, its head hung low. R’lyeh had told her about a horse that used to come around the village. It belonged to no one, and she was the only one allowed to pet it.
Vrana nodded at the horse and got out of its way.
Aeson, Elizabeth, and the Skeleton waited behind her, beneath the wings of the lounging Camazotz. The flight between here and the Keep outside Skygge had a blur of Elizabeth’s sobbing and the Skeleton’s apologies. It had only taken them a handful of hours to get to Alluvia, and most of the journey was done at night. The world below them had been dark, but Vrana knew rot when she saw it. And the source of the decay couldn’t have been more obvious.
What good was healing something that was already dead? Vrana’s mother might’ve thought all her training had been for nothing, but that wasn’t true. Vrana had committed to memory every plant and its curative qualities. She’d just locked that information up so tight with stubbornness that no one could’ve been the wiser. In these last few months, however, that knowledge was the very thing she’d been relying on to heal Aeson. The poor guy had been subject to every powder, paste, and potion she’d managed to cobble together to address his physical and mental symptoms. Even then, she still had a sneaking suspicion that she was trying to heal something that was beyond healing. Was he like R’lyeh as she was today? Was she merely putting flowers on his grave to pretty up his passing? She could give him the attention, or she could make him unremarkable. There was a fine line between closing a wound and tearing it apart, and she wasn’t sure her talons could tell the difference.
Maybe he could be healed. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe the same could said for her, for Elizabeth and the Skeleton. But she knew when she looked to the heavens and saw the Vermillion God there, watching them from Its crimson throne, there was no healing to be had there. It was the Silence and Serenity before the surgery; before the excavation; before the infestation. She’d been too late for the Red Worm, too late for the Blue; and the witches had eons on her. But there was still hope for healing the land. There was still a chance to stop It. To bring the “Balance,” whatever the hell that meant anymore.
Hearing the horse approach R’lyeh’s grave, Vrana went to the others. She said to the Skeleton, “Take us to the Ossuary,” and didn’t look back. The moment that had been set aside for her was gone now, just another bead upon an endless string. To protect something, you had to make it unremarkable.
The farther south they flew, the worse everything got. Kistvaen behind them, the southern tip of the continent had been transformed from a parched expanse to a burning garden. Great, arcing highways of vermillion veins formed a lattice over the land, and upon them, new villages and towns were being built. In between the veins, where the ground could be seen through this crimson jungle, massive pyres burned, adding more heat to this already nightmarish hellscape. When Camazotz flew lower to let them have a better look, they saw that not only were Corrupted and Night Terrors being burned, but so, too, were other “unnatural creatures”—beasts like ghouls, lamias, Arachne, and sandwraiths, and anything else that’d climbed into this world from the Membrane during the Trauma.
What made Vrana sick to her stomach and caused Aeson to look away, were the Lord animals fixed to the pyres. The overgrown birds and wolves and mountain cats; the bound, human-sized insects; the dried-out fish succumbed to flames and flies that feasted on them. There were so many of them. It was hypocritical, Vrana knew, to be upset by what she saw. Her people killed the Lords, too. But not like this. There had been respect and meaning, and a careful consideration into their selection. The Corrupted didn’t care. At this rate, in a year’s time, there’d be nothing left of Night Terrors or Lords, or things that went bump in the night—but only that which the humans could passively dominate.
I could be wrong, she thought, because it seemed wrong to judge the world from her place above it, where everything was rendered in broad strokes. Amongst the clouds, even R’lyeh’s grave would appear to be nothing more than a pile of pretty flowers.
I might be wrong, she thought, staring at Aeson, clinging to Camazotz’s fur, wearing his skull mask, like some groupie of the Skeleton’s. They hadn’t had a chance to sit down and speak to one another about anything that’d happened. They were all following her lead.
I can’t be wrong, she thought, and Elizabeth glanced back at her, face screwed up and sunburned, with an expression that read, “What the fuck are we doing?” Or, actually more like, “What the fuck are we doing, yeah?” Vrana didn’t know Elizabeth well enough to know what was going through her head, or what she was getting out of this. None of them did, though, did they? Know each other, that is. They were strangers. Even she and Aeson were, in some respects, brought together by what amounted to nothing more than an over-the-top suicide pact.
Tasting sand, seeing a desert like a shimmering splinter on the horizon, Vrana said, “Set us down. Let’s stretch our legs.”
The Skeleton, straddling Camazotz’s neck, gave the bat a tug on its ear. “Good idea,” he said. “Got to drain the lizard.”
He howled with laughter as they made their spiraling descent.
Camazotz cleared several valleys before landing atop the lone butte that stood watch over the otherworldly frontier beyond—the Ossuary. Sienna-shocked, the rocky guardian had somehow staved off the vermillion tide. From it to the sandy shores of the Deep, there were no veins, nor signs of God. The way was clear and open to them from here on out. God could’ve swatted them from the sky at any moment, but instead, It let them fly to the outskirts of heaven unscathed. Vrana didn’t know what to make of that.
“I got you,” she said, hopping off Camazotz and holding out her claw for Aeson to take.
He took it. When his legs hit the ground, they buckled, and he squealed. “Shit, shit.”
“What?” she cried.
“They’re asleep. Oh, man.” He bent over, rubbed them raw. “Goddamn it. I hate that feeling.” He took off the skull mask. His face was dirty and red underneath. “Fuck, it’s hot.”
“Doesn’t seem like it’s still March, yeah?” Elizabeth said. “Never thought—”
With his gloved hand, the Skeleton spun Elizabeth around and walked off with her.
Vrana plucked loose feathers from her body until she was sure the two of them were out of earshot, and then said, “Aeson, what’re we doing?”
He threw his hands up in the air. Going to the edge of the butte, he sat down and threw his legs over the side.
Vrana joined him. She pressed her body into his. They sat like this for minutes, staring into the blinding depths of the Ossuary.
“You know, the sands are bone-white because the sands are actually ground bone?” Aeson said.
“Makes sense. From the Old World?”
“One of them. All of them. Who knows how long this has been going on with the Vermillion God? How many Traumas there’ve been. Here. Elsewhere.” Aeson tapping his fingers on the skull mask in his lap. “It’s never going to stop.”
“It could,” Vrana said. “He could stop it.”
Aeson snuck a peek at the Skeleton, conceded with a shrug and a nod.
“How’re you doing?”
Aeson stared through his legs, at the plummet below, as if he were considering jumping.
“That bad?”
“Better, oddly enough. The farther away we are from everything, the easier it is. Being out of the woods, not around the constant reminders… I feel alright. Didn’t know I’d have to go to the end of the world at the end of the world to get this way, but I feel alright. Feel like I can breathe. What about you?”
What about me? Asking herself, doors were opened. Pain returned. Partially digested and stitched together like some mad scientist’s greatest achievement, the
witch threw herself down the corridors of Vrana’s mind, rending the walls with her claws, disemboweling every defense mechanism she’d put in place to keep the memories at bay. Out they spilled on a steaming wave of hate and debauchery, the corpses Vrana had made. Then Pain dug deeper, into the soft, festering darkness of Vrana’s own personal Geharran pit, and there they were—the women she’d kidnapped, the children she drugged; the crying incubators for the Choir’s stinking seed. Pain went further, where Death dare not even go, to the fragment of the Void she carried, where she lay shackled to Joy’s desires, tonguing and tasting her dead holes.
“Vrana?”
“N-Not so good,” Vrana said, taking a deep breath. “It’s like Pain and Joy are still with me. And I can get by as long as I pretend they’re not there. But once I make eye contact…”
“It’s all over.”
“Yeah.”
“Same for me. They’re not going anywhere, the witches or my flesh fiend. But they can’t get us out here. For now, that’s good enough for me.” He smiled. “I guess.”
“Is that why you decided to come?”
He shook his head. “I came for you. This peace of mind of mine is just icing on the cake. You were so gung-ho about doing this.”
“I am, but at the same time… It’s so ridiculous, killing God.”
Aeson picked at the plateau, filling his hands with rocks. “I’m going to be honest. I wasn’t really on board until I saw Him.”
Vrana stole a look at the Skeleton. He stood against the sunrise, his cloak—when had he gotten another one?—swaying gently in the wind. Around him, in subtle reverberations emanating from his ribcage, reality bent. It was both terrifying and amazing to think that all that was stopping chaos from consuming the world was some shitkicker pile of bones from the ass-end of nowhere.
“Also,” he said, “I never thought you cared about people that much.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m a part of this,” Vrana said.
Aeson cast his handful of rocks to the dusty depths below.
“God’s just another Worm to me, I think, and… it’s like you being an Archivist. No matter how hard I tried, I could barely get you to give it up. That’s what you were used to, you’d been doing it so long.”
“Yeah, but Vrana, if you think about it, your initiation was what? A year and a half ago? Two? That’s not that long.”
“No, but everything that’s happened since… I can’t see myself doing anything else. I like this. I’m good at it, and no one else’s doing it. But I do care about people. They may not be at the top of my list, but they’re there.” She laughed. “Mom would be so pissed if she saw where we were right now.”
“You don’t even know,” Aeson said. “As soon as you’d have your back turned, she’d run me into a corner and chew me out. ‘I can’t believe you let her do this’ and ‘If you were my kid, I’d tan your hide so bad, you wouldn’t walk right for a week.’”
Vrana croaked out shrill laughter. “Shut up. My mom never talked to you like that.”
Cocking an eyebrow, Aeson said, “Want to bet? When I gave you your second trial to go to Ødegaard’s Hospital, the first thing she did after you left was hunt me down and say that if anything happened to you, she was going to tan my hide so bad—”
She checked him with her shoulder, saying, “Dude, shut—”
Aeson fell forward. In grabbing the edge to stop himself from falling, the skull mask rolled off his lap and fell, end over end, through the air, before finally breaking on some rocks along the way.
Vrana stared at him, her inky black eyes sinking into her skull.
“It’s alright,” he said. “I didn’t need that, anyway. I appreciate you playing along in Formue, skinning that guy’s head and all, but I was just… so scared out of my mind. I don’t want to be that guy.” He paused, then: “I’m more pissed you just tried to kill me! What the hell, woman?”
Vrana tried to smile, though, like the Skeleton, it wasn’t a gesture anyone could see. It was something else they had in common: their inability, at times, to be human, no matter how hard they tried. Like the deaf learning to sign, they’d have to figure out another way communicate.
“I’m okay,” Aeson said. “At the moment.”
She believed him. He was acting more himself. How long this would last, she couldn’t say, but it was good enough to cast aside her doubts about his stability for now.
“I do want to see how this plays out. I blame Bjørn. Despite… everything… it was fun being on the road, going on a… fucking adventure.” His eyes started to water, and then they stopped. “And I am an Archivist, whether I’m a Night Terror or if Caldera’s around or not. You kill shit good, and I be smart good.”
Vrana nodded at him in agreement.
“I do want to see how this plays out. I want to be with you. And I’m not sure I can do that anywhere else but here. I don’t know what God’s going to do. King Edgar’s Great Hunt is going to make it even harder for us to live. I know that we might not make it there—” he pointed to the Ossuary, “—but I know I won’t make it back there,” he said, pointing to the north, to the rest of the continent they’d left behind. “I say that, but I hate to ask: God’s right there. Why the Ossuary?”
“That’s where the Deep is,” Vrana said. “I don’t think God’s in one place at one time. I think the Deep is like the Void. If we fight It head-on, it’s just going to cause another Trauma and go back to sleep. We have to kill It where It sleeps. I guess. I hope. If not, then, I don’t know.”
“Makes sense,” Aeson said.
“Those two…”
Vrana stared at the Skeleton and Elizabeth. Their arms and legs were slowly becoming the color of the plateau—that harsh brown that called to mind biblical wastelands and hard times ahead. They stood close, but not that close; they were close by association, but there was a rift, be it the Black Hour or something else, between them.
“… I wish I knew them better.”
Aeson whispered, “I don’t think anyone in their right mind would be trying what we’re about to try.”
“We hear you, yeah?” Elizabeth said.
The Skeleton turned, drilled into their skulls with his lidless gaze. “If you got questions, ask them. We’re not shy. We’ve been around the block and back.”
Vrana came to her feet and stretched her wings. Aeson followed her lead, stretched his arms instead. The wind whipped up, pressed into them. It smelled of flowers, and the cloying warm aroma of sunburns. The day was getting on, and as it got on, it got hotter and hotter. Vrana could literally feel the water being sapped from her body, the calories drying up; leaving her drowsy and slow. This was a prelude to the desert to come; the scorching promise that this wasn’t going to be easy, that getting to the Deep, even if they got to the Deep, was going to take everything they had, and some.
Elizabeth, with a desert-drunk swagger, went over to Camazotz and rested her head against the bat. “Did you miss me?”
Panting, Camazotz glanced back and rolled her eyes.
“Sorry about leaving.” Elizabeth patted her. “It wasn’t you, it was her, yeah?”
Blood bubbled out from Camazotz’s mouth, and she fell asleep, content.
“I’m sure you want to know why I always say yeah, yeah?” Elizabeth mopped her brow. “I was a vampyre, I told you that. We lived at Our Ladies of Sorrows Academy with the others. Camazotz was our master. First, Eyota ran the place, then Gemma took over when Eyota finally died. Gemma was an idiot. No adults were allowed at Our Ladies, and yet she let an adult in. A demon. We called her the Bad Woman. She promised to get us out of the Nameless Forest, to restore Camazotz to her former glory.”
Camazotz snored in her bloody nap.
“She didn’t. Instead, she abused us. Tortured us, in the name of some place called Exuviae. Whenever the Bad Woman asked or told you to do something, you had to say yes, or she’d beat you to a pulp. Me b
eing me, I thought I’d be a smartass and instead of saying yes or no, I’d say yeah. I was too afraid to say no, and too much of a shit to fall in line.
“She still beat me. And it became a game. I got so used to saying yeah, getting beat, getting torn apart, that I guess it stuck. It’s a nervous tic, yeah?” Again, she wiped the sweat from her face. “Things linger.” She started to lift her shirt, to show something on her side, then stopped. “I don’t let things go.
“We kept the Dread Clock at the Academy. We were its protectors, yeah? Then this guy—”
The Skeleton licked his non-existent lips.
“—came in and took it. The last time anything could touch the Clock was the Maggot… the Maggot that said it was going back to the Ossuary after dropping it off on our doorstep.
“Exuviae… the Deep… I don’t know if they’re all the same, yeah? But I don’t have much love for things that think they can get away with whatever in the name of some higher purpose. And if Exuviae has something to do with the Deep, I’d like to know where the Bad Woman came from, what she wanted. Why she hurt me and my friends so much.” Elizabeth closed her eyes, steadied her breathing. “That good enough for you two?”
Vrana and Aeson nodded in unison.
The Skeleton strolled over to Camazotz and mounted her. “As for me, I’d like to die right. This heat isn’t agreeing with Cammie here. She’s been good to us. We ought to be good to her. Let’s get, so she can do the same.”
Camazotz carried them for another hour southbound, before her wings began to give. Beneath them, the sparse prairies gave way to cracked earth, to an immutable stretch of bone-white sand that seemed to swallow the distant sky. There were no landmarks, manmade or natural, by which to measure their progress, to gauge how deep they’d gone. Before them and behind them, there was only the Ossuary. They’d crossed the forbidden frontier. They were no longer of their world.
Failing, Camazotz slowed. She beat her wings as she lowered herself onto a gleaming dune.
The Skeleton hopped off first. Impervious to the heat, without need for drink, there was a pep in his step that made Vrana want to slap him.
