by Scott Hale
“We should not hide what we are proud of,” Neksha said. “We should share our accomplishments. We should bear the lives and deaths of those who’ve come before us. Our choices will be better for it.”
Another mumiya entered the room bearing a bowl of water that appeared to have been drawn from the lake. They set it down on the Skeleton’s table, and then promptly left.
“What’s this, anyway?” the Skeleton asked, stirring the water with his finger.
“We don’t know, but we call it sanies. History tells us the first mumiya found the corpse of a creature near the lake, but all traces of that creature have been lost. We have tried to find the bottom of the lake, but it appears to be bottomless,” Neksha said. “It reinvigorates the body and heals minor wounds. It can provide protection from light and heat, if you stay submerged within it. It is addictive, though. We will provide you with more than enough sanies for your journey, but you must manage your intake. Too much will send you into a slumber from which you will not awake.”
The Skeleton cackled. “Not only will we have things after our fat, but our water will try to kill us, too?”
“Like you have to worry,” Elizabeth said.
“Real delightful place this Ossuary.”
“Well, if killing God were easy, It’d be dead by now,” Neksha said. “We have never had anything like you, Skeleton, come through Kres. It almost seems selfish to bring these others with you.”
“They brought me here, in a way,” the Skeleton said, “or she did—” he cocked his head at Vrana, “—at least. They’re my amoral compass. I expect, without them, I won’t find my way. Don’t worry, Rags, I’ll keep them safe.”
Neksha stared him awhile longer and turned away. Heading out of the room, he turned, said, “Get some sleep. We will chart your course tomorrow and explore further the ‘delights’ of the Ossuary. And whatever you hear outside, do your best to ignore it.”
With that ominous warning, Neksha nodded and left.
Silence rushed into the room and didn’t waste its time submerging those within it. As the seconds passed, Vrana, Aeson, Elizabeth, and even the Skeleton started to find themselves growing anxious, fidgeting with the bindings gifted to them, or, in Aeson’s case, flat-out gasping for air. They held their words the same way the drowning held their breaths. No one wanted to be the first to say it, to admit defeat and let the truth of the matter fill their lungs, but it was inevitable. Someone was going to choke, and all their insecurities were going to spill out.
Unsurprisingly, Aeson was the first to croak, and croak he did, this obvious question: “Are we really going to fucking do this?”
But surprisingly, it was Elizabeth, not Vrana or the Skeleton, who was the first to answer. “Yeah, why not? We got this far. These guys are willing to help. I know there’s some weird shit with Vrana and the Skeleton meeting, yeah? But hey, look, we’re not the only ones who’ve had this idea. I mean, I don’t know what the hell else I’m going to do. I’m here. You’re an Archivist. I know you’re scared—”
Aeson grumbled.
“—but isn’t this exciting? Trust me, I’ve spent my fair share of time with Boner over there, yeah? We’ll be fine. And if we’re not, well, shit. Could be worse company to spend my last days with. Kind of wish Warren was here…”
The Skeleton’s jaw clicked as he laughed.
“… and maybe Hex, but I like you guys. Pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it out of Communion alive without you, yeah? Like Vrana said, got to roll with the punches. I get the feeling time’s running out. I don’t know. Kind of nice knowing that, yeah?”
Aeson furrowed his brow, said, “Not for me.”
“You went through a lot to be with Vrana, yeah?” Elizabeth got off the bed and went to the bowl of sanies. “Think of it this way: You’re still fighting to be with her.”
Vrana spread her wings and let their shadows fall over Aeson. “Unless, you’re think of dumping me.”
“Goddamn it,” Aeson said, smirking. “Goddamn…” He stood, threw up his hands. “You look just like the Cruel Mother when you do that.”
“I’ll show you Cruel Mother, mother fucker,” Vrana said, hurrying towards him.
Aeson snorted and ran across the room, crying, “Get away from me you weirdo.”
As they regressed ten years, the Skeleton threw his legs up on the table, put his hands behind his skull, and said to Elizabeth, “Know anything else about this Exuviae?”
“No,” she said, “you?”
“Not as much as I’d like. Going to have to remedy that situation tonight.”
Elizabeth dabbed her finger in the sanies, brought the liquid to her lips, and tasted it. “I’m sorry about Clementine and Will.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I’m sorry enough for everyone. Save your sorries for those two grab ass’n over there.”
Vrana swept Aeson off his feet and body slammed him into one of the beds.
“If you knew they were alive, you’d still be doing this, yeah?”
“Yeah, I probably would be.”
“You really want to die?”
The Skeleton had himself a taste of the sanies, and then spat it out. “No, not really. But that’s the only thing I got to start living again.”
Vrana didn’t realize she’d fallen asleep until she started dreaming of the Void. She knew it was a dream and that she wasn’t visiting the place as she had done in the past because of what she saw there. In the dream, in the Void, there were two women walking along a ridge, the one in the lead pointing to something on the other side, where green light bloomed on the air, like lichen or moss. The woman in the lead wore a white satin dress, and she walked with that same self-righteous, desperate to be sexy strut characteristic of Joy. Vrana didn’t recognize the second woman, but there was no doubt in her mind that it was Pain, because there was no other explanation.
“Get out of my head!” Vrana screamed at them.
Joy, turned, a huge grin on her ghastly face, and said, “You first.”
A piercing scream shredded the dream.
Vrana sat up in her bed, a cloud of feathers drifting over her. She turned over. Aeson, who’d been by her minutes ago was gone.
“Aeson?” she called out, getting off the bed.
Elizabeth grumbled, “Shut up, yeah?” from her bed and deep slumber.
“I’m here.”
Vrana turned to the window. Aeson was standing there in the shadows.
Another scream. Now that Vrana was awake, it was obvious it wasn’t coming from anything human. She went to the window. Outside it, two mumiya were stabbing repeatedly at the viracocha they’d seen earlier. It was too dark to make out what the creature looked like, but it seemed as if they weren’t trying to kill the creature but torture it.
“You okay?” Vrana said, wrapping her arms around him from behind.
“Yeah.”
“What are they doing to it?”
“I don’t know. Neksha said not to go out tonight. I think there’s something out there, beyond the sands.”
Vrana strained her eyes. There did appear to be things moving behind the sand avalanches that surrounded Kres.
“They don’t seem so civil after all,” Aeson said.
The mumiya drove their spears into the viracocha’s head, twisted. The creature stopped wailing.
“Neither do Night Terrors,” Vrana said. “We spent our whole lives judging Corrupted. I’m not sure we’re in the position to judge anything anymore.”
“We’re judging God, aren’t we?”
Vrana poked his back with her beak. “No, God’s already been judged eons ago. We’re just here to make good on the sentencing.”
“The screaming outside didn’t wake me up.” He touched his temple. “The screaming in there did. Every time I think I’ve got it together, I lose it. I know I’m a burden.”
“Aeson…”
“I am. I know I am. I can tell. You’re tired of dealing with my shit. Elizabeth probably thinks I�
�m being ridiculous. The Skeleton… I’m no use to him.”
Vrana stammered, “L-Listen, shut up for a second—”
“But Elizabeth was right. I want to be with you. That means I have to keep fighting. I think I thought when I got you back, it’d be over. I keep trying to make it be over. When I do that, all this… shit in my head comes out.”
“It needs to,” Vrana said. “It is. It is right now. It’s a process. You keep trying to make it all or nothing. You ignore it, you try to wear some Corrupted’s skull. You say you’re in this with us for what you’ll learn about the Vermillion God. Aeson, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help you.” Her voice cracked; she held him tightly. “I feel like everything I do is making it worse for you.”
“Just…” He sighed. “Just… tell me you won’t think less of me. That they won’t think less of me.”
“We’ve all been through something,” she said. “No one’s going to think less of you. Don’t just fight for me, though. Fight for yourself. I know you are. I mean, look where you are, but… you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.”
“I love you, Aeson.”
“I love you, too, Vrana.”
They stood there for several minutes, holding one another, not saying anything at all. Eventually, the mumiya dragged the viracocha’s corpse away. Shortly thereafter, the sanies lake took on a gentle glow. It flickered off and on, like light from a candle caught in the wind.
“Maybe it is something like a luna lake,” Vrana said.
Aeson laughed, covered his mouth.
“What?”
“Sanies is a real word.”
“Really?”
“It’s a fluid that has blood and serum and pus in it. It comes from wounds.”
Vrana shrugged one shoulder. “Sad that that doesn’t even gross me out anymore.”
Aeson took Vrana’s hand and kissed the top of it. “I’m just going to watch the lake a little longer, clear my head. Get some sleep. I’m sure I’ll spaz out and you’ll have to carry my ass tomorrow. You’ll need all your strength.”
Vrana said, “Shut up,” nudged him with her head, and climbed back into bed. She was asleep before she knew it. When the screaming started, she didn’t bother waking. Instead, semi-conscious, she rolled over and reached out for Aeson on his side of the bed. A hand, cold and clammy, closed around her own.
“How are you freezing?” she said, slurring her words, eyes shut tight.
If he told her why, she hadn’t been awake to hear it.
CHAPTER XXVI
Joy called her home the Void, and now that she was standing in it, Isla could see why.
It was a gray place amongst unrelenting darkness; a piece of mold stubbornly growing on the underside of the Abyss. Like an island at the bottom of the deepest oceanic trench, the carved, pitted, and jagged piece of nightmare country floated, and though it never moved, itself was moved. Parts of the ground, which alternated between rock beds, pale grass, and solidified bands of water, shook, swayed, and surged to an invisible finger stirring the currents. Where there were pits, and there were many, noxious clouds rose and billowed, like the smokestacks attached to some hellish workshop. Beyond, the bruised sky fell with the land, as if being fed into it, and it was in these thorn-choked gulches and ravines hundreds of thousands of birds—ravens—had been thrown, either whole or in pieces—forming what looked like a mass grave, or a monument to the sadistic stirrings of extinction.
Isla, breathless, because there was no air here to breathe, knew there was more to the Void than what her eyes could see, but until she could mine its depths for deeper horrors, there were only two other places of interest she’d made note of. One was a house upon a hill which, given the debris strewn around it, looked as if it had been recently torn apart in fit of rage. The second was at the bottom of a valley, where a beacon of light cast its beam into the Abyssal star fields. Surrounding this beacon were ghosts, hundreds of them. Ghosts of people she knew or had seen; Winnowers and Rimeans, and then others; more Night Terrors, more humans. At first, she thought they were those who Joy’d fed to Onibi, but no, the dead and still living alike were here. And running between them, from their mouths and asses and the holes in their sexes, was a feasting umbilicus that snaked and twisted through the ghosts before finally connecting to the beacon.
A second passed. Another ghost, a child, stepped out of nothingness and joined the others. The umbilicus rammed itself into her ears and came out her belly button.
Isla glanced back the way they’d entered this place, but the way was shut. She was glad Joy was in front of her as they walked along this cliff, so she couldn’t see how frightened she was. Isla’s uncle, the Exemplar of Innocence, had always claimed to be somewhat of an expert on Old World mental illnesses. He told her many times she had an impulse disorder, that she didn’t think things through until it was too late, until all the damage that could be done, had been done, for the sake of some inconsequential satisfaction. When she got older, he added to her diagnosis. He told her she had fixations, delusions, too. He told her impulsivity and erroneous beliefs about the world led her to making poor decisions to fix things that were simply not true. Finally, a year before Isla joined the Winnowers, her uncle Augustus accused her of being a sexual deviant, after having found her in bed with Joseph Cleon, the Demagogue, and a mousy maid who knew a thing or two about candlewax. When that happened, Augustus put it all together, said she was an impulsive, delusional sexual deviant who, by delving into the Old World’s problems, especially through Lux, had helped him rediscover the dangers of liberalism and homosexuality. He’d told her he’d use every power he had to make the Mother Abbess and Holy Child hear his concerns and act upon them, because after all, he was the Exemplar of Innocence, and that meant he was gatekeeper for all things pure and right.
Her uncle Augustus had never managed to convince the Mother Abbess or the Holy Child, but he had convinced someone in the end that something needed to be done.
Isla.
And now, here she stood, on the edge of an unknown universe, Death’s twinkling domain calling her into its undertow, because of what he told her she was, and how she’d decided to rebel against that, becoming the very thing she’d never intended. Isla had issues, she knew that. But she believed what she believed with all her heart, and yet her heart spoke to her at this moment and suggested that she may have taken things too far. When the Winnowers’ Chapter assaulted Rime months ago and that little shit Audra had escaped their grasps, it’d been easy enslaving the Rimeans and ensnaring their village in vermillion veins. In the months that’d followed, it’d been easy torturing them, toying with them; molding them to fit her message. But hours ago, seeing them on the ice, seeing the fruits of her labor consumed by a creature far more powerful and capable than herself, for the will and hidden whims of a woman just as powerful and capable, if not more so, Isla began to have her doubts. The methods didn’t seem to justify the results. Lux had taught her through her teachings that you had to change the word with ways as subtle as a sledgehammer, but how could that be? If you break everything, and you have nothing of your own to put the rest back together, then you have only yourself. And this wasn’t supposed to be about Isla. It was supposed to be about social justice, bringing equality and fairness to an unbalanced world. She had tried to heal with hate, and having failed, now she hated even more. It was always about her.
Her stomach turned. Her body tingled with nervousness. She thought of her uncle, and the last time she’d seen him. He was probably still in Pyra, running the show with the other Exemplars, while the Mother Abbess and Holy Child were doing whatever they were doing in Cathedra. He knew how to play the game. He probably got what he wanted. Isla had gotten what she wanted with Rime before ever learning how to play the game, which led her here, to the Void, with another adult (was it sad she saw herself as a child?) who’d convinced her of her worth and used her for it. When she got to Eldrus, things were going to be different wi
th King Edgar. She was sure of it.
Joy, ahead of her, turned sideways and stared into the gray distance. She appeared to be listening to something. Excitedly, she cried out, “You first.”
Isla couldn’t see who she was talking to, and maybe that was for the best.
Joy led them to the end of this hill. It dropped off into a craterous lake filled with icy blue and white water.
Unable to follow any longer, Isla took the lead and asked, “What’re we doing?”
“One last thing,” Joy said, “and then it’s off to Eldrus.”
“Why did you kill my people?”
“The Winnowers or the Night Terrors?”
“Both.”
“They weren’t your people,” Joy said, smoothing out the wrinkles in her white satin dress. Abortion blood flaked off the fabric. “It takes time to build a cult, trust me.”
“I’m not building a cult. I’m building a wave for change.”
“Until you’re mainstream, you’re a cult. And once you’re mainstream, you’re not changing anything.” Joy waved her hand. “Come here, Sister.”
Isla ignored that. She didn’t like it when Joy called her sister. It sounded like a curse. She joined her at the edge.
“Pain was much better at controlling and maintaining the Void. She had amassed quite a bank of belief that funded her activities. I spent too much time in the Nameless Forest, watching my sons. It made me soft.” Joy bit her lip. “Pain’s gone. When God awoke, It nearly wiped out all our believers. All our work, and we were nearly forgotten again. But still some remained, and then there was you, Isla.” She smiled. “You kept Lux’s ideas alive, and her ideas lived because of us.
“I need you to remain relevant. And I needed those we sacrificed on the ice to give to Onibi.”
“Why?”
“Onibi is the spirit of the dead. It is connected to everything that has died on this planet. It knows every time and place and cause of death. Onibi is a keeper of records no one else will ever read. This grants it the sight to see everything on this planet, at all times, because death is constant.
