by Scott Hale
Audra wiped her forehead. She was sweating. Her mouth hurt, so she must’ve been rambling to herself, too. God’s silent commands, trying to loosen her tongue.
She deflected his question, said, with a laugh, “What would Johannes think of you now?”
Deimos smiled. Even when he smiled, his discolored and scarred face was hard to look at. “He would be very proud.”
“Don’t try and get yourself killed so you can see him sooner,” Audra said.
“He would not like that,” Deimos said. “I live, because he cannot. When I am gone, he will be, too. No one remembers him but me. Trust me, Audra, I want to live.”
The stench of the dungeon stopped them dead in their tracks. It was a few feet ahead, the torches in their sconces blazing by the entryway. The sweating walls around it were sweating blood.
Commander Yelena pushed through the soldiers to the front with Audra and Deimos. “When we brought the Skeleton in, King Edgar had his flesh fiend pet eat the flesh off his bones. It did something to it.” She drew her sword, too. “Pray, it is still locked up in the torture chamber.”
“And if it’s not?” Audra asked.
“Then we’ll only have to fight one flesh fiend, not tens of them.”
The soldiers filed past and took to the dungeon door, the obsidian armor they wore catching the firelight in its harsh, glassy texture.
“Well, thanks for jinxing us, Yelena,” Audra said.
Deimos shushed them.
One of the soldiers barked at the gated door, “By the order of King Edgar, put down your weapons!” and then, seconds later, using a skeleton key, opened it.
“My God,” one of them said in a baritone drawl.
Audra went to the door, and then regretted everything they were about to do. The fifty or sixty cabalists Joy had Joseph transfer here for someone called Onibi (Wait, she only just realized. That Onibi?) were still here. They were everywhere. On the floor and the walls, and the ceiling, too. Nothing was attached to anything. Every limb had been ripped from every torso; every organ, torn out. Half-eaten severed heads had been jammed between the bars. Piles of regurgitated gore, tender and glistening, stood four feet high. Worse yet were the bones that lined the walkway between the cells: a series of spinal cords all pointing in the direction of the torture chamber. They were expected. They were awaited.
Yelena rounded up her team. She put eight in front of Audra and Deimos, herself included, and four on their rear. She said to Audra, “I will do what my King tells me, but your brother couldn’t have come up with a better plan?”
“Joy can’t resist an audience,” Audra said. “She knew we were coming.”
“What’s stopping her from coming back?”
“She’s immortal. What’s the worse we could do to her?”
Yelena thought on this for a moment. “What is the worse we can do to her?”
“You’ll see.”
God’s voice was going at Audra’s brain like a battering ram. She ignored it and began to weave. She reached within herself, deep enough to touch the Deep, and pulled from that rank wellspring her minions. Umbra, her shadowy consort, was the first to answer. It rose up inside her, until it was beside her. The shadow, with its red eyes and silvery fangs, assessed their surroundings. It laid itself over her; bound itself to her with ephemeral webbings, so that its movements mimicked hers.
Just you, for now, she told Umbra. We’ll need as many of the others as you can spare.
They proceeded. The sticky, blood-soaked tiles gave away every footstep. The piles of gore shivered, avalanched into a sludge of meaty remains, as if to cut them off. Instead, they persevered, wading through the chewed-up dead. Yelena and her soldiers checked every corner, stabbed every nook. It’d been awhile since Deimos had a good fight, but you couldn’t tell. He was stoic, calm and collected. The sword in his hand didn’t shake; to every odd sound, he was attentive. The only thing missing was his bat mask, and it was obvious he was missing it. He kept rubbing his bald head, probably hoping for the texture of fur, instead.
In a constant state of shadow-weaving, the pain of God’s will had dulled. The Deep within her was a vacuum, consuming every emotion inside her to store in its heavenly caches. It was thrilling, though, to have the shadows—God’s damned—at her beck and call. Their hate and malice were so infectious, she felt it pumping through her arteries, blackening her heart. They hated the living, and though they helped her, she bet they hated her, too. For using them. For them having to be used by her. In some way, if they had any free will left, they still must’ve thought killing Joy would somehow stop God.
They reached the rotund room at the back of the dungeon. The back wall was an illusion, one wall overlapping one directly behind it. On that obscuring wall, smeared in semen, were the words: “Happy Wife, Happy Life.”
“I hate her,” Audra said.
They made it to the wall, went around. They slipped into the hall hidden behind it. At the farthest end: dark shadows, and that rotten orange light so characteristic of Vincent’s dungeon, it’d be disappointing if it wasn’t there. The gate to the torture chamber was open. If there were flesh fiends inside, they could’ve escaped, but they hadn’t, probably wouldn’t. Deimos had taught them too well.
“Can they be reasoned with?” Yelena whispered, as they inched down the hall, two at a time, because it was so narrow.
Deimos shook his head. “They are very intelligent, but they fear nothing. To them, there is no difference between the pain they inflict and the pain inflicted upon them.”
Audra drew more power from the Deep, to silence God’s rapping. “The Night Terrors were different, weren’t they?”
“Of course,” Deimos said, “but we had hundreds of years, maybe more, to become what we were. Joy has no patience. She does not grow. She takes, and takes apart.”
They pressed forward. The rotten orange light enveloped them in a sticky, stinking embrace. The two largest soldiers took the vanguard and hurried into the torture chamber. Seconds later, their shadows on the wall waved everyone else in.
The torture chamber was empty. Spotless, too. All that remained was the portal to the Void, bending reality around it, like a mirage no one would ever ask for.
They fanned out around the room, but there weren’t many places to hide here. It was clear. There were no flesh fiends.
Audra glanced at Deimos.
He shrugged.
A loud bang came from the edge of the chamber. That was the room Yelena had been talking about, where her brother kept the flesh fiend who’d feasted on the Skeleton. It sounded as if it were throwing its body against the wall, trying to break free. From what she could tell, it seemed to be working, too. The bricks were getting looser and looser; cracking. But just how large was that flesh fiend? It couldn’t have been the size of a man. Not anymore, at least.
“Alright, fuck it. I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s get this over with,” she said.
Audra went to the portal. The soldiers formed a circle around her. Deimos kept close. Calling upon Umbra, the shadow opened a tunnel inside her mind, between here and their garden in the Deep. Audra’s body temperature plummeted. She held her breath, so her lungs wouldn’t explode. The veins in her body tinted out of her skin.
Darkness oozed from underneath her. It latched onto the moist floor, and heaved itself from its eternal fetters. She became a conduit. The shadows were answering her call. They emerged from the darkness, like new souls crawling out of some primordial ooze. Two, three at a time; but it wasn’t enough. They would need more. She’d grown the Crossbreed and the Bloodless slowly, with the necessary ingredients to draw out the shadows that would assist in delivering the right seeds and soil. They didn’t have time for that. She didn’t have the necessary ingredients, because they existed only on that forgotten continent on the other side of the world. If they were going to bring the Shadow Bladder to the Void, they’d have to bring it wholly, all at once.
But as the shadows pil
ed up around her, lying in the shallows of that darkness, their hands, or rather, their wills, latched onto the Bladder in the Deep, Audra realized this wasn’t going to work. Because she couldn’t do this from the torture chamber. If she were going to summon the Shadow Bladder, she’d have to do it in the Void itself.
Audra broke the connection with the Deep. The shadows receded. The darkness below her slinked back within. Umbra, disappointed, retook its place beneath Audra’s flesh.
“What is it?” Deimos asked.
“I can’t do it from here,” she said. “There’s too much interference.”
“I thought you sent the shadows into the Holy Child’s mind.”
“I did. That was only to find out about the Void. They need me to bring anything but themselves. We have to go into the Void.”
Yelena, ever the loyal soldier, nodded, shouted to her soldiers, “You heard your future Queen.”
Audra smiled.
The flesh fiend in the adjacent room let out an anguished moan and threw itself one last time at the wall. A brick fell out, cracked in half when it hit the ground. One long finger, with an infected ingrown nail, slipped through the gap and flexed. It started smashing itself against the wall again.
Time had run out. Joy would be at the celebration by now. And this thing, whatever the hell it was, was going to have this wall down, come hell or high water.
Don’t stray, stay sane, Audra told herself. Edgar had said it once. It’d stuck with her since.
“Ready to be ambushed?” Yelena asked, with the utmost sincerity.
Her soldiers grunted moronically they were.
Together, all at once, they went through the portal.
And to no one’s surprise, they weren’t. They weren’t ready at all.
Fifty flesh fiends, probably more, were waiting for them in the Void. Before they’d had a chance to step out of the portal, the beasts were on them. They tore Yelena off her feet. Her soldiers were taken from all sides; scattered like the crumbs they’d soon be upon the creatures’ rancid lips. Deimos, untouched by the onslaught, staggered into the Void. He ran his sword through a flesh fiend, ran with it still on the blade into another howling nearby. But before he could work the blade free of the creature’s spewing gut, a fiend was on his back, trying to tear his eyelids off.
Audra didn’t have time to think or take in her surroundings, just to react. The shadows were her weapons, and she, theirs. Screaming, she swung her arm. A black wave lashed the air. It crashed into several flesh fiends. Their chests cracked open like an overcooked animal, and hissed out a pink sludge of blood and liquefied bones. When they fell, more followed. She punched in front of her. A shadowy column of the damned rammed into the slobbering mass. Skulls caved in, and limbs twisted back; and the beasts dropped to their knees, as their brains oozed from their ears.
The bodies of soldiers piled up around her and Deimos. There’d been at least fifty flesh fiends, and for all their efforts, there seemed to be fifty more. Captain Yelena came raging from the sidelines, drenched in blood. She swung her sword in a dizzying flurry, maiming in favor of killing. Severed fingers and severed hands slid across the Void’s jagged ground, and lopped off feet rolled with thick thumps into craggy pockets. It was something to see, but it wasn’t enough.
Audra paced back and forth, narrowly avoiding flesh fiends that were practically throwing themselves at her. For every near miss, there was a soldier to absorb the blow. In a minute’s time, she’d seen her human shields lose ears, eyes, fingers, toes, cocks, and a hunk of their ass. Without them, she would’ve been long dead, a mangled corpse this side of nowhere.
The Deep swelled inside her. Her vision doubled. She saw the Void, and also, Heaven. In each, a swarm. The flesh fiends were tearing across the Void in packs of ten and fifteen. The shadows were climbing over one another, their arms extended, pleading wordlessly to be used. She had to be careful. She couldn’t overdo it.
Blood clapped the side of her head. Four soldiers went down, and their innards went up, as the flesh fiends dug into them and held their guts high. Deimos yelped. He was down on one knee. Commander Yelena, on two. Flesh fiends were bearing down on them, one of which was polishing off a newborn’s head, chomping into it like a ripe apple.
Throwing caution to the wind, calling on Umbra and the Deep’s most despicable prisoners, Audra dropped to her knees and smacked the ground with her palms. Out of the ground and into the feather-textured sky, massive spikes of shadow erupted. Tall as towers, thin as blades of grass, the roiling spears impaled fiend after fiend, tearing through their asses and exploding out their mouths. She kept her palms to the ground, and the plumes kept coming, penetrating every creature she set her sights on. The immense power it took was staggering—she was killing thousands of shadows by the seconds to hold the conjuration—but she had no choice; and God billions to spare.
With the last flesh fiend impaled, a bouquet of intestines and testicles and bloody shit dripping like stuffing from its mouth, Audra took her hands off the ground. The shadowy spears disappeared; every flesh fiend corpse—a hundred; maybe more—hit the ground at once in a deafening, stinking smack.
Deimos came to his feet. Both his legs were wobbling. Going to her, he offered her his hand, helped her up. Four soldiers were left, though they were so chewed-up, you’d only get two if you combined them together. Yelena was still alive, too. Her eyes were almost swollen shut, most of her armor had been torn apart, and she was bleeding profusely from somewhere.
“Got any more tricks up your sleeve?” she asked, drained.
Weaker than before, but more determined than ever, Audra called upon the Deep once more. Umbra, her second skin, split open her mind, and Heaven, like a ship parting placid waters, came through. That infinite, erasing darkness of before returned, spreading out from underneath her. Her heart stopped. Her lungs seized. Her veins ran hot, then cold, then scratchily, as if filled with sand. Hands clawed, head tipped back, she wrenched her minions from their eternal fetters. Out of the darkness, a multitude of shadows were pulled. They built upon one another, like a dam; their bodies melding together, in an orgiastic mass—a mating ball of death. From Umbra’s fingertips, to the heel of the shadow furthest down this interplanar line, she groped God’s Kingdom, until at last, the bridge of tens of thousands was long enough, she felt the sweet soil of her garden.
It was a maelstrom of wicked intent. At the eye of it, the Shadow Bladder. The way was open. Now, it was only a matter of getting it here.
One of Yelena’s soldiers let out a bloodcurdling scream. A flesh fiend, in its death throes, was on top of a soldier, tearing out her kneecaps. Deimos rushed to the soldier, clocked the fiend in the jaw, breaking it off completely. The bone fell down the beast’s throat, and it choked to death on it.
“More’re coming,” Yelena said. “More…”
Audra glanced at the Void. The haggard mountain ranges and the plunging valleys; the noxious vents coughing out toxic fumes into the raven-colored atmosphere; the dilapidated home upon a lonely hill; and the flesh fiends, yes more flesh fiends, climbing out of fissures; pale, not long from the womb, come to collect scraps from the living and the dead alike. No one would miss this place. And when she was finished with it, no one would know it’d ever existed.
She retched. Her throat widened. Shadows climbed up her esophagus, out her throat. Black vapors hissed out of her pores. This had never happened before. She wasn’t sure this should be happening.
The shadows were piling up around her, so much she couldn’t see her surroundings. One mass of countless many—and now, a great weight, a demanding load, pumping through it. Her final child, cultivated to perfection, ready to be reborn.
“Hurry,” Deimos begged.
She did him one better.
Blacking out, conscious only by the connection to the shadows, Audra disgorged billions of shadows into the Void. The mass shot out into the air, hung over the valley, a moon brought to bear. She fell on her ass, on her palms,
her quivering legs spread wide. Systems failing, she forced Umbra from her flesh, for the shadows were parasites, and if it were to have stayed any longer, it would’ve killed her.
The shadow moon drifted for a moment in a constant state of entropy and negentropy, unmaking and remaking itself.
The pale child flesh fiends were groaning as they scurried towards them, cross-eyed with deviant glee. Yelena and her three surviving soldiers formed a bulwark, but it barely held, they were bleeding so bad.
Deimos limped towards her. “Is that it?” That’d been the first time she’d ever heard genuine disappointment in his voice.
Is that it? she said to herself, sarcastically. You’ll see.
And they did.
Shadows fell from the moon by the tens of thousands. The final remnants of the Old World’s people, finally laid to rest. Entire cultures cleaved, races snuffed; any hope for insight, dashed for this, it, the Shadow Bladder at the moon’s core. First, revealed, then obscured; and finally, naked.
It was gigantic, far larger than Audra had ever imagined. The size of Ghostgrave. She imagined it to be lumbering, ponderous, but it couldn’t have been farther from. Its purple, red-shocked roots, tightly bunched up around its central pouch, unraveled with startling speed. Along the roots, pitchers as large as the torture chamber grew. They quivered, their sensuality stomach churning, and spewed out a dense amber fog, like censers. The fog began to deteriorate the Void, dissolving the sky and the ground, layer by layer; first by rock, then by soil, and then bone, from the millennia’s worth of murders committed by the witches here, and finally, it ate through the amniotic swamp upon which the Void had been built, until there was nothing but Abyss.
The approaching fiends, for the first time in the history of their species, chose caution over carnage, and fled.
Deimos helped Audra to her feet once more, and hugging her from behind, said, “We have to go.” His breath smelled of copper.
She squeezed his forearms. He let her go. She had to be sure.
With the roots completely uncurled, the central pouch was exposed. It was… immaculate. Emerald green, and thickly veined, and itself as large as the Archivist’s tower, the pouch was covered in serrated frills and flaps, which chewed and smacked—tasting this place; identifying its every ingredient, down to every atom; to single out, to eradicate. Yet this didn’t go on for too long. It must’ve had its fill. From inside the pouch, a bubbling sound, so loud and deafening, it was as if the oceans were burning. The central pouch was a cauldron, and its magnificent brew about to overflow.
