by Scott Hale
The heart’s nothing more than a sealing stone. God’s just a big Worm. Wonder what the necklace was? Earth?
“I think only you, Atticus, can imagine how terrifying death can be, when not even Death can reap you. Death beyond Death. Big red button behind ten feet of glass. Hit in case of that one emergency that should never happen.”
“I’m fine with that, if it comes to that,” the Skeleton said.
Vrana hesitated, plucked some feathers in her hesitation. “I’d still like to keep kicking after this, as crazy as that sounds. Since this is Ruth speaking… You two and your split-personalities are a pain in the ass… Are you looking forward to dying?”
“Fuck yes,” the Maggot said.
The Maggot hadn’t warned them where the caverns would let out to. Perhaps it was best it didn’t. Words would’ve failed what even sight struggled to capture. One minute, or two days in Deep-time, they were in tunnels. The next, amongst history.
Vrana didn’t know what it was like to see a planet all at once, but this had to come close. In every direction: cities, continents; an entire world or worlds taken apart and thrown together like keepsakes in this endless valley. Her eyes hurt to take it all in at once, so used to the curvature of the Earth they were, but they did the best they could, cutting through the chaff of civilizations. The Old World wasn’t gone. It was here, clumsily preserved; this place as much a museum as it was a landfill. Skyscrapers vomiting out roadways; trailer parks afloat in lakes of stagnant water. There were whole chunks of land standing freely, their severed undersides riddled with pipes, dangling subway cars, and fallout shelters; or simply a forest’s worth of roots, the trees to which they’d belonged cast out to the neighboring country of automobiles and war machines, and mountains of plastic and glass.
Vrana couldn’t see beyond the dark and foggy mountain beside them, but she figured the scenery on the other side was no different. Instead, she cast her gaze above, where the ceiling rounded over them, murky with filtered red light. It was as if she were inside a blister, seeing outward. But, thinking that, it became more than that. She started to piece together shapes in the murk, to see beyond the red light. Vermillion veins. That’s what it was. That’s what it always was, wasn’t it? Vermillion veins above her, netted and knotted; too many too count, for no scientist had yet come up with such a number. But they did seem to be going somewhere other than up. They came down, too—a reverse parabola—and to the mountain, into the mountain, they fed.
About to question the Maggot as to what the mountain was, she gave silence the stage, instead.
Because in this graveyard, they were not alone.
The glimpses came sparingly, then more frequently, either by coincidence, or the creatures’ unintelligible curiosities. In the wreckage of the Old World, grubbers; springing from the black muck that constituted the floor to the valley. Out of that primeval muck, they came on calloused elbows and knees—victims not of evolution or a genetic defect but amputation. Their bodies were humanoid, textured like stone. Their mouths were not. They were rubbery, stretched into a permanent howl; and when they hobbled along, their maws dragged on the ground, collecting wreckage in that great gape. Like snakes, their bodies swelled to the shapes of the things they’d swallowed, and shortly thereafter, they’d pass whatever they’d eaten, leaving it behind undigested, but covered in a cloudy discharge. Though it was too quick to judge, as far as Vrana could tell, they had no purpose, but damn if they weren’t doing their damndest.
Across the sky, more visitors. Humming swells of muscles, not unlike brains. The creatures had no eyes, no limbs. Instead, they drifted, as if they were meant to drift; and sampled, as if they were meant to sample, the highest peaks of God’s wondrous wreckages. The brains, five at first, thirty not long after, rubbed their girth against skyscrapers and cathedrals, and the ocean liners capsized in commercial districts. When they did this, the brains glowed, and what they ground against was left behind with a splash of blood along its façade.
On the valley walls, even more creatures had emerged from its honeycombed sides. Huge rats, with six-foot wasps riding on their backs, their gigantic stingers permanently embedded in the rodents’ spines. Wraiths, with guts like boilers and heads like iron helmets—their flesh, an ectoplasmic waterfall that never stopped flowing. Whirling dervishes of brightly colored fabrics, their centers obscured by their flailing, though Vrana spotted, in the gaps of their performances, chains and bells fixed like piercings to a feminine figure, black and bloodied.
Atop the valley, which should’ve been imperceptible, she spotted shadows. She’d heard about them enough, had even encountered them a time or two, to know that, yes, these were shadows. There were a lot of them, too many to count, but not as many as she would’ve expected. They were milling about on the precipice. They looked lost. They looked confused. But all the same, they were looking at her.
“What’re all these?” the Skeleton asked.
The Maggot said, “I have no idea. I’ve never seen these before.”
Vrana heard a cracking. Above, in the looser stretches of veins, a portal to Exuviae had opened. A golden glow pushed through it, and in it, a dark shape stood, winged; covered in an anxious cloud.
“Do you think the Bad Woman is an agent of Haemo’s?” she asked. “Is that him?”
The Skeleton didn’t respond. Some of the bindings on his leg had burned off, black mass in its place.
The portal closed shut.
“Anyway, that’s God,” the Maggot said.
Vrana stared at the Maggot, but it didn’t laugh. It didn’t explain what it was talking about. God? God’s here? It was a dumb question, but she was a dumb mortal, and like a dumb mortal, she didn’t see divinity, even when It was right in front of her.
And right in front of her, It was. The dark mountain, now rumbling, and fogged, as if under a constant wildfire, that, It… It was God.
“Holy shit,” she said, taking a step back.
But no matter how far she stepped back, even if she stepped all the way back to Caldera, it’d never be enough to witness God in full.
The Vermillion God was… There was no unit of measurement to properly calculate its size. Truth be told, she wasn’t even sure if she was comprehending Its size, or if It was adjusting Itself to make it easier on her unenlightened mind. The mountain she was looking at was Its scaly side. And crowning the top, at the storming precipice, a halo of smoke, and eyes, gelatinous and clogged, like embryos, and large as moons. She’d seen God every day ever since It took Its place upon Kistvaen, but this was different. This was the real deal.
The Maggot headed towards the Vermillion God. Vrana and the Skeleton followed. The bug drove them away from the straightest point. Instead, they went at an angle, closer to where this land bridge let out to more cannibalized countries. It took hours—in Deep-time, who knows—and when they got to where they were going, they stood at the end of the bridge, where, for once, the ground was not flat, but a sheer drop- off. There was no wreckage here, nor did it appear there ever had been. In standing near this place, Vrana realized when she looked back, she couldn’t see where they’d come from. The valley was gone, replaced by darkness and things lurking in the darkness; leaving only this cliff and the things growing alongside it.
“Intestinal tracts,” the Maggot said.
That’d been her first guess, too. Attached to the side of the cliff, like mushrooms, were miles of intestinal tract. They were tiered and layered; there even appeared to be some sort of path connecting each of them. Odder still, the plant life. It was teeming. Roots and stalks and engorged ovaries—a jungle of nightmarish greens and bloodlust-reds pricked with thorns, blanketed in hairs; all moving, all at once, leaning in, like grass to the night, to see what fresh meat had come to visit their vile garden.
Vrana smelled a pungent cocktail of traumas-past, then saw milky streams dribbling off the intestinal flaps. “Crossbreeds…” she whispered. She’d never forget that smell.
“A
nd Bloodless,” the Maggot said. “My garden. A feeble attempt to kill God. The shadows tend to it now, but…”
The Skeleton, reeking of burning, and missing more bandages on his arms, said, “What?”
“Something’s… wrong.”
Wrong? Vrana was half a second from flying away when—
“There’re no shadows here,” it said.
That was true, but she added, “I saw some at the top of the valley.”
“There should be billions upon billions,” the Maggot said. “And…”
Again, impatient, grinding his teeth, the Skeleton: “What?”
“The Shadow Bladder is gone,” the Maggot said. “It should be right here.” It gestured to the nearest tract, where there was a clear opening. “We were going to have to fight through it.”
“Isn’t that good we don’t have to?” Vrana asked. “Isn’t the Shadow Bladder basically a black hole? Thanks for letting us know, by the way.”
The Maggot hissed.
“What happened, then?” the Skeleton asked.
“I don’t know,” it said. “Only the Speaker can manipulate both the shadows and these plants. Audra must be using them for something. If she’s that powerful, we may be too late.”
The fear in the Maggot’s voice was enough to kick their asses into high gear. Carefully, they moved across the piece of intestine. The organ buckled in places underneath their weight, but held. It wound around the cliff, before starting upwards and coming to a stop directly at God’s back.
“Oh, good,” the Skeleton said. “And to think I thought you were going to have us going up God’ ass for a second.”
Vrana started laughing hysterically. She held her beak shut with both hands.
The Maggot was the first to God. It went up to Its back and gestured to a patch in Its reptilian flesh. There was something wrong with it. It was puffy, swollen, like an open wound. Albeit, a wound the size of Caldera, but still, a wound. Several vermillion veins fed into God’s flesh above the site, but below them were the stems and nubs of veins from before. They looked rotted, poisoned, really.
“Amelia Ashcroft struck a chamber of God’s heart with a Red Death weapon untold time ago. It absorbed the tainted material into Its body, because It was unable to heal or remove it,” The Maggot said. “My mother’s blow has been eating at God ever since.” Now it was Ruth speaking. “It has been contained, the rot, for a long time, but the damage is done. A path has been carved. At the end of it, is the end of It.”
Vrana and the Skeleton approached the wound. Beyond the layers of flesh and muscle, a slab of meat that shot upwards into the squelching dark of God’s guts. There were no handholds, and no way up but up.
“What if I didn’t have wings?” Vrana said.
“But you did,” the Maggot said. “And you had him. Providence.”
The Skeleton pressed his hand, which was unbandaged and covered in black mass once more, to his chest. He said, “How the fuck did my life come to this?”
Vrana let out a heavy sigh and shrugged. “Not bad for monsters like ourselves, all things considered.”
“You scared?”
She held out her hand. It was shaking badly.
“Me, too.”
The Maggot started towards the wound, stopped. It said, “Once we are in, God will react. It will know. Because of the Black Hour, but first, because of me. Its body rejects me, as It does all Worms. Once we are in, we will be attacked relentlessly. I will go a separate path and draw their attention away from you. But once I am dead, and I will die, you are on your own.”
“Thanks, Maggie,” Vrana said. It was hard to feel sympathetic for something as repulsive as it, but she did her best.
“Figure your suicide run won’t draw the attention of Liz’s Bad Woman?” the Skeleton asked.
The Maggot shook its head. “As soon as you expose the heart, she will come for it.”
Vrana stretched her wings, readying them for flight. “I don’t have any weapons, Atticus.”
“Just keep breathing, R’lyeh,” he said.
Vrana twitched.
“That’s the only weapon I need.”
Vrana ignored him and the insanity returning to him. She entered the wound, kicked off the ground, and flew upwards. The Maggot followed, scaling the organic wall; and the Skeleton did the same, taking chunks out of it as he climbed with a frenzy.
It’s almost over, she told herself, looking down on her companions, missing them before they were even gone.
CHAPTER L
It was five in the morning, hours after the so-called celebration, and neither Isla nor Felix had slept. They’d been joined at the hip, the way they had been years ago, when she was thirteen and he was eight, during those few strange weeks of summer back in Pyra. That’s when things had gotten bad with Uncle Augustus; when he’d started insulting her, and suspecting her sexuality; when he’d caught her reading Lux’s A History of Hell and pronounced her a rabblerousing whore. She’d gone to Felix afterwards, to ask him to do something about Augustus, but too afraid to speak her mind, she hung out with him, instead, because she didn’t think it fair the only friends he had were Justine and the ones in his head. They played games and explored Pyra, and she’d even given him his first kiss, though she doubted he remembered that (she’d forgotten it herself), because it’d been quick and awkward—just something someone had done to her. Their moment, those weeks, so pure and sweet, they’d come and gone, but it’d come back around, this time, him to her, wounded and in need of healing.
They stood in the shadows of the torture chamber, watching a handful of soldiers and even more doctors gather like vultures over what she’d just recently come to find out was Vincent’s monstrous offspring. Before they covered it in curtains, because there hadn’t been a sheet large enough to drape over its protuberant frame, she and Felix had come in and seen it’d been riddled with tens of deep, bloody holes, some of which had smoke coming out of them. Whatever it was King Edgar’s people had used to take the beast down, it left a sulfurous stench in the chamber.
They’ve got guns, she thought.
After Death had showed up, Isla ran with Felix out of the hall to his quarters. Though he’d been heavy in her arms, she’d never put him down. He’d been holding her so tightly, and he was so naked, in every way, that she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He reminded her of a wounded bird that’d fallen from its nest, while its mother and mates watched, too busy with their own plans to pick him back up. Justine had seen Valac take Felix into that room. She knew that, because she’d seen it, too. Everyone had, even King Edgar. Isla had more hate in her heart than anything else, but when she of all people was the first through the door and saw Valac’s jaws wrapped around Felix’s belly, she was ready to kill everyone.
Felix scratched his stomach. They’d doused it in disinfectant, an anti-bacterial, and covered it in bandages. Valac hadn’t bitten very deep, but only God knew where that Anti-Child’s mouth had been.
Isla, on the other hand, hadn’t bothered with her hand. Her knuckles were split, and she might’ve broken something when she broke Valac’s face. She wore her wounds like a badge of honor. In all this time, despite all her designs, saving Felix was the first thing she’d done where she’d felt as if she’d done something right. Made a difference.
They hadn’t spoken much since the celebration. Instead, they mostly wept on his bed, the two of them cross-legged, their foreheads to one another’s, raining tears on each other’s calves. He cried for what’d happened to him, and for what’d happened to him a year and some change back, with Samuel Turov. She cried, at first, because he was crying, and then, she cried for herself, too. Because seeing Felix stripped naked on the floor, his would-be doppelganger seconds away from becoming him, something triggered inside her. A memory. A feeling. Some combination of the two wrapped around one another; a thread teased out from amongst the thousands that comprised her life experiences. It was dark and filthy, and alone, it stood out, but before th
at, it’d blended in, normalized into nothingness, because what was her life if not dark and filthy? It hadn’t always been, but one day, someone had convinced her it was, and then it was.
In that moment of weakness, Isla had the strength to bring down the lies like walls that’d sectioned off her mind. Behind them, men, but sometimes, women. Moonlight, too, and covers that kept sliding off. Shushes and sighs; sour films in the cracks of her lips. There’d been ghosts, their weight making the edges of her bed sink, and later, bruises. Also, blood, off-cycle; doors open in the morning when she’d sworn they should’ve been shut. And after that, at times, smiles on old faces, traded like secrets.
Most of the Exemplars had drugged and raped her at some point. When she started to realize what was going on, she was demonized by demons. They enchanted with her lies, filled her with doubt and disbelief. They made her question her victimization, until she bought into the role they’d made for her. The mad woman. The social justice warrior. Always looking for trouble. Too sensitive. Too hysterical. Privileged, and irrelevant, because she never practiced what she preached; never went through what she wanted to change. Internalized trauma, externalized.
The soldiers started inspecting the corner where the gateway to the Void used to be. There was nothing to suggest that it’d ever been there to begin with. It would’ve been easy to chalk up the last few months to simply being a nightmare, but you had to sleep to dream, and Isla hadn’t really slept in a very long time.
“I’m sorry about Joseph,” Felix said, his condolence monotone.
One of the reasons she’d wanted to come to the torture chamber was to find him. Though she hadn’t, she was fairly sure she’d seen, if nothing else, pieces of him back in the dungeon. If not, then he was either sitting perpetually undigested in a flesh fiend’s stomach, or lost to the Void. He’d been so eager to report to Joy, after Isla told him he was needed by the witch. He’d said he’d gather intelligence for Isla. Now, he was just gathering flies. She missed him reluctantly, because they still hadn’t found a body. If he had survived, she hoped she’d never see him again. He would know she’d betrayed him, and come back to her, anyway. And she would swallow her guilt and self-loathing, and welcome him back with an open arm and a closed fist. For, through him, she could be the Exemplars that’d run through her.
