(Warning: graphic and gross.)
Ariel dreamed…
It was hotter – hotter than it should be, hotter than it had any right to be. It was hotter than he could ever remember Lithmore being, even in the first day of the Flood, when the rain had almost felt like a relief. One day as a child in Tubor City, he had stolen an egg from a market stall and hurried off to a street he knew, where a big black paving stone sat in the sun all day long on a corner. He was sure he’d seen the egg’s edges begin to solidify, begin to whiten, before he gave into his hunger and scraped it off the stone to shovel it into his mouth. It was as hot as that day, maybe; it had been so long ago.
It was raining, but the rain was no relief this time; it was hot as blood, unctuous and oily black. It clung to him, plastering his hair to his skin, washing out the colors of the street. A strange street, familiar but known – all brass lanterns and vibrantly-painted walls. Something wasn’t right. He felt strong and hollow, felt as if some part of him he should be concerned with was rattling around inside him like a bird shut in a great hall: fluttering, leaping, hitting walls it couldn’t comprehend. Even stranger than the walls, however, was the space between them. Was he supposed to be so vast, and so empty? It was difficult to care.
The rain stung him at unpredictable intervals, sometimes merely felt and other times endured. It took him long moments to think to look down at himself. He stood naked, his skin an unfamiliar map of red – fresh cuts crossing and criss-crossing, obliterating older scars with rigorous perfection. In an eyeblink the mess resolved into something recognizable, his mind helpfully reflecting it upside down and unified into the runic message it represented:
“I, Praxxis, call you into this body, here and now, Baylethe Tainted Queen. Let the final gateway open.”
His head swam as something wormed its way up from his gut; a thrill, unfolding slow and sweet and thick as molasses. Suddenly he knew he was moving, drifting in the direction of some ineffable pull like a fishhook lodged in his breastbone. This way, it hummed to him. The rain tasted like soot and ash and old, old blood. This way, Ariel. Time to become.
The road spread before him, expanding into something he recognized at last: Montford Square, abode buildings with red-yellow-green shutters, flat smooth stones underfoot. Everything was streaked in black, tinted scummy and unclean. A lake of the falling rain, round and polished as a mirror, occupied the square’s heart. Its depth was impossible to guess, its opacity perfect, and its surface smooth – even though it was occupied. Bodies lay strewn all across it, floating suspended.
They lay in a great circle, a summoning circle, and every person was a rune. Backs were broken to form the sinuous curves of rounder letters, a hideous flexibility that left exposed spine gleaming wetly in the sourceless golden light around him. Limbs had been dejointed or double-jointed, rearranged – stretched or amputated to fit the proper design. A ribcage was snapped and splayed to form the tiny hashes that differentiated the third and forth forms of the rune modern students of Eld termed ‘a’.
He knew them all, knew every body no matter how resculpted and malformed the flesh. They were those he had loved. Family, friends, others for whom there were no convenient labels. People he was angry with, but loved. People who were long dead, resurrected for this, people he had already mourned but loved. People who had kept their lives but chosen to leave him, people he resented but loved. People who had betrayed him, that despite himself he wanted to forgive, people he hated but loved. People he had let down, people who wracked him with guilt but that he loved. Rarest and most precious, people he simply loved, without qualification or conflict.
And they were all still alive, every last one of them. They watched him, with terror or pleading or the blankness of utter misery in their eyes, and he could feel their heartbeats. The collective heartbeat of the living circle, unnaturally unified; the thready pulses had been twined and tied together, and its leash lay in his hand. Their hearts beat at the pace of his, their lives at his mercy.
The ritual was his, was him. He had grown a new sense for each of them, an essential knowledge of every soul in his keeping. Their pain was like a little itch in the back of his mind, perceived but hardly felt and totally irrelevant. He could will them back, call the blood oozing down their skin into the black lake back into their limbs. He could use his power over them to knit bone and seal flesh. This was the space within his skin that his mind flitted through: power, hollowing him out in expanding him ten times greater. He understood, at last, why mages would not reject their gift. Who would choose to be blind when they could see? Choose to be lame, when they could run?
And then for a second, as if shocked to awakening by the utter wrongness of that thought, he was himself. His will and his sanity roared through the distance that separated his mind from his body, and he was in command. With a strangled laugh of gratitude, he began to gather up the power. The leash ran both ways. The right words would give it all back, would pour everything in him down the threads back into the people he loved. The force of it would scour him clean, burn him out, and finally everything would be over in a way nobody could blame him for-
“Papan?”
One tiny figure stood at the very center of the circle. His fine black hair, but given the wave of Marisa’s; Marisa’s soft brown eyes, but set in the darkness of his skin. Elena’s white nightdown was spattered red, bleeding to black even as he watched. She was bedraggled and her stare was so impossibly wide.
Elena, his little princess, his firstborn. So prim and bossy but sweet beneath it, so sweet. So clever, with such manners – no six-year-old should be so imperious but correct – You bastard, he thought dully, knowing somehow this was someone’s fault but unable to remember whose. Not her. How did you know to make it her? Roaring, the darkness rose up around everything that was him, bringing with it a dark, quiet joy that thrummed in time with each beat of his omnipotent heart.
“It’s all right, sweetheart. Papan is here now.”
The black lake froze beneath his feet as he stepped across it, fractals infinitely spiralling across the space between the bodies of his loved ones. He crossed to Elena’s side, watched her blanched face tilt upward to keep him in view like a lodestone. “Papan?” she asked him again, voice quavering; he let himself smile indulgently. In proper audiences she always called him Father, like a good Lithmorran noblewoman, but when she was hurt or frightened she called him the word he had taught her. But there was no need for fear, of course.
“Just trust me, darling.”
His hand was large enough to frame her whole face as his palm cupped her cheek gently, his fingers stretching to thread through her dampened hair. Her small head leaned into him; he could feel her trembling. “It will be all right soon enough.”
With all the power at his fingertips, all the power in the world, he needed nothing more than his other hand and a sharp twist to break the little girl’s neck. He felt the moment when the thread – subtly and invisibly worked into the center of the weave that united them all – violently parted. It was so easy: the one act done, every other tie begin to fray, drawn taut by the tension. The first one snapped with a long, despairing wail, one less soul in the symphony. The next in a sigh, the next in a moan, and even as they died his own heartbeat waxed louder, song and thunder.
It was rising in him, crackling to life, something that came from above and below and within all simultaneously, something greedily suckling the black rain from the air, something surging to fill the empty space and give him back a connection a hundred times more profound than the false unity of the loved ones dying all around him. Above him the sky burst at its seams like a ripe and rotten melon, revealing black without end beneath its two halves as they peeled back, writhing grey. The world shed its skin, and something darker uncoiled from the new heavens, flowed down, sought him like the inverse of lightning – searing away everything bright left as it went.
Ariel threw his arms wide, laughing in the face of the end, and welcomed the Demon Queen into the vessel readied for her.
