Arc 9: Chapter 15: Stain |
The Candrian was the only one who visited the angel’s sickbed. The others were all too frightened of catching the disease. No one knew if the master of their house was merely immune, thanks to whatever sorceries had altered him so drastically, or if he simply cared enough to brave the risk.
He visited his angel every day, and every day she drew closer to death. It was slow, that sickness, and unkind, and many of the newer priests in the city said that this was punishment for sin. By dirtying themselves, the city’s paphians had sullied their very souls, and wasn’t the pox that ravaged their flesh proof of that inner wickedness? Just as the Flyscourge had massacred the city’s populace, proving the fundamental darkness at root in the Exalted’s realm. Many were listening to these dust-stained missionaries in recent days, and their words about the darkening of the stars and the approaching end times.
The angel, who was no angel, had been devout through much of her life. Many of the new priests came from her homeland, and before she entered the final stages of the illness she had one brought in to pray for her. At the end, fearing for his own health and soul, the priest had told her she was beyond hope, that by allowing the krasis sculptors and the hordes of Rot Voraag to touch her, she had committed the incontrovertible sin of thoroughly defiling the body the gods had woven for her with their own hands. There could be no forgiveness for that.
She’d believed him, and wept until she had no more tears to shed. Even the Candrian could not console her.
I manifested in the room shortly after one of the Candrian’s infrequent visits. The room smelled of slow death and despair, and the white form on the sweat-stained bed was far removed from the sadly smiling creature who’d called me sister once. It tilted its head and looked at me, seeming unsurprised.
“I knew… you would come here.” Arlee struggled to speak through her swollen throat.
Strange. Normally, mortal agony was easy for me to watch, even enjoyable. This only made me feel a sense of dullness, like a bad joke I’d grown tired of long since.
“I would have visited earlier,” I said. “I have been… preoccupied.”
“Yes.” Arlee blinked. Her eyes, once opal, were reddened and damp to the point of blindness. “The Candrian has been telling me what’s happened. I cried when I heard about Ekasne.”
I’d wanted to brag, in truth.
I wondered if she also knew about the others. Tej and Pazé had started another Lodge, theirs dedicated to guiding adventurers and researchers through the Tombs. Apparently, they were doing quite well for themselves. Fell had taken to drinking himself into regular stupors in the city’s seediest Tavernas and starting fights with Justikars. He wanted to die, but his god demanded he do so in battle, and he was too strong. An ironic curse.
Of Didikas, there had been no sign or word.
For a long while, I stood by the bed while Arlee struggled to breathe. Her wings looked sallow, and she’d lost a good number of feathers. Their wilted remnants lay scattered about the room, almost like dead flower petals. Her hair was thinning too.
When she worked up the strength to speak again, her voice was brittle. “Are you here… to take my soul?”
Was I? For many years, it had gone unspoken that I saw the Lodge of the Wurm as mine. Their ambitions, their flesh, their lives. No other power claimed Winged Arlee. No god cared about her, or saw her. She was just another lost soul in that kingdom of lost souls.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Arlee had not shed all her tears after all, for they brimmed up then and began to spill down her cheeks. “What’s after, Shy? Where am I going to go? You’re from there, right? From the other side… Tell me what it’s like.”
I closed my eyes and did not answer at first. Arlee cried softly, and while she did I considered whether I should tell her the truth. How her soul would be shunted from this plane at the instant of her death, how it would burn itself through the walls between realities and suffer a great falling, like a comet hurled through vast spaces. I wondered how she would react to being told that her sense of self would be splintered across the dimensions, leaving an impression of itself in each so that one would become many, insensate ghosts echoing over eternity, like mirrors stacked in an endless hall to cast back countless reflections.
I considered describing to her how, once that spiritual flensing was done, the flayed core of her essence would be plucked from its flight by the Wending Roads, caught in the flow of that stream of will and dreams that flowed from the Silver City like rivers from a mountain. I might tell her of the Gate Realms, and the purgatorial deserts across which the spirits of the dead wander and wait to be collected by winged messengers, taken above to the fiefdoms of the Empyrean or below into the wailing chasms of Damnation, depending on which side found her to their liking. I had a guess which it would be.
So divided, she would lose all agency and sense of self, until she didn’t even remember who she once was, or what, becoming little more than a faint memory echoing across the wastelands of Time. That flight would be traumatizing, destructive, and to her perception would last for eons.
And all of that was assuming she wasn’t taken by spiritual predators or thrown off course. With the Silver City darkened and the Empyrean embattled, there might be no sure beacon to guide her flight. Even if she did make it to one of Heaven’s roads, it might not be safe. My kind hunted those paths now.
Yes, I knew what lay beyond the veil of life. More struggle. Endless, hungry, uncaring horror.
I said none of this. Instead, in a quiet voice I said, “You do not have to die, Arlee.”
She stared at me through eyes shimmering with tears. “But…”
“I can save you,” I told her. “But it would mean remaining here, in this place. That might not be a kindness.”
What compelled me to offer this, I could not say at that time. I have a better sense now, looking back. Arlee had called me her sister, and it had felt truer than when any demon or devil had said it. Perhaps I had no true family, no godly parent, no tribe to claim me. I thought then that perhaps I might make my own.
I still remembered her stiff but warm embrace, and the concern I’d scorned, and realized just how hungry I was for more.
Arlee’s eyes squeezed shut. “I’m scared.”
She was scared of me. Ekasne had been afraid of me too, more than I’d realized.
“I know. That is my price. I will take your fear, and you will never be afraid of anything again. You will be strong and beautiful forever.”
I thought it was a kindness, then. For many years I would preen over my own generosity.
“Please,” Arlee sobbed. “I want it. Please, save me.”
I brought up one sharp nail and drew it over my own skin, just below the collarbone. The blood that flowed free was black in the room’s dim light.
“Don’t fear, my sister. I will save you.”
Some time later, drained and lost in thought, I stepped out of the Candrian’s House and into the winding streets of the Bow Quarter. It was the early hours of the morning, not long before dawn, and the time of greatest danger in the city for lone wanderers. The streets were quiet, not even a breeze off the wastes to disturb that stillness.
But not empty. A figure stood in the street, a tall shape clad in dust-brown robes with a staff carved of petrified wood in one bronze hand.
I scoffed quietly. “I was wondering when you would crawl back.”
Didikas had his hood up, so his features were masked in shadow. He said nothing.
I turned to him and lifted my chin. My voice echoed down the row as I called out. “I thought you didn’t indulge in such low lusts?”
“I came to see you, Shyora.” Didikas’s sonorous voice rolled back to me. It held a slight echo, telling me he was drawing up power.
A fight, then. I wasn’t in the mood, but I’d known he would try me at some point. I glimpsed beneath the brim of his hood, and saw that he’d concealed his missing eye beneath a leather wrap.
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“Nothing has changed since last time,” I said. “You should have stayed away from me, wizard. I was in a merciful mood then, but now…”
I trailed off. Something was wrong. The way his voice echoed, and something about his unnatural stillness. He wasn’t breathing. His remaining eye was dark and unblinking. I looked for the dim white spark at the center of that eye, the sign of a practitioner of magic who’d become self-aware of their own soul. It should have looked like a pinprick of starlight trapped in the pupil, but… there was nothing there.
I realized my mistake and whirled, already starting to shuck off my human disguise. As I turned my eyes away from the illusion, the real Didikas appeared. He stepped out of a nearby surface, literally emerging from the wall. He’d hidden himself with some spell, and as he stepped forward his body seemed half liquid, so stringy lines of his own form connected him to the wall for a moment before snapping away.
Hissing furiously, I raised a hand that flickered with arcs of lightning, preparing my own sorcerous attack. My instincts were to use my claws, but I’d not been unprepared for this.
He prepared better. Before I could raise my hand, he spoke a string of words in a quiet voice, almost a murmur.
He did not need to speak them loudly. I would have heard it even had we been orbiting different stars.
With a sensation not unlike an invisible fist striking my shoulders, combined with the feeling of my arteries being gripped like a bundle of thread and pulled downward, I stiffened and fell to one knee. The pain was excruciating, a buzzing, electric noise in my nerves that dragged me downward. I fought it, but it was like fighting a lake’s worth of water slamming down on my back. I grit my teeth and struggled to keep my head up, but it was a losing battle.
He’d commanded me to bow.
“Gah!” Didikas gagged, then turned and vomited on the street. The spew was black and hissed like acid where it landed. He took a moment to wretch, then wiped his mouth and glanced in my direction. His lips were blistered, and his remaining eye watered as though from an acrid fume. “I still haven’t gotten use to that feeling,” he told me in his refined accent, almost apologetic. “The language is difficult to master even without the other effects.”
He’d used kandaric, the secret language of demons. It was poisonous to the mortal world, much less felt in the mouths of its denizens. The air buzzed like it was full of invisible flies.
I tried to speak, but he’d also commanded me to silence in his string of murmurs. Didikas leaned closer, as though to hear me, then nodded. “How?” He asked for me. “You didn’t think I would show up to our reunion unprepared, did you? Or did you expect me to charge in like an indignant scorned lover, my breast full of fire and tearful words on my lips? Come now, Shyora, you know me better than that.”
“…Narahn,” I gasped. Even that defiance against his order cost me, and I groaned at the fresh wave of agony.
“You always were quick,” he said begrudgingly. He’d begun to pace in a circle around where I knelt, lecturing like I were a student and he the patient tutor. “It wasn’t hard to earn his trust. Bright lad, very bright. He would have made a decent apprentice. Shame that he knew more than was healthy for him. Shame that he held so much regret about taking part in your presence here in the city.”
I managed to turn my head just enough to glare at him, but my anger withered to shock when I saw his left hand. The mage followed my look and raised it, pulling his sleeve back so I could see it more clearly. The skin was dark, much more so than Didikas’s sun-bronzed but naturally pale complexion. The line where it had been hacked off was marked by a lattice of stitches, connecting it to its new owner.
The arm was covered in golden tattoos.
“What… have you…” I pressed a hand to my throat as my voice slowly returned. “Narahn is—”
“Food for ghouls,” Didikas said coldly. “Your stink was all over him. To think, I offered you a mutually beneficial partnership, and instead you spread your legs for that…” He scoffed and shook his head. “Well, if you gave him a fragment of your spirit, it is gone now. His master’s research, however, that will remain with me. And this.” He waggled the fingers of his stolen hand. “Quite incredible work, these marks. I imagine they sting.”
Narahn and I had not coupled, not in the way Didikas seemed to be thinking. He must have sensed my lingering presence from our journey through the Tombs. I’d left enough of myself behind to keep an eye on the alchemist, wary that he might follow through on his threat. The scadudemon should have returned to me when Narahn was killed. Didikas must have destroyed it.
The mage strutted, brandishing his stolen arm as he monologued to his captive audience. “That boy has given me such gifts! His master’s research is fascinating. Already, I’ve advanced my knowledge of demonology by years. I’ve started the process of binding other fiends. None as comely as you, my dear, but the potential!”
He saw my look, and his good cheer withered. I was laughing at him. My current state made my amusement a breathless, quiet thing, but it hadn’t gone unnoticed.
He reached out and pressed his gold-branded palm to my forehead.
Pain. All-consuming, blinding, molten pain. I might have screamed, lost moments of time. When I came back to myself, I lay prostrate on the floor and smoke issued off me like steam off a wet rock. My forehead had been badly scorched, and the sensation was strongest there. I lifted a hand dumbly to it.
“I imagine that’s painful,” Didikas said in a calm voice. “Don’t get up.”
“So you have me now,” I said, wincing as I touched the wound on my brow. The brand mimicked the alchemical circles on Didikas’s — on Narahn’s — palm. “What is your intention?”
In answer, he made a signal by raising his staff. More people began to move into the street, melting out of the alleys. They wore ramshackle armor and carried weapons. Some held torches.
“Burn it,” he said and gestured to the Candrian’s House.
I grit my teeth and struggled against his binding, fought hard enough that my spirit started to come loose from Kaida’s body. Didikas scoffed at my efforts, and spoke another string of words in my own kind’s ruinous tongue. Another flash of pain, and I slammed back into the vessel hard enough that it took me to the dusty street. I curled there, shivering.
Inside the brothel, people began to scream. Windows were shattered. Blood was spilled.
“You will pay for this,” I hissed.
Didikas shook his head. “No, Shyora. This is payment for your sins.”
Several of the thugs emerged from the smoking building. They had the Candrian in hand, who’d been beaten bloody and looked dazed.
“What do you want done with him?” One asked Didikas.
The mage considered a moment, then nodded. “We can’t be certain he isn’t one of her thralls. Kill him.”
And before I could so much as whisper a protest, two of the men lifted their blades and brought them down. The Candrian let out a grunt, then slumped into a fast-growing pool of his own mercurial blood.
“Not human after all,” Didikas mused. “I’d always wondered.”
I could not shapeshift. He’d bound me inside my stolen human body as surely as if it were an iron maiden, locked and sealed, the key lost inside the wizard’s own throat. To my right, the brothel went up as the muffled screams of its occupants were swallowed by flames surely as the building itself. No one would come to save them. No one could, or cared to.
“DIDIKAS!”
The voice ripped down the street like a thunderbolt. In the corner of my vision, I caught a glimpse of a new figure stumbling towards us. He was a lean man, young and covered in his own sweat and blood, right hand clutching the hilt of a leaf-bladed sword. His left arm was missing, his bloodied shirt tied over the stump.
“Impossible.” Didikas turned to face the shambling intruder with bewildered shock. “I threw you into the depths!”
Narahn lifted his sword. One side of his face was a mask of blood and swelling, so he formed an odd mirror with the wizard as he glared with one angry eye. He said nothing, just advanced.
Didikas began to work a spell, but I concentrated on the leather patch covering his left eye and he let out a shout of pain He stumbled back, clawing at the patch with his free hand.
“Kill him!” He choked. His hired murderers moved on Narahn, but the man didn’t stop, just clutched his blade tighter. He caught the first cleaver on its edge and let out a shout as he riposted, hacking into his attacker’s hip.
Didikas managed to get his eyepatch off. Insects crawled inside the gaping, infected hole where his eye had been, chewing on the inside of his skull. His face formed a rictus of pain and rage, his stained teeth clenching so hard they threatened to chip.
Above my head, one of the windows of the brothel shattered. Something emerged from it, a pale shadow against the night sky that almost glowed as it spread its wings. I felt it call out to me, desperate, scared, and hungry. My blood was still fresh in its veins, our connection strong.
I commanded it to save Narahn. It let out a scream of hollow anger as it realized it could not disobey.
I have made few Woed in the grand scheme of time, but I regret none more than poor Arlee. I will not ask you for forgiveness, sister, for I know I do not deserve it, just as you did not deserve this unkind world.
Half blind and in agony, Didikas whirled on me and tried to speak another command. His broken concentration had allowed me to move, however, and I took on my demon shape. My wings clapped together, slapping him about the back and shoulders so the claws gouged him. Further disoriented and injured, he lifted his staff in a half-hearted effort to shield himself.
Just then, one of his thugs stepped forward with his sword raised for a swing.
“STOP!” Didikas yelled in horror, but it was too late. The mercenary, frightened and acting on reflex, swung his blade into my neck.
It didn’t cut all the way through, not on the first swing. It was a cheap blade, and it jammed in my spine. I collapsed to a knee, gurgling through the blood that welled in my throat. The metal was so cheap and impure that it did little more than scald.
The mercenary’s eyes were wide as they stared into mine, and I knew what I needed to do, the only way I would get out of this. Through that eye contact, I whispered into the man’s mind. Didikas pleaded for him to stop, to spare me, but the terrified man ripped his blade free and swung again.
The world spun, twisted, became a blur. Sky and ground, then sky again, a glimpse of the moon I’d daydreamed of flying to, then—
Darkness.
There are more stories of the age that followed the beginning of the wars over Fallen Heaven. In those days, demons ran wild across the planar highways, dark lords rose to claim their own fragments of divinity, and there was suffering across the whole of the kingdom of Creation.
In the tomes of history, that time would be known as the Age of Falling Feathers.
There were more tales too of Rot Voraag. Perhaps you have heard of Exalted Eibon, of Golden Narahn and Wandering Didikas, of the White Valkyrie and other names of distant legend. Perhaps you have heard of the Fly Days when plague spread across the west like a tidal wave of death, or of the Chimeric Wars, and of the rise of the Cambion and the darkening of the west.
But their stories are not mine, though I have left my stain on the pages of history. This anecdote of my days in that place and time is meant to settle what came after in context. I have spoken of my pride, conceit, and desire, of the enemies I made and the truths — both personal and existential — that I learned, even though it took me much more time and torment to fix them into my identity, and I will not pretend that even now I have come to terms with them.
How does one accept that there is no hope, no peace? I will never die, for I was born of the will of immortals, and am immortal myself. I can evolve, even forget, but I can never escape.
In the centuries following the death of Heaven, entire worlds burned. The agonies of that time still ripple through eternity. Can you not hear them?
I can.
