Arc 9: Oath || Chapter 1: The Abgrûdai |
Part One: Tormentsister
“So you were there?” The alchemist asked. “When Heaven burned?”
He stood outside of the circle. Well out of reach, even from its outermost ring. His laboratory was large, almost cavernous, yet made to seem cramped by a plethora of equipment — shelves of jars filled with reagents, bubbling apparatus, the skeletons of half-finished mechanisms and machines. His life’s work, and a long life judging by what remained of his white hair, his thin and thickly veined flesh.
I could see the desperation in him, taste it. It called to me almost so loud as the lethargic heart struggling to beat inside his chest. One I could not reach, not inside his cage, but the other…
The scratching of a stylus drew my gaze from the old alchemist. In the corner there sat another human, this one young, little more than a boy. An apprentice? A slave? Perhaps both. He was drawing while taking notes, capturing the scene. Drawing me. When he caught my gaze, all the blood drained from the apprentice’s face. It rushed back again when my lips twitched into a smile, darkening his face to red, but he remembered himself and tore his eyes from mine to fix them once more on his parchments.
The alchemist said something in a language I did not know, perhaps the one used wherever he’d brought me. “Speak, Abgrûdai! I command you to answer me.”
He may as well have reached pliers into my sinew and twisted. I hid the stiffening of my limbs by lifting an arm, letting my fingers trace the lines of my new face. My vessel was comely, though the apprentice’s reaction told me that much. A sacrifice, judging by the blood in her mouth, the ritual wounds cut into her flesh. She’d been alive when I entered her, the poor thing.
“If you want to give it that name.” The question wearied me. It was all they ever wished to know, men like him. They choked the world in their fervor to remain in it, and obsessed over whether there was an after, as though my mere presence in his lab did not prove the fact.
Not even bothering to disguise his excitement, the old man leaned forward over his staff. He was centuries old. I smelled the stalled decay in him, scented the metals with which he’d replaced brittle bones, the chemicals he’d used to strengthen his blood and sharpen his mind. The instrument supporting his weight was a type of wood he birthed from unnatural soils, inlaid with gold he’d transmuted from iron and lead.
A master of his craft, and yet the sheer hope in the old sorcerer’s eyes as he asked his next question made me want to laugh. “What was it like?” He asked me like a boy demanding stories of the ocean. “What did you see?”
I did laugh, after all. It felt good to laugh, to have a voice, to have lungs and breath of air rather than fire. The student-slave in the corner flinched at that laugh, and the dying alchemist glared and tightened his grip on his mimic cane.
“It would take far longer than this circle will hold me to describe all I’ve seen, mortal. I would counsel you to narrow your question.” I let my tail explore the alchemist’s circle, used my second tongue to taste the energized air of that boundary which, in that moment at least, was my window into this world. Though which world, I did not know. Twelve concentric circles bounded by a twelve-pointed star, forming a space in the center just wide enough that I could stand within it with my wings folded. A dodecagon. About the circle there were twelve tall lamps of brass, each high as a man, set to shine light from all around and prevent me from casting a shadow.
The language he used to speak to me, to summon me, was the tongue of Nekhral. I almost snorted. This warlock was quite the melodramatist.
And not a patient one, either. In a hard voice he said, “Answer me, demon. Is it real? The First Kingdom? Is Onsolem—”
That word scalded me, and I spoke over his clumsy questions. “You hold all the power of creation and destruction in this very laboratory. You can turn to water to wine, wood to gold, even reach forth through the fabric of existence and drag me here, yet you doubt the existence of God?”
The old man scoffed and began to pace, his staff clacking with each unsteady step. “There are many beings we might call gods. I want to know the truth. The origin.”
“Poor, tired old man.” I smiled at him then, running my tongue over a full set of teeth. They would be white, I suspected, the body healthy. “Do you fear your death? If you but ask, I will take you in my arms and we will sink together into that great darkness. I will hold you close and show you horrors and wonders…”
To demonstrate, I spread my arms as far as the bounds of the dodecagon’s innermost circle would allow. Not far, but it gave the alchemist a full view of me, of the bloodstained and naked body of the sacrifice into which he’d called me. He’d carved more of his goetic marks into her flesh, cut circles around her navel, dug runes into the meat of her shoulders and legs. Within the bounds of my cage, I showed him the clawed and webbed wings and the hissing serpent that were but the appendages of my true shape. It grew within the taken flesh at that very moment, reknitting organs, crawling through veins.
All I needed was time, and I would be strong enough to challenge this tired sorcerer’s will.
“You really think I will just give you my soul?” The alchemist asked in a tone of incredulity. His pride was naked as his hunger for knowledge. I’d offended him.
In answer, I lifted the vessel’s left hand and dabbed at the middle finger with her tongue, tasting the salt of her drying sweat. “I will take better care of it than the one you seek.”
The old man swallowed and averted his eyes. He was tempted. I saw it in him, knew I’d read him correctly. This proud master was old, and in his dotage he’d become afraid. Afraid that after an age of playing at being a god, of murder and monsters of his own making, his spark might simply cease. Or, worse, that in death he would be less than in life, prey and plaything to the monsters who lurked beyond veils he’d pried open with his greedy fingers.
And he was exactly right. After all, I was one of those monsters.
Once again I attempted to lay claim to the apprentice’s attention, but some stray word from the alchemist, or simple instinct, kept his attention fixed on his work. Smart boy. Smarter than his master.
“Enough,” my summoner said and began to pace again. “You are here to answer questions, not goad me with temptation, succubus.”
But I do tempt you, I thought. Don’t I, you frightened thing? But I did not say it aloud, for I could guess his mind well enough. A little longer and I would hold it in my hands and read it like I might a book.
Folding my wings neatly together, better covering the sacrifice’s modesty, I twined a lock of her hair around one forefinger. Black. “Very well,” I said and made my new body sigh. “Ask.”
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“Where were you before I called you here?” He asked me.
“In the Tower of Glass Bells,” I told him.
The alchemist slammed his staff down. “You mock me!”
In answer, my tail flicked its tongue near one of the arching lines of gold-encrusted runes cut into the floor. “I see scripts of truth in this cage, old man. Do you have so little faith in your own science? Jannakul da’ae rolok, mortal. You know these names from those who made them. I do not lie. We threw down the bells from that tower and broke them, and now our voices fill it.”
The sorcerer composed himself and took a moment to think. “So it is real. There is a Heaven.”
I covered my mouth with the claw of one wing to hide my smile. “Not anymore. Let me ask you a question, sorcerer — how did you come by my name?”
He seemed surprised by the question, turned to stare at me. His eyes were false, twin crystals without color jammed into the sockets of his aged skull. Could he see the eddies of will in the air, as I did? “You were known to the priests of Aghart, and there was reference to you in Morganthalr’s Journals.”
Morganthalr. I would rather have not heard that name again. Were this body more my own, familiar enough to heed my will on reflex rather than focused intent, my lip would have curled then. I knew where I was, and it would not have been my first choice. These ancient shores were near as abused as the realm I’d just been pulled from.
How long had it been? Centuries? Millennia? Time had little meaning beyond the mortal coil.
Aloud I said, “I recall the men of Aghart. They offered better sacrifices. Who was this one? Another apprentice, perhaps? Your daughter?” I ran a hand down one breast, smearing blood over it.
The alchemist shrugged. “A whore I pulled from the street. It is a rule of my art to call like to like, after all… She agreed to this for a bronze coin and a promise that I would show her an angel.”
He smiled at the look on my face, then turned to snarl something in that unfamiliar local tongue. In the corner, the apprentice cringed and started writing again, having ceased during our debate. The sorcerer leaned closer to me, almost so close as to disturb the flow of energies that bound my prison. I knew the next question before it even formed on his cracking lips. They all asked.
“What of the origin?” He all but whispered. “Have you seen it?”
My reply was flat and devoid of flirtation. “He is gone, mortal. He has abandoned you and all of us, and His throne is empty.”
“Bah!” The alchemist turned his back on me in contempt, his long coat sweeping dramatically. “Drivel. I do not speak of God.”
“Of course you do!” I laughed again. “Call it what you will, but all men seek a god. Especially dying ones.”
To accentuate the statement, my tongue — my tongue, long and forked just like the serpent’s — flicked out to taste his chemical stench. I’d almost forgotten his kind believed all things and all places to be fashioned of their vaunted mathematics, their rules. They pulled the levers of the machines of Creation, and yet mocked the idea that there might have been an architect.
If they but knew the truth of the reality they dwelt in, they would pluck out their eyes and lobotomize themselves. The edges of their maps were dark and full of horrors.
“Very well,” the alchemist said and once again mastered his anger. “Then tell me this, where does—”
Just then, I scented something else in the air. It overcame the febrile odors of the laboratory, and I knew it at once. My tail coiled close and let out a long, angry hiss.
And in that very moment, the darkest edges of the alchemist’s lab began to move, to boil. It had been cold before, but now the temperature rose sharply, a prickling heat that bit at my gifted skin. There came a sound like glass breaking, like stone grinding and rising thunder. The alchemist noticed it too, as did his boy. He turned, his eyes wide, just as scarlet lightning breached the walls between planes and the first horrors began to burst through the fractures.
The beasts were lupine things, front heavy, their bodies not unlike lions and their heads resembling those of diseased wolves. Their tortured hides glowed with heat, and toxic flames spilled from their jaws in place of saliva. Burning collars of iron enclosed their blistered necks, from which spiked chains writhed like serpents devoid of any hands to grip them.
I knew their burning eyes, recalled their stink before it had even touched my vessel’s nostrils. The hellhounds surrounded the alchemist as he backed almost to the edge of the circle. Behind me, the apprentice rose from his desk, displacing his notes in his haste to stand. He said something in the local language, his voice high and fearful.
No. I need more time. I closed my wings around myself, knowing they would not shield me from what was about to happen.This fool hadn’t even covered his tracks.
The doors to the study, heavy oak bounded in iron, burst to release a flurry of embers and heat. Were the building we stood in not made of stone, it would already be aflame, but the alchemist was not that shortsighted at least. The one who stepped forth through those cinders was a mummy wrapped in soot-stained bandages from head to toe, only one bloodshot eye visible. They wore ragged robes like some mendicant, all in shades of charcoal gray, and cast no shadow.
“URIZEN TAAR'UK,” the burnt monk rasped in a voice like rusted knives scraped together, the words wheezing from scorched lungs. “YOU HAVE BROKEN THE LAW OF ZOS. IT IS TIME TO FACE JUDGEMENT.”
The alchemist, Urizen, scrambled away from the burnt shape in terror only to flinch as one of the hellhounds snapped at him. Another knocked over one of the tall candles he’d set around the summoning circle. It struck the outermost ring and broke it.
Not enough. The inner ring was still strong. And once they had my summoner, they would take me. They probably already had a pit prepared. The sound of rattling chains and tortured metal echoed through the open doorway. Two great shadows fell on the crowfriar, and something worse than him entered the room.
He’d brought scorchknights.
The apprentice cried out in fear and ran for his master, but paused when my serpent hissed at him. He saw me shake my head. He is not worth it, boy, and you have broken no laws yet.
His hazel eyes became wide as saucers as my words slithered through his mind. My serpent knew all tongues once it had tasted them, but I did not need his language to make myself understood this way. Fear of those hellspawned arbiters, for his master, and fear of me all warred together and froze him. In his distraction, one of the hellhounds noticed him and spat out a plume of flame. It was a bright flash of light and heat in the dim laboratory, hot enough that the one of the glass tanks with a half-grown homonculus shattered, spilling its contents in a heap of colorless fluid and meat to the floor.
The hellfire burned the boy, made him stumble back and fall with a cry of pain. It cast a light across one wall, over which my own shadow stretched for just an instant.
An instant was all I needed. The shadow broke the circle, and I became the shadow, the body of meat and blood I’d been ensconced within melting into an ichorous black sludge. I sank into the brief-lived corridor cast by my own winged silhouette over the alchemist’s dodecagon.
The first scorchknight to step into the laboratory saw me. A towering shape, clad in a suit of burning iron onto whose spikes tormented mortal souls were impaled, he lifted a flaming spear. No, a harpoon, like to that a whaler might use, tied to his arm by a long chain. An angel glared at me with dismal hate from inside the cherubic mask of the helm, where its form was compressed into a space far too small for it.
A mortal might have quailed at the infernal gaze hidden within that helm’s black depths, but I was no mortal and felt only glee at his pain. He threw the harpoon, and my shadow-self split so one took the blow and was pinned against the wall, a writhing patch of darkness caught like a fish. A good throw, if hasty.
I abandoned my new-made sister and swam across the laboratory’s stone walls to the small window across from the door, hurling ghostly laughter at that scorched angel. Then a second stepped into the room, and I knew it was time to go. The window was curtained against the outside light to avoid the very method I’d used to escape the circle. I found the slimmest of cracks in that cloth, went through it and through the seam beyond, even as the apprentice began to weep and his master let out a high wail of pain and terror.
Mortals are always afraid. He should have taken my offer.
Beyond the window was daylight. Fast-fading, a distant yellow star falling below a mountainous horizon. Between me and it lay a land, a country, a city, abundant with souls and life and unexplored dreams. Clean air, open skies, a new world.
Freedom! No more of that carcass kingdom, no more of those petty monarchs and their pointless war. Minds which might not know me.
I spread my wings as night fell over that world, casting my shadow over that city whose name I did not know. Freedom. Warm air. Clean light. A blissful quiet that my scream of jubilation shattered. Oh, those mortals hiding in their meagre dens of wood and stone would have bleak dreams that night! They would dream of me, and despair.
They would dream of Pernicious Shyora.
