INTERLUDE 7A: THE CITADEL
“Do not fear to walk in darkness, for that is where I walk. Wherever you walk in darkness know this: you do not walk alone.”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 2:1-2
They’d better not have been lying to me.
Abstraxia’s cracked feet were no match for the black boulders. These rocks weren’t just jagged; they were like sponges of salt-crusted blades, nests of dark ridges that clustered about, hiding the shallow grooves with which this hostile terrain sought to harvest her blood, draw it away into sunken canals. Those canals were visible at times, where a wedged-in boulder had been shifted up the shoreline, revealing the arterial network beneath the torturous land. The crimson waves would wash over the landscape soon enough, stealing away the little globs of treasures she left behind her. She would be forced to seek the higher ground yet again, wait out the itinerant, softly-singing tide on the slopes.
She didn’t like the slopes. Sometimes she had to put her hands on the boulders, clamber up the shelves, and no matter how careful she was she always ended up slicing her palms and fingers, her beautiful long fingers. Feet were one thing, but did this place have to take her hands too?
There was often nothing else for it. To refuse to climb would mean facing the waves, and, more than anything, she did not want to get swept out into that sea, to join her voice to its everlasting chorus. Yet to climb without using her claws would risk falling, and she’d long-since learnt her lesson about falling over. Her face, torso, limbs… the brutal teachings had marked every part of her with criss-cross letters that ached and wept, forever unhealing.
For now, she limped on. There was no sunrise or sunset, no morning noon or night. Just the eternal bloodstain clouds seeping across the eternal bloodstain sky, like a child using a stick to swirl the left-overs on a killing-floor, refusing to let the puddles congeal. Red – red was the order of everything here. The sky was red. The waves were red. Even the black rocks – on those rare occasions when she’d passed a boulder that seemed to have recently fallen, upon inspection she’d found that even the rock itself bled, bright-red rivulets dripping down into the canals below.
My skin is red, she mused, noting her arms as they swung. Their surfaces were more scabs than skin, the wounds still weeping clear fluids at a startling rate.
Where the moisture, the blood came from – where any of it came from, she didn’t understand. Surely she ought to have been dead days ago, and, yet, here she was. Dragging her corpse up the coast.
All to find the Sunset Citadel.
They’d better not have been lying to me, she said to herself yet again. It must be real.
It must be.
Must be.
If this was all there was – if all that existed was this unbearable coastline – then she might as well have ended herself. Casting herself into the sea was out of the question, but climbing a pile of boulders then launching herself off? She would be more than capable of that. A solid fifteen, twenty foot fall… if she plunged down head-first, aimed her skull straight at a vicious right-angle of rock? She’d killed in a similar manner plenty of times before. She knew she was capable of this much.
Yet what would stop her returning again afterwards? A creature was at its most vulnerable on the plane of its origin. So would she return to Etherium, or was Infernum her place, now and forevermore? Would she be bound to this shoreline, consciousness refusing to properly depart flesh? What if the remnants of her spirit were drawn on into the waves, and her reawakening was in the midst of a million million thrashing souls, all clamouring futilely for release?
No. She would stay the course. Keep walking.
Keep walking.
* * *
Days passed – or what would’ve been days, had the skies ever changed. She couldn’t count out the passage of time by the tides; what might have felt like an hour went by, but in its course the tide could’ve switched direction three times already. There was nothing, no one. No crabs or gulls. No delicious midges. Nothing.
Nothing.
She kept walking.
They’d better not have been lying to me.
It had become something of a mantra to her now. The hideous people in the city whose rumours sent her here – they’d warned her in their strange chittering tongue, insectoid mandibles clicking. She wasn’t able to lie to herself – she’d somehow understood every Infernal word, the meaning clear as glass.
“If you go, that will be-e-e-e-e-e-e your path and you’ll never se-e-e-e-e-e-e our fair walls again!“
The bit about the ‘fair walls’ was garbage. Literal garbage. The strange, half-buried settlement was walled-in with the refuse of a thousand lands, wafted through the demi-planes of dross and decay and used to form a barrier against the denizens of the swamps beyond. It wasn’t even the good stuff – no booze, no filth, no body-parts or even bones. Just broken pottery, little scraps of shattered furniture, threads lost from clothing. The best thing she saw was half an odd sock.
No, she’d taken the meaning alright. As surely as the past pointed only into the future, she’d bound herself to some dark purpose by setting out for this destination. Her feet could only take her one way, and upon seeing her resolve the many-eyed, dangling creatures of the swamps had let her pass by unmolested. Onward, or death, and rebirth, and rebirth, and rebirth…
Never backwards.
Never ending.
On what should’ve been something like the tenth day, the sea started calling to her.
It began subtly at first. The soft inward sigh, like an ahhh or ahhb sound. The rush of the wave as it crashed, like strax. Then the pensive recoil, the furtive retreat, iii-ahhh.
Ab-strax-ia.
Ab-strax-ia.
She thought regularly about the re-naming process. Her previous name had been found wanting, and it had been changed – she understood this much. It had happened before. There was little power in it, then, but there was more now. A kernel of the self she sought. An enticing nugget of lore, designed to drag her on, tease the correct responses out of her.
Abstraxia, whispered the waves. Abstraxia…
She dragged herself on.
Or so it seemed to her.
* * *
The grey smudge ahead of her was hard to make out at first – and it wasn’t just a matter of distance. The figure approaching Abstraxia, coming the other way down the coastline with unnerving rapidity, appeared to have about it an enigmatic aura so strong that it dispelled its own presence from her mind repeatedly. The fifteenth or fiftieth time she noticed it, it was closer than she could bring herself to understand, and she actually halted, bringing her hands up to her face and cringing.
She was watching between her ragged fingers when he arrived in her vicinity, seemingly between one footfall and the next, his posture that of one merely out for a stroll. He was a tall, thin man, his hood cast back to reveal his narrow face, big hooked nose, flashing grey eyes. The iron-grey robe he wore possessed its own colour, independent of the crimson illumination casting everything in shades of red, and its fabric was so festooned with silvery spiders as to appear almost woven out of them; they moved continually, a fabric of living metal arachnids.
He was already raising the other foot to depart – a bare foot, bereft of both boot and, somehow, blood –
Then, just as he shifted his weight, he tossed his head in her direction, the long colourless hair barely swinging, clinging to his face and neck in lank locks. He smoothly returned the bare foot to the rock, turning to her. Those flashing eyes fell upon her, and in her naivety she failed to hide her gaze, failed to pay obeisance to this superior entity.
And to think!
To think she’d thought she knew. She thought she knew what pain was.
The stranger was a teacher and oh, oh, how he taught her.
She almost snapped her neck shoving her chin into her chest, and she went to her knees heavily, thrusting her arms out before her and pressing her face to the boulder in gratitude. Breaking eye-contact was her only goal. The bitter embrace of the rock was nothing, nothing, even as it opened her up, a thousand wounds –
“You poor creature,” the man said tenderly.
Somehow, every ache alleviated all at once, every laceration closing despite her prostrate pose. When she’d gone down, she’d unthinkingly sheared off half the scrawny kneecap – but she only noticed it as the damage was being reversed.
There was no pleasure in healing. Only bitterness.
She sat back on her knees, marvelling at the fact she felt so thoroughly unimpressed. The restoration still working its way through her, she slowly got to her feet, but she still didn’t dare to raise her face, her eyes to the stranger.
She stared down at her feet instead.
Her healed, unharmed feet. Skin smooth and grey and clean.
Clean.
A trick!
“Do not be fooled; Moon-sight holds as much Truth as Sun-sight,” the interloper said, as if his fancy words meant anything to her. “Your soul’s pages are bare to me, but your body reads the words aloud, those dreadful utterances whose echoes resound in the halls of your own mind. You long for release, but they will not permit you to Die here. Ere the binding of your wounds, each oozing opening and every itching sore sang a song your ears could not, cannot hear. Yet Star-sight brings Truth unparalleled. You will not relent, even if I say you head the wrong way along the shoreline. If I offer to take your hand, you will not trust me. You will only trust in the ones who offer to mould you, not those who would have you mould yourself. I would need to break you to take you at my side.”
She may have been a crude creature, but she did glean something of his meaning. She wasn’t stupid.
“You want me to think you can help me. That’s not what I want.”
“Whither your footfalls lead, I see naught for you but pain, purposeless pain, its only goal to prolong itself, to invest itself in new hosts, infest flesh, upon flesh, upon flesh. If you think you know what suffering is…”
She closed her eyes, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. There was still none of the agony she associated with standing, none of the constant reminder that her bare feet were pressed into grooves formed by a web of razors…
“Ah. And so you think of me. How can I be as a teacher to you? You think me a liar. You cannot trust in that which will not admit wishing you ill. That which will not openly use you. All for fear of the hidden hand, at whose movements the unsensed strings are set to pull you hither and thither, put you to dance. But in this I see you still thirst, only and always, for Truth. Would you not see all strings, even those tied fast about the hidden hand itself, and about every limb of its Orchestrator?”
“What about the strings on your hand?” she countered, trying to keep her voice from trembling.
“No,” he went on, using a tone that told her he hadn’t even listened to her. “You are already broken and healed in the wrong shape, taken beyond my ability to repair. I see through your mind, Traseya, as though it were a frozen pool on a clear morning.”
That name hurt more than any other. She sobbed suddenly.
“Do you not know who you are, child? I could offer to show you, but it is not given to me to open closed eyes. That must always come from within, or come none at all.”
I’m Abstraxia.
“That is not my name,” she snarled quietly. Her eyes may have been screwed shut against the tears, her chin may have still been tucked against her chest – but she was willing to gamble her defiance would be recognised by the masters of this place, those whose game she played, whose tests she faced. “Who are you? You don’t belong here.”
“I am not alone in that,” he replied, “and I have many names, and more guises. In that I fear you shall all too soon rival me. To which world were you bound, when they herded you through the Mist?”
She shuddered despite herself. What did he mean? Why did his words resonate within her like a bell, keening clearly, hideously, through the silent halls of her soul?
“Perhaps, if you know not the name of the realm, you could tell me its chiefest demons. From whose womb do the spawn of Hell emanate in your lore? Whose seed sets them there?”
“You mean,” she breathed, suddenly wanting to understand, to be a part of this, “you mean Mejesta and Vaanus?”
“Makrieleg and Vanabroth.” There was something new in his voice there: disdain. “I shall visit them soon enough. That world is known to me as Avalost, the Sixth of its name. And therefore you must know me as Kultemeren, where my sigil is kept by the Liars as though it were holy, thereby hoping to share in my sanctity.”
She reeled, almost opening her eyes to behold him again, take in his strange splendour once more in the light of this revelation.
I will not!
“Where Rivorn Mortichor is my son, he whose pupil and rival will break you in the end, if you pursue the course.” This… this god, or pretender-god, went on in a relentless tirade. “You have strayed far from the path, daughter. You ought to wander the Insebeleth, on Avalost’s lanes of memory, among the dark roses in the fields… your choice still before you. How came you here, to seek the Citadel? You are a warped soul but you are no demon!”
“I will be!” she cried back, turning her head aside so that she could open her eyes, glower in safety at the red sea. “If you’re gonna strike me down, do it.”
“And thereby satiate all your needs for you?” He sounded sad. “No. I see you, Traseya, such that your beauty blinds me! Will you not let me loan you my eyes, even for a moment?”
Between one moment and the next – surely a manifestation of the godling’s desire – a mirror of polished glass appeared, right before her eyes, interrupting and reflecting her ocean-bound glare.
She screwed her eyes shut once more, but not before she caught a glimpse of the woman in the mirror.
Her hair was a cascade of flames, her nose and cheeks full of freckles, eyes blue like pale sapphires.
It was her. Not as she was – not as she had been for as long as she could remember. The goblin-skin… she hadn’t been born with it, had she?
I had red hair, red like fire.
“I shall let you pursue your course, as with all the denizens of the World, until such a time as our courses will not permit us to pass by one another. Then our paths shall instead bring us into Inescapable collision, and both of us will be lessened for it. I for one shall not judge awry for the sake of spending some strength in slaying one more Foe, aeons hence. For you, perhaps, the choice shall prove graver.”
He stopped speaking.
She sat in the silence, listening to the crashing of the red waves.
“Very well. I have almost lingered too long, and every second spent wastes incalculable lives. You are not my only charge, as you well recognise. Fare thee well, Abstraxia. I would say I hope our paths will not cross again, yet that would be the first lie I have spoken, and I will not lie to you. Remember me, later, when you can. I am the Demonslayer. You will not hear me approach unless I will it.”
There was no rustle of fabric, no distinct change she could tell by hearing or by scent – the sea was louder than his movements, the overpowering odour of blood stronger than the god’s perspiration – yet she felt the change as he left her behind, as if the whole world had been tipped over in his presence and only now righted itself.
Sending her crashing back into her blanket of pain.
She opened her eyes and, half-wincing, she looked.
The boulders before her were empty.
It was harder than ever before, setting out again, leaving tranquillity behind in order to seek an uncertain fate. But she did it with a smile fixed on her face.
Keep walking.
She’d passed the test. The masters of this place, this plane, would recognise her worth, her loyalty, her commitment to pain.
Her old wounds made new, started again from fresh.
Keep walking.
* * *
The honest man, the faker-god pretending to be Kultemeren… he’d lied. There was no salvation for her. There was no Sunset Citadel. The meaning of his words was plain now. She was lost, travelling the wrong direction, heading from nowhere into nothingness.
She didn’t care anymore. She was Abstraxia. She would continue, and she would continue, and that would be all.
It was only when she lost all hope that things changed.
A single thin red rod, protruding vertically from between two rocks, was waving cheerily at her from a great remove. So strange was the notion of something new, something different, that she halted immediately upon spotting it.
She had little doubt that to an observer, to the observers, her cautious approach might’ve made her look timid. She didn’t care. She slunk up, hunched low to the rocks, heedless now of the bitter slicing the bare soles of her feet endured. It could’ve been anything. The appendage of some native animal she’d be forced to fight. Something dropped by the godling on his opposing route, inherently perilous…
It was no more than a foot long, and it continued to wave. The motion, it seemed as she came closer, was entirely random. Like a blade of grass, shifting in the caress of a wind she could not feel.
The last ten yards she covered swiftly.
It was a blade of grass. Crimson in hue, like all else here, yet it was grass. At least in appearance.
She plucked it, claws snicking through its slender stem, and raised it to her teeth without even thinking. The meagre amount of red sap inside was sweeter than she’d expected, sweeter than bee-honey. A luxury unlike anything she’d tasted since the before-times, since she was someone else. She guzzled it, slurping hard at the thing to drain it dry, then chomped the dry husk to bits between her fangs.
When she was done she dropped to all fours, letting the boulders work their magic on her, uncaring. A sudden influx of aggravating sensations went rippling down her shins but she could ignore it to press her lips about the broken-off stalk of the plant.
It wasn’t just the taste of it. It was the feeling it aroused in her. There was power in the stuff. And this was just a single measly blade of grass!
When she struggled to her feet, she cast about, seeing her surroundings anew.
A landscape… of power.
“That was not for thee, Abstraxia.”
The female voice spoke softly but there was a hint of menace in the sound, and it seemed to come from between her toes.
She looked down at the gnawed grass-stump, eyes wide.
“Do not be afraid.” It used a coddling tone, now, as if satisfied with her reaction. “Thou art not the first to make that mistake. But be warned. Those blades of grass thou didst sup belong unto the King’s own ministers. Thou shouldst not knowingly draw from his stock, and to do so unknowingly would invite their wrath no less.”
“Who – who are you? Why are you… why would you tell me this?”
“I am one who would see thee reach the Citadel.”
Chills of excitement gripped her. She flung her head up, looking out at the rocky horizon.
Nothing. Still nothing.
“Thou art closer than thou canst understand. Continue. There’s juice left in you yet.”
With that last phrase the formality seemed to leave the voice, replaced with gentle mockery, and this loosened her own tongue.
“And you’re helping me, because…?”
“I have tasks for you to complete. You will be my ward.”
“Your prisoner?”
“You have been a prisoner. A million shadows did close upon you tend, inhaling your breath and blowing it back, needling each hair to your scalp, fastening each bond about wrist and ankle, wrist and ankle… Now it is your turn to guard, and to chastise your former wayward cellmates. If you see this as enslavement, so be it. There is no better role for you in this world, or any other.”
She hesitated, despite it being everything she’d ever wanted.
“Which god do you serve?”
The voice coming out of the rocks at her feet seemed to laugh, fizzing and wheezing.
“Which god? There is but one! We serve the Queen of Night, of course! No other lesser being called deity shall hear our pleas, to their eternal shame.”
Abstraxia straightened up. “Mejesta? Ma… Makrieleg?”
“No, no.” Impatience now. “Thou might in time become, as I, the peer of such a creature, and rule domains in thine own name, the dark goddess of worlds in thine own right. Thou art no longer blinded by the Shadow. Soon thou shalt cast thine own across worlds, and see millions whimper, tremble in fear at thine approach. All this and more might I promise, shouldst thou come hence, and offer me thy service.”
“Your…” She stopped herself, steeling her will. “By what name… by what name shall I call thee?”
The voice laughed.
“I am known as Haehuinil. From the womb of my mind issued forth Dhoron, Golyana, Velko, and a hundred others whose myths once claimed worlds in my name.”
Was that a trace of regret, there, in the voice?
“And now thee also, Abstraxia. From my mind, thine. From thy power, mine. And all for the King and his Queen, in the end. But to keep even one drop for each gallon thou spilst; ah, ’tis a glory! A glory! A glory…”
Regret replaced with relish. Relish Abstraxia knew for herself, now.
Without another word, she started walking once more, not even wincing.
It was not a lie. My reward lies ahead. I only need the strength to get there.
Her knees knocked, and by pure force of will she forced the legs to lope out ahead of her, clawed feet pulling her across the landscape in spite of the agonies they endured.
Keep walking.
* * *
The endless churning sloshing became rustling, swishing. Waters that were not really waters shifted, intensifying, coalescing. Grasses that were not really grasses came into sharper and sharper focus. When at last Abstraxia stood in the midst of the open plains, surrounded by crimson foliage, she understood the reality of things.
Water, grass, the form was meaningless. It was the objective truth behind the form that held meaning, and that truth was blood.
That truth was power.
She resisted the urge to cackle, saunter about in glee at this, this conquering, this victory beyond the jaws of death and death and death. For one thing, when taken in clumps these blades of grass were like bundles of razors, more likely to slash her to pieces than the grim boulders she’d left behind. For another, she knew that she was watched. She would have to show only her most resolute expression, wearing her face like a mask. She would impress this Haehuinil. She would slide barely-harmed across this crimson landscape, and present herself to her new masters in all her glory.
“You show remarkable restraint.”
The wind moved the grasses, and the voice rose from them, immeasurably louder now.
The same voice, though. Haehuinil’s.
“Come to us. Don’t delay – you’ll never reach us that way. Run wild through the fields, my child. Run and bleed and be free.”
She obeyed at once, giving in to temptation, raising a bawling yell of pure joy for the last time in her long, long existence. She sprang out across the rolling featureless expanse, trailing blood as she went, uncaring.
For all of seven or eight bounds, anyway.
Before she’d even gone what should’ve been a league in the old measurements, despair had eaten and re-eaten her, regurgitating what remained and swallowing it again and again, seeking to whittle her away, strip her into dismayed little flecks of her former self so that she might be more-easily digested. Once or twice she even heard the laughter of Haehuinil, her patron and sponsor, echoing across the delirious flatlands as though a million million souls repeated the sounds.
The feet were gone entirely, and little remained of her legs. Twisted stumps of bone tapered down to the ankle where they finally culminated in white knots of unfeeling matter, oozing marrow where they pressed into the scarlet soil. In her fascination as she walked, walked, walked she realised this must’ve been how those sword-demons felt all the time, their blade-legs digging into the ground…
Did it still hurt them too? Or had they moved past it as they changed, making flesh and bone into metal?
She touched her tongue with a nail every now and then to ensure it wasn’t becoming a rod of metal, traced her brows with a fingertip to check her face wasn’t shaped like an hourglass. She felt stupid; she hoped Haehuinil didn’t know what she was doing, but the chances of that were next to nil. One time, the laughter rang out across the endless fields as if in response to her nervous gesture – and Abstraxia lowered the hand instantly, stopping and throwing her own laughter back at the horizon’s carpets of blood, a nasal, self-mocking, self-doubting sound.
Haehuinil’s laughter only grew louder, more amused, descending into a bubbling wheeze that every empty parcel of air seemed to join and amplify, a chorus of increasingly-deafening clamour. At first Abstraxia tried to match it, but there was no point. She fell silent, waiting for the excoriating cackling to stop.
It didn’t. Eventually she stirred her stumps into action once more, making her way into the source of the noise, battered and buffeted by its thunder.
Scowling, she endured it.
Scowling, she kept walking.
* * *
How it crept up on her, Straxi had no notion. How anything so immense could not be seen on the approach, how it could blend so seamlessly into land and sky, not even shimmering in spite of its heat… It was utterly bewitching.
She bounded right into it, loping along at her customary furious pace; she left a red mark at head-height where her face impacted the invisible barrier, splitting the left eye-socket.
As she watched, the smear of blood that seemed to hang there in thin air began to disappear, perhaps being absorbed… She put out her bony claw, marvelling at the hot surface, but before she could touch her blood it was all whisked away, transported perhaps to some imp’s work-station, to be counted drop by drop, to be meted out drip by drip, to the worthy. The faithful.
Perhaps I’ll get some back, someday, she thought, and tittered.
It couldn’t have been a mirror, exactly; she cast no reflection in the surface before her. But it couldn’t be made of glass, either. The red fields just went on, and on, and on… If it was glass, this couldn’t be the Citadel, the place she’d sought, longed for for so long she could no longer recall a before-time, a pre-longing.
And this had to be the Citadel… didn’t it?
Unless the innards of the Sunset Citadel were being hidden from her by some witchery. There had to be something other than more fields, more bloody prairies, didn’t there?
Like the Citadel even exists. C’mon, Straxi.
Giggling, she placed her left hand on the warm, mirror-like wall, and then started walking to her right.
“I know!” she cried aloud in defiance to the red universe watching over her, casting her gaze up at the broiling blood-clouds, their constant swirling conflicts. “I know I don’t know! Ah-ha-haaaaa!”
The universe laughed back in response. Soon she was leaping along again, following the wall with her arm outstretched to maintain contact.
I’m less, now, I think. I think I’m Straxi.
She laughed again. It was funny. So funny, what they’d done. When she closed her eyes she pictured the things she’d always pictured, so nakedly real before the imagination that she could’ve been mistaken for thinking they were things she’d really seen.
Her legs becoming swords, her head caving in until only an hourglass span in its place.
Sprouting nests of thorny limbs until she was those thorns, multiplied eyes left atop her shoulders.
The laughter taking over, consuming her with such force that as she ran the entrails shuddered free of her belly.
She was ready.
I am ready.
There was no half-remembered sea by which to orient herself; every infinite horizon looked like dusk no matter which way she turned her head, as though a million or more suns perished just out of view on this fateful eve. She travelled swiftly, and after the first hours or days she became uncertain as to the shape she traced across the fields. Was this a straight wall, or had it curved subtly, bringing her back to her starting position? It was impossible to say for sure; over the course of hundreds of miles, a gentle arc would’ve been impossible to discern, and there were no landmarks to help guide her.
She didn’t feel like she was going in circles, though. The grasslands ahead of her appeared untrodden, unlike the pockmarked track she left in her wake, ditches and grooves marking the points at which she landed, leapt off again… These fields of crimson corn looked new. Different.
Then she saw another, like herself, coming the wrong way. Heading towards her, his right hand touching the wall, his course opposite her own.
For it was a male, going off the hulking frame. There were remnants of a big square chin hiding beneath the folds of torn lips, where the lower jaw had been vertically split – never mind the lack of breasts on his open chest. His scalp hung off his bare yellow skull in a great dry curl, flapping against the earless side of his head as he cantered.
He didn’t leap. Instead of lengthening in response to their punishment as hers had done, his legs had divided. Three extra limbs had sprouted from his pelvis; the one by his navel looked like a useless, abortive mutation, swinging around and slapping into him as he moved. Yet the other legs were doing a fine job of propelling him towards her. The nails or knuckles of each toe had closed in, forming hooves.
“Nooooo!” he squealed when he saw her, slowing somewhat. “Wrong way! Wrong waaay!”
She reduced her own pace, trying a contemptuous grin.
“Wrong way to you!” she cried back.
The landscape hailed her response by laughing uproariously. Hell clearly sided with her here.
He slowed even more, looking to stop; his head swivelled about as he tried to determine the source of the laughing sound, and the earless side of his head received a good slap from the loose, hanging scalp.
She giggled, still grinning as she came to a halt near him, and the universe giggled along with her.
“How – how are you doing that?” he growled. Suddenly his dark eyes were narrowed in rage; he retracted his heavy, muscle-knotted arms, seeming to take up a boxer’s stance.
She needed no more provocation.
Straxi’s arms thrust forward, and she sank her talons into the man’s eye-sockets, instantly ruining the only part of his anatomy as-yet unmarred. He was certainly the stronger; he batted her hands aside in a second, thumping her in each forearm to move her limbs out of the way as he pressed hooves to his dripping brows.
The moan that rose from his distended mouth was hypnotic.
He had nothing. He was nothing. Just a bag of blood, waiting to be drunk.
He had no voice here. No patron. He belonged to no one.
He belonged to her. That was why he was placed here. Just a test of how thirsty she was. How deeply she could slake the needs of her parched parts in him, in his sloshing contents.
It was her turn to kneel at the ocean’s edge and sup the surf. Her turn to take up a fistful of red wheat and grind its grains between her fangs.
His responses were slow. Her first action was to blind him, and his first response was not to take her immediately in his powerful arms, break her, crush her, feed off of her and in her hidden reserves of vigour find his own healing, the regeneration he so needed. No. His first response was to wail like a child, cover the eyes that were already without sight, as though doubling his blindness were his only concern.
She darted back, amazed at the uselessness of his reflexes, and struck again, at the throat this time. She moved her hand in between his wide-flung elbows, snicking at the front of his neck with her thumb and fingers arrayed like scissor-blades, and was welcomed by a spray of warm blood that splashed right over her face.
The centre-leg snapped out at her, a crude and instinctive blow, but a good one. He kicked her in the midriff, pulverising whatever she’d had inside and filling her with a delicious nausea.
It was almost tempting – to stand there and trade blows. Inflict and enjoy agonies, one for one. Perhaps this was why the horse-man’s killer-instincts had atrophied, if he’d even had them in the first place. He hadn’t yet realised what it would mean, how horrific it would be to die again, in this place… in this state…
What it might mean for eternity, to be drained by one such as she? She whose ministrations might take every last shred and sliver of the self he’d possessed and burn it for fuel…
She wrapped her claws about the leg he used to strike at her, digging in deep near the base. He finally attempted to grapple her, big hands fumbling at her shoulders and throat, but it was too little too late. Her skin was a scabrous fabric, shiny and sleek, and a simple twist of her upper body was enough to slip his grasp.
She used the same twist to gain purchase with her talons, and a satisfying ripping sound followed her as she danced away.
He howled, clutching the exposed bone of his extra leg, the tube of pulled-away skin dangling over the hoof.
He’d given up, but she’d only just started. She circled him delicately, trimming him, even darting in and drinking from the lacerations she scored before he had chance to swing about, lunge clumsily at her. She undid his tendons, untied ligaments, stripped away sinews thread by thread. Soon he could lunge no more, collapsing where he stood, sucking in air through his ravaged throat-opening.
The encounter was over all too quickly, and she settled in for a nice bit of torture. She’d gone out of her way to be merciful, delivering several killing-blows, yet that had only incapacitated him – not one of the fatal strikes seemed to do the trick of actually ending his existence.
She found herself re-examining her assumptions. The entities born of this plane, amongst whom she had to count herself, were far more durable here than they first appeared, far more durable than she had ever anticipated. It wasn’t just the outer layers, the fabrics of flesh, that were expendable. When she took of his innards, she found she was chomping and slurping on them indefinitely; they replaced themselves, again and again, as if purely for her amusement, and sustenance.
Am I doing it? Or is he…?
Either way, his death was finally accomplished when she fully removed the heart from his quivering body. She lifted the prize to her face, luxuriating in its sweet aroma before pressing her lips against its warmth, sinking in her teeth, flooding her mouth with its hallowed juices.
When she looked back down, the horse-man beneath her had already decomposed; she no longer straddled a humanoid figure, but a pile of tiny dry flakes, like ground-up leaves. All that remained of him was the skull with its blasted-apart jawbone, the shattered ear-holes where she’d pressed fingers into his brain.
She got to her dagger-feet, carefully stepped on the skull to smash it, and put out her left hand to touch the invisible wall once more.
And the wall –
It was gone.
She approached closer, certain that she was mistaken, she had to be mistaken… during the fight she’d simply moved farther from the unseen barrier than she’d estimated, surely…
Yet, no. She moved fifty yards from the horse-man’s remnants, and…
What if I got turned about?
She whirled on the spot, racing around the swiftly-vanishing corpse, moving fifty yards in every direction.
No wall. No Citadel.
And there’d been part of her that was certain – so certain…
She didn’t sigh. She laughed at herself instead, and, as if to reassure her, the world laughed along with her.
Straxi resumed what she thought to be her former course, not knowing, not really caring anymore, whether she was going the right direction.
Direction’s meaningless now. I’ve got all the direction I need.
Keep walking.
* * *
The former woman came by the long road to the door of the tower. It stood in the centre of a plane of red glass, and from its elevated floors storm-arms emanated, the crimson clouds that shadowed entire worlds here hiding the Citadel’s lofty infinitude from the sight of those who might grasp some miniscule fraction of its height, and thereby be driven insane.
As what had once come before gave way to the vast grassland, so now did grass give way to bitter, brittle ruby stalks. And this time Straxi espied it on the approach. From months away. Years away.
Gargantuan could not encapsulate its size. When at last distances began to fall away, permitting her sorry eyes to resolve detail, resolve understanding, she realised the paltriness of her previous assumptions. She had thought that after all she had seen, that she had some comprehension of the scope of things, some ability to recognise the limitations of the possible.
Not so. Not so at all.
It could not be plainer that this place was not just the centre of the local domains, the scarlet glinting landscape through which she loped, but the centre of Everything. The clouds that went out of here hung invisible behind every blue sky. The edicts of this tower’s dreadful King were heard and obeyed in every land.
To encircle the Sunset Citadel by bounding along, her hand touching its wall, would take not years but centuries. Millennia. With the way it seemed to swell up to meet her, growing more with each step closer than the rules of perspective ought to allow… it was entirely likely the very prospect of circling it was impossible.
Closer. Closer, day by day.
One day’s travel from the featureless red walls, the door materialised before her. It was a door for her. The circumference of the tower was a million miles, yet she approached from just the right direction, this edifice at the heart of the World? No.
No.
It was hers.
And the moment she saw the door from afar, the knowledge and the need combined in her mind –
She covered a hundred thousand steps in a single bound, a trick she’d picked up somewhere along the way. In the one instant she was tilting her hourglass, six thousand grains of sand straining to perceive the distant wooden arch; then she was standing before it, the dark-oak door looming up above her, tall enough to accommodate giants.
She beat at its scratched surface with the flat of one of her blades, leaving her own marks in the ancient timber.
“I am here,” she grated. She had no mouth, and though she still remembered what it was to have one, it wasn’t strange to feel her hidden metal parts move, produce sounds. This was how she’d always been meant to be – of that much she was certain.
“I am here,” she repeated, and beat on the door once more. “O Almighty King! I am thine!”
Nothing. No wind. No change, of any kind. Not even a feeling.
It was beyond her to feel anger or hate. She knew what she had to do.
She backed away a few paces, then folded herself, kneeling, prostrating herself before the great arched door.
“I am here, and here will I wait,” she clicked, speaking only to herself. “When they need me, they will take me in. But I did it. I am here.
“I am here.”
* * *
She never knocked again, never made her presence known.
* * *
It was enough for her that she was here.
* * *
Even in this, even in this emptiness, I serve the King’s will.
* * *
And when she had waited for longer than she had walked – only then did the barrier suddenly creak, softly opening.
So slowly did it fall ajar, announced by the squealing creak, that even the reverie-bound Straxi had chance to roll back and aside, allowing a wide-enough berth for the colossal arc of this implacable door.
A crone stepped forth from the immense, endless hallway Straxi could see behind her. The newcomer was at once both bulbous and gangly; she had to be eight feet tall, and would’ve been rake-thin if not for bloated bulges that seemed to hang from her in random assortment. The crone was either naked and truly loathsome in appearance, or else clad in a sack made of skin the same shapeless mottled texture as her own flesh, a gown enmeshed without visible seams to her neck and shoulders and arms. Upon the hairless saggy scalp, several distinct clusters of weeping brown moles had taken root. Her eyes were tiny-seeming given her overall size, buried in the wrinkles of her age-shattered face, more the raw-pink of a sobbing, lonely old woman than the fierce redness of a demon’s gaze.
“And what are you doing here, my dear?” the crone wheezed.
It was an entirely unexpected question.
Straxi clicked blankly for a few seconds then stammered: “I’ve to b-b-become a demon, of course.”
The crone waved a saggy-skinned hand at her.
“You appear to have accomplished that much yourself, child. How might I aid you now?”
“I…” She looked down at her sword-like arms, the dagger-fingers protruding from the bladed disc she had for hands. The sand in her head swirled, bringing the limbs she bore into ever-clearer focus.
Why did I come here?
“Someone called me,” she clicked at last. “Someone… was going to own me.”
“And that is what you want? To be owned?”
She nodded frantically.
“But there have surely been other entities you have encountered, on your journeys? Others whose ownership you might have accepted?”
“The King of Everything!” she blurted, then covered her face with her knives in shame.
“The King of Everything indeed!” the crone repeated, suddenly stern. “Indeed! How camest thou by this lore?”
“I – I know not –”
“What art thou inside, creature? What is thy name?”
“I am – I am nothing, if not his! A pr-prisoner without a prison! A – a demon without a name! Straxi, I was called… Straxi, before I was broken, or – or after…”
“Straxi…?”
She looked up at the crone. A tone of wonder had entered the doorkeeper’s voice.
“Straxi, wouldst thou know me as Haehuinil, perchance? Couldst thou be Abstraxia?”
The moment she heard the word, she cast off her metal flesh, and was herself once more. Meat appeared where before only cold edges reflected the redness of the skies. Real fingers found a pair of eyes in her face, beneath her brows.
Her face.
Face.
“So it is you!” the crone crowed in delight. “Ah, but ’tis a strange plane. I’ve not forgotten you, dear one, not ever. I expected you at least ten thousand years ago. How we laughed together! Do you recall the epheldegrim? The funny fellow with the extra leg? No, I don’t suppose you do, do you…”
“My face! My hands!”
“Ah, yes. It’ll all start coming back to you soon, don’t worry. There’s so much to learn. So much to forget. Come on, come inside. There’s much for us to do together.”
Abstraxia stepped forwards, on her feet. Her feet!
The long high hallway of velvet darkness swallowed her, but she didn’t look up, or aside. Didn’t try to penetrate its cool shadows. She kept her eyes fast on the crone, her saviour.
She wants me. After everything – after waiting for me for so long.
She still wants me.
* * *
“This is but one entrance into the Labyrinth; my own little corner of the world, you might say.” Haehuinil’s tone was wistful. “Here I raise my children, then send them forth, that they might do the same in turn. Ah – see here. The Thumbs of Nath Sanor. He was till then a fierce archer, whose volleys were as storm-clouds. And here – the Sundered Throne of Mat. A recalcitrant little world…”
The hallways twisted senselessly, sometimes looping back on themselves with no change in elevation without ever meeting, simply continuing relentlessly no matter how absurd the geography became. Abstraxia trod awkwardly on the fur-carpeted path, unused to toes, never mind the luxurious texture of this new terrain. She tried to keep as close to Haehuinil as she could manage, just beside and behind her; the bloated, haggard crone seemed to vary her pace, going slowly while she spoke, describing and explaining the various works of art displayed upon the walls, yet suddenly would appear at the next corner, looking back at Abstraxia with a twinge of impatience in her red-raw eyes. Abstraxia would have to remind herself several times of her newfound power to consume distances, lowering her eyes in deference as she caught up, hoping only not to have too-sorely disappointed her patron with her ignorance.
The corridor was as wide as a dining-hall in the palace of a lord of men, yet only the central aisle, barely wide-enough to accommodate the two of them, was safe to walk. The rest of the space was devoted to what looked like graves, deep rectangular holes interspersed with raised platforms upon which stood wondrous sculptures, twisted trees, cases of scintillating weaponry… Haehuinil never mentioned the graves in all her rambling and Abstraxia had not the nerve to ask. Even the closest were too deep for her to see to the bottom without stepping away from her guardian. That wasn’t yet something she was prepared to do, not without being asked explicitly.
Every hallway was the same. Vaulted, matt-black ceilings. Parallel walls draped in tapestries, paintings of delicious scenes hanging every few paces; each took for its subject one facet of misery, perhaps depicting particularly hideous wounds, malformed infants crawling with flies and disease, or cities laid to siege and sack. Tall windows that admitted the same sunset-redness, windows that faced each other – given the size and scope of the Citadel itself, this was clearly a trick of dimensional witchcraft, yet knowing it made it no less disorienting.
Every one the same, and yet so different. There was always something new around the bend. The pungent Sickness-Spears of Astraxor, the embalmed Eyes of Orden, the nineteen Unseeing-Stones… the broken Shield of the Cursed One, the lightless Jewel of Eternity, the enormous, still-breathing Lungs of Leviathan… and even the windows themselves were alike only in the quality of the light they admitted. Upon each one were figures etched in black lines, their arcane scenes beyond Abstraxia’s understanding. Yet one thing she was able to note: the same person was shown on every window, clad in a jagged cloak or pointed armour, a tall crown upon his brow. Haehuinil never mentioned those either, yet it was assuredly the King. The King of the Sunset Citadel. The King of the World. And in each he presented a different facet of the Majestic Persona. In some he was the central shape, shown apportioning punishments with a variety of regal weapons in his hands while wide-eyed, wide-mouthed traitors were paralysed in the moment of their execution – else he was shown sitting in a lofty chair, presiding over lesser shapes engaged in their own ever-ongoing arguments. Yet in many windows he seemed to merely linger in a corner, a spider waiting in its web, watching over the proceedings without engaging.
It became something of a game to her, to spot him in each window. It was made easier by the fact that the maker of these glass marvels had sometimes chosen to tint the shards comprising the King’s body, darkening him and him alone, as surely befit his ascendancy.
“The sixty-six wings of the Princes of Sephir, recovered at great cost after White-Rose slew the entire pantheon.” The crone indicated a tall case in which great sheets of bloodstained feathers hung like cloaks. “And this –“ she indicated a transparent vase filled with blood, upon which a single white fleck of matter floated “– is a white leaf from the World-Forest, such as he wore in his hair when he slew Lord Afayel and Lord Morlanar. How it survived the carnage I know not.”
Abstraxia nodded, then glanced left, right, spotting the next Kings.
“You are perhaps wondering why I am telling you this,” her guide said mockingly.
She immediately moved her eyes back to her feet. “M-my apologies, Haehuinil –“
“Call me Mistress.”
“Mistress!” She tried to meet her patron’s gaze, but the reflection of the dusk-light in the pink of those eyes was too glorious, forcing her to bow her head again. “I – I merely looked to find the King – th-there, and there… I did listen. The white leaf, from the World-Forest, the same as… the same as White-Rose had in his hair, when he slew… Lord Afayel… Lord Morlanar…”
“Good. Very good. I did not doubt you listened, and your admiration of the King is itself admirable. You will go far, young one. Glad-hearted I am that I chose to spare you when you supped of my branch, instead of striking you down where you crouched.”
Abstraxia recognised the warning in those words, and kept her eyes downcast.
“I tell you the histories of these items, because each artefact is a treasure returned to the King by one of my pupils. He has in his great charity bestowed upon me the honour of retaining them, holding them in his name. You shall, in turn, bring me such glorious gifts that I might extend my domain, set them beside these, to his glory, and thine, and mine.”
Abstraxia shivered, breath catching in her throat as she suppressed the almost overwhelming urge to titter, nervous apprehension flooding her.
“But first – to your training. Go. Seek an empty enclosure.”
Haehuinil gestured at the nearest grave, then at others.
Fascinated, Abstraxia took a couple of steps towards the first her Mistress indicated.
Leaning over, she saw a white-skinned, black-eyed man lying there, eight feet down. His hands were folded on his rag-covered chest. His feet were crossed at the ankle. He looked perfectly peaceful, stretched out in his grave.
She stifled a gasp.
“I removed the eyelids,” he said in a hushed voice. “Permanently. You can’t sleep, you know.”
She straightened, stumbled away a few feet, and cast an uncertain glance at her Mistress.
“I have many such as yourself in training.”
“Hundreds? Th-thousands?”
Haehuinil nodded, grinning. “It is given to me to decide whom to admit. Each from a different world; each of you to provide me a unique foothold. And I hold the key to but one of the Citadel’s innumerable doors. I am not alone in this practise, believe me. Go – toddle off! You may need to search awhile. Call to me when you have found your place. I shall attend you.”
So it was that Abstraxia was sent off on her own, wandering back along the twisting corridor, looking down at last into the yawning rectangles that had so long mystified her. Each one had its occupant – some were like the first, seeming happy with their lot, whispering greetings to her as she cast her gaze down into their holes; but more were clearly wracked with the same anxiety that filled her. A few snarled at her, lashing out with claws and tails so that she hurriedly retreated. Many refused to meet her gaze, looking aside, pained expressions on their faces. Several times she came across men and women mumbling numbers, rattling off the seconds with desperate despair gleaming in their eyes – “Sixteen billion three-hundred and twenty-six million eight-hundred and four thousand two-hundred and twenty-nine… Sixteen billion three-hundred and twenty-six million eight-hundred and four thousand two-hundred and thirty-four…” While others still simply panted, taking deep, agonised, endless breaths, meeting her gaze with their own imploring stares.
Did they want help? Did they want to help her?
It was with a certain amount of trepidation that she leaned over and looked down into a vacant grave, right between the Hairs of Lithiguil and the Tree of Empty… Empty Something.
She spent just a moment or two in consternation. It was not as though she could just lie to her new Mistress. She’d found a vacancy. This was the moment of decision. Would she commit herself to this existence? Would she claw her way to the top of the pile, over the bodies of all these others, these other Children of Haehuinil whose own ambition had brought them this far? Would she do anything, anything, put herself through a hell within Hell just for a chance to be?
Anything, Abstraxia thought. Anything at all.
“Mistress!” she found herself calling. “Mistress, I’ve found somewhere.”
Then the huge crone was right there beside her, looking down with her into the dark recess, a satisfied smile upon the bloated lips.
“Very good, Abstraxia. Very good indeed. This, then, is your first lesson. Go, lie within.”
She dropped lightly into the hole. The black fur-carpets extended down the four walls and across the ground at the bottom. Compared with the before-Citadel, the landscapes of torment, this was idyllic.
Feeling thrilled, excited more than anything now, she laid herself down as she was told.
“What’s next?” she asked, hearing the timid tone of her voice and hating herself for it.
Haehuinil crouched, bringing her face over the lip of the grave.
“There is no time. There is no distance, Abstraxia. There is only the Queen’s Will, and the King who dispenses it.” Such a reassuring, almost motherly, voice was unexpected. “But we are lesser entities, you and I. We cannot exist in that timeless void forever. Glimpses of the future, and the past, and far-flung secrets – glimpses are all even the greatest are afforded. Our minds cannot encompass the Dark Oceans inside a single stride, and thus we cannot so cross them. We need our anchors, what we would call the internal chronometer. The hourglass, the moondial, the lightlever, the waterspring… we must carry time in our hearts as we traverse an unbound plethora of worlds, each rolling with its own pace. You must realise – there are Veils one might cross and spend a century in sojourn, only to return across the border and find a minute or less has passed. So I shall ask you, Abstraxia, to do now as you shall need to for all the rest of your days…
“Count your heartbeats. Do not rise out of this enclosure until you count out a million.”
“A… a million?”
“That will not take so long, dear. Know also that for each heartbeat amiss, you shall spend ten in torture, torture of a far more imaginative nature than that which you have endured already. Ah, I see you react to this. Recognise that we seek here not to cause undue suffering – you have already been so-tested, and have succeeded, with commendations. Now we seek only to create in you those instincts which you will need, if you would see through the Mist. It is but the basest, first lesson of the lot – time must be on your side, my daughter.”
She recalled the woman whose count reached into the billions. She must’ve been lying there for what Abstraxia would’ve previously called ‘many years’…
And torture tenfold, for each heartbeat out of count?
“When you say – torture –“
“I will excite the structures which serve Pain. You will be glad of it, afterwards. It is naught when compared with the torments inflicted by the Brotherhood, and shall serve you in good stead should you ever become subjected to the Grey Affliction. Believe me – we have attempted to replicate it, but we are not yet even close. To endure such requires experience in kind, obtained in controlled circumstances where the mortification factors can be closely measured.”
She’d never heard of the Brotherhood or its Grey Affliction, and right now such things did indeed seem very distant possibilities.
“And after – after I’ve counted to a million…”
“We will continue, increasing the count, until you know the passage of time as reflex – spine-lore, as you might call it. Then, and only then, shall your training begin in earnest.”
Haehuinil rose. From down here, she looked so far away.
“Climb free of the enclosure,” she continued, “and call to me when you believe your time is done. Do not be alarmed, if the others laugh. They are listening. They will know your heartbeats better than you, at first, and your mistakes will amuse them. Permit me to say this much: the time shall come soon-enough, whereupon you laugh with them at the mistakes of my next student to follow.”
Abstraxia understood. The time for talking was over.
“Yes, Mistress. For you. For the King.”
She closed her eyes, focussing her senses inwards.
One… Two… Three…
“Very good, child.”
There was a soft rustle, folds of loose skin rolling and slapping, as Haehuinil turned – but no sound of footfalls. Haehuinil was already gone.
Abstraxia settled her shoulders, drew a deep breath.
Eight… Nine… Ten…
Beneath the counter running at the forefront of her mind, thoughts slipped and surged, sliding over one another like eels. Snippets of her previous existences, slick scales, surfaces she couldn’t grip, unknown to her.
They weren’t… weren’t lying…
It’s okay, Traseya. Go back to sleep. Go back…
But they told the truth! The… Truth…
It’s okay now, honey. Just a bad dream. Go back to sleep.
Go back and keep counting.
Keep counting.
Keep counting…
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