Memory 1
My first feeling, guilt. It loomed over me with a body, a face, and a wound made by my own hand—they'd earned it, but I didn't have to do it; there's a lot of things I didn't have to do…back then, and I can't take them back nor make whole what I broke. A fact my embodied guilt made sure I was well aware of. They layered it into their smile as they said, "Up, up, little brute, consciousness is still yet in hand."
I was alive, and they'd found a way to twist that into a mocking castigation. Is it fucked up to say I liked it? That I appreciated the bubbling cauldron that was my grief-screwed hybridae mind granting me the gift of their voice—even as I tortured myself with a vision of their final moments; a gorey hollow in place of a smooth chest, bone shards dappling its circumference in ossuary constellations that flashed white with every sway of their body. Such a small detail, swaying, but that was Secretary, swaying as they thought and laughed with their eyes or cried with their mouth. My fragile blossom, seduced by the promise of a baleful wind, but hardstuck to its branch and thus suffered evisceration.
Maybe that's why I'd preserved the wound, a reminder that my claws had and could do this with the ease of plucking fruit from a neighbor's tree. A theft of minor action with grave result; the heart encompasses a person's entirety I think, pumping life into flesh but giving life meaning through the feelings attached to every blood cell, and from feeling—memory. The memory of them, what poured from that sticky copper fruit I'd plucked, haunts my palate. It always will.
Your palate? Did you—
I did. It was a flavorful burden, but I'd…grown used to it. Nadia, from how she kneeled frozen at the feet of my extant atrocity, hadn't. I don't think she could've to be fair, having 'experienced' it at an absolute remove; how an entity processes memories from previous summons, or how you—and whatever tight-assed boss of yours—will read my words over and over again in order to understand them, me. Though I'd argue reading isn't understanding…it's flattening. The diminishment of endless dimensions sensorial, emotional, and temporal into a few carefully chosen words that'll be enervated by your imagination into a simulacrum of a life. But if you actually came face-to-face with it, you'd be frozen just as she was; lips teasing the precipice of a reaction yet undecided as to which: screaming, wailing, maybe a gasp that'd suck the air clear of any other words. Tell me, interrogator, what's the appropriate response when your greatest failure stares back at you?
Laughter.
Interesting—Nadia opted for the polite, "Oh," before turning to me with a shattered window of smile. "I think we're finally insane."
"Always were, little brute." Secretary laughed, blood spurting with each chortle. "The both of us were just too...we didn't want to admit it."
Nadia's head whipped back to argue, but realized that arguing with the phantom of your guilt about how you weren't insane was poor ground to stand on.
"Are you going to just lay there?" she snapped at me, implication dangling that I should stand beside her. That if we both argued we could deny the truth she'd first identified. I wasn't having it.
"Yes. I am," I stated, rolling away from her.
"Alls below, what happened to the Nadia who yelled at Sovereigns? Who said that ours would be a living Revelation."
"She's here," I said, "and she was carried away by the moment."
I'm not good with my words, or my actions either—I'm just not good. I knew that moment, hurtling back into this drab bowl we call reality, meant the world to her. It'd meant the world to me as well, but at the time—even now—I doubt anyone could convince me I deserve a good drink, let alone the world.
"Fine, maybe I'll find that Nadia somewhere else in the infinity of the Underside," she cried, tears beading lashes that weren't mine but I could feel as if they were; tears for the both of us. "I shouldn't be surprised that you couldn't commit, Orchard, you were always bad at it and are still bad at it!"
"Sinaya hates us, Lupe is dead, Amber is a liar, Melissa buried us, and the foundation of our vengeance is utterly immaterial!" I shouted back. "We have nothing and nowhere to go, and I don't see that changing anytime fast. So tell me, Nadia, what is there for us to commit to?"
"Each other," she whispered.
The only person who can hate you as effectively as yourself is your sister, and mine was both.
"If you're going to fight, take it off my wings," a sleep-speckled voice said from below us.
Nadia and I scrambled off the wings, fury dissipating into the cold mist of wistful silence. It wasn't Sphinx. We knew it wasn't going to be her, but to be tossed into that reality was hard. In the place of our beloved was our Baron, Revelation Living. Small in body, but possessed with the grandeur of an ancient redwood or a canyon eroded over millennia; infinitesimal and immense at once. The wings helped; larger than Sphinx's relative to her body, and more numerous by two for three pairs in total. One on the outside of her ankles, the largest sprouting from her lower back to fold over her crotch like a skirt, and the last was made of her hair as if parted and styled by some unseen power. All of her wings, feathered in cold Revelatory fire and colored in hearth-fire hues, contrasted her glossy onyx skin but matched the crimson chalcedony 'eyes' swimming in schools across her skin. It made me nostalgic for Sphinx's fur pattern.
"Aww, puppy," Revelation Living cooed, "can't you ask a baron her name before ogling her?"
"We know it's you, Revelation Living," Nadia said. "Besides, I wasn't ogling."
Revelation Living rolled her eyes—so large in her face, innocent in the ways her cigarette-chewed voice wasn't. "Ah, but she was." Revelation Living pointed me out with her chunky salamander tail. "Not surprising when you're a rare beauty like myself. Feels like it was only yesterday when the Babylonians were drooling to jerk it to my toes—thus the ankle wings. Hard to provide wordly enlightenment in that environment."
"What's…you're…" I struggled to get the words out.
"Nothing like Sphinx," she chuckled. "Yeah, but why would I be—to live is to change whether that takes you from one self to another and back again. So unless you want to show me your best 'mutation's maiden' impression, focus on the fact that Sphinx lived, grew, and—"
"Became you," Nadia said.
"Exactly."
She knew what she was doing referencing Melissa, and the aching wound that formation overload of a relationship had done to me; Revelation Living had the glib manner of a traveling merchant who'd sell you treasure alongside trash, and be happy to make a sale whether at a loss or a gain. Though, I also remember how those sorts would come to the temple, easy smile traded for a shield of grim mirth, and sit at the sorc-desktops to check if anyone they loved had died while they were out of New Net range. Her smile, plump but overdrawn by worry, was the same—to live is to lose as well as gain, but where treasure like trash can fall from the hand easily, the loss of a loved one can't be made up. Especially if you weren't there for when it happened.
I held out my hand to lift the little Baron from the ground—said, "What's your name?"
"Anza'centorii." She took my hand and sprung to her feet, ankle wings fluttering her into a balletic leap before landing soft as a leaf poured from the hand. "She Who Treats Dirt As Diamonds."
"Dirt as diamonds?" Nadia asked, skeptical.
Anza'centorii winked. "Wealth's what you make of it, and…" She twirled, pointing off into the distance. "There's wealth to be found if we want to take it."
Nadia and I followed her statement to the horizon where we spotted two people in Undersuits hobbling toward us at high speed, so not that fast at all. Rather than wait aimlessly, we took in our surrounding context, what we'd ignored in our narcissistic spat; Revelation, bitch queen that she is, had deposited us into an arctic forest thick with trees of ice whose bark was the frozen ridges of a rushing river and whose branches were aggressively fractalizing in a snail-sprint explosion of repeating ninety-degree angles. Neither fruit nor leaves hung from their frigid boughs, only umbral puff clouds wedged into square frames. And I could swear, that in their Abyss blue darkness there was something there…someone there? I only had to look deeper, let the chill into my chest—screech!
"Fuck," I hissed.
"Stop it," Nadia hissed back, lips pulled in reveal of her fangs. "We're crazy enough, I don't want to deal with you getting Underside exposure on top of things.
The noise was shrill, two scissors tribbing to climax, and its aural traces rang on my cheek where Nadia's claws struck scale. We'd changed since dying, become closer to the…us we'd seen from our future. There were the tails—bident tipped, our horns—sickle-sharp and curving from our temple in a spiral like a candy cane with one stripe and no white, but our biggest change was our color. Before splitting, Nadia—the pre-Division composite of my sister-self and I—had a spiritual musculature the color of molten metal. Now, our musculatures' hue diverged; Nadia in azure and me in gold. A pang took me in the chest, in Dividing how far would we be diverging?
It was a question I whirled away from, throwing myself back into the moment, the scent that wafted from these strangers—tanghulu sprinkled with tajin. The type that I only ate during festivals, and despite needing Mom to help floss sugar out from between my teeth everytime, I kept eating them. I needed to eat them, tear the sentimentality seasoning their skin and rejoice—I controlled myself this time, smothering fangs and scowl beneath both hands; I'd not shaken the curse despite dying, and one sidelong look informed me of another divergence between me and my sister—Nadia wasn't cursed.
"Seems we're not the only fucked pair," Nadia said, using my sorcerous malady to confirm the depth of trouble plaguing the two headed toward us. And what trouble it was, a skittering curse dragging its aborted brushstroke of a torso across the unReal permafrost.
"Trio," Anza'centorii corrected, "and we're hardly fucked—I'm not even turned on."
"I'd rather you be then deal with them," I said.
"Come now, puppy, don't you miss having a bone to chase—a purpose."
"No," I lied, earning a sideways glance from Nadia who was still annoyed with me and an incredulous shrug from Anza'centorii. "Purpose led us astray last time. I'm not doing it, and have no reason to do it."
Anza'centorii's tail thumped mine. "You have no reason not to do it. Besides, you've never needed a greater reason than want. So, do you want to find a way to a Staircase? Do you want to get out of here? And do you want…to find out who you want to be?"
That was a cuntpunch of a question; "We'll find the answer to who we want to be," was the last thing we'd said to Revelation before our return to life. In reversing it, she'd swept clear a path toward trouble on pain of me demonstrating to my sister that everything I'd said was a lie. I turned from Anza'centorii's joy-smeared expression to the trouble closing in, and set off.
There's an ease to violence, and it starts with a breath; stolen from your foe whether they realize it or not because in stealing that intake of life you'll exhale the flames of their death. It's the only way I know how to breathe. So with one long drag, I swept past the two that should die, stepping in line with the tie of fate—the muddy-brown of Survival—that connected them with this second stage horror, a curse of Absence close to some evolution, but still lacking sorcerous purpose. I didn't know anything more about the curse, but you don't need to know something about a thing to intercede in its life and change its trajectory forever. Evident by how no test of knowledge prevented my fingers from crossing with the tie between them, igniting on release with a chalcedony spark that rolled into a hungry blaze—Atomic Glory. Easy as breathing.
"Alls below, thank you so much," the uninjured woman said—the first words I heard from them when I walked over to the mini-sanctuary Nadia's made for them beneath the Inviolate Star's light. "I don't know what would've happened without your help."
"It's alright," Nadia started, "you—"
"You'd be dead," I stated.
"You don't know that," Nadia said.
"Survival was what you tied you two to it," I explained, ignoring my sister-self.
"And you helped answer that question," the injured one said, before laughing—wet and red on the inside of his faceplate. Up close I could see he had more than the laceration on the thigh; the man was porous as a pumice stone, and each one was the source for the rivers of life that drenched his suit. Apparently, curses aren't alive in a fashion that matters to my own, but on recognition of his wounds, the sight of this man struggling to live, only whet my abominable appetite. Covering my mouth, I hustled over to Anza'centorii.
"Is she okay?" the uninjured woman asked.
Nadia let go of the Inviolate Star, and shrugged. "Depends how you define 'okay.'"
Their conversation was swift, seeing that the man was a living water clock, and his partner—teammate rather than lover—was committed to making sure he didn't die. They rambled about their company being decimated by a rain of Oblivion needles when they tried to access a ruined fort, and the wraith atop the battlements that ordered them to leave. From there it was one tragedy after another as thirty became five became two; Dinah and Julian, bonded to Isolation and Ascension respectively, and brought so close to the grave because Dinah was meant to help harvest Conceptual materials and Julian was there to locate the nearest Staircase when the company was ready to leave. They'd already lost the materials, but how fortune turns long as you draw breath; Julian'd located the Staircase before running into the curse, and our rescue of them made reaching it feasible.
Despite the action of our meeting, the trek to the Staircase was uneventful, and unfortunately, Dinah was allergic to silence and myopic when it came to reading how little I wanted to talk to her. "Are you three with a company?" she asked.
"No," I answered, for the third time to her re-arrangment of the same question.
"But she said you two have amnesia? How could you know you don't have a company?"
"Perhaps because I'm poor company," I replied.
"Oh you're hardly poor, little brute, you have quite the entourage of Ghosts haunting you, remember?" The specter of Secretary had found a new way to torture me, mocking my words and tracing a bloody finger around the gaps of my speech, and though it rankled I couldn't say anything back.
I thought you were doing your best to ignore them?
My best has never been enough, and Nadia isn't entirely wrong on the subject of my difficulty with commitment. I shred what I hold even as I crave the feeling of it in palms.
"You look nice enough to me," Dinah said pertly, stretching 'nice' into alternate lascivious meanings that appreciated the circumstance of my and Nadia's resurrection; we'd returned nude as Anza'centorii. In the Underside this shouldn't have been cause for notice, but it only takes one person wearing clothes to make you feel weird for being naked. Nadia didn't seem to mind, weaving the adoration into a shawl that covered up the holes in our story—fucking amnesia—and left enough of our abs and a hint of trimmed bush to keep someone like Dinah looking where we wanted. Pay attention to how we have nothing save ourselves and one entity, of whom we don't remember who she's bonded too, or why we look exactly the same. Company, why I thought those went away after the Corporate Wars of the Pacific Northwest. It was nonsensical, and Dinah, whose attention hardly wavered from our bident-tipped tail, even helped us refine it with the inclusion of the rumor of bandit smugglers said to waylay traveling parties, taking the valuables and leaving corpses behind. See? Nonsensical.
"A dragon always looks nice when you only stare at its scales," Anza'centorii said, rescuing me from the conversation I didn't want to have. "As does the solitary cave to the woman bereft a hut."
A smile broke across my face—I think—watching Dinah's faceplate all but fog up as she overworked her brain puzzling out what Anza'centorii had said. If that was what I looked like trying to solve for the half-truths and cosmic intimations of others, I'd probably talk that way myself.
"You kept the cryptic speech," I said.
"Allow an old woman her hobbies." Anza'centorii winked, lighting a candle in the black expanse of my heart, before whispering to Dinah—loud enough for me to hear, "Find yourself some non-standard features, my 'maybe' summoner enjoys those who've engaged in self-creation more than she does people content with what life's roulette gave them."
"So the little brute has a predilection toward her fellow children of Granny Gita?" Secretary teased.
"I was with Melissa," I argued beneath my breath, but I couldn't tell you who it was directed at. Only that my unbalanced swing of a defense left me open to more questions from Dinah.
"You remembered something," she squealed. "That's great. Who is she, why aren't you still together, is she why you have that bangin' eye scar, and—"
"There it is!" Julian shouted. Nadia had made the strategic call to carry him—she said it was because we'd go faster, but…that bitch just stranded me with Dinah!
Oh the gems, recollection recovers for us.
I wouldn't call the rest of this memory a gem. I felt…fizzy in my stomach, an off-center line approach that voided happiness to strike at a semi-positive anxiety. The intestinal saboteur crept in through my eye upon sight of the Staircase, a tenebrous cyclone impaled by spears of white-Absence—brushstrokes of sharp-edged nothing—whose thrashing conjured images of a serpent in its death throes. All set to a keening song butchered from the air and scattered across the glade in a demand of mournful obeisance. This was the way that'd lead back to the Real…and the fruits born of my misdeeds—however justified I'd thought myself at the time. But therein laid the problem, I didn't want to come back to a life shattered, the glass slicing upward to spill my blood with every footfall, and the only sound being the crunch of ruin that'd echo into the high rafters of my forlorn state.
"It'll be okay," Dinah said, taking my shaking claw—I was shaking?—into her hand, "we'll figure out who you were together."
Am I wrong for giving in to the fiction, or am I allowed this weakness? Whatever the answer, it's too late to change my choice; I let her lead me to rejoin the others who were halfway across the glade, and being held up by a lout astride the back of a stilt-legged ostrich with a bouquet of necks rotating about its body in unending surveillance.
"—can't possibly believe I'd buy that!" We'd arrived to catch the ass-end of his denial.
"The truth is the lack of clothes on my back." Nadia waved at the edge of their nudity.
"No one's saying you're not naked," he retorted.
"Then are you saying he's not dying?" She raised Julian's hand as if the final Silence would descend to pluck him away just to prove her point.
"No, it's just—"
"What?" she asked.
"The part about bandits doing all this!"
"And you know everything about bandits?" Dinah asked, cornering the man against a wall I couldn't figure out. "Please, we just need a little medical care and then access to the Staircase so we can get out. It won't kill you to let us in, would it?"
The guard thought for a moment before asking, "You sure none of you have companies that'll come banging at our door?"
"I'm sure," I stated, voice falling guillotine-swift to behead the chance of further argument.
He swung himself from the back of his entity, sending her off in a quick patrol about the glade before leading us the rest of the way. Up close, the base found a way to achieve a higher level of conspicuous unremarkability—out of fashion by at least two centuries going by its concrete composition, and the near absence of any spatial fuckery or even external defensive wards. Visibly, it was a half-turned phoneme that'd make fireworks of any formation, but sorcerously, the place was a rock in the shadow of an atomic blast—you weren't detecting shit. The only aspect that deviated from its cubic nature was a concrete protrusion from the facade, a hallway cleaved from a sister building lost to time's ravages or predated on by mortal depredations. Though I didn't allow the question to sail as long as I could've, preferring for the swell of errant thought to see it sail long enough that it'd pass the point of my own care—see, noncommittal.
At the end of this severed passage-turned-proboscis was a blast door that didn't fit the rest of the structure, all metal with a laser-etched formation that'd only become possible in the last five years when a summoner published a spell on the Public Record for how to make a laser swim through metal rather than be fired at it. "No longer shall we attempt artisanal works by firing on our subject like they're the enemy," he'd written. I'd needed…Dad, Kareem Temple—for your records, to explain the quote to me. He'd decided not to, and distracted me, upset as I was, by reading me the abstract of the paper, so I wouldn't be tempted to dive into the text proper. But I'm digressing—avoiding really—because the next part was awful; the 'hallway' was a transitory chamber meant to make the shift from Conceptual-space to the Real smoother.
How a Staircase changes you with every step?
Similar, when it's built well—this one wasn't built well. The formations running through the pilasters weren't carved as artistically precise as a serpentine laser, and the guard for the place advised us to pass through one at a time for those not bleeding out. He didn't waste time with us to figure out who should take Julian across—likely wanting to avoid the blood-laden man himself— so the duty fell to Dinah.
"Don't worry," Nadia said, smiling without showing off her fangs, "I'll make sure to hold her hand."
She'd looked back to me, brow furrowed and mouth pursed around tart concern, and I looked away, saying, "I'm not dying, just go." I should've said, "Thanks for worrying, but I'll be okay." I could've even said what I did, but warmed it a bit with one of Nadia's smiles or a squeeze of the hand as she'd done mine. A shame that knives are rather cold, and she'd found me in a moment where I was at odds with my heart.
This rejection, not that I'd saw it as one then, earned a rusty sigh from Anza'centorii. "I'll see you in the Real," she said, stepping free from my side in a disavowal of my behavior to stalk Dinah's shadow down the chamber. My bondmate, new-yet-old, swayed her hips in the casual fashion of tea swirled in a cup, tumultuous yet never overflowering, and I could watch her walk away from me a thousand times if that was what I saw depart. It was in watching her, I saw the chamber work its rustic sorcery on her and attempt to translate dichotomous beauty within Realspace's narrow lexicon. Her skin, moist and glossy, was a mirror that caught the shimmer of the chamber's transitional curtains in the taut curvature of her cheeks before losing it as she traded the tautness of non-flesh for the hand-swallowing plush of cellulite and muscle that'd support her exterior. Her wings of hearth-fire feathers diminished into keratin product that, if nothing else, I'd imagined running over my skin. While her swimming spots grew still, but struck an iconic pattern. On the otherside, functionally in the Real, she pirouetted to face me in mocking challenge—am I still, beautiful?
"Of course," Nadia and I whispered. Not even once looking away from her face, now alien with eyes larger than any human's and a mouth that I could envision swallowing a chicken whole—how could she be anything but?
It being my turn, I set off with Nadia—who was annoying enough to actually hold my hand—and discovered that a story told from the backline isn't the same as the vanguard's. The curtains, visible moments before you reached them, were a pale mint shimmering with a deceptive diaphanousness that caused me to lower my guard, ushering in agony. They were sandpaper and gravel, a brush meant for leather hide that settled for my skin. This wasn't some gentle Transition, it was a scouring of anything Conceptual without the gentleness of consideration, and then it was done; the first curtain.
"You alright?" the guard asked.
I'd dropped to my knees sometime during the process. Nadia had sprawled over my back, wheezing. In a second we'd lost whatever mask of cool prowess I'd gained from besting the curse. We looked weak. And the first thing I saw when I raised my head, Dinah's concern for me, sickened me. I snatched Nadia's wrist—allowing her no time to wipe away her tears, deciding that she could tough them out like I was—all so we could race through the curtains one after another just like everyone else. But we weren't like everyone else, can never be like anyone else, we're Nadia Temple—Division…an entity as much as a person. In my obstinancy, I pushed aside the pain like I always did for us, and that scouring touch of sorcery stripped us down like a painting in a turpentine bath. All that was us, thinned and flaked off in a flock of Metallic spirit chips that hovered around our collapsed musculatures. Where's my body? I thought, as I felt the rest of me float up into the air threatening to wink away and leave me bereft aspects of self that I knew were important, but in my diffused state I couldn't say what they were.
"Oh, little brute, you look cute when bloodied, but not like this," the Secretary I'd conjured to torture me said. They squatted like Mom would when she'd look through Dad's records on the bottom shelf. It was a good memory that—"No nodding of, save that for bed."
What did I do wrong? I thought. The last time I'd ascended a Staircase—Secretary scowled at me as I recalled this—the actual re-assembly of my body was effortless. Why not now?
"Mmm, I can think of two reasons," they said.
Nadia—what remained of her decomposing spirit—wiggled over to my wilting pile, slopped herself over me, and in pressing against me I could hear her—"Margeurite said a spirit couldn't be without a body. In the Real there's only one Nadia. We have to remake her." She was pleading with me to take hold of her, and I could feel the indignation about needing my approval, of all things, to recreate ourselves. It wasn't like I wanted to live like she did, but the instant the spark-flash of cognition which denied living as an option emerged…it was smothered behind mind-numbing oscillations of spiritual pain warning me away from this road, threatening to leave my entirety shattered. What remained of my resistance crumbled; I wanted the pain to stop, but to live is to hurt and the only balm for that aching recognition was my sister-self. She drew me against her breast, pressing me in as if I could sink beneath her surface, and I clawed at her, shredding away strips to leave myself gaps to feel the world about me, swimming to the surface of what we were. We were two born of one, and could play the role of the singular if we had to—even if we fought the entire time.
"Is she okay?" Dinah asked, her voice floating through the black. Then I opened my eye, and felt so disgusting and itchy as my lid slid overtop the moist orb in a skull that wouldn't stop buzzing. I felt gross, incredibly itchy—the scales on my arms and legs were streaked through with azure, or if you ask Nadia the azure was streaked through with gold. We'd become one without being Unified, an emulsion of a person that rose on unsteady legs piloted by two dissenting voices who spoke through the same throat.
"She's fine," Nadia said, with a smile that made me ill. I asked, "Can I get clothes?"
"I'll do you one better," the guard laughed, "and get you a beer to go with it."
"Lo, the little brute rises again," Secretary sang, "and now to see who'll suffer as a result."
This group's transitory chamber was trash, and the clothes they had on hand were baggy in a fashion that Nadia didn't entirely approve. "You can't even see our tits," she whined, groping ourself in the bathroom mirror. Not like we ever had much in that department, but for the moment that she lingered there—not long considering what happened the last time we'd stared into a mirror—I didn't entirely hate what I saw nor did I love it. In our emulsification and reconstruction, we became a jumble that no one but ourselves could pick apart, ignoring the scale coloration. Our mouth kept moving, the knife that Nadia loved to wave about to guard against…
Judgement?
Analysis. Watch the lips, how they quirk and curl, pout and scowl, and part just enough to make you think she'll kiss you…before biting your throat out. If I can be trusted to know what honesty is, that wasn't it, and above the lips she commandeered were our eyes—my domain; battered though it was, with one sealed shut from my own self-harm and the other, a burnt-gold medallion painted via arterial spray. A violent treasure that too many people wanted to possess, to hold, and I wondered how many other queer treasure seekers would die for me to look at them before there was no more gold in my iris.
The neutral-to-enjoyable aspect of our new look, however, was how much it hid our body; scales, tail, ass, abs—all of these horrible candy trap details that'd get someone killed. It felt better to hide it—a knife needs a sheath afterall. Especially when I walked out of the bathroom, pressing my hope into the fibers of the baggy tee and the folded over jumpsuit they'd fit me in, so that the fabric coverage could drape over their memory of me crossing the pseudo-tavern that was their main floor. The idea of any man having the image of me, vulnerable like that was…was a pleasant justification for what I did later.
I was three beers deep; they had this spicy microbrew I'd never drink otherwise because beer tastes like grief and piss poured into your heart. Each bottle worse than your first one, and my first one was with her—all my drinks were with her—and the thought of those raspberry eyes glinting in the lowlight as she all but admitted to being so much older, laughing at me for not figuring it out!
"Are you good?" Dinah asked, resting her hand on my arm. I glanced from her touch, to her face, and leaned forward, fangs peeking as she was so tempting to bite into.
"No, I'm not," I admitted, swerving my lips from hers at the last second to look at the rest of shitty not-tavern. "I'm wearing bad clothes, drinking shit beer—cause all beer is shit, and I'd much rather be in bed with a girl who's sweet, and soft, and can make me forget all of this."
I can't say who said that, maybe Nadia, maybe me, maybe both of us finally being a little bit honest. Thank the brew, it's the only thing that helps slur me and my sister-self further together. But honesty wasn't the right approach with someone like Dinah, she got all itchy, looking away from me before flicking her eyes back, and I felt awful about it. Now that I think about it, those words were from Nadia—she's the one who lashes out verbally. I just kill people. And that little heart of Dinah's she'd pressed into my hand, it's nervous rabbit beat, I didn't want to see it busted. So I turned away from her, eye to the ceiling, and in my desire to look away from that moment my other eye—the one I'd thought permanently shut—opened. It showed me…travelers on Underside roads, warriors who'd drifted too far from distant frontlines, and innocent scholars who'd chanced on this place in their search for escape. People who passed Transition's veils as we did, and took to bed before alighting up the steps of Ascension into Realspace. They never made it to Realspace. Knives, boots, twisted fingers in sorcerous compositions, and hammers fell upon them, predators gleeful at what'd landed in their den. Yet worried that the den might be revealed. Over days and months and ages past, blood waterfalled from that room down to the tavern—they danced in carmine rain, and blindfolded themselves with Abyssal coin.
If there was more to see, it shattered in the grip of my ego as did the bottle of beer. Dinah leaped up, ready to perform triage on my palm, but stilled when I opened my hand and unbloodied glass tumbled to the table. I was flesh now, but even as flesh my scales were steel. However, passing my eyes over the bar—aware of the naked impatience these strangers held for me and Dinah—I took advantage of them not knowing that.
"Alls below, I fucking—I'm sorry, I have to clean this," Nadia rambled off, waving her clenched fist to staunch the lacking bloodflow as she rushed us up the stairs to the sole guest room. Dinah hurried after, hiding her confusion inside her confusion, and only unbottled it after slipping through the door behind us.
"What was all that about?" she asked. "Your eye went all fwoom for a second there."
Nadia tossed herself onto the bed, and I rolled over to face the wall—I couldn't watch Dinah's face when I said this. "They're going to kill us."
Nadia turned our head a bit, activating the Omensight to see a tie of Survival snap—"They work fast."
"What are you talking about?"
We called over our shoulder, "Julian's tie to us got snipped."
Dinah gasped hard enough to cry, locked and loaded a heavy sob, and we couldn't have that. Nadia poured from the bed, gliding across the floor, and angled our face to catch Dinah's before it could hide in the overcast of a sorrow that'd overtaken her emotional levees. "No, don't cry," Nadia purred, wiping away Dinah's tears. I said, "We can't have them know that we know."
"I can't die," she whispered.
"Technically, everyone can. Comes for free with being human," I muttered back. She laughed—brittle and bitter, but a laugh.
"I don't want to die," she re-stated. "I was just a trial member with this company. It was supposed to be easy money, do this and then I can help my little sister…"
I'd yelled at a lot of Sovereigns before, told a crowd of equally skilled and murderous Lodge prospectives to fuck off, but the sorcery of a woman's sob story is one I fear deeply. It caused me to back away from her, realizing she was a poison of my own choosing. I didn't want to keep choosing it though. I wanted to be something else, figure out what that else even was, but Dinah had caught my wrist and in doing so trapped my agonizing heart in her mournful song.
Dinah Jadisdottir, bonded to the Court of Isolation when she was nineteen. She'd taken a year to figure herself out, travel to see some relatives, and in that one year of considering her options she'd lost everything. Her childhood home, her parents, and even her dog. The only thing that survived was her little sister who'd watched everything she knew become so much melted nothing. Their neighbors were helpful, beyond helpful, but Dinah wanted things for herself and her sister; things that were unattainable considering her lack of technical knowledge in most fields that'd allow her to climb the Chain at least moderately while also providing enough to support a household and a dependent. So when this company started up and was looking to harvest Conceptual materials, it was the best thing she could think of. She should've thought harder…but who am I to judge on the matter of thinking.
"You can help us get out of this, right?" she asked.
"Us is doing a lot of heavy-lifting," Nadia said. Before Dinah could squeal in disbelief, I added, "You don't want what I can do. I'm not a fighter, Dinah."
"Are you bonded to Lies—I saw you defeat that curse," she said. "Maybe you don't remember all your moves, but you have to remember something."
She pressed my hand against her chest—she had such an honest heartbeat, and then looked at me as I'd wanted Melissa to do. I must curse easy, because there became a new vacancy in my heart with Dinah's name written on the housing agreement. Sealed with an, "I believe in you. I trust you. Just get me home."
"Now doesn't this bring back memories?" Secretary asked, having taken a place behind me on the bed. "A stop on a trip with people who aren't who they seem to be, a beauty—though not as beautiful as me—beseeching you for assistance. So let's hurry up, we both know you'll say—"
"Okay," Nadia and I answered, "we'll help."
There wasn't much we had to work with, lacking Mother's Last Smile, Amber, and Melissa to make this an easier fight, but last time I'd done this I only had two spells. Now I have four, a Court I didn't fully know how to process, a fucked up eye that…had already closed back up, and a number of body modifications that made me enough of a weapon. "Sphi—Anza'centorii, are you still down there?" I asked her over our spirit connection.
"I already have good seats," she replied, "why be anywhere else."
When I told her the plan she giggled, and was on board. After which I directed Dinah to take cover; a direction she interpreted to mean hiding in some interstitial space exclusive to the Court of Isolation. She'd slipped in with her entity's help, space cracking up like a trapdoor as segmented crustacean legs terminating in armored hands plucked her by the scruff of her shirt and secreted her inside. All before the stomping of seven would-be murderers who thought themselves assassins rumbled down the hallway.
"This isn't necessary," Nadia said. "You owe her nothing. We can just slip away and—"
"I want this," I replied.
"Like you know about wanting anything."
"I know enough to recognize that vengeance was your poison," I shot back. "Mine's…"
"A woman in need?"
"Who happens to have a pulse?" Secretary offered.
My shoulders fell, and with them my pretensions. "Someone who sees depth in me—other colors," I said, catching Secretary's pursed annoyance. They huffed, fading from a present hallucination to some other part of my brain. I wished they'd said good luck, but that wasn't my handler's style and I loved their style.
Nadia said, "Bitch, don't get us killed like last time." Then stepped away, leaving me at the controls, our flesh sharpened to an unbroken gold ready for another carmine topcoat.
"Anza'centorii," I thought, "do it."
It, in this case, was the re-transformation of her feathers into the seeds of cascading explosion. Chalcedony flame rippling across the bar, up the walls, and through the ceiling—my floor—in giant-fingered plumes that snuffed a few lives in their immediacy. All while I resisted the natural physics that would've been at play were this not my bondmate's doing, falling down through the firey plumes as a slide back to the main floor—and into the encirclement of those summoners quick enough to avoid anything worse than burns.
"A warning would've been nice," I muttered.
"Oh, you have this well enough in hand," Anza'centorii tittered from a stool.
The bartender, a summoner whose bondmate was a hydra of chains and anchors, screamed, "When our boss returns, you'll—"
"Be alive and gone," I interrupted. "Which is more than I can say for you."
The hydra clambered over the bar, its necks extending across the floor in chained rivulets to constrain my ankles. While to my sides, the other smugglers readied sorceries to blast me into less than memory. The problem here being, they readied when they should've just shot me. A mistake I gave no room for correction, letting the knife in me unsheathe in a quick-draw that took me over the chains, the bar, and past the bartender's head, claws side-swiping his carotid in a release of such succulent wine that I caught in my parched mouth.
These smugglers were ambush predators, if you could call them that, and lacked the rich Bloodlust I craved the moment I left one of their number all but decapitated. Still, I could take what I wanted with all the ease of stealing a neighbor's fruit, and how I craved a refreshing punch post-resurrection.
So I danced between spears of lightning, slid beneath black gales of rot, conducted men into memory with lashes of Atomic Glory, and found the smile I thought I'd left Beyond Causality's Rim. In my role as death-dealing dervish I could put aside all my concerns for what would come after. I could be exactly who I was when unbothered…
"You're her, aren't you?" the last surviving smuggler moaned out, his lower body twitching from a severed spine. "Her…"
I lifted him higher, pressed my stilleto-thumbs into his throat, and pried apart the last fruit, spilling it down my throat and chest. "Nadia Temple," I tittered, dropping him to the floor. "At your serv—"
A ring of metal pressed against the base of my skull—one of the few non-scaled parts of my body. Click went its safety. As the crackling movement of Dinah's entity deposited her back into the room. To say my euphoria dissipated instantly couldn't encapsulate the negative speed with which it vacated me.
"Why?" I asked. What a dumb question. As if she hadn't explained, as if I couldn't put two severed topics together. Dinah had lost family and everything in Brightgate, and what event had yours truly instigated that could've made for such an outcome. "I saved you."
"One life doesn't equal the thousands you took…you traitor!" The gun shook against my skin. She'd probably gotten this tool as a method of self-defense, ignoring the fact that her own Court was all she'd need. Isolate my head from my shoulders, heart from my chest, life from my body. She could bring me to places beyond simple death, places I couldn't escape.
"Well, that's true, I suppose," I replied. "Though if you put the gun down—"
"Not until your head is in pieces." Then, she sobbed—which normally is the role for the person being executed. "You probably planned for all of this, taking us here to be killed."
"Dinah, I promise, most people who know me would argue I'm far too stupid for that sort of scheming."
"Then I guess this is my lucky day."
It really wasn't. Remember what I said happened when I dared touch at the possibility of dying, that immediate paroxysm of the spirit? Well, there it went again as I caught Anza'centorii's attention from the bar. How she mouthed the words: gnostic boundary. What a cruelty to make this mine, and how unlucky for Dinah that she didn't have the heart to pull the trigger the moment I was caught. If she had…well, my tail wouldn't have whipped across her eyes tossing her aim to the side, and I'd not have pivoted with enough force to spear her heart from her chest in a single easeful blow.
I unsheathed my arm from her chest, stared at the heart in my claw before tossing it back into her ruined breast. Looking up from her corpse to meet Secretary's mournful expression.
"There you are," they chuckled.
There I was, alive again and already doing the same bullshit.