Chapter 51: I-You-Me (2/2)
Hundreds of years ago, there were terrors in the world.
They came from the heart of a wretched dungeon known as the Demon Core, and they were led by the demon king, whose horrors spread across every nation and nearly brought humanity to its ruin. The demon king was defeated in the end, struck down by a powerful sorceress whose name survives in a hundred contradictory tellings. But the monsters he made did not all die with him.
Some of them lingered.
They slept in deep places, forgotten places, places where no one thought to look.
But there was no need, for they often went out looking themselves. Sometimes on their own.
Sometimes when they were called.
The stars shone down on a place in ruin.
Flames rose along the broken walls of the village, the fire moving from roof to roof, and beneath the firelight something crawled through the streets on a hundred arms.
It had the body of a woman, stretched beyond any sense, segment after segment of torso joined in a chain that ran across rooftops, down alleyways, through doorways and out again. Arms extended from every segment. Its face was featureless. Where the eyes and nose should have been, there was only skin, smooth and blank, and beneath that blankness sat a single pinhole mouth that drew in air with a thin, continuous hiss.
It was a Thing that Took.
Whereas the term ‘monster’ was used to describe something like a goblin or a giant rat, a ‘terror’ was a specific thing. It was a monster that defied classification through the conventional system.
— They were the things children screamed of at night and that those who were in dark places dreamt of in the back of their minds.
It had a man pinned beneath its foremost hands. It bent its blank face over his and breathed in, and a white string of prismatic light rose out of his open mouth and flowed into the pinhole. His soul. It took it the way a person drinks water. And when the last of the light left him, a new segment swelled at the lowest joint of its body, a torso in the shape of the man it had emptied, and the Thing was longer than it had been.
People ran. Knights fought and were struck down, crushed. Arrows came and did nothing because there was more meat than there was damage than even a barrage of arrowheads could provide.
A girl was on the ground.
She had been knocked down in the crush and the crowd ran over and around her, boots striking her back and shoulders while she covered her head and screamed. She was small and blonde, her hair cut short and straight, an apprentice of the village church still too inexperienced for the full robe.
Fingers moved through the ashen mud toward her. The centipede body crept, inching.
A hand grabbed hers and tore her to her feet, a person.
It was an older girl from the village. A year older, dark-haired, with her curls wild around her face. Some girl from the village. She pulled hard and did not let go, and the two of them ran, the older girl leading and the blonde girl fighting her grip the entire way.
"FATHER!" the apprentice screamed, reaching back.
Her father turned his head to look at her from beneath the Thing that Took, and his eyes went dull while he was still looking.
Her hands sparked. The barest flicker of holy light, all the magic she had, useless at this distance and useless at any distance.
The older girl stumbled. A black book fell from inside her coat, hit the burning mud, and went alight.
Behind them, the Thing that Took turned its blank face after the two running girls, and its body began to elongate.
Quiet. It was hours later, deep in the woods.
"Ow!" the apprentice priestess yelped. She had been crying about her father this entire time.
The stranger held the rag to her bleeding head. The dark-haired girl, a spinster's daughter, said nothing. She had never said anything. She was mute, and she shushed the smaller girl with a soft breath and kept the rag pressed firm.
Some of the other survivors looked their way from across the camp, murmuring to each other.
The dark-haired girl paid them no mind.
Days later.
They were walking at the back of the refugee column.
"Do you believe in heaven?" asked the little priestess.
Her new friend looked at her and shook her head.
Then she looked around, bent down, and picked up a flower from the roadside. She held it up, pointed down at the ground, and nodded. All there was was here. That was enough for her.
"...Huh," said the priestess.
She took the flower anyway.
"And on that day will come the tower of Isiah, to save us from all wicked things," read the priestess from her gospel.
The mute girl sat next to her, listening, her chin on her knees.
The priestess stopped. "Hey. I've never seen your family come to church. How come?"
The mute girl looked back at her. She shook her head. Then she made a gesture, drawing one finger slowly from her wrist up along her palm to the tip of her longest finger.
Hurt.
A week later.
The refugee children were playing near the wagons, and the priestess was with them.
"Ew. She's so weird," whispered one of them.
The dark-haired girl walked past, carrying a bucket of water. She did not look at them.
"I heard her mum's a witch. That's why she doesn't have a voice."
"Do you think she died?"
"I bet she was the one who called the monster."
The priestess looked at them. Then she looked after the girl with the bucket and said nothing.
A week later.
The priestess was studying her scripture in the shade of a cart. Only one copy of the text had survived the village, and it had been given to her because she was the only one of the church left.
Laughter. She looked up.
A group of older children walked past. One of them held a tuft of black hair in his fist.
She got up. She followed the bend in the path into the trees.
The mute girl was there, sitting on the ground against a tree, bruised and holding herself. Her hair had been cut off. Not neatly. In fistfuls.
She pushed herself upright when the priestess approached.
"Are you okay?" The priestess reached out. "Let me try and heal you." Her magic was weak, but it could tend a bruise.
The mute girl pushed her hands away.
The priestess sat down quietly. Then she saw the scissors. They had been stabbed through the back of the girl's dress, pinning her to the tree trunk. She had been sitting there unable to leave.
They looked at each other for a long time.
A week later.
The bald girl keeled over.
"You killed my mum!" yelled a boy, his boot connecting with her stomach. She curled on the ground, holding herself, and he kicked down at her again. "Witch!"
A few other boys stood around her, lashing down with sticks. The sound of them beating her was audible around the camp, but nobody did anything.
In the distance, the little priestess watched with her hood up and did not move.
Holding herself, the battered girl limped into their corner of the camp.
The bald girl slumped down, broken, her wounds bleeding, her face swollen along one whole side.
She opened her eyes and looked at the mute girl sitting next to her.
The mute girl was wearing the priestess’ robe. She, herself, was wearing her tattered dress.
The priestess had cut her own hair off and taken the other girl's clothes, and now the swollen face belonged to the wrong girl entirely.
"Your turn tomorrow," said the priestess through her split lip.
The mute girl was crying. She shook her head, pointed at herself, and gestured. ‘Why?’
The priestess didn't respond.
"...Are you really a witch's daughter?" she asked quietly instead.
The mute girl held, frozen. She looked away, guarded. Then she looked back.
She gestured again at the battered little priestess. ‘Why?’ Still not understanding why anyone would suffer this with her.
The priestess, too hurt to answer, lay there and breathed through broken ribs.
Slowly, the mute girl lifted her sleeves.
Marks ran up her forearms. Sigils, fine and deliberate, worked into the skin. Witch-sign.
Her mother was not the witch. She was. She was one.
The priestess lifted one hand and pulled the sleeve back down over the marks. Her eyes shut. The last thing they saw was a desperate signing of why, over and over, that she gave no answer to.
It went on for weeks. Months.
Each of them slipping into the other's place when the beatings came, trading the robe and the bruises back and forth to make it survivable. With their hair cut off the same and their clothes swapped, they were similar enough that nobody could tell the difference anymore.
Night. Screaming.
The refugees were one day from the Great Palisade, the Cathedral of the Spire, a bastion of the faith and home to a paladin order. Weeks of walking, and the sanctuary was just over the ridge.
The ground shook.
A Thing that Took came through the forest at a charge, its long body weaving between the trunks, criss-crossing in every direction at once. Hands reached out of the darkness on all sides, tearing people from the column and dragging them into the night. It had found them again. It had followed them the whole way.
Soldiers came over the ridge with weapons glowing holy and faltered at the sight of it. They had been raised in an age of common goblins and slimes. None of them had seen a true Terror.
"This way! This is consecrated ground!" a captain yelled, pointing to a line of old bricks half-buried at the forest's edge, the boundary of the convent's territory. It would repel a demon. It should be enough.
People ran for the line.
But the mute girl slowed. Then she stopped.
Her friend pulled her arm. "Come on! We're almost there!"
The mute girl looked at her and shook her head. Her eyes were sad and resolved.
The priestess looked down. The line of bricks ran between them now. And where the mute girl's hand had crossed above it, the skin had turned red and begun to burn, a thin hissing sound rising from the flesh. A witch could not enter consecrated ground.
They stood apart, on either side of the line.
"...Why?" asked the priestess, her fists clenched.
Behind the mute girl, the shape wove and skittered through the dark on a hundred hands.
The mute girl made a gesture. One finger vertical, another laid flat at its base. A point. A hat. A witch's hat.
"No. Why did you do it?" The priestess was crying now, but her voice held. "I know you did it, but why?"
The mute girl looked at her for a long while. Then she gestured back. ‘Why? Why did you help me? Why did you bring me this far? Why are you nice to me?’
"Because I wanted you to be punished!" the priestess shouted at her. "You killed my father." She swept her arm out. "I didn't want people to hurt you. I wanted God to hurt you! I HATE YOU!"
The mute girl stared at her. Her eyes made many small motions.
Then she stepped back, turned, and ran toward the thing in the forest.
"COME BACK!" the priestess shouted.
The witch ran into the trees, and the Thing turned and began to move around her.
She stood panting in its midst while it wove itself through the trunks around her, hands crawling through the foliage, flesh dragging over old rocks and sharp sticks. Something snapped taut and came at her, and she was knocked flat onto her back.
The torsos crawled over her. One after another, a hundred and more, until it ran a full loop and the head lay above her face. Its first pair of arms held her cheeks, and the blank skin looked down at her.
Indifferent to her being the one who had once called it from the darkness it had resided in, the monster began to draw in.
Her body convulsed. A wisp of light left her lips and flowed toward the pinhole. It drew once. Twice. Her eyes began to fade and turn milky.
A blast of white light struck the Thing's head sideways.
The priestess stood at the tree line with her hands raised, the spell still smoking off her fingers. The Thing lowered its sizzling head toward her, a single loud whistle escaping its pinprick mouth, and began to curl.
The priestess ran to the mute girl and hauled her up. Around them, the Thing circled, building a round prison from its own body, a stacked tube of torsos with endless arms reaching inward.
"Get up!" the priestess yelled. "You idiot!" She grabbed her by the collar and shook her, crying. "You think you can just die and get away from what you did?! You think I'm going to let you? I'm going to make you pray every day until your skin burns off. Look at me!"
The mute girl's head rolled weakly. Her eyes were nearly vacant. Her hand rose, and one finger touched the priestess's palm and slid slowly along it to the tip of her longest finger.
Hurt.
Then she was too heavy to hold herself up, and she fell. Her body lay slumped on the forest floor.
The priestess screamed. Everything inside her released at once.
The wall of bodies crushed inward, and her hands lit with a power that matched the light in her eyes. The Thing grabbed her face and latched on, its pinhole mouth drawing, and she felt herself becoming light and saw the trail of her own life leaving her mouth.
Her sleeves burned away. Beneath them, her arms showed marks. Witch-sign, drawn onto her own skin in careful imitation, part of the disguise she had worn for months.
And instead of fighting the Thing's grip, she pressed in.
She grasped its skull with both hands, put her lips to the pinhole mouth, sank her nails into it, and inhaled.
She pulled.
The monster rattled and screamed, and she latched on harder and breathed in more and more, dragging the foul miasmatic air from its lungs and then dragging what was under the air. It writhed and thrashed and began to unravel, and she pulled in deeper. Prismatic holy magic sparked and clashed against a darkness that came from somewhere inside her, and a howl rose that did not stop, carrying across the forest and out into the world.
From the outside, nobody knew what they were seeing. Only that the spiral of bodies radiated a shine from within itself, bright enough to cancel the night. Holy power poured from her hands, not the power of one soul but of a dozen, of a hundred, a cascade of stolen lives fleeing the monster and flooding into her instead.
Her skin burned. Her hair burned. Her nails and her eyes burned. Every part of her body overloaded with more than it could carry, and all of it went out through her hands, the spell growing until it banished the dark entirely.
The Thing that Took screamed because now something took from it.
It began to ash, unravelling.
She fell, shaken loose, bleeding and blistered. The monster wound up into the sky above the trees, blackening, burning from the inside out, coming apart into drifting grey.
As she lay on the ground, something crawled toward her through the ash.
She turned her head, saw, and crawled toward it in return.
The priestess and the witch met in the middle. Forehead pressed to forehead. Palm pressed to palm, each mirroring the other exactly. They had a plan.
The priestess prayed, and the mute girl mirrored her lips.
They were both dying. One because she was too empty. One because she was too full.
And that was their solution.
A shine rose between their joined palms. The souls moved. Half of the flood left the priestess and flowed across into the empty girl, and the current carried more than power with it. Two bodies became exactly alike. Two minds became exactly alike. Each of them was made now from the same homogenised collage of hundreds of souls, so many-faceted and so identical in their composition that the two of them ended as one and the same.
Two vessels of the same melded humanity.
Washed with a flood of souls from the inside out, they were identical in every way. Their bodies had changed, but had changed the same. Their minds had changed, but changed the same.
They lay next to each other in the falling ash, exactly alike in every way, hand in hand, while the paladin order approached across the ridge with lanterns raised.
Neither of them could have said, afterward, which of them had been which. Or who they were before then.
Neither of them ever needed to.
Because now, they were one creature, together. A single whole made out of multiples.
They, in unison, were one Thing that was Many.
"Aaah~! Help me!"
Blibli was being dragged bodily across the grass by a deeply annoyed Ead, who had one pseudopod gripped in both hands and was pulling with her whole weight. Scraps of half-digested notepaper bobbed visibly inside the slime's mass.
"Give. Them. Back," said Ead, hauling.
The twin priestesses looked at each other. Then at the slime.
They reached out together and each grabbed one of Blibli's free hands, and they pulled the other way, and the tug-of-war stretched the slime princess into a long, wailing, giggling ribbon between the three of them. The saintesses pulled harder, and their sleeves bunched together at the elbows, and both of them were laughing.
"It is not like me to laugh," said one of them, smiling.
"I suppose I'm getting used to this," said the other, happy.
Where the sleeves had ridden up, a series of old marks and sigils across both forearms caught the daylight, identical on each of them, line for line.
But everyone was caught up in the game, and nobody remarked on them at all.