Arc 5: Chapter 30: The Soft Matter of Sin
For a long moment, we just watched each other. I stood in the center of the tower room, Catrin by the moonlit window, with only the sound of the waves stretching over the island’s rock to break the silence.
I inhaled deeply, and smelled something sickly sweet in the air, a crisp scent it took me a moment to recognize. It smelled like a beetle’s shell, like the deep parts of a lightless wood. Like rot.
And through the tower’s stone, I could feel a great heart beating in warning.
My entire focus had been on the figure standing there, framed in the window. But now I paid more attention, the shadows around her seemed to move. I could hear many tiny, scuttling legs around me, beating wings, and clacking mandibles. All those sounds fused into one chorus, and the demon spoke.
Your ploy this night almost had me, marked one.
I felt certain I would taste the bite of your axe.
Some of the insects were crawling on Catrin herself. I bared my teeth. “Let her go.”
I will not.
Something crawled up the side of Catrin’s neck. A crimson beetle. She shuddered, but made no move to bat it away.
Inside, I felt terrible relief at seeing her right there in front of me. And fear, because another innocent had been used by this thing as a suit, and Yith had not been gentle with that poor boy’s undead flesh. In addition to an array of lesser injuries, mostly cuts and bruises on her arms and neck, I could also make out the mottled tissue surrounding a more hideous wound in her shoulder. Her hair and clothes were filthy, like she’d just crawled out of a pit.
Or a grave.