Rose screamed. Well, she tried. She wasn’t exactly sure how. She was … what? Floating? It felt a bit like the floating in the water elemental had, but less. She felt like less, too. What the shit was this? She looked around. Holy fuck, she was naked. Which was only slightly less distressing than floating in near darkness, which she also was. So how was she seeing herself?
The orbs around were still illuminating but in a ghastly sort of green, and the structure of this place had changed. Well, it had and it hadn’t. The archways weren’t taller, but they felt taller and more sweeping and made of a dark glossy stone. Had they been made of a dark glossy stone before? She wasn’t sure. Far above her there was a thin bridge spanning from one side to the other.
The bridge. Rose remembered. Hester. Dead Hester. She’d failed. Not only had she failed at the one thing she came to do, she’d failed so spectacularly that she’d also managed to die in the process. She was dead. They were both dead. Fuck.
She wanted to wallow, but honestly, she was having trouble summoning the emotion. She felt … well … dead. The bridge being up above must have meant that she was at the bottom now, no? Which meant.
Oh, no. She looked slowly from where she was to the center arches. There it was. The beast. The giant. The god. Huge head still laying, massive body still bunched up, huge left socked still empty, massive right eye still grey and staring. But now, it turned and looked at her.
This time Rose DID scream. It wasn’t even a cool scream.
“Holy fuck, holy shit, holy sucking shit!”
The massive eye blinked and she heard a second voice to her left. “You seem to have covered the bases with your blasphemy, you crude thing.” She swung her head around and there he was. The dead priest. In life he’d been a boring looking right half and a rancid left. In death he was all boring. Seems like dying had healed his artful face, though his left eye was now a black pit, somehow. What, did dying not heal eyes? Seemed to have healed her legs, because she wasn’t so much floating as lightly standing, though she seemed to weigh so little that she might not have noticed if she hadn’t seen the eye. He was a little less plain now. Almost striking, though nobody would call him handsome. Nobody who meant it.
“You killed my sister.” She wasn’t yelling now. Her voice was low. Her attention … well, it wasn’t entirely off the massive god. It probably never would be, but she hated this fucker enough to ignore it for now. He arched an eyebrow.
“Very good, that’s right, I DID kill her. And you’re going to do what about it? Kill me?” He gave her a little superior smirk, but Rose had to admit, she didn’t have a comeback for that one. This sort of changed her perspective. “She spoke about you, you know. Your sister. Tender little Hester. On the road she spoke about everyone, but you most of all, I think. How you left the family. Left her. alI alone with that,” he gave a soft shudder, “woman.” Clearly her mother had made an accurate impression on him.
“Oh, she opened up to you, huh? You sick -” wait. Why the fuck was he talking to her? Why were they having this conversation? Was he distracting her? His gaze flicked to the right and she followed it.
Hester. Oh, Gods, Hester! She hadn’t seen her before because she floated twenty feet or more up. Still horizontal. The knife was still in her chest!
“Your sister is going to do something marvelous, girl. You have no idea the greatness she will bring about. The death. The pain. The beauty.” Oh, gods. This guy was eating his own shit. He had no idea what would happen. No, actually, he DID know. He just … he wanted it.
“I’ll stop you.”
The stupid man actually laughed. But not a laugh like a real person. He just barked out a literal ha. “Ha! You will stop nothing. She’s caught up in his power and you are just a dead soul now. No magic, no weapons. I won’t live to see it, but I wasn’t going to survive the resurrection anyway. Really, your way was probably less painful.” He winced when he said it. Not painless, though, huh? Rose smirked, though. Because he didn’t know. He thought she did magic. Fair, she had done, but that was just on loan from Emrys. She wasn’t sure he really knew her well enough to act as a focus for her magic, but it seemed he’d been paying attention. Good on him. But this poor sap didn’t actually know what she was.
“You fucking moron. I have it on good authority that there are no souls. What I am right now is a mind. And my mind is all I need!” She opened her third eye and blasted the motherfucker so hard it scattered his mind into the surrounding dark, leaving nothing but a brief afterimage of his shocked stupid face. Turning to Hester she focused on the blade. What would be better? She needed something top heavy. She held the shape of it in her mind: she’d remember that blade forever. It killed her sister. And she rewrote it. It became a garden spade, with the handle end down and the shovel pointing up. It tipped, top heavy, and fell the twenty odd feet to the ground and landed without a sound, turning back to a knife as it struck.
Hester fell, too, but slowly, as if she had a bit more control. Her form came to a stop near Rose and she got her first good look at her sister since she’d left two years ago. Hester was taller than she had expected. Her hair was still the frizzy puff around her head that their mother had never bothered to learn how to properly keep. But honestly, it was the eyes. She looked aware. Strong. She looked a lot less freaked out than Rose felt. She also saw Rose. Saw her and knew her instantly. And then her sister was hugging her tight and Rose was hugging her back. She felt like the moment called for tears, but she couldn’t make them. The emotions were muted, but even smaller than they would have otherwise been they were still the biggest thing Rose had felt in years. Her sister.
“Why are you here, Rose? How are you here?” Hester made a face. “Also, where is here?”
Rose laughed, despite the situation. “Well, I hoped I was saving you, but… “ She shrugged. “I guess the best I could do was kill that shit who killed you. Twice.”
Hester’s face was dark. “Mika. Yeah, he’s a real piece of work, huh?”
Rose didn’t like that look. “Did he do things? Touch you in ways he shouldn’t.”
His voice was like a gut punch behind her. “You mean apart from the violation of murder? No, nothing entered her but my blade.” Rose turned and saw him behind them, still more or less complete, though a bit fuzzy at the center of the chest where her blast had taken him. “I do not partake of such basic things.”
“Yeah,” spat Rose, “Like you have a choice. I’m sure the ladies love your face-scab.” His hand instinctively shot to his face while he scowled, but he seemed surprised to find it smooth. And maybe a bit worried. He glanced at the titanic god near them. Shit, Rose had almost forgotten the thing.
But then he regained his composure. It wasn’t actually calm. Nothing so sleek. He was just pushing his feelings down. He probably thought it was the same, but Rose had trained with Sage. She knew the difference. “Anyway, this was a cute tantrum, but the master will take her, blade or no blade. She was made to feed him.”
Before Rose could ask what the shit that meant, the great eye focused on them once more. In fact, it felt like the eye AND the socket were focused on them, at the second was much more terrifying. She opened her mouth to say something to it, but nothing came out.
NOURISHING. YES.
Holy shit, that voice. It wasn’t a voice and it didn’t speak, but she not only felt it inside her mind, but she KNEW it. It was true, her sister would nourish this thing. Was it true because it was true or true because it said it? No idea. This time Rose did find her voice. “Yeah? What about this eyeless shit. He looks like you already, why not eat him instead?”
The man – Mika – looked alarmed. She expected him to be honored. Maybe his faith wasn’t as deep as all that. “Master! Yes, of course, if that is your will, but ….” he was thinking fast now. “This one has been prepared for you! Of your own bloodline and bathed in the blood of the mother! She is ready!”
Rose looked to Hester, who only looked down. Holy merciful shit. She looked at Mika who was looking at her like a fox sitting alone in the chicken coop. He wasn’t afraid of her. What was she going to do, blast him again and buy herself twenty seconds? This shit had killed her mother and her sister for his oversized one eyed monster and what did ‘of your own bloodline’ mean? Whatever it was, it meant she couldn’t offer to take Hester’s place. She might be able to take out the thing’s big eye for a bit, but she had a guess that it was a little harder to hurt than Mika had been. Even if she did, what was the point? This thing was going to eat her sister and probably then her. Probably Mika, too, but that didn’t make her feel better. She’d lost.
Hester hadn’t gotten the message, though. “Pain! Daughter of Bala! Tell me, what will happen if you consume me now?” What the fuck was that?
WAKE. BEING. AWARE.
The best part was how Mika looked as totally gobsmacked as Rose was. His mouth was hanging open, his eyes were like saucers – well like one saucer and one ugly sack you might collect the pieces of a broken saucer in. He had the look of a man seeing his corn negotiating with the scythe.
“And is that what you want?” Hester sounded so sure of herself. Rose remembered a timid girl who she’d had to keep hidden from their mother. She remembered Hester, terrified of thunderstorms. But, strangely, in that moment she also remembered Hester spending the whole day lying on the floor with their dog before he died. Like she knew.
PROMISED.
The thing almost sounded petulant. There was an edge to the earth shattering reality of the word. It had been promised a sacrifice. Hester sounded sympathetic. “I know. The way is open. But I am not a good choice for you today. It would be too much. Maybe I could return to you when I am less and complete the ritual. It won’t be long.”
Rose felt her panic rise. What was she doing? Offering herself? And soon? Not on Rose’s watch! If the way was open, this giant piece of shit could choke on something. Rose hadn’t walked in years. Same amount of time since she ran, really, since she’d fallen right after. But she ran now.
Mika didn’t seem like a very flexible thinker, but he wasn’t stupid, sadly. He tracked her movement, not knowing what was going on, but knowing he didn’t like it. He also moved closer to Hester. Rose wasn’t sure what sort of powers he might have in death or how things worked in this place, but she knew that if he got much farther she was done for, so she shifted her movement and went for him. That sick black hole where his eye used to be started to glow a gross orange color that Rose didn’t much like the look of, and it turned out that she was right not to because a moment later she was frozen solid. All she could do was watch as he walked calmly toward Rose. At least he blocked her view of his great ugly god’s face some. She could still see Hester off to the side, looking at them in alarm now.
Rose knew that she only had a moment to act. Light blared from her eyes as she forced her talent out of them, the very first trick she’d ever learned. It hit him and, of course, didn’t do him any harm, but he didn’t know that. He stopped moving and held up his hands to guard himself. And suddenly Rose could move again. He shouted from the other side of her light. “I will flay your soul until there is nothing left but ribbons!” She could tell he meant it. Could probably do it. That just meant that Rose couldn’t give him a moment’s calm. She figured the only reason she wasn’t frozen right now was because he couldn’t see her, so she had to keep the light up.
Then Rose noticed that she felt fine. Dead, sure, but fine. No strain, of course, because no body. Rose let her third eye open wide. As she did so, she could swear that she saw the huge grey eye behind him open even wider. She blasted the kidnapping shit in a wide band, blowing him back, shredding his form in places, but more importantly, right into that huge face. And the empty eye simply swallowed everything. Mika and the blast. They both fell into that space. Rose, herself, began to fall towards it. Oh, shit, it was like she was being pulled in by her third eye. She closed it, of course, but she was still being pulled in! The thing had a hold of her somehow. She was falling into it as if the empty socket were the ground, but there wouldn’t be anything for her to land on.
“No!” it was Hester again. She reached up and grabbed Rose by the hand, because Rose realized that now she WAS falling into the thing. Her feet had already crossed into the socket and Rose could see they were fading into nothing.
But Hester pulled hard and Rose felt a great tearing. She thought, just as she was hurled in the other direction and upwards, that perhaps she’d been wrong about there being no souls. If there weren’t, then what had just ripped so painfully?
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