A series of microfiction pieces highlighting moments from the upcoming novel in my Judge of Mystics Saga, Char & Ash.
Mould dotted the moist canvas, slunk into cracks in the varnish caused by a wet, bowed frame. The portrait seeped with black pocks, distant cousins to the smallpox Anna never got in life, nor in a death screaming. Caleb hung brittle as the thin wire, his foot poised on rotted wood while he tried to reach for the portrait, reach for his mother’s love as dead as she was, decrepit as her grave. House caving in around him, he reached to his limit. Anna’s face, mottled by mould, flaked of its beauty as the rain pouring through the hole in the roof slid down ancient oil paint in splattered drip-drops to the floor.
A creak, a desperate exhalation. Caleb’s boot slopped through sponge-wood. The portrait’s rusted wire failed. It tumbled in a broken heap in the tangle of old beams down to the ruined cellar.
The sickly rip of reality shredded down Caleb’s spine as Stana vanished in a bloody tear, one arm limp from the bullet lodged in her shoulder. Firing three more shots at the cosmic wound, the stink of rotten misgivings slunk into the Judge’s nose in tandem with gunpowder and copper. He charged the suturing tear, until the last Caleb saw of Stana was a scrap of her brown dress caught in the breeze left behind.
“Damnation!”
Air crisp with autumn’s gumless teeth snapped at Caleb’s neck. He popped the collar of his pea coat, hands shoved into the pockets where the comfort of the pistol and a few extra degrees celsius resided.
“Place is desolate, sweetheart. Abandoned by the look of it, why would Stana be here?” Tuija tied her chestnut hair back from a weary face, tucked the ponytail under her scarf and rolled both shoulders in the leather jacket she ‘borrowed’ from Finn.
“We’re not looking for Stana.” Caleb knocked at the door and it slumped off its’ one rusted hinge, a crack in split wood creaked until the door crashed in two wet pieces. Stepping over the remains, Caleb offered his hand for Tuija, who hopped past and folded her fingers into his for comfort’s sake.
“So the creepy dilapidated house is…”
“… an old friend’s. Oy! Alvar, you here!?” Caleb trotted over a broken bit of flooring, to another door bereft its stopper, which angled down into the pitch and dark.
“If they are, we should probably grab one heck of a plastic bag and a shovel. Carry out the remains…”
“Kitten, claws.” Caleb smirked as Tuija rifled through one of the hallways, plucking the leaves off the crab apple tree which grew through a wall into the one room hytte.
“Puppy, eyes. Nobody’s here.”
“No body doesn’t mean nobody’s here, young sapling.” The voice lilted like Caleb’s when he was tired or frustrated, a gravelled Scandinavian tilt to the English language incorporated into ‘ease of use’ for the Realms. Tuija jolted back from the warbling sound, which stole across the degraded log and pitch cabin. Ruined furniture appeared as bespoke and desolate as the slop of rain on a roof lost of its sod come a harsh autumn, fabric disintegrated to scraps by time’s stinging arrows. Out of the miasma of damp and desolation, the stride of a man narrowed into focus. Form from the gloom shuddered irreconcilable from the small hearth with rusted spit broken at one spoke.
“Caleb, you old fool. I should haunt your nethers to spite you for waking me. I dreamt I was in Folkvangr… oh now, you dreamt you were in Ásgard. Didn’t you? Tisk tisk, my friend, no benefit comes from those furrowed places.” Alvar’s leather boots made no noice on the creaking floor, for the gjenganger’s soles did not touch it. Eyes with the cataracts of death glared milk-white and empty into the middle of the two living beings, a twitch of the ghost’s neck. The tilt of a chin which followed noise instead of vision.
“The Book abandoned Salomon.”
“A dead man’s coin for a dead man’s tale. Make yourselves useful, split wood and put a fire in my hearth. I have no more hands to do it.” Alvar raised the stumps of ethereal arms, settled against the creak of a broken bench once carved with the roots of Yggdrasil.
“All your friends ask you for impossible finds before helping out?” Tuija grimaced at the spent spirit’s wisp-like bone-cage, the rot-rags of flesh clinging to Alvar’s memory of once being strong.
“Only the good ones.” Caleb dug his hand into an inner pocket of the peacoat, and pulled out a single drachma, pressing it into the dilapidated hearth. He and Tuija busied about for tinder dry enough, and not finding what they needed in the dap sod house, Caleb yanked the tail off his button down after cutting a slit with his knife. The waft of flint and steel to dry cotton brought enough embers to light for Tuija to curl her open fist around the fledgeling flame and coax it into a blaze warm enough to dry the derelict wood they pulled from the driest places.
The fire crackled and pocked, matte grey smoke billowed around the sod house’s ceiling and out holes deconstructed from the once solid frame. Alvar grumbled out a sigh, and set the stumps of his arms toward the fire.
“So, the Book?”
“Yes, you’re f$cked.”
“I’m telling ya, the keyboard is the best enchanted thing in the universe.” Chestnut curls puffed back from a face slick with one too many chip run, illuminated in the blue light of a wealth of led screens.
“Yeah, sure kid.” Caleb barely glanced up before Icarus had a cloth and wiped his brow, tossed it into a bin beside the wide desk in the library basement. Place was terrifying enough without stopping to ponder the derelict liminal space between stacks of antiquated information. Who read books anymore?
“It’s the best, no carpal tunnel! No tired wrists or sore forearms, I can code for days! Nobody bothers me down here, it’s stonking.” Icarus tippity-tapped at the keyboard, the only sound but a vibration from headphones he never removed.
“Mmhmmm?”
“You don’t seem impressed… I thought you’d be impressed.” Icarus’ eyes flickered up to the Judge, who let his fingers slide across spines as dusty as a forgotten hallway in a home no longer occupied. The walls caved, metal stacks of books creaked. Tippity-tippity tap. Tip tip tap.
“Got a ton on my mind, kid.”
“I’m twenty centuries older than you.” Icarus sang to a tune of his past, screens awash with information difficult to discern if one didn’t understand at least three dead languages and how their trading partners marred them over time.
“Act your age.”
“Eff that, dude, eff frickin’ that… oh hey, the report’s compiled. You ready to have your mind blown?”
“As long as that’s all we’re blowing tonight.” Caleb leaned his arm along Icarus’ chair, the space between Icarus’ bank of screens and their eyes fluctuated and sparked. Swooped across Caleb’s retinae and down his optic nerves with a poor man’s salvation. “… scratch that. This is perfect.”
“Really!? ‘Cause nobody can hear us down…”
“Huh? Oh! No, I was gonna call Hephaestion up for you, seriously? I don’t swing.”
“Only thing scarier than a library after hours in the dark is the tomb of your love life, my dude.”
“Asclepius got to you, didn’t he?”
“Yyyyyyep!”
The Book of Knowledge rested in enemy hands. In one conversation, Caleb realized Stana was the dangerous kind of non-believer, who radicalized killing gods and striking every memory from the record until they ceased to exist. Tiperet’s corpse crackled like blank spots on his eyes, tempering the pub’s cacophony of humanity veering for drinks, handing over fivers, slapping cards on scanners. Did Stana know she had the misfortune of caustic hatred to sustain her pursuits? Who was the puppeteer of the woman’s first forays into the mystic realms? Shoulder slumped into a poster for a gambling site, Caleb thought back.
Vines. Sickly, red vines. The Fae?
What nature sect was disgruntled enough to give the woman power?
Finnegan’s eternal party roiled on. Drinks and bodies. Brief periods of interconnection followed by the fumble of lost numbers. Lost coats. Lost souls. Caleb Mauthisen stumbled through the throng, tripped over a first date and slapped his palms down to steady his fallen gait on a table full of Kemeti revellers drinking down cocktails in Tiperet’s memory. Their drinks stalled in hand, gazes locked on the listless calm betraying Caleb’s frenetic inner waters.
“Judge Mauthisen, Sir? Do you need to sit down?” A woman with her tight curls oiled under a demure golden head-dress set her martini glass down and slid it out of reach. She worried at her bottom lip, Caleb’s hand slid away from gentle fingers.
“Look at him.”
“Shush.”
“But look at him…”
“Judge? Sir, is there someone we can call?” Fingers the colour of deep ochre swept across his hand. Caleb’s breathing lacked the syncopation of the blundering music, a Siren DJing with her signature red duct tape over her mouth.
“He’s a mess…”
“Shush, Meresankh, go find Finnegan. Go. His lover died avenging Tiperet, why wouldn’t he be like this?”
Pulsing lights shot at Caleb’s retinae with a wave of nausea. ‘His lover died…’ Cerulean met mahogany and a sympathetic purse of concerned lips painted gold. ‘His lover’, was Tuija’s memory erased because of their nights together? No longer Tuija, warrior-captain for Czernobog, Veteran of the Mystic War. No longer Fae-Cursed powerhouse in her own right. The Judge’s Lover. He pushed away from the table, the chasm ached into his bone-cage.
Caleb needed out.
Thorns mangled Stana’s ankles, spearing her calves, separating flesh by microns in their crawl. Stana yelped a caterwauling shriek, each vine clawed. Cut through clothing on their way to the shoulder’s crimson release of lifeblood. Spasming as her limbs were immobilized, Stana gurgled at the talons of the Fae lord’s vines wrenched aside her throat. Three spirals of vine dove into the wound. Rent flesh spread in undulating rivulets, until each of the bullet and bone fragments spilled to the soil.
“Better, little human?” The thorns receded.
“You’ll be last to die.” Stana cursed the gods once more, they could not even cure with kindness. "Your daughter, the first."
Caterwaul until the gods change hands, limbs like paper airplanes in the damp autumnal gloom. Howl into the sky in competition between deities who claim it, born aspects of the firmament above the planet’s bulk. Roar as fervent and heavy as the rage-gods and their hammers. Their lightning bolts. Howl as heavy as companion hooves.
Prove to me you exist, so I might snuff you out and pluck your vibrations from the sky.
Tuija stood in front of the hotel mirror, left hand swathed in soft human skin drifted along the fissure of pink scarring, which burst at its seams in cedar bark. She peeled a thin strand of red wood-flesh from the mass on her cheek, scratched at a corner to get more grip on another band. The pads of her fingers searched for more skin, and found the deficit which rebuked her pride.
Humanity reversed.
“Tuija? You copacetic?” Caleb called from the bedroom.
“Yeah! Got any sandpaper? I want to exfoliate.”
The faint sound of rustling morphed into stepping feet. Caleb’s arms swept around her from behind. He nuzzled into her hair, rocking them back and forth in front of the mirror. Tuija clung to his arms, and with a whisper, pushed her head back into his chest. The cedar bark which would in scant years consume her speared at Tuija through the mirror.
“Don’t remember me like this.”
Temper me, broken vessel.
Shatter-shards burst in glass and pig iron
Too dangerous for Fae skin
Too kind for villains, who bump and grind
Ash and bone to weaponize charnel fires
Fill the slag of Realms through my sieve-breaks
Hollowed out in testament
To bullets blossomed in shoulders too late
Too far from centre mass
Too close for the rip in reality
Steal the sacred pages back from the fiend.
"Aaaaaaah... sorry Judge Sir, ah, you mind I .... ah... I'm just going to leave you for a minute... go.... make small talk with my Nysse." Lu grabbed Tuija's arm and towed her further from Caleb into Lu's apartment space. If apartment was the word at all. Like Tuija's, it was less standard four walls, kitchen, bedroom and living area and more echo of the Realm she left behind. A softly rolling hill in Tuija's place became the stiff peaks of a fjord for Lu. The sun and the moon were thinly veiled chariots, Sól's golden hair radiated with a solar glow. Two wolves, like wisps of clouds, gave chase.
Caleb's breath escaped fallow in his lungs. Barely capable of hearing the mutters of two women in rapid discussion about protection and Judges and lack of pregnancy, Caleb Mauthi's Son stopped short. The wall surrounding the inner place was as high as the legends stated, each block the size of a mountain excised by a giant and his mighty stallion. In the distance, long houses nestled between groves of trees, tucked into the mountainsides.
Dragon-headed ships waited on the lowlands, docked at the base of a village which spun up the fjord-side.
Asgård.
He stepped out into the light cast from Sòl's hair and his lungs contracted. If he dragged his eyes from the halls to the skyline, Caleb could barely make out the limits to Lu's pocket framed within Finnegan's Pub and its secret places. Close, so close he could reach down and touch the sweet grass, the lingonberry and cloudberry bushes dotting round. A tug came to his pant-leg and Caleb gasped. Cast his eyes down to the Nysse, who muttered on in Old Norse about breaking things and the cost of lumber these days.
"Beklager... Unskyld..." Two simple words, which seemed to pacify the creature. He wondered if he ought to pay the Nysse in oatmeal, or gruel, but before he could ask another question, the tiny house spirit trotted off and away into the space between Lu's cupboard and the entry wall to her spot of paradise. Came back out with a two-hand saw of miniature scale, and another Nysse. Off to the copse of trees nearby.
Caleb sat on the low stool Lu had been using to shape her bonsai.
"I get it! Yes, you can have your divination, but he's... what's he staring at?" Lu tromped back to the table and picked the bonsai up, back to a display shelf built beside the quilts which made up her bed.
"If I told him where you lived, do you think he'd agree to kick open your door?" Tuija sat beside Caleb and took his hand in hers, gripped and played with his fingers. "Welcome home, baby. Or, a mirror image of it."
"The Truce isn't going to last, Father Finnegan."
"I ain't your father."
"Aren't you the father of us all?"
"I ain't yours directly. Don't pin your gut-rot on me not lovin' you enough as a budling."
"Fair! Fair." Cormac wiped an ash stain onto his upper lip, watched Finnegan's limbs return to a 'human' shape, a bipedal mechanism of their state in a world of mortals, immortals, of flesh and the stink mammals maintained, before they turned into the most valued of fertilizer for the fae's young.
"Why're you burning my sacred trees?" Amber solid and twice as red, Finnegan's eyes bored into Cormac with a reflection of the malice hidden in the Willow's contrition. An ache-chested desire to pitch Selyka's arranged man into the first lye-water lake he found.
"When the Truce fails, when it goes wrong and it will go wrong, I've seen it." Cormac tapped at the side of his head, unfurled from his crouch as the moisture in the air calmed the embers on his body, quelled the flame. "I see it in the smoke. The fire. The Truce will fade, as Mauthisen is fading. And I was wondering, Ancient Father, where will you go when it does? What will you do? Return to Court, batten us down until there's nothing but a sequestered group of Faeries, Selkies, Pixies and Sprites all awaiting for their Queen to call the charge? Will you retreat or will you keep running your little party, playing house to the festering slime sacks and their stink? Their hormones and loud bangs and wastrel noises in the night?"
"What did you see?"
"Caleb, it's time."
"N-no." Caleb clutched Tuija more firmly, watched her jaw lull open as a new wave of groans burned through his esophagus and into his ribcage. Jace put his arms around the man one at a time, until the Judge was swaddled in the embrace of a man who seemed to grow larger to accommodate Caleb's burden. "No, Jace... no... p-please..." "Caleb..."
"Please... Please..." Caleb towed her body upward, the stiffness held her artificially in position, and Jace grimaced with tears in his own eyes.
"She wasn't one of mine. Are you asking me to bend the rules, to break the Truce?"
"Wh-why can't I have..."
"Caleb. It would haunt you."
"She can't be gone." He gasped, one hand yanked to his mouth as Tuija dropped. Mika caught her, used the momentary lapse of the Judge to pull her away with the speed of angels, to cover her body in a white shroud. Caleb scrambled to his knees, tried to chase Mika down, to crawl to where they took her, but Jace and Leonidas held him firm and fast. Pulled Caleb back. They scuffled, Caleb punched and clawed, tried to bite when he found no purchase. The three men were down on the ground, dirt roiled in their clothes, their mouths and hair and still Caleb wailed.
He wailed for what would have become of him, if Tuija survived. Wailed for her, the life she held to so firmly as dead as the tree for which she was cursed now to fertilize.
Caleb wailed for the near death of Stana, the bitch and her coward-escape. As he laid on the ground, Jace and Leonidas on either side, Caleb sucked in one more heavy breath, and hissed it out with three significant words.
"Let me go."
Char.
Two figures entwined, saplings as tangled as old cord in the bottom of a forgotten fisherman’s vessel. The char drifted from the bark of burnt flesh to the sodden grey shore. An ember of orange faded to a dull red, as dull as the wood in the Dover Museum scant kilometres eastward. Inhaling to the side in a weak attempt to escape the miasma, Judge Caleb Mauthisen lowered to his haunches, navy peacoat slumped over a driftwood log. He rolled one sleeve to his elbow, popped the button on the other cuff and rolled it up like its’ twin as the waft of charnel fires melded with the salt water.
"Bringing the Roman Empire to Dover? Little late to pick back up at the Fort, isn't it?"
“Helios found them, recognized the ruinous smell. We mobilize quicker than most. Don't need to pile up at Finn's. Helicopters and vehicles, my friend. Faster than a door knob and a hearty run.” The man who spoke towered over the figures in the sand, his dark hair cut shorn on one side, the other long enough to tuck behind a tanned ear. Stance as militaristic as his shoulders and the pistol strapped to his thigh, he surveyed the English Channel as if the primordial depths would regurgitate any number of Poseidon’s children for the hell of it. In his eyes, they likely could.
The forest was a beautiful place; sacred as cathedrals dedicated to the Abrahamic deity, the swell of saintly tales and guilt-ridden kings. The forest sang with songbirds, the caw of twin crows or ravens. Deer, raccoons, the odd bear or mountain lion traipsed through with a stray Wolverine. It was a beautiful place, remote in the British Columbian wilds north of Whistler. Wildlife nestled in their burrows, birds in nests made of twig and feather. It was a place verdant and alive, before Cormac stepped in from the meadow.
A wild daze possessed eyes the colour of amber sap in their sockets, blackened welts shifted to ochre, then the thin green of healing Fae membrane, thin as skin. Cloth clung to him, loose collections of tinder-dry linen and leather. He plucked a charred leaf off a bay laurel and sniffed. The rains hadn't come for a while, this summer. Too hot, too dry. Bird's nests were creative tinder, burrows provided aeration. This grove, holy and secure, would burn.
Fire. It was as transformative as oxygen and water, as necessary to plant life as the animals the mammals consumed. Ash mixed with soil to return substance to Mother. Loose vines twisted in hair charred the colour of old brown bark. Greyed by the dust collected from a hundred such fires, Cormac's willow-like body shifted in the forest loam, old pine needles and evergreen fronds. Root-like feet pushed into the undergrowth, searched for an aquifer or stream. He was Cormac of the Willows, and as the moisture further off began to seep into his roots, he brushed his fingers together. Fast as a quiver, he used his own fingers as friction, one charred the other returning to a place of healing. Bandaged with a layer of sap from the poor idiot who thought he'd been caught up in a fire instead of causing it.
His fingers smouldered, the pain of friction a sensation for investigation. Intense sensation, what Selyka offered wasn't enough, cool thighs and sensual placations, a daughter sprouted and growing into her princessly magics. The Courts. Their machinations were as fickle as his firestarting, the lot of them amass with fear.
“Hey, are you okay?”
“He looks terrible.”
“Who tells that man to sleep?”
“Freakin’ Judge. Oh poor baby, ‘I kill your criminals someone give me a hankie’. Frickin’ bastard.”
“Killed my cousin last year… didn’t do nothing, who cares if a few little humans were sacrificed… frickin’…”
“How many times, Lucy, clean up the pixie dust before…”
“Tuija didn’t make her shift again?”
“Caleb, you alright, mate?”
“Take Tuija off the schedule.”
“Caleb, you alright?”
“Tuija…”
“… dare he bring her into his shit…”
Caleb left the Pub in a host of whispers.The forests would burn, the middling plane with its' humans and automotive conglomerates, hedonistic spiritual naysayers, they would see and they would believe. The Mystic Truce, shaken by its' own repulsive escape from Earthly politics, was a sham. Left to themselves, the humans expanded in their self-serving technology, they ate the planet wholesale, turned the Realm Folk into fairy stories and children's tales. Movies of superheroic monsters biting back at alien attack.
If they wanted alien, the threat of outside forces, Cormac would take their collective chins and shove them into his firelight. Into the fae lights with the bastard animals. Rotting beasts, who reproduced and died, enriched the soil from whence all fae grew. He expedited an existing process.
The fingers shuddered as sparks began to curl up with a slim grey smoke. Red bark spreading coal-like to the bay laurel leaf in his other hand. When a burst of wind sent the leaf from his palm, Cormac felt the vacuum at his back.
A rip in the meadow behind him would have caused the Fae lord to pause, or quake if he hadn't had centuries to get used to the sound, the flow of Chaos with its lack of sensation. A rush of atmosphere as if to fill the original chaos his wife's pet used as a highway. Fingers shaking from exertion, he set a match to the bark-like flesh of his arm. Dragged the phosphorous sulfide across the etches of scale-like oak bark made rigid by beating his own arm with hammers. The match head ignited with the fizzling sound, ringing in his ears with the rip of the Ginnungagap.
Footsteps meant nothing. The quiet gust of wind drawn into the gnawing void as it closed behind the figure was nothing.
"When I found the book left stagnant in the old man's basement, I had no idea of the Mystic Realms or the Truce. I knew nothing but the fairy stories of youth. Films and animations. A few folktales. There was no God, for we killed him, left his bones for dead and moved past the societal requirement for a guiding hand. There were no gods. I would not believe in one." Stana set the ereader in her pocket, refused to see the message which flashed on the backlit screen. Refused to read the document pages, articles put further up in the priority list generated by the small voice inflected with magic's artifice, when the Book spoke to her in Croatian. No, she would not be told what to read from a book. "Imagine then, finding the Book of Knowledge. The repository of all wisdom, all information. And it was full of deities clinging for scraps. Fetid relics of collective weakness."
Stana slumped into a chair, holding her head in one hand. The struggle of the Olympian Lieutenant bound by rope knots she learned from her Book. A gag stuffed in the Lieutenant's mouth was slick with sweat and mucus, the woman's head cranked back by the ropes, hands and feet tied together behind her, body stretched on the floor. One foot at a time, Stana propped her heels on the Olympian's ribcage. Cooed sweet whispers to hush the woman into a compliance which would never come, for she was of Ares' folk.
Ares spat, before descending into a shattering silence. "There, the mighty King of the Gods. No, father. I could kill you. I should for your crimes against the women and..."
"Pfth women. Uppity bitches."
"I should kill you for that too, for I have daughters. But. If I killed you, your pain would cease. If I let your life slip through my fingers, I would lose my freedom to act in the best interest of our family. Through the sheer act of keeping you here, caring not only for you but all these people, through their praise and their admiration for the work of your diligent, beloved sons... they give you just enough worship. Just enough power not to fade away." He leaned in, nose within a brushing milimetre of Zeus' face. "You will live in this place, decrepit and bereft. You will live in the shadow of our dotage. And you will hate not only yourself, but the world you helped maintain. I told you, father.
I win." Ares, God of War leaned down and kissed his father's forehead with lips which pressed like fire. He turned down the light, and walked to the door of the small suite. "Melinda? My father is ready for his bath, if you don't mind. I think he soiled himself again."
"Not at all. Happens all the time. Why we get paid the big bucks, right?" Melinda walked into the room and pushed her white sweater up her elbows. "Aww, look at this. You've got such a good son, how he takes care of you."
"Thank you, Melinda. Alright, I'll see you in a few weeks, Father."
Zeus mumbled curses under his tongue in a language Melinda didn't understand.
"I love you too, father. Goodbye."
"Give me the door, Finnegan." Caleb grit his teeth around the neck of the bottle, tasted the acrid liquid down his throat like the wildfires set by Cormac's lethal fetish.
"Not till you get yourself level headed, my boyo." Finnegan crossed one arm across his chest, eyebrows tweaked at the liquor draining into the other man. "Take a feckin' breath, me lad."
"Give me the door." The pistol's safety clicked off, Caleb set the bottle down and raised his pack over the bandages on his shoulder. Over the layers of wool and leather he wore. Tiperet's corpse took residence in his temples, shifted all other thoughts until it spiralled and spilled into Caleb's waking gait. "I don't have the time. You know where Cormac is. Talk."
For once in the long ages of his life, Finnegan the Fae wasn’t awash in laughter at the centre of the world’s longest running party. Drinks gushed from faucets and bottles, cocktails chased pints and the folk who held them, but the Lord of Finnegan’s Bluff sat on a barstool tossed together from lost old coats and a cardboard bottle carrier with a heave. Something in the place, a sensation lingered in the dust motes on their passage through the air.
Something was wrong.
Sure, folk used his pub for all sorts of eccentric mischief, but wrong? In the thorn and stinging nettle sense of the word?
Finnegan set down his half-drunk pint and slipped off the hastily made stool. Coats unfolded, the cardboard wound itself into a roll and tucked into the recycling bin behind the bar. Slinking past a dryad dancing with one of Horus’ ilk - how did the ladies handle beaks instead of lips on the bird headed ones - Finnegan wove through the gyrating crowd. At the edge of the dance floor, beyond the thudding bass of DJ Bob the Unicorn’s sick beats, he heard a voice.
“Is someone… smoking?”
He knew that scent, the twinge of tobacco or ganja, the flavoured smoke of hookahs. Nasty business, consuming the bodies of desiccated plants, but if the mammals ate themselves, a plant around a flame wasn't necessarily the worst to overcome.
Beings and their intoxicants.
He sniffed deep, and waved at a piece of wall behind a booth of mismatched red and black leather. The booth deconstructed into fabric rolled to the side, foam in chunk and pile, wood boards snapped to the edges and Finnegan launched into the bowels of his perpetual party. Through corridors none saw, Finnegan's Bluff became a tangled garden of overgrown forests interconnected through the ages of the world. He trotted as the scent caught his nose.
"Shit... shit!!" Finnegan cursed and burst into a sprint, when smoke stung his eyes, acrid and toxic.
She spun and she spun, mind a blur to the nauseous sensations as her blood vacated to the abyssal spray. Muscles contracted, bones crunched in her skeleton, lungs burned and screamed and deflated. Stana felt her life flung away in the tear, the rip in the Realms she made without direction. Deeper still, she felt the drain of the True Name she used to make the spell-rip in the first place.
Sacrifices. Raw meat laid upon the altar of human expansion without interference from all comers, the Atheist's Altar rang in Stana's senses, she could create it, she could use it, she would see the job done. And when the dust settled, when the spinning stopped and she found the right method to kill the gods, the humanity left over would worship her anonymity. They would fade from their beliefs in a generation or two, become nothing but the meat and the bone and the marrow they were. Nothing but creatures of chance, evolved from the dust cast off of adolescent stars.
What would faith affect but the manipulation of morals and ethics the sensible person could design through rationalization? Once the Realms were free of elves, fae, Aesir, kami, ancestral spirits and Anubis-headed guides, what did the rest matter?
Once inside, he stepped on a ground-trigger for the lamps to cut the darkness, and the room painted a soft yellow glowed with golden light. Pictures of Greece, of the Roman Colloseum lined the walls, Zeus's bed (woefully narrow to Zeus's standards) held fresh silk sheets, three pillows set to prop him up in bed, one for his knees. Ares laid him on his bed, propped the two pillows behind Zeus's back and slipped the other under the knees to alleviate pressure from Zeus's hip.
"There you are, father."
"Why don't you kill me? Are you lacking in ambition?" Zeus croaked, arms crossed over the stain on his yellow button down.
Ares passed by the pictures on the wall, sat in another scotchguarded armchair big enough for his and Heph's frames, done in red velvet. The closest thing Zeus had left to a throne, aside from the porcelain one in the attached bath.
"I could. Keep thinking it wouldn't take much. A pillow to your face while you sleep. But..." Ares leaned into the chair, felt the toll of the day as it tempered into his spirit. "... then I think. It's what you want."
Clutching the Book of Knowledge, Stana cursed the one who watched her above the chaotic waters, as firmly as she cursed the one who pulled her from them. Willow fronds collected and pressed into the wounds to staunch bleeding, bark pushed between her teeth. She clenched her jaws, gnawed on the willow bark as a grinning face consumed her shaken vision.
"Wasn't the kettle of fish you thought was it, poppet?" Cormac of the Willow grinned down at the faltering mammal, her lifeblood full of iron and oxygen leaking to the soil.
"F-fix..."
"Use the names. What does it matter if some fallen mammal gives you the name of their lifesblood? Use it. Heal yourself." He didn't say 'give the pain to them', the slim few people Stana coerced or forced into revealing their True Names. Most humans didn't realize they had a true name at all, as lost within the echo of the gods they didn't know to acquire it. How to hold and contain it. Stana coughed and rolled in the dirt. Screamed at the agony across her chest, deep into her body. Whispers tamed the pain, as she felt the slack of ownership soften to a fine line.
Others took her pain, and as their bodies bled and fissured, Stana rolled to her elbows and knees. Coughed red onto the soil as Cormac soaked the blood up into his roots.
"Wasn't so difficult. Why didn't you kill him?"
"I didn't get the chance." Stana glared at Cormac, fought to her knees. "You didn't tell me he was divine."
"You need a god to make god-killing incense. Where do you think I was going to send you, to hunt in a mini-mall? A human den? Row-homes? You need a god and a believer. I taught you that."
"I can try again."
"Tears in the fabric of the Realms don't emanate from many traditions, they're too dangerous. Too many tears and the fissures between dimensions tumble into one big ball of string nobody can make sense of." Caleb threw a stick into the soil, it tilted at an obtuse angle, top wobbling in the stillness.
"One of the Truce rules, then?"
"Common freaking sense. Don't puncture holes in reality you don't need, especially when few Folk left know how to close them up behind you. Not a single sane person wants the Creatrix to smack us upside the collective brainstems."
"Sane person, or in the know person. If Stana thinks the deities and spirits of the Realms are causing all the troubles in the world, I don't see why she'd care where the energy came from or what it does." Tuija shifted a loose scrap of cloth from a bush with her bowie knife, then let the fabric drop. "Don't think she's caring about what's on the other side beyond 'kill it with fire'."
Drown her. Caleb crawled on his elbows and toes, ached to reach Stana before she wafted with another soul's worth of magic. The gut-rot rips of reality, flesh-like in its wet sound could yet be stopped. Halted. He was the Judge of Mystics, perpetual executioner of those whose whiles and war sounds demanded culling.
An agonized roar purged what ease was left in his throat, Stana quaked and shoved to her knees in the forest loam.
Caleb pushed to all fours, and lunged. Either the waters would claim them, or he would spill her brain matter out on jagged rocks.
"Caleb! No!" Stalwart arms yanked Caleb from the precipice, before he could wind his arms around her.
"Let me go! Let me..."
Bloodied from battle, Stana's lips curved in a lopsided smirk. She pitched herself with one last ounce of strength, into one more rip and drowned in the deep of the Ginnungagap.
"No... No!"
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