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Tillman Henderson had always fancied himself a main character.
Sure, in the way that the Crabs all said about each other, the hype-up god-killing fear-us way, the despair-all-ye-who-keep-us-from-ascension way. But he had always taken it a little personally. Felt a spark within his chest. Looked himself in the eye when he was giving himself the type of pep talk he’d never be caught dead admitting he dared to and said, you, you, are someone great.
It was something certain as the waves hitting the shore, certain as his heartbeat, certain as the shadow cast by the walls of the Crabitat. You couldn’t dissuade him of it if you tried. So he couldn’t say he was surprised that the Olde One had decided to speak to him. There was a smug, self-satisfied part of him that thought, you know what, yeah. I am the hero of this story. This is my destiny, I am different.
It had been a calling, something intangible leading him by the wrist, something he could figure out where it was going even if he had had his eyes closed, but he’d kept them open, partially because the thought crossed his mind that what if he tripped along the way to wherever it was leading him, wouldn’t that be stupid , and he didn’t want that. So he walked, with eyes open, away from the bar where the Crabs were celebrating another successful game, through the streets of Baltimore, to the part of the harbor where the water started to lap at your shoes if you walked far enough, until the water started sinking in through the lace-holes in his sneakers, until he was standing on the old rotten wood of the oldest pier in town, the one nobody could tell you when it was built.
He believed in destiny, he’d tell you, if he was drunk enough; he didn’t really believe in gods, or at least not in the omnipotence of gods--sure, gods existed, they saw way too much of them to begin with these days, but they surely couldn’t really mean shit, not since the city had killed theirs--and it was needless to say a little bit awkward when he felt the tug on his wrist tip him forward and right into the waters of the Bay.
He panicked, as everyone is want to do, when they realize they are drowning. There was darkness, movement of currents around him, that stupid bomber jacket he’d bought himself at the stadium’s merch shop was heavy around his arms and he couldn’t move them fast enough, and there wasn’t enough air, and there wasn’t--
--until there was, and he realized quite suddenly that he was breathing, but still felt the weight of the water around him, and he dared to open his eyes.
He knew what the Olde One looked like, of course. All the Crabs did. All the folk of Baltimore did. They played in Her shadow, of course, band there was a sort of memory in him that if he squinted hard enough he could see in a blurry tone, of what it must’ve been like, for her to die. (of what it must have been like, for them to kill her.)
The recognition was not in the visual. Before Tillman even laid eyes on the great spiritual form of the Old One he felt it, its gravity, pulling him in like the inexorable tide. Now there was something in his chest pulled taut, and his arm stretched out in front of him of its own accord, reaching for the undefinable god-ghost, for the memory of reflection of the moon on the surface of the waves.
It was in those images that She spoke to him, trying first to stop his thrashing and panicking, to reassure him, with the sound of the waves, of soft sands, of footsteps on the boardwalk. He struggled still, for a second, before giving in, relaxing his muscles all at once almost without control and letting destiny hold him upright in the water. He exhaled, deep, exhausted. He didn’t have it in him to fight the Olde One on his own. As he quieted, he could feel Her smile, as much as a great crab could smile, because She could tell he was listening, now.
The visions flowed faster between them. A silhouette, recognizable, the whole right side of her body encrusted in the divine carapace. Then darkness over her, separation. But now, Horror, disproportionate horror, at that separation. A feeling so strong and so visceral Tillman’s hand went to his throat in shock.
He knew Nagomi, of course. Everyone knew Nagomi. No one had seen Nagomi’s face in four years, but everyone knew Nagomi.
Faster, now. Nagomi again, surrounded. A storm, billowing. Red sky in the morning. Red light in the clouds—in the cracks of the clouds, in the separations so solid and fragmented that Tillman began to wonder whether those were even properly called clouds. That same sense of horror, and he looked / She looked upon Nagomi again, and upon her eyes, a solid red, and Nagomi looked back at him / at Her, and Tillman for the first time in a long time felt real fear.
You can stop this, She said to Tillman. Somewhere along the line, he had ended up in the socket of her thirty-seventh great Claw, and he stumbled back, still somewhat aware of being underwater, still reeling.
“How,” he thought, even his own thoughts shaky.
You know how .
Tillman knew.
He hated that he knew, but he knew. Tillman knew, as they all know. as dead players know in the second before the ump lifts its mask. as that kid on the Lovers now knows when his eyes glow violet and he speaks in a voice not/yes/not his own. Yes, Tillman realized, ice suddenly coating his throat, as Mike Townsend knew.
You have to take her place, She said. I’m sorry.
The apology echoed within him. He didn’t know how to respond to it.
It hadn’t hit him yet. It would hit him when he hoisted himself up onto the docks, legs dangling off the edge. When he looked up at the moon, and down at the water lapping at the edges of his uniform pants, which were soaked, and felt the feeling of salt spray working its way into the fabric. When he realized that this was the last night he would ever feel those things again.
Tillman Henderson was not one to cry. He probably would tell you he has never cried. When the weight of it, of knowing what would happen, hit him, though, that stopped being true.
He had accepted, of course. There was a part of him that thought maybe just maybe, if he said no, She would just pick someone else, but he also didn’t want to risk it. What he had seen in that vision had chilled him to the core (the skies rotating head over head, the flames, something grinding underfoot, standing over you, malice, destruction) and he did not want it to come to pass. He didn’t want it to happen to his team.
His team. It was only when he walked away from the pier, that he realized the real reason why the Olde One had chosen him.
You can’t tell anyone, She had impressed upon him. If anyone finds out what’s coming, it will all be ruined, and they will turn to ash.
(Okay, the turn to ash part was a little bit of an overstatement, but it was the image She put in his mind, and it stuck.)
That was why She had chosen him. Because no one would suspect a thing. Because he was Tillman fucking Henderson. Because no one would ever guess he would be the type to sacrifice himself for the good of his team.
The word turned itself around in his brain, sacrifice, sacrifice. He thought about that guy Mike. He’d never met him. He had a grudging respect for the Garages, battlefield allies in deicide, but Mike’s story had always made his teeth curl. It was too sweet, too perfect, too tragic. They’d written songs about him. They’d mourned him and called him a hero.
Nobody was going to even know what Tillman did. There wasn’t going to be anything to write songs about.
Fuck, he was crying again. He didn’t like this. This didn’t feel like him. He was harder and tougher than this.
He reached a hand up to his face to wipe away the shameful tear—(he should be stronger than this, martyrs never cry, heroes never cry)—and felt a bumpy roughness on his cheek, familiar and ancient and strange all at once. His eyes widened.
He looked around for a reflective surface. Finding it in the darkened window of some boardwalk shop, he looked himself in the eye, and saw the darkening orange band of carapace that now surrounded his eyes, like a sort of masquerade mask, and trailed down the right side of his neck.
People said a lot of things about carcinization, but one he’d heard too much of was that its timing had something to do with when you reached your potential, when destiny touched you and you reached out your hand, your claws, to grab it. He’d checked himself over many times before, but he’d never found even a speck. Until now.
“Holy shit,” he said. Then again. “Hooooo-ly shit.”
He stifled a desperate sort of laugh, tracing the edges of the newly hardened armor over the top half of his face, feeling the ridges and strength of it. All the way home, back through the city, through the back door of the team clubhouse, without looking anyone in the eye.
—-
Waking up on the day he knew he was supposed to die was not as cool or dramatic as he thought it would be. There was no music, no fanfare. Nothing speaking his name from beyond. The carapace spreading on his cheeks, as cool as it was, looked the same as it had last night.
He drove to the stadium that day fast and reckless like he always did, maybe a little more than usual. The burnt-red of the crabshell in his rear view mirror. He always had heard red made you go faster.
He ended up arriving at the stadium hours earlier than he needed to be. He sat in the locker room, alone, for an hour. Then he paced around the edge of the field, in the shadow of the ancient skeletal remains, hand tracing the wall.
The went a lot faster than he thought it would, too. The game did, anyway; he played like shit, barely paying any attention to the ball.
He had never paid much attention to eclipses before, but now, on this day, he couldn’t stop looking up, even though everyone said not to look right at it. He’d never thought about how strangely beautiful they were before.
He tipped his hat back and stared. What did it matter, he was dying anyway. The ring around his vision circled in, white-hot and enclosing.
When the moment came, he knew, because that ring had tightened, his field of view a tiny pinprick, and he looked ever forward over to third base, while he was mid run, and slammed right face first into the cold stone wall he knew to be an enforcer if the game. He ran right into the ump, and barely felt it.
And he made a fuss, started arguing about the call, as loudly and conspicuously as he could, because he knew on autopilot that that was what was supposed to happen, and he barely felt his hands waving in argument, though he could see them, if he looked down, like a point of view from a first person video game, and he didn’t want to look the ump in the mask when it happened and god he didn’t want to die but he did it and he did it and he did it anyway and the burning circle closed up its center white and Tillman Henderson couldn’t see anything anymore.
---
If you asked Tillman what death was like, he would probably lie to you, and tell you he got into a bar brawl with Landry Violence, and that that’s how he got this sick blue-flame scar over his eye. Or that he’d punched through the endless glass of the Trench’s hallways and fought his way out. Or that the devil had seen him and shook their head and said “no, excuse me, you’re going right back.”
The truth was, Tillman Henderson had very little actual memory of the Hall. It was a blue blur, a smudged inkblot on his memory, sensations as opposed to concrete moments. There was no linearity to the hall. A vision in wobbly lines, in recursive outcomes. You could run to third base and end up at first, you could look behind you for a second and the game is over, without ever knowing the score. There was no score, really. There was a sense, in every moment that he could recall after the fact, that the game had been over for a long time.
Truth was, he never fought with Landry Violence. He didn’t remember seeing Landry Violence, or anyone else, even that damned squid, or what the Hall itself looked like. He remembered the cold feeling of glass under his fingertips, the dirt on the infield replaced with sand, flowing inward and outward with an invisible tide, ebbing away under his cleats every time he took a step.
He remembers seeing a great blood-red flash from...somewhere, at what he later learned was the singularity so-called by many names, but most commonly “DAY X”; he was not surprised, at this, he had felt it before, after all. Despite his pride, despite his resolute smirk, which still plastered his face like a mask, he said a silent thanks to the Olde One, wherever She was, that she had kept him from witnessing that moment firsthand.
He only found out the details later, heard secondhand accounts of the glow in their eyes, the sickening crack of their bats, the horrible identical smiles. The Pods. In the moments before and after that fight, it was only a feeling, the abstract sense of the color red, of battle, of despair and defeat.
When he found out the Crabs had lost their chance to fight them at the last second--(just as planned, a part of him thought)--his instinctive response, of course, was “oh, well if I was there, that simply wouldn’t have happened.”
It was truer than any of his former teammates would ever know.
Apparently, he was down there for about a season and a half. Time words like that had no meaning in the Hall. He lost track of time somewhere after Day X, when the game really fell into the swirling whirlpool of an unfamiliar sea, where no eyes could find you, where no number could define you. Sometimes, when he felt the water, somewhere around him, but never enough to drench him or drown him, he would call out, in his mind, for the Olde One, and despite his pride, pray that She had not abandoned him, or his team, wherever they were.
But this was another sea, another time, far from Her time, and she could not reach him here.
Until, one day--one moment, one year, one century--she did.
He had nearly forgotten what Her voice felt like, and nearly forgotten that his face still bore the markings of Her plan, that the carapace still spread, ruddy and uneven, across the side of his cheeks, and stiffened when he blinked his eyes. But he Heard Her, and for a second all his pride left him, as you would expect when one hears a god speak for the first time in an eternity, before he caught his balance, stepping back on one cleated foot and regaining for a second the confidence he always put on.
Tillman Henderson, She said, but not in words, more in a series of colors, a grinning face in shadows, a spiny sea urchin underfoot, a wave crashing over a broken cliff.
“Took you long enough,” he said, smiling somewhere between smugness and pure blessed relief, and he suddenly remembered what speaking was, what a person could do with words, what it was to hear sound come from his own mouth again.
You have more work to do, She said, and before he could process it, he felt himself lifted, the sand falling from his shoes, an unearthly storm-wind brushing the ash from his shoulders, rising, flying, ever still.
For a second, he hoped beyond hope that this was ascension, before he opened his eyes to see a sun overhead, the same old sun, no longer darkened by eclipse, but hanging still in the sky in the way he knew it always did. He was lying in the dirt, and he could feel it under his palms, and a warm southern sun beaming on the rigid armor of his face, and a breeze from a sea somewhere to the east.
He breathed in. The taste was wrong. Not his sea.
Tillman Henderson sat bolt upright and gasped for air, suddenly realizing that he had not breathed in a year and a half’s time, and not moved with his body in probably a little longer. The dirt felt wrong under his nails, and he whirled his head wildly around, trying to get a sense of where he was, what had just happened, what had just dragged him up from damnation.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to look down at himself to see he was wearing yellow and blue instead of orange. He had never been feedbacked before. This was a new feeling. It was no wonder there was such a shock. He had never been anything other than a Crab, and now, here he was, on this unfamiliar team, in an unfamiliar city, in a body he wasn’t even fully sure was his own from the beginning.
It also took him an embarrassingly long time to realize exactly who he had replaced. He had never really felt one way or the other about her, kind of admired her audacity, in a “maybe there’s someone else out there who knows how to talk shit like I do,” way, but he had never actually met her. He didn’t learn till later that she wasn’t hated like she used to be, that she had stood up against the god and that IT had struck her down.
People looked at him strange now, which he was used to, but this was a different sort of contempt. He didn’t like it very much.
When the finals came, he felt wrong, watching his team take the field against the Thieves, and smash them to the ground. There was something that called out to him, from far off, in the direction of the Bay, in the deep, whenever Sutton Dreamy hit another triple, whenever Forrest Best stole home.
There was something in him that was angry . He should be with them. No matter how much they postured about hating each other, that was his team. And he was their jerkwad of a batter--(a pitcher, now, again, he reminded himself).
Now, the sun opens up its great wide mouth and swallows the moon. The Crabs, in their red armor, steel themselves and rise to face the God above in its mocking rotation. Tillman is below, trapped here in Charleston. The sea is here, but it’s not his sea. Like the Sunbeams feel the tug, like the Flowers feel their call to the earth, he feels his call to his city, and his city is beyond him now.
He doesn’t even know if the Olde One could hear him here. But if She can, he screams at her. He storms out of the dugout and out of this stupid Charleston stadium stomping down the cobblestones, and to the pier of their closest island to the ocean, where he can smell the salt of the sea again, wrong and acrid in its difference.
While the Crabs fight above, while the Hall rains down undead-divine fury on the legions of the Shelled One, Tillman Henderson rages, in a way Mike Townsend never got to rage. There is futility in his tears, frustration, regret. He punches the stupid splintering boards of the docks and stares up at the sky, at the battle he has been locked out of.
And he is happy for them. Gods, he’s happy for them. But he is also terrified for them. They’re up there fighting against that thing, (and he saw it, in his vision, what they would be up against,) and he can’t do a thing about it.
The battle is over, again, like all things of the Hall, of the Trench, in a period of time that’s difficult to pin down. He sees the Hall Team streaking across the sky like so many shooting stars. He sees the Crabs-- his team, his team --alight on the ground, beaten and worn, and with a flinching fear in their eyes, but upon realizing one another intact, he sees them embrace one another, cheering, crying salty tears of joy, reaching heavensward for their destiny.
He wants nothing more than to join them. He admits to himself for once in his life--his un-life?--that he cares about something, and he can feel the glow of tears start to well up behind his eyes again. Stupid. Stop crying. Stop it. You don’t do that. What’s your problem.
He’s so engrossed in trying to keep that face on that Tot has to come right up to him and put his little paw on his shoulder to snap him out of it.
“Tillman, you idiot,” Tot says, and Tillman opens his eyes. “Get over here before we kick your ass.”
And he does, and he lets himself smile this wobbly-not-smirk of a smile that he doesn’t think anyone has ever seen before. Because the Crabs have won the championships. The Crabs are ascending. And he is alive, and there is saltwater on his face, and he is laughing.