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His whole life, Quackity has found himself somewhere on the edge of religion. He keeps one foot safely on either side of worship and apathy, ready to shift his weight at any moment.
It isn’t that he doesn’t believe in the gods. He’s certainly prayed his fair share, and he grew up under the care of several of the Ancient One’s clerics. He could’ve devoted himself to the church at any point in his youth, could even go back now and they’d welcome him with open arms. At this point, it would be far harder for him to not believe in the existence of things greater than himself than to ignore them altogether.
It’s just that, from Quackity’s experience, the gods tend to be far less effective than getting up and doing it yourself.
(It’s sacrilegious, a little, for him to say so, even in quiet. There was a time that he’d tucked himself behind the Lady’s shrine and whispered a faltered promise to Her - “If You send them on,” he’d gasped out, in a shallow voice with his heart hammering in his ears, “I’ll pray to You–uh, I don’t know. Every day for a month. A year? Gods, I’ll fucking pray for the rest of my life if You don’t let them find me here.”
He hadn’t known exactly what she’d been goddess of at all back then, but–well. A desperate enough man will pray even to the Lady of Death for mercy. He wears her mark still, a silver crow’s skull polished against his collarbone where it thumps his skin and reminds him between heartbeats to send a quick thank-you heavenwards.)
But Quackity was raised to be a religious man; only in his recent years has he cast the teachings of his childhood aside. He’s always been bright–That’s the word the clerics who raised him used, bright. He’s clever, he’s got a sharp mind, he laughs so loudly and broadly that looking back, he can picture the smothered smile that accompanied every scolding–and he’d picked up the teachings quickly and easily. Even now, he remembers the stories he’d been told then.
He remembers the prayers by heart, well enough to whisper them under his breath when he passes an antler-adorned shrine to the Creator. He leaves a pinecone resting on it, and then he lingers. Standing before it, as if he’s waiting for something that will never come. As a child, he wished to feel something in the midst of worship. He could memorize passages of archaic text, perform every ceremony and ritual without a single mistake. He could pray for a sign, for a calling, for something to touch him in the same way everyone around him seemed so moved by forces unseen.
And he was desperate for it when he was younger. Craved to be chosen like a man in a desert cries for water.
And the sign never came.
No god ever stepped down to call him to something greater, and Quackity has never been one to sit patiently and wait. So he’s here, setting a pinecone on a pile of rock-and-bone, whispering, Unto your mystery, Ancient One, beginning and end–and there’s only an empty sort of hollowness resting in his stomach. A silver crow’s weight rests on his collarbone. When he was sixteen, the cleric who’d raised him had fastened his traveling cloak around his shoulders with the twisting loops marking him as one of the Ancient One’s fold, welcome in any of their temples. On his own, he’d gotten the next symbol: a compass of ink pointed towards his palm, the Wanderer’s tattooed charm to guide his steps and his journey.
Quackity counts a rhythmic prayer to Autia with the crunch of autumn leaves; he breathes a hymn to the Weary Guardian on each first snowfall. In every game of cards, Quackity matches a silent blessing of the Gambler’s with a card tucked into his sleeve. His cloak crinkles with charms while his head echoes with prayer, and through it all–
Through it all, Quackity remains a man with no god on his side.
If only the clerics who raised him could see him now, he thinks, and he almost laughs along with the pang of guilt in his ribs.
“The Ancient One, mm?”
Quackity glances across the bar at the man he’d fallen into step with on the road. He’s a bard, recognizable from a mile off as such with the brightly colored coat, patched together of a dozen colors and fabrics in seemingly no rhyme or reason. Something tingles on Quackity’s skin whenever he stands too close, like static electricity and the moment before a lightning strike.
He’s no stranger to magic, but this is a kind he’s unfamiliar with. At least up close. A cleric’s magic, in his experience, is something holy. Sacred, reliable, stable–a host of other terms Quackity might use to dance around the word boring.
This man is nothing like that. The magic his cloak gives off tingles and dances on Quackity’s skin. It’s in the way he smiles too, teeth-and-gums wide and a little off-center, and eyes that Quackity can’t quite pin down the color of crinkle up. Bright, loud, full of life.
Now, the bard gestures to the clasp of Quackity’s coat. “That’s an old religion. I’ve heard the stories. Cleric?”
“Uh, no,” Quackity says. “It’s, uh, inherited. A gift for the road.”
“You’ve got someone looking out for you, then. Ancient One’s not somebody to fuck with.” He smiles and offers a hand, and Quackity takes it. “Karl Jacobs.”
“Quackity.” That tingle of magic prickles against his skin. He feels it zip up his veins, feels its pulse in his heart. There’s a moment of silence where any other would fill with a last name, but the moment hangs empty between them instead.
Karl takes this in stride. The pause ends as quickly as Quackity had noticed it. “Will you be in town long, Quackity?”
“Nah, I’ve got a job up in Arboria. Heading out at dawn.”
“What a coincidence! I’m on my way to Portcal tomorrow.” Karl offers another one of his smiles, eye-crinkling and infectious. Quackity can’t help but smile back. “Perhaps we’ll run into one another on the road.”
Quackity says, dryly, “If we’re leaving from the same point and headed in the same direction, I’d imagine we would.”
Karl laughs. “I look forward to conveniently meeting one another on the road, then.”
And in the same way he smiles along with Karl’s laugh, Quackity finds himself agreeing too.
When Karl drifts to the hearth of the tavern that night, Quackity lingers later than he should to watch. He listens to Karl’s stories, accompanied by the lazy strum of an instrument that he plays almost as a second thought. Between each beat of his story weaves the melody of a song, quick and light, as Karl quips and winks his way through each tale.
Everything about Karl is full of life, from the way he speaks, the way he plays; from the bright colors of his coat down to the way his eyes swirl from green to blue to purple and back again.
Karl tells the story of twin godlings, Lyra and Lyca. They aren’t gods Quackity is familiar with, but he recognizes pieces of them both in Karl himself as he spins their story in words and in strings.
The twins are two halves, Karl says. Yin and Yang, heads and tails. Lyca is the chrysalis, and Lyra is the butterfly who hatches from it. Lyra, the shifting sands under your feet; Lyca, the fierce waves that mold the very ground itself. Cycle, permanency, rebirth. Young, old, new again.
But in this story, the twins are separated by the devil himself. Without their other half, they grow weak. They grow apart, and the cycles grow dark.
“What is a butterfly who never hatches?” Karl asks. “What is the sea with no shore in sight?”
Quackity isn’t sure he’s looking for an answer, but someone ahead of him murmurs, Death. Karl nods, as if they aren’t wrong, but Quackity keeps thinking about the question. The sea doesn’t die without a shore. A butterfly might never hatch without a chrysalis, but then it would never be a butterfly at all.
Karl finishes his story while Quackity wonders what the answer would have been. Lyca and Lyra save one another in this story tonight, but Karl tells the same story at a tavern nights later, and again and again. Quackity listens to each of them, in each new town, over each new hearth, with each new crowd. He and Karl follow one another, and then they simply stop leaving one another’s side, for all of the weeks of travel ahead. Karl tells the twins’ story again and again, but a little different.
Lyca saves himself, Karl says. But Lyra will never hatch on her own. Freedom dies without resilience to keep it alive.
Lyra kills the devil, Karl says. Her innocence turns to fury at the pain her brother endured. Even when the twins are reunited, a piece of Lyra is gone forever.
The twins give up on ever seeing one another again, and here is how a god dies, Karl says: When there is no one left who believes in them.
They travel together a fortnight. At the end of it, Karl bids him farewell in Arboria, and he leaves an empty chrysalis sewn into the hem of Quackity’s cloak.
“It’s for luck,” Karl says. “For beginning again.”
Quackity says, “I think it’s eternity.”
Karl stops, sewing needle and thread in hand. “What?”
“The twins’ story. You asked what they were without each other to complete the cycle. I think it’s eternity.”
There’s a slow blink of brown eyelashes over ever-changing eyes, and then a quirk of Karl’s lips. He threads another stitch. “I’m going remember that one.”
Quackity doesn’t know prayers for these new gods to carry with him, but he gets the idea that perhaps they aren’t ones you pray to, exactly. So he thinks of them instead. Believes in them in the way that keeps a god real. That, as far as Quackity has ever felt, is all that worship can be.
The twin gods’ weight tugs on his cloak, but it’s only Karl that lingers in his heart.
Here is the reason Quackity had never been meant to stay at the temple: There is nowhere in him for a god to fill.
The empty space in his heart where a god might pull is full of teeth instead of a gentle resting place. It tears at anything that dares get too close, and it leaves him still desperate for more. He’s hungry, for love, for attention, for recognition. For anything he can get his hands on.
It’s this gaping thing where hope or faith should be. It opens up when he hears a bard’s tale of a great adventurer; when he meets a regal traveler who exudes power; when he stands a little too close to riches he has never had a chance of owning. It claws itself apart, tooth and nail, and leaves him starving.
Quackity is hungry.
He always has been.
Quackity knows the laws of a religious building. He’s spent enough time in temples and shrines, churches and chapels, to understand the religion of many places.
But tonight, he finds himself standing in the worship of something else entirely.
He’d stumbled here with a pounding heart and his breath raw as a knife tearing in and out of his lungs. His legs are near to giving out, but he pushes himself further yet. There’s only one drive in him, and it’s the fight to survive.
The thing on his tail is worse than any low-level fight he’s ever found himself in before. It’s worse, because this is a cataclysm entirely of his own making. He’s carrying the sin of it raw on his skin.
He crashes through the woods, and then suddenly, he is not in the woods at all anymore.
There isn’t supposed to be a road this close to the camp. There’s no easy way out, and that should’ve been his first clue that this place was not somewhere he wanted to be, but Quackity has always been too easily persuaded by the allure of something new. He’d been offered the chance of a lifetime, and Quackity’s hunger for something he can’t put a finger on snapped it up like a child’s first taste of cake.
So Quackity stumbles out of the woods, and he finds an altar instead.
If you are meant to be holy in a church, then it stands to reason that Quackity would find himself standing before this godforsaken altar with another man’s blood still wet on his hands.
The Devil is spoken of in hushed whispers and careful voices. You do not speak his name, every teacher instructed, no matter the religion, for fear it will summon him, and that fear is one stronger than a thousand others. Fear comes in the shape of a ram’s horns and horizontal pupils, shunned from conversation and yet revered in a quiet sort of awe all the same.
The altar ahead of him is decorated grimly, in rust-brown stains and obsidian pillars. Carved into the side are horns, curling around an empty space that seems as hungry as the one in Quackity’s chest.
It pulls him forward, or maybe it’s just the exhaustion trembling in his legs that leads him to kneel here. This is the end, one way or another, and he feels it in his chest like a hunger and in his bones like an ache.
“I don’t know how this works,” Quackity whispers. His heart beats aching in his chest. He tastes copper between his teeth. He has no prayer memorized for the obsidian devil leering back at him. “I’m not sure if the devil has a prayer, and I don’t know it if it does. I kind of figured you’d be, like, an alien or something. Not from this plane. My bad for thinking a cult would be a little more creative, I guess.”
“Creativity is secondary to efficiency,” a voice says behind him. No change in the air; no ripple of dark energy; no sound of footsteps or crack of magic. It’s just Quackity, knelt in front of a bloodstained altar, and then a voice behind him.
His heart stops, skips, falls low and sick in his stomach. Haltingly, he looks over one shoulder.
Quackity is not a religious man, for all of the prayers and charms he carries with him. He may not devote his heart to any one being; may not fawn over any higher thing, but somehow, his heart leaps at this. At the real, tangible entity in front of him–a deity made manifest even in this twisted form. Something incomprehensibly more than himself meets his eyes, and for the first time in his life, Quackity feels the thrill of being chosen.
He understands now. Every shrine, every cleric and paladin, every devout acolyte and devoted priest–he understands. He stands before a bloodied altar under a dark sky with crimson painted all across his cloak, his face, his hands, and the devil himself stands in front of him, and Quackity knows he should be afraid. What is awe, but fear with a taste of the divine?
“Looks like someone’s in trouble,” the devil says, curling smile on inhuman lips. “Let me guess. You’ll do anything?”
Quackity’s mouth has gone dry. “Not anything.”
“Oh, but pretty fuckin’ close to it, right?” He takes a step closer, strangely tall on sheeplike legs. Quackity rushes to his feet, but the corner of the altar digs into his spine, so he goes rigidly still instead. “Tell me what a shabby little garden-variety murderer could offer me to make this worth my time.”
“It wasn’t–” He starts, and then cuts himself off again.
“Murder? Or on purpose?” A laugh. It’s scathing, so sharp Quackity shrinks in on himself in something like shame. “Don’t bother defending yourself to me. I don’t give a fuck why you bludgeoned a man to death with–what was it? A skull, wasn’t it?”
He can’t form the words to answer. He still feels that thrill. He feels so very, very cold.
“Irony in there, isn’t there?” The devil shifts, moving his weight as though he’s getting comfortable. Settling in for a longer conversation. “Tell me what kind of skull it was. How nicely did it fit in your palm? Was it easy to crush his head under your hand?”
It’s in this moment that Quackity realizes that everything but the not-man in front of him has gone utterly silent. Even the hum of the insects around them has stopped. Clouds obscure the stars; the trees stand still with branches heavy and empty of even the wind to sway them. There is no life anywhere in the world but here.
“Well?”
“I’d offer my answer in exchange for a gift.” Quackity hasn’t died yet, so he risks a bold offer.
For a moment, he worries it was too bold. Rectangular pupils narrow at him, for one moment, stretching longer into two, three–and then he bursts into laughter, loud and raucous. “This is a friendly conversation, no need to move so quickly into the negotiations. How about something a little more fun while we talk this out, eh?”
And in the same silent rush, there are two chairs and a table in front of them, and an obsidian and quartz chess set laid out on the table. The devil moves first, settling into one chair. He unbuttons the front of his jacket–a suit, adorned with gold and scarlet thread, richer than anything Quackity has ever seen up close in his life–and he gestures to the other seat with a lazy hand.
“Please, take a seat. I don’t bite.” And then he laughs, loud and harsh, with that same smile curling back to show his teeth.
Quackity takes a seat.
The devil moves first. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Quackity.” He isn’t good at chess, but he just barely remembers how each piece move. Well enough to pretend at a semblance of confidence. “What should, uh, what do I call you? Mister Devil? Your fiendishness? I don’t want to assume we’re on first name basis and go with Satan or anything.”
This time, he throws his head back and cackles so loudly that Quackity feels every muscle in his body tense in apprehension. Either Quackity’s getting better at witty quips, or this guy laughs as an intimidation tactic. When he looks back, wiping a tear from sheep’s eyes, Quackity slides a pawn forward. The devil flicks a knight ahead without a second glance. “God, yeah, don’t assume. That’s how you piss off a lot of devils, let me tell you. Name’s Schlatt. Don’t bother with any of that other shit.”
“Schlatt.” Quackity’s guessing at strategy. He moves a black bishop towards enemy lines. He leaves a crimson thumbprint on the piece. “What do you want from me?”
“You really aren’t one to beat around the bush, are you?” Schlatt clicks his tongue disapprovingly.
Quackity shrugs one shoulder. “I’m told I’m not a patient man.”
“Patience is meant to be a virtue, anyway.” Schlatt captures a pawn. “If you’re so eager to move into the negotiations, go on then. Make me an offer. Something I can’t say no to.”
He searches for something to say. What does he have to offer? Quackity is a man with no ties to anything of value save for his soul.
As if reading his mind, the devil snorts. “I’m not taking your soul, kid. It’s dime-a-dozen for that shit. I can get that anywhere.”
“What’s something you want, then?” Quackity asks, finally bold enough to pose the question.
The smile before him widens. “That’s a dangerous road to go down.”
“I’ve already killed,” Quackity says. He captures a rook and slides the white quartz to his half of the table. “I’ve killed a man and if they find me out here, I’ll be following him. I figure it’s hell either way for me tonight.”
There’s a strange look in the devil’s eye. His hand hesitates over the board for a long moment, and then finally, he says, “I can offer you power. Power like you’ve never felt before. You ever cast a spell before, Quackity? Ever felt fire in your veins, burning you up but entirely in your control?”
Quackity imagines the way Karl’s magic had tingled against his skin. He imagines the crackling power, but he imagines it wilder. Deep inside of him, he can already feel the flames licking at his ribs. He can feel the heat as it warps and cracks each and every one of his bones and rebuilds them stronger.
“Here’s my offer.” Schlatt pushes a piece across the board. Quackity can’t see a way to win this, but he’s never been one to go down without a fight. “Tonight, I’m yours. No harm will come to you.”
Quackity makes what he knows is his final move. “And after tonight?”
“After tonight–” Schlatt corners Quackity’s last piece. He waits for Quackity to turn the piece over himself. Calling his own defeat. “After tonight, you’re mine.”
The way Quackity has viewed religion his entire life is this: you find a god, and you carry them with you. Your life molds around their shape, and their worship fits into you like a puzzle piece. There’s a resting place inside of you for faith to fill, and there are no teeth to bar its path.
Quackity carries a dozen charms, tattoos, blessings, and prayers with him. He remembers the stories and the teachings of the devoted. He believes, he waits, he claws himself apart in service of something that doesn’t want him.
Schlatt waits for his answer with a smile.
As he shakes the devil’s hand, Quackity feels the weight of a whole pantheon on his collarbone.