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The knife goes in remarkably easy, given the circumstances. It glides from one carotid artery from the other so that the slit is perfectly symmetrical.
Despair finds herself pleased—morbidly so, but few things about Despair are not.
And the amount of blood would border unfathomable if not for the source; blood that is cold, even as it spills and spurts forth from her neck—cold and quick and consistent. Unburdening, she thinks. It does not hurt, really. She is vaguely disappointed.
Endless or not, her vision blurs, and the deeply reddened hand around the knife is her own, and her assailant’s, and aren’t they one in the same either way? It matters not whether there are one or two reflections in the blood pooling about her. It crawls outwards regardless, perhaps warming rather than cooling as it is exposed to the air.
The knife clatters to the ground. The black heart of Despair beats slowly, slowly, until it no longer beats at all.
Across and beyond the fabric of space (though not so far away after all), Desire goes perfectly still. It feels the entrance of the blade, the exit of its twin’s blood, and, finally, the familiar slip of Despair’s hand into Death’s.
A silence hangs over the Threshold like the fog in the Grey Realm. For an endless moment, all is motionless, soundless, lifeless.
And then there is a great, resonant thud. And another. The Threshold’s gradually waking heart gives one monumental spasm after another.
Death spreads her broad black wings and encompasses her sister in an infinitely vast and inky night. Thus, Despair’s departure is completed.
She is not gone, of course. Her cold dead eyes burn into Desire like the hottest of branding irons. The twins have never not known one another, but Desire knows her now like never before.
Death stops for a moment, feels the absence of a hand in hers. This, too, is Despair, though it is also not. The remaining Endless all take one deep, fortifying breath.
And the Threshold bleeds.
Today, the Garden of Forking Ways resembles a pane of shattered glass, a hundred shifting paths stretching outwards from the center, a web of gaps between hedges. In the heart of the labyrinth stand the Endless, their gathering incomplete: only six silhouettes cut against the pale blue sky. The seventh sibling’s absence is felt by the others in varying degrees of pain.
Delirium visibly tries very hard not to dissolve into a cluster of dragonflies. She gathers her attention to the best of her ability and directs it at her family, though, of course, it cannot help but wander here and there on the way back to her.
“And why should we not allow our sibling to look after itself?” inquires Dream, arms crossed. It is unfortunately only natural that he feels Desire’s nonattendance with one of the smallest sums of pain, perhaps after Destiny, for Destiny can find no reason to ache when everything is meticulously preordained. “This isolation is of Desire’s own perpetuation.”
“Desire has forsaken its duty.” Death’s dark eyes rise to the statue of her aforementioned sibling; ten others follow her gaze, even if two are blind. “The consequences bleed out of its realm. I’ve seen it.”
Destiny turns his head only slightly, and there is an accompanying whisper of grey cloth. “It is so. The Threshold is not as it is meant to be.”
All six reflect for a moment, take in the posture of Desire’s statue, hands over its face in a rare gesture of sincere distress. Its height pales in comparison to that of the Threshold—perhaps this is the ominous thought that gives the Endless pause, that gives rise to twisted imaginings of what Desire’s realm could possibly have come to while the siblings have all dared to look away.
“I’ll go to Desire,” Despair finally says. The new Despair, that is—substantially quieter and more somber than her predecessor. When her brothers and sisters look at her now, it is primarily pity that glints in their eyes.
Delirium plucks the petals from a little red flower, one at a time, mouthing the words to some nonsensical song. As each bit of floral scarlet drifts to the ground, a new one blossoms forth in a different color. Destruction pats his youngest sister on the shoulder, and the flower held between her slim fingers floats away as a dozen iridescent bubbles.
“Are you certain?” The pity in Destruction’s gaze resembles empathy more than anything, a likeness mirrored in the eyes of Death. If Desire were here, it would likely remark that pity and empathy are the very nearly the same thing anyway.
But Desire is not here. Despair feels Desire like one might feel a loneliness in a crowded room. Desire feels Despair like a phantom limb.
She brings her hooked ring up so that its curved edge winks a promise in the timeless light of Destiny’s domain. “If not me, who else? Of course it must be me.”
“You, my sister—” Dream straightens, turns to Death. “Why is it that you cannot go in her stead? You have always been content to act as mediator for family matters in the past.”
Death snorts. “You saw how Desire acted at the wake. It wants nothing to do with any of us. Especially not me.” She glances at Despair in her peripheral vision. The others see this and understand; they see this and know that Death is here, but she is also back in that moment in which she'd taken the Other Despair's hand. Such is her curse. No one comments.
“The wake,” repeats Delirium airily. “Not a-wake, not really.”
“I don't expect Desire to allow me in readily either.” Despair hooks the point of her ring in her cheek and slices downwards, rivulets of blood escaping the red chasm opening down her face.
Delirium claps her hands together. “Oh, I can take you.”
The hook halts in Despair's grey cheek. “Can you?”
“Through my realm. You can go a loooot of places from there.” The youngest of the Endless mimes tracing the lines of map, but the gesture is vague and bizarre enough to cause one to wonder. “It's like, ummm, Destiny's home. But much louder. And friendlier.” She throws her arms outwards. Destruction reaches out to her again, this time to prevent her imminent transformation into a colorful bird of paradise and subsequent flight.
Destiny remains silent. He flips the page of his book. All is laid bare to him already; there is no cause to interject on that which he can already see the outcome of.
“Thank you, Delirium,” says Despair in her hollow whisper of a voice. Even if it does remind of a grey desert, all colorless sand for miles and miles around, the sincerity that comes with it is not something that was lost in the grim transition from old Despair to new.
Delirium beams in a manner that borders ecstatic. Death gives a little shake of her head, but the gesture bleeds fondness, and she smiles anyway. “If you are going to go, then, be careful,” she says, slipping into her considerate Big Sister voice like it is a second skin. “Like I said, things aren't right because of… Desire's state.”
“How so?” The blood emerging from the gash in Despair's face still slides downwards from beneath her eye.
A great distance comes to her elder sister’s eyes, and even though Death opens her mouth to answer, it is Destiny who speaks: “Lovers with their legs tangles in knots find that their flesh has begun melting, fusing together. In the throes of ecstasy they scream their own names until their throats are raw and bleeding.” His voice almost suggests prophecy, but the Endless have all come to recognize the tone of his recitations—his decisive echoes of the Book of Souls.
Destruction glances to Despair (with compassion, always) and Dream discreetly bites back some comment about Desire's inherent, lifelong apathy. Delirium, for her part, remains silent, her face turned upwards toward Destiny's all-seeing, all-consuming sky.
Despair, of course, harbors a thousand more questions within the pale cage of her skull, but she retains them. They float aimlessly through the blackness in her head as she straightens up (though not much can be said of the height seemingly gained by the act, if any), and she takes a deep breath. “Will we go, then, my sister?” she asks Delirium.
The latter's attention descends back to the Endless from the clouds. She nods decisively, extends an only slightly shaky hand. “It's your first time coming through my place, isn't it?” A pause. Her free hand comes up to tap her chin, as if she is deep in thought. “Well, not your first time, but your first time.”
“Yes,” Despair answers simply, placing her own hand in her sister's, who immediately begins pulling her along to nowhere in particular—though not roughly. The rest of their siblings watch silently at their backs.
“You will like it,” declares Delirium, and the world begins to fracture about them, the sky and the ground and everything between glinting in a million little pieces as they all begin drifting apart. “It's all heads and tails and pretty songs.”
And when the Garden of Forking Ways is finished shattering all the way through (or perhaps it isn't—every line is blurred in Delirium's realm), only Madness remains. Despair's eyes stay trained on her sister, but she sees all regardless.
Gurgling green oceans dry up and fall as a million leaves on the whitest canvas. There is screaming, so much of it, so much banging and clashing and jangling and
Delirium slides through it like a fish through water. Sometimes she is a fish. Sometimes she and her sister stop and look around and keep on moving anyway even as they dig their feet into the sand.
Some people think in Helvetica. Some homesickness sings like the mouth of a gun against your throat. You vomited up the last few butterflies. Swallow another tablet. Breathe in. Breathe in. Breathe in,
“Oh, almost nearly there.” Delirium's voice cuts through the Madness, clear and true.
They're packing up her things on the third floor. The kaleidoscope windows will cry hand gestures obscene and beautiful, like
Dancing, like spiraling; melting, that is, down into the cracks and the gutter and up into the wind and the sheets; street signs and billboards all SPIT out their teeth, fall forever and ever and always (all ways); there is a candle on the table but it says nothing;
Bits of Despair's realm slip through here; she feels it with open arms and congenial familiarity. They must be near the border between realms, she thinks, though the border of Madness is hardly a perimeter at all.
And then they are stumbling out of Delirium’s psychedelic hurricane, the nothing (everything) beneath their feet turning to soft tissue under some shallow, sloshing red river. Despair’s hand does not leave Delirium’s. The former almost imagines that maybe they are still within the bounds of her younger sister’s domain— almost. This, too, is a place of mindless horror, but Despair knows intrinsically that it is the incomprehensibly vast territory of her twin rather than their youngest sister. And it spins.
The residual ringing in Despair’s ears drowns out the screams long enough for her to ask, “So this is it?”
Delirium does not answer. She just cranes her neck to look upwards, and upwards, and upwards. Upwards, at the towering ceiling three cathedrals high, all damp red flesh, all pulsing and throbbing and leering down at its uninvited guests.
And the source of the screaming becomes apparent, now—excruciatingly, deafeningly obvious. Despair and Delirium find themselves able to do naught but stare.
The cathedral ceiling of the Threshold’s veins is a fresco of abject torment. Ten thousand writhing, wailing figures bleed into one another, into the structure that imprisons them. Some are embedded at the waist: they struggle to tear limbs from the Threshold itself, red, mangled connective fibers straining and ripping as they are wrenched in visceral desperation.
Some are fixed much deeper in the tissue—they are reduced to faces contorting into grotesque expressions of terror on the surface of the ceiling, of the walls. Perhaps not even they know, now, where the Threshold ends and they begin.
And there are those who dangle by their hands or feet; there are those who hang hopelessly from the very top of the corridor; there are those who attempt to twist their extremities free of the megastructure and its flesh and blood horrors. They are a menagerie of vertigo and dislocation.
No one is freed. This, of course, prohibits nothing; all ten thousand individuals go on pulling and rending and screaming; they go on exacerbating their mutilation, knowing, perhaps, that they will die here. Perhaps they even hope for it.
Despair draws the tangible distress into her lungs and holds it there. It is bracing. She knows her twin is no thoughtful architect of sorrow—not like herself, no; Desire is all capricious whims and variability—but this certain work does give her pause.
Once she manages to tear her gaze away from the repulsive scene above and around her, she turns back to her sister. The shift sends ripples in the crimson fluid they stand in as it streams lazily past their knees. Crimson is perhaps too generous of a word—it is nigh black, a body of liquid so dark and opaque and shifting that it resembles a flat beast of solidified shadow on the floor of the Threshold's veins.
The sickening scent of blood and viscera is so thick that it is almost visible. Despair sees visions of the people melted into the Threshold bleeding, bleeding continuously, a great exsanguination reminiscent of the cruelest slaughterhouse, a mass exodus of blood.
“Desire did this?” asks Delirium, face still upturned towards the apex of the hall. For a beat her mismatched eyes are very similar in color, but the moment is brief, and Despair finds herself wondering whether it had been merely a trick of the dim light.
“Maybe intentionally,” she says, “maybe not.”
And a great, slow heartbeat echoes on down the corridor, foreign and reverberating and palpable in its misery. Both Despair and Delirium look down the hall toward its origin. They wordlessly proceed in its direction.
“Yeeeuch.” Delirium picks her feet up extra high, sticky blood dripping viscously from her shoes. “I swam in the blood sea once. This is like that, but not really.” She raises her legs higher and higher until she begins to float just above the surface of the red river.
Despair eyes the point of her hooked ring. “It isn't usually like this, is it?”
“The smell?” answers Delirium airily. “Isn't always so sweet and coin-y. Usually it smells like smoke and empty art exhibits, you know, like the big clean white ones they have in big cities with a lot of people who don't go to see.”
“The blood. The sight and the sound.”
“Oh. Nooo…” She blinks, and three little fish manifest around her head. Helplessly they fall into the opaque sea of crimson, where they sink down and disappear. “S'pose she wanted to redecorate?”
“Desire?”
“Uh-huh.”
Despair says nothing. She feels her twin raise its head at the second mention of its name. Anyone else would wonder how it was that Desire had heard over the sound of the screaming and the beating and the echoes of both. Despair knows the answer is simple, anyway: it hadn't.
They continue to walk (or float, in Delirium's case), sometimes listening to the cries of the people melded into the passages of the Threshold, sometimes exchanging brief strings of words. And so it goes on like this, until at last the sisters linger together at the entrance to the Threshold’s heart.
The blood flowing through the rest of the structure does not stop in the center; if anything, its surface is higher here. Little red ripples shoot across it whenever Desire's bleeding heart beats.
And the sound, the beating, would be deafening to anyone else in this place; it is so loud that Despair feels it in her ribcage, in her skull, in her own wretched beating heart.
Delirium seems to sense her sister's dull trepidation, and so she takes her once more by the hand to pull her into the center of the chamber.
Desire has spread itself out on a settee, one pale hand dangling into the blood near the top of the cushions. When its sisters present themselves before it, Desire attempts no fleeting smile.
“They sent you?” it exhales, trailing its slender fingers through the ocean of red. “I was expecting Dream, maybe, to come and tell me I've no right to my misery.”
“Just us,” says Delirium, cheery as ever.
“Yes. Why?” Desire asks sharply, peering at her with narrowed citrine eyes.
Delirium looks obliviously from Desire to Despair, then from Despair to Desire. “Checking on you! Your house is very watery. Not watery like Dream's. He has a moat sometimes, and an ocean and rain— ”
“So he does.” Desire lifts its hand so its fingers are no longer submerged, watches the blood slip lazily from one knuckle to the next. “And I still fail to see what you were hoping to achieve.”
Despair remains silent. There are no people in the walls here—at least on the surface of the tissue—and so she continues to stand in the hot red flood, to feel every throb of the Threshold's heart like a jackhammer that sings when it hits her bones, to watch her twin all but rot on its favored red sofa. The stagnation that seems to grow on Desire like cobwebs brings Despair to wonder how long it's been since her twin moved. It has never spoken to her; not to this her—this Despair.
She raises her ring to her mouth, hooks it through the inside of her cheek. When she slices through her own grey flesh, it is Desire that flinches, subtly, disturbing the cobwebs constructed by apathy between the cushions of the settee and the figure upon it.
“Why did you come?” it says, perhaps a little more gently. “Our youngest sister”—and here it nearly sneers, eyes glinting, for a moment, with something bitter and scorching hot to the touch—”must have been generous enough to bring you to me. That was her purpose. What is it you want?” And the final phrase, like a familiar hammer falling upon a foreign nail, almost brings a razor blade smile to Desire's face. Almost, but not quite.
“We worried about you,” says Despair, her voice now more of a bleak sigh than ever. “Including me. Especially me. How could I not?” She draws her hook through her cheek—another centimeter. The chasm widens, a grotesque extension of the grim line of her mouth. “I would like to know you. You and the first Despair—I would like it to be like that.”
Delirium, likely lost in a fantasy of her own creation by now, opens her hands and releases a frog that sits on the surface of the blood as easily as it would stone. Desire looks on with more than the usual amount of disdain mixed into its apathy. Every word boasts edges sharp and straight and ruthless. “No, sister mine, it won’t be like that. The first Despair was murdered. It will not happen again.”
Despair does not reply. She is content to simply listen; it has always been so, and it likely always will be. So Desire goes on:
“Do you know what it is that will happen to her killer, then?” It finally pulls itself into a sitting position, propped almost casually against the arm of the settee. “Oh, but I’m sure our siblings told you.”
“He walks through the doorway,” sings Delirium, tracing an invisible door frame with her hands, “veeery slowly.” She says her piece and immediately returns to playing with her frog.
No further words are exchanged, then, for a beat, then another; the heart of the Threshold spasms on. Desire does not blink, and neither does Despair. Her brothers and sisters had indeed informed her as to what became of the man known only to them as the killer of Despair. She remembers, now, sitting on one side of Destiny's heptagonal table, listening to Death gently tell her of the punishment that is taking an eternity to die.
(And if Desire had been there, she thinks, though it had not, it would have said “wouldn't he spend his whole life dying anyway?” and Dream would have told Desire that it knows nothing of mortality. If Desire had been there, perhaps Despair's lungs wouldn't have rattled when she drew in that first terribly uncertain breath after hearing of her past life, past death. But perhaps they would have. With her twin or without, she is doomed to remain one thing consistently, forever—herself.)
“Yes,” she says very quietly, “they told me.”
“I would have put forth an idea for some different sort of damnation,” remarks Desire, and Despair longs to say I know, but really, she is not entirely certain that she does. “Something that would truly make him long for Death.” It pauses, allows its gaze to wander vaguely upwards. “He does already, of course—I can feel it. But they should've sent him over to me. ” When it returns to regarding its twin, something dark and pointed flickers in its eyes.
Despair knows that Desire has been sharpening its misery against a whetstone of resentment. She all but feels the desperate tightening of its fist around the handle of the blade when it next speaks:
“Do you know why he did it?”
She does, of course. Delirium probably does too, but Delirium knows many things and rarely airs any of them coherently. Despair nods, and she watches the painful twist of Desire's painted lips as it evidently contests with itself on whether to allow the words in the back of its throat to run free through the open air. But the air is only so open in the Threshold, and the wailing in its veins says everything Desire wishes to convey anyway.
“I know why he thinks he did it,” whispers Despair. She feels very small here before her sibling, and very alone regardless of Delirium's flighty presence. “But maybe she—I—had another reason.”
Desire remains silent. This is a mercy it does not often grant.
“She wanted to craft the most exquisite despair, ultimately.” The hook is moving to her shoulder now, but it hesitates at the arteries in her throat. “Well,” says Despair with some air of finality, some declaration of truth, “didn't she achieve it? Isn't this it?”
All of the shrieking in the corridors outside fizzles out into nothing. Despair takes a breath. She holds it. And holds it. And Desire's fortress of a heart does not beat.
Delirium raises her eyes to her siblings. The tension in the air would be enough to make her hair stand up if it weren't already defying gravity about her head anyway.
“Yes,” exhales Desire finally. The revelation takes the hand of relief. “It is, isn't it? It's so very like her.” And though Desire says her, Despair knows it really means you.
She allows her hook ringed-hand to fall to her side. “Then, sister-brother, I ask that you forgive me for it.”
The heart around them remains perfectly still. The silence in the connected veins is so heavy that Despair almost feels a creeping sense of dread in the absence of the echoed screams. She can see that Delirium likely feels similarly, the periphery of her form already growing warped like summer heat waves. The youngest of the Endless still says nothing.
And Desire finally flashes its habitual fleeting smile, like white-hot sunlight glancing off the edge of a reflective silver blade. “If that is how it is, dear twin,” it says, “how can I not?” It stands at last, appearing to pay no mind to the maddeningly warm sensation of the blood around its legs, and extends its right hand to Despair in invitation.
She accepts it all but impulsively; Despair’s pale hand slips into her twin’s as a key slips into its lock. When she withdraws her hand once more, the deep crimson from Desire's fingers will have stained her own. Or perhaps Despair's palms were already bloody even before this; she finds herself unable to recall.
The twins shake hands, and it is done. It is done, for now, even if the rise of the dark hot blood does not undo itself or disappear, even if the state of the people in the walls is sinister and uncertain, even if Desire's next laugh still holds the sharpened blade in a death grip behind its back. Desire is such a fickle thing. In the blink of an eye it will return to a feeling of plunging ecstasy and shrieking delight, and the memory of its sister's greatest tragedy will dim and fade and melt as a snowflake loses its sharp edges in the sun.
Or maybe not. Who's to say? Destiny, perhaps, or even Delirium, but Destiny holds the future as cards close to his chest, and Delirium glances at the future as a blinding sun that leaves spots in her mismatched eyes. Desire’s fist will be an unfurling rose, blooming raw and gory red.
But this time will be the last.