Chapter Text
The world shudders. Wracked by grief, contracting in pain, until suddenly I am squeezed into existence, inflicted. Even after the countless grinding hours spent wallowing through the pale grave-city of the First Civilization, nothing I had the dubious honor of enduring was worse than being born.
I am told that mortals do not remember the moments of their genesis. I consider this the only true blessing there is and hope it never changes for those fortunate enough. There was the first strife of air on my shell, followed by sound, temperature, gravity. Dry, cracked flagstones of the Pyramid floor, the scent of Salt and the vaporizing ooze of my miraculous birth. But that was all vestigial. That is not why I wish for ignorance.
That was because I remember everything. Because I remember things I should not.
I really, really hated the Bazaar.
That’s not true for the reasons one might expect. It truly was grand: a place of cheerfully died pectin, basilicas and theaters, proud arches and pleasure-chambers that piled atop one another in a bacchanalia of cumulative wealth. The walls were woven wood panelling, glossy oranges and oiled purples, cushions and quilts piled to near the ceiling tiers above, seeming to conspire toward the hanging terraces clutched to the bosom of the vaulted ceiling. An attractive striped stone comprised all the brickwork, while suspensions of floating crystal made life from light. Dust glimmering in ancient places revealed rugs and spools organized in neat alcove-niches.
But the effect was lost on me: I found the scale numbing rather than impressive. An endless warren of the most exuberant and ludicrous amenities coin and Ichor could buy. There were those among my following—and I use that word only because cult seemed a bit disingenuous when they were only trying their best—who cited hedonisms such as this the reason the Red Star had risen in the first place.
I didn’t share such strong opinions. Then again, I didn’t say much to begin with.
I didn’t care for the dyes and spices, or the platters of stale bread and mouldered cheeses. What I disliked most was the liminality. There should have been scholars and phylarchs, long parades of caravaners bringing in yet more luxuries from lands far and unknown. But there hadn’t been any of that in a long time. Yet the place looked clean, trimmed and swept clear of creep from the nearby gardens. One might think to thank the constructs for that, but I hadn’t seen any in working condition.
I could have just missed them. I was a little preoccupied.
The justicar’s blade passes close enough it’s ceramic edge looks a straight line in my vision. The very tip gouges a scar in my mask right below my eye.
Twitch fibers contract. In the blink of an eye I leapt away and back. The guard resets, clockwork in its movements. It sets its enormous greatblade gently back down on the floor and begins to shuffle toward me, ornate armor clunking softly, its jaw a rictus that hangs stiff from ossified tendons, gums pulled back to lay bare the bone beneath.
In life the justicar had been the pinnacle of the legions. A common warrior proven thrice over, handpicked over the chosen of their Progenitor god or goddess. A product of rote and discipline. Some of that pride shows even now after the person it had been had desiccated into a mindless husk.
Air is displaced. It rushed me with a speed that belied its emaciated form, lurching in a smooth— too smooth —motion to bring its sword up above its head.
I hush them. Whatever they had assumed I be used for, I am frighteningly good at this one thing. When it’s strike comes, I don’t bother to dodge. I become amorphous. Bubbling away into an ooze that parted cleanly against the incoming strike. The sword embedded itself in the brick, and before the guard can pull its weapon loose, I re-solidify, restructuring myself like wet clay on top of its weapon, inches away from its slack mouth. This close I can see the narrow-corded muscle standing out from its frame, its lower-face a crumpled leather sheet of thirst and agony. The armor it wears it etched in hieroglyphs: scrawl that contained the warrior’s name and cartouche upon its chesplate, his legion-markings and service record encircling the vambraces. An entire history written in loving detail. I commit these to memory as I reach for his head.
My claws flash once, rents of venomous color trailing in their wake that seemed to suck the colors from the chamber before stitching back closed. There is no sound, no thrashing, not even any blood. Just the crisp snap of eons-old bone and the faintest gasp.
Its sword drops and I teeter to the ground, pivoting to watch a half-existing silhouette out-gas from the armor as whatever meager spirit trapped within the shell is finally allowed to cease. I watch it go, glimmering into the scintillating light above like a night cloud swept up in a breeze. I sense fear and confusion from the shade, and finally, relief. Then it is gone like an echo.
The husk within the armor all but disintegrates. The empty pieces clatter to the ground, metal scratching on the stonework, brown-gray grains of sand slithering out from between the gaps in a quiet stream of hisses. Its helmet rolls up to my feet, facing up toward me.
We stare at one another: bascinet to mask. Empty visor to my single eye. My brother would probably have something philosophical to say about that. ”Weary is the head that wears the crown”, or something. As for me, I just sink to the floor, using the back of a talon to dust off the royal cartouche that remains upright atop the pile of dust, trying semi-successfully not to scratch it further.
I stand. Arms finding their ways back into the folds of my membranous cloak, held to my sides like the wings of a locust: a gesture that I guessed was comparable to shoving one’s hands within their pockets. I shiver there, alone. Not from the cold—I could not feel differentials in temperature, heat or its absence—but from within myself. Everything felt wrong. My insides were still adjusting, my organs finding their right places. Cells hawking around, confused at their new arrangement and slowly sectioning themselves back into dermis, cartilage, and chitin. I’d avoided the worst, but the revenant had landed some return strikes with the blunt of it’s blade, which I was certainly feeling now. But I was made of stronger stuff than my stature may suggest. And the Salt ever rejuvenates.
I reach for the receptacle I kept on me. A gift—begrudgingly given, but still a gift. A small crystal bottle, blood-red in color. Fleshchanged safely within my body when not in use. A simple wooden cork keeps its powdered continents within. I remove it with one claw. The scent of ash waffs from within.
A shadow falls over me.
Strings snap in my mind.
It sailed toward me, visible more as sound and movement than anything I can actually see. Muscles contract, bunch, explode into motion again. But I’m still semi-liquid, my bones not yet hard enough to support such sudden movement. They fold like saplings as the ground upturns, but I manage to roll with the blow a little, sending me careening off to the side. There’s a pile of silk and cushions that way. I don’t land on that. I go through the wall next to it instead.
Dust is everything. The impact is indescribable, all-encompassing. Cartilage just beginning to harden to bone cracks noisily. My right arm screams as it subluxes from its socket, torn tissue spurting synovial fluid. I’m still holding the receptacle in my right, caged against my chest. No sooner had I come to a rest, ligaments reaching out to pull my arm back into its socket with a sticky, liquid sensation, than a hulking shadow followed through the dark, the stony diadem of it’s head and shoulders dislodging more bricks, and swings down two fists wider than I was tall.
The eye in my bicep is wide and alert, twisting wildly in its socket as if trying to come loose. The cavity between my ribs opens like a mouth, absorbing the receptacle into a spongy lattice. I dive not to the sides, but back and up. Tibial spurs unfold from the backs of my legs as I hit the wall, locking me there. I scuttle up to the pregnant camber of the room, never losing sight of the thing below.
I mistake it for a construct at first. A statue come to life. I was not entirely wrong. Most of what walked the hall of the city were abominations. Its inhabitants—lords and servants both—distending and jellifying into new forms under the baleful light of the Red Star. But not this. This was man-made.
The justicar’s armor had been baroque, brass-alloy plates only just beginning to show signs of tarnishing, hotspots of precious stone integrated just as smoothly as the layers of metal. The builder below me received none of the parade of its former master. The form trapped within the armature was ubiquitous, beaten into the iron around it, nailed through with rods of control. Everything about the indentured bio-component in that stony dreadnought flexed with colonnades of grotesquery.
It drooled looking up at me. Faintly lustrous saliva spilled in droplets to the floor where it began to crawl towards others of itself. Arms and biceps bulging with artificially-enhanced muscle sway like pendulums as it stomps back, one foot still clad in at least a half-ton of ceramic and the other bare and mangled from its lopsided walking. I wonder at how I had not noticed it before. It must have been sitting in the room all along, deactivated until being peppered by shrapnel.
When it swings one gauntlet into a support, collapsing a section of the mezzanine opposite of where I cling, I think it is because my retreat out of reach had sent it into a blind rage. It was only when I sifted through the detritus and flapping pendants, pulling free a chunk of masonry that had been a grand stachion, that I realized it was getting ammo.
It throws the beam like a javelin with unerring accuracy. Adaptive physiology or no, that would have hurt to get hit by. I let go and topple head-first toward the floor.
No sooner had I splattered on the flagstones than I was up and sprinting. Not in the other direction. Toward my adversary.
It charges to meet me, frothing luminous at the mouth. It truly is seismic—bigger than even it should be. Grown beyond the alchemical stimulation forced upon it in ages past. When it swings high, I duck low, twitching around to the outside of its arm, and slide my fingers into the exposed heel of the leg not armor-clad.
It howls in a voice more metallic than organic.
It was a furious thing. Almost elemental, and brutally hard to put down. It stank of blood and pain. Of lifetimes of torment for a sentence long served finally allowed the chance to loosen upon one related to its tormentors. That I was another construct of their folly made no difference.
It fought back even as I hacked through it and ripped it apart. Cracked open its grafted armature and pulled flesh into leather ribbons. Rods of control, lancing like needles through its stone-hide skin, were pulled, split, and broke, and with that came a sound almost of relief as the giant toppled.
I stand there, the foyer a mess of split wood and shattered ceramic, claws dripping with its blood. But there’s something else staining my skin now, swirling up and down the edges of my outstretched talons, absorbed into me wherever it touches bare skin. Ichor seeps from the lacerations in it’s body, my eye transfixed upon it.
That was why is was larger, more aggressive. Not merely anger, but madness had possessed it.
I watch it trickle from the body, trickle into my own. I raise my hand in front of my mask and let it play through by fingers. Droplets of transcendent vitae, swirling with colors I struggle to describe. Pinions of fire and light and, there, at its center: just a mote of darkness. A substance entire wars had been conferred and ended on in the early days, when their city had been merely a cluster of warring tribe-nations. It is only when it begins to collect together in the runnels by the side of the path, flowing down into drainage channels, that I finally make my legs work again.
I leave, a curious ache of withdrawal having settled into me. Of something familiar having been taken before I could fully understand it. I spent more effort than I’d like to admit trying to smother it, erase it, push it out of my mind. Because that was the disturbing detail. I wanted more.
“My, my,” It says slowly. “In all my long years, i’ve never seen a thing such as you before.”
The being before me steeped its hands together, sausage-thick fingers leaking sweat and translucent oils. It chuckled, smiling grotesquely down at me from its canapé. It’s sincere, not malicious, despite coming through teeth filed to points. It tipped back its head and spread its mouth open, the flaps of skin at the corners partially decomposed, showing the backs of its gums. The contents of its chalice toppled into its mouth, some meaty stew, thick as pus. It wiped its chin with the back of one hand, smearing the stain across pale skin.
It was clad in ecru and decrepit gold. Bloated like something left submerged for too long. It chuckles as if amused by my silence, and the act dislodges something from its gut the color of fresh liver. It rolled down the pile of cushions and landed wetly by my feet.
It leaned down, sighing right in my face, breathe like burnt sugar and sour milk. “I saw what you did, you know. Cleverly done. For something so frail and small, you have such strength!”
I don’t raise my hand, but I do unshed one arm. Voidal currents crackle along the tips of my spread claws. The air pops and hisses. The baron sees this and laughs, ribbons of intestine uncoiling from its belly. It does not seem to mind.
“What teeth you have! Good! Very good. You are resplendent.” It cackled, clapping its hands together like a child. The contents of its chalice splash over the side of its seat. On cue, almost mechanically, its entourage cheered as one, similarly exultant.
“Relax, please. You aree a guest here. I understand things are not quite what they used to be. Then again, commerce thrives on change. Rest assured, we will always be here to entertain!”
It’s ensemble breaks into performance. A band plays heavy percussion while flutes chime. Concubines and fire-slingers handled their trays and braziers with eye-catching flourishes. Couples dancing together like drunken fools, and the air is pervaded with an orgy of spice-like harmonics. But my senses are sharper than a mortals. I could see that the fruits in the trays were dry, the jugs of wine empty, crystal stained where the pulp had sunk and rotted after the liquid evaporated. The thin, translucent sinews that disappeared up in the ceiling, animating some of the bodies present. How their expressions weren’t quite right, their eyes glassy and quiet.
Trumpets blare. My host expands, swelling out, skin writhing in places. It throws out its hands.
“Welcome to the Grand Emporium!”
I stare at it. I look it right in the eyes. The celebration stops at once, performers falling slack like constructs whose heartstones had run dry. It appears for the first time less than utterly pleased.
The thing shook its head, disgusted at my facelessness. “Bah. This city used to have such an appreciation for the finer things.”
It snaps its fingers, and its attendants—limbs, I guess was more accurate—slink away so quickly I have no idea where they’d gone. The bulbous thing readjusts itself, its attempt at getting more comfortable sending a tremor through the platform.
“You don’t talk much, do you? What are you, some kind of jester? Silent performances went out of the light six centuries ago, you know. They were outlawed for eighty of those years. Capital punishment. Should have been longer..”
I look around, idling gauging how much coin it would have taken to assemble the space we were in. It’s even more exquisite than the rest of the Bazaar. A variable hoard of ivory and gold. I ignore the material wealth though, my attention instead on a dusty rack of tomes and paperbacks, falling apart in a corner, half-covered by a rotting tarp.
“So you come into my palace in a mask of bone and moth-bitten rags only to say nothing at all. Do I have that right? Are you just passing through, perhaps?” It sniffed the air, suddenly appearing very interested. It leans over its own massive gut, seat and floor creaking as it went lower, lower, until it was less than a foot from my face. Nostrils twitch among the gluttonous folds of its skin, scabbed edges flaking.
“No. No, you’re here for something, aren’t you? Else you wouldn’t have brought that. Let me see it.”
There’s an art to what I do. A step back to give my host a better view. A slow sinking into myself, reaching for the sopping pouch that contained what I’d brought. What it could probably smell on me the moment I walked in, had it been paying a bit less attention to me. This seems an over-embellishment for what I wind up pulling from the depths of my overcoat.
What I display for it is a plump mass of phlegmy neural tissue, the texture of wet sponge. One that, in the time since it had been carved from the body it once belonged to, had evolved enough internal organs and live connective tissue to fully sustain itself. I hear voices and whispers everytime I hold the tainted meat with my bare hands. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
Nothing less than a piece of divinity. Holding it repulsed me to my core.
It stares in wonder, reaching out its cracked fingernails. I let it get close before snatching it away back into the folds of my cloak. It was potentially a dangerous game given I didn’t know how it would react. Definitely, my sister would have harped about it. But for once, luck was on my side. It appeared more enamored than irritated at my taunting.
“Ah. I see . A trade! It has been so long since we’ve had a transaction. Oh, this is wonderful! Tell me, masked one, what is it you covet? There is nothing within my grasp I am not willing to share…for the right price that is. Speak it, and the emproium will make it so!”
It throws it’s arms wide. As one, it’s processions returns, shuffling back in from places I couldn’t determine. They carry velvet-padded crates filled with jewelry, electrum and platinum glinty within. Antique vases and polished pieces of armor. A entourage of concubines slip out from the sides of it’s throne, dancing around me. One blows me a kiss and wink, and I see her tongue is forked.
“Well?” It says, voice fat with anticipation.
I walk through the slack-jawed crowd of performers and entertainers, back to the shelf I’d seen earlier. I reach up to take a single scroll from it’s alcove, one that appeared to be in somewhat better condition, which was proven true when it didn’t turn to dust at my grasping. I return to stand in front of it, chronicle held in both hands.
“Oh…will…that be all?” It says, sounding disappointed.
I nod.
“Hmm. Very well. You are a strange one. Most is, now.” It added, more somber. “From what I understand the rest of the city has fallen on…hard times. Truth be told I think my emporium is the only sane place left.”
I concede the point inwardly, but neither deny or confirm outwardly. It extends a hand the color of corpse-flesh. Purple as wine, bruised and thinly sheened. I think it desires to shake on our pact, but I only offer payment. This was the terminus that marked where I could no longer go back. Flesh of a progenitor. A cut from a body of the butchered divine, scrabbled over for its gift of eternal life. I knew the value inherent to it. What I could do with it. And that is exactly why I give it away.
I turn to the heavy wooden doors that served as entry.
“Wait, masked one.”
I turn to see it tear a piece, a dactylus that still squirmed, clutched between thumb and forefinger like a delicate sweet-meat, and offers it to me.
“It was a struggle to teach them to enjoy boundless pleasure.” It nodes to the side, where members of its entourage have re-appeared. They still smile at us, but their eyes are dead. “But they got there, eventually. You can too.”
I stare at its treaty for a while before shaking my head. The beast shrugs, popping the worming appendage into its mouth, slurping it like a noodle.
“You cast a shadow wherever you go, young one.“ It says between bites, rolling its meal around with its stub of a tongue. “I can feel it. Cold. Inevitable. Like heat death at the end of time. I do not know what you are.” It swallows before smiling too wide. “But I cannot wait to see what you do next.”
I watch the expressions of some in the audiance flicker. There is recognition—faint, before whatever bindings they were under reasserted themselves. They see what I’ve done though, and some of them, their eyes widen, just barely.
The gods were gone. Slipped downward into eternity or sideways into the throes of madness. Their transmogrifying detritus was all that remained. And some thought that was enough. Their pores could serve as soil, so they sought out their refuse. The flesh would save them.
My host can no longer contain itself. It does not eat it, instead shoving the bounty of the gods into the rotten bulge of its exposed intestines for quicker digestion. Acidic juices seep out and sizzle on the floor, smoke rising like the claws of a beast from the pile of rugs it situated on. Its bulbous form distorts around it. There is no shudder of pleasure, no satisfied laziness. It licks juices from its fingers, a tongue as long as myself slithering back between sharp teeth. It whimpers and begins gnawing on a knuckle.
They weren’t wrong. But they weren't quite right either.
I move like a parting shade through the ruins of faith. My claws glitter in the dark, black laquer that sucked in the meager light of braziers that self-ignited at my passing into themselves as if famished for it. Those lanterns held the cremated remains of saints, burning slow and steady over the long centuries, as they lit the way still.
Eidolon chimes resonate in my wake, every step carrying me higher. When the way is blocked, a sinkhole having swallowed an entire street, crumbling pillars cavitying the route, I seek alternatives, ghosting through sturdy adobe homes and alleys. Scuttling up slate-roofed buildings carved from the stone, dislodging scree behind me. When the path too wide, I jump, hollow bones bending like springs. When too narrow, I ooze through the pores between the bricks, leaving parts of myself behind as black stains, thick as unglazed clay. My Ichor is not the true blood of the progenitors, something within my body’s alchemy transmuting it into something short-lived. It skeletonized within moments of leaving me.
I flow down the streets of the commonwealth. In my short time here I found the place almost unbearably depressing. A haunt for dust and semi-fused shamblers, myself it's a single black-ragged denizen. Not a living thing had walked these prolific halls in centuries. Not until now. And even that was being generous.
I was not seeing it at its best, I was aware. If nothing else, this dead stone feels more honest than the rotten chowk. Despite haste being my objective, I can’t help but slow down when passing by some structures. A communal bathhouse, a tomb for a particularly noteworthy individual, the locked entrance to the Court, sulfurous green fumes seething from under the barrier. Traversal was not a matter of mental mapping, careful cartography, or even sensory input, but of eidetic recall. A lot had changed since I had incubated, but more had stayed the same. We weren’t caught in a cycle of decay, but a quiet descent into stasis and insanity.
It was because of that I was so uncomfortable here. A place alien because of its familiarity. I know these places, what they had been, despite never seeing them. I was imbued with a compendium of lore alien to me. I know the name of the first High Priest, the bible of the mad hierophant, and the still-living horrors created and locked into fermentation vats by the early Alchemists, who kept their tenderized children alive against the priesthood’s commands for further study. It was from that subversion that Salt had been discovered.
It was no boast to say the First Civilization had been the greatest and oldest of any, and our sciences knew no rivals. Our wealth so accumulative that even the peasantry had occasionally enjoyed amenities fit for the kings of another culture. I had seen the works of the outsiders—that brutal leviathan of metal and meat stuck in the ice above, hammered by the merciless indolation of the Red Star until it’s very heart had turned inside out, it’s crew reduced to antibodies. Legacy was the one thing we had going for us now, and there was power in remembering. We were ancient. We were still here.
What comes from that though is a brooding weight. What a strange feeling to lament a home you’d never known. Miss a place you’d never seen. Is it grief I feel, or merely the expectation of it? I can’t say. Not like I have a heart to judge with.
I soar higher toward a ceiling of hammered beam stone. It hung on carved pillars: a vertiginous slab that loomed over all the commons as if about topple. It was dank, glistening with condensation from the melting ice sheet above our heads. The dry rock further down sucked the moisture into itself, becoming rotten and slick. I don’t worry: there were cave-ins caused by seismic upheaval, but those supports had held for centuries. The stonemasons had done well to shape it as it was.
My fingers, each a fan of razor-light claws, sink into terraces and walls as I climb. Right before the peak of my final ascent, I pause as a glimmer catches my attention. I hang there watching the wane droplets as they drip into the deep places through channels once carved for water and ornamental fish. Places I couldn’t follow—even as I sense it’s pull like a hook in my chest.
Instead I watch shapes slink through the myrrh of lambent semi-light. There were shamblers there, the husks of the commonfolk, reduced to things that gnaw at the ground and lick the droplets with muscles half-atrophied into bone. I avoided those things whenever I could. They were of no threat; I could cut them down as easily as sliding my claws through sand, but doing so stirred deep sympathy in my hollow chest. But that isn’t why I stop either. I watch, grimly curious, as things took shape where the Ichor pooled. Fungal life rising from the essence of the dead, that got up and slid down deeper into the catacombs.
Candles mark my approach. The ossuary stood at the highest point in the belt, a solemn stone stairwell, unembellished, crumbling to pumice around its edges, leading to the entrance. I step onto the black stone that marked it’s portico, pausing to look over my shoulders for unfamiliar shapes before starting again toward the heavy slabs of black stone at the far end. Like the rest of the district, all of the gray Pyramid was shaped from the surrounding strata, and it looked nothing quite so much as a prison for what was within.
My smallest digit drags along the wall as I slowly walk. Candles catch and toss my shadow in flickering shapes. I smell the incense burning inside even from here, on the other side of the barred entrance. I finally stop, staring gloomily up its immense height. The pyramidion that once sat at the top of the complex had been stolen long before. Perhaps by the same raiders aboard the vessel I purged, come back for more bounty only to find their ends. Fools with more avarice than sense. Now its tip was just a crumbling spade of mudbrick.
I knock once, quietly.
It was a little ironic that I needed to be granted entry into my own home. But it was a necessary precaution, and hardly one I had issue with. Eventually one door grinds open on its ancient hinges just enough for me to turn sideways and slide through.
I had to go in, despite rather not doing so. It was important to these people to make an appearance. And it was good for me too. There was a great irony in lacking a soul, that being that the inner seclusion it brought meant I needed companionship all the more, for it filled the emptiness within myself. But I pause. Something tugs. I take another, more furtive look over my shoulder, afraid my hesitancy would be seen by those waiting on my safe return. I look down the jutting jaw of the ledge, over the blurred sprawl of the commons, at wounds opened by tectonic activity and the rivers of luminous liquid that weft over their edges, the light swallowed by the dark.
The sense was easy to shake off, and I started inside.
But I felt it all the same. Something was bleeding down there. I was sure of it.