Archive of Our Own

December, 1870: Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.

—

Absence of sound in the Research Hall: a silent rapture.

Life moves as clockwork beneath the bonesaw, scratching, pleading, little mouse-claws grasping at shreds of humanity and dregs of blood in distant chalices. Please help me, they cry. Please help me. I cannot see. I cannot see.

And yet, the saint, the holy one, is exempt from the shadow he casts: this is a task for his acolyte by title, his catholicon in spirit. They’d danced prior, before one had tied another to the diving bell and watched it sink to nothingness, an abyssal trench of oak wood and cobweb, flickering lamp-oil and soulless parchment:

“Look at me.”

(He looks)

“Tell me you will remain in good health? Even— exemplified by my absence?”

“Such mild-mannered concern is unlike you, Vicar. Was it you who said it– invention requires no permission?”

(His lips curve upwards, sly, dry, driving the words into a playing field of his own making. It does not fool the Vicar. It never will.)

“You will hear no gods.”

(Stated like a prayer under the guise of an order. Of course, prayer and order are both children of hope.)

“Suppose they dismiss my listening.”

(A hand to the shoulder, feeling, tasting bone-carved scaffolding that masquerades as a human silhouette.)

“Deafness is preferred to absence eclipsing.”

(Quieter.)

“Do take care.”

(To this, he says nothing. A scientist’s not one for words- nevermind how well Micolash spins them, how pointedly the smell of tobacco vanishes behind sealed doors. They’ve known, since the eve of the divine moon’s funeral, that he would say nothing. Knowing does little towards erasing uncanniness.)

Absence of sound in the Research Hall.

Letters had been passed along. Messengers. Meals and formulas and everything in-between, like coaxing a stubborn cat from a tree, or game to a trap.

A lack of response was customary in the midst of such wicked work. More a gesture or a sport, the letter-writing. Penning down an intimacy now gone stale. Ancient.

A lack of response was customary.

Then, with enough time, it wasn’t. Concerns and nightmares came hand-in-hand. 

So he retrieves a master-key, and here, in the passing of weeks to months, he is a saint no longer: scraped clean of his fineries by a strigil of desperation, left only a nightgown, a candle, and sleepless eyes. Painfully, he is but himself; Laurence. Whereas the other’s a visionary, an enigma, the pit-and-tar-tack of the underworld and yet defiantly an embodiment of the cosmos himself; dark, unfeeling, shimmering with otherworldliness:

He is a former scholar some years past his prime alone in a castle of his own making. Stirred from a not-quite-slumber with the quiet understanding that this is not correct. This is not correct. There is transmutation afoot in dark corners best left to dust.

There is an absence of sound in the Research Hall.

The doors resist as though to mock him. He eviscerates an elegant metal lock with a key rusted from temperance, time, and all the terrible things that lead prized objects to abandonment. The door gives, croaking, a body split open too soon.

Distance is not merciful.

From the maw of the doorway he sees it, from the first cautious steps, he sees it, it burns the eyes, burns and burns, burns the throat and the stomach and the muscle.

Oh, he’d known something had gone bad, had the sensation in his gut. He’d known from the minute he’d met him.

(INTERLUDE)

—

(Before we proceed, let us be reminded that every effigy possesses a defined system of assembly, and an order to aid the purpose for which it was created. Human bones are of a structure not entirely unlike a whale’s; though seasalt and tectonic forces have re-aligned their centres and not ours, beneath fins, beneath cartilage, lie the same phalanges that one would use to reach out to an old friend.

The act of reaching is a very ancient one, indeed. Persisting centuries of evolution is proof that all living creatures should be measured by their desires and not their remains.)

—

(THOUGH, IT MUST BE HARD TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING WITHOUT SEEING)

The order of tragedy proceeds as such; first, a mark. Not his own, not a carving nor a signature of what is now his beneath the cover of cloth and night, well-placed, thrumming pulse. Red-brown-black cells, putrefaction in real time, suppose concepts of reality remain in a room so cold.

Next, the body. Slumped over the work he’s so bitterly learned to adore, the desk his kennel; humans and dogs are not so dissimilar, then, offer it a bone(be it god or sheep) and watch the hunger sharpen its teeth, his quill. The inkpot is spilled. The blood mingles well, a kinship in oils of different origins, still stardust when brought to their base components.

Unwelcome, the pick. Measured and mathematical in the way it pierces him centermost: the sharp end jutting out.

(Stabbed) from the frontal lobe. Pointing northwards to places mankind may not ever reach.

In dreams, Laurence reaches out and seals the wounds with the blessings of the heavens, a thumb-touch to his ruined forehead so gentle that it restores all consciousness, returns him to the land of mistakes, returns him to life and the living and the black blood is a figment of his imagination.

The form. Well. The form vomits.

It is not graceful nor becoming of him, but the Vicar has only kept up appearances for as long as they serve him. His candle, for better or for worse, wisps out and dies as it falls from his hand. Hot wax dresses the floorboards in artificial skin.

Laurence lifts his scientist carefully, methodically, afraid to touch it, to touch him, so final and statuesque. Then he calls on violence, shakes him, takes his body weight into his own in hopes that his trembling is contagious. He holds him in any way that will make him speak. Anything to reanimate him.

Remember your phases. Algor, pallor, rigor. A scale permanently unbalanced between holyman and scholar. The scientist will not move. A crimson line cleaves his face in two, dressing-up a nosebleed, a split lip, dripping down the hollow of his neck, the collar of his shirt.

His miracle hands, gold-tipped and dripping with the cure to all humours, are at once reduced to useless lumps of meat and bone.

What good are his miracles, now?

Laurence does not remember what comes next: from the glass and scent of steel, he assumes vial, after vial, after vial, enough to have the wounds bloom in blood flowers and flesh-filled growths, cancerous, then more vials still, one more until he awakes, one more until there is noise again, until the wound’s but a trick of the eye. One more.

It works for the hunters, it will work for the body- we can restore the brain later, it's the body, the body must move, the body must live, the body, please, somebody, anybody.

Two stop him. A groundskeeper and a spider. “We heard you scream,” they say. “What’s happened to him?”

He does not remember. He grasps at more, though not all vials find their way to their target, and brute force is (in a cruel twist of fate) enough to stifle all his willpower. His arms are full. Then empty. The room is full. Then empty. His head is full.

Then the noise never quite goes away.

—

Before they wrap his body in cloth, he tastes two things.

One: the weight of the divine. A note remains, blackened by the blood of the desk:

The sky’s already past the line. The sea seeks to swallow me whole. I will meet her, then.

Two: the red of his neck.

He does not tell anyone he’s done this. The words will not leave him: the words to say he’d taken him from the coldroom, this body-not-his, and licked the blood from where it’d stained the dip of his throat for a final taste. It is unbecoming of his saint-skin.

Funny, how one longs for a flavour, any flavour, anything outside the ravenous regret. But regret is flexible, tastes like every memory, every worry. What he could’ve done and should’ve said. The work still left to be done. The work that never ends.

The Vicar sits then, stiffly, whilst his remaining followers await their answers:

So? Do tell us, Vicar, had you granted him freedom, in excess? Do tell us, Vicar, had you leashed him too short? Do tell us, Vicar,

Is the blood(body, dream, marrow) made to fit your hands?

Is it?

Is it?

Is it?

Though, the Upper Ward is awfully silent these days.

The groundskeeper lingers by the doorway, spectre-like, youthful yet raw of tendons and weary hands. The spider breathes at his shoulder. Laurence re-enacts a tragedy at a desk of his own, gloves fingers interlocking, hiding the lips that hide the fangs that hide the wanting, the weakness. An irony of an irony. They both watch him with caprine eyes, one in a reflection and another point-blank. Soft. Naive.

“Sunday, then,” Gehrman dares to break the silence, still lowers to a murmur while he faces the window. “The wake. Four days, is’t?”

Spindle-soft hands graze Laurence’s shoulder, to which he startles like a beaten child at the sight of the cane. Touch has now turned foreign. Rom drinks it in, this reaction, and douses it in the sort of pity that erodes stoicism. Her eyes are but water themselves.

“We may wait five.”

A consolation.

“There’s hope yet. He’s a doctor’s son, that one. Knows what the pick does. An accident, perhaps, or-”

“No,” Laurence interjects. Mortifyingly, it is the only phrase that does not rust his silver tongue. “Four. As is our custom.”

Then, quieter, dulled by the cover of a pensive hand;

“Micolash does not subject himself to accidents. Some agency in it. Always needed that– the agency.”

He says it scornfully, for when the grief whittles away all sensibility and direction, there is only ever scorn left. Perhaps it’s nostalgic to be angry with him. Perhaps he’s simply running out of things, and ways, to feel. The words burn like acid on the way up, the way down, his tongue’s run dry for far too long. Food and drink’s but a distant luxury.

Gehrman scoffs. The sound’s appreciated– the silence is a predatory thing.

“Must’ve seen something. Had a habit of it.”

Rom straightens her back, stands taller than the cooing, pacifying posture she’d taken moments ago would lead one to believe.

“Gehrman, a word?”

And though it would have been best for him to beg for their company, (don’t leave me, please, not here), for him to shed his gilded skin and reveal himself vulnerable, soft, freshly molted from sorrow or perhaps some form of trauma, he does not manage to make the words. There’s much he’s yet to make.

The murmuring past the door never raises to a volume of which he can discern individual words, still, he has studied at Rom’s side long enough to feel the empty spaces in her cadence of speech, the syllabic cuts and dents in unspoken cuneiform.

Don’t question the obvious, they seem to say. Don’t bring insanity into the equation unless you’re prepared to carry your figures and drive it on another. One casualty is plague enough.

When they re-enter, the jury makes their verdict. Four days. Leave the prying to the morticians. A Vicar’s duty is to his people, not his corpses.

“There’s nothing they’ll find that you couldn’t already have known,” Rom soothes, a hand to his back, at once transmuting him from saint to sinner to schoolboy, snivelling and useless.

“I know,” Laurence rasps.

“Do not blame yourself. He was unpredictable. Kind in his own way. He would not want to see you so distraught.”

“I’m aware.”

“Please, don’t do anything rash. There is still work to be done. It won’t be done alone, now. You’ve my word.”

“Yes,” he responds, stichomythic, rehearsed to the finest letter. Perhaps, if he spins his lines well enough, he will re-assimilate into a past self, one that can uphold his responsibilities. “There’s still work.”

He rises, with great effort, from the desk he’s rotted at for an undetermined amount of time (should such a thing still be relied on in times of crisis– disasters last anywhere from two seconds to millennia of dead civilizations beneath his feet). Unconsciously, he makes his way to places now marred with a certain sense of absence– he learns then, the tricky thing with death, the lesson that haunts his waking days and unwaking nights and even beyond that.

See, it is never the moment of passing that carries the hurt. The day itself does not matter. The sight of the pick and the body and the empty vials will blend, as all memories do, into a distant, yellowed, dust-ridden image. It’s the days that come after. The instinct to see the deceased in everything he had previously ignored; in ashtrays, in the smell of tobacco, in the haphazard parchments and dog-eared pages of books never to be fully read.

The Vicar cannot undo it, but he can control what’s left. The remaining acolytes will surely remember the following weeks not for the burial, but for the rather absurd forbiddance of smoking in the Ward’s halls. Suffering breeds suffering. Those bound to the habit complain, and the resulting disorder is quelled.

Ask the Vicar what he’s eaten, what sermons he’s delivered, what laws and regulations he’s surreptitiously pulled or pushed in the days that followed, and he will be unable to answer. Ask the Vicar what he’s dreamt of, then, he will stare something awful into your eyes, something brutish and unbecoming, a snared beast made mortal.

Then, he will tell you of the lake.

—

Once, when you were both soft-knuckled and smooth, he’d stood in the lake and drawn equations you still don’t quite understand.

“Come now,” you beckon from the shoreline. “You’ll catch a cold. Look there. The lake’s begun to freeze over.”

“Nonsense. She’s never frozen over.”

“She certainly might.”

The boy-surgeon pays you no mind, wading in much like a child of five or six, shoes, socks, trouser-cuffs all darkening with a drink of lakewater. The concept of indignity seems to be absent from his mind, these days.

Perspective makes him smaller, ever so slightly, shrinking towards that twilight horizon. As though having caught his affinity for the scientific method, you outstretch a hand, measure the scale of him with an eye closed as a hunter aims his gun. He fits perfectly between your index and thumb, having shed the moth-eaten hide of his long coat, the thin fabric of his rolled-sleeves like sails on a whaleship.

He turns, unexpectedly, and you dig your heels in the mud. You do not lower your hand.

“What‘s that?”

“I’m measuring you.”

He grins, pivoting to you, arms outstretched. The edges of him disappear until he is seamless with the water beneath, home again, a sort of strange nostalgia painting his body until it moves like liquid.

“They say the Vitruvian Man is of ideal proportions,” Micolash lectures, the drawl of his voice skipping across the surface to find you.

“Though I doubt the great Da Vinci has ever walked our Yharnam streets.”

Your Yharnam streets, you want to say. That is the burden all liars bear. That every moment, every so often, one is stricken with the great and all-consuming desire to self immolate.

See? I am as much a liar as you. I am built of lies. I have been built of lies as long as my father’s been built of lies, and his father, and his father. He told me of when the Christians would come and go, and on those days, he was devout, and on the days without them, he borrowed time from their hell.

You cannot please all Gods, but you may trick some of them.

I wish you would try to trick me. I wish I had been born here. I wish you would step out of that awful water.

His arms complete the circle-square, and you voice nothing of your prior thoughts. You think of artists. You think to tell those old masters to measure a true nonbeliever– they come in more interesting shapes.

“Well?” he asks. “Am I proportionate?”

“Ghoulish, maybe,” you answer, and the lie lives yet again, a second heartbeat in your chest.

“Perhaps you did not do it right.”

“That, or your arms are much longer than the average Vitruvian. Or man.”

He does not bestow one of his raspy laughs, but you do earn a smile. It contorts his face in strange ways. New ways. You’ve grown to appreciate this, the premature lines carved ‘round his mouth, the ghost of the future come to share the joy of the past.

“Alright, enough now, that’s quite enough. Come back,” you say.

In one turn of the key, he relents, water sloshing at his ankles and lapping at his heel, trailing behind you both while you circle your shriveling college, only, one finds himself too elegant to say as such, the other embraces it. In the night, you practice forbidden rituals. Both of your fathers had told you other things, warning things; that tenderness was a woman’s business, that success did not leave room for clasped fingers. Still, you clasp yours all the same until sleep takes you.

In another, his smile stretches like fat over a fresh wound. You may be young yet, but you know the basics of business, of a quick tongue, of solid coin. You know this smile is compensatory.

“Micolash.”

“Have you ever truly looked at the moon?”

“What?”

“The moon. Have you seen her?”

You step forwards. Your stomach sways like a pendulum, seasickness incarnate, the smell of algae and fishbones (his bones) filling your senses. The horizon moves out further– the lake is unimaginably vast once you’ve entered it.

“Almost every night.”

He clicks his tongue– a disconcerting sound, that. You hear it from yards and yards away. The gap between you two does not want to close as a surgical complication by another name.

“No, not like that. You aren’t seeing her. The womb. The sound it makes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Prophecies, I suspect…or, ah, I can’t say. You’ll find out soon enough.”

“You’re speaking nonsense, now. The muck’s gone to your head.”

Strange– there’s a limp to him now, brief spasms, as though fishing line’s been run through each part of him, tensed and released. You march with a little more haste, but the lakewater's heavy, unyielding. It knows you do not belong here.

Distance is not merciful.

It is easy, when it happens, when the lake swallows him whole. He offers no goodbyes and no consolations. Just the sight of his silhouette, smaller, smaller, even smaller, until his head falls beneath the lake’s mercurial surface and you are dirty and alone once more.

Scream it, Laurence. That name. You will not hear it again for many years. You may be the only one who remembers.

When morning breaks, you wake up sweat-drenched and miserable, heart slamming like a caged bird against your ribs. No amount of gold or sunshine or honeyed tea can keep the lingering dread at bay and you are happy in turn to let it haunt you. Rom calls it grief. Your lower ranking Choirsters call it senility. Gehrman and the hunters offer you the dignity of not naming it– for this, you’re grateful. You do not tell the others about the lake, the unspoken name. You suspect they would not approve.

You’ll see what you can do about his body, then.

—

Tides ebb and flow at moonrise, shifting sands of progress while the Choirmen sleep.

Papers lie scattered in half-organized arrangements, and there is a nightly burn in the Vicar’s wrist. An inkpot sits half-empty as the chalice beside it, awaiting fulfilling its purposes on a desk that holds illusionary bloodstains between the wood. The devil makes work for idle thumbs.

The knock on his office door at so odd an hour brings with it a papercut nostalgia. He hisses inward; his holy robes do not protect him from the fatal softness in his chest.

“Come in,” he says, not looking up.

Before him approaches a scholar carved hollow by the mantle of second-in-command, a knighthood born solely of admiration, granted, admiration is all a man of faith needs. He comes empty-handed, and without bow.

Laurence snaps stiff at the spine, dust-blonde caught in a peripheral. (Almost) mirror images are not to be trifled with at dark hours. The shadows distort perception. Beckon wicked imaginations.

“Damian. How might I assist you?”

The soft padding of leather against darkstone is all the response he’s first afforded. There’s a redness there, in the scholar’s puddle-eyes. A freshness. They recognize it in each other, recoil at the presence of weakness in a House-Of-God, each waiting, in some manner, for strength to return.

You’ve been crying.

As have you.

“I’m sorry to interfere with your work at this hour. You must be tired,” he begins, and Laurence notes a shift in his manner of speech, fashioning it something servile, pacifying. Addressing a master that no longer exists.

“It’s no trouble. Out with it.”

“I’ve a proposal, my Vicar. One I suspect you will not approve of.”

Laurence pauses in his writings, quill-tip pooling black at the end.

Damian straightens himself out before continuing, adjusting the cuff of a sleeve and poising himself like a weapon, rigid, piercing. He does not waver when Laurence’s stare bores holes into his sunken visage.

“As I’m sure you’re very much aware, the recent…tragedy, shall we abandon equivocations, has shaken several aspects of the Church’s foundations. The work of managing the Research Hall is now a duty placed squarely upon my shoulders, and there have been…difficulties.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Then you must also know of the widespread decline concerning the health of all my patients, and, more pressingly, the number of my assistants who’ve since resigned their work?”

“Yes,” Laurence concedes, “dreadful, that. I’ll see to it that your missing workers are replaced.”

“That is not the problem.”

With great restraint, Laurence sets his various papers aside, the weight of a clenched glove-fist enough to transmit a message against the table. No matter the weakness in his legs, nor the aching of his ribs, disrespect is not something he easily entertains.

“What is it then? Speak.”

Stiff hands release into thinly-veiled irritation, or something a great magnitude more complex, misplaced respect and bitter remorse stripping Damian of his previously held composure. Yes, the Vicar knows that look well. This is the look of honest men; the deep-set frown, the winding of his shoulders, this, this is what it means to peel back another’s skin.

“All this work. All this work– and our former leader is not resting with his fellow researchers, nor patients.”

“Ah, so that’s what it is. You wish to see him reburied.”

“He was never buried,” he’s quick to protest, unbefitting of his otherwise subdued nature. “So the patients tell me. They dream of him, sometimes. Call out to him in the night.”

“And you believe them?”

“I’ve nothing else to believe in, sir.”

The remark earns a strained breath from the Vicar, one that might’ve been born a chuckle in one differing circumstance, a click of the tongue in another.

“Not even the church you work for?”

The scholar shakes his head.

“This is as much a church as I am a chemist. I’m sure it sustains the illusion for some, but, I myself can’t take much stock in it.”

“And yet you stay,” the Vicar’s smile is a wayward kind, foxlike. Hiding a grimace.

“Because I’ve a duty to him. Please. Wherever you’ve put him, give him back to us. The researchers will see to it that he is cared for. We will not require any of your resources. Only the body.”

Silence befalls them both. One liar and one chevalier together make up an empty space where a contrarian had once stood. His voice exists in the gaps between their own.

Laurence briefly fixes his attention on a nearby candle, removing his glove as a businessman would check his pocketwatch, casual and practiced. A frail flame licks at the now exposed curve of his palm, weakly, first, then stronger in increments as his newborn burn festers. He does not pull away until the mark is sufficiently raw and red.

The entire procedure is committed with great apathy to which the scholar is forced to give witness, equal parts awed and revolted.

When the self-made ritual is finished, Laurence waves that same hand dismissively, extinguishing the flame and the burn alike. A wisp of smoke dissolves in the aftermath.

“Your patients. Do they see me, in those dreams?”

“I—”

“I— don’t believe so, my Vicar.”

“Then what, pray tell, is the purpose of bringing your complaints through my door? How can you be certain that his body is not resting properly in the cemetery, right as we speak? A vision? A collective hallucination? Divine intervention, perhaps?”

Damian is wise. He does not attempt to answer.

“Ah, but alas, you’re not one to believe in churches, are you?”

“No,” he concedes. “But you may call it a hypothesis. The patients were rather descriptive.”

“Hm.”

The Vicar scratches his new wound fresh again, a thumb digging relentlessly until the skin comes off in flakes, though a candle does not run hot enough to burn bloody. There is an animosity in his study now, he understands. It comes off the scholar in waves as he stands statuesque, teeth gritting, body tensed.

“You’re very far out of line. It would do you good to return to your work.”

Where Laurence expects an apology, an admission, he receives none. Only vindictive glares.

“It’s not right, what you’re doing.”

Then, the eyes soften, hostility liquifying to a sort of pity, a sadness, reflecting and puddle-like once more.

“I understand you’re grieving. He’d pass mention of your shared history. I imagine there’s a great pain in that.”

Where the flame could not touch him, the consolations do; he winces inward, an otherwise gentle complexion contorting under new weight, cut harsh with the light. Laurence was not a man of failures. It was not in his nature, his complexion, his manner— then, his father always would always remind him; they will not share your books. It cannot be helped. Children are not biologists, not doctors, and there is no way to explain that you are of our enemy’s appearance but my and your mother’s blood. 

He was wrong. The only child-made-doctor he’d known had found his place in the operating theatre.

“But this is not right. His colleagues did not see him buried while the work that killed him continues to spoil. Please, Laurence. There will be no scandal should you reveal where you’ve put him. We can collect him quietly.”

The Vicar pauses, contemplative. He does not contemplate for very long.

“You may take your leave.”

Damian’s expression hardens something like stone, but he nods, regardless. Expectant.

“Very well.”

Only after the scholar was truly gone, each trace of him fading into the same cruel darkness he'd emerged from, leather steps echoed to nothingness and the lingering stench of formaldehyde gone through the gaps in the window-glass, did Laurence allow himself a momentary respite.

Sharp-stressed fingers weave through locks of golden hair, missing its sheen for a long time now, as the jackdaw would croak– you’re not as you used to be. With each tug comes a few more loose strands, making mapwork of his desk, drawing lines and threads better suited for surgeries than desecration.

“The patients.”

The patients. What must they speak of, writhing in those chairs, their numerous cots spread white pock-marked linens like a disease within the Ward? Of course, the patients, they’ve always seen more, seen beyond.

But beyond has never been particularly kind to his ilk.

On the brink of dawn, he descends, one underworld to another. The Upper Ward has many crevices, built on the bones of ancient ruins, roots of the long-gone civilizations that play in two-part canon. There are laboratories where there should be altars, and altars where there should be infirmaries, of course, the blame is to be shared amongst mortals who cannot delineate architecture around what they cannot see. A spider greets him with hands marred by near-chemical burns, quickly shedding the softness of her youth. When they put one palm to the other, their wounds will overlap.

The door to the hidden clinic is not so much an entryway as it is the mouth of a crucible.

“You look like death,” she observes when he enters. Laurence receives it with grace, or exhaustion’s mimicry of it.

“I’ve had an unpleasant night. How is he?”

She opens her mouth for a statement– thinks better of it, swapping one concern for another.

“Unchanged, mostly. We’ve managed the growths, at the very least, and not without great difficulty.”

“Hm. Suppose I owe you an apology.”

Rom takes the effort to straighten out the body’s collar, tidying away loose folds and hems near the knee, plucking specks of dust off unmoving shoulders or perhaps a hasty re-dressing for the sake of shared dignity. She possesses an odd grace, here, around him. They say mimicry is the highest honor.

“No,” she soothes. “I would have done the same, had I been in your place.”

You’d have done better than me, that much is certain, he thinks.

Through years of dedication as a conductor would to his orchestra, Laurence has learned to manage where his gaze falls, to suppress those twitching urges to tense his brow, bare the crease near his nose like a dog bares teeth. It is with this mastery that he avoids staring at the body directly, still, the peripheral is vision enough; Rom’s done good work, and he is cleaner.

Morbid curiosity is a powerful thing for those familiar with Byrgenwerth’s teachings. Though the pick’s been removed, sterilized, he can tell from the blur– the wound’s still fresh, unscabbed and pulsing.

“Is that the blood’s doing?” Laurence asks aloud, aside, while the chorus sleeps. Rom peels his mask away with deft hands made for placating troubled minds, not reconstructing troubled bodies. She speaks as though afraid to wake him.

“Your hunter seems to think so, and I’m inclined to agree. He’s—“

She blocks the view of him, steps between Vicar and scholar and severs the line right then, a bulwark of sorts.

“Well, he’s yet to lose his warmth.”

“It’s not possible.”

“Not possible, and yet, persisting. I did not want you to visit so soon. Can’t be good for the mind.”

“I’m alright, Rom. I’ve seen worse in the old theatre.”

When she yields and the body finally does come into view, all angled marble and steep cliffs of bone, sinew, and tendon, bundled beneath a shirt incised open as a gaping maw revealing the ribs beneath, Laurence is quick to make observation. Be it for modesty or for sanity, a thick linen is draped curtain-esque over the corpse’s face, obscuring half-lidded eyes that refuse closing.

“Have you and the anatomists looked inside the stomach?”

He speaks with sickness behind the teeth, a building pressure hot like a pier on a summer’s day, glottal decay filling his head. Rom treads carefully, now that he’s been revealed. Better to speak of a body unseen.

“We have, briefly. Nothing out of the ordinary. Traces of the usual, medicine, tea. Bits of a last meal.”

“And the scar?”

She points, barely perceivable, masterfully made. Laurence finds a chest is rather odd to see when unmoving– he’d grown accustomed to it, the pulse in-out of lungs at work, heaving at times, coughing at others.

“A miracle, you might call it, as with most our incisions. The effects of your holy blood.”

“He never much cared for it.”

Laurence recalls an infirmary of days past, no, not an infirmary; a quiet dormitory made in the approximation of one, two stubborn men with their points to prove.

“His own does not mix well with it. Did I ever tell you that? That his first transfusion ended in a great deal of sickness– he was quite upset, then, as was I. Very upset. He hid it rather poorly.”

Rom does not take the admission as it is, rather, sees the spaces between, what’s left unsaid. The planes of her face crumple around tender eyes, pity seeping from every inch of her.

“You thought it’d cure him.”

“Yes, I–”

He sighs.

“I suppose I did.”

They share a laugh, a shy one, ashamed of its own existence. The lock on the clinic door brings to mind the matters at hand.

“The patients, Rom. They see him in dreams.”

“Do they?” she says. Unsurprised.

“Troves of them, from the sounds of it. They’re unhappy. They say they’d like him back among their number.”

“Well, that’s just the nature of the beast, isn’t it?”

An attempt at lightheartedness, though, the Vicar’s not found use for one, these days.

“Has anyone tried to enter?”

“Not while I’ve the key. I’m afraid my assistants don’t particularly enjoy the sight of him.”

“Keep them close. I suspect there’ll be attempts.”

“Then perhaps, further conflict can be avoided by appeasing your masses. It’s about time we bury him, anyway. He’ll not rot anytime soon.”

“No. I’ll not allow it. Not until we understand– the nature of his death.”

Then, less as a Vicar, more as a colleague, a friend, the boy of twenty-something with ambition to match his wit;

“Please, Rom. I beg of you. Do me this one kindness.”

There is a guilt unique to enabling, to the assisting of self-medication with concoctions best left to the executioners, but Rom has known little else to kindness for the better part of a lifetime. Where most scholars deal in bargains, burials, and ancient texts robbed from their dust-eaten caverns, her penchant lies in understanding, intimately, the inner workings of the mind, the strings of connection and cooperation that weaves a web of sole responsibility for humanity’s continued existence.

Weaving was her mother’s gift. She only knows to take a gloved hand into her own, smoothing the back of it in her own sense of embroidery.

“I cannot speak of the future, but I will do all that I can.”

Quieter. A secret just between the two of them, accented with a smile;

“Do get some rest.”

—

Hunters pass in and out. Their weapons, clothing, desires and aspirations, all of it litters the dream’s various crevices until Laurence tastes metal in the back of his brain, the tip of his tongue. The closer they come to aiding in a true ascension, or at the very least, the ceasing of this one, there’s the light-headedness, a knowing of knowing. They kill little more than beasts and beasts kill little more than each other.

I quite liked that one, his doll hums, turning a page all-too casually, legs crossed against the table. He’s taken to reading in great quantities, though, it’s never clear how much he retains.

He spoke to me, now and again. Told me things. Stories. I like the talkative ones.

Another ache behind the eyes, and Laurence is grateful when it comes. He warms himself by the fire.

You entice them, somehow. Embolden them. Better to be rid of him.

The dilemma unfolds, geometric, creasing over itself like a tunnel; he cannot seal the doll away, for there is still hope in the hunters, waning, dying hope, but hope all the same, and he cannot send them off weakened as they arrive.

Still. There’s a foulness in his mouth when the two interact. The doll is bound to learn. Bound to discover things solely reserved for the animate.

Put that down, he says. Those books are not meant for you.

The doll obliges, and another hunter wakes. The sea bides her surrogacy.

Maybe this one will make it farther than the last.

—

You are a boy when a bird hits the mashrabiyya, frightened, dazed.

You are a boy when he comes down with a cough, dry and wretched.

You take the thing into your hands, cup it as water from a fountain and hold it close to your chest. There now. Breathe. Your father does not approve.

Distantly, a hawk circles from above. Feathers are scattered over your lap. He gestures for your embrace, for your hands, though rejects food and drink.

Leave it, your father says.

It will bring disease.

I will bring disease.

You place him in a crate meant for your few fineries, your good shoes, and find you cannot dig past the market’s armor-plate soil. You leave him in the alley instead, where the cats make quick work of him. You hear it even with your back turned.

You bring him another set of sheets, a portion of thin broth and the last bit of soft bread from the morning. The work is not in helping him rest, rather, it is in seeing to that he is nourished. I’m not fond of eating, he confesses, when you beckon for an open mouth. It’s a foul concept.

When I am grown, you think, I will not have to bury you.

—

And so it goes like this;

A desperate saint-turned-cultist-turned-madman makes a deal with God to erase his sins. The moon bleeds in his cathedral walls and the ocean mourns her mother. The peasantfolk continue to burn. The groundskeeper is left with his blood. The spider reads her webs and the runesmith guards the lake.

What is the price of a miracle?

Laurence finds it is something akin to de-gloving, the horrid purification by flesh for flesh, one minute he is whole– the next, he is at once in the Cathedral Ward and again in the field of asphodels outside. God’s kiss feels as a tear in fabric, ripping, shearing, an eye for an eye, an arm for the sky.

He comes-to ungracefully, groaning, cursing everything he can think to name; his gods, his father, his peasants, himself. He curses enough to undo half a lifetime’s worth of sanctity.

Granted, the spongy stump of where his left arm once was does not particularly expect grace upon arrival, and neither does the blood that spills out beneath him. In writhing, he meets dirt, abandons every value that’d helped him tame a plague and turns it on its beast-ridden head. Divinity’s aftertaste is moreso akin to bruised gums and lakeweed.

Enough pressure, and a limb stops bleeding. Laurence manages as much after a less-than-tasteful deconstruction, his robes dirtied, his hair wild and unkempt.

But pressure does not solve all things.

Case-in point; he is met, not by Kos, his promised one, but by an ambassador resembling one who is long dead and long gone. Represent a thing well enough, and you become it. The Vicar understands this more than anything.

Then what’s become of the Mensis scholar?

First, he sees his shoes– untied, worn to near-ruin, unpolished and of his voice he hears his complaints; shoes are much too costly, I’d rather buy novels. Next his trousers, his dress shirt, his waistcoat– reassembled, resembled, but not unlike they were before, here he is, out of the water, out of the murky dark, flesh-and-gore-and—

The curve of his hands.

His hands, look, his hands are insectoid, segmented. Laurence skitters back to the wall, cornered mouse, frightened beast, and perhaps that is what Judgement Day has determined him to be. This assessment is not entirely incorrect.

Eyes, face, hair. All of it intact. The pallour is seeped deep beneath the skin, now, crafting him veinless, whiter than snow, tidied up with lace and ribbon, old fabric and new trim. Oh, he smiles the same. Oh. Debt-collecting’s nasty work.

He is old now distant from the maths and sciences he’d once excelled in but even he knows this perverses the laws of the natural world of course what’s natural is what’s visceral is what’s tangible is what’s before him but what’s before him is a dolled-up corpse walking the earth yet again and the mass of an arm does not equate the mass of his body so the cost must be additional the debt must be incurred the mind must be dissolving like sugar in liquor drunkenness and divinity make an awful pair much like the two of them but see you can ignite both see you can make it right again you can pray to god (oh god) and now he must pray pray pray pray.

He prays.

Prayer exists in many forms, the scholar had once said, working the quill as an autumn-boy might work a crowd. Prayer is a private thing, unless you desire it not to be.

—

A debate between scholars once took place on the concept of graphs;

It began, as all dubious science does, with boyish pride and discussions of the Greeks. Measuring the suffering of various sinners leads to unproductive results— all the same, the scholar of appearances announces his personal sympathy for the man trapped in the lake.

“Could you imagine? Such perfectly crafted damnation all for but one man? He must be just miserable down there.”

The blackboard hums in a strange sort of morse, then stops. Swapping one equation for another, the fish-boned scholar entertains, as he always does, the musings presented before him.

“Or, the stupid bastard might have considered an alternative to boiling his son. I hear the Greeks were very fond of their grape leaves.”

Laurence is quick to find his own chalk, nimble hands drawn in honest calculations, wielding anything (the false dagger, the chalice, the pen) as a knight would draw his sword. A wordless duel of ideals; the former’s equations are halted by the latter in calcium-carbonate lines. Battlemarks drawn in earthy slate-stone.

“Mind the boundary,” Micolash warns, the drawl of his voice low, and there Laurence thinks; this is a sound that only a mother could love.

“I’ve put good thought into these numbers, now.”

“Ah. You’ll have to forgive me. I was under the impression we were discussing history, not mathematics.”

“History and mathematics are not wholly separate.”

“To you, everything’s a figure.”

“Not quite,” ever the contrarian, the fish-boned scholar objects. “Figures are not all there is. Everything can be calculated, but not everything is in and of itself a calculation.”

“Tell me, then, what do your equations make of Tantalus?”

He asks the question half-leaned ‘gainst the board, obscuring what’s yet to be marked, vivisected, solved and unsolved. Never quick to anger, Micolash only cocks his head, briefly lost in questionable thought. A weak thumb dissolves one exponent, carries another. Where he cannot respond, he smudges and rearranges until the sounds return.

“I don’t think it's all that cruel. One would, I imagine, choose to suffer eternity surrounded by beauty rather than his fellow man.”

“That is the point, yes. Surrounded but never granted.”

“Must he be granted?” Micolash challenges, now, brow raised as a penned mark, ink-black and cutting. “Seems one man’s curse is another’s blessing– they did not give Sisyphus clear lakewater, nor ripe fruits, nor gilded branches. They gave him a rock.”

“A boulder,” authoritative– of course, idol-in-the-making, all had to be right by his judgement first. “And they did not give Ixion those things either.”

“Hm. I don’t believe I’ve conveyed myself properly– no, no, I’ve a point, y’see. Now– step aside, would you? I’ll draw it for you.”

There, perhaps, a slip of the tongue or intentional in the way of all ill-slick things, squirming just at the edge of his sentences:

For you.

The prodigy stands vigil while the offer curls upon itself, screeches and taps into a wall much too large to properly look upon, Micolash now hasteful in his makings of new diagrams. An arm swings, pendant-like, one axis to another, curved latitudes and longitudes. The graph is larger than it needs to be. Arched, just as church-windows and various other marks of faith, right to the end– there, he straightens at the elbow, draws a line as an execution, throat-slitting in its swiftness.

“There,” Micolash gestures, as though having produced some grand discovery for the ages.

Laurence tries to make sense of it, this fish-hook-made-white, narrowing eyes in a way unbefitting one of his gentle appearance. To Micolash, there is some achievement in this– Laurence is not one to befuddle easily.

“What is it?”

“This,” Micolash works in planes, drawing an X-axis with infuriating precision, “will represent your Tantalus’s joy. His happiness, if you will. And this–”

With an X comes a Y. Micolash commands attention in different ways, Laurence thinks, following each chalk-mark intently.

“This is his sanity. Suppose he’s put in the lake. Picture it. Of course, to begin, he’d be rather cross, don’t you think? Then, naturally, there’s the false hope– he devises plans, crafts ways to outsmart his damnation. They don’t work, as one might predict. A bit obvious. Next comes the surrender– but see, this is where the lines ease out, where we begin to approach infinity; eternity, I imagine, should dull one’s senses to most peaks and troughs. That,”

He gestures to the edge of the graph, pin-pointed at a crescendo, the culmination of his sudden thesis.

“Is what my equations make of him. One can not suffer eternally just as one cannot cross a rational boundary should it be continuously approached. An asymptote of sorts. Not so bad, is it?"

Applause, not for the figures nor the board nor the scholar, really, but perhaps the rationale behind it, and that above all, one man has drawn a picture for another. Two men used to be dead men, but the courthouses borrow rope from sailors still. Better to draw pictures.

“Your mind works in fascinating ways,” mocking, though the approval never drains from Laurence’s eye. To this, Micolash takes a perfunctory bow.

“Ask, and you shall receive.”

“There, again.”

“What?” he squawks, bird-like. Laurence continues.

“There. When you say ‘you’, surely, you don’t mean me? In specific?”

Micolash cocks his head to the side, dark hair coiling like live-wire when he does, curiosity and craving incarnate. This is a boy all too soon made a man who has only known hunger.

“Who else would I mean?”

“That’s–” Laurence hesitates, feels an ale-burn down his throat, dry with ferment, bitter and sweet playing on his tongue and through his nose. “Nevermind. Nevermind it.”

He takes a moment to let his eyes scour the blackboard. The figures are more cipher than science, 2’s alike to 5’s, A’s to 8’s.

“Fix your handwriting. Can’t even begin to read the stuff.”

“Have you considered,” Micolash leans back against the lecture board, all loose-limbs and sallow smiles, “that not everything in this world exists solely for your viewing pleasure?”

“Consider it a personal undertaking, then. I’m sure you’ve had marks taken for it.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I write just fine, thank you.”

“Demonstrate.”

“Pardon?”

“Demonstrate it, then.”

Each touch from tongue to tooth clicks like a match against the box, hissing sulphurs, charming in its ugliness.

You’d make a good lecturer, the prodigy thinks, but never says. You’ve many voices for such a frail thing.

He takes the chalk as a hand-off, close enough to feel the bone beneath his colourless skin, jutting irregularly with stories of various illnesses and frozen winters. They trade warmths for juvenile competitions.

“What am I to write?” Laurence approaches the blackboard, eager to prove, yes, proving is a skill he’s long since mastered, a fine reward for the ambitions of a boy who’s never quite left those busy marketplace streets.

“Write your name,” Micolash gestures with a tilt of the chin. “I’d hope you’re familiar.”

So Laurence writes, the struggle not in his penmanship but rather his ability to hold his composure in the face of the absurd.

“Notice, with mine, that you can identify each letter. That’s the problem with yours, I think. Your marks all meld with one another.”

“Hah.”

The fish-boned scholar shuffles closer, gets an eyeful of his signature, measuring proportions and curves.

“Hm.”

After a brief thought, the easy gestures fall away. He is left stiff, near-frowning.

“Write yours,” Laurence returns the chalk, but Micolash refuses to take.

“I write it plenty. You’ve seen it before.”

“I’ve forgotten what it looks like. Go on. It’s only fair.”

Relenting, Micolash pens each letter with great apathy. To the challenge, or the proof of identity, Laurence has yet to know.

“Stranger, my own.”

Then, quieter, at the edge of a jab or perhaps a feeble joke.

“Good bit uglier, too.”

At this, Laurence laughs something that turns into more of a sigh on the way out. Half-echoed, reaching outwards and inwards, this, this is what separates one actor from another; warmth, gold-gilded and yet deceptive, reflective, a mirror in the way his manner soaks in all words and all pleasantries, spins them back like a folktale– reveal my true name and perhaps you’ll spin gold no longer.

An autumn-boy, that one. Quick to ripen sweet and strong, at once a thing to worship and a thing to bury, then quicker yet to wilt. The city had first swallowed him when he’d come dressed in the costume of locality, speaking her language, knowing her songs. Still. He never quite forgets the laypeople, the townsfolk, the sniffling and glares.

You smell strange, they’d say in those early days. Of spices. Cinnamon. Are you high-born?

A Laurence of today smiles, just at the mere thought.

No, no, nothing of the sort. I’ve just come from an apothecary, is all. Many such places.

Where is it you come from, then?

Down the road. Perhaps we’ve met before.

Though the autumn-boy can weave his tales, he cannot as easily unweave them. Spinning gold comes with its fair costs. Ideally, he will have a Yharnamite’s funeral.

Micolash addresses him when the silence has gone on long enough.

“Though, my professors read it just fine.”

“I’m sure they do,” Laurence concedes. “Have they read your papers?”

“Thoroughly.”

“Then I suppose your handwriting isn’t as bad as it ought to be. You’re still enrolled, after all.”

“Mm. How kind.”

Down, down, even further down, past the burials of shared namesakes and civilizations past, even further than that, stands a man in a lake, stands a man with his boulder, stands a man with his fiery wheel. Recto et verso. Ut supra sic infra.

Above them, above, above still, stands a man in a classroom, unaware that all his kinsmen were granted more mercy than him, nevermind that the flesh he’d eaten was not of his own kin. The figures are wrong. The numbers fall short.

Often, an implosion turns inside-out, corrodes the bread and the body and purifies it to an essence, a special sort of concentrated penitence.

Not every man who is trapped is given the benefit of madness.

—

Dearest Laurence,

It is with deepest regret that I am to inform you of my resignation. There is no place for me in your city.

You may think it selfish when I say I feel I’ve much to live for, granted, you have always managed forgiveness in unexpected circumstances. I cannot wish you longevity, for that is not the future you have chosen, but I wish you endurance all the same.

The grieving man has fulfilled his work. You have my deepest apologies, should they still matter.

Live well,

–Rom

—

The concept of a day has long since melted. One thousand and six hundred celsius. One thousand eight hundred and three in kelvin. Reformed, it goes for around forty kuruş, barely tuppence here.

Ceramic neither absorbs nor imparts flavor. The gods don’t much care for your choice in the matter.

You have had your fill of both gold and misery. Now, you will learn to love the taste of nothing.

When the Vicar’s eyes open, the shoes in front of him have not moved.

The rather amusing thing about demonology is that every faith produces its own demons, and not any one faith has a method to dispel them all. Laurence could have read every holy book in existence front to back, and none would’ve been likely to contain instructions for a foulness such as this. At any given time, there are more devils in the world than there are priests. Viewed from this lens, religion seems all at once quite useless.

“Gods,” it gasps. “You’re bleeding.”

Holy-work of this calibre smelts him down to his bare essentials, of a primal need to survive. Conserving one avenue of energy means shutting off another– he cannot speak, only vocalizes, beginnings of names, or expressions of shock, or whatever else his eyes can communicate to the brain.

“Well. Don’t just lie there like a dying fish. Come on, I’ve some thread for the wound–”

He snatches a sleeve, feels the implication of a bony arm beneath.

I should have held you more, he thinks. I should have held you and memorized every part, so that I could reconstruct you in the dark. I should have. I should have.

What are you?

The doll beams with some cross of affection and pride, eyes roving for stimuli, for answers, clues. As one might recall, much of Pandora’s first days were spent learning.

It crouches down to be at his eye level, discarding the severity of the wound in interests of newer discoveries, a brutal curiosity. It really is him, then.

“Yes,” the doll responds. “That’s right. You haven’t forgotten me, have you?”

“No, you– he’s dead. Micolash is dead. We’ve both gone and died. We’ve died.”

“Ah,” it stiffens upright, dusts itself off and pulls, with great and insensitive force, the bleeding past-Vicar off the ground.

“Have we?”

Now, memory is something of a prism; Laurence recalls it diffuses when placed in different lights, different scenarios. He cannot recall exacts, but knows, with exact precision, the moment in which his good arm swung out, striking, but not strong enough. How the sting of porcelain against his wrist reminded him of the tangible intangibility– he’d not gone mad, not yet, and perhaps the true horror was that he never would.

I should’ve been a lawman, Tantalus thinks.

I should’ve been a lawman.

The doll hits the ground and shatters, as most delicate things do, unexpecting of the outburst. Reality defines itself, then. Micolash did not shatter. Micolash was thin skin stretched taught over a frame that hid necessary answers and even more necessary evils, and this never shattered. But who’d ordered that of him? Who’d locked him in the Research Hall? Who’d made the diving–divining bell?

“Laurence,” the broken thing croaks, making no effort to rise, no resistance. “I don’t understand. What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

He remembers what it feels like to be cut by doll-edges. The shards like fine china embedding against his knuckles, squelching something bloodless, still awful, and there was no smell, yes, there was no smell when he’d cracked the thing’s head in, factoring in the already-present copper stench of a hasty debt repaid. An eye rolls marbleesque onto the Upper Ward floor.

There’s no entry wound.

Tantrums to a tenderness or perhaps an apology by another name; Laurence takes what he has left, his left, and brushes the doll’s hair back and away from where it covers his forehead, runs a thumb smooth over the not-dent just between his browbones.

“Oh God,” Laurence whispers, or thinks he does. The remaining eye spins back to look at him on some unseen axis.

“Where is it?”

“You’re bleeding, Laurence. We ought to get you to your study. I’ve some thread.”

“Where is it– where’s the– there was a pick. There was a pick in your head.”

“What are you on about?”

“I saw it. I watched them pull it out. I saw– oh, the, the parts, the parts that clung to it, you, what’ve you done with it? Where–”

“You’re in hysterics, Laurence. Come on. Off of me, now. That wound’ll get infected.”

“This is not real,” he decides. Then, skyward, to a false chandelier and an even falser ceiling;

This is not real.

Call it hysteria by one name, blood loss by another. Between that and the traversing of a boundary of consciousness, Laurence cannot begin to guess what might have gotten him first, but it gets him all the same. He wakes to the smell of ether, candle-wax, and a doll that has never been broken, bears no mark of it. Caught in a chemical dream-haze. Dying of it, maybe.

How long does it take a murder to leave someone’s mind?

Laurence remembers the screaming, but not so much the murders. Not so much the amount he’d broken.

“Oh? How do you mean?”

“You look just like him,” he says, a letter-opener in hand, jutted through an empty socket.

“Down to the teeth,” he says, a hand through its chest, rummaging for a heart, or the idea of one.

“The habits– you’re just missing the, the habits,” he says, dissecting. Careful, this time. A proper send off.

“Of course I do,” The doll pops an eye back in.

“Naturally,” The doll assists; a hand to his wrist, guiding, no, not there, a little higher. Not a heart as your idea of one but perhaps something your god and my creator might’ve called a centre.

“Which ones?” The doll rises effortlessly from the desk-made-slab, buttoning itself up as though it carried any notion of decency, any notion of shame.

“He used to smoke.”

“Then pass along a light.”

“He’d talk in his sleep. Half-murmurs.”

“Then tell me what he dreamed of”

“He–”

Laurence sits, trembling, at a seat he’s long since thought abandoned. A fire crackles in the nearby hearth. The curtains are drawn. His wound reeks of alkaline and burnt meat. The needle never wavers.

“...was always very good at that,” his tongue catches on his teeth, shivering as though cold. He cannot look up at the one attending him.

“Suturing?”

He nods.

Then, drunk on the smells and the illusion of courage or whatever of it’s left before the gut-haze take the rest;

“Am I in hell?”

He asks it as a scared child might, a sinner in a church might, a man at the gallows might, not facing the executioner and favoring the sight of the floor. Afraid of an answer he already knows.

It does not stop stitching for a moment. Eerily silent, the doll, when tasked by its presumed owner. Approximating some sort of focus.

“I don’t suppose so,” it finally answers. “Though, I’m afraid I’m not awfully familiar with the concept.”

“Of hell?” Laurence laughs– he really has gone mad, or been mad, right from the beginning, then gone backwards until sane again. Scurvy on the mind. Kos’s curse, like scurvy on the mind. Opening old scars and memories and rummaging deep until she could touch something tender, hot with body temperature, ripping it out again and folding it to new shapes, unnatural shapes.

“Yes,” it pulls the string taut. “You’ll have to teach me.”

“Like you. It’s something like you.”

“A present?”

“No,” Laurence draws a breath short, chokes on it. “No, it’s– well, there’s no point in’t. Talking to you. Ah–”

“Don’t move. You’ll tear.“

”How are you doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“This– this parody.”

He shifts his gaze, sullen and slow, looking towards a window he cannot see through.

“How did she know those things? Kos. How did she know his tooth was crooked there?”

“Is that not the point of calling her a god?”

As all malaise in life develops; rot, mould, evil vines and foreign bodies, the doll begins to develop something akin to curiosity, a personality. A singularity.

Collapsing.

Then, after pause;

“He looks like his father,” it offers.

“Does he?”

“Yes. Very much so. He is not unique in that aspect.”

Laurence is silent for the rest of the procedure, and the doll does not interrupt him. It is only when the fire lessens to a muted glow, and the acrid scents have escaped elsewhere, that he begins his sentence with a sob.

“Unmake me,” pleads the Vicar. “Please. Kos. Unmake me.”

“That is not how this bargain works. You offered everything.”

“Everything but you. Why must it be you?”

Porcelain fingers dig at the Vicar’s throat just as the thought leaves him, and he gasps, and he struggles, and he chokes from something he refuses to see. Any man is suicidal until the graph completes itself, altitude and cognition intersect, forming vertices of last-minute wishes. Any man is suicidal right up until he sees the ground fast approaching.

They lock eyes in a vertex of their own, black on blue on brown. Suffocation is its own kind of persuasion in the doll’s hands.

“Because someone ought to look after you.”

There, Laurence thinks, is a voice that only the Mother could love.

And a punishment is not a punishment lest it deal in absolutes. You will have everything you wanted and more. You will have it because you cannot make a beggar out of a man who has nothing.

—

The moon falls out of the sky when you are both but collegians, splattering grotesquely over flowered fields, making music where the divine blood seeps into the dirt.

As scavengers on a sea floor, you’d all crowded, analyzed, theorized, peeled godskin off holy bones and peered into caverns resembling an eye, an abyss, an origin, the center of all or perhaps nothing more than a crater, littering her body, weakened now or perhaps washed upon your grassy shores to enact a hypothesis; give the people a cross and they will find someone to nail on it. They have always found someone to nail on it.

The line between business and banquet blurs until your own hands are sticky-sweet with paleblood, tingling, alighting nerves and sense alike, sweet in the way a scent is carried on a breeze, like an aftertaste. Miracles are never renowned for their grace, as the saints missing their skulls will tell you– they are made when a butcher takes a knife.

You turn, in that distant field, grass licking at your calf and petals caught in your hair, to find your shadow.

You have never seen him so afraid.

He curls into you beneath an empty sky that same evening, haunted, wire-thin ribs making friction against yours when he shakes.

“They used to hang you for this,” he murmurs, the rumble deep and low ‘gainst your collarbones, tectonics at play. You trail your hand down his roadmap spine, revise the places you’ve touched already, the vertebrae made yours.

“This?” 

“Both. The lying and the sacrilege.”

You sit up, studying the way your teeth-marks bruise his skin right at the shoulder. The runemaster spoke of claws, once, but never teeth. You think to inform them of your findings when the sun comes up– one does not need gods to make a sigil. Ours fell out of the sky tonight and still my sense of faith remains. Look there. A holy sign.

“You’re paranoid.”

“Do you blame me?” he laughs, sheepish, and reaches for a cigarette. Though you’ve your own reservations concerning the vice, you pass one to him nonetheless. Perhaps another night, you will even light it for him.

“Still, you must admit, there is something wrong about all of it. Imagine the conclusions one might leap to, should they walk through that door.”

“That is why I have it locked.”

“Yes yes, very good, that’s all well and good,” smoke curls around his mouth, wafting skywards and filling the room with the putrid scent of tobacco. You wish you’d opened a window.

“I might be able to sleep alone.”

“You’re an awful liar.”

Now beside him, pulling him not-so-subtly back into your embrace, resting your chin in the space beside his throat, there, you can almost taste his heartbeat.

“All this shame you have, what advantage does it buy you?”

Muscle is tense against your face, the craning of his neck back to see you looming, spectre-like, weight against weight. Fine-made machine he is, when you feel his bones at work with each shift, lowering his shoulder so that you might rest with greater ease. You study the jut of his cheekbone when he’s turned away from you– how it meets just beneath his ear, cupped shell-like, licked by waves of sea-dark curls. You think to sample him there.

“Of course you’d measure things in terms of advantages. I cannot begin to explain.”

“Try.”

The next exhale comes like waves against a shore, pungent, grey and serpentine. His lips curve upwards– he bites them, you’ve long since noticed, an unconscious habit much like all his others. An absent-minded self destruction.

“Have you ever looked at a dog?” he asks.

“A dog?”

“Yes. They’re– oh, how to describe? Smaller wolves, of sorts. They bark. They’ve got ears that fold.”

“I know what a dog is, Micolash.”

“You could say I’m very familiar with it. That look.”

You pull back, move your other hand higher up, soothing the dents you’ve put in his body. He swats your hand away.

“None of that, now, it’s not a thing to be pitied. I quite liked it, actually. You can get away with many things, when you’re a dog. Many many things. There’s a freedom the look brings.”

He sighs, lamenting days long-gone. Micolash is not a wasteful man, but you suspect he will not smoke this one down to the end. You’ve gained a skill in reading the unreadable– when he might extinguish one, light another, omit a truth or tell a lie.

He looks to you at last, a strange sense of sorrow about him, in his eyes, mismatched as they may be.

“You’d mastered it, you know, when we first met. I relive it at times.”

The cigarette is proof when he puts it out, right there on your windowsill, of which you’ve scolded him half a thousand times before. You suspect he will continue to put them out on your windowsill even after you’ve both left this old building, built new windows and new frames.

He stares past, into the moonless sky, stars scattered like ashes.

You invite him back to bed, and with great effort, he surrenders, slotting in place against your form. You fit against one another like fingers clasped; softness to sharpness, a hipbone against your leg, your hand against the small of his back. Though he does not say it outright, you understand the sight of God has shot bullet-like within, fermented in his centre, a fever-dream, a viral wakefulness, the understanding that one has not just been watched but been studied, visibly dissected, fallen back to his base components.

He was simpler when he was invisible. 

Falling. He’d disclosed to you some time ago that when all was quiet and mired in sleep, he’d fall through the cot, quicksand, now, and drown, and that it was not the falling that’d wake him but the drowning, naturally, he obsessed around the lake because he’d tasted mudwater in a dream and craved to comprehend the overlap, whether life is only precious in the mind or body both. On good nights, he’d take flight– not so much ascension as a weightlessness, drifting through a blue-black nothingness; the sky and cosmos are one, infinity mirroring an endless sea.

You hold him so that when he falls, there is an anchor there, a thing to grasp for, and you wake up many mornings with scratches against your chest and back, and you trim his nails while he regales you with stories of things he’s seen, distant realms and silver mirrors. Tethered, tangible, he finds sleep where you subject yourself to ropeburns.

He’ll drown without you.

Thus, you refuse to let go, even when the water pools from your ankles to your knees, knees to waist, and the quicksand’s made a home of you.

Better to have thought him insane, you think, washing red-white lines from your stomach in the morning.

“I think I hear something,” he whispers.

“I think I hear something. Do you hear it, too?”

If only you had.

If only you had.

—