Work Text:
Here's what Rita still needed to do:
Fix the portside guns, after they took a nasty hit against a corsair's galley last time at zee. Then sail again—this time, strange enough, with a goal. More of these perilous expeditions to deadly little spits of islands in the middle of nowhere means more to write, more to write means more for them to read, more for them to consider. And that gets her closer to getting back to the University, back to her lab, back to her work studying…
Slip back through the mirror. There's a river in the Waswood that gives her treasures every time she soaks her hand in the silt on its bank, strange forgotten things—some useful, some not, and more still she knows are just out of reach. There are beasts in the jungle that look to her with familiar eyes, and she sees more kin with them than with the pictures on her mantle of her so-called-family. They taunt her when they run, like they don't know she's faster, sharper, brilliant and deadly. Take the knife, drive it deep, and ignore the sinking feeling that…
The Godfall, that massive crashed stalactite half-sunken in the zee, continues to haunt her. Not the part you'd think would bother a lady—not the stretched bones and warped flesh, the wordless drone of chittering, garbled chanting, the interconnections of their hands-on-hands, eyes-on-eyes, skin-on-skin. No—they looked at her like they knew something she didn't. Like they're waiting, not for her, but for something within her to eclose. Almost as if…
There's a twisted bone on her desk—meant to head back to her lab, but it's not worth going all that way if she has to use the back entrance and sneak about like the urchin she swore she'd never be again. Two bones, if we're being clear—radius and ulna, likely human but could just as easily be any simian, twined up in each other like a dancer's ribbons. She stares at it—runs her hand along her wrist idly, traces the groove all the way to her elbow, folds her hand this way and that to feel the longbones cross each other, imagine them meet at the middle with a clean click. She doesn't think her bones are twisted (that doesn't keep her from checking) but she knows, knows, that something else is changing under her skin.
Every plunge beneath the waves, she keeps her eyes wide open, because if she blinks, she'll miss what's coming next. There's shadows in the deep that flit on the edges of her vision, and she tries to be fast enough to move first, a deeper shadow than the Neath can produce. It's changing how she sees on land—she doesn't remember the Surface sun, but even the tenebrous lamplights lining the cobbled streets make her wince. Colors fuzz at the edges of each other—red warbling into green becoming virric, cosmogone, gant. She blinks—it all resolves. Headache, she says to anyone watching the tears bead at her eyes as she stares into a candlespot. That's all.
Every death brings her closer. She's gotten good at chess. The first death was the hardest, everyone knows that, but she doesn't think they're supposed to be this easy. Killing gets easier too. She's learning more about the weak spots that pepper the skin of the living, and everything below her scalpel becomes the same masses of blood and bone, chitin and scale, fur and claw and skin and hair. She finds someone in the colonies retired from the verysame job, and they tell her quite plainly that a Monster Hunter does not mean one who hunts monsters. She doesn't stare at the uncanny shapes beneath their bandages. She has gotten good at expecting the things that do not want to be expected.
Finally:
Try to kill the beast. Again. Again. Again. Again.