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The end of the world was quiet. In a vast, glassy stillness, exquisite darkness infinitely reflecting itself, Lace opened her eyes.
She cast her gaze about it. Nothing. It was as she had imagined. The Void, no longer reaching with desperate, creeping tendrils, had opened its gaping maw and swallowed her whole, and she had fallen, sinking deftly, as if into a lover’s arms, into the promise of oblivion. It had been as easy as falling asleep. Death or dissolution—they were one and the same. Here, her mother could not touch her. Here, her mother could not save her. She had doomed them both. And what a thrill that was!—her freedom finally won, the price of which was absolute. She was untouchable.
She was utterly alone.
She began to laugh, at first lilting and shaky, then harder and louder, and louder still, nearly screeching, all nervousness falling away, until she would have been bent in two had she remained in full possession of her own body. She giggled and cackled and howled uproariously, fear and exhilaration and—distantly, she realised, anguish—collapsing in upon themselves in an ever-consuming crescendo. She did not know when she had begun to cry, but her sobs came in great, heaving waves. She wept for her mother. She wept for her mother’s fallen kingdom. She wept for all her mother’s children. She wept for death itself, death brought to heel by sheer desperation. And, in the most private depths of her heart, she wept for something she could not name, an ember that refused to die, a light she could not snuff out herself, no matter how hard she tried.
Then, from the darkness, came an answer to her tears. She felt the Void shift around her. Where emptiness had stretched into eternity, she now sensed intent coalescing. Good, she thought viciously. Take me. Drown me. End me. I am yours—I could not be hers, but I am yours. You wanted me. You have me now.
It paused, sending faint eddies swirling around her. The sensation of a question she was uncertain of answering. A presence, almost familiar—though she could not see it, she knew, as she knew her own name, that it was there, that it saw her—breaking away to drift before her, the void somehow denser there. It asked her: was she certain?
She answered: what difference would it make? and the Void went still. Perhaps a hundred lifetimes passed. Perhaps only one heartbeat had. She imagined the heartbeat of a strange creature that had bested her twice to cut her mother down. The only creature to ever judge her worthy. The creature she had always wanted to be.
She waited an eternity for the verdict, suspended in repose. When it came, it came as a sudden current sweeping through the mass, both movement and its origin, rushing toward her with divine force. She could not have stopped it if she had so desired. It moved upon her very self—she prepared for absolution—and tore her harshly open.
It was unlike anything she had ever known. The cut of a blade, slicing through a thousand of her threads, a strand of silk catching and ripping away from her, the pass of a needle again and again across the wound until she was whole, even that horrid time she had fallen into the steam of the exhaust organ and burnt herself terribly—they all paled before it. Immediate and unceasing, it was the sensation of total disintegration.
She screamed, and oblivion screamed with her, her agony made manifest. She sobbed, and the whole world shuddered with the force of her sorrow, groaning in abject horror. Despair, sublimated into mania, congealed within her, and she heaved, twisting and thrashing as it choked her. She could not bear it—and, with a terrible clarity, came to know that she was despair. The fragile boundaries of her self had unraveled. She saw the truth of her nature laid bare, and longed in equal parts to destroy and reclaim it. This, she now understood, was the price of total obedience, of dissolution.
She was terrified. She had not wanted this. She had wanted—she had hoped—to die with grace. To slip into stillness as water runs smoothly down in rivulets to meet itself. She had wanted relief. She had gazed upon her mother’s face—last light she’d ever see—and tipped backwards freely into her own undoing.
She had not thought that in those depths she might discover the incontestable evidence of her existence. For despair was a presence—it raged against disintegration. It made itself known. It made her known. It was, she realised, the very proof she had desired all this time. Of course it had taken that final plunge to awaken her to this truth. How fitting. How ironic! A mad laugh became a shriek as the Void roiled with life—hers—and for one brief instant, she caught a burst of white, a streak of lightning rushing at her, the gleam of metal, and, though blurred and dulled, as though seen through several layers of dirty glass, an unmistakable, vivid red.
Fool spider, she whispered, voiceless, even as she strained. I am alive. And we will all die.
If that damned, impossible spider heard her, she gave no sign of it. The needle flashed, and darkness came again. Some part of her wondered if it had even been real, or if it had been a vision—a memory, a dream—burst forth from her dying mind. It begged to succumb. Let her live in fantastic, agonising visions, it pleaded. Let her struggle in vain against death, and in that moment know herself, and let her die gloriously, her wish realised all too late. Let it all come down. The Void responded, surged to meet her, and she was suddenly stripped raw, her mouth gashed open in an endless scream.
She writhed. Black globules spewed forth. Barbed tendrils burst from her chest to lash at the air. The ground quaked with her desperation. She felt herself everywhere, in the black blades that solidified and came crashing in from all sides, and the void that streaked blindly through the abyss, seeking any target. At once pulled in all directions and crushed into a single point, she was everything and nothing. She was falling apart. She was nearly through. Oblivion would take her in all her ugly, futile, waning strength. She hung, ragdoll in the air on the precipice, and felt all her sorrow sharpen her pin, aimed at the heart of a weary, staggering spider, who still fought so fiercely to free her. Would she, too, die despite her gods-blessed, gods-cursed, gods-given, incontestable life?
No, said the sad, mad coal still singing in her heart. Not her. You shall not take her.
And in her darkest despair, in her echoing, chorused anguish, at the centre of the self she was frightened to admit she did not want to surrender—a spark. It smouldered, faint and flickering at first—and then it sputtered, and caught, and all at once set her aflame. Everywhere desolation touched her, had suffused her, it blazed defiant. It licked along her limbs, along her very soul, and burnt as hot as she had feared, so hot she almost—almost—thought herself too weak to withstand it. But there she was, alight. She felt it in full force, she felt it despite her terror, and she remained. She held fast to herself, fed the fire until it, too, threatened to consume her, until it was her.
She named it hunger. She named it hope—
—and hope stayed that fateful blade. Black eyes met hers. Grim posture. Lithe body more a line of movement. Recognition. Determination. Glint of silk and steel. The rush. The strike. The cry.
And darkness veiled her eyes.