Thana does not see a city. She does not see the shops, and the wonders, and the barnacles twisting themselves into a mockery of space. Her gaze does not linger on the crying walls or the screaming ones (although the sounds of them live in her chest like a tumor nested into the chambers of her heart).
The eyes in the wall, the apex of the rib-cage bridge, the wind no one else can feel but that she can see, all catch in her gaze like flies in a corpse. And Thana welcomes them in with a slack jaw and blood that coagulates instead of races.
Come closer, each whistle of that not-wind in her horn says. Come in, her teeth say as they grind against each other like whetstones and blades. And she does not blink, does not falter, does not pause, as she runs through the noose city like an arrow to the throat of it.
Eligos runs with her, shoulder to shoulder, and his body says nothing--- nothing at all. Death never does.
She feels that same nothing as the gemstones eyes in the door follow the shadow of their death when she passes through. The carpet withers like a forest laid flat at her hooves-- red, to brown, to black, to dust gathering in the mortar. Rooms gather their secrets close, like hens their eggs, as she passes by the chambers of them. The walls grow thick and fat with mold, and moss, and larva while she moves through the stone veins of the castles.
And if the palace is screaming a lament she does not hear it above the thump, thump, thump of a monster’s heart calling her to war.
Her own thump, thump, thumps back an answer. Yes, it bellows, yes.
The throne rises up before them as does the false-god with their throne of bones and their crown of trees. Thana smiles at their opalescent gaze in their opalescent brow-- one that does not compare to the incandescent and implacable wrath in her own. There is a mouth full of teeth in her look and nothing of kindness, or caution, or anything but a poem that she promises to carve into the legs sprouting from a false-god’s chest.
Outside the not-sun dies and the eyes blink.
Inside, in the cage of molded walls, Thana drags her horn against the throne-room archway.
Asterion had to leave this world to find out what true horrors were. Until then, his had all been of the heart — men and kings without virtue, and his own watercolor love. Even the gods here dealt in tame, childish things, politics and grudges; even the deaths they caused lacked imagination.
Oh, but there are horrors here. And although every distant toll of sound, every heavy footfall, echoes wrong, wrong, wrong, there is something within him that whispers that if this is not right, at least it is true.
He might have questioned that voice, if the island in this iteration were only stars, or glass, or darkness. But this time it is chaotic, overstimulating, a carnival maze of surrealities. It began before the awful ribcage of the bridge; a hornets-buzz in the back of his head, the sensation across his skin of insects’ feet. At the gateway to that empty kingdom, Asterion does not pause to explore; he walks deeper, to the heart, as if drawn on a wire. Like Thana he does not turn aside, and his eye is not drawn by rooms that glitter like stars and beckon like women.
From somewhere there are screams, and laughter, and the sound of a hundred feet dancing (but no music), and it is as incomprehensible and unworrisome as the language in dreams. Everywhere is the mockery of splendor: ornate archways with ripped veils spilling like intestines, the same greedy red. A tiled ceiling shadowed with mold. Cracks in the walls that spiderweb like broken mirrors. Past them all the once-king walks, and though his eyes are wild-eyed and his nostrils wide his steps do not falter or slow.
He enters the throne room at the same time Thana does, from an opposite hall like a yawning mouth. Within it is black with shadow and red with firelight, the not-sun far away, and the castle itself seems to be beating like a heart (perhaps it is only the echo of their steps, dying away). And there, oh there, is the king of this place - the god of it - his chest tightens at the sight of that smooth cold face, the gnarled crown. And Asterion, too, gnashes his teeth, and feels his magic rise up in him like a mighty wave (and something else, too, hungrier and darker, something like and not-like that creature on the throne).
Only then does his gaze find Thana, but there is only time for his heart to flinch before the thing that sits on the throne makes a choking, awful noise, a grinding, gurgling voice that does not seem come at all from its mouth, but deeper within, someplace invisible. And perhaps the sound is only in Asterion’s mind (perhaps all those others were, too, and would it be better that way?) for he realizes, with a sickened glance up, that the king, the god, the beast is laughing.
It is laughing at them.
the way upward and the way downward
is one and the same.
Lilac floats to twilight in her eyes as the screech of bone and stone echoes like a rolling roar of thunder in her ears. Wrath turns liquid and quicksilver as starblood in her veins. It spills over her liver, and stomach, and rotten ovaries, like flies over blood-red wine spilled across a wood floor. Hunger spits, and froths, and snarls as it walks ten-legged and frantic up and down, up and down, up and down, her spine. And her hair rises across her back like a lion’s warning as the false god opens his mouth and laughs.
Seeds, wishbones, and opiate powder fall from his teeth like the starblood wrath that is still spilling across her liver.
Thana, or what is left of Thana, does not pause to see the look in Asterion’s eyes. She does not pause to smell the very marrow of her bones clinging to the hollow of his cheeks and the tainted air expelling from his lungs. She does not feel her heart leaping in her chest like a locust at the spine of a wheatgrass blade (like it’s trying to jump out of her chest and go home).
She does not pause to see, or look, or wonder. Because all she can do is listen to that opiate laugh bellowing out from an opalescent mouth. And she watches, in a way that is very much not a look, as the seed and wishbones fall from the lips of the false.
And Thana does not laugh back, or whisper, or bellow out her rage like a lion. She is no mortal thing that makes sound from her rage, or music from her war. She is no thing at all.
Here, in the belly of the castle with twilight glimmering pale and bruise-dark on her cheeks, she is not a single cell of anything. She is a fog rolling in from the sea that a single horizon cannot tame. She is a knock on a door superimposed upon the bleating sounds of sorrow from a mortal’s broken heart. She is the black cosmos whittling children out of the moon until not even a sickle sliver of light is left. She is an abyss with a bloated belly of abominations. She is magic. She is death. There is nothing that she is not.
And she does not laugh because she does not know how to feel so gentle a thing as that. Nor does she scrape her horn down the wall in warning again when she lunges towards the gap thighs of the monster when he raises his body onto two legs like a grizzly bear. Eligos follows closely behind.
Her teeth do not spit out opiate dreams and her throat does not echo with a scratching hiss of wishbone and sinew. Her teeth only know violence-- only violence.
But her teeth learn something new when she uses them to rip out the monster-god’s kneecap from the tender boughs of his birch legs. And what new taste they learn, they learn well.
There is no sound but the endless laughter and the tiny, delicate sound of something hitting the throne room floor. Asterion does not look to see that it is bones, and seeds, and other deep-buried things from the litter of the forest floor, from the bosom of the earth.
Neither does he look at Thana (or her creature, sharp-toothed beside her) to wonder if they are still hungry for his flesh, still hateful of his words.
He and the unicorn both keep their silence, and so there is only the sound of their feet on the floor - as Thana charges the throne (as Asterion might have known she would, as unicorns must always do) and he circles wide, back to a black-tapestried wall. Then the laughter turns to rage, a wrathful scream that makes his ears ring and ring. Then the god-king seizes a scepter ten feet tall and wings it toward the unicorn with a cry like a crumbling bridge, and Asterion reaches down into his magic to see if a monster can drown.
The waiting feels like eons. There’s a roar in the bay stallion’s head, a roar that echoes through the hall; around them things are shaking, dust drifts like mist down the walls, through the winding hallways. Somewhere, metal clangs like the gnashing of teeth; perhaps there is an army, as well as a king - perhaps the city does not sleep at all, but only waits.
But perhaps it will wait too long. For the sea is coming now, answering Asterion’s call, and the water beneath the bridge begins to churn, and roar, and flood. Within the castle (below the castle), water bubbles up, bursting through pipes and pathways, trembling, running, roaring through the halls like blood through veins, racing to the heart.
the way upward and the way downward
is one and the same.
Blood, as it always does, awakens something that has only ever pretended to sleep inside Thana. The ichor of the monster king feeds the hunger that is only like a Hydra. For each drop that slips, smooth as ice on a pond, down her throat a mile of hunger opens up. And her hunger is a horizon by the time the screams sound like anything at all to this thing that has awakened inside her body.
If this world, this pale and civilized world, had thought her monstrous they would have no name, no understanding, for the thing that bares her teeth at the scepter swinging towards her shoulder.
The tip of it, a lapis whittled down to blade, slips down her side and cuts a line across her from shoulder to hip. Her blood does not sing as it falls across the monster’s bloody knee sitting on the floor and his opiate seeds trying to burrow into the meat of them as it falls. The only sound Thana makes, the only sound her blood makes as it falls, is the sound of ruin creeping in tomes of rot and mold across the soiled floor.
Like a wave, a dark shadow of the coming tide, it pushes closer and closer to pool in rivers of decay around her hooves. It rises with the same brutality as her hunger, her wrath, her fresh-hate and vengeance. With it, in it, upon it, Thana pushes through the agony of her flayed skin to sink her horn into the stomach of the towering monster.
Eligos leaps upon the throne and goes for the throat, as all monsters born only from violence know do. His dust pack follows him, their tongues fat with rot and mold as they drag their mouths down the god’s legs. Their collective moaning (as they drink ichor down into their dirt bellies) sounds like another sea racing in from the center of the city.
The monster king screams his rage and swings his claws down towards the unicorn embedded into his center. All he can feel is pain, and a rage that cannot compare to Thana’s, and there is nothing left but survival for any of them. Thought has been devoured by reaction. He swings over and over again, so consumed by feeling that he cannot tell the movement is cleaving him in two upon the point of her horn.
Thana, now marked with maplines of blood and gore, smiles in the river of horror running down her face. To the death, that smile says in the same way it always does. With her, to her, it is always until death.
Before, when he was only himself, he would have gasped in horror at the way the lapis tip of the scepter opens a gash across Thana’s body as neatly as cutting a seam. Instead, as blood begins to bloom red red red, his breath only quickens through his clenched teeth.
At first the floor at the base of the throne is only wet and slick with unicorn blood. But already there is water swirling around Asterion’s ankles, and it washes like a wave over the beach, carrying a foam of decay and the jetsam of the castle. Soon, seconds later, it is scouring the floor below the throne. Soon it is at the bay stallion’s knees, rising toward his belly, and he doesn’t know how much more of the flood is coming but oh, he knows it is. The new current tugs at his legs, urges him away. Tapestries and pictures in gilded frames and things he doesn’t take the time to recognize whirl past him to be pulled into a whirlpool that is forming around the dais.
And still Thana is doing her death-work. It is clear now that she was created for nothing else. If Calliope was made to avenge, to inspire, to ring a bell deep in his heart that said Rise and be brave, Thana is a god only unto herself and her name is Ruin.
He wonders if they are killing each other. He heard the sound, the sound the thing on the throne made when her horn pierced its belly. It was as though the castle was crumbling. And now there is only the sound of a rising sea (rising too quickly) and a pack of beasts devouring, and Asterion’s stomach turns sickly even as his heart is hollow and black, without even seawater to fill it.
But they are taking too long in their struggle. Soon they will all drown. He is certain the god-king is dying, is dead and doesn’t know it yet, but still he swings his claws, each blow more feeble than the rest, against Thana’s hide. Asterion wonders if there will be enough of her left to put back together.
The whirlpool is a charybdis, moaning. If anyone else was coming they have all been swept away from the hallways and the courtyard by the inside-out sea. And as Asterion steps forward the waters part around him, leaving gleaming floor, as though just laid by seraphim for the hallway of god. He steps up toward the throne, and the whirlpool rises until it hovers above the now-still surface of the other waters, and flows and flows in the shape of infinity.
And then the whirlpool drives itself into the king-beast’s throat. It drives him back against his monstrous throne. It runs out his eye sockets like weeping tears, pours out his mouth, cleans the blood from his chest in patterns, and he is still, and quiet, and gone.
Asterion says, just over the sound of the water, “Thana. We must go.” Because the water is still rising, and the city is waking up.
the way upward and the way downward
is one and the same.
When the monster-god dies, and water pours from every orifice of him, Thana feels only a spark of her hunger start to flicker and flame again. She is not settled as the whirlpool rips at her tail like a hurricane turned to sea. She is not content when the god falls from her horn and the water splashes into her eyes when he falls.
She is not content, or settled, or placated.
And if she had felt herself alive with a rabid sort of wrathfulness, it is nothing (nothing!) to how she feels with Asterion speaks to her with water dripping like bloody from his belly. Now, as she feels the water hurry and rush at her hocks, she settles into a universe of violence Novus had yet to discover.
The city is waking up (of course it is) but Thana has already risen to the apex of its sentience and cracked upon her jaw to devour more of it. That same risen part of her turns to the fallen thing caught between Asterion’s skin and smiles.
In another place she would have told him what lived curled between his heart and his soul, what sliver of rot sinks down, down, down closer to his soul each day. Any other time but this one she would have snarled and plucked it loose as it is the right of unicorns made to do. But around them the city is waking up in the flood waters and before them the monster-god is sinking like a stone. And Thana knows, with that unicorn’s knowing that she is not to run away, or turn away from it like he suggests.
She snarls and lifts her blood blade from the water to lay it against his throat. “Go Asterion. It is not your time yet.” Her teeth, below the words, gleam in the light of the water and the eye in the sky to promise that the time is soon, soon, soon, for him. If she is aching, and creeping closer to her own death, she does not know as lost as she is too the universe below her wrath.
Soon Thana will come for him and that blackness creeping towards his soul. Soon she will drain him dry of it.
But today is for the city waking up and so she turns her bloody body into the rising waters instead of away from them. Because when the city wakes up she will be there to meet it, and devour it, and sink it back into the world it came from.
And Thana needs no tide, no current, no sea to do it.
You’re dying, he wants to tell her. But Asterion isn’t sure that Thana would believe him. What unicorn has ever listened, or believed they were a mortal thing at all?
Instead he only watches her (her and her beast) drip with blood that is only partially their own. He pays no more attention to the sinking god, not even to wonder whether it will only rise again (something always does). He doesn’t consider that he has never killed anything before.
Maybe this is only a dream, too. Maybe that’s all the island is, a palace woven of nightmares.
Asterion almost wants to test it by pressing forward against her blade, scattering the salt of his blood to the sea he’s made. His bones are hollow without all his power; his soul is still black and bottomless. If it were not for the thing inside him, cozied up against his consciousness, he might have given himself to that death, if only to prove her words wrong.
Instead they both (he and the sickness within him) only watch as she turns back toward the flooded hallways of the castle and the waking streets of the city. And there is no one left to watch when Asterion steps up onto the water that swirls beneath his belly like it is no less solid than glass, and walks from the dead monster-king and the drowning city.
the way upward and the way downward
is one and the same.
