INTERLUDE 7A: THE CITADEL
“Do not fear to walk in darkness, for that is where I walk. Wherever you walk in darkness know this: you do not walk alone.”
– from ‘The Book of Kultemeren’, 2:1-2
They’d better not have been lying to me.
Abstraxia’s cracked feet were no match for the black boulders. These rocks weren’t just jagged; they were like sponges of salt-crusted blades, nests of dark ridges that clustered about, hiding the shallow grooves with which this hostile terrain sought to harvest her blood, draw it away into sunken canals. Those canals were visible at times, where a wedged-in boulder had been shifted up the shoreline, revealing the arterial network beneath the torturous land. The crimson waves would wash over the landscape soon enough, stealing away the little globs of treasures she left behind her. She would be forced to seek the higher ground yet again, wait out the itinerant, softly-singing tide on the slopes.
She didn’t like the slopes. Sometimes she had to put her hands on the boulders, clamber up the shelves, and no matter how careful she was she always ended up slicing her palms and fingers, her beautiful long fingers. Feet were one thing, but did this place have to take her hands too?
There was often nothing else for it. To refuse to climb would mean facing the waves, and, more than anything, she did not want to get swept out into that sea, to join her voice to its everlasting chorus. Yet to climb without using her claws would risk falling, and she’d long-since learnt her lesson about falling over. Her face, torso, limbs… the brutal teachings had marked every part of her with criss-cross letters that ached and wept, forever unhealing.
For now, she limped on. There was no sunrise or sunset, no morning noon or night. Just the eternal bloodstain clouds seeping across the eternal bloodstain sky, like a child using a stick to swirl the left-overs on a killing-floor, refusing to let the puddles congeal. Red – red was the order of everything here. The sky was red. The waves were red. Even the black rocks – on those rare occasions when she’d passed a boulder that seemed to have recently fallen, upon inspection she’d found that even the rock itself bled, bright-red rivulets dripping down into the canals below.
My skin is red, she mused, noting her arms as they swung. Their surfaces were more scabs than skin, the wounds still weeping clear fluids at a startling rate.
Where the moisture, the blood came from – where any of it came from, she didn’t understand. Surely she ought to have been dead days ago, and, yet, here she was. Dragging her corpse up the coast.
All to find the Sunset Citadel.
They’d better not have been lying to me, she said to herself yet again. It must be real.
It must be.
Must be.
If this was all there was – if all that existed was this unbearable coastline – then she might as well have ended herself. Casting herself into the sea was out of the question, but climbing a pile of boulders then launching herself off? She would be more than capable of that. A solid fifteen, twenty foot fall… if she plunged down head-first, aimed her skull straight at a vicious right-angle of rock? She’d killed in a similar manner plenty of times before. She knew she was capable of this much.
Yet what would stop her returning again afterwards? A creature was at its most vulnerable on the plane of its origin. So would she return to Etherium, or was Infernum her place, now and forevermore? Would she be bound to this shoreline, consciousness refusing to properly depart flesh? What if the remnants of her spirit were drawn on into the waves, and her reawakening was in the midst of a million million thrashing souls, all clamouring futilely for release?
No. She would stay the course. Keep walking.
Keep walking.
* * *
Days passed – or what would’ve been days, had the skies ever changed. She couldn’t count out the passage of time by the tides; what might have felt like an hour went by, but in its course the tide could’ve switched direction three times already. There was nothing, no one. No crabs or gulls. No delicious midges. Nothing.
Nothing.
She kept walking.
They’d better not have been lying to me.
It had become something of a mantra to her now. The hideous people in the city whose rumours sent her here – they’d warned her in their strange chittering tongue, insectoid mandibles clicking. She wasn’t able to lie to herself – she’d somehow understood every Infernal word, the meaning clear as glass.
“If you go, that will be-e-e-e-e-e-e your path and you’ll never se-e-e-e-e-e-e our fair walls again!“
The bit about the ‘fair walls’ was garbage. Literal garbage. The strange, half-buried settlement was walled-in with the refuse of a thousand lands, wafted through the demi-planes of dross and decay and used to form a barrier against the denizens of the swamps beyond. It wasn’t even the good stuff – no booze, no filth, no body-parts or even bones. Just broken pottery, little scraps of shattered furniture, threads lost from clothing. The best thing she saw was half an odd sock.
No, she’d taken the meaning alright. As surely as the past pointed only into the future, she’d bound herself to some dark purpose by setting out for this destination. Her feet could only take her one way, and upon seeing her resolve the many-eyed, dangling creatures of the swamps had let her pass by unmolested. Onward, or death, and rebirth, and rebirth, and rebirth…
Never backwards.
Never ending.
On what should’ve been something like the tenth day, the sea started calling to her.
It began subtly at first. The soft inward sigh, like an ahhh or ahhb sound. The rush of the wave as it crashed, like strax. Then the pensive recoil, the furtive retreat, iii-ahhh.
Ab-strax-ia.
Ab-strax-ia.
She thought regularly about the re-naming process. Her previous name had been found wanting, and it had been changed – she understood this much. It had happened before. There was little power in it, then, but there was more now. A kernel of the self she sought. An enticing nugget of lore, designed to drag her on, tease the correct responses out of her.
Abstraxia, whispered the waves. Abstraxia…
She dragged herself on.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
Or so it seemed to her.
* * *
The grey smudge ahead of her was hard to make out at first – and it wasn’t just a matter of distance. The figure approaching Abstraxia, coming the other way down the coastline with unnerving rapidity, appeared to have about it an enigmatic aura so strong that it dispelled its own presence from her mind repeatedly. The fifteenth or fiftieth time she noticed it, it was closer than she could bring herself to understand, and she actually halted, bringing her hands up to her face and cringing.
She was watching between her ragged fingers when he arrived in her vicinity, seemingly between one footfall and the next, his posture that of one merely out for a stroll. He was a tall, thin man, his hood cast back to reveal his narrow face, big hooked nose, flashing grey eyes. The iron-grey robe he wore possessed its own colour, independent of the crimson illumination casting everything in shades of red, and its fabric was so festooned with silvery spiders as to appear almost woven out of them; they moved continually, a fabric of living metal arachnids.
He was already raising the other foot to depart – a bare foot, bereft of both boot and, somehow, blood –
Then, just as he shifted his weight, he tossed his head in her direction, the long colourless hair barely swinging, clinging to his face and neck in lank locks. He smoothly returned the bare foot to the rock, turning to her. Those flashing eyes fell upon her, and in her naivety she failed to hide her gaze, failed to pay obeisance to this superior entity.
And to think!
To think she’d thought she knew. She thought she knew what pain was.
The stranger was a teacher and oh, oh, how he taught her.
She almost snapped her neck shoving her chin into her chest, and she went to her knees heavily, thrusting her arms out before her and pressing her face to the boulder in gratitude. Breaking eye-contact was her only goal. The bitter embrace of the rock was nothing, nothing, even as it opened her up, a thousand wounds –
“You poor creature,” the man said tenderly.
Somehow, every ache alleviated all at once, every laceration closing despite her prostrate pose. When she’d gone down, she’d unthinkingly sheared off half the scrawny kneecap – but she only noticed it as the damage was being reversed.
There was no pleasure in healing. Only bitterness.
She sat back on her knees, marvelling at the fact she felt so thoroughly unimpressed. The restoration still working its way through her, she slowly got to her feet, but she still didn’t dare to raise her face, her eyes to the stranger.
She stared down at her feet instead.
Her healed, unharmed feet. Skin smooth and grey and clean.
Clean.
A trick!
“Do not be fooled; Moon-sight holds as much Truth as Sun-sight,” the interloper said, as if his fancy words meant anything to her. “Your soul’s pages are bare to me, but your body reads the words aloud, those dreadful utterances whose echoes resound in the halls of your own mind. You long for release, but they will not permit you to Die here. Ere the binding of your wounds, each oozing opening and every itching sore sang a song your ears could not, cannot hear. Yet Star-sight brings Truth unparalleled. You will not relent, even if I say you head the wrong way along the shoreline. If I offer to take your hand, you will not trust me. You will only trust in the ones who offer to mould you, not those who would have you mould yourself. I would need to break you to take you at my side.”
She may have been a crude creature, but she did glean something of his meaning. She wasn’t stupid.
“You want me to think you can help me. That’s not what I want.”
“Whither your footfalls lead, I see naught for you but pain, purposeless pain, its only goal to prolong itself, to invest itself in new hosts, infest flesh, upon flesh, upon flesh. If you think you know what suffering is…”
She closed her eyes, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. There was still none of the agony she associated with standing, none of the constant reminder that her bare feet were pressed into grooves formed by a web of razors…
“Ah. And so you think of me. How can I be as a teacher to you? You think me a liar. You cannot trust in that which will not admit wishing you ill. That which will not openly use you. All for fear of the hidden hand, at whose movements the unsensed strings are set to pull you hither and thither, put you to dance. But in this I see you still thirst, only and always, for Truth. Would you not see all strings, even those tied fast about the hidden hand itself, and about every limb of its Orchestrator?”
“What about the strings on your hand?” she countered, trying to keep her voice from trembling.
“No,” he went on, using a tone that told her he hadn’t even listened to her. “You are already broken and healed in the wrong shape, taken beyond my ability to repair. I see through your mind, Traseya, as though it were a frozen pool on a clear morning.”
That name hurt more than any other. She sobbed suddenly.
“Do you not know who you are, child? I could offer to show you, but it is not given to me to open closed eyes. That must always come from within, or come none at all.”
I’m Abstraxia.
“That is not my name,” she snarled quietly. Her eyes may have been screwed shut against the tears, her chin may have still been tucked against her chest – but she was willing to gamble her defiance would be recognised by the masters of this place, those whose game she played, whose tests she faced. “Who are you? You don’t belong here.”
“I am not alone in that,” he replied, “and I have many names, and more guises. In that I fear you shall all too soon rival me. To which world were you bound, when they herded you through the Mist?”
She shuddered despite herself. What did he mean? Why did his words resonate within her like a bell, keening clearly, hideously, through the silent halls of her soul?
“Perhaps, if you know not the name of the realm, you could tell me its chiefest demons. From whose womb do the spawn of Hell emanate in your lore? Whose seed sets them there?”
“You mean,” she breathed, suddenly wanting to understand, to be a part of this, “you mean Mejesta and Vaanus?”
“Makrieleg and Vanabroth.” There was something new in his voice there: disdain. “I shall visit them soon enough. That world is known to me as Avalost, the Sixth of its name. And therefore you must know me as Kultemeren, where my sigil is kept by the Liars as though it were holy, thereby hoping to share in my sanctity.”
She reeled, almost opening her eyes to behold him again, take in his strange splendour once more in the light of this revelation.
I will not!
“Where Rivorn Mortichor is my son, he whose pupil and rival will break you in the end, if you pursue the course.” This… this god, or pretender-god, went on in a relentless tirade. “You have strayed far from the path, daughter. You ought to wander the Insebeleth, on Avalost’s lanes of memory, among the dark roses in the fields… your choice still before you. How came you here, to seek the Citadel? You are a warped soul but you are no demon!”
“I will be!” she cried back, turning her head aside so that she could open her eyes, glower in safety at the red sea. “If you’re gonna strike me down, do it.”
“And thereby satiate all your needs for you?” He sounded sad. “No. I see you, Traseya, such that your beauty blinds me! Will you not let me loan you my eyes, even for a moment?”
Between one moment and the next – surely a manifestation of the godling’s desire – a mirror of polished glass appeared, right before her eyes, interrupting and reflecting her ocean-bound glare.
She screwed her eyes shut once more, but not before she caught a glimpse of the woman in the mirror.
Her hair was a cascade of flames, her nose and cheeks full of freckles, eyes blue like pale sapphires.
It was her. Not as she was – not as she had been for as long as she could remember. The goblin-skin… she hadn’t been born with it, had she?
I had red hair, red like fire.
“I shall let you pursue your course, as with all the denizens of the World, until such a time as our courses will not permit us to pass by one another. Then our paths shall instead bring us into Inescapable collision, and both of us will be lessened for it. I for one shall not judge awry for the sake of spending some strength in slaying one more Foe, aeons hence. For you, perhaps, the choice shall prove graver.”
He stopped speaking.
She sat in the silence, listening to the crashing of the red waves.
“Very well. I have almost lingered too long, and every second spent wastes incalculable lives. You are not my only charge, as you well recognise. Fare thee well, Abstraxia. I would say I hope our paths will not cross again, yet that would be the first lie I have spoken, and I will not lie to you. Remember me, later, when you can. I am the Demonslayer. You will not hear me approach unless I will it.”
There was no rustle of fabric, no distinct change she could tell by hearing or by scent – the sea was louder than his movements, the overpowering odour of blood stronger than the god’s perspiration – yet she felt the change as he left her behind, as if the whole world had been tipped over in his presence and only now righted itself.
Sending her crashing back into her blanket of pain.
She opened her eyes and, half-wincing, she looked.
The boulders before her were empty.
It was harder than ever before, setting out again, leaving tranquillity behind in order to seek an uncertain fate. But she did it with a smile fixed on her face.
Keep walking.
She’d passed the test. The masters of this place, this plane, would recognise her worth, her loyalty, her commitment to pain.
Her old wounds made new, started again from fresh.
Keep walking.
* * *