The honest man, the faker-god pretending to be Kultemeren… he’d lied. There was no salvation for her. There was no Sunset Citadel. The meaning of his words was plain now. She was lost, travelling the wrong direction, heading from nowhere into nothingness.
She didn’t care anymore. She was Abstraxia. She would continue, and she would continue, and that would be all.
It was only when she lost all hope that things changed.
A single thin red rod, protruding vertically from between two rocks, was waving cheerily at her from a great remove. So strange was the notion of something new, something different, that she halted immediately upon spotting it.
She had little doubt that to an observer, to the observers, her cautious approach might’ve made her look timid. She didn’t care. She slunk up, hunched low to the rocks, heedless now of the bitter slicing the bare soles of her feet endured. It could’ve been anything. The appendage of some native animal she’d be forced to fight. Something dropped by the godling on his opposing route, inherently perilous…
It was no more than a foot long, and it continued to wave. The motion, it seemed as she came closer, was entirely random. Like a blade of grass, shifting in the caress of a wind she could not feel.
The last ten yards she covered swiftly.
It was a blade of grass. Crimson in hue, like all else here, yet it was grass. At least in appearance.
She plucked it, claws snicking through its slender stem, and raised it to her teeth without even thinking. The meagre amount of red sap inside was sweeter than she’d expected, sweeter than bee-honey. A luxury unlike anything she’d tasted since the before-times, since she was someone else. She guzzled it, slurping hard at the thing to drain it dry, then chomped the dry husk to bits between her fangs.
When she was done she dropped to all fours, letting the boulders work their magic on her, uncaring. A sudden influx of aggravating sensations went rippling down her shins but she could ignore it to press her lips about the broken-off stalk of the plant.
It wasn’t just the taste of it. It was the feeling it aroused in her. There was power in the stuff. And this was just a single measly blade of grass!
When she struggled to her feet, she cast about, seeing her surroundings anew.
A landscape… of power.
“That was not for thee, Abstraxia.”
The female voice spoke softly but there was a hint of menace in the sound, and it seemed to come from between her toes.
She looked down at the gnawed grass-stump, eyes wide.
“Do not be afraid.” It used a coddling tone, now, as if satisfied with her reaction. “Thou art not the first to make that mistake. But be warned. Those blades of grass thou didst sup belong unto the King’s own ministers. Thou shouldst not knowingly draw from his stock, and to do so unknowingly would invite their wrath no less.”
“Who – who are you? Why are you… why would you tell me this?”
“I am one who would see thee reach the Citadel.”
Chills of excitement gripped her. She flung her head up, looking out at the rocky horizon.
Nothing. Still nothing.
“Thou art closer than thou canst understand. Continue. There’s juice left in you yet.”
With that last phrase the formality seemed to leave the voice, replaced with gentle mockery, and this loosened her own tongue.
“And you’re helping me, because…?”
“I have tasks for you to complete. You will be my ward.”
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“Your prisoner?”
“You have been a prisoner. A million shadows did close upon you tend, inhaling your breath and blowing it back, needling each hair to your scalp, fastening each bond about wrist and ankle, wrist and ankle… Now it is your turn to guard, and to chastise your former wayward cellmates. If you see this as enslavement, so be it. There is no better role for you in this world, or any other.”
She hesitated, despite it being everything she’d ever wanted.
“Which god do you serve?”
The voice coming out of the rocks at her feet seemed to laugh, fizzing and wheezing.
“Which god? There is but one! We serve the Queen of Night, of course! No other lesser being called deity shall hear our pleas, to their eternal shame.”
Abstraxia straightened up. “Mejesta? Ma… Makrieleg?”
“No, no.” Impatience now. “Thou might in time become, as I, the peer of such a creature, and rule domains in thine own name, the dark goddess of worlds in thine own right. Thou art no longer blinded by the Shadow. Soon thou shalt cast thine own across worlds, and see millions whimper, tremble in fear at thine approach. All this and more might I promise, shouldst thou come hence, and offer me thy service.”
“Your…” She stopped herself, steeling her will. “By what name… by what name shall I call thee?”
The voice laughed.
“I am known as Haehuinil. From the womb of my mind issued forth Dhoron, Golyana, Velko, and a hundred others whose myths once claimed worlds in my name.”
Was that a trace of regret, there, in the voice?
“And now thee also, Abstraxia. From my mind, thine. From thy power, mine. And all for the King and his Queen, in the end. But to keep even one drop for each gallon thou spilst; ah, ’tis a glory! A glory! A glory…”
Regret replaced with relish. Relish Abstraxia knew for herself, now.
Without another word, she started walking once more, not even wincing.
It was not a lie. My reward lies ahead. I only need the strength to get there.
Her knees knocked, and by pure force of will she forced the legs to lope out ahead of her, clawed feet pulling her across the landscape in spite of the agonies they endured.
Keep walking.
* * *
The endless churning sloshing became rustling, swishing. Waters that were not really waters shifted, intensifying, coalescing. Grasses that were not really grasses came into sharper and sharper focus. When at last Abstraxia stood in the midst of the open plains, surrounded by crimson foliage, she understood the reality of things.
Water, grass, the form was meaningless. It was the objective truth behind the form that held meaning, and that truth was blood.
That truth was power.
She resisted the urge to cackle, saunter about in glee at this, this conquering, this victory beyond the jaws of death and death and death. For one thing, when taken in clumps these blades of grass were like bundles of razors, more likely to slash her to pieces than the grim boulders she’d left behind. For another, she knew that she was watched. She would have to show only her most resolute expression, wearing her face like a mask. She would impress this Haehuinil. She would slide barely-harmed across this crimson landscape, and present herself to her new masters in all her glory.
“You show remarkable restraint.”
The wind moved the grasses, and the voice rose from them, immeasurably louder now.
The same voice, though. Haehuinil’s.
“Come to us. Don’t delay – you’ll never reach us that way. Run wild through the fields, my child. Run and bleed and be free.”
She obeyed at once, giving in to temptation, raising a bawling yell of pure joy for the last time in her long, long existence. She sprang out across the rolling featureless expanse, trailing blood as she went, uncaring.
For all of seven or eight bounds, anyway.
Before she’d even gone what should’ve been a league in the old measurements, despair had eaten and re-eaten her, regurgitating what remained and swallowing it again and again, seeking to whittle her away, strip her into dismayed little flecks of her former self so that she might be more-easily digested. Once or twice she even heard the laughter of Haehuinil, her patron and sponsor, echoing across the delirious flatlands as though a million million souls repeated the sounds.
The feet were gone entirely, and little remained of her legs. Twisted stumps of bone tapered down to the ankle where they finally culminated in white knots of unfeeling matter, oozing marrow where they pressed into the scarlet soil. In her fascination as she walked, walked, walked she realised this must’ve been how those sword-demons felt all the time, their blade-legs digging into the ground…
Did it still hurt them too? Or had they moved past it as they changed, making flesh and bone into metal?
She touched her tongue with a nail every now and then to ensure it wasn’t becoming a rod of metal, traced her brows with a fingertip to check her face wasn’t shaped like an hourglass. She felt stupid; she hoped Haehuinil didn’t know what she was doing, but the chances of that were next to nil. One time, the laughter rang out across the endless fields as if in response to her nervous gesture – and Abstraxia lowered the hand instantly, stopping and throwing her own laughter back at the horizon’s carpets of blood, a nasal, self-mocking, self-doubting sound.
Haehuinil’s laughter only grew louder, more amused, descending into a bubbling wheeze that every empty parcel of air seemed to join and amplify, a chorus of increasingly-deafening clamour. At first Abstraxia tried to match it, but there was no point. She fell silent, waiting for the excoriating cackling to stop.
It didn’t. Eventually she stirred her stumps into action once more, making her way into the source of the noise, battered and buffeted by its thunder.
Scowling, she endured it.
Scowling, she kept walking.
* * *