Joel’s body crawled along the frozen ground of the cemetery with his nose pressed so close to the dirt that it rubbed the flesh raw. Around him, in awkward imitation, the sharp-toed children snuffled along. Though young, they were eager to learn the ways of their parents.
Not-Cassy strolled along, her rotting body wrapped up in the thick fur-lined denim coat of a man foolish enough to picnic in the cemetery. Now his corpse lay slumped and twisted in the shade of a granite crucifix as the snow quietly concealed the disaster of flesh. The man’s lover had run, but his vision had not pierced the veil of Not-Cassy’s stealth technique.
She licked blood from her fingernails as they continued. There was nothing amiss with sowing a little terror. One of her fingernails came away from the suction. She chewed at the crispy, crunchy treat with relish.
It’s the little things, she mused, and when you broke the universe down it was all little things.
A snowflake landed on her skin and shivered. She delighted at the fear of winter as she strode through it like a knife through a hogtied victim. Tombstones spread out around them. Little stumps of stone sticking up from the blanket of snow. Ahead of her, Not-Joel paused above a certain grave with a fresh headstone. He raised his head and let out an excited, guttural growl as their children dug their sharpened claws into the hard soil like pickaxes.
Someone had scratched a name into the polished black slate with a knife.
Penelope.
You always made me laugh.
1999 - 2023.
A scent wafted up from the grave, something light, almost sheer, an essence of another world seeping in through the cracks. This strange scent, not scent, like the blackest perfume or the whitest sewerage, pervaded the whole graveyard — the sublimation of death — but here it was stronger.
Not-Joel had done good work. They weren't strong enough to face Zoe, to face the system-blighted champions, not yet, but soon…
A smile tugged at Not-Cassy’s face as Not-Joel dug through the snow until his fingertips bled. The droplets spread like rose petals upon the snow. Their children flung dirt behind them. Even though the grave was fresh, the winter chill had compacted and toughened the ground.
“To me,” Not-Cassy whispered, and Not-Joel retreated from the grave. He slunk up beside her and leaned his shivering bulk against her leg. She crouched as their children continued digging. His still-living skin was numb and cool in her hands as she lifted his fingers to her mouth. One by one she sucked his fingers until the blood no longer flowed. He shivered as his fingers, now clean and damp with her saliva, settled once more upon the snow.
She swirled the blood inside her mouth before leaning over Not-Joel, and, like a mother bird, retched. She fed himself to himself and his frozen and cracked skin healed over as the warmth seeped through him.
Let nobody say Not-Cassy was not kind.
The children continued their maddened digging, flinging dirt every, but wrapped up in Not-Cassy’s cocoon of stealth, there was no concern of them being seen.
Eventually, claws scraped against wood, and the children gibbered with excitement. They practically leaped from the disturbed grave and clambered over Not-Joel’s back until he bent under the weight. Within minutes their excited chirping had become faint snores.
Not-Cassy peered over the edge of the grave. Her hands were snug inside the furry pockets of the heavy jacket. There was no coffin. How could there have been? The whole graveyard stank of the hastily buried dead. Instead of a wooden tomb, there lay a body wrapped in cotton sheets. It resembled a fly in a spider’s larder. The dirt stained the once white fabrics a pale coffee color, but over the eyes were two dark circles where blood and filth had crusted up through the funeral layers.
A smell as beautiful and intrinsic as the one that sluggishly pumped through Not-Cassy’s vein.
The wrapped corpse twitched under the cold air. It wriggled, and moaned, but the wrappings kept it in place, kept it gagged beyond words.
“Open it,” Not-Cassy ordered,
Not-Joel dipped his head in obedience and crawled into the pit. Weighed down by his children it took him a few minutes to grip the wrappings and tear them apart. A woman spilled out. Her body was black with rot and oozing. She turned to look up at Not-Cassy and her neck snapped with the effort and dangled awkwardly upon the shoulders.
Not-Cassy crouched beside the edge of the grave like a ghoul and smiled.
“You have nothing to say?” she said as Joel climbed out of the grave.
The corpse moaned. Burned-out eyes twitched. A tongue flopped against teeth that slipped beyond lips as a cloud of rot exhaled from a liquifying throat.
Not-Cassy’s grin grew and grew.
“You have spent so long here that you have become a silent one. I wonder what you are thinking and feeling. What do you want to express? Weeks you’ve spent railing against the System’s presence. Ever since this pitiful flesh you wear rejected the embrace of that heavenly liar. You’ve lived inside this corpse like a maggot in fruit, but the humans threw away the fruit before the safe zone fell. Before you could wriggle free and fly. What have you learned, trapped so in the deep and the dark? What secrets plague you?” She tittered and cupped a hand about her ear. “Do not worry, we can hear you loud and clear. We know what you want.”
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The corpse twitched and looked up at her with the longing of a charred puppy.
“Yes,” Not-Cassy whispered. “You want freedom and feasting and I am here to say… you shall have nothing.”
The thing that was not Cassy reached her fingers up inside her jaw and yanked hard. Her jaw unhinged with a snap and stretched down like a hungry serpent. She dropped onto all fours. Her distended chin scraped the ground as she slunk down into the pit, toward the thrashing corpse.
Drool and laughter slipped over her lips before she sucked. Air whipped toward her mouth with a hollow moaning. A sound filled her throat, a sound that came from deep within, like the dying groans of an abandoned hospital.
Flecks of filth floated up from the corpse and spun into Not-Cassy’s throat. She swallowed it all but did not stop sucking.
The corpse of Penelope and the parasite within flailed. In its urgency, it snapped the bindings and hurled itself out of the grave like a fish flopping on land. Too long in the grave had rotted sinew and joints. It rolled away across the snow, but Not-Joel placed a foot upon its chest and pinned it down as Not-Cassy crawled up out of the pit and sucked.
Filth cracked the skin as veins ruptured.
Not-Penelope screeched and squirmed but she could not escape the ravenous pair. Filth flowed out of her faster and faster. Not-Cassy’s stomach bulged, and her breasts grew heavy with milk as she devoured. Soon, there was naught but a husk in the snow before her. She snapped her jaw back into place and the rotten sinews reformed, the blackened skin flushed with warmth.
Not-Joel pushed the crumbling corpse back into the grave before cavorting about, groaning, whining with excitement. Not-Cassy smiled and rubbed at her belly. The skin, and the meat beneath, trembled at her touch.
“I feel it too,” she said as her smile stretched until it split her cheeks. “So many siblings to devour.”
###
It took Trinch longer than he expected to acclimate to the fiery body of the mantis. The extra limbs made walking difficult, and the molten Skein caused intense discomfort. People didn’t call him the Winter Thief for nothing.
But slowly, as he wove his way through the snow-covered forest, he figured out how to manipulate the limbs so he moved with not just ease, but with grace. The long barbed claws felt like gripped daggers, rather than weighted mittens. The fiery heat became a perk, something to melt into, not to resist. He experimented by fighting a mantis he stumbled upon. Its path of earth and water should have given it an advantage, not to mention its level, but Trinch reached level 100 in his former body, and it was a poor crafter who blamed their tools.
The fight — if it could be called that — was over in seconds. His claws stabbed through a bulging eye and lit the brain on fire.
With his new body satisfactorily under control, he set about recreating his old techniques. The four legs folded underneath him in an insectile lotus, while his claws rested on his knees. He couldn’t close his eyes, but he could open his mind, and with his connection to the system secured he endured bolt after bolt of thunderous lightning.
[Technique crystalized…]
[Cuddly as a Cactus]
[Charming as an Eel]
[Greasy Black Peel]
[Heart’s an Empty Hole]
White lightning slipped along his limbs and crackled around his exoskeleton. Evaporated snow billowed in waves as the ground beneath throbbed with a red glassy light.
For the same reason the molten rock didn’t harm him, he could not be the same. Though his last body was the peak of perfection — and that was perfection as defined by two systems — and his mind was of equal grade, even he could not recreate god twice.
Of course, though his knowledge of techniques was intimate and confident, it couldn’t alter reality: his new body, his new Skein, was different, and so his results would be different.
Rather than despair, he looked forward to testing his abilities in combat, and a wicked smile chattered at his mandibles. There were certain targets he looked forward to practicing upon.
It was a shame that he could not recreate his ultimate technique:
[Termites in your Smile]
But that one required time above all else.
As the lightning died down and his techniques solidified, he rose from his position and set out through the snow.
After a few hours of travel, he reached the Mantis Hive. Indistinguishable from the surrounding forest except for the prevalence of caves, Trinch entered a tunnel. The flame-wreathed brain he rode knew the way as instinctively as a floaming fish knows the way to its heartland, and he let his body lead him to the central chamber in the hive's belly. Mist filled the ice-lined corridors. Steam rose from each step of his superheated feet.
At last, he entered the chamber of the Winter Queen. Part throne room, part birthing chamber, and part laboratory. It was ovular distinctly organically, shaped not from the surrounding stone but by some chitinous bone. Pale like moonlight on a field of ice. Icicles dripped from the ceiling, and in the center, ringed by heavy frost, lay a pool of frigid water that glowed with pure turquoise light. Mantis drones ringed the pool, each of them staring at him with their stark inhumanity as he entered, but Trinch ignored them. His gaze fell upon the pool, and its occupant.
The pool was deep, easily deep enough to cover the head of even his previous body, but the Queen was not of such small stature.
She stood in the pool with only her abdomen covered, but her form was not completely insectile. Though she retained the lower half of a mantis, from the middle up she wore a pale human frame. Silver hair cascaded down to cover heavy breasts and wide hips. Dexterous human fingers cradled an embryonic mantis. While from her back, huge war scythes hung, each as long as Trinch’s new body. Hot blood dripped from these scythes and landed in the pool, staining the blue a deeper green. Some attendants hurried away with the still-bleeding corpse of a human into a tunnel in the walls. Other attendants dragged away the crushed body of a mantis drone.
The Winter Queen ignored both as she dipped a blood-smeared finger into the embryo’s mouth.
It twitched.
Squirmed.
Stilled.
“Another failure,” she said in a serene voice as she dropped the embryo into the pool. “And now a stranger dares enter my hive.”
Her wings fanned as she faced Trinch. Thirty-seven wings of power, and even with Trinch’s mastery over his techniques, he wasn’t sure he could defeat her in a fight.
Well, he was sure he could, but he wasn’t sure it would be painless.
Good thing he wasn’t there to fight.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “You wear my child. Is this an insult? Or infiltration?”
“Neither.”
Trinch lowered himself into a deep bow until his head almost touched the floor.
“My queen, I am here to make an offer.”