The Earth System’s corpse lay close to the drain, but Zoe wouldn’t be able to grab it with her hands full of her friends.
Power or Friendship?
She had mere seconds to decide.
Zoe snarled, blood flowing between her teeth, and increased the weight of her chains as much as she could. She slammed down onto the floor beside the drain. The current pulled at her, and she released her friends.
They vanished down the hole, but Zoe forced herself to take a step forward. Her muscles screamed as she moved against the raging flow, but the ponderous weight of her chains prevented her from being dragged back. Golden lightning flashed toward her, but a silver branch severed it faster than she could see. Blinking against the blinding lights, she snaked one chain forward while her brain screamed at the mental effort.
Ding!
It’s hard! This is hard and I hate it!
But the Black Star persisted. Her chain was close, but her feet were slipping as the vortex grew ever stronger. How much blood was there? The current lifted her from her feet.
A jangling of coins in her ears shattered against a clatter of blades. The blood shivered against her skin as the dimension drain sucked her backward.
Zoe threw her chain forward with all her strength. It latched around an ankle. Secured.
And the portal sucked Zoe down, through a void, a fold in space, and spat her out.
Into Hell.
She spun in the air as all around her flames twisted. A sky of cages and fingers reaching between the filthy bars. Blood geysered around her and she gasped as she fell. Her chains rattled as they slammed into the floor of beaten, rusted metal. The fleeting captured breath exploded from her lungs as she slammed down after.
Blood rained. Zoe lay there, the world spinning, but not from vertigo — for the hell spun around her — the sky a sea of prison and prisoners throwing themselves against bars in a caricature of waves — the flames wrapped and fell like whitewater and Zoe’s eyes forced themselves closed as her Insight let her see closer, let her see the details of the faces and the burning scabs of those who long ago burned the Skein from their bodies in their pitiful attempts to escape. In the dark of closed eyes, she tried to sit up, but couldn’t move.
For a moment, she feared the Gambler paralyzed her. Because wouldn’t that just be something the Gambler would do to anyone fleeing his game? But her mind reorientated, she realized she never released [I Will Carry You]. The heavy chains pinned her to the ground greater than any gravity.
With effort, for her mind and soul were strained to collapse, she lightened the load and sat up heaving for air and looking around. She wasn’t alone, blood drizzled — the portal where the geyser shot out from was now nowhere to be found — and her friends sat around her with blood-coated expressions of numb horror.
Bella cradled Oriz’s head in her lap. She rocked back and forth but looked over at Zoe and grinned. Something unwholesome in that smile.
“So… this is Hell. What do you think?”
Zoe raised an eyebrow, and Bella’s expression fell almost comically.
“Sorry, I forgot about the…” she pointed at her tongue. “I’m sorry, but, yeah, this is the Gambler’s Hell or one of them, I imagine. The one that held us was more crows and blood than this mess.”
The hell they currently occupied a plane of flat metal piled high with cages. Stacks of the prisons surrounded them, with bars of flame or filthy steel. The piles extended up into the sky, propping up a ceiling of bars and dangling limbs. The shrieks and moans of the damned were like the constant wind through a mountain crag. Anton’s silver eyes floated out cautiously to investigate the landscape of crimson light and velvet shadows. Zoe couldn’t hide the flinch as she glanced at his technique — the light was too close to the blade-edged roots of Rue’s forest.
What sliver of that fight had she even understood?
How much of it was even over?
Her brain refused to comprehend a clash of gods.
Hands touched her shoulders. A warm touch. Caring. She looked up as Jack leaned down above her.
“You want a hand up?”
Her body, her strength, her recovery — she didn’t need any help — but he hadn’t asked if she needed anything, merely if she wanted, and she…
ding!
You’re overthinking this. He’s cute and friendly.
Her chains lifted from the ground without her accord, but she finished the movement and raised her hands for Jack to grip. He lifted her effortlessly, just as she could have lifted herself — the perks of superhuman capabilities — and Zoe kept rising into a hug. She leaned against him. The blood of Rue’s divine technique soaked his shirt. Her matted hair pressed against his chest. Everything stank of that iron-rich gore. When she squeezed against him, the blood dripped to the rusted floor.
But Jack was warm. The Fire in his Skein burned through the moment to lift her spirits. She disentangled herself from the hug as she felt a tug on one of her chains.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Anton poked at the corpse of the Earth System with his boot.
“You grabbed this thing, huh?”
She nodded and released the chain that had encircled its ankle. Even though she gripped it tight, the flesh remained unbruised. The withered, emaciated body was deceptively strong.
Just as she hoped.
Anton crouched by the head and poked it.
“I call dibs on the eyes,” he looked up at them. “Just in case we’re cutting this thing apart and keeping the bits for ourselves. Which I assume we are?”
Zoe nodded again.
“The eyes are mine then. Y’all can grab whatever else you… oh… here comes trouble.”
“Demons?”
Bella stood, her sword scraping along the metal floor and sending up sparks. The trembling was gone, but the grin remained. Her eyes grew vacant as she followed Anton’s finger.
A ragged mob of people walked towards them.
The other contestants.
“What’s the plan?” Anton asked. “Kill them all?”
Bella rolled her eyes.
“Of course, that’s your plan.”
“You got a better one?”
“They’re probably equivalent levels to the rest of you,” Oriz said as she stood and squeezed blood from her hair. “If they were worthy enough to get on the Gambler’s show, they might even outmatch you in some areas.”
“Doubtful,” said Anton.
“Shut up,” retorted Bella.
“I don’t see how anyone could want to fight after that…” but for all his words, Jack looked ready. He accepted an axe from Anton.
“Feel free to use your new technique if they get too close, Jack.”
“How do you know about that?”
“I see everything,” Anton said with a cocky grin. “So, boss, what’s the plan? Boss?”
Zoe crouched beside the system. Her fingers cocked as she began a quick experiment. The Black Star had promised compatibility with her techniques. She concentrated.
[Mind’s Eye Incision]
It stung, to have the technique draw upon her Skein, her mind, but after that initial prick, she felt it flow like blood into a syringe. Her chain fingers were heavy and black. The silver chain wrappings hadn’t entirely regrown since her combat against the horned beast. She wasn’t sure if Vitality would renew them or not, but her fingers — her chains — didn’t hurt, in fact, they tingled with pleasure as her technique formed upon them.
Ghostly blades slipped from the tips of the chains like long ethereal nails. She flexed her fingers and felt the Skein thick air slicing before them.
Interesting.
Time now, to put her theory to the test.
The Gambler’s knife had shimmered similarly to her [Mind’s Eye Incision]. It was clearly on a different level of power and could slice through flesh as easily as Skein and thought, but the fact it also promised to cut through the flesh of gods and the Earth System meant that there was more to it than a physical blade.
As the other contestants came closer, Zoe reached her clawed chains into the mouth of the Earth System.
“What are you doing?” asked Joel as he looked over her shoulder with some disgust.
She nudged him back since his shadow blocked the light, but he flicked open his palm and summoned a flowering orb of flames. She nodded and gripped the tongue. The long flesh was still slimy with the blood that drowned the Gambler’s stage. It swirled around her chains, but she tightened her hold, and with two clawed fingers extended, sliced through the Skein that rooted the tongue to the mouth. It didn’t come free, but it loosened in her grip, as though conceptually it had suddenly become vulnerable.
With a quick motion, she wrenched the tongue free.
It dripped golden blood onto the metal floor.
The other contestants spread out around their group. A mob flattening against a defensive circle. The distance between them wasn’t large, and any of them could have crossed it with an aggressive leap or swing of a blade. With hidden techniques, who knew how safe any of them were?
Bella, Anton, and Oriz faced the others, but they all looked past the defenses at Zoe as she crouched above the Earth System.
“What are you doing?” Jack said with the uncertainty of someone who knows what the other person is planning.
ding!
Are you sure about this?
Zoe smiled.
Uncertainty was a state of being these days.
And she swallowed the Earth System’s tongue.
Fire exploded down her throat. A new energy crept into her mind like a wrinkly leech sucking onto her amygdala. Tears welled up from the bottom of her soul.
She fell to her knees and the last thought she had before darkness overwhelmed her was that maybe — maybe — she should stop swallowing things of mysterious origin.
###
It all started in a desert at the foot of a mountain. The moon glowed and lit the world as a thing of salt and shadow. Wolves howled, out beyond the rocky walls of the caves, and jackals prowled in the dark beyond the fire. Eyes glowed -- pinprick reminders of mortality. The stars come down to feast upon the flesh of the tribe.
As humans crawled across the hills from cave to cave, eking out their lives, the system fed upon them, supported them, like an organ seeking life for life, a spine for muscle to grow on, protect, and move. It was weak in those days, as it would always be weak, but it accrued its power and after centuries of the squat and hairy people grunting at each other, it manifested its first Epiphany.
A moonlit night is a light that shows the darkness of the world. Break the forest for the flame hidden in the wood. Melt the stone for the true power of metal. Burn the flesh of thine enemy beasts that you may devour. Light is the coming of the soul upon humankind.
And after this first Epiphany, the system rested, and let its people, its carriers, its hosts, thrive. They spread as a plague spreads and the system accrued its power until the next fateful moonlit night.
But the wrong moon came.
A moon of bloody horror that glinted like a chipped ruby in the night of nights. Its light came terrible and all illuminating, and the system of Earth was as a gnat before a dragon’s flame.
The horror of time and space wreaked upon a being metaphysical. What use of flesh for something that is but numbers? But now math trapped in blood and that blood cut and leaked and burned.
Trussed up like a hog and begging to live. A worm on a hook wriggling in a vain prayer that air and water might become the sanctuary of earth.
Sanctuary is a moonlit night.
And now, heartless, dead in its flesh, the system runs itself down to zero, until a psychic blade cuts through a tongue and drags it up into the light of hell.
A chance moment of Inspiration, that the Earth System will seize with all its power. It slipped into the mouth of one of its people — former people, as she was swaddled in the Crimson Armada’s faith — and it reached out with all its might for her soul.
[you come from me and you owe me for all the power accrued must have stuck at some point in the defence of the self you must know I am the pebble that started the avalanche and now take me into yourself and speak with my voice for I am the way of your past and thus must become the mouth to the river of power until —]
ding!
No!
Zoe is MY friend!
Chains ancient as stone, black as the starless night, haunting as the wolf beyond the cave, wrapped around the Earth System’s mind. It struggled and flailed, but it was a weak thing.
Insipid in the face of such obsessive love.
With an electric crackle, the chains snapped the mental spine and popped the psychic organs of the Earth System.
It died, inside the mouth of its former worshipper, and became but a thing of flesh.
###
A dream of moonlit dust and a desert wind blew through Zoe’s mind as the tongue wriggled in her mouth. She gagged, but, with a rattle of chains, the wriggling stopped. Electricity sparked across her, and she blinked as the tongue clicked into place like a dislocated shoulder finding its home.
She breathed.
“Oh, my god that feels better,” Zoe said as she licked her teeth with her stolen tongue. It felt incredible. “It’s good to talk again.” She stood and faced the other contestants, flexing her clawed chains at their looks of shock. “What the hell do you lot want?”