Zoe, Bella, and Oriz rejoined the others atop the cliff. They took the Angel’s flesh in silence and gathered some distance from the edge under the shadeless branches of a tall glass tree. The bark of crackled blue dripped with constant condensation. Eddying mist softened the sounds of plinking water as they took turns pooling drinks in their palms. After the oppression of steam, the fresh water rejuvenated them. Eyes alert, brighter, they set about making camp.

Bella placed her sword down in the center of the rocky clearing. She murmured to the hilt, less words and more scrapings of tongue upon tooth, sounds like grinding metal whispering from between her lips, and the runes of the blade lit up one by one.

A gentle wind spun up from the center of the blade. It spread out and wrapped around the tree and the party and pushed back the mists. The air grew balmy in the soft, songlike breeze.

Bella sagged.

“The things I had to promise that damned blade to calm it down…”

Oriz planted a kiss on her forehead.

“We appreciate it.”

The alien woman continued walking a spiral around the camp. Each footstep spread grass across the rock to make the surface soft and bearable.

Anton helped Bella to her feet.

“Good thing your baby’s not screaming anymore.”

“Shut up,” Bella rolled her eyes. “How do we want to do the meat?”

Once upon a time, Zoe might have imagined the piles of flesh to look like a stack of steaks from the butcher. Maybe some chops and ribs. That mental image also held coiled sausage links like party boas. Cartoonish. Despite her years with her hands gloved and bloodied from surgery, she still distinguished meat as something else.

Something different from flesh.

Eating the System of Earth broke that separation. Some fragile membrane in her thoughts now lay shattered on the floor of her mind. The two concepts intermingled: meat, flesh, food, life — all of it gathered in the stacks of bloodied scraps.

The five of them gathered around the Angel’s meat.

After spreading grass across the area, Oriz twisted ropes to hang the larger chunks of meat. The draining blood steamed as it splashed upon the rocks. The ichor of the angel, roiling, molten, pooled over the vibrant carpet of living Skein.

The grass quivered and swelled as they soaked up the blood. Everyone paused what they were doing as they watched the plants absorbing the steaming blood.

“I bet it burns,” Anton said with a sense of anticipation. “Bursts into flames.”

“Twenty pounds says it mutates and tries to kill us,” Skidmark responded.

“Money’s meaningless,” Zoe added. “I doubt my bank account still works.”

“True…” Skidmark tapped her chin. “Twenty million pounds it attacks.”

“That’s not what I —”

“I’ll take that bet,” Anton said.

They shook on it while the grass bloated and twitched. Each blade expanded as the blood flowed. Instead of drooping, the grass ballooned. The cellulose skin grew translucent as the liquid inside sloshed and swelled.

“I feel it,” Oriz murmured. “Dancing inside me, so slow, it’s like… falling into a dream.”

“You alright?” Bella asked her.

“You woke me up from the Angel’s hold, but if you hadn’t… I think I would have been happy there forever.”

Bella frowned.

The blood ran, trickled, dripped. The party backed away as the grass continued absorbing. Growing. What had been a carpet became a mass of large bulbous nodules each a foot long. The campsite had become unnavigable. They twitched and rubbed against each other with a rasping sound like balloons.

“Well, doesn’t look like it’s attacking us,” Anton said to Skidmark. “I’ll take that money in diamonds, thank you.”

“It didn’t burn either.”

“That wasn’t the bet.”

“Well, good thing money is meaningless.”

“Debt is never meaningless,” Anton said. “The one thing my father was sure to teach me.”

Those words brought darkness, a stillness, to the group as the steam circled their clear area. The sullenness only broke when the first swollen strand of grass burst like a pinata.

Glowing green spores exploded into the air. The party stepped back as another blade popped. The sound was oddly like bubble wrap, and the spores drifted like the trails of fireworks. A cloud filled the campsite, and they watched in silence as it drifted out into the steam. More grass popped, and the shredded remnants deflated to lay wilted across the rocky floor.

“Look at the tree!” Skidmark called out.

The spores stuck to the glassy surface. Each one bubbled, twitched, and spread roots around the dark blue bark. They wrapped around the branch and extended small shoots and leaves. The alien tree flowered before their eyes and settled into something green and alive in every sense of the word.

The scent of a fresh garden overwhelmed them. Fresh life shocking after the rich smell of the steam and the barren rocks. A sense of quiet awe suffused them as they listened to the rustling sound coming from the steam as spores landed on distant trees.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

Zoe clapped Oriz on the shoulder.

“Looks like it takes more than an Angel to bring life to Hell,” she said quietly. “Congratulations.”

Oriz nodded.

“Thank you, Zoe.”

Did these words repair some of the lost bridge between them? A strand of ivy reaching out across a chasm? Neither dared test this, and Zoe’s hand fell away as she faced the meat which fortunately remained untouched by spores.

“So, if the blood did this to your grass, what will it do to us?”

“I think it’s obvious,” Anton said.

“Oh?”

“We’re all going to grow into giants and then pop like pimples.”

Skidmark gagged.

“Sorry, flashbacks to boarding school. For the record, I don’t want to explode.”

“Nobody’s going to explode,” Oriz said with the frustrated sigh of a long-suffering teacher.

“As much as I want to take you at your word,” Zoe said before wincing at her phrasing. “Can you explain it for us?”

“Sure.”

The others sat as Oriz coated her hands with gloves of grass. The alien woman’s eyes lit up with joy as she formed a knife. The blade shone like a dew-dipped emerald. It was so sharp it hurt Zoe’s eyes. She had never seen a weapon that so loudly screamed ‘assassin’ before. Once again she reassessed her former teacher and now… friend?

ding!

Maybe…

Oriz worked the knife through the hanging chunk of flesh. Her motions were economical as she lectured.

“What none of you understand, and I guess what you will never understand, is the sense of gravity that the Trinity holds throughout the worlds ruled by the Crimson Armada System.”

“Point counterpoint,” Skidmark interrupted as she sat cross-legged on the floor. “The largest religion on Earth had a trinity.”

“Did that trinity walk amongst you? Treat your lives as coins to gamble, as materials to forge, as fuel to be burned?”

“Well…”

“Come off it, mate,” Bella said. “You’re being facetious, and you know it.”

“I object to that.”

“Christianity was never the largest religion in the world,” Anton added.

“Yes, it was,” said Skidmark.

Zoe rattled her chains.

“All of you, shut up.”

Oriz sliced. A small pile of neat steaming slivers sat on a broad leaf at her feet.

“Angels would visit worlds, visit people, performing the work of the Smith. While he would place us upon our body path, the angels would correct the paths of civilization. Reshaping walls, and mountains, directing rivers, creating monsters. Sometimes for our immediate salvation, and sometimes… sometimes it took millennia for the cause to come to light. To you, it must seem like the Crimson Armada encourages death and destruction at every turn. Everything is a resource to be devoured. Everyone is a potential enemy. Trust nothing. Am I right?”

They nodded, and Oriz sighed.

“It’s not supposed to be like that. At least, my home, when I lived there, wasn’t like that. At the heart of the storm one may find calm, and peace, but that is only because the wild fringe expands ever outward.”

She continued cutting as the steam swirled around their small calm camp.

“Ancient Civilizations on Earth based their worldview on conquest,” Anton said after a moment. “But they had to keep fighting. They fell apart when they lost.”

“The Crimson Armada doesn’t lose.”

“Nothing wins forever.”

Oriz smiled and shook her head.

“For someone who has seen the malleability, the flimsiness of time… you truly believe in forever?”

“I don’t…” Anton frowned. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“There’s an expression where I’m from. ‘The stars in the sky are as the grains of sand on the beach. In number, but not in kind, and then there are the droplets of the ocean’.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand that either.”

“You’re not supposed to understand. Some things are too large and too different to be held in a mortal mind. So, you probably wonder, who understands? Surely the authors of our universe understand, right? The systems, the gods, and even those who fail at the crucial point — the Mubilashi — they must at least glimpse understanding, no?”

She finished cutting and started on the next hunk of hanging meat.

“It is my belief that none of them know,” Oriz said as she passed the meat around. “There is no understanding, because there is no plan. At least…”

“The fourth member?” Zoe asked.

“I suppose it’s the third member now,” Oriz chuckled. “I can’t believe I’m saying that, I really can’t…”

“What are you talking about?” Skidmark asked.

“There’s a heretical belief that there is a silent member of the Crimson Armada Trinity. That the chaos of the others is all part of a plan held by that unknown person.”

“Not so dissimilar to Earth religions then,” Skidmark said. “Just trying to make sense of a universe of chaos. There has to be someone with a plan. It has to make sense to someone.”

Oriz nodded.

“You’re right. There are always similarities between religions. When you are at the bottom of a pit and you look up and see the light you hope… well, I suppose you hope the light is a way out. Now, with the Gambler dead, I don’t know what to hope for anymore. Things I never believed possible have happened. Rue formed a new System. My intractable world has changed. There are things coming that I cannot help you with, but we’re getting off topic.”

“Such is the way of arguing about angels,” Skidmark said in a tone of mocking wisdom.

“True, very true,” Oriz laughed.

A chuckle passed around the group as they gazed down at the meat in their hands. It was still warm, steam curling up and a scent like incense, like the wind upon a desert, filled their nostrils. It was hard to remember, in that moment, that they were trapped in one of Hell’s drifting circles.

The silence of a church surrounded them.

“What will this do?” Oriz held up a scrap of meat as she sat amongst them. When had they formed a ring? “It made my grass bloom and burst because such is the nature of Grass Skein. The Angel is more than essence, but it is essence first. The Smith creates. The Body Path is your future, but it is your future because it is your footsteps advancing one after the other. What will happen when you eat the flesh of the Angel? That is up to you, but I do not fear death or danger,” she stared at the meat, lost somewhere else for a moment. “No, because the Angel gave it to us willingly. I was inside its eyes and there was no hatred, no malice, no plans inside those depths. It is the emptiness that does not want, no matter that it calls itself Sorrow. Trust that the [Epiphany of the Flesh] shall guide you where you must go.”

And with that, she swallowed the meat. Blood dribbled down her chin. She closed her eyes and reached for another sliver. The others followed.

[Epiphany of the Flesh: 77%]

Zoe closed her eyes as it burned down her throat. A taste like noonday heat, like burning oil, like the heat of a mother’s hug. Her eyes squeezed shut against the pain welling inside her. Darkness swooped down upon her.

She ate another piece.

[Epiphany of the Flesh: 87%]

Again. Chewing on fat and blood and gristle. Taste like licking a car hood in mid-summer but also the burned hamburger still frozen in the middle in one of those weekends when she could see the hollow eyes of her mother not caring as she gazed at the world.

[Epiphany of the Flesh: 93%]

How long had Zoe been eating? Gore caked her finger. Her jaw ached. The silence of a church filled her mind. She thought it would take more, but now the Epiphany reared and she was not ready.

ding!

[Epiphany of the Flesh: 99%]

ding!

Good luck, Zoe! I won’t be able to follow you.

Fear raced through her as the pain seared. Bubbling oil through her blood. She didn’t want to face this alone. She couldn’t be alone. Not now, please not now.

Her Skein kicked.

[Empress In Time]

Moth wrapped her arms around Zoe’s shoulders. Lips against her ear. A head cool as a mirror pressed against hers.

“I am here.”

“Together?” Zoe asked, gripping hold of Moth’s cool hands..

When did she stop seeing the others? When did the darkness overwhelm her so?”

“Together,” Moth said.

[Epiphany of the Flesh: 100%]

[Epiphany of the Flesh: Complete!]

[Reward pending…]

There was light.