"Listen closely Mergini," I instructed, holding his head still, speaking into his caviar eyes. "Wanda is caught in a life or death duel with her eldest sister. Only a demonstration of amblush can stall them. We must play, and you must follow my lead, with the heirs watching. Finally, we will really play! Do you understand?"

He quacked. What an unbelievably good boy. On both wing and scale he was the faster, his flight giving him enough of a vantage to show me where the fight had moved in the course of the last minutes. Wanda and Janizary were no longer in the field, having drifted instead toward the mountain.

Again I was forced to sprint, arms unable to pump as they held both the board and all its pieces against my chest, like it was an open book and I was trying to prevent all the world from spying its secrets. Over the last roll in the land before I could see the entrance to my cave I spotted them, both worse for wear.

My Venus was bloodied, her furs unable to slough off the crimson dye as they usually could. The bridge of her nose was smashed open, all her freckles hidden, in what had to be a glancing blow from the rock. The white hot hate in her eyes had gone cloudy. Clothing in tatters, I saw splotched bruises all across her bare legs and feet. Between us her animal trap and its chain were smote across the ground in a hundred pieces, leaving nothing to contain the rock but Janizary's hand.

Her grip had not given way, despite the numerous punctures and scratches dropping streams of red sand, like a ripped bag of flour. Her cloth armor was torn, peeling as an onion, revealing an additional layer underneath.

The damage was clear... and insufficient to weaken or tire either of them. Wanda pounced on Janizary from across a wide gap, leaping as high as Mergini flew. The elder caught her, unable to swing with the rock while redirecting Wanda's weight, so my love was tossed backward into the wall of the mountain, where her claws found purchase and prevented her from sliding down.

Briefly she looked to me like her own portrait hanging on the wall, something still missing from our domicile. My heart throbbed, ached, joining my taxed lungs. How I despised these events, denying me the opportunity to worship her every domestic image. I yearned for our routine, nothing but love and nipping play day in and day out, further blurring my time into ecstasy.

Her elevation also revealed a complication to our plan. They weren't going to stop on our account; we had to be able to follow them closely. I needed more air than my haricot vert legs could grant me.

"I'm sorry to throw off the perfect balance of this craftsmanship Mergini, but I need a little lift." He bowed to me and, gently as possible, I snapped off two edge pieces of the scale brace from either side and inserted them into my sleeves as cuff links. My arms then lifted on their own, but I was able to force them down, where they picked our supplies back up.

Wanda gouged lines in the mountainside when she decided to descend, with Janizary charging to meet her. She would've had my goddess butt heads with the rock, but Wanda swallowed her foe's hand with a tail of her furs, the skins tightening to form a bag. For now they were locked in place, pushing, looking for hidden reserves of strength. It lulled enough for our game to begin.

"Now Mergini, so that Janizary sees our every move!" He flew to them and I leapt, testing the buoyancy of my world serpent ornamentation. It was enough to get me close, still enough gravity present for me to fall with some speed. If my partner in life, the responsible owner and gardener of my suffering, had been a mere human I would guess she would be perplexed and disgusted by my behavior as I sat down on the ground next to their life and death struggle, set up a game board, and challenged the duck nestling across from me.

But she was Wanda. The trust was a mighty wave underneath her, allowing her to give her all without even looking at us. Whatever I did it was with her help, on our behalf, and for the greatest good our combined efforts could conjure. It was Janizary who glanced askew, furrowed her brow in confusion.

Mergini was playing as gray, so the first move was his and consisted of shifting the darkness piece down its starting spiral of circles.

"The equatorial dusk, a classic opening," I mused, suppressing my taxed breathing as much as possible. Then I moved to take my harvest moon and begin a moon train around the edge of the board, my personal favorite opener, but Janizary didn't choose to lollygag long enough to see it. She went right back to trying to murder my wife, tossing the both of them away from us, in the process rolling over the amusing indignity of Lord Ruthven's unmarked grave.

Wanda exercised the advantage of familiarity, thrusting both her legs into the soil just as their tumble crossed over. Her feet found the loose frequently-disturbed stuff about the vampire's body, then hooked her toes underneath his torso to anchor herself. That forcibly stalled them, which she surely had done for my benefit and not her own, as it gave Janizary the room to strike at her ribs with the rock. She did. I heard the pain in Wanda's growl, felt an echo of what she suffered tighten my own chest. I had to speak regardless.

"The pieces mustn't fall," I wheezed at Mergini. "The game must progress intact. Here we go!" I stood and raised the board, most of my concentration on keeping it level, soon to be all once we were airborne. To stabilize me further Mergini bit the opposite edge of it, flapping his wings with a skill a mere man couldn't discern.

Together we flew across the gap, spinning slowly; a touch more force and the pieces would have been flung away. Since I trusted my feathered friend to make the minute adjustments I had the full responsibility of the landing. The procedure was a success, quite the nuisance to have to insert between turns of the world's most advanced game of tactics, but Wanda suffered so much more, as I continued to hear in my right ear: rock against flank. Reaching out couldn't help her, resulting only in me losing my arm.

I needed the limb to make my next move, which drew criticism, not from Janizary, but from Excoria, whom I had, in a small blessing, forgotten all about until she leaned over and her shadow darkened our board.

"What are you doing?" she asked, affronted. "Move your world serpent skin backward you dolt. That's the best move. Wanda, did you teach him to play this atrociously?"

"That might be the best move," I corrected so Wanda wouldn't have to spit an answer, "if I was trying to kill. We're trying to live." Mergini quacked in agreement, then made his own move. World serpent forward, out of its spoke. He was following my lead. We had to take some of each other's pieces, but only as bait to draw in our real prey.

"Nonsense," Excoria grumbled. "You're not worthy of touching one of these boards. Give it to me, I'll show you." I had to put my hand between her approaching painted claw and the game, practically serving it to her with cream sauce and chives.

"You said you were not interfering," I reminded her before she could interfere with the proper flow of my blood. "My turn again." Next I would be willingly sacrificing the middle of my moon train to Mergini's swallowing crater piece, but before we could act it out the rock of Cain was flung backward, to the mountain wall, where it became lodged in one of the dirt and weed-loaded outcroppings.

So began a mad scramble between the two siblings to claim it, the tumbling limbs of which might have disrupted our game if Mergini hadn't thought quickly and used his bill to drag it away from them. Each of the heirs' faces was smashed into the ground at least once before they made it to the steep incline. They then proceeded to make it up the incline.

"Damn it," I snapped, half-rising and tiptoeing to Mergini, who was already prepared for our next maneuver. We shuffled over a few steps, not ready to jump, for the fight had halted far up the rocky wall. Without claws or godly strength we had no way to stabilize our play up there. Our only choice was to make another request of my taxed Venus. "A shelf would suit us well!" I shouted to her, though her face was invisibly pressed into the wall, her throat in Janizary's crushing vice.

We jumped, trusting her to understand and act. The task was silently handed off to her furs, the tails of which squeezed out from under Janizary's knee and slapped at the wall next to their struggle, looking for the best spot. That slapping became scorpion-barb stabbing as the furs produced some tool from their hidden folds, a blade or perhaps something as mundane as a corkscrew from our kitchen, tucked out of my sight so I might focus on her instead of dinner preparations.

The wild stabbing freed chips, clods, and clouds. By the time we were arcing down it had gouged out a horizontal slot and several hand and footholds for me. Wanda could see what I saw whenever she wanted, all parts of my body were offered to her altar; she must have used my eyes to judge where we were going to land.

The board slid into place like a baking stone into an oven. Mergini used the scale's power to fly upside down, giving him the only acceptable vantage on his pieces now that several were under the shade of the slot. Janizary wasn't watching, until I hummed obnoxiously loud sounds of contemplation. If I'd had a free hand I would've rubbed my chin.

When she finally looked over I enacted the by-now stale decision. It would baffle any experienced player of the game, just as it did Excoria as she clambered up alongside once more, dress ill-suited to climbing now ripped through by both of her legs. This woman-shaped monster surely had the stamina of an ancient dragon; her huffing and puffing and loose strands of hair were just to show her irritation that the front row seat kept moving. One look at the board had her crowing.

"Hah! You're going to get beaten by a duck Severin! That birdbrain knows more than you." She addressed Mergini directly. "Go on, take his world serpent skin. Then go to the center and resurrect your constellation." The duck disobeyed, moving his comet out of its aggressive orbit, effectively ending its bloody rampage through my forces, and putting it on a course for an outermost space. "What!? You two are mocking me. You're making this up as you go along."

"Perhaps this is how a prophet plays amblush," Janizary commented, shocking me, though she didn't look our way. She had avoided commenting on me directly since her arrival. I was beneath her station, until these amblush antics dragged her down to our level. Would you not be curious if the cockroaches next to your foot neglected to skitter away and instead brought out backgammon?

Her attention was partly snared, but it did not interrupt the fight. Wanda's arms were flailing, looking for purchase in sand-weathered flesh rather than rock. Janizary was cloaked in streams of the red sand she'd produced, a supernatural wind pushing them to redirect my love's talons. The rock of Cain was pressed against the mountainside by Janizary's elbow.

It wouldn't take long for her to find the right position, now that Wanda was pinned in a deepening divot, where Janizary could freely wield her dreaded weapon for one final blow. Mergini and I had to play quickly, confoundingly. We were down to seconds per move. Some caution was still required, as even in collaboration we would have to take certain pieces if we arranged them incorrectly, which might leave us with too few to cover the whole of the board with our combined vision.

My sweaty left hand threatened to drop me to my death, my sweatier right doing the same for my blood moon. Mergini's wings must have been all the more fatigued, considering he'd been flapping through another realm for the past few hours. Still he managed to bend his neck, push the tokens stuck under the overhang.

Another piece made its move, rose into the air, belonging to neither of us. Janizary had the rock of her people, the will to reduce their number, and the hard won opportunity to drive it into my Wanda's skull. She bravely gurgled defiance from the other end, biting down on her sister's hand, choking on a red umbral sand. No. Time was slow and fast at once, just like it used to be. Wanda's control had slipped. This was the terror of life without her, my tolerance of it totally gone. It was Mergini's turn, thank goodness. He kept his head and completed the circle. Our true foe was surrounded.

"Aha!" I squawked, nearly losing my footing. "Player the third arrives!" Excoria's eyes. Janizary's eyes. All the remaining eyes of amblush. They all saw. The world seemed to shrink, the mountain shed dandruff instead of stones, as the meteor began existing at the center of the board.

"What the hell is that!?" Miss Diatribe demanded. Janizary said nothing, just stared, but Wanda's head suddenly emerged from the wall, gasping for breath. Both her eyes were clasped in a raccoon mask of bruises. She coughed red dust. Freewheeling rage was barely contained by her taut skin. Chips of her own teeth clung to her cheeks magically, hoping to be used as caltrops should Janizary's punch stroll across her face. I knew nothing more gorgeous in the world. I had been tuned to not even be capable of it. Wanda. Together we triumphed, somehow holding each other over the precipice of death.

"That is the owner of the tool called amblush," I explained, "and the same owner of that rock in your hand Janizary. Both come from that icy black workshop above the sky and beneath the sea. Their purpose is the same: draw those who know, who might one day stand a chance of writing the world's laws, closer to their doom.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

For you see death watches all of these contests. Our efforts in them are so helpful and amusing. That world you await, empty of me and mine? It is a world where death has mostly won. You will emerge with but one solitary piece on a board hewn by and belonging to your ultimate enemy.

You can play that game, and lose, like the rest of us, or you can drop that rock. We'll show you how we sniffed this enemy out." I snatched the meteor knowing full well I would fall, and full well that the tails of Wanda's furs would catch me and hoist me aloft. Janizary saw the piece was solid, no illusion. "Quarantown can craft strategies, and surveil, and share with those who only emerge occasionally."

She wanted to take it, but she had no furs, no tools, no overlapping webs of familiars and disciples. The only hand that could clutched the rock of Cain. Not a word came from Excoria Vainglory Diatribe, all of them having spilled out and tumbled down the mountain in a humiliating landslide. In all her years, perhaps centuries, she'd never learned so much about death as Wanda and I had through loving collaboration.

They would have to humble themselves in order to learn, and we had just demonstrated the only way to survive was to learn. Their progress would be slow without the flash inferno of falling in love. By some other route they would have to come to the conclusion that Wanda had progressed so much further than them not through oppression, but through the radiating glory of true righteous strength. She had only the dominion I gift-wrapped and gave her on bent knee, alloying us to an everlasting empire's fortitude so much greater than they could generate through the brutal taking and backbreaking of thralls.

If Janizary truly wanted to advance she had to leave the stone age. Her eyes were mostly empty, but what did reside there was desire. Desire to climb down, to stop embarrassing herself under a guffawing Death, desire to rest and contemplate.

"We will show you what we learn," Wanda promised, drooling the blood of sincerity. "Swear not to get in my way. I will swear off yours. Then we will share, sister." I turned to Excoria, white as a Quarantown sheet, which are the whitest since all the bedbugs and mites in our borders serve the Venus in furs, the heat in the dark.

"Between this and prophecy, I'm sure we can find a clue as to the whereabouts of a certain heir of Cain," I told her, "who would do something like abandon his pregnant mate wandering through the rain in Geneva." She looked into my eyes, and I believe, for the first time, tried to see something other than the taxidermy remains of Abel subserviently posed.

A rock slipping out of a hand might not make a sound, but it does when the hand belongs to an heir. Like a swan taking off from a placid lake. A dying elder's hand slipping out of their descendant's. A love letter pulled from between the pages of a heavy book, pulled long after the romance was deemed defeated.

The rock of Cain struck the Earth as humble as any other, nothing fiery, nothing meteoric about it. Perhaps the impact caused a line of fleas to split into Abel-fleas and Cain-fleas, but if so that fell under the umbrella of Wanda's familiars, and was not to trouble me at all. Nor were Wanda's family to trouble me, to any degree such as this attempted duel to the death, ever again (though Wanda may have shuffled some of that into the future, saving it for when I am more prepared).

Terms were discussed, but the heirs were eager to get them done with and move on. Wanda's skin of defeat, her wounds, her shredded furs, was but the surface. She was the victor, indeed the only one who understood the contest, and both her mother and eldest sister were licking deeper lacerations despite their invisibility. It was best to send them away once deals were struck, so the Quarantowners could come out to grieve young Zachariah and not be overcome with feelings of revenge.

His fate fell heavy upon me once I knew Wanda was safe from a rock that we tossed into the underground river (where the ghosts were free to war over it in the dark, never learning their lessons). He was gone, and Wanda was no necromancer. She still has a human body, burdened as her spirit is with the yoke of divinity. Death will attempt to take her as well. Heirs such as Ruthven and Devorgoil had circumvented it somewhat, but in so doing were robbed of many of the joys of life, a fate she was too kind to visit on anyone, especially what was to her barely more than a babe.

There was to be no resurrection, only a safe dwelling for his soul among his family, which Wanda promised Doppler, his wife, and their other children they would feel often, especially on 'times of time' like new moons, new years, birthdays.

And there was something I could provide them. My life was a shell game, only Wanda kindly placed a different prize under every shell. Sometimes, after Zachariah's death, I would experience a day that happened before it, and I knew to seek him out, spend time with him, learn about his dreams, the girl he wanted to marry, and then encourage him to go and bond with his family rather than brood or scheme as wealthy youngsters are most prone to do.

Then when I returned to a time after the event I would instead find Doppler, signal to him what I had by putting my arm most of the way around his massive shoulder. No matter what he was doing he would drop it, even if 'it' was wooing investors even wealthier than himself, left to be entertained by his servants while we sequestered ourselves in a coat closet.

Huddled together over a candle, his gold teeth shining weaker than his happy tears, I told him everything I learned, all that Zachariah said and did. In so doing I could provide for him a taste of what Wanda did for me, fresh medicinal doses of his son for the rest of his life in Quarantown. Over the years, through this, even Doppler Burstyn was made into my friend. Bless you Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, mender of furs and bridges.

Speaking of mending, Wanda and I retired that evening, after the fight, after the grief, after reclaiming Nepenthe and setting her down in her own room, finally, to the bedroom. We needed each other's restoration. We needed close attentive investigations of our monolithic achievement, for chips and cracks.

I am always hers to use as she sees fit, which turns pain of her prerogative into pleasure. She decided to give me her post-duel suffering as a present for serving her so well in such a tight bind. Freed of shoes we crawled into bed, where her furs clambered over her shoulders and onto me, slurping off my own clothing without popping a single button before they retreated to the foot of the bed and curled up like an old dog.

Wanda took to me, came over me, like a roiling storm. Her muscle had begun to fail her during the battle, while the hate trapped within had not. There was a surplus of it now, and only one safe receptacle. Her vivisecting eyes, unblinking, released it as a deluge upon my own. Dutifully I welcomed it, opened all gates to its inundation.

The harm she did me was a god's innocent exploration, passionate curiosity. As we kissed she ate the breath out of me. Her teeth cemented solid once more as mine cracked in equal measure, jolts of pain down my jaw which dissolved into bliss halfway down me. The cut on the bridge of her nose healed as my forehead darkened and swelled with bruising. What closed across her opened on me.

Wanda could heal them faster, but why should she suffer them at all? It was a shame to waste them when they could expand her understanding of her vulnerable husband. As I felt the wounds weeping down into my emotions I also knew she would dispel these pains when they weren't being played with. She would break up all the time I took to heal, toss it like salt, one granule in my experience every lunar cycle or so.

As I reeled from her pleased experimentation she guided me between her legs. I was weakening, vision blurring, but the injuries couldn't stop the blaze she fed. A dam of pinpricks, the rushed undertaking of healing, clashed with the engulfing forest fire in my midsection, resulting in complete disobedience of my abdomen. I couldn't sit up to join her.

Her furs spit out two pebbles at her, rising instead of falling, and she caught them: my makeshift serpent scale cuff links. Bending down as a lioness ready to lap at the watering hole, she nipped my ears with her fangs, straight through. A multitude of prior pains and persistent priapism kept me from feeling any of it as she stuck the scales into the piercings. Then the pair lifted me.

From that angle Wanda could have it all, and she took it while I nursed what had dared vandalize her. My Venus sans furs took special care of me that night, turning me over as if on a spit, literally and figuratively, making sure to experience me from all sides as we had trapped death itself. She wanted as much control as her ever-present enemy. This meant I had to allow her the power to stop my heart just as it eventually would.

But also, across that spectrum, she would have the power to raise me into supersensual life, awareness without thought, joy burning and consuming like the core of the sun, experience stretched to match its lifespan. That is where she left me instead of allowing me sleep, suspended in the sauna of her breath, the steam of her obsession. That is where I leave you, as far as the most direct portion of this account.

Our lives were so much more; hers is. Yet my purpose here was just to chronicle the formation and nature of our bond. The rest can be found between the lines and in the margins of the history books. Consider these tales but another prophecy, one meant for mortal ears, which gives plenty of clues as to how the realm of a loving yet viciously possessive god might expand in this modern age of ours.

A simpleton's accurate reading of these clues follows. Throng's delirium, like all other plagues, eventually loosens its grip and is blown away on a spring breeze. Quarantown remains, despite no need of it, and it flourishes too. People who pass by on developing railways experience a strange sense of longing even as they fail to spy it through the trees. Wanda's love is magnetic to the soul. Wars miss us, iron heels landing on either side. Bitter rivals become lovers if they attempt to clash under her watchful eye, joined and shot through by a bolt of electric green out of eyes that are always seeing, swallowing, more and more of the world.

There remain bumps. Heirs outside the clan Diodati have to be made aware they cannot meddle. Devorgoil gradually revealed the wisdom of his ways, harvesting our hard-won discoveries via infrequent and good-natured visits. I started to suspect he was stillborn by choice, which allowed him a wide enough view to see that death was running the horse race, so he crippled himself early to be out of the running, but where a stud got mares he had our lowest and most vulnerable points, grim reminders that it might have been him if he'd participated.

And with Wanda and I close enough to swap traumas and synchronize our heartbeats there were, inevitably, more children. Not all of them were as carefree and poet-bred as Nepenthe turned out to be. Sometimes we were rejected, more rarely opposed, and it broke our hearts each time. More than once I was despised for providing them with Abel's blood, the blood of reflection, which slows progress as one checks over their shoulder, the blood that waters the crops, which they deemed a contaminant of Cain's.

Never did any of it make me question her. I speak on it now not to justify any of it, not to excuse or redeem my own shortcomings, but because it is all very fresh in my mind. Wanda does not want me to perceive it, but I am far too old, and soon I will not be Abel-bodied. My goddess has stretched me like rations, perturbed death lurking in my joints and organs. She cannot remain watchful at all stations as their numbers proliferate exponentially.

There is so much life left in her; she will have to go on without her favorite toy, her most reliable instrument. To ease my passing she has intensified her manipulation of my time, sending me away to more and more of my past that she has kept in reserve, though the tanks now rapidly empty.

She has succeeded in mostly freeing me from any sense of impending doom. I always knew she was plucking pieces from my memory and putting them in a basket, like flowers she planned to press, but, as yet another gift to me, she had totally obscured the extent of it. While I contract in my deathbed, drying out like a pressed flower myself, I am learning new things about the formation of Quarantown, about myself, about Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.

So this account really is like a prophecy, woven together from threads of the past just as I did with quotes and stanzas from Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Polidori...

Wanda has made many modifications, clever reorientations, repairs, additions, but she is still only my master. Not my craftsman. I am in disrepair. Her anguish must be incalculable by the mortal heart, and I hope her other disciples know that after I pass they must leave extra offerings at her altars. I hope also that the more ambitious do not try to take my place too quickly, as it will likely cost them their lives.

She is accepting it though, in part, enough to give me the greatest gift she had held the longest. This memory, never experienced by me before, was snipped seamlessly out of that first dark train ride, that tranquilizing chug into a black forest and a foggy future. Even then she was following other tracks, planning to arrive right back at those seats. I got to fall in love with her all over again, and hear things she told me at our first meeting, only reaching my spirit wrapped up in hers furs an unknown number of decades beyond.

Something I'd heard once before... leading somewhere new...

"You'll forgive me for rushing an account much grander and older than the Conclave Diodati," Wanda said to me on the train, "but I assure you that the time I'm keeping in a drawstring pouch, to protect you from its distractions, is still limited.

I have such big plans for you, and the pouch is so small, what a curse. I am a goddess so I will not feel the pain of stuffing you all the way to ripping with my schemes. You will feel it. I will make you love it. That is the best I can do.

Already I love you, my Severin, and if you earn that love you will hear me say this. You will be mine. Forever. When the end is close I will flip you over, disorient you, and make you go back, away from the abyssal truth. Perhaps you will walk so far back, blissfully oblivious, that you will find my origin. We could be as children, grow in the garden together, equal, awaiting divinity together. For...

The evolution of life that crawls, that spawns in slime, is entirely separate from the evolution of the spirit..."

These events, both remembered and hidden, took place just before Wanda learned she couldn't have me entirely, that I could not be a mere hypnotized slave. Her probing advance, her voluptuous weight placed upon me, gave her exposing insight, where she saw that at my last breath I would not belong to her.

At the time she thought it defiance, devotion to a higher moral she would never be able to attain. She thought I stood valiant, at my last, upon unbreakable rocks of right and wrong. Not so. That last breath was denied her not because I refused to give it over, she would earn that trust, but because death claimed it. In so doing it was made my last.

All I demonstrated by keeping it from her on the train to Quarantown was that I was distantly aware, showing my early inclination toward prophecy, of what I would know. Poets demonstrated the same when they wrote, mathematicians when they marveled at numbers as if they were the stars in the sky.

Until that last breath I will know one other truth, and better, feel it:

Here lies Severin Pelts, during and after many years of faithful service.

He was handled with love and care.

The End

Wanda Reigns