Of course Burstyn was there, the first face to show itself. And of course he had shovels, having anticipated that success probably meant digging. If he couldn't solve a problem with gold he solved it with dynamite, and if not dynamite a shovel. The sheer utility of his limited blunt tool set irritated me to no end, being the man of percentage signs, emdashes, and sewing needles that I am... but I still grabbed a shovel and allowed him to follow alongside Giselle.
Really what we needed was some sort of theoretical anti-shovel, something that could keep the primordial spirit of the world serpent grounded. The cap of the scale was right where we'd left it in memory, most of the way up the hill to the mountain overlook. Doppler broke ground greedily and was not prepared for that single strike being more than we required.
The scale immediately shed a curtain of dry dirt and dust, lurching toward the sky as an inverse shipwreck. Giselle, ready to use the last of the speed that had been stunted in our shared dream, leapt and grabbed hold, but she only slowed its ascent. It would've carried her off to the doom of a clear sky if Doppler hadn't taken the other side with his much more substantial weight.
He was a massive man even with an ego of that size technically weighing nothing, yet the scale still kept them both so buoyant they had trouble touching heel to ground. Only with the addition of my own weight, a difficult prospect given its limited circumference, were we able to manipulate it with any dexterity, down the hill, into town, and into my home.
Before leaving me the two of them helped me secure the shed serpent scale with clamps, the weight of the dining room table sufficient to bind it. Then I had to dismiss them. Goodbye Burstyn. Farewell, Giselle. Someone's Giselle. A someone Wanda would find for her if she couldn't do it on her own.
The door closed, and I was finally alone with my plan and a sewing drawer full of craftsmanship. From the scale's behavior it was clear I couldn't just keep hold and hope for the best. It needed to be modified into something granting me a degree of control over my flight into the beyond. With limited time and my skill set in mind, only one configuration appeared viable: a garment.
What a boon it would have been to have Wanda's furs. Some of her will was in them, and their instincts, both animal and supernatural, would have been all the guidance I needed. She had taken them with her. Instead I would have to resort to comparative scraps.
My Wanda put herself into everything she touched, possessive by nature, more so I suspect than most of her kind. Our house was filled with her influence, and once I lowered my standards I had my pick of the litter from her closet. Yes, it would have to be something she wore, always meant for her, as opposed to an outfit of mine she was fond of clawing off me.
There's been much talk of the gravitation of the serpent's scale. Not to besmirch its impressive power, but I knew true levity when I re-encountered something I had handmade for Wanda in a specific time now lost to me. The Nepenthe gown. It drew me in. Forced me to snatch it off its place among other lesser dresses.
Burying my nose in its ruffled shoulder, I found scents not only reminiscent of my love, but intoxicating in much the same way as her true presence. For her it had started as a comment, a joking challenge to me, one that I decided to take seriously. We'd had one of our dinner parties to celebrate the birth of our daughter; Quarantown had collectively assumed Wanda would make only a brief appearance given that Nepenthe had joined the world just two days prior.
We knew we were going to shock them all with her heir's speedy recovery, so she told me to make her a dress that would be just as stunning. And so, wielded by her, for the jest of a goddess is as fulfilling as any order, I followed through with my needle. Its green matched her eyes. There was red too, but only a striking splash about the collar and bust, like blood dribbling down her throat after a fresh kill. It was stunning, as when combined with the avaricious hunger always in her expression it made one think they could be the next victim, and made them fear they might enjoy the process.
Somehow this gown had been lost in the shuffle of the other important memories from around that time. We had our child for one, and she would always be so much more than the commemoration of her own birth. Still, it was strange I'd allowed this item to fade so. There must have been an implication that she would never wear it again, for it could not strike the way it had the first time.
What would strike again was the forging hammer, as I refashioned it into a vessel for the boundless sky and a suit of armor against it. Garden shears were strong enough to cut the scale into as many pieces as I wanted, and I wanted many, so that the pull of each was too weak to overcome my hands' precision as I affixed them in fashionable places all over the gown as a kind of sequin.
One scale became a thousand, sufficiently broken up for me to be able to move my limbs, overcome portions of the forces at play, and thus steer my way as if arms and legs were rudders, all of that achieved without diminishing its aesthetic properties either. Three cheers for me.
Now, I didn't exactly strike a becoming figure in my attempts to don it without floating away, but that was handled in private with the aid of Porter and Mr. Hammerstein, who in his days as a stagehand had helped many a difficult actor with their hurried costume changes. While they did so I felt not a shred of embarrassment. We were all united now, and something like a man in a dress was hardly a cause for anyone's concern.
It was equally easy to show my face when I waddled out of the house, held down on each side by friends and compatriots, all the way to a good hill for my launch where a crowd had gathered, only small thanks to the taxing invasion at our border. Most of them gave me my three cheers, and then some extra, and also wishes of good luck on my voyage.
"If I do not return," I warned them stoically, "take heart that Wanda will. Never will she abandon her people, whether the future looks dark or entirely shrouded. If you should see me return, please keep your distance, as I may not be in my right mind for a time. I trust you to follow this instruction, no matter what condition I might be in. We are Quarantown, and if the very sky tries to get away from us we will drag it back to where it belongs!"
The exact number of the next set of cheers eluded me, for I was off, unhanded and passed to the sky, voices below quickly fading. Storks must flap. Dragonflies must buzz. I was neither, more akin to a droplet from a geyser. Before my eyes could adjust to having the water whipped out of them I was too high to see individual trees.
Quarantown was a fiddle head, the railroad its curling stem. It shrank as I did once encircled by the cold of air too elevated for man. Best to spread my wings before they were frozen stiff. Moses parting the waters was my first gesture, and it succeeded primarily in parting me from my sense of balance.
Thrown into a spin, the horizon rotated so rapidly that it blended the lower light with the upper dark into a cosmic field of purple clover. Somewhere in my confusion the border between worlds was crossed, from Earth to the beyond. To quell nausea I stared at my own hands, found an ethereal skin wrapped about them and the rest of my person.
Air, I think, gift wrapping me, as the recipient realm was not hospitable to any human organ, least of which were the lungs, which insisted always on eating chunks of the space around them, sucking it in through an insultingly primitive straw. Whether it was Wanda's gown or the scale facilitating this vital skin, I could not guess.
The ward keeping off the chill would not last, as the cold continued to grow into me. Perhaps I had minutes before it would strike my bones and tunnel all throughout my skeleton. How could I find anything in mere minutes out there? It was being and anti-being, the frozen yet volcanic depths from whence all color erupted, only settling to become matter millions of years on. It was no place for a prophet who couldn't even prognosticate the position of his wife.
I am wielded, I reminded myself. The scale, the gown, my ties to her, all of them together constructed the form of a tool and I needed only reconstruct and obey the will of the clawed hand. Where to my Wanda, my heat in the darkness? Ignoring the cold, its power was nothing compared to hers, I lowered my defenses and explored all regions for any guiding warmth, a compass needle candle flame.
Haha yes! There was heat in the darkness, so I bent my arms away from it, worked my hands like Mergini's paddle feet when he dove. As intended it propelled me closer to the faint sensation. I'd half-expected to find the stars up there, perhaps school with them, but this was some other avenue. Strands must exist, like layered curtains, squishing, obscuring, yet clearly separating paths leading to new realms and the conclusions that could only exist there.
This place was the heavens, but not the heavenly part, or the part with stars. This was where the truth hid, where color spewed from concentrated obsidian nothingness that simply could not compress any longer. Somewhere there, in the purple and blue, the world serpent swam.
Somehow I knew there were no others like me, not in that moment. This place, if it wasn't too large to call a place (a state perhaps), could only be defined by its vacuity. One tiny speck of consciousness, one peppercorn of insecurity almost hoping to be dashed across the gristly bone of time-charred reality, would be allowed at a time, just for the purposes of comparison and definition.
I had only what I brought with me, and my faltering, my trembling, was entirely my fault, as there wasn't anything around me to cause it. I had to fly through my own weakness, pierce my fears that my identity could not sustain itself without a cradling Earth, without the stilts of a god's fingers pressing their prints into my soles with every step.
I might go out. Like a flame. Like a light. And not reoccur. Except I had a mission, and that could be my structure and fuel simultaneously. If I had interpreted the second half of the prophecy correctly, my Venus was out there doing much the same as her dispatched agent: battling weakness itself. That shared motive brought us closer, and not even the planet Venus felt nearer.
On I pressed, adjusting to the hollow medium, like the stale air of a dreamed-up cave, as fast as I could. My eyes scoured bottomless, topless, and sideless chasms of color. These hues were never upon the painter's brush or slicking the poet's wit. They would leak through canvas itself, made soluble by attempts to attach meaning or significance. These shades were dry vapor, illustrated chaos, and a defiance of the order of color itself. If blended they would not become the same as mingling dollops upon the pallet, but pass through each other in ignorance.
None of them bore anything so fitting in its form to be called a feature. If not for the looming hot presence I could never have found my way. It too was not a feature, but an absence. The color cleared away from it as if frightened, eyes sparkling in the shadow around a campfire, but here the flame was black bound in gold (which vanished if looked upon directly), and the kindling was highly flexible.
This ball of black and elusive frosty gold was encircled by, knotted underneath several coils that rivaled it in size. Finally a word took some meaning, and the cat claws of that meaning found firm painful purchase in the folds of my brain. Coils, coils, coils! If there was something in this lifeless realm other than the world serpent bearing coils, then I should've given up before starting and plunged my head into a hole right alongside the scale, leaving it there to dry brine my yearning soul away.
Instinctively I knew I couldn't call to him; there was no medium on which the cry could travel. Even if he heard he would likely not concern himself with me, and even if he did I doubted it would be with kindness or hospitality. But what was he doing wrapped about that... that thing so tightly?
Flying closer forced me to slow as both forms grew. They were colossally big. To know exactly how big would be too much for me, so I dared not approach further, but how could I acquire the knowledge of death without doing so? The quandary did nothing to halt the seep of the cold, which just then mocked my desire for revelation by infiltrating my bones and granting the opposite: agonized paralysis of thought itself.
Death was inevitable, which I was there to learn, so it seemed the explanation would be the mechanism itself. Until. Until the world serpent, without so much as revealing its eye or head, still nothing but a world of a knot, intervened. Two monolithic sections of its length pulled away from each other, opening like an eyelid, allowing me to peer into the gold-clad darkness he had bound.
All of a sudden the cold was gone, because the cold was nothing in comparison. It was at least a sensation, whereas the contents of that diabolical orb were a cessation. Of everything. Of course. The world serpent had ensnared the knowledge itself, or some testament to it, a monument to a death twenty scales larger than my being.
A star died there, I realized in the beam of hopeless perspective. And when it died it bit down, ripped, tore part of the fabric of everything and took it along to oblivion. Here was a necrotic nodule fallen from a wounded, weeping, shambling god that searched in vain for some salvation higher than itself... and there was none. These comparisons do it no justice, and that enrages me. Yes, me. A creature never described by his fellows as angry or wrathful.
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But you see I know! You cannot. You could never. Offering these attempts at elucidation is an insult to your intelligence, one I cannot stop myself from making, because I know. These burnt matches I'm throwing in your eyes as I grimace at your blank-eyed foolishness are not the knowledge of death. It cannot be transferred in such a fashion.
And though I possess it I cannot re-experience it. It sits inside my chest like a crater. It burns like a torch tossed into a subterranean coal vein. The fire is under me, and I'm always dangling just over it, and that is my life at all times now, unless Wanda should so bless me with a loose grip on my time, returning me to blissful ignorance.
The gleaming golden death that peered from the recoiling serpent's makeshift eye gave me what I was after, and in that process I was broken, shattered, swept, compressed, adhered, fused, amalgamated, fired, coiled, sanded, polished, and set out to decorate an abandoned palace exterior, something built in the very name of futility.
Gutted, furious, I attacked the image, stared daggers at the white-gold shaft leading into a bottomless black forge which only melted, never produced. Like a cornered animal I tried to make violence into reason, to undo what it did to me, and never was there a creature so pathetic as the one smote there in his denial, almost dead enough himself to become a pitifully miniature version of the fallen star, a wispy pip of a cigarette burn.
The world serpent prevented it by closing the eye. Still he did not raise his head and meet mine, nor would he. He showed me to keep me away, to punish me for getting so close, to reward me for making the journey and my bravery, and to mock my preconceptions. All could be true, and it was best to let meaning proliferate and bloom across all its fields, for when it didn't it was just that dead eye, perpetually open if not for the watchful constriction of the world serpent.
I could still experience my love for Wanda, and for our daughter Nepenthe. Now they hurt, but they still held strong. It was them that ordered me back, to turn my emerald fish's tail and swim back to them. This time I had to seek the cold, leave the heat in the darkness further and further behind.
The path ahead, the path to Earth. That was the healthier subject on which to dwell, not the knowledge. Suppression would not work for long however. It would let me reach home, safety, just to rob it from me with terror generated entirely by my own soul. The devil needs no hell when man is actually tinder. All he needs is a spark.
Somehow I found our planet, and did witness its continents as mere stains of green. Higher continents, white ones of weather, drifted above those, rolling like fog. There was all of life as I knew it, so much smaller than the poked-out eye. We could be nothing but a grain of gravel shoveled into its grave.
As I said, without saying precisely, I now knew. That knowledge wore, eroded, ached, hollowed. The character of it would never change, but it could fade into the background, and the closer I came to our world the more it did so.
On the outskirts of our air I lost all momentum and recognized my scales acting as if they had defined up and down once more. I saw no way to descend but to leave them behind, section by section. Scratching and tearing, I incrementally shredded the gown I had sewn for my love. It hurt to do so. Yet like the serpent my skin had be shed. There was a new man underneath, and he could not define himself by his walk without getting his feet on the ground.
Over an hour it took me, I think, to fall slowly enough and find my way, back to that fiddle head next to the mountain. When I could aim even more I set sight on home, on our very doorstep, and I landed there, barefoot, feeling like a whip that had every last crack extracted, holding the final red shred of the gown over my heart.
Silence behind me. If anyone saw they were obeying my order and keeping their distance. Bless their discretion, as it could also here be called self-preservation. The door didn't dare creak as I let myself in and closed it behind me. A few steps over the threshold. Awful steps. Staggering more like. Whose home was this? It couldn't be mine. My hide felt so raw, chafing against such comforting hearth-dried air.
And the silence. Unbearable. You might expect silence, given I was alone, but we are never truly alone on Earth. There were woodworms in the floorboards, spiders in the high corners, mites in motes of dust, mold colonizing bread, cockroaches in the shadows, seeds in jars in cupboards that could yet germinate.
Every last life form hid from me, kept its mouth shut, sterilized and scoured the minutest thought that might cross the three-cog clockwork of their insect brains. Those too dim to know fear knew aversion. They all sensed what I now knew.
"You cannot hide from it," I scolded them in an alien shadowy voice. I sounded like dead crows falling out of drain pipes. "Nor should you! You are nearest of us all. Your lives are measured in the snaps of my fingers." I snapped to a slow beat. "Death will be upon you in hours... and yet you still will not face it!?"
No creature answered me, and I do not blame them. I wanted blood, for you see, blood was proof. Blood was catching your life red-handed as it attempted to flee. Blood cannot be ignored. Ask the murdered splayed on their white sheets. Ask a king in need of an heir. Ask a gash in your own flank. What do they think of blood, hmm?
"Cowards," I accused. "I will find someone brave enough to know. If they hide that bravery I will draw it out, take it sword, or club, or my brittle nails! Stay here if you wish, wallow in it, if that's all you can do. I'll find-"
I turned to go back to the door, but it was blocked. There stood, after a profoundly silent entrance, Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. My Venus in furs, not a hair out of place. My goddess who also knew. She had no injuries, not so much as a smudge on her cheek, but whatever she had been through was writ across her face, a bust sculpted solely with the strikes of a cat o' nine tails. Her eyes were all rain, no lightning. Her breath resigned. No pounces stored in her muscles, where usually there were fifteen or so.
"Wanda," I panted as I broke out into a sweat and started to tremble. "Wanda I know."
"I see," she said, staying right where she was. No attempt to embrace, hold, possess. She did not want to wield me. Was I broken? Did this hot poker now heat on both ends? "I felt it... so I've come back."
"The prophecy. This was all for the prophecy, please tell me that," I pleaded.
"It was." None of her toying. Straight answers were dangerous around Wanda: a fence of pikes ready for heads. Tears rolled down the sides of her nose, and I wasn't sure if she allowed it or if they overwhelmed her. "I know you and I said we were to discuss anything like this beforehand, but the words were so cleanly divided-"
"-In half."
"Yes. I thought we might fail if we weren't... cleanly divided. I had to split off, without a word. But there were words! That was the entire point my Severin! That's what we made the prophecy predict, our connection. The words pass between us without ever being spoken. That is how you knew what to do. That is how I kept myself from falling apart out there over fear of losing you, our child, our home. That is how I did what I needed to do."
"Your half? It's done as well?" She nodded. Still neither of us dared move.
"From thy false tears I did distill an essence which hath strength to kill; from thy own heart I then did wring the black blood in its blackest spring; from thy own smile I snatch'd the snake, for there it coil'd as in a brake; from thy own lip I drew the charm which gave all these their chiefest harm; in proving every poison known, I found the strongest was thine own." Wanda reached into her furs and withdrew a small stoppered bottle filled with something like ink, but less like it the longer I looked. Ominous threatening silver veins swirled within it, churning, making my brain hear deep sounds of magnificent scale, as if I was trapped in a cave underneath the mulling ethical dilemma of a continent.
If I knew anything about my own prophecy, then I could already approximate the contents without her having to explain. This was the 'black blood', the 'strongest poison', and through some ritual, the details of which I did not need to know, just as I did not share with her the emptiness of my conversation with the serpent, Wanda had drawn the material out of herself.
It bore an obvious connection to her inherent serpent's knowledge. Heirs lived with it, but they never accepted it. That was why they always sought to conquer, to master, to dominate. each in their own way. It was the search for a counter-proposal, a method wrought of madness that would reverse the order, put life in charge of the universe.
So what had Wanda extracted from her spirit and bottled? Weakness. Flaws. The essence of her failures, where emotion overcame her goals, where she did evil for its own sake and not as a means to crafty end.
"And on thy head I pour the vial which doth devote thee to this trial," she solemnly said, punctuated by a gasp from the cork. My goddess stepped to me, challenged me to close the rest of the gulf between us. I did, all but naked before her. She felt the last scrap of the gown around my neck, recognized it, then tore it away and discarded it. Cautiously she raised the vial and tipped it.
The contents flowed across the canal of my hair part. Down my forehead. Over my lips. Briefly pooled where my throat met my clavicle. Overflowed. I understood what trial I was devoted to. A black crescent moon in my navel. I was to process her weakness, filter it, neutralize it, with my Abel's humanity. Through hair again. Only a sieve of serpent's knowledge could withstand it. My other end, which Loved Wanda as much as its counterpart. I was the vessel for her frustrated rage, Noah in her hot wept floodwaters. Not a single drip.
When passing through me her mistakes would produce only miracles. She was the master, but I was just as crucial. There are no orders without obedience; there is no authority without respect. Her poison sank into my skin. Insults that never left her mouth, that she didn't mean, but which crawled and slithered in the villainous crevices of her mind regardless, bubbled and pricked in my saturated flesh.
I could handle them, cherish them even, for she had held them in reserve rather than inflicting them, having recognized them as false, as weakness. She was complete in another type of knowledge: that she could hand over these treacherous weapons without wielding them. I knew them, and took them away for storage and care. I was safekeeping her shortcomings, and between us that left only the long ones.
Off came her furs, with nothing underneath. She attacked me, bit me, and I bit back. This was a new kiss for us. I wanted her, and by extension my arms did too, but I wasn't sure what I was telling them to do. Instead of embracing her they fought her off, no, they just fought. The threat the poor bugs and spores of my home felt was still in me, still acting out. If Wanda were Abel-bodied she might have gotten hurt. I was a child of reflection ready to smash the mirror. Our connection transformed with a tumble, into her pinning my arms, against the wall, then the floor, then the furniture, then flat against the dinner table. How had we moved that far?
Her poison had moved with us, colonizing my surface. Every time I opened my eyes it had spread, from my core to my extremities, never in splotches or spatters, only a swirling tide of black and silver. As she maneuvered my sensation lower and directed me into her cradle of heat, her ravenous caldera, one dip in her waist coated her too.
Always her body heat had overwhelmed mine; she had the repressed fury of a goddess after all. But now my own anger at what I knew boiled my insides, practically turned a certain bodily attraction into a train whistle. I matched her as we made love, both frustrated, both mounting in pressure and need.
By the time we rolled off the table, and kept rolling, her poison had coated us completely. With closed eyes we were naught but naked shadows fighting to stay out of the seams in the floorboards. We were the wriggling forms that resisted death, the worms in his topsoil begging the rain to wash off our fetid fates.
This was a moment I could have before death, I realized, a knowledgeable body, well-read in the cruel common law of material existence, capable of expending all the life that remained when it recognized the approach of the hound from beyond the cosmos, that traverses all of it like a street corner, and which does not growl in mouth or stomach.
Violent, fearful, and fitful were our movements, we both thrashed in tantrum against the powers hovering over, watching more closely than ever before, but our passion was becoming stronger too. The darkness of her poison was absorbed into my skin, turning me the gray of a headstone, but then our lovemaking came to a head, in which my stoniness was lost, and that color was overcome by fervent reds bordered by fading, bashful, humble pink.
Gliding on sweat, Wanda coursed up my midsection, found my face with hers. All her claws anchored in my scalp as she stared down into the new character of my knowing eyes. Her converging freckles, backlit by the fire under her skin, burnished an expression so intoxicating to me that I could not continue to look upon her radiance. My vision blurred to protect itself.
Wanda wanted them to see, so she undid the blur. I didn't need to be in control of myself, for she was fully capable of taking it, nor did I need to protect, for she proudly took up that duty as well.
"Mine," she warned my eyes, and any other part of me that might get funny ideas about who I belonged to, who my instincts served.
"Yours."
"Death will not have you-"
"Because I am yours."
"Nothing can stop us now Severin." Her fanged smile, ill-behaved with ambition, took hold of my shoulder, pulled me the way a mountain lion pulls its meal into a cave. Together we tumbled along the floor, the clump of her furs rising like bread and opening to swallow us. Once in its folds it flattened again. We were somewhere new: a place she made only out of jealous greed. The vermin likely emerged, flicking antennae to and fro, wondering if they were now safe.
Wanda hadn't been safe. She'd been imperiled. By me. Yes, now nothing could stop us, meaning that if we were destroyed it would be together. Our romance was complete, our persons whole. But I shudder over how it could have been different if she had misjudged the timing to approach me.
Or if she had come to me in love... and I had held a rock.
The End
Wanda and Severin will return in
Heirs of Cain
Venus in Charge