Gadorprims lowered his head and collapsed over the ground. I managed to release Jillsenbane, and left it alone, walking with difficulty over the thin, frail layer of stone that was becoming more fragmented with each movement.
The proud dragon curled up and did something I thought was impossible: he began to cry. A dragon’s tears, a thing of legend.
From behind Scarreladai came a company worthy of escorting the four horsemen. First entered the dogs, forming a line to her sides. Then from above and behind flew in the ghosts, held captive with ethereal chains attached to each other. Screaming in agony, the tortured souls began circling above us in layers, three of them, as if they wanted to frame the eye of night.
“You said you wanted a themed wedding, But I didn’t know end of times counted as a theme,” joked Abeline. She was too far gone to care about our current situation. There seemed to be truly nothing she feared anymore, the worse had been done to her and she was still there.
I couldn’t answer, I was fighting against the shifting flesh to not lose balance, against my sphincters to not make a scene, and against the oppressive atmosphere to not desperate and blow us all up.
I should have, hell, I should have!
The chestipede walked in from the opening on the roof, and he began climbing along Abeline’s web.
“Pawn, dispel the explosive glyphs.”
I couldn’t obey, I couldn’t move. I could barely think. Abeline, the end, Abeline, be free, Abeline, stop joking, Abeline.
Gadorprims opened his eyes to give a look at the sky, and, following his stare, I saw the seven undead whelps that observed us from the borders of the ceiling opening. He promptly shoot a bolt of blue lightning to one of them, and the little thing caught flames before falling into the chamber and becoming a smudge of charred remains when it hit the fleshy base.
“You.” he shot down the second. “Promised.” Then the third. “Not.” And the fourth. “To.” Five down. “Do.” The sixth outright exploded with the impact. “This.” And thus they were seven.
“I promised not to use the children of my mate as servants. And my mate you are not.”
“I am a direct descendant of Jillsen! You cannot do this to me!”
“So she is your something something-aunt?” asked Abeline.
Scarreladai looked into Gadorprims eyes, and he did the same as he gathered electricity to shoot a bolt on her face. And he did.
After being hit with the force of a raging thunderstorm, Scarreladai sneezed.
“Technically, yes, but his divine blood is so far diluted that the only thing he has inherited of my father is the light shows.”
Gadorprims curled back into a ball and resumed his crying.
She began advancing towards me and I thought about blowing up. I needed to, I had to, it was the correct course of action, then why didn’t I do it?
“Come on, pawn, remove those glyphs.”
The chants got closer and closer, and towering shadows were cast on the floor.
“Oh, Pawn, Abeline, Gadorprims the Pathetic, I present you the inhabitants of Luricia. Say hi.”
“Hi fellow torture victims, hi!” Abeline saluted effusively, shaking her original arms high in the air.
“I am thoroughly pleased with your insistence on upholding your day-one-threat to be my most annoying servant, Abeline.”
That explained so much. It was part a coping mechanism, part the old Abeline’s insistence on being true to her word.
Tall dark figures loomed over the hole. These could initially be interpreted as wriggling worms the size of skyscrapers, their setae wagging from side to side like dog tails.
Giant, carnivorous, man-eating worms would have been neat. They would have improved the whole atmosphere. A horror whose worst outcome is being chewed or crushed to death would have been more than welcome. When their tops bent, closing in on us and starting to descend, well… worms would have been Christmas.
“Pull the trigger, Francisco,” I said to myself, lips trembling, as I beheld the choir. I wanted to die but I did not want to die. Call it instinct, call it cowardice, but killing oneself for a greater good took a quota of bravery small but necessary. And, besides, the diary, my light in the dark, was still mostly intact, and to blow up would be to erase my only legacy to the world.
The fingers in the place of the toes. Each leg coming out of a flower of singing faces, grasping at the flesh walls. A string of garlic of heads without neck, with barely any volume when coming out of the main cylinder: a veritable column of circulatory systems, sinew, livers and kidneys, compacted inside transparent skin, like the contents of a sausage.
And they kept on chanting despite their state, despite the jaws being unhinged and the mouths having more tongues than they should, despite the teeth being inserted in decorative patterns around the cheeks instead of in the gums where they supposed to be.
I knelt before the gruesome sight. “What language are they speaking, Lady Scarlet?”
She came up to me, laid on the floor while closing her arms and then, looking upwards, at her infernal singers, she spoke: “My mother tongue. The laments of the dead that have forgot it all but my name. I can’t know what they are saying, Pawn, because the only thing there that makes sense is the way they address me. I was born listening to this lullaby.”
“What a shit taste in music,” said Abeline, as obnoxious as she had apparently sworn to be.
Scarreladai paid her no attention, instead pointing at her with a single claw, while still staring at me.
“You come here to save her, correct?”
I glanced in direction to Abeline. “Y-yes, Lady Scarlet.”
“I am in the mood to negotiate her freedom, and, also, because I know how important it is to my special little dear pet, the spread of you diary. I will make a servant safely drop it into some library, in a town full of living, breathing human people that may be able to read it. What do you say?”
She extended her paw, as if offering me a helping hand.
I nodded. The chants were getting to my nerves. “Make them shut up, please, and I will aid you in whatever you need.”
The chants stopped, but the mewl of the ghosts continued.
“Don’t be a fool, Francisco. She wants you to destroy Jillsenbane,” warned Gadorprims, without uncurling.
“Party pooper. You were on board with my plans yesterday.”
The pillars of faces started to bend in a spiral fashion, and the wailing ghosts descended over Gadorpims like vultures over a carcass. Some arrangements of faces from the cylinders exploding, sending a stream of gore all over gadorpims. Bones, muscle, blood, lard and nerves lumped around the dragon, flowing as if they were liquid, raising him vertically into the air as if he were inside a coffin being pulled by a crane, ready to be sent to his final rest.
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The dragon began snickering, and then broke into an ugly laugh as a parody of the first Abeline (The crucified angel) was built using him as the center piece.
“Yes! Graft a tit to his eye socket! I have one to spare!” cheered on the second Abeline.
“Keep it for a rainy day, my dear Abeline,” Scarreladai answered and raised a claw, palm up, as if she were giving directions to an orchestra.
The angel of gore fluttered its wings, and from between its feathers imitations of dragonlings dripped into the ground, mushy, struggling to keep their shape.
“My style is getting stagnant. I need new materials to work with. Any suggestions, pawn?”
I didn’t answer. I could not. What was she even referring to?
“Suggest me a new organ for humanity to develop. Venomous glands? Too vertebrate. Trachea? Just holes all over the body, inefficient. Malpighian tubules? Or… why restrict myself to the Animal Kingdom? What if I find out how to turn bones into wood, make men spread by spores? Bananas, I could make them produce bananas filled with livers and pancreas,” she rambled like she was mad, but oh, she wasn’t. She demanded an answer, her snout full of teeth every second drawing closer to my face, my eyes going from the meat grinder to the glyphs on my skin and back.
“I… I… Bombardier beetles!”
She withdrew and put on a pensive expression.
“I love it. I can use the lacrimal glands as a starting point. Make little Abeline cry fire over her own cute face.”
I tried to reach for Jillsenbane, but I didn’t find the will to take her out of her sheath.
“No, please, anything but that.”
“Lady, I have an eyeball to spare. Avant Garde,” squeaked Abeline. This wasn’t a joke, but a plea: torture me in a way I know, in a way I am used to.
“Well, fate of sweet Abeline is in your hands,” she said, her gaze fixated on Jillsenbane’s handle. “Destroy the sword, end my fear of death, Pawn. Only that sword, of all mortal weapons, can kill me. Only a blade with the hatred for dragons Saho himself fostered can end me. You know how terrible it is, to live as an almost immortal? The fear of death being a tangible, single thing instead of a random occurrence? To know you can live forever, but have that little woodpecker in your brain, tapping, tapping, drilling, tapping? Destroy Jillsenbane, grant me peace and Abeline will know it too.”
“And then what? We, Gadorprims and I, keep on being your toys? We become that?” I gestured towards the chestipede. “Or that?” and then towards the pillars. “Or maybe a dog or… an adultshower.”
“No, my pawn, no. Destroy Jillsenbane, and I will give you a life of luxury. All you ever wanted, a lie so perfect no one will be able to break it. The chants will become birdsong; you will eat ovaries but feel them as you would the finest caviar. You may dine on Abeline’s remains today, and think of them as a deliciously baked piggy. With an apple in their mouth, Pawn, in a fancy seaside restaurant, Pawn. Obey the queen of this soon to be kingless-chess board, Pawn.”
“Do I get an opinion about being devoured by my ex?”
“Ex?” I asked, and Immediately shook my head. “Yeah, ex, I guess.”
“No. I deserve that caprice, that little leisure.”
“Scarreladai, treacherous cockroach of a partner, why am I not dead yet?”
The dragoness collapsed onto herself, the flesh seemed to wrestle under the skin as her colors shifted, and for brief moments, gifted to me by the light of the explosive sigils, I could still see that all of that wasn’t really happening. Illusions again.
From that unreal mesh of a dragon, reformed the Fourth Abeline.
“No, let her image go too. You have no right to look like Abeline.”
“But if you obey I will be your Abeline.”
The second Abeline was laughing hysterically, one hand gesturing at her disfigured face, the other at the Fourth Abeline.
“I offer you an Abeline that doesn’t break down, an Abeline that doesn’t age. An Abeline that will wake next to you every morning, and smile, and have with you the quarrels she is supposed to have as a good partner.”
“No illusionary bitch can match my ability to feed a baby whilst I carry it over my head. Horrid monster Abeline one, cute unblemished Abeline zero.”
I stood and turned towards her. “Shut up! I am trying to free you, my love. It’s no easy task.”
“Free her… and have this.” The illusion gestured towards her body, a mixture of those of the third and second Abelines, the real and the ideal. “Francisco, I can be a really good girlfriend. I studied humans a lot.”
“Why am I alive? Why?” screamed Gadorprims, despairing a bit more with each word.
“You know, Gador mon amour: Jillsenbane needs a parting gift.”
Gadorprims began to fight against his prison, making the flesh bulge out and the surface betray the shapes under it, but it didn’t budge. Not a centimeter of tissue budged.
“Pawn, the sword will eat my soul, it will, it will, it always eats the souls of dragons in her last meals. You would be doing something way worse than killing me.”
“And yet better than grafting a—” one of the passing ghosts slapped Abeline to shut her up.
“I offer you your Abeline, prior to the weird over-fixation on the least horrible modification her body underwent.”
“I... I cannot accept your offer in good faith. I want her, the Abeline in my dreams; I would prefer it to be her,” I pointed at my ex-girlfriend with my right index finger. How mistreated was my nail, that it looked like a deformed claw, “The Abeline in the web; but I can only have her,” then I turned again towards Scarreladai, “The Abeline for which I’d need to hand you control over the world.”
“If you are not able to kill your lady, your new Abeline, the world is already mine, Pawn. Worry not, I’ll let life and what you call beauty be. Otherwise, my art would not be… sustainable,” The Fourth Abeline licked her lips and then embraced me. She was lovingly warm, cotton soft, and smelled like the perfume she wore before we, optimistic and full of tomorrows, parted from town and came to this cave.
“Can you make it tailor made to me? Every last detail? Can the illusion be so perfect that, once immersed, breaking from it would feel like encroaching madness? Can you make me the hero I wanted to be? Make me believe I killed you, that this all was a nightmare, that I retired from the adventuring life and—”
She shushed me and placed two fingers from her other hand over my lips. “Anything that can and cannot be, Pawn. With a spell so powerful, so well crafted, that you will never wake up from. A heaven tailored for you, despite your sins, despite your shortcomings. Haven’t you spent enough time in hell? Wouldn’t it be nice if it had a patina of paradise painted over?”
“Yes, it would be. Hell yes, it would be! Please, my dear Lady, please.”
“Francisco, you immature coward! Will you replace me with a lying dragon?” questioned the second Abeline, extending the hands that were on her shoulders, signaling as if she were about to strangle me.
“Yes, why not. I am tired, Abeline. I am old. You are dead, you should be dead, a bygone. Look at what you are. Don’t you want to rest in peace? Don’t you want to—”
“You are a rat, Pawn,” Interrupted Gadorprims, who had long stopped fighting against his flesh cocoon. “As much of a rat as I am for thinking I could get away with being her mate. A dirty, basic, scared rat.”
“Rats want to live and be rats, Gadorprims, they eat their legs to get out of traps. If I have to live my remaining days believing myself a sewer-dwelling rodent, I will.”
“Scarreladai can arrange that, swine. So come, kill me so she spares my children, make the sword devour my soul, see if you don’t suffer every time you sleep, see if you don’t exchange the world dreams and reality have. I sinned out of a dragon’s hubris, I thought my children would inherit the world if she was their mother. There are two hearts in this room that Jillsenbane would love to pierce, to taste the sweet blood coursing through them. Don’t you feel her dying inside every second you don’t use her to kill us? So feed her if you will, but know that she would be infinitely more sated by her soul than mine.”
The fourth Abeline raised her open hand and slowly closed it, smirking. Gadorprims gasped for air and shrieked as I heard something break, crack. The gore-angel wings around the tortured dragon.
“I have a beating heart. I have a burning dragon soul that Jillsenbane would love to consume. And I have the key to your happiness. Fight me and perish, knowing a simple explosion won’t even scratch me, or, even if by some miracle you win, remember you are now old, remember your woman is disfigured and dead. You have no family nor friends, you lost most of your hair, and developed a hunch. I hold the sole key to your happiness, Francisco, so think it pretty well. Which one will you feed to Jillsenbane?”
I looked at Gadorprims, knocked out, with his head limp and fallen, striving to breath and doing so slowly. I looked at the second Abeline, heartbroken, despondent, looking at both her open, trembling hands with the head tilted so the breast would not obstruct her vision. Were it not for her, Gadorprims would have escaped, and with him the chance to destroy Jillsenbane. I looked at the undead and pulsing horrors that surrounded us. I looked at my malnourished torso and trembling hands.
“I hate you, Scarreladai. But yours is the key to my happiness.” I drew Jillsenbane and pointed her in the direction of Gadorprims. “I hate you almost as much as I hate myself. But today I earn the flawless world you offer. No more Jillsenbane, and no more Gadorprims, in exchange of no more suffering or sadness or nights without my beloved.”
“Stop!” cried the second Abeline.
“No,” I said without turning, gesturing the fourth Abeline to proceed. “You cannot offer me what she can. You are dead, my Eurydice, and I was not man enough to go into the Hades and try to save you when I had the chance. Let this parody of Orpheus be dismembered by his own disgrace too.”
Abeline shook her head. “I mean, conjoin a breast to his face first!”
Scarreladai had enough. The fourth Abeline sprouted tattered blue wings and flew up to where the second was. A blue spark appeared in the darkness, both of Abeline’s eyes staring at each other in a way they should never have. The fourth Abeline opened her mouth impossibly wide, and in flash, the dragon beneath replaced the girl for a fraction of a heartbeat. The second Abeline stared fearlessly, almost bored.
“Goodbye Francisco. Have a good lie,” she said with a sweet voice, closing the only eye that still belonged to her. Seconds later, her severed head was on its way to Scarreladai’s stomach. Not much time elapsed until the dragon had consumed her chest and abdomen too.
“Pop the eye too!”
“What?” asked the dragon, now unmasked.
“Pop out her eye, destroy it, have no remain of Abeline left here.”
“Do your task, servant, and you shall have it all:The illusions, her eye to keep or dispose of, and my absolution for attacking me back then. Jillsenbane dies today, and I want to be in the first row for her execution.”
I defused all my sigils. They would do me no good anymore.