“Open the door,” commanded Uncle in front of the cabin, “or it will be opened for you.”
He said that Zariah was supposed to be here. No one had heard from her since the first attack. It was hard to imagine a celebrity like her in a shack like this but there was no mistaking that the drones in the middle of the forest were protecting something.
With no response, Uncle dipped Letiche to the door handle. She gripped the handle to rapidly cover it in pink foliate rime until she let go. Uncle pulled her back and delivered a swift backhand that shattered the embrittled handle. He pushed the door open to enter the cabin with Todd behind him. They followed the sound of voices.
“You said you would protect us!” cried Zariah.
“I said I would give you strength,” said a voice that was less than human, “But there is no strength to protect us from the predator that stalks you.”
“If you know that,” said Uncle when they arrived in the kitchen, “then I suggest you leave.”
“With expedience, great slayer.”
The ghoulish thing came and went just as fast as it did before. With it gone, the only others in the kitchen were two old people. They must be Zariah’s parents. The whole family was shivering in the corner of the kitchen, trying to get away when they had nowhere to run.
“Leave us alone!” cried Zariah, “What did we ever do to you?!”
“You contributed to the apparatus that oppressed your own people. But that was understandable given your position in the circumstances, and the others would agree. What I can’t forgive, however, was making a deal with a daemon. In doing so, you’ve tainted yourself, as well as put the rest of your family in jeopardy. Many before me would take drastic measures to prevent the spread of that taint. Burning a witch and her family at the stake, for example.”
Zariah was blubbering now as she cowered in the corner in the arms of her parents. Todd had always held back the full force of his flames because the image of someone burning alive caused an emptiness inside him like his organs had fallen out. He enjoyed getting to weave a blaze just a moment ago but the scene in front of him now brought back the feeling he feared.
“But that does not have to be the way we settle things. My family has a bloodletting technique that can drain impurities, physical and spiritual. If you come with me, we can cleanse you and have you repent for your indiscretions. If you do that, then your family will be safe.”
That was Uncle’s proposal. He stood there to wait for Zariah’s decision. She looked at her parents on both sides of her. Eventually, she stood up and pulled out of her arms. With her head hung low, and her hands holding her shoulders, she shambled to Uncle like the cadavers from outside. He said nothing. He merely turned to leave the cabin and allowed her to follow him. Todd looked back at the parents one last time before he left.
----------------------------------------
Under the moonless nightfall, flood lights were all that illuminated a tree island in the Everglades. A gurgling generator powered those lights as well as the other machines that were brought here. Auntie Chen and the scientist from the Pantheon were working at a console on the island. In the water, two pods were laid within the sawgrass. Zariah was put into one of those pods, where she was strapped in and hooked up to tubes and monitors. One of the monitors on the console displayed her rapid heart rate. There were no loincloths; unlike last time, everyone but the people going in the pods wore hazmat suits.
Uncle drank the Cassina and sat in meditation as the last of his impurities bled out from hundreds of cuts.
“Is something bothering you, Todd?” asked Uncle.
“No… I mean, those cuts are kind of freaky to look at I guess.”
“It is more than that. We are connected, especially here where the barrier between worlds is the thinnest.”
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“You still haven’t told me what this is all for, why we had to go after someone harmless like Zariah.”
“Do you remember the abomination from Tartarus?”
“Yeah. That was what Angel brought the scientist for right?”
“Yes. With his work, we can accelerate the spread of magic. Connecting with Zariah, specifically, will strengthen my connection to magic,” he opened his palms to let emerald embers flutter out, “and these faint sparks will become an inferno.”
“So like… you’ll get stronger?”
“Yes.”
“I mean, I heard you can beat GalvanGal on your own. And the old gods or whatever. I get the spreading magic part, but was the other part really necessary?”
“The mining sector in the Guiana Shield digs for gold with open pits and chemical separation. An Omai gold mine contaminated billions of liters of water and destroyed the Essequibo River for all eternity. Omai was never held responsible and continued mining.
There are countless Omai’s, in this world and the next, and no matter how many I destroy, there are always more, and I can never bring back what they destroy. The world we have now is a fragment of a fraction of what it once was,” Uncle stood up to face Todd,” We can’t restore what once was. But we can make something new. To do that, I need to combine your strength with mine. So that we can burn down the world together, right?” Uncle held out his fist. Todd bumped it on reflex.
“Right…”
Uncle was strapped down in the pod and hooked up to the apparatus the same way Zariah was. Glass doors sealed the pods. Zariah started shivering when the temperature within them plummeted. Her blood was connected to Uncle through tubes that hung between the pods. Then one tube would connect their cerebrospinal fluids. Then came the hard part.
They were injected with a drug that would induce their deaths. Zariah’s heartbeat spiked all over the screen. It flatlined. Both monitors filled the air with the sound of death until Chen muted them. Dr. Golgi’s science had taken them this far. As much as Chen admired his expertise in human biology, she was much more excited to continue pioneering an emerging field of study.
An assistant gave Auntie Chen a mirror. After admiring how good she looks in coveralls, she dug into the mirror and pulled out a vial full of orange dust. She took off her gloves and poured the orange dust into her hands. She clapped her hands together. An orange cloud lingered in the air as she rubbed dust into her palms. She pulled them apart to reveal sticky strands of sinew. She stretched out her hands until the sinew snapped apart. The wet flesh and dust clouds coalesced around each hand into glowing tendrils from her wrists.
She directed the tendrils towards the pods, for underneath them was the rune of bone. The tendrils connected to the rune and caused the shallow waters to glow with baleful light. That light revealed the spirit animals that gathered to the corpses in the pods: a great variety of them to be studied another time; for now, the target was the Cormorants that came to collect and the Toucan on top of Zariah’s pod.
With a rise of her hands, so too did tendrils rise around the pods from great splashes that shook up still waters and scared the animals, earthly and otherwise. The tendrils were conducted to capture every bird. Plucked up from the surface or snatched out of the sky, no bird was allowed to escape. Their struggle was nothing under the grip of the tendrils that dragged them beneath the water.
After some bubbling in the water, all the machines were deactivated at once. The monitors and screens on the console turned off on their own. The gurgling generator was killed into silence. Without the floodlights, the pitch black consumed all such that one could not see their own hand. What insects and animals would be around were scared off. The only sensation left was the faint sound of ripples in the water and the wind that chilled to the bone.
The rune flared to life and filled the wet prairie with a baleful light. The cormorants and the toucan splashed in the water, desperate to break free. One by one, they were once again dragged under the water. By the time all the cormorants were gone, the toucan’s flailing wings had slowed as it had tired itself out. The wings stopped beating and the toucan floated in place to catch its breath.
The jaws of an alligator burst out to engulf the Toucan. Zariah’s corpse screamed and banged its head on her pod’s glass. The jaws clamped shut, the bird was swallowed whole, and Zariah’s corpse returned to the grave. The baleful light swirled to coalesce around the alligator as it dove back under the water. The generator revved to life and so followed the floodlights. Zariah’s pod was opened and her body was collected.
“What just happened?” asked Todd.
“Zariah’s soul, along with the cormorants, have been devoured by the Gator. The rest is up to him,” said Auntie as she stripped the coveralls.
“So… she’s really gone?”
“Hopefully. I hated how my hospitals had her garbage playing 24/7.”
Auntie Chen admired herself in the mirror as her assistants packed up the equipment. Todd had only seen the silhouette of Zariah banging her head against the glass of the pod, but the scream, muffled as it was, rang clear even now. Yet, somehow, watching the staff carry on is what brought back the emptiness that he feared.