An old scream hung in the stagnant air.
Though he tried to keep his inhalations as shallow as possible, with every rise and fall of Blake’s chest came a cutting pain. Any twist of his torso spurred another bout of sharp agony to assault him, so the young man sat in the exact position he’d been carelessly tossed into hours ago. The fallen tree pressed against his back, and the ache of broken ribs against his front. Far above, the sun transformed the clear sky into an endless blue, but none of its heat reached him.
Blake felt cold.
Distant wails echoed down the caverns – a chorus of thousands originating from just one creature. The Seeds had dragged the new god upwards; to bury the huge contraption the being had made for them into its flesh and suck out its blood to power that self-same machine. The thing that used to be Blake’s friend screamed like a field of corpses given voice. A horrifying sound that the mind kept trying and failing to make sense of.
Blake sat, breathing imperceptibly slight, and stared at a ghost. His eyes plucked at the places where its edges frayed into nothingness, attempting to parse the exact point they disappeared. Yet repeatedly, he found that pinprick outside of the acuity of his eyes. If he was capable of putting together some kind of magnifying tool, or simply possessed sharper sight, then maybe it would be possible to find it. But increasingly, he’d begun to suspect it didn’t exist at all.
Just an empty shaft, far-off screams, the pain in his chest, and the dull weariness permeating it all.
More Shrikebloods ran through the caverns, their footsteps and muted exchanges a pale accompaniment to the howls of a god. Their words were indistinguishable from one another. It was self-evident, the others had told him, why they would want to kill a god. Blake hadn’t inquired – hadn’t wanted to inquire – any further. But their entire group – the Scattered Seeds, Gaia had called them – seemed one unfathomable mass: crawling forward with all the purpose of a god. Or a colony of ants. With alien motives mapped to unanswerable intentions. Each moving according to a design beyond them.
Every encampment gave different answers when asked about their goals. Cutting off the Albright’s power, said one. One populated mostly by Heartlanders spoke of wresting control over the region from the god. Another simply wanted to match the deed of the Godslayers over a dozen years prior; etch themselves into history as their predecessors had done.
Yet as he sat, each breath a tired grimace, he couldn’t help but notice that Erin’s low tones didn’t seem to be among them. When the god had disappeared the day before, every Seed was given a search radius. Erin’s had been slightly further away from the rest. A position of privilege, afforded because of her supposed familiarity with the god. A location he had heard.
Blake hadn’t asked for a role. Instead, he’d waited.
He’d done a lot of waiting.
Slowly, he removed a hand from his ribs and placed it against the rough bark of the trunk behind him. Then he began to push.
When a sharp stabbing in his torso rattled the strength from his arm, the young man stopped. After a short break, he tried once more. Eventually, ribs afire with a pain that dominated every ounce of his consciousness except the one piece charged with pushing, he got to his feet. He started carefully moving forward.
None of the lanterns had been lit that day, and the sun had yet to extend its light so far down. In the dull darkness that remained, the only sounds were the far-away screams of the god, the skittering of fallen branches kicked by Blake’s feet and his strained breathing as he struggled across the shaft. When he was faced with the lurking abyss of one of the adjacent tunnels, he smeared the blood from one of his cuts on a lantern he’d demounted from its wall and fumbled onwards in the feeble glow his insignificant Oxblood provided. The pock-marked man braced himself against the rough walls of the path, then shuffled along the rows of cots within the barracks and past Ronnie’s sweating slumber to the room’s quiet termination, where his own possessions lay.
Everything he had been able to carry through half the continent lay there. Some of it had been traded for information on the Face Bhan and his apprentice. Most had been confiscated by the Esfarian hunters, and left with their bodies when no one except Erin had the stomach to rifle through their corpses. What remained was a bedroll, a banged-up copper pot, his wood axe, water-skin, a good, heavy knife and an accompanying whetstone, and a few small carvings.
Blake had tried to convince Orvs to create more. Patiently offered good pieces of wood sourced from trips to the surface. Sat for hours upon hours, coaxing and wheedling his way into the god’s full attention. And sometimes it would sprout a thin, sharp shard of speartree from the black masses of what could have been hands, and begin slicing away at them. Inevitably, its flesh would transition from stillness to a frantic shuffling.
The thing that was once his friend never finished them. They were left ill-defined, with central features abandoned to languish as forever incomplete. Each failure had been quietly crushed beneath Blake’s hand.
“Try again,” he’d whisper to it. “One more time.”
Yet no sudden changes materialised from its hesitant limbs. It had left him stranded in the present.
Laboriously, Blake strapped the knife to his belt and tied the axe to his shoulders. Then he picked up a single wooden figure, gripped his ribs and slowly began walking upwards.
Those steps passed in a fugue of insidious pain creeping at every twist of his torso and long exertion building with every faltering step. His beaten body ached with the urge to draw deep, fulfilling breaths, but each attempt was punished with a shard hammered into his side. The young man was frequently forced to stop and recover; leaning against a wall while feeling far more aged than he had any right to be.
The agonised screams grew louder, but though he cringed with every discordant screech, Blake no longer had the energy to block his ears. He doggedly trudged onwards: past inclines that seemed to stretch forever and insurmountable walls he somehow found the grit to scale; past the Shrikeblooded warriors scurrying through the earth’s veins like a kicked anthill and obstacles wreathed in shadow.
Past a familiar bend in the tunnel that fell away to reveal Kit – a weary snarl drooping from her face – and the three Seeds holding her back. The twins, Dash covered in welts and blood while Sash was smeared with mud and grime, shared the same trail of dried tears beneath both their eyes. Taja, head bowed with featureless guilt, despite Maddie’s arms around his shoulders – perhaps more for her sake than his. The Face Bhan, quips and lessons vanished from his lips to leave behind only the deep lines of his features and the mute horror twisting them. And finally Gaia, silently directing her people to continue operating the huge, head-aching contraption with the spiral tip, by stabbing it into a divine being.
Blake looked at them, his stare trying to peel back their skin and reach what lay beneath. It failed.
None of them called to him, or took him by the arm. None of them noticed Blake shuffle past. But the thing that was once his friend – the thing that was me – did.
Where its gut-wrenching, writhing flesh was impaled upon the machine to draw the blood that would fuel it, it screamed with empty maws that studded its immense form like pock-marks, eyes crawling across its body as its musculature waxed and waned like a moon married to a mad, torturous sun, and a world that saw only riches in its sky.
Blake shuffled from the caverns and left them all behind.
Into the heat of the sun’s zenith. Where the birds sung and the leaves swayed and the forest was alive with animal life and all their animal concerns: deer delicately chewing on grass; possums scuttling over high branches; great hogs snuffling through undergrowth that Blake gave a wide berth. It was nothing like the Wastes.
This day was the first of Spirit season, he realised. The shortest of all five seasons – five, instead of the two they’d had in the Wastes – at only a week long. This season, Bhan had told him, was closest to the many ghosts that roamed the land, awaiting the bloodletting of gods or word of a Face to find peace. While it was ongoing – not everywhere, and not every year – it was possible to see waves of green and orange flowing through the sky, carrying those souls to wherever they go, after life. Or so Blake had heard.
The sky was blue today.
Blake gripped his side and trudged past it. His eyes slid over all they beheld. Until they finally staggered to his first destination.
Sometimes, out in the wilderness that dominated the continent, a wanderer stumbled upon the remnants of what had once been a home. A wooden hovel with its thatched roof collapsed; a mud-brick hut with a wall caved in; half a shed formed of charred logs; a fallen fence containing the remnants of bird-feed. Sometimes these derelict properties languished alone; other times they gathered in a small of collection of other buildings, strangely solitary despite their proximity.
Many things could leave a place derelict. Back in during Frost, in the abandoned village he, Bhan, and Erin had been held captive within, the village had probably been abandoned due to the Heartland’s famine. Their former residents could likely be found in Spires or on the road to it, quietly waiting in a grave. Attacks by godkin or the rumoured movement of the gods themselves could force a family to uproot themselves; drifting upon the wind until, if they were fortunate enough, they found a new place to settle. Blake had even heard of a place abandoned simply due to the fact the two people that lived there couldn’t tolerate one another any longer. Which had always seemed funny to him, for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. Regardless of cause, they were all similar in the end.
He’d grown up in such a place. Most of the Foot had been abandoned due to the dual factors of forced conscription by the Houses and the plague that followed the Raven’s death. Of the entire city, only the markets and the Frond’s fields could truly be said to breathe. The rest simply gathered sand and dust, furniture slowly rotting as time passed. Blake remembered running with Orvs alongside some other dirt-stained kids for hours, and never running out of space to stretch his arms out wide.
That place didn’t exist anymore. House Esfaria had seen to that. Brought their soldiers and their bloodtech; their masons and smiths and cordwainers and hunters and dozens of other trades Blake couldn’t wrap his head around. The city was fuller than it had ever been, and that meant there was less room than ever.
At the end of his stiff, lurching gait and the pain each breath drove into his ribs was a small stone wall seated in a meadow. Its apex barely reached his waist, and its length stretched a few paces in either direction. Perhaps it had once surrounded a house, or been part of one itself. Barely a whisper of that existed in the present: only a few scattered rocks hinting at a far taller structure, before the vines had begun to crawl over it.
Blake carefully seated himself upon it and caught his breath underneath the sunlight.
A breeze played with his hair. It had grown far longer than he usually kept it. But he never had managed to grow a beard, beyond a bit of scraggly fluff. A small bird – red feathers dotted with black speckles – foraged through the grass for bugs. But the pock-marked young man stared at nothing.
After a time, he pulled the wooden figure from his pouch.
Frozen in wood was a youth. Perched atop a tiny stool, hand frozen halfway to his knee as he laughed uproariously at some undefined joke. Close-cropped hair. An easy smile sat on a face unmarred by pock-marks, torture, or starvation. Eyes full of laughter. A kid for whom breathing was as easy as anything else. A person who had no need for hope.
Once, it had seemed that youth could come to life at any moment.
Blake had thought all his tears had dried in the shaft, but somehow, he found them falling once more.
He found a quiet spot at the end of the wall for that figure. Where the sun was bright and the air was warm.
And left it there.
----------------------------------------
“Erin.”
The woman in question stiffened, her shout for a god that was no longer there terminating on her lips, and reached for the javelins holstered on the small of her back. A beat passed, then she turned and realised who had spoken. “Blake?”
She stood in the ashen remnants of a glade, once lit ablaze by an errant strike of lightning that had extinguished just as quickly under Tempest’s fury. A layer of dust concealed the dirt, and the leaves of the single surviving charred tree slowly swayed, pale as disease, under a slight breeze. The only other feature of the clearing were the stumps – so burnt they were barely recognisable as such – scattered eclectically across it. Blake sat atop one, hands pressed against his side.
It had taken him hours to reach his former travelling companion. Gaia had sent her to this place because the god was known to frequent it. Whether out of affection or something else, only it knew.
The large, muscular woman deposited her javelin back in its pouch, where it clanged mildly against its fellows. A grey cloud had passed over the sky, reducing the colourless surroundings into even more lifeless shades. Erin’s skin was a vicious red from the sun, Blake idly noticed. A dark indentation stretched under her eyes.
Erin must have been searching for the better part of a day. Given the disarray that had spread throughout the Seed’s ranks, it was no surprise that they had neglected to tell her the god had returned.
“Did they find it?” she asked, then her eyes widened as she set eyes upon his state. “Gods, Blake; what happened to you?” She slid to her knees in front of him, reaching into her pouch for a roll of cloth. “Where does it hurt? Is anything broken? If you breathe- ”
He couldn’t stand it.
“D’you remember,” Blake interrupted, “that day in Maja’s restaurant? When Orvs was absolutely fumin’ ‘bout his mother havin’ better luck with girls than him?”
“The day Sash nearly choked you out,” she supplied, lips quirking as she looked up.
He didn’t acknowledge the light ribbing. “Was that a good day, for you?” The young man’s tone was monotonous; like a mountain range pounded flat. “Were you happy?”
Her smile fell.
Blake was not smiling, either. He was not making any expression at all.
The Blooded took that in and slowly straightened. “What is this about?” Her voice – deep for a woman – had gone entirely still. Neither rasps nor assonance accompanied it; merely the edges of words chiselled from ice.
Forcing sounds from his throat felt to Blake like rolling boulders up a hill. “Were you happy, Erin?”
The woman who’d once been his second-in-command in keeping his gang of orphans afloat slowly bobbed her head.
Blake gave a slight snort.
“What?” she snapped. “You’ve spent the entirety of Tempest dancing around the issue. If you want to ask me something, then- ”
“What do you think this is about?”
Despite his tone lacking anything but fatigue, she flinched.
The wounded man nodded, then turned his hollow eyes towards the ground. “I had a good time, that day. Things were good. We’d made a nice little corner of the Foot for ourselves, yeah?”
Erin didn’t answer. It was clear he didn’t want her to.
“Took a while. Since Mumma died, it’d been hard. But I got there, in the end.” He paused, then gave a short chuckle which quickly transformed into a wince.
“You never talk about your mother.”
“You don’t either. Lot o’ kids in the Foot don’t.” He gave a worn laugh, then grunted with pain. “I dunno. I guess I don’t remember that much. You might’ve gathered she was a, uh… What’s the word…”
Erin waited.
“…A prostitute. Course I didn’t know what that was at the time; just that she’d kick me out when people came callin’, an’ let me back in when they left. When the Godslayers came marchin’, I guess that was a lot o’ business for a bit, but, uh…”
He stared at the ground. Wind kicked up ash. “Might’ve been the plague, might’ve been she just, uh… Caught somethin’ from her clients. But then she was gone an’ I was left behind.” He scoffed. “Like I said. Typical kind o’ story in the Foot. Heard dozens like it myself.”
“…Was she a good mother?”
He rubbed the back of his head. “Iunno.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
In some ways, she hadn’t been. Blake could recognise that in hindsight. He remembered spending hours outside in the Still heat, growing thirstier and thirstier underneath the baking sun while he ran out of things to do waiting for his mum to finish with a client. He recalled thinking that this was what bread must feel like when it was in an oven. Sometimes, if he told her he was hungry and she was in a mood, the only reply he’d get was a smack across the face. He remembered falling once, ripping his knee open and bursting into tears, only for Mumma to ignore his cries.
Yet better fragments floated around the back of his skull. Mumma humming quietly while she waited for him to fall asleep. Her watching him eat with a broad smile across her face. A day when they’d gone to the market, swum in the oasis, and played with some other kids, leaving him so bone-weary that she’d been forced to carry him home.
Blake remembered feeling safe, then. Like the walls of their little hovel formed the outer edge of eternity.
When she died, he should’ve learned otherwise.
Afterwards, he’d spent years carving himself a piece of the world. As a dumb kid, it’d been simpler. Yet it’d all turned to smoke anyway.
“Felt like I had everythin’ figured out, when I met you.”
Erin smirked. “I never told you this, but I thought you did as well. You were coordinating a whole gang – either kids who’d sooner kill you than look at you or ones where making them speak was like pulling teeth. The fact you managed them all was a miracle.”
Blake shrugged. “They didn’t all listen to me, personally. Jus’ pointed the older ones they did listen to towards them.”
He hadn’t always been good at it. Sometimes it was hard to work for kids determined to hate you. But Blake had been patient. And he hadn’t been alone.
“Delegation’s a skill as well.”
“Mm,” he grunted. “They’re all off doin’ their own thing, now. Have it all figured out, I guess.”
Erin nodded, smiling tightly.
“Would you believe it.” His voice had lost what little animation it had. “I figured somethin’ out too, Erin.”
“And…” She swallowed heavily. “What is it?”
“Orvs; the god; the Vulture: whatever you wanna call it…” He turned his gaze back up, where Erin stood, perfectly still. A stranger in a friend’s body. “It freaked out. Hurt some people. But, you see, it yelled out somethin’ while it did so. What d’you think it said?”
“What?” Her voice was a whisper.
Blake leaned forward. “They’ll let none survive.”
The words were quiet, but rung loudly in the quiet of that burnt place. Several clouds slowly drifted across the sky. Briefly, they parted to reveal a beam of the falling sun, which fell upon Erin’s face. The woman looked as if she’d woken from a nightmare, only to find it lurking in the corners of her bedroom.
The injured man removed his hands from his ribs and placed them on his knees to carefully lever himself upright. A blade of pain forced a grunt from his lips, however beyond that he remained silent as he stared at her, several paces distant.
“Was this the plan from the beginnin’?” he asked, breathing shallow and ragged. “You befriendin’ Orvi, me; gettin’ the Ravenblood out here?”
“I simply…” Erin swallowed heavily, fingers frantically fiddling with a button on her pants. “I just did odd jobs for them. And they wanted to know if a Ravenblood appeared- “
“How long was it ‘just odd jobs’?” Blake’s voice curled in a monotonous imitation of her own.
She didn’t answer.
“Y’know,” he began, “Shrikeblood’s got even fewer tells than Ravenblood. None o’ the orange hair of Foxbloods, or the bluntness o’ Lizardbloods or the long faces and massive bodies o’ Oxbloods. I thought the only similarity was that you were all big, but that’s not even true, is it?”
He stepped forward, and Erin stepped back.
“Because Taja told me they knew a man who drunk directly from the source, an’ that he didn’t get any bigger after.” The wounded man hissed against the pain in his side. “Didn’t live long enough.”
Erin splayed her hands, stare plaintive. “You need help- “
“And,” Blake continued over her, “that’s bloody interestin’, isn’t it? Because it means someone – maybe a girl, for example – could’ve been a Shrikeblood for ages and no one would know she was anythin’ but your standard, everyday mortal.”
“Blake- “
He took another stiff step towards her, teeth bared in a perpetual grimace. “Remind me: when did you say your second growth spurt start, again? The one that hasn’t ended?” There was no space for her to answer before his voice stumbled on. “A little before we met, wasn’t it?”
The Shrikeblood’s gaze did not meet his own.
“‘They’ll let none survive.’ Whaddaya think that means, Erin? ‘Cause all the other Seeds seem t’think we’re jus’ killin’ one House; one god.” He winced as the fervour of his speech jarred his side. “So why did our new god say that? The one that shouldn’t exist. Because the Raven died halfway across the continent, and Orvs became a god without so much as touchin’ its corpse.”
Blake inhaled a breath, then leaned further forward, grunting as his torso bent. “I won’t say I understand it, but it seems to me like divinity’s a godsdamned hot potato. Tossed from Blooded to Blooded when a god dies. Reckon that means that if you were, I don’t know…” He raised his eyes to the air, then lowered them. “Tryin’ to kill a god, maybe you’d have to get rid o’ all of its Blooded t’make the death stick.”
He took one final step. This time, Erin did not retreat. “And it’s a real coincidence that you’ve got all the Ravenblood in the world in one place, and all the Shrikeblood either in the veins of the Seeds or stompin’ through the castle you’re about to invade.”
The only sign a person inhabited his face was the tightness around his eyes.
“Whaddaya think all those Shrikeblood conversion stones you’ve got the god makin’ are for, Erin?”
Once more, she said nothing.
“So,” he said, gazing with dead eyes, intonation absent from his voice, “what’s the plan, Erin?”
“I… I’m not Gaia,” she protested. “I don’t know.”
Blake cocked his fist, then there was a flash of white as his head snapped backwards, sending his body teetering backwards. He barely managed to catch himself in a halting stagger before he fell to the ground.
“Sorry.” In front of him, Erin withdrew her hand from the punch she’d thrown, yet maintained her sturdy brawling stance. “I thought you were going to- “
The person opposite her pinched one nostril shut and shot blood onto the ash. “Oxdung. You worked your way up the ranks quick, huh? Made good use o’ your knowledge o’ Orvi, I bet. You know more than your average Seed, I’m sure.” Belatedly, he paused and added, “By the way, I was gonna hit you.”
Erin’s tiny movements – her breath, her cautious shifting from leg-to-leg, the susurrus of thoughts flitting across her face – ceased. Her eyes fixated on a spot in the air.
“Don’t try an’ lie t’me,” Blake warned.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly nodding to herself as she worked up the nerve to speak. The fathomless green eyes perched on her face didn’t move. “Alright. Sure. The plan.” She continued nodding. “The plan.” Suddenly, her stare locked onto his own. “You can’t tell anyone.”
A humourless, blood-filled snort emerged from Blake’s nostrils. “Who would believe me?”
“I mean it.”
His lips quirked at the corner. “Fine.”
For a few moments, the Shrikeblood continued to stare at him. An almost brown smear ran beneath his nose where she’d punched him. Whatever she was attempting to glean, Erin emerged from her inspection dissatisfied. Regardless, she continued.
“…You’re mostly right. The Vulture will kill the Shrike, and so two gods will become one. Then we will force it to kill the other six.”
He blinked. “All o’ them?”
Erin slowly nodded. “All of them.”
“We’ve…” For the first time that day, Blake felt as if he’d been struck. “It’s almost lost its mind, and that’s just with one type of blood. You think it’ll listen to you with seven more?”
“The moment the Seeds can’t control it…” The Blooded opened her mouth then closed it several times as she searched for the words.
Blake finished for her. “You kill it.”
The large woman bobbed her head mutely.
“…And the conversion stones?”
“We remove all Shrikeblood from the Seeds before the deicide and kill any of us who refuse.”
“There’s more’n jus’ Shrikeblood in th’ other gods.”
She looked at him, “…I know.”
“…Like how the Houses dealt with the Raven Cult. But with all Blooded.” Blake glanced at the woman he used to know. “Am I right?”
“…Or just the Blooded of every god it’s killed before being put down.”
“That’s insane,” the young man stated blandly. “Every Blooded? Every monster? How long’s that gonna take?”
Erin gave a shrug that belied the severe set of her features. “Generations, maybe. Getting rid of all of us is the project of a century. But perhaps the time will go faster, with the help of a god.”
“And how d’you figure you’re gonna kill that god?” he inquired, unable to prevent a trace of mockery entering his voice. “Hit it real hard?”
“Gaia said that before Gale Heltia became…” She didn’t finish the sentence. “He created a piece of bloodtech. Put it in a god, and it’s self-perpetuating. It will eventually kill it with the power of its own divinity.”
A hint of teeth entered his tone. “And you’re gonna put that in Orvs?”
“Orvi’s dead, Blake,” Erin suddenly snapped, face contorting in deep, wretched fury. “Godsblood has eaten him alive. I doubt it’s even capable of thought. It’s an empty vessel aping those that have already left. Nothing about this thing is worthy of your consideration. Nothing. If Orvi’s still in there, he would’ve begged us to get him out.”
“Erin. I have two things left.” The tanned young man cringed as he stepped closer and pain jarred his side. “I have you. And I have him. You’ll break that. I don’t care if he’s gone. I’ll hold vigil over his ghost. So please just…”
Blake tried on a smile. Cautiously moved it over his lips, and the muscles around them. Brought it into the wrinkles around his eyes. Then held it there, at tension with the entropy gradually metastasizing behind his gaze.
He managed to keep it there for a few moments before it slipped away. “…Let it be.”
Erin clenched her eyes shut and turned her head away, teeth gritted in reluctance. As if telling dark truths to a child better left ignorant. “We’ll all be better off with it dead.”
“It’s not hurting anyone,” he managed.
She barked a humourless laugh. “Are you joking? It’s murdered plenty. It hurt you.”
“You’re really gonna kill what’s left of him?”
“You asked, Blake,” she stated tersely. “That’s the plan.”
There was a long pause as Blake felt his surprise fading. After all, he’d known something had triggered the Vulture’s sudden fixation on the twins. The scope of Erin’s plan was immense – stupidly so – and throbbed with a quiet hubris. It was little wonder the other Seeds gave different answers: they likely didn’t know. Anyone sensible would take one good look at their objective and wander right on to the other side of the continent. But the real question wasn’t whether Erin believed it was possible.
He released a weary breath. “What’s the world gonna look like at the end o’ your plan?” he asked. “What’s the world you see, when it’s over?
While they’d been speaking, the horizon had begun to redden. The sun had fallen below the clouds, and its light fought through the gaps of distant hills and the dense forest stretching around their location to reach the ashen meadow they stood within, alighting the charred logs and stretch of grey beneath their feet crimson once more.
“No gods. No monsters. No Blooded. Just…” He ignored the pain and stretched his arms, mind sketching what the place at the end of Erin’s path might look like. “People. Spires hangin’ over the land, with all their bridges and the little humans walking over them in-between. All the Godsblood in the world to power it. This whole forest made a field, to make as much food as you can eat an’ then some.
“Houses, stretchin’ from horizon to horizon,” he finished. “But none with room for you or me.”
Erin’s eyes widened. “It might not get that far, Blake.”
“But that’s still the dream, isn’t it?” He peered at the mottled clouds covering the sky, and imagined the verdant lights that Spirit might bring. “Get the Vulture t’eat the gods. Kill it. Flatten all the edges of the world. Make it a smooth, level place. Fit for only humanity.”
Her lips tightened. “The gods are monsters.”
“Your people’ve locked a god beneath the earth,” he hissed, “and are pumpin’ it for everythin’ it’s worth. The Vulture screams, Erin. Gods walk – these unspeakable titans; the greatest o’ their kind and unique in their own ways – and we… we swarm ‘em. Bite at their heels for their blood to put in our veins and make machines. They’re dangerous, maybe, but they’re not…”
A memory drew itself towards the present: white halls full of bars, trapping broken corpses in a tomb of man’s making. “They don’t put people in cages.”
“They are a cage,” the Shrikeblood snarled. “While they hound us, we cannot grow. Their cruelty marks the limits of what humanity can be. You say the Vulture screams?”
For the first time since their confrontation had begun, she leaned down towards Blake, seeking his dark eyes with her brighter pair. “What makes their screams more worthy than humanity’s? Than mine? They ache with eight voices, even as they quash hundreds of thousands of others. Why should they be allowed to exist? Their beauty? Some misguided notion of romance?” she snapped, voice a flash of hateful steel. “What is romance, when confronted with a graveyard that spans the entire continent?”
“So you’ll replace it with somethin’ that’s the same, no matter where you walk,” Blake quietly stated.
Erin opened her mouth, face tensed as if to continue her tirade, then closed it. Eventually, she gave a simple nod.
He gazed at the ash beneath his feet. It crunched minutely as his boots shifted. “We could walk away.”
The larger woman’s face suddenly wrenched.
“Wander off. Find some place to live. Some good food. Some good company.” He smiled lightly as a thought occurred to him. “Bet I could find someone just as ugly as Maja t’date you.”
“Blake,” she mumbled, covering her eyes, “please.”
“Or,” he continued over her, “we could stay here. But you’re gonna have t’get through me.”
Erin stiffened, and slowly removed her hands from her eyes. “…What?” she whispered.
With excessive caution, Blake removed his axe from where it hung on his belt and spun it several times between his hands. Despite that, the motion still had pain pounding on his chest. “I reckon I know what you’re gonna choose.”
“Blake,” she said, eyes wide as moons, “come on. Don’t do this.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You’re all I have,” she pleaded, voice quavering. “I’ve burned every other bridge to get here. Every person I could’ve been. You’re all I’ve kept.” Desperation swum through her words. “Without you, there’s nothing left.”
In a field of ash, with the sun shining behind, her face was locked tight within shadow. But hints of her expression lay in her muscular form: the slumped set of her shoulders; the tightness of her fists; the tendon wound tight against the skin of her neck. Her frame seemed far smaller with that desolation as a backdrop. The absence didn’t dominate her form with great mass; it simply removed everything that could give perspective. Despite her position in the Scattered Seeds, Erin’s body had become an island unto itself.
Some part of Blake recognised looking away as selfish. The sure sign of a poor friend. Yet nevertheless, his eyes gravitated downwards, towards the head of his axe. Past its blunt edges and within its polished metal lay his own face, writ in stark clarity.
Filthy hair brushed his chin, which was adorned with a scraggly beard. A limp pair of lips. Dried sweat and tears had cut through the grime of his face – forever marred with the pockmarked remnants of the plague the Lizard had left in the Foot. Beneath his lowered brows were a set of eyes. They were neither colourful, nor beautiful. Not like Erin’s green pair, or Orvi’s expressive set – always flitting around like two excited birds. They were just eyes. Containing nothing more than what they beheld.
There were empty, now.
“Well.” Blake’s hollow gaze left his axe to seek out Erin’s own. “What’s one more figure for the pyre?”
Then he spun his axe’s head forward and swung for her, torso blazing with agony. The Shrikeblood ducked underneath and slammed her fist into his chin, rocking Blake’s head backwards before everything went dark.
The impact of his head against the ground woke him. He blinked. Their steps had kicked a cloud of ash into the air that sucked into his lungs with every breath. All he could do was laugh. Every harsh bark sparked his torso with another blaze of agony beyond anything he’d felt that day, yet that only made him laugh harder.
“Why?” Erin asked from above him.
His laughter vanished as if had never begun. “Why?” Blake repeated, blood dripping from his nostrils.
Erin stepped away as he staggered upright, bracing his body against his fallen axe.
“Because I’m sick of this,” he muttered.
“Sick of this,” Blake hissed at her, weeping.
“Sick of this.” Pain shot from his chest with every word.
“I’m sick of this. I’m sick of this,” he chanted, teeth bared and bloodied. “I’m sick of this. I’m so godsdamned sick of trying to find something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Erin’s eyes trembled in their sockets. “Then let go, Blake.”
“I can’t,” he spat.
She shook her head in mute denial.
“Either you die here,” he said, wiping the tears from his face, “or I do.”
Erin opened her hands. “But you won’t win,” she pleaded.
Blake barked one last laugh at that, then swung his axe towards her.
Once again, Erin stepped aside, feet crunching firmly over the ash, and he stumbled forward with the momentum. Black spots danced before his eyes. Blake turned on his heel and barged into her, yet she matched him with her greater mass. Her hands closed around his but to both their surprises he managed to wrangle his arm from her grasp and slug her across the face.
The blow pained him more than her, but even as his ribs erupted in protest his fist was falling once more: a savage hammer-blow that caught her on the side of the head. When Erin stumbled backwards, Blake readied his axe once more and swung. With a few fluttering steps, the Shrikeblood evaded the blow with ease. As he’d known she would.
The young man swung, punched, tackled; Erin dodged, slipped, rebuffed. Each of his failures to harm her came with a punishing blow, and though none ever had his vision flickering all stoked the agony in his ribs that threatened to eat him alive. Yet for every four swings she evaded, one fist would glance off the side of her ribs or skull, or the blunted edge of his axe would hammer into her side. Even so, were it any other day, he wouldn’t have been standing.
Blake felt ghoulish. Like a rotten thing that could not be put down, no matter how many blows it took.
Then Erin produced a javelin from her back and slammed it through his foot.
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The thing that was me felt something flicker, and tore itself from the machine and the people weaving metal through its flesh and the deserved pain they brought to sprint from the cave.
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Of course he screamed. It might not have been his first, that fight – maybe he’d been screaming with every miss that jarred his side or blow that rocked his vision. Maybe he’d screamed simply to kindle some heat within his veins. But this was the first blow he felt deep in his bones.
The point of the javelin entered through the top of his boot and exited the bottom, having muscled aside bone and tendon to pierce his foot entirely. Blake was nailed to the ash that blanketed their battleground.
One knee buckled as he groaned, fingers curling ineffectually through the air.
Above him, Erin spoke. “You can’t beat me.”
The young man spat blood and laced his fingers around the javelin. An attempt at chuckling emerged as a pained hiss instead.
“Why are you doing this?”
“I’m gonna…” His eyelids fluttered as a sudden bout of dizziness overtook him. “…You know.” His voice grew in ferocity. “You know.”
“You can, if- “
With a great bellow, Blake tore the javelin from himself and smashed its haft into Erin’s side. Involuntarily, she released a gasp of air. He did it again, and again, but on the third swing she trapped the javelin between her elbow and tore it from his hands, casting it aside to punch him in the torso.
From that point onwards, every blow she delivered was aimed at his ribs: expressly designed to beat him into submission.
He responded with shouts, flailing arms, and the occasional connecting hit. But the pain was beginning to seem like something glimpsed at the end of a long road. Every impact seemed to push him deeper into some intangible cave, and eventually, Blake ceased being capable of connecting the things he saw with reality.
The ground beneath his feet was a deception. Taste; tactility; sight; scent; sound: their non-existence had become self-evident. His body was someone else’s; his memory an extended delusion. His very name felt a flicker of sunlight: sensed but never held.
A small part of his mind was concerned with the fight: the movement of Erin’s limbs; her flickering eyes and what intentions they translated to. It coiled, barren of anything but empty calculation, awaiting the moment where he could hurt her most. But for the rest of Blake their fumbling dance might’ve been shadows twisting on a wall. All his wild swings and jagged shouts seemed mere froth layered over one central truth.
Blake felt cold. The fire he feigned could not light the empty hearth at his core.
So it was that when the Shrikeblood had punched him to his knees and braced a javelin around his throat to choke him unconscious, when the exhausted man felt its point dig into his neck, he twisted into the agony instead of away from it. There was no bravery in it, for there was no fear.
And because of the shifting of his body and her complete focus on his submission instead of where her javelin lay, Erin accidentally tore his throat open.
Blake fell. His blood hit the ground first.
“No, no,” he heard her say. “Oh, gods. I didn’t- What? Why?”
He felt himself blink. Though beyond anything he’d ever felt, the pain was not painful. But it was a surprise. It sucked him back into his body.
Then her hands were on the wound. Look at all that blood. Where was it all coming from? Could one human really make so much?
Blake didn’t know. He stared upwards.
The sun hadn’t set yet. But he felt cold. So cold.
He found himself trying to laugh. Like a hero from a song might, facing their demise. Took a few moments for him to give up.
Couldn’t believe it’d worked. Didn’t know if he regretted it. Didn’t have time to sort those feelings out. He’d never been good at that, anyway.
Erin was saying something to him. She was furious. Weeping, too.
What he’d inflicted upon her was crueller than anything she’d done to him.
He’d been a… He’d been…
The thoughts slipped from his grasp.
Some great dark thing obscured the sun, and he felt ice-cold fingers upon his throat.
Then the derelict walls of his reality suddenly grew.
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Blake died without so much as a whisper.
The thing that was me stared at the corpse and the girl grieving beside it.
Unable to avert its eyes.
The pain in its ribs had faded, but the cold lingered still.