Screams are held in a trembling grasp. The shivering of fingers threatens to allow them an escape, albeit one that strangles them to a whimper. Yet despite the noise churning across the barren dusk that defines this great cavity, a whimper would fall like an avalanche.
The landscape churns all around; rising, rotating, and retreating to form a vast maze. Some paths appear safe; others bristle with thorns – all are misleading. An errant step will dash the uncoordinated to pieces as surely as a splinter caught between cogs. Crushing is a common occurrence, and a cacophonous one. The beating that emanates from above seems miniscule in comparison.
From the small alcove it has folded itself into, the sculpture’s wooden gaze stares out at it all; fingers rounded tight over its mouth. Its hands are a chart of indiscretion; clumsiness, minor mistakes, and corporal punishment forming a map marked by worried scabs. A single clipped wing is pulled tight against its back. The crevice is far too tight to allow a full breath. Screams persist regardless.
At the very least, the thin crack is spared from the turmoil occurring outside it. The wooden statue watches figures twist through the heaving labyrinth to pull their peers out of danger, or alternatively push them into it. Many stride through according to inscrutable machinations: utterly at ease with their goals and surroundings. They are often crushed anyway. And the sculpture is much smaller than they.
It does not notice that those maze-hoppers lack faces, or that they walk with halting coordination. Nor does it comprehend that their conversation is wrought not of language but an indistinct imitation of it. It does not notice that they move in much the same way as the maze itself.
It does not truly matter. The essence of those ill-defined growths are irrelevant – they could be no more than empty shapes and their importance would not change. For the raw danger they represent is enough to render its own form miniscule in comparison. Remaining unnoticed is one of its few protections.
Even that is feeble. As proved by the thickset figure that strides towards its alcove, perpetual grimace splitting its wooden head asunder. Despite its feckless steps, the maze seems to bend around it: swinging vines fast enough to decapitate brushing just above its head; falling walls crushing together mere steps before or after it would stand beneath them. Miraculously, the figure arrives unscathed and turns its inscrutable gaze towards the small sculpture’s hiding place.
With a cold clarity, strong hands seize its heavy wing and drag it out. Instead of resisting, the small sculpture curls around its stomach; bark and flesh creaking as it does so. When it is tossed away, it manages to roll onto its four limbs, look up at its captor and see the single extended finger pointed towards the labyrinth.
For a brief span, the sculpture’s sunken eye-sockets sway back and forth between the finger and the maze. Then the figure raises a brow as full of promise as a wolf’s fangs and it scurries towards the unfathomable danger of the place. The blind rotation of the world outside is far kinder than what it leaves behind.
Creeping through the twisting maze, it passes through all manner of mysterious places – beneath canopies of tangled branches, over shelfs of ivory stone and between barriers crafted of vaguely humanoid forms as incomprehensible as anything. The labyrinth has gone dormant; its threats receding like claws into a lion’s paws. Yet it has not changed at its core. An errant move will still see the small sculpture crushed into splinters. The walls breathe that promise. So it moves quickly and quietly; progress carefully balancing its environment’s mindless catastrophes with the concentrated ire that awaits if it takes too long.
Then there’s a stirring. Seemingly unprompted, the walls begin to shift. Some atavistic impulse causes the sculpture to flinch beneath the first rotation. A wall spins around its front. It stumbles back, and takes a few moments to realise it is missing a foot. It clamps both hands over its mouth. Ducks again. Dodges. Starts to limp away.
Then it misreads a quaver from a wall and steps to the right, where a branch tears off its head.
Everything grows quiet.
Its decapitated torso continues stumbling in that direction for a few halting moments. Like a mouse tapping through an abandoned theatre. Eventually, the damage done to it reaches its legs. It halts. Lingering in the darkness above, the great pulsing seems to grow louder. Until it conquers the world.
Hands grope a bare neck. Their nails shudder along the ossified bark. Both settle upon the hollow stump.
Without a cap to stifle the screams, they begin to pour out unrelentingly. Jagged, animal howls. High and grating. Low and monstrous. The petty ugliness of them unmatched by any other sound in that place.
Alongside the wails, plumes of liquid flame weep from its bare neck in a recalcitrant flow. They light the sculpture’s body ablaze; making its wing a flailing torch amidst the darkness. But there is nothing kind about its agonised glow.
Soon, the fire spreads to the maze around. Its damp wood is limp and lifeless, as if its animating spirit has fled in shock, and accepts its role as tinder passively. Fire devours it; embers scuttling like a swarm of frenzied termites. Soon, the inferno grows riotous; into a battlefield of sparks and collapsing wood. There, the one-winged statue punches and breaks and bends and kicks and hurls – the burning god-child of its own corner of the world.
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Its legs turn to charcoal and burnt meat, and snap. Yet its screeching only grows louder, and its blazing violence more erratic. Great gouts of flame erupt from its neck with enough force to clear a path. It drags itself through the crackling inferno as pieces of itself grow feeble under the onslaught of heat and melt away. Eventually, it can no longer crawl. The flesh-melting screams continue regardless.
The amalgamate, having arduously marched to the edge of the heat, struggles to get close. They call to the ruined sculpture at the centre.
Calm down!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-
The shriek is discordant and frayed, but it brooks no answers.
They try nonetheless. This heat is destroying you!
The screams are cacophonous.
Words – these clipped, contained things – have no purchase on it. Instead, the amalgamate begins to steadily draw nearer. The bark of their arms begins to smoulder thin smoke; the blackened flesh binding them begins to bubble. The air wobbles, as if unable to support the heat’s weight. Each pained step brings them closer, yet the blinding blaze obscures all else. It is hard to tell whether anything but screams wait in the centre.
They push through fragile walls and feel flesh slough off their frame. Fire crawls over their body, but though the shocking heat might kill a mortal outright, they are not mortal. Implacably, they push closer.
When the amalgamate reaches the centre, they find a burnt husk: four melted limbs, a neck bleeding magma, and a cracked wing. And, somehow, it is looking at them.
It’s hard to know what to say. No phrase can cure such grievous wounds. But the lay of its body implores them.
You are suffering, they say.
It shivers. I shouldn’t be.
Why?
If I were tougher…
Toughness has nothing to do with this. Are you suffering?
If I were stronger-
Are you suffering?
…
SPEAK.
And it does.
Carefully, they lower themselves into the cooling cinders and cradle the body in their arms. It shakes with something far, far too familiar. Then both are ash.
***
His left arm aches loudly. Deafeningly. The noise should be enough to swallow all other sensation: the burn in his chest; the taste of dust in the air; the splinter rupturing an eye; the metallic tapping from below; the disparate sunlight shining shrilly through the haze above; the grating roughness of the sandstone beneath his elongated feet.
It’s too much. But he can feel every chord equally. Like his mind is a flower unfurling; each petal endless. And the flower is burning.
He examines that hurt; rolls it over his serpentine tongue as if it were any other object. The twin ears atop his head flick as they strain to glean what lays in the squat building beneath. Long, yellowed nails scrape across the roof.
“Blake?” he hears; the whisper detonating through the empty streets. Then a creak from poorly-maintained hinges.
His head darts up. Halved vision consumes the shock of colour the once-dreary place has erupted in. That manifold image shivers incomprehensibly. The torrent knocks him off the roof, yet the location of his body relative to the ground is carved in perfect detail. He lands on three limbs – the smaller fourth tucked against his chest – and bounds towards the storehouse. Its doors yawn open into darkness invitingly. He prowls inside.
Air rushes across the hairs standing across his skin. The darkness is sturdy, but his senses are sharper. Slowly, through the dirt under his gnarled fingers and warped feet, and the way his breath bounds across the abyss, they chisel the storehouse into his mind. The minute granulation of its many crates seems enormous. Enough to drown in. And the still waters promise to erupt at any moment.
A thud resounds from the darkness and he crashes towards it, bruising skin as he smashes through crates. Another compels him to veer towards an opposite corner. Drool escapes the corner of his mouth, cloying and stinking. It squirms across his skin, then splatters onto the chisel he finds. Metal seems to warp beneath it.
He doesn’t really understand why he’s doing this. Despite the absolute enormity of the sensations assailing him, it all seems slightly askew. Disconnected from him. Like a dream cast according to foreign logic.
Light disappears. The door slams shut. There’s a heavy thud as a bolt seals it.
“Sash! Dash! I’ve done it!”
He lopes towards the door and smashes through it with his left arm. The limb churns in a torrent of shifting muscle and flesh. In moments it matches its partner. Through the splinters of wood he sees his quarry: a larger boy than he. A nicer one. A luckier one.
Around his left arm, something snaps. Far, far away, tears prickle at his eyes.
He gropes for the bolt.
The boy outside turns as he opens the door and buries his arm deep into his friend’s stomach. Gasps. Stares at the frayed bracelet dangling from his wrist, and the broken wing looped through it.
Orvi looks at Babs, eyes full of horror.
There is no cessation, in that realisation. None of Babs’ pain recedes. If anything, its shape becomes more substantial; transforms from mere heat into a crushing burn.
It becomes real. That reality strangles the breath from his body as everything descends upon him. Causes him to flail; to twist into violence.
But as the low, all-encompassing ebb of fear and agony is spoken into bloody reality by his claws, there is relief.
The relief persists when a warrior far larger than he arrives. It persists as his empty slashes write his pain into being. It persists when she cuts off his head. It persists when he begins to die.
It persists when Orvi asks a question, and Babs answers with everything.
***
Amidst the fading cinders of what once was an inferno, flecks of wood and flesh pull themselves together, conjoining into four limbs. Scorch-marks wind through bark and flesh, still aglow with remnant heat. Their fingers probe these rough marks as their gaze settles on the ruins around them.
The ash lays stagnant and passive, despite the incomprehensible shifting they were once endowed with. Even now, it seems as if the landscape might reform and claim its former animation. Yet it does not. It stays cool to the touch. For a moment, it seems as if only the blackened marks on their body recall that blaze.
But when the amalgamate clenches their hand tight, they find a small, stone wing in their palm. It’s cracked and scarred. Well-worn from the leagues it has travelled over, and the fights it has seen. The string around it is still a little frayed.
It is real.
They close their fingers over it and hold it, for a time. Above, the stagnant orb of blood hangs perilously, and they shudder in time to a heartbeat. Then the bark and flesh of their body creak slowly motion. They join it to the blade buckled to their waist and continue onwards, the bell and wing chiming together with each step.