Hiiro Volshebso
Colonizing a planet was something of a mixed bag. On the up-side, there were enough semi-habitable worlds within human-controlled space that anyone who wanted a fresh start could drop their life and build a new one free of civic responsibility, resource rationing and involuntary sterilization. Some couple hundred years ago that's exactly what my ancestors must have done, not that I know who my ancestors are. I don't even know who my parents were.
On the down-side, a few hundred years of free breeding augmented by hormone therapy and total freedom from personal responsibility brought my home world to its current predicament. Over ninety-percent of Intatenrup's population were generational orphans raised by the state, nothing more than replaceable parts in the grinding wheels of the terraforming archologies and their sprawling slums. I was one of the lucky ones, a genetic flook that made me immunologically suited for a life of more than just manual labor in a sterile hab tower. Before I was old enough to speak, I'd been conscripted into the pioneer regiments alongside another forty-thousand-odd kids in my generation.
By the age of eight, I was building roads and railways out on the flats. At twelve, I was given a rifle and sent to hunt ripper-cats and giga-toads in the highlands. I was assigned to a permanent garrison in the southern tundras at age fifteen. I was a week into my seventeenth year when the Polaris XV crashed two-hundred kilometers southwest of us during a month-long solar storm. None of us questioned the order to travel there on foot and do what we could for the survivors. One-hundred and sixty kids who knew the risks and made due. For an overland arctic expedition the number seemed excessive, but with vehicles grounded until the solar storm died down, it would have to be enough. Kids got tired, they couldn't keep up, they froze to death in their sleep or on their feet.
Ninety of us fought our way through the ion-charged blizzards to the crash site. The Polaris XV had eight-thousand souls at departure; fewer than a hundred had survived the crash and only a quarter of them were still breathing when we arrived. We hunkered down in the wreck and waited for a week. The solar storm should have passed by then, flyers and tracks should have arrived to start ferrying out survivors, but they didn't.
With no end to the snow and no chance of making the return journey with the afflicted, we settled in to wait out the storm. We hunted until we ran out of game, which wasn't much to start with. Weeks passed, the snow falling a meter deep on the worst nights and no less than half that on a good day. Snow got places it shouldn't, people got wet, people froze. We ran out of rations and people started starving. We ran out of fuel and had to start melting snow with the Polaris's damaged nuclear reactor; anyone who lived through this wouldn't live long or well without life-long countermeasures. No one wanted to make to call, but someone had to.
If you didn't want to starve or freeze or scat out your own rad-cooked organs, there was another option. We called for volunteers before we started drawing twigs. There were no takers right away, but six weeks after being stranded someone volunteered. It was around week eight or nine, we ran out of bullets before we ran out of volunteers. It got harder after that.
Between blizzards, I'd stare up into the southern lights and watch the solar storm. The ion storm was supposed to last five weeks at worst, but two months into this one-week trip, it didn't seem likely. When the days were only four hours long, it left a lot of time to watch the night sky while the cold seeped into your bones and froze you so stiff that just breathing the icy air felt like you were about to crack into pieces. At some point, I started doing more than just watching the stars and the lights and the cosmos above.
I started listening.
I heard things that might have been my own thoughts and for weeks I thought that was all there was to it. Then I started hearing things I knew I didn't know, things about the flow of the cosmos and the ambient energy of all things. There were thirty of us left when I heard the question.
"I wouldn't mind being warm again." I chattered through lips so frostbitten they were locked in a rictus scowl.
That night I could have sworn a lightning bolt shot up the length of my spine. My nerves felt like white-hot copper wires, heating me up from the inside better than any drink or workout I'd ever had in my life. When I tuned my mind into the heat, there was a resonance to it. The more I focused on it, the more it whelmed up inside of me. My whole being hummed, every fiber was alive with energy, with heat. For the first time in three months, I wasn't cold in the slightest.
I listened again for the voice I'd heard between storm's light and distant stars and ionic blizzards; the only thing I heard were stray thoughts that could have been my own. The whispered thoughts uttering the secrets of the cosmos were gone. There was no evidence that anything had happened, no one and nothing had spoken to me, save that I was still warm.
The storm ended that week and rescue arrived days later. Thirteen of the eight thousand wealthy, politically-connected elite managed to make it back to their luxury mansions, arcology penthouses and private estates. Twelve of our one-hundred and sixty soldiers returned to our underfunded state-run barracks at the edge of the planet's habitable region. Most of us were awarded commendations, some even got patted on the back for a job well done. Those of us who still had our fingers and tongues made our reports before settling in for a few months of recuperation.
It wasn't even a week later that I was deemed unfit for duty by some pedigree doctor safely tucked away from the sharp end of Intatenrup's terraforming. Psychotic delusions of supernatural power, irregular radiologic contamination, unhealthy coping post-trauma, unusual thoughts and beliefs, social withdrawal after the death of comrades. I could have explained all of it but I was never given the chance.
My report and every spoken word thereafter were cherry-picked and misquoted as the deranged ramblings of a broken man, instead of the confused wonderings of a kid looking for answers to questions beyond his ken. My years of flawless service meant nothing. The protests of my peers and superiors, even less. The testimony of my fellow expedition soldiers and Polaris XV survivors was moot. The system took one look at my file and made up their minds before I was fully debriefed or could even refute the allegations.
Medically unfit for service (lacking in moral fiber), recommend immediate termination.
I didn't know anything but conscription. My name was slandered in closed circles behind sealed doors, the private sector wouldn't have me— not even the ingrates I'd rescued would hire me. My peers abandoned me, the world rejected me and for a time I gave into despair. Uncertain years passed in a blur of medications, depression, poverty and homelessness. I was empty inside, lacking in purpose and lost, but I was never cold. Even at my lowest point, I was always impossibly warm.
I played by every rule they gave me and I lost. I lost because I was never supposed to win. That was what happened when the only option presented was to meekly bow and accept whatever scraps were thrown your way. As time passed my meager severance drained, I embraced the noble poverty of veterans thrown away by the system they would have gave their lives to protect. I braved the wilds for a time, living as little better than an animal while the drugs and psychological conditioning slowly cleared from my head.
Desperation forced action. Later than I would care to admit, I heeded the call. Months of desperate survival found me at odds with organized crime, yet the Green Serpents gave me a chance the system never had. A chance to prove myself, and prove myself I did. They didn't need a builder or another mindless thug. No, what they needed was a problem solver. Someone who could get things from A to B without raising a fuss, who could make people disappear if they wouldn't be missed, who could keep an eye out without being seen.
The work was dirty but good. The pay was better. I bought things I never knew I wanted; guns, wheels, books, fun and a place I could call my own with clean running water and a lock on the door. It was nice, for a while at least, but it never scratched the itch. Nothing I owned answered the question. What did I desire? Not stuff, not a life of painting houses with their occupants. I wanted something more, and whatever that something was, I wouldn't find it here on Intatenrup.
It was on my last house painting job that I learned about magic at the age of twenty-four, seven years after my involuntary release. When people hear the word 'crazy' this was the guy they thought of. This house was on the smaller end of my usual workspaces, a basement sublet in an upper-end, arcology mid-rise neighborhood. It was a normal evening in suburbia save for the gun in my pocket and murder in my heart.
Normal stopped at the door; furniture in shrink wrap, ferrocrete walls smashed and floor gouged in rutty symbols. Portraits hung at head height, painted in the familiar reds I often used but patterned so the portrait had depth; dried blood building the layers of the painting more than any change in color did. The overhead lights had been smashed and the wall-mounted emergency lights only had enough power to dimly illuminate the room through the gore glazing them.
Then there was the muttering, words choked and broken with new ones smashed into the gaps. It was a blend of the common tongue and what sounded like three others that shifted and rose and pivoted around the house. It was a pleading, desperately wretched noise not unlike what I'd heard in the arctic years ago or in the shaded drug alleys months afterwards. This was the voice of someone who needed something more than they needed life itself.
My skin was crawling, the hairs on my arms capturing the house's charged atmosphere. This space was a disgusting pervasion of the conductive warmth within me. The static charge clinging to me was a hateful mockery of the ionic blizzards that haunted my dreams. I'd rarely taken my painting job personally before but this place held an atmosphere of wrongness that battered against my very soul.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
I drew a heavy four-shot revolver from my unassuming day clothes. The cartridges were right for the job, twenty-gauge bismuth slow-shot. I had a spare load tucked in my pocket, more so for comfort than necessity. I only needed one shot, everything else was just to send a message. I moved slow, trying my best for quiet despite the litter of crushed glass, rubble and rubbish underfoot.
This house seemed bigger than it had when I was studying the floor plan. I'd just walked past the second bathroom when there should have only been one, both decorated in mirrored sigils that sung out to me with siren's songs of perverse delights. The kitchen held a banquette table crowned with a trussed kid no older than five, throat slit to the bone without a drop of fresh blood in sight. When I took the job, I'd been hoping it wasn't too late for the kids, back-alley justice postmortem was secondary. I checked over my shoulders a dozen times, the infinite space stretched on into darkness behind me everywhere but the square room's five corners.
The last door on the left drew me in. Like a hatchet buried in my spine, it was pulling me closer. This twisted realm was profane and sickening but I wanted to see more of its horrors, akin to watching extreme sports in the hopes of seeing mangled bodies. I wanted to weigh these new horrors against my own and see what was beckoning me closer. I reached out a hand to open the door.
"She needs… Enter."
I stayed my hand. Had I been made? Did he know I was here? I cocked an ear and leveled my pistol at the door.
"Entry… Entry into something? I don't understand your words, my dark goddess!" He wailed to the stench of spilt bowels and fresh entrails.
So I wasn't made, he was still muttering in his unwords and the common tongue. I opened the door enough to draw a bead on my man. The room's single window caught the city's ambient light along with a single overlapping ray of the twinned full moons. He was sitting on his knees, back to me, facing a living alter of the foulest sorts.
The girl was the reason I was here. Not for a rescue, she was too far gone for that, but a mercy for her and justice for the wailing man who'd taken the knife to her. I squared my aim on the back of his neck and took in a half breath.
A voice whispered inches behind my ear.
I quickly checked my shoulders for the whisper's source. I was alone in the hall. I let out my shaking breath, licking my lips as I collected myself. It was shit like this that made me want to take up smoking again. I'd eaten men and women froze half to death, yet I knew this place would stick with me when the work was done.
"Goddess, yes! My dark goddess." The wailing man cried. "Show me the meaning in the entrails of my offering!"
"More prey? More praying? Both? Command your loyal slave!" The wailing man raised a curved blade and brought it down on his alter's haunch. The girl didn't even whimper as the blood left her. I brought my trembling gun to bear a half-meter from the wailing man.
I pulled the trigger. For the first time since I'd started painting houses, I missed. The wailing man had tilted and twisted his head aside at the last second, his torso hardly moving. The angle was impossible, his neck should have been broken and his spine twisted into paralysis but it wasn't. His face found mine down the length of a gun, his milky white eyes locked with my own and he smiled.
"You bear the mark of She." I pulled the trigger again, aiming for his head but blowing craters out of his shoulder as he dodged the point-blank shot again. "We are dark brothers, soon to be bonded in blood!"
Now his torso moved, spinning in place to line up with his face opposite his knees. How his guts weren't wrung from him escaped me as his knife flashed through the moonlight to lick his own wound. I dropped my aim and pulled the trigger again, his hips finally flipped to the common plane as the rest of his body as flesh burst throughout the room. If he noticed the bulk of his thigh missing, he didn't show it.
"Hey buddy! You're supposed to be dead!"
I pulled the trigger a fourth time and finally hit my mark high of center. Brain-smeared bone scattered across his altar of innocence and the wailing man toppled back to the floor, silent. I hadn't wanted to paint on the girl but nobody's perfect. I popped my four-shooter's cylinder and fumbled half my fresh rounds to the ground from shaking fingers.
"…ill…me." The girl croaked. She might have been a beauty when she grew up. Present circumstances aside, she was already a real looker. Long black hair, like silk in the moonlight. A slim build that was well on its way to womanly. A heart-shaped face that all the boys would have loved. Not the face then, the family would want a final look.
"Working on it, sweetheart." I plucked my ruby-dyed cartridges from the ground beside the twitching corpse and locked the cylinder. I aimed for low chest— heart and spine. "Sorry I took so long."
An arc of biting pain slashed up my calf, a full spread of pellets blasts a fist-sized hole in the wall next to the girl's chest and I sag to the ground.
"We shall be united in her courts on the other side, Brother!" The man bellows, half his brains blown across the room.
The other half looks like a writhing mass of shapeless things caught between death throes and ungodly regeneration. I spot a flash of movement in the dim light and then pain. The not-dead man has me down in the gore, one arm driving the knife in my shoulder deeper, his unnaturally bent knee pinning my gun arm. My arm is locked, but not my wrist.
"I'm an orphan Pal." I bend my wrist until I can feel the tendons creaking and pull the trigger. Pink mist paints a wall and the gun flies out of my hand, snapping my trigger finger along the way. The pinning leg goes limp.
Something like an icy nail spikes into my mind, driven in by a mental hammer blow right in my forehead. I could feel my skull blown wide open, both of my shoulders were mangled and everything below my ribs was a grey blur of nothing. I felt like I was dying.
I felt cold.
I felt all the warmth I had ever known being drawn from that spike in my head. From blazing summers to winter bonfires to burning radiation, every notion of heat I'd ever had was robbed from me until only one remained. It was the wordless sensation of a candle's final flame defiantly lighting the darkness that failed to smother it. I was corpse cold, but I wouldn't freeze.
I blinked my eyes clear. Not-dead was still on top of me. My head was splitting under his driving thumb while his other hand worked the knife deeper in me. His eyes lolled in euphoria, while mine struggled to find my gun. It was too far away. My eyes rolled back to his, exhausted. Not-dead was draining me twice as hard as the blood loss was. I was dying, but I sure as scat wasn't dead yet. His eyes came back around and met mine. Deep within them, I saw a fire.
Not-dead's eyes exploded into two steaming craters.
He rocked backward howling in agony, both hands clutching at empty steaming sockets. I crawled for my pistol, my broken trigger finger flopping uselessly. He heard me moving and came back for the knife in my shoulder.
I snatched up my gun and put a spread in his chest before he reach me. Then, while he was wailing on the ground, I put the barrel in his mouth and gave him another.
"And stay dead." I growled.
If I'd had the energy in me, I would have worked over his skull some more, just to be sure. I didn't have the gas or the time. It took some doing but I got my disposable comlink out and dialed. My fixer picked up on the first ring.
"It's me. Job's done."
"The boss's kids?"
"No, neither." I couldn't keep my voice from shaking.
"You sound rough. How'd it go?"
"Rough. Messy and rough. Get Stitches on the horn, I'll make my way there tonight."
"That bad?"
"Worse. Let the boss know I'll be chatting him up when I can. I need a vacation."
"How long?"
"Might be forever, I'm thinking."
"We'll be sad to see you go. I'll make the arrangements."
I snapped my comlink and stowed the pieces in the pocket I used to keep my smokes in. I'd have killed for a single cigarette, but that would have to wait. I put a hand on the knife lodged in my shoulder and gave it an experimental tug. It was buried deep, a good stab. My hand fell away from the handle, settling on my empty gun. Eight shots wouldn't have gone unnoticed, I needed to beat feet. I tucked my pistol and stood.
"Kill me… Please." The girl pleaded, in little more than a whisper.
"I'm outta bullets."
"Please." She sobbed.
The moonlight had disappeared, lost to clouds and the omnipresent glow of an unsleeping city. The girl's wounds mingled with shadow and blood, vanishing then resurfacing as I teetered on my feet. Dangling intestines spooled out onto the dead pet I hadn't seen before, her womanhood had been cut out with enough skill that she wouldn't be dead when someone came looking for the shots. The room filled with the sound of my labored breathing, and the weak pulse of her exposed heart sac.
"Okay."
My hand went for the knife again, but I thought better of it. The girl had tasted the blade's kiss too many times already. I wouldn't put her through that again. Not even as a mercy. My hand floated to the throbbing mass in her open chest. I should have, but I wasn't man enough to take a beating heart in my hand and crush it. I bowed my head.
"Sorry darling."
I lifted both hands to her throat and took her thin neck in my bloody fingers.
"It's okay." She whispered.
Her breath was a fresh breeze that cut through the foul stench of the room; it smelled like vanilla tea with mint. I steeled myself and raised my eyes, then I squeezed. I wished she would have closed her eyes, but she didn't.
The girl was a fighter. She saw it through to the end, her emerald green eyes never wavering from mine. She would see her final embrace to its end. What kind of man would I be if couldn't do the same?
In her final moment, she did the unthinkable. She smiled at me. Her teeth were a thousand-watt beacon in that dark place. Her smiling face was forever burned into my memory.
I held my misty eyes in check until her pulse had stilled in my grip and once it was, I held back no more. All her light had left the room but it still wasn't dark enough to hide my falling tears. I embraced her as I clenched down on her throat longer than I needed to. I had to be thorough. I didn't want her to wake up and be back in this place all alone.
I broke from our embrace when I heard the sirens in the distance. The muscles in my hands were seized tighter than I'd thought possible. My manic strength left me, one man too slow and too weak to save a couple of kids from a monster. I closed her dead eyes and headed for the exit, but stopped.
The hatchet lodged in my spine was still tethered to something on the very-dead man. Like two magnets aligning my hand claimed a black-bound notebook and stuffed it in my pocket. Job finished, I made my escape into the night.