III
“You know me.” The woman’s whisper was a bolt of abyssal thunder laden in melted silk.
“I do?” A specter of Arden’s past blushed through his brain, recalling a maelstrom of emotions. Her glare cauterized the frayed weavings lingering from a dead yesterday, stitching threads of a bygone self with the smoldering needle of the fire she lent. “I do.”
From the ash he was reborn to Arden sifted for a shard of his former mind. Recollection stoked immolation of the remnants of his heart. Graven guilt reflected from her gorgeous countenance, her contours illuming the edges of his anguish. Verilla, was it? The name felt illusory, tasting of shadow & threads of a farce - a thing akin to her transformation upon the stage. She’d been a boon to that pagan play in the moonlit amphitheater, incarnate in her role; embodied. Yet the furor of his fascination then, though tempted by her talent, paled in comparison to the impious blossom her later audience had birthed for him. The shame of that bedside performance, that betrayal of Lucilla excused by his weakness when he feared her already too far across the gulf to know, bled his sorrow. Yet no matter the ounces, the leagues, of torment tapped from his basin not one tear could be given. His pain merely chipped the solemn granite of his face and etched droughted rivulets, stretching tendrils that wriggled thunder under rimy tissue.
“You remember aspects but coat much in confusion.” Her autumnal voice lilted with wind, bidding the breeze to soften & bristle by her hushed inflections. “You have made a burial of your own. For me. I am immured under… jealousy, is it? Your eyes hide much in passing limelight…”
“Did I know you? I thought I know what you were… a-”
“Night-spouse? A courtesan for an evening? One you paid for with delirious study and shuddered so steeply when in her arms?” The arching of her brow compelled lacerations in the gelled mud within her quarry.
“But you are of the evening, are you not? I knew the wonder of your shadow on the proscenium, the shivering triumph of your touch, but never saw how you looked in the day.”
“You never will. Nor should you pray to know the face of the sun again. There was a time before this continent returned from the depths when we could stomach the day with slumber, but our creed is in drought. That star is now your destroyer. As mine is your-”
“Maker?” Arden bellowed a mewling groan replete with a certainty that sullied his question.
The pale woman veered close and clasped a palm to his cheek. As wintry as her pallor was, her measured stroke placed a balmy pressure upon him. By perdition’s heat or the passion guiding her feeling, an echo of a pulse traveled through her touch. Her anchoring affirmation sank beneath the hoary waves that carried the black fire in her voice. “I am your mother in Death. My kiss bears you to Resurrection. The breath I gave grants wings beyond the entropy of the body and the rot of the soul.”
Arden’s breathless marrow shuddered under a spell of mania. Gibbous radiance slithered from slits in the woman’s pupils to coil about this reality. He was not a murderous neurotic but a thrall of this hungering hell. “You made me a bloodless gaunt… that breath is stolen by another. I’ve tasted death already. Some rogue’s mortal ink bleeding into my gums.”
“I saw. Thought to see how you’d fair alone. I can’t blame you for acting on rabid impulse, but you must learn courtesy. You were after another taste, yes? Observe that pulse once more.” The gorgon’s rimy lilt blew into his lobes with her biting instruction. “Do you not see the echoes of all hearts bound to that lone steward? You must know what fruit is ripe from the bites which will turn foul – lest you make dust of your mouth.”
Auras & imprints of connective threads wound lace through the eye that perused the withered sentry. No deeply entwined affections perfumed the man’s scent. The cold glow of pathways emanating from his orbit were of faint iron, bonds of duty more than any familial or matrimonial pursuits. “His star is long faded; no one would mourn. He’s not so far from that fiend who I lent my bed. That creature would’ve been hung for vampirism if caught for his crime. This old hound is kin to the ghoulyard ‘imself, simply on the other side of the gate. Why-?”
“The steel lightning that swells through his bonds is of the law. Those with duties and responsibilities will be more than missed. They’ll be searched for, and, if the winds are so foul, turn to discovery of our own kinship…” Her head tilted in disappointment and the air begged to follow her motion, drifting on solemn echoes. “Observe those Vestal barriers that divide us from them. Our hearth is not of earth, and the customs of old gods – even in death – linger on. Their rituals of hospitality have ways of denying us evermore. Though they abide in what seem to us as plains of rot, where love & toil are entangled with– their hateful kin – their inversions, we are forbidden to trespass. For our own code, all the same, we must not act as wanton beasts.”
“Do not stoop to the part of a hapless daimon. All filaments strung from the life before your burial must be severed, but it must not be the knell of the soul’s death.” An immaculate yet weathered nymph, a sylvan goddess, contorted within the icy diamond of her image. “Draw to humanity, nurture a trace within or fall beneath the well where all sanguine bounties pool.”
“Slash all ties?” In the emanations of his scourge-ridden sockets a baleful silhouette in effigy of that siren he’d betrayed seized that glow. Lucilla’s likeness, the memory & hope of her adorations, peeled shade until her harsh brilliance poured over Harrow’s wintry lake. “What duty are we bound to then? What passion - past a ruse – what reason is there to pretend!?”
“The longing we are now cast to transcends that of our mortal lives. And those were oft painful enough to carry in the hours we had.” Stern compassion oozed & blistered Arden’s eyes to abrade then with those of his matron of undeath. The confluence of her sweltering rivers and the frost of their shared realm bore her morbid prodigy to seas of rekindled feeling. An undertow of alien sensation, the currents that swept through the phantom left in her, ripped him back into her arms. “You are gone from the halls of the living. No kin nor lover can know you again as you are. Yet hate or it’s cousin in apathy make poor companions; in slumber & wake.”
“Why? Wherefore reinvent my body to ghastly proportion? A thing of evening’s shade and a-aberration.” Arden reared back, clawing at his temple while holding it in wriggling hands. “For what higher plan should I be raised from oblivion to walk the night beside a-?”
“A concubine of many passing suitors? Or a striga? I shall forgive the insult and not press the point that your lust sought me out for more than art or science. Let us move fast from the fact …. For that main part I played to the ogling & leers of Gorgotha society: we must subsist among the unseen castes. Harken to the vice in that need, of a supply uncounted by the arms of the Watch. Or else perform as nobles, in the courts where heavy inquiry is taxed and disavowed from perceived ‘lessers’ – and tastes can be bent to the liking of a treasury. Play – and prey – upon the expectations of the living world. Pay heed of its changeling fancies & fears.”
“Sever those former threads and weave a new face. We must be transient to them to walk safely on into forever.”
“My fate is to subsist alongside and for some harlot of the night?!”
She struck him. Searing thunder berated her errant pupil with the back of her stone claw.
What would this unfathomed eternity matter if it cost the denial of all that made his pulse thunder in life? Away with this impossible eternity, he thought, this hex upon passion. The only warmth Arden could know now would be the maw of the inferno which had spat back the fumes of his consciousness into this parasitic hovel of a corpse. “Apologies… I have you to thank for this… condition. O, mother of my ripe limbo. But what law rules your mind? Who lies beneath the ageless façade and the spurious blush of rose prepared for so many eyes?”
Arden pursued derision, feeding it with the stings striking on through his pain. He refused to be numbed by brute thunder or quell any storm in himself until she showered him with some truth worth latching on to. “The name you gave then, was it an alias? Another mask for the actress?”
“Truly? That is what you ask! My maiden name,” she sighed, and the sky moaned a foul alto timbre, “like asking rain from a sewer grate. Trying to figure how my history fits into the shape of your guilt instead of searching out what you now are?”
“The stage…Our… embrace?” Arden’s ribs heaved and scraped his cage to try his voice. Yet he could not keep the rambling gusts penned but let them rain. “That cursed maiden you asked me to care to? What else is there to you but those opaque shards, jagged flashes?”
“How wretchedly disappointing. What’s next? Will you beg to know if I enjoyed your enflamed affections? Still shuddering to ask how it felt, how satisfied you could make me, when your blood was so doused in libation and drenched in pity for your desires even as you gave to them.” With her laugh the bleak winds over midnight’s crest chortled raucous squalls.
The horizontal crescent of her lips returned its shape to an imitation of a smile. That arch a look to bruise craters in his hope, concaving under the scrutiny of her gaze. Ardency gleaming above her taunting gesture snared his tongue & sight, asking nothing more until she waived her abrasions of his soul & measure. “The film of false finality is gauze over all old pleasures. Yet we can still know feeling without motion in our veins. Though it shall be dissonant and faint at first – then spout like a deluge - it can be a purer art we are elevated to. If only you abide by my light and not chase after the moths of that fluttered before your casket. I recapture my humanity from the fleet miracles and joyous illusions under the proscenium arch. Play acting recalls me to empathy & inner wellspring, as does the practice of understanding the suffering they display.”
“And wherefore shall I abide this phantom calling, when my specter hears no angel, sees no art, past what is already lost to me? No glory can be mine. A terror is all I might be to those bared of this affliction.” A sickening metamorphosis occurred of Arden’s mind, flailing to splay a sardonic simper that harried rather than humor. “Shall I rechristen myself after Sisyphus? Syphilis, mayhap? Proudly wear the ensign of futility or the standard of pestilence I walk under by your grace. Make mockery of what I can’t know my-”
“Calm yourself, childe. Do not make a mockery of yourself. Do not avaunt from the kiss of my chance and our sunless orbit for pettiness and frailty.” She softened her approach, courting him with claws retracted. “What moves through us is no pestilence. A curse? To some, surely, and yet it can be a boon. A blessing to supplant heaven’s darling and be honed to combat strife & plagues. We arise to break stagnation and harness wisdom lost to all but aelders…”
“I should know my guardian of eternity. Who is this woman hanging over my grave?” Asked Arden insistently. “You won’t offer me the knowledge of your true name. Yet I am expected to rejoice to find wisdom which cannot be lauded to the waking planes and those I cannot be known to.”
“The names, the masks, the shapes we stride with are as passing as the children of dust who know them. Still, solemnity is earned for them.” The night maiden lifted a dreary palm to the city beyond the walls before clasping it to her face. “Keys to our identity, tools for our persistence. I’ve been Verilla; danced as Serenity; sang with the title of Marena; commanded courts in disguise of noble Eryie; bled warfronts as the mercenary Vyle; I’ve been known as different maidens and shapes from myriad families. If a name is so integral to you, so essential in quelling your tumult, then you may know me as Hialeah. Tis as close to the truth of the one sown under my breast, cradled for my comfort alone. If you agree to know the higher plane offered through this dream I share.”
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“Well then, Hialeah,” began Arden with sour recompense, “burn through this dream. Illume this grove of smoke & stone is still rife with suffering & replete with tumors in the overgrowth. What calling in my former soul links the man - who was Arden – you sired into deathless hunger to a high plain? What vestige of eternity might we stroll to?”
“My need of you then was tethered to my nature. To our dawnless tide and the tithe you still must pay.” Hialeah tailored her pitch & warble to weave solace. Stitching a verdant cradle through the flowery needle on her tongue to fit revelations of the grave’s denial; seeding blooming ardor under a tone to twine gentle faith & the thew of her command as one sound. “You must return to the stage you set for yourself… go to where I found your inquisitive talent bathed in the limelight of alchemical concoctions, improvising with fellow players in medical tragedies, and curtained by pincers from an apparatus. The true dance we shared and the need for resurrection. As the prime mover of your animation, you must hear the season I wish to sow.”
“Your wish?” Arden quaked to whisper back, furrowing into her the folds of her embrace. He traced Hialeah’s neck with a lover’s gentle yet testing inquiry of touch, appraising the curves of her breathing thought. “Do you mean that odd girl? You… asked no tribute to your ‘profession’ to know you-”
“If only you did not inform your cohort, the genteel doctor Halloway. Yes. Though perhaps his treatment might’ve been more mercy than my frayed hope for her in your care.” Hialeah dammed the shadow of a tear, casting down the stillborn drop before it winked through an effervescent pustule from her pane. “She suffered, my daughter, from the mare that scours my dreams for a boundless evening.”
“Was she… one of us? I – nearly drowned myself in entropic elixiris of my own to stomach the shock,” exaggerated shame crossed Arden’s face, distorting the semblance of the self-disgust he oft wore in life with his gross pallor in half-death. “She had no pulse. Yet she was in anguish.”
“If only my prayers and deeper efforts had made it so. Alas, no. Not fully. I came to her side too late. The reaper of all seasons and his hand in the scourged had stolen too much from her marrow when I gave her my kiss. I revived her unto a fate I would wish on none. Save a few old enemies. You saw-!”
Arden nodded, dipping his head beneath the gloom. “The boils? The necrotic waves? Her cancerous regeneration? Aye, I saw. Although I glimpsed her through a sodden veil of halfborn sorrow and the fear of greater ailment poking past the warding herbs in the mask of my vocation.” He relived the horror and impotent flares of inspiration; those fragments that had nearly sunk into the mire where all stimuli and self was thrust to in a villain’s burial. “She was… so replete with pain – and pustules. Only to burst it all away and begin again from what should have been the final ro-”
“Aye, alas, I know. Gouge me, ye Fates! O Furies, claim my flesh for what I did to hers. Tear talons into this dead soul to match how I marred hers. Leaving her to tumorous purgatory, to iad! To Naiba, a Sheol of her own by my dumb choosing.” Hialeah’s grip tensed and gained claws to stake Arden to her hold. She snarled curses and frothed a short vesper in the span of a winged strix. “Did you at least discover something from her suffering?”
“I – ahem. I was too fascinated and far afraid, by the method of her illness and the miraculous grant, the quality, of her endurance. Persisting without a heartbeat, in so icy a clime despite the ailing tempest of what looked the foulest fever & spiteful.”
“No need to rub the symptoms. She is passed from this. I made up for my mistake – and yours, in making a martyr to passion of yourself – when you were resting in Abis. At least tell me you awoke with a mind for science and the talent to redeem our failure with your art?” Hialeah clutched her nocturnal progeny by the throat and brought his mouth to feel her spectral breath, enfevered. “At least now you shan’t need to fear catching any blight of the body from your study.”
“I swear to pursue what recompense the worm in my can offer for my return to the earth. If I must slave to know & conquer this plague for all eternity, I shall.” Vowed Harrow, fearing the severity of this oath keenly driven into his temple with Hialeah’s talons.
Lamenting strains filled the breadth of Hialeah’s breath, pushing sorrow from her lungs with piercing tenor. Then that shrill breath fell to tethers, vanquishing all but its echo, among nauseous shrouds. “You must. Recover that spark of talent you drowned in debauched distraction. You were almost brilliant when I first found you. Fail, prove me a fool for believing any intellect in you, and you will want for the death that boy’s pistol would’ve lanced you with.”
Hialeah pressed off from Arden and lifted herself onto a tenebrous stairwell above the swaying fog. “Come see the sprawl & toil of the landless and the unloved. Let us elope from this ‘ghoulyard’. Fly to a purview where we can see the caste of laborers & noble sufferers, those whose backs have been broken for generations to build the plinths if our opulent atrocities. Tis them who you must slave to save.”
“Fly?”
“Yes, child. Tether yourself to the winds. The breeze from the gulf and the tides of aether will provide wings.” Spoke Hialeah, rising higher in the air. Gauzy claws carved the winds her hands swam, arcing between her umbral membranes she flew on.
Arden followed, unsurely at first. His limbs shuffled awkwardly, splinting with newfound tendons that extended out past his mass. Soon membranous folds sprouted of his changeling matter, granting motion and power that inverted the atmosphere into an ocean. He swam after her, elongating tissue to adjoin the midnight sea, as Hialeah’s lilt charted the course. “We are invisible among the perennial fog of fresh industry. Travel as mist and no living should be the wiser to our presence.”
Sailing over the palisades, towering estates, walls of smog, and iron maws that divided the districts, the pair of fanged, shimmering threads rested on a perch many terraces down. Looking over the plodding streets beyond the toothsome bulwark that kept the floods of the impoverished at bay, symptoms of the blight found avatars in the souls there. Vorpal insights flittered through Arden’s skull, scanning the boils of people wallowing & enduring in squalor. Revulsion trickled through his heartless body before any remnants of empathy, yet Hialeah gripped his head to guide his eyes on. Bidding him to absorb the signs and seek their causes.
The stagnancy of these quarters fed beasts of corrosion. Sickness and the humans it festered in founded new, verminous forms from. What was first a dissonant whisper blossomed to grotesque symphony; brass sections clamored in violent eruptions and torrid coughs; wailing sopranos filled the lulls in the cancerous cadence, hailing swansongs of murder, violation, and new life damned to the caste of their mothers. Necrotic specters, hobbling lepers, and fiends borne on by opium ambled through the blasted commonwealth. Variants of endemic and rousing malignancies stole through the alleys, nooks, and peeling abodes in many shapes, all in mockery of civilization’s false promise.
A wringing thought doused Arden’s initial consignment to loathing. As hated as his family were for their eccentricities, they still had their means to indulge those fancies & bloodied histories while still subsisting. Had he been born to a more soured lot, like these damned souls, he likely would have made no more of himself than another shade of senseless misery. These folk held no hopes but those they could claw from the mold; no legacy to yearn for save the meagre scraps their labor could scavenge to pass on to their siblings & spawn.
All signs of the stars were for them forbade by the brumal sweat from the steam districts congealing into a brooding ceiling. Ashen mist seeping from maws of industrial spires cast a concrete film to block the firmament’s glow with bilious wreaths. Whole bloodlines, from grandfathers to the youngest, were offered to the furnaces whose engines were the hearts of modernity’s dreadful gods. The blood & toil of the canned workers, with their families & limbs minced by the grinding intestines of factories, leached from infernal orifices to join the wan-ebony spirits snatching the horizon. Tumorous smoke rose to heights once only known to avians, where machines now flew in mockery of wings. Electric eels and mishappen canoes with grinning propellers sailed the rivers of the sky, sharing their eyeline with only the most grossly regal of vistas. The bellies of these fliers were fed by the mislaid organs of laborers, fattening the bellows & granting red oxygen to the fuel which allowed merchants & martial lords to soar to ever higher markets and fronts.
Hialeah caught a wince from Harrow, causing her to wonder if the buried poet inside him possessed an ounce of incendiary compassion for the betrodden. If passion served his purpose, she would allow it. But for Harrow his look and the bristling mask reflecting it was soured for the emergence of his taste. He frowned upon the districts immured in fog and fens of miasma, disdaining how harried the hopeless vessels below were. He spat sulfurous venom onto the street, a globule rife with anathemas against the Many whose blood was thick with poison. Kyphotic lesions dictated their evolution; those workers & their children: bent to contorted frames by grim assemblies in the guts of mankind’s churning ascension. The thought of consuming the sludge of their draught seized the fresh revenant’s innards with a windfall of spasms. He swore then to hunt richer sustenance in blood not despoiled by virulent conditions. To feed on those who gained nobler prospects from the profits fired by the forges and the flesh of lower castes.
Arden titled his eyes to scan the spires of Windshire and, higher still, those royal estates mounted atop Gorgotha’s proudest crests. Profane emulations of pagan ceremonies fired there, illuming chaunting choruses of decadent courtiers and priests playing at cleansing themselves of impurities through excess so deep that purging only burrowed the spirits further. His ire chased those balcony pyres, searching out a singularly loathsome silhouette among the revelers. Harrow’s curse blooded the gales that berated those grand perches. Flames of acrimony were in his glare, flicking tendrils at lights borne by synthetic elements. His scowl shot toward the beacons bearing down on the sinuous cords of smog to mark the route of industry. How they granted tendons to the slithering breath that sank the city just as the roar of infernal chords from the bowels of the factories gave voice to the wounds that razed the nightsky’s palls.
When her fateful progeny had gorged enough on the horrors Hialeah emphasized her reason. “We do not get sick. We cannot know death of the body again once woken to the night. And yet afflictions dilute the blood. Though it brings me no joy to feed on the abused we must answer to our own need, as they do. Our need for their draught has grown; we are harried by it. But what ails them will trickle to us as crippled desiccation. You must continue your studies, reappear as a man of medicine, alms, and means, to combat the buboes & blots. Lest we be chased back into the starving wilds when the cruel face of ‘civilization’ crumbles to show a harsher world. We mustn’t be driven off by drought, lest we are to bury ourselves from the damming rays in some foxhole in the fens or a sturdy ditch in the warrens.”
The facets of humanity refracting into Arden twisted his aspect. A gnarled union of a sneer & a baubling grin crossed his face. “I’ve an inkling that you’d ask this Augean task of me, even were our resources not so pestered by their sickness. You retain more compassion for them in your cursed state than I knew in mortal awareness.” The humor of a freshly defied burial slithered from between bouts of odd chuckling. “You can be sure of my ardency in this. I honored my obligations in life, to a fatal fault.”
“Oh, my sulfurous son,” the mist of Hialeah’s scrutiny enshrouded Arden, “your jests are soured. Those obligations you died for were mere romantic fancies of an idle soul. This promise to me is wound by deeper binds; not such a fleeting thing as a few moons of honey with a lover before one is torn from the tapestry of life or else grows weary of your company.”
“I know, I know. We are eternal. By your teeth to my throat, your hoary blood in my veins, I am immutably bound to the night.” Arden suppressed a shiver beyond any arctic wind. For Hialeah’s form contorted and grew possess all breath within his bones as she enfolded. He knew then a grinding fear of this forever. “And yet-”
Asphyxiations from Hialeah’s coiling hold silenced his speech. If this gesture was to temper his doubts, Arden found them now so terribly enthralling as her talons traced his shoulders and the black breath of the wolven hour sang her whispers. “Pull your puddy up, sculpt it anew, or be nothing more than the black rust between the stars. Do not turn to nihil and whither. Seek not to make offerings to blind predation or else find yourself a mere shadow among countless more in the void beneath & beyond the spinning world.”
“I made you what you are. Betray us both by acting errant and revealing our nature to the sleepers, and I shall sever your wings and let you fall in solitude.”
With this warning Hialeah leapt into the welkin chimneys, stealing away with Arden in her clutches. Her wings split the gulf of the city, wrenching the thew of her raw creation to show him to the stone basin beneath the bowels of Gorgotha’s languid gut. Her lips made no motion, enclosed as gorgon iron, yet the winds of her storm boasted a firm sermon. Like sweat from the forge, Hialeah’s soul blistered and bled into her pupil until each word in her commandment pressed & shaped his soul to match her temper.
“We are the dragon’s teeth and the breath of that flame. Imperishable by the march of time’s force, yet denied all creation save to mirror our aberration. We are interlopers; denizens of a veil between; vagrants, without an age to call a hearth and be buried in.” Hialeah dipped beneath pavement, passing through the cobbled streets and the stains of sufferance. Past stone, under bridges and altars to opulence; into roaring waters forgotten to all but those who chart the borders and note their flow; flying through the veil betwixt the city’s fibers they plummeted. She showed him to where the water gasped and the bones of Gorgotha’s predecessor subsisted as skeletal plinths beneath her lavish and wounded pith.
“We have our beds in the necropolis wherein the old lords are inlaid. Where their monuments lay immured in rest and the obscurity of a new day reaching past their time. This is how it is: by night we hold court in the sky – recusants to the laws of earth – and by day we must plunge beneath. Or else find a fitting lair that can conceal its nature and hide our own.”