In school, I watched a kid shake a terrarium once. It wasn’t a big one, and the only thing in it were bugs found and caught from the surrounding wilderness that framed my hometown—beautiful little insects—but this kid didn’t care about beauty. He only wanted to shake things up, see everything tossed about and splatter against the glass. I’d had sympathy for the bugs; when Marduk’s attack hit, I developed empathy the moment my face, limbs, and spine received an introduction to every surface, piece of furniture, and the few appliances that lined Nemesis’s cage of an office. I didn’t go splat, didn’t even break a limb, but with each shake and introduction I discovered the limits with which my body could bend and flesh could give. When everything was still again, my nose bled—a small reminder of my mortality, but I didn’t notice cause my hand was wet…that was when I turned to find that a table had landed, edge first, on #2’s skull, cracking it open but not killing them, the wound’s interior almost a twin to the ideal slice of cherry pie.
#2 moaned, “Christy. Christy. Christy. christy. christy…”.
#1 hauled me to my feet, gathered #2’s sorc-deck—somehow it survived—and shoved it into my arms. They yelled something, but I didn’t, couldn’t, hear. Christy was echoing on repeat and—
“Look at me,” #1 yelled, punctuating the command with a slap. I whipped my head, growling on instinct. They nodded, “Good, stay in it. I need you to pull the feed up over the city before #2 dies. Damn thing’s their spell.”
Before I could agree, they called #3 over to do triage on #2. Said, “They don’t need to think, but I need them stable!”
I looked down at the sorc-deck, the controls were similar to the aerial shrines Dad sometimes made as presents. The function of the shrine’s sorcery was to fly around according to user input. I figured it’d be better to “sit in” that—the memory of him—then in rage or let the cold-wet mushy texture of #2’s brain against my palm ensorcell me, and so I controlled the spell until the vision on the video feed could see the entirety of the city in all its hemoluminescent grandeur.
#1 stood like they were the center of a shield-wall that couldn’t afford to collapse, and considering who they had to stand beside them…it wasn’t an inaccurate assessment. Rimlit by the sanguine light of the feed, their spirit blossomed, velvet petals grazing flesh and teasing out fringe details of memories that had passed the river bend of conscious recollection but whose passage left its mark in the shore of my being. There were #404’s smiles, begrudgingly extended, and accompanied by the awareness of what was lost when each one was given. The sensation of Lupe’s hands at my back as she squeezed me, assuring me that I wasn’t evil. I even heard the sound of Amber’s voice, bobbing just above the nonsense noises of festivities partaken in earnest glee, as she said, “This line is too long for an old lady like me, take my spot,” before it was subsumed in a child’s thanks, mine and Melissa’s—my conscious thought chased after that memory but it was like catching a breeze in your palm. I looked up, and saw #1 levitating atop the power of their Court and link—Earl, perhaps—while flanked by a serpent composed of lenses in a hundred colors and sizes wrapping around their waist and over their shoulder, curving across her hidden face; its lenses shifting and re-assembling according to unspoken their unspoken needs as they stared into Abyss.
“What are you doing?” #3 asked, their voice breaking.
“My part,” #1 answered, their voice an iridescent sphere rotating and warping what hides within. “Remembrance within Informed Prediction.”
It was a claim that couldn’t be argued, realer than gravity or the hand in front of me, and, backed by their Court’s affirmation, #1 vivisected Marduk’s plans and made them plain. Attacks hidden behind randomness were pinned by its planner’s habits and limits, a constellation of vantage points. Whilst impressive it wasn’t free because the Abyss knows when it’s being watched, and everyone across the district had already learned that there’s an Abyss in Every Heart. Theirs was ripped open, and from within their chest inflated, Abyssal water shattering their ribs and sternum, drowning them in hopeless sorrow. It burbled past their lips, staining despite the water’s chill already shifting vibrant red to cadaverous blue, and this Abyss blue, teasingly black, overflowed their eyes’ waterline—a stark pillar of condemnation struck down their cheeks for the hubris, per Marduk’s vision, and loyalty, their truth, that led to their intercession.
They stumbled toward the wall, hands slamming against it, before they slipped sideways as sloshing water upset their balance, shattering their kitten heels. I moved to assist them, but they raised their palm in denial, stay where you are, before shaping their last hand-spell. A churning protean mass of stained glass shards bubbled into existence, a carrier for their final thoughts. When the mental transfer had finished, the shards formed together, a dodecahedron of tactical intel, before tumbling from the air, kicking up gleefully across the floor, and into the wall—which I suppose was in some way also Nemesis, wherever they lurked within The Infinite Slaughterhouse.
“#1, what do we do?” I asked, as #3 was busy sobbing and stabilizing #2.
“What you must as long as you don’t abandon her. She’s sensitive to that,” #1 said, “and call me Danni—it's my—”
Abyssal waters clogged their throat, depressing their tongue and breaking their jaw’s hinge in search of even more space. It made lagoons of Danni’s eyes, silenced a touchingly sardonic voice, and caused their entity to break apart in a rain of verdigris and unReal glass. Marduk had slain the greatest of this Lodge’s secretaries, and that petty backlash stoked Nemesis’s simmering rage to a furious boiling over. The Infinite Slaughterhouse re-shaped itself, an Escher-esque puzzle box of a city whose inner mysteries were cadaver hooks, bone-saws, and great wheels for withdrawing organs as if threading a bobbin. Its architecture slid against itself effortlessly, lubricated in blood but made efficient through practiced control, before striking out with a butcher’s surety against each point Danni had brought to their attention.
You’d be forgiven for thinking the Nemesis’s anger was…tepid—how could fury be found in such elegance—and fiercely corrected as her aspect hooked into The Lightless World’s expanse, dragging it onto disemboweling wheels, and the saws, joylessly shrieking as teeth shredded darkness; birthing shafts of light, sunlight, that plunged into The Infinite Slaughterhouse, danced along its gore-glistened buttresses, skipping of it blood-tipped spires, to return heavenward replete in the perfect shade to paint the imperiled The Lightless World—carmine; the first wound their war had wrought.
Learn the taste of hubris you glutton, for Abyss is Obstructing, and you’ll regret sinking teeth into my flank.
The Lightless World’s skin twisted to skein, contorted into an unyielding Abyssal hank whose umbral fibers trapped the sawteeth and counter-hooked The Infinite Slaughterhouse’s crystal-coated carmine claws. Its wheels stalled to a wailing groan, unseen tendons stretched beyond tautness, bowing until all that the city had become vibrated in a shriek that threatened to flay the spirit hiding beneath the flesh and fat of your physical body. Abyss is Obstructing. Marduk had seen the hope we’d placed in the sorcerous machines assembled from Nemesis’s aspect, and reminded us that—Machines break down. Nothing is inevitable except the slow grind to quiet, stillness, unchanging cold; shatter your teeth on me, and internalize this.
I ain’t internalizing shit! The only unchanging fact of Abyss is that you’re still an uncreative fucking hack, and I’m still the Insatiable Reaper whose hunger can never be sated nor denied!
The Insatiable Reaper lashed new tendons to the wheels, slotted Corinthian pillars of scrimshawed femurs into crackling arteries—originally benign thoroughfares—repurposed into bolt guns that fired in accordance to the aortic bellows of transmuted bell towers. Get. Fucking. Wrecked. Impaling The Lightless World’s tightened hanks, the pillar-femurs vibrated to the major key harmony of Nemesis’s unbowing heart, shaking loose the fibers that now pried apart couldn’t resist the turning wheel. Sewers-turned-veins snaked from within their architected sheathes, vomiting the digestive blood of Nemesis’s territory; a weakening glaze that softened the darkness into a curry consistency that she slurped down with awful vengeance.
Turning the feed around, from city to sky, what was an indistinguishable dark had been afflicted with a cerulean vitiligo that fed on Marduk’s imposition, growing until mottled islands kissed, and what was black became the cloudless pelt of a high noon heaven. Realities bickered, how could light exist in the Lightless World, and the answer was that we weren’t in The Lightless World after all; Marduk’s grip on the horizon unfurled, and with no shadows to hide him and his entity, flying fortress that it was, were forced into the open, a worm and its ruler plain against the sky’s plate for inevitable consumption.
No more hiding, Marty! The Infinite Slaughterhouse rearranged from its consumptive configuration into a Babellian tower designed by a serial killer in mimicry of a whaling harpoon. At the riotous officiation of the city’s hearts, one for every district, the tower-harpoon fired; the tit-cannons of Marduk’s entity fired in unison, glancing off its bitter edge—knocking it off-course by just enough. It lost a cannon, a chunk of Atlantis which tumbled into the city somewhere, and was knocked off balance in the sky lilting into the side of a barbed building whose piercing nails multiplied through the entity into a fractal spit, eliciting a wailing moan whose baritone blues found sympathy in any heart that cared for life—even mine, squeezing out tears I’d rather use on anyone else.
Escaping the spit which sought his heart, Marduk leapt from his entity, withdrew it into his spirit, and descended down into The Infinite Slaughterhouse; a virus, dodging all methods of titanic-intended evisceration, that nestled deep within Nemesis’s aspect, settling in the frail shadow of a heart-tower that overlook the square they’d had their pre-battle discussion. His watery-hair lifted, churned into frothy white waves—he was surrendering? Nemesis emerged from The Infinite Slaughterhouse’s charnel streets, shaping flesh from blood, and sporting a face fit for a war goddess as the white-enough flag announcing Marduk’s defeat reflected in her eyes.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Nemesis asked. “We don’t surrender.”
Marduk shrugged, “Maybe I’ve changed? Wish to parley?”
“You, the ‘unchanging Abyss’ have changed?” Nemesis scoffed.
“It’s not impossible, I’m only one-link above the mortal precipice of Earl,” he stated. “Not as high as you or Miss Redacted, for whom change may truly be impossible beyond the remit of your Courts’ offices, and despite that, you have changed. Last I’d seen of you—all of us, had seen of you—was a feral youth that couldn’t accept her ‘fun’ was over. To think, the Rapacious Slaughteress has been domesticated by the constant sight of a jewel-toned bay.”
“Fuck off, Marduk, I’m no more ‘domesticated’ than you’re any less of a pompous asshole,” Nemesis said, rolling her eyes.
Marduk pressed his hand against his chest. “You wound me, but despite being an ‘asshole’ I’m also curious. You were content in your power for so long, too lazy to climb, and now you stand a link above me in the victory’s effulgence. If not domestication, what changed?”
Nemesis shoved interlaced their fingers behind their head as they thought. “It was Brightgate,” she answered, “when you all left, threatening to kill anyone who tried to follow you, this city took me. Didn’t care that I was a ‘feral child’ who’d never get the sin out from beneath her nails. I fought for her, made it into the slaughterhouse for anyone who tried to hurt her, and in turn she made me family.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Marduk nodded thoughtfully, but the ice sculpture of consideration shattered in the light. His lips trembled before bitter-black laughter broke free, and his hair swirled into whirlpool coils of delight. He thrust his arms out in comedic embrace of the city Nemesis claimed as both weapon and source of her evolution from whatever he’d known of her previously.
“Then let’s see how strong these familial ties are,” Marduk said, “when The Condemning Judge holds you and this fucking city accountable for the sins of the other! As Below, So Above!”
In accordance to his incantation and will, the shadow that fell across the square became mirrored as the sharp silhouette of a heart-tower punched out the sky and the sun, acting as the doorway to an Abyssal beyond where stars served as distant necrologue for light’s evanescence. Tumbling from that depth was an iris, jagged and cold, howling the cry of an astral more ancient than the arctic—a comet the size of a city, the gavel with which we would be judged, and the testament to Nemesis’s sins.
Nemesis unlaced her fingers, turned to dive back into The Infinite Slaughterhouse and direct a defense, but Marduk had formed a seal with his other hand while Nemesis tried to puzzle out his plot, shooting a black marble suspended between a cocoon of orange light, pointed like a drill at both ends. It punched through Nemesis’s back, spun her around as it took inside of her, greedily consuming the consumer, and dropping her to her back—the blood streets holding to a brick’s firmness rather than letting her drift into their depths. Marduk, hovering above the sanguine mirror of the square, drifted over toward Nemesis, eyes ablaze in manic glee braided in rage.
“What happened to surrendering?” Nemesis asked, groaning as she clutched at her chest and the widening hole within it.
Marduk cackled, “Nemmy, you know we never surrender. In fact, I think that was one of your moves, get captured by the enemy post-surrendering then consume them from within like the parasite you are—the parasite your city deserves to see—when forced to choose between someone else’s needs and your own.”
Lowering, he traced the rim of the hole in her chest, the spaghetti strands of flesh, blood, and spirit spiraling down into a forever prison. She clawed for him, but Marduk only had to direct his hair to slap her hand away—water was firm when struck hard enough, tutting in disappointment. Then glanced up at the crowning comet, applauding once birthed as, now struck by light, a shimmering umbilical cord traced up into stellar wasteland he’d summoned it from.
“What are you going to do, Nemmy?” Marduk asked. “If you don’t close your aspect and fold your spirit back together, the Cosmic Pinhole will consume you, trapping you in a prison where you’ll die-but-not for eternity. Of course, then my gavel will pronounce judgment, crushing this undefended city you supposedly love like family.”
Struggling until she could sit up, Nemesis asked, “And what happened to taking Brightgate for your ‘experiments?’”
“Eh, I suppose I’ll lose this district. The rest of the city, cowering under their warding shield, they’ll be alright. A bit smarted, but alright,” he said. “In fact, this might be just what they need to understand who I am.”
Unable to guide The Infinite Slaughterhouse’s defenses, the comet-gavel crashed into it, grinding against Nemesis’s aspect with an instilled insistence to strike its designated soundblock, the city streets. Darkness clogged the veins and arteries of The Infinite Slaughterhouse, roused by the ice wall that stretched across the district like a giant’s palm and blocked the light. Marduk cupped a hand about his ear, as the conceptual glaze of Nemesis’s aspect cracked, spilling crumbs the size of window panes to the streets below.
“Hear that Nemmy?” Marduk asked. “It’s the sound of your indecision—a potential double win. If I break your aspect’s cohesion then you’d be stuck without much spirit to crush that pinhole—though, it’s more like a porthole at this point.”
An apt description, as the black hole in Nemesis’s chest was a yawning abyss slurping down her being without break or breath. It left her limbs convulsing, her mouth unable to turn throated grunts and groans into articulated sounds—words. He’d cornered her, and she was losing. Nemesis tried to crawl away, force her hand into her aspect, imbue just enough direction to save the city, but Marduk tsk’d, pursuing with the unbothered pace of a parent after a crawling infant.
“Now this brings back memories,” Marduk said. “They’d appointed me to care for you and Bubo—wonder how she’s doing these days—all because I was ‘mature’ and ‘trustworthy’ with ‘naturally maternal instincts.’ So I stayed behind, watching you and that fuck-up of a twin of yours, while everyone got to ride the high of completing missions and earning distinction. Seeing the world and setting it aflame.”
Nemesis grunted, flipping him off. Marduk clutched her wrist, pulled it from the bloody street where she’d only just got her index finger inside, and bent it behind her back, securing it further by dropping on top of her, making Nemesis—Lodgemaster of Brightgate, the infamous Slaughteress—into a cushion. , clutching her hair at the root, he lifted her head back.
“‘Why does this matter?’ you ask, well it’s because you—since creation—have been something I hated,” he said. “I didn’t have to raise you long, but I watched as you proved just how defective you were—a feral thing who’d barely learned human speech, struggled with utensils, and even nearly ate your fucking sister—and received accolades for it. ‘A natural killer,’ ‘What we wanted all along,’ and ‘More of a soldier than that water-haired bitch we ended up with.’ You were foisted on me, became the anchor ‘round my neck, caused me to be seen as…something I never was. So right now, I’m going to do what I should’ve done when you couldn’t roll over in the crib—smother you.”
Marduk’s storm-sea hair coiled about Nemesis’s head, a fishbowl bereft the glass, invading her nostrils and mouth. The hand behind her back clutched uselessly while the other tried once again to touch her aspect, only to be caught by Marduk and left dangling a hair’s breadth away from possible liberation. He was toying with her, torturing her, for a history only the two of them truly knew, and within his watery tresses, Nemesis was done. Using the hand behind her back, she formed a seal that liquified her aspect, sucking it down from the builds and off the rooftops to the streets below where it crashed and churned into a sanguine flood that raced back to its true heart, Nemesis.
Tongue clicking against his teeth, Marduk leapt from Nemesis’s back just as the tide came in, whirlpool forming above the cosmic pinhole, draining down into it as the rest of the bayou sunk through her skin into her spirit. Hair drenched and dyed carmine, Nemesis stumbled up from the ankle-deep blood that covered the square, diminishing as it surged into her body, arcing carmine streams that raced to repair her spirit in time to counter the black hole consuming it.
“And there we are,” Marduk said. “There’s the feral little Nemmy that ruined my life, and has decided to ruin this beautiful peaceful city. I can’t believe they trusted you, let you lead anything here, pretending to be this place’s protector when all your hands can do is destroy—you are War incarnate after all.”
“Marty, move on, I didn’t ask to be made. I didn’t ask you to be my mother-father,” Nemesis said, before revealing a chainsaw smile beneath the locks of blood-drenched hair that fell like strips of flayed curtain over her face. “Though what’s funny, I never pretended to be a protector. This place called to me for the Bloodlust that carved every valley it was spread over. Neither of us were peaceful, we didn’t pretend like we were, but we both wanted to do something else, be something more. So I slew its enemies, safeguarded its children, and for that, the city and its people adopted me—their feral fucking daughter. They made me their Lodgemaster. Cause at the end of the day, like attracts like, and Marty…Bloodlust Seeks Kings in Carmine.”
The city was breaking, the comet descending, and with the gavel close to pronouncing judgment, Nemesis invoked something that I could only describe as a purpose; the answer, or at least one answer, as to why we cracked rocks over heads, sink teeth into flesh, made beautiful obsidian into knives, and shaped the tree of life into a ladder of death from which we ascended to a necrothrone that oversaw our world mother, sputtering and dying. This was the cosmic purpose of Bloodlust, for us to climb, to make plain through disembowelment our right to exist, and make more of ourselves. It was in the name of this purpose that I—everyone across the city—was granted a carmine vision of Nemesis holding out to us a crown of woven veins barbed with teeth, and could hear the divine dictation of her words with every beat of my heart.
Oh city of mine, Lodgemembers mine, I offer you a chance to stand as legion and make plain your rage. I won’t force you, but I do beseech you this question, Brightgate, will you stand with me?
What words could a city’s mass convey, mortal speech clanging and banging against counter statements of our neighbors, but that didn’t matter because every statement was a sword and every word a shield on which we drummed a furious din; a roar by any other name. Marduk spun around in shock, unable to pinpoint where the sound emerged, deaf to what clearly came from every brick, every ruined piece of glass, every beam of steel, and every building whole or made a carcass.
Brightgate, will you fight with me?
Our din heightened, the monkey screech in the back of skulls recognizing us as one and Marduk as other, and what started as the bellow of noble man became the blood-frenzied cry of a beast who’d been wounded and would deliver in kind. Surging from the city’s corpus was a stormcloud of carmine that rolled itself into a lumbering bloodtide colossus, a hundred-and-eight armed asura whose tongue wagged in salivation of Marduk’s heart’s blood. First, though, we—a mob, a community, a city—decided that we would not be judged by any outsider, and with every fist formed from the failings of our hearts, whether neighbors or ourselves, we drove them into the comet, battering it with chisel-sharp punches that cleaved way flakes of ice that broke buildings, shattered streets, but would never pass judgment over us. As a city, we raised our fist to icy heaven and struck a dolorous blow to its body, exploding it into a spray of frigid shrapnel, a mist of snowflakes that settled on windowsills and roofs, and taking back the sky and the sun with our own hands.
“No, no,” Marduk cried, “this isn’t fucking fair. You don’t work with anyone!”
Nemesis shrugged, shambling toward him as he floated backward in fear of her and us. “Sorry to say, Marty, but all I needed was a pack to run with—and this city and my lodge, well, they’re full of feral motherfuckers.”
Marduk cast the hand-spell for Cosmic Pinhole again and again, until Nemesis was an idea, barely a silhouette, that still advanced on Marduk. We raised our fists to crush him, but Nemesis, daughter of us all, raised a fist to halt our judgment of this failed conqueror. She pushed back her hair, smiled at the person who’d raised her.
“If it makes you feel better, I won’t kill you with my Duke’s purpose,” she said. “I’ll beat you with an Earl’s insight, using a trick you taught me—in this very fight actually. Bloodlust behind Burning Eyes, and yours are plenty aflame, Marty.”
His eyes widened, the heat that’d burned joyously as he taunted Nemesis, tortured her, and tried to destroy the city sputtered, briefly, but couldn’t quench fast enough—he had Bloodlust in his eyes, and so Nemesis was already in him. She cast a hand-spell, carmine wolves popped free from Marduk’s exploding eyeballs, a lupine hydra that turned back onto him, tore his limbs from his body, consumed his flesh, and reduced him down to a single eye, a plump grape. Nemesis plucked it from the ground, dusted the wolves off, and popped it into her mouth where it burst to her own smile. She turned back to us, the city, and with a wave of her hand dismissed the assembled legion of consciousness controlling that colossal asura.
Back in my body, I dropped to my knees—control over my motor functions returned far too slowly—and unfortunately banged my head against a chair leg. As darkness fluttered at my vision, I saw Nemesis re-enter her office, take in #2 broken but stable by some definition, #3 who was beside themselves, and #1 who’d died to help her win the war. She gave some sort of instructions—I couldn’t make them out—and crossed toward me where her face colonized my view of the ceiling.
With a smile, she said, “Let’s do this execution thing tomorrow, I have paperwork to do.”
Her knuckles rapped my head, shutting the door of my awareness, and all became dark.