Ravenna(/Snow White)
1100 words.
Some sexual content.
Also posted @ A03
The queen keeps ravens because ravens keep her secrets with a trueheartedness that cannot be matched by any man, by any girl, by any beast that has never craved the melting sweetness of dead flesh in its mouth. Their black and shining wings rise around her like a shield against decay and their landing comes soft as nightfall when her dreams are bright, too bright to bear. Their hunger, swift, consumes the path she has walked down from the distant hills, far from this clashing, crashing sea. Attended by ravens, the queen does not fear her past or her future. They tore the one to pieces long ago, they hold the other at bay.
How beautiful and kind they have been, she reflects, their cruel silhouettes bent over tattered banners and bloody horses on the battlefield where a wounded king took the last step toward his downfall.
But Ravenna has eaten her fill of kings and their graceless battles. Such things have never soothed her hungers. Perched in a castle overlooking the frothing sea, she steals away to her towers and heights thinking of a time when flesh and love made her heart light. The simple contentments of youth. A time she never knew. A thing she was denied. Before, when great weakness still overwhelmed her, she would look to Finn in the hope that he might tell her otherwise, that he would say she ran and skipped in the sunlight like any child; but there was such fear and sadness in his eyes when he beheld her even then that she can hardly stand the thought of him, she screams and rages to know that he would pity her. Pity her! Pity the ageless, bloodless beginning and end. Pity his dauntless sister, the deathless queen.
His sorrow was ugly and misguided. Ravenna is certain that she has known true love. She may not worship at its altar but her heart knows the proper gestures of devotion. She has loved, she has done that, and not merely opened herself to a man’s desires or coveted the arch of another girl’s back. Each of the women she has consumed, they who sustain her; every one is beloved. And Finn who honoured and affronted her with his blind adoration; beloved. And the people in the streets who hate her with all their souls; beloved. And the birds in the tower and the birds in the sky and all the birds who have winged her away from powerlessness and anguish; best beloved.
Only — this is not love in the way of the flesh and the heart at once. She must admit it. Even ageless, she is human and she thirsts for the press of humanity against her, inside her, to lie immortal beside some ephemeral beauty. And so, she thinks often of Snow White.
What value is she, the princess-no-more of a country and castle wholly conquered? Unlike the ravens, she keeps nothing for being kept; but still it pained Ravenna to have her slip the collar of her captivity, not least of all with that precious young heart clutched tight between her ribs. Snow White is a rare bird, a memory gone past and a shadow on glass, the ghost of a girl lost long ago. Not of herself, no, Ravenna crows; for that girl is not lost. She simply never was.
No. Snow White is a beauty composed of many unlike parts. She is the subtle raven with the songbird’s sweet voice, her eagle-brave heart is nestled deep in owlish wisdom. And most precious of all, she has the human gaze that Ravenna thinks she must crave, the eyes that could look upon her and the hands that could touch her face. Gentle and proud is Snow White, stung by the hollow places left in her by loss. These are places Ravenna could fill: place of the mother, place of the friend, place of the woman who has also suffered, who knows how it feels to lie awake, alone. Or, lastly and at last, that place of deepest longing, sated only by the lover’s caress. And such a caress she could be made to endure, more ecstasy than a proper princess was ever taught to expect: a queen’s regal tongue on her breast, a queen’s elegant fingers easing between her legs, slick and sweet, the one silver talon arching over her clitoris, the clawtip circling down and down.
As kings on the battlefield fall, so too may a queen find herself brought low by her passions. Her instincts warn her not to personify prey. Kill the girl. Claim her heart. It gleams in the mirror, all the ways she might do it. Quick and slow, bloody and clean. But Ravenna’s designs here have been crafted with an eye for a wider purpose. She will rule forever, she will lay men down as carrion for her ravens, and ravens will fill her skies as she looks on, triumphant. Not alone; no. All those years, all the world. She could not bear it. Even with Finn at her hand she would not have been able to bear it; he who loved her too much and she of a beauty so great that mountains would bow to her, so pure that it would demand adulation from one more worthy. And so she indulges her fantasies. For the dread queen, a dread consort; beautiful, sweet-lipped, courageous, wise.
A bright dream. Too, too bright in dark times. Towers of ravens shriek and whirl, hungry for the sweet, bleeding future they have been promised. And Snow White is gone. Snow White is far away, obscured by the veils of many deaths, by water and forest and fire and ice. She sleeps, her dreams as delicate as glass. Do not shatter, Ravenna prays, thinking of mirrors. Even as her magic wanes, she troubles herself to look inside the girl and flinches away from the fierce joy she takes in what she sees. Shards bury deep in her heart and eyes. Tiny reflections of a thousand possible futures, drawing blood drop by drop. The tower shakes with the currents of a storm stirred by a million struggling wings and Ravenna smiles though it hooks deep creases into the corners of her mouth. She smiles.
The ravens cry because Snow White's lips are red as blood that cannot be kissed away. She tastes it when she wakes. It melts down her throat and her black hair shifts like wings hunched against the cold winds, a streaming banner over kind hearts hardened with the hunger for war.
Rahab.
1800 words.
Written for a prompt at areyougame.
Rahab circles the abbey cloister on a deep, dark layer of the lake, far below the overwhelming chatter of daylight pressed against its surface. Watchful, he makes his tour alone and encounters no living things. Any blooded Rahabim knows to allow him solitude when he skims the lower channels; their sleek bodies will be stitched into the reeds somewhere past the sunken postern gate, just close enough to attend him if he requires it. As for the other creatures, the animals that dwell in the deep by nature and know no other life, they show respect in an idle, thoughtless way that pleases Rahab. To them, he is a force. He is like current and temperature and death. Beasts do not treat with these things; they leave them to their work.
In the silvery blue cast of calm water, the chapels and cells are hulking black shadows, their domes intact despite centuries of near-total submersion. Eventually he expects that they will be claimed by the lake completely, smoothed over by floods to serve as a cavernous den for thousands of the organisms tracking vivid on the edges of his perception. Just as well, he thinks; as such, these buildings will be more sacred than ever they were on the dry shelf of the surface world.
At the centre of his circuit is the ancient church itself, which still presents its nave and towers boldly to the arid sky. When the winds are hateful and push the clouds thin, sunlight can reach those great windows crowning the high altar, fills them with a glaring radiance strong enough to be distressing. When its rainbow glass gnashes downward into the risen altar pool like fangs, the church remains dangerous. It is, in spite of this, Rahab’s personal retreat. Better that I should guard the last true gate to the world above, he tells the Rahabim — they do worry — but perhaps the most immediate reason that he should wish to inhabit such a dreadful place is that it provides the most convenient point of contact for Kain on the occasions when he should cross the outlying lands to seek Rahab’s counsel.
How quiet the lake must appear on those occasions. In another age, before the inland flooding began in earnest, Rahab had taken possession of a territory composed of high plains and playa, cracked heights overlooking marshes that reached dark to the distant coast. He had thought then that his holding was devoid of life, so still it lay beneath the thin film of blood he and his clan had set down as the foundations of his rule. And now; he is the lord of those countless things lying beneath, placid and patient until his waters are disturbed. The Rahabim fret over Kain's comings and goings, knowing that they must defer to him despite his intrusion. They do not recall their lives on land very clearly anymore; and some have not known the surface since becoming Rahab's creatures at all.
Sometimes it is difficult to remember the old ways, difficult to say why it seemed so important to stand as brother and equal among beings who have since proved themselves to be insincere, cowardly or incompetent. Even if it were possible, Rahab would feel no longing to converse with any of them. Kain’s presence and power, however, have remained constant from the first flickerings of his memory, and so he is presented with this constant reminder: he is Kain’s creature, tethered to Kain's plans and purpose. Without him Rahab would hang in stasis, facing only bare, featureless immortality howling in the yawn of unmeasured time.
This is, admittedly, a ghastly honour and the Rahabim as a clan have taken refuge from it in the pure, clean functions of their evolved forms. Moving with grace through the ghostly cold like stars in the abyss, they dare ever closer to the limits of the traditional territory; searching. They are hungry for something nameless, Rahab can feel it in them like a hook through the lip; but he always brings them to flank when they stray too far, too close to finding paths away. He will not leave the abbey ruins, will not leave Kain unattended. He will never do that, not even for his own kinsfolk.
Following Turel’s disappearance so long ago, the formal bindings of the Council had been all but dissolved. It did not happen slowly, yet Kain had seemed untroubled by the prospect of such upheaval among the remaining landholders of his empire. At the time Rahab had thought that he understood: Kain still occupied the seat of power at the Sanctuary of the Clans and so could never truly feel threatened, least of all by any creatures of his own making. This was a logical conclusion to one who had spent hundreds of years in that dread citadel, watching his brothers endlessly strategize, measuring losses and gains to be had from every exchange, wary of one another because each knew his own ambitions to be lofty and his own bloodthirst limitless.
By now those hundreds of years have stretched hundreds longer. With the Council disbanded, Rahab has invested himself wholly in the welfare of his clan. He watches the Rahabim grow restless, wheeling slowly toward unknown waters. At the first whisk of his approach, they will return to their shoals immediately, but he sees longing caught in their opaline teeth and that has given him new insight on the matter of the Council’s decline. One day their ardor will take them away against his wishes; he will have to accept this, or kill the defectors. He suspects that Kain was, perhaps, simply tired of weighing this ultimatum in his mind, tired of foreseeing his lieutenants’ departures. That is, after all, what they all called it on the very rare occasions that they would encounter the need to mention Raziel and his dismissal: that grim departure. The fact that Kain was content to see the rest of them fold away at once spoke to his — anger? grief? — exasperation.
That he has continued to seek out Rahab speaks to something else entirely. It says something unspoken, it makes Rahab’s abstract devotion burn more fiercely than any coloured windows lit by any petty, guttering sun. Though his deeds are his own, he has always revered and obeyed the master. He had thought they all did, doubtlessly. Never once did he expect particular recognition for his loyalty or his services but he is now the only confidant to whom Kain reaches out as often as he does.
At first he came to the abbey for purely practical reasons: Rahab was a useful scout in otherwise unreachable quarters but he could not safely make the journey to the Sanctuary to receive orders. Placing no trust in messengers, Kain traveled to issue his own commands personally — but perhaps he was also being kind in his way. Rahab’s gift was a tyrant from the beginning, affording him no control over his transformations; it drove him into the water as it developed, though his anxieties regarding the threat of immersion remained. During those first audiences in the church, as distant drains echoed and scalloped lights scaled the walls, Kain had asked innocuously to watch him move in the shallows. Of course Rahab had put aside his misgivings then and obliged; and it was in those moments that he first learned to find pride and tranquility in his pedigree. Any ability of his own is borrowed from Kain. The master understands, where the rest of the old Council cannot. Brothers, they had all called each other once, but the blood and bonds they share even now are unnatural, at once tighter and more selfish than brotherhood. Kain chose them. That is the beginning and end of their unity, pressed upon them while they were dumb with death. Most of the similarities they share were cut into them, not gently assigned at birth. No single one of them can comprehend the struggles or motivations of the others. Only Kain can do that for each of them.
He appears to Rahab less frequently now and only wishes to discuss matters of small or vague importance: the movements of nomadic humans who may eventually cross the marshes and test the Rahabim, the sand-blasted sighing of the canyons surrounding Sanctuary, the idea that the Soul Reaver suffers hungers, the state of his other lieutenants, his regrets (these often change) and his grudges (these are always the same). All of it intrigues Rahab. He has never understood Kain’s mind, cannot discern patterns in his thoughts or anticipate the moments in which he might impart on others his wisdom or brutality. In that way, he has always been an implacable natural force, and Rahab has lurked around him with animal respect.
High, high above, the sun shows its leering face briefly; the shadows pulse with smoky edges and Rahab drops to the crumbled remains of the refectory, pushing up tumbled and jagged from the lake bed like broken teeth sealed with tar. He courses through an archway that stands firm though the walls that once flanked it have broken and the stones have scattered. He thinks of how readily the Rahabim would obey if he commanded them to leave. Knows how easy it would be to simply forget this place. They could slip away and find some narrow path to the ocean. In such a huge, blank space, he could hang motionless and disconnect at last from the slavering seed of himself, surviving in his reflexive mind, his physical form a meaningless scrawl on an otherwise unmarked surface, cold as death. The ocean is a loom. It would make something new of him.
But then, he has no wish to be new again. The blood of the world is his hard-won domain, feared by all walkers of the land. He revels in the charge of terror that takes his prey as he allows his wake to disturb the surface of the water around them. His teeth shred flesh as if it was cobweb, and a single turn of his long body can twist free the limb of any beast. There have always been prices he must pay to refine himself, and he will continue to pay them here. No matter where he goes, there will be more change, other lives; and Nosgoth is failing slowly. Even Kain, he thinks, may not be able to stop this.
Satisfied with the reports of his senses, Rahab returns to the church and settles himself in darkness. The marshes have been spreading inland for centuries, expanding his grasp; and the lake rises, and the ocean froths. Conquests are being made for him and he wants for nothing specific. The abbey is quiet. All that threatens him, then, is the ending of the world and he expects that it will happen as it was said to have begun: in the primordial sea, unfathomable.
Dante(/Vergil).
2300 words.
Written for a prompt at areyougame.
If you think of the dimensional seals as the last great jam any demon ever laid down across the intangible divide, Dante can make a strong argument that the human realm is its B-side. Pretty much every demon that he finds stranded in meat town principalis has this tired, atonal way of menacing the mortals, like they've used up their best riffs and just want to skate to the finale on some sloppy, recycled rhythms. Big claws, scaled bodies, brimstone breath; everything you've ever heard from every bad garage band singing about hell. It gets embarrassing. It gets old and that's why the new rumors of a ghoul and a grimdog ripping through anyone who dares the streets just off of Main on a nightly basis are worth checking out. Demons don't usually play real duets, but by all reports these two are always spotted together. At least one mail order hunter is dead and Dante's pride isn't so great that he'll wait around for someone to hire him before riding to the rescue. It would be nice to get paid, just saying, but putting down the legions for free now and then is such good press it practically pays for itself.
(Besides, there hasn't been anything good on tv since he finished the half-eaten pho-to-go that'd been sitting between the rabbit ears for days. So it's not like there's anything else to divert him.)
Running out totally unprepared isn't going to help anyone, of course. That's a good way to end up skewered on a wall of teeth. He gets his gusto under control and tries to take stock. While demonic tag-teams are an unnerving concept, he isn't overly surprised by the phenomenon. Apparently it's a lot of work to drag rawhead and bloody bones together nowadays. Breaking a path into the mortal sphere is easier with more bodies, which is why it's usually mobs that come through the hellgates. And that's fine because mobs usually turn on each other as soon as the hellgate hits their asses, at which point it's survival of the fiercest. Either way, you end up with a real prick of a demon wandering the neighbourhood having manifested under its own power or killed all of its comrades. Upon encountering Dante and figuring out his heritage, the damned-that-speak love to let him know about their exploits and the various inconveniences wrought by Sparda in excruciating detail. He can only suppose they expect a gold star and a heartfelt apology with the mouthful of smoking lead any self-respecting hunter is going to shoot in their faces while they take the time to complain.
It's kind of sick but the silent ones are his favourites, and he hopes Ghoul and Grimdog are a pair of that ilk. Out from the belly of the night they come, bones and brain matter all tied up with clean hatred. Their jaws swing voiceless and they track his movements wild-eyed a hot second before even he knows where he's going to move. That's the sort of creature he can take some pride in killing. Given the chance they'd take his heart without a word and turn it into a handful of volcanic ash.
(Phone rings. He gets it, greets static. All kinds of dead calls have been hitting his number. It makes him wonder if he moved into a real creep cabana, or if it's just that teenagers seriously can't believe that demon hunters are an actual thing until they hear it for themselves.)
It's important for him to keep in mind that a lot of his regard for the unspeaking breed comes from a very thorny fact: they remind him, however abstractly, of Vergil. Wanting to fight them has nothing to do with it. He likes watching them move before the violence enters into things. Vergil was time-jumped too, just a little. For all Dante could ever tell, he saw three seconds at once: then, now, next. In other ways, it was as if he saw absolutely everything as a static moment, each detail frozen on a fixed plane, each possible outcome exploding out of each little action, all of it stacking as the actions followed through and the possibilities multiplied. It was hard for him sometimes, seeing all that and knowing people better than they knew themselves. Dante remembers his melancholy better than any of his own mistakes or victories or dashes of pain. But he used it, as he used all his faculties: with the keenest, coldest focus you'd ever see out of a living thing.
Vergil is the whole secret behind Dante's success, such as it is. Survival itself can be considered a great achievement and lo; Dante is alive and alone because the rest of his family could not share in this particular kind of prosperity. Through piece-meal weapons training on the lawn, genuinely thinking that he knew what he was doing, Dante was drilled on how to fight second by second without projecting his thoughts. It's mostly about muscle control and erasing the unconscious tells that the body discloses as it braces to move in certain ways, but that's not how you think about it because that not how you're drilled. No. The lesson was much simpler than that. Dante would advance with some kind of big sharp nasty in hand and every single time Vergil would get around him, then catch him on the back with whatever little sharp nasty he happened to favour at the time for his trouble. And Dante just had to find ways to deal.
Vergil wasn't even much of a fighter himself; he couldn't often beat Dante outright, but he could easily see his intentions and figured out how to be a pain in the ass accordingly. It got eerie fast, realizing just how perfectly he could anticipate what was coming. At the time, it made Dante wonder exactly how far ahead he could see, and how in tune with the real world he was through all that roaring chatter filling up his perceptions, all the white noise of probabilities that never came to pass. Now, it makes Dante wonder how he was taken, how the hellspawn managed to tear him down despite his seemingly insurmountable strengths.
That's just it, though; they weren't insurmountable. Maybe it's not even fair to call them strengths. Once, Vergil just stopped in the middle of practice. Just stopped and sat and stared at the ground - at the blood tacking there, black as coffin nails - with his arms on his knees and his fingers furrowing his hair back. Dante found himself thinking: What do you do with that? How do you help someone who should be you repeated, and instead is another creature in another, unfathomable world? After a while, Dante sat next to him. And they sat there together and then Vergil grabbed his arm, iron fingers folding the inside of his elbow, and he said: I read that arch-devils can take the form of dead people you love. Like it was relevant to that moment.
Maybe it really did mean something in a possible future. All Dante got out of it was that Vergil feared things that were too big for either of them to handle alone. He'd held onto the back of Vergil's neck until whatever troubled him went away. That's what it was like in those times; he just found ways to offer comfort until those bleak, formless things went away. Anything he could think to do, he would do it without a second thought. And things would get better. Vergil would smile at him, as if he was far away but still his favourite.
Sitting inside waiting for sundown, Dante truly hopes Ghoul and Grimdog are time-jumped, silent, slavering things, easily blamed for everything that's gone wrong in the world. Maybe they're just faceless, brainless scraps of damnation. Maybe taking them to pieces won't really fix anything. That's not the point. He wants to see them move, and then he never wants to see them this side of Sparda's sweet banishment solo again.
—
It may not look so bad - kidding, it's obviously a dump - but the city is teeming with hellspawn. Only a tiny fraction so far have ever actually been manifest; most just lurk on their bank of the divide because they can feel banishment echoing nearby and it draws them in a swirling hot backwash to mass against the seals as if the sheer weight of knowing about their existence could snap them open. Left unguarded, maybe it could. Every demon that comes through is like a tiny hole poked in a self-healing substance, and every time you kind of wonder: what if it doesn't close up again?
The shop is coming together, so that's something. Dante's services are still freelance - the assholes who land government contracts are both unforgivably fortunate and unfortunately short-lived - but it's good to have a stable base of operations. He's gotten a good sense of the city's grid and culture. He's put down scavenged furniture, and started throwing his stuff all over it. He's even begun networking, which is to say he's been eavesdropping on channels frequented by established hunters, and that's about as settled as he ever expects to get.
The ghoul and its grimdog are local celebrities of a sort, so he's been hearing a lot about them. Nobody really wants to try dealing with them, not after they spread the last hunter out in a major intersection right before the break of dawn. The bounty on them is still being farmed out as a contract job, which means any freelance agent who just goes ahead and jumps the target can't expect to collect more than fifteen percent of the total. Dante's made up his mind, though. Anomalies always fascinated Vergil. This would be something he'd have wanted to investigate from all angles, just to understand the methods of binding involved and all kinds of jacked up weirdness like that.
Lots of pros prefer to hit the field laden with gadgets and arcane safeguards, but again: lots of pros don't stay in the game very long. Dante heads out just after midnight strapped down with his sword and guns and a long coat he thought he'd lost but actually it was just folded up in the fridge for some reason. Anything more would get in the way, block his perceptions, distract him from all the tiny separate parts of the world, among which there were two very rotten bits of sulphur steaming in darkness, just begging to be stomped out.
He walks directly to Main Street and follows it in the direction that promises to be the most immediately seedy. Someone or something has pulled trash from dumpsters tucked into alleys and side streets, the varied contents strewn around like guts at a supermarket ritual suicide. Glittering confetti from some daytime wedding or birthday celebration in a distant park curls serpentine down the empty street, catching yellow light from the filthy streetlamps and splashes of rarer colours bleeding from neon signs that have been left to blink and gutter overnight.
Certain that he should be keeping an eye out for some diversion or optical trick, it takes Dante a second to realize that the two shapes emerging from storefront shadows are in fact the demons themselves. He stops, watches them walk out soundlessly and square themselves with the centre line, facing him, and that's it. They stand there on rawbones, two- and four-legged, the ghoul trailing dark vapours, the grimdog leering cinders from all the gaps in its polished skull. Electric light passes through them completely. If there was a moon, its glow might show Dante where their bodies are most substantial but why should he ever expect to have the kind of luck that would bring the moon around on nights made for mischief?
He draws and fires at the ghoul before anyone can do anything about it. The only response is the report of gunfire, scaling the apartment buildings, snuffing the few lit windows visible overhead as it goes. Neither demon makes a move, so Dante holsters the guns and lets them see that he prefers to use Rebellion anyway, a close-range weapon and an artifact of the old ways of war, when demons roamed freely. As if intrigued, the ghoul comes forward. Dante goes to meet it, aware of Grimdog peripherally, turning so they both have an open line to his ribs, putting himself between them; in danger of both, yes, but blocking their clear sight of each other, and Ghoul is just starting to coast up the asphalt and take the bait when Dante suddenly realizes that there is no ghoul at all, the weak charm is falling off of some black plastic trash bags and broken dowels, which twist and skitter back toward the grimdog, taking his attention with them, but the thing isn't there anymore, it's back where the ghoul had (not?) been standing. He lunges, razoring for an eyesocket, and Grimdog oils around him somehow and slices him in the back, not nearly hard enough to be the sincere effort of a ravenous shade launched from the demon realm.
He's astounded. Not because of what it did - demons are crafty bastards, always - but how it was done. The same kind of movements, the same weight to the strike, the same sound as the type of blade Vergil came to prefer. Even for a fluke it would be terrifying, so Dante turns and goes for it again, in the middle of a drill now, all his plans to euthanize the particularly belligerent denizens of hell forgotten. It happens again. Different motions, same result.
"Bad puppy, look what you did," he breathes, and Grimdog snarls vividly through its fangs.
He gets the sense that it probably won't kill him. Cuts and abrasions peel open all over him - the creature's body is a snarled bulk of thin, slicing wire - but it pointedly avoids his weakest nadirs. For that, it's all the more horrible. It's a caricature, he thinks, some kind of carefully-schooled puppet; but who could have patterned its behaviour? Who could have taught it to do this? Who could have known?
Finally, dodging and weaving and tracking its beautifully unnatural maneuvers, he has to admit another unpleasant truth: he doesn't want to kill it either. Nothing in it is a true, clean tribute to his brother, save perhaps a scrap of his hair that was somehow preserved and placed inside the puppet's core for guidance; but if Dante destroys it, that last tiny glimmer of Vergil's presence in all these bland, hopeless worlds goes with it. He doesn't think he can do that. He has to do that, because it's what he does. He stops. Sits, which reminds him of long ago. He feels sick. Tells himself it's the stench of turned garbage. Knows better than that, but doesn't for the life of him know what to do.
(The grimdog is impossibly still. There. A ragged skeleton haloed in bloody threads. He knew it would stop. If nothing else, he knew that much.)
Maybe he wouldn't have done anything at all. Maybe he would have hunched there in the road until daybreak, let the sun drive the thing away and told himself it escaped fair and square. But then the grimdog is creeping close, it is curling loosely-jointed bones around his arm, and he remembers that; and it is starting to fold against and into him, and he remembers that too; but its abrasiveness, that's wrong, it's too cruel a parody of the obvious subject. Where Vergil was cool and measured, the grimdog burns and froths. Dante will not accept so crude an approximation of someone so refined. Hell cannot possibly understand what Vergil was, how he functioned, what drove him to persist.
The grimdog - fawning, now, insisting maintaining the hoax - breathes gentle warmth on Dante's face, reaches for his, and for an instant he want to apologize (I don't have her keepsake because I don't want to lose it, you know I loved her too) but that's an urge he crushes easily as he takes its skull in one hand and its scruff of wire in the other and he pulls it apart, bleeding black into the puddles of neon leavings and party glitter, searching for the knot that binds the demon, finding it, tearing at it in a fury, Rebellion forgotten someplace nearby and far, far away.
The threads come away clean and gore-soaked. Heavy in his palm, hellfire whispers from inside the fine, gleaming shell of the brain case.
Devils of the fire, who wander in the region near the moon. She says those are the least likely to ever threaten humans. Vergil's words, which this creature couldn't have learned from him. Vergil is dead. Nothing else would keep him away for so long. That sounds like us.
The demon is tangled thread and a poodle's skull in Dante's hands. If thread counts as entrails, he could take it to be read by a fortune teller but suddenly the stuff is awful, worse than anything he's ever touched. He wads it up and tosses it away. The skull, he holds that a moment longer. When he crushes it, a streetlight goes out and the sun comes to the top of the grey buildings high above, crowning them like glass towers in a better place, but the sun can't call him brother, it can't smile at him like he's far away, so that means nothing to him at all.
Valtiel (& Heather Mason).
330 words.
Character death.
Darkness now. Mother weeps in darkness thinking that she is not brave. Shadows cold, Valtiel listens to her moving parts - the throat of her, the eyelashes, the fingers slowly tracking out the wounds of her in the flesh of her - and hears other movements buried deep like gentle music submerged in the thunder of old machines.
Mother keeps the godchild cocooned in her blood and her body, sealed up against a long wait finally coming to its end. Human woman, soon to be bathed in the flames of regency. It must be so. Hale and whole shall God emerge from the core of her at the proper time. From the womb of her, the temple of life inverted, shall God emerge. From her blackened bones shall God emerge, if God deems it proper.
Valtiel waits, still as she trembles. There is a moment and a purpose. One comes, and God's chosen attendants will serve the other. It is no matter of loving or knowing or believing anything. Valtiel serves when the moment for serving arises, as it does when Mother falls. Weak, the body of her; quick, the blood of her. Dying, as living things will do. Shades fade, harbingers decay, all servants are bid to destroy each other in time. Only the living delivered from Silent Hill possess the great secrets, the blind faith and the courage required to simply die.
Wrapped around the godchild, Mother dies in the dark without any words.
Something calls out, even so. Voice of God, speaking no command. The weight of all the sacraments presses heavy on Valtiel's shoulders. Mother is a dread creature not to be approached; but the voice calls. The voice calls to Valtiel, who submits to the strongest will, the great flame trapped in a bed of coals, the mouth in the pit, the absence of sky. 'The Mother of your God needs you.'
Valtiel does what is needed.
Stitched and stranded back on her bones, Mother lives for God again.
