A repository (maybe even a depository…) of my original fiction progress. Quarantining it off from everything else so people don't have to deal with me being insufferable about my original work on main.
Currently working on The Lucifers' Wall, a contemporary fantasy novel about a nature preserve for mythological creatures that wasn’t built to code, and a confused lesbian forced to put her life on the line to complete the centuries-long repair effort.
Coming in around 5200 words, here's the complete third chapter of The Lucifers' Wall! Comments are open as usual.
3 ⬩ Taking Direction
“YOU’RE COMPLETELY CERTAIN it fell out on its own?” Although her tone of voice remained neutral, the woman seated across the desk regarded Elsie with intense scrutiny, severe despite the diplomacy, her presentation a harsh juxtaposition to the natural softness of her features. Her eyes, though a familiar shade of light brown reminiscent of caramel, were sharp and focused, her hair gathered back in a tight plait of grey-streaked blonde without a single lock out of place. “You didn’t touch it?”
Elsie started to shake her head, stopping halfway and lowering her eyes with a wince, the roiling in her stomach pushing acid up the back of her throat. “I did touch the wall, but it wasn’t—” She gestured with her free hand, feeling uncoordinated and shaky, indicating the span between support beams on the structure outside. She gave a furtive glance to her right, but Cora’s eyes were low, brow furrowed deep as she looked at the dark piece of wood in Elsie’s other hand. Elsie swallowed and looked back across the desk, voice trembling. “I-It was just barely…about here.” She brought up that hand to indicate the level where her fingers made contact, then raised the board still clutched in her other hand. “Then there was a noise, like—like something falling. But loud.” Too loud, impossibly loud, like something falling from the top of the dome to the earth, but she couldn’t put the words together in a way that made sense.
She had no idea how long it had been since she came up out of the tunnel to the unicorn enclosure with her head a mess of noise and confusion, but it felt like hours. Until today, Elsie believed the main handler station was a fairly small structure, not much larger than a single-family home, but the path she and Cora took revealed that assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth; the surface structure was small, but served as the entrance to a sprawling network of underground tunnels, splitting and intersecting for what seemed like miles. It probably spanned the entirety of the Reserve. Cora stayed at her side the entire way, pulling and guiding her deeper and deeper into the facility under those flashing yellow lights, hurrying down halls and around corners, into elevators and up stairs, but she offered no explanation beyond a repeated reassurance that they were going to see the director, and an insistence that they move quickly.
The room in which she now stood lacked even a single window, the entire interior black and shiny from floor to ceiling, all six faces meeting in tight curves instead of sharp corners, cold as marble and seamless as a bell jar. Save for an alcove set into the back of the room, every wall was spattered in color, a metallic gold scrawl of characters and constellations, glyphs and sigils, all crowded together and gleaming in heavy lines, smudged over the surface as if painted with a fingertip. The alcove, situated directly behind the large cherrywood desk separating Elsie from her cryptic interrogator, housed a series of wide black shelves, all left unused save for a large silver box situated to one side of the uppermost ledge.
Elsie held up the board, still hesitant and uncertain, part of her wondering why no one had tried to take the thing from her. “This was on the ground by the next section,” she concluded, “and there was a space—a gap in the wall, in that section, where it fell out.”
The woman clenched her jaw, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, perching one elbow on her desk and pinching the bridge of her nose.
Although Cora had introduced her less formally as simply Lor, the gold placard set into the front face of the desk read DIRECTOR in bold letters. She was younger than expected for a facility like the Reserve, probably in her mid-fifties, and wore the cleanest white suit Elsie had ever seen, cutting a bright figure against the dark backdrop of the room.
Though intimidating all on her own, her demeanor nothing short of intense, the director wasn’t alone, her seat flanked by two tall young men with broad shoulders and black hair—and high cheekbones and square jawlines, bearing the same long, aquiline nose, and even though there was something strange about their wide eyes that she couldn’t quite name, those eyes were undeniably blue in color. Just below the curve of the left eye socket on both men, a series of characters stood in sharp contrast to their pale skin, clean black lines arranged into familiar patterns tattooed in power black. They wore perfectly fitted fatigues, material covered in a dark red geometric camouflage pattern with black accents at the seams and cuffs and collars, and neither even acknowledged Elsie’s presence, standing at parade rest with hands crossed behind their backs.
Elsie had seen that face before. Features clear and comprehensible as daylight, it was Mel, who dropped the rat on Furtur this morning, and it was Emelex, interim handler to the Nachtkrapp; it was Dex, the only one who could get away with swatting at the manticore, and it was Lucky and Lex and Liv, the ones who dedicated themselves to the Qiqiao during the short period in summer where the two surviving specimens could actually perceive one another.
She’d seen that face on hundreds of staffers thousands of times, and never noticed.
The director exhaled heavily. “All right,” she said, straightening up again. She turned to look at the young man to her right. “Bring me 23.”
Without any other acknowledgment, he turned around and walked directly to the wall to one side of the shelf; the black surface split from ceiling to floor, rectangular sections flaring out from either side of the break and pulling apart to allow passage into the brightly-lit corridor beyond, then sliding back together to seal up behind him. Elsie stared after him for a long second, stunned by the easy, comfortable utilization of one of the most complex metaphysical powers she’d ever seen. She knew the Reserve was advanced in its use of faceri, most notably in wards and other power neutralization techniques, but she couldn’t even begin to guess what school of power that display belonged under, much less the skill required to culture it into a solid material in such a way that it activated without physical contact.
“Miss Reyes.” Lor’s voice was firm, demanding attention with only the slightest hint of aggression. She crossed her hands on the desk, eyes fixed on Elsie. “It takes a certain kind of person to be comfortable enough for even a few repeat visits, considering the nature of some residents. You’re not an anomaly in possessing that comfort, only in the number of times you’ve expressed it through visitation. Based on admission records, you’re the Reserve’s most frequent individual visitor—but most of our staff to sign on from the outside were, at one point, very much like you.”
The look she shot across the desk was expectant, a moment of silence allowing room for a response, and Elsie nodded. She always assumed she held some kind of record for individual visits, but never viewed the prospect as particularly worthy of recognition. It always felt like a part of her belonged at the Reserve, and giving in to that feeling whenever she could was no one else’s business.
“However, unlike our staff, you’ve achieved an ability to perceive certain elements of this facility without any protections. You’ve pulled back a curtain, now you can see, and without wards to obfuscate your perception, you can also be seen. You’ve made yourself a target.”
“For what?” She blurted out, as disconcerted as she was ill at ease. “If just—if it’s so dangerous to come here too much that—”
Lor held up one hand, cutting off the harried, inelegant attempt to decry the facility’s prioritization of risk. Elsie clenched her jaw and held her tongue, sick to her stomach and unable to understand how such a thing, once known, could ever be permitted to occur.
The director continued in the same firm, even tone as before. “The Reserve was created for the sole purpose of housing sentient, metaphysically powerful creatures that would do our species harm. Every resident here has the capacity to end you, whether through intent or negligence, but they made a compact with the founders of the Reserve, hundreds of years ago, in order to protect themselves and us. Each and every resident, regardless of their destructive potential, made the conscious decision to coexist to the best of their ability.” She inclined her head, eyes dropping for just a moment to light on the wooden slat in Elsie’s hand. “Conversely, the Lucifers’ Wall was created to imprison those that didn’t.”
Elsie allowed her eyes to fall back to the board in her hand, the anxiety clawing through her body slowly coiling into a rigid tension, sharpening and galvanizing as the situation came into focus. She’d never noticed the impossibly massive structure from which this object came before today—just like she’d never noticed how most members of staff had the same face, the same build, the same voice—because she wasn’t meant to. Humans were incapable of learning or implementing perceptive faceri, but it was a fairly common power in supernatural entities. Every culture had stories of demons and spirits and more capable of crafting flawless illusions, of warping memories, of speaking lies that demanded belief.
The scale of perception manipulation blanketing the Reserve erased any doubt about whether the entities living were truly here by choice. A manipulation of reality that could only ever have been effectuated by those same entities.
If the residents’ part in the founding of the Reserve was true, then it stood to reason that Lor’s cryptic explanation of the nature of the wall was accurate as well, identifying it as much more than a simple wooden barrier. The gap created when Elsie saw through the illusion and touched the wall, as Cora frantically announced through the loudspeakers under the main handler station, was a breach—in a line of defense beyond the material, presumably crafted through the same metaphysical expertise as the seamless walls all around them.
“The physical structure of the Wall is imperfect,” Lor elaborated, “and the energetic barrier it upholds is uneven, thinner in some places than in others. In normal circumstances, that’s an acceptable defect, and one we’ve been managing to the best of our ability since the founding of the Reserve. The perception filter works both ways, hiding guests from the beasts beyond the Wall as much as it hides the Wall from our guests.”
“But when it gives way,” Elsie posited slowly, “they can see through.”
“It’s called imperception collapse,” Cora added, joining the conversation at last. “But we have a system, it hasn’t been allowed to get that far in decades. First-waves—our most senior staffers can tell when the filter starts to fail, they report it to the board or the director, and we bring the guest on staff so they can be warded.”
Elsie blinked, head snapping up again as she turned to look at Cora, a jab of something like betrayal cutting through her unease. “Is that why you kept trying to get me to—”
“No!” She interjected, shaking her head quickly and moving in a half-step closer. “No, it’s…there is a risk for long-term repeat guests, but it wasn’t—I’m on the board, but I don’t make that call.”
“That decision falls to me,” Lor explained. “In regards to guests for whom the filter is on the verge of failure, the opportunity to decide whether or not to sign on has passed. Warding can be done to anyone, but those wards have to be maintained via periodic offerings to the Reserve, specifically in the form of time. It’s only a couple hours of service on the grounds every lunar cycle, and often only lasts a year or two, but it’s completely compulsory.”
Elsie frowned, processing. The fact that Cora was apparently on the Reserve’s board of leadership was less of a surprise than it should have been, considering she’d only been on staff for five years. She did always seem to know all about the goings-on throughout the facility, regardless of whether the events in question were at all related to her own position on the grounds. Furtur was in a completely different category than the Nachtkrapp, and as such housed in an entirely different section on the opposite end of the grounds, but Cora still knew all the details about his meltdown that morning, including the fate of the rat that caused it all. Of course a board member would know exactly what knocked out radio communications.
Beyond that, however, came a question. Cora suggested she look into a position on staff several times over the years, and Elsie had decided against it every time; she was able to make that choice because only the director could declare it mandatory. While Elsie wondered the exact means behind forcing someone to take a job they might not want, the fact remained that they were never used on her.
She looked back to Lor. “You said I’m the Reserve’s most frequent guest. If the risk increases with repeat visits, why wasn’t I made to sign on?”
“It wasn’t recommended to me,” the director replied plainly. “There’s much more to filter failure than time spent on the grounds. We’ve had delivery people at risk of filter failure after dropping off shipments two days in a row, and tour guides who visit for hours every single month for years without so much as a wrinkle in their perception.” She gestured toward Cora with one hand, though she didn’t look away from Elsie. “Cora was never affected by the perception filter in the first place, and had to be warded on her very first visit. She may be an outlier, but each of the tens of thousands of people to set foot on this property per year presents an entirely unique situation. I have no choice but to rely on the guidance of those senior staffers responsible for monitoring for filter failure.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, Miss Reyes, but none of them ever made the slightest indication that you were even at risk.”
So Cora really couldn’t have known. No matter how great she believed the risk to be, there was no way to prove inevitability without guidance from those senior staffers—first-waves, Cora called them—and Elsie somehow just slipped through the cracks. It was as much of a relief with regard to Cora’s part in Elsie’s current position as it was a disappointment with regard to literally everything else.
“Unfortunately, irrespective of why no one caught you in time, what’s done is done. When you underwent imperception collapse, you revealed your presence to the beasts beyond the Wall.” Lor’s voice hardened, one part warning and one part exhortation. “Something saw you, sensed you, and took interest. Whatever it is used some measure of its power to push at the barrier until it found a weakness, where it punched straight through, creating the breach.”
“There was nothing on the other side,” Elsie asserted. “It was just—it was open desert. I swear, nothing pushed the board out, it just fell!”
“That doesn’t matter,” Lor reiterated, harsher this time. “What you saw, where you were, how it happened doesn’t matter. What matters is that you broke the filter, you touched the Wall, and you allowed something to—”
A distorted warble cut through the director’s tirade, pulling Elsie’s attention upward. The ceiling was uneven, angled to make the room shorter behind Lor than behind Elsie, and a short distance down the decline hung what appeared to be a spherical gold cage, inside of which drifted something small and blacker in color than even the Nachtkrapp. Against the scrawled symbology on the ceiling and the gleaming gilded wires of the cage, Elsie could make out featherless wings and small clawed feet, a long neck and sharp white teeth that glowed amid the shadowed cavern of its mouth. The creature repeated the noise, coughing out a jet of flame that fizzled before reaching the ornate coiled walls of the cage.
“…Vanta,” Lor acknowledged with a hint of irritation, though the heat drained out of her voice. “I have it under control.”
The creature, Vanta, chirruped once more before coiling up in the center of the cage, floating in place, appearing as nothing more than a perfectly black and imperfectly formed ball in the heart of the golden sphere.
Elsie hadn’t seen a proper familiar since she dropped out of college more than ten years ago, and gazed up at the little creature for several long seconds. With a cage in here, it must have belonged to Lor, but the interjection seemed out of character for the few familiars Elsie had met as a teenager. She’d never seen one interrupt its conjuror before.
“She’s right,” Lor said after a long second. Elsie looked at her with confusion, but the director just sat with her eyes closed, sagged slightly in her seat, and heaved a sigh. With a shake of her head, she straightened up and returned her attention to the matter at hand. “I apologize. This situation isn’t your fault, but you’re the only one capable of remedying it.”
Elsie swallowed, trying to focus on the fact that this predicament, extreme as it apparently was, did have some known remedy. Supernatural entities and metaphysical powers had requirements for rectification, and Lor knowing those requirements at all was more encouraging than her obvious distress was alarming. “How?”
“Repair the Wall,” the director stated. “The breach needs to be closed, or whatever created it won’t stop until it’s torn the whole thing apart to reach you.”
“You have to go inside.” Cora’s voice was small and tight, punctuated with a sharp intake of breath. Elsie looked at her again, but Cora’s eyes were locked straight ahead, the gentle slope of her shoulders hanging low. “The Wall can only be repaired from the inside, or the breach will just keep spreading as whatever made it tries again and again to push through to get you. If you’re inside, then—it can tell, it will know you’re on the same side of the barrier. It doesn’t have to keep tearing through the barrier to reach you, so it will stop.”
A cold fear washed through Elsie as reality sunk in, Cora’s behavior since Elsie found her in the handler station cast in stark, horrifying clarity.
If the creatures residing at the Reserve by choice were dangerous enough to warrant quarantine from the rest of the world, if they joined together to protect themselves and humanity as Lor said—and if the entities inside the Lucifers’ Wall were even more dangerous than the residents, if they were less reasonable, if they lacked the minimal sympathy displayed by the majority of entities housed here—and if Elsie had to enter their territory in order to reaffix a single piece of wood before some great and terrible thing tore the entire wall apart to get to her—
This was a death sentence.
Elsie gripped the board tight in her hand, looking down at the smooth-worn wood, and let out a rough, desperate murmur. “Shit.”
“It’s been done,” Lor stated quickly, giving Cora a sharp look that the young woman definitely didn’t see, her caramel-colored eyes still somewhere off in the distance. The director returned her focus to Elsie, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the desk and interlock her fingers. “I can’t offer much in the way of protection, but you won’t be going in alone.”
Cora came back to herself, standing straight and squaring her shoulders. She looked to the director, expression deepening in determination as she crossed her hands behind her back and shifted into parade rest, her stance as trained and precise as the man still standing in silence at Lor’s side. “Requesting to accompany.”
The director’s tone hardened again, returning to the same authoritative plainness from before the exclamation that led to Vanta’s outburst: “Request denied.”
“Auntie—”
“Absolutely not.” Lor reiterated. “Your unique skillset is a boon to the Reserve regardless, but with a breach in the Wall, you’ll be needed more than ever. As a member of the board, you have a responsibility to this facility.”
Cora’s voice pitched up, taking on a harsh edge not dissimilar to that of the woman in front of her. “You can’t refuse to send a resister to help fix the Wall just because—”
“I have no choice but to refuse to send our only resister into the Wall because she’s a necessary mechanism to uphold the stability of this facility in a time of crisis,” Lor spat, eyes narrowed. “The maintenance of the Reserve takes precedence over any personal feelings either of us may have.” She spoke through clenched teeth, each word enunciated in a hiss. “Request. Denied.”
The revelation that the director was Cora’s aunt helped to bridge the gap between the story Elsie knew of how she’d gotten her current job—a relative on staff recommended she sign on—and the apparent truth that she was immune to the perception filter altogether and had to be warded immediately on arrival, but there was something else in the air, a heaviness of words left unsaid. Elsie recognized the void in conversation left by missing details, but with no way to know whether those details related to the looming catastrophe or to something more personal, she held her tongue.
The staredown between the two women didn’t last long. Cora’s shoulders sagged slightly and she exhaled through her nose, teeth clenched. “Understood, Director.”
Before Lor could respond, the wall behind her desk splayed open again, yet another black-haired, blue-eyed young man stepping into the room from the corridor beyond, this one dressed in the standard Reserve uniform of an orange polo, khaki shorts and hiking boots. The man in red fatigues who came in behind him was probably the guard Lor sent out earlier, but there was really no way to be sure.
The director relaxed visibly at the new staffer’s arrival, a hint of a relieved smile tugging at the corner of her lips as she glanced back to Elsie. “While even one human inside the Wall is too many, we have other options.” She swiveled her chair to gesture toward the young man with one hand. “Miss Reyes, this is Reserve Officiant Simulacrum 23.” She raised her chin slightly to look up at the young man. “23, you’ve heard of Miss Reyes.”
“I most certainly have!” He replied with a smile broad enough to light up the ice blue of his eyes, more than wide enough to showcase the gleaming whiteness of his teeth and his just-too-prominent canines. He crossed the distance between them to take Elsie’s free hand into both of his own without a beat of hesitation, giving a squeeze. “I have to say, you are exactly as described.”
The epithet awarded to the newcomer struck Elsie like a freight train, leaving her unable to reply as comprehension dawned almost painfully bright in her mind.
Simulacrum.
In mythology, simulacra were artificial lifeforms crafted to a purpose, made from blood and breath and god only knew what else—literally. No one knew what went into creating a true simulacrum, because they were a myth, and not in the colloquial sense as applied to mythobiological life. No known school of power or combination of disciplines had ever come close to producing a single specimen, never mind the massive population staffing the Reserve. Simulacra appeared in stories, of course, but so did worldwide floods and mortal apotheosis and time travel, all of which were completely impossible.
Any yet, here and now, it made perfect sense. The simulacra portrayed in stories were relatively mindless as far as Elsie knew, capable of doing that which their creators commanded them and nothing else, but that clearly wasn’t the case for the Reserve’s constructed workers. They were humanoid and human-adjacent, with the right shape and overall presentation, but weren’t actually any such thing, and weren’t likely to have the same energetic vulnerabilities that made working with many residents so dangerous. Whoever or whatever built this army of flesh golems did so with impressive insight.
The simulacrum called 23 had longer hair than either of the young men standing alongside the Reserve director, long enough to curve over his brow in a wide arc that reached well below the contour of one high cheekbone, parted and trimmed unevenly so the other side curled back behind his ear—probably to keep the markings on his cheek visible, given that all the simulacra had them. The styling was a stark contrast to the almost military cut of the others, but he was every bit as tall, with the the same broad shoulders and chest, narrowing to the same noticeably slimmer waist, prominent hips and long legs. His nose was different, but only because of a very slight curve down the length and a noticeable bulge at the bridge, testifying of a fracture at some point in the past. The corners of his mouth were slightly more upturned than his cohort, though that seemed more related to personality than physical features, lending him an air of smugness to juxtapose to the almost childlike eagerness in his large blue eyes.
Close as he was, Elsie could finally tell what was wrong with his eyes, and by extension the eyes of everyone with whom he shared a face and form. His pupils, instead of being round holes in the center of the slightly-oversized blue discs of his irises, were a bizarre wavy line, pulled up in the center and at either end to form two distinct curves that dilated and contracted independently in a shape similar to a lowercase W.
The simulacra had eyes like cuttlefish.
Elsie wondered whether it was just the shape, or if the similarity ran deeper. Did they also lack the blind spot found in the eyes of all known vertebrates? That would probably be useful. More useful than her thoughts’ automatic and determined avoidance of the matter at hand, in any case.
From this proximity, she could also decipher the black markings just above the crest of his left cheekbone, below his eye socket, which read XXIII in deep black. A Roman numeral matching the number by which he’d been introduced.
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” he beamed. Was his accent different from the others? It was hard to keep them apart in her memory, Elsie having only just gained the capacity to remember them at all, but there was a flow when he spoke long vowels that seemed inconsistent with the rest of his kind.
The difference was familiar to a bewildering degree. Elsie had definitely heard him before—not his voice, they all had the same voice, but his accent. His tone. Something in his cadence sat on the edge of Elsie’s recollection, just too far back for her to grasp. That familiarity permeated his carriage, as well, along with his smile, his posture, the tilt of his head. It all resonated in a way she couldn’t explain.
“Have I…seen you before?” She asked, brow creasing. It was a stupid question, knowing that he would be familiar no matter what simply because he looked like all the others, but there was something else at play here. She just couldn’t remember, but not at all like the perception filter. It didn’t make her head spin, it didn’t fill her thoughts with static or recursive loops of blurred imagery.
Elsie knew this man, she was sure of it.
His smile softened, thick eyebrows arching as curiosity lit his strange blue eyes. “I don’t think so. Although, on the chance you didn’t notice, I do have one of those faces.” Elsie couldn’t help the low scoff that comment pulled from her throat, and his smile broadened again in response.
“23 has been with the Reserve since it was first founded,” Lor explained. “He’s the foremost expert on the inside of the Lucifers’ Wall, and will accompany you as your guide.” She gestured to the man standing on her left, the one who remained at her side through the entire discussion thus far. “Likewise, Reserve Praetorian Simulacrum 1017,” she said it as two numbers, ten-seventeen, “will accompany you as protection.”
Unlike the more recent arrival, 1017’s features were perfectly symmetrical and unmarred, though still undeniably built from the same base. He slanted a look at Elsie, his expression unreadable, and lowered his head in a single measured nod. Now that she knew what she was looking at, Elsie could decode the numeral on his cheek as MXVII. It was quite the jump in sequence, and she wondered just how many simulacra there were altogether. The others she could now remember weren’t referred to with numbers, but rather by name.
It took only a moment for her to realize that many of those strange names were the result of reading the Roman numerals as letters in the English alphabet. Emelex would be MLX, Simulacrum 1060, with Mel his close predecessor as ML, Simulacrum 1050. Dex and Clive, whose names were ostensibly quite normal, were probably DX and CLIV, Simulacrum 510 and 154 respectively.
23 turned around to look at Lor, eyes widening. “You’re giving us 1017?” He marveled. “Are you sure?”
She gave a shrug, body language looser and overall bearing much lighter in comparison to her interactions with either Elsie or Cora, in spite of the latter being her niece. “Only the best for our most frequent guest.”
The statement brought all eyes back to Elsie. She stiffened and looked down at the slat in her hand, then glanced at Cora, who just looked back with an unspoken apology in her eyes. Seeing her so upset brought a sharp pang of guilt to Elsie’s heart. Even knowing the situation itself wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help but feel responsible, at least for Cora’s pain. She should have listened to her. She should have applied for a job. She should have signed on as a volunteer.
She should have asked her on that date.
Elsie swallowed and faced forward again, taking a deep breath and straightening her posture, raising her chin to meet Lor’s eyes with determination.
The staffers provided to assist in the task were apparently the most capable the Reserve had to offer, and even if Elsie wasn’t unique in her ability to withstand the eerie, threatening existence of the creatures here, she was unique in her breadth of knowledge. She knew the Reserve better than anyone not on staff, she knew the ins and outs of resident sociology and physiology, she knew myths and legends above and beyond those attributed to those intelligent beings who made the choice, centuries ago, to help keep humanity safe by living here. Elsie had an obsession, born from a part of herself that belonged on the Reserve, and it never failed to guide her back here time and time again.
Anything that had been done before could be done again.
“All right,” she said. “How am I supposed to do this?”
When Lor smiled, she looked so much like Cora it hurt.
I have been struggling with this transitional scene for literally like a month and it's driving me bonkers. It's like pulling teeth. I wrote 2k words that I really liked, but pulled the scene in a direction that it doesn't need to go and totally fucked the pacing, so I had to scrap that and try again. Fuckin' miserable.
The complete second chapter of The Lucifers' Wall; just over 7000 words, comments are open!
2 ⬩ Questioning Significance
CORA STOPPED IN the doorway, scanning the busy break room for several seconds before her shoulders sagged in disappointment. “Hey,” she called into the space, raising heads and drawing eyes in her direction. “Has anyone seen Dex? He didn’t show up to the position change meeting, and radios are still down so I can’t get him on the horn.”
“Have you checked in with Laghari?” There was no discerning the speaker from the voice alone, but Exelli’s long black braid slipped back over his shoulder as he leaned away from the table to see her past the broad shoulders and dark hair of a colleague. “It’s way past time for him to get his pinger charged, she probably gave him an earful.”
“You’ve gotta stop calling it that, man,” came another voice from a little further down the table, instantly distinguishable as Tyler from aquatics thanks to the difference in pitch and accent from the others at the table.
“That’s what it does, isn’t it?” Exelli countered.
“It’s a telemetry unit,” corrected the man on his other side.
Exelli rolled his eyes. “Which you ping to get readings.”
“Precisely,” the other, probably Emdee or one of his cohort from his tone and the tightly clipped cut of his hair, continued. “It is pinged, it doesn’t do the pinging. So your preferred terminology is inaccurate on top of sounding obscene.”
Cora sighed, turning her thoughts back to the situation at hand while they continued to debate the legitimacy of Exelli’s word choice. Language aside, he was right to suggest checking in with Laghari, but Cora wasn’t particularly eager to do so when Dex had probably just forgotten the meeting was scheduled for today. It couldn’t be easy to catch up after a week off, much less a week spent recovering from a manticore bite, but she still couldn’t help but worry. He’d been around for so long—the chance of his recent injury triggering a cascading physiological downturn might not be dangerously high, but it certainly wasn’t zero.
Then again, Exelli was first-wave; he’d been around longer than literally every other member of staff save one, and had definitely experienced much worse in his term than a monster bite that wasn’t even severe enough to require regeneration. If he wasn’t worried, Cora had no reason to feel differently.
Unfortunately, worried or not, she still needed to brief Dex on the upcoming shuffle and make sure he was comfortable with the change in his autumn assignment. Usually he’d be one of the half-dozen staffers to work with the manticore clear through spring, but Shuck needed a new liaison and, while no less dangerous, he was much less likely to express his displeasure through violence.
Well, he was usually less prone to violence, in any case. Cora couldn’t be the first person to notice, and she certainly wasn’t going to be the first one to point it out, but the marked increase in aggression from the majority of residents over the past couple weeks was hardly easy to ignore. Although, perhaps that wasn’t the right way to describe it; the issue was less with increased aggression than with decreased patience, their tolerance for mortal limitations growing weaker by the day. Normally, simultaneous behavioral changes in multiple residents could be attributed to some natural phenomenon, an upcoming eclipse or a burgeoning storm, but she’d never heard of anything affecting so many entities at the same time. She may only have actually worked at the Reserve for five years, but Cora had been a part of life in the facility since childhood, regularly hauled along to work with her aunt after responsibility for her upbringing landed in the poor woman’s lap out of the blue. Twenty-odd years wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but she was positive she would remember if anything like this had ever happened before, particularly considering her aunt’s position on staff and her own place among facility leadership.
“If you don’t want to bother Laghari,” Tyler chimed again, pulling Cora from her reverie and allowing Exelli and Emdee—probably Emdee—to carry on their ridiculous debate just the same, “you can check security? Not like Dex would be hard to spot, he’s the only one with an arm wrapped from thumb to elbow.”
She blinked at the suggestion, feeling a low twinge of embarrassment lighting at not having thought of it herself. Dex would be easy enough to recognize on sight right now, wouldn’t he? And traditional wireless communication might be down until the discharge stopped reflecting off the inside of the dome, but the main video feed was hard-wired, lines and viewports coated in enough protections both physical and metaphysical to withstand much more extreme electrical interference than one angry resident’s outburst. Most importantly, the security feed and all related offices were accessible under Cora’s security clearance, no permission or reporting required.
With luck, he’d be somewhere on the surface property, maybe one of his secondary stations. He wasn’t supposed to be working with residents again just yet, but he also wasn’t supposed to shove his arm in the manticore’s mouth, even to help another staffer, and that certainly hadn’t stopped him. At least the scar would make him easier to tell apart from the others, though he was extremely lucky to have avoided a mandatory regeneration term after a stunt like that.
“Good idea,” she replied, perking up. “I’ll do that, thanks.” She turned to leave, but called back over her shoulder, “If anyone sees him before I do, let him know I’m looking for him!”
“Yes ma’am,” chorused the others at the table, a dozen near-identical voices in harmony.
The only security office in this quadrant would be under the main handler station, so Cora headed back toward the briefing room where Dex had failed to arrive. She paused there, ducking her head in the door to make sure he hadn’t just shown up late, then withdrew and carried on down the hall when she didn’t see him among the couple people tidying up from the meeting to assure a clean space for the next group. If memory served, the next round would include everyone on duty in aquatics today, and she thought fleetingly about doubling back to remind Tyler and Exelli, but reassured herself that micromanaging of her colleagues wasn’t necessary. Tyler hadn’t been on the Reserve as long as she had, but they were properly hired around the same time, and he took on his current long-term position well before she did. He knew what he was doing. Exelli definitely didn’t need her help with anything.
She was just on-edge, that was all. She couldn’t blame it all on Dex being missing, either; that was a point of concern, but she was already out of sorts when that fact came to light in the first place. Even those residents who had yet to give in to their more violent tendencies still showed a change in behavior, increasingly defiant and obstinate regardless of the amount of support given. At least her ward had been receptive, although he was far less responsive to Cora’s support than to that ad-hoc concession from—
“Hey, Cora!” A voice called as she passed an adjoining hallway. She stopped and backed up, turning as Roland came trotting up the way. “Just who I wanted to see,” he huffed as he came to a stop, slightly out of breath. “You got a minute? It’s important.”
“I’m heading to see if I can find Dex on the security feed,” she said, jerking her head to the left to indicate her direction. “He missed a meeting, so I’m a little worried, but I can walk and talk if you’re okay with that.”
He just waved a hand, ushering her forward and moving to walk at her side. “Okay, I don’t know if you saw her already, but Elsie’s here today.”
She nodded. “I spoke to Miss Reyes earlier.”
“Cool,” he quipped. “You need to talk to the director about making her a job offer.”
“I have spoken to the director about making her a job offer,” Cora responded, tone flattening. Roland knew that already, his frustration with the outcome almost on-par with her own.
“Talk to her again,” he insisted, voice caught somewhere between firm and furtive. “Stolas was talking to her earlier, and I didn’t hear everything he said, but—the radios are still down, so I had to come find you.” He took hold of Cora’s shoulder, ducking in slightly closer to her height. “Cora, I think she’s on the verge of filter failure.”
She stopped dead in her tracks, eyes widening. “What?”
Roland shook his head. “I don’t…I can’t be sure, I’ve never seen it happen. The last one was before either of us were born, and the director’s really good at bringing people on before total imperception collapse. But Stolas was talking about how it’ll be a shame to see her go, and something about how neither of them can change it.”
A chill seeped into Cora’s chest, spreading out through her body as she thought about the Nachtkrapp, remembering his little quip earlier. Not the comment about Emelex, but before that, his non-response to the question of why he chose to speak Deutsch when he was clearly as fluent in English as Cora herself was in his preferred language.
At the time, it sounded like another rude comment, but if Roland was right…no, she couldn’t be alarmist about this. She couldn’t jump to conclusions. Prince Stolas had preternatural foresight, but his prophecies and warnings were unclear at the best of times, often bordering on opaque. Conversely, the Nachtkrapp didn’t have any such gifts in the first place, the power woven into his form much more limited than an entity like Stolas. He was probably just trying to rattle her, as usual. Par for the course as his seasonal handler.
Cora took a deep breath, giving her head a slight shake. “Miss Reyes has been here hundreds of times,” she reminded. “If she was going to experience filter failure, it would have happened years ago.”
Probably. It wasn’t as if there were exact numbers on these things—some people were flagged as high risk for imperception collapse on their second visit, others came around regularly for years before raising a single alarm. Some guests returned time and time again for their entire lives and never saw anything more than the Reserve’s perception filters would allow.
She continued anyway, doing her best to put the uncertainty from her mind, at least long enough to reassure Roland. There was no reason for him to be so concerned about one of her friends. “And if she were on the verge now, wouldn’t one of the first-waves have caught it? They can see thin spots from a mile away, and they’re supposed to report everything.”
“Maybe,” Roland conceded, thought he sounded even less convinced than Cora felt. “But I know Stolas. I trust his judgment, especially on things like this.” He clenched his jaw, lowering his eyes for a moment, expression deepening. “I only ever see her here, but I know you two are friends. I don’t want anything to happen to her.”
“…Neither do I,” Cora agreed. She kept her distance from the Reserve’s most frequent visitor for a reason, after all; whether Roland was correct about his ward’s cryptic declarations or not, this was a good excuse to push the envelope a little bit. If it went well, maybe she could finally close that distance. She breathed deep, resolving to head to the executive office as soon as possible, and gave Roland a nod. “All right. I need to find Dex, then I’ll go talk to the director. Do you know where Miss Reyes went after visiting with Stolas?”
He shook his had. “Sorry, I kinda—I pulled him away, basically. I think he was freaking her out.” He let out a weak chuckle. “He was also freaking me out.”
That seemed understandable, given how rare it was for Stolas to engage so intentionally with anyone, guest or staff, without a legitimate reason. “I’ll see if I can find her when I’m looking for Dex,” Cora reassured. “She’s got that sundress on, she should be easy to find.”
Roland’s expression brightened, eyebrows arching, and the apprehension fell away from his demeanor in an instant. “You remember what she’s wearing?”
Cora huffed at the obvious implications behind his question, reaching up to give him a shove. “It’s a cute dress,” she elaborated. “And it has pockets! I keep meaning to ask where she got it.” While hardly comprehensive, none of those statements were untrue. Any other opinions she might have about the woman’s choice of attire was no one else’s business.
“Right,” he drawled, sounding unconvinced yet again, albeit this time in an entirely different way. He clapped her once on the shoulder before straightening up, tapping at the earpiece clipped to the collar of his orange polo. “Lucky said radios should be back in about an hour, so update me when you can. I’ll keep an eye out for Dex, too.”
“Appreciated.” Still turned to face him, she took a sideways step down the hall. “I’ll keep you posted, and thanks for letting me know. See you.” Cora waved and turned to heading down the hall again, following the long path toward the main handler station and the security office beneath.
Regardless of her own assurances, anxiety once again began to build in Cora’s gut. Filter failure was rare, and rarer still were instances where the resulting imperception collapse led to anything perilous. Just as Roland said, the last time was before either of them were born, more than half a century back. Two directors prior, if Cora knew the timeline. The easiest way to avoid the risks inherent to filter failure was to simply bring the person at risk on as a staff member, even if only a volunteer capacity, thereby warding them with the necessary protections so long as they performed some small duty to the Reserve on a regular basis. In some cases where those protections were instated quickly enough, filter failure never occurred at all; the individual simply carried on none the wiser, life entirely unchanged save for an hour or so of volunteer work a couple times a month.
None of which mattered, because it was probably nothing. Just like this whole business with Dex—who was definitely fine, wherever he was—the situation with Stolas was unlikely to actually warrant attention. It was probably nothing. There was no reason to worry. Everything was fine. Core reiterated it to herself over and over, even as tension clutched at her heart.
That quip from the Nachtkrapp echoed in her head, clear as day, automatically translated in memory from his mother tongue to her own.
“Careful, I think she’s finally paying attention.”
The unicorns, housed in the largest single enclosure in the entire facility, were surprisingly calm after the electrical incident early that morning. Though tame and fairly nonviolent by nature, they could be quite difficult to pin down when alarmed, with the capacity to run for literal days at a time without any impact on their health, and it was that fact which sent Elsie wandering this way in the first place. If Furtur’s outburst spooked them into a gallop, they’d be running laps around the field all week.
Thankfully, they all seemed just fine. Perhaps a little more alert than usual, but they weren’t exactly well-known for their obliviousness—assuming the mythology of those creatures known as ‘unicorns’ even applied to the version housed in the Reserve.
The mythological illustration resembled the residents in many ways, but the differences were stark enough to bring the name under scrutiny in academic circles quite often. They sported a single horn like the beast of legend, but it curved back over their heads in a long arc, ending almost level with the base of the skull. The horn itself was slightly ridged and somewhat triangular in shape, coming to a point on the outward facing side to form a sort of serrated blade that gleamed iridescent white under the sunlight. More colorful were the creatures’ massive eyes, situated on the sides of their heads in almond-shaped domes; though seeming on first glance to be filled with prismatic bubbles, shifting color and position as they took in the sights around them, the reality was nothing more than a unique variation of the very mundane concept of compound eyes.
Another point of debate was the fact that the Reserve’s unicorns, while quite long-lived, were noticeably absent from the list of residents classed as persistent. The unicorn of myth was generally portrayed as immortal, like Stolas and the Nachtkrapp and so many others, but the creature currently happily thrumming away as Elsie stroked its flank was as susceptible to age and disease as most animals.
Their mortality may have brought their name into question, but it also opened up the possibility of research, with the remains of deceased specimens donated to professionals in the appropriate fields of study as they passed away. Thanks to those studies, Elsie knew a great deal about unicorn physiology. She knew they had two hearts, three toes, and that the thicker patches of woolly off-white fur around the chest and throat and rump weren’t there for warmth, but for protection, tight white curls perfectly structured to catch the serration of a competitor’s horn in seasonal mating duels.
And now, if only anecdotally, she knew they weren’t terribly bothered by surprise exposure to a rather intense energetic facere, at least when there were glyphs in place to protect them from harm. In fact, it was Elsie who found herself startled, jumping and whipping around when a voice rang out close behind her.
“Hey, hands to yourself!”
Judging by his line of sight, however, the nondescript young man—tall, pale, black hair, broad shoulders—wasn’t speaking to her, but rather a much younger guest inching her way over. There weren’t supposed to be children on the Reserve today, but older teenagers managed to skirt under the barrier to entry fairly often. The way the girl deflated and rolled her eyes upon admonishment made it very clear she had been trying to avoid detection. She pointed at Elsie. “What about her?”
The young man stepped between the unicorn matriarch, affectionately nicknamed Azúcar by a previous staffer, and the guest. “When you’ve been to the Reserve close to three hundred times,” he said, sending a jolt of confusion through Elsie as she looked on, “then maybe the matriarch will let you touch her. Until then…” He raised his head to look past her as a young man approached the pair, hurrying to the girl’s side.
“I am so sorry,” he sputtered, looping one arm around her waist and pulling her close. She leaned back against him, looking up with a pout as he turned to her and hissed, “Babe, what were you thinking?”
“It’s a unicorn,” she declared. “I was just saying hi.”
The debate went on for another minute or two, Elsie watching in silence as the staffer asserted the risks of unwanted contact with a critically endangered species, warned that they’d have to be removed from the property if either of them broke another rule, and reminded the young woman that greetings were best offered with words, not hands. She huffed in apparent indignation, but her date remained apologetic, nodding and repeatedly trying to subtly pull her away even as her arguments to the point continued.
Elsie was still staring, not at the drama caused by the young couple, but rather at the staffer. In spite of her certainty that she’d never met the tall young man now standing with his broad back to her, he was definitely familiar with her. It was possible he’d heard about her from his coworkers, but her appearance was hardly unique enough to be so quickly identifiable; with black hair, brown eyes, and skin in the classic dark gold shade most commonly seen in the range between the south coast of Nihong and the central region of Luzon, Elsie’s features were often mistaken for questionably-similar traits endemic to Aztec and Mexica, too common to be recognizable by a stranger in a crowd.
And that detail about the frequency of her visits seemed far too specific to be hyperbole.
Looking between the two of them with his hands on his hips, the staffer cut off any further debate in a voice that rang out strangely clear even over the murmur of the crowd. “It would be best if you both showed a little more decorum.”
The petulant expression on the teenage girl’s face eased, pout slowly changing to a grimace. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Sorry.”
“Enjoy the rest of your trip,” he said, although not without a lingering hint of warning. A bandage wrapped up the length of his forearm almost shone in the sunlight as he made a short sweeping gesture, as if releasing the teenagers in the field just the same as a resident let off his leash.
The wrapping, dappled ever so slightly blue toward the middle, was bright, even whiter than the title embroidered in bold capital letters on the sleeves of his orange polo. Elsie wondered how she hadn’t noticed it before.
He watched the couple hurry off and heaved a sigh, then glanced back over his shoulder at Elsie, expression turning more apologetic. “Sorry for the interruption. They’re technically adults, but only just, so with the radio down I’ve been stuck tailing them since gates opened to make sure they don’t get eaten.” He chuckled, shooting her a slanted smile. “Hopefully you’ve had a better time running around the grounds today than me.”
“Have we…met?” Elsie finally asked, brow creased. Try as she might to remember, she didn’t recognize this man, she was sure of it. Not in general, nor as any of the handful of handlers usually set to work the unicorn plot, nor a liaison assigned to any of her other favorite residents. The way he spoke, both of her and to her, expressed familiarity on his part, his tone casual to the point of friendly, his accent skirting around the corners of her memory without properly revealing itself.
He looked at her for a second, then his smile softened. “I don’t think so,” he replied, giving his head a shake. “Do I look familiar?”
She frowned. “No, it’s—you mentioned me visiting hundreds of times, like you…” She squinted. “Have I seen you before?”
Tall, pale, dark hair, broad shoulders. Had she seen him before? Sharp features—no, not really. Maybe. No. Yes. She wasn’t sure. Big eyes—what color was that? She couldn’t tell. Lavender? Cora’s favorite color. No, blue. Ice blue? No, that wasn’t it. Red? No one had red eyes. She couldn’t tell. She should have been able to tell.
“It’s not important,” he said, tone of voice almost jovial even as the words struck Elsie again, more directly this time, clear and sharp as broken glass. He waved over his shoulder, and moved into the crowd to continue his surveillance. “Have a nice day, Miss Reyes!”
Elsie blinked, exhaling slowly, then gave her head a shake and turned back to Azúcar. She was usually so good with faces, but there were a lot of people on staff at the Reserve. She supposed, as he said, it wasn’t important.
…Did he call her by name?
The unicorn matriarch’s muzzle nudged at Elsie’s shoulder with a rumbling sound, more like a gentle growl than an equine snort, drawing her back out of her own head. The light behind those strange eyes eyes flared as a ripple of tension ran over the unicorn’s body, demanding attention as it traced along the musculature down her neck, over the barrel of her chest and narrow, wasp-like waist, concentrating into a sharp flick of her long tufted tail.
Elsie sighed and moved up a bit, running her hand through the soft, almost downy fur at the side of the unicorn’s neck. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “I thought I…heard something? I know it doesn’t matter, but I really thought—”
Azúcar huffed, turning her head to look out into field for a moment before returning her attention to Elsie, hooking her chin over the young woman’s shoulder and thrumming again, purring from somewhere deep in her throat. Elsie wasn’t sure what led the matriarch to conclude she needed soothing, but appreciated the gesture nonetheless, leaning in closer and just breathing for several seconds. The background noise faded, the chatter of other visitors and vocalizations of the rest of the herd growing quiet, and the knot of unnecessary apprehension tightening in Elsie’s stomach loosened ever so slightly.
“Thanks,” she murmured, withdrawing. “Not sure what’s wrong with me today. Maybe something to do with Furtur’s tantrum still reverberating back.”
Azúcar shook her head, but didn’t respond otherwise. Unicorns couldn’t speak in the traditional sense, but did have the ability to communicate. All residents were sentient to some degree, whether they looked eerily human or like some alien creature.
Not that unicorns were alien after so many years of biological research. “You know,” Elsie mused, “of everyone here, I think you’re the ones we understand the best.” She ran her fingers carefully through the beast’s thick, wavy mane. “There are so many of you—I’ll bet there are at least a few still out in the wild somewhere.”
This time Azúcar shook her head more emphatically, giving another of those little rumbles of dissent, and Elsie cocked her own head to one side.
“You don’t think so?” She repeated the action a third time, now with much less severity, and Elsie pursed her lips in a contemplative frown. Her petting motions slowed to a stop as she thought about all the apparent lastlings housed on the Reserve, the contemplation cut off by the memory of Stolas’ cryptic reassurance earlier.
“We are as we always were.”
She looked to Azúcar again, inquisitive. “Isn’t it sad? If you’re the only ones?”
This time, the matriarch’s declaration of dissent came with a purr. Elsie supposed she would be content with her lot—the entire herd had been born on the Reserve, descendants of a wild population that died out long ago. If this was all Azúcar had ever known, why would it matter if it had been different in some distant past?
Most residents probably felt differently, given that the majority were persistent, having come to the facility themselves years, decades, maybe even centuries ago, and stayed ever since. If it were even possible that evolution and human expansion hadn’t wiped out their wild populations, then what? What was the point in gathering up the subjects of so many mythological records into a single space? The more Elsie thought about it, the less sense it seemed to make.
It might protect them from manmade horrors like deforestation, saving them from the ecological collapse of habitat loss, but most of them were too intelligent for that to possibly be a concern. If humans came across a flock of stolim while trying to settling in a new region, why wouldn’t the birds just tell them the space was occupied? Why had there never been some kind of trade agreement between fishermen and aquatic species?
Homo sapiens might be the only survivor of their own branch of the evolutionary tree, but it wasn’t because they’d personally killed the others; they interbred, adapting through hybridization, coalescing into something greater than the sum of their predecessors’ parts. Sibling species died out, but their traits persisted in the humans of today. With that kind of precedent for humanity’s handling of other species on their level, they couldn’t possibly have all but wiped out so many other sapient species, most of which were arguably more intelligent and undeniably more powerful than themselves.
And if they had, against all odds and reason, it didn’t seem possible for the last of every single one to end up on a nature preserve—in Zonari, of all places.
“Your kind harmed us not at all.”
Elsie sighed, frustrated and uncomfortable, the coil of tension in her gut slowly tightening back up in spite of Azúcar’s best efforts.
Not wanting to distress the majestic beast any further, Elsie said her farewells, waving goodbye as a handler she didn’t recognize started up on a simple lecture on unicorn biology in response to a question she hadn’t heard. Azúcar followed her from a distance, slowing as she approached the treeline, trunks positioned too close together for something of her size to fit in between.
She waved again. “I’ll stick around longer next time, I promise.”
Azúcar let out a low vocalization of her own, deep and drawn out in a way that seemed almost mournful, a goodbye the likes of which Elsie had never heard before. They stood in silence for a second, then the unicorn turned and slowly plodded back toward the rest of her herd, head held just a little too low.
Feeling more shaken by the minute, Elsie slipped through the barrier to access the stairs and then down to leave the enclosure. That sad noise, eerie and alarming as it was, became one more entry in the growing library of confusing sights and sounds from the past couple hours.
The tunnel leading to the unicorn enclosure was situated between the main handler station and the gift shop, a hatch in the earth leading down into a long hallway, then back up into the edge of the unicorn’s designated territory. The Reserve offered the services of a transport cart to ferry guests from one access point to the other, but Elsie dispensed with it this time. Waving off the staffer at the wheel, she moved to follow the footpath in reverse, back toward the primary area of the facility. She braced her right hand against the wall as she walked, sliding gently over the worn old bricks and casting strange shadows under the low blue light, turning the day over in her mind.
The Nachtkrapp’s teasing of Cora in words she couldn’t understand, but which lit confusion and concern in the other woman’s eyes.
Stolas’ cryptic statement about Elsie being here and nowhere and how no one could change it. Roland’s hurry to get him away from her before he could say any more.
Azúcar doing everything in her power to soothe Elsie’s anxiety, and the goodbye that sounded like the last she’d ever give.
That young man whose face she couldn’t remember, who knew things he shouldn’t have known and said things he shouldn’t have said. She was sure she’d seen him before, the certainty running the vague image of several staffers through her mind, far too many for all of them to be the man in the unicorn plot.
But they were, weren’t they? Exelli had that thick, dark hair—Emelex had that same fair skin—Clive’s chest was every bit as broad—Liv and Lex had the same eyes, that color she just couldn’t see—
No, none of them. And it didn’t matter what they looked like. It wasn’t important, but he wasn’t any of them. She’d seen him before, he’d introduced himself; Elsie could feel his name in her mouth, trapped between her tongue and her teeth, but it wasn’t important.
What was his name?
Elsie knew so many members of staff, it was no surprise that one would call her by name. Cora most of all, of course, but Roland handled the stolim, Bailey oversaw the fae hives, Kaiden did exhibitions with Tsuchinokko, Ira managed the dryad habitat. Who was it that fed Furtur that morning? Cora talked like Elsie knew him, but she couldn’t remember. It wasn’t important.
Elsie knew the staff because they were a part of the Reserve, and it was her favorite place in the world, a facility centuries old. How old? It was her favorite place, she knew everything a civilian could know about it, but even with all her years of visiting she couldn’t for the life of her remember the date, the year, the century it was first established. Had she ever heard the name of the person who founded the Reserve?
She heard the young man she couldn’t remember in the unicorn plot, saw him wave his hand before he turned away.
“It’s not important.”
It wasn’t important, but she knew it wasn’t important. She could feel it deep in her chest, repeating like a mantra. How did the Reserve come into being? It wasn’t important. Who built the sprawling, city-sized facility? It wasn’t important. When had those nameless, faceless founders first broken ground? It wasn’t important. How big was the property in totality? It wasn’t important. How had so many supernatural entities been gathered here? It wasn’t important.
Head spinning, Elsie climbed the steps to surface in the primary dome, shielding her eyes from the sun as she shakily turned toward the main handler station, aiming for the long path to the exit in the distance. For the first time in her life, Elsie couldn’t wait to get off the Reserve, as if everything would make sense again the moment she stepped off the grounds.
It felt so horribly wrong. Elsie had always been obsessed with this place, she adored it with a strength she couldn’t explain, why should she feel such a driving need to leave? That mantra rose up inside her again, and this time, at last, she pushed it down.
Something was wrong with this place she loved. That was important.
The world snapped back into focus, clarity returning to her thoughts and her eyes in an instant, and Elsie stopped.
She found herself on the path to the exit, standing just to one side of the main handler station, staring past the familiar brick building at a massive structure. Built of wood the color of black coffee, slats positioned between towering support beams like blinds tilted to be just the slightest bit open with swaths of familiar Zonari scrubland visible through the gaps, the wall spread out in either direction, running parallel to the path beneath Elsie’s feet. It stretched clear to the perimeter of the Reserve, dividing the western edge of the grounds from the desert beyond.
And Elsie had never seen it before in her life.
She tilted her head back and back, tracing that support beams with her eyes until she faced the sky, finding the place high overhead where the dark wooden slats intersected with the ceiling of the dome and…and what? No matter how she squinted against the daylight, she couldn’t tell what happened at the junction of wood and facere, as if she had a blind spot there, a blur in her vision and an inability to focus on the architectural tangent enough to comprehend anything beyond the fact that the wall was at least as tall as the dome.
Maybe she was going insane. Perhaps continued exposure to so many supernatural entities over a span as relatively short as thirty years brought on a mental break severe enough to include full-on hallucinations.
She allowed her gaze to slide back down, realizing that she was eerily alone. Other guests milled about to her left and right, but only several yards away, and the constant drone of unintelligible conversation seemed even further away. Even those heading directly toward her, presumably seeking the entrance to the unicorn plot, turned in unison to follow the same indirect detour, giving her a wide berth as if she stood in the center of her own invisible dome. That couldn’t be a result of her losing her mind.
Taking a deep breath, Elsie squared her shoulders and approached the wall, determined to see how well it held up under direct scrutiny. It could be some kind of illusion, some resident or another playing with her, but part of Elsie knew—just as she knew something was wrong—that wasn't the case. She hadn’t seen it here before, but found she couldn’t remember an alternative. Elsie knew the position of the main handler station, she knew the path to the gate, and she couldn’t remember what the westernmost perimeter of the Reserve even looked like. As if this wall had been here the entire time, and she simply never noticed it before.
Stylistically, it was distinctly out of place, nothing at all like the brick and stone architecture of the rest of the facility. The vertical beams separated it into sections about three feet wide, spaced in a way that reminded Elsie of wall studs, as if the structure were built to remain standing under immense weight and force. The consistency in those upright supports was a stark contrast to the uneven spacing and varying size of the slats secured in between without any obvious joinery. The wood itself was heavily weathered, grain so raised it looked sharp, but nonetheless so dark in color it seemed a show of defiance against the bleaching power of the sun.
The land beyond, visible through the gaps, looked utterly normal, filled with the same gnarled mesquite trees and desert scrub as the space within the primary dome. Just stone and sand and the visual distortion of heat rising off the ground as far as the eye could see.
Elsie stopped up just short of the wall, uncertain of what to do, hands clasped close to her chest as she looked the foreign structure over once more, up and down, right and left, then looked back over her shoulder. No one else, whether an obvious guest or dressed in that familiar orange shirt, so much as glanced her direction.
Looking back at the wall, she swallowed thickly, reaching out with one trembling hand to prove once and for all that the wasn’t losing touch with reality. No sooner had her fingertips brushed the weathered material than a noise rang out so loud she jumped, feeling like she might as well have leapt straight out of her skin, the sound like something falling from a distance and striking the ground with an intolerably loud slap.
Spinning toward the source, Elsie blinked in increasing confusion. A bit under three feet long and around four inches wide, dark in color and worn down by god only knew how many unforgiving Zonari summers, a single wooden slat lay on the ground to Elsie’s left.
She bent down and picked it up, turning it over in her hands as she straightened up again, surprised by the almost meager weight of it as much as the soft, freshly-sanded texture of its surface. She cast her gaze to the side to look through an oversized gap in the wall just at the level of her eyes, from which the board had presumably fallen, and found no signs of damage. No splitting or breakage, and also no nails, no braces, nothing that could have held it there in the first place. The slat itself was equally unmarred, visibly—if not tangibly—worn by the climate far more than its use in construction.
Elsie took another deep breath to steady herself. If nothing else, she absolutely was not losing her mind. Holding a piece of the wall precluded that entire issue, even if the structure appeared out of nowhere.
Had it been there all along, hidden by some unknown facere? Some residents could manipulate a person’s perception of reality, but surely not at such a scale.
Elsie turned around, gripping the board with both hands, and headed for the handler station. Whatever this was, it was important. For now, that was all that mattered.
“Hello?” She called, pushing the door open and leaning inside, looking around the reception area. The front desk was unmanned, although the sounds of a footlob game drifting in from somewhere in the distance testified of some human presence, and she raised her voice. “Excuse me! Anyone?”
Hurried footsteps caught her attention, and she turned just as a young blond woman appeared from the nearby hallway.
“Cora!” Elsie exclaimed, relief washing over her.
“Miss Reyes?”
“I—something happened, and I don’t—” Stepping fully inside and allowing the door to swing shut behind her, she held up the strange wooden slat, hoping Cora would have some explanation for what just happened, and what Elsie could do to make up for it if necessary.
The color drained from Cora’s face, her dark eyes going wide. “That’s…” She met Elsie’s gaze again, something entirely too much like panic settling into her features. “Where did you get that?”
“The…wall?” Elsie winced at the other woman’s reaction, letting go of the board with one hand to gesture shakily over her shoulder. “Along the west side of the—”
Before Elsie could say any more, Cora grabbed her free hand and hauled her further into the handler station, breaking into a run to pull her down the hall. Cold fear leached into Elsie’s chest as Cora half-led, half-dragged her around a corner and down a set of stairs, barely able to get a handle on their shared momentum in time to avoid slamming straight into a large metal shutter at the end of the hall.
Cora stumbled to a stop, taking hold of the shutter’s handle and throwing the retractable barrier up over her head with a crash, then reached into the small space beyond to slam her hand against a large, glowing red circle—a button, Elsie realized, mounted on the wall and lit from the inside. The lights overhead dimmed, then flared back to life in bright, flashing yellow as the wail of an alarm began to blare.
“Cora—”
She grabbed what looked like an archaic intercom microphone from the wall beside the button, depressing a switch on the side and frantically speaking into the plastic grating on the front of the handset.
“We have a breach of the Lucifers’ Wall!” Cora announced, her voice echoing in tandem with the klaxon ringing out all around them. “I repeat, we have a breach of the Lucifers’ Wall!”
I have not drawn Oniche in two million years but I'm gonna be getting to them soon in the rework so here they are! Beautiful, ethereal, so far outside the realm of human thought that they kinda come off like a sociopath sometimes, but actually just loves everyone everywhere all the time. May or may not be the first supernatural being in existence, may or may not have assisted in genocide against their own kind, and definitely has never done anything wrong in their entire life—which started at the onset of dreaming, so it's been a really long time.
So I posted the full first chapter of The Lucifers' Wall over on @valentinedwords and it's got talking birds, exasperated lesbians, and a situation that led my sister @archi-pelago to make this for me a bit back:
She also made these:
It's been two weeks since she did this and I keep coming back to them and weeping.
Exelli (Simulacrum 42) is so fun to write, he's such a ludicrously competent menace. There's literally no reason for him to have more of a role than he does, but I kinda wish he did just so I had an excuse to write him more.
The complete first chapter of The Lucifers' Wall; roughly 6000 words, comments are open! (General reblogs disabled due to tumblr's new engagement handling.)
1 ⬩ Talking To Birds
The Reserve existed without question. Like black tea served with honey, the stylized ‘S’ scrawled on primary school desks, or yellow taxi cabs in New Amsterdam, its existence was ubiquitous to the point of universal recognition.
Located in the desert hills of southern Zonari, a little over a half hour’s drive from the nearest city, the Reserve comprised close to 20 square miles of enclosures and exhibits spread out across a sprawling campus, along with an undisclosed amount of extraneous territory designated off-limits to the public since before the state in which it stood joined the Emmericine Union. Maintained by a veritable horde of highly dedicated staff, visited most often by students on field trips and families seeking child-friendly excursions, the facility had been a constant, almost consummate presence for centuries. How it came into being didn’t matter—it was here, safe and stable and familiar, and Elsie loved it with all her heart.
At the lowest possible estimate, Elsie had visited three hundred times, a record starting with photos of a toddler gripping her mother’s hand as she eagerly pulled her toward the next resident’s enclosure and carrying on for a full three decades in photographs and recordings and journal entries, eventually culminating in a growing archive of artwork featuring the entities housed within the facility illustrated from Elsie’s own point of view. There was something about the consistency, the certainty of its place in the world, that blessed the Reserve with an aura of quiet contentment she never found on the outside. Though entirely removed from the bustle that was modern society, the Reserve inspired none of the loneliness she found in solo visits to common parks or weekends out in the woods; even structured to the needs of creatures so different from humanity that some weren’t even perceptible without specialized equipment, she’d never gotten lost or felt out of place even in childhood.
Elsie didn’t know who built the Reserve, but she knew the facility itself with all the intimacy of an old friend.
Even so, it was a massive facility, and Elsie knew there were plenty of places she hadn’t seen, places she didn’t even know about. Some residents were only active one or two days out of the year, others lived deep beneath the ground, still others resided underwater, so many simply too difficult for common visitors to reach. There also had to be a myriad of hidden alcoves and enclosures of which only staff members were aware, housing residents whose quality of life was at its best when they remained cloistered away from people.
The only way to see everything would be to sign on, to have the freedom of movement enjoyed by facility staffers. She did periodically consider applying for a job or a volunteer position, assuming she would be quite easy to train. Elsie knew the placement of almost every public exhibit and specimen, which residents were allowed to wander the grounds and which had to be kept in safe enclosures, and even how the changing seasons impacted the behavior and placement of various supernatural species housed within its metaphysically-warded walls.
Still, thus far, she’d decided against it, leaving every opening that reached her notice unpursued. The last thing she wanted was for her safe haven to start feeling like work.
Elsie remained a guest. Today, she didn’t have a specific itinerary, no urge to visit any particular habitat or resident, but with a week off between contracts and no other activities on which to spend it, the Reserve was her go-to use of free time. She couldn’t very well pass up the chance to squeeze in a visit during a seasonal adults-only weekend, an event originally intended for scientific research trips and now utilized most often as a safe first date. Saturdays were usually too busy for her favorite pastime on the property, but this time she had no trouble finding a nice bench along the field path on which to sit, where she settled in and pulled out her sketchbook.
Looking up, Elsie took in the iridescence of the dome high above, intent upon the visual distortion in the sky, that gleaming metaphysical installation the only thing standing between some residents and escape into the desert. Despite the power woven into that transparent barrier, a facere that must have taken years of training to implement so flawlessly, it looked so fragile from down here, light glinting on the surface in blooms so faint she doubted any artistic medium could truly capture their delicacy.
Sketching the strange shapes of the clouds as seen through the dome, Elsie contemplated how odd the Reserve must appear to people who hadn’t grown up nearby. Miles across and entirely self-sustaining, it was a testament both to mankind’s determination to stand at the top of the food chain and to the ingenuity required to achieve that goal, standing for hundreds of years without a single visible sign of decay. The general assumption, at least recently, was that credit for the structural stability of the Reserve belonged to its residents, fantastical and incomprehensible as they were, their presence imbuing the facility with some sort of supernatural protection. Elsie, however, had met and even spoken at length with enough of those residents to keep her from feeling particularly confident in that explanation—not that she could say why. Just a feeling. Not important, but persistent.
“Guten tag,” came a voice just behind and to her left, rich and deep with an almost musical rumble beneath the vowels. Turning, Elsie looked up at a monstrous beast covered in dark feathers. It could have been a rook, a raven, any number of common birds, if not for the fact that it stood at least seven feet tall, plumage blacker than black and eyes gleaming scarlet.
The sudden quickening of her heartbeat was automatic, if not outright instinctive. No matter how many times she came here, some residents by their very nature never failed to instill a sudden, indescribable apprehension. It was a power, she knew, an aura that followed the great shadowed creature like a smoke followed a torch, and reminding herself of that fact made it easy enough to shake off.
“Guten tag, Nachtkrapp,” she responded after half a second’s pause to get her wits about herself and shove down the invasive terror threatening to solidify in her chest.
Before the avian itinerant could reply, the sound of hurried footsteps drew his attention along with her own, and they both turned to see a young woman racing up the path in their direction. Blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that swung back and forth in time with the rhythm of her sprint, she wore the familiar orange polo and khaki shorts of all Reserve staff, the word HANDLER embroidered on both short sleeves in bold white letters.
Upon reaching the pair, she turned to the Nachtkrapp to speak in distressed Deutsch, to which the bird responded with a laugh before ducking his head and rumbling out something that made the young woman stiffen visibly. Her hand ghosted toward the radio clipped to her belt, but she stopped, clenching her jaw, and instead hissed out a sharp rejoinder. The Nachtkrapp just huffed and angled his head back, slightly askance, distinctly pantomiming an exaggerated roll of the eyes. He settled down lower to the earth, the sleek contours of his feathers raising across his body just the same as one of his much smaller cousins trying to keep warm.
The young woman, whose name tag read Cora in the center and Resident Liaison just below, turned to Elsie with an apologetic look. “I’m so sorry, Miss Reyes. I hope he didn’t startle you.”
“It’s fine,” she reassured. “And, again, it’s just Elsie.” She glanced between Cora and the Nachtkrapp with an inquisitive smile. “What’s got you two wandering around out in the open?”
Cora gave a vague shrug, one hand straying out to touch the giant blackbird gently, fingers stroking through massive too-black feathers. “No minors allowed on the premises this weekend, so he’s allowed out of his enclosure for a while. It gives him a chance to stretch his…legs.”
“Meine Flügel,” he corrected with a huff that sounded more like a warble, his voice turning sharper, more emphatic. “Nicht meine Beine.”
“Freilich, Herr Nachtkrapp,” Cora replied hurriedly, her own tone softening in response to the overt expression of displeasure from the supernatural being in her care. “Es tut mir so leid.”
Elsie didn’t know enough Deutsch to completely understand the exchange, but recognized an explicit show of subservience—a so-called microsupport—when she saw one. While the myths and stories attributed to the plethora of residents on the Reserve were hardly accurate, the vast majority of them had been treated with reverence by their human neighbors before taking up residence here, and continued shows of deference remained integral to the emotional and social stability of their corralled supernatural society. Still, understanding aside, even Elsie rarely saw one carried out so openly.
Cora once again reached down to her radio, this time flipping a switch on the side and looking down to watch the result: the little light at the top of the device came to life, blinked green once, twice, and then turned a bright, angry red.
She frowned. That didn’t look good at all. “Is something wrong?”
“The radio has been down all day,” Cora explained, flipping the switch back and forth twice more before giving up and taking a seat on the bench with a sigh, positioning herself between Elsie and her oversized avian ward. She leaned back, draping one arm over the backrest and turning to Elsie with a tight, tired expression. “This morning, when Mel was feeding Furtur—you know Furtur.”
It wasn’t a question, but Elsie nodded anyway. She knew all the public-facing residents on the Reserve, although she was fairly certain that Furtur was too antisocial for anyone to know him particularly well. Though as capable of speech as any of the residents in his class—artistically referred to as ‘Illuminated Spirits At Call’ but more commonly categorized modern parlance as Goetic demons—he tended to prefer communicating in a more naturalistic and far less comprehensible way, making noises befitting of the deer’s head he bore. When he spoke in words people could understand, Furtur was clear and concise, if somewhat impatient, and absolutely, undeniably brilliant. As with most of his class, Furtur had an implicit understanding of specific subjects that transcended human comprehension. His almost feral pride made him difficult to deal with at the best of times, but it was well-earned despite his appearance.
Cora continued, making a vague gesture with one hand as she spoke. “We usually try to feed him before the gates open, since he can be a bit violent about it and some people are squeamish.”
That made sense. Most of the time, Furtur was more bizarre than intimidating: discounting the antlers, he stood slightly shorter than Elsie, with the head, hind legs and tail of a whitetail deer, his forelimbs and chest like those of a wiry human man with rough skin the color of rhassoul clay, and a pair of delicate mammalian wings at his back with a span shorter than that of his arms even when fully extended. Feeding time was an entirely different situation, considering his wide, milky white eyes lit up like the moon when he grew too eager, his otherwise deerlike mouth housed a set of razor sharp teeth, and his carnivorous diet included energetic limitations necessitating his prey be consumed alive.
“Mel was trying to feed him, but he decided Mel was taking too long and took a snap at him,” Cora pantomimed the biting motion with her hand, curling her fingers like Furtur’s curved fangs. “Unfortunately for everyone, Mel had already roped the first feeder by then. He dropped the stick when he jerked away, and the rat slipped the noose.”
Elsie quirked an eyebrow, unsure how a feeder animal delaying the inevitable could impact radio communications. “Who got stuck chasing it down through the enclosure?”
Cora shook her head. “Nobody. Furtur’s fed from a platform to keep him from biting anyone when he gets rude. It slipped the noose on the way down and caught itself on one of his antlers.” Her tone took on a sharp edge of exasperation. “You’d think Furtur, as one of our residents with hands, would be able to take care of this himself, right?”
Elsie winced. “But his antlers are so big…” They were also more similar to those of an Emmericine elk than the deer he otherwise resembled, spikes sticking up from a single long branch of bone that reached backward rather than splitting into forks upon forks that haloed out to the sides.
“They’re huge,” Cora confirmed, reaching up past her own head in illustration. “This thing was up at the top, too high and too far back for him to reach without dislocating something. He flailed around, but our feeder animals aren’t some chubby pets with no concept of self-preservation. It held on tight and didn’t let go.”
What a mess. Elsie could imagine the scene clearly, Furtur’s batlike wings flapping furiously, ungulate head swinging dramatically back and forth, cloven hooves tearing up the ground as he spun in place, reaching and clawing the air in a futile attempt to reach the desperate little animal intended as his morning meal. The piercing, ragged shriek of an elk’s bugle would be terrifying enough from a normal animal in the enclosed space of a standard feeding station, but Furtur wasn’t an animal. He could do a great deal more than struggle and make noise.
“…And when nothing else worked,” Elsie said, finally able to see exactly how a misplaced rodent could lead to a radio outage, knowing the very particular energetic facere at Furtur’s disposal, “he tried to zap it.”
“He didn’t try anything,” Cora proclaimed. “He flooded the whole place with lightning. The wave spread clear out to the unicorn plot. We’ve got protection glyphs to neutralize the effect on living things, so nobody was hurt, and a senior staffer was eventually able to get him under control, but the radio will be down until the energy finally dissipates enough for the perimeter wards stop reflecting it back.”
Elsie groaned. “All that over a rat.”
“Over a rat!” Cora echoed with much more intensity, gesticulating helplessly with both hands. “And with how the protection glyphs work, he didn’t even get the rat!”
The ragged warble of the Nachtkrapp’s laughter rang out as if to spite his handler’s audible frustration, but she just clenched her jaw and took a deep breath, not engaging with his provocation.
Elsie gave the giant bird a glance, but he didn’t join the conversation beyond that little outburst. It was a little funny, she had to admit, but wouldn’t say so when Cora was so obviously aggravated. Maybe they could joke about it the next time they ran into each other in town.
“What happened to it?” She asked. “The rat.”
“Lucky—that senior staffer—peeled it off and took it with him,” Cora grumbled with a roll of her eyes. “He said anything that ‘willfully defied destiny and won’ deserved to survive, so I guess it’s a pet now.”
She didn’t seem impressed, and wasn’t alone in the sentiment. The Nachtkrapp let out a sharp cough, his earlier amusement giving way to annoyance. “Verschwendung,” he spat with a chatter of his beak. “Lebensmittelverschwendung.”
The first word was waste, Elsie knew that much, and she assumed the second probably clarified his issue as a waste of food.
“I think it’s kinda sweet,” she murmured.
He gave another cough, deeper and more guttural. Disgusted. “Verschwendung.”
Although Elsie’s expression flattened at the argument, she knew better than to take it any further. That particular brand of sentimentality wasn’t likely to be found in a resident whose mythology centered almost entirely around infanticide.
Further, Cora’s behavior proved this definitely wasn’t the right time to attempt any debate. The lack of radio explained her trepidation toward the resident under her oversight, removing the ability to subtly hail another staffer to switch out if the Nachtkrapp grew too obstinate to manage. Wandering the field was a good safeguard, since she could literally flag a coworker down with a yell and a wave, but other visitors would notice that. Until communications were fully restored, it would no doubt be better to be a little more sycophantic, even if that meant showing subservience to a resident in front of a guest.
Not that Elsie was just any guest. She knew the purpose of a microsupport, after all. She might even be able to help.
“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted, trying to sound appreciative, conceding to the giant bird’s point of view. “It was supposed to be food, so keeping it isn’t really fair.”
The Nachtkrapp’s response was every bit as positive as she’d hoped, as if Elsie’s opinions somehow meant more than those of his handler. He perked up slightly where he sat, closing his eyes and reciting what could only be some kind of smug affirmation, his tone dripping with self-satisfaction even if his words were beyond Elsie’s very limited vocabulary.
She gave a sideways glance to Cora, who looked on with a grateful smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, broadening the heart shape of her face. Elsie couldn’t help but respond in kind. As fond as she was of the giant blackbird seated on Cora’s other side, it was the other woman’s approval that mattered.
“Since we’re alone,” she continued, looking back to the bird as she changed the subject, “I’ve always wondered—why you only speak Deutsch when you know English?” It felt similar to the issue of Furtur preferring to scream and huff like an angry animal rather than speak like the hyperintelligent entity he absolutely was, a self-imposed limitation that served no obvious purpose beyond making their care and protection more difficult for the humans who dedicated themselves to the effort.
The Nachtkrapp laughed again, throwing back his head to let the sound more freely escape his forearm-length beak, but offered no proper reply. Instead, he straightened up enough to look pointedly at Cora, eyeing her for a second before rattling out some incomprehensible aside in a conspiratorial chitter. She frowned, brow creasing in what looked to be confusion, but he simply settled comfortably back into a giant ball of black feathers on the ground.
Cora squinted at him for a moment more, but didn’t ask for elaboration any more than he offered it, and eventually the uncertainty eased from her features. She returned her attention to Elsie. “I’ve been told he speaks other languages sometimes,” she revealed. “When he thinks it’s ‘worthwhile,’ whatever that means. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’ve only been one of his seasonal leads for a few years, and that sort of thing always takes a long time with persistent residents.”
“Of course.”
It was years ago, but Elsie remembered the first time she saw Cora at the facility, an easily startled wisp of a woman only a couple years younger than herself, with wild flaxen hair just long enough to be pulled back into a bun, but too short to stay there with any sort of reliability. She was the first member of staff to suggest Elsie apply for employment on the grounds, albeit not until she was a half-dozen seasonal position changes finally led her to her current ward. They had both changed a lot since then, Cora growing much more physically sturdy than she’d appeared and Elsie growing much less socially awkward than she’d felt, but a few years was a drop in the ocean for something as long-lived as the Nachtkrapp.
“Maybe he’ll talk to you someday,” Cora continued. “He sure likes you enough, racing over here as soon as he saw you. If you were younger, I’d be worried.”
Elsie had to agree. Attention from the Nachtkrapp wasn’t exactly in high demand. He might be one of the more docile residents on the Reserve, but even Cora was only his handler from the summer solstice to autumn’s equinox, unwilling or unable to put up with him for any longer at a stretch.
It probably had to do with the fact that, until coming to the Reserve at some point in the past, his primary source of food had allegedly been human children. These days it was mostly piglets and fetal livestock, and at Elsie’s age she had nothing to worry about—not to mention that she had been far from his usual fare back in her days as part of his dietary demographic. Too sickly to be anything but small as a child, in contrast to her height today, she had been quiet, timid, and almost self-destructively agreeable. Nothing at all like the squalling brats on which stories warned the Nachtkrapp preferred to prey.
Cora’s expression brightened. “You definitely know how to talk to him, though. You really should put in for a job. He’d probably love you as his handler, and my term this year is ending soon anyway. Right now he’ll have an interim handler through the winter, but he’s not fond of Emelex.”
“Ich bevorzuge echte Menschen,” the Nachtkrapp stated plainly, content to remain a massive unmoving ball of feathers alongside the bench.
Elsie looked at Cora. “What did he say?” Something about people, but that was the extent of her ability to translate the key terms in that sentence.
Cora just shook her head. “It’s not important, he was being rude.”
“Ich bin ehrlich.”
“Regardless,” Cora turned her attention back to Elsie, “you’d be a shoo-in. We can always use more staff.”
Looking around, Elsie doubted that. “This place is crawling with staff.” Mostly tall, dark-haired young men with broad shoulders, a fact that struck Elsie as odd on and off throughout her visits, and did so again as she looked out into the field and took in the sheer number of staffers with similar features—but the thought only lingered for a second. It made Cora stand out significantly among her coworkers, but otherwise it just didn’t seem relevant.
“Trust me, we can always use more.” Cora bent at the waist to rest an elbow on her knee and perch her chin in her hand. “Did I tell you I’m spending this winter handling Fenrir and his boys on my own again? One handler for a whole pack!”
Elsie chuckled. “That ‘pack’ is three members strong, all of whom are docile enough to walk around the facility on their own, off-leash.” Not that the harnesses and leads they occasionally wore were much more than formality or fashion, considering Fenrir was the size of a large shire horse and his cubs weren’t much smaller. Trying to pull one of them back with a leash would be like trying to stop a truck with a necktie.
“Your lack of sympathy is cutting, Miss Reyes,” Cora lamented with wry amusement.
“Just Elsie,” she corrected yet again.
Before Cora do more than smile in response, the Nachtkrapp hopped up, feathers smoothing back down in the motion to the more svelte shape of his body. Curling his toes to dig black talons into the soil, he loudly declared, “Hungrig!”
That word needed no translation, and Cora was on her feet immediately, putting a hand to his wing and urging him down the path with muttered promises of food. She slowed her pace to give Elsie a wave over her shoulder, but looked away before Elsie could do the same when the Nachtkrapp warbled out, “Hol mir ein Baby.” The admonishing tone in Cora’s reply remained distinct as she ushered her ward down the way, but the words were lost to the distance when they turned the corner around a walled enclosure.
Elsie looked after her for a long moment before heaving a sigh and leaning back on the bench again, raising her eyes toward the sky.
Maybe next time, she’d finally ask Cora if she’d like to pick up dinner after her shift.
“And maybe the Nachtkrapp will get approved as a foster parent,” she muttered to herself.
The problem wasn’t one of unfamiliarity; if anything, she and Cora were better acquainted with one another than any other repeat guest might be with another member of staff. They spoke regularly on Elsie’s visits, certainly, but also followed such similar routes in town that their paths crossed with striking frequency, leading them to spend enough time interacting in public spaces to be more than casual acquaintances. Cora kept details of her work close to her chest, which made sense considering the critically endangered status of literally every resident on the Reserve, but they knew each other well enough. Elsie knew most of Cora’s basic likes and dislikes—the color lavender and iced coffee versus spreadsheets and microwave dinners. She knew where she’d been born—Aotearoa, though she left young enough to lose all but the faintest hint of the accent. She even knew how she’d wound up working here—a relative on staff encouraged her to put in for the position after she finished her degree. Cora certainly knew just as much about Elsie, if not more given that her storyboarding job was far less clandestine than Cora’s position at the Reserve.
For goodness’ sake, Elsie helped Cora carry groceries to her car a little over a week ago so she didn’t have to walk through the rain to put her shopping cart away. Cora sneakily paid for Elsie’s coffee twicein the past month when they both happened to stop by the same café around the same time. They were undeniably comfortable with one other, and yet, for some incomprehensible reason, Cora absolutely refused to call Elsie by her first name.
How could she suggest a date if Cora was sure to call her Miss Reyes the entire time?
Elsie heaved another sigh and pushed herself up from the bench, closing her sketchbook and tucking it under her arm to head further afield. She still had the better part of the day to use as she saw fit, and this was no way to do it.
She wandered the field for a while, stopping to sketch a wren’s dogged pursuit of a particularly tenacious rosy cactus fae, the latter having strayed too close to the former’s nest in search of ripe fruit to bring home to the hive. Both sides of the dispute were too fast to take in with much clarity, much less portray in traditional media with the detail they deserved, but there was something to be said for the messy gestures that resulted from the attempt, and she moved on fairly satisfied with the image of smeared graphite silhouettes swirling around a towering saguaro in bloom.
The contrast between the bright orange shirt of a Reserve staffer and a handful of bobbing blue shapes milling around toward the nearest interior curve of the dome caught Elsie’s eye. It had been a while since she visited with this particular group of residents, and longer since she’d even attempted to draw one, so she might as well head their way.
‘Prince’ Stolas was large for an owl, but not as inordinately massive as the Nachtkrapp, and nowhere near as viscerally frightening. With long, stilt-like legs, deep blue feathers that sparkled in the sunlight, and massive eyes filled with stars, he was a common favorite for families with small children. His size and the crown-like crest on his head clearly set him apart from his kin, a flock of noticeably smaller birds that bore no crown, but looked every bit as much like the night sky pulled down and condensed into living form as their progenitor.
Roland, the flock’s lead handler, gave Elsie a wave as she approached. “Hey! Long time no see.” His left hand rested on the head of one of Stolas’ flockmates, who grew openly perturbed when he turned his attention elsewhere, giving a rattling squawk and pushing up into Roland’s hand, stomping one foot on the ground. He sighed and continued his careful stroking of the bird’s feathers, soothing the little beast instantly. The lack of radio seemed to have everyone a bit on-edge with handling their residents today.
Stolas himself perked up as Elsie approached, crossing the distance between them in three of his hugely long strides and giving a little chirp of delight at her presence.
“Hello, Your Highness,” she greeted with a nod so deep it was practically a bow, though she only held it for a moment. Polite enough for a resident with whom she had such a long acquaintance. “How have you been?”
He chirped again, this time with an echo, a layered distortion just barely discernible as words. “Well, thank you.” It wasn’t at all like the Nachtkrapp, who enunciated clearly and spoke like a person, instead more reminiscent of a voice picked up in the static of a radio on a barely-believable ghost hunting television program. “And you?”
“I’ve got a few days off, so I thought I’d come by and visit.” She held up her sketchbook. “Do you and the kids mind if I try again?”
Stolas turned and gave a low hoot, garnering the attention of the other dozen or so oversized, long-legged owls in the group, including the one still demanding Roland’s attention.
Like Cora, Roland was easily distinguishable from his coworkers, but in his case it had nothing to do with the color of his hair or slimness of stature. Roland was a veritable tank of a man, heavier than the majority of staffers, and where those rather utilitarian young men whose names Elsie always struggled to remember tended to be quite pale—despite spending all their time in the Zonari sun, she had no idea how they didn’t all burn alive every summer—Roland’s complexion was a much more appropriate shade for the climate, darker even than Elsie’s, a near-perfect match to the dreadlocks currently looped and tied into a knot at the top of his head. The hint of stubble below his cheekbones was visibly darker at a glance, though still slightly paler than Elsie’s own short-cropped mane.
The stolim, as the smaller members of the prince’s court were commonly called, all pulled away from Roland to turn little circles around Elsie, chirping and hooting, bobbing up and down as they looked her over curiously. There were more now than she recalled from last time, one of them barely tall enough to reach her hip.
“Well, hello,” she said with a smile, looking down at the smallest of the owls. “Where did you come from?”
Roland laughed. “Came in to work last week and she was just huddled up with the rest of ‘em in the main hall of the rookery. Y’know how stolim are, I’m sure they’ve got other nestlings cloistered in the enclosure somewhere we can’t find ‘em.”
At first the use of feminine pronouns came as a surprise, but further scrutiny revealed the longer flight feathers on the little owl’s wings, down clinging halfway down her legs, and the lack of spurs at her ankles. There were so few females among the stolim, it had to be exciting for the Reserve staff to have another.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She held out a hand out with her palm facing downward, as she usually did with Stolas himself, but the young female hesitated, looking to her prince for approval. Stolas’ call was a high, eager hoot that made the little female fluff with excitement, and she eagerly pushed her crestless head into Elsie’s hand, closing her huge eyes and rubbing like a pleased cat.
“There we go,” Roland said with a grin. “She’s really friendly so far. We’re hoping she’ll be good for species conservation.”
“Hopefully.” Elsie petted the young stolim once more before straightening up and looking back to Roland. “At least they’re better off than the Nachtkrapp, right?”
Roland nodded, grin fading. The Nachtkrapp had probably originally been brought here for the safety of the human population, of course, but he remained for his own protection—he was the only one of his kind in the entire world. Centuries old and all alone, all records indicated he’d been housed on the Reserve since its inception.
Of course, he wasn’t the only resident in such a situation. There was the manticore, with its human-like face and prehensile stingray tail; the mapinguary, a Bolivian giant with one eye and thick russet fur; the Qiqiao were a distressingly humanoid mated pair incapable of even sensing one another without specific environmental factors in place, both despairingly lonely. A large swath of the Reserve’s residents were so-called sole survivors, apparently the final specimens of great, fantastic species wiped out somewhere along the line.
Everyone said the solo residents were the last of their respective species, at least. Science dictated that they all must have been part of greater populations at one point or another in the annals of history, but there were few if any records of others having ever existed. The more that Elsie came here and the more she got to know the entities living within the bounds of the facility, the more she wondered if they were just all that had ever been.
Was it possible they somehow came into being all on their own? If that were the case, how did it occur, and what were the deciding factors? The one thing they all seemed to have in common were their interactions with humans being horribly dangerous for the latter participants, even violent in many cases. Maybe they were some kind of population control? That still didn’t sound right, but it rang with more probability, somehow, than the concept that the Nachtkrapp was the last of a seemingly immortal species of giant sapient corvid.
Stolas sidled up to her and leaned in close. “It will be unfortunate to see you go,” he said in that strange whisper-through-noise.
She smiled slightly. “Oh, you know I’m never gone for long, and I have all day.”
“No,” he stated plainly, huge starry eyes unblinking. “Soon there will be no choice. Soon you will be gone, but here, until you are gone from everywhere. You are beginning to see, and that is always how it ends.”
Elsie looked down at the large creature with confusion, a sense of dread coiling in her chest. “What are you talking about?” Her voice was more hesitant than she intended. She’d never gotten a sense of unease from the stolim before, much less Prince Stolas himself.
“As you are, you are not the first,” Stolas continued. “As things stand, you may not be the last. You come, you look and fear not. And now you are beginning to see.” His voice, such as it was, dropped even lower. “The question in your heart rings clear, but as you see, you may know before you go: we are as we always were. Your kind harmed us not at all.”
Roland came forward, breaking up the group and all but pulling Stolas away from Elsie. “That’s enough of that, no whispering on my watch.” His tone was light, but the undercurrent of tension was palpable. “C’mon, Highness, we should get going.”
“But he—”
“Talk to you later.” He herded the stolim and their prince away without meeting Elsie’s eyes.
“The stars and starlings long for company,” Stolas continued as he trotted off. “This time, neither you nor I can change it.”
Elsie watched them go, that cold dread leaching out through her like ink dripping into water. Prince Stolas was always talkative, but usually spoke about weather, star patterns, even the symbolism of geometric shapes he found in the fields or in his enclosure. It was never anything ominous, nothing the least bit disturbing.
The complete first chapter of The Lucifers' Wall; roughly 6000 words, comments are open! (General reblogs disabled due to tumblr's new engagement handling.)
1 ⬩ Talking To Birds
The Reserve existed without question. Like black tea served with honey, the stylized ‘S’ scrawled on primary school desks, or yellow taxi cabs in New Amsterdam, its existence was ubiquitous to the point of universal recognition.
Located in the desert hills of southern Zonari, a little over a half hour’s drive from the nearest city, the Reserve comprised close to 20 square miles of enclosures and exhibits spread out across a sprawling campus, along with an undisclosed amount of extraneous territory designated off-limits to the public since before the state in which it stood joined the Emmericine Union. Maintained by a veritable horde of highly dedicated staff, visited most often by students on field trips and families seeking child-friendly excursions, the facility had been a constant, almost consummate presence for centuries. How it came into being didn’t matter—it was here, safe and stable and familiar, and Elsie loved it with all her heart.
At the lowest possible estimate, Elsie had visited three hundred times, a record starting with photos of a toddler gripping her mother’s hand as she eagerly pulled her toward the next resident’s enclosure and carrying on for a full three decades in photographs and recordings and journal entries, eventually culminating in a growing archive of artwork featuring the entities housed within the facility illustrated from Elsie’s own point of view. There was something about the consistency, the certainty of its place in the world, that blessed the Reserve with an aura of quiet contentment she never found on the outside. Though entirely removed from the bustle that was modern society, the Reserve inspired none of the loneliness she found in solo visits to common parks or weekends out in the woods; even structured to the needs of creatures so different from humanity that some weren’t even perceptible without specialized equipment, she’d never gotten lost or felt out of place even in childhood.
Elsie didn’t know who built the Reserve, but she knew the facility itself with all the intimacy of an old friend.
Even so, it was a massive facility, and Elsie knew there were plenty of places she hadn’t seen, places she didn’t even know about. Some residents were only active one or two days out of the year, others lived deep beneath the ground, still others resided underwater, so many simply too difficult for common visitors to reach. There also had to be a myriad of hidden alcoves and enclosures of which only staff members were aware, housing residents whose quality of life was at its best when they remained cloistered away from people.
The only way to see everything would be to sign on, to have the freedom of movement enjoyed by facility staffers. She did periodically consider applying for a job or a volunteer position, assuming she would be quite easy to train. Elsie knew the placement of almost every public exhibit and specimen, which residents were allowed to wander the grounds and which had to be kept in safe enclosures, and even how the changing seasons impacted the behavior and placement of various supernatural species housed within its metaphysically-warded walls.
Still, thus far, she’d decided against it, leaving every opening that reached her notice unpursued. The last thing she wanted was for her safe haven to start feeling like work.
Elsie remained a guest. Today, she didn’t have a specific itinerary, no urge to visit any particular habitat or resident, but with a week off between contracts and no other activities on which to spend it, the Reserve was her go-to use of free time. She couldn’t very well pass up the chance to squeeze in a visit during a seasonal adults-only weekend, an event originally intended for scientific research trips and now utilized most often as a safe first date. Saturdays were usually too busy for her favorite pastime on the property, but this time she had no trouble finding a nice bench along the field path on which to sit, where she settled in and pulled out her sketchbook.
Looking up, Elsie took in the iridescence of the dome high above, intent upon the visual distortion in the sky, that gleaming metaphysical installation the only thing standing between some residents and escape into the desert. Despite the power woven into that transparent barrier, a facere that must have taken years of training to implement so flawlessly, it looked so fragile from down here, light glinting on the surface in blooms so faint she doubted any artistic medium could truly capture their delicacy.
Sketching the strange shapes of the clouds as seen through the dome, Elsie contemplated how odd the Reserve must appear to people who hadn’t grown up nearby. Miles across and entirely self-sustaining, it was a testament both to mankind’s determination to stand at the top of the food chain and to the ingenuity required to achieve that goal, standing for hundreds of years without a single visible sign of decay. The general assumption, at least recently, was that credit for the structural stability of the Reserve belonged to its residents, fantastical and incomprehensible as they were, their presence imbuing the facility with some sort of supernatural protection. Elsie, however, had met and even spoken at length with enough of those residents to keep her from feeling particularly confident in that explanation—not that she could say why. Just a feeling. Not important, but persistent.
“Guten tag,” came a voice just behind and to her left, rich and deep with an almost musical rumble beneath the vowels. Turning, Elsie looked up at a monstrous beast covered in dark feathers. It could have been a rook, a raven, any number of common birds, if not for the fact that it stood at least seven feet tall, plumage blacker than black and eyes gleaming scarlet.
The sudden quickening of her heartbeat was automatic, if not outright instinctive. No matter how many times she came here, some residents by their very nature never failed to instill a sudden, indescribable apprehension. It was a power, she knew, an aura that followed the great shadowed creature like a smoke followed a torch, and reminding herself of that fact made it easy enough to shake off.
“Guten tag, Nachtkrapp,” she responded after half a second’s pause to get her wits about herself and shove down the invasive terror threatening to solidify in her chest.
Before the avian itinerant could reply, the sound of hurried footsteps drew his attention along with her own, and they both turned to see a young woman racing up the path in their direction. Blonde hair pulled into a ponytail that swung back and forth in time with the rhythm of her sprint, she wore the familiar orange polo and khaki shorts of all Reserve staff, the word HANDLER embroidered on both short sleeves in bold white letters.
Upon reaching the pair, she turned to the Nachtkrapp to speak in distressed Deutsch, to which the bird responded with a laugh before ducking his head and rumbling out something that made the young woman stiffen visibly. Her hand ghosted toward the radio clipped to her belt, but she stopped, clenching her jaw, and instead hissed out a sharp rejoinder. The Nachtkrapp just huffed and angled his head back, slightly askance, distinctly pantomiming an exaggerated roll of the eyes. He settled down lower to the earth, the sleek contours of his feathers raising across his body just the same as one of his much smaller cousins trying to keep warm.
The young woman, whose name tag read Cora in the center and Resident Liaison just below, turned to Elsie with an apologetic look. “I’m so sorry, Miss Reyes. I hope he didn’t startle you.”
“It’s fine,” she reassured. “And, again, it’s just Elsie.” She glanced between Cora and the Nachtkrapp with an inquisitive smile. “What’s got you two wandering around out in the open?”
Cora gave a vague shrug, one hand straying out to touch the giant blackbird gently, fingers stroking through massive too-black feathers. “No minors allowed on the premises this weekend, so he’s allowed out of his enclosure for a while. It gives him a chance to stretch his…legs.”
“Meine Flügel,” he corrected with a huff that sounded more like a warble, his voice turning sharper, more emphatic. “Nicht meine Beine.”
“Freilich, Herr Nachtkrapp,” Cora replied hurriedly, her own tone softening in response to the overt expression of displeasure from the supernatural being in her care. “Es tut mir so leid.”
Elsie didn’t know enough Deutsch to completely understand the exchange, but recognized an explicit show of subservience—a so-called microsupport—when she saw one. While the myths and stories attributed to the plethora of residents on the Reserve were hardly accurate, the vast majority of them had been treated with reverence by their human neighbors before taking up residence here, and continued shows of deference remained integral to the emotional and social stability of their corralled supernatural society. Still, understanding aside, even Elsie rarely saw one carried out so openly.
Cora once again reached down to her radio, this time flipping a switch on the side and looking down to watch the result: the little light at the top of the device came to life, blinked green once, twice, and then turned a bright, angry red.
She frowned. That didn’t look good at all. “Is something wrong?”
“The radio has been down all day,” Cora explained, flipping the switch back and forth twice more before giving up and taking a seat on the bench with a sigh, positioning herself between Elsie and her oversized avian ward. She leaned back, draping one arm over the backrest and turning to Elsie with a tight, tired expression. “This morning, when Mel was feeding Furtur—you know Furtur.”
It wasn’t a question, but Elsie nodded anyway. She knew all the public-facing residents on the Reserve, although she was fairly certain that Furtur was too antisocial for anyone to know him particularly well. Though as capable of speech as any of the residents in his class—artistically referred to as ‘Illuminated Spirits At Call’ but more commonly categorized modern parlance as Goetic demons—he tended to prefer communicating in a more naturalistic and far less comprehensible way, making noises befitting of the deer’s head he bore. When he spoke in words people could understand, Furtur was clear and concise, if somewhat impatient, and absolutely, undeniably brilliant. As with most of his class, Furtur had an implicit understanding of specific subjects that transcended human comprehension. His almost feral pride made him difficult to deal with at the best of times, but it was well-earned despite his appearance.
Cora continued, making a vague gesture with one hand as she spoke. “We usually try to feed him before the gates open, since he can be a bit violent about it and some people are squeamish.”
That made sense. Most of the time, Furtur was more bizarre than intimidating: discounting the antlers, he stood slightly shorter than Elsie, with the head, hind legs and tail of a whitetail deer, his forelimbs and chest like those of a wiry human man with rough skin the color of rhassoul clay, and a pair of delicate mammalian wings at his back with a span shorter than that of his arms even when fully extended. Feeding time was an entirely different situation, considering his wide, milky white eyes lit up like the moon when he grew too eager, his otherwise deerlike mouth housed a set of razor sharp teeth, and his carnivorous diet included energetic limitations necessitating his prey be consumed alive.
“Mel was trying to feed him, but he decided Mel was taking too long and took a snap at him,” Cora pantomimed the biting motion with her hand, curling her fingers like Furtur’s curved fangs. “Unfortunately for everyone, Mel had already roped the first feeder by then. He dropped the stick when he jerked away, and the rat slipped the noose.”
Elsie quirked an eyebrow, unsure how a feeder animal delaying the inevitable could impact radio communications. “Who got stuck chasing it down through the enclosure?”
Cora shook her head. “Nobody. Furtur’s fed from a platform to keep him from biting anyone when he gets rude. It slipped the noose on the way down and caught itself on one of his antlers.” Her tone took on a sharp edge of exasperation. “You’d think Furtur, as one of our residents with hands, would be able to take care of this himself, right?”
Elsie winced. “But his antlers are so big…” They were also more similar to those of an Emmericine elk than the deer he otherwise resembled, spikes sticking up from a single long branch of bone that reached backward rather than splitting into forks upon forks that haloed out to the sides.
“They’re huge,” Cora confirmed, reaching up past her own head in illustration. “This thing was up at the top, too high and too far back for him to reach without dislocating something. He flailed around, but our feeder animals aren’t some chubby pets with no concept of self-preservation. It held on tight and didn’t let go.”
What a mess. Elsie could imagine the scene clearly, Furtur’s batlike wings flapping furiously, ungulate head swinging dramatically back and forth, cloven hooves tearing up the ground as he spun in place, reaching and clawing the air in a futile attempt to reach the desperate little animal intended as his morning meal. The piercing, ragged shriek of an elk’s bugle would be terrifying enough from a normal animal in the enclosed space of a standard feeding station, but Furtur wasn’t an animal. He could do a great deal more than struggle and make noise.
“…And when nothing else worked,” Elsie said, finally able to see exactly how a misplaced rodent could lead to a radio outage, knowing the very particular energetic facere at Furtur’s disposal, “he tried to zap it.”
“He didn’t try anything,” Cora proclaimed. “He flooded the whole place with lightning. The wave spread clear out to the unicorn plot. We’ve got protection glyphs to neutralize the effect on living things, so nobody was hurt, and a senior staffer was eventually able to get him under control, but the radio will be down until the energy finally dissipates enough for the perimeter wards stop reflecting it back.”
Elsie groaned. “All that over a rat.”
“Over a rat!” Cora echoed with much more intensity, gesticulating helplessly with both hands. “And with how the protection glyphs work, he didn’t even get the rat!”
The ragged warble of the Nachtkrapp’s laughter rang out as if to spite his handler’s audible frustration, but she just clenched her jaw and took a deep breath, not engaging with his provocation.
Elsie gave the giant bird a glance, but he didn’t join the conversation beyond that little outburst. It was a little funny, she had to admit, but wouldn’t say so when Cora was so obviously aggravated. Maybe they could joke about it the next time they ran into each other in town.
“What happened to it?” She asked. “The rat.”
“Lucky—that senior staffer—peeled it off and took it with him,” Cora grumbled with a roll of her eyes. “He said anything that ‘willfully defied destiny and won’ deserved to survive, so I guess it’s a pet now.”
She didn’t seem impressed, and wasn’t alone in the sentiment. The Nachtkrapp let out a sharp cough, his earlier amusement giving way to annoyance. “Verschwendung,” he spat with a chatter of his beak. “Lebensmittelverschwendung.”
The first word was waste, Elsie knew that much, and she assumed the second probably clarified his issue as a waste of food.
“I think it’s kinda sweet,” she murmured.
He gave another cough, deeper and more guttural. Disgusted. “Verschwendung.”
Although Elsie’s expression flattened at the argument, she knew better than to take it any further. That particular brand of sentimentality wasn’t likely to be found in a resident whose mythology centered almost entirely around infanticide.
Further, Cora’s behavior proved this definitely wasn’t the right time to attempt any debate. The lack of radio explained her trepidation toward the resident under her oversight, removing the ability to subtly hail another staffer to switch out if the Nachtkrapp grew too obstinate to manage. Wandering the field was a good safeguard, since she could literally flag a coworker down with a yell and a wave, but other visitors would notice that. Until communications were fully restored, it would no doubt be better to be a little more sycophantic, even if that meant showing subservience to a resident in front of a guest.
Not that Elsie was just any guest. She knew the purpose of a microsupport, after all. She might even be able to help.
“Maybe you’re right,” she admitted, trying to sound appreciative, conceding to the giant bird’s point of view. “It was supposed to be food, so keeping it isn’t really fair.”
The Nachtkrapp’s response was every bit as positive as she’d hoped, as if Elsie’s opinions somehow meant more than those of his handler. He perked up slightly where he sat, closing his eyes and reciting what could only be some kind of smug affirmation, his tone dripping with self-satisfaction even if his words were beyond Elsie’s very limited vocabulary.
She gave a sideways glance to Cora, who looked on with a grateful smile tugging at the corner of her mouth, broadening the heart shape of her face. Elsie couldn’t help but respond in kind. As fond as she was of the giant blackbird seated on Cora’s other side, it was the other woman’s approval that mattered.
“Since we’re alone,” she continued, looking back to the bird as she changed the subject, “I’ve always wondered—why you only speak Deutsch when you know English?” It felt similar to the issue of Furtur preferring to scream and huff like an angry animal rather than speak like the hyperintelligent entity he absolutely was, a self-imposed limitation that served no obvious purpose beyond making their care and protection more difficult for the humans who dedicated themselves to the effort.
The Nachtkrapp laughed again, throwing back his head to let the sound more freely escape his forearm-length beak, but offered no proper reply. Instead, he straightened up enough to look pointedly at Cora, eyeing her for a second before rattling out some incomprehensible aside in a conspiratorial chitter. She frowned, brow creasing in what looked to be confusion, but he simply settled comfortably back into a giant ball of black feathers on the ground.
Cora squinted at him for a moment more, but didn’t ask for elaboration any more than he offered it, and eventually the uncertainty eased from her features. She returned her attention to Elsie. “I’ve been told he speaks other languages sometimes,” she revealed. “When he thinks it’s ‘worthwhile,’ whatever that means. I haven’t heard it yet, but I’ve only been one of his seasonal leads for a few years, and that sort of thing always takes a long time with persistent residents.”
“Of course.”
It was years ago, but Elsie remembered the first time she saw Cora at the facility, an easily startled wisp of a woman only a couple years younger than herself, with wild flaxen hair just long enough to be pulled back into a bun, but too short to stay there with any sort of reliability. She was the first member of staff to suggest Elsie apply for employment on the grounds, albeit not until she was a half-dozen seasonal position changes finally led her to her current ward. They had both changed a lot since then, Cora growing much more physically sturdy than she’d appeared and Elsie growing much less socially awkward than she’d felt, but a few years was a drop in the ocean for something as long-lived as the Nachtkrapp.
“Maybe he’ll talk to you someday,” Cora continued. “He sure likes you enough, racing over here as soon as he saw you. If you were younger, I’d be worried.”
Elsie had to agree. Attention from the Nachtkrapp wasn’t exactly in high demand. He might be one of the more docile residents on the Reserve, but even Cora was only his handler from the summer solstice to autumn’s equinox, unwilling or unable to put up with him for any longer at a stretch.
It probably had to do with the fact that, until coming to the Reserve at some point in the past, his primary source of food had allegedly been human children. These days it was mostly piglets and fetal livestock, and at Elsie’s age she had nothing to worry about—not to mention that she had been far from his usual fare back in her days as part of his dietary demographic. Too sickly to be anything but small as a child, in contrast to her height today, she had been quiet, timid, and almost self-destructively agreeable. Nothing at all like the squalling brats on which stories warned the Nachtkrapp preferred to prey.
Cora’s expression brightened. “You definitely know how to talk to him, though. You really should put in for a job. He’d probably love you as his handler, and my term this year is ending soon anyway. Right now he’ll have an interim handler through the winter, but he’s not fond of Emelex.”
“Ich bevorzuge echte Menschen,” the Nachtkrapp stated plainly, content to remain a massive unmoving ball of feathers alongside the bench.
Elsie looked at Cora. “What did he say?” Something about people, but that was the extent of her ability to translate the key terms in that sentence.
Cora just shook her head. “It’s not important, he was being rude.”
“Ich bin ehrlich.”
“Regardless,” Cora turned her attention back to Elsie, “you’d be a shoo-in. We can always use more staff.”
Looking around, Elsie doubted that. “This place is crawling with staff.” Mostly tall, dark-haired young men with broad shoulders, a fact that struck Elsie as odd on and off throughout her visits, and did so again as she looked out into the field and took in the sheer number of staffers with similar features—but the thought only lingered for a second. It made Cora stand out significantly among her coworkers, but otherwise it just didn’t seem relevant.
“Trust me, we can always use more.” Cora bent at the waist to rest an elbow on her knee and perch her chin in her hand. “Did I tell you I’m spending this winter handling Fenrir and his boys on my own again? One handler for a whole pack!”
Elsie chuckled. “That ‘pack’ is three members strong, all of whom are docile enough to walk around the facility on their own, off-leash.” Not that the harnesses and leads they occasionally wore were much more than formality or fashion, considering Fenrir was the size of a large shire horse and his cubs weren’t much smaller. Trying to pull one of them back with a leash would be like trying to stop a truck with a necktie.
“Your lack of sympathy is cutting, Miss Reyes,” Cora lamented with wry amusement.
“Just Elsie,” she corrected yet again.
Before Cora do more than smile in response, the Nachtkrapp hopped up, feathers smoothing back down in the motion to the more svelte shape of his body. Curling his toes to dig black talons into the soil, he loudly declared, “Hungrig!”
That word needed no translation, and Cora was on her feet immediately, putting a hand to his wing and urging him down the path with muttered promises of food. She slowed her pace to give Elsie a wave over her shoulder, but looked away before Elsie could do the same when the Nachtkrapp warbled out, “Hol mir ein Baby.” The admonishing tone in Cora’s reply remained distinct as she ushered her ward down the way, but the words were lost to the distance when they turned the corner around a walled enclosure.
Elsie looked after her for a long moment before heaving a sigh and leaning back on the bench again, raising her eyes toward the sky.
Maybe next time, she’d finally ask Cora if she’d like to pick up dinner after her shift.
“And maybe the Nachtkrapp will get approved as a foster parent,” she muttered to herself.
The problem wasn’t one of unfamiliarity; if anything, she and Cora were better acquainted with one another than any other repeat guest might be with another member of staff. They spoke regularly on Elsie’s visits, certainly, but also followed such similar routes in town that their paths crossed with striking frequency, leading them to spend enough time interacting in public spaces to be more than casual acquaintances. Cora kept details of her work close to her chest, which made sense considering the critically endangered status of literally every resident on the Reserve, but they knew each other well enough. Elsie knew most of Cora’s basic likes and dislikes—the color lavender and iced coffee versus spreadsheets and microwave dinners. She knew where she’d been born—Aotearoa, though she left young enough to lose all but the faintest hint of the accent. She even knew how she’d wound up working here—a relative on staff encouraged her to put in for the position after she finished her degree. Cora certainly knew just as much about Elsie, if not more given that her storyboarding job was far less clandestine than Cora’s position at the Reserve.
For goodness’ sake, Elsie helped Cora carry groceries to her car a little over a week ago so she didn’t have to walk through the rain to put her shopping cart away. Cora sneakily paid for Elsie’s coffee twicein the past month when they both happened to stop by the same café around the same time. They were undeniably comfortable with one other, and yet, for some incomprehensible reason, Cora absolutely refused to call Elsie by her first name.
How could she suggest a date if Cora was sure to call her Miss Reyes the entire time?
Elsie heaved another sigh and pushed herself up from the bench, closing her sketchbook and tucking it under her arm to head further afield. She still had the better part of the day to use as she saw fit, and this was no way to do it.
She wandered the field for a while, stopping to sketch a wren’s dogged pursuit of a particularly tenacious rosy cactus fae, the latter having strayed too close to the former’s nest in search of ripe fruit to bring home to the hive. Both sides of the dispute were too fast to take in with much clarity, much less portray in traditional media with the detail they deserved, but there was something to be said for the messy gestures that resulted from the attempt, and she moved on fairly satisfied with the image of smeared graphite silhouettes swirling around a towering saguaro in bloom.
The contrast between the bright orange shirt of a Reserve staffer and a handful of bobbing blue shapes milling around toward the nearest interior curve of the dome caught Elsie’s eye. It had been a while since she visited with this particular group of residents, and longer since she’d even attempted to draw one, so she might as well head their way.
‘Prince’ Stolas was large for an owl, but not as inordinately massive as the Nachtkrapp, and nowhere near as viscerally frightening. With long, stilt-like legs, deep blue feathers that sparkled in the sunlight, and massive eyes filled with stars, he was a common favorite for families with small children. His size and the crown-like crest on his head clearly set him apart from his kin, a flock of noticeably smaller birds that bore no crown, but looked every bit as much like the night sky pulled down and condensed into living form as their progenitor.
Roland, the flock’s lead handler, gave Elsie a wave as she approached. “Hey! Long time no see.” His left hand rested on the head of one of Stolas’ flockmates, who grew openly perturbed when he turned his attention elsewhere, giving a rattling squawk and pushing up into Roland’s hand, stomping one foot on the ground. He sighed and continued his careful stroking of the bird’s feathers, soothing the little beast instantly. The lack of radio seemed to have everyone a bit on-edge with handling their residents today.
Stolas himself perked up as Elsie approached, crossing the distance between them in three of his hugely long strides and giving a little chirp of delight at her presence.
“Hello, Your Highness,” she greeted with a nod so deep it was practically a bow, though she only held it for a moment. Polite enough for a resident with whom she had such a long acquaintance. “How have you been?”
He chirped again, this time with an echo, a layered distortion just barely discernible as words. “Well, thank you.” It wasn’t at all like the Nachtkrapp, who enunciated clearly and spoke like a person, instead more reminiscent of a voice picked up in the static of a radio on a barely-believable ghost hunting television program. “And you?”
“I’ve got a few days off, so I thought I’d come by and visit.” She held up her sketchbook. “Do you and the kids mind if I try again?”
Stolas turned and gave a low hoot, garnering the attention of the other dozen or so oversized, long-legged owls in the group, including the one still demanding Roland’s attention.
Like Cora, Roland was easily distinguishable from his coworkers, but in his case it had nothing to do with the color of his hair or slimness of stature. Roland was a veritable tank of a man, heavier than the majority of staffers, and where those rather utilitarian young men whose names Elsie always struggled to remember tended to be quite pale—despite spending all their time in the Zonari sun, she had no idea how they didn’t all burn alive every summer—Roland’s complexion was a much more appropriate shade for the climate, darker even than Elsie’s, a near-perfect match to the dreadlocks currently looped and tied into a knot at the top of his head. The hint of stubble below his cheekbones was visibly darker at a glance, though still slightly paler than Elsie’s own short-cropped mane.
The stolim, as the smaller members of the prince’s court were commonly called, all pulled away from Roland to turn little circles around Elsie, chirping and hooting, bobbing up and down as they looked her over curiously. There were more now than she recalled from last time, one of them barely tall enough to reach her hip.
“Well, hello,” she said with a smile, looking down at the smallest of the owls. “Where did you come from?”
Roland laughed. “Came in to work last week and she was just huddled up with the rest of ‘em in the main hall of the rookery. Y’know how stolim are, I’m sure they’ve got other nestlings cloistered in the enclosure somewhere we can’t find ‘em.”
At first the use of feminine pronouns came as a surprise, but further scrutiny revealed the longer flight feathers on the little owl’s wings, down clinging halfway down her legs, and the lack of spurs at her ankles. There were so few females among the stolim, it had to be exciting for the Reserve staff to have another.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She held out a hand out with her palm facing downward, as she usually did with Stolas himself, but the young female hesitated, looking to her prince for approval. Stolas’ call was a high, eager hoot that made the little female fluff with excitement, and she eagerly pushed her crestless head into Elsie’s hand, closing her huge eyes and rubbing like a pleased cat.
“There we go,” Roland said with a grin. “She’s really friendly so far. We’re hoping she’ll be good for species conservation.”
“Hopefully.” Elsie petted the young stolim once more before straightening up and looking back to Roland. “At least they’re better off than the Nachtkrapp, right?”
Roland nodded, grin fading. The Nachtkrapp had probably originally been brought here for the safety of the human population, of course, but he remained for his own protection—he was the only one of his kind in the entire world. Centuries old and all alone, all records indicated he’d been housed on the Reserve since its inception.
Of course, he wasn’t the only resident in such a situation. There was the manticore, with its human-like face and prehensile stingray tail; the mapinguary, a Bolivian giant with one eye and thick russet fur; the Qiqiao were a distressingly humanoid mated pair incapable of even sensing one another without specific environmental factors in place, both despairingly lonely. A large swath of the Reserve’s residents were so-called sole survivors, apparently the final specimens of great, fantastic species wiped out somewhere along the line.
Everyone said the solo residents were the last of their respective species, at least. Science dictated that they all must have been part of greater populations at one point or another in the annals of history, but there were few if any records of others having ever existed. The more that Elsie came here and the more she got to know the entities living within the bounds of the facility, the more she wondered if they were just all that had ever been.
Was it possible they somehow came into being all on their own? If that were the case, how did it occur, and what were the deciding factors? The one thing they all seemed to have in common were their interactions with humans being horribly dangerous for the latter participants, even violent in many cases. Maybe they were some kind of population control? That still didn’t sound right, but it rang with more probability, somehow, than the concept that the Nachtkrapp was the last of a seemingly immortal species of giant sapient corvid.
Stolas sidled up to her and leaned in close. “It will be unfortunate to see you go,” he said in that strange whisper-through-noise.
She smiled slightly. “Oh, you know I’m never gone for long, and I have all day.”
“No,” he stated plainly, huge starry eyes unblinking. “Soon there will be no choice. Soon you will be gone, but here, until you are gone from everywhere. You are beginning to see, and that is always how it ends.”
Elsie looked down at the large creature with confusion, a sense of dread coiling in her chest. “What are you talking about?” Her voice was more hesitant than she intended. She’d never gotten a sense of unease from the stolim before, much less Prince Stolas himself.
“As you are, you are not the first,” Stolas continued. “As things stand, you may not be the last. You come, you look and fear not. And now you are beginning to see.” His voice, such as it was, dropped even lower. “The question in your heart rings clear, but as you see, you may know before you go: we are as we always were. Your kind harmed us not at all.”
Roland came forward, breaking up the group and all but pulling Stolas away from Elsie. “That’s enough of that, no whispering on my watch.” His tone was light, but the undercurrent of tension was palpable. “C’mon, Highness, we should get going.”
“But he—”
“Talk to you later.” He herded the stolim and their prince away without meeting Elsie’s eyes.
“The stars and starlings long for company,” Stolas continued as he trotted off. “This time, neither you nor I can change it.”
Elsie watched them go, that cold dread leaching out through her like ink dripping into water. Prince Stolas was always talkative, but usually spoke about weather, star patterns, even the symbolism of geometric shapes he found in the fields or in his enclosure. It was never anything ominous, nothing the least bit disturbing.
A snippet from another absolutely unshareable short piece that takes place during the course of The Lucifers' Wall, but won't be included. I gotta find some way to fit more details about simulacrum biology into the book itself…
I have written 1700 words that will never ever make it into the book, from 1017's POV, during his last major confrontation. I can share this with two people in the entire world, because it has a spoiler density rivaling an unmoderated video game subreddit, and both of those people are busy at work. Woe.
I have written 1700 words that will never ever make it into the book, from 1017's POV, during his last major confrontation. I can share this with two people in the entire world, because it has a spoiler density rivaling an unmoderated video game subreddit, and both of those people are busy at work. Woe.
Doing that thing again where I pretend I'm formatting my book for print in order to hype myself up to work on the draft some more. I go through a lot of different visual styles when I do this, since the appropriate style can't really be finalized until the book itself is done, but this one is kinda neat.
Doodling simulacra, presented in sequential order; these three appear directly in the first few chapters—Exelli is technically the first one who appears in the story but I've never drawn him before because he's not part of the repair crew—so it seemed like a good selection. They're all basically the same while also being very visibly different!
Doodling simulacra, presented in sequential order; these three appear directly in the first few chapters—Exelli is technically the first one who appears in the story but I've never drawn him before because he's not part of the repair crew—so it seemed like a good selection. They're all basically the same while also being very visibly different!
I knew 1017 had a major case of babyface compared to the first-waves, but I didn't expect it to be so obvious when you put him alongside more than one of them. That man is pristine. Unmarred. He has never had a broken bone in his life.
By contrast, Exelli took a literal brick to the face within a year of his creation, and 23 throws himself into so much danger to this day that he's very lucky to still be so symmetrical. Officiants aren't exactly built different, but they definitely have more obvious signs of wear.
