#cue A Perfect Circle's “The Noose”

[sheikfangirl]

He knows she is there before he turns around. He can feel her in the heat of the red and black whisps that always follow the blood moons. Sometimes she takes her time. Sometimes she stalks him, trying to catch him off guard. He has wondered when she would come back while the moon was still tinged red. Because she always comes back. He hears her draw in a breath, but spins and slams her to the ground before she has a chance to speak. He has his blade drawn and against her throat, and she looks at him and laughs. ”Do it,” she says. “You know I want this.” He does. Instead of blood, it is gloom that spills from her throat. He shudders. He is cold where her body was pressed against his—where her naked body was pressed against his, and he chokes back a wave of nausea. When he stands, she is gone. He looks up and watches the last of the color fade from the moon

Thank you @summonerluna for writing today's caption ❤️ ...she always comes back. Glory to Puppet Zelda!

[zombocomme]

Please, interact with us, our music cues will be highlighted for your convenience

[Midnight Special Theme plays:]

Zombocomme: Well, well, well, we are back on the air and we thank our audience for their patience. Mental health vacations should be taken by everyone, and loving yourself is so important, no? As this episode airs we have a little bet going on behind the scenes. You see, this story was originally selected from the BTL Lore vault and it's central characters and true ending have since been left on the cutting room floor, in favor of lending it's spirit to this collaboration project. Half our crew believes the original ending for the AU should make a debut, (ending A.), whereas the other half believe that leaving the episode resolution a mystery is perfect as is (ending B.) I've seen both of course, but I find that every rendition of the story means something new. I could go on forever re writing it, but the spirit of the tale is the same. And yes. It is time to move on from this Collab project to our next exciting slot, even if we do wish we saw a different end. I'll hope our audience enjoys this theatrical cut... And once again, this program is brought to you by contributions and collaborations from audience members like you, thank you.

And Now, Ministry 📺TV presents.

Featuring @frjimdefroque and @ask-miasma-ghoul in

RBRG/ FRJD and AMG:

✨️🐦‍🔥Combiverse🦋✨️

Spin off Episode: part 4 (ending B.)

Between The Lines, Episode 7 PART 4 of 4: “So help you god…you're set free”

Enjoy

NFW: MDNI : Rated-R: (Mature themes) *mentions death and dead bodies, bugs, gore and frontier diseases and violence, guns, religious interpretation of trauma, consumption of body and blood, allusions to murder/self and description macabre, and ghosts of the espooky kind.

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me” KJV- Mathew 25:37-40

🌌🗻🍂🐑🐾💀❄️🫲🙂‍↕️🫱❄️💀🐾🕊🍃🗻🌄

[Midnight Special Theme continues to play:]

God… The temptation made Miasma shiver  and his stomach pool a hot coil tightening from within…Jim shivered, but for a completely different reason…

Jim’s eyes clouded milky white. As he stood at the edge of the sunken sacred earth, it became more and more like a pit at the bottom of a gentle slope. They had dug into  the brick and when they had looked  up, the world around them seemed like a whiteout. Nothing. Only the distant row of the trees, the line circling them like a black fingered noose, that while it lay in wait, seemed somehow to tighten all around them all at once.

Jim stood up and threw the shovel, “The Captain wrote it, all but confessed it, ‘The Game had moved on’, he said! There were no ‘bucks’,” Jim seethed, desperately aching,  “Only desperate people.”

Miasma tilted his head away as if in mild disgust beholding the long since charred remains. Remnants of their time, discovered in the horrifying aftermath of ‘The end’, preserved like a stony fossil, cold and forever dead, until it hardened and became known… became the truth…concrete, and indifferent.

“They must have been starving” Miasma said, his tongue flicking out to wet his lips, voice barely above a whisper.

“Like the Donner Party. They burned everything they could.  But left the main place standing, the places most damnable. All this evidence left behind… like someone wanted this to be found” Jim said through his trance like state, rocking on his heels, vulnerable and icy. “Whoever wrote that Diary probably.” Jim swallowed, feeling like a blue ice cube had been swallowed, frosting through  a hole in his stomach. He felt sick. Brittle old bones and a few scraps of rotted cloth, trinkets and tokens that had somehow in the heat, collapsed the kilns, trapping the mass grave of bones with saw marks and serrations.

Miasma’s face hardened, his nose catching whiffs of torn tender flesh, festered like that of a blackening fruit, zinging in the putrid of the juice, flies buzzing daintily, “My god… They really dead eat each other, didn't they. and that line, 'to the brick with their kin', hell it condemns the captain as well. Seems it is true...Mankind cannot help themselves can they, when it comes to their baser desires," he swallowed, "I suppose all mortals face this in the end… the judgement day of their wretchedness.

It’s, almost as if no matter what, under the eyes of god, it is true, all mankind is created equal.. That is…” Miasma paused, “...that is because, all men must die… funny… that a God who demands everlasting faith, is also a God that creates its faithful out of such perishable vessels... It’s a shame really” Miasma said, feeling his stomach clamp shut, trapping his insides. Jim eyes were white, his voice echoing almost as if he was speaking aloud where he stood loudly, but softly in a more intimate voice, as if moist in his ears, Miasma heard Jim speak to him.

“And if people are in a kiln, it is because they are dead, or fated to die. Grace means nothing, when the moment comes when the living envy the dead. The true crash of the human psyche, the end of humanity, the end of one’s self, “If the living envy the dead, it’s because the living have something they wish they were dead over, but didn’t die for. If such people willingly went to the fire.”

Was it what they deserved?

Was such a hellish scene of people walking into the fire meant to be the door to their hell, or their purifying baptism in that lake of fire, to get their ticket punched for heaven? 

[Don Abandons Alice plays:]

Miasma dropped his shovel letting it clatter on the icy ground. “A willing Lamb for slaughter.” he whispered. He watched as despair for the wretchedness of the world sank Jim to his knees crying milky white tears, that glowed white like the snow around them, “If only they could have saved them from themselves.” Jim wept. 

Miasma watched as his vision swayed and all sound hollowed to a numbness like he felt on his body from the unusual coldness of the world. “I am nothing special to god, am I...” Miasma said softly.

Jim shook his head, rubbing at his stinging tears, “Intercessor, hear our prayer”. Jim Wept. 

And as Miasma watched on, Jim began to sob, saying the prayers of Last Rites, and the Apostles creed.

…As the dead around them at last began to rise…

“O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee,

Dust curled around them “ashes, ashes, we all fall, up?” Miasma sang softly to himself, a lilt, as the rising debris began to slope up, taking shape, bone and soot, ice and charred things that began to warm and fowl under the sudden humidity and heat that melted away the snow. the immediate Area encircled with Fire.

and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments,

Miasma’s breath sucked into his chest, it was like being in the pits, all over again!

"No, no, no, no!" Miasma panicked, pacing like a wild thing, looking for escape.

but most of all because they offend Thee, my God,

who art all good and deserving of all my love.

“Father! Father Jim!” Miasma began shouting, his voice raggedly higher in his panicking call, trying to climb over the brick as a corpse groped for his blackened boots, the others approaching, rising, clawing, teeth gnashing. One even tore his crucifix off. 

Jim whirled and saw the hellish scene, his eyes watering, in a voice not his own, but that of the captain of that camp mourned, “Oh what have we done, what has the world done to us!”, lamenting and wailing.

Jim could feel it, like empathic fire searing his veins as he felt the dead in their personal hell that was this goddamned oven, boiling over with a cacophony of cries for absolution. Seeing Miasma on the ground as he tried to scurry away from the dead thing lurching forward, chasing after him, Jim grit his teeth.

He grabbed a shovel and swung, a nauseating squelching noise as the blade of the shovel bisected a purple and grey corpse… “Miasma, Miasma I’m coming!” Ice chipped, bones snapped and shattered, ashes swiftly swept away, charred remains crumbling, there were too many closing in, every single one of them blocking all hope of leaving this circle of hell alive.

As Jim swung the blade, he could see the exact moment each person had died, like a snap of an old timey photograph flashing in his mind, how they had died, the white smoke around him distorting his vision, seeing human faces in place of the skeletal, every stage of decay and remains, portraying the humanity of their souls; The human experience all share at that moment where life ends and death begins, the fading light, and not every time had the eyes gone dark. before their breaths drew their last .

Miasma saw it too, and said what Jim couldn’t say, or else it would mess up the narrative, Oh yes. not only cannibals... but *MURDERERS*

I firmly resolve with the help of Thy grace

to sin no more

and to avoid the near occasion of sin. 

Amen.”

[The Walking Dead Theme plays:]

Jim grunted, kicking back another clawing corpse that kept re-rising, like everything else. The suffering just would not die. And the living wished it was over, but their night had only just barely just begun…

Miasma felt like he was unable, incapable, inconceivably broken, that Jim had to come to his rescue, him? A Ghoul born from the fiery scapes of hell, why was it so hard to move, to run, or rush to defend. He felt like he was a helpless thing, marooned on an island surrounded by the sulfuric seas, boiling and acidic, toxic air stinging his every pore, bleeding from every hair”

“Jim help me, please!" He cried, seeing these beings the way humanity surely saw him, a murderer, a consumer, a black wolf preying on the living. "I can’t I can't go back! Please Jimmy! Help- I” Miasma began to cry. He knew, if they were dragged under by the suffering souls fondling the earth to rear up and claw their way back down with the living, sinking more and more souls with them, they would surely be lost.

Jim gripped Miasma by the shoulders, “Shut the fuck up! I’m getting us out of here!”

“Jim if we get caught and we die-”, “Then suddenly this is not our problem anymore” Jim said, brows knitted in pain from the feeling he had, the empathy of feeling the suffering and fear of his friend. 

[The Last of Us plays:]

“Miasma, We came to fight, even though we didn’t ask to. We came to find a way to set things right, and we came to find that peace. Please,” He said standing, panting. The dead were closing in as well as the greenish hellfire that was now all around them, as if they were trapped in a circle at the heart of the darkness where the deepest pain and regret could go. “Take my hand Miasma” Jim said softly, as if the dance macabre all around them were but nothing.

Green flames looked like blades of green grass soft in the sun like silk through the fingers.

“Though I walk through the valley….” Miasma thought as he looked up.

“Miasma, please. What is higher power than what we are inspired to follow as a light in times of darkness.” Jim said, his tone soft and yet gracious, begging his friend to heed his words.

“Pray with me Miasma” Jim said, lifting Miasma up. “This is  the lord’s fight…and we are on a mission from God” he said, a defiant tone as he faced the crowding undead. He held Miasmas hand in his, turning to dig his heels, a shovel in hand, ready to cut down whatever stood in their path.

“I never thought I'd fight beside a hell-spawn against hell.” Jim chuckled as they circled back to back, eying the massing wall of bodies, the weight of their work, heavy. Miasma looked down and saw his shovel, ready, calling out to him like one crying from the dust, ‘get to work’.

“What about dying beside a friend?” Miasma said, feeling a renewed strength in him as he brandished the broken shovel where blood was already painting it like a splattered crown.

Jim chuckled, “Well hell, guess I'd call a man pretty lucky if’n you can count him amongst your friends."

As shovel blades thwacked and spun, slicing as they ducked to move away from the grapples of the corpses haunting their every footstep, as they danced around, trying to clear a path with the force of their wills, but finding the action wasted, the dead were rising as soon as they were brought down, unending. Unyielding. and all around them...

"You'd call me your friend?" Miasma huffed, dodging around a small group.

"Friend, follower, whatever the fuck you call someone like you!" Jim shouted with a crooked grin, taking a large bloated corps down at the knees, trying to avoid its grasp as it crawled towards him.

"SINNER! how 'bout that!" Miasma said angrily, roaring as he cut a corpse down, black blood spewing from it's gut and flying to fleck his face. He bared his fangs as he faced off another skeleton, this one more agile than the last.

Jim frowned, "You act like ain't no sinner has a chance at seeing heaven's light! Don't be a doubting Thomas when you are so close!"

"Close?! Hah!" Miasma swung, bashing the skull into pieces and watching it mend over, but for being momentarily disabled, he moved to his next target, trying to force his way out of their circle of suffering.

"You know what I mean, I'll tell you every story under the sun if it will help you see the light! Even if I have to drag you over them pearly gates myself!" Jim winced, a shattered rotten ulna cutting him deep as he pivoted to break free of another hands grasp. "If'n we make it out alive! But I'll keep fighting till I'm dead!" He almost laughed.

“Yeah well, what the fuck about Judas then! If I’m gonna fucking die, I want to hear you preach to me about that story!” Miasma shouted as he was hauled backwards towards the ground. Jim bounded over to the offending body, bringing the blade to sever the head from the neck, the corpse clattering to the ground, the icicles of it’s skin shattering, peppering the white and black snow with meaty shards of putrid chunks.

“Ya know, if that ain't THE most perfect story for this” Jim said, an idea touching his brain like the light of god, burning in a bushel behind his eyes. “Miasma, corale them!” “The fuck you mean coral them” 

“Just shut up and gather your flock, look at them, going after you like you’re going to give them what they want, round them up!” “Like a fucking sheep dog?!” “Exactly!” Jim said, a gleam in his eye, as he made his way towards the dilapidated chimney, the flames closing in. “Use the time you have, and it ain't much, look!” Jim pointed as he scrambled on the dirt, ripping up icy clods that stung his fingers with the freezing cold bricks.

[Earth plays:]

Miasma managed to peek behind his shoulder, shovel up in two hands as he used it to try and push the herd of corpses back, his tail flicking back and forth to avoid being singed by the hellfire.

No. he didn’t envy the dead. That wasn’t his purpose. It wasn't what his dreams and yearnings meant. It was a hunger for something more, something beyond the toxic sludge of desecrated flesh. His consumption wasn't of bodies, or people, he wasn't trying to quench something in him over humanity and its hopes and dreams. No…. He craved what came of something higher, that which is granted from above...

*purpose*.

And now, now he had it. It didn’t matter how. What mattered was that it was. And with a great heavy groan, he pushed the group back, inch by inch as the fire closed in, circling them, getting them to move in hopeless circles, for their own good, he knew. You can only break curses when you set the offending souls to rest. They rest only when they can be reached. be understood. finding peace in compassion.

Jim climbed the highest mound he could, he could feel the green flames surrounding them like a sphere closing in. and it was his purpose to fight, by pushing back.

Holding out his arms to the green light at the end of what would be his mortal life, his voice rang out, catching the ears of all who could hear, and the eyes of those who got turned around by the likes of Miasma to see. Beginning his sermon on the mound of detritus and dust of self destruction. Feet wedged in the brick, rooted unmoving, and yet bowing in and around as the dead tried to drag him down but failed in their graspings, he began to preach...

“SINNERS!” Jim shouted above the chaos, “Even Ye are worthy of redemption, an absolution…an end to SUFFERING! I call on you to listen! Suffering is but a means to a grateful end. And for what considerations do ye call yourselves devils!” he said, the wretched word pulled like toxic ooze from his mouth, tongue lolling out as the black bile in his stomach rose, and vomited out of his stomach. It felt like it was tearing at everything on its way up, but there was a relief in the regurgitation, of finally letting the words he should have said before, at last coming out to reach the sinners in his current care. Truly, Jim really was speaking to those that called themselves damned for their actions. 

“If ye believe in God, as whatever you call divine, that grants swift justice that now gnashes your teeth, then you must also believe that as exists justice, so too does there exist MERCY beyond!"

Miasma shouldered several corpses causing them to crumble and hiss, but as Jim’s voice rang out clear and true, his conviction became theirs, and spellbound like rats to the piper, they slowly turned, and gathered around him. Heeding his words.

One by one, brainless, heartless, things turned toward the voice that was preaching about the possibility of redemption. And Even Miasma was listening...

As the ghoul swiped and prodded the masses of corpses stumbling to face Jim , they swayed and stuttered in their cries, as if halted in their footsteps… looking almost human, in the clarity behind their once cloudy eyes. Blinking even. The dead and things forming from the earth, wove in and around the ones who listened, and their features began to change. Taut leathery skin slacked and sagged but lay more supple upon their gaunt features.

Shattered bones and cracked fissures separating one bone from another healed and came together, bones and flesh began to mend, and even as Miasma still had to fight hard, ever on his toes, there was a rhythm to the movements he made. He found a sure footedness he could confidently maintain. And the unexpected shove and grappling attempts made, he would handle one foe at a time.

Funny how in the moment he realized the noble way of fighting for himself, was what nobly fought for the people stumbling around, lashing out and being turned to words of comfort, and repentance.

*you can't pour from an empty cup*

Miasma thought.

Jim continued, “If you believe in miracles, in the divine, then believe in me when I say, if god so rests on the seventh day, then surely, in god’s image, you must also have your end, and at an end is there not rest?!”

Miasma could feel the shifting crowd as he continued his circling, trying to keep the group's edges from fraying. The hell fire was still closing around them but it was slowing, as if it too, was listening.

“I beseech you, right here, right now, look beyond the guilt, the blame, Your God knows of them and has clearly made you suffer for it. But there is more to God than just, justice. There is also MERCY. Deliverance, Salvation. Forgiveness. Absolution. 

[Bonnie Choses to Stay plays:]

Jim felt the white smoke and mist around him settle, as one by one the faces as he saw them at the time of their deaths began to appear. And he recognized each one, and because someone had the talent to preserve it, knew them by name. 

And as Jim recited the words of psalms from memory, every syllable uttered gained in power and conviction. As he spoke, a great tree sprung from the earth behind the congregation, and Miasma jumped, the hellfire that had been around them shoot past and into the tree, whirling and and brimming with the green light that no longer burned around them with heat infernal, but rather swayed and danced like the leaves of summer tresses, a weeping willow sighing in the breeze...

“If you would find your God now, would his cleansing fire scorch you, or warm you of the coldness settled in your hearts.” He could see the fullness of their faces, where in their eyes a prayer of hope had remained in each one. 

Jim’s voice that had been booming now took on a softer tone, gesturing to the ground he stood on, “Can a monument to the cruelties of time not also be the ebenezer  raised, the miracle that comes at the end of all  suffering?

The animated remains yearned for hope. To Miasma and his sight, all he saw were hellish beings, poor devils, in rapt attention to the sound of Jim’s voice, hanging onto every word.

While Miasma was breathless, a sense of pride and accomplishment at being an author of such a bizarre and touching scene, made him almost chuckle. As Jim preached, the words he had heard so often said at the rituals and from the pulpit, came swimming to him, floating, haunting his thoughts as time moved onwards, and yet seemed to also stand still.

“The memory of your suffering will not define you, but the hope and promise of renewal, FAITH, is your salvation…Even the likes of Judas can find their way to heaven... You are but on the long road to Damascus, and struck blind to see... for without suffering how can one know peace. I call on you, for it is time now, to know of that peace...”

Miasma stood his ground, panting, his purpose, stood before him, the herd of corpses corralled around Jim, who spoke to them with such grace and compassion, reaching a hand out for their humanity to reach back.

1 LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens.

*From the pinnacle to the pit*

2 Through the praise of children and infants you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

*Her acts of cruelty and her lust for blood

Makes her one of us*

3 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

*You shine like the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky*

4 What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?

*Holy Mother, you washeth the sin from our feet*

5 You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor.

*Under a monolith, her likeness

Marble white*

6 You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet:

7 all flocks and herds, and the animals of the wild,

*An' piercing eyes emotionless

A heart so black and cold*

8 the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas.

*Winds come on strong so help you, God

Come unleashed,*

9 LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! 

 *you're set free*

And suddenly Miasma realized why the number of the flock was off. Why there was a presence in and around every story told. There had been one last member of this flock that needed finding. That needed saving.

*Himself*

He prayed, pleading for the green fire in the tree to call out to the lost, and as he backed away from the congregation gathered at Jim's feet he heard the soft bleating sounds of the Lost. the one’s whose stories were never told…

Coming forward, drifting towards the tree line where Miasma was running was a spectre of a young woman. The opaque figure was heavy with child. Even as Jim held the attention of the crowd he too saw the visage in the shadows. The implications not lost on him. 

[Farewell plays:]

He motioned, gently parting the sea of faces as he too made his way to where the woman went no further. Miasma looked at Jim. “We have no choice, if we want to break this curse, all the troubled souls must be put to rest. Even this one..." his tone almost tender, as he saw himself in her- eyes moistened.

*Jim always came back for him. Couldn't he do the same for her?*

Jim looked at his friend, a verse in his head that repeated over and over…

*Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me*

Jim nodded and gently clapped his hands together, snapping the white smoke and mist away, the congregation paused, no longer animated, still as statues. The mist swirled ahead as they watched the woman drift off into the trees the mist following her, like a guide-rope to her every step. While they followed her, they reverently pondered on her presence in these woods...

“Of course… her name would never be in the ledger, or the photograph. Most women weren't so acknowledged at the time, and certainly not a preacher's wife. It was seen as vain." Jim muttered, shaking his head. "Such a shame it is that such stories were often left so unknown, trapped in time. Stories want to be heard, and if it curses something to achieve it then so be it...even if the story was not a happy one, it deserves to see the light..." Jim turned, putting a hand on Miasma's shoulder, stopping a moment. Miasma laid his own on top. The two companions sharing a quiet look, one filled with understanding and compassion. It was a moment that even if lost to the known world in those woods, would forever stand the test of time, in the peace it gave to each of those beating hearts.

*She considered herself damned though at her death she was harboring the life in her belly… there was a restlessness in the tense air around them..  Stemming not only from that burden, but also, that they had never been known at all.*

“Were you the one who kept the ledger” Jim called out. He had noticed the crucifix on her visage as being the same as  the one Miasma had worn and subsequently lost. The very same...

The woman sobbed softly in response, her mournful cries echoing around the trees unnerving and heartbreakingly hollow.

*... at its heart, that bloodstone…they had found it. They had found her. At last...*

Miasma thought aloud, “It makes sense doesn't it… Father Evight Vanhassel, and his wife, the  civilizing influence together as they tended the flock of sinners that worked in these woods. When the camp lost them, they lost their reason to hold on to their humanity, The Captain, The Doctor, Father Evight, and the Missing, Lady Van Hassel...such a tragedy...such a loss...But if she, her remains, I mean, are not with the other bones then-” 

“What happened to her?” Jim finished. They took a breath of the cold pre-dawn air, and strode to follow the spectre into the dark wood.

Braving the unknown, to seek the truth…

The specter led them on, floating, as if walking, stepping on stone long since worn smooth, over dips that no longer existed, through thick trees that had been thinner when she had once wandered the paths of these woods, her mournful cries and trembling voice bouncing all around them.

Their stomachs felt uneasy, like something sad and horrible awaited them. So very much like the dreams they had been having except this time, someone was leading them to the pit in which the lost had fallen…except, even the horror they knew they would face, was as valid and important to know. If it meant giving the young woman peace, who were they to deny her story to be known...

Yet, step by step, the eerie stillness surrounding them abated, giving way to the common sounds of a sleepy winter wood. The spectre appeared almost tangible now, and though the air was growing colder as she lead them farther into the wood, towards a deep fissure in the earth where a frozen creek lay still now, where the truth lay buried, and scattered, the companions felt an ease in the tension. A lift of their burdens, in carrying them together. The broken things inside them would mend, they knew. The pieces would fall into place. And soon, both Miasma and Jim stood at the edge of their triumph, facing a chasm where a ravine gaped at their approach.

The night was clear and the air rushed around them as time all at once stood still. They found themselves surrounded  in the events that lead to the curse of that wretched blood stone… carefully they descended into the ravine and trotted together through it's shallow waters that and been lost to the passage of time, following the bend until they arrive to their destination...

The woman almost seemed to sigh in relief, as they approached her lovely bones, and learned of her demise. For at last her story would be told. And all that had been lost, every last sheep of that flock, would be found again... and non would ever be left behind again...

Daylight was breaking, and as they gazed upon a conspicuous spot where she had fallen so long ago, they had tears in their eyes. The sun was once again rising in that lonely valley, dappling through the trees over this spot where the scene almost felt Holy.

A sapling had sprouted so long ago in that very place, and as the mysterious passage of time faded from view and Jim's eyes lost their powerful sight, they stood before a magnificent Willow tree, miraculously untouched by the surrounding white snow, green spring grass under it's umbrella of care.

This is what they were meant to see. A corner of the world where goodness and love remained untouched by that which corrupts it. A Holy place in the heart where faith in those one loves, and in those whom one cares, lives on forever.

Jim pulled the crucifix from his pocket.

"I, thought it was lost" Miasma said softly, admiring how it shined in the dawn light.

"Oh ye of little faith" Jim chuckled softly, his voice thick with emotion, "Despise not the small things..."

He lay the cross at the foot of the tree and a gust of wind blew through, that sigh of relief washing over them like a warm blanket, enveloping them in a grateful embrace.

"Do you think we did it? Do you think we did the right thing?"

Miasma asked, taking Jim's Hand, they stood back and watched the willow shiver and shake gently, swaying in the breeze like any other ol' tree.

Jim removed his shoes. Miasma did the same.

Feet on the hallowed earth they stood hand in hand.

"Yes," Jim replied, giving the ghoul's hand a squeeze. He turned to see his friend, face upturned to the sunlight, eyes closed, a soft smile playing on his features as he basked in the feeling all around them.

"Yes angel," Jim said once more, "I suppose we did."

"Hm." Miasma smiled, feeling as if in the glow of the morning, he had wings.

*... he was free...*

[awritingrose]

Burn Everything You Love

(Then burn the ashes.) Celine is haunted from the moment she is born, and spends the rest of her life chasing answers.

Celine character study. 9.1k.

Warnings: abusive parent (non-explicit domestic violence, psychological/emotional abuse, racism); unhealthy coping mechanisms; toxic behaviors + relationships; illness/death/hospital scenes; this is not quite Dead Dove territory but we sure are pushing it

Read on ao3 or continue under the read more

Celine is haunted from the moment she is born.

There are creatures in the corner of the nursery that stare at her while she is paralyzed between waking and dreaming. She watches shadows try to suffocate Damien in his bed with their mere presence. She learns to speak from the spirits that whisper in her ears of dangers yet to come.

It makes her an eerie child, frighteningly intelligent, with raven hair and shifting hazel eyes. She watches the world around her with a flat affect, studying everything she sees.

Her father, simmering red, teaches her rage and defiance. Perhaps she should learn to cower instead, like her gray mother and blue-tinged brother. Perhaps that would make things easier. Keep her from spending the next twenty-odd years of her life always tense, always bracing for a fight—always looking for one. But she favors her father too much for that.

(She thinks, when they’re grown, that this is why Damien tries to control her in his gentle way. He favors their mother, in spirit and in face, while Celine is a mirror of their father’s sins. The heir he would have wanted, if only she’d been a man.)

By the time she is fourteen, Celine has grown so used to seeing the unseen that it barely makes her flinch. She learned quickly that no one else, not even her brother, sees the auras that cling to everyone.

(“Synesthesia,” the doctors call it when she is small.

“Hysteria,” they call it after she turns twelve, with an edge to their voices. If she were not rich, she knows, if her father’s name carried less weight, they’d lock her up in an institution and leave her to rot like the women that wail half-baked prophecies in her ears.)

She and Damien stand beside their father at a society dinner one night, dressed nearly identically in a white dress and white suit jacket. Damien takes to holding her hand at times like these, when she’s at her most unpredictable, half to comfort himself with her presence and half to try to rein her in.

(Later, she’ll unleash her temper on him for it. It’s the only time she ever does, because as angry as he might make her, she cannot stand the pain in his eyes.)

Tonight, his pinky is looped through hers. Despite his easy charisma, crowds still make him nervous. She and the voices in her ear both know that the world will eat him alive if she gives it half a chance. She can protect him from it, thrust her hand out and force everyone to hear her, but she cannot keep him safe from what really frightens him: the monster in their father’s skin.

“Arthur!” Celine watches their father’s spine stiffen at the sound of his name, echoing from the other side of the room. “There you are!”

The man coming towards them has his arms open as if he means to embrace her father. He radiates golden warmth from the top of his balding head to his stout legs, and somehow the kindness of it all makes her tense.

It is the daisy chain of three teenagers following him that truly captivate Celine.

The first of them is a boy, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the whisper-thin beginnings of a mustache. Around him swirls a sunset corona, pinks and yellows in shades Celine never knew existed. She can barely resist the urge to try to bury herself in the colors. She can barely tear her eyes away from him and his infectious smile.

“I’d like to introduce you to my son, William,” The man says. He ruffles the boy’s hair, and Celine feels Damien’s pinky tighten around hers. “And my nephew, Mark.”

Mark is slightly taller than William, and completely clean shaven. There’s an intensity to his dark eyes that threatens to swallow Celine whole, just like the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. She recognizes a kindred spirit from the set of his shoulders and the faint circles under his eyes—he’s the older sibling like she is, always on guard, always ready to pack up everything he loves and run. A muted rainbow surrounds him.

“And who’s this?” Her father asks, not even trying to hide the disdain in his voice. “Another foster?”

The senior Barnum laughs, loud and from his belly.

(His name is William, too, whispers a voice. His wife is everything you will never be.)

“She might as well be!” He looks down at the girl with a fondness Celine has never seen in her own father’s eyes, and for a moment, she is struck with jealousy. “No, this is Tess. Grace is sponsoring her for all these parties—the debut balls, and whatnot.”

Tess, holding Mark’s hand, cannot seem to meet Celine’s eyes. Celine knows the trick of staring at a person’s forehead too well to not be able to recognize it. There are freckles across the other girl’s nose and cheeks, the kind that come from too many hours in the sun, the kind that Celine is always put into wide-brimmed hats to avoid. Tess’s cheeks are flushed with sunburn and not cosmetics. She’s not, Celine realizes, chained by the expectations of wealth, and again that dark jealousy rises in Celine’s chest. It’s beaten out, barely, by fascination: there is no aura at all surrounding Tess.

And around each of the teens’ throats is a writhing black tendril.

(Learn, cries her very soul.)

“I’m Celine,” she says. She steps out of her father’s reach. “Nice to meet you all.”

She lets go of her brother, and she does not look back.

The Barnum manor is silent, and for months, Celine thinks that is a blessing. It’s the only place she’s ever been where she can hear herself think, where there are not so many spirits clamoring for her attention that she almost thinks an institution’s sedation would be a relief.

“Let me show you something,” Mark says when she tries to explain this to him.

He takes her hand, and Celine is caught between the rush of heat it sends to her cheeks and the shock of how cold his skin is.

He leads her deep into the woods surrounding the property. If she were a different girl, Celine thinks, she’d worry about his intentions or her reputation. It’s the sort of thing Tess would focus on (Celine would call her prissy or prudish, if she hadn’t seen Tess and William sneak out of sight more often than Celine has ever been alone with Mark).

When they finally stop, it is in a clearing ripe with wildflowers and cloudy sunshine. There’s a humid haze in the air; she can taste a summer storm on her tongue. It’s the most beautiful place she’s ever seen, and the same part of her she’s tried to repress thinks of how dreamily romantic the whole thing is.

“William and Tess used to come here all the time. They said the birds sound prettier here,” Mark says. He looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

Celine frowns. She lets go of his hand to take a step further, eyes closed and head tilted to listen.

“I don’t hear anything,” She replies, turning back to him.

She can’t read his aura like she does everyone else, the soft colors giving him the appearance of experiencing every emotion at once. But she knows the flash of relief that goes across his face. It’s the same one that went across hers when Damien admitted he’d seen something in the darkness of their room one night. The relief of knowing you aren’t crazy. You aren’t alone.

“Exactly!” He grabs her hands again with a fervency that keeps the butterflies in her stomach from waking up.

He’s giving her a look that she knows is supposed to convey some deep meaning. He’s trying to tell her something that the writhing blackness wrapped like a noose around his throat will not let him say. She has no idea what it is.

(When it’s much too late to save either of them, she’ll understand. She’ll think about how prey animals fall silent when a predator is near. She’ll wonder what it means that the things she always thought were predators fall silent in the manor’s presence. She’ll find out.)

So instead, she leans forward and kisses him, because the consequences of that are easier to deal with than trying to understand why William and Tess hear birdsong in a place too perfect to be real.

That winter, she and Damien are invited to the Barnum’s second home high in the mountains. It’s not the first time they see snow, but it’s the first time they see so much of it.

Celine falls in love.

Damien can’t seem to put enough layers on to keep himself warm, while Mrs. Barnum (Grace, she wants them to call her) has to nag Celine to bundle up. She loves sticking her hands into the snow until her fingers burn and turn red.

(Someone should notice she’s self-destructing, but no one says a word, and so she buries herself deeper and deeper beneath the ice.)

She and Mark sit on the porch most of the time. They watch Tess run about up to her knees in snow, pelting anyone foolish enough to look away from her with snowballs. She shrieks with laughter when William dumps some down the back of her dress. Anger brings heat to Celine’s cheeks; it’s not fair that Tess is so free, but even holding hands with Mark seems scandalous.

On the third day, William rushes up to them. Tess runs past him into the house—Mrs. Barnum’s voice echoes from a distant room, reminding her to take her shoes off.

“Are you ready?” William asks. His aura rotates around him, like fairy floss at the carnival. It makes her nauseous, yet the intensity in his eyes keeps Celine from looking away.

“Ready for what?” Mark tilts his head.

William throws his hands up like they’re both missing something obvious, and a smile pulls at the corner of Celine’s mouth.

“Skating,” He enunciates each syllable carefully.

As if on cue, Tess appears in the doorway again, one hand carrying five pairs of skates by the laces, the other hand pulling Damien along behind her.

And though she’s seen it coming for months (even if she couldn’t see his aura flare pink anytime Tess looks at him, his cheeks doing the same would be enough of a giveaway), Celine can’t stop the ugly, unnamable feeling that rises in her chest.

“How thick is the ice?” Damien asks as they trek through the woods.

Tess shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s never cracked, so we don’t worry about it.”

“Thick enough,” William offers, with a wink that makes Celine roll her eyes.

They skate for hours in the silence of the frozen lake. Mark tries to help her get her balance at first, but Celine throws his hands off. He doesn’t try to force it; he simply lets her do as she wishes, and she loves him all the more for it.

The boys go to sit together in the snowbank when they tire. Tess turns dizzying spirals across the ice with her dancer’s grace that Celine envies. Celine circles the exterior of the pond, stubbornly pushing past her aching muscles.

“Watch this!” Tess calls to pull the boys’ attention away from whatever they’re discussing.

Celine watches something dark shift beneath the ice. It's as if some great fish were trapped within the lake. Yet nothing could be alive there, certainly nothing so large, certainly nothing with a half-rotten face that smiles at her as it passes beneath her feet. It comes to a stop under Tess, draws its melting hands back—

She thinks she screams Tess’s name. She’s never sure, even years in the future. But if she does, the warning comes too late; Tess launches herself into the air. The thing in the water slams its fists against the ice. The crack echoes like a gunshot when she lands.

There is a deafening roar in Celine’s ears as she propels herself towards Tess. The boys are shouting, Mark barely holding both Damien and William back for fear their sudden weight will plunge the girls through the cracks. They cannot see like Celine does. They don’t see the laughing face, the burning eyes, the creature that pounds against the ice, the thing that wants nothing more than to grab Tess’s ankles and drag her under.

And for all the things Tess does that Celine hates, Celine will not let her come to any harm.

She slams into Tess with a force she’ll regret later, but it is enough to throw Tess into Damien’s arms. A fraction of a second later, bony fingers wrap around Celine’s ankle, and frozen water fills her lungs.

(She thinks of those moments under the lake in the distant future, when she and Damien and Tess are thrown into an abyss. She takes them back to that moment. She tries to conquer the fear she felt, the echoes of her father’s voice that told her she would drag everyone around her to Hell if she kept acting the way she did, the realization that he’d been right.)

Celine wakes in the smallest bedroom in the house, lying in a cot and buried under a mountain of blankets. Tess sits upright in the second bed, similarly dwarfed beneath the covers. The ends of her thick hair are still wet, and that’s strangely infuriating to Celine, because Tess should be the only one without the bone-deep cold on her skin.

“What did you do?” Celine hisses. Her throat stings with the effort.

“Saved you!” Tess snaps back.

(She hadn’t hesitated; she’d wrapped her scarf around one wrist, handed the other end to William, and jumped into the water. The boys had pulled them out once Tess had a grip on Celine’s waist, both of them weightless in the ice. It was William, Celine finds out later, who pressed his lips to hers to help her breathe.)

“You shouldn’t have! I was trying to save you! You should’ve left me!” She shouts. It’s a little too close to a confession of something Celine isn’t ready to deal with. “You should’ve just done what you were told!”

(She hears her father’s words come out of her mouth. They taste like vinegar and blood. She does not try to take them back.)

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do!”

Celine has never heard Tess shout until this moment—she’s not sure she’s ever seen Tess pass a stage of “mild annoyance”. She always assumed Tess was too soft, too feminine, for something as uncivilized as anger. It feels…good to see Tess finally crack.

It’s good enough that Celine begins to laugh, though it quickly turns to raw coughing. Tess stews on the other side of the room. She doesn’t have to have an aura for Celine to feel the anger coming off of her.

“So you aren’t perfect,” Celine finally says.

Tess’s eyes widen with panic. “Shut up.”

“Why are you still pretending?” Celine doesn’t even lower her voice. She’s certain most of the house has heard them yelling. She’s surprised Mark or Damien hasn’t burst in to try to calm them down.

Tess looks away, fidgeting with the corner of one of her blankets. “They’ll get rid of me if I’m not.”

Celine knows about Tess’s attempt to run away—Mark had told her. He’d mentioned how lucky Tess was to be able to leave, how angry he was that she’d come back. Celine had agreed. If she ever had half a chance, she would throw everything she could into a bag and run. She wouldn’t look back. She never has.

But at the same time, she knows Tess’s fear more intimately than she knows anything else about the other girl. She’s felt it too. Tess made the choice to bend to it; Celine broke it.

“Can we...can we start over?” Tess asks softly, several hours later.

Celine wants to say no out of nothing but spite. To feel that rush again of seeing Tess break, of making her feel a fraction of the pain Celine has learned to live with.

(They’re not friends, Celine tells herself. They will never be friends.)

“I’m Celine,” she says instead. She smiles and stretches her hand out across the space between their beds. “Nice to meet you.”

The light in Tess’s eyes is a gift.

Celine falls through worlds only once.

The furniture floats away from her with the slightest touch. She rests her fingers on the keys of the piano and they begin to play a symphony from a memory that isn’t her own. The room on the other side of the door shifts as she thinks of all the places in the house she’d like to go.

It does not frighten her. It feels good. It feels right. This is what the power in her veins is meant for. She is meant for so much more.

Color returns to the world when she steps through the doorway and into the kitchen. That power still drums beneath her skin, though the counters do not move when she touches them and her fingers can no longer remember how the song began.

“Celine?” Mrs. Barnum’s voice makes Celine jump. The older woman stands over the stove, stirring something into the soup. “What are you doing in here?”

The real question is how she got into the kitchen. There is a look in Mrs. Barnum’s eyes whenever she asks anything like this, as if she already knows the answer and only wants to hear what the children will tell her. Celine has no patience for the games.

She has never gotten along with Mrs. Barnum. She’s a woman loved by her family, the heir to the Barnum fortune, so powerful that her husband had taken her name instead of the other way around. She’s everything Celine wanted to be as a little girl. She’s everything Celine will never be, and the voices are fond of reminding Celine of it.

(They are wrong—Celine is just like Grace Barnum, in all the worst ways.)

“Through the door,” Celine replies.

She won’t tell Mrs. Barnum of what she saw. She can’t stand to be looked at like she’s crazy, not again, not when she’s finally found a place she feels she belongs.

Mrs. Barnum’s brows lift. She doesn't point out that Celine's answer doesn't make sense. “I see. I thought I heard someone at the piano.”

Celine shrugs. “Must have been Damien. I can’t play.”

She can’t, not like this, but if she can only find that place again, she can learn. Learn everything her soul has ever needed to know.

(She spends another decade trying to find her way back. She doesn’t regret a moment of it.)

Her first attempt is with the ouija board, when she is fifteen, when she and Mark have finally declared to their parents that they are courting, when William still winks at her while no one is looking.

(Her father disapproves. Says that Mark isn’t a suitable match. She looks at her mother; she looks at Damien; she knows what he means.)

She smuggles the board into the manor with Mark’s help.

“My aunt hates those things,” he’d said, looking at it with a reluctance that almost gave Celine pause. She didn’t care if Mrs. Barnum didn’t like the board, but Mark’s obvious discomfort was nearly enough.

“Then I won’t let her see it,” Celine had reassured him.

He refuses to touch it, so Celine stuffs it into a bag and hides it beneath her skirts; Mark simply provides enough distraction to allow her to shuffle into the parlor.

William, Tess, and Damien are already gathered around the low table, Tess perched on a cushion she’s pulled into the floor.

Celine feels that power rush into her body as soon as she unveils the board. She does not feel the eyes that watch her; Tess feels them, Mark feels them, but Celine is too focused on finally, finally, getting answers to pay attention to their apprehension. The world shrinks to the thrumming in her veins and the whispers of the board.

William is the first to speak. “A seance?”

“Does anyone have any objections?” Celine’s tone makes it clear it is a challenge, not a question.

Tess and Damien trade a look that makes Celine want to roll her eyes. Tess speaks for the pair of them. "Are you sure about this?"

Instead of snapping, Celine smiles, soft and reassuring. “You know there’s something strange about this house, Tess. The spirits could tell us what it is.”

(She doesn’t mention that the spirits have never spoken to her in the manor before.)

There’s suddenly something strange in the way Tess is looking at her, too. That black tendril around her throat tightens and Tess reaches out for the planchette, her eyes glassy. It’s like she’s…empty.

The parlor door bursts open a second before Tess’s fingers reach the board, and Celine spins to face the door with a frustrated growl low in her throat.

Mrs. Barnum looks over the five of them. When her eyes land on the board, she flares such a bright red that Celine has to squint to see. For a moment, Celine is scared. She can’t recall the last time she felt anything other than anger or a crushing numbness.

Celine leaps to her feet when Mrs. Barnum snatches the board from the table, the heat of her own anger rising to burn against her skin.

“Give it back!” Celine shouts. “We didn’t even get started, there’s so much to--”

She feels the power draining from her fingers and she has to get it back, she finally has answers, she can find out what’s wrong with her, what all this means.

“You are done!” Mrs. Barnum shouts even louder, and Celine’s shoulders draw inward out of an instinct she’s not yet conquered. “Whose idea was this?”

Celine can feel herself start to shake with rage as all five of them look at one another. She wants to scream that it was her idea, of course it was her idea, and damn the consequences. Damn the fear in Mark’s eyes. She opens her mouth to speak—

“It was me, Mrs. Barnum,” Tess says from across the circle. Her eyes are cast downward at the floor and Celine sees her tense.

“Tess,” Damien whispers.

(They’re not friends, they’ll never be friends, they’re not friends, why does she do these things?)

From the look on Mrs. Barnum’s face, she knows it’s a lie. They all know it’s a lie. But Celine isn’t going to say anything.

Mrs. Barnum’s lips press together into a thin line. “Alright. I’ll have the driver take you home.”

Celine watches her go.

Their mother dies when they are seventeen.

Damien holds Celine’s hand again at the funeral. He stares into the distance, through the trees around the cemetery, into a spot that does not exist. He is trying not to cry.

Celine is glad for the mourning veil on her hat. It hides her dry eyes. It hides her rage. It hides her disappointment that the name carved on the stone is misspelled, and that she does not know enough of her mother’s language to fix it herself.

(She keeps the hat and veil. She dresses in black long after society says she should have put it aside. She is not sure there is a name for what she mourns.)

When the others speak of their futures, she speaks only of all the places she will travel to, all the people she will meet. All the spiritualists she will see and the questions they will answer. She glares at her brother and Tess when they trade looks behind her back.

(The voices in her ears scoff when she speaks of it. They tell her that she is the only one that has ever been like this. She is alone; she has always been alone.)

Mark is the only exception, the only one that doesn’t make her feel crazy, the only one that doesn’t question her. He simply smiles at her the same way he always has, like she hung the moon and the stars in the sky. Celine teases that perhaps, if he behaves, she’ll take him with her when she travels, and they will see the world together.

(“I can’t leave,” he snarls, in a rare display of temper that makes her skin prickle. She doesn’t understand what he means until she realizes the tendril around his throat has grown so large that she doesn’t know how he can breathe.

Something dark and ancient laughs when she decides that she will free him from it.)

It shouldn’t surprise any of them when William declares his intentions to volunteer for the war effort; he’s talked for months now about joining the service to find adventure in the world. Still, it grips Celine with a sense of panic that is foreign to her. All the news reports say that they are winning, that it will be over by Christmas, but the voices in her ears tell her they are lying. There are horrors to come that none of them could imagine.

He kisses her forehead at the train station and Celine finally learns what his aura feels like. It wraps around her for seconds that stretch into hours. It’s like the first time she got drunk on champagne; the bubbles had gone straight to her head, and she’d felt like she was flying, like everything was the funniest joke she’d ever heard, like the world was good and warm and she was finally happy. William feels like euphoria.

(It’s why she comes back to him, again and again, over the years. He makes her forget.)

While he’s gone, he sends letters home to Tess. She reads them out loud in the parlor. After the Barnums go to bed, she shows the rest of them the bits that she’s censored for his parents’ sake. They try to laugh at his stories of rats as large as cats that live in the trenches even as they pray he is only exaggerating.

And then influenza comes.

Tess moves into the manor permanently when her mother is the first to die. Damien is the one that found them, and Celine thinks it hurt him nearly as much to see Tess catatonic and staring at a corpse.

“I had to carry her out of there,” He tells Celine in a low voice. Mrs. Barnum gives Tess a glass of hot chocolate in the next room. “She was just...waiting to die.”

Celine has seen that hollowness in Tess’s face before, when the tendril around her throat tried to guide her movements. She is struck by the strange notion that the darkness is gorging itself on Tess’s sorrow; it grows larger and larger, though not nearly as large as the noose around Mark’s neck.

(Something cruel and ancient growls when Celine decides she will free Tess from it, too.)

The Barnums fall ill soon after, and Mrs. Barnum insists with a fervency Celine doesn’t understand that they go to the hospital.

It almost suffocates Celine as soon as she steps through the doors—screaming spirits, pain that smothers the world, so many emotions and colors and feelings that she cannot stand it. She lasts an hour before she begins to hyperventilate and runs from the hospital.

She is three blocks away, sitting in an alley with her knees pulled to her chest and tears streaming from her eyes, when she feels Mrs. Barnum die.

Tess grieves by working until she can’t feel anything at all, and Celine is happy to go with her. The second time she enters the hospital during the pandemic, she conquers her fear of it. She forces herself to breathe evenly. She puts walls up around herself until she can no longer hear the screaming.

She and Tess sneak out from the manor while Damien and Mark are at work. The boys would keep them locked up forever to keep them safe, but neither girl can stand it anymore. They’re starting to go insane from the solitude and volunteering as nurses seems like a good way to wash their hands of their guilt and grief. They learn quickly how to care for the dying. There is no saving most of their patients. All they can do is try to alleviate their suffering.

It works—until Tess collapses.

She’s been coughing for a few days, but Celine had ignored it; Tess had told her not to worry. Now she gathers Tess into her arms and drives her back to the manor because she doesn’t know what else to do. The hospital didn’t save the Barnums. But she can save Tess, if she can just channel enough power, and she’s strongest at the manor.

(If she can’t—if she can’t, this will be her fault, it was her idea to volunteer at the hospital, she’d just wanted to prove she wasn’t afraid and her selfishness will have killed Tess.)

“We need to take her to a doctor!” Damien shouts outside of the door to Tess’s room. Celine peers around the corner at her brother and her partner; they look half ready to tear each other apart.

Mark shoves Damien back into the wall. “I’m the master of the house! She stays here. The hospital is where people go to die.”

Damien storms past her on his way down the staircase. His permanently blue aura churns with streaks of red and purple. There is disgust in his eyes when they look at one another, though she knows it isn’t directed at her. He doesn’t say a word.

(She finds him later, at the writing desk in the study, penning a letter to William.

“He should know,” Damien says. “They didn’t let him come home to bury his parents, they’re not going to let him come home to bury--”

Celine wraps her arms around him for the first time in a very long time; he can no more stand to say the words than she can to hear them. He sobs into her shoulder.)

That last afternoon, Celine knocks on the locked door and waits for Mark to answer it.

“Chef has dinner ready. Go eat something. I’ll sit with her.” She leaves no room for argument in her tone.

Mark is too tired to argue, anyway. He shuffles out of the room and down the stairs like a zombie, his hair uncombed and his eyes red and sunken. Tess’s death will destroy him. Celine always found it silly that Tess was afraid Celine would take away everything she loved, but now Celine understands. Tess will take everything Celine has left with her to the grave. She has to stop it.

Tess looks terribly small in the bed, drenched in sweat. Her eyes flicker rapidly beneath her lids. If it weren’t for the blood and mucus drying on her lips, she would almost look like she was having a bad dream.

Celine sits down in the chair by her bed. She slips her fingers through Tess’s and gasps—it feels like Tess is going to catch fire. Celine wonders, for a strange moment, if that wouldn’t be better. Burn the manor down with them all in it. Die together instead of this long, slow process where they are damned to watch one another suffer.

She takes a deep breath. The power is there. She closes her eyes and thinks of how much she wants Tess to live.

(They are not friends. They’ll never be friends. This does not mean anything. She just—she just doesn’t know what to do without Tess, damn it.)

Nothing responds. Celine can feel it, so very close to her, just out of her reach. It gathers around Tess’s throat. It gathers in her lungs. It does not flow into Celine’s hands.

Tears roll down her cheeks unbidden. How dare she cry, how dare her power not obey her, how dare this happen again and again and again, this isn’t fucking fair—

(In the morning, Mark tells them that Tess is cured. She smiles at them all, but Celine sees that the darkness around her throat has hooks now, digging into her skin. Celine realizes she will never free Tess from that cruel, ancient, hungry thing.)

Mark takes her out into the woods behind the manor, back to that place that is too perfect to be real. He drops to one knee and pulls a ring from his pocket. The diamond is carved in the shape of a crescent moon, with smaller yellow stones on either side of it like stars.

“Marry me,” he says. It is not a question. There are no flowery declarations of love.

There are no voices in her ears to yell at her. Her stomach turns anyway, and every bone in her body screams at her to run. She is not the marrying type. She will never be a good wife. She will never be like Mrs. Barnum. It’s better to run now than to drag it out.

“Yes,” Celine hears herself say.

(She knows what he meant when he said he couldn’t leave.)

Damien looks like he might cry when he sees her in her wedding dress, even with her brows pinched tight at all the bridesmaids trying to help pin her veil into her short hair.

He shifts the tulle to lay flat over her back, meeting her eyes in the mirror. “I wish mom could see you. You look amazing.”

The reminder that he is the only family she has left makes her stomach turn. It isn’t much different from the rest of their lives; he’s always been all she has. But he’s always had so much more.

(“I won’t allow it,” their father had shouted when she’d told him about her engagement. She’d been foolish to tell him, she knows. Some stupid part of her she had yet to bury had wanted him to walk her down the aisle. Had hoped for it.

“I’m not asking for your permission,” she’d snarled back. It was the last thing she ever said to him.)

One of Mark’s cousins scrapes a hairpin against her skin and that’s all it takes for Celine to break. “Everyone out!”

Damien lingers. He’s never counted as a person.

“Will you--” Celine takes a deep breath and curls her nails into her palm. “I need you to send Tess here. And go help William get ready.���

She sees the hurt that flickers in his aura; it is the first time she has sent him away. But he is dressed, coiffed, picture perfect as he always is, and she knows for a fact that the best man is still drunk from the bachelor party the night before. William will need all the help he can get. Damien is the only person she can trust to take care of things. And there are—there are some things she cannot tell him.

Tess is a vision, even in her wheelchair. As soon as the dressing room door closes behind her, she is on her feet. The doctors may have forbidden her from standing for long periods of time, from walking, and from dancing, but she refuses to rest like they want. She usually has Damien or William’s arm to help her instead.

Celine knows that restless feeling. The chair is a cage to Tess, a cruel reminder that she can no longer do the things she loves--so she will do them anyway, and damn the consequences.

“Cold feet?” Tess asks gently. She takes the veil off of Celine’s head and frowns at the state of her hair.

Celine wants to hate how easily Tess sees through her. “No. ...Yes. I don’t know. I-I said yes, so I’m going to marry him, but I just—I don’t want to end up like--”

She chokes on the words. Like my mother. Mark is not her father, Mark is nothing like her father, Celine knows this, but at the same time, he could be. She’s seen that darkness in enough people to know that anyone could become a monster. And nothing scares her more than being seen and not heard, being buried in a grave with her name misspelled and no one able to fix it because she has been stripped of everything that made her her.

“Hey,” Tess says, resting her hands on Celine’s shoulders. Celine turns to look at her, and the determination in Tess’s eyes takes her off guard. “Listen to me. Tell me right now. Do you want to marry Mark? Because if you don’t, my car’s out front, and we’ll make a run for it.”

“He’s your brother.”

“And you’re my sister.” The love in Tess’s voice steals Celine’s breath away.

(They are not friends, they will never be friends, this is—this cannot be friendship.)

Celine takes another deep breath and closes her eyes. She focuses on the weight of Tess’s hands on her shoulders. Focuses on all the times she’s felt warm in Mark’s arms, all the times he has let her fight her own battles, let her rebel all she wants. Mark knows she is strange and eerie and cursed with wanderlust. He has never tried to change her. He loves her.

When she opens her eyes again, Tess is smiling at her.

“Alright. Then let’s get your hair fixed—what were they even trying to do?”

(Celine tells herself that Mark will not become a monster. She convinces herself of it, and she does not see it until it is too late.)

Damien walks her down the aisle. William cries when he sees her. Mark’s hands shake when he puts the ring on her finger. Tess leaps from her wheelchair to catch the bouquet.

For a moment, Celine is truly hopeful.

Everything is perfect for the first few years.

Mark’s career skyrockets. It makes him happy, and in turn, Celine is overjoyed. When he’s home, he hangs on her every word, does everything she wants. She can finally travel. There are no locks on the manor windows. She has a key to every door. Mark has never tried to control her.

She is free of the voices, too, now that she lives in the manor. They cannot reach her there.

Mark starts to throw wild parties on the weekends for his coworkers. Networking, he calls it. He doesn’t ask her to come. Celine is much happier staying on the second floor of the manor, setting up her work room or reading. He’s always been better at those sorts of things. Telling people what they want to hear. He comes to check on her periodically throughout the night whenever he has a party, kissing her forehead.

(After a while, it is Benjamin that comes to check on her, bringing her dinner and a drink at “the master’s” behest. She always thanks him.)

She sees when Tess meets Julian, when the man turns her across the parlor floor without any care for Tess’s breathing. His aura is golden and glowing, tinged with pink. It is love at first sight. It sickens her, though Celine can’t explain why. She retreats back to her study.

When they discover what Julian has done to Tess (when she turns up on the doorstep of the manor after not seeing any of them for weeks, bruises on her throat, tears in her eyes, carrying nothing but the clothes she’s wearing), it takes Mark and Damien both to hold Celine back. William paces the floor with his pistol in hand. Damien takes away their car keys, to keep she and William from driving to Julian’s home and showing him how it feels to be powerless.

When the man himself comes knocking, they hide Tess in the study with Mark and Damien. Celine and William greet Julian at the door. William’s pistol is in hand, and one of his medals is pinned to his lapel. It is Celine that steps forward.

“She’s not here,” Celine says. It’s clearly a lie, one they must tell as a sort of ceremony.

“I just want to talk to her. She’s been sick—I don’t think she’s in her right mind lately,” Julian replies. He runs a hand through his tousled hair. Celine supposes it is meant to be charming.

It infuriates her instead. He fooled her once. He will not do so again. Celine steps forward, into his space, and to his credit, he does not back down. His aura is brown with rot and black with pride.

“She isn’t here,” She repeats. “It’s a good thing she isn’t. Because if she ever tells me that she so much as thinks she sees you, I’ll kill you in your own bed.”

Something bubbles up inside of her. Power. Rage. He is just like her father. He hurt her pride when she realized he’d tricked her into believing he was good. He is not her father, but her father is six feet underground, and Julian is here, where she can reach out and strike him, where she can give him all the retribution he deserves—

Dry lightning strikes one of the trees in the yard and sets it alight.

Julian’s eyes are wide when he looks back at her. “You’re crazy. Where the hell is my--”

Whatever he was going to say is drowned out by a deafening gunshot. William has stepped out of the manor, his pistol pointed up at the sky.

“Oops,” he deadpans, as if he could’ve pulled the trigger by accident.

Julian runs, and he does not come back.

She dreams of his voice.

Celine is adrift in a void. She knows she is sleeping, but she cannot find her way back to consciousness. It’s almost pleasant in the darkness. Like she’s been there before. Like she’s always belonged there.

“Trust me, let me in, and I can make you happy just like Celine.”

It is Julian, and yet it cannot be. He should have no reason to speak her name, let alone make an offer like that in her dreams. It’s the sort of thing he’d say to—

She suddenly knows how to move through the void and she flies as fast as she can towards his voice. If he is here, if he has found Tess again, then surely he means her harm. Celine will kill him before he gets the chance.

Tess sits at a dinner table in the void, though there is no food in front of her. The man across from her looks like Julian. It should be Julian, Celine knows this. But the more she looks, the more Julian’s appearance falls away like water, and the monster beneath it is revealed.

It’s...formless. Endlessly shifting into shapes that should not exist, twisting around itself and inside itself. Millions of eyes blink lazily across it.

“No,” Tess says.

The entity surges forward to nearly envelop her. Celine watches the tendril that has always been around Tess’s throat tighten until the other girl’s lips turn blue. A thousand of those eyes see her all at once, and Celine realizes she must have cried out. She cannot move under its gaze, cannot help Tess, cannot save her—

Celine wakes and tumbles out of bed moments before Tess’s scream pierces the silence of the night.

(I know what you saw, Celine writes to Tess a few months later, after Tess has run far away, when Damien is the only one of them that knows how to contact her. I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you from it. I love you.)

It is as if Tess was the last thing holding them all together. With her gone, everything begins to fall apart.

William is rarely around; some strange animosity has grown up between him and Mark. He is always in search of the next big fight, the next war to be won, relishing in the violence of it all. There are moments, late at night, when he and Celine are the only ones awake in the manor. They sit together on the kitchen counters like they did when they were teenagers. They don’t speak about his nightmares. They talk about her work instead, and how phenomenal he thinks her research into the manor is.

(Mark forbids her from speaking of it in his presence. That is the first time she packs a bag and runs.)

Damien is more upset by Tess’s disappearance than he wants to let on. Instead, he wants to talk about all the things Celine is determined to avoid. She doesn’t want to speak about their father or his death or the strange, guilty mix of joy and sorrow it left them both with. So when he needs to borrow money from her, it is a relief, and she does not ask why. She simply lets him take it from her half of the inheritance, or she gives it to him from Mark’s bottomless coffers. When things get too rough, she takes the money to the speakeasy herself, more comfortable amongst the debauchery than she’s ever been amongst high society.

(She knows it is cards. She knows his tells. But he does not ask for help to get away from it, and so she does not give it. Mark is both too rich and too busy to notice.)

And Mark—

Mark is not the man she married anymore. He is gone from the manor more often than not, and Celine tolerates it for longer than she thought she would. Even when he is home, he may as well not be. They do not go on weekend trips anymore; it's rare that she can convince him to leave the manor for dinner. He spends all of his time locked in his study with script pages scattered across the floor, obsessively going over his lines. Sometimes he stumbles to bed with ink smeared across his hands from whatever new writing project consumes him.

(They start sleeping in separate beds when she shouts that she is tired of him waking her up in the middle of the night.)

Celine feels as if she is drowning. The marriage was a mistake. She should’ve taken Tess’s offer to run before the wedding. It hadn’t been cold feet—it had been a prophecy. The world is not a good or kind place. The only person she’s ever been able to rely on is herself.

In hindsight, she thinks that she wanted to get caught.

William has the same wild spirit as she does. Neither of them have ever looked for safety. Every time he kisses her is like the time on the train platform, like being drunk on champagne, like the world fades away and reality doesn’t matter for just a little while longer.

He runs from the manor when she screams at him to go, blood streaming from his broken nose. It is smeared on Mark’s knuckles as well.

William would kill Mark if he stayed, she knows this. His temper is too unpredictable, his tendency towards violence more frightening than intriguing now. Still, when Mark turns on her, Celine almost regrets being alone.

He takes a deep breath and smooths down the wrinkles on his shirt. He's pretending to be calm when he looks at her. His hands still tremble with the force of his rage. Celine keeps her weight on her back foot, ready to run.

"Now," Mark says. His smile is too wide--it is deranged. "Let's talk about this. William has always been...well, jealous. I know you wouldn't hurt me on purpose. I know this is because of him, so why don't you and I let bygone be bygones?"

How is she meant to respond to that? His eyes flicker with manic energy. Something dark shifts behind his irises. it is like all the times she's seen Tess go hollow, only worse. She does not recognize the man she once loved.

"I'm leaving," Celine manages to say. She backs up to the edge of her bed and pulls out the bag she's kept packed for the past six months.

(She should have left the moment she packed it.)

Mark follows her through the house as she makes for the front door, a demon nipping at her heels. Like all the shadows and spirits she's never been able to outrun.

"What's this about, Celine?" He laughs. "Whatever you want, just name it! Is it a child? Will that make you happy?"

In the future, the only credit Celine will give herself is not hitting him. He has become the thing she fears, the husband that wants her beautiful and home and caring for his children; the husband that does not know the first thing about her. Or, worse, the husband that simply does not care.

He catches her in the foyer. He grabs her shoulders and forces her to turn and look at him. The tears in his eyes are half rage and half sorrow.

(That is how all things will end.)

"I'll die without you." Mark's voice breaks on the words.

He is an actor, Celine tells herself. He's made his living by lying to people. This is just another lie. Like all the times he's said he loves her.

So she looks up into his eyes, and lets out that awful part of her that always screams to go for the jugular. "I don't care."

He stumbles back a step like she's punched him. Celine finally breaks into a sprint towards her car.

She looks back, just before she peels away. Mark still stands in the doorway, staring at the spot where she'd been with the same stricken look. For the first time, she sees the full extent of the darkness that has wrapped itself around him. It winds around his wrists, between his ankles, chaining his limbs together and rooting him to the floor of the manor itself.

Save him, shouts the part of her that still loves him, that knows they are not themselves. She could save him. She has the power.

But that’s not her job.

Celine does not plan on ever coming back. She sees Tess and Damien in brief flashes whenever she stops off at home to retrieve funds. They are still dancing around one another. Nothing else has changed. She is growing, becoming more powerful, but everyone else is...stagnant.

Tess corners her only once about what had happened, and for a moment, Celine is angry that Damien told her.

“I wasn’t happy, Tess,” she says, and it is far too close to the truth than she ever planned to admit. “You of all people should understand that. I regret it, but I’d do it again. I had to get away from there.”

There’s a flash of understanding in Tess’s eyes that makes Celine feel almost guilty. No, she wants to say. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like you. I wasn’t a good person. But it is easier to let Tess think what she will.

She drives into the strange storm that lingers over the hills. The spirit in her passenger seat has a smile that is too wide. It urges her to hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, aren’t you curious?.

(She will have her answers.)

The void is no longer familiar as she falls through it. It is everything she’s feared; it is being forgotten and being lost; it is her soul severed from her body and a name that will be misspelled on a grave and no one left who cares enough to fix it; it is the light of every bridge she has burned along her way; and worst of all, it is Damien falling with her, clinging to her pinky like he always has even though this is all her fault—

The ice groans beneath her as she sits up.

It is not really the lake she fell through as a teenager, nor is it really that forest. It’s her mind, her power, this place, all coming together to make something of nothing. It flickers and distorts even as Celine tries to hold on to it.

Cracks form beneath her feet as she stands, spiraling out towards the two prone forms lying too far away for her to help. Tess, bloodied, sprawled, moaning weakly. Damien, eyes closed, silent.

“Celine?” Tess’s voice echoes across the lake. With it, the world around them shakes, and the cracks deepen. “Celine, I can’t—I can’t move, please--”

The lake remains, but the trees around them flicker and warp and twist into—into places Celine doesn’t recognize. When she tries to pull it back to the forest, to hold on to anything familiar, Tess sobs.

She sees Tess clearly, now. Her eyes are sunken and red, the skin around them turning grey; her cheeks are hollow and her lips are cracked. Blood and a thin layer of foam have dried on her mouth and nose. The blood on her chest is still fresh, still oozing from the wound.

(It hits Celine in a rush. Influenza Tess has died before Tess has been here before Tess is fighting me for control Tess has a stronger connection Tess will win and I will lose Damien--)

If she and Tess keep playing tug of war, Damien will be dragged to the depths. Celine feels her feet sink a fraction of an inch. She has to act. There is a choice to make and no time to make it.

She runs to Tess.

Tess smiles up at her and Celine wants to recoil from her blood-stained teeth and rheumy eyes. But she remembers that moment, a lifetime ago, pushing Tess to safety and taking the plunge in her place.

(They are not friends. They could never be friends. They are not friends, so why are there tears frozen on Celine’s cheeks?)

Celine jumps. The ice shatters. Tess has enough time to realize what Celine’s done and scream in terror before she vanishes beneath the surface.

A thin crust of rime forms over the cracks, and the ice no longer protests when Celine runs across it to pull Damien to the shore, to pull him into her arms. The world no longer resists as she forces it into as much of a shape as she can manage.

And by the time Damien wakes in that one-room cabin, Celine has nearly convinced herself she doesn’t regret a thing.