#they hang out around the burnt husk of their old mansion

[rainedroptalks]

Fictional sisterhood my beloved

[deromanus]

The Empire is Burning: Chapter 1

The emperor was dead.

It was a newspaper headline, a reason for rejoicing or lamenting, a whisper on the lips of slaves and soldiers and farmers alike, it was a fact written in stone and in blood. And to me, it was a call. A fervent whisper on the wind, Come home. She is waiting for you. It’s time.

In a quiet mountain town somewhere in northern Dunbar, a town that resembled in all facets the one I had grown up in, but was not, I sat in a tavern and drank a tumbler full of warm whiskey and thought about our dead emperor. An assassin, they said. A spear-wielding tribeswoman from the tundra masquerading as a whore, brought to his bedchambers. She slit his throat from behind. I wondered what he looked like when he fell, if he was wearing that awful golden mask, if it cracked on the marble floors. I sipped my whiskey.

There were other men in the bar, farmers and bowers and viehzüchters, older men with their fresh-faced sons, men in flannels and jean overalls, yellow-eyed and vein-marked from the poison vapors of the Burning River. It was strange that the sweetwater of the river made things grow so perky and ripe, made the orchards bloom and the corn pop up tall and golden, yet it sank like foul sediment in the blood of the people who drank it, who breathed its venomous air. It was the cursed fruit that was the sweetest, and the poison tasted like the purest nectar.

Outside the mountains were that particular autumnal patchwork of browns and reds, sweeping golden fields and hills of fire. Down in the valleys, between jagged lines of split-rail fencing, cows and sheep milled about in the morning mist. The sound of a train’s whistle echoed down the mountain and mourning doves cooed on thatched farmhouse rooftops.

The batwing tavern doors swung open and Dr. Cale Montgomery stuck his head in, his face wind-burnt and red. “A’right,” he said with a curt nod to me. “I sent the tele on ahead. She’ll be waiting on us ‘round noon.”

“Did you get ahold of Morgan, too?” I murmured.

He nodded firmly. “You ready?”

I finished my whiskey and pushed the clouded brown glass back across the bartop.

Outside the wind put a chill in my bones. I tugged my greatcoat closer around my shoulders, lifting the collar to protect my neck from the frigid nip. Our caravan was parked outside and Cale was leaning against the front wheel, cigarette hanging idly from his mouth. The horse pawed the ground impatiently and shook her head.

“How far from here, you reckon?” I said.

Cale grunted and maneuvered the cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other without touching it. “Well,” he said. “Judging by the map, I’d say no more’n three hours. Aberforde is just about thirty miles from here.”

“And where is she meeting us?”

“Along the Pilgrimroad. We don’t even need to go into town. Unless you wanna, that is.”

“I ain’t gonna be accountable for this decision,” I said. “It’s unless you wanna. Your town, your sister, du ken?”

“Well,” he said, the word long and drawn out like he was tasting of it. “I don’t.”

“That’s settled, then. Now we’re just wasting daylight.”

We climbed onto the front of the caravan, in the rickety seat padded with moth-eaten quilts sewn by both of our mothers. The steel-banded wheels beneath us swayed and creaked. The horse shook her head, tossing her mane of sand-colored hair about in the wind.

Cale grabbed the cracked leather reins. “Come on, Earnshaw, y’up.”

The gravel and dead leaves crackled beneath the slow-turning wheels. The horse bobbed her head methodically. Off the main road we went and down a narrow mountainside path, pale red dirt and the sheer sloping face of the cliff below, sparkling with ochre. We came to a parting in the thick oak and maple, where the rhododendron and wild roses flourished, and the sky was vast and slate-gray beyond, falling like a cold blanket over the silhouette of the mountains, the distant violet curves like the outlines of slumbering giantesses.

I pulled my hat down over my eyes and looked away from it. It was too pretty, these wildlands, but I knew the dark shadow-places, the matas, the witch-woods, and the druid-cursed raths of the deep forest. This was a land with a beguiling face, but underneath was something sinister and ancient and smoke-whispered. There were demons in the hollows of the trees. It couldn’t be trusted, it couldn’t be loved. And yet I did, I loved it. It was my home and I had always loved it, wicked though it was. Beware the red parts of the forest, boy. Beware the wolf’s beckoning howl. Darning-needle, prick thine eye. Burning poker, stab thine thigh. Darkling, darkling, through the trees, something dreadful calls to thee.

We moved on and a grove of beech trees obscured my view of the mountain vista.

Miles into the far-off sky, I could see the fat, insectoid shape of a warship. It moved like a bloated corpsefly, shiny green exoskeleton reflecting off the sunlit moisture in the clouds.

“Seen more and more of those lately.” I shaded my eyes as I stared upwards. “I can’t tell which direction it’s going.”

“South.” Cale flicked his dead cigarette down into the dirt. “Must be going home. The same direction we’re going. To the Accursed City.”

I wrestled down some deep-bone surge of fear. We don’t speak of the city, the city will hear.

“And how long until then, you think? Till we reach the city.” I took my hands out from inside my gloves and rubbed the sore, cold-dry skin between thumb and forefinger.

Cale leaned back, looking up at the brim of his stockman’s hat. “Three days, may could be, if we don’t stop moving but to sleep and restock the water. The Pilgrimroad goes straight down, through the Redfaines, through the wastelands, following the Bösewicht. It’ll take us right to the foot of the city. Drop us at the front door.” The doctor was quiet for a moment, considering. He patted at the pocket of his chambray shirt where he usually kept his cigarette tin, didn’t find it, and gave up. “You really think you’ll find her there, huh?” he asked. “Seven odd years later.”

“I don’t except to see her just standing at the city gates, waiting for me. But I do expect there’ll be something to find. Someone who remembers her. Someone who might know where she’s gone.” Or, I thought, where she’s buried.

“What I don’t understand,” said Cale, “is why you waited so goddamn long. Sure, we were young when she went missing. And lots of shit’s been dredged up since then, what with Larrington, and your father, and your brother – ” He glanced askew at me, looked sheepish, and cleared his throat. “Anyway. But why only now? You coulda gone after we got out of the trenches at Larrington. You coulda gone after we finished at Kirkwell. You coulda gone in any of those years we spent wandering. But why only now that the emperor’s dead?”

“He was the last thing standing in my way. The last thing keeping me from finding her.”

“But was he? You really think he was responsible, that he did something to her? How could he have, from all the way across the continent? And even then, he ain’t really gone. We’ve got an empress now. And the city – the city still belongs to the duchess. Nothing’s changed.” He had this sad, sympathetic look in his crystal green eyes.

I laughed, because the truth was that I had been afraid of the emperor. Not that I wasn’t afraid of the new empress or the duchess on her blackstone throne. But it seemed to me that now was as good a time as any to go back. If I were to be the prodigal son, here was the hour for my return.

“It’s just time,” I said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with his death. It’s just time to go.”

Cale shook his head at the winding road in front of us. “You’re a strange one, mousekin,” he murmured. “A strange one indeed.”

We rode on, and the meadowlarks cooed down at us from the branches. We were sloping ever downward, down the twisting red path, arcing across the mountain’s face. We began to see quivering fields of cotton and swathes of golden wheat. The cornstalks were dead this time of year, withered husks lining the highway. This was the foothills, and it was near here that we would find Aberforde.

In the early afternoon we came to a crooked signpost in the road. A raven was perched atop the arrow pointing to Aberforde. It blinked at us with eyes of chipped onyx, cocking its head to one side.

“An omen?” Cale wondered aloud.

The bird cawed once, accusatorily.

“Just a bird,” I said.

“It’s never just a bird,” he muttered, and turned the horse to the left, following the raven’s ominous glare.

Aberforde was half a mile down the road and as we approached the outskirts, Cale got fidgety. He took off his hat and smoothed back his sloe-black hair, rubbed at his unshaved chin. “It’s been such a long while,” he said.

“Two years ain’t such a long time.”

“It feels like it though, boy does it,” he muttered. “Sure feels like it.”

We slowed the caravan as we came upon the ridge overlooking the town in the valley below. It made me feel sick to my stomach standing up there and staring down, like I was looking at a dead dog I’d once loved. The town was quiet, the streets seemed mostly empty but for a few farmers carting their goods into market. The rusted bells in the old white chapel were silent. Far to the west side of town, through the marshes and down the causeway, was Cale’s father’s home, a grand black mansion sinking into the mud.

And just behind that mansion, right on the edge of the rye fields, there would be a little ranch house which, generations ago, belonged to an overseer and his family. But just a few years ago it was my family who had lived there, my father who was hofmeister, private tutor to the doctor’s children.

I could just see the misty outline of the manor, like a ship coming in with the fog. A dark house, a haunted house. There were many ghosts that dwelled in those rafters. Through the salt marches and the thick, treacherous muds, it sat a decrepit building, black as the old, rotted wood it was built from. Inside it would be only darker. The corridors creaked, rats scurried behind the faded wallpaper. Years of marsh winds and wet, salty air had weathered it. The walls were distended in places like a pregnant woman’s belly. The floors were cracked and bending, the finish was peeling. The windows were gray and clouded over. There was no electricity in the manor, even though the rest of Aberforde was wired. The halls were lit only by candlelight at night and from far away, it looked like a lighthouse on some ghostly shore.

There would only be a handful of servants in the place, one dour old butler and his wife, a ruddy-cheeked cook. There was a single maid, timid and mute since birth, who tended to the doctor’s wife and daughter.

It was a big house with lots of rooms and very few people to occupy them. It was always quiet, which made it all the easier to hear the ghosts. As I child I found them in all sorts of place, hiding under the massive oaken dining table with its feet like a lion’s, nestled in the dusty sconces of the basement, sleeping in the old graves in the yard, below the weeping willows.

Only my mother had believed me about the ghosts. When I told my father, he laughed and rattled off some lesson on physics and the impracticality of life after death. But they weren’t dead, they were still-living things that slunk through the shadows and sang lullabies in the dark corners. But my father did not believe that, either.

My brother must have believed me, at least a little, because it frightened him. If I annoyed him by talking about it he would shout at me or pinch my arm until I cried. Tycho was older and bigger and I was certainly more afraid of him than of the ghosts. But I could run to the basement to hide from him, because he was too scared to go down there. It was only my mother who ever went down into the basement.

The Montgomery children had not liked my ghost stories, either, though I doubted they believed them. My father was their teacher, after all. Cale was a stout and black-haired child, looking very much like his ursine father. His little sister, Keziah, was slim and fair as their mother.

There was once when I tried to show Cale the ghosts. Towards evening one night we were sitting in the library window, reading by candlelight. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of a shape, black-and-burgundy, slinking through the bookshelves. It had horn-like protrusions coming from its shadowy head, like the minotaur in the storybooks my mother read to me. Gooseflesh climbed up my arms as I watched it sneaking through the library. I should have ignored it, but the desire to acknowledge it was like an itch at the back of my throat.

“See it, there?” I had said, talking Cale’s arm.

His green eyes were blank. “What are you talking about, Laertes?”

“There – crawling by the shelves. Don’t you see it?”

“You’re scaring me,” he murmured. “There’s nothing there.”

The creature turned to look at me. Its eyes were like fire.

I looked away. Tears burned in the corners of my eyes and I rubbed them away. Later in the night, cheeks tearstained and eyes puffy, I went down to the basement looking for my mother.

“What’s the matter, little one?” She pulled me into her arms. She leaned her head down so that her auburn curls, the same as my own, fell down over my face like a protective veil.

“Why doesn’t anyone believe me? Why can’t anyone else see them?” I sobbed against her chest.

“Oh, my little Achilles, I don’t know,” she said, rubbing small circles on my back.

“Can you see them, mama?” I whispered.

She was quiet for a long time. “No,” she said. “No, my dear, not anymore. But when I was as small as you, I could. I grew out of it, as I’m sure you will too. But I know they’re there. I believe you. I will always believe you.”

My mother lifted me in her arms, placing me on top of her alchemy table. I looked down at the variety of tools and containers, boiling beakers and clouded bain-maries. It must have all meant something to her, the bluish steam and the burning copper dust, the hot bowls of blood-colored water and the tins of blackish, ground plant material. It looked like a witch’s brew from a storybook, I thought. And perhaps this was why the people in the village hated her, why they called her a witch, why they threw stones.

“Do you know what alchemy really is, my love?” asked Sanna Carmody, nodding down at her table. “Some people will say it’s magic, but that’s not true. It’s only a form of science that is hard to explain. It’s about observing the world around us and using the energies that are imbued in things. Everything is connected by tiny little particles. Things we can’t even see. And yet we know they must be there, like invisible strings tying everything in the world together. So just because there’s something you can’t see or can’t explain, that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, or isn’t there. Never mind what your father may say.” She gave me a knowing wink and a wicked smile.

I smiled, but started to squirm, struggling to understand. “So…are they alchemy, then?”

“Perhaps,” said my mother. “Perhaps they’re the energies that help me perform my alchemy. Or the byproduct of the transmutations I do.”

“That would explain why there are so many in the basement,” I said.

She widened her eyes at this, but nodded. “Oh…yes. I suppose it would. Come with me for a moment. Let me show you something different.”

She led me up the stairs to the ground floor, but we did not stop there. We kept going up, up, up the main, spiraling staircase at the center of the manor, up the servant’s stairs on the fourth floor, through the large, dusty attic with the sewing mannequins and cracked mirrors in the corners and the old, broken furniture. Finally we came to a room I’d never been to in the manor before, a kind of domed observatory at the very top, where there was old stargazing equipment, telescopes and ancient nautical star-charts beneath a glass ceiling. Above us and around us was the night sky, pinpricks of white light on velvet.

My mother had always loved the sky. My father called her his angel, beloved of the stars, for the way she could wander on a clear night and stand in the starlight, pointing up to name each constellation. In the observatory, we looked up together and she whispered of their mythologies, of Orion, the hunter, the swordsman in the sky.

“Do all the stars have names?” I murmured, my eyes glazing over the dusty astronomy books and compasses scattered on a forgotten worktable. One of the Montgomerys, some time ago, must have loved the stars, too.

“I’m sure they do, though I only know some,” she said. “Some people believe that the heavens are a portal into another realm and that every star is the bright eye of a god. But the gods do like to keep their names secret. The patterns of the stars are used in alchemy, you see. So it must be some cosmic force that makes it so. Ghosts or gods or demons, it doesn’t matter. How else could the world have such perfect symmetry in all things? The ground and the skies, all magic, all divine in their roots.”

I thought of how my father had once showed me the tiny patterns on a leaf and how identical they were to the patterns of lightning crashing in the sky, that threading, veined design. I had seen the alchemical symbols, too, and how they were traced on the maps by the astronomers of old.

“It’s impossible to understand,” Sanna Carmody said. “But we can try.”

“How? If it’s impossible?” I asked.

She looked up at the stars with longing. I thought perhaps she wished she was out there, swimming through that dark sea, with the light of the stars to guide her, glowing orbs floating in the blackness, as she rode by on a shooting star.

“Everything has a soul, Laertes. This world, and all the others, and everything and everyone in them, has a soul. That is what connects us with all creatures, with all things. That’s the core of alchemy, of science. And it’s the soul we can’t understand.”

Sometimes, I imagined she made it to the stars, that if I had the ability to look far enough, I’d see her dancing through the rose-tinted constellations, holding hands with Orion, as the stardust fell into her hair.

As I grew older, I did not stop seeing the ghosts. And I felt other things, too, things that had always been there, but men were not meant to acknowledge. It was my goldblood, Cale thought, our ancient alchemical heritage from the gods and heroes of lore. It was like a snake, a horned and dragonish beast, coiled in the pit of me.

Cale touched my arm gently. I reached up and flattened his cowlick.

Then came a rustling in the brush. Hands parted the chokeberry bushes and out she stepped, smile delicate and faltering as the shivering dead leaves in the branches. She drew one finger to her lips and pointed up the path. Wordlessly, like a wandering ghost girl at the edge of the highway, barefoot in her old pink muslin gown, she walked ahead and lead us to a branching path in the road. It was just barely hidden by the shrubbery and clinging kudzu, narrow as a trail worn by the hooves of deer.

“Park that here, behind the trees,” she said softly. “So it’s hidden.”

Cale did as she instructed, directing Earnshaw off the main path and into the cool shadows of the trees. The horse balked slightly at the spindly branches scraping her neck and back, but she obediently moved forward until the entirety of the caravan was veiled by the trees.

We left Earnshaw and the caravan, dismounting and following Keziah Montgomery further into the woods, along a strip of rusted tracks, unused for generations. She stepped blithely, neatly over the winding roots and snatches of snakegrass, as this was a path she had tread many times before. Through the lacey canopy of the trees, a round stone structure became visible. The old Bell Gristmill, a place that had once seemed so terrible and dark to me, now benign and senile in the sunlight.

Keziah stepped around a rusted wheelbarrow and heaps of old grain-grinding equipment. The gristmill rose up like some ancient military fortress, a cathedral in the middle of the forest. But it was just a cylinder of old gray rock, crumbling, sinking in on itself. The entrance was barred by a sheet of scrap metal, which Keziah deftly hefted to the side. She ducked beneath the worm-rotted tinder beams fallen in the doorway and entered the mill. Cale and I followed suit.

Inside, between the jagged edges of broken metal and the sound of rats scurrying through moldy old grain sacks, the ruin was brightly lit, the sun spilling in from above like heavenly light. Keziah found herself a place amongst the weeds and vines, avoiding patches of snakegrass, and spread out an old quilt on the ground. She settled down, cross-legged, and patted the ground beside her.

“Does anyone know you’re here?” Cale asked quickly.

Keziah shook her head, black curls bobbing. “O’course not,” she said.

“Not even mother?” murmured Cale.

Keziah took a deep breath. “If I had told her, she woulda told the doctor. You know that.”

Cale looked disappointed. He kneeled on the ground and embraced his sister, pulling her into his arms. She buried her face in his chest and began to sob, wretched ugly cries punctuated by bouts of sniffling. When she was done with that she leapt to her feet and threw her arms around my neck.

“Oh Laertes, Laertes,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I loved him so. I’m so sorry…”

Awkwardly, I patted her back.

Recovering quickly, Keziah nestled back onto the quilt and smiled brightly, her cheeks glistening with tears. “Okay, then!” she said, grabbing the picnic basket she had brought with her and unlatching the top. “I brought some good things. Cranberries mama and I canned last week and a loaf of bread we baked this morning. Oh, and here are some tarts, which I bought from the baker. Apple butter, some deer jerky, sausages, and cheese. And this.” She pulled out a brown bottle wrapped in linen and tossed it to me.

Rye whiskey, grown and bottled in Aberforde. She gave me a knowing wink.

Keziah passed around frosted bottles of cider and we sat down to eat. Cale had brought the radio from the caravan and he set it to the one crackly station we got up here, which only ever played spooky, lonesome mountain songs about meeting the devil at the crossroads and drowning your babies in a well.

“I’ll be leaving here soon, too,” Keziah said, licking the sausage grease from her fingers. “I got a job lined up at a hotel down the mountain. Mama’s friend owns the place. I���ll just be changing the sheets, sweeping the floors, that sort of thing. But it’s something. I know mama would like me to leave here. To go anywhere but here.”

“You be careful, though, a’right?” said Cale. “The rest of the world ain’t like Aberforde, where you’re the daughter of the man who owns all the land in sight.”

“I know that,” said Keziah, tucking her knees to her chest. “That’s exactly why the rest of the world is better than Aberforde. No one will know who I am.”

I could understand that sentiment well enough. It was why Cale and I had left, why we’d gone so far. To travel in countries and cities where no one knew our names.

Cale took his sister’s hand and squeezed it. “You’ll do good. Whatever you decide to do, you’ll do just fine.”

They looked so alike, brother and sister, that same raven-black hair, dark and slick as oil, those same verdant green eyes, savage and keen as the eyes of a hunting puma.

Through the static, the radio hummed out a few verses between a hollow-sounding guitar chord, She comes down yellow mountain, on a dark flat land she rides…

“So you’re going into the city?” Keziah asked nervously, her voice lowered to a whisper as if the trees themselves might overhear our conversation. “All the way down south?”

“Aye,” said Cale. “It’s not that far from here, really. But it’s not an easy journey.”

Oh they say she died one winter, when there came a chilling frost…

“And what are you gonna do there?” murmured Keziah, looking anxiously between us.

Cale glanced at me, as if seeking permission to answer. I gave an indifferent shrug.

“Laertes wants to find his mother.” Cale’s voice dropped to a whisper, as well.

Keziah turned her wide-eyed gaze on me. “Is that true, Laertes?”

By the dark of the moon I planted, but there came an early snow…

“Yeah,” I said, and busied myself with wrapping up some of the food and putting it back in the basket.

Cale watched me with wary eyes, watery glaze slipping off me and back to his sister. “He thinks he’ll find clues about what happened to her if we go there. But, o’course, there’s more in the Accursed City than just that…”

“They’re all there, aren’t they?” said Keziah. “All the boys.”

The children I’d once known, yes, the boys I’d loved as a child. They were there, alright, like blurry faces, charcoal smeared with tears. An old photograph, waterlogged and faded to sepia. I couldn’t see their faces. Ghosts without features, expressionless, blank as the rocks run smooth by the river current.

There's been a hoot owl howling outside my window now, for six nights in a row. She's coming for me, I know –  

Cale switched off the radio. “We should go,” he said.

“So soon?” Keziah scrambled to her knees, reaching out for Cale’s shoulder as if to forcefully staple him back onto the ground. “But you just got here.”

“We gotta get back on the road if we plan on reaching the bottom of the mountain before midnight,” said Cale.

“Please,” begged Keziah, tears streaming down her cheeks again like the grail overflowing with blood. “Don’t leave me alone here.”

Cale drew her into his arms again, pressing his lips to the top of her head. “You’re a brave girl,” he said. “You’ve been doing it for nineteen years now, plenty of those without me. What’s a few more months, huh?”

She didn’t sob anymore, but the tears didn’t cease altogether, either. She refused to wipe her eyes, but stood pitiful and defiant in the sun-dappled gristmill, snot and salty tears running down her chin. “Take all that with you,” she said, motioning limply at the basket of food. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Thank you, Kez.” Cale took her face and kissed each wet cheek.

By late afternoon, we were on the road again. Keziah stood behind us on the path, watching the caravan rumble away, the horse picking up speed as her hooves trudged up red mud and coppery stones.

“You take care of my brother, Laertes Carmody, you hear me?” Keziah called after us. “He’s mad with love for you, so you watch out for him, and don’t go breaking his heart, or you’ll have me to answer to…!”

I leaned over the side with a grin, waving back at her. “You can count on me! I’ll bring him back in one piece, I swear it! Fare thee well! Grosgot!” I called.

She looked small in the distance, her hands falling from where they’d been cupped around her peach-colored lips. One white arm raised in a final gesture, as if reaching forward, fingers splayed.

I glanced over at Cale, whose face had just the slightest tinge of a flush beneath his hat. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he muttered.

“What, that you need me to protect you?” I said with a musing, teasing smile. “Or that you’re in love with me?”

He tugged his hat further over his brow. “I should think the answer to that would be plenty obvious.”

I tilted back my head in a laugh, but felt the sound catch in my throat and the unfamiliar, unexpected sting of tears in the corners of my eyes.

We rode on through the afternoon and into the early evening. The road was dotted with old forgotten things, memories and reminders of the dead. We passed old abandoned farm buildings, blanketed by crimped blankets of kudzu. Broken down trucks, so rust-dissolved and overgrown with greenery they’d become part of the landscape. Bikes forgotten in the forest by little boys sent off to war.

Little shrines dotted the path, knee-height stone altars where weathered stone depictions of the gods were perched, surrounded by the relics and offerings of the pilgrims, pale seashells and bent coins and wood carved into the shapes of an ailing arm or leg. And candles, mounds of candlewax, where pilgrims from a decade ago or a week ago had sat for a moment in the dark of the forest path and lit a candle for their chosen deity. Thousands of peaceful, desperate, hopeful moments of prayer and flickering candlelight and the deep, dark forest rising up like a castle wall behind it.

“I’ve seen shrines for every god and saint I can think of along this road,” I murmured. “Except for Silurian.”

“The God of Death doesn’t get a shrine,” said Cale. “Building a shrine, lighting a candle, invites an audience with that entity, right? No one wants an audience with Death.”  

“I don’t know,” I said. “I might have a few questions for him.”

But I had already seen the God of Death, had met him on a variety of occasions, in fact. And I knew I couldn’t ask questions of him, because he never spoke. Death had no mouth.

When the sun began to set, a fiery globe of liquid gold between the treetops, we took out the picnic basket and ate some more of the sausages and cranberries. I uncorked the bottle of whiskey and took a thirsty sip. It burned raw down my throat, like a gulp of icy, dry air. It made my lips tingle, my cheeks burn. “Want a swig?” I offered the bottle to Cale.

He shook his head. “All yours, mousekin.”

The trees grew thinner and the road seemed to be more level beneath us. The sky above turned to a particular shade of dusty rose as the sun disappeared behind distant violet hills. The bullfrogs began their croaking in the bushes and the cicadas screamed their night-songs.

“There’s the river again,” said Cale, tilting his head to the side. “Hear it? We’re almost down the mountain.”

Soon the moon unmasked her globular red face, dripping with that viscous carmine light. She looked angry, seething like a wound in the sky’s flesh, pulsating and hot.

We came around a bend in the road and passed through the last of the thick forest.

“By the gods,” murmured Cale, staring at the new landscape before us.

We had come to the wastelands. They sprawled like gray, diseased skin across the land. The velvet black of the horizon met nothing but the sickly bluish pallor of desert, the seam broken only by tufts of vile snakegrass. It was a pockmarked, hellish land, populated only by bandit troupes, ragged creatures mutated by the waters of the river, and the wandering, stumbling plague-stricken.

Cale paused a moment, took a deep breath, and reached into the side of his leather satchel. He took up a pouch of tobacco and began rolling himself a cigarette, spreading the blackish leaves onto waxed paper. But he also had a tiny, twisted packet of green powder, some of which he sprinkled over the leaves.

“Mescala,” he said at my curious look. “Figured it was appropriate. I know it’s not as strong as what you’d prefer, but you want some?” He rolled up the cigarette and offered it to me.

I crooked my finger at the half-empty pocket. “I’ll take it straight,” I said. “I hate smoking.”

He handed me the packet and I tipped the contents onto my tongue, knocking it back with a swig of whiskey. It tasted bitter and chalky, the unpalatable consistency and flavor of fine, powdery ash.

Cale lit his cigarette. The smell was more pleasant than the taste, a fragrance of dry earth and spice. The long stream of smoke spilling out from between his lips like a dragon’s breath was a curious green color, swirling against the black sky.

“I must say, doctor, I’m quite surprised you carry stuff like this around.” I smirked at him.

He gave me a wry look. “It has medicinal properties.”

“Mm. I’ll reckon it does.”

“We should ride on a ways, find some shelter, if we can, and turn in for the night,” said Cale.

The wheels of the caravan groaned sharply as we passed from the soft dirt of the mountain path to the coarse, cracked blacktop of the highway. The winding highways, passing through the wastelands like several interlocking serpents, hadn’t been tended to in millennia. The cement existed only in patches like isolated islands, connected by the faint ghosts of painted white lines in places.

We crawled along the highway for an hour or so. “I feel like there ain’t much chance of us finding shelter out here,” I murmured eventually, glaring out at the flat emptiness of the land.

“You’re probably right,” Cale acquiesced. “We can just stop here. But keep your gun close, there are bandits lurking all over the Outerlands.”

We parked the caravan in a roadside ditch where, hopefully, it would be hidden from a distance. After watering the horse and building a fire with the dry kindling we’d brought from the forest, we spread out our bedrolls and settled in for the night.

“Almost there.” Cale gave a heavy sigh and removed his wire-rimmed glasses, folding them and placing them carefully in a leather pouch beside his bedroll. “Just a few days more, and we’ll reach the city.”

“It scares me,” I murmured, “to think about.”

I fell back on my bedroll, pistol tucked neatly beneath my pillow. The sky hung over me like something black and breathing, watching me from above with its single crimson eye, its skin pricked with the silver of stars.

Cale brought out the radio. The signal was slightly better here than in the mountains. The speakers crackled out some melancholy fiddle tune, no words, just the sound of those lonely strings echoing over the mesas and through the ravines.

I slept beneath the moon’s enchanting eye and I dreamed of a witch.

 _____________

The witch knew she was to be burned.

In the cold of the wintry forest a cart carrying prisoners of war rumbled up the mountain path. In the back of the cart, this knowledge of her fate kept the witch warm. Even as the snow drifted down to settle on her matted black hair and the numb, freckled skin of her arms, she felt tongues of warmth unraveling deep inside.

Most of the prisoners were like her, starving Ipagachians from destroyed villages, those that were too old, too young, or too rebellious – like herself – to be sold as slaves. Some would be taken to Cattalia to work in the copper mines until their backs gave out, until the sun dried them and the thirst drove them mad.

But they would not enslave the witch, would not put her to work. Because they feared her.

They chained her hands and feet and placed a spiked iron collar around her neck so that she could not move her head, could not fold her hands in prayer. They immobilized her, made her like cattle, a heifer to be taken to market or slaughtered for her tender meat. The pine needles fell in her hair.

Amongst the shivering, huddled grandmothers and squalling babes, there was another prisoner, another woman young and strong as the witch. She was not Ipagachian. By the darkness of her skin and the blue-black color of her hair, cut off at her shoulders, she was Gorgothian. She was chained like the witch. She wore a woolen black cloak with a cowl over her head, hooded and furtive. Even so, as the cart rocked and tilted, the witch caught occasional glimpses of her face beneath the cowl, and saw that her eyes were bound in bloodied cloth, blinded like a martyred angel.

The soldiers whispered about her. She was once a knightess of the old Gorgothian throne, now a rebel and an outlaw. The empress would pay well to have her rid of, and discreetly. She, like the witch, was to be executed today.

The cart rumbled on. The oxen snorted in the cold. One of the children sniffled miserably.

“They will not burn you, I’ll wager,” murmured the witch. She spoke in the language of the Gorgothians, which she knew well. She knew many languages well.

The knightess looked up, though she could not see behind the bandages.

“The Cattalians believe that the alligator blood of Gorgothians is flammable, like gasoline. Like the plague-stricken,” said the witch. “A silly belief. But they fear to set you aflame. Perhaps they will chop off your hands and feet and watch as you crawl about like a wounded animal, until you bleed out in the snow. They will take your head and their general will mount it on his wall. They adore such trophies.”

The knightess said nothing.

The soldiers drew the cart to a stop in the middle of a snowy grotto surrounded by the thickness of pine trees. They were shuffling about, the Cattalian soldiers, smoking and shivering in the cold. They were accustomed to sand, not snow.

They came for the witch, then. They took hold of her iron collar and pulled her to her feet, throwing her out of the cart. The spikes dug into the newly-healed wounds at her throat, opening them, smearing warm blood on her white neck and chest.

A pyre had been erected at the center of the grotto. A cross, like the one on which Jesus was mounted so many eons ago, staked in a pile of rocks and piled high with dry kindling. Christ was but an old god, forgotten by the centuries. No one cared to worship martyrs anymore.

“Undress her,” boomed the general, brown mouth twisted in lecherous glee.

The soldiers took her with their cold leathery hands and stripped the gray rags from her sore, scarred flesh. She stood naked amongst the wolves, but she was not cold, even as the frosty air struck her bare skin. For she was a priestess of the Moon-Mother, and the cold was servant to her whims.

“Get her up there. And bring the lizard down, let her get a taste of what’s to come,” said the general.

Soldiers lifted the witch up onto the rocks. They wrapped her chained wrists around the wooden arms of the cross. They used the collar to lock the back of her neck against it. While these machinations went on, she watched the Gorgothian knightess be led down from the cart and onto the stone ground. She did not lift her head as they walked her towards the center, as they braced her shoulders, made her stand to face the pyre.

Some of the prisoners in the cart murmured amongst themselves. Some, who had seen this all before, were silent and stone-eyed.

A soldier poured a bucket of pinesap over the witch’s head, drenching her white skin with it. Her hair clung in black sticky ropes to her chest. It felt like the birth viscera of some old, fishy beast’s belly, as if she’d just been born and entered the arid, cold world, yet to shed her caul.

“Witch!” shouted the general, his words carried on the winter wind. “You are accused of the practice of devilry and sorcery and the murder of seventeen Cattalian soldiers with your blasphemous magicks. How do you plead?”

“Guilty,” she whispered, her lips sticky with black tar.

“You admit to the murders and your knowledge of forbidden arcane arts?” he said.

Gooseflesh patterned her arms. The forest watched her amiably. “I admit to protecting my village when you raped my woman and slaughtered my children,” she murmured, voice heavy with the gravelly acid of fury.

The general had to step closer, lean in, just to hear her words.

“I admit to practicing the earth-magicks of my goddess in my divinely ordained right as a priestess of Kubaba…” she said.

“A false idol,” spat the general. “Under Nefehotep and Ishtal, the Blessed Son, worship of any other deity is strictly forbidden. This is written in the Code of the Cattalian Union, a law under which you are now bound. As has been decreed by God-King Kronos of House Naamunqar himself.”

“Kronos is not my king,” spat the witch. Her blood ran hot with her righteous anger. She felt as if she was glowing, the gleam of her goldblood shining through her translucent, crystal skin.

“That is heresy,” said the general, with eyes narrowed. “The lands of Ipagachi and all its peoples are now under the rule of God-King Kronos. You will give respect to his glorious name.”

“And if I do not? What will you do, burn me at the stake?” she whispered, and let out a hoarse laugh.

The general was becoming frustrated. “Light the fire,” he snapped. “Burn the witch.”

She looked outward as they stepped forward, the soldiers with their pitch torches, that black and acrid stench of burning pine smoke. They placed the orange flames at the edge of the kindling. It sizzled and popped.

In the grotto, the knightess was looking upward, towards the witch on the pyre. She could not see, not with those blood-stained bandages across her eyes, the wounds underneath. Even so, the witch felt her eyes.

“This witch is found guilty of crimes against the Cattalian Union, and the sentence is death,” growled the general. “Have you any last words?”

“I curse you,” she seethed, a smile wolfish and sharp-toothed peeling from her lips. The fire burned towards her, tickling the tips of her bare toes. “I curse your country and all its people. Your crops will be devoured by locust swarms, your water turn to blood, your women bear the grotesque children of demonkind. By my goldblood and by the Horned God Anaktoron, I curse you all!”

“Hurry up! Get more wood on that fire!” shouted the enraged general.

She felt the hairs on her legs singeing, the blisters forming. “And by my right as priestess of Kubaba, the Moon-Mother, I curse your king! I curse Kronos to die by the hand of one he loves and to be forever damned to the hellfire of Sheol-and-Abaddon! He will fall, as your beloved Ozymandias once did, and on that day, one of my people will stand over his mangled corpse and laugh!”

She could smell the burning of her own skin and hair. It was a sweet, singing pain.

“Silence the hellcat! Get more pitch on that fire!” crowed the general, red-faced.

Another bucket of pinesap was tossed onto the wood, bursting into tongues of flames. She screamed as it burned and her scream became a laugh, cackling and hellish, the cry of the wounded tiger.

I have played your game long enough, she thought.

The witch clenched her red, blistering fingers into fists, and her goldblood burned. There was a song in her, somewhere deep, far beyond the whispering taiga, and when she closed her eyes she heard the drumbeats of an ancient jungle, of blackstone and lost pyramids. She saw a pair of eyes, prismatic blue and ice.

The chains on her wrists and ankles crumbled to ash. The fire took them as if the metal were little more than sawdust, dissipating on the wind. The collar around her neck snapped open. The flames hit her blood and it turned to steam.

Through the smoke, the soldiers saw what was happening and they stepped back in horror, cowering. They watched the witch and her outstretched arm, covered in blood and burning pitch, and the long gray fingers that pointed to the Gorgothian knightess. Her chains and shackles, too, came undone.

The witch flicked her wrist. The general’s rifle was torn from his hands by invisible fingers and thrown into those of the knightess, stolen and swept away as if by the wind itself.

The outlaw knightess hesitated, feeling the hot steel between her palms. And then she reached up and tore the bandage from her eyes. They were eyes like portals, pink and silver starlight, and they were unharmed; a horrid, bloody gash ran down one eyebrow, over the bridge of her nose, and under her right eye-socket. But she was not blind. Oh no, far from it.

The knightess fired on the soldiers. They took up their own arms, but they were terrified. Terrified of the witch on the cross.

Her flesh aflame, the witch ran. She had no desire to stay behind and see how the gun battle played out. She ran into the forest, naked and in pain, and the pine needles stuck to the tar on the bottom of her blackened feet.

Because though she was a witch, she was still human. And she could be wounded. And she could die. The smoke in her lungs slowed her, made her cough and tremble and fall into the snow. She heaved and blood and black soot spewed from her lips. But she stood again, on the open blisters of her feet, and she ran again.

They would speak of her in the Cattalian camps. Of the witch, the tigress who escaped, who hunted in the woods, stalked them and carved out their livers for supper, drank their blood from their skulls.

When the moon came out, she collapsed in the light of her goddess. And she felt the cold of the snow beneath her. Her magic was fading, her goldblood cooling. She could make poultices for the wounds, draughts to ward off infection, she knew how – but she was too weak to even move. Her body ached and trembled.

And then there was a shadow over her. She had not heard the footsteps, the crackling of the pine branches.

“I followed your tracks,” said the knightess. “As the Cattalians will do, if you do not leave this place.”

The witch did not respond. Her lips were burnt and her throat was too dry to make a sound. Her head rested in a pile of pine needles.

“You did not need to save me,” said the knightess, kneeling before the dying girl. “You could have just as easily escaped and left me behind. So why? Did your goddess tell you to do it?”

The witch lifted one hand towards the moon; it fell and landed on the other woman’s knee. “So there will be…someone to remember my name…”

“What is your name?”

“Keda,” she said, her lips barely moving, “Mura’sada.”

“Keda Mura’sada,” repeated the knightess with a  stiff nod. “I will remember.”

The knightess put down her weapon and pushed back the cowl from her head. She lifted her wrist to her mouth and bit down, tearing at the skin until it bled freely. With one hand she supported the witch’s head as she fed her, poured her goldblood across her lips.

To Keda it tasted sweet as honey. She moaned with the warmth that flowed through her chest, grasping for the arm, for that supple, life-giving flesh. Like drinking at a mother’s breast. Her body stung with a new pain, a gentle pulling, vibrating of the skin as her wounds, ever so slowly, began the healing process. Skin reweaving itself, sewn at the edges, regenerating. It tingled, effervescent, and boiled from her lips in a hot breath.

“It is not much,” said the knightess, panting as the life pulsed out from her, dragged on her heart muscles. “But it is all I can offer.”

The witch let go, desperately, falling back into the snow. She rolled onto her back facing up at the moon, blood glistening around her mouth.

The knightess stood, taking up her weapon. “Sunkawa Vorgas,” she said. “Remember my name, too.”

At the edge of the forest, she paused – looked back – hesitated.

And the witch laughed at the moon’s face.

[spitefulpumpkin]

Moonshine Lake; Ch.6: The Doctor

Mirror on AO3

Self-indulgent as hell AU fic about a boy meeting a fish creature and their unusual love story. Co-plotted with @jyagantz

Trigger Warnings: Homophobia, Bullying, Animal Cruelty, Drug Abuse, non-explicit Interspecies Sex Unbeta’d, mostly written on mobile!

Gossip spreads best between candle light and stone walls. The recent events in Adlersbrunn had reached the university late, three days after, and they tossed Jamison into a panic. Autumn had barely started and already the young man was on a carriage back, praying none of his worries ring true.

One of them wasn't. Despite the close proximity of their mansion to the woods, it and Camilla were unharmed by the bursts of fire that had spread over the surrounding greens of the town. At dusk, he decided to move along the stream. Praying his second worry wasn't true either. The story was bizarre. Farmers, craftsmen and soldiers grouped up and marched up the Moonshine Meadows, leaving behind a trail of dirt, soot and ash. Locals rumored almost a fourth of the Lord's lands are now gone. As Jamison lurked across the familiar path, he saw nothing familiar anymore. The trees were bare black skeletons made of coal, the grass was stepped flat and dead by too many feet and he was pretty sure he could smell burnt flesh from somewhere. He pushed the nightmarish thought aside. His lungs were aching from the smoke that still hang in the air when he reached the lake. Blood splatters covered the stones by the shore, the ripped nets floating on the surface. He was shaking. In the grass lay a bracelet. He recognized the seashells immediately. He collected them for Akande himself.

A scream broke through the evening air, shaking those who could hear it. And drawing up a smile on the features of the witch, who watched from the furthest corner of the dead forest, that from now on would be known as the Wilds by the locals.

At first he refused to believe. He would roam the woods and fields, every time he returned, trying to find clues, but only finding animal carcasses and broken eggs. More of them. Monsters. Bastards. Every single one in this town. They deserve no sympathy. They deserve pain. None of his bottled messages got a response. Even when he desperately tossed them into the ocean. Without a drive to return home, the man dove into his studies instead. Manically trying to keep his mind busy he tried to master whatever he could touch. Engineering. Biology. Chemistry. One of those coated him a leg. Foolish. It was worth while. He became one of the best students the university ever had. A doctor with barely thirty years old. And already graying. In the same year, Camilla had to be laid to rest, next to her beloved husband. The day after her funeral, the last staff who stayed with her until the end left the mansion as her son moved in. That was the day, on which Jamison became Junkenstein.

The doctor spent his life secluded. Even let his food be delivered rather than going out on the market himself. The only time people saw him was when he looked too deep into the glass at the tavern or when he tried to sell his ideas to a noble. He can't live off of the family's saved riches forever after all. The Lord of Adlersbrunn, who reigned over the town and its surroundings, was a gentle man. However he had little faith in the doctor. He knew his story: A former weakling, picked on by his peers for talking to himself. People called him crazy. Bewitched, even. He mostly tolerated the scientist, gave him funds to work on his weird "robots" as he called them. A promising addition to his military force for sure. This is how it would go. For over seven years. And still, the witch waited patiently.

...

It was quiet at the tavern that October night. Only the old soldier and his alchemist friend sat in their usual corner as Junkenstein bent over his notes. The secret project that had been taken form in his basement still required parts. And he would need to find a way to get those. "Evening, doc!" He twitched, glancing at the bard of the tavern. A bright young man with an even brighter smile. "What's that face about, man? Got the boot from Wilhelm again?" "If you wanna put it like that." he scoffed back, pushing his empty glass away. When Lúcio started talking to him, Junkenstein knew it was a slow business day. The bard set his lite aside. "Hey, have you heard the rumors?" "Which ones? This bloody town does nothin' but gossip." "About the swamp monster, man! The hunter has seen it. Like, two and a half meters tall, almost as wide, blue skin, sharp teeth..." "McCree talks a lot when he's tipsy. And even if, it might just be some stray mer. One of those these bastards haven't killed..." "Wait, you say there are mer people around here?" Lúcio was not originally from the town. Might explain his less superstitious attitude. "Last living ones I saw was fifteen years ago." Junkenstein hummed and left coin next to his spot on the table as he packed his books. "You saw them?" Lúcio seemed to beam in excitement. "Saw. Note the past tense, bard. They are not around anymore, because a bunch of scared farmers slaughtered them and their offspring. Those you spot nowadays probably only pass by on their way to the oceans. Like many sea creatures do." "Wow! You know a lot about them. You learned that in academia?" "Most of it." He lied. His backpack was heavy from his utensils. "...McCree saw them in the swamp, you say?" Lúcio nodded. The doctor hummed quietly before pulling his hood up.

He had become a night owl by now, using the safety of the darkness as a shield for what felt like a definite crime. The doctor often roamed the Wilds, musing in vague memories and lost dreams as he eyed the dead trees. Rain fall and decay had turned the surroundings of the old lake into a field of morass. Too quick for the doctor's liking, almost as if magic had it hand in it. But that couldn't be the case. The barren nature of the Wilds made it attractive for vagabonds who hope to find a short cut in the muddy paths. But the quicksand-like gunk had claimed countless lives by now and it still will, until it finally dries out. Junkenstein would seek out these corpses for his project, even the ones of clueless animals. It felt more tactful than raiding a graveyard, but no less illegal or ethic. Armed with a shovel and a bucket Junkenstein would slip around the trees, too familiar with the surroundings to trip over a root or fall into a puddle. Sometimes he would nick a berry from a bush here and there. A small sign that life was slowly returning to this husk of a forest.

He must have been too deep in his thoughts. Or maybe he underestimated the fatality of the darkness. But somehow, he ended up falling and not finding grip. Instantly, Junkenstein felt mud run into his boots, sucking him deeper into the wet soil of the swamp. Already knee-deep within seconds. The doctor tried not to panic...but by now, panic had become his second nature. He wound himself, trying to find a root or a tree arm he could pull himself out of. Only to drop deeper and deeper. Thighs gone. Hips gone. The metallic arm got stuck, too, drawn down by a gentle yet strong force. This can't be normal quicksand.

"Help...help!" His voice echoed. Screaming, as if he didn't know no one would hear him. He felt his body tremble, sad last attempts to free himself. The trembling followed a weep. A sob. He began to cry. Is this really how he would go out of this world? Eaten by a bog, like the people who's bodies he used to steal from here? Would he meet an angry mob of ghosts by the pearly gates? Would he meet his parents there? Or maybe even...

Through teary eyes and sad thoughts he barely noticed the muddy footsteps coming from behind his back, as well as the shadow looming over him. He only took actual notice once an enormous hand took hold of him. Following the hand that held him the doctor's eyes trailed along a strong arm covered in dark green and blue scales and many old scars. A tiny voice in him screamed in excitement. Eureka, he was right! There was a mer living in the swamp. His eyes kept wandering, but before he reached the mer's face, the large hand dragged and tugged at him, pulling him out of the sand. The doctor lost one of his shoes, but that was little damage. He sat against a large root poking out of the ground, trying to catch his breath. "Tha....thanks..." He muttered, looking up. The mer was leaving already, heavy steps taking it into the darker parts of tge woods. Junkenstein hopped up. "Oi! Wait a minute!" The creature gave off a low, rattling noise. He could barely make our their features in the shadows of the trees, but what Jamison did notice was a large gauntlet hanging from their arm, that seemed to be made of crustaceans and sea shells. He took off his glove and the scientist showed off the jewelry underneath it. His and Akande's intertwined. Slowly he raised that hand and tapped himself two times against the shoulder. "I won't harm ya. I'm a friend of ya people." The mer's eyes couldn't break through the darkness but Junkenstein felt eyes drill into him.

"Leave."

"What?"

"Leave this place. And never come back."

The mer's voice crawled under Junkenstein's skin as they inched away, disappearing in the darkness. He began to shiver. He knew that voice.