Voracity
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3.14 For Yuri, I Go Clubbing in Another Dimension
🕑 Added 2025-08-13 19:59:33 +0000 UTCIn the dark between worlds, I laugh at two familiar strangers who call themselves rising gods. The children of Hastur don’t seem impressed by my answer.
“You should watch your tone,” Mars threatens. “You stand before divinity.”
“Watch yours,” I mock. “You stand before a yandere.”
Venus frowns, stepping out of darkness to loom over me. She’s resplendently beautiful, that I can’t deny, but she’s not my type. “You claim this ‘lovesickness,’ yet you deny your chance to save the one you love?”
Her accusation is empty air. “Nah, I’m only denying you. But go on, convince me—if you think you can.” I’ve already made up my mind, but I want to learn more about these would-be gods. Mars and Venus make a clear pattern; Jupiter must be another of their number. We use the Roman names for the planets, and they named them after their gods. Is there a Mercury? What about Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto? Wait, does Pluto still count since it’s not a planet anymore?
“My charm is the key to saving Sophia,” Venus argues. “Your beloved bears the world on her shoulders when that work could be offloaded to others; give her the tools to do more good with less work, bound to your influence, and you will have all the leverage you need to secure time with Sophia. Use my gift to inspire the masses—direct them to Sophia’s cause—and you solve both her civilian workload and Vanguard’s civic pursuits, freeing up an immense portion of your dearly beloved’s time.”
“Wrong,” I say immediately. “Sophia will never settle for any amount of good when she could push herself harder to accomplish more. Give her a clinic, give her the Foundation, give her the goddamn world and she will find a way to do more. There will always be another task, another stack of paperwork, another reason to never rest.”
“There is another way,” Venus insists, smiling now, that velvet voice dripping with venom. “You are close to her. Her defenses are impressive, but you alone could use my charm on Sophia herself to—”
“Unacceptable,” I snap. “I want Sophia, not a puppet that looks like her. You have nothing to offer me.”
“The harlot cannot help you,” Mars agrees, stepping forward as Venus returns to the shadows with a glare at her brother. What’s the phrase people usually use for a build like that? Brick shithouse? “Your damsel will not relent while she has the freedom to destroy herself, and destroying her mind to save her body is unacceptable. This is why you must conquer the heroine; reveal the lie of her invincibility, that she might change her ways. Imprison her if you must, until the lesson has been learned. She will forgive you, in time, once she realizes how you have saved her.”
“Also wrong,” I say more lightly. “It doesn’t matter how thoroughly I thrashed her, Sophia would never, ever give up. She would never stop fighting, never stop resisting, never stop trying to escape whatever prison I put her in. There would be no peace for either of us. Conquering Striga would mean a war without end to keep Sophia confined, bleeding, and miserable. That’s not salvation.”
“Then you have become a witch for nothing,” Mars accuses. “Did you not take the mantle to scar your truth into the woman you desire?”
I flinch. He’s not wrong about that. I wanted to be a witch because Sophia is a magical girl. I wanted to fight her, to beat her, to pin her down and make her mine, keep her mine, keep her eyes on me forever. The vision Mars showed me, it didn’t come from nothing; there’s still a part of me that wants it. I want to steal Sophia away from the world, and it feels like the only way to do that is to break or cage the part of her that needs to be a hero.
For how callously I dismissed it, I’m not immune to Venus’ offer, either. The thought of Sophia staring at me with dazzled, lovestruck eyes is intoxicating. I want to run my fingers through her hair and take all her worries away. What’s a little free will in the face of the greater good? I could make her happy. It would only cost everything.
When the deimovore tried to break me, I realized something—or rather, I finally got through a mental block that’s been in my head for seven years. The future I want with Sophia, the future that I’ve been terrified of jeopardizing by saying the wrong thing… it only happens if I tell her how I feel. Not by conquest, not by control. I must grasp that future with my own hands.
Sophia is my angel, and I love her. I have to believe she can love me back. I have to believe I wasn’t just a wounded animal she saved out of pity.
“Neither of you can help me. I’m going to save Sophia my way, not yours. You don’t get to be involved in that.”
“This will prove a costly mistake,” Venus warns, now standing beside her brother.
“You do not want us to be your enemies,” Mars growls.
“Nah, you can fuck off with that,” I say cheerfully. “I know how this game works. This is a test, and I pass. So… Hastur! Get in here and tell your kids I win. Hastur!”
A yellow cloak envelops the dark. A jester’s voice fills the air. “What a magnificent performance,” the King in Yellow praises. “Let’s hear some applause from the audience!”
I’m blinded by sudden light, my hands instinctively moving to block the glare, and when my vision stabilizes I’m standing on a wooden stage, spotlights beaming down. My ears are assaulted by the sound of a thousand clapping hands, but the chairs in this grandiose theater are all empty. Then, suddenly, the room falls silent.
“Now,” the King purrs from nowhere, “I did promise you a reward. You’ve done such fine work upon the stage; allow me to return the favor with a performance of my own.”
I blink and I’m sitting in the auditorium among all the empty chairs—except, a few of them aren’t empty anymore.
“A play, a play, what a wonderful day!” Harlequin claps happily a few rows down.
“I see everyone is accounted for,” says Ferromancer, immediately rising from her seat in the center of the area to inspect the rest of us. “Good. I trust no one was foolish enough to accept those obviously untrustworthy pacts?”
Agatha whimpers, looking frozen to her chair just a few seats over from me. Howl, down in front, has somehow acquired a bottle of whiskey and is drinking straight out of it, feet kicked up. Delilah grips the arms of her chair tightly, far to the right of the rest of us, saying nothing.
I keep my eye on the spider witch. She made it pretty clear in our meeting back in the Ossuary that she came along for personal empowerment and little else. I haven’t dropped my theory that Striga chose Delilah as a sacrificial lamb, or as bait. But if Delilah did make a deal with one of Hastur’s children, which seems more likely? Charm would suit her “schemer in the shadows” deal better, but the raw power of Mars might appeal more basely.
“Mars and Venus?” I ask the others. “Did we all get two offers?”
Ferromancer, Harlequin, and Agatha nod. Howl throws up two fingers. Again, Delilah doesn’t react. What’s going on with her?
Howl finishes off her bottle and drops it, letting glass spill across the auditorium floor. “That’s a lot of questions answered in itself, isn’t it?”
“Mars and Venus,” Ferromancer muses. “Two data points is hardly a pattern, but…”
“We can guess that Jupiter is their third,” I finish.
“Indeed!” the King in Yellow calls out, voice echoing from above. “My children, my four, precious, terrible little children: Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Minerva. But, ah, that’s not where our story begins.”
Minerva? That one’s not a planet. Wait—
“Striga,” I whisper at the same time as Ferromancer and Agatha. The name of Striga’s power is Athena, which is the Greek form of the Roman goddess Minerva. Is that just a coincidence, or do the two have a connection? There’s no fucking way that’s a coincidence.
On the stage, yellow curtains are drawn closed and then opened again to reveal a transformation. The back wall of the stage has been painted over in dazzling displays of stars and planets, the floor of the stage now a solid pane of rainbow-colored glass.
“For countless millenia,” Hastur narrates, “the World of Glass was nothing more than a quiet reflection of your world. Where humanity built wonders, this world grew wondrous. Where humanity unleashed horrors, this world grew horrific. On occasion some piece of here slipped through to the other side, or brought something over—unexplained disappearances, strange lights in the sky, Tunguska—but, for the most part, the two worlds had very little contact.”
Yellow ribbons peel down from the rafters, splitting apart and twining together until they reach the stage and touch the rainbow glass.
“Then I arrived.”
The yellow cloth swirls and becomes the yellow cloak of a shadowed figure, pale mask smiling at us all, golden eyes gleaming in the darkness. She bows to us. Where the hem of the figure’s cloak touches the glass, yellow dominates all other colors, spreading and spreading until the whole glass pane is uniform.
“A stranger from another star, drawn here by stories, I saw such magnificent potential in this untapped realm. I took the name Hastur and fashioned myself an avatar after secondhand interpretations of a delightful anthology—The King in Yellow, now flesh and ribbon.”
Stranger from another star? Does that mean it was aliens after all? Is Hastur—or, the thing that became Hastur—some kind of alien god?
The glass undulates around Hastur, rising and falling in erratic peaks and valleys.
“For a time,” the King continues, “I amused myself by reshaping this world to my liking. I experimented on its natural inhabitants until I understood how to pull them apart and put them back together in new and exciting configurations. I applied that mastery to the creation of four children, my egregores, and gifted them with the terrible flame of ambition. I ruled over them only briefly, feeding them with stories of your world and stories of mine, before stepping off my throne and telling them, ‘May the worthiest of you claim it, for I have grown bored of it.’”
The undulating glass resolves into four sculptures, each crude in form and half the height of Hastur: a man holding a spear and shield, a woman carrying a scepter, a man throwing a lightning bolt, and a woman with a spear in one hand and an owl perched on the other. The sculptures clash, sending shards across the stage that leave great rents in the glass floor.
“Their conflict tore the landscape apart, bleaching the city I had built for them and tearing it from the earth. One stepped closest to my throne, fingers outstretched: Jupiter, the prodigal son, who had learned my arts best and raised an army of malevolent spirits from the paranatural fauna of the World of Glass. You would know them as Jovians.”
Misshapen beasts rise from glass, surrounding the four sculptures of Hastur’s children.
“That’s confirmation,” Ferromancer mutters. I nod.
“They look so different,” Agatha points out, having finally found her voice. “Do you think that’s what they really look like, and the cat form is just a disguise?”
Hastur speaks again. “The other three, fearful of their brother’s ascension, made a secret pact. To keep Jupiter from the throne, they would each sacrifice their own bid and forswear my forfeited crown. They struck down Jupiter and cast him into a pit at the bottom of the world… where he remains to this day, imprisoned by threefold seal.”
The wall behind the stage crumbles, wooden shards swept away in a sudden gale. Behind it, I see the place from my dreams: a city of bleached white stone drifts through the air beneath a bleeding sun, and beneath that city is a deep, dark pit. In the depths of that pit, something stirs and shifts. A god roars, pounding against the walls of his prison.
Harlequin rises from their seat and stares into the pit. Howl reaches for her bow.
“The dark spirits, their master sealed away, threw themselves at the mercy of the triumvirate. They swayed Mars and Venus with honeyed promises to act as proxies and envoys on the other side, spreading their worship to the mortal world. Minerva, the dissenting voice, allowed this on one condition: forevermore, the Jovians would be cursed, their actions restricted to the notion ‘empower and guide.’ It was the most she could do without incurring the wrath of her powerhungry siblings and breaking their delicate peace.”
Back on stage, the misshapen horrors shrink and smooth out until they look like glass felines, strutting around and flicking their tails.
“And so the Jovians came to Earth. As per their bargain, they set about drawing mantles from the World of Glass—passed to them by Mars and Venus—and granting these mantles to chosen warriors, the grand and glorious, the heroines and villainesses: you.”
The glass sculptures all melt back into the floor, returned to stillness. Hastur gives us another bow and holds it, silent.
“‘Spreading their worship to the mortal world,’” Ferromancer quotes. “We’re conduits to them. Love and war, beauty and bloodshed, it’s all… food for gods.”
I grimace. “The Visage idols generate the ‘adoration of the masses’ that Venus prizes, while the feuding factions give Mars plenty of conflict over their beliefs. The whole system is set up to enrich them, and nobody even knows they exist.”
Agatha shivers. “But why? What are they planning to do with all that worship?”
“Nothing good,” Howl mutters. “But I’d wager they still want that damned throne.”
Delilah hasn’t said a word this entire time. I glare at her, but she doesn’t react.
“What of Jupiter?” Harlequin asks, still staring into the pit.
“That’s a good question,” Ferromancer says. “Have the Jovians abandoned their creator, or do they have a scheme of their own? I’m betting it’s the latter.”
“Jupiter,” Hastur answers us, rising from her bow, “is the sealed god of disaster, singular in his cruelty. In exchange for their service feeding worship to Mars and Venus, the Jovians were granted an elite handful of particularly potent mantles attuned to Jupiter’s resonance, which they have parceled out very carefully after one initial mistake. The first you know as the Texas witch.”
She pauses, giving us all a moment to soak that in. That eerie, pallid mask seems to smile even wider.
“The rest you know as the Catastrophes.”
Agatha goes pale. Harlequin clenches their fists.
Ferromancer is the first to speak. “We’re not the main score; we’re the side game.”
Dazed and horrified, I murmur, “Vanguard, Syndicate, Visage, Coterie, organizations like them all over the world… it’s all to keep Mars and Venus appeased—and to keep us at each other’s throats while they maneuver their monsters into place. Distractions to keep us from organizing against the Catastrophes on anything more than a regional scale.”
“We’re fodder,” Howl snarls. “Sacrifices on the altar to free their wretched god.”
Our revelations are interrupted by Delilah falling from her chair onto her hands and knees, suddenly screaming in rage and pain. Something is wrong with her silhouette, like she’s losing shape—like she’s melting. Her screams get louder.
Howl whirls on the spider witch. “Her power is betraying her. She broke the oath.”
A red glow suffuses Delilah, bright and bloody, and that screaming turns to laughter.
Mars. Her deal was with Mars.
Delilah rises and turns to face us. “Finally free of that damned thing,” she rasps, voice scraped raw. “I suppose talking my way out was never going to work. Now let’s see what this gift can do.”
Comments
Wensber
Thanks for the chapter!
Lako
Thanks for the chapter! Agatha also took a deal didnt she...
Arueshalae Table Building Society
"I suppose talking my way out was never going to work." BINCH YOU WEREN'T EVEN TALKING
Clara
The only force that can go toe-to-toe with a god: a 8itch
NeverSayNether
[“You should watch your tone,” Mars threatens. “You stand before divinity.”] [“Watch yours,” I mock. “You stand before a yandere.”] Lmao this is such a good quip!
pix
thank you for the chapter <3
