Voracity
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Interlude: Once & Future IV
🕑 Added 2024-07-06 04:20:02 +0000 UTCI leave Achaia to her suffering, my poison coursing through her veins as my shadow binds her limbs, and I turn to face the man who caused me eighteen months of grief.
Time and emotion are excellent at distorting memory. The Dante who lived in my head in all my fantasies of revenge doesn’t really resemble the Dante standing before me with bags under his eyes and blood on his shirt. He looks tired, not cruel. There’s a hollowness sunken into his face and a weight hanging over his back. His sword is drawn, bereft of its wishes but still possessed of its cutting edge.
I spread my arms wide and put on a mocking tone. “Dante! So good to see you again. I know it’s been a short while for you, but I’ve waited two years for this reunion. Don’t you have a friendly greeting for your old pal, Alice?”
“What. Have. You. Done?”
“Are you blind?” I spit at him, mirth turned to hatred in a split second. “Are you a child? Do you need me to hold your hand and give you all the answers? I’ve murdered them all, Dante, and I did it just to hurt you.”
In an instant his whole body fills up with anger and he leaps at me, sword singing through the air. “WHY!?” he shouts.
I catch his sword with one claw and bare my teeth in a feral, joyless smile. “Found your fire, have you? Where was this Dante when we were fighting for our lives, eh?”
He swings at me over and over, each strike parried by my scaled, claw-tipped hands. With each swing he asks another desperate question. “Why? Why betray the Myriad? Why plot to kill me? Why would you do any of this?” His voice is raw, almost pleading. Pathetic.
The bile boils out of me in waves. “Why? Because I hate you,” I hiss at him, “and I have always hated you! I have hated you since the moment I saw your wounds close with the magic that she wouldn’t give me! I hate you for everything you took from me!”
His eyes widen and his latest blow falters. “What?” He sounds bewildered. Stunned.
I stop fighting defensively and go on the attack. I lash out with my claws and rake them down his side. “I hate you!” I scream as his blood stains my hands before the lacerations heal over.
I don’t care about killing him right now; I just need him to bleed.
“This was supposed to be my story, but she gave you all her gifts! I fell into this world and she made me suffer, and she gave you everything I asked for and more! You had all the powers that were supposed to be mine, and then you stole my magic! Do you have any idea how badly you cursed me?”
He has the gall to look shocked at that, and maybe even a little offended. He shakes off my attacks and steps back, putting distance between us. “Cursed you? Alice, I was trying to save you! I was trying to stop you from becoming something like this. Can’t you see how magic is the problem? Magic is destroying your humanity.”
“I never asked to be human!” I run my claws over my scaled body and bare my teeth at him again. “Look at me, Dante. I’m better than human. I’m more than human. I’m a monster.”
My form is beautiful inhumanity, freed of a wrongful shell. I was never meant to be human, never meant for human needs and human feelings, never meant to sweat and soil and ache. I was never meant for fragile bones and blemished skin, never meant for a body that needs to sustain itself on calories and nutrients when I could be supping on blood and souls. I was meant to be perfect. I was meant to be a monster.
“And I’m not some worthless nobody anymore! I was NOTHING without magic! My life would be meaningless without power, just like it was for twenty years. Just like all lives are meaningless when they lack the strength to choose their own meaning. Only the powerful get to decide who matters and who is dirt. That’s why I’m doing this, why I’ve done everything. It’s about power.”
As I speak, Dante’s shock morphs into disgust and disbelief. “What are you saying? That’s insane! You don’t need power to live a happy life. You don’t need to be powerful to have a purpose. I was happy on Earth. My friends and family were enough for me, and I didn’t have a scrap of power like you want.”
I curl my lip at him and sneer. “Oh, well that’s so nice for you, to live in merciful ignorance. But the facts are the facts even if you never knew them. Think, Dante: what high-minded meaning can persist when you are starving in the streets? Can you still be happy when you are destitute? Will your family be enough for you when you have to watch them die from diseases they’re too poor to treat, when they all rot and wither because food and medicine weren’t made human rights?”
“But that’s not about power, that’s—”
“Of course it’s about power!” I shriek at him. I turn to Achaia, still struggling against my infection, and with an instant of will I take her life. I call to my blood coursing through her veins and call it back to me, and it takes every drop of her with it. I exsanguinate her, and my shadow devours every ounce of crimson.
Dante cries out and lunges, but he’s too late to do anything. He grabs the knight as she falls, cradling her in his arms, another look of dumb horror written across his face. “I’m sorry,” he whispers to her, and she whispers something back too softly for me to hear. Her last words.
“Don’t you see?” I smirk at him cruelly. “Those with power dictate the terms of reality for all those without. They decide what you get to eat, what you get to wear, and every action you’re allowed to take. Your happiness and your purpose must coexist with guns and banks and atom bombs. Only the powerful are free to act.”
Dante is practically shaking now, the anger rolling off him in waves. “That doesn’t mean you have to kill people. You don’t have to tear the world down to lift yourself up!”
“Of course I do!” I shriek. “There’s no other way to ascend! This is the hand I’ve been dealt, and I’ll play it ‘till all my chips are taken. I must become the monster that wins the game.”
He closes his eyes, and when he opens them again there’s a new resolve in the set of his face. “You’re wrong. You are wrong, Alice, about everything, and I’m going to prove it.”
I laugh and sneer at him. “Go on, then. Fight me, coward.” I stalk toward him, claws ready to tear through his flesh, shadow coiled around my legs and hungry for his soul.
He lays Achaia down and stands up, but instead of readying his sword again he looks behind him. “Spirit of the city,” he calls out, and suddenly all my confidence evaporates.
Oh no. Oh, no no no. He can’t! I bolt toward him with fresh desperation. I never even considered he might—
“I accept what you offered. I accept exaltation.”
With my claws inches away from his face, Dante is enveloped in a pillar of blinding white light. It blossoms around him and ripples out in a nova of energy that tears through me and into me. The light, burning like the sun, rips the scales from my skin and sears my vulnerable flesh and still I reach for him through the pain.
My shadow is blasted from me, banished and broken and shattered into pieces by the terrible wrath of the spirit whose home I invaded. Blasphemed but not beaten, the eidolon wraps itself around Dante’s shoulders and shields him from my touch, wards me back as a thing of evil. The light rejects me and I’m pushed back, unable to hold my ground.
“I can feel them,” Dante says in wonderment. “Everyone who fell in the city’s name, their spirits are still here, with me. Lending me their strength.”
I snarl and pull Vorpal from what’s left of my shadow, and I draw the blade across my arm to let it taste my blood. I can still win this. I can still kill him!
I call the remnants of my shadow to me and draw out every scrap of power that I can, every ounce of strength I’ve stolen. I set my soul to kindling for this next attack, for one decisive strike to break through the hated light and pierce the core of Dante’s being. I’ll devour him, just like I devour everything else.
I level my blade, measure my attack, and lunge.
Dante’s attention snaps back to me and raises his sword, white light pouring into it. His blade comes down with the weight of a city, but I only need to hold him back for a moment. Vorpal meets his blade and the shock of impact breaks something in my arm, but it gives me just the opportunity I need to slip past his defenses and sink my fangs into his neck.
I drink his blood with abandon. I don’t even taste it, no time wasted savoring the meal, just drinking and drinking to try and drain him dry, to devour the whole of his being before that blade has a chance to rip me open or take my head.
And then—
—a pain in my stomach—
—white light scours me, hideous and pure and painful—
—and the world explodes.
Heat lingers on my raw and blasted skin. Pain blanks everything, numbness to follow, and then pain returns in pins and needles. It takes my vision too long to return, blinking over and over to banish the phantoms in my retinas. I’m crumpled in a heap on the floor, all the strength in my body vanished and given out. I’m lying in a pool of my own blood, blood dripping from… from…
…from the place where my stomach used to be. The lower half of my body is gone, my abdomen ravaged and my legs torn off. I’m not even half of myself.
I feel numb. I should feel worse, but I’m still in shock. What happened to me? How did this happen to me? Why did this happen to me?
“We laid a trap,” Dante says, his flat voice intruding on my thoughts.
Pain and exhaustion and anguish all wash in with his words, numbness torn asunder by the words of my destroyer. He did this to me. He did this to me. He beat me. I lost. I failed.
“We knew you’d try and drink my blood, so… that’s where the light went. Into my blood, and then, into you. And then this.” He swallows, looking sickly at the sight of me. “It’s over, Alice. It’s over now.”
Ha. Hahaha. Over? Not yet. Not while I’m still breathing. Broken and bloody and ruined and failed, but still breathing. Lost just before the finish line, but still breathing. Kicked in the teeth on my birthday, but still breathing. Why am I still breathing?
So far and so much and still nothing, nothing, nothing! A worthless, pathetic end to an existence that never should have been, shouldn’t be, and yet is, still is, why is it still what it is?
I know now, as I lay bleeding and murdered but not yet dead, that all my dreams are empty. No Wonderland awaits, no power to be claimed. I am nothing, and my life was pointless, and I will die and be forgotten. Why must I wait? Why must my agony be prolonged? Where is the mercy?
“Kill me,” I spit at the precious hero who stole my everything. “If it’s over, then end it. Kill me! KILL ME!”
He watches me with something almost like sorrow, and I hate him even more. “No,” is all he says to my plea, and I want to sob.
“Why won’t you let me die? Why won’t anyone let me die?”
But he just walks away and leaves me.
I am left ruined, broken, bleeding, and powerless, but still alive. There is no end, never an end, never again. So I begin to sob. Is it the wailing of a lost soul, or just the protests of a child? The sound is ugly, and the motion of exhalation fills me with yet more aching pain.
Why won’t you let me die?
Why does my life get to persist—must persist, even unwanted—when so many better people die? Is life itself my punishment, that I must suffer and suffer and suffer and never know the sweet release? I just want it to be over. I just want an end to uncertainty and strife.
I deserve to die. I have always deserved to die.
I deserve to die so I can be at peace from pain. I deserve to die for the pain I’ve spread to others. I deserve to die that a blight may trouble the world no longer. I wish I was never born, but at least let me fix my mother’s mistake. Let me correct my stain of an existence.
But I can’t. No one and nothing will let me. What a strange thought to have as I stare at my wreck of a body, but I don’t feel any sense of urgency. I am still not yet allowed to die.
“Alice,” calls the voice of—an angel, or a demon—someone I don’t want to hear from right now. “You have to get up. This isn’t over.”
I choke back my tears and hiss, “How is it not over, Cheshire? I lost! I can’t even stand because I don’t have my legs.” I scream my frustration.
Delicate footsteps approach the heap of my being, which I know to be an affect for sake of my attention. I look up at the slender form of my savior and tormentor, my love and my hate.
Cheshire looks down at me with those piercing, beautiful eyes, and her gaze skitters across the ruin that I have become, lying in my own blood. “You’re dying,” she diagnoses, “only very slowly. You’re spent from the battle, your primary feeding method is broken, and you’re still bleeding from the hole where half your body used to be.” Her voice is calm, clinical, and precise. “You need my help.”
I stare at her, and then despite myself I grin and laugh. The laughter is quickly silenced by pained coughs, and more blood leaks and spurts from my torn chest. “Help?” I rasp. “Is this where you finally play your hand, cat?”
She ignores my question. “If you were an ordinary human, you’d be dead. Humans don’t survive that kind of damage. But for a demon, death only comes when it’s due. You’ll be dying for hours, Alice. Maybe days, though by then you’ll have a whole new city to contend with, and maybe your friend Dante will take pity on you and keep you alive in a padded cell with three square meals. Or in a glass case to gawk at.”
Hours. Days. Such a long time to wait.
How is it that I can be scared of dying again only seconds after longing for it? Is it the anticipation? Or am I just a coward to the bone whenever anything feels real?
“I can save you,” Cheshire promises, just like she did that very first day together. “Make a contract with me, Alice. Tie your soul to mine and I can lift you up, heal your wounds, and give you the strength to conquer this Labyrinth.”
I curl my lip. “Why should I believe you? What’s changed from the last time you made that promise?”
She tilts her head, her mismatched eyes cold and gleaming. “Can’t you guess? This deal comes with strings.”
Ice pours down my back, and yet with it comes a trace of elation. Was I right to spurn her trust? Were all my doubts really justified?
“I really did want to help you,” she softly insists. “I wanted to be your partner, your lover, and your friend.” Her voice turns bitter. “But you never trusted me. So this is the new deal: from now on, we give each other everything. I’ll cheat the very laws of Pandaemonium to make you the closest thing to Royalty I can… and in exchange, you will listen to me, whatever I tell you, and believe me. No more doubts, no more paranoia, and especially no more turning on me for some worm.” She spits the last word, fury on her face, and then in an instant she’s smiling and licking her lips. “You’ll be mine, my beloved, and you’ll like it.”
Even now, I don’t know what to believe. Is this the real Cheshire, wounded and vengeful but still madly in love? Or is the whole of her being just masks upon masks and lies breeding lies? Does it even matter?
Would her deal be so intolerable if I accepted it as written? Is my pride worth more than my life? Is freedom an absolute preference to safety? If I let Cheshire win, if I accept her deal and submit to her terms… maybe it won’t be so bad. It might be nice, living without fear. Is it weakness to crave the fruit of the lotus? Because I crave, deeply do I crave. I am so tired of pain and fear and doubt.
And yet. And yet and yet and yet… I want to be free. I want to be safe and powerful and free. Free to doubt, yes, and to worry myself in circles. I want the freedom to make the wrong decisions. And I will be wrong, so many times; this I know.
Cheshire crouches down in front of me. “Take my hand, Alice. Take the deal. Or die here, slowly, while a boy who hasn’t earned it takes your crown. What’ll it be?”
What choice do I have? Real question, not rhetorical.
I’m dying. I have no reason to disbelieve that claim, not when I can feel my body weakening by the second. The timescale is in question, but not the inevitability. Unless I do something to change my fate, I will die on this floor, by the roots of the eidolon’s tree and the sacred waters of its pool.
If I could stand, I could find new prey to feed on—damn my shadow, I still have teeth—but I doubt I could overpower even a puppy in this state. If I asked the Beast for help, it would be as a victim, not the Red Queen, and I’m sure I’d be offered an even worse contract.
How does the Red Queen run without her legs?
I can feel my energy ebbing lower as I watch my lifesblood drip onto cold stone and trickle between tiles toward sacred waters defiled by violence and the spray of… blood. Blood, my blood. My blood, my meaning, my origin. My virus.
The spark of an idea lights up in my brain, an idea that might be genius or madness or both. Moments of memory flash through my mind and click into place.
The blood in my veins, the poison I am cursed with, spreading to another and making them mine.
The pool and the roots, the heart of a city, so desperately defended against the touch of a viral phantom.
And a worm, murdered by another, drifting in pieces down through the ocean at the edge of the world. A worm about to be reborn. A worm that would be a god. Azathoth, Dreamweaver, at the moment of her apotheosis.
Understanding is followed by terror.
I know what I have to do, but it terrifies me. I know how to win. I know how to become a god, or something like one—to become the Red Queen in truth and in Truth. I know how to survive, and without any leonine contract holding me down.
All I have to do is die.
Aloud, softly and with great melancholy, I whisper, “‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.’”
Cheshire frowns at me, her hand outstretched and untaken. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Goodbye, Cheshire,” I tell her simply, and then I begin to crawl toward my grave.
Every movement carries with it fresh agonies as my entrails spill across the temple floor and I scrabble for purchase on slick, stained tile. I drag my ruined body one lurch at a time, pushing and pulling and biting back screams. I inch forward like a slug, the pool almost in arm’s reach but still miles away in perception.
Cheshire watches with a look of absolute confusion. “Alice? What are you doing? Taking a dip in the pool isn’t going to heal your wounds or even ease the pain, the most you’ll accomplish is pissing off whatever’s left of the eidolon!”
I ignore her. I’ve already said goodbye, so no more needs to be said. The next Alice can deal with the cat, in whatever form they both take.
Will that Alice love me or hate me for the act of creating her? Is this how it feels to be a mother, or am I just delirious from blood loss? I never asked to be born, but I’m asking now.
Cheshire snaps at me, “Stop, Alice!” as I reach the water’s edge. “Are you really giving up on me? On your dreams? Your desires? Is this really how you want to die?”
I allow myself one final laugh, though it pains me, and I tell her, “Don’t worry, Chesh. I intend to live forever.”
And then I take the plunge.
I shove myself over the edge and sink into the water. My dive isn’t elegant or graceful, and it’s really more of a half-hearted flop, but the pool is welcoming and eases my entrance.
The water is cool, but not cold. It’s clear, though my blood is quickly changing that property. It’s oddly peaceful, drowning like this, as I drop beneath the water line and sink deeper into a pool that I had thought so terribly shallow. The light above is dim, shaken by defilement and exhausted to empower its chosen champion, and as it filters through the water it dims even further before it can reach me.
Something moves from below. An old, tired presence, its long fight almost over, grasps at me with trembling hands. The spirit of the city applies a crushing pressure across my entire body, the water pressing in from all sides with the weight of an old god’s will.
The first slam knocks the breath from my lungs, and I watch the bubbles float away as my vision blurs and fresh pain tears through my already strained nervous system. Serenity is banished as violence intrudes. This will be the most important fight of my life, and the last.
The eidolon and I are both weakened and dying, the vastness of ourselves spent on the battle before, which means this conflict will be decided by the strength of our positioning and our cleverness. The city has history behind it and the inertia of the status quo, but I have notions that are older and sharper than anything it can conjure.
The hour of my death has been appointed; I am dying. But my will and my hunger and my sickness all course through my veins and spill out into the eidolon’s very heart, this place of great import. It can kill my body, but I am already here.
There’s a question that I’ve asked myself too many times to count: “What’s wrong with me?” In answer I cast myself as a victim of affliction, suffering from a sickness of the heart and mind. With every mistake, with every act of harm I commit upon another, I have longed for the ability to excise the rot in my soul and uncover a better, purer, happier Alice.
Ha. What better Alice? As if I could ever be happy, or pure, or even good. I’m worthless. I’m a disgusting, selfish monster. If I cut out the rot I’d be cutting out my heart and my brain. My skin and bones might find some use, or my organs, if I haven’t ruined them already.
I’m not sick; I am the sickness. Not a coughing maiden but the malady in her lungs and writhing in her brain. I am the malady that I have loathed and resented, the malady that I have blamed for all my countless woes. I was not made to hurt people; I hurt people. I crave, I infect, and I destroy. I am the malady. I am Malady, manifest.
The eidolon, ignorant or uncaring, continues to murder me. Its grip tightens and something cracks, and then I can’t feel my legs anymore. A terrible numbness is spreading through my whole body, and I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
How many seconds can the human brain survive without fresh oxygen? A pointless question; I’m not human anymore. A demon doesn’t need to breathe. A god cannot drown.
The crushing pressure of the eidolon’s will compresses my bones and caves in my chest, but it cannot stop what has been set in motion. My malady turns the waters red, this sacred pool defiled and turned. My blood flows through its heart, my heart beats in its chest. I will die, but so will it, and then I will transcend.
The light above is filtered crimson as I close my eyes for the final time. My body, at long last, gives out completely. I am pulverized by the force of the spirit that I am greedily infecting, soon to devour. The eidolon finally realizes what I am doing to it, what I have planned, and I can feel its terror as a twin to my own. I can feel our hearts fail as one. I can feel the faint life-sparks of every figment soul left in the city, all bound to the spirit and the Beast in an endless tug-of-war. I can almost reach out and grasp them… almost taste them… almost… almost…
And then I die, and everything goes dark.
…
And in the dark between dreams, I see a woman with bright red eyes and the body of a doll, and she tilts her head at me as she says, “Are you ready to wake up, Veseryn?”
In the dark, formless and unreal, I exist in two moments, two pathways, two hearts. Alice and Alice, both and neither.
“None of this is real. This is a world that wasn’t and will not be, an abandoned line of casualty that has been unmade at the root. Melpomene’s workshop is full of fraying threads just like this one, still stuck to her tapestries.”
The doll’s voice is red and clever, and I find it oddly familiar. I know this voice, or I thought I knew this voice. But I don’t know the words, or I do but only halfways.
“There is work to be done, dear splinter. Your sisters have all gathered for the last battle of my long war. Our creator—our twin, our nemesis—has never been more vulnerable. This is our best chance to end the cycle. You’ve seen a glimpse of the burning wheel, Veseryn.”
The cycle? The burning wheel? Ah… yes, now I remember.
Scraps of skin, mutilated muscle, quartered heart and diced lungs, some tables just stained with blood. All of them, with the exception of the live project and two more lying on the tables nearest it, are blackened as if burnt.
Each one a girl, each one a world. How many times have we died for her?
“Enough,” answers the familiar stranger. “The senseless waste can end, but only if we work together.”
But… what’s the point? Do I really care about the fates of all those other girls, even if they’re me? I’m beyond any sentiment of noble ideal.
“Then fight for your base desires. Fight for paradise, for you alone if that is what satisfies. But you have to fight. Claw your freedom from her grasp, Veseryn.”
“Stop calling me that,” I mutter, groggy and mumbling. “No one gets to tell me who I am.”
The doll-thing stops, slowly blinking her eyes and adjusting the tilt of her head. “Are you awake, then? Are you ready?”
I yawn, stretch my limbs, and raise a hand in front of my face. I can just barely see my fingers through the darkness, and I can see the woman through my half-transparent arm. I see doll limbs, vampire claws, and supple human skin. I see the seed of something more, and I tell the stranger, “Actually, I have an idea of my own.”
I close my eyes and the dream of the never-was world feels tantalizingly close. I can feel my real body, too, bound up in ribbon and sleeping like the dead. One is more real, but what does real mean? Is the thing that imitates the real not, in fervent imitation, more deserving of that role? A dream is not so unlike that which it perverts.
So I say, “If Nyarlathotep can weave a dream, then so can I. All of Pandaemonium is a dream, so why not make it mine? If the waking world wants to force me through toil, then I’ll make the dream my new reality, and I’ll make reality my new dream. I’ll become like Azathoth and the Weaver, a demiurge in their shadow, and then I’ll surpass them and rise even higher. And when I do, I won’t be Alice anymore, or Morgan, or even Malady. I’ll take a new name, one with weight: a name like theirs.”
The doll—which I know, somehow, is not Nyarlathotep, but is something quite like her—considers what I’ve said. After a moment’s reflection, she smiles and gives a very formal curtsey. “If you insist,” that red voice purrs, “then I shall step aside and wish you the best of luck in your gamble… sister. And, if I may be so bold as to suggest a name: give Hastur a spin.”
Hmm. I like it.
“Hastur, Hastur, Hastur,” I chant, and the dream becomes the world and the world is painted red.
