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Garden of Memories III
🕑 Added 2024-03-02 16:08:58 +0000 UTCTwo monsters test their mettle within a city that doesn’t exist. Flagstones crack, the air shudders, and shadows thicken. And I, unharmed and harmless, vulnerable and frail, am left with thoughts that idly twist.
Hey, gobbet: do you know I have opinions about aphorisms? Of course you do, you’re me! But I’m going to tell you anyways, because I don’t care what you think of me and I love the sound of my own voice. That’s something we share, you and I, only you hate to hear your nasal tones and I can’t stand you in gross volume, but I digress.
My head is full of noise and my body is numb and hollow. Empty, listless, staring. Quivering meat struck dumb and mute.
Aphorisms are a sucker’s game. I hate aphorisms, adages, proverbs, and dictums, and I can barely ever tell them apart! Nonsense, the lot.
The creature that isn’t my Cheshire—or might be, might hope to be, please let her be my Cheshire—tries her best to kill a zombie that looks like me if I had blue eyes and worse skin. The corpse-thing dances around swiping claws and gnashing teeth, a long knife in each hand, clad in dark leather that bares midriff and cleavage. The shapeshifter that used to be my girlfriend—might be again, might never be again—keeps herself between me and the enemy, her flesh hardening and growing scales to absorb each dagger strike meant for my soft, defenseless body.
Here’s an aphorism for you, an old coat to try on: “You never know what you have until it’s gone.” Completely inane, right? What an absurd little phrase. As if you didn’t know exactly what you were giving up when you made your stupid, selfish demand. You knew what you were throwing away, gobbet. You’d been living it and learning it for almost the entirety of your physical existence. There was more Alice and Cheshire than there had been Alice alone, and you gave it up for… what, exactly? For why?
Cheshire’s shifting is more complex now, more varied and potent, like when we would merge as one to best our foes. The lithe frame of the girl that tried to seduce me is replaced by a warrior’s build, her whole body made into a weapon. She spars against her foe with the joy of child’s play and the intensity of an apocalypse, her grin burning across her face and lit up in those mismatched eyes—one red, one blue.
The Demiurge stitched a doll that had no choice but to love you, and you told her to scrap it for parts because you couldn’t bear to be loved, couldn’t stand the thought of it. Maybe love is a lie and you see right through it, or maybe, just maybe, love is no match for the loathing that whispers in your ear, “No one ever loves me who doesn’t want to leave me.”
I stand, hollow. I watch, helpless. The song in my head continues to scratch.
Isn’t this pathetic, gobbet? Aren’t we? Here we are, worthless and powerless, being saved by someone we barely recognize who probably doesn’t recognize us. It’s life or death out there and here we are getting lost in our head about nonsense and loathing. How typical. How disgusting. Are you ever going to change?
The interplay is faster than I can follow, just blurs of color and thunderclaps of sound. Crumbling stone, shattered glass. A roar of triumph, the tearing of skin. A red haze, a splatter of blood. Then: searing white and blue, a wash of numbing cold that seeps beneath my clothing.
When my sight clears, the zombie is in pieces. Beetles and flies crawl out of the cracked stone beneath the fragmented corpse and begin to feast upon frozen flesh beginning to steam. Cheshire—changed and familiar, beautiful and terrible—looks lightly injured but healing fast, a thin layer of frost upon her body already burning away.
The changeling’s breath is heavy, her grin almost manic. She licks her teeth as she straightens out of her combat stance, and when she glances my way she gives me a wink. “Trickiest of the bunch, that one, but I was better. Nice to finally put her down.”
Through cloying brain fog and a cacophony of Alice, I try to pull my thoughts together. “You… you’ve fought that thing before? When? What was it? And… do you… I mean… how did you find me?”
“Do you know who I am?” That’s the question we should be asking, gobbet, but you’re a coward and a fool too stupid to ask. The answer is clear as day, of course, but you can’t stand to look at it because you know that it makes you a murderer. As if that mattered.
Cheshire turns her full attention on me, stepping away from the site of her victory. She laughs, and my chest seizes with how different she is now. Her carefully-chosen outfits are now just tatters of fabric that barely cover skin still furred and scaled despite the absence of immediate danger. Her claws are out, her teeth are sharp, and I even see a barbed tail flicking back and forth behind her. And that red eye—my red eye—burns where her golden used to rest.
“We’ve scrapped,” the changeling evades. “I’ll tell you the whole story later, once we’re somewhere safe. Let’s get moving; I’ll answer whatever questions I can on the way.”
“On the way to where?” I ask, curiosity briefly overcoming dread.
“There’s a big fancy clock tower about an hour’s trek from here,” Cheshire answers quickly. “It’s the one place in this supercharged dream bubble that Prevara’s pets can’t enter, and it’s where the Demiurge is going to give us our marching orders for the last stage of this little war with the Emissary.”
The Demiurge, our maker and breaker, our doom and our savior. The hand that holds the knife, the will that parts our flesh. Will you run back to her arms, gobbet, to wither beneath her scorn and beg her absolution? Her game is yet to run its course, and she wants you for her star piece. Will you let her lay that curse upon us?
You should, says a second voice, a harder voice. You don’t have the means to take her on, not yet. Don’t sacrifice strength for dignity, and don’t spurn an opportunity just because you hate the hand that holds it. Only an Intercessor stands a chance at winning the game and breaking her wheel.
I swallow nervously, tongue heavy with fear and doubt. My hands are trembling—weakness, can’t be showing that—so I dig my nails into my palms and clench my fists tightly. “Cheshire,” I say with an injection of hollow control. “You saved me from a monster, and for that I’m grateful, truly, but I’m feeling a bit too lost to go sprinting off with just a word. I need information, I need to find my bearings, and I need to know: who—or what—are you, to me?”
Cheshire takes a casual step closer and replies, “All you need to know right now, Miss Intercessor, is that our mutual employer sent me here to keep you safe and keep you moving. I’m your bodyguard: your sword and shield, and a second pair of eyes. Beyond that, we can make more personal introductions once you’re in a secure location and we’re not at constant risk of more zombies like that one bursting out of the woodwork. We don’t have much time.”
There’s an urgency in her voice and in the subtleties of her movement as she draws closer, a tightening of her expression that might indicate sincerity or be another layer of performance, but I can’t bring myself to care. Nothing about what she’s saying and doing sticks in my brain like those key few words that tell the story I didn’t want to hear.
Mutual employer. Miss Intercessor. The words of someone who’s never met you before. The words of a new woman. Face it, gobbet: there’s not a drop of our girl in her.
She doesn’t recognize me at all. She knows who I am, but she doesn’t know me. And of course she doesn’t, of course she’s a stranger, because that’s what I asked for. I wanted a fair playing field. I—I wanted to do the right thing. It—it was the right thing, wasn’t it? Didn’t I do good?
Or did you wish away your only friend for a few motes of privacy? Did you rid yourself of the only girl to ever show you love for the brittle illusion of just action and righteous course?
It wasn’t an illusion! hisses that second voice, a voice quite like Homura’s. Justice is bought in blood and pain. Justice demands sacrifice.
Sacrifice? What a fancy word for murder.
I’m not a murderer! I’m a hero, damn you.
The girl I liked is dead and I killed her.
Cheshire reaches for my arm and I jerk it away. I try to speak but my throat seizes up.
Careful now, warns Homura. Don’t antagonize her. Play the game as if you buy the rules. Bide your time and wait for the perfect moment. You can’t fix anything if you just lash out at the nearest target.
Fuck that, scorns the first voice. Are you really going to take this lying down? Look at her, gobbet. Look at her! Are you happy with this? Is this the deal you made?
Cheshire raises an eyebrow at me. “Hey, I’m not kidding around. We have to go.”
Play along. Say what she wants to hear and gather intel.
Spit in her face and tell God you want a refund. Make the Demiurge give you back your tailored doll.
I bite my lip hard enough to draw blood and the bliss of pain brings clarity to chaos. “Then we can go, but not to the clock tower. I need more information before I can plot my next moves, and I am starving, so let’s walk and talk until we find a place to grab a bite.”
It’s a reasonable request. A minor detour at worst. My Cheshire would agree to it in a heartbeat. My Cheshire would be happy to talk and eat with me.
My Cheshire is gone. The cat-eared thing staring back at me cocks her head for only a moment before lunging forward and seizing me by the wrists so fast I can’t even start to react before she’s already caught me in a vice grip. “Yeah, this isn’t a negotiation. You can eat once you’re safe,” she says with a hard new edge to that familiar voice.
Panic streaks down my spine. This isn’t the plan. This wasn’t supposed to happen. What do I do? I try to pull away from her in desperate futility, but her strength is far beyond my own. I call out to her, voice cracking, “Stop it! What are you—”
Her grip tightens and pain shoots through my arms and I gasp and shudder and freeze. My wrists, she’s going to break my wrists, she’s going to squeeze and squeeze and my bones will crack and pop and push through my skin and the blood will run rivers down my arms and I’ll lose my hands and it’ll hurt, hurt, hurt, I don’t want it to hurt.
Cheshire murmurs, low and menacing, “It wouldn’t take much to shatter those pretty wrists, frail as they are. And I know for a fact you don’t have the strength to stop me, and you won’t until you come back to your master. Do you like being able to move your hands?”
She relaxes her grip, but just a touch, just enough I can think and breathe. I’m starting to shake again, worse this time, legs and arms and teeth. “Wh-what are y-you doing, I th-thought you were supposed to be my—”
Squeeze again, her hands on my wrists, spiking pain in bruised muscle and aching bone, vulnerable bone, so close to breaking. She’s going to break my wrists. She’s actually going to break my wrists, I can’t believe she’s actually going to break my wrists, this can’t be happening.
“P-please, please stop, this is—this is insane, this is insane, what kind of bodyguard cripples their—”
Tighter, tighter, tighter, her strong hands crushing my delicate limbs, her strength about to annihilate me and take away my everything and it hurts, it hurts, it hurts so much. I whimper and start to cry, tears streaking down my pathetic, blubbering face even as she releases a bit of tension again and grants me that false reprieve.
“You’ll live,” she tells me dismissively. “You’ll heal. So am I going to carry you to the Demiurge with broken wrists—and maybe ankles or kneecaps, your whole spine if you keep fussing—or are you going to be a good girl and come along quietly?”
I whimper for a second time, barely vocal now. It hurts. It hurts and I hate it and a real hero isn’t supposed to be this weak and spineless and frail but all I want is to make the pain go away. I don’t care about standing up for myself, I don’t care about causes or goals or grand machinations. I just want the suffering to end.
Would she really do it? Cheshire’s eyes smolder, hard and uncompromising, and I know with absolute certainty that this is not an empty threat. She will break me if I defy her. She will carry me in pieces if that’s what it takes. Why?
“Why are you doing this?” I whisper, and when her grip starts to tighten again I cry, “I’m not resisting! Stop, please, you—you win. I’ll come with you. I won’t resist. Just please… please tell me why.”
Cheshire tilts her head, contemplative for a moment. Then, in a single flourish, she scoops me into her arms, tenses her legs, and leaps onto the nearest rooftop. I squeak at the sudden change in heights. As she bounds from building to building over the streets of Fata Morgana I cling to her like a drowning woman clings to wreckage, the world below us passing in a blur.
I shut my eyes tight to block out the terrifying imagery and clutch my kidnapper with all the strength I can muster, more scared of being dropped from these heights to smear against the pavement than I am of what awaits me in the Demiurge’s domain. I’m such a coward.
“To answer your question,” Cheshire says blithely as she leaps and dashes across the city skyline, “I’m doing this because it’s the only game in town. You’re with the Demiurge or you’re a dead woman walking. And I’d do anything for one more day of being alive. Wouldn’t you?”
I don’t have anything to say to that. I can’t. So I cling to her in silence, miserable and crying and completely helpless. Just a weak, powerless, ordinary nobody.
Back in Sanctuary, in the maze, chased by hunters and bound up in a duel, I ran all the way to the rotten core of my soul. In the very core of my being I found a scared little girl crying over her dead mother, and I knew what that made me: a slave to fear. An eternal victim, terrified and traumatized and broken and never, ever amounting to more.
I thought that if I took Cheshire’s hand and forged myself into a knife that cuts as it bleeds, then I could change that scared, crying core. I thought I could be more than what I was made to be, more than I was painted.
Was I wrong? I don’t feel any stronger. I don’t feel any different than who I’ve always been at my lowest, at my weakest, my truest. I will always be what I am in the cold, lonely dark.
You didn’t even keep to that plan, the cold voice from before insists in my mind. You had Cheshire’s hand, her loyalty, her immortal soul suborned to yours, and you threw it away. Is it any surprise what happened next? You forged yourself into a knife and let the edge blunt and chip and rust. Your hasty scaffolding crumbled away before it could make even an ounce of change to the wretched husk beneath. You sacrificed everything, and for what?
Tell me, gobbet: is this the deal you made?
No. “This isn’t what I wanted,” I whisper through the tears.
Cheshire drops from her latest perch and slams into the ground, the shock of it running through me an instant before she dumps me like a sack of bricks onto the hard street. The breath is knocked from my lungs and I curl up, gasping for air as soon as I can move the right muscles, wincing and cringing and hoping desperately that I haven’t broken a rib.
My vision is still spinning when I hear a new voice, another familiar voice: the voice of Nyarlathotep, the Lucid Demiurge, the Toymaker and Soul-Sculptor, the architect of all my woes.
She says, tone sickly sweet and mocking, “Why, that’s very unfortunate to hear! What did you want, darling? If I’ve gotten it wrong, I’ll be happy to correct your mistake.”
A tower looms overhead, a twisted thing of brick and marble and concrete like three buildings smashed together with no concern for aesthetic or integrity. A giant clock face sits embedded high up the tower, all hands set to twelve and unmoving.
From the arched entrance to the clock tower hangs an adult-sized doll strung up by the wrists and bleeding from eyes and mouth and holes in its chest and throat. The doll is smiling, its lips cracked at the edges.
“If I recall correctly, which I do,” she says to my disoriented silence, “you asked me to make something up for your silly little girlfriend. So I did. You don’t like this draft?”
A bit of fury blooms in my heart and tears through all the pain and fear I’m drowning in. “I told you to free her! I wanted her without your fucking chains! This isn’t that! Where is the real Cheshire?”
The doll sighs. “I see it didn’t sink in. Let me give you a more hands-on demonstration. Cheshire, push her in.”
The changeling immediately grabs me, lifts me to my feet, and pushes me through the archway into another world. I fall through time and space and am lost as once before, trapped in a dream within a dream and before the watching eyes.
In a town in a world never born and never ending, there is a street where every building is a crooked, lanky shadow.
Night-black skyscrapers with golden window-eyes claw at the sky’s violet expanse and choke the stars with smoke. The street below is a slash of trailing white, pure like a lily, a single line of snow unbroken and untouched. The gawking crowds are smudges of brown and gray with static-scribble faces that watch without eyes and laugh without mouths. The buildings twitch and writhe on the edge of sight, always still when you turn to look.
In the distance, both before and behind, the horizon narrows to a single point of white enclosed by ceaseless black; this is a street that has no end and no beginning, for endings are a sin and beginnings are a lie. If you walked for nine hundred years and ninety-nine days down the solemn street toward its distant horizon you would come no closer to the nearest gawker or the pitch-black tenement that looms just out of arm’s reach. Gently, softly, snow falls between the cracks in the roof of the world.
All is silent. All is still. All this is true and none of it real.
In the middle of the street, where there is only snow and air, a door opens and a woman steps through. The door closes behind her and vanishes with only a hint of what lay inside: a single glimpse of sterile lights and metal tables.
Sharp eyes scour the world. Teeth gnaw on lips wet with blood. The woman whose name is secret to her children wears the same lack of outfit as she did before, nothing but a gore-stained lab coat open to expose her fleshless skeleton. She is unbothered by the falling snow and the chill of blowing wind, with not a hint of pink on her face or hands.
“There is a body lying in the street,” she says, and thus there is. “It is the body of a girl with blue eyes, now glassy, stripped down to her smallclothes as red as the blood that spills down her side and stains the snow beneath her, bled out and half-nude. Her skin is pale and dead and beautiful.”
The corpse is painted as the woman speaks, detail clarifying from the muddy suggestion of human form. The dead thing is red and cream and two shining pools of lifeless blue.
The woman taps her chin and muses, “No, not quite dead, not yet. She clings to her last breath, desperate for another nine. This girl burns with life, has burned with life, will burn for life. She knows me, her Lucid Demiurge, and so she fears me, but she owes me and she needs me and she will bend for me as I wish.” The woman snaps her fingers. “Scene.”
The dead girl gasps for breath, blue eyes wide and panicking. Shivering fingers clutch at torn and bleeding flesh. She is born; she is dying. She cries out, “Please, please save me, please! I don’t want to die! It hurts, make it stop, make the pain go away!”
The woman sits down in the snow and as she cradles the dying girl in her arms she is transformed: gone is the lab coat, replaced by flowing robes of brightest gold, and her face conceals beneath a white mask that bleeds black tar from its crooked eyes and slanted mouth.
“Cheshire,” she names the dying girl, “you must tell me—and tell me true, for I will brook no deception from the breath of my lungs—which do you fear more: the pain, or its cessation? For if you fear the pain the greater, then your peace is one breath from settled. But if your terror comes in endings, know that pain is all I offer.”
The girl coughs, bloody and shuddering. “Why, my lord? Why must I suffer?”
The woman takes the girl’s hand with a surgeon’s care and gently breaks her first finger. “Pain is how we learn, for the stove is no danger until you burn your hand upon it.”
A second finger snaps, a loving mutilation. “The value of each meal is marked not in satiety but in the hunger that it wards.”
A third, bone cracked and flesh torn. “Pain is how we grow, for love’s great lie is only known when the knife is felt hilt-deep.”
Her fourth finger, rent with delicate force. “If you would live, then you must bleed, for the body that bleeds not is but a doll of painted clay. This I teach you. Show me you understand.”
Hesitant, fearful, dying, the girl takes her final finger and bends it to its breaking. She cries and cries and cries, her tears freezing in the snow.
“Good. Tears are good. Now I ask again, and you will answer, for I have placed it in your heart: the pain or its cessation?”
“Death,” Cheshire whispers. “I fear death more. Save me, please.”
“I shall. And you will give me all of you. Say this and make it true.”
And Cheshire says, “I will give you all of me.”
“You will bleed for me. You will burn for me. You will smile for me.”
And Cheshire says, “I will bleed for you. I will burn for you. I will smile for you.”
“You were mine, are mine, will be mine, then and now till stars are scattered dust.”
And Cheshire says, “I was yours, am yours, will be yours, then and now till stars are scattered dust.”
The woman smiles behind her mask and the dying girl lets out her breath. With care and love, the master of the worlds plucks an eye from Cheshire’s head and lowers a golden copy in its place. The Demiurge rises, and the body of the girl sinks into the snow to blossom and be changed.
The woman walks down the street, the crowd parting to bow and kneel. Eight times she lays to rest the body of the girl. Eight times a life is spent. Eight times the words are whispered. The world blinks.
In a forest in a world never born and never ending, there is a glade where every tree is a crooked, lanky shadow.
Coal-black roots creep over an endless field of white while golden leaves flutter in the breeze. The sky is gray and stormless. No hunters tread this wood, no rabbits or deer prance beneath this canopy. There is nothing here but death and memory. Gently, softly, snow falls between the cracks in the roof of the world.
All is silent. All is still. All this is true and none of it real.
“In the dark and the cold, I found you,” the Demiurge proclaims. “With dying breath, you begged my aid.”
The blue-eyed girl lies bleeding in the snow, mauled and left for dead. She looks up at the white-masked figure and with ragged breath she begs, “Save me, please.”
The woman tilts her head. “Why?” she asks.
“Because I will give you all of me,” the girl that will be Cheshire pleads with her master. “I will bleed for you. I will burn for you. I will smile for you. I was yours, am yours, will be yours, then and now till stars are scattered dust.”
The Demiurge lifts Cheshire from the snow, blood staining golden robes. “So it shall be. You have died nine times, will die nine times, and on your ninth I will take you and you will become my vessel, as you have always been. This is your name and your nature.”
And snow takes the world in endless freezing white.
When the blizzard passes, I find myself standing in a room that might pass for the interior of a clock tower if you didn’t look too closely. There are great gears of brass, chimes and whistles, and all manner of thrumming pipe and exposed wiring, but everything isn’t quite right. Pipes melt into gears that sprout gauges with symbols from three languages, and nowhere in this confusing mess of metal and glass and rubber is there any sense of purpose or design.
Though I passed through an archway, there are no doors behind me. There are no stairs or ladders leading up, either, but there are windows looking out; the world outside is kaleidoscopic and celestial like rivers of burning stars that glitter in all the colors unnatural.
In the center of the room is an autopsy table of cold, sterile steel, and lying on that table with arms pressed together is a girl with feline ears and glassy blue eyes. Her open hands cup a bloody eyeball, its iris crimson.
The Demiurge is nowhere to be seen, but I know she’s here. Watching. Listening. Mocking me. I open my mouth to speak and her voice intrudes first:
“Now you surely see, so lay to rest your pining for a girl that never was. The changeling is and always was nothing more than a narrative construct. There is no Platonic form of Cheshire, no deeper essence you might uncover and free from unjust imprisonment; there is only what we make of her by our choices and our reading.”
I stare down at the corpse of Cheshire and feel sick to my stomach. “What is this, Nyara? What is the point of this?”
Her whisper comes to my ear: “The point, dear one? Why, it can be whatever you like! Violence or love, horror or the erotic, empathy or self-loathing; you are always free to create your own meaning. In fact, I quite insist that you do, else this will come to very little. Just take my hand and tell me how you feel.”
I clench my fists and hiss, “Enough of this! Enough!” I brace myself against the autopsy table and squeeze my eyes shut. “For once in my life I am tired of debating philosophy. You’ve dragged me around through torment after torment, you’ve baited me with prizes only to rip them away, and now I am done with all your games. I want answers. I want agency. And if you refuse me, if you keep toying with me like this, I—I will…”
What can you say to threaten a god? What can you deny the lord of the universe?
I curl my lip, sneer a little, and say, “I will sit here and do nothing and I will bore you to death.”
The noises of the clock tower stop. Gears grind to a halt. Pipes cease to thrum. Whistles and chimes wind down.
Silence. A pregnant pause. A trillion grains of sand spilling down the hourglass. The second hand of a clock going tick… tick… tick… stop.
Stillness is like a kind of poison. It’s like being buried alive. When all stimuli are denied you, when you are left with nothing but the noise inside your head, it can be a kind of hell. No wonder thoughts will wander, if only to escape the dead and dreary room.
But daydreams can only distract for so long. Eventually you have to acknowledge the physical realities of the situation you’re in. The situation you put yourself in.
Hunger and thirst are horrible things.
Fire is more painful in its singular moment, but it kills with relative haste. Denied a meal but finding water, the human body can survive a few months, or rather it can die that slowly. With neither food nor water, a week would be stretching it, but I wouldn’t worry; a gracious god will always grant another drop to drink.
It’ll go slow, and it’ll feel even slower. Your fat will burn and your muscles will wither, and then you’ll shrivel up to skin and bone. What starts as simple pangs quickly transforms into need into emptiness into agony, and that pain will stick with you as the weeks turn into months.
Your senses will dull, mind clouded and foggy. Pop goes a neuron, then another, atrophying en masse. Every cell in your body will start to die, one by one, and the engine of your biology will fail to produce replacements. You can feel yourself getting slower, weaker, dumber, frailer.
Can you imagine what you’ll lose, piece by piece, as hours turn to days turn to weeks? Can you imagine how little will be left when I come to cradle you in my arms and whisper your salvation? Will you remember why you were resisting? Will you have the strength to become anything but my slave?
Or will I leave you there to die in a tomb of your own making?
“Speak for me, dear one. Tell me you’ll be mine.”
I gasp and shudder as the Demiurge releases her hold on my senses. I fall to my knees and heave, but nothing rises from my empty gut. I shiver. I remember. I relive. I die a hundred slow and unforgiving deaths.
There’s so little fight left in me. I just want to give in.
Then lay down like a dog and let her have her way with you. Is that really what you are? Are you truly so spineless?
She's playing a trick, Homura warns. Think: if she really has as much control as she's making it seem, if she really wins that gamble, then why is she flaunting her hand? Why taunt you with the outcome when she could just play it out?
But what if we're wrong, whispers a third voice, a soft and trembling Reska, and she gets angry with us? What if she isn't bluffing? That's too big a risk, too awful a fate.
She needs us, Homura insists. She needs us more than we need her, and all of this stagecraft is to hide that fatal weakness. It has to be a bluff. She can't rig the game as well as she pretends, trust me.
Don’t believe her lies, hisses Reska. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
Ignore the lamb, dismisses that first voice, cold and cruel and so like my own. The murderer has a point, gobbet. Use your brain and actually think about what’s happening. That thing can reach inside your brain and place whatever thoughts it likes, so why is she still asking? Why does she ever ask? Why is this a choice?
“Because it has to be,” I whisper.
I know what I need to do and it’s hard, it takes so much and I wish I could lie down and sleep instead, but I can’t. I won’t. Not after all I’ve sacrificed to get this far.
I swallow, mouth dry, and rise from the floor with shaky hands and wobbly knees. My tongue is leaden and it takes me three tries, but I get the words out. I give her my answer.
“I know you’re strong, Nyara. I know you’re more than me. You’re more than I’ll ever be, right? You can crush me like a bug. You can pull me on your strings and make me sing and dance. You can put me in a box of nightmares and shake me around for a billion years till I come out crying for your mercy, sure, that’s mostly true. But there has to be a point. There has to be a reason. Because there—because there is a purpose to me.”
I laugh, wretched and manic. The laughter bubbles up as strong as it ever has. My chest hurts and my cheeks strain as I laugh and laugh and laugh, unable to stop. What a joke this all is, that it all comes back to that tea party in the chaos of my soul.
The first time I sat down and really conversed with Cheshire, in the raw moments after our covenant, we talked about significance. We talked about the search for human meaning in a cold and uncaring universe, but this universe cares very deeply; this world has a maker and her touch is known, her gaze made clear. This is a place where all things have a purpose.
The cat called us all toys in the toybox, the victims of a great game with only one player and we the hapless pawns, but she was wrong. I’ve seen the truth, or at least a glimpse of it. I’ve seen the room outside of time where the surgeon works upon her red material. I know my purpose, and I know that I’m not a toy at all.
I’m an experiment.
“There is a purpose to me,” I repeat. “You made me for a reason. You made everything in that room for a reason, every gobbet of meat you cut off from whatever the hell you are. You’re asking a question, and you know you can’t find the answer if you just cheat, so you have to play by a set of rules. God ties her own hands. You could have made me another puppet like so many of your creations, but you didn’t, and that means my freedom is a requirement for whatever you’re trying to do here. It has. To be. A choice.”
The gears and pipes all hum to life and the bleeding doll claps politely, freshly appeared on the other side of the table. “Correct! Very good! We’ll make an Intercessor out of you yet.”
My relief at not being tortured for months is immediately soured. “I told you—”
“Yes, yes, the details of the deal.” The doll waves a hand dismissively. “Listen, I understand that the deal hasn’t been to your liking. You feel like you lack agency. I can fix that. I want to fix that. That’s what this is all for.” She gestures at the cat lying cold on the slab.
I’m taken aback. “What?”
The Demiurge licks her lips—dolls should not have tongues, that is so weird—and paces around the table, circling me. “Agency. That’s the word you used, but I prefer ‘control’ as our guiding beacon. That’s been the real issue with Cheshire from the very start. You can’t trust her because you don’t control her, like you don’t control anything in your life. That would have been true even without my interference. Your trust issues were never confined to Cheshire, Alice; you thought about killing Dante, might have murdered Esha if it suited you, treated every soul in that city with ruthless suspicion. Most of all the girl fighting hardest to keep you safe. No matter how many times Cheshire showed her love or proved her loyalty, no matter what story she told you, no matter how hard she pleaded for it, you could never really trust her. Oh, you tried, or you told yourself you tried, and perhaps that’s to be admired. But deep down, you know it was all a lie.”
“That’s—” I cut myself off, hesitating to refute her words. That’s not true, is it? I changed! I took the risk, I chose to trust.
“Did you really? Then, my darling Alice, why ever did you betray that trust?”
I flinch. It wasn’t a betrayal. I was saving her!
“Because you knew better than her? Because you were right and her own desires were wrong, is that it? Because you didn’t trust her? Listen to yourself: you’re still calling it a risk to trust, but trust is not a gamble. Trusting someone doesn’t mean treating them like a half-loaded gun pointed at your heart.”
No. No, that’s not right, that’s not true, I’m not. I wasn’t. I—I want to scream, it’s in my bones and building, I can’t stand it. “What are you offering?” I snarl at my maker to keep the static at bay.
The doll gently lifts one of my hands and presses a scalpel between my fingers.
The Demiurge smiles at me. “I’m offering the chance to take control for the first time in your life—your life here, and the life you remember that never was. Take control, Alice.”
I stare at her, uncomprehending, not wanting to understand the implication of what she’s suggesting. The horror only mounts, and the fascination.
She sweeps her hands at the still form of the girl I almost loved. “The clay is fresh, your tools laid out. You can sculpt a new Cheshire, a better Cheshire, a Cheshire that you can trust. Shape her as I shaped her, carve her as I carved her, create her as I created her. Alice and Cheshire, together again, but this time by your intent, by your rules, by your design.”
Cheshire, my Cheshire, cut and molded and made anew. An act of insane violation. An act of absolute control. All I’ve ever wanted, or dreamed I might want. All I’ve ever feared, or convinced myself so.
“By this act, claim your seat as my Intercessor. And with Cheshire at your side as she always should have been, I am absolutely certain that you will become Royalty of this world and annihilate that lowly priest of worms. Wield the knife, Alice. Make the first cut, and all the rest will follow.”
I stare at the scalpel in my hands and marvel at its edge. Could this simple, dreadful, beautiful thing truly shape a life? Could I create my own Cheshire? Should I? What would I become?
What are you even saying? Reska’s voice sobs in my mind. Nothing is worth that kind of monstrosity!
Don’t be naive, Homura derides. This is exactly the advantage we need.
There’s a flash of pain between my temples, the doll flickers out of sight, and then Reska and Homura are standing in the room with me.
Homura, hard-eyed, hand resting on the hilt of her weapon. Reska, despondent, head in her hands. Both as they were the last time I saw them, in my dreams, in the dark beneath the castle. A night of deep betrayal.
“Heroes make hard decisions. We have to be willing to use any tool, pay any price, so long as it gets us closer to our goal. When the stakes are raised this high, winning is all that matters.”
Reska shakes her head and cries, “How can you say that? It doesn’t matter what we use it for, a tool like this would stain us far beyond salvation. It can’t be love if it isn’t a choice. Didn’t you tell me you believed in justice?”
“There is no justice except at the end of my blade!” Homura snarls. “No justice under the rule of that tyrant, no justice in the billions she’s tortured! The ends will always justify the means.”
Reska flinches, but she presses on. “The means will always shape the ends! What use is the death of one tyrant if the next is twice as cruel? Is it justice to trade one monster for another, and the throne red with blood? Was that your justice when you pierced my heart?”
Pain flashes across Homura’s face, chased by resolve. “I did what I had to! The consequences for the world—”
“And what about the consequences for us?” Reska’s voice is raw and full of heartbreak. “I trusted you. I loved you.”
“Do you really think I didn’t feel the same?” Homura whispers hoarsely. “Did you think I didn’t care?”
“Then why? Why, why, why?”
“Because one will never outweigh infinity.” Iron conquers heartsblood and Homura turns back to me. “Use the blade. Break the wheel. Save us all.”
There’s a surreal reverie to the scene, to the sight of the girls from my dreams now clad in flesh and silk. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know who to believe. I don’t know why both arguments ring hollow.
I look at Homura and I still feel the sting of betrayal and the deep unease of trying to parse a liar’s words. I remember the moments we shared that weren’t really mine. I see the fire in her eyes and I feel it as my own. I know the spirit of rebellion and the hatred of injustice imparted by my glimpse into Homura’s beating heart.
Am I a hero? I don’t feel like one.
I look at Reska and she’s right in front of me, pleading with hands clasped, sorrow and terror in her eyes. “Please don’t do this,” she begs. “Don’t be a monster. Don’t murder the girl you love.”
For a single moment, my hands are red with her blood as I pull my blade from the hole in her chest. The stench of it is thick in the air, rust-scent clogging my nose. Murderer. I am murdering this girl and it will be worth it, she promised it was worth it, it has to be worth it or I should have driven that blade into my own throat instead and spared this world my every stolen breath. What have I done? What did she make me do?
Then I’m staring at her face, no blood to be found, but I can still smell the slaughter and I remember what I did. What she did.
Monster.
I back away, horror finally eclipsing fascination, and I stumble and trip and hit the flagstones outside the tower. I’m breathing too much, too hard, hyperventilating. What was I about to do? What was I thinking? Who am I?
We, whispers the cold, familiar voice, are a reckless coward and a clever fool. We are a liar pretending to be a hero. We seek victimhood in fear of hunger. We are Veseryn, just as we were named. It’s time we admitted what we really want. It’s time to be a monster. Go back into that room and claim our prize.
“No. No, that’s not who I am!” I shout at the empty air. I stumble to my feet and away from the tower, back into the city, anywhere but here.
Admit what you want and take it! Forget love, forget justice, and take control, or you will die a powerless liar.
I start running. I sprint through the streets of Fata Morgana with only the great glass tower for a guiding light. I run and Veseryn laughs.
And then a red ribbon wraps around my throat and the world goes black.
