Snarling. Snorting. Tearing. The visceral sounds of the beasts devouring their meal drowned out the rest of the battlefield as I stared down at the body of the Seeing Oni. The gunshot had broken the strap of her mask, revealing her face. Her lifeless eyes watched the storm clouds above. The blood covering the long grass stained it black in the light of the car fire.
Why?
I had a simple answer that I didn’t want to accept.
They had been Witch and Wolf. It made sense, the way they moved in perfect unison. But that wasn’t enough to satisfy me. Who were they? What had happened to bring them to Organ? What were they to each other?
I wanted to know so badly. It was a hunger. One I had the means of sating.
The sound of eating, swallowing, chewing, animals fighting over scraps, it all seemed to grow to a feverish pitch as my hands shook.
I could find out everything about her. I could even feel what she felt, in her last moments, when her connection to her Wolf broke. Fire burned against my skin like shame. I squeezed my eyes shut but that was no solace. Phantom sensations played along my neck, the ghosts asking me to add another to their numbers.
They’re not real. You’re going crazy and at the worst time.
Ark burped, cutting through the noise in my head.
I opened my eyes and looked at him. The animals were just finishing melting away into his skin. He eyed me, picking his teeth with a fingernail.
“Why do ye look so disturbed?” he asked. “How did ye think this was gonna fuckin’ end? Ye should at least look like that when I kill yer friends, not when a stranger bites it.”
I stared at him, lost between outrage and sympathy. “You suck,” I uttered.
He snorted. “Weak-hearted people have no place in this world…” he trailed off, staring at the entrance to the manor. “But I’m willin’ to postpone yer death to have a chat with that one.”
The rest of my squad were near the entrance too.
I should go.
I roused myself and formed Locust Legs. No way I was letting Ark get there first.
Launching myself towards the manor, I was immediately hit by a wave of heat that seemed to emanate from the manor. The grass at the center of the driveway loop had burned away, leaving blackened earth. Strangely, there was a cut off point, where beyond it the grass looked just as green as before. The squad was standing just outside of this line.
There were bodies lying about, covered in terrible burns. At the front steps a short woman stood, dressed in a white fur coat and tall fur hat. She should have been dying from the heat, yet her face was not flushed. Her skin looked as though it had never been touched by the sun. She looked utterly composed.
The man beside her wasn’t Damascus. He was dressed like a butler, with silver hair and gold-rimmed glasses. Despite his aged face, he held himself with poise. I had trouble believing that this was Damascus, as I had never seen him apart from his Witch and without his liquid armour. He must have left.
The squad leader paused what he was saying as I landed next to the group. “Marrow. Report.”
I glanced at Fir who didn’t look away from the woman in white.
“The invisible knife guy is dealt with. Same with the two masked Shapers. The beast-maker Wolf is coming this way. I wouldn’t attack first, he said he just wants to talk to that woman.”
“That’s inadvisable. They could decide to team up against us. She’s a Witch. Don’t approach her. You can see the result of entering her range of influence.”
I looked across at the bodies and realized that none of their clothes were burnt in the slightest. At the center of the driveway loop next to the car, the white wax still bubbled in a large pool.
“Why not just…” I said in low tones while making a finger gun, hiding it from the view of the Witch.
“Can’t,” one of the soldiers said, flexing the fingers of his free hand. It looked stiff. “We’ve been Shaped. Can’t curl our fingers enough to pull the trigger. We’re not sure when it started.”
“She doesn’t seem to be budging from the entrance,” the squad leader said. “Which could be good for us. It means we can avoid her and look for another way in. Let’s not waste time.”
The group started to move, circling towards the side of the manor with the forest behind it while giving the Witch a wide berth.
The Witch in white spoke powerfully, orating across the open space, above the noises of battle, “I know you, Phage.”
I paused, looking at her.
“Wolf to Ortum Three. Nick Harte.”
I motioned for the rest of the group to keep going. They did so, although I heard Conrad protesting about leaving me with an enemy.
The Witch looked young, she still had the round cheeks of a child, yet the look in her eye was cold and calculating. That look gave me vibes similar to her. Someone in charge. Someone who made decisions that led to untold suffering.
“Sure,” I said loudly back. “Go fuck yourself.”
She didn’t bat an eye. “Ortum Three has developed so much over such a short time. I’ve never seen anything like it. Even now I can sense her influence over this entire area. Truly incredible. I suppose it is thanks to you that she has grown this powerful.”
“Nope. That’s all her. Despite everything you did to her, she is flourishing. And she’s here to bring your whole operation to an end.”
The Witch crossed her arms. The butler stood impassive, keeping an eye on the wax thing that was constantly shifting.
“I see. Organ owes a great deal of our progress to her. And to you. For putting such pressure on us, we’ve grown too. Forced to change our plans over and over, make them faster, more efficient, with so little time to execute. Even this conflict is bettering us, pushing us towards the ends we need.”
“The ends being…?”
“Surely that is obvious. Contact with the presence hanging over our heads. But you weren’t asking about that I suppose. You were asking about what comes after?”
“From what I’ve gathered, you’re defending a weapon. One that is designed to kill a god.”
She shrugged. “Killing it would not be ideal. But we need control, Nick. A way to have some say in what comes next. Letting it run wild could spell disaster. There’s just too much we don’t know about its intentions, if it even has any.”
I gestured towards Ark, who strode towards us with murder in his eyes. “Seems like not all of you are in agreement on that.”
“Snegurochka!” Ark shouted, addressing the Witch. “Ah’m disappointed.”
She turned her gaze on him. “Aindrea, was it? I can’t say the same. Conflict is simply another means of resolving disputes. I don’t feel personally betrayed at this disagreement.”
“Spoken like the true ice-cold queen of the Fedyaev’s. Is this all just business to ye? A new market to exploit?”
“You misunderstand the purpose of the weapon. It is merely a tool that grants us some precision in the matters to come. We cannot simply allow that seed to grow wild. It must be controlled. Pruned.”
“And if God doesn’t like being pruned?”
Snegurochka’s eyes flashed coldly. “Do you all wish for a reversion of history? A return to the oldest ages, where beast had equal footing with man? Evolution is fickle, it may not grant us lordship twice. If we want to continue as a species, we need control.”
Ark stamped his foot, Shapes shifting beneath his skin. “Ah don’t have time. God needs to come soon or none of this will matter to me.”
“Think of something beyond yourself and your petty desires,” she said imperiously. “If I was still a child, I would seek this god to break free from my ties to Fedyaev, to be free of the power and responsibility, to undo what my family had built up for centuries. But I know that it would spell disaster for humanity as a whole. My family’s power is needed.”
“So ye lock away yer own desire for some nebulous concept of greater good? Pathetic.” Ark sneered. “You are a doll with no soul. Step aside.”
She spread her feet, standing firm. “No.”
“Then we have nothin’ more to discuss. Ichor!” Ark shouted.
The bubbling wax twisted upward into a column and a face emerged, dripping and ill-defined. Two more pillars joined the first, faces contorting into various emotions. Smaller constructs stretched through the surface of the pillars, breaking free to shamble towards the Witch, each with a different number of limbs. They bubbled and popped as the heat seemingly intensified within the Witch’s range.
The old butler stepped forward to match them, swinging a fist which splattered one construct into waxy droplets. He kicked another and it fell apart. But the individual pieces simply formed new shapes and continued onwards, unperturbed by the violence. He raised an arm, staring at the wax that had solidified on it, weighing it down.
The heat emanating from Snegurochka abruptly ended. In its place was a leeching chill. Then she extended out her hand, her breath frosting in the air.
The wax golems grew slower until they began to freeze and crack. The old man was unaffected by the temperature. He gripped the wax stuck to him and shattered it in his grip.
Ark grinned from where he was standing. “Just what Ah was waiting for.”
He reared back, skin frothing with animal faces. Then he unleashed the torrent of beasts from within himself, a horizontal version of the tower he had produced before. A flood of fangs and claws and horns, rushing towards the Snergurochka.
Like a switch had been flipped, the heat came back in an instant, like hell brought to earth. The sweat on my skin evaporated in an instant even from where I was standing.
The animals howled as they burned and Ark howled with them, the veins at his neck standing out in full relief. The stench of burning flesh stung my nose.
Snegurochka showed a flicker of discomfort at the display. “What would drive you through such pain?”
Ark continued to push a chimeric font out of himself, seemingly endless amounts of flesh burning to black and breaking to charred pieces at the Witch’s feet.
Then, abruptly, the animals stopped. Ark was spent. He crashed to his knees and fell forward into the burning air.
His voice came out in a rasp, “I just… want Natan to get the life he deserves.”
Snegurochka drew her coat closer around herself. She looked at him sadly and said, “Sometimes, our old dreams need to die so new dreams can be born.”
The last wisps of flame around the car were extinguished by the winds, sending thin threads of smoke spiralling into the sky.
I regarded Ark’s body and the Snegurochka solemnly before following after my team.