Chapter 3: Chapter Two: Unspooling Threads of High Treason

(Amaranth)

Okay, uh... how do I... I want to break down, want to say 'what the fuck' over and over, but that's just as inadequate now as all the high-minded fluorescent... flowery... all the ornate? Like... everyone on Earth wants to pretend they get this moment. A-And the thing, is I think they do, but it never comes through in any of the stories I know that are about getting it.

'cuz, the thing is... we do know what it's like. Everyone associates it with childhood because that's the only time most of us get to feel it. The slipping-away. Feeling the cold hands of the world grab you by the shoulders and peel your skin down a layer at a time.

The way someone speaks about it, the things they say--that all only matters as far as it matters to them. As part of the grappling. It's the grappling that matters. The scrabbling and the scraping to find one's own words to express something so precious that to use anyone else's words to speak of it is, just maybe, sacrilege. That's the only reason for all the upturned noses, all the sneering, all the splashing in the gutters while we scream, "Who the fuck says purpurescent, you pretentious fucking prick?!"

Some instinctive understanding that idly cannibalizing the words of others is wrong for us. Some instinctive fear that no one will care about this thing we care about if we say "I need my own words" instead of "everyone needs my own words."

Because the thing is... the people who came before us, who imagined this moment before us. Their words aren't really in the way. There's all the freedom in the world to work around it. There's no need to tear down the things others say. Is there? Surely it doesn't have to be like that.

I keep wanting to say 'like a child," but I no longer think that's right.

We do know what it's like to have the whole world inverted. Mundanity itself, that is the first inversion. As a kid, I was surrounded by bright, colorful stories telling me that the only difference between dreams and reality was which direction I walked in. Magic was real. Transformation was real. Wishes do come true. It gets grittier going into young adult stuff. More angsty and jaded. But werewolves and witches and vampires are still supposed to be real until somewhere just after high school.

And then, whether you get your diploma or not, you step across a dividing line a single micrometer thick. It peels all the pastels and dreamscape contact lenses off you along with your skin. On the other side there's a labyrinth of plaster walls, cubicles, assembly lines and sweat shops. Sometimes you'll catch a glimpse of a skull a second before it's crushed into powder sold by some lady who smells like sage and bullshit. And you'll go to your deathbed wondering... did I really see horns in that split-second vision?

"Have to flay you to get the laziness out," says the figure of a man in a five-figure suit. "Get to work. Your skin'll grow back. Try to keep it workplace-appropriate this time, or we'll have to take that one away from you too."

You assume the rubbery, pinkish seal of no-feeling you grow all over your body is what a practical skin is supposed to look like. After all... it's what everyone else is wearing.

How's that for spellcraft? The whole grown-up world learns to think it's normal. to suffocate in scar tissue and calls it living.

Of course, for other people, the flaying comes way sooner. As a child, sometimes. Guess I ought to be grateful for what privileges I had.

God, what the fuck is wrong with me? I've experienced a miracle. I've got my second chance. And now that I'm out, now that I'm free, now that I can chart my own course, I'm right back to wallowing in my past.

Uh... how do I... gonna turn this off for a bit, I think. Stew on how to begin.

(Pause--crop background audio for a few seconds, for effect)

(Resume speaking without preamble)

There's a bizarre glow to the streetlights in Michigan. I swear I've never seen it elsewhere. Or... maybe when I lived elsewhere, I was young enough I didn't pay much attention to the way streetlights seep into the night around them. An oozing haze of orange spilling from the amber core.

I don't know if "suburbs" is or isn't the right term for the big open lawns and tree-lined streets around the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament. I do know that in the darkness post-witching hour, when I'm the only person traipsing along the sidewalk out here in front of its gray-brown gothic facade, this whole area has a way of seeping into the night.

A long-dormant instinct stirs. Sight is a way of concretizing the world, it whispers. Therefore, when one is accustomed to focusing her magic through her sight, the dissolution of visible things is tantamount to the world-boundary's breaking.

What if it's real? Wait, what if all of it is real? I know the edgy urban fantasy ideal should be flipping off the church, but if supernatural things exist, that potentially includes the Christian God. I couldn't handle another human girl in a bad mood, let alone a god.

I turn antsy. Hold my hands up towards the earthly embodiment of the Great Anathema. "We're cool, right?" I inquire of the sentinel stonework. "I know I'm a lost soul and all, but I'm not..." I waggle a hand at the cathedral's platform, "trespassing on the consecrated ground. This is a public sidewalk, right?" The silent edifice grows louder in its silence. I linger from morbid curiosity. What if I'm struck by lightning?

In the whole time I'm doing this, no convenient priest cracks the door open and starts talking about "my child" to signal the start of a come-to-Jesus character arc. Probably for the best. Sex work has long since broken my brain. If God did turn out to be real, I'm pretty sure making jokes about "penance Daddy" inside a church would be exactly how witches get spontaneously combusted.

Why the fuck am I laughing at that? Oh, I'm such a mess.

I walk on into the night. Pass by another building just down the road from the cathedral. The signage on its roadward side declares it to be the "Greater Faith Assembly." Is that some kind of Christian codephrase for a church that can't afford to look like a church, or is it more of a secret machine cult kind of deal?

It's made of those little drab brown blocks that have the thinness of wooden slats and the texture of especially dreary bricks. There's probably a specific name for this kind of building, and names for its materials. All these things exist in my own world. They have origins, intentions, whole architectural traditions behind them.

Real things built by real people.

And yet... yet now that I stop to think about it, I know nothing more about what they're really made of, or what takes place inside them.

Is the entire planet actually just made of liminal spaces, pathways leading off in all directions into futures we just don't end up visiting?

When I turn my eyes back to the sidewalk, I'm headed right for a strip mall with a brightly-lit parking lot that absolutely was not fucking there a few seconds ago.

"Oh." My feet drag to a stop. So soon? I thought... I thought it would take more than this. Hours of walking. A breakdown. Maybe blood sacrifice.

Nope. Already here. Already at the moment when I have to choose which to believe: has something finally broken in my brain, a few rogue synapses abandoning all hope of recovery from my self-inflicted suffering? Or it really... really just this easy?

"You look lost, kid." A shadowy silhouette--no, my mistake, a horned creature made of murky, inky, seeping shadows lounges against an especially off-kilter tree. Its decaying branches hang heavy with glowing fruits. He unfurls. His grin comes to me like a remembrance of snowblind--the red-edged suggestion of fangs and a forked tongue known only by the negative space they make against the maroon night in his throat.

"But lucky for you," and with each word his prong-feet bring him closer until his breath--stinking of burning oil--pours right up my nose--"ol' Cam's here to guide you--"

"Dude, I'm a whore." I push him away, along with the many conflicting feelings I get from the way my hand sinks, squelching, into the muggy depths of his forehead. "And more importantly, a witch." Those words are bullshit. I've never done a single manifest spell. And yet... space just shifted. I'm looking at a demon. It's all real.

He's saying something but the words don't sink in. That's for the best. Whatever it is might sap the fire igniting in my head.

As it stands, I realize... I wasn't crazy. I was never crazy, or entitled, or childish, or wasting time. I knew. I knew something everyone else forgot, or gave up, or never knew in the first place. I knew it in my heart, in my bones, in my... womb? Weird thought to have right now. But this isn't the time for self-criticism. I've done more than enough of that. This is the time to reclaim everything I ever wanted to be.

I'm not a lesser witch than Carrie. I just didn't get the chance I'll bet she did--to nurture her power in private where no one could poison it with anxiety, with shame, with self-denial.

And despite all that, despite all my fuck-ups and the evil I've done, I am still. Fucking. Here. I don't need this wretched parasite or anything he's going to try to offer me. I don't know what my story's going to be, but I know there's no place by my side for someone so...

"Derivative."

My voice drives out. The condemning word echoes audibly in one repetition after another inside the demon's semi-liquid skin." You make me really uncomfortable." I sink into the swelling sensation. It's like my whole body breathing at once, every nerve coming alive at the same time, or maybe it's my soul that for the very first time feels alive to the sensations of my own body. I feel him: feel the oily heat of his silhouette, the shapes of his leering face, the saliva dripping down his tongue. "I want you to back off. I want you to respect my boundaries."

The crushing fullness of me pours out. Shoving. Driving into shallow points all through his form. Squashing deep and unfurling tendrils from him. He goes rigid--then, screams and recoils. "Alright, I give, I give, I give!" he backs away. "I didn't mean any disrespect to a witch, alright? Just trying to make an after-living out here, is all."

"Oh, were you?" I spit. "Fate and sin--let them both cut their portions out of you, you odious worm of rot." I fold my arms. White satin rustles. I've come into a dreamlike gown with drooping sleeves and a golden hem. My hair's still pink. It feels... right. "I kind of hoped the first demon I met would be pleasant. Perhaps even good."

"There are no good demons, you stupid whore!"

"You know what?" I snap. "No! Bullshit! I've met the Devil, or at least a Devil. I was a child, curious and helpless. She could've fucked with me, totally ruined me for life, and she didn't. All demons aren't evil. You're just a fucking asshole, a two-bit scavenger. The only one to blame for your problems is you."

He sneers. "You wouldn't know the Devil if she kissed you on the lips."

"Yeah?" I cock my head up and back. Challenging. "She had five eyes, two pairs each in teardrop shapes and one great oval in her forehead, but the center and the lower left eye were gouged out by scars that smoldered with rusty orange pus. The eyes that remained had the last traces of an amber glow, and her upper arms each had five spines on their undersides getting longer towards her shoulders. And now that I'm an adult, I know for an absolute fact she was a succubus."

"No way." He recoils further. "No way did some human brat find Ildresig."

Ildresig? It resonates. I feel that same perilous beckoning. I try the undercurrents of the something behind that name against the undercurrents in my distant memory, and they mesh. "Yes," I mutter, as much to myself as to him. "Yes, I think that is her name." I snap my fingers. "You. Churl. You are to tell whoever you meet next that you've been granted an amnesty by the witch Moonsilver. I would be grateful to them if they give you a chance to redeem yourself by service... but will not hold it against them if they don't."

He bares his teeth at me. "I can tell just from smelling your filthy aura that you have no right to judge anyone, you miserable little bitch."

I bare mine right back. "Good for the goose, good for the gander... prick."

I point off into the night. There's no trace back the way I came of the Cathedral or the Faith Assembly. "Get moving, jackass. I'd have done worse if you weren't a demon. One of my sisters took great pains to remind me of the ancient accords. It's to honor the esteem in which demons and witches once held each other that I show you mercy, not for any virtue of yours or mine, understand? So get fucking lost!"

Cam--which I am absolutely certain isn't his real name--flexes his claws, snarls, stamps his foot, but ultimately stalks off into the night.

I feel... I totter. Wielding my power like that, so sudden and forceful... it took something out of me, but even with the chills of a burnout episode settling over me, I feel amazing. Giddy, airy, absolutely bubbling with joy.

"Witch." I stare at my hands, hands that haven't changed a single cell yet seem to glow with potential. If I reached into the dream I'd just woken from and pulled my favorite parts into the waking day with me, I think I'd feel just what I'm feeling right now. I repeat the sacred title over and over. "Witch, witch, witch, witch, a real witch, a true witch, a horrid evil scum-witch and yet she will not die..."

It takes me a while to fully recover my footing. But when I do, I stride off to the strip mall with my head high and a strange new flow to my stride.

The long, low, melancholy thing greets me with a rank of gutted name-plates where only one retains letters, and a glow: a neon sign in pride colors reading "Destination Transformation!"

"Take a wild guess," I muse. "This'll be the 'folks' my contact mentioned."

The double-doors and the window are all dark. Not opaque. Dark. Nothing inside but shadows and huddled shapes of furniture. But the instant I pull the door open I'm looking at a brightly-lit waiting room where several people sit in plush armchairs. There's a fountain in here wide enough for Amaranth-the-kid to get ten of her friends together and make a terrible mess. Ferns, trees, brightly-painted statues of mythical creatures, and a vaulted ceiling. The interior space is easily five times the size of anything a strip-mall department should actually be able to fit.

And before I can think cheerfully about what a strong start this is, all four of the other people in here are getting up to leave.

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A faceless humanoid figure of wicker weavings, flowers, and a single heart that beats much louder as they pass me by. A muscular demon with red skin and straight horns whose scent cuts right past the rational part of my mind and makes me want to pounce him. A mirror-polished carapace with seven cameras in its face to substitute for eyes, and whirring mandibles, and legs of segmented titanium strung through by golden cables.

A tall figure with long, pointed ears, a face and nose and cheeks all formed from exposed and yellowed bone. Braided furry tufts marching up his back. Hexagonal eyes each filled by three glowing off-white irises.

"Hey, wait!" I call. Everyone freezes. Then, three of them bolt out the door in a sprint. Only the one with the pointed ears remains. I cycle through a bunch of gestures in the time it takes me to get words out--a shrug, a supplicating outstretch of my hands, a bow of apology. "Please... I didn't mean..."

"Please understand," he says, "it's not that you did anything wrong. But you're a witch of the abyss. It is a felt thing, the presence of a power like yours: too much. None could look upon you without being overcome." He looks away. "An elf is no exception."

And he's gone.

I slump into the nearest empty chair--one that's mercifully empty of recent, guilt-inducing body heat--and put my head in my hands.

I sit there brooding until metal clinks draw my mind back to the present, and the approach of a being with pale orange fires burning in the empty sockets of his eyes. His entire body is a cagework of copper, bronze, silver, and gold. Narrow gaps let me see grooves and channels in place of veins, all funneling that same pale orange from his hips to his toes and his shoulders to his fingers. The metal clinks come from the robe of burnished platinum discs he wears.

"Good evening to you, dear guest," he says. "I am Avess." The fire-orbs shift, taking in the empty waiting room. "Ah. No need to worry. I, and our in-house specialist, are accustomed to the presence of an abyssal mind. You might say we are," he chuckles, "immunized."

He turns, motioning. "Right this way. Please do not take my words as an invitation to assault my psyche. I am not so immune that I can afford to endure such things without retaliation."

I rise, following. "Do you need a name? How am I going to pay for this, uh... consult?"

"You may state your name if you wish," he says. "But our establishment is staffed by immortals who do this because we wish to. When we do not wish to, we simply are not here. We take no payments, though donations and gifts are permitted, and as such there is no reason to insist on knowing names."

"Huh. Well, uh..." I tap my fingers on my arms. "Thanks for telling me that. I'm from Earth, so... I appreciate anything anyone tells me about the way things work..." I look back towards the waiting room. Still empty. Still feels like my fault. "... around here."

Avess looks back at me over his scaffold-shoulder. "You understand that morals and social skills such as empathy, respect for bodily autonomy and consent, basic politeness, respect for privacy, and so on, are not exclusive inventions of the human species, and this is not a playground where you can just stop treating the people around you as people simply because they are not human?"

It's not what he says that horrifies me. It's the implication that something this basic has to be delivered as a generic disclaimer to every outsider he meets. "Of course!" I run my hands through my hair. "Have there--have there been a lot of people who don't get that?"

"It has been a running theme with new arrivals from the middle world. The planes of Earth you think of when you say the name 'Earth.'" He turns away and mutters, "New arrivals both human and otherwise." His voice takes on a faint anxious note. "Just to be clear: you are not going to ask whether or not my genitals are also made of metal piping?"

"What kind of fucking lunatic meets someone and immediately demands to know about their dick?" I get so worked up that my power spills out through my steps. I grow phantom nerve-endings in the spiral-threads I make from disintegrated flooring strands. "Sorry about the floor!"

"Apology accepted." Avess doesn't look back. "At this point, I am simply glad to have physical evidence to prove your emotions are in earnest. You would be astonished at the things middle-worlders think are acceptable, so long as they nail the words, 'I'm just kidding' or 'it was just for the vibe' to the end." He falls to muttering again. "Just a prank, just a joke, only having a laugh, old sport, 'twas just a jest, sirrah... different words but the same miserable manipulation underneath it all, century after century after century..."

The silence gets too heavy. I, idiot that I am, try to fill it with my idiot-words. "Yeah, uh... a lot of men aren't great."

He glances. "The individual who felt entitled to ask about my genitals was a trans woman."

"Oh." The conversation dies after that. Way too much for me to process.

Avess leads me to a door flanked on either side by magical fires, one red and one jade, with a third of sunset orange directly above the doorway. "Our specialist is inside," he says, bowing away. "I will leave the two of you to it."

"Right, uh... thank you..." I walk as gingerly as a certain young witch sneaking into the kitchen at 2AM to steal incense from her mother's herb-cabinet. I'm so focused on keeping my newly-unsealed power in balance, and closing the door with polite softness, that I don't even see who's lounging in one of the two open chairs until I'm done, and I turn around.

Hannah Schumacher looks as at home in that oh-so-familiar She-Hulk shirt, with her bob of black hair and her pretty green eyes--now slit-pupiled and glowing--and an oversized pair of jorts, as she does in four red-orange horns, and whole swaths of red-orange skin glittering and stretching like latex. Her figure is, um... a lot heavier up top than it used to be.

"Oh, wow," Hannah says. "Sorry, um... you just remind me of another witch I met once. Or..." She waves a hand. "Sorry. Bad comparison. Very unfair to you. She was sort of a huge fake."

Great. Just straight from zero to one hundred, huh? Instant test of character? I could give any name and fly completely under the radar. Just talk face to face with the girl I tried to use for a scapegoat, slip away into the night, and leave her none the wiser after I get what i need.

Maybe Amaranth Dawson would do that. Amaranth "Moonsilver" Dawson definitely would. A huge fake... yeah. I was, back then. What about a witch whose only name is Moonsilver?

"If it's unfair to me," I say, hovering by the door and bracing for the worst, "it's my own fault. Do I really look that different?" I motion. "With the dyed hair, and the, uh... the pastel makeup?"

Her smile slips away. A sober look. "Ah." She motions to the open chair. "Have a seat, Amaranth. Did you come looking for me?"

I shake my head. Settle into the plush chair. "Random chance, Hannah. Just random chance."

She's prettier than me. And not just slightly. She's an order of magnitude prettier. Her little heart-shaped face is balanced right between humanoid beauty and uncanny valley over-perfection--just asymmetrical enough to keep the symmetry pleasing. Her red-orange wings, each big enough for her to hide her whole body behind, cocoon and frame her instinctively. A short-stack succubus with a swishing tail and playful eyes and...

"Feminine" is a dangerous word. But "feminine" is the word that I associate with everything I'm looking at right now. I can't blame this on society or the patriarchy or whoever else. There's no one to pin my preconceptions to except my very own self. So there it is: in my own eyes, Hannah's become way more feminine than me.

"I'm sorry for trying to destroy your life to cover my own ass. I'm sorry for being a manipulative closeted bigot. I, uh..." I flop my hands. "I don't know, do you want me to do some labors for you? Words alone don't seem equal to the things I did."

Hannah... Hannah smiles at that. "Maybe I ought to judge, but I'm not exactly pure and saintly either. And, I mean..." She quirks her lips. Looks away. "It's kind of hard to imagine I'd have wound up where I did, with--" She stops herself. Starts over. "With the girls I'm with, if you didn't behave the way you behaved. It's weird. It's backwards. But you paid your prices, and, I mean..."

Her smile blooms into a radiant grin, so bright and deliriously joyful I should melt where I stand. "Amaranth, I'm free! People bow to me in the streets here and they whisper stuff like, 'the horned sisters have come back to us!' and there's awe in their voices! I..." she breaks off, sniffling, crying tar-black tears that burn at the edges with sunset-colored fire. "I make people happy. Every time I have sex with somebody, they just say over and over again, 'I can't believe a succubus chose me,' and there's this shine in their eyes and that was me, I helped them see themselves that way."

In the first genuinely good deed I've ever done, I don't ask the question on my mind. I do not say, "But what about the folks back on Earth?" So Hannah's grin stays radiant.

"I can help you find a place to stay," Hannah says. The rest of my thoughts smash themselves to pieces under the weight of those words. "Or--"

"No!" I wince at my own abruptness. "No, I'm sorry, I can't. Not right now, you know? You're this achingly pure beacon of joy and... and that's who you always were. The more i let you help me, the more aware of that I'd become, and... what does that make me, as the girl who tried to ruin you?"

"You're not that girl anymore," Hannah says. A faint edge trickles into her bubbly voice. "Right?"

"No." My hands wriggle around each other in my lap, like little alabaster spiders. "But I'm not so far away from her that it stops hurting. I know it's shitty to say. To hide behind this. But awakening to myself as someone that horrid... it wounds me. Wounds me too much to trust myself to be stable. My own evil..." I shrug. Try to grin, but it festers into a grimace. "It hurts too much. Enduring that leaves me no strength to atone with."

Hannah shakes her head. "That's not shitty, Amaranth--"

"Moonsilver," I interrupt. "I'm sorry, I... I can't run from this name. Amaranth Dawson is a fabrication of my mother's. Her pet project. Moonsilver is the first name I ever gave for myself. I'm the one to blame for tarnishing that."

Hannah gives another smile. Gentle. Almost... sisterly. "I understand. I think you've figured out something really hard, Moonsilver. If you're not well enough to help, then trying to help isn't good. You'll just make things worse. Bad decisions, having no energy to think or act unless you make yourself panic because you're so tired all the time. I mean..." She tilts her head. "Wasn't that your whole problem in the first place? Forcing yourself to take action even if you weren't the right person for the job?"

I look away. "Yeah."

Hannah lets the silence percolate for another few breaths. "Mind if I ask one question?"

I shrug. "Shoot. Answering is the least I can do."

Hannah receives that. Shifts her lips around like she's chewing my words up for digestion. Then her eyes flick back to me. "Moonsilver, are you, like... a demon egg?"

Rigid. Wide eyes. Flash-sweat as a paradox surge against the chill going through all my limbs. Hannah watches, calmer than ever, as the chair starts to unstitch itself around my fingers. I'm hardly there. Staring, feeling every second like I've just taken a fresh concussion.

"Uh..." I hold that sound on my tongue. Hoping, maybe, it'll remind me what words are. "I think... I..." I force myself out of the chair with white-knuckle hands. "I think, with that reaction, you know my answer. But, um..." Sagging. "Too much, Hannah. There's too much. I need... I need..."

"Space," she says softly.

"Yeah." I stagger. "Uh... is there, like, somebody you can call?"

Hannah rises. "Yeah. There's a shelter for strung-out psychics in this part of the City." She steps briskly to her desk in a corner of the room and plucks a very ordinary looking smartphone from one of the drawers.

"They said I'm an abyss witch." I support myself on the doorframe. "Is that..."

"Um..." Hannah frowns, not at me but at the phone. "Abyssal witches are kind of like... psychics on steroids. I mean, not really at all, it's way deeper than that, but it's not my area of expertise. Short answer? Yeah. You qualify enough."

"And... they're not gonna care?" I ask. "About who I am? The things I've done?"

Hannah opens her mouth to say something. Closes it. Starts over. "Abyss witches, um... they tend to do not-great stuff when they have breakdowns. The folks there will understand."

"And you..." God, what a pathetic question. But I'm so tired, so out of it, that it just comes out of my lips sounding breathless and disoriented instead of whiny. "You don't hate me?"

"No, you silly." Hannah finds the number she's looking for, and dials. One more smile--this one deeply, deeply sad. "The only reason I didn't turn into someone just like you used to be, is that nobody ever took me seriously enough for me to get power over them. I'd have abused it just as bad if I ever had any. I'm really glad I didn't get there." She holds it to her ear. Winks. "That's why I want you to have a second chance, too."

Long after Avess helps me to a kind of flying car with big gelatinous tentacles and a passenger compartment full of little pink tongues, I think about those words. I'm still thinking about them when I stagger into a sparse but quiet room, slump onto a soft, just-cleaned pillow, and pass into dreamless sleep.

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