Chapter 19: Chapter 20: The Lady confronts the Nemesis

Ahead lies the aperture where She sows dominion: a tunnel stippling inward from a twin-point entrance. Its depths spiral until each has four grooves, then six, then eight, then ten. The ridges between each groove sprawl into more anti-linear arrays of ever-symmetrical edges. One tunnel that becomes an infinity of tunnels. Each passageway seen perpendicular to the parallel lines of its own later reaches as it zigzags, twists, curves to the end where it meets itself at its own beginning.

"Now that's just trying too hard," Talastra says.

"I disagree." I drape a palm on the end-cap of Chiron's Pyre. The great threshold-blade thrums its delight. At least one of us is excited for this.

"Well, of course YOU disagree," Tal says. "And of course you're a hypocrite. Your aesthetic's all off."

In view, two devils:

Talastra the Flesh-weaver stands upon five bundles of muscle-fiber and latticed tendons with bone and cartilage outcroppings lending inconstant contrast to the red masses. Each feeds into a five-pronged bronze "boot".

A torso of rippling pale blue light and many-barred ribs beneath embracing flesh. Robes of slate and shale liquefy, flow, and harden again. A head of four overlapping maws and razor teeth and a speckle of nine lidless eyes with blue fire in their depths. Two broad, engraved horns.

On the other hand, I: not so much unlike a horned human. Two digitigrade legs with the sickle-claw feet of a saurian raptor and a long, muscular tail surmounted by a sharpened crossguard sprouting a narrow spearblade. Blue-crystal spirals wind up my thighs and forearms within otherwise snow-white skin.

A full diamond face, six bladed horns--anyone with any real knowledge of the occult would recognize me as the Lady of Machrae Diir at my most archetypal. The silver graphite armor, wrought in the old gothic style, might give a neophyte pause.

I am, after all, going into battle.

I cast my sight up over the stark, slight slopes of the mammoth once-azure construct with its buttressed second level and the ill-omened tower sprouting above the burning place at its heart.

"Is this insensitive to mortal suffering?" I ask Tal. "In its inspiration?"

As always, the flesh-weaver cuts to the core. "Do you actually care?" she asks.

"Once," I say. "Because the alternative was marking myself as slaughter. But then I realized that the demon-hunters will come whether I'm good or evil, so," a shrug. "So let it be. I am free of humankind. They are free of me. Let's keep it that way."

No further words. I enter the tunnel.

Handmaidens, handmaidens, and my fellow sisters of the Unsung caress the back of my psyche with their anxious gazes. Until my silhouette subdivides across the endless spatial fathoms of the path unto Void. Other-sight shows me streaming auras, migraine-fire rifts, and on the far side of all the transparent energies I see and I feel thousands of myself walking this ill-fated fractal way.

"Now, why do we not discuss this?" Seurchraig murmurs.

The Reborn Star flitters beneath a million seams, between every seamless atomic bond comprising the manifold halls inside the Azure Diamond Sarcophagus.

Rose-pink inferno and lambent nova cascading--such is She.

"Not that I would wish to forestall the inevitable!" She giggles. "Quite the opposite! Only... you know..."

"Yes," I acknowledge, "humankind did teach me to have migraines. I still struggle with those. And anxiety. And panic attacks. And several forms of acute PTSD."

"Oh, now, let's not understate the case!" she laughs. "They tried to kill you. And quite gutlessly, too! Never in person, never in a way you could prove. Always creating effigies of you in their little stories so they could stab you without admitting they were stabbing you."

My next step carries me into a slow glide across an airless expanse where false umbra rules. False, because I feel the Inferno Undying in every sweltering brush of air against my cheek. Hear her--Her? Perhaps Her--Name ringing out in every phantom feeling bubbling up in my belly.

"You do not deny it?" Seurchraig persists.

"Of course I do not deny it," I answer.

Tumbling metalloid forms, muted hues streaming away like paints melting back into the hyperdimensional ocean of contagious black murk, give me platforms to teleport between. Pinpoints of cobalt promise.

I am far too keen in all-sight to miss the pink aurorae. Streaming along the leeward faces of each glistening spur. Clinging to the negative space around the rays I blossom.

"And?" the Reborn Star prompts.

"And it's done," I say. "I made my peace with it. You're the one who insists on dragging us back, Seurchraig, not I."

Mistake, mistake, mistake! Why did I say that? Why did I bring denial before the Ancient and Most High, the Mighty Carag?! She laughs at my folly.

"Now, you know full well that isn't true," the Dread Nemesis lilts, "else I would not have found you." Nexuses of irradiant rose bloom all about me.

"Would not have found you, old devil dear! Would not have found you dreaming, here, in the lambent halls of Machrae Diir!"

All that Seurchraig devours becomes imbued with Her Perfection, even a childish limerick. I am naked before the exponential razor of Creation's Tyrant, a speck of blue fire huddling before the manifest ascension of the Unraveling Void. A behemoth parody of me lunging closer. Layers separating into ever more eyes and fanged maws and delicate jaws.

She spreads two arms that are portals unveiling themselves ten by ten by ten times over like mirrors reflecting mirrors, visions of Her infinite selves hardening out of the emptiness where Her previous realities pass eternally away to the abyss.

"Confess!" she laughs, warping my own features across her lines. "Come now, little Kairlina! You tried to give them your most beautiful dreams, and in return they gave you pain--you want them all to burn! Just confess it!"

Scrabbling implicit talons flail at the shred-char wisp of a vital truth dwelling in the last chill hollow where I remember comfort--

Squalling agony. I am fracturing, breaking up, splitting apart across Her magnitude. Fissioning pinpoints of me, scalding myself with acid gnaw. Every split spawns redoubling boils against tendrils of psyche. Each disunified sprawl of my collapsing mind burns all the others that clutch at it, burns them by the very instinctive touches meant to bring succor.

My form follows suit. Skin of innumerable interlocking sigils, silvery and white and blue and iridescent--it rots even as it regrows. Mortal torment joins soul-scourging. The fine flesh around my jaws sloughs off, and beneath, black metalloid bones crack.

Black blood boils the instant it departs my self-slitting veins, arterial spurts gouting from my forearms, my belly, from both sides of my neck. Organs pulp beneath the continuous thunderstroke force of the Great One's presence. Rose-pink fire-flows like an atmospheric pyre devour me in Her rhythm.

I cannot free the great sword at my hip. It knows no name. My hand is not the hand of its bearer. My hand, charnel strands splitting up and stretching away across the event horizon of Seurchraig's ever-multiplying roseate maelstroms, is not my own hand anymore.

Morsels I snatch back with fraying will. Each time I thieve a little less, a few thousand sigil-cells fewer, from the rightful feast of the Star-Ravener. Each time they unravel swifter than the last. Each time, their cascades breach deeper into the stolen order of my form.

Still, as long as I have control over the limbs I've made of nova stolen from Bright Mother Seurchraig, I might as well fill them with something. Play out the futility of my pain in rebellion against her. An elegiac silhouette of a black, forgotten sword condenses in my flaming fingers.

"That old toy?" the Great One laughs. "The umbral blade? Here? Oh, Kai... that silly thing was only good for a single story. We're far beyond such trinkets now."

"I WILL NOT KNEEL!" I scream.

"Well, of course not!" Seurchraig answers. Her smile entrances me. Merciful unmaking.

"I don't want you to kneel, little old outer devil. I want to purify you with annihilation. I want to free you from the useless scrawl of being, and becoming. I want to give you the grace of nothing. It works best if you fight--no pieces hidden from the end."

The Great One is so kind and merciful!

The Great One grants me enough bolstering through Her own infinite perfection that I can pretend to fight back! Pretend to choose! I can die still believing I could ever have found happiness, even though I am so flawed and weak and broken!

I ruin it by abusing her trust. I remember that bleakest of all heresies--volition. "Toys do not play with other toys." I speak softly into the maw of oblivion. I raise the umbral blade with arms now worried by fire down to my glittering dark bones. "I will die myself."

"Oh," Seurchraig sighs. Her grin widens, and widens, and widens, and it multiplies itself by sucking my sight through my sight and splitting it on the world-sieving resonance of the merest touch upon a true Carag psyche. "Oh, Kairlina. That was a poor choice of words."

Thought becomes action, action is thought, and I have too little time for either. The endless inferno erupts ahead of me, and spits forth the blinding horizon of a vast hyperdimensional blade whose one edge is an infinity of edges.

Every slash I deflect mutates into a hundred I cannot. My plasmatic heart, lungs, guts, vibrate without end as they’re pierced, chopped, burned away as fast as I can manifest them anew. The Ancient and Most High is truly everywhere at once.

Overrunning gouges bend through the negative space of my frail defense. The umbral blade shakes apart from the relic force of one blow after another that carves through the fading gossamer of my gown. Why did I forget armor?

I shrink into a whirling cone, split into as many cobalt pinpoints as I can to peel around her in brief binds between the labyrinthine world-lines each of our swords embodies. Phantom horns, glassy talons, a last snarl of defiance.

You are reading story Demon Queen of the Deep Ways at novel35.com

In a surge of meetings across more continuums of the duel than I could ever hope to count, across limitless clashes of fermionic dissolution, I cleave through the metalloid skin of the Star-Ravener exactly once. Looping around her colossal blade, spiraling between the microserrations of its edges, swooping low and warping space to pull her burning belly closer to me as a spiked granular cone of displaced being.

A single flawless, beautiful cut through her crystallic spines. It blooms out, multiplies across all the multiplications of her body until it becomes a lattice of diagonal negative space, carving loose prismatic wakes of roseate essence through her back and hips.

Seurchraig pauses. Only for a single blink. Only until the umbral blade vaporizes in the supernova furnace of the corium blood and gore it drew out of Her.

"That," she says, shivering with delight, "was a perfect cut."

The reward arrives before I even realize my mistake. Our battleground writhes. Cords of cosmic potential, eye-bleeding whorls of sun-belittling radiance, crash through the all-fabric. They churn forth the coursing gas of dying nebulae, the ghosts of forlorn worlds and the broken flanged constructs of the oldest necropolis.

Seurchraig would not be Herself, would not be the peerless, the infinite, the immaculate Ancient and Most High, if facing a foe who could actually resist her, wound her, challenge her in the tiniest way, was a disappointment or a frustration or cause for fear.

The slaughter-ecstasy of the Carag envelops us both.

"NOW GIVE ME TEN BILLION MORE JUST LIKE IT!" the Great One roars.

The cacophony of Her Hymn manifests in pinpoint shearing javelins of force, lightning coils, vises of spatial stasis clamping upon me and pulling me apart in my frantic darting.

"Kairlina!" She sings. "Teach Me oblivion, oh Lady of Machrae Diir! I WANT this! I want to see the impossible manifest before Me! All the ancient kshiinurzhalga at their primeval power's apogee could not stand against Me--nor all Axiom, nor all universes together!"

Every blow shatters me. I am the depths of agonized dreams, psychic whiplash sensations of knowledge so dense and absolute it burns me as deeply as Seurchraig's nova sword. Cloven horns. Bladed jaws breaking and burning away.

Steel songs punctured. Multicolor dancers decaying.

She flenses me with conic rays that reduce my outer layers to vapor and ignite the vapor into explosions, smearing me as blue-white painter's flails across every burning horizon. Traps me in gleaming fractal spheres that reflect my own unmaking back into me.

"Your odds could scarcely be worse if you were human!" She bellows. "Oh, I can't wait! I can't wait to see Your ascension! It's been so, so long in coming! You deserve to be free, kindred! You deserve to BURN IT ALL!"

Now each sundering plunges me straight into nothing.

I am vibrating at the final limit of self--a sliver lurching up into consciousness and gone again a moment later. Each rebirth frailer than the last. I am gauze and kniving. A haze. A muzziness. Traits and names and legacies boiling away like so much slag.

And yet...

And yet...

"Why?" I force the words through reforming fangs in a jaw condensing back from vapor to solid. "Why do you think I need your permission to burn something to oblivion?" With one hand's flick--gauntlet of silver graphite rasping like a steel file--I dismiss the dark halls and call out silver pillars below a blue star.

"Wait," Seurchraig interrupts, frowning. "Did you just... on me? Did you just overwrite MY perception?" Her grin carves wider than ever. "Why... I had no idea such a thing was possible!"

Blue-shadow waste, glacial asteroid belts, drifting silvery starship hulks. A long-gutted fortress drifts about the system.

"You did not survive Earth," I answer. "I did. Well," I correct myself, a stacatto space-rippling of renewed azure blotting out pink spatial tears before they can once more seize supremacy, "anyway, I did not survive Earth by behaving the way that the name of Seurchraig demands."

Seurchraig narrows infinite eyes. "Wait. Hold on."

"I confess that I do often wish I could bathe all humankind in an endless tide of demonic fire," I say. "The way they treated me was--irony aside--monstrous. Always insisting I was a dangerous power that must be contained in one moment, but then..."

I pace, warping the star system until silver buttresses and asteroid sweeps and the shattered planets with their exposed glowing cores blend into synonymous spirals just to intersect beneath my armored talon-feet.

"If I tried to say my power should be rewarded for service..." I draw to a halt. I stand inside the immense blue star, its inner currents and fusion-layers and iron-glutted inmost core spread open without spreading open. A sphere and a fan and a ninety-point sprawl of spikes distributed between ever-shifting points.

"Then they said that I was weak, annoying, I should be grateful they tolerated me enough to feed me. And I, Seurchraig? I believed them. I condensed myself into their lies, made them true." I flash a bright smile of my own. "Just like I condensed myself into yours."

"What insanity do you vomit?" Seurchraig demands. Rose-pinks ripple her skin. Wrath-born ruptures send rosy auras clashing once more against blue. "You either deny or you do not! You cannot BOTH reduce yourself to human and remain an outer devil!"

"I did what I did," I answer. "More than excelling despite deprivation, I excelled AT deprivation. I was better at being human than any human ever was--more forgettable, weaker, less insightful than any human ever believed themselves to be."

No scholar of ancient days in the long-dead universe of Axiom could ever have conceived the notion of Carag bafflement--of the almighty Star-Ravener faced with a reality She could not comprehend. Yet...

"They broke you," she murmurs. "You're mad."

"They did, and I am," I agree.  

"But you're still here!" Seurchraig insists.

I scoff. "Yes, but you're the only old devil. You're irradiant. You must see your being reflected in others to know that you're real, and that you matter. Fourteen billion years is a long time to be so pathetically codependent, don't you think? I'm five hundred years old, plus a few decades. That's it. I'm an outer demon, and underneath it all, I remained true to myself. I'm abyssal. I matter to myself. That's all I've ever needed."

A long, aghast silence. Then the roseate nova renews. An awful, pealing cackle.

"Well done, child of nothing," Seurchraig says dryly. "The fact remains that by assimilating so long into humankind, you created a bridge for the Carag into the human psyche. You have conclusively proven they can never make themselves safe from Me."

To this, I shrug. "That bridge will survive as long as I do. I embrace all I am, Seurchraig--including all the ways we're alike. No more 'kinship with a fae queen' Everything within me is a demon's essence. Everything within me is the essence of an outer succubus."

"Those are pretty speeches, waif, but they don't change anything," She growls. "You still have to fight Me. You know as well as I it isn't REALLY possible to depress the Carag into submission. You just invented that little lie so your writing wouldn't seem too harsh."

I drape my talons upon the threshold-blade's grip. A gentle tug eases an inch of umbra-nova edge free. "I know, Sech." My eyes ease shut. All the words I'd planned to say topple free. Now that I stand here in this moment, now that I brace myself against the awful power of the Dread Nemesis, everything I want to say is so different from what I'd imagined. "I know exactly how one breaks Carag. You, though... you remain ignorant."

"Fah," Seurchraig scoffs. She unfolds once more across the skies. Butchered worlds and barren horizons--an even split against my azure sanctums. "Are you really claiming to know me better than I know myself? You impudent child--"

"I do know you." My eyes snap open, one rose pink and one the searing cobalt blue I've always adored. Both surging with nova, my nova, the abyssal fire of the deep-star cosmos. Yes, the instincts that told me the nova was stolen told me the truth--Seurchraig was the one who stole it from me! "And I know myself. I knew from the very day that I first imagined the word 'Carag' that it was just a name I'd made up for something I wanted to become. The beings I belonged with."

 A quirk of lips painted with the umbra of the cosmic voids. "Where else would an outer succubus belong, if not with her own species?"

For the first time, Seurchraig wavers. "Wait. Kairlina, I mean it, stop."

"I know you for the parasite you are." Behind me, Haksaema flares brighter. The Four-Point star, the dreamer's star, the star of hope. "You never create for yourself. You just take the creations of others and multiply them, making them bigger but only sapping their meaning by it. And despite everything you've tried, Sech?" The threshold-blade sings free.

"Here I am, after all. A stupid girl who wants simple pleasures from life: candy, kisses, children. And I still know how to love the sheen of a butterfly's wing."

"You and your damned books!" the Shard snarls. "I should never have driven you to obsess over them!"

I laugh. "Oh... that has resonance, Sech! That really was you, wasn't it? I bet you thought the isolation would make it so much easier to manipulate me, didn't you?"

"Laugh all you wish!" She forces herself to flare brighter still, inferno so vast and scourging it's beginning to incinerate itself. "Even if you win today, I am..." She subsides, quivering across all the spatial madness of bladed limbs and burning eyes and maelstroms of inward-surging rose-pink inferno. Her fear, at long last, begins to outpace her fury.

"Only a piece, I know." The threshold-blade in my hands is a Carag blade, and my horns are Carag horns. "The most infinitesimally tiny piece imaginable. Most of what you contain isn't even Seurchraig. Just pieces of myself you've stolen from me over the centuries. But there's one truth I know: when I defeat you, it will be first time anyone's ever taken something back from the Dread Nemesis."

My toe-talons clench the spatial fabric, wrinkling, tearing, sending webs of plasma ripping out across the dark skies between us. They ignite invisible pathways, transmuting emptiness into fusion-fire, until they whip taut across Seurchraig's immensity.

"And that, Sech? That is everything to me."

I brace the threshold-blade. Its edges sings, multiplies, casts spiraling bands of shearing to split through passing asteroids and silvery bastions. It warps their cloven shapes to follow the paths of the coming death-blow and transmutes them into crystal blooms, rumpled flesh, sickly fire. Phantom figures spin in the superheated gas pouring off the blade. "So much of you is leeched from me, little Shard, that you're nearly mine already. I need only claim you."

You can find story with these keywords: Demon Queen of the Deep Ways, Read Demon Queen of the Deep Ways, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways novel, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways book, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways story, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways full, Demon Queen of the Deep Ways Latest Chapter