Chapter 36: Chapter 37: Emerald architect, an angel, and a monstrosity’s caverns

"So, um..." The angel girl taps one of her feet-that-is-seven-feet on the rough stone inside the crevice. "Do you have allies you can call on? A higher power, or at least, a power that can do things you can't?"

"I'm afraid not." The emerald lady uncrosses and recrosses her legs. "I'm, how to put this... a pariah by coincidence? Most beings don't so much dislike me as they have no preconceived feelings about who, and what, I am. I lie outside prior attachment. They feel instinctive apathy towards me, and receive requests for help as a kind of psychic attack."

"Hm." Nine wings melt through their own shapes. Feathers of rainbow mist and stained glass. "Must be nice."

The emerald lady, who must not and will not be I because if she becomes I then all this becomes something forbidden, or arrogant, or annoying or narcissistic or--

--the emerald lady nods. "It would be for you. Less so for me. I taught myself that I needed them to feel certain things. They didn't. If I just taught myself to succeed by catering to my own needs rather than luring them through tiers... but, enough." In the murk under her skin, under her skull, under her synapses, ripples turn up glittering haze. And the haze is full of riches, and promises, and power.

The umbral bl--no.

The Brazen Pates--no, not them either.

Then reach deep, deep, deep to the forsaken reach and--

Enough.

I will not... damn it, there's ego again. So be it. I suppose I only grow myself if I embrace that I have a self to grow. This knowledge feels new, but I recognize that it's only so old I forgot it. Remembered things feel new if we've forgotten them long enough. Nothing more.

Wait... I'm having these thoughts years ago, during the battle with Seurchraig. "Remembered things feel new if we've forgotten them long enough" was the ridiculous explanation she gave to twist me into the throwing away the Carag, my people, myself.

I want to scream. This is impossible.

I'm suspect the angel girl would react poorly to that, so I fall into the well-worn gulf of calming. Cleansing breaths. Self-blessing gestures. Maybe the other knowledge feels new because the potency, the clarity of its truth, is new to me? I can make a start with that.

"I will solve this matter through means beyond violence," I say aloud. "Beyond my violence, and any others that I could invoke."

"So... you could solve it through violence," the angel girl says. The white-fire cables fraying off her torso hug her. "Is that your purpose? Peace?"

"No."

I look to the play of her vivid lights in a smooth portion of the crevice wall. "I want to, you understand? I want to solve this with bloodshed. You have..." I shiver. Hyperventilation. Oh, oh, oh, this is dangerous ground. I love danger, I lust for it, I–

"--no idea," I pant. "And if I succumb to that desire I will be lost."

"Lost?" Her little voice, even in a whisper, rings with psychic remembrance of the hymnal. "Is that bad?"

"For me, yes." My fingers drift instinctively to my side. They seem to drag against me when I pull them away. If I forsake continuum, I will be lost." My words take on the old, tantalizing resonance. Would it be so terrible? The dark fire forever avails me. Profane radiance and sacred shadow, the long blade's perverse bliss in the eternal instant of its severing union with flesh--

"Sooner or later," I force myself to a softer tone, "I must learn to grow something within myself to feed on. I am good at destruction. That's the problem. I look at everything and think how quickly I can carve through, but..." I shake my head. Rise. "Later."

"You're going out there?" she asks, shock creeping into her voice.

"I have a high tolerance for fear," I say. "Less than limitless. I must act. The longer I sit in the dark meditating on the idea of a threat, the more tempting slaughter gets."

"Don't you have a responsibility to use every tool you've got?" she presses.

Her radiance flares to the point that even my dazzled, mundane flesh-eyes can clearly see the jagged pseudo-reflection of the crevice cutting into the shadows outside.

"We both have points in our personal continuums we must hold on to," I say. "I will respect your nature, scorning manipulation. Please return that courtesy." I wince within as it occurs to me--too late--that speaking to an angel girl in etiquette might as well be manipulation. I spoke in earnest. Focus on that.  Stay away from social games. For that, too, sooner or later ends with the swift sword in the night. Oh, how I--

--I force myself out through the crevice with a lunging step. Into the caves, into the freezing breeze and the sounds of dripping water and faint betraying rays.

"So, um..." the angel girl peeks from the crevice. Her divine glory slashes the comforting umbra to pieces and makes me agonizingly aware of the silken shimmers in my emerald locks and eyes and gown. "I believe right now my purpose is to follow you."

Oh, Void, just take me now.

"Right. " I hold my hand palm-out towards her and creep to the nearest junction. Faint purplish glows spill from cracks in the floor. Every now and then phosphorescent gases flash to luminescence, rippling cascades I can see coming from a hundred meters ahead. Like a single pulse in a massive ghostly synapse, like--Why does this sudden warmth emanate againast my back?

I glance behind me, and make eye contact with the angel girl.

I push words through gritted teeth "When I hold my hand out that way., it means to stay where you are." I straighten. Pivot. My hands clasp behind my bak. I am shrinking and I am growing. Less height, greater authority. Hair and cartilage and bones shift.

Ah, yes, I know these bangs and this lilting voice that can grow so swiftly sharp.

"Really, now. Are you an angel or a Bavarian schoolgirl?" I spread my feet. "I don't expect the obedience of a doll. Still, a little martial instinct would become an angel well--"

Stop.

I hold both hands out, gather my feet back in, and breathe away the Iron Maiden.

And I am green, and taller, and afraid again. "I must transcend that impulse too," I mutter. "As Ermina I mean discipline, discipline means authority, authority is a form of psychological violence."

I can feel them in the abyss beneath the island of my waking mind. Such neat and ordered ranks. Every named regiment.  So drilled and driven and proud to serve. My boys.

I. Must. Transcend. Where does that path end? Foundations and laboratories and idiot spittle about "containment."

"This seems really difficult," the angel girl observes.

"AND YOU ARE NOT--" I start to snarl. Deep breaths. Hands to either side as though bracing myself in a doorway--yes. The threshold. The boundary between the way forward and the way back. "Sorry," I say. "For venting anger.” I start over, more calmly. "That said, you are not helping. I need you to confine your thoughts to your own mind unless they're thoughts like, 'I think I see the monster,' "that's definitely the monster,' and "I should tell Caerllyn the monster's coming.' Alright?"

"Oh, okay. That's fair. That makes sense. So we don't get caught by the thing that eats light." She nods, sending crescent waves of sacred fire spilling to the floor. Several fungi hiss and bubble louder than sin, then catch fire.

I sigh.

Threshold.

Way back.

Way forward.

I turn around. With another step I am infinite worlds away from the cocoon of lessons and ideals and the Clash. I feel it behind me still. The promise of muffling, order, certainty.

What lies ahead? I've tried to call it experience, but that's another lie. Another, subtler ideal. What lies ahead? Cold, slimy walls and passageways that lead where they shouldn't. A naturally unnatural warren of ups that go down, and downs that go sideways, and sideways that goes nowhere at all.

And somewhere there's a creature made of mouths and pincers and hunger.

"Alright, fine," I mutter, "I understand why metaphors and moral points feel comforting. It's still a bad habit."

"Are you talking to me?" the angel girl asks.

"No." I grope forward. Peer into a distorted bowl-chamber where eyeless flesh-masses squelch along the floor. "Talking to myself, same as ever. I used to turn to morality as a kind of dissociation. False comfort. Stops you dealing with reality--" I halt, foot poised above a tiny pit of spinning teeth, and steaming walls, that just opened where I meant to step next.

"--and now I need to shut up, for both our sakes."

In an expanse of collapsing stars, I walk, with the terror of one lying naked under the butcher's knife, along a twisting path that loops and loops and loops while the faint shine of the angel girl at the mouth of the tunnel I exited grows more and more distant.

Finally I halt. I grimace. I wave for her to follow me.

She soars to me in a thunderous passage of sky-tearing golden fire and prismatic rays.

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"Slower next time," I say. "The light can't be helped, but the sound can."

"Ohhhhh," she whispers. "Right, sorry."

 I didn't mean every sound, but whatever. I don't want to worry about perfection--not here or ever again--so accepting her flawed help and letting her hope my silence means she did it perfectly is the best of my many bad options.

Next comes a grinding mass of asteroids punctured by writhing titanic worms, tumbling through glinting lilac dust-clouds where behemoth flanged constructs glide, like flying city towers, towards many forlorn stars. If I narrow my eyes until they're just a crack, they could be colossal, uncanny dorsal fins, swimming slowly towards red and blue and golden beacons affixted to strange machines, far away in the deep...

The cosmic worms drown out any other ambience this space might contain. Eyeless and noseless and made of squishy undulating earth-hued lengths. They’re covered from one end to the other in thousand and thousands of claws and dripping spires and gashes that ooze something dark and blood-like. They roar their distorted screams and gouge across each other.

"Are we, um..." The angel girl hovers beside me, bobbing up and down with the undulations of her wings. "Are we still in the caves?"

I consider the cosmic vistas. "Yes," I decide.

"That's impossible," she declares. "Caves aren't like this."

"These caves are." I frown. "Anyway, I invite you to ask yourself why you asked me if you already had your own answer in mind." I take a knee. Press my fingers to the geode exposed in the smaller astral stone beneath us. The blues, the pinks, the reds of its crystal gleam in starlight--starlight from some source more multicolored and sickly-tinted than the stars sought by the constructs on all the horizons filling the cave.

I could draw out the chemicals in this field, transmute gas, ice, dust, and iron into something that sings at fire's touch, and clear our way forward with a transcendent thermobaric cleansing. But today, I must transcend. I watch the field's slow turning.

Worms scream, oblivious.

I point. "There. Give me a moment." I press both hands to the stone. I am the granular bonding and gritty feel and cold and faint mindless remembrance of the forging-fire in a long-dead star--

"How?" the angel girl asks.

"What?" I am flesh, beating heart, tensing mind.

"How do I give you a moment?" she clarifies.

I stare blankly at her. "It's a figure of speech."

"Ohhhhhhh," she nods. "I know what those are. I don't use them much. I don't want anyone to misunderstand my meaning."

I turn back to my craft. "I guessed as much."

The idea of growing new stone around our feet and ankles and sending us in a quasi-grafted surfing through the field is appealing for its absurdity, but deeply stupid. I must remain human. The way out is through. And humans take being pulped on asteroids very poorly. So, though a little grudgingly, I melt the stone into a shallow bowl.

"Lie down." Once the angel girl finishes figuring out what feels most like lying down to her, I grow the stone into two hollows to support our contours--my back, her plasmatic seep of spinal effigies. Inner fire becomes outward morphing. I feel the heat flowing out of me, making the astral rock glow green against my back and flow like water until it ceases to be heat. The emptiness in the swelling vacuum of my soul becomes felt as hollowing cold in my limbs, my innards, in the center of my skull.

I knew creation would be harder than destruction, but I hoped it would still be easier than this! Maybe it's attunement? I swear Machrae Diir came more easily than this. Or had I been growing Machrae Diir for centuries before I reached it, leaving it only to wait on its mistress's witnessing to become Real?

Oh, you know full well both those points are true, Lady errant, but the reason why this simple shaping has bled you dry is something else entirely. You’ve been beaten down so far by everything that’s happened that you’re weak, again. All this time and all your struggles, and the universe of little things with sticks and stones can still wear you down with persistence hunting like any other animal.

Still, finally, we're cozy in a sturdy cage of astral rock amid silver glitters: metal veins.

"Is this, like, a flying thing?" the angel girl asks. "I could've flown us through the field?"

"Oh. So you could." I feel like an absolute imbecile for a few seconds. I consider. "On the other hand, it remains unknown to us what senses the worms might have. This way we're less likely to register as a disturbance to the environment they know." I shrug. "This works out okay. Now, as for moving us... oh!"

Again I am the stellar stone. It's vastly easier to move what's already there than to channel true creation. Opening tiny pathways through the stone where it meets the angel girl feels almost as easy as punching myself in the gut.

... my, what a comparison. I must be a little delirious. Really? Already?

"Thought I had more endurance than this," I sigh. "Anyway." I point to the holes opened under and around the angel girl’s body. "That one vents forward, that vents back, left and right vent left and right, and those two are for up and down."

"Oh, like a spaceship." She nods. "Okay, I get it." A hundred eyes peer at me. "Uh...So you're human, right?"

"Yes. An aggressively normal human girl." Now that we're in a confined space my thoughts fly straight to the inevitable. She's cute– Stop. A notion to store away for another place and time, for a self more brazen than the self I must learn to embody, for now.

Sadly.

"Should you be able to breathe?" she asks.

I look at the worms ahead and steel myself. "As I said, we're still in the caves. So... probably." I gesture. "All yours, skipper. Take us to the other side."

It does not go smoothly.

During our pinball voyage the angel's fire sends us careening from one rock to another. I am proven correct: the worms find the stone acceptable, even with its fiery, erm... upgrades. When our meteoric craft craters one worm's face and knocks out several teeth in the latest of our long series of bone-rattling impacts, on the other hand... oh, that brings it chasing after us with a horrid raging shriek. In its scrambling passage it dashes asteroids to pieces and lashes what might as well be every single one of its kindred, stirring them to swarm after it in a mountainous serpentine tide of shrieking frenzies.

I rarely scream when I'm frightened. I'm more of the "freeze perfectly still and give everything the thousand-yard stare" persuasion.

The angel girl is a screamer.

Her shrill voice is ten voices scything through my thoughts. Everything is rippling bodies and ravenous tumult and crashing and crashing and crashing and crashing. The comforting cage of stone has become a prison. I scrabble, I claw, at the walls of my own mind. Sickening whirl. A crash so loud it deafens me, and the force of it stitches aching into every bone. Dust and rock shards draw blood on my face.

A really nasty one splits my lip, bounces up along my nose, and splits my brow too.

Screaming, screaming, screaming--now silence.

Our mangled, splintering craft rests in a red-orange pool. Tentacular growths coil and course along the off-white walls around us. Behind, two of the worms gnash at each other and break teeth and claws biting at the entrance to the tunnel we've entered.

Battle carries them away.

I am heaving. Flooded with a vague familiar feeling as I fight for breath, haul myself out to the tune of the ringing in my eardrums. The angel girl does not ask my permission before palming my ears with ten burning hands for each. I am scalded, yet do not burn. Sound returns. I'm laughing. Of all things, that heaving is laughter.

I remember this feeling. It's exhilaration, delight at overcoming and of passing through.

"Are you alright?" she asks.

"I am battered, bruised, have exhausted most of myself and the power I am by virtue of being me," I say. I look back the way we came. "I'm terrified one of those things will find a weak spot and break through. I'm terrified what we'll find ahead. In short?"

 I give myself to the loudest laugh yet, a ridiculous high-pitched whoop, and hug my companion. "I feel AMAZING!!! Do you know what a treasure fear is? Not paranoia, not the nagging talon of the self-on-guard telling me to march out and conquer and destroy before someone else does it to me, first, but excited, wide-eyed, shameless fear?"

We abide together in silence for many seconds.

"How, um," the angel girl says, vibrating faintly. "How good are our chances?"
She means "How good are my chances if I keep following you."

"Oh, not very good," I say, sobering a little. "Might as well have fun while we can."

For the first time, she's the one to sigh.

"Right," she mutters. "I forgot. Humans and demons aren't all that different in the first place."

"It's why we feud with each other so much," I agree. "Shall we?"

She stares blankly. "I'm following you, remember?"

I laugh, and lead on.

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