Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in League

Including her name serves no purpose, for she was never going to be a citizen of our village. Such was her stated intent, with so much simulated earnestness that I could not smell the trick, nor could my goddess, lover, and wife Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, until she encountered the applicant up close that is.

Her waiting period was nearly over, which all potential residents of Quarantown had to endure to even step foot over our borders and barriers, both obvious and arcane. The plague called Throng’s Delirium, the impetus for the founding of Quarantown in the first place, before it was commandeered, still in secret, by my Wanda, and before I was wooed as her chief disciple and chiefest confidante, still ravaged the continent.

For every person we added to our enclave the disease took tens, necessitating the waiting period, as the nefarious pathogen, whatever its nature, was only contagious in the stages immediately preceding obvious symptoms. If an applicant made it the entire time without the characteristic rash-lashes across the back, or the fever, or the delirium (not to mention the death that came to a full third of the sufferers), they were pronounced clean and allowed to enter.

She who is here nameless was not clean, but it wasn’t Throng’s that Wanda smelled on her; it was yet another insidious form of sabotage employed by one of her jealous siblings, several of whom sought to usurp her throne-town and growing godhood.

Time it was for me to learn of a new one, as Wanda kept familial information so close to the vest that it was perpetually under her furs, which meant no probing hand but hers could even pull it from the recesses of that peculiar and hexed motley garment. Already I had encountered her vampiric brother Ruthven, the stillborn phantom Devorgoil, the famished Goriana, and the sex-shifter Melmoth, none of their strange powers and presentations preparing me for what was stowed away in this latest victim of the murderous line, this guillotine edge, of Cain.

Wanda and I entered the humble applicants’ house unannounced, prepared to welcome this nameless young woman, when the furs of Venus’s coat bristled. At the sight of her Wanda’s nose scrunched into a dog’s snarl, compressing her many fanning freckles into a few crowded loaves of burnt bread.

If she had a lie to tell us she was not given time to tell it. I barely had opportunity to register her face: big eyes that got bigger as Wanda lunged, raven hair that flew like whip cords as she was pinned flat on the nearest table, and earthen skin that broke out into a muddy sweat when she was flipped over and forced to breathe between the cracks in the wood.

That was when the screaming began, coupled with extreme flailing. I doubt I would have been able to restrain her, despite being the larger, but it was trivial for Wanda. Any extra hands she needed were provided by loose tails on her furs, which shot out and held the young lady as still as possible.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, keeping a healthy distance. The applicant’s screams contained words and sentiments, but I paid them no heed, and see no point in reproducing them now that I know they were all concocted for the singular aim of deception. There and then she was not a person, but a poison-dipped arrow.

“I smell a sister on her,” Wanda growled, tearing at the clothing around the woman’s waist, exposing more muddy skin.

“Goriana?”

“No.” To elaborate she ripped away the last piece obscuring the base of her spine. There we both spotted a shocking interruption of the flesh: a perfect circle of bony cap split by a cross. The nearest comparison I have is bone protruding from a wound, except this was far too neat and tidy, looking downright machined. The skin surrounding it wasn’t even irritated, not at first anyway. As we watched swelling and redness radiated out from it, as if it objected to our intrusion and was getting red in the face as it insisted we turn around and give it some privacy.

The words I will not reproduce became a string of curses I will not reproduce, partly because they may bear actual power in each expression. Where she got them was a mystery to me, and I was half-inclined to wash her mouth out with bar soap purely by instinct before I recalled that our little daughter Nepenthe, hardly on her own two feet, wasn’t actually with us just then, watched as she was by my friend Porter.

“What is that!?” I sputtered.

“An attempt at infiltration,” Wanda said, her face drawing closer to it; a cloth of furs passed over it. After that initial inspection her hand swept in, one finger suddenly sharpened into a claw that fit into the cross. With a twist of her wrist she forced the bony cap to turn, and from the host’s piercing wail we could assume that unseen parts of the thing had also pierced.

Squeaking against other more native bones, the cap turned and rose, turned and rose, bringing with it glossy blood slurry jellied by the addition of liquefied flesh, which ran down the threading that appeared. A screw. A screw grown from bone. I knew it wasn’t carved, as an heir of Cain wouldn’t need craftsmanship to make such a thing, just guile released into their own material as an order of production.

“This is the primary recruiting technique of the Diodati second-eldest,” Wanda explained, “whom you will hopefully never meet, cowardly as she is. Matilda Screwshaft Nunbleeder. She makes these and drives them into the spine, controlling her disciples remotely. Why she tried it now I can’t say. Obviously I would be able to sense it, as it is made of her own bone. Perhaps she is just trying to scare us, keep us on edge.”

Once the screw was mostly extracted it stood on its own despite the ragged wound it left behind. I asked Wanda if the girl would live, to which the answer was yes, but that was not necessarily a blessing. Falling under the influence of an heir of Cain is not an experience that you can ever be fully rid of, and I imagine the effects would be worsened with a gaping hole in the back where the heir had planted a flag, threaded in the hopes it would never be extricated.

We couldn’t keep her either, tainted as she was, so she would have to be sent away on the next train, to a fate unknown. As my wife’s bridge between her and her people, I tried to keep abreast of everyone who so much as brushed up against Quarantown, or heard distant whispers of us, but I could not make time for this nameless sufferer, busy as I would soon be with the turning of the screw she set in motion.

Neither Wanda or I suspected that Matilda’s plan was more insidious than a thorn in the side. The potentially-fatal error was not made until Wanda, in her infinite but often hidden and downplayed compassion, reached out and grabbed the bone screw to free the poor victim. Nothing came of it immediately. Or came the next day. While I cannot pinpoint the exact number of days that passed before its sinister poison took effect, owing to Wanda’s loose grip on my sense of time, intended to stir me to premonition and prophecy in service of her grand designs, I can guess… based on the typical progression of Throng’s delirium.

That’s right. Somehow, beyond all of the logic I operated by, my Venus in furs contracted the plague that had instigated the building of Quarantown as an untouched health retreat for the wealthy. Whether the result of sheer chance, she was still technically a sort of human being after all, or through a curse placed upon the infectious material by Matilda Screwshaft Nunbleeder, the love of my life, the very center that I chose to waltz about rather than orbit, was struck down.

Temporarily! I hoped. I prayed… yet she who I prayed to could not answer them as coherently as usual. Before the sojourn that would become the rest of my life, I’d overheard a sufferer of the delirium describe one of its intensest accompanying hallucinations as a ‘roseate supersensual mist’, from which the only valuable information I was able to take was that this mist would overwhelm perception entirely, a thing that my dear Wanda had never come close to suffering.

She was not prepared, having never been ill once in her life, having never sneezed, never contracted so much as a case of a single hiccup. No surprise then that she did not understand what was happening in the earliest stages of the symptomatic phase, which can last one to two weeks, and then progresses on to either full recovery or death by fever accompanied with euphoric asphyxia.

(To address any concerns that this incident, and the revelations that poured out from it, was the portent of Quarantown’s doom, it should be noted that the contamination, perhaps through sheer luck, did not spread to the populace at large. If anyone was to have contracted it in the asymptomatic infectious period it would have been me, intimately close as we are every moment of every day, her breath living in my lungs even when she is far, and I did not, which could have been a benefit of Wanda’s broad magical investment in my health.)

Yet there was no one to invest in hers, myself such a lax watchman that I hadn’t known there was any watching to do. Still, I was the first to notice, and significantly disturbed when I heard Wanda’s furs hit the floor of our rather stately master bath. The floor was itself a luxury item, tiles of black slate, gifted to us by Quarantown’s wealthiest resident who actually bothered to live there, the obnoxious braggadocio Doppler Burstyn.

In gifting it to us I imagine he was trying to compete, cognizant of Wanda’s powerful magnetism without yet recognizing its divine nature, attributing it to a more esoterically-flaunted fortune than his own. At the time he’d told us that he very much liked to take off his shoes and feel a cold floor when using the washroom, and since he was bound to be invited to all our dinner parties and imbibe enough liquor to need the washroom, it might as well cater to his expensive tastes.

Their cold touch was not of interest to me, only how Wanda’s furs hit them. Heavily. Wetly? Had she been sweating, into her furs? Given pause, despite the fact that I’d expected her furs and the clothing underneath to come off shortly anyway, I turned to examine her. Normally she would meet my gaze when she sensed my eyes on her, but she was turned away, a hand massaging the back of her neck. Soreness? We’d done nothing to make us sore that evening, not yet.

That was supposed to come after the bath we were about to share in the large copper washtub that stood in the middle of the chamber. The conditions for it were right, normal, with Nepenthe already down for the night in her nursery and the tub already full of water that would soon be heated solely by the carnal passion of a demigoddess.

“Wanda? Are you alright?” Her head swung toward me, pupils unusually inky, looking ready to overflow into her vivisecting green eyes, which were missing the typical crackle in their color, like a vivid illustration bleeding and fading on a wet page.

“Of course… what worries you, my precious Severin?” She continued to disrobe, unsteady on her feet, at least compared to her usual; she seemed only capable of running as fast as a dog just then, rather than her usual fox.

“Strange as it sounds… I’m confident you took your robes off several seconds earlier than you normally would. And you less ‘let them go’ than ‘dropped them’. She would know my meaning. I did not expect her to deny that she knew it.

“Have you lost your way again Severin?” she asked coyly, but the words were almost slurred, imperceptible to all but me. Her approach was downright unbalanced; she’d never sounded so heavy in her soles. Both slender arms slapped onto my shoulders, a gesture in which I instantly recognized the absence of her characteristic ‘ownership’ of my form and in its place an attempt to support herself on me like a pillar. “Straying from the path of time I cleared for you… seeing a newer habit and forgetting that I started it weeks ago, or was it months?” The punctuating tease did little to dissuade me.

She looked fuller than the tub, personality gushing, aura sloshing all over me and the floor. Her eyes were flat, expression expanding like ice melting and pooling. When she breathed on me it was, comparatively, as if a cow had done so after gorging on grass and stowaway pebbles. Messy flecks of her intent struck my cheek wetly.

“You’re burning up,” I said sternly, the heat in her arms practically welding them to my shoulders. My Wanda pulled back, a drunken cobra, ready to spit venom but unable to pick a target through double vision.

“Severin! How dare you take such a tone with me!?” My hand made it to her forehead before she could react, which was another worrying sign, but less so than the inferno that must have been devouring the last of the fuel inside her skull. A scorch on my palm. I let her see. Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on it.

At last she acted out some confusion and concern, stumbling back, slowly spinning around, looking for a culprit for her condition, but it was within, where an heir of Cain could not look. To them, and to her especially, reflection was the weakness of the children of Abel. When they understood themselves they understood how flimsy they were, and they invited a Death they should have been watching out for.

“Matilda,” she muttered, expecting a face to appear somewhere and sneer maniacally, out the window, or from the depths of the tub perhaps. Nothing. Nothing but the fire growing in her flesh. Manifestations she had likely subconsciously combated for days sprang up in this unnerved opportunity, and I watched as nasty lashes of red swelled across her shoulders and hurdled her ribs, taking no more than a minute.

“Wanda, it’s the delirium,” I told her, applying as much chill to my words as I could. “You’ve come down with it.”

“Impossible. I’m… That’s a mortal ailment. That’s…” In her following babbling she deduced, and then disregarded, what had likely happened. Her nasty sister Nunbleeder had coated the bone screw with the contagion, relied on Wanda to remove it, and in the process infected her.

“We need to cool you down,” I instructed, recalling the treatments that were by then widely known. Ice for the fever. Lots to drink. Remove meat and salt from the diet, to relieve the swelling and internal pressure. And beyond that, nothing more substantial than patience. “Into the tub my love, quickly now.”

“You do not order me!” she honked, like a goose with a plucked tail feather. Thankfully she had enough clarity following the brief descent from the improperly regulated shout, which cracked a tile underfoot, to recognize both concern and wisdom in my face. “Severin, my chief disciple, and prophet of the new, glorious, and everlasting age of Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, I order you to escort me to the tub. I wish to bathe.”

“Yes goddess, right this way.” I took her arm in mine as if taking her to the dance floor, and I did dip her, but it was right into the water. Like an eel she slithered out of my grasp, weighing nothing, disappearing under the surface without so much as a second ripple. As if spineless she contorted to reorient herself face up, then her head reappeared leaning against the copper curve, with relief apparent in her tiny chilled gasp.

But it couldn’t last, not with an inhuman fever ravaging her; the water soon began to steam. With so little understanding of how the line of Cain dealt with the line of Throng’s, I was myself relieved to see that the bath did not come to a boil. Still, there was much work to be done to make her as comfortable as possible.

At first she didn’t speak, trying to plot I’m sure in the darkness of closed eyes, the closest she came to meditation short of staring between the stars on the darkest nights. In that worrisome silent gap I ran about town, fetching the doctor, fetching ice to store in the basement and replenish her bath, arranging care for Nepenthe once the morning came.

Of course the doctor admonished me for putting her in a hot bath, unaware the sufferer herself was heating it, but once I hauled a block of ice up and dropped it in, his sudden shock indicating he thought I was far too rough with the process, he dropped the matter and simply told me to keep adding ice, but carefully.

Beyond that I already knew the treatments he prescribed, making it no wonder people were so helpless under the red whip of the scourge. Once he was gone I brought up another block, as the first had melted already, and as I dumped it Wanda caught it, cracked it as her fingers dug in, and she carried it into the depths as if drowning a mesmerized sailor.

And depths the bath now had. Intentional or not, Wanda worked magics upon it in order to feel less confined. If one looked closely they would realize the bottom was gone, replaced only by shadow, Wanda sometimes disappearing down into it for minutes at a time before resurfacing for air. I said nothing; perhaps with more of a world around her to control she would regain some composure.

By midday next, give or take, always given to me and never taken by me, she had, but only enough to think she was back to her old self. Upon hauling in her next dosage of ice I found the window flung open, a strong breeze carrying in leaves and clinging insects upon her order, to give the tile some comforting forest floor touches. Spots of moss had begun to swell in various seams and the moist joints of pipes.

I’d kept the bath down to the wispiest simmer, but I didn’t doubt it was still uncomfortably warm for the various pond and puddle creatures she had somehow gotten to join her in her new swampy domain. Our feathered firstborn, Mergini the brilliant drake, was paddling idly, quacking nervously under his breath, smart enough to know that if Wanda requested him as bath toy he had best obey.

Him I worried over less than the minnows darting about, looking for cool spots under her knees and between her toes. Retreating into the depths might help them, but that was less of an option for the toads, reliant on air as they were, that she had seated on lily pads around her head and at the foot of the tub.

“Ahh Severin,” she said, slithering into a strange swim, head and neck fully upright and aimed my way, as if she stood on something. “See what I have created even under this foul spell. It is a whole world now, and it reflects the larger Quarantown. When something goes wrong out there I will see it here, in some form,” she assured herself. Rather than responding immediately I lowered in the ice, slowly as I could, so as not to disturb her dubious project. The sweat of my efforts ran almost as thick as hers under the fever, and I was drenched despite having dipped no more than a forearm into the bath. This frazzled fatigue was taken for a lack of confidence, of belief.

“And now that I’ve restored my surveillance, I must dispatch you to do what I cannot,” she continued, patrolling in a circle around the sinking corner of ice.

“Darling… toads don’t swim.” Her eyes, mostly dark, rolled toward me, like little boats rowing silently through the steam, so that their soldiers might disembark and attack with the element of surprise.

“I made them,” she breathed as her head glided, mouth slightly open, below the surface. She was waiting out my resistance to her will, and came back for a breath only when my posture was sufficiently supplicant.

“I am busy keeping you afloat, and the household,” I explained, practically hearing my concerns bounce off her like walnuts off brick. “Can Quarantown not fend for itself until you are well? Are your familiars not remaining vigilant even as we speak?”

“They are, but vigilance will repel nothing,” she said. “You must go while I plot. Take this.” Her hand emerged, grabbed my shirt. She bent me over the side and rose to meet me in a kiss, which she used to instill a sickly but powerful breath. I could taste her fever, her stewing anger, globs of yammering mania as a fatty oil coating my mouth. It gave me a sense of urgency, but a hot shadow of her own.

Full of her breath, there was only one more thing she could give me to make me into the best imitation of herself: her furs. I was instructed to don them for the first time, only having pulled them over myself as a blanket before. At first they wore as heavily as one would expect, like a mound of dead animals bones and all, but within seconds they adjusted just outside of my perception, became something I was only reminded of when I felt I needed them.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, which Wanda enabled, dispelling the blurring condensation on it with a wave of her hand. The very definition of a fierce cave-dwelling femininity on her, I found that the furs altered themselves without need of a tailor on my shoulders, into a masculine coat with broad shoulders and more flared sleeves hanging behind my arms.

Altogether it was more like a cape, and i felt compelled to straighten my already admirable posture, if only to puff out what little chest I had and match its energy. I can’t describe it any better than to say I suddenly looked naked without a fat cigar in my mouth and the darkest stubble on my jaw.

“What they do for me they can do for you in part,” she assured, trusting I would remember the garment’s many abilities. “Now we get back to the business of running this place. First I want you to go to the mine shaft and Burstyn. He has dragged his feet in closing it. Machete through his excuses and have it blown shut. When a large bubble bursts right here,” a dainty fingertip poked out of the water, startled a sweltered toad, “I’ll know you have done my bidding.”

“Yes I’ll see to it Wanda, and I’ll also be back in an hour with more ice.” Never before had I felt it a relief to leave her behind, though I never did that fully, even discounting the breath I was vessel to and the fur coat hung on me. This was not my Wanda, but a concussed and dizzy impersonator, a furious crawling pomp ready to drag other lives down with her.

I should have always known this was possible. An heir of Cain has a harsh selfish nature, one prone to abandonment when the pressure is on, one which sees all love and connection as ballast the moment their survival is called into question. The ultimate goal is to perceive and avoid the reaper, and to destroy everything that might prevent that evasion, including family who are doing little more than standing ignorantly in the path they flee down.

I did not love her any less. Instead I recognized what she worked so hard to suppress when all her faculties were under her own command. My Wanda aspired to be a goddess, not a tyrant, and her bloodthirst could only ever paint the stony pillars of justice that hold up her presence. This illness had to be waded through, slowly, painfully, so that we might be reunited on the other side of the delirium’s fog.

Regarding the mine shaft, it too had been weighing on my mind. Only once had I entered, when we were dispatching the stalwart stalking skeleton of Melmoth into the swift coursing of its subterranean river, where Wanda, and myself after a time, had sensed a separate ominous presence.

I cannot recall how long ago she ordered it to be closed with explosives, but it was at least days, and I doubt she would’ve allowed it to drag on for months. Now technically Wanda had no legal grounds to order such a thing. She was not the owner, on paper, of anything in Quarantown aside from our home, but so great was her power of persuasion, even without revealing her true nature, that she could order any such thing and have it done within a day.

Except where Doppler Burstyn was involved. The man’s ego was so swollen, alongside his pocketbook, that he thought of my wife as a social connection to foster rather than someone to please. He’d not outright rejected her request that his mineral explorations be closed, but he had generated a seemingly endless list of excuses for why it couldn’t be performed on any particular occasion: poor weather, insufficient manpower, faulty fuses, improperly stored powder, previous engagement, and so on.

When I visited him, with Wanda’s furs on my shoulders, he immediately suspected something. The man was not stupid, but through a life of doing business with the stupid he had come to rely a good deal more on instinct than intellect, which gave him a conversational style something like my Wanda’s, albeit the pestering dragonfly version to her righteous hawk. He sniffed around suspicious things, nipped at them, played it all off as good fun, and even with the furs artificially inflating my presence he still out-barrel-chested me and managed to defray me temporarily.

Long enough to cause a good deal of trouble. You see when I asked him why he hadn’t closed the shaft yet he said he was in preparations, and that I could go and inspect the site myself to confirm. Like a fool I did. ‘Preparations’. They were not preparations. They were in fact complete given that he clearly had no intention of taking them any further.

Never would I proclaim myself an expert in demolition, not even an admirer of fireworks in fact (does anything need to be that loud?), but it only took some measured thought to read the scene outside the shaft mouth. Yes there were fuses wired up along the mountain’s bluish stone, disappearing down its gullet, and yes as well to the plungers and boxes used to detonate, but everything was hollow or in poor condition. The fuses had been sitting out so long birds had pecked away at their fibers for nesting.

After dealing with Wanda’s sudden sickness, and presumably being without sleep for the past thirty hours, I was in no mood for this discovery. I had every intention of marching back to Burstyn’s residence, scuffing every last slate tile in the place, and using some percentage of Wanda’s strength to drag him up there and make him push the plungers himself… until the poetic muse finally, after an entire life of longing, reached me.

She came on the wind, cold and spritzing like the ocean, but slightly clammy, so the origin could only have been the cave. Poetry was one of my primary passions, alongside fashion and maths, before Wanda placed me upon her mantle, and it hadn’t gone away despite her overshadowing presence.

If ever I’d had poetry of my own to share with her I know she would have listened, cherished it, even if she deemed my efforts ‘cute’ rather than truly inspired. Lines. That was all I could ever write. Getting through a whole stanza left me wheezing, as if each syllable was a step on a ladder made too far apart from the last.

Maths were much simpler. Everyone shares the same arithmetic. Old Man Mathematics is a decrepit yet undying creature, kind and loud and coughing, always eager to show you some numerical trick on a scrap of paper, not minding that he loses your attention when he tries to relate it to everyday life. I love him for that, and I like his rambling stories.

What saddened me was the comparatively cold shoulder the poetic muse paid me. From just after I put down my first book of poetry (Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake) and attempted to write something as concise and profound as The Clod and the Pebble I resigned myself to a fate of deserved obscurity.

But now came verse, fed to me out of the cave on cold breath. Only I could warm it up, give it the breath of life, and only by speaking it aloud!

“The hour arrived—and it became
A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe;
Still rolling on with innate force,
Without a sphere, without a course,
A bright deformity on high,
The monster of the upper sky!
And thou! beneath its influence born—
Thou worm! whom I obey and scorn—
Forced by a power (which is not thine,
And lent thee but to make thee mine)
For this brief moment to descend,
Where these weak spirits round thee bend
And parley with a thing like thee—
What wouldst thou, Child of Clay! with me?”

I whirled around, somehow expecting an audience to have congregated, and have their hands properly oiled for long-lasting applause, but of course I was alone with the spotty grass, the discarded stones, and the false blasting equipment.

There or not, the audience was deserved! True poetry, you know it on the tongue first and the ear second, the echo of a flavor, that was it! Now I understood it hadn’t come solely from me, inspired as I was from the breath of the mine, but no poet works without inspiration. Perhaps the verse had simply been worked through me, but that was in keeping with my identity; I have always felt worked through. Like a tool of a tool of the universe. A small but vital part, and vital in its obedience to its designed form.

Just as the lines flying out of me like an epiphany drew great pleasure, they then flagged and crashed troublingly upon my psyche. Discord, not in my meter, but my relationship. The ill Wanda and I were now in a genuine disagreement. I did not want the mine blasted shut, or shut at all.

How I would justify such a position was beyond me at the moment; all I had was the sensation, the yearning, and the hope that it would continue. Some future version of myself who had to stop every now and again, in the market, on a tree-lined trail, and expound in rhyme on the nature of the world was itself an inspiration to me. Poetry was an event that happened within, and without warning, a surprise gift from the soul.

Normally Wanda would be understanding of the state it put me in, but there was much doubt she would appreciate it now, swamped in restrictive sickness. All the same, I had little recourse. She would need to know why that prescribed bubble hadn’t appeared and popped.

So I returned to our master bath for counsel with the master of the bath. Someone was heading out the door, closing it behind them; we locked eyes and paused.

“Devorgoil?” Surprise had me questioning him, not uncertainty, as there was little mistaking the man-phantom for any other thing living or dead. Thus far I’d only known him as a presence barely solid enough to hold a razor steady, a flitting specter thanks to his stillbirth, yet here he looked more alive than ever, glistening with steam. I guessed it just a skin he couldn’t avoid accumulating inside her hothouse.

“There you are Severin,” he said, smiling thinly, dabbing at, and slightly into, his forehead with a handkerchief. His blue eyes were much softer than Wanda’s, broad face more inviting. “I was hoping you would help me talk some sense into her before she kicked me out, but you’re a little too late.”

“Did you have some advice for us?” I asked so that he might impart to me what Wanda would automatically refuse. Devorgoil Oblivion Goblinry only appeared when someone was at their most vulnerable, which meant Wanda was at her lowest point in all the time I’d known her, for his only previous visit in memory was to me when I had a blade against my throat.

“Before she screamed at me to get out of the room first and her town second, I offered to help see her through this, keep an eye on Quarantown while she couldn’t.”

“That has been relegated to me,” I explained unnecessarily, as he could surely read it in the fur coat hanging off my shoulders.

“It’s not that I don’t have confidence in you brother… but this really is something an heir should handle.”

“If she won’t accept your help there’s nothing we can do about it,” I told him, letting slip my current attitudes, and my impatience. “But do drop by again the next time one of us is about to die. Perhaps the third time is the charm.”

“The third?” he said with an amused puff out the nose, before he caught my puzzled expression. “Yes, the third. Good to see you again Severin, as always. Give Wanda my best once she’s at her worst again.” He embraced me, like a hug from an empty wool coat, and then walked down the hall, achieving a total vanish before he would’ve turned the corner.

And vanishing is something I would’ve much rather done than take the handle of our washroom door and open it, for what I must assume was actually the second time after the departure of Goblinry.

Recall the instability of my memory in time, something taken so for granted before Wanda that I never even thought of it as one of my senses. In happier healthier times her grip was perfectly measured, having little effect beyond providing me a sort of euphoric calm without upsetting the flow of my life. That calm, one of the boundless parts of my love for her, had only the side effect of preventing me from calculating the date, or reading a clock, or writing down the hour. All very minor. Until she fell sick.

Incoherent, agitated, distracted by the effort of turning the tub into a functioning miniature of Quarantown, Wanda was no longer managing my place in time properly. This was the only conclusion I could draw when I turned away from Devorgoil, let myself in, and found that Wanda wasn’t alone.

I’m not referring to any of the animals that were still present. It was a different animal showing golden teeth, pretending it was a grin: Doppler Burstyn. Now consider this, Devorgoil had always appeared somewhat spectral to me, and either could not or would not don a perfect disguise. If he had been in there moments before, discussing sensitive matters of primal divinity with a gobsmacked Burstyn standing off to the side, some impact of that would’ve shown on the man’s face.

He looked smugger than ever, not disbelieving, forcing me to rapidly reorient myself in chronology. What I was experiencing was the second of two events nearly identical up to this point, which I believe had occurred in a few other instances. I recalled a handful of times where I ate a midday meal, with Wanda further from me than usual, and wound up eating it twice, leaving the kitchen or dining room only to, with a hiccup in my awareness, circle back and sit down for another serving of something completely different.

There was even one instance of my luncheon not taking until the fifth time, and by then I was worried I was trapped between one end of a loaf of bread and the other. I sat down, to a full steaming bowl of soup and bread I did not remember making, and even as my stomach growled I felt I was about to explode, like I couldn’t possibly eat another bite. Indeed I didn’t, freeing myself only by leaving the food there to waste, which pained me greatly.

I had to accept that with Wanda sick these events were no longer anomalous. Stuttering. Stumbling. Tripping on a rock in the woods only to splash into the middle of the ocean. Composing myself as quickly as I could, I asked what on Earth the man was doing in there while my wife was stark naked in the bath, as if I was a simple linear man and that was my primary concern.

“Drop the pleasantries old boy!” Doppler said. Nobody but him would call an implied accusation of impropriety ‘pleasantries’. “The game’s up! I always knew there was something funny about you two; I just thought you were killing people and burying them in your cellar or some such skulduggery. To think, I’ve had a goddess keeping an eye on me ever since I got here.”

I turned to Wanda hurt, angry. Him? The first person to learn her nature in Quarantown was the man in possession of the worst nature in Quarantown! In my study was a stack of lists, possible orders in which she might reveal herself most seamlessly, recruit the best people in the best sequence under the advice of her chief disciple.

Better to tell the mayor of London than to tell him. She’d shown little inclination toward him before, leading me to believe the sickness had driven her that much closer to the edge of reason, but I quickly realized there was another factor when Wanda, through her delirium, managed to read my emotional state.

“This is what happens when you do not follow my orders in a timely fashion,” she said, flippant, a most unexpected tone for her to take. How could I be expected to do anything in a timely fashion when I was barely-in-timely!? Think, I reminded myself. I’d been accused of disobedience, which meant I’d already told her not to close the mine shaft and why, just after Devorgoil left and before Burstyn arrived, presumably summoned by her. She had rejected my plea, found the poetry of the cave unconvincing, or perhaps convincing of the urgency of its closure. Yes, that was likely it; she was hostile to whatever entities had a part in my inspiration. We could discuss it further and for the first time, once Doppler was gone.

“Our goddess here tells me that closing my mine was no mere request, but an imperative for our safety,” the man said, strolling around behind the tub, touching hanging flowers and moss as if testing wind chimes in a showroom of fragile crystal. “Now that I know I’ll have the boys bring in the explosives immediately.”

“No you won’t,” I countered.

“Yes he will,” Wanda countered back. “I need to see bubbles bursting Severin.” I had already defied her, and I would not have done so without good reason, so I trusted myself to remember that good reason at a later date. It was not hard to trust that forgetful man, not compared to this Wanda, who would choose as her chief disciple instead of me a gorilla that tested to see if every shiny rock was food.

“Don’t be like that Severin,” Doppler said jovially, making his way around the tub to me, leaning like a careening carriage around a tight curve. He smacked me on the shoulder, which quickly turned into stroking Wanda’s furs the wrong way. No, he was not admiring them, was instead imagining what they might look like on his own silhouette. “I assure you I am fully committed. Being involved in something this grand, why it’s like making my fortune all over again, but better! Disciples we’re called, right my friend? And to think nobody else knows and I’m second in command!”

“That would be the chief disciple and the prophet,” I corrected him doubly, “both of which are me.” I slunk to the side, dropping his hand off my furs.

“Of course, of course, I meant second in command beside you,” he said. “Our Wanda’s a goddess, so she’s not in command. She’s in control. Her orders drop out of the sky as revelation! Bu-hah! I finally have a use for all that brimstone language the nuns used to try and scare me with. I’ll let you two lovebirds hammer out the details while I fetch the brimstone proper.” With that he finally left and I had what felt like my first moment alone with my wife in ten years.

“You’re too concerned with my health,” my Venus said from her waters, “and it’s distracting you. You can’t make me better any faster by reading me poems. Doppler will get the job done. You’re still wearing my furs, not him.”

“What do you think is in there that frightens you so?” I asked of the cave, cutting to the heart of the issue before my heart felt anymore cut.

“Nothing frightens me Severin. They wouldn’t dare raise so much as a speck of foam in my ocean.” She surveyed the surface for blemishes, pushed Mergini aside to check underneath him. Clear, but she still eyed the spot suspiciously.

“Who is they?”

“Manipulators lost to time,” she said cryptically, “thinking they can still play the game. Perhaps they can still, but only enough to move a piece in amblush when nobody is looking.” (It was of no importance then, but she’d just accidentally revealed to me one of the remaining mysteries of that game: how my pieces sometimes wound up where I didn’t want them.) “Now that I’m not by your side they’re trying to whisper in your ear my Severin, take what they can’t even have.”

“Do you mean… some kind of spirit lies in there? A ghost of Cain? More than one?”

“I will explain it when I am restored,” she growled with narrowed eye before starting a dive that would outlast my patience. “You were to close it and wait for the answer, without question. So now you will have uncertainty.”

There was plenty more on my mind, but she had gone deep into the simmering shadows, and refused to come back up until I departed, which I shortly did. What choice did I have, if I was going to stop Burstyn before he burst any further into my life? As I stormed off I was already aware I was about to do something I had hoped to never do in my life: exert authority.

Authority is for those more competent than myself, an act of divine imitation, and no one makes a bigger ass of themselves than the man who pretends at authority. He has less dignity than a ruffled parrot shrieking its mating call, bobbing its brain out of its head in a demented mating dance, all on a most lonesome branch.

It was also the only language Mr. Burstyn would understand. He had just been lifted onto the saddle behind Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, and I knew that experience was like the whole world moving faster under your feet. The man would be angry, fearful if he found himself not following her revelation.

I would tie his hands by putting myself in harm’s way. No matter what her orders, he would be smart enough to know they did not include any kind of bodily harm to the man who was at least nominally her husband. In short, he could hold his incontinent fuse if I stood in the blast radius.

Wanda’s furs didn’t constrict as I left the house, headed once more for the mine, leading me to believe that I had their favor. Little more than instinct was bewitched into them, but instinct and poetic urge are close cousins I think. Its animal life felt the rhythm of my current musicality, and together we made the trip shorter than it had ever been, arriving just in time to keep going, past some young men whose names were utterly inconsequential at that moment (and every other moment where I transcribed Wanda’s dictated history) and their blustering boss.

“Severin, don’t be daft! We’re about to bring the whole place down!” Burstyn shouted at me, lurching into a run to catch up to my lanky imperturbable stride.

“I think it would be rude to shut the door on me,” was all I had to say, but it was said with more confidence than ever previously generated by the man Severin Pelts. Doppler didn’t dare lay a hand on me in anything other than false friendship, and even then only to directly show Wanda he was playing nice. “You needn’t wait around; I’ll close it when my business is finished.”

The magnate was no slouch when it came to arguments, boisterous volume his preferred rapier, so I calculated my speed to leave him no time at all to use it, not without following me into the shaft, which he might have done if we didn’t both catch a chilling wind it threw at us. He ground to a halt at the threshold, almost tipping over, while I continued on into the darkness.

A line of lamps were strung up along the wall, and I hadn’t had time to fetch the supplies needed to light them. Yet every single tool was at my disposal, as the real Wanda kept herself obsessively prepared, should she take on any foe or challenge, even those ten times her size. That Wanda was the wellspring of my current confidence, with which I dug deep into the recesses of the furs, looking for pockets I trusted to be there, and found the means of lighting the lamps.

Their light was weak, but enough to guide me back to the one spot I knew within the mountain: the precipice overlooking the cold yet raging waters. Their roar had grown in my ear, and when I looked over the cliff for the first time the sound took on new aggression, curling against the interior of my skull like a large wave finally nearing shore.

Down was water, but just a black void to the eyes. Up was a vertical passage in the rock, wide as the biggest organ I’d ever seen, its pipes former stalagmites that had been reincorporated by an advancing wall of another mineral paler in color. As my eyes adjusted to the dark seven points almost jumped out of that back wall, conical shelves protruding just enough for a large bird, or perhaps a spirit, to alight on.

First they would have to escape the darkness, and perhaps they needed me to hook them up and rip them through the skin of the waters as well. Thad idea struck a chord in me, yes, they did not have the strength of minnows without my help, only the ability to lure me in with the pitter patter of spritely metrical feet.

And could I dredge them up? After a deep breath held I could feel the cave’s air moving across my gulf. It was not the silence of nature, but a vacuum only I could fill with the lines climbing my throat. Very well spirits, what is thine summons?

“By thy cold breast and serpent smile,

By thy unfathom’d gulfs of guile,

By that most seeming virtuous eye,

By thy shut soul’s hypocrisy;

By the perfection of thine art

Which pass’d for human thine own heart;

By thy delight in others’ pain,

And by thy brotherhood of Cain,

I call upon thee! and compel

Thyself to be thy proper Hell!”

Demanding echo, reverberating as powerfully as it was spoken, mightiest in my life, journeyed into the river below and broke these beguiling spirits out of whatever prison bars kept them from perception. As I watched, careful not to take even one step back in fear, seven shapes began to take to the rocky roosts.

If ghosts they were such entities were far more colorful than I would’ve guessed, coming in every stripe of the rainbow, and not faded at all, red as roses, violet as a comet’s tail, green as spring under the flowers… I was not permitted much more than color. Their forms were still ambiguous, but I could see motion, and unhelpful as it sounds I can say nothing more revealing than that I spied a head’s tilt, but no head, a fist’s tightening but no fist.

Lording over me as they tried gave them the presence of squatting men pretending to be frogs, but also of vultures waiting for an overturned cow’s last breath. These inklings gave me no clue as to whether they were masculine, feminine, or a mix. Much clearer was the oppressive chill of emotion poured onto me from all seven precipices: cold hungry expectation.

“I am Severin Pelts,” I all but barked, adjusting Wanda’s furs on my shoulders though they already hung perfectly. “Who are you? And why have you tantalized me with such poetry? It does not feel as if it is wholly mine, and if you stole it we won’t be getting along at all.” Red spirit spoke first, where I noticed their voice did not echo, so such benefits must be for the living. They needed me to speak for anything they wanted said to last.

“With the azure and vermilion, which is mix’d for my pavilion, though thy quest may be forbidden, on a star-beam I have ridden; to thine adjuration bow’d, mortal— be thy wish avowed!”

Forbidden quest? Did the red spirit mean our meeting? Wanda had forbidden it. My avowed wish… I suppose that was why I was there, but I wasn’t sure what I wished with them or what they wished with me. Rather than say anything for the time being I pushed my gaze like a boulder, with eyebrows arced as leverage, onto the orange spirit, and the yellow, willing them to speak one by one.

“Where the slumbering earthquake lies pillow’d on fire, and the lakes of bitumen rise boilingly higher; I have quitted my birth-place, thy bidding to bide— Thy spell hath subdued me, thy will be my guide!”

“I am the rider of the wind, the stirrer of the storm; the hurricane I left behind is yet with lightning warm.”

“The monarch of mountains, they crowned him long ago on a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, with a diadem of snow. I am the spirit of the place, could make the mountain bow and quiver to his cavern’d base— and what with me wouldst thou?”

“Like the storm on the surface came the sound of thy spells; o’er my calm hall of coral the deep echo roll’d— to the spirit of ocean thy wishes unfold!”

“My dwelling is the shadow of the night, why doth thy magic torture me with light?”

“The star which rules thy destiny, was ruled, ere Earth began, by me.”

Liars. That was what my instincts told me, before I even consulted the instincts that had raised every hair on Wanda’s furs. If these seven were to be believed they were spirits of nature, covering everything from the red rivers under volcanoes to the faintest glow of distant stars, and they had all risen and descended to do my bidding.

It was all still vexing though, as I sensed someone’s truth in their introductions, just not theirs. I don’t think either of us was sure who had called to the other, with my time muddied by Wanda and theirs long gone, and thus no longer mastered. If some of this was true, what could I deduce?

That these were indeed heirs of Cain, dead and kicking, gathered here to scavenge on Wanda’s growing power, emboldened by her illness to reach out to her chief disciple. What domains of nature they’d claimed to embody were likely the forces they had invested their accursed magics in when they were alive, as Wanda did her furs and familiars.

“We are here for a reason,” I said, rather than admit my consternation. “Because… of poetry. One poem. The one that brought me, that I read from to summon you, and that will end this summit of ours. Before I speak the ending, you must say what you’ve got to say. I will speak it as soon as it comes to me, so don’t you dare delay.”

The spirits spoke amongst themselves, and without seeing any heads I saw heads moving. Their hushed tone was inaudible to me, perhaps not to graveyard rats and composting beetles that frequented the same places. Whether they reached any accord or not, it was green, spirit of mountain, who answered me, and without the same skill of verse, adding further evidence to my theory that they’d scavenged it from elsewhere and passed it off as their own profundity.

“Before any ending I wish to offer proof, confirm for you a mending.”

“Proof of what?” I asked.

“Proof that we are your friends,” said orange-of-earth’s-hidden-fires, “that with time we can make amends.”

“Time,” I muttered before speaking up, “that’s what we have in common. I am a prophet. I bring the future to Wanda the blasphemer, so that she might preempt punishment and make blasphemy into gospel. For this I look ahead. Are you bringing me some of those days to come? Are you outside time enough to swim ahead of the stream and gather it?”

“Yes!” shouted indigo-of-shadow. “With us compose a prophecy, so the serpent doesn’t see our fated forgery.”

“And you.” I pointed at green. “You have proof that you know what I do not. And that will convince me your contributions are the missing ingredients in my prophecy?”

“We all have it now,” yellow-of-lightning insisted. “Any of us can drop it on your brow.” For their outburst they received some jeering and hissing, confirming for me that their alliance with each other was opportunistic, and if it could become one’s opportunity they would take it. That was added to my arsenal of weapons against them, but for now I wanted to see this proof. When I asked again violet-of-light-between-stars offered it up, perhaps because green could not concoct a rhyme in time.

“That which was buried escapes! It currently crawls, but soon it will traipse!”

“This anniversary can never be treated as- as cursory!” green sputtered to make sure they were included, which I was glad for, as it was the word anniversary that gave me their meaning. That meaning sent me fleeing from the cave in a full sprint, flapping furs extinguishing the lamps as I went.

If it was what I expected then it was definitive proof that these skulking spirits had a degree of prescience. Wanda knew they were about as soon as she entered the mine, and if they had so much as dared to flit a ghostly tail out in the open air she would’ve known; there was no way for them to gather what happened inside Quarantown directly.

I thought it doubtful they had been following us since the train, which was the only other way they might track the number of days that had passed exactly: three hundred and sixty-six. That was the number of a very particular beast with the fangs of a bat and the pallor of a corpse. Once I had slain him, and until the spirits spoke of him cryptically all thought of his crypt had slipped from my mind.

He was Ruthven Typhus Andronicus, vampire, heir of Cain, and first sibling of Wanda to compete with her. One sip of my blood and I might have been his instead of hers, enslaved rather than betrothed. Together we had buried him, not far from what would become the mine’s entrance, in a spot unmarked but for the refusal of any plants to grow there.

Wanda had warned that Ruthven would not die permanently, and that he would rise again in a year and a day and get back to his tricks before the sun rose on three sixty-seven. I very much wanted to stop, to consider the island my raft in the sea of time had just struck, but he was probably escaping, so I could not.

There was no avoiding thinking on it. If I did find his grave freshly empty it would mean Wanda and I had been together for exactly one year and one day, which would put her pregnancy with Nepenthe just two and a half months into our relationship. I couldn’t believe it had been so quick. Never would I have guessed anything less than two full years.

And there were other things that did not get along with that notion. Miss Ulterrine’s boys were at that age where they sprouted new inches and new leaves almost daily. To me their growth had far exceeded a year and a day. And yet-

I was unaccustomed to the speed granted me by the furs, so my feet slid a good distance in the dirt as I came to a stop. The barren patch was now so barren as to be free of dirt as well, most of it laying in haphazard heaps nearby. Some of it trailed off, and at the end of that trail I was relieved to find nothing but a mammoth slug that did not yet have the use of its limbs. It groaned when I kicked it over onto its back.

“Hello again Severin,” Ruthven said, squinting against the sunlight despite ample cloud cover and being entirely contained in my shadow. I had not tested all of the weaknesses of the vampire from folklore against this foe, having only encountered him on a train in the middle of the night before, but his discomfort suggested an uninhibited sunbeam might burn a hole straight through as if by magnifying glass. “Is Wanda not joining us today?”

“She knows I can handle you.” I made sure he was pinned, pressing on his ankle with one foot so assertively that the dirt underneath formed a divot. It was best to feign control with the other heirs, so I trusted Wanda’s furs to provide in the case of my shortcoming. I reached a hand into them, concentrating on what I would need to put the ghoul back in the ground: something made of wood and sharp enough to pass for a stake.

I was rewarded with a suitable item, though my mind would’ve been more at ease with something larger. It was a world serpent token from the game of amblush, brown in color, bared fangs aimed into the sky. I held it upside down to indicate it would momentarily pass through his heart, before he could shake his rigor mortis and fight back.

“You were late this time,” he teased. Not again. This time? Had I already visited his grave and stuffed him back in between the train and now? That would give me my two years I felt owed… and hopefully not three! I had to beat back the uncertainty, lest I reveal that Wanda had likely forgotten he was due to rise thanks to her illness.

“I was busy writing my latest prophecy,” I boasted, gauging his expression for any fib detection. Previously his eyes had held great hypnotic power, but so long under Wanda’s affectionate rule had immunized me against his charms. Now he just looked like a bloated grub dug out of a rotting log, his clothing eaten thin and dirt-caked.

“Oh? Do tell. I get so little news of late; I’ve been living under a rock.” His mouth scrunched, then he grunted with the effort of lifting his head and looking back at the hole, where he saw there was still no grave marker. “No I haven’t! Really, you two could get something for me.”

“I think I’ve met some of your kind, but they’re dead,” I stated as nonchalantly as I could, hoping to get accurate information out of him while Wanda was on the mend. “They say they can assist me, and obviously I don’t trust them, but they are full of lovely little poems, and some of that might sound good in a prophecy, don’t you think?”

“Poems? I suppose they do rhyme sometimes,” the vampire answered, hopefully having resigned himself to another year and day of destiny and resolved to participate in this brief conversation as much as possible. “Not that I’ve ever been so fortunate as to have a prophet of my very own.”

“I’m certain they’re hoping to be counted as coauthors,” I dismissed, “that’s not in question, but might they have anything to offer at all? Where do you think they acquired such lyrical information?”

“They must be relevant to you to be of use. Ghosts mine the past, but it repeats itself, so there are fossils yet to be born.” He cackled a little. Being undead it wouldn’t surprise me if most of his social connections he couldn’t enthrall were phantoms. “A good prophecy uses what would have been to show what can be, like including truth in deception to make it go down easier.”

“And what would have been?”

“You should ask yourself what would have been if not for us. The line of Abel does as it was always supposed to. You do not understand death, which is another name for destiny, and thus you are no danger to it. We are. Our line caused the destruction you might use as tinder for foretelling. And it wouldn’t have been long ago, seeing as you’re just getting started. I’m sure you’ll be excellent once you dig deep.”

“Not long ago…” I pondered aloud. “It wouldn’t be Wanda; she’s never destroyed anything that didn’t deserve it… but your mother! She killed those people at the Villa Diodati when she was carrying all of you.”

“They were poets,” Ruthven reminded, flashing his fangs in a chiseled smile. “So many things would’ve been written if their lives weren’t cut short. Those stories and ideas were left to stagnate, splintered and useless.”

“So this prophecy is a work never written or never completed,” I mulled aloud.

“The truth the author sought to state, which can now only be validated by you.”

“Fascinating.” Wanda’s furs bristled, then my hairs underneath them. Something was amiss, and that internal compass one only detects when it moves was suddenly redirected back toward home. A twitch in my hand reminded me I held the miniature stake. “Thank you for your help brother, but the watch is wound tight today so I must be going.”

“Severin, wait, why don’t we have a nice-” I dropped on him and used my weight to drive the token into his chest, where the previous perforations had created a target for me. Having not fully reconstituted, his flesh offered almost no resistance, like the paper of an abandoned hornet nest.

His eyes centered and emptied while his mouth closed rather intentionally, probably to keep out beetles and rats and other tongue eaters. Though now deceased he retained the ability of facial expression, and I saw in it his irritation, but also resignation. Perhaps we were on our way to becoming friends.

To maximize that chance I made sure to place him back in his grave gently, and face up. He might’ve also liked the rest of that amblush set to keep busy down there, which I could’ve shaken out of the coat, but I recalled the game couldn’t be properly played without an opponent, so all I offered was familiar dirt.

Hopefully I could surprise him with a headstone before the next go-round. For now it felt Wanda needed my attention, so I hurried back that way without any concern for the seven spirits awaiting my return. They had time.

One might think I did as well! Another shuffling of my activity occurred, putting me in a house, but not the right one. I’d barged right into the residence of Godwin Hammerstein, our playwright who hadn’t yet staged anything in Quarantown. Not that that mattered! I could see any play of his I wished regardless of whether or not he’d written it yet; all I had to do was show up on the exactly right wrong night.

If I went there I must have had some reason, so I backtracked through my likely thought process. The poem. Of course I was there to ask him his thoughts on the prophetic poem, written by Byron, Shelley, or Wollstonecraft sometime in a future they never reached. Hammerstein wasn’t a poet, but we didn’t have one of those in Quarantown (channeling a dead one hardly makes me count). He was the closest.

Glossing over my disheveled appearance and heavy breathing, I hastily asked him what he thought of the sections I had memorized. To my surprise he guessed they were from a dramatic work, one perhaps meant for the stage, given that it read to him more like a speech, delivered from one character to another, than a poem expounding on a subject dispassionately.

This notion had me feeling like nothing more than a player, so I sought to preempt my stage directions by quickly thanking him for his expertise and excusing myself. The furs had not settled; if anything the garment had contracted about me, from the tension of prolonged cringing rather than fear.

Luckily the next door found was the one sought. The familiar scent of home, of downy duck feathers and sharpened silverware, soothed me some while leaving the furs distressed. Together we practically flew to the washroom and passed through the door.

Wanda was as well as could be expected given her condition, resting idly in the copper tub, though she’d switched sides in order to look across the room at her new guest, who had taken a chair from elsewhere (one that really shouldn’t have been exposed to the warm damp of that air for very long) and sat herself down like she belonged.

In her lap was our tiny daughter Nepenthe, sat on a knee, eyes wheeling about the ceiling and watching the various moths there, searching for purchase in the creeping vines that had emerged from Wanda’s swampy tub and climbed the wall. When one of them flew down and across the doorway she recognized me with a smile and a laugh that I could not return.

“Severin, is it closed?” Wanda asked without explaining the situation. My patience was gone, as if it had left for the Trojan War.

“No. I’m drawing a prophecy out of it first. Who is this?” My wife could have been furious with me for further disobedience, I fully expected it, but she was pretending to be unbothered in the process of projecting strength with the other party. Once I recognized Wanda wouldn’t be shouting or lifting her head my eyes returned to our unwelcome guest. All at once I understood who I was looking at.

A face in its fifties, a spirit much older. Wearing burgundy with a tan under-layer where patterns of black ivy clung, like what you find when you peel a living blanket off an untended garden wall to learn what had lived there first. Her hair was down. A long face. A nutcracker mouth. She was a stiff presence, like a door that opened then refused to close. Wanda didn’t need to identify her, but she gave all three of this heir of Cain’s names.

“This is my mother, Excoria Vainglory Diatribe.”

“I’ve been hearing so much about you Mr. Molochi,” the woman said, smiling with the very teeth once stained with my prophetic poet’s blood. There was none there now. She almost smelled of it, like dewy rusting iron. Her grin was nothing like my Wanda’s, or little Nepenthe’s, and not just because heirs never bore family resemblance.

“Pelts actually,” I corrected, staking the early claim that I could willfully correct an heir. “Quarantown serves a higher law than that of man. Legal or not, my name is Pelts.” Wanda hummed a chuckle.

“That’s right my love. You see mother? That’s what a real man looks like, be he Abel or Cain.”

“What, furry?” the older woman joked. Wanda’s furs were all standing on end, puffing me up like a cornered cat, which likely looked absurd.

“We weren’t expecting you Lady Diatribe,” I said as plainly as possible.

“Please Severin, call me mother, or,” her eyes rolled up for a flash, “Mum even! If your name is Pelts then that’s what I am. This was a surprise visit, but more for me than for you, seeing as it’s the first time you two have left the gate open.”

“You smelled my illness a country away,” Wanda grumbled. Her head went back to gliding in circles around the tub, like a dollop of oil. “Came scampering just to bother us at the worst possible time.”

“Is Nepenthe comfortable?” I asked my Venus tumbled off her half shell and into the waters.

“Do you not think our child can handle her feeble old grandmother?” Wanda asked in turn. “She wouldn’t dare pluck a hair from her precious head. Her throat would be torn out before it hit the tile.”

“It is lovely tile,” Excoria commented as she bounced my child on her knee. Given the lack of resemblance I had to remind myself she was her granddaughter. This was the family I’d deliberately taken up with, something I should never forget, given that I murdered Wanda’s brother on our first night out, and had then made a habit of it.

“Before I forget,” I said, turning back to Wanda, who only eyed me briefly as she drifted across the tub, “I took care of our little mosquito problem while I was out. We won’t have to worry about those little bloodsuckers anymore.” It was impossible to know what affection Excoria had for any of her children, so it seemed prudent not to tell her one of her sons was buried nearby in an unmarked grave. Through the delirium Wanda managed to catch my meaning. A slight hiccup in her swim confirmed that she had forgotten about Ruthven entirely.

“Excellent,” was all she said in response. “Mum was just about to tell me what she wants, now that she has met her first grandchild.”

“Hopefully not my last!” Excoria burbled as baby talk in Nepenthe’s ear, which disturbed me greatly despite my child’s oblivious delight. Here was a woman who had abandoned all of her children to the wilderness as soon as they dropped, and technically it wasn’t clear if Wanda had ever come face to face with her before now. They spoke like they had, but heirs made many assumptions, including with familiarity. “An heir can have many at a time Severin,” she lightly scolded me. “You’ll have to put more effort into it.”

“Nepenthe requires my full attention.”

“I suppose she would. It’s a lot to ask of someone such as yourself.”

“Do not insult my husband again,” Wanda snarled, surging forward so that her arms hung limply out of the tub and water splashed between her and her mother. The already dark tile became a glossy abyss between them. “I shall treat it the same as plucking a hair from my daughter’s head.”

“I only meant on top of his regular duties.” She threw up her hands and leaned back; my chair creaked. The wood really shouldn’t get that moist. “I’m here watching the baby because he was out prophesying,” she looked my way, “as you should be Severin. That’s what you’re good for. Be it seed,” she gripped Nepenthe’s waist and shook playfully, “or scrying, a man gives you something to invest in. Then he disappears, because when the dust settles and you get back into the work of the everyday he can only be an obstruction.”

“Severin prepares my every meal,” Wanda contradicted smugly. “He mends my clothes, throws me parties, dotes on our darling child whom we love very much.” In her sloppy bragging her heavy-lidded eyes slid over me and I felt some of her healthier lust. My skittering heart pined for a near future I hadn’t seen, but knew was coming. Soon those red scores would fade and vanish. “He is an everyday worker, and the only reason I let him out of the moment to dabble in the future is so that he can fetch me a prophecy from the market.”

“You said you were just out getting one, didn’t you?” Excoria asked pointedly, and I confirmed it with a squeak and a nod. “And you hardly look flustered. Some oracles I’ve known have to go to the brink of death to really catch that last part, which I’m sure you know is the most important. Sometimes the last word changes the entire meaning. But not a drop of sweat on you, so it must not be a very long prophecy. Is it for tomorrow? What you’ll be making us for breakfast perhaps?”

“It’s unfinished,” I said. Her insults could not harm me; only Wanda had that power. “I was drawn away by concern, but Wanda has everything under control here, same as always.”

“Only half a prophecy, that explains it,” Excoria said with enough sugar to turn coffee into sand. Wanda rose halfway out of the tub, supported by nothing but rage, her naked body only barely cloaked in the vegetation she’d imported for the beleaguered toads and fish. Throng’s slashes pulsed fierce red down her sides.

“I warned you!”

“No, I’ve come to warn you!” Excoria fired back. She too stood, and in the process threw our child across the chamber, care only shown in the direction. I lunged and flung Wanda’s furs forward so they could shape into a cradle and gently catch Nepenthe. Once she was swaddled against my chest I backed away, relieved to see nothing but more giggling on her face, even as Excoria Vainglory launched into her diatribe.

“What business do you think you have in founding this place!? Two hundred years since another heir even tried to build a stationary house of worship, and it’s only become exponentially more difficult with all these machines and newspapers! If it were an intelligent thing to do I would’ve tried myself!

Do you know how many other families have shown up to berate me for not stopping you? Quarantown, Quarantown, Quarantown, it’s all I hear these days. You’ll draw so much Abel-bodied attention that we’ll all get hunted out of the brush. And with that much scrutiny about your damn father will never drop his guard, which means I’ll never find that bastard and give him what he so richly deserves!

As your mother I order you to destroy this place. Burn it down. Take your oracle over there and drown him!”

“Mother!” I blurted haughtily, pretending to be offended. Wanda cackled.

“And as your daughter I say never! It’s a good thing you didn’t raise me; you would’ve ruined perfection.” Toads leapt out of the tub in shocking numbers and bounced across the tile like a fountain of disembodied warts. “You missed it, passed it like a gallstone, but my people will know it! My husband will know it, my child will know it, the whole rotten world will return to ripe when they know me: Wanda Blasphemer Pelts!”

“You’ll drown in that tub first!” Excoria shrieked. Both of these creatures jerked forward, prepared to battle to the death in the washroom, but I intervened.

“Excuse me!” Both faces were hateful when they turned. “Do we not want to hear the prophecy before we do anything else?” It was the Lady Diatribe who pulled away first, straightening her hair with raking fingers and circling around behind the tub. Wanda sank back down, hooking her arms over the side to watcher her mother.

“He’s right,” the elder heir admitted without looking at me. “It could be an ill omen, which you might listen to since it’s not the wisdom of your creator.” Silence settled like dust, except for the slapping of toad bellies on smooth stone.

“Go and finish your work my love,” Wanda ordered me. “Return as soon as it’s done.” I moved to leave. “Ah! Give me Nepenthe.” She reached out, rather like a child herself, awaiting a promised gift.

“I’d rather-“

“Give me my baby! Don’t worry, she already knows how to swim. I think it best I have her for the rest of mother’s visit.” That was difficult to argue with, so I took her over to the lip and handed her off, trying not to care that her little dress was not the best material to wet either. I’d probably be picking live toads out of the folds of her clothes for the next what-felt-like-a-month as well.

Wanda took her and held her close in a way she didn’t often, as heir infants can subsist on solid foods immediately after birth. Seeing my goddess so, flushed with many different heats, able to bring grace even to fever, sharing her golden skin with the vulnerable being we had created was… more than enough to shore me up. No spirits could keep that prophecy from me if they tried. As I pulled away Wanda ran her hand across the furs I trailed.

“They look so good on you,” she complimented.

“Thank you love. I’ll be back with a basket stuffed with good tidings.” Confirming the skepticism on Lady Diatribe’s face was utterly unnecessary, so I just continued out with as much force in each footfall as could be mustered, and I didn’t stop with the stomping until I was well out of earshot, but as I had taken into consideration the exaggerated range of the heir senses, that was barely outside the mine’s entrance.

I told myself the slain author had been waiting many years to complete this work; I’d better hop to it if I did not wish to poison the well that might provide all my future prophecies with disrespect. In I charged, after savoring the only moment between bouts of unnatural domineering confidence.

“Let us get right to the finale!” I bellowed before even reaching the precipice with waters below. The spirits would hear, and they would assemble. This was their first chance in a long while, presumably, to send anything out into the light of the world, and if they did not play their cards right with me I would see to it they didn’t get another chance until the mammoths walked this planet once more.

As hoped they were there when I approached, each glowing in their distinct color, occupying the same points of stone jutting from the wall. Since they hadn’t switched places I assumed they hadn’t even moved, and further that it might be difficult for them to do so after taking near-shape. Their perches might have been their greatest connection to the material world, what was left of the heir ability to invest strength in objects and concepts.

“I don’t want to hear a single rhyme out of any of you unless it’s a line from my prophecy,” I warned them with jabbing finger. Something cold and metal brushed my wrist, underneath the furs. Whatever it was I hadn’t summoned it, so likely a suggestion from the garment itself.

“First we must discuss credit, what the key was, and who said it,” the yellow one tested me, and I passed with flying colors, or should I say color, it being yellow. Out shot my palm, and from around it an animal trap with iron teeth on jangling chain. Wanda had used the weapon to disassemble an ornery skeleton, one half of one sibling, the worse half, and I saw no reason it couldn’t be used on another sort of visitor from the grave.

Aiming for an amorphous blob merely of human body language felt futile, so I aimed instead for the tip of their perch, the rock exploding when the trap snapped shut around it. Yellow rained along with the rubble down into the dark currents, shouting lamentations all the way.

“As to the topic of credit that has just randomly occurred to me,” I stressed, “the prophet in question is none other than Severin Pelts, and the author is the dead person you dredged up and brought to me, like a cat proud of a beheaded sparrow.

We will pool our powers, and in so doing learn the whole of the prophecy. You will reveal to me the author’s name, and only then, only written under it, will be mentioned any colorful spirits of nature, order to be determined at a later date, and also randomly. These are the terms. Now begin before the others beat you to it! I’m not afraid to claim I saw a rainbow of a solitary hue!”

I clapped my hands to add to the urgency, with the side effect of the animal trap’s chain swiftly retracting back into my sleeve. How I avoided losing a finger in the process is a mystery. Luckily the six remaining spirits were too afraid of falling behind each other to take note. Almost as one they leapt from their stony purchase, across the gap, and to me, clinging to Wanda’s furs like squirrels in a windstorm. Now I was their connection, I felt it, and it would be all too easy to shake them off and consign them back to the caverns of the dead.

Together we recited the first half of the prophecy, what had led me into the cave in the first place, while I made every effort to open myself to the universe, to a colossal serpent that might have swam the black skies overhead, and to a future firmly embraced in the loving guiding furs of Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. What followed was only what could. The end.

“Though thy slumber may be deep,

Yet thy spirit shall not sleep,

There are shades which will not vanish,

There are thoughts thou canst not banish;

By a power to thee unknown,

Thou canst never be alone;

Thou art wrapped as with a shroud,

Thou art gathered in a cloud;

And for ever shall thou dwell

In the spirit of this spell.

From thy false tears I did distill

An essence which hath strength to kill;

From thy own heart I then did wring

The black blood in its blackest spring;

From thy own smile I snatch’d the snake,

For there it coil’d as in a brake;

From thy own lip I drew the charm

Which gave all these their chiefest harm;

In proving every poison known,

I found the strongest was thine own.

And on thy head I pour the vial

Which doth devote thee to this trial;

Nor to slumber, nor to die,

Shall be in thy destiny;

Though thy death shall still seem near

To thy wish, but as a fear;

Lo! the spell now works around thee,

And the clankless chain hath bound thee;

O’er thy heart and brain together

Hath the word been pass’d—now wither!”

Their work complete, the six spirits took the withering word as an order. One by one they released their grip on me, and I felt lighter each time despite their complete lack of substance. Once loosed they drifted out over the chasm, faded, and sank out of sight and mind. In a flash of panic I feared I wouldn’t be able to properly credit the slain author or the couriers that brought his work to me, as I’d written nothing down, but the entire prophecy was just sitting in my mind, like furniture bolted to the wall, and I was reassured that it wasn’t a matter of memory at all, but of conduction, the same way lighting passes through rods; it would remain within me until it was conducted elsewhere.

Suddenly weary, thin as an old sheet, my chest deflated. Being Wanda’s proxy was terribly draining, and the situation was not helped by having to fulfill my chief disciple duties at the same time.

On my way out of the cave, into sun that did little to invigorate me, I recognized that the goal of prophecy was achieved, but wasn’t necessarily any sort of salvation. All it consisted of was arcane prediction, one possible outcome encoded into the denied verse of a dead man. What role I played in its form and content was terribly muddy to me.

Were there others I could have drawn out, or different spirits to aid me? Had I successfully set us on the path to a better future than the one we would have found without my interference? All of the language sounded rather negative, like the casting of a curse. Could Wanda be harmed by hearing these words? Nepenthe? Was it now my sole duty to never repeat this dark future, denying it the ability to come to pass by letting it rot my insides until I fell over dead as its eternal imprisoning tomb?

Hopefully not. That was all I had the strength to think as I staggered my way back to my goddess. The stairs up to the washroom were most taxing, but I couldn’t lean against a wall once I had presented myself, refusing as I did to show Excoria any weakness I did not need to.

Both of them stared at me expectantly, so I quickly divulged the entirety of the prophecy, unable to lend my voice any gravitas, for it would have caused me to cough or retch I think. Once it was complete it didn’t bear so much weight in my soul, but the impression was still there, and perhaps would be for the rest of my days. Even if my experience should slip backward in time it would stay, which opened new pathways to making more predictions earlier… assuming we survived the consequences of this first one.

“Byron. Dreadful,” Excoria said, but she was grinning. She gathered herself up and headed for the door, patting Nepenthe on the head on the way. “It seems my coming wasn’t necessary after all. This Quarantown will sort itself out. Goodbye daughter, Severin.” We let her pass without comment, and I felt when she was gone from our town like peace on the ear after a rooster’s incessant crowing.

Her interpretation worried me. Only after she was gone from sight did I realize she had given me the author’s name, not the spirits, though they had likely foreseen it. Lord Byron wrote those words, or would have if Excoria had not opened him up and let them spill into the world. Energies meant for that work had instead gone into her, into her brood, into Wanda, and thus into changing the trajectory of my very life.

Goriana, the consuming youngest sister, had access to all her victims’ thoughts and memories. Excoria likely did as well. Somewhere in her lurked the entirety of Lord Byron and the other unfortunates of Diodati. Did that not grant her the greatest insight into the meaning of the words? Could she not taste their very essence whenever she pleased?

“What did she mean?” I asked, weary. Have I doomed us?”

“No Severin,” Wanda assured me as she leaned over the side of the tub to free Nepenthe, who crawled toward the door herself. She was escorted by our eldest Mergini, who waddled out from behind the tub. There was no need to worry while she was a ward of his. “Mother reads into it what she wants, as do I, but it is we who will be in position to make it so. You have done well.

I… made the correct decision in revealing myself to Doppler… but it was done too hastily. The delirium it was, dearest, and it will not happen again. While I understand your decisions these past few days, and am proud of how you’ve fared, I do expect obedience as your default state of being. It is the only proof of your love that an heir can feel.

However, if you feel compelled to act similarly in the future, I know it will be with good reason, for I have honed you to your task perfectly, and to not trust you is to not trust myself. There will be no anger between us, only trust, and that is an order.”

“You’re welcome,” I said brazenly, but with finality, letting her know it was a transition, the end to my frustrations with this whole tub-heated affair. I slipped off her furs, and to my surprise the rest of my clothes went with them. When I looked at Wanda she was beckoning me closer with a curling finger, one that tickled my soles.

“For now I will assume any cheek in your rebellion was purely a means to tantalize me,” she growled, some of the old electricity flashing in her green eyes. Her freckles smoldered as a mask of coals, as if her mind had been struck by a meteor of carnal yearning. “My head is swimming Severin, come and swim with it.”

Wonderful it was not to feel even a twig of resistance once more. I threw myself to her, let her pull me in like a crocodile sinking its prey. Locked together we tumbled deeper than the tub could have been, and in her passion I felt that she was finally on the mend.

We made love without surfacing, without drawing breath, sunk in her dark fires. I would never question how. All scrutiny was best saved for the poison of prophecy, to be carefully consumed at a later date. As late as I could make it, for there was nothing better than the now of unrelenting love.

The End

Wanda and Severin will return in

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Peril