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, 31 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Peril

What had until recently been a long and tall storage shed for mining equipment and explosives was now shrouded in mystery and wonder, cloaked inside and out with black curtains, doors thrown open to entice the townsfolk into its dim stalls, themselves converted to show off peculiar creatures and abominations of an intellectual nature.

“Welcome one and all, to Severin’s Hall of Incredible Beasts! Yes, this way, do keep walking, I want everyone inside and hearing me. There will be plenty of time to meet them all and learn for yourself what they have known for as long as they can remember.

Up first we have the genius rabbit, generously lent to us by her owner. She is called Sugarbowl because she is so very sweet. Please Sugarbowl, demonstrate for us. What is… five plus eleven?”

The rabbit, fur coiffed to within an inch of popping out of its follicles, promptly hopped forward, then back, and repeated the action fourteen times more as the small crowd that could fit around her stall quietly counted along. There were mutters of ‘sixteen’ and ‘no, you counted too fast’. I had to usher them forward, as there was so much more to see, and Sugarbowl was just the dusting on top meant to ease them in.

Doppler Burstyn, unfortunately my partner in this affair, in fact deserving partial credit for this harebrained scheme, the rest of it going to one of the hares, waved to me from across the river of people, smiled confidently with a flash of a gold tooth. I didn’t want him to be right, so I embarrassed myself thinking it over for hours, hours I did not truly have to spend.

All to end up realizing he had found the best way to demonstrate. Wanda, my eternal love, my Venus in furs, had masked her divine nature so well that there was little proof of it in Quarantown that could be made physically apparent. What we had to work with was not even her design, but mine. It was I who insisted she not further alter the animals wrangled into the shed that day, in the hopes they could live out their lives comfortably rather than returning to dullness and the wilderness at the same time.

Though I had kept only one in my care, as well as in my confidence and good graces (Mergini the duck), the others had mostly done as hoped. Wanda had increased their intelligence, not to make them disciples like the people of Quarantown, but to enrich the flavor of their meat with the various tenderizing terrors of existence.

Obviously this endangered them, and a little cleverness of our own had to be exercised to move them out of the butcher’s window and into other interpretations and roles. Enhanced rabbits became pets, chickens egg-layers, ducks accents to the public fountain, and trout… well we figured the river went far enough that they could make their own fates.

We were only partially correct on that front, as when I ran a net through nearby, catching several fish, I asked them if they would be willing to temporarily exist in captivity in exchange for helping me. Instead of speaking they very deliberately circled my ankles, and it was the majority. Those that remained were either regular fools or didn’t care for me very much.

“And trout that leap on command!” I claimed, having moved on to a long aquarium set up near the rabbits. The agreeable fish then proved it with synchronized leaps and spins. Children made their way to the front through a copse of pant legs and put their faces against the glass, where the trout met them. Soon they’d be giving them names, which would make it difficult to say goodbye when the time came to return them to their waters, but there was a much larger problem at the forefront.

“Games!” Burstyn shouted in order to draw half of them off me. “Who wants to lose at chess to a chicken, bu-hah! And you will. Step this way Miss Essen, have a seat. Beat me three times this morning this rooster did; he might go easy on you seeing as you’re such a dainty young thing. Don’t you do it.” He picked up the tall orange bird like a watering can of unknown contents and set it down at a chess board, playing as white.

Four more people filled up the games section, with three feathered opponents and one furry. I imagine the fish were just as good, but we hadn’t worked out any means of dictating their moves.

All the stragglers, not many now, drifted back to me; our only exhibit left was the ducks. There was actually a third hand in this, if I’m allowed to count the webbed foot of Mergini, which I have just given myself permission to do. He was leading his own kind in a march, back and forth across a long lane of sand I’d laid out up against the back of the shed.

They’d been marching in perfect lockstep since before I’d thrown open the doors, the evidence visible in the sand as two perfect rows of overlapping prints. Training could achieve that of course, so it was time for a dynamic and undeniable demonstration of their intelligence.

“Mergini, if you would please give us a blank slate,” I asked of my eldest child. He obliged by issuing an order, the sternest quack I’d ever heard out of him. Then he practically chased his brethren back across the sand, feet storming and bill about to plow. Obediently they scrambled in reverse, swishing their lowered bills to and fro to erase the footprints and leave a blank on which anything might be written. “Go on Emilio,” I encouraged Miss Ulterrine’s younger boy, “ask Mergini any question.” My duck waggled his tail feathers to indicate readiness. The child stepped forward, rapidly went through the process of composing the sort of question one might expect a duck to know the answer to.

“Mr. Mergini… What is your favorite food?” Ah, an easy one. It might perturb him to spend his efforts on one so trivial, but soon the adults would want to have at him, and they’d be trying to discredit him with geography and history trivia. Mergini issued another order, with several of his subordinates breaking away from the huddled flock at one end and taking up spaced positions.

Diligent and industrious, each duck went to producing a single letter in the sand with their feet, completing them in unison, spelling out the word ‘grapes’. It lingered only long enough for the children to spell out before the others swarmed back in and erased it. After that someone a touch older came in with a more complex query. Considering the exhibit thoroughly handled, I moved away, toward the center of everyone to gauge the atmosphere of their distraction.

First I had to set aside my own fears: ignore a racing heart to hear the beat of the town, swallow bated breath to feel the breeze of their curiosity, and still trembling fingers to sense their rhythm when we shook hands at the end of this day. If we shook hands. This was almost everyone in town, save those too young to participate and those too indigent to move. Quarantown was having a collective daydream, but its many constituents were not obligated to all respond the same way when they came down.

Doppler had taken it extremely well, but a ravenous attention hog like him took every revelation as the next course. Others would not be so straightforward. Who would be the greatest danger, and would it be to themselves? The frightened? The offended? The disbelieving?

Circumstance had forced my hand. It wasn’t the right time for them to know, but the only time if I was to create a future that both fit my prophecy and benefited Wanda’s ultimate ascension. So everyone must learn of her grace, her power, and the passion with which she had startled wrestling for control of the world. The best way was to tell them.

“Everyone, if I may pull you away from your new friends,” I requested at the fullest volume that could be called friendly. Burstyn brought me a box without my asking, and it might have weakened my position to shoo him away, so I stepped up onto it. All their faces had turned, every last one, which I had not expected. To some degree they already sensed something very important had happened.

“Thank you,” I said, too obvious in my shock at their speedy attention. “I have brought you all here today not just to amuse you, nor to amaze you. I’m sure you have many questions about these animals that have been living among you, hiding their brilliance, but there is a single answer only… and her name is Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.

Most of you know her as my wife, but she is much more than that. I’ve made sure she has been in the presence of each of you at least once, so you know what I say is true. You have felt how much more she is, yet you do not know what she is. Your head has swirled with bad guesses, all inadequate to describe her. Beautiful? Not just. Persuasive? Not Just. Spirited? Not just.

No, there is that something on the tip of your tongue, and it stays there, as you cannot put your finger on it to remove it. You are happy to see her, and you are worried once she leaves. That is because she takes most of her authority with her when she goes, but she does not forget you. Never will she forget you. Every thought of hers is a wondrous manifold; always she sees our town in all its possible configurations, hurtling through time, and she bats it this way and that to keep it out of harm, and to remind us of her presence.

Wanda Blasphemer Pelts… is a god.”

To say the shed shook would be an exaggeration, to say their souls shook an understatement. All our lights flickered as we rapidly blinked. Nothing to blink away. No false grit. Even without her there they saw a new truth of hers: a path in the mind widening. Tears started to flow. A few collapsed into the arms of their significant others, and a few more into the arms of strangers who would not have been willing to catch them just a minute prior.

I watched the edge of the crowd, expecting… and getting! They huddled closer to each other, closer to me, eyes hungry, cheeks drawn in a sort of bodily disbelief, a retreat of flesh into the more comprehensible realm of gravity as god. Insanity, their bodies told them. No human could be such a thing. Feel this? This drag toward the grave? This is the only power of man. All of us can only fall and decay and bleach and powder. We cannot be gods.

Yet, their hearts thundered, soaring free and high, Wanda can, Wanda is. That was what they’d felt in her presence. Too strange it was, for some, and those were the ones who covered their hearts with their hands, looked anywhere but me, but they too took the most crucial step by accepting it.

A new ultimate truth, up there with the spherical Earth and its revolution about the sun, was in them. Everything that came after would seem so much lesser, so I continued my speech and told them the most vital facts of our circumstances. Wanda was the caretaker of Quarantown and all its people. She protected us from harm of all sorts, including Throng’s Delirium. Her line was descended from Cain, the gates of power unlocked through an ignoble act. There were others like her, but they could not be trusted, and she sought to rise above them all, reclaiming not just the name of Cain, but the legacies of man in their entirety.

“Alas, now I come to the most trying news of all,” I said to the huddled who were about to call themselves disciples. “I have shown you one of Wanda’s minor acts of power in these creatures, as evidence, though I see now I barest needed them. Nonetheless, that effort was gone to because we could not take the simplest path, on which a single word from her mouth would address any concern.

My friends, my newfound family, I have revealed this to you prematurely because… Wanda has gone missing.”

Now it wouldn’t do for us to dwell on their immediate reaction, suffice it to say that I delivered a gut punch straight to the center of their last gut punch. We were all doubled over in grief we did not fully understand. I had to find some more breath, for my work was not yet done. With my beloved gone, all of them would need to contribute to Quarantown’s immediate defense.

I swiftly made them aware of the infiltration attempts of her siblings, and together we developed ways to keep watch, to alert, and to react should any of them come calling when we were at our most vulnerable (something one of those siblings did as a physical reflex). Guards were posted on Ruthven’s grave, illustrations of Goriana were passed around, and everyone revealed their lower backs to prove their spines had not been sabotaged by Matilda.

Everyone did their part, which was a mighty relief to me, as it allowed me to focus on the problem at hand: her absence. Already it was the longest I’d been without her since our first night on the train when I swore fealty and the other three chambers of my heart: affection, curiosity, and intelligence.

The sensations stretching within me were most peculiar, as I felt incredibly drained, but I could still recall my sorry state before a goddess entered my life, and I knew that even a weakened and heartbroken self was stronger than that window-watching nobody. Still, it was difficult to think.

Trains of thought were constantly derailed, cars tumbling explosively and falling open to reveal her face painted on every interior wall. Perhaps I had come close to guessing where she’d gone more than once, but each time a barrier of lamentable beauty stalled me and erased my memory. My first idea became the electric patter of her green eyes, my second the bundled freckles on the bridge of her nose, and my third the tufts of hair hanging over her ears like fox tails.

In stabbing contradiction stood my ability to recall precisely how she disappeared. I woke up. That was how. The simplicity of it hurt the most. Her side of our bed was empty, and I could still feel the pressure of her teeth on my scarred ear. The window was open; the cold intruded. It woke Nepenthe, whose crib we keep nearby most nights.

I went to her, picked her up and held her. Together we looked out into the night and found clouds hiding the moon and stars. Our daughter started to cry, and no night air could damage her constitution. She felt what I felt, the plunging, the sinking, the absence. Waiting up all night for her return provided no reward. This was no midnight rendezvous with a migrating familiar or pagan banishing of a minor demon. It was enough to rend our family in two, and offer no explanation to stem the bleeding.

Not a soul understood Wanda better than I did, so if there was anything to figure out I had to do it. What could take her from me, silently, instantly, seamlessly? In her realm, her house, and with her arms and fangs wrapped around her love, nothing was the only acceptable answer. She had left of her own volition, intentionally used her control over me to keep me from noticing for a brief time.

Wanda would sooner die than abandon what was hers; there was no point in entertaining the idea that she would not return if she were able. However, any number of pressures and mechanisms of dark magic could have convinced her that she needed to depart for a time in order to protect us.

We had discussed such a thing at length, as the first time was in the past, how far I cannot say. ‘Previously’ will have to do. Previously she had denied me information regarding siblings like Devorgoil and Goriana, and after those debacles agreed to fight the impulse to keep me in the dark.

So, if I gave her the benefit of the doubt, which was not just my obligation but my privilege, she had all of that in mind when she slunk off. That meant she intended for me to know or learn enough of her plan to steady myself, to keep things running until she could return, which she would do at the first available opportunity.

In short, this was a test, perhaps premeditated and perhaps not. Either way, she trusted me not to sit there, arms full of babe and nothing else, howling at the moon until someone came to help or put me out of my misery. And as a man careening completely out of control on his track of time, I needed to do everything with a sense of urgency.

After all, I did not know how long it had been since our last charitably-described adventure, in which I argued with some ghosts over poetry until we wrote a prophecy while she took a very long bath. Weeks? Possible. Months? Also an option. My best way to sound the depths of time was to monitor our daughter, who in this early stage of life grew and developed very quickly.

Sometimes those developments were out of order, owing to my condition rather than one of hers, but the trend was always upward, or downward if you go by her weight when attempting to lift her into her crib or keep her away from other children she would almost certainly frolic with too aggressively. Left to a typical play date, a child appearing her own age might wind up as little more than a grass stain on her knee.

Especially now that she was large enough that I deemed it months since the prophecy. Ah, there was the key. The prophecy had been sitting in a journal, and in my mind, inert, for too long. Perhaps the error was mine, and not just in letting my own life’s work fester. When constructing it I had failed to develop any sort of definite timeline for its completion.

Was this the prophecy that would be the culmination of Wanda’s entire works in Quarantown? Judgmental comments, aimed at my ineptitude in foretelling, had come from her mother that suggested otherwise. In them was likely a grain of truth, that as the ability was honed its effective range would grow, but that meant my initial effort would come to pass sooner rather than later.

My muse and I had discussed the steps that followed making prophecy. Each of us had a role, similar in nature but differing in leadership. In order to make use of the art, rather than fall victim to it, which was best achieved by ignoring it as one might an ingrown toenail or an expanding hornet’s nest, Wanda had to find something to do that fit the prophecy’s description of events, something that also benefited her.

So the strategy was hers to dowse. My role was to also seek overlap with what was written, but within the additional constraint of her developed strategy. Thus my frustration. She’d left me with no strategy, just a precocious child and a town full of people who wouldn’t understand why I was fretting so uncharacteristically.

That wasn’t quite accurate though. My goddess had also left me with my trust, which was exactly as strong as I chose to make it. With that trusty trust in hand I made several assumptions that few other men could make and remain surefooted: Wanda tested my ability with good reason, she trusted me to make decisions of consequence as much as I trusted her, and this was part of my prophecy’s realization.

Once all that was managed in my mind I went about the task properly. The timeline was a greased rope to me. Others would need to manage it until she returned, and the only other human soul that knew of her nature at that point was Doppler Burstyn. A good strategy could not rely on him, for while I doubted he would ever betray Wanda, I was not her. He knew my position as chief disciple could be his position if I failed.

Rather than narrow down the whole town to a handful of candidates, what would be a taxing process that would leave us defenseless all the while, I instead chose to host them all at Severin’s Hall of Incredible Beasts and get it over with promptly. Now I had an army at my disposal, one I knew intimately, and could dispatch the right soldier to the right task at my leisure.

I had hoped there would be leisure anyway. It was not so. Attacks came almost immediately, by my perception. Suddenly we were awash in potential citizens coming off the one and only train that stopped outside Quarantown. All of them had the necessary prerequisites, including some connection to a person already living there.

Our collective suspicion was aroused, and sure enough the true cause was revealed in the quarantine houses we had on the outskirts where people were meant to wait out any possibility of passing Throng’s Delirium to the citizenry. Normally those places were empty, but now we had a crowd pooled around each building, all of them sweaty and shifty-eyed, refusing to explain themselves fully. Tempted as I was to dictate the task to Doppler, I was the one who had some experience with the prime suspect: Matilda Screwshaft Nunbleeder.

It was her who had managed to wound Wanda the most, surreptitiously infecting her with the plague in the hopes of destabilizing Quarantown enough to waltz in and take it over… or perhaps destroy it outright in the names of the Diodati matriarch: Excoria Vainglory Diatribe. My Venus had recovered from that plot, made herself invulnerable to other iterations of it, but we could do nothing of the sort.

Ninety percent of the new arrivals were carrying a screw of bone on their body somewhere, most of them threaded all the way down into the flesh and anchored in marrow. Matilda must have been amassing them over time, sniffing them out from the edges of wealthy social webs surrounding the blank space that was Quarantown.

Somehow she had gotten word that Wanda was not here and decided to throw the entirety of her investment at us. Managing them was a nightmare, as they all had to be held down, searched, and freed of their screw by means of blunt iron tools. Remote control was exercised over their actions, and Matilda tried everything from confusion to pleading to threats of hellfire. Some of her victims were close relatives to my citizens, siblings even, and they could not be allowed to be in the same room or participate in those extractions for reasons of conflicting interest.

What had felt like an army dwindled so swiftly I experienced a pit of fear in my stomach, the footprint of the lumbering dragon of failure. Attached to each screw of bone was some manner of invisible contagion, just as before, bearing the delirium. Knowing what I did, all who performed removals were isolated immediately, regardless of symptoms, and to my horror they all came down with it.

One man had had it before, and it was by then known that second infections were very rare, so some relief came in his leading of the efforts to free and turn away the influx, but there were too many for him to handle alone. We were going to run out of makeshift doctors, nurses, and orderlies in short order, with precious few left to attend to the rest of the town’s security needs.

More big black dogs of decision accosted me, hot breath on me, teeth ready to settle for my face if I wasn’t going to offer up anything more immediate as food. To freeze up was to fail, be nothing but an altar to Wanda when I needed to lead the flock.

During the briefest respite, a moment alone in the washroom, I delivered a powerful slap to my own face, an intimidation tactic to slow my breathing and dislodge any ideas shirking their duties on some recessed shelf of the mind. All I found was the notion of expediting my efforts.

I needed to learn (or forge) my role in the prophecy now, before we were overrun, and for that I decided to take another drastic step: recruit from the next highest tier of humanity. Lord of the chronically dead, Ruthven, had technically assisted me in the development of my art, presumably because he had nothing better to do at the moment, which led me to believe any other heir brains I could pick would both be able to assist and less likely to mislead than the vampire I had to keep stomping back into the earth like an incorrigible gopher.

Summoning them wouldn’t be quite so easy as digging them up unfortunately. Of the two candidates who had not yet displayed outright hostility toward me, Devorgoil and Melmoth, I was less sure of how swiftly Melmoth could travel there, so I attempted to invite them first to allow more time.

I hadn’t done such a thing before, but luckily something had dropped off those dusty brain shelves of mine some time prior and I’d just been waiting for an opportunity to use it. You see we had in our possession a part of their body: two vertebrae. They clung to each other aggressively, presumably through the hateful force that normally held their stalking skeleton together. That inner entity, forever vengeful that Melmoth had made it outer in order to maintain their shape and sex-shifting abilities, had come calling in Quarantown; we had disassembled it for them and scattered it in the currents. The way I saw it Melmoth Sympathy Dunajew now owed their sibling a favor, one that could be fulfilled through assisting me.

The shapeshifter was an empathetic being, so it seemed likely that they felt everything in a divided nature. If I handled the vertebrae they would sense it, but not necessarily come running. A coded message could be delivered through it with tapping if both of us knew such a code. Without one I had to rely on their common sense, an understanding that any rhythmic pattern from us was intentionally meant as a summons.

Utilizing nothing but a fingernail, I tapped on the section of spine, once, then twice more in rapid succession, and repeated in this fashion for a full ten minutes, the time overseen by my friend Porter to make sure I didn’t lose or gain any. Three times, at the start of three successive hours, we sent this message in the hopes it would be enough.

After the task was complete I stashed the bones away, knowing Melmoth would hate to see them at all, and moved on to reaching Devorgoil Oblivion Goblinry. This should’ve been trivial. Granted a more peaceful nature than the rest of the brood by his stillbirth, Devorgoil treated the most delicate of situations as nothing more than his patio on a brisk autumn morning, a place to sip at a warm drink and greet songbirds that fluttered by.

I went to shave, out on the duck pond dock where I’d first met him. The presence of the razor against my throat should’ve tickled his awareness, brought him forth, but to my consternation nothing at all happened.

Actually, something did interrupt me. Three separate times. A concerned disciple rushed up to me and shouted that I should not end my life; they were certain Wanda would return soon. Their sentiment was touching, but ultimately frustrating, forcing me to explain that this was a ritual that very much served a purpose, and that they should kindly depart as to increase the chance of its functioning.

Yet even when I had the space to threaten myself undisturbed there was no response from him. Gritting my teeth, I pressed harder, drawing blood. Still nothing. I moved the razor lower, over what felt like the largest of my veins, and barely scraped the surface.

“I’m in no mood to be ignored Devorgoil!” I grumbled, standing from my chair and marching to the edge of the dock, scaring away the nearest ducks. At least they took my threats seriously. My Wanda was gone, so there was a genuine kernel of suicidal urge somewhere in me that I was not afraid to utilize.

The pressure I now put on the blade was insufficient to cut through, but it wouldn’t be if I smacked into the pond face first. A lean of just a few degrees. A few more. More. Fine then, watch me, heirs of Cain, as I show a devotion most of you will be forever incapable of. Over I went, with ducks as my witness.

I was Wanda’s greatest treasure and most reliable weapon; without her there to hold the hilt I fell. That role was so crucial to me that I kept myself a statue, as I could not act even in my own defense unless she approved it.

Finally, at the last possible moment in the last possible second, a pair of hands caught me and maneuvered me back to the dock. Our positions were so unbalanced that I wound up splayed across the boards, frantically checking for a crescent of spilled blood along my path. The razor was lost to the depths, but Devorgoil had a hold of me, forced to fall into an awkward sit by my shenanigans.

“What are you doing Severin?” he asked, panting. The man was shocked at his own exertion; once I was secure he moved a hand to his chest to feel its rise and fall.

“You weren’t responding,” I complained. “I felt I had to take drastic measures.” His eyes rolled.

“Yes, it takes much more peril for me to notice if you’re trying to call me,” he explained. “Your intent makes it false. I didn’t even ‘hear’ you until that last board squeaked. You could’ve died! And you know what that would’ve meant!”

“Wanda would blame you,” I acknowledged, “before making sure you suffered the same fate. I’m sorry. It wasn’t my goal to put you in any danger… but we’re already in a boiling pot over here. I need your help.” Devorgoil looked out at the town, assessing with far-reaching eyes I didn’t comprehend.

“Any time,” he eventually said, which I took to mean ‘this time anyway’.

That was the first occasion I’d gotten so much as a whiff of negativity from him, reminding me he was an heir of Cain just like the others, regardless of his blood running gaseous and cold. Heirs were not to be trifled with, and thus the question was raised: am I trifling? The only way to find out was to explain the situation to Devor just as I had to Quarantown, which I did in the relative quiet of my home, the kitchen to be exact, the place I was most comfortable outside of the boudoir.

“She’s taking an aggressive approach,” was the first thing Wanda’s brother suggested to me after he was caught up. He wandered over to the stove, busy with empty pots I hadn’t organized since this affair started, and sampled some of the nothing within using a wooden spoon. His eyes closed and he sighed with satisfaction, able to taste a meal as dead and gone as himself. “To protect not this town, but this enveloping home.” He grabbed his own arms in a self-embrace, wooden spoon pressed against his bicep as prisoner.

“What has happened, historically, when someone tried to rough up a prophecy?” I asked him.

“A rushing. People who try to catch destiny by the throat are the first to run out of breath. Wanda is sprinting through every step. Obviously she hasn’t shared her plots with me, but I think her goal is to ascend as quickly as possible to deny as many opportunities for opposition as she can. It puts much pressure on you.”

“Pressure I will withstand. I believe right now she wants me to be a steam engine. This conversation is but a venting whistle of my activity.” He grinned dismissively. “There is no time to slow down. Will you examine the prophecy with me and help me determine where Wanda’s gone? What she’s doing?”

“I am curious to see it.” He turned back to the pots, sampled something else I hadn’t cooked for months. “Oh, basil.”

“Pesto.”

“With toast?” I pointed to a cutting board, the one on which I laid out sliced bread in order to slather it with butter and, sometimes, my famous pesto, famous at least among Wanda, Nepenthe, and Mergini. Devor shuffled over and wiped a finger across the air over the cutting board, then put it in his mouth and sucked. I was accustomed to his slightly transparent form, like fog, but just then he left his mouth a mystery for some reason. Hiding his joy?

“If you help me find the secret ingredient in my scribbled omens I will tell you the secret to that sauce.” (It was pine nuts.) He threw out a flat-handed gesture, inviting me to fetch it. I did so, and when I returned he had pulled a stool up, from another room, near the stove and was helping himself to the air in my imported tajine. As authoritatively as I could I snuck the pot away from him and put the papers in its place, sampling its apparently delicious air with a finger myself to keep the mood light. “Needs more turmeric.”

“Tell that to the chef who had it two owners before you,” he said with a snort. “She couldn’t cook her way out of a campfire.” Rather than boost my culinary confidence (which was hardly needed and may have been a detriment given my ego on the subject), his criticism made me worry about how amateurish my prophecy might look.

As he took the book from me and examined the page, mumbling the words, I suddenly felt like a child bringing his pencil drawing to a father who could paint a landscape during his progeny’s midday nap. The words weren’t mine, they would have belonged to Lord Byron if he hadn’t been devoured by my mother-in-law, but to not accept responsibility for them is to state the artist who merely curates is no artist at all, not something I take up with as a man who has read a hundred poetry books yet produced not one original poem. One would think I had composed one by now simply by muttering badly recalled lines in a fitful sleep.

In full my collaboration with Byron went:

“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?

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!”

“Beautifully done,” Devor complimented when he finally glanced up at me and saw my nervous wringing hands.

“You really think so?” I gushed.

“Absolutely. Mind you, prophecies can’t be written about me, seeing as I’m too dead for them. That could be good however, as it makes me an impartial observer. I’ve appeared in all sorts of places and bumped my toe on the heads of many a fallen man and woman, still clutching a crumpled prophecy they obviously had not worked out well enough.”

“Can you tell me anything about it, so that Wanda and I might avoid such a fate?” He sighed, an indecipherable sigh, and reached into his pocket. Out came a pair of half-moon reading spectacles that he donned at the very tip of his nose. Why would he need such things, given that he’d just read it? The answer came in the way he looked at me. I was what he needed to see in better clarity, presumably, as he did not feel the need to explain.

“A prophecy is a tool that you have to learn how to use,” he explained at an exacting pace, “and like many others it is composed of pieces. If you understand the pieces you can better understand the whole. Every word, every phrase can be used to construct a hidden meaning, often to multiple parties.

Why don’t we try an exercise where I will read to you the phrases that sound most sharpened to me and you give me your immediate guess as to its reference. The openings are often the vaguest, so let’s take that as example. ‘The hour arrived’ is broad, but not in your case, as I think it’s clear that the hour that has arrived is right now: the time you have chosen to untangle the prophecy.

What follows is ‘a wandering mass of shapeless flame’, which I believe is leeway for you, as it could mean just about anything active, anything burning. If I say something and nothing jumps out at you, let it lie, otherwise speak.”

“Yes, a wonderful idea, thank you Devor.” I sat down at attention and slapped my knees. “Feed them to me.” Forgive me as I cut most of the hemming and its spouse hawing from the rest of the exchange, for clarity’s sake.

“The menace of the universe—the monster of the upper sky.”

“The world serpent! Oh, that just bubbled right up. Keep going!”

“Where these weak spirits round thee bend…”

“The mine shaft! There I conferred with spirits and dredged up these lines. It means I need to go there again…”

“Oracles are often strongest at specific locations,” Devorgoil said, adding to my confidence, before returning to the bright spots in the text. “By a power to thee unknown, thou canst never be alone.”

“And I am not alone, for love joins Wanda to me eternally… but that power is not unknown. So what keeps us together, but is unknown to me?” Something lurked under my thoughts, moved my brain stem for me, almost physically, the tremble of a newly boneless limb. “Death. Death unites us all… and only the heirs have seen its nature. I know of it, but I do not know it.”

“No, you don’t,” Devorgoil confirmed gravely, as if to cool our speed moving through the words. “The serpent was the first to know, and he does not die, until he does.”

“Yes, the world serpent lives to this very day. He is relevant here. The knowledge he can give I imagine, seeing as he has never given anything else. And the mine shaft.” I stood, paced around. Pans clattered as I struck their handles, for the first time oblivious to their position relative to mine. I was worlds away, or rather, I soon would be. “In the shaft I will acquire, or learn how to acquire, the knowledge of the world serpent. Is that it? Does that sound right Devor? It feels right.”

The heir leaned back, arms crossed, so far that the front legs of his chair were airborne; yet he did not topple. All his concern appeared to be for me.

“There is still half the prophecy.”

“No, there isn’t,” I said, having launched myself continents ahead. “Those lines in the middle- ‘from thine own heart’ and on, those are for Wanda. It is her half. It talks of snatching the snake from her mouth, and the snake must be the serpent, so figuratively that would be his knowledge, which could only be snatched if she already had it.” My eyes must have been as wild as rutting porcupines, eyelash quills shaken loose by prickly obsession.

“Severin,” Devorgoil said to anchor me back to that planet, that house, “are you aware of what you’re suggesting?” I sounded it out for the both of us.

“Wanda wants us to be united in understanding. She has gone off to handle her end of things, and expects me to hold up mine. Mine is not just maintenance of Quarantown. I must gain the world serpent’s knowledge, just as the heirs have.”

“She is not asking you to become an heir,” he said, much more definite than everything else he’d offered. “The heirs were made not when Cain learned the knowledge, but when he split himself from those who didn’t with an act of fratricide. He acted in haste, and I don’t believe was fully aware of what he was doing.”

“Are you saying that if I gained the knowledge as he did I might kill someone?”

“I’m saying everything will, at least immediately after, feel lesser than what you have just learned. Trust me Severin, as I have known death more than most heirs even. It pulled me from the womb and swaddled me in snow. In its wake, no single life will seem to matter.”

“I understand, but it does nothing to sway me. I’m certain this is my path through the prophecy. So… how might one get in contact with Mr. Serpent? I don’t suppose he has a mailing address?”

“As far as I know he has not descended to our level since the days of Cain. He’s out there somewhere, in the darkest sky.”

“Then I must ask what has long had a vice on my curiosity. How is it that you heirs come by his knowledge? Are you born with it, does he communicate it to you across the distance, or do you meet him?”

“We’re born with it,” he answered plainly, which a more lively heir might not have done. They usually think there’s no point in trying to explain its nuances to a lowlier type of mortal. “Some do try to reach him, take the journey to the knowledge themselves.”

“And how is this journey undertaken if he no longer stops by for tea and coffee?”

“What does every snake leave where it has visited? There is plenty of his shed skin here on solid ground. There would be more, but every scale of it is imbued with his power of flight. If they are not held down they rise endlessly. If you can find one such scale, attach yourself to it, you will find him.

But I will not have Wanda hunting me down, accusing me of not warning you sufficiently. There are a hundred ways you could perish Severin, the easiest of them being a strong wind. And I do not know what will become of you even if you succeed. I’ve never heard of any prophet or chief disciple among the Abel-bodied attempting it.”

“That’s why Wanda expects it of me,” I said, nodding along to my own ideas. “She knows she is pushing the boundaries of what the other heirs have tried. She moves toward deification now, even in the face of steam engines and newspapers that could carry warning of her across the globe in mere days.

And she does it faster, I’m now realizing. I’ve been protected from this by her grasp on my time. She shields me from any whiplash. But she chose me because she thinks I can do the same. I can surpass these boundaries, for I am wielded by her. She has always been a heat in the darkness, and now that will fuel me, ward me, against the cold of the skyless sky.”

“You are, perhaps, too good for my sister,” Devorgoil said, removing his glasses. He anticipated my objection. “Which isn’t meant to impugn her, no more than I would our entire kind. Your love is real Severin, but an heir may not be able to reward it properly.”

“Someday there will be someone like me who loves you the same Devor.”

“And I would be forced to never satisfy that love, not fully. For if I did they would be content, and if they were endangered I couldn’t come to them, as they would die happy. Dying happy is something heirs of Cain refuse to witness.” He walked away, sampled from the pots once more (one of my past dishes I think). “People have seen the scales of the world serpent whether they remember them or not. They would always be partly buried just as they are in memory, otherwise they would’ve drifted away.

Take your citizens to this mine shaft. The spirits there will help you rummage through everyone’s past as with your prophecy, until the treasure is found.”

“Won’t you join me?”

“I came where I was called, and I prefer not to follow those who have taken control of their own destiny. Good luck brother.” And then the specter-barber was gone.

I will here do my best to act like Mr. Goblinry would to you, and not subject you to the frankly sweaty proceedings, overflowing with babble, that immediately followed. Instead we go into the mine shaft and the cool winds whipping off its subterranean river. The only light was a lamp set down at my feet, blue and ghostly as it burned through ambient spiritual energies seeking light like moths almost too mummified to move.

This was not the first session. It was the fifteenth or so, and by this time I had honed my technique down to ritual. One by one Mr. Burstyn had called in available citizens, those not suffering through the delirium or occupied by Nunbleeder’s mass assault. Together we stood at the precipice of the waters, and I placed my hands upon their shoulders before calling up any invisible spirits, old dead heirs, who wanted to have an effect on the world once more.

None of them took form, as the ones who assisted in my prophecy had, for this was a lesser act, merely the assisting of memory, like helping an elder shuffle off to bed. It took a delicate hand and soothing words, otherwise the people would not open themselves up to allow me and the cavern’s residents to intrude and rifle through their belongings and keepsakes.

I had learned several things in the experimentation phase that worried me, but couldn’t approach the need to slow down or restrategize. Primarily, this was an intimate act, one of involuntary empathy, where at least the two human parties present felt identical emotions. It created a closeness, one easy for instinct to misinterpret.

A few people had embraced me, and just as many went for a kiss. No indulgences could be allowed, regardless of the degree of compulsion, for several reasons, the least of which would be the volcanic forehead temperature achieved by my Wanda if she’d heard I’d pressed my lips against another in anything less than the resuscitating breath of life.

More important was my position, which I had to remember was now one of authority. None of them could know Wanda but through me, and because of her they would naturally seek my approval. I could not take advantage of that.

It got more difficult to resist these impulses as the exercise wore on, and you’re rejoining me just as I took the shoulders of Giggles Terroir, known more for her earnestness than her self-control. She shrank under my touch, but that meant she shrank in respect to the cave, and its yawning cold unsettled her further.

“You say you’ll be looking through my memories?” she asked, doe eyes failing to adjust to the spectral blue light.

“Yes, but you’re not being scrutinized, I promise. It’s a treasure hunt. The treasure has a mundane appearance, and probably doesn’t look like anything more than an oddly glossy rock buried under some sticks and leaves. You never would’ve noticed it, which is why we must take this walk together.

We’ve found some already, but they are from before Quarantown. They might no longer be there, and they are too far away for us to retrieve quickly. While this process has been painless so far it can be… intense. Remember I’m just a visitor. Our relationship is not as old as it will feel.”

“Severin,” she said, leaning in to keep me from proceeding. The satin smell of wine tempered on her breath was not a good start. She shopped and sold vintage bottles of the stuff, so it was just the swish of tasting and not intoxication, but the note of intimate dinners in such a smell always affects me. “I’m afraid you’ll judge me when you see all the times I… I followed your little ducky around.”

“Mergini has forgiven you and so have I.”

“Yes, but now I know I almost killed and ate a duck as smart as a child. It’s so shameful.”

“That was an early error of ours, and one of our last hopefully. You don’t need redemption, but if you did we could find it by turning over one of these scales we’re looking for.”

“We shouldn’t need to look anywhere near the market,” she commented without meeting my eye. I imagine that was where she did the most contemplating regarding her plot to fricassee Mergini. It would be a lie to say I wasn’t curious how many hours had gone into said contemplation, but we had a job to do.

“No we shouldn’t. There’s always a crowd there and it would’ve been found or destroyed. Can you remember the wooded places you’ve been, alone perhaps, not too far out of town? A nice midday stroll. A look at the stars lounging in the foothills.”

“I’m not sure I enjoy any of those things alone.” Her eye finally met mine again. Ghostly activity grew, as did the intensity of the blue. My hands on her shoulders felt more like I was leading her in dance. Hers found my waist. The closed loop was vital, the swaying of our hips mimicry of, hopefully, that midday stroll.

Our foreheads touched; my eyes were closed, but I felt that hers were open. Ignorant as I tried to remain, it was impossible not to feel waves of what she had felt in that memory, and what of it reoccurred in her now. Giggles was lonely. She sighed during walks, she didn’t like silence, and each one was like a statement stabbing at the emptiness so it couldn’t encroach further.

Supernatural insight confirmed what I had merely suspected when writing about her in my reports to Wanda. Her outgoing personality had been even more so before she’d been shuffled off to Quarantown. To her it was punishment for not navigating a hierarchy perfectly, causing her to suppress her natural instincts here, which she had done too forcefully, isolating herself in a way I hadn’t quite seen because I always invited her to our dinner parties. They were the only events she was attending.

And her avoidance of the market was not entirely over her scheme to serve my firstborn with crispy skin and a citrus glaze. The market was where she went to try and make friends, as invitations were not necessary there. Yet all her knowledge of wine, her best method of starting a conversation, didn’t pair well with the rustic produce not yet inspiring recipes, not even washed clean of the soil it had grown in. It was like telling people what style of curtain to use around their bed when the down was still on the goose.

“But I don’t know what else to try. I’m too old and silly to learn to socialize all over again,” she muttered, unaware she actually voiced it. The notion was absurd, Ms. Terroir was younger than myself, but to disabuse her of the idea right there would interrupt the flow of the memory. Nor could I hasten the search beyond the somber pace of her original stroll.

“Wanda can help you when she returns,” I suggested. “Now that she is in the open people will be able to come to her with any problem, and there will always be a solution. She won’t allow them to hang like a botched nail clipping. For better or worse, she will try to solve anything for you, aggressively.”

“Why does she care about us? Is it this place alone? Because I don’t think I belong here.”

“If you didn’t I would’ve been the one to reject you, as not good enough to be one of her subjects. Everyone here has goodness and potential. I’ve seen to it. She will bring them out, and in doing so you will think she is the source of it, but she can only empower. What you bring with you is what you’ve made, or what you’ve always had.”

My eyes were still closed, but I felt her delicate fingers sliding down my cheek. Her eyes must have been wide as wells, waiting for something that looked as deep as all the new godly sensations felt, something to fill and embrace. Wanda wasn’t there to do that, only me. She was mistaking me, our connection, and there was little stopping it.

“I don’t see any scales around here Severin. But you’re here. You weren’t… but I see you now. It’s as if you belong. Are we? Could we be meant to be together, together under Wanda?” A note of desperate joy in her voice flooded my eyes, which I still refused to open. “Did she pick you out for me, since I can’t find any-“

“I don’t see any scales either. Thank you for your help Giggles.”

“Wait, I don’t want to leave yet! This was a nice day… let’s go…” she took my hand as if to drag me, but our feet remained glued near the lamp, “over there where the sun is. It’s not working… Why can’t we walk?”

“You didn’t go there Giggles. We have to go back to the cave, and you have to leave to find the sun.”

“We can just try-” No, we couldn’t. Her lips found the palm of my hand, which I’d slipped between our faces. As soon as she touched her composure buoyed back. Apologies poured out of her, tinged with fear that Wanda was going to flay her for touching her husband in such a fashion, as of course she had to possess and keep any hide that had come into contact with mine.

“This was a burden I put on you,” I told her to ease those fears. “You’ve done nothing but help Wanda today Giggles, but now you’re needed outside. Please, go.”

“I’m sorry.” She shifted away, footsteps light as a dove’s. They halted. “Will you not look at me?” I didn’t want her to see me crying. From what we’d just shared I knew she would consider it harm she’d somehow done to me.

“It’s part of the process is all,” I lied. “Do not worry; everything will be alright. Please, send in the next person. I must get our goddess back.” Finally she took her leave, but my mistake was trying to make absolutely certain she was out of sight before I opened the two floodgates on my face.

By the time her footsteps were inaudible the next pair had taken their place. With no set order to this process I wasn’t aware of who it could be. Weeping could’ve just as easily undermined their confidence or willingness, so I kept my eyes shut. About to welcome them and explain my expression, the words were practically squeezed out of me.

Something started at my belt and wrapped its way up my chest, correcting my posture for me. A spasm of terror was stilled, not from the constriction, but recognition. I opened my eyes and through the pouring streaks saw the serpentine form of a slender, handsome, boneless man. A wicked smile would’ve split their long face, but they didn’t let their lips separate. They didn’t want to show me their complete lack of teeth.

“Severin,” they said, looking down on me like a cobra to hide their speaking mouth further, “are you so happy to see me it has brought you to tears?”

“Hello Melmoth. I see you got my message.”

“Every tap of it,” they confirmed.

“I didn’t intend for us to meet in here. In fact I’m in the middle of something important.”

“Yes, I’ve gathered from the scuttlebutt just outside. You’re looking for a scale of the world serpent, and there’s only one reason to want one of those. You want to fly.”

“To learn,” I corrected.

“Someone has made a prophecy in here,” the heir cackled. “It reeks of predetermination.”

“I know you prefer to keep things flexible, and your options open. Perhaps we can talk outside.” I tried to shuffle, but they squeezed tighter. Not enough to harm. Never enough to earn Wanda’s wrath… but enough to immobilize me.

“You asked for my help and I came to help Severin. This is about sharing memories, yes? I know I’ve seen some of those scales around, if only I could remember…”

“I’d only intended to search Wanda’s other disciples-“

“Oh but my memories go back so much further than theirs, and in much greater detail too. Here, allow me to make this more comfortable.” Making it more comfortable did not entail reducing the pressure, just changing their form from man to woman. This was Melmoth’s primary power, in which they had invested most of their strength. A softer voice matched the transformation. “These memories are sharper in this form, as I had favored it then. Plus, I’m sure you prefer the touch of a woman.”

“I know no touch but Wanda’s. Everyone else’s is like brushing against a blade of grass, or feeling a raindrop. Or the bite of a spider.”

“Now you know I don’t bite,” they said, blowing on my face gently, through an opening just wide enough to see their toothlessness but not so wide as to ruin their beauty. Let’s take a trip.” Without asking they joined their forehead to mine and I found I was no longer the one leading. To drag me into my own memories would’ve been too obvious an assault, so I was instead taken to foreign places of Melmoth Sympathy Dunajew’s life, places only an heir would understand.

As a tamer example, somehow Melmoth had once been in another cave, but one which was obviously underneath the ocean, from the sounds of whale song through the porous rock walls. Peppering the space was an assortment of fine furniture, wood yet dry as a bone. The ceiling didn’t so much as drip. A gigantic purple starfish hung on the wall like a clock, may have been keeping time with the positions of its many arms.

I didn’t get to see whoever lived there, presumably an heir from another family. The visit was brief, and served only to intimidate me, as did the cascade of other locations on this immersive scenic route to whichever scales they might decide to show me.

“Those memories must be somewhere around here,” they practically laughed. Force rolled along the muscle of their coiled body, feeling me out. The further I plunged into their game the more I understood I’d made an error in judgment when I’d messaged them. I had thought Melmoth ‘one of the good ones’, like Devorgoil, but I had not really tested either of them under any amount of temptation.

Melmoth may very well have been ‘good’, but not by the standards of common man. They hadn’t killed me after all, or tried to steal me away despite having the capability. However it was perhaps too much to expect them to control themselves when I’d baited such an opportunity for the snatching of Wanda’s power with nothing less than her prized possession: her prophet.

And I also doubted Melmoth was entirely immune to the intimacy of the memory search, might even choose to make themselves vulnerable to such a thing. They had always struck me as the heir most willing to engage with the Abel-bodied on their own level; they had a sort of fascinated familiarity with my kind.

As we descended further into their past I resolved not to give them anything of my own memory, which I could protect with powers Wanda had instilled. All of the contents of my mind were her property, and the key to lock them on her behalf was kept somewhere in my structure. To not use it was to grant her sibling a chance in stealing me away, heart and soul, to their own cause, whatever it might be, though I was certain the formless Melmoth had far more trivial ambitions.

“Tah-dah!” they declared, throwing up slender arms clearly lacking in elbow. Physically I was still bound, but in the memory we walked independently. An old growth forest surrounded us, peaceful as death, except for the shifting of the light overhead. When I looked up I saw a ceiling of foggy heptagons shifting against the bottom of the canopy like a shoal of cruising stingrays.

“Are those all-“

“Scales!” Melmoth crowed, but they didn’t seem too impressed with their own rediscovery, instead addressing the buttons keeping their clothes together. The heir tried, in vain, to undo them, then pouted. “Foo. I wasn’t naked when I found this, so I can’t be now. I wish I’d done it before.”

“Why is that?” I shouldn’t have asked. The smartest thing to do was to show no interest in this creature. I’d seen more, much more, from my Venus in furs.

“This place was strong with the serpent’s presence. We can feel it, like beams of light, and I should’ve felt it on all of my skin. Isn’t it so much better to be nude? Unadorned. Unburdened. The snake sloughs off his clothes as fast as he can grow them.”

“I’m a tailor by trade,” I sad stiffly, despite salesman possibly being a more accurate title for my old profession. “How long ago was this?”

“Feels like yesterday.”

“So you wouldn’t have gotten to see it at all if Wanda hadn’t protected you from your own bones.” Another memory, not quite guilt I think, flashed across their eyes. Whatever speech they were cobbling together under that gray tiled sky fell apart, revealing a slump in their empty shoulders not too dissimilar from Giggles’s loneliness. If she wasn’t Wanda’s already perhaps I might’ve introduced them.

“Is this not what you were searching for?” was all they ended up asking. “Am I not reliable?”

“Where is this?”

“Not far from Diodati.”

“But Diodati is far from us. Nothing kept these from floating away but the trees, so they must be gone by now as well.”

“I suppose you’re right.” They kept staring at them regardless. Whatever time was to them, it wasn’t so friendly to me.

“It’s time to go,” I said. Then came my best effort to lift myself out of the experience, to find a more familiar cave where I had better footing. Melmoth didn’t fight me. Once restored to our proper place and time I noticed I was no longer bound, and the heir was off next to a wall, still looking up, restored to a shape that could pass for bony.

“You don’t have to be bound to all this Severin. This place, this very spot, has hooks in you that you can’t even perceive.” The implication was clear to both of us. Instead of being bound to Wanda I could be bound to them.

“This is what freedom looks like to me.” If they ever understood anything out of my mouth, it was that.

“Then I would never dream of denying it,” they said, as if they hadn’t been considering it moments prior. “Always happy to help Severin.” They started to leave. “Feel free to put your hand on my back whenever you desire.”

Melmoth was gone before I could rid myself of the emotions they caused. A break would’ve been lovely after such an intense exchange, and perhaps the heir was kind enough to give me one, but if they did my sense of time circumvented it unhelpfully. Before the lid was fully back on my boiling pot the next citizen came in to help.

She was the third difficult endeavor in a row: Giselle Ulterrine. It was all I could do to not groan at the sight of her. While she wasn’t the delicate creature that Giggles was, she also lacked the adaptability of Melmoth. She had an utterly normal number of weaknesses, but Quarantown kept her sequestered enough that she never had to patch them. One wrong step in the wrong memory might wound her substantially.

“Severin, are you alright?” she asked as she came a little too close. Her foot barely tapped the lamp, yet the sound of its metal frame echoed in my ear. It might’ve been the mounting pressure of the whole affair, an inevitable consequence of stuffing a chopped blend of memories into another memory.

“I am sound enough to continue,” I said, admitting the strain, but that in itself was an issue. I was comfortable being that honest with Giselle. Often I had thought of her as my most meaningful friend when it came to our citizens.

Porter was my most frequent ally, the most present, but he wasn’t tied to my perceptions of the town. Giselle was. She was a person I could’ve taken up with romantically, if no one had entered my train car a life ago. And excuse the presumption, but I always had the sense she felt similarly.

Only Quarantown was our purview, so I had not speculated too much as to her history, though it was clear someone had financed her life here, gave her the ducks which were now her primary business. She, like me with my Uncle Piotr, looked to be a placeholder for someone who hoped the delirium never got so bad they would have to retreat to our retreat.

It could’ve been an ideal mouse hole of a romance, full of squeaked nothings and stolen crumbs split in half. I could’ve quietly been a father to her sons, never seeking the label itself, perfectly content to trust they were thinking the word. Giselle was humble, loyal, all her feelings ran as pure aquifers, and she had a habit of appearing beside you when you needed her most, like a shadow picking up everything you drop as you swagger blithely along.

But now the shadow was before me, inches away, and I did need her… at least her memory. Jumping right in would’ve been hasty, I needed a few breaths more, but that meant I was looking at her face, her concern, the precise amount of worry, to the teardrop, that could be wrung out of her on my behalf. Now that she knew of Wanda’s nature we were all the closer, disciples together.

“What must I do?” she asked when I didn’t offer instruction quick enough. Her sun-faded hair picked up the glow of the lamp just enough to distinguish the brown of her eyes from the black. Why did this light have to make everyone so damn luminous? They all looked like their own soul, peeled out of the rind, vulnerable in the soft flesh of their mingling morals. Giselle, nostalgic and graceful as she was, probably had memories better organized than an apothecary’s drawers.

“I hope this task will not be too much for us,” I said, letting slip a trickle of doubt. “I’m searching everyone’s memories for something seen but not actively recalled, and some of Wanda’s divine power is helping me do so. It adds intensity, but that is all it is. Please, remind yourself of that if you feel strange. Intense does not mean real.”

“Intense does not mean real,” she repeated. The way in which she said it made me retroactively insert the statement into our other life together, where she used it to describe our parting, since the man who fathered her boys and owned her ducks would finally show up and claim what was his. “Which of my memories might help Severin?” She didn’t need to say my name. My handle. By which Wanda gripped me, asserted her domineering love. Giselle used it with a softer hold and the satin touch of a polishing oil, where Wanda used sweat.

“Think on times you spent in undisturbed wood and wilderness near Quarantown. We’re after something no more notable than a partly covered stone in the path.”

“I have many of those. There’s always a duck convinced he’s got the lay of the land, always a drake, and they go waddling off into the trees. If the boys don’t give chase I do.” We had to get on with it at some point. I pulled her in, touched our foreheads. Too much warmth passed between us, a sampling of each other’s puppy love.

“Give chase,” I told her too breathily, wrists almost trembling. I felt like I’d climbed too high into a tree, and was only now hearing the creaking of the branches underfoot. A moment later it was as if I’d fallen out of that tree, for we were on a rough path I recognized as not too far from the duck pond. Giselle led me down an unfamiliar fork that hooked toward the mountain. We climbed just enough for discomfort, each step paired with the urge to dig in claws we didn’t have in order to hold our footing.

“You can see all of Quarantown where this path terminates,” she offered as an apology for making me exercise my imagination. “The ducks look like poppy seeds.” Managing the town meant I always had a sense of its whole, so I’d never sought such a vantage. It sounded lovely, thus I hoped we would find a scale before we reached it.

“What does Wanda want to do with us… in the end?” she asked after I didn’t offer anything for more than a minute. My eyes were glued to the ground, kept off her long braid swishing against her lower back, but my ostensible searching had little point when frequent patches looked very fuzzy, owing to her looking ahead when the memory had formed.

“She will be mankind’s chiefest deity. Help will come to those who suffer calamities, even continents away. Lives will be lengthened. The miscommunications and petty hatreds that comet to blows and war will be cut through by her presence in our hearts, and the most bellicose of men will back away from their weapons like guilty boys dropping rocks in the schoolyard.

For as long as she lives, which will be the longest any human will ever live, death will have a weakened hold on life. And we of Quarantown will be the most privileged of all, for she makes her bed here. You, and the others, have already felt it, yes? A presence in your heart?”

“It’s like trust,” she confirmed, “as if I could fall off this mountain happily, knowing she would catch me.”

“If she was physically here, anywhere within the borders, she likely could,” I said, careful not to imply she was omnipotent. Wanda was only omnipotent to me, and only because I desired it, allowed it, reaffirmed it. The truest power of Pelts was elevating, not saving. She took away doubts, made us question how a god could err by believing in fallible creatures such as ourselves. “But what Wanda would want is a disciple who used their connection to heighten their senses and awareness, keep from falling in the first place, or choose the least perilous path to descend while doing so.”

“Yes, I see,” Giselle said, which I knew to be the truth because I’d heard that inflection out of my own mouth a thousand times when my tongue knew the pleasure of rolling across my Venus’s virtues. “I want to disappoint even less than I want to fall.”

Giselle suspected the same things of the nearing vantage, slowed to a shuffle, then finally turned around. A knot formed between us, the tension sapping me of what little fortitude remained. Internally I begged her not to speak on the subject of us, even how we might fit together in Wanda’s world. All I wanted, this far down in someone else’s soul, was companionship, and my only companion was lost.

“Severin.” Polishing oil. You can’t stop it from getting all over what it touches, and of course it lingers stubbornly. Remember, I warned myself, she feels the same, only worse, for she does not answer to Wanda with the same intensity I must.

“These feelings will pass Giselle. I was never there for you, not the way it appears now. You were alone.”

“I am alone.” She came toward me; I threw up a hand to stop her. It did nothing. For the first time ever I saw hunger in her eyes, which grew with her speed, snowballed into ravenous desire for connection. Her heart beat toward mine. It might outpace the rest of her. Break free. Find a way inside, to mine. Could I stop it? Did I want to? Things might become so much easier, the squabbling of demons reduced to indecision at the grocer. My life could be painless without the strife Wanda chose for us. It could-

Putht. The sound quelled us both. Giselle’s foot had struck something. The something. That gray ridge was no stone, and it would not go unturned. I hooted. No owl laying an owl-sized egg could have done it better. My lunge toward it was foolish, as I could not disturb what was never disturbed in the memory, but that couldn’t diminish my excited relief.

“You’ve done it Giselle! There it is! And I bet it’s still there! That’s nothing but a nodule, who would ever even bother to give it a second look.”

“Yes,” she said, face darkening on my final phrase, “it’s quite ordinary. Nothing to see at all… so we didn’t. We had to hear its pathetic little…” She kicked it again. Putht. She threw a leg back so far I could see more than a memory.

“We’ll… get it out properly where it actually is!” I sputtered to help calm her frustrations. With our goal achieved I was already lifting us both out of the exercise, and she begrudgingly came along. By the time our foreheads were freed from each other she had regained her composure, but something in her expression was difficult to shake. When next Wanda took hold of me she would certainly make note of these traces of oil.

“Come, let’s dig up our treasure,” I told her, hoping the experience would be reward enough for what I’d put her through. Wordlessly she agreed, an assent I might not have registered had we not shared a mind moments ago. Together we left the ocean bed blue of the mine shaft behind and found ourselves partly liberated by sunshine.

Of course Burstyn was there, the first face to show itself. And of course he had shovels, having anticipated that success probably meant digging. If he couldn’t solve a problem with gold he solved it with dynamite, and if not dynamite a shovel. The sheer utility of his limited blunt tool set irritated me to no end, being the man of percentage signs, emdashes, and sewing needles that I am… but I still grabbed a shovel and allowed him to follow alongside Giselle.

Really what we needed was some sort of theoretical anti-shovel, something that could keep the primordial spirit of the world serpent grounded. The cap of the scale was right where we’d left it in memory, most of the way up the hill to the mountain overlook. Doppler broke ground greedily and was not prepared for that single strike being more than we required.

The scale immediately shed a curtain of dry dirt and dust, lurching toward the sky as an inverse shipwreck. Giselle, ready to use the last of the speed that had been stunted in our shared dream, leapt and grabbed hold, but she only slowed its ascent. It would’ve carried her off to the doom of a clear sky if Doppler hadn’t taken the other side with his much more substantial weight.

He was a massive man even with an ego of that size technically weighing nothing, yet the scale still kept them both so buoyant they had trouble touching heel to ground. Only with the addition of my own weight, a difficult prospect given its limited circumference, were we able to manipulate it with any dexterity, down the hill, into town, and into my home.

Before leaving me the two of them helped me secure the shed serpent scale with clamps, the weight of the dining room table sufficient to bind it. Then I had to dismiss them. Goodbye Burstyn. Farewell, Giselle. Someone’s Giselle. A someone Wanda would find for her if she couldn’t do it on her own.

The door closed, and I was finally alone with my plan and a sewing drawer full of craftsmanship. From the scale’s behavior it was clear I couldn’t just keep hold and hope for the best. It needed to be modified into something granting me a degree of control over my flight into the beyond. With limited time and my skill set in mind, only one configuration appeared viable: a garment.

What a boon it would have been to have Wanda’s furs. Some of her will was in them, and their instincts, both animal and supernatural, would have been all the guidance I needed. She had taken them with her. Instead I would have to resort to comparative scraps.

My Wanda put herself into everything she touched, possessive by nature, more so I suspect than most of her kind. Our house was filled with her influence, and once I lowered my standards I had my pick of the litter from her closet. Yes, it would have to be something she wore, always meant for her, as opposed to an outfit of mine she was fond of clawing off me.

There’s been much talk of the gravitation of the serpent’s scale. Not to besmirch its impressive power, but I knew true levity when I re-encountered something I had handmade for Wanda in a specific time now lost to me. The Nepenthe gown. It drew me in. Forced me to snatch it off its place among other lesser dresses.

Burying my nose in its ruffled shoulder, I found scents not only reminiscent of my love, but intoxicating in much the same way as her true presence. For her it had started as a comment, a joking challenge to me, one that I decided to take seriously. We’d had one of our dinner parties to celebrate the birth of our daughter; Quarantown had collectively assumed Wanda would make only a brief appearance given that Nepenthe had joined the world just two days prior.

We knew we were going to shock them all with her heir’s speedy recovery, so she told me to make her a dress that would be just as stunning. And so, wielded by her, for the jest of a goddess is as fulfilling as any order, I followed through with my needle. Its green matched her eyes. There was red too, but only a striking splash about the collar and bust, like blood dribbling down her throat after a fresh kill. It was stunning, as when combined with the avaricious hunger always in her expression it made one think they could be the next victim, and made them fear they might enjoy the process.

Somehow this gown had been lost in the shuffle of the other important memories from around that time. We had our child for one, and she would always be so much more than the commemoration of her own birth. Still, it was strange I’d allowed this item to fade so. There must have been an implication that she would never wear it again, for it could not strike the way it had the first time.

What would strike again was the forging hammer, as I refashioned it into a vessel for the boundless sky and a suit of armor against it. Garden shears were strong enough to cut the scale into as many pieces as I wanted, and I wanted many, so that the pull of each was too weak to overcome my hands’ precision as I affixed them in fashionable places all over the gown as a kind of sequin.

One scale became a thousand, sufficiently broken up for me to be able to move my limbs, overcome portions of the forces at play, and thus steer my way as if arms and legs were rudders, all of that achieved without diminishing its aesthetic properties either. Three cheers for me.

Now, I didn’t exactly strike a becoming figure in my attempts to don it without floating away, but that was handled in private with the aid of Porter and Mr. Hammerstein, who in his days as a stagehand had helped many a difficult actor with their hurried costume changes. While they did so I felt not a shred of embarrassment. We were all united now, and something like a man in a dress was hardly a cause for anyone’s concern.

It was equally easy to show my face when I waddled out of the house, held down on each side by friends and compatriots, all the way to a good hill for my launch where a crowd had gathered, only small thanks to the taxing invasion at our border. Most of them gave me my three cheers, and then some extra, and also wishes of good luck on my voyage.

“If I do not return,” I warned them stoically, “take heart that Wanda will. Never will she abandon her people, whether the future looks dark or entirely shrouded. If you should see me return, please keep your distance, as I may not be in my right mind for a time. I trust you to follow this instruction, no matter what condition I might be in. We are Quarantown, and if the very sky tries to get away from us we will drag it back to where it belongs!”

The exact number of the next set of cheers eluded me, for I was off, unhanded and passed to the sky, voices below quickly fading. Storks must flap. Dragonflies must buzz. I was neither, more akin to a droplet from a geyser. Before my eyes could adjust to having the water whipped out of them I was too high to see individual trees.

Quarantown was a fiddle head, the railroad its curling stem. It shrank as I did once encircled by the cold of air too elevated for man. Best to spread my wings before they were frozen stiff. Moses parting the waters was my first gesture, and it succeeded primarily in parting me from my sense of balance.

Thrown into a spin, the horizon rotated so rapidly that it blended the lower light with the upper dark into a cosmic field of purple clover. Somewhere in my confusion the border between worlds was crossed, from Earth to the beyond. To quell nausea I stared at my own hands, found an ethereal skin wrapped about them and the rest of my person.

Air, I think, gift wrapping me, as the recipient realm was not hospitable to any human organ, least of which were the lungs, which insisted always on eating chunks of the space around them, sucking it in through an insultingly primitive straw. Whether it was Wanda’s gown or the scale facilitating this vital skin, I could not guess.

The ward keeping off the chill would not last, as the cold continued to grow into me. Perhaps I had minutes before it would strike my bones and tunnel all throughout my skeleton. How could I find anything in mere minutes out there? It was being and anti-being, the frozen yet volcanic depths from whence all color erupted, only settling to become matter millions of years on. It was no place for a prophet who couldn’t even prognosticate the position of his wife.

I am wielded, I reminded myself. The scale, the gown, my ties to her, all of them together constructed the form of a tool and I needed only reconstruct and obey the will of the clawed hand. Where to my Wanda, my heat in the darkness? Ignoring the cold, its power was nothing compared to hers, I lowered my defenses and explored all regions for any guiding warmth, a compass needle candle flame.

Haha yes! There was heat in the darkness, so I bent my arms away from it, worked my hands like Mergini’s paddle feet when he dove. As intended it propelled me closer to the faint sensation. I’d half-expected to find the stars up there, perhaps school with them, but this was some other avenue. Strands must exist, like layered curtains, squishing, obscuring, yet clearly separating paths leading to new realms and the conclusions that could only exist there.

This place was the heavens, but not the heavenly part, or the part with stars. This was where the truth hid, where color spewed from concentrated obsidian nothingness that simply could not compress any longer. Somewhere there, in the purple and blue, the world serpent swam.

Somehow I knew there were no others like me, not in that moment. This place, if it wasn’t too large to call a place (a state perhaps), could only be defined by its vacuity. One tiny speck of consciousness, one peppercorn of insecurity almost hoping to be dashed across the gristly bone of time-charred reality, would be allowed at a time, just for the purposes of comparison and definition.

I had only what I brought with me, and my faltering, my trembling, was entirely my fault, as there wasn’t anything around me to cause it. I had to fly through my own weakness, pierce my fears that my identity could not sustain itself without a cradling Earth, without the stilts of a god’s fingers pressing their prints into my soles with every step.

I might go out. Like a flame. Like a light. And not reoccur. Except I had a mission, and that could be my structure and fuel simultaneously. If I had interpreted the second half of the prophecy correctly, my Venus was out there doing much the same as her dispatched agent: battling weakness itself. That shared motive brought us closer, and not even the planet Venus felt nearer.

On I pressed, adjusting to the hollow medium, like the stale air of a dreamed-up cave, as fast as I could. My eyes scoured bottomless, topless, and sideless chasms of color. These hues were never upon the painter’s brush or slicking the poet’s wit. They would leak through canvas itself, made soluble by attempts to attach meaning or significance. These shades were dry vapor, illustrated chaos, and a defiance of the order of color itself. If blended they would not become the same as mingling dollops upon the pallet, but pass through each other in ignorance.

None of them bore anything so fitting in its form to be called a feature. If not for the looming hot presence I could never have found my way. It too was not a feature, but an absence. The color cleared away from it as if frightened, eyes sparkling in the shadow around a campfire, but here the flame was black bound in gold (which vanished if looked upon directly), and the kindling was highly flexible.

This ball of black and elusive frosty gold was encircled by, knotted underneath several coils that rivaled it in size. Finally a word took some meaning, and the cat claws of that meaning found firm painful purchase in the folds of my brain. Coils, coils, coils! If there was something in this lifeless realm other than the world serpent bearing coils, then I should’ve given up before starting and plunged my head into a hole right alongside the scale, leaving it there to dry brine my yearning soul away.

Instinctively I knew I couldn’t call to him; there was no medium on which the cry could travel. Even if he heard he would likely not concern himself with me, and even if he did I doubted it would be with kindness or hospitality. But what was he doing wrapped about that… that thing so tightly?

Flying closer forced me to slow as both forms grew. They were colossally big. To know exactly how big would be too much for me, so I dared not approach further, but how could I acquire the knowledge of death without doing so? The quandary did nothing to halt the seep of the cold, which just then mocked my desire for revelation by infiltrating my bones and granting the opposite: agonized paralysis of thought itself.

Death was inevitable, which I was there to learn, so it seemed the explanation would be the mechanism itself. Until. Until the world serpent, without so much as revealing its eye or head, still nothing but a world of a knot, intervened. Two monolithic sections of its length pulled away from each other, opening like an eyelid, allowing me to peer into the gold-clad darkness he had bound.

All of a sudden the cold was gone, because the cold was nothing in comparison. It was at least a sensation, whereas the contents of that diabolical orb were a cessation. Of everything. Of course. The world serpent had ensnared the knowledge itself, or some testament to it, a monument to a death twenty scales larger than my being.

A star died there, I realized in the beam of hopeless perspective. And when it died it bit down, ripped, tore part of the fabric of everything and took it along to oblivion. Here was a necrotic nodule fallen from a wounded, weeping, shambling god that searched in vain for some salvation higher than itself… and there was none. These comparisons do it no justice, and that enrages me. Yes, me. A creature never described by his fellows as angry or wrathful.

But you see I know! You cannot. You could never. Offering these attempts at elucidation is an insult to your intelligence, one I cannot stop myself from making, because I know. These burnt matches I’m throwing in your eyes as I grimace at your blank-eyed foolishness are not the knowledge of death. It cannot be transferred in such a fashion.

And though I possess it I cannot re-experience it. It sits inside my chest like a crater. It burns like a torch tossed into a subterranean coal vein. The fire is under me, and I’m always dangling just over it, and that is my life at all times now, unless Wanda should so bless me with a loose grip on my time, returning me to blissful ignorance.

The gleaming golden death that peered from the recoiling serpent’s makeshift eye gave me what I was after, and in that process I was broken, shattered, swept, compressed, adhered, fused, amalgamated, fired, coiled, sanded, polished, and set out to decorate an abandoned palace exterior, something built in the very name of futility.

Gutted, furious, I attacked the image, stared daggers at the white-gold shaft leading into a bottomless black forge which only melted, never produced. Like a cornered animal I tried to make violence into reason, to undo what it did to me, and never was there a creature so pathetic as the one smote there in his denial, almost dead enough himself to become a pitifully miniature version of the fallen star, a wispy pip of a cigarette burn.

The world serpent prevented it by closing the eye. Still he did not raise his head and meet mine, nor would he. He showed me to keep me away, to punish me for getting so close, to reward me for making the journey and my bravery, and to mock my preconceptions. All could be true, and it was best to let meaning proliferate and bloom across all its fields, for when it didn’t it was just that dead eye, perpetually open if not for the watchful constriction of the world serpent.

I could still experience my love for Wanda, and for our daughter Nepenthe. Now they hurt, but they still held strong. It was them that ordered me back, to turn my emerald fish’s tail and swim back to them. This time I had to seek the cold, leave the heat in the darkness further and further behind.

The path ahead, the path to Earth. That was the healthier subject on which to dwell, not the knowledge. Suppression would not work for long however. It would let me reach home, safety, just to rob it from me with terror generated entirely by my own soul. The devil needs no hell when man is actually tinder. All he needs is a spark.

Somehow I found our planet, and did witness its continents as mere stains of green. Higher continents, white ones of weather, drifted above those, rolling like fog. There was all of life as I knew it, so much smaller than the poked-out eye. We could be nothing but a grain of gravel shoveled into its grave.

As I said, without saying precisely, I now knew. That knowledge wore, eroded, ached, hollowed. The character of it would never change, but it could fade into the background, and the closer I came to our world the more it did so.

On the outskirts of our air I lost all momentum and recognized my scales acting as if they had defined up and down once more. I saw no way to descend but to leave them behind, section by section. Scratching and tearing, I incrementally shredded the gown I had sewn for my love. It hurt to do so. Yet like the serpent my skin had be shed. There was a new man underneath, and he could not define himself by his walk without getting his feet on the ground.

Over an hour it took me, I think, to fall slowly enough and find my way, back to that fiddle head next to the mountain. When I could aim even more I set sight on home, on our very doorstep, and I landed there, barefoot, feeling like a whip that had every last crack extracted, holding the final red shred of the gown over my heart.

Silence behind me. If anyone saw they were obeying my order and keeping their distance. Bless their discretion, as it could also here be called self-preservation. The door didn’t dare creak as I let myself in and closed it behind me. A few steps over the threshold. Awful steps. Staggering more like. Whose home was this? It couldn’t be mine. My hide felt so raw, chafing against such comforting hearth-dried air.

And the silence. Unbearable. You might expect silence, given I was alone, but we are never truly alone on Earth. There were woodworms in the floorboards, spiders in the high corners, mites in motes of dust, mold colonizing bread, cockroaches in the shadows, seeds in jars in cupboards that could yet germinate.

Every last life form hid from me, kept its mouth shut, sterilized and scoured the minutest thought that might cross the three-cog clockwork of their insect brains. Those too dim to know fear knew aversion. They all sensed what I now knew.

“You cannot hide from it,” I scolded them in an alien shadowy voice. I sounded like dead crows falling out of drain pipes. “Nor should you! You are nearest of us all. Your lives are measured in the snaps of my fingers.” I snapped to a slow beat. “Death will be upon you in hours… and yet you still will not face it!?”

No creature answered me, and I do not blame them. I wanted blood, for you see, blood was proof. Blood was catching your life red-handed as it attempted to flee. Blood cannot be ignored. Ask the murdered splayed on their white sheets. Ask a king in need of an heir. Ask a gash in your own flank. What do they think of blood, hmm?

“Cowards,” I accused. “I will find someone brave enough to know. If they hide that bravery I will draw it out, take it sword, or club, or my brittle nails! Stay here if you wish, wallow in it, if that’s all you can do. I’ll find-“

I turned to go back to the door, but it was blocked. There stood, after a profoundly silent entrance, Wanda Blasphemer Pelts. My Venus in furs, not a hair out of place. My goddess who also knew. She had no injuries, not so much as a smudge on her cheek, but whatever she had been through was writ across her face, a bust sculpted solely with the strikes of a cat o’ nine tails. Her eyes were all rain, no lightning. Her breath resigned. No pounces stored in her muscles, where usually there were fifteen or so.

“Wanda,” I panted as I broke out into a sweat and started to tremble. “Wanda I know.”

“I see,” she said, staying right where she was. No attempt to embrace, hold, possess. She did not want to wield me. Was I broken? Did this hot poker now heat on both ends? “I felt it… so I’ve come back.”

“The prophecy. This was all for the prophecy, please tell me that,” I pleaded.

“It was.” None of her toying. Straight answers were dangerous around Wanda: a fence of pikes ready for heads. Tears rolled down the sides of her nose, and I wasn’t sure if she allowed it or if they overwhelmed her. “I know you and I said we were to discuss anything like this beforehand, but the words were so cleanly divided-“

“-In half.”

“Yes. I thought we might fail if we weren’t… cleanly divided. I had to split off, without a word. But there were words! That was the entire point my Severin! That’s what we made the prophecy predict, our connection. The words pass between us without ever being spoken. That is how you knew what to do. That is how I kept myself from falling apart out there over fear of losing you, our child, our home. That is how I did what I needed to do.”

“Your half? It’s done as well?” She nodded. Still neither of us dared move.

“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.” Wanda reached into her furs and withdrew a small stoppered bottle filled with something like ink, but less like it the longer I looked. Ominous threatening silver veins swirled within it, churning, making my brain hear deep sounds of magnificent scale, as if I was trapped in a cave underneath the mulling ethical dilemma of a continent.

If I knew anything about my own prophecy, then I could already approximate the contents without her having to explain. This was the ‘black blood’, the ‘strongest poison’, and through some ritual, the details of which I did not need to know, just as I did not share with her the emptiness of my conversation with the serpent, Wanda had drawn the material out of herself.

It bore an obvious connection to her inherent serpent’s knowledge. Heirs lived with it, but they never accepted it. That was why they always sought to conquer, to master, to dominate, each in their own way. It was the search for a counter-proposal, a method wrought of madness that would reverse the order, put life in charge of the universe.

So what had Wanda extracted from her spirit and bottled? Weakness. Flaws. The essence of her failures, where emotion overcame her goals, where she did evil for its own sake and not as a means to crafty end.

“And on thy head I pour the vial which doth devote thee to this trial,” she solemnly said, punctuated by a gasp from the cork. My goddess stepped to me, challenged me to close the rest of the gulf between us. I did, all but naked before her. She felt the last scrap of the gown around my neck, recognized it, then tore it away and discarded it. Cautiously she raised the vial and tipped it.

The contents flowed across the canal of my hair part. Down my forehead. Over my lips. Briefly pooled where my throat met my clavicle. Overflowed. I understood what trial I was devoted to. A black crescent moon in my navel. I was to process her weakness, filter it, neutralize it, with my Abel’s humanity. Through hair again. Only a sieve of serpent’s knowledge could withstand it. My other end, which Loved Wanda as much as its counterpart. I was the vessel for her frustrated rage, Noah in her hot wept floodwaters. Not a single drip.

When passing through me her mistakes would produce only miracles. She was the master, but I was just as crucial. There are no orders without obedience; there is no authority without respect. Her poison sank into my skin. Insults that never left her mouth, that she didn’t mean, but which crawled and slithered in the villainous crevices of her mind regardless, bubbled and pricked in my saturated flesh.

I could handle them, cherish them even, for she had held them in reserve rather than inflicting them, having recognized them as false, as weakness. She was complete in another type of knowledge: that she could hand over these treacherous weapons without wielding them. I knew them, and took them away for storage and care. I was safekeeping her shortcomings, and between us that left only the long ones.

Off came her furs, with nothing underneath. She attacked me, bit me, and I bit back. This was a new kiss for us. I wanted her, and by extension my arms did too, but I wasn’t sure what I was telling them to do. Instead of embracing her they fought her off, no, they just fought. The threat the poor bugs and spores of my home felt was still in me, still acting out. If Wanda were Abel-bodied she might have gotten hurt. I was a child of reflection ready to smash the mirror. Our connection transformed with a tumble, into her pinning my arms, against the wall, then the floor, then the furniture, then flat against the dinner table. How had we moved that far?

Her poison had moved with us, colonizing my surface. Every time I opened my eyes it had spread, from my core to my extremities, never in splotches or spatters, only a swirling tide of black and silver. As she maneuvered my sensation lower and directed me into her cradle of heat, her ravenous caldera, one dip in her waist coated her too.

Always her body heat had overwhelmed mine; she had the repressed fury of a goddess after all. But now my own anger at what I knew boiled my insides, practically turned a certain bodily attraction into a train whistle. I matched her as we made love, both frustrated, both mounting in pressure and need.

By the time we rolled off the table, and kept rolling, her poison had coated us completely. With closed eyes we were naught but naked shadows fighting to stay out of the seams in the floorboards. We were the wriggling forms that resisted death, the worms in his topsoil begging the rain to wash off our fetid fates.

This was a moment I could have before death, I realized, a knowledgeable body, well-read in the cruel common law of material existence, capable of expending all the life that remained when it recognized the approach of the hound from beyond the cosmos, that traverses all of it like a street corner, and which does not growl in mouth or stomach.

Violent, fearful, and fitful were our movements, we both thrashed in tantrum against the powers hovering over, watching more closely than ever before, but our passion was becoming stronger too. The darkness of her poison was absorbed into my skin, turning me the gray of a headstone, but then our lovemaking came to a head, in which my stoniness was lost, and that color was overcome by fervent reds bordered by fading, bashful, humble pink.

Gliding on sweat, Wanda coursed up my midsection, found my face with hers. All her claws anchored in my scalp as she stared down into the new character of my knowing eyes. Her converging freckles, backlit by the fire under her skin, burnished an expression so intoxicating to me that I could not continue to look upon her radiance. My vision blurred to protect itself.

Wanda wanted them to see, so she undid the blur. I didn’t need to be in control of myself, for she was fully capable of taking it, nor did I need to protect, for she proudly took up that duty as well.

“Mine,” she warned my eyes, and any other part of me that might get funny ideas about who I belonged to, who my instincts served.

“Yours.”

“Death will not have you-“

“Because I am yours.”

“Nothing can stop us now Severin.” Her fanged smile, ill-behaved with ambition, took hold of my shoulder, pulled me the way a mountain lion pulls its meal into a cave. Together we tumbled along the floor, the clump of her furs rising like bread and opening to swallow us. Once in its folds it flattened again. We were somewhere new: a place she made only out of jealous greed. The vermin likely emerged, flicking antennae to and fro, wondering if they were now safe.

Wanda hadn’t been safe. She’d been imperiled. By me. Yes, now nothing could stop us, meaning that if we were destroyed it would be together. Our romance was complete, our persons whole. But I shudder over how it could have been different if she had misjudged the timing to approach me.

Or if she had come to me in love… and I had held a rock.

The End

Wanda and Severin will return in

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Charge