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, concludes here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Charge

Locked in battle I was, with none other than my goddess herself, my dearest who so transcends the term wife, the mother of my child with so much more potential than I will ever have: Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.

The grueling ordeal entered its fourth hour, judged by the sun’s journey, as Wanda controls my sense of time’s passage and could have been using it against me to gain an edge in our high stakes contest. Half my army was gone, banished to their dark central grave, and there were traitors in the midst of those that remained.

These wounds were not inflicted without reprisal however. She too was down on her forces, but her strategy remained aggressive: her trio of moons, harvest, goblin, and blood kept my world serpent and my crater surrounded. You will notice these are not the names of men conscripted, but of tokens.

The battle, the contest, was the game of amblush, a thing I learned to play even more slowly than I learned to author prophecy in service of my gorgeous opponent. This game was the oldest in the world, played by the first heirs of Cain, the tribe to which my Wanda belongs and which she so ravishingly embodies. Perhaps Cain himself, first of the murderers, was the strategist that set down the rules. Or perhaps another party beyond man itself… though I should back up, as that’s a few too many moves ahead.

As I said, I learned amblush slowly, in phases, originally introduced to it by her just so she could enjoy my curious frustrations; the mild pain of my fruitless contemplation amuses her. First I had to come to the revelation that it could not be played alone. As the earliest game, at least the earliest of real tactics, it had not yet advanced to ideas of practice or self-play. If one was not earnestly fighting, one was just moving pebbles and sticks about.

After I learned that, I had two regular opponents: my duck Mergini (Wanda had made his mind more than rival mine in some regards) and my Venus herself. The latter loved to defeat me, and that was all she ever did. Such a strange mix of joy and consternation was felt each time I fell to her. Her victory was my own of course, but only in the sense that her positive emotions ripple through me, even when based upon my own negative source material.

She never offered any lessons, only the fact that I could not defeat her because I did not know how. Obvious, yes? But oh, not so, as that was foreshadowing on her part, to something she wasn’t sure would come to pass, something that eventually did. I knew. Not strategies gleaned from muttering in her sleep. Not insight into the history of amblush. Nor the product of late night study sessions with my waterfowl companion and our compared notes. What I knew was what only the heirs and the world serpent knew: the very nature of death.

It is found in one of the more philosophical layers of the cosmos, where the concepts of being sleep and ruminate on the ways to deal with pesky lifeforms. A black orb was its form, colossal beyond description, wreathed in foggy white-gold. It taught me the cold of oblivion, the numbing of thought into dissolution. The soul is soluble, and will eventually disappear back into the whole of the whole.

One needs to know this, know it, to perceive the full rule set of amblush and develop any real skill at the game. Now I outclassed Mergini greatly, and my Wanda did not want me summoning any of her siblings as opponents, so she offered herself up, aware that I might finally be able to challenge her in some respect other than general sensitivity, a thorny proposal for us both.

The only challenges I ever wished to issue were to her faults, for her to correct so swiftly and completely that I looked the fool for ever even mentioning them. My criticism was of the minor wounds she took in the process of living, serving only to agitate the area and speed her divine healing. I was no more than a medicinal leech on her mistreated perfection.

Yet I could win. Just as I’d seen the world serpent encircling a collapsed star, the diamond of death’s nature, I also saw an opportunity to use the game piece representing him to encircle and ensnare any of her pack of moons. She was using their numbers to intimidate, but once the serpent occupied an adjacent space to any heavenly body he could not be taken by any other, such was his mastery of the permanent midnight beyond the Earth and its drifting refuse.

And the crater, currently his neighbor, was the key. It generated paths along which other pieces could travel, straight lines, like those that led to its formation. So I used it to launch my world serpent across the circular board, an impact in reverse, which erased the crater piece from existence, though it might return if I could create another destructive incident.

My world serpent found and trapped her goblin moon, but rather than banish it to the center of the board, which I now realized might be a representation of that conceptually and literally distant diamond, I chose to keep it prisoner, thus I was granted a great deal of leverage on all three of her most capable pieces.

She could not retreat without scattering them, and in the process destroy most of their power. The limbo of shuffling a piece back and forth wasn’t safe for her either, as I could then approach and mop up with my constellation piece. Either I squeezed the life out of her moon by moon or she was swept up by my reserves that had waited so patiently in a nook of the night sky.

Victory now appeared inevitable. Dread filled me, and shame. Something was wrong. It was not my place to bring her down, the opposite! To support, to bolster, to champion, these are my roles. If she loses sight of why she should shape the world with her magnificence, I supply it.

Both of us realized my position on the board at the same time, looked up, locked eyes. Not a word passed between us. I had the initiative, so she made no attempt to infiltrate and examine with her vivisecting green eyes that could do so easily. Instead I was to make a decision, pluck one from the electric rain streaking in her green, hanging precariously on the tip of her impish fang, hiding in the brush of the bunched freckles stuck crossing the bridge of her nose.

For a moment it was too difficult to face, and I was the one to retreat, to the perspective of our surroundings. We hadn’t set up on the dock of Miss Ulterrine’s duck pond, where Mergini and I had failed at playing amblush most often. This spot felt new to me, whether or not it was. The first time I’d witnessed this small clearing was in a vision of someone else’s memory, then we’d climbed the hill overlooking the entrance to the cave that was my prophecy workshop. Form its summit, despite being only a short way up the mountain that helped hide Quarantown from the rest of the world’s view, you could see everything we’d built: her brother Ruthven’s grave to the distant railway station.

But no market or homestead was most notable. That honor went to a humble divot in the ground, close to where we sat with the board between us, legs crossed, no table or chairs preventing us from leaning close enough to the board to sniff out each other’s brewing strategies. That was where I’d found one of the serpent’s very scales, a gemstone of levitation, which I’d used to ascend into his realm.

My Venus in furs was distressed, and here I was reminiscing about my own accomplishments, which she’d achieved just by being born. This very moment had the potential to be an accomplishment, all I had to do was match my conviction in my knowledge of death with that in my knowledge of Wanda.

Death was inescapable. Wanda was inescapable, as I had made her. Both were true. Once my mind was equally full of these two colored mists, one roseate and sensual, the other necrotic purple and frigid, I reexamined the amblush board and the predicaments of its pieces.

Defeating Wanda was not victory. This game had only ever defeated me, and would do so again if I only scrambled over an opponent in an insecure need to dominate some aspect of it. But I did not need the game’s approval, only that of my loving goddess. So who truly stood to benefit if I demolished her forces? Of course. Death. He wasn’t conscious in the world, merely a force, but in the game we lent him such capacity. The black at the center of the board, so like what I’d seen, was the game’s true master. He set the snare, a trap of prey killing each other because they couldn’t see beyond themselves.

Thus I became more aware of the spaces that matched the black center in color, the compressed-kite shapes between the spiraling circles where all the tokens started and mostly stayed. They were extensions of Death, those that encompass us and watch hungrily, those that that stay glued in our blind spots.

“Blind spots,” I muttered, reaching out for my constellation. If I moved toward Wanda’s moons she was done for, but fear didn’t so much as flash across her eyes. Instead I moved along the board’s rim, turned the piece toward the center. It was uncontested territory I’d just entered. Nothing to fight over. But that was the point. We had nothing to fight over. Our eyes met again. “We must see what we know.”

My idea transferred to her, almost an erotic process, an influence she added to all our interactions (nary a touch from her is ever felt in one spot alone, always in the nethers as well). Wanda breathed it in, sucked on it, panted it back out. Her concern became hunger, and she went to work moving her harvest moon away from my serpent, disregarding the danger.

Back and forth we worked in tandem, spreading out the remnants of our armies, ignoring all dangerous proximities, until we had pieces ringing the entire board and all facing toward the black pit at the center. Now there were no more blind spots. The beings of the board not only knew death, but spied also all its radiating pockets, nothing extending behind them out of their sight.

So we acknowledged mechanically the true nature of amblush. Though one player could defeat another, they were themselves defeated by the third player, of whom they were never aware they had begun a contest with. To Death went the spoils on two tiers, but he couldn’t collect while we watched him, while we were vigilant against his approach. Our actual eyes matched those of our devoted figurines, wooden and unblinking, until the third player we had sensed was fully revealed.

And there he was. A new token. It hadn’t risen from the black waters of the center, instead stamped on our perception with a jolt. That piece had always been there, we’d just failed to spy its slinking before, weaving its way in and out of a most distracting conflict, a crow swooping between bullet paths.

Depicted was a crashing meteor, the threat from beyond come to roost most explosively in our lives. What a discovery it was… but we had no idea what to do with it! When Wanda has no ideas, she tries pouncing, and this was no exception. Her arm shot out to grab the piece, but it was gone as quickly as it had come.

“I shouldn’t dare to hope for such a thing,” she sighed, but then her attention turned to me and a grin split her lips. She was pleased with me, which I get to feel as a spark-throwing fire in all my flesh. Another pounce was being readied, but I wanted to catch my goddess off guard, tantalize her all the more, and the only shelf I could reach that she couldn’t was the future.

The cave where I drew prophecy from a coursing subterranean river was beneath us, but if I treated it as a lance of spiritual energy, one that pierced all rock and continued beaming into the sky until death darkened, then I was still in its path. Some dreg of its power could still reach me. I thought back, mentally sidestepped, into a past that wasn’t my own, in search of a sparkle of prophecy.

“With the contagion of a mother’s hate, breathed on her child’s destroyer; aye, I heard thy curse, the which, if thou rememberest not, yet my innumerable seas and streams, mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, and the inarticulate people of the dead, preserve, a treasured spell. We meditate in secret joy and hope those dreadful words, but dare not speak them.”

“Hmm,” she purred, drawing closer, shadow swallowing the amblush board. Her draping furs picked up the tokens, vanished them into their recesses. Both her arms bore her leaning weight, framed me as her prey. “Was that the demented little Byron boy again?”

“No,” I intuited, “Shelley I think this time. What do you suppose it means?”

“First we must interpret what I am feeling Severin.” My favorite heir of Cain lunged, and then gave me full documentation of what she felt: my chest, my neck, my thighs, et cetera, et cetera…

Eventually we did get to the business of interpreting what I’d managed to snatch from our game after its ever-victor Death fled back to intangibility. At least I assume we did, for I, just as you will be now, was thrown from that most joyous tumble at the lookout’s edge straight to a time I think many days later.

Whatever Wanda has me skip she eventually returns to me, when she thinks I will enjoy the memories most, and it has not been in my nature to question her craft. Instead I, and here we, must do our best to adjust to the circumstances. I knew at least where she had dropped me back into myself: a field not far outside our open air market where the children often played.

It was not a sight of play now however, but much strange activity that required its unobstructed open space. There were people, our people that we were very much responsible for, floating about in the air like bubbles!

Some panicked, raining tears on those waiting below, others effervesced with laughter enough to send themselves spinning. And those raining tears I mentioned were just to prepare you for the other precipitation that was less common but far more concerning, which was all the vomit caused by wingless men, women, and children challenging gravity.

What I witnessed was far too chaotic and disorganized to be anything of Wanda’s design, she often had spiders synchronized in the same web and centipedes marching in company, so I searched for an explanation. Unnecessary, as it turns out. The answer drifted down to the earth before me, touching delicately with a single bare toe.

Some questions are better left unanswered, especially when the naked truth is presented so close to literally. Doppler Burstyn, light as a feather despite his rotund form, was wearing less clothing than usual, which I assumed was part of a series of calculations over several hours where he adjusted his own weight to find the perfect balance between levity and control.

Less luminous than his gilded grin, it took me a moment to recognize his flat gray bracelets, anklets, and strategically placed pins. Their dull material would never have caught his eye naturally, but he was already fully aware of the power of the world serpent’s scales. Had my smoldering stare been drawn away, off to the side, I might have seen a heavy iron cage half as high as a man, lidded with a heptagon, holding in and down a stack of broken, carved, and complete scales like piled griddlecakes.

I knew it best for him to talk as little as possible, so I answered as many questions with context as I could. Where had he gotten them? I asked the imaginary version of myself standing in front of the bobbing ninny. Simple, right where he knew one to be. We’d dug up the one I used to visit the serpent right by the lookout above the mine shaft. Burstyn too had assumed his expertise extended vertically, replacing my prophecy with industrious extraction.

He had dug there in the hopes that the scale was not alone, his hope proven right. Snakes do shed their skins all at once most of the time. We might’ve discovered what length he was if we uprooted the whole sleeve and measured it.

But why? The magnate couldn’t sell them. We were now at the point where he couldn’t sell anything within Quarantown’s borders. With Wanda’s nature revealed, all present turning themselves over as worshipers, her glory had replaced currency entirely. Needs were met to meet her approval, avoid her disappointment. Anyone who dared dream of inter-acolyte exploitation would be tossed out on their behind, into thorns, if they were lucky.

Also as simple as the man, I told myself. It was in his nature to maximize his own contribution to any pit he stumbled into. The lack of financial opportunity did not technically remove his ability to do that, especially when replaced with another powerful material resource. All of this was just his latest effort to usurp my position as chief disciple, prophet, and quite possibly lover, to the goddess Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.

Now I did not learn this until later, but his little symposium of flight training and stomach emptying was not merely for whimsy. At that very moment Wanda was off trying to address a very specific problem I had created, or at least delineated. This was all over the pearls of wisdom I’d shucked from a Shelley over a tricky game of amblush.

Several times over now we’d learned that a prophecy wasn’t a contract or a shopping list. It was instead a map bearing no names or legend, and you place yourself by putting your finger upon your best guess. Creating it is a skill, and so is realizing it in your favor. Wanda had been particularly troubled by the line ‘yet my innumerable seas and streams, mountains, and caves, and winds, and yon wide air, and the inarticulate people of the dead, preserve, a treasured spell’.

She had taken the first parts of the list, streams, mountains, and caves, to mean my oracle’s workshop and thus Quarantown at large. The ‘inarticulate people of the dead’ were the ghosts of old heirs, eager to help me prognosticate to better their own reputations and desiccating fortunes in the tomb of the past.

‘Yon wide air’ gave her pause. For years now she’d been setting up wards, charms, familiars, hexes, and curses to safeguard our home against her siblings, her mother, and her kind at large, covering the waters, the railroad, the mountain, the creatures big and small… but not the wide sky above. That was a vulnerability, so she sought to seal it and settle the prophecy at the same time.

My goddess was mediating a conflict just as I was about to start one, not far from all the foolish floating, but obscured by the dense screen of the forest. She’d made the decision to enlist the various ducks of our town as the familiars tasked with safeguarding our sky: both those with enhanced intellect and those without.

It was a logical decision, as the ducks already lived integrated with the populace, their numbers were high, and the smarter ones could act as commanders for the rest in her absence. This was a matter of nature however, which does not always think or feel logically. Some of her disciples among the animals, namely the crows, had taken offense at being rejected in favor of web-footed and spatula-billed bath toys.

They had guarded her woods capably ever since her arrival, better equipped with their versatile refuse-curating bills and dexterous claws. In their opinion they should’ve been the ones to move into town as the new constables, unaware they would be perceived by the citizenry as a swarm of ill omens. Could you imagine how difficult it would be to optimistically interpret a prophecy when surrounded by crows who only, in their efforts to keep a beady eye out for intruders, ever managed to look hungry?

So in the high branches the crows were trying to pick a fight with the ducks, cawing dares and insults down at their idle waddling. Both were plumed in black, so it was like the crows had dripped their shadows to the forest floor in a heat wave and were now trying to call them back. Wanda was in the middle of it, leaping from tree to tree, swapping animal tongues even faster, to broker a peace. Not a compromise of course. The ducks would guard the skies as per her decision, but, tragically, they would not do so in time.

“What is the meaning of all this Doppler?” I asked the man, swallowing down an angry froth. He took a flagging balloon’s step toward me.

“The skies are in need of guards, aren’t they?” he asked. “I’m equipping and training some guards. Bu-hah!” One of these ‘guards’, too unsure of her position to scream but not too unsure to honk, slowly spun over his head, forcing him to brush her hair out of his face. “They need practice, but I assure you I’ve perfected the equipment.

There’s a formula the boys and I have worked out, based on weight. Once we know yours we can give you some braces of the correct thickness.” He clicked those around his wrists together. “They make you almost as light as the air itself, but not quite. You remain just a feather or two heavier. Meaning we can do this without worry of floating away.” He jumped, to a height beyond comical.

Our conversation was so delayed in waiting for his descent that I simply could not stand it any longer. From my perspective there was no rhyme or reason for Wanda to shift me forward or back in time, only trust, so I might’ve been tossed to another knot on the chronological rope before he finished a single protracted hop.

My only option was to find one of his elder sons, Zachariah, the one following in his footsteps most precisely, and get him to outfit me with some of the scale braces so I could go up there and argue him out of all this. Anything of the serpent was not to be trifled with, especially for people who couldn’t possibly know. Their fledgling flailing might’ve been misinterpreted, could’ve invited the beast, or worse, the meteor his coils kept imprisoned.

Zachariah was right where I expected him, managing the cage that was so much lighter than it should have been despite the chains draped over it. He was twenty already, but much shorter than his father, and must have lost several teeth all at once, for a fused but expertly molded chunk of gold was taking the place of three of them in his lower smile.

“Could you get me up there please?” I asked sternly, trying to remember nobody was particularly at fault. Those who knew should be keeping lids on all their pots, keep the steam from escaping.

“Yes sir Mr. Pelts,” he said politely, a twinge of fear in his voice. I often forgot I was now an authority figure. Perhaps the young man had to listen to his father plotting every night, desperate for ways to pickax at my responsibilities, even though he already held the coveted position of being the first citizen who learned my Wanda’s nature within the town itself.

By the time I was done charging over these notions, Zachariah had given me all four rings on my wrists and ankles and put several carved pins where they apparently needed to be positioned. Were I in a better mood I would’ve told him my Uncle Piotr could use his subtle fitting skills if he was ever in need of employment far enough away from his father to not hear that boisterous chortle that was currently overhead.

Now I was already the most practiced despite having just donned the equipment, as I’d flown all the way out of the sky in a similarly empowered ballgown, where I danced with the stars themselves. My knowledge helped as well, making me innately aware of the undetectable elegance with which death flew about us always.

Getting up to him was trivial; I only had to weave past a dog-paddling Mr. Hammerstein and Giselle’s boys, who were already skilled enough to chase each other through their elders like minnows darting around stones.

“A marvel isn’t it?” the man said as soon as we were eye to eye again. Light as we were I could still feel gravity’s nagging tug, which made it clear he had used someone else as a stepping stone to stay up there that long.

“It was the first time,” I couldn’t help but gloat. “Now that the novelty is gone I only see the risks.”

“No, I’ve accounted for all that,” Burstyn insisted, shaking his head. “There are no worries as long as you’re properly weighed and outfitted. A strong wind might have something to moan about, but we won’t get anything that could take us away this time of year. Where is our goddess? Imagine what she’ll be able to do with the power of flight!” He spun in a tilted circle, checking every angle for her approach; when his face came back to my orientation it looked a little disappointed.

“What she does with every power: bring respectability to it. And our concern is not the wind Doppler. It’s what may be riding it. Have you considered that you might’ve just served up a hundred defenseless morsels to any predator that has mastered the sky? And you’ve done so before we’ve instituted any protective measures. We need to get everyone down, now and not later. Am I understood?”

“Poppycock! You don’t need to be a prophet to see the skies are clear of everything but sunshine. If we all practice now we can have guards perched on chimneys like vigilant owls by tonight… Now that I think of it, we could attach a bead of scale to some twine and some wrapped-up food… send it right up the chimney so they can eat while they work! Oh Wanda does fill me with such clever ideas.”

Getting him to stop producing baubles of a profiteering mind would be fruitless; I had to take matters into my own hands. Take them back rather. Burstyn was very much overstepping his position. If he wasn’t he could’ve done what I did, which was make several assumptions based on my intimate knowledge our goddess, thus leaping over the gap in time that left me without much of the context surrounding me.

I had no way of knowing Wanda was perfecting our duck guard a short distance away, but I could access our past even more easily than those of the poets and authors of Diodati. She always went to the animals first, sometimes overlooked the foolishness of the Abel-bodied. It was a safe guess she was patching our sky with feathers or bat leather, so I wagered on it.

“Did Wanda assign you to training guards?”

“No, but I know she appreciates initiative!” he blustered.

“She appreciated it once, while half-drowned in fever and delirium. Now she’s back to despising presumption from anyone but those who can see the future. Stop this aerial posturing and help me get these people back to where they belong.”

“Beneath you,” he spat. It was the most outwardly hostile I’d ever heard him. I decided to take the higher path, without gaining elevation.

“Beneath Wanda. If she does not ask, she does not want. Therefore she will be providing any guards our skies need, and they will be birds. I will help you undo this embarrassment before she gets here and sees.” He stared at me for several moments, but did not respond, speaking instead to everyone below him.

“Are you all having a good time?” he shouted, to a cheer from half those he’d equipped. The others were still learning which way their contents were sloshing. All the while we were slowly descending, and as soon as he bumped into someone he used them as a springboard, to, with surprising grace, deliver himself into the thickest part of the crowd-cloud.

The man started riling everyone up, giving them little pushes in random directions they didn’t have the nerve to protest. The sky became a chaos of kicking legs and hands in search of things to grasp. Perhaps he hoped to accelerate their mastery, akin to pushing someone who has not yet learned to swim into a pond.

I detest anger, mostly because I am not immune to it. I find it to be ill-fitting scalding armor, put on involuntarily, yet almost always used in a scuffle. Fully encased in the stuff, I unwisely dove in after the man to try and calm things down. The problem was that I sought something more reserved and cautious, while he wanted roughhousing. One is significantly slower than the other.

For every person that I helped down, who had had their fill, three more were scattered and sent higher by his pushes and daring them on, efforts in which he was joined by Zachariah and two of his other children. Minutes later I had made little progress, and a few of those I’d pushed down had buoyed back up when I wasn’t looking.

Not only did Doppler succeed, it was a runaway success! Everyone got louder. Some of those who were confident they were about to complete their first straight shot through the air felt cut off by those drifting into their path. Collisions abound. Ricochets of both body and insult. This was the least united the town had been since they learned of Wanda’s heritage.

And I was right in the middle of it, looking as guilty, lost, and foolish as the rest of them. What would Wanda think if she suddenly came across us now? After all her hard work scouting locations, people, opportunities in time… only to come home and find everyone had forgotten how to walk.

My shame was making me even angrier; I couldn’t realize, in the thick of it, that this was not truly one of my duties. As the conduit between Wanda and her people, my actual responsibility was to smooth over incompatibility. When it came to the population itself, only Wanda’s hand could guide them, or push their heads out of the clouds when needed.

Almost everyone adrift was arguing with one another, fists flailing just out of reach of faces. Frustrated hands of the earthbound were outstretched and grabbing, catching barely anything. Someone unknown accidentally kicked me in the face. I was rolling the taste of shoe around in my mouth, trying to dispel it, when I first heard the quacking charge.

Like the Valkyries storming into battle, the flocking ducks of Quarantown crested and swept over the treetops, their calls quickly drowning out our bickering. At first the people were frightened, assuming these black wings belonged to scavenging crows, but those birds had lost their appeal to Wanda, and were now sulking in their knothole dens of pilfered treasure.

We were treated delicately, despite being swallowed by the mass of them. Every feather brush actually made the tiniest of adjustments to our positions, weightless as we were. The newly appointed guardians of our sky reoriented me right-side up, spun me along with all the others to face her.

In came Wanda from on even higher. Her furs were cast wide under her arms, catching and holding the air like the gliding folds of a flying squirrel. Whenever her altitude faltered a ball of ducks would toss themselves up into the furs, push her higher, and so she flew from her woods and back into her town, where yet another dispute had to be addressed.

My heart went out to her. Powerful and wise as she was, she didn’t have the temperance of a diplomat. With me she could unleash her wildest spirit, her evilest desires, possess with permission rather than brood in scolded yearning. I took pleasure in grooming the furs that would otherwise bristle.

But she showed remarkable and admirable control by tackling the issue with her own strengths. Our troubles were resolved without her speaking a single word, in a tremendous dance of ducks, a waltz of waterfowl, the many mallards’ mise-en-scène. As she supervised from above the birds rearranged everyone, took them from the person they were angriest at in the jumble and paired them up with the best choice out of everyone entwined in the serpent’s coils.

Wanda had confessed to me a mere idea on our first night together, aboard that fateful train, that she suspected there was only one way in which she could be a god to people in a rapidly modernizing world of canneries, photography, inoculation, and a hundred other things too fastidious and finicky for a god’s temperament.

She wanted to be a goddess of love, and of sex. This was a realm in which, hopefully, the machines could never invade. A man would not want to make love to a furnace, nor a woman a printing press. There were no improvements to be made on the human body in these affairs, as, no matter what entity was responsible, the bodies were made for each other.

Just as she had gripped every aspect of my physical existence, she could influence elements of her disciples: rush their blood, reveal a suppressed blush, tickle to tantalize, gently redirect their eyes to a person they hadn’t properly observed the first time they’d seen them, and all the other licks that could make up a case of puppy love.

Properly wielded, these powers made her more than a match for Eros, as well as making some of the Quarantowners more than a match for each other. All of this was happening before my eyes, and I wasn’t prepared for it, given that Wanda actually told me precious little of her plans for godhood.

We shared everything in terms of our relationship, but her rule was her prerogative, and I was meant to patch up leaks as they appeared. Unto her I delivered silver platter prophecy, which she then took under advisement, producing miracles at the other end of the process. So to watch her work in real time, and to be intentionally glued in that moment by her, would have been the most beautiful thing I’d ever witnessed if I hadn’t already spent a whole life in miniature witnessing my Wanda.

Problems that had weighed on my mind since I started compiling a dossier of our citizens were all but obliterated in the slow romantic spins of this airborne dance, the pairings carefully curated.

Take Miss Giselle Ulterrine, who owned most of the ducks now showing her the floorless steps. Her boys gave her some fulfillment, but she was terribly lonely, prevented from venturing out in search of a lover by the butchering hook in her back: obligations to the distant man that had set her up with her homestead and the birds in the first place. He was never going to marry her, I knew, just use her.

Vainly I had worried she would become attached to me, but I was too grounded and too dense to see the solution that Wanda now made look like the very breeze through Giselle’s faded hair. My closest friend in Quarantown was Porter Montbel, whom I might have competed with if my relationship with Wanda did not put us in separate leagues.

Perhaps you see where Wanda took it. A woman who might have had eyes for me, and a man running about town delivering things and doing favors just as I liked to do, made to embrace each other in midair so they could stabilize together. Ducks spun them slowly as their hands joined, found comfortable positions.

I could see they were talking already. I couldn’t read lips, but I could see laughter on them plain as day. He was younger than me, than her, and his interests more varied than mine. Giselle was a listener, a contemplater, so he could go on about whatever caught his eye and she would never get tired of taking it in.

Her legal obligations to that distant man would remain, but they would mean nothing if that debt was ever called in under the claw-tipped umbrella of Wanda’s hand. She was freer than she realized, to spend the night with Porter, to let him take the boys out to skip stones in their pond, to marry him with the goddess Pelts as officiant.

“Incredible,” I muttered, but it was lost even to me under the thwip-thwap of the birds’ hairpin maneuvering. Wanda’s efforts were not limited to just those two. She had also paired Giggles, a neurotic woman with access to far too much alcohol than could be beneficial to her condition, with Godwin Hammerstein, our resident playwright who hadn’t yet written a play.

Just as with Giselle and Porter they had almost snapped together, and it suddenly made sense to me, and likely made far more sense to them. Now she could distract herself by encouraging him, babble to keep him from self-doubt, and their combined efforts to coax a script out of him like a crab from its sandy burrow would either succeed or wind up far too lubricated by the bottle of wine they’d opened and shared hours earlier. They might make something else instead, with even better results.

My own confidence in the both of them shot at the sight of their spontaneous joy. (They seemed to compliment each other’s dancing, though Wanda had complete control over their orientation and speed.) Giggles had the tendency to blurt unhelpful things, but so loved to be social, and in this new light I saw her as an actress, saying only what Godwin had written, partly inspired by her wine, their strengths and resources and affection feeding into each other in a spirited tumble that I hoped would not end.

Many other couples were formed, some of them only functional enough to create calm in the moment, but all of them successful to at least that degree. Mr. Burstyn’s wife, who had produced children for him the way he expected his mines to turn out various minerals, had her hands and her staff’s hands full at all hours, and the twenty-fifth through twenty-eighth hour of the day Burstyn would have purchased for her if he could, so she was not there to be paired with him.

Instead he was holding the shoulders of his son Zachariah, who had ascended to try and teach balance before Wanda had come along and made it entirely unnecessary. His father was rattling off to him, concentration on his ruddy face, and I don’t doubt it was some adjustment to his plans now that his goddess had entered and solved his ‘contribution’.

That was the man’s realest problem. Wanda granted security, in a physical sense yes, but in the long run danger can come for anyone, just less frequently under the full protection of an heir. What was most valuable was peace of mind, the knowledge that always you were in her thoughts, and that there was real power being deployed in your best interest, good health, and eventual happiness.

If he had been secure in this, rather than desperate for approval in excess of what his peers now received by default, he would not have dug up those accursed scales like they were nothing more than shale, and would not have put on this charade of a training ground. Then the targets would have been far more scattered; it would have been harder to strike so mortal a wound with a fiery arrow in our meadow flank.

At first I thought Death had come, for this was the form I’d last seen him wear, robed in fire, brandishing rock. His token on the amblush board bore wooden streak tapering into the sky, implying the plummet Quarantown now had to witness and hear as the immolation of the very wind.

Out of the wide air, out of an invisible distance, came streaking a blazing missile of red. Shot at us malevolently, it struck painfully true, piercing and destroying the quivering black flesh of the ducks’ cloud and scattering them. All the people would have been cast away, tumbling weightlessly, but as they fled the ducks tore at their scaly ornaments, broke or removed most of them. Thus we fell a little too quickly, injury not entirely avoided.

Nor death. The missile had struck a pair, broke it in two, destroyed one. Doppler and his boy. Upon landing on my backside my chest shot up and I saw the man in a similar position, staring at a crater before him, the clods of the impact still raining around us. At its bottom sat the crumpled and burned remains of Zachariah, his bones broken and his flesh blackened in an instant.

In organizing the people for Wanda’s approval, little time had been spent on the children. Their youth meant they had infinite potential, and they would mostly go as their parents did. Naturally they would come to being acolytes on their own, curiosity drawing them to their goddess. And I had my own child to contend with; little Nepenthe had the same habits as regular children, such as putting unwise items in her mouth, only with her heritage those items were sometimes live animals.

It was a blessing that she was far from the clearing that day, watched by her typical sitter in our cozy train stop that was hardly more than a platform and a vestibule. She was safe, but not happy. There was no need to confirm, for she was an heir like her mother, and would’ve felt the death of one of her mother’s people, especially the result of a deliberate attack. Nepenthe surely wept, as did we all.

In addition to his tears Doppler screamed. He scrambled to the edge of the crater. The ground was still hot from the impact, it scalded his hands, but he’d never feared diving into the earth and he would not hesitate now if it meant he could dig his son out of an early grave. The man was prevented from entering by our enemies, who had been contained in the meteoric projectile, and who now stood by as if they’d done nothing less mundane than stroll out of the woods under parasols.

One of them kicked Doppler, tossed him a great distance. A few ducks flapped down behind him to slow his rolling. I was not far behind in my duties even while wiping away tears. This loss was all of ours, a pistol shot to our collective heart, and the difficulty was not in imagining how Doppler felt but in understanding how Wanda would manage to contain her fury enough to direct it effectively.

I felt that too, like a sunrise flashing into a ceiling-consuming fire. It was overhead somewhere though, and my people dashed upon the dirt. I helped up Porter and Giggles, shoved them toward Doppler, ordered them, as kindly as I could, to see to him and get the man back to his family. They obeyed, his wailing all the louder once they got him on his feet, its volume paradoxically maintained despite the growing distance until fully outside the threshold of human ability to hear it.

Only then could I turn back and begin telling the others to disperse, to return to their homes and cower there while Wanda and I handled what only we could handle, for among the two who had dealt this vicious blow one was no stranger to me, and the other I could guess at, painful as it was to do so.

“Let them stay and watch,” the one I knew shouted, stepping around the crater, her eyes glued on Wanda as she descended and planted her feet. Her furs maintained a volume of trapped air, doubling her size, each and every strand rattling like a saber. A splash of red on her mouth was not lipstick, but her own blood, as she had bitten the inside of her cheek, unable to suppress her rabid rage entirely. She had to drip feed it her own life just to maintain it.

An heir of Cain she has always been, but the Abel-bodied too know the strain that can come with their mother’s visit, especially when she is a critical, conniving, cannibalistic woman like Excoria Vainglory Diatribe. Long of grimace, short of patience, holding herself like a loaded gun with a loose trigger, the eldest heir I knew lifted her burgundy dress with both hands and daintily stepped away from the smithereens she’d made of poor Zachariah, merciful compared to what she’d done to the authors and poets at the Villa Diodati.

With her was, if I guessed correctly, the next eldest. An heir’s three names could be like curses, or an incantation, more powerful with each one heard, so Wanda had protected me in shady ignorance under her family tree. By this time however, I already knew several crucial facts about the litter from whence my hellcat had spawned.

There were seven in total. I had met five in person, and we’d tangled with a sixth from a distance: Goriana the youngest, Melmoth, Ruthven, Matilda, Wanda, Devorgoil the stillborn… All but Devor had been referred to as her ‘little’ siblings at one point or another. The specter-barber was her elder, but never called the eldest.

All I knew of this new creature was that she had murdered Zachariah and that she was the firstborn of Diodati, perhaps most infused with the evils of what fed her mother in the later stages.

Excoria had subtlety, hidden away somewhere under smug dismissiveness; this new heir was forged from the stuff. And yes, I do say that in light of their bombastic and fiery entrance, which I suspect was the mother’s idea.

The eldest was tall, elegant in thinness rather than gangly. Flat dark hair was pulled back, tucked away under her clothes, which I could not categorize for they bore no era or style. If I had to make a comparison I would say she had just removed the face mask from a fencer’s outfit. It was like cloth armor, and as I realized that I thought it might protect against some of that otherworldly cold one encounters when they pay a visit to the world serpent.

Her eyes were like that distant compacted death, black and bordered with ghostly wisps of white-gold. She was tight-lipped and of earthen skin, which had a red undertone like an orange dune under a once in a century rainfall, compacted darker and more aware. This new creature examined not us, but our town and the many invisible modifications Wanda had made to it.

Before I had even the first of her three names I saw what Wanda saw, and as with the serpent’s knowledge we both knew what it was though we had never seen it before. In her eldest sibling’s hand there was a rock, shaped as a wedge, weathered smooth by time, its flat side’s slightly curved edge not chipped as it should have been.

Upon that side was a dashed stain, a darkness suggestive of crimson. Across that stain was writ the whole history of the heirs of Cain, for that was the hand ax that split the human family tree in twain. Here, having already murdered on our doorstep, was the first object ever used to perform such an act: a meteor cast between men. All warfare, all strife, all the strangling betrayal that silenced contentious households behind closed doors and drawn curtains stemmed from this, what had smote my ancestor Abel upon the blank canvas of his ignorance, the first stroke of an incomplete portrait of our kind that might receive plenty of new color this day.

“The rock of Cain!” Wanda shouted as she came to my side. Her furs were so alive that individual hairs in the sable collar were launching, arcing like dolphins, and disappearing back into the sea of their brethren. Her fear would never be as strong as her resolve, or even her anger, but I’d never seen it at such an obvious height.

Why shouldn’t she be afraid? For while it is true that no heir can kill another directly, having never earned the indivisible power and right as they had with my branch, her elder sibling now held what had been used to alter such facts before. We had spoken of the rock prior, of its lore, of its supposed location, and of its likely power: with it an heir could strike down another.

Colossal implications were but mist I blew away. It did not matter to me if such an act would cause another fork in the road of man, if it would then allow all heirs to destroy each other, for the only outcome that mattered to me was the endgame of that day, that clearing, that showdown between my wife and her jealous family.

Here was a way I could lose her. Not to denigrate the many wonderful women of the world, but Wanda was different, even more than her bloodline would suggest. Her possessions are a part of her, and I had worked my hardest to become one of those possessions. When I gained a skill as I did with prophecy I did so for her, to justify more time in her hands and under her focus. Life was finding uses for myself so that I would be used, by her, and by no other. I would crumble in anyone else’s hands.

If she lost her life mine would go with it. Even my concern for the people of Quarantown would not keep me tethered to the Earth. Life would remain, but lose all vitality, a wooden carving petrified to an inert stone, a mere grave marker. Nor would our daughter keep me, Wanda’s blood in her veins gifted, not possessed by the true Venus of furs. Nepenthe needed only a push away, as if on a raft, with one trusted person to watch over her, and she would survive, grow into a mighty heir herself. She did not need me, which I was glad for.

“I’d best say it,” Wanda addressed us all, “and call you a trespasser before you say it and call yourself a conqueror. You are not welcome here Janizary Adjitant Judgment. Nor are you mother! Nor is that rock! You’ve just killed a child of mine, an orphan of this cruel world nestled under my wing, and for that you should suffer eternally.” Her eyes crackled to life, bolts of hatred streaming up out of them as I’d only seen when she charged her sister Goriana on all fours before expelling her from the city, as she surely planned to do now; that particular rock was not immune to becoming nothing more than a stepping stone for her enemies to depart on.

“Please, child of mine, stop this ghastly display,” Excoria demanded. “You knew I was coming, or you would have if you had interpreted your own pet’s prophecy correctly.” She referred to the one I had made when Wanda was ill with the delirium, still my masterpiece at that point, torn from the mouth of one of the men Lady Diatribe had flayed and devoured as he screamed his last. “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,” she recited.

Those were Byron’s words, and then mine, now Excoria and Janizary attempted to make them theirs. Prophecy was a matter of interpretation, of applied heir power after the fact of its authoring. Wanda and I had already processed it in our own way, used it to gain the serpent’s knowledge and rid ourselves of flaws. But her mother had heard it too, used it in her own way. Somehow those words that had most certainly, fatefully, referred to the world serpent for me now referred to Janizary for her.

“Have you nothing to say sister?” Wanda asked she who had not yet spoken, who had not yet looked us in the eye. When she did there was harsh disgust sculpted onto her expression. I knew nothing of her but that she was our enemy. The other siblings were more complex, or at least did not hide their complexity. Several of them had or pretended at kindness, affection. Not this one. She came with a rock, already lubricated with blood for its utilitarian purpose, seeking to make it industrial by its repetition. “Are you but mother’s puppet in this!?”

“No one who wields this is a puppet,” our invader finally said, hefting the rock. “She told me what goes on here, obviously to convince me to intervene and thus risk nothing of herself. What you do here threatens my journey.”

“And you’ve threatened Wanda’s prophecy,” I asserted, knowing that anyone Abel-bodied had to act to be truly seen by the heirs. “Already sullied it in fact. What journey could justify these heinous acts?”

“She’s been in the desert,” Wanda answered for her, “doing nothing.”

“Lasting,” Janizary countered. “When I am as timeless as death it will be conquered. The sands mummify and bury. They preserve. Together with them I will wait out the rot of Abel, emerge into a scoured and clean world where our line, the true line, may properly begin.

Nothing they do could bring me out of my trance prematurely. It is you, sister, who has forced this. The time to try and master these monkeys is long past. Be as the leopard, and take them from the trees as food when needed, and do not try to inculcate ambition into minds that cannot grasp it. You might as well dash their brains with this; the end result will be the same.”

“One day I will see a future that far, to the very hour you emerge expecting a clean slate,” I declared, “and the both of us will see nothing but the domain of Wanda Blasphemer Pelts: a world thriving in her presence, flourishing in her demands, rising to her expectations. What you have come to stop will be made inevitable, by our faith.”

“Do you ever shut your mouth?” Excoria asked of me, polite pretense cast aside. “If you could we wouldn’t worry so much about you two exposing the heirs to the world at large. They won’t let you take over their governments, their industries, their false gods, no matter how insidiously you try, nor will they differentiate between you and us after they’ve mobilized! And by that time they’ll have guns that can march all by themselves or some other absurd blasphemy against nature.”

“Your cowardice at the reach of my power is no concern of mine,” Wanda snarled righteously. “Drop the rock as payment for the life you have stolen, then depart.” I looked over my shoulder, saw that not all the townsfolk had obeyed me. They watched from behind trees, around houses, and there was a cluster of them on the overlook in the distance. This was the fate of their goddess; of course they would bear witness.

“Aren’t you the least bit curious where we came across such an antique?” Excoria asked. “It’s not been seen for over three hundred years.”

“It belongs to me now,” Wanda claimed with such authority that my skin prickled, conditioned to become more sensitive when she used that tone with me in the intimate dark of the bedroom. She could find me in pitch black, from a pasture away, by just the way the rise of my gooseflesh caressed the air. “That’s all that’s relevant.”

“From thy own lip I drew the charm,” their mother reminded, again from my prophecy, “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.” Her reading of that section was now plain to us. ‘Thy own lip’ referred to my prophecy, used by her. ‘On thy head’ was interpreted as the weak spot for which they should aim. A blunt reading in my opinion, one that led them to choose a blunt instrument. The line about the trial probably pointed in the direction of the rock, which turned all of Cain’s existence into a trial of isolation, suspicion, and endless attempts to master the world rather than live in it.

“If you got the idea from my work you must have then decided to visit the ‘monster of the upper sky’,” I said, working through it myself, “where you found the ‘blackest blood’ in the ‘blackest spring’.” Death, wrapped in the shroud of the world serpent. It struck me, again meteorically. He’d been in possession of it, the slippery devil. If I wasn’t so utterly destroyed by gaining the knowledge I might have been able to claim it from him, prevent all of this.

“What would make the world serpent give that to you Janizary?” Wanda asked, having arrived at the same conclusion. “I know mother didn’t bother to go.”

“The cold gets into an old woman’s bones,” Excoria dismissed.

“He was returning it,” the eldest daughter claimed, stepping away from the crater and the evil smoke it still issued. We’d emptied the air of onlookers, yet the space tightened about us as a knot: two strands of prophecy weaving skillfully until the conflicting conclusions balled it all up. “He has received too many visitors of late, disturbing his slumber. He thought perhaps they were after this, so he sent me away with it.

Where its absence will grant him peace, its wielding will grant me the same. I will return to my shifting tomb once you, the most unworthy of us, have been pruned.”

“Unworthy!?” I honked, better than the drunkest and most amorous of Christmas geese. “Wanda has founded paradise! Her love for us is the exact opposition of whichever desert you washed up from! Bite your tongue… off! And leave it alongside the rock!”

“Thank you darling,” Wanda complimented me sweetly, still finding time and space for me under the threat of Cain’s granite guillotine. Her face darkened as it turned back to her family. “Yes, I’ll have the tongue as well, if only to end this interminable jabbering.”

Her confidence had inflated mine, but it came sputtering out of me when Janizary, without the necessary build-up as far as I could perceive, leapt the remaining distance between their arrival point and Wanda. Her landing sprayed me with dirt, knocked me over, but didn’t cause Wanda to blink.

The two heirs were a hair’s breadth apart, Janizary far the taller, staring into each other, daring the other to be one iota less godly, thus granting an opportunity to strike. None came, so Janizary resorted to the terms planned, no doubt contributed to by my considerate mother-in-law.

“If you are truly divine then you have nothing to fear from this,” the elder challenged, brandishing the rock. This close I felt its aura: a dull knife under my scalp. A mountain rising between me and my own life. “We will have a duel. You wield this town and your disciples as you wish. I will wield but a simple rock, chosen only through an opportune and furious moment, the briefest of starts in my long rest.”

“To the death for me, to forfeit for you sister,” Wanda hissed back; I expected her to call the terms egregious, unfair. They were. If she’d had a second tongue, not impossible for an heir I assume, I would’ve demanded that one as well for the sheer gall.

“Yes,” Janizary confirmed. Wanda bristled; her pert little fangs seemed to lengthen more than I’d ever seen. Weapons hidden and primed shuffled under her furs, rearranging themselves in the hot air of her intention.

“A duel it is then.”

“What!?” I blurted again. My Wanda looked to me, all the electricity passing from her eyes. Her message rooted me, installed itself in my every nerve, prepared my muscles under my hide just as her secret claws and devices did under her exquisite pelt. My body already knew what to do, but she chose to inform my soul aloud.

“Severin, be a dear, and fetch a way to make her forfeit.” I would never contradict her. Any prophecy that said I would was a forgery. I had no desire to do so now, but I did not know how to grant her request.

“H-how much time do I have?”

“Until I get tired,” she answered with a smirk that sharpened all her teeth. And with no further warning her hand shot out, clamped around Janizary’s rock-wielding wrist, locked it in place so Wanda’s second paw could strike, not from across her waist, but out from the same sleeve.

A metal maw on a chain slid across my Wanda’s feminine wrist and bit down on Janizary fiercely. That was a favorite toy of hers, a hunter’s trap in our woods disarmed and turned traitor. Now was the highlight of its adventures at her side, for it chained the two heirs together and enclosed the rock of Cain, preventing it from being swung effectively.

But no cry of shock or pain from Janizary. Her face was a wall of slate under a glistering sun. The trap loosened only enough to bite further and further up her arm, but all that fell from the first punctures was a stream of red sand. There was her power. All heirs chose what to invest their godly strength in. Wanda had chosen her furs, the animals of the wood, the trap, me, and Janizary had the desert she had perhaps already spent a lifetime with. Each day she became more like it, more immune to what harmed wetter flesh and faster hearts.

With a stomp that dented the Earth and a mighty grunt Janizary grabbed Wanda by the shoulders, ignoring that her furs had become stabbing needles, and hurled my love a great distance, cut short only by the chain keeping them connected. The two entered into a tug of war, but Wanda shot me a glance, giving me permission to get on with it.

Awkwardly, stiffly, I turned and started walking. Where was I going? I had no idea. Things had to start somewhere though, and that field wasn’t much of anywhere. If any tool could help us it would be in town, so with each step I flipped through the inventory in my mind in search of anything that could possibly go one on one with the very rock of Cain. The process was interrupted by Excoria coming up alongside me. I chose not to look at the smile I sensed on her face.

“Where are you going Severin? Don’t you want to watch the fight?”

“Do you intend to interfere with me mother?”

“Stop with this mother nonsense you barely-Abel! If I felt like interfering I wouldn’t have brought a daughter at all.”

“And you’ve brought the only one you have that wishes to obliterate Quarantown completely, rather than usurp her throne. One might think, if you had the confidence of a true goddess, you would just keep to your own business, cognizant of the fact that no coalition of barely-Abels could ensnare and destroy you.” There might’ve been rage on her face, but I couldn’t see it as she checked over her shoulder. At least one of us wanted to watch the fight.

“With all this talk of tongues perhaps I should have yours.”

“One might think that, not this one. My job is not to think. I but peer into the distance from the metaphorical crow’s nest.”

“And what do you see on the horizon?”

“Victory.” Excoria scoffed, but her love of bloodshed overpowered her curiosity into my strategy; she fled back to her warring children. Only then was I free to panic in my search for ideas. Wanda kept all of her most invested items on her person, which was her furs, as her body was her god.

She’d opened the fight with the animal trap. The furs themselves could capture the rock, sequester it away in her hot hidden shadow where she kept many things, but Wanda must have believed Janizary’s grip on it was unbreakable, otherwise she would not have sent me off in search.

We had her dead brother Ruthven close by, and he might help defend Quarantown so there was still something to steal for himself, but his next resurrection could have been months away. In addition he was weakened in strong sunlight, the tragic meteor having arrived out of a cloudless sky.

I stopped cold. The meteor. Not the one out of the sky, not an interpretation of my (latest?) prophecy that favored the invaders, but the one we’d discovered in amblush. We’d already encountered the ‘contagion of a mother’s hate breathed on her child’s destroyer’ come out of ‘yon wide air’, and now it was time for the ‘inarticulate people of the dead’ and their ‘treasured spell’.

Amblush was the game of all heirs, not just the clan Diodati. Its pieces were moved by Death and the dead alike. Always he participated, evaded their search for his weakness, one merely assumed to exist. The game had been played across many expansive generations of demigod, yet as far as Wanda and I knew, no one had discovered death’s third player status.

When Janizary emerged from her shifting tomb, after Abel-kind’s end, she would then go to work trying to defeat death, now that all the distractions, now that all his unwitting minions, had left existence. To do that she would still need tools to fight with, clues to the truth, and I believed the meteor on the amblush board was one of them. If she had it she might even be anxious enough to pursue death immediately that she would disregard all of humanity still being in the way.

It was a lofty hope, and the only idea I had. All it required was showing her the meteor token, and her being curious enough to ask after it. So what I needed was the amblush board. Our home. Our game cabinet. Not far.

Wanda kept me in the best shape she could, but I was never one for strenuous exercise outside a tangle of bed sheets, which left me huffing and puffing by the time I got indoors, dropped painfully to my knees, and ripped the board from the cabinet. The pieces went flying; I scrambled to gather them and practically stamp all eighteen to their starting positions.

“I already know you’re there!” I barked at death, but the meteor did not appear in the dark center. The ritual had to be repeated. Recalling which pieces remained in play and their exact positions at the time was not difficult. I went to rearranging them with devilish speed, snatching away the defeated, retreating to the edge of the world with the others, turning them inward to create a web of sight lines that covered all blind spots. He could not hide from me.

Somehow, the meteor did not strike. What was wrong? The answer needed to come quickly, still hurting me when it did. The ritual was not properly repeated. Amblush’s first real lesson to the novice player is that they cannot practice away their foolish mistakes in isolation before debuting. It only functions with a true opponent; how else would death get the conflict desired?

This presented a much greater problem. No ordinary opponent would do. They would be completely lost without what I knew, just as I was until I knew it. Doing their absolute best would result in pieces going missing, in even my pieces being somewhere nonsensical. That was the game I played so long with Mergini, and while it was good fun it only ever felt like we were getting closer to understanding the rules.

Nobody who knew was available to play out the meteor scenario with me. Wanda was occupied, Excoria was against us. She thought so little of me that she would not acquiesce to a challenge that would force her to take her eyes from the only contest she cared about: one of her children bludgeoning the other to death.

Ruthven too dead. Devorgoil would help, but the last time I summoned him I was only barely successful, nearly lost my life in the process. The knowledge would have to be bestowed then, and the only way was to send one of the Quarantowners to the world serpent, now with the additional danger of him being irritated, since he had apparently sent the rock hurtling back to Earth to dissuade visitors.

Did we have time? Hours it would take, at the very least, and I had no idea if Wanda could last that long in sustained combat with another heir, let alone one wielding the rock of Cain. And if so, who? To send someone to receive this knowledge was an act of cruelty. Even Wanda, who spoon feeds me cruelty in a controlled manner to take pleasure in my fits, had not sent me. I had tasked myself with its acquisition.

The people had pledged themselves to Wanda, would do it if asked. I didn’t want them to suffer under such a burden, not Porter, Giselle, Giggles, or any of the others. Arguably Doppler was the best candidate. He would be the most eager to volunteer, for power, for vengeance over his son, and once he knew he would shut his mouth about certain things in the future.

Alongside the stone I swallowed as I stared at the board was the realization that I would not send him either, not after what he’d just suffered. He couldn’t make the decision responsibly. Desperate beyond measure, I settled on rushing the board over to the cave of prophecy, where dwelt the spirits of heirs long past. Perhaps one of them could become corporeal enough to assist me.

It was a long shot, and I only took part of it, for a third of the way there, under a sky that now couldn’t stop issuing developments, I was met by a godsend, a Wandasend, an angel on black wings delivered to me across the twine of time she stretched to its breaking point: Mergini. He landed right in front of me to halt my sprint, causing me to spill amblush pieces.

As I bent down to gather them he waddled close, let me see what had granted him his uncharacteristically elegant glide. About his neck there was a brace of gray world serpent scale, cut to a custom fit. The sight brought back a memory that was not of note until just then. Mergini had not been in the charge of all the other ducks. Of course he would have a high rank among the birds now guarding our sky; the only reason he would not have been present, issuing quacking orders, was a task of even greater importance.

And one he had assigned himself. I always knew that duck had ambition, that he wished to make Wanda proud just as the rest of us did. Now that all the ducks were to be entered into active service he thought he needed something to distinguish himself from the flock, choosing the loftiest goal possible.

He wished to know. Understanding death was an even dicier prospect for a creature so likely to wind up plucked and hooked in a butcher shop window, but he had taken to the challenge regardless. We still did not communicate with words (we had no need of them), so it wasn’t immediately clear who had fitted his scale.

Of course, Zachariah. He had been manning them at the flight practice, for an unknown amount of time before I arrived. The young man was old enough to do it skillfully, but still invigorated with enough childhood whimsy to both descend to Mergini’s level and try and interpret his requests. As soon as I could, assuming I survived, I would tell Doppler and the rest of his family that he had saved us all from being shattered upon the brutal bluff of the heirs.

“Mergini, my son! You have no idea how happy I am to see you!” I embraced him, let him nibble my tattered ear affectionately. In truth, it might not have been affection. This was his return from truly learning of death, which had made Cain, and myself, homicidally turbulent. Heirs, born with it, treated their fellows as, at best, rivals. Again my dear ducky boy’s brilliance shown, glossier than his black coat and regal olivine bill. As a duck, a possession by a predatory instinct had very little to subvert into weaponry: no claws, no fangs, and no mass to throw around.

He could be distracted by something he loved, those chaotic destructive urges redirected, just as Wanda and I had made dangerous love in the aftermath of my history lesson, all my hostility diffused into bumps and bruises on knees and elbows as we rolled across the hardwood. Mergini would instead have a game of amblush.

“Listen closely Mergini,” I instructed, holding his head still, speaking into his caviar eyes. “Wanda is caught in a life or death duel with her eldest sister. Only a demonstration of amblush can stall them. We must play, and you must follow my lead, with the heirs watching. Finally, we will really play! Do you understand?”

He quacked. What an unbelievably good boy. On both wing and scale he was the faster, his flight giving him enough of a vantage to show me where the fight had moved in the course of the last minutes. Wanda and Janizary were no longer in the field, having drifted instead toward the mountain.

Again I was forced to sprint, arms unable to pump as they held both the board and all its pieces against my chest, like it was an open book and I was trying to prevent all the world from spying its secrets. Over the last roll in the land before I could see the entrance to my cave I spotted them, both worse for wear.

My Venus was bloodied, her furs unable to slough off the crimson dye as they usually could. The bridge of her nose was smashed open, all her freckles hidden, in what had to be a glancing blow from the rock. The white hot hate in her eyes had gone cloudy. Clothing in tatters, I saw splotched bruises all across her bare legs and feet. Between us her animal trap and its chain were smote across the ground in a hundred pieces, leaving nothing to contain the rock but Janizary’s hand.

Her grip had not given way, despite the numerous punctures and scratches dropping streams of red sand, like a ripped bag of flour. Her cloth armor was torn, peeling as an onion, revealing an additional layer underneath.

The damage was clear… and insufficient to weaken or tire either of them. Wanda pounced on Janizary from across a wide gap, leaping as high as Mergini flew. The elder caught her, unable to swing with the rock while redirecting Wanda’s weight, so my love was tossed backward into the wall of the mountain, where her claws found purchase and prevented her from sliding down.

Briefly she looked to me like her own portrait hanging on the wall, something still missing from our domicile. My heart throbbed, ached, joining my taxed lungs. How I despised these events, denying me the opportunity to worship her every domestic image. I yearned for our routine, nothing but love and nipping play day in and day out, further blurring my time into ecstasy.

Her elevation also revealed a complication to our plan. They weren’t going to stop on our account; we had to be able to follow them closely. I needed more air than my haricot vert legs could grant me.

“I’m sorry to throw off the perfect balance of this craftsmanship Mergini, but I need a little lift.” He bowed to me and, gently as possible, I snapped off two edge pieces of the scale brace from either side and inserted them into my sleeves as cuff links. My arms then lifted on their own, but I was able to force them down, where they picked our supplies back up.

Wanda gouged lines in the mountainside when she decided to descend, with Janizary charging to meet her. She would’ve had my goddess butt heads with the rock, but Wanda swallowed her foe’s hand with a tail of her furs, the skins tightening to form a bag. For now they were locked in place, pushing, looking for hidden reserves of strength. It lulled enough for our game to begin.

“Now Mergini, so that Janizary sees our every move!” He flew to them and I leapt, testing the buoyancy of my world serpent ornamentation. It was enough to get me close, still enough gravity present for me to fall with some speed. If my partner in life, the responsible owner and gardener of my suffering, had been a mere human I would guess she would be perplexed and disgusted by my behavior as I sat down on the ground next to their life and death struggle, set up a game board, and challenged the duck nestling across from me.

But she was Wanda. The trust was a mighty wave underneath her, allowing her to give her all without even looking at us. Whatever I did it was with her help, on our behalf, and for the greatest good our combined efforts could conjure. It was Janizary who glanced askew, furrowed her brow in confusion.

Mergini was playing as gray, so the first move was his and consisted of shifting the darkness piece down its starting spiral of circles.

“The equatorial dusk, a classic opening,” I mused, suppressing my taxed breathing as much as possible. Then I moved to take my harvest moon and begin a moon train around the edge of the board, my personal favorite opener, but Janizary didn’t choose to lollygag long enough to see it. She went right back to trying to murder my wife, tossing the both of them away from us, in the process rolling over the amusing indignity of Lord Ruthven’s unmarked grave.

Wanda exercised the advantage of familiarity, thrusting both her legs into the soil just as their tumble crossed over. Her feet found the loose frequently-disturbed stuff about the vampire’s body, then hooked her toes underneath his torso to anchor herself. That forcibly stalled them, which she surely had done for my benefit and not her own, as it gave Janizary the room to strike at her ribs with the rock. She did. I heard the pain in Wanda’s growl, felt an echo of what she suffered tighten my own chest. I had to speak regardless.

“The pieces mustn’t fall,” I wheezed at Mergini. “The game must progress intact. Here we go!” I stood and raised the board, most of my concentration on keeping it level, soon to be all once we were airborne. To stabilize me further Mergini bit the opposite edge of it, flapping his wings with a skill a mere man couldn’t discern.

Together we flew across the gap, spinning slowly; a touch more force and the pieces would have been flung away. Since I trusted my feathered friend to make the minute adjustments I had the full responsibility of the landing. The procedure was a success, quite the nuisance to have to insert between turns of the world’s most advanced game of tactics, but Wanda suffered so much more, as I continued to hear in my right ear: rock against flank. Reaching out couldn’t help her, resulting only in me losing my arm.

I needed the limb to make my next move, which drew criticism, not from Janizary, but from Excoria, whom I had, in a small blessing, forgotten all about until she leaned over and her shadow darkened our board.

“What are you doing?” she asked, affronted. “Move your world serpent skin backward you dolt. That’s the best move. Wanda, did you teach him to play this atrociously?”

“That might be the best move,” I corrected so Wanda wouldn’t have to spit an answer, “if I was trying to kill. We’re trying to live.” Mergini quacked in agreement, then made his own move. World serpent forward, out of its spoke. He was following my lead. We had to take some of each other’s pieces, but only as bait to draw in our real prey.

“Nonsense,” Excoria grumbled. “You’re not worthy of touching one of these boards. Give it to me, I’ll show you.” I had to put my hand between her approaching painted claw and the game, practically serving it to her with cream sauce and chives.

“You said you were not interfering,” I reminded her before she could interfere with the proper flow of my blood. “My turn again.” Next I would be willingly sacrificing the middle of my moon train to Mergini’s swallowing crater piece, but before we could act it out the rock of Cain was flung backward, to the mountain wall, where it became lodged in one of the dirt and weed-loaded outcroppings.

So began a mad scramble between the two siblings to claim it, the tumbling limbs of which might have disrupted our game if Mergini hadn’t thought quickly and used his bill to drag it away from them. Each of the heirs’ faces was smashed into the ground at least once before they made it to the steep incline. They then proceeded to make it up the incline.

“Damn it,” I snapped, half-rising and tiptoeing to Mergini, who was already prepared for our next maneuver. We shuffled over a few steps, not ready to jump, for the fight had halted far up the rocky wall. Without claws or godly strength we had no way to stabilize our play up there. Our only choice was to make another request of my taxed Venus. “A shelf would suit us well!” I shouted to her, though her face was invisibly pressed into the wall, her throat in Janizary’s crushing vice.

We jumped, trusting her to understand and act. The task was silently handed off to her furs, the tails of which squeezed out from under Janizary’s knee and slapped at the wall next to their struggle, looking for the best spot. That slapping became scorpion-barb stabbing as the furs produced some tool from their hidden folds, a blade or perhaps something as mundane as a corkscrew from our kitchen, tucked out of my sight so I might focus on her instead of dinner preparations.

The wild stabbing freed chips, clods, and clouds. By the time we were arcing down it had gouged out a horizontal slot and several hand and footholds for me. Wanda could see what I saw whenever she wanted, all parts of my body were offered to her altar; she must have used my eyes to judge where we were going to land.

The board slid into place like a baking stone into an oven. Mergini used the scale’s power to fly upside down, giving him the only acceptable vantage on his pieces now that several were under the shade of the slot. Janizary wasn’t watching, until I hummed obnoxiously loud sounds of contemplation. If I’d had a free hand I would’ve rubbed my chin.

When she finally looked over I enacted the by-now stale decision. It would baffle any experienced player of the game, just as it did Excoria as she clambered up alongside once more, dress ill-suited to climbing now ripped through by both of her legs. This woman-shaped monster surely had the stamina of an ancient dragon; her huffing and puffing and loose strands of hair were just to show her irritation that the front row seat kept moving. One look at the board had her crowing.

“Hah! You’re going to get beaten by a duck Severin! That birdbrain knows more than you.” She addressed Mergini directly. “Go on, take his world serpent skin. Then go to the center and resurrect your constellation.” The duck disobeyed, moving his comet out of its aggressive orbit, effectively ending its bloody rampage through my forces, and putting it on a course for an outermost space. “What!? You two are mocking me. You’re making this up as you go along.”

“Perhaps this is how a prophet plays amblush,” Janizary commented, shocking me, though she didn’t look our way. She had avoided commenting on me directly since her arrival. I was beneath her station, until these amblush antics dragged her down to our level. Would you not be curious if the cockroaches next to your foot neglected to skitter away and instead brought out backgammon?

Her attention was partly snared, but it did not interrupt the fight. Wanda’s arms were flailing, looking for purchase in sand-weathered flesh rather than rock. Janizary was cloaked in streams of the red sand she’d produced, a supernatural wind pushing them to redirect my love’s talons. The rock of Cain was pressed against the mountainside by Janizary’s elbow.

It wouldn’t take long for her to find the right position, now that Wanda was pinned in a deepening divot, where Janizary could freely wield her dreaded weapon for one final blow. Mergini and I had to play quickly, confoundingly. We were down to seconds per move. Some caution was still required, as even in collaboration we would have to take certain pieces if we arranged them incorrectly, which might leave us with too few to cover the whole of the board with our combined vision.

My sweaty left hand threatened to drop me to my death, my sweatier right doing the same for my blood moon. Mergini’s wings must have been all the more fatigued, considering he’d been flapping through another realm for the past few hours. Still he managed to bend his neck, push the tokens stuck under the overhang.

Another piece made its move, rose into the air, belonging to neither of us. Janizary had the rock of her people, the will to reduce their number, and the hard won opportunity to drive it into my Wanda’s skull. She bravely gurgled defiance from the other end, biting down on her sister’s hand, choking on a red umbral sand. No. Time was slow and fast at once, just like it used to be. Wanda’s control had slipped. This was the terror of life without her, my tolerance of it totally gone. It was Mergini’s turn, thank goodness. He kept his head and completed the circle. Our true foe was surrounded.

“Aha!” I squawked, nearly losing my footing. “Player the third arrives!” Excoria’s eyes. Janizary’s eyes. All the remaining eyes of amblush. They all saw. The world seemed to shrink, the mountain shed dandruff instead of stones, as the meteor began existing at the center of the board.

“What the hell is that!?” Miss Diatribe demanded. Janizary said nothing, just stared, but Wanda’s head suddenly emerged from the wall, gasping for breath. Both her eyes were clasped in a raccoon mask of bruises. She coughed red dust. Freewheeling rage was barely contained by her taut skin. Chips of her own teeth clung to her cheeks magically, hoping to be used as caltrops should Janizary’s punch stroll across her face. I knew nothing more gorgeous in the world. I had been tuned to not even be capable of it. Wanda. Together we triumphed, somehow holding each other over the precipice of death.

“That is the owner of the tool called amblush,” I explained, “and the same owner of that rock in your hand Janizary. Both come from that icy black workshop above the sky and beneath the sea. Their purpose is the same: draw those who know, who might one day stand a chance of writing the world’s laws, closer to their doom.

For you see death watches all of these contests. Our efforts in them are so helpful and amusing. That world you await, empty of me and mine? It is a world where death has mostly won. You will emerge with but one solitary piece on a board hewn by and belonging to your ultimate enemy.

You can play that game, and lose, like the rest of us, or you can drop that rock. We’ll show you how we sniffed this enemy out.” I snatched the meteor knowing full well I would fall, and full well that the tails of Wanda’s furs would catch me and hoist me aloft. Janizary saw the piece was solid, no illusion. “Quarantown can craft strategies, and surveil, and share with those who only emerge occasionally.”

She wanted to take it, but she had no furs, no tools, no overlapping webs of familiars and disciples. The only hand that could clutched the rock of Cain. Not a word came from Excoria Vainglory Diatribe, all of them having spilled out and tumbled down the mountain in a humiliating landslide. In all her years, perhaps centuries, she’d never learned so much about death as Wanda and I had through loving collaboration.

They would have to humble themselves in order to learn, and we had just demonstrated the only way to survive was to learn. Their progress would be slow without the flash inferno of falling in love. By some other route they would have to come to the conclusion that Wanda had progressed so much further than them not through oppression, but through the radiating glory of true righteous strength. She had only the dominion I gift-wrapped and gave her on bent knee, alloying us to an everlasting empire’s fortitude so much greater than they could generate through the brutal taking and backbreaking of thralls.

If Janizary truly wanted to advance she had to leave the stone age. Her eyes were mostly empty, but what did reside there was desire. Desire to climb down, to stop embarrassing herself under a guffawing Death, desire to rest and contemplate.

“We will show you what we learn,” Wanda promised, drooling the blood of sincerity. “Swear not to get in my way. I will swear off yours. Then we will share, sister.” I turned to Excoria, white as a Quarantown sheet, which are the whitest since all the bedbugs and mites in our borders serve the Venus in furs, the heat in the dark.

“Between this and prophecy, I’m sure we can find a clue as to the whereabouts of a certain heir of Cain,” I told her, “who would do something like abandon his pregnant mate wandering through the rain in Geneva.” She looked into my eyes, and I believe, for the first time, tried to see something other than the taxidermy remains of Abel subserviently posed.

A rock slipping out of a hand might not make a sound, but it does when the hand belongs to an heir. Like a swan taking off from a placid lake. A dying elder’s hand slipping out of their descendant’s. A love letter pulled from between the pages of a heavy book, pulled long after the romance was deemed defeated.

The rock of Cain struck the Earth as humble as any other, nothing fiery, nothing meteoric about it. Perhaps the impact caused a line of fleas to split into Abel-fleas and Cain-fleas, but if so that fell under the umbrella of Wanda’s familiars, and was not to trouble me at all. Nor were Wanda’s family to trouble me, to any degree such as this attempted duel to the death, ever again (though Wanda may have shuffled some of that into the future, saving it for when I am more prepared).

Terms were discussed, but the heirs were eager to get them done with and move on. Wanda’s skin of defeat, her wounds, her shredded furs, was but the surface. She was the victor, indeed the only one who understood the contest, and both her mother and eldest sister were licking deeper lacerations despite their invisibility. It was best to send them away once deals were struck, so the Quarantowners could come out to grieve young Zachariah and not be overcome with feelings of revenge.

His fate fell heavy upon me once I knew Wanda was safe from a rock that we tossed into the underground river (where the ghosts were free to war over it in the dark, never learning their lessons). He was gone, and Wanda was no necromancer. She still has a human body, burdened as her spirit is with the yoke of divinity. Death will attempt to take her as well. Heirs such as Ruthven and Devorgoil had circumvented it somewhat, but in so doing were robbed of many of the joys of life, a fate she was too kind to visit on anyone, especially what was to her barely more than a babe.

There was to be no resurrection, only a safe dwelling for his soul among his family, which Wanda promised Doppler, his wife, and their other children they would feel often, especially on ‘times of time’ like new moons, new years, birthdays.

And there was something I could provide them. My life was a shell game, only Wanda kindly placed a different prize under every shell. Sometimes, after Zachariah’s death, I would experience a day that happened before it, and I knew to seek him out, spend time with him, learn about his dreams, the girl he wanted to marry, and then encourage him to go and bond with his family rather than brood or scheme as wealthy youngsters are most prone to do.

Then when I returned to a time after the event I would instead find Doppler, signal to him what I had by putting my arm most of the way around his massive shoulder. No matter what he was doing he would drop it, even if ‘it’ was wooing investors even wealthier than himself, left to be entertained by his servants while we sequestered ourselves in a coat closet.

Huddled together over a candle, his gold teeth shining weaker than his happy tears, I told him everything I learned, all that Zachariah said and did. In so doing I could provide for him a taste of what Wanda did for me, fresh medicinal doses of his son for the rest of his life in Quarantown. Over the years, through this, even Doppler Burstyn was made into my friend. Bless you Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, mender of furs and bridges.

Speaking of mending, Wanda and I retired that evening, after the fight, after the grief, after reclaiming Nepenthe and setting her down in her own room, finally, to the bedroom. We needed each other’s restoration. We needed close attentive investigations of our monolithic achievement, for chips and cracks.

I am always hers to use as she sees fit, which turns pain of her prerogative into pleasure. She decided to give me her post-duel suffering as a present for serving her so well in such a tight bind. Freed of shoes we crawled into bed, where her furs clambered over her shoulders and onto me, slurping off my own clothing without popping a single button before they retreated to the foot of the bed and curled up like an old dog.

Wanda took to me, came over me, like a roiling storm. Her muscle had begun to fail her during the battle, while the hate trapped within had not. There was a surplus of it now, and only one safe receptacle. Her vivisecting eyes, unblinking, released it as a deluge upon my own. Dutifully I welcomed it, opened all gates to its inundation.

The harm she did me was a god’s innocent exploration, passionate curiosity. As we kissed she ate the breath out of me. Her teeth cemented solid once more as mine cracked in equal measure, jolts of pain down my jaw which dissolved into bliss halfway down me. The cut on the bridge of her nose healed as my forehead darkened and swelled with bruising. What closed across her opened on me.

Wanda could heal them faster, but why should she suffer them at all? It was a shame to waste them when they could expand her understanding of her vulnerable husband. As I felt the wounds weeping down into my emotions I also knew she would dispel these pains when they weren’t being played with. She would break up all the time I took to heal, toss it like salt, one granule in my experience every lunar cycle or so.

As I reeled from her pleased experimentation she guided me between her legs. I was weakening, vision blurring, but the injuries couldn’t stop the blaze she fed. A dam of pinpricks, the rushed undertaking of healing, clashed with the engulfing forest fire in my midsection, resulting in complete disobedience of my abdomen. I couldn’t sit up to join her.

Her furs spit out two pebbles at her, rising instead of falling, and she caught them: my makeshift serpent scale cuff links. Bending down as a lioness ready to lap at the watering hole, she nipped my ears with her fangs, straight through. A multitude of prior pains and persistent priapism kept me from feeling any of it as she stuck the scales into the piercings. Then the pair lifted me.

From that angle Wanda could have it all, and she took it while I nursed what had dared vandalize her. My Venus sans furs took special care of me that night, turning me over as if on a spit, literally and figuratively, making sure to experience me from all sides as we had trapped death itself. She wanted as much control as her ever-present enemy. This meant I had to allow her the power to stop my heart just as it eventually would.

But also, across that spectrum, she would have the power to raise me into supersensual life, awareness without thought, joy burning and consuming like the core of the sun, experience stretched to match its lifespan. That is where she left me instead of allowing me sleep, suspended in the sauna of her breath, the steam of her obsession. That is where I leave you, as far as the most direct portion of this account.

Our lives were so much more; hers is. Yet my purpose here was just to chronicle the formation and nature of our bond. The rest can be found between the lines and in the margins of the history books. Consider these tales but another prophecy, one meant for mortal ears, which gives plenty of clues as to how the realm of a loving yet viciously possessive god might expand in this modern age of ours.

A simpleton’s accurate reading of these clues follows. Throng’s delirium, like all other plagues, eventually loosens its grip and is blown away on a spring breeze. Quarantown remains, despite no need of it, and it flourishes too. People who pass by on developing railways experience a strange sense of longing even as they fail to spy it through the trees. Wanda’s love is magnetic to the soul. Wars miss us, iron heels landing on either side. Bitter rivals become lovers if they attempt to clash under her watchful eye, joined and shot through by a bolt of electric green out of eyes that are always seeing, swallowing, more and more of the world.

There remain bumps. Heirs outside the clan Diodati have to be made aware they cannot meddle. Devorgoil gradually revealed the wisdom of his ways, harvesting our hard-won discoveries via infrequent and good-natured visits. I started to suspect he was stillborn by choice, which allowed him a wide enough view to see that death was running the horse race, so he crippled himself early to be out of the running, but where a stud got mares he had our lowest and most vulnerable points, grim reminders that it might have been him if he’d participated.

And with Wanda and I close enough to swap traumas and synchronize our heartbeats there were, inevitably, more children. Not all of them were as carefree and poet-bred as Nepenthe turned out to be. Sometimes we were rejected, more rarely opposed, and it broke our hearts each time. More than once I was despised for providing them with Abel’s blood, the blood of reflection, which slows progress as one checks over their shoulder, the blood that waters the crops, which they deemed a contaminant of Cain’s.

Never did any of it make me question her. I speak on it now not to justify any of it, not to excuse or redeem my own shortcomings, but because it is all very fresh in my mind. Wanda does not want me to perceive it, but I am far too old, and soon I will not be Abel-bodied. My goddess has stretched me like rations, perturbed death lurking in my joints and organs. She cannot remain watchful at all stations as their numbers proliferate exponentially.

There is so much life left in her; she will have to go on without her favorite toy, her most reliable instrument. To ease my passing she has intensified her manipulation of my time, sending me away to more and more of my past that she has kept in reserve, though the tanks now rapidly empty.

She has succeeded in mostly freeing me from any sense of impending doom. I always knew she was plucking pieces from my memory and putting them in a basket, like flowers she planned to press, but, as yet another gift to me, she had totally obscured the extent of it. While I contract in my deathbed, drying out like a pressed flower myself, I am learning new things about the formation of Quarantown, about myself, about Wanda Blasphemer Pelts.

So this account really is like a prophecy, woven together from threads of the past just as I did with quotes and stanzas from Byron, Shelley, Wollstonecraft, Polidori…

Wanda has made many modifications, clever reorientations, repairs, additions, but she is still only my master. Not my craftsman. I am in disrepair. Her anguish must be incalculable by the mortal heart, and I hope her other disciples know that after I pass they must leave extra offerings at her altars. I hope also that the more ambitious do not try to take my place too quickly, as it will likely cost them their lives.

She is accepting it though, in part, enough to give me the greatest gift she had held the longest. This memory, never experienced by me before, was snipped seamlessly out of that first dark train ride, that tranquilizing chug into a black forest and a foggy future. Even then she was following other tracks, planning to arrive right back at those seats. I got to fall in love with her all over again, and hear things she told me at our first meeting, only reaching my spirit wrapped up in hers furs an unknown number of decades beyond.

Something I’d heard once before… leading somewhere new…

“You’ll forgive me for rushing an account much grander and older than the Conclave Diodati,” Wanda said to me on the train, “but I assure you that the time I’m keeping in a drawstring pouch, to protect you from its distractions, is still limited.

I have such big plans for you, and the pouch is so small, what a curse. I am a goddess so I will not feel the pain of stuffing you all the way to ripping with my schemes. You will feel it. I will make you love it. That is the best I can do.

Already I love you, my Severin, and if you earn that love you will hear me say this. You will be mine. Forever. When the end is close I will flip you over, disorient you, and make you go back, away from the abyssal truth. Perhaps you will walk so far back, blissfully oblivious, that you will find my origin. We could be as children, grow in the garden together, equal, awaiting divinity together. For…

The evolution of life that crawls, that spawns in slime, is entirely separate from the evolution of the spirit…”

These events, both remembered and hidden, took place just before Wanda learned she couldn’t have me entirely, that I could not be a mere hypnotized slave. Her probing advance, her voluptuous weight placed upon me, gave her exposing insight, where she saw that at my last breath I would not belong to her.

At the time she thought it defiance, devotion to a higher moral she would never be able to attain. She thought I stood valiant, at my last, upon unbreakable rocks of right and wrong. Not so. That last breath was denied her not because I refused to give it over, she would earn that trust, but because death claimed it. In so doing it was made my last.

All I demonstrated by keeping it from her on the train to Quarantown was that I was distantly aware, showing my early inclination toward prophecy, of what I would know. Poets demonstrated the same when they wrote, mathematicians when they marveled at numbers as if they were the stars in the sky.

Until that last breath I will know one other truth, and better, feel it:

Here lies Severin Pelts, during and after many years of faithful service.

He was handled with love and care.

The End

Wanda Reigns