Chapter 26
I waited in that room until the inversion of the furniture my mother's name caused had faded, and it rained chairs and tables. I waited as the silence excoriated the excuses I'd laid over my chest to defend my heart—it beat a disgusting fleshy rhythm that churned my stomach. Another biological reminder that I yearned to sprint from to instead embrace the heatless flame of an Inviolate Star.
With a blink, the star was in my hand. Balanced in a false precarity on the pad of my ring finger. There was a promise in its light. In the way it came to a skewering point but didn't break skin because its point had nothing to do with a Real sharpness but rather a Conceptual perfection.
Tears rolled down my face. The silence had found my heart, and injected a venom of regret which was gleefully pumped throughout my body.
"Melissa is coming back. She's coming back with Amber. She'll come back," I said.
"She'll be back," my voice cracked.
The weight of my wrongdoing silenced the phrase that had become a prayer. I'd said enough lies. But they weren't lies, no they were partial truths. Whole fears. Altogether much worse than if I just had the creativity to lie. The grace. However grace is a rare to receive, and even rarer to have yet be willing to give away. It's why some of us chase the gods and their tenders, I suppose. Perhaps it's a flavor that Amber sought in every bottle she came across.
As I let that star become the final point of my vision—blackened in a pique of self-rejection, I knew that grace was a heatless flame that would willingly feed on the failings in me. Transubstantiate me into something worth the life I had…and my dad didn't.
My jaw was open and I nearly guillotined my fingers between my teeth if it meant getting every bit of the star inside my mouth for one glorious moment of psychic self-immolation. Then I heard a chord. Gently struck but infinitely warm without ever becoming hot. The uplifting reminder of the sky's circularity. There'd always be a star, bright and cold, but there was also dawn that never withheld a day's promise to go again.
It sounds ridiculous—maybe it is—but I prefer to think Lupe was that good. I removed the star from my mouth after all. Shook out my hands to disperse the spell. Then pushed myself from bed. Cracked my knees against the linoleum to give me a feeling more base than traitorous empathy. I hissed and let myself be on my knees for a moment. Felt my tension release, and I breathed—cycles of ten second inhalations and exhalations. I did five cycles then got dressed.
I picked my way through the halls carefully. Surrounding me was a flow of nurses, doctors, and secretaries that moved with a practiced precision that I'd interrupted by my existence as a non-wounded patient. When I broke free from the red arterial hallway that denoted my room being on the internal medicine floor, I let a smaller tributary of people carry me toward the elevators.
I rode to the highest floor—postnatal care. I scoffed as the first thing I saw were the murals of rainbows leaping and looping in melting arches. There was a casual freedom that crawled between your legs daring you to tell it to behave. Room after room was filled with parents and babies—some rooms just those unlucky few that needed a bit longer to bake—who had no reason to regard cynicism or guilt as anything important in the face of a pure beginning.
Sure, maybe some parents had a bit of regret, but when I looked at any of those kids I couldn't help but put my dark compound thoughts away. Instead of them, I indulged a bit. Siphoning the color that ran beneath my fingers as I trailed hand against wall. Painted with them, so if someone looked in my eyes they'd see something they could compose—love—into a frame or image that didn't haunt them like the black-less dark of a grave at nighttime. Pregnable yet inescapable.
I laid my hand against the door, and tested a few faces that'd play well—Lupe couldn't see them to check, but a good mask makes it easier to pretend. Right?
The door parted way for lances of the summer sun to blind me. I squinted, tightening my defenses, and forced the door further ajar to step out onto the roof. Immediately the wind took me in the side, tugging at my hair and loose clothes as I stood still in appreciation.
Lit by the sun that made radiant the guitar in her hands, Lupe was the perfect image of a lupine wanderer. Hair fluttering up on the wind, but never cutting past the black shields of her shades. Though those were tilted down just enough that you could see the clouds in her eyes that rippled dark as light was trapped within them seeking its way out. She was—thud
I jumped and turned—the door had shut announcing me and revoking the gentle reverie I'd fallen into. When I turned back I found Lupe's head raised—no clouds, only glossy ebon glass.
"Were you disappointed?" she asked.
"By what?"
She plucked a thick string while pressing down high up the guitar's neck. The bassy tone vibrating in lurching swings. My own nerves swung up and down with it. She stilled it.
"That I wasn't there," Lupe said. "Or did you not miss me?"
"Oh, that," I said. "I totally missed you, but I heard your playing from my room when Ina was showing off her new arm. You couldn't be in too much trouble if you were able to mindlessly strum."
She scowled at the mindless part.
"Never mindless," she said. "I just don't mistake my anxieties for actual thoughts. Keeps me from standing but not opening a door for three minutes."
"You saw that," I said.
"Or for a justification to moodfuck the people who cared about keeping me alive."
"Moodfuck?"
"Have a better word to describe how you talked to Amber and Melissa?" Lupe asked. "Alls below, get out of that shadow."
She formed a hand-spell over the guitar's soundhole. A golden pollen spread outward from her in a wave that dissolved every mote of shadow that I'd used to hide.
"You heard everything?" I asked.
"You weren't trying to be quiet."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Lupe leaned against the steel mesh fence that covered the rooftop's perimeter.
"I don't need an apology," she said. "Wouldn't mind the truth though, since you had fun throwing it around earlier."
"What was the question?" I muttered.
"Were you disappointed when I wasn't rushing in to see you?"
I spat, "Alls below, yes. I sure as shit wasn't excited to see Ina. I'd thought…"
"What?" she asked. "That I'd fallen for you after two conversations and getting pointed toward the omelet station? Gosh, you're so used to being the center of girls' worlds that your heart broke a bit realizing that you weren't the center of mine."
"I don't—" I muttered.
"That I could give you less room in my mind than I use going through a few random chord progressions. That—"
"I don't think I'm the center of anyone's life," I snapped.
A cloud passed overhead, bluish-gray and herald to a fleet that could be seen just teasing the edge of the horizon. I sucked in a breath—it was still summer and any shadow was a fair reprieve from the way moist summer-heated air bludgeoned you down into a muggy sludge.
"Really?" she asked. "Do you want my shades because you're blind as fuck, Nadia."
I stayed quiet. Turned my head to the side to hide from the accuracy of her accusations. As if she needed to see to see through me.
"Want to know what I see?" she asked.
No.
"Melissa, a girl you were engaged to for how long?"
Don't say—, "Ten years," I answered.
"Wow, you really suck, and not in the cool slutty way," she chuckled. I squirmed.
"So ten years, for ten years you both knew each other was the solution to every problem we face in life—most of the time facing alone," she said. "Who'll hold me when I'm sick? Who'll love me when I hate myself? Who'll laugh with me when I think of a random joke?"
Lupe began to strum a gentle melody on the guitar. It languished in a minor key as each plucked note dropped with the heat of fresh tears. A pitter-patter against some psychic ground. She looked up at me, shook her head, and looked out across the glittering bay.
She said, "Forget about yourself, she had that comfort. I don't know why you two divorced—though I bet it was your fault—but I can tell how much care she has for you with every breath that'd be better spent cursing you if she said your name at all. It's more than you have for her real or performed."
Lupe strangled the guitar, choking the notes to rest.
"She took a fucking bullet for you, and you shoot her like that," Lupe said.
"And Amber?" I asked.
"The weirdest case of hero worship I've ever seen," she said.
"That's just…no," I said. "I'm not a hero."
"You surely aren't," she said, "but with how experienced you seemed dangling a life over a person's head—or their arm—I bet you did something to her."
I remembered the lindwurm frozen in mid-air, and my Sovereign who had Observed me, put my life on this track, and slew it. If I stretched I could remember the way each drip of her blood around the wound she'd suffered supporting me—even then—threatened to overthrow the balance of my chilled heart.
"For her." I said, "I endangered her life first, but I did save it. She's saved me enough times though that we're even."
"Does she know that?" Lupe asked. "Cause I haven't known a Baron in my life that enjoyed taking orders from a soldier. Especially when they have a past tall enough to make a girl run from them and into a sniper's bullet. So be real, do you really think you didn't notice how they felt? How they—for reasons weirder than the Underside—still probably feel about you."
"I may have noticed," I said in a scratched voice. The admission clawing up my throat in terror of what it'd mean to be voiced.
"How couldn't you, you needy little girl," Lupe said. "So broken and so pretty, and who can resist caring for a broken pretty thing that if you fixed up just right maybe it'd be yours forever."
She unslung her guitar and laid it against the ground. Opened her arms wide in ready for an embrace. I bit my lip fearful it was only a trap. Lupe shook her head and I raced into her arms. Let her squeeze me until the glue that held me together threatened to melt. Her body was soft and warm in the way the sun was when it teased your face in the morning.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you looked like you needed a hug. Your silhouette was slouching dramatically."
"No, but, why me? After what I said?"
"You're not that special, and you're not that evil as to deserve or not deserve a hug. Besides," Lupe said, "when you have basically nothing all you do is preserve your fears and petty loathings for the right time to throw them at someone."
She stroked the center of my back while gently cradling my head against her chest. There was a heat inside of her that was every bit pained as my star was cold—we all had what we leaned on.
Lupe didn't look at me as I raised my head in recognition of a question I could ask, and she didn't look down at me with expectation that I'd ask it. Instead her fingers spider-crawled onto the guitar to erratically dance and pluck at its strings.
"What's the center of your world?" I asked.
Shifting around in her grasp so my back was to her chest. She guided us down to sit before picking up guitar and laying it across my lap and hers.
"My song," she said, "the Seven Families of the Sunken Valley, is something special. An innovation in conceptual weapons where we layered Courts atop Courts fused in damascus forge welds of melody. Way more than the 'metaphor you beat someone to death with' angle Amber has. I mean, you heard the song, it's more than just a Conceptual weapon and almost like a spell—a proper entity given Sorcery."
She continued, "It's what made Marduk decide to stay when he washed ashore naked and broke. Not a hint of Sorcery in his spirit that was small and loose like a child's. Overtime he became a fixture of the valley. Had children, and our problems started."
Lupe pulled the guitar flat against our laps. The sound was lurking, shifting beneath dark waters, before emerging in a shredding chord of sonic seafoam.
"See, old Marduk's kids weren't born right. They were born normal. A failure of the secret test he'd conducted. Cause Marduk liked the valley not because of the people or the scenery. He liked its isolation. There'd be few, if any, interruptions of his grand design. So he cast aside the cover he was using. Unveiled himself as a Marquis, and with a roll of his hand the valley fell under his territory."
I turned back to her in surprise, and didn't say anything when I saw the tears roll down her face, shining gems in the sunlight. Then returned my eyes down to the guitar and the long tanned hands that played it.
"That'd just kill people," I said.
Territories were the harshest of any conceptual zone short of the Underside. A space under its maker's control, and tuned to the power of a single Court. So condensed it was a scalpel that severed unprotected too weak spirits; filling the gaps in a person with itself.
"Oh, Marduk knew, but he said, 'With pressure comes diamonds, and with this gift may the treasure that is mankind's future step forward,'" Lupe said. "The treasure was this mad plan of making humans into entities or something near enough. Unfortunately for Marduk, we were too adaptable."
The song settled into a bluesy haze of a land that'd been sunk into the Abyss. Lupe sighed alongside her guitar's own rasp.
"And so our sunless time passed. Generation after generation until the sun became a myth, and children stopped being born with the ability to see."
I asked, "What about moving?"
"After the first generation of Sunken Valley's kids came of age they tried," Lupe said. "But the Abyss was in us now, and we'd become accustomed to a certain pressure. When they passed the threshold their bodies just, thbbpt."
She pantomimed an explosion with her hands.
Lupe said, "We were like blobfish. Perfectly fine until removed from our environment. The homeland had become a cage, and the only way out was through joining the cult."
"But you got out," I said.
She nodded, "I did, but not by myself. See, those of us who didn't want to join the cult had accepted we'd likely never use Sorcery again, but there were seven families who didn't. They weren't necessarily the most important before Marduk, but after…they were the ones who didn't give up. Helped a few young hopefuls bond with musician friendly entities, like this guy here."
Lupe fiddled with the whammy bar of her guitar-axe. Her hands not touching the strings I watched them vibrate until an eye formed in the plasma blur. It blinked once, twice, and became a smiling mouth. An eye again that closed.
"The Seven Families were our resistance," Lupe said, "but my sister was our escape. My escape. Dumb as hell but bold as fuck, she jumped a drunk cultist that'd left the bar one winter. Killed him and stole his sorc-deck. The idiot had the cult's grimoire on there. So where we—I—got to bond to Morning she pushed herself to bond to the Abyss—"
"Then used magic to acclimate you to lower pressures," I said.
Lupe didn't sob, but her shoulders shuddered and her song was a curtain of feeling.
"Damn right," she said. "The families gave me our song to carry, and our plight to sing in the hopes we'd find someone—a real hero-type—to help free us. It's the only reason I came for this death game exam anyways."
"If you haven't found your hero, why not leave and try the collectives?" I asked.
Lupe smiled with her teeth sharp and gleaming in answer.
"Because I know, in the same way I know the Abyss, that Marduk is here and I'm gonna make sure he dies here."
I tap her leg, and she spreads them and her arms so I can crawl away. Not too far—I wasn't running from her. Then I turned to face her. To hold her hands even as one held the neck of her guitar. I nodded in understanding.
"That's a good center," I said. "Same as mine really, vengeance."
"Nah," Lupe said, "vengeance is what I'm doing, but it's a means to an end. Not who I am or what I'm about."
"Then what's the center?"
"Liberation," Lupe said, and if I hadn't felt her hands I would've sworn she'd cast a spell just then as a cloud parted and a blade of sunlight cleaved through our shadow. Illuminating her and darkening me ever further.
There was a weight to the way she said it. The combined dream of hundreds—maybe a few thousand—people that only wanted to see the sun again. It was there, in that shadow, that I realized how cold I was and how much I wanted some of that light.
"Lupe, I…" I searched, "I want to help. Let me help."
"How, you're just a Baron and not even a real one."
"I have a key," I said. "I'd looted—um—I'd recovered one after cutting down an ally of the cult. It accesses the murals around the city. Turns them into Staircases to somewhere."
"His throne probably," she said. "Alls below, no one in the families have gone into that thing and come out before."
"You can," I said. "I'll hand it over the next time I see you?"
Lupe furiously nodded. Her hair undulating in the wind. She was silent, but her hands couldn't help but play. A tune of clouds breaking, sunlight seeping in silent as a thief and ready for the big display. I left her to her thoughts—plots?—and made for the door. Her playing stilled.
"Nadia," she called out, "I'm not a fighter, and—"
"I'll go with you," I said, the words smearing as I whirled back around to face her. "Can I ask one thing though?"
"Why not," she said.
"Did you want to be in the room earlier?" I asked.
Lupe rubbed the back of her head. "It doesn't matter if I did," she said. "Amber and Melissa love you, and Ina is at least turned on by Melissa. There's no room for me in that dynamic."
"But if you did," I argued, "it'd make sense why you would be positioned only a few floors above my room exactly. The floors aren't that spiritually dense, and I'm sure you have a way to see deeply if needed."
Lupe chuckled and strummed her guitar. "That's a good theory," she said. Missed a note in an arpeggio and fumbled her fingers back to hit it. It was a good theory.
I took the cable car back to the suite that'd become 'home' insofar as it was the closest thing I had since losing my actual one. Inside was more quiet and loneliness. I placed the glaive in my room, and dove into a shower to ward off any strange feelings using the rushing water.
It was a warm gentle drone that kept my thoughts to a minimum. Buried beneath the white noise rush that filled my ears. The shower was technically a shrine. Working off a series of principles that generated hot water at the perfect speed and amount of droplets to fall on you with the natural pace of a modest rain. Each drop of water tuned to cut through and absorb grime to be deposited down the drain with all the other refuse.
A good shower could work wonders on the mind. As did Lupe's hug, and the sense of her pressed into my back. Soft and hard in all the right places. I almost felt like being a person again when it was over. I padded across the rather morbid shower mat in the bathroom—the thing turned red when hit with water. Creating the appearance of blood-stained footsteps in the otherwise pristine white of the mat. Like I said, morbid.
I leaned against the sink and wiped away the fog on the mirror so I could see myself.
"No," I screamed. "Oh fuck, no."
Unveiled by one bold swipe, were my eyes flecked red in their usual gold. It was due to my look of horror that I realized my teeth had changed too. My canines properly sharpened into fangs capable of ripping out an artery so I could guzzle what I craved from the source. I stumbled backwards as I pounded the intrusive thought from my skull. It wasn't the first—I know that now—but it was the first that I felt truly aware of at the time.
I stared at myself in the mirror. At the reflection that wasn't me, and then I yawned. It, the reflection, yawned and I didn't. I beat a hurried retreat from the bathroom back into the suite's common area. Paced between the couch and coffee table—ignored the bloodstains my eyes could make out even though what had stained the area was just the barest trace of Amber's previous violence that soap and water could never remove.
I forced my mouth shut so I didn't feel tempted to lick my lips.
Then I formed the hand-spell to eject Sphinx from within my spirit. She herself yawned from her place atop the coffee table. I dropped down onto the couch in front of her.
"What's wrong with me?" I asked.
"Are you asking emotionally, mentally—"
"And physically, mystically, I don't fucking know Sphinx. I don't know," I said. "I have fangs, red in my eyes, I'm changing. Just now the mirror yawned, and if I'm honest what did I see when I had my 'two out of three' death? Why a cabin?"
Sphinx sealed my lips with her front paw. I noticed then that she'd grown from her plushie size to something more equal to me—still not her full size, but this had a charm all its own.
"It's easier to read one book than seven at once," she said.
"The fangs and eyes," I said.
She chuffed, "Choices, Nadia, the parent to most change. Though all that is is sliding us on more delineated paths that might better suit the way we follow."
"That's not an answer. At least tell me if they're really there."
Sphinx rolled her eyes and raised a paw bidding me to hold open my eyes for examination. She searched and then pushed my head up.
"Open," she ordered. After a moment of examination she said, "Nothing for either eyes nor fangs. If they're true then perhaps they're not Real. A symptom of something, yes, but buried inside your spirit most in places I can't walk to chase down the answers."
I fell to my side crashing into the plush solidity of the couch. Pressed the candy cloud softness of my bathroom against my skin. Sphinx tilted her head to follow my new orientation.
"You're unhappy with the outcome?" she asked.
"No," I said, "but maybe a bit. Everything is happening so fast—too fast—and I feel like there's no ground beneath me anymore. Just blood and adrenaline and fire. Under it all I just, I want to know that there's something real about me. Intrinsic and immutable. Something I don't have to worry about betraying."
"Intrinsic," Sphinx said. "At best that's just the result of an anti-choice to not change. There's no such thing."
I propped myself up. Eyes sharp as daggers as I stared down Sphinx for my own sanity.
"Yes, there is."
"Okay, then tell me this," Sphinx said, "would the Nadia from the train, the one who'd never taken a life until just then and was tormented in her dreams, look at the Nadia from two nights ago—the one that hollered and cheered as she dyed her suit red in blood and spilled futures—and agree that there was an intrinsic sameness between them?"
Emphatic, I said, "Yes. Both her and that other her, could agree we only killed bad people."
"I don't remember that Nadia, gleefully cutting down foes, saw them as people. Do you?"
"They were still bad," I muttered.
"And what of last night's opposition during the test, were they bad?"
"They'd crossed a line. Killed Amber."
"Hmm, so not bad, but they crossed a line. Is your line the demarcation of moral allegiance?"
My lips squeezed behind the sour point Sphinx had just fed me. She didn't need me to say anything to keep going, to bury me.
She added, "And, to be clear, they thought they killed your darling gin-soaked mummer. They hadn't, which would mean—had you successfully slain them before the player's appearance—you would've crossed the line first."
"They intended—"
Sphinx's voice boomed and the shadows in the room shock in time with her intonation—honeyed and strong, royal. The background pitter of dripping water stilled to nothing as I was dragged into a Godtime by the one that gave truth to its name.
"Now we speak of intention," the Sovereign said through my darling Sphinx. "You shift your borders so elegantly that you've mistaken their tracks as the wind. So let us be plain, so you don't get confused."
I pressed myself into the couch in terror. This was more than a Godtime. It was an Observation.
"We made an oath, did we or did we not?"
"We did," I said.
"So we did, I'm glad we agree. The terms of which I considered very clear and very generous. I help you with your petty tiny vengeance. Through my Sorcery, which you've taken too so well, I've aided you in finding your foes."
I tried to defend myself. I sputtered, "But, I promised Sphinx we'd investigate soon about your foes. I have leads."
"You do," the Sovereign said.
Using Sphinx's body, she hopped from the table and crawled up my body. Paws soft but her weight put atop each step to drive it like a spike through my body. She sat and stared down at me with burning ripple stars for eyes.
"But my terms were two fold, vengeance only one of them. The other?"
"Chart your return?" I said, the memory making no delay to be held up in a bid to win me a god's grace.
She smiled. "Perfect, you do remember. So why is it that my darling daughter, Sphinx—such a creative name by the way—is thinking about you not becoming a baron? Instead you're fixated on things as worthless as eyes and fangs."
Her face pressed in close to mine as she said, "I can remove them for you if you'll be less distracted."
"What does me becoming a Baron have to do with anything?" I asked.
"It has to do with everything," she screamed.
My spirit rattled and I felt fibers melt beneath a heat grander than theirs.
"Sorry, let me use my indoor voice." She said, "It has to do with everything, my dearest and most favorite summoner. The climb up toward the thrones of all that Is and will ever Be. I speak of the Chain, Nadia. You can't bring me back in my entirety until you tend to my divinity from a throne of our shared Sovereignty, understand?"
"Y-yes," I said. "I just…"
"What?"
"I'm not ready to see Sphinx go," I whined. It was selfish and petulant and small and human. "She said it'd be us in the end."
"Fool that you are, a child raised by an impossible union. A impossible union. It's why I was so impressed by you, and something I should've taken into account before I let my gatekeeper see to you. To find that she's stalling, how indulgent."
"Please, don't do anything to Sphinx," I begged.
"Why would I? This too is Revelation, but please don't leave her older sister's waiting. They're only so polite."
The Sovereign gestured with Sphinx's wing to the four shadows that split from beneath, crawled up a wall each, to stare down at me with shining eyes of Revelation. A question, the question, as to them and the trial I'd have to pass if I was to climb the Chain had squirmed its way atop my tongue.
I swallowed it down; if I asked then…I don't know, but I knew, intuitively, that I wouldn't leave this Observation with Sphinx. So I turned my eyes back to my bondmate—possessed though she was—and raised the question that'd get me through this.
"Do you have a pace I have to hit?" I asked.
The Sovereign smiled with Sphinx's face and licked a paw dismissively. "No, but one shouldn't keep an ancient divinity waiting. There are many links in the Chain, my dearest and favorite summoner. So no stopping. Not for exhaustion, or love, or death. Upwards always upwards."
She blinked, the shadows that hid Barons behind them retracted, and Sphinx returned to me. Her smile a line of broken shards arranged in an attempt at something beautiful. The pitter became patter, and the water counted out the seconds of tension between the two of us.
"You said it'd be the two of us in the end," I said.
Sphinx glanced away from me. I gripped her face and turned it back to mine.
"Was that just a lie to keep me climbing?" I asked.
Sphinx said, "No, it'd be the truth. Our bond wouldn't change."
"But you would," I said. "You wouldn't be Sphinx. You'd be something named and titled. Someone else."
"I thought you believed in an intrinsic and immutable nature somewhere within people?"
"I do, but…" I trailed off.
Sphinx filled in my words, "It's different for 'people' than it is entities? Is that it?"
My silence was agreement.
Sphinx lowered herself against my stomach. Stared at me just above my chest.
"A lot of humans think that, but they don't have to be right. Their bonds are different than ours. They don't pour humanity into their entities the way you do me," Sphinx said. "But you've been changing me since we met. You've changed since we met. Yet you still call me Sphinx and I call you Nadia."
She smiled and raised herself. Took the lapel of my robe and tugged it loose bearing my chest in its modest stiff peaked glory. Her breath was heavy at the sight of me—hair askew in a messy halo as I lay on my back.
"Even if you call me something else, you can always call me yours. Through the small changes and the big," she said. "I'll still be of Revelation and you'll still be my divided summoner. You don't have to fear power."
Tears pooled at my cheeks before falling down the sides of my face to get lost in my hair.
"I'm not afraid of power," I said. "I just…I don't want to look around to find that I have it and I'm alone, Sphinx. I don't want to push away my friends, but things get scarier and scarier. I get scarier, and it seems like everyone around me dies. Mom, Dad, Wren, people close to me and strangers…" I trailed off. I cried. I couldn't stop crying the whole fears that lurked behind every cruel word I'd said to Melissa and Amber.
"I don't want them to follow me if it means they end up in a grave somewhere. Cause it feels like death sticks to everyone but me. Even though I'm yelling and screaming and opening my arms so wide for it to just take me. Cause it's all so hard," I said. "It's so hard."
Sphinx was quiet. She allowed me the space to sob. Didn't complain as it shook my body. Instead she stretched herself above me and I watched her grow—just a little bit more, closer to her proper size—before she settled on me like a blanket. Then she pressed her mouth to mine in a kiss that attempted to claim the entirety of me—burdens and all.
"I'm sorry for being selfish," I moaned into her mouth. I knew she was alone and my sentimentality was dragging out her torment.
She migrated kisses from my lips to my cheeks. Claiming a tear from each.
"What have I always said about apologies," she reminded me. "They have no place between us, and if anything I'm the selfish one. Prodding you to advance when you needed me to have the wisdom to hold you back. Though even then, I'm more selfish than you, because despite it all the concerns of the Court are far from my mind."
"And what's on your mind?" I asked.
She pressed her mouth to my neck. Grazed it with her teeth in a dangerous reminder of status as an entity. A danger that fled my thoughts when she pressed her mouth to my chest. Teased my breast between her lips, rolled its peak against her fangs, before letting go with a suckling pop.
You, she thought, always you.
I've taught you the worst things about humanity, I thought.
"We're equals in all things," she said. "Even our selfishness as I don't wish to hurry from this moment with you."
"Then don't," I said.
Sphinx drew my other breast into her mouth, and plunged us both into the heady depths of a lascivious Godtime. We stretched seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, and all just spent exploring the territory of each other that we hadn't dared do since she passed a star to me on our first kiss.
She marked my collarbone in a constellation of greedy kiss-marks barely hidden beneath my own melanin. I said that this made us 'fang for fang,' and received a paw to the face for the joke. By the time our ten minute eternity had passed, I was worn out and breathing hard having traded her breath for mine and vice-versa.
"Sphinx, am I a good person?" I asked.
"Be specific," she said.
I said, "I just feel like I'm bad at being a person. Everyone's so clear about themselves and committed to things. What am I even doing?"
"Finding out," she said. "As is Revelation's way. Though if it soothes any, I love your dual-sided complexity."
"Why?" I asked. "It's the worst thing about me."
Sphinx silenced my self-flagellation with a kiss. "What we loathe in ourselves is often what others love. And though I can't speak for the maiden or the mummer," Sphinx said, "I can speak for myself. That your divided self, your petty humanity and glorious spirit, your gallant smile and even now your wounded tears; in all ways I find you beautiful."
Sphinx's eyes burned with the flame of Revelation as she continued, "Nadia, no matter my link nor whatever I become, I shall inscribe it within myself to such depths that even when the stars grow cold and the last dream has been spun, my vow will remain untarnished. That I, Sphinx of the Court of Revelation, did love my summoner, Nadia Temple, ward of Kareem and daughter to a Sovereign."
"Sphinx, you're crying," I said. My thumb catching a streaking ember before it fell from her face. That single wipe became a cradling. A guiding hand. One last kiss.
With a blink, the star was in my hand. Balanced in a false precarity on the pad of my ring finger. There was a promise in its light. In the way it came to a skewering point but didn't break skin because its point had nothing to do with a Real sharpness but rather a Conceptual perfection.
Tears rolled down my face. The silence had found my heart, and injected a venom of regret which was gleefully pumped throughout my body.
"Melissa is coming back. She's coming back with Amber. She'll come back," I said.
"She'll be back," my voice cracked.
The weight of my wrongdoing silenced the phrase that had become a prayer. I'd said enough lies. But they weren't lies, no they were partial truths. Whole fears. Altogether much worse than if I just had the creativity to lie. The grace. However grace is a rare to receive, and even rarer to have yet be willing to give away. It's why some of us chase the gods and their tenders, I suppose. Perhaps it's a flavor that Amber sought in every bottle she came across.
As I let that star become the final point of my vision—blackened in a pique of self-rejection, I knew that grace was a heatless flame that would willingly feed on the failings in me. Transubstantiate me into something worth the life I had…and my dad didn't.
My jaw was open and I nearly guillotined my fingers between my teeth if it meant getting every bit of the star inside my mouth for one glorious moment of psychic self-immolation. Then I heard a chord. Gently struck but infinitely warm without ever becoming hot. The uplifting reminder of the sky's circularity. There'd always be a star, bright and cold, but there was also dawn that never withheld a day's promise to go again.
It sounds ridiculous—maybe it is—but I prefer to think Lupe was that good. I removed the star from my mouth after all. Shook out my hands to disperse the spell. Then pushed myself from bed. Cracked my knees against the linoleum to give me a feeling more base than traitorous empathy. I hissed and let myself be on my knees for a moment. Felt my tension release, and I breathed—cycles of ten second inhalations and exhalations. I did five cycles then got dressed.
I picked my way through the halls carefully. Surrounding me was a flow of nurses, doctors, and secretaries that moved with a practiced precision that I'd interrupted by my existence as a non-wounded patient. When I broke free from the red arterial hallway that denoted my room being on the internal medicine floor, I let a smaller tributary of people carry me toward the elevators.
I rode to the highest floor—postnatal care. I scoffed as the first thing I saw were the murals of rainbows leaping and looping in melting arches. There was a casual freedom that crawled between your legs daring you to tell it to behave. Room after room was filled with parents and babies—some rooms just those unlucky few that needed a bit longer to bake—who had no reason to regard cynicism or guilt as anything important in the face of a pure beginning.
Sure, maybe some parents had a bit of regret, but when I looked at any of those kids I couldn't help but put my dark compound thoughts away. Instead of them, I indulged a bit. Siphoning the color that ran beneath my fingers as I trailed hand against wall. Painted with them, so if someone looked in my eyes they'd see something they could compose—love—into a frame or image that didn't haunt them like the black-less dark of a grave at nighttime. Pregnable yet inescapable.
I laid my hand against the door, and tested a few faces that'd play well—Lupe couldn't see them to check, but a good mask makes it easier to pretend. Right?
The door parted way for lances of the summer sun to blind me. I squinted, tightening my defenses, and forced the door further ajar to step out onto the roof. Immediately the wind took me in the side, tugging at my hair and loose clothes as I stood still in appreciation.
Lit by the sun that made radiant the guitar in her hands, Lupe was the perfect image of a lupine wanderer. Hair fluttering up on the wind, but never cutting past the black shields of her shades. Though those were tilted down just enough that you could see the clouds in her eyes that rippled dark as light was trapped within them seeking its way out. She was—thud
I jumped and turned—the door had shut announcing me and revoking the gentle reverie I'd fallen into. When I turned back I found Lupe's head raised—no clouds, only glossy ebon glass.
"Were you disappointed?" she asked.
"By what?"
She plucked a thick string while pressing down high up the guitar's neck. The bassy tone vibrating in lurching swings. My own nerves swung up and down with it. She stilled it.
"That I wasn't there," Lupe said. "Or did you not miss me?"
"Oh, that," I said. "I totally missed you, but I heard your playing from my room when Ina was showing off her new arm. You couldn't be in too much trouble if you were able to mindlessly strum."
She scowled at the mindless part.
"Never mindless," she said. "I just don't mistake my anxieties for actual thoughts. Keeps me from standing but not opening a door for three minutes."
"You saw that," I said.
"Or for a justification to moodfuck the people who cared about keeping me alive."
"Moodfuck?"
"Have a better word to describe how you talked to Amber and Melissa?" Lupe asked. "Alls below, get out of that shadow."
She formed a hand-spell over the guitar's soundhole. A golden pollen spread outward from her in a wave that dissolved every mote of shadow that I'd used to hide.
"You heard everything?" I asked.
"You weren't trying to be quiet."
"I'm sorry," I said.
Lupe leaned against the steel mesh fence that covered the rooftop's perimeter.
"I don't need an apology," she said. "Wouldn't mind the truth though, since you had fun throwing it around earlier."
"What was the question?" I muttered.
"Were you disappointed when I wasn't rushing in to see you?"
I spat, "Alls below, yes. I sure as shit wasn't excited to see Ina. I'd thought…"
"What?" she asked. "That I'd fallen for you after two conversations and getting pointed toward the omelet station? Gosh, you're so used to being the center of girls' worlds that your heart broke a bit realizing that you weren't the center of mine."
"I don't—" I muttered.
"That I could give you less room in my mind than I use going through a few random chord progressions. That—"
"I don't think I'm the center of anyone's life," I snapped.
A cloud passed overhead, bluish-gray and herald to a fleet that could be seen just teasing the edge of the horizon. I sucked in a breath—it was still summer and any shadow was a fair reprieve from the way moist summer-heated air bludgeoned you down into a muggy sludge.
"Really?" she asked. "Do you want my shades because you're blind as fuck, Nadia."
I stayed quiet. Turned my head to the side to hide from the accuracy of her accusations. As if she needed to see to see through me.
"Want to know what I see?" she asked.
No.
"Melissa, a girl you were engaged to for how long?"
Don't say—, "Ten years," I answered.
"Wow, you really suck, and not in the cool slutty way," she chuckled. I squirmed.
"So ten years, for ten years you both knew each other was the solution to every problem we face in life—most of the time facing alone," she said. "Who'll hold me when I'm sick? Who'll love me when I hate myself? Who'll laugh with me when I think of a random joke?"
Lupe began to strum a gentle melody on the guitar. It languished in a minor key as each plucked note dropped with the heat of fresh tears. A pitter-patter against some psychic ground. She looked up at me, shook her head, and looked out across the glittering bay.
She said, "Forget about yourself, she had that comfort. I don't know why you two divorced—though I bet it was your fault—but I can tell how much care she has for you with every breath that'd be better spent cursing you if she said your name at all. It's more than you have for her real or performed."
Lupe strangled the guitar, choking the notes to rest.
"She took a fucking bullet for you, and you shoot her like that," Lupe said.
"And Amber?" I asked.
"The weirdest case of hero worship I've ever seen," she said.
"That's just…no," I said. "I'm not a hero."
"You surely aren't," she said, "but with how experienced you seemed dangling a life over a person's head—or their arm—I bet you did something to her."
I remembered the lindwurm frozen in mid-air, and my Sovereign who had Observed me, put my life on this track, and slew it. If I stretched I could remember the way each drip of her blood around the wound she'd suffered supporting me—even then—threatened to overthrow the balance of my chilled heart.
"For her." I said, "I endangered her life first, but I did save it. She's saved me enough times though that we're even."
"Does she know that?" Lupe asked. "Cause I haven't known a Baron in my life that enjoyed taking orders from a soldier. Especially when they have a past tall enough to make a girl run from them and into a sniper's bullet. So be real, do you really think you didn't notice how they felt? How they—for reasons weirder than the Underside—still probably feel about you."
"I may have noticed," I said in a scratched voice. The admission clawing up my throat in terror of what it'd mean to be voiced.
"How couldn't you, you needy little girl," Lupe said. "So broken and so pretty, and who can resist caring for a broken pretty thing that if you fixed up just right maybe it'd be yours forever."
She unslung her guitar and laid it against the ground. Opened her arms wide in ready for an embrace. I bit my lip fearful it was only a trap. Lupe shook her head and I raced into her arms. Let her squeeze me until the glue that held me together threatened to melt. Her body was soft and warm in the way the sun was when it teased your face in the morning.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because you looked like you needed a hug. Your silhouette was slouching dramatically."
"No, but, why me? After what I said?"
"You're not that special, and you're not that evil as to deserve or not deserve a hug. Besides," Lupe said, "when you have basically nothing all you do is preserve your fears and petty loathings for the right time to throw them at someone."
She stroked the center of my back while gently cradling my head against her chest. There was a heat inside of her that was every bit pained as my star was cold—we all had what we leaned on.
Lupe didn't look at me as I raised my head in recognition of a question I could ask, and she didn't look down at me with expectation that I'd ask it. Instead her fingers spider-crawled onto the guitar to erratically dance and pluck at its strings.
"What's the center of your world?" I asked.
Shifting around in her grasp so my back was to her chest. She guided us down to sit before picking up guitar and laying it across my lap and hers.
"My song," she said, "the Seven Families of the Sunken Valley, is something special. An innovation in conceptual weapons where we layered Courts atop Courts fused in damascus forge welds of melody. Way more than the 'metaphor you beat someone to death with' angle Amber has. I mean, you heard the song, it's more than just a Conceptual weapon and almost like a spell—a proper entity given Sorcery."
She continued, "It's what made Marduk decide to stay when he washed ashore naked and broke. Not a hint of Sorcery in his spirit that was small and loose like a child's. Overtime he became a fixture of the valley. Had children, and our problems started."
Lupe pulled the guitar flat against our laps. The sound was lurking, shifting beneath dark waters, before emerging in a shredding chord of sonic seafoam.
"See, old Marduk's kids weren't born right. They were born normal. A failure of the secret test he'd conducted. Cause Marduk liked the valley not because of the people or the scenery. He liked its isolation. There'd be few, if any, interruptions of his grand design. So he cast aside the cover he was using. Unveiled himself as a Marquis, and with a roll of his hand the valley fell under his territory."
I turned back to her in surprise, and didn't say anything when I saw the tears roll down her face, shining gems in the sunlight. Then returned my eyes down to the guitar and the long tanned hands that played it.
"That'd just kill people," I said.
Territories were the harshest of any conceptual zone short of the Underside. A space under its maker's control, and tuned to the power of a single Court. So condensed it was a scalpel that severed unprotected too weak spirits; filling the gaps in a person with itself.
"Oh, Marduk knew, but he said, 'With pressure comes diamonds, and with this gift may the treasure that is mankind's future step forward,'" Lupe said. "The treasure was this mad plan of making humans into entities or something near enough. Unfortunately for Marduk, we were too adaptable."
The song settled into a bluesy haze of a land that'd been sunk into the Abyss. Lupe sighed alongside her guitar's own rasp.
"And so our sunless time passed. Generation after generation until the sun became a myth, and children stopped being born with the ability to see."
I asked, "What about moving?"
"After the first generation of Sunken Valley's kids came of age they tried," Lupe said. "But the Abyss was in us now, and we'd become accustomed to a certain pressure. When they passed the threshold their bodies just, thbbpt."
She pantomimed an explosion with her hands.
Lupe said, "We were like blobfish. Perfectly fine until removed from our environment. The homeland had become a cage, and the only way out was through joining the cult."
"But you got out," I said.
She nodded, "I did, but not by myself. See, those of us who didn't want to join the cult had accepted we'd likely never use Sorcery again, but there were seven families who didn't. They weren't necessarily the most important before Marduk, but after…they were the ones who didn't give up. Helped a few young hopefuls bond with musician friendly entities, like this guy here."
Lupe fiddled with the whammy bar of her guitar-axe. Her hands not touching the strings I watched them vibrate until an eye formed in the plasma blur. It blinked once, twice, and became a smiling mouth. An eye again that closed.
"The Seven Families were our resistance," Lupe said, "but my sister was our escape. My escape. Dumb as hell but bold as fuck, she jumped a drunk cultist that'd left the bar one winter. Killed him and stole his sorc-deck. The idiot had the cult's grimoire on there. So where we—I—got to bond to Morning she pushed herself to bond to the Abyss—"
"Then used magic to acclimate you to lower pressures," I said.
Lupe didn't sob, but her shoulders shuddered and her song was a curtain of feeling.
"Damn right," she said. "The families gave me our song to carry, and our plight to sing in the hopes we'd find someone—a real hero-type—to help free us. It's the only reason I came for this death game exam anyways."
"If you haven't found your hero, why not leave and try the collectives?" I asked.
Lupe smiled with her teeth sharp and gleaming in answer.
"Because I know, in the same way I know the Abyss, that Marduk is here and I'm gonna make sure he dies here."
I tap her leg, and she spreads them and her arms so I can crawl away. Not too far—I wasn't running from her. Then I turned to face her. To hold her hands even as one held the neck of her guitar. I nodded in understanding.
"That's a good center," I said. "Same as mine really, vengeance."
"Nah," Lupe said, "vengeance is what I'm doing, but it's a means to an end. Not who I am or what I'm about."
"Then what's the center?"
"Liberation," Lupe said, and if I hadn't felt her hands I would've sworn she'd cast a spell just then as a cloud parted and a blade of sunlight cleaved through our shadow. Illuminating her and darkening me ever further.
There was a weight to the way she said it. The combined dream of hundreds—maybe a few thousand—people that only wanted to see the sun again. It was there, in that shadow, that I realized how cold I was and how much I wanted some of that light.
"Lupe, I…" I searched, "I want to help. Let me help."
"How, you're just a Baron and not even a real one."
"I have a key," I said. "I'd looted—um—I'd recovered one after cutting down an ally of the cult. It accesses the murals around the city. Turns them into Staircases to somewhere."
"His throne probably," she said. "Alls below, no one in the families have gone into that thing and come out before."
"You can," I said. "I'll hand it over the next time I see you?"
Lupe furiously nodded. Her hair undulating in the wind. She was silent, but her hands couldn't help but play. A tune of clouds breaking, sunlight seeping in silent as a thief and ready for the big display. I left her to her thoughts—plots?—and made for the door. Her playing stilled.
"Nadia," she called out, "I'm not a fighter, and—"
"I'll go with you," I said, the words smearing as I whirled back around to face her. "Can I ask one thing though?"
"Why not," she said.
"Did you want to be in the room earlier?" I asked.
Lupe rubbed the back of her head. "It doesn't matter if I did," she said. "Amber and Melissa love you, and Ina is at least turned on by Melissa. There's no room for me in that dynamic."
"But if you did," I argued, "it'd make sense why you would be positioned only a few floors above my room exactly. The floors aren't that spiritually dense, and I'm sure you have a way to see deeply if needed."
Lupe chuckled and strummed her guitar. "That's a good theory," she said. Missed a note in an arpeggio and fumbled her fingers back to hit it. It was a good theory.
* * *
I took the cable car back to the suite that'd become 'home' insofar as it was the closest thing I had since losing my actual one. Inside was more quiet and loneliness. I placed the glaive in my room, and dove into a shower to ward off any strange feelings using the rushing water.
It was a warm gentle drone that kept my thoughts to a minimum. Buried beneath the white noise rush that filled my ears. The shower was technically a shrine. Working off a series of principles that generated hot water at the perfect speed and amount of droplets to fall on you with the natural pace of a modest rain. Each drop of water tuned to cut through and absorb grime to be deposited down the drain with all the other refuse.
A good shower could work wonders on the mind. As did Lupe's hug, and the sense of her pressed into my back. Soft and hard in all the right places. I almost felt like being a person again when it was over. I padded across the rather morbid shower mat in the bathroom—the thing turned red when hit with water. Creating the appearance of blood-stained footsteps in the otherwise pristine white of the mat. Like I said, morbid.
I leaned against the sink and wiped away the fog on the mirror so I could see myself.
"No," I screamed. "Oh fuck, no."
Unveiled by one bold swipe, were my eyes flecked red in their usual gold. It was due to my look of horror that I realized my teeth had changed too. My canines properly sharpened into fangs capable of ripping out an artery so I could guzzle what I craved from the source. I stumbled backwards as I pounded the intrusive thought from my skull. It wasn't the first—I know that now—but it was the first that I felt truly aware of at the time.
I stared at myself in the mirror. At the reflection that wasn't me, and then I yawned. It, the reflection, yawned and I didn't. I beat a hurried retreat from the bathroom back into the suite's common area. Paced between the couch and coffee table—ignored the bloodstains my eyes could make out even though what had stained the area was just the barest trace of Amber's previous violence that soap and water could never remove.
I forced my mouth shut so I didn't feel tempted to lick my lips.
Then I formed the hand-spell to eject Sphinx from within my spirit. She herself yawned from her place atop the coffee table. I dropped down onto the couch in front of her.
"What's wrong with me?" I asked.
"Are you asking emotionally, mentally—"
"And physically, mystically, I don't fucking know Sphinx. I don't know," I said. "I have fangs, red in my eyes, I'm changing. Just now the mirror yawned, and if I'm honest what did I see when I had my 'two out of three' death? Why a cabin?"
Sphinx sealed my lips with her front paw. I noticed then that she'd grown from her plushie size to something more equal to me—still not her full size, but this had a charm all its own.
"It's easier to read one book than seven at once," she said.
"The fangs and eyes," I said.
She chuffed, "Choices, Nadia, the parent to most change. Though all that is is sliding us on more delineated paths that might better suit the way we follow."
"That's not an answer. At least tell me if they're really there."
Sphinx rolled her eyes and raised a paw bidding me to hold open my eyes for examination. She searched and then pushed my head up.
"Open," she ordered. After a moment of examination she said, "Nothing for either eyes nor fangs. If they're true then perhaps they're not Real. A symptom of something, yes, but buried inside your spirit most in places I can't walk to chase down the answers."
I fell to my side crashing into the plush solidity of the couch. Pressed the candy cloud softness of my bathroom against my skin. Sphinx tilted her head to follow my new orientation.
"You're unhappy with the outcome?" she asked.
"No," I said, "but maybe a bit. Everything is happening so fast—too fast—and I feel like there's no ground beneath me anymore. Just blood and adrenaline and fire. Under it all I just, I want to know that there's something real about me. Intrinsic and immutable. Something I don't have to worry about betraying."
"Intrinsic," Sphinx said. "At best that's just the result of an anti-choice to not change. There's no such thing."
I propped myself up. Eyes sharp as daggers as I stared down Sphinx for my own sanity.
"Yes, there is."
"Okay, then tell me this," Sphinx said, "would the Nadia from the train, the one who'd never taken a life until just then and was tormented in her dreams, look at the Nadia from two nights ago—the one that hollered and cheered as she dyed her suit red in blood and spilled futures—and agree that there was an intrinsic sameness between them?"
Emphatic, I said, "Yes. Both her and that other her, could agree we only killed bad people."
"I don't remember that Nadia, gleefully cutting down foes, saw them as people. Do you?"
"They were still bad," I muttered.
"And what of last night's opposition during the test, were they bad?"
"They'd crossed a line. Killed Amber."
"Hmm, so not bad, but they crossed a line. Is your line the demarcation of moral allegiance?"
My lips squeezed behind the sour point Sphinx had just fed me. She didn't need me to say anything to keep going, to bury me.
She added, "And, to be clear, they thought they killed your darling gin-soaked mummer. They hadn't, which would mean—had you successfully slain them before the player's appearance—you would've crossed the line first."
"They intended—"
Sphinx's voice boomed and the shadows in the room shock in time with her intonation—honeyed and strong, royal. The background pitter of dripping water stilled to nothing as I was dragged into a Godtime by the one that gave truth to its name.
"Now we speak of intention," the Sovereign said through my darling Sphinx. "You shift your borders so elegantly that you've mistaken their tracks as the wind. So let us be plain, so you don't get confused."
I pressed myself into the couch in terror. This was more than a Godtime. It was an Observation.
"We made an oath, did we or did we not?"
"We did," I said.
"So we did, I'm glad we agree. The terms of which I considered very clear and very generous. I help you with your petty tiny vengeance. Through my Sorcery, which you've taken too so well, I've aided you in finding your foes."
I tried to defend myself. I sputtered, "But, I promised Sphinx we'd investigate soon about your foes. I have leads."
"You do," the Sovereign said.
Using Sphinx's body, she hopped from the table and crawled up my body. Paws soft but her weight put atop each step to drive it like a spike through my body. She sat and stared down at me with burning ripple stars for eyes.
"But my terms were two fold, vengeance only one of them. The other?"
"Chart your return?" I said, the memory making no delay to be held up in a bid to win me a god's grace.
She smiled. "Perfect, you do remember. So why is it that my darling daughter, Sphinx—such a creative name by the way—is thinking about you not becoming a baron? Instead you're fixated on things as worthless as eyes and fangs."
Her face pressed in close to mine as she said, "I can remove them for you if you'll be less distracted."
"What does me becoming a Baron have to do with anything?" I asked.
"It has to do with everything," she screamed.
My spirit rattled and I felt fibers melt beneath a heat grander than theirs.
"Sorry, let me use my indoor voice." She said, "It has to do with everything, my dearest and most favorite summoner. The climb up toward the thrones of all that Is and will ever Be. I speak of the Chain, Nadia. You can't bring me back in my entirety until you tend to my divinity from a throne of our shared Sovereignty, understand?"
"Y-yes," I said. "I just…"
"What?"
"I'm not ready to see Sphinx go," I whined. It was selfish and petulant and small and human. "She said it'd be us in the end."
"Fool that you are, a child raised by an impossible union. A impossible union. It's why I was so impressed by you, and something I should've taken into account before I let my gatekeeper see to you. To find that she's stalling, how indulgent."
"Please, don't do anything to Sphinx," I begged.
"Why would I? This too is Revelation, but please don't leave her older sister's waiting. They're only so polite."
The Sovereign gestured with Sphinx's wing to the four shadows that split from beneath, crawled up a wall each, to stare down at me with shining eyes of Revelation. A question, the question, as to them and the trial I'd have to pass if I was to climb the Chain had squirmed its way atop my tongue.
I swallowed it down; if I asked then…I don't know, but I knew, intuitively, that I wouldn't leave this Observation with Sphinx. So I turned my eyes back to my bondmate—possessed though she was—and raised the question that'd get me through this.
"Do you have a pace I have to hit?" I asked.
The Sovereign smiled with Sphinx's face and licked a paw dismissively. "No, but one shouldn't keep an ancient divinity waiting. There are many links in the Chain, my dearest and favorite summoner. So no stopping. Not for exhaustion, or love, or death. Upwards always upwards."
She blinked, the shadows that hid Barons behind them retracted, and Sphinx returned to me. Her smile a line of broken shards arranged in an attempt at something beautiful. The pitter became patter, and the water counted out the seconds of tension between the two of us.
"You said it'd be the two of us in the end," I said.
Sphinx glanced away from me. I gripped her face and turned it back to mine.
"Was that just a lie to keep me climbing?" I asked.
Sphinx said, "No, it'd be the truth. Our bond wouldn't change."
"But you would," I said. "You wouldn't be Sphinx. You'd be something named and titled. Someone else."
"I thought you believed in an intrinsic and immutable nature somewhere within people?"
"I do, but…" I trailed off.
Sphinx filled in my words, "It's different for 'people' than it is entities? Is that it?"
My silence was agreement.
Sphinx lowered herself against my stomach. Stared at me just above my chest.
"A lot of humans think that, but they don't have to be right. Their bonds are different than ours. They don't pour humanity into their entities the way you do me," Sphinx said. "But you've been changing me since we met. You've changed since we met. Yet you still call me Sphinx and I call you Nadia."
She smiled and raised herself. Took the lapel of my robe and tugged it loose bearing my chest in its modest stiff peaked glory. Her breath was heavy at the sight of me—hair askew in a messy halo as I lay on my back.
"Even if you call me something else, you can always call me yours. Through the small changes and the big," she said. "I'll still be of Revelation and you'll still be my divided summoner. You don't have to fear power."
Tears pooled at my cheeks before falling down the sides of my face to get lost in my hair.
"I'm not afraid of power," I said. "I just…I don't want to look around to find that I have it and I'm alone, Sphinx. I don't want to push away my friends, but things get scarier and scarier. I get scarier, and it seems like everyone around me dies. Mom, Dad, Wren, people close to me and strangers…" I trailed off. I cried. I couldn't stop crying the whole fears that lurked behind every cruel word I'd said to Melissa and Amber.
"I don't want them to follow me if it means they end up in a grave somewhere. Cause it feels like death sticks to everyone but me. Even though I'm yelling and screaming and opening my arms so wide for it to just take me. Cause it's all so hard," I said. "It's so hard."
Sphinx was quiet. She allowed me the space to sob. Didn't complain as it shook my body. Instead she stretched herself above me and I watched her grow—just a little bit more, closer to her proper size—before she settled on me like a blanket. Then she pressed her mouth to mine in a kiss that attempted to claim the entirety of me—burdens and all.
"I'm sorry for being selfish," I moaned into her mouth. I knew she was alone and my sentimentality was dragging out her torment.
She migrated kisses from my lips to my cheeks. Claiming a tear from each.
"What have I always said about apologies," she reminded me. "They have no place between us, and if anything I'm the selfish one. Prodding you to advance when you needed me to have the wisdom to hold you back. Though even then, I'm more selfish than you, because despite it all the concerns of the Court are far from my mind."
"And what's on your mind?" I asked.
She pressed her mouth to my neck. Grazed it with her teeth in a dangerous reminder of status as an entity. A danger that fled my thoughts when she pressed her mouth to my chest. Teased my breast between her lips, rolled its peak against her fangs, before letting go with a suckling pop.
You, she thought, always you.
I've taught you the worst things about humanity, I thought.
"We're equals in all things," she said. "Even our selfishness as I don't wish to hurry from this moment with you."
"Then don't," I said.
Sphinx drew my other breast into her mouth, and plunged us both into the heady depths of a lascivious Godtime. We stretched seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, and all just spent exploring the territory of each other that we hadn't dared do since she passed a star to me on our first kiss.
She marked my collarbone in a constellation of greedy kiss-marks barely hidden beneath my own melanin. I said that this made us 'fang for fang,' and received a paw to the face for the joke. By the time our ten minute eternity had passed, I was worn out and breathing hard having traded her breath for mine and vice-versa.
"Sphinx, am I a good person?" I asked.
"Be specific," she said.
I said, "I just feel like I'm bad at being a person. Everyone's so clear about themselves and committed to things. What am I even doing?"
"Finding out," she said. "As is Revelation's way. Though if it soothes any, I love your dual-sided complexity."
"Why?" I asked. "It's the worst thing about me."
Sphinx silenced my self-flagellation with a kiss. "What we loathe in ourselves is often what others love. And though I can't speak for the maiden or the mummer," Sphinx said, "I can speak for myself. That your divided self, your petty humanity and glorious spirit, your gallant smile and even now your wounded tears; in all ways I find you beautiful."
Sphinx's eyes burned with the flame of Revelation as she continued, "Nadia, no matter my link nor whatever I become, I shall inscribe it within myself to such depths that even when the stars grow cold and the last dream has been spun, my vow will remain untarnished. That I, Sphinx of the Court of Revelation, did love my summoner, Nadia Temple, ward of Kareem and daughter to a Sovereign."
"Sphinx, you're crying," I said. My thumb catching a streaking ember before it fell from her face. That single wipe became a cradling. A guiding hand. One last kiss.
