One After Another – 10.z
Author: Wildbow

One After Another – 10.z | Pale

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“Sydney!”

Sydney fled, running through the unlit hallway, slamming the front door behind her.

“Sydney, get back here!”

She didn’t get back there.  The door opened, hall lights on and bright orange, and her parents’ large, wide silhouettes danced on the walls and the front lawn.  She was small and they were heavy and they couldn’t run to the front gate, let alone the end of the block.

Downtown patios were filled with people on dates and families.  Restaurants had railings bolted to the sidewalks to section off areas for people to sit outside, and Sydney jogged along the railing.  Her body was a knot, breath and heartbeat and stomach all tied up to the point she wasn’t very aware of anything; her thoughts fluttered like butterflies that couldn’t sit still with what waited for her at home.  Trouble.  Trouble.

Eyes danced, her head light and airy and her body a lead weight.  Acting on impulse, she saw an opportunity and swiped a thing of fries from a table where the people weren’t paying attention.  Multiple tables of family talking to one another.  She saw another opportunity, a little girl eating a brownie, and reached through the bars of the railing to steal the food, gripping the brownie with hot fudge oozing between fingertips.  Hot, sticky.

There was a yell, and before anyone could articulate what had happened or accuse her, if they were even yelling because of her, she bolted.  Half the brownie crumbled as she ran, and fries spilled out.

It wasn’t that she was hungry.  She was full if anything.

But she could stop, turn the corner and lean against the wall, and she could shovel salt and starch into her mouth, vinegary ketchup, choking it down, coughing and wishing she’d been able to get something to drink, too.

Then, when done, she ate the brownie too.  She licked at fingers and sucked them free of hot fudge.  She didn’t even enjoy it, but the effort stirred her stomach to life, and freed up those knots.  Butterflies in the head, stirring, butterflies in the stomach, queasy, breath in pants from trying to breathe while eating, slow to recover.  Mouth dry, even with moist brownie.

She kept going because it felt like she’d die if she stopped.

There was no going back, not to home, not until she was out late enough that her parents were more relieved she’d come home than they were angry she hadn’t listened.  Not to the street with the food, in case anyone was looking for her.  She ran until her legs were out of steam, panting, not because she couldn’t recover her breath but because she didn’t want to.  The knots around heart and lungs tightened.

She thought she might have a heart attack.  She felt calm even as she had the thought.

Vending machine, outside a hotel or motel or something.  Brownie-sticky hands dug into her pocket for change.  She paid and mashed two buttons at once in her hurry, cracked it open and drank from it while it foamed.  Past a certain point, the guzzling gulps hurt, but she didn’t stop.

She knew what this was all leading up to.  Her thoughts got twisted when she got like this, and it happened more and more easily.  She found herself in a place where there was one road and only two destinations.  That self-inflicted heart attack or…

She looked back, then looked forward.  The can tumbled from her hand and she kicked it aside.  The side street was residential, dark, with cars parked on both sides of the narrow condo buildings.  No driveways, so every resident parked on the street.  Nobody was really outside.

A brownie-sticky hand dragged along windows as she walked by the cars.  Nice cars, lame cars, cars with rust by the wheel well, cars with dings in the side.

She burped and it tasted like brownie and soda.

A car with windows cracked open so the inside wouldn’t get hot.  There was a tree nearby, sticking out of a little bit of ground that had been allowed for it on the sidewalk, and a short one-foot fence bounded it in, metal with round knobs on the posts, painted green, even though that was hard to see in the gloom.  No nearby lights.

The fence and tree gave her a stepping stone and something to lean against, a low branch covered in leaves provided some cover, and none of the nearby lights were on.

She held her breath as she approached the car, stepping up onto the little fence.  Gingerly, she reached for the partially open window and pulled down on it.  It was an old car, and the window had some give- pulling gave her almost another inch of gap.

She checked again.  Nobody.

Reaching into the pocket of her cargo shorts, she pulled out things.  Stuff from dinner last week, set aside in the bustle of visiting family and barbecue being served.

Lighter fluid from the barbecue, matches, some wads of tissue.  She used the wads to wipe at the residual brownie-stickiness, then triple-checked the coast was clear before leaning over toward the window.  Uncapping the lighter fluid, she emptied the little, squat bottle, roughly the same dimensions of grandpa’s hip flask.  She gave it a shake, then tossed it inside.

She was still holding her breath.  The knotted stomach and chest and heart were all worse, even her thoughts were still and without butterflies.  When she had to breathe, she allowed herself only a gasp, before gulping in more air, until her lungs hurt.  Every muscle was tight, every part of her taut or clenched.

She struck the match, then stared at it, watching as it burned down toward fingers that probably had traces of lighter fluid on them.  It was bright, beautiful, clear, and her life had very few things that were bright, beautiful or clear.  There was television and clothing and toys but she had to share television with her parents and the clothing was secondhand and the toys were few in number and shared with her cousin, who visited too often.  Every time she complained, her parents reminded her she was eleven.  Those toys were for children half her age.  Not for her.

Nothing was for her except this dangerous, dancing light.  This was hers in a big, out of control way.

She gulped in air, lungs hurting, breath still held.  Muscles released because she couldn’t hold them taut any longer and then she clenched them again, and in the process almost nodded into the fire, nose touching it.  She held onto the flame for as long as she could.

Sometimes this was enough.  Sometimes she could blow it out, chicken out, and it was still enough.  Not tonight.

At the last moment, she touched it to tissue, then shoved both match and tissue in through the gap.

Sometimes that was enough, too.  Sometimes it didn’t take but the fact she’d taken that leap of trying worked.

It took.  It waited just long enough for her to reach for a second match, and then it leaped up, orange light bright and beautiful and hers inside a random car that had the unfortunate luck to be perfectly deserving, because of where it was.

The trapped breath left her lungs with a quiet ‘whoo’, heady and dizzying as the initial whoosh of fire danced up the back car seat.  She leaned forward, touching glass, face almost smushing up against it, as muscles relaxed, everything unclenching, leaving her wobbly and exhilarated.  She thought for a long few seconds she was either at risk of wetting herself or already in the process and she didn’t care.  It was that much of a release.  The fact the glass was in the way let her get closer than she otherwise might, seeing the fire spread and roll, catching on trash on the floor between the back seat and front seat.

The swelling light consumed her senses, the smell of smoke tastier than the brownie.  Her eyes glittered, her hands warmed, touching glass.

A door banged open, and she ran, keeping to shadow.  When the shouting started and neighbors stepped outside to see what the problem was, the fire in the evening was bright enough to consume everyone’s attention.

It held hers.  She hugged herself, watching, and saw the fires rise up enough to lick the branches and leaves of the tree that had helped hide her while she lit the fire.  People shouted in alarm.

Everything was that orange light, then the red and blue lights of the fire truck.

Guilt mingled with the relief and release, that heady, overwhelmed feeling that came with something this big being so hers.

The fire was quenched, and all went dark.  Before people could wonder who she was and why she was hanging out here alone, she ducked away, stumbling over trash left on the curbside.

Flies buzzed around her from the trash, rain dripping from the sky.

There were more houses with lights out.  She ventured toward a park with a play structure, unoccupied late at night.

Something big and black loomed there.

“Sydney!”

Her parents, behind her.

Sydney ran down the dark path.

“Sydney, get back here!”

She didn’t listen.  Lights shone behind her, dull and orange, shadows dancing.  She was a better runner than her parents, who were older and overweight.  It meant she could run around the bends in the path, escaping to the outdoors.

Rain fell around her.

Joys of earlier faded away, replaced by a twisted tension.

She escaped into the commercial area of downtown, a few blocks from home.

Past shops that were still open.  She waited until the clerk was grabbing cigarettes from behind the counter, then snatched up snacks that wouldn’t crinkle when pocketed.

A louder voice startled her.  She ran, taking what she had.

Something was wrong.  It added to guilt and to anxiety.  Trouble.  Trouble.

The tension built, her breath was held, and that big dark thing from the park crouched in a parking space as she ran past.

She found a place to crouch, to devour the stolen snacks.  To chug a soda until her throat hurt.  Trying not to eat, but to release that tension.

There was only one way to release that tension.

She held her breath, walking down the street, as she approached a parked van.  A side window was open.

The dark thing watched her, watched as she reached into her shorts pocket and got the lighter fluid and lighter.  She had the paper from the stolen snacks from the corner store.

Every muscle tensed.  She let out half breaths and gulped in full breaths until her lungs hurt.

She checked the coast was clear, then poured the lighter fluid into the window.

Holding the paper snack wrappers in hand, she clicked the lighter, and she stared at the dancing flame.  Captivated by it, enraptured.

Her parents shouted her name.

She didn’t know her name.  She didn’t know what they were shouting.

They shouted her name again.

There were no flashlights, no hall lights, no car headlights, to cast that orange glow.  But somehow, there were still shadows.  Deep and black, swaying as they ran behind her.  She was faster than them, but not necessarily faster than the shadows they cast.

The dark thing without eyes snatched at her from out of that darkness, tore at her.  Lights of nearby houses and streetlights flickered, dimmed, and the world got darker.

She staggered, stumbling, weaker, mind numb.  It let her go.  She was running in circles, she knew, and it would be waiting for her at the next lap.  Another would be waiting up ahead.  They gathered around her like crows.

The rain poured, soaking through her mesh shirt and the shorts- what kind of shorts were they?

She had an impulse, a desire to eat, to reach for food, but the walls that stretched to her left were without window or door.  Any energy food might have given her was denied to her.

The circles she was running in got smaller and tighter each time she ran them.

She saw the car.  She swayed, almost too feeble to approach, but dark things gathered.

Rain pounded down around her, anxious.  The smell of trash on the curb was stirred up by wind and water, the detritus making each footstep a risky one, something that she might slip on, when slipping wasn’t-

It wasn’t something that was supposed to happen.  The dark things would be waiting for her when she was done with it.

Every bad feeling swelled and the good things- she wasn’t sure what was supposed to be good.

She approached the car- she couldn’t make it out in the rain, her vision bleary with water, every attempt at blinking water away or shielding her eyes a failure.

She reached for her pocket, and found tatters and smoke instead of anything.

The tension built.  She held her breath, releasing a half breath, gulping in a full breath.

Releasing a half breath, gulping in a full breath.

The black thing’s feet sloshed in the ankle-deep water, crunched through trash, stirring up more smells, more bugs, more fetid revulsion that worked its way into her and made her very aware of how much of the trouble she ran from was locked in the deepest recesses of her chest, her stomach, her mind.  From herself to herself.  Couldn’t get away, could only-

She reached for her pocket, and found tatters and smoke instead of anything, the tatters snarling at fingers and smoke creeping up her arm.

It drew closer.  The lights of nearby buildings dimmed more; they had been dimming for a long time.  Little by little.

There were others.  The second one she saw after the one in the park was sleek, black, and panther-like, muscles rolling beneath skin so thin she could see strands and bands of muscle.  Its head held a prominent position, overlarge and lacking in any apparent eyes, hair, ears, nose, or mouth, and its tail was impossibly long, stretching down the length of the city block behind it as it crept closer.

A third was man-shaped, with normal length legs, but long arms that let it lift and hoist itself onto a nearby streetlight, then reach out to the next streetlight to transfer its body over.  It poised above her, arms wrapping around the streetlight, choking out the light, so it dimmed further.  This one had a mouth, lips barely able to pull closed to hide white teeth, the mouth reaching a point that was close to the corners of the jaw, before traveling down the sides of its neck and part of its chest.

Her thumb clicked the end of the lighter.  A bubble of water oozed out instead of fire.

No precious fire, that would let her find relief and release, no light, no light, nothing of hers.

The one above her reached, arm unwrapping from the upper end of the streetlight, long fingers extending toward her.  She jogged, running, and almost came face to face with another.  It loomed on one edge of the road.  Landscape that was supposed to be there wasn’t anymore.

The lights dimmed further, half of the streetlights going out, and the dark oblivion of these things deepened by the same measure.

With so little light, it was possible to see other, distant lights.

Fixating on one, she ran.  She sought it and felt a need for it that matched what she’d sought and needed when she’d set the car on fire.

The things that pursued her were slow, patient killers.  They wounded and then followed after, letting the wound do its work in slowing her down, tightening her downward spiral.  They followed, some faster than others, but none particularly inclined to fight.

Scenes flickered.  Outdoors, indoors.  Nature and city.  But darkness and rain were omnipresent, grinding down everything.  There were figures in the rain and dark, some worse off than others, many milling around.

She chased the light.

It was a road.

A crowd dispersed, blurry, barely there.  Behind them, they left the echo of a song sung, filled with faith, of love and loss.  Behind them they left a wreath by the roadside, a girl’s portrait in a heart forged out of flowers, the image on the portrait bleeding away in the rain and the dark.

The light helped to clarify her.  The feelings heavy in the air helped to lift her up.

This was a dying image, the rain putting out candles, the darkness creeping in.

This was a door.

She gathered up the candles, and her lighter worked when she clicked it, igniting others that had gone out.  Wax melted into wax and the faint song carried on.

She burned the wreath because it could burn, paper flowers catching, and the remnants of the singing ceased.  It was more light, now, more of a door in wake of the sacrificial flame.

Cradling an armful of the candles, she turned toward the way she’d come, and she could see the stalking predators in the gloom, waiting and following.

She raised the newfound light and they shied back.

She ran, dogged by shadows, away from the dark things, and into a space with less rain and darkness.

“Cole, please.  Cole.”

“Quiet.  There are dark spirits here that will follow your voice.”

“Please!”

He slapped her, hard.  Then he slapped her again for good measure.

The landscape was rolling clouds of oily dark.  Some clouds looked like vapor but were gossamer footing, and other things looked like footing but were vapor.

The further she ventured into this space, the more important the candles became, and the less important the girl who’d set fire to the car became.

Figures stood by the wayside, working, writing on every surface available, or chipping material out of cracks in surfaces.  Some had printings on their flesh and others were dressed up in clear displays of the work they did and what they represented.

She trudged forward, feeling a deep and impossible longing for something she’d never truly have again.  A keening sadness that was only magnified by candle flame.  But the flame meant something and that gave it life here, drew attention, lit the path and helped make distinctions clearer.

It allowed her to follow these two people, who belonged here even less than the girl who’d set fire to the car.

A man dragged a girl half his age.  He was decked out in clothing that belonged here, and it made him strong.  When she struggled too much, he threw her, then picked her up while she reeled, hurting.  The girl wasn’t solid, not completely.  She was transparent, her clothes changing every few seconds, hairstyle and hair length varying.  In certain light, from her candles, points at various parts of her body glowed, radiated, and smoked.

Most importantly, the man, Cole, carried a lantern.  The fire of it caught her eye and drew her in.

Every commotion, every bit of pain, it made the candles receptive, made them glow.  It drew in dark things, figures who had imprints on skin of weapons.  A silhouette of a man without a face with letters carved into flesh.  Lesser things, too small and indistinct to have clear forms, beyond four legs and a lump that could be a head, some more transparent than others.  Many of the dangerous things stayed away from the light of the lantern.

He threw her again.  She shrieked, scrabbling on gossamer ground as she came to the edge of a cliff.  The edge of a hole.  “Cole!”

“Bailey,” he said, crouching in front of her, as she fought to avoid falling.  “In a minute or so, I’m going to ask you if you’ll cooperate.  Don’t tell me yes now.  I won’t believe you.  We’ve been down this road.”

“Don’t let me fall!  Please!”

“If you interrupt like that, this will take longer.”

She made small, frightened sounds.

The girl with the candles approached, cautious, fixated on the lantern.  She reached out, and the drippings of candle hit ground beneath her reaching arm, each droplet forming into a smaller candle on the ground.  The longing feeling extended with the carpet of small candles.

“Annoying.  You’re distracting my stepdaughter and you’re distracting me,” he said.  He swiped the lantern toward her.

She reached for it as it passed by, pushed out more with her being and reached with a hand and arm that had held candles for so long that they’d melted into flesh and become part of it.

“Not a spirit, are you?  Not wholly?” he asked.  He reached for a pocket.

This time, he flung something out.  It was pure and it was clean and it cut through her like thrown razors.  She moved back, pained, candles broken and falling away, flesh torn, the edges now tattered and smoking away.

“Please,” Bailey pled, fighting not to slip over the edge.

“This, Bailey, is the spirit world.  Ideas have more power here than the material.  Symbols, themes, the art of things, they form this space.  Shrines were inadvertently created by the artist clique in the neighborhood downtown… it gives the spirit of this region structure and clarity.  But we’re not there.  That should be obvious.”

Bailey fought to gain ground.  He put a foot out, blocking her, and she grabbed it.  Her arm, insubstantial, passed through.  She lost five feet of ground and nearly fell, holding on with the tips of one hand’s fingers, and the forearm of her other arm.

“This is the spiritual reflection of the bad end of downtown, and that, below you?  That’s a hole that leads to the Abyss.  For a long, long time, we thought that it was hell.  It will chew on you for a long time and then, if you have the grit, it will spit you back out.  But you don’t have the grit, Bailey.”

“Please,” Bailey whispered.

It hurt.  The razors, the way her lights had died out.  She wanted to venture forward but the ground that had been covered in whatever had been thrown at her was disintegrating, and what remained was covered in those razors.

“If you disobey me again, I will use the holds I have on your spirit, no matter where you are, and I will bring you here.  Then I will give you a choice.  Either allow me to mold and alter the spirits that make you you, for which I’ll require your consent… or fall.”

He stood straighter, and planted the rod with the lantern dangling from it into the ground, using it as something to hold onto, as he got a little closer to the edge.

“Bailey,” he said.

“Cole, please.  Please don’t-”

“You’ll realize very quickly that obeying me in the first place is so much easier,” he told her.  He crouched, and reached down, and he found the umbilical- a cord that stretched from spirit to body.  “If you go, your body will follow.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Then we should think about what alterations to make to your spirit, Bailey.  I can’t have you embarrassing me.”

It hurt.  These razors.  She circled around them, every footstep pained on legs that were now tattered.

Candles dripped to ground as she moved, drawing out a half-circle behind him.

He became aware of it.  He half-turned, one hand wound with the umbilical cord wrapped and twisted four or five times around his hand and wrist, fingers gripping it, other hand holding the pole of the lantern.  He watched her.

“The wildlife can get persistent this close to a gateway to the Abyss,” he remarked.

The candles had their light and by pushing- extending out with that keening longing, that loss of classmate, daughter, friend-

Rain pattered, light at first.  Darkness extended, gaining ground to deepen the shadows of surroundings at the same time candles grew taller and brighter.

She willed herself at him, embraced him with feelings and found little purchase.  By protections he’d forged or by the life he’d lived, he didn’t have much room for emotions to get their grips on him.

He started to stand, then stopped.

Bailey was holding onto the spiritual umbilical cord, which he’d wound around his hand.  She wasn’t heavy, but her weight made the knot cinch tight around hand.

“Release me, Bailey,” Cole said.  “Now, or we’ll both end up in a bad situation.”

Rain increased in intensity.  So did her strength and ability to make him feel that longing and loss.

She wasn’t alone either.  Splitting off, pulling apart, she became the girl who’d set fire to the truck.  Lunging past and snatching lantern from pole in the same way she’d stolen food.

And with the lantern going, the shadows became twice as dark, and the spirits at the edges of the light were free to approach.

“Bailey!”  He barked her name like an order.

“Go to hell, Cole,” Bailey told him, her words bitter.  “Even if I have to drag you there with me.”

“You were always a stupid girl.”

Spirits lunged.  The one with words carved into flesh gripped him, flowed into him.  Words flowed from it to his flesh, fresh and raw like a knife had cut them in, blood flowing.  They redefined, inserted labels and meanings.

It didn’t matter.  All that mattered was that she had that burning light of the lantern now.

The rain extended, the spirits crumbling and falling back.  The flowing water made it hard for Cole to maintain footing.  Candles flickered at the edges of this region, with only oblivion on the far side.  Every time he fought to get free or get to a position to fight back, Bailey clawed at him, or tugged on the umbilical to jerk him off balance.  It was all savagery, all emotion.

“You don’t realize how bad this is, stupid girl!  It’s moving us, and spirits don’t do well here.  I have preparations, if you’ll just let me-”

“I realize, Cole!  Believe me!  And I won’t let you!”

The dark, eyeless shape slipped out through a gap in the half-circle of candles.  It was one of the older, stronger, slower ones.  It could reach out and it could find things in the dark that reflected Cole and Bailey.  Neither of them were physical.  They’d left bodies behind to come here, voluntarily for Cole and involuntarily for Bailey.  Their shapes being what they were let this thing snatch at the edges of them.  Gathering up the half-formed images and almost forgotten moments.

The hole of the Abyss and the dark thing worked together.  The Abyss provided the hooks, ground at the cliff’s edge shifting, nails and bent metal in evidence.  The dark thing gave the hooks their worms, and it gave a face to the darkness, reflecting something deep and horrible they had to confront.

A young woman, slightly older than Bailey, hair and clothing black, a small, sad smile on her face.

“No.”  Cole’s voice was sad and small.

Bailey hauled him back into the hole to deeper, darker places, and then fell after him.

The dark thing disappeared into the dark, pursuing.

The change was subtle, but there was power in this, in something being lost to the deepest dark.  It was power that fought the lantern and stoked it.

Dark things loomed, too.  The stalking predators who waited for her to dim and die a little so they could have their meals.  Oblivion things, faceless or eyeless or both.  They yawned large in frame or in maw, wanting her in a very different way than that hole in the ground had wanted things.

She hugged the lantern and candles close, stumbled, nearly fell, then let the light lead.  The lantern was physical, bright, defiant, and she found her way to a physical, bright, and defiant place.

A place that seemed so far away and long ago.  Staggering footsteps on wounded, tattered limbs, holding too much at once, the fires licking her shoulders and arms, metal around the lantern hot, burning her to tatters.

She followed smoke and stepped through rain and gloom onto the side of a road.  Cars whizzed past, signs glowed, and people were everywhere, in spirit and in heart and in darkness.

The smoke came from a car that had crashed.  People were inside, checking that they were all okay, speaking in frightened words and reassuring ones.

There was oil on the ground and she burned orange.  They noticed her and she had no choice but to duck low, so they wouldn’t see.

Ducking low and close to oil, igniting it.

She set the car alight, half by accident, half by intent, and half by no will at all.

Lantern, candlelit vigil and arson.  She was three halves put together.

Following the swell of pain from the people in the car as they fought to get out as the fire erupted around them, the traces of darkness from her proximity to the Abyss were fed with another sort of power.

Burning, powered, hungry and harried, feeling guilt and awe and other scattered things, she moved on.

A tattered, fading figure crawled along the floor.

The family that lived in the house couldn’t even see her.  One of them rubbed at her nose.  “Still smell that smoke.”

“The price of a cheap house.”

“It’s morbid.”

“Not having a place we can afford is even more morbid.  It’ll clear out eventually.”

It would clear out eventually.  The young girl who crawled across the floor, choking and whimpering, she wouldn’t last long.  When she faded, so would the phantom sensations and faintly desperate, frightened emotions.

The young pyromaniac with the candles and the lantern drew closer.  She’d come because she’d noticed the faint smoke, and she’d hoped there was more to it.  More to exploit, to take, to drink from.  Fire to capture her.

The fire drew the attention of the girl on the floor.

White ash began to collect, falling like snow.  Moisture in the air collected on walls and ceiling and dripped, streaking the window.

The scene was painted in that tapestry of ash and moisture, the darkness closing in as the smoke deepened.

In a house fire six years ago a young girl was upstairs while the babysitter slept downstairs.  The fire erupted and the babysitter called for help, but she couldn’t get to the girl.

Crawling, scared, blind, the girl couldn’t see anything.

Panicked, delirious, choking, and unable to see through bleary eyes, she saw the light and interpreted it as a way out.  A beacon to follow, a light at the end of a dark hallway, leading to something better.

She chased the flame and left other escape routes behind.  Smoke deepened, and her coughing intakes of breath failed to deliver oxygen where it was needed, as the fire greedily drank it all.

The pyromaniac with the lantern and candles was that fire, in this scene.  She let the girl come to her, aware the family downstairs was panicking as the smoke smell became overwhelming.

She’d existed in this world for a year and she knew rules, ways to make this all easier.  Touching an outlet where a bulky plug was stuck into the wall, she seared plastic until she got to the wire.  The suffocating little girl struggled to crawl closer in the meantime.

The smoke and flame would be blamed on a short.

The girl drew close and she embraced her.

Three echoes met.

A girl who saw beauty and glory and herself in fires faced a group of men and women who held the small candles, who were awash in emotion and faith and remembering the beauty and best parts of a young teenager who’d crashed by the side of the road.

There were alignments there.  Places to meet.

The chasing of the flame, the self-destructive pursuit, the fear, running… that was common ground between the pyromaniac and the girl who was suffocating in smoke.  They found places for the parts of themselves that weren’t whole to meet and to marry.

The vigil and the suffocating girl married in their own ways, in the senselessness of a tragedy still in the making.  They met and joined in hope.

All joined together.

They were big and strong enough to carry their burdens now.  Lantern, candles, pieces of wood from a lightning strike that had hollowed out a tree and filled it with fire instead.

They stood back, letting the house burn, in relief and release, in vigil, in empty hope.

The shadows of oblivion that stalked her waited at the edges of the burning house’s light.  A brief reprieve.  So long as things would burn she could fend them off.

Burning things had their consequences.

And this was a final consequence worse than oblivion.

She was encircled; her being was drawn into the circle and trapped there.  The lines were guides for spirits both big and small to obey by ancient compacts and laws and the laws could be turned against the spirit.

Three practitioners and their familiar stalked the shadows around the diagram.  The faceless shadows of oblivion stalked the darkness beyond it.  Not that there was much beyond- her senses didn’t extend that far, and what use thinking about the world at large when one was imprisoned for life?  The world shrank down to a single prison, a single cell.

A patch of sparse forest outside the city.

She knelt, tattered edges of her being pulled into salt that tore at her like razor blades.  It was as though her skin had been cut from her and nailed down.  She had forged a greater self with spirit, drinking in the heat of flames and the sentiments surrounding those flames.  She had rigged up a fresh pole to bear her lantern and candles were arranged all up and down the pole, wax dripping down around metal.  Those things, too, were bound and weighted down.  Lines were as good as invisible walls, and the smallest movements were interrupted with impacts that bent and threatened to break fingers or damage her lantern.

This wasn’t even the worst of it.

She could see what was spelled out beyond that, waiting.  This was a cell, yes, and she was imprisoned for life, but that life was to be a short one.  The parts of the diagram that had yet to be used were a kind of extraphysical machinery made of lines in the ground.  Machinery that would saw her open and puncture her, machinery that would leech out power, machinery that would latch onto her and pull pieces of her in separate directions with more brutality than if she was flesh and they’d lashed her to four chains and four horses, each horse set to run in a separate direction.

She would be spiritually butchered and the pieces of her portioned out like so much meat.  It waited for a single word.

She’d run, she’d pursued.  She had three good faces and several lesser ones.  When she wanted to run to, she could wear the face of the suffocating girl.  When she wanted to run away, she could be like the young pyromaniac fleeing her parents.  When she was to remain still, she was the force of spirit from the crowd holding vigil.

She struggled to find her feet and stand in this webwork of invisible lines.  Her being tore where it had been bound down, but she still felt it important to stand.  The power from the lantern helped, dark and physical.

She spoke with the voice of the suffocating girl, youngest and most scared.  “What’s happening?”

“If we cut this short, we can move on without any further hassles.  Like locals, and certain Lords,” one practitioner said.

“We’re fine,” another answered, terse.  “It was drilled into me as a kid.  If you’re not going to die in the next five minutes, you can always check your diagrams.”

He paced around, investigating, and then bent down, pouring some salt on one of the exterior portions.

Sharpening and fixing the angle of one of the blades that would saw her open, so to speak.

“I’m scared,” she said, her voice hoarse and young.

“Shut up.”

She wore the face of the vigil.  Faces swam in her being, sometimes three, sometimes eight.  Tears streaked cheeks.

They didn’t care.

She, at the very least, felt guilt when she burned down houses and set fire to cars.

There was nothing in her makeup that would let her scream.

She, wearing the guise of the young pyromaniac, reached up to her lantern and unhooked it from the pole.  She let it fall to the grass below her.

Grass ignited.

But fire didn’t cross the lines.  Flames licked up the length of her legs and tattered clothing, which was blended together from the mesh shirt and cargo shorts of the young pyromaniac, the nice clothes of those holding vigil, and the nightgown of the girl who’d suffocated on smoke.

They didn’t care.

“Hurry it up.”

“The little adjustments I’ve made have cost us two minutes and bought us ten percent more.  That’s more than three percent each.”

“If the local Lord takes issue with us hunting a distorted echo in his territory, do you know how much we get?”

“Wouldn’t he be glad we’re cleaning up his problems?”

“Not how it works,” the third person said, speaking up for the first time.

“Probably half.  Maybe none,” the impatient guy said.

“I’ve never regretted taking the extra time to make sure I do this stuff right.  You brought me in for a reason.”

“You only have to regret it once,” the patient guy said.

“This may be one of those times,” a fourth voice said.

The three young men turned and rose to their feet, gathering together as three.  The familiar, a large spider, dropped from a string and landed on one’s shoulder.

The fourth was a teenager, scruff on his chin, hair tousled in a way that made him look young, but his clothes looked like they’d seen at least a year of hard living on the road, spots around the knee and seams paler.  He was heavyset, not fat but solidly built, broad across shoulder and hips.

His eyes were empty, dark, and he was tattered, but it was a physical kind of tattering, edges raw like chunks of him had been cut away with a knife and sewn over, the blood a mist that bled out from the open wounds.

“Moss.”

“If you’d taken my notes on the Other I was tracking and nothing else, I could have let it go.  I don’t want the trouble.  But you took my money, my things.  Stuff my parents left me.”

Two of the three looked at the third, the impatient one.

“Yeah,” the impatient man said.

“He tracked us with that stuff, you imbecile,” the man who’d been careful with the diagram spat the words.

“He’s weak,” the impatient man said.

“I’m weak.  Inexperienced with practice,” Moss said.  “But I have very little to lose and a lot of pride.”

“What if Art returns what he took?” the diagram man said.

Moss shook his head.

“With interest.”

“Fuck off,” Art told him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Moss said.  “I already committed to handling this.”

“Handling?”

Moss touched one of the areas of his shoulder that bled, then a spot on his arm.  “See.”

Their eyes flashed.

The girl in the diagram looked as well.

There were things in those sewn-over spots on his body.  Some slithered, some were far bigger than the spaces given to them, and others were only darkness, or only tainted blood.  Lines traced up and down his body.

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be cool about this so I assumed you wouldn’t,” Moss said, staring at them with empty eye sockets.  “Cut away my ability to feel pain, cut away fear, cut away mercy.  I put other things inside.  Curses.  Lesser Others.”

“Moss.  You took this too far,” Art said.

“I don’t have much.  I don’t like people taking what little I do have.”  Moss stepped forward.

Art reached for his waist and drew a gun.  The diagram man kept him from pointing it at Moss.

“Idiot.  If you kill him you let everything out.”

The quieter third man spoke, “What if we give you Art?”

“Fuck off!” Art raised his voice.  “What?”

“I think the part of me that’s supposed to be able to agree to that kind of deal was cut away,” Moss said.

“Damn,” the third man said.

Diagram man told the others, “Keep hits to the face, and places he didn’t-”

Moss charged in.

He wasn’t fast, so it wasn’t a very startling charge, but he was big for a teenage guy.  All three seemed to expect he’d go for Art first but he didn’t, instead choosing the guy who’d been focused on the diagram.  Fist hit face with enough of an impact it was very clear that the flesh was a foregone conclusion and it was the bone that would be feeling the hurt tomorrow.

Moss’s hand was destroyed by equal measure.  He held it out at his side, and flesh and bone began to knit back together.  She could see his spirit working to restore structure to the temple-shrine that was his body, trained and bound by five year old rituals.

The other two tackled him, blows aimed at his face.  At the side of his head.

Something was inside his left ear, the flesh cut and sewn to provide a barrier, etched with a small rune.  When the blow separated fresh stitches, Moss screamed, and so did Art, who pulled away as fingers with too many segments and clawed tips gripped his fist.  It seemed to hurt Moss as much as it hurt Art, the arm reeling out, the lesser horror following.  It had been a mouse once, maybe.

Moss recovered faster than Art, who was still dealing with the clawing, ferocious little thing that Moss had placed in his ear canal.

“I only know a few tricks,” Moss told Art. “This is all of them, and some extra gambles, things I guessed and half-knew.”

“Fuck, dude, it’s not-”

Moss grabbed Art’s mouth, keeping him from talking.  “If it’s any consolation, I’ll feel bad about what I’ve done to you here when my conscience and sense of mercy grow back.”

Art shook his head.

Moss hooked a thumb and finger into two separated stitched-up sections of his arm, and tore them.

The Other and the curse inside slithered under skin instead of escaping from the freshly opened wound.  Into Art’s mouth.

She could see into and through Art, as internal organs twisted and became Other, churning and tearing at one another.  His back arched until it looked like it would break, every part of him contorting in pain.

A pain that would last until he died or the curse was extracted, and no doctor would ever diagnose it.  The girl in the diagram leaned against the barrier, surrounded by her fire, wax dripping down arms and pole, onto clothing.  Her eyes reflected fires long past.

Moss turned on the diagram man, who was still in the process of recovering from having his face smashed in.  A running start, a leaping kick, because that was the best way to get a good kick in without adjusting footing.  Essentially smashing in the other side of his face.

The third man ran.

Moss chased.  He wasn’t faster.

But she could see the measure of them, in spirit and in the echoes that drove them and pulled at them, the resonance of them as people.

Moss had removed the part of himself that registered being tired, and he’d removed the part of himself that was willing to let the other man get away.

She waited.

Thirty minutes later, Moss returned, so tired he was limping, breath ragged.  He checked that the diagram man was alive.  For a moment, it looked like he was considering doing something to him.

He looked at her.  Straightening, huffing out a breath, he walked to the edge of the diagram.

She faced him as the girl who the vigil had been held for, venerated in spirit, remembered in mourning as the best version of herself.

The best side of her best side.

“Look at you,” Moss said.  “I didn’t think you’d look like this.”

The suffocating little girl.  “Help me.”

“Ahh,” he rasped the sound more than he was uttering any word.

He didn’t help her, turning away instead.  He rooted through the men’s things.  There were some books, and he set those aside.  He finally found what he was looking for, sat down with a huff on grass, and picked through things.

Art twisted, balled up, then flexed the opposite direction, hands scrabbling in dirt for useless purchase.  He made retching sounds as his transformed intestines reached up for heart, distending stomach as they reached, showing the bone ridges that ran along their length now.  They constricted around the heart and Art managed a strangled scream.

“I think Art here tossed my things,” Moss said.  “I.D.  He was all too happy to take my notes… I was tracking you, on request from a local Lord.  They decided to steal from me and pick up my trail.”

The suffocating little girl spoke through her.  “Help me.”

“I’m not in a helpful state of mind,” he said, as he lurched to his feet.  He looked at the diagram.  “I’m not a good enough practitioner to know what this is.”

She didn’t have the words to spell it out.

“The Lord of this region only asked that I track and identify you.  I can’t leave you in a diagram in case someone stumbles on you, I don’t know how to keep civilians away… want to strike a deal?”

She stared at him, searching herself.

The vigil.

“Mmm,” someone mumbled affirmation in words to a prayer at the vigil, when words failed them.

“Swear to leave me physically whole, and to make no attempt to occupy my body yourself.  Swear to clean this scene of bodies and evidence, and to give me the answers to my questions.”

She stared at him.  She didn’t have the means to ask.

“I’m curious why the local Lord was interested in you.”

“No,” she answered, in the voice of the girl who’d realized the light was fire, rather than a way out, hoarse, quiet.

“No?” he asked.  “He’s not interested?”

“Well, these three were, enough to pick a fight with me.  So I am, too.  Give me a bit of your time.”

“Mmm.”

“So sworn?”

She raised her hand, other hand at her heart, and again, gave the affirmative.

The fires pulsed, as if fed fresh oxygen.  Wind stirred.

He scuffed the diagram with his foot.  The invisible walls broke, then collapsed, lines all across the diagram losing cohesion, blurring, smearing, becoming salt on dirt.

She stepped closer.

Then, akin to a blind woman reaching for a face to get a sense of it, she reached for his face.

Fingers hooked in empty eye sockets, and she could feel the echoes there.

You have to do it yourself, Matthew.  Reach back and around and then tear them out.  Then we’ll awaken you.

I’m scared.

The fear in the moment is the price you pay for advantage later.

His dark, shadowed eyes closed, eyelids pressing around and through her fingertips, severing them.  They were only echo, only spirit, so they regrew as she moved fingers to cheekbone instead.  When he opened his eyes, they were human once more.

They were bright in the light of her fires.

“You’re far from home,” Matthew said.

She touched his lips.

Did you know what your father was doing?

Don’t make me answer.

Did you know?

She moved fingers down.  The dialogue clarified as she touched throat.

I can’t-

Answer the lawyer, Matthew.

Down to heart.

She could see him, cutting pockets of flesh open to place packets of paper beneath.  Papers with curses inside, papers with Others he’d collected or bought.  He’d taken on a debt.

He would suffer for it tomorrow.  Later tonight, when he cut them out to carefully remove them.

She touched the place where ribs met stomach and she could feel the vibration of him.  This was where he was most him, the center of his being.  He was content.

And below- she found his weak point.  Just below the belly button, in the stomach, a vast emptiness.  He hadn’t eaten and didn’t want to eat, and she wasn’t talking about food, but about power and ambition.

With that, as if sensing that she’d found that weakness in him, he pulled away.  He had cut away fear to be able to take on three men and to hold curses inside himself without crumbling in the wake of it, but this spoke to a deeper discomfort that went beyond fear.

She had the measure of him.

A man who had been wounded early on, who had been condemned for the sins of his father.  Who had found peace and contentedness, but in the smallest and simplest way, and had no drive to venture further.

Take away what he’d managed to scrabble together for himself, however, and…

She looked at Art, as Matthew walked away from her.  Art writhed, spittle frothing at his lips.  Flesh distended around his face as his brain slithered to find another place to live in his body.  Lungs bulged through and between ribs.

“Mmm,” she uttered.  She stepped away from the shattered prison of chalk lines and approached Art.  She held out her hand and waited for confirmation.

Matthew noticed her.  “I don’t care either way.  I’ll care tomorrow.”

She reached out with fire, disconnecting from the parts of herself that cared, from even the guilt that the young pyromaniac had felt in the aftermath.  She found the spirits that made Art into Art, spirits that now wrestled with the Other that had slithered in alongside the curse.  She met them with spirits of fire.

Art burned from the inside out, as did the Other he housed.  The curse, a simple charm that made endings far more drawn out, dissipated.

She approached the unconscious man who had been punched, nearly knocked out, and then kicked in the head as he’d started to rise to his feet.  He was easier to burn.

“Other one’s a bit of a hike into the woods,” Matthew said, as he gathered up the things he was taking from the men.  “After, if you don’t object, I’ll take you to someone.  I need to do some research and figure out how you work, figure out how to get you to where you can communicate better.”

“Emotions fit to a wheel.  She found a good balance on her own,” Charles said, taking notes.  He was a young guy, blond hair combed back, wearing a jacket that looked more suited to keeping him warm and comfortable than anything.  He wrote down a frame on a paper, then held it up.  The interior of the square filled in, an x-ray for the metaphysical and spiritual.  “You can approximate love with a combination of the vigilance of those attending the vigil and the relieved ecstasy of the pyromaniac with her fire.”

“But?” Matthew asked, arms folded.

“She’s lopsided.  Trust is missing.  That’s hard to approximate.  She lacks the heat of anger, ironically, and revulsion.  Too much of that’s turned inward.”

“We did as you suggested, and found the origins of the original echoes.  Sydney is twenty years old now.  She gave up the pyromania.  Became a different kind of wild teenager.  Found release in drugs and sex, instead.”

“Whoo,” the Girl by Candlelight whispered, in the young pyromaniac’s voice.

“Whoo,” Matthew said, deadpan.  “We toured her hometown, she seemed to pick up some things.”

“And she’s lost others?”

“She’s gotten weaker.  We ditched the lantern, as you suggested.  But that was a big source of power.”

“It was an anchor.  Too physical.  It was doing a lot of damage,” Charles said.

“I know.  You said and we believed you, but she’s weaker, and she’s weaker every day.  Fraying.”

“If this was an Other I’d made, complex or simple, I’d have bound it, to limit the damage.  Put it in a vessel of some kind.  But she’s always going to… some Others don’t live long, Matthew.”

Matthew sat back, looking over at the Girl by Candlelight.

She sat across the brick of the fireplace, close to the flame.  Her candle dripped wax across her chest and legs, her cheek resting against it as she hugged it.  This was their fourth visit with Charles.  He had told Matthew what to do to help her smooth over the gaps, and to bring things closer into alignment.  She was three major events, two echoes and one spirit, and twenty more smaller events and sources of power drawn into the mixture.  She was the pyromaniac, death by suffocation, and the vigil; the three faces now blended together.

“Does it bother you?” Matthew asked her.

She paused.  She still had to search for words before speaking.  “I don’t want the darkness to take me.  It’s too vast.  It wants to pull me apart and distribute me evenly across distances light can’t easily cross.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Matthew said.

“Speaking of times and places,” Charles told Matthew.  “Your time in this place… I’ve been asked to talk to you.”

“About this town?”

“Kennet.  I’ll be blunt, Matthew.  They get impatient if I spend more than a few days here, and they like and trust me more than they like or trust you.  You’ve been here for months.”

“They’re encouraging us to leave?”

“You, Matthew.  She could stay.  What keeps you here?”

“You live close.  You know as much about the Girl by Candlelight than I do.  It’s quiet, peaceful.”

“Your definition of peace is different from theirs.  You’re a threat.  They know what happened to the practitioners who tried to bind the Girl by Candlelight.  It wasn’t peaceful.”

“Ugh,” Matthew made a small sound.  He looked over at her.

“It’s all my fault,” she whispered.

“No,” Matthew said.

I swore the oath to burn the evidence.  You could claim I failed and destroy me.

She turned her focus to the fire, taking it away from the forces of oblivion that crept outside the window, at the boundaries of light.  Waiting for her, ready to pull her through Ruin and into black oblivion.

“Do you know the soldier with the little girl?” Charles asked.

“John?”

“Yeah,” Charles said.  He adjusted his position.  “John.”

“Is that who they’ll send to encourage me on my way?”

“No.  They’re asking him to kill her.  She’s too dangerous.  Kennet’s become too large a town, things that would be fine on their own in a smaller place are concerning in aggregate.”

“Us included?”

“They’re cleaning house, Matthew,” Charles said.  “Tidying up, preparing.”

“And they don’t like me being here.  I can… I can connect those dots.”

“John’s yet to decide.  What would you say, in his shoes?”

“With the Girl by Candlelight?” Matthew asked, sounding surprised.

“I meant with the little girl, but that’s a more effective way of putting it.”

“I’d leave.  I’d tell them to fuck themselves and I’d go somewhere else, to another territory.”

Charles nodded.  He sighed.

“Fuck,” Matthew swore under his breath.  “Here.  I owe you…”

“Two hundred.”

Matthew handed over some bills, neatly arranged and folded, with another five dollar bill slapped over top.  “Here’s two hundred and five.  I need another beer.”

“Sure,” Charles said, sitting back.  “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew grumbled, as he crossed the cabin to the fridge.  “Would they be receptive if I asked to talk?”

“I’d say you should go now.  Before they get underway with cleaning house,” Charles warned.  “Offer to swear some oaths.  Offer to help out.  Make yourself indispensable.”

“And we can stay?”

“I’d guess you can stay longer.  This isn’t a forever arrangement.  It wasn’t ever intended as such, not by them.”

Matthew started to swear but frustration cut the word off, leaving it to hiss between teeth and lip instead.  He held the beer bottle like a club.

“Go.  If you make yourself too valuable, agree to play by rules, they’ll let you stay around.  It’s what I’ve done.”

“What are you doing for them?  What sorts of things do they ask?”

“For me?  They want me to build a perimeter.”

Matthew nodded.

“Go now, Matthew,” Charles said, sighing the words.  “Speak from the heart, let them know your concern for your friend here.  I want to check on some things with your friend here, that I can’t easily do while you’re around.  Take your beer.”

Matthew paused.  He gave Charles a long look, then looked at the Girl by Candlelight.

“Can I trust her to your company?”

“Yes,” Charles said, firm.  “I believe you can and should.”

Matthew shook his head, swore under his breath, then stepped outside, pushing the door open and letting it bang closed behind him.

The car started up.

“I wouldn’t drive…” Charles murmured, walking over to the door.  “But he’s twice my weight, I’d guess, and one beer.  Hmm.”

“What do you want?” the Girl by Candlelight asked, wary.

“Forming sentences better, are you?  Matthew’s worked hard with you on that.”

She nodded.

Charles sighed, then sat in a chair, lanky.  He pulled off his jacket and tossed it onto his couch, which it looked like he slept in.  “You’re in love with him.”

She stared at him.

“Yeah,” he grumbled the word, slouching back, his own beer bottle resting on one leg.  “How do you see that going?”

“It seems… oblivion will take me before Matthew will take me.”

“Tragic,” Charles told her.  “So much about this world of ours is tragic.  Human and inhuman.  Why not tell him?  Take the time you have?”

“No,” she answered, and the word was clearer, drawn from memory.

“Or extend your time.  We’ve danced around the subject, but you could become his familiar.”

She hugged the candle tighter.  “I cannot.  I’ve sworn not to possess his body.  Tying myself to him, I would flow over and in.  There’s too much emptiness there.”

“There are ways to shape the ritual.”

“No… perfect.”

“No perfect ways,” Charles said, nodding.  “Nothing’s perfect.”

“Hmmm.”

“I wish… I had sworn something else.  The things I have in abundance are things he lacks.  Fire inside, something desired, a goal to move to.  I can patch over damage and he is so damaged.  I have the eyes of two people and a crowd, glittering with flame, and his eye sockets are empty and dark.  We would fit together so…”

She hugged the candle tighter and softened wax squished in her embrace.

“Sexual desire?” Charles asked, eyebrow raising.

“No.  Possessive desire.  I want to live in the spaces inside his skin.  I want him to be mine, bright and alive.  I want to mix with him beneath the surface of his skin.”

“And him?”

“He doesn’t want that.  So I will stay quiet.  And… warn you.  Quiet.  Shhhh.”

Talking was hard, and straining herself beyond what her echoes would say was even harder.  Her flames were waning.  She fell silent, eyes on the ground, drinking in the heat and light of the fire, very aware of the darkness that was always stalking her.

“Shhh, yeah,” Charles said, sighing.  “I won’t tell him.”

At her full strength, she was a threat to anything minor or moderate in strength, including the occasional lesser lord of a small town or dominant Other of a rural region.  It meant that few were willing to help her without reservation.

Echoes were expendable, common, many faint in strength, and even something like her, part spirit, part echo, part elemental, was tainted by association.

At her weakest, she was stalked by the dark shadows of oblivion.

She was stalked now.  Dark oblivion’s mouth yawned open, drawing her toward the Ruins any time she wasn’t moving.  Lesser things from there followed after, watching without eyes and reaching with inhuman hands.  They were always preceded by dark, and in the hours there wasn’t enough dark to precede them, rain would start falling instead.

John had shot his longtime friend and companion, the girl Yalda.

Charles had been forsworn.

They didn’t have Charles’s help anymore.  Many of Charles’s books had been stolen by the man who had forsworn him, or lost because Charles had been forced to move, and not all of his things had escaped with him.  Matthew was at a loss for how to help her without Charles helping to direct, the locals had done their cleaning house, and Matthew had left, suggesting he’d return when he’d found something workable.

Two years had passed without his return.  She preferred to think that he’d been killed than to think he’d ceased caring.

If he was dead then he might have an echo out there.

She’d set out on her own.

Now she was dogged and harried.  Again and again, she faced paradox and conflict.  To fend off the dark, she had to set fires.  The fires invigorated her and drove them away.  They could be gateways to spirit, to ruin, to abyss.  Candles had a certain meaning and she could use that meaning to claim a space, but that required power.

At the same time, using power and setting fires drew unwelcome attention.  Lords and the powers of an area took offense to the suspicions and sentiment that a burning building drew.

She was fading, her light dwindling, the beasts of dark oblivion creeping nearer, and she was driven by the pyromaniac’s pursuit of release.  Spiritually, metaphorically, and in reflection of past, she held her breath.  Tension laced through her body, as she carried the candle and dripped with wax.  The fires that had once been her complete and total release were now like the snatched snacks that tided her over, fixing one part of her.

She needed and wanted something else.  The light and life that was Matthew.

She would find some echo he’d left and marry herself to it, and she had no illusions that she would live for long after.

Blackest oblivion would claw her to pieces and disseminate those pieces over dark void, but she would go with the echo of a man who made her life brighter.

Three towns, then four, then after a Lord encouraged her to move, a fifth.  Too many practitioners in the fifth.

A burned theater drew too much attention.

The idea was a consuming obsession, the tension crushed her very being.  A fire needed oxygen and she held her breath.

“There you are.”

She turned.

Matthew Moss.  He’d aged by a little.  His beard was fuller.

She spirited herself to him.  Embracing him with arms that were insubstantial, passing through flesh but not the spirit of him beneath.

She held herself close, hugging him, and reached up, touching his face.  Touching eyes.  The orbs beneath eyelid.  Then, after he blinked, empty sockets.  Touching mouth, throat.

There you are.

Heart.  He was tired.  He’d been traveling for a while.  But he was healthy.

The space between rib and stomach.

There, before, he had been content.  At peace.  The equilibrium had been found, once.  It wasn’t there now.  She imagined she was helping to stabilize it, now that he’d found her.  She imagined, too, that it was her believing what she wanted to believe.

And there, in the center of his belly, just beneath the belly button, the well of his spiritual desire.  Want, need for food, for sex, for sleep.

Still an emptiness, inviting, warmed faintly by her candlelight.

She imagined she could break her oath and occupy that space.  Just to taste it for a moment before fate and law ripped her to shreds.

“Will you come with me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s a long trip.  I didn’t think you’d wander so far afield.  I went back to Kennet to find you but you’d gone.”

“I thought you were gone,” she told him.

“No.  But I didn’t want to go back without answers.”

She went with him, and it was a long trip.  Back toward Kennet, but not to Kennet.  He played music and kept the window rolled down, and between the two of them and the speed they were moving, she could almost forget about oblivion’s chase, dogging her heels, ready to drag her through the Ruins before pulling her apart into her constituent elements and scattering them.  The universe cleaning up symbols and memories.

Her heart, a cluster of elemental fragments, wood from a tree set afire by lightning, and a few pieces of the Abyss-touched lantern, was lighter than it had been in some time.

To a hospital.  Matthew stepped out of his truck, then pulled on a janitor’s coveralls.  He looked across the cab of the truck to her.  “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.  A little less after you didn’t come back for two years.”

“Nearly three, and a few months to find you.  I need you to occupy this oil lamp.  And I’m going to put it away, so it doesn’t set off smoke detectors or give off light.”

She thought of how easily the beasts of oblivion would be able to reach her.  “It can’t be for too long.”

“No more than ten minutes.”

Ten minutes spent in oblivion’s reach.

He held eye contact with her.  She nodded.

He provided the lamp, and she occupied it.  She was immaterial spirit, and it was a vessel he had paid careful attention to, making it suitable as a place for her to live.

The walls of the lamp became protection, stability and scaffolding for her to lean against.  The fire fueled her in a small way.  She would drink it in these ten minutes, she was sure, but everything helped.

Then the darkness swallowed her.  A cover for the lamp, a rustling and jostling, the oil in the lamp moving around her.

Darkness and a whisper of oblivion around her.

Claws reached for her, and even with the lamp’s protection, she struggled to fight back.

It cost her strength.

Another clawing cost her time.

Another yet cost her precious feelings she’d had to reinvent and build in the spaces between other emotions that her echoes knew and embraced.

There was no time, here.  Only the fight, the struggle of a candle that didn’t exist in reality, doing its best to keep from going out.  A memory of wild release and flames reflected in eyes.  The scared moment of a girl who had died struggling to breathe, chasing fire while thinking it was escape.  The vigil for a girl whose roadside shrine no longer existed.

The cover was lifted.  Oblivion retreated.  Matthew set the oil lamp by a open window.

There was a girl on the bed.

“Her name is Edith.”

The Girl by Candlelight emerged from the oil lamp.  She crossed the room to stand next to him.

“Did you have a hand in it?”

“No.  If I was willing to do that it wouldn’t have taken me nearly three years to come to you with an idea.”

“What’s she for?”

He extended an arm, hand out.

She took that as an indicator to approach.  She flowed closer, over.

Immaterial fingertips touched the top of head, and found it open, empty, inviting to the point that it was hard to move her hand away.  Other spirits had already moved in.  Lesser ones, ambient ones.

She touched eyes with thumb and pinky, brow with the middle three fingers.  There was nothing.  A certain kind of terrible oblivion.

Throat, where it connected to ear, then at the center.  Some stirrings, but nothing of substance.

Heart, she was alive.  Frail but alive.

Traces of her between rib and stomach.  Traces of memory.  Many of the spirits had already moved in there.  Had she come sooner, there would be more.

Matthew must have had to look so hard to find vitality and so little else.

The Girl by Candlelight bent over the girl’s head and kissed the peak of it.  Then she let herself be called into that small emptiness.  She had to fight the lesser spirits, grinding them to pieces against the boundaries of Edith.  The ones who wouldn’t be ground to pieces had to be burned.

Edith’s body temperature rose.

“Careful,” Matthew said, glancing at the monitor.  He sighed.  “I told myself I wouldn’t do what my father had done, but here I am.  Prowling around hospitals, wearing his old coveralls.”

She worked to find her place and she hated it wasn’t Matthew, but-

Eyes fluttered open.  Everything was blurry, but she recognized the blur that was Matthew.

“Charles said a fitting vessel would give you time,” Matthew told her.

She stirred, finding the means to move, to ground herself in Edith.  She still fought against spirits who had settled in.  The body temperature rose further.

“Mat-” she tried.  She struggled to breathe and speak.

He approached, taking her hand.  He held it in his, and she squeezed with the feeble strength she was able to muster.

Four times, she tried to speak, and ended up out of breath, or stopping because she worried she wouldn’t get the full sentence out.

“I should go.  That body temperature is going to bring nurses running soon.”

“Matthew,” she whispered, voice paper-thin.  “Thank you.”

He smiled.  It was a nice smile, the sort that made people want to like him.  He was so kind.

“I- love you,” she told him, squeezing his hand with that feeble strength from before.

The smile faltered just a little.

What a way to break her heart, so soon after she’d obtained one.  A twitch in a smile to destroy her.  Tears appeared in the corners of her eyes.

“I am so fond of you,” he whispered, brushing her sweat beaded forehead with a hand, stroking hair.  “It wouldn’t be right.  I defined you.”

“I def-”  Her lungs didn’t have capacity, and the word broke off with a sob of a breath.  “I defined me.”

“I clarified you, then.”

The alarm on the monitor went off.  Her temperature had risen above 38C.  39C.

“Matthew,” she whispered.

“I feel responsible for you, so I wanted to make sure you were okay.  But as deliriously fond of you as I am… it wouldn’t be good.”

“Is good,” she whispered.

Another alarm went off.

“I have to go.  Heal, find yourself.  I’ll be in touch in a few years.  We’ll catch up, compare notes.”

The nurses came running.  The temperature was at 40C.  Her body was suffering.

“I was just standing there, she started whispering, the monitor started beeping,” he said.

“Out of the way!” the nurse ordered him.

They separated Edith from him.

He shot her a smile before disappearing into the hallway.  Leaving.

“Goblins in the deep Warrens are so expendable that we think nothing of a life.  So common that we cannot stand out unless we find a unique name, a creative way to twist our own flesh, or a way to stand above,” Toadswallow spoke, addressing everyone.

Edith folded her arms.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and noble persons, we aren’t in the freaking Warrens!  These souls, Fishmittens, Humpydump, Bumcake, Creamfilled, and Biscuit, they had stories!  They lived good goblin existences with ups, downs, and glorious disasters in between.  We’re going to remember them, reminiscing on deeds and dares, and I challenge the everloving shit out of you, goblin and all, to name the best way to remember each of them.  Take your turns, give us your best memories of them, name their best deeds, or come up with the best way to remember them.  We’ll settle for the best one, with respect and spoils from the dead going to the person who came up with it.”

“I’m alive,” Biscuit said, lying on the table by the dead goblins.  They had towels and pillowcases draped over them, and Biscuit had a facial tissue draped over her, her feet and calves sticking out.  She wriggled her toes.  “Real hurt though.”

Kittycough stirred.  The goblin was skinny, akin to a hairless Siamese cat that walked on short back legs.  It went to the stage, then held up one fist, claws holding three shrimp.  The other hand held a lead pipe.  He pointed the pipe at Fishmittens.

“Any translations?” Toadswallow asked.

“Putting shrimp in curtain rods in three houses,” Gashwad growled.  “They rot, stink like nothing else, and they’ll never find them.”

Kittycough nodded once, turned, faced the body of Fishmittens.

“They weren’t friends,” Snowdrop observed.  She was standing behind the four dead goblins and Biscuit, hands clasped in front of her.

Kittycough kissed the back of one hand, then punched Fishmittens in the balls, before walking away, satisfied.

Tatty walked up.  She’d attached black elastic bands to her usual ‘dress’ of interwoven, drooping breasts, with more at her hair.  “I pledge to put shrimp in the curtain rods of four houses, instead.”

Kittycough screeched.  Tatty barely had any time to look before Kittycough tackled her, beating her with the pipe.

“It’s allowed,” Toadswallow said, somber.  “Tatty pledges to shrimp-rod four houses.  Keep in mind, if you pledge and fail, we’ll fucking kill you for letting down our dead.”

Kittycough raised a paw, dropping shrimp to extend five clawed fingers.

“Kittycough pledges five shrimprods.”

“Can I pledge?” Biscuit asked, from beneath the facial tissue.  “I liked Fish.”

“Anyone alive?” Toadswallow asked.

“I won’t pledge,” Ramjam said.  “This should be Kitty’s.  They were buds.”

“Then shut your yap!” Tatty screeched.

Ramjam spoke up.  “But I got a memory!  Remember Price?  Barney before last?  The helicopter.”

“Shit yeah!” Biscuit cried out, sitting up, the tissue slipping.  Snowdrop put a finger on her forehead and set her back down, fixing the tissue.  “The helicopter jump.”

“We needed the helicopter so he jumped through the rotor blades to get at the pilot while the door was open,” Ramjam said.  “Didn’t make it through.  Was real hurt.  That was cool.  So brave.”

“So brave,” Biscuit said, her breath making the tissue lift up around her face.

“Six!  Six hou-” Tatty’s voice was muffled as Toadswallow stepped on her face.

“Five houses with shrimprods, for the brave soul who jumped through spinning helicopter blades,” Toadswallow said.  “Going once… going twice…”

Peckersnot got up and approached the front.  He held up a paper and patted it, holding up one finger.

“Your snotty pictures aren’t worth the prank of five shrimprods,” Gashwad said.  “Sit back down.”

Peckersnot, dejected, went to sit back down.

“And you shouldn’t draw any,” Snowdrop said.  “Nobody wants them, they suck.  It’d be thoughtless.”

Cherrypop burst into laughter, pointing, while Peckersnot quietly glanced around, made sure nobody was arguing with Snowdrop, then smiled before sitting down.

“Biscuit?” Toadswallow asked.

“Yes?” Biscuit asked.

“Any suggestions for Biscuit?” he asked, ignoring her.

“She wanted to be a Tod for a Barney.  That was a dream,” Ramjam said.  “Good dream from a good goblin.”

“Still a good goblin,” Biscuit interjected.

“I pledge,” Ramjam said.  “I’ll get booze to three impressionable youths.  Enough to get them drunk.  They’ll have fun.  Maybe they’ll be Barneys one day.”

“Hecking yeah!” Biscuit said, sitting up.  Snowdrop pushed her back down again.  “Can I die for real?  That’s great!”

Edith cleared her throat.

“Outside Kennet.  Reasonably safe,” Ramjam amended.  “It’ll be cool.  She was cool.”

“Still am.”

“I’ll smash the biggest goblin from her old neighborhood in the Warrens, so long as they’re not bigger than me,” Bluntmunch said.  “Then tell everyone who’s looking, Biscuit sends her regards.”

“Hecking what!?  Badass!” Biscuit sat up again.  Both Toadswallow and Snowdrop pushed her back down and held her down.

“It’s kind of charming,” Matthew said, beside Edith.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, her arms still crossed.  “I hope they don’t end up trying to kill each other by the end of this.”

“The fact that they’re doing a send-off like this in the first place,” he murmured.

“Mmm.”

“We’re holding a second service later.  John’s swinging by, he’s out on patrol now.  The trio will visit.  We could have words with them then.”

“Mmm, maybe.  What do we even say?”

“We make peace.  If the Witch Hunters come in greater numbers…”

She sighed.  “Yeah.  Peace would be nice.”

“Just a little bit longer,” he told her.

“Yeah.  I’m going to get some air.”

“Don’t smoke,” he told her.  He winced.  “Please.”

She turned his head and kissed him.  “It’s air, for real.  I won’t smoke before I see you again.”

“Okay.”

She left Matthew to supervise the goblin funeral, going upstairs, through the kitchen, where she got a bit of water, and then she stepped outside.

It was all so much.  Too much.  The close calls, the threats around every corner, the chaos of having to manage everything…

That was without delving into the issue of the furs, the process at the end of summer, and the losses that would come of that.

She heard Maricica’s wings unfolding before she heard anything else.  There was no brush of wind, no audible flap or swoop.  Only the draping of thinner-than-silk wings across a part of her porch, Maricica up in a tree, lying across a branch, one wing draped over her unclothed body.

“The goblins are still having their funeral.  Non-goblins are elsewhere.”

“I know,” Maricica said.  She turned her head toward Edith, silky hair falling to one side, framing her expression, her smile turned up at one side.  “I thought you would step away.  You’re in a state where you must, I think.”

“What state is that?” Edith asked, tense.

“Bereft, anxious because of things unknown.  I come to end your ills.  I come bearing a gift with strings attached and I come with information.  What do you want first?”

“Is this a ‘do you want the good news or the bad news’ thing?” Edith asked.

“Not at all.”

“A dangerous gift or bad news?”

“You want, Edith James.  You desire, you hunger, you have a spark of dancing flame you chase, and you have thoroughly cornered yourself.  You want a release of this building tension, and you will do something destructive or self-destructive to find that release.”

“No riddles, please, Maricica.  Give me the information.”

“Miss has returned.  The practitioners know.  If they don’t already know you and I are collaborating, she will tell them.”

“Just like that?”

“Implicating Montague in the perimeter has warded her off.  She’s limited in what she can do.  She’ll focus herself on the witch hunters who are on the approach, next.  She’s working from the back foot.  She’ll try but not necessarily succeed.  Be ready, but in equal measure, be confident that she’ll be preoccupied a little bit longer.  Our concern is the practitioners.”

“Of course it is.”

Maricica sat up, smiling wider.  “What would you think if I told you that Guilherme hired the Witch Hunter?”

“I would think that posing it as a question like that is a ludicrously obvious way to imply without lying, Maricica.”

“Guilherme hired the Witch Hunter.  He used the contact he’s been in touch with, a human who interacts with the courts.  I can’t ever be sure when he outclasses me in scheming, and he may never admit it clearly, but I think it didn’t go as he wished it would.  His attention is divided, and mine is singularly focused on countering what he does.”

“Will he call them off?  Or will Miss succeed?”

“The door has been opened and I don’t think it will close until summer’s end, at the earliest.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Edith said, voice tired.

Maricica touched a part of her wing that draped over the branch, stepped into a fold, and let herself down to ground in a smooth fashion.  She crossed the lawn, tossing one wing around herself like a noble with their cape, smiling.  “Do you want your gift?”

“You tell me.  Should I want it?” Edith asked.

Maricica approached until their toes nearly touched, a foot of space between them.  She pulled back the wing and showed Edith the syringe.

“How did you know the other one-”

“A look in your eye, as you glanced at me.  Fear, apprehension, need.  Few things match to those specific proportions of those three things I saw.  Seeing how you looked at your husband confirmed it for me.”

“You said there were strings attached.”

“There are.”

“The same strings as the last?”

“No.  Those strings hold.  You took them and you’ve bound yourself in them and if you tried to take another course you would do devastating damage.  For this one… it’s a simpler task.  The girls are motivated, thanks to Guilherme’s Witch Hunter.  They will come for you.  They will bind you.”

Edith tensed.

“Perhaps until the end of Summer.  Perhaps this is the only way you’ll ever be free of that binding.  However it unfolds, I will buy your silence with this gift.  Do your best to avoid the binding, fight them, maneuver, enlist my help if you wish, enlist anyone’s, but you must swear that if captured and compelled to talk, you will say nothing about us.”

“Is that it?”

“I’m a Faerie, Edith.  It’s rarely ever the one thing.  There will be ripple effects.  But what is your alternative?”

Edith hesitated, hand hovering above the delicate syringe, but not taking it.

“If left alone, the Doom of Edith James will dwindle and fluctuate in strength, getting weaker over time.  That darkness that binds Matthew to you will lose strength over time and Matthew will be left to wonder and theorize why it changed its behavior.  In the midst of that wondering, it will cross his mind that it was convenient that you two were drawn together by your need for him.  He knows you better than anyone, and he will connect changes in your mood and approach to the changes in the Doom and see your hand behind it all.”

“Enough,” Edith whispered.  She took the syringe, then slipped it into her pocket.

Maricica pursued as Edith turned away.  “You’re a villain more degenerate than any of our local goblins, Edith.  Fostering the darkness inside yourself so it gives him a reason to save you, to stay close.  Letting it fill that space inside you, extracting it, over and over, to make your own monster.  Making it stronger to match his growth in strength.  Do you put it in his food, or do you inject it into him while he sleeps?”

“Enough!” Edith told the Faerie, eyes flaring orange.

Maricica laughed.  “That ugliness from inside you has grown to such terrible proportions as you’ve used it to poison the man you love.  You’ve no idea.”

“I’ve some idea,” Edith answered, quiet again, overwhelmed.

The sweeping dark of oblivion that reached over her wore her face, now.  It slithered inside Matthew because she couldn’t.  Much of her life was like that.  Edith’s parents were the wary, dancing, ever-pursuing shadows at the edge of her life, always wanting to be closer to her, when she didn’t care enough.

The body of Edith, at least, was happy, content she had spared them too much grief.

Maricica smiled.  “Good luck with our local practitioners, dear Edith.  Put on a good show and convince them you’re our primary culprit, and we’ll release you from any binding or circumstance when we’re done.”

“If you win.”

“We’ll win,” Maricica told her, with a smile.  “For now, you should do your best to survive.  If you can keep your relationship with Matthew in the wake of this, it’ll be a miracle.  We can bargain further if you need more help.”

Edith badly wanted that help but she denied that need.  She fled the conversation with the laughing, smiling Faerie, entering the house, dogged by darkness and circumstance she couldn’t share with Matthew.

Into a dark spiral yet again.  The big distinction was that she was poisoning with Doom instead of setting fires.  She still saw the light of hope and stumbling into danger.  She still held stasis, maintaining vigil, holding onto love even as it hurt.  Even if that love, if she really were able to be honest with herself, was as good as gone.

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