Ajax Kallistrate

There are spirits in the world that have nothing and give everything. They’re the caretakers of the fallen, the lost, the wanderers that don’t inhabit their lives, but only haunt them. They’re doors that open inward, arms that lift to embrace.

They have names. Signposts on the pathways of want. But we don’t remember them. They live on only in the eye that doesn’t turn away.

I met one such many years ago. I didn’t recognize them, and only thought how lucky I was that I’d slipped through a hole in the fabric of the universe and missed hell by the width of a lifted finger.

That was how she summoned me. In the rain, the smell of sulfur, the rippling heat of a city paved in light, the thoughts of a thousand passers-by cascading like liquid fire through my veins. “Come,” she had said (and didn’t say). “I’m here.”

I went. I followed the shimmering edge of her presence as it drifted over wet streets, through banks of cellular fog, into and out of illuminated passageways bound by gates of darkness. I couldn’t see her. I only knew she was there by a tremulous rhythm that described all sensation in one moment. Fear. Anticipation. Regret. Satisfaction. Enlightenment. Grief.

I sank down when she sank down, into the murky fastness that elevates all great places by being beneath them. Down into desire, hunger, meanness. A narrow, compressed place. I lost her then and couldn’t turn back. I found no trail, no sign that I’d ever been. I closed my eyes. The world constricted, like a heart that would never beat again.

I took a breath — and let go. I yielded to the end of time, to the end of the future, to the end of myself. I didn’t exist in that place. I became that place. I held nothing and could not be held. I became every moment lost and forgotten, all the moments that would never be. All futures. All possibilities. All that diverged only to reunite in a final moment of dissolution.

And that’s where I found her. As if it were she who’d been seeking me. As if it were I who had led her to where she’d always wanted to be, a singular moment of salvation, an eclipse of the self that remade the whole world in a new image.

She and I. I and she.

We were one, as all things become one. And in that instance of release, I left behind what had once defined me and passed through the flesh and was born anew. In fire. In pain. In an obliteration of grief that left stains and scars and whole new planes of thought in its wake, striations that can be read like a language, a message to the imprisoned soul from the liberated future.

“Come,” it says (and doesn’t say). “I’m here.”

July 26, 2015

I’d never traveled the Underworld alone. To do so now, with omen-songs riding the wind and every tongue heavy with rumors of a broken seal, would’ve been foolhardy — but to take a soul-reaver with me? That wasn’t my choice. I shared my rations with one who didn’t eat only because the city could afford no better, neither hireling nor sanctioned priest, just myself — a debt-ridden old mercenary — and this creature molded from human flesh into death’s handmaiden.

Her name was Makes Shadows Shift, so I called her Makeshift. She was eight feet tall and as emaciated as a weeks old cadaver, and so unnaturally still I began to doubt she breathed at all. She never sat. Never slept. Never spoke. She’d been trained at the Sanctum Dolor for purposes unknown, and lent to me freely, without terms, for their coffers were deep and influence had never come so cheaply. She’d taken vows in two worlds to become what they’d made her. I didn’t yet know what that was.

We walked on foot, as no mount would bear her, and passed the Sphinx Gate in six days, crossing the boundaries of inhabited land and following the river as it snaked its way through the marshy heath. Tonight we’d reach the ruined temple that breached the Underworld. I’d hoped to enter it by the grace of daylight, a boon to mortal travelers, but a storm-laden wind had been against us — a warning or a last chance to turn back I didn’t know — and we were delayed. Night had come to this forlorn stretch of wild lands, and from within it blew the hot breath of the fane, an exhalation like the sigh of a lost soul.

The temple’s rocky crest rose on the black horizon, limned in gold by the sharp crescent of the waxing moon. I hadn’t thought to look for good omens, and took the one that was proferred, sending a whispered prayer to Omela Ahma of the Waters for even so slight a lamp in the darkness. Makeshift didn’t pray. She kept walking, her stride modulated to match my own until my breath came faster, unwilling as I was to slow down, to reveal any weakness, though she wouldn’t have noticed.

I didn’t halt until we’d reached the shattered outer wall of the fane. It had once been a monastery dedicated to a god so old it had forgotten its own name. It had been overrun a hundred years ago, first by reformists who had slaughtered the monks, and then by thieves who had slaughtered the reformists, and finally by the teeth and claws of nature. Home now only to beasts of the field and lubas and gulagar and other malformed things escaped from backwater cultists, it stood like a gap in the night, a blasted place that had never felt the touch of a blessed hand. I’d been here before, a dozen times, and each time I swore I wouldn’t return.

Makeshift stood with her back to the moon, either oblivious to its presence, or so much an atheist as to be beyond caring. Her arms hung limply from her shoulders, her back slightly curved, her legs splayed at the knees. Her hair stood out in whorled knots, an adornment I hadn’t expected when we were introduced, and her reaver’s robes — a diaphanous silver cloud that blurred if looked at directly — shifted about her bare feet as if with a will of its own. Her face was turned away, and in profile, had a noble cast, the empty eyes sunken over an aquiline nose, the chin at once stubborn and over-long, every aspect of her body stretched as if by long use of the arts that made her both feared and pitied.

The urge to speak rose in my throat. An oblate’s instinct, I suppose, though I’d been many years breached of my vows, to manifest resistance with the power of ancient words, to make true every thought by repeating it aloud. But I only took a breath. Makeshift wouldn’t have cared what was said, and the gods already knew what was in my heart: I didn’t want to be here, but I’d do what I’d come to do — or die in the attempt. It was in my nature more so even than that of the Reaver.

I stepped through a gap in the wall, desiccated leaves crunching underfoot. Makeshift followed behind, the rasp of her claws against the stonework strangely reassuring. I caught a glimpse of a ghostly tendril extruded from within the sleeve of her robe, her peculiar gift for hunting down anomalies in both worlds at once.

Nothing moved within the great pile. A breeze blew cool with the draught of coming night as it hissed through the remains of a broken tower to funnel into the open bailey. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me even with the glad assistance of the maiden moon, and kept a hand lightly on the rapier at my side. It wouldn’t do to draw prematurely. Some of what called the ruins home might dismiss us if we proved no threat.

Makeshift moved silently, the grass bending only briefly as she seemed to float over the dusty cobblestones. The illusion unnerved me. I glanced at her and caught a warning tremor in her face, the skin drawing tight over her cheekbones as she lifted one cadaverous hand.

I dropped to my knees. I drew my dagger, the long rapier useless in close quarters, and a breath of air touched my cheek like a whisper as Makeshift’s hand passed in front of me. Her long fingers curled as if to swipe at my face and I lurched backwards, my teeth bared in fury — until I saw the glimmer caged by the reaver’s pale hand: a glyph ward, cast in the shape of a dart.

Makeshift dropped her arm to her side. The moon painted an outline of the creatures that surrounded us. Six or eight, or ten, I couldn’t count them by their eyes, as they had so many. One was a luba — humanoid, as tall as Makeshift, its multitude of arms as flat as tentacles and each one bearing a phosphorescent glyph. The rest were a mix of wild and constructed, once-human and never animal. Some rose up on two legs, others hunched over on four, all of them seething with a hunger that pinched my mind, an urge to yield without the futile waste of resistance.

I whispered a glyph ward of my own, six words to reseat the soul — “I am foretold of the light” — and to my surprise, Makeshift echoed them, a double blessing, her voice like the rush of a wind-drawn flame. The luba’s glyphs faded to a lifeless gray, but the creatures didn’t falter. Only steps from the breach in the world, they would have risked far more for such fresh prey. A mouth swelled with teeth. One creature paced back and forth on human hands. The others shifted, uttering plaintive moans, until at last they surged forward as one and the luba leapt in a graceful arc, sighing as if in anticipation of the downward plunge into the crunch of bone.

This time I moved before Makeshift. I drew my rapier and swung, cutting the luba in two. Bloodless, it fell with a screeching wail as I ran my blade through a second, and then a third, the whole mass moving now — angry, fearful, and most of all, hungry — until, dismembered and oozing a foul ichor, the survivors crawled away. Mewling piteously, they rejoined those that were still whole and slithered together into the darkness, and down into the gaping maw that opened into the Underworld.

I took a steadying breath, my rapier hanging limply at my side. I drove the blade deep into the earth, speaking aloud a heartfelt prayer to Oma Oman of the Blood that she might cleanse it of the stain of the unshriven. And she did, tugging on the blade with an added benediction before I could free it, clean and unblemished.

Makeshift stood as stoically as before, unmoved by the attack. Her robe clung to her narrow chest, as still as the dead, though for the first time I detected the tiniest throb of a pulse in her throat.

“Remat a atta,” I said in the old language, the one taught at the Sanctum Dolor. When she didn’t react, I spoke again, in the coarser tongue of the new people. “I am yours.”

This time she did respond, and for a long time after I wouldn’t understand what it meant. She swung her head in a broad motion, as if she lacked the fine control required for a simple negation. “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

Puzzled, not knowing how to reply, I sheathed my rapier. The gap to the Underworld awaited, and I had no time for riddles. Six days from now, I’d either stand triumphant over the enemies of the living, or I’d be one of them. I resisted the urge to look back at Makeshift, to reassure myself that I didn’t travel alone — for what kind of company was a reaver of souls?

Without another thought, either of prayer or regret, I stepped into the breach.

July 17, 2016