The Nothing in the Not-Quite House

by Broken Phalanx

Are you there?

What assaults is unseen, what protects is unknown; negatively ablative, the shield withstands as the body cooks and broils behind it.

Yet as quickly as it appears, the pain dissipates a moment later. From a smoking grasp the shield drops, rolls away into the impenetrable shadow; the head of a long dead friend, no, not a friend, but perhaps a kindred spirit, winking at him as it departs into the dark. Its mein freezes him, what remains of the reassembling body looking for all the world like stone.

Then, again, as reliable as the thunder, another presence. The form may change and the intention may differ, but that dreaded Monomyth plays out all the same, always, always. Another sword, another death, always, always.

Ah, but not this time. The hunt is spoilt, the chase aborted; there is nothing to slay here, not now, not at all. Leave the trophies unearned and the story undone; the Sisters can choke on their knotted strings...

***

No light. Not even sparks. Before her, behind her, a void. She takes two steps backwards, then another, another, another, again and again, ignoring the unsettling sensation of something looped around one of her hind legs.

She took one step in to this building and twenty steps back, yet none of them lead out.

Slowly, uncertainly, swallowing the panic rising in her gut like bile, Starlight closes her eyes, reopens them, then with finality closes them once more; both leave her blind, but the latter is more honest about it.

Again something jostles a rear-hoof, and now she turns her head to look, still unaccustomed to the umbra and no longer certain if her eyes are open. What she sees, yes, sees, is a bit of string, startlingly red against the dark. It trails behind her like blood, shrinking in length as she follows it and growing as she advances away from it.

She shuffles further in, papers rustling in the drafty, sea-scented breeze; the last good tidings of the outside world, it seems, as the miasmatic darkness grows thick, resisting her movements more and more with every stride. The cold is omnipresent and cuts to the bone, the air reeks of a mausoleum crossed with a cesspit. This is a warning, some part of her brain notes, or at least a disclaimer; any further and pain, if not promised, is probable.

“Bring it,” she finds herself mumbling around chattering teeth; admittedly, usually she could at least somewhat rely upon her not-insignificant magical prowess to do something (hopefully, something useful), but there have been worse times than this, more miserable circumstances that she and her friends have extricated themselves from. Admittedly, her memory was getting somewhat foggy as she bumped into an invisible wall, and the particulars of those situations were getting harder to recall in the numbing chill, but they were there, immutable as her nam-

What is her name?

Is she Starlight? She certainly hopes so, otherwise it would be quite a thing to try and explain to her friends.

Hazily, three answers drift around in her brain before another bump jostles the wrongness out of her skull to splatter messily upon the floor.

Starlight Glimmer. Phew.

There is something here in the mire, watching, dissecting, splitting her essence from her bones and judging it only to haphazardly cram the stuff back where it belongs a moment later.

That, or this place is starting to get to her in the worst way possible.

“I’m going to name you ‘Chorus Proedria’, maybe get Sunburst to help me write an article and probably get some hot cocoa and samples if-” she rambles, the words not mattering, only their intentions. Perhaps the ‘Proedria’ (if they exist) take pleasure in her words, perhaps they don’t. Regardless, so continues his her voyage trek into the mire.

It goes far smoother than it ought, as if the ‘Proedria’ usher her onwards, onwards, to follow the phantom warmth that haunts this place of cold desolation. Behind her, stripped of their meaning, the papers and articles gently stream from her saddlebags, now too loose by far; perhaps there were fingers in the dark, flicking and twisting and yanking at straps with imperceptible motions.

She accepts this notion for a dozen steps before asking herself, “Fingers?”

And, head still woozy, filled with whatever lingers in these cloying shadows, she does nothing to stop the paper torrent.

A minute passes.

All that is left is a trail to emptiness.

***

The fog rolls in with ephemeral tendrils, carrying with it a scintillating splotch of muted color against the dark. It reeks, smelling of sweat and the stench of low-tide, a harbor with workers and sailors. The saga continues, always, always; so strides she, so noble and bright and glorious with blood not yet spilled. The story is broken for now, but gouged deep within the world rests its corpse, ready to rise once more; the cycle never ends, only interred long enough to mark another period at the end of a long sentence.

Revenants. The awakened dead. Thousands of years and no end in sight, corpses on marionette strings to shuffle a dance so repetitive that the ground beneath (if such a thing exists) has sunk from wear.

Slowly, thoughtfully, the trophy on the wall exhales, rustling ancient hairs that have grown too long on splotches of otherwise matted fur. The breath whistles, a low and uncertain note.

With unsettling fluidity the headless body raises a desiccated phalange to where a mouth would’ve been, and, quietly, “Shhhhhh,” the movement revealing the decapitated form to be very naked and very decayed. Lining the body, always, always, weeping lines of unhealed scars; this, the body knows, is the past, the countless incarnations that have perished in furious bloodlust.

Even now, the First Incarnation brays and rattles its ghostly prison, a mass of emotion and instinct too stupid and angry to be tamed by the two Abstracts. Though, what else can be expected from such a thing?

The body flinches for a moment, the onrush of hatred surprising even this, its old forsaken frame. Flashes, moments of color so brief they may well have been imagined and motion so desperate that no, it couldn’t have been. There was yet a world of not-dark, somewhere, not-here, a world of motion and others and-

-and then a darkness born of wicked intelligence, for the only bastards celebrated are those divine in heritage. The rest go where they always have; the pit. The first few days, hunger, anger, some semblance of unnurtured thought percolating through a child’s mind.

This is no home, just another prison.

He had no sharpness to tear at flesh, no, no, just molars and other lumps of exposed bone; but the hunger made that matter little, not when they were dropped in. His father’s strength, his mother’s form, but only the former mattered as he ate and ate as the tears streamed unceasingly from his eyes; it was the stuff of madness, like spiders dancing on his naked brain, little food and less water.

And then, then-

Slinking in the dark, murderer, executioner of prisoners, hero. The sword, stabbing, sharp, callous to his pain and cruel to his flesh; the steel of civilization and that almost barbarous strength, that great and terrible wrenching strength that parts flesh and the deepest darkness that follows. And in that span between the First and Second, it wafts through the air, a balm to heal all wounds.

“The scent of salt and lemons,” whispers the head still upon the mantelpiece, even as the body trembles and there he is, rounding the corner with sword at the ready-

***

With nary a sound or warning, Starlight falls.

The floor simply isn’t. The string continues trailing after her, a rope too thin and rigid to avert her descent into Tartarus. And yet it continues, seconds to minutes, hours, days, weeks-

Until, eventually, what falls is no longer Starlight.

Author's Note:

No Deus ex Machina, no god from the machine. We will watch them, you and I, until we grow weary of them, perhaps.

---

Or perhaps...