Shattered Pentacle

by Starscribe

Chapter 3

The city extended in all directions, an endless gray eternity that stretched across all reality. Streets crowded with gray figures, moving in hushed, slumping groups. Dark cars sped past her down muddy roads, splashing helpless pedestrians on either side.

It was every worst day she’d ever had, when dark eyes waited in every window. When Ventus’s whispers compelled her to unspeakable things. She would not be deceived by such a voice ever again, no matter how sweetly it said her name.

“It’s us against the universe, Lyra,” whispered a dark figure, catching her by the shoulder. She was too strong to resist, tugging Lyra sharply to one side.

Agent Sweetie Drops stood in full tactical gear, black right down to the paint on either side of her face. She rested her hands on a submachine gun covered in sinuous silvery wires, with a magazine that made the air hum.

“The less you know about it the better. They’re all monsters, all finding new ways to prey on people like us. If you saw what I’ve seen.”

She nodded along reflexively, as she’d done so many times before. But now she knew it was a lie. “My friend isn’t a monster. Akiko saved my life.”

The crowd shoved up against her, surging in seemingly random directions. They crashed down in waves like the sea, shoving her back. They threatened to wash her away, and obscure the distant light on the horizon.

“I won’t go back!” She pushed through the crowd, even though it meant losing sight of Sweetie Drops. Answers waited for her, whispered in the planet’s pulsing heartbeat.

She emerged from the crowd, and out onto an empty intersection.

A solitary figure stood there with his back to her. Rain soaked pale flesh, torn and shredded with a dozen bullets. It wasn’t red blood that emerged from within, but black. The body was long dead, yet walked still.

“You could’ve been one of us,” he said. “I had such hope for you, Lyre. The Camarilla would have welcomed you.”

She slowed in her steps, but did not stop. “I don’t have to listen to you anymore, Ventus. I didn’t listen to you then.”

He turned as she approached, showing a ruined face torn apart by gunfire. He had done the same in her memory, before the fire took him. He gripped her coat, tugging at her with iron fingers. “You are chattel now. You can’t fight the craving—not forever. The rot already runs into your soul, the beast stirs.”

“You’re lying!” She shoved him back. But he was too strong—she tumbled instead, tripping over the curb and into the road.

She fell forever, through addiction and blood, through murders and sex in darkened basements and lonely alleys.

She landed on the seashore. Lyra had never been to a beach before, but she never imagined anything like this. The water was not blue, but liquid darkness, soaking the light of the moon and stars without dimension or contrast.

Lyra struggled to her feet. Bare skin scraped against a rocky shore, leaving her sliced and bleeding. She stood up anyway, shielding one eye with her hand.

Ponyville was gone now—the shore to her either side held only the empty, crumbling skeletons of once great buildings. Whatever city lay ruined here was greater than anything she had ever seen—even the steeples and rooftops emerging from the sand looked to be once mighty monuments.

Her bare feet scraped against a broken road, cracked and crumbling. It led into the black water that was not water.

“Do you hear the music?” asked a voice. Octavia stood on the shore beside her. She reached down to the broken beach, and lifted something in one hand. “Play for us.”

Lyra took it in both hands. Someone had worked a lyre in living wood, covered over with a dusting of pale green moss. Its strings were taut sinew, dripping blood.

“Do I...” She did hear it. Simple at first—the steady thump of a heartbeat. She flicked her fingers over the strings, at once rotting and firm. She played along, strumming to the rhythm.

“There was a road here, before the dragon died,” Octavia said. Except she wasn’t Octavia anymore, she was a... monster. A monster of mismatched limbs, with long gray hair and naked singularities in his eyes. “We broke it. We broke everything, Lyra.”

His words were a mournful dirge in time with the music. Her fingers moved without thinking, spraying blood and bits of flesh across bare skin. A song for the graveside, mourning the passing of something that was once great. No longer.

“There’s still something there,” she sang back. Her words brought hope to the melody. A tune of seeds freshly planted, the last hope for a harvest. She held the lyre against her heart, so close its vines wrapped around her fingers, crept up her arms. They grew along her veins.

Her heart still beat. It joined to the other, deeper sound. “Your birthright,” whispered the speaker. He towered over her, great limbs digging into the rubble. “Now hidden. A sliver of darkness poisons you. Strangles the melody.”

She saw it anyway. Far across that dismal sea was a forest. Life as nothing she had ever seen, a world of life untouched by smog or poisoned rivers. Seeing it made her heart swell with longing.

“Vitae,” she whispered. “I let him give it to me. It won’t let me go, will it?”

Laughter. “The Kindred? No. This corruption was in you from the moment you were born. If you want to cross, rip it out.”

The lyre crumbled in her fingers, leaving only a piece of jagged wood as sharp as any dagger. Her skin went pale, her hands shook. “I can’t.”

Warm hands touched hers, pushing the broken wood to her breast. Sweetie Drops, still in her dark tactical gear. “You know you can. You knew in the moment that Ventus ordered you to die for him. You heard the music then.”

She pushed on Lyra’s fingers, just hard enough that sharp wood touched unprotected skin. “The music. Creation’s melody. A truer song than Ventus’s lies. You followed it all the way to the end of the universe, Lyre. What is it telling you?”

A slug festered in her chest, like tar that covered something shining underneath. She felt it wriggling under her skin, filling her soul with poison. The human race were helpless victims, they strangled their planet. Nothing would ever get better. What was broken could not heal.

“I’m not the one who can’t be there,” she realized. She plunged the dagger through her chest.

She screamed, body spasming. The awful passenger in her soul thrashed and contracted, constricting her limbs. She pushed anyway, heedless of her own blood dribbling down her chest.

She knew the instant it was dead. Black tar dripped from the wound, splattering beside her bare feet. It trickled away, oozing into the sea and joining with the tide.

Lyra kept breathing. Even with a dagger piercing her chest, plunged in so deep the tip emerged from between her shoulders. But she wasn’t Ventus—her heart still beat, louder and stronger than ever.

“I knew you could.” Bonnie stepped back, out of her way. “But you aren’t finished yet.”

Behind her was a road, cutting through the sea without touching it. The road had never been broken after all—she just didn’t have the eyes to see.

“Come on.” Lyra offered her hand, covered with blood and slime. “We can go together!”

There was nobody there. Lyra glanced to either side, but never took her eyes from the road. If she did, she might not find it again.

So she walked. Vines along her skin tore and crumbled with every step, leaving a trail of dead and browning plants behind her. She walked.

Lyra landed in the trees. They were great pines all, towering old growth of a forest that had never felt the lumberjack’s ax. She inhaled, and the world’s breath flooded into her lungs. The world spoke to her, but not with words.

She rolled onto her side, and saw the corpse of an ancient tree, tumbled over and covered with decay. Strangling vines encircled it, brown and dead.

But something emerged from the rotten heartwood—a sinewy green sprout. It cut through the debris, soaring upward as lifetimes passed in seconds. Storms raged, scavengers devoured what was left of its corpse, and the tree grew on. It grew twisted near its crown, but it grew strong.

Lyra stood with it. She had only the dry blood and dirt that stuck to her body for a cloak, but somehow that felt like enough here. She needed the growth of this place for herself.

A herd of deer passed by, hooves thundering as they loped through the dense foliage. Great bees hummed as they moved between the wildflowers. There was a music to it, rhythm written into the shape of every honeycomb and the chirp of every starling.

One instrument was missing. It waited for her, but she didn’t know the words.

“Only one,” said a voice beside her. A shape appeared there, a horse with a shimmering white coat and a mane like a rainbow trapped against its head. “You have to write it.”

Lyra turned towards the speaker. As she did, the forest changed around her. Trees morphed and fused together into Ponyville’s main street, overgrown with vines and foliage. Nature snaked over every surface, songbirds nested on the rooftops, and foxes rummaged freely through backyards.

Only the horse remained, spreading a pair of huge swanlike wings. She said nothing, but the command was there all the same. Lyra walked forward, through the center of the overgrown city.

The ground shook, rock and ruin crumbling in great chunks. A towering brown trunk rose up from beneath, wider than any structure built by human hands. Its branches opened into balconies, galleries, and libraries, flowing with the structure of the tree without killing it.

A door opened as she approached, into a vast chamber lit by flickering of mighty torches.

The tower pulsed beneath her, rumbling with the heartbeat of the world. It shook through her whole body, no longer strangled by darkness around her soul. There was only one thing left to do, if she wanted to join the song.

Lyra found an empty part of the wall, where uncountable other markings formed the lyrics. They were names, of course, each one signed in blood. She already had the pen.

Lyra ripped it out of her chest, broken wood still dripping red. As she did, the wound closed behind it, smooth skin knitting together as rapidly as the accelerated growth of the trees.

She dragged her makeshift pen against the wall, writing out her name in the spot waiting for her.

LYRA HARPER

With the last stroke, her dagger dried, then crumbled away in her fingers. Light pulsed through the dense wood, radiating from every letter written on the walls. Her own shone brightest of all. When the building shook, so did her insides.

Once she had tasted Vitae, filling her with stolen strength and false immortality. Even when it tasted sweet, it always left her feeling empty. Power, but always false.

Not anymore. The light that burned in her chest wasn’t stolen—it wasn’t even from outside. A seed felt since her earliest days was free of the strangling parasite, and now could finally grow.

Lyra wandered up the tower, or maybe it grew around her. Names blurred past her until they were all a single, uniform glow.

Then she was on a balcony, under a roof formed from a vast stone book. Before her was forest, jungle, ocean, and plain—a planet, seen from uncountable eyes. Horses galloped together across the plain, their coats a rainbow of colors.

“You see now,” said the one beside her. The same great mare who had guided her here, with vast swan wings and a horn rising to a sharp point. Not frightening or aggressive, somehow—yet still mighty.

“I want to understand,” she whispered. “This place—this is how the world is supposed to be.”

“In part,” answered the horse, jostling her shimmering mane. “There are others. In union is the Phenomenal realized. Its stones form the foundation of the firmament. Its trees cast the shadow that shelters what lives. Here life learns to grow, to adapt, to fill every void and spread into every gap. The great choirs of the Umbra are pale reflections of the mighty principles written here.”

Lyra nodded along, though not a word of it meant anything to her. The truth of every word was written in the stones. “Teach me everything.”

“One day, perhaps. But now—your soul is still weighed down by smoke and shadow. The Tellurian calls to you. For now, you must return. Tomorrow? Perhaps. Nurture what was planted.”

Her horn flared with light, blinding even in the radiant dawn of a world free from darkness. Lyra reached for her, hoping to hold on, to stay. Soft, smooth fur passed over her fingers. But she couldn’t hold on—not to something so perfectly soft. The horse’s magic sent her screaming back to reality.

Comments

[parlaptie]

It's kinda weird knowing that this world has names like Sweetie Drops and Ponyville mixed in with names like Akiko. Kind of a bizzare alternate universe. Other than that, I'm curious where this is going. I'm not familiar with World of Darkness at all.

[OmicroniX]

Beautiful. Read this chapter three times to make sure I didn’t miss anything. This is quickly shaping up to be my favorite of your works.

[Mime Slayer]

Oh hell yeah, this slaps so far! Been waiting for the next weekly fix from you for a hot and spicy minute, and I reckon this is it!

[FanOfMostEverything]

Brilliant work thus far. Definitely looking forward to seeing how this develops.

[Mindscape]

Ooh, now that was a fun awakening, and very evocative.
From the visuals and vibe, I'm thinking either Thyrsus, or maybe Acanthus? There's probably a key giveaway with the tower, but I'm not hugely familiar with Mage.