Oathbreaker ch 9.24 - A Lost Soul (Patreon)

My flight took me beyond Enkarsura’s walls, out over the sea and then into the hinterlands beyond it. That was untamed territory, the haunt of wild demons beyond the Margravine’s power, where freak storms and abyssal ravines were a constant hazard.

Flying over one of those bottomless pits could very well trap me in their pullwell, and I did not want to deal with that inconvenience. It could be an age before I managed to crawl back out, assuming something didn’t eat me first. But I needed to make distance.

I had time to think during that flight. Time to make excuses and tangle my thoughts up with justifications. I told myself that what I’d done to Nilmarin was necessary, for her own good. That I should have done it a long time ago. Weakness did not survive in these worlds, and she was no innocent in any case. One did not form out of the Dross innocent. I’d only given her the excuse to playact.

I’d done the right thing. For her. She would survive, because I taught her how to. Her new hate of me would elevate her as a demon and give her the strength to protect herself.

The right thing. As if I could comprehend that.

My flight eventually slowed as I came to a point where more planning became necessary. My exit from the palace had been hasty, mostly driven by instinct and impulse. Now I needed to decide what to do next, where to go. The Drossian Sea was massive, but it only formed the uppermost layer of the Abyss, a buffer between that great darkness and the higher hells, but I would need to go far in order to escape the Red Bloom’s net.

There were other Abgrûdai lords I could offer service to. Many would have use for a competent succubus. I could also live as a feral in the abyssal wilds. It might be a welcome distraction, to be savage and thoughtless for an eon or two, to ravage whatever I came across to my heart’s content. To be elemental.

There were other options. I had my choice of Hells. I could seek out Orkael, find Meshann and take him up on his offer to turncoat.

No. I wasn’t ready to go that far, though I held no performative loyalty towards my own kind anymore. That had been a younger, more foolish spirit, one who swallowed the Gatebreaker’s drivel about tribes and paradigms. Even still, becoming a cog in the soul-grinding machine of the Iron God did not appeal.

My gaze went up, to the bleeding skies and igneous moons eternally tumbling into Abysm’s hungering maw.

I didn’t want damnation. I wanted to live.

So lost in my own thoughts was I that I almost missed that I was being followed. It was sheer luck that I happened to glance back towards the receding sanguine glow of the city and caught sight of six motes of light racing across the skies.

That soon, eh? Someone really doesn’t trust me.

I beat my wings once, gaining speed, then turned and dove into a range of crags. Lesser spirits scattered from my shadow. I alighted on an outcrop, letting my bare feet settle on the sharp stone. It wasn’t really stone. Nothing here was as it looked. The material felt pliable, almost like clay, and would have broken off and sent me tumbling into the yawning darkness below had I not willed it to hold.

That was the way of this reality. The Hells, and the upper regions of the Abyss, were so choked with the ghosts of the formerly living and fragments of places that had truly been that they took on aspects familiar to earthly minds. There were mountains, seas, planes, forests, skies. An up and a down.

It wasn’t all sane, but neither was it total chaos. The rock under my toes wasn’t rock, but it resembled it. The blood rain that fell from the sky wasn’t truly blood, but the idea of blood, a spiritual echo of cosmic violence given shape by the brooding minds of devils and gods alike.

There were places like this in the deeper Abyss as well, islands in which powerful spirits had created facsimile worlds. But much, perhaps most, was a mindless, fulgurous chaos where I could only move in elemental-shape if at all. And all of it bled into itself, every land caught in the midst of endless apocalypse.

I stood there a while, thinking on the nature of spiritual and material existence, and waited just long enough to be sure the ones following me would know where I must have gone. Then I took the form of a serpent and slithered down into the crags.

The other succubi reached the ravines minutes later. They were all Woesisters, appearing as a beautiful elfin women with great fleshy wings and barbed tails. They wore revealing armor fashioned of trophy bones and carried weapons carved from stone and horn. Their leader was a slight thing who carried a whip of living fire.

Pale-At-Heart, I thought as I retreated into the narrowest cracks of the tall rocks. Eshirrie must really want me gone.

Pale-At-Heart was one of Eshirrie’s by-blows, and she was viciously loyal to her demonic mother. I wasn’t going to be talking my way out of this one.

The flight of abyssal valkyries went over the crags and split into three groups of two. I marked the pair that included the leader and avoided it, instead slithering through the rocks as I stalked the others. The Woesisters were savage and potent, each a veteran of countless monstrous battles, and Nilmarin had wounded me badly. I’d no interest in a fair fight.

I took one as she dipped beneath the tops of the rocks, lunging up and grabbing her by the ankle. I’d taken on the form of a two-headed serpent the size of a great constrictor, large enough to devour crocodiles, and I was strong and deceptively fast. I strangled the woesister and devoured her, then used her voice to lure the other one further down.

The second must have sensed something wrong, for she put up more of a fight. She held a bow made of horn, and arrows tipped in perforated stone that carried deadly parasitic worms.

I don’t fancy myself a warrior, but I’d fought angels in Heaven and survived the brutal streets of Rot Voraag. The huntress wasn’t a match for me alone. By the time I’d finished and the other four were converging, I was already gone. The display I’d left behind elicited a piercing shriek of rage from my sister succubi, and had I been in a shape capable of it I would have smiled in satisfaction.

I descended deeper into the valleys until I found a secluded cave. It had a chorn in it. We negotiated. It didn’t like my terms. I’d barely finished dismantling the creature when I heard wingbeats in the valley outside and angry screams. I laid a curse on the cave’s entrance, knowing that it would do little more than buy me time, and retreated deeper.

The burrow folded in on itself into ever smaller spaces deeper in. The chorn had dug itself a dimensional tunnel, likely a passage out of the Drossian Sea. No telling where it went. Chorn were the moles of demonkind. Their tunnels were labyrinths the mad spirits used to trap their prey and drag them back down into the Abyss. I’d often found it strange, how some of the weakest of demons could possess such a useful skill. The rest of us needed help from the other side to escape, but the Chorn, who had little interest in the worlds above, could do it at will and shared their secrets with no one.

While I deliberated — prepared myself to kill and probably die, really — a susurrous, whispering voice said, “So was it you?”

I stopped my search for an exit and scoffed. “Hello, Liieshi. I take it that the Margravine didn’t believe me, after all?”

I turned, still balancing the chorn’s smoking skull on my right palm, to face the other succubus. She lurked in the deeper shadows of the cave, beyond the light of my victim’s smoldering carcass.

I’d suspected this, of course, from the moment the Red Bloom dismissed me. It didn’t matter if she believed me or not. The possibility existed that I had betrayed her and created the monster who might be her master. Even if she was willing to grant me grace, my sister succubi would never forgive my trespasses. They would act to defend their leader and punish the apostate.

“No,” I decided. “This is all Eshirrie. Berisembri would have sent the Haboraym.” I took on a casual, conversational demeanor, lifting the canine skull in my hand to eye level as though my words were directed to it. “There was never a barge to the Kenosian Steppes, was there? If there was a ship, I admit to you that I might feel a touch embarrassed.”

“You never would have reached it,” Liieshi said. She wasn’t like many of the Bloom’s followers, having forgone wings or other homages to her mistress’s aspect. She looked like the dry husk of a grieving mother, with her distended belly and its gaping cavity, the almost featureless face, the worm-like muscles contorted as though she’d died in such pain that she wound herself into knots.

I was wary of her. Eshirrie was probably stronger, but more direct and not impossible to trick. Liieshi was more mysterious, the ever-watching shadow of the Sisterhood of the Bloom. She wasn’t a renowned fighter, but that did not mean she wasn’t a threat.

And I was injured. Nilmarin had done me more harm than I’d expected her to. Even if all Liieshi did was stall, the Pale-At-Heart and her sisters were closing the net. I could hear them calling to one another outside, eager to avenge the two I’d taken.

“I always wondered if you were Eshirrie’s dog,” I said as I began to stalk around the cave’s other occupant.

That manikin face followed me. “It was Nulpeko who sent me, actually. That was cleverly done with Nilmarin, by the way. You have much of the palace fooled.”

“Leave her out of this,” I snapped. “She has no loyalty to me, not anymore.”

“Perhaps. We will know for certain when we bring your head back and show it to her, deserter.”

Oh, the irony. I’d called that Urrson a deserter with such vitriol once. Now, I hardly even felt offended.

“I spoke the truth earlier,” I said. The part of me was still and probably always would feel daughterly devotion to the Red Bloom wanted to defend itself. “I did not betray her.”

“You lied to her,” Liieshi said with glee. “We all sensed it.”

When the Bloom asked me if I’d fathered a mongrel in Rot Voraag, I’d instinctively thought of the men I’d courted there. Those thoughts betrayed me. I let out a quiet, bitter laugh at the realization.

“I am no traitor.” I continued to pace, moving with slow, catlike steps deeper into the cave.

“You are not loyal. You never truly were.”

“And you are, Liieshi the Empty? You are not one of Berisembri’s disciples. You came to us from the depths of the Abyss. I’ve always thought you stunk of Hieroloth, personally.”

The succubus said nothing. I glanced to the back section of the cave, where the chorn’s burrow lay. It was a wound in the fabric of this plane, a well of folded space. The other demon had used it to drag victims into this very den, evident by all the bones stacked into altars along the walls. Those stank of power, though the demon itself hadn’t been particularly strong. I guessed all its power to be directed upward.

No idea where it went. Away from here. I had the key — the chorn’s angry spirit was locked inside the skull I held, but that did not make the passage stable. And when I got there, what then? The followers of the Red Bloom would hunt me to the ends of forever. Even if I made it to the higher planes, I would be without a proper vessel, isolated, little better than a ghost scratching at the membrane of reality.

“Go,” Liieshi said with a mocking laugh. “Flee into that tunnel. We will be waiting for you when you come tumbling back.”

Well, I did say that I had my choice of hells. So be it.

The Woesisters found the cave. Liieshi struck. Tentacles emerged from the hole in her belly and darted towards me. I inhaled so deeply that my neck expanded like a reptile’s, then vomited fire and cooked those barbed limbs before they got hold.

I dove into the chorn’s tunnel, and into darkness.

Did you know there are pipes between worlds, listener?

Call them sewers. The Silver City was — is — like a mountain at the top of everything, with rivers tumbling down to spill across space and time. That energy starts clean, like any mountain spring, but as it wends its course it accumulates sediment.

Sediment is a kind word. Let’s call it waste. Toxins. Impurities. All energy flies outward from the center. All souls naturally flow downriver. If you’re a good little mortal, kindly spirits will collect you to decorate the shining kingdoms permitted to bask in that higher light. If you’ve been naughty, then you’re allowed to fall down the cataracts.

Those rivers eventually flow into seas, oceans, and swamps. The water is caught in drains and fissures, like suspirals falling between the cracks in the bedrock of time.

The great cistern at the bottom is where my kind dwell.

But I was speaking of pipes. Rather than just as mountains and rivers, think also of your universe (though it is actually a multiverse) as a great machine, or perhaps a palace? In that palatial machine there are rooms and towers, and there are walls, and inside the cavities between those walls are all the devices made to maintain a structure of such complexity. It has as much in common with a great clock, but I confused the metaphor.

These are the places where water is drained out, where air flows, where rats and roaches crawl, and where mold grows.

The Abyss crawls up through these tunnels. It eats at the barriers between you and I.

I traveled through a passage of fanged rock. Then one of wet clay. Then one of fractal black glass full of the broken memories of the chorn’s victims. The tunnel became a ravine, one too narrow for my wings, so I had to climb up. Soon it grew too narrow for human shape, so I slithered up as a serpent. When even that form was too large to go further, I became a tendril of flesh, then smoke.

Thought fled. Fear faded. My will became focused on a single overpowering directive, driving me ever upward. Voices and strange lights filtered down from high above. Sourceless sounds echoed in the tunnel. I thought I heard Nilmarin crying, and wasn’t sure if it was really her or my own mind conjuring her voice.

I do not remember emerging from the tunnel. It simply happened, and when my meditative focus to simply continue broke I found myself standing in a long hallway. The walls were rubble stone, laid rather than naturally formed. A dungeon. It was dank, dark, full of the stink of mildew and the echoing taps of falling moisture. I thought I could hear a distant thumping sound, like a slow drumbeat, or the labor of an enormous heart.

The walls to either side pressed in, but the ceiling rose high. It gave the hallway a surreal aspect, almost liminal, like it could not decide what shape it wished to form. There were engaged columns on the walls, but they were spaced irregularly, and stairs that seemed to go nowhere. Droplets of water, or something that resembled water, made puddles here and there.

I looked up, and saw the same tunnel rising in a shaft directly upward. It seemed to go on forever.

Chains rattled in the distance. The thumping sound grew louder. I turned and started walking in the opposite direction. The chains faded from my hearing. I ascended stairwells and navigated black corridors with no sense of where I was going.

I did this for a very long time. I had time. A living human would starve here, if they weren’t driven insane by the darkness first. A ghost would get lost. There were others, some of them like me, and those who didn’t wander aimlessly had made dens.

A Devil’s Well. An oubliette of souls. Once these had formed the foundations of the Odfather’s kingdom, little more than sewer systems to redirect the flow of planar energies. The dead congregated in them, and demons hunted the dead. Sometimes the dead became demons, if they were mad and strong enough.

Servants of the Iron God would be on the hunt. I could smell the reek of metal in the still air. The dungeons were a labyrinth made to trap and confuse lost souls. It would take a long time to find my way up and out.

But there was no going back. I kept going up.

There wasn’t much else to do in the maze but walk, stalk, and think. My thoughts went back in time, rather than forward. Perhaps I could blame that liminal labyrinth, but without knowing where it would take me I found my mind turning over where I’d been. I thought of Rot Voraag mostly, of the fact it had apparently changed hands since I’d left. I wondered what had happened to the people I’d known there.

Strange. Once I’d simply thought of them as food. Now I missed them. I even missed Didikas. He’d been charming, in his way. I could even forgive him for what happened at the end, considering it was hardly less than I’d have done to him were our positions reversed.

They were all probably all dead. Centuries had passed. But what if…

It was an idle thought and a foolish one, but left with little else to occupy my mind while wandering the endless darkness, I let myself fantasize. What if Didikas had survived, become the great wizard he’d had the potential to be? What if Arlee still roamed the wastelands as a winged huntress, made strong from my blood and thankful for it? What if Narahn toppled the Yellow King and he himself sat on that clay throne above the wastes, a fairer king and a kinder one, golden and just.

What if.

What if the Bloom’s suspicions were true, and I had mothered this dark lord and become the dowager queen of their dark kingdom? What if I ruled beside Didikas or Narahn? Would I feel less empty? Would I be content?

What if.

The dungeons were cold and lonely. Other wanderers avoided me. I lingered by the crypts of gods and wondered at their stories. What did it feel like to have once been prayed to and then forgotten?

I never stopped climbing. I never stopped wondering what I would do if I found my way to the other side.

I’d decided that’s what I wanted without reaching the decision consciously. There really hadn’t been another option. The Drossian Sea and its dread nations held no appeal to me anymore. Getting lost in the deeper regions of the Abyss was little better than self annihilation. Joining the courts of the Zosite would only trap me in another ouroboros of intrigues.

I wanted to live again. To do things differently this time. To be someone else.

There were ways to do it, none of them pleasant. The usual fashion was to wait until some foolish mortal or godling reached down with their lures, giving me the chance to bite and be dragged up. But Didikas, if he did live, hadn’t tried in all this time despite possessing my true name. He might have died and gotten his soul trapped on the earthly plane, but the wizard had been obsessed with cheating death, and something told me he of all the others might have persisted.

Yet he hadn’t tried to summon me. The likely culprit was fear. Though he had the means to bind me, I’d taken a piece of his flesh and soul, so that influence went both ways. It also provided an anchor, but not one I dared use unless there were no other choices. He would be prepared for me.

He could have acted as a door, had I given him what he wanted. There is irony in that, I suppose.

The second element required was a vessel to house my spirit once I got there. I could wander the earth as a ghost, but my ability to experience and interact with it would be severely crippled. It was not preferable, not least of all because it would make me vulnerable on top of the practical concerns. Even the least of angelic spirits or exorcists could banish me in that state. I lacked mortal servants to influence into preparing a body for me. There might have been one, if she’d survived, but I wasn’t yet so desperate to escape the darkness as to use her.

I would become that desperate, with time, but there were always other ways. I would scratch my way into dreams. I’d find any door I could to escape.

Every option involved effort and risk. I wasn’t supposed to leave these rotting cisterns beneath the realms the gods had made. These walls were made to keep me from intruding in their gardens.

Damn them all to Hell. I would have my time in the sun.