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The ghost watched as Breath paused to bend down and run a finger through decaying blood. She slipped that finger into her mouth, and smiled.

Book TwoAdvertisement

Eaters of Diamonds and Gems

I heard a story

Of a river

Which is where water flows over the ground

glistening in the sun

It’s a legend

And untrue

In the story the water is clear and that’s

why it’s untrue

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We all know

Water Is the colour

Of blood

People make up legends

To teach lessons

So I think The story is about us

About a river of blood

And one day

We’ll run clear

Of A River Badalle

Chapter Seven

The horrid creatures jostle in their line

A row of shields and a row of painted faces

They marched out of my mouth

As slayers are wont to do

When no one was looking busy as they were

With their precious banners and standards

And with the music of stepping in time As the righteous are wont to do

Now see all these shiny weapons so eager

To clash in the discord of stunned agreement

Blind as millipedes in the mud

As between lovers words may do

In the murky depths swans slip like seals

Scaling the ice walls of cold’s prison

All we dream is without tether

Confessions of the Condemned, Banathos of Bluerose

The errant walked the flooded tunnel, remembering the bodies that had once drifted there, shifting like logs, flesh turning to jelly. Now on occasion, in pushing a foot forward, he kicked aside unseen bones. Darkness promised no solitude, no true abandonment, no final resting place. Darkness was nothing more than a home for the forgotten. Which was why sarcophagi had lids and crypts were sealed under stone and barrows beneath heaped earth. Darkness was the vision behind shuttered eyes, little more than the dismissal of light when details ceased to be relevant.

He could find such a world. All he needed to do was close his one remaining eye. It should work. He did not understand why it didn’t. The water, bitter cold, lapped round his thighs. He welcomed its gift of numbness. The air was foul, but he was used to that. There should be nothing to hold him here, chaining him to this moment.

Events were unfolding, so many events, and not all of them shifting to his touch, twisting to his will. Anger was giving way to fear. He had sought out the altar Feather Witch had consecrated in his name. He had expected to find her soul, her fleshless will curling in sinew currents round the submerged rubble, but there had been nothing, no one. Where had she gone?

He could still feel her hair beneath his hand, the muted struggles as some remnant of her sanity groped for air, for one more moment of life. His palm tingled with the echo of her faint convulsions beginning in that moment when she surrendered and filled her lungs with water, once, twice, like a newborn trying out the gifts of an unknown world, only to retreat, fade away, and slide like an eel back into the darkness, where the first thing forgotten was oneself.

This should not be haunting him. His act had been one of mercy. Gangrenous, insane, she’d had little time left. It had been the gentlest of nudges, not at all motivated by vengeance or disgust. Still, she might well have cursed him in that last exhaled, soured breath.

Her soul should be swimming these black waters. But the Errant knew that he had been alone. The altar chamber had offered him little more than desolation.

Wading, the tunnel’s slimy floor descending with each step, his feet suddenly lost all grip and the water rose yet higher, past his chest, closing over his shoulders and lapping at his throat. The top of his head brushed the gritty stone of the tunnel’s ceiling, and then he was under, blinking the sting from his eye.

He pushed onward through the murk, until the water turned salty, and light, reflecting down from a vague surface fathoms overhead, flashed like dulled, smeared memories of lightning. He could feel the heavy tugs of wayward currents and he knew that a storm did indeed rage, there upon the ceiling of this world, but it could do little to him down here. Scraping through thick mud, he walked the ocean floor.

Nothing decayed in this place, and all that had not been crushed to dust by the immense pressures now lay scattered beneath monochrome draperies of silt, like furniture in a vast, abandoned room. Everything about this realm invited horror. Time lost its way here, wandering until the ceaseless rain of detritus weighed it down, brought it to its knees, and then buried it. Anything-anyone-could fall to the same fate. The danger, the risk, was very real. No creature of sentience could withstand this place for long. Futility delivered its crushing symphony and the dread music was eternal. pqdm.com