(Kairliina, deeper pitch)

The esteemed listener is reminded that the Analogue Ruins podcast does not contain content warnings. Please stop listening immediately, and look to your own mental health if at any point you feel discomforted. No story is worth sacrificing your well-being.

Episode Eleven: Shadows Dance on Dismal Plains

(Carrie)

“The City.”

That simple declaration leads us to hours of aimless wandering. One of the portal-passageways in the upper reaches of Sarkosch connects us to the City, but it’s a dilapidated section barren of life since the latter part of the Dark Ages. We emerge into a wind-kissed warren of cold, dark, smooth-worn cobbles, skeletal temples and townhouses, guildhalls so long abandoned that only scratch marks on stone lintels hint at the crafts they catered to.

We walk, district to district to district. When we’re accosted by a towering formation of sea-urchin spines sprouting from a segmented body, with row upon row of double-jointed legs distorted like purple paint-smears, we reduce it to ashes: a barrage of red lightning and jade fire.

Melancholy takes me. I wonder what that creature might’ve been like. The violence leaves me a little queasy, but it’s nothing like the blackout panic I experience when I even think about killing Moonsilver. That, more than anything, proves that she’s human: my instincts rebel at the idea of ending her.

I’ll be stronger than my instincts.

I take the City’s ever-changing blocks well enough, as we wander from a fever-dream reinterpretation of a financial district, to a library made from hundreds of fire departments stacked together where assembly-lines compile books by welding discolored pages into place. Now we come to a labyrinth of circuitry, pipes, and sewers with miniature parks curved into their walls and ceilings. Surprisingly, Mero’s the first to show anger.

(Merovingia)

“This wretched place! Even chaos requires a measure of order. If someone were to control this place, just enough for consistent navigation, it would be better for all that dwell here.”

(Carrie)

“This is just the City’s nature, isn’t it?”

(Merovingia)

“Hell also had a chaotic nature at its inception! There, too, we learned to anchor it with the will of leaders. How else do you suppose the title of ‘Devil’ came to be?”

(Carrie)

“I don’t know, Mero. Satan, Lucifer, Azazel, Asmodeus, Lilith... Do those names refer to any actual demons? All I’ve got is what my pastor told me. I generally assume everything my Lutheran upbringing taught me about demons is pro-Christian propaganda.”

(Merovingia)

“That is wise. Satan comes directly from Hebrew. I believe it means something to the effect of ‘accuser?’ You must forgive me on this count, Carrie. You ask for knowledge I have no claim to speak of. Outside my own youth and early days in Hell, my knowledge might be as much a tapestry of lies as yours. The demons who dealt with ancient Judea are, or were, altogether different from the demons of the Hell I knew.”

(Carrie)

She gathers jade fire in her claws and carves crispy black glyphs into the tiny grass of the garden on the ceiling above us, one complete with a miniature pavilion where tiny parodies of human life scream and stagger away in jerky motions, like an old stop-motion movie.

(Merovingia)

“I remember hearing many rumors about ‘a Satan’ or ‘the Satan,’ but little solid. Perhaps one of the lilim, the children of Lilith, could give you clearer answers… if any still survive. You must understand, Lilith was at least a thousand years before even I was born. Kabbalah mysticism is altogether separate from proto-Germanic paganism, and the ways of your ancient sister-witches. This applies also to Azazel. As for Asmodeus, I, er… did meet him a few times. He reigned as a Devil of my own Hell for a century or so, but I suspect he never felt like he fit in, and in time he left us for other planes of existence. I found him amorous, but not more so than any given mortal man. His reputation for lust is a relatively recent invention. It’s more about the Christian stigmatization, and othering, of normal human sexuality than…”

(Carrie)

She spreads her wings wide and low, angling all four tips down to tap the green metal floor.

(Merovingia)

“…than the dysfunctional levels of desire I have observed from demons that self-identify as demons of lust. Other than this, I could not tell you how many of the tales about Asmodeus are true. Again, this is outside my spiritual heritage. I can look within myself and find the answers to many things about the Hell of my girlhood. It is a collective unconscious of we infernal demons, I suppose. But it is limited to culture and inheritance. I am equally ignorant about the demons influenced by relationships to Islam.”

(Carrie)

“That’s fair. And Lucifer?”

(Moonsilver)

“Lucifer was the name Christians gave to the Devil that gave their god and his angels the most trouble during the second war. There was the first war for dominion over the Earth, you see, fought in the first age of demon kind, and then there was the war for preservation of Hell, fought against the invading forces of Heaven.”

(Carrie)

“Am I correct in thinking Hell had to fight the second war because you lost the first?”

(Merovingia)

“Hell did not start the first war, the Burning of a Thousand Horizons. We were dragged in after the lawless demons, who we allowed to share in the realms we’d built, elected to fight the entire planet: demon lords against gods, with humankind as the prize. Otherwise, you’re correct. The wholesale slaughter of our… our wayward kindred, meant that by the time the Christian God rose to power and gathered his heavenly armies, Hell no longer had the power to fight except inside its own planes. Their invasion ignited the second war: the Cadence of a Million Suns.”

(Carrie)

“So you were there? You fought in the second war?”

(Merovingia)

“For a few decades, yes. Until I could no longer…

(Carrie)

I catch the demon of my heart by the shoulders as her fire dims. She falters, staggers, leans heavy against me and wraps her wings around us both for comfort. The lapping of dark red water, which could be blood if it only began to smell of iron, comes to us from countless cracks. They glisten in the otherwise too-smooth walls of the tunnels. Like crystalline roots reaching down, like a cross-section of arteries and oxygenated vessels.

“We don’t have to keep talking about this.”

(Merovingia)

“I’d prefer to finish now that we’ve begun. I want these thoughts and these feelings out of me. Lucifer, then: after she distinguished herself as a fearsome fighter and a keen strategist, the Christians wrote a false history. They portrayed her as a fallen servant of their God. That demons are true outsiders, that our power is innate to us rather than stolen from their God and his tyrannical order, is intolerable terror to them.”

(Carrie)

“Zealots always claim the universe works to a plan only they understand. After that, they can say that any random thing they want is part of the plan. Control without responsibility.”

(Merovingia)

“Indeed. Well said, my love. As for Lucifer, that’s not her True Name. I never met her face to face. Few outside her inner circle ever did. She was busy fighting a war for our survival, ja? She didn’t have time to be every single demon’s best friend and mentor. Thus, I don’t know what she really called herself. Even if I could find that answer within our collective unconscious, it would be a terrible invasion of privacy. Suffice to say that after the Christians’ little moniker grew popular with the forces of Heaven, she took to calling herself Lucifer as a gesture of defiance.”

(Carrie)

“And after Heaven was defeated, you all got to work rebuilding Hell?”

(Merovingia)

“I believe so. I… I was forced to leave the war behind. I was too exhausted to fight well any longer. A liability. I have learned to forgive myself for that, for we all have our limits. The wandering ones, the lawless ones, were wiped out, or hid themselves away in the far reaches of creation. I’ve long meant to return and see how my Hell fares, but, you know… always another project.”

(Carrie)

“There’s no rush. We have eternity, right?”

(Merovingia)

“Just so. All this is to say... if even demons can learn to benefit from order, I doubt this City—which largely imitates the ideas of humans in any case—would be harmed by some guidance.”

(Carrie)

“I see.”

The truth is, I don’t. I’m bothered by much of what Mero says. It’s fine for her to be frustrated by the City, but it wasn’t built for us. We’re the outsiders here. We’re the ones who need to adapt. But I don’t know anything about the history of Hell or demons, except what I’ve learned through Mero. I have no right to question her on that, so, since she’s tied these questions together, I hold my peace.

Our wanderings eventually bring us to a nighttime district speckled by strip-malls with empty parking lots. There’s one exception, a sprawl with color-jumbled wings that curve off the ground to the murky dreamlike sky. Rings and serpentine twists stretch it higher and higher, like a warped crown. In place of a lot, it has a blue-black expanse of chitinous ridges and perforated archways. Creeping, tentacular things land craft like broken ovals in notches atop those structures. Their forms shift wildly, lopsided to pinched to sprawling, as every little movement changes the apparent sizes of their plated heads and tentacles by whole orders of magnitude.

I pause to ask Mero about them. Black streaks mar the jade of her fires. Her brow creases so hard that it looses a metal groan.

(Merovingia)

“The creatures of the deep cosmos. Outer ones. Things that skitter and crawl and eat burning seams of spreading void into our reality. Ancient, brooding, corruptive minds. Some of whom, I hear, have recently taken to claiming that they are another kind of demon—madness, indeed…”

(Carrie)

She flaps her wings, letting the passing air carry away her emotions.

(Merovingia)

“Enough. I no longer wish to think about this. Let’s find something to do.”

(Carrie, playful)

“Or someone?”

(Merovingia, exasperated)

“Not right now, Carrie. Please?”

(Carrie)

“Right. Sorry, Mero.”

She answers me with silence. Her tail’s narrow bladed tip, hollow at the top like an odd flat needle, clacks without rhythm on the asphalt under our feet. Asphalt that I notice is transparent, like dark glass, allowing glimpses into somewhere deep below and outside where roiling, spiny things with stretched carapaces and thousands of eyes swim across the darkened void.

I keep my eyes fixed on the road from then on. It’s slowly dawning on me that, as powerful as I might be compared to an average human, at the cosmic level I’m just a slightly-larger strain of bacteria. At best, I’m a tardigrade that’s learned to think and put on makeup.

We leave that strip mall behind and pass up an avenue, leaving behind one of those buildings made from what look like miniature bricks, until we have our second close encounter of the night: a mass of shadows leaning against a nearby tree. Murky, inky, seeping… horned.

Merovingia sees him a fraction of a second later and halts, with a hissing intake of breath. That draws his attention. I can’t see the features within the umbra, per se. The street lights disappear into the black depths without casting reflections. But as I repeat the sight of the demon in my mind, I find impressions of red-black burning in my mental image, like the shapes burned into my eyes if I happened to look directly at the sun. Dark-red blindings of maw, teeth, and sharp eyes.

(Cam, sleazy as always)

“Evenin’, ladies. Little lost? Maybe old Cam can--”

(Carrie)

His eye-impressions settle on Mero, and his shadows turn transparent with fear as realization dawns.

(Cam)

“Aw, Hell…”

(Merovingia)

“‘Cam?’ Is that what you’re trying to call yourself now? Fah! ‘Enrazhug’ was too fine for you in any case. Disdain this wretch, Carrie. He’s a deserter. He fled from the war against Heaven, making deals with mortals to save his own skin.”

(Cam)

“You—I—what? You! Merovingia Konalakt, of all beings, is calling me a wretch and a traitor! I just hid out with some sages in—whatta they call it now, Australia? I didn’t betray anybody! Everyone knows how you sold out the forest demons! Everyone knows about the deals you made with the--”

(Carrie)

A sonic crack, a rush of burning air, a blaze of pale green fire so bright it almost blinds me. Merovingia’s claws seize Enrazhug. She lifts him off the ground as the pressure-wave of her inferno forces even me to take a step back. His umbral claws clamp on and scrape at her forearms, raising sparks and tiny shining scratches in her folded-steel form, until each black sickle snaps off.

(Merovingia)

“This is the second time in as many days that someone has slandered me in front of the woman I love. Slur me again, and I will test your immortality. Besides, she’s heard it all before.”

(Enrazhug)

“She… she has…?”

(Carrie)

I step closer to Mero, pressing my hand to the small of her back in support.

“I have. Look, you can hold whatever grudges you want. I don’t care if you don’t like Mero. But you can be a fucking adult about it, and just say you don’t like her instead of making up lies. Because, I’ll be frank with you: there is no reality in which I’d ever take your word over that of my girlfriend.”

(Enrazhug)

“What… (choking) … what if… just hear me out a sec—GRLK!”

(Carrie)

Merovingia’s claws tighten inward, burning sickly fumes out of Enrazhug’s neck. He already reeked of burning oil. Now, strangely, sickeningly, his stench becomes that of rancid, putrefying flesh.

(Merovingia)

“No one has ever benefited from hearing you, Cam.”

(Carrie)

“Hey, hey… Mero. It’s okay. I’m sure he deserves this, but you don’t have to do this to yourself, alright? Don’t put yourself in this place on his account.”

Slitted eyes flick to me, flaring with a brief surge of green fire. I rub her back, tuning out the screech of scorched nerves from the blistering heat of Mero’s rage.

“We can crush him if we have to, right?”

Her gaze softens. She drops the spluttering shadow-demon. As he collapses, his horns dissipate, and his humanoid shapes melt away, until Enrazhug exists only as an amorphous mass of shadows that warp the light and the dim shapes of the night suburbs behind him.

(Merovingia)

“Of course. You recall that I told you of the wandering ones, the lawless ones? Old Cam here is one of them.”

(Enrazhug)

“I’m—fuck, what was the word they gave us?—right! I’m udug, damn you! The formless kin have a title, we were known! The Assyrians and the Babylonians knew us from the Akkadians, who knew us from the Sumerians, who gave me the name of Enrazhug to wear among them, and knew us from their own gods! We existed long before you infernals and your precious Hell! If you hate me, so be it, but you’ve got some gall to deny the legacy of my kind while putting yours on a pedestal! And you better be careful about touchin’ me. Got an amnesty from the witch Moonsilver--”

(Carrie)

“Let me stop you there, old one. ‘Moonsilver,’ as Amaranth calls herself, is a pariah. She’s lower than anyone. An amnesty from her means nothing.”

(Enrazhug)

“You’re shitting me. But I thought… she… she came in here, woke her power right up when I got in her face, did something to me I still don’t understand. I thought, no way would she act like that if she didn’t know what she was about. Figured she had to be some new hotshot.”

(Merovingia)

“No. She is only a new swindler. How fitting that in trying to con her, you were conned instead.”

(Carrie)

The formless one in shadow convulses, groans, and settles to a miasmic sprawl on the City’s off-kilter interpretation of park grass.

(Enrazhug)

“Fuck… can’t believe it. I thought I might finally be getting a break… damn her. Fine. If that’s the case, then I guess I might as well spill. Last I heard, she’s staying at some place called Metronome House. It’s like a halfway house for monsters with nowhere else to go.”

(Merovingia)

“Ugh. I might’ve known.”

(Carrie)

“Are you familiar with it?”

(Merovingia)

“By reputation. It’s one of many such establishments around the City. A strong argument in favor of establishing a little authority to ensure that, even here, the worst among us face the consequences of their actions. It’s a plush refuge that caters to the self-pity of failures and villains. Especially those who wish to pretend that feeling sorry for themselves is some form of redemption, and hide away from their past sins.”

(Enrazhug)

“Authority? Sins? Witch, tell me you’re hearing this. How can you not see how off it is that she--”

(Carrie)

I snap my fingers in a sudden surge of fury, blasting him with a bolt of lightning. The timbre of his screams, the way he writhes and distorts into fractured islands of burning darkness, is bliss.

“We’ve both had enough of your opinions. Keep it to yourself.”

(Enrazhug)

(crying) “Wh-why would you do that? I’m trying to help this time! I swear! I’m trying to… I’m trying to do the right thing! Why does nobody ever believe me…?”

(Carrie)

I grimace, and crush down the guilty sickness that churns my stomach at the spectacle of the old demon’s tears. Mero and I focus on each other.

(Merovingia)

“I am given to understand that Metronome House answers to witches in particular. At any rate, it has never appeared before me any of the times I’ve walked or flown or crept through the City. There. Another proof that whatever she claims, Moonsilver—Amaranth, that is…”

(Carrie)

Mero trails off, wincing, baring her fangs with an odd, confused look.

(Merovingia)

“What a peculiar, queasy-making name that is… Moonsilver…”

(Carrie)

“We can just call her ‘that one’ if you’d rather.”

(Merovingia)

“That’s perfect, Harvest! Thank you!”

(Carrie)

The delight of hearing my witch-name from my beloved demon’s lips is sweeter even than the kiss she plants on my cheek—though it’s not quite as sweet as the mouth-to-mouth she gives me a moment later, human tongue and demon’s forks entwining. Gods, it’s been too long…

… but we’re still on business, and Mero pulls away, leaving me woozy and pining for more of her warmth, her taste, the maddening aphrodisiac tang of her steaming saliva.

(Merovingia)

“So, yes. As I am a succubus, and unable to find Metronome House, it follows that no matter what she claims, Amaranth cannot be a succubus, because the house allowed her to reach it while I was kept away.”

(Enrazhug)

“S-she’s claiming what, now?”

(Merovingia)

“To be a succubus.”

(Enrazhug)

“But if she claims that, you have to… it’s not for you to say whether… never mind. I-I need to go!”

(Carrie)

Before I can decide whether to try binding him, the self-proclaimed udug drops out of our reality: black streaks condensing like a photo-negative cloudbreak in reverse, an inward hissing sound, a rush and pop of air filling the void.

(Merovingia)

“Good riddance. Let us hope he doesn’t give us cause to regret sparing his miserable life… as far as it can even be called that.”

(Carrie)

“Let’s forget about him, okay, Mero?”

I rub her arm.

“It scares me, how angry we both got as were dealing with him. He’s a bad influence.”

(Merovingia)

“You’re quite right, my love. Thank you.”

(Carrie)

She pulls me into her arms, and rests her head atop mine. We hold that tableau until my breaths quicken, and I begin to nuzzle into Mero’s neck. This sweet need between my legs, swirls in my belly calling for Mero’s clever presses to stir them up to a storm… the night’s heavy and soothing. We could take a few minutes, or an hour or two, to explore each other on these grasses by the side of the City’s eerie, empty suburban roads.

Then Mero pulls away, taking me with her back into the realms of necessity over desire.

(Merovingia)

“If I leave you alone for a little while, you promise not to speak with any strange beings, no matter how enticing they seem, and summon me from Sarkosch the instant you find Metronome House?”

(Carrie)

“Of course! But how will I know it when I see it?”

(Merovingia)

“It always appears in a district like a distorted hallucination of gothic horror. Stretched stonework, over-tall archways, and in that region the many moons of the city are all crescents, or else many full and bleeding discs.”

(Carrie)

“You mean they’re red like blood?”

(Merovingia)

“No.”

(Carrie)

“Oh.”

(Merovingia)

“It has an ivy-walled courtyard opening off of narrow, off-angle alleyways, and within that is a secondary wall of wrought-iron spikes set into black bricks. The facade is studded with gargoyles, but gargoyles as the city knows them: strange and warped and much queerer than any you have ever seen on an Earthly cathedral. Trust me, Carrie. You’ll know it if you see it.”

(Carrie)

“Of course I trust you, Mero.”

(Merovingia)

“Do you? I confess that sometimes, Carrie, it hasn’t felt like you do. Not anymore. I see you thinking things, all the time, and choosing not to say them. You used to tell me everything.”

(Carrie)

“I’m sorry, I… the things we talked about back then were simple, and I’d been thinking about them my whole life. They were easier to say, I guess. I… I’m sorry. You’re right, Mero. I’ve been holding back without even thinking about it. As soon as we’re back in Sarkosch, I’ll tell you everything.”

(Merovingia)

“Promise?”

(Carrie)

“I promise.”

She pecks my cheek, spreads her wings, and stretches her arms skyward. She carves burning jade circles with her claws, and a cone of green rays expands up to meet the otherworldly clouds of the City. It becomes a portal opening upside-down on a snow-swept mountain in a plane where one horizon is always darkest night, and the other is always brightest day. In the mountain’s slopes I can just make out the faint shine of two glass slits: the sunroofs looking down on the great platform in the center of Sarkosch, where I first met Mero.

Without another word, the demon of my heart leaps into the air. Her jade fire propels her as swift as any rocket wrought by mortal science, faster and faster, complete with a crackling roar like afterburners. Finally, the pinpoint of her inferno disappears into the portal.

The glowing oval contorts inward. Seconds later, as I turn my gaze back to the streets, the sonic boom of its sudden closing rattles the windows on an empty rental suite.

So I walk, a pale wraith in black silks, stung by the acute loneliness of it all. Every waking moment for two years, I’ve either been with Mero, or sensed her close by. I haven’t felt this alone since the night of the false ritual, the night of the witch-queen’s awakening, when Amaranth and I flexed our verbal claws and tore into each other before her whole coven.

How far have I really come? It’s not as though I learned anything new by blasting her to… to pieces… in front of those poor girls she’s abused into calling themselves dolls, into believing they’re not even people. There’s no meaning in surpassing someone that vile, that small, that vain, empty, and lacking in true power. I wish with every fiber of my being that if I couldn’t have a peer, a friend, a sister, chance had at least given me a worthy rival. Someone I could be proud to measure myself against.

As always, my wishes are answered by emptiness.

Emptiness? God damn it, what’s wrong with me? So poor Mero doesn’t count for anything? I live in a private palace with a beautiful succubus, and I’m so selfish that I’ve still wound up moping around whining to myself about how my wishes are never granted. Small wonder my darling demon feels underappreciated when this is what I give her in place of gratitude.

I enter a jumbled district of art-deco abominations: bronze-ridged facades melting together like misshapen crystals, towers jutting sideways from other towers like perverse trees. Immense thickets of golden chains fall from the undersides of archways and hovering geodesic domes to hold dangling, jangling forests of glass and aluminum chimes. Stark, polytorsal figures with countless copper eyes stare at me from the other side of translucent windowpanes.

None dare approach.

Onward, until an ascending ramp takes me through a cyan slit in the clouds—the sort of accidental vaginal symbolism Hannah and I would’ve pointed at, once, and laughed together. Damn you, Amaranth.

I discover that the clouds have the weight and texture of sludge: wet, cold, pressing dense against me like badly-ground meat.

Onward, into a realm of part plant, part flesh, part circuitwork. Imperfect rectangular rooms and cubicles break up the space between enormous fungal pillars. Transparent veins cut spirals into the pillars, and etch circuitboard patterns on the floor and ceiling. Every vein carries greenish fluid with copper wires suspended in the flow. Greenish-white computer monitors of oddly-smooth plant-flesh, heaped mainframes and desktops fused together like many overlapping ziggurats, buzz with unpleasant radiance. Their cases pulse and writhe, discolored crystal cutaways revealing irregular hollows filled by convulsing organs.

Organs of red blood and meat, melding with discolored leaves, fused with chlorophyllic stems.

Even here, I’m greeted only by emptiness. From the day I met Mero, bitterness was supposed to be the name of a forsaken and decaying empire. Now I’ve returned, and with all the magic I can command, I am still lost in these ruins. These are the thoughts I sink into, while the underfoot squish of cybernetic mycelium changes now and again to metal, then to brick and stone, and the corridors shrink and narrow. Soon I might as well be walking in an old dungeon.

Multicolored moonlight spills through. The hunched tunnels cast off their ceilings to receive a sky of ever-midnight. Blackstone porticos uphold many-leveled facades, and arched windows glint bent reflections of fog trimmed by a faint silver tint, and cemeteries fold skyward on curving stripes of cobble like the half-turned pages of madcap popup-books. Crooked steeples lift their not-quite-right crosses to the sky. Every silhouette flaunts lines in the wrong places: a notch here, a crosshatch there, even an inverted symbol of Neptune.

This should be home—no. Stop that, Carrie. You’ve been through a lot. It’s okay to have commitment issues, and Amaranth’s always had a way of stirring up your doubts. It’s not your fault you feel tempted to run away, but running is never the answer.

A chance glance, a faint rustling born from a night wind’s kiss, brings me to a halt. Through another narrow archway, I glimpse walls clad in ivy. I square my shoulders and approach.

Wrought-iron fencing in black bricks. Gargoyles with many heads and maws melted together and overlapping, with wings sprouting arms sprouting bellies full of entrails studded in pincers. Limbs jumbled, tripods and quadropods and polypods of jutting feet, claws, hooves, and more. Above the uncanny facade and the cold golden glows from its latticed windows, an immense silver moon swells into fullness: its lower hemisphere blended pink, and bleeding pink blood across the skies.

All over the district around Metronome House, other moons bleed: emerald and orange and blue and black. Their liquids turn to shimmering mist long before reaching the ground, and all the skies are a painter’s spasm of overlapping colors mixing, merging, or overwhelming each other.

Again that traitorous urge: yearning. Home. Get away, get some rest. It’s so strong and so sharp that I lose myself in it for a moment. One step. Two. Three. The main door looms just a little closer. Inside is freedom. Inside is friendship. Inside is where I become me--

Enough. Remember yourself, Harvest. Remember that Mero trusted you.

My steps resound hollow and solitary from the paving-stones underfoot as I turn around. Stones laid out in a sprawling occult mosaic I should’ve noticed before I was standing on it. No matter. I return to the tunnel, press my hand to one wall, and make my incantation as blood-red power glows in my flesh, turns my veins to dark fractures in its radiance, and sketches black battlements from my finger-bones:

“Vast be pathways under stone,
vast be halls of cloven bone,
far the hearth and far the dream,
far the fae queen’s lonely scream

Ties that bind us,

draw us close,

times that mind us,

give us hope.

Open, gateway,

mirror’s dove.

Open, gateway.

Show me love.”

Far more ornate than I’d usually incant for a portal, but this is as much a spell to strengthen my spirit as it is to bridge Sarkosch with the City. Either way, stone melts away into a ring of scarlet power enclosing empty, true void. Within grows a pinpoint of light and color, and it ceases to be a void.

First it fills with dark, muted hues like a crowd kissed only by the smallest and most distant light, shapes horned and winged that fill my belly with familiar yearning. Yeah. I’ve always had a thing for succubi. I suppose that my incantation’s vague enough to let a few subconscious associations manifest.

Then the figures wash away in a surge of green flames. The flames whirl, spiraling, creating depth. They cohere to form a tunnel with gentle glows from a new pinpoint at its far end. The tunnel narrows swifter and swifter, until the portal fills with the sight of Sarkosch’s main platform.

I catch a single glimpse of Merovingia reclining on a couch. Her head’s turned away from the portal. The last traces of smoke, of ash, of fire collapse away from a nearby seat, the seat she looks towards.

The moment passes. Her eyes flick, she gives a start, and she leaps to the air for a moment and glides to touch down at the portal’s entrance.

(Merovingia)

“You found it?”

(Carrie)

She seizes my elbows as she steps out of the portal. Her claws dig in a little. I’m used to it by now. Mero tends to forget how strong and sharp she can be when she’s nervous, and, well… there’s some part of me that really likes the pain.

“Or it found me. But yes. There’s no mistaking it.”

I let the portal seal itself, and lead her to the tunnel’s end.

“It’s Metronome House. Unless Enrazhug lied to us, that’s where Moonsilver is.”

(Merovingia)

“Then let’s bring that wretched girl to heel. It’s past time that someone with a firm hand put that one in her place.”

(Carrie)

I nod silent assent to the words of my succubus. We walk side by side out of the tunnel to the darkened facade of Metronome House, whose windows now hang utterly dark. I frown, peering closer, and realize that where once glass panes rested, and inviting lights shone, only void remains.

“Mero, I think they’re expecting us. These windows were lit up and filled in when I arrived.”

I frown, pursing my lips in thought. How did they remove so much glass so quickly from so many different rooms and floors, without making a sound? Why prepare this way? I speak wards against kinetic attacks, fearing anything from crossbow bolts to bullets and live grenades. Mero only scowls. She strides past me to the once finely-finished doors, now coated in faded, peeling paint.

With a hypersonic crack, her claws snap forward and sink straight into the dark wood. She snarls, heaving the door off its hings with a shriek of tortured metal. It crashes against the wrought-iron spikes behind us, bending some almost horizontal and snapping others right out of the bricks. Black brick-powder scatters like coal and ash.

Within the darkened maw left behind, we find only dust and rotten heaps of furniture, only ragged scraps of blackened moldered carpets, only a large but ultimately mundane four-level manor. It’s deserted up to the last collapsed chest in an attic under a roof so full of holes it’s more like a frame for climbing vines, and down to the last fossilized wine-cask in the cellar.

I watch as Merovingia snarls, snaps her palms outward, and sends waves of jade fire running over the walls and floors. She grinds her fangs. Her tail lashes, gouging the stonework with awful shrieks of its hollow spearhead tip. Though her inferno raises patches of molten glow on the cobbles and the ancient bricks, though the flames dig like claws into every crack in the foundations and the floorboards above, she at last sags and staggers until I catch her.

(Merovingia)

“I know that this is some sort of trick! Metronome House has displaced its true interior to another point in space. I’ve seen this ploy many times. I should be able to force it to return by attacking the connection between its manifested exterior and its innards, but I can’t—I can’t fucking find it!”

(Carrie)

“It might not be, Mero. It’s possible that Enrazhug just lied to us to give himself a chance to get away.”

It seems like a simple, reasonable suggestion to me, but when Merovingia whips her head around to look at me, her slit-eyes blaze with outrage. There’s a single heartbeat when her expression falls suddenly into open horror. Then the moment passes. She shakes herself.

(Merovingia)

“I’m sorry, Carrie, I… I’m just very tired. That might be so. I suppose it is possible that the rumors I heard of Metronome House were only rumors. Again, it is said to be one of many such establishments in this city. I am sure those that dwell here are not above inventing false locations to toy with visitors like ourselves. But we will continue to try until we are absolutely certain. “

(Carrie)

My gut tells me it’ll only be a waste of time. But Mero seems determined, and after seeing how much I hurt her with doubting words, I don’t want to risk doing it twice.

Over the next month and a half, I find Metronome House seven more times. Though Merovingia insists on coming with me on eleven different occasions, it never appears while I’m with her. Every time I summon Mero after finding it by myself, and we approach the House together, its windows have gone dark. It’s always the same deserted, dusty, rotten-wood layout inside.

Eventually it stops appearing for me. It’s difficult to express the desolation I feel after the eighth night in a row I spend wandering, alone in that gothic quarter of the City, and emerge into another district without so much as spotting the eerie manor in the distance.

I know, with a terrible finality, that I will never find Metronome House again.

(End)