Our answer, Secretary’s and mine, to Lupe’s question was simple—though not one I admit to with any pride; it was a scream. Shrill and jagged, the type that’d ruin your vocal cords and so only ca forth when more poetic evocations couldn’t possibly transmit the depths of terror that slaughtered higher reason leaving only the aforentioned primal screech. It was then followed by both of us dragging Lupe along as we sprinted for our lives.
“Screaming is not an answer,” Lupe yelled.
“This ti it is,” I yelled back. “Now jump!”
As one, the three of us hopped over a train of crustacean shadow imps marching back to their den. We swerved around the dangling toxic hooks of vampire squid rmaids gossiping just above us—Secretary had to shove Lupe’s head down when one hook swayed over my head and nearly took her in the ear. Yet, despite our frantic pace and absolute terror, Secretary made good use of not just the vision they’d copied, but also the understanding of the nagerie’s layout that was pillaged from the Lurkers’ heads. It was why with every step, hop, and swerve we found ourselves gobbling up the distance between us and the exit built into the far wall. A rather modest set of double doors bound by three concentric rings of tal with phones carved into each ring—a formation dial-lock—and from which spectral bands radiated.
“Stop,” Secretary scread.
My body responded to their command before my thoughts had wheeled away from examining the curious security chanism. An impulse I thanked as my vision of the door was all but instantly revoked by a deluge of molten sulfur that cascaded from the cannibalistic orgy on the ceiling. Though none had splashed on , I stumbled back in bare shock. The sulfur, or to be more technical, what passed as a “sort-of sulfur” ate through the rock of the floor with a satisfied sizzle. I was only a half-step from my brain being the material that satiated those leviathans’ acidic by-product.
“You saved my life,” I whispered, breathless.
Lupe asked, “From what?”
Secretary explained, “Deluge of molten sulfur. It’s the sizzle you’re hearing right now.”
“Woah,” Lupe said, “they really did save your life.”
“Nadia’s my asset,” they explained, “if I can help it, I’ll let nothing harm her.”
“Riight, right,” Lupe said, “she’s just your ‘ass—’”
Her teasing was interrupted by the bone-reverberating rumble of shaking earth. Then the crackle of shattering stone. At six points surrounding us, spined pillars burst from the ground, bending at segnts in their plating before impaling the floor and heaving up the section of earth we were standing on from the ground. All set to the cry of a spirit-curdling shriek. The acid had eaten through the rocky floor and found the flesh of a buried and sleeping entity.
The three of us fell to our knees. We tried to plug our ears, but the scream that scratched the world wasn’t one which troubled flesh—of which any instinctual action was engaging—rather it was a rending sensation felt in the musculature of our spirit. The pain of one made into an agony for many.
“Why’s the ground feel like it’s moving?” Lupe moaned.
I said, “‘The ground’ is the armor of so kind of entity.”
“Looks a bit like a sea spider,” Secretary added through gritted teeth.
Lupe’s laugh was pitiful and bitter. “I hate crabs and spiders. This place sucks!”
With determination remaining, I forced my head up and with it my body. Lupe had the long and short of this place, it sucked, and that was why I knew we weren’t going to die here. I knew that the place I was ant to die wasn’t sowhere where my demise would be a random occurrence of nature. It would be by my hand and will that death would take . Though that confidence, which caused my tallic spirit to be made nearly molten, was soon tested.
“Fuck,” I said. “This place sucks!”
Lured by the keening of our titanic spider transport, the angler-eels who’d otherwise be content arcing from shadowy hole to hole had turned their heads. Noted our carrier’s weakness; the way it swayed on its spire legs, drunk and mad from the cocktail of pain and fury. It outsized them, they outnumbered it, and it was screaming its weakness—so they struck. Swimming through the air like so many sinuous spears lobbed as legion.
“Get up,” I urged. “Get up!”
I dragged Secretary and Lupe’s moaning bodies to their feet. Wrapped my arms around their waists, and bent my knees. Though pain had draped a haze over them as well, they weren’t so far gone as to mistake my intent.
“We’re jumping?” Lupe asked.
Secretary asked, “Little brute, what’s the gambit here?”
“Jump. Run. Jump again,” I said. “We’re too close to give up now!”
We were close to the exit, but close is an unreliable estimation of distance. Used interchangeably for contexts where you and a loved one were close enough to kiss, or when your coach comforted you after your kick sent the ball wide of the intended goal and hit soone sitting in the stands—Dad stopped coming to gas after that. It was a phrase that ant everything and nothing. So sure, we were “close” if you tolerated that we were however many tens upon tens of feet in the air, and still a good couple of yards shy of our destination. Still, nothing gets the body moving more than being told your suffering was “close” to its end.
“What are we running on?” Lupe asked, her legs were already bent.
I said, “Don’t worry about it. Just jump!”
The angler-eels struck every surface of the titanic sea spider. Their jaws clamped around the joints of its legs, wherever its eyes were, and so even tried to plunge their teeth into its rocky back plating that served as both armor and camouflage. It was one of those eels that I leaped onto the back of, my hands firmly clasped around Lupe and Secretary’s waists. When our feet landed it was just in ti as the sea spider toppled over from the force of the angler-eels assault.
As it and the angler-eels fell through the air, I pushed the three of us to run—hard as we were capable of—and shoved from my mind any consequence of what would happen if we fell, if we faltered. My thoughts had no room for it when I was busy screaming verbally to myself and my partners that we had to run faster and faster. It wouldn’t be enough to stay in place while our “floor” disappeared beneath us. No, we had to gain ground, ascend up the arc of the massive angler-eel’s body to get even a few feet closer to that damn exit. And we did—gain a few feet closer that is—though our mad scramble took us to the apex of the entity’s arced body right when there was no more body to run over.
“Jump!” I yelled, and we did.
We took a leap of what could only be called faith; our legs running on the hopes that we wouldn’t die here, from the fall or from so stray entity whose existence itself was inhospitable to our own. The nagerie wasn’t a place for people after all. A detail reminded to by Secretary’s superlative talents in observation.
“Nadia, look,” they said, their arm outstretched to sothing I could never miss.
A hole. Wide and filled to the brim with black shadows that seed to gnash their umbral teeth in excitent at the al set to tumble down into its open maw. There was no more ground to run, no more dangers that could be dodged, what waited for us at the bottom of our descent was nothing but pure unavoidable consequence. It infuriated because we’d tried so hard to avoid using our Sorcery that’d draw the attention of every Abyssal denizen within the nagerie, and were still going to be consud by them.
“If it’s eat or be eaten here,” I said, “then, alls below, I’m going to burn first!”
I flexed my spiritual musculature allowing Sphinx’s wings to unfold from my back. Angled them so the eyes of her feathers were aid behind . Secretary gripped my face forcing to look them in the eye and explain myself—I didn’t say anything. They found the answer the mont they read my expression. This wasn’t our end, and it wasn’t a suicide. The eyes in Sphinx’s wings burned with a chalcedony incandescence that teased the attention of every entity in the room.
“Atomic Glory.”
In the Abyssal purity of the nagerie, a star was born. A minor thing of chalcedony fla that shot through the darkness and evoked deep Conceptual pain for its violation. It was a violence that only entities and their bondmates might inflict on one another. It ant there was an invader in their realm and for that it brought every entity into an alliance. For all that they quarreled, they were all warriors of Abyss, enemies of light, of foulest Stars.
Angler-eels peeled off the corpse of their prey. Vampire squid rmaids shot forth like bullets, their hooks ready and toxins prid. Those ogres clad in cloudy armor drew forth a panoply of arms and marched. Even the leviathans, otherwise distracted by their gas of violent procreation, pulled their heads free from their entangled sea revealing faces of wizened elders that split in half lengthwise baring serrated teeth and let themselves fall upon the star.
“We’re not going to make it,” Secretary said, having done the calculations comparing our velocity to the host of Abyss that pursued us.
“Like fuck we won’t,” Lupe scoffed. “Secretary, if you can ‘rember’ sight, any chance you can ‘rember’ our flight trajectory?”
“I’ve not tried it,” they answered.
“As soone who experints with spells on the fly,” I interjected, “there’s a first ti for everything.”
“Alls below, I hate improvising,” Secretary bemoaned, the closest we’d get to enthusiastic agreent.
Lupe said, “Good, now Nadia,”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Kill the fla when I say so,” she ordered.
“Understood.”
Lupe ripped her bracelet off her wrist. The fibers of her Radiant spirit shifted as the claw of her Baron overlaid her own finger. She scratched extra phones into the tal band.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Introducing the nagerie to an ancient Old World song,” Lupe said. “Secretary, that spell ready?”
Secretary’s answer was a twist of her field-spell. It stretched before and behind us like spindles, our velocity increasing as the thrust from my Atomic Glory and the mory of that thrust layered atop one another. Lupe’s grin was broad and manic, but her voice clear as a sumr sky.
“Kill it,” she ordered.
I followed. Where once there was Revelatory fire burning strong and long to propel us there was suddenly absence. Lupe twisted in my grip, shifted the bracelet from one hand to the other, and lobbed it behind us into the furious mob.
“What was the song?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing special,” Lupe said. “It’s called, ‘Here Cos the Sun.’”
An apt reference because I, with my Atomic Glory, had made us into a shooting star through the void. Lupe brought the fucking sun and the beauty of a Morning undeniable. Secretary and I couldn’t look at it, our borrowed sight was built for the absence of light, not a flood of it. Even looking away from it, my peripheral vision was whited out. So you can imagine how furious it made the mob that trailed us. The lot of them converged onto the bracelet, tearing each other apart to be first to destroy the sun that shouldn’t be in a place like this, and we—Secretary, Lupe, and myself—soared toward our freedom.
“Can you slow us down?” Lupe asked. “We should be in the clear.”
Secretary said, “This is the first ti I’ve used my spell like this.”
“So?” I asked.
“Were you able to use every trick of your Atomic Glory on the first try?” they asked.
“Oh,” I said.
Lupe added, “Well Nadia, ti for the second part of my plan.”
“You have a second part?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, “it’s called, ‘this bitch owes , and should take the brunt of our landing.’”
“I don’t like this plan,” I whispered.
Secretary patted my face, “I believe in you, little brute.”
With no other options, I wrapped Sphinx’s wings around the three of us and did my best in the process, to turn so it’d be my side which crashed into the wall first. Our faces were all shoved close together. I could sll the sweat of our fear, our struggle, and, alls below, it made feel just a smidge guilty. It was my “clever” plan to sneak us into the throne that had us arrive here, and my selfish request to save Sinaya which instigated even that. I owed these two, even if it was my body that’d foot the bill.
When we collided into the wall my thoughts whited out. There was no thought of guilt, of the affection I had for these two, or of bills and their due. I did, however, think about that phrase, “foot the bill” in no small part because the collision felt like soone had kicked my side harder than I’d kicked the ball that broke my Dad’s nose all those years back. Then, having arrived at our destination, Secretary’s spell concluded and we tumbled from the wall down to the space in front of the exit doors.
“Ugh, my ribs,” I groaned. “Heal, please?”
“Why are you asking , don’t you have a wild amount of spell resistance?” Lupe asked.
I tapped my forehead. Explained, “Star trap. Took the heat. No more resistance.”
“Oh, that does make sense. Slipped my mind between all that running and screaming and nearly dying,” Lupe said. “So nah, have the Angler Knight heal you up.”
Lupe tapped my bruised rib, I moaned in minor agony, and they stood with a smile. I deserved it and they knew it, but Lupe still pulled to my feet. Things weren’t cool between us—I hoped they would’ve been given ti—however life-or-death circumstances have a tendency to iron out most issues. I think it’s because it puts things into perspective.
“#404, heals?” I asked.
I ambled over to where they stood next to a small callbox. They waved off my question with a quick hand-spell, and I felt my body Rember its condition from before we crashed into a wall. I pulled them by the waist into a side-ways hug of thanks which they stiffly accepted. When I let go they patted my shoulder.
They said, “Quiet, little brute, I need to convince the kind man in the operating room to open the doors.”
Lupe asked, “Couldn’t they just see we’re not the two people who went in?”
“If they had caras here or so other observation tool, then yes,” Secretary answered. “However they don’t. The nagerie is, according to the mories of those lackeys, a ‘black box’ ant to be opened sparingly. Now, shush!”
Lupe held up their hands in mock surrender. I took a hand and—after a silent check-in for consent—led Lupe over to the doors. For their own part, Secretary ford a hand-spell and held the seal to their throat. When they spoke, what erged was the vocal mory of one of the Lurkers we’d waylaid—their voice, congested and horribly nasally at once.
Secretary asked, “Hey, Tomas, you there?”
The callbox crackled before who I assud was Tomas, responded, “I’m here. You and Mira done in there?”
“You betcha,” Secretary said, before grimacing in disgust—their spell having copied both the sound of the Lurker’s voice as well as their speech patterns.
“Then let’s get you out of there,” Tomas said. “Don’t want to risk domain contamination.”
The callbox clicked off. Secretary joined Lupe and I in front of the doors. The tal rings of the dial-lock spun to the unseen command of Tomas. One after the other rotating before stopping as each formation landed in its appropriate spot—the chanism requiring internal alignnt alongside aligning with each successive inner ring. With a final click, the dial-lock was undone and the spectral bands that radiated from it retreated inside. There was a hiss as the Conceptual vacuum seal on the doors was broken, and they cracked apart just enough for three people shoulder-to-shoulder to pass through.
On the other side of the doors was Tomas, a lanky man who looked both thirty and thirteen with how no singular part of himself matched proportionally to the next. A sandwich rested beside him leaking grease onto a ceramic plate. His mouth hung like a pendulum, swinging slightly to find the appropriate words. Maybe to inquire as to who we were, what had happened to his friends, or so other reasonable request I knew I had no intention of honoring.
“Hey there, Tomas, right,” I said, asking but not really asking, “could you believe that our invitation had us going down a Staircase leading into the nagerie. Unbelievable really.”
I crossed what could only be described as a laboratory. Charts and printouts covered the wall and wheelable spirit-boards. I was a bit jealous to see them—the school back ho had us using chalkboards like it was the Old World as opposed to the much better spirit-board which let you write on it with just your finger and a bit of intent, like a token slate but less permanent.
On the tables were jars, beakers, and other glassware containing Conceptual materials in varying states of analysis. Next to Tomas were two empty workstations, likely Mira’s and her compatriot’s, which were arrayed in a little row. It was on one of those workstations I’d hopped onto to sit down and catch my breath—also force Tomas to either look at or Secretary and Lupe. Since I was talking, he looked at . Twisted in his chair to keep track of my position.
“Unbelievable, yeah,” Tomas muttered.
I said, “Exactly! Now, I know and you know, Marduk runs a tighter throne than this. So, just point to the party and I’ll let the right people know that soone made a Sovereign-sized fuck-up.”
His gaze lingered on , trying to decide what to believe—if any of it—from what I’d said. Trying to be congenial, I flashed him a smile shoving into it all the cheer I could. Tomas’s expression went from undecided to decided extraordinarily quick as fear flashed in his eyes.
“D-dog,” he stamred.
“Well, I think these days I’m maybe more of a dragon,” I said, trying to keep things on the other side of panicked.
“A Lodge dog,” he spat out.
Secretary shoved their head into their hand. Lupe threw their arms up in frustration, nice going Nadia. My shoulders sagged as I let my deception deflate alongside any hopes I’d be able to resolve this peaceably. Tomas’s hand had shot for his sorc-deck, and I couldn’t let him get a ssage out. So I ripped my claw through the air, his throat, and watched as his life was jettisoned away in an arterial spray of blood.
The force of the curse hit soon after. A gut-deep throbbing born from a hunger that I knew could never be satiated. Yet still I hungered, for blood, for the spilling of lives, and a slaughter with no end. My breath ca out in ragged heaps. A thin line of drool dripped from my mouth as I salivated just looking at Tomas’s still warm corpse—I needed a bite of sothing.
In an attempt to wrest control, I repeated a mantra, “I’m not a fucking cannibal. I’m not a fucking cannibal. I’m not—”
There, on the plate, was the sandwich that slled so good. I didn’t know if it could work, but I had to try. So with ferality, I pounced on it. Gripped it tight as grease dribbled through my fingers while I shoved it into my mouth. Tearing it into chunks with my fangs, swallowing, barely chewing, and greatly appreciative that Tomas had ordered the at in his sandwich—thinly sliced ribeye—as rare. It wasn’t much in the way of blood, but it was more than nothing and better than a corpse whose ex-inhabitant wasn’t soone I cared for enough to tear their flesh from their bones.
“Alls below,” Lupe muttered, “you killed him and stole his sandwich.”
“I didn’t want to,” I said, trying to speak around a mouthful of bread, cheese, and steak.
“Oh little brute, you’re a horrible liar,” Secretary said. “Toss him inside the nagerie when you’re done.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
After finishing the sandwich and tossing Tomas’s body inside the nagerie, I joined Secretary and Lupe on the balcony outside of the lab. Lupe leaned against the railing as she tied off a new vision bracelet on her wrist. Her expression was sour and, going off of the distance between her and where Secretary stood, very pointed. When the glass door to the lab closed behind , Secretary addressed with a glance over the shoulder.
“Did you toss his body inside?” they asked.
I answered, “Yeah.”
“Wipe down the blood?”
“Yep.”
“Did you use the right solution—”
“Alls below,” Lupe interrupted, “are you their handler or their mom?”
Secretary didn’t dignify her interjection with a response. Lupe flipped them off for ignoring her.
“Um, nice to see you whipped up a new bracelet, Lupe,” I said.
Lupe scoffed, “I didn’t need to. Been blind all my life, and using these bad boys for nearly half of it. I know to keep spares on .”
“That makes sense,” I said. “Which, speaking of, that thing you did back there was amazing.”
“Eh, nothing special,” Lupe said with a smirk that told how special it actually was. “A few extra phones to increase power output, have actual luminosity and then stole a few from what we did to keep you from blowing up so it’d store itself until it reached critical capacity. Simple really.”
Secretary muttered, “I thought you hated my little brute?”
“What are you on?” Lupe asked.
“Nothing you haven’t intimated to ,” they replied. “You’re pissy about the mission, understandable, but either be upset with them or get over it. Rather than snipe at every point yet flaunt your work in the hopes of her praising you.”
“I didn’t want Nadia—cause that’s her fucking na—to praise ,” Lupe said. “Besides, her extra goal may piss off, but at least she’s not about to sacrifice innocents—”
“In the na of every Godtender, what is going on?” I asked. “I clean up one body and suddenly you go from picking at to verbally scrapping with each other.”
The two of them pointed past the balcony. I crossed over to them, leaning over the coral railing. Secretary decided then to revoke the vision we’d copied off the Lurkers from earlier. I wanted to protest—thinking I’d need it if I was to see anything—only to swiftly discover there’d be no need. As past the railing was a city, ancient and preserved through the unchanging cold of Abyss, that reflected the soft cerulean bioluminescence of the entity whose back this elder tropolis was built on. Thinking back I recalled what Sinaya had terd it when we first t, Atlantis’ Ferryman.
However, for all the city sprawled with its towers, dod buildings of stained sea glass, and roads paved with bricks taken from the shell of so great beast—it all paled in comparison to the spire which stretched far above the balcony we were on, going up as if it could spear through the barrier between the Underside and Realspace. Though I noted branches that fractaled off of the tower in every direction, disappearing into a darkness that rippled softly—the Staircases. I counted more than were listed in the Lodge’s mission brief. Marduk’s throne was connected to the city above by what must have been hundreds of Staircases.
“There’s so many of them,” I said, with a fearful reverence.
“My point exactly,” Secretary said.
Lupe growled, “Keep looking. Beyond the tower.”
So I did and beheld a queer sky. There weren’t clouds, no moon or sun, but instead what seed like a forest of leafless trees, a city district tilted as if a municipal wave, there was even a valley filled with the little ants of village hos and likely those who lived in them. Lit by what I had to presu was so kind of light born of Abyssal bioluminescence—I didn’t see how Abyss would tolerate anything else. This wasn’t the sky.
“Behold,” Lupe said, “the Sunken Valley in all its stolen magnificence. Alongside it, every other Abyss-claid domain beneath Marduk’s throne.”
“Wait,” I said, “that doesn’t make any sense. We’re in the Underside.”
Lupe shrugged, “I know. It’s what makes Conceptual zones and territories so dangerous. They exist in the Underside and Realspace at once.”
I screwed my eyes shut as I processed. That lady I t at the Palace of Ghosts—whose face I found rather hard to conjure at that exact mont—had described territories as an “imposition,” and I finally understood why. To forcibly exist in the Real and the Underside left you endangered by both. It ant that anyone who wanted to even save the Sunken Valley had to also gear up for an invasion of the Underside. I glanced to Lupe, and chunks of my Heart fell in shattered pieces—no wonder she’d been seeking aid for so long, it wasn’t a simple request.
“Okay,” I said, slowly catching on, “but why are you fighting?”
“The mission, Nadia,” Lupe said. “Alls below, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it can’t happen.”
“Wait, why?” I asked. “You were up my ass about this earlier.”
“And you were up mine about liberation and shit,” Lupe said. “Alls below, we can’t detonate those fucking bombs if the valley isn’t liberated first.”
Understanding pressed upon eliciting a sigh of pure exasperation. I dropped into a squat, head between my knees, and scread at the unfairness of it all. Our mission was simple: plant bombs to sever the Staircases and a different set to destroy the throne. The brief didn’t say anything about what the throne hovered over, who it hovered over. Where the debris of a broken throne would fall when we’d left and triggered the detonations. Though now the three of us knew where, and our team at least, nominally, together for my bullshit was actually coming undone. All over the fact that to do our mission right would an dooming the entirety of the Sunken Valley.
“Secretary,” I said and was ignored. “#404!”
“Yes, little brute,” they said, their voice so weak.
“This isn’t right,” I stated. “You know it’s not right.”
Secretary’s shoulders shuddered, their body at war with itself over what path to take. “I thought we’d been over this, little brute. The Lodge doesn’t want the right thing. It wants the best.”
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