Episode 7 - The Horned Hare

  Chapter 66 - The Hollow

  “Will she be okay?”

  The voice snaps my eyes away from the blood, and I turn. It’s the woman we came here for; it feels like a distant memory already. What a stupid, ignorant statement. She can see what I can see, right? How arrogant. How rich. Nessa is bleeding because of her, and because her stupid brother can’t listen to our instructions.

  A quiet little voice corrects my thoughts. Nessa is bleeding because of me.

  The woman’s hands are to her lips watching in horror, but her feelings might as well be nothing to me now. “No time to find out,” says Yellow, dragging her away. The Caracal at her feet snarls, putting itself between them and us. Its dark eye markings wrinkle around its muzzle as it bares its white teeth framed by dark lips.

  “Get out!” I scream after them. I don’t want her here. I don’t want them watching.

  Red comes running, eyes crazed, and dives across the space after his symbiont. Pooka turns, growling with an icy fury. The distraction is enough for the Lepus to get her feet underneath herself, clawed feet lashing out blindly. She juts her horns upwards, catching Pooka in the chin. To something made of flesh and blood, the tear from jawbone to throat would have been horrendous, but Pooka merely becomes fog, pulling himself free.

  Pooka slaps her head back with one paw, pinning her again. The Lepus screams with a human voice, wordless curses and shrieks growing in intensity. Red throws himself at them both, and Pooka tosses him back off with a kick of his back legs. He rolls, looks once at Rhett bent over Nessa’s body still desperately working, then at me.

  He tucks one hand into his waistband and withdraws a handgun, eyes locked on me.

  I am sick of seeing barrels pointed at my head.

  I raise my hand, stretching my fingers towards Red. Time seems to halt, frozen in the moments as Red raises that gun towards me. I am the weak link. He knows it, just like Rhett does. Control the human first.

  I have felt Pooka call to matter through our communion. It is a thrust of will into the world beyond, an unshakable knowing that reality will bend to your beckoning. Never have I been able to muster the certainty he feels, always crippled by fleeting mortality.

  My muscles are not Pooka’s, my calves burn and my feet drag when I run on the treadmill for too long. I’ve gotten stronger, faster, but Nessa, when she keeps me company, can still outrun me. When Pooka runs, I feel the world fade away, and only joy at our confident, endless power.

  He never gasps for breath. I get tired and my chest burns. He never feels pain; he never feels the weight of his own limbs. He feels not hunger or thirst. No wonder he ?hated being bonded to people he considered weak in his memories. I must sicken him with my constant barrage of weakness, body screaming constantly just to fight the entropy of constant, impending death.

  But… his joy is hollow without me. He is nothing but hollow without a human to parse his understanding of what he is for him - nothing to process contradiction and comparison to understand the raw existence he experiences. He would not feel the elation he does when I let my mind drift on the breeze with him if I did not know the tired weight of being chained by gravity to the ground.

  Eventually, without the human, he would forget the joy of his memories - places with verdant grass soft beneath his hooves and rolling hills that invite him to run endlessly. It is the pain of the struggle that lets us feel the joy of improvement. He does not hate being bonded to all humans. He was invited, he came on his own to me, because I improve him with my weakness. We overlap.

  Maybe that was why this symbiosis formed once in the distant past. Just like faultless glass and stainless chrome, endless perfection is a curse of its own for them. We drown in it, we forget. Pain and texture wake us… remind us to strive for something, just as it might have attracted his kind once when the bond with conduits was as equals. Just as I needed my fight with Regina to wake from the stupor I’ve been in for months. A symbiotic mutual parasitism that benefits both parties.

  I cannot have Pooka’s certainty on my own. And I never will. It is not what I bring to the partnership. He takes what he needs from me. He has taken it every day since he handed me his pain and rage and trust. The trick was never to learn how to do it myself, but how to take what I needed from him. Our bodies, our hearts. At this moment, I know what we are.

  Frost builds on my fingertips as his powers respond to me. The water in the air around my hand condenses. It gathers on my skin where it crusts, at first a thin film, then I can feel it harden and thicken as more gathers. It’s so cold the pain is fleeting.

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  Die. Rot. Rust.

  I do not command. I do not call. To do so would imply that some other had a choice to obey.

  I assert my very existence upon the world. I avow what I am. With my whole being, I know what I am capable of at this moment. I am vast. I am ever-changing. I am relentless.

  The gun crumbles in Red’s hands. The slide falls through the barrel as it rusts within his fingers. The rubber grips tumble away. His hand loosens with horror as his weapon falls to pieces.

  The Lepus hurt Nessa! She didn’t even listen to us! Kill her. Kill her Pooka!

  I do not kill my sisters.

  Then I will!

  It is my will that closes our teeth on the Lepus. Jaws sink deep. The texture of fur on our gum and fibrous meat within giving way. A bitter black liquid erupts from her flesh, blossoming across our tongue, filling our cheeks to bursting until it expels between our teeth.

  Red gives a single choked gasp and clutches his chest. I pull back with Pooka’s head, tearing my jaws free of the Lepus, fur and gristle and bone still trapped within. Black ichor spills from the Lepus, her eyes rolling. The thickness of it is far denser than Pooka’s ethereal mass, like viscous tar. She opens her mouth and a gurgling, high-pitched scream erupts, shattering the glass windows around us. Then the ichor fills her mouth, muffling her death-cry. It bubbles from the side of her jaw, white teeth so bright against its darkness.

  Red collapses to his knees.

  The woman we came to save adds her voice to the symphony of death.

  Lepus, human, felid. All of them at once.

  The jackalope’s voice dies first, and she fades to black fog beneath Pooka paws. Red falls face first onto the floor, as limp as weighted sacks. He does not fade like his symbiont. He is just dead now. His matter stays here.

  “No!” screams the woman, again and again. Tears stream down her face, she claws desperately against Yellow who grips her without compromise.

  “We have to go!”

  “Brother! No!” She is weakening now, her knees shaking. Yellow drags her backwards across the carpet floors, her eyes growing wet too.

  Pooka lifts his head, eyes burning. I turn to them. I feel as if the black ichor must be on my own mouth, as if a thick clay coats from my skin and cheeks and that cracks as I open my lips to speak. I feel as if clumps of fur still remain in my teeth, as if shreds of flesh tangle my tongue.

  I feel it all, but my human mouth is empty.

  “Get out!” I scream at them, bunching my fists. The frost around my frozen hand cracks, shards of ice dripping to the floor. The throbbing pain in my hand is distant, but oddly grounding. As if without it I might risk drifting off from my body into this sudden infinity I feel at the power within my reach. “Run. Before I change my mind.”

  Yellow wins the battle with the woman, and they retreat. I don’t watch them go. I don’t care anymore what happens to them.

  Rhett is growing paler, sweat dripping down his brow as he remains folded in half over Nessa’s body. He’s stopped packing her wounds. I step closer. My adrenaline drains from my body, and a tremor begins in my hands and knees.

  He has one hand cupped around Nessa’s cheeks, holding her head to look at him. Her eyes are distant and unfocused, pupils wide and black. “Nessa. Nessa, can you hear me?” His voice is so strained. His desperation almost stops my heart.

  Nessa’s symbiont continues his keening. The blood on the floor is on his paws now, staining his golden fur crimson. I did this. I did this. This is my fault. Then, his edges start to fade.

  “No!” I gasp. Pooka, please do something.

  The hollow claims them. I can not prevent this. No one has power over this.

  Rhett’s hand stills on Nessa’s chest, his fingers curling. He withers, kneeling by her body. Every shred of his confidence seems to have abandoned him. Slowly, fingers caked in darkening gore lower Nessa’s head to the floor, and he settles her arms at her side as if to make her comfortable.

  I drop to my knees with Nessa. I reach out a hand to pick up her own. Her flesh still feels soft but… it is too cold, her skin too pale, her fingers too loose. They part between my own as I curl her hand into mine. Her symbiont finishes fading, dripping to black fog that dissipates to nothing.

  This is cruel. This is pointless. This isn’t what I wanted. I tried. I thought this was right. I didn’t even really do anything, we were just going to… defy through inaction.

  Rhett bows his head and whispers a few strangled words. “You never learn.”

  I don’t know if he says the words to himself, or if he meant them for me. There are no tears that will wash away the blood that soaks into my knees as I lean over Nessa’s body on the floor.

  With Pooka's eyes, we watch the Caracal, its host and the woman we came here for climb onto the dark iron platform they arrived upon. The woman looks back, her face pale and shaken while Yellow settles and reassures her, whispering again and again that she is safe, that she is going home. She hugs herself, and looks back with moisture in her eyes - and I think her face might not look so different from my own right now.

  I paid a friend... and she paid a brother.

  We feel hollow. There must be other ways.

  The art of runesmithing died long ago. Once legendary runeswords have been reduced to mere decorations, their powers made irrelevant by the discovery of ethereal spirits. Techniques were forgotten, and any remaining runesmiths were ridiculed and shunned.

  Vivian is one such runesmith. Born as an orphan and adopted into a smithy, she and her adoptive grandpa persist with a dream. They wish to prove that runeswords are once again worthy of fighting monsters in the lands below.

  What Vivian never expected was for herself to be the one fighting. Alone in the underground with a crazed spirit that seeks to profit and grow from every monster in their wake. Below the earth awaits a subterranean labyrinth of monsters and demons, where ethereal storms ensure nothing stays dead for long…