Order and Chaos

kill sir nose.

Sir Nose went back to the stovetop to stir his corn soup. "Take your time to decide," he said. "I can wait forever."

I staggered to the counter beside him, leaned above the sink, and looked a thousand miles out the kitchen window. This was no time for moping and tears, though, much as my heart craved to wallow in it — I was a Vindictus, and it was time for a little Vindictus action. I threw open the silverware drawer, grabbed her biggest carving knife, and stabbed Sir Nose in the side.

I had planned it so he wouldn't have time to react. What I didn't expect was no reaction. He stepped to the side from the force of the actual blow, but was otherwise unphased. When I took the knife out again, the wound closed itself. I stabbed him again, with enough force to knock him back and send his wooden spoon flying out of his trunk and across the room, but he took the knife out of his own gut and began to stir with that. His face — either of them — didn't so much as twitch.

"You might have killed Felus, but HE was an idiot," said Sir Nose. Then he laughed once. He honked. "Two stab wounds to the torso with her biggest carving knife — do you even remember that's how you killed her?"

I didn't. But then, it's not something I would want to remember.

"Soup's done," he said, then upturned the pot right into the sink beside it. It was only "soup" in the loosest sense of the word. Watered-down boiling blood, interspersed with human viscera and even bone cascaded out of the pot and pooled in the sink. Two human eyes floated to the top as it drained.

Now it was my turn to be unimpressed. It's not like I needed a violent metaphor for the violence I was guilty about, and it wasn't scary, just so gory that it was impossible to take seriously.

"If you're trying to psyche me out," I said. "It didn't work. Those eyes aren't even Adeline's color."

"Boy, you ARE little miss tough stuff," he said, sitting down at the dining table. "That's good, I can use that when you're on my team." He beamed.

Ugh, this guy.

I have a better idea, let's go to the underworld.

With the gatekeeping gods dead, we can probably even get in without having to do something stupid like offing ourselves. We (probably) can't kill anyone who's already dead, and someone there might have some ideas about this mess.

So I couldn't kill him. Fine.

"I can talk this over with the gods themselves," I said, voice unshaken.

"It took your dad 2 years to get to the home of the gods from Vendet castle," said he. "Do you think you won't encounter more people to slaughter along the way?"

"I know a shortcut," I said, returning to the silverware drawer. "I — I —" I stammered and caught myself. I would not let my emotions get the better of me. "I deserve it."

"Death won't release you from Felus' curse," he said. "You'd have to break out of the underworld and then it's still a journey to the home of the gods. Face it, you really only have the two options I said. Might as well flip a coin."

"I'll find a way," I said.

"I'll be happy to watch you agonize over it and fail," he said.

I spent days there, trying to figure out any way around the issue. I tried Ouija boards, but nobody was there. I tried prayer, but nothing answered. I buried Adeline next to her father, weeping bitterly: "it's not fair" and "I'm sorry." And all the while, the elephant in the room watched me like a vulture in that chair at the dining table. ("Life's not fair," he told me, "death triply so.") Every day he made more blood soup for the hungry sink, though it didn't make it any more scary. More effective psychological warfare was the mounting stench of rotting flesh that got a little more rancid every hour. I was afraid to sleep, afraid to dream.

Eventually I had to give in on that last point. I dreamt of a life in Cordonia with Adeline, I dreamt I told her all the things I never did and she wrapped me up in her arms and told me she forgave me (even though in the dream there was nothing to forgive,) also I dreamt of a circus where everyone in the audience and all the performers were bears. Sir Nose made no appearance.

When I woke up (at 3 am, having simply passed out the previous afternoon,) Sir Nose had disappeared from the ranch entirely. I allowed myself to wonder if it had all been a horrible dream and searched the whole farm top-to-bottom, calling out for my Adeline. Before the hour was out I was disillusioned of the notion, especially by that ever-worse stench that followed me around all through the farm.

I sat on top of a sand dune to watch the sun rise. Wind blew through my hair, which was now long enough to be blown through. In 3 weeks, it was my birthday. They'd send out a search party for sure, by then. They'd find me, and I'd have to marry whoever my mom said, then I'd start killing again. I wondered whether I even had loved Adeline, or some illusion or impersonation designed entirely to make me suffer. I hadn't done anything, not a damn thing, to deserve this.

The sun broke over the horizon with an incongruous flash of beauty. As the daylight grew I saw... something at the bottom of the dune, uncovered by the wind. I scrambled down and dusted it off. It was a dead man, but he hadn't just passed out in the desert. His face was skinned off and his eyes were gouged out, his right forearm was cut off, and his torso had been cut open and emptied of organs like you would to prepare an animal. Had I done this too?

The next day, the man in the elephant mask returned. I sat down across the table from them. "Apologies," they said, "but I do have other parts of my plan to attend to sometimes. I meant what I said about waiting forever, though!"

"I figured it out," I said, smiling.

"Oh?"

"I didn't kill Adeline," I said. "I saw, when I was burying her — she was strangled, she had bruises on the neck. Those torso stab wounds, you went back to add them to the corpse after you said that's how I did it. She didn't have any blood on her dress. I don't know how corpses age in the desert, but I'm willing to bet she was dead before I even got here."

"The human mind really can convince itself of anything, can't it?"

"I'm not done. You're not even Sir Nose. I found his body out in the dunes. You've been turning him into soup and dumping him down the sink so there wouldn't be a body to find. You haven't even said any of the weird nonsense stuff about funk nobody understands but he's always saying."

"Ooh, clever girl! I guess it's time to stop lying then," he — she — it said. "It also means it's time to stop explaining things — Oh, I repeat myself. I hope you meant it when you said you had it figured out."

Without warning, the thing in Sir Nose's skin threw the whole table at me. I leapt to the side. Damn, I was actually really really hoping it'd help fill in the gaps for me.

"Queen will be a nice stepping stone on the way to god," it said instead. I went back for the carving knife. "Still won't work," it said.

It whacked me upside the head with a cast-iron frying pan and I went straight to the floor. Holy shit, did that ever hurt. At least if they were trying to kill me, that meant I was onto something, right?

"Don't worry," it leaned down and put its hand on my throat. "You won't even know you're me until someone reminds you." (Does that mean that she...?)

I grabbed its arm and twisted it off of me, then got back on my feet. I tried to stab them in the throat, but this time it passed through like it wasn't even there. I lost my balance and nearly fell on my face right through it. It laughed.

"I'll make it easy," it said, its form shimmering back into Adeline's. "If I kill you, your soul will be reunited with its mate." She — it rushed right at me, but I sidestepped it and it went right through the wall. In a couple seconds its arms went right back through, and pinned me to the wall by my neck with its... black gauntlet? I tried to pull the arm off of me, but I had no leverage. "And your father, too!" it said. Oh, it was the Nothing. Great to piece it together, but that didn't help me not suffocate.

I had to do something stupid, before there was nothing left to do. "I can help," I croaked, desperately. "I'll help you."

"Oh, I was just gonna take your life when you said that anyway," it said. "Queens can declare a state religion."

I still had the knife in my hand and my hands on the gauntlet on my neck. I was going to die. I laughed, barely, wheezing. It was just a short trip from the gauntlet to...

I stabbed myself in the neck and died. The last thing I experienced was a very angry Nothing, which must have meant I was REALLY doing something right.

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It had been almost 3 weeks since I had donned Malcolm's armor and started down the mountain, but despite the improved weather conditions, the troop count had dwindled down to a paltry 1,030. What went wrong?