QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 3: Deluge]

I swear to whatever forsworn deities oversaw your creation, Pearson, you'd best have a plan.

They'd trekked a mile in the steady drizzle, two boars bearing a carcass to the nearest Inderigan outpost. Barbary still knew the warning signs, or maybe he could smell them on the landscape like the offal-pits they were. It wasn't difficult, finding them.

Explaining how it hadn't been difficult, that was harder. The sentries refused to negotiate with all of Barbary's animals, words only for the human that finally, begrudgingly, fronted. Naked. Shivering like his muscles didn't quite fit him right. The four of them had waited in the rain until orders came through from the main temple. Barbary had refused trousers, and the soldiers promised they'd make a shambling mine of Robin if he grew so much as one extraneous hair. He'd settled for a shirt, draping it over his shoulders and tying the sleeves loosely back.

They'd let them come in from the rain, after an age. More correspondence from headquarters. More waiting. They took Robin to Triage, and Barbary fought them tooth and talon and several other appendages until he got assurance that it wasn't a euphemism. Some final messenger-ghoul must've arrived, because they were moving again, hustled by sombre-visaged Shamblers into a fleshcart which scuttled through the warzone on three dozen simian legs. Barbary refused to ride with the guards, sulking up on the roof as a flock of crows, hunched and huddled against the rain.

Robin was tended to by bone-fingered creatures. They creaked as they sewed, making discontent little groans whenever the cart trundled too quickly over a rock. Other than a skirmish a hill or so away (according to Barbary, anyway) between Raxis' forces and another walking catastrophe of Visindi's, the trip was peaceful. Unsettlingly so. Then the great iron teeth of Inderigo's cogs and machinations rose from the horizon to greet them, and swallowed them up. Barbary didn't know what form suited a place like this, other than something impractical like maggots. He settled instead for seventeen raccoons, forming a bandit phalanx around the meat-doll carrying the lifeless Robin like its corpse bride. A wicked-clawed second and third composed their escort, one clutching the necrologist's pack and coat.

Robin's eyes flicked open, twitched slowly about.

"These shamblers have no ears," muttered Barbary, not one of his thirty-four eyes looking straight at her. "You are a presumed Visindian spy, worthy of interrogation by High Priestess Scinda herself. The assumption is I brought you as tribute, a token of goodwill after I turned my back so long ago on god and country."

The woman's chest rose with excruiciating slowness. Barbary shot her a warning glare. Just one.

"They think you dead, your soul tethered with some stolen technology reserved for Inderigo's clergy. My curiosity on such matters was sated long ago. My only wish now is to crush Visindi's cult."

There was steel in the raccoon's voice, a cold deadliness that was so very human in origin.

"You promised to help me. Shirk that now and you'll be another showered spark in Inderigo's furnace. The High Priestess will see to it."

Robin didn't catch much of that. They were walking into something with a spectral ambience that didn't hum so much as wail. A deterrent to keep your soul-butchery clean, she supposed, and a bad case of the pseudo-corporeal jitters what threatened to dislodge her from her physical tether only reinforced the fact.

This was new territory. The best seat in the house in a decent-sized magic circle, if we were strictly off the record, not so much. Robin kept her eyes shut as they lowered her into position, resisting the urge to sit up and get a proper look at proceedings. Would they use the same syntax and arcane vocabulary her contemporaries used? I mean, of course not, this whole gods business implies a whole bunch of different underlying laws to this universe but what if-

"Rise, accused."

Robin found that a perfectly reasonable request, blinked a bit, and struggled into a seated position, working her shoulders. Her stomach region still felt kind of tender, but whatever magic these Inderigan types employed appeared to be (with a quiet sort of understated diligence) stitching her up from the inside out. Nice touch. Robin would've called it life magic or healing magic and a subsequent shade out of her area of expertise, but it wasn't like anyone else in the room cared.

"Hi," said Robin, experimentally. "Am I ok like this, or-"

"Do not speak unless addressed," rasped a distinctly automated kind of voice, devoid of personality or a clear source. Robin looked around anyway, trying to pinpoint it, but everything beyond the circle was a nondescript blur; a nonreality. Moving of her own accord was still difficult; she tweaked and tugged her eyes to the floor and absorbed what she could before they dilated back out of focus.

Fuck. Conditional relife within- what is this? A separate reality? Maybe? I guess I don't blame them, but shit. Shit shit fuck-

"Doctor Robin Peaugh fuck-" Lost in thought, Robin caught her mouth responding to a command for a name. She clamped down hard on her tongue, and assorted nerve receptors fired to the tune of pain and blood. She glared straight ahead, heedless of her audience's dumbstruck expression. Corpses, even haunted ones, didn't pull stunts like this under interrogation.

"I'm a non-combatant. I enter no plea for any accusations. And, I'm not answering to anything until I've got a lawyer."

A pause. "You are in no position to negotiate."

"Actually, considering I could tell you what you want to hear, or tell you what's actually happening, I'm sure there's-"

"No. I mean. You should not be capable of negotiating. Barbary." There was a tangible edge to the voice at that point; enough for Robin to get a sense of where in that nondescriptness beyond the circle. Look for the anger. Your anchor. There. Everything came into focus all at once, several lines in the magic circle snapped and crackled a warning as Robin took an unplanned step-

An emptiness stared back. A gap-in-space. A familiar face. A paper-thin facade of a familiar face, stretched across what adopted all the adjectives of, but still couldn't possibly be, a black hole. Robin's spectre or soul or whatever perched on the event horizon. She wasn't quite torn between her familiar vessel and this one, but Robin sensed a casual lean in either direction might warrant such a violent term for the feeling.

Someone - Scinda - snarled a warning. Robin took another step outside of everything, succumbing to the pull.

Florica jolted her back into vitality like that first cup of post-bender coffee, murky and bitter and hers and perfection. She sighed, and felt it catch in her throat as her fingernails (a bit too long, a bit too uneven) dug into her palms. She felt the thrum of machinery through the soles of her feet, an odd contrast to feeling it through her very self, and saw the body.

"Right," said Robin. Priorities. She looked next to the figures in the corners of the room, two Frankenstinean patchwork dolls stuffed with muscle and ensconced in circles of their own. To her left (Florica's left, Robin mentally corrected herself) was an anaconda. It was tensed in a way a herpetologist might expect from a smaller, more venomous snake, and its tail twitched like it had been expecting a rattle on the end of it.

"Barbary, it's me." She gestured to the floor. "Can you read any of this? I've got a plan, but I don't want all this screwing it up."

The snake hissed, shifted through a couple of intermediary forms, and settled on a peregrine falcon or fourteen. "You can read this?"

"A word here, familiar syntax there. I've read denser manuscripts, but I don't think my life ever counted on parsing a Masters paper. That's-" she pointed "-a conditional there, right?"

"A secondary conditional, yes."

"Fuck. Where's the original conditional, then?"

The falcons not actively reading shrieked in frustration. "Pearson, you said you had a plan!"

Robin was unmoved, gesturing impatiently toward the tidily-arranged rows of implements sitting on a desk. "Pen. Chalk. Whatever this priestess used to edit the circle's ruleset. Did you bring my equipment with me?"

Barbary sulked, to the best of his multiple-bodied ability. One of the falcons grabbed a stick of something like black chalk in an awkward talon, and dropped it in her hands. "It's elsewhere in this temple."

"Find it." Robin brooked no discussion, her attention focussed entirely on the circle. It took her a good three minutes before she dared mark the script with her own addition; she (Florica) sighed with visible relief when her first cautious, meticulously cross-referenced line didn't bring the whole thing crashing down or combusting. She looked to the body, and after a tense moment it took a shuddering breath. Robin (Florica) just about sagged with relief then and there.

"Cool. Ok. Barbary, trust me on this. I can get you your deicide, but I want my coat and my suitcase back. I also want to have a chat with this girl. Not the priestess-" Robin clarified, catching the suspicion "-I can't even tell where she is. It's this girl she was haunting, the one I'm talking through right now."

Barbary's glare was full of reproach, an expression falcons wore well. "You never explained your purpose here. Does this husk of Scinda's have something to do with you?"

Robin just smiled, or pulled the corners of Florica's mouth up into something more or less the same. "I'll explain later. Promise." Barbary still looked sceptical, but he disintegrated into a sea of something ectoparasitic and surged for the door, not even bothering to open it.

The necrologist-in-a-ghost-magnet took a few steadying breaths, then lay down and carefully arranged Florica's robes about her until they were comfortable.

Then, she screamed at the top of her lungs.

---

Exterior. A mountain slope. Rain, rain, rain. Watcher in the Woods, patron of the Hyleoroi, crownless king of predators, stands in the double-gloom of the rain and the Between.

Fade to faded, muddied gold.

If you've got guns, Son
well
now's the time for sticking

Kedemonas flinched. "You sound ill, Zoo."

A tactful choice of words, my son
One considers 'infected', but that incriminates a culprit that does not exist
No, you're afraid (my son) this is my necrosis

"I'm afraid?"

Indeed
You acknowledge no death but the broken neck, the snakebite, the finishing blow
A dying like mine scares you, as rightly it should
For my lack of fear or dread or apprehension is just that, an absence
An absence you godlings are wont to fill flood with passion
Some toxic mockery in me of those emotions deems your passive demeanour unseemly

Zoo sighed. The mental note had a wet gurgle to it, to which Kedemonas flicked his ears and barked a callous laugh.

"This is unlike you, Zoo. You, who spent all existence mocking me, scoffing at the other gods, to fret for our continued existence! Is it the river in your lungs that changed your tune?"

Back to question every effort, back to challenge your command?
The better to form a sovereign nation, snickered the old god.
No, Kedemonas, every beastly form is a macrocosm of the perfection of the now
And the price of existence in the now forever
Is to consign the forevers before and after to the darkness of ignorance

I am such a beast
Sprinting on the thinnest slice of now between an endlesss unknown before me and after me
And just like me, that unknown now has a tongue and jaws for her own
And
You know my son the role of prey in this gruesome world of ours

The gold settled about Kedemonas' shoulders like a cloak, or the desperate grounding grasp of a begging man. Kedemonas pulled it about himself, staring down at the flames and the rain and the death. "We are bested."

I am bested, remonstrated Zoo.
And it is to such fatalistic fancies that you are my son
My investment, my pocket of gold
will never be enough to saay I do
Nooooo
No
I offer you
Or more accurately
Your passion, whatever will you have to ensure your continued existence
My domain and power, freely given, to do as you please
To storm Malhaven and seize the throne
End this war or tame the river
But to know full well that she will not stop at this valley
She will not stop at all the beasts, all the worshippers, all the mortal things and their mortal songs
And that your choice is now to fight or consign the world to silence

Zoo bowed his head, materialising at Kedemonas' feet as all the beasts to which the two had given names, for Kedemonas to impart as a gift at the birthplace of man. The old god shivered, shedding the black like a layer of ice or a raft of fleas. He stood radiant, the primal incarnation of life itself, and the Lord of the Hunt knelt before him.

I will all this to you, Kedemonas
My wilful child
My prodigal progeny

"My beloved father," growled Kedemonas, and he reached forward and ripped out the Millionbeast's throat.

---

Hey. Hello. Fl... Fr... Grave girl. Sorry, I'm bad with names.

Florica said nothing, instead sitting with priestly serenity in the ribcage of something very big and very defiant of the limits of its original physiology.

I'm Dr. Pearson. Robin, if you like. We're both contestants in that thing, with those other things. Well, other ladies, I guess. With that guy. You know who I'm talking about, right?

If Florica did, she gave no indication. Robin had been keeping as much of a spectral distance as she dared, but this Florica girl was alerting the necrologist to the fact ghosts were frigging everywhere in a warzone. That, or she just naturally attracted marauding souls in a five-mile radius, and a spirit more accustomed to a still-breathing body had the clout to keep the air ahead of her clear. The necrologist bit back the temptation to sigh with Florica's ribcage, wishing she could just entrust the whole facade to the girl and get her own body back. It was in a casket the next corpse ride over, for fuck's sake.

Look, I can understand if you're scared shitless right now, frankly, and I know my riding shotgun's only a liiiittle bit less ideal than some other ghost, but I want to help. I mean, I'd help right now, but I also promised I'd help this other guy, hence the 'leading all Inderigo's forces in a decisive strike against Visindi' plan. Thing.

If it bothers you? Sing out. I promise I won't take this charade far enough to put you in danger, but maybe you'd rather not do this at all. I don't know.

Still nothing.

Listen, I'm not like the other ghosts. Well, I'm not even a ghost. Technically. I guess. Anyway. I'll figure out a way to fix you. Stop the ghosts. Let you live your own life again. Okay?

Robin wondered if the girl just wanted some peace and quiet in her head. She conceded that being jostled and cajoled, albeit only to the ends of just talking, was still much the same of what she must've dealt with. Other people's wishes. Desires of the dead. Robin borrowed a guilty glance over Florica's shoulder, appraising the full force of the Inderigan army marching behind them. Her officers had reported something that sounded like Barbary forcibly reclaiming her gear, in that chaos that followed her proclamation, but she'd dismissed it. The multifarious beast himself still hadn't shown his face, though Robin suspected he wasn't far off.

Sorry. Just - let me do this one thing. Then I can to you I prove I'm different.

The entire Inderigan army, storming Visindi's temple. It was tactical stupidity.

It was the divine decree of Inderigo himself, to teach those fools their folly at affronting their oldest ally. So the High Priestess had spoken.