Page 93 of Children of Fallen Gods

Every angle of Sammerin’s face went hard, as if this statement reviled him.

Someone is waiting for her,I thought.They’ll just never get her.

“It does not matter,” I said. “The Zorokovs would see it as an insult, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because they want—”

I stopped short.

Nura and Sammerin both looked back at me.

“What?” Nura said, at last. “You? That’s what you were going to say?”

I felt sick to my stomach. I wished I hadn’t even had the thought. Yet, the idea burrowed into my mind and wouldn’t let go.

It wouldn’t be perfect. It might not even be good. But how could I ignore any possible solution, when so many lives hung in the balance?

“Sammerin,” I said. “I have a question for you.”

And Sammerin nodded, his face pinched with a resigned dread that told me he already knew what I was about to ask.

* * *

I didn’t wantSammerin to do this.

I told him so, when I asked him if it was possible. Let us find someone else with a mastery of flesh to do it. Or let us find some other fresh body. Yes, the idea had come to me here, at Eslyn’s deathbed, but that didn’t mean that it had to be executed under these circumstances.

Sammerin had given me this pitying look, like the proposal was that of an innocent child. His gifts were incredibly rare — it would take weeks, potentially, to get someone else with his skills in Korvius. Eslyn was the right age, shape, size. The stars had aligned, he told me, flatly. We might as well take advantage.

I was grateful that the corpse had not yet begun to smell. It was one less thing to find horrifying as we hacked off Eslyn’s head at the throat. Ariadnea helped us do it, to my horror. When Sammerin and I tried to tell her that we didn’t need — didn’twant— her help with this, she merely gave us a flat, eyeless stare and said, “The Syrizen have given her body to this purpose. It’s my job to do it.”

It shouldn’t be, I would have said, but Ariadnea turned away before I could argue further. Still, I felt her presence acutely as we cut off Eslyn’s head, a process that took agonizingly longer than I would have expected it to. Then Sammerin took Eslyn’s decapitated head, and began to — there was no other way to describe it —sculptit.

I wondered if I would ever stop finding Sammerin’s abilities shocking. By now, I had watched him heal wounds and illnesses and broken bones more times than I could count. This, though, was something else completely. Sammerin placed his hands on either side of Eslyn’s face, and her flesh responded to him as if it were nothing but clay. He started with the bones, which produced terrible cracking and grinding noises that even made Ariadnea flinch. First the jaw, which he made longer and softer. Then the cheekbones — raised — and the eye sockets — further set apart. The nose, he made flatter and wider. And then, the muscle and fat in her face shifted, like thousands of ants were crawling beneath her skin, as he rearranged muscle.

Finally, he pulled out several small bottles that contained thin, greenish liquid.

“The coloring won’t be perfect,” he said. “That’s harder for me to change. But it will be good enough to pass.”

Sammerin brushed the liquid over parts of Eslyn’s face, leaving others untouched. And then he placed his hands on her again, closed his eyes, and slowly, the color began to sap from her skin, and chunks of her hair — leaving behind patches of white hair and grayish, colorless flesh.

The grayish, colorless flesh of a dead Fragmented Valtain.

The whole process took nearly two hours. When he was done, Sammerin gently set the head down on the table and looked at me. Then it. Then me.

“I think,” he said, “it is passable.”

It was better than passable. I was looking at my own corpse. Certainly, someone who had never seen me before with their own eyes would have no reason to question it.

“It’s…good,” I said, though giving it any compliment seemed… strange. Sammerin himself stared at it not with pride but disgust. I hoped that however Ariadnea “saw” the world spared her from how we had defiled her friend.

But her head tilted towards it. “The eyes,” she grunted. “You’ll have to do something about that.”

It was the only thing missing.

“I can,” I said, and reached out to Eslyn’s smooth, eyeless sockets. When I touched them, the flesh began to rot beneath my fingertips, flesh shriveling. When I pulled my hands away, the head was left with two empty black pits for eyes, rotted out in decay — as if “my” eyes had been pried out before death, and the remaining ruined flesh left for the maggots.

---