Page 94 of Odder Still
Raghnaid’s gaze moves over Tavish, over the barricade, and lands on me. Her eyes flash.
Not-Lilias streaks toward me. I barely stand in time for her to swing at my face with unnatural speed and a snarl that’s bestial even for her. Fire rushes through my limbs. I thrust my own desires onto her, overwhelming Raghnaid’s for an instant. My little remaining strength falters. Darkness swarms close, tunneling my vision. I swear I’m tearing back in two, but the halves I once was no longer have a neat seam, and each popped stitch takes part of myself with it.
Not-Lilias’s full fist hits me, coating my world in a new set of sparks, but I dodge her next blow, attempting and failing to slip around her back, toward Raghnaid. Tavish struggles to his feet in front of her, dripping and pale. The control in each motion, the poise and determination despite his clear confusion, fills me with affection.
Raghnaid steps up to him, her mutants snarling behind her. Her voice seems to pierce a hole in their violent howls, a black diamond now, reverberating on a new level. “Stand aside, Son. I’ve no wish to kill you.”
Tavish’s fingers curl into fists. He does not move.
As I duck Not-Lilias’s next assault, my heart pounds for him, each beat screaming no.No, I just saved you. No, you’re finally mine. No, I can’t lose you now.But beneath that rhythm roars a pride so strong it makes my chest ache. This is my Tavish, beautiful and brave and good. I would not ask him to be anyone else.
I tighten my hold on his cane and crack my elbow into Lilias’s jaw. She barely stumbles, her threads repairing what little damage I did. Her knee slams into my side.
“These people have been wounded by us long enough.” Tavish’s words come out strong and righteous. “I won’t let you—”
Raghnaid lifts an aurora-gashed hand and knocks him to the ground. I cry out as he falls. She balls her sopping skirt in one hand and steps over him.
Her mutants burst forward. Sea life slams into the square’s windows as the land beasts leap for the necks of intoxicated rebels.
I try to slip around Not-Lilias once more, but she grabs me, one hand around my neck and the other at my arm, nails digging in like claws. Through the crashing bodies and flying blood, I see Tavish rise again. He turns toward his mother’s back, something in his gait, in his shoulders, in the tip of his chin. Something strong.
I roll the cane across the main square. As it clatters beneath the feet of the charging mutants, I tug at them, letting my will redirect theirs just enough to lift paws and tails, letting the cane’s course stay true. It comes to rest against Tavish’s boot.
He picks it up and stands. Its blade gleams as he unsheathes it. His grip tightens. He steps forward, once, twice, tracking a sound I can’t hear above the howls of the mutants. He finds his mother’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers. Face contorted, she swings back toward him.
He plunges the sword cane into her chest.
Raghnaid’s aurora fibers twist to stop it, but the being they belong to fights back. It finds the rhythm of threads with my own, its hand with mine in the reality we both once came from, and with the last of my energy, I pour into it the way its kin poured into me. Be enough, please, please be enough.
Through the network of threads that weave from this world to the other, I feel the Trench auroras reaching too. They sing in a soundless string of vibrations, their language cascading through me like a kind of energy. Together, we give Tavish’s blade space to rend. To end this.
Tavish must feel the lessened resistance, because his lips curl, not in joy or despair, but resolution. He leans forward, his mouth at her ear as she chokes. “I have no wish to kill you, either, Mother. I did this the right way. I gave you the choice, and you couldn’t accept that.” He pushes the blade farther, shoving until the tip pokes out from Raghnaid’s back. He twists it. “I only said it had to end. You were the one who chose how.”
Her mouth opens, but no words come out, no denial or apology, only a slim line of blood slipping down the corner of her lips. Tavish pulls out the blade, and that same scarlet drips along its hilt, covering his freckled hands. His mother stumbles. She reaches out, fingers extended as though to brush away Tavish’s wet bangs or to smother him with an ashen palm. But as her hand creeps toward Tavish’s stiff jaw, the skin of it sloughs off in a wave of ash. The disintegration spreads, chipping away at her, through flesh and bone and organ. As her face peels up, her eyes seem to widen.
Then, she’s gone. Her empty dress collapses, gusting the last of her ashes around Tavish. After a moment, they, too, vanish.
Raghnaid’s anger deserts the ignation mutants, replaced by twitches and confusion as they release their prey and cease their attacks. Slowly, Not-Lilias lets me go. Her red-gashed eye seems to bore through me, as if trying to remember the person she was. Or to break free.
I could kill her now. Even weaponless, it would be easy. I could tell her to grab the eruptstone-tipped knife from the mutated Not-Blue waddling among the intoxicated soldiers and shove it into the space between her spine and skull.
But even after everything she’s done to me, I don’t want to kill her. I don’t want to kill her like this, with this otherness infecting her mind, making her no longer her. And I don’t want to kill her as herself either. Even if I don’t care abouther, I still care. Perhaps Lilias deserves to die, but what becomes of her here will affect more than just herself. It will be the first act of murder in a reborn city, the death of a young boy’s mother, a person executed not to protect anyone, but to enact justice. After all I’ve done, justice lies in someone else’s hands.
I lift my palm to her cheek. My aurora’s fishnetting gleams with a rainbow of colors, dazzling in the bright upper-city light. “She did not ask for you,” I whisper. “It’s time to let her go.”
I reach the aurora half of my consciousness, out to the strands of the thing inside Lilias, strumming them gently. They recoil, the impression I get from them as bestial and chaotic as their physical manifestations, but their presence doesn’t let go. The further I push, the more I feel it: the mix of their alarm and confinement. A beast, yes, but a beast with its legs trapped in tar.
“Poor things, you don’t want to be here, either, do you?”
It shivers. I feel like a veil draped over a corpse, but I have to fix this atrocity all the same. With whatever I have left.
Like I had with the strands invading Tavish, I take hold of those inside Lilias and pull. My vision wavers. I tell myself this is the last thing I’m needed for right now. This is the end of the war. But every moment I’ve thought that so far, something worse has come. Every time I hit the bottom, I’ve been forced to dig deeper. And this time I have nothing left. I sway.
The song of the Trench auroras rises around me, lifting me up, like a cloud, a breeze, a loving embrace. They twist their energy into mine, and together, we pull. With their boundless power rushing through me, I extend my reach to the other mutants, tugging at a hundred beings like the one within Lilias. Their bestial presences release, and the colorful gashes they caused close over. The ignation flows out, sweeping from them through wounds and mouths and eyes. It drips from Lilias’s nose, and tears of it roll down her cheek.
As the last of the chaotic threads slip back to the place from where they’d come, a final burst of power from the Trench auroras flings me with them. I feel more than see my consciousness stretching out across a network of life as though it’s a tapestry I can weave myself into.
I sense the way the auroras’ threads are spread across the natural world, from Mara to the Murk to Alkelu and beyond, but in the place of their origin where I first grasped hands with them, they huddle together, locked tightly in one place. A dying place. Sickness creeps in, siphoning off the auroras’ energy little by little. Some are more infected than others, but none are safe.
