SSCS 04: Installment 19 of 34
The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
This is Installment 19 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
(And the character list is here.)
Previously…
Long-fingered hands, now dark and no longer sprinkled with starlight, reached from long-jointed arms upward much further and faster than Ki would have guessed. They wrapped around the man’s wrists, yanking him back down to his knees, while long, dark tentacles reached for his face, calling with a knife sound in Ki’s mind.
Without thinking Ki reached forward themself to intercept the binding thread.
Just as they felt it wrap like fire around their wrist, burrowing into flesh and more than flesh, the bland man cried out and fell back, his arms now ending in stumps and the dead Trawerler-puppet now lunging away, diving for the deep, black river.
…The Heart of the Gull Queen’s Huntress
Installment 19: 23.0303
***
Once, long and long ago, a goddess of death walked the earth, and her name was El. Her strides across the plains of war were the strides of a giant, long and swift and implacable, and those she felled with her own blades rose up again in her wake and followed her and only her. Her touch, through plague ward and famine fields, was the touch of purest, deepest ice, freezing any soul that stood before her to crystalline stillness, granting eternity if only her eyes were the only thing such soul would see forevermore.
She walked the earth, and the hundreds dead walked behind her, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands. She wandered, and carried the dead of her making always with her, the bow-wave to her sea.
Once, she rode down a great gorge, with her dead like thunder behind her, while a living army swept forward to meet her, a fierce Queen at their head, and fought to the last to give their countrymen time to flee oversea. El cleaved the Queen’s head from her shoulders at last, but her belly was great, and the life within did not so much as flicker. And so El took the child out, and named her Lot, suckled her and raised her to walk beside her.
Once, there was a desert child of the mountains who followed, living, amongst her wake of corpses for a full turning of the stars, and then another, and did not die. And so at last El called him to eat at her fire and to learn the shape of music from her hands, on flutes carved from bone and bound with sinew.
And once, she found herself stopped at a cross-roads by a half-blind beggar-priest and their companion, who laid out a board and stones, and bade her choose the first move. While she contemplated what she would do with them, the priest beckoned one of her longest dead come closer, reached up a hand to trace the line of her compulsions from its missing belly to its sternum to its missing eyes, then quietly snapped it free.
***
Wrapping ‘round Ki’s wrist, the binding thread quickly burrowed deep, sinking between the webbing of their fingers, knotting into the small bones of their wrist, singing a knife song straight to that hollow center of themselves where their breath pulled in and out.
Ki let it. Sinking down to sit on the fog-slick stone of the jetty, they breathed in and out, feeling how the thread tugged, taut and silver fire, between the heel of their hand and all the fine web of every inch of their lungs. With their other hand, tip of their longest finger, the edge of their nail, barely brushing cloth and skin, they traced the path of it, the full, long length of it, until they felt its boundaries clearly mapped.
Then they reached down, carefully, firmly, and pulled it, burning, from the depths of their flesh and soul. And cast it away into the river’s night, already turning to ash before it hit the water.
“Well.” San was crouched beside them, arms wrapped around the bland man who no longer had any hands, holding him in order to keep him from toppling over in his shock and pain. “That certainly was a trap, wasn’t it? Now.” He looked at the man who, shaking but aware, looked back at him. “Where shall we carry your books for you?”