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Description

Next Chapter: War Beneath the Tonsil

Previous Chapter: Leviathan Vorax, Chariot of Eridanus

Beginning Chapter: A saint's appetite


I see her reflection in the waves. I see her teeth in the anchor and throat beneath the water. The whales are her children. We know this from the shape of the skull and the color of the oil. The primordial ones leave their signatures in the strangest of places. Sometimes in the trachea, the kidneys, the liver, or the omentum. Persephone is unique because she scratches the eye sockets and vomits in the oil. That’s why the liquid is glossy and the barrels burn.

PERSEPHONE, SHEPHERD OF THE WICKED EIGHT

Several hours passed before the winds finally died down, leaving behind only the distant rumble of thunder. Persephone lowered her head to the ground, nestling an ear in the sands.
    There was a heartbeat, a drum pounding, a slow rhythmic thud. Her mother’s heart was steady, and the battle was long over. Did she feel the kick in her side this time? Icarus and Xerxes never pulled punches. Persephone knew best. After all, she rode the sands close to her mother’s endothelial lining; puffy, red, and swollen, Persephone could feel the heat as her brood dove into the river of pus.
    Today, there were violent currents in the milky mass, currents the likes of which she had never felt before. The soup pulled her scales and dug into her skull, the fluid in her inner ear bouncing like marbles in a jar. The world spun around, and she heaved as thick waves battered her ribs.
    “Locking the ooclid chamber,” Id five whispered. “I will assume control.”
    Persephone then heard a clicking noise as the endolymphatic sac hardened and tiny calcified disks spun, forcing the fluid of her inner ear to settle at the bottom. Soon, the world steadied itself, her hands quit shaking, and her stomach grew calm.
    Nearest the gills along her neck, between the rope-like flesh across her waist, and below the grooves in her tail were a thousand tiny projections with web-like fans and pointy sharp fingers. They poked through her membrane under pressure and beat in unison, stirring the already violent waters. There was an increase in pressure now, a stiffening of the fingers as her blood vessels constricted and eyes dilated.
    Persephone shot through the river of pus like a strung needle through milk, the waves flowing with her. Left, right, left, right, she knew every step, every flourished wrist, and tapped foot; this was a song and dance that her fifth Id knew well. Persephone was right to bury Navigator’s skull so close to her inner ear.
    “Rotating the scaphoid, tapping the phalanges. I will assume control,” Id six said, grip tightening on a bundle of luminescent thread.
    Fortitude had such a firm grasp with locking thumbs. She was the muscle, the heavy hand, the one who drove the brood forward.
    Crack!
    Fortitude swung the glowing weave, and eel-like serpents leaped out of the thick rolling waters. They clapped their fins, matching Persephone’s rhythm and speed. She was right to bury Fortitude’s skull so close to the muscle fibers in her neck.
    “The left flank is moving too slow. A defect in the fins, I should think,” said her third Id from behind her ear.
    Ingenuity was correct. There was a skip in their beat, a limp in their heel. Looking close, Persephone could see a slight indent in the dorsal fins of the left flank, causing the fluid to arc and sputter. The cut wasn’t clean, and so the current pushed them off course. The eels had hatched too soon, not enough time in the kiln.
    Persephone had picked up a trick or two from Xerxes and his obsession with antennae. Roll the dough and flatten the hide, pinch the center and mold the corners. There was no need for a stalk; that made things easier. These appendages were flat like wings but with a folded shape. They were not meant to catch the wind but the rain. No other engineer would dominate the sea beneath the sands like her. That’s why she buried the skull of Ingenuity close to her optic nerve. No other part of her consciousness had such an eye for detail.
    Her third Id worked well with her sixth. Ingenuity and Fortitude shaped scales out of mud, snouts from pudding, and claws from clay. That space just below the diaphragm, that’s where the stomach was supposed to go. She tossed the tissue, molding a sleeve instead with retracting spikes—a nasty surprise for anyone who bit too deep. Two days in the kiln and not a moment longer. The right flank finished first, and the pod was perfect, but at the cost of the left. Persephone would have to remember to stagger the numbers next time.
    There was a shift in the currents, an updraft that pushed her brood closer to the surface. Up there, the river was less violent and pooled, forming stagnant shallow ponds. This was where the wound drained, the source of her mother’s ulcer. Persephone had to see, had to count the bodies for herself. Her elder brothers were the only ones capable of causing such turbulent waters. Who survived? Who died?
    Only one way to find out.
    Persephone left her brood, tiny fins slipping back under the membrane and replaced with digits as stiff as gravel; rough hands made sand travel easier. She cut through the soft ceiling, pushing past the dense lower layers and into the granules of the epithelial lining. Soon, she could make out a pale blue light piercing through the darkness. Bursting through the topsoil, Persephone landed on her feet, sand denser under pressure and able to support her weight.
    She took a deep breath, gills closing shut and lungs curling open like flowers in bloom. Her eyes squinted in the blue light that blanketed the Overworld. The tonsil was so close to the ground now she could touch it.
    “Just one taste,” said her second Id, teeth grinding together and chewing on the edges of her tongue.
    Persephone could feel it. The nectar was so close the taste was at the tip of her tongue. Sweet, savory, and sour. Oh, what she wouldn’t give for another bite.
    Drip, drip.
    Saliva pooled in her mouth, dripping over the sides like a swelling dam. There was an itch in her belly that couldn’t be scratched, a gnawing sensation causing her tongue to sweat and fingers to twitch. For a moment, she could feel the golden nectar burning the roof of her mouth and scoring her throat. The pain was momentary, a fleeting distraction from the sensations that followed. There was warmth, a summer breeze that spread from her belly to her fingers; that was the start of the slope, the tip of the iceberg. She plummeted over the edge now, stomach leaping into her throat as the smooth muscle convulsed. Then came a popping noise, her taste buds splitting open and tendrils rolling out to catch the last droplets.
    It was hard to forget the first time she tasted the Pallid Throne, the memory so vivid she caught herself ripping out her teeth to lick the roots. That’s why she buried the skull of Gluttony and Lust as far from her belly as possible. But no matter how often she tried or how many vibriatus she inhabited, her second Id could not be separated from her—a vicious tumor swelling at the edge of her neck.
    “Look away, you drooling slob,” so said her fourth Id, a flash of pain across her right cheek, claws scraping just over the nerve.
    Ah, there was the whip that cracked when she strayed from the path, that undaunted conscience that screamed for attention. Temperance was the one who said to let go when she buried her teeth in the neck of Numina. Temperance was the one who scolded her for drinking dew off the pupils of Morn. Temperance was the one who shook her awake when in her mother’s embrace; golden hair looped through her soul’s pores, sliding across the surface and saying, “Never let me go.”
    She was right to bury Temperance’s skull so close to Gluttony. The two of them were a balanced harp string.
    “Just one bite,” Gluttony said.
    “Don’t speak with your mouth full!” Temperance spat, slapping the chattering skull.
    A balanced harp string indeed.
    Persephone shook herself, turning away from the blue light of the tonsil. There was a dark silhouette, something she once thought to be a mountain, but mountains didn’t have teeth, mountains didn’t have claws.
    “This is the old rat’s doing,” Wisdom said, scratching her chin.
    Wisdom was right. There was something in the curvature of this creature’s spine, a series of joints nestled close to the vertebrae, allowing such freedom of movement for a creature that should have none. Next was the size, a cavernous beast sinking beneath now brittle sands. Even the plains of Kath’le Kal couldn’t contain its weight, but the dunes weren’t deep enough. Half-submerged, its head still blanketed the horizon.
    “It looks so clumsy, so lazy and dull,” Ingenuity said.
    Even Ingenuity missed the genius beneath clumsy lumps of flesh and a crooked collar bone. Persephone had to look deeper to see the little digits that hummed under every hair, the ordered weave of bundled muscle fibers in the legs, and the looped chambers of a sixteen-valve heart. The incubation time was perfect, a golden-brown crispy exterior with a smooth center. The skin was harder than stone, but Icarus hadn’t cooked it all the way through. The thoracic cavity was pink in the center, allowing for flexibility beneath plate mail. How she would’ve loved to taste the kiln that made this beast.
    Yet, it wasn’t the shape of the heart, the feel of that calcified beak, or the curvature of its spine that tipped off the rat king’s design. It was a stomach. There, in a gaping hole where Xerxes’s black bolts tore through, she found a lump of tissue with eight chambers. Tissue that sweat acid eating through her mother’s endothelial lining. This creature had been a raging bull, a nucleus of chaos that even Persephone couldn’t control.
    After a thousand years, she and her elder brother Xerxes were still playing catch up.
    “Look at the bodies,” Wisdom said. “Now is the time to strike.”
    Indeed, before the juggernaut was a veritable sea of corpses. Blackened leather wings, broken nails, and split hides. The sands, too, were scarred with glass, evidence of Xerxes tempest. He won the last war using that little trick. Persephone herself marveled at the designs of delicate antennae unleashing such devastation in large numbers. Yet, if he thought to win again using the same tactic…
    “Tsk, tsk. Shame on you, brother,” Persephone whispered.
    “He still hides in our mother’s soft palate,” Wisdom said.
    “Good of you to remember.”
    That’s why she buried Wisdom so close to her frontal lobe. That way, she could stimulate the hypothalamus, trigger the amygdala, and connect the left and right lobes. Appetite, fear, and fine motor function were all essential attributes in the heat of battle, especially for an engineer.
    The little digits along her tail rotated as she dove beneath the sands once more. Persephone would drive the eels forward, leaving behind the turbulent river caused by Icarus’s abomination. Instead, a smaller stream trickled further south—a babbling brook of stringy pus left behind by broken wings that fell from the ceiling above.
    Drip, drip.
    “I believe,” came a voice, a mewling squeak that scratched Persephone’s ear.
    Her first Id squirmed at her belly, lifting her chin to be heard once more. Faith, what use had she of such nonsense? Was it Faith that pushed Icarus’s hoard into the darkness? Was it Faith that drove the crown of the Pallid duchy into her skull? Was it Faith that rejected her mother’s embrace and gave her a name of her own? No, the truth wasn’t so soft, wasn’t so thin and weak. Persephone was right to bury Faith’s skull as far from her ears as possible.
    “I believe this time, we will win,” Faith said.
    Persephone couldn’t help but smile, maw splitting wide and calcified chunks raining down from her cheeks.
    “For once, we agree.”
    She felt a stabbing pain in her side, a swollen, rotting memory of the black bolt she took to her heart years prior. This time, she would return the favor.
    Revenge was a dish best served cold.

Description

Next Chapter: War Beneath the Tonsil

Previous Chapter: Leviathan Vorax, Chariot of Eridanus

Beginning Chapter: A saint's appetite


I see her reflection in the waves. I see her teeth in the anchor and throat beneath the water. The whales are her children. We know this from the shape of the skull and the color of the oil. The primordial ones leave their signatures in the strangest of places. Sometimes in the trachea, the kidneys, the liver, or the omentum. Persephone is unique because she scratches the eye sockets and vomits in the oil. That’s why the liquid is glossy and the barrels burn.

PERSEPHONE, SHEPHERD OF THE WICKED EIGHT

Several hours passed before the winds finally died down, leaving behind only the distant rumble of thunder. Persephone lowered her head to the ground, nestling an ear in the sands.
    There was a heartbeat, a drum pounding, a slow rhythmic thud. Her mother’s heart was steady, and the battle was long over. Did she feel the kick in her side this time? Icarus and Xerxes never pulled punches. Persephone knew best. After all, she rode the sands close to her mother’s endothelial lining; puffy, red, and swollen, Persephone could feel the heat as her brood dove into the river of pus.
    Today, there were violent currents in the milky mass, currents the likes of which she had never felt before. The soup pulled her scales and dug into her skull, the fluid in her inner ear bouncing like marbles in a jar. The world spun around, and she heaved as thick waves battered her ribs.
    “Locking the ooclid chamber,” Id five whispered. “I will assume control.”
    Persephone then heard a clicking noise as the endolymphatic sac hardened and tiny calcified disks spun, forcing the fluid of her inner ear to settle at the bottom. Soon, the world steadied itself, her hands quit shaking, and her stomach grew calm.
    Nearest the gills along her neck, between the rope-like flesh across her waist, and below the grooves in her tail were a thousand tiny projections with web-like fans and pointy sharp fingers. They poked through her membrane under pressure and beat in unison, stirring the already violent waters. There was an increase in pressure now, a stiffening of the fingers as her blood vessels constricted and eyes dilated.
    Persephone shot through the river of pus like a strung needle through milk, the waves flowing with her. Left, right, left, right, she knew every step, every flourished wrist, and tapped foot; this was a song and dance that her fifth Id knew well. Persephone was right to bury Navigator’s skull so close to her inner ear.
    “Rotating the scaphoid, tapping the phalanges. I will assume control,” Id six said, grip tightening on a bundle of luminescent thread.
    Fortitude had such a firm grasp with locking thumbs. She was the muscle, the heavy hand, the one who drove the brood forward.
    Crack!
    Fortitude swung the glowing weave, and eel-like serpents leaped out of the thick rolling waters. They clapped their fins, matching Persephone’s rhythm and speed. She was right to bury Fortitude’s skull so close to the muscle fibers in her neck.
    “The left flank is moving too slow. A defect in the fins, I should think,” said her third Id from behind her ear.
    Ingenuity was correct. There was a skip in their beat, a limp in their heel. Looking close, Persephone could see a slight indent in the dorsal fins of the left flank, causing the fluid to arc and sputter. The cut wasn’t clean, and so the current pushed them off course. The eels had hatched too soon, not enough time in the kiln.
    Persephone had picked up a trick or two from Xerxes and his obsession with antennae. Roll the dough and flatten the hide, pinch the center and mold the corners. There was no need for a stalk; that made things easier. These appendages were flat like wings but with a folded shape. They were not meant to catch the wind but the rain. No other engineer would dominate the sea beneath the sands like her. That’s why she buried the skull of Ingenuity close to her optic nerve. No other part of her consciousness had such an eye for detail.
    Her third Id worked well with her sixth. Ingenuity and Fortitude shaped scales out of mud, snouts from pudding, and claws from clay. That space just below the diaphragm, that’s where the stomach was supposed to go. She tossed the tissue, molding a sleeve instead with retracting spikes—a nasty surprise for anyone who bit too deep. Two days in the kiln and not a moment longer. The right flank finished first, and the pod was perfect, but at the cost of the left. Persephone would have to remember to stagger the numbers next time.
    There was a shift in the currents, an updraft that pushed her brood closer to the surface. Up there, the river was less violent and pooled, forming stagnant shallow ponds. This was where the wound drained, the source of her mother’s ulcer. Persephone had to see, had to count the bodies for herself. Her elder brothers were the only ones capable of causing such turbulent waters. Who survived? Who died?
    Only one way to find out.
    Persephone left her brood, tiny fins slipping back under the membrane and replaced with digits as stiff as gravel; rough hands made sand travel easier. She cut through the soft ceiling, pushing past the dense lower layers and into the granules of the epithelial lining. Soon, she could make out a pale blue light piercing through the darkness. Bursting through the topsoil, Persephone landed on her feet, sand denser under pressure and able to support her weight.
    She took a deep breath, gills closing shut and lungs curling open like flowers in bloom. Her eyes squinted in the blue light that blanketed the Overworld. The tonsil was so close to the ground now she could touch it.
    “Just one taste,” said her second Id, teeth grinding together and chewing on the edges of her tongue.
    Persephone could feel it. The nectar was so close the taste was at the tip of her tongue. Sweet, savory, and sour. Oh, what she wouldn’t give for another bite.
    Drip, drip.
    Saliva pooled in her mouth, dripping over the sides like a swelling dam. There was an itch in her belly that couldn’t be scratched, a gnawing sensation causing her tongue to sweat and fingers to twitch. For a moment, she could feel the golden nectar burning the roof of her mouth and scoring her throat. The pain was momentary, a fleeting distraction from the sensations that followed. There was warmth, a summer breeze that spread from her belly to her fingers; that was the start of the slope, the tip of the iceberg. She plummeted over the edge now, stomach leaping into her throat as the smooth muscle convulsed. Then came a popping noise, her taste buds splitting open and tendrils rolling out to catch the last droplets.
    It was hard to forget the first time she tasted the Pallid Throne, the memory so vivid she caught herself ripping out her teeth to lick the roots. That’s why she buried the skull of Gluttony and Lust as far from her belly as possible. But no matter how often she tried or how many vibriatus she inhabited, her second Id could not be separated from her—a vicious tumor swelling at the edge of her neck.
    “Look away, you drooling slob,” so said her fourth Id, a flash of pain across her right cheek, claws scraping just over the nerve.
    Ah, there was the whip that cracked when she strayed from the path, that undaunted conscience that screamed for attention. Temperance was the one who said to let go when she buried her teeth in the neck of Numina. Temperance was the one who scolded her for drinking dew off the pupils of Morn. Temperance was the one who shook her awake when in her mother’s embrace; golden hair looped through her soul’s pores, sliding across the surface and saying, “Never let me go.”
    She was right to bury Temperance’s skull so close to Gluttony. The two of them were a balanced harp string.
    “Just one bite,” Gluttony said.
    “Don’t speak with your mouth full!” Temperance spat, slapping the chattering skull.
    A balanced harp string indeed.
    Persephone shook herself, turning away from the blue light of the tonsil. There was a dark silhouette, something she once thought to be a mountain, but mountains didn’t have teeth, mountains didn’t have claws.
    “This is the old rat’s doing,” Wisdom said, scratching her chin.
    Wisdom was right. There was something in the curvature of this creature’s spine, a series of joints nestled close to the vertebrae, allowing such freedom of movement for a creature that should have none. Next was the size, a cavernous beast sinking beneath now brittle sands. Even the plains of Kath’le Kal couldn’t contain its weight, but the dunes weren’t deep enough. Half-submerged, its head still blanketed the horizon.
    “It looks so clumsy, so lazy and dull,” Ingenuity said.
    Even Ingenuity missed the genius beneath clumsy lumps of flesh and a crooked collar bone. Persephone had to look deeper to see the little digits that hummed under every hair, the ordered weave of bundled muscle fibers in the legs, and the looped chambers of a sixteen-valve heart. The incubation time was perfect, a golden-brown crispy exterior with a smooth center. The skin was harder than stone, but Icarus hadn’t cooked it all the way through. The thoracic cavity was pink in the center, allowing for flexibility beneath plate mail. How she would’ve loved to taste the kiln that made this beast.
    Yet, it wasn’t the shape of the heart, the feel of that calcified beak, or the curvature of its spine that tipped off the rat king’s design. It was a stomach. There, in a gaping hole where Xerxes’s black bolts tore through, she found a lump of tissue with eight chambers. Tissue that sweat acid eating through her mother’s endothelial lining. This creature had been a raging bull, a nucleus of chaos that even Persephone couldn’t control.
    After a thousand years, she and her elder brother Xerxes were still playing catch up.
    “Look at the bodies,” Wisdom said. “Now is the time to strike.”
    Indeed, before the juggernaut was a veritable sea of corpses. Blackened leather wings, broken nails, and split hides. The sands, too, were scarred with glass, evidence of Xerxes tempest. He won the last war using that little trick. Persephone herself marveled at the designs of delicate antennae unleashing such devastation in large numbers. Yet, if he thought to win again using the same tactic…
    “Tsk, tsk. Shame on you, brother,” Persephone whispered.
    “He still hides in our mother’s soft palate,” Wisdom said.
    “Good of you to remember.”
    That’s why she buried Wisdom so close to her frontal lobe. That way, she could stimulate the hypothalamus, trigger the amygdala, and connect the left and right lobes. Appetite, fear, and fine motor function were all essential attributes in the heat of battle, especially for an engineer.
    The little digits along her tail rotated as she dove beneath the sands once more. Persephone would drive the eels forward, leaving behind the turbulent river caused by Icarus’s abomination. Instead, a smaller stream trickled further south—a babbling brook of stringy pus left behind by broken wings that fell from the ceiling above.
    Drip, drip.
    “I believe,” came a voice, a mewling squeak that scratched Persephone’s ear.
    Her first Id squirmed at her belly, lifting her chin to be heard once more. Faith, what use had she of such nonsense? Was it Faith that pushed Icarus’s hoard into the darkness? Was it Faith that drove the crown of the Pallid duchy into her skull? Was it Faith that rejected her mother’s embrace and gave her a name of her own? No, the truth wasn’t so soft, wasn’t so thin and weak. Persephone was right to bury Faith’s skull as far from her ears as possible.
    “I believe this time, we will win,” Faith said.
    Persephone couldn’t help but smile, maw splitting wide and calcified chunks raining down from her cheeks.
    “For once, we agree.”
    She felt a stabbing pain in her side, a swollen, rotting memory of the black bolt she took to her heart years prior. This time, she would return the favor.
    Revenge was a dish best served cold.