Chapter 122 – Hunting Old Gods (2)
(Erynd)
People think I'm grooming a pet princess.
If they see the naked lessons, the kneeling, the lectures sharp enough to cut bone, and they think:
Ah. He wants a toy on a throne.
Idiots.
If I wanted a toy, I wouldn't be hammering Olivia this hard.
I'm training a disaster response.
I don't know if she dies.
I don't know if she lives.
I don't know if there's even a version of this timeline where she gets to grow old and fat and bored, arguing about harvest quotas instead of cults.
All I know is that once the king dies—and he will, he's mortal, even if everyone pretends that crown weighs like eternity—I need someone sitting on that chair who can do the hard thing and the wise thing at the same time, and not flinch so hard the whole Empire cracks.
Not "good."
Not "kind."
Not "pure."
Functional.
A ruler who understands that sometimes you break a noble house so the slums don't burn. That sometimes you hang a popular man so the unpopular many don't starve. That sometimes you have to be willing to be called monster so the real monsters don't win.
I don't trust fate.
I don't trust prophecies, auguries, or whatever smug hints Vastriel refuses to say out loud.
Even with everything I have—the 'System' muttering in the back of my skull, the way my holistic brain stitches details together faster than it should. I have no idea where the actual threats are until they're already gnawing on the foundations.
I don't have enough information to be elegant.
So I'll be crude.
I'll destroy all the cults that can plausibly cause the right kind of problem.
Outer Gods first. The ones who don't belong here. The ones whose presence feels like a math error made flesh.
We broke most of those.
The ones whispering about the Void Between. The ones who stuff their heads full of eyes and call it enlightenment. The ones who tried to turn Meltèn into a shrine.
Most of those altars are ash now.
Old Gods are what's left.
The ones who did belong here once.
The ones people prayed to before Vastriel woke up and started rearranging the board.
The ones who died, and then their faithful dragged them back anyway.
After that, it'll be the Daemon cults. The Devil pacts. All the lovely little import/export problems from other realms who see this world as a buffet and haven't realized yet that I bite.
This fucking world is doomed.
Too many ways to die.
Not enough people willing to count them honestly.
But it's my world.
Right?
***
The capital's underbelly is not the sewer system.
That would almost be respectable.
Sewers [1]have plans. Angles. Purpose.
This is… a scar.
We stand at the edge of a hole someone hacked into a cellar floor and then just kept digging.
No supports. No bracing. Just raw earth and bad decisions.
The walls slump inward in places, cracked and damp and ready to come down if anyone sneezes too hard.
Which, on a normal day, would be convenient. One good explosion, one collapsed tunnel, one cult problem solved by gravity.
Today, it's less simple.
Because halfway down the slope, the texture changes.
Dirt gives way to something that looks like meat.
The smell hits like a slap.
Blood and rot and perfume, layered together until they form a fourth smell that doesn't belong in any sane world.
The walls pulse.
Flesh has grown over stone, knitting it together like scar tissue. Veins as thick as my thumb throb just below the surface, carrying something too sluggish to be blood.
"Charming," Zoe murmurs beside me.
Her voice is muffled slightly by the mask covering the lower half of her face. The rest of her is encased in armor that would have given any sane quartermaster a stroke.
Sane quartermasters don't work for me.
The rogue armor is a Frankenstein marriage of my sketches, Grum's stubborn craftsmanship, and Rana's unholy affection for over-engineered rune channels.
Light plates over vital areas. Flexible mesh everywhere else. Mana thrusters at shoulder and hip, small and mean, designed to give sharp, dirty bursts of acceleration, not flight.
Chains run from her gauntlets to anchor ports on her back—gleaming metal, rune-studded, coiled like leashed serpents. She can extend, retract, swing, yank herself around the battlefield like she never learned about gravity and refuses to start now.
If I tried to make her fight normal, that would make me a bad teacher.
"Tunnel's not collapsing any time soon," I say. "She's holding it together."
The flesh waves under my palm when I touch the wall.
It's like pressing on the inside of a throat.
"Ugh," Zoe says appreciatively. "I hate it. Can I set it on fire?"
"Not yet," I say. "We're walking inside a goddess's idea of architecture. You set off the wrong reaction and this whole thing clenches."
Ahead, the passage widens.
The walls go from "membranous" to "some physician's nightmare sketch."
Faces bulge under the surface here and there. Not full features—just a mouth, a cheek, an eye fused half-shut. Fingers stick out of the ceiling like roots, twitching when we pass.
Deeper in, I can see the door.
Calling it a door is generous.
It's a slab of tissue grown thicker than the rest, the suggestion of panels and hinges made of bone, pulsing in slow wobbles.
Where a handle would be, a cluster of eyes blink wetly.
Well-crafted flesh-wrought doors give you options.
Handles.
Runes.
Literally anything other than "stab your way through and hope you don't trigger a carnivorous reflex."
This is not well-crafted.
I could blow it open.
I could also turn the whole tunnel into a press.
"My Lord," Julia had said earlier, in the planning room. "We'll take Control. Yara and Edward take Strike. You and Zoe… Subjugation?"
"Something like that," I'd said.
Three roles.
Team Subjugation: me and Zoe. Break the god.
Team Strike: Tamara, Yara, Edward. Kill everything in the outer warrens that looks too far gone to salvage, before it reaches the surface.
Team Control: Julia, Lyra, Noelle. Clean up what Strike misses. Extract anyone who still has a mind under the madness. Contain panic.
I don't actually believe we're going to find many worth saving in a Nazyen pit.
The Cult of Love has a reputation.
Incest isn't a rumor in their circles.
It's doctrine.
Purity of blood. Purity of form. Purity of devotion.
They chase the idea of perfect union so hard they forget inbreeding has consequences, that mortal flesh is not designed to fold back in on itself that many times without breaking.
What's left of their 'beauty' is usually fingers fused together, jaws that don't quite close, too many teeth growing in the wrong directions.
Sex as sacrament, taken past anything human.
I've seen the aftermath before.
Rooms that smell like sweat and iron and stale seed. Children with eyes that don't focus. Women whose hips are ruined by too many pregnancies too close together. Men with hands that shake when they try to hold anything other than someone else's skin.
Nazyen used to be the kind of goddess who looked good on coins.
Once, she was carved marble at her shrine: brown hair to her hips, falling in artful waves, one lock braided with flowers. Skin smooth and unblemished. Breasts full and high. Hips lush. Waist narrow enough that sculptors cheated the proportions.
A smile like a promise.
Fertility and love. That's what they called her.
The picture I had the artist draw—based on old texts, descriptions, echoes—had captured that.
Left-hand page: Nazyen as she had been.
Right-hand page: Nazyen as she is now.
Or… close enough.
Hair hacked short in clumps, twisted, knotted, clotted with fluids that didn't politely dry. Eyes too big for their sockets, one hanging a little lower, the lid torn. Flesh sloughing in places, too much in others, like clay that had been squeezed too many times by impatient hands.
Limb lengths wrong. One arm extended, bone poking through the wrist from where the skin hadn't covered properly. Mouth stretched into a shape that might once have been a smile and now looked like a cut.
That was just the image.
Reality will be worse.
Dead gods dragged back never come back right.
Their forms are patchwork: whatever their faithful remember, plus whatever the corpse can hold, plus whatever the world refuses to accept.
Something like that doesn't belong here anymore.
Its mind goes first. Fractures. Fixates. Loses the ability to understand "enough."
It feels its own rot.
It punishes everyone around it for not ending it.
"We're going to blitz," I tell Zoe quietly. "You, me, Gungnir, Melody. Straight through to the core. Strike and Control keep the cult from scattering and making more mess elsewhere."
Zoe nods.
Her chains rattle softly as she rolls her shoulders.
"Permission to make it ugly?" she asks.
"It was ugly the moment they dug this tunnel," I say. "Do what you have to."
We step past the lip and into the underbelly properly.
The others peel off at the earlier branches; Strike to the left, Control to the right.
It's just us and the pulsating throat ahead.
We run.
The tunnel floor is uneven, slick in places with things I refuse to identify without a lab.
Cultists come out of side alcoves like maggots from sores.
They're wearing what used to be people.
Robes half-rotted, stained with fluids, hanging off shoulders wrong.
Some move like they remember how joints work.
Some crawl.
One man's face has sagged so far that his mouth droops down onto his chest, lips parted, tongue lolling. His eyes have slid sideways, one over the other, like someone didn't reattach them properly.
He shrieks when he sees us.
It comes out wet and bubbly.
Zoe is a blur in my peripheral vision.
She throws her arms forward.
The chains scream out, bite into the flesh wall ahead with a dull, sick sound, impale an eye cluster.
She yanks.
Her body launches, thrusters flaring, a streak of motion swinging low and then up. She tucks her legs, plants her feet against the opposite wall, pushes off, flips.
That spin would be the first thing I'd yell not to do in any other fight.
Here, it works.
She carves through three bodies in the arc of a heartbeat, the hooks on her boots ripping along skulls, her blades finding soft spots with obscene ease.
Blood spatters the walls.
The walls drink it.
I move forward.
Gungnir is heavy and perfect in my hand.
The first cultist to get within reach doesn't even get a word out.
I thrust.
The spear hums, the visible projection barely a whisper of light at the tip.
He jerks around it, eyes wide, like he expects something explosive.
From the outside, it looks like nothing happened.
Then his skin sags.
An invisible ripple shudders through him. Bones dissolve into mush. His body deflates like someone poked a hole in a bladder.
He collapses without drama.
No scream. No gore.
Just… off.
Each step, more of them.
Some too far gone to have been saved even if I were feeling charitable.
Spines fused to other spines. Two heads on one set of shoulders, one child-sized, one adult, both with mouths sewn shut in crude, loving stitches. A woman whose belly is swollen in a way that doesn't match pregnancy, the skin over it crawling in waves.
I don't feel guilt.
They made vows to this thing.
They fed her.
They bred for her.
They took weakness and turned it into ideology and called their own children holy meat.
They die quickly where I can make it quick, and not at all cleanly where I can't.
Zoe ricochets from wall to wall above me, a spider on steel webbing. At one point she plants both feet on the ceiling, kicks off, and comes down in a spinning, laughing spiral that leaves a ring of bodies behind her.
"Normally," I call up, "I'd tell you never to spin in combat."
"Normally," she shouts back, "walls don't have nipples, my Lord!"
Fair.
The deeper we go, the thicker the tissue.
The sound of the surface fades.
All we hear now is our own breath, Zoe's occasional half-hysterical giggles, and the wet, sluggish pulse of a god's leftovers trying to remember how to be sacred.
Finally, the corridor opens.
The flesh stops pretending to be walls and gives up entirely.
We step into a chamber.
The air is different here.
Heavier.
Thicker.
It tastes like perfume spilled on a corpse.
"Zoe," I say quietly.
She lands beside me, chains retracting, armor dripping with things that steam gently in the warm air.
"Go back," I tell her. "Tell Julia and Tamara the job is done. Their teams can finish the cleanup and pull out. I don't want anyone else near this."
She studies me for a second.
Her eyes, visible over the edge of the mask, are bright and wild.
"Yes, my Lord," she says.
She pauses.
"You'll kill her?" she asks. "For real?"
"If I can," I say.
"And if you can't?" she presses.
"Then I'll make sure she doesn't get back up quickly," I say. "Go."
She hesitates, then nods once.
The chains fire again.
She's gone, whipping herself back through the carnage.
I'm alone.
Well.
Not entirely.
[ System ]
[Warning: You are witnessing the Goddess of Love. ]
My vision shudders.
For a fraction of a second, the world glitches.
The chamber is two things at once.
On top of the pulsating, rotten walls, an overlay flickers: marble, clean and bright, columns carved with vines, bodies twined around pillars in graceful embrace.
The scent of roses. Warm skin. Wine.
Nazyen as she was.
Beautiful in all the ways that sell statues.
Coy smile. Perfect breasts. Hips designed to make sculptors sigh and nobles donate for bigger shrines.
The illusion snaps.
The truth slams in behind it.
She's not standing.
She's… grown.
Fused to the back wall, her spine an obscene column of vertebrae too long for her torso, ribs blooming out at weird angles only to sink back into the meat of the chamber.
Her hair is in clumps.
Some strands hang to her shoulders. Others just… stop, hacked off, the ends frayed and matted.
Her face is a smear of what it used to be.
One eye too big, staring, the pupil blown wide, veins burst so the sclera is spiderwebbed red. The other eye is smaller, sunk deep, lid torn so it can't close. Her nose is half there. Her mouth is stretched, corners split, full lips now cracked and bleeding.
Her skin has gone patchy.
Some places sag, grey-green, like meat left too long in the sun. Other patches are stretched too tight over the bone, shiny and cracked. Below the sternum, the flesh doesn't quite cover the organs; slick, pulsing shapes move under a translucent layer.
Her left arm hangs down, long.
Too long.
The bone shows through at the wrist where the skin didn't form correctly, a jag of white poking out of raw red.
Below the waist, she fades into the wall.
Tendrils of her—muscle, fat, nerve cords—have grown out and into the chamber, stitching the walls together. In some places, they terminate in human hands, fused at the wrists. In others, in mouths that open and close slowly, full of teeth that never quite commit to biting.
My mind tries to stutter.
The human brain does not like this kind of thing.
It wants to file it under "nightmare" and move on.
[ System ]
[Cognitive disturbance detected.]
[Stabilizing…]
I've seen the artist's sketch.
I've spent days staring at that before-and-after, committing both the lie and the truth to memory.
No amount of glamour can make me forget what she is.
"Beautiful, isn't she?" Melody murmurs from my back, voice low, almost sympathetic.
I don't answer.
Nazyen moves.
Not much.
Just a shift.
A twitch.
A hundred little mouths along the walls gasp in sync, exhaling air that smells like sweat and loss.
Her head tilts.
The sound of it is wet.
When she speaks, the voice doesn't come from her cracked mouth.
It comes from everywhere. From every finger twitching in the wall, every half-formed mouth, every throat this place has ever eaten.
A chorus of whispers, layered and echoing.
"The one who has an Authority?" she says.
The words ripple through the chamber like a caress and a threat.
My hand tightens on Gungnir.
"Hello, Nazyen," I think.
"Let's talk about love."
[1] Not Invented yet