Chapter 136 – Tainted One (5)
(Erynd)
She watched me.
Or rather, the eye on the back of my left hand watched me, lid half-lowered, waiting like a kid who'd just handed over a drawing and wanted to know if it went on the wall or in the trash.
Names are dangerous things.
You name something, you admit it's real. You admit it has a place that isn't "problem" or "tool" or "symptom."
You give it a slot in your head and your heart, and then when it gets ripped out, there's a hole.
I'd collected a lot of holes.
But she'd eaten my worst corruption, anchored my arm back into something human, and then asked—politely—to stay.
That earned something.
I sat in the lee of a wind-carved ridge, back against the rock, knees up, watching the dead world glow faint-orange under a sun that was clearly losing the argument with entropy. The cold bit my face again. It felt… almost nostalgic.
My left hand lay on my knee.
She blinked up at me.
"What do you want to be called?" I asked quietly.
Her iris tightened. "I don't know," she said. "I only… am. I was 'that thing.' 'That mistake.' 'That voice that won't shut up.'" A faint ripple under the skin, like she was remembering being stretched inside the obelisk. "They didn't name me. Naming is… caring. They didn't care. They just needed."
The word tasted bitter in her mouth.
Needed.
Like a battery.
Like an anchor.
Like me.
I exhaled through my nose.
"All right," I said. "I'll pick one. And I'm not calling you 'Glove.' Or 'Corruption.' Or 'Lefty.'"
Her pupil dilated, hopeful. "You will name me?"
"That's usually how it works," I muttered. "Parents do the paperwork, kids complain about it later."
"Parent," she repeated softly. "Is that what we are?"
It would've been easier to lie.
"No," I said.
Her pupil shrank.
"But," I added, before that flinch could finish, "it's closer than anything else I've got for you right now."
The eye stilled.
Waiting.
I looked out over the white.
The sky here never went fully dark. Stars were eaten, but the yellowish pall from whatever was left of the sun and the Hearts kept everything in a permanent twilight.
Darkness that wasn't really night.
Light that wasn't really day.
I glanced back at her.
"You came out of the worst kind of dark," I said. "And you're one of the few things in it that decided to reach toward instead of just grab. You're… not quite night, not quite light."
She listened like each word was being tattooed into her.
"Nyx," I murmured. "Old word for night where I'm from. Too tidy on its own." I tapped her lightly. "Nyxa. That'll do."
"Nyxa," she whispered, tasting it. The eye closed, then opened again, shining brighter. "Nyxa. Nyxa." A hum ran through my arm. "I like it."
"Good," I said. "Because paperwork's a nightmare and I'm not changing it now."
She didn't get the joke.
Didn't need to.
Her joy hit me like warmth, bleeding through the bone. For a second I saw myself how she saw me: enormous, blazing, ringed with scars that glowed in places where most people would've just left voids.
"Father," Nyxa said, carefully trying the word on for size.
"Don't—" I started.
Stopped.
The correction died in my throat.
She'd already lost one set of gods and masters. I wasn't going to be the one to rip away a word she'd picked for safety.
"You can call me Erynd," I said instead. "Or… whatever feels right."
"Father," she repeated stubbornly. "Erynd. Both can be true."
I huffed.
"That's not how contradictions work."
"In you, it is," she said simply.
Hard to argue with a parasite that knows you intimately.
I let my head fall back against the rock and closed my eyes for a second.
Her presence sat against my skin like a second pulse.
It was… nice.
Terrifying.
Both.
***
Obelisks are easier to kill once you've murdered one of their siblings.
Patterns repeat.
The first had taken everything: careful dismantling of spell geometry, dragging guardians out of position, throttling the flow instead of just smashing the stone and risking a god sticking its face through the hole.
The second had required improvisation and almost getting eaten by an eye that didn't have a body.
The third had given me Nyxa.
After that, six more felt almost like work instead of apocalypse.
Almost.
They weren't evenly spaced. The Three Wise Men who built this system had clearly been arguing about topology by the end. Some Hearts had half-a-dozen anchors clustered nearby. Some had just one towering spine, overloaded and pulsing dangerously hard.
We took them one at a time.
"Left," Nyxa would whisper as I approached another cluster of stone and meat and cultists. "The weak one is left. They're feeding that one too much. Hit that first."
"Front," she'd murmur, when guardian formations shifted. "The back line hasn't adjusted. Their pattern is old. Exploit."
Her perception of Qlippothic lattice was instinctual, where mine was half-learned, half-stolen.
I handled the killing.
She handled the editing.
Sometimes I let the hunger off its leash for a few bites.
Enough to keep me moving. Not enough to slide all the way into something that didn't recognize names anymore.
Every time the hunger surged too high, Nyxa tightened around my arm and took the brunt of the urge, choking it back like a parent covering a child's mouth before they scream in the wrong place.
We were a feedback loop.
Broken, but functional.
Kill obelisk. Kill guardians. Kill cult.
Repeat.
Again.
Again.
Time bled.
Days? Weeks?
Hard to tell in a world that only had two settings: white and bruised.
Somewhere along the line, Nyxa learned to hide.
One morning—I think it was morning—we were stalking a Heart-adjacent anchor whose cultists had stolen enough tech to triangulate our approach, spells already trained on our last known position.
"Too many eyes," Nyxa said. "I will make fewer."
Before I could ask what that meant, the glove peeled off.
It didn't fall.
She unspooled from my arm in a slow cascade, tendrils slipping free of my skin with a sensation like a pulled splinter healing in reverse. My veins spasmed around the absence, then steadied as mana rushed to dampen the sting.
Her mass dropped into the snow in front of me with a soft whuff.
She reared up, struggling, recombining herself.
First she tried a humanoid shape.
Too many joints.
Too long spine.
She folded, grimaced—if a faceless thing can grimace—and tried again.
The second attempt was better.
Short.
Bipedal.
A torso with the right number of limbs, though her fingers kept fractaling at the tips into smaller, twitching branches before remembering they were supposed to stop at five.
Her "face" was a blank, smooth plane with a single eye in the middle, still the same color, still looking at me like I was the center of her gravity.
"You're leaking," I pointed out.
Black-gold threads of Q seeped out of the places where her shape couldn't quite hold, fizzing into the air.
"I know," she replied. Her voice came both from the air and from the small lump of flesh still attached to my forearm where she kept our anchor. "I cannot stay like this for long. But it is useful."
She melted a second later, surging through the snow like spilled ink, wrapping herself around cultist ankles, dragging them under quietly while I dealt with their guardians.
After, winded and half-burned, I stared at the small glove re-forming on my arm.
"You're getting more like Melody every day," I muttered.
"Melody?" Nyxa asked.
"A different kind of problem," I said. "We'll introduce you if we ever get home."
"Home," she echoed quietly, tasting the word like she hadn't been allowed to use it before.
***
When the last obelisk fell, the world… shuddered.
I felt it in my teeth.
The Hearts—those massive heating towers the villagers worshipped like saints and mechanics simultaneously—hummed differently. The constant background pressure of Q along the lattice eased, like a tight band around the planet had finally loosened a notch.
The wind shifted temperature by a fraction.
Not much.
Barely noticeable if you hadn't been freezing for months.
But the next time I exhaled, my breath didn't crystallize quite as fast.
The villagers didn't celebrate.
They didn't know.
To them, food still came from Shoggoths, heat still came from the Heart, the sky was still wrong, the snow was still endless.
But something in the bones of the world had changed.
We sat on a low outcrop overlooking one such village as the "day" faded into a slightly darker shade of bruised sky.
I'd killed again.
A lot.
The hunger was loud.
Nyxa clung to my arm, small now, glove-thin, eye closed.
She was tired too.
We shared a slab of Shoggoth meat I'd carved from a hunt.
"Shared" is generous. I ate. She… absorbed through contact, drawing the more corrupted aspects into herself, leaving me with protein and not much else.
You'd think eating outer god flesh would taste like madness.
It tastes like oily chicken.
Disappointing, really.
I was mid-chew when the air… tipped.
Not like when an obelisk cracked.
Not like when the Yellow King leaned too close.
This was… deeper.
A pressure change in the part of the universe that normally stays politely out of human notice.
I froze.
Nyxa's eye snapped open.
"Father," she whispered.
The Shoggoth meat in my hand twitched.
Then decayed.
Not over seconds.
Over instants.
One moment, solid.
The next, a smear of grey slush collapsing between my fingers, then steam, then nothing.
The same effect rippled outward in a slow, deliberate wave.
Old Shoggoth bones in the midden pit below us crumbled.
Qlippothic residue along the shattered anchor-lines evaporated.
The lingering stink of too-many-summoning rituals bled away like smoke taken by a wind that didn't blow.
I looked up.
The thing in the sky wasn't a shape.
Shapes have edges, silhouettes.
This was… a collection of decisions.
Where to be thick.
Where to be absent.
Where to let starlight through and where to crush it under a mass that wasn't mass.
Every time my eyes tried to pin it down, they slid off, like it had a built-in deflection for mortal perception.
My brain rifled through categories.
Outer God.
Heart.
King in Yellow.
Qlippothic source.
Architect.
None of them fit alone.
All of them fit a little.
It wasn't hostile.
That was almost worse.
Hostility you can respond to.
This felt like being watched by a storm that was trying to decide whether your particular tree was worth the lightning.
Nyxa tore herself off my arm.
Not like before, when she melted.
This was… instinct.
She ripped away so fast my skin split along the anchor line, hot blood splashing into the snow.
"Nyxa—" I started.
She didn't answer.
She flew.
Not physically.
One heartbeat she was glove, small and clinging.
The next, she was there, a thread of herself stretching up toward the distortion in the sky, trailing a line back to my arm that pulled my nerves taut.
"Wait," I rasped, scrambling to my feet.
Pointless.
They weren't listening to me.
They were talking to each other.
The pressure in my skull changed.
Sound without air.
Meaning without language.
I caught fragments.
Fragment.
Stolen.
Returned.
Nyxa's presence thinned up the line.
Part of her was leaving.
I wanted to grab the tether and yank her back.
I didn't.
This wasn't a fight.
This was… accounting.
The distortion in the sky bent, concentrating around the tiny knot that was Nyxa's ascending half.
Recognition.
Agreement.
Then—
Blessing.
It wasn't light.
It wasn't power as I understood it.
It was permission.
From something that had not been in the habit of giving that to anything for a very long time.
The tether snapped back.
Nyxa hit my chest like a thrown stone.
I staggered, boots sliding on the ice, back smacking against the rock face behind me.
Arms wrapped around my ribs.
Small.
Too small.
Warm.
Too warm.
I looked down.
Little hands clutched my coat.
Thin fingers, human, short nails bitten ragged.
Bare feet stood on my boots, toes pink with cold they didn't quite seem to feel.
A girl stared up at me.
Eight?
Ten?
Hard to say.
She had hair: dark, chopped unevenly around her jaw like someone had tried to copy a style from memory and given up halfway.
Her skin was pale with a faint undertone of something not meant for human dermis, like the color hadn't fully decided if it was blood-fed or stone-fed.
Her eyes—
Her eye.
No.
Two.
She had two.
But both irises were that same strange molten amber-red, ringed in black, catching the dim light wrong. When she blinked, for a heartbeat, a third lid flicked horizontally across before remembering it wasn't supposed to be here and vanished.
She was wearing… something.
A dress, if you were feeling generous.
It hung off her shoulders in loose, uneven layers, like someone had draped woven shadows and half-remembered cloth around her and hoped gravity would do the rest.
It didn't hide the places where wrongness still lingered: a line along her forearm where skin rippled too smoothly, the faint suggestion of tendril-sockets behind her shoulder blades, a pulse of Q under the collarbone like a buried second heart.
She beamed.
Wide.
Teeth: small, human, mostly even. No inner ring. No obvious maw.
"Father!" Nyxa laughed, voice now fully external and absolutely delighted. "Look! Look at me!"
I stared.
My brain did the same thing it had when I woke up with tentacles.
Tried to edit.
Failed.
"You're…" I managed.
She spun, letting the ragged dress flare.
"A girl," she said proudly. "Human-shaped. Mostly. He said I could try."
"He?" I repeated, looking up at the distortion, which was already starting to thin.
The thing in the sky didn't answer.
Didn't need to.
I wasn't the one it had just updated in the registry.
Nyxa reached up, grabbed my hand in both of hers, and pressed it to her cheek.
Warm.
Soft.
Real.
Under the skin, I could feel the same Qlippothic current as before, wound tighter, leashed harder. The glove was gone; our link now ran through bone and deeper, subtler anchors.
She nuzzled my palm like a cat.
"Do you like it?" she asked, suddenly shy. The bravado of her initial spin faltered. "I know it's not… right. There are still pieces left over. And sometimes I forget how many fingers I should have. But I wanted to be something you could see when you talked to me. Not just a voice, or an eye you notice only when you're about to stab something."
"I—" I swallowed.
Words tangled.
Every instinct screamed that this was bad.
Outer gods do not hand out blessings for free.
Nothing in this cosmos does.
She'd just gone from being a contained corruption-glove on my arm to a walking, talking piece of me-with-permission, visible, vulnerable, and unsupervised by the obelisk's prison geometry.
And she was looking at me like a kid in a too-big coat, asking if I thought the sleeves made her look stupid.
"Nyxa…" I started.
She flinched at my tone.
I forced my voice softer.
"You look…" I searched for a word that wasn't dangerous, wrong, or weapon.
"Alive," I settled on.
Her smile came back, smaller, but truer.
"Good," she said. "That's all I wanted."
Over her head, the distortion thinned further.
As it went, I caught a flicker.
Not in the sky.
In her.
For a heartbeat, the shape she wore… shifted.
The angle of her jaw.
The set of her shoulders.
The tilt of her head when she looked up at me, an old, sharp intelligence in a young face.
A veil over her hair.
A weight in her gaze that didn't belong to anything small.
The Witch.
The one in the empty house that had been mine by habit, not by deed.
The one who'd opened me up, called me demon king like a joke, and watched me die with clinical interest.
Nyxa's outline matched hers for a fraction of a second.
Then it was gone.
Just a tired, unstable girl holding onto my coat.
Must be the head injury, I told myself.
Or the Q.
Or the fact that my last experience with being murdered by a woman in a veil wasn't exactly something my subconscious had processed in a healthy way.
Right?
Nyxa tugged on my sleeve.
"Father?" she asked. "You're making the face."
"What face," I said automatically.
"The one that says you see too much," she replied. "And don't trust any of it."
Accurate.
I exhaled slowly.
The thing in the sky finished whatever it was doing and faded, leaving only ordinary wrongness behind.
The world kept turning.
The Hearts kept humming.
Somewhere far away, the Yellow King probably scribbled a note in the margins of whatever script he thought we were following.
Nyxa swayed on her feet.
Human bodies are heavy.
Fragile.
Full of demands.
Her knees buckled a little.
Without thinking, I scooped her up.
She weighed almost nothing.
Bone, cloth, a handful of Q, and more hope than anything born in this hellscape had any right to carry.
She tucked herself against my chest, small hands fisting in my shirt.
"Sleep?" she asked, voice already drifting.
"For a bit," I said.
"Will you be here when I wake?" she murmured.
"I'll try," I said.
No promises.
Never promises.
She hummed, satisfied anyway.
"Good," Nyxa whispered. "No more stones. No more alone."
Her breath warmed my throat.
Within moments, she went limp in that unnerving way only children and very trusting animals can manage, as if the possibility of being dropped had just left her calculation space entirely.
I stood there, holding my corruption-born daughter under a dying sun in a world that had already ended once, and stared at the empty sky where something too big to name had just reached down, touched what was mine, and handed it back in a different shape.
"Right," I said eventually, to no one.
"This isn't going to bite me in the ass at all."
The wind didn't argue.
I started walking back toward the nearest Heart, carrying a girl who shouldn't exist and trying very hard not to think about the way her new face had almost matched the woman who'd opened my chest and called me "my little demon king" while my world died around me.
Must be my mind playing tricks on me.
Right?