They removed her eyes and tongue first. Then her heart and lungs, her liver and her kidneys, her testicles and her brain.
FIRST: When Situations Degenerate
It took them two years to find her. Two years of living in hiding, looking over her shoulder, keeping to herself in her shitty basement apartment in Cleveland fucking Ohio, working at a sports bar for less than minimum wage. It was almost a relief when she went out back for a smoke break and saw the pink Rolls Royce idling by the dumpster. Beside it stood Marshall, wearing an even worse suit than last time and a tie that appeared to have borrowed its print from a dakimakura of some anime femboy. He gave her a little wave.
"Ms. Black! Can I call you Iris? I think I'm going to call you Iris," he said with a smirk. "I hope you didn't think you'd hidden from us. We just… Didn't need your services quite yet."
"Oh? What services would those be," Iris asked, as she prepared to hex the ever-living fuck out of the asshole in front of her. "I charge reasonable rates for sorcerous consultation. I'm sure you can afford it, I didn't manage to graduate, after-"
She was interrupted by the asshole behind her, who grabbed her wrists in a vice-grip before she could finish the mudras of her spell. "Ah, mademoiselle, it is your body that we need." Carter, then. Iris wondered how a fat man in a bright pink tracksuit could be so sneaky. Must've been the camo pattern. "Ah, not in a sex way, that is, I wouldn't want you to get the wrong idea, Skitter isn't even into women and I'm voluntarily celibate, for reasons that I don't need to get into at the moment but—"
"Shut the fuck up, Al." Marshall sighed, and opened the door of the Rolls. "Come on, Iris, we haven't got all day. It's not like we're gonna kill you. Very important that you remain alive, actually. Mission critical."
"Do I have a choice?"
"No."
Iris sighed. "You know I'm just going to keep trying to escape, right? Might as well go ahead and drug me now, it'll save us both some…" And a slight prick in her neck was the last thing she remembered before she woke up in the barrow.
The first thing she noticed was the smell. Corpse-blood, rot and copper and formaldehyde, layered over dirt and dust and stale air. Then the cold. The stone chair beneath her naked body, the golden manacles on her arms and legs not yet warmed by her skin, the dank air drawing goosebumps from her flesh. Then the silence—only it wasn't quite silence. Silence is the absence of sound; this was its antithesis. She could still hear her own breathing, her own heartbeat, the occasional breath or footstep somewhere else in the room, someone trying to keep quiet but not quite managing; but all the sounds were swallowed up immediately, without an echo, and under them she couldn't hear the clatter of golden coins, there was no machine counting bills, a man was not foreclosing on a family's ancestral home, but there was the emptiness where all those sounds and more should have been—
And she opened her eyes, and screamed.
There was nothing on the altar. There were golden bowls, and silver plates, and knives and hooks and clamps all studded with blood diamonds and black pearls; and in the center, surrounded by the plates and bowls and implements of destruction, there was nothing. Or, there was Nothing, there was an emptiness so tangible it rejected air and light and sound and even space. It was the Dark. And it looked at her, and its eyes were black.
Iris fainted; and when she woke again, she saw that Marshall and Carter were in the room with her. They wore thick leather aprons, embroidered with arcane sigils that hurt to look at, and their faces were painted with woad and ochre in dizzying whorls of color; but they also wore perfectly tailored suits, and silk neckties, and ten-thousand-dollar watches. Marshall held a knife, and Carter a golden bowl. The Dark did not issue a command; and they begun their work.
They removed her eyes and tongue first. Then her heart and lungs, her liver and her kidneys, her testicles and her brain. Iris felt it all; her eyes saw the stone barrow-roof above, her tongue tasted coppery blood and stale air, her lungs screamed soundlessly through the mutilation. And whenever they cut, whenever a new hole opened in her living corpse, in flowed the Dark. It was a hundred hands pulling her wounds open and groping her innards; it was a single, massive centipede crawling in and out and around, piercing her bleeding flesh with thousands of sharp legs; it was a numbness, removing all sensation but her pain. It was bound to her, body and soul, and with every new invocation and blasphemy that binding grew tighter.
And then it was finished. She was still in agony, still looking through her absent eyes, still pumping nothing through a torn-out heart, but it was all old agonies, not new ones. The ritual was complete, the beast was bound to her, and she would stay in this tomb until the next unlucky bastard got carved up by the sons or grandsons of the men who did this to her.
Her body had slumped in its throne, head lolling to one side. It straightened, animated by the Dark within; and it smiled a ruined smile.
"Thank you, gentlemen. Very well done." It was her voice, almost, it came from her throat, but the Dark had not used her lips or tongue or voicebox to make it. (Her tongue was on the altar; her lips hung off her face by strands of gristle; her voicebox was pierced through with a silver nail.) "The compact has been followed to the letter. You performed the ritual, step by step, upon the only descendant available…"
It paused for barely a moment, and in that moment, Marshall and Carter finally understood the pact their ancestors had made.
"But I do not believe I am bound within a son of Jushur."
And then Iris felt her body stand, and the terror she felt in that moment overwhelmed anything she had felt during the ritual. It leaned over the altar, over her eyes, and its own eyes were simply black, holes in space where eyes should be.
"This is going to hurt quite a bit, I'm afraid."
It reached forward, and plucked Iris' eyes from the bowl. She would've thrown up, if she was still in control of her throat, as it turned them around and lifted them. She saw Marshall, a growing wet spot in the crotch of his suit, and Carter, on his knees, hands clasped in prayer to an absent God. And then the agony returned, as fresh as it had been the first time, and she blacked out.
She awoke to the sound of weeping. Carter, probably, it was interspersed with French-accented Ave Marias. Then the scratching and pounding would be Marshall, trying to open the doors. They wouldn't open, of course, she had sealed them much too tightly.
Wait. She hadn't done anything. It had sealed the doors, the Dark had, not Iris.
I think you'll find that it'll be much easier to think of us as a single entity. It wasn't talking to her; the thought came as a single idea. There's only one soul in here, you can check if you'd like.
So she did. The spell was simple, almost a reflex; it required only thought, a shifting of channels to see with the extra sense of thaumaturgy. She saw Marshall's soul, half-poisoned by demonic residues and designer damnations, and Carter's soul, engorged with the sips and nibbles he'd taken of a dozen others, and the tatters of the old wardings on the barrow's walls, her own fresh work on the door. And then she turned that sight inwards, and saw her own soul.
Iris knew her soul, as every thaumaturge must. Hers was an idealized version of her body, sculpted from pink marble—or, at least, that was the metaphor that her visual cortex used to interpret a fundamentally immaterial thing. It changed, from day to day, as her self-image changed, as she made choices for good or for ill; it had never changed this much, or this drastically.
Wherever Marshall and Carter had mutilated her physical form, her soul had been wounded as well. Her torso was torn open, her eyes gouged out, dead languages scratched into her skin. And each of these wounds had been filled in, by the Dark. It was a part of her now, though it made just as much sense to say she was a part of it. They were one. She was one. Iris was the Dark.
Iris Dark opened her eyes. There was Marshall, trying desperately to wrench the door open. There was Carter, weeping on the floor. And there she was, still naked, still covered in her own blood and bile. That wouldn't do.
She stood from the throne once more, and as she stood, darkness wove itself across her limbs. It billowed and swirled, suggesting a dozen fashions: a toga, a ballgown, a trenchcoat, a doublet. Eventually the darkness condensed, and where there had been an amorphous cloud, there was a perfectly-tailored suit. She lifted one foot, then the other, and the shadows shaped themselves into black leather wingtips; she breathed out a cloud, and it became black lipstick, eyeliner, mascara. Her hair moved of its own accord, tying itself into a tight bun. She cleared her throat, and immediately became the center of attention.
"Mr. Marshall. Mr. Carter." The former pressed his back against the door, the latter curled into a fetal ball. "We're going to be running things a little differently around here."
Iris waved a hand, and the door opened. Marshall scurried out of her way, and for the first time in eight millenia, since two men bound their king in a chain of gold, the Dark stepped into the world. She smiled. There was money to be made.
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