The reborn Queen grapples with the duties and consequences of her divinity.
Drowning Lessons
Authors: Anorrack &
DrGrimoire
If you liked this, you would like:
SCP-8352: Little Havana Syndrome: The Foundation contains a transmissible strain of Communism in Cuba.
« Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us || Hub || Vampires Will Never Hurt You »
Starving. Hungry. Gnawing needles of hunger piercing fetid flesh pocked by ghostly maggots.
The Hound trembles, skittering through the legs of pedestrians unseen, sniffing the air for scraps. Nothing. The winding streets of Portlands are bare of the shards of soul the feral Hound once feasted upon. The pet graveyard, the sewers, pounds, even the dreaded clinic where it perished were empty of spirits.
The souls of dog, cat, rat, all eaten by something larger, a shadow cast over Portlands, a biting, consuming wind.
Hungry.
Its nose scents something in the air. The smell of coming death, of decay, of cloying sweetness. Larger prey than it, but wounded. Sickly. It will have to do.
The Hound runs. The streets blur past, the flickering flames of living humans burn past, the world of black and grey and living white tunneling and warping as it gallops faster than it ever did in life, bounding over rooftops and across clotheslines, keeping on the scent, howling wildly into the air. The hunt begins.
Across the city, Saoirse is startled awake by the sound of a wolf's cry.
Dashing, rushing, closing in.
A mile away, then a half mile, then a street, then a single wall.
The heady musk of a soul slipping out of a mortal body fills its nose as it flicker-jumps between worlds, a burning eye fixed on its target, maw open and salivating as it pounces on the last meal in the city.
Saoirse was still rubbing the sleep from her eyes when death on four legs barreled out of her living room wall. A wolf-like thing, as much of a dog as a dog's shadow, lunged towards her neck, its jaw snapping and salivating.
Time seemed to slow down as it sailed through the air. Even as her mind struggled to process this abrupt change from dream to reality, an alien instinct kicked in and broke her out of shock, foreign battle-reflexes imprinted on her soul forcing her body off of the couch and rolling onto the floor.
The beast's jaws clamped down on the pillow that her head had rested on a moment before, scattering stuffing everywhere as it ripped into what it thought was her throat. It took a second before the Hound processed that it had missed.
By then, Saoirse was already up on her feet, muscle memory racing a million miles ahead of her mind as she flipped the coffee table onto its side, trying to create a barrier between herself and the threat, something to slow it down. Not sparing a second, she ran down the hallway and into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her and swearing all the while.
Panting, dripping in cold sweat, she slumped against her bed. Her mind was finally starting to catch up to her instincts, processing what had happened. Some thing had appeared out of nowhere, trying to attack her, eat her. It was in her house. It was in her living room. There was nowhere to go. Saorise just got out of the hospital, she couldn't afford to go back again, or worse, back to the graveyard in her own coffin.
Saorise heard it prowling down the hall, claws click-clacking on the floor, coming to a stop just outside the door. She saw the shadow of a shadow looming through the crack under the door. She held her breath.
Then, hazy as smoke, its head appeared through the door, and Saoirse screamed. Far in the distance, her shriek was echoed by a flock of crows — her flock — but they were too far away, comfortably perched in the trees of a nearby park to do anything but screech in sympathy.
The animal was huge — easily the size of a Great Dane. Clearly starving, too, but through its too-tight skin she could also see the corded muscle of a predator, steel cords stretched tight by starvation. It possessed a single eye centered over its snout, gleaming red and narrowing as it stared at her. Its jaws were foamy and frothy with thick strands of dripping saliva, droplets evaporating as they landed on the bedroom rug, steaming.
The beast hunched down, hackles raised, and filled the room with a low, echoing growl. Saorise looked around for anything that she might be able to use as a weapon. Her eye landed on the disassembled skateboard on her desk. She lunged for it.
Hungry. So very hungry.
The prey-thing had dodged it once, but wouldn't again. Instinct woven into its being tells the Hound to wait for an opening, to pounce when the prey is distracted. And it does.
As its prey races away, the Hound jumps, aiming for center-mass to bring it to the ground, to pin it down, to carve and tear the mortal soul from its body. It makes contact, its jaws close around the prey's black hide, and it tastes victory for a split-second, before its prey slips out of its bite, like it was made of air. Its jowls and tongue burn as if struck by cold iron where they made contact with the hide, but the pain is distant compared to the hunger.
Undeterred, it pushes forward and pounces again, its weight knocking the prey to the ground, but something is wrong.
The Hound tries to claw at the hide, tries to tear through it to get to the living flesh, but again it slips off. Its paws burn and sear where they make contact, and the dog yelps with pain.
This is not what it wanted. Its quarry is not the easy prey it had anticipated.
The dog backs away, keeping its eye on its prey, hackles raised. Fear wars with hunger as it paces, growling a funeral dirge as it has for countless other souls, more to bolster its own spirit than to frighten its prey's own. It feels scared.
The thing freezes, eyes doe-wide, and stares at the Hound, its gaze inscrutable. With its long, awkward limbs, the thing slowly strips off its black pelt, revealing the pallid flesh underneath. It holds up its own hide in front of itself, as if that would ward away the beast.
An opening.
Starvation wins out against fear, and the Hound lunges once more. Its prey is cocky, its prey is stupid. Its black hide was the one thing protecting it, and it was willingly removed.
It flicker-jumps to the side, so it can come at its prey from the flank. It prepares itself to feed.
The wolf vanished mid-stride before her eyes, its corporeal form evaporating into mist as it dissipated into nothingness. But Saoirse saw its path, she could see its paw-prints on the rug as it made them. It was trying to get around the battle jacket.
Saorise dove in the direction she thought the devil-dog would be, the jacket outstretched, and impacted a mass where there shouldn't be any. As soon as she felt the wolf's weight between her arms, she wrapped it tight in her battle-jacket — her divine mantle — and squeezed, immobilizing the thing in its grip. It reappeared, mist forming from nothing, yelping, barking at the surprise attack.
It took all of Saorise's strength to wrestle the hound to the ground, trying to keep its gnashing teeth as far from her face as she could, her muscles burning.
She laid on the floor of her room for what felt like hours, waiting for Anand to arrive, the wolf thrashing and snarling underneath her.
It wasn't going anywhere. She made sure of it.
The makeshift restraints gave Saorise enough breathing room to study the monster in greater detail. There was no way it was a normal dog — even by Portlands standards. Its whole body was hazy somehow, corporeal, but only inasmuch as looked like it was made out of smoke and shadow, bound together in a loose mold, tight enough to infer the broad strokes of definition and texture. There was also the single eye, a red-irised, malevolent orb floating in that black misty mass, and of course the fact it was able to phase through walls with seemingly little effort at all.
She mentally flipped through her relatively slim index of mythical canines, trying to identify the snarling thing in her grasp, hoping it would give her an understanding of what to do with it. Cerberus? Missing two heads. Coyote? Not a dog, also a bit too far north for that. The Hound of Baskerville? Was the dog even magical in that one?
Her train of thought was interrupted by a cacophony of bird chatter and wing-beats as the soul-flock poured into the room.
"Saoirse! Forgive us our tardiness, but we are arrived!" Anand croaked, landing on an open windowsill.
Saoirse panted between the cyclopean wolf's apocalyptically loud barks. "Yeah, I can see that! Do you- Do you have- any idea what this is?"
Anand cocked her head in contemplation. "I… believe I did, once. Though I know not now. Certainly, it is some kind of psychopomp." She declared, as if that was clarification enough.
"A what? And…" Saoirse's frustrated reply was interrupted by the bucking of the beast, "how do I get it to go away?"
"There is time for questions later. As for removing the beast, you must slay it. It is your duty."
Saorise went rigid, and shook her head. "I'm not going to kill a dog!"
Said dog snapped at her face, spattering her with ectoplasmic spittle.
"It is no mere dog. Perhaps once, but no longer. It is a creature wearing the shape of a hound, a beast which feasts on souls. As Phantom Queen, as Protector of the Dead, it is your duty to slay any such creature which might feed on your subjects." The rest of the soul-flock stared at Saoirse as Anand spoke, their half-lidded eyes silently judging her.
Saorise's mouth twisted. Her arms burned. "It's a dog, Anand. It's clearly starving — can't I like, I don't know, feed it? Throw it a bone or something?"
If crows could sigh, Anand would have. Instead, she approximated the gesture with a ruffle of her wings. "Saoirse, for thousands of years I hunted creatures such as these. If I were in your stead, I would have slayed it without a moment of hesitation. Why should this one earn the Queen's mercy?"
"Because I don't want to kill it! I don't want to kill anything! Ever! " Saoirse's voice projected louder than she had intended, her tones echoing the clash of spears and shields, with the spilled blood of the dying and the orders of their execution as she spoke.
The hound froze at the sound of her voice. It whimpered, the white of its eye showing, as if recognizing her as an apex predator for the first time.
Anand stamped her feet and flapped her wings in frustration. It was a while before she was coherent enough to speak in anything but meaningless, peeved croaks. "Saoirse. You are Queen, and my fealty is to you. But you must understand — you are a goddess of war. The day will come when you have to kill, even if you intend to spare a life. Sometimes, the only way to save the life of one is to end another."
"Maybe you're right, but I'm not going to kill this dog, not now. So find another way."
Anand turned her head from Saoirse to study the beast, which had resumed thrashing against its denim bonds. After a moment of silent contemplation, she hopped back out of the window, leaving Saoirse, the hound, and her flock behind. The rest of the crows continued to stare at Saorise, barely moving even to ruffle their feathers. Generations of opinions weighed heavily on Saorise through their gaze, but she pointedly ignored their looks. A few minutes of wrestling with the dog later, her arms beginning to scream from exertion, Anand returned, carrying the wriggling body of a squirrel.
"What is…" Saoirse trailed off as Anand pinned the writhing squirrel to the floor with her claws and plunged her beak into its body. The squirrel immediately ceased in its struggle, limbs sagging and eyes going glassy. Her ghostly beak did not leave a speck of blood in its wake, phasing through the squirrel's flesh as easily as the dog had the door. Anand jerked her head back, and tore loose an exact copy of the rodent, translucent and eerie, its spectral nose twitching nervously at this change of circumstances. Anand held the ghost aloft in her beak, freshly harvested from a still-warm corpse.
Moving as if fighting a stiff wind — the squirrel's ghostly tail and fur fluttering in its nonexistence — Anand dragged the spirit to the Saoirse. At the scent of the squirrel's specter, the hound stopped struggling and let out a hungry whine.
"Feed it." She said flatly. "Feed it, and understand the lesson I teach you."
Shaking, without taking her eyes off of the dog, Saoirse picked up the squirrel's ghost. It was a tiny, flimsy thing, but within it she could sense a tangled web, a knot of memories and emotions. All of the nervous energy the animal had had in life, all of the fear of winter and the joy of summer, a lifetime of tiny experiences cut short by her order, if not her hand directly. It was so small, so delicate.
Such a beautiful little thing.
Tears welling up in her eyes, she tenderly cupped its spirit in her hands, and delivered the squirrel's soul into the dog's maw.
Rich, vital essence fills the Hound's body, and it immediately feels reinvigorated in a way it hasn't in weeks. The fog of hunger clears, mostly. Not as big of a meal as it had hoped, but one far less terrifying than the one it had initially sought. It was a tasty morsel gifted to it by the not-prey and its strange pack, which the Hound realizes all had the same spiritual scent. Involuntarily, its tail begins to wag, long-forgotten memories of its lost life tugging at its mind.
The not-prey stares at the Hound, and relaxes in its grip, unwrapping it from its pelt. Gingerly, fearfully, it shakes off vestigial thing-stuff out of its fur and backs out of the room. It doesn't glance back before it shifts out of the material world, and races away through the monochrome world of Dead Portlands.
It isn't sure what to make of this. A predator of predators, disguised as dying prey. A hunter of hunters that shared its kill. A distant, aching familiarity, to someone long forgotten. A firm lesson, rising up out of the bubbling soup of memories from its former life.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Saoirse quietly sobbed as she flopped face-down on her bed, her cries muffled by her pillows. Anand let her be, for a time, perching on the headboard to survey for any further threats in the bedroom. Eventually, the teenage goddess flipped over, staring up at her predecessor's corvine form.
"I… I understand, Anand." Saoirse said, her expression blank.
The crow approximated a look of compassion, black eyes half-lidded and downcast. "I am sorry, child. It is a lesson that does not come easy for some."
"It's the circle of life. The food chain. Something had to die for it to eat. It eats souls, and there aren't any of those in the city, right? So it was between the dog, me, or something else dying. That's how it works."
"Yes." Anand cawed, mournfully.
Saoirse groaned, staring at the posters on her wall. "This isn't right. Why me? Why did it attack me? Why couldn't it just hunt squirrels or something by itself, like you did?"
"You are the bridge to the crossroads, Saorise. You straddle the line between the living and the dead, of both and yet of neither. Creatures such as that hound — they are creatures of the spirit. To attack the living is beyond their typical abilities, only the dead and dying are prone to their predations." Anand shuffled her feet on the headboard. "I— you, now, the Morrigan, are uniquely vulnerable, a target on both sides of the crossroads."
"…Oh."
"Hm. I would reckon that with the dearth of spirits in this city, the ecosystem has become unbalanced. It is a lean time for these beasts. It may not be inappropriate to say that every psychopomp, every demon, every magic-eating glutton in all of Three Portlands has considered attacking you, attacking us, absorbing our essences for themselves. This hound was but the first. It was a harbinger of future things to come."
"So, like everything else, it's about the missing souls." Saoirse covered her face with both hands and let out a low, muffled scream. "What am I even supposed to do, Anand?"
"For now, you rest. And then, you must do your duty." Anand's voice was flat and brooked no argument, a divine command from the ex-divine, a fire of determination glinting in her avian eyes.
"I'm not killing animals, Anand! I can't."
"Saoirse, it is your charge. A heavy burden, to be sure, but it is yours." Anand puffed up her feathers, agitated. "I understand you are not overjoyed, but this is your life now!"
"It's wrong!" Saoirse shouted, her voice filling the room with clamor of war drums.
Anand jumped back from the goddess, but continued. "You eat meat, do you not? You would kill in self defense, would you not? It is necessary. Right and wrong do not play into this."
"Yes, they do." Saoirse took a deep breath before continuing, the beating of drums fading into silence. "How many times did you try and find another way to do 'your duty'?"
"Never. It was fate. There was no other way."
"Wasn't my dying supposed to be fate, too?"
Anand gave no response, so Saoirse continued.
"Look. I agreed that I'd be the new Morrigan. I agreed that I'd take on your responsibilities and your powers. But I won't use them to kill." In a smaller voice, she added, "Not unless there's no other way."
"Saoirse, there is—" Anand's reply was cut off as Saoirse continued.
"There is another way. I don't care if we have to change fate or whatever to do it, but there is. Maybe we take the psychopomps out of the city. Maybe we, I dunno, find a way to feed them normal food. But the fact is, I fed that dog, and it didn't attack me." Saoirse paused, then repeated softly: "It didn't attack me. It was just lonely, and hungry, and scared, and we gave it a chance, and it took it and didn't attack me."
"Why are you so resistant to this, child? It cannot be a mere moral issue."
"Because! Because…" Saorise's voice trailed off, her mouth moving but producing no sound. Tears filled the corners of her eyes, and she rested her head on her knees, trying to avoid eye contact with the spirits of the dead. She took a shuddering breath before finding the courage to continue.
"Because… because when my mom was in the hospital, when she was really sick, it got really bad. She had to… they put her on life support, they put her on ventilation, she couldn't breathe by herself. The doctors said that… he said that she wouldn't recover. He said that science couldn't help and that… that the magic carried too much of a price to pay."
She wiped her snotty nose with the heel of her hand. "It was up to Dad, in the end. He looked so… aged, after. He looked old, walking me back home from the hospital after Mom… after she was gone. He didn't speak to me for two days. He didn't speak at all. It was just too much for him, and… I don't want to feel that. I don't want to feel that hurt, I don't want to hurt people. That's why."
A long, silent minute creeps past before Saorise looks up from her knees to Anand. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought that the crow's flinty eyes softened, when it next spoke. "There is no convincing you otherwise on this, is there?"
Saoirse shook her head tentatively, and Anand gave another shrugging sigh, shaking her head. "Very well. There seems to be little I can do in this matter, but… I hope you are correct, child. I hope that your new path works."
"Me too." The new goddess sat up on the bed, dabbing at her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. She took a breath, calming herself down. Slowly, she changed the subject: "So. What do we do now — about the missing souls, I mean."
"You rest. You learn. You pray that no other psychopomp comes for you, and tests your vow of pacifism. And we — "Anand gestured with one wing to the murder of her sisters, perched on various furniture around the room" — we search. We shall find where the rest of us have gone, and then we shall hope that you have grown into enough of your gifts to take it back."
The girl. Not-predator-not-prey. The Hound doesn't know what to make of her, yet. A thing that small, that unassuming and vulnerable, yet something so strong, intelligent… kind…
By all rights, it should have learned its lesson, and stayed as far away as it could from the girl, yet something compels it not to. It finds itself dogging her footsteps in the days to come, lurking in the shadows, watching unseen. It sees others following, as well, lurking in the same dark corners it is. Following the same scent that lured it there in the first place.
It is lurking in the alley outside of her apartment when it hears chittering. A rat-king, gnarled and twisted with so many squeaking mouths, perched outside of her window, looking for a way in past the newly fitted wards.
The Hound clambers up the fire escape and swallows it whole, and the girl sleeps peacefully another night.
In the morning, a skili swoops overhead on tattered wings, its eyes round and staring as the girl comes back from a walk in the park. The Hound jumps and catches it when it flies too low, snatching it out of the air like a plastic Frisbee. Another small morsel, but more than it has had in months.
The girl walks home, safe and sound, never knowing the Hound is near.
The Hound grows content. Hunger loosens its fire-cold grip on its ghostly belly, and is replaced by the stirring of a long-forgotten feeling, memories dredged up where they had almost been cast away. Memories of another girl, of warm hugs, of games in the park, of treats echo from its mortal life, and it doesn't know what to make of them.
Surely, it only follows the girl because the hunting is good.
Once, she nearly glimpses it, on a walk home from her school. The Hound is no longer careful. She walks with one of the birds in her soul-pack, the connection between them obvious to the Hound's eye and nose. The bird croaks into her ear and she wheels around, staring in the direction of the Hound. Instinctively, it hides behind a thin light-pole, cloaked in its shadow.
The girl is quiet for a beat, and then unleashes a peal of laughter, a sound of unfettered joy. It is a good sound. A familiar sound. A sound that makes its tail instinctively wag. It cannot see her, its eye obscured by the pole, so she must not see it. It is so well hidden. She must be laughing at something else.
When it finally breaks from cover, she is gone. It finds her again that night, as it takes up its post in the alley. Where it can smell anything that might come for her — any potential prey.
But there was a new scent, a fresh, different scent.
She has left something outside the window, on the fire escape. A mess of blankets, arranged in a loose nest, and a bright green tennis ball, nestled in its center. It calls to the Hound, dredging up more memories of a time long forgotten. Of a girl who cried the last day it saw her. Who cuddled next to him in a narrow sunbeam. Who threw such a ball for it, over and over again. How it loved that game, hunting and not hunting.
The Dog picks up the tennis ball, curls up in the blankets, and settles in for the night.
« Honey, This Mirror Isn't Big Enough for the Two of Us || Hub || Vampires Will Never Hurt You »