Page 73 of House of the Beast

Chapter

I t was dark. I would have likened this place to the void between the umbral plane and Sorrowsend, except that I could still hear that constant wail.

And after a few disorienting seconds, as the light from the doorway faded behind me, I could see other lights in the distance—little pinpricks of it, like stars in the sky.

There was nothing else around and no path to follow, so instead I followed the baby’s cry.

My footsteps were muffled like they weren’t really there, or perhaps like the ground beneath me didn’t truly exist. Thinking about it left me unsteady, so I kept my head up and walked.

It was impossible to gauge how far I went without landmarks to guide me, but after some time, one of the lights on the horizon began to grow brighter.

I took that to mean that I was going in the right direction and quickened my pace.

It continued to grow as I approached, brighter and larger and closer, until it opened up like the exit at the end of a tunnel, its edges fading into the darkness.

The cry was all around me now, hitching and rising with the stubborn strength borne by something eager to announce its arrival to the world.

Another few steps and my feet landed on something solid.

I looked down to see a polished floor of pale marble shot through with gold.

The darkness had faded away; the tunnel closed up in the blink of an eye.

I was in a room—though the word room could not adequately describe its grandeur.

The vaulted ceilings were high enough to make one dizzy, and displayed magnificent murals inlaid with precious stones and metals.

It was night. Ornate sconces lined the walls, flames flickering lowly within.

Gauze curtains fluttered in a warm breeze; the windows had been thrown open to air out the smell of blood, and the view outside was astonishing.

Beyond the walls of what must have been an opulent estate were the myriad ramshackle roofs of an unfamiliar city, its streets and buildings packed so tightly together I wondered how its people breathed.

Even the docks were crowded with ships, drifting slowly across the moonlit ocean as they searched for a place to berth.

A woman sat in the bed at the center of the room, cradling a soft bundle in her arms. Her face was sheened with sweat and pale with exhaustion.

She would have been rather plain in appearance, if not for her hair of pure silver and the glow of triumph around her.

Two figures in dark robes and golden masks bustled nearby, silently collecting soiled rags and a basin of bloodied water, but she paid them no mind.

Her eyes were focused solely on the precious burden she carried. She cooed down at it.

“There you are,” she sang, “here at last in my arms. We will do great things together, my little monster. My prince from the stars.”

My heart stuttered. I walked forward, led again as if by an invisible path as the bundle gurgled back at her. The masked figures hurried past me as if I weren’t there, their heads bowed low in deference. The woman, too, did not care as I drew closer to peek down at her arms.

Right at that moment the bundle kicked, and the blankets fell away.

His small form was strong already—lively and obstinate. His skin was an awful red, as if he had been stained with old blood; his mouth opened in a terrible wolflike maw and his legs were twisted like the roots of a tree. He was missing his left arm.

It was so strange to look upon him like this.

The light changed. The room was the same, but now it was day.

The ocean shimmered a deep blue-green in the distance as the sounds of men toiling under the hot sun drifted in through the windows.

A whip cracked. Beyond the lush palace grounds, the city was in poor shape.

It had fallen into decrepitude as its queen gave everything to her new pursuit of godhood.

The little monster—bigger now, big enough to sit by himself—was perched upon a plush pile of cushions on the ground.

His malformed legs were tucked close as he listlessly played with wooden figurines that looked too fine for a child’s hands.

More masked servants watched over him, but even as he gazed at them with his three wide, pleading eyes for attention, they ducked their heads and looked away.

They were afraid. He was an abomination, the son of a queen who had lain with a monster.

A monster that had been summoned with the blood of their people, their screams echoing long into the night, and every day they feared it would be someone they knew next mounted on the Pyres.

Their queen did not care for their hardships.

She cared only for her new gods, who spoke maddening words to all who were able to listen, driving people to frenzy.

These servants would wait on their grotesque little prince because they had no choice, but there was no love there.

A clatter, and one of his wooden toys fell to the floor. He could not walk yet, not with those legs. He reached for the toy and his stubby arm fell short. The servants pretended not to see.

I rounded the bed and went toward him, and he turned those firelight eyes on me.

He watched as I picked up the toy—a carving of a bird—and held it out to him, cradled in my hands.

Though I was still filthy and covered in blood, he looked at me without fear.

Instead, there was something like fascination in his expression.

Like he couldn’t believe that I was there, and that I had reached out to him.

Tentatively, he smiled—the kind of smile one would give to one’s first friend.

In the depths of my chest, my heart ached.

Everything shifted again. It was night. The ground was wet with blood.

Sounds of battle raged beyond the open windows as the bodies of servants and guards turned cold on the marble floors.

The palace grounds were aflame. The queen had been left dead in her throne room, and now it was time for her infant fiend to join her.

Four figures stood in ominous anticipation around the bed of the little monster.

He was crying again, the helpless cries of a child too young to do anything else.

He was everything his mother had hoped he would be, and thus he could not be suffered to live.

Sorrowsend was already his. Reality bent its head to his whim.

Both the men, with their fragile, arrogant rules, and the gods, with their whispered words, were nothing in the wake of his existence.

They had come to an agreement, and it was time to put that agreement into order. The monster’s death was quick: a blade drawn across the soft young flesh of his throat. His cries cut off with a gurgle; his heartbeat stuttered desperately, slowed, and stopped.

But he was not mortal. And they could not kill all of him. His death was merciful, but it was what came next that horrified him so. The four men and the four gods they had bound themselves to were not content to leave his mother dead and him with her.

They wanted more. They hungered. Those rules, so arbitrary, would become dogma; those whispered words, so easily ignored, would become an anchor in this mortal world.

They carved out the monster’s third eye—that blazing, sunlight eye, that marker of his divinity—and seized it for their own. It would nurture the new Kugara, hidden in plain sight of all its people.

The image before me crumbled. Firelight lashed my vision.

A great pyre had been built where the queen had once sacrificed so many of her countrymen, and her broken, battered body was thrown in.

She would not be given a proper burial. Her ashes would scatter in the wind and besmirch Kugara no longer.

Her child, the monster, the boy from the stars with his broken legs and bloody skin and three terrible eyes, one now taken away, had at least been given the courtesy of being bundled in funeral robes before joining her.

The flames grew strong, and I turned to escape the heat. Darkness enveloped me and brought cool relief—but once again it was not the darkness of the void. I knew this darkness, this starry sky overhead.

The little monster’s temple. The ghost of his mind, born again into the umbral plane.

I watched as the god who saw the heavens opened a gate into it, as the dread hunter’s vessels ventured in to butcher the ghosts percolating in this dead realm, as the sorrowful Lady’s men came in after to heal their wounds.

They built a Church here to match the one in the new city for the Lady to rest inside.

They set down seals to guard the secrets of the city’s beginnings.

Time passed. Stars moved in their inexorable paths across the perpetual night sky of this midnight temple.

Every so often, one of the stars would notice this place that their brethren had taken residence in, where they could reach into mortal minds and see all the lively, fervent things that didn’t exist in the great void above.

They would come close and fall into its orbit, hoping to have a taste of that for themselves, and the monster, trapped as he was in this state between waking and death, could only watch as they were butchered and consumed by the vessels of the new order.

Decades passed. Then centuries. The monster’s anger grew.

His resentment festered. His fever dreams of rage birthed new, frightful shadows that lurked in the city they built, in the corpse of his mind.

How dare they use him like this; how dare they treat him with such indignity while they basked in veneration.

He was a prince. This land was rightfully his.

Stars continued to fall, and the new order grew stronger.

More pacts were made with the Odious Tinkerer, the Heavenseer, the Weeping Lady—and the Dread Beast, the sinner who had lain with a queen.

In the mortal realm, the court of betrayers became unstoppable, and their vessels were worshipped as holy men.

The monster waited and slept and yearned for release from this ceaseless undeath. Every now and then, someone would aspire to unbind him. They would speak the secret of his name and, with a sacrifice worthy of the one his sire had made, waken him briefly from his long slumber.

But they were always the same. The same kind of men who had butchered him in the first place. Hungry for power, small-minded, and more boring than the monotony of his death. He woke and despaired and slept again to dream of one day destroying the ones who had done this to him.

And then, finally, something changed. A man just like the others stirred him with blood. But this time there was something else.

Another soul. A lonely girl with an empty space in her heart.

One that he recognized from a half-forgotten dream.

The monster reached for her, this girl who was as bitter and frightened as he was, and she reached back.

She gave him a name. She imagined him charming, so he learned how to make her laugh; she imagined him beautiful, so he left behind the old memories of his twisted flesh body, only keeping his mother’s moonlight hair—the last remnant of a dynasty no one else remembered.

He had finally found a home away from the cold and empty graveyard of his mind.

He had found his friend again.

She was not the one who had called him, but he stayed with her still. His sire saw this as he arrived at His temple; but He saw, too, all the years of debasement and agonizing tedium, and let the monster be.

And as the girl grew more bitter and angry the monster delighted, because now he had found someone who could understand his revenge. Someone who knew the injustice of the world and raged against it. Together they would make their villains pay.

That holy order of betrayers had tried so hard to keep him locked away.

To forget the sins of their foundation. They could not destroy him completely, for they needed his power still.

His eye, tucked safely into the Weeping Lady’s socket, the keystone between Sorrowsend and the umbral plane.

But they could bury the knowledge of it, a secret to be kept by only their most loyal servants—that the grail of apotheosis came from the boy abomination who cursed Kugara.

I could finally see it.

When I put all the pieces together in my mind, the word that formed on my tongue was—

“Aster.”