Page 75 of House of the Beast

“You poor, feeble-minded fuckup,” Aster tutted.

“You truly thought this would be it. This would be your chance to prove that you were something more than a second-rate shadow, a self-absorbed, self-important waste of good blood. I have to hand it to you—you were creative, at least. Summoning an ancient abomination just to prove something, no matter how many died as a result of your actions. And congratulations! It worked.” He smiled, slow and hurtful. “But I don’t choose you.”

There was a moment when the look on my father’s face could only be described as devastation. It almost took me aback. I hadn’t thought him capable of anything like it.

As quickly as it had appeared, it was overtaken by sheer animal rage. He ripped his sword out of Aster’s grasp and lunged for him.

“You dare!” he roared. “You exist because of me. I was the one who brought you here!”

“I existed long before you came along,” said Aster coldly, flickering into thin air as my father’s sword plowed through the space where he had been standing.

He materialized again a mere step away, taunting.

“You were a vehicle to be manipulated and it was so easy to feed those plans into your head. I let you kill the star so you would spare us the effort of dragging you here. The Beast was only too happy to enable me. He has His debt to be paid.”

My father roared again, bearing down on Aster with his blade.

He still held it in his metal hand. He was trying to call the Dread Beast’s power, the power he had fed with the felling of a star, the one thing that should have ensured his victory no matter the situation.

But I could tell that something was not right.

His movements had lost that fluid grace I’d seen in the Avera temple, in the trial against the Meister’s Thing. He was off-balance.

His blade cleaved toward my monster’s neck and all of a sudden stopped.

Aster had his left hand held aloft, palm facing upward. “By my decree,” he said, “the Dread Beast no longer favors Zander Avera.”

In one violent movement, my father’s hand swung back, and his sword buried itself deep into his shoulder.

His cry echoed through the Church. My hands jerked at my sides before I forced them to relax.

Even though I hated him, even though I had waited for this for so long, a part of me found it hard to watch him die.

My mother had loved this man once. She had seen something good in him and cared enough to bear him a child.

Sevelie had loved him too, emboldened by their shared passions.

Even I, in my darkest moments, had once craved his acceptance.

I could not help but mourn for the version of him that he could have been.

The father I had needed and never gotten.

His knees hit the ground. His sword had gone through his collar completely, through his right shoulder blade and part of his rib cage, to lodge inside his chest. He scrambled for the hilt with his other hand as if to try and pull it out, but the movement only made him cry out again in pain.

Blood gushed onto the ground in steady spurts.

His shoulder began to gape apart from the flesh of his torso, exposing muscle and bone.

“Your offering of flesh is accepted,” said Aster.

My father laughed. Air wheezed out wetly from his wound; his lung was probably punctured. His eyes, already glazing over, went to me.

“Well played,” he gasped through his bloody teeth. “You really are just like me. My stupid, useless daughter.”

He let out one last wet, stuttering breath, and went still. His eyes dulled. His body listed to the side and then toppled over, the sword, still stuck in his torso, knocking dully against the ground.

Aster went to his corpse, to the eye still held in my father’s hand, and plucked it from his grasp. He held it up, considering.

“Mine again at last,” he said.

He swallowed it whole.

The eye on his forehead closed, and when it opened again, it glowed with celestial light.

And then the screaming began.

Distant cries drifted through the brilliant serenity of the Weeping Lady’s Church.

At first I thought it was my imagination; after all, there was nobody outside.

But the cries soon grew into a cacophony, and among them were the unmistakable voices of women, children—regular people living in Sorrowsend.

Heart dropping to my feet, I realized what had happened.

The monster had been awakened and his temple, which for so long had been plundered by his court of betrayers, was now becoming one again with the land of his blood.

Just like how Aster’s body had become flesh, the umbral plane was melding into Sorrowsend.

Aster took my hand and grinned.

“We should go take a look,” he declared.

He led me outside, and I could do nothing but follow.

The glowing gate that had circled Sorrowsend’s skies for years had broken into pieces, like stars scattered in a canopy over the city.

Light spilled from the roof of the Church like blood from a wound and cast everything in a sickly glow.

The Lady’s blackened blood had seeped into the waterways to spread like a plague through the streets.

As we stood at the top of the stairs, I saw the doors of nearby buildings slam open to spit their inhabitants out, pursued by shadows.

The city roused from its revelry and roiled into a panic.

Aster’s expression was bright and vicious. He let go of my hand and positioned himself facing south toward the court’s buildings, then raised his hand as if to hold the city within its palm.

“By my decree,” he declared, “the Court of Divine Hearers shall be no more.”

His fingers curled in like he was crushing something between them. With a great crash, the banquet hall we had danced in together only days ago collapsed in on itself, glass shattering, stone crashing down. Dust and debris billowed into the air. The screams grew louder.

“This place is mine now,” my monster said triumphantly. “As it always should have been. And now that eyesore is finally gone, thank the heavens. I hated when they put it there.”

“Aster,” I said.

“Hmm?” he hummed distractedly, still gazing at the city that now belonged to him.

I swallowed my fear. I forced my voice even. “Don’t do this,” I said.

The exuberant energy that had been near radiating out of him dispersed like warm breath in a winter wind. He looked at me, head tilted to the side as if puzzled.

“Don’t do this?” he repeated lightly. “Why not?”

He knew why. He was going to make me argue with him anyway. “People will die.”

“Yes,” he said viciously. “They will—as they deserve. They are guilty, all of them.”

“Not all of them.” I shook my head, pleading. “Some of them are good. Innocent.”

He scoffed, that bright smile morphing into something ugly. “Innocent? They’ve been living off my remains for centuries. They’ve prospered off the actions of my murderers and would have happily kept doing so if I let them.”

“They didn’t know,” I beseeched. “You can’t punish all of them for the sins of their forebears.”

“I can if it means I will be free of the punishment given to me simply for being born.”

I should have known by now how stubborn he could be, but I had hoped that he would listen to me.

“You said you would do anything for my forgiveness,” I tried again, growing desperate. “I want you to stop.”

His face fell. “You know I can’t, Alma,” he said, sounding in that moment like nothing more than the lost young man that he was.

I had suspected as much. This merging of the two realms was his birthright.

His was the existence between humanity and godhood.

Had he been allowed to live, he might have eventually accomplished something just like this.

But his death had guaranteed it. The umbral plane was all that had been left of him—and now that he was awakened and walked the mortal realm once more, it came along with him.

“We can figure out something else,” he tried. “Anything else you want, and I promise I will do my utmost.”

“No, Aster,” I said. My heart felt like it was breaking. “It’s not going to work like that.”

He was quiet. Chaos raged around us. Knights of the Church swarmed the streets, trying fruitlessly to control the frenzied masses, but terror had spread as quickly as the black water through the city.

There would be no hiding inside homes, waiting for the worst to pass.

There was no containing it. Even if I went down there and fought until my last breath, I would not change a thing.

It was the end of the world as we had known it, and the birth of a new one.

When Aster spoke again, his voice was hard.

“Haven’t I given you everything you wanted?” he demanded.

“You have.”

“I killed your father for you.”

“I know.”

“All I ever wanted was for you to stay by my side.”

“Not like this,” I managed through the lump in my throat.

His expression turned bitter, and finally I could see a bit of the monster through that perfectly crafted veneer. “You’d give me up for them?”

I thought of the lonely little boy whose face had broken into a smile when I’d reached out to him. Of my own childhood, finding comfort in an unseen friend. He would always be my love. I reached for him. “That isn’t—”

“That’s exactly what this is!” He began pacing back and forth in agitation.

“This is because of those people. Your cousin’s fiancée.

That clockwork Thing. I told you that you shouldn’t have gotten close to them!

And those two vessels of the Heavenseer—they were a part of this, you know?

The Heavenseer knew! All of them, scions of the Houses that betrayed me. ”

He pivoted on his feet, a furious whirlwind. His hand raised again.

He was facing Sevelie’s home.

“If you won’t listen to reason while they’re around,” he declared grimly, “they’ll just have to go. By my decree—”

I had drawn my sword and lunged at him before my senses could hold me back. It hadn’t been an attack with true intent to hurt, only to make him stop—but he had been slow to dodge, surprised by my action as he was. He staggered backward. A line of red bloomed across his cheek.

He brushed his fingers against it, then stared at the blood on them with wide eyes.

“After everything, it’s come to this?” he asked me.

“I won’t let you hurt them,” I said, my pulse thudding almost too hard for me to hear my own words. I wanted to cry—but I had cried enough for one day. “And I won’t let you hurt all those people down there either. It’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong is how they’ve used me all these years!

” he yelled back. “Kept forever undying, feeling every brick they piled upon my bones to build this city! Of course it’s wrong—but should I just keep lying there, stuck in a dream, until they have no more need of my corpse?

I thought you of all people would have understood. ”

I did understand. I understood all too well.

I had stepped on a lot of toes in my quest for revenge.

I had ruined lives and ended many more that I had not wished to end.

It was only coincidence that my goals had aligned with the greater good.

That stopping my father had given me, momentarily, the moral high ground.

Aster’s revenge, however justified, came at the cost of thousands of lives. Nothing would change that. There was no way to erase the past—to give him back a life not tied to the ghost of his mind.

He had only wanted to live again. To be free of his immortal prison. I understood.

But I also knew that if I didn’t do anything to stop him, I would not be able to live with myself afterward. No matter how happy I would have been staying by his side, no matter what forgiveness he sought—I would never have peace again with myself.

Aster looked at me. The anger faded from his expression and was replaced with anguish. He had always known me so well.

“I can’t back down now, Alma,” he said to me, softly and full of regret.

“I know,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I raised my sword. For the second time tonight, and for the first time with true, grievous intent, I pointed my blade toward him. “Neither can I.”