Chronicles of a Falling Empire [Bloodstained, Bloodshed]

the living breathe, they talk and think
they love, they fight, they learn, they drink.
we all have souls to trade away
the cards are dealt, the Ladies play.

"The Soul Trade," Verse 1

It's been six moons since the snake's last vole. Hel has been unkind before, but never this unyieldingly. The snake slithers through the underbrush and scents with his tongue. Subtle changes in vibration and texture—the expedition is different from his usual hunt. The foliage is suffocating. The trees are closing in.

The forest is different tonight. Even the chiggers agree.

Lady Life has returned. We ascend!

She frees us!

Freedom. Freedom! FREEDOM!

The snake pays no attention to the pests. They've claimed the grasses, and their beetle-like crunch won't nourish him. Lateral undulation propels him forward, and hunger propels him onward. Pressure on his side scales, and (ooh!) his side scales are sensitive. Branches. Leaves. Vegetation. Warped edges push against him, scratch him, violate his body.

One scent prolongates his hiss. Artificially sweet, stinkingly strong. The snake knew it in a past life, knew it or feared it. Slink to safety, the scent says, but the snake can't afford to flee. He's growing weak, hasn't had speed on his side for some time now. Soon he won't be strong enough to leave his underground lair. He was imprisoned there after his first life. Shriveled and decayed, betrayed by his body, condemned to eternal starvation. That was Hel. If a tarantula had not wandered into his den he'd be trapped there still. There is only one rule that matters to beasts of the wood. To eat is to move. To move is to breathe. To breathe is to live.

The snake catches another scent, moves toward it. A ground squirrel drinks from the pool at the edge of the riverbank. It's in his mouth before it can squeal. Quivering, warm, wet.

Delicious.

If it has a name, you shouldn't eat it, chides a voice.

A series of muscular contractions move the squirrel down his throat. It stops twitching.

Future-reading, says the voice. In Ko's next life, he'll be the hunter and you'll be the prey.

The snake's mouth wrenches open. His jaw snaps from the sudden force. The squirrel peels from his jowls and splats to the ground in a glob of fluid—salivation and toxin from the snake's glands. Blood from the kill-bite, and (ooh!) it smells sweet. The snake does not understand what it means to love, but if he did, he'd love the smell of blood. Blood would be his everything. Blood would wake him up and put him to sleep. Nothing in Hel smells as wonderful as blood. Nothing.

Even so, the snake doesn't chomp the bloody mess back up. Prey is not usually ripped from his hungry mouth and cast upon the ground. The snake has spent countless years in Hel across various sentences, and he is wise to the ways of the wind. It has never blown this way before.

Once again, the voice hisses by on the breeze. This time, the sound fills him with a deep and pulsing dread. It is an angry voice. You killed a Lady's plaything, the voice says. Pray for forgiveness.

The snake recoils, flees, stops suddenly as the river begins to gurgle. First a bubble and then a churning whirlpool, white with moonlight and froth. The riverbed soil falls through an opening descending down. Cascades of water follow in a roaring rush.

The being that ascends from the river is naked. She rises from the water—or the cavern below—dry as cracked earth. Tangled hair covers her breasts. Her legs are long. Like tree trunks, the snake thinks. Inviting, climbable. There are lots of places to bite. He wants to sink his teeth into her, carnally so.

"If you bite me, I'll bite you harder," warns the woman.

She speaks in hisses, salivating. Her jaw unlatches like his own does. The snake understands her tongue, and with this understanding comes knowledge of who she is. This being is a Lady. Her incarnate fleshes are how Life itself can walk this world, if the chiggers are to be believed.

Lady Life offers him an interesting proposition. She'll feed him if he covers her.

Good by the snake.

When the being reaches the bank, he winds himself around her leg. He's as thick as her arm and the length of her body, and he does not squeeze as he coils around her waist and breasts. She moves his rattle to cover her belly button and the crop of curls below.

Perhaps, the snake thinks, she came bare because she plans to hunt her new skins.

He likes this idea.

She might feed him the scraps of whatever—whoever—clothes her next.

###

Brid closes the door, leaving the adults seated around the table. Sighing, Segolé fills Lefe's pipe with malloweed, takes a hit, and opens his eyes.

An incarnate of the fifth Lady—called Time, Luck, or Fate—weaves in the clearing: His wife, Reign, separated though they may be. Reign must have known he'd need her tonight, must be smoking the same plant as he wherever she is in the Fifth Circuit, and therefore joining him here. Her textured, graying hair braids back into a crown. Blue skirts hang around her chair, rolling and cresting. Blinding light surrounds her. Segolé's never been sure if Reign causes the mysterious energy when she enters the time web—maybe she embodies it. He squints when he looks at her.

Killián's dinette is gone. Reign's glow illuminates the surrounding terrain. They're in the woods—he can see the upper towers of Le Château du Roi Dieu peeking over the tree line. It's nighttime. Cold. At the center of the clearing, Reign touches her loom like a lover. Tensioned threads rise, horizontal and parallel, from warp beam to warp beam. Heddles—wire loops—attach the strings to a harness. Reign adjusts the shaft, controlling the warp threads as they're lifted and lowered. Weft yarn passes through.

Segolé hacks to clear his throat. Damn cigs.

"Where are we?" he asks, then realizes that's a stupid question—they're in the Célestial Forest, clearly. "When are we?"

"A night hunt," Reign says. "The living hunt deer. The dead hunt the living."

Night hunt. Segolé came up with the military academy tradition when he first took a lanista job some forty years back. Médéric, Killián's father, gave him shit for retiring from combat (same Médéric who went after his sons like they were enemies, so Segolé never argued the case. Médéric's kids would be a-o-kay if Father-deary took a blade from a Xob.) Hopefully this hunt is in the future and Segolé's flesh vessel is in the crypt. If dead were stalking the living during his Sunday games, Killián and Lefe would put a stop to it.

Then again, this shitshow with Leómadura proves they know jack squat about what goes on at L-DAW.

Once upon a time, the fifth Lady's lord was omniscient in the web. He needs help to know the time but these days, Fate's two known incarnates are useless. Genevieve's rogue and Reign can't—won't—play tour guide. Woven, enigmatic, never-ending. That's marriage—and the time web as it's become. Without a functional and non-retired fifth Lady in the lands of the living, Segolé's a pinprick of fiber in four worlds of woven thread. No idea which tapestry he's a part of, whose fate Reign is weaving. She'll make this hard on him. She always does, these days, but it's better than dealing with Genevieve's bullshit.

Reign uses a comb-like reed—mounted in a frame called the beater—to push the yarn into place after each insertion. The take-up roll winds the fabric as it's formed, allowing continuous weaving without excessive fabric accumulation. Segolé's never seen Reign lose her place, but there's a first time for everything, and he lives in fear of the day when he won't be able to find his way out.

"I assume you have a riddle for me?" Segolé says. "That's why we're here, isn't it?"

The web curls around them as she weaves, closing in. Everything is gold, gold, gold. Segolé can barely make out the details of Reign's face—she's turning gold too. Forever immortalized in this moment, deep in the depths of the time web.

"We're still married," she says—it's not a question. "You need me. That's why we're here."

The marriage is a technicality—they've been separated since 199 GKE. It's been four years. Seventeen since she retired as Lady Fate. They still see each other on holidays and when their boys need a united front, but damn it, it's not the same. She doesn't look at him. Why would she? The Segolé she married was forty years younger—he thought the sun shone out of her tits and ass. Her Segolé was fresh out of L-DAW, a three-titled denmaster by honor, an up-and-coming lord by bloodline. Her Segolé held the bottle instead of the other way around. Reign knew where they'd end up—she saw their future in the time web before they wed—but she married him anyway. When she moved to Arcadia, she said she knew on their wedding night they'd die in separate beds. Not what you want to hear from your bride of four decades.

"How are our sons?" Her fingers brush the loom. "They haven't been born. Already I miss them."

"No idea what you mean," he says.

"Your apathy is indicative of our underlying problem," she says. "You want your riddle? Fine. Rash as Baumé, wise as Fate. Missing Loss, she saves the snake. Life grows weak, the grass won't grow. The river opens, stops her flow. Who is she?"

Lefe is lucky to still be semi-coherent, putting up with this nonsense every time he wants a consult with his wife, the incarnate since Reign retired. But Fate's been glitchy since Genevieve went rogue—they say she eats human flesh now, and that's where she's gotten power since the divorce. Poems and riddles, riddles and poems. Fate's job is a simple exchange—an explanation for an answered riddle. Reign could at least make it easy like she once did—she used to give him hints. Why does Lefe keep coming back when he's never known Lady Fate as helpful? How does he still have hope?

Segolé, at least, has memories of who Reign once was.

The seconds drag on for eternity. Time has no meaning. Fate weaves her tapestry.

"You've wasted a century," Reign chides. "You know the rules—answer a question, ask a follow-up."

The rules are actually play along or stay here for eternity. There are people waiting on him back home, so Segolé doesn't spend a lot of time weighing the options. Rash as Baumé, wise as Fate. An incarnate or a conduit—female or male respectively—anyone who's wise and rash. Could Lefe's ex-wife have something to do with Ko? Is Genevieve the answer to the riddle, or the mastermind behind it?

Missing Loss, she saves the snake. Female pronoun—could be Leclère. Life grows weak, the grass won't grow. Checks out with the Leclère theory—the history tracks. Sister to six male titans, Mistress to all who breathe, incarnate to Lady Life. Etcetera etcetera. If a person was ever able to keep grass from growing through sheer willpower, it would've been Leclère. Lore says when she was twelve, she snuck off her mother's estate to join her father on the frontline, disguising herself as a flag boy so her brothers wouldn't catch her. According to her journals, she was discovered after eating the head off a dead frog—dare from a platoonmate—and projectile vomiting on Yosif.

Segolé considers this a fine assertion of dominance. He has no qualms with the woman.

Problem is, Leclère's a titan—she retained her memories after death, as well as her connection to a Lady. There are only seven titans (that we know of, Segolé reminds himself) and they aren't supposed to cross into the lands of the living. It's the Septemvirate's job to keep them out, and Life's living incarnate—Lady Aui—has never mentioned an encounter with Leclère. Killián hasn't mentioned one either, and Yosif—another titan—would be hunting his missing sister from the Lands of the Dead. If Leclère's back, at least one of the churches is covering it up. Or maybe Segolé's overthinking this. What if the answer to the riddle is Aui? The river opens, stops her flow. Metaphor for menstruation? Do ladies keep their moon cycle in the afterlife worlds? Aui or Leclère? They're both incarnates for Lady Life—it could be either.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Hard to tell how long she's been weaving. Five hundred years, give or take.

"Leclère," he guesses.

"Correct," she says. "You may ask a question."

Fuck yes. He knew it couldn't be Aui. Everything about that woman screams smoke and mirrors.

"What's happening with Ko?" Segolé says.

"We've already had this conversation," Reign says. "I don't know. I don't care. Well, you should—her name's Leclère."

Segolé loses the last of his patience, not that he had much to begin with.

"Future-reading—I'm gonna tell Ko that he'll survive the next few months," he says.

"He'll be dead within a week," Reign says. "The snake digests the squirrel as we speak."

What the actual fuck? The kid will be dead in a week? How in Hel is he supposed to give that little prophesy to Killián? Ladies and gentlemen, Lady Fate—her predictions are accurate, and Ko's going to die. Isn't that spectacularly helpful? Isn't she a peach? Segolé opens his eyes. He's in Killián's dinette.

Lady Fate stays in the past, where she belongs.

###

A murder of crows descends upon the forest. Reign flies among them, envelops them, becomes them.

###

Two girls hold hands in the backland meadows, illuminated by moonlight. They pray quiet prayers in the hopes of spending tomorrow together.

The deadcrows scatter.

###

A boy—not Marix, not Ko—waits for the girls to be done with their ritual. Hyacinth is of the opinion that Zeph and Rypress are wasting time—they have a night hunt to win. Instead they're making wishes on a clover like goddamn schoolgirls. He's not losing to a pack of grunts and Saxxon. He'd never live it down.

"Quit stalling," he calls.

"Piss off," says Rypress.

Maybe the interlude is understandable. The backland meadows are romantic, Hyacinth supposes—not that he has a girlfriend to enjoy them with. He drops his spear on the ground, kneels in the meadow, puts his face in his hands, and imagines.

The woman dressed in snake approaches. So does Reign. Hyacinth can't see or hear them, but he's a believer who's chosen Lady Fate. He knows she's watching him—omniscient, omnipresent, beside all her subjects, in all her subjects. She's more than her incarnates—they're just her walking minds. Her believers are her bodies.

Reign relates Hyacinth's story to the woman dressed in snake as she passes: He enlisted to make his parents proud and protect the realm, in that order. As a child, he did chores on the family farm and played with his siblings. A quiet, obedient boy who neighbors describe as good and normal. His childhood was plagued by intensely pleasurable visions of rhythmically stabbing his mother. Sometimes he got off on them. He usually imagines doing the deed with a hunting knife, sometimes with his father's switchblade. Dissecting rats fueled these urges instead of sating them, so he left home. He's never acted on these impulses—he's not a monster. He's just curious what it would feel like to kill someone he loves. Sometimes he plays out the scene in his head.

Simple as that.

"We've all been there!" says the woman dressed in snake.

Reign does not agree, but she brushes a kiss on Hyacinth's bowed head as she passes. He doesn't feel it, but a shiver racks his body.

They go their separate ways and leave Hyacinth to his fantasies.

###

Deep in the Célestial Forest, three loupwolves drink from the river. The oldest and grayest—the packmaster—smells a dead squirrel and the surrounding tracks. The shape of the print is human, but the scent is off. Ancient, decaying, rotten. A caribou corpse left one too many days in the hot sun. The meat would poison a hungry cub.

The wolf's maw drips, blurring the footprint as he sniffs.

He goes back to drinking.

###

Four lancers play cards beneath Vandame's willow. A liar, a cheater, a gambler, a conman. They're supposed to be hunting grunts, but instead they pass around a flask. Who cares—it's the middle of the night. Too early to be working, and they're making overtime sitting on their asses.

None of them notice the woman dressed in snake.

She pauses her march to watch them. One man—the liar—remembers a time when he was five years old. He looked out the window of his parent's farmstead and saw…something. Blue-lips, waterlogged body, face pressed against the glass. The woman—she wasn't human—grinned at him. Rotting flesh peeled off her cheeks like cheese, and tendons snapped like taut string. Her jawbone clattered to the wooden pane.

"L'Angly drowned me in a well," the thing said in a horrible, cracking voice. "He should've known I wouldn't stay there. Will you help me find my serpent?"

The lancer screamed himself awake. His mother scolded him for soiling the sheets.

He carries the jaw in his kitbag—even now—as proof the titan Leclère is a witchy, time traveling she-demon. Even so, the lancer chose Lady Life as his patron. If he must pick a team, which he must, he doesn't want to play against whatever that thing was.

When he shows the other lancers his bone, they laugh. Too misshapen to be a human jaw—too angled, too serpentine. Almost got us, buddy. Maybe next time.

###

West of the Norrington Streambed, a boy plunges the javelin tip of a sacred scythe into the heart of a fawn. The girl beside him doesn't scream. She turns around when he tells her to, and he straps the blade to her back. The boy hoists the deer over his shoulders.

Hidden by shadows and crouched behind a tree, a man ejaculates onto the dirt. He wipes his hand on moss. Watching isn't enough. It's never enough.

The deer is carted off. The man follows at a distance. The blood dries—hard and crusty— and twigs snap once more.

The woman dressed in snake moves through the forest like a ghost—man on a mission, woman on a quest, spirit possessed. Who is she? What is she? Is she a she? The woman knows her name and little else, but she remembers quickly—she's a titan, after all, Lady Leclère in all her glory. She stops before the den where children killed the deer. At the clump of trees—obscured by shadows—she bends at the hips and palms the forest floor.

Her fingers brush lichen and a smattering of white sludge.

"Where there's lust, there's L'Angly," she tells the snake. "Let's get you fed."

A good idea. On this, she and the snake agree.

###

Below the dirt, worms wriggle blindly for damp ground. Recharge from the morning rains replenishes the earth. Water seeps through rock, forming underground aquifers. The path of least resistance flows downhill, frolicking into springs before rejoining the stream bed. From there, the Hurrington River follows a straight path to Les Rivières de Lady Hope, where it eventually rejoins the ocean.

###

The woman dressed in snake takes her newest companion to Vandame's willow, where the girl with missing toes offered flesh, blood, and bones to Lady Death. Children paying off debts that aren't theirs—that was when the empire began to fall, thinks Leclère.

The tree has an elegant, graceful appearance. It's tall as twenty men stacked on top of each other, with long, slender branches that droop and sway. Waxy leaves and swaying catkins provide a curtain, obscuring the trunk from view. The woman dressed in snake— Leclère—does not break stride, and the veil of greenery parts before her like a sea. She walks to the trunk and touches the carved equations.

A.D. + B.N.D.V

<3

And below that:

/.D. + J.D.V

Someone scratched the bottom message off the wood. The first letter could be anything with an upward slant. The tree expands as the woman strokes the slash. Catkins bloom to fruit—apples and oranges, persimmons and grapefruit.

"Take your pick," Leclère tells the snake. "This tree offers life."

Snakes do not eat such a thing, the serpent tells her. Neither should humans.

"We are neither snake nor human," says Leclère. "Yosif won't know what we've stolen until it's too late. Have an apple, Marix."

The names trigger long-lost memories.

The snake reminds Leclère—not kindly—that the ascended Lord of Death (Yosif?) gets persnickety when people eat his fruit. Marix made that mistake in a past life. Now he's a snake, and he's perfectly content with a ground squirrel or two. Ground squirrels smell like blood and goodness. The fruit she holds before him has…an odd scent. One that does not belong in a forest. The same stench he smelled earlier. Artificial. Sweet. Poisonous.

If she wants to eat the apple, fine. The snake would prefer something warm and bloody.

"Do you want to stay dead?" she asks. "I'd rather be alive."

The snake does not particularly care if he lives or dies. He's a snake. He's hungry, and he was promised food. This is not a meal. This is grand larceny. Leclère is mistress of every breathing thing in these woods—he believes that—but the tree does not breathe, so Leclère does not own the tree. This tree should not be disturbed. Not by Leclère, and not by the snake.

The snake tells Leclère to return the apple and get him a ground squirrel or something.

Leclère sighs.

"I'm not above force feeding my pets," she says.

There's no time to react, flee, or drop from the woman's body. The snake's jowls wrench open once more. He hisses, sprays venom from his glands. Droplets of his fluids hit her face. They bubble like the river did, evaporating into clouds of steam that rise to join the starlight.

Something very hard and very whole jams its way down his throat.

Muscles flex and contract.

The snake has no choice but to swallow.

###

Marix wakes up in a medi-center, in a body that is not his own.

You sweet, simple thing, he says, but he's not sure who he's talking to—Leclère, or the boy who conjured him. Lady Loss has a new conduit—one who's destined to die, if the wind's whispers are to be believed. If Ko makes it the full week, he'll have lasted longer than the last lad. He won't, though, because Lady Fate has spoken—that, Marix knows.

Marix's mouth tastes of apple. What have you gotten us into? he asks, but he already knows the answer. He'll live in this body for a few days, and then he'll die with it.

Lady Fate's dice have rolled, and the boy is damned.

###

If I can't trust my sisters, I can't trust anyone, Ko tells Marix after bringing him up to speed on the abominable shitshow that is Ko's life.

Now you get it, Marix says.

There's not much to get. Having siblings sucks. Marix's brothers killed him, which was not ideal. Lady Loss took a few conduits after his death, one incarnate, and they killed those too—and quickly at that. In his last life, Marix's sister wrapped him around her naked body—shirt, fig leaf, pet, whatever—which Marix thinks is debatably grosser than murder.

He misses being a snake.

All he wanted was the squirrel.

###

"Can you tell me the future?" Ko asks Segolé once the kids return to the dinette. "How does all this play out?"

Segolé tries not to feel anything when he looks at Ko—really, he does. Sure, the kid is damned for death within a week—but Segolé's had kids die on him before. It's an occupational hazard of teaching the next generation of military leaders. The fact that it's a regular occurrence doesn't make it hurt less, though, and it feels like a knife is twisting into him as he meets the kid's gaze.

Segolé does the only thing he can think of when faced with the prospect of telling a fifteen-year-old he has less than a week to live. He lies his ass off.

"You'll survive the next few months," he says. "Probably."

"Lady Fate told you that?" the kid asks.

"You didn't choose Fate," Segolé says. "You can't consult with her."

He'll be burned to death, or decapitated, or dismembered—or he'll die on the frontline. Does it really matter how Fate takes him home? She's rolled her dice, and he's marked for the Lands of the Dead. If Segolé can help the kid sleep easier tonight, well, that's a good thing. Kid's got a week left, maybe less.

Might as well make it a good one.

###

"Genevieve's gone rogue, Lefe," Ko says. "Your lady, your responsibility. Stand before me, and answer for the crimes of your church."

Something dark—akin to wrath—bleeds into Lefe's gaze.

"You have no idea what you're doing, conduit," he says.

"I have no idea what I'm doing," Ko agrees. "That's never stopped me before. Let the trials begin."

Oh honey, Marix thinks, an invited guest at Killián's table. If Ko is welcome, so is he—that's the only rule that matters now. Ko's the conduit, he's the titan, and Loss is their Lady. Invisible and unseen, memory the spirit, the past in the present. They've already started.

###

Deep in the Célestial Forest, a snake picks up a scent.

A ground squirrel drinks from the pool at the edge of a riverbank.

It's in his mouth before it can squeal. Quivering, warm, wet.

Delicious.

A series of muscular contractions move the squirrel down his throat. It stops twitching. The snake returns to his den, sated.

Within him, a river of digestion fluids transform flesh into energy.