Parsec

Curdled flesh. Cristae. Mud and snow. Venera’s ghost-touch shimmered over her truncated fingertips. Parallax should not have done that.

“You were gone for far longer than before,” Parsec asserted. “I was right to come when you were being attacked by that…creature.”

Predecessor was holding place. Six-wing. Feather-grip.

“What’s she saying?” Jackal asked warily.

“That I took an unnecessary risk.” Parsec tipped back the last of her samphire soup and called her two skeletal birds to her. “I will try to allow Venera to enter a body now. They are coming, and they may look unusual, but they are only bones articulated with magic. Do not be alarmed.”

Necromancer.

She sighed. “To be clear: it is necromancy.”

“Necromancy’s dead,” Jackal snorted.

“Perhaps not all the way. Don’t be afraid; it isn’t too different from commanding a fodder body.”

“A what?” he said, as the birds landed at her feet in a clatter of bone.

They had been a large and migratory species. The beaks and bodies resembled the usual shape, but they shouldn’t have been able to fly on the stalks which remained of their wings. Yet they did so with ease, shadowing what was true in life. One tilted its head and parted its beak in a mimicry of soul.

Jackal rubbed his eyes and reached out to touch the nearest. “Hells. How do I know you’re not just a really good illusionist?”

“You may believe that, if it comforts you.” She brought one of the birds—the one he wasn’t occupied with poking gingerly—to perch on her outstretched hand. “Here, Venera. Try, though I can’t be sure it will work at all.”

Phlogiston, Venera agreed, and Parsec sensed her pouring herself into the hollow bones. The skeleton was suffused with light. The body twitched of its own accord, beak parting, before it slipped from her grasp and…

…Crumbled into ash. One instant it was pale and whole—the next, it disintegrated into powder.

“Venera?” she asked, suddenly fearful. She’d expected inertia at worst, not the ash that clumped in her palm, drifting in flakes to settle over the sand.

“Shit,” Jackal said in the same moment. “Was that meant to happen?”

All safe, Venera said from over Parsec’s shoulder, and she jumped. Body too small. Burning consciousness, built a pyre.

“No. Thankfully, Venera is unharmed.” She shook the ash from her hand. “The bird was insufficient. Perhaps I will find something in the forest, something bigger—a deer, or we could combine pieces for a different sort of construct…” She pondered the bodies of archived Titanias, but those were far beyond her for now.

“So you’re seemingly a necromancer,” Jackal said, stepping over the remaining bird to get to his pack. “Brought magic back from the dead? Great. Just great. Try not to do that in front of other people, or they’ll really freak out. Are you done with your faery meditation stuff yet? Because if it’s all the same to you, it’d be nice to get going.”

“Quite done. Do you insist on travelling by foot?”

He began collapsing the tent with practised movements. “You’re the one who said you wanted to hide from your people.”

“I was referring to later, over the forest.”

“If you’re sure you won’t drop me.”

“I will not,” she said, and paused. Would it be alarming to tell him their wellbeings were so unfortunately intertwined? Perhaps she could use less specificity. “Due to the nature of your problem, it is likely that I may be harmed if you are…injured.”

“I told you, I’ve still got some dried meat. And the forest’ll have something.” He seemed to cheer considerably. “We could forage some herbs, even. Make a real meal of it.”

She assisted him in rolling up the tent cloth and packing away what few implements he had lying around. She commanded the skeleton-bird to gather up spoons with its beak. He took them from it with exaggerated caution but made no attempt to shoo it off. He didn’t protest when she perched it on her shoulder, either. In minutes, they were making their way down the coast. They set upon finding a gentle slope to the clifftops; when there was none to be found, Parsec flew the both of them upward.

As they traversed the cliffs—Parsec ensured Jackal kept a healthy distance from the edge—they discussed how to best keep a supply of meat available and the merits of stopping to smoke or dry anything they hunted. He claimed it would take two weeks by foot, but she was sure she could manage it faster. Eventually, Venera wished to speak and she found herself obliged to translate.

“Venera wishes for you to know your problem is an incubation,” she started. “That the…eating and your hunger is not the intention of the aponeurosis so much as your body’s attempt to stave it away with enough food, enough flesh, and enough magic. So we will do what we can, but the Archivist-frond…ah.” She became distracted. “She’s a frond? Is that the correct word? Was Orion the ortet?”

No. Thought that his predecessor touched the eggshell, or…ambient leakage. Unintentional. There were others. Venera knows not if those survived.

“You’ve lost me,” said Jackal.

“Apologies. What Venera means to say, is: do not fear the hunger so much. If it were not there, you would be worse off.”

He gave her a flat look. “Don’t see how that helps me, but thanks.”

They moved on to less tense topics of conversation and reached the forest by afternoon. The trees cast deep puddles of shadow, and grew thicker and taller the further out they went. The dark flowers which gave it its human-name were beginning to bloom in abundance, speckling the land and twining up the branches of every sapling. She knew this went on for some hundred-hundred miles or more.

“We should fly,” she said impatiently.

Jackal must be used to walking many hours a day, but he didn’t complain. They drifted over the treetops, her bird swooping maneuvers below. Jackal asked questions about the necromancy, which she found difficult to answer. She made the bird do flips and rolls instead. It kept the both of them somewhat entertained.

But she couldn’t fly forever, and she wasn’t used to carrying such weights for so long, especially with half her fingertips still missing. By the time the sun dipped below the horizon, she was very tired. But descend she must—they needed to eat and sleep, after all. She did so with great and begrudging reluctance. They found a small clearing among the brambles and bracken, and Parsec cleared it further with testy sweeps of her chitin-blades. Her spines bristled at the sight of the ever-present night-blooming flowers, their petals sprawling like a taunt.

Pentachlorophenols, Venera said knowingly.

“Something wrong?” Jackal asked.

“No, nothing. A campfire will suffice, but those flowers don’t burn well. I will…find a lookout.”

She fluttered into the leafiness of the canopy before her carapace could start to prickle and began weeding out nearby flowers. Watching through her bird’s senses was easy; she got an impression of heat and light as Jackal started a small fire. A light breeze sprung up, and it began wafting all of the pollen to her face. She sneezed. When he called out that the food was done—bunches of samphire and biscuits so dry they had to be soaked in hot water to chew—she sent her bird to fetch it.

“Place some in its mouth,” she called, opening the bird’s beak obligingly.

“Can’t you get it yourself?” he asked, but he did it anyway.

She chewed on wilted samphire while looking at the moon, pausing every now and again to scratch at an imaginary prickle on her carapace. For all its abundance, there was a reason the Nightbloom forests hadn’t been colonised by her kind. Despite herself, she fell asleep, and the reason presented itself the next morning.

“What the…?” Jackal asked as she dropped from her tree.

The cursed creatures had found her, despite her choice of perch. They fastened themselves to her spines and wingtips, small in body but many in number. They had bodies like leeches, or perhaps maggots, only wreathed in distinctive papery husks. This, at least, made them easy to grip. She plucked them off by the handful, tossing them aside as she rose from her landing crouch. She would have enlisted the bird’s help, but its beak was too large and clumsy to help peck them away.

“Parasites,” she answered curtly, clawing at another weeping cluster. “They feed in the flowers. Short-lived. Active at night. We call them…frillteeth? Yes, the meaning is similar. Don’t worry, they don’t like humans. Unless you have a lot of chitin in your body? No? Then you are safe.”

“And you’re just walking that off?” he asked, eyeing the writhing bodies in the grass.

Parsec squashed a particularly engorged frilltooth underfoot. “I am in discomfort, not danger. But they’ll tear through a Hive in weeks and harm fledglings, especially in the earlier instars…” She trailed off, shaking her head to dislodge the last few. The sheen of her carapace was left pockmarked where clusters had fed. The wounds would heal by tonight, only to be made afresh. “It isn’t good. A Hive would do well here if they were eradicated, but they love the entire forest and aren’t edible. Even if they were, these flowers…” She sneezed. “…They are unpleasant.”

“At least you won’t run into your people here,” he offered.

“At least not,” she growled, summoning her bird to her arm. “Let’s make haste. The scent of their feeding draws many more, even in the daylight hours.”

Jackal shouldered his pack and stepped around the puddles of parasites. “Weren’t you looking for bones and things for your uh…friend? Venera?”

Venera hummed in agreement.

“We can do that while walking away from this beacon of rot.”

“How do you mean to find them, anyway?” he asked, jogging to keep up. “Do you sniff out the bones, or dead bodies too? Because as nice as it’s been knowing you, I’m not helping you deflesh a carcass.”

“That won’t be necessary. My magic would hold the body together. Let’s search.”

She flew them further south until the scent of frillteeth dissipated. Then she set Jackal down and began to hunt for dead things.

A forest was a many-layered creature in its own right. There was scent everywhere, hundreds of details vying for her attention. The soft rot of leaf litter was distinct from the tart decay of curling fungus, but neither was what she needed.

“Can you use dead wood?” Jackal had asked. “Or does it have to be bones?”

“I haven’t tried.” She curled her magic around a stick underfoot and felt it respond far too weakly. “…No, I think it has to be from an animal. Bones are much stronger than twigs. But only if they are not in pieces.”

There was an optimal amount of decay for her to use such things. She scavenged from deer remains: ribs and femurs and columns of vertebrae. Only larger bones would do. Too many points of articulation would make control difficult. She needed birds too, for their wing pieces, but the ones she found were frustratingly small.

“Can I see the map again?” she asked Jackal when they settled for their midday meal.

“Sure, if you help cook. I’m going foraging.”

“Very well. Don’t get lost.”

She perched herself by the bubbling pot and stirred idly as he strode into the undergrowth. Her bundle of bones sat nearby, trussed up with borrowed cord. Would it be enough…?

Would like wings, Venera murmured. Shadow of memory. Old body, bygone.

“I agree. Similarity in form may prevent the reaction we saw with the bird. Could we mimic wings with rib pieces?” She used her tail to drag the bundle closer and began picking up various pieces, weighing them in her free hand. By the time Jackal returned with a selection of herbs and berries, she’d sorted out some of the most promising.

Common and camphorous, Venera said as they rested and ate. Parsec could sense her prodding at the pile of bones. This deer’s head…?

“The next closest would be a human skull. I couldn’t find one.”

Jackal gave her a sideways glance, looking vaguely alarmed—it was brief enough that he probably didn’t notice her noticing.

“I wouldn’t use a human skull,” Parsec clarified, unsure of whether or not she was lying for his benefit.

Venera produced a muffled reverberation of amusement, before her tone sombered. Would you use a shell?

She hesitated. Bygone shells were just bygone shells, far lesser than they once were. But that didn’t mean they didn’t hold significance. There was a reason they weren’t thrown away, instead Archived to be kept or changed or melted as the Archives saw fit. She was certain that chitin of old thrummed through the Hive’s walls, shielding everyone within from the mammalian strangeness of the outside world.

“If it were Archived…I think I would need Orion’s permission. Or whoever they’ve replaced him with.”

Dredged one? Force your friend Archivist to teach? Or taken from the shallows and into the deeps?

“I suppose we’ll see,” Parsec answered darkly. “In the meantime, let’s try…”

She sensed both Jackal and Venera looking on with piercing interest as she assembled a chimerical skeleton. Her necromantic magic allowed her to bind pieces together and assign pivots and joints, but it was a crutch at best. The construct couldn’t stand if it wasn’t inherently well-balanced. She gave it two arms and two legs, an approximation of wings, and an articulated column of vertebrae for the tail. Finally, she crowned it with the deer’s skull. Half an antler was missing. It stared at her with hollow sockets.

“Does it look alright?” she asked dubiously.

Calvaria-eyes. May well try.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Jackal said, sounding wary. “Wouldn’t want to run into that at the back end of a crypt. Or anywhere, really.”

“Aesthetics was not my primary concern. Try it, Venera.”

Air seemed to whisk past her cheek as Venera drifted forward. That same pale light sparked around the bones as she climbed in. The construct slipped from her grasp and straightened, wing-bones flexing. It didn’t crumble to dust—but Parsec’s gaze caught on a flaking joint. The bone was slowly but surely being eaten away, as if by invisible frillteeth.

“Empty body,” Venera-the-construct rasped. “Burning soul.”

The voice was rough and grating, bone-on-bone, nothing like it had been in life. Parsec squashed down her ingratitude and supposed she was lucky to hear a voice at all.

Jackal was staring. “That’s one hells of an illusion, if it is one.”

The skull swivelled on invisible joints. “I am the predecessor. The name Venera. Would you like to speak…Jackal? Difficult to—answer better…sufficient words, in this way, no adaptation.”

“You can help me, right?” he demanded, lifting his chin. “I don’t care what you are, as long as you can help.”

The deer-skull bobbed jerkily. “Admirable intent. We will see this through. Come, Parallax—we should create…something flying, to keep us out of this…what is—hunger.” She gestured at the dark flowers.

Parsec nodded her spines and gathered the remaining bones in her arms. “I can only fly so far, but perhaps I could maintain a construct for longer. We’ll need to gather more bones—wing-parts especially, if we wish to stay above the canopies.”

“Gather?” Venera sighed. “Gather…would be…not optimal. Takes many hours. Common birdlife native to this system…too small. Why the little bones? Why not from one corpse?”

“Which corpse?” Parsec retorted. “It is as you say, Venera. They are all too small.”

Jackal sighed. “Assuming you’re really a necromancer—you want us to fly on dead creature’s backs?”

Venera answered for her. “No. We only require the one being.”

“One big enough for all of us?” He made a vague sound. “You two go ahead.”

Venera tilted her skull. “Yes. Require old scouting maps in the Archives. If you could help, Parsec?”

“I will help however I can, but we’re a long way from—ah. You mean the Archives we…brought with us.”

“Brought with you,” Venera answered with strained emphasis. “The predecessor was already dead. I am not alive. So, there is no real magic, inside of me. But I know the path…the many paths. If you would lend me some, I could take the burden of sludge-remnants from your wings and store it, and use it to be of aid.”

Parsec held out her hand. Venera grasped it and knelt before her. She bent her head, chipped antlers and all. Parsec almost stepped away. This didn’t feel right—Venera was the Titania, not some construct under her rule.

But a strange sensation between her eyes halted her mid-thought. It wasn’t painful. It just felt slow, like the trickle of a dying river. She sent Venera a portion of her magic like she would were she doing this with a fellow General. The feeling rose to nestle beneath her skin. It felt like dead fish bloating, their bodies buoyed to the surface. Handfuls of rotting scales spun away in the current. A weight drained from her skull, leaving her lightheaded.

“There,” Venera rasped, breaking contact. She rose to her feet and touched a hand to her empty sockets. “Yes. As I thought. Old wyvern nest to the east. A ripe valley. Let’s go scavenging while we can. Not too much…time…left in this body, and once it is gone we will need to find another.” Her jawbone was already starting to crumble.

===

Flying alongside a companion wasn’t unusual, but reminding herself it was Venera made her head spin. The situation was almost surreal in its mundanity. They alighted on a shrubby outcrop overlooking the wyvern nest—a huge hump of earth and shale, not unlike a crude imitation of a Hive—and crouched among the brittle leaves. Through the lingering haze of Nightbloom, she could smell stone and carcass, running water and living bodies.

“They still live here,” Parsec said, troubled. Wyverns did not live nearly as long as Behemoths, but this site must be good enough to host generations.

“Then perhaps we should hunt one.”

“By ourselves?” Parsec asked worriedly. Venera’s skeleton was flaking softly all over.

“They exile the old and dying,” Venera murmured. “Such creatures don’t know better. A straggler must be somewhere. Any season is the season for it. I will be the bait; this body will not last regardless. You have the skills I helped you find. Less painful to initiate yourself.”

“The form I used against the Archival wyrm? Perhaps, but…”

She trailed off as a breeze swept the air, information from upwind. Venera touched a hand to her wingtip and they crouched lower amongst the shrubbery.

A minute passed, then two. The air pricked at the leaves and she could hear a rhythmic buffeting, coming closer and closer. The birdsong cut out and a heartbeat later, twin shadows sleeked overhead.

“Juveniles,” Venera said once they were gone. “Not those.”

“No,” Parsec agreed.

They slithered further along the valley’s wall, anchoring themselves to branches and stone. She spotted a trio of even younger juveniles curled against the shade of the nest, but nothing more.

“No scent of rot. If any have crawled off to die, they have not died yet.” She flicked her spines in dismay.

“Peace. There’s always one or two, each season.”

“Quieter places,” Parsec suggested doubtfully.

“Yes. You lead the way.”

Scouting patterns were far less efficient with only Venera and herself to implement them, but they combed the forest from just beneath the treetops; every now and again, she glimpsed Venera’s bones weaving through the tree trunks. The sun climbed hot and high as noon approached, and it had reached its summit when Parsec glimpsed the clearing.

She perched in a tree and whistled, soft and high, sending her magic reverberating through the branches. Venera glided to her side in minutes.

“There,” she said, shifting her position on the branch to make room. She didn’t need to point.

A dozen feet ahead and far below, a wyvern slumped in the leaf litter as it lapped at a sluggish spring. Its bulk showed a suggestion of ribs, the hide dulled with age, pitted and scarred. She could picture the cavity within, the organs excavated, room enough to manipulate the bones.

“Weak enough,” Venera said. “You say when.”

Parsec hesitated. “Shouldn’t you?”

“What use would I be, leading a charge? Even if these memories were clear, never has a predecessor fought. But I am intimately familiar with sacrifice.”

Her spines chilled, twitching faintly. “You mean to destroy this body?”

“I do not think I can die more than I have already. Perhaps there will be a dormancy. Yes, I think so. It should not concern you, Parsec. It is only like how I had to…sleep without sleeping. No rest. No dream. Recuperation, if you could call it so. Just like after I forced the honey synthesis. It is hardly as if this form will last more than another day, at best.”

Parsec glanced back down at the wyvern. There was a vulnerable spot at the base of its skull, she knew, a plateau beneath a ridge of bone. She had hunted a few during her time at Glister, before becoming a General. Strong as the honey had made her, it would be far safer to rely on a distraction.

“If you’re certain.”

“Yes. Now show me.”

Parsec grimaced, recalling pain. But she had the idea of it now, the knowledge that such a thing was possible at all. She ignored the necromancy pooling in her core and reached, instead, for the shining tangle of quicksilver strength.

The fangs sprouted fast, along with venom glands and armour to insulate her from her mortality. With it came pain, but brief and gone—only physical pain and a spark of grief swiftly extinguished. She placed a hand onto her shoulder and felt the chitin respond, gathering material as she trailed her fist down her arm and tail. No little whittling knife this time; she shaped herself a hunting spear with all its weight held in the head and filled it with magic.

“On your word,” Venera said softly.

Parsec allowed herself a moment to gaze into her hollow eyes before turning her attention down to the wyvern, laying still but for the soft rise and fall of its side. The creature was far past its prime. It would only take the work of moments—if she sprang at the correct angle, if the spear was braced just so, if Venera was effective, and if she herself had ever been strong enough.

“Now,” she spoke.

Venera took off, arcing up and over. The wyvern surged to its feet, wings raised like a war warning. Its jaws parted with a muted roar as it lunged. Parsec didn’t wait for it to complete the movement before pushing off the branch.

Air whistled past, sweet and clean. Her spearhead cleared the distance a fraction of a second before she did, plunging through hide and into flesh and muscle. Jaws snapped shut. Something cracked, the sound muffled through her armour, and the air grew ripe with the smell of powdered bone. Venera gave a faint cry and flickered out. The wyvern ground its teeth, stumbling. Parsec gripped the spear, driving it deeper as the creature rocked forward and roared. Bones dropped from its parted jaws, splintered ribs clicking against shattered skull.

Parsec pulled another slice of chitin from her skin and stabbed again, deeper. Blood spurted, thin and blueish and almost scentless, darkening as it mingled with the air. She sensed its joints crumpling a moment before it fell, and the impact jarred her along every joint. Leaf litter fluttered up in a soft, rotting cloud.

The poor creature was roaring and whining, every sound creaking low with pain, almost near its end now. Her two spears of chitin were right next to each other, blocking the flow of blood. She pulled them out, the suction yielding with a wet sound. Blood gushed warm over her hands. She slid off its side and retreated a safe distance away as it thrashed and twitched, half-paralysed on the ground. The chitin melded back into her body.

“Venera?” she whispered, and there was a whisker-thin touch against her brow, melted away in moments. I am only sleeping without sleeping, it seemed to say, and she could not do more than trust this was true.

The wyvern’s movements faded as she watched, growing weaker but not still. She had struck hard, but it clearly not hard enough. Well, it usually took a whole team to make a clean kill. She gathered her resolve as it whined again, a bleak and rattling sound, and flew over to grant it some poor measure of mercy.

===

“Take your fill,” she told Jackal, gesturing loosely.

“You killed that?” He crept up to where its head lay and stared down the pile of bones, sun-dappled and loosely strewn. “And your Titania lady…?”

“Yes. It was very old.” She paused. “Venera will be fine.”

“I remember saying something about not helping you deflesh anything. Especially not anything as big as that.”

“Then I will ‘deflesh’ it myself, as you say.” She gave him a pointed look and drew a thick cleaver from her shoulder. “But you will be wanting what flesh you can harvest, first. It would be wasteful it you did not.” She flipped the implement around and offered it to him handle-first.

He hesitated, before taking it carefully.

“I can move it to your convenience if you wish,” she prompted. “Are there any particular pieces you prefer? Perhaps meat from the back will not be as tough, this one being too old to fly often.”

“The heart,” he said uneasily. “Lungs, too. Kidneys. I think—” He halted, clutching at his head. “The Library…the daemon wants the organs, mostly.”

“Good. Do not eat the brain or liver. They will poison you, cursed aponeurosis or no. Unless you humans digest differently?”

“I wasn’t going to—” His brow furrowed uneasily. “I haven’t. Unless, that oldwoods deer—”

“Deer liver shouldn’t harm you. And you didn’t seek to imbibe any brain.”

“Right,” he said shakily, looking at the cleaver. “I’ll go ahead now, yeah?”

Parsec reached into the wyvern with her cords of necromancy and heaved it onto its side so its belly faced them. “Yes. This will make it easier to cut.”

Jackal blinked, expression dawning with something inscrutable. “You can move the whole thing…” he stated.

“How else would we travel in it?” She shook her head at the sight of shadows lengthening, dark buds peering from behind every leaf. “I will make a sleeping place now, to evade the frillteeth. Try to avoid breaking any of its bones; we will need them later, for the best structural integrity. Call me if you want help.”

She flew into the canopy, thoughts already turning. She would eat what she could herself, and as for the rest…she could only manipulate movements and not the flesh itself, so she would have to gouge and tunnel. What a waste. Except, she didn’t have a Hive to provide for anymore. There would be enough scavengers to clean up her work. She would keep the hide and bones intact, she decided. What flesh she couldn’t strip would be kept relatively clean by the insect-repelling effects of the magic.

It was efficient enough, she noted with no small amount of satisfaction. There would be enough room to huddle inside the ribcage, especially if Venera was not kept corporeal. Any distant Hiver patrols would only see a lone old wyvern that was not worth hunting down.

Blood filled the air as the hours passed; occasionally, she heard Jackal cursing as he fought with the carcass. She slipped down to help carve away the tougher connective tissue and drank a cup of proffered soup as sunset blanketed the horizon. They played a listless round of dice before she returned to her perch and gazed restlessly at the sky. The flowers bloomed fully and the wind picked up, carrying sounds and scents to her. She sneezed at an errant spray of pollen. In the distance, a juvenile brayed.

More hours passed. Birdsong flickered on the breeze. No Venera. She dropped from the canopy and crept past Jackal’s tent, stopping before the wyvern corpse.

“You must have been a great creature once,” she whispered.

Many scars had ridged its chest and wings and back, testament to years of survival. How harsh the wilderness was, without a Hive. It was a flaw of nature, that such magnificent beings were forced to cull their elders. She swallowed against the tightness in her gut as she lifted a little flap of hide at its breastbone and peered into the chest cavity. Jackal had done an admirable job hollowing out the first few feet, deep enough to pluck out the heart. Tiring work, it must have been. Well, she could hardly sleep now. The sooner she started, the sooner it would be done.

And she had to distract herself until Venera was back, proof that what she had done was worth doing. That this endeavour to take back her place and her Hive was not draped in insanity. What better way to purge her anxious, fermenting rage than claws into carcass? Hands and teeth and chitin—she had tools. She had a purpose, for the time being.

Parsec sharpened her claws and began carving the wyvern’s corpse into a carriage fit for a Titania.