Mizrah's Ladder Ch. 14

In the long, many-legged shadows of the library...

Your breath is a ragged, uneven rattle. You are badly wounded, each rent in your flesh crawling closed with agonizing slowness, crackling orange around the edges as oxygen metabolizes in your blood; your savaged meat gives off a red scattering glow, electrons changing energy states in the furnace of your regenerative heat. Your blood flows like muddy, brackish water in your veins as your body works to filter the massive spider-monster's venom through your ensorcelled flesh - it drips from you, vented painfully as tears down your cheeks, as sweat down your back.

Your hand jerks uncontrollably as the venom wracks your nervous system, like pins and needles in your veins as you reach for your prize - that ugly, ochre covered book - you replay the nightmare ambush in your head. The shadow of the Prey's massive corpse (twitching unnervingly on occasion) looms large; in the unlight of this tenebrous place you can still see where it was once human.

You realize the vision from one of your eyes is milky, as if a bee had stung you in the pupil but it is but pain - what is mere physical agony to you? You simply will it not to exist in your mind, instead pondering what you'd survived - the Spider-Ogre, for that is how Mizrah had described them to you and it was a fitting description, had descended in silence, suspended by a string of silk while you were at your most vulnerable and awkward - stretching out on a rickety ladder, at least five meters off the ground.

Curiously, you feel an absence of anger; you're relieved to be alive, firstly, and above all, you've learned from this experience, as with every encounter with one of these strange, Cursed night creatures; there's even some respect to be had for the efficiency and singular might with which it tried to assert its place in the food chain over you. From the Bat you'd learned where to root and dig for power, and from the Spider-Ogre...every wound you suffered was a sage verse in survival.

The air is flowing through a jagged, round hole, drilled lance-like through your chest and out your back - truly your body is supernaturally resilient, this kind of wound should have put you down, but the most important parts (your lungs, your spine) had already healed. When you look at your chest, it speaks to you with a silent voice - this is a parable of the aerial strike, invoking images of hawks descending upon helpless mice; a jaguar upon an unsuspecting iguana; or in this case, a spider the size of a compact car, transfixing an unwatchful Werewolf upon a pike-sharp limb. You couldn't even scream when it hauled you upward into the air - could you strike in the same way?

Your neck pulses and throbs where its terrible, hook-sharp fangs had found purchase, injecting its venom directly into your bloodstream. Each aching pulse of your heart pushes acrid fire through your veins, and even as you dry-heave on your knees, you ponder the efficacy of fast-acting toxins such as this. Rolling along through your organs, pumped by your own body's functions to your brain, you reason that a second or third bite from the Spider would have doomed you. You were no spider, but...Mizrah had told you, bluntly, 'whatever they can do, we can do better'. What did he mean, exactly? Images of syringes and grooved knives flit through your feverish mind.

Asserting your will over your shaking legs, you rise but trip on the strands of steel-hard silk tangling your legs - so gossamer thin you can't even see them in the darkness. Your knees ache from banging them against the dirty linoleum, but you marvel at how quickly the enormous arachnid rendered you unable to flee, and your arms bound, unable to strike; you recall this silly independent Turkish movie your uncle made you watch with him, about this manly survivor in the Caucasus Mountains; you recall him tying stones together with twine and hurling them at a deer's legs, tangling its limbs. You picture yourself in the same light, breaking Charys' shins with a well-spun throw.

Everything the Spider-Ogre had done - and it'd happened in the space of six seconds, at most - had been engineered to render you helpless before it. It had almost gotten the better of you too, but that initial lesson Mizrah had taught you, the dissolution of structures and environment with your Will alone, was what had ultimately saved you in this musty place ripe with potential for destruction. The crude manipulation of entropy, more a brutal thrust against the integrity of the bookshelves than any elegance on your part, had saved you; two of the tall, wooden book stacks above your head tipped against one another, providing the anchor from which the Spider-Ogre had descended upon its web. A snap-decision, scarring the structural integrity of the shelves around you with your Will, and everything had come tumbling down in a chaotic scrum of scattering books, torn pages, and broken monster limbs.

From there, you'd taken the Killing Shape and after a painful struggle, ripped it in twain; its swollen, enormous abdomen, wrapped in pallid human skin and shot through with veins like a goiter, still throbbed with life. Its chest and shoulders, its head had been disturbingly human, like some mockery of a centaur, but bald and bony; the ogre's lower jaw had split open, massive chelicerae and pedipalps splayed across its chest and red with your blood.

The simple thing to do would be to simply leave with your book, but you, Isabel Aphelion, had survived by the hair of your teeth and even prospered by seizing every opportunity as it came by...and you see it embodied in the massive corpse before you.

You wear four legs and feast upon it until you are sated. In two legs, you use your talons to open its throat and remove an iridescent blue lump of flesh that you knew to be a venom gland, roughly the size of a pear, which you wrap in a torn page from an atlas. Similarly, you split that awful abdomen - blood gushes forth - and your fingers grow sticky with pure white silk as you haul it out, looping the strands over your sleeve -

- as the sweat trickles down the side of your head in this place, down beneath the concrete and rebar, where the stagnant air reeks of asphalt and overtaxed wiring. You're in a rather bad position, strategically speaking: a maintenance hall at the bottom of a parking garage. Only one clear path forward, and in it loomed Charys' menacing form. A retreat would simply return you to where her packmates guarded the door...though in your mind you likened them more to minions.

Neither of you says anything for a while. She's pulled up a chair as well, straddling the back and leaning upon her elbows, never taking her eyes off of you. A minute passes like this, staring each other down as you muse on the differences in each other's qualities.

She strikes you as an icy cold predator with few reservations in her winter-blue eyes. Charys doesn't walk, she struts with commanding arrogance that, unfortunately, she was able to hold over your head by virtue of having you in a compromising position. She's got another unlit cigarette between her lips, and you take note of how a sharp canine gently worries the filter, rolling it around in her mouth

You, by contrast, are the picture of elegant disdain. Your jeans may be torn from your scuffle, asphalt stains clinging to your cheeks and you may stink of your own blood, but you may as well have been a painting for all you gave away. Your bow-shaped lips are set in a quiet smirk of dismissal, leaning back in your seat with your arms crossed loosely over your chest. You grow tired of this stupid stare-down game, and lean forward, never breaking eye contact.

"Why are you trying to kill him?" you demand.

Charys plucks the cigarette from her mouth. "There are three reasons. The first is that he murdered my little brother, literally tore him apart, limb from limb." You're unfazed - well, not entirely. It tracked, you'd seen how he handled opposition - breaking it down, piece by piece, like the first Hisser you two had devoured together. The idea of him doing that to another Werewolf, however...you can't help but feel yourself recoil inside, an instinctive revulsion. You fight it down and deny it because you don't want to think of Yusuf that way, and even though the accusation doesn't come off as a lie...no, surely there have to be extenuating circumstances.

You don't bring it up though, Charys seems like the type who'd marr your face for questioning her brother's actions, so you tilt your head to the side patiently, waiting for her to continue.

"Secondly, he..." you watch as the chill, armored mask she wears creaks and cracks, just a hint, revealing...something ugly and tormented. This is hard for her. "He did the same thing to my girlfriend that he did to you - used the Hunt to seduce her and fuck her, and...he messed with her mind. He turned her against me and she ended up dead, because I wasn't there to protect when she left."

...that does sound like something he would do, and not for the first time you're wondering about the kind of person he once was, during the months before he met you. He'd dropped implications of some sort of conflict that went down between himself and the others, but you realize, looking back on it, when you'd asked for details he'd given you...useless information, or distracted you. He was incredibly distracting too, and already you find your mind drifting to the imagery of him seducing some faceless, shadowy female figure, taking her into his bed, fucking her and cumming in her and filling her with his Mark.

You want him. You miss him. Behind your ribs there is a clenching tension of longing.

Memories of passionate, almost surreal intercourse divert your attention, like an erotic lightshow through your mind. You realize that Charys has been watching you, as if waiting for a response. Valkyrie bitch...you have no sympathy for this woman, only for the people who must have stepped in your mate's path. "I'm listening," you add with no small amount of skepticism. Why should you respect this woman, just because she and her packmates had beaten you senseless and humiliated you?

She's got it back, that armored, cold-forged exterior that shows little yet reveals much. Quiet disdain for you is a cover for laser-intense focus, an obsessive edge that you could tell was ground against your packmate like a whetstone...she seeks to turn you against him; how could she not? She'd been after his life for months, here now was an opportunity to strike him right in his heart. Predictable...you hope he's alright.

"Has Mizrah even told you about the moon?" Now her expression is different...she's smiling a little, looking bemused; she knows the answer, because you do too and your own silence says much. That had always been a part of the equation that'd never been addressed, and even when you'd asked his answers had been simply a roundabout way of saying you were tied to its cycles, but never directly how.

Terribly distracting man.

"Hnnh..." She tsks three times, biting gently on the tip of her tongue. "Probably told you we're at the top of our little fucked up food chain, right?"

"Yes," you answer cautiously. "I've seen other Versipels, they're all Prey." It seems like a non-committal line, and paints you as more gullible than you really are; you've always suspected that there was a greater predator, a part of the equation that just didn't quite seem to balance out. Otherwise there would be more of your kind, wouldn't there? Realistically given the virulence of the Curse, The City should be crawling with Accursed Beings.

"Of course they are, everything on this Earth is our Prey." The absolute confidence with which she states this, as if it were as empirical a truth as the force of gravity, makes you question it even further. "The Curse...it's more than just something that makes us change our skin, it's bigger than that."

"Mm-hmm, yes, he used some clever physics analogies, you can spare me the basics and make your point, Charys." You cover your mouth to yawn and -

-WHAM-

The chair, and you in it, are slid violently up against the concrete wall of the tunnel, her fingers knotted in the collar of your shirt. Her face is inches from yours, pale eyebrows arched downward, her voice a hiss that's somehow quiet but forceful as a gale.

"Then you'll know to take this shit seriously . The moon is the fucking genocide of our kind, it's where the monsters that steal our souls come from...here in the States we call them Outsiders, elsewhere they're Daimonioi , Slake-Ghosts, Shades...they don't care."

You do your best to not look rattled by her display, but the sudden movement and violence, after having suffered her retaliation, calls forth fang and claw, grinding together in your mouth and gripping down on the chair you sit in. Calm as you can, your eyes peel her back - the armor shows its cracks, revealing truths about her you can read like scratchings upon a prison cell wall.

Whatever she's gibbering about, she believes it wholeheartedly, that...moon aliens somehow cross hundreds of thousands of kilometers of space, specifically coming for you.

Is she afraid of them? If so, why hasn't Yusuf told you about them? Why has he kept so much from you? She backs off slowly, and you start to breathe again.

Finding your own composure, fighting back the savage aspect of your being, you refuse to let her cow you and find your words. "They sound like alien ghosts. What are they, exactly, and why are you so unsettled by them?"

As if catching herself, she fights down the rage she clearly can barely restrain against your modest shows of defiance...a weakness. "Alien ghosts isn't a far off comparison, cuz nobody's really sure what they are. No two ever look or behave quite the same but every one of them cares about three things."

She taps them off on her brutal fingers - you notice she's missing the tip of her left ring digit. "Getting to Earth, consuming our thinking minds, and spreading the Lunar Strain...that's the vector by which they cross space. It's a disease within a disease, a Curse that grows inside of our own Accursed heads."

Charys lays it out for you with more detail than you can imagine a person like her inventing, so whoever made this up was either terribly creative or...more than likely, best as she can, she's describing some mysterious process of this universe you thought you once understood - a place of immutable, unchanging laws like your unalterable bad luck; but the allegorical cave wall had been blasted apart, and the shadows moving behind them defied all expectation.

These 'Outsiders' seemed to be some sort of only partially-substantial phantasm that could only be found on the far side of the moon, whichever part wasn't facing the Earth at that time. Greater in size and power than any individual Werewolf she knew of, they had a method she couldn't clearly explain of poisoning and tainting the dreams of Firstbloods who had either delved too deeply into what she referred to as 'forbidden sciences' without specifying their nature, or who'd simply gone mad. This was, apparently, the Lunar Strain - a mental and spiritual corruption of a Werewolf's natural drive to Hunt, replaced by the need to build some sort of occult architecture that allowed these Outsiders to manifest in this world.

It all sounds far-fetched and fanciful, but again...it seems too strange, her accounts just a bit too disorderly to question her honesty. Her words are interlaced with smoke, floating toward you -

- like the murky, thick tendrils of incense that intertwine with each other in the bronze stand. You peel your aching eyes from the ugly, orange little book you'd smuggled from the library and into your apartment

You consider the shallow, sand-filled bronze urn on your desk, burning with sea-breeze scent. It had been given to you by someone who'd stoked your heart's passion in a different way than Mizrah, a man possessed of similarly horrible luck like you, and it was that hellish misfortune that prevented you from having him.

You'd reached a point where further translation was made increasingly difficult by the use of unfamiliar words, symbols you didn't recognize, and grammar that only barely aped anything Hellenic; it is as if someone rudely shoved another language amidst the familiar one, and it kind of makes you think of your own situation...a human woman, once, your nature painted over with wolf teeth and suffused with eldritch energies, brutally forced into an impossible whole.

He'd know how to read it, you had no doubt...not Mizrah, but the one who'd given you the incense stand - Ascher. Yours is a complex relationship, one that spanned over a period of three or four years, defined by deafening periods of silence when the Peace Corps' endless work took him to ancient, war-torn countries: Samothrace. Kham-Do. Andes-Mallorca.

You turn your attention back to the yellowed, fragile pages in front of you; you were about halfway through the little book, and the standard text on Myrma Sidon's life had underlain the spidery, orange-glinting claw language scratched into the pages...like someone had marred fascinating graffiti upon a boring fresco. The arcane letters don't tell a coherent story so much as they guide your mind in building these...mental constructs, instructions to picture and alter complex objects in your mind, such as...

A great, sky-piercing tower, square at the base and gaining faces as it rises; pentagonal, hexagonal, spinning on an axis; the book instructs you to reach forth, farther than your hands can grasp, and find the place where it can twist and turn like a great, interlocking puzzle...

Inexplicably as you work your way through these mental puzzles and abstract instructions, you feel the presence of something new in your flesh. It is as if you'd discovered a muscle hitherto unknown buried in your head, and when you flex it the world falls quiet around you; sound is muffled, even the vibrations of your movement upon the floor dissipates as if you weighed nothing. As someone who favors the efficient singular strike unseen to end your Hunts, the utility of this imprecation is immediately apparent - how it worked, on the other hand, is not.

You realize that you've barely scratched the tip of a rune-encrusted iceberg, floating in a sea of ill-omened dweomers, spells and subtle, reality-bending power. Your mind floats unbidden to a conversation you'd had with Yusuf on the nature of this power, how it 'descended from its metaphysical moorings, refracting through the conceptual lens that is the Wolf's Pursuit,' for that is its purpose; to aid you in the Hunt. Put more simply, he'd compared it to all the terrible things that just happen to go wrong for the victim in a monster movie.

Imprecations are the key breaking off in the ignition; the staircase crumbling beneath terrified feet; the thunderstorm on a clear summer night. Hindrances to keep the Prey from finding escape from your claws and fangs, or from turning their own weaponry against you. You look up from the pages and rub your eyes, itching with dust and dehydration; gulping down a pulse of water from a bottle as if squeezed from a jugular vein, you find that you simply cannot decipher anymore of this book's secret contents...not alone anyway. There's more to the Imprecation than just quiet.