The Creators Ch. 15

Postlude: Fear

CORRUPTION

I raced through the threshold of Diamond's realm, and slammed the gate behind me. Diamond's astral projection vanished in an instant, and Xaya looked confusedly down at the space where her unwilling lover had just been. Her reptilian gaze focused on me, and she cocked her head curiously. I had never shown her weakness before, but now I was huddled in my own arms, and shaking from head to toe. The predator slinked over to me, then adopted a submissive posture, and snuggled like a comforting canine into my side. I held her tightly, and raked my fingers through the serpentine tendrils that crowned her head, trying to find some source of reassurance to stay my mortal terror.

I had been hurt. I had been hurt badly. I touched a shaking finger to my lips, and felt the raw flesh there. Perhaps it was superficial, but it would scar. I looked down at my ribs, where another scar lined me from abdomen to armpit. It was something I had been born with. Petranumen had lived for countless years, and through all those epochs, she'd only managed one lasting mark. It was a burn scar, and I didn't have to wonder at how it had come. But the flaming patterns on my flesh marked me as immune to the Heat Bringer's fire, so why then did I feel such excruciating pain upon the lips of the nymph girl? WHO WAS SHE?!

I sifted through the rubble of Wisdom's and Passion's combined minds, looking for anything that would help me. I was manic in my search, and I tore through the mausoleums and libraries of memory, but I could find nothing in the lexicon of tethered beings that would tell me why an astral god could be touched so. The nymph's astral projection was so weak that it could not even create its own realm, and yet, she had dealt me such damage that my very self-perception was shaken. That pain I had felt was not normal pain—it was lethal. The nymph was possessed of a thought so powerful that it could kill me.

"Not a thought," I muttered, "an idea...."

I had thought myself immune. I had thought that all the weakness Petranumen once carried had died with her, but it was not so. The realm of Depression had been forming a beeline right to its source, and that source was Guilt. My flesh was made from this realm, and this realm had sharp edges that could cut me. I touched the blisters on my lips, and frowned when I saw that my fingers were still shaking. I turned my hand into a fist, but still, it shook.

Excerpt from Dr. Siam's thesis, The Broken Bridge, page two-hundred-five:

Recipe for kale soup:

One pound of kale.

Three tablespoons of iodized salt.

Two pounds of self-loathing.

One cup of body dysmorphia.

Five teaspoons of attention seeking.

A pinch of poorly-masked insecurity.

Fifteen cups of oh-my-god-I'm-almost-forty.

Just a dash of suicidal contemplation before realizing you're too old to die young.

Two tablespoons of pepper.

Boil until your family loses the last bit of respect they had for you.

Serve in one bowl. Take one spoonful, then store the rest in the icebox under the guise that it needs to set for a while.

Leave in the icebox for a decade until the frost obscures it completely.