Page 95 of Inkpot Gods

“I am the alkahest and the void,” says the figure. “The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end. I am the improbable road, and I am your doorway to the graveyard path.”

“How did you take our friends?”

“As easily as a flower takes the petal,” says the figure. “They were always mine. I only needed to remind them. The little Lunar isn’t my property, but she comes close enough, and I pulled on the threads Avery had tangled inside of her to convince her to obey. The rest were simple things. Their sympathies have always been mine to have and to hold.”

Artemis is a hunter, but Kelpie, at her core, is a prey animal. When Artemis glances to her to see how she’s taking this particular intro to a villain speech, she’s standing so still that it barely looks like she’s breathing. If not for the contrast between the vivid orange of her skin and the glistening red of the walls, she might well disappear, blending into the background through sheer force of will.

The flensed figure steps forward, and Artemis’s stomach clenches, confronted with such an obvious sign of how wrong everything is here in this lab below the world, where the natural laws have somehow been warped and replaced with the outlines of the Up-and-Under, Asphodel Baker’s wild reimagining of reality becoming manifest.

“You’re not mine either, little Lunar, but you could be, if you stopped fighting and gave in to what I require,” it says. “My son remade you in his own image. There are barriers in your flesh that have never been there for the others of your kind. I didn’t tell him to take you. If it had been down to me, I would have set him stalking among the Hyades, to square this circle smoothly. But I was already gone by the time he came to court and claim you, and I had no way of telling him what to do.”

“What do you mean, ‘already gone’?”

“I’ve been traveling the graveyard path since my departure, and it’s shown me so many things I didn’t think I would ever have the luxury of knowing,” says the figure. “It’s taught me what I did right, and what I did wrong, and now that I understand it all, I can finally continue. Great sages have always died for wisdom. I have nothing of the god on the tree to claim as my own, but my father knew him once, and he was able to show me the path to descend and then return. They used to call it a katabasis, before they knew the name of the graveyard path. So many things are redefined when you name them, even if they remain otherwise entirely the same.”

There’s no more denying what—or who—this figure has to be, and still Artemis swallows the name, refusing to give voice to what she now fears more deeply than ever before. It’s Kelpie, prey animal that she is, who overcomes her terror and steps forward, hooves muted against the flesh-covered floor, to look up at the skinless, raw-meat figure of their apotheosis come at long, terrible last.

“Hello, Asphodel,” she says, and the word is spoken, the story is told: there is no longer any changing what comes next.

Death

TIMELINE: SEPTEMBER 5, 1896.

Miss Cottingsly is dying.

There’s almost certainly another word for the process when entropy comes at last to consume an auf, making a victim of someone who has already been victimized by nature itself, winding down the artificial clock of the pulse and pulling the lightning from the lungs, but Asphodel doesn’t know that other word. She only knows that Miss Cottingsly has been her companion longer than anyone else, that she never gave Asphodel away to an unfamiliar uncle or demanded she change her name for something more alchemically acceptable. Her memories aren’t so rose-tinted as to paint Miss Cottingsly as her only ally, but in some ways, she feels the old auf is the only person who’s always cared for her as herself, not as a useful tool or an alchemical potential. And now she’s coming to pieces under Asphodel’s hands, the immutable bonds that formed her fracturing and falling away.

And there’s nothing Asphodel can do.

Eliza is still thriving. She talks and grows and changes and learns just like an ordinary little girl with no lightning in her heart or borrowed blood running in her veins. If Asphodel hadn’t been there when it happened, she would swear the child had never been resurrected, that Eliza was perfectly natural in every way.

The nature of her resurrection makes her an auf, a useful tool with little free will of her own. The nature of her existence makes her something entirely new. In a world of scholarship, Eliza is her own field of study, her own specialization. Asphodel supposes the Congress was right about one thing: every mother, back to the beginning of humanity, must have felt in some way like an alchemist when they called life out of the void, when they walked the border of death and snatched a new soul from its cold hands. She didn’t carry Eliza with her own body, but she may as well have done.

Eliza looks at her as she imagines normal little girls must look at their mothers, with love and trust and unearned faith that Asphodel can change the world in whatever way she needs it to be changed. And while Asphodel is more than willing to try for Eliza’s sake, she finds that she still prefers to change the world to suit her own desires; she’s more interested than ever in putting forth a version of the world that meets her needs.

And any world that meets her needs must by necessity have Miss Cottingsly in it. She supposes she came to love the old auf at some point in their relationship, imprinting on her as a cygnet swan may imprint upon a chicken. They’re different in every way that matters, but Asphodel was a child in need of love, and Miss Cottingsly was a constant: sometimes that can be enough.

Her uncle could still find them if he wanted to. They haven’t traveled so far from Boston as would be wise, but have returned to the village of Asphodel’s earliest childhood, to the dilapidated house that was once her mother’s. The villagers eye her with suspicion unallayed by the fact that some of them remember her—not so many as she would have expected. She’s forgotten, during the long, safe city years, how dangerous it can be in the wild country. Father Clemence is more than ten years gone, stolen away by a fever, and a young priest who doesn’t know her either by name or by history occupies his house. She will never walk those halls again.

She came here to decide what she’s going to do next, now that the Congress has rejected her, now that she’ll have to find a future for herself, rather than allowing them to hand her one. With every day that passes, Miss Cottingsly fades, Eliza thrives, and Asphodel becomes more determined to show those bastards in the Congress the error of their ways. She will be the greatest alchemist this world has ever known. She will earn and honor the storm inside her, and she will change reality to suit herself.

The American Alchemical Congress has made a terrible mistake in rejecting her. It wasn’t their first, and it won’t be their last, but it is the mistake that makes everything that is to follow entirely inevitable. Their deaths, when they come (in the far, far future, at the hands of a man she has not yet constructed, but is drawing ever closer to creating), will be entirely due to how they’ve treated her. They may never understand. It won’t matter. They’ll die either way.

It is late afternoon, the sunlight through the windows buttery gold even after passing through the dust that chokes the glass. (Miss Cottingsly would normally have scrubbed them clean within an hour of arriving in the house, but her decline began almost immediately after leaving Boston. Asphodel almost turned back when she realized what was happening; only Miss Cottingsly insisting that going back to her uncle would do nothing to change what was happening to her kept them moving forward, away from the Congress, seeking safety. The house is still a wreck. Asphodel has no skill at house-cleaning, and Eliza is too young and too recently returned from the dead to have the knack.) Eliza is somewhere out in the fields behind the house, running wild through them even as Asphodel once did. Miss Cottingsly is resting in the single narrow bed, not seeming to mind the dust or the smell of mouse droppings.

“There must be something I can do,” says Asphodel.

“There isn’t.”

“But there is. There always is. I can … I can go hunting for the current incarnate Winter. The seasons don’t die, they cycle. They come back again.”

“You can’t steal me a seasonal crown, and I wouldn’t wear it if you could. I’ve been dead longer than you can imagine, sparrow, and I’m ready to rest. I’m ready to see my families again.”

Asphodel pauses. “Miss Cottingsly … do you remember who you were?”

“Not as complete pictures. I’m more like … like a patchwork quilt, bits and pieces sewn together, remembering the colors of the whole they once belonged to. I remember three distinct wedding days, to three different men. I remember the births of what I believe were all my children. I remember two of my deaths. And I remember other things, little scraps of all those women. They would never have been friends, when they were alive. They had different religions, different ideas about the world … but they learned unity, when they woke up and they were me. They’re fading away now, one by one, like candles blowing out in the night. Soon they’ll all be finished, and I can rest.”

“I don’t want you to go!”