Achlys

Far Off Unhappy Things: Solitary Reaper

Chapter 3: Achyls

By Renko Chazakiël Rodenburg and Septimian I.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– W. B. Yeats

Achlys stirred in her sleep, too aware of the awful cold to be able to sleep again, still too attached to oblivion to properly commit to waking. She struggled around for a blanket to pull over herself and ward off the cold for a minute longer, but there was none. She was, after all, not waking from sleep, and she was not doing so in bed, either. Groggily and still drunk on the perfect black void of death, Achlys started to become aware of the rough stone coffin around her.

“Ueurgh,” she spat as she strained herself to shove the coffin’s stone lid out of the way. Her crypt was a mess. Dust everywhere, and water leaking in, mixing into a nasty grey sludge. Most all of the belongings she’d been buried with were gone. “Hello?” She yelled, wondering where her servants had gone. As she climbed out of the coffin, she noticed a dozen trinkets attached to the side. Little amulets, most with a deer antler motif. Maybe they were seals, placed here by someone trying to lock her into her coffin or prevent her reawakening? Whoever had placed them had no idea what they were doing, because not a hint of spiritual energy went out from them. Superstition instead of magic, then. Trying to find her servants, she reached out into The Gray, only to find it absent. “Helloo? Anyone here?”

She went up the stairs of her crypt, and found her castle in ruins and completely abandoned. Hundreds of years must’ve passed since she went to sleep to account for all the wear and tear on the building. Almost every single one of her treasures that had once lined the main hall were gone, down to the metal candle holders. As she wandered the dilapidated halls, she occasionally cried out for her servants, but found none. Not even corpses. She kept trying to access The Gray, but found it gone entirely. Baseline reality had re-asserted through the entire castle as far as she could see. Given that it had been the core of the entire phenomenon, she had no doubt in mind that it had somehow been dispelled entirely. Eventually she reached her old atelier, and found the traps disabled and her paintings missing. Someone had looted this place, perhaps it had been looted several times. Combed clean by groups of ‘adventurers’ over the decades. “Fuck!” She screamed as she kicked a piece of rotten wood that had once belonged to the door to her atelier across the room. Outside, the wind turned, blowing a suspiciously warm north wind in through a broken window. “Autumn be damned,” she muttered as she rushed down and outside through winding hallways and twisting stairs.

She spat in surprise as rays of sunlight filtering through the trees blinded her as she left the castle. It was awfully warm for the time of year, which was especially notable given that for the past millenia or so it had always been the exact same time of year. Trees all around her estate were budding, and sparse vegetation was springing out of the snow around her. A small brook of meltwater babbled softly in the distance. Life was springing forth all around her- no wonder her rest had been disturbed. Aside from it being an unsightly mess, it was deeply disturbing. Time was supposed to have stopped moving, which would have halted the ordinary shifting of the seasons. Here, up north, outside the boundaries of the Deer God’s autumnal lands, the world faded into winter. That used to be absolute, spring moving in was an anomaly. And that, of course, meant everything else was now up for question too. Who knows what other things in the world had changed in her absence?

She needed to get information somewhere. Towns and villages had always been sparse up in the north, but with the cold receding and running fresh water brooks that could have changed. Though now that she thought about it, the weather had hardly been the only obstacle to human colonization of the furthest reaches. This was the territory of creatures, of monsters. The forgotten things of yesterday, roaming about today. If anything, they’d be the first to be able to capitalize on the changing climate.

Of course. She slapped her head in an exaggerated gesture before looking around for approval from her servants out of force of habit. Right. Nobody was here. Where was she? Ah right, of course- monsters attracted huntsmen, and huntsmen worshipped the Deer God. That explained the stupid trinkets on her coffin. If the chasing each other around with spears and knives economy had come all this way up north, then there was no way there weren’t any settlements nearby now. Though, this was all conjecture without any way to confirm one way or the other. She needed to get moving and find a place she could anchor herself to before her torpor would set in again. Wandering out into the snow and leaving her estate behind her, she tried to orient herself based on distant mountain peaks and half-forgotten maps lingering in her head and wondered how the world could ever be so pretty. Droplets of dew having frozen into little crystals hanging from budding plants, the pristine snow, even the sun glittering in the reflection of the little brook of water was beautiful. If only it could be like this without all the sickness that came with all this change, all this life. Perfect. Frozen. Unchanging. This was of course why she’d rappelled down into death here, in her forgotten fortress. The idea of her perfect doll-like body, forever perfectly preserved in the cold had been enticing to her.

“Previously forgotten fortress,” she corrected herself as she started wandering down the brook now flowing along her estate and castle. It wasn’t too bad. The water was pretty, like crystal. Not long after rounding a bend and finding a path downhill, she spotted a bustling village in a valley below. It was a few miles away, but not so far that the inhabitants wouldn’t have discovered her castle. Good chance, she told herself, that she found the thieves that had plundered all her belongings.

And, of course, a supply of potential new cultists, servants and slaves, she thought to herself as someone suddenly yelled out.

“Whuahu?” She mumbled as she turned around and saw an armed stranger standing twenty meters upstream behind her.

“Up already?” The stranger said, grinning.

They- or she?- Were leaning on a spear or lance of some unknown make, dressed in black rags. They had black leather bracelets around her wrists, ankles and neck. Despite the snow they were barefeet. The leather bracelets were studded with metal spikes, which made the potential adversary look so absurd that Achlys couldn’t help but laugh. Despite their silliness, Achlys could deduce a lot from their outfit. Painting leather black was prohibitively expensive. The shackles and collar denoted some kind of servitude, the meaning possibly inverted by the spikes. Some kind of anarch from a cult? Definitely not one of the Autumn huntsmen. Not a barbarian one from one of the forest tribes either. They were walking around the snow barefeet, denoting some kind of supernal durability or endurance. The wind was coming downhill, and Achlys breathed in deep through her nose to catch the stranger’s smell. Human, unusually clean. The vaguest scent of lye or glycerin lingered on them. They had bathed with soap or other beauty products, but not recently. Definitely someone rich or employed in servitude of the rich.

“I asked you a question,” the stranger said. They clenched their fist around the spear they were currently abusing as a walking stick. It looked plain, with a wooden shaft and grey metal tip. There were no runes inscribed on the shaft and not a hint of magic in the air, so the stranger probably didn’t rely on an enchanted weapon. That meant that they were physically gifted enough to wander around the northern mountains barefoot with only a glorified walking stick for protection. Worrisome.

“I take it you’re an assassin, and given that you knew that I’d ‘be up,’ an assassin with a connection to someone who could somehow know that. That means some kind of divination ability, shortening the list of people that could be employing you to less than ten. You’re absolutely not working for either Prince Autumn or Princess Summer, and Spire mages would not have hired a freak like you. I assume your employer had ears like mine then, and is one of my sisters. Both Fleur and Aster are diviners. Fleur doesn’t care about me nor our recurring game of playfighting, so then you are sent by Aster to put me back in my coffin before I cause any problems.”

“Wow,” the stranger said, laughing. “I love how your mind works. I am an assassin, but I’m not employed by whoever you are talking about.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m not going to disclose my employer to you, though.”

Achlys grinned. “You must not be very confident, then. If you thought you could kill me, then there’d be no problem telling me. Dead men tell no tales, after all.”

“You are no man and given that you have recently crawled out of a grave- you’re still wearing your funeral gown, for Autumn’s sake- I somewhat doubt the ‘dead’ part of that proverb, too.”

“I see. Well, since you were so polite to announce your presence before coming at me, I hope you don’t mind if I take the first move.”

“Go ahead,” the stranger said. “I’m much better on the defensive anyway. Let me see what you’ve got.”

“I have to say, I like how your mind works, too,” Achlys said. “You’re not very smart but you are charming.” Before the stranger could answer her, she turned around and started to run downhill as fast as her legs could carry her. There was no way she was going to engage some freak of nature with Winter-knows-what kind of physical capabilities in hand to hand combat while at significant disadvantage due to being unarmed.

“Hey!” Her assailant yelled somewhere behind her. “Curse you!”

From the weakening voice, Achlys assumed her attacker was lagging behind, but she wasn’t so careless as to slow down to turn around. Running downhill through half a meter of snow on uneven terrain without losing her balance and turning herself into some kind of snowball or avalanche was hard enough with her eyes straight ahead. What do now, she wondered while charging down at maximum speed. She could try and make it to the village, but there was no guarantee the locals would be remotely receptive to her presence. If they were Autumn cultists, they might see her as a meal and aid her assailant instead. “Urgggh, fuck,” she muttered as she tried to reach deep into herself to try and find her death-mist, the foul vapour expelled by her very soul and the source of her magic. It was difficult to get it going, and the mindset required to exhale the poison was best reached through introspective meditation, not strenuous physical exercise.

“Fucking, Autumn, Hell, Fuck, Typhus,” her assailaint screamed as she suddenly flew past Achlys, having lost her footing and now rolling downhill. Her ride down was so rough Achlys was amazed she hadn’t broken her neck yet, but not so amazed to stop and watch. She turned around, and started bolting uphill instead. Back to her castle. Defensive ground where she had at least some sort of advantage. By the time she’d gotten back to the local maximum she was completely wasted and out of breath, coughing up pale, pink linseed oil blood, but she couldn’t afford to stop moving.

“Aaugh,” she cried as she stumbled through the snow and back towards her estate. Despite theoretically being capable of great physical feats, she was deadly allergic to life, flame and warmth. The fight-or-flight adrenaline of the whole situation had, aside from literally warming up her body, ignited some kind of spiritual feeling of flame in her heart and mind which was now wreaking havoc on her body. This would further inhibit her ability to summon her death-mist, so she needed another plan. By the time she was back in her castle, her feet hurt and pink blood was generously leaking out of her mouth and nose. “I’m not made for this!” She cried out loud, once again disappointed there wasn’t anyone watching her well-rehearsed little character traits. Coughing and hacking she stumbled into the hallways of her fortress, looking for anything, anything at all to use as a weapon. Rocks and moldy wood everywhere, but not a sensible weapon around. Mold. Moldy wood. Death. She needed rot and death, to find something to draw strength from. She needed something stagnant. Random mold growing on wood was not true rot- it was life doing what life always does, recycling resources. She needed true decay. The kind cultivated at the bottom of pools of decades-stagnant water. The kind that formed in the marrow of the centuries-long-dead. If only her castle had a graveyard!

Oh, but it did, she realized as she turned around and rushed towards her tomb. To her relief, her attacker was still nowhere around. Back in her crypt she grabbed some of the old trinkets and seals people had left on her coffin over the years. Now she had to calm down. It was almost impossible to calm down when you knew it was unlife-or-death if you didn’t calm down before the mysterious assassin hunting you found you, but she had to.

“Fuck it,” she said as she scrambled over to the corner of the room, scooped up a handful of the slimy water, brought it to her mouth and inhaled with all her might to try and drown herself. She started to choke and felt her body do its utmost best to cough up the foreign substance again, but she managed to restrain herself. Choking and throwing up, her heartrate sped up until her body could not keep up with the different stressors anymore and she went into cardiac arrest while simultaneously choking on a combination of dust, stale water and her own vomit. She didn’t actually want to die-die, die for real, though, and she had never used her magic like this. It was a gamble if she’d actually be able to rappel down into death while holding on to her body if she damaged it this much, if she was under this much stress. A single lapse in concentration and her soul would plummet straight down into the Nowhere beneath, into the Black, and then that’d be it. Final death. With her last strength she clasped her fingers around the trinkets, held them close to her heart, and let her mind descend into the unending ocean of death.

She wasn’t falling. She was hovering, for now. Somewhere above her was her body, still within reach. Currents around her gently pulled on her, and the seductive lure of complete dissolution of self, the end of all pain, tugged on her from below. “Not today,” she thought and spoke, for these were one and the same thing for the dead. At least some of the people who had left her the trinkets had to be here somewhere, sunken into the abyss. At least some of them had to have been forgotten or been denied their afterlife somehow, having slipped into final death, into the Nowhere, the Black. She focused on whatever weak memories the dead had of the trinkets, and found only a single soul stirring somewhere beneath her in the infinity of black water.

“I am here,” She said. “You are not alone anymore. I remembered you. Come to me. Come.”

The soul tugged on her, and almost did she lose her spiritual balance. Almost had she been dragged down into the dark with it. Around her now, tiny pinpricks of light appeared. Some of these would be lampades, alerted by the unnatural intrusion into their realm, and others would be abyssal predators, death-fish swimming around in the abyss to devour the unfortunate souls luminescent enough to attract them.

“I am here,” She repeated. “Let’s go,” She said as she felt a spirit take her hand. “Let us leave this awful place,” She said as she pulled herself back into her body.

Her body which was still dying. With all her might she coughed up the detritus in her lungs, gasping for breath. Her heart had stopped. She could go without a heartbeat for what, a minute or three? A human would’ve been irrevocably dead already. Bless this corpse-doll body of mine, she thought.

Pain wracked her body as a horrific cold entered her. The dead soul she had pulled back with her. If she messed up now and died, she’d probably turn into one of the walking dead, a ghoul possessed by whatever random soul she’d just fished up from the abyss.

“You have to want it,” She screamed, lungs barely strong enough to do so. “You have to want to live! Live!” She screamed.

Inside her, the cold chill curdled up into something almost solid, and she threw up. She threw up what felt like an endless wave of ectoplasm, further wreaking havoc on her almost obliterated physique.

“Help me,” she stammered weakly as a ghost slowly took form around her. “I’m dying, help me, or you’re going back down there together with me.”

“Huuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” The ghost wailed, now slowly taking the form of a person.

Achlys could barely see out of her eyes, her vision slowly going dark, and then she felt icy hands push straight through her chest as the ghost attempted CPR.

“My heart,” she muttered. “You’re a ghost. Touch my heart and feed it some of yourself. You’ll get it back, I swear. I saved you. You have to trust me.”

Her world went black.

Her world went black, and then she jolted back to whatever passed for life for her as her heart greedily stole from the poor soul she’d dragged back up here to restart itself.

“That’s enough,” she muttered as she cut off the connection. Pangs of hunger shot through her entire body, but she couldn’t eat this soul in its entirety right now. She still needed it to fight- else this whole insane endeavour would’ve been for naught.

“Lady?” The ghost said, now so translucent as to almost dissolve into the background entirely.

“Hey,” She replied, doing her best to smile. “I almost lost it just now. Remind me to never do something as risky as this again.”

“Why?” The ghost asked. “Why did you descend into death to call me back? What have you done to me?”

“You had been forgotten,” Achlys said. “The souls of whom all memory has passed from the world die a second death, and are consigned to the Black. I was the only person that could save you from that, and I did.”

“But why?” The ghost wailed. “Why me? I have forgotten who I even was. There is nothing left of me.”

“Come,” Achlys said, taking the remnants of the ghost in her arms, careful not to let him fall straight through her. “It’s okay now. I will be your mistress, and give you a new purpose in unlife. You will never have to go back to the darkness as long as you have me, I promise.” The seduction of final death was sweet, but not so sweet as her own. Even the oldest of the dead remembered somewhere that they were once an individual, longing for the embrace or even the acknowledgement of other individuals, let alone hers.

“We must be swift,” she said. “My enemies are coming. Help me face them.”

“Your enemies?” The ghost said surprised, angry. Her hold on this one was almost unbreakable already.

“They come to destroy me and cast us both into the darkness. We cannot let that happen. The dead- they need their saviour. You need your saviour.”

“Yes, mistress,” the ghost said as he helped her to her feet. His upper body had stabilized, but beneath the waist he dissolved into a faint trail of ectoplasm, floating around on it.

“Don’t worry,” she said, gesturing to the half-digested soul. “I’ll restore you later.”

“Thank you, mistress.”

Together they left the crypt, with Achlys carefully looking around before walking all the way into her castle’s central hall. Her assailant was nowhere to be-

“Oh, there you are,” They said, walking down one of the two stairwells connecting the central hall to the upper hallways. “I kinda assumed you’d be hiding in one of the stairwells with a rock to cave my head in.”

“I know that’s what you assumed so that’s why I didn’t do that,” Achlys bluffed, trying to sound as smug as possible.

“Ah,” The mysterious assassin said. “What’s that around you?”

“You can’t tell?”

“I can’t.”

“Or you can, and you’re saying that to make me careless and overextend myself.”

“Oh,” They replied. “You got me.”

Achlys had no idea if they were lying or not. Frustrating.

“You’re going to have to attack me this time, I don’t want to give you that edge you claim to have when on the defensive.”

“In that case, I’m not going to attack first,” The stranger said. “I’ll just euh, go sit over here,” They said while sitting down on the bottom step of the stairs they’d just descended. They held onto their spear like it was a staff, no doubt to help her get up quickly in case Achlys decided to swing at her.

“Fine with me,” Achlys said. “Let’s play the waiting game.” She walked backwards, until she found her back against the wall, her eyes locked on the stranger.

“I never sleep,” The stranger said. “I am always in peak physical condition.”

“That’s nonsense,” Achlys replied. “Who’d fall for that? You’re human. You have to sleep eventually.”

“Augh. You’re right I do sleep every now and then.”

There was no way to know if they were speaking the truth or not. She had to consider basically everything coming from the stranger to be noise intending to confuse her. At least they seemed unaware of her true nature and abilities, or they would never have given her a chance to calm down and breathe. They probably couldn’t see the spirit hovering around her very well either, but they could see it, which implied a level of spiritual awareness decently above average. Still, if they were confident they could handle Achlys, they’d have attacked straight away. Shit- it was possible that they really possessed some kind of innate advantage when fighting specifically defensively. Did things like that exist? Martial arts that worked better when defending than attacking? Perhaps they did. Achlys stilled her breathing, stilled her heart, and drew on her connection to the dead soul hovering near her to find her quiet composure, to find the stillness in her heart. Slowly, bit by bit as she focussed her inner blight outwards onto the world around her, she both strengthened the ghost and started to exhale vapour.

The Achlys. The death-mist, the fog that clouds the eyes of the dead. If she managed to properly tap into her power, the poison she was expelling would reach harmful levels before long, and would do so long before it would be present in such amounts that it’d be readily visible. She’d win this waiting game. Even if the vapours wouldn’t do in her opponent, the ghost around her would have regained enough strength by being fed from the bottomless pool of unlife, of unvitality, residing in Achlys her heart that it’d destroy her with ease.

“I haven’t actually lost a fight in my life,” The stranger said.

“I see,” Achlys replied. “We haven’t properly introduced ourselves to each other, have we? On the off chance you don’t actually know who you are hunting- Hey, I’m Achlys Scarborough. Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, huh? Yeah, I’m Desdemona Cinzio, nice to meet you too.”

“Strange name.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“Sorry, I mean, where do you hail from? It’s an unusual name.”

“Two can play that game. Wherefrom is your name?”

“I was named Achlys by my father, who has been dead for some thousand years or so by now. It’s no wonder it sounds foreign to you. They do say that the past is a different country, after all.”

“Hmhm, I see. My own name is a joke, a composite of a character from a play and the name of the author who penned the short story that inspired the play.”

“Strange name for someone to have.”

“It’s a perfectly serviceable name for a fake like me.”

“Aha, so you lied again,” Achlys replied while pondering what they could possibly mean by that. Perhaps they had low self esteem, seeing themselves-

She opened her eyes, and realized they weren’t being facetious. They were fake. A fake person. A thing masquerading behind a small layer of pretense.

“Aha,” Desdemona laughed. “You seem to be stressing out about something.”

“You really are a fake,” Achlys said. “You don’t smell out of the ordinary because you don’t have any traits except those bestowed on you by your creator, which includes smell. You probably really don’t need sleep, either.”

“I love how your mind works, I mean it,” Desdemona replied.

“There has to be an upper limit to your abilities. I assume you can’t create a passing fake that can, say, move faster than sound or which is entirely indestructible. Similarly, you can’t have any traits that’d break the illusion of what you purport to be. You look bizarre. Your name is from a stage play. You were sketched up by a playwright or artist, weren’t you? What are you originally? Paint? Text?”

“Hey now,” Desdemona said, getting up and readying her spear. “You are too smart for your own good.”

“You were going to attempt to kill me the moment I got tired or slipped up anyway, let me have this.”

“I think it’s time we put an end to this,” Desdemona growled.

“Ahahaha, no, no no no, I’ve got you cornered, Desdemona dear,” Achlys laughed. Desdemona had planned on tiring her out, had been afraid of a reckless attack or even of stabbing her in the back. It should be possible to intimidate them. “You are a fake, but so am I, in a way. Did you know? I am but moonstone and linseed oil, fashioned into something resembling flesh by a madman.”

“Your ‘father,’ I assume,” Desdemona said.

“My blood is a paint thinner,” Achlys said, rushing towards Desdemona, who fell into some kind of martial stance, no doubt to utilize some ridiculous martial arts trait their creator had bestowed on them, the trait that’d hand them the win as long as they didn’t attack first.

Achlys didn’t attack. The moment she was within striking range of Desdemona’s spear, she mentally ordered her newly bound ghost to slash her throat. Despite his distress at doing so, he couldn’t actually disobey her- and her blood spewed from the wound as Desdemona stumbled back in surprise, in fear, stunned, and tripped on the stairs behind them. At the last moment they stuck out their spear, and Achlys willingly let herself fall on it. The indescribable pain of a spear going straight through her large intestine and out her back almost paralyzed her, but she couldn’t quit now. She had to win. She had to win no matter what damage she’d have to take in return. She’d died and come back once already today. She could do this.

“Aaauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh,” She howled as she dragged herself forward along Desdemona’s spear. Their eyes darted around in a panic, their face wrung into a mad grimace from fear. “My blood,” Achlys gargled, “Is a paint thinner.”

She bled on Desdemona, closed one eye, and imagined her hand to be the brush with which to wipe this canvas clean. She brought down her hand, and wiped all that made Desdemona into Desdemona into a blurry mess of black ink stains on a page.