Lightspeed Story: The Blade and the Bloodwright by Sloane Leong

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “The Blade and the Bloodwright” by Sloane Leong. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!

The soldiers slit the woman’s throat every evening before bedding down so they can sleep without worry. She mocks them but never fights the knife coming to her. Two of the men still take turns watching her in case she heals before the rest of the cadre wakes; so far she hadn’t surprised them but a weapon drawn is a weapon able to kill.

By morning, the sawn red threads of meat and muscle will have restitched her banyan-brown neck and she’ll wake them with gritstone curses, scolding them for cutting too roughly into her vocal cords. The horror of her rasping, gurgling voice does not match the rest of her; she is arc and undulation, a mountain of rounded bends, long hair a windfull banner of black mist. All a crass indulgence in the face of the men’s strong knife-cut frames, hard nets of muscle starved into severe contour.

Vaikan never volunteers to kill the bloodwright. Touching her would be undeserved, hateful. Cutting her was a new obscene intimacy he couldn’t force himself to try. Hers is a body that has borne change beyond all his reckoning and he cannot stifle his envy at that knowledge. Walking or riding beside her was enough of an endeavor; contact would mean calcifying their gross differences and the contrast would fill his thoughts with venom.

He sees to the woman while she lives under daylight and gulps down the antidote that will keep her from killing him. The brackish tincture, sown with her blood, drips resinous down his throat and he feels the immediate effects, the prickling on his skin like a false cold sweat. Latent nausea and the beginnings of a fever mists away. One sip every dawn, the spellwright had said, would keep the woman’s creeping influence from them all, preventing their flesh from sickening and deforming.

There is no way to stop her when she draws on her macabre craft, the spellwright told them. Not even her own will can temper what she has become.

As the rest of the exhausted cadre rouses, Vaikan prepares the woman for travel and wipes the crusted veil of blood aproning her heavy breasts and round belly. The highpoints of her body flake where it has burned. The southern seas are ruthless to sail and a seaside cave on a nameless atoll is their first camp on solid ground in weeks. While he feeds her strips of dry fish, the soldiers around them debark their double-hulled vessel to the stony beach and go about the rote habit of bringing themselves off. The spellwright had instructed them to masturbate upon each awakening, to rid themselves of the fire in their blood and ground themselves in meditation; the bloodwright thrived on such elemental imbalances, naturally encouraging any disparity of energy in the body until its perversion made itself manifest.

“You must take better care of yourself, soldier,” the bloodwright says as she accepts another briny white strip. Her teeth look loose in her mouth as she pulls the meat away. He makes sure his fingertips don’t touch her lips. “You never do. And I can feel a skewing.”

She is right and Vaikan knows this. Touching himself in her presence fills him with disgust; at her for being what she is, at himself for what he is not. To touch himself is no relief, just another new sickness for him to bear. Without reply, while she chews and chews, he unbinds the rope hobbling her legs and makes a leash.

“The next city is waiting,” he answers, a vileness at the back of his tongue as he tugs at the rope. “Up.”

“I say this as a warning not a threat: as a storm tosses about both evil and righteous alike, so too was I born of the same nature.”

Vaikan knows her nature well enough. Not even a storm could match her in viciousness.

He tugs the rope again. “Up.”

They travel as a company of ten plus the bloodwright in tow, along a route marked by their chief and his counsel. Their home, the archipelago of White Chain, lies behind them in shades of black, a churned slurry of ash and kinblood. Their enemies, an alliance of island kingdoms, will come to know the taste of the Chain’s fury.

This is their divine mandate and they will see to it every craven chief is compensated with an equal share of suffering, for they are the Blades of the Chain and there is no concealing yourself from their fine edge. Like the bloodwright has been reared to rend and mend the body, so too has Vaikan been educated from birth to be what he is: a Blade, a soldier loyal to the chief and brother to his fellow warriors.

The first island-city they wipe out, Vaikan and his soldier-brother Naru bring the bloodwright to the night market. Rara Vo had little in the way of military strength but it had provided the food and weaponry needed to keep the Six Chief alliance strong. They arrive as two sons with their mother coming to sell their share of ambergris from the flensing farms and bypass the watchmen’s suspicions easily. They wait till deep in the evening and take up a central position in the city, amidst the mudbrick tower blocks and high tree mansions. On this night, the woman’s neck remains whole. Her power is wanted.

Before the bloodwrights had been bent to the task of war, they had been healers, re-weaving and unmaking the sickly machinations of humanity’s wild flesh. But now her spirit knows only one thing: to call the flesh of her enemies into new form.

Arms wide, eyes closed and bleeding, she offers no hesitation. The call is felt from the youngest urchin in its cradle to the most high chief. Before Rara Vo’s spellwrights can stir and attempt a counter magic, she is in them. In their sleep, the skin of their enemies begins to harden and pale. Blood fills with calcic particulate and coagulates. The drying seams of all their orifices sluggishly seal. Some wake choking, panic, begin to flee but there is no escape now. Their screams stay locked behind conjoined teeth as their soft organs calcify and the city fills with the sounds of muffled moans and the snapping and grinding bones. Their skeletons ulcerate, twisting into vast spires of ivory, erupting from every home and tavern, piercing through buildings, through the high canopies.

By the end of her unleashing, anything with a heartbeat has turned to bone. The bloodwright falls to her knees, weeping, foaming at the mouth, her body churning like an angry sea. There is no stopping bloodcraft, a magic thought to be eradicated from the great seas for centuries.

There is no stopping her.

When they push off from the island and look back, great spikes of bone impale the sky, knifing high past Rara Vo’s tallest trees. At the furthest point without vanishing, the island looks gripped by the talons of a great dead beast, rising from beneath the foundation.

Cleaning her is necessary after these attacks, Vaikan learns. The magic calls to her flesh as well as others. He uncloaks her and sees the marks of her power: a skeletal crown of spikes juts from eyes and temples. Her vertebrae rise in thick protective spikes. Sharp bones pop from the tips of her fingers like long cat’s claws. After he scrapes dried red tears from her face, the foam that collected around her mouth, she tells Vaikan she can still see just fine.

“You wept,” he says, when most of the men have bedded down for the night. He is partly suspicious but mostly eager to find some vein of weakness he can tap. Will she be able to carry out the rest of their attacks? “You pity our enemy.”

“I pity us all,” she murmurs, chewing the bone claws from her fingertips. “But I gave them a better end than they gave us.”

The bloodwright cracks the excess phalanxes from her smooth sockets and he hates himself for the envy that rolls through him like a rot-filled tide. If there is one thing Vaikan wishes he could not see, it is himself.

When the bloodwright first boarded their ship, accompanied by the head spellwright, the Blades couldn’t help but scoff at her, some in abject disgust and others in anger. She had seen a soft and studious life, waited on by others so she could hone her bloodcraft. It reflected in her figure, her bearing, the unblinking gaze she held each of them with. Vaikan knew she was wholly unprepared for the danger they were sailing into. She was the only one of her kind that they knew of in all the kingdoms of the sea and she carried herself as such; no chief would stomach such a perversion of magic. But then no chief had undergone what the White Chain had.

During the war in the Chain, she and all the novice wrights had been hidden away from the war. Unlike Vaikan and his men, she had missed the half-shark barbarians tearing apart fleeing families and the oil-spitting war petrels, covering the battalions in an accelerant for their fire-tipped arrows. Better we preserve them and their potential magicks than risk them for a temporary victory, the chief had decreed. And indeed, no victory had been gained, even temporary, and his surviving subjects were furious at such folly.

Vaikan had begrudgingly led the woman to the back of the ship, affronted at her cool confidence, the unscarred hills of skin and clean, flowing hair. A fully-fledged bloodwright could bend the shape of their being into any shape at a thought; that she chose this shape, even with all the forms she could take, laced a bitterness through his perception of her.

As a boy before the war, Vaikan had seen three bloodwright children at distance, training under the tutelage of a spellwright. The exercise was to grow their nails as long as talons. A simple enough task and painless. Two of the children held their hands out, watching their nails grow and curl inwards. The last child struggled and then began to scream as his fingers began to turn and spiral, the splintering bones and rending flesh audible even at a distance.

There was a price, as there always was, for such a power. The pain of failure was a fearsome one but the true debt would come after death; anyone who wielded this malignant magic would enter the afterlife cursed, trapped in the whirlpool of reincarnation.

Vaikan had wanted to be one of them. Instead of a body free of shape and limit, a body of pure potential, he was shepherded into the role of a warrior and hewn into the form required. There would be no change for him. His body weighed on his soul like an anchor.

“What do we call you?” he’d asked as he led her to the stern of the ship.

She hesitated before speaking but not, Vaikan realized, because she was unsure or humble. It was puzzlement as to why he did not already know.

With a joyless smile, she answered, “Wrath.”

Before the second night of sailing, all the Blades had fucked her except Vaikan.

Immune to her bloodcraft, they pleasured themselves over the neutered power of her. When Vaikan’s turn finally came, he pretended at taking out his cock and rammed his hips into hers, acting out a quick rut while the rest of the men wrestled each other and howled out broken war songs, drunk and raging. Beneath him, the bloodwright kept her head tilted starboard, eyes locked on the moon-cut crests of waves. He did not think of how she must hate them all, how she must wish she could draw their hearts out through their nostrils in one wet string. He did not think of himself being remade by her will.

Instead, Vaikan shut his eyes and thought of himself as her, beautiful and soft and impervious to any cruel touch. He came looking down at their bodies pressed together and wanted to vomit; everything she was, crown to cunt to callus, became a mockery of his desire. Afterwards he let the bloodwright up and wiped her down with a sea-soaked rag. When their eyes met, he thought, more than accusation, he could see recognition in the smooth stone of her face.

Tamarong is the largest island the chief means for them to destroy. Two sharply-peaked ranges jut from the ocean, close enough to squeeze the sea into a long narrow channel between them. The city is situated on the interior of the colossal split, the metropolis carved into the meandering and decorated cliff faces that boast a height of near 1000 fathoms. Hundreds upon hundreds of braided bridges and a single immense stone crossing net the two sides together while heavy bamboo lifts ferry people and their animals up and down the great heights.

Had he time, Vaikan would have liked more time to admire the place before it was decimated but their second invasion cannot wait. The general’s black albatross had sent them word that shrewder defenses should be anticipated. Vaikan wonders if the islandhold has gotten word of what they’re defending from. Even he had not anticipated what manner of death the woman would wreak.

They file the bloodwright’s horns down until her face is at least passably human. Despite her irritation, they opt for a veil just in case. They enter Tamarong in the same fashion, this time two sons and a mother selling throwing nets and spearheads. They wait for entry into the city in a line of other foreigners, in a long cavernous hall whose end vanishes to a distant and invisible point. The city guards upturn each merchant and visitor’s burden. When they arrive at the entry gate, the guards swagger around Vaikan’s small group and focus their attention on the woman, pawing rudely through her rattan pack. Vaikan can see the bloodwright’s teeth begin to bare behind her veil. Naru, the other soldier with them, subtly grips Vaikan’s forearm in panic. Her power is necessary but only when used at the correct time and place.

Not here, Vaikan mouths to her. Not so far on the perimeter of the city where her reach will surely leave too many alive.

But it is too late. One of the guard’s squints at her downturned face and yanks the veil from her head. Plush lips catch his eye first and then the rest of her: a skinless, bone-smooth face arrests his motion and his mouth gapes in shock. She sticks her tongue out childishly and the guard seizes her by the cloak. A bone spike shoots from her mouth faster than a javelin, making a transit through the guard’s skull and into the foreigner behind him. A scream rises then three then ten. The queue begins to scatter.

Vaikan curses and pulls a sword from the dead guard’s scabbard and scythes the legs out from a confused guard to his right. The crowd boils away only for the mass of bodies to be replaced by more guards, more people too panickstruck to take stock of their surroundings. Naru commandeers a glaive from a less-experienced sentry and whips the curved blade through a series of unlucky throats, guard and citizen alike.

The bloodwright crouches against the corridor wall amidst the frenzy, clutching her head with shivering hands. A guard draws up his sword two-handed to skewer her through the head but Vaikan sends his sword through the guard’s spine, crumpling him in place.

“Get the fuck up, wright, we have to go,” Vaikan snaps, hauling her up by her arms, hating himself for enjoying the plush sink of flesh under his fingers. “Shield yourself in bone if you can, these bastards only have—”

“I can’t,” she cuts in, voice still abraded from too many knife cuts. “Too many people pulling at me. All their hearts, the beating—!”

Even with the antidote torrenting through his veins, Vaikan can still feel the unnatural pull of her power in him. He fends off two guards with his sword, hacking into the cheek of one through his leather helm which gets stuck in the depths of his jaw. A well-placed kick to the stomach sends the second guard sailing backwards into Naru whose glaive pops through the guard’s lung. Lifting the dead man up, Naru tosses him aside.

“We need to split up,” Naru hisses, holding up a stray corpse to shield them from a sudden barrage of arrows. “I’ll distract them and you take her to the city’s center.”

Vaikan nods and forces the bloodwright to her feet, intercepting another arrow aimed at her head with the flat of his sword. Naru places himself between the entry gate and the rest of the crowded corridor as Vaikan and the woman escape. Wrapping his nose and mouth in a cloth, he uncouples a pouch from his belt and hurls it hard at the ground in front of him. A white powder explodes into the air and the wind from the open gate forces it down the great corridor. People and guards scream as the caustic cloud slips down into their lungs, spreading the toxic seaslug distillate into their bloodstream. They fall quickly as if boneless, helpless to the paralytic.

On the other side of the gate, Vaikan pushes the bloodwright onto the cliffside lift. The platform is large, sturdy enough to hold ten men and their cargo. The only option now is to go up; but wouldn’t they face more guards at the top levels of the city? And the time it would take for them to reach the top would leave them open to all manner of projectiles . . .

“We should retreat,” Vaikan bites out, wishing she’d stop crouching like a scared animal. He wants to yank her up by her beautiful hair, tear it from her sweating scalp. Below, the narrow strip of sea calls darkly to them, smiling whitecaps urging them to its depths. “I can’t get you where you need to go. I can’t protect you. We need to jump.”

“Cut the rope there.” She jabs a bone-clawed finger at the windlass. “I know what to do.”

“You know nothing of—!” A hail of arrows drums into the lift around them, skims across Vaikan’s shoulder and thigh, and glances off the hard bone of the bloodwright’s eyeless face. Fuck it, he thinks, and uses all his brute strength, the momentum of his weight, to slash through the barrel-thick rope.

The rising force immediately flattens them against the platform as it surges up the side of the cliff city. They pass waiting denizens on each level whose yelps of surprise clip away faster and faster. The wind’s scream builds as they ascend and the weight on their body begins to feel like a godling’s amused finger pressing them down, just short of shattering, in the same manner a child might squish an ant. A roar rips out of Vaikan in the face of his encroaching death, barely audible over the high wail of wind and the screech of a burning rope.

The platform hits the giant windlass at the top of the cliff, launching them into the air at the same time the platform shatters into fatal splintering debris. They soar upwards and Vaikan is stuck looking up into a bright morning sky, clear and untroubled by clouds. Too clean a vision, he thinks, to see before death. He twists his neck to find the woman and finds her clear, dark eyes inverted and red.

Red wings burst out of the bloodwright’s back, as big as their ship’s sails. Suddenly Vaikan is caught by her but not with hands or arms or any recognizable human limbs. Thready red muscle snakes around his waist, binding him to what was once the woman, but there is nothing of the bloodwright he knows. Only an impression of her face wedged amongst a tangle of thrumming tumorous growths. With a beat of her great wings, red webs of squirming tendons, she takes them up and then dives for their destination: a great stone bridge affixed in the middle of the city where all transit of import takes place.

She smashes into the busy crossing like a missile without Vaikan feeling the impact, cradled as he is in the mass of her. A living sarcoid web fulminates from the bloodwright, bursting across the decking with all the pressure of an over-swollen cyst. Her gristly malignancies serpentine up and down the bridge and rails until the entirety of everyone and everything on it is engulfed in her. The sky fills with shrieks and retching as the rest of the city begins to feel her call to change.

Great reams of offal begin to pour from the windows, balconies, and open walkways. Loose organs knotted in ligaments pour down the cliff faces, painting the pale stone red as war. Gullets with no stomachs gulp at nothing and arteries bound to no hearts throb and pulse. In minutes, there is not a single soul in Tamarong left standing. There is only a single wet and pulsing flesh, soulless and yet still terribly alive.

Paring her from the greasy thicket of offal and entrails takes Vaikan the better part of the night and early morning. He watches himself at a remove from his body, as he always does but most often when in the midst of death. Hours of daylight bake the city of viscera until it perfumes the air with the dense odor of dying mushrooms and the ripe piquancy of moist copper. By the time he gets some semblance of the woman free, she has made herself mostly whole again, embodied into something recognizable. The only thing she is missing is skin.

“Can you walk?” he asks, hoping he will not have to carry her. Pouches of bubbly white fat make up her breasts, thick sheets of suet covering her stomach, the back of her arms, and thighs. The rest of her is a stringy brocade of white and red muscle pulled tight across her body.

“Yes,” she says, grasping his shoulder as she finds her feet. She has something like a face again, no longer just a smooth plain of white of bone but a mask of tendons and writhing veins. Her black eyes crater through the walls of his protective detachment, dragging him back into the nauseating presence of his body. “Naru is dead. But not from me.”

Vaikan doesn’t answer, a few species of emotion shoaling within him. Was she trying to reassure him or herself? It mattered not. He’d already accepted this outcome for all his brothers, had mourned them after lost battles when he’d assumed they’d met their end. They are vengeful ghosts, less alive than the trembling meat beneath his feet.

They trek to Tamarong’s northern port and steal a double outrigger sailboat with a mind to meet with the rest of the Blades at their pre-appointed rendezvous. But when they get within eyeshot of the chosen half-moon cay, they see only the same manner of stringy viscera webbed across the beach. Somehow the bloodwright had reached even here. The only living thing left on the tiny islet is a freshly-wounded sea dragon burying its eggs into the soft white sand. As a draft pulls their scent towards it, the leech-like circle of its mouth opens like an umbrella towards them, gauging the danger. Pools of red spread under the tattered limbs and disemboweled trunks of his brothers, the carnage scattered in a circle around the sea dragon’s nest.

Vaikan stands in the boat and grips the hilt of his sword at his side hard, wanting to feel some sparking need for vengeance, waiting for the painful contraction of his ribs around his heart as his body realizes the loss; he remembers what grief feels like, how love’s warmth burned. But he feels nothing instead.

“I told you,” she says into his silence, low like she might startle him. “There’s no controlling a storm.” There is, he thinks, penance in her voice. “Will you kill me?”

“That sounds like a request,” he says. “Do you want to die?”

“Soon, yes.”

“Then, at the end of this, we will find our death together.”

They watch the sea dragon fill its nest with eggs and scrape all the broken bits of bodies atop it, a gristly mockery of their lives and yet a divinity in its own right. Vaikan finally looks down at the woman. The bloodwright does not offer to kill the sea dragon and he does not request it.

He shifts the sails to their final destination: Tereti Mo, home of the last coward-chief.

It takes several days of sailing on belligerent currents and beneath the storm-wracked sky to realize they are still far off from their destination, their course wrecked. There are no islands between Taramong and Tereti Mo, no spits of sand they can set up camp on to rest and warm themselves. Vaikan spearfishes and nets their daily meals, paces the meager length of their ship, rows and rows, and curses the bastard godlings of the sky and sea.

The bloodwright does nothing but finger the sun-scorched seams of her red body, hiding beneath a collection of nets to stave off the sting of further burns. When he asks her to row as well, she ignores him. The only help she offers is direction; she can feel the churn of life as clearly as one feels the sun on a clear day.

When Vaikan tosses her a few dried striped surgeonfish for their supper one night, she doesn’t eat it with the usual gusto. He eats his own quick enough to avoid the flavor and watches the shape of moonlight delineate her body in the darkness.

“This place will be my end,” she says, breaking almost a week-long silence. For the first time, she sounds fearful.

Vaikan frowns at her. “We will not die at sea.”

“No,” she says sharply, a breaking beneath the syllable that makes her seem painfully young. A sound that makes Vaikan realize he doesn’t know how old she is. “This last city,” she says. “I can feel it. There won’t be any of me left.”

He tells himself he doesn’t care but he has enough sympathy for her not to speak the lie of it. The sea-chilled wind moves over them both then, forcing a shiver out of Vaikan but not the woman.

“If you had not accepted your death before we left the White Chain, then you proved all of us right. You were not ready for this mission.”

“I know full well I am going to my death,” she says, cleaving through the acid of his accusation. “But it is different, knowing from feeling it.”

“Meditate on it. Plough your soul for the seed of death. It will sow itself softer when it does.”

She holds herself against the darkness of the sea and sky, against the salt of the stars.

“Vaikan.” His name and the softness with which she says it makes him sit up straight. “There is so much life I haven’t lived. So much they’ve taken.” A heartbeat’s pause. “May I request something of you?”

Fear skitters its way up his throat like a sea spider. “And what would that be?”

A step and then two and then the shadow of her is on him. In the moonlight he can see ribbons of muscle, bloody ligatures but then she is too close, touching him, her mouth against his. Shock keeps him still for a moment. Kissing her is a finger in his wound and when he grabs hold of her, he feels how he’s formed the absence of his wants into an object of its own, an unreachable thing.

“Touch me,” she says, hiding a desperate stutter under his tongue. Young, he thinks again, and tries to pull away.

“You’ve already been touched.” It’s cruel but he needs this to stop. The sight of her is the sight of everything he can’t be: powerful, sumptuous in flesh, and ever-changing. He had always contained a longing for what he could have been in another incarnation, so much so that it became invisible to him, ubiquitous as air. To exist was to languish in the impossibility of his desire as to have lungs was to crave breath, as natural as reflex. There was no altering the nature of these things. Except perhaps now.

“No,” she hissed, her clawed fingers digging into the sides of his neck. “That was an initiation. I want to be loved.” And then, thinking better of it. “I don’t want to be alone.”

“I don’t have anything for you, wright.”

“You do. I see it when you look at me,” she says. Then, in a whisper. “Even if it’s hate or disgust, I’ll take it.”

Vaikan’s voice feels far away when he answers her. “Enough.”

“You haven’t taken it in days. The thing that stops me from touching you. So let me touch you.”

It’s true; he’s given himself over to the whims of her magic already. He is already courting death, so why not invite it sooner? He tries to curse her, to push her away, but the woman fills his vision, and the singular act of her mouth on his becomes the entirety of his perception. A bite on his lip and through becomes a revelation: wherever she hurts him, her magic spills in to knit the wound. Their mingled exhalations fight the echoes of the lapping water, hearts drumming out a building war rhythm, the percussion fierce in his conspiring veins. There is no more assent needed between them; Vaikan moves at the speed of suffocation with all the greed of a lifetime’s drought. Clawing for purchase on the bloodscape of the woman’s hips, Vaikan marvels as he fills her with all the weight of a first hunger.

She leaves him destitute, pillaged of all thought but attuned to her cries. He bleeds heat into the bloodwright’s urging mouth, the taste of her grin the tang of answered prayers. Their joining is a skirmish, the instruments of war the frictive resonance of flesh on flesh. When her magic begins to seep into his pores, he can sense it is not to dismantle him. It is to join them. Threads of muscle slip beneath his skin and his own pale blue nerves slip out with unnatural ease to find her. His once solitude becomes a joint existence, a feeble tributary meeting the rush of a stronger stream. He sees through two sets of eyes now, feels himself fucking and being fucked, a dual being both soft and hard, taking and taken.

Lungs rhythmic as supplementary hearts, Vaikan shuts his eyes against the dream of it all, running headfirst into the euphoria she is granting him. He wants to be swallowed and the whole world with him, hoarding the scattered light of her magic in the broken cage of her soul.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her tears beading from his eyes, her vocal cords rumbling in his throat. “I didn’t mean for this. But I . . . I can’t stop.”

“Then keep me,” he says with the mouth she’s allowed him to keep. He knew what it meant to love a storm. There was no other outcome then for his soul to be swept away by it. “Keep me and we’ll end this together.”

“Yes. Together. Thank you, thank you Vaikan,” she says, a brightness on the edge of her voice. She buries the rest of her need under the stem of his tongue, drowning him in the wet excess of her acceptance.

Storm-tossed, the tempest takes him.

Vast pillars of smoke rise from Tereti Mo’s volcanoes when the woman makes landfall. The bloodwright walks the black sand shores alone until she finds a dormant hill high enough to allow her a full view of the island and its many cities, packed with people tight as coral. She doesn’t need to find the strategic center here for her reach to be complete; this is the end of her journey and there is nothing of her magic she needs to save. With what she has of herself and Vaikan, she can call to all flesh from this hill and all flesh will answer.

The call is a single breath out.

The unmaking is silent this time. Instead of rifts blooming open for new flesh to grow or bones forcing themselves into towering protrusions, the process becomes subtractive. Their screams vanish before they have a chance to leave their mouths. Bodies deflate one by one, emptied of all matter, and fall limp to the ground.

On a breath in, the bloodwright draws the plundered hides to her. Together the empty bodies billow upwards, churned by the untouchable gale of the bloodwright’s magic. The people’s skins pour out from their lavish homes, overflowing markets, and opulent halls—luxuries bought with the blood of her kin—and rise into the skies above the great cities with a weightless ease. Skin by skin, they patch together their ragged edges until a great tapestry of flesh undulates amongst the clouds, shadowing the island and the shallow surrounding waters below.

A seething white fire shoots up the woman’s nerves and this time there is no stopping it. Her body ripples with fear as her magic turns on her for the last time. Every part of her begins to reshape itself but into what she cannot tell. Above her, the monolith of skin begins to float out towards the sea and it pulls her along with it. When she turns to follow, she does not expect what she sees.

A god’s giant carcass wades through the sea towards her, each step making the soil shudder under her feet. It is not any god she knows and no tale or myth she’s heard has described such a terrible vision. The empty-eyed skull stares straight ahead at the horizon as if in expectation. A great cape of offal hangs from its skeleton and floats behind it on the water. Slowly the meat strings itself inside the beams of its ribs, clustering into formation and filling the white frame with what the bloodwright can see are lungs, a liver, a heart. The floating skin meets the giant at the shore, draping itself over bones and the raw, writhing mass of organs.

Finally, it calls to her.

She claws at the ground, queasy and shivering, trying to fight the drag of magic on her. Her body is still changing against her will, all of her pink and rounding out, layering over itself in wiggling worm-like rows.

“No, no, please,” she yells as the malformed god draws her up to its voided eyeline. Her soul burrows itself in her fear, deeper and deeper away from death. It is different from knowing and feeling, to see one’s end. Except it is not an end she senses; it is something else that this entity wants. “Vaikan!” she screams, desperate for anyone, the last one to soothe her, “Please help me, help me—!”

Not this, not like this, not alone! she thinks as the god presses her into its mouth, past white teeth as big and pale as gravestones. A throat forms just to swallow her but she feels herself rise and expand, deforming into something new. She hisses to herself as something electric arcs through her, a splash of sudden color, of sensation so overwhelming it makes her scream in agony.

Was this another untold price for her magic? To be eaten by the deep god of death? Her soul a meal to be shat out into the abyssal plains, outside the currents of reincarnation?

Kill me please, whatever god you are, you must have some mercy in you! This is supposed to be my end, our end! No more, no more, no—

Wright!

Inside the woman inside the god, Vaikan strokes her soul with his own.

Open your eyes.

She does.

I’m with you.

No. Their eyes open. His soul braids through hers, cooling the searing of her fear. The curve of the world bends before their new sight as they take up the god’s eyes. Gulls flit around their bare head, minuscule wisps of white feathers, stupid and curious, pecking at their new behemoth body. Half-submerged around their feet, they see the unpatterned patchwork of reefs and meadows of kelp from their great height as abstract teal and emerald splatters.

The voices of skin and flesh and bone call to their once-enemies, speaking in a chorus of dreams, of desires they had never conceived, fears they had never imagined. Together, they lift a hand to the clouds and feel the cool moisture of gathering storms collect on their fingers, then further still, up into the vastness of the pitying sky towards nothing and anything, grasping for the shape of uncountable futures, uncountable ends, like so much salt and stars, bitter and bright and boundless.

Sloane Leong is a cartoonist, illustrator, writer, and editor of mixed indigenous ancestries. Through her work, she engages with visceral futurities and fantasies through a radical, kaleidoscopic lens. She is the creator of several graphic novels: From Under Mountains, Prism Stalker, A Map to the Sun, and Graveneye. Her fiction has appeared in many publications including Dark Matter Magazine, Apex Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Analog, Realm Media, and more. She is currently living on Chinook land near what is known as Portland, Oregon with her family and three dogs.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the August 2023 issue, which also features work by Benjamin C. Kinney, Russell Hemmell, Scott Edelman, David Anaxagoras, Dani Atkinson, Isabel J. Kim, Lowry Poletti, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $3.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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