Chapter 1110: The Girl Who Snapped a God Back

ARIA descended but not in haste but in a long, deliberate, falling spiral, wings angled to catch and slow the morning’s hush, white feathers shedding faint motes of golden light that drifted upward in her wake like a benediction running in reverse.

The closer she came, the less her sight obliged her.

Nine hundred metres above the green... a pale shape upon the lawn, indistinct, a smudge of something organic and fallen and slowly the shape resolved into a body, and around the body the silver-white sentinel of Nyxire, her vast head bowed in a tenderness that had no business existing on the architecture of a horse.

And the body became a girl — and ARIA’s mismatched eyes — went wide.

Awe? Astonishment? Bewilderment? The vocabulary of her ascended mind, a vocabulary that had ingested the libraries of a dozen civilisations and synthesised the etymologies of the dead, fluttered uselessly through its files in search of a word that fit.

Surprise — was a sensation ARIA had been engineered to render obsolete.

She was, just now, surprised.

The cosmos, it seemed, had outpaced her.

Her wings beat once — a soft, slow displacement of air that bent the grass into a momentary halo around the kneeling horse — and her bare feet found the lawn.

Nyxire’s eyes lifted to meet hers.

They had always been winter-storm eyes — that grey-deep, knowing grey that had unsettled her readings since the first day she had attempted to draw the animal upon any honest graph — but in this moment they were not unsettling at all.

They were welcoming like eyes of a sentinel handing the watch to a successor she had been waiting, possibly for centuries, to relieve.

She nudged her, once, with the velvet imperium of her nose. The gesture brushed her shoulder, soft as a footnote, and conveyed in its single warm breath.

ARIA knelt on the lawn that received her with the absurdly perfumed softness. The blades parted around her thighs while her wings folded, then folded again — tightening into the patient devotional crescent like she was an angel attending the bedside of a saint.

Nyxire returned, with the unhurried gravity of a celebrant resuming her rite, to the licking.

And ARIA, kneeling, looked down at the girl who lay upon the grass.

She was young.

Younger, perhaps, than the body ARIA wore —

A small slender thing.

The compact, taut musculature of someone whose adolescence had been spent climbing things, breaking things, surviving things but her black hair cropped short and damp with blood, the matted, copper-stinking iron of it gluing the strands flat to a high, pale forehead.

Her face.

Oh, her face.

It was a small chapel of violence.

A canvas of hairline lacerations that was already healing and stitching themselves shut at velocities ARIA’s senses could measure but not, in any reverent sense, understand — laid in elegant chaos across cheek and jaw and the bridge of a fine, straight nose.

Some of the blood was hers. Most of it was not.

The girl wore a single white tunic — or had once worn it.

The garment now persisted as a shade of madder-red so saturated it had ceased to be cloth and become witness. Wet to the hem. Stiffening at the chest and clinging to her ribs in the unflattering, anatomical way that only blood, drying, taught fabric to cling.

Beneath the tunic’s gaping neckline, fresh scars wrote themselves shut along the column of her throat and the slope of her clavicle, the edges still pink, the seams of them visibly migrating, even now, toward the polite invisibility scars.

Her arms lay open at her sides. Her legs, scarred from ankle to thigh... she looked as if she had walked the long way home through a field of glass and not, at any point, considered the inconvenience worth a second thought.

The soles of her bare feet were ploughed black with grass-stain and clotted soil; her toes were curled, idly, the way a child’s curl when the child has been carried up the stairs already asleep.

Her eyes opened.

They were red.

Not the red of corruption but of exertion, capillary fatigue... like she was an instrument driven, recently, far past the cautious bands of its rated operation and was now glowing, faintly, in the radiant afterglow of its own abuse. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

The girl looked at her.

The girl smiled.

It was a tired smile, lopsided, almost embarrassed smile... like done so much than her body could take and she’d finally permitted herself to lie down, and would prefer, all things considered, that no one make a fuss.

Her lips parted. ARIA, leaning, caught the breath but not the syllable.

The girl sighed.

And — with the sweet, surrendering punctuality — she passed out.

Nyxire stepped back a small, sacramental square metre.

ARIA gathered the girl into her arms.

Her body was light. Disgracefully light. A goddess could lift entire architectures upon a single unfurled wing, and ARIA felt the girl’s weight as one feels the weight of a folded letter that one is about to carry to a fire.

Easy. Almost insulting, in its ease.

The girl’s head lolled against her collarbone.

ARIA, looking down, catalogued — this being the deepest and most habitual rite of her life — what her eyes refused, in any reverent silence, to ignore.

The girl’s left hand... the thumb and her middle finger.

They were ruined.

But not crushed or severed in a way.

The two digits hung from the hand in the sagging like her fingers had been somehow extracted — as if the marrow, the vasculature, the small architectures of bone and cartilage, had been drawn out of them by a mouth ARIA could not quite picture but could, in the dim folkloric corners of her new mind, sense.

The flesh of her fingers remained. But the inside of them was gone, leaving the digits collapsed and faintly translucent, a pair of pricked balloons hanging where there had been, very recently, fingers.

ARIA looked at those two ruined fingers and knew, in some new vestibule of itself recently grown to receive such knowing, that the girl had paid.

For what, ARIA could not yet name.

How, ARIA could not yet calculate.

But the price had been collected against this small left hand, and the small left hand had — without complaint and ceremony — paid.

A hundred questions stacked themselves, with brisk Imperial efficiency, in the antechamber of ARIA’s mind.

How had this child entered the Chasm.