Page 126 of A Frozen Pyre
Sedit jogged up on the four legs of a canine, powerful haunches propelling him along the barren edges of her estate. His glistening, amphibious skin was muted against the gray of the overcast sky. Winters had been particularly hard on her creatures, but as many of the naked monsters migrated southfor warmer weather, some had gained the love and affection of living with Ophir in her manor. Sedit wasn’t her most perfect creation, but he was the first thing she’d made that she’d loved.
He looked up at her lovingly with the many twinkling predator’s eyes he possessed. She admired the rows of needlelike teeth that had inspired many of her finest creations. She appreciated how they punctured and tore so absolutely. Nothing could shred like her vageth, and as he was the first of his kind, he’d remain her proudest manifestation.
“Dinner, Sedit.” She gestured to the pit.
A girl shivered on the soil below her, earth and grime marring her pale skin. At least, it might have been a girl. Her shape was wrong. Her face was human—but not. Her spine rose up with unnatural spindles, curling with knobs and divots where no spine should. Her eyes were large, even for the fae. Rather than the sharpened canines she’d been trying to create, this girl had rows of jagged teeth on both the top and the bottom. There was always something uncanny about the near-fae creations she conjured from earth and air. They could speak. They could function. But no matter how she tried, her demons had no soul. They were nothing but imitations, shells of what took one from man to monster.
Sedit leaped into the pit, and the girl wailed, a feral, guttural sound. The wet noises of gore and viscera joined her dying shrieks, mingled with the delighted ripping and disemboweling of the canine. He enjoyed the shredding more than the eating and quickly tired of his limp toy. The pit had been too sheer for the humanoid creation, but Sedit had no trouble burying the talons of his mighty paws into its walls and climbing out.
“Good boy,” Ophir shushed, stroking his hide.
She sat down along the pit and stared off into the spaces between the trees, knowing no one was looking back from the dark gloom of the forest’s gaps. It didn’t stop her from scanning the woods, hoping that one day, a familiar face mightstep out from the space between the great redwood trees. She was quite certain that when she’d arrived, she’d thought it would take three to five fae to encircle their bases. Now, if twenty strong men gripped each other by the wrists, they could still not wrap their arms in a complete circle against many of the trunks in these forests.
She knew Tyr would have loved everything about the forest.
He’d loved animals, and nature, and things that were good. He would have loved the way it smelled. He’d have loved the empty, open possibilities. He’d have loved that no men or fae had sullied the lands. It was her kingdom of birds and fish and deer. He’d loved the short life they’d shared, chaotic and disastrous as it may have been. Somehow, he’d loved her.
His absence wasn’t a silence. It was a void.
When Caris had been murdered, Ophir’s heart had perished with her sister.
When Tyr had left, whatever had remained of her soul had gone with him. His sacrifice had stirred in a darkened cauldron with Harland’s, simmering for years as it told her that all the pain, the suffering, and the loss was because of her.
Sedit began to nuzzle against her, and she stroked the head of the great gray beast. His frog-like skin was made slicker with the remaining bits of organs and blood that coated the dog’s face. At least, she liked to think of him as a dog. Tyr hadn’t ever cared much for the vageth, and Sedit had never been particularly fond of her lovers, either. In the end, Sedit had been the one who’d stayed.
Then again, her monsters had no say in the matter. She was their mother, after all.
“Come on, boy. We’ll try again tomorrow.” Ophir stood from the pit and began to walk away from the unholy grave. The freshly abandoned body of the recently slaughtered girl was one in a long line of many. Corpses in various phases of decomposition littered the circular space that had been carved into the earth. The clean-picked spinal column of herfirst attempt was a bright white reminder of the time that had passed in her decades of trial and error. Every day desensitized her more to her failure.
Manifestation was as much art as it was science.
Some of her earlier creations had done the digging for the very pit that served her now, though for one reason or another, she hadn’t kept them around. While her monsters had been fun exercises in creative expression, any true partner needed to be perfect.
She knew from her botched success with the ag’imni that she could make creatures capable of speech, though their gargoyle features, reptilian skin, and monstrous, birdlike talons had immediately disqualified any ag’imni from becoming someone or something with whom she might share what remained of her days. She made a few more, interested in how the demons spoke to one another, and urged more than one to go off and find the ag’drurath that she’d long ago left alone in the world. The lives they lived and the characteristics they developed were incredible to behold. She may have birthed them through mind and will, but their individualistic expression of her manifestation was unique and beautiful.
The pale, bug-eyed abomination who now rested dead in her pit was a testament to how far she’d come. Her hands were soaked in blood. Her brokenness had handcuffed her far more than a ring ever could. And while she put most of the creatures out of their misery, there had been a few she’d set free just because the sounds they’d made had been akin to the broken glass of madness. It made her smile with the barest amusement to inject a little chaos into the world, and it felt good to smile.
She’d felt so little for so long.
She’d used to love with her whole heart, her whole body, her whole mind. Ophir had danced, she’d explored, she’d been curious and interesting and fun. She’d had lovers, she’d had family, she’d been a whole person, once.
Sedit followed her into the hall of her manor, the clatter of his talons sounding over the stones of the foyer. The halls were empty, save for the creatures who served her.
She sank into a chair at the head of her dining room table. Three vacant chairs remained, one for every soul who’d abandoned her once they’d made it to the Wilds. They’d remained empty—untouched. Harland, Dwyn, and Tyr. The three who’d stood in her ramshackle cabin centuries prior—ghosts of names she didn’t utter.
A twisted, speechless thing limped with its club feet and shriveled hands as it carried something from the kitchen. “Thank you, Keres.” She smiled at the goblin as it clumsily slid a plate before her, releasing the food from its spider-like fingers. She’d enjoyed the sick joke of naming it something so similar to her sister. While Caris, the perfect fae Princess of Farehold, was named for “beloved” and “grace,” Keres meant “destruction of the dead.”
She didn’t think her sister would have appreciated the joke.
Keres nodded as it set the plate in front of Ophir, limping back to the kitchen. The goblin was a benign improvement on the other humanoid abominations she’d created, and she’d chosen to keep it. It was a perfect—albeit silent—servant. It contained the sentience necessary to listen and understand, but it could not argue, it could not fight, and it experienced nothing of longing, reflection, or anything indicative of a soul.
Ophir ate her dinner slowly, taking no joy in her food. She wished she could eat with half of the fervor that Sedit possessed as he tore into flesh time and time again. Instead, the wine had become ash in her mouth. The meals, no matter how decadent or sweet or buttery, had all begun to taste like the same carrion she’d created. Ophir would not die of natural causes, but perhaps if she stopped eating altogether, starvation might still claim her.
If she didn’t learn how to create her perfect companion soon, perhaps she’d abandon the enterprise of survivalaltogether. She’d served her time in purgatory on the continent. Though the fae face didn’t show the lines of age, she’d been alive for a millennium, watching time pass with the cruel disinterest of a god who’d made her world and walked away. Her creations would wander from the manor, many never to be seen again.
The uneven slap of Keres’s feet against the ground of the manor sounded as the goblin meandered about the estate, lighting the evening torches. The sun had not yet set over the gray gloom of the day, but it was only a matter of time.
Ophir wandered the halls of her manor for a while after dinner. There was nothing to see. There was nothing to do. The vases held plants that had withered and dried years and years ago. The trinkets and baubles hadn’t been dusted in decades. The dirt and cobwebs that filled her home hadn’t bothered her in lifetimes. Nothing had mattered in a long, long time. Ophir had torn down the portraits of Tyr and Caris. She’d set fire to the beautiful things she’d put aside to keep them close to her. She’d burned, and raged, and screamed.
