Solid Ground
Ashen Rider. Part One. Chapter IV.
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Greetings, traveler,
Thank you showing up another week. We’re in the thick of Part One, now. We’ve all sat alone somewhere, ruminating on bad times.
I recall sitting on the steps to my apartment, drinking whisky and smoking a cigar after my mom passed from her battle with cancer, wondering just what in the hell I was going to do. I snuffed out the cigar and started writing.
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On the docks of Monrovia
The Vale Betwixt, first layer of Pandemonium
Kateryna sat legs dangling off the edge of the limestone bridge connecting the quay to the tenements. How the damned thing never sank with the town was beyond her, but she was thankful, at least, for a place she could sit on solid ground.
She watched the horizon as the sun dimmed like a lantern burning out. The sun did not set or rise in Pandemonium. It turned on and off; the sun was an illusion cast for some eldritch reason outside her reasoning.
Holding out a shaking hand, still stained with blood and pus—Isshiah’s blood and pus—Kateryna wished desperately for a smoke. Something, anything, to grant a modicum of comfort. Such comforts were rare, traded for bread by the occasional drifter searching for a way out of Pandemonium. Myth told of a silver river leading to the waking world, but if something like that existed, it was now buried beneath the sea.
I can’t do this… How can this happen again?
The pestilence that had killed the people of Monrovia followed them into the underworld, lurking in the background, so that the anxiety of contracting it again prevented any hope of a restful moment. Kateryna often wondered why she and her neighbors ended up there. The only common thread was that they had all died the same way.
Kateryna let out a sharp laugh just to hear it echo off the waves. She let out another, and the guffaw soared with the wind into the distance. She hoped Morgana heard her—saw Kateryna laughing at the Dread Angel’s pathetic hubris. Strike me down, oh glorious benefactor. Spare me the pain of my second death!
She spat thick bile into the waters below, her waste dissolving to join countless others. The roiling muck inched closer every day, faster than they could lift, even with Fulcrum’s obsessive labors. If not pestilence, then festering floods. If not one death, then another. And so on, and so forth, for the rest of eternity. That’s how it goes, isn’t it? That was how the holy books described it, anyhow.
Overcome by a fit of laughter, Kateryna doubled over with uncontrollable despair. She rolled on the ground and pounded her fists on the bricks, hitting hard so her callused skin tore open, so she could feel something other than illness and regret.
“I heard what happened,” a man said behind her. Embarrassed, Kateryna pulled herself to her feet, swinging about to face Isshiah’s elder brother.
“Seth,” she said. “I’m sick.”
Seth shook his head. “Me too.”
“Have you… gone through this before?”
“We all have—that ain’t a mystery.”
“Right, but you—”
“I had it.”
“Okay.”
Seth grunted, his face etched in stone, his demeanor just as cold. Talking with him was always difficult. Kateryna could never understand why. She knew she had known him in life, but the specifics were lost to the fog.
I’ve hurt you. So bad, and yet I don’t think either of us knows how… We just know that I did.
“I begged Cain to help.”
“Little good that could do… but thanks for trying.” Seth looked down at his bare feet, dirty and torn. “Isshiah was as good as dead by the time he found you. He declined fast. So will we.”
Kateryna did not know what to say—she just looked into his eyes, searching for what she had once found there, long ago. There was nothing but iron.
“I’m going after him,” Seth said. It was not up for debate; his mind was made up. Somehow, she could tell that by his tone of voice, the flattening of his lips.
“That’s insane,” she said. “Even if you managed to get a skiff to shore, you’d be eviscerated by whatever beasts hunt in the fields.”
“One step closer, then. He’s just a kid, Kat. I can’t leave him to do this all alone. I am dying anyway, so what does it matter?”
It did matter. It mattered a lot. The thought of him going out all alone made her sick to her stomach. “I guess there’s something to that.”
Seth fumbled in his pockets, pulled out a cigar wrapped with a thick tobacco leaf. “I got this a while back. Last time someone made the trip here. I meant to give it to you.” He handed it to her. “Keep it dry, eh?”
Kateryna smoked alone well into the night, trying to see the blocked pathways that made her gut churn with worry at the thought of Seth and Isshiah in danger—out of her reach.
When the cigar was spent, and Kateryna could no longer abide the wind and the rain, she returned to her mother’s house. She had torn up her hood so she could wrap her face and hands like a leper.
Her mother stood in the dim candlelight of the kitchen, waiting as she always did, her mouth curling into a mournful smile when their eyes met.
“Stay away… I don’t want you to—”
But her mother had already swept her up, holding her just as she had when Kateryna was a little girl. Kateryna tried to wriggle free, to spare her mother the fatal contact with the sores already blossoming on her hands and face, but a mother’s love transcends such things, and soon she gave in to the embrace. And she savored it, knowing such comforts were soon to be forever lost.
“Thank you….”
Next Chapter → Songs of Dwindling Rain
This was so good!!!