Swords v. Cthulhu

Daughter of the Drifting Jason Heller

Waves of mud from the Ocean Amorphous tugged at the hobnails of my boots as I trod the shore that morning. The soil undulated nauseously beneath my feet. It wasn’t a large quake. I trudged on.

The stench of rot, fetid and heavy, rose from the squelching sea. No gulls wheeled in the sky above its gray-brown swells; no fish wriggled in them, save for the lungfish that trawled its murky floor, occasionally to emerge, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.

I had partaken of such a creature the night before. Lungfish could only be eaten raw, as fire caused the meat to sublimate into a noxious vapor, and pickling it produced a mucus nigh on poisonous. Choking down its oily flesh, I had pondered my path thus far.

It was not a comforting path to retrace, nor an easy one. The small islands that comprised this world shifted constantly. There were no continents of which to speak, or islands so large they couldn’t be trodden across in a day. They roiled constantly, like blobs of sludge in the glutinous soup that was the Ocean Amorphous — the body of water, if indeed it might be called that, that encircled the world. One often awoke after a haunted sleep, adrift on a clump of slime and flattened ferns; it had been, just the night before, the promontory of an entire island. People lived upon these clots of muck, fought over them, died for them, only to have them dissolve and drift away before each sunrise.

It was a world that afforded no constancy, but my path was difficult to contemplate for another reason. Like the lungfish, I did not belong here. My body — its piebald skin, its pendulous breasts, its robust hips — was native to this filthy hell, all too true. But my spirit had long ago been hurled across the cosmic void and back by the hand of a Great Old One, whose immeasurable, skull-bejeweled hilt protruded from my eternal soul like some scabrous and cancerous growth.

My path, deformed as it was, had been prescribed by the arc of the Blade of Anothqgg.

My name is Y’vrn. I am a daughter of the Drifting. It was on the eighty-fifth day of the month of Ornuary, in the two thousand and eleventh year since the world was set Adrift, that the Blade of Anothqgg — as deftly as it had pierced the flesh of untold multitudes in battles both ancient and yet to come — entered my own life.

I know not why I remember the date. I do not linger on the past; sentiment, as L’kmi once taught me, is the swain of bloodshed. Of what consequence, he used to instruct, are the mawkish chalk-marks of the chronologist to a blade that can slice into eons long forgotten as keenly as it cleaves the dim mists of the future? Not that I was a woman — at least not at that tender age — apt to contemplate the finer points of philosophy. All the points that concerned me could be found at the ends of sabers.

Many blades had come by me over the course of my brief life. I’d even accommodated a host of them in my belly, my arms, my thighs. My many scars, tawny across my dappled skin, marked my history; they were the fossils of my intimacy. Swords, perhaps, were the only lovers I sought, not counting a quick fuck in the oozing mud-rain after battle. Or on the caked, quaking shore of the Ocean Amorphous, sludge mingling with the spent juices of our union. Like lovers, blades were neutral, utilitarian, to be wielded however one’s will might bend them. They could be friends or foes, stolen or won, relations or strangers.

None, however, was stranger than the Blade of Anothqgg. It came into my hands the way so many had before: I slew its owner, my lover. I plucked its hilt from the wilted worms that had been his fingers, even as his manhood — which had, only moments earlier, displaced flesh inside me — pulsed with the ebb of his final heartbeats.

That owner had been L’kmi.

His death, like our lovemaking, had come swiftly and with passion. Our nakedness only added to our savagery. But I had learned everything he’d had to teach, and more. He was no match for me. I knew his tricks; I knew his stance; I knew his every flinch and instinct. He knew mine, too, but he had failed to heed his own maxim. Sentiment killed him long before I did.

Gripping his sword for the first time, I noticed that it was not common. Moonlight shone through the greasy clouds, crackling with sparks, and each flash of luminescence was refracted from the steel in a different way. It was solid, surely, but it seemed to dance like a flame. Despite the fact that I held it in my hand, I was unable to tell how far it stood from my eyes. When I stared at it directly, its image writhed and blurred like a lungfish clambering back into the mud, caught by the corner of my eye and then gone in a blink. But when I looked away, the sword became more vivid, as if my mind projected the reality of it outward rather than the other way round.

It was then that my soul screamed.

The blade didn’t move, yet it entered me. It fractured like glass, everywhere at once, filling the air and the hidden space around the air that I had never before seen, or imagined, or imagined I could imagine.

The pain could have split the sun.

A voice came. Somehow I heard it over my own howl.

“You are neither the holder nor the wielder of this, my Blade,” it thundered and whispered and purred and ululated in a billion languages all at once. “You are but its Sheath. You will hold it in your soul, quenching its thirst for death, until I have need of it.”

I no longer felt confusion or pain. Or more accurately, I was no longer able to recognize them. It was then I realized the truth: L’kmi was no fool. He knew what I was, and he had trained me regardless, and he had led me to kill him, to release him from this curse.

I stared in bemusement. How L’kmi — an average swordsman in practice, truth be told, better at thinking about killing than killing — could gain such a weapon in the first place, I have never come to know. Perhaps ownership of the blade doesn’t pass from the strong to the strong, as it does in battle, but from the weak to the weak, like a plague. What that speaks about me, I don’t care to speculate. All I can state without doubt is this: that night my soul became the Scabbard of that dread Blade, forever to incubate its unimaginable mass like some teratoid fetus inside me.

If tracing one’s own path across the Ocean Amorphous was difficult, tracking another’s was even more so.

Or so I could only hope. I first caught wind of the woman following me — for it was clearly a woman — a week prior. Her boat must have been at least as swift and silent as mine, but her musk was unmistakable. Since then, I had barely slept. Not that sleep has come easy to me over the years since I became the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg. My soul had been thrown countless times across the dimensions untold, strapped to my master’s hip as he waged war with other Great Old Ones, in a war that I had come to understand was an uprising against their masters. The Gods had Gods of their own, and to them Anothqgg was as puny as I was to him. I could gather little of this from my vantage; as my body slumped in a kind of stasis on this stinking world, I was flung elsewhere and otherwhen, my spirit shuddering in ecstatic agony each time Anothqgg sheathed and unsheathed his Blade. Each time, he asked me, “Do you receive this Blade unto your soul? Answer me now, for every time I commit slaughter with it, you must agree to let it return to its Scabbard before it can be so quenched. You may refuse, of course. But then you will remain here, in the void, at my behest, adrift for all eternity.”

What choice did I have? This wasn’t a window into death, a reprieve from my burden. This was everlasting nothingness, to be endured awake and without hope. Each time Anothqgg posed this conundrum of me, I assented. No torment could have been worse.

When I did return from his battles, which might have lasted seconds or centuries, sleep eluded me as much as did tranquility or succor. I was alone, more alone than alone, my only reason for existence to serve as a functionary — nay, a function — of a being beyond my perception or comprehension. The irony was not lost on me: I was the Blade’s Scabbard, yet I was a stranger to it, and it to me. When I caught sight of the hilt, I could see the many skulls — some human; some horned; some grotesque, bulbous sculptures of bone that might have only come from the ossuary of the netherworld — that encrusted it. For all I knew, it wasn’t a sword at all, but the tusk or toenail or eyelash of some vast, gargantuan entity that dwarfed even the Gods of the Gods.

Such thoughts churned through my brain as I set the trap for my pursuer. Exhausted from constant flight, parched from drinking half-filtered mud, subsisting on steamed ferns and the repulsive pulp of the lungfish, I halted for the night and devised an elaborate web of vines in the clearing around me. As I did so, the ground quivered. Nearby, the bottomless mud of the Ocean Amorphous burbled and slurped. Was the Drifting to take hold tonight? I pushed the thought from my mind as I finished tying and concealing my apparatus. I squinted at it from one angle, then another. I wove the trap according to the arcane geometries I had observed, if never fully understood, as my soul had dangled from the belt of Anothqgg on some quasar-strewn battlefield. These geometries were impossible to devise according to the calculus of this flattened plane, but I relied on brute cunning to construct an admittedly paltry facsimile, just enough to render my trap invisible — that is, assuming my pursuer was not able to exist in more than one point in space and time simultaneously. Perhaps I would be so blessed.

Satisfied with my handiwork, I leaned against a large stone, smoothed by the millennia of the Drifting, and dared to let the tremors lull me into a trance. The opal moon shone down, mottled as if by disease. What lies upon that moon, I wondered, and beyond it? Was it a thing, or a lack of a thing? A globe or a hole? Were moon and sky perhaps made of some similar viscous liquid, like a yolk within the white of an egg? If so, could it somehow be hatched? The cosmos itself, that is? Was Anothqgg himself the hen? Or the fox come to poach? Or the mother of universes who devours her own young? My mind swam as I beheld that orb, that orifice, white within black. Positive space became negative, and negative positive. A profound throe of disgust sickened me to the marrow.

My loathsome reverie was cut short by the suck of footfalls in mud.

There was no posturing, no blustery preamble. I leapt to my feet, my hand on the hilt of the Blade. My master slumbered, so it was mine to draw into form, its only intersection in this dimension. As such, it appeared almost common, save for the shimmer it caused in the air around it.

“I am Ili, the Sheath of the Sword of Pnthai,” the woman intoned. Her voice was hoarse, her hair yellow and wild, her limbs sinewy and thin. Her face was contorted in spasms of barely checked excruciation. For a moment, my heart clenched in harmony with hers. Another Sheath? Here, in this world? The things we might share with each other! The tales we might tell! The pain only the other could understand… Sentiment, all of it. I held my breath until my ribs ached, crushing the softness inside me.

She stared at me with eyes like flint, then went on with her ritual incantation: “I will take your hair as my trophy, your skin as my tapestry, your innards as chum for the demons I will tame. I will please my master with you, and by doing so become her Squire.”

A grin curled my lips. “You will take my blade, aye. The length of it. And if you are lucky, you will die before you glimpse it twice.”

With that, the ground heaved. The stone I had leaned against a moment before flew into the air. A wave of mud broke over the shore and drenched us both in the sour stench of the sea.

So it began.

Some swords ring like bells when struck. My blade and that of the challenger Ili clashed like cities being pitched against one another. She brandished hers with the poise of a champion; I held mine like a beast with a bone.

Mud drenched us. Each time I came close to scoring scalp or severing limb, the quaking earth shuddered, and I lost purchase. The island around us squirmed in the throes of some topological mutation, no longer beholden to the laws of geology. Ili did not taunt me, nor I her. The peals of our blades were proclamation enough.

Near my feet, a geyser of fetid slime erupted. Boiling and blinding, the rust-red gout of fungoid scum made me drop my guard long enough for Ili to clip my breast with her blade. The pain bit into me like the teeth of a living thing. Twisting out of the way, I saw that it was more than a mere nick. Like the Blade of Anothqgg, her sword intersected the space around us in eldritch ways. The incision widened, as if the strike were still happening, as if the moment had slowed down and refused to move on. I collapsed, a kind of fire coursing across my chest. A river of mud opened just before me, as if mocking my wound.

The Blade of Anothqgg skittered from my hands and plunged into it, disappearing from sight.

I raised my arms in feeble defense. Ili stood over me. The point of her blade hovered above my forehead.

Her eyes bored into mine. There was no triumph in her gaze. Only pain, the anguish that comes from one’s soul being strewn through the cosmos, infected by the violation of a lance so holy as to be unholy.

But was life not worth living? Even after becoming the Scabbard of the Blade of Anothqgg, I had loved. Hesitantly, true, but not without pleasure. I had even laughed. It was a bitter, blackened laugh, but perhaps more hearty because of that. Death might free me — who knew? The Great Old Ones worked in unfathomable ways — or it might consign me to an even grimmer fate. I was not yet ready to know.

I grasped her blade. It bit into my flesh. Its vibrations thrummed through my bones. Blood seeped down my forearms, first in rivulets, then in streams.

Ili’s lust was not sated. I could see it in her eyes. Tortured yet unable to veer from her destiny, she tightened her grip. Slick with sweat, a tendon along the side of her neck fluttered elegantly. It was beautiful. Even here, even now, I could know beauty. It came as a revelation to me, and I gasped at the enormity of it, larger and grander than the pulsars I had seen extinguished in uncounted skirmishes between the Great Old Ones.

Ili, however, stayed her hand. Her gaze left me. The ground rumbled and palpitated around us. A force whose puissance overrode our petty squabble seized us, and we both turned our heads as the soil blossomed like a flower.

Out of it came Anothqgg.

I cannot describe him. I would not if I could. With a wave of his hand — I call it a hand, but it was the tip of some serpentine appendage I have no words for — he sent Ili’s head whirling off into the wind, a spume of melted skin and skull.

With the same appendage, he reached into the river of mud that now flowed mightily through the dissolving island. From it he withdrew his Blade. In his hand, it looked nothing like it did in mine. It stretched from his hand to the heavens, in all directions at once, in directions that no coordinates could name.

He offered it to me.

Out of instinct I reached for it.

Then I stopped. I was not in the void, on the battlefield of the Great Old Ones and the Ones Even Older and Greater. I was here. Home. How I loathed it. How it sheltered me now.

I looked around and laughed. It was not a desperate laugh, nor the cackle of the mad. The Ocean Amorphous seethed. Along the horizon, innumerable islands evaporated into palls of oily haze. The planet could not support the weight of Anothqgg, or even the terrible clangor of his voice. Pandemonium danced above me, a swirling storm of desolation as wide as the sky. It seemed to open into the cosmos, which glared down like an exquisite, crystalline eye.

The moon cracked and fell into it.

My home was dying. And in its death, it knew beauty.

I drew my hand away from the Blade. “I am a daughter of this place, this filthy hell, this abscess of putrefaction. I would fight over and die for it, a hundred times over,” I screamed into the hissing maelstrom with labored breath. The storm swallowed the pitiful chitter of my voice. Yet it echoed, and those echoes grew, spiraling outward, elongated and distorted, crawling across the chaos, until my soul emerged, squinting in the dim light of the violet sun like an internal organ thrust into the cruel air.

“Then so you shall,” came the voice of Anothqgg.

He pushed his Blade into me. Not my soul, but my flesh.

As I bled, so did the world. The bedlam fell to mute silence as the atmosphere dissipated around me, leaving no medium for the roar to traverse. The sea poured skyward, a colossal pillar of mud emptying out into infinity. With it, I began to rise.

At last, I belonged.