In the beginning, there was a war—a terrible conflict between two entities as vast and mysterious as the endless expanse of dark space. She who seeks true emptiness sits at the seat of all, with mouths embedded in the darkness, feeding on light and matter in equal measure. All sense is abandoned with her name, a thoughtless tower of gluttony, twitching eyes, pulsing gums, and the ribbed surface of a hard and soft palate, the Great Devourer.
Her tendrils stretched far and intruded upon the domain of a sentient storm where her starved finger, leviathan Crucius, attempted to consume a fleshborn tempest. The Stormbringer, he of violent winds and volatile temperatures with hollow bones and feather and fin-shaped capillary beds, pushed back against her reign over emptiness. The pinioned tempest tore into the hide of Crucius and the two erupted, molten hydrogen and ionized helium stretching far beyond where light could travel, the fingers of a nascent god.
When the volatile gases and winds grew calm, matter populated the spaces between once more, an uneasy alliance and the end of a violent conflict.
At the seat of their struggle, the place of their union, the Devourer gave birth to two sons—the dukes of the material realm and firstborn larvae of an unending brood.
Adelaide sat before the sea of storms, a roiling abyss of super-heated gases and condensed flames. Beads of sweat gathered across her brow as her toes grazed the surface, creating ripples in a violent mirror. She saw distant peninsulas drifting near the tempest where monsters, hardened fang and claw, fought to the death adapting in struggle and refined in war. Blood spilled, fur torn, and pus bubbled.
She closed her eyes, pressing her daughters against her chest. Her eldest, Morta, lay still in her arms, her heart silent, and her eyes forever shut, the first of the stillborn. Her youngest, Decima, cried, clawlike fingers digging into her breast, her feet contorted and limp.
“It hurts,” the little girl sobbed. “Mother, it hurts.”
“I’ll take away your pain, my love,” Adelaide said, rocking back and forth. “Just a little longer, I promise.”
The sea of storms coalesced, violent towering clouds and snapping lightning twisting and turning into a whirlpool of plasma, causing the peninsulas to drift further apart. Then, the nebula grew calm, and the surface became like an undisturbed metallic mirror.
Adelaide recoiled from her reflection, her fingers twisting into claws, her white hair fusing with her back becoming a mane and a tail, a dark and terrible hunger reflected in her blood-red eyes.
“I warned you, Adelaide.”
Iapyx, the god of fate, appeared in the metallic reflection, seated beneath his brother’s domain. Decrepit tapestries covered his body, nailed into his graying flesh, many hexagonal eyes staring back at her from a ribbed face plate, his tube-like teeth tucked beneath his chin.
She could hear the pounding of his hammer against the anvil at the seat of his birth, a metallic crib where the heavier elements gathered, forming structures and shapes she didn’t recognize.
“I warned you not to bargain with Daedalus. You were a mistake. Uncured batter underbaked in his kiln. He has no love of beings soft of breast and heart and cares only for war, survival of the fittest,” Iapyx said.
Adelaide brushed away her tears and held her daughters close. She looked above Iapyx’s reflection, where the gases and lighter elements coalesced into a primordial kiln, bricks of bone, omentum, muscle, and a thin moist layer of endothelium.
Though the throne lay empty, she remembered Daedalus, plucking the fruits of life from his destitute wings and, with milk from his ear, and the salt and sugar from under his eye, he crafted tooth, claw, liver, and stomach, giving birth to the things that gnawed in the dark.
Adelaide touched her belly and pursed her lips.
She grew jealous of Daedalus and longed to shape life, to conceive through love and not violence, so she begged him to craft for her a kiln. To her surprise, he answered, shaping the squamous epithelium into a hollow muscular organ beneath her belly, liver, and kidneys. Now, sharing love means so much more than simple infatuation and pleasure. Now she carries life within her and her kiln is fruitful, but she was deceived.
Adelaide doubled over, her skin turning gray, fangs poking her gums and drawing blood from her lips. She itched and scratched, her skin peeling, her toes curling, and her nails snapping.
“He poisoned the bricks of your kiln, Adelaide. Soon you and all life born of your womb shall be as they are.” Iapyx pointed towards the distant peninsulas, where scaled beasts with towering insect-like appendages decapitated each other in a depraved, loveless ritual of violence and strength. “You shall snarl as the beasts do and your soft heart and breast shall harden into exoskeleton, tooth, and claw.”
“But you killed him,” Adelaide said. “Daedalus is dead. Surely his venom shall fade.”
“No, Adelaide, first of womankind, I committed a grave trespass by reading my fate and thinking it could be altered slaying my brother, but I could no sooner still his beating heart than conquer the vast emptiness of space. With my actions, I have all but assured my death at Daedalus’s hands. He shall return and with him, the certainty of my end.”
Adelaide bit her lip, stifling a cry as her legs twitched and twisted, her toes elongated into hooked nails and vestigial teeth. Decima sobbed, clinging to her breast, the color of her auburn hair draining from the root like paint from a wet canvas.
“It hurts, Mother!” the little girl cried. “It hurts!”
Adelaide turned to the metallic reflection, laying her stillborn daughter Morta at her feet. “If you care so little for me, the man I once called husband, and the children we sired,” she said, her eyes pleading and desperate. “So be it, but what of the love we shared?” She curled her hands into fists. “These are your daughters, Iapyx! Will you abandon them to become twisted into beasts?! Will you ignore the cries of pain from Decima or the still heart of Morta?!”
A stellar wind kissed Morta’s cheek, clinging to her as a swaddling blanket, warming her infantile hands and brushing her hair.
“My eldest has already been saved,” Iapyx said. “As the first of the stillborn, the mangle retreats from her, for my brother’s venom, his curse, fears death above all things.”
The warmth of that distant star retreated from Morta and came upon Decima. The little girl’s brow unfurrowed and she sighed in relief, pain taken from her by the gentle caress of her father’s kiss.
“Life dwells so strongly in her,” he said. “My divinity has taken root, but the mangle will change her. She will be as my brother and I am, an engineer, a shaper of fate and flesh.”
“She deserves better than that!” Adelaide shouted. “Better that she remains a child as her sister than twist into a horrific entity chained to a kiln to shape beasts of fur and fang.”
Her voice echoed within the primordial soup, yet Iapyx remained unmoved, his stoney gaze unraveling her and leaving her bare against a violent tempest of super-heated potassium, nickel, and iron.
“If you would save her from that fate,” he said. “Then you must do as I say.”
Adelaide’s lips quivered, and she clung to Decima, her hands shaking. “I’ll do anything, just, please, spare her.”
“Very well, then you must bathe our child in the sea of storms.” Iapyx’s voice rumbled like distant thunder. “The divinity that has taken root within her breast will protect her, but, Adelaide, you must submerge her head to knee and cling to her ankles, never letting go.”
“I will,” she said, holding her daughter before the hungry storm.
“Adelaide, you mustn’t allow your hands to make contact, for the sea will tear you asunder. Hold fast to her ankles and no matter how much she pleads; you must keep her submerged to preserve her form.”
Adelaide breathed deeply as the calm mirror descended into chaos. A roiling tumultuous sea of hydrogen, sulfur, and carbon isotopes. She clung to her daughter’s ankles, tipping her upside down until her hair, now white as snow, grazed the sea surface. The girl’s eyes grew wide, and she reached for Adelaide, her little hands and lips trembling.
“Mother, what are you doing?” she pleaded. “I’m scared.”
Adelaide dropped Decima into that hungry maw, plunging her headfirst into a boiling liquid soup of nitrogen, helium, and chlorine. The elements hissed and spit as the girl struggled in vain, her screams lost in vast anvil-shaped clouds and rapidly spinning vortices. The violent currents threatened to rip the girl from Adelaide’s hands, but she clung fast, holding Decima’s ankles as if a rope on the edge of a cliff. She kept her suspended, but the liquid soup hungered for more than her knees, snapping at her ankles and reaching for her toes.
Adelaide cried, tears running down her cheeks as she felt her daughter struggle, kicking and twisting against rivers of stripped electrons and waves of plasma. Lightning cracked and thunder boomed the striking of an immaterial hammer against flesh. Decima went limp like a withered leaf at the end of an ailing branch.
“She’s dying, Iapyx!” Adelaide shouted. “I can’t leave her in there any longer!”
The sea hissed and spit, bubbled, and boiled, the vast emptiness of space doing little to quell the violence within, but, at last, she heard Iapyx’s voice over the storm’s roar.
“It is done,” he said.
Adelaide pulled Decima from the hungry soup and she burst from the unnatural waters, phosphorus and iodide dripping from her hair. The girl felt hot, a raging fever as steam rose from her naked body, but she was alive. Adelaide felt the girl’s breath against her cheek and saw the rise and fall of her chest, recoiling from a sharp effervescent scent.
“We have preserved what we could. Her heart, breast, and womb shall remain soft but the rest…” Iapyx’s gaze shifted towards the red, hand-shaped bruises on Decima’s ankles. “The mangle shall possess. A potent reminder of the mistakes you and I made.”
She brushed away her tears, smiling as she looked at her daughter. Decima slept soundly, her temperature returning to normal, claw-like fingers needing her lap.
Adelaide grunted, pain welling up in her belly, her skin bubbling, vestigial organs rising to the surface.
“What of me?” she asked. “What of my other children and their children’s children? Are we destined to be beasts, or can we bathe in the sea and take away our pain?”
“No Adelaide,” Iapyx said. “Neither you nor your children sired by men have my life in them. The sea of storms will destroy you.”
“Better to die than to return to your brother’s primordial kiln!”
“If death is what you seek, there is a kinder way, a gentler way, than what this throne offers.”
The clouds parted and the roiling gases turned glassy and smooth: the surface of an untouched pond. A shaft of black steel erupted from the liquid soup, drawn from its sheath, and burying itself at Adelaide’s feet. The dagger hissed, a black fog radiating from the hilt and caressing the blade.
“This dagger was forged in my mother’s belly, the steel of Kath’le Kal.”
Adelaide fingered the hilt, drawing the blade from the sand and turning it over in her hands.
“Drive this steel into our stillborn daughter’s throat and she will rise as a Duchess of Death, but be warned, Adelaide. Should you do this, you, your mortal children, and your mortal children’s children will grow old, feeble, and die with time’s passing. Though your descendants shall be as numerous as the stars, they will be like dust, ephemeral as a spring flower.”
“But we shall be spared from the mangle?” Adelaide asked.
She lay Decima in a bed of soft grass and then knelt in front of Morta. Her eldest daughter looked serene, her chest still as a calm spring and her hair the color of a starless midnight. She positioned the dagger above her throat.
“If I do this, we shall not succumb to your brother’s curse?”
“Yes. Coronate our duchess and the mangle shall retreat into your bosom,” Iapyx said. “Accept death’s kiss, become dust, and you shall be spared the fate of monsters for the mangle fears death above all things.”
Adelaide’s hands trembled, the blade shaking above Morta’s neck. “Will our child feel pain?” she asked. “Am I going to hurt her?”
“You cannot kill that which is already dead, but you can trick the mind, heart, liver, and kidneys.” Iapyx’s voice faded like distant thunder, the metallic mirror becoming clouded, disturbed by ripples. “Life, Adelaide, is cruel. Life is unfair. Life is pain. Though hers will be an imitation, she will feel it all the same.”
Adelaide squeezed her eyes shut, bit her bloody lip, and drove the blade into Morta’s neck.
