Death isn’t the same for them. The gods and goddesses of war wax and wane going through periods of inaction bound to their mother’s will. An engineer’s soul takes time to heal, scabbing over and forming nasty scars that blister and bleed. Their true forms are like the surface of the moons, filled with craters battered and bruised. They will never forget how they last died and their cravings for vengeance run deep. Ask yourself, what would you do if you had a second chance? The engineers have had many and they’ve never changed.
A blinding flash, an ear-splitting squeal, a sky parting cloud of ash and dust. That was his legacy. Xerxes never felt the impact, never felt his body crash against the rocks or the tiny bits of sharp glass that penetrated his spine. His hearts were beating too fast, mind racing at the speed of light. If only he had anticipated his sister. If only his hive had time to incubate a few minutes longer. If only the fight had been fair.
Persephone never played fair.
The pain hit him now. It was like a vortex bearing down upon calm seas. His fingers twitched, eyes circling from left to right, and his teeth clacked together, searching for something to bite on, anything to escape the spasms in his back.
Where was his tongue?
Where was his tongue!?
He moved the bloody stump in his mouth, swimming in a lake of the plasma between his cheeks. Xerxes lifted his head and grabbed hold of a crooked stone jutting from the dunes. He pulled until his tendons snapped and something slippery gave behind him. Then came the winds, a howling storm that kicked up the sands, covering his body in a thin film of ash.
The plains shook when the last of his strength gave out, and he rolled down the dunes until his head rested upon the hillside. From here, he could see the cloud of devastation touching his mother’s soft palate and spreading like a blanket across the horizon. Even half cooked, the blast had spread more than a mile wide, touching the ceiling and gouging a hole in the roof.
The wind whistled through the gashes in his wings, brushing past tattered membranes and tickling the silver hairs beneath his collarbone. Xerxes tried to stand, dragging tendrils of black tissue behind him. His nostrils flared, kicking up sand as he pulled himself forward.
Maybe he got the attacking engineer in the blast. Yes, there was a chance for him to make it out, to rest here for a bit and find his strength. The throne could still be his if only the stars were aligned.
Suddenly, his fingers touched something solid, not like the stone jutting from the dunes, the raining glass, or the porous cliffs of his mother’s hard palate. No, this was rough, but with a rounded edge that ended at a point, a talon, a claw, a sharp reminder of his failure.
Xerxes lifted his head to meet Persephone’s gaze. She was missing two heads, and her fingers were bruised, with flesh peeling off the sides of her elbows. The gills along her neck were pale, and a few broken fins were twitching along her waist.
“Of course, it had to be you,” he said, stumbling over his words with half a tongue.
The orca was her specialty. How had he failed to recognize that before?
“Give it to me,” she said, the skulls along her neck clicking their teeth together. “give me the design before it is too late!”
It hurt to laugh, but he couldn’t help himself. The sound slipped out like a low rumble, causing his diaphragm to spasm and fingers to curl.
“Don’t you see?! I can beat the old rat! He will never hold the throne again! Just give me the design!” Persephone shouted, tendrils wrapping around Xerxes’s neck.
“Do it yourself,” he whispered softly.
“What did you say?”
“When next I’m freed from mother’s embrace, I will give you the design,” Xerxes said, and with a burst of adrenaline, he lunged forward and grabbed hold of her collarbone. “I will shove it so far down your throat you won’t have time to get it out before the blast! You won’t see it coming! None of you will see it coming! I will hold the throne again and never relinquish the duchy! All of you are dead! All of you ar—”
Xerxes didn’t notice Persephone’s scintillating spine, the forked tendril with oscillating teeth that sprung from her neck and cut clean through his own. There was no rush of wind, no flashes of pain nor cracking of bones, just a whimper and the sound of sand parting beneath his cheek. His head fell first, but his body hung on, still digging into her shoulder until she ran it
through with a jagged spine, breaking it off at her clavicle. There his body remained, pinned to the dunes like a scarecrow in a field.
As the last of his breath left his lips and eyes rolled into the back of his head, the pink tendrils that held his name went limp, and Xerxes the hollow spear, fell from his vibriatus’s skull. His porous soul spilled onto the Overworld and cast luminous tendrils upon the dunes. He stretched himself like a cobweb, frantically grasping for anything solid, anything that might contain his vessel.
Xerxes struggled in vain.
Sand slipped through his fingers, stone melted like ice, and the rivers of pus below parted as easily as the dunes above. He fell through the Overworld, past his mother’s endothelial layer, and poked through her basement membrane back into the abyss. For a second, he held fast to the tissue above, radiant digits stretching like rubber until finally breaking away.
It was dark down there, so dark that even his light faltered like candles smothered beneath a thick blanket. A stale wind came from the west, which pushed away the moisture slithering down from above.
Drip, drip
“No, no, no, no! Not now! Not yet!”
Xerxes launched himself back up towards the tissue, but there was nothing to anchor him, and so he slipped back into the walls of his mother’s womb. She wrapped around him; arms as black as midnight breath like diesel fuel. He pushed hard against her, but the more he struggled, the deeper he sank.
Then came the warmth of a used cloak, the pressure of sheets tucked under his shoulder, and the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Rest now. It’s over.”
“No, not yet! I can still win!” Xerxes pulled away, black tendrils breaking free and whipping violently in the air.
Another tentacle grabbed tight and looped through pores in his spirit, sucking him back into the black tar.
Xerxes choked, the last of his light turning dull and gray as his soul went slack. He fell through the darkness and further still until neither wave nor particle could escape.
The air sickly tart surrounded him now, and he could taste something at the tip of his tongue—something sweet, savory, and sour, just like mother used to make.
Drip, drip, drip, drip
What was it he woke for?
Drip, drip, drip.
What was it he fought for?
Drip, drip.
What was it he died for?
Drip.
What did it matter?
— ✦ —
Persephone cast the engineer’s head into the dust and left the still twitching body behind. She rarely let her eighth Id out, but Wrath was so hard to control. Even Gluttony and Lust couldn’t hold a candle to the raging fire within.
She should have known better. No engineer, living or dead, would ever relinquish their secrets; she was no exception. Still, Persephone had hoped their kinship against the rat king would have been enough to sway him.
She was wrong.
The tears came not long after, deep red and thick as blood. The weeping, that’s what they called it. All engineers could feel the passing of an elder, and so their vibriatus’s wept blood in response.
Xerxes was gone.
Persephone sank beneath the sand to collect the remains of her pod, the fin-like digits poking through her waist and rotating to prepare for the violent currents below. There was something wrong in the way her fingers moved, a shaking joint, a hesitant twitch, a lack of confidence. The spirit of Fortitude, now sharing a skull with Ingenuity, could no longer pluck the muscle fibers as easily.
She would have to make do.
As Persephone entered the swirling waters of pus, she bundled the spirit of Rage tight to her chest and closest to the thyroid. She would need the eighth Id again if she were going to succeed against Icarus, a trick up her sleeve. Wrath always gave her that last burst of strength, that desperate push to claim the throne.
She could feel it now. The tonsil touched the ground, digging a trench into the dunes as it swayed back and forth. The Pallid Throne was within reach.
Persephone and Icarus were the last engineers.
“Fine,” she said, breaking through the rivers below and letting the current carry her to the source. “I will finish this myself.”
