A dead god and a dying prisoner must reach an accord.
tags: apotheosis, the black ZIGGURAT, heroic azuras, naga, nsfw, transformation
art by angrboda
The colonists of New Heimat lived in the shadow of the black ziggurats, never quite able to put the eldritch architecture from their minds, never quite certain that the pyramids were as dead and empty as they appeared.
No one knew who had built them; they were there when the first imperial expedition dropped anchor offshore, visible from the sea as they loomed above the jungle canopy. For a while, each new ship that sailed eastward had carried another team of explorers, eager to unlock the secrets of the pyramids’ creation, to unearth the gold and secrets that must be held within. But the ruins jealously guarded their secrets, and whatever foul magics had built the ziggurats still protected them. After years of fruitless losses, the entradas had slowed to a trickle, and now the ruins were again unperturbed.
But not forgotten. The obsidian pyramids exerted a type of psychic pressure on those that saw them, a pull to be near them, a revulsion to look away. It was the fly in the ointment, the constant itching reminder that the world was not quite what it seemed, that something powerful and unknown had once walked these shores and built great projects of dark purpose.
In times of crisis, the need to know and to understand became greater; men and women from all walks of life, paupers and vagrants and merchants and soldiers, would be dragged from the hellish jungle, babbling and weeping and begging to be allowed to go back. Something stirred within the pyramids, they cried, something that needed to be let out.
Or so the rumors went. The colonial administration of New Heimat had always been a tumultuous affair, and those that emigrated from the Ceraphon Empire were ambitious and unsavory. Everyone had an enemy in New Heimat, and more than one person’s sudden disappearance had been explained by him or her going mad and “taking a walk into the ziggurat.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Eleanor Hale wasn’t mad; she was furious.
She had survived plague, and flood, and the sun becoming a baleful black. She had survived her father’s death and held his title as acting governor. She had bent the merchants to her will, kept the garrison loyal, played the privateers one against another.
But have one ship, the one damned ship from the capital, be nine weeks overdue, and suddenly everything fell apart.
No one knew what it meant. Every month for decades, at least one ship had arrived from the world capital of Tecera. In times of imperial strength, the ship was the chain that bound New Heimat to its mother country, its hold the ravenous maw that reminded the colony why it existed. In times of imperial weakness, it was the thread that reminded New Heimat the Ceraphon Empire still remembered, that in due time, more ships and more soldiers would arrive, the loyal rewarded and the disloyal punished.
But no ship? Individual ships might be early or late by a few days. Occasionally, a ship had sunk or been blown off course. But nine weeks overdue meant three ships were late, and the implications were enormous.
This was a portent for some, an opportunity for others—and for those that felt the pull of the black pyramids, it was both. So said the evidence that Eleanor presented to her privy council; mysterious cultists were excellent foils, and in this time of uncertainty, a shadow in the underbrush made a better enemy than an acting governor. The ploy had worked, too—the marine garrison alert to treachery and the whole settlement actually, for once, convinced of the necessity of martial law.
It had worked right up until a group of masked figures broke into her office and dragged her into the jungle for her own walk into the ziggurat.
She was furious for having been outmaneuvered, taken by surprise in her own ploy.
But right now, survival demanded focus. She bit back her anger and willed ice into her veins, a cold detachment settling over her as she considered the possibility that she was dealing with an actual, honest-to-gods cult. And to their credit, they had knives in the sashes across their waists and dyed ebon bandanas that hid the lower half of their faces. It was a fine effort, a theatrical effort, enough that from a distance they looked exactly like who they were supposed to be.
But their robes were clean, only now getting dragged through the mud, and they moved with a temerity that betrayed ignorance of the jungle. There were four of them—a man with graying hair, leading with a torch and machete, and three followers, flanking to her sides and back. The woman directly behind Eleanor pushed her along without much vigor or conviction; the two large men at her sides exuded more certainty, but the path was too narrow to walk three abreast, and they routinely tripped in the jungle’s thick undergrowth.
Eleanor watched their movements, waiting for an opportunity to break free and plunge into the jungle head-on. Her chance came when they both suddenly stopped—only for Eleanor to belatedly realize that the party had emerged from the tree line into a clearing of some sort. She instinctively jerked her head up to see what they had halted to stare at—and then she, too, stood slack-jawed, thoughts of escape momentarily banished from her mind.
The moon was high, bright enough that the hard, dead ground almost appeared silver. But the ziggurat at the heart of the clearing was darker than the night sky, darker than black, a featureless void that light disappeared into. It hurt to look at the pyramid, but Eleanor couldn’t look away, its stepped edges like a jagged bite out of reality itself.
Ahead of them was the pyramid’s cavernous entrance, its proportions just wrong enough to feel alien and inhuman. On its stoop lay a large and flat alabaster stone, rendered diminutive by its proximity to the ominous archway that towered above. Eleanor was left with the impression of something terrible and profane emerging from the bowels of the ruin, called forth by offerings stacked at its door.
“Over there,” the man in the lead said, motioning to the rock with his torch. “We’ll make it look like a sacrifice.” The other two men grabbed her arms, and the woman stayed out of sight, behind all of them.
Eleanor felt her heart speed up, a panic threatening to consume her; her death was imminent. And then the icy focus returned—accept that you will die, her father had always said, and then push past it. Things were about to reach a critical point, a moment that would decide everything. She needed to be completely committed to surviving, unruled by her fears.
At the altar—Eleanor assumed it was an altar, or a sacrificial pyre, the dimensions were roughly correct for a human body to be laid on it—they stopped. She glared daggers at the lead man, an affected anger, something to make him engage her.
He took the bait: “Any last words, governor?” he mocked. When she didn’t give him the satisfaction of mumbling through her gag, he motioned for one of the men to ungag her.
“Charles,” she said. “Caroline. Tobias and Gunther.”
The lead man pulled off his bandana, smirking. The woman beside him gasped, startled at having been identified, and the two underlings shifted uncomfortably.
Charles Solamance had been a peer of Eleanor’s father, a merchant of significant influence, and the two men had been friends, as much as business partners in New Heimat could be friends. They were of similar age and temperament, they indulged in the same virtues and the same vices, and they were also both widowers with daughters who came of age in the colony. Eleanor had spent enough of her youth playing at the Solamance estate that, in the bright light of the moon, she could recognize all of them under their masks, even the porter Tobias and the manservant Gunther.
But it was the presence of Caroline that Eleanor was most surprised by. Charles, she understood. The old man was ambitious and petty; he had thought himself the next governor, and Eleanor’s ascension to the office rankled. But Caroline? His daughter was better than this. And they had shared something, or so she had thought, since childhood: Eleanor always playing the role of the queen, commanding and brash, and Caroline always the queen’s handmaiden, even her consort—too timid to be the knight, but loyal like one, dedicated and trustworthy and quietly principled in a way that Eleanor was not, had been trained not to be.
Eleanor realized then that the anger she had for Caroline was not affected, and it stung.
“Eleanor,” the merchant said, his voice sickly sweet in victory. “How nice of you to join us.”
“So what’s the plan, Charles?” She had a good sense of what it was, but she wanted to keep him talking as long as she could.
“You had a great idea with that overblown cultist threat. I’m just building on your work, giving New Heimat a real threat to unify around. How terrible that you won’t be there to see it.”
The hairs on the back on Eleanor’s neck stood, a warning that something was about to change.
Caroline shifted, too, feeling the charge in the air, but Charles was oblivious, still waxing eloquent. “It’s a shame, but let’s face it: you’re going to do more good for this colony dead than al—”
From inside the pyramid’s entrance, a keen began to rise from, low and mournful.
Caroline screamed. If her father or servants knew her half as well as Eleanor, they would have recognized her cry as one of simple fright, the same scream Eleanor had teased out of her a hundred times before. But they didn’t, and all three turned to face whatever was attacking the girl, momentarily distracted.
This provided Eleanor with the opportunity she needed.
With a sudden, sharp kick, she brought her heel into the old porter Tobias’ knee—not on its front or back, but on its side. With a sickening crunch, it bent at an awful angle, and he went down with a yelp. The other two men turned from Caroline, reacting to this new cry, confused. Eleanor was prepared, already swinging her bound hands like a club, boxing Gunther on his ear and sending him sprawling onto the snow-white altar, which he tumbled over, landing heavily on its far side.
She twisted, only to find herself face-to-face with Caroline. The girl had apparently drawn her knife in self defense, and it took them both a moment to realize that she had inadvertently succeeded where Eleanor’s other captors had not, that her knife had easily slipped passed Eleanor’s defenses and into her gut.
They stared at each other, their eyes a mirror of shock and pain. “I’m sorry,” the Solamance girl started to say, “I didn’t—”
Eleanor didn’t hesitate. In one smooth motion, she twisted her fingers into Caroline’s hair and pulled the woman’s head downward, into the sharp edge of the altar. The white stone bloomed red, dark and rich, and Caroline crumpled, deathly still.
With a grunt, Eleanor pulled the blade from her own stomach, holding it underhand in her bound fists. For a moment, she considered charging Charles, the source of her woe. But he was ready now, his surprise replaced with fury, and Eleanor knew that she would only grow weaker with time—and that once Gunther picked himself up, she’d be outnumbered two to one.
So she did the only sensible thing.
She vaulted the altar and ran, hands bound and teeth clenched, into the weeping pyramid.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The interior of the ziggurat was brighter than Eleanor expected. The floor was made of the darkest black, a fathomless void, and with each heavy step Eleanor was certain that this was the time she would topple into the abyss and fall to her death. But the slabs of basalt under her feet did not give away, and the dark stone above her head was inset from the walls, creating open skylights that allowed moonbeams through. The effect was a silver edge to all the world, patches of brilliant white framing unending darkness, guiding Eleanor deeper and deeper.
As she stumbled forward, it was not the joy of survival that filled her heart, but a profound self-loathing. Doubt and despair and anger slid over her thoughts, crimson blood on white stone. She had survived—so what? To what end?
Her father had once told her that, when faced with two choices, the correct choice was always the one that kept you fighting, that preserved you for another year, another day, another minute. When she was younger, she had hated him for his… flexibility, his lack of self-restraint and self-value, as he did whatever was necessary to retain power just a little bit longer. Then she had become the colonial governor herself, and immediately took to following his advice, proving herself to be as covetous and unprincipled as he had been—proving that she, too, would sacrifice anything and anyone to suck in one more gasping, grasping breath.
She still hated him, more than ever, but now she hated herself, too.
The keen continued, a cry of wind passing through the structure. The light breeze felt good on her face, and she appreciated any noise in her ears that was not her own labored breathing. She had used the knife to cut her bindings; she still held it in one hand, less a weapon and more a totem against the unknown. She needed to keep moving, she told herself; her other hand made a poor tourniquet, and she was leaving a clear trail for her pursuers to follow—though eventually they might grow weary and leave, and she could follow the same blood back out to the mouth of the pyramid.
So was that the plan—to simply wait them out, on the off chance they assumed she had died and didn’t leave someone waiting for her? And then what? Crawl out of this ruin—a ruin which, to her knowledge, no one had ever left alive—and miraculously survive the dangers of the jungle, then present herself, alone and without allies, to the people of New Heimat? Would she instead wait on the beach, eyes to the sea, for a ship that would never come? And that’s if her wound didn’t kill her first.
So lost was she in her own mind, that it caught her by surprise when the hall before her opened into a moon-bathed atrium. She froze at the room’s entrance, struck still by the dark enormity of what loomed over her, her nervous and angry thoughts suddenly silenced.
The room was dominated by a singularly massive statue, awe-inspiring in its proportions. It was far taller than her, taller than any man; if it were life-sized, then the monster it depicted must be truly terrible. As when she first laid eyes on the black pyramid, something about the figure called to her, attracting and repulsing her simultaneously. Its lower half was that of a snake, obsidian so finely polished that it looked as if its fist-sized scales were made of a black liquid, trapped in a frozen moment of time. Its coils rose, a thick girth of lovingly crafted muscle that Eleanor would be hard-pressed to wrap her arms around. Her gaze drifted higher and higher, and she was shocked to discover that the top of the monster gave way to a human-like chest, arms outstretched to its—no, her—sides. Her face was cloaked in shadow, silhouetted by the moon above, but Eleanor could tell it was looking down at her, the jeweled eyes set into the statue’s face glowing the orange of dying embers.
She stepped forward, haltingly, never looking away from those eyes. Who was this creature? Across the ocean, there were rumors of half-snake people—nagas—in the southern provinces of the Ceraphon Empire. In all her years, she had never heard of something similar in the colonies, but maybe there was a connection? Maybe she could—
Eleanor blanched when she realized that she was touching the statue, that she had dropped her knife, that she had pulled her bloodied hand away from her stomach wound so that she could run both hands along the statue’s glistening scales. She jerked back, and felt both elation and despair that she had marred its grotesque perfection with her own blood. And then a third emotion: confusion that she felt anything at all about touching this statue. What the hells was she doing? She didn’t even know the name of the goddess—it was a goddess?—that this statue honored.
And then to her horror, she realized that she did know Her name. She couldn’t pronounce it, not quite yet, but it was there, coalescing in her head. Some atavistic part of herself, something deep and primal, recognized this monster. Her name was on the tip of Eleanor’s tongue and in the corner of her eye. She is coming back, Eleanor thought, unbidden. The goddess of what once was, and will be again. She who—
Eleanor shook her head and ran, trying to clear her thoughts as she escaped the overwhelming presence of the statue—not leaving the way she came, but moving around it, descending deeper still into the pyramid’s interior.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The walls were no longer smooth, but covered in reliefs made of moonlight and night. Stark figures jumped out at Eleanor as she reeled past, human halves of alabaster suspended over long tails of shadow. She understood, dimly, that the carvings were telling a story—rows of tiny figures, kneeling before creatures of terrible power. Some looked like the statue that Eleanor had fled; others were… worse.
Her stomach wound was hot under her hand now. She was lightheaded, too, and her mouth tasted of dried blood. She had lost track of time and space; she had walked for what felt like hours, a far greater distance than the pyramid was wide. But her feet carried her forward—away from the exit, away from the statue, yes, but more importantly, toward something. What that something was, she couldn’t yet say. The madness of the pyramid must be inside of her now, Eleanor sardonically thought; she would end this night a crazed cultist yet, blabbering the name of—
The name. It itched at her mind, a fact long-forgotten—a fact that she and no one living knew, and yet did know, improbably, impossibly. There was a growing feeling of wrongness and anxiety, too, a need to correct a grave error—a shame born of forgetfulness, anger and humiliation that the name should have ever disappeared from the world to begin with. These thoughts were alien to her; these thoughts were primordial, ever-present, only momentarily forgotten. She had never known them, she had always known them—they were as a seed within her psyche, planted by her progenitors, waiting to grow anew.
Ahead of her, there was another room, larger than the previous atrium, and at its center was not a statue, but blocks of basalt, arranged like a sepulcher, or a…
… a throne.
And then the name was there, on her tongue and in her mind.
“Xolotzil,” she whispered into the empty room.
The wind that had keened out of this place suddenly reversed, rushing back in a terrifying gale that tore at Eleanor’s skin and drove the air from her lungs.
And in the stillness that followed, the room was no longer empty.
A shape of dust and shadow had coalesced on the throne before Eleanor, the shade of the statue she had previously seen—her long tail wrapping around the base of the throne, her claws resting on its sides, her eyes glowing bright in the room’s twilight.
In Azuras, it was a fool who denied the existence of the gods. The two greatest goddesses—Keraph and Phar, whose war against each other for dominion over Azuras had broken mountains and twisted continents—were gone now, exiled from existence or in occultation, who could say. But theirs was not the only power; the world was populated by minor deities, spirits of places, beings that time had forgotten, or that had been summoned into being by remembrance.
There were codes, too, about how one should interact with the divine. Once, before they set out for the colonies, her father had entreated with one such deity, an undine who he beseeched to protect their fleet. Eleanor had knelt in the wet sand of the shore, her eyes screwed shut as commanded—until, compelled by childish curiosity, she peeked out to see the hem of Her skirt, the blue-green of shallows in sunlight.
But Eleanor was a grown woman now, holding what little remained of her life in one cupped, bloodied hand. She barely had the energy to stand, let alone to kneel and supplicate. And she had knelt all her life, in one way or another. Now, at the end of all things, she would stay standing.
So she opened her mouth and said:
“You’re smaller than your statue.”
The smoke and air swirled, but the monster did not move.
“I’m—” Eleanor paused. Even in the grip of her fatalism, she knew not to speak her True Name with her own voice to a creature of power.
“You are Eleanor Hale,” Xolotzil said, and Eleanor’s body hummed in resonance.
Well, shit.
“You summoned me,” She continued.
“I did no such thing,” Eleanor replied, in a fit of pique. “How do you know my name?”
“I have tasted your blood, mortal.” The glowing embers that were Her eyes burned brighter. “Caught in a trap of your own device, you spilled blood on my threshold to escape—the blood of a friend who you loved, and who loved you, and whose wound will kill you yet. You struggle against death, yet cannot articulate why you should live. You craft deals as easily as you breathe, but now, at the end of your existence, you are too proud to beg. The universe turns on such ironies. It is poetry to Us, these little stories that consume the lesser race. They are the keys that strike the strings that sing the notes. They are the keys that turn the locks that open the doors.” The eyes blazed with greater intensity. “I know all that there is to know about you, Eleanor Hale.”
Her body again shivered at the use of her True Name, but she forced down the vertigo. “What do you want from me?”
“You summoned me,” She repeated.
“I don’t believe you.”
“A fact does not require your belief, mortal.”
“The cry from the pyramid, before I escaped. It let me escape. That must have been your doing. Why?”
Xolotzil was silent.
“Then who are you? Beyond your name—which is in my head, somehow—I know nothing ab—”
“That is not true. You know everything about Us. You simply need to remember.”
The breeze began to blow again. The room became opaque, dust and ash rising to create a vision of kneeling bodies—thousands, tens of thousands of men and women on one knee, an endless sea of bent backs and heads craned low. Towering over them was a pantheon of eldritch gods, of which Xolotzil was front and center, a clawed hand outstretched before Her.
“We raised you from the clay of this world, shaped you into forms that were pleasing to Us.”
Something about Her words seized at Eleanor, and she looked closer. The humans weren’t kneeling, she realized with a shock—they were partially enveloped by the ground, as if growing from it. No, that was wrong: as if summoned from the soil by Xolotzil’s will.
“We gave you purpose; We rewarded your devotion. When We erected Our great works, you were Our tools. When We sought to walk among you, you were the vessels that carried Us.”
Now some of the humans stood, their glowing eyes matching those of the pantheon behind them. And then they began to change, human bodies twisting and flowing and breaking into something inhuman and grotesque and beautiful, altered in the service of something greater.
“You can feel it now, Eleanor Hale, in your bone and in your blood. Though eons pass, the creation will always be marked by its creator. Our hand is indelible upon your bodies. The echoes of Our will still shape your fates. You can appreciate it, deep within your soul, the rightness of looking up to your betters—the joy of a creation finally reawakening to its true place and true purpose. Ours and yours was a union of unequals, an accord of the mighty over the weak. It was magnificent, and it was eternal.”
“It was eternal,” Eleanor echoed.
Xolotzil was silent, though the illusion lost its form for a moment, dust whirling erratically.
“It was eternal,” Eleanor repeated, her emphasis pointed. “What changed?”
The scene shifted again, the terrible, gargantuan gods of before suddenly arrayed against three new foes. The vision was less distinct, less imposing than what came before, but Eleanor could make out the sigils of Keraph and Phar on two of the newcomers.
“There were… interlopers.” Xolotzil’s anger ground out of clenched teeth. “Invaders. They cast Us down and stripped Us of our power. They stole from Us our creations. But We endure.”
Eleanor smirked. “And in their great power and wisdom, these new gods—” the illusions flickered with Xolotzil’s fury at the term “—left you buried in a tomb that anyone could walk into, and talk with, what, your ghost?”
Xolotzil smiled, as if what Eleanor had described was the true victory. “We are as indestructible as We are ineffable. They could only contain Us, and every room must have a door. This is mine, as impossible and immortal as I am. And now something has changed. The door has weakened. We will again be free.”
Suddenly Eleanor laughed. The goddess’ smile turned brittle, and Eleanor only laughed harder, until the gash across her stomach bled anew, until she gasped through phlegm and blood for breath.
“This isn’t a throne and it isn’t a tomb,” she finally coughed out. “It’s a prison, and you’re still trapped in it. You’re calling out through the bars, begging for someone to free you. Begging for me.” And then Eleanor grinned, her teeth red and vicious in the twilight of that place. “So let’s make a deal.”
The goddess stood, lording over the hunched, dying woman. “Who do you think you are, mortal, to dictate to a god? Who are you to—”
Eleanor’s fingers were cold, but her head was clear. “No,” she said, her defiance cutting through Xolotzil’s protests. “It’s like you said: I already know everything that I need to know about you. You need worshipers. You need tools. And most of all, you need vessels to contain your essence.”
Xolotzil was shocked into silence, but Her ghostly tail wrapped around Her throne, straining against it in apoplectic rage.
Eleanor barreled on, stabbing in the dark. How different could a pantheon of gods be from a quibbling privy council? It sounded right, and she was clearly having an effect on Xolotzil.
“And you, specifically, need me. You need someone to carry you and your word back into the world. And I bet… I bet you’re desperate. You’re afraid that whatever has weakened your prison door is temporary, that you’ll be plunged back into darkness before you can escape. Or worse—” Eleanor smirked, feeling the truth of her words strike home “—or worse, one of your fellow gods will escape their imprisonment first, and they’ll amass power in Azuras while you languish. I bet no one else has crawled into your prison in centuries—or if they have, they haven’t lived this long. And now here I am, just out of reach, the… what was it?… ‘the key that turns the lock that opens the door.’”
Eleanor felt the words tumbling out of her mouth, as surely as the life seeping from her wound, the blood pooling at her feet. She didn’t have long. “And you know what else? I know all of this is true. I know you are weak and desperate, because no goddess would ever tolerate someone speaking this to Her face in Her seat of power.”
Eleanor’s final word was punctuated by the sound of Xolotzil’s throne cracking, crushed under the pressure of Her wrath.
And then Her tail relaxed, and when She spoke, Her voice was beyond fury, returned to a terrifying tranquility. “What I know, Eleanor Hale, is your True Name.”
Eleanor Hale screamed—not just her voice and her flesh and her soul, but everything that ever was or ever would be Eleanor Hale screamed out in a torment eternal. The feeble substance of reality fell away, the stygian black of the pyramid swallowing light and matter until only Xolotzil Herself remained—only Xolotzil and pain, and a choice between them.
“Beg,” Xolotzil commanded, Her voice every lashing wind.
“Submit,” Xolotzil commanded, Her strength every crashing wave.
“Become,” Xolotzil commanded, Her will every towering mountain.
And Eleanor wanted nothing more than for the pain to stop, to do as Xolotzil commanded, to accept Her and let her own reality be renewed, her life saved.
But some things are larger than wanting and desire. Some things are more important than pain and even obliteration.
“No.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
She was awake.
Everything hurt. Her skin burned where she lay against the cold floor. It seemed to smoke where it touched the cool air. Her dry eyes could no longer cry, and her split lips had no more blood to shed. She was a shell, the remains of someone, the flotsam of a ship dashed against the shore.
But she was Eleanor Hale.
She pulled herself up, braced to see Xolotzil again looming over her, preening in Her victory, so proud to have destroyed Her only means of escape, all to prove a point.
But Xolotzil was toppled off Her throne, too, heaving against the floor like Eleanor was. Whatever Xolotzil had done, it had taken just as much out of the goddess.
“You,” She croaked, “should be dead.” Her long tail dragged behind as She used Her arms to feebly push Herself up.
Eleanor tried to shrug. Instead, her hand slipped, and she fell back to the floor. She groaned out a laugh, amazed at her weakness—amazed that her strength had carried her this far, but no further.
The shadow of Xolotzil pulled itself closer to Eleanor, clearly in pain. “Even if it means I must wait ten thousand more years to escape,” She spat, “I will choke the life out of you with my own hands.”
“Well, hurry the fuck up,” Eleanor wheezed. “I’m going to be dead before you get here.”
Xolotzil cursed—a true curse, words of power that could rend flesh from bone—and the tile under Her cracked. A long, shadowed claw wrapped around Eleanor’s throat and hauled the woman to her knees. “And to think that I would have used you as a vessel.”
Eleanor looked up through lidded eyes, the thinnest of smiles on her lips. “I win.”
The claw tightened. “How is this a victory, mortal? No one will ever know of your defiance. You will die here, alone and forgotten, and I will endure.”
“My flesh is about to die,” Eleanor replied, her breath labored. “But for the rest of eternity, your only companion will be the memory of me, telling you ‘no.’ So get on with it, you coward. Make me immortal.”
Xolotzil pulled the woman higher, off of her knees and then off of her feet, toward Her baleful, glowing eyes. “My hatred for you,” She hissed, “is boundless. You must understand this. The mountains may crumble, the stars may dim, the gods themselves may finally die. But I swear to you that my hatred will never end.”
And then slowly, very slowly, Xolotzil lowered Eleanor back to her feet. “What are your terms, mortal?”
Eleanor stumbled back, disoriented. She had not expected to be pulled to her feet. She had not expected to be alive. She sucked in a deep breath, buying time to regain her balance. “What does… being your avatar entail?”
The specter above her smiled, delighting in the woman’s sudden discomfort. “You are currently the agent of a greater power, yes?”
It took a moment for Eleanor to understand what Xolotzil was referring to, as if the world outside the ziggurat had become a half-remembered dream. “Yes. Yes, I’m the acting governor of New Heimat, a colony of the Ceraphon Empire.”
“The acting governor,” Xolotzil purred. “Then you already know what it means to wield power on behalf of a distant sovereign. Your duties will not change. You will intuit the will of something larger than you, and employ your wit and your wisdom to see Our goals obtained. You will inflict great violence on Our enemies, and provide succor to Our subjects. You will become something because you wield Our power—and through you, Our power will be expressed, created.”
Eleanor’s disorientation grew as Xolotzil began to circle her, leaving her with the unmistakable impression of being pinned at the heart of a hungry, covetous vortex. “What is this… Our?”
“You will no longer rely on writs or charters from across the ocean for your power. Ours is immediate and visceral. When We act, We will act as one, in concert. You will be a branch of me, and a manifestation, my embodiment. You will know my will, and you will act on my will, and it will be Our will. You will possess my power, even as I possess you.”
This last comment brought a clarity to Eleanor’s thoughts. “I will not be something that you possess,” she growled, clenching her fists.
“But you are already possessed.” Xolotzil’s voice came from behind her now, difficult to place, but she could feel the goddess all around her—a breeze, a touch of dust and smoke on her skin. “The ambitions, the drives, the desires that burn within your heart, the fire that animates your clay—you are possessed of them, possessed by them, and they sing out to me.”
“Don’t play with my words, snake,” Eleanor bit back. “I won’t have you own me. I won’t bend to you, not even for your power.”
“Then allow me to make this easier for you.” The wound along Eleanor’s gut was suddenly touched by a ghostly hand, so frigid that it burned. She grimaced as the terrible cold seeped into her, and then gasped in pain and surprise as her flesh began to knit.
“Leave this place of your own volition. I will not stop you. Your wound is healed, and no one waits for you at the entrance of this ruin.”
For a moment, Eleanor thought about turning and leaving, if only to prove that she could do such a thing. In her mind’s eye, she could see herself emerging into the pre-dawn darkness, the jungle’s night humidity clinging to her victorious skin—and there, waiting for her, would be no one, her skull split open, her eyes still wide with the shock of betrayal.
Eleanor clenched her jaw but did not move.
The shadow swooped close, grazing along her cheek. “I know you, Eleanor Hale,” Xolotzil growled, right in her ear. “I despise you, but I know you, as well as you know yourself. You have said you will not be owned. That will not be the nature of our… relationship.”
Uncertainty lanced through her heart. “That’s not—”
“Silence,” Xolotzil commanded, and Eleanor’s protest was cut short with a gasp, a shadow slipping into her hair and pulling her head back, forcefully baring her neck. “You had your chance to leave,” She growled. “You saw the visions; you know what this will entail. You protest, because you feel that your lips should protest. You believe to admit desire is to admit weakness—that to want something more than yourself gives that object power over you.”
The voice was creeping along Eleanor’s neck, the hint of breath along her exposed flesh, until it reached her other ear. “But to be a goddess is to know only hunger. It is to covet. It is to demand sacrifice and offerings. You will want many things, and they will be yours, if only you have the will to seize them.”
A flash of hope lanced through Eleanor’s heart: if what Xolotzil was saying was true, then maybe Caroline—
“Yes,” the goddess confirmed, a knowing, mocking tone to her voice. “She can be yours again, if you so want. We will see to it, together.”
Eleanor flushed with embarrassment, chagrined to have been read so easily. But the heat was in her chest now, filling her, and she could feel herself warming to this arrangement.
“You will know pain,” Xolotzil continued. “I cannot promise otherwise. But you will never again feel pain like this.” The shadows embraced Eleanor more fully, hands running along her body and under her clothes, brushing away the night’s cuts and bruises. “No mortal blade will ever bring you low, no disease will ravage your body. You will be worthy of your name, fit and hale until the end of time.”
The touches were growing stronger—no longer ephemeral caresses but probing massages, pushing past skin and into the muscle below. “But I have warned you: this will not be enough. You cannot be merely strong; you must be the strongest. You cannot be attractive, as a mortal is; you must shine with the beauty that only the champion of a goddess can possess. You will be the greatest—the greatest leader, the greatest warrior, the greatest poet and artist and lover—because I demand that she who speaks for me be these things. And you will feel this lust settle in your heart, and it will fill you, and you will come to demand these things, too.”
Eleanor tried to reply, a retort that she understood the nature of desire, that she was familiar with a thirst for power. But instead, what left her lips was a gasp of pleasure. Xolotzil’s touch was everywhere now, light brushes in unexpected places, possessive clutches elsewhere—and in the face of all Xolotzil’s assurances, they were indisputably possessive, laying claim to Eleanor’s body. It was no longer a breeze that caressed her but a tempest, coils stretching and sliding across her flesh. The cloth of her blouse and pants began to disintegrate under Her touch, and beneath it… beneath it was…
She stared, enraptured by the sight of her flesh beginning to transform—no longer skin, but the lustrous shine of black scale, her body now graced by Her hideous beauty. She did not feign a protest, not this time. Xolotzil had been right; she could have left, and she did not. She had known this would be the outcome, that Xolotzil would claim her body and twist it into something powerful and inhuman, something…
… more worthy of Her avatar. It was with a faint surprise that Eleanor realized this—not surprise that this was what she was becoming, not surprise that she was in that liminal moment between once and future, between then and will be—but surprise to find that this was something she wanted.
“More,” she begged, finally. “More.”
Xolotzil’s hold grew stronger, Her coils tightening around Eleanor, sheering away the last scraps of her clothes. In the twilight, Eleanor could see her new scales glistening along her legs—and then, as the pressure grew tighter, she could feel the scales closing together, her legs merging into one tail, its strength that of a truly terrible and atavistic predator.
With a throaty moan, her lips—no longer cracked and pale, but black and full, flush with the promise of both pleasure and poison—pulled back in a wild grin, and her smile was now filled with malicious teeth. She could feel her strength growing, muscles and sinew developing into a form that was pleasing to her goddess, ideal to evoke dread and desire in all who looked on her. Her long fingers clutched at her swaying breasts, the dark of her claw-like nails a perfect contrast to her flawless, alabaster skin.
In her mind and in her soul, she could feel it now, all of it—Xolotzil’s hunger, Her ambition, Her anger at a world that had forgotten Her. And she could see the future unfolding before them: first New Heimat, and then more, more, always more. A world of black stone and silver trim, an ordered world, a world of hunched backs and true deference, the idols of the false interlopers cast down, the compact of the strong over the weak restored—Her name on every lip, every word a prayer to Her glory and Her grandeur and and and—
—and Xolotzil was there, crushing her in Her embrace, twisting the last parts of her clay into something terrible and wonderful, an avatar of woe and a herald of pleasure. “Xolotzil!” she cried, so close now. “Xolotzil!” she screamed, smoke and dust and power playing with every part of her body, tormenting her mind. “Xolotzil!” she begged, tears and sweat running over her trembling flesh, her need for absolution, for culmination, so close, so very—
—and then she was in the throne room, braced against the stygian floor, panting and gasping and shuddering, her promised release held in abeyance, her body edged to the point of madness. She looked up to see Xolotzil’s throne restored, and her goddess sitting on it, proud and cruel in Her victory. “I warned you, my Eleanor Hale: to be a goddess is to know hunger.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
In the twilight of early dawn, that which was Eleanor Hale and was now more than Eleanor Hale emerged from the ziggurat, its black scales drinking in the light as readily as the stygian blocks.
And then it was just Eleanor Hale, battered and bruised and victorious and defiant, smiling in the sun. But though she was the same height as she once was, the pyramid’s towering maw now framed her perfectly, its grotesque proportions rendered sublime.
Caroline lay where Eleanor had left her, slumped against the altar, her eyes still open in surprise. Unexpected, though, were the bloodied bodies of Tobias and Gunther.
Eleanor felt Xolotzil move through her, a terrible, ageless familiarity with blades and death recreating the scene in her mind: Charles, angered at the escape of his quarry, confronted with the death of his daughter. Charles, practical and conniving, dealing with witnesses. Charles, taking Gunther from behind, a slice across the throat. Charles, stalking the crippled Tobias, deaf to the man’s pleas.
Charles, who even now was returning to New Heimat, the lies of this night on his lips. She wondered how heroically the late Eleanor Hale would play in that story.
She knelt beside the altar. Tobias and Gunther’s deaths were not hers. But Eleanor had spilt Caroline’s blood, and there was power in that. She cupped the woman’s pallid cheek, feeling the crimson thread than ran from Her hand and out into the void. Her eyes glowed, and when the universe resisted, her lips turned up in a snarl. And when the universe continued to resist, Her coils lashed out, cracking stone, strangling air, rending the powers and the wills and the laws that stood between Her and Her goal.
With a shuddering gasp, Caroline’s eyes flew open. “Eleanor!” she cried, staring up in awe at the beast above her, fury and exertion etched on Her face. With a laughing sob, she flung her arms around Her neck. “You came back for me!”
And for a moment, both of their eyes glowed the orange of dying embers.
Author’s Note: For a very long time, it has been a dream of mine to commission Angrboda. She’s one of my all-time favorite TF/TG artists, and I’ve followed her work for years. She opened commissions just as I was beginning to write The Mortal Coil, and I knew that her style—especially her ability to express shiny, black scales!—would be perfect to illustrate it. They say “don’t meet your heroes,” but in this case, Ang was an absolute saint to work with.
This story is set in Azuras, like many of my fantasy stories, but a little later than the rest—less high fantasy, and more a tale of swashbuckling. One of the largest influences on this story—though perhaps not obvious—was Starz’ amazing, four-season series, Black Sails. The Eleanor of this story is inspired by the Eleanor of that story, down to her name and her appearance—but also, for being a ‘problematic fav,’ someone who refuses to lose, regardless of the consequences.
As always, I would like to thank my supporters on Patreon, whose support made this possible.