“What was it, though, I mean, I keep wondering, from your closer vantage, a whirlpool, you know what I’m talking about, what did you see, exactly, when you looked in its eyes? Madness? Some bizarre soul?” Perhaps Ichneumon had breathed too deeply of the exhilarating crystalline gas.
In a convulsive gesture, Charops sank her fingers in around the perimeter of a sour peach and then ripped the pale lavender flesh apart.
“Of course not,” she said. “Souls are invisible.”
“What, then?”
Charops considered the strangely dry peach pit in her hand. Tufts of pinkish flesh clung to the pit, which was ridged and grooved like... Like... You could follow those grooves down forever. Well, no.
“I saw... rest. Time. Seconds, minutes. Enough time to finally rest. Hours. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an hour before. I always thought they were invisible too.”
“You can rest now. There’s time. Gods, the way... Hours of it.” Ichneumon drained a flute of wine green as grass. “We’re resting now. The way his skull melted. Right now.”
“Yes,” said Charops. “It almost does seem like that, doesn’t it?” Ages passed, then: “You probably know what I keep wondering. Why weren’t you affected by it?”
“Dear,” said Ichneumon, “I have so many things on my mind, I can’t concern myself with that kind of nonsense. Time can’t actually be slowed like that, so I just ignored the fact that it seemed to be.”
Its foot rippled as Shell Oak advanced. It reached the throne, horns drawing inward for protection. The shell tilted backward as it bowed up and over. The brutal wedge of its foot folded over Loron, and the erstwhile Snail King emitted a muffled shriek as the snail backed up, dragging him with it. Loron vanished under the foot. Trickles of blood crept like flickering fingers toward the torchlight.
Shell Oak turned, elegant as a ship, toward Charops. Its horn was extended, wet like some horrific gland. Charops’ voice: “Ichnuu-u-u-u-u-maaaaahhhnnn — ”
A reek belled before Shell Oak, carried not by a breeze but an envelope of air that moved with it. The shell green and black, ornate with craquelure, shaggy old growth, and old filth. In the hollows where the shell rode away from the foot was a dark red wetness.
Years later, just after Charops betrayed the city of Zend to its doom, she remembered this moment. She remembered every stab in the back, every backdated execution order. Standing over the abyss, the bricks of the shattered towers still bouncing down the walls in their clouds of dust, screams still rising, she wondered if she were a monster. Why do monsters devour their prey? She was not a monster, because monsters only eat when they are hungry. She was much worse.
She thought of Shell Oak, tricked away from its homeland. Transplanted by desperate priests from the southern coast of Lesath, carried north on barges along rivers that had long since dried up, and for centuries sheltered and fed at the distant landing, because the normal human reaction to Shell Oak was Get It Away! Shell Oak was like Charops. It didn’t crush its prey because it was hungry. It had a strong, if dull, intelligence. It wanted to know what happened to things when it crushed them. And its foot was also its mouth, so... If it could, Shell Oak would crush the world just to satisfy the itch of curiosity. Curiosity: Charops wondered what had happened to old what’s-her-name. A weird one, for sure, though the name refused to come to mind. Charops’ mind was in terrible shape. The only old companion she could remember by name was Kobius, whose bones by then must have been spread for miles across the plains...
Shell Oak glided over Charops’ left foot. She sank to the ground beneath the weight. Her leg was under it now, pressed between stone and its greasy bulk. It slid forward over her right leg, which Charops had flung to the side to avoid being crushed. She could not avoid it. The soft edge of the foot rolled up her body. She felt her skeleton creak, her innards compressing, distorting.
The light was gone. Pressed blind between planes of glue and of stone, Charops found Loron’s arm, ripped loose and stuck to the snail’s lubrication. The slipperiness of its foot allowed her to move sideways, and, once she got her hands and wrists at the right angle, to crawl onto her hands and knees. There was a gap under the snail’s foot, but the slime was drowning her, and there was something caustic in its composition. Eyes closed tight anyway since there was nothing to be seen, the flesh of the snail heaped up over her like a grave mound. From her hands and knees, Charops began to press upward, moving into the snail from beneath. Not a gap, a mouth.
Charops unfurled upright past knobs of bone, directly into Shell Oak’s gullet. What had been black was now laced with gray. Not a good sign. Her fingers, burning and weak, found Loron’s crunched and shattered body, and she climbed up it like a tree. She was standing now, snail flesh pressing in on all sides. It was not fierce, there was no strength to it, yet it was unavoidable as a flood.
Her fingers closed around her knife and she began to stab. Not a stratagem in her mind. The corpse of Loron was pressed into her arms as close as a lover, and now she felt him struggling against her. He wasn’t dead, his lips were at her ear, he was whispering something to her, and she struck at him, so slowly, near paralyzed, her hands a mess of blood and slime. Loron was dead. She was dancing with a puppet of chance.
Think, think! But there are some problems you can’t think your way out of.
There was a reason Weirds and Strategists always traveled in pairs. From some other world there came a knocking. The darkness split and there was air again, and light, a rupture opening in the congealed slime that was the snail’s innards. Charops’ heart was thundering now, she could feel each beat, time dripping and sputtering like ice-melt. She stepped up out of the broken shell. Shell Oak was dead, the slow creep of time released from its glue. Ichneumon stood still for a second, one hand flung to the throne to keep her from keeling over.
“The statue, it just fell apart,” she said. “I weakened it, I did that, I know that, but I didn’t mean to, and I didn’t know he was the Head Weird. I didn’t mean to crush him like that, the blood, I didn’t mean any of it. I was only eight. It’s not easy to become a Weird, you know. You have to force your way into the Folly. I didn’t mean to kill him.”
The ground in a circle around Shell Oak, stretching out ten feet on each side of its shattered shell, was black with soot. A web of charred marks. Charops wiped ooze and ichor from her eyes, and then collapsed.
“I weakened the shell. I let a little anger into it. Sorry if it was too much. Was it too much? Are you all right?” Ichneumon leaned in close over Charops like a doctor observing a corpse that can no longer bite, her red clothes splattered with slime.
“No.”
Recommended Reading List
The following is by no means an exhaustive survey of the field, but simply represents some favorites of both the editors and contributors. The cosmic horror elements range from the fleetingly light to the overt and overwhelming, with the one common element being they are all worth checking out.
Berserk
Claymore
Conan
Heavy Metal
Oglaf