3.9|Ich glaub’ ich spinne

 

3.9|Ich glaub’ ich spinne

 

Beyond the reaches of space and time, of life and death a goddess watched from the realm of the Underworld. Novus, in all her curiosity spun a calf's femur in her ancient well. Each scene played out like a dream for Grahim's delirium, each vision and moment in the well casting Fate's dictations for her to gaze upon. She stuck her hands in the water, raising the liquid into a bubble up in the air that she could observe like a shimmering orb. From there it's projections spun slowly over the course of time. Anne did begin to learn magic. She and her brother, had never been this far away from home before, so he knew only what he saw with his eyes, but she was beginning to understand more. Her hubris caught up to her one day, when she her usage of the naive power backfired and she converted her brother into a deer.

Mercy, under her mother's instruction would wed the king ceremoniously. And of her own volition, she would begin to tutor Anne, appearing one day before her as a widened sage from another world to guide her. Their conflicts would begin when Anne stole Mercy's ring. The bubble's projections shifted. From small beginnings, the two garnered followers. Their rift grew, and teachings spread further still. Mercy, known to many now as a prophet would share and preach the ways of the Hex. What was first a dictation under her mother's command became a movement. A way of life.

When this bubbling projection shifted in Grahim's hands, it turned to Mercy captured by her enemies, her brother transformed beyond recognition. The Ladies of Dawn seeing the conflicts ahead, adopted his extensive notes and grew into the Night Sisterhood. Mercy's followers started what would be known as the Hex Church. Mercy, despite all her power had another enemy.

Sway, granted the role of another Void Queen as the Feaster felt the presence of a force she had not known since her childhood. She ascended beyond the world, into the stars to fight this force and was subsequently crushed.

The Shadowking. In the Void Realm she'd begun numerous battles under the direction of her mother, fighting as the first Void Queen. He'd become her greatest rival, a despot with hefty skeletal armor seeking to solidify his reign against the Meister's of Glitter Kiss and the Ethereal Empress - Protlyn. The nights before her final engagements with Anne, Mercy was captured by the Shadow King and stripped of her power, sealed with tattoos where her false mother had once scarred her in back. Without her strength, Anne set her before a glowing brazier of coals. Just as the Hex Church began, its persecution's first victim would be the burned prophet herself.

She, the Void Queen of Light had been defeated.

That night and thereafter, Anne would awake in the dark, her room flooded with the glowing fire burning and the ashes of her dead sister and of those who came after. With each passing day her own eyes took on the same hue and she began to take more fire. The guilt of what she'd done drove her to isolation. Her brother, scarred but secretly alive reached out and convinced her to absolve her sins and step down. The two, sharing a tender moment atop the kingdom they ruled, bid the world fairwell and accepted a totem of the Shadow King- effectively, allowing brother and sister to leave this world to another. He had sought so long to go there for himself once, but now there was nothing in that desolate world for him now. The despot of the Void Realm had others still in his sights, the Ethereal Empress still a rival requited for revenge.

Ten years had passed since Mercy's 18th First Day.

After meeting her end in the ritualistic Inferno, Mercy awoke in a pile of dead leaves. There was another girl laying in rotting bones and carcasses nearby. "Sway?

"Ugh.. Sup Merc'." Sway asked.

"Where's Anne, where are my worshipers? The Hex- we have to protect, why am I in.." She coughed, a stream of blood spraying out over Sway. Mercy reached out to her, pulling her into her arms. "Ughhh 'it oOOff me!" Sway gagged. They held each other as the wind blew around them, taking with it the smell of the rotting leaves and lilacs.

Sway had never known a world this dark existed, it was strangely comforting.

Mercy looked down. She was 28 when she'd expired, and now barely appeared

older than 16. "I, think I shrunk??"

Seeing the deathly plain, she knew the reason, Mercy understood everything now but, she was dying, she wanted to tell her followers, the ones she held dearly to her heart, that she could no longer live among them anymore. But, before she could, a woman with eyes as dark as night came forward, standing between them and the darkness of the wilted forest and seas beyond the boneyard.

The woman, with 3 arms was holding a sphere containing the history of everything that had happened. The Prophet's spectacle across every level of society, it's repression and fierce resistance. The dazzling religious fervor, the lessons and sermons Mercy tried to give, and the ultimate result of her and Anne's clash. They looked up at the entity who looked over the two with both fascination and poetic sadness.

"Ugh, 'ook alive Merc. We in fer sum 'ullshit."

"I am-"

"Novus. You're Novus Grahim." Mercy said simply.

"Taking away my thunder are we?" Grahim leaned in.

"My mother told me about you. She said the entrance and creation

 to the Void Realm was, your doing."

Grahim grew several arms out her back and waved them wistfully.

"Yes, that is true. I grew to know your mother quite well. The Void Realm was supposed to be a wedding gift of mine. I was supposed to officiate their wedding, but they delayed it." The watery bubble showed images Protlyn sitting on her throne by an altar, in an ornamented black dirndl, lacy around the corset and full of frills at the end of her sleeves. Checkered stockings expressed across her legs, a black beret atop her head. Silky sheer frills flowed out the sides of her skirt. Atop her forehead, a crescent shaped jewel sat embedded. Over her head, two foxy ears stabbed out like daggers.

Mercy had always felt the Void Queen's influence within her but, as her mother's memory and personality were faded in death, that power slipped away. "Is my mother still in there?"

Grahim nodded, ripping off her back limbs and using them like a ruler on a chalkboard. "I tasked her with a mission once, to stop the arrival of one of my own. My sister tasked her with freeing her daughter, but for our requests.. as passions sway, hers swept her aside. She's quite busy with that, banal durge. While you were fighting wars with your sister, she was waging wars against him."

"Yeah I know. I fought him too.." Mercy rolled her eyes. "That thick helmet-headed prick is no picnic." "Yes. That you did. But you're not a little girl anymore.. Gertrude." Grahim waved her flailing, half-decapitated limbs, which made Mercy cringe.

"Gerty?" Sway laughed, snickering. "She called yoo by 'tcha otha name."

Mercy folded her arms. "'Gerty' is from a long time ago, before I left Glimmer Kiss. They're old habits still carried on, but once the Shadow King is defeated and we've reclaimed the Void Realm fully, things will be different."

Grahim stood silent, Sway nibbling on some of the ripped off limbs. Mercy looked at the watery orb and wept while she poke. "I, I know that I didn't succeed. I made a mistake, something so grave that I can't even be found anymore, and it brought with it great destruction and suffering. I can't do anything to right it. Only in death can I-"

Sway belched, smelling of malodorous rotten bovine carcasses.

The three went silent.

"In death?" Grahim chortled cheekily. "Child, I am death." She put all her

arms out rotated around the prophet.

"I'm not a child.. why do I look like this again?" She grumbled.

"Because to me you are a child." Grahim pulled her up by the arm, as if she

were a mere doll. "And no child should act like such a martyr."

Mercy kicked and threw her fists into the air with no purchase to where they

landed. Novus dropped her.

Her body fell to the ground again, Grahim still standing and laughing. She was not going to give up this time. "You're the first proselyte of what you call Hex. You should embrace that. There's much darkness to come, and the only thing that can stop it is your power."

The girl rubbed her shoulders. "I don't.. have any power. The Shadow King

cursed me. Even in death, I don't have the kind of abilities or strength I once

have."

Novus gave a look of amusement. She extended her hand out. "You will need to confront the Shadow King about his misdeeds at some point. But for now a greater threat looms." She turned to Sway. "You died too, child of Yulentka."

Sway grit her teeth. "Yu'lookywho?" She threw aside the bones of the limbs.

"My daughter, one of her descendants. You are one of them, and so was your

predecessor. And all of your family as well, dearest Feaster."

"Dun guu talkin 'bout me fuggin famlee! Pain in ta arse."

Novus waved her hand over the bubble until it turned black as the night and full of stars. In its projections, Sway attempted to fly close to a giant entity hurling through space. She came across several of her own kind, fighting off and devouring a thousand Zes-Lethiska and fighting her way into a gangling tentacled Asteroid the size of a city. She fought ferociously until one that looked similar to her with longer hair, huge muscles and a massive thorax coiled around Sway and started to tear her apart. Mercy covered her eyes as the girl was mauled, chewed and completely eviscerated.

"Me Sistah, Yavon Samurath-kway.." Sway folded her "Ughhgrrr. Fookin Sammi. Ah'ate her. She thinks ah'em some kinda jook. Beeg mommii gurl, never leaves me mum. Tw'aht ah brat."  The sight before her was horrific. Sway being chewed alive and torn apart horrified Mercy.  Grahim pulled both two girls around her arms. "Wouldn't you like a chance to make up with your sister?"

She turned to one girl. "In Mercy.."

And then the other. "And in death?"

"You mean Anne?" Mercy said, her heart breaking. "So, so that's.. what you

were talking about? Anne's still alive?"

"Yes, yes." Novus shook her head. "And you haven't learned a thing, have you? She is not what she once was. She's repented and left for less fertile ground. But you won't get a chance if you don't take this opportunity. The Vexia Seed, and all of Sway's kin. They need to be contested."

Mercy bit her nails and took a deep breath.

"My mother was supposed to do this task originally?"

Grahim nodded. "Your mother knew a great deal of the Vexia. However you are a much more powerful woman now than she ever was, your potential is so much higher." She changed the imagery within the sphere.

"But you will need some help. From your other mother."

Queen Momutie, sneering over her subjects on her taffy-plastic throne sat her

legs on several royal Rainboyal members.

"She.. is not my mother. She's not the one that raised me. My mother was-"

Grahim put her hand on Mercy's shoulder. "You will meet her soon. She will be just as lovely and just as manipulative as her daughter, Anne, though she has a far more powerful form of magic. You cannot trust her. But you surely can use her." She leaned back, waving her arms and creating a throne made of bones and skulls.

"What do you say? Shall you two agree to my terms? Become my heralds, my champions! And I'll grant you even higher levels of power."

Mercy turned to her left.

Sway turned to her right.

They met eyes, both of them now holding hands. Sway had just been beaten to death by another female in her family. Mercy, likewise, burned at the pyre by the daughter of her abusive ex-mother. Novus looked down, as if a ghostly apparition was looking down from the ceiling. "Oo'ight! We'll be ya champons!" Mercy flexed her biceps, Sway readied her claws. Grahim gave a smirk.

The trio stood strong as the world around them turned black.

Black as the void.

Black as the night.

Black as hell.

A gigantic scroll several meters long appeared, big enough for Mercy and Sway to both stand on. Grahim took out a quill, bled herself on the tip until her blood dripped from the tip. She created a tattoo symbol on their hands and then, handed them it.

"Sign here. From this contract, your souls will forever be braced and bound to

I, Grahim. Novus of life and death."

Mercy and Sway looked at each other.

Sway looked at the contract and then at Mercy.

"Fook the bish. Ah've brang yoo tooo da Void. D'yoo really want ta re-sign

back 'nto da fray?"

Mercy punched one fist into her other. "Duh I do. I'm the Prophet, the epitome of the Hex! I cannot just give up." She pulled Sway in and quickly pecked her lips. "And you shouldn't either, Sui-kway."

Sway nodded. She smiled, and then the two both signed.

She placed her hand on their forehead. A black circle, a little bigger than her palm with a small slit, opened up on her hand and consumed them. A purple light came out of the hole, shining bright against the darkness of the room, filling their bodies with Grahim's immense deathly power.

"Come," Grahim said, taking each by the hand. "Let us go home."