Act 3, Chapter 124: The Art’s true self

Day in the story: 1st February (Sunday)

Elle Erikson

Terrified by everything happening around her, Lia focused more heavily on directing the team. Her emotions were still painfully obvious. Uncertainty had crept into her movements. Her eyes kept darting from one point to another, and the commands she shouted had stopped being precise.

“Someone pull them closer! Help them!” she yelled, without really specifying who was supposed to do what.

Kito was already dragging Milo toward the group, while Patricia tended to Bastien, who had become almost completely useless without his sight.

At the same time, only Liora and I were still fighting the creature the Eiffel Tower had become.

My lóng flew around the enormous tongue-like monster as it tried to catch and crush him. Thanks to his ability to transform into pure shadowlight, though, he managed to deceive it every time.

I hurled cards at it whenever I had a clean opportunity to land a hit. Larger and larger stretches of membrane burned, torn apart by one explosion after another, but it was slowly becoming obvious that we weren’t going to defeat the creature this way. It regenerated faster than I could damage it. Without Piotr’s destructive power, our chances of winning like this were practically zero. And I was becoming increasingly aware that I was needed somewhere else too—to fight for Zoe’s life, and the life of the child she carried inside her. My brother’s child.

“Listen,” I said to the rest of my team, stopping my attacks and leaving Liora to keep the creature distracted.

Anansi guided my dragon, feeding him all the information he needed. Everyone else was already nearby. Milo, despite having lost his right arm, still held his baseball bat in his left hand and braced it against the ground, creating a zone of safety around us. He looked like he might lose consciousness at any moment.

Patricia lifted her head to listen to me. Liana stared blindly toward the lóng, which was trying to delay the inevitable. Even Bastien, despite Patricia working on his injuries, seemed to be trying to listen.

“We have to surrender,” Kito said, cutting me off. “We’re not going to win. If this keeps going, we’re not even going to survive. This has gotten beyond us.”

I turned toward the man supporting Milo with an arm that, for the moment, looked entirely human. Like the other man, he was bruised and wounded all over.

“Let’s call the Bohemian representatives. They’ll get us out of here.”

“Yeah. That’s a good idea,” Liana said.

“Listen to me,” I tried again, waving a hand in front of her eyes. “I have one more idea for how we can win this. But I need a little more help from all of you.” I paused. “And a little more trust, even though I lied to you before.”

“What are you planning?” Bastien asked.

“To force the place we’re standing in to remember that it is something else than this creature.”

“What?” Milo replied. “How the fuck are you planning to do that?”

“Laurent, do you have a picture of the Eiffel Tower in its normal form? Somewhere on that device of yours? Can you print it?”

“I do, and I could,” he replied, just as shapes flowing out from the top of the tongue and circling beneath the membrane caught my attention. I ignored them for the moment. “But unfortunately, I can’t see anything.”

“I’ll do it,” Liana said, crouching beside him. Laurent held out his hand, and she started operating his screen—apparently not for the first time in her life.

“A folder called Landmarks or Memories. It should be in either one. Or just type Eiffel and search—”

“Got it,” she said, cutting him off. “I hit print.”

The machine connected to the crystals in his armor began producing a Polaroid-style photograph. She quickly grabbed it and waved it through the air.

“Looks like we’re about to have company again,” Kito said, tracking the shapes moving beneath the membrane with his eyes and head. “What are you planning to do with that?”

Liana handed me the photograph. The Eiffel Tower had been captured from below, taking up most of the composition while still perfectly framing the empty spaces between its metal latticework. It was an artistic photograph and I liked it, but it did not matter in the slightest now. I curled it in my hand and lowered myself into a cross-legged position, focusing on everything around me. Truthfully, I didn’t think I actually needed the photograph. Simply knowing that the tower was an artistic creation should have been enough. But for them—for everyone who believed my Domain was paper—the photograph gave me exactly the alibi I needed.

I closed my eyes and let everything else disappear.

Not completely, of course. With Anansi connected to me and the sp-eye-ders still clinging to my body, there was no real way to become blind to the world anymore. Somewhere beyond my immediate thoughts, I still saw Liora weaving between the enormous tongue's attacks. I still saw Kito looking beneath the membrane for whatever shapes were approaching us, Patricia supporting Bastien and Milo swaying on his feet with one arm missing. But I pushed all those images away from the part of myself that mattered and reached outward with my Aura.

At first, there was nothing but flesh.

It was everywhere. The membrane beneath me felt thick enough to be a floor, riddled with veins through which blood and shadowlight flowed together. Above us, muscle clung to the latticework like ivy made from meat. Tongues twisted through openings, around beams and between supports, wrapping the entire structure in layer after layer of wet tissue until the Eiffel Tower had become little more than a skeleton trapped inside something else's body.

But it was still there, and the moment I stopped looking for the monster and started looking for the art, I felt it. I saw metal shaped by human hands. Lines brought over from the artist’s mind onto a paper and then into reality. I witnessed repetition of forms, of connections, of materials and of ideas. And more than all that, I was aware of the intent behind all of it.

The sensation reached me faintly from beneath the layers of biological horror, not unlike hearing music played several rooms away while someone screamed directly into my ears. I followed it anyway, pushing my awareness down through the membrane beneath my legs until I touched cold iron.

My Authority moved toward it and the answer came immediately—not from the tower, but from everything wrapped around it. My Psyche strained so violently that my shoulders jerked despite the rest of my body remaining still. Something enormous noticed what I was doing and threw its will against mine, not as words, but as certainty—its own claim, that all of this was its flesh. The claim crashed into me with enough force that my teeth clenched.

This was its body. More Authority followed, pouring through every tongue and every pulsing membrane surrounding us.

This is hunger. This is hatred. This is ours.

“No,” I whispered, barely hearing my own voice beneath another roar from the creature fighting Liora. “It really isn't. This is not the truth of this place.” I pushed back. “The Eiffel Tower is art.” I whispered without pushing sounds into the words.

Rainbow shadowlight spread beneath me in thin threads, seeping into the tiny gap between membrane and metal. Where it touched the tower, I felt details that had been completely hidden from sight: rivets, braces, intersections of iron, repeating patterns created by people who had decided exactly where every piece should go.

That mattered, because art was not merely beauty. Art was intention expressed through form, and there was intention in every inch of this place. My Authority seized upon that truth. For one glorious heartbeat, the membrane beneath me loosened.

Then a contraction traveled through the flesh around us so violently that the entire chamber shifted. The ground rose beneath my left side and collapsed beneath my right, almost throwing me over despite my crossed legs. Somewhere nearby, someone screamed my name, but I barely registered who.

Another claim entered the conflict.

The tower is the body.

Images accompanied it this time. Not pictures in the ordinary sense, but relationships impressed directly against my soul. Tongues threaded through iron. Flesh grown around rivets. Bone fused to beams. Muscles anchored against the framework until the metal itself served as tendons and joints.

It had incorporated the Eiffel Tower into itself, it made it into itself. The realization almost made me release my hold. Almost, because the monster was right about something, and that was exactly what made its claim dangerous.

A straightforward source note: the author's publishing page has this chapter, but the version here was copied without permission.

Identity wasn't determined by origin alone. I knew that better than most people alive. Replace a leg and Alexandra remained Alexandra. Split her into multiple bodies and minds, and somehow every one of us could still say I. Change something long enough, integrate it deeply enough, and eventually the difference between what had been added and what had always belonged became much harder to define. The creature understood that instinctively.

This is body, it insisted again.

My Authority faltered and the flesh immediately surged back.

“Kurwa, the floor!” Milo shouted somewhere behind me. “Move!”

Hands grabbed me beneath both arms. I nearly broke concentration, but Anansi caught the panic before it could spread through every part of my mind and separated it away into foreign minds. Through the sp-eye-ders, I saw what was happening without needing to open my eyes.

The membrane around us had started dying. There was no explosion or sudden collapse. It simply lost color, pink fading toward gray as veins darkened beneath its surface. Entire patches shriveled inward, pulling away from the iron below. Unfortunately, that muscle had been the only floor beneath half the team.

“Toward the beam!” Liana shouted as she helped drag Bastien away. “There is metal underneath us. Move toward the metal!”

Patricia and Kito held me, whie Milo with a newfound surge of adrenaline moved on his own. They each hooked an arm under one of mine and began dragging my limp body. I could not afford to lose composure, as I channeled into becoming the art myself as Gertrude taught all of us to do, and in equal measure reminding the tower that it was one all along.

Another wave of certainty entered me in an assault against what I claimed was true.

This has lived here. The flesh tightened around the Tower.

This has become part of it. I couldn't deny that truth directly.

So I didn't. Instead, I changed the question. I used what I learned so long ago, when I was trapped in a sigil painted by Eve. My Aura sank deeper into the iron as my teammates dragged me over the decaying membrane. I stopped asking the Eiffel Tower what it was now and started searching for the thing beneath all the additions—for the intention that had shaped it before anything else had begun claiming ownership.

The photograph crumpled inside my fist. I held onto its composition. Those intersecting lines. That widening base. The impossible-looking delicacy of a structure made from so much metal. A shape designed not by the monster, not by hatred and not by whatever Authority had twisted this place into an enormous feeding organ.

The tower had an author. More importantly, it had an artistic identity that existed independently of what had happened to it afterward.

The monster could become part of its history. It could scar it. Damage it. Cover it. It could even use the Tower as its own skeleton. But it had never authored the Tower. That distinction struck something inside my soul so cleanly that my entire Authority realigned around it.

“You aren't the art,” I whispered. My Authority surged, because I did not ask the Tower to become something different. I asked it to express itself, to be the work beneath the vandalism.

A metallic groan rolled through the entire structure, so deep and vast that I felt it through my teeth. The membrane beneath me cracked open, exposing dark iron covered in slime, and daylight appeared through three tiny holes overhead as pieces of the fleshy ceiling shriveled away.

The monster screamed, through everything it had. Hundreds of tongues slapped against the Tower at once, producing wet impacts that blended into a hideous chorus. The enormous appendage fighting Liora abandoned him completely and slammed itself against the metal supports around us as though trying to physically hold the transformation in place.

Its Authority hit mine again.

Art changes.

I almost lost the contest. The thought carried too much truth. Art was restored, repainted, repaired, expanded upon, interpreted and sometimes deliberately transformed. A work did not become less itself merely because time touched it. Alexandra had spent her entire life changing herself and calling every new version real. The monster sensed that uncertainty and forced itself through it.

We are its change.

Flesh surged across the metal again. One of the openings overhead sealed. For a few seconds, I was losing. Then I realized the creature had made exactly the same mistake I had. It was treating change as ownership.

My Aura traveled outward through another beam, following the construction beyond where my ordinary senses should have stopped. Shadowlight sank into joints and supports, each piece leading me to another because all of them belonged to the same composition.

It grew on it, used it and even changed it, but change did not make it its author, and that claim was enough, I just had to hold onto it with all of my strength poured into that truth.

Another section of the ceiling began decaying. The Eiffel Tower was not being transformed into the Eiffel Tower. It already was the Eiffel Tower. I was simply giving that truth enough strength to reject everything trying to pretend otherwise, filling all that which was supposed to be negative space back with nothingness. The Universe helped me with that, because I had claimed Authority over making things into nothing before. I had made walls, floors, and ceilings empty, nonexistent, almost ever since I gained power over Artistic Creation. This was just another attempt at making a Looney Tunes hole.

The monster fought desperately. Tongues wrapped themselves around exposed beams and squeezed until the iron screamed beneath the pressure. Veins pumped black fluid into the dying membrane, briefly restoring color wherever it spread. New tendrils erupted from the walls and stitched sections of tissue together faster than they could decay.

For several seconds, the battle reached equilibrium. Every patch I stripped away was replaced. Every piece the monster reclaimed forced me to push farther. My Psyche burned. Pain spread through the spiritual muscle like I had been lifting something far too heavy for far too long, but I refused to let go.

Behind all that resistance, the Tower remained. Unconcerned with either of us. It didn't need to fight. It just needed to be. And suddenly I understood how arrogant both the creature and I had been. Neither of us got to tell the Tower what it was. The monster had tried to make it flesh. I had tried to make it art. But the artistic identity was already there, provided by all the people that had seen it over the years. By the Author who made it, by the lovers who confessed their love underneath it, by the Parisians who looked at it every day. By the World which identified the city by its look alone—it supplied Authority for it to be what it was and I… I wasn’t much needed. All I had to do was stop everything else from drowning it out.

So I changed my approach one final time.

Rainbow light spread through the Eiffel Tower. Every beam within my awareness answered at once. The monster's Authority crashed against mine, declaring ownership, integration, growth and transformation. Mine answered with no new identity at all.

The first enormous strip of membrane fell away.

It didn't explode or burn. It simply died, detached from the iron and collapsed downward in a rotting avalanche of muscle, skin and tongues. Sunlight flooded through the opening.

“Move!” Patricia screamed, and the rest of the team scrambled away from the collapsing surface.

My legs unfolded somewhere along the way, dragging uselessly behind me while they pulled me across patches of membrane that were rapidly losing the strength to support our weight.

Kito hopped beside us partially transformed arms digging into exposed beams whenever the ground shifted. Patricia guided Bastien while Liora flew ahead, searching for stable footing and shouting directions back toward everyone else.

“Left!” he yelled. “There is one of the old bridges there, humans! The flesh is already gone!”

The world around me brightened despite my eyes remaining closed. More holes opened. Then more. The monster's presence began shrinking. Its great claim over the Tower fractured into hundreds of smaller ones, each trying desperately to defend a tongue, a patch of membrane, a single muscle wrapped around iron.

I followed every retreating fragment to remind the Tower underneath that they were not necessary. One by one, they lost their purchase. The tongue above us withered first. I felt its enormous muscles contract in one last attempt to cling to the surrounding lattice before its Authority failed completely. It turned gray, then brown, then almost black as the entire appendage dried from within.

Its weight tore it loose. Something massive crashed somewhere beneath us. Then the walls started falling. Daylight poured in from every direction. Rain touched my face. Cold wind rushed across my skin, carrying away the stench of blood and decay and replacing it with wet metal, smoke and the distant smell of a city.

My Authority kept moving, across every connection I could maintain.

Reminding and recognizing, but returning nothing, because nothing needed to be returned. Eventually, there was no resistance left. The creature's last claim vanished so suddenly that for several seconds I continued pushing against an opponent that no longer existed.

“Elle.” Someone touched my shoulder. I didn't respond immediately. “Elle,” Liana repeated, much more softly this time. “Open your eyes.”

I did and for several heartbeats, I couldn't understand what I was seeing.

We were sitting on one of the original metal walkways spanning part of the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by wet iron gleaming beneath breaks in the storm clouds. Rain ran along the latticework in tiny streams, catching the sunlight and turning parts of the structure almost golden.

The Tower stood around us in all its strange, skeletal elegance, damaged in places by everything that had happened but unmistakably itself.

I slowly rose to my feet. Far below, enormous masses of dead biological matter continued breaking apart and collapsing between the foundations. Some dissolved into black sludge. Other pieces simply shriveled into unrecognizable heaps.

Above us, the Eiffel Tower reached toward the opening sky. For the first time since we entered this place, it looked like art again.

“We did it,” Kito said.

There should have been cheering. Instead, silence followed. Milo was missing an arm. Kito could barely stand. Bastien would not see the restored Tower. Patricia's equipment was stained almost completely red, and Liora's paws looked as though someone had dragged them across broken glass for hours.

The victory was real. So was its price.

Liana slowly lowered herself onto the walkway beside her brother and wrapped both arms around him. “Yeah,” she said, voice trembling. “We did.”

I looked at all of them and felt happiness trying unsuccessfully to push through the weight in my chest. Then Zoe entered my thoughts again. Everything happening beyond this place while I had spent these precious minutes fighting here.

“Guys,” I said and several faces turned toward me. “I have more bad news.”

Liana stared at me for a moment. “What is it?”

“I need to leave.”

Her expression hardened immediately. “Elle, what do you mean?”

I stepped closer and squeezed her shoulder gently. “I will try to give you all the answers you deserve. All of them, Lia. Just not now.”

“Then stay.”

“I can't.” I looked toward the sky beyond the iron lattice. “There is somewhere else I have to be right now, and people I love might die if I don't get there.” No one answered immediately. “I am sorry,” I continued. “For lying to you. For cheating my way onto this team. For leaving now, after everything that happened. I will explain it all in due time, and if you decide afterward that you never want to see me again, I'll understand.”

Liana stared at me for several long seconds. Her jaw tightened, then relaxed.

Rainbow shadowlight folded around me as Alexandra reached through the connection binding us together, seized my place in the world and replaced it with another.

The last thing I saw before entering the Domain was the Eiffel Tower standing beneath the broken clouds, stripped of everything that had tried to turn it into something else.