Deus Necros - Chapter 607: Unpaid Gratitude

Chapter 607: Unpaid Gratitude

Within the lands that bordered the Kingdom of Tulmud and Lamar, the territory of the dark forest, a being moved. The canopy above pressed low, a lid of wet leaves and stitched shadow, and the earth held the weight of old roots like ribs. She passed through in a hush of layered cloth, bandages whispering against bandages, the sound small enough to be mistaken for wind. Smell of resin and damp bark followed her. Every tree she crossed seemed to lean away, not out of fear, but in the wary politeness given to something that should not need paths.

She was covered in many layers of cloth and bandages. Hidden away from sight. Unable to show herself to the world due to the suppression that was applied to her. The bindings were not only habit, they were a sentence she had learned to serve with precision. The strips lay at exact angles, the knots placed where fingers could find them without thought. She had wrapped herself so often that it felt like prayer. Every coil promised another day where light would not hurt.

An angel who was forcibly made to fall due to her losing her skin. The word still tasted like theft. Not death. Not judgment. Theft that had peeled the world away with it. A sister of hers who envied her very being, took away all she had. And now she had become what is known to many as the Witch of the Mare. As in the Witch of Nightmares. Names tended to be cruelly accurate. She had made peace with that cruelty the way one makes peace with a scar they cannot hide. One learns the way light will catch it. One learns how to turn the face.

But for the first time, in a very long while, the pain and agony anyone would feel if they had their very skin ripped out of their body seemed to subside. No, more like completely disappear. The absence of pain was so clean it felt unreal, the way silence after a storm can make the ears ache with memory. She stopped walking and let the forest hold still around her, listening for the hurt that always lived under the breath. It did not arrive. Her hands trembled once inside the linen shells.

She slowly reached for her forearm, hesitant at first, but still peaked under the bandages. Fingertips worked at a familiar knot, tug gentle, tuck gentler. Expecting to see rotting flesh that was unable to protect itself from the mere gaze of a light sunray, she saw a glistening skin, porcelain of color and sturdy of nature. The sheen along it was soft and even, not the slickness of oil, but the faint polish of something whole. No fissures. No angry red. The tiny hairs lay flat instead of brittle. When the breeze wandered through, the skin did not scream.

Her hands trembled as they reached her face, uncovering the rest of the bandages, one turn, then another, each fall of linen louder than it should have been. She rushed inside her small abode, but hesitated to look for a mirror. Habit pricked at her. Avoid reflective surfaces. Avoid glass. Avoid pity on other people’s faces. She searched anyway, half hoping to fail.

Only for her to scoff at herself, “You destroyed every mirror in this house yourself…” Her smile felt new against her teeth. She laughed as she pulled a small teacup, the very one she served Ludwig tea when he first came here. The cup had a hairline crack at its rim where her thumb always found it, a small fault that made it hers. Water was all she had to see the reflection of her face on it. She poured slowly to still the ripple and held the cup under the thin light that sifted through the curtain of leaves.

It was no longer the face that would make a ghoul terrified, no, it was her older skin, her angelic skin was back. The angles were the same, the mouth that had once learned to carry blessings without breaking on the edges of hard truths. The eyes were blue and bright, and their brightness did not wound her. The world did not recoil. She blinked and the reflection blinked back instead of tearing.

With the sturdiness of the divine themselves, impeccable, indestructible, and certainly this time, unremovable. She pressed the pad of a finger to her cheek and felt resistance that belonged to her, not some temporary graft, not some magic that would fail at sunset. When she drew her hand away, the skin did not cling. It simply stayed where a face should be. Her shoulders loosened, a slow pulling down, as if some invisible harness had finally been unclipped from the bones.

She trembled as she began touching her face, unable to hide her joy, or more like thankfulness to the young Undead who instead of seeing her as an opponent was able to help her in regaining her powers back. Gratitude made the throat warm and strange. She was not a creature given easily to thanks. She knew how to pay debts. She knew how to leave offerings in exact measures. Gratitude was messier. It demanded more than coin. It wanted faith.

With her skin back, she was no longer bound to this place. The wards that had once clung to her like burrs loosened their grip, the edges of old sigils softening in her sight. With her link to divinity restored, immediately, the witch raised her head up, gazing at a roof that didn’t stop her sight, her blue eyes shone bright as they pierced the spatiotemporal lock. The sky above was only a suggestion now. Her gaze found the seam behind it and went through like a knife going through cloth. Distance flattened. Time thinned until it felt like breath on glass.

She was no longer limited to her position, though at the same time she couldn’t remain in this world any longer. The tether above tugged with a patient insistence. Before she would be forced back up where she belonged once the divinity is fully linked she had to see what was going on. How did this happen, and if Ludwig truly was the cause. If he had paid for her restoration with anything more than effort, she needed to know the measure of it. She would not accept a gift bought with a boy’s dying. Angels were not supposed to bargain, but she had learned how bargains kept people alive.

Just as her eyes focused, she saw a sight that shouldn’t be possible. The distance snapped into clarity with a neat little pain, like a drawn needle finding vein. The dunes came first, pale and endless, then the line of a river that was not water and would never be water, then figures like seeds scattered along its edge. The world stepped closer at her call until she stood, in sight if not in body, at the edge of a scene that treated mercy as rumor.

The young undead who was supposed to help her was laying on his back, no signs of life coming from him. He lay crooked, the way a body that does not fear bruises can lie, one arm flung wide, fingers curled as if still around a haft that was no longer there. His chest seemed to have a massive gaping hole in it where remnants of energy far too great for any mortal should ever dare to control spewed out from. The edges of that hole burned with a color that did not have a word, a heat that did not warm. It bent the air. It made the sand around it remember oceans.

While in front of him was a young woman, a hateful woman. Her own sister who caused her to come to her former situation. The sister she trusted, the sister who envied her out of her own skin was standing in front of him. Familiar mouth. Familiar posture. The way she held her head had always said she loved the shape of her own thoughts more than any truth. Some things did not change when one stole divinity. They simply learned to pose better.

The boy is dead. And Envy lives still.

Anger that shouldn’t have belonged to an angel began swirling up her chest. Her savior lays there without motion, while her sworn enemy had taken yet again something that shouldn’t have been taken.