Chapter 12 #2
With a deep groan, the earth within the Circle began to crack apart, and the young man fell over, skittering backward out of the Circle, like a crab.
Then he stared with an awestruck expression as a smoky something began to unfurl itself from the crack in the earth.
He didn’t look afraid—or rather, he didn’t look just afraid. He also looked… hopeful?
I couldn’t understand the hope myself. All I could feel was an almost irrepressible urge to scream warnings at him—that he should run as far away as he could from whatever it was now rising up in front of him, unfurling and stretching toward the sky like a plant growing in a sped-up film.
And then it was there. Staring down at him. A nightmare in physical form.
I knew the instant I saw it that this thing would haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.
It had a vaguely humanoid shape, but the proportions were all wrong.
The arms were too long, the hands, ending in wicked claws, far too big.
The shoulders were inhumanly broad, but still somehow fragile.
The spine curved in an exaggerated S-shape, so that its head hung beneath its long, snakelike neck, its sharp, pointed chin nearly rested on its rounded, glistening belly.
The whole creature was the raw red color of burned flesh, with charred edges of black and ashy gray.
The texture of its skin was almost scaly, stretched taut over a sharp-edged skeleton beneath, which seemed in constant danger of poking through with every movement.
Something rippled underneath the skin of the creature, not like muscles, but something less anatomical—fluid perhaps, or maybe just a pulsating energy.
But none of this, as terrifying as it was, could hold a candle to the horror that was the creature’s head.
It was bulbous and bald, the great expanse of skull covered in the same scaly film of skin.
A strange appendage, like a horn, protruded from its forehead, curved straight back over the skull, and then curled in on itself in a spiral, like a nautilus shell or a ram’s horn.
There were no features identifiable in the elongated planes of the face, apart from a bulbous pair of eyes that burned a sulfurous shade of yellow.
Those eyes, unblinking, surveyed the man now shaking on his knees in the dirt, and the man stared back, mouth hanging open, looking at once terrified and awed at what his magic had wrought.
Though I couldn’t imagine how he did it, he managed to tear his eyes from the creature's face, and fling himself forward into a kind of groveling bow, fingers splayed in the dirt, his head bowed so that his hair swung over his face.
It was the creature that spoke first, though I’m not sure “speak” was even the right way to describe it.
It had no mouth that I could see. Instead, the words materialized inside my head, like thoughts someone else had shoved in there without my permission.
I flinched at the violation, and yet I didn’t pull back.
I needed to know what happened here—I couldn’t look away, couldn’t let my terror interfere with the discovery.
“You dare to summon me.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement, shrewd and appraising, as though the very words were a tool used to measure the man now cowering before it.
At first, the man seemed incapable of speech, and I didn’t blame him. I was nearly paralyzed with terror myself, despite the knowledge that nothing here could harm me. But then, impressively, he managed to speak, his voice a rasping, breathless husk.
“I summon you, and I name you, Abaddon.”
Every particle of matter within the clearing seemed to freeze with the speaking of that name, which landed on my ears like the most vile of curses, a word I wished I could unhear, not only because there was something wrong about it, but because I knew what it meant in magic to use a name.
Names held power. If you could name a person or a thing, your magic could be directed at them, and their magic could have less power over you.
The creature—I still didn’t know exactly what kind of creature—knew it, too. Its glowing eyes flared brighter, a light I knew was full of anger. It let out a low, menacing hiss in response.
“Why have you summoned me? Speak your piece, mortal.” The words slid along the hissing sound like a bow along strings, raising goosebumps on my arms. The sound of the voice made my head pound and my stomach turn sour.
I reached out automatically to steady myself against a nearby tree, but then remembered that I couldn’t touch anything.
“I need… I need a miracle,” the man choked out, and a violent sob ripped through him.
“And these you know I can perform, for a price.”
“Yes.”
“What is this miracle of which you speak?”
“Isabel. I can’t… oh, Isabel!” The man collapsed in on himself, like the pain of simply saying the name ripped a hole right through the core of his body.
I felt it in my midsection, like I’d been punched.
It took him several moments to recover, to gain control over the gasping, the sobbing, the agony that had him tearing at his hair and beating at his chest. Just when I thought I couldn’t bear to watch him a second longer, he gathered himself and looked up again at the creature before him—Abaddon.
“Please,” the man said, his chest still heaving. “She is sick… dying. I have done all that I… I have no more medicines. No more magic I can perform. She cannot die. I cannot bear a world in which… in which she no longer breathes.”
The silence stretched between them as the man waited and the creature contemplated. Already, a dread was building inside me. I didn’t need to understand exactly what Abaddon was to realize that it would be a grave error indeed to make a bargain with such a creature.
“I am not in the habit of saving lives,” Abaddon said finally.
“I know that.”
“And yet you ask.”
“I do. I have no choice. The alternative cannot be borne.”
“Others have borne it.”
“I am not others.”
Though its face had no mouth, there was a smile in the creature’s voice, a sort of wry amusement. “You claim that weakness?”
The man on the ground bristled. He straightened up, throwing his shoulders back defiantly. “No. I claim the purest of love, which you will never understand.”
The words were spoken with a ferocity that took my breath away. I suddenly felt small, impossibly young, and inexperienced. There seemed to be a century’s worth of suffering wrapped up in those words, a suffering that I, too, could not comprehend.
Abaddon appraised the man now glaring at him. I felt as though I could feel the wheels turning beneath that strange hornlike structure on his head.
“And what will you pay, mortal, for something so fleeting, so ephemeral, so brief as this love?” Abaddon hissed. “What do you think it worth?”
“It is worth more than my own life. Spare her, and take me instead,” the man gasped, the words tumbling out of him in his haste.
“What is your name, mortal?”
Here, for the first time, the man hesitated. He must know, as I did, that there was power in a name. By giving it to the creature, he was handing it a weapon it did not yet possess. And yet, what choice did he have? He was already losing the only thing he held dear.
“If you knew enough to summon me, then you must also know that I do not bargain with an unnamed soul. Your name, mortal, or our game ends here.”
“Ambrose,” the man said. “Ambrose Wright.”
The name sounded inside me like a gong. Abaddon’s eyes changed shape in a way that suggested a smile on his mouthless face, which made him look even more disturbing than a moment before.
“Ambrose Wright.” He rolled the name around like it was the most delicious thing he’d ever tasted, and both Ambrose and I shuddered.
“And what do you think I want with your life, Ambrose Wright? What benefits me, to take those few fleeting moments, when I have the ages of the world behind me, and all the ages yet to come before me?”
“Then what?” Ambrose asked, voice cracked. “What else have I to bargain with?”
“Your life is but the blink of an eye to such as I. But you do possess something more lasting. Something that will far outstrip that fragile husk it clings to.”
“What do you—?”
“Your soul, Ambrose. I speak of your soul.”
The man blinked. He opened his mouth, and then closed it again.
“You do not understand?” Abaddon asked, with a ring of amusement.
“I… I was not sure that I… that I believed in souls.”
“And yet you believed in me. Am I not the stuff of such stories as souls?”
“I… did not believe. But I did hope.”
Abaddon moved closer to Ambrose, and to his credit, Ambrose did not back away. Abaddon leaned in, examining Ambrose with those lamplike eyes. “You must be despairing indeed, to hope for the likes of me, Ambrose Wright.”
I watched as the understanding passed between them, the mutual acknowledgment of a pain so profound, that what happened next became inevitable.
There was no choice anymore. It was already made, no matter what terms Abaddon laid out.
My heart sank under the weight of it, watching another human being make a mistake they didn’t yet know was a mistake.
“What is it you want?”
“I want her to live,” Ambrose replied without hesitation, his voice cracking. “I want her to stay with me.”
“And for this—the sparing of her life—you would give your soul?”
Ambrose hesitated. “Can I… can I live without my soul?”
“You can. But you needn’t worry, Ambrose Wright. I am feeling generous on this night. I do not ask your entire soul. I ask only a piece of it.”
Ambrose flinched, like Abaddon had slapped him. “A… a piece?”
“Just a taste,” Abaddon went on, nodding his monstrous head. “Surely an easy bargain to make, a piece of your soul for the whole of her life? Your… Issssssssabel.”
The serpentine lingering on her name would have been enough to change any man’s mind, except a man as desperate as Ambrose.
“Yes,” Ambrose said, with a swiftness that broke my heart. “Take it. Take it, please, but… spare her. Spare her from this fever.”
Abaddon closed his eyes, lids like black, scaly film sliding up over them from the bottom.
He arched his head back and took a deep breath of the night’s air and the desperation carried on it, like it was filling him up, like he could live solely on the despair of another creature.
Again, I wanted to scream at Ambrose to run, to refuse, to do anything but what he was about to do; but instead, I swallowed my own despair, because there was nothing I could do, and Ambrose made his choice long, long ago.
“Your hand, mortal,” Abaddon whispered, reaching his own clawed fingers toward Ambrose.
I flinched, though Ambrose did not, as he placed his own hand within the terrifying creature’s grip.
As that grip closed around him, trapping him there, the creature closed its eyes and bowed its head, and began to chant in a language so ancient, so evil, that I couldn’t bear to listen to it.
It burrowed into my ears like insects, clawed at my insides like a body clawing its way out of a grave.
I pressed my hands to my ears, but could not block out the screams that rang out through this memory I stood in.
The screams, the creature’s incantations, the pain, the triumph, the despair, all of it pressed in on me until I thought I would burst. I dropped to my knees and began to scream.
And scream…
And scream…