Chapter 10 – — A History of the Fissures, Vol. II
Chapter Ten
“We called them omens. Then we called them myths. By the time we called them heralds, it was already too late.”
— A History of the Fissures, Vol. II
The body on the table sits up.
I’m whispering something to Lux about how I didn’t sleep well last night when the sheet slides off and the creature beneath it jerks upright with a rattling gasp.
The classroom is long and narrow, built like a chapel dedicated to something darker than any god.
Rows of old wooden benches line either side of a central aisle, long tables in front of each one.
The vaulted ceiling rises high above us, all dark timber beams and stone arches that swallow the weak light from the iron sconces along the walls.
The air smells of dust and old wood and something metallic beneath it that clings to the back of my throat.
At the front of the room, where an altar might stand in a place of worship, there is only the table.
And the thing that was supposed to be dead now perched on top of it.
It’s massive, far larger than the crawler we dissected last night. What was once in the deer family has become something nightmarish. Its body is skeletal and towering even while seated, patches of rotting hide failing to cover exposed bone.
But it’s the antlers that are terrifying.
They branch upward and outward like a chandelier made of bone, twisting into dozens of sharp points that almost reach the ceiling.
Its chest is partially carved open, ribs splayed wide, and I can see inside.
There are organs in there, a heart and lungs and other glistening things I can’t name, but they aren’t where they should be.
They’re suspended, floating in the hollow cavity of its body, held in place by faintly glowing strands that pulse with soft light.
Like puppet strings made of electricity or current.
Someone screams. The sound bounces off the stone walls and multiplies, filling the narrow room with chaos. Chairs scrape back against the worn floor. Someone near the front falls trying to scramble away, their boots slipping on the uneven flagstones.
Draven Alucard catches my eye from where he sits a few rows ahead on the opposite bench, leaning back with his arms crossed like everyone in the room is being dramatic and he’s amused.
A sound comes from the creature’s throat, or maybe from its chest cavity. A low vibration that I feel before I hear rolls through the room like a wave. It rattles the old sconces on the walls and hums through the wooden bench beneath me, up through my bones.
My stomach lurches. My vision swims. The flickering light from the sconces seems to dim and pulse in time with that horrible frequency.
Beside me, Lux doubles over, her pink hair flying forward as her hand clamps over her mouth, and I grip the edge of my desk to stay upright.
The old wood bites into my palms. The panic is instant and irrational, flooding my veins with the overwhelming urge to run, to flee, to get as far from this thing as possible.
Professor Nestor stands at the head of the table, watching the mayhem with an expression of pure amusement.
His hair is wild and gray, sticking up at odd angles like he’s just rolled out of bed or been electrocuted.
His spectacles are crooked on his nose, and his white coat is stained with things I don’t want to identify.
The creature swings its head toward him, empty eye sockets searching, skeletal legs scrabbling against the table. Its hooves scrape against the metal with a sound that makes my teeth ache.
Around me, roughly twenty students are in various states of panic.
Across the aisle, an angel with rich brown skin and massive gray wings pressed tight against her back grips her desk so hard I can see the tendons straining in her hands.
I recognize her from orientation. She was near the front during the headmaster’s speech, standing tall and composed but she doesn’t look so composed now.
Her dark eyes are wide, fixed on the creature like she’s calculating whether she can make it to the door before it moves again.
“Sit down,” Nestor says calmly, and the room starts to quiet as everyone tries to regain control of themselves. “It can’t hurt you. I’ve severed its motor control tendons.” He shakes his head at the class, disappointed. “It merely doesn’t know it’s dead yet.”
A few rows ahead, a man with pale white skin and striking green eyes hasn’t moved at all.
He sits rigid, his jaw clenched tight, watching the creature with an intensity that makes me wonder if he’s a shifter.
There’s something predatory in his stillness, like prey holding its breath while a hunter passes.
“What the fuck?” someone mutters from the bench behind me. I don’t turn to look.
Nestor pulls a long silver instrument from his coat, something between a needle and a blade, and drives it through the monster’s skull in one smooth motion.
There’s a sound like cracking ice, and then the thing collapses back onto the table.
Its antlers clatter against the metal. For a smaller gentleman, Professor Nestor packs some strength.
The low vibration cuts off abruptly, and the nausea recedes along with the unease that surged through me moments ago.
I release my grip on the desk and realize my knuckles have gone white.
Beside me, Lux slowly straightens, her face tinged green.
Across the way, the angel with the silver-streaked braids exhales shakily and loosens her death grip on the wood too.
“Lesson one.” Nestor wipes the instrument on his sleeve and tucks it back into his coat. “The twisted creatures do not obey the rules of death as we understand them. If you retain only one thing from my class, let it be that. It could save your life one day.”
He scans the room, cataloging each of our faces.
What does he see? Terror, probably. Revulsion, maybe.
A few students still look like they might pass out.
The pale shifter with the green eyes has finally blinked, some of the tension leaving his shoulders now that the thing is truly dead.
A girl near the front, small with delicate pointed ears and hair the color of autumn leaves, has tears streaming silently down her freckled cheeks.
What does he see when he looks at me?
His light-blue eyes stop on my face, and an unnerving giggle escapes his throat before he moves closer to the table. Something about that laugh makes my skin prickle.
“Welcome, bone year students, to Architecture of Flesh.” He spreads his arms wide in greeting. “It’s going to be a fun year.”
He slaps his hand down on the metal table loud enough that I flinch. The girl with the autumn hair flinches too. The angel across the aisle doesn’t move, but I see her wings twitch out of the corner of my eye.
“This here is a hollowstag. You may have seen its distant relatives before, prancing through the forest like cute little deer that flee from predators.” He tilts his head as he examines the cadaver with something like affection. “This guy here is a little more scary than his relatives.”
He reaches into the creature’s open chest and plucks one of the glowing strands like he’s playing a stringed instrument. A faint hum fills the room, and my breakfast roils in my stomach again. I swallow hard, willing myself not to be sick.
“Should’ve skipped breakfast,” the angel mutters. I want to tell her I was thinking the same thing.
“The organs of a hollowstag are suspended by strands of pure current. We don’t know how this happens.
We don’t know why.” He plucks another strand, producing a different tone, almost musical.
“What we do know is that this current allows the creature to emit a low-frequency vibration that induces panic and vomiting in any living being within range.” He smiles, and it’s not a reassuring expression. “As you’ve experienced firsthand.”
“Why would it need to do that?” someone asks from behind me.
I look back to see a guy with long brown hair and high cheekbones.
He looks genuinely curious rather than horrified, which is more than I can say for most of the class.
His skin has a faint bronze undertone, and there’s something almost feline about the way he holds himself.
Another shifter maybe. I wish I knew how to tell for sure. Maybe I’ll learn that in my next class.
“Excellent question.” Nestor points at the student without looking. “Hollowstags are not predators. They don’t hunt us. They don’t feed on flesh. So why evolve such a terrifying defense mechanism?”
He waits for an answer, but no one speaks. Twenty students and not even one willing to guess.
“Because they are heralds,” he says with relish, drawing it out like it tastes good on his tongue.
“Hollowstags appear before mass fissure events. Always and without fail. They emerge from the deep forests and the mountain passes. Days, sometimes hours before a fissure tears open and spills its horrors into our world.”
He leans forward, bracing his hands on the table, his eyes glittering with something between madness and fascination. In this light with that expression, he looks less like a professor and more like something that crawled out of a fissure himself.
“They’re warnings, living, screaming, panic-inducing warnings. And for centuries, we ignored them.” He straightens, clasping his hands behind his back. “We won’t be making that mistake again.”
His gaze sweeps across the room one more time, lingering on faces seemingly at random. The green-eyed shifter. The crying fae girl. The angel with the silver braids. Draven, who still looks bored. And then me. When his eyes pass over me again, I feel the weight of it like a physical thing.
He claps his hands together. “Who wants to touch it?”
I throw my hand up along with a dozen other people, and Lux grabs it, pulling it back down beside me.
“Yuck.” She scrunches her nose. “Why do you want to touch that thing?”