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The raw mouth of devouring darkness swallows Faulkner whole as he descends down the caves of the Endless Drear with his first true disciple following in his footsteps close behind him.
“Brother Faulkner.” The echo of Sister Thurrocks’s voice licks at his heels like a rising tide, her heavy, unsteady breathing rippling through the dark like through deep, murky water. “Brother Faulkner, this doesn’t feel right.“
The craggy walls of the tunnel loom and press from every side, devouring the light, snuffing out the warmth, trapping the sound, turning it around on itself, twisting and churning, but never letting it go. The water drips, and gurgles, and pools through the hollows and the winding passages of the rock all around, wet and horrid. The cave air is stale, musty and cold like a foul breath stilled in a dead man’s throat. As if they are going down the gullet and right into the waiting belly of the beast.
It does not feel right. But. “This is our only way forward.”
Leading the way doesn't feel fully natural, no matter how much or how long Faulkner has been yearning for it. Too much time has he spent making himself smaller, quieter, shallower, always having to look up, always forced to walk behind—standing tall, chin raised and shoulders pulled back, being the loudest voice in the room and the one to always take the first step still feels strange and new. Faulkner is still trying this role of his invention out for size as he gathers one title after another, each one heftier and shinier than the previous one. He thinks it might actually suit him. He likes the way he reflects in the bright, over-eager eyes of his disciples. Faulkner only wants them—all of them—to keep looking at him this way.
And he does like these children, he really does. That’s why he is going to do it right, make it right. After all, to provide, to light the way, to be the vessel for others’ happiness is the way of a prophet. He can do this, can finally prove himself, can be the man they see before them. It feels like just one more step, and Faulkner will finally be able to reach that golden, gleaming shadow stretching before him.
The prophet and his disciple keep walking onwards and downwards through the darkness, gingerly feeling their path from one treacherous stone to another, sweating and shivering by turns.
“We’re getting out of here.” Just for a second, Faulkner looks back at Thurrocks. Under the broken furrowed brows, her eyes are wide in terror, but trusting. “We’re going back the way we came,” he says even as he drags both of them deeper and deeper into the cave’s yawning maw.
Water dripping from the jagged ceiling, water running down the crevices in the walls, water streaming in the winding rivulets around their feet. The farther they go, the lower the jutting vault of the cave seems to sag. Wetly glistening walls constrict and tighten all around, angulating, breathing, suffocating. The ground slips and slops more and more with each new step, ready to swallow them any moment now. The heavy, moist air rots and festers.
And yet, there is a song faintly rising up from the black, mouldering throat of the tunnel. It’s not like anything. It’s like nothing else. The sinking melody of driving rain, and rushing currents, and the thick, inhuman gurgling of brackish and stagnant waters. Clear and beautiful music, like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and Faulkner can almost pick out the words, can almost understand it. He knows the closer he comes, the longer he stays under, the clearer the music will get. Twinned echoes of a voice that is two voices, both high, and shrill, and low, and groaning with the weight of bursting pipes, and dams, and the softness of running streams beckons from the still and deep darkness. The voices are saying something to him, only to him, and if only Faulkner could pick out the words, he would at last understand.
Sister Thurrocks’s steps fade behind him, getting more distant with each passing moment, but they can’t stop now, not when they are so achingly close. Blindly, Faulkner’s hand shoots back to grab her own. Her palm is strangely limp in his grasp, but they keep walking.
“They will tell stories about this,” Faulkner tells more to himself than to anyone else. “This is all just part of the greater pattern that’s yet to reveal itself.” His mad whispering shatters against the cold, looming walls in crawling echoes.
The next cave ends in a narrow hallway of a tunnel that stares at them blindly like a black, empty eye socket. Stark white symbols painted upon the rock around its toothless mouth make Faulkner’s fingertips itch with recognition of the prayer marks from his sacred water butt.
“Which way do we go now?” Thurrocks’s wobbling and worried voice strikes him from behind.
“What do you mean ‘which way’,” Faulkner tells her absentmindedly, still hypnotized by the shifting and swirling prayer marks that his hand knows so well, far too well. “There is only one way.”
“Which way do we go now,” the voices echoes back in the exact same tone and with the exact same cadence.
“There is only one way, Sister,” Faulkner forces through clenched teeth, and there is finality to his voice even as chilling dread sips through the marrow of his bones. “The only way out is through. I… we can’t go back.”
The echo of Thurrocks’s voice, pale and distant, sails away. “…Can’t go back.”
Her slack, drooping, coldly sticky palm keeps slipping from Faulkner’s hand, but he doesn’t look back. Only grasps at it bruisingly tight as they go down the devouring mouth of the tunnel. It’s pitch dark and suffocating, and Sister Thurrocks grows slower with each drag of her feet.
“Please keep walking,” Faulkner whispers desperately into the void, his knuckles going pale with exertion and sinews pulled strainingly taut as he heaves this child entrusted to him through the darkness.
“We should never have come down here.” Thurrocks’s voice drawls, low and pained.
Her breathing grows heavy and labored. With the back of his head, Faulkner can feel her every long, strangled inhale. Choked gasps come wheezing breathlessly as her throat burbles, wet and gurgling. She is getting heavier with each step, her body a leaden dead weight that Faulkner has to drag behind him through gritted teeth.
“Sister Thurrocks, we need to keep moving,” he hisses, squeezing her cold hand so hard it should hurt, but the fingers crushed in his hold remain numb and will-less.
There is a string of lit flares strewn down the tunnel like a constellation of radiant stars that douse the wet constricting walls in nauseating flaming gleam. Bright red light pulses with each step, each breath, each heartbeat, throbbing deep behind Faulkner’s eyes and pounding inside his skull like a hammering migraine.
“Come on, we’re there— we’re almost there—” An abrupt, hideous, blaring drone cuts him off.
A blast of noise makes the rocks crack and shake, reverberating through the air and Faulkner’s bones, setting his teeth on edge. Dull, repetitive and chilling bellowing of the alarm rings in the ears as pulsating, blinking flare-lights flood the vision. Drawn-out, soulless droning and screaming red drowns everything. The world rocks around them nauseatingly, but Faulkner can already see the opening of the tunnel, and they are so close, they are almost there.
“There! The daylight!” Faulkner screams, his voice the echo of hope, even though the light bleeding from the cave’s jagged maw is blaringly, blindingly red.
One last push, and the prophet and his disciple stumble out into light, into the world and the open air, into freedom and safety.
Only they don’t.
“What— Where?..” Faulkner asks even though his own chambers in the Paraclete’s Gulch is an achingly familiar sight.
Inside, he goes terribly quiet.
Bleary-eyes and with his mouth dry and sour, voice groggy and hoarse like of a child unable to wake up from a nightmare, he turns to his first true disciple to look her in the face. “What is happening, Sister Thurrocks?”
Thurrocks’s face is bleak, drained and resigned—no more over-eager eyes and bright smiles. Throbbing bloody light paints her pale face in long shadows, setting the halo of her frazzled curls aflame. Her gaze is distant, but knowing. “This is the part where you hurt me.”
Breath spiking violently, Faulkner calls through the poison-fog of confusion and the lump in his throat, “Uh— Sister Thurrocks?”
A lancing pain bites into the palm of Faulkner’s hand, sharp, cold and sudden, and when he looks down it’s not Thurrocks’s hand that he is squeezing. A jagged piece of glass is clutched in his grasp, digging deep into his pale palm and cutting his trembling, tense fingers.
“No, this isn’t—” Faulkner’s own face reflects darkly in the blood-smeared, glinting glass, his own eyes looking back at him, bright and wild. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to—”
Recollection doesn’t strike like a bullet though a heart—instead, memories crawl back to him through glass shards on their bloodied hands and knees. Blaring, drawling sound of the weeping alarm rings in Faulkner’s ears as echoes flood his head.
Sister Thurrocks. The bright, sharp pain in his palm as he closes his hand around a piece of glass Did I give you permission... and the aching, hot strain of his muscle and sinew as he holds it aloft to sound the alarm? and brings it down again, and again, and again.
Faulkner’s gritted teeth, and the great and savage coldness rising in him. Sister Thurrocks’s wide—so impossibly wide—eyes. Faulkner! Her hands fleeting and flailing as she tries to cover her face. Katabasian Faulkner! In vain.
Hard hits connecting with vulnerable flesh, sinking in with dense, wet, sawing sound. Please don’t! Wet squelching of rended flesh and shamelessly spurting blood. Please!
Her horrid screaming Faulkner! turned desperate begging Please don’t— turned heavy, breathless wheezing please— turned choked, bubbling with blood gurgling please— turned dead silence at long last.
In a cold and miry torpor, with his stifled, shaky breath stuck in his throat, Faulkner raises his eyes. The shard of murderous glass is no longer in his hand. Instead, it sticks out of Sister Thurrocks’s slashed up, torn and shredded neck, caked in blood and reflecting his own face back at him condemningly.
Thurrocks’s breathless body is collapsed on the floor, slumping against a wall, lifeless hands sagging down from the red-soaked white sleeves of her robes. Nauseatingly vivid red is sprayed and smeared all over the wall in a gruesome painting of agony. Her head surrounded by the blood-mottled curls is drooping to the side limply, brokenly, face coldly ashen and violently splattered with gore.
Thurrocks’s eyes, glazed over and glassy, aren’t even pointed at Faulkner, yet he can feel their heft with his every pore. Her mouth is slack, lips parted will-lessly, but her voice wheezes out of the bloody gashes in her mangled throat instead.
“I trusted you…” The voice of Faulkner’s first true disciple bubbling up from the split meat of the weeping wound comes out hoarse and rasping, broken and twisted at the wrong angles.
“…With my life,” echoes his other first true disciple Sibling Rane, isn’t it? from behind, their voice just as earnest and eager as Thurrocks’s eyes used to be.
Because there are always more bright-eyed and young devotees to look at him adoringly, devour his every word and take his hand to be lead to slaughter.
Faulkner wants to be anywhere but here, wants to be anyone but this.
Sister Thurrocks’s body doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t curse his name, or throw deserved accusations, or pass out dooming judgements. Doesn’t demand he be sorry. Thurrocks is just a corpse, and Faulkner has her blood on his hands. She isn’t even really looking at him, and yet he still can’t face her just like he can’t face the truth. Instead, he does the childish thing, the cowardly thing, the usual thing.
He rounds on her, armed with impotent anger. “You… you were the one who lied to me, deceived me, Sister Thurrocks,” Faulkner hisses through gritted teeth, sour and bitter like a petulant child. “You disobeyed me. You betrayed me!..”
The dead and bloodied girl doesn’t deny anything, doesn’t fight back—what use would that be anyway? Didn’t work the first time. Her bleary eyes are just as unfocused and distant as before, her corpse mouth still bloodless, breathless and unmoving.
Pulsing red light dances on the blood-smeared glass shard as rasping air escapes her torn throat. “…And you betrayed her…”
An echo of muted footsteps makes Faulkner’s blood run cold. Someone's on the staircase.
“Wait. Don’t come in,” he begs under his breath, tongue leaden in his briny mouth. “Please don’t come—” Not again, not her, please, just not her—
The door swings open. A shadow falls across Faulkner’s back. He doesn’t turn around, he doesn’t dare to.
“Faulkner?” Carpenter echoes behind him.
Desperately cinching his eyes shut as he curls in on himself, Faulkner clamps his bleeding and bloodied hand over his mouth. His stomach lurches as the blood’s mineral tang sours on his tongue, the sharp and cold smell of it stinging his nose. But he will not turn around, he will not do this to her again, this time it will be different, this time he won’t ruin her.
And yet, no matter how hard he grits his teeth, his own voice, contemptible and wretched, echoes from the darkness. I’m sorry about this, Carpenter.
Venom of acrid shame spreads through Faulkner’s bloodstream, binds him hand and foot. He presses the hand over his mouth harder and shuts his eyes tighter as if this way he can shake this nightmare off and escape the prison of his petrified body and despairing mind.
Still, he can’t make it stop. But you’re going to need to run again. Because all this has already happened, hasn’t it?
“Brother,” his sister calls out to him, voice painfully raw, and vulnerable, and butchered by the shards of her broken heart. “Please don’t.”
Faulkner’s hand trembles pressed over his mouth, his choked breathing coming in sobbing stabs. His shoulders begin to quake. I’m so sorry. That’s all that his echo has to say to Carpenter. That is all he can offer his sister after taking everything from her.
The memory of a memory screams and howls from the shadows and echoes in the droning of the alarm, What are you… what are you standing there for? You can make it if you run— Why are you just standing there?
Carpenter’s silent and leaden stare weights heavy on Faulkner as he crumples to the floor, numb legs giving out from under him.
Run! Carpenter, please! The past echo of his own voice begs, resounding and rippling through the darkness, entirely wretched, agonized, feverishly hysterical. I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry!
Faulkner doesn’t turn around to face his sister even as she says, voice cold, miserable and drowned in sinking dread, “I’m sorry too, Faulkner.” He doesn’t need to. He remembers the broken look in her eyes far too well.
Running footsteps fade into the distance as their echo grows louder, more thunderous and oppressive, pressing from the inside of Faulkner’s skull and ringing in his ears. When he lowers his numb, shaky palm from his face, it leaves a smear of a bloody handprint across his mouth.
“You killed her.” Even though the voice bleeding out from Thurrocks’s mortal wound is wrecked and broken, the tone of it could almost be pitying if it wasn’t so deathly tired. “Just like you killed me.”
Faulkner drags his saturnine gaze to Thurrocks’s pale, blood-stained face and forces through his gritted teeth and frantic, guilty breathing teetering over into sobbing, “She made it for the river. She knew they way. She made it out.”
Faulkner had no other choice, no other way out, he had to seize the moment and the narrative before it all could come crashing down upon his head, he couldn’t let his story end that way, that couldn’t be the end! And Carpenter didn’t want a place among them and on the pages of the Silt Verses anymore, so then why not let her run, let her go. In the end, why shouldn’t she be the traitor so that he can carry on being the prophet?
And even then, Faulkner keeps clinging to his faith in Carpenter with broken and bloodied tooth and nail. He hasn’t signed her death warrant, hasn’t sentenced her to death, hasn’t ordered her execution. He truly believes—has to believe—that she had enough time to get away and she’s too capable to get caught.
She will make it out. She has to, and she can. She is Carpenter, she is capable of anything. Betray her he might, but Faulkner has not killed his sister. She will escape, be rid of them all… be rid of him. She can still keep on running, keep on fighting, keep on living. Even if that means she will hate him till her last dying breath.
And in the meantime, Faulkner has a duty to make her sacrifice worth it.
“But she’s alone now,” Sister Thurrocks remind him, echoing his own words back at him. Each torturous word sinks in like needles under his fingernails.
“She’s had no chance to stop, no chance to rest.” The words spill from Thurrocks’s slashed throat together with gushing blood streaming down her white robes and flooding the floor.
The blood-splattered walls press down on Faulkner from every side, the never-ending blaring of the alarm reverberating in his very bones. His own reflection in the shard of bloodied glass won’t stop looking back at him.
“She’s wounded, and she’s tired.”
Faulkner keeps desperately squeezing his eyes shut, futilely hoping that next time he opens them the harrowing visage of Thurrocks’s corpse will be gone. And yet, she is always there. Scarred and burnt into the inside of his eyelids.
“Soon she’ll have nowhere else to go.”
The noose of chilling dread tightens around Faulkner’s neck. He needs to go. He can’t keep listening to what he has done. Can’t keep looking at what he has done.
Faulkner staggers to his feet, his foggy head swimming dizzyingly. Stumbles out of his chambers, his still bleeding hand leaving an angry red smear across the doorframe. Desperately, wildly tries to forget the glassy look in Sister Thurrocks’s filmy dead eyes as he rushes down the hall of the Gulch, down the cave’s tunnel, down the gullet of the beast.
Blood dripping from the jagged ceiling, blood running down the crevices in the walls, blood streaming in the winding rivulets around his feet. And yet, with some feverish, mad hope, Faulkner thinks that maybe he can still catch up to Carpenter. Can leave with her. Together.
He can still get it right, can fix it, make it different, make it better. Maybe he can even still be forgiven. Because even after everything, Carpenter has called him her brother. And that’s what it means to love someone, isn’t it? To look at them in all their ugliness and still reach out your hand.
Faulkner’s head spins frenetically as he thinks to himself that yes, yes, he still has time to grasp his sister’s proffered hand, it’s so close he can almost see it, can almost touch it already.
He can even become someone else, someone new. Someone better and kinder. Someone who isn’t so horribly hungry for all the wrong things. Someone who doesn’t have to remember Thurrocks’s horrid, wheezing dying breath.
Faulkner can hear his sister calling out his name—Faulkner, Faulkner, Faulkner—and oh, she must be waiting for him. So he rushes to meet her, slipping and stumbling on wet and mossy rocks, not stopping or slowing down even as the muddy water squelching under his feet rises first to lick at his ankles, then to splash around his shins as he blindly wades deeper and deeper into the murk and darkness, the faint echoing of his sister’s voice his only leading light.
“…Faulkner,” the voice reaches him, getting closer and closer with each step he takes, but it sounds… different. Wrong. “Katabasian Faulkner! Katabasian Faulkner!” Faulkner’s heart drops, sinks, drowns because it is Sister Thurrocks who is calling him.
Faulkner stops, but it’s too late to turn around and run again. A pole rises from the dark, hungry waters. A sacrificial pole with a body tied to it. There is a burlap sack pulled over the drooping head of the motionless sacrifice, and yet it doesn’t save Faulkner. He knows too well the dark, grey-streaked, wiry hair limply hanging down her shoulders and the rough hands that have been through too much.
“She is dead,” Sister Thurrocks tells him simply from where she is tied to the other side of the mast.
“No,” Faulkner tells her, resolute and firm, even though he can’t tear his eyes, wide and petrified under the furrowed brows, from the blood-caked votive hooks plunged deep into Carpenter’s throat and her still, unrising chest. “No, she isn’t.”
He kneels in the sloshing water, knees sinking into the silt and legs tangling in kelp as he tugs at the coarse and sodden rope knots with desperation and his numb and cold-prickled fingers.
“Sister Thurrocks, help me take her down,” Faulkner whispers madly to the corpse of a girl he killed. “I need to untie her. I need to free her—”
“You can’t.” The voice crawling from the blood-drenched, gore-sopping wound is dry, shallow and final. “You sacrificed her yourself. She is dead on your altar. I am dead on your altar. And you, too, are dead on your altar.”
Something shifts, and writhes, and crawls under Thurrocks’s dead skin, bulging and pushing from the frame of her face, twisting and breaking her features.
“She reached for you, and you bit her proffered hand. She came back for you, and you ate her right up. Crunched down every bone and licked the plate. Swallowed me up, too, devoured in just one bite.”
Sister Thurrocks’s palid skin stretches uncomfortably, rising at sharp, absurd angles before shiny needles of glass break through the death mask of her face that cracks and breaks until it’s nothing more than a mess of bleeding meat butchered by shrapnel of glass. From every glinting shard, Faulkner’s own twisted and savage face stares back at him. Fresh blood is yet to dry on his lips.
Thurrocks’s voice rises like an angry high tide, and then it fractures, shattering into a kaleidoscope of swarming echoes, all their cutting edges fitting together at the wrong angles.
“And will go on devouring others, you parasite, you leeching horror, you hungering thing.”
It’s the voice of his sister, and his brothers, and his father. The voices of those he couldn’t save and those he couldn’t let live. It’s the twinned voice of his hungry god. And above anything else, it is his own voice.
“It’s only a matter of time before you eat yourself, too. Our prophet of the river.”
Faulkner can’t keep looking himself in the eyes in the bloody and broken mirror of Thurrocks’s face.
Trembling from cold and fear, but aflame with burning shame, he rises to his unsteady feet, his head spinning nauseatingly, his stomach churning with sour dread. Faulkner throws one last pained glance at the sacrifice who he tells himself, lying, is not Carpenter, and he turns around and leaves her behind.
This isn’t how it ends, his heart screams from the inside of its ribcage prison.
Faulkner’s sister is just a little way ahead of him, but she must be waiting for him, waiting to leave this place together with him.
She is just a step away, Faulkner tells himself step after step after step.
Water rises up to his knees and keeps rising, and rising, and rising. It’s black, thick and viscous, its all-consuming smell metallic and choking. Muddy riverbed clings to him, tempestuous waves knocking into him as tangles of kelp ensnare his limbs. The prophet’s cope that stretches far behind him weights heavy on Faulkner’s shoulder, dragging him down and under, the bloody handprints staining its opulence unwashed by the waters. Shaky breath spiking in his throat, Faulkner fumbles for the clasp on his chest, but the only thing that his numb and trembling fingers find is a cold and unyielding chain. And yet, he struggles on, believing he can still be free.
“Sister, wait for me!” Faulkner yells out, joyous, pleading and desperate in equal measure. “I’m coming with you!”
There are bodies all around him. Half-submerged in the water, her disciple’s robes buoying her up, sodden hair drifting around her pale face, Sister Thurrocks floats by, the look in her glassy eyes the definition of terror. Charlie drifts face-down, the back of his head sodden and silent, and he is so small, older brothers should never be so small. Carpenter’s strong profile looks slack and wilted, wet and clammy skin of her face sagging defeatedly, dead and hollow eyes dim and achingly disappointed as she sinks under the black suffocating waters to forever be buried and trapped in silt.
Faulkner ignores them all, desperately shutting his eyes as if this way he can pretend that he never saw them at all, as he bounds deeper into the waters, swept up by the rushing currents. He pushes past the drooping corpse hands swaying over the water like reeds, doesn’t look back at the swirling reflections skittering across the water’s black mirror, doesn’t stop for the shadows of bodies—so many bodies—under the murky surface. Faulkner faces forward even though he can see no light of escape.
“Sister! Where are you, where are you going?” His voice cracks as he struggles and gasps in the water. “Come back, wait for me—”
He remembers he can’t swim only when the ground slips from under his feet, water splashing in his face like a cold slap. Thrashing and fighting to stay afloat, Faulkner wastes his breath on hope and desperation, calling out into the darkness, “Marco!” Coughing and sinking and tearing his throat and heart apart. “Marco! Marco! Sister!”
…Marco…
…Marco…
…Marco…
His own voice is thrown back in his face from the uncaring darkness. Empty, fading, lonely echoes are the only answer Faulkner ever gets.
Excruciatingly cold water fills his burning, aching lungs…
…as Faulkner takes a breath, eyes flying open upon awakening.
Instead of a craggy cave vault, it’s the ceiling of his chambers that looks down at him.
Faulkner lies in his messy bed like in a grave, eyes torturously wide, teeth clenched and hands fisted in the damp with his cold sweat sheets, as he waits from the harrowing visions of his Sister and sister’s dead faces to fade and dissolve in the morning light.
But he isn’t that fortunate. Instead, they stay with him like a resounding echo.