Title: No Church in the Wild
Summary: Every creature must die, and she would see to it that they stayed dead.
Notes: An Old Kingdom series AU of Season 1 where Vanessa is the Abhorsen, a necromancer who does not raise the dead, but sends them into Death for good using magical bells.
The bell, Isis the Binder, cut a chord, whip sharp. The creature, once human was now only a being of burning mud and even hotter hatred. It was a hatred of everything living, the kind only jealous coveting evokes. With the chord, it froze in its tracks, inches away from Vanessa Ives. She stared into the hollowed pits of its eyes, and it stared back hungry and seething. That was all it could do because she held it in her grip with that one endless sound.
And with a flick of her wrist, the melody of Set the Walker unleashed itself upon him. She sent it walking into Death with a jig livelier than its dead self, back through the First Gate where Nut the Sleep-bringer was forged, all the way to the Ninth and the Beyond it feared so much.
She had long since lost her fear of that Beyond, the river's flow, and what lurked beneath its waters. Every creature must die, and she would see to it that they stayed dead.
He was on the hunt.
For what exactly, he did not know, but he could sense it. It preyed on all of his senses, except he considered himself the predator, and it the prey. It was an itch he needed to scratch – or rather something he'd like to scratch away with claws and fangs and the white hot rage of the berserker that waited within him.
Vanessa had hired him and brought him over from England with honeyed words and smile that said she knew of all things unknown.
And what do you seek to escape?
Perhaps the same thing you do. We all have our curses, don't we?
And in the first weeks of being in this land, he'd learned a few of those unknown things and considered going back to England where the unknown wouldn't haunt him with the creeping hands of the dead.
He'd considered, and let the thought drop. The reality was that he belonged here as much as he didn't belong there – with Vanessa and her dead. So, he followed her and her sponsor through the dark, along tree–shadowed paths twined with dead leaves and deader things.
The scent hit him just as the canopied tree line opened to the precipice of a jagged, cavernous mouth of dark grey rocks. In its jaws that were open wide to gnaw them apart and swallow the remains, Ethan Chandler smelled something dead.
He raised his pistol and adjusted his aim.
At his side, Sir Malcolm Murray carried a sword of ornate silver and jewels that he acquired from his ventures Across the Wall. The other side, England was a strange place of untold riches, and he had conquered it easily. Much easier than the demons that they stalk.
People were easy to convince and to woo. So very easy to subdue.
But these were not people. These were desperate monsters eager to maintain their tenuous hold on life and devour anything that could push them that bit farther and help them cling just a little while longer.
Vanessa would describe him much the same, he bet – and in England, he had been known as a betting man.
He took no bets about their current course. Together, they took careful steps down the craggy and decayed path to the pit, Vanessa at the lead.
Vanessa was the thread that bound them together. A thread of origins not of this world or the next but somewhere in between, in the unknown.
He was drawn to her as all the dead things that refused to stay buried were. Dorian Gray, he who should have been dead, the picture of gruesome immortality come to life.
Arisen into life, a troubled phoenix of dubious origin.
On a clear blue lake between eight great stones, rife with the heartbeat of aching, breathing life, the should–be–dead thing that was Dorian Gray lay on a hand woven bed of dark green reeds and sparkling marks of light, and waited for the day his thread would be unwound.
Silence was not his companion.
Silence was his armor and his blade. One that the decorated sword at his side, sharpened and strengthened to cut through steel, bone, and the magic that would separate him from it, could not compete with.
England was a land where words were weapons. And south, in the land where he was pronounced dead and brought back to life, words were Sembene's friends, brothers, sisters, daughters, mothers, and sons.
Here, in this land where snow fell while the rest of the world enjoyed the sun – here, words were death. They were the creeping that you could not hear. They were the choked off cries of someone too loud to feel the shiver in the air or smell the decay on the breeze.
So, he held his sword close and his silence even closer. And when the wind blew south and the air grew cold, he whistled along with its tune and danced his blade, silent and swift.
In the mouth of the cave straddling the Northern barrier, Vanessa paused and studied the tens of dozens of dead eyes watching her from the bowels of their despair. Milky white or lit red with flames, they inched ever closer, ill content with the patience they were forced to endure.
Still, they waited.
Vanessa could feel the prickling of raised hairs like a delicate kiss to the back of her neck.
It reminded her of being young and oh so foolish with ravenous hunger, the same that she could see reflected in the darkness that shrouded their faces.
They would tear her apart with their broken and misshapen limbs given the chance. She would consume them with that ever present hunger long before the first ragged creature could reach her.
Yet, the hairs rose and she only stood her guard. It wasn't these dead that she feared, and it was not the one that they waited on that she feared either.
What she feared was what they would have become, what she must do, and the beyond of her actions. Life was far more terrifying than what lay after Death.
Her sword in hand glimmered with blue moonlit words.
I see all.
She shifted it to her side, and released her bells.
Ethan's hunt came to a brutal end with a burnt patch of skin on his arm cooking his blood, and the ruined remains of not quite a woman. It had a young look, despite the way its features twisted as no human face should before his gun had torn through it.
That hadn't been enough to stop it from lunging forward and grabbing his arm with sharpened fingers like claws and a grip like the grave. But as he had done, when Vanessa called the dead heeded and released him.
From behind, it looked a helpless thing, walking on grossly bent legs to Vanessa's side, where she stood before a pile of dusting carnage that would soon blow away on the wind. It was a cold wind, but Ethan felt hot all over. Feverish with the creature's touch and his own blood, begging to return the favour in kind.
Vanessa did not smile as she settled into that cold and disappeared to a place that he could not follow, even as much as he wished to.
Malcolm cooled the fury that bubbled just barely beneath the controlled surface of his mind.
It wasn't her. It wasn't his Mina.
Still, Chandler had killed any chance of them finding her when he'd blasted off this Shadow Hand's face and left a wrecked hole behind. Shadow Hands, as Vanessa had explained to him in his bewilderment of life outside his sheltered town and even more sheltered England, were dead souls controlled by a necromancer working outside Ma'at's harmonic domain and wielding magic from the chaos of Nu.
Perhaps Vanessa would be able to get something out of the creature in the same way she found Mina, circling the first gate in an orb of magic and crying out pleas for help as she disappeared into the Second Gate, Ra's precinct and perhaps further. Vanessa had not followed, but returned to life to alert him instead and lead them into this descent.
Malcolm often thought she didn't do enough, that she should have followed. That his daughter should die when Vanessa was the leech, so like her dead in her craving of life – Malcolm would trade her and her whole damned line if it would bring Mina back.
In Death, life did not feel real.
It was how it pulled you in. The water soothed all your worldly worries. The fog cloaked your mind from what it would remember about life. And the gates, oh, they sang a song of endless sleep and suffering washed away in dreams.
Vanessa was attune to its ways, and so, she thought of her duty and stepped forward into the waters, so murky when you focused on them and kept an eye on the fog and the menace it might have hidden.
A few feet before her, trapped by her bells as it had been in life, the faceless shadow hand awaited her command.
She smiled though it should have frustrated more than it amused her. Ethan had done quite a number on it. If Malcolm didn't strangle him, she'd have to talk to him about giving Ethan a raise.
If she loved Mina more she would not have laughed. If she loved Mina less, she would not have acted. But Vanessa, she loved Mina enough to do what must be done.
She swung Iris' Bell in a careful arc, almost like a caress to a loved one's cheek. A kiss to the back of their neck.
The bell rang a discordant but deliberate note, an awful ringing reminiscent of betrayal long remembered and never forgot.
When Vanessa left Death, the shadow hand's last control left with her. Inside its shell, it raged. Outside, it followed, step by rotten, broken step to the beat of Vanessa's drum and the twinkle of her bells.
The barrier between Life and Death had always intrigued him. The Great Nile, a river to lead you through all the nine gates until the end took you. However, it was the Beyond, that intangible place that none had discovered or...lived to tell the tale – his joke brought a smile to Victor Frankenstein's face, not unlike a sickly half–moon winking out the night's stars.
If his blade could cut through that barrier as surely as Miss Ives' bells do the dead, he would have sliced it to pieces, stepped through and took the knowledge that he had long sought with steady hands and an even steadier head.
For now, he had to settle for this, cutting through the dead thing held in Vanessa's grip to discover what secrets it would hide.
The shadow hand had a name once.
Once, once, once, once...
Now, it only screamed, life forgotten just like its name.
Dorian's hands were smooth, delicate. Ice cold with an unnatural warmth. Life taken back.
It was his touch that saved Ethan's arm, out on his bed of dark green reeds. Dorian reflected the lights of the stones, in his words, in his touch, and in his kiss.
On that bed of reeds, Ethan remembered a kiss that tasted of lingering death, a touch too broken to heal, and a light swallowed by the darkness of disease.
On that bed of reeds, with Dorian's hand on Ethan's stomach and his tongue tracing light into Ethan's mouth, Ethan remembered death and was brought back to life.
Malcolm trusted the Doctor far more than he trusted the Medium. Even in his mind he spat the name as if it were her name and not her title.
She was the only Medium to have done so. What arrogant ways she had.
He looked at her over the Doctor's dissection. What he would never admit was how he suspected that it was he who made her that way. Born of his own dark heart, spilled out into the flesh of a girl. Another wayward daughter.
It was a pair to break him in two, one piece for the each of them and nothing left for him – or the son he left Across the Wall, the wife dead in a decorated grave in a brightly lit city, or the Medium before Vanessa and the maze he had her in. It was a dead thing that not even Vanessa's bells could put to rest.
The dead swarmed as they did when there were secrets they wished to keep. But the secret was no longer theirs, it was locked away in Vanessa's mind.
It was a cage that not Ethan's strength, Victor's creations, Dorian's healing, or Malcolm's seething terror tempered by Sembene's lethal silence could break through.
The dead piled up outside, a herd of maggots waiting to feast on the corpse of their endeavor.
She stared into the night, trapped in a Death of her own making.
Once, she spoke, to Ethan. Malcolm stood by to hear the words, a witness to testify.
"Oh, Mr. Chandler, don't you know that there are no churches in the wild?"
The hoarse whisper stayed with him for hours in which the dead piled up and up, maggots hungry for the feast.
Mina stayed by her side.
Mina, in a white dress of her own making. She always was the talented one.
But she was not strong. In her white dress, curved to her form like a second skin of fabric so white, Vanessa could see right through it, to Mina's weakness, so unlike Vanessa's own.
Sisters.
More than that – reflections across a shallow pool.
If Mina was stronger, she'd have reached right through and pulled herself out. If Vanessa were weaker, she wouldn't have let her drown.
The tears did not separate them. Even the betrayals of the past did not, in this space beyond life and death.
For they were a pair. Sisters.
No, more than that.
There may have been no churches in the wild but Victor watched Ethan create one in the room they had shielded with every possible Mark of Ma'at they could draw up. With the eight stones beside them and the blood of the Medium, the Doctors, the Royals, and the Clairvoyants running through their veins it was all they could do to stop the inevitable destruction of life as this world knew it.
The inevitability of death. Victor had wished to conquer it. It was a wry, terrified grin that tore across his face at the lost battle.
Lost until Ethan drew Vanessa back to life with words shouted in a language Victor learned years ago and never had much use for as a denizen of the Old Kingdom. Words that spoke of life, of forgiveness, of coming back from the brink and conquering death itself.
Victor always thought it would be he who would do so.
Vanessa stepped past their barriers and drove the horde back with a draw of her wrist on Nut. The note rang clear.
Sleep. Submit.
Dead fell out of their bodies in wave after wave of smoke and ash, a path Vanessa tread down the stairs and to the waters of the Ma'at's Great Marks.
He had thought himself the future master of Death. It was the arrogance of too learned a fool.
It was silence that welcomed them into the engulfing walls of living stone. Silence punctuated only by the sound of their feet in the water and Gray's bed of reeds, bouncing against the walls.
Sembene knew this silence. It was the silence of the grave.
But for who, he could not say.
Mina knew she was dead.
As alive as she had always wanted to be, as alive as Vanessa for whom death had clung like sticky spider webs.
She had wanted so much to be Mina. She had loved Mina. Mina's happiness, Mina's despair. Her heartache and her beautiful rapture.
But she had loved Vanessa as well, and one could not love Vanessa the way Mina did without ending up here.
Oh, Mina had loved Vanessa, and she still loved her enough – just enough to die.
Its name was a cry that Vanessa had called out once when she came out of Death, pale as his son in the last throes of his life.
She had cried the name like a secret, wrong and wondrous, oh so terribly right.
Malcolm had never thought to encounter an Opponent of Light – Apophis. He'd never thought he'd see his Mina trapped within the bleeding orb and look to Vanessa.
He'd never imagined he'd have to make this choice. Malcolm had never even considered that he had one.
Oh, he knew one day this pair would tear him asunder, equal halves for each to carry.
Vanessa to life, and Mina to death.
She could not walk it to the final gate. She, Set's walk and Isis' binds were strong, but she did not have the strength. If she laid down now and let the river that felt so warm and so inviting take her where it may, all would be lost.
Not just the piece of her heart she willingly gave to Mina, a kiss with the swing of Nut, a sweet lullaby to guide her home.
The doing was not something Dorian would have liked to think of, but it was his curse to bear and he did it with a smile, watched the memories of Mina until he could share them with Vanessa as clearly as she remembered them.
He watched so he could lock them away for her and allow her to step forward, even if it was away from him.
Should-be-dead things like him didn't have hearts to break.
He remembered nothing of their tangle with Death, which was just as well because the scent of it cleaved to him and he'd much rather have washed away than let it linger on him and his stained soul.
Ethan joined Vanessa in her study where she busied herself with plans. Ma'at's Marked Stones to mend and the dead and Apophis itself to turn back and destroy for good.
For a second, he thought he could read words on the pistol he tucked into its holster. Words that brimmed with life.
He laughed at her look of barely contained exasperation, let the gun rest where it was, and stayed within the warmth of her smile, pulsing and brimming with life.
I have been seen.
End Notes:
If you have read the Old Kingdom Trilogy, you know of the Bells and the Charter and the Precincts of Death. If you have not, the wikipedia page for the series explains it quite well.
As Egyptian mythology was mentioned quite often in season 1, I blended it with Old Kingdom Mythos, where the Charter became Ma'at's domain the Egyptian goddess of harmony, justice, and balance. Of the seven bells, each became a different Egyptian God.
Ranna: Sleep-bringer – Nut: Sky Goddess
Mosrael: Waker – Ra: Sun God
Kibeth: Walker – Set: Chaos God (Chaos equals the
Dyrim: Voice – Osiris: God of the Dead; Resurrection; Judge of the Dead
Belgaer: Memory/Thought – Thoth: God of Knowledge/Writing
Saraneth: Binder – Isis: Protective Goddess of Magic/Tricked Ra
Astarael: Sorrowful – Anubis: God of Embalming/The Dead
Of the 9 precincts or gates leading up to the Beyond mentioned here, 1-7 correspond to each Bell and 8 and 9 correspond to Horus: God of the Sky, and Ma'at respectively. I chose these because of Horus' title as a Warrior God, corresponding to the rings of fire, and Ma'at because of the relaxing nature of the final precinct and how looking up at the "sky" pulls you upwards, as Ma'at's keeping the balance would make sure the dead move on. As for "the Beyond," I consider this to be Amunet – the hidden one – and her domain as it is unknown and Vanessa feared it for a significant portion of her life as she feared the demon who referred to her as such. The Demon in this fic is Apophis.
As to the characters, Vanessa was, as stated, the Abhorsen. Victor, the Doctor, is a Wallmaker, descendant of those that built the Wall between The Old Kingdom and England. Dorian is the Clairvoyant, half Clairvoyant and half Abhorsen, so like Lirael, he can go into Death to see the past. He is also as Touchstone was, embalmed for centuries by an Abhorsen (perhaps even himself, though he does not wish to recall that) within Death until Vanessa found him and pulled him out. Ethan has the berserker blood and is an adept Charter, or Ma'at's Marks, mage, specializing in offensive magic and his gun is imbued with Marks of Ma'at. And of the Royals, Malcolm is a descendant of that line, though the blood has trickled down much since the great Royals passed.
With that said, hope you enjoyed the fic. (And comments are most appreciated)