A/N: This is my first fic. Comments and criticism requested. Thanks and enjoy!
~ Chapter I ~
The Momentary
Christopher Carrion had watched the girl closely as she had pressed her forehead to the lens of the momentary. That moment's expression, he decided, he would keep in his mind along with the protective scowl captured by Pixler's mechanical bug. The brow of the girl from the Hereafter had crinkled with curiosity just before it touched the padded edge of the wooden box. Curiosity could kill this girl, was killing her now. As he often had in recent days, Carrion ruminated on how the girl had not, in fact, been killed already. He knew well how the inhabitants of the Hereafter, when the Harbor had still been open, had been driven mad by the unfamiliarity of the Abarat.
This girl had seen much too much to have kept hold of her sanity, but that look of hers, as with that first show of spirit against the robotic pest on the Yebba Dim Day… It was too controlled. There was something different about this girl, and Carrion knew it. Without one of Pixler's recording gadgets, there would be no way to replay Candy Quackenbush's imperfections which were so perfectly encapsulated in this her last expression, and he could tell by the girl's slackening face that it would indeed be her last.
Her body he would dispose of in some way or another. It would be useless, fearless as the shell of the girl would be, to try to make a meal of it for the darkly luminous nightmares ethereally swimming through the mask which guarded Carrion's corpse-like visage. The idea of leaving the body to be consumed by the beasts of Efreet was one of the most horrifying ways Carrion could think to be rid of her entirely, but this one time, he could not bring himself to be horrifying. He could smother the girl's being and pinch it out like a dying flame, but letting those foul monsters desecrate her in any way would be a brutality that even he, the Prince of Midnight, could not bear. The only end he could think worse for the human girl was to let his grandmother scalp her and, filling her with Todo mud, turn her into one of those demented stitchling warriors. Carrion would grind the girl into bone dust for his next conjuration before he would let Mater Motley and her coven get their mending, skeletal fingers on her.
The body could wait for another time. The girl's mind was the matter at hand, her consciousness to be dealt with before her body could be wrenched from it. He neared Candy until he could see every last stray brown hair jutting from her temple, and, sure that she had thoroughly disappeared into Marapozsa Street, he began to jerk his hand through the air in small circles as if slowly creating a viscous tempest. Candy's disembodied senses stirred to the surface of Carrion's mind. She saw the street. She saw the residents. She saw the dreams that all on Marapozsa Street wore as carnivalesque hats. She was getting deeper into that world, turning corners, even getting lost, but on Marapozsa Street, her head was still bare as that of her physical body, limp against the momentary.
It was an inconvenience that the stubborn girl had not put the hat on unprompted. Most would mimic the dreamers in order to seem ordinary. They did not realize that these dreamers were not dreamers at all, their bodies dead and their minds displaced. No, they were only dreams, and to wish to be them was to wish to be obliterated. But this girl, this obstinate girl, she had never really been normal, not even in the Hereafter.
Carrion knew this with the same near-complete confidence with which he knew everything else about Candy. Each action confirmed that Candy Quackenbush was exactly the girl he had imagined in those one-sided conversations in the woods of Gorgossium. And then, in killing her with her dreams, he could take comfort in a new absoluteness of certainty and in the memorial of her which would remain in the momentary eternally, a frozen recollection. He reconciled himself to this small form of possession, and as if his words were magic instead of sound, Carrion spoke Midnight's dark poetry stripped of horror, "Show us your dreams."