10: The Lord God Prepared a Gourd
The vast and eroded walls of the archon's den curved inward and met in a dome engulfed in shadow, although a vague gray aura illuminated the rest of the astronomical absence. Mouths of caverns like the one in which they stood dotted the bulging center of the den, and into each trailed a pulsing, thorny root. The roots clung to the lower walls and coalesced at the base of the immense ovular room. They widened to the thickness of tree trunks until they disappeared beneath the heaving, bulbous bottom of the archon.
The archon was a giant flower bud. That was the best way Sloan could conceive it. At the base, its dappled and slimy epidermis swelled into a rotund, almost perfectly spherical bulge that gently heaved as if breathing, attuned to the ripples that surged through its roots into its body. The bulb tapered into a conical protrusion about halfway up the extent of its confines. At the tip, the epidermis contracted into a wrinkled nub, out of which a small black flower with three petals swayed in an imaginary breeze.
At the bottom of the room, a puddle of the archon's inky runoff ebbed slowly back and forth. Roots weaved in and out of the brackish pool.
"You're sure that's it. That's the archon," said Sloan. Her voice came out as a whisper, although she had not intended it.
"Oh yes, love," said Delaney. "Look."
She pointed her arm, frail and white against the overwhelming blackness below, at the great black drops of dew that formed on and rolled off the leathery skin of the bud. As each drop struck the pool and burst, a wraith emerged as if from a cocoon before plunging beneath with only a small ripple.
"It's creating wraiths," Delaney continued. "Only the archon can do that. They must use these tunnels to spread throughout the town. With all these roots, it can perceive everything in its domain. It can probably feel the palpitations of your heartbeat right now."
Sloan shuffled further away from the writhing root that extended from their cavern.
"It has no discernible weakpoint." Winnipeg crouched low as she surveyed the immense and unbroken form of the thing's vegetable flesh. "No doubt that hide is too tough for normal weapons to pierce."
"What about the roots," said Sloan.
Winnipeg stroked her chin. "If we severed them all, perhaps. There must be hundreds."
"The flower on top?" said Delaney. All of them were whispering. This thing, this archon emanated a daunting presence, not sheerly from its immensity but from something else, something extrasensory, not quite a smell or taste or feeling but nonetheless something Sloan could perceive. Bad mojo.
She had never put much thought to the wraiths as much more than an adversary for her to kill, but the full rush of the realization of their true nature struck her now. The word evil for the first time meant something to Sloan as she gazed upon the archon; for so long it had been only the antonym of good, something from fables and fairy tales, the cheap gimmick employed by a writer too afraid to delve into the complex realities of the human psyche. In the face of this evil thing, complexities dissolved, nuance and subtlety vanished, all fell into the oblivion of its darkness. Words, thoughts, and reason were devoured and replaced only by a hollow emptiness, a lack of life and hope.
Sloan felt very much like she wanted to die.
"The flower..." Winnipeg's words came out slow, distorted. "Is probably... A trap..."
Sloan rubbed her eyes. Blinked. Her head rang with the murmur of the archon, with the elongated words uttered by her companions. She sagged against the wall as a wave of nausea swept over her. Her body felt like an empty husk, like skin draped over bones and blood, a feeling exacerbated by the realization that it was exactly that: a husk, soulless and empty. Like chattel. Like compost. Decaying and rotting in the ground, fed upon by worms and termites.
This had to be... some kind of... psychological attack. Something propagated by the archon. She knew it, but the feeling consumed her. Delaney and Winnipeg continued to speak without noticing. They didn't care about her. Nobody cared about her. Not her family, not the only person she could have ever called a friend. Memories surfaced in her mind unbidden like images on a projector screen. She tried to blot them out, tell herself it was the archon's doing, but they would not be ignored. Images of her alone. Alone at home. Alone at school. Alone in the neighborhood as she scratched sticks in the dirt. So many images.
The setting shifted from Scottsdale, Arizona to Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Sloan grabbed her skull and tried not to think, tried to shut down, tried to die, but she could not. She unspooled from the reality of the cavern mouth. The images played as though she had returned to that time and place in Minnesota middle school where she skulked across campus stewing in resentment of her blind twin sister and all her friends and all her popularity, wondering why her defect made her so much more desirable than Sloan herself as she searched for a place to sit and eat her bag lunch but every bench and table was occupied by cliques of happy friends, as if they were absorbing Sloan's happiness for their own nourishment, because every time she turned and saw another smiling face she grew emptier and emptier inside, until she found a bench with a single quiet girl who stared down a sandwich with pensive curiosity, as though this sandwich were the single most engrossing thing in the world, and Sloan thought maybe if she kept quiet and ate quickly this other girl wouldn't even notice her, because the sandwich must be infinitely more interesting, but no sooner had she unraveled her own lunch had the other girl looked up and extended a cordial hand and said: "Hello. I'm Clair Ibsen. What's your name?"
And Sloan had stared back shocked for a moment and muttered a response except that wasn't what Sloan did now, what Sloan did now was throw herself across the table and wrap her hands around Clair's throat and throttle her pretty white neck, intending to squeeze until her fucking head popped off and rolled across the quad so all the happy people and their happy fucking lives could see the true horror of their world. Clair's eyes bulged and she fell back and Sloan fell atop her and slammed her head against the ground channeling all of her strength into her grip, kneading the soft flesh of the throat like putty.
A blade ripped into her back and through her chest and into Clair Ibsen's chest and out her back. Eden Prairie Preparatory School shattered into a thousand shards to reveal the world of the miasma and the compacted walls of the cavern. Clair Ibsen disappeared, replaced by Delaney Pollack. Delaney's face was an almost comical shade of violet, her mouth agape in a twisted half-grin.
Winnipeg retracted her blade from both of them and voided it of blood with one quick wipe. "Are you done being crazy yet?"
Sloan's eyes sagged as her blood dripped down and splattered Delaney's white dress. She relinquished her grasp and rolled over against the archon's root, struggling to breathe as her lungs heaved worthlessly in her chest cavity.
It took only a moment for Delaney to jump up and heal them both with an operatic wave of her arm. The purple drained from her face, replaced by her typical rosy luster. "Pretty weird, love! Hope that was a one time thing."
The root breathed beneath Sloan. She peeled herself off and stood abruptly, growing dizzy as her brain and senses calibrated. She rubbed the back of her skull and regained her balance. "Fuck."
"Careful, don't fall over the edge." Delaney steadied her. "Were you hallucinating or what?"
"Something like that," said Sloan. Everything felt topsy turvy. "I thought you were Clair Ibsen."
"The girl from Minneapolis? The one you hate?"
Sloan nodded. "The archon must have—"
"Your leg." Winnipeg brushed aside the tail of Sloan's coat with her blade. Sloan drew back shamefaced as her companions ogled her nearly bare (and poorly shaved) legs. Only after several seconds of prolonged staring could she muster the will to look down herself. A shallow red line ran along her lower left leg, no broader than a pen stroke. Even after she saw it she could not feel it.
Delaney snapped her fingers and healed the scratch as fast as she had healed the stab wound. "Remember where you got that, love? I'd wager one of these thorns nicked you as you squeezed by."
That sounded right. She certainly hadn't taken the utmost care when she slithered through the narrow aperture on her belly.
"So the thorns are toxic after all," said Winnipeg. "Significant intel. Good that we learned this now, before the fight began."
"Glad to be the guinea pig." Sloan pulled the tails of her coat back together to conceal her legs. She hoped her embarrassment wasn't too obvious, but of course Delaney gave her a knowing look with what might have been a wink as she tapped her lower lip.
At least Winnipeg could be counted on to not give a shit. She made an abrupt turn back toward the archon. Its bulb-like body had made no movement or change; black beads rolled off it endlessly into the pool below. "Now the matter of how to fight this thing."
Miffed by the the preceding events, Sloan elbowed a space for herself between Delaney and Winnipeg and ushered them aside as she materialized her gun. "I say we shoot it. A few seconds of sustained fire and it won't matter how thick the hide is."
Her companions shifted behind her in the narrow space, both taking especial care to keep away from the thorny root throbbing beside them. Neither objected to Sloan's plan, so she revved up the barrel, waiting for it to reach full spin before unleashing a focused and steady stream of light at the archon. She struck at the most corpulent part of the bulb, where the epidermis stretched wide and (she hoped) thin. Not that she knew jack dick about plant anatomy. Not that a magical demon formed of pure despair had to conform to actual plant anatomy anyway.
The light hit the skin with no splash, as though it had bored a hole straight through on first contact. Or maybe the fleshy plant was absorbing the light the moment it touched, slurping it into the infinite darkness of its miasma. The irony of fighting with light was that things got so bright it was difficult to see exactly what was happening. Usually Sloan assumed when something disappeared beneath a deluge of her magic it meant the thing no longer existed, but as she fired for five, ten, fifteen seconds with no change in the archon whatsoever, either in demeanor or the gleeful murmur that burrowed into her earbuds, she began to doubt. After twenty seconds she shut off her magic before she taxed herself too heavily.
Not a single mark where she had hit.
"As I expected," said Winnipeg. "I recall saying exactly that: I doubt normal weapons will harm it."
"Yeah, whatever."
"It doesn't even care about us," said Delaney. She folded her arms and chewed her lip. "We're so insignificant compared to it, it doesn't even bother to react."
It baffled Sloan. Never had she encountered a wraith that simply ignored her. Basically her only strategy ever was to shoot something a lot. Sometimes things moved fast or had some weird power to make things tricky, but then she just had to find a creative way to shoot it. The shooting itself had never failed to suffice.
She glanced over the bulb in search of a weakpoint. Her eyes settled on the tiny black flower that sprouted from the topmost tip of the bulb. Aha! Perfect weakpoint. Winnipeg began to say something but Sloan cut her off by raising her gun again and sending one swift beam at the flower, incinerating it instantly.
The bulb made no change. The beads rolled off, the roots throbbed. After a few seconds, an identical flower sprouted from the tip and swayed back and forth in the nonexistent wind. Sloan tossed her hands and turned away.
"Thank you for that pointless interlude," said Winnipeg. "As I intended to say, we should next attempt to destroy the roots."
"All of them?" said Sloan.
"If it refuses to launch a counterattack, I do not see why not."
Delaney shrugged. "Might as well."
They stepped aside to give Winnipeg room as she pressed one foot against the quivering root next to them and touched her blade to the thinnest spot in the vicinity. She drew back her sword and swung it hard on the root, sinking in halfway with the first slice. With a vicious tug she pulled the sword out and swung again, severing the root. Noxious white pus oozed out.
Winnipeg dried her blade on the dirt and sheathed it. All three of them looked from the root to the bulb in anticipation.
Nothing happened.
The pus quickly hardened into a sealant and soldered the severed ends of the root back together. The root continued to throb happily.
Sloan jabbed fingers into the corners of her eyes. Winnipeg prodded the sealant with her sword. Delaney found a safe part of the root and sat down.
"Well," said Winnipeg. "Hm." She strained for something more profound with a series of false starts. Eventually she turned away from the root with a huff. "It's too cramped to think."
Without warning, she stepped from the mouth of the tunnel and plunged into the vast subterranean chamber of the archon. She skated the festooned root down to the lagoon below and evaded the thorns with almost imperceptible maneuvers of her feet. When she reached the bottom, she pushed off and landed atop a gnarled bramble nearby. A few wraiths ascended from the mire painted black by the liquid, but Winnipeg decapitated them with a single whirlwind strike of her sword, which she performed as though by rote as she she surveyed the surroundings from the new vantage.
Sloan considered joining her, since she had nothing better to do, but Delaney said, "What exactly did you see?"
"What."
"When you were strangling me. You mentioned your friend in Minneapolis. What was the exact nature of the hallucination, love? Had I simply been replaced by Clair Ibsen's visage or was it something else—like a dream, perhaps?" She leaned close to observe a thorn, her face inches from the tip.
"No, I saw memories. A lot of them, they spanned my whole life. When I got to one with Clair, I..."
"Snapped." Delaney's interest expanded. She climbed off the root and kneeled beside it to conduct a more thorough examination of the thorn. Her head turned every so often to compare it to the next thorn over. "But there's no guarantee the effects of the toxin have to manifest in violence. You simply encountered something you were naturally predisposed to hate."
Sloan disliked this. "Whatever it is, it's obviously no good, so don't touch it."
"I know, love." Delaney sighed and stood up. She brushed dirt from her dress. "I would never jeopardize our mission over something so silly. But I am curious, you know. Memory is something that appeals to me greatly. As it must appeal to most who harbor great regrets."
"You mean the girl you killed in Saskatoon."
Delaney flinched. "Claudia, yes. What I did back then, I did specifically because I believed nothing I did could matter. That nothing mattered. My actions were the offspring of the severe nihilism my inability to feel had created inside me. It wasn't that I hated Claudia. It wasn't that she made me angry, that if I saw her I would fly into a murderous rage and strangle her. She mildly annoyed me, her and her little dog. And since I, as a newfound Magical Girl, had suddenly fallen into a position where law and society no longer constrained me, mild annoyance meant cause for murder. Because nothing mattered, nothing governed the universe. Do you understand?"
"I understand that's totally psychotic."
At first, Delaney seemed about to protest, but her shoulders slumped. "Yes. Yes, it is. But that's the point! Because God or something exacted divine retribution upon my wrong in the form of that first archon, three years ago. Now I think, if I just went back to that moment where I had Claudia and her dog at my mercy, how easy it would be to simply not kill her. How easy! Because I had no rage, no emotion. No passion. No frenzy. I had mild annoyance. Just as I have mild annoyance at Winnipeg, just as I—no offense—occasionally have mild annoyance at you, love. And since I now know something does govern me, does create meaning in this universe, I now have no desire to act on that minor emotion of annoyance—No, emotion is the wrong word, let's see... How about discomfort? Anyway, where was I."
Sloan folded her arms. "Rambling."
"Right, right. So I think, how easy it would be to go back and simply not kill Claudia. The pointlessness is exactly what made it so sinful—I understand that now. But at the same time, killing her was what made me understand that. Without a powerful enough sin to turn the eye of God upon me, I could never understand that what I was doing was wrong. Which means... in a way... killing Claudia... was a good thing? A necessary thing? That made me a better person, in the end?"
She turned to Sloan as if expecting affirmation. Sloan had zoned out for most of it, the logic so tenuous she had difficulty following. "Delaney. God didn't punish you for killing Claudia. Archons just spawn in these boondocks from time to time. I'm glad you regret murdering some innocent girl. Great, awesome. Keep up the not murdering, Delaney! But this babble doesn't cut a case for your sanity."
Delaney's brow furrowed. Probably experiencing some of her favorite discomfort, mild annoyance. "Don't you even think, Sloan love? No. You feel. You see someone you hate and throttle them. You're exactly like I was! Except you can feel stronger emotions and thus need stronger emotions to act. If we slay the archon, do you truly intend to kill Clair Ibsen?"
"Yes."
The murmur of the archon peaked in pitch for a moment and returned to normal. Delaney sighed. She tapped her foot against the thick encasement of pus the root had bled when Winnipeg severed it. "Please, Sloan. Think about what you're doing, okay? If we win here, you'll be healthy, you'll be strong. Why squander that on an act of destruction?"
"She took my city. She betrayed me." Sloan tried not to grow angry. It didn't work. This was the bullshit that always happened. First with her twin sister, then with Clair. Where they could get away with all sorts of things, awful things, but because Sloan's sister had been blind and Clair had been pretty and sociable, nobody batted an eye. But when Sloan tried anything, anything at all, it was fire and brimstone, hail and plague.
She turned toward the mouth of the tunnel to signify the conversation was over. Because it was. Clair Ibsen had taken everything from Sloan short of her life. Retribution was justified, the way the killing of a girl Kyubey slated for termination was justified. As if Delaney had any right to speak! After what she did? Oh, but wait, now she was Miss Moral Exemplar, who THOUGHT about things, so obviously she KNEW the TRUTH, and who oh-so-regretted all the bad things she did except, except maybe they were a good thing after all? Fuck you, Delaney. Sloan would rather join Winnipeg in whatever foolery down below.
But Delaney flung out a hand and caught Sloan by the shoulder.
"Okay, okay sorry, I didn't mean to trounce your feelings, love." She tugged Sloan's shoulder to turn her around, but Sloan remained fixed at the cavern mouth. Winnipeg had vanished from view, probably on the other side of the archon. "You have every right to hate her. Every right! Kyubey told me all about what happened to you. She stabbed you in the back, beat you to a pulp, forced you from your own home. None of that is okay. But. Hatred begets hatred. It creates a cycle, an endless loop. A snake biting its own tail! If you kill Clair Ibsen, will you be happy?"
"No," said Sloan. "I'll be vindicated. That's enough."
"Archons are powerful beings," said Delaney. "Odds are high we won't all make it out of the upcoming battle alive. Not to be dour about it, of course! It's mere probability. Kyubey told me as much. I have a simple request of you. Would you like to hear it?"
"You're going to tell me anyway."
"If I die, and you survive, could you forget Clair Ibsen and go to Saskatchewan and take over my cities? They're not Minneapolis, but combined they're enough for a Magical Girl to live happily. You wouldn't have to dwell in misery, and you wouldn't have to destroy yourself for vengeance."
Delaney's hand curled into Sloan's shoulder, the fingers white and lithe. Sloan could feel the chill of her touch through the jacket. "Why the hell would I do that," she said.
"Because... because it's my dying wish! You have to honor a dying wish."
"You're not dying. You can heal your own severed head, how are you even supposed to die?"
The hand dug tighter. "Ugh! You're missing the point entirely—"
Winnipeg's telepathic voice interrupted her. You two. Get down here. I found something.
Sloan brushed off Delaney's hand. "I'm going down."
Delaney allowed her hand to fall and made no reply. Sloan surveyed the network of roots leading to the lagoon and plotted a path for herself before leaping from the ledge and following it. She hit a root at an angle, bounced off, and landed on the same bramble Winnipeg had used earlier.
A chill wafted from the black liquid, an aura of negative heat. Her body temperature plummeted instantaneously and wrapping her jacket tighter did nothing. Thick plumes of white air billowed from her mouth as she realized she had experienced no overwhelming coldness like this during her stint in Williston, the kind of coldness to which she was accustomed in Fargo. Except this coldness extended beyond what was accustomed; it seemed a coldness capable of debilitating a normal human. Her insides felt frost-coated, her ribs like icicles. Despite the pain, the cold imbued her with mental clarity and sharpness. Cold was her natural element, after all.
Sloan glanced over her shoulder, but Delaney remained in the mouth of the cavern. She lifted a toothpick-sized arm and waved.
The primordial expanse of fluid and foliage, all primitive shades of black and overgrowth green, made hunting for Winnipeg difficult. Most of the things that moved were either throbbing roots or spectral wraiths that drifted through the swampland. The fleshy vegetable mass of the archon heaved and shook. From below it took the appearance of a celestial body, its bottom perfectly rounded, like a moon drawn too close to the orbit of the planet and now threatening to crash. Roots flowed from its lower parts like a mass of cables, each pulsing with chunks of lifeblood, siphoning energy from the tunnels back to this bulb, this planet.
The bulb was not submerged in the lagoon. Although it perspired black globules in a constant torrent, the room did not seem to fill. A small space beneath the bulb was navigable, and deep beneath it Sloan saw Winnipeg, perched on a low root and poking her sword at something in the mire.
With a series of cautious jumps, Sloan approached Winnipeg, all the while trying to discern the thing floating in the swamp. It was about the size of a log, but the blackness of the liquid around it made it impossible to see anything more. Even when Sloan managed to climb onto Winnipeg's root, she still had trouble piecing together the amalgam of organic bits that composed the thing. Winnipeg was trying to reel it in with the tip of her katana, but it kept sliding and rotating in the muck.
"What is it," said Sloan.
"A girl," said Winnipeg.
The moment she said it the pieces came together in Sloan's mind and she could make out the muddied and mutilated corpse for what it was. Details such as age could only be guessed at, but it was a slight, shriveled body, swaddled in the remains of an oversized sweater perforated with ragged holes. About half the girl's face had been gnawed off, exposing a bare eyeball in a clotted socket, and the mouth hung open in a perpetual cry of horror.
Winnipeg finally fished the body and dragged it onto the root. The murmur of the archon had risen in intensity, surrounding them in a manic chuckle. The bulb bulged and throbbed above them.
"Think the rat sent someone before us?" said Winnipeg.
"Why just one girl," said Sloan.
"Perhaps there are more." Winnipeg scanned the surrounding area. No other bodies anywhere on the placid surface.
"Where would they even come from. We're the closest cities of any size. He'd've brought in girls from even farther away, or nomads."
"Perhaps the rat did not send her. Perhaps she came of her own volition, seeking cubes. And died for her troubles."
It seemed impossible a lone girl—a lone nomad no less, a girl too weak to hold territory even in this barren edge of the world—could have made it this far. Besides, Delaney had mentioned the archon hadn't been around long, which was why the miasma was only a partial distortion of the real world (although if what she had seen were only partial, Sloan wondered what true distortion meant). Unless the girl had been here concurrent to them...
A thought popped in her head and she scrutinized the corpse more closely, trying to make out a distinct appearance through the tar and eviscerated flesh. But soon she decided the girl was not Asian, and thus could not be Omaha. It didn't make sense why Omaha would rush down here and die anyway. Probably she stood a few feet away from Sloan, watching the corpse just as they did.
"This body has begun to decompose," said Winnipeg. "I am no coroner, but I would say several days of putrefaction."
"That would mean it's been here since the miasma started, or even before," said Sloan.
Winnipeg wiped her hands on the sides of her skirt. "Interesting. Did the rat inform you what causes an archon to manifest?"
"Uh, a lot of sin and despair. I kinda figured it had something to do with the oil drills."
"As did I," said Winnipeg. "Do you know why an archon appeared in Saskatoon three years ago?"
Unable to stomach anymore the sight of the decayed corpse, Sloan turned away. "I heard Delaney babble about divine retribution and God and shit."
"So that is how she frames it..." said Winnipeg. She clasped her hands under her chin. "I see. That is how she creates meaning in her life. One of the oldest forms of doing so in human history."
"Huh?"
"Religion," said Winnipeg. "Faith in something greater. I assume you are not a religious person, Fargo. Neither am I. Neither are most Puella Magi."
Sloan got the feeling she was getting roped into another uncomfortable philosophical conversation. While on the one hand she wanted to not do that, to in fact do the opposite of that and not speak to either Delaney or Winnipeg and just find some way to kill the damn archon and part ways, she couldn't muster the same vitriol toward Winnipeg. Both her and Delaney had opened to Sloan lately, and of the two Winnipeg felt more genuine, more honestly conflicted, most of all because Sloan wasn't even sure what exactly Winnipeg's conflict was, and maybe neither did she.
At the same time, the constant seething of the bulb above them made Sloan uneasy. "Let's get out of here," she suggested. The murmur had grown to a frenetic intensity, a pounding cackle she tried to blot out by clapping her hands to her ears. But the sound refused to abate even an iota, and she realized it was not a real sound, it was a sound in her mind, as though the archon were trying to speak to her with telepathy. She wondered if only she could hear it, or if Winnipeg and Delaney simply refused to acknowledge it.
Winnipeg remained by the side of the corpse, inspecting it. The brackish mire around them began to ripple and the roots writhed and twisted. The immense body of the archon emitted a vast rumble. Sloan backed away, but the roots she had used to get so far beneath the archon were no longer there. The root on which they stood started to sink.
"Let's go," said Sloan.
Winnipeg stood up and wiped her hands again. A disinterested, almost spacey look had crept over her features. "Oh. So it has finally decided to attack, has it?"
The root had almost completely submerged in the mire. The thick, elastic liquid sucked at Sloan's bootsoles. She searched for another root to leap to, but the black expanse of the lagoon was total. Almost every root had disappeared across the entire surface. The tar rose to her ankles. She tried to lift one leg, but she had to exert considerable force to break from the adhesive.
Around them burst thousands of gnarled, thorny roots, erupting from the lake in a indistinguishable mass of sickly green and splatters of tar. The roots surrounded them on all sides, coiling in close to entrap them. By the time Sloan had become cognizant of the situation, Winnipeg had already launched herself through the briars and disappeared in a flurry of sword strokes and windswept squalls.
Sloan attempted to jump but she had no footing and no momentum and the tar had crept halfway to her knees. So instead she fell flat on her face, hitting the tensile surface with an audible smack. Had she not grown enough over the course of this stupid expedition to stop fucking up like this? She struggled not to swallow any of the acrid fluid. The scent of decomposition swelled in her nostrils.
A hand grabbed her collar and yanked her up. "Come on!" said Omaha's voice. "You need to jump!"
A root swung at her like a spike-tipped flail. Sloan jumped, bounced atop it, and sprung into the fray, which had finally begun in earnest.