up at it, a small patch of light in its darkness, the robe flapping mere feet from her face.
“I... my calculations...”
“Were correct, of course. Little monster, is that what you feared? That you were merely wrong? Is that all you fear in this life? They were correct. But you did not go far enough.”
Something else in her face now. Something that sent ice through my veins. I knew that look. “Johnny,” I whispered. “Don’t listen to it. Let’s go. Run. Back to the...”
“Finish,” it whispered, its voice thick, gloating. “Finish it now. You stopped at—what? Where it fit your human ego? Where you thought you could save the world, where you thought They will call me now a god. Now go on. Let them run. We do not; Our minds do not work that way. We know it in the other way of knowing. But you, you will not believe me. Finish it in your head.”
It chuckled, rising to a howl as Johnny stared at it, through it, the golden glow rising above her head and quickly ripped away in the strengthening wind, as hot as the breath of a bonfire.
“You see?” Drozanoth hissed. “You do, I see it, I even smell it from you.”
“Johnny!” I grabbed her t-shirt and pulled, but she seemed fixed to the ground, not even noticing me as the seam along her shoulder ripped, exposing skin, blood, the ancient scar.
“You opened not one door or a hundred or a thousand but a number you cannot even conceive. And you opened them into one of the few places—and there are so few now! —where the chanting that lulls my masters to sleep can be heard with human ears.”
The noise, I thought. Oh God. We heard it. We both heard it. You lie, I wanted to shout, you lie...
“Yes,” Johnny said dreamily, still staring blankly up at it, her face suffused with internal light. She looked like she had the night she’d discovered the reactor. When I had seen her in her silver dress. “Yes. Microportals. Of course. Opened briefly and randomly by the flipping of the electrons. I thought it was into one dimension, the closest. But it wasn’t. It was all, all of them. And it let everything through. The reactor wasn’t a call but a—”
“—an invitation. Not a—”
“—gate, but a road.”
“Not a road. You know that, my child.”
“A ship to fly,” she said softly. “Between places you often travelled, and had become overgrown. Wings, and—”
“—the power to soar between the places. Carry us, O—”
“Lesser Angels. Carry us. Carry us down the meeting ways.”
I looked between them with revulsion, listening to them finish each other’s sentences as if they were singing a canon. Old friends. I let go of Johnny’s t-shirt and wiped my hand on my jeans, only half-aware I was doing it.
“You didn’t save the world,” it finally said, trailing closer; I backed away instinctively lest the dripping liquid touch my skin. “My unwilling apprentice, you carved it and served it to Us on a plate. What will they say when they know? And after you have spent so long keeping your secrets. What will become of you? Ripped to pieces by a baying mob? Well, you need not worry about that, little godlet. No one will ever know. You will not leave this place. Nothing of you that can be torn apart will leave this place. And We will take you for Our own, and you will re-make your toy, and We will use it to go between the darkness and the light as We wish. Forever. Effortless as the flight of a star through the void.”
“No,” she said, and shook her head sharply, the scarf sliding free and landing next to her. Freed, her hair crackled at the tips with black and violet light. “It doesn’t matter how it happened. It won’t matter. You’ll be gone. We are sending you away.”
The sand below us trembled again, more definitively this time. I fell to my knees, got up. The sharp bone face swivelled to me, casting inexplicable shadows on the sand, flickering at the edges, all wrong. I resisted a powerful urge to jump into the hole I’d just dug. It doesn’t matter how it happened, she had said. Of course it did. She said it only because it was her fault. Hers. Her doing.
“This world is as much Ours as he is yours,” it said, drifting even closer, till I could hear the wind through the shredded edges of its wings.