Rollerskater: Life
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This instalment contains some scenes of horror.
The illustration for this instalment incorporates elements of “Jumbo Water Tower, Colchester, Essex, UK”, originally photographed by Ritchie Hicks and released via Wikimedia Commons, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. As such, the illustration for this instalment is hereby distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Almost silently, the boat paddled across the water, towards the western shore.
“Be ready,” K-Os said. “He may have laid a trap.”
The other side of the river was, as the eastern side, marked by an artificial wall defence made of steel. The only way up was by climbing a slimy, wet ladder. As they got nearer to the ladder, dimly shining in the moonlight, Socks was gripped by a nauseated feeling in his stomach, and his bowels knotted.
“One after the other,” Dolly said. “K-Os first, then me, then Socks.”
“Didn’t you say that if I fall in, you won’t be able to save me?” Socks said, smiling in the dark.
“Quiet, smart-arse.”
K-Os moored the boat, then placed her hands against the ladder, and transformed into that milky, pink substance, flowing up the metal, and reconstituting herself on the shore.
“I forgot she could do that,” Dolly said, indignantly. “Lucky cow.”
She took her wedge heels off and tossed them up to the shore, then climbed, barefoot, up the ladder, slipping a couple of times and righting herself. After a couple of minutes, she reached the top.
“Alright, Socks,” she said. “Come up.”
Socks nodded, then grabbed on to the slimy metal, hoisting himself on to it. He was gripped by anxiety. The crap treads on his worn-out trainers slid against the wet metal, and he very nearly lost his balance. Slowly, however, and surely, he was able to pull himself up.
As he neared the top, he lost his footing and slipped. There was a flash, and he found himself back near the top of the ladder.
“Socks?” K-Os called. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah,” Socks said. “I almost fell.”
“Stay calm,” she replied.
After an agonisingly slow climb, Socks was finally able to pull himself back on to terra firma. Dolly was putting her shoes back on.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” Socks said.
They had made it across the river.
“Listen,” K-Os said.
There was nothing to hear.
“What?” Socks replied.
“It’s quiet,” she said. “And dark. It’s like there’s no one here.”
Dolly looked horrified.
“You don’t think—”
“I don’t know,” K-Os said. “It’s possible.”
“Shit,” Dolly said.
To their left – the southwest – was the water tower, tucked behind a row of houses.
They looked at each other.
They walked down deserted residential streets towards it. The spring air, though not wintry, was noticeably chill, and there was no sound but wind blowing through the trees. It was giving Socks the creeps. He recalled a night in December, walking through the student neighbourhood, and the shadows peeling themselves from the walls. He had almost died that night. A feeling of dread came over him.
Then they came to a side-street. Just beyond it, over the tops of houses, the water tower lay there, waiting for them.
“Wait,” Dolly said.
“What?” K-Os replied.
Dolly reached into her handbag and pulled out her camera, aimed with the viewfinder, and snapped a picture of the water tower with a small click.
“Well?” K-Os said, after a few moments.
Dolly blinked.
“He’s in there,” she said. “He’s…waiting.”
Socks swallowed. His mouth felt dry suddenly. K-Os put a hand on his shoulder. Déjà vu again.
“Come on,” K-Os said. “Don’t lose your nerve now.”
“Right,” Socks said.
They turned up the path and K-Os skated ahead. The water tower was behind a metal gate in an open field. K-Os slipped past the gate by liquefying herself, then unbolted it from the other side. The other two proceeded through the gate.
Silently, stealthily, like thieves in the night, they approached the tower. It was of Victorian construction, not at all like the modern water towers of concrete and steel that would be more familiar to a modern viewer. It was likely disused; mains water would now come from further afield.
There was a door in its side to allow access to its interior. Carefully, one-by-one, they approached it. K-Os pushed against the door and it creaked open. The door was unlocked.
She looked at the other two, and silently beckoned with her head.
Inside the tower was a narrow passageway leading to a set of stone steps, and in the centre of it, a large metal pipe going down to a well.
Socks could hear something trickling, like a tap that had been left on. He noticed that his hands were shaking. He had a terrible feeling about this place. Something was wrong.
K-Os skated over to the steps. Socks was, as always, impressed by how deftly she was able to make her way up steps while wearing the skates. Dolly followed after her, just as before. Socks almost took one last look behind him, but he steeled himself and filled himself with resolve. Remember Lot’s wife – never look back.
He followed after them. The stairwell was narrow and dank, and the walls were covered in moss, algae and lichens. Moonlight shone in through the windows on each side, creating an eerie bluish illumination as they made their way up the steep steps. The tower could not have been more than thirty feet high, but the steepness of the steps and the dankness of the stairway made it seem far longer than it really was.
At the top of the tower there was another wooden door, heavy and painted black. The sound of trickling had been replaced now, by something heavier.
Behind it, he awaited them.
All three looked at each other.
“On my count,” K-Os whispered, so quietly as to be nearly inaudible. She held up three fingers.
“Three…two…one…”
She pointed.
“Go!”
They crashed through the door and into a large room. The wet sounds were louder than ever, a colossal bubbling, gurgling sound.
Socks looked to his right to see what it was: An enormous pool of black, ink-like liquid, burbling away like a cauldron. As they stepped into the room, there was silence but for that sound. No evidence of anything or anyone human. Which, Socks thought, might be appropriate.
As they cautiously rounded the pool of umbric, he noticed that the top of the tower was surprisingly more spacious than expected. Socks thought his mind might be playing tricks on him, but perhaps this tower employed the same trickery Harri-Bec used in her house; the outside was a comforting lie, and the inside something far more – in this case, far more sinister.
As they made it to the far end of the room, they stopped.
Standing in the corner, with his hands behind his back, was a man.
He gazed out of the window serenely, as though he were birdwatching, as though he were admiring the view of the world below.
“Hello,” he said.
He had uttered but one word, but his voice caused every muscle in Socks’s body to tense up. There was something horribly off about his voice. It was as though it were being whispered, very intimately, directly into one’s ear, causing a frisson of prickling hairs on the back of his neck. It was a seductive, warm-sounding voice, yet paradoxically as cold and crystalline as ice. It was the voice, Socks thought, that the Devil would have, as he tempted the weak. And, he thought, that observation was not far off.
“I have been expecting you,” the man said. “I have been waiting so long for you to figure it out.”
He turned, smiling. He looked at K-Os and Socks.
“I have been watching you.”
He held up a finger as though it were a perch.
Through the skylight above, the full moon could be seen. And through an open window in the skylight, something flew in. A bat? Socks wondered.
As it came to rest on the man’s finger, he realised at once what it was.
A little wagtail.
The man clasped his hands over the wagtail and then spread them. The bird was gone – subsumed back into the being from which it had originated.
“Who are you?” Dolly asked.
The man stepped forwards, out of the shadows, and his face was bathed in the moonlight.
He had an elderly, grandfatherly look about him. He looked to be somewhere around his sixties, with whitish-grey hair. However, everything else about him was grey, as well – unnervingly so. From behind two semi-rimless spectacles, whose arms were matte black, two grey irises peered back, set into a face that was as grey as granite, and his skin, too, was grey, as were his impeccably-tailored clothes. Even his shoes were grey. It was as though he had been hewn out of rock.
“You already know who I am,” the man said. “I am the Grey Man…Cosimo Chesterton.”
Silence fell across the room.
Chesterton smiled, and stepped forwards.
“Don’t come any closer,” K-Os said. “I’m warning you.”
“K-Os,” Chesterton said, reaching out to her as though requesting an embrace. “It has been so long since I last saw you, my dear.”
Socks and Dolly looked at Chesterton, and then back to K-Os.
“You know him?” Dolly asked, incredulously.
“No,” K-Os said. “No, I don’t.”
“Oh, of course, you wouldn’t remember me,” Chesterton said, smiling. “After all, it has been ten thousand years.”
There was a long and pregnant pause.
“What?” K-Os said.
Chesterton feigned offense. “Don’t you remember me, my dear?”
“I can remember the last ice age,” K-Os replied. “But…I don’t remember you.”
Chesterton grinned. He looked downwards and pointed. What he was pointing at was not clear, until he spoke his next sentence.
“My dear,” he said. “Did you really think it was you put those stupid things on your feet?”
K-Os was beginning to lose her nerve.
“What…” she stammered, “…what are you talking about?”
“K-Os?” Socks said, quietly.
“Allow me to jog your memory,” Chesterton said. “Ten thousand years ago, around the dawn of modern humankind, you and I met. Well, I met you, but not in this form. I met you in a past life.”
“What?” K-Os said, backing away from him.
“One of my…unique abilities, I suppose you would say. I am willed to be. I can never not be. I am eternal.”
“I don’t remember you,” K-Os said. “Stop lying to me.”
“I’m not lying,” Chesterton said. “There would be no point in me lying to you. I merely state the facts.”
“What is going on?” Dolly asked.
Chesterton continued. “It is rather simple. K-Os has spun you a tale. She has told you that she is the universe’s saviour, that her continued existence allows for the safeguarding of reality. But I am here today to tell you that that is anything but the case. For you see, K-Os – the universe does not regard you as a saviour. It regards you as a terrorist. A free-wheeling anarchist, who defies the established laws of reality for her own selfish ends. And it brought me into existence to deal with you.”
“Y-you lie,” K-Os stammered. “I…I chose to wear the skates, I…I’m sure I did…I just…can’t remember when I put them on…”
“Of course you don’t,” Chesterton said, smiling. “You pulled one of your tricks and managed to erase me from existence – to the point that not even you would remember me.”
K-Os was, by this point, backed against the wall.
“But, my dear,” Chesterton said, “What you did not consider was that the universe willed me back into existence, even after all that. And it ensured that my alterations to your person had ontological inertia. Did you really think that those contraptions were something you wore by choice? No, my dear!”
He grinned.
“They are limiters.”
Socks looked at K-Os. He had never seen her look quite so terrified.
“Limiters?” K-Os exclaimed, through a forceful exhale.
“Imperfect ones, at that,” Chesterton replied. “They contain the majority of your chaotic energy, but they are prone to springing leaks…as I well know.”
“What a load of bullshit,” Dolly said.
Chesterton looked at her. “Why would I lie to you? I gain nothing from it. I gain more, in fact, by telling you the facts. And these are the facts, my dear.”
Dolly fell silent.
“And now,” Chesterton said. “I intend to kill K-Os, and finally end this foolish charade.”
Socks stepped forward and jabbed a finger at him. “You and what army?” he said. “We’ve killed or stopped every one of your people along the way. It’s just you now, you against three.”
Chesterton laughed.
“My boy,” he said, “Do you really think I would explain my plans to you if I thought you might have a chance of stopping me? Are you really so naïve as to believe I would simply stand here and let you kill me?”
“Whatever you’re planning,” Dolly said. “We’ll kill you before you put it in motion.”
Chesterton turned to her. “Oh, but my dear,” he said. “What you fail to understand is that the plan is already in motion.”
The pool began to bubble more and more furiously, rolling, as though it were an enormous kettle.
“You see,” Chesterton explained, “The natural umbric deposits found in the groundwater in this area are quite wonderful. If you drink umbric in small amounts, it finds its way into the blood. Makes people easier to coerce. And…”
He clicked his fingers and the skylight opened, and an aperture allowed moonlight from the full moon, directly overhead, to shine straight down on to the bubbling pool.
“The Moon, sister of Our Lady Umbric, born simultaneous with her. A natural attractor. See how she energises the liquid umbric in this vessel.”
“What have you done?” Dolly demanded.
“The people of this town made a noble sacrifice,” Chesterton said, laughing. “Their bodies and their blood given nobly in the cause of a great, universal justice. Do you want to know what I have done, young woman? Then I shall show you!”
He stood before the pool, as though he were a conductor, commanding an orchestra to begin playing a hateful symphony.
“You see,” he said. “All death is, really, is the cessation of a series of patterns. Merely the end of essential biological functions. What you might call a ‘soul’ or a ‘spirit’ is merely a pattern of electrochemical signals. Therefore, it follows that the resumption of those patterns is all it takes to bring someone back.”
“Wait,” Dolly said. “You’re not saying—”
“Silence, please,” Chesterton said. “The show is about to begin!”
He snapped his fingers.
The liquid umbric ceased to boil.
Then, it began to throb.
There was a horrible sound: blooorrrpp.
A hand – a human hand – burst from the liquid, and pulled itself out of the tank.
And K-Os screamed.
“Yes,” Chesterton roared. “YES!”
Another hand shot from the liquid, and another, and another, and another. Legs, too.
Its very existence was perverse – a sick parody of humanity, of the birthing process; an insult to life itself – a quivering black mass of flesh, whose arms and legs pulled it on to the stone floor, where it slithered, like a slug. It made a horrible slurping sound as it pulsated and gurgled, the arms and legs twitching as though attached to wires.
Socks could only stare at it in horror. Dolly covered her mouth in disgust, turning away from it. K-Os had buried her head in her hands.
Chesterton stepped over to the quivering creature, seemingly marvelling at his handiwork, and then placed a hand against it.
There was a sound, a terrible sound – a wet ripping sound, like a water balloon bursting in slow motion, a sort of boooosplakttt.
The quivering mass of flesh split into six slimy lumps, which heaved and buckled under their own weight. They kicked and rolled, and limbs protruded from their disgusting, unnatural trunks, twitching. Crackling and snapping noises sounded from within the dark flesh: The beings now being born from the slug-like mass were forming skeletons, vertebrae, structure.
The figures stood, and their bodies were coated in a soft black membrane, akin to a cocoon, or an amniotic sac. Each reached up with their hands and tore off the membrane, and the rebirth was completed.
Their eyes glowed red like embers on a slowly dying coal fire. In a flash of orange light, their clothes were restored on their bodies, and from their bald heads, hair grew like a time-lapse film of grass growing.
Socks could only stare on in horror.
There they stood: Reconstituted, as though they had never been dead – the umbric users that still wore fealty to Chesterton, even in the nowhere place of death. There stood Tanizaki, Chroma, the Man in Black, and the three members of The Light Havoc. All wielded their respective weapons. It was as though they had never been killed.
They smiled silently, marvelling and luxuriating in their own resurrection. They had done the impossible. They had ceased to exist, and returned from that dark place, as though they had merely been asleep for a while.
Chesterton clapped his hands. “Ah, my friends,” he said. “Welcome back. I did dearly miss you.”
“It is nice to be back, my Lord,” Chroma said. She looked over at Socks. “I am eager to have my vengeance.”
“Have patience,” Chesterton said. “You shall have your vengeance and more.”
“Thank you, my Lord.”
K-Os had buried her head in her hands. She seemed to have suffered something akin to a nervous break.
“No…no…”
Chesterton laughed and pointed. “Look at her. K-Os. The Nihilist, Bringer of Destruction, Lady Discord, Queen of Decay, The Omega. Reduced to a sobbing child. Is it not pitiful?”
The umbric users laughed uproariously.
Dolly flew into a rage.
“SHUT UP!” she shouted, loud enough to silence the laughter. “This is disgusting…this is perversion.”
Chesterton stopped laughing and looked sternly at her.
“Perversion?” he replied, coldly. “No, young lady. There is nothing perverse about the restoration of life…” He pointed to K-Os. “…Life you so cruelly took away under the auspices of that thing over there. This is what we stand for. Life eternal. And what she – and by proxy, you – stand for is quite the opposite. Death eternal. The ruination of all meaning, all cause and effect, the chaotic decay of all structured systems.”
“Entropy,” Derrick le Prince said, still marvelling at his reconstitution.
“Exactly, Derrick, my boy,” Chesterton said. “That is the very definition of perversion.”
“You boiled down corpses and transformed them by the power of the Moon into these monsters,” Dolly said, her voice tinged with disgust and rage. “That is vileness on an unprecedented scale.”
“Oh, there you go again,” Chesterton said. “Do you not understand what the guardians of chaos really stand for? The total and inevitable liquidation of all reality. The death of all meaning. There is no meaning without permanence.”
“And what is permanence without meaning?” Dolly replied, furiously. “Meaning is derived inherently from ephemerality. It is that our lives must eventually end that gives them meaning. What you stand for is the death of meaning, in favour of an eternal, unchanging, crystallised nowhere-land. You coward.”
“I’m sure that is what she told you,” Chesterton replied. “But has she not lived sixty million summers? Has she not seen all there is to see? Open your eyes. She wishes immortality only for herself, a selfish eternity. All I wish to do is bless the remainder with that privilege.”
“You know it isn’t that simple!” Dolly shouted. “K-Os is a fundamentally different being to normal human beings.”
Chesterton smiled. “You are indeed correct, my dear. But what you fail to understand is that the same is true of me. I come as an emissary of the universe itself – of God. I will recreate this universe, such that death may be abolished, and none shall ever hurt again.”
Dolly stood, shaking for a few moments. She turned to Socks, who was still standing in stunned silence, unable to speak.
“Socks,” she said, quietly. “Stand aside. I’m going to kill this motherfucker.”
“No, Dolly, wait!” Socks exclaimed, but to no avail.
Dolly charged the group around Chesterton, who got into formation in front of him, to defend him.
“You can’t win!” Chesterton shouted.
“Then face me, you coward!”
“Dolly!” Socks shouted.
Tanizaki charged forwards. He roared like a beast, and with a clean swipe of his right hand, backhanded Dolly across the face, sending her careening across the room. She crashed into a stone wall and was knocked unconscious. Socks realised – the revival process had not just brought them back, it had made them stronger, by ten or twenty-fold.
“DOLLY!” Socks cried, turning to Tanizaki. “You bastard!”
The enormous man snorted like a bull, wiping his nose on the back of his hand.
“That was almost too easy,” he said, grinning. “But I could go for dessert.”
Socks felt his face grow hot with anger.
“Bastard,” he growled. “What has Chesterton promised you? Money? Power?”
Tanizaki laughed. “Mere children’s toys. Who needs money and power when they can attain godhood?”
“So is that it?” Socks said. “You really buy that bullshit about eternal life?”
“You really buy the rollerskater’s bullshit about saving reality? You are as blind as you are stupid, boy.”
Socks laughed. “Just like old times, eh, Tanizaki? Sorry you missed Christmas.”
“Shit happens,” Tanizaki replied. “But don’t worry, boy. I’ll pay you back in due course.”
Socks ran towards Tanizaki, roaring in defiance, and drawing his hand back into a fist.
With terrifyingly deft movement, Tanizaki caught him by the throat and lifted him off his feet, delivering a punch to his face. Socks felt something in his nose crack, and then warmth dripping over his lips.
“You just don’t know when to leave well enough alone, do you?” he said.
Socks choked. Tanizaki was strangling the life out of him.
“My Lord, what do you want me to do with him?”
Chesterton laughed. “Is it not obvious, sir? Kill him.”
Tanizaki smiled. “You poor little fucker,” he said. “In your hour of need, your girlfriend can’t even muster the strength to save you. I almost feel sorry for you.”
The grip tightened around Socks’s neck, and his vision began to disappear into a grey tunnel. He saw every moment that had led him to this juncture, every stupid, terrible decision that had led him to invite K-Os to that party, to his initial confrontation with Tanizaki. And a voice, tiny, yet clear, called from the darkness, and it said: “Survive.”
“Hey,” Socks said. “She’s not my girlfriend.”
“Watch out!” Chroma shouted.
With his last strength, Socks raised his left hand and punched Tanizaki in the side of the head.
On impact, Tanizaki’s head seemed to crack as though it were made of crystal, and he went reeling, collapsing on to his back.
Chesterton looked on in shock.
Tanizaki staggered to his feet, and made a gesture to manifest his umbric blade in his hand. He stumbled, hunched over, punch-drunk.
“I think you’re forgetting something,” Socks said, looking at Chesterton. “Sure, you can bring people back from the dead, but you had to rely on umbric to do it. Their bodies are made out of umbric, instead of carbon. And my left hand can break umbric. Which means…”
He turned back to Tanizaki.
“I can break you.”
“You little shit,” Tanizaki replied, rushing him with the blade.
Just as he was about to strike a killing blow, there was a flash, and he was running at nothing.
“What—”
Socks appeared next to him.
“Goodnight,” he said.
For roughly two milliseconds, Tanizaki had a moment of horrified epiphany, as it became apparent just how dead he was, followed by Socks uppercutting him. His head instantly shattered as though it were made of sugar glass, and he collapsed.
Socks turned.
“Who’s next?”
Chesterton smiled, and slowly clapped.
“Oh, bravo, bravo,” he said. “Yes, my boy, we are quite aware of your ability to break umbric. What you have failed to take into account, however, is that I have planned for that contingency.”
He snapped his fingers, and the others quickly grabbed the headless body.
They took it and threw it back into the pool of umbric, which swallowed it with a disgusting squorch.
A few moments passed, and then another cocooned man-thing was birthed from the unholy liquid, pulling away the black membrane once more to reveal Tanizaki, fully restored.
“You can’t win,” the Grey Man repeated. He turned to the others. “Enough of these childish games. Kill them.”
There came a voice, from the other side of the room.
“No.”
Now standing at her full height, K-Os skated forwards, her fists clenched.
Chesterton laughed, mockingly. “Ah, I see you have stopped snivelling in the corner.”
“Shut up,” K-Os said. “I grow sick of you, and your pompous attitude.”
“Hey!” shouted Sven Gunnarson. “You can’t talk to him that way!”
“I will talk to him however I damn well please, insect.”
“I’ll shut her up for you, boss,” Danny St. James said, leaving the group to face her.
“Daniel, wait,” Chesterton said.
He approached her as a bear approaches a deer, stalking her, his enormous, paw-like hands poised to break her in two.
“Get out of my way,” K-Os said.
She regarded him with eyes that made it clear that she saw him as little more than a particularly annoying wasp or mosquito.
“Make me,” Danny replied.
K-Os grabbed him by the arm, and with seemingly effortless strength, coiled her arm around him and tossed him over her shoulder, where he slammed into a brick wall behind her. The group yelped in shock. Chesterton stood and stared at her with his cold, grey eyes.
“I am done playing games,” she said. “I will admit, this little trick of yours caused me to lose my cool for a moment there.”
Chesterton said nothing.
“For a moment, I even thought that I feared you. And, I suppose, any other person would fear you. But I am not any other person, Chesterton. Let me tell you who I am.
“I am the waves that turn cliffs to sand. I am the mouths of volcanoes, sundering the earth and filling the sky with ash. I am the hearts of stars. I am time. I am space. I am all that has been, all that is, and all that ever will be. I am the one who makes the clock tick by. I am the first. I am the last. I am the one-in-a-trillion-trillion chance that, on some tiny world, suspended in some endless space, life may form. I am the morning light that banishes your feeble Moon. I am everything, and you…”
She pointed at him.
“..are nothing.”
Chesterton looked down and smiled.
“You are one woman down, you are seven-against-two, and you think that a simple soliloquy is all it will take to break my mental fortitude? My dear – I have been planning to destroy you since before the founding of Rome. Do you seriously think that rubbish will work on me? You are frightfully, frightfully mistaken! And I take great pleasure in ordering my loyal followers to kill you—”
TWANGGGGGG.
The upper left side of Chesterton’s head suddenly exploded in a shower of black glass, as a thin needle of rainbow-coloured light, like the refractions on the surface of a compact disc, pierced his head.
The umbric users cried out in shock.
He staggered backwards for a few moments, clutching his broken face. A hole had been punched straight through his head, destroying his left eye, revealing what lay beneath his skin: a crystalline network of umbric.
The Grey Man was not merely an umbric user; he was living, conscious umbric.
Fragments of crystal tinkled out of his ruined head.
“Wh…” he stammered. “…WHAT?!”
There came a sound from outside:
Remmm rem rem rem rem remmmmmm remmmmmmmmm—
A motorbike crashed through the brick wall, throwing bricks and mortar across the stone floor.
Socks watched in awe as it sailed into the chamber, ridden by a young woman in padded trousers, beige leather jacket, and black helmet, and standing on the back of it was none other than Ella Foe, clutching her bass guitar in her hands, playing her bass:
Dung-da-dung-dung-da-dung-dung-dunnng, dung-da-dung-dung-da-dung-dung-dunnng.
“It’s…” Sven said, trying not to sound terrified.
“Her,” Derrick said, furiously.
The bike screeched to a halt and Chelsea Rose removed her helmet and shook out her hair.
“Nice of you to join us,” K-Os said.
“Sorry we’re late,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get a magic bike to balance on water.”
“Who the hell is that?” Chroma demanded, pointing at Ella Foe. “I’ve never seen her before!”
Ella Foe dismounted the bike, muting the strings temporarily.
“My name is Daisy,” she said. “But I am also known as Ella Foe.”
Chesterton backed away, trying to hold his head together. He looked at her with a mix of terror and rage.
She continued:
“And I’m here for my revenge.”
Another time, another place…
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except the illustration, which is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
ARC ONE: UMBRIC SPRING
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