The Wyrms of &alon

The kids got put into one of the priests’ rooms. Pel had been insisting the Innocents house her and her children in an unused room, and fortunately enough, her status as Margaret’s daughter was enough to ensure her request would be granted. Unfortunately, that same status meant that when the demon that had taken over Margaret’s body invited Pel to a late lunch, Pel had no choice but to join her.

Apparently, Rupert wasn’t available. Pel didn’t know how to feel about that. She had never liked Archluminer Umberridge; he was to sneeze what lard was to bad cholesterol. And yet, for once, Pel found herself wishing for his company.

At least then, she’d be able to leave.

Pel had joined her mother for lunch in the Great Nave as soon as she’d gotten Jules and Rayph situated. Here, “situated” meant handing them consoles so that they could explore what remained of their dead world’s internet while begging, begging them not to go anywhere while she was gone, or do anything, or—

—Pel’s fingers twinned, an ache from how tightly she’d clamped them around the edge of her console.

Lunch was being held on the cloistered walkway on the second floor above the nave, opposite from where Pel had stood with Jules and Rayph an hour before. It was a table for two, only without the table, unless you counted the sweeping girth of Margaret’s coiled lower body.

And Pel really, really didn’t want to count that. She wished she was drunk out of her mind, or lost in the depths of a drug-addled bender. But she wasn’t.

Sometimes, sobriety wasn’t always what it was cracked up to be.

Pel didn’t know what horrified her more: her mother, the two and one-third bodies lying beside her mother, or the charnel house horrors playing out in the Nave, below.

After leaving the room, it had taken all of Pel’s mortal strength to keep from turning around and running away with her heart screaming in her throat as the Grand Nave had come into view from where she’d stepped out onto the Melted Palace’s second floor. When approaching her mother, Pel had taken pains not to rush, nor to go too slowly, nor to scowl or shudder, nor to avert her eyes, nor hunch over too much nor lean back too far, nor breathe like a frightened bird, nor any and all of the anythings and nothings that the Norm could have taken as a sign that something was amiss.

Stay calm, Pel told herself. Stay balanced.

Pel kept her thoughts on the Moon Door far behind her and the Sun Door beneath it, and the Sword Chamber beyond. Those thoughts were a pendant for her soul; they kept her weighted toward the light, and she needed that, now, more than ever.

Pel prayed.

Though I walk beneath the eyes of Night, I fear no evil.

The thing in Margaret’s skin was blossoming forth, fed by the human remains piled around her.

The Angel guides my hand, and the Queen’s Law is my road.

Margaret had more than doubled in length, seeming more like a proper Norm now, her tail a plump, slug-curl coiled beneath her upper body. Her elongated neck gave her a monitor lizard’s gullet, with a wattle of distended human skin. The skin sloshing about with her meal, still bulging from within her throat, beyond the black ooze smeared over her protruding lips. The hanging skin’s pallor couldn’t have contrasted more with the dark Norm scales spreading across her form.

The Beast walks beside me, chasing away shadow and bone.

As Pel intoned the prayer in her mind, more than anything—even more than an end to the Green Death… she wanted to believe in those words. The world needed the Angel’s holy power now, more than ever, and yet, He seemed content to watch in silence.

“Hello, Pel, dear,” Margaret said.

The Norm reached down with her monstrous arms, picked up the remains of a half-eaten corpse, and stuck the disembodied legs down her throat, biting down on them like they were oversized breadsticks. The way the bones crunched as Margaret bit down on them made Pel squirm.

“Sit, Pel,” she said, “sit.” She patted the floor with a claws hand, splaying her three fingers over the marble floor, making a wrinkle in the antique carpet laid out in the middle of the vaulted corridor.

Pel grabbed the balustrade alongside the walkway as she slowly lowered herself to the floor and sat down, cross-legged, never taking her eyes off her mother’s body. She could see biomass crawling across her mother’s body. Margaret’s underbelly brushed against the rug and the marble as it grew a little bit longer.

“Come to mama,” Margaret said, patting the flank of her lower coil.

Pel stared for a while, but then complied. Scooting across the floor, she pushed herself up against her mother’s body, leaning against the warm, firm flesh, trying to get herself as close to the wall as she could manage. The marble was ice cold and its touch made her shiver and ache, but she couldn’t bear moving away from it and getting closer to the Norm.

Margaret had piled her meals beside her, over the rug. Pel wanted to stay as far away from that corrupted flesh as possible.

She hoped her mask would hold up.

Where was the Angel? Where was her guide through this darkness? Had the Lass been here with the Sword in hand, she’d have wiped this evil clean off the face of the earth.

Margaret pointed down at the Nave with a gore-slicked talon. “Look,” she said, “isn’t it beautiful?”

There were many words for what was happening in the Nave. “Beautiful” wasn’t one of them.

The Last Church was making good on Verune’s proclamations. There were already half a dozen new Norms festering down below, drawn to the Melted Palace by Verune’s words.

Pell dreaded to think of how many would come over just the next few days—assuming she lived long enough to witness it.

The cult’s system was diabolically simple. It was the same set-up as what Pel had seen in her mother’s dive bar, only scaled up. The strongest Norms, furthest along in their changes, went out into the city streets to hunt for human bodies. The still-living ones and those changing into monsters were taken as converts. The rest were human carrion—the payments of sin—to be gathered in piles in the Great Nave, for the Church’s Norms to feast, and the regular deliveries ensured the demons never wanted for sustenance.

An abattoir wouldn’t have been half as gruesome as the piles of dead human beings amassed in the Nave. The divine image in which mankind had been made was scarcely recognizable in the fungus-ravaged flesh. Some of the misbegotten undead still moved, active zombies that the Norms dismembered as they consumed their rotten dignity, just to keep the food from crawling away.

When she’d first seen it, Pel had immediately pulled Rayph and Jules away from the horrid sight. She didn’t want her children to have those kinds of nightmares in their minds. It fell to her to suffer that in their stead.

The Last Church’s Norms changed as they ate. In a way, it was almost fitting: they acted like monsters, feasting on the dead as they did, only to become those monsters themselves, changing as they ate.

The recognizable figures of men, women, and children snapped and elongated as the demons within reshaped their bodies. They writhed and moaned as they sucked and chewed. Cracking teeth crunched on fungus and bone; tails wriggling out beneath the Melted Palace’s majestic ceiling.

The demons were shedding their human shells. They shed them off, and raised their slender heads to greet the Sun.

Margaret watched it all with joy and warmth on her mutilated face. Pel couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen those emotions in her mother. As a child, she’d always hoped to see them one day, but, now that she had, she wished she could reach back in time and tear those hopes to pieces.

All her life, Pel had believed in miracles. She’d lived by them and prayed by them, wishing for them in her every waking moment. And who wouldn’t? Miracles were the promises made by the architecture of the soul of the world, the guarantee that she mattered, and that those she loved mattered, and that there would be justice. After all, miracles were how the Angel set things right. But now… they seemed so far away. Once, her hopes had been confident and majestic. This was how the world worked, and here was my role to play.

But where was that now?

She couldn’t let the Norm see her doubt. She couldn’t.

Pel whimpered slightly. She nearly choked on the sound.

Margaret’s scales brushed on the carpet as she turned to face her. “Did you say something, dear?”

“No, just… just speaking to myself.”

“Don’t do that, Pel. It makes you sound like a schizo.”

Beneath her mask, Pel licked her lips. Her tongue was like gummy sand. She squeezed her console a little tighter, watching her own mummified horror glisten in the wet of Margaret’s tumescent eyes.

Pel knew the Norms and their human worshippers saw them as divine beasts, but all she saw were those hideous forms of theirs. In this sea of death, they were parodies of life, as if nature itself was mocking her.

Even so, Pel couldn’t help but wonder…

What if they were right?

Oh, God…

What if they could see the divine beasts the Norms claimed to be?

No, that couldn’t be true. Every word of all that Pel knew and believed in told her it couldn’t be true. They were God’s words, not man’s.

But still, that doubt lingered. That nagging, grating doubt.

Pel didn’t know what to do. She’d always lived her life with her faith at her side. It was her constant companion, her guardian, her strength. But no, that support was gone.

Was my belief not strong enough? she wondered.

Or had she only believed because of the strength it had offered her?

But then… she asked herself, what do I do?

Pel had barely noticed her mother beginning to feed on the second corpse, but then Margaret reached out and offered Pel the body, and Pel had to press her fingernails onto her dress and dig them into her thighs to keep herself from knocking the chair back and stumbling over the balustrade.

“You want a bite?” Margaret asked.

Margaret’s meal was an erstwhile priest, still clad in the Mallard Robes. Unlike the corpses from the dive bar—all of which had been twisted and deformed by the fungus until they barely seemed human anymore—this man was still fully intact. His prickle-bearded face was flushed with death’s calm pallor.

And he smelled of death.

It was the throat-squeezing scent of burnt chalk and dead dreams, slathered in caustic sweetness that nearly set Pel’s nasal passages on fire.

Margaret held him with a single hand, her claws wrapped around his torso. The priest’s robes shifted around as she flopped him about, revealing rivers of necrosis. Pus bobbed like sea foam on the black rot in his spore-dusted ulcers.

Oh God oh God oh God.

Pel was already nauseous, which made it a miracle she didn’t puke her guts out right then and there.

She faked a cough to cover up the sound of a disgusted wretch jostling around in her throat.

“N-No… no thank you.”

Margaret shrugged. “Eh, your loss.”

The Norm ripped off one of the priest’s arms with a gentle tug, and then tossed the severed limb up. With a flick of her lengthened neck, Margaret darted her head upward with her jaws opened wide and snapped the arm up out of the air, like a crocodile at a zoo.

Pel swallowed hard. “Who was he?”

“I think he was Lassedite Bishop’s butler, or something? Whatever he was, he was probably another faggot, just like faggot Bishop, so who cares?” Margaret waved one of her claws dismissively.

“When did he die?” Pel asked.

Watching Margaret eat this man of faith, Pel couldn’t help but feel that the demon was gobbling up her own faith, leaving Pel hollow and forlorn.

Had the Angel abandoned the priest, too?

“Dunno. He was found dead in his apartment.” Margaret’s eyes widened in spiteful glee. “The fucker hung himself. I bet it wasn’t even the first time he’d tried.” Margaret spat on the corpse. “Sicko.”

Wisps of smoke rose up from where the Norm’s spores had landed on the dead priest’s robe.

“Wait… what?” Pel asked. She hoped her mask would hide her alarm.

Had he killed himself because he knew was turning into a zombie?

It was possible, but it didn’t match what Pel had seen. Everyone who had turned did so in almost the blink of an eye, usually with only enough time to cry out for help before their souls were stolen away.

So he couldn’t have known. But that meant…

“Why are you…” Pel hesitated. She shook her head in dismay before redoubling her efforts, forcing herself to complete her thought. “Why are you eating that man?” she asked. “He’s not a zombie.”