man i need to stop rush-posting minutes before midnight

~

The door drummed shut behind her. 'Huh,' said Shem.

Parchment rustled as Morne marched forward, her eyes narrowed on the far end of the courtyard. 'What happened here?' she murmured, hearing Shem step up beside her.

'It's no precise business,' he said, rapping on a bookshelf. 'I've heard about this. A mind shunts things between worlds, they come out changed by it. Shapes and details bleed together. This is all from the archives in the eastern wing.' He paused. 'She did well to keep us in one piece.'

What Morne thought was: It killed her to bring us here and she still couldn't get it right.

She slowed. The ground gave way ahead, a ragged blackness that split the courtyard in two. The remains of a solitary statue teetered on the fault line. Its arm reached down from a shoulder that was not there; its face hung above it, a stone mask suspended in nothing. Morne met its downturned gaze.

Creeping vines of parchment and ink overwhelmed the statue's base, but she knew what word would be carved there.

MORNE.

She stepped past it to the chasm's edge. The door to the nave lay broken open on the far side, a ruin of blackened wood. 'We'll need another way around,' she said.

Something scuffed on stone. Morne snapped her gaze upward. A balcony overlooked the grounds, nestled behind rows of stately pillars and choked with shadow. In the corner of her eye a figure shifted. Feet pattered over marble.

She backed up, preparing to move. By chance her eyes slipped over the statue's disembodied face, and for an instant its eyes seemed to turn. At the edge of the chasm, the ground creaked as it iced over.

'Run,' she hissed, and the word condensed in the chilling air.

Parchment tore as they crashed across the grounds. She scanned the courtyard, wide-eyed. Hendel had reached the balcony somehow. Morne saw the stairs the same moment Shem did, spiralling up against the far wall, and that was when she heard the whine of hinges. She looked back. The priest let the door to the antechamber lurch shut and stared first at them, then at something behind them. Morne didn't look back, but Shem did.

In the deepness behind the statue the abyss, stirring, rose. Lesser emptinesses tore free from that yawning nothing, fissures in the air that shivered and warped like clay shaped by uncertain hands as they seethed out across the grounds. Shem thought he saw stars inside them.

Morne grabbed his shoulder. Stumbling he tore his eyes away.

'Don't look,' she said. 'They feed on it.'

They scrambled up the staircase. The priest followed, and when they burst all three of them onto the balcony he leaned against a pillar with his back a wall shrugged up against their eyes. He had seen shapes in that abyssal multitude, symbols and figures and faces familiar one instant but meaningless the next. Some he was certain he knew. Sketches glimpsed in stale tomes: the cobwebbed idols of forgotten gods, writhing and hungry and spreading ancient frozen air over the cathedral floor.

Back pressed against the wall, Shem watched the staircase panting. He swallowed. 'Feed on what?' he said.

Morne took his chin in her hand and faced him toward her. 'Don't look.' He gripped her wrist but didn't take her hand away.

'Belief,' she said.

An uncertainty flickered across his face. She didn't like that, and seeing her frown he pulled away. 'It's nothing.'

'What did you think happens to a god when men forget them?'

Across from them the priest stirred. He spoke to the floor, kneading his brow. 'What makes you think they need us?'

Morne didn't even look his way.

'No,' said Shem. 'It's not that.'

'What, then?'

He studied her face. Shem kept thinking of the jumbled courtyard, the grass made of parchment still lined with old ink. Morne began to realise that what she'd mistaken for doubt on his face looked more like concern.

'Morne,' he said. 'What colour were your sister's eyes?'