Ethel knew something was up when Avery didn't respond to her texts after a few days, but the sudden rupturing of the Reikai spelled something much, much worse. He'd had every opportunity to step outside the Veil and call or text back, but it'd been days of quiet and calm. That always meant something bad was getting ready to rear its ugly head. Ethel just hadn't expected something this bad.
When the rupture came it came with news of government instability, rights being revoked, nuclear war threats, mass shootings, and dozens of simultaneous murders and suicides. She had seen it in her dreams, a great scorpion stinging the sacred egg of the world to poison it. Her dreams were never that vivid, and never that visceral with detail. She had seen the tail sink through the frail shell into the yolk, rotting and spoiling the unborn from the inside out. It was a horrible vision, something unstoppable. She was in her car as soon as she could be, cursing the sputtering motor.
As she kicked off, she could feel the panic of the spirits lingering around her. From the smallest shadows to the beautiful specters she communed with. Their passion, their fear, their excitement. Like fish on the precipice of being devoured, hearts aflame with instinct. Only the spirits wanted this. Some unspoken desire to commit to something greater than the sum of all of them. Ethel had no idea what, it was something she'd never witnessed before. All the more reason to be afraid of the unknown.
Her journey was unsafe, and she already knew what to expect from the hushed whispers of the flickering shadows. Ethel hoped, she prayed to any god that would listen, that it wasn't true.
The axle of her car was nearly broken from running over train tracks— she didn't dare wait at the station any longer than she had to. Even through the tense drive, her heart never waivered.
She had been a lost child, as all of the others had been. Back then she went by a different name and a different face, a time where she would have given anything to cast off her old skin. And she did. All to escape a world that hated the children it'd abandoned so willingly. Children who, when they clawed and grasped for footholds, the world stomped its foot on their fingers. Ethel put her foot to the pedal with hopelessness closing in, and she already knew that things had been put into motion she had no hope of controlling.
Ethel stood at the archway, the lack of snide remarks or colorful lights to blockade her. She stood at the edge of the asphalt Hell that had once been a forest, and the only place she knew true safety. A home she'd given up because maybe, just maybe, she could extend a hand and help others like her. Guide them here, give them a bed to sleep in and people who truly cared where nobody else would. It was all she could do to not feel like a complete waste of space.
Her feet shuddered as she walked across the reduced pavement and the endless expanse of black. The women and children of the village, strung up as corpses impaled through black pillars of stone and salt. Twisted and rearranged into ancient symbols, limbs bent wrong from torture and faces unrecognizable. Among them stood one figure so vile, Ethel immediately accepted an oncoming death.
In the midst of the macabre display, it stood. An unholy monolith to depravity and debasement. It towered over the remains of the village homes and tents, all reduced to ashen waste below it. At the bottom, grand, spiked doorways of steel containing countless bodies packed within pulsing entrails, leading up to an iron cage dotted with live ravens and wreathed with black flames— a decrepit, beating heart clustered among them and hanging from the top by a strand of barbed wire. Ethel gasped, taking in the immense, irredeemable shape as it continued up to a set of dozens of melded shoulders, all with their arms bound, cut, tied, scraped away, or flayed too severely for the hands to remain. Above it all, a bouquet of animal skulls, each taken from a different beast. A feline, a crow, a goat, a serpent, an owl, and a bat— a constant spark of malevolent light present in the sockets of each as they stared down at Ethel in a slow, unending rotation. Atop the formation of skulls was a disjointed crown of twisting, unpredictable ram's horns, curling and impaling the skinned, conjoined pelts of infants and children, whose eyes leaked molten gold onto the ground with sizzling tears.
She felt her legs give way as she knelt in front of the abominable effigy, its presence alone driving horrid nails of truth to her morals and beliefs. Such a thing was ancient, unheard of, but it most assuredly had to exist. Like a skilled chef, it peeled away the layers of her character one by one, discarding each shed skin as if to find the sweet core of any remaining innocence she possessed. Ethel could feel it single handedly revealing every act of human evil to her. Behind closed doors, in the dark, with closed palms and traded secrets. She could see every act of evil, of filth. All committed for power, or lust, ignorance, and delusion. The lowest of man, shown to her by force. Children and animals in cages, the dried corpses of the starved dotting cities to be hidden away from the public eye.
Countless hands materialized from the darkness within the black desert, each branded, devoid of fingers, and wrenched by nails and stakes. No consent was given, Ethel had no say here. The spirit was stripping her to the last thought and ravaging every cemented idea that the world was anything but cruel and mismade.
Yet with every hand that touched her, the feeling was exhilarating. All of the cruelty and suffering she witnessed was redeemed by the feeling of blackened joy it brought her, some endless satisfaction found only by locking eyes with the void and not just refusing to blind, but to taunt it for worse. All in one moment, the world became some sick joke she could merely bystand with. In the moment the hands left her, she felt only shame for feeling as she had, an amoral, empathy-devoid husk.
She understood the spirit's existence in that moment. Despite all of its power, all the sway it might have had, it was merely a cuckold of the world's dark happenings. It was less than a bystander, it was a detached observer of all things. It would continue to watch until the very end, where perhaps it would finally feel shame when everything came to a close.
Ethel had seen such things before, from the people she had grown up with. It was familiar but no less disheartening to be reminded that such consciousnesses existed. She regained her bearings and stood, immediately uttering a verse for mental fortitude and assistance against the Spirit of Sins. Her careful eyes darted around cautiously, finally noticing that none of the bodies splayed and twisted upon the black pyres were familiar; this was not the village she had called a half-home, but rather a domain that had replaced it in its weakened state. Still, why was such a powerful spirit here? It was old and powerful enough to be a New Witch God if it pleased, but perhaps the nature it had been born with withstood its temptations.
"Why are you here?" Ethel grunted, her tone coming off as more of an annoyed parent than a fearful mortal.
The spirit responded the only way such an ancient creature could-- or rather, would. From the first stone thrown to the last button pushed. Images filled Ethel's mind, varnished with the raw feeling surrounding them. Her preparedness aided her here, with the emotions and sensations dulled as if pushed to her through a screen door. She could see the chaos of the mortal world within the Veil, an unwanted opening of eyes. Repressed angers made into real actions, deep-set fears turned into missions against invisible threats, and fists turned towards former lovers. Ethel feared she already knew her next question was misinformed, or doomed to be shot down, but she asked anyway.
"Have you done this?"
The spirit could not show emotion, but the face of the owl eyed her from within its hollow sockets. More visions came, showing one truth she could not accept as easily as the other despicable acts she had been forced to view. A great poisoner, a prophet garbed in the rot of Xanthe. It struck her heart like a barbed bolt to know that all along it had been the boy she'd seen herself in countless times. Before the visions could continue, Ethel found herself defying it with words and accusations.
"He must be getting tricked then!"
No. The eyes of the observing predators showed her more. As much as Ethel despised it, as much as she wished it were a lie conjured by this creature to instill hatred in her falsely, she knew it wasn't. Ethel knew this because the visions filled in the gaps of Avery's absence. The disappearance at the train station, the lack of texts or calls back, and what had happened to the village to allow its people to trickle away slowly.
The Wolf Anchor Spirit Ethel had known wasn't dead, it had simply given up its role to assist another group that had taken the rest away after the first group's pilgrimage to some other Anchor Spirit's domain. With tensions rising, it fit well that groups of Witches might reach out and attempt to strengthen numbers. She sadly had no idea which group it was, but they looked organized in the way they handled things. She needed a plan, but that involved getting out of this domain first.
Ethel turned to the spirit neighboring her, opening her mouth to speak. As she did, the spirit's form lurched and its disconnected hands slammed her head against one of the pillars nearby, wrapping around her mouth. More came, spreading her arms and binding her limbs around it while her head seared with pain. As Ethel attempted to curse the creature, it spoke from the maw of the feline skull. A wretched, low voice, on the verge of shrill laughter.
"You will do nothing, as the rest of the world will. They will watch, as I have. They have been dulled by false hopes and promises— all they are good for. You know it to be true, the idea of a hero died long ago."
They were always the worst when they could speak. It meant they'd been around recently, or long enough to grow into the habit of using words rather than images. Using both meant they were exceptionally versed in age. Something like this growth was meant to be wiped out long ago, but it had likely hid from hunters in a biding of time. The shifting of the Reikai had just disturbed its holes in the ground enough for it to crawl out and show itself.
"You should not feel misled or betrayed." It mused. "There is good in him, as buried 'neath the skin as it is. The world the boy ushers in will be one of incomprehensible beauty. You may not see it yet, but you will understand his vision soon."
Its gaze turned back to her, but she felt no less relieved by its words than one might feel relaxed by a gun to their head. Ethel said nothing, mostly because she couldn't. The creature's hands were cool, pale, warm, comforting, and invasive equally all at the same time as they crept over her body to hold her in place. It seemed… disappointed somehow. As if the spirit were a professor who couldn't quite manage to get their point across to the audience of students.
"Very well. I don't expect you to understand. It won't matter soon. When all of the hands left to fight for a cause have been fettered and severed, the cause will die too. Just as it has a thousand times already. They will do anything for their cause, no matter how many wayward souls must be sacrificed. You, who would stand for justice, equality, caution— pointless things— cannot make the sacrifices and risks needed. Little more than outnumbered ants. Your champion is dead already, a short-lived whimper of a life from start to finish."
A final image flashed in her head. Bloodsoaked ground, glassy eyes, curly black hair, and a hole straight through his lifeless head.
DeMain.
"We will watch. And we will wait until the end. You will do nothing, as the clay-hearted have always done."
Ethel could feel it, the distant light of her quiet prayer had reached something. Regrettably, she wished she could do more than pray.