Arridon laughed and nodded. “New garbage, not old.”
“Hah, yeah,” Derrick replied.
“Where would we go? If we were going to try and find the gods?” Arridon asked Phil as the old man got up to leave the room.
Phil stopped at the threshold of the kitchen, pipe still in his mouth. He removed it, and turned to face the boys. “My wife told me the gods had a remaining city.”
“The Endless City is overrun,” Arridon said. “And the gods left there not long after I was born.”
“Whatever town you call ‘Endless’ is nothing compared to this place, boyo,” Phil said. “The Bleed will always find a place that can’t move far and fast.”
“What do you mean by that?” Derrick asked, confused.
“The gods of today built a city that jumps through time and space. I guess it’s as much a vessel, as it is a city.”
The two young men looked at each other, and they both saw excitement in the other’s eyes. That, and more than a little cockiness, trying to smother any visible fear.
Sebastian’s body had been broken down into viscera and meat, all tinged and tainted by both the Bleed’s evil presence and Sebastian’s own withered soul. It whirled and spun, roiling in formless fury. The Bleed then grabbed one minuscule bit of matter, then another, and stuck them together in a new and tragically awful puzzle. It built him again like this, one bite at a time, drawing from the disintegrated pool of flesh, skin, and bone.
Finally he stood, clawed feet, sinew-strewn calves, a powerful quasi-human torso with a back covered in a nest of shelled legs that would serve to allow for motion in four dimensions. Long, powerful arms tipped with clawed hands big enough to crush a man’s head with ease grew from shoulders topped with bony crenellations. Dark, furious eyes opened above a maw filled with tentacles, fangs, and saliva that sizzled with hatred and malice.
Sebastian set free a bellow that shook the dust off the gears and shattered the massive clock face on the side of the building. Visible waves of power emanated from his ashen skin as he felt his new form’s strength and power. He slunk down, growling, and flipped over onto his back, as agile as a hunting cat on the savanna, and crawled to the nearby wall using his crab-legs. He flipped then like a spider, and ascended ten feet in the blink of an eye before dropping back down to the stone floor of the god’s clockwork room.
Sebastian crouched low, his body thrumming from otherworldly might. He turned his black orbs upward to take in the sight of the now idle, gear-strewn machine that had taken his prize from him.
“What now, lord?”
Seek the girl Thistle Frost.
“She is the meal I crave most.”
Your futile, hormonal obsession with her is a binding fetter. We will use it. She is with others that must die. Half-blooded wretches no better than feces stuck between your clawed toes, my child. You will bleed through, as we always do. You will seep into the reality she is in and infect it. You will grow again, and murder those who slow down the spread of our righteous consumption.
“How do I bleed through?”
It is different every time. For each reality, new rules apply. Some realities are protected, and take much, much longer for us to pierce. Others are bare, easy to penetrate. To find your Thistle, you must devolve into pure lust. Think only of her, her loins, and the taste of her heart’s meat as you chew and swallow it. Think only of pressing into the very fiber of her being. And in time, you will cross the unguarded threshold into her reality, as close as you need to be. As close as you can be.
Sebastian closed his eyes and let his imagination wander to sunny summer days back at Mercy Point and the dresses Thistle wore that had roused him. The segmented limbs growing out of his back, tipped with claws, click-clacked in tremulous, sexual joy.
Minutes turned into hours, and as Sebastian’s monstrous desires grew, his memories took flight, soaring above the flat, crumbling disc of his home world, soaring through unfamiliar time and space until his perception became wholly different; seeing and hearing energies and spectrums reserved for the eyes and ears of things far, far above his station.
He existed like this for some time. A hundred hours, a hundred days, a hundred years…it didn’t matter. Sebastian had moved to an existence that didn’t need to track such things.
When his perceptions drifted back to normal, he could taste only dust, and everything was dark.
But deep inside, where the anger and desire lived within his breast, he could feel that Thistle was close.
He laughed, but in the empty world where his prey had taken shelter, no one heard him.
“How do we find it?” Arridon asked.
“All of the clockwork rooms can bring you home, such as it were,” the old man said as he ladled out steaming bowls of soup. Outside, the tanks rumbling through the streets shook the apartment walls, causing the mugs in the cupboards to clink together. The floor shook. Distant sirens and angry men yelling over megaphones and speakers yakked along in the background.
“The city-ship?” Derrick asked as he leaned over a bowl to inhale its aroma. His stomach grumbled in excitement.
“It’s more of a…planet, really. A handful of linked cities in space. Big as a continent. Not a real planet, of course. Call it a planetoid, if you like.”
“The Death Star? Gods live on the Death Star,” Derrick said, and laughed. “Of course they do.”
“What’s a Death Star?” Arridon asked.
“From a movie,” Derrick answered.
“What’s a movie?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Phil said. “Take your food to the couch. I’d offer you the table, but as you
