A serialised novel of sunless planets, hallucinogenic mushrooms, daemons, and... pizza rats. 🍕🐀
New chapters posted every Friday!
Available Chapters — Content Warnings
Ginx doubled over on the sofa, frail and hollow-faced, hands grasping at her stomach. She began to convulse, gasping for air in hoarse, shuddering bursts as Tattie scuttled away on the floor. Brax jumped up and pulled her to her feet.
“I’m guessing she chose the powder,” he said. He was still holding Tattie’s hand, entwined fingers gripping hers so hard, it was almost painful.
Tattie, help me,” Ginx managed between breaths.
“How am I supposed to help you?” Tattie demanded, anger burning a hole through her initial shock.
Ginx stared at her with wet, red-rimmed eyes, then turned her face to the floor and vomited a long stream of blue-black bile. It hissed softly as it ate into the thin carpet tiles.
“This is great,” Tattie said. “Just fantastic. You are so incredibly stupid, Ginx. You had the option to get rid of this thing but instead, you invited it in, and you have the absolute brass tits to ruck up here. Asking for what? For help? For guidance? I tell people their fortunes, I don’t deal with sodding daemons. I’m going to kill Traci-Lynn for this. I’m going to murder the little bastard.”
“Tattie.” Brax’s hand was on her shoulder. He turned her to face him. “She’s just a kid. She wanted her friend back.”
“Well, she can’t help Toni now, can she?”
With a guttural cry, Ginx reared up on the sofa. The fiery sparks stuttering in her eyes had roared to livid flame and her face contorted into a death mask grimace. When she blinked against the heat, her eyes burned a black, ragged hole clean through her eyelids. They each smoked and shrivelled up into their respective sockets.
“For fuck’s sake,” Tattie yelled. She tore herself away from Brax and hardened her hands to fists at her sides, fighting a tremor of nausea. “She’s about to pop. We need to make a crating circle.”
Brax looked at her as though she’d lost her mind but she shoved him hard in the chest, pointing to the opposite side of the apartment. “Get over there, you’re taking west.”
Without waiting to make sure he’d comply, Tattie raced across the room. She stopped outside her bedroom and hurriedly shrugged off her shirt, kneeling on the floor in her washed-out bra to pull a Rakkonian knife from the pocket inside the waistband of her trousers. She had sewn a similar pocket into all of her clothes so she could keep the knife close at all times. It was a safeguard, to be used only in situations like this. Situations where it was safer to expose her power than it was to conceal it.
Pushing down the choking wave of memories kneeling in this position with a Rakkonian knife in her hand provoked, Tattie turned her arm over and cut a line from the underside of her elbow to the centre of her forearm, perfectly and expertly straight. Blood rose immediately but she needed more. Passing the fingers of her free hand over the cut, she pictured the veins inside, sliced and broken, vibrating with pain beneath her pliant skin like a hundred long screaming mouths. She forced more blood along their fractured highways, pulling it up and out of herself until it pooled around her knees on the floor.
She glanced at Brax, relieved to see he was kneeling in the same position across from her, his forehead creased in concentration as he methodically pulled blood from his own scarred body. Keeping their eyes locked on each other, they each dabbed two fingers into the bright founts massing before them and bent to mark a sigil on the floor—an angular eye, framed by radiating lines.
“Keep watch within, keep watch without,” they intoned in unison, rising to move around to the southern and northern points of the room. They each knelt to daub a third and a fourth eye and complete the circle.
“Keep watch within, keep watch without.”
They rose together for the final time, their movements fluid and rehearsed, drilled into them from childhood until they could have performed them blind and drunk.
“Bind the circle,” Brax said, raising his hands over the cross-section of sticky eyes.
Tattie moved her arms apart. “The circle is bound.”
She nodded at Brax and they lowered their arms, each a mirror image drawn in blood and rent flesh.
“Let’s get Ginx in the circle,” Tattie said. “Before she tears the apartment apart.”
Ginx was completely unaware of what they‘d been doing. She was panting, hands clasped on her knees and her head hanging between her legs. If Tattie hadn’t known there was a daemon trying to claw its way out of her, she would have assumed she was simply trying not to throw up after a heavy session.
“We need to get her up.”
Brax helped Tattie pull an unresistant Ginx from the sofa. Thick black fluid was still dribbling from one side of her mouth. They walked her into the centre of the circle, then stepped back out of it, leaving Ginx alone within the scarlet ring of unblinking eyes.
“You still cut too deep,” Tattie said, watching the awkward way Brax was holding his sigil arm away from his body. His face was leached of colour and he was gritting his teeth, trying very hard and failing to disguise the fact that he was swaying on his feet.
She pulled open a drawer beneath her console and pulled out a can of Globifix, a hermatic mage essential. Aiming the can’s long nozzle at Brax’s weeping forearm, Tattie shot a spray of sour-smelling gel over the cut. One pass was all she needed to seal the wound.
“I never had your knack for crisis,” Brax said as Tattie carried out the same procedure on her own arm.
The deep, throbbing pain in Tattie’s forearm ceased immediately. She stretched out the limb, wiggling each of the fingers in turn. “That’s better.”
“What now?”
“Now, nothing. I can’t do anything for Ginx. All I can hope to do is contain her. She chose this for some stupid reason.”
“I think she did it for Toni.”
“You know what happened to the bonded on Raccone, Brax.” He looked away. “It’s up to Ginx now. Either she’ll bond, or the daemon will tear her bloody. And I’ve never heard of a successful bond.”
With a piercing shriek, Ginx’s head snapped up. She rose to her feet as though pulled on wires.
“Here we go,” Tattie said. “If you still believe in any of the old gods, now’s the time to start praying.”
Brax edged closer to Tattie.
The shriek pitched higher, spiralling to an anguished roar as Ginx ran at them, her red-rimmed eyes roving and wild, her cracked lips stretching impossibly wide. She slammed into the perimeter of the circle, hitting it so hard the rebound took her off her feet. She fell back to the floor, one leg twisted beneath her. Tattie suspected it was broken until the Ginx-creature flipped over onto its front and rose on all four limbs, tensed like a spider bracing to strike. Its head snapped back up and it snarled at them, black ichor oozing from between its teeth to spatter across the floor in steaming globules.
“You think this cage can hold me?”
The voice was a deep scratch torn from Ginx’s throat, ancient and caked with creaking dust.
“Well I’m not going to let you ride roughshod over my apartment,” Tattie said. “I should bill you for the lost deposit money.”
The Ginx-creature opened its mouth and Tattie readied herself, expecting another splitting shriek. The mouth kept opening. The creature’s jaw kept swinging lower, spreading wider. Bone shattered, wrenched from what had once been a humanoid skull with a sound like splintering wood. A long, muscular tentacle flashed from the gaping maw, then another. Twin arms covered in glossy mucus and quivering suckers snapped towards them, repelled by the barrier created within the circle of eyes. Tattie stepped in front of Brax as the creature struggled to its feet, deformed head craned towards the ceiling, tentacles thrashing from its frothing mouth-pit.
The daemon was fighting with its host, each vying for dominance, each arguing with the other, insisting they should be the one permitted to exist. But mortal bodies were so pathetically fragile. The daemon would win. The daemon would burrow its way out and then Tattie supposed she would have to kill it. That, or open the window wide and shunt it through to tear up the steaming streets of Noctara. She waited for the inevitable sundering of skin, the ripping and tearing. The terrible, pitiless screams of small mortal death.
No sundering or screams came. The tentacles retracted. The elongated cave of a mouth closed up. The splintered bone of Ginx’s tortured skull flattened back into the shape of a human head, limid flesh closing over it with a soft, wet noise. The Ginx-creature smiled at Tattie, then spoke again in its ancient, dry parchment voice.
“I’ll be seeing you.”
The invisible wires that had been holding Ginx up snapped free and she collapsed to the floor in a boneless heap.
“What just happened?” Brax said. He was breathing very fast.
“I don’t bloody believe it.”
“Believe what?”
“They’ve bonded. It’s a successful bond.”
“So, this is a good thing?”
“It might be. Help me get her into my bed. We can’t leave her here.”
Brax looked as though he’d rather wade waist-deep into Noctara’s reeking sewers than touch Ginx again, but he helped to carry her into the bedroom. He was tense, starting at every tiny sound as though he expected the daemon to break open Ginx’s face and tunnel back out at any moment.
Once they’d laid Ginx in the bed and covered her with a blanket, Tattie sat beside her. Ginx’s eyelids were a blackened ruin, and two deep and perfect shiny-pink scars crisscrossed her mouth—a permanent stamp marking the tentacle eruption site. Despite these wounds, she seemed peaceful. You’d never know a malignant fiend was happily hunkered inside her, setting up shop and laying down roots.
“She’ll need to sleep for a while,” Tattie told Brax. “A long while.”
Content Warnings
Body horror and descriptions of gore, descriptions of cutting/bleeding, swearing.