video; un: leavegodalone

[necrolord]

Is this thing on?

[ The camera opens on a man, but there is something horribly inhuman about his eyes: they are black from edge to edge, the iris burning with a ring of white light. He is flanked by two skeletons which stand at attention, each with a speck of glowing red in their shadowed eye sockets. ]

Been a while since I had to do this. Hey, hello, kia ora. You face the King Undying, the Necrolord Prime.

[ He claps his hands together. There is something wrong with them: the whites of his metacarpals are exposed, flesh crumbled away like so much ash. ]

But let's not stand on formality, right? I hear we're on a first-name basis, now. So: I'm Emperor John Gaius, creator of the Nine Houses, and also God. Not locally, mind, [ and he gestures vaguely upwards, ] here it's a more crowded playing field. I'll admit, it's been an adjustment. I tried to get a peek at my usual domain... turns out Mariana doesn't like to share.

Now, I get that I've made a few mistakes. [ He says this like funny understatement, hands splayed. It shows the bare red tendons in his palms. ] Let's clear up some misconceptions.

[ He stands accused of baby-killing, human sacrifice, and the destruction of whole planets. He riled Mariana into a deadly storm. But what he says, with all the gravity of a king, is: ]

My wife is that hot.

[ Fantastic. Amazing start. He leans in to regard the camera. ]

Look, I get it: I haven't made myself popular. I'll get a lot of kids at my door screaming log off. We're on, what, bloody retribution attempt six or seven? It's been a constant parade of death lasers and witches and kids with swords. And I see where you're coming from. I put a serious damper on everyone's fun vengeance beach party.

But it's getting a little old, so consider this a friendly warning to all my executioners: I will start losing patience. [ He quirks a smile that does not touch his eyes. ] Not to be all, I have over ten billion confirmed kills, but: maybe do not fuck with me.

Cheers.

[ The skeletons perform an ancient First House salute, and the feed cuts out. ]

Comments

[necrolord]

[ He can recognize the indictment for what it is, and he is quiet all through it. On his end of the line, John Gaius is nothing but the occasional silence of a caught breath, the ringing empty space of her words hitting somewhere unseen. When she's finished, that silence hangs.

His voice comes low, remote, simple as a blade. ]

Whatever's broken is broken.

[ The distant levity has vanished; he's dropped it. This is an uncommonly unguarded moment, a flash of something bare and real, but still he holds her apart with the stretch of emptiness between them. He isn't laughing, but he speaks as though he's very far away. ]

Do you want to be happy? [ Who doesn't, right? What kind of fucked-up revenant of a person isn't capable of even that, anymore? But the prospect is exhausting; he's ten thousand years too late for it; he knows it only in sidelong glimpses, brief gasps of air. ] Am I really the one raising ghosts, here? Anyone could walk out of that ocean, Anna, at any time. It's like they want us sitting there praying on the shore, killing ourselves waiting for the miracle to hit.

I'm opting out of that. [ His tone is so calm, so level, like he's said this a million times before. ] I don't want any part of it. [ It sounds uncannily like don't deserve. ]

Pretty rich from the guy who invented necromancy, right? But I do not love this place's take on never letting anything rest.

[hauntedsavior]

Oh, is that how this works? [there's a smile of incredulity stretching the words thin.] Is that how we do this? We just say that we don't want to deal with it and then suddenly we don't have to? God damn, dude, that's the most human thing you've said this whole time.

[she needs to get that out of her, the anger, the snap response, the judgment that she hopes will slide off of him as everything else has. she doubts she will be so lucky. she can tell that she is speaking to someone who has not revealed himself in this way in a myriad. she does not yet know if this is good or bad, but she's getting what she wants, and she should be happy about that.]

I don't want to bring your dick waving contest against the Pthumerians into this. I already know anyone could come out of there at any time and I'm going to deal with it when—if it happens. I'm not turning it into a crusade. [she knows, realistically, that her odds are low. that everyone she loved had already gone or fled a couple years ago. but there's always the chance, however slim. and she cannot let it destroy her from the inside on the possibility that one of the people she left on terrible terms with does show up here.]

Besides, if I wanted to talk about theology, I'd talk with your son. [she does not know where paul stands. she does not want to know.] I'm not asking you as the Necrolord Prime, or the Conqueror of Death, or the Kindly Prince, or whatever name you decide to hide behind today. [the anger is slowly starting to boil away, or maybe it's just simmering while she attends to something else. either way, she speaks like she's trying to reach out to a friend.]

I'm asking you as John Gaius. The man who once tried to marry a boy on the swingset, the man who wasted away his teenage years on Tumblr and Twitter and TikTok, the man who probably took trips to the mainland to watch fucking—[she fumbles for the name of an opera]—Faust or the Ring cycle or something in Sydney.

And I'm asking you to just stop dodging the question already. [she sounds exhausted by the end of it. there is no way, there is no possible way that she's getting through to him. he's showing all the parts of himself that are the most dangerous, that are just as sharp and deadly as any beak or talon. and she recognizes it as a threat display no matter what tone of voice he puts on it, but she cannot let herself back down from it now.] If you hate how this place never lets anything rest, why are you playing right into its hands? Why can't you just rest, John?

[necrolord]

[ It's a good speech. He should kill her for it. (Oh wait.)

(There is no breath in his lungs to crack a joke; it has been arrested in his throat, where it burns unspent.)

She says your son, and on John's end of the line, the silence goes punched-breathless. On John's end of the line, he shuts his eyes. She says Tumblr; she says Sydney. She makes wild stabs at whatever she thinks will hurt him, whoever she thinks he used to be, and in the end she asks the same fucking question they all do. It's been echoing in his ears since the day he washed up here.

Let it go. Let them go. Nobody has to be punished anymore.

He still wants to rip the throat out of whoever dares say it to his face. ]

I understand who you think you're talking to. [ His tone is so level, so calm; the water draws back from the shore before the wave comes. ] So I want to be really clear, here.

That man is dead.

[ Convenient that he only decides that when he doesn't want to play ball, right? Human of him, right? But he isn't just human; he will never be just John again. It's one sort of pain to be seen as divine, remote, untouchable; it is worse still to be held up as a friend. ]

It has been ten thousand years since that planet burned. Everybody on it went down in the fire. Sure, I got back up... But I got up as something new, and I built something new. I can't undo what's been done.

[ He will not bear the dangled allure of second chances. ]

Let me put it this way: when I kill something, I want it to stay dead.

1/2

[hauntedsavior]

Then you'll have to try harder next time.

[she hangs up.]

[hauntedsavior]

[there is another recording about an hour and a half later, when she's able to finally shake off the hand of terror that's been gripping her throat, when her heart rate has normalized, when she's burned off the adrenaline. she knows that sending this to him is inviting further calamity. she remembers the icy calm of his words cutting through the depths of the sounding sea of her mind, each one striking not an immediate fear but one far below consciousness. one that she had not realized at the time was creeping up inside her until it threatened to hold her catatonic. it is when he speaks like that that she is most convinced of the death of john gaius.]

[she speaks in a calm of her own, the calm of recitation. a prose reading of something simple, something that she's unwillingly committed to memory. it's as though the cursed book is between her hands, the vellum flimsy as she turns each page to find the one that she means to deliver.]

Thy soul shall find itself alone 'mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone, not one of all the crowd to pry into thine hour of secrecy. Be silent in that solitude which is not loneliness—for then the spirits of the dead who stood in life before thee are again in death around thee, and their will shall overshadow thee.

[she reaches for the omni and speaks the final two words in desperation, though she doubts he will need her to finish the verse.]

Be still.

[the recording ends. she powers off her omni and leaves it in the main room. she retreats to her bedroom and shuts the door. she turns on the overhead light, and the one by her bed, and she crawls beneath her covers, and she pulls the blanket over her head.]