Chương 24: 23: The Donkey In The Halls

Katherine blinked. The way Korhess spoke reminded her of the old fantasy novels she'd loved growing up, every sentence wrapped in flowery, archaic language that sounded centuries out of place. Why was she talking like that? They were in the modern age. Then another thought struck her. Were all the experiments like this? Maybe Butter was the odd one out. Honestly... that would explain a lot. The fight began not with motion, but with choice. The memory struck Katherine first.

A hoof crushing Butter's chest, ribs exploding, heart bursting. The vision arrived a millisecond before reality, stealing the taste from the popcorn in her mouth. Then the prosthetic blazed yellow. Resonance. Divine marrow recognized the chosen future and issued its rebuttal. THOOM- WUMP. Korhess's slender shin snapped backward as though struck by an invisible giant. Her hoof screeched across the floor and the selected future shattered into glittering dust. She had never moved, yet somehow she had been moved.

Her beautiful face showed no pain. Only deepening fascination. A new strand lit. MEMORY. A palm strike scrambling Butter's brain and a knee snapping her spine. Two deaths arriving together. The prosthetic's yellow glow split into twin frequencies, issuing two denials at once. CRACK - SNAP. Korhess's head jerked sideways and her lower back twitched. Both futures shattered. But Katherine noticed something. The light had dimmed, only slightly, a fraction less brilliant than before.

Butter stood within the storm of exchanged non-blows, Gloom swirling around her in agitated currents. She wasn't controlling the leg's defenses. She was studying them, feeling its decisions through the graft while a growing knot formed in her stomach. I can't keep this up forever. Every denial cost something. The prosthetic could shoulder the burden, but the fuel was hers. Gloom bled away with every resonance, every rejected future, every overturned certainty.

Korhess smiled, beatific now, and raised a hand with all five fingers spread. Her fingertips brushed a dense cluster of strands. Dozens. Hundreds. An orchestra of deaths selected at once. I'll whack you, stop spamming. The thought flashed through Butter's mind, raw with frustration. Fighting Korhess felt like arguing with a loaded gun that had learned to fire in every tense simultaneously - past, present, and future. Butter kept her expression flat. Don't let her see it. Every rejected future burned Gloom.

Korhess was already testing limits, already counting the prosthetic's denials. If she realized the defenses carried a cost, this would become a war of attrition. And Butter would lose. She couldn't let Korhess know blocking was hurting her. Her eyes narrowed as possibilities raced through her mind. If she couldn't outlast this, she needed to stop it. Manipulate her. Distract her. Challenge her pride. Get her to abandon the strands and fight properly. Hand to hand.

The prosthetic's yellow light screamed, a silent solar cry of overloaded annulment.

"Ah," she breathed.

"A judicial repeal." Her head tilted the other way.

"Let us try… plurality." Butter frowned.

"Or we could stop doing the weird silk-and-prophecy thing and fight hand to hand." Korhess blinked.

"Hand to hand?"

"Yeah." Butter rolled her shoulders and stretched her neck.

"Punches. Kicks. Actual fighting. If you're going to kill me, at least do it yourself instead of outsourcing the work to whatever bizarre nightmare accounting system you've got going on." A faint smile touched Korhess's lips.

"Little saela, thou couldst train for ten thousand years and still fail to reach the mastery of one who began her practice before she grew breasts." Butter rolled her eyes.

"That is the most arrogant sentence I've heard all week."

"It is also true."

"Maybe." Butter grinned.

"Test it first." Korhess raised a hand. Flames erupted within her palm. Green-gold fire blossomed outward, beautiful and terrible. Its light flooded the chamber, painting the pods, walls, and distant machinery in shimmering emerald and gold. The fire moved strangely, folding through itself like liquid memory. It smelled familiar. Childhood. Summer afternoons. Forgotten birthdays. The taste of favorite foods. The warmth of home. Merely looking at it stirred old recollections from the depths of Butter's mind.

But that wasn't what frightened her. She didn't need the Gloom to understand what she was seeing. A touch of those flames would burn her beneath the weight of her own worst nightmares. Against ordinary matter, it was merely fire. Steel would melt. Stone would crack. Structures would collapse. Against anything capable of thought, however, it became something far worse. Defenses that could withstand the birth of universes would mean nothing. Biology capable of surviving a Big Bang would still burn.

Korhess regarded her calmly and released the flame. Butter reacted instantly.

"Fermata." The fire touched the suspended pause and burned through it. Butter's eyes widened. The flame continued forward.

"Perdendosi." Its shadow stretched. The shadow swallowed it whole. The fire was dragged into nothingness. Korhess's left ear perked upward.

"How delightful." Her mismatched eyes studied Butter with renewed focus.

"Thou possessest a uniquely fascinating collection of abilities, especially thy fondness for naming them." Butter forced a grin. Inside, she was sweating. She hated using Perdendosi. Every use brushed against memories she preferred buried. Every use brought her closer to the Red State. And she had just used it against a tiny flame. If Korhess forced her to employ it against something larger, something truly dangerous... The thought remained unfinished.

Korhess opened both palms and green-gold fire unfurled from them once more. Butter immediately snapped open the Aria. A page tore free, and from it emerged a giant octopus. Long eyelashes framed enormous eyes. Its skin rippled through constantly shifting colors while luminous spots drifted across its body like living constellations. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Korhess's assault faltered for the briefest instant.

Her mismatched eyes flicked from the octopus... to the book. She stared at the Aria with open curiosity, as though trying to decide whether the impossible object in Butter's hand intrigued her more than the battle itself. Katherine's eyes widened. I know that one. Tentacles. She searched her memory, trying to remember what the creature actually did. Butter had mentioned it before... Something to do with psychic... stuff? She couldn't quite remember.

Whatever it was, the fact that Butter had casually stored something like that inside a book was becoming increasingly alarming. The octopus stretched outward. Its presence expanded across the chamber, wrapping around the flames with vast invisible limbs. The fires froze, buried beneath layers of thought, memory, and identity before the creature dissolved into colored mist and slipped back into the pages. Korhess tilted her head.

"It buried my power beneath my soul."

"Yep."

"It will require several minutes to resurface." Butter smiled.

"Yep." Korhess's eyes narrowed slightly.

"And thou considerest that sufficient?" Butter closed the Aria.

"More than enough time to beat you." Korhess's expression darkened.

"Do you truly believe that?" Butter didn't. Not even a little. But if she could convince Korhess to stop throwing impossible Apis nonsense and fight hand-to-hand instead, she would happily lie through her teeth. So she smiled, met Korhess's gaze, and nodded with complete confidence.

"Yes." Korhess faced Butter's charge with perfect composure, yet something in the girl's fierce, unyielding expression tore open a lifetime of memories she had spent fifty years trying to outgrow. — Fifty years. Long before Butter was born, before the Last Stand, before the Sin War dragged the factions into open conflict, Korhess had been a triumph. Experiment A-1. The First Antler. A human-deer hybrid blessed with predatory speed, senses sharp enough to taste fear on the air, and durability surpassing titanium.

She and the other hybrids of the New Zealand faction had been hailed as the future. Then Antarctica changed everything. Kestrel's faction began producing something new. Sorcery woven into genetics. Living miracles that didn't merely honor Crook's vision, but seemed to channel it. Overnight, Korhess and her kind became obsolete. The Ascension Protocols followed. Forced mutations. Conceptual bombardment. Flesh rewritten with alien DNA.

Most subjects died screaming as their bodies rejected powers they were never meant to possess. Korhess survived because she refused to break. Her genes resisted every alteration. No magic bloomed in her blood. No transcendent form emerged. When the experiments ended, she remained exactly what she had always been. A durable animal. The humiliation was complete. She was reassigned to manual labor, hauling machinery through the ice and moving ore where stronger assets were considered too valuable to waste.

Enforcers used her as a training dummy. They knew dozens of martial arts. She knew instinct. Again and again they broke her ribs, fractured her jaw, and left her bleeding on cold floors. That was when the animal decided to become a scholar. She stole books. Anatomy texts. Physics journals. Combat manuals. Anything she could find. She also stole fashion magazines. Glossy pages filled with impossibly beautiful women. Everyone admired them.

Maybe, she thought, with the desperation of someone drowning, they would admire her too. So she began erasing herself. Using stolen surgical shears, she cut away her antlers, leaving aching stumps hidden beneath scarves. She buried her hooves beneath trousers and painfully tight shoes. She spent hours before polished steel mirrors plucking every trace of deer-soft fur from her face until her skin was raw. If she could not be beautiful, then perhaps life was not worth living.

No one had ever looked at her with affection. Only curiosity, disgust or clinical interest. Love felt fictional. Korhess forced herself to eat in the Syndicate mess hall, a gleaming cavern of polished steel and low conversation where the food was, by any objective measure, excellent. The chefs prepared gourmet meals for the elite: seared meats, delicate pastas, rich sauces. Even the lower ranks ate well, with hearty stews, fresh bread, and sprawling salad bars bursting with greens and herbs.

It was the salad she wanted. The clean crunch of lettuce. The scent of fresh vegetables. Something deep and instinctive in her hybrid biology yearned for it. Yet every day she walked past. The possibility alone - a glance, a whisper, a barely suppressed snicker - terrified her more than hunger. Look, the deer is eating a salad. How fitting. How animal. Instead, she filled her tray with what she imagined a normal woman would choose. Thick steaks that sat heavily in her stomach. Creamy pastas that left her sluggish.

Rich foods she tolerated rather than enjoyed. Then she sat beneath indifferent eyes and ate methodically, praying no one noticed how often her gaze drifted back toward the greens. No one mocked her. Not here. Her existence was already a classified embarrassment, a relic from a failed era. The cruelty came from somewhere quieter. From herself. She would rather suffer indigestion for a lifetime than offer that confirmation. So she ate rich human food instead, swallowing discomfort with every bite.

Only beneath true darkness, far from the compound's lights, would she kneel in frost-kissed fields and graze. The cold grass felt like relief, a homecoming written into her cells and a secret confessed only to the uncaring moon. Her studies became an asylum. By day, she performed her pathetic imitation of humanity. By night, she dissected combat with cold obsession, studying the enforcers' habits, their tells, their blind spots, and the limits they could not see.

From that analysis emerged a language of motion they would never understand. Asherah's Step was born in a kennel of self-loathing. Its first forms were traced into dirt by a trembling hoof and refined through decades of solitary practice. Built around the leverage of a hybrid body rather than human symmetry, it taught a simple lesson: the safest place to be was where the attack had never found you. Every parry rebutted an enforcer's fist. Every evasion denied the hands that had plucked hairs from her face.

She was building a fortress of skill where beauty had failed her. If she could not be loved, she would become undeniable. If she could not be beautiful, she would become perfect. Then she learned of Apis. Before that, the Magpies relied on little more than electrical reserves and kinetic batteries woven into their suits. Korhess had been ten when the first unstable strains appeared and fifteen when Dr. Isolde Vex finally perfected the process.

Early Apis was disastrous, draining dreamers dry before extraction could finish and killing thousands in the process. To sustain production, Magpie raiding teams abducted inmates from prisons and psychiatric institutions, their fractured minds yielding the richest harvests. Most Apis condensed into spheres, some into triangles, and only the rarest specimens formed perfect hexagons. Dreams refined into fuel capable of rewriting reality. One night she stole a fragment no larger than a grain of rice and swallowed it.

That was when she discovered true agony. Her teeth seemed to forget they were teeth. Her bones argued with the concept of solidity. She felt like a sculpture being melted and recast by a dreaming god. When morning came, she was stronger. Time itself became less concrete. Objects revealed themselves as continuous patterns, their yesterdays, presents, and tomorrows existing together. Opponents trailed chains of cause and effect, their next few seconds unfolding like pre-recorded footage.

The distant future remained unreliable, but the immediate future carried frightening certainty. When even that failed, she simply borrowed from it. A strike could arrive from yesterday. A dodge could occur before the attack that required it. So long as the debt was repaid, causality proved surprisingly accommodating. Her body changed as well. Food and water dissolved into unreality almost instantly. Hunger became habit rather than necessity.

She could eat diamonds like candy or drink lava like tea and notice no difference. It became a sacrament. Training by day. Theft by night. A grain. A sliver. A chip. Each dose was a negotiation with annihilation. Year after year her durability compounded as her body learned to survive what should have destroyed it. She was not consuming power so much as conducting a decades-long dialogue with oblivion, and gradually, her body began winning the argument.

Her hooves, already the foundation of Asherah's Waltz, became stranger still - durability layered upon durability, physical indestructibility reinforced by conceptual permanence. By the end, they could shatter objects deemed indestructible, breaking not only matter but the ideas protecting it. At nineteen, the Syndicate completed her modifications. At twenty-five, she looked exactly the same. It was around this period that the flames first appeared. No laboratory could fully explain them.

They scaled to her intent, warm as bathwater or hotter than a star's core, drifting like lanterns or crossing vast distances faster than light. Against living things, they were far worse. Korhess could burn the soul while leaving the body untouched, reduce mind, spirit, and flesh to ash together, or choose exactly what aspect of a target the fire recognized as fuel. Most terrifying of all, she could choose a state where the flames did not travel.

They simply appeared - on skin, inside armor, within organs, even upon the soul itself. Unless a target possessed some form of precognition, the attack had already succeeded before they knew it existed. That single gift transformed Korhess into one of the Syndicate's most prized experiments. At thirty. At forty. Time passed while her face remained unchanged. Human staff aged around her, their features becoming maps of lived experience while hers stayed frozen in youth.

Sometimes she wished for wrinkles, gray hair, anything that proved she had lived rather than merely endured. But even that was denied. Her biology repaired itself too efficiently. Researchers estimated it might take another century before she resembled a woman in her thirties. She was trapped inside a beautiful statue, and statues, no matter how lovely, are only admired from a distance. In time, she reshaped herself into something extraordinary.

She forged Velvethorn, a language of botanical poetry and temporal philosophy that buried every trace of the animal she believed herself to be. She authored Asherah's Waltz, a martial art so fluid and preemptive it looked less like combat and more like a dance performed one heartbeat ahead of time. She coined her own axioms.

"Sylv-varai tel-mora." The forest's path is already grown.

"Val-tel miran." A bloom in the silent season. Beautiful futility.

"Fas-mora vel-thorn." A root that grows into its own shadow. A truth that unravels itself.

"Aen-mir leth-vas." The final leaf has already fallen. No longer speaking with the voice of an experiment, she cultivated the measured cadence of an eternal monarch. Every phrase became a cathedral raised over silence, every word a thorn wrapped in velvet. It was a magnificent performance. An act of sublime theater meant to convince the world, and herself, that she was not a discarded hybrid but something inevitable. Something divine. The antlers were cut away. The deer hair plucked.

In their place she built Korhess: the First Antler, the Final Obstacle. A persona so imposing that even her Syndicate masters stopped seeing the frightened animal beneath it. They forgot the donkey in the halls. She never did. From beast of burden to enforcer, assassin, and legend, she clawed her way from the kennel to the throne. And for a moment, Korhess thought of Crook. The resemblance was irrational. Butter and Clock could not possibly be related to her.

It would be absurd to assume every albino carried some connection to that phenomenon, and neither sibling possessed even a fraction of Crook's impossible absoluteness. Yet the association lingered. A memory unfurled. The Sin War.