HFTH - Episode 208 - Aftermaths

Content warnings for this episode include: Body horror, religious violence

Aftermaths

It was funny, Hector thought, how things changed. The day that Hector Mendoza had been asked to find Jonah Duckworth, he had set his expectations on finding a dead man. He supposed, in a way, he had. And in all the days that followed—escaping froglins and Wandering Night-Gaunts together, wandering into the endless wild of the Northmost Hallowoods, confronting the Faceless King—he had wondered if in some way he, too, had died the second he touched Jonah; as though he had passed then into the world of spirits and they had been walking in it ever since. It had been firmed all the more when he lay bleeding, torn apart by the Fisher, on the verge of death, and Jonah’s touch had planted new life in him, caused a new arm of bark and twig to grow where his old one had been taken. He was well and truly a dead man walking, after that, and that made two of them.

The whole time Jonah had been the same, really—on the outside, warm and soft and welcoming in all the ways that Hector wasn’t. But within the weathered hands and wispy grey beard and gentle folds of skin there was a fire that burned emerald green, one that could consume the stars, bend the trees, make distant constellations shine. An angel, filled with all the terrifying light that entailed. And Hector loved the light, as much as he loved the vessel that held it.

They lived in Jonah’s world, now, and his head and his heart told him different things. He knew in his head that it wasn’t Jonah’s; not really—it belonged to the god who had chosen Jonah. It was an abandoned workshop, and a memorial, and a tomb. A circular realm of black sand and jagged obsidian mountains, lit by a perpetual canopy of green stars and emerald clouds. But in his heart, it was Jonah’s world. The crown that hovered over Jonah’s head was the same color as the stars. He knew in his head that, from what Jonah had told him, the sky here was just an illusion, that there really were no stars, that it was like a painting of a universe where the holy green fire had spread to worlds beyond number. That if you were to remove the illusion, there would only be black, because they were in a realm of a nature known only to Jonah and impossible to explain without getting into talk of other dimensions and the energy fallout of a dead god. But in Hector’s heart, he felt that the stars had been lit just for them, as lanterns beneath which to build their afterlife.

In his head, likewise, he knew that he might not really be dead; that the qualities of this realm merely suspended the normal course of life and death to allow for work to be done, that if he had been in his dying moments then he might still cling to the breath of life a little longer, at least until mortality had a chance to catch up with him and pour two glasses of horchata to sip on the porch. In his heart, he was in heaven, and as long as Jonah lived there too, he could make the rest work.

He missed his dogs. Jackie, he was sure, was dead, if fourteen years had really passed in the outside world. But Heidi, he didn’t know. He wondered if she was still out there in the Northmost, waiting. Perhaps that could be his next thing to barter for when the Rat King made his once-in-a-blue-moon visit to trade gossip. But except for the dogs, and the lack of motorcycles, they’d managed to make do surprisingly well. There was no plant life in Jonah’s world, no standing features at all except for a large tomb where the god was buried. So they’d had their work cut out for them. But any twig cut from Hector’s arm would take root in the black sand, and either they grew quickly or Hector’s sense of time was screwed or both, because what were only tiny saplings were now groves and groves of black trees. The timber had gone towards making tools, a cabin, furniture. Rocking chairs and a porch of their own, to watch the tumbling mirage of green on the horizon drift. They liked to sit out there for long hours, wishing that they had anything to drink, even though neither had experienced hunger or thirst since coming to stay. He was amazed that they hadn’t run out of things to talk about yet; each time they spoke, it felt as though Jonah was dredging some new untold story out of the murky depths of his memory.

And then there was Jonah, always developing new and unlikely powers. He’d tried to explain something long-winded to Hector about the purpose of the workshop and its controls, which Hector hadn’t completely understood at the time, and still did not. But after that, Jonah had raised his hands, and seemingly from nowhere clouds had arrived, and began to pour down rain—the first hint of moisture that Hector had ever seen in this place that wasn’t leaking out of the lake door. They’d danced together like two wild men beneath the oncoming storm; green lightning lit the black clouds, and they laughed madly. And the trees grew much faster after that.

But it was the doors—all three of them—that were their primary focus now. The Duckworth Lake door was where it apparently always had been, tens of thousands of feet in the air and surmountable only by a mountain of stones that Jonah had piled up over centuries spent alone in here. The Instrumentalist’s Door had been closed for quite some time; it had only opened once in all of Hector’s time here. And then the Third Door… well, that one was the problem, because what they assumed was just a nuisance at first had turned out to be a few individuals resurrecting the Instrumentalist’s work. And Hector loved that as much as he personally would have weighed the pros and cons of getting involved in the doings of a world he was no longer really attached to, Jonah had been immediate in taking up arms. Things had not been the same since the sudden visit of Riot, Russell and Shelby, and for the moment, the quiet peace that they had enjoyed for untold centuries was gone, replaced with the nervousness that fell upon Jonah whenever it was time to go to war.

“Can you believe them,” said Jonah. Beneath his bushy brows, his eyes were fixed on the Third Door. He’d taken to tying his long grey hair back in a bun, and he stood with his hairy arms crossed, a wide stance, facing off against the closed door. On this side, it was a stone monolith set into the jagged black cliffs of the realm; there was a small keyhole. The carvings depicted an entity with a deerlike skull and several hands outstretched beneath—spread to gesture at three flaming crowns, three flaming keys, three flaming doorways carved into the stone. On the other side, they knew, it took the form of a wooden triptych, set high on the wall of the Church of the Hallowed Name’s old chapel. Waiting to be used once again.

They kept their vigil now, on this side, and Hector nodded. He stood side by side with Jonah, their chairs folded and set to the side of the mountain pass.

“Yeah,” Hector said, looking the doors up and down. Jonah looked over at him.

“I said, can you believe them?” Jonah said again. “Doing this again. Using this place to hurt people.”

“Yeah,” Hector said, looking away from Jonah back to the doors. “I can. Most people are awful. You’re no stranger to that.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” said Jonah, putting his hands in the pockets of his ripped yellow Scoutpost jacket. “I’ve spent plenty of time alongside hard people. They could be rude, cruel even. But deep down they had good hearts. Just, a lifetime of hardship will hide it pretty good.”

Hector frowned.

“A lifetime of hardship’s no excuse,” he said. “You can be better than that. Some of us choose to be. Maybe everyone’s born with a good heart, like when they’re children. Maybe for most of them it dies early.”

“I wasn’t trying to bring up your father,” Jonah said. “And you know that my own wasn’t a great example either. All I mean is, I think people are more good than evil, a lot of the time. So it’s unbelievable to me that anyone would stoop this low again. For a second time.”

“I mean, it’s power, isn’t it?” said Hector, eying the door. “The Instrumentalist had power. The power to kidnap and kill whoever he wanted. It’s power they worship. Not a god or a saint. We could put a bunch of rocks in front of this door, you know. Stop them from coming in.”

“The door opens inwards,” Jonah mused. “And I think open is all they need, rocks or not. Enough of this place would get through that it would serve their needs. The poor person they’d be torturing on the other side wouldn’t die; their soul wouldn’t escape until it was safely bound into that church organ. This place was supposed to make creating beautiful things without letting them die in the process possible. Not… that. Not that.”

“Right,” Hector said, and sighed. “Jonah, when they open that door again—and I have no doubt that they will—what are we going to do? Really?”

“What do you mean?” said Jonah, looking over to him.

“Make a big voice?” said Hector. “Spin the world? Scare them off for good? I see one of two options. Either, when that door opens, we take the key, and lock it from this side so that it never opens again. Or, we kill them all.”

Jonah’s brows furrowed.

“They’ll listen,” he said. “They’ll listen when I speak.”

“They’ll listen, but will they care?” Hector said softly. “These are people who slaughter others, Jonah. People like you and me. That’s what they said. I don’t know if they’ll be scared of us just because we’re from the other side. If they’re not, what are you going to do?”

“I guess we’ll see,” said Jonah. Hector opened his mouth to say more, but there was a quiet shift, then, a click, and he knew instantly what was coming.

He and Jonah faced the door, and its lock shifted as a key slid in on the other side, and turned. And then there was a boom as the doors flexed, and pushed open. The chapel on the other side was dark, and only the smallest glimpse of light in distant red stained glass window illuminated it. Even from here, Hector could see the church organ, and it became surrounded by the misty white presence of spirits as Jonah’s world made contact with the one outside. But first and foremost, there was a man standing in the doorway, one whom Hector had never seen before.

He was bald, mostly, except for wisps of grey hair that clung to the sides of his head. He looked rather like the kind of man that would ask you about conspiracy theories outside of a gas station. He had a hawklike nose, and an intense gaze that caught Hector and Jonah both in its sights. His thin-lipped smile said nothing of his actual emotions. He wore robes, like a nativity scene actor, and one of his hands was silver, skeletal bones, with no flesh at all.

“Greetings, gentlemen,” said the stranger. “I am Tiberius Laevinus, disciple of the Black Eternity.”

“Hello,” Jonah said. “Are you the man who’s been using my realm to imprison the souls of Scout City in a church organ?”

“Not the one who began its construction,” said Tiberius, folding his hands. “But the one who is going to finish it. You fancy yourself the protector of this place?”

“Not the one who was appointed to it,” said Jonah. “But the one who protects it now. Destroy the organ and surrender the key, or I will kill you and every last one of your followers in a storm of destruction the likes of which you have never seen.”

“Nice,” Hector said quietly. Jonah’s balled-up fists were shaking.

“A shame,” said Tiberius, spreading his hands. “I had come to speak diplomacy to you. But you are only a man, serving a god, just as I do. The difference between us is that your god is dead, and mine is surely alive. You wish to kill every last one of my followers? Allow me to introduce you to the first.”

Hector nudged Jonah, and gave him a dire look. Now. If you are going to do this, strike this man dead now. Never let an enemy get to the end of their talking. Strike first and hard, before they expect it. But even as the man’s gaze shifted away, to something on his side of the cabinet, Hector could not catch Jonah’s gaze. He knew what lurked in Jonah’s eyes, even now: Jonah was looking for a sign, any indication that there was some reason not to kill the man before him.

Even now, Jonah was waiting.

Hector grit his teeth. He was not as patient a man as Jonah Duckworth. He slung his wooden hand back, and his fingers flexed, his barklike wrist cracked, and his hand detached from his arm completely; he began to whirl it on the long black strand of vine that connected it to his arm, as he might once have prepared to sling his old dredging line and hook.

But there was a person coming to step in front of Tiberius, then; clearly someone much younger, in her early 20’s. She wore black pants, boots, and a cloak that obscured much of her figure, and it came to a head wearing a mask. The cracked white splinters took him a moment to recognize as piano keys. Central to her mask was a black, eyeless grin, that stretched from one side of the mask to the other.

“Please,” said Tiberus, to her. “Introduce these gentlemen to the meaning of eternity.”

“Cease,” Jonah said, and his voice had become a massive thunder that echoed through the stony crags of the mountain. A burning green crown of flame hovered brightly over his head. “Turn away, you who enter here, and begone. This is the realm of the Changing of the Age, the Garden of the End. It is sacred, and his bones that are buried here keep it so. You defile this haven with your presence.”

The sky shook; stones tumbled down from either side of the pass. But Tiberius and the masked stranger remained, and with dismay Hector looked down to the stranger’s mask and found that it was weeping. Or drooling? Pure black liquid trailed down from the piano mask’s black grin, ran in rivulets down the white keys of its chin, and dropped into the ground, and immediately there was a transformation happening. Where the black ichor touched the ground, the obsidian stones lost their luster; it was as if they were black silhouettes, nothing more. But it did not stop with one stone. Behind the stranger with the piano mask, Tiberius had his eyes closed as if in prayer; his hand of silver bones outstretched, outstretched over the head of the stranger, over the entirety of Jonah and Hector’s world. And the darkness that blanketed the ground was sweeping outwards, then, spreading across every stone and…

It cannot. Truly it cannot. This is, as Jonah Duckworth said, a sacred place. He cannot touch here. How dare he.

But the fire is gone in Jonah’s crown, and Hector reaches for his arm, feeling a dread run through him like none that he has ever faced before, and they both begin to run, running from the shadow that sweeps across the ground. I have never seen it spread like this, dreamer. It consumes not just one stone, but stone after stone after stone, leaping from one to the next, pulling thousands of tons of rock into the vast abyss of… nothing. Jonah and Hector flee, but they are old men, even gifted with all the gifts of Marolmar himself they are old, and do not run quickly. Jonah calls upon his authority to craft, to create, and puts a mighty wall between himself and the growing, sinking expanse of black.

It is not simply tears that pour from Piano’s mask, now, but a flooding torrent of darkness, like a geyser from the mask down into the shadow at her feet, and the faintest sound of her chokes and sobs. And… as Jonah and Hector flee, the shadow claims it.

This world.

This workshop.

We spent so many quiet starlit hours in this place, waiting to go back to a changed universe. The darkness spreads in every direction, to every horizon, washing over the stones.

It takes the infinite circle.

It takes the tomb, swallowing up the carvings that I made until it is only a shadow of its former self.

It takes the bones of Marolmar that are buried in the sepulchre beneath.

Urnundurn, how dare you. How dare you touch this place.

It is funny, Hector thinks, how things—even the things that seemed like the safest haven, an untouchable happiness—change.

It is… it is all dark, dreamer. Within minutes.

The sky of green stars flickers out.

In all the vastness of Marolmar’s World, there is only an open doorway into an old chapel, where Tiberius Laevinus stands with his disciple. He tells her to stop, and she stops. He tells her to come, and she departs, stepping through the door again, and then the door closes, and only a keyhole of light shines in.

This is too much. This, he cannot take from me.

Urnundurn, you must have been prepared to fight the entire Council of Heavens when you began to wage war on the edges of this universe.

But now, you must prepare to fight me. And I assure you, I am more ferocious than all the rest put together.

What lies beyond the edge of this universe?

When I am done with you, it will be darkness new longer, but an unknown horizon where an endless emptiness is remembered by no one. No story will be told of you that lives for the next generations of this universe to hear.

I will make it so.

But I must return now to the Hallowoods.

The bonus story that goes with this episode is called 'Shudder' and is available on the Hello From The Hallowoods Patreon. Consider joining for access to all the show's bonus stories, behind-the-scenes and more! Until next time, dreamer, don’t turn off the light. It is needed in many places throughout the universe, and it plays a vital role in supporting life on many planets.