C.E. Mutphy - Hands of Flame

She stretched her hands out, not so much daring to touch the monster from the heart of the world as in worship, felt more deeply than she had words for. “My God, look at you. Thank you. Thank you for letting me see you.” She caught the tiny chess carving and held it up in her fingertips. “This is for you,” she said impulsively. “We do remember. Even humans. We do remember.” That the serpent in her personal mythology was most often passed off as a thing of evil seemed shallow and absurd in face of the great Leviathan. That it had offered the path to knowledge seemed the important part.

The serpent’s swirling vortex slowed as it brought its head in to examine the chess piece. Its eye was taller than she was; taller than herself and her guide put end to end. Margrit had no way to give words to the creature’s size, only that it dwarfed any living thing she’d ever imagined, and that she thought the earth’s molten core would look small in its coils. It studied her and her gift with inexpressible calm, then with great and slow deliberation, opened its mouth.

It did so very carefully, as if aware that it would suck Margrit, her guide, everything around them and half the ocean’s water in if it were to do so quickly. Even with its jaws barely parted, its gaping maw was cavernous, so dark and huge it couldn’t conceivably be something alive, but had to be some new-born formation torn from the ocean’s bed. Margrit hung in the water, frozen in bewildered incomprehension before realizing the vast serpent was accepting her gift. Trying not to laugh with terror, she kicked forward and very, very cautiously dropped the chess piece into the serpent’s gum beside a tooth so large it reached a vanishing point when she craned her neck to look up at it.

With a delicacy that belied its size, the serpent dipped its tongue—forked and unbelievably long—into its gum, wrapping it around the minuscule carving and flicking it back into its throat. It swallowed once, an action that slid along forever, then, with what seemed to Margrit to be incalculable amusement, flicked its tongue a second time, this time at her.

The world spun head over heels, and she opened her eyes in Grace’s council room to find she was soaked through and through, and that she held nothing at all in her hand where the chess piece had been.

The silence in the audience chamber was as impressive as the crushing pressure of the ocean depths. Biali, still across the table from her, stared wordlessly at her clothes. He looked as he had before their journey into memory: scarred and angry, but now also confused. Margrit stood up, water spilling down her thighs to puddle at her feet. “What the hell happened to me?”

“We thought you might tell us that yourself.” Alban, voice dry to hide concern.

Margrit turned to him helplessly, then back to the others. “I take it I’m not supposed to come back soaking wet.”

“It has never happened before,” Eldred allowed. “What memory did you follow? What words were you given?”

“Words? I—Ah, crap, I forgot all about that part of it. He—it, whatever—didn’t say anything. I don’t even know if it could talk. It probably would’ve vibrated me to pieces if it had.” Margrit closed her mouth abruptly, stemming her babble, then said more carefully, “I had a serpent in my hand. What was I supposed to see?”

“One of my long-lost brethren, presumably.” Janx opened his hands expansively, as if inviting the whole of the room to fall into that category. “One who might perhaps share some salty bit of sea wisdom to guide us all with. One who might tell you if any of his kind still live,” he said more quietly, and more sharply. Margrit’s face crumpled.

“No, sorry. None of that. What about you?” She turned to Biali, water droplets flying with the vigor of her motion. He passed a hand over his shoulder as if he’d brush water away, though she didn’t think she’d sprayed him. Then he opened that same hand, revealing one of the gargoyle rooks.

“I saw Hajnal, who reminds me that there is no greater force than the beating heart. Love conquers all,” he said, bitter growl to the words.

“Or life does.” Margrit dropped into her chair again, squelching, and curled a lip at the coldness of her leathers. “Sounds pretty sage to me.”

“And so it is,” Eldred said. “But your journey must be more fully explained, Margrit Knight. No one has ever come back wet. Where did you go?”

“The heart of the world.” Margrit repeated what she’d said to the siryn male, feeling as absurd to voice it now as she had then. She wanted flippancy in her voice, but instead she sounded as she felt: awed and very, very small. “I met an oroborus who’d let go of its tail, and gave it my chess piece.” She turned her empty palm up again, then let her hand fall. “It didn’t say anything, just ate the carving and sent me back home.”

With her last words she realized the profundity of silence that had fallen over the room, and twisted to look at the tribunal and its audience. To a being, they had the stillness that only the Old Races could accommodate, and of all of them, only Chelsea Huo watched Margrit.

The rest watched Chelsea.

She had risen at some point, perhaps while Margrit spoke, and now stood as if rooted deep in the earth, unmovable, unswayable, her apple-wizened face so neutral as to be terrible. Under that gaze Margrit felt as small as she had beside the oroborus, pinned in place by great weight and age and strength.

Chelsea did not, in actuality, shake herself, though some infinitesimal shudder ran through her and broke the stillness that held her captive. “You saw the serpent at the heart of the world? You offered him a gift?”

“Was that bad?” Margrit’s voice quavered and she cleared her throat, trying to embolden herself. “It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. He—he? He seemed pleased. What—who—is he?” Her palms were damp with sweat, but wiping them on her leather pants would’ve done no good even if the pants were dry. Margrit tried anyway, then hugged her arms around herself, feeling as though Chelsea’s answer might be a headman’s ax.

“He is the Serpent.” Daisani answered when Chelsea’s silence had gone on too long, and drew all eyes to himself by doing so. To Margrit’s astonishment, the vampire sounded very nearly reverent as he spoke, but recalling her own emotional reaction, she understood. “The same who litters your holy books and the same who entwines your healing staves. He is more than one of us, more than one of anything you might quantify. He is the beginning and the end of time, eternal in a way no other thing is. And he never lets go of his tail,” he added more prosaically, which earned a snort from Chelsea.

“He’s never had hold of his tail,” she said briskly, then shot a sharp-edged smile toward Daisani. “But they do say he knows the truth about where the vampires came from.”

Daisani’s gaze narrowed. Chelsea huffed an unimpressed breath, but Janx took attention from them with a murmur as soft and awestricken as Daisani’s own.

“They say he’s the counterpart to the mother of us all. That one can’t exist without the other, and neither of them can die until the end of the universe. No one in the history of the world has ever spoken with him.”

“The mother of us all? There’s a mother of us all?” Margrit came to her feet, her boots and clothes squishing.

“You would call her Gaia. Mother Earth,” Chelsea said with a degree of impatience. “A legend from which everything is born.”

“Her—mother—but—!” Margrit reined in her spluttering and lifted her hands to her head. “And this serpent is her counterpart? What, the death of us all? And I found him in the gargoyle memories? How’s that possible if nobody’s ever talked to him?”