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“On your knees, Bondrewd,” Ozen commands, her voice low and steady as always, as she slowly tugs at each fingertip of her right glove to loosen its hold on her hand.
“Of course,” Bondrewd replies with his usual perfect composure. He drops to a kneel without regard for potential injury, his knees hitting the concrete floor with a noise that sounds painful. Typically his clothes are reinforced by armor—including hard pads sheltering his joints—but the version of his uniform he has on now has the protection removed from it.
Ozen tosses her glove to the side, leaving it to lie on the floor, and uses her bare hand to touch her whistle, focusing on the crevices of it. She crosses the few meters of distance between herself and Bondrewd and crouches down before him. He stares at her silently and steadily, offering her no reaction. She studies him, trying to find any cracks in his composure through his mask; she knows better than to think she could uncover any so early on but she likes subjecting him to the scrutiny. She wonders if he’s capable of the same self-consciousness under observation that actual people are. Doubtful.
Finally she puts three fingertips under his chin to tilt his head up slightly. “You are an irredeemable monster—” Lyza’s favorite word falls from her tongue easily. “—and I am going to destroy you.”
She doesn’t know how much she means it when she calls him that; it’s true she thinks his moral worth is catastrophically negligible, but she has no particular hang-ups about it. He conducts his experiments out of her sight and abstains from them when she’s visiting Ido Front, and the only information about those experiments he makes her privy to during conversations and through written correspondence is the bare minimum she needs to understand the substance of his findings. She knows the general idea of what he does to his test subjects, humans and animals alike, and she doesn’t have it in her to care overmuch so long as she doesn’t have to watch any of it happen. But regardless of all that, he is, objectively, an irredeemable monster; it’s just that she doesn’t care.
“Give me your worst, Ozen,” Bondrewd says. His tone suggests no particular anticipation or impatience and it’s nearly frustrating to listen to. “It would be an honor of the highest order to be subjected to your power as unrestrained as it can be without pulverizing this mortal vessel.”
Ozen stands up so she can more effectively look down on him. She places her whistle in her mouth, biting down on it and blowing it so forcefully her vision tunnels for a second. Gangway’s purple light pulsates gently, intensifying mildly with the sound and returning to its normal level of brightness when it stops. His preparedness for something like that leaves him without much visible reaction.
The Thousand-Man Pins thrum with Abyssal strength, as if the default boost in strength the pins provide her wasn’t enough as is. She tugs off her other glove, tosses it aside to lie with the other, and drops the whistle from her mouth.
She raises one of her legs to prepare for a kick and allows Bondrewd to sit with the expectation of a blow for a moment before landing one. Her foot slams into his side and he falls easily; she doubts he would be able to stay upright if he wanted to, without his extra armor and in a position unready for combat. He offers no further reaction, however, and not for the first time Ozen has to wonder what his perception of pain is like. She knows he’s capable of experiencing it, but after selling his humanity she’s only ever seen him react to it with excitement, amusement, fascination, or nothing at all.
She kicks him onto his back, and he keeps his wrists tucked firmly behind himself at the small of his back. She brings her foot down forcefully on his stomach and leans her weight onto it. In all her life, she has never had the vaguest inkling of interest in men, but it’s impossible not to savor the way he submits so fully to her; he is one of the most powerful men in the world and has spent over a decade effortlessly avoiding the bounty on his head. There are so many governments across the world who would pay anything to have him taken out and yet no bounty hunter can be convinced to come after him. No reward is worth the promise of death at the hands of a man so cruel that most people are reluctant to believe a single person could truly do all that he has.
The power trip makes up for the lack of sexual attraction. His fascination with her in general has, in recent years, become a bit of a sexual thing for her as well. He worships the Abyss, and because his interest in her is due to all the ways the Abyss has warped and altered her physically and mentally, he worships her as well, in a sense. He considers humans to be fragile and life to be disposable; for him to be invested in her not as a person or a tool but as a product of the Abyss’s miracles is a feat she’s astounded she could pull off even with the countless many modifications she’s made to her body.
It’s never been sexual for him, however. Once upon a time, he considered her enticing in such a fashion and she’s sure—at lower ranks, before Zoaholic—he likely touched himself thinking of her more than a few times; but he respected her exclusive attraction to women and never bothered her with his attraction to her, so she never minded. But when he lost his personhood, he lost his capacity for sexual interest and his libido. He didn’t miss it, either, finding that he preferred existing that way. It was a useless inclination trashed, one less human drive to get in the way of his research.
But then Ozen tapped into something somehow. It’s to do with the relics embedded in her flesh, the relic-activating power of the life-reverberating stones, the relics Bondrewd is bound to and particularly attached to. She doesn’t understand how it works but according to him, it’s the closest thing he can get to sexual stimulation—but better, he claims, and infinitely more worth his while due to it being a product of the Abyss in some way.
Far be it from her to question him. He is the scientist between the two of them, and she can’t imagine she would be any less fixated on exploring an indescribable extra sensation unlocked by the Abyss if she found she could experience such a thing. If anything, there’s satisfaction to be derived from helping him tap into it and attempt to figure it out.
“This body is going to be useless when I’m finished with it,” Ozen says.
He looks up at her, and she knows he’s beaming with enthusiasm. He’s bafflingly expressive despite the helmet. “Yes. I look forward to it.” His voice is a bit strained, though it seems to be due to nothing else but the pressure on his organs limiting his oxygen intake. One of his hands squirms free from where it’s pinned beneath him so he can grab at her ankle, trying to pull more of her weight onto his torso. It doesn’t work, because she can’t spare any more there without risking the integrity of her balance. “Pain hasn’t been uncomfortable or unpleasant for a very long time by now.”
Ozen doesn’t plan on killing this body, though she could easily inflict enough injury to cause it to die in the aftermath. She briefly wonders if she ultimately will, then concludes that it’s almost certain. This body is still human despite the inhuman entity residing within it, not yet warped with the “blessing” he had been so excited to discover. He is thrilled each time he imposes it on another stolen vessel, and although Ozen retains the ability to be rightfully disturbed by his willingness to use children as he does, she is also perversely curious about the results.
She’ll have to ask him later on to let her batter and break open one of his vessels after it’s taken on the “blessing.” She wants to know more. But for now she’ll shelve the idea.
She lifts her foot off of him so she can slam it back down on the right side of his ribcage. The bones don’t make a sound but it feels like they’ve crunched somewhat and bent beneath her boot, and Bondrewd lets out a soft wheeze.
“Do you ever miss suffering?” she asks, leaning over him so she can step more heavily on his ribs. Something does audibly crack, then, and it gives way a little more.
“I have no real way to quantify or qualify something like that,” he replies, and finally he sounds like he’s getting breathless. “When I could suffer, I don’t think I suffered as humans generally do. I can’t explain it. I wasn’t able to back then, and now I can’t recall it well enough. But pain can no longer impede on anything I wish to do.”
It’s such an inhumanly clinical reply, exactly what could be expected of him. Ozen wonders if she can break his coherence. She doubts it, but she wants to try.
She steps off of him and kneels so she can push up his shirt to inspect his stomach. Most of it has gone pink and red with little grey-purple splotches of bruising already beginning to bloom. She pushes on the ribs she smashed and finds that they bend easily; they must be broken.
“How does this feel?” she asks. She isn’t seeking any answer she isn’t already able to predict.
Bondrewd makes a huffing sound that she suspects is meant to be a laugh. “I want more.”
“Of course you do.”
She presses down harder on the broken ribs, feeling along each one to find the fracture. The muscles of his abdomen twitch involuntarily under the prodding and his breathing, nearly too quiet to hear, visibly picks up. She pushes a hand beneath his shirt to rest her palm on his chest, checking his heartbeat; unsurprisingly, it’s racing.
There’s a creaking sensation as she leans her weight on it, pressing down on the bones protecting his heart. He doesn’t react until it feels as if she might cave in his chest cavity; he exhales harshly, then, and draws his shoulders back as much as he can against the floor to press up into her palm.
She puts her whistle in her mouth, presses her tongue into the opening of it, and drags a finger from the top of Gangway’s shaft of purple light to the bottom of it. Bondrewd shudders. She drags her finger back up and continues stroking it over the crevice, holding an angle that causes her nail to scrape against the metal at either side. His breathing becomes more audible. She flattens her palm over the helmet and blows her whistle, and a tremor runs through his whole body.
When his muscles release the tension holding them firm, Ozen removes her hand from the helmet. “I know those—reactions are not orgasm, but could I make it too much to bear if I was to continue?”
“That assumes the existence of ‘too much,’ which may not exist in the first place.” Save for the unevenness of his breathing, he sounds mostly normal.
Whether it was intended to be or not, she takes it as a challenge. “Too much will exist even if I have to create it myself.”
“Is that a promise?” The mild breathless strain in his voice does nothing to obscure his delight.
“I don’t say things I don’t mean, and I don’t make empty threats.”
“I hardly see it as a threat. I would like nothing more than for you to make good on it.”
Ozen doesn’t reply; it would be a waste of words. She begins running her finger over the purple line of light, again and she jams the fingertips of her other hand against the most prominent forming bruise. The ribs beneath it bend under the force and she has the brief urge to keep pushing until one of them punctures the lung it’s meant to be protecting. But it wouldn’t do to kill him right now, like this, when it would interrupt whatever it is they’re doing.
“It’s difficult to breathe when you do that,” Bondrewd comments. “It feels nice.”
“Do you think I could push you far enough to make pain bother you again?”
“No. I believe that’s an impulse reserved for the living.”
It’s an answer she could have expected. He doesn’t need to articulate the details of what he meant, because he has expressed being some type of nonlife to her before. According to him, the entity he is can’t be categorized as “alive” after the resignation of his humanity; the vessels he uses to interact with the world and with others are alive and cease being usable when they die, but that doesn’t mean he is alive. And how could it? The first thing he did after selling his personhood to the Abyss was kill his original body. Someone else previously owned every other body he has utilized after that point.
In a sense, he’s a parasite, and one Ozen finds particularly unsettling. Like any parasitic organism found in nature, Bondrewd doesn’t act maliciously or spitefully. Despite his sentience and his capacity for highly complex, intelligent thought, he lacks the ability to experience anything that could lead to malice or spite. But unlike those naturally occurring parasitic organisms, he has the capacity for love, enthusiasm, and a deep, nuanced fascination with the world. It makes him more dangerous, less fathomable.
She considers replying but opts not to. She quits prodding at his ribs and instead raises her hand in preparation for a punch. She brings the blow down hard on his abdomen, and he wheezes and chokes. She finds that she likes the sound, so she repeats the action, this time with more strength behind her punch. He chokes again, coughs a few times, and gags so hard so can hear it; then he rolls over onto his side and removes his helmet so quickly he drops it. He gags a few more times before vomiting on the floor.
“Oh, my,” Ozen says mildly. “An oversight on my part. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Bondrewd wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and lays back down. “This body retains all the usual functions of a living, mortal human. The only way it’s not one is in how it’s had its original soul trashed to make room for me.”
“It’s easy to forget.”
“I’m not surprised. I forget, and I’m the one using it.”
This one is much different than his first one. Even so long after the death of the original human being Bondrewd had been, Ozen is able to pick out each little detail of difference in every new vessel. This one is blond, with fewer curls and a horribly pallid complexion that accentuates the dark bruise-purple shadows beneath his seafoam eyes. This one had been young for a Black Whistle, somewhere around twenty-four if Ozen were to guess—too young for her to have any interest in, if not for the knowledge that the man puppeteering it is an Abyssal entity who was older than this body when she met him and is, by now, functionally ageless.
Ozen reaches for Bondrewd’s whistle. “Does this feel like anything?”
“A bit.” He pauses and massages his jaw. “In my teeth. And I believe in my bones as well. It’s slight, but very odd.”
“Interesting.” She uses her other hand to take the one Bondrewd has on his jaw, lifts his whistle, and places the back of his hand on his chest so she can place his whistle on his palm. “And like this?”
“It feels like… more. It’s vibrating in my joints.” He reaches for his helmet, and holds it against his side rather than putting it back on. “It’s very nice.”
Ozen blows her whistle, just hard enough to create a sound. Bondrewd’s eyes go slightly hazy for a second as his breath catches, and he smiles broadly at her when he recovers.
“Could I persuade you to do that again?” he asks. “Harder, this time?”
She considers denying his request for a moment. He wouldn’t complain if she did and wouldn’t press her about it; his self-control is unbreakable. But she complies, pulling in a deep breath as she puts the mouthpiece of her whistle between her lips to free her other hand to set her palm over Gangway’s faceplate. The light is so dim it’s almost out, but when she blows out full-force, it flares brighter than she thought it could without being worn. Bondrewd responds well, jolting against the ground and exhaling harshly, and with how his eyes flutter shut for a moment it really does look like he’s coming.
“That good, huh?” Ozen says.
“Yes,” he breathes, delighted. “Absolutely marvelous. It’s such a bizarre sensation, and I plan on explaining it to you the very second I figure out how to articulate it.”
“I can’t say I’m not curious.” She removes her hand from the helmet so she can finger at her whistle instead; she savors the way it makes his breath catch and his hands quiver. “Perhaps this will be what you need to be able to explain it?”
“Perhaps. But I can make no promises. It’s very—inhuman.”
“Most things about you seem to be these days.”
He huffs out a breath of laugher, smiling with amusement. “Yes, that’s true. It’s been that way for quite a while now, hasn’t it?”
“Mm.” She stands. “I’m going to try something.”
“I look forward to it.”
She approaches the Soul-Slave Machine where it stands closed and inactive. She lightly touches the most bulbous part of it, careful not to put any pressure on it as her fingertips run across the uneven surface. After a few moments, she rests her fingertips against the crevice just above the dark reddish leaf-like bottom of it. Bondrewd sits up to watch her, clutching his side to support his broken ribs.
“Tell me if this feels like anything,” she says.
“I’m not getting anything,” Bondrewd says, “but that may be because it’s currently resting.”
“I haven’t done what I’ve intended yet.”
“Oh. Please do proceed, then.”
Ozen didn’t need extra input for it. She starts by jamming her fingers against the crevice as hard as she can and digs her fingernails into the fleshy material it’s made of. It doesn’t give but she hadn’t expected it to. She reaches up to grasp her whistle and Bondrewd’s gaze goes out of focus for a second. She blows it and he shudders to hard he collapses onto the ground, landing on his front, cheek against the cold stone floor and forearm crushed between the floor and his body.
“That feels like something,” he confirms.
“I assumed, based on that reaction,” Ozen says.
She doesn’t stop what she’s doing with her hand against Zoaholic, and continues feeling at her whistle with her other one. She puts the whistle in her mouth to free up her other hand, and she tongues idly at the hole as she scratches her nails against the fleshy outside of the Soul-Slave Machine. Bondrewd gasps and his breaths begin coming more rapidly, and he looks about ready to shake apart.
“Gloves off, hand on your whistle,” Ozen orders.
His hands tremble as he tugs his hands free of his gloves, making the effort clumsy and inelegant in a way that’s incredibly rare for him. He drops them carelessly on the floor, and while he goes back to clutching at his broken ribcage, he uses his other hand to grasp his whistle. His fingers twitch away, releasing it, as if the sensitivity of it is too much, but he grabs it again and this time he squeezes it forcefully.
Ozen wonders if the fact that this is how he uses it by default changes anything. Sacrificing his original form had the inconvenient side effect of making it halfway incompatible with him, receptive to being touched but not so much to being blown. Getting it to sync with the inhuman soul utilizing a stolen body well enough that it could function at full power with physical contact required a long period of effort and patience, trial and error. It seems unlikely that he would be able to do much to mitigate the potency of the effects now, after how long he spent teaching himself and the soul-reverberating stone to get to this point.
“This is—” he starts, voice unsteady, but the rest of the sentence is lost with a sharp exhale.
“Have we reached ‘too much’ yet?”
“No. God, no.”
The simple statement registers in Ozen’s mind as a challenge. She removes her left hand from Zoaholic just long enough to put her whistle back in her mouth so she can blow it again. The dizziness from the first forceful blow hasn’t quite abated yet and her head is beginning to swim, causing a mild twinge of nausea to swirl about in her stomach, but it’s worth it. Bondrewd hisses through his teeth as he’s hit with another of his unexplained pseudo-orgasms. He squeezes his whistle tighter yet for several seconds before letting it go.
“Give me a moment,” he gasps, bracing an unreliable palm against the floor to push himself up. Ozen complies, eyeing him curiously.
“I haven’t even gotten to the whippets,” she says.
“You’ll get there. I need to mentally catalog this first.” He pauses for a long moment. “Denatonium. My mouth tastes like denatonium benzoate. It is the same taste that came with cracking my last vessel’s neck too hard.”
The reference to denatonium doesn’t bring to mind for her what it is, what it’s used for, or what it tastes like, but it strikes her intuitively as abnormal for anything to cause a person’s mouth to taste that way. She’s unconcerned, however.
“Why would that be the case?” Ozen asks.
“I don’t know,” Bondrewd says. “That’s why I’m so fascinated by it. But please do proceed.”
Ozen doesn’t hesitate. She grasps her whistle and punches Zoaholic as hard as she’s able to, cracking her knuckles against it and making her joints protest for a second. Bondrewd huffs out a heavy exhale and nearly falls again.
“Speaking of whippets,” she says, and kneels in front of him. She pulls one of the tiny metal canisters from her pocket. “I have three, in case I don’t consider one to be enough. I’m sure you wouldn’t complain.”
“No, it sounds quite nice,” he says.
“Of course it does. I’m not convinced you can go a week without some sort of drug.”
“I could, and easily. But things are far more fun with substances. You would know, wouldn’t you? With how often you drink.”
Fair point, Ozen thinks. At the end of the day, it isn’t different, regardless of what anyone else might be compelled to think. She knows well what alcohol can do to the human body, and it’s worse than almost anything Bondrewd has dumped into any of his, save for whatever untested injections he’s given himself for the sake of scientific research. It feels different, somehow, despite the fact she knows it’s not, but she knows better than to let herself be guided by unfounded impressions of things rather than what she knows to be true.
She pops the foil sealing the canister, brings it to Bondrewd’s nose, and covers the lower half of his face with her other hand. Inhaling it straight from the tiny canister is inadvisable, as the temperature of the gas inside it comes with the risk of inflicting frostbite to the nose, sinuses, and throat; it’s much safer to transfer it to a balloon or something similar to raise the temperature and inhale it from there. But neither of them expects this body to survive extensive injury long enough to heal, and the only reason she isn’t putting a bag over his face is because of the potential for instant death.
“I hardly ever do nitrous,” Bondrewd says when the canister is pulled away.
“Not as fun if the high is only a few minutes,” Ozen says.
“Precisely. That’s much of why I hate cocaine as well.” He draws in a deep inhale. “Cocaine doesn’t feel very nice, though. Nitrous is lovely once it takes effect.”
Ozen doesn’t agree. It generally takes a lot of anything intoxicating for it to hit her, but the single time she had whippets, decades ago, all it did for her was make her vomit as her head swam too badly to do anything but stay down on her hands and knees until the oxygen deprivation began to recede.
“Take off your boots,” she says.
Bondrewd smiles at her for a moment, searching her expression futilely for some hint as to why, then hums curiously as he complies. His hands fumble with the nitrous muddling his mind. Ozen reaches beneath her shirt for the sheath strapped to her side and pulls the dagger within it free.
“How much are you willing to allow this body to be fucked up?” she asks.
“The only line I’m drawing is at death,” Bondrewd replies. “Anything short of that is free game. As I said earlier—do your worst.”
She hands him the weapon. “Then cut the calcaneal tendon.”
He laughs as he takes the dagger, and doesn’t hesitate to comply. He grunts quietly as he leans forward, busted ribs pressing against his thighs, and places the sharp edge at the calcaneal tendon. The dagger slashes through flesh and tough collagen easily; his fingers twitch, the ones around the dagger hilt squeezing tighter and the ones on the floor scraping the skin from the fingertips against the concrete. Blood gushes out, scarlet staining the pale grey floor, and Ozen wonders if he’ll bother scrubbing it clean later. Part of her hopes not.
“The other one as well,” she says.
Bondrewd huffs out another laugh and does as ordered, and the second tendon severs as easily as the first. There’s as much blood as the first as well, soaking the ground in a spreading ruby pool shining in the dim light of the room.
“This is going to hurt much worse when the nitrous eases up,” he comments, a mild slur to his words. “That was your intention, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Ozen says. She pulls another canister from her pocket. “Let me give you another one.”
“That seems inadvisable.”
“No kidding. But I’m giving you another one.”
She pops open the whippet and holds it out for Bondrewd to inhale it. He offers no complaint as he breathes in the sweet fumes. This one seems to hit quicker, gaze glazing over from the extra fuel added to the high.
“Helmet on, hand on your whistle,” Ozen says, stuffing the empty can in her pocket.
Bondrewd nods and complies, his awareness clearly wavering. His moves are slightly sluggish, his eyes shift around slowly and blankly, and his breaths come audibly and with effort. Gangway’s purple light is unsteady, pulsing arrhythmically. He looks bizarrely vulnerable like this, though without giving Ozen the impression she could meaningfully exploit him. Drugs rarely addle his mind too much and often don’t bring him to a point beyond successfully feigning sobriety, but something about this has severed his connection to himself and the surrounding world beyond what Ozen had been hoping for. It’s a wonderful thing to behold.
Ozen places a palm over Gangway, partially obscuring the line of light, and Bondrewd leans into her touch. She considers blowing her whistle again but she knows the number of times she can do that within such a short space of time is limited, and she’s probably nearing it. It’ll take more than a few more times to push her to collapse but it won’t be long until she gets too dizzy to stand properly. She chooses to simply touch it instead.
The reaction is immediate. His weight falls against her as his strength fails entirely, and the skin over his knuckles is pulled into a perfectly colorless white with the tightness of his grip. He whines outright now, shaking and panting and shoving as much pressure against his broken ribs as his quavering hand will permit.
“I think—” he starts, slurring, then falters. He swallows harshly and the air leaves his lungs in a noisy rush. “I’ll be able to put it into words, later.”
“Intriguing,” Ozen deadpans. “And all it took was being reduced to this.”
“You say it as if—as if it’s a shameful thing.” He gives a small, frail laugh. “I don’t find it to be so.”
“Anything for research. Anything for more knowledge.”
“Yes—precisely. If it’s about the Abyss, anything.”
“Obviously. I’m not finished with you yet, though.”
“Oh, wonderful. But I fear everything feels—far too much. I’m not requesting you stop, but—but I doubt you’ll be able to wring out any more of these…” His words fail. It’s surprising it took until he reached a matter he didn’t have an easy, single-word descriptor for; he’s slurring so bad every syllable is running messily into the next. Ozen is confident it would all be incomprehensible to her if she wasn’t already so used to his accent.
“Pseudo-orgasm, I guess,” she suggests.
“Close enough, yes. I don’t think—any more of those are possible. Even the previous one was… I had my doubts about it before it happened.”
“That’s fine. One more once the nitrous wears off, and I’ll let you recover.”
He laughs. “I won’t be recovering. I think I’ll be leaving this body for dead when we’re finished.” He makes an abstract motion with his hand. “And if you believe you can draw me over that… edge again, I welcome you to use any and all means you see fit.”
“This is going to hurt.”
“Marvelous! I look forward to it.”
Ozen pulls him toward her and he’s practically a limp doll in her hold, giving not the barest hint of resistance. She turns him away from herself, grabs him under his arms, and stands up, hauling him up with her. Never could a human man weigh more than she could easily lift, but she notes that this body is lighter than his original one and significantly lighter than his previous one. The blood from the severed tendons is soaking her boots; the laces are going to be stained with it forever, even if they’re too dark for the color to show.
“You were being quite serious,” Bondrewd says. His head falls back against her, just below her chest.
“This isn’t all yet,” she replies.
“No?”
“No.” She pulls him along, dragging his feet along the stone until they reach Zoaholic. “I want you to hold as much of your weight as possible.”
“Oh—how brutal. And in case you’d like to know, I fear sobriety may begin creeping back in soon.”
“That’s fine. Hands on the Soul-Slave Machine.”
He places both palms against it without further comment. Ozen uses a forearm across his upper abdomen to keep him up so she can free her other hand. She tugs at his collar to loosen it up slightly and drops his whistle down the front of it. Zoaholic squirms, its fleshy outer layer rippling with internal activity, and Bondrewd’s breath stutters.
“This is—fascinating,” he breathes. “But hardly enough. You’ll need to put in more effort.”
“Yeah, figured.”
She reaches for Gangway and splays her hand over its surface, and a pulse of energy runs through her pins. She isn’t used to making direct physical contact with other relics, and especially not ones that aren’t her own; she hasn’t yet adjusted to the strange energy that crackles across the entire network of relics embedded in her own body when she touches one that’s activated. It’s fascinating to her that Gangway is properly active at present. She didn’t realize how much activity could go on within it outside of it being used for violence or for experimentation; she had figured it lay largely dormant at times when Bondrewd had no need for its primary purpose.
But this makes sense as well, she reasons. The glow must be powered by something, especially considering the way the intensity of it fluctuates.
Bondrewd leans on the palms braced against the Soul-Slave Machine when Ozen stops holding him up with her other arm. There’s only so much he can do to support himself with his calcaneal tendons cut so she shifts the position of her hand on his helmet so she can angle her arm downward, helping to keep him up with an elbow against his chest.
She starts fingering her whistle and he jerks, and without the added support of her forearm he would’ve collapsed. She scrapes a nail over each of the crevices in her whistle’s design and she can feel each tremor that twitches through Bondrewd. His heart is pounding aggressively and his breaths are coming short and rapid.
“I fear I can’t—” he starts, uneven breaths adding a quaver to his voice.
“You will,” Ozen murmurs. “You will.”
And he does. She bites the mouthpiece of the whistle with all the force she can manage without breaking any of her teeth, and he responds with a violent jerk and a series of brief, staccato gasps.
“I’m thinking one more, for good measure,” she says.
“Ambitious,” he says, “and unrealistic.”
“We’ll see.”
Before he has a chance to respond, she lets go of him. He lurches forward and collapses. He hits the ground and his head slams against the stone floor. He laughs breathlessly on impact, and tries to roll over without any success.
Ozen’s foot comes down hard against his back, forcing a choked gasp from him. She then nudges him with the toe of her boot as if trying to roll him from his stomach only to use the force of a kick to turn him over.
“Continuing won’t give you the results you want.” He states it as a simple fact, not a complaint or a protest or a request for her to cease.
The Abyss has been Ozen’s primary residence long enough for her to know when dealing with a thing of the Abyss has a low chance of a worthwhile outcome. These days, it’s rare for calling quits on anything to be the better option, but it happens from time to time—and she is confident this isn’t one of those times. In all the decades she has been a White Whistle, her instincts about the Abyss haven’t once led her astray. She has no reason to believe they will now.
“We’ll see, I said,” she repeats, then puts her whistle in her mouth.
She kneels over him, one knee on either side of him, and drops herself down all at once to sit on his torso. He wheezes at the sudden weight landing on him and punching the air from him. She places a hand on his ribs and leans onto them to feel them bend beneath the pressure, then touches his whistle through his shirt. He doesn’t try arguing against her goal again, allowing her to do what she wants. It’s not as if it’d be unfortunate for him for her to continue; there’s a gratification that comes from the pain that no human would be capable of comprehending.
She slowly eases her weight onto his whistle, ignoring the way it begins to hurt her palm as it presses into it. Eventually she can hear a dull crack, and Bondrewd sucks in a sharp, quiet inhale. His sternum bends slightly and she keeps going until it gives further, fracturing with a muffled crunch she feels more than she hears. As soon as his sternum breaks, she bears down on Gangway with her other hand, draws in a deep breath, and blows all the air from her lungs with as much force as she can manage.
Bondrewd seizes almost violently, the stolen vessel pinned beneath her going rigid as he lets out some pathetic, strangled sound. There are a few tremors that wrack his body, jostling Ozen slightly. The satisfaction of doing something he had so adamantly insisted was impossible is thrilling.
There’s a blankness in the way he looks up at her afterward, baffled and impressed and with a head fully empty of anything else. She wants the satisfaction of seeing his face so she sits up and removes his helmet. She isn’t disappointed—his eyes are glassy and unfocused and distant, and the only thing that touches his expression is the vague suggestion of wonder.
“Shit,” Ozen says. “This is pretty good.”
“You’re bleeding,” Bondrewd murmurs.
As expected. Her attention is drawn to the wetness dripping from her nose right as it hits her upper lip, and she wipes it with the back of her hand. More begins trickling out immediately afterward and she doesn’t bother wiping it away again. “Figures.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you exert yourself by using your whistle before.”
“No, you wouldn’t have. It’s been a while since my limit was low enough that I could reach it under… normal circumstances.”
“Well, I consider this an honor, then.”
Ozen shrugs, then stands up. “So what are we doing with this body?”
“Oh, I think the only way to salvage this one would be to incur the sixth layer’s blessing very soon, and that would not guarantee anything anyway. I’d rather not go through the trouble. I’ll find a different primary body and leave this one for dead—unless you would rather do the honors of putting it permanently to rest?”
“Yeah. I’ll kill it.”
Ozen sits down on the floor beside Bondrewd, watching the now-stagnant pool of blood that had spilled from the injuries he inflicted upon himself. Neither of them speak as they wait for another one of the Praying Hands to arrive.
When the chosen Praying Hand enters the room, the Soul-Slave Machine activates. Ozen picks up Bondrewd’s helmet, rises to her feet, and holds it out to him. He removes his own helmet and exchanges it with Gangway, and as she stands with his helmet in her hands, he puts on the one she gave to him.
“Thank you,” he says with a cadence and timbre that are not quite Bondrewd’s.
“Yeah,” she says. “This too.” She bends down to remove the white whistle from the dying body left on the floor and hands it over as well. He takes it without the sort of expressiveness Bondrewd possesses.
“Wonderful—perfect,” he says, and his voice now aligns with what she expects of Bondrewd. He has vacated the body on the floor, at least for the most part, and Zoaholic slowly begins closing back up again. He motions toward the abandoned vessel. “The privilege is all yours, Ozen.”
Blood continues dripping from Ozen’s nose, spilling over her mouth and down her chin and soaking into her collar. Something relatively clean would make the most sense and result in the easiest cleanup, but violence takes a while to wear off of her. She raises her foot and drives it down on the body’s head. The cranium crunches, brain matter squishes wetly, blood and cerebrospinal fluid spatters.
“Quite the display,” Bondrewd comments.
“Yeah.”
“Come now, Ozen. You can take a bath and I’ll get your shoes cleaned. And I have something to help with your nose as well.”
“A bath is fine. The bleeding will stop whenever it does.”
“Ah, yes, I suppose I should have expected a response like that.”
Bondrewd refuses to allow her to run her own bath, and upon seeing that her whole outfit has some amount of blood on it, he takes it all to be washed. The water is so hot that all the skin uncorrupted by the Thousand-Man Pins turns pink instantly upon exposure. It’s comfortable and refreshing, and the heat melts away the violence still clinging to her mind.
She wants to leave as soon as her clothes are clean, but the strain of using her whistle so much weighs heavily upon her and puts an exhausted ache in her joints. She spends the rest of the day in Bondrewd’s chambers as he sits at his desk, alternating between looking through one of his tomes, written in netherglyph, and writing in a notebook. She leaves the next day without informing Prushka of her arrival, with a sealed envelope from Bondrewd tucked in her backpack with more care than she usually affords to letters.
Ozen:
I planned on articulating the bizarre sensations yesterday, but as I was doing your laundry, I found myself struggling to structure any explanation in a coherent way. I finally fully understood what I was feeling, but I doubt anything I could have said to you would have been understood—not because you are not highly intelligent beyond what I expect of anyone else aside from my Praying Hands, but because of how messy anything I could say would have inevitably been. What I was writing while you recovered from the exhaustion and winding down for the night was a series of attempts to find a way to structure my words in a cohesive manner able to be grasped by a person. I believe I have succeeded.
Firstly, and most interestingly to me, I can say with complete certainty that there is nothing sexual about it, regardless of how the reactions may outwardly appear. It is, perhaps, something similar to how reactions to pain can, in some cases, look the same as reactions to pleasure, and vice versa, but I cannot confirm if that’s related or if it’s merely coincidence.
It is overall an incredibly overwhelming experience. Thinking becomes difficult, and the sensory input is such that it seems nearly all-consuming. The sensation is largely in my bones, teeth, and heart, as if something is scraping at the insides of my bones and teeth and as if something is trying to compress and expand my heart at the same time. There was also an odd sensation in my head, as if there were claws scraping at the inside of my skull. I’m sure that all sounds deeply unpleasant, but it was incredibly nice. It cleared out my mind in a way that benzodiazepines used to but cannot anymore.
I’m glad you thought of using nitrous oxide. That is what enabled me to make sense of everything. The nitrous high alongside the sensation of everything else clarified it. I am eternally grateful, and I consider it a great honor that you were willing to spare your time and energy on this. Thank you.
Until next time,
Bondrewd