15 – Silence Eternal

Erika realized that she might have been an idiot.

With the downfall of two gods notched on her belt, Erika saw another god and figured she could cross a third off her list. The Final Judge wasn’t even a massive monster, just a little, human-sized skeleton—hardly worth raising a bat over. The Monk looked more intimidating, the maggots were more disgusting, even a zombie felt frightening.

But it was a god.

And Erika was an idiot.

The Final Judge stood from the throne with the gravity of a glacier sliding down a mountain. It still didn’t look terrifying as it placed its tome on the table, slowly paging through it. It was just a lanky skeleton—almost comical in how small it was compared to Erika.

Erika couldn’t move. Her legs didn’t respond. Its mere words rooted her to the spot, pinning her in place more effectively than any enchanted glue. She couldn’t break free because there was nothing to break free from. Breaking herself out of a stupor normally worked, but now, all it did was let her realize how fucked she was.

It wasn’t even paying attention to her anymore. The Final Judge focused entirely on the tome, grinding its gaze over to the hourglass on occasion before flipping a page.

Mᴀᴅᴇʟɪɴᴇ Jᴏʏᴄᴇ. Yᴏᴜʀ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ᴇɴᴅᴇᴅ, ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ᴘᴇʀsɪsᴛ.

The words fell like a pallet of bricks. The speech wasn’t masculine or feminine. The words didn’t touch her ears, nor did they worm their way into her head like The Mind’s psychic voice. They simply were.

It took Erika breaking down her shock just to realize that the Final Judge wasn’t actually talking to her anymore. It said some name she had never heard before. With its attention directed elsewhere, Erika felt some of the pressure lessen. For the first time since it spoke and her subsequent stumble, Erika straightened her back. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Erika’s eyes flicked around, breaking from her unending stare at the Final Judge. The party ended abruptly. All the people Erika could see without turning her head were struck as dumb as she was. All but the furthest four were on their knees, heads slumped forward in a bow. Erika couldn’t tell if they were truly paying reverence to the god or if their muscles just couldn’t support themselves in its active presence.

The skull looked up, moving past Erika to settle above her head. Following its gaze, Erika found her ghost hovering high over the table, poised unnaturally still.

Yᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ ʙᴜᴛ ᴀ sᴍᴀʟʟ ғʀᴀɢᴍᴇɴᴛ, ᴏʙsᴇssᴇᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ғʀɪɢʜᴛᴇɴᴇᴅ.

The words thundered down once again. Knowing they weren’t aimed at her, Erika flinched only a little.

Her ghost wilted, withering and shrinking under the Final Judge’s gaze as if it were mummifying her with its stare alone.

Erika ground her teeth, dragging her foot forward through sheer determination across the tabletop. Pins and needles prickled her leg, like she had been sitting in one spot for far too long, but Erika didn’t know how long the Judge would remain distracted. With a grunt, she kicked, boot knocking against a bowl of glazed pecans.

It wasn’t her best kick, but the bowl still launched the pecans through the air. They arced, crashing back down with the force of all the power Erika could muster.

The table split and cracked. Plates, glasses, and bowls shattered into fragments. Each fragment exploded outwards, striking more and more of the table and the meal placed on top. A chicken bone went spinning through the air, thumping against one bowed man’s back and very obviously breaking it. The man made no response, not even a squeak of pain.

The rush of chaos compounded upon itself into a wave that swept down the table. The Final Judge moved, but just as slow and glacially as it had before, doing little more than pulling its hourglass back inside the long, dark cloak it wore loose over its bones. Despite it holding its cloak open, Erika couldn’t see where it put the hourglass—it simply vanished once it got close enough, like some reverse of what Erika could do with her armory.

Chaos rained down upon the grim reaper in the very next instant. Fragments of a butter knife broke straight through the reaper’s cloak, piercing its spine.

The reaper exploded. Shards of bone flicked outward, crashing into more of the skeleton. Erika got a clear view of what happened to The Monk when she broke every bone in his body, but without all the meat and flesh there to hold the broken bits in. The skeleton collapsed in on itself, cloak wafting gently to the throne. A mere trickle of wood and bone falling to the floor filled the silence, slowly fading out as the chaos settled.

The top of the throne toppled backwards, sending one final, resounding thud through the room as it landed on the black marble floor.

Erika breathed, panting heavy and hard, only now realizing that it felt like some icy claws had been wrapped around her lungs.

“Are you alright?” Erika asked between pants, glancing upward.

The ghost still hovered overhead, still there, but it retained its withered size. Erika didn’t know if ghosts could heal, or what that reaper had even done to begin with. The ghost managed a nod, and that was enough for now.

Erika doubted she had time to sit around and chat with the spirit—Madeline, presumably. That skeleton had used its final action to protect the hourglass, which was not the action of something about to die. Erika was willing to stake her abilities on that not being the end.

Two steps ahead of Erika, the table simply ended. There wasn’t much left but debris and a slowly settling cloud of dust. One thing remained intact.

The tome of the Final Judge sat on the floor, fallen off to one side of where the table had been. Despite the ruination around it, aside from a few scraps of food scattered over its open pages, it looked wholly untouched.

Erika hopped off the table’s end, boots splattering mashed potatoes around, but she paid it no mind, eyes on the book. Her thoughts warred in her mind, torn between fleeing until she had a better plan or staying to deal with this once and for all. The reaper claimed not to know The Mummy, but that didn’t mean anything; Erika had heard fifty different names for the same being in the last few months, so who knew which one the Final Judge recognized.

This had to be an aspect of The Mummy, and that meant it needed to go.

Trying to snatch that book from the reaper’s hands was what started the whole debacle, and yet Erika didn’t hesitate to grab hold of it, yanking it to her side. If it really did represent preservation, figuring out how to break it would be her best bet at getting rid of the Final Judge, though now she was thinking the hourglass was the more important object here. Quizzing Delilah could give her more insight, maybe a better title to focus on while trying to destroy this thing.

For that, she would have to get out of here.

After a brief glance over the tome—unreadable text, all of it—Erika turned.

None of the people around approached her as she tucked the book under her arm and stalked across the meal hall. Those who had been closest maintained their deep bows—not even the guy with the broken back stirred. Everyone else adopted wary looks riddled with concern, though Erika could tell that concern wasn’t meant for her. They backed away as she moved, fearful, all while shooting astonished looks at the broken throne.

Only one man remained where he was as Erika drew near.

The butler who greeted her at the door manifested in the crowd, not so much a part of it as he was apart from it. One hand nestled behind his back, he stared down at her with the slightest of frowns. “Must you have made quite such a mess?”

“Maybe tell your boss not to fuck with people who frequently make big messes.” Erika felt a slight tremor in her voice, like it had been ages since she last spoke and needed to practice a little again.

“And the chef will be so disappointed to find all his efforts have gone to waste. The humanity of it all…”

Erika shot one glance back. Ninety percent of the massive table was still completely intact, not that anyone was eating to begin with. All the food would have gone to waste regardless. Shaking her head, not getting drawn into antics, Erika glared the servant down. “How do I get out of here?”

“You wish to leave? You could have done so without making so much work for me. Did you not hear my master? Yᴏᴜ ᴅᴏ ɴᴏᴛ ʙᴇʟᴏɴɢ ʜᴇʀᴇ.”

Erika flinched back, but the words were not so oppressive this time, spoken aloud as they were. “Then maybe you people should work on your communication skills. And not harm my…” Erika trailed off, glancing back to find her ghost following slowly behind her. “My hitchhiker. Show me how to leave unless you want more of a mess to clean.”

He stared at her, lips pressed to a thin line, maintaining eye contact like he was trying to decide whether or not she actually would.

Erika would. She didn’t know what this guy was—maybe the Final Judge’s bird or maggot equivalent—nor did she know if threatening to smash this place up would inconvenience them. At this point, Erika didn’t care. Either they showed her a door or she would start smashing everything in sight until she figured out how to crack reality enough to slip through to the other side.

“Very well, Miss,” he said, turning to a door that Erika was mostly sure had not been there a moment ago. “If you would kindly follow me, I will show you to a suite where you may rest in peace—”

“Not a suite. An exit. A way out. A door to the real world.”

The servant paused, half turned back toward Erika. “I… am not sure I understand. There is no way back. Death is a one-way door.”

“I am not dead,” Erika hissed through clenched teeth. Shoving past the man, she swung her bat.

The door broke. Splinters of formerly fine wood flew through the air. Chunks of stone snapped away from the frame. Fissures spread in fractal patterns through the walls, bending around corners to the floor. The hallway behind the ruins of the doorway looked identical to the one she first walked through, all marble with stained glass windows between columns and pillars.

“Miss!” the butler called as Erika stalked through.

She didn’t stop. Letting the end of her bat drag along the floor, gouging out a long groove in her wake, Erika stalked into the hallway.

There were no other doors. Smashing out one of the windows got her nothing but a void—not even the light on her phone could ward it away enough to see the building’s exterior, let alone anything beyond. For all she knew, there wasn’t an exterior. Like that feast spread across the table, everything was for show.

Erika sought a thin point. Wherever the cultists made their portals, or where Carter had warped reality with The Stalker, she could break through. Since she arrived, there had to be one here, but she hadn’t felt anything where she first appeared.

Unless she really was dead, but Erika refused to consider that.

Would breaking the ring get her out? Erika could feel its case, a heavy weight in her pocket. She hadn’t touched it with her bare hands, but carrying it brought her here. The Warrior would be pissed, but Erika was starting to care a whole lot less about bringing it back than she was about getting back.

Erika pulled the box from her pocket, flipping it open. The ring sat, nestled in the cushion, just as she left it. The teal-hued stone and rough gold band looked entirely unassuming. Somehow, perhaps simply by wearing it, the ring granted the mayor longevity and some insight into death.

Or…

Erika paused, glancing back the way she had come. Both Madeline and the butler were following. The former drifted along silently, peering through every window she passed, only to move on in disappointment. The butler fretted over the results of every careless swipe of Erika’s bat. He muttered over broken glass, bemoaned a crack in a column, and sighed with every step along the gouge.

But Erika’s gaze was past him, back toward the meal hall in the distance.

Bob had been a regular guy from Safe Harbor.

Erika snorted as one piece of the puzzle became just a little more clear. The ring didn’t grant the mayor insight into death; none of the people here were dead. As the mayor said, they were preserved. The Judge was not a god of death, if such a thing existed, because people died constantly throughout the whole world… the odds that the first person she bumped into would be from the little culty town she was investigating were astronomical.

How did that reasoning change things? Erika wasn’t exactly sure, only that she knew the Judge wasn’t what it appeared to be. Maybe there was some flaw in her logic, but the only two people around either couldn’t speak or weren’t trustworthy, so Erika elected to believe wholeheartedly that it was not a god of death.

“Hey,” she called out, earning herself a flat, withering look from the butler.

“Have you finally elected to restrain yourself, Miss?”

Erika swung her bat, aiming for a thick, load-bearing column. The bat clanged against it, but she didn’t put any effort into breaking it. “Maybe,” she answered, watching the resignation flicker to hope on the butler’s face. “If you can’t find me an exit, I’ll settle for the bench.”

If she couldn’t find a weak point, she thought she could make one. Both the ziggurat and the entire realm of the blood bridge had collapsed in on themselves once she annihilated some concept related to the gods dwelling there. She hadn’t used that collapse to escape, but that was only because she had better options at the time.

Options she now lacked.

The butler stilled, moving nothing but his eyebrows in a slight look of surprise. After a brief glance back at the destruction left in Erika’s wake, his lips twitched into the barest of smiles. “Certainly, Miss. This way,” he said, turning down a hallway that had definitely not been there a moment ago.

Hoping she was doing the right thing, Erika shot a questioning glance to her ghost.

Madeline’s sunken face looked in no state to answer. If anything, she was doing worse than a few minutes ago when they were in the dining room. Erika didn’t know if it was this realm, lingering effects from the Judge’s presence, or simply that Erika hadn’t taken a closer look before, but she didn’t look like she would last forever.

Erika hadn’t asked to be haunted in the first place, but this seemed like a shit way of getting rid of her ghost.

Glaring at the servant’s back, she followed a short, clipped route through the corridor to another rich wooden door. There were no markings, nor labels—nothing indicated what was inside. The servant stepped aside with a slight bow.

Resisting her initial impulse to break the door into tiny pieces, Erika grabbed the handle and slowly pushed the door inward. She peered inside, then slowly closed the door, turning her back to it. She looked to Madeline, then to the servant.

“The Judge is sitting behind the bench.”

Madeline trembled, shrinking further; Erika hoped that stemmed from posture, not withering away.

The servant simply smiled. “It is the Bench of the Final Judge. What did you expect?”

“I expected it to be in pieces in the dining hall,” Erika hissed through clenched teeth, feeling her heart hammering in her chest. “Maybe off super gluing itself back together at best.”

The servant didn’t shrug, but got the feeling he would have if his image of a polite butler had allowed it. “I have brought you here as requested. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an unexpected amount of cleaning to attend to.”

Erika glared at his back, watching him go. She was tempted to fling her bat after him—not to hit him, just to smash something near him—but her fingers felt too numb.

She saw it there, robed skeletal figure slumped in a throne behind a judge’s desk, and immediately felt still. Its mere voice, or whatever you would call its manner of speaking, paralyzed Erika in just a few words. On the table, she had managed to break out of her stupor to realize how big of an idiot she could be, but had not managed to move until the Judge distracted itself with Madeline.

The unsettling fear of a repeat, especially a repeat in which the Judge did not get so distracted, had her rethinking this idea. God of death or not, it could surely find a way to kill her while she couldn’t do anything but consider her poor choices.

Yet, at this exact moment, Erika didn’t see many other choices for herself. She could try bashing down the walls and windows and doors until there was nothing left, but based on her efforts thus far, she wasn’t sure that would get her anywhere. The ring had potential, but should she destroy it? Wear it? Or maybe even put it on some statue to reveal a passage like one of Carter’s video games?

Erika leaned against the wall next to the Judge’s door, fingers massaging her temple. She started going over every step of her first encounter with the Judge, trying to figure out any way she could break out of that effect again, hopefully without needing it distracted. She went over all the short phrases it spoke, the reactions of the crowd, the way her heart thumped so hard it felt as if it would burst from her chest the entire time.

The way it rendered her unchanging… the possible ways she could frame that in her mind so it would work for her instead of against her.

A few thoughts circled around her mind, ideas that might have merit. Erika doubted she could say with any certainty that what she pictured would work.

“Stay here,” she said, not sure if the ghost would listen. Pushing off the wall, Erika steeled herself and placed her hand on the door handle.