Work In Progress #16: She Seeks Peace #8 (October 28-November 1)

"She felt very strange, as if her memories weren't her own, because they were a swarm of ants crawling around inside her skull, their skittering feet tickling her every synapse, making her laugh out loud, her voice echoing around her.

She wasn't sure what her name was, but knew it definitely wasn't 'The Hunter'. It most certainly wasn't 'The Eighth Deadly Sin, Willful Insanity', either."

  – Excerpt from She Seeks Peace.

She Seeks Peace is volume 4 of Ashen Blades.

You can read a short description of She Seeks Peace to learn more or you can read short summaries of each day's writing on Mastodon

Here's links to the rest of my blog entries on She Seeks Peace, in chronological order:

1. September 12-13
2. September 16-20
3. September 23-26
4. September 30-October 4
5. October 7-11
6. October 14-18
7. October 21-25

Chapter 38: Letting Go

Evie spends all morning and afternoon speaking with the spirits of her dead friends. It gets pretty emotional for her, because she's doing her best to let them go, so they can pass on.

The Hunter holds her hand and Evie squeezes it pretty hard with each tearful goodbye. She grows a little older with each, until she's about thirty years old.

Last of all, she talks with her grandmother, but Evelyn asks to speak with the Hunter and Evie makes her visible.

Evelyn explains that she watched the world with magic for a very long time, looking for a champion to take Evie to her family. She'd heard of the Hunter, but couldn't see her, because the hunter is effectively invisible to most forms of detection magic.

In August (around the same time the Hunter went back in time, during the previous book), the Fates appeared to her in a vision, telling her the Hunter was on the way, to take Evie to family.

She asks if the Fates can be trusted and the Hunter somewhat reluctantly agrees, because she at least trusts them to help her against Vogerath. That reassures Evelyn she did the right thing and she passes on, vanishing from sight.

The Hunter comforts Evie for a time, before the rapidly-aging woman says she's tired and lonely. The Hunter pats her back and Riley steps in, for a group hug.

He reminds Evie, "You're not alone."

After that, Evie asks to be left alone, for a nap. She also corrects her accent mid-sentence, finally figuring out how to pronounce the letter L, promising to make Simmons visible, once she's rested.

As Riley and the Hunter leave the bedroom, Riley expresses his worry that Evie might not stop growing older, because she's now in her mid-forties!

There's a brief scene in which Evie is alone with her thoughts and she briefly considers suicide, that she might be with her friends. The first of the monks that died was a woman with depression issues, who took her own life, though Evie hadn't understood that at the time. Having seen how that didn't solve anything, she decides against suicide.

She doesn't realize it, but she's growing older by the moment and she's already rapidly headed toward a death by natural causes, though her aging slows as she falls asleep.

Some time later, Evie calls out for help. Riley and the Hunter rush in, finding Evie on the floor: she fell out of bed and can't get up, because she's now over ninety years old!

They help her back into bed. She offers to make Simmons visible and the Hunter prepares by hauling Mashu'ra out of her hat.

Simmons appears and thanks Mashu'ra for giving him the chance to fight demons. Next, he tells them both he loves them and admits this is going to be goodbye for a long time, though he'll wait until the end of time to see the Hunter again, if required.

He also discusses the fact that he knows neither of them will let go of life until the demon threat is permanently solved.

Finally, he addresses the elephant in the room, asking the Hunter to let him go, because she's been dragging him through life like a boat anchor. He isn't angry, because she had no idea her magic had responded to her emotions by binding his spirit to her, but he is upset that he can't pass on.

Last of all he says: "Go ahead and treasure the time we had together, but don’t hold onto me so tight."

The Hunter enters her internal mindscape, like the way she fought Sogliun, seeking the deepest, darkest corner of her mind, where she buries things she doesn't want to deal with.

This turns out to be a steel-lined corridor, along which hangs paintings, each of which is a different traumatic memory. Two examples are the death of her parents and Reggie's death. She takes the painting of Reggie's final moments off the wall and puts it under her arm as she goes deeper, seeking the darkest corner of the place.

She ends up at a dead end dominated by a piece of raw canvas that's been riveted to the wall, which displays the death of Simmons on an eternal loop.

She goes off somewhere else for a ladder and drill of the old hand-cranked variety. She sets up the ladder and manually drills out every last rivet, taking the canvas down, though that leaves the wall bleeding. She rolls up the canvas and carries it away.

She returns to the usual corner of her mindscape and as an experiment, she sets the painting of Reggie's final moments on fire, with magic. It turns into smoke that fills the shadows surrounding her, which are actually her memories. The return of that buried memory is painful, but it brings with it a flood of good memories that she'd been forced to bury with it, because they were connected. She's finally able to look back on her time with Reggie, feeling joy.

She next lights the bloody canvas aflame, releasing the full pain of loss into her mind. It really hurts, but she's ready to really deal with it and find a way forward.

Her inner demon (The Eighth Deadly Sin, Willful Insanity, or Insanity for short) hugs her in a surprising turn of events, because Insanity was born from the Hunter's Id, which is all about emotion.

Back in the real world, she tries to say, "I love you", though it comes out as "It's a secret."

Simmons responds, "I love you, too."

Mashu'ra also says goodbye and Simmons fades away.

Meanwhile, Evie has grown translucent, because she's also fading!

Riley is upset, because he basically gained a daughter and now she's dying, in less than a day's time.

Evie tells them what she just realized: She didn't understand it at the time, but she's been dead for a great many years. When she faced the demon that killed the monks, she blasted him with such a potent burst of life magic, she erased the demon magic in both her own body and that of the demon, killing them both.

Due to the nature of fairies (which is technically what the beings calling themselves demons in these novels are), Evie rose again in the same way Lara did in the previous book.

In the end, it hardly made a difference, because she'd never understood, until that morning, and the nature of her Spirit powers allowed her to freely cross the divide between the living and dead.

With her attachment to life fading, Evie is now ready to pass on.

Before she goes, she tells Riley something Evelyn told her: the woman he's been carrying a torch for feels the same, so he should marry her and have lots of kids. He promised he'll soon have a daughter again.

He thanks her for that message.

The Hunter is sad, of course, because she'd been looking forward to visiting Evie from time to time, thinking they would be friends for thousands of years to come.

She tries and fails to express herself, saying, "It's a secret."

Evie smiles and slips back into her Chinese accent, "I ruv you, too."

She fades from sight, leaving a set of empty clothes behind.

After a scene break, the Hunter steps outside, in tears, mourning both Simmons and Evie, finally understanding the meaning of 'bittersweet'. Looking back on her time with Reggie, however, she feels nothing but joy at having known him and the pain is gone, giving her confidence that she'll someday feel the same about Simmons.

Too distracted to pay attention, she bumps into a huge man in a biker's leather jacket and looks up at a squirrel's head!

Part Four: Grounded

Chapter 38 marks the end of Part Three and Chapter 39 will begin Part Four.

This part will cover the climax, in which the Hunter will face Ulmoch, leading to her capture, followed by a battle with Wrath and his arch demon wedding guests.

Chapter 39: Chasing the Rabbit

Ulmoch starts to tell the Hunter he's set a bomb on a timer, which will go off if she doesn't face him, only to realize, mid-sentence, he forgot to set the timer. He tries to excuse himself, to go set it.

Naturally, the Hunter cuts his head off with her sword, intending to threaten him until he tells her where to find the bomb, but she's momentarily forgotten the fact such a wound won't disable Ulmoch's body (on her personal timeline, the last time she fought him was a couple years ago).

Ulmoch catches his head and runs off, while the Hunter gives chase. He briefly trips on a bicycle (his head was facing the wrong way, because he was too busy talking), but loses no momentum, rolling down the sidewalk for a time. Once his head is reattached, he leaps from one residential roof to another, while the Hunter flies after him.

Ulmoch uses hairpin turns to avoid her, while subtly navigating his way toward a low-rent area of Alice Springs. He's more dexterous than she is and able to stay out of reach. She tries using fire magic from her hands to turn better and starts to catch up, only for Ulmoch to accelerate, as if he's intentionally staying just out of reach.

Finally, he goes in a straight line and the Hunter thinks she's got him, only for him to drop between houses and enter one. She overshoots and smashes her way in through the front window, sending a hail of sharp fragments into Ulmoch!

He rolls sideways and ends up next to an old, hand-cranked record player, which is ready to go. He starts it up and it crackles in the background as the Hunter catches him by the neck and slams him into the wall, putting her sword very near his eye.

She's so angry, her eyes glow an intense, blue shade.

Ulmoch surrenders and says he'll show her where the bomb is, if she'll let go of him.

She puts him down and he instead reaches into his jacket at high speed, yelling, "Psych!"

He produces the jar of liquid he's been saying he got as a present for her and throws it at the ceiling, where it smashes, causing the liquid to spatter down on the both of them! It's LSD, by the way. Nearly a whole pint of the stuff.

While Ulmoch sort of just accepts the high with pleasure, the Hunter stumbles around as the room becomes more colorful and spins around her, as if her head were mounted on a swivel.

She mutters, "It's a secret?" followed by her inner demon using her lips, "What the-" she finishes by cursing.

The next scene is inside the Hunters mindscape, where rainbows pieces the perpetual smoky shadows, chasing them away, while the sun shines from under the feet of the Hunter and Insanity.

Years of carefully maintained self-control by the Hunter erodes under the onslaught of the drugs, forcefully drawing her two halves together, where they splash and merge, like droplets of molten metal, reforming as a single individual.

Meanwhile, Sogliun has been watching the house from the other side of the street and is really surprised to see it melting like wax, while every color of light shines from within. He analyzes the magic of the air, finding nearly every form of it he recognizes, though Void and Life magic are most prevalent.

He growls, "Ulmoch, what did you do?"

We switch back to the young woman having her first drug experience, but I pointedly don't refer to her as the Hunter. In fact, she struggles with the very question of who she is.

She stands in a sunny field of grass and flowers, with rainbows flying like birds, surrounded by a landscape that's singing along to the song White Rabbit, by Jefferson Airplane. The flowers sing soprano, the sun and rainbows are tenors, the stars of the sky sing alto and the ground itself produces a pleasant bass. She initially thinks the cartoonish landscape is beautiful.

The song refers to Alice from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and she comes to believe her name is Alice and the story her mother read to her as a child is her own story, while the memories that crawl around inside her skull, like ants, obviously are not her own (memories of the Hunter and Insanity). That's a little hint that Alice is a brand-new personality, brought on by a drug overdose.

Having solved the identity issue, she looks at her magic clothes, which have gone absolutely berserk in response to her thoughts and feelings, unable to settle on a style or color.

She says, "Stop that" and her clothes settle on a long, blue dress with a white apron, a pair of fingerless, elbow-length gloves and a blue, silk top hat, while her hair turns blond and hangs loose.

She finally notices a pair of items in either hand, including a bit torn from a white mushroom cap and a bottle of dark liquid, labeled, 'DRINK ME'.

Feeling an urge to eat, Alice goes with the flow and bites into the mushroom. As a result, she grows quite large.

From Sogliun's perspective, the house explodes into melted droplets as Alice shoots through the roof and the reality-warping power she's manifested rolls outward, spreading her reality-warping physical hallucination to the neighborhood!

Humans run in every direction and even Sogliun seeks distance, because he doesn't want to be caught up in it.

Naturally, he blames Ulmoch.

Alice decides she doesn't like being large and takes a swig of 'DRINK ME'. It tastes mostly of fruit, but she can pick out a little turkey dinner mixed in. She shrinks just as fast as she grew, ending up shorter than the grass, beside a caterpillar smoking from a hookah.

The Ulmoch-become-caterpillar asks, "How high am I? This is like nothing I've ever seen! Is this real or is reality as high I am?"

Realizing she overshot, Alice nibbles on the mushroom and returns to approximately normal size, finding herself standing beside a small apple tree covered in green apples, with a golden one near the top.

The dream-like beauty fades as the landscape turns hostile (the LSD is finally getting through her skin and her trip is turning bad, as a result) and the flowers grow fangs, trying to bite her ankles, though that doesn't matter, because she's wearing boots.

The rainbows, on the other hand, become a deadly problem as they swoop at her, their edges cutting her like razor blades! Seeking to defend herself, she calls up the Hunter's wakizashi and deflects them.

As she fights, the landscape changes to a chess board on which a battle between the red and white armies takes place! She realizes the rainbows were actually the men fighting and they only cut her by mistake.

The Red Queen screams, "Off with their heads!" to encourage her men and Alice, being in a drug-induced suggestible state, swings her sword as she spins like a ballerina.

The Ulmoch/caterpillar has apparently changed size along with her and loses his head to her twirl, complaining, "Oh, come on! I thought we were finally getting along!"

She grabs Ulmoch's caterpillar head out of the air before he can catch it and hauls it out of reach.

The song reaches the last line and she takes it as an instruction. Looking on the severed caterpillar head, she finds herself looking into the eyes of her own severed head. She grabs the golden apple from the tree and forcefully rams it into the head's mouth, incidentally shattering teeth in the process. With the stem facing toward her, she plucks it off and hurls the head away, because instinct tells her something energetic is about to happen.

Ulmoch's head sails out of the reality distortion and returns to normal. So does the high-explosive anti-personnel grenade she called up from the Hunter's arsenal, which is inside his mouth. It explodes and Ulmoch is sent home, where it takes him weeks to heal properly. It was such a bad trip for him, he stays sober for three full months.

Feeling sick, Alice pukes, while the LSD dribbles form her clothes as they magically self-clean. She finally lays down, to sleep off the high.

Solgiun notes the unreality bubble reversing course and it eventually vanishes, leaving most everything as it was before it appeared. He reluctantly enters the house and finds Wrath's intended out cold, so he calls for pickup, quite surprised that Ulmoch actually succeeded in knocking her out.

Chapter 40: Final Preparations

Alice is captured by Wrath's minions, but in the process of getting her on a pallet with a binding circle on it, her hat falls off. One of the demons tries to pick it up. The hat eats them, both as the means to defend itself, but also to gain some extra energy.

Under normal circumstances, the Hunter's father, Jake, gets the energy he needs to maintain the pocket dimension inside the hat from the Hunter, but when the hat is separated from her, he's on his own, so he uses the traces of demonic magic available to him to consume any demon that dares to touch it.

He needs the extra energy, lest he be forced to start discarding things stored inside, as he once did in 1972, throwing out dinner rolls to maintain sufficient energy.

In the next scene, Lara arrives at Riley's home, who tells her the Hunter left an hour earlier.

Lara summons Mashu'ra and he directs her toward the hat.

Alice arrives (still unconscious and captured) at Wrath's abandoned mine base, where Lust gets to work positioning the pallet holding her, in preparation to separate her human and demon sides.

In the background, Gluttony prepares the wedding feast (summoned imps), while a trussed-up justice of the peace awaits being of service, probably followed by being eaten.

Wrath makes arrangements for the other arches to be summoned and the wedding dress is brought in. Lust tries to remove Alice's clothes, but fails, complaining that they must be glued on. Wrath gives it a go, literally trying to tear them off her, but only tears a small portion, which rapidly repairs itself.

Seeing the magic clothes at work, Lust suggests leaving them be (magic clothes aren't easy to make and can be very useful). Wrath asks her to put the wedding dress on Alice over them.

Wrath heads off to get dressed and get his hair done, for the first time, ever.

Meanwhile, Lara arrives at the old wrecked house and puts on the Hunter's hat, surprised by the fact it has turned blue.

She uses the tracking curse Verda put on the Hunter and her hat in 1972 to learn the direction and distance to Alice. Next, Lara grows bat wings and flies off (with Mashu'ra in her body, the animal forms she can use are limited to mammals).

Chapter 41: Three for the Price of Two

Alice finally wakes and looks around at the room, which has all seven arch demons in it. She tries to leave, because it isn't her kind of scene, only to burn herself on the interior of the one-way force field produced by the binding circle.

She looks down and sees the wedding dress, but doesn't quite make the connection that she's the bride. She's a little slow on the uptake, like a stoner normally is.

She notes the tuxedo Wrath is wearing and finally realizes she's at a wedding. She looks down again and realizes she's supposed to be the bride. The arches laugh at her exclamation of frustration.

She tries to escape with magic, but she's unable to accomplish anything.

Wrath orders her to hold out her left hand and she reasons she can't win, so she goes with the flow and obeys.

Wrath puts the enchanted engagement ring Lust made on her finger, resulting in Alice exploding into a cloud of black smoke.

Switching to Lust's perspective, she's surprised to see not two figures forming from the smoke, but three. She's also somewhat bothered by her slowly-growing conscience, because she helped put her jailer (the Hunter/Alice) in this position.

Her calculations are all wrong and with three personalities instead of two, none of them will end up inside a binding circle. She decides that with the plan so far off the rails, it's time to leave, but as she heads toward the exit, Gluttony sends three of her bodyguards after Lust, presumably to kill her.

Seeing no better option for survival, Lust plays into the desires of Greed, who's always had a thing for her, and buddies up to him, using a considerable share of charm magic to wrap him around her little finger. It's a game she doesn't want to play, but it's better than the alternatives; Greed wishes to possess her, but the others likely want her dead for political reasons.

Nonetheless, manipulating the feelings of a man doesn't sit well with her, because she actually feels guilty about it.

The three figures solidify at the corners of a triangle, free, rather than on the two binding circle pallets that stood ready to catch them.

One is the mutated cat form of Insanity at full-strength, wearing the wedding dress, as planned. The Hunter's human form is next, but she immediately collapses. The last is Alice.

Tags: writing, work-in-progress, ashen-blades