My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 768: Soul Realm: The Cradle of the Unfinished

Her soul finally arrived in a new realm... but calling Sienna’s Soul Realm a place was an insult to language itself.

It was no Soul Realm but a wound that had been carved into a very huge realm of nether and death itself.

It was the suffocating void between heartbeats — the small, impossible space between two adjacent moments where the laws of existence had been pried open along a long ragged seam and left to fester.

The seam had not closed in seventeen years. Maybe it would not ever close.

Time did not flow here so much as it bled, each second arriving already half-decayed, already whispering the shape of the next wound it would become.

The realm did not contain the wound... the wound was the realm, and the realm fed upon it with the slow, patient hunger of a parasite that had learned to love its host.

Every drifting shard of black glass, every bleeding constellation, every echo of her own screams turned back upon her — all of it was sustained by that single, unhealed rupture in the fabric of what should have been.

The horizon — if a wound could be said to have a horizon — extended past sight.

Black lakes of liquid oblivion stretched outward in all directions, their surfaces unbroken, the depths were unmeasurable, their very geometry refusing the small mortal courtesy of a curved planet.

Ridges of unfinished bone climbed past the lakes in the middle distance, the ridges themselves the size of mountain ranges, formed of femurs and ribs and skulls Sienna had pulled into her realm centuries before her current vessel had been born.

Beyond the ridges, distant wails travelled across the rotting air — the cries of things too far from her to reach her in less than a millennium of crawling.

Then again, they had been crawling for some time and would be crawling for some time more.

Above her, where a sky should have been, was instead a body.

A vast cosmic something stretched across the hollow above the realm, its shape impossible to fix on, its visible portions rendered as long pale columns of vertebrae arching across the upper dark and disappearing into the further upper dark.

The body was not dead but it was not alive either.

It’s organs were visible through gaps in the rotting cosmic flesh, and the organs pulsed, and from each pulse the realm received its weather: ropes of black pus dripping from invisible fissures, slow glistening cascades of nether settling into the lakes below, occasional distant lightning that was not lightning but the body remembering it had once been a god, before it had crawled into this hollow and settled into Sienna’s ceiling.

Here she was no longer the small quiet girl who had torn reality apart with a whisper.

In her Soul Realm, Sienna was the Nether Goddess.

Her form was not the seventeen-year-old body that had collapsed in her room.

It had never been, her mortal body was the fragment of her real body.

Here, in the wound of her Soul Realm though, she was herself — taller, longer-limbed, the proportions wrong by the small private margins that distinguish gods from the bodies they wear.

Her hair fell past her hips in a slow black-violet cascade that moved when no wind moved, and behind the hair the rotting air bent toward her in patient gravitational courtesy, the air itself paying tribute as it passed her face.

Her skin was pale as bleached bone.

In places it was transparent.

Through the transparent places — along her ribs, the inner curve of her thighs, the side of her throat — the cosmic darkness coiled inside her was visible, and the darkness was not anatomy.

The darkness was a separate creature.

It had been folded into her body for seventeen years and it was barely contained, the small private creature of cosmic appetite that had been waiting since before the present sun for permission to occupy the body it belonged to.

It pressed against the transparent skin from the inside and tested the seams along her ribs.

It slowly coiled and uncoiled in slow patient breathing — her breathing, its breathing, the same breath now — and the rotting air around her body curved inward toward those transparent patches the way iron filings curved toward a magnet.

Her eyes glowed with the hemorrhaged violet that bled stars into extinction.

Black blood leaked from the corners of her eyes in perfect glistening lines, tracing down her cheeks before evaporating into more nether mist. Black veins of living nether and death energy pulsed visibly beneath her translucent skin in the places that were not transparent, crawling like fat worms trying to burrow deeper.

Every breath she exhaled seeped fresh death into her realm and every breath she pulled in dragged more of the outside cosmos into the rot to scream.

She was not contained.

Here, with the leash slack—

She was almost what she would soon become.

Sierra, or rather the real body of the Nether Goddess, was not this.

She breathed in the air which was not air but a thick wet rot.

A choking miasma of nether and raw death seeping from invisible fissures in the fabric of her soul like black pus from a gangrenous wound. It dripped constantly from the body-sky above in slow glistening ropes, pooling below into the shallow lakes of liquid oblivion that reflected nothing and swallowed every echo, every plea, every memory of light.

Death energy coiled through the nether in sickly green-black threads — the exact color of corpses left too long in stagnant water — knotting and writhing through the realm like parasitic intestines.

Together they formed a constant wet peristaltic heartbeat that shook the entire realm.

Thump... squelch... thump... squelch... thump...

And from that heartbeat, the dead crawled.

They did not rise peacefully, and they clawed to the surface.

Skeletal paws shattered the surface of the nearest black lake; it’s bones still wrapped in rotting sinew that hissed and steamed on contact with the nether.

It was not complete though...

Behind came more — talons and ribs and half-jaws and fragments of skull and long writhing things that were nothing but spine, all of them clawing their way out of the lake’s surface in a slow committed swarm that the lake itself was vomiting upward.

They were not coming for her.

They were coming to her.

The distinction mattered.

Sienna’s energy struck the leading swarm. Nether threads punched through marrow with wet pops.

Death energy wove rotten muscle back onto the frames in twitching incomplete lumps that never quite sealed — and the things hauled themselves the rest of the way out of the lake, jaws unhinging too wide and snapping back crookedly, new rows of teeth sprouting and dissolving in the same breath, scales forming and melting and reforming.

They would never be whole.

They would never stop trying.

They howled anyway — a sound like every throat that had ever begged for mercy being inverted, raped, and forced to laugh.

More followed in an endless writhing tide.

Some were small, smaller than her hand. They scuttled across the lake’s surface on too many legs, their tiny bodies bursting and reforming with every step, their tiny mouths whispering every secret terror their living selves had carried into death.

Some were vast — the size of mountains — their ribcages cresting the lake’s surface like submerged warships, their wings dragging across the nether in tattered membranes that bubbled with new flesh in raw weeping masses that immediately began to melt.

Some had no shape at all but tides of meat that had once been alive in some war Sienna’s current state was too bored to remember, and they boiled across the lake’s surface in slow obscene pulses, growing limbs and absorbing them, growing eyes and burying them, growing mouths and using them.

They were all Unfinished.

Her children.

They lived here permanently — perfected in their imperfection, kept in the eternal patient cycle of becoming-and-failing-to-become that was her singular gift to them.

Outside her realm they would have died.

...Inside her realm they could not.

They all bowed when she moved.

She raised her right hand.

Slowly.

Sienna’s palm opened, fingers spread and a small dense pulse of her own substance — black and violet and liquid-cold — gathered in the centre of her palm, the size of a closed fist, glistening with the same arterial wetness that leaked from the corners of her eyes.

The pulse hung above her palm for one dilated breath.

Then she let it go.

The realm answered.

Every Unfinished within reach — and reach, here, was an unmapped distance the realm itself negotiated — turned toward the falling pulse of her substance with the patient hunger of a starving multitude.

Their incomplete mouths opened. Their incomplete bodies surged.

The lake’s surface broke in a hundred places at once as long pale things hauled themselves further out to reach for the offering, and the things already on the bone-shore climbed over each other, smaller bodies trampled into wet powder beneath larger bodies, larger bodies snapping at the flanks of the largest, the largest splitting open their own ribs in slow obscene flowering to receive her gift the moment it arrived.

It pulse landed in the centre of the swarm.

A hundred mouths converged on it at once.

The pulse was consumed.

The Unfinished that received it briefly — briefly — stabilised.

Their incomplete edges firmed and their dissolving teeth held.