She wrote the names using a crow’s feather as a quill and animal blood as ink, as the book instructed. The names numbered thirteen and each had its own narrow scroll of parchment. She dropped these into a brazier where she’d burnt numerous molds and fungi in the weeks prior, as the book instructed. She prayed over the smolder as they ashed and crumbled.

In the bathroom of her tiny Section Eight apartment she fingerpainted glyphs and runes onto the tiles using a bloodbag she’d stolen from the hospital. The symbols needed to be precise, the work exacting. This offered ample time for her to reconsider, to change her mind. To pick up the phone and call the crisis hotline, instead.

But she’d made her decision long ago.

After the cops had pulled her out of that drug-fogged basement, after they’d told her she’d been doped up and tied down and raped by more men than she would ever remember, more than she could even count…

The others had formed a support group. After the shrinks had signed them out of observation, they’d tried to rebuild themselves. Of the six of them, she’d be the second suicide. Of the surviving four, one was homeless and only one had kept her job through the pandemic. Behold: justice.

Randall Hill had broken them and Reverend Tongue had eaten up their futures. Now those men were dead, but their accomplices walked free. A lot of people had made a lot of money through her rape. Québécois mobsters, cops, even a couple truckers and an everyday accountant. And beyond those that profited directly, how many more had known? How many had known and shrugged the knowledge off? And when the hideous truth showed its thousand-toothed visage to the people of Oceanrest, how many had faced consequence?

The number would rise higher soon enough.

One of the women locked down there had been a witch. A real one. That was how she’d learned about magic. In the White Room, a witch had taught her a handful of simple tricks. “Not everyone can see when it happens, not without…bad things happening. But if you see it, if you can, and if you know what it is, that means you can learn to use it.” And she had seen it and she had known what it was and she had learned it. One thing led naturally to another. One day, she found the book—or maybe the book had found her.

She didn’t recognize the woman in the bathroom mirror anymore. Through the drug-smog mists of that white hades, she’d lost nearly six years of her life. She recalled only frozen images, random event-memories gapped by spans of uncertainty. The drugs and the trauma conspired to worm holes through her mind; so many things had fallen through…

With bloodslick fingertips she painted the sigil of the goddess over her unfamiliar face.

(She Who Crawls Within)

Behold: justice.

She muttered the words, walking from bathroom to kitchen. “Ours will be a kingdom without end,” she whispered. “A cycle unbreakable.” These were important phrases for the spell. So, too, were the listing of the crimes. “Thomas Aberdeen, for protecting them from police notice. Luc Grenier, for profiting from my rape. Boo, for profiting from my rape. Jacques Lefevre, for aligning with Randall Hill, for bringing him into the mob, for empowering him. Pierre Poulin…”

The names numbered thirteen and their crimes against her numbered in the scores.

The glyphs painted, the words spoken, the crimes listed, she poured herself a glass of wine. She started with only four pills, prescription painkillers, which she swallowed with the entire goblet. She refilled the wine and rattled more pills free from the phial. Her final meal, bloody steak and a bowl of sauteed mushrooms, followed. The steak was her choice. According to the book, she could eat and drink anything for her final meal, so long as she consumed nothing but root vegetables, fungi, tubers, truffles, insects, algae, and water during the thirteen days prior.

But what was thirteen days in the shadow of so many lost years?

And what were the thirteen months before?

The ritual required at least three hours of work every day for thirteen months. It required other things, too. A ritual of this magnitude meant phases, different interlocking spells and practices, the kind of work that broke people. Fasting, feasting, binging, purging, self-harm…this particular ritual demanded a lot from its practitioners. It offered a lot, too.

The witch in the white room had told her that some people were born with magical aptitude but most weren’t. Not being born with a talent didn’t mean that one couldn’t learn it, but it made the learning more difficult. And the execution.

Next to the kitchen sink, she opened a Tupperware container. Buried in moss and fungus and roots, she dug up a knife. The knife had belonged to a dead man, once, as the book instructed, and had been used to kill, as the book instructed. She transferred the blade from the festering Tupperware to the stolen bloodbag, letting it taste the leftovers.

She drank a third goblet of wine and took more painkillers. Her guts squished and groaned but she gulped down the urge to vomit and continued the ritual. This last part worked on a time limit. She had only three days to perform the finishing touches, make the final decision, and enact the sacrifice. She had only sixteen hours left. That night would be the night.

The strain of using magic, combined with the thirteen days of lunatic diet, had drained her immune system empty. She’d woken that morning with a fever and it had worsened through the day. Her thermometer beeped her at 101 degrees when she checked, but she had no other symptoms. She had no cough, no sore throat, no goo-packed sinuses. She had a fever that hurt her bones and no other signs of illness. Maybe not a fever, then. Maybe a sign.

Someone below her started blasting loud music and she thought this was hilarious, though she wasn’t sure why. She laughed so hard she lost balance and collapsed into another of the mold-mottled walls of her apartment. Still giggling, she took another bottle of wine and the rest of the painkillers and shambled into the bathroom.

She wasn’t even supposed to be here. In the economic wasteland of Oceanrest, the Section Eight applications were so backed up they stretched all the way south to Portland. But someone, one of the doctors or psychiatrists who’d ministered to her and the others after Randall Hill’s operation collapsed, had greased the appropriate palms and filed the appropriate paperwork and now she had the ironic pleasure of dying unnoticed in a place nobody wanted to think about.

The last step before the sacrifice: the lighting of the candles, the final prayer.

With a cheap gas station lighter, she lit thirteen candles, all either black or white and no other color at all, as the book instructed. She listed the names and their associated crimes again. She whispered a hope for a kingdom of justice, thirteen executions handed down as the growth-seed of a new world. A surge of vomit curdled the back of her throat before she finished and she gulped it down, breathing hard. The book said nothing about how vomiting might affect the magic and she couldn’t take risks, now. She clenched her jaw against a second gut-spasm and heaved hot air out of her nostrils. When her innards settled back to minor complaints and squelches, she finished the prayer.

She took the knife from the bloodbag, now tacky with gore, and stripped off her clothes. The book said nothing about what to do with her clothes, so she left them there on the floor. Then she lowered herself into the warm and waiting water of the bathtub.

do not be afraid, a sweet and far away voice mused to her.

Through the furnace of her fever she felt a new warmth spread through her. She felt arms wrap her up. Two arms, four, eight, twenty, each appendage at once strong and gentle. Tears rimmed her eyes.

do not be afraid, the sweet voice repeated.

She nodded, feeling as safe and secure as a child in its mother’s arms. With a quick jerk, she drew the edge of the dead man’s blade along the underside of her forearm, wrist to elbow. Loops of carmine unwound from within her, dancing through the water. Through the fever and the goddess’ warmth, she felt no pain. She repeated the process on the other arm, sinking, now, into...what?

A throne of mushroom-cap bloomed beneath her. A crown of fingerbones, of tar and teeth, mantled her head. She wore a gown, black-hole dark. The goddess writhed around her, a cloud of teeming motes, attending her, tentacular. At her feet, a triumvirate of dukes. At their feet, an endless congregation, a crowd of genuflective worshipers singing praises in their silence, their hands and faces upturned to the sky.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Her hands splintered into thousand-clawed appendages. They branched and kinked like spiderlegs. They reached needle-thin through door locks, under windows, in the sliver-thin gaps between everything. Her will found them and unseamed them. Her many claws skewed their skin, unfolded their musculature, dissected their spines. She collected up their vertebrae and added them to her own.

ours will be a cycle unbreakable, the goddess whispered, a thousand crawling legs against her earlobe. a kingdom without end.

She sank and rose at the same time. She did not know when she hit the bottom nor when she reached the top.