I did not say that thing just to comfort him but to comfort me. I meant it. But only if it was both of us. If it was just me, I would melt into the city. I would disappear and give up my name and my past and any hope of a home, and become no one.
At the edge of the plain, the dark dead forest waiting on the slope, I laid my burden gently on the ground amongst the sparse grass and dropped my pack. Wick’s mouth was closed, his eyes were still closed, and he was cold. A terrible sense of drowning closed over me. Had he died as I carried him? Was he dead now?
I could not tell if he had a pulse, with my broken fingers, my hands that shook. There was a resting peace to his features I did not want to interpret. But he could not be dead. I would not let him be dead.
I put water to his lips, then mine. I kissed his filthy face and bathed it. I said his name again and again—and again. I paid no mind to anything but his slack, small body there in the yellowing grass. I could not even shake him or in any other way try to bring him back because I was sure the slightest tremor would do him damage.
I knelt there beside Wick feeling so very light and so very helpless. I was covered in dirt, in blood both mine and not mine. My stomach was a shriveled pebble in my belly, my body so dry I had no tears.
I calmed myself. I stopped the shaking by holding my right arm in a vise with my left hand and taking Wick’s wrist with my right hand—long enough to convince myself I felt a faint pulse of life there, that he would hold on if I just kept going, if I didn’t give up on him.
I put my pack back on. I gathered Wick up. I got my legs underneath me, widened my stance, and lifted him.
Together, Wick and I started up the slope.
*
There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.
As I carried Wick up the slope, there came a sound from the city, a new sound. It was like the reverse of the sound that had left us when Mord lost the power to fly. A snap that kept snapping, as if it had moved through the ground, like an earthquake but not. A sound that made you look up.
Still far off, but clear above the trees, in the late-morning light, Mord no longer fought Mord. Instead, Mord fought Borne, for Borne had shed his disguise, had abandoned claws and fangs to become even more terrible and complete—like a true god, one who repudiated worship because he had been raised by a scavenger who had never learned religion. The monster I had helped raise fighting the monster Wick had helped create.
Such a shock, to see the fur instantly replaced with the Borne I knew, but much, much larger. A glowing purple vase shape, a silhouette rising that could have been some strange new building but was instead a living creature. Borne was failing as Mord, so now he would try his luck as himself. He rose and rose to a full height a little taller than Mord, the familiar tentacles shooting out, while below, at his base, I knew that he was anchored by cilia now each grown as large as me.
Mord stumbled back, smashing walls of already crumbling buildings, great clouds of dust rising from his surprise. But only for a moment, and when the gouts and storms of dust had settled, I could see that Mord had surged forward to attack newly vulnerable flesh, while the proxies no doubt swarmed Borne’s base.
There came from Mord’s throat a chuffing roar of purest joy, as if blissful to no longer be fighting himself, to engage with a creature clarified and robbed of disguise.
For the cost to Borne was monumental, no matter how he altered himself, bristling with spikes and ridges—no matter how he battered Mord with tentacles that Mord tore off only for them to return. He could not stop the truest killer of the two—could not stop Mord from ripping into his flesh. Mord dug into Borne, tore off great curving slices, which shivered and quaked as they fell and as Borne screamed—a sound so piercing it buckled my knees on the hillside and I felt a deep fear, a rending, thinking of what should happen if Mord won, if Borne died.
Mord leapt again and again, brought Borne close, paws forcing the neck of Borne down as Borne strobed—as rings of eyes appeared and then disappeared, in his distress. Borne shook and flailed, pried at Mord with his tentacles, but Mord held on, trying to deliver a death bite. Ravaged Borne’s throat and tore into him with his claws. Those fangs snapped through Borne with a terrible wrenching and crunching that laid my heart bare. The Mord proxies were dark smudges clambering up Borne’s sides while Mord artfully runneled Borne’s flesh as if it were wax and Mord’s claws were made of flame. More of Borne came away, smashing wetly to the distant ground.
Borne now flailed in that embrace, being broken down in a way I had not known was possible, in a vision becoming so horrific I kept looking away as I stumbled forward with Wick. But it was no use evading. As Borne’s life ebbed, I could feel his wounds through the gravity of my own.
Until Borne gave up.
Until Borne understood, I believe, just what he had to do. He would not win. He could not win. Weapon he might be, but Borne was not, in the end, hardened as Mord was hardened; Mord would keep devouring, would keep seeking the snap, the gurgle, the spray of blood that ended his prey, never retreat, never surrender, as if that meant death.
What happened next no one in the city could see all of, but all of us could see part of. Yet, in memory, it is complete.
As Mord feasted on Borne’s flesh, Borne changed tactics. Instead of trying to become taller, he spread out, giving away his height, so that Mord was angled into Borne, tunneling through flesh, sloppy with it, seeking the heart of Borne, that he might tear it out and hold it up still beating for the city to see. But Borne kept flattening and widening the aperture at the top of his body until he resembled an enormous passionflower blossom. Complex and beautiful, with many levels.
To Mord it must have resembled surrender, as if Borne was dying and that is why the end came so quick, abrupt. Mord rose up, straight up, higher and higher on his hind legs, and then came down, straight down into Borne … but Borne was still opening up and opening up, and so Mord fell straight into Borne and kept falling and falling while the sides of Borne now rose, shot up with an elated speed, and tentacles formed over the top of Mord like bars. Borne lunged toward the sky, closed like a trap, with the head of Mord still visible at the aperture.
There came a muffled whimpering and screaming, a howling, a roaring, a blustering, a snapping of mighty jaws. Mord punched out from his prison, still ripping through flesh, struggling to get free.