The Ripper Affair

Still alive, if only in the vast storehouse of memory a ruling spirit could contain.

No. I live.

The heart struggled, the lungs collapsing with shock. Her murderer crowed with glee, his purpose achieved, his chant becoming the savagery of an attacker’s, almost swallowing the sound of sorcery spilling through the bloody necklace of a cut throat.

I live.

They burst free of her not-quite-corpse–for the throat-cutting does not kill immediately, for a few crucial moments the sorceress, her Discipline invoked, was between living and dead. A threshold, a lintel, a doorway…

… and Death itself, the other face of the coin called Life, for a bare moment gave a fraction of the citizens of its dry uncharted country their mortal voices back.

The unsound was massive, felt behind eye and heart and throat…

… and it struck down the man who had sought to give a mockery of Life with a flood of leprous-green flame.

He squealed, beating at the fire that erupted from his slowly regrowing mortal flesh, but such is the nature of Death’s burning that it consumes metal, red muscle, rock itself, the dry fires of stars and the tenderness of green shoots, all in their own time.

He fell against the obsidian altar, and the sound of its shattering was lost in another–the scream of a malformed soul given half-life, brushed with a feather of sorcery and set free.

The Promethean fled, shrieking, and on a wooden shelf in a stone womb underneath Londinium, a sorceress’s mortality writhed.

For a dizzying moment she trembled between, neither alive nor dead, as the sisters of murder and confinement clamoured for her voice to be added to their number.

No.

In the end, the choice was hers alone. If she suffered under the lash of living in a world not made for her sex, it was the price extracted for protecting those upon whom her regard fell. Those she protected–did her arrogance extend so far as to think she was, in her own way, their final keeper?

To rule is lonely, and there was the last temptation.

The pieces of her erstwhile lover’s spell curled about her. Her mortal death could fuel its completion, for she had taken from him, again, everything.

He had wrought too well, when he sought the perfect victim. In that perfection itself lay his undoing.

Oh yes, it was possible. To take the shards and knit them together, to drive the taproot deep into the shimmering field of pain and Empire, and to become what he had wished to create: a spirit of rule.

One last, painless lunge, and she would Become.