the haunted

November 2021

(atlas versus chaos. good against god.)

“I’ll kill you,” she spits, and the sentiment tears a rib from her chest. She feels it go, feels the shred of her skin, wishes she could sharpen it into a better blade than this. The world is dark, and the wind is loud, and the clouds are going to suffocate them both. “I will kill you with my bare hands.”

Chaos only throws its head back, and Atlas nearly lunges forward to do it right then. It’s laughing — and how awful it is, to see something so beautiful as this in so terrible a light — and Atlas realises for the first time that her hands are almost burning for a neck. Strung so tight with tendon that the skin above seems to flicker as Chaos moves, shifts its whole stance from bowstring to blade. It, too, could murder. It already has.

“You won’t.”

There is something burning inside of the mortal, here — a beast which writhes away from divinity — the sort of seething hatred which almost folds you in half. She nearly clutches at her stomach from the force of it, almost doubles over and wins the beast the battle before it has even truly begun. She cannot speak. The fury sews her mouth shut, kicks her hard enough in the throat that she might just forget her own name.

“You,” instead, is what comes. From the space between her shoulder blades, from the scar on her back, from the burning tips of her fingers and the raging shatter of her pulse. It is not her voice — she looks up, and it is staring, now. Blade to barrier. An entity scorned.

“The darkness.” This, she knows from the other stories. Darkness-and-never-Light-again, a personal attack — I know you — that leaves the undead reeling. Spectral revelation — Atlas will. Atlas’s pen is not her sword, though her mouth knows it can be: she wields instead an absolute agony which will slice through flesh, muscle, bone. Darkness. She is speaking, certainly, though the words thunder in from all around them. Chaos blinks. It has never faced this enemy. Unliving beast — I am going to rip the heart from your chest. 

And because the sentiment belongs to the storm, not the human, Chaos understands that safety is believing it. It does not run — this is not a weapon which comprehends how to — but shadowed fists clench, and unblinking eyes narrow, and suddenly the story shifts into one of ghost against ghost.

“You are a human,” Chaos manages, though the string tugged through it is fraying, slightly. “We are not the same. You could do no such thing.”

Could versus will. Atlas knows she can, and she knows that she will, and strewed edges of the storm clouds are curling down towards her chest. 

I am not you, she hears, and these words are not within her control anymore. I am not you, but I will tear the skin from your bones and I am going to make you watch it happen. 

These are not empty threats. This shadow creature is flesh and nothing more, and Atlas knows this now. If there is one weakness strung between the wits of the divine, it is this: nothing will be left holy. It is incapable. The world will take such light from you and drive it spear-like into your stomach, over and over again. 

You are not invincible, Chaos. We are skin and skin. I will kill you and eat you raw. 

At this, she straightens, and the storm curls noose-like around her neck. It is not a battle. It is an ending — there is no dreaming. No reanimation. No waking. There is this: the haunted, and the haunting. The end of the living world. 

You tried to ruin me, comes again from the thunderclouds, and they will not stop until the haunting has knelt down and begged from the earth which made her. 

“I had no choice.”

Half angel, half antichrist, and Atlas is fit to burn. She feels the fury flood each vein of hers like ichor, flooding out from the edges of her nailbeds, streaming like shadows through shattered skyline down her face. 

You had every choice. 

The storm hurls louder and the sky hungers darker and the world is going to collapse around them and the tempest that Atlas has become cannot find it within itself to care. 

This is on you. 

The haunted: the haunted. They are one and the same, and Atlas is lunging forward and the clouds move with her. Atlas is lunging forwards and Atlas is the storm and Atlas is the fury and Atlas watches from a distance as the bowstring snaps. It tears its way through Chaos’s limbs, strips the sinew from skin almost faster than Atlas can reach it, digs deep into the vice-grips of her memories — and yet it is still whole. Still standing. Strung low and heavy from the treetops, breathing faster than it has ever known, casting its eyes up at the skyline as though to beseech the god that betrayed this secret. 

I am going to kill you, says the storm, the beast, the entity.

“You are,” murmurs Chaos. It is looking up as if in awe, and there is a smile gracing the very left corner of its mouth. Another ghost between them. “I did not believe it.”

I know. 

Atlas blinks. She is not storm. Not beast. Not entity. She is human, and the clouds are dispersing, and she is holding herself up before this enemy as though she is still wrung spectral with grief. She speaks. These words are hers, this time. “I know.”

“So?” Chaos is tall. Taller still when it raises an eyebrow as though to ask the question again.

Atlas is reduced. She is human again, and it strikes her now that perhaps this is all she ever was. 

“You think I can kill you?”

A small scoff: it comes out desperate. 

“I think you’re the only one who ever could.”

Its chest is bared, slightly. More exposed than it has any right to be, jutting a ribbed torso out to Atlas as if to say here is the heart you wanted. 

“And you want this?”

A tremor. A pause in sliced demeanour which says yes. It looks down at Atlas, now — not considering, but confirming. Dark limbs and darker eyes and a set to its countenance which speaks far too loudly of the centuries which it has lived.

“Do you?”

Atlas barely even needs to think.

(She does, though. She thinks of the past and the present and the sleep which she fears she will not be able to wake up from, this time. She thinks of Atlas of the stories and Atlas of the tragedy and Atlas who was not ever supposed to inhibit so vast a storm. 

She thinks of home. Of angel to antichrist and rage to abandon and the first night of facing an enemy she does not even remember summoning in the first place.

She thinks: she cannot stop thinking. A film reel. The tempest returns, and it is a whole life — haunted and haunting both. Stronger than either. Strongest the world will ever know.)

She looks up, and Chaos is looking right back at her, and they are face to face. There is no hesitation. There never could be. Just this:

“I would break you into pieces if I could.”

The hand that Atlas drives into its chest is gentler than the storm tried to detail. She is not necessarily soft about it: it is a killing, and an ending, and there is no blood left in these ancient veins. It’s like pressing palm to ash, almost — soft and parting, as if this ghost of a ribcage has folded open to greet the inevitable. There is no heart. There are no lungs. Chaos inhales a last siren’s breath, and then it, too, is folding — there is nothing left inside to save. It burns up in the sunlight like parchment, and the wind takes it by the grasp of a hand as if to say finally.

It is there, until it is not. Until Atlas has blinked just once and found a horizon before her, ghostless and stormless and utterly unholy. 

Until she takes a step back, and there is no more horizon. 

Wet clothes and grey skies and a body in a lake. 

The haunted, and the haunting — Atlas’s knees buckle. You cannot unhaunt a human. 

You cannot rip the heart from a ghost.