Unable to lift the skull any longer, I placed it back onto my lap.
I wanted to smirk, but my facial muscles didn't budge a millimeter. I was left with a drained, drooping expression that only held the shreds of the defiant emotion in my heart.
"I've been forced to go through all of this—Huff—trouble—Huff—Over some bones. Heh, geez."
My voice cracked and broke as I barely managed to get enough air in my lungs to even speak. Thankfully, it seemed that my words were still carried off by the wind, reaching even the sentinel watching from above. In reaction to my actions, the ghost was trembling with rage. The entirety of the subspace shook to match its churning surge of anger.
'Oh yeah. This feels a lot better than I'd expected.'
Unexpectedly, my own heart swelled with a foreign kind of joy. The pain of my molten skeleton had not gone away, but it dulled in the face of my revelation.
"It wasn't the house, swords, or some typical trinket." I croaked, my face a mess of bloodied sweat. "Guess for a backalley parasite such as yourself, this would be the ultimate keepsake. It is you after all, am I right?"
The swords stabbed in the dirt rattled with increasing intensity. At the same time, the countless colors spiraling within the domineering eye began to darken. The eye above twitched, its pupil constricting to a pinprick, then dilating wide. The blinding light of erasure, which the ghost had been letting leak all this time, finally closed shut as something about the ghost's demeanor. Even the ancient, archaic symbol etched deep into its sclera pulsed with energy.
'Bingo.'
My shot in the dark landed a perfect bullseye.
It was either my luck or perhaps my unluckiness that allowed me to figure it out. The pain that throbbed through my skeleton forced my mind to focus on the idea of bones. The intimacy of one's own bones wasn't a concept that we tend to focus on, but for a ghost who no longer had a body, it was immensely important.
The ghost's treasure was itself—its old bones buried in the dirt. With its final remnants of intelligence, it decided to hold on to the final tether it had to its life. Besides this skull, there were likely other bones scattered about in the dirt. If you discovered them all and put them together, you'd get the whole skeleton.
It was both impressive and sad in equal parts.
'I can't be sure what kind of life you lived or how it was that you died. Since I've decided to fight against you, I likely won't ever get a chance to figure that out.'
'Since I decided to follow her words, I'll listen to this desire in my chest. I'll get revenge for all the people that you've ruthlessly devoured. This isn't a tit for tat situation. You've taken so much from all kinds of innocent people, so I've got no choice but to take everything from you.'
'Today I've found out that a bunch of supernatural stuff is real. That means there's a chance that the afterlife is real as well. If so, then make amends there and repent for all that you've done.'
'For the sake of The Vanished, I'll make you come down here. I'll make you descend and put the Null Streets to a close.'
I only knew one way to force the ghost to descend, and I only had one method available to me that I could even use.
Thankfully, they were one in the same.
"Heh-heh," I rasped. "So, you held onto your bones because... What? Were you feeling extra sentimental? Or maybe you just never found a good place to get rid of them or something? You too good for that graveyard down the street?"
The eye blinked slowly as an accusation. The colors in its iris crawled like oil, pooling and folding on themselves, darkening further as they went. The utter hatred that it felt couldn't be masked.
Khak! Khak!
I coughed up a bit of blood onto my jacket. I couldn't muster the strength needed to cover my mouth with my hand and simply let it stain my clothing further.
"Well, I'll have you know that the graveyard in question was home to the most mystifying, wondrous woman that you could even imagine. Ha! As one who has travelled upon the highway of seven stars and is more than capable of recounting the tales, there's a bit of knowledge that I'd like to impart on you."
I leaned forward, fighting against every fiber of my body.
Huff-Huff
"You see... These bones of yours aren't anything special. They're just washed-up relics of a life that wasn't worth remembering in the first place. Do you get it? From the very start, your worthless life wasn't worth being buried in the same place as the Empress. No matter how many more decades you spend haunting unknown street corners, you'll never escape that fact. Don't you know that?"
The old lawn chair groaned under me as I quickly sat back. The skull in my lap was warm from the blood on my hands. I pressed my thumb into a cracked zygomatic and felt bone give like old wood.
"Listen close," I continued, tasting metal with every syllable. "I'm a generous man with a heart of pure gold. Let's figure out a solution for you. Hmmm... For a monster like you to be clinging onto scraps of dignity so fiercely... Hahaha! How ghastly! It's totally unsightly!"
My chest heaved. Laughter tried to crawl out and died in my throat. I managed a crooked grin that felt as though it might rip every facial muscle I had. My face wouldn't cooperate beyond it, and I was glad to even be able to do this much.
"You won't erase me or this house because you're too scared of damaging these old relics... Being the generous man that I am, I'll do you a favor and ease your troubles!"
With one final push, I raised the skull overhead and prepared to slam it down into the compact dirt.
The ghost's reaction was instant.
The eye above flared so bright I thought my brain would split. For a second, the world went all white, then color slammed back in like a punch. The grey filter that encompassed the world now mixed together with a twistedly, dark rainbow. The archaic sigil in the sclera burned hotter, and I could feel its stare inside my bones.
The oppressive gravity that the eye emitted suddenly intensified. It quickly matched the level from before we'd taken refuge in this backyard, but soon it exceeded it.
The dirt beside the chair cracked with an offended groan. Dust rose in a lazy halo.
The force pressing down on my body made it feel as though I'd sink into the ground.
My crooked grin remained frozen on my face. I was unable to change my expression.
The ground under the lawn chair bucked. A brittle wind whipped across the yard, pulling at my hair and at the wet fringe of my jacket. The eye split open further, a seam of darkness running through its center, cutting through the colors. Then it opened like a festering wound.
Boom! Gush!
It was as though a dam had broken. A tidal wave of pure darkness exploded from the split pupil and rushed downward. The blackness that emerged from the eye was not shadow but something thicker, wet and hungry, a blackness that tasted of old graves. It hit the air with a sound like a thousand pages tearing and a single, high, dying scream lanced through the yard. The noise scraped at my skull and wanted to hollow me out from the inside.
It was inhuman, unimaginable, vile, undescribable, disgusting. It was a terrible sound coupled with a terrible sight that couldn't have come from a living creature.
From the moment that the blackness emerged, I could sense the raw negativity that was laced within it.
Raw negative emotions flood forth—a surplus of regrets stolen from the last moments of countless individuals. And all of those regrets were assimilated into the overpowered hatred of the ghost. That was what came together to form that blackness. It was the Null Streets themselves, in their purest form.
'The regrets stored within the ghost's core? Is the core mixed in that darkness?!'
It rushed down like a tidal current, the air in its path becoming cold and brittle. As it stretched downward, the darkness began to braid itself into a more refined exterior.
Its shape continuously morphed, shifted into its most suited state.
A human outline first, then the details.
The suggestion of shoulders, a spine, a torso. They were all uncanny. The figure was skinny to a disturbing degree, as though it were only skin on bone. The head gaped with a jaw that unhinged like a trapdoor, the interior a void rimed with the same oily, ink-thick black that the pupil had vomited forth. From its unhinged jaw came sharp, deathly screams. One hand flicked outward, long fingers spread like hooks, reaching toward me. Below the waist, however, there was no body to finish the picture. Where hips, thighs, and legs should have been, the figure dissolved into an unformed swarm.
Unlike the human form that it was mimicking, the figure born from the blackness was enormous. Just like the eye that it was sourced from, its scale was dreamlike.
Even incomplete, its torso was as large as a skyscraper. No, even that might be an understatement. I don't know if I've ever seen a skyscraper as large as the creature born from the blackness.
And it was coming down on me.
Not slowly either.
The black torrent and the figure made of the blackness were barrelling toward me faster than a racecar.
Suddenly, the skull weighed a thousand pounds in my hands, but I still clutched it tight, as if the brittle thing could shield me from the giant reaching down from the sky. My arms trembled, blood slicking the grooves of its eye sockets.
The pressure thickened. Every second I breathed felt stolen. The air in my lungs wanted to cave in on itself.
The creature continued to let out a deafening screech as it descended, the pressure being forced upon increasing at the same time.
'Come on... Come on!'
The hooked claws tore through the sky, each black finger trailing ribbons of regret that hissed and evaporated into the air. My ears rang with its screeches, my chest crushed as if the very sound were grinding my ribs to splinters.
My heart pounded faster as it threatened to rip me apart. Before long, tears formed at the edges of my eyes.
'I'm counting on you! It's already game set, so don't let me down!'
I gritted my teeth tightly and reflexively pulled the skull closer to myself, pressing it against my stomach.
Stray words crawled from my lips.
"I... I believed in you! With all the power vested in me, I'm commanding you to get up and save me!"
I held my eyes shut as the dying wails of the blackness surrounded me.
"Cacophony!"
The name bled into the storm, pitiful against the unearthly roar. I thought it would vanish, swallowed whole by the ghost's hatred.
But then—
"Foolish boy. A servant is not meant to make commands of an Empress."
The voice was soothing and melodic. Its pitch brought salvation, and its meaning spelled victory.
My eyes snapped open despite the weight crushing them down.
Standing in front of me, partly blocking out the dark blackness, was a dazzling ruby red.
My heart lurched.
"Oh? Aren't you too surprised? I let it be known that this was when I'd be making my appearance."
She spoke calmly and without worry. She was easygoing even as the blackness was nearly upon us.
Her hand rose, delicate yet unwavering, as though the crushing gravity of the ghost was no more than a summer breeze.
She spread her fingers wide.
At first, the change in her palm was subtle. A faint red flush spread across her pale palm, no brighter than the color of blood through translucent skin. But then the glow deepened, blooming like embers coaxed to life. The power blossomed at the center point of her palm, firing out as red threads. Those crimson threads unfurled from her fingertips, curling upward, spiraling, and knotting together.
"Steady your gaze." She spoke without looking at me. "Do not shut your eyes, not even for a heartbeat. Watch closely, and learn what separates an Empress… from the carrion that haunts her streets."
Her palm was now alight like a molten star. My vision blurred at the edges, but through the haze I saw what took place.
The mass of knotting crimson threads took form and became a fierce fireball. The claws of the black born monster came down upon us with the wrath of a hungry void, but before it could touch down, Cacophony acted.
Her crimson fireball shot upward and unraveled into lashing streams of flame and light. Each one pierced through the dark void, blasting the tidal wave into cinders. They struck the descending claws, split them, burnt through them, and left no traces.
The fire didn't didn't stop there. The threads of flame moved like serpents. They coiled together, fanned out, clustered, and then released again. Each one seemed to have a life of its own, making its own choices as to what it destroyed.
The swarm of regrets shrieked, their cries a thousand voices folded into one.
The figure convulsed. Its jaw unhinged wider, a chasm of black trying to vomit more darkness down upon us. But the crimson threads surged faster, cutting into its unholy maw and replacing its endless black with a bright ruby red.
For the briefest moment, I saw something beyond the blackness. Within the writhing torso of blackness, past layers of shadow and sorrow, there was a single thing untouched. It was a spherical orb made up of a cluster of colors. It was similar to the orb of regrets that I had in my pocket, except the colors that were stored with the one in the sky were far deeper.
But before I could think about it further, the crimson light touched it. And then, it was burned so thoroughly that I doubted it ever existed.
A shriek louder than any others reverberated, and soon the swarm of darkness began to dissipate.
The torso shattered down the center, fissures racing across its ribs of darkness. The skyscraper-sized abomination folded in on itself, tearing apart from its core outward.
The crimson fire consumed it whole, burning away its regrets, its hatred, its everything. The sky, once drowned in oily blacks, split open with a harsh crack like shattered glass. The oppressive gravity lifted, leaving my chest empty and raw, as if my ribs had just been unshackled. The grey filter had also disappeared, allowing the world to be seen for what it truly was.
Even so, with one eye still stained blood red, only one of my eyes would be privy to the truth.
"But, I'm fine with that."
Because in both eyes, I could see a beautiful red.