Brain Hurty!

“It was really a race to see who could ask for the other’s hand first,” he says, brushing out a clot of sticky maroon. He has stripped down to his undershirt and pants and sat on the stone slab that protrudes from the wall as a Cult member holds the showerhead up for him. His eyesight has largely recovered, though today the double-vision lingers, so he keeps his eyes closed. The bathroom is large, cold. Grey stone and green walls. In the other room, a Cult member has their blue robe sleeves rolled up as they dunk his blood-stained shirt in dish soap and scrub. Another is setting up their phone, “Delta Dawn” crooning from the speakers.

“I think she had been working on her gift for me for a while, and wished to give it to me first.” Abaddon continues. “So whenever she would see me with a hare or a fox in my hands, she’d run away.”

“I’ve had a few Tinder dates like that,” the Cult member with the showerhead says.

“Really? Did you ever catch them?”

The Cult member blinks. “Well, no. I mean, it seemed like they—”

“I thought modern women liked to be chased.”

“I think that’s just metaphorically.”

“How boring.” Abaddon forces his hairbrush through a nasty tangle, says, “Esther loves the chase. Although admittedly, we take turns; sometimes she even chases me with a gun. That was our third date, though. What was I talking about?”

“Your first date, my Lord.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” The water still runs red, so Abaddon motions to be given the shampoo bottle again, speaking as he lathers up the side of his head. “Finally, after a week or so of this, I managed to corner her. Well, I cornered her through her uncle, who was a ghost, so I just had to pass through him.”

The water stream jerks. “Ghosts are real?”

An edge of annoyance creeps into Abaddon’s voice; “It was in your introductory pamphlet.” And he will always enjoy watching a Cult member tense around him, ready to prostrate themselves at a moment’s notice. “Anyway, I presented her with a necklace I’d made of carved bird bones—she’d been looking into prophetic magic, and I knew the bones would help with haruspicy.”

A pause. “This is where you ask what she got me in return,” he says, rolling the wrist with his brush.

“Oh, apologies, my Lord. What did she get you?”

“She’d remade the quilt her first version had made for me, back in my original timeline.”

“The one that’s hung up in the Great Hall?”

“Yes, that one. Although the stitching is honestly much better—my original Esther had made it in haste, thinking I’d be going back to Hell the next day.”

He can still remember it: running his thumb over her lines, noticing how much smoother and straighter they were, and feeling a deep, sick pit in his stomach. The thought alone somehow felt a betrayal. But that was stupid, wasn’t it?

He still doesn’t know how long he stood there, only that it was long enough for Esther to place a hand on his shoulder, asking if he was okay.

A dry, mirthless laugh. “If only.”

“That’s really kinda wholesome,” the Cult member says.

One of the others in the bathroom adds, “My wife hasn’t given me a thoughtful gift since our first kid was born.”

The one washing Abaddon’s shirt lifts their head, asks, “You’re married?”

And so it goes.

This is always Abaddon’s least favorite part: telling the story of his quest—yes, a quest!, a noble myth and not a string of blank centuries punctuated with brief, intense failures—to enhance his and Esther’s aura—to “farm it,” as she’d once said. And in a venue like this, letting the Cult members in whom they’d seen potential as sacrifices feel like they were being let in on something intimate. A peek behind the curtain, a glimpse of the man behind the god—a trick to deepen the devotion.

It’s what the original Esther would have done. Of that, Abaddon is certain.  Still, sometimes it feels…. Obscene.

But why should a demon care about something like that?

This is where he needs to lie, at least, so the feeling largely goes away. In truth, his “official” first date with Esther had been the Matriarch driving them to see some forgettable movie and then sitting two booths down from them as they stuffed their faces with grease and cheese fries. Their real date had been under the moon, just outside the mouth of her mineshaft hideaway, cutting open the bellies of birds to see what the future would hold.

“This one says we’re gonna have 12 kids and teach them to form a human Mech and beat people up,” she’d said.

“I just see lottery numbers,” Abaddon had replied, holding up the slimy, half-digested ticket.

“It says so right here,” she answered, pointing to something on the ticket—causing him to look down long enough for her to flick his nose.

After a moment, she adds, “Oh, come on, that was funny. Are demons not allowed to laugh?”

“Ha ha ha ha ha,” his dry reply.

And then she’d made like she was going to slap him.

To the Cult members, the lie he tells as the water from his head finally runs clear is that Esther saw in those slimy strings of intestines the future of the Cult—fields of followers, glory, and riches. Palaces of black glass, crowns of bones, and enough gold to sleep on.

The truth is that Esther had complained she couldn’t even throw the disemboweled bird at him because he’d probably just eat it. Somehow, this ended up calling into question his ability to swallow the bird, bones and all, in one bite.

Somehow, this ended up with her telling him to “go long” as she threw the corpse to him, and him backing up until he slammed into a tree.