a good monster

“Am I,” Sylas says.

“Mhm.”

“Now why would I go and do that?”

“Because you love me,” Delilah says. “And because this will allow you to be even more daring and reckless in fights, which I’m sure will thrill you.”

“You know me too well,” he says, his voice melting with tenderness. He presses a kiss to the top of her head. “Do you already have your components?”

“Almost all of them.”

“And you have the spell prepared—”

“Yes.”

“—and you could cast it immediately—”

“No, not immediately, I told you, I don’t ha—”

“You were only waiting for me to say yes,” Sylas says, amused. “You already knew I’d say yes.”

“I didn’t. You might have said no.”

“Delilah. You already knew I’d say yes.”

“You had the option to say no.”

“Did I?”

“Yes,” Delilah says. “I would have been very upset, and it would have been a stupid answer – you know as well as I do that this is in your best interests – but if you had said no I would have let you. I wouldn’t have cut off a piece of you in your sleep. It’s your deci—”

“You wouldn’t have done what?”

2. Material components: A vessel worth at least 2000 gold, a diamond worth at least 1000 gold, and at least 1 cubic inch of flesh of the creature that is to be cloned, which the spell consumes.

He looks like a cadaver, lying face-down under that sheet. But he’s moving too much to be a cadaver – rolling his head back and forth over his folded arms, flexing his feet. 

Delilah passes the knife over the flame an unnecessary sixteenth time. “Tell me again,” she says, “why you couldn’t do this yourself.”

“I can’t reach back there,” Sylas says reasonably.

“I used the top of my thigh.”

“And hit an artery, I’d imagine, and nearly bled out.”

She did. “I didn’t.”

He hears the lie, laughs. Every time Delilah makes him laugh, she feels giddy – stupidly, unhelpfully giddy. She lets the flame peter out, crosses to the table where he is sprawled face-down. 

“You have the potion,” she says.

“Mmhm.”

She lifts the sheet, folds it back – there – the crest of his calves, which burst with a riot of hair and the faint few lines of scars. (“They rarely aim for the feet,” he’d said wryly.) She brushes the tips of her fingers up the taut thrumming line of muscle. Says: “Say no. Tell me you don’t want to do this.”

“You know as well as I do, my love, that it’s in my best interests.”

“I hate it when you parrot me.” (She doesn’t.)

Sylas lets out a warm huff, doesn’t deign to engage with this lie. “I’ve suffered worse.” (She folds the sheet up again, leaves the pile of it at the base of his spine.) “Honestly,” he says, and then he hisses as she sterilizes the skin. “Quite honestly,” he says again, “it’s the anticipation that bothers me more than anything. Delilah—”

And then his voice stops abruptly as she pushes the knife in.

She does her best to do it quickly – efficiently – because he deserves her at her quickest and most efficient. And she absolutely hates hurting him, hates it, pushes the knife farther into the flesh of his rear, has to saw through a band of muscle, finally reaches all the way up to the little green line she had marked on the blade. So that’s one side of the cube. Sylas’ breath is rasping, wheezing; she can feel the way he’s shaking. She isn’t going to vomit she isn’t going to vomit she isn’t. It would be stupid to vomit, it would be unforgivable. Two faces of the cube – three, counting the top – a cube has six sides, which frustrated her when she was very young, she thought it should be sixteen. Four by four. (There’s so much blood, her grip is slick and shaking.) She has always been a terror to contend with (the grind of muscle against the blade) when the world doesn’t go the way she thinks it ought to. No matter how many times her tutors explained that a cube has six faces, she wasn’t satisfied with it (five done, only the sixth left), because it wasn’t logical. It shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen like that. And if she explained that coherently enough, then surely it would stop.

“Done,” she says hoarsely, and Sylas grunts. She hears the sound of the healing potion being uncorked, sees at the edge of her vision as he props himself up on one arm and drinks. The chasm she has left in him immediately begins to fill up; Delilah ignores it, turns the cube of flesh over and over and over in her fingers. Six sides. One inch each. She spent weeks hiding from her tutors, cutting out abominable shapes with sixteen sides. She thought she could prove it to them. But no matter how much she screamed, and no matter how much she cried, and no matter how much she begged, nobody listened. And eventually she had to give up.

3. This clone forms inside the vessel used in the spell’s casting and grows to full size and maturity after 120 days.

Sylas is perfectly content to ignore the growing body; he obligingly stays home with Delilah until it’s done, but he only seems to remember it when she informs him how it’s progressing. (She tries to keep her updates brief. “Eyes,” or “four separate limbs,” or “five feet tall now.”) Delilah, on the other hand, likes the process – she creeps down to the basement once a day to sit and watch it grow, to see the distant promise of him floating peacefully in the salt water. She is greedy for him, she has always been greedy for him; she wants his childhood, she wants to know every skinned knee and lost tooth and kiss and touch and pain he knew without her. But she wouldn’t ask that of him, so instead she watches him grow up a second time. And when it’s too much – when the body is so still, so silent, that she can’t trick herself into believing it’s him – she runs back up the stairs and finds him waiting for her. Alive, smiling, warm.

“Do you like the clone more than me?” he asks her once, teasing, but then his face cracks open at whatever expression of horror he sees on her own.

“I don’t like anything more than I like you,” she says, and means it. She likes the clone for the way it could become him – how its soft hands will grow into the hands she loves, the ones that touch her everywhere. But once it’s grown, all that potential will be lost; it won’t be anything but a copy of his body. And she likes his body when he’s in it, only when he’s in it. Only when he’s there with her.

When the clone is grown, he leaves again – some battle to fight, some peace to keep or break – and she goes back to missing him again, just the way she did one hundred and twenty-eight days ago. She tries bringing a book down to the basement, to sit next to the tank and read by that distant, oceanic light. Instead loneliness pierces her like a bone stuck in her throat, and she stains the pages with crying.

4. It remains inert and endures indefinitely, as long as its vessel remains undisturbed.

He never uses it. He never needs to use it. He gets bruised, broken, maimed, sick with a cold (“I’m ready for the clone now,” he says through a stuffed-up nose, and she hits him in the head with a pillow), but he always comes back to her alive. Delilah visits the tank less and less; each infinitesimal speck of dust that grows over the lid is its own small gift. Their lives move on above its head, their feet on the floorboards: the endless waltz of their wedding night, the rhythmic entrances and exits of the routine they build together. The frantic staccato pace of wait, before we go, one more thing— and the cautious step-step-pause of hello, are you home? Two sets of feet climbing the stairs (or skipping the stairs and teleporting straight to bed). The body below them, dreaming of nothing, its empty mind waiting patiently for an inhabitant who won’t—

“I’m ready for the clone now,” Sylas says.

“Don’t,” Delilah says; her voice comes out horrible and wrong, too sharp and too cruel and too soft and too worried. She is kneeling by the side of the bed, picking impatiently at the mud-stained laces of her husband’s boots. He hadn’t been able to get out of the carriage, so she had cast Dimension Door to get them both inside – and here they are, travel-stained and weary and no closer to an answer than before.

“Why not?” Sylas says. “Isn’t that what it’s for?”

“I’m not going to euthanize you,” Delilah says, in that same horrible voice. “Not over – there’s a cure, I know there’s a cure—”

“Apparently not!” Sylas says. “Delilah, this is the tenth—”

“Then we’ll try eleven—”

“I don’t want—” and as his voice crests into a shout, he cuts himself off abruptly with a long, rattling exhalation. He doesn’t have to finish the sentence, she already knows: how Sylas loves his body more than even Delilah does, is patient with it, maintains it, treats it gently, all with the knowledge that it will be good to him in return. And it is. It was. It has been. It will be, once they’ve figured out what’s wrong. And fixed it. They’ll fix it. She’ll fix it.

But the laces won’t come undone, so Delilah sits back on her heels and looks at him. His hands are knotted into the blankets, straining and white knuckled; the rage is visible in every taut muscle. She can see it ticking away right under the skin of his face, where he is only just barely holding it back from her. He is trying so hard. He must be exhausted.

Delilah stands up and presses the palm of her hand to the twitching muscle of his cheek; Sylas lets out another exhale, and she loves him, and she won’t call the sound a sob. His eyes close. He leans into the touch of her hand. 

“I know,” Delilah says quietly. “My love. I know. I’m so sorry. But it isn’t—” the words splinter in her throat. She tries again: “We don’t—” Again: “Sylas, you aren’t in the vessel. You’re here. With me. I don’t want – we can’t throw that away.”

He reaches up, folds his hand around hers. He opens his eyes. He looks at her. Says, seriously: “If we go to fifteen different experts to find a cure, Delilah, and there’s no cure – then I want the contingency. Alright?”

“Twenty,” Delilah says immediately.

“Twenty?” The amusement creeps into his voice, almost unwillingly. “Delilah, I don't think there are twenty kinds of healer in all of Wildemount.”

“Mm, I hadn’t thought about other continents. Thirty. Give me thirty.”

Sylas laughs, just once – a harsh cough, unlovely and enough to make Delilah’s heart flutter. “Thirty. No, I see what you’re doing. You may have fifteen.”

“Vasselheim alone—”

“I will die before I go to Vasselhei—”

And then he stops, because she kisses him. His smile presses against her mouth like a signet ring to wax – it melts her and remakes her in an exact reverse of his shape. When they kiss, it seems impossible that anything could ever hurt either of them. How could he be sick, when his smile tastes like sunlight?

“Twenty,” Delilah breathes against his mouth.

Sylas makes a displeased sound. “Dirty play,” he says faintly. “Fine. Twenty. Then we’ll—”

She doesn’t want to hear it, she doesn't want to hear it, she kisses him again. She climbs into his lap, she shoves him down to the bed, she kisses him and kisses him and kisses him and he has to lie there and let her because she didn’t get his shoes off so he can’t get his feet on the bed, there’s mud, and she couldn’t pick through the filthy tangle of his laces but that doesn’t mean anything, surely that doesn’t mean anything—

5. At any time after the clone matures, if the original creature dies, its soul transfers to the clone, provided that the soul is free and willing to return.

Delilah has learned a perhaps unwise amount of damaging spells, considering her line of work, but she has found uses for all of them in their time. Blight, Finger of Death, Disintegrate. The humble Fire Bolt and the dramatic Negative Energy Flood. She cultivates the incantations the way some women cultivate orchids – notes the differences in syllables, the slight flourish of the somatics that convinces a surge of energy to go here, to render a body to this. She finds them elegant.

She found them elegant.

Blight drains the moisture from a living body, mummifying it but rendering it uninhabitable – if – and Disintegrate does what the name implies. Fire Bolt is too weak, it takes too long, and Finger of Death and Negative Energy Flood both create an undead where the corpse should be. She doesn’t want an undead creature. She doesn’t want that. She wants him to live.

But she made him a promise.

The queasy, horrifying silver lining is that his memory is starting to go – she has promised him twenty attempts to cure him, but he can’t hold all twenty in his mind at once. So she lies to him. She keeps him alive. Twenty-one becomes seventeen; twenty-two becomes nineteen; on one very bad day, twenty-three becomes five. (When the pain—) (Well, then he can’t remember anything.) By the twenty-fourth failed healer, Delilah has managed to procure the scroll. She brings it home to him, clenched in her fist. Up the stairs. Across the lonely floorboards, which seem to cough up the noise of her footsteps like they ache to double the sound. But they can’t: he’s lying in bed, rolled over onto his side (he should stay on his back, but what’s the point?), staring at the landscape on the wall. She should have taken that painting down. He shouldn’t have to look at Maladomini, like the wreckage of that world is a mirror.

He startles when he hears her timid footsteps, sits up – wobbles – she gets to him in time, but there’s nothing she can do. She’s too weak to hold him up and so he falls back down.

“Delilah,” he says. His eyes are foggy; the sickness has made them bigger, somehow, bluer, the eyes of a child. Watching her with amazement, like she’s going to do a magic trick. Like she’s going to save his life.

“My darling,” she says, and she leans down to press a kiss to his forehead. “I’m home. Hello, sweetheart.”

“Did you find—”

“No,” she says, “I didn’t find a cure.”

The realization hits him the same way every time: after all of this, really, there’s no cure? What’s wrong with me? What has hurt me that the brightest minds in Exandria can’t understand, can’t solve? Why am I alone here?

He says, slowly, “How many…”

“Twenty.”

“No,” he says, “no, that can’t be…the hedge witch, the Archive, the temple, the Assembly…that old man in the woods…five, Delilah, that’s—” and his eyes flare wide, and his whole body snaps into rigidity, and the pain seizes him again, and she can’t bear it, and she opens the scroll, and she says the Word.

6. The original creature's physical remains, if they still exist, become inert and can't thereafter be restored to life—

The second he dies, she scrambles to her feet and runs. An Archmage, and she runs – no spells, no tricks, just her feet slapping clumsily on the ground as she runs (wheezing) down to the basement.Away from their bed, away from the body, away. She bangs her shin on the banister, she tumbles down the final set of stairs, she runs to him: Sylas, face blown wide with terror and confusion, scrabbling at the inside of the crystal tank with bubbles cascading from his open mouth. He finds the lid, shoves it once – twice – and it explodes outwards with a bang, followed by the heave of his body out of the top. He collapses, naked, onto the stones. (She should have gotten him carpet, why didn’t she get him carpet, why didn’t she.) He coughs up a gout of cloudy water. Says “Agh.”

“Sylas,” Delilah says, “Sylas—”

He rolls over, sits up, flexes his hands – watches himself flex his hands – and then he looks at her, and he smiles: an arrow of light pierced through her heart. The sound Delilah makes is involuntary and guttural; she falls on her knees, she crawls to him. He has his arms open already. When she tumbles into his embrace, the cold salt water soaks right through her.

“Delilah,” he murmurs, and kisses any part of her he can reach: her ear, her neck, her cheekbone. “Clever Delilah.”

“You don’t feel—”

“I feel like I can think. For the first time in – months.”

“Do you remember—”

“Mhm.” He stops kissing her. After a moment: “There were more than twenty.”

“I know. I know. I promised you. But I couldn’t – Sylas, I still don’t know what happened to you—”

“We’ll dissect the corpse,” he says reasonably, and then he flinches as she sinks her teeth into his neck. “Delilah.”

“We won’t,” she says, “we won’t, we won’t touch it, we won’t look at it.” This is the stupidest thing she’s ever said, of course, and she hates herself for it – but the feeling is as cold and bone-deep as the press of salt water. If they get in the room with that body, something terrible will happen. It will pass its disease to Sylas. It will kill him, it will steal his soul. It will make him cry, which is the worst thing she could possibly imagine.

She should be better than this. She should be the rational one. If Sylas wants to cut his own corpse open, she should already have the scalpel ready and waiting for him. Instead she clings to him and says nothing and is a loathsome little coward.

“I can still solve it,” she says eventually, which is a pitiful attempt at an apology. Sylas seems to hear it in the way she meant it; he hums, shifts their weight so he can pull her closer.

“You don’t have to solve it,” he murmurs. “Delilah—”

“I can—”

“I don’t want you to run away and study and research and argue with doctors. I want you to stay here with me.” Wryly: “Not leave me for my own corpse.”

“I don’t want the corpse, Sylas,” (she’s getting hysterical) “I want to understand what happened to you, what hurt you, what was kil—”

In his haste to kiss her, he knocks his forehead against hers hard enough to bruise. She hasn’t kissed him in – gods, it’s been so long, she’s happy to moan shamelessly against his mouth and give herself over to him. He is so good at kissing certainty into her. It’s over, he tells her, it’s over, it’s done, we’re together, we love each other. What else could possibly matter? What in this world could shake that foundation for even a moment?

“Not on the floor,” she says breathily, “not – mm – Sylas, you’ll catch a chill—”

He assures her eloquently that he won’t. He’s cheating, certainly: he uses his tongue, his hands, the solid weight of his thigh.

“I’ll take us upstairs—” Delilah gasps.

“You won’t,” Sylas says, and he sucks a bruise into her neck. “You’re busy.”

She’s already laughing, helpless and giddy and terrified. “Busy?” (The word is unintelligible through the press of giggles.) “Are you—”

That’s the last thing she says for a little while, besides his name. She can’t possibly talk. She’s too busy.

7. —since the creature’s soul is elsewhere.

They change the sheets, they change the blankets. They dream up windows so that they can throw open the windows. The invisible servants carry the body away and dispose of it; those same servants discard the buckets half-filled with fluids, the potion bottles and herb packets that may as well have been colored water and fallen leaves. Delilah and Sylas can’t be bothered to deal with these things, of course: they’re too busy. There’s so much to do – an entire new body to break in, to map and catalogue, to teach to dance. And Delilah would give up all of her time, she would give her whole life, just to dance with him.

At the end of the party, when everyone else has left the floor:

“We should make another one,” Delilah murmurs.

Sylas makes a questioning sound; he doesn’t stop their slow and shuffling waltz, keeps slowly turning them both in circles. The room is quiet, now. The musicians have packed up their instruments, their hosts have begun to blow out the lights. But he had wanted one more dance. Just one more dance. And she’d wanted to give it to him.

“Another clone,” she says.

“We should,” Sylas says, and in his voice she catches the powdery traces of her own irrational terror: that by invoking the sickness they will draw it back. By preparing for it, they will take its hand and pull it closer. That stupid superstition. They’re too clever for it; they should know better. There is never a situation where ignorance is the right option, not when they could learn something – and she knows that – and she stays where she is, anyways, tucked close to him, her head pressed to his chest, listening only and ever for the steady beat of his heart.

“Delilah?” Sylas says softly.

“Yes?”

“It…” but then he stops. The breath he pulls in lingers in his chest, rattles there. His heartbeat lurches into something quicker. It says what he won’t.

“No,” Delilah says. “No. It can’t.”

Sylas lets the breath out slowly, tucks his face against the top of her skull. She can hear the sick and terrified pounding of his heart, but his feet never waver; his hands don’t tremble. He is – as he has always been – a flawless dancer. Even in the dark. Even with no music to dance to.

He doesn’t have to ask. Delilah answers his question: “I will,” she says. “If you want me to.”

Sylas lets out a breath. Not quite a laugh. “It breaks my heart,” he says. “When you build these beautiful things for me, and you hope that I’ll want them. And if I don’t want them, you’ll destroy them without a second thought. My Delilah.” He sounds fond; he sounds on the edge of tears. “Always waiting for me to say yes.”

“And will you?” she says. “Say yes.”

Warmly: “You already kno—”

“It’s time to go,” someone says.

Delilah blinks, lifts her head – the room is dark and silent. Nothing remains but featureless black. The only real thing in the world is Sylas, touching her.

“We weren’t finished,” she says.

“It’s time to go,” the same voice says, insistently. “You have to leave. You can’t stay here.”

Sylas lets out a warm breath, squeezes her hand. “Well,” he says, “we’ll finish this dance at home. And then maybe another three or four turns around the floor, hm?”

Delilah stares into the dark, squinting – like that would change anything – like the blackness would pull away, like everything would reveal itself if she just looked hard enough. That old child-voice squirming, insisting: it should make sense. Why doesn’t it make sense? Why can’t I make the world go right by wanting it hard enough? Why can’t I break it all apart and put it together in the right shape?

“Delilah,” Sylas says. “Let’s go.”

“Alright,” she says, and she turns away, and she clings more tightly to his hand.

8. The clone is physically identical to the original.

“One more dance?” Delilah says, her voice trembling.

Sylas tries to laugh; the sound is wet and thick and painful. She fumbles the knife, drops it in the blankets, and doesn’t quite manage to get the bucket up in time. He stains the sleeve of her dress when he coughs it all up.

“Delilah,” he slurs. “Delilah.”

“Yes. I’m here. Please – say yes. My love. I can solve it this time. Sylas – Sylas, just one more, I swear—”

The laugh bubbles, spits, and then peters out. Nothing but exhaustion remains when he says: “Why not. Why not. Just one more dance.”