Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XXVI - Arrant Thief
"The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun."
[The Past – TMT Marine Terminal, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA]
The flash of green and red navigation lights fight for attention as they gently sway from side-to-side, inducing a queasiness as they bob ahead of the vast steel-struck skyline on the opposite side of the riverbank. Office drones reduced to indistinct, nondescript silhouettes make for a hundred miniaturised cataracts that float across bright office windows as they scurry in some meaningless, unproductive triangle; made from email inboxes, photocopiers and bad coffee burnt to the glass.
Trapped in their concrete and metal prisons of polished glass and refrigerated drinking fountains, serving effective-life sentences of their own free will with the only difference being the luxury of making their cell a home in the fitful few hours between office calls. The rhythmic splash of water sloshing against pierside makes a lazy timpani for the atrophied snarl of a thousand internal combustion engines, idling in nose-to-tail traffic. Heat shimmer rising from a blanket of choking exhaust smog across the river makes the navigation lights on those tall, bobbing masts shift and warp and bleed into each other.
I press an edge of my heel down against the soft, rotting wood of the jetty and watch it depress and burst at the effort. Thick green algae spills out to either side, as if the structure itself is bleeding. Or leaking its corruption, its poison, into the wider world.
The unmistakable clack-clack-clack of stiletto against concrete echoes against the fibreglass hulls moored nearby, adding an off-beat interval to the lapping water’s effort. The stink of brackish water and industrial run-off fills my lungs, and I turn to watch the last time she will ever see any of this, ever again.
Cassiopeia, in brilliant red – it does so suit her – sweeps around the corner. Industrious, fast-paced. It does not suit a young woman to be dockside with nothing but the cityscape and the Moon to light the way and yet, she resolutely takes this same route home every evening. Perhaps she did not think it could happen again. It is why I knew where to find her.
It is how they have found her.
A group of four, stood leaning or squatting on the sun-bleached, fat bodies of abandoned storage crates and barrels. Burst open and ransacked, deformed by the elements and the weight of the thugs now waiting for their moment.
For their prey. For a flowergirl named after the stars, dressed all in red.
“Evenin’, Lady,” The tallest of the three men drawls as he moves out to stop her dead. She takes a step backwards but the other two have already circled around behind a strung-out section of wind-tossed plastic sheeting, standing against the way she came.
Panic manifests itself in so many curious ways. The involuntary jerking of limbs as the fight-or-flight reflex spins up on a heady, stomach-twisting cocktail of adrenaline and cortisone. Swallowing repeatedly, pursed and dry lips working in some silent affectation or prayer. Eyes narrowed, taking in the danger and desperately trying to categorise as the heart begins to hammer against the prison bars of its ribcage.
But then, curiously, it all seems to dampen down. A flicker of recognition passes over Cassieopia’s features and instead of heightening her anxiety, it seems to tamp down. Cooling. Her fists ball to match the fat hands of the three men forming an unwelcomely intimate triangle.
“... Been waiting a while to see you again.”
“Where’s your guardian angel?” The second of the three calls out, the slightest quiver in his voice betraying an absurd fear that very angel might inexplicably appear for having been summoned. Ironic, if he had only known how close she stood watching all of this work its way to such an inevitable, tragic conclusion.
She does not look over her shoulder, but instead finds those bobbing navigation lights out over the water. “ … And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgement on the great Day …”
The third thug frowns, the thick fat folds of his face contorting. “Huh?”
“Bible shit I think. Guess she’s busy,” The first shrugs. “Same goes for that redhead bitch I’m guessing?”
Cassiopeia purses her lips and then finds his eyes with her own. “Miss Ryan’s been extremely busy, lately.”
The crash of splintering wood snatches all of their attention as the fourth member of the ambush strolls languidly into view, twirling a tyre iron in-hand.
The former talent manager of the former Bombshells’ World Champion watches the end of the metal bar spin. Recognition dawns. “Where’d you get that?”
The other woman, the newcomer, stops and turns to look at the fire-blackened tip, its protective plastic coating boiled and warped under tremendous heat. “Lying around, like all the rest of the trash. Like you will be soon enough, sweetheart.”
She runs a free, knuckle-scarred hand through her short-shaved scalp. “Seems as good a way as any to send you to yer’ … You know …”
“Oblivion,” Cassieopia replies. At that moment, I suspect she knows I am here and that I will do nothing to stop what is about to happen. It is time for her to learn her final, most painful lesson.
Hurricanes cannot help but destroy everything they touch, even by proxy. Even when they are hundreds of miles away. Even when they have stopped spinning and whirling. At least for a little while.
It is the flower girl dressed in red who makes the first move, to the point I am genuinely surprised. She closes the gap on the most talkative of the large men – the one directly ahead – and as he clumsily reaches out to seize her by the shoulder, she simply swings a pointed heel up between his legs. A grunt of pain fizzles out as his lungs are emptied by a diaphragm squeezed in tight and collapsed on itself. Cassieopia closes the distance and buries the sharp edges of her nails into his face, tearing. He howls, one agony forgotten in favour of another as he stumbles backward and falls.
She goes with him, ripping.
Cassieopia is still clawing even as she is lifted up and off her feet, cold metal pressed in tight against her throat and up hard under the chin. The man at her flailing feet rolls away, gasping and pawing at what is left of his face. The flower girl lashes out as best her untenable position allows; lacing the other woman with cuts and gouges but she is resolute. She is determined.
She squeezes tighter.
Stiletto heels clack-clack-clack on the concrete to a new, slurred rhythm – desperately scraping for purchase until it becomes disjointed and heavy, and yet …
… Cassieopia does not fight the tyre iron itself, even as her life is squeezed out. Instead, she fights the woman trying to take it. Leaden arms rise slowly and slice red ribbon-laced lines across cheeks that bulge with exertion and effort. Her blood flows, even as the flower girl’s drains from her face.
Objectively, the Human Body cannot operate for any significant length of time starved of oxygen. Basic cellular function continues for longer, but the complex movements associated with thinking, with fighting, expire in mere moments. Those moments stretch out now into entire hours contained within the mind’s eye – becoming an age and epic which soon seems to stop and hang on some new, impossible eternity.
But, of course, it does not. Objectively. It takes only seconds for Cassieopia’s fingers to fall away from their bloody work, arms swinging limply by her side. In just a few more, her head lolls forward and hugs the tyre iron pulled in tight, underneath. And then she does not move ever again.
My attention is not fully focused on the end of her life, because even now – with so many variables accounted for and understood to the point I feel as though I have somehow directed it all, myself – I cannot help but think she will still intervene. Every crushed can tossed down from a rotting edge by the wind whips my composite face around and over my shoulder; each creak of tensioned, rusted metal chain as the river nearby tugs on the ship attached to its associated links steals my gaze.
I wait for my Resplendent Hurricane to somehow, someway, appear like an apparition all too many think me to be. Objectively, I know such a thing is impossible. I know exactly where Miss Ryan is; many hundreds of miles from this Iron Underbelly within the pit of which her former talent manager is being lowered to the concrete, limp and pale. There is no reason for her to be here, now, and she will learn about Cassieopia’s end whenever she deigns to leave the razor-topped walls that separate her world from this one.
And yet … I still expect it. Still imagine a rageful redhead in ripped jeans and bunched fists stalking across pierside, breaking jaws and saving the day.
I almost laugh, because the warm and reassuring embrace of precedence gives me comfort. Amber Ryan has never saved the day. She has never saved anyone. Not a Man in a Hat, not her Husband and not a Flower Girl Named After the Stars. Twice. She could not even save herself from making the same mistakes again and again.
The woman with the tyre iron sends it high into the night sky and out of sight, to disappear into the river water with a splash. Swallowed by the wail of sirens reverberating through a criss-cross maze of rusting shipping containers, blocking out the south side of the city. Those sirens belong to any number of other awful things being visited on people by each other, but not here.
Not to this particularly awful thing, that I feel so integrated with. Orchestrated.
But, of course, I did not. None of what is happening here, by the floating red and green navigation lights, against a backdrop of capitalism wrought in steel and polished glass, is my direction. This is simply the inevitable consequence of becoming associated with someone who does not suffer from anything as mortal as consequence, but only seems to pass through them whilst others bleed and die by the wayside.
All of this is the responsibility of Amber Ryan. The very same who so confidently broke those bones in ripped jeans in this very same dockyard, only a few months ago. The telltale scar under the chin of the thug helping his bloodied, torn partner up to his feet is testament to her actions and the efforts of surgeons to repair what can never be truly whole again…
Testament to the consequences which eluded her, and killed Cassieopia.
On that night, back then, I intervened. On that night, I saved my Resplendent Hurricane from herself. But those were different times. I was a different person. Before my Rapture was realised; before I understood my purpose.
While I mused, the thugs that took their revenge for a chance encounter all those months ago have slinked away between broken crates and burst, stinking drums. It is just me and the flower girl and I step out from where the shadows kept me hidden. With the toe of my heel I press down on the fluttering edges of her red coat, and capillary action from the damp concrete underneath makes it turn a dark crimson.
Blue and glassy eyes stare up, through me and through the Moon overhead. Squatting down, the servos of my prosthetic whine as its forefinger extends, plastic hovering a few inches above Cassieopia’s slack face. For a few moments I consider reaching to pull her eyelids closed in some instinctual gesture of tranquillity, but that is as misplaced as it is futile.
There is no peace to be had. She is dead …
And Amber Ryan killed her.
[The Rapture]
I am sorry that these lessons have been so painful, my Resplendent Hurricane, but you are a difficult pupil. In seven tumultuous and long years, you have repeatedly refused to learn and yet it feels as if we are nearing a breakthrough. Some seminal moment, an epiphany, a point at which you will finally reward my patience with that final step on what has been such a trying journey of self-realisation and actualisation.
At last, you will acknowledge a truth that you would otherwise previously have rather died than accept as gospel, sung from hymn books so that all the world as a congregation can join as one:
Your storm is spent; its winds stilled. Now is the time of my Rapture and you are already as good as dead. If not physically, then assuredly spiritually. In your soul. Without that – without your vaunted fire, you are as cold and silent as the gold which saw you risk everything for ultimately, nothing. The same gold which now belongs to me. Thermodynamics demands any system of something becomes nothing, and whether it is coldly categorised as entropy or given some nebulous, awe-inspiring label like fate, its effects are the same. Nothing lasts forever, and you have used up the last of your so-called immortality.
It is written in the intravenous drips and catheters you wore while bedridden, while being put back together from the sum of my most recent lesson. When you struggled to support your own bodyweight, arms trembling with the effort as you limped down a track penned-in by cold metal handrails, every step a rattling proclamation of the end of your reign as a so-called Queenpin.
Checkmate, my most beautiful redhead.
You measure yourself against the pitiful opposition you so expertly culled during your previous all-consuming reign. The three hundred and fifty seven days which made you think you could lay claim to ownership of the board and, perhaps, all its pieces therein. Fools and young children, cut down brutally and tossed on the pyre that burned to keep your legacy bright enough for all to see and acknowledge. To stoop and bow and curtsy.
Such egomania in someone so obsessed with appearing nonchalant. Such a dichotomy between who you would like to be, and who you inescapably, inarguably are.
A reign of three hundred and fifty seven days, hollowed out by the weakness in your bones and the weariness in your heart. The soft, pliable thing in your chest and not what you ultimately replaced with by proxy of Championship gold and sweat-stained leather. A reign held up by my thorn-painted hand as you dithered and struggled to reconcile your new-found feelings with a desire to remain imperious. To remain Amber Fucking Ryan.
Compassion. Empathy.
While you experimented with these poisons, they corrupted your purity of purpose. Oh, how wonderful you were before these new trinkets twisted your senses and blunted those murderous instincts. Even then, I strove to teach you valuable lessons; encouraging focus, preaching to eschew all those distractions and irrelevant factors and silly little flower girls named after the stars. And for a while, you listened. And you won.
And you were still Champion. Queenpin. A Resplendent Hurricane. A goddess made from fact and violence and given form to make her earthbound folk wither and turn away and find an excuse to avoid their reckoning today.
But, of course, it did not last. It could not, because the only thing that gave you purpose was the World Bombshells’ Title, and while that stood impregnable and impervious to mere feelings as any iron replacement for a heart could be, the body that carried it and the mind that directed it soon gave out. Such frailty; made mortal and cast back down to join all the rest of us in the mud and the shit.
I waited so very long before taking matters into my own thorn-painted hand. Perhaps it was because the poisons which had leached the lethality from those hollow bones had infected me; gave me reason to stay while I hoped you would come to your senses and rediscover the living weapon you could so easily otherwise have been. Were, before mundane concerns and trivial feelings burst your wonder and made rusted that reaping edge.
Perhaps I simply wanted to wait to maximise your suffering. Not only your suffering, but to the maximal pain and misery of others. Bane, Fexxfield, Jones – every one of them leeches draining the greatness from you to grow fat and however briefly in an otherwise uncaring universe, relevant.
For whatever reason ultimately drove me, I killed you.
Killed your reputation and your mystique. Here lies Amber Fucking Ryan, taken from her pedestal too soon.
And then they came for me because I had dethroned you and taken your place … But they did not come back again. All your supporters, your cheerleaders and sycophants and most worshipful believers, martyred on your behalf by me and elevated. Become something greater than merely the end of your story but instead, the beginning of mine.
But there is another number you should preoccupy yourself with considering.
Two thousand, five hundred and fifty five. Seven years.
For over two and a half thousand days, you have been unable to find a solution to the problem I present, and you have tried so many different methods. Ignore me, side with me, and ultimately defer to me and in the end, all of this has led you to fall back into the same tired behavioural feedback loops that define your entire life. A silly little carnival-girl who believes that pretending, make-believing herself aloof and untouchable will somehow translate into material reality. There is a perfectly sound alternative so cordially excited to meet your acquaintance; one in which you accept that all the qualities you so fervently believe make up your brand, your existence – you – can be found in me.
I am everything you wish you could be, Miss Ryan. Free from the petty concerns of ethics or trifling morality. I am the living weapon you could almost have been, save for your obsession with maintaining meaningless trinkets like friends and your husband made bane by nature and name. Gumshoes and walking constellations in cherry-red heels, an eclectic mix of broken souls all helping to hold together the fragments of a psyche which only ever existed in your mind’s eye.
Look upon all the things I have accomplished in a fraction of the time it took you likewise. Consider the legacy I have built as an afterthought in dismantling yours.
Is it jealousy that drives you? Fear? Of what? Inadequacy, perhaps. Of realising that you are worthless if you are not what you have always told everyone you are. A force of nature, a hurricane that cares not and wants not but simply is. Simply destroys.
I imagine that on Sunday, I will have to kill you to keep you from climbing back to your feet. Because no mere arbitrary three-count or momentary submission would do in terms of stakes versus which you can once again hurl your broken body against. Because in the end, perhaps there has been no breakthrough at all. No epiphany. And so there is only one question for which I have no answer.
It is not how to defeat you, because I have already defeated you. In body broken with tyre iron and love, and in mind when you pressed your lips against mine. You really are so very beautiful in fluorescent strip-light.
It is not what happens after the lights in California dim and your eyes flicker open in the all-too-familiar surroundings of an Intensive Care Unit, serenaded by the electronic lullaby of a dozen chirping machines and safely buried in a cocoon of clear plastic tubes. Because there is nothing beyond Inception. This is the end, Amber. The only question left to answer is …
… How many times do I have to kill you, girl?
[The Past – Atlantic City Medical Examiner, Linwood, New Jersey, USA]
Had a whole story concocted up to get through the reception and into the back – probably the only time anyone ever tried to sneak into a morgue, but turns out to be a whole bunch of thinking time wasted. Guard behind the desk to my right barely lifts his brow up, let alone eyes, and those stay glued to the tablet making tinny whirling sounds as his fingers tap rapidly across its grease-smeared plastic.
So I just bustle on through and push the doubleset doors ahead apart. The muffled thumps of my well-worn shoe leather turn into crisp echoes as threadworn carpet underneath gets exchanged for faded, lime-green tile. Where the edges are bevelled and hidden from the rattling wheels of gurneys and the bootie-wrapped, scuffed footsteps of their attending orderlies, their original brilliant colour hides. Survives.
Then the smell hits me, strong enough to make out like I might just gag on it. A heady perfume of eye-watering antiseptic, floating over the unmistakable stink of decay. Not spoiled fruit left out too long, but ordered and structured rot mitigated as best medical science delivered on a county budget can manage.
Know that cocktail only too well. Can’t say I miss it.
Fluorescent lights overhead make the washed-out walls, smeared in white gloss, even harder to look at. Everything is reflective and sterile except the line of frost drawing perfect outlines of the refrigerator hatches set into the far side. That tells a story …
Or, maybe, marks the end of one.
“Can I help you?”
She’s hard to pick out for a second – pale blue scrubs underneath a white overcoat, face mostly hidden by a surgical mask pulled in tight – but the cluster of pins attached to her lapel give me bearing to find her eyes fixed on mine. There’s a black heart, miniature metal key swinging underneath; a few caustic references to good days and bad and a fair mix of accompanying swear words, but there’s a guarded kindness above the mask that offers reassurance. Comfort.
It’s not going to be okay … How could it be? But maybe we can pretend a while.
“Sorry, Doc,” I offer, sweeping the hat from my head. “Here to see the flower girl.”
She frowns and takes a step forward and just a little bit of that kindness goes someplace else. “Pardon?”
“Cassieopia Mearns,” I clarify and she relaxes. “Name’s Terryl Fexxfield.”
Reaching over for a clipboard, the Doctor nods. “You called earlier. Don’t suppose your family?”
“Nope.”
“Friends?”
“Would’ve liked to have been,” I reply.
She tosses the clipboard back onto the stainless steel tabletop with a clatter. “I suppose I don’t need this then. Guess that’s why you called first.”
“Appreciate the favour.” But I don't. Not really. Who would, given the circumstances.
Making her way over to the bank of refrigerators, the Doc gives the handle of one of the units a sharp twist and it takes all my self-composure not to flinch at the clang of the lock as it disengages. “I’ve seen enough thoughtless murder in this cesspool to know nobody’s going to work particularly hard to find out who did this to her. Just another statistic. If you can help, if you’re willing, I can look the other way on the paperwork.”
Then she tugs the integrated gurney out and that all-too-familiar face, framed with blonde and all waxen and pale, emerges from a twinkling cloud of ice crystals and billowing, antiseptic vapour.
Christ. Not again.
Takes a few moments to steel myself strong enough to talk and she waits, patiently. It’s how I know that for everything this miserable city has taken from – from people like Cassie lying there – I know it hasn’t changed me. Chipped away, got underneath the paint and made it bubble up with scabs of rust, maybe. Hollowed out and made the structure tired and weak … Definitely, but the substance has stayed true.
I’m still me, because my heart feels just as heavy seeing this as it did any other time someone got what they didn’t deserve.
It doesn’t take long to see what put her to sleep forever, and against that pale skin the sickly half-moon smile of bruising underneath her chin stands even prouder. I pretend like I’m putting more effort into examining the wound than I really am, because I know how this happened. Knew how it was going to happen. The whole sorry story laid out on the bookshelf like some cut-price novel, waiting to tempt badly-organised travellers at rail stations and airports the world over.
“You said you know who did this?”
I shake my head. “Don’t know who …”
Something like anger flashes across those kindly eyes and her hand instinctively – protectively – goes to the gurney handle to push Cassie back inside the refrigerator. “That’s not what you said, listen … If you’re one of those–”
“Said I knew what happened to her,” I interrupt, watching the door shut with an anticlimactic thump courtesy of its thick rubberised seal. “Not a matter of who, but what.”
The Doctor frowns. “I don’t understand, Mister Fexxfield.”
“A situation,” I clarify. “Got caught up between two irreconcilable differences. Got torn in half by them.”
The lock swings shut with that same, shaking boom. “Just sounds like another metaphor for awful people to me,” She shrugs.
Can’t argue, and I flip over the hat in my hand and set it down on my head. “We’re all awful people, Doc. Some of us are more than that, though. Some of us are forces of nature.”
I push the heavyset door open, letting the whiff of traffic fumes and stale coffee from the reception room beyond clear out the medical stink in my chest.
“What kind of forces?”
Holding the door open, I pause for a few moments. “Hurricanes …”
No, that just doesn’t feel like the right description anymore. This isn’t about a storm and the world it passes through. It’s become some twisted diarchy; two opposing things, equal and terrible.
She takes a step forward. “Mister Fexxfield?”
“Feels more like the Sun and the Moon,” I toss over a shoulder, taking one myself and letting the door bang closed behind without looking back.
[The Rapture]
Is it jealousy that drives you? Fear? Of what? Inadequacy, perhaps. Of realising that you are worthless if you are not what you have always told everyone you are. A force of nature, a hurricane that cares not and wants not but simply is. Simply destroys …
… But over these last two thousand, five hundred and fifty-five days, I have come to realise that the wrong metaphor has been applied. You are not a swirling hurricane. Rageful winds and whirling chaos. You are the Sun, burning furious and bright and threatening. Incandescent and awe-inspiring; eye-drawing. Dominating of the sky and everything in it. Unwilling to share, uneasy at coexistence with anything that might question or compete.
A slavering, hungering ego lies at your nuclear-hot core, desperate for validation. Not for anything as uncouth as money or the typical trappings of fame. Instead, you crave respect. That sickening yearning for fear. Above all else, you want people to fear you, Amber. The uneasy murmuring that robs a full-throated room of its roar when you cross its threshold, the subtle nods from those that might on their best day catch you cold on your worst, but will not. Not today. Not ever, because they are scared.
Not money. Not fast cars. Fear is the currency you wish to see exchanged for bodily acts of violence in your name, by your fists.
I have come to realise in these last few months, since taking your heart and making it mine as Bombshells’ World Champion, that I have eclipsed you. This is no longer a question of influence, of machinations and plots and subterfuge. The epicentre of this – of all of this – does not lie in you, but me.
Your radiance is dimmed and the flames that once licked and burnt at the clouds are cut across by the black orb of my ascension. It is not simply that I sentinel the night when you choose to turn away. I am more than a reflection of your fury and power and presence held out of sight for a spell.
I have taken everything from you and made it mine.
That, however, is where our eclipse-esque metaphor draws to an end because unlike the transitory nature of the Moon’s zenith over the Sun, our equivalent has no such sudden end or reversal of fortune. This heart of yours made mine, this Championship, stays on that dark side away from your furious, rageful red light.
And why should I not? Why should I stop at simply robbing you of your light and plunging all things into a more peaceful, more calming darkness. Granted, there is such beauty in the nocturnal; where all things rest and recuperate and a blessed silence falls over everyone and everything. Such an antithesis to your sound and fury and metal-on-metal clanging. But it is not enough. I think I would like more.
I think I would like to be you. More than you … And I think I have done so very well at doing so.
Look to the way I have resisted the toxicity of the title that has otherwise riddled you with the disease of self-doubt; eroding your resilience and crumbling your willpower and robustness to fine ash. Like the cinders swept out of Oblivion, razed to the ground by the hubris of one half of the Bane-Ryan machine. Imagine becoming embrittled by the cancer of your own perception of excellence. A psychosomatic wound that has become terminal, made you into nothing from something that was once so wonderful.
Here lies Amber Fucking Ryan née Phaethon, son turned daughter of Helios. Who took their father’s chariot made the Sun become the SCW World Bombshells’ Championship, and hurt so many so widely with an inability to wield it or control it. Who allowed it to consume them, and where it touched the Earth it burnt the land to desert and where it disappeared into the stratosphere it froze all under thick tundras of ice.
Oh, for all those who suffered while you tore through this company as Champion, oscillating wildly between teeth-grit rage and stand-offish cool. How Mac dealt with the choice wounds you cut into his soul, all under the guise of independence. A free-spirit. Because that is who you are. A hollow, pathetic justification to explain away all the cruel things you have visited on everyone foolish enough to dare to cross your path without a cross word, once in a while.
You were weak in mind, transferring your self-respect and self-confidence into an inanimate object as if that could endure more successfully outside of your psyche than in. Weak in body, because I have broken it utterly and what stands across from me on Sunday, in California, is some hastily-repaired imposter.
The real Amber Ryan is dead. I killed her, so many times. This is a remnant, more suited to the umbral shadow of the Moon than the Sun she once represented. A breeze in lieu of a hurricane, robbed of her gravitas and reduced to the role of spectator to the coronation of a new Queenpin. Her crown placed upon my head and with it, proclaimed Regina.
You have watched me take everything from you from your hospital bed. Your place in the panoply of this company, to replace your monotheistic cult under the One True Painted Hurricane with a new Diarchy and polar opposites. Your past; accolades and accomplishments rendered moot when considered against the reality – pay no attention to the redhead behind the curtain, furiously pulling brass levers and twisting dials and working her terrifying visage with its clockwork mouth and steam-powered smirk.
Your present, left broken on the floor of a boiler room in Long Beach. Your future, taken as I took your protege, Miss Blackthorn, under my tutelage. I find it a powerful parallel that she, too, was abandoned by those that should have done so much better by her. I wonder what rationalisations you tell yourself to justify that particular betrayal. There have been so many.
Curious, that you manage somehow, some way, to retain those that still believe in your message, despite such proclivities for the turncoat persuasion. Your proclamation. The Gospel of the Distorted Angel. Oh, I remember that title well.
I wonder if Terryl does, too?
I was there, Amber. Two thousand, five hundred and fifty five days ago in Atlantic City. I gave you the first of many tests, all of which you have failed spectacularly. As you were destined to fail. Because despite the passage of time and all the wounds and agonies it has brought, you have learned nothing. Incapable of change, of personal growth.
Do you remember how he looked at you, when you decided a title was more important than what I believe may well have been true love? You will have to forgive me for approximating, since I am not sure what love is. I think I have been in it.
I think I loved you. I think I still do. I think I understand why so many huddle under the warmth of a fleeting moment of your attention. They line up so desperately, and they vie for your transitory interest like mayflies. But you do not really care for them. Perhaps that is the only difference between all these people and their love.
They believe in delusion or denial that you feel the same, whereas any affection you showed me was as calculating as it was artificial. Oddly, that comforts. To watch Mac eviscerate himself emotionally, spiritually, under the pretence he is simply supporting rather than enabling your worst impulses. To watch – to enjoy – Terryl shorten his professional career and personal life repeatedly, for the privilege of watching you give up time and time again. The things you did to My Songbird, Matthew …
For poor Cassieopia, the second flower girl named after the stars you have upended and ruined. Tell me, does your insistence that they did what they did, to love you, support you, of their own free, will give you comfort too? Is it easier to ignore the contribution you made to their damnation, rather than accept culpability?
Your former protege, now mine, Miss Blackthorn, once said that the difference she saw in me was one of truth. That unlike all of the others, unlike you, I did not hide behind layers of misdirection, falsehoods spun into wicked narratives to advance your own desires and frustrate others’. Is it not ironic that here, now, at the end of everything we have ever done together, that I am the one most content with my truthfulness and transparency?
Everything I have ever done, every act committed by my thorn-painted hand, was laid out and foretold. You cannot say the same and, I think, you would simply smirk and toss that red mane over your shoulder and shrug.
Line up your personal retinue of lovestruck fools, both matrimonial, platonic and somewhere ambiguously in-between, and ask them otherwise. Pointless, an exercise in futility, because it does not matter what anyone else thinks.
The only words that matter, truthful or not, are those of Amber Fucking Ryan.
It is a remarkable study in the depths of Human ability for self-obfuscation. To be faced with so many opportunities to step from the path that leads to only disappointment, destruction and the end of everything you have worked for and stay that same path through to the bitter, tearful end shows the ultimate perversion of the illusion of choice.
I do wonder how many of them will be left, at the end. They do so seem to wilt while you thrive, like sacrificial Pawns in some greater game to protect their Queen.
There will be no such choice on Sunday, at Inception. Instead there will simply be the administration of a final test: not for you, but me.
Am I the Moon, destined only to eclipse your light and take it away? Rob the world of the Sun and replace it with nothing – the absence of Amber Ryan? Or have I taken her place? Become the new centre of this universe and everything in it. A test whose conclusion is largely independent of the outcome as far as you are concerned, because both represent a final, unequivocal end.
I once told you I thought we were destined to this forever, My Love, but I was wrong and you have outgrown your usefulness. Perhaps once, you could have been something truly terrifying. Something to shake the walls of this world itself and bring everything crashing down as you walked, imperiously, free and uncaring. But you are not what you once were, and I am so much greater.
Are you not proud of what you have helped to make? Everything I have done, have become, is because of you. Once upon a time I was merely an insubstantial reflection; an arrant thief stealing my pale fire from your greatness and wonder and beauty. Maybe when your eyes roll open to that soft and familiar electronic lullaby, surrounded by worried faces and their sycophantic owners in some private medical suite in downtown Las Vegas, you will finally learn a lesson of substance.
That there are oh so many things worse than death. I will show you every last one of them.
It is time to put an end to whatever it is that wears the face of Amber Ryan, like a mask, and would have the world believe she still walks. I am cold, and I think I would like to walk in the warmth of the sun for a while. Maybe after you are gone, I will dispense with mine. Maybe, after you are gone, I will go by my real name.
Abigayle DeLune, SCW World Bombshells’ Champion.
On Sunday, I think I will have to kill you to prevent you from climbing back to your feet, but that is okay.
I have killed you so many times before.
