CW: blood, death.

NINE YEARS, FIFTY-TWO DAYS, SEVEN HOURS UNTIL HYADEIC CONVERGENCE

Kayla watched the hot, empty cake pan smoke on the kitchen counter. It was her husband Henry’s birthday, and she’d planned a little surprise for him. A party, just the two of them, the way he liked it—no one to take any of her attention away from him. Her makeup needed refreshing and her second-best dress was loose around her waist. But that was good! Henry’d be much less likely to complain about how much the special meal had cost if he saw her in a dress he recognized. Of course if she had planned nothing, he still would’ve grumbled. But there was no sense in thinking about that. She’d forgotten to take the cake pan out of the oven before she’d turned the oven on. She needed to get her head together, and focus.

The grocery bags sat unopened. She pulled out the sweating carton of milk, the lovely brown-shelled eggs, and the tiny brown bottle of vanilla. She twisted open the little bottle and sniffed; it made her feel better. On the table were the bagged salad and the tomatoes that would need slicing, and at the bottom of the bag was a black box. She wrinkled her brow—she didn’t remember picking that up. The top had a funny logo on it, like some squiggly fishhooks, but the words on the top of the box, in gold lettering, said “butter.” It looked far too expensive. Well, once she’d gotten the batter mixed and poured and baking and the whole house filled with the scent of love and celebration, maybe Henry wouldn’t even ask to see the receipt.

Kayla wrenched the knob on the oven to turn off the heat. Her husband was at least an hour away, and everything else for the evening meal was easy enough to make. She grabbed up the black butter box and felt it lurch uncertainly in her hand, as if the contents were liquid, or some kind of wet shifting sand. Carrying it over to the cooled pan, she opened the box. Inside was a . . . substance. Far from the solid block of pale yellow butter she had been expecting, what was inside was more like an oily paste. The scent was meaty, salty, but not unpleasant—in fact, it made her a bit hungry. Well, she hadn’t eaten all day.

Maybe it was some kind of ghee. That would explain the strange lettering. She hoped the texture wouldn’t affect the cake much.

Kayla scooped up a large glop of the butter onto her fingers to oil the sides of the cake pan, and the world lurched. She was flung, stretched like taffy, joints popping, ears popping, until her body slammed onto the ground with a pain that shot through her legs and hips and up her spine to spike into her skull.

She was in a nightmare, a glaring green-yellow nightmare, shins scraping against rough yellow brickwork. Her arm was on the seat of some sort of chair, a hideous throne of old-pus-yellow leather padded seats set in onyx black. Her arm was moving, the skin of her grease-slicked fingers aching raw as they were forced in slow circles against the surface of the seat of the throne. She could not see who held her there, but she could not pull her arm away, and now her fingertips were in agony. Her hand ground into the seat, working against the rough yellow leather, rough as a cheese grater, that stretched across the seat of a large, ornately carved yellow and black throne.

At a fresh blast of pain she cried out. She set her feet to boost herself up so she could see what was happening to her hands. Her fingertips tore, the flesh pebbling away like flakes of a pink eraser, blood drops firm as tiny beads rolling down in circles on the seat as she ground them against the cracked and jaundiced leather. Kayla cried for help and wrenched away, but her hand kept to its task, tearing away at her skin until she could no longer clench her teeth hard enough to keep in a scream. Her body thrashed on the gritty brick beneath her.

The legs of the throne were of smoke-dark wood, intricately carved into thorns and needles and tiny open mouths full of teeth. Those little mouths stretched and shifted in her vision, as if to mimic Kayla’s screams. She braced her bare feet against the legs of the chair to try and push away. The thorns snagged into the skin of her feet. She was hooked against the strange curling tentacle legs, dark as the darkest black and yet not black at all, slick now with blood, unmoved by Kayla’s straining body.

As she howled and flung herself like a cheek-hooked fish on a line, Kayla’s hand went right on polishing its own skin off, its own meat off, her fingernails catching, tearing off, shearing away Kayla’s sanity. Kayla made inhuman noises as her exposed nerves began to stretch and tangle and rip against the throne. Her feet tore open and bled slippery against the throne legs, and she fell twisted all wrong and ripping her arm out of its socket, but still her hand ground itself steadily away, in slow firm circles, to smooth the butter and her own flesh into the horror of the throne. The butter’s meaty, smoky stink filled Kayla’s howling mouth. Her snot-filled nose burned with a scent of rot so thick she could not breathe, she was drowning. She thrashed against everything and called out for help, please help, someone please . . .

Kayla crawled across the kitchen tile, stinging sparks falling on the backs of her bare legs and her arms, her face. She was coughing and sobbing, unable to breathe. Everywhere was blinding, stinging smoke, poisoning her tears. She brought her hands up to her face, twisted around to look at her feet. Her hands and feet were whole, undamaged and unblemished. Her shoulder gave no indication of injury as she crawled towards the front door. There was a loud crash and a wave of squeezing heat, and Kayla turned to see the kitchen completely alight, burning in undulating waves of yellow fire.

She clambered outside and was surrounded by concerned neighbors within seconds, who draped their jackets over her and patted her arms as the sirens grew closer.

Kayla cried noiselessly, tears leaking from her raw reddened eyes, as the firefighters led her to the waiting ambulance. They spoke about gas leaks and cooking oil spillage and faulty wiring and other things that did not matter to her. She’s in shock, they said to each other, watching her cough tiredly, watching her turn her hands over and over, as if looking for something.

Henry arrived home, barreled out of his car, shoved the firefighters aside, and charged at Kayla, knocking her to the ground with a heavy slap. Whoever had called him must have hinted that the blaze was Kayla’s fault. He was restrained quickly, and the neighbors shook their heads and glanced at each other, but it was none of their business.

SEVEN YEARS, EIGHTY-THREE DAYS, FOUR HOURS UNTIL HYADEIC CONVERGENCE

Half-past midnight, Kayla rattled the key to her apartment door and gave it a shove. The splintery wood groaned open enough for her to enter. She dropped her purse, spilling a wallet, a library book, and a plastic container stained with the remnants of last night’s dinner. She kicked off her shoes, navigating by the slices of moon through the cracked blinds in the tiny kitchenette.

She nearly tripped when her foot came down on something strange, something sharp. She steadied herself and touched the item with her wary foot.

It was a small box. Kayla peered down. In the darkness, it shone iridescent, yet darker than the shadows.

Kayla stumbled back against the door, her heart beating in her throat. Even in this moment, she worried about making any noise that would bring the creepy neighbor next door over. He was always coming by to check on her, uninvited and at all hours, whether she wanted him to or not. But she would move in and shack up with him forever if it meant never having to address what was glowing unblack on the floor of her apartment.

Heart thudding, she edged around the room, flat against the wall, and clicked on the solitary light. In the yellow-pink glow from the standard cheap apartment ceiling bulb, the black box with the gold lettering seemed to breathe and shimmer against the dingy carpet like air above hot asphalt.

Right after the fire, a series of tests confirmed that Kayla was still of relatively sound mind, if traumatized by the house fire and perhaps concussed by years of marriage to her ex-husband Henry. The doctors prescribed a series of comforting little mantras for her, tiny poems she could recite throughout the day to help her focus on the task at hand, on breathing, or walking, or smiling at strangers instead of scowling or flinching. She practiced managing her tics when she had to start the pilot light under a pot of instant noodles and reminded herself about the dangers of misinterpreting the horrible yellow-throne hallucination no doubt brought on by smoke inhalation. Kayla promised she believed those sweet, helpful people, but she never stopped wondering how that butter box had gotten into her grocery bag on the day her life blew apart.

Touching the box did not seem to cause anything to happen, but still, she moved slow as a sloth to pick it up from the floor. It sloshed heavily in her hands, making her retch. She muscled the front door open with her free hand and placed it outside, on the walkway. If it were still there in the morning, she would throw it away.

Door closed again, Kayla took a shaky breath and walked over to the fridge and pulled out a beer. Then she picked up her library book from the heap by the door; she’d taken to reading luscious romance paperbacks before bed, trying to replace her rotten yellow nightmares with something a bit more pleasant. In bed, by the bluish tinted light of her bedside lamp, she read until she blushed, and then a few more pages. She’d try, on occasion, to unearth fond memories of Henry, to a time when he’d loved her, when he’d been gentle. But he never really had been, had he? He’d seemed so sturdy, so strong, scary but fiercely protective; nobody could hurt her without feeling his wrath. Until he began to hurt her himself. It was a relief, to confirm that she did not miss him, not really. Still, it was difficult, being so alone.

Kayla sighed, set the book on her nightstand, turned out her light, and snuggled under her covers. There was a scratching sound, like trees on a windowsill. Kayla opened her eyes and turned to the window, to see if it was cracked to admit in the evening air. As she turned, she caught a dark shimmery shadow sliding across the ceiling above her, and the black butter box top fell onto the pillow beside her, glaring with its golden letters. Kayla opened her mouth to scream and threw up her hands as a stretching glop of yellow fell onto her palms and face—

—her palms and face ground into the thorns of the legs of the throne, tearing the flesh from her cheekbones. Thorns snagged on her tongue, jaggedly slicing it in two. A hooked barb caught her eyeball and ripped it open. The jelly ran into her open screaming blood-fountain of a mouth, bitter and gamey as it mixed with the salty rotten taste of the butter. Kayla’s teeth, exposed in the gaping holes of the side of her cheek, caught in the thorns. They stabbed and stabbed into her gums, wrenched nerves shooting hot wires of splitting pain all through her brain. Her teeth crunched apart in her jaw with an agony like biting into molten rock.

Kayla’s apartment was on the fourth floor. A walk-up, so it was in her price range. She was a model tenant, never complained, never made noise, never had company or cooked pungent food or did anything clearly and publicly illegal. She was quiet, if a little easily spooked, especially by her neighbor, who seemed to have a pretty big crush on her. All the neighbors liked her and worried a little for her. But years after this night, they would talk about how she finally snapped, screaming her head off from some sort of night terror, scratching her face bloody, yelling for something to let her go, let her go, as she thrashed around on the walkway outside her open door.

Her neighbor came out to comfort her immediately, wrapped his arms around her. No one knew if it was a spasm, some sort of PTSD from the fire they knew she’d survived, but the minute he touched her, she twisted like a pro wrestler, and with a war cry, muscled him right over the fourth-floor railing.

The court ruled self-defense, throwing out the charge of manslaughter because of the footage from the walkway cameras.

FIVE YEARS, SEVENTY-TWO DAYS UNTIL HYADEIC CONVERGENCE

Winter came twice. The second winter closed off with an interminable bout of freezing rain. Kayla swayed numbly, soaking wet and bundled up in a nasty blanket. Alone in an alley between two buildings that gave partial shelter, she wondered how long it would take her to die. The obliviating medicine they’d filled her with, while they kept her bound and calm at the institution during her trial, had given her what she decided was a lovely preview of what death would be like. As much as it hurt starving to death while freezing to death, the end would be a grand relief.

The trash can outside the alley held molding pizza crusts and soggy soda cups, but she’d found a pair of broken-down shoes that she could tie tightly enough to stay on her blackened, crusted feet. In heaven, with wings, she wouldn’t need feet. But she was going to hell, wasn’t she? She’d been there, even before she’d killed a man. Kayla shivered so violently that her teeth ached from the clench of her jaw. But only from the cold.

Someone passed the alley mouth and tossed a white paper bag into the trash can. Kayla lunged into the sleeting wet to snatch it up. It was warm. Sickened by herself and her ferocious joy at the chance to eat someone’s fresh trash, she ripped open the bag, her fingers too numb to be delicate.

In the bag was a black box with a gold symbol on it. Gold letters.

She waited for the choking, desperate fear. It did not come. Instead, there came a strange feeling of familiarity. This stuff, one way or another, would force her into a horrible place, but something about that did not worry her. She had wished for death, had she not? If her own life was already hell, what was the difference? Hell was being an unhoused, unwashed, unwelcome, unhinged woman sleeping on the streets and living in the stinking shadows. People were constantly looking at Kayla as if she were crazy, but here, sloshing around in the box, was liquid madness. And it was apart from her. It was something that happened to her. It was not who she was.

The thought snuck into her brain that whatever else she had felt in that yellow place, she had never felt cold or wet.

Kayla took the box top off, paused to consider and reconsider eating the sloshing paste, picked up the soggy edge of her blanket and carefully, carefully, dipped it into the box.

In the dry, temperatureless air, Kayla stood steady on her own two feet and swirled the butter into the grand and hideous unblack frame of the throne with the edge of her blanket. Her hand moved methodically, working the oil into the nooks and crannies of the gaping demon mouths and swirling tentacles carvings. Whatever damage the chair liked to do to anything that touched it seemed to be visited only on the blanket, which was shredding in her hand. Each time a bit of cloth tore away, she was careful to move another section of the blanket between her hand and the shimmering dark surface.

Kayla looked out past the throne as her hand worked, out beyond the thousand sulfureous stone steps leading down from the throne’s dais to a gray dirt path carved into the yellow grassland. Long stalks squeaked as the airless breezes tossed them against each other. Beyond the grasses stretched a grim beach of dark wet sand or dirt, perhaps clay, over which green-gold mists washed forward and surged backward like a tide. The sky was slightly greener than the rest of the yellow world, but small punch holes of unblack seemed to sparkle in it, studs of obsidian gemstone. A pair of black-gray moons rolled past the tower and seemed to menace the place from the sky, glowering and sliding steadily as if on a collision course.

It was objectively horrible, it was hell, quite clearly, and yet . . .

Kayla looked back at the shredded side of her blanket, her body whole and alive and strong here, not hungry, not cold, and not broken. Under her hand, the carvings shone a deeper unblack hue, reflecting the green gold light, and for a moment, it felt like a benediction. For a moment, Kayla felt pride.

In the alley the storm drains gurgled, and water had risen to soak the mangled shoes on Kayla’s feet. She edged back farther into the alley, the paper bag and box gone from her hands, from her view. She stood a while and tried to figure out what was off, and then it hit her. Her blanket, as whole as it was before shredding itself on the throne, was dry. It was clean. Her skin was dry and clean. The ball of her heel was pale pink again, the skin soft and sensitive. Her hair, matted badly, did not feel like it was crawling across the top of her head, her sore-pitted scalp no longer stinging and itching. She did not smell like months without a shower. She was not tired. She was not hungry. And she was not afraid.

Kayla laughed to herself. As the storm raged outside her alley, she overturned a garbage-filled milk crate and sat on it, her back against the brick, and planned. She would go to the shelter, she would smile when she spoke to the lady at the front desk, she would present her clean and healthy self, and get some help. Get a bed, or even a dry corner of a room, get a job anywhere. She would keep this blanket always, and when the next box of butter came, she would be ready.

TWO YEARS, ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN DAYS, SIX HOURS UNTIL HYADEIC CONVERGENCE

And how ready she was, months later, at seven a.m., in her meeting with the halfway house morning manager, who was smiling viciously at Kayla over a plastic bag full of contraband food. It was, in fact, bags of chips and candy, little things to give Kayla the energy she needed while working in the laundry room and in the garden. The facility food was joyless, flavorless, textureless, and the small portion sizes kept everyone on edge, tired. The manager was ranting about ants, and the mole above her eyelid disappeared into a smile-line crease every time she accused Kayla outright of disobedience.

There were ants, and worse, crawling along the walls and floors of the facility long before Kayla had been brought there by a caseworker, and anyway, Kayla never kept any open food around. But the facility was constantly being brought up on violations, and every time, someone new was chosen to blame. Three strikes meant a return to the crowded shelter, if there was room. Unless, of course, you had something to bribe the morning manager with.

Nothing Kayla could say would change the trajectory of this meeting, so she sat very still and said nothing. The shadows were shifting. She knew it was close. The morning manager stood up very suddenly, lifted the plastic bag with both hands, and upended the precious contents into the trash can next to her desk. She sat down and smiled again. Then a puzzled look crossed her face, and she leaned over the trash can and gingerly pulled out a small black box with a gold symbol on it, gold lettering.

Kayla’s heart stumbled a few beats.

The morning manager gingerly lifted the lid and peered inside, then leaned back and wrinkled her nose, revolted. The heavy yellow butter substance sloshed to the rim of the box but stayed inside. Kayla would never ask herself if she actually believed it had called to her, offered itself, offered her power, solutions, or if she was just tired, underfed, overworked, and beyond caring. She simply watched and waited as the morning manager leaned over the box again and then, quick as a snake, flung herself across the desk, grabbed two fistfuls of the morning manager’s hair, and slammed her face-first down into the butter . . .

. . . into the thorns stabbing out of the twisted legs of the throne. Strands of the woman’s face pulled off and tangled together like dead worms, slick with black-toned blood. The skies and mists and grasses of the yellow world gave Kayla’s eyes a place to rest. She tried to listen past the morning manager’s high-pitched sobbing to the rustle of the grasses, imagined a faint chime emanating from the dark stars, tinkling bells in the golden mist, a tremulous bass that might be the voice of the nearest rolling moon. Dread curiosity made her glance down once. In the ruination of flesh she saw, draped on the thorns, a ribbon of human tissue with a mole on it, a smidgeon of hair from either eyelashes or the corner of an eyebrow. Then she looked up and away again, into the yellow sky, counting the black stars.

In the office, Kayla ducked to avoid the chair that the manager hoisted up and swung at her. Kayla got the door open and backpedaled into the hallway, jumping aside to avoid the other chair the manager threw, flinching at the pitch of the woman’s shrieks. A crowd of waking people surged out to hear the morning manager’s screaming curses and wild-sounding stories of yellow and chairs and torture and devils and demons. Three or four women held her down as she lunged at Kayla, threatening her, crying, wailing about her face.

Kayla observed herself for any guilt, but she found none. The woman had been setting her up for no reason. That was a choice the manager had made of her own volition. It did not matter that she did not know that messing with Kayla came with consequences. Kayla was not particularly interested in allowing any more harm to come to herself, ever again. After all, it was a choice. It had always been a choice. She had just never realized it before.

She wished more people, good people, beaten-down people, lost and broken people—she wished they knew, too.

The morning manager never came back to the facility. The ones who took the position after her were very careful to make sure Kayla never wanted for anything. This was their choice. There was always a choice.

HARK: CONVERGENCE

Once she was safe and secure in a new job, settled in a new apartment, Kayla developed some rituals to help her remember how she had gotten to where she was in life. Some were healthy; others she hid from her nervous employers, from her avoidant neighbors, from her infrequent lovers. She took long hot baths every day, a luxury she would never deny herself again. Every time it rained, she would go out in a tattered old blanket and stand on her balcony in the rain and pray to dark moons. She muttered some words she’d read in a play somewhere, reciting them as she checked her house each night for any black boxes decorated in gold letters and signs. She delivered food to food pantries as often as three times a week and worked many weekends participating in soup kitchens and shelters.

Strange things happened to the people she met that she took a special interest in, those who needed most desperately to be “helped.” These strange things many of them never recovered from, things like nightmares and terrifying delusions that they were being taken, abducted by demons, torn apart. Many died soon after making friends with her. After a while, Kayla changed her name, and even had to move to another state entirely. Her employers were delighted to transfer her away from them, and remained close-lipped about why they wouldn’t just fire her.

But wherever she went, it was still easy to find a person just a little too broken, a person who’d been beaten down by life too many times, who was ready, whether they knew it or not, to get tougher, to make the choice to survive. Kalya would speak to each prospect over a few weeks, find them wherever they went, follow and shadow and entice them, and speak of a secret task, a special errand that would make everything better once you learned how to let go. After a few weeks, the downtrodden would ask her to show them. And she would shepherd them into the yellow world.

Kayla had not met anyone yet who could stand it long enough to reach her level of power. But what mattered was that she tried.

As she stood over a bloody, convulsing pile of whimpering ribbons pleading for Kayla to let him go, to get him away from there, to help him please, Kayla sighed. There had been a time when she had been pitied, when she had been capable of pity. She could barely remember either sensation now.

The man vanished from the newly polished chair once his time was up, and Kayla found herself hesitant to return to the gray and white and blue world of uncertainty. Yellow waves of dry mist arced and crashed silently over what felt like her gray beaches, her knife-sharp grasses undulating under her sky, under her big black stars, her rolling moons. It really was all hers, wasn’t it? She had tried to share this gift, but in the end, it was hers.

Kayla stepped over to the spot where she had once knelt and lowered herself down to sit upon the freshly buttered leather of the yellow throne.

LONG LIVE THE KING