Content Note: aftermath of sacrifices, blood, body horror, offscreen abuse, suicide

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a pin prick, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of death. Shadow Jack knows that smell better than his own. He has spent his life as an altar boy scrubbing blood from the chiselled grooves and delicate carvings on the stone altars that are dotted through the temple.

When he was first given, he was innocent enough to be tasked with only the duty of keeping the upper temple clean. There, the great altar is made of black stone and it sits under a wooden carving of their gods. One of them, or an approximation thereof. It is very delicate work, cleaning the great altar, but at least it is safe.

The hole whispers and hisses, tiny grains of stone moving as the hole widens itself, pressing indecipherable promises into Jack’s brain.

The first bell begins ringing, and Jack closes his eyes as the Chant of Awakening follows, relieved that the din drowns out the sound of the hole, and exhausted, because the chant means the starling jacks’ day has begun.

They assemble, groggy-eyed and grey, under the hard eyes of the Master of Starlings. Master Haril oversees the altar boys – a task that holds little status – and this position has made him cruel. Or perhaps, Jack thinks, as he lines up near the end of the queue with the other older jacks, he was picked for the job because the temple could see the kind of man he was and rewarded him for it.

Only a bare handful of older jacks are left, and the front of the queue has a fresh-faced intake of brats, still in the early, easy stages of their time with the temple. Jack wishes he could roll the years back and be like them again, his skin unmarred by the stripes from Master Haril’s whipping cane.

Then again, there’s not much to look forward to after that, so perhaps he doesn’t. He glances behind him. Tall Jack looks tired, stretched too thin, and Jack grimaces because, chances are, he’s going to get paired off with either Tall Jack or the boy in front of him in the queue. There will be no choice.

The Master of Starlings leads the First Chant, and Jack dolefully sings along, the words meaningless. They are the first songs of supplication, sung in the language of gods. Even Jack, unschooled as he is, knows that it is only an approximation, like a dog barking something that sounds like hello. They do not have the throats and beaks to sing in gods’ tongue.

After, they are led to the dining hall, where they eat their morning porridge – grey and salted with fragments of minerals that look like ground glass. There is nothing to talk about, and the Master discourages idle chatter. For Jack, there is no point looking beyond the porridge in his bowl; his world is one of blurs and smudges. The only clarity is close up.

Bowls washed, they line up again, and the Master pairs them off with instructions. He taps Jack and the boy in front and says, ‘Altar room five.’

Unlike the new altar boys who have yet to learn the labyrinthine entrails of the temple, they know the way. Jack starts walking, his companion trotting behind him.

‘Not my favourite, five,’ the boy says cheerfully, His name is Porridge Jack because he always finishes his porridge, and will lick clean the bowls of anyone who hasn’t managed to stomach theirs. Of all the jacks, he is the only one who does not look half-starved.

‘Hmm.’ Jack does not slow down to make allowances for his partner’s shorter legs. There’s no point. Just as there is no point in bothering to name a starling jack. They will die, and it will be soon. Already Jack and his intake have lived longer than they should have. Of the original year, only himself, Tall Jack, The Other Tall Jack, and The Fuck Jack are still alive. Porridge Jack has only Short Jack left from his group.

Soon, there will be new jacks carrying those names.

There are always new jacks.

‘It’s so messy,’ Porridge continues. ‘Like the god there hasn’t learned to eat a sacrifice properly yet.’ Blasphemy, but also true. And who is to shush Porridge? He knows his own messy death is days or months away, so it’s not as if the priests could threaten him with it.

They turn the corner in the underground tunnel, their pails and brushes clanking and sloshing, the air turning icy with static hisses, and come to the great sealed doors of altar room five. The security detail are trigger-finger lunatics, breathing through mirrored masks, oxygen tanks on their backs to avoid contamination from the air inside.

Jack doesn’t know their names, assumes that they are as nameless as the starlings, but he recognises them for what they are. As they recognise him. The shorter one nods and keys in the code that opens the temple doors. They are deceptive, made to look like dark carved wood, but behind them is steel and multiple locking mechanisms that can only be opened by a combination of keys, hand prints, and digital code. Behind the doors is a small empty space, and a secondary set of unadorned plate glass doors. An airlock.

Jack and Porridge step inside, and the great doors shut behind them. Through the glass, the void is dark, hissing. The lights will switch on when they enter, triggered by motion.

There exists a moment of something like silence where the only thing Jack can hear is the soft whistle of air through his nose, the echo of Porridge’s inhalations, the near-subsonic ramping thunder of heartbeats. The skin on Jack’s body belongs to another creature, one desperate to crawl away from Jack’s flesh, to separate itself and escape.

While they wait for the second door to open, Jack thinks of his skin sliding off him, inching across the cold ground until it reaches the door behind them, nudging at the seal and trying to press itself through the crack. He imagines his flesh weeping as he waits for the door to the altar room to slide open.

When it does, with a hiss that has long since become a part of Jack’s nightmares, so commonplace that the fear it raises feels comfortable and welcoming, the scent of the air changes. The sweetsour stink of his and Porridge’s sweaty, clammy bodies is sucked away and replaced with cold bitterness, the air filled with wet ash.  And under that, the familiar copper tang of blood, the underlay of vomit.

The work is drudgery.

In his early days of cleaning blood off the great altar in the upper temple, he learned to tell one sacrifice from another. The blood of lambs and slit-eyed kids, of black cockerels and white pigeons. He has picked the tender hearts and livers of doves from the carved channels, has dusted feathers and fur into pans and swept them away. It is an incremental task – one day a child is gathering the delicate rib cages of birds, sponging the soft white brains of day-old lambs, and within a few years he is lifting finger bones out of ruts, scraping the gobbets of splayed lungs from deeper, darker altars in chambers that the masses will never see.

Even if Jack would rather die on his own terms, there isn’t  that option. The starlings have no laces or ties to strangle themselves with, their utensils are soft and blunt, their food controlled.

‘This one put up a rare old fight,’ Porridge says good naturedly as he flicks a smeared eyeball off the wall with the edge of his little trowel. The eye lands near Jack’s feet. It is of a startling blue, and both of them recognise it.

They will not say his name, because he no longer has one. This is the way of starling jacks – they exist only to serve their gods – first tasked to clean their altars, and finally to end on one.

Behind the altar is a space that is both empty and not empty. It is better not to look into it, to try and see the there that is not there, and the gods that might be waiting. The smell of ash and the void is strongest here, rising with the wind that gusts from the space, that skitters the broken shards of bone across the black marble floors. Jack will not even look at this space sidelong, but rushes to clean behind the altar as quickly as he can. As soon as they are done, he and Porridge race to the door to press the intercom.

The guards release them, and the jacks leave behind a room that waits like a closed fist.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a finger, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of death.

It is an Ascension Day, and the jacks will not be needed for a while yet, so Jack is lying in bed, listening to the sounds of the other jacks. The younger ones snore or babble or weep, while the few older ones grunt and moan. There is little pleasure in the life of a jack, and friendships are rare and pointless. But they will still take what comfort they can, in their own flesh or others.

Jack turns to face the wall where the hole has widened enough that he could explore it with a forefinger. The wind that blows on his face is colder, tastes of distant stars, of metals and the dust of comets.

The steel bunks in the dormitory are each three beds high, riveted against the wall so they can never move. There is little in the way of privacy, but the older jacks commandeer the blankets of their younger compatriots as makeshift curtains. It gives them an illusion of a private world in which to jerk off or fuck, or perhaps sob into their thin pillows, while the younger ones must make do with shivering, or sharing like litters of piglets looking for the warmth of their brothers.

Once, Jack was like that. Long ago enough that it feels unreal.

Currently, Jack has his entire bunk to himself, as the two occupants above him have both recently died. For now, he has taken their blankets and walled himself off, given his nest some extra feathering. He has nothing to hide from the others, except this strange new hole in his wall.

A few feet away, the bunks shudder and grate, and one of the other jacks groans to completion. A moment later Jack hears the soft footfall of the Fuck Jack as he makes his way to another bed. Soon, the songs of the springs and rivets and the pant and slap of flesh will begin again.

At first, Jack couldn’t understand why the Fuck Jack did this – why he gave himself to the others, one after another. But Jack has begun to empathise a little with the Fuck Jack’s need to be filled, to be close to someone, to exist. So that when Tall or Other Tall or Porridge or one of the other starlings scraped his eye off a wall, even if they didn’t say his name, they would remember the feeling of being in him, remember the way he smelled and tasted.

The springs groan louder, the pace rising, and Jack sticks his finger into the hole in the wall, half expecting the snap of teeth, or the fall of some invisible blade. His flesh feels jellified, nerves sparking all the way up his arm into his brain. His vision fills with a surging ultraviolet and lime green and bile yellow, and he gasps along with the copulating couple in the next bunk over, and pulls his finger free.

It looks whole, slightly slick with a shimmer that dries away in a few seconds. He pinches his finger gently with his other hand. It feels whole. After a moment, the nail goes papery white and peels off like a petal falling from an apple blossom, leaving his right index finger naked. The tip is sensitive but not painful. Jack picks up the nail petal and holds it close to his face to examine it. The nail is pearly soft and thin, almost translucent. He places it on his tongue and swallows the evidence of his sacrifice.

After a few minutes, a new nail begins to grow. It is exactly like the first, and Jack wonders if he hasn’t been dreaming, or if he should thank the god that waits in the hole beside his bed in case it is not as benevolent the next time. ‘We praise you—’ he begins. There is no we. This is not the gods of the temple above or below, worshipped by thousands, fed meat and bones of sacrificial lambs and prisoners and unwanted children.

This is his god alone.

‘Thank you,’ he whispers to the hole, and it answers him with the hiss of light from distant suns.

~~~

Jack has never been close to his compatriot starlings, even the one who once shared a womb with him. He never wanted a mate to cling to or a king to follow. In the beginning, it was because he felt distanced from them, unable to tell their faces apart, knowing them only by the registers of their voices, and later, once he had become familiar with their relative shapes and tones, because by then so many of them were already dead.

Now Jack avoids them because he prefers being alone. Too much stimulation and noise can trigger one of his turns, and they have become more common and crippling with each year he lives through. On those days, when his stomach is a churning sewer and his neck a rod of tortured steel, his head crushed as though his skull was being pressed into the soft matter of his brains, Jack wonders if being the next sacrifice on Altar Five wouldn’t be an improvement.

But the turns pass, and usually Jack is still relieved to be alive.

Today there is no respite. His headache began creeping up his spine to the base of his skull a few hours before the Ascension, and peaked with the altar room screams the jacks could hear even in their dormitory.

They fell silent, and listened. Not out of any sacred duty or because they cared overly much, but because the screaming of an Ascended is so particularly painful that ignoring it is impossible. The sound drives into Jack’s skull, needle fingers piercing the cathedral of his cranium, making his eyes feel like molten porridge.

After a while, silence falls.

‘Well,’ drawls Tall Jack into the rawness, like the space left behind after a rotten tooth has been yanked free, ‘guess old Tomley’s Ascension went well.’

‘Poor old fucker,’ says Other Tall Jack. ‘I kinda liked him, as priests go. He wasn’t so bad.’

‘Yes he was,’ Porridge points out. ‘He starved me for three days because he said I looked at him wrong.’

‘You could afford to miss three bowls of porridge,’ Tall Jack says. ‘At least he never beat anyone.’ A pause, then as an afterthought, ‘Much, I don’t think.’ He sighs. ‘Well, what’s left of him is slop for the pigs now, anyways.’ He gets up from his bunk, the springs protesting. ‘You liked him, didn’t you, Fuck.’

The Fuck Jack takes a while to answer the statement. When he does, his voice is low, mellifluous. ‘He was occasionally kind.’ As eulogies go, it says both little and much.

‘Yeah,’ Tall continues, ‘You like that new one much better, don’t you – Ahrend.’

There’s no response, and Tall paces the room, and the younger starling jacks keep out of his way, cowering in the iron shelter of their bunks. ‘What about you, Shadow, hiding away in the dark there. What did you think of Tomley?’

Shadow is not a name he likes, and Jack hates that Tall decided to call him it all those many years ago, as a joke about how he would always be in his brother’s shadow. 

But it is a name he has learned to answer to. Jack has no particular recollection of the dead priest aside from the week he spent in the dormitory as part of the ritual before his Ascension, snoring too loudly, taking up too much space and air – he was just another blurry adult, an unexceptional cruelty in a world filled with them. He shrugs. ‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Pity the Unascended,’ he adds, as a capstone on the conversation, ‘for they will never carry gods within them.’

Tall snorts. ‘Away with that pious shite.’ But Tall leaves him alone to his curtained bed, his darkness and the receding fingers of pain.

Jack is annoyed that Tomley failed his Ascension. Not because it means no new god will walk the earth in the body of a holy man, but because someone will need to clean Tomley’s remains from an altar room. Failed Ascensions are a tedious job.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a child’s mouth, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of death. Jack has lost his curtains to a new brood of starling jacks and the dormitory is filled with their noise, their caper. Jack has wedged his pillow over the hole so that no one will be able to see it.

At night, the hole whispers promises he can almost understand. He whispers back, so softly he cannot be sure the hole and the god within it can even hear. Master Haril says gods hear everything, know even the deepest secret thoughts we have, the dirtiest, darkest things we must keep hidden from every other person in the world. They know our evil, relish it.

Jack finds this freeing. The gods do not judge his sinful thoughts, the times he has wished Tall dead, or to smash Porridge’s head against a wall when his snoring cut through Jack’s head like a sacrificial knife through gristle. The gods do not care that Jack wants to take the Fuck Jack by the throat and scream at him until he understands that letting the priests fuck him over altars will not save him from what is coming.

There has been little sleep that night, and morning comes with the bells, and the tinny braying of the Chant of Awakening through the speakers above the locked door.

It is the Feast Day of Starlings, and Jack finds himself excited by the prospect despite knowing he will suffer days of pain after. It is his twelfth Feast, which means he has been alive for at least seventeen years, maybe more. As starling jacks go, this is very good indeed.

Even if he didn’t know the calendar of the temples by heart now, Jack would know that it is feast day by his hair. It has grown as long as his thumb, curling and soft.

The first order of the feast day is the Shearing. Above and beyond their usual weekly scrubbing under scalding water, with rough yellow soap that seems to be made more of sand than fat, the starling jacks are lined up from smallest to tallest, and a novice with a clipper gives each a ragged buzzcut.

Shaved, scrubbed, dressed in the elasticated-waist loose trousers and formless shirts of their order, the starling jacks are led blinking up the winding staircases and out into the light. For the older ones, it has been a year at least since they have seen the sun – the younger ones may have felt it touch their skin and eyes softly, transmuted into shards of rainbow colours by the pageantry of the great windows in the upper temple.

Shadow Jack pauses, his eyes watering from the brightness of it, his skin assaulted by the smell and taste of a world that is not buried under stone and blood. It is spring. He knows this from the calendars and the chants. It is the season of trussed lambs on the altars. Of eggs like small chalky pebbles cracked and added to their rations of porridge along with clipped bitter leaves.

‘Fucking brill,’ says Tall under his breath, but it is not the usual sneer, even if he is trying. Underneath rolls the undercurrent of his desire, and Jack cannot argue. ‘A day of good food and pretty girls,’ he says, then, knocking Jack with his elbow, ‘even if you can’t see those titties for shit, can you, Shadow.’

No, Jack cannot see for shit, as everyone underground knows.

Up here, they will walk through the long temple gardens to the feast tables, and on the way they will pass the gaggles of serving girls the temple owns, the way it owns the jacks. The unwanted goose girls who must toil in gardens and kitchens and washrooms until they are old enough to become sacrifices themselves. Some to the altars; others plucked up by the temple as gifts for their parishioners, given to men who will breed them and ensure another wave of starlings and geese. Jack’s not always sure which sacrifice is worse.

‘More’s the pity,’ Jack says, though he does not care about the titties of goose girls. He has scraped enough body parts of floors and walls that pretending they are people is too sharp a knife to turn on himself.

Tall begins extolling the virtues of the girls they pass. Jack can see them only as vaguely shapeless ghosts, dressed all in grey the way the starlings wear black. Instead of shorn, their hair is covered by long snoods.

The starlings walk side by side, led by Master Haril and followed by the novice initiates who have been tasked with their care, such as it is. The goose girls, though they are also temple property, seem to have more freedom. A drift of three hazy figures has pushed to the tree line, and they whisper and laugh as the starling jacks march past on their way to the feast tables.

Jack can smell the earthy tang of their sun-simmered sweat, the musky sweetness of their hidden forms, their hidden hair. The starlings dawdle, all looking upon the three goose girls, like goddesses between the slender trees, leaf and light dappled. The girls cover their teeth as the starlings pass, their secrets kept. This close, Jack cannot see much more of their faces than the vaguest suggestion of features, but he can see the soft curves of their bodies, the way the shifts hug the rolling geography of their hips, their thighs. Their titties, despite what Tall said.

He remembers a conversation years old, when the older starling jacks first began to notice the goose girls as something other than themselves. Tall, who had as much experience of the girls as the rest of them – which was to say none – telling Porridge about the wonders that lay hidden under those falls of grey cloth. ‘They don’t have dicks like jacks,’ he’d said, as Porridge ogled, wide-eyed and wary, as though the hooded girls were more predator than prey.

‘How do they piss then?’

‘Well, they do have dicks, but they’re as small as yours, Porridge. But they also have another mouth there, between their legs – instead of a ball sack, you see.’

Porridge, flushed, but still curious and clever enough to know that it was better to be Tall’s acolyte than enemy, asked, ‘Mouths, like proper ones, with teeth?’ And then, horrified, ‘What do they eat?’

‘Yeah, fangs, sharp as a gutting knife.’ Tall had grinned, showing his own teeth, perfect, straight. ‘And they eat little fucking dicks like yours.’

They are all old enough now, have seen enough dead bodies, to know that the wounded mouths between the goose girls’ legs cannot eat anything. Their teeth have all been pulled.

But they are past the watching girls, and the starling jacks’ attention is taken now by more immediate delights than veiled titties and soft, hidden mouths. The feast tables have been set up under the long weeping branches of an immense willow so that they are curtained by whips of green. The starling jacks push their way in, the thin branches striking their faces, followed by the tender, aromatic caress of soft leaves.

The tables are dressed in white like Ascended Priests, laden with trays and bowls; roasts of every kind swimming in gravies, steaming hills of vegetables, their edges crisped by the oven flames, soups and breads, jellied tongues, pastes of liver, fish still staring heavenwards, clotted jams and sauces.

The starlings fall to their feast, screaming.

The first part of the Feast is incoherent, and Jack can barely remember any of it. Like the others he is caught in this ecstasy of greed and joy, grabbing handfuls of food to shove into his mouth. A mouth that has eaten nothing but salted porridge for a year, so that the feast is an overwhelming assault on his senses, so that he dribbles sweet and sour, admixing them like antidotes to his death.

After a while, the blur recedes, and the panicked fervor of the feast settles. It becomes a marathon of excess, as Jack plucks featherless wings, tears breasts, sops up bloody juices with bread that prickles his palm with a ragged crust. The desire to press the bread against his face and bury his nose in its soft white innards is almost too much. He contents himself with breathing deep, the yeast and wheat scent, the smell of wet iron, the sour burst of jellies; rolling the pulp across his tongue and pressing it into his cheeks like a rat.

‘Enjoying yourself?’ his right-side companion asks, but the laughter in his words is muted, self-mocking.

Jack turns. It is the Fuck Jack, who should have learned long ago not to bother speaking to Jack. He has never been interested in what he offers. 

The Fuck Jack tilts his head slightly toward Jack’s loaded plate, and half-smiles. Not very much, just so that Jack can see the tips of his teeth. The Fuck Jack never smiles because his mouth is a graveyard mess of crooked teeth, with extra canines pressing through the gums to create a jagged double row. Jack wonders what his skull will look like when it rests on an altar – will the gods reject it for its monstrosity, or will they be the Fuck Jack’s final congress.

‘Why are you crying at a feast?’ the Fuck Jack asks.

Jack wipes his streaming face with the back of a grease-slicked hand, the knobs of his wrist bones punishing his eyes. ‘I’m not,’ he says. ‘It’s the light, makes them water.’ Everyone knows his eyesight is more fucked than the Fuck Jack, this is hardly news. How the light leaves his eyes slitted and red, triggers his turns so that he will vomit from the pain of it.

‘Eh,’ the Fuck Jack grins properly this time, his gangrel teeth startling in their ugly display. ‘Save your tears, Shadow. Our imperfections have kept us alive this long.’ He holds something out to Jack, who takes it warily.

A plum, soft and purple-ripe, and the skin splits under his teeth. Jack sucks the orange flesh off the stone, and wishes he could keep this sweetness in his mouth forever. He spits the clean-sucked pip into his palm. ‘From a single seed grows a thousand fruits,’ Jack quotes.

‘I hear enough scriptures from priests,’ the Fuck Jack says. ‘Eat plums, drink wine, fuck death in its eye socket.’

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a fist, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of death. Jack has caught a cockroach under his bunk, and he holds the papery, prickly body between his palms like a prayer. It scratches and gnaws, rustling its yellowed hymn book wings.

The only light in the dormitory comes from the single square panel above the locked door, and the starling jacks are asleep, snoring or sobbing or muttering. Even the older ones are done with their play and retreated to their own bunks. No one is awake except Jack. And the roach.

‘You are an explorer,’ Jack whispers. ‘You will go places no other roach has gone.’ He doesn’t know if this is true – although he has never seen anything living willingly go into the spaces behind the altars, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened before. Quickly, before he can change his mind or his captive can escape, Jack shoves the cockroach into the hole in his wall, keeping one hand pressed there like a stone before a tomb.

The roach kicks and bites, its little prickly legs and little prickly mouth seeking escape.

It falls still.

Jack waits a few minutes before slowly taking his hand away. A wind blows across his face, and he thinks he can taste carapace and wing on the sides of his tongue. The hole is empty and dark, and Jack presses just the very tip of a forefinger in to see if he can feel the corpse of the roach.

Nothing.

Jack falls asleep, dreaming that he has sprouted translucent yellow wings from his shoulder blades. He fans them out, and they fold around his pale, naked body. Like this he can see the traceries of black veins are scriptures, the repeated inhuman chant of the Ascension.

In the morning, he finds the cockroach on his pillow. Still alive, it has turned the pale green of a willow bud, grown elegant and cunning and predatory. The mantis-roach watches him with its bulging eyes, then swaggers delicately away back into the hole as though it has found him wanting.

That day, he is paired with the Fuck Jack in his daily tasks – an unusual occurrence. He tries to dissuade any attempts at conversation by grunting monosyllabically, but this does not seem to stem the tide of chatter as they scrub blood from the tiles, fold the few remaining bits of gristle and bloody bones into paper towels and throw them in the pails. Jack lifts a portion of a wrist with a thumb still mostly attached from off the altar. The void behind the stone dais is quiet, breath tinged with the acrid taste of old, unbrushed hearths. Even so, it feels as though he is being watched.

A flash of luminescent green, like the eyes of animals hunting in the dark, or fallen stars clustered together, and then it is gone. ‘Did you see that?’ Jack asks quietly, interrupting the Fuck Jack’s moronic gabble.

He falls silent, suddenly watchful, and he looks to Jack like a different beast altogether, slender and wary. Not a stupid, desperate creature, but something that has learned to play one and play it well, that it might more easily slip among its prey. ‘Hmm, no, nothing.’ He pauses to wipe a sticky drip of blood from the corner of the altar. ‘What was it?’

Jack looks at the bones he’s holding, the finger joints still held together with shredded bloody meat and stringy tendons. Thinks of the plum stone secreted back from the feast, hidden now under his pillow, of the mantis-roach going back to the god in the hole, and shakes his head. ‘Nothing. Nothing.’

~~~

The next week brings the Migration, following as it always does, the Feast. The new starling jacks are herded into the dormitory, their knees still fat and dimpled, milk teeth and bloody gaps in their gums. They are bewildered, fresh from the nursery dormitories where there is still a semblance of care, of something passing close to love. The goose girls who have grown so old that they are sexless and diminished serve as mothers, as wipers of arses and singers of cradle songs.

Jack remembers his dorm mother, a woman they called Pit, though he cannot recall why. Her hands were so gnarled they looked dirty and Jack was terrified of them touching his skin lest somehow the withering transferred to him. Now, he thinks, he would beg to be touched, just to know that he is real.

The new starlings make too much noise, crying and sniffling and dripping snot everywhere. By the end of the year the prettiest of them will be dead, unless they are very clever and learn how to become invisible.

Jack was neither pretty nor clever, but he learned to fade away into the walls, to become nothing. A shadow. His head is starting to hurt from the sound, and he retreats to his now curtainless bed. He cannot block the chatter, but he can block the slowly-widening hole in his wall with his body, let its cold breath soothe his back.

When the dorm finally stills late that evening, Jack lies awake. Partly because his head is being slowly, excruciatingly crushed, his stomach churning, bile thin and bitter in his mouth, and partly because he can hear a soft scritching from his hole.

The sound washing over him has the cadence of the Chant of Purgation, the one that is sung while the priest lies helpless and bound, salt water enema flushing the last remnants of shit and part-digested food from his bowels, readying himself for gods, for the Ascension.

‘Shh,’ Jack whispers to the hole, and the skittering chant stops. He can hear only his breath through his nose, the deep snores of his fellow starlings. Jack edges a fingertip into the hole and finds it warm and dry, eerily pleasant. He pushes his fist in, and the hole constricts so slowly that he is caught unawares in its soft grip. The hole slickens, tightening rhythmically, and Jack’s cock twitches in mindless response, thickening and swelling in time with the thud of his pulse.

The god hole releases him unexpectedly, and Jack pulls his hand out to find it glimmering in the greyness with a greasy sheen. In the silence, he works his wet hand over his cock, teeth gritted so that he cannot make any sound, his thin blanket shoved down to his hips.

His cock splits in two, then two again, each new organ dividing and multiplying. A chrysanthemum blossoms at his groin, each tender red petal bowed and fluttering. The petals vibrate, contract and dive inwards as the heart of the flower spurts and leaks.

The jism is oily black, filled with rainbows, and Jack wants to scream but cannot. His skin moves as though a thousand roach-mantises crawl beneath it, trying to find a way out. The tender chrysanthemum petals intertwine, growing together, their length slackening until Jack is left with only a singular flaccid penis and a spatter of milky fluid across his belly, pooling in the little mouth there. His skin is still except for the clockwork pulse of his abdomen.

The dormitory is too quiet and Jack, face searing, angles to look if anyone has witnessed this phantasmagasm. The bunks are filled with sleeping humps, still as corpses.

Only one other person is awake, propped on an elbow, their dark silhouette a shadow in the shadows. Jack cannot see his face, but he knows who sleeps where. The Fuck Jack shifts, turns, and lies down again.

Jack wipes himself clean with his blanket, moving as little as possible. It was another half-waking dream, he tells himself. Not real, his actions spurred on by a feverish mess of pain and exhaustion and overstimulation.

His headache is gone.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a skull, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of flowers on an altar.

Papery and peppery, like chrysanthemums.

When he leaves his bed, Jack shoves his pillow and his grey blanket over it in a crumpled pile, but if it grows much larger, it will be impossible to hide.

The routine of the starling jacks has gone back to its usual rhythm. The new starlings have settled into their rookery, and the first of the best of them have already died. This is why the older starlings do not bother to give them names for the first few years. It is easier that way.

Things have begun to crawl from the hole – another factor in its inevitable discovery. Mostly it has been small insects, roaches and the like, and the novice priests have set poisoned traps along the edges of the walls.

One of the younger starlings ate the poison and took three days to die. They left him in his shit and vomit and urine-stained bed. As a warning, Jack supposes, to the other fledglings.

Jack already knows that he would prefer a death on the altar – this boy is not the first he has seen try to master the moment of his ending. Poisonings, and starvations, and once a boy whose memory he still carries like a talisman with a broken pin. Trouble Jack was one of those who should have died young, but learned to be invisible. But everyone knew his time would eventually run out and he’d be brought to one of the altars, and there would be nothing waiting for him but the void and the gods inside it.

So, instead, Trouble stood by the empty space near the door and beat his head against the wall. The others watched him do it and no one stopped him. Watched until his skull was a bloody broken mess, and still he did not stop. Until he lay twitching feebly on the floor, and the novices came to take the mostly-corpse away.

Jack does not know what happened to him – if they let him die like that, or gave him to the gods anyway.

Trouble taught him that no matter what you choose, the ending is the same. It’s only a matter of how much it hurts before you die.

A new creature is pushing its way free from the hole, squirming and fighting its way out. Something far bigger than a roach or a centipede, something bedraggled and pointed, with eyes that glitter like candle flames in an altar room. Jack pushes back at it, but it snaps at his fingers. It is wet with the birthing fluids of the hole, and Jack scrambles out of its way, still not fast enough. The thing lurches free, terrified and raging, and there is a sudden deep pain in Jack’s face, a wet shock.

He stumbles from his bed, gasping, his hands clamped over his right eye as though he can save it.

The room is filled with shrieking, with the panicked clap of wings against walls. The boys leap and yell, trying to catch this intruder, until Tall fells it with a well-aimed pillow and traps it under a blanket.

Jack hears the snap of its neck, a small sound that is too loud under the noise, and passes out.

~~~

He wakes in the sickroom, alone, his head bandaged. They have filled him with the softness of painkillers, and he is mostly numb except for the dull empty ache where his eye used to be. He has a hole now to match the one in his wall.

When he is well enough to stand, they return him to the dormitory.

‘How did a fucking bird get in, is what I want to know,’ Tall says. ‘You look like shit, One-Eye.’ Tall has bestowed on him a new moniker. It is marginally better than Shadow, and at least more accurate, so Jack doesn’t bother arguing.

He feels lightheaded, dizzy with the loss of his eye. He has heard from Porridge that the bird was oily and glittering like a starling, that it had four wings instead of two, that its eyes clustered across its head like a spider’s. Tall Jack broke its neck and the initiates took it away.

No one has any idea how it got in.

Jack’s bed has been left as it was, rumpled and unmade. The hole is there, visible, half-covered by the blankets, yet no one seems to have seen it. It is a mouth that speaks only to Jack. Nothing has been touched, and Jack furtively checks under his pillow. The amber plum pip, dried out now and waiting for soil and rain it will never receive, is still there.

‘Did you bring it in?’ Tall accuses. ‘Smuggle the fuckin thing in somehow?’ An impossibility, but there is no other explanation. Perhaps Tall is under the impression that Jack brought it in as an egg from the Feast, held it in his mouth until it hatched, fed the monstrous fledgling spit and skin until it grew feathers and learned to fly.

Jack stares at him with his remaining eye for long enough that Tall sneers and sweats. ‘Idiot,’ Tall says, ‘keeping a bird in your bed. What did you think was going to happen?’ But the other starling jacks do not snigger or tease – they cannot understand this vitriol when it is obvious that Jack had no way of bringing the bird into their underground hell.

They are unaware of the delicate and barbed friendships that come from being from the same hatching, and being the last of the brood to survive. There are many reasons for Tall to hate Jack, but mostly it is because they are both still alive. Every day is spent wondering which of them will die first.

And also because Jack has never bowed to Tall’s strutting, preening, self-proclaimed kingship.

Other Tall, who was once Short but grew so that he had to be renamed and his old name bestowed on another, joins in. He and Tall are close as twins, closer than twins truly are. ‘You always were a little weirdo, One Eye.’ His delight in the new moniker is thick as overcooked porridge. ‘Remember back when his little pal smashed his head open – cried like a baby, remember.’ And they laugh together as if they did not also weep in the dark, in their frightened hearts. Other Tall does not say Trouble’s name.

Porridge, ever eager to be included, pulls his thumb from his mouth, where he has been chewing the nail down to nothingness. ‘Yeah, lucky your bird only pecked out an eye, since yours are useless anyway.’

 ‘Shut up, Porridge, you wank,’ Tall says affectionately, before turning back to Jack. ‘Maybe the next pet you take to bed will peck off your pecker, since that’s useless too.’

‘Eh, leave him be,’ says the Fuck Jack unexpectedly. He is sitting cross-legged on Tall’s bunk, and he leans back, extends one of his long legs, angling his body. It is an invitation. And a distraction.

~~~

Jack finds that having one eye is a blessing. He sees only half the horror; he can shut out the world simply by turning his head. And his headaches have stopped. Perhaps the missing eye has left him some emptiness, a space in his head for all the sins that must have accumulated there, pressing, crawling over each other, gnawing at the inside of his skull.

Now they can flow out of the eyeless socket, seep through the stitched-together lids like tears.

He is on a cleaning shift in one of the upper-level altar rooms, where the voidways are small, the gods still weak. The sacrifices here are likewise small – birds and rabbits – and the bitter breeze from the darkness is comforting. Jack cleans in silence, but his companion is having none of it.

‘I know you didn’t bring the bird in,’ the Fuck Jack says as he scrubs the floor around the altar. The slate gleams black, like a wing, and the knees of the Fuck Jack’s trousers are wet. ‘But it is weird, how it came from your bed, like.’

‘It was just a bird,’ Jack says. ‘It must have found— A hole, or something.’

They both know there is no something.

‘Don’t let him get to you,’ the Fuck Jack says.

‘I never do,’ Jack finds himself answering, and the Fuck Jack grins, showing those ugly teeth just for him.

‘He shouldn’t have killed it though, maybe we could have caught it, and set it free.’

Nothing ever gets free from underground. ‘It took my eye out, might have hurt one of the little ones.’

‘Maybe,’ says the Fuck Jack. ‘But I don’t think it took your eye.’

Jack pauses from wiping the sides of the altar and stares, eyebrows drawn in a frown.

‘I think you gave it, like a sacrifice.’

‘I—’ How much does the Fuck Jack know, what has he seen that the others haven’t. He shakes his head, but the Fuck Jack is up from his knees now, stepping towards him, and he lifts the wrapping from the tender hole in Jack’s head and Jack does not move to stop him, he is still, waiting as though he is bound to an altar and the gods are coming up through the empty spaces and pushing into the world, filling him up with their holy horror.

Up close, the Fuck Jack is in focus, magnified, moving from gentle blur to cruel clarity. He has a spray of the palest freckles across his nose and cheeks, so close in tone to his moon pallor that it is only now, inches away, that they are visible. His eyes are flecked, and Jack cannot tell if they are brown or gold or green or all three at once, like sunlight through willow leaves. His breath is cold.

‘It’s a pity,’ the Fuck Jack says as he carefully places the wrap back around Jack’s missing eye, hiding it. ‘You have beautiful eyes – had,’ corrects himself. ‘Black, almost.’ He steps back and says softly, ‘Don’t go giving away the other now.’

At Jack’s back, the void is a howl, a storm, a silence beyond silence.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a buck hare, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of blood spilled on an altar.

Jack is not alone. He has his back to the hole, feels it sucking gently at his skin, as though a thousand slender tongues are licking across his shoulder blades, down his spine.

Another tongue is in his mouth, and it is an interesting violation, one he has curiously invited. He still does not fully understand why he is allowing the Fuck Jack to kiss him, but nonetheless, here they are.

His companion runs his fingers lightly down Jack’s arms, stroking them like a priest calming a rabbit before he slits its throat. Jack imagines that at any moment, the Fuck Jack will tear off his tongue, snap open his jugular with his teeth like an animal cornered, and Jack’s blood will soak into the sheets, drip into the hole at his back, and the god waiting there will finally be strong enough to emerge.

Gods do not leave the void without human bodies – human consent.

Jack has never been interested in the Fuck Jack’s offerings, and he finds himself bewildered that he has allowed this. That, worse – stranger – he wants it. The desire to be made real by the press of skin on skin.

‘Why,’ he says into the Fuck Jack’s mouth, but the word is muffled, swallowed. He closes his eyes, and he can still see his companion burning red, a flame against his own. Jack has become a candle lit for the first rites of Ascension.

There will be a small sacrifice first – a lamb or a calf or a kid – before the priest is readied; starved and purged and made pleasing for the god to come.

~~~

When the morning chant rattles overhead and the overhead light strips buzz slowly brighter, Master Haril comes for Tall Jack.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a lamb, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of shit and rot.

No one in the dormitory mentions the smell or the gaping black voidway. Either, Jack thinks, he is going mad, or the hole exists only for him.

He sits cross-legged, his hands cupped over his ears to block out the sound of the other starlings, their frightened glances.

Jack opens his eye, sees only the smears of their faces as the boys clump together, trying to find safety in their friends. Tall Jack is gone, the king is dead, the king is dead.

A figure steps into his line of sight, blocking the vision of the starlings in their silent panic. Warm hands on his, pulling his palms away from his ears. The muffled wailing turns sharp and clear, a single voice, rising and falling, weeping in a tragic loop. Jack hadn’t realised how close Other Tall had been to his hero, how much Tall had meant to him, that he would grieve like this.

‘You’re scaring the littles,’ the Fuck Jack says softly. ‘They need someone to step up.’ He sits down next to Jack, and his warmth is an anchor, a comfort. It makes Jack feel momentarily real. ‘Other Tall’s a mess right now, Porridge is Porridge, and they know what I am. That leaves you.’

‘I am not the king of this shithole,’ Jack says.

‘You don’t have to be.’ Fuck slides one arm around Jack’s shoulders, his face close so that his stubble catches against Jack’s cheek. ‘Just give them something to focus on.’

Jack stands.

And the room falls silent. Even Other Tall’s sobs dwindle into hiccoughs. ‘Tall was never a friend of mine,’ he begins. He is not supposed to name the dead, and the other starling jacks look uncomfortable. ‘Though we knew each other from the cradle.’ This is true of all jack generations, but in Jack and Tall’s case, as only Other Tall and the Fuck Jack knows, it is doubly so for them.

Brother is a meaningless word here, it implies only service to gods, not kinship, and Jack has never felt any attachment to his brother, and the feeling was reflected.

Tall was everything that Jack is not, as though in the womb the two fought over their bones, their natures. Tall was the one who claimed the crow’s share of the feast, and Jack was only ever a shadow, an insubstantial thing.

He starts again. ‘But Tall was your friend, and your king. Tall looked after you, he named you when you needed names. He protected, sometimes, and he kept you laughing, not thinking about what’s coming for you. How you will die ripped open on a stone altar so gods can feed.’

The starling jacks shift and mutter, trading uneasy glances.

‘Well this is going brilliantly,’ the Fuck Jack says behind him, voice low enough for only Jack to hear.

‘And now you want a new king to pull you together, to give you someone to follow, to stop the stupid fights and to comfort you in the dark.’ Jack swallows, tasting oil and copper; the onion sharpness of his armpits assaulting his nostrils as he sweats. ‘But I’m not going to step into my brother’s place.’

Even Other Tall has stopped weeping; he is shivering, staring at Jack as though he cannot understand where he came from, how he could be so much the antithesis of his twin.

‘You exist only for yourself,’ says Jack. ‘There is no king who will save you, no name you can wear that will not be given to another when you are dead.’ He swallows. ‘Stop fearing it, stop hoping for someone to save you. You’ll find your strength in acceptance, not in making a king out of another sacrifice. Enjoy the things you have now and hope for nothing more. Nothing less. Exist, until you stop existing.’ He sits down again, abruptly, his hands shaking, his legs shaking, his heart shaking.

He does not know who that speech was for – the starlings or himself.

‘Cold,’ says Fuck, ‘But true,’ and he takes Jack’s hand in his, fingers weaving together so they are pressed palm to palm and Jack is for this moment real, anchored by the weight of another person, by the touch of someone outside himself. The ground is cold and rough beneath his feet, but it is real, and this room is real and the staring boys are real and the bunk under his arse and thighs is real, and the Fuck Jack is real, and the plum stone under his pillow is real, and the hole in the wall is real.

~~~

Jack is no longer alone. Fuck has moved into Jack’s bunk, bringing with him his pillow, his blanket, which they have rigged up as a curtain.

The hole, still growing, remains unnoticed, and Jack is now certain it is merely a manifestation of his unspiralling mind. He does his best to ignore it, lets himself be distracted by his new companion instead.

It seems a cruelty to keep calling the Fuck Jack by a name he can no longer carry, but as Jack has said, he is not in the business of replacing his brother.

They are kissing, grinding against each other, which is the most of what they do. Jack is repulsed by the idea of anyone being inside him or he anyone else – it is too much a thing of gods. He breaks the kiss, and rests for a moment, feeling the twin drum of heartbeats, the slide of sweat and skin as their ribs move like bellows. ‘What do you want me to call you?’

‘Shadow,’ the Fuck Jack says without thinking about an answer, and Jack does not know if this is a request, or if the Fuck Jack is just repeating his name in exasperation – then, ‘Call me Shadow.’

Jack laughs and the sound is bright and strange and he cannot remember if he has ever heard himself laughing before. It feels like choking. ‘Right, fine,’ he says. ‘You be Shadow, and I’ll be Jack.’

‘Just Jack?’

‘Yes.’ It’s as good a name as any other, all the better for having no meaning.

‘Alright then,’ and Shadow kisses him, and Jack closes his eye and dreams that they are pushing their heads together, their bodies together, bone passing through bone, meat passing through meat, blood mingling until they are one unhuman creature. A tangle of limbs and interlocking skeletons. Until they push right through each other and emerge, transformed.

New things, remade from old, from broken things they are made whole.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by their bed.

It is almost the size of an Ascension sacrifice, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of promises.

After the death of the king and Jack’s pronouncement on resignation, a simmering peace has settled over the dormitory.

The jacks go about their tasks, play and fight as they always have, but a blanket of calm lies over every action, as though they are now aware that they are actors playing parts for an audience that will only ever reward them with a slit throat and an altar bed.

Jack’s calm is different. He feels moored, balanced. Where before he was drifting and insubstantial, now he has become real, convinced of his ability to assume space in the universe by this shadow boy in his bed.

The hole still grows, but nothing new has come from it – no roaches or centipedes or monstrous birds.

Today Jack is in the lowest temple where the huge altar is carved from a black stone that looks and feels eerily wet even when dry. Other Tall is his workmate. Both of them go about their tasks quickly and methodically, careful to never turn their backs to the chasm behind the altar.

Even the mirror-visored guards outside the airlock do not turn to face away.

It’s not unheard of for the gods here to send out a questing arm, flanged and fanged and suckered, to pluck some unsuspecting starling at work, as an extra sacrifice.

Other Tall has been avoiding Jack, as much as that is possible in the confines of temple dormitories and altar rooms and dining halls where starling jacks are pressed together like tongues. But now they are alone in a sacred space, gobbets of blood and flesh on their clothes, under their fingernails, and Other Tall says, ‘You’re glad he’s dead, aren’t you?’

Jack looks at his hands, at the paper towel, pinkish and dripping, disintegrating where it has been folded around some pulpy remnant of a crimson-brown liver with the texture of blood solidified, jellied. ‘My brother?’ He will not call a dead boy by a name that no longer exists. ‘No.’

‘You hated him.’

‘I felt nothing for him,’ Jack says after a slight pause to digest the idea of hate. He has never felt strongly enough to hate. Nor to love. ‘I did not want him to die, but I knew it would happen, so I chose not to think about it.’ He looks up in sudden understanding. ‘You thought it wouldn’t.’

Other Tall flinches as if Jack had slapped him across the face.

Love, Jack realises, is more angular and awkward and monstrous and frail than a misshapen starling that has flown from the void. He feels a sudden tender ache of pity for his dead brother, for Other Tall, who thought his devotion was enough to save the one he loved.

For himself.

The paper towel is twisted, wrung between nerveless fingers, and sloppy bits of liver fall to the floor. Jack stares at the blurred globs and wonders if there is a pattern that can show him the future. An augury, the way the Priests of the Upper Temple claim to know what the gods want from the way bones fall, from the curve and cross of entrails.

‘You think nothing can touch you,’ Other Tall says. His voice is oddly thin and choked. ‘But you’re wrong. I know things, Father Ahrend tells me.’

This is possible. In the last months, Shadow has shed his role as the Fuck Jack, avoiding the grasping priests and leaving the beds of other jacks cold and empty. Perhaps Other Tall has seen a place for himself now that his king and protector is dead, perhaps he hopes to curry favour and avoid the altars by becoming a priest’s pet starling.

It is unlikely to save him, but it might buy him time. And if he has gone to Father Ahrend, who Jack knows from Shadow is a man who cannot keep his tongue still, who must puff up his meagre importance with boasts and secrets, then it is very possible that Other Tall knows the names of those who will be called next.

‘Father Ahrend is soon to Ascend,’ Other Tall says. What he does not say is, people will die, and you will not be able to save them or yourself.

~~~

That night Jack cannot sleep, cannot lie still. His head is full of crawling things and the hole where his eye was cannot let them all out. Jack turns, tosses, kicking the single blanket from his legs, from off of Shadow, who wakes blearily and kisses his temple. ‘Headache?’ he asks. ‘I thought you stopped getting them?’

He hasn’t had one in months, but all Jack can think of is how big the hole in his world is, and how much bigger it might yet become. 

‘You’re going to leave,’ Jack says instead and Shadow can’t answer him because every answer is a lie.

~~~

Father Ahrend is commended to the Week of Unbecoming, the first stage in his Ascension. He is shaved and scrubbed with gritty yellow soap, dressed in the blacks of starling jacks. Salt porridge in his bowl, a thin blanket on his bed.

For a week, Father Ahrend must attend the dormitories as a starling. The last time a priest shared their room it was Tomley, short and squat, soft-chinned and wide-eyed as a dead rabbit. Ahrend might look more suitable to be the host body of gods, but the physical form is irrelevant. It is the strength of the mind that the gods must share, that must not shatter when the body is entered.

Few people survive Ascension, but despite the promise of a cruel slow death at a failure, the reward of walking out the temple no longer flawed and human, but powerful, immortal, a thing beyond beauty and shame is too bright to refuse.

While the priest pretends humility and suffering, the starling jacks pretend civility. Their beds are made daily, blankets tucked and pillows shaken into shape. There are no night time activities or curtained partitions made from stolen blankets. Every starling sleeps alone.

Shadow winks at Jack, promising normality as soon as Ahrend has gone to his gods. For his part, Ahrend tries to take his role seriously, scrubbing altars and eating his porridge with the soft wooden spoon that the starlings must return at the end of every meal. He cleans the altars, prays when he is meant to, sings the chants with the rest of them.

But he is not like them. Older, certainly, but more than that, when this is over, he will walk out the rookery still as Ahrend. He will never be nameless and given only a description to serve as identification.

At first, Jack was certain that the priest, of all people, would see the hole slowly growing across his bunk wall. But not a mention has been made of it. The god there is Jack’s alone.

The seven-day period of Unbecoming passes and Ahrend Jack becomes once again Father Ahrend, and the dormitory lets go of a collective breath. The starlings chatter louder, making up for the week of awkward silences and stilted conversations.

That night, Shadow slips against Jack and tells him in breathless, rushed words the thousand ways he has missed him. Jack bites Shadow to stop himself from answering, leaving arcs of bruises along his throat and shoulders. Their reunion is feverish, passing in a cruel rush of things better not said, better said.

The hole in their wall croons, adding its soft voice to theirs, and Jack cannot tell who cries out, if the sound is his or Shadow’s or the god’s. Behind their grey curtain, they are in a world of three, separated from the mundane reality of orphaned jacks waiting to become sacrifices.

Shadow traces the bones of Jack’s face, his clavicle, his ribs and hips, tells him unintelligible nonsense that only Jack’s skin understands, and Jack mirrors him, learning the anchoring rites of this adoration. Invisible appendages stroke down the hollows and ridges of Jack’s spine, curl around his ankles and knees and throat until Jack no longer knows who touches who, cannot tell tongues from fingers from slender boneless arms. 

~~~

On the second morning, after Ahrend has been bound and purified, Master Haril comes for Shadow.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. It is the size and shape of grief, or the endless second as a bird’s neck is snapped. It is wider than death, and deeper, and colder. The wind that blows from it is filled with a lover’s whispered, broken promises.

Jack stares at the empty bed for a long while, then turns away and walks to the door. He presses his fingers against the rough expanse of bunkless wall, skimming the faint indentations and the faded stain. It has been years, and the spot has turned from crimson to brown to a sepia so pale it is almost indistinguishable from the marrowy paint.

He rests his forehead against the place where Trouble methodically smashed his brains out, letting the coolness sweep through his skin and skull. He closes his eye, settles into the swimmy half-darkness, the pooling, amorphous lights of an aura dancing in his vision. The paint has a faint must scent, like stone after a rain when the moulds spread their delicate grey forests, an undertang of alms.

A hand tugs his shoulder. ‘C’mon, One Eye,’ says Porridge sadly. ‘Get away from there.’

‘I thought we were supposed to all be resigned to an ending,’ Other Tall says, hard and cold and hurting. ‘So resign yourself, you fucker.’

Jack can’t bring himself to answer; it’s too much effort, his tongue thick and alien in his mouth. His head hurts.

When the tinny braying of the Chant of Ascension begins, Jack sighs and steps back, and takes his place in the queue of starling jacks waiting to be led to their daily tasks.

They work through the first part of Ahrend’s ritual, and Jack is with Porridge in one of the upper hallways cleaning the shit of frightened animals off the walkways when the screaming begins.

The hallway is on a level high above the great lower altar where the Ascension ritual takes place, but at these times the gods are closer to their world, and the sound moves through every open altar space, magnified by the walls and the chambers.

Jack grits his teeth as the screams and sobs rise and fall in waves. The pain is part of the process.

Shadow told him that a failed Ascension is a risk not just for the priest, but also for the god entering him. If one dies, so does the other. Jack didn’t believe this but Shadow insisted that it was the truth, that he had heard it from several priests.

They seem to like to talk about god while they fuck their pet starling.

‘I’m sorry,’ Porridge says, and Jack blinks in confusion. Porridge rests his mop in the bucket, and the handle clangs against the rim, the sound echoing, dripping through the long dark passages. ‘I know…’ Porridge grimaces, spreads his hands as if the words he needs to say will fall into them. The screams fade, a gasping moment of relief. ‘I know he meant something to you, even if you like everyone to think nothing means anything to you ever, like you’re above all of it.’

The screams start again, and Jack’s head fills with a familiar ache. He doesn’t know what to say, scared that if he acknowledges this meagre comfort, he will crack open, fragment into a spinning vortex of shards and splinters.

‘It’s ok to be sad,’ Porridge says as he returns to his labour, swirling the shit-infused water with his mop and squeezing it out. ‘You don’t have to pretend. Not for us, anyway. We understand.’

Jack folds down, squatting onto his haunches, and covers his head with his hands. Like this, he rocks back and forth, a minute movement in time with Father Ahrend’s dying screams.

Far below them, the altar is already spread with Shadow’s remains, the bound priest is anointed with them, Shadow’s heart blood striped across his face.

Jack prays that Ahrend fails his Ascension, that he will never know god.

~~~

Master Haril chooses who goes to clean which altar room, and no starling ever argues or asks to be changed, so when Other Tall and Porridge are assigned to clean Altar Room Fifteen, the deep altar, Jack expects the master to stop him when he takes Other Tall’s place instead.

Perhaps he has never bothered to learn to tell the difference between his starlings.

The mirror-visored guards open the airlock doors for them and their trolleys of cleaning tools, and Porridge and Jack enter the charnel house of a failed Ascension.

‘You don’t have to do this, you idiot,’ Porridge tells him.

Jack nods. ‘I need to.’ He thinks Porridge understands, even though he cannot see the starling’s expression.

Porridge sighs loudly. ‘Alright, then, but…you can stop if you have to. You really can.’

It is hard to tell what animal was slaughtered here, unless you already know.

And Jack does know; he knows the contours of Shadow’s skull, the breadth of his rib cage. He picks through the remnants, bagging indistinguishable ropes of gut, shredded muscle, long splinters of bone. He finds Father Ahrend’s heart, half-chewed, coated in waxy ropes of fat, and throws it in the offal pail.

He finds part of an upper jaw with overlapping canines, and pulls the teeth from the bloodied bone, the torn gums.

Jack looks to the great archway behind the altar, where motes of skin and stars dance in the emptiness, and he swallows Shadow’s pointed teeth.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ Porridge says.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed. There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed.

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow Jack’s bed.

Shadow’s canines have lodged in his stomach. Jack can feel them pushing new roots into the lining, budding pearly little grains that blossom into molars and incisors.

Shadow will eat him from the inside out.

~~~

The dormitory is too quiet. There were whispers and guarded looks when he returned and he knows Porridge told the others about how he ate Shadow’s teeth off the altar, but he doesn’t care.

They should be snoring or moaning, at sleep or pretending, but the silence is tense and watchful. Eyes on him, waiting. Jack doesn’t know what they’re expecting – perhaps they think he will break down weeping or find some new and brutally interesting way to kill himself. He’s not interested in either option, nor does he care that the starling jacks are apprehensive about this unknowable beast in their midst.

For the last three days, he has given all his meals to Porridge, who looks at him sadly but licks his bowls clean anyway. The lack of food has made him feel weightless and insubstantial, dizzy with it. He is unmoored, and with every step he half-expects to fall through the surface of the world.

For three days he has moved through his blurry world like a ghostling. The other starlings speak to him sometimes, their mouths move but the sounds they make are unintelligible garblings.

For three days, he has felt Shadow’s teeth embedded in his stomach, growing and spreading their rootlets and veins and nerves. His belly aches, a searing cramp like he has a round of the post Feast shits.

For three days he has sung the Chant of Ascension to himself, humming alien cadences under his breath.

He’s going to give himself to god.

Jack lies on his back; hands palm up at his sides. He is still but for the soft motion of his belly as he breathes in long, slow counts, the faint flicker of his eyelid. In the hollow of his close-stitched eye socket, Jack has placed the dried, dead plum stone.

The hole in the wall is waiting too, its breaths subtle and cold, as though the god is still too young and new to understand that finally it will get what it wants.

‘I’m ready,’ he tells the hole, and it sighs out an army of mantis-roaches who clamber over him with a delicate, drunken stateliness, feet pricking his naked skin, their globular eyes scanning him for imperfections.

He knows he is wanting — that as sacrifices go, he is far from ideal, but small gods must take what they can. The mantis-roaches envelop him, covering him with their wide-spread paper-yellow wings, and for one lurching moment Jack is lying on his bed and falling into the hole, both still and moving, here and nowhere.

He clenches his teeth and does not scream as he falls endlessly.

~~~

There is a hole in the world. There are a thousand holes in the world, and each is a gateway to god.

Jack wakes in darkness, naked and alone. After a few moments he gets to his feet, the plum stone falling to the ground to be lost.

His eye adjusts to the gloom. The void is filled with glittering dust like a snowfall made of starlight, and after a few moments, Jack realises he is in a tunnel. His fingers brush a stone wall, and it is slick and warm, and he remembers touching himself, the oily jism and the chrysanthemum cock. A distant dream, unreal, heating his skin.

The air is thin and bitter and every breath makes him more a part of the gods’ world, changing him. Shadow’s teeth grind in his stomach, and Jack walks forward, deeper into the realm of god.

He walks until his feet are bloody, but no god comes to claim him as a sacrifice, to use his body to Ascend.

Finally, Jack reaches a split in the passage.

He chooses his eyeless side, and keeps walking. The air around him thickens with icy glowing dust and he shivers uncontrollably, his teeth chattering. Eventually the passage ends in a singular round cavern, and Jack comes face to face with god.

It looks every bit like the bas-relief carvings on the altars, but more so. It is a god older than the earth, and stranger. Its myriad eyes glow black-green, like the flickers of light from new-lit tapers. It clicks serrated teeth, pedipalps tasting the air, gathering the scent of Jack to its multiple maws.

‘I’m here,’ Jack says. ‘And I give my body to you.’ The gods need his consent.

A tentacle slithers forward to caress Jack, to curl hungrily around his calves, trace familiar, loving patterns up his thighs.

‘On one condition.’

The god moves forward, waiting. And Jack tells him what he wants.

Perhaps the god laughs, but it agrees, and Jack steps into the agony of its embrace. 

He will probably die, and he knows this, and accepts this, and the god accepts this too. But the Ascension rites will always happen because both men and gods love power. Enough to chance their deaths on it.

~~~

The pain goes on for much longer than Jack had anticipated. Father Ahrend took many hours to die, and Jack was ready for that, but he was not ready for how every hour would be stretched into centuries. The failed Ascenscions beg for death, and Jack can understand why.

It is beyond the pain of hunger and beatings, beyond the pain of cracked bones and torn flesh. Jack lies on the ground, his body writhing, bones snapping as muscle and tendon rearrange his skeleton into inhuman shapes. He screams the way he has heard priests scream as their minds are shredded by the gods’ untender invasions.

Jack will not beg. If he ends the Ascension, if he is too weak to be the body for god, then there is no point to his suffering. He chews through his tongue and swallows the traitorous appendage, where it joins Shadow’s teeth in a slick, violent kiss.

Extra bones are growing alongside his own, and his skin bulges and stretches, pulling thin as stomach caul. His skull splits to make room for this sprouting newness.

There are three of them in this private world, and Jack cannot tell fingers from tongues from slender, boneless arms. There is an edge of ecstasy to his pain, gone beyond human nerves and understanding and into a space that is vast enough to hold divinity inside a sack of skin and meat and bones.

~~~

Jack wakes in his bunk bed, and stretches his mind out into the temple like a mould colony reaching filaments to the heavens. He can taste the sweet heavy breaths of the sleeping starling jacks, the sour wine saliva of priests in their cells. On the altars lie offerings and candles, and the walls and tapestries repeat the thousand names of gods.

He is home, he is real, he is whole.

~~~

There is a hole in the wall by Shadow and Jack’s bed. It is no bigger than a pin prick, and the wind that blows from it is cold and bitter and smells of death. Shadow and Jack are used to that smell, know it better than their own.

‘I was dead,’ says Shadow. He has not moved from Jack’s embrace.

Jack holds him tighter. In his head the god shifts, coming to terms with the limits of its new body. Its freedom. ‘Yes.’

Shadow does not point out the rest; that Jack carried him inside his belly like a goose girl breeding an infant sacrifice, or that Jack gave himself to god to bring Shadow back. The pain that he endured. That Jack has Ascended. ‘Ok then,’ he says. ‘Neat.’

Jack and the god laugh, and around him the world is sharp and clear, is limned with scintillating auras and Jack can see the way the universe is built, the subtle magic that threads it all together. He can touch the walls and make them crumble, if he wants. He can press his fingers to the door and turn it to dust. He can take a plum stone and turn it into a starling.

They can walk out of the temple and never look back.

The god laughs, and asks what he really wants under all his emptiness.

The world as an altar, and even then, it will not be enough. Jack has never wanted to be a king, and only became a god out of need. Instead, Jack kisses Shadow and promises him a crimson robe of flayed priest skins, a crown of finger bones and fragments of mirrored visors. A throne made from the twisted iron of bunk beds for the King Jack.

___

Copyright 2025 CL Hellisen