Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Alice found this deeply disappointing. It was all so unfair, she thought. You thought people were giants, and they devastated you by being so human.

This was the saddest thing. The loss of faith. If he really were a giant, she would have followed him still.

How dare he, she thought. Making impingements, implying failure, when he had no grounds to do so except for being a dick.

Professor Grimes had ever done to her—made her doubt she was a good scholar. He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own.

She’d grown reliant on picture-perfect captures appearing in her mind’s eye; until this point, all her work had been mere tracing. How much harder it was to reach for memories she wasn’t sure were there. Blurred now were the lines between memory and imagination. She could not trust her mind not to invent what she wished she’d seen. The best thing she could do was to try to turn off that part of her brain that thought too much. Sink into the movement of the chalk, and let the memory of Peter guide her work.

Oh, he howled then. He screamed at her all the invectives that could possibly apply, something about whores and tarts and stupid, stupid brats. She didn’t make out the specifics; she let it all fade into a vicious

homogenous wash. She’d heard it all before. He leaned over her, came so close that his aura was superimposed over hers, as if he could settle into her body by sheer force of will. He leaned round and screamed into her ear. He forced his ghostly head into hers and screamed into her mind. You are a child you are useless you are stupid—

She rocked into him; listening to his laughter in his chest, shaking even as she pressed closer and closer. So warm he was! How good he smelled. Like fresh pages. Like pencil shavings. Like reading in springtime under a weeping willow, sunlight on her

face, grass between her toes. Had she always known how good he smelled? Maybe she had once—maybe she had forgotten—but now that he was alive she could learn it over and over again, now she could delight in the constant discovery of everything about him. She felt a lightness spread from her chest through her limbs. She could not breathe. She felt any moment now she might split into a million glimmering stars, that this lightness would overwhelm her. She did not know what to do with this feeling. She had never felt joy like this in her entire life.

Language failed them here; it did not come close to capturing the depth of feeling, of guilt and relief and shame and love. The abyss was still there; they had not bridged it; they had only waved at each other from across the gulf. Maybe parallel lines could meet at infinity. Maybe. There was so much else to say and miraculously, now an entire lifetime to figure out how to say it. But she felt that apologies, offered and accepted, were not a bad place to start.

King Yama hates corruption, they told her. He is a benevolent bureaucrat. He is harsh to cheaters, but he rewards hard work. He is nothing to fear.

Something about the effects of all the ambient magick interfering with modernity, dimming the sounds and lights of the city around.

It seemed too good a deal to be true, one little pomegranate tree for all the myriad blossoms in the world. How could she deserve life? Who ever deserved life?