The Five-Saint Strike Delivered from On High By Ishtar, Bound in Silk: Rebirth

“One mouthful per worker,” buzzed the queen’s flickering hologram, looming over the line of marching ants. Rugel advanced past the nearest seer — balanced on her forelimbs and cradling the hologram between her terminal pair like a dying blue-white sun — toward the hill of half-melted pink spun sugar draped over the mossy stone on the far northern border of the colony. The queen’s voice echoed through the soaring grass and in among the dead and crumbling chimneys of abandoned anthills. “A glucose-enriched ant is a strong ant. A strong ant is a strong colony.”

Rugel felt a nauseating surge of pleasure as the seer sprayed a cloud of signal chemicals onto the queue, bathing them in the queen’s approval. Ahead the line wound around blades of grass and up a gentle slope, snaking back and forth to the moss-covered stone and the sodden pink mass rearing up from it, the lowest reaches of its bulk alive with workers shrunken by distance to black specks. Rugel wondered what it tasted like, those glittering gossamer strands, that wondrous color like nothing she had seen in her life. Not far along the queue parted for a tick which lumbered fat, red, and translucent with stolen blood across their path, its small black head armored and insensate. Rugel watched it.

“You wanna forget about that,” said the worker ahead of her, who was missing a mid-limb and walked with a strange, lurching limp. “Check this out, bitch.”

She held out a partitioned laptop running Linux, some kind of video player active within a field of open windows filled with text. Rugel’s mandibles fell open at the sight of humans deep in conversation, light and shadow slanting across their bizarre, fleshy faces. Pirating human art was punishable by ritual disembowelment, but a quick look around assured no one was really paying attention. Plenty of workers were on their personal devices. She wouldn’t stand out just by watching something on a friend’s device. She stepped forward, beside the other worker, and took the laptop almost reverently in her forelimbs, noting by its heft that it was probably a 2015 or 2016 model. Harp music swelled in the video as one human, a scar at the corner of his mouth, eyes burning with a combination of hot rage and seething scorn, beat the other ruthlessly, shoving a badge in his face and babbling in incomprehensible humanspeech.

“This is the most meaningful thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” said Rugel.

The other antgirl passed her a vape. 

“Oh my God that is so disgusting,” said Babe Ruth the human baseball player who had come to the edge of the fairground to take a piss, stomping on the seething mass of ants and cotton candy with his cleated foot. “I hate ants!”

Rugel blew out a pale cloud of vape smoke and watched the foot descend, plunging down into its own shadow, the shadow of a titan who in the space of hardly more than a moment had come striding into the pale sunlight. Screams rose up in a ragged chorus from the thousands strung out in among the grass. They began to run, to stampede, to push one other aside. The tick was picking up speed, breaking into a lumbering gallop. A few worker girls scrambled after it, their obedience centers confused. The seers strung out along the line let out a unified scream, their holographic projections discorporating as their eyes burned out in jets of white sparks and caustic flame and the suffocating psychic grip of the queen seized hold of the entire line. Rugel’s body turned. She began to run stiff-limbed in harmony with those around her.

You are the beautiful extension of my body, said the queen. You are a single perfect arm which functions as I will it to function. You please me. Your existence pleases me. 

Behind her, the foot slammed into the hillside. She looked back, her own curiosity and that of the queen joining the endless writhing line of workers glancing in horror over their own shoulders, crying out in awe and terror at the spectacle of the great toothed sole of the foot crashing down into the cotton candy and the workers dining on it. Pink gossamer and loose soil roared up in waves into the morning light and then collapsed like curtains falling. Bodies pinwheeled through the deluge of plummeting earth. Clods struck the ground all around Rugel. A flying pebble crushed the five-legged worker who had given her the laptop and with a convulsive, half-possessed heave Rugel flung the laptop aside to shatter, screen sparking, fearing that her queen had already seen its contents through her eyes.

Do not think of transgression. Do not worry yourself. Run for my pleasure. Give me your strength. You will die in the manner I wish you to die and this will please us both. It will fulfill you.

Rugel looked back again. Not a leg in flapping slacks. Not a shoe. Not an ankle or the sock that covered it or the colossal shadow which had driven it down upon them. A goddess, vast and terrible and ancient, red-clay face rutted with the wrinkles of unfathomable age, crown marked with the lunar phases and adorned with dying stars. The goddess threw back her head and roared and the sound of her voice was the sound of the sun and the gape of her mouth was a cavern from which no light could escape.  

Screams from ahead. Rugel whipped her attention back toward the runners as a shockwave of wind from the foot’s passage lent her speed. The queen’s power was flagging. The line was losing cohesion. There were workers all around, mouths stained candy-pink, staggering in circles and shaking one another, vacant expressions on their pretty, angular faces. Clouds of signal chemicals squirted and swirled. Others, the ones screaming, seemed to surge and heave in place. Rugel slowed to a jog, panting hard, and then she saw it. A river of slow, clear, glutinous adhesive crept through the dirt, sweeping workers along in its path with terrible slow-motion inevitability. Rubber cement spilling over the unseeing eyes of a discarded doll lying crushed between the loose components of a windshield wiper under a cracked recycling bin. There was a book there too, moldering and covered in babblespeak. Rugel thought, screams ringing in her ears, that it would make good fungal stock for farming. 

The clink of metal ringing against metal reached her. The ground shook. Rugel was tired. They had run so far from the hill and now the landscape was barren and gray and strewn with humanity’s titanic refuse. A vacant lot. The workers drowning in the cement flood were still screaming. The sound of heavy footfalls, and then a piercing light and Rugel was convulsed by sudden apparitions of vast loose-skinned things which crept on sagging feet among the fleeing workers, eyeholes drooping around rolling white orbs, hair stiff and shedding visibly, mouths stretched into obscene smiles. She screamed, and then the light was gone. She was alone.

A duckling barded in great swags of chainmail waddled out from among the hills and drifts of rubbish. Atop its back there stood a gilded palanquin, and in it were five saintly figures dressed in the regalia of war. One carried a hawk on her gloved wrist and one wore a scorched and flour-stained apron and the others had long, billowing waves of hair, two in black and one in red, and were goth. Rugel fell to her knees as the figures descended a set of gilt-trimmed steps carpeted in sacred velvet. They came to stand before her. The hawk screamed.

The apron-wearer knelt before Rugel and proffered a mirror, though when she looked she saw nothing but empty sky within it. “This is your enemy,” said the saint. “Find and kill them with the cruelest stroke.”

The smallest of them handed her a peppermint. “For bravery,” they said.

The other three had neither gifts nor words.

A sharp, echoing slap across the face woke Rugel from her vision. A hulking soldier girl stood over her, one palm back for another strike. “No,” said Rugel. “I’m awake. I’m sorry. I...I had a vision—”

All around them the column was reforming, pointedly not looking at the tar-slow river of rubber cement. An old ant watched them from where he sat smoking on the carcass of a soldier not far off. “Visions,” he said wearily. “Take her in, lieutenant. I have questions for her.”

“So I am betrayed,” said the queen. Six times as tall as her advisors and her loyal guards she sat slouched in her earthen throne watched over from the circular tiers of seats overlooking the throne room by her silent, winged children preparing for their mating flight. One of the queen’s glistening black legs was extended and the other drawn up, knee against her belly, while the colony’s newest males sucked on her ears and bit her neck and three of them scrabbled and thrust between her armored thighs, clawing each other to pieces in a himbo antboy fever of procreative murder-lust. 

An antgirl, a lithe soldier, hung trussed with artful knots of spider silk from the curved wooden arms of a suspension frame before the queen. Around the room psychic projectors smeared red-gold images of stolen human art across the soil. A man reeled like a drunkard along a fence in a deserted field, a chainsaw roaring in his hands, the blade swinging, looping, whirling in deranged trajectories. The light spilled across the bound and shivering soldier, revealing the ethanol-drugged stupor in her eyes and the blood that glistened at the corners of her mouth. Someone had torn off one of her midlimbs and infected pus dripped slowly from the twitching stump.

“Perhaps, your majesty,” said First Seer Uneqisti, kneeling in her god-empress’s shadow. It was Primidi, the first of the Republican week, and she had been woken by her aides to ruin and disaster. She was old, older than her queen, and struggled to think now in the pale hours of dawn with clouds of the mating chemical swirling around her like laughing gas. “One of the workers claims to have experienced a vision during the escape from the Divine Strike. When queried she admitted to frequent dreams of disaster, to seeing the colony engulfed in flames and then reduced to ivy-covered earth over the course of years. She said she hadn’t realized that these were visions, that she possessed a seer’s power.”

Uneqisti thought back on her long ant-years as the colony’s minister of intelligence. The purges. The inquests. She had been relieved when her sisters elected her First Seer. Relieved she wouldn’t have to thrust her arms into the muck anymore. Now here it was, bubbling up again around her elbows. The forbidden movie glitched and hissed over the walls. The bound and dying soldier moaned. The males screeched at one another, one clambering up onto his mother-lover’s thigh to stand on his toes and lick her erect nipple. The queen shuddered with pleasure, clawed toes curling.

“I felt her nascent gift when I wore the exoskeletons of the glucose expedition,” said the queen, rising to her feet. Antboys fell from her to roll over her throne and at its foot or clung, greedily sucking at her flesh, and scrambled up her mighty and vertiginous height. “She has more power than you, Uneqisti. She may have more power even than I.” She reached down and took hold of the soldier, stroking the bound antgirl’s belly, teasing and tickling. With a sudden jerk she ripped the prisoner in half. A cheer rose up from the seats above.

The movie’s dozen reflected images fell still, static hissing in long scrapes across the frozen images. A lamb. A halo. Staring eyes with pupils in the shape of hourglasses. The queen laughed as her children in the stands rose up skyward with a wild, chaotic buzzing like the song of bagpipes and dove down atop the weeping and still-living soldier. They tore at her with slick black claws. One dug its fingers hard into her face and plucked an eyeball loose, gorging itself on soft jelly and slurping the optic nerve while others fought over the skeins of the screaming warrior’s entrails and another worried at a kidney still trailing a mess of cockles and pale veins, remnants of her neural network sparking with random dendritic fire.

“Send her to the pit!” screamed the queen, smearing the soldier’s blood on her face as her children feasted and Uneqisti staggered back, avoiding the diving bodies and diaphanous wings, running for the exit. “Let her face Balethshe-Karkinos!”

“Oliver,” said Babe Ruth to his pet quokka, Oliver Reed, who was hunched over eating a carrot on his lap. The two of them sat under the stars in a folding chair on the roof of Babe’s Winnebago. “All those lives in that anthill, snuffed out in an instant. From their perspective it must have been the wrath of God. Am I culpable for a slaughter on the scale of my imagined version of their collective trauma?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Oliver Reed through a mouthful of carrot. “In a matter of minutes a rogue planet two thirds the size of our own will make contact with Earth’s atmosphere. The pressure will boil whole oceans instantaneously, crack the Earth’s crust, and raise a pillar of debris and dust so quickly, so violently, and on such a massive scale that it will escape the gravitational pull of both planets and drift away into space.”

“There’s so little time left,” said Babe Ruth. “My quandary is either of no importance at all or else infinitely more pressing than I realized.”

“There’s more,” said Oliver Reed. “The rogue planet is no simple rock hurtling through the void. A consciousness, ancient and malign, drives its travel and seeks to resume its ancient course of absorbing the flesh and blood of entire global populations in order to achieve divinity and immortality, becoming a god through the simple accretion and repurposing of biomass. Before our world is annihilated we will know a single moment of total union and oneness across all races, species, mindsets, ages, and genders. All social constructs will collapse and then we will be subsumed into the unimaginably vast mind and body of our destroyer, an angel in the shape of a broken world.”

Babe Ruth thought of his wife, and of her severed braid of long, lustrous blond hair which in a fit of passion she had cut off in the kitchen of the house where they had raised their children and thrown to the floor. He thought of her rage and of their passion together that night as acid rain drummed against the tin roof of their house on Lake Michigan, before he’d woken to find her gone. His reverie was interrupted as someone threw open the hatch that led to the Winnebago’s interior and squeezed out onto its roof. It was a pikachu, a very round one with a zig-zag lightning bolt tail and beady little eyes. Babe Ruth stared at it, easing his hand from the butt of the glock he habitually wore now that it was clear there was no threat.

“You’re a piece of shit, Oliver Reed,” said the pikachu, its adorable features twisted into a disgusted sneer. “You sit here fucking philosophizing like knowing the arbitrary nature of all thought and the constructed nature of reality we make and remake through consensus in a continuous process makes that process’s results less wondrous and renders its participants somehow impotent and pointless. You are a cheap, cynical thinker who confuses the retention of information with understanding and even if this weren’t the eve of our destruction you would never amount to anything.”

So saying, he turned and scurried back through the Winnebago’s hatch. Babe Ruth glanced at the sky where the advancing face of the rogue planet, smeared with whorls of cloud and boiling storm systems half-veiling dark and sunless seas, was now alarmingly large. The air rumbled. There was a sense of terrible tension.

“That seemed very harsh to me,” said Babe Ruth.

Oliver Reed sniffed. “Thank-” 

The quokka discorporated into a tangle of flesh, skin peeling back from flopping, aimless worms of muscle as bones liquefied and teeth fell upward from a sagging jaw to disappear into the boiling sky. Babe Ruth felt it happening to him, too, but in an abstract kind of way. He looked down and saw his thighs running together in a pasty mass of flesh already beginning to twine around Oliver Reed’s skyward-stretching biomass, to interweave their nerves and thoughts as together they ascended in the thrall of a whole planet’s dying memories toward the end of everything, the final death of all experience and an end to war and strife and love and God and every thought that had ever been had and every word that had ever been spoken.

And then there was nothing.

“KAWAIIIIII,” squealed Mimi, wrinkling her nose at her webcam in what she hoped was a cute way. “Thanks for watching me stream The Five-Saint Strike Delivered from On High by Ishtar, Bound in Silk: Rebirth! We even got the True Despair ending, which is, like, super difficult! No guides, no cheats, just Neko Princess Mimi-Chan!!! Thank you thank youuuuuu!”

She paused, putting a finger to her lips in thought. “Oh, and check out my new Voltron fanfic on Archive of Our Own! Love youuuuuu!”

She killed the stream with a contended sigh.

“The shit that comes out of your mouth is like an alien fucking language said her girlfriend Carly from where she lay draped across their bed, legs kicking absently, reading a comic book she’d laid on the floor. She was turning the pages with her fingertips. “You need to get offline.”

“You love me!” Mimi shrieked, flinging her long pink wig and cat ears at the other girl.

Carly smiled, not looking up, the wig hanging from her left heel. “Yeah,” she said, “but you still need to log off.”

Rugel woke from the strange dream, her head pounding. She put the heel of her hand to her forehead and massaged herself as though she could work the racing thoughts from her own brain. Pink hair. Cotton candy. Death. A dark place where a man lay frozen, his pencil mustache sheathed in ice, and his dreams spread slow and dumb and sterile from mind to mind, heart to heart. Shooting stars. She looked out with watering eyes through the bars of her cell in the colony’s bowels. Today was the day of the pit.

Her guards looked back at her without remorse. “I’m ready,” she said.

The colony’s grand arena, known to its soldiers and workers as the pit, yawned vast and black entire feet beneath the earth, the light of glow worms and chained fireflies casting erratic radiance over the vast sand-strewn floor and the tiered seats where oceans of ants bore witness to the sight of Rugel, alone and armed only with a blunted longsword, limping out onto the barren expanse. Ripples ran through the vast crowd. Their voices ebbed and flowed in a dark murmur. The queen’s psychic shadow hung heavy over the assembly. The queen herself reclined in the royal box, advisors and winged guards clustered around her, a sardonic smile twisting her perfect mouth.

I came from her loins, thought Rugel, lowering the sword and steadying its wavering blade with a hand set halfway up its length, palm against the steel. It would hamper her reach but quicken her strikes, and reach was of no use to her here. She knelt and bowed her head to the royal box, then waited for the cheering to die down before she dared look up again.

The queen raised a fist, drawing fresh cheers from the millions of onlookers. “Release Balethshe-Karkinos!” screamed the sovereign. “Release the eater of pulp and flesh!”

The great wooden gate on the far side of the arena ground open as chained pill bugs surged into motion, straining in their harnesses to turn the massive gears that drove the coliseum’s machinery. Wood thundered against wood. Dust shook from gate’s stained teeth. Through the gap shot something swift and huge and hideous, a scarred earwig fifteen times the size of the largest worker. She thundered into the arena, mandibles gnashing, acid drool splattering the sand as she shrieked in predatory hunger and beat her clipped and ragged wings with a nerve-shredding buzzing noise.

Rugel rose into a fighting crouch. She was no soldier. She entertained no illusions she would walk out of this place. Her only wish was to strike as the saints had told her to strike, to bring the wavering edges of that single vision which had damned her in the paranoid queen’s eyes into sharp, focused reality. A mirror reflecting nothing. A peppermint dissolving on her tongue. This was the secret.

Balethshe-Karkinos charged. The crowd bayed for Rugel’s blood. She caught the beast’s jaws on her sword and leaned into its momentum, sending it blundering past and into the arena wall with a resounding crash. A gasp from the onlookers. A screech of rage and pain from the beast, which rounded on her, the sinuous length of her armored body whipping over the sand, her thoracic mandibles clanging together with a vicious report as her lunatic eyes spun in their scarred sockets.

Again she charged and again Rugel guided her aside, though this time a mandible caught the worker’s arm and opened it from shoulder to elbow with a ghastly shock of agony. Rugel staggered, her sword’s point striking the sand as her left arm fell useless to her side. She didn’t have the strength to wield it one-handed. The crowd thundered and stamped. The beast circled her, pointed limbs thudding against the arena floor. The queen in her high box looked on in enigmatic silence, cradling a fat white larva one of her attendants had brought up to her.

Balethshe-Karkinos reared up, wings roaring, and dove at Rugel one last time just as the worker managed to bring the sword up to rest on her good shoulder. One swing, if she was lucky. Se could make one swing. The earwig clattered toward her with hideous speed. That flat, drooling head, its toothed maw gaping, mandibles spread wide. An engine of predatory rage and hunger that would annihilate her utterly upon contact.

She felt the monster’s rancid breath wash over her. Mandibles pistoned toward her throat. She had one swing.

She took it.

Balethshe-Karkinos’s severed head lay gushing ichor out onto the sand. The worker stood triumphant over the slain beast, one arm dangling at her side, a spark of hot blue psychic power burning in the center of her forehead. The crowd was silent. In her box the queen stood dumbstruck. The larva squirmed in her arms and wailed. 

Rugel looked up at her mother. Blue fire burned along her wounded arm, closing the hideous gash, incinerating even the most minute molecular traces of the earwig’s acid. She raised her hand to point. The queen cried out, dropping her newborn and clutching at her head. White ruin. A beam of cleansing light. The arena shaking, walls crumbling, winged soldiers rising up to flit between the falling clods of earth and stone, to fuck with silent abandon in the wreckage of their world as the beam shredded the royal box and half the seers in the audience exploded into simultaneous flame, consumed by psychic backdraft, and the crowd rose up and began to scream in a mad ecstasy of freedom.

Rugel clung to the reins of her power, burning in their grasp. She saw a world hurtling through the dark. She saw a man spitting brown juice through his teeth and swinging a length of polished wood. She saw a woman giggling and meowing to another girl, who seemed annoyed. White fire ate its way back through her brain. White fire ripped through the soil high above the colony in a killing lance that pierced the clouds and petered out a million miles away in the cold blackness of space, a wisp of white fog blowing on a solar wind.

And that was all.