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Upon the naked hill, one can still smell the corpse of the <span class="mu-i">Malostromo</span>.
It hasn’t stopped burning yet.
She gives it a little tap with her dainty naked foot and a cloud of cinder expectorates from the cracked surface.
“A tad too violent. Must be her signature.”
Helias, standing slick and darker than the night sky behind her, knows better than to ask if she’s referring to Ansàrra.
“Are you sure you do not know her? Should I worry you sneak out by daytime for a glass of wine with the Amaranthines?”
“I know the searing flame of desire, love,” the Stilladìa replies with a sickle-like grin, he crimson eyes alight from within. “How it flashes. Astoria di Ottava Ora is no different. Drawing the last remaining embers of righteous vengeance out of weary Ansàrra.” The Stilladìa then walks on the grass, hands behind her back, as if following a scent only she can recognise, a hound chasing after phantoms. As silent as the shades of the departed the two climb the hill, where they find man-shaped holes carved in the old stone, like rotten gums left to fester.
Helias crouches in front of one, his gooey fingers dancing around the edge of the hole, without touching it.
“They consumed them with such haste.”
“I suppose that haste was forced upon them.”
Stepping between the craters left by the remains of the consumed acolytes, they reach the top, which is covered in broken black stones, which shines gently under the faint glow of shimmering white figures, walking back and forth, pulling and pushing and moving and checking like a gathering of bricklayers.
The Stilladìa watches her contracted souls give back a tiny bit of their debt, balancing it out with mere menial work. She is not asking them to do anything but check under every stone and yet her not-skin bristles with impatience.
She has learned the art of waiting over six hundred years—
But she keeps forgetting it.
“If there is anything left they will find it,” Helias wraps his arms around her shoulders, crouching to set a gentle kiss upon her white head. “Was it worth interrupting our holiday over this?”
“You know me,” she groans, leaning back into his embrace. “I tried to enjoy it nevertheless, but as soon as I sensed something was off—” she bites her platinum lip. “I may need to be the one reaching out to Carnaval, for once.”
“She is not going to like it.”
The Stilladìa keeps looking at her souls — pulling, pushing, checking, scraping — and if she still had a heart, she might feel it pick up pace, anxious as she is that they may find something left.
Or that they might not find it.
“All for the better,” she mutters, her crimson eyes scanning their surroundings.
[cont.]
