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“I en’t here for your jokes,” Tseges said, trying to massage his hand without being obvious about it. He couldn’t make up his mind whether to be watery with terror at the audacity of this job, dizzy with disbelief that he was helping the Mask-damned Rook, or pissed that the Rook hardly seemed to be taking any of this seriously. “Let’s get on with it.”
It was as big as the last time he’d encountered it, the length of a train and the width of a locomotive. But it was no longer covered in smooth scales that held all the colours of the rainbow, like before. Now it was a massive skeleton, except it had a new patchwork skin of sorts. That skin was writhing and twisting and screaming as Azrael stared. It took him a few seconds to realize the dead god’s new hide was made of human bodies, or at least what had once been human bodies.
Maribel had not spoken of that day in the thirty-eight years since it had happened. But she thought the pig-boy deserved to know what would happen. “When they pronounce him guilty,” she said, “Father Domingo will come and get you. He will want you to pray at the shrine of Saint Rafael for the power of transmogrification. He will tell you the words to use. Then he will take you to the village square. Everyone will be gathered and the man tied up there. You’ll make the man swallow a cup of something and command his devil to take the form of a javelina.”
I'm sure there was a vision. There had to be, as that's the whole symbiotic exchange. It’s how Mother worked her fortunes. While the syopterae feed on our smoke-saturated brains, we go to Tera. We experience visions there. Past or potential futures. I don't remember one that first time. I do remember Mother wiping the streaming tears from my eye, her own dead eye darting fish-like and upside-down as she bent over my face.
Merciful Even to Scorpions by Kay Chronister. Between Gasp and Ground, I See by Julie Reeser. BCS 316: Merciful Even to Scorpions by Kay Chronister.