The Unmaker

Little Dahlia awakens in the middle of the night with a flail, and the first thing she sees is her mother trying to claw her eye out.

“... Mama? What–”

Her father doesn’t give her a chance to blink. He grabs her by the waist and throws her out of the bedroom, hard. The door slams shut while she cries, having hit her head on the corner of the living room chair. It hurts. She’s bleeding. Her muscles ache because of this afternoon’s gruelling training at the Bug-Slaying School, but inside the bedroom she hears screeching, she hears screaming, she sees the shadows of her father and mother moving from under the slit in the door.

She rams her shoulder into the door, trying to break the lock.

“Mama! Papa! What’s going on?”

She rams her shoulder into the door again, and something pops out of place. She winces, gritting her teeth as she curls into a little ball. Raya had hit her too hard this afternoon. Inside the bedroom the screeches turn feral, like that of a blood-curdling bug, so she bites her tongue and stands to start kicking. To start punching. She hears her father falling to the ground and insect parts falling all over, what sounds like bones cracking and skin ripping apart. Her hand trembles, her fingers lock on themselves. It takes her a whole minute to realise she can’t get through the lock with brute force, so she dismantles it with a chisel and tuning needle before stumbling through.

Her mother isn’t her mother.

It’s the giant black bug in her dreams.

And when it lunges at her face, its needle for a tongue aiming for her eye, her father kicks her in the face first to send her back out the room.

She spends the next five minutes, completely disoriented, head spinning, stomach churning, her lungs tightening so hard she feels as though they might burst at any moment. But she hears it, she feels it—a battle for dominance was taking place inside the bedroom, and she has to be there.

Holding her breath, she races out the front door and circles around the house, struggling to stick her fingers under the window panes. The glass refuses to budge. She thinks about how to break it for a second before remembering what her father told her long ago; if she breaks something violently, it cannot be put back together gently. She likes the window. She doesn’t want to go without it. So, running briefly back into the living room to grab her father’s scalpel, she wedges it into the tiniest gap and starts prying. The scalpel snaps and cuts into her wrist, but she manages just enough force to loosen the lock and climb into the bedroom.

When she enters, her father is standing over the eviscerated carcass of the giant black bug.

His hands are claws.

One of his eyes is a vertical amber slit.

Immediately, before she could even scream, he hits her across the face and shoves her into the closet, locking the handles with a metal chain. It isn’t a complete lock. She can peek through the crack, bang on the wood, and see her father picking the giant black bug up so he could bury it outside in the field—the entire time she screams and cries, her heartbeat a storm in her ears, her throat so dry and airy any more screaming would probably shatter the window she’d tried so hard not to break. It was of no use.

She watches, through the crack in her closet, through the window looking out at the field, as her father buries her mother without dressing her up first.

Her mother disappears into the soil as a giant, disgusting black bug.

“...”

She falls backwards and bumps into a hundred pocket watches, turning their dials all at the same time. They start counting down. They don’t stop counting down. She can hardly hear herself over the rhythmic tick tocks, she can hardly shake the shaking in her hands as she covers her ears.

She doesn’t want to hear.

She doesn’t want to see.

She doesn’t want to remember.

Tonight, ‘Mama’ and ‘Papa’ are no more.

- Scene from Sina Household past

… Dahlia had been thinking about it for quite a while now, but there was a chance that her pocket watch’s one minute wasn’t the same as everyone else’s one minute.

At least, that was what her mom had always told her. When she’d first gotten into making Swarmsteel out of discarded insect parts nobody wanted, her mom had told her to time herself so as not to get bogged down by the small, insignificant details. This way, she’d be making ‘more’ Swarmsteel than ‘better’ Swarmsteel, and her mom had always been a stalwart believer of ‘quantity over quality’—the exact opposite from her dad, in that sense, who believed every Swarmsteel should be made to fit only one person, down to their exact specifications. He’d never forced her to time herself. He’d never approved of her keeping a closet full of pocket watches, because the rhythmic tick tocks hurt his sensitive ears and he just couldn’t stand reading around them.

She’d always wondered how her mom and dad got along with such different outlooks on life, but it wasn’t until now—facing her dad head-on with his feral amber eyes boring holes into hers—that she wondered if maybe they’d simply never considered Swarmsteel as all of their lives.

It was true she couldn’t remember much about her mom apart from the times they’d spent dismantling old Swarmsteel together, and it was also true she struggled to recall the times she’d spent with her dad not talking about his work or putting some new toy together out of scrap… but at the end of the day, before they were toy makers and doctors and weapon designers and dismantlers at the old repair shop downstairs, they were a happily married couple.

Their lives weren’t all Swarmsteel.

They had other things they cared about, other things they were exceptionally skilled at.

They weren’t like her, who had nothing in her name apart from the one skill she could claim to be a little bit proud of.

Therefore, the steel thread in her eyes was brighter than all ten of her dad’s under brilliant moonlight.

… Tick, tock.

Raya struggled to stand using his broken spear as a crutch, so she strode past him and tapped him on the shoulder, giving him a ghost of a smile. To think she’d thought him cruel and cold and distant for five years straight; the reason he’d volunteered to accompany her all the way here was simply because he didn’t like owing people debts, and he felt an obligation to put her dad down for the sake of Alshifa. He was a kind person after all.

Amula and Jerie, too, who were trying their best to recover while stumbling back into the house—she didn’t exactly know why they’d volunteered alongside Raya, but surely it had something to do with her dad as well. Even though he’d stayed a recluse the past two years, a person to be pitied for being unable to get over the passing of his wife, the people he’d helped as a doctor remembered the softness of the calloused hands that were extended to them… and to see those same hands turned into revolting black claws that could do nothing but cleave and destroy now, well; if her mom couldn’t set him right, then it was up to her to give him a good talking to.

His were soft and gentle hands, incapable of clenching into fists, incapable of cruelty.

Were her hands even somewhat similar to his, she wondered?

Tick, tock.

Her dad screeched out with each step, with each ragged breath, swiping his claws in a mad flurry. They’d cleaved through walls, shattered stones, parted flesh from bones and felled giant insects five times his size, but he was a doctor who’d not practised with his scalpel for two long years. His steel threads aimed for her throat, and she saw them coming, barely managing to sidestep them calmly before breaking into a forward dash—she saw the space between his attacks and jumped for it, closing the three metre distance in the blink of an eye.

His extra insect arms swung at her from his waist, as though trying to wrap her in a hug–

“This is how you evade papa’s hug, Dahlia!” her mother says, poking her father’s waist and then immediately jerking her upper body away, throwing her spine so far back little Dahlia almost felt like she heard something snap. But her father’s hug misses, her feet are still firmly planted on the ground, and he grimaces before attempting a follow-up hug.

Miss again.

Third try.

Miss again.

As her mother laughs and jerks herself around the living room, her father gets frustrated and turns to little Dahlia. She gulps. She parts her legs and mimics her mother’s stance. The trick seems to be moving only her upper body, since her father doesn’t like hugging people above their waists, so ‘minimal evasive movements would both be effective as a physical counter and as an emotional blow to his confidence’. Her mother is the best at teasing her father.

So when her father whirls on her, grinning from ear to ear, practically pouncing at her from across the living room to wrap her around in a hug she’d not be able to escape from for the next twenty minutes–

–she threw her upper body to the left, avoided getting bisected in half by the cleaving arms, and pivoted by jamming her scalpel into his thigh.

Tick, tock.

His body trembled, a pained growl escaped his throat, and she cut three times along the gaps of his black chitin with her scalpel before kicking the scalpel deeper into his leg—the heavy armoured plates peeled off his muscle strands and exposed them to the air, throwing him off balance. He leaned heavily on one leg, his claws went from sky to ground to cut her face off. In another single, smooth movement, she followed her steel thread and withdrew a single step. Left his attack range. Then she stabbed his wrist with her chisel and slid forward, carving off more chitin plates growing around his arm.

She ended up behind him, her breaths still held. She’d disabled one of his arms. There was hardly any need for a mirror for her to tell five steel threads were still converging behind her on the back of her neck, but hers was brighter, hers was stronger; she whirled on her heels with a burst of speed, cutting in a zigzag eight times down his torso before he even managed one, and then she darted out of the way as more chitin plates shattered directly off his chest.

He snapped his head and neck at a complete right angle, his needle for a tongue hanging out, the tip sleazing with venom–

“Papa’s really bad at hiding secrets, you know?” her mother says, as the two of them laze around the sofa while watching her father try to hide what he was making from them; his shoulders are too thin and his back too narrow to properly cover his arms, so he scowls back at them and waves at them to go outside. Her mother picks her up, laughing softly. “I can always tell when he doesn’t want us around the house, or when he wants to take us by surprise with something special. If you can read the same tell, Dahlia, he’ll never be able to take you by surprise ever again.”

Little Dahlia looks down at her mother, nodding fervently. “What! What! What’s the tell?”

“Guess first. What’s so suspicious about papa’s body language?”

“Um–”

“–Eria, don’t teach our daughter how to extract information out of me–”

“–papa always looks away when he’s lying?”

Her mother smirks. “Nope.”

“He always stands up and paces around when he’s nervous?”

“Nope.”

“He always sneaks a bottle of alcohol at four in the morning when he can’t sleep?”

“N… what? Huh? Sanyon–”

“–Dahliaaaaaaaa, why’d you tell her–”

“–but it’s not that, either,” her mother says, grumbling quietly at her father’s direction as she did. “You see, whenever he’s keeping things from me or he’s trying to be discreet about something, he tilts his head at this really weird angle, almost as though he’s… trying to figure out how to dissect me. It’s really eerie.

“So whenever you feel creeped out by your papa, and you think he’s up to some funny, no-good business–”

–she lunged forward, stabbing her scalpel through the back of his hand to stop him from pulling out another bombardier beetle bomb.

Tick, tock.

He came at her swinging, abandoning his plan of using any explosives on her, and there was nothing elegant about his swings this time—he wasn’t following his steel threads. He was just an insect taking the form of a frail, dying man who’d not seen a single ray of firefly light in the past two years. She stepped around his claws, using her free hand to redirect his bloody hands, gradually putting more and more distance between the two of them; it was only once he’d completely abandoned all semblance of fighting like a human that her steel thread twirled in spirals around his remaining functional arm, a pretty shape that seemed as though it wanted her to fly in swinging, screaming with all her might.

She wasn’t going to do that, though.

When his claws cleaved upwards, she already knew what the attack was going to look like—she’d already seen him do the exact same thing to Raya and the seniors—so she dashed in with a quick half-step, evading and counter-attacking at once.

Five cuts to each claw joint, severing them by the second knuckle.

Two cuts in a zigzag across his wrist, cutting the contracting tendons.

Eight spiralling cuts along the length of his forearm and biceps, freeing his skin beneath from the suffocating plates of chitin.

Softly.

Gently.

And then her steel thread took her from shoulder to clavicle, clavicle to chest, chest into sternum into muscles into fat, leading her to plunge her chisel deep into his heart.

… Tick.

Tock.

Ding!

The timer was up, her lips parted for a gasp of fresh air—it didn’t last long. Her dad snarled and shot his hands around her neck, claws removed, but his bloody stumps for fingers were still more than sharp enough to tear into her skin. Dozens of serrated chitin edges ripped into her flesh. She tried to pull back, letting out a small cry of pain before she found her lungs burning for air, her throat screaming for water; tears filled her vision as he lifted her into the air, legs kicking uselessly off the ground.

There was only pain. His fingers didn’t let up, shifting their grip and tightening as he tried to snap her neck. She let go of her chisel to try to pry his hands off, but her muscles felt like jelly and even the smallest amount of effort brought about agony-induced rigour in her arms. She had no more strength left in her. Sixty seconds was all she had, and sixty seconds was all she had spent. Her dad knew this. Of course he knew this. Even now, his vertical amber slits were watching her quietly, his needle for a tongue hovering dangerously close to her remaining eye, his sharpened ears twitching as he listened to her croaking out his name…

…

… And then he dropped her, his bloody fingers flying over the chisel lodged in his chest as he stumbled back into the sofa at the end of the living room.

She fell onto her knees, spasming and flailing with her whole body, and for a brief while she thought she might be falling unconscious—but no. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Before she even felt she formulated the single coherent thought in her mind, Eria injected a rush of adrenaline through her veins and made her spine arch, her vision curving like she was observing the world underwater again. Her lungs drew breath. Her limbs plundered residual strength from her deepest reserves. She managed to pull her head and grit her teeth as she crawled forward, making her way to her dad.

He was sitting motionless at the base of the sofa one second, and then in the next, he ripped out the chisel in his chest to impale his left wrist into the wall behind him.

Now he couldn’t possibly lunge at her anymore.

“... Eria?”

He whispered, his words a bit stilted because of his needle tongue, but she could understand him just fine.

So she froze, just half a metre before reaching him, and pressed her quivering lips together as she watched him stare right over her head.

There was nobody in the direction he was looking at.

He was looking straight out the broken front door.

“I… must already be dead, huh?” he mumbled, his whole body shuddering lightly as what sounded like a laugh bubbled out his chest. “The realm between the living and the dead. A world without light, a limbo without sound. I can’t… I can’t see you, Eria.

“Where are you?

“You’re here with me, right?

“...

“... No.

“This is the trial to determine whether I am free to reincarnate or fated to karmic suffering, is it not?”

She had to clamp her hands over her mouth so as not to let out a single sound. Faintly she heard footsteps behind her; Raya and the seniors recovering from their injuries, stumbling back in to see what was going on. She didn’t need to shoot a glance back at them for them to know they should stay back.

Her dad was smiling, still, at the empty space over her head.

“I’d always thought karmic suffering could be my only end for failing to fulfil my promise to you, but here I… am. Still conscious after death. Still waiting for ‘true’ death,” he said, chortling as he did. “The divine exists. They have given me a chance to perform one last kind act in my life, and now that I have stabbed myself into this wall, I will be able to hurt you no more.

“I can reincarnate with you now.

“I can be with you again.

“So go ahead, first, and I’ll… I’ll catch up with you, after this cursed body of mine draws its last breath.”

Her self-control shattered. She couldn’t stop herself from crawling forward once again, her breaths quick and heavy, her fingers fumbling around his insect claws for toes before she managed to climb his leg like a tree, pulling herself up over him.

He was still so, so, so much taller than her.

He wasn’t old at all.

He wasn’t frail at all.

He wasn’t pitiable at all.

He was anything but the man everyone knew him as.

“... I’m sorry, dad,” she whispered, as she leaned in close, tears rolling from her eye, her voice a stammering, blubbering mess. “I’m sorry. I’m… I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything. I knew what’d happened, but I didn’t… I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t research like you. I’m not smart like you. I ran and ran and ran–”

“I’m sorry too, Eria,” he mumbled, patting her head slowly with his free hand, head lolling round and round. “I’m… no genius of a doctor after all. I couldn’t fulfil my promise. I couldn’t look after Dahlia. It was reckless injecting myself with your blood, and I knew it, but I thought I could… I thought I, of all people, could’ve found a cure–”

“N-No, dad.” She sniffled, wiped her nose, and grabbed his face to glare into his amber eyes; not that he could see anything out of them, anyways. “You are a genius. The youngest doctor in Alshifa’s history. Swarmsteel Maker hobbyist. You made half of the school’s equipment, gave off half of your pay every month to the orphanage you grew up in, and you worked so hard nobody demanded you to start working again even after two years of silence—so don’t say you’re not a genius. Refusal. You… you’re my dad. You looked after me just fine–”

“Dahlia will be alright, though,” he said, quite plainly, as she swallowed a gulp and let out a shuddering exhale. “She’s… the spitting image of you when you were younger. Quick with her hands. Poor at socialising. I worry she won’t be able to find a boy like you found me, but… hah. She’ll be just alright.

“She’s the ‘Make-Whatever’, after all.

“She’ll make her own path, and when she does, she’ll be brighter and more dazzling than both of us combined.

“I know it.

“I feel it.

“So… I don’t think we need to worry about her all too much.”

He offered her a weak smile, and her jaw remained clenched with pain as she held him still, refusing to let his head fall—but by now even the unnatural boost of adrenaline had worn off, and she couldn’t hold her arms up anymore.

They fell, slowly into his lap.

Her head followed the same path, pressing into the ground.

And when he breathed his last, his broken face melting into an adoring smile, his bloody fingers reaching into his pocket to hand her a piece of bloodberry candy–

“Dahlia,” her mother whispers.

“Dahlia,” her father repeats.

Little Dahlia looks up between the two of them, fingers fidgeting nervously. She knows it isn’t a name her parents had considered she’d pick, but she really, really, really wants it—it is the name of the pretty flower her father could grow all year-long, without fear the cold would claim it, without worry loneliness could make it wilt. Even if there is only one little flower standing outside on the field, it would continue to live until it could make new friends, see warmer days; what better name could there possibly be for a friendless loser like her?

The only thing she’d been worrying about was whether or not her parents would accept the name.

But, in hindsight, she should’ve known her mother would support her no matter what decision she made, and she should’ve known her father was always just a bit too easy to persuade if she cried and pretended to be a little sad.

So tonight, without worrying about what anyone would think of her–

–Dahlia cried.

Moonlight fell cold and gentle on the back of her neck.

And she felt she might never be able to stop crying.

Arc Three, “Father”, End