My Taboo Harem!

Chapter 769: Goddess of Forever & Almost

A wing that had been melting reformed and held its shape for two full heartbeats. A jaw that had been splitting too wide closed properly, neatly, like a healthy thing.

Two heartbeats.

Then the stabilisation collapsed.

The pulse had not been enough. The pulse was never enough. The Unfinished cannot be finished, and her substance was the only thing that came close, and the closeness was both the gift and the cruelty — the small dilated taste of being whole before the cycle pulled them back into becoming.

They crawled back hungrier.

They always did.

She raised her hand again.

She would feed them again.

She always would.

But she was still too weak even stay in her body much less satiate they’re hunger.

Sienna walked off, but her bare feet did not touch the ground.

The rotting air carried her — she moved across the bone-shore at the slow patient pace of a being for whom motion was decorative.

The Unfinished parted before her. The ones that did not part fast enough were unmade by her passage and only to come to life again.

She did not break stride until she arrived at the throne.

The throne was visible from horizons that did not exist.

It rose from the center of the realm like a wound’sspine — a cathedral-tall structure of fused still-living bone, the upper tiers narrowing into a high pale spire that disappeared into the rotting air half a cosmic mile above the lakes.

Approaching it was a small mortal experience even Sienna’s true form briefly registered in her chest.

It was too large. But the harrowing throne was alsotoo alive.

The throne had been built by the realm for the realm’s sovereign, and the sovereign was the small wet engine of patient fusion that kept its million constituent parts locked together in eternal compromise.

The base of the throne was a mountain of writhing pelvises and ribcages, each rib still flexing as if it had forgotten how to stop breathing, each pelvis grinding against its neighbours with obscene wet clicks in the slow patient effort of trying to pull free and reform into something whole.

Black nether threads laced through every joint like living sutures. Green death energy filled the gaps between bones with wet rotting muscle that immediately began to dissolve and was immediately replaced.

The mountain moved and breathed.

The mountain’s very groans from they weight it was carrying, was like as if it moaned, a low collective grinding note that rose from the base of the throne in continuous unbroken sustain.

Above the base, the throne climbed.

Vertebrae the size of houses formed the long sloping flanks of the structure. Femurs the length of city streets braced the inner architecture.

Skulls the size of carriages were embedded into the surface at every angle — some facing outward with empty sockets leaking violet worms, some turned inward, some pressed cheek-to-cheek with their fused brethren in the obscene intimate arrangement of bones that had been forced to share an eternity they had not asked for.

Dragon-ribs arched overhead like the buttresses of a cathedral too tall to register, cracking and regrowing with wet grinding sounds, the cracks audible from the bone-shore far below and travelling up through the structure in slow seismic pulses.

Whenever a skeleton in the lower tiers managed to wrench a limb free — a femur prying itself out of the fusion, a rib cracking loose along its base, a vertebra trying to slip away from its neighbours — Sienna’s energy answered.

Black nether threads lashed out, punched through the freed bone with a wet squelch, and dragged it back. The re-fusion was always at a wrong angle.

Whatever brief comfort the bone had managed to assemble in its small private rebellion was unmade on the way back to its place. The bones learned, slowly, over centuries, that resistance produced not freedom but a more uncomfortable position.

Some learned. Some did not.

The throne kept fusing.

Sienna ascended.

The bone-tiers shifted to form steps beneath her bare feet — the throne itself recognizing its sovereign and offering up its constituents to be walked on.

Each step was a fresh skull, freshly drawn from the throne’s surface, freshly positioned beneath her foot, freshly receiving the small honor of being briefly used by her.

The skulls she walked on did not survive the use.

Her weight was not the weight of her body but instead weight of what she was, and the bones that received it cracked, splintered, and fell back into the throne’s mass when she lifted her foot.

She climbed past the lower tiers, past the middle tiers before she arrived at the seat.

The seat was a throne within the throne — a small concavity in the upper structure formed of perhaps a thousand fused ribcages bent into the shape that fit her form, the ribs flexing to receive her, the spaces between them lined with the pale silk-soft membrane of organs the realm had grown specifically for her comfort.

She turned and sat.

The seat moaned — a long collective ecstatic groan from the thousand fused constituents she had just settled her weight onto.

Black blood and greenish ichor seeped up from between the ribs and pooled around her bare feet, the fluids warm against her skin, the warmth the realm’s small gift to its sovereign.

She rested one delicate hand on the nearest armrest.

The armrest was a single colossal vertebra — the size of a wagon-wheel, black and porous with age, fused into the throne’s structure half a cosmic age ago. It had once belonged to something cosmic and unwilling.

It had been unwilling for half that cosmic age, twitching beneath Sienna’s hand in small private rebellions every time she rested her fingers on it, every time her energy patiently re-fused its small attempts to wrench free.

It twitched now and went still.

Even the unwilling things, by now, knew better.

She watched her realm.

From the seat, the bone-shore stretched outward and downward in unbroken cataracts of writhing Unfinished. The lakes glittered black-and-violet in the absence-of-light. The distant ridges climbed and climbed and disappeared into the mist of pure rot that occupied the further distance.

Above her, the body-sky’s organs pulsed in slow patient succession, and from the pulses the realm received its weather of black pus and slow green nether.

A new dead thing broke the surface of the largest lake at the realm’s heart.

Vast. Bleached. The remains of something cetacean, but only barely.

Sienna watched it heave the first half of its rotting body out of the oblivion. She watched her energy strike it — nether threads punching through its ribs with wet pops, death energy knitting the gaps with green sinew that immediately began to rot and reform.

The thing thrashed wildly, half-formed flippers slapping uselessly against the surface of the lake, its mouth opening into a maw lined with concentric rings of teeth that kept growing new rows even as the old ones dissolved and slid down its throat.

It screamed.

It’s scream alone shook the entire realm — every Unfinished pausing in its crawling, every bone in the throne shuddering in resonance, the body-sky’s organs briefly flexing at the sound — and still the thing kept hauling itself toward the bone-shore.

Sienna smiled.

The smile was small. Soft. Maternal.

It was more terrifying than the scream.

"Welcome home," she whispered, her voice layered with a thousand unfinished throats speaking at once.

She felt at... home.

The throne answered first — a low collective groan of fused bones grinding and cracking in ecstasy, the cathedral-tall structure briefly flexing around its sovereign in the ecstatic shudder of a creature being acknowledged by the goddess it had been built to serve.

The realm followed.

A wet collective moan of agony and worship rose from the bone-shore and the lakes and the distant ridges and the body-sky and the cosmic horizon beyond.

Every Unfinished within hearing — and hearing, here, was the unmapped distance the realm itself negotiated — paused in its incomplete becoming and moaned, the collective sound the slow patient music the realm danced to, the worship and the agony entirely indistinguishable from one another because, here, they were the same thing.

Sienna closed her eyes.

She let it wash over her.

She let it settle in her chest the way a long-absent warmth settled in the chest of a traveller returning to a fire they had not stood beside in too long.

Here, in her Soul Realm, nothing ever finished.

Nothing ever died completely.

Everything simply... continued.

Crawling.

Shifting.

Melting.

Screaming.

Hungering.

Forever.

And the Nether Goddess sat upon her throne of eternal unfinished torment, watching over her children with the quiet pride of a mother.

She had given them exactly what they deserved.

She had given them forever.

She had given them almost.

She had given them the slow patient music of becoming, locked into a loop that would never resolve, and they worshipped her for it because they were her children... their mother.

She was home.

She did not consider this a horror.

She considered this love.

And in the upper world, in Infinity Chaos Hotel, her seventeen-year-old body lay broken-and-leaking on the cream wool of her bedroom floor, and the body would not move again until she chose to return to it.

She would return but there was something she had to do for herself first and him.