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In order to plan for the fall of God—the death of the maker of their world, the end of everything—Mercymorn the First, Saint of Joy, and Augustine the First, Saint of Patience, had to travel to the far reaches of a distant galaxy and have a picnic.
It simply could not be done any other way. They could not imagine having this conversation in one of their rooms on the Mithraeum, or in the cabins aboard whatever vessel John was dragging them along on at the moment, or anywhere else that their Holy Emperor or his beloved subjects had graced. Is a sin still a sin when no one is around to witness it? Mercy, who had kept the secret of the most indelible sin for thousands of years yet, would say yes, absolutely, inarguably, but Augustine was—according to her—frailer and stupider and thus much more confined to superstition, and he disagreed. And, he had reasoned, if they were to travel so many light-years, they might as well make a day of it.
They picked a planet that was mostly uninhabited; it had never contained any human life, and the fauna was only of a woodland variety, nothing that would be any trouble. When their shuttle landed, the sky above was a blue so clear Mercy half-expected to see her face reflected in it when she looked up. Augustine whistled as they disembarked. He had no baggage around storms and clear skies— his cavalier had had normal eyes, not hurricanes—so he paid it no mind.
The planet’s surface was split between open, grassy hills and thick, tangled forest. Augustine wished to enjoy the sunshine and the fresh air, and did not wish to enjoy any mosquitos or similar creatures, so he suggested they camp out on the hills. However, Mercymorn was—according to him—frailer and stupider and thus much more confined to superstition, and she insisted they stay inside the woods, where it would be harder for words to carry.
“Carry to whom, exactly?” Augustine said. “We’re alone here.”
“We’re alone as far as you know, dumbass,” Mercymorn huffed. “Is this something you want to risk being overheard?”
“There is no risk. We scanned for life forms before we set down and did not find any people.”
“That was five minutes ago! The margin for error is large!” She was jumpy, irritable—although, with Mercymorn, irritability could be assumed to be a natural feature. “When will you learn that your actions have consequences?”
“John is not omniscient, you know.” He was also jumpy, and this manifested as overcompensating in his attempt to live up to his namesake.
“Take your omniscience and shove it up your asshole!!”
They flipped a coin—an old Third house one, a silver piece that hadn’t been used in currency for fifty years—and Augustine won. He always called heads, and she always called tails. Mercymorn was unaware that these coins were specifically weighted unevenly. Augustine would be on his deathbed before he told her. He was very attached to his lucky coin.
Up the hills they went. They took turns hauling a picnic basket, a big one with a handle so large it required both hands to carry. Mercy insisted that when not carrying the basket, it was only fair to hold the carrier’s rapier in exchange. Augustine’s turns with the basket were slightly longer, as he had to keep re-adjusting the wide-brimmed hat he wore to keep the sun off his face. Mercymorn, meanwhile, had elected to burn.
It was more of a trek than it needed to be, seeing as they were both dressed to a degree of extravagance unsuited for a day hike. Besides his sunhat, Augustine wore a light grey suit, complete with a tie and silver cufflinks. His black dress shoes shone in the sunlight and did not provide the surest footing in the grass. Mercymorn had adorned herself in a pale pink slip of a dress, the kind that was designed to slide off her shoulders and reveal the slits up the sides of the skirt at the slightest breeze. Her shoes, silver heels, were even more impractical. Her rose hair hung uncharacteristically loose past her shoulders.
There was a slight delay about halfway up the fourth hill, a good fifteen minutes into the walk. A loud HOOOOONK rang out from behind them and Mercy jumped half a meter in the air, sending the basket tumbling down the grass. They both whirled around with a terror neither acknowledged. Augustine drew his rapier, awkwardly sidestepping the basket as it rolled past his ankles, and tossed Mercymorn hers.
The source of their fear was, anticlimactically, a flock of geese. This probably could have been inferred by the honking, but both were feeling particularly skittish. It was a sizable herd of geese, in fairness: about thirty or so creatures wandered about, poking at the ground and at each other.
“There must be a lake in the woods,” observed Mercymorn. It was hard to tell whether she was scarlet from the sun or from the embarrassment. “Perhaps we could take our lunch there?”
“Nice try. Shit!” The basket had rolled to a stop at the base of the hill, and the geese had immediately swarmed in. They smacked each other out of the way in their desperation to peck through the basket’s lid and consume the food inside. Feathers flew and the honking was excessive.
Augustine waded into the fray with a dignity unbefitting of his task. Mercymorn did not trouble herself with aiding. She was getting sick of that basket anyhow, and she had been sick of Augustine for centuries. Instead, she stood and rubbed her tired arms—that basket felt like it weighed a million pounds—and watched the show unfold.
Augustine and the geese parted with decidedly ill will. They watched him retreat with violence gleaming in their beady eyes, their feathers ruffled. Augustine, for his part, was left with several red marks on his arms and hands and his hat thoroughly stamped on. There was a tear in the right sleeve of his jacket. He shoved the flattened piece of fabric into Mercy’s hands. “Thank you for the help,” he sneered.
She batted her eyelashes at him. “Of course.”
They finally settled on top of the ninth grassy hill, a distance Augustine deemed necessary to keep from the geese flock. The basket was set down and opened. A blanket was spread out. Two plates, two bowls, two glasses, and two sets of silverware wrapped in lace handkerchiefs were removed and laid out. A bottle of wine had its cork removed and its contents poured into the glasses. A loaf of bread was sliced and buttered. An apple was cored and slathered in honey. A temperature-controlled pot of soup, still steaming, was ladled out.
“Your cooking is abysmal as always,” Mercymorn informed him. “Your soup is lacking in both flavor and texture.”
“The crust of your bread is burnt,” Augustine shot back, “and the wine you selected is cheap and vulgar.”
“A cheap and vulgar wine for a cheap and vulgar man.”
“Oh, please, my dear. Do not pretend you are above vulgarities. I do believe you were just telling me to...oh, what was it? ‘Take your omniscience and shove it up your asshole’?”
“You take everything so literally. The vulgarity is in your personality, not in your mouth.”
Augustine swirled the wine around in his glass, but did not raise it to his lips. “I’d rather be vulgar in personality alone than vulgar in personality and mouth and looks. I’d rather be a mite insufferable than be so thoroughly rotted inside and out that my companions must drink this excessively poor wine in order to sit through just one conversation.”
Mercymorn raised her own glass to her lips and then set it back down again without taking a sip. “I will not deign to engage with someone so childish as to stoop to insulting my appearance.”
“Very well then,” said Augustine. “We’ll just eat the rest of our meal in silence.”
“Fine, then.”
“It’ll be a relief to not have to pretend to enjoy your company any longer.”
“I’m sure it will be.”
“I do not enjoy talking to you.”
“Likewise.”
“And I never have.”
“The feeling is mutual.”
The silence stretched on for some time in between two minutes and an eternity, and then Augustine said: “How long has it been since you and I were together?” He dipped the last of the bread in the drizzles of honey that remained on his plate and finished it off in one bite.
Mercy drained the rest of her bowl of soup before answering. “It depends on whether you mean alone or in the presence of others.”
“Both, I suppose.”
“In the presence of others… I think it was thirty or so years ago, back when Cytherea still insisted on hosting dinners. We ate that awful burnt dish she made us remember? I still shudder at the thought. Alone… it was after Cassiopeia’s funeral.” The unspoken lingered in the air. Augustine felt the ghost of Mercy’s hand on his arm; Mercy tasted the remnants of The commander has made contact. Are we doing this for real?
Mercymorn cut through the silence before it became too unmanageable. “So,” she said, suddenly all business, “let’s get into it.” She reached into the picnic basket and pulled out a notepad, filled with the kind of real paper that would have made anyone from the Houses envious. She uncapped her monogrammed pen and shook it lightly to get the ink flowing. “This dress—does it look too much like I put it on with the explicit intention of taking it off? Dios Apate must seem spontaneous, not planned. I don’t want him to be getting any ideas.”
Augustine examined the chiffon fabric, the way the skirt pooled around her bare legs. “No, I don’t think so,” he answered. “If anything, the layers I’m wearing will cancel out any thought of intention on your part. I’ll have to get this sleeve fixed up. You shouldn’t come with your hair already down, though. Let it fall loose during dinner—or during the wine after? What do you think?”
“During the drinking,” said Mercy decisively. She pulled her hair back up. “I’ll have a few strands escape during dinner—” Here she shook her head from side to side, letting a few flyaways do their job. “—and take the clip out once I’m on my second glass. By your second glass you should have your sleeves rolled up and your collar loose. Your jacket has to come off sometime during the meal. Spill something on it if you can’t make it look natural.” All of this she jotted down in her book.
They both re-adjusted their appearances according to Mercymorn’s vision. Augustine even went so far as to run a hand through his hair and upset the meticulously-gelled prematurely grey locks. He thought it made him look rakish. Mercymorn thought it made him look stupid.
“How many drinks deep should we start?”
Augustine considered his still-full glass carefully. “Three. Yes—in the middle of the third. We’ll have to be actually drinking, or else he’ll realize something is afoot. We’ve all built up a tolerance over these millennia, so three should get us buzzed but not incoherent.”
Mercy nodded. “It’s for the best that we’re actually drinking. I wouldn’t be able to debase myself in this way without liquid stupidity in my veins anyhow,” she said as she added to her notes, her eyes fixed determinedly in her lap.
“That’s not even a little bit true, my darling.”
He expected her to huff and puff, to spit and curse him out, but she closed her notebook, leaned forward, and took his wine from his hand without acknowledgment. She set it down next to her own glass, two untouched drinks next to a mess of empty plates. “What’ll be our cue?” she asked.
“Our cue?”
“To begin. How else will we know when to start?”
Augustine shrugged. “I assume the kissing will be the cue. I believe that when three people start kissing, that is always a cue. A cue that clothes will be coming off.”
She didn’t find him nearly as witty as he did. “You dolt. I mean, how do you want to choreograph this? Who goes first?”
Augustine couldn’t help it—he burst out laughing. “Joy, we are not going to choreograph our threesome.”
“Why not? We have everything else planned down to the littlest detail,” she pointed out.
“That’s different,” he told her. “A meal is an art form. A performance. Sex is not—we’ll have to just do. You said it yourself: it has to feel spontaneous, or else John will smell the bullshit long before it hits him. We’ll just kiss him when it feels natural, whenever there’s an opening. We are not choreographing this.”
“Yes, we are!”
“No, we are not! John will never buy it if we act like marionettes on strings; he knows us too well, he can read us too well. He’ll never let you take out his dick if it’s blatantly obvious we’re timing his thrusts to the minute. We need to leave a little room for improvisation.”
Mercy wrinkled her nose. “No!! We can’t just wing this! There are too many variables at play!! Who kisses him first? What if there is no natural opening? Who takes and who receives? What is the tone we should try and set? Fun and playful? Longing? Desperate? How intimate are we getting? How undressed should we be by the end of it? What if he doesn’t—”
“Close your eyes,” advised Augustine, “and imagine we’re back at Canaan House. Then the muscle memory can take it from there, hmm?”
She stiffened, the tips of her ears going scarlet. “That is not funny, Augustine.”
Augustine . He had almost forgotten how his name sounded coming from her mouth, and that egged him on further than he had planned on going. “Isn’t it? I certainly find it funny, that you pretend that you’ve never done this before. That we’ve never done this before.”
If Mercymorn had been stiff before, it was nothing compared to now. It was as if her body was trying to calcify. “Shut your mouth.”
He did not shut his mouth. “You certainly didn’t need alcohol in your system when Cyth was throwing all of those parties. When Cyrus was starting all of those games with the simple goal of removing as many clothes as possible. What did you call it? ‘ Debasing ’ yourself? You’ve debased yourself stone-cold sober, my dear.”
Mercy’s stillness had given way to trembling, but her voice was level as she said, “I know you think I’m deluding myself because you believe I’m still clinging onto my piety.” Her hazel eyes—her eyes that were not her eyes—had become something of a storm stirring.
“What?” Augustine blinked.
“You think sucking the dick of the Lord makes you immune to worshiping him, Augustine,” sneered Mercy. “It doesn’t. You and I have always been drinking at the same altar.”
“A false equivalency,” Augustine spat, with much more venom than he’d intended. Mercymorn’s most maddening habit—she’d flipped the script, and now he was the one pretending not to seethe. “I never worshipped him. I wasn’t like the rest of you.”
“Hmmm.” Mercymorn reached for her notepad and uncapped her pen again with a practiced calm. She began to add a few more bullet points and, without looking at him, said: “I think we’ll begin to undress in the window between five and seven minutes. Our clothes first, then his. And not fully undressed, either. I’m thinking I’ll keep my dress on but push it down to my waist, and hoist up my skirt, of course—”
Augustine reached into his pocket for a cigarette and was sorely disappointed to discover that he’d left them back at the Mithraeum. His lips twisted, against his will, into something that vaguely resembled a pout; this increased his irritation even more and filled Mercy with a sense of delight that she had been previously lacking. “I was his best friend before the Resurrection,” he said to his knees.
“—and you can unbutton your shirt all the way—or let one of us unbutton it—but leave it on,” Mercymorn continued. Her pen made a scritch scritch sound as she wrote. “Oh! Shoes!! Those should be the first to come off, somewhere in between the first drink and the second. Hmm, perhaps you shouldn’t be wearing those, you’ll have to unlace them. Wear ones you can slip off, yes?”
“His best friend,” Augustine repeated. “Before the Resurrection. I wasn’t—I wasn’t like Cyth, or Anastasia, or Cassy. I wasn’t like Cyrus or Ulysses. John raised me not as a disciple, but as a friend.”
Mercy scoffed. “You’re a Lyctor, Patience. By definition, you are a disciple. His hands, his fingers, his fists, his breath and his tongue and his teeth and his collarbone.” She coughed. “His co—”
Augustine cut her off before it got vulgar. There was no need to make any of this sexual. “I loved the man,” he told her, “not the god. We’re betraying the man, not the god. You should remember that.”
“Forget that we’re plotting to bring about the ruination of God? Not likely.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”
The notebook hit him square in the face, between the eyes. “What the fuck?”
“ I’m being deliberately obtuse?! Me?! Me !!” Mercy easily swerved the notepad as he threw it back. He’d never had as good of an arm as her. It landed in a heap inside the picnic basket. “Of all the ridiculous, stupid, off-base things to say! I’m not the one who insisted on flying all the way out here because he doesn’t have the balls to lock his bedroom door in case the Lord walks in!!”
“Don’t you talk to me about mettle, darling.” Augustine contemplated throwing his plate at her head. “Not when you can’t even say a name.”
Mercy threw her own plate at his head, and then his plate for good measure. These he was able to anticipate, and he blocked with his forearm. They shattered against his bone. “Fuck you!” she shrieked. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!! I’ll say a name. I’ll say many names! Augustine, Saint of useless, vile, decrepit, gutless play-acting of honor. Augustine, Saint of sniveling, of bedwetting, of cocksucking, of bootheel-suckling. Of stupidity!! Of time-wasting!! Of popcorn lung!! Of… of… of…”
There was something almost relieving about the anger that rose up in him and caused him to slap her across the face.
Mercy recoiled, her eyes narrowing down into slits, and then slapped him back. She curled her fingers as she pulled away, her nails digging into the side of his face and coming away with blood. “Fuck you, Augustine.” She stuck her fingers in her mouth and sucked them clean.
A trickle dripped down from the cut and got stuck on his cheekbone. He gathered it on his thumb and copied her gesture. His blood tasted like iron, which was disappointing—Alfred’s had tasted like wine, and he’d often wondered if it ran in the family. “Fuck you too, Joy,” he said.
The sky, who had previously sat still and pretty watching the scene, chose that moment to open up and dump its grievances on top of them. For a second, they both just stared at each other as their fine clothes were soiled by a foreign planet’s water cycle. Then they both leaned forward and smashed their lips together.
Mercy bit down hard; she had also discovered that his blood did not taste like wine, though she had never been under such delusions, so it wasn’t much of a revelation. Augustine gripped her chin so hard that bruises blossomed like flowers, so she slammed him down on the ground with enough force to knock the wind from his diaphragm.
The blanket they had laid out was covered with irrelevant shit, so they kicked aside the plates and the bowls and the glasses and the basket and the blanket itself, until they were rolling around on the bare grass.
Augustine removed his hand from her jaw and used it and his other to push her dress down to her waist, hoisting up her skirt. She removed her teeth from his bottom lip and set them to work on his neck, her fingers tangling up in the buttons of his shirt. When it wouldn’t comply with her request to unbutton, she ripped it open. “You can’t do anything right,” Augustine purred, and then shoved his tongue down Mercy’s throat.
Her hands around his neck, his raking lines up and down her rain-slicked back, digging his fingernails in just like she’d done to him. An outsider observing the scene would have said there was no love, no fondness in the way their mouths slotted together and came apart again and again and again—that outsider would have been inaccurate.
“I hate you more than anything in the universe,” said Mercy as Augustine held her hair away from her face so she could bite his shoulder. He cried out, and she sank down harder. “I hope you drown in this storm. I hope the rain smothers you so I can tear you limb from limb.”
He hooked his thumbs into the divots of her hips, flipping her onto her back. “I’ll break every bone in your body first.” His knee slotted in between her thighs, and she bucked against him in a thrust with the kind of force intended to stab. “I’ll grind your bones to dust and drink it in my coffee.” He twisted her hair around his palm and dragged her gasping mouth back to his.
When they came back up for air, her lips were stained red. There was so much blood on the both of them that it was impossible to tell whose was whose, where the essence of Mercymorn began and where it separated into the essence of Augustine. “You can’t grind any bones if I’ve removed both of your wrists from your body, you stupid, stupid man.” She rolled her own wrist and then popped the button on his pants.
Augustine pulled back just enough to let her pull down his pants, kicking them aside once they got around his ankles. He watched with amusement as she lapped up the blood from her shoulder bite. “You couldn’t remove any bones from my wrists if you wanted to. You don’t have the temerity.”
She smacked him across the face once again. “I have more temerity in my pinky toe than you have in your entire body. I would eat your heart on the Mithraeum dining room table.” She took a page from his book and grabbed him by his hair, which had been freed from its gel prison by the rain.
“You have to have a heart for it to be eaten,” Augustine crooned in her ear, “and unfortunately that excludes the both of us, sweetheart.” The last syllable of his sentence got swallowed by her tongue.
Mercy reached downwards, but Augustine pulled back. “Do you—do you hear that?”
“What? Hear what, you senile old man?”
“Shhh.” He held her lips shut. “Listen.” They went silent, and, with no trouble at all thanks to their Lyctoral hearing, they heard it: an incessant, unmistakable sea of honking.
Slowly, Augustine turned his head to the left. Then he sprang upwards, very nearly kicking Mercy in the face—this time on accident. “Are you fucking—shit! Shit!”
Disgruntled, Mercymorn sat up. “What are you going on about—oh, fuck!”
The picnic basket they had kicked away from their spontaneous tryst had rolled down the hill, right back into the hungry jaws of Augustine’s third mortal enemy: the herd of geese. They were happily digging into the basket, tearing apart the bread and gagging on the apples. Their most favorite treat, however, was Mercymorn’s notepad.
“Stop them!!” Mercy shrieked. And then, a sentence even she knew was incomprehensible: “That’s—that’s classified information!!” She scrambled to her feet as well, haphazardly pulling her torn dress back up.
They launched into what could only be described as a bloodbath, a shrieking, messy, poorly-planned bloodbath in which both sides knew definitively that the title of winner was held by the geese—at least for the first fifteen minutes. There was very little even two fully-fledged Lyctors could do against a wall of sheer brutality.
Quickly they realized that coming out with both the basket and their dignity was an unrealistic goal, so they moved to focusing on the notepad, which proved to be a smidge more manageable. This played out as Mercy grabbing a snapping, hissing goose by its neck and forcibly wretching a fragment of sopping wet paper from its jaws while Augustine fended off its angry compatriots. She got through roughly four geese this way before Augustine’s brain finally turned on and he shouted, “Joy, just knock them out!”
“Oh!!” Mercy’s brain had also been decidedly lagging. She stepped back and clenched her fists, slowing the breathing and dulling the heartbeats of the entire flock. They all dropped, as one, into unconsciousness, and suddenly her task became a whole lot easier.
She and Augustine straightened up, the lone victors standing amongst their fallen foes, the shreds of their meticulous plan to overthrow God clutched between them. For a long moment they just stared at each other, at their clothes which were covered in blood and grass stains and spilled wine and goose feathers, and which had been made practically transparent by the rain anyhow. Augustine and Mercy were both decently attractive people, at least in each other’s opinion, but even they could not make this assortment look fashionable.
They broke out into laughter at the same time. Mercy’s laugh was half of a giggle and half of a snort, both tripping over the other in a battle for dominance. Augustine’s laugh was nothing short of a chortle. Regardless, in each case their laughter knocked the breath out of their lungs and then started them back up again.
“Here,” said Mercy in between wheezes, holding out her hand. “Give me those disgusting wads of paper.” Augustine obliged her, and she tore them into even tinier shreds, until it was impossible to determine what kind of object the paper even was, never mind what was written on it.
“I have decided,” Mercy said loftily, “that it serves no purpose to write down a physical script of our crimes, other than to potentially indict us before or after. After all, it’s not like we can read off the paper during the actual… act.”
Augustine shook his head. “Joy, are you saying that I was right all along?”
She huffed. “No!! And if I was, well, there’s that saying about broken clocks, isn’t there?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Come along, you daft old man.” She led him down into the forest, until they found a stream that was deep enough and fast-moving enough for her liking. Then she gave what remained of her Dios Apate notes a watery burial. They stood, side by side, and watched the notes drift away.
Unexpectedly—or perhaps very expectedly, so expected it would have been insane to suggest otherwise—Augustine reached forward and took Mercy’s hand in his. This gesture, unlike so many of his earlier ones, was soft and tentative. He ran his thumb along the ridge of her knuckle. She stared up at him with wide hazel eyes, but she did not pull away.
“Mercymorn,” he whispered, and still she did not pull away, “can’t we be friends again?”
“Augustine…” she whispered back, and there was no malice. It was just his name.
He realized he was attempting to cross a lake that had just recently frozen over, but she continued to let him hold her hand, so he pressed on. “I liked you a tremendous amount before I started hating you,” he told her. “And I know you felt the same about me.”
Mercy sniffed, but she knew he could tell she was actively at war with the muscles around her mouth. “You have no proof of that.”
“Joy, there used to be sixteen of us and now there are four. I never thought I’d say this, but our days are numbered. We are not living infinite lives like we thought we would be. We can’t be wasting our time with anything that our hearts aren’t one hundred percent in.”
“We have hated each other for ten thousand years,” Mercy said, softly. Sadly.
“And we can stop any day we want. Hell, Joy, I don’t care if it takes you another ten thousand years to fully like me again. Maybe you’ll go into the River one last time and still be thinking, ‘That’s one fucking bastard of a man’. But can’t we at least start learning how to not hate each other now?”
Mercy turned so she was fully facing him. Unexpectedly—or perhaps very expectedly, so expected it would have been insane to suggest otherwise—she reached forward with her other hand, so that they stood with both hands clasped between them. “Augustine,” she said again. “I’m… I can’t say it. I…”
“I will forgive you for Cristabel if you will forgive me for Alfred,” he promised.
Augustine had, metaphorically, taken one step too far. The ice broke beneath his feet, and he plunged straight into the freezing depths.
Mercymorn yanked her hands free of his and took a step back. There was a tornado swirling about in her irises. “Fuck you, Saint of Patience,” she snarled. “Fuck you. I will never, ever forgive you for the actions of your cunt of a cavalier. Take—take her name out of your mouth. There is nothing, nothing for you to forgive her for. Fuck you.”
He, too, hardened. He shoved his hands into his pockets. “So that’s how it is, huh?”
“That’s how it is.” She began heading back out of the woods, away from the stream. When Augustine didn’t immediately follow, she turned half way around and added, “We are not friends. We will never be friends. We will follow through on this plan and then you will never see me again.”
Augustine laughed: not his laugh from before—a bitter, twisted twin of it. “Believe me, Mercymorn, I look forward to the day when I get to breathe air in this lifetime and you don’t. I rejoice in it.”