Chapter 10: The Art Critic's Gambit
Nergal, satisfied, walked over to the horrified Calista. The asphalt around her feet had blossomed into intricate mosaic tiles depicting her own face in a scream. Sophie the kitten wove between her ankles, mewing anxiously, the only living thing left untouched.
He leaned in, inches from her face. His breath smelled of linseed oil and tomb dust. “Call the one called the Red Tornado,” he whispered, the words etching themselves into the air like cursive smoke. “Tell her what happened here. Show her my gallery. And then… wait. The show isn’t over yet.”
He stepped back, his form dissolving into a shower of pigment and parchment scraps that blew away on a non-existent wind. The silent, edited tableau remained: the statues, the topiary, the mechanical Wands, the dragon lighter. Calista Gunderson, former Merlin, stood alone in a circle of civilized horror. With trembling hands, she pulled a Golden Wand communicator from her pocket—a device that now resembled a child’s tin can telephone. She lifted the receiver to her ear, and a single, pristine tear traced a line through the dust on her cheek as she began to speak.
In the Dark Market, the news came through Jan’s pendant as a raw, psychic scream of images and grief.
She saw it all. Mike’s marble form, Casey’s terra cotta eye-roll, Yukio’s defiant column, the topiary that was Annie, the scales that were Aaron, the horrific taxidermy of Eric and Reggie, Bethany’s mindless march. She saw Flamewing reduced to a trinket. She saw Calista’s devastated face.
Jan’s temper didn’t just roar. It exploded, a silent supernova behind her green eyes. The air around her crackled with unfocused desire magic, a chaotic pulse that made Rainbor flinch and Lady Eleanor gasp with involuntary pleasure. Brigid reached for her, but Jan was already moving, a streak of furious red hair and pale skin, shrugging into her tunic with violent jerks.
“That’s it. He’s touched my people. He’s turned my best friends into fucking… lawn ornaments. I’m going to find his narrative heart and I’m going to fuck it until it forgets its own name.”
She spun, ready to storm toward the alley where the tin soldier pointed, ready to charge into the museum and burn it all down with the sheer, stupid force of her rage.
A hand came down on her shoulder. It was small, work-roughened, and possessed the absolute, immovable weight of a mountain.
“Stop, Jan Siobhan.”
Shiv’s voice was quiet, but it cut through Jan’s fury like a scalpel. Jan turned, her chest heaving, ready to argue.
“The cavalry,” Shiv said, her gaze steady, “is coming. You don’t win a war against a story with a bigger fist. You win it with a better ending.”
As if summoned, the air near Rainbor’s stall rippled like water. A man stepped through, rumpled in a worn flannel and jeans, his red hair a mess, a coffee stain on his shirt. Johnny O’Connor blinked, looking around at the assembled, distressed faces.
“Right. May sixth. The… Art Institute thing. Do I have the date right this time?” He asked, his voice perpetually distracted. “The temporal signature here is a right mess. All knotted up with narrative threads.”
“You’re on the nose, John Patrick,” Shiv said, releasing Jan’s shoulder.
Johnny nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets, and then took them out again. He made a series of casual, complex gestures with his fingers, as if untangling invisible wires. A sphere of wavering, silent energy bloomed around their group in the Dark Market, encapsulating Rainbor’s stall, the crates, and them. The sounds of the Market faded to a distant hum. Time within the bubble stretched and stilled.
“Right. Time-bubble. We can plan. He won’t perceive us until we step back into the stream.” Johnny said. “Brought the experts.”
Two more figures stepped from the ripple in space behind him. Charlie Winkle, thin and kind-eyed, and his sister Paulette, who bounced on her toes, her curly hair flying, smiling at the wonder of the Dark Market.
“Auditors,” Shiv said, looking at Charlie and Paulette. “Or ex-Auditors. Among other things, they know everything. Or they used to. And what they don’t remember, Johnny’s been digging up from the clay tablets and ghost archives of ancient Mesopotamia for weeks now. He knew something was coming. A spike in edited realities.”
Johnny shrugged. “It was a hunch. A pattern in the temporal stains. Then Mam called about the garden gnome and the three-foot fiancée. Connected the dots.”
Shiv laid out the plan with the efficiency of a general. “We don’t beat Nergal with power. He eats power for breakfast. We beat him with knowledge. Specific, targeted, undermining knowledge.” She pointed to the scroll from the sphinx, the various herbs and mystical components from her own pouch, the strange metals Rainbor provided from beneath his counter. “Katie, Brigid, and I will be building the proper weapon. Here. In Rainbor’s kitchen. His place is warded six ways from Sunday. We’ll use Kaboom demolition principles, Archimedes-style precision math, and my own dirty village witchcraft to bind it all together with the Epic of Unbinding as our guide.”
She then pointed to Lena, who stood close to Katie. “You, sweetheart. You craft stories. You know their architecture. You’ll work with Johnny, Charlie, and Paulette. Johnny has the historical data. Charlie and Paulette have the… innate understanding of cosmic rules and the nullification protocols that used to govern things like rogue gods. You four will tear apart Nergal’s myth. Find the plotholes. Find the contradictions. Find the weak points in his own narrative of himself.”
Finally, she looked at Jan, her gaze softening a fraction. “When we’re finished, you won’t follow the tin soldier’s path to the museum. That’s a trap. It leads into his curated gallery, where his power is absolute. You’ll follow the second path. The narrative thread Lena will help you see. You’ll go into the raw, unformed stuff of his story, the place before the editing. And you’ll be the one thing any artist, any god, grows to dread.”
Jan understood. The fury cooled, refined into a sharp, gleaming point. “An art critic.”
“A brutal, nitpicking, devastatingly accurate one,” Shiv confirmed. “You won’t fight his magic. You’ll review it. And you’ll take your panel with you.” She looked at Stacy, Vivian, Hank, and Fatima.
Stacy cracked her knuckles. “I don’t know shit about art. But I know when something’s bullshit. I’m in.”
Vivian, still wrapped in a blanket, her face hollow but her eyes clear, nodded. “He took Dale. He makes things frozen, silent… unloving. I want to hear him scream.”
Hank looked from face to face, completely lost but unwavering. “Yeah, okay. I am much more than just comic relief. I’ll say it louder.”
Fatima, from her three-foot perspective, glared with ferocious intelligence. “He shrunk me. He treats living beings as objects. This is an abomination of form and function. I have many notes.”
Jan looked at her team, then at her mother, her brother, her friends all preparing for a different kind of war. She nodded, once. “We go when you’re ready.”
Hours passed within the bubble. Outside, time was a held breath. Inside, it was a frenzy of focused work.
In Rainbor’s kitchen, which smelled of exotic candy and ozone, Shiv, Katie, and Brigid worked in a near-silent symphony. Brigid calculated angles of metaphysical resonance on a tablet, her brow furrowed. Katie carefully wound filaments of magical energy—plucked from the very air—around a core of shattered mirror and charged graphite, her touch making them hum with contained potential. Shiv chanted in low Gaelic, weaving the Epic’s words into the construct, her hands staining with rare inks and powdered memory.
At a makeshift table of crates, Lena, Johnny, Charlie, and Paulette were deep in a shared trance of information. Johnny spoke in a monotone, reciting historical records: “Nergal, lord of the unseen, scribe of fates. His authority derived from the recording of events, not their creation. A bureaucrat of destiny. He grew jealous of the storytellers, the ones who got the applause…” Charlie added soft, definitive statements that seemed to bend the light around them: “Rule 7.4.3: An editor may not become the author. The separation is fundamental.” Paulette giggled, pointing at invisible lines in the air. “Oh, look! His story has a continuity error! Right there, in his transition from Mesopotamian scribe to Renaissance curator. He didn’t bridge the thematic gap. He just glued it with borrowed prestige.” Lena, her eyes closed, traced the narrative thread in the air with a finger, whispering, “He’s vulnerable in the gap… in the edit itself. The moment between ‘what was’ and ‘what he wants it to be.’ That’s the crack.”
Jan sat with her team, preparing in their own way. She needed to be strong, focused. The draining from Vivian had left her feeling thin, translucent. She couldn’t afford that.
“I need a charge,” she said to Stacy and Hank, her voice matter-of-fact. “A real one. Not a life-force drain. A good, old-fashioned, pounding fuck. Ground me. Fill me up with something… messy and human.”
Stacy understood. Hank blushed but didn’t hesitate. They found a relatively private corner behind a stack of wooden pallets within the time-bubble. The air was cool, dusty.
Jan pushed Hank down onto an upturned crate. She unzipped his jeans, pulling out his already hard cock. She didn’t bother with teasing. She needed the blunt, physical truth of it. She straddled him, guiding him inside her with one swift, sinking motion.
“Christ, Jan,” Hank grunted, his hands flying to her hips.
She was wet, but tight, the sudden fullness a shocking anchor. She began to ride him, not for pleasure, but for sensation, each upstroke and downstroke a reclamation of her own solidity. Her cunt gripped him, milking his shaft, and she threw her head back, concentrating on the heat, the friction, the sweat already beading between her breasts.
Stacy watched for a moment, then moved behind Jan. She pulled Jan’s tunic up, exposing her back, and pressed her muscular body close. She reached around, her strong fingers finding Jan’s clit, rubbing tight, urgent circles. “Get what you need, Red,” she whispered into Jan’s ear, then bit the lobe.
The dual sensation was overwhelming. Hank’s thick cock stretching her, pumping up into her core, and Stacy’s expert fingers flicking and pressing her clit. Jan’s breath came in ragged gasps. “Fuck, yes. Just like that. Don’t be gentle. Fucking use me. Fill me up.”
Hank, spurred on, grabbed her ass cheeks, spreading them, driving up into her harder. The slap of their skin echoed in the corner. Jan could feel every ridge of him, the thick head hitting a spot deep inside that made her see stars. Stacy’s fingers were slippery with Jan’s arousal, working her clit with a relentless, practiced rhythm.
“You’re gonna make me come,” Jan warned, her voice guttural.
“That’s the point,” Stacy growled.
Hank’s thrusts became erratic, desperate. “I’m close, Jan, I’m gonna—”
“Do it,” she commanded. “Shoot your load in me. Paint my fucking insides. Make me messy.”
With a choked cry, Hank obeyed. His body stiffened, and Jan felt the hot, liquid pulse of his cum jetting deep into her womb. The feeling triggered her own climax, a devastating wave that rolled from her clit through her entire pelvis. Her pussy convulsed around his still-spurting cock, milking him for every drop. She screamed, a raw, unfiltered sound of release, her body shuddering between them.
As the last tremors subsided, she stayed there, impaled, feeling the warm trickle of him leaking out of her, down her thighs. She was grounded. Solid. Sated. Hank, spent, rested his forehead against her shoulder. Stacy gently withdrew her fingers, giving Jan’s ass an affectionate slap.
Jan slowly lifted herself off him, Hank’s softening cock slipping out with a wet, obscene sound. She didn’t clean up. She let his cum seep into her underwear, a tangible reminder of life, of sweat and sex and dumb, loyal friendship. She pulled her clothes back on, the fabric sticking to her damp skin.
She looked at her friends. “Okay,” she said, her voice steady, clear. “I’m ready.”
At that moment, Shiv emerged from the kitchen. In her hands, she held not a weapon, but a book. It was small, bound in what looked like worn leather, but its cover shifted under the light, showing glimpses of stone tablet, papyrus, vellum, and finally, a sleek, modern art critique’s notebook.
“The Unbound Critique,” Shiv said. “It’s empty. It will hold the arguments you need. It’s keyed to you, Jan. It’ll listen to your voice and your… unique perspective.”
Lena stepped forward, her eyes shining. “I’ve found the thread. It’s not golden. It’s the color of a correction, of white-out. It leads into the margin of his story. The place where he hesitates. Where his own doubts live. That’s your way in.”
Johnny, Charlie, and Paulette stood together. Paulette grinned. “We’ve compiled a list! His top five narrative failures! Number one: inconsistent character motivation post-Babylonian era!”
Jan took the book. It felt warm. She looked at Stacy, Vivian, Hank, and Fatima. They gathered around her, a determined, messy, furious unit.
Shiv met her daughter’s eyes. “Go be a critic, Jan Siobhan. Tear his masterpiece apart.”
Jan grinned, a wild, fierce expression. She looked at the faint, shimmering line of correction-white Lena pointed to, hanging in the air beside the tin soldier’s golden thread. She reached out, not with her hand, but with her will.
The time-bubble popped.
Sound and time rushed back in.
And Jan O’Connor, the Red Tornado, leading her friends, stepped off the solid ground of the Dark Market and into the jagged, whispering margin of a god’s story.
The ground vanished. Solidity became a lie. Jan, Stacy, Vivian, Hank, and Fatima stepped through a portal of shimmering temporal force, a tear in reality woven by Shiv’s time-bubble and Lena’s narrative sense, emerging into a void of swirling colors—the raw stuff of Nergal’s narrative. It was not empty. It was cacophonous. Unformed thoughts shrieked past like comets. Emotions—pride, jealousy, boredom—swam in thick pools of ochre and midnight blue. Scenes half-painted flickered and dissolved: a lion-headed figure scribbling on clay, the same figure rearranging museum dioramas with a petulant sigh.
Lena’s voice echoed in Jan’s mind, a thin wire of clarity in the psychic storm. ‘You’re outside his story now. He’s inside the frame, admiring the composition. You’re in the studio, looking at the discarded sketches and the stains on the floor.Critique it. Tear it apart.’
Jan clutched the Unbound Critique. It warmed in her hand, its blank pages thirsty. She focused, pushing through the disorienting roar. She sought a specific thread, the one tied to her friends. She found it: a garish, gilded cord thrumming with smug satisfaction. The thread of Mike and Casey’s transformation. She grabbed it with her mind.
The memory implanted by her mother’s psychic link flashed: Mike’s last, grumbled protest about marble genital proportions. Casey’s exasperated eye-roll forever captured in clay. The absurd, human banality of it amidst divine horror.
Jan’s mouth opened. Her voice, when it came, did not shout. It was conversational, dripping with disdain. It cut through the chaotic colors like a razor.
“This is derivative,” she stated, her words leaving her lips and etching themselves into the void in letters of cold, green fire. “A cheap knockoff of Ovid. Metamorphoses as performed by a community theatre group with a marble fetish. The irony is so pedestrian it hurts.”
The void shuddered. The swirling colors recoiled from her words as if burned.
A sickening crack appeared in the fabric of nothingness. Through it, Jan saw a frozen snapshot of the Art Institute’s main hall. She saw Nergal’s ever-shifting form, standing before his tableau, a painter stepping back from an easel. His head—currently a Greco-Roman bust—twitched. A flicker of confusion marred the serene marble.
Stacy’s strong, calloused hand grabbed Jan’s, squeezing tight. Her grip was an anchor of pure, physical reality. “Keep going,” Stacy urged, her voice low and fierce. “We’re with you. Rip his fucking heart out.”
Vivian, her eyes reflecting the void’s chaos, reached out a trembling hand. She didn’t touch Jan physically. She fed her a thin, precise thread of her own hunger—not for life force, but for validation, for meaning, the desperate need that makes an artist crave praise. That need amplified Jan’s critique, giving it a desperate, cutting edge.
Hank, squinting at the crack and the glimpse of Mike’s statue, snorted. His confusion was weaponized into pure, blunt honesty. “Yeah, and the proportions on that marble dick are totally unrealistic. Mike’s a grower, not a shower. That’s just bad observational work, man. Did you even use a live model?”
The crack widened with a sound of tearing canvas.
Fatima, levitating slightly to be at eye level with the rift, glared. Her small body vibrated with focused power. “Ya ibn el sharmouta!” she spat, the Arabic curse cracking like a whip. She channeled her own meticulous magical analysis into the critique, a scalpel of intent that dissected narrative technique. “The thematic transition from living flesh to static medium is not earned! It is an authoritarian assertion, not a narrative consequence! You have violated the internal logic of your own stolen genre!”
The fissure became a chasm. The void screamed—a high, thin sound of rending concepts.
Jan felt Nergal’s attention fully turn toward them. It was a pressure, dense and sickening, pushing directly against the frontal lobe. A migraine of divine focus. She welcomed the pain. She bared her teeth in a grin, naked and fierce in the raw narrative stream, Hank’s spend still slick between her thighs.
She pressed the advantage, shouting into the howling storm.
“You’re not a god! You’re a hack with a god complex! A glorified taxidermist of reality! Your best work was a jungle rip-off of Heart of Darkness and you didn’t even have the guts to keep the horror! You just made it… tasteful! You are the definition of a sell-out!”
The void didn’t just scream. It ruptured.
The chasm swallowed them. The swirling colors coalesced, hardened, and became a landscape. They stood, suddenly, on a pathway of cracked, yellowing parchment under a dripping sky of liquid gold. The air stank of solvent and rotting papyrus. The whispers were now distinct, miserable voices: edit me, perfect me, why am I not enough.
They were inside. Not in the curated gallery, but in the back rooms of Nergal’s mind. The workshop of his godhood.
Ahead, the path forked. One branch, paved with polished anxiety, led toward a glowing doorway from which issued the silent, frozen applause of a captured audience. The main gallery. The other branch, a muddy track littered with eraser shreds and shattered pencils, wound toward a pulsating, tumor-like structure of mismatched bricks and weeping mortar. A sense of profound shame emanated from it.
“The source of his authority,” Vivian whispered, her succubus senses tasting the thick emotional residue. “It’s not beautiful. It’s a wound.”
A figure detached itself from the shadows near the polished path. It was Nergal, but diminished. His form was less solid, his features flickering rapidly between a hundred artistic styles, unable to settle. A single, cracked monocle hovered over one shifting eye. He held a gigantic, dripping red pen like a scepter.
“Critics,” he sneered, but the sneer wavered. The word “derivative” was now burned across his chest in faint, smoldering letters. “Bugs.Gnats. You buzz. You irritate. You are not part of the work.”
“We’re the review,” Jan shot back, taking a step forward. The Unbound Critique flapped open in her hand. Words began to scrawl across its first page, echoing her earlier insults in elegant, devastating script. “And the review says your show is a pretentious, plagiaristic disaster. We’re giving it one star. And the star is for the cute dog-turned-kerosene-lighter. That was kinda funny.”
Nergal shrieked, a sound of pure, unadulterated rage. He slashed the red pen through the air. A tidal wave of crimson “EDIT” commands surged toward them, intent on scratching them out, on rewriting their very presence into footnotes.
“Stacy!” Jan yelled.
Stacy was already moving. She didn’t try to block the conceptual wave. She grabbed Hank and Fatima, shoving them behind her. She planted her feet on the parchment path, lowered her center of gravity, and pushed against the oncoming narrative not with magic, but with sheer, stubborn will. The wave split around her, parting like a river around a rock, but the effort was immense. Veins stood out on her temples. “It’s… really fucking heavy!” she grunted.
Vivian stepped past Stacy’s defensive stance. She looked at the raging god, at his wounded pride, his desperate need for a masterpiece. She understood need. She opened her arms, and this time, she did not pull. She pushed.
She fed him a memory. Not of life, but of profound, cringing artistic failure. The feeling of presenting something you love and seeing only polite bafflement. The acid shame of a bad review that is, secretly, right. It was a thread of pure, empathetic humiliation.
Nergal flinched as if slapped. The red wave faltered.
“Now, Jan!” Fatima shouted, weaving her small hands through complex patterns. She wasn’t attacking Nergal. She was reinforcing Jan’s connection to the Unbound Critique, turning its pages into a conductive channel for their collective assault.
Jan drew a breath filled with the stink of his insecurity. She looked at the pathetic, pulsing workshop of his power, then back at his flickering form. She didn’t shout her next critique. She said it quietly, with the lethal precision of a final verdict.
“Your tragedy isn’t that you were forgotten. It’s that you were never original enough to be remembered in the first place. You’re a museum of other people’s ideas. Empty. And you know it.”
The words left her mouth and did not merely burn in the air. They flew, physical things, etched on shards of broken mirror. They shot toward the pulsing, tumorous workshop.
They struck its weeping walls.
And the world of parchment and liquid gold caught fire with the brilliant, cleansing blaze of truth.