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non-consensual medical treatment; suicide and references to suicide attempts; terminal illness; body horror; references harm to childrenedited by Amanda Helms
I ease the corpse of my beloved into the depths of the temple, clutching tightly at the shrouds that cocoon her, descending ancient stone stairs worn smooth and soft, down into the blood-drenched womb of the world where the ishetim await.
It is a betrayal to bring her here.
I descend by feel into the darkness, one hand trailing along the chisel-scarred stone wall; the other, with its handful of rough-woven linen pressed tightly against my thigh, bearing the burden of her. The stairs are slick with moisture. There is the sound of water dripping, rhythmic and steady. I clench bare toes into the chilled stone and try not to fall. A mineral stench, acrid and sharp, rises from below. My shoulder and arm ache with the weight. The shrouds whisper along the stone and her skull beats a cadence as it slips down each step.
It is difficult for me not to recall her empty, vacant eyes, unblinking, when I wrapped the shrouds around her. I try, instead, to remember her eyes shining and vibrant with life. With love.
The ishetim will return her to me. We are each allowed one resurrection.
I set her down, bracing her so she does not slip into the darkness without me, and sit on the damp stairs, wiping sweat from my forehead and neck. My fingertips graze the resurrection scar which runs along my collarbone, braided ropes of scar tissue, twisted upon themselves, hard and solid, like bone.
There is a hard knot of grief and anger under my heart. I push aside the grief and stoke the anger, compressing it like stone under earth: harder, sharper, heavier. The absence of her is too much for me to bear. The grief too razored. She can return to me. She should.
And then, I am reminded of my beloved touching my resurrection scar the first time, fearful, tentative, the only part of my body which repelled her.
“Do you remember?” she had asked, carving at the scar with her finger.
The moment was long ago, when we were first lovers. We were drunk with each other’s touch, satiated, heavy with pleasure; limbs sprawled and tangled, sweat drying on her breasts, on mine. She held my hand in hers.
I shook my head. I didn’t remember. Not the dying. Not the return. Not the space between.
“Don’t ever do this to me,” she said, insistent, stabbing at the scar to emphasize her words. She had thought, even then, that we would be together until the end of our days. “Don’t. It is very dark magic.”
I disconnected my hand from hers, sat upright on the bed, crossed-legged, facing her. “I’m alive. I’m here with you.” I said, staring at her, bewildered. “How is that not the most wonderful magic?”
“How did you die?” Her voice caught on the last word.
“Plague. The most uninteresting of stories.” I laughed, leaning over the bed and snatching a pillow which had fallen to the floor. I curled myself around her, settling blankets over us as the room grew chilly with the descent of the sun.
“It is said that they were human once.” Her face fell into shadow. “The ishetim.”
I heard her quiet, cold voice.
“Never let the ishetim touch me.”
I dismissed her words and took her into my arms and I loved her for a time, then slept tangled with her, and allowed the conversation to be lost.
“Don’t ever have me resurrected,” she said, again, decades later, after we had wed, loved, lived most of a lifetime in each other’s days. After her illness had begun to devour her. “When I am dead, I am gone and lost to you, and you have to accept this.”
We argued for days, for weeks, for months. “Why would you refuse life-saving treatment?” My voice was hoarse with repeating the same words to her, with screaming, with choking on tears.
She was bed-ridden, only able to lift her hands. Her touch was gentle and insistent, both. “Because it is not life-saving. It is only life-prolonging.” Her voice was calm to my storm. “It is a darkness that I do not want to hold in me.”
I wrenched myself from her touch. “Have you loved me this long believing there is darkness in me?” I was incandescent with rage at the revelation. “The resurrection gave me my life! I would have been dead as a child, buried in a mass grave with thousands of others. We wouldn’t have met. We wouldn’t have had this love.”
She said, very quietly, “I have been grateful for this love.” She didn’t speak much after that.
I watched while she grew frail, until her breath came in long, shattered gasps, until all that was left of her was an empty, hollow husk, with eyes that stared at something I could not see.
My hands cupped her face, my forehead pressed to hers. I did not know if she could hear me. “I can’t be without you.”
I scrub at my tears and clench my fist again around a handful of shrouds. I drag her down. She will forgive me.
The stairs end with a faint, warm luminescence. There is a small iron gate. The pickets are straight and slender, unadorned, sharp. There is neither lock nor latch.
There is movement in the dark beyond the gate. Shadows shift. I can hear the whisper of heavy fabric, soft footfalls, breath, the gentle rattle of chain sliding along stone.
My beloved’s fear was irrational. I tell myself this as I wait for the ishetim to attend us. I kneel and lay a hand against her brow, as though to reassure her.
A long, pale-fingered hand wraps around one of the gate spikes and pushes the gate open. The creature is bent double, stepping through. It is hairless, long-limbed, smooth-skinned, with large, round eyes black as the night sky. It is wrapped in a loose robe woven from a cream-colored, thick, fibrous material, stitched through with iridescent flecks of flaked stone. There is the scent of something sour and earthy, like fermented mushrooms; and the scent of something mineral, sharp, fresh-cut.
The isheti ignores me, its attention on the corpse. It pulls the thick folds of fabric back from its hands and forearms. It slices the shroud over my beloved’s eyes, deliberately, intentionally, with its elongated fingernails, sharp and knife-like. The act is precise. The shroud parts. The isheti uses the back of its hand to ease open my beloved’s eyes.
The isheti slides its hands under the corpse at shoulders and thigh, and lifts her, cradling her against its chest. It turns towards the gate and bends to crouch through. There is movement in the shadows at the base of its skull. I see it as it turns away from me. Something shifts there. I can’t see what it is. The isheti arches its neck and glances back at me. It beckons. It gestures ‘halt’. It shrugs. The choice is mine. Its eyes are wide and welcoming in the faint light. I am invited to witness. It is also permitted for me to wait here, outside the gate. She will need me there, when she understands I have done this against her will.
I follow the isheti and my beloved through the gate, reaching behind me to close it as I pass. Iron snicks on stone.
The passage beyond the gate opens to a vast, enormous cavern. The cavern is illuminated with a soft, warm light emanating from tangled, organic growths suspended from the arched ceiling. There is a block of polished stone, the color of cream, in the center of the cavern.
The isheti lays my beloved on it, removing the remains of her shroud, arranging her limbs. She is naked now, cold, stiff. Her eyes remain open and staring toward the tangled light above.
As it bends over her, its hands floating lightly over her body, in intimate gestures, as though to know her, the object at the back of the isheti’s skull is illuminated by the light overhead. The sight of it reverberates through my bones, across my skin. The hair on my neck stands. A shard of iron is pierced through the isheti’s skull, just at the occiput. The shard is curved into a closed circle. The bone clings tight to the iron ring, as though it has grown around it. The children are chained as soon as they learn to walk. They scream as the spike is driven through bone, and brain, and spine. They die. They are ishetim. Resurrection is easily done. A chain flows from the iron ring down the isheti’s back, onto the floor, and snakes away into the darkness.
Other isheti come from the shadows. Each is chained.
My beloved fears them. And yet I have brought her here. I am not afraid. I am angry. I am writhing with anger that she has not listened to reason. I am blistered, torn open, with anger that she has chosen to leave me, when she could stay. That I have been abandoned.
The ishetim begin to chant, weaving threads of wordless vocalizations together, as they move towards my beloved’s corpse, their robes rustling softly as harmony to their voices. They are no longer capable of speech, I am told. Speech sacrificed to obtain their unspeakable potent magic.
The ishetim remove their robes and fold them carefully on the floor. They gather around her, bearing bowls of stone and woven baskets, and the sharp implements of their magic. She is cleansed with water, and with smoke, and with marrow scooped from long, cracked bones. She is scrubbed with sand and with sharp, broken splinters of rock. She is anointed with oil, and with a pungent fermented liquid covered in a pale blue down, and with blood pulsing from the long, slender neck of one of the isheti.
Then they begin to cut.
The work is terrible. The ishetim use blades of stone and iron for the long, deep cuts across the collar bone, chest and thigh, and their own fingernails for the finer work along hands and fingers, through cheekbones, and nose, and chin. They cut out her blood vessels, removing them whole and entire. It is painstaking, delicate work, separating arteries and veins, and capillaries as fine as the hairs on her cheeks. When they have finished, she is unrecognizable. No longer human. Ribbons of flesh. Bones showing through. The blood, jellied in the vessels, now discarded on the floor, glistening and weeping.
They press something into the parted flesh. It is impossible to know what it is. It is soft, pliable, the color of milk. It fuses with parted flesh. I run my fingers over my arms up to the collarbone, imagining this alien substance inserted into my own flesh. I don’t care. I live. What else would matter?
They thread long, impossibly delicate needles with a substance as fine and translucent as spider silk and begin to sew.
I wait and witness. And then.
My beloved is no longer a corpse. Her skin is lush with life. Her breasts rise and fall with breath. Her skin is smooth and unmarked, save for the single wound along her collarbone, deliberately left. I yearn to kiss her, to feel the warmth of her skin, to lie with her again, and listen to her voice. I cannot regret the choice I have made. I do not. Instead, I feel the hard, cold anger in my chest begin to loosen and unwind, replaced with relief, with love.
She opens her eyes. She smiles and reaches for me. My heart lifts. Then, she frowns as she sees the roof of the cavern above and the faces of the ishetim surrounding her. She scrambles upright. A small, startled sound escapes her lips. She glances down at her naked body, the congealed blood, the bits of flesh, the newly sewn resurrection wound left deliberately across her collarbone. She scratches at it frantically, tearing the stitches. It does not bleed. There is no blood left in her.
“What have you done?” Her voice is wretched, newly stitched. She strangles on it.
There is no undoing this.
“Oh, my love,” I say. I exhale suddenly, as though I was not aware I had been holding my breath since her passing.
“You’ve betrayed me,” she says, astonished. She is sidling backwards on the stone table, away from the ishetim, away from me. She places her palms flat on the stone, and reaches down with one foot towards the floor, finds her balance, places the other foot. The floor is wet and slippery with her blood. She looks down, still clutching the table. She retches.
“You’re alive,” I say.
She takes a step away from the table. Away from me. She touches a hand to her chest. Her heart no longer beats. There is nothing for it to do without the blood. I know this. I place a hand to my own unbeating heart to show her that I know.
“I’m ruined,” she says, her voice very still, very quiet. But she is whole and perfect and everything she has been.
I feel my anger compressing again. I reach a hand to her, to bring her back.
She flinches away from me, slipping in her own blood. “It is very dark magic,” she gasps, still moving away.
The gate is behind her. Shadows of the gate spikes are stark and black against the cream-colored stone floor. The ishetim begin to move away, deeper into their shadows. Their chains rustle softly.
“It is wonderful magic,” I counter, echoing the words I spoke to her so many years ago.
“I don’t want it.” Her voice becomes shrill. She trembles. She claws at her body as though trying to tear it apart. Her eyes are wide in the soft glow of the cavern’s light. “I am… wrong.” She looks towards me, accusing. “How could you betray me like this?” she says, bitterly. Her gaze searches the cavern, as though trying to find an escape from the cavern, from me.
Now my anger sinks to the pit of my stomach, like a rock in water. “I betrayed you?” My fingers clench and my voice rises. “We are together. How, oh how, is this a betrayal?”
I take another step towards her, hands reaching out.
She snatches one of the isheti’s knives from the bloody altar. She holds it between our bodies, menacing, keeping me at bay. She pauses, staring at the blade. There are bits of her flesh on it, her blood. She turns the knife, pointing the blade towards her unbeating heart. She looks up at me. She tightens the fingers of one hand around the hilt, presses the palm of her other hand flat against the butt.
“No!” My voice tears from me. I lunge at her, frantic. I catch one of her arms, tighten my grip on it, try to wrest the knife from her. We struggle. My hand slips and catches on the blade. I try to hold on to it. She pulls it from my grasp. A shriek of pain slides over my palm. I rush forward, grasping for control of the blade, of her hands, of her life. And the knife, soaked in her blood, and in the milky white fluid from my sliced palms, the knife plunges under my ribs, deep, to the hilt, to the bones of her fingers. Her skin touches mine, and it is warm and alive. I clutch her hands. It wasn’t intentional.
“I did not want this.” Her voice is shaking now. She looks down, gasps. She pulls her hands away from mine.
She retreats quickly. She looks behind her, for an escape, for a way out.
“Don’t leave me.” I hurl the words at her. The pain in my belly takes my breath from me. I pull the knife out. It clatters to the floor.
“This is my decision to make, only mine.” She is nearly at the gate now. She is half in and half out of shadow where the gate separates the ishetim’s world from the long, long ascent back into ours.
“I don’t have to lose you.” My voice is soft now, as though the anger leaks from me along with the fluid that drips between my fingers where they press against my wound. There is despair, and a loss of hope. I had held the hope all these many days since she died in arms, and now it cascades away from me.
Her fingers reach out towards one of the iron gate spikes. She is suddenly calm. She stands straight. “You have already lost me.” She turns. She grasps one of the iron gate spikes, curling her fingers around it with both hands. She plunges herself upon it. It pierces her under her jaw, up and through. She hangs there. Trembles. Is still.
The ritual can only be performed once. There is no undoing this.
The ishetim wail. They are agitated, restless.
My beloved’s body hangs on the inside of the gate, in the shadows. She remains in their world, has not crossed the threshold. They take her down. Her head falls askew. Broken. Bloodless. They do not put her on the stone altar. The resurrection cannot be done again. One last chance. Instead, they take her by the limbs and drag her back, further into the dark, into the shadows. They make ugly, terrible sounds in their mouths.
A hard sharp sound, like a hammer on stone.
I hear something like a scream.
I am alone in the cavern under the world. The pain of lost hope is as encompassing as the cavern that surrounds me. The pain of the wound has narrowed to a small, sharp hole inside me. My limbs are numb and my face cold. I know that I am dying. The ishetim have retreated into their darkness. I am alive, and once dead already, and there is no need for them to attend me. I wonder, if I die here, will the ishetim take me and drag me into the darkness in the belly of the world? Will they bury me alongside my beloved?
I cannot bear for us to be parted.
I do not want to die.
Even without my beloved, I do not want to die. I tear a strip from my dress and bind it around the bottom edge of my ribs, tying it as tightly as I can manage with my unresponsive fingers. I pass through the gate. My fingers reach up to touch the spike where my beloved betrayed our future together. I stumble, on a loose stone, on grief, on anger. The spike bites into me. My body jerks in reaction, and I am bent double by the searing pain in my belly. I collapse against the gate, hearing the iron on stone as it closes. I drag myself upright and begin the long ascent back into the light.
***
My body is frail and shaking as I descend in the darkness. I stop and sleep on the stone stairs when exhaustion overtakes me. There is no hope to keep track of time, but I am dehydrated and stumbling when I reach the gate. It is difficult not to see her body hanging from it in my memory. I sit and wait.
The physicians have done their best for me. They stopped the milk leaking from my body, cleaned me with strong astringents and with flame, stitched my skin closed. But the hole is too deep, and the knife that cut me was not clean. An infection has taken hold. And the physicians say there is nothing more for them to do, save poppy or mandrake or henbane.
I do not know where else to go. I still yearn for my beloved. Maybe the ishetim will bury me alongside her. There is despair. And longing.
I hear the soft rattle of chains. A shadow interrupts the light emanating from the cavern. An isheti has come for me. I try to rise. I cannot. It crouches on the other side of the gate, inspecting me. It turns its face to allow the light to shine on it. There is a familiarity to it. It is isheti, hairless, and dark-eyed, and misshapen. It is my beloved. Was. There is a ring at the back of her skull, and a chain.
“You’re alive,” I gasp. There is radiant joy.
She tilts her head, listening. She doesn’t speak.
“The ishetim can resurrect more than once,” I whisper, astonished. “You become one.” I reach through the spires of the iron gate. My fingers caress the fabric of her robes, imagining her smooth warm skin against mine. “Oh, my love, let us be together for always.”
She stands and removes her robe. She is naked before me. She wants me to see. She is much changed. There are ligature marks at her neck. A long, flat, roped scar on one side of her throat. A handful of jagged puncture marks between her ribs. Burn scars covering part of her face, and down one arm. And a delicate blossom of pale scar tissue under her jaw where the iron spike of the gate went through.
“Resurrect me,” I say, pleading.
She looks at me for a very long while. Then she shakes her head, once, very strongly.
She leaves me lying on the stone, in the darkness, outside the gate, to die.
© 2025 by Sheila Massie
3584 words
Sheila Massie is a speculative fiction writer of fantasy and horror, both dark and hopeful, (though not always in the same story). She enjoys a good sipping tequila, can’t live a day without cheese or tea, and doesn’t like mornings unless it’s of the still awake at 2am variety. She lives with her husband and her two dogs in Victoria, BC, Canada. Her fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Augur Magazine and elsewhere. Find out more at sheilamassie.com.
Bluesky: @sheilamassie.bsky.social
Twitter: @writersmassie
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