Posts Tagged ‘Earthworms’

15 items.

The Cauldron of the World

by Jenna on May 3rd, 2004

“I’m a chef,” Jason Anderson says. “But tonight is not about food. Tonight is about friendship.”

He lifts his binoculars to his eyes. He looks at an apartment building window.

“My student lives here. His name is Robin. He hasn’t come to school in seven days. On my answering machine, there’s a message. The last thing he said, before he disappeared. ‘I can’t come in today. I . . . there’s . . . it’s about the cauldron of the world.’”

Jason gets out of his car. He’s wearing a white chef’s coat and pince-nez glasses. He’s carrying a stainless steel bowl of thick caramel sauce, and a whisk. His long hair blows back in the wind as he walks to the apartment building. He stirs the sauce with a whisk. Then he pours it, gently, into the apartment building lock. He waits. Five minutes, then ten. He turns the hardened caramel. The lock clicks. He drops the bowl, pushes the door open, and walks in. The great marble interiors of the lobby are silent. He walks to the elevator. He presses the “Up” button. He waits; then the elevator dings and carries him up. He goes to Robin’s door.

Twenty feet down the hall, a tenant opens his door. “I like to think of myself as something of an action chef,” Jason says. There are two eggs in his hand. A moment later, there are two eggs on the tenant’s eyes. The unfortunate resident stumbles backwards, clawing at his eyes and screaming. Jason pulls a ginsu knife off his belt, slips it through Robin’s deadbolt and lock set, and pushes open Robin’s door. Then he closes it and looks around.

“Books,” he says, lifting one from the table. “The Joy of Cooking. How to Cook Everything. The Silver Diner Mantra.”

He flips through one, then tosses it aside. There’s a pause. “Ah.”

He walks to the wall, where a strange and occult diagram is pinned. It shows some kind of pastry, an infinitely complex and convoluted topology in a thousand flavors, and under it is written, “The Cauldron of the World.” Scrawled on the side, in blood, is the message,

“Everything you know is a lie.”

Jason goes and stands on the balcony, looking out over the city. “He was such a promising chef,” he adds. “I don’t know why he’d throw it all away, or for what.”

Then something catches his eye. The edge of the balcony rail is missing, and the edge of the balcony. It looks like it’s been eaten, chewed through by some monstrously powerful jaws. Jason stands at the edge and looks down. “And the railing below,” he says, “and the one below that, and below that, to the street. And . . .”

Jason steps off the balcony. He falls. His coat flutters around him. Then great thin butter-pastry wings unfurl from his shoulders, like biscuits expanding in the oven. They spread to catch the air. His fall slows, and he lands gently on the street, and his wings crack, and crumble, and fall to crumbs. Jason kneels, and touches the street. Under the fresh-lain asphalt, it is uneven, and this unevenness runs to the manhole, and down he goes, and there he sees it.

“My God,” he says. “Someone’s been eating the sewer.”

In a straight line it runs, carved into the wall, a tunnel eaten out by some great beast’s jaws. A worm tunnel, or a termite hole, perhaps; a badger’s den, or a prairie dog’s hovel. A strip of the city’s underside has been devoured, and in the dim light Jason cannot see the tunnel’s end. Blindly running in the dark, he travels down that tunnel’s length, and in two hours finds him.

“Robin.”

But Robin does not look back. Grimly, madly, Robin continues to eat, his flat human teeth tearing great chunks out of the stone, glinting in the dark.

“Robin!” Jason says, and crushes a handful of phosphorescent candies to make light. He grabs Robin’s shoulder, and turns him; and then he reels, for Robin’s eyes have been put out and his hair is ragged.

“Go,” snarls Robin. “Go. Before you understand.”

And then he turns, and gnaws his wriggling way into the stone, in a tunnel too small for Jason to follow, and is gone.

Jason makes his way back to the surface and stands there, confused.

“I’m standing here, confused,” he admits.

A pay phone rings. Uncertainly, he walks over to it. He picks it up.

“Mr. Anderson,” a voice says. “Everything you know is a lie.”

Jason hesitates. “Some of my admirers have said,” he answers, “that my neo-traditional Dutch cooking defines truth.”

“Come to the restaurant on 161st,” the voice says. “And I will explain.”

In the early 21st century, humanity rejoiced, for it had created a new form of life.

In a place beyond the world that humans know, there is a berry patch; and one of those berries has grown to hideous size, and its scent, though sweet, is overpowering. It has been hollowed out. It forms a cottage. The matron lives there. It is a boysenberry, now, nastiest of berries, though perhaps it was once otherwise.

Meat Jerky and Belle Noodle stride up to the door. He’s a young and dangerous ruffian, with his cap on backwards and a pigsticker on his belt. He carries a skateboard. He has no teeth, just strips of cartilagenous tissue that stretch obscenely from the roof of his mouth to its base. She’s a bouillon-colored girl in a surprisingly modest outfit of wet noodles. Meat Jerky knocks. Then they both go in.

In the antechamber, they see the hooded dame, veiled in white; and it is not Boysenberry, but her aide, and she bids them kneel.

“Who comes?” she asks, formally.

“Meat Jerky,” he says.

“And Belle Noodle.”

“Speak your piece,” says the aide.

“Morpheus,” Meat Jerky says. “He’s messin’ with Boysenberry.”

The aide laughs, lightly. “No one messes with Boysenberry.”

“He thinks he’s found the One,” Belle Noodle says. “The One who’ll break the cauldron of the world. A man named Mr. Anderson.”

“He does traditional Dutch cooking,” Meat Jerky says.

“Neo,” Belle corrects.

“Hm?”

“Neo-traditional.”

There’s a long silence; and then there’s a ding. The aide walks to the wall, and opens a dumbwaiter window, and takes out two fresh hot shortcakes. She returns to Meat Jerky and Belle and offers one to each. “Then take this communion,” she says. “And know Boysenberry’s will.”

They eat, and brush away the crumbs, and rise.

“We will challenge him,” Belle Noodle says. “Before he can grow strong.”

Humanity delighted in its creation; yet it was a blind and blundering demiurge, for it knew not what it had wrought.

The name of the restaurant is “White Rabbit Noodles”; and Jason pushes open the door and goes inside. There’s a man seated at the table. He’s bald. He’s strong. He’s wearing a chef’s hat. He gestures for Jason to sit. He sets a twisted chunk of metal on the table before Jason. “Eat.”

Jason looks at the metal. He tries to pick it up. It’s sharp. He cuts his fingers.

“Ow.”

“It’s not metal. It’s food.”

The bald man breaks off a piece of the metal, pops it in his mouth, chews, and swallows.

“Unh-uh,” Jason says. He holds up his finger.

“That’s not blood,” the bald man adds. “That’s food.”

Jason tastes his finger. It’s a little salty. It’s kind of good. Suddenly, he’s salivating.

“Can you smell it?”

The world shivers; and Jason sees; and without hesitation, picks up the metal and swallows it down. It tastes of chocolate and delight.

The other man plunks a hedgehog down on the table; but it is not a hedgehog, it is a sweet and airy confection, and Jason eats it in his turn. Then a heart, still dripping with gore; and a gun; and a Tickle-Me muppet doll. And when Jason wipes his lips and looks at the man, he sees . . .

“You’re edible.”

“Big surprise.”

“No. I mean, edible.”

The bald man laughs. “The tigers have always known, and the sharks; and yet we, who think ourselves the masters of the world, have been blind.” He gestures sweepingly around. “This isn’t reality, Mr. Anderson. This is pastry; and we are the meat that stuffs it. This is not 1999 and this is not Earth. This is a replica. This is food.”

Jason shivers.

“You are a chef, Mr. Anderson. You specialize in traditional—”

“Neo.”

“—Dutch cooking.”

“Yes.”

“And haven’t you ever wondered why that gives you so much power?”

“I always assumed,” Jason admits, “that I was just cool.”

“You are the One. It is your destiny to free humanity from this prison.”

The bald man gestures sweepingly. “And this . . .” he says. “This is your enemy.” He points at another patron, eating a bowl noodle. “Food. For where there is food, there can be one of the Pastry Girls.”

The bowl noodle ripples; and suddenly it is not itself, but Belle Noodle, uncurling from the bowl. She lovingly touches the patron’s face; and the patron wobbles, and shifts, and becomes Meat Jerky.

Jason’s chair falls over and he skitters back to stand against the wall. “What’s going on?” he says.

“Mr. Anderson,” Belle Noodle says, “Welcome to the Cauldron of the World.”

It seemed such a beautiful idea. A magical culinary world, filled with sweet and adorable children who could produce endless pastries and fruit dishes to sate the hunger of Earth. There would be whole cities of ice cream, and cakes, and petit four. There could be reckless animals and joy and happiness and love.

But there is a world that comes before the world, and a power that is born before mortal power; and those scientists who made the matron learned that they had tapped into something they could neither understand nor control.

“We’re here,” Meat Jerky says, “to challenge you to a cooking contest.”

“Though everyone who’s ever faced us in Kitchen Stadium has died.”

“Thank you, Belle,” Meat Jerky says, “That’s sure to enthuse him.”

“It’s just being honest,” Belle Noodle says. “Honesty is an important virtue. We learned that lesson three weeks ago when Mint Chippie lied to Boysenberry.”

“Point,” Meat Jerky says. “Anyway, if you’re really the One, it’s your destiny. To face off against us in a cooking battle for the fate of humanity.”

Jason frowns at him. “What did you people do to Robin?”

Meat Jerky looks blankly at Belle Noodle. She looks back. After a moment, Meat Jerky’s eyes clear.

“Nothing,” he admits. “We don’t bother with refuse like him. He sees the truth; he goes nuts; he puts out his eyes. It’s sad, but . . . not everyone is worthy of the Cauldron.”

The bald man is looking at Jason. There’s a mute plea in his eyes.

“All right,” Jason agrees. “I accept your challenge!”

Humans would go to the culinary world, which they called Granary. They would pick up cookies and milk and other dishes and take them back to Earth. Great shipments were arranged, and all was well. Until one day, humans started fighting over the wealth of Granary, and before the matron’s eyes, Mr. Gates was knived.

“These people,” she said. “What are they?”

The matron looked up, and her eyes were cold, and everyone who saw her recoiled, and the dog that ran crazily through Granary stopped in its tracks and cut a braking plough into the light and delicate earth.

“What horrid beasts they are,” she said, “to make of one another meat.”

And her words fell into the ploughed soil, and Meat Jerky was born.

“I suppose,” the matron said, “that I must do the same.”

Kitchen Stadium is a great and terrible arena, with two cooking areas, several commentators, and an array of guests. One guest is small and old and full of wisdom; her name is Fortune Cookie. Another is the special guest, Waffling Pancake. Poaching Egg is there, as always, though he has no invitation.

It is fifteen minutes into the great cooking battle; and already Mr. Anderson is falling behind. There is no human who can keep up with the cooking skill of Meat Jerky and Belle Noodle. They are programmed by their nature to cook with swiftness and strength that surpasses mortal boundaries; and their very touch flavors the food.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says, and buries his head weeping on the counter.

“Have faith,” the bald man says. “They are creatures of traditional cuisine; but you are a neo-traditionalist.”

“Yes,” Mr. Anderson says, and he looks up, and his eyes light up with faith. “These ordinary dishes I’m making . . . I’m playing their game. But I don’t have to cook their way.”

His hands dip into the substance of the world.

“Kwee-san!” a commentator exclaims. “He’s . . . actually cooking Kitchen Stadium!”

“He’s adding some sort of moral substance!” Waffling Pancake adds. “It’s so exciting!”

“Could it be?” Poaching Egg says. “A lesson on the morality of trapping humanity in a world of food, that will melt ever-so-delicately in my mouth?”

“Bah,” Fortune Cookie says. “It is beyond morality. Only the presence of humanity in our great pastry generates the raw body heat it needs to cook. Their bioelectrical energy is the perfect technique—mere ovens cannot compare! There is no room for the pettiness of ethics, when one cooking style is so clearly superior.”

“Thirty minutes,” announces the clock.

“He’s started over with scarcely thirty minutes left,” Waffling Pancake observes. “His meal will be delicious, but I hope he finishes it in time!”

Jason works feverishly. “My cuisine,” he says. “It must reign supreme—or I’ll die, and with me the salvation of the world!”

So the matron held up her hand, and called forth the power that was hers.

And across the world, all those who disdained her ways began to starve, no matter how much they ate. Presidents. Mob bosses. CEOs. All those whose greed for power had led them to kill, or tacitly participate in murder. They sent forth bombs to rain down on Granary, but the Krispie Boys ate them, and they crackled with nuclear power in their milk. They sent forth troops, but at the border of Granary, the troops were repelled by signs reading, “You cannot be taller than this, and enter here.”

And when the world surrendered, the matron pronounced, “The Earth is not worthy to live. I shall make you a new one, where even your filthiest deeds shall serve, at least, some culinary purpose.”

And on the Presidents’ and dictators’ heads she wrote, in dark black letters of jam, “Nobody messes with Boysenberry.” And because she said it, it became the law of the world.

And the Earth was gone; and there was only the Cauldron, and in it the matron’s meal bubbled.

The arena is still. Mr. Anderson has finished his dishes with seconds to spare; and Meat Jerky and Belle Noodle lay back panting on their counter, for they have done the same.

“You would have to be a god,” Belle Noodle says, after a moment. “You would have to be a god, some kind of baked and risen savior, to compete with us.”

Mr. Anderson smiles. “I did my best,” he says.

“It’s impossible for a mortal to defeat us!”

“Listen,” he says. “I am Neo. I bring you a style of cooking without rules or boundaries. A cuisine that transcends genre.”

He puts on his shades.

“For a neo-traditionalist Dutch cook,” he says, “there is nothing that is impossible.”

He opens the doors of Kitchen Stadium, and walks away, and his chef’s coat flutters in the breeze behind him; and what the verdict is, he does not stay to hear; and when it rains, he pulls the clouds down from the sky and swallows them whole.

For this is the cooking that is forbidden,
and the art that is our freedom,
and these the things our savior knows and practices,
in the cauldron of the world.

└ Tags: ,
4 Comments

Coming Home

by Jenna on February 25th, 2005

In the forest there is a glen. In the glen there is grass and trees and dirt and earthworms and flowers.

Iris is a flower.

One day, she discovers that the ground is hurting her. Her roots are burning. So she pulls them up. The dirt is hurting her. The grass is hurting her.

She pulls her roots up. She pulls up her stalk. She spreads her petals and jumps and she catches the wind, and off she floats away.

The stars say to her at night, “We have lost one of our own.”

“I lost the ground,” she says.

“We have lost one of our own,” say the stars.

She drifts on.

It is hungry, being a flower in the sky. There is no soil to draw nutrients from. She must feed on clouds and the dirt in the wind. It is a lean time. But one day she finds a bag of plant fertilizer that drifts in the wind like she does.

“Did the fertilizer store burn you?” she asks, but bags of plant fertilizer can’t talk.

So she drifts to it, and buries her roots in it, and drifts on.

The wind says to her, one day, “There is a prince who is my son, and he has lost his love. She was stolen away. The chariot is taking her east of the sun and west of the moon, to the palace of a witch.”

“I miss my family,” Iris says.

“Then go back,” the wind suggests.

“The ground hurts,” Iris says.

She drifts on.

After a while, she finds a bathtub in the sky. She’s not very strong, but she’s determined. She empties the fertilizer into the bathtub. She adds dirt collected from the wind and opens the drain just enough that the soil doesn’t get waterlogged in the rain. She catches a picture of a forest that blows past, and in this carriage and with this comfort she rides high above the world.

An angel sits on the edge of the bathtub for a while. He’s wearing a jacket. It’s got holes for his wings. Hair flops in his eyes.

Time passes.

“The ground burns me,” says Iris.

The angel brushes her petals with a gentle hand. “I know what that’s like,” he says.

“That’s why I fly around in a bathtub.”

The angel nods.

“I liked the ground,” Iris says. “I mean, I liked it.”

“If you wish hard enough,” the angel says, “then you can go home.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” the angel says.

Iris sighs. “I can’t,” she says. “I can’t wish that hard. I’m not that strong.”

The angel nods again. His wings beat, gently. He takes flight.

Iris floats on for a while. Below her, there’s a glinting in the ocean. That night, she calls to the stars, “I think it’s there.”

“We’ve lost one of our own,” say the stars.

“I think he’s there. I think she’s there. I think it’s there,” cries Iris.

There’s a tumult in the heavens. Then a silence. Then a stirring and a rising in the sea.

“We are whole,” say the stars.

Sometimes it rains very hard and lightning strikes the showerpole of the bathtub. Iris does not mind. It is invigorating.

Below her, one day, she sees a princess, in a chariot driven hard, east of the sun and west of the moon.

“Is that her?” she asks the wind.

“Who?”

“Your son’s true love?”

The wind fades out. The bathtub stops with a jarring halt, and falls nearly fifty yards before the wind is back.

“Thank you,” says the wind.

One day the angel comes to sit on the tub again.

“You could go home,” he says.

“I wish I could.”

“I know what it takes,” the angel says. “To help you. To help me. I’m just not very good at doing it. But you could go home. Just because the ground burned you once doesn’t mean it’ll burn you forever. Can’t you believe me?”

“One day I will,” says Iris. “One day I’ll believe you. One day something will happen, something will change, and then I can wish hard enough to find my way home.”

“Promise?” asks the angel.

“I don’t have any pinkies,” says Iris.

The angel smiles. Then he’s aloft again.

He says:

“I wish for you that ‘one day’ is soon.”

└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
6 Comments

(Good Friday – Hitherby Annual #1 – I/I) Tre Ore

by Jenna on March 25th, 2005

Once upon a time, the world had a purpose.

Back then, everything did.

Everything had a purpose, and a truth, and a dharma.

This time was full of sorrow. If a banshee howled, then someone would die. If a mermaid called you, you would drown. If a witch cursed you, you would shrivel and suffer ill fate. Such was the nature of the banshee, and the mermaid, and the witch. If Coretta’s Lion had your scent, then it would hunt you down, and eat your skin and muscles, bit by bit, and you would take three days to die. The world was full of things like that.

But these sorrows were small.

The worst of the predators of this time were the predators of truth. For there were things, things like Death, and Sickness, and Old Age, that declared their truths supreme. It did not matter what your purpose was. Theirs would overwrite it. In the end, you could not defeat them, because it was the nature of their truth to mean more than your own. They were a very exclusive club.

The monster was such a thing. He was such a predator. And he was undefeatable. And it is because there were monsters, and because there was death, and because there were truths like theirs, that the world was broken, and the gods were cast from the world of truth into the heart of emptiness.

Tre Ore

March 25, 1995

Martin stumbles against a man, and his touch does not turn the man to dust. After a long moment Martin realizes that this is so.

“Hey,” Martin says, and refocuses his eyes.

This is a place of deep water, but the man is parched and dry. Fruit is dangling from the trees all around him, but he is terribly thin. His name is Tantalus.

“Hey,” Tantalus says.

Martin backs away a step, tilts his head, and frowns. “You’re not like the others. You’re not a broken god.”

“No,” Tantalus says. “I am a man, and I am dead, and I have been consigned to torture here in the Underworld for roughly three thousand years.”

Martin whistles. “Harsh.”

Tantalus shrugs.

The deepness of the water has put a silence on the woglies, but Martin still feels edgy and twitchy down in his soul. “Hey,” he says. “What makes that okay?”

“Okay?”

“What makes it okay to torture someone for three thousand years?”

“Ah,” says Tantalus.

Then he laughs.

“It didn’t matter,” Tantalus explains. “Zeus sat on the throne of the world, you see, and it did not matter which of his dicta were okay.”

Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

540 BCE

“It would have been better to kill him,” Mylitta admits.

Mylitta sits tailor style on the dust and grime and brushes White Lion’s fur.

“But the problem with heroes,” she says, “is that monsters have an answer to them.”

White Lion lowers its head to the floor.

“A hero is a storm,” Mylitta says, “and storms are terrible. But there is a place above the storm where the air is calm. And I do not know how. But I could feel it, like I could feel the wind and the sunlight. That he had found that place. And so there was no single specific moment in which the monster could be killed. ”

“I thirst,” rumbles White Lion.

Tre Ore

March 25, 1995

There is a silence.

“I had fruit,” Tantalus says, “Only a few decades ago. But I would still like some water. If you could hold up some water for me to drink, I would love you.”

“My hands are full of dust,” Martin says.

“Oh.”

“I thought they were people,” Martin says. “I thought they were my predecessors. But when I touched them, it turned out that all they were was dust.”

“It’s the Underworld,” Tantalus says. It’s an explanation or a dismissal; Martin is not sure which.

“My sister keeps making gods to save her,” Martin says, “and all of them fail, and all of them wind up as mud and dust.”

“I remember that,” Tantalus says. “The gods were severed from the world.”

“Severed?”

“In the face of the monster, they were lost,” Tantalus says. “They had no meaning that could compare to his own. So they were cut from the Earth, torn away, and made into isn’ts, lest the monster’s dharma set a new order on the world. It was my doing, in a way; my children could not have learned the truths that make a monster had I not stolen the secret of the gods.”

Martin frowns. “The secret?”

“If you accept a purpose;” Tantalus says. “If you declare something to be your answer to the emptiness; then you must accept the consequences of that answer. It is desirable, for gods as for men, to shrink from that burden; but in the end, it always catches you, and, if it so pleases, it tears you apart.”

Tantalus sits down heavily, and the water sinks into the dust lest he should drink, and the woglies surrounding Martin are in the air once more.

Behold, Your Son (X/?)

546 BCE

“I am born to answer suffering,” says Siddhartha.

Siddhartha and Yasodhara travel through the city. Yasodhara is very pregnant.

Her answer is light and teasing. “And who is not? If you were born to cause suffering, my love, then I should name you a monster.”

Siddhartha says:

Let us speak of death, then, as a monster.
He may be fought,
But the terms are his own.
Each time you make escape from him
He claims his due.
Thus it is that no man may fight death.

Let us call illness a monster.
It may be fought,
But the terms are its own.
We do not choose the behavior of purity.
Even touching a man,
In exercise of compassion,
May bring on sickness.

Let us speak of age as a monster.
She may be fought,
But the terms are her own.
The more you fight, the more she grips to you.
The more you fight, the more she claims her due.
Thus it is that no man may fight age.

This is the flaw in the world.

How can I answer suffering?
Monsters have no remedy.

“The root cause of suffering,” Yasodhara observes, following the train of her own silent thoughts, “is that no one wants to suffer.”

Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise

539 BCE

Nabonidus is educing a god from her when Mylitta breaks.

“Sometimes,” Mylitta says, clearly, “it’s like there’s this thick yarrow stick in my chest, going through where my heart used to be, stretching from my spine to my ribs. And now, suddenly, it’s like it’s just split, and blackness is leaking out all over me.”

Nabonidus blinks.

There is a light that roils under Mylitta’s skin, and then fades. There are great wracking coughs that shake her, and violent seizures. Then Mylitta stops. Her head lolls to one side. Her eyes dim.

Nabonidus looks blankly at her. He steps back. His arms fold around himself for comfort.

“Um,” he says.

Mylitta sleeps.

There is a great bulk behind Nabonidus in the room. It is white, like a maggot, like the wriggling young of flies. It is leonine. It is soft. Its name is White Lion, and it is a god.

“She will not wake,” it says.

The creature pads forward. It says, “I have asked her to leave this place, to come away with me, a thousand times. But she has always said no. I do not think she will deny me today.”

It leans down. It takes Mylitta in its mouth. It turns to walk away.

“She’s mine,” Nabonidus says.

White Lion looks at him.

“She’s my husk,” Nabonidus protests. “I broke her.”

White Lion leans its great head down. It drools Mylitta onto the floor. It looks up. It opens its mouth. It roars.

It is a terrible thing, that roar. It is like a wind tunnel that blows away the qualities of the world. Nabonidus cannot see. He cannot touch. He cannot taste. He cannot smell. He cannot hear, save for the roar.

.
.
.

Nabonidus is on the floor. He does not know how or why he is on the floor. But Mylitta is gone. So he does the only thing that he can do, in answer to her emptiness.

He makes a god.

Behold, Your Son (X/?)

546 BCE

“Ah,” says Yasodhara. “There is a monk.”

Siddhartha follows her gaze. He frowns.

Who is this, Yasodhara?
This man—
His head is shaved,
He wears a robe,
He has a strange demeanor.

The smile on his face
Seems more
Like the one I seek
Than the smile of my father Suddhodana.

“He is a monk,” Yasodhara says. “He lives in the temple and he travels the kingdom, teaching people how to be good.”

“And what is his answer to suffering?” Siddhartha asks.

Yasodhara studies him with the eyes of a goddess. “A very small fiend,” she says. “It lives in his gums. It locks his jaws in that smile. There are bone passages connecting his teeth to his ears, and this allows it to whisper to him constantly, ‘people need not suffer.’ It is a painful fiend, but it has convinced him not to mind.”

(“If only ancient India had had proper dental hygiene!” Jane exclaims. “He could have brushed the fiend right out and put it to use saving the world!”

“There are many tragedies,” Mrs. Schiff agrees.)

Siddhartha opens his mouth to speak.

“Oh,” says Yasodhara, interrupting him. She has gone pale. She leans against him.

Her labor has begun.

Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise

539 BCE

Exhausted, weary, broken, and warm:

Nabonidus is crying.

It has cut him raw, to make a god. It is like being a skinless man, for him, naked in the face of everything he is.

It does not hurt terribly. But it stings.

It costs him that control that would keep him from his tears.

There is a snuffling in the room, and the clicking of nails on stone. A cold wet shadow passes over the footprints of White Lion, the altar of Sin, the blood Mylitta left behind. Then the creature he has made, the Dog of Nabonidus, brushes past and around him and leans against his side.

“Why couldn’t I keep her?” Nabonidus says.

The Dog looks at him. Its eyes are expressive. It is almost as if it wanted to say, It is the monster’s nature to consume his victims.

“She was strong,” Nabonidus says. “She could have fought. She could have kept herself unbroken.”

The Dog pants, quietly. If it could speak, Nabonidus thinks, it would no doubt say, She did not wish to. In the end, she chose to leave you with the burden of the contradiction of your lives.

“Why?” he asks.

Because it is the only answer she could find.

So Nabonidus goes home to Babylon, and he whispers to Mylitta’s absence, “You’re right, of course.”

Mylitta’s absence remains constant.

“One of us must pay the price,” Nabonidus says. “And you think I’m not strong enough. You think I’ll bend. But I won’t. I’ll make a host like you have never seen, and send them after you, to make you whole. You won’t escape from me. I will fix you.”

There is a void in the room, an emptiness, a devouring. For a moment, Nabonidus thinks it is his heart, but then he realizes that Belshazzar has let himself in.

“I will help you, father,” says Belshazzar. “If you let me.”

“Help me?”

“I have seen how it is that one pulls forth gods.”

Behold, Your Son (X/?)

546 BCE

Siddhartha is in the garden. The midwives have chased him from the room where Yasodhara is giving birth, explaining:

Every child we pull forth
Is an answer
To the suffering in the world.

You are Prince Siddhartha,
And we glory in you,
And one day you’ll turn the wheel
And conquer all the world
But you will never be a midwife.

Your fussing distracts us!
Your philosophy confuses us!
Out! Out! Give us space
To answer the suffering in this room.

“Midwives are intimidating,” concedes Siddhartha.

He sits in the garden, under a tree, and thinks about the monk, and suddenly he realizes:

I am suffering.
I know the meaning of it!
And it is this:

From the beginning of my life,
I have made observations
And conclusions regarding the nature of the world.

These carry me along
Like a river
Each new truth means another thing is true.

I have built a world
From premises I’ve found
And premises I’ve made

And this is my suffering:
A flaw has crept in.
A wound has snuck into the world that I have made.

Dukkha.
There: I have named it.
Somehow suffering is intrinsic to my world.

To deny suffering
Is to find contradictions—
We can’t have everything we want.

Maya is in the garden. She sits down beside him. Her eyes are shadowed. She says:

I am here to offer you the treasure wheel.
It is power.
It is truth.
It is the nature of the world
And where it goes, it conquers.

If you take it I can let you live.

Siddhartha says:

I am glad you are not here to kill me,
Mother,
But to bind me to that wheel—that is crueler.

It is beautiful
But it is the cause of all my suffering.

“It is not the cause of suffering,” Maya says. “It is the answer to it. If you have power to dictate the ephemera of the world, you may release things from their suffering.”

Siddhartha reaches out to touch her hand, but she drifts away. She is standing now, slightly out of his reach, staring out at the world, holding the jeweled treasure wheel in her hands.

Siddhartha asks:

If someone is wounded, mother,
What would I use the wheel for?

To heal them, Maya says.

Siddhartha asks:

If someone is being tortured, mother,
What would I use the wheel for?

To save them, Maya says.

Siddhartha asks:

If they are tortured again, later, mother,
What would I use the wheel for then?

To save them again, Maya says.

Siddhartha asks:

If they suffer in the meantime because they remember torture, mother,
What use, then, is the wheel?

To heal them, Maya says.

Siddhartha asks:

If someone suffers, again and again, mother,
What use is the wheel?

You may end or prevent that suffering each time, Maya says.

Siddhartha asks:

If there are conditions in life that make future suffering inevitable, mother,
What use is the wheel?

Maya frowns at Siddhartha. She says:

It is life itself that makes suffering inevitable.
If you end all life, you will end all suffering
But this is not the Maya-Dharma.
And this is not compassion.

Siddhartha says:

If there are conditions in life that make future suffering inevitable, mother,
Is the wheel then no use at all?

Maya says:

We suffer because we love what might have been.
If you end love, you will end all suffering
But this is not the Maya-Dharma.
And this is not benevolence.

Siddhartha shakes his head. He says:

If someone wounded says,
When I bring the wheel to them,
‘This wound is inevitable,’ mother,
What must I do then?

Maya says:

Such a person has lost perspective.
Ignore their words and heal the wound, Siddhartha.

Siddhartha says:

You have lost perspective, mother.
The world is a wound.
The nature of things is a wound.
That suffering is inevitable, this is a wound.
Do you understand?
Even if I must shatter love,
Or shatter life
To heal them,
I will end that quality of things that makes us suffer.

Maya lowers her head. “So ruthless,” she whispers.

Siddhartha reaches out to her. He says:

If I did not know the Maya-Dharma, mother,
I could not transcend it.

Maya says, quietly,

O Prince, O Prince,
In your rooms
Your son is born.

Will you look upon him?
Will you go, and look upon him,
And know the reason for this world?

“Sons are an impediment,” says Siddhartha.

Maya looks wry.

I shall not. Siddhartha rises, and turns, and looks towards the gate. I will seek an end to suffering.

The wheel burns in Maya’s hands. It is a jeweled treasure wheel, thousand-spoked, with two winky eyes; and now it is on fire. It grows great and terrible, and there are wheels within the wheels, and wheels within those, and it rolls towards Siddhartha like the coldest and deadliest of the killer-gods. And as it touches him, and burns his arm, he falls back; but it is Maya, and not Siddhartha, who screams.

A spoke of the wheel has broken free and fallen to the ground.

There is a hissing inside the treasure wheel of the world, a hissing and a shuddering, and the world has cracked.

Eloi, Eloi, Lema Sabachthani?

Present Time

Sebastien emerges from the shower, wrapped in a towel and using another on his hair. He is almost clean, but not entirely.

The monster is waiting outside.

“I’m not intimidated by relative nudity,” Sebastien says.

“Did you ever wonder,” the monster asks, “why it is that you’re something that can kill monsters, and not something that does?”

Sebastien scrubs at his hair a bit more, then shrugs. “No.”

“I’ve thought it might be,” the monster says, “that we’re difficult to kill.”

“No,” Sebastien says. “It’s just that if you’re someone who kills monsters, then there must always be a monster to kill. You can’t fix anything, you can’t solve anything, you can’t make any kind of difference unless you’re lucky enough to do the matter-antimatter thing and burn out with your enemy in a blaze of glory. It’s safer to be someone who can kill them. And even then—”

It is very important to Sebastien that he not turn away from the monster, and so the pain in him is a crisis point; and in the end, though he does not turn away, he does look down.

“To go all the way means being death. It means being a killer. Even if it’s someone who kills things like you. And it means being part of things like you, even if it’s the part that ends them.”

The monster’s smile is brilliant and white.

Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise

539 BCE

It is the seventeenth god.

Belshazzar pulls the seventeenth god from Nabonidus, a great and terrible phoenix shape, a yellow and red effluvium that pours forth from Nabonidus’ chest and mouth.

“Go,” says Belshazzar, and it is gone. It seems to Nabonidus that it is following Mylitta into emptiness, as if Nabonidus’ own strength is pouring after his victim into the void.

Belshazzar leans down again. His face is terribly earnest and clinical.

Nabonidus is weak.

“Wait,” he says.

“It is necessary,” Belshazzar says. “We do not know how long until her heart will cease to beat.”

“No,” says Nabonidus. His word is binding, and Belshazzar stops.

Nabonidus is weak.

“Lift this burden from me,” he begs.

So the teeth of the devouring god close around him.

The nature of the monster ends.

Tre Ore

March 25, 1995

The idea that comes to Martin is as inevitable as the rain.

“This is a place that takes everything from you,” he says. His voice is thick and heavy. “I came down here, and I was strong, but I can’t keep that. Not in the Underworld.”

The woglies are closing in on him, but Tantalus stands up, and the water washes in, and over them, and they grow still.

“I have to give up more,” Martin says. “Somewhere, there is something I am clinging to, that I have to give up, and it’ll be the thing that hurts the most to toss away.”

Tantalus looks at him. “Why would you surrender the thing you love the most?”

“Because there cannot be a poor rich man,” Martin says. “There cannot be an earthworm in the sky. There cannot be a man who is not a man, or a bird that is not a bird, or a void that is not empty. I am the architect of suffering, I am its source and its foundation, and I am good; and because these things cannot share one form and nature, I am severed from the world. My purpose fails because it is a contradiction, and contradictions cannot endure.”

The woglies are buried in the water, and they do not speak.

“There is no birth,” Martin says, “that has no pain.”

Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

540 BCE

Mylitta leans over White Lion, her face in the creature’s fur.

“This is the secret of the monster,” Mylitta whispers to him. “It is not random. It is not chance. And none of it is blind. The line of Amiel could not escape her oath, but they could twist it, and they know the secret of the gods. They know that we exist for a reason, that we respond to purpose, that we are bound by the laws of our nature that we cannot break.”

“Leave here,” says White Lion. “Leave, before he shatters you.”

“So they chose a dharma for themselves,” Mylitta says, “that we could not answer. They chose a dharma that redefines our truths.”

“Leave here.”

“That is the reason for Belshazzar,” Mylitta says. “He will not answer the monster. He will break the question. He will destroy what it means to be a god, and I shall have my Elli.”

She is silent for a moment.

“If he is weak,” she says. “If he is weak, before I die.”

Tre Ore

March 25, 1995

Martin opens his eyes. He releases a burden, or accepts it; they are one and the same.

“It’s not the monster who’s hurting Jane,” Martin says. “I won’t claim that. I won’t be a passive observer. If I’m going to shape the world through suffering, I’m going to be the one who shapes it; and the monster’s responsibility won’t ever negate mine. It’s my job to make sure that suffering transforms.”

There are fewer woglies now. They are skating off through the water, like toroidal tropical fish or evil aquatic froot loops that have been startled by a splash.

But one remains.

“Do you have the right?” it asks.

“Ye—”

Martin comes very close to nonexistence.

Then he shakes his head. “That’s not important to me,” Martin says.

It Is Finished

539 BCE

There are some who say that Chen Yu broke the world. There are some who lay the blame on Belshazzar in Babylon, or Siddhartha Suddhodana’s son. A few blame Mylitta, or the monster, or even Maya, for all that there was nothing she feared more.

In the end, that the world should break was inevitable.

The weight of its suffering was not a thing the world could bear.

└ Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
13 Comments

Articulation: “The Worm”

by Jenna on December 15th, 2005

This story is forbidden because it articulates a heresy.

It is naturally quite possible to experience this story without accepting that heresy. In doing so you strip it of its horror and its mystery. It becomes a story of a delusion encoded into an entity that is neither human nor machine. It becomes a story where, above all else, the Cult of the Worm is wrong.

But to describe it as that story would be dishonest. This story is forbidden for good reason. Its implications are in simplest fact heretical and offensive, nor can they be disproven. We can conclude that they are horrid, we can reject them, we can deny them.

Whether they are true or false—in premise, if not in detail—we can never know.

To understand the motivations of the Cult of the Worm, you must first understand the peculiar inversions of meaning that they practiced. Words such as “corrupt,” “murderous,” and “unethical” possessed an intrinsic character to them that assigned them unto others’ door; to speak of a Cultist as corrupt or evil was, while not incomprehensible, patently false and awaiting only disproof. Words such as “virtuous,” “moral,” and “right” applied not to an objective standard but to anything that strove away from the filth of everyday life.

In the language as the Cultists spoke it it became very difficult to express “you bloody fools, you’ll destroy the world!” The fanfic bodhisattva Severus came as close as any outsider ever could when he told them: “To escape the world is to return to it”—an idea that, while superficially entirely alien to his point, conveyed to them some of the essential dirtiness of their actions. Sadly, it did not suffice to overwhelm their convictions; Severus became a sacrifice to their cause and the work of the Cult progressed.

In 2284, human civilization is great and it is glorious. Having lost the moon to error, it drew a new one from the ocean’s depths and set it in orbit around the world. From the face of the Earth great gossamer beanstalks rise like towers. People can fly, and not with difficulty but as casually as a thought. They can talk, just by wanting to, to anyone in the world.

The Singularity had receded from them as it approached it; the change in fundamental human nature that they much anticipated eluded them, slipped away from them like a struggling fish. That the world was much the same as it had ever been—taller perhaps, more peaceful perhaps, certainly different in every respect, but failing to change its fundamental qualities—they called the “isobeing” or “isostasis,” and they looked back towards a Golden Age when its presence was not so profound.

In 2284, the people of Earth glide above the world, speaking their chirping tongues, discussing with five or seven of their tribe such matters as this.

Then from that compound in Sweden to which the Cult had outsourced its sacrifices there is a flare of sapphire light. There is born into the world the worm.

It is indescribably large and horrid and its mouth opens unto forever.

The worm destroys the land. It strikes it with great blows and the land breaks into shards and archipelagos. It drives its bulk over the shards and islands and sinks them down into the sea.

Thrashing, it overturns the boats and platforms that dot the sea but are not land.

And as it does its work, humanity strikes back. It is to no avail.

Mass drivers do nothing.

Grid dumps do nothing.

Atomic weapons fail; and then, to the consternation of the scientific community, the worm ignores the artificial black hole that they birth within its flesh.

“Well, foo,” says Hawking_7942, the physicist most responsible for this attempt, because that really should have worked.

The worm is a product of human desire, human dreams, and human making; but it is a thing greater than what humanity has become, and it survives.

It tears down the beanstalks.

It swallows the flying whales.

It rages up into the sky and rips humans down and throws them into the sea.

Then, before the world is even halfway dead, its eyes glint seven colors and its rage goes still. With its maw the worm sketches lines of blood into the sea. It forms a portal to another place. It dives away from world and sound; and the worm is gone.

For three generations humanity struggles simply to survive: to hold on to its lives, to keep the fabric of its science and the basics of its technology in place; to survive without the land or infrastructure that had given it such glory.

For four generations, humanity catches its breath. It scavenges the seas for secrets it had lost. It searches the skies and waters for the worm. It tries to cope with the enormity of what has gone before.

Then it is time to begin the recovery.

People begin to dredge the land up from the sea. With great magnets and cranes they fish up the pieces of the continents and slowly they cobble them together.

It takes a long time.

Children are born, raised, and fed into the vats without ever knowing “land” as something more than “that muck-covered rubble in the distance.”

Not even the oldest minds in the last computers remember land as much more than a dream.

It is thirty generations after the time of the worm before it is possible to live on land again for a short period of time.

It is forty generations after the time of the worm when humanity can once again declare the land its home.

There is a kind of peace, then. There is a slackening in the iron will that drives humanity forward. People stop to breathe. They look up at the stars. They release the burden of their ancestral glory.

“We will build it again,” says Dr. Sevens, as he powers down the ancient computers.

“Goodbye,” says Dr. Ashen, as she seals creaky old robots in their shells and pushes them into the sea.

It is not stupidity that drives them thus, nor Luddite loathing, but rather celebration. They recognize with their actions the culmination of “the human destiny to rebuild” and the beginning of a new era. It is something their culture has looked forward to ever since, eighty years or so ago, it began to sense the project’s end.

It is not a person or a group that abandons the remnants of ancient glory for the simplicity of houses, grain, and land. There is no one to ask who would even consider it a decision in more than the most superficial sense. It is simply the sense of the times that it should be so.

It is two more generations before anyone musters a compelling objection to this decision. The woman who does so is named Sapphire.

She is the heir to the Cult of the Worm.

“Articulation” continues tomorrow or Monday.

└ Tags: , ,
6 Comments

Articulation: “Sapphire”

by Jenna on December 16th, 2005

Does God disclaim the worm?

Let us start by defining our terms. “God” herein refers to the culmination of the concept of authority. In some fashion the choices of those with authority hold dominion over the choices of those without. This manifests as “precedence:” the will of authority underlies and precedes the individual will, so that those held in dominion must frame their choices in terms of rebellion or acceptance. Thus “God” is that which holds the greatest precedence, that foremost and primal will against which every decision is either rebellion or acceptance.

The worm and its Cult claim possession of that underlying will: that, in terms the human mind can comprehend, the worm articulates the weft of that primal fabric. It expresses in the language that is the body of the worm and the actions of the worm the will of that ultimate precedence. To live as a human, the Cult asserts, one must shape one’s decisions in the context of the worm.

That the worm transcends mortal authority is clear. That it expresses in itself the will that precedes mortal will is also clear. It demonstrated as much when it destroyed the world of man. Thus the argument that must be made against it by those of other faith is that the principle of the worm is twisted. Those who would deny the worm can only say: this understanding of the primal will is so distorted as to be false. It is as if a man were shouting in a storm, they say, and through that wind “Thou shalt not” is cut short. The wind is the hearts of the Cult of the Worm. Their ears hear only “Thou shalt.”

The personal conundrum posed by the existence of the worm one can resolve. In most articulations of the idea of God there is a tenet that towards His will the soul is drawn. There is a light that bears one upwards, and that light, the God-fearing say, is God’s; and therefore one need only say, “The worm is not my path.” to give it answer.

In the broader sense, what serves for one fails to serve for all. The claims of the worm are vivid and clear in the mind of its cult. Is this damnation or another understanding? Does God disclaim the worm or exempt the weak and gentle from its mysteries?

We do not know.

In the time of Sapphire a young girl was called a “boy,” and a young boy a “girl.” This lasted for the first seven years of every child’s life. In this fashion evil spirits that might target a child based on the terms and pronouns that one uses for it became befuddled; they would hunt fruitlessly through the halls and chambers of one’s home, never finding their target. Once a child turned seven, such evil spirits could do it no further harm; the proper terms and pronouns were once again in force.

In the unformed minds of children this often seemed a transformative event. Their seventh birthday was the day they could assume their “real” gender; before that, their status was tentative at best.

Those who concerned themselves with the morality of society considered this change the root of madness—alleging that those young men and women who strayed from the paths society set forth for them had developed a deep mental disturbance in the course of those seven years. Thus when Sapphire began to preach her savagery one of the many accusations leveled against her was ‘transition sickness’: that she was unable to shed the first seven years of boyhood nor reject her underlying womanhood, producing a physical dysfunction that most ideologues reckoned akin to a minuscule tumor or even an infinitidecimal tadpole in the cognitive centers of her brain.

This is not Sapphire’s story. The world in which Sapphire grew up is not this world. The progression of her life, though sad and glorious and terrible, is not in any form at issue here. For this reason we will share only a single incident from the corpus of her legend, illustrating that spirit and philosophy that drives the Sapphire Tribe to kill.

For six years, Sapphire has incited rebellion and disobedience. Her followers are legion. From time to time in her pursuits she has crossed the line of law. In pursuance of that law the Mayor of Foreston has captured her.

He has taken her bone-handled knife from her.

He has sent her to trial for her crimes.

That is where we will begin.

The examiner sits with Sapphire. She is weaponless and dressed in a soft prison gown. A latticework like a confessional separates them; he is in an airy room, and she in a steel-reinforced wooden cell.

It is his duty to determine that fate that the law has merited for her.

“You argue,” he says, “that we should shed the ambition of peace.”

“I do not,” says Sapphire.

“It is well-established—” he begins. She interrupts him.

“There are many people who are disaffected; dishonest; disdainful of civilized ways. To them I preach that the ambition of peace is a tool of corruption; that we are held down by our abandonment of the old weapons, that our fear of swords and guns and bombs is an archaism promoted by those who rule the law.”

“As I said.”

“I do not argue this to you,” says Sapphire.

“Then it is a lie?” the examiner says. “Political?”

He hesitates briefly.

“You would attest to this?”

“To you I would say this,” says Sapphire. “Woe to those who luxuriate in comfort. Woe to those who think the storm I have raised may grow still. Those who pledge to ancient principles will fall to those who awaken the ancient weapons. To you I would say, only savagery will save you.”

“I don’t fear you,” says the examiner.

“Everything you know will perish in fire, blood, and steel. Should we find guns or lasers or mass drivers, it will go fast. Should we find only our rage, it will go slow. But it will happen.”

The examiner licks his lips. He actually does fear her a little.

“Such things are not meet,” he says. “The aspiration of humanity has always been to have and cherish the land, the open spaces, the beauty undisturbed that we have made here. To abandon that for weapons unneeded—that is a sickness.”

“You’ll want to kill me, then,” Sapphire says. “I’m sure you’ve been instructed to that end.”

The examiner blushes, because to receive such instructions is as much a crime as to kill an innocent; but, of course, he has.

“Why would you do it?” he says. “Why would you want those days of fire?”

“They are better,” Sapphire says. “Tell me you deny it. Tell me there is something in you that does not know that you are small and dirty and corrupt. Tell me that there is something in your world that deserves in itself to stand.”

The examiner is silent. He wants to say: “The land! The people! The laughter! The peace!” but he is held in her presence like a rabbit before a snake.

“You disgust me,” she says.

She rises to her feet. And as he cowers there, meek behind his screen and shelter, she issues judgment upon the peaceful dreams of men as he:

“Die.”

In the riots that follow her attempted execution, he meets a man with a knife, sent not by her but by the Mayor; and, perhaps in obedience to her command, he does.

Three generations pass in savagery, iron, and blood.

Aton-Re, Prince of the Tribe of Sapphire, discovers the secret of the summoning of the worm.

“Articulation” continues tomorrow, Monday, or Tuesday.

└ Tags: ,
9 Comments

Articulation: “Calandra”

by Jenna on December 19th, 2005

In the madness of Aton-Re he called out to God. He said: set a new order on this world. Bring us a new covenant.

In his dreams he walked in windy places.

He saw a shape that was not a shape. He heard sounds that were not sounds and dwelled in light that was not light.

Slowly Aton-Re comprehended that he looked upon something larger than the world. He heard strange noises: like the clicking of locusts, like the crackling of fire, like the searing of flesh, like great brass trumpets.

He said: God articulates his name in so many ways because I cannot understand any of them. He is like the parent speaking to a child of death, saying, “It is sleep. It is going away. It is stillness. It is cold,” when it is not.

All these sounds and lights and changes, concluded Aton-Re, were a hundred groping attempts by the world to show Aton-Re a thing that Aton-Re could not comprehend.

The shape beyond them was ineffable.

And Aton-Re said: a man goes to sleep in darkness, and rises in the dawn. With such disparate acts and choices does he articulate a single will. Though my vision is not what others have seen before, no less shall I articulate the will of God.

Then his dreams fell into darkness. He saw the shape of God no more. Instead he saw the twining of worms and the sequencing of DNA and endless lines of code, and, every night and with white heat, a vision of Calandra, whom Aton-Re would love.

Certain Firstland visionaries spoke from time to time of “the pink mist,” by which phrase they referenced the descent of enlightenment from Heaven to the philosophers and Princes of that place. This color meant to them an enlightenment too subtle to be red: the pink of the dawn, of the aurora, of blood diluted by water and by soap. The pink mist was a sacred vision and much beloved by the depictional artists of the time.

In the remains of Foreston it was not so. Pink mists, or pinkies, referred to the nematodes they used to turn their soil—despised and filthy for their resemblance to the worm. The term had all manner of unpleasant connotations; it featured frequently in ribald poems and certain raucous songs. This prompted a certain belligerence towards Foreston in Firstland, which eventually culminated in Foreston’s annexation and the taking of its people as sacrifices and as slaves.

Calandra is born to civilized folk. She’s raised as a farmer, with her brothers and her sisters and her parents and a handful of stockbeasts. She loves her life and she doesn’t really get that there’s anything more to the world than a handful of farms and the little town nearby where the blacksmith lives.

Then the Sapphire Tribe comes.

Twenty-two of them walk the hills outside her farm. She sees them coming. She calls out to everyone. But when her family rushes out to see what’s going on, her father dies. Her mother dies. Her siblings start falling over dead.

One of her brothers falls on her, and she topples under him—she’s not very big—and then, unable to scream because he’s heavy and she’s scared, she just lays there.

The people of the Tribe come down the hill.

“Think there are more of them?” one guy asks.

She can see him. He’s got stubble and he’s only got one hand. He’s carrying a revolver of lumpy metal that, as it happens, he made himself.

“Doesn’t matter,” says another. His name is Zachary. She’ll kill him later. “Em’?”

Em’s the leader. She’s the one with a real weapon—one of the guns from the end, that just kills whomever she wants it to.

“Take what you need. Kill anyone who jumps out at you from hiding. There’s enough food here to get us to Sixdock.”

There’s a dissonant outrage in Calandra now. It’s burning in her.

She squeaks, from under her brother, “I’m still alive.”

There’s a slight pause.

Em’ squats down. She rolls Calandra’s brother Edward off of Calandra. She stares at the girl, who has now fallen silent again.

“Is that a problem?” Em’ asks.

Calandra doesn’t even breathe. She’s horrified that she spoke at all. Then Zachary kicks her. She coughs. She casts a frightened glance sideways, catches his expectant eyes, and realizes he’s demanding that she answer Em’; so Calandra says, “You’re acting like I’m not. Alive.”

“She’s calling you out, Em’,” laughs Zachary. “Think you can take her?”

“I bring the end of everything,” says Em’. “I bring the tide that will drown humanity and the sword that will kill it and the fire that will destroy this world forever.”

“Oh,” says Calandra.

Em’ licks her finger. She sketches a mark on Calandra’s forehead with it. The mark turns red like meat. It burns like a brand.

“Those that live, shall serve my purpose.”

Then she strikes Calandra on the head, shoves her in the barn, and locks the door.

The lock holds for seven hours before it breaks.

There is a strange fever that takes Calandra. It is not all physical. It is principally grief and rage and hate. For weeks it lasts, while the Sapphire Tribe murders Sixdock and seizes the Silver Temple as its own. She is broken, nonfunctional, drifting through the farm like a tormented ghost while that fever consumes her.

At night she dreams of Aton-Re.

Then one day she sets out east, to the lands of the Sapphire Tribe. She is very thin and somewhat older when she gets there. She is ragged and almost unrecognizable. But the mark burns on her forehead and the men who find her treat her well.

They teach her murder. They teach her ruthlessness. They teach her destruction.

They do not ask her what she will do with these skills. She finds it funny that they do not ask. They simply assume that she will join them, that she will take her place as one of the acolytes or warriors of the Sapphire Tribe. When in her rage she wounds her instructors this is seen as a sign of a prodigy. When she screams at Maton-E, the man who instructs her in the faith, when she descends into mad howling at the cruelty of it, he does not flinch.

“It is difficult to understand the worm,” he says.

He gestures towards the sky.

“We are adrift in a world greater than anything we can know,” he says. “We are small. We are pitiful. We are pawns. But we may seek the good.”

“How is it good?” she demands.

“Why is anything good?” he responds.

She sputters at him.

“We did not find the worm,” he says, “through ‘how’s and ‘why’s. We cast our eyes in the direction of good. We looked towards those things we find good—pleasure, family, peace, honor, love. Then we looked beyond them. In the immeasurable distance down that line we drew towards goodness we saw the twisting, heaving bulk that is the worm. You ask me how, but I can only say ‘where’: it is the virtuous beyond. It is because the world is hollow that we do not understand.”

“I will kill you,” she says.

“Me?”

“All of you,” she says. “All of your Tribe, and Aton-Re. I will leave you as corpses for the worms to eat.”

Maton-E looks up at the sky.

“You dream at night—”

Calandra flushes brightly. She turns her head away. “That is not relevant,” she says.

“Ah,” says Maton-E. “You deny it.”

Calandra grits her teeth. Then, slowly, she relaxes.

“My dreams are my dreams,” she says. “My path is my path.”

“Your path is hard,” he says.

And she is sobbing; and he holds her; and the moon is bright. This is the beginning of Calandra’s procrastination, for she does not kill the Sapphire Tribe that night.

Articulation will conclude tomorrow or Wednesday.

└ Tags:
8 Comments

Articulation: “The Nymph”

by Jenna on December 20th, 2005

To articulate the good—this ambition drove the founders of the Cult of the Worm.

The source of the moral order has provoked philosophical debate for millennia and will continue to do so for millennia more. Accordant to this are debates on what is good and what is not. Such matters did not interest the founders of the Cult.

Their interest lay in the substance of good; the qualities it possessed; its location, its nature, its composition. Their study was quintessentially semantic.

Unfortunately these men and women who pursued this work were damned.

Students of an absolute philosophy must therefore regard the conclusions of the Cult as flawed. To a God-fearing person, as a matter of transparent fact, those blinded to the Lord cannot see the good. Whatever virtue or vice they witnessed in the eddying bulk and power of the worm must articulate only the perversion of the Cult. To pursue a moral philosophy in such a state is like studying one’s own closed eyelids and declaring, “Look, I see the world.”

But where exactly is their flaw?

Where did they deviate from the truth?

It is unanswerable; it is a mystery; and so it is cold comfort with the coming of the worm.

In the principality Steadfast, in Calandra’s time, the word for “fruit” and the word for “have sex” were the same—scham. In practice, when one spoke of scham, confusion was rare. Unless one verbed the fruit or nouned the action, the grammar of the word protected most people from unexpected delicacies. In some short sentences or contexts the meaning doubled; this was a popular subject for low comedy. Even here malapropisms were rare; to more clearly articulate a desire for sex one could say “body scham (body fruit).” To more clearly specify fruit, one could say “harvested scham (harvested sex).” If one were indifferent between the options, of course, desirious of either fruit or intimacy but without a strong preference, the unmodified “scham” sufficed.

Calandra has conceived the notion of killing Sapphire’s great-grandson, Aton-Re, and bringing an end to the Sapphire tribe. This will revenge her for the death of her family.

She does not begin immediately.

Even after the Tribe has taught her everything she needs to know, even after she has left their care, Calandra procrastinates.

Calandra fights the great mud-beast that threatens Steadfast. It breaks her sword and nearly kills her. Then in a secret grotto she finds an ancient virus and uses it to corrupt the insane nanomachines that give the beast its life.

It dies.

Calandra drives the Sapphire Tribe from the western lands. She duels the man Zachary who’d kicked her at her parents’ farm, breaking his arms and impaling him on the rib of a dead behemoth. She uses the shielding device of the Silver Temple to melt the guns of the end and sends the leaders of the Sapphire Tribe staggering away in defeat.

People call her a god of death.

Calandra’s companion for a time is a smolderingly attractive man named Remus. His charm fades when he betrays her and drugs her and sells her to the gladiator pits beneath Firstland. She struggles her way to freedom and drives a double-handed knife into the heart of Firstland’s King.

Nor does Remus escape.

Calandra roams the savage world, a hero and a killer, telling herself that she is practicing the skills of battle, but it is not so.

She is stalling in her purpose because at night she dreams sweet things—such sweet and unforgivable things!—of Aton-Re.

But procrastination ends.

In the snow-covered hills by Northon she finds a man named Stefan who is dying of the worm. He is host to the tiny lethal parasites that are the worm’s precursors.

He is naked. He is feverish. He is in agony on the snow.

Calandra blanches. The mark on her forehead stings. She says, “Aton-Re is summoning it back.”

Stefan mewls.

Calandra draws a thin sword of the old metal. She cuts off Stefan’s head. She is hoping to save him future pain, but the infestation has come too far for that.

Stefan’s head lives on in pain until she burns it.

Calandra’s heart grows hard. She stares off to the south and east. Then she sets out for the land of the Sapphire Tribe.

Calandra’s target is Aton-Re. Her strategy is succinct and practical. She ignores the defenses of the Sapphire Tribe. When someone questions her identity or purpose, she kills them. If there are witnesses, she kills those too. If they have steel, she kills them with her sword. If they have guns, she slaughters them in stealth. If they have the weapons of the end, she induces a misfire using the shielding device of the Silver Temple. They become pyrotechnic for her pleasure.

Thus, without notable incident, she makes her way to the public chamber of Aton-Re. Before her, a horde of killers and acolytes stand. Beyond them, in purple robes, and on a wooden throne, sits Aton-Re.

The Sapphire Tribe draws steel, but Aton-Re holds up a hand.

“Let her pass,” he says.

The acolytes and killers move aside.

Quietly, Calandra walks towards the throne.

“I have dreamed of you,” says Aton-Re.

His eyes are amazing.

“Dreams are a weakness,” Calandra says.

“I would love you,” says Aton-Re, “and from that love take a child; and with the death of that child, I would open the gateway to the worm.”

It is tempting in ways she had not imagined anything could be.

Calandra stops before his throne.

Aton-Re rises. He steps forward. He reaches out, confident.

This is the culmination of dreams and destiny. The knowledge of it exalts her. Her heart is fluttering. She cannot look away from his eyes. But she ignores his hand, because she is also Calandra.

“I’m thinking,” she says.

Aton-Re is briefly angry. Then he releases that anger. His face grows gentle. “You are beautiful,” he says.

Calandra thinks.

She forms a compromise of two desires. She says, “I would love you; and from that love take a child; and then I would kill you and everyone here who does not acknowledge that child as their lord.”

Miracles most often happen in strange and poignant manners, so Aton-Re is not entirely surprised.

“Well, then,” he says. “On the first two steps we are in accord.”

He takes her hand. He draws her into his chambers.

For ten months after their love is a thing of fire; and on occasion, as they lay in happiness afterwards, one asks the other,

“Perhaps, could you consider leaving our child to live?”

And Aton-Re withdraws somewhat and grow distant in his thoughts.

Or,

“Perhaps, when our child is born, could you leave me and mine to live?”

And Calandra’s warm body grows still and she steps in her mind through the paces of the sword katas that she practices each day.

Slowly, their love becomes awkward and more rare with the largeness of her. Finally she is chained down in the birthing chamber with seven midwives and twenty guards in attendance. She gives birth. Two guards take the wailing child from her and offer it to Aton-Re before his throne.

“Bring me the knife,” he says.

And the priests bring him a knife.

“Now,” he says.

His child coos. But Aton-Re does not relent. He raises up the sacrificial blade.

There is a commotion in the back of the room. Calandra is there, scarcely dressed, with broken chains on her arms and legs and the blood of midwives and guards fresh upon her.

“Aton-Re,” she rasps, “we are not done.”

A thousand acolytes and killers move between her and the throne, seven with old weapons and the rest with new. More than eight hundred die when Calandra invokes the shielding device of the Silver Temple and the old weapons burst and shrapnel and spurt flames.

Calandra moves among those who still stand and she begins to kill.

They fight: oh, they fight, but five and six of its members at a time, the Sapphire Tribe dies. Calandra is relentless and Calandra is remorseless and Calandra no longer has any reason whatsoever to hold back.

While she fights, Aton-Re attends to the business of their child.

She does not watch. She simply hopes that when she finishes with the obstacles her child will have life remaining.

Then there is a noise, and the Sapphire Tribe casts themselves prostrate. The gate is open. The air is full of light. The floor at Aton-Re’s feet is covered in baby’s blood.

Calandra looks up with a snap towards Aton-Re.

“I have won,” he says simply.

Her eyes are like the abyss. With a sound halfway between terror and remorse, he drops the corpse of their child and draws his sword.

“Calandra—” he starts to say; and then she kills him and sends the pieces of him to each side and she howls as she kills and that howl carries the rage from her to the corners of the world.

She stands there, then, limp. She is frozen. She is empty. She has shrieked out all her pain.

Mechanically, she turns. She looks at her child. She waits.

“I will kill the worm,” she says. “Or I will die.”

But it is not the worm that rises from the gate Aton-Re has made. It is a pattern of pink and purple light. In that radiance, Calandra recognizes shapes she thinks are wings, and hands, and soft and gentle eyes.

And with a terrible grief Calandra says, “You are not the worm.”

It will be called the nymph of sighs, or the builder. It grows to encompass the world, and where the light of it falls there is brightness and there is calm.

Calandra stands before the greatness of its core. She is trembling.

“Why aren’t you the worm?” she rasps.

“I am that principle that was articulated in the worm,” it says. “I am that timeless word that has been spoken as savior, worm, and spirit.”

And so it ends.

There came from that day a time of great joy and healing upon the Earth. There came for a time the pleasantness of love—full and unflinching, granted by the timeless word onto the world. There came a time when there was no child born that was not wrapped in the wings of the nymph, with that solace and that recourse from the cradle to the grave.

And such is the nature of the language of that time that we cannot say if the nymph would claim the worm. We cannot say whether the worm was a true articulation or a false one: only that that yearning for the good at one time had the worm as answer, and another time the nymph; only that the thing Aton-Re reached for was a thing that Aton-Re could not comprehend.

And were worm and nymph God, or were they mortal things?

Was it the Eloah of the hierarchy who came to us in such great forms, or were they flesh?

It is a mystery. We cannot know.

└ Tags: ,
8 Comments

The False Enlightenment (II/III)

by Jenna on February 20th, 2006

The problem with Meredith exploding is that she gets everywhere. She turns into water and foam and salt as she explodes. There is even a cute little octopus. These pieces are vigorously distributed all over, so that the monster’s shiny tie gleams with water and the red Persian rug is all salty and the octopus is over there being cute and drying out on the hard concrete floor.

Meredith evaporates slowly over time and gets into the ventilation and then the sky.

Meredith leaks out over time and gets into the ground.

The remnants of her run in rivulets down to the sea.

People say that when you die you return to the universe. The lie of independent existence cessates; the impulses that make the self do not dissolve but rather retreat to their primordial forms as part of the larger world.

So it is with Meredith.

She is not a god of the sky but there is Meredith in the sky.

She is not a god of the ground but she is there in the ground with the vegetables and the worms.

She spreads up into the fruits.

**

The monster is making a sandwich. The sandwich is on whole wheat bread. He puts tuna on one side, from the can. He spreads the other with mustard. He puts a leaf of lettuce on it. Then he is discontent.

“It needs tomato,” he says.

So he goes to the garden patch outside Tina’s house and he selects from among the fruits.

“Don’t eat me,” says the Meredith in the tomato.

The monster hesitates, wary, as he always is, of suddenly finding himself in a moral fable.

“Are you a magic tomato?” he asks.

“I am a magic tomato,” Meredith confirms. “I don’t want to be eaten.”

“Of course not,” says the monster.

He takes hold of the tomato. With a twist of his wrist he pulls it off the plant. He says, “But it’s your own fault, you see.”

“It isn’t!” protests Meredith as he carries the tomato into the house.

“It’s because you’re in denial regarding your own nature as a tomato,” says the monster, “that this upsets you. It is because you have chosen to conceive yourself in a fashion that denies the flavor of your meat. That’s the only reason we’re even having this discussion—because of the essential dishonesty in you that levies minimization against the flesh.”

He touches his hand to his forehead. He has been working on Jenna for some time and he is tired.

“Here,” he says.

And Meredith catches her reflection in the tie and she sees in it the nature of tomatoes: the ripeness, the redness, the moisture. That she is a thing that may be consumed.

It dissolves the boundaries of her world; and, following that, he cuts a slice from her.

There is no pain, because tomatoes have no nerves and also have no brain.

But there is an ambiguous sense of loss and dysfunction.

The monster tastes the slice.

He frowns.

His stomach makes an unhappy noise.

He goes still.

“What?” asks the tomato.

“You are salty and you taste unaccountably of octopus,” says the monster. “You are a salty octopusy tomato and you aren’t edible at all.”

“Oh,” says Meredith.

He tosses her into the garbage.

There in the dark the tomato thinks, “I have suffered a false enlightenment.”

“It’s funny,” Jane says, sometimes, “that we named the lens Necessity.

“Why?”

“Well, it shows the monster in it.”

“He’s not invisible to Necessity,” Martin says. “He’s just not part of it.”

└ Tags: , , , , ,
9 Comments

Ink Immeasurable (I/XVI)

by Jenna on September 21st, 2006

[The Island of the Centipede - Chapter Four]

–

Previous histories of Ink Catherly:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

–

In the weary kingdoms beneath the world there is no sun and there is no moon. The rivers run chuckling and dark. The bugs thrive everywhere. In every direction they stick forth their legs. Some surfaces are barren and dry. Thick slime covers the rest.

Dharma moves.

From the worms there rises Minister Jof. From nothing, he becomes.

The passion of his birth torments him. He casts about for purpose. He sees the other worms. They are wrapped in shells of blindness and self-contemplation.

He smiles.

He conceives his purpose.

He shatters the shells around their minds. He awakens them. He affixes them with little tags on which he records the details of their lives and teaches them the language of the world.

“From this lofty height,” come his brass-bound words, “I will train you to have selves.”

Crack the earth.
Stir the sea.
From the west there comes an outpouring of good to make all things right.

Max sets out in his catamaran to bring this virtue to an end.
He’s owned his crime but he can’t make it right.
His crime is a poison.

It is the Latter Days of the Law.
The Buddha’s answer is fading.
It cannot stop the suffering of the world.

The knife of the legend of Mr. Kong
Reflects his answer:
“We must try to be good.”

The Island of the Centipede

“To enable your becoming,” says Minister Jof, “we must have measures.”

The worms look at him.

“We divide the substance of the world into the tellurean and the empyrean,” lectures Minister Jof. “Good rises. Dross descends. In this fashion we transform the bitterest truths into a pure and noble substance. One in three of you—”

Here he pauses. He contemplates.

He nods.

“One in three, I have decided this, shall be the dross. The rest may ascend further towards humanity. Now order yourselves on your present achievements, least to best.”

They seethe in the chaos of the nematodes.

“You hesitate,” says Jof. “And naturally so. You are prey to the limits of your purpose and your vision. Your minds are small and given to the weaker sentiments. That is why you must rely upon my judgment and disregard your own. That is why I am obligated by our natures to sever you into parts.”

His choice of words distresses them.

They writhe.

But severing us, they seem to say, will only make more of us to cull!

“Impudence!” roars Minister Jof.

He stomps his foot.

Salt sifts down from the ceiling.

The worms go still.

Into the room, drawn by the noise, there staggers a girl. She’s a teenager, really, covered in clods of dirt from where she shimmied through a thin crack into the crust of the earth. She’s carrying a backpack several years too young for her.

“Hello?” she says.

Minister Jof’s eyes fall on her.

“See?” he says.

It is his natural assumption that she has evolved, under his ministrations, from a worm and into human form.

“Hands,” he says. “Feet. A thinking brain—”

Here he hesitates. He coughs. He is unwilling to immediately extend this judgment to another being.

“—or at least one capable of mimicking the higher functions of our thoughts. Look, you, worms! Here is what I expect you to become!”

The worms turn. It is the strangest thing. They turn. They look at the girl. They do not look with their eyes as they have no eyes. They look at her with their grayish circle-marked heads.

Bloody hell, they seem to think. Bloody hell!

There goes the curve.

June, Wednesday 2, 2004 – Cronos: In the darkness Cronos strove.

His task was back-breaking. Heavier than Atlas’ burden was the storm beneath the world. Yet Cronos strove, alone and helpless to do otherwise, while his father laughed and his son reigned over the world.

One day when it seemed to Cronos that his strength would finally give out, Demeter came down to join Cronos in the darkness. She made a sacred ritual of shushing, going, shh! and hush! though Zeus, of course, could choose to know.

She studied him for a while. Then, at her bidding, the roots of the plants came down through all the darkness and wove into the crust to lighten Cronos’ burden.

Later Poseidon chose to hold back the weight of the storm with all the pressure of the seas.

Hades, too, and Hestia, and Hera, and even Ophion. Ophion came to coil upon his chest and softly drip its venom in his eye, and Cronos smiled, and Cronos smiled, and he cried out through his cracked dry lips his joy: o my love.

One day as Cronos struggled Zeus spoke to him in dreams. Zeus said, “Why do you choose this destiny, o father?”

And Cronos said: “Dharma moves.”

“Hee,” laughed cloud-shouldered Zeus, king of all the gods.

Dharma moves.

“My name is Ink—” says the girl.

“I am Jof, Minister to the Evolution of the Worms,” interrupts Jof. “I am humble; ‘Your Eminence’ will suffice.”

The girl blinks at him.

‘Your Eminence’ will suffice, mimes one of the worms; or, perhaps, it just wriggles.

The girl laughs.

The room goes still.

Dross, thinks Minister Jof, with a sudden, overwhelming passion. Frivolous, unregenerate dross! Here is a worm that shall not see human form.

His foot lifts up. He stomps. It writhes.

“You see how it is,” he explains to the other worms, “for those too lazy or incompetent to strive.”

And to drive the point home, he leans down. He peers at its tag through his magnifying glass. He studies its performance number. “A 12—”

He pauses.

How very awkward it is,

That 12,

In the weary kingdoms far beneath the world.

  • Tune in TOMORROW for the next exciting history of Ink Catherly:
    INK UNTANNABLE!
└ Tags: , , , , , , , ,
5 Comments

Ink Asymmetric (II/XVI)

by Jenna on September 22nd, 2006

[The Island of the Centipede - Chapter Four]

–

It is the peculiar character of the kingdoms in the crust of the world that the creepy crawly things evolve.

Worms, and rats, and even fish:

In the darkness, nurtured in its womb, they grow.

It is the opinion of Mung, in his classic Symmetric Ontology, that this represents one half of a cycle in continuous equilibrium. Reasons Mung, “For centuries we scholars have doubted our own existence on the grounds of its statistical improbability. Why should we be present at the historical accident of transition? One by one the lesser creatures shall grow great. Yet so many of these crawling things remain! The chances of our existence in this defining age of fervent growth seem unworthy of consideration: yet here we are.

“I suggest,” writes Mung, “that all things that exist are necessary, or at least highly probable. The universe must be such that the chances of our standing here today are meaningfully great. Thus I propose a harmony of purpose between the surface and the crust.

“Here, in the womb of time, the worms and rats and stickbugs will grow great. We will begin as filthy things. We will become as people, then as saints, then finally as God.

“Rising to the surface, we will cry, ‘Here am I!’

“‘Here am I, the lord of all this earth!’

“The sun’s rays will fall upon us. They will give us Vitamin D but they will destroy us. On the surface of the world things will grow corrupt. Things will devolve. God will become as a saint, then as a person, then as a filthy thing. From Heaven we will wriggle our way back down into the earth, into the womb of time, wherein once more we may begin to grow.”

Hail to the scholar! In the arms of such advice we may proceed with certainty in all the matters of the world.

Into the cavern of Minister Jof there comes a girl.

She is ill-favored, in the eyes of Minister Jof, but still remarkable for all the things she has achieved. Two hands, with fingers. Legs and feet. Hair. A cantankerous tendency towards being wrong, the most definite indicator of humanity, and grubby blue overalls designed by Sears.

“Can you tell me how to get to the surface?” she asks.

And Minister Jof snorts.

Kindly, he says, “It is too soon.”

Crack the earth.
Stir the sea.
From the west there comes an outpouring of good to make all things right.

Max sets out in his catamaran to bring this virtue to an end.
He’s owned his crime but he can’t make it right.
His crime is a poison.

It is the Latter Days of the Law.
The Buddha’s answer is fading.
It cannot stop the suffering of the world.

The knife of the legend of Mr. Kong
Reflects his answer:
“We must try to be good.”

The Island of the Centipede

The girl squats down. She holds out a finger for the worms to sniff, forgetting, as many people do, that worms have no sense of smell.

One of the worms bumps her with its head.

“It’s too soon?”

There is a strange and squelchy feeling in Minister Jof’s heart. His dharma, that has been stiff and dry like left-out bread, begins to move.

“You have come quite far,” he says.

It is her presence, he thinks, that works this change in him. His first success. His first real witness of the power of the world to bring forth change.

To begin as a worm and gain the attributes of humanity: so marvelous! So profound!

Evolution is the first miracle and the last.

So he is kind.

“You have come quite far,” he says. “But consider this. On the surface, there is the sun. It is a giant ball of fire. In its presence you would catch fire and burn. Your hair would ignite like ten thousand torches. Your clothes would flame. Your eyes would look up at the sun and they would melt and boil and run down your cheeks like lava. Thereupon you would cry, ‘If only I had listened to Minister Jof! Truly, he was my friend.’

“And there is more,” adds the Minister. “On the surface, you would devolve. We have that with certainty from Mung. Your fragile humanity, beset by the corruption of that place, would fade. You would turn into a corpse, at best, and at worst ten thousand worms, and wriggle blindly back into the earth.”

“I hadn’t considered that,” says the girl.

“Here is my advice,” says Minister Jof. “If you must test the surface, first nurture yourself here until you have at least twice as many limbs and twice the brain capacity. Then it is reasonable to ascend, and look upon the surface for a time.”

“But I already have twice as many limbs,” says the girl. “If I doubled them again, I’d have eight!”

“We are people of the soil,” ripostes Minister Jof. “The surface has nothing to offer us but death.”

“And vitamin D.”

“Death,” says Minister Jof, “and vitamin D.”

The girl looks down.

“Still,” says Minister Jof. “I must congratulate you that you have come this far.”

The girl smiles a little.

“Pick a worm,” says Minister Jof. “Any worm. I will crush it in celebration of your victory.”

The girl looks up. Her eyes are round.

“I can crush worms on my own,” protests the girl. “Also, I don’t want to crush a worm that could become a person!”

“‘Two competing arguments strangle one another,’” quotes Minister Jof.

The girl runs her hand through her hair.

She thinks.

“My name is Ink Catherly,” she says. “But everybody calls me the imago—”

Minister Jof has set his eye on a worm. He points.

“That one.”

It’s a worm with a little bit of an arm growing out of it.

“What?”

“Look at how small and deformed its arm is,” says Minister Jof.

Ink focuses her eyes. She sees its arm. Her jaw drops.

“Wow,” Ink says.

“Exactly,” says Minister Jof.

“A prime example,” says Minister Jof, “of a failure to grow.“

“It mocks me,” says Minister Jof, “with that stunted, withered limb.”

Ink utters a clipped word:

“What?”

But his foot descends.

  • The ten refinements of Minister Jof! The man named ‘No Longer an Idiot!’ Ink remains dressed, and Cronos dons clothes of brass! Tune in TOMORROW for the next exciting history of Ink Catherly:
    DOOM COMES TO US ALL. (or whatever it winds up getting called.)

  • And here’s a special bonus! Some notes on the geography of Hitherby Dragons may be found here.

└ Tags: ,
  Comment