He stared at the mirror, prodding his skin with his index finger imagining lines carving out pieces of flesh off of his body.

There was always something to remove.

His stomach and the way it sagged over his waist like a bloated boil, inescapable no matter how many baggy shirts he wore. His legs like long pointed triangles with fat and ripples on his upper thighs tapering off into these thin sticks by which he ferried himself from class to class.

He couldn’t afford the changes. Just staying employed and maintaining middling grades in his public university drew out so much energy from him.

This was supposed to be the start of his new life, new image.

He walked out of the bathroom, avoiding taking another glance at his sagging arms and muffin top and threw an oversized shirt around his neck.

It was time for him to sleep and he would not feel compelled to adjust and readjust his shirt for his best profile, whatever that was.

He closed his eyes and slept. Laz was weightless in an endless darkness with faint wind zipping through his cropped hair. The black was viscous as he ran his hands through it, looking down at a sea of stars becoming larger and larger-

Laz seized and found himself in a field of statues. There were stars above him and tears in the sky that exposed billions of blinking lights cast in cosmic hues. The air was intoxicating and euphoric, a faint buzzing in his lungs filling him up with excitement over each drawn breath, eyes dilating and focusing on the scenery around him.

Each statue was more magnificent than the last, all cast in glossy stone and flesh with defined muscles and jaw lines. Each piece stood in front of a mirror and all statues shared the same forward facing view, inspecting their own bodies for imperfections as a self-sculpt. There were so many pieces caught in different poses, all radiant to the eyes.

“Hello!” Laz called out into the void above and the scenery below. “Is the artist around here?” The mention of an artist caused his neck to pivot towards the rustling of leaves around a sculpture yet unfinished, a body in transition. He moved through the foliage and found a wholly undefined specimen making its best attempt to remain still under scrutiny. Its body was like rivulets of brown puddy, forming and reforming around the head or a close approximation of one with its many vestigial limbs poking out at odd angles reaching out for help.

“Are you the artist for all of these works?” Laz asked the creature.

He felt a sharp pain in his mind.

“Yes…” It hissed for Laz.

He could not contain his excitement and was brought to tears. His feet moved on their own as he ran into the creature with an open embrace.

“Make me as beautiful as them. Please!” Laz pleaded to the creature, head buried in the ripples that smelled of salt and musk.

He felt its fingers, warm to the touch, pick up his chin to face the deformed head of its visage, “Are you not afraid of me? Of all of this?” Although its mouth did not move, it’s incredulity could be felt within Laz’s chest like a child expecting praise.

The man smiled, “You have given them the chance to be their best selves! A sculptor who gives the clay the pieces. What is that if not beautiful?” There was nothing that Laz wanted more in that moment than to be caught in this artist's web and molded as clay into something magnificent. Was he being too desperate? Would this creature sense that desperation of his and be put off by his request?

“Do you wish to learn of my craft and hold me in your heart?” The statue asked but they both knew the answer.

It was a formality to pose the question, a contract formed by consenting parties to share in power and senses together. The experience was unspeakable and so his very mind blocked out the memory. But the two were united as one with Laz as vessel and canvas both for his artist's creative pursuits.

He awoke from his dream and could feel that it was something more. He woke up to a world of chaos as those around him in his dorm halls succumbed to what he would later recognize as the Astral plane.

And what luck Laz had that he met his kindred on the night of the Schism.

The rest of the world struggled to wrap their head around the innumerable wonders this Schism had caused but he had a purpose now and this pursuit was in art and honing that craft for their mutual amusement. Like a curious child, Laz took to his hands and in front of a mirror gingerly sculpted sections of his body.

He indulged. The fat that hung on his side was rolled up into a ball of putty in his hand. The flesh felt like lumps of clay to him. The work was inaccurate but he set the unwanted remains to the side and attempted to sculpt himself the way the statues in his dream were. Muscles were moved and organized in small amounts at first but the pain and fatigue hit as soon as a deeper rearrangement of his body took place and he was forced to stop. He was still incomplete but this was a start.

He could look himself in the eyes now, those dark circles staring back at him with a passion to do more.

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His body was going to be the magnum opus but he needed more experience. There were more canvases walking outside of those halls, disquieted by the way their meat held together and he would be the one to give them a helping hand.

And so they did.

Creatures at first, squirrels and rabbits they could trap in the wilderness with rudimentary traps fashioned with assistance from manuals in a library. Threading each sinew on its forearms into its hindlegs and hoping for a kangaroo to form. Expanding the skin underneath the squirrel's arms and running bones for structure so it could join the birds in the sky.

Laz would confess that these were quite primitive opening pieces and not quite deserving of a gallery slot but all bad art portfolios are stepping stones into bigger and better things. They taught him the importance of preparedness, housing balls of flesh in saran wrap in his repurposed art bag for additions. An artist was more than just a removal of what their subject was or in the shifting of their canvas; they required the ability to add and manifest new additions.

And Mitch was the first piece of art he could consider beautiful, the culmination of his initial study put to work. A quiet and standoffish man living at the edge of the dorm house with no roommates and few friends. The two would converse and commiserate about classes and life in the communal hall and soon after the Schism, found small kinship with one another about the end of their former world. He would offer the poor boy a gift, make him so beautiful as to fundamentally change the course of his life for the better.

Laz knocked on his door in the dead of night and invited himself inside Mitch’s room with cookies and a smile.

It did not escape his attention that soon after the Schism, Mitch gave Laz’s body more consideration and inquired pointedly ‘how one could slim down so fast’ without some aid or trick. That night he gave Mitch the answer he was looking for as his hands dug into the boy's sinews and molded a proper upper body. The initial shock left him more pliable for shaping and his startled face waking up and discovering a form befitting a friend brought tears to Laz’s eyes each time he thought about it.

Mitch certainly agreed with tears of his own.

Life was a sequence for Laz, a series of starts and stops where an older him would die with the last project and a new one would begin when either he or his mentor took inspiration and sought their materials for the next piece. Each project gave him the insight needed to mold his ongoing project over and over, getting the tones in his muscles or the wrinkles on his skin just right.

Laz was sure to be careful. He needed to be under those times to avoid scrutiny and detection, at first taking a job as a salesman for a business company that sold management software to middle managers, an egg within an egg. And when the infrastructure finally failed with the presence of Incants as brigands and gods over a powerless underclass of humans, becoming a drifter in a disconnected world and taking odd jobs to feed himself became his life. The profession was irrelevant, his performance meeting the threshold for continued employment while giving him the liberty to find new canvases to immortalize and new sceneries to be inspired by was what mattered to him.

After several years, the two felt he was honed in his craft. The act of transformation and transfiguration gave Laz a rush all of its own, something he couldn’t admit to his mentor for fear of losing the abilities to continue his expressive activities.

They grew more competent by contracting additional tools for their art. A man made of strings who could force others to dance to your own tune. A decomposing woman who could call on the dead and breathe into them cold life. A ball of light that would shine ethereal scenes into the world with such vividness and clarity. A bundle of masks on a floating robe that altered his visage when facing others.

His mentor led him through the Astral plane to these disparate and misunderstood folk and they were given his bosom as a place of refuge and understanding. They were his critics, his muses, his family, offering themselves within him and he reciprocated by channeling their passions into the physical world.

Throughout his ventures in a crumbling United States, the world morphed into something magnanimous and unrecognizable.

Decades spent in a blissful communion between art and artist that it wasn’t until Laz saw himself in the mirror that he experienced a crisis like no other. The effects of his art on his body were made more apparent with the passage of time, the malleability of his skin to his fingers becoming less pliable. The foundation of his form was hard and cracking in places, incapable of being adjusted and only added onto like some patchwork kindergarten creature.

He was ugly. All over again he felt that disgust, the inescapable feeling of imperfection. But there was more power to be had. A power to give him back his beauty was all but guaranteed in that wondrous land. The rest of his family agreed with him, their internal thoughts streaming through his mind as impulses and visions for what to do next and where to go for answers.

They agreed that he would not be strong enough to subdue a creature with sufficient power to revitalize his body but that hadn’t stopped Laz before.

“You will need to barter,” The familiar hiss of his mentor began to explain while Laz sat at a diner waiting for a cup of coffee, “You must create an entrance for this being into your world and offer them a contract and the materials they’ll need to perform the task.” His mentor’s capacity for speech had improved substantially over the course of its observance of the human world, an internal transformation that Laz was proud to have facilitated.

“And how would you suggest I do this S.C.?” Laz asked his oldest friend.

“Bind them. Tether and tie them here and give them the rope to go back for their favor.” The only other companion of his who could speak, the Puppeteer creaked out their solution as a forgone conclusion.

“This favor must be bartered for… the consequences for a forced favor are unpredictable.” S.C. shut down all discussions of a violently coercive approach.

“I will do anything necessary, dear friend. Just give me the task and our will shall be done.” Laz mumbled the plea under his breath, readjusting the scarf around his face out of habit. It wasn’t necessary but consoled him all the same.

“What you need to bring to the table must be proportional to the request; do you simply want to make this current form pristine or do you wish to evolve, over and over again?” S.C. asked Laz.

The thought of looking at himself in the mirror disquieted him a great deal. Would he grow tired of what he saw on the other side? Maybe this body was just a staging ground for something better, something new.

“I want to mold a new project. Over and over again.” He replied quietly. The rest of the family inside of him swirled with anticipatory glee and excitement.

“Good. We need to find a stage to welcome our guest,” S.C. gestured for Laz to stand up and walk out of the establishment, “And find participants willing to donate their youth to the cause.”