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I pulled out three forearm-long needles of reaper hair from my body.
Flesh-wounds in the New World were just that; by the time that it was afternoon, I had recovered enough to fight. I had an inkling as to our miraculous regeneration: ontological permanence.
Our souls, image-negatives of our beings, had been strengthened through the long-night, becoming more resistant to ontological change. Sort of like an immune-response categorizing a foreign body and cataloging it, the more anomalies we were exposed to, the faster we healed back to default state.
The physical world could be seen as a reflection of the metaphysical one, both interacting but the latter taking precedence. I assumed they connected like super-symmetrical quantum pairs: integer-spin binding two sides as the same coin.
Tissue mended back in accordance with the “true” object as three-dimensional euclidean-form was considered lesser than the fourth-dimensional hyper-polygons that made up our souls.
I was returned to earth from my quantum-jargon-infested musings by Bao.
“Mary, we need you at the front again.”
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It was hard-fought to get our backs to the river and set up a defensible position from the five-eyed moon’s gaze—we felt a crescendo on the horizon. Had we not had mantis-blades, our group of eight would’ve long since perished as not everyone had explicitly-offensive esoterica.
The Antediluvian weapons were surprisingly durable, being organic and all, but they did sometimes chip when I missed my mark and hit cement—the angels had started to use their wings to protect their vulnerable heads. The trick to mantis-blade sempiternity had been found by Raj’s experimentation—just stab the odd scythe corpse with their own blade and it would self-repair.
The next trick happened when each of us passed some sort of invisible threshold of slaughter in our mad dash to the closest body of running water.
Our mantis-blades glowed with the same subliminal fire of the [Termina] and then transformed before our very eyes—all twenty-one of them, counting that of the moon.
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Entity: [Paradox//Artefact]
Sphera: [Antedilluvia], [Luna], [Golgotha]
Para-class: [Red-Orange]
Esoterica: [Death-Prayer]
Hubris: [Mourning]
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Esoterica: [Death-Prayer]
Ignosis: [The esoterica of {Death-Prayer} derives from the sphera of {Antedilluvia} and {Golgotha}; establishes a commissural tract in the implanted entity matrix between the ontological concept of shape to the platonic ideal of funeral rites.]
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Hubris: [Mourning]
Ignosis: [The hubris of {Mourning} derives from the sphera of {Luna} and {Golgotha}; establishes an antipodal ligature in the implanted entity matrix between the esoterica of {Death-Prayer} to the ontological concept of grief.]
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Our eight blades were the same, linked together inextricably no different than the framework that bound bosons and fermions. The power of one fed into the other and would grow for every once-human anomaly felled—each of us gave our respects in accordance with our dead religions.
Bao recited taoist scripture from her late great-grandfather, laconic in their simplicity and yet no less beautiful. Raj didn’t have much in the way of a living body of theological knowledge so he followed Bao’s lead as she had been the first to truly embody the paradox-artefact’s esoterica of [Death-Prayer].
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Seeing as everybody was whispering sweet nothings, I joined in along with the cute poli-sci major—don’t judge. If I was ever going to shoot my shot, it was going to be in between all the violence; that was just par for the course of the apocalypse.
Aisha was a Mediterranean beauty whose parents hailed from some corner of Shafan, though I had my suspicions on Heaven, angel without wings that she was.
“Ya know any good rites?”
As ice-breakers go, it wasn’t so bad. At least, I thought it wasn’t.
“Nope. Do you?”
“I know some, lemme teach you.”
We’d be needing all the power we could get—don’t judge…
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Raj had grown an armor of rusted razors around his body from the stolen mantis-blades. Each scythe we killed was fed into our little Rex to fuel his esoterica [Sword-Logic]—no man was left behind as we pooled resources and allocated them to who needed it most.
I got nothing out of it directly—my esoterica didn’t have an object lynchpin clause—but indirectly I had made our band of bastards all that stronger.
Other humans had quickly become a rare sight, most having been culled on the first few days. Only the moonscorched survived until the [Omniglot]’s advent and even then it wasn’t a guarantee that we’d survive—some of us were still quite squishy.
Juan’s moon-given esoterica, [Panopticon], gave him a third-eye smack-dab in the middle of his glabella. It was a hollow-thing like that of the eponymous moon—downright sinister to look at, as if it spiraled down into some depraved corner of reality that mere mortals were not meant to look upon. The esoterica made the concept of his eye-sight malleable, allowing him to see through nearly any point of view. His corresponding hubris, [Puppet-With-Cut-Strings] made him insensate to all his other senses, making it impossible to walk while using his third-eye.
Mike’s esoterica had become complementary to Juan’s, allowing the quarterback to carry the skinny latino in his arms when we ventured through the day. [The-Strength-Of-One-Man] did exactly that, granting Michael Steinberg—a twenty-year-old anthropology major with jewish heritage but was non-observant and an agnostic like me—his own base level of strength.
Indefinitely.
He’d been sketchy on the details but I’d bet my nonexistent legal tender on his hubris being similar to my own—a nearly impregnable armor that held a uniquely-shaped lockhole that could unravel it to pieces should one figure out the cipher. As for what was the price that Mike paid, he lost all trace of melanin, becoming leucistic with white hair and an austere complexion like a starving angel.
Bao’s skin-based esoterica [Silver-Fish] gave her a stronger premonition sense than the rest of all of us, but beyond that and some firepower, the little dumpling was a glass cannon (don’t tell her I told you about that.)
Aisha had been a gymnast in her past, old-world life; the moon played off of that, giving her the ability to manipulate her bones to an unsettling precise degree—supersymmetric regeneration was a helluva drug to be on. She had, on many instances, used her ulna as a make-shift pipe-bomb, building pressure along ossean fault lines and then chucking a chunk of her skeleton at an angel.
Those words arranged in that order should not have ever made a lick of sense.
Anyways, the shrapnel eviscerated anything in a five-foot radius. We learned real quick to stay the Hell away from Aisha when she yelled ‘fire-cracker’. It sounded like a cat in a blender.
I was among our frontline heavy-hitters of Raj and the McCarthy twins—John and Elizabeth.
The moon had singled-out Johnny’s skeleton just as it had chosen Aisha’s, casting his bones into a crucible of molten lead; the metal weighed him down with exhaustion, trapping him in his own body. Most of the time he couldn’t move faster than a brisk crawl but when the stars aligned, so to speak—the stars had long since disappeared from the night sky after the eclipse that set the Apoc into motion—Johnny could leech the lead from his bones and wear it as armor.
Out of all the moonscorched curses, Johnny had been hit the hardest—we couldn’t carry him as his weight had more than tripled. Out of all the blessings, he’d been given the strongest as well—he became an unstoppable force of nature, a juggernaut of molten lead. Aisha’s bones still pertained to the human-level in chemical makeup; Johnny’s most assuredly did not.
Eli lost her tongue, root and stem. Had she not been studying linguistics, she’d be hamstrung on efficient communication during the long night just after the eclipse. Throughout our travels on [Golgotha], Eli taught Raj, Bao, Aisha and Johnny sign language while Mike and I simply polished up—extracurriculars in highschool finally paying dividends.
As for getting our attention, Eli quickly figured out how to whistle by sucking in air through her lips. Slowly, though, she was beginning to reproduce sounds even without a tongue, but fricatives that revolved around articulating the aforementioned missing limb were still impossible.
This new world was one of equivalent exchange: for every thing we lost, we gained an equal and opposite boon. Our supersymmetric regeneration did not meddle with the stipulations of our hubris and esoterica.
We were stuck this way for the foreseeable future.
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