Chapter 13: We Have Such Sights to Show You

Layer 28: As Nightshade Wilt

“Thus, we the humans, once a lowly shambling mass, would find soul in Sol. Our Father, the Sun. He asks little in return, verily, he asks for inaction. He asks that we bear not the lights of our filthy will; that we leave it to the Sun to give us light. He asks for us to continue shielding the Moon, those fair and weak and without lights of their own to follow. He decrees that in exchange for bountiful life, we need only passively return the favor. All are subjects free from pain and prolonged misery, beneath the merciful Sun. Burn in purity, knowing eternity; the flaming wheel perpetually turns. By Hallowed Gold, amen and adjourned!”

Dr. Vepar finished his lecture—sermon? Seminar? — and turned from the podium to face me. Churned it on, postrhyme, spurted the Alraunic spoutmouth. “See now, what we do isn’t so bad. We just help people find the selves inside the shell. What they couldn’t see before, for all that… excess in the way. We cut out the debauchery of ritual and the hubris from modern medicine to create the only perfect Art under the Sun. Light where magicks and science alike are Dark. We seek nothing so selfish as comfort, nor something so malleable as truth. Instead, we will forge our own knowledge, pure as the Sun and just as limitless. In this gnosis we shall be made complete.”

“Should the Sun allow you to see falsehoods, would you abandon this path?” Augustus interrupted from next to me. He was cool as always, a sharp contrast to the burning panic I felt. The feeling of a fish in a backwater being put to fevered steam.

The ache had never really cooled, the jaundice about my brain never really went away. My eyelids collapsed, beaten past matchstick ropes that were never really there. I'm ashamed to say it; but exhaustion won.

From out of the darkness, two aphid-sized suns. Specks of glowering flame, growing yet staying the same tiny size, incandescent decay in reverse... They blinked. All five thousand and one blinked, cyclopean; and awakened from their second-long sleep as cloaked towers. In reds and yellows and blues... flower-stained madness followed with. Smeared petals on fabric seas, thousandfold unfolded sheets, hanging deadflesh, dancing about, hunched backs to my purple hands... I saw it as a worm would have; the rebel gala. The bloodied chessboard, the place I should have fit and never was, scarlet needled by filaments like glassy eyes.

I've made a terrible mistake, a tiny warble self-gnawed out from within. The kind of mistake that can't be outrun or outthought, it can only be accepted, laid upon the sprawling sea of a sofa, face to the fabric... you never notice how rough velvet is until it's up against your eye...

Sweating from the smothering candles, choking on guttersmoke poetry, I would have wept but for the Sulphur crystals growing in my brain. Flowering. That was the word. Bloom. Decay in reverse, still spiraling and tragic but growingly so, within. My soul was not atrophied, it was smothered; smothered by a yellow flower planted to compliment scarlet, and I just let it happen...

Fever chills crawled icewater trails down from my brainstem, spread roots deeper and deeper, echoing the veins. Sickened, I rejected something up from my guts... a twisting display, serpentine blooming into a puddle eggshellish.

A lizard arose from flat depths awash in crystal milk; looked at me and spoke: "Your own words will be forever smothered by othersouls my small violet orchid contradiction (it spoke this way, spittingly; despondent spurts of cobra venom, but from a harmless lizard tongue) smothered by shame at the guttering motif and the repeated words world turns not for humans but for the verminous such as yourself" and then died spreading into a rosy pink cloud. Mirrored the pillows of scraping velvet. No time to cudchew the arcane intonations—

The beetle-helmed man and Augustus looked at me, with selfsame aphid flame in their eyes and mirroring pheromone stink and pulsating vase collections in their wallet-pockets and... I shouldn't have seen it; Augustus taught me as much. He was righteous and the Healing Church was lying; but as it stood both had timebomb buds in me and I saw no difference. Nightshadely, I wept. Belladonna tears. Bulletpoints. Burningly despondent at the revelation I'd known all along.

Layer 29: Swan Eyed

Alistair slumped; Beloved and nowmine and unwanted, wilted orchidly against their sinister chains... Didn't matter so much. Lesser player out of the way freed me to debate matters of the questing and medicinal with the Archdoctor. If I'd had my way of course I'd have halfsnapped him, chitinly about the joints, and I don't doubt he'd have done the same to me... my recollections of the chamber are all like this. Run-together and hellishly metaconscious. I don't doubt that it got to me as much as it did sweet Alistair.

Still, I kept my own, that's what really matters, right? Beat back the urge to unholy Lunacy?

"Take for an example my pretty little Alistair. Passed out there in the corner. Would you really be any different, if you found out your whole cause were just... some auric shimmer? No, proximal heat... Mirage! A mirage. If you gave yourself to a mirage and knew it, how would you..." I grasped the air, dramatically, strawsearching. "Cope, I suppose." There's that old king-recalling charm.

That very same charm that chained Alistair to me, from the moment I offered them power, not just magick but a position in my dream. Tactician. Give me a break. Maybe it was before that, even—dumb little dolly stumbled in my path, alone, and followed me in all but physicality. Either way I'd had them chained since long before that night on the roof. How long ago was that? Hours? Weeks? How long had it been since I first knocked them out, planted metal dragonsteeth in veinlined fields; the forearm? How many times had they bit the bottom of the gardenbath, and then blue perfection, the velvet sea of the loveseat... How many times did they even remember? How many would they remember?

Consciously, that is. The links in your arm are circuits, Alistair Macabre. You are wired to my every whim.

Fight like the demon you are in their eyes.

Alistair unfurled suddenly, flew like a phantom to their feet; those goddamn troopers materialized from stillness to hold them down. I saw a metal glint in their left hand, as the self-defense guide decreed. Good, I thought. Their fist, lined with dull tin masquerading as brass, crashed into the fleshy interzone between metal helm and plasticky platemail . Right on the squishy neck gap... bit the Adam's apple...

They fought like I ordered, fought like a demon. Or a man possessed. Mustn't think like that; such sank faint snakefangs. Lookpast like the ghost in a photograph; added postfactum. Right? Past. Left. Shakingyourhead like I'm wrong. I'll live, the sunset behind your head and hid it; I'll remember this as a nod...

A second Trooper fell, then a third, and three converged vulturely upon the purple whirlwind, swinging guns as clubs. A violet-cloaked forearm; a failing shield. A crunch that turned my stomach. Alistair never quite recovered from that one. One brisk whack behind the knees and my hopes for them, and by extension their purpose, were stilled.

I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe after all I had given them, Alistair still failed me so. I wasn't even angry, nor beyond it, though I should have been, they had sworn me fealty and submission and failed even that... some hot ringing in my ears threatened to drown my thoughts and I wondered, a good many things, mostly if this is how they felt on the roof and in the Golden Room while they were passed out and I drowned them.

"I confess it. I drowned Alistair. Again and again. They may not remember; such is the way of things. I was stupid and desperate and I took them to a bath and washed out their soul and drowned them and took the cleaned body-copy to keep me company on that blue couch of perfect velvet... and they'll never remember it, right? But even if I grow past this moment and that urge I'll never forget. Even if I intend to repent, I'll remember, only I will remember, forever..."

Archdoctor Vepar smiled down at me. "My child. They too will remember. Even if they don't know, they will remember."

Hot static ate me, wolfed me down like the tail of a snake... the eternal worm recurrence...

This is how it always is, for me. Thus spoke a voice dyetinged in radioesque distance.

How can a consciousness stand up to this?

Our good friend... Sorry. I am the host for his Evening Majesty's August Horror Show. You may not call me, but if you must; Eye shall do... nicely. (I stole that from the sun. Story for another time, though. [A mariner yelps.]) So our good friend and sponsor and emperor here is or was—pardon, nacheinander, neccese est in this form—see also the dogshore chapter... Eitheror, byside. Some muggy serpent bugged him beneath the skin, in the most cliche of waking dreams, but too liquid to be an insect. Some giant hot amoeba, not sunhot but lifehot. Bloodhot. "The blood is the life!" Sorry. Been a while. Since I've thought of that I mean. Augustus is sick and wrong and I have, now, little enough care for his ascent (as narrative) to say so. Can we get a collection going for our sick good sponsor? [Monkeys sprout wings and third eyes and fifth limbs and screech in asheneyed ears.] I guess none of you can spare a hat or penny for the despised thinker. Shame, that.

He took a hit from a flask of golden poetry; spat it on the broad glass back of a camel. Shuddered, but unshattered; still it stands today. Lazily runningoff, drops of nectar, children are starving for time you know and here you are, oh! Self-indulging. Whotoldmethat?

I or rather a body of mine made some comment beyond thought; the old hated cliche. "We are the same."

"We are the same in all but aim, and so we are complete opposites," Augustus parried.

"Then prove it." My avatar drew a golden blade, short, square, gladius one might call it or else just a boxy dagger; and made himself apparent to the augurs. I mean he spilled his guts. I mean he cut his stomach. I mean the king died; killed himself. (Most kings do but not so directly.)

The redrobed commander wept; tears of ceremony for the death of a king. Behind the mask, confusion, cold and motionless as an unseen spring. In a scarlet palm; hollow throne. On a flamefilled head, a hollow crown... Augustus became holy that day. Cleaned by the same psychic fire that tempered quaking revolutionaries. Ascension to plasma, consumed by the light of the moon. There are no words—he took the throne.

The poor huddled—child, still? Clumped as ashy lavender under nightpurple robes, looked past the dead king, and the scarlet-armed prince taking the throne; the dramatic picture before them fell hollow. The drama of life, the play, the picture show, the story, it all just slid right by as noise bereft any meaning. But I saw the meaning and I think you did too and I think. Did Augustus? Did he know he was onstage?

My eyes were ash, I couldn't think stable, my eyes were wet, my thoughts shook, my eyes stung dry, full of dry sand, and hot, and my thoughts were tropical. My brain and gut as one a swamp. Citruscolored and tigerskinned. Lioneyed watching from the sun; too ashamed to look back or say it—that the eyes were there. They're not there you know. But they feel like they are at the worst of times like now. At the best of times I can ignore the eternal worm. At the worst it becomes me...

A voice. It's getting worse, I knew. A voice and eye in the sky were and still are not good signs.

"Rattle your saber at the great blue, lightly and raspingly, blade a branch of dead leaves and stolen flames... feeling the hilt clatter about shoots aches up and down the arm like tendrils of feverchill ivy about the bone but it’s fine... just don’t kick at the roots too much..."

None of that was or is me. Or anything I wanted or needed or want or need to hear. Not ever not never; I still listened. Fight for me and die for me if you must. Fornot your own sake but for the better world. But it will still end... Fatalistic I know but perhaps, fatalis est. It must be. "It can't be helped," would come the voice from my future. Everything rattled and I was so tired...

Layer 30: Disintegration/The Trial

The same voice. It had never stopped from the throne the dais whendidthatgetthere? Ever since the strange call-to-arms but it, then, called me forward.

"Despite being under no obligation to do so, we shall continue with your case for today."

So generous, to hold me further, and yet—there I sat, painfully silent. Shameful really. Guilty before any proclamation. Still, and still, not punishment enough... [Interjection from Oberon. This thought is what we call a fragment, and there is but one master of them. We dare not draw comparison. But sometimes wretched Alistair cannot help it. We shall see where that gets them.]

Chanted Romanly, invoking medicine and holy law, set fire to brimstone-colored veins in my head, stank like a less transcendental hallucinogen, not mushrooms but spores themselves... instigate a runny ayahuasca rot... Craven decay. A perfect spiral circling in lazy danger, lovesong, the warped record shows. I shuddered and opened my eyes and found myself in a lecture hall awash with noise... Latin babbling, and words I could pick out besides.

And so we see, objectively, the sad fact of the trap gravitational; the spilling of orchidwater upon a filthy sweater. The Addictrag. Teacher! Teacher! My Lord! Yes, frontrow. What might one intone about the orchid's. Well The fact of its shape. I'm so glad you asked [The king of the room morphs and folds.] The petals represent the phallus and the shears, the desire to return to the womb. [The teacher returns] Very insightful. [A chorus follows with.] Insightful, insightful! [They repeat these words in a pair five times, for a total of ten insights.] Perfect. Now for the balancepoint [The king morphs into a doctor holding a stack of various unread scriptures. Most major religion's texts are sandwiched between strange manifestos typewritten and scrolls of deerhide. They (the currently relevant sacred texts) smell like bubblegum that smells like strawberries; several pages are glued shut with shame.] So you see. So you see the flower is the orchidself allowed to bloom and the shears are the shadow. [A line of cocaine is produced and passed around the room in a cloud. It does not make it far before scattering to the windless air.] Indeed, the shadow. Indeed [Twentytimes repeated.]

I cried out. "Ah, das isch der shadowplay!" I'm not sure why, it just felt right on the tongue; wrong in the air, though... Earned me a thousand glares and an African Gray repetition and a cockatiel cackle and—peanuts, by way of bird reward.

Alistair never laughs. Not now and not again and not for a hundred seconds that feel... Centurion.

Bur what did Alistair know they were thinking?

Nuppebo Dogskull Orchidbloom; empty shell, graysanded corpse of sazae-oni searches for own meaning in the motif. The only work is in the papers. [Or so spoke Saturn. And Vesta; only her Bacchanalia. Vino recalls out confessionals in plentydoses.] In long and short they thought of acid (citric) in large doses and venom (serpentine) in smaller but still noticeable doses; unknown they noticed the leaky adrenal gland. Filling Allthoracia with sour smallmarsh. A tiger whined; a dying whine with burningeyes.

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I have no idea where I am or what is happening or what any of it means; only that it can mean nothing. All good people are asleep and dreaming; I am awake. Again awake, next to them, smelling hair (accidentally) and staring at the ceiling (with intent) and hiding precious botanical effects (in parentheses). I jolted awake; again, awake.

A litany of literary cursenames were screamed at me. Caliban Kali-Ma Medusa! Call Me Lilith! Serpented Iscariot! Blighted Byron. Sick skin-wearer. They came to a consensus climax; yowled a livid scarlet-fever pitch. Phantom Operatic.

Lucretia, I reflected. A flaming red apple slid into my throat; I was screamed down.

Poison! Poison! jeered the court.

Belladonna, I retorted blasphemously. Your Guy, your god, a Demon Emperor, he filthied me, declared my newborn spine. Thus Belladonna.

Belladonna. The chorus concurred; rubberstamped me euphoric in resonance. Thud, quoth the oncepounded reverie. Letters to release, on good behavior.

The wailsong booms from a single scarlet voice. Cast thee out with allpower in deified I. Thus yowled the God-emperor of computer chips and dumpsters unspoken in polite company. King in Scarlet, Lord of the Sane. He looked and acted and for all intents was hysterical, selfsame as me, but they all wordclung; rapturously adrift. All but I, newborn into exile from his domain.

Spoken in dreamy reverse:

slide into these somatic depths of little death, lose yourself to the gentle tug. be swept off your feet; laid down by the current, sluggish and milky white as a dead man’s eyes.

Link by foul link, the chain slithered into my left arm, first from within the skin and then pressing deeper; within the thin slit between Radia and ulna. Anti-birthed into being bit by bit, scraping on bone, pushing past gristly tendon and trailing white hairs. Nerves, churned asunder in the impromptu entrance. They burned.

I chose this and the blue sofa and the night on the roof, I thought, or someone thought from within me. Even despite the pressure and the starved-out emptiness, and the need to be needed, at the end of the day I still let this continue...

"You still let this continue," someone told myself.

The thought of another consciousness within my own head made me physically ill, at my own fall, at what that says about me, at notvoices but just something rushing to fill the hollowness. Turbulence churned itself out, dirt settled, I realized that everyone was constantly under this sort of societal psychic effect, I could feel normal. We are all alike under the sun and moon and stars, alike and judged in pallid illustrious eyes. It's ok. Take it easy. Settle down there. We're allwitched, make no scene. I think that was one of mine my thoughts I mean or else someone so like me as to be functionally indistinguishable...

The overwhelming tide rushed hot then, baking heat, and roaring like blood in the thin ears of the tiger who slumbers above. Tracing gently as a finger along the recalled-out scar, all other signs pointed to ritual relief that I shouldn't know about (according to again the overwhelming light-eye.)

Regardless; psychically or aurically really I began the chant; echoed off the cathedral-recalling skullceiling, the chant I knew but was never taught.

resplendent as I wilt it at the interstice/cast to frost kissed fingertips... Over and over and over again...

Purple shadows puddled in probable contradiction to the pale green glow... from behind... some softness come to set me free from the indoor sun...

The moon rained down, green and spaceflaming, the flame of rings in midfall, angelic and terrible and soothingly wicked.

Luna Elise Lavenza looked upon me, silent, but with truest pity in her eyes, the eyes once full of rain now less icy and more chilling. Fog. She had fog in her eyes.

Luna, do you remember the day they gave you wings?

Those halls full of shuddering homunculi. Yes, I remember.

Do you remember the day?

The lights inside were the stars. The sun specifically. Illustrious. I remember.

How old were you?

I had just started using the Necronomicon forums.

How old were you?

Somewhere between nine and fifteen years old.

Where is your family?

I don't have one.

Who requested you be given wings?

My family.

Tell me about them.

Why?

Tell yourself about them.

After they gave me wings, I said I wanted to die. After my back opened up and out and I flew so sorely, and I said I wanted to die, and they called me beautiful. I said something stupid to my mother. "I'll go up to my room and be alone forever and you'll never see me again and then I'll go to sleep." She didn't understand; maybe it was the drifting sickness in me or something gumming up her ears but I really hoped she would hear me, I asked her for help in such silver ways and she didn't even listen. This actually happened.

And how did that make you feel?

Like I was going to swell and burst.

What do you mean?

You're just like her. You can't listen.

What did you do next?

I swelled up and burst.

What did you do next?

I ran away.

From?

That house.

You ran away from home.

No. It wasn't home. It was a closed circle.

Like a magic circle?

Now you're listening.

No. I need to call someone.

Nonononononono they'll give me wings again and I can't have that pleasepleaseplease not again not again not again not one more time; I couldn't take it. Please I'm barely hanging on as it is if you scrape me open one more time will I actually swell and burst and die?

Fine. What did you do after you ran away?

I kept running.

What did you do?

I threw myself into hero work. That's what I thought of it as. I think it's a little foul now. To save lives for my own sake? The sake of escape I mean. Terribly unempathetic to the psychopomps doing the same, the Troopers too but they don't deserve mercy anymore. Taking lives into their own hands, I mean. How disgusting. I feel sick. Is that what you want to hear? I know if I hadn't been given wings I would have been melted down and put into one of those Trooper suits and made into a wall of flesh. Maybe there was no functional difference, or maybe that's just what they want me to think.

So there was no difference?

I became the same. Not really. I was cool as the moon; and soothing. The Troopers were a single hot swamp of rage and sour acid. But we were the same.

In the end, there was really no difference?

The end?

The end.

Are you... finally listening?

No. But you told me anyway.

I was vaguely aware I'd been muttering to myself, I couldn't do that anymore though. Now it was all I could do to keep a smallslight smile, to keep my jaw from falling off. Mandibles and muscles felt like pale strings. I am going to become a butterfly. I am going to swell and burst. I don't want to but I will.

You haven't been talking to yourself, Luna. You've been talking to the moon. There is a slight difference.

"Ah... I can't take it anymore," I realized, and swelled, and burst.

A giant thumb bust forth, smeared center mass into messy bloom...

Luna was gone, her Papillion resplendence cannibalized to ragged strings of powdered silk. Moth-eaten, and fluttering still, preserved in a tiny box with a false bottom, smuggled out of time.

Trembling fingertips tenderly pick up fuzzy remains; drop them in a soft spiral to the ground, to the trash, mercy by force...

Misty eyes could hold the crumpled husk of a hero in honored exile. Treasure hidden amidst mundane possessions; another pretty bit of nature shed and collected. A feather or the leathery corpse of a frog, hairline bones in a box.

My brain was, then, aflame, with flickering tongues alight at the recitation. And could you blame me? My hero had died, in front of my eyes, and all because I met her. I pinched my eyes shut, handlessly and sore, but still the light danced on, still wormingly pulsated a yellow-green slimetrail. A dull talon dug into my temple, squeezed a Fibonaccian beat, psychically intoning... I have nothing in my head but other people's petals, I protested silently; the eagle still picked at the liverless plaque gleaming in my brain's gray crevices. What did I do?

A voice called out deep to me, forcibly resonant with my bones; it may have been beetlehelmed or it may have been crimsonrobed, solar or wicked alight; it still made me sick to my head. Made my brain so fevered that my eyes might burst into white fire, were I to open them... Recalled suppressed velvet and the smothering sunlight...

When again I opened my eyes, the skies were dominated by a celestial body I can only call chimeric. Gleamed like the moon, screamed like the sun, red and hollow like nothing I have a name for. It was a loosely illuminated ring, a hypnotist’s instrument liberated from its string. My mind raced to put a name to this face, void of splendor and too deprived to be plentiful; but all that came to mind were still tied to that solar and lunar duality. Hollow sun. Blackened moon. New moon, burning brightest. Sun shot through with its opposite. The sky, which to this point had hung low, clouds aglow in crimson resplendence, opened up; and from the solar-parched depths poured forth a rain deep gold and sweeter than any nectar. Not the obscure and seductive flow of the milky Lethe, nor the glassy scarlet torrent called Phlegethon, but at the same time not a fenceperched mist between them. This ambrosia from out of the sky… it was resplendent in and of itself.

My hero was dead, in body and ego. The moon went away before the sun, and the sun went away for the sake of this rain.

From my hollow home amidst the gargoyles and hallucinations, I drank of the sizzling bullets, shooting me mad... Yellow crazy raindrops, kingsrobe gold, livid nest of ants... Aether began taking hold on my mind and form alike...

Spreading cloak into wings foul and feathered as a Bathory raptor’s; and gigantic... like the Roc of Arabia, said to lift elephants into the depths of the sky if you only turn your back long enough... Eerie in frosted onyx, crying oily iridescence, opium smoke of a fevered brain’s dream; and indeed, the minds of those who beheld this vast and wretched bird were burdened by its sickly weight (greater than any albatross). I was, this, in truest form, a Raven; trickster known at crossroads the world over, harbinger of plague and doom and all such things shapeless and impending; and of mind wickedly sharp as its almost hooked beak. If beast or bird should ever utter in human tongues, it ought to be the honor of this flying malice; to boldly croak forth that single word which drove Poe to madness.

And yet before my opponent Apis Titania The Fae Queen Bee and her tearing counterpart the tearless Saturn unconsumptive coldshouldered worm; Oberon, Nameless Father, Saturn—still. That great bird was food to them. The fox and the wolf, the vulturepair, picking the ragged flesh. A once divine avatar, chained, drowned, torn apart, grown fur, not in that order. Killed fourfold. Numbing scarletink punch from the King clad in the same, that was number five. Feline lives ticked by... I'm only human or should be... What's happening to me? Some node prophecybound for thoracia was assigned its own judgement. A different sentence to the toxic flower of the mountain I claimed myself to be at best. It—the egg—was named Demiurge, the failed god, the failed child, the disaster synthesis, and I was to carry its guilt vicariously.

Thus always to tricksters.

Just like on that perfect sofa, the velvet ocean, surrounded by comrades and will-less of my own, the kernel slid into me. Through skin and ribs, and choked-down objections, propelled onwards by pinpoint sentences, and notsayinganything but asking for this purpose... It was recorded all fuzzy, I think; the memories were. Once upon a baking summerday I'd placed my hand firmly and toally and completely—palmwrapped, about a metal railing. All the sweat just wicked away. My hand felt like it lost all moisture, and with it all feeling; it was hotly numb and perfect. I was an automaton in that moment. Thermally perfect. But you have to take your hand off the railing at some point. You have to break the equilibrium. I had to, it would seem, realize what I had let happen...

The hot metal wicked flametongues to my flesh.

I should have died from the pain. If there was a speck of mercy in the world, it would have severed my consciousness then and there and permanently... The world is a spiraling tragedy, though. Worse and worse and worse every time we complete the cycle. It, then, would stand to reason that something like this wouldn’t kill me. (The mind wanders to impractical philosophy when overwhelmed. Or at least mine did. Maybe just to justify it all.)

Pain alone, even so acute, would never kill. The node (wishitereanegg) lazily slid leftwards, towards the heart, the heart that despite all my attempts at stoicism and aloofness and cultivation of a naive appeal, needed someone. Either Luna or Augustus or some version of them that wouldn't get killed or turn on me... My left shoulder should have bubbled and melted away; in a more merciful world perhaps. The seed planted itself in my left hand. Augustus's chains rooted it in place, and it still burned—with numb prominence of the solar railing. For the rest of my days, my left arm would hang heavy and clean, cauterized by this cleansing space-flame. Even if no one else could see it, I would always know. I would always look at my left arm and see that desecration-in-the-name-of-purity, that glisten. Fresh fruit flayed open, glistens about a solid pit.

I drifted back into a waking harbor holding a bleary vision; vision of fervent yellow-orange highway lines (bug-gut colored) ticking by Geigerly, counting the half-life to home. Where home? Is. Dammit. I'm not some goddamn test subject. (Don't need to be so acrid angry either but my mouth is sour.) Eventually I came to, came to the door, or else visions of the door came to me. The door. Thedoorthedoorthedoorthedoorthedoor. With its little lightpeek eye at the bottom and the papery glow that it cast, darkly as anylight, as argentlight lining a witch. But it just traced the door.

Home was the same room it always was but softer. Less anthill antechamber and more human. I couldn't help but feel—iin some psychotically egotistical mind-cranny—that the room had changed to reflect me in some way. I still felt the chains in my left arm, but that's just it, I felt them, pressed heavy into the spareyouthegorydetails scraping the (recalled out) hurts to think about. Well; better hurt than cold, shelled off, and the room was warm for the (possible first?) time. Felt like a first at least... One wall was lined with books, of all sorts, not just dry tomes (excluding them, actually). These shelves were full of shameless fantasies and kaleidoscope visions; occultic tomes and fairy tales (several, and several more sold as "myth") and comic books from the world over, and pulpy genre fiction, and books that once I brushed aside as a trite sort of rebellion. Once was told to... Recalls the ache of internal chains, to correct myself there.

My shadow rippled; at first I played it off as trick of the (low fuzzy paintingish) light but I couldn't forever stifle the visions breaking. Not an expert but shadows don't move when their caster is still and sane. But up up up from out of the bronzecast depths she swam; blackdressed, witch-hatted, mess of lace, speck against a tannin sea at first but then into a platinum focus.

"I'm Alice. Alice Persephone Nightshade."

Nightshade recalled some hellish visions. "May I call you Alice?"

"What can I call you?"

I smiled for some odd reason. "Alistair. Macabre, is my last name, if anyone asks—" cool mask fracturing here but I must truthtell I stumbled arthropodish, centipede thinking about steps—"not that I expect they will, but..." Trailed off; snake bit its own tongue for that, better to cut my losses there... I never used to be so guttersmoky but wow have I gotten worse...

Hours passed, apparently. Alice fell asleep smally on my lone mattress and I wasn't going to what kick her out? So, I dreamt in my chair. I might have been awake.

"I feel like I'm going to die," I groaned, croakingly, and to no one in particular.

"You are, but not now." Alice intoned darkest. Thought you were asleep. But I liked the cut of her jib as they say, and I still do.

"Then when, O Prophetess?" Thus spoke Delirium; not I. But it sounded nice and felt nicer in my mouth.

"Come here for a second," she said, so I did, lowered my head between her offered hands till they gripped my temples. Foul bodies, bloodied churches, horning things on my head... She held me all the same. And looked at me, pierced my eyeside really, two-pronged Lance occultic looking back through my pupils and up my optic nerve and into my brain.

She said something but I just couldn't focus not with her hands in my hair like that and before I knew it Alice's again adreaming and I was Blooming ("yes") nightshade in soliloquy like the whole thing was a dream with the aching no lingering transience of a nightmare a flowercolored nightmare orchidly no sleep for the wickedest alive. And did I ever feel like that, then, dead images of myself spilling onto the velvet, perfectly blue "is its color"... Blooming into white flame a synapse firework behind the ear in the hair the hair feels like straw and shot through with treasuring fingers. It is. Fingers at least. They felt treasuring. Possessive in a way Augustus never was as He made me some goddamn Alraunic watering can.

She had said, "Not for a long time, if I can help it." Alice had I turned to thank her because like yes in the soliloquy I felt loved but she was already asleep again. Remember? I chided myself if my runny gray matter could be considered, still, myself. I don't feel like myself... So simple and not even my own words. I feel gutted and guttersmoke. My own and so meaningless without streaming consciousness. Or the shores of the selfsame stream. I mean I cannot—there is just no way this is, I cannot be fully awake.

Days passed, and hours passed, Alice woke and slept and we talked in between. I even slept some, in my chair, with my boots on so to speak, and dreams recalled so many terrible revelations. I felt more like a poison flower day by day. Cruel joke it was that Alice was last-named Nightshade when I was and still am so Belladonnic. 50ccs of shimmering dragonsblood to make me immortal. Ironic that Augustus wanted me as his dead thing so bad he made me immortal. I felt like I could come back from anything now, even coldhollow as I was, evacuated by an airlock (Thus Felt) I could survive thanks to his spitting folly. Though I was the cobra here. And the nightshade. Sorry, Alice. I claim the nightshade, and the cobra, and the chimera for my banner. Heraldry meaningless to all but the most romantic and emptiest (the selfsame; sorry, the word echoes in my head far far more than it does in this... this which feels like a log of the end of days; days mine. But I'm not dying and it's not the end of the world. It's not even the worst thing to happen in this fucked-up city. It's not the end of the world.)

Serial experiments killed me and made me immortal. For science first and then for pleasure even if I don't recall all the everylast details; it's all been a series of experiments up until now.