Am I a bad person?

I sat alone in Staff Lounge 3, in dimmed light in the dead of Night, pondering that question, and whether or not it was too late for me to do anything about it. I sat on the edge of a stool, improvising a haunted adagio on my clarinet, and not caring about the lag-induced complications in the slightest.

“And a one, and a two, and a three…”

I made no effort to keep myself from crying.

Was I a bad person?

According to the Church, the Godhead was always willing to forgive a truly penitent soul and allow them back into a state of grace, except if there was an exception—and there were always exceptions.

Lassediles of every denomination were supposed to believe in teleology, the doctrine that all things had an inherent purpose, given to them by their Creator. In that regard, Sin wasn’t as simple as just “doing something bad”. Hamartiologically speaking, Sin was a malfunction in the moral order of the world. It was a metaphysical “divide by zero” error. It was an unintended use of the product. The Godhead created the world, and the world was good, yet, through mankind’s Primordial Sin, Sin came into existence, poisoning creation from within, befouling it. In this way, even the slightest of sins was a direct offense against God. It was an act of defiance against the moral order of the world—both insult and injury.

Even so, I was taught that Sin came in several distinguishable forms, the least awful of which were the venial sins: these were the white lies we said to avoid trouble, the cruel words we spoke when gripped by anger, our unhealthy habits, our unsavory choices, as well as accidental killings. Above these lay mortal sin; a mortal sin was an act sufficiently grievous that it put a soul in danger of voiding the Bond of Light—mankind’s Covenant with the Angel. Heinous murder was a mortal sin, as was fornication, sexual deviance—even within marriage—avarice, theft, complicity in evil, disobedience to rightful authority, fraud, greed, false witness, and so many others.

But then, there was eternal sin. These were the big ones. Eternal sins were sins that could not be forgiven. Eternal sin was a rather contentious topic. On the one hand, scripture and teachings told us that eternal sin existed; on the other hand, the existence of eternal sin appeared to directly contradict the parts of scripture and teachings that said the Godhead would forgive any truly penitent soul. Some said there was only one eternal sin: to deny the Angel and His sanctifying Love all the way to death, the point past which a soul could no longer affect its eternal fate. Officially, the controversy had been resolved some three-hundred years ago when the College of Angelic Doctors had determined that eternal sins were those sins which, by their nature, represented a deliberate and irrevocable refusal to repent and accept the sanctifying grace of the Angel’s Sacrifice. But, even that was just a guess—a learned, magisterial guess, certainly, but a guess all the same. In the end, none but the Moonlight Queen could know a man’s final thoughts, and the Church maintained that damnation could always be avoided, up to the last possible moment. As the saying went, “It was never too late.”

But what if it was too late for me? The fearful questions kept hounding me.

I was already dead. Did that mean I even have a soul anymore? Was I just an empty husk? Could wyrms be saved? Would my failure to properly tend to the souls that had been put in my care damn me to Hell? Were the wyrms demons of a sort? Had I been wrong in thinking that Andalon’s wyrms were more like the ones from Catamander Brave than the ones from Lassedile myths—from the pits of Hell itself?

I felt like I would never be free of these questions. Their weight would make me forever miserable.

Dismal thoughts like these made it difficult to play my clarinet. My melody soured, cutting off in an ugly screech. Taking the mouth off my clarinet, I gaped in horror.

The reed and the mouthpiece were dissolving right before my eyes!

Panicking, I pulled them off my clarinet and threw them in my mouth, swallowing them after a couple of bites.

“Oh no, oh no no no no!”

All musical instruments had to be kept clean to function properly, and never was that more imperative than for a woodwind instrument like my clarinet—and that was before you took into the count that my saliva was turning acidic! Bleach would counter acid, but that would destroy my clarinet! Even using water to clean the inside of my clarinet was absolutely forbidden. The moisture could damage the wood, as well as deform the valve pads or even encourage the growth of mildew.

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But what if I’d gotten acidic spores on the wood?

I totally freaked out.

Rushing over to my case, I pulled out the bottle of pH neutral soap gel and my plastic cup, which I filled with cotton swabs from the bag of them I kept on hand. Spilling the swabs onto the sofa, I ran to the sink, filled the cup with lukewarm water and darted back to my stool, where I mixed the soap into the water. I spent half an hour disassembling my clarinet, dipping the swabs into the fluid—dabbing them on my coat until they were just barely moist—and then sticking the damp swabs into my clarinet and wiping it down. Every time a swab came up tinged in green, I winced, tossed the swab into the incinerator chute in the wall and grabbed a fresh one.

Once I was done, I cleaned up as best as I could. I apologized to my clarinet—bowing in shame—as I dried it off with the cleaning cloth and stowed it in its case, fully disassembled. Had I wasted any time, the corrosive spores might have destroyed my clarinet altogether. I’d need to treat the wood with bore oil, but that would hardly make up for it. Even then, I was pretty sure I could feel tiny pits on the interior of the wood. I was terrified the sound would be ruined. Or maybe the pits were just my imagination—perhaps hyperphantasia.

I didn’t know anymore.

I was a Sinner through and through. I even sinned against my clarinet.

Closing the case, I sat down on the floor in front of the couch, and wept.

Andalon still hadn’t reappeared. I bet that was somehow my fault. Yes, Ileene’s ghost had beaten her up, but, surely, I’d screwed up somehow and made it worse.

I mean, look at me!

“All I do is screw up…” I moaned, cradling my head in my hands.

My family had rejected me. They probably thought I was a monster—and, if I wasn’t, I would be in no time at all.

Maybe my next change would be like Maryon’s. Maybe one of my arms would swell to monstrous size. Or maybe I’d be like Valentine or Werumed-san, forced to slither along the ground like a snake because my legs had melted away into a tail. Maybe I’d start eating people, just like Bethany and Nathan and Lopé!

The revelation that wyrms could eat people—and, from all appearances, enjoyed it—was not something I was okay with. I would eat metal and fabric and everything else, but not people.

People didn’t eat people!

“Flibbertigibbet! Everything’s falling apart.”

I wonder: maybe the Norms were the wyrms that, like me, weren’t cut out to be Keepers of Paradise. Maybe the Norms were those of Andalon’s wyrms who’d chosen to embrace evil and sin; who’d tortured the souls they’d been given—turning them into demons—instead of trying to nurture and protect them.

I couldn’t even properly feel guilt anymore! I had to fight to keep hold of my emotions, lest they go out of my control and trigger hyperphantasies that opened the doors to Hell.

I clenched my fists.

By the Angel!

Part of me had been pleased when Lopé/Paul’s mouth had sewn itself shut! It was almost poetic, you know? He said all those awful things, and now, he can’t say anything anymore, and wouldn’t say anything ever again.

But that was a bad thought! Bad! It was exactly the sort of thought that a bad person would have. A cruel person. A failure. A sinner!

Guh…

Unsurprisingly, Paul didn’t let an inconvenience as minor as losing his mouth stop him from “spreading the Words”. His lips might have been gone, but he still had his tongue, and it wasn’t long before the little genius had figured out how to talk again, after a fashion. The speech he produced was like a stripped screw: it didn’t stick. You could kind of understand him if you really tried, but that was easier said than done, and, honestly, it was unnerving to watch him “speak”.

All those holes! A dozen little nostrils; his garbled words; his drowned consonants. I convinced him to just use his bedside console. He could type up what he wanted to say, and the machine would read it aloud.

It was sick, in a way: I kept getting answers, only they were never the answers I actually wanted.

Having learned that Kurt had encountered Andalon in brief visions, I’d followed up with the other transformees to confirm what I suspected to be true—and it was. They’d all seen Andalon. Even Lopé. Andalon had appeared to Lopé while he’d been eating Isabel. The visitation was short and sweet: she’d walked up to him with Isabel’s spirit in hand—just like she had with Joe-Bob and the others—only to disappear as soon as she’d handed over the ghost. I remembered Lopé screaming in the middle of my long videophone call with Director Hobwell. As I eventually learned, he’d screamed because the ghost had frightened him, mostly because she’d been missing most of her body. She had only her left arm, the lower half of her left leg, and the upper right quarter of her torso—and it turned out those were exactly the parts of Isabel’s body that Lopé had eaten. Bethany and Nathan had eaten the rest of her.

Thinking back upon the grizzly scene hyperphantasized it in front of me in full detail, not the least of which was Isabel’s half-eaten corpse. But my hyperphantasia took it even further: I watched a simulacrum of Andalon guide the nurse to Lopé. Isabel’s dismembered body parts floated in front of Lopé, indifferent to their own incompleteness. Blood dripped from their ragged, masticated edges.

So, now that people were eating other people, you’d think things had gotten as bad as they were going to get—but you’d be wrong.

I ran my fingers over my nose and cheeks. I stroked my lips and scratched my teeth, wondering how much longer it would be before I lost my face and fully became the monster my family believed me to be.