CW: religion (pagan, Gnostic, Thelemic), killing, bladed weapons, necromancy, near death, swearing, body control, pedophilia allusion, genocide allusion, nuclear weapons allusion

Marieken Mithras

During the day, I hide. At night, I float over the city. There is so much I have to think about. The last vestiges of my life, even what few things I had gained not long after finding myself Moontouched,have fallen away. I am no longer strictly ‘Moontouched,’ either. I am somehow dead and yet still going. I float over the city and I think about what I actually want. A normal life? To live with Kate, and be subjected to the horrible mistreatment the Periphery Demographics in this country face? I can move, maybe. To another country. There’s nothing to stop me. At night I am so fast my movement might as well be instantaneous.

I have found myself to be like a god. Not in a grandiose way, but in the way where if I were to do something, there would be very little anyone could do to stop me. Through sheer happenstance and random chance I found myself with the second highest paraphysical aptitude score ever measured, and that was before accidentally peering beyond the constraints of the world and finding myself a shadow on the wall. Ruby-Lynn had not understood it. Robin had not understood it. Sareth, who lived within me now, did not understand it. She still struggled- struggles- for control. Wants to go back to a life with her high school flunkies, her doll. Wants to take over the world.

Maybe I could do that. Take over the world. I wonder what it would look like, to actually do that. Teleporting into the white house maybe, and killing the president of the United States? But what would that bring me? It’d just devolve into a slaughter, where I lose myself in manic psychosis and until I’ve destroyed everything around me again.

Here, floating over the city as nothing but a shadow on the clouds, I feel at peace. Calm. Here I can think.

Mistress, the sword hidden in my shadow says. If it is power you want, we should hunt down some demons! Devour their souls and add them to our own.

I’ve decided not to pay too much heed to the words of an ancient soul-devouring samurai sword. That seems like a fast track to destruction.

Inside my mind, the soul of Sareth stirs. I’ve decided not to talk to her much either. She keeps trying to steal my body for herself.

Down below, life goes on. Police cars race down the A-10 towards the south of the city. A fire burns near the park in the eastern ward, not too far from where I used to live. Where my parents still live, the parents I still somewhat blame for my current predicament. Well, they’re not really my parents, I realize. DNA tests and all that have disproven that, I think? Moontouched are not the biological children of the people who end up raising them. I wonder who my real parents are.

You are a daughter of Tsukuyomi, mistress, the cursed sword chimes in.

“Yeah, I don’t know who that is.”

It is what the priest who forged me called the god of the moon.

“Like, in Japan?”

Yes, mistress!

“I’m not religious.”

You don’t have to believe in Tsukuyomi specifically to believe yourself to be divine progeny. The moon is real.

“Yeah, but the moon isn’t magic. W- Hey. Why are we called ‘Moontouched’ actually? I never understood that. Every time I tried to look it up online or in a book or even ask someone all I’ve gotten back was vaguely mystical gibberish.”

The moon isn’t magic? Mistress, the moon is the reason you all are in the predicament you are in to begin with.

“What do you mean?”

The current age started when mankind managed to leave the bounds of planet Earth and landed on the moon.

“Yeah,” I absent-mindedly reply. “But that has nothing to do with the moon specifically. It’s belief that shapes the world, right, the laws of physics? I learned that in school. Belief had calcified into an orderly set of rules, but when the moon landing happened for a brief moment everyone on Earth simultaneously believed ‘everything was possible,’ which shattered the status quo.”

Forgive me mistress, but you are ignorant to the workings of the ages and the divine mechanisms that make puppets out of men.

“You don’t have to insult me,” I chide the sword. “If you know so well, why don’t you teach me?”

I cannot teach you. But if you wish for wisdom, there are ways to attain it.

“Ruby-Lynn didn’t manage to teach me anything profound. Neither did any of the books she made me read. Sure, I’m a little better at magic now, but I have seen truths that they could not understand. This world is a shadow on the wall, a fake. A reflection of something illuminated from behind. I know that is true because I have seen it.”

I don’t know about these things. I am a sword. But I was forged in aeons past to be wielded by a daughter of Tsukuyomi, at the dawning of the turning of the wheel.

“Explain these things. You say things I don’t understand. The turning of the wheel?”

I am not good at explaining mistress. But if you want wisdom-

“Yes yes, you’ve told me. There are ways to attain it. Tell me, then. How do I become wise?”

The great Siddharta Guatama became enlightened after becoming disillusioned with the teachings of many masters, and returned to his childhood home to meditate under the Mahabodhi Tree. There he saw the truth of all things and became wise.

“So what do I do, I go sit under a tree? You aren’t helpful at all.”

I’m sorry mistress. What I mean to say is that maybe you cannot be helped by a teacher, and need to attain these things by yourself. You attained this shadow-truth by yourself, did you not?

“That was on the verge of death. I was dying.”

Many great sages have found enlightenment in battle. You could seek out worthy foes, and test yourself against them until you are once again forced to evolve.

“You just want me to go hunt down demons because you’re a cursed sword overcome with bloodlust.’

The sword didn’t reply.

“So,” I say, after thinking about some of the things the blade had said for a while. “Moontouched aren’t human. They’re changelings, children swapped out at birth. You say I’m a child of the moon. How is that possible?”

There are many stories in many religions of the sun and moon begetting children. There was an emperor of Rome said to be the offspring of the sun.

“That’s just more stories that don’t help me. And I’ve never heard of ‘suntouched’ people, for that matter.”

I wish I could tell you more.

“Hey,” I say. “I know someone who researched Moontouched, for the government. Maybe I’ll pay him a visit in the morning.”

Yes! Seek out this great sage of the moon, mistress!

I sigh, and I look for the science campus in the east of the city. I collect myself- literally- and step out of the shadow of one of the campus buildings. It’s cold out, I realize, and I dispel my dress and then manifest warmer clothes. The katana clatters on the ground behind me, following me through some means of its own. I pick it up and attach the scabbard to my waist with a stylish belt.

“Marieken?” I hear someone stammer behind me.

“Huh?” I say as I turn around. It’s Noor, Sareth’s doll. “You are out and about early in the morning. It’s what, five in the morning?”

She stumbles back. “Please don’t hurt me. I heard from Maria and Theresa. I swear I bear you no ill will. I’m sorry for everything that has happened, I really am just please don’t hurt me.”

“That thing with Maria and Theresa wasn’t me,” I say, not really feeling like explaining myself.

“Ah, euh, okay,” Noor stutters.

“You’re a horrible person,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” she whines. “What are you doing here?”

“Huh? Oh, I want to talk to doctor West in the morning. I thought I’d go wait for him in his office, catch him right at the break of dawn.”

“Ah. I, yeah, I see. Aha. Do- do you want to smoke some weed? I come out here often to smoke. We smoked- remember, we- we smoked together here, after we both got tested?”

“I couldn’t care less,” I say, making a ‘go away’ gesture with my hand. She doesn’t hesitate, and sprints away. Pathetic little porcelain creature.

“Hey, sword,” I command the blade on my belt. “Do you have a name?”

No, mistress. If ever I had one, nobody has told me.

“It’s a hassle just calling you ‘sword’ or ‘blade.’ Come up with a name.”

Call me Murugan.

“Remind me to google what that means later. Murugan, do you know about dolls? The people that turn into literal puppets?”

No mistress.

“You’re a useless sword, Murugan.”

That is not true, mistress. In the hands of a proper daughter of Tsukuyomi I am without peer as a weapon. If you wish to know things, you should use your ‘google’ artefact- the glass rectangle, yes? to look them up.

I snicker. “You’re right. I’ll use my cellphone to look things up and you for battle. Now, let’s go and wait for doctor West.”

My body dissolves, and my consciousness skirts from shadow to shadow, creeping along the buildings until I find a way into the office where doctor West first administered my paraphysical aptitude test. There, I reconstitute myself and wait on his office chair, my feet on his desk.

[CHAPTER BREAK]

It is not doctor West who comes walking in through the door several hours later. Instead, it is a dishevelled man, slightly too fat for his Star Wars t-shirt. He’s balding, and carries himself oddly.

“Marieken, euh, thingy?” He asks. I wonder how he knows who I am.

“Yeah?”

“Ah, good. Tell me: if you had to be in a Hogwarts House, which would you want to be in?”

What a bizarre question to spring on someone, I think.

“I’m looking for doctor West,” I reply.

“That’s not what I asked. I asked you what Hogwarts House you would want to be in, if you went to Hogwarts.”

I think for a bit. “I would’ve said Hufflepuff in the past. But given the events of the last month, I’m afraid I’d have to go to Slytherin instead.”

“Ugh,” the man says, as if I gave entirely the wrong answer. “Okay. If you were in Star Trek, do you think you’d be a Vulcan or a Romulan?”

“What? I don’t watch Star Trek. I don’t know that. What a bizarre question. Who are you?”

“Come on,” the man says. “Star Trek. It’s one of the most popular science fiction franchises on the planet. You know what vulcans are.”

“Like, doctor Spock?” I answer, confused about what is happening.

“DOCTOR SPOCK?” The man laughs. “Of course a woman who would want to be in Hufflepuff would think he’s called DOCTOR Spock.”

“What are you- what?” I ask again, but the man doesn’t answer me. Instead he spits on the ground, and then

my heart

stops

beating.

I clutch my chest as I fall off my chair, and feel a rapid wave of decay surging out from my heart, consuming me. A wave of pure death washes out from my heart and over every individual cell of my body, triggering cell death. I am going to die, I realize. Fuck. I’m already dead. Again.

Time slows, and I realize I can handle this. My body isn’t me. It’s sort of me- it’s messily entangled with me- and if whatever had just happened had hit every cell in my body at once, cleanly without giving me a chance to respond, then I might’ve actually bitten the dust. It’s still going to be tricky when the wave of death reaches my brain. But I can handle this. I try to dispel the shadow-matter making up my body, and find that where it has already died, it doesn’t take. The dead matter isn’t part of ‘me’ anymore. Instead I dispel healthy cells right ahead of the ‘wave of death,’ and regenerate them right after it. It passes through a void, an absence of me. It goes through my head, and I let go of my brain’s neurons- currently containing my consciousness- and manifest new ones right after.

It is unbelievable my sense of ‘self’ is this clear, I realize. To be aware of every cell in your body, to be able to ‘look’ on yourself in as much detail as you want- and almost I get lost pondering the magnificence of the human biology, of the intricacies of the organic machinery in my cells. Then I realize I am in danger.

“Fuck,” I spit. My heart still isn’t beating, but my body works hard to replace death tissue with new. The body can work wonders when not constrained by such petty limits as material resources, thermodynamics, or energy. It’s a gigantic drain on my magic, though- my cells rip through shadow-stuff to weave new Marieken-stuff like Hello Kitty and her friends go through cookies.

“Fuck you,” I scream, scrambling to my feet. My assailant stares at me dumbfounded.

Mistress, we are in danger!

“I figured,” I say. It’ll take a minute longer before my body has been fully restored and I can shadow-step away without risking accidentally leaving a leg behind, or leaving a gaping hole where my heart used to be. At night I wouldn’t have been concerned. But it is morning now, and with the sun on the horizon I would risk burnout if I tried to shadow-step and regenerate my body at once.

I draw Hiro’s sword- my sword, I realize. I draw Murugan, and point it at my mysterious assailant.

“Who are you? What the fuck did you do to me?”

“I euh,” he stammers, and he stumbles back out the door. I walk after him. My body is almost done removing my dead heart tissue. Thirty seconds before I come back to life. I become light-headed, and weak. My heart isn’t beating. My heart still isn’t beating! Of course I’d be in serious trouble if I tried to walk around and swing a sword like that!

“What- euh, what- in the Star Wars Legends lore,” he stammers, “Emperor Palpatine was secretly preparing for an extragalactic-”

It clicks in my head what is happening. Well, not exactly, but probably close enough. This man has a ‘hack,’ an instant-win ability. I kick him in the stomach as hard as I can. Dark spots form in my vision. No oxygen for my brain. I let go of my blood, and try to manifest new blood, blood with oxygen. It barely helps. I need my heart.

“Uuuuafugh,” I yammer as I fall over, on top of my foe. I should’ve stabbed him straight away, I realize. Not just kicked him.

“What the fuck?” Someone else down the hall says, a childish voice. “Why is she still alive?”

“I DON’T KNOW,” the man scrambling to get out from under my now almost catatonic body screams. “SHE DIED AND THEN SHE JUST GOT BACK UP.”

Badum, badum, badum, my heart comes back to life and a rush of energy surges through my body. I crawl back up, lift my sword and swing at my mysterious foe. He dodges- not gracefully, but by stumbling out of the way as fast as he can in a panicked, jittery manner. Before I can rush him and cut him down, a metal chain suddenly sprouts from my arm, and attaches itself to the wall.

“Wh- whuh?” I yammer, as I awkwardly spin around. A moontouched child- she couldn’t have been much older than thirteen or so- stands further down the corridor, laughing maniacally.

I bring Murugan down , and as the chain shatters a horrible pain shoots through my head.

Hey! Murugan yells. I’m not made to cut through steel, mistress!

“Sorry,” I mutter.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” the young moontouched girl says. She’s dressed in a ridiculous getup, like a cheap cosplay of an anime character. It is a cheap cosplay of an anime character, I realize. “My chains attach to your very soul.”

“What is going on?” I ask. “Why are you attacking me?”

Don’t talk, mistress. Kill them or retreat. We are still in danger.

“Ugh,” I spit as I try to shadow-step behind my first attacker, who seems the most dangerous. That, and I don’t think I want to kill a child. My teleport fails as a second chain emerges from my leg, and attaches itself to the wall. I am yanked painfully to the ground. “Fuck!”

“Get her again!” the girl yells.

“Euh, yes,” the balding man stammers. “The pilot episode of Star Trek, the original series, features aliens that kidnap the ship captain. Why did t- No, no, too complex, what’s the episode called?”

“Fuck off,” I growl, struggling against the chain tying me to the wall. The girl told me it’s dangerous to cut it, and Murugan didn’t like it either. How to get free, then?

“Star Trek was a revolutionary show with an immeasurable impact on later pop culture,” the balding man angrily yells. “You really don’t know what the first episode was called?”

“I don’t give a shit,” I scream while contemplating cutting my own leg off to get free from the chain. But allegedly it attaches to my soul, so would that- Death.

My heart stops again, cell death radiating outwards. I scream in terror as I grapple for the manifestations required to dodge actually dying. To my surprise, the chain attached to my leg vanishes. It almost surprises me so much I lose sight of my spell, but I manage regardless. I was quicker this time, and the damage to my heart and the surrounding tissue is limited. Still, it has stopped beating again. It’ll be seconds, maybe even tens of seconds, before I am up and running again. I have to act now, I have to act now, I have to act now I scream at myself. Kill, kill, retreat? Kill? Retreat? I shadow-step away and make it almost all the way down the hallway, round the corner and down the stairs before two chains burst from my shadow and I am forcibly reverted back into physical shape.

“Help me,” I scream, but there’s no one to hear me. “Murugan, what do I do!?”

I don’t know, mistress. Do what you did the last time to escape the chains, then kill them before they can affect you with their magic again.

“I escaped because my temporary death at the hands of the balding one seemed to dispel the chain, but I can’t indefinitely survive that.”

Oh. Use me to cut off your legs to free yourself.

“That- the last time I cut myself on you I lost my mind and senselessly killed two dozen people. I don’t want to lose more of myself to the nightmare world, either.”

There must be a trick to the chains. They are spiritual manifestations, and such attacks are as a rule all trickery and deceit.

“The other man asks me questions, and if I fail them, my heart stops. Are you saying there’s something similar happening with the chains?”

Most likely.

I rack my brain to think what it could possibly be. Running away? I wasn’t running away when she first hit me. As I struggle to make sense of possible weaknesses in the spell, my assailants catch up to me. One of the chains vanishes, and I look at the other one in confusion. Did I just break the prerequisite for one of them? Did my attacker dispel it herself? I’ve gotten no new information.

“Why are you doing this,” I scream standing up and facing my opponents with my sword in hands.

“It’s nothing personal,” the girl says. The man just looks at me. “C’mon, hit her,” she chides him.

“I don’t, I- she just keeps tanking my attack. That has never happened before.”

“You heard it in our briefing, she has the second largest amount of magic ever measured. She’s clearly affected when you hit her. Get her again, and I’ll just stab her while she’s crawling on the ground again.”

“O- okay,” he says, and I brace myself for another question. It doesn’t come. My heart just stops.

“This is bullshit,” I grunt, falling to the ground and feeling my store of magic run dangerously low. Again, I get to work on surviving the death-magic, and again the chains disappear. The girl runs up to me as I keel over, coughing up blood, and stabs me in the abdomen. I look at her and remanifest the injured portion of my body. She looks me in the eyes, visibly surprised, and stabs me again, and again, and again, and again. It hurts, but it’s trivial to restore these injuries, even running low on magic.

“Knives really do not bother me anymore,” I say, coughing, and do my best to swing Murugan at her. Without my heart, I can’t muster the strength to do more than flail and jerk around a bit.

“What the fuck,” the balding man says. “She’s immortal. She’s goddamn immortal.”

“Your attacks are clearly working,” the girl says, annoyed, as she stabs me again. “She has some kind of spell to rapidly heal injuries. She’ll run out of magic eventually, just hit her again.”

“I CAN’T,” he screams. “I can’t, I can’t, I need a breather.”

“You’re fucking in for it now,” I groan as my heart starts beating again and I crawl back up on my feet. My head is spinning, and sunlight falling in through the windows is starting to badly burn me, my contours blurring. If I don’t discorporate and explode due to burnout, then the next instant-death attack will certainly kill me. For a moment I wonder about taking on my shadow-form, but worry it’ll be too taxing on my depleted stores of energy.

I level my sword at the girl. “I don’t want to kill a child,” I growl. “But I will, if you two don’t fuck off and leave me alone, right now.”

“It’s you three,” a third voice sounds behind me. A man in a tweed jacket flanked by two moontouched girls with swords walks into the building and heads straight to the stairwell. “Sorry for being late, I had to go fetch backup.”

“Christ,” the girl swears. “You are supposed to stay on the backline to bring her back when she finally kicks the fucking bucket.”

“You two do seem like you need help, though. Veronica, Esther, kill!” he barks at the girls flanking him as if they were dogs. They rush me, and I can barely parry the first swing of a sword with Murugan, while the second swing from the second girl cuts into my back. I scream in pain.

Mistress! You need to use me. Cut off your leg. I’ll feed you power. You’re going to die if you don’t.

“God, fucking, damn it,” I yell as I turn Murugan upside down and pull him straight through my tigh to cut off my right leg. I feel a part of my soul fall into the nightmare realm, but in return a vast store of energy- stolen from past victims of Murugan- flows into me. The world becomes a blur, and I scream. I scream, not in agony but a furious howl, giving in to the endless bloodlust of the Nightmare Demon inside me. The Nightmare Demon I might have been all along.

The two moontouched girls attack me, but I effortlessly parry. Murugan knows how to fight, and hundreds of years of experience borrowed from the nightmare realm are now flowing through my veins. I cut into them, but they refuse to even react. Their flesh is stiff, and I realize they’re dead. Dead puppets, probably reanimated by magic.

I get angry. Angrier than I have ever been before. These are my sisters. Who gave these creeps the right to turn them into soulless dolls?

“Fuck,” I hear the girl behind me as I effortlessly parry and counter my two attackers at once. In only seconds, I’ve disarmed them- literally. I rush for the newcomer, who I suspect is the necromancer.

Yes! Murugan says as I stab him through the abdomen. I feel energy siphon out through the wound and into Murugan and then into me, at least partially restoring my stock of magic. We got one!

“Jeremy moment,” my new opponent mutters in confusion and then he drops dead. I spin around, and make a mad dash for the balding man. It is a feint, and I split my twin shadows into six tentacles with eyes, mouths, claws and teeth to attack the girl instead. To my surprise, chains sprout from my shadow tentacles, locking them in place. How can you pin someone’s shadow in place, I wonder? Probably the same way my shadow can eat people, I wonder. My anger and rage slowly turns into a detached flow state. I need to kill. I need to do these two the way I did Hiro, rip them into pieces and devour their flesh. I stand there, with six tentacles cast on the ground, with six chains attaching them to the ceiling, to the stairs, to the windows.

“Fight fair,” I growl. “Face me!”

“We need to run,” the girl says. “If Jeremy is dead we can’t achieve our objectives anymore. No reason to risk her getting the better of us.”

“Y- yeah,” the balding man stammers, and they both rush up the stairs as fast as they can.

“Aaauuurgh,” I scream in frustration at my inability to get free from my predicament.

Can you let go of your shadow?

“I am my shadow,” I answer. “It’s the body that’s extraneous.”

Can you split them temporarily?

Split them? I wonder if I can. Be my shadow, and my body. I take a breath, and I take a step, trying to imagine my body as a drone I am letting go, a remote controlled puppet I am releasing to move around. For a moment it works, as my body comes free from my shadow. Then it slips from my grasp, stumbles forward for a moment, and sprouts two new shadows. It turns around, and looks me in the eye. Wait, I still have- oh god.

“Oh god,” the other Marieken says as we realize what we’ve done at the same time.

“You- I- You, we? Didn’t let go of our body, we made a copy,” we both say at the same time.

“Oh god, which- wait, huh?” we mutter at once.

“You first,” we both say at once.

“I’ll go first,” we both say at once.

“Marieken with the sword goes first,” we both say at once.

“Which one of us is the copy?” I ask.

“I think you are? I detached from our shadow, and then you manifested a new body behind me.”

“But I am the shadow,” I say. “The body is just a manifestation,” we say at the same time.

“But I have a shadow too?” The other says. “From my perspective, I stepped away and sprouted a new shadow.”

“From my perspective- this is really confusing,” I reply. We both laugh.

“Are we… both the original?” We ask at the same time.

“Two Mariekens,” I mutter. “We both know our body isn’t real. We are a shadow on the wall- two shadows- I have an idea.”

“I know,” the second Marieken says, as she reaches out for me. I’m hesitant, because I am not sure what will come next. Part of me mentally braces for oblivion, and I touch her fingertips.

I am ‘dispelled,’ de-manifested. In the process, I see what I saw when Hiro killed me clearer than ever. I am not a ‘self.’ I am not even meaningfully ‘real’ in the way I thought I was before I died the first time. We are both manifestations of the same Marieken ‘concept,’ the real thing, the thing illuminated from behind, the thing that casts the shadow we interpret as the self. We mix together like paint, and I am one Marieken again, with a confusing set of double memories.

“Oh my god,” I say. “I can have multiple bodies at once.”

Mistress, that was remarkable.

“You have no idea,” I mutter. Then I bolt up the stairs, desperate to catch up to my two attackers. Partially running, partially shadow-stepping, I zip across the hallways of the university. It’s eerily empty. Outside I hear sirens. How did they even know I was here?

Noor, I realize. Noor has casually stabbed me in the back once again. Then I catch up to my attackers, who have run all the way to the other side of the compound, intending to take the stairs down on the far end and then sneak out.

“Shit,” the girl says as she spins around to face me, and chains sprout from my arms to restrain me. I manifest another Marieken, and before the chains yank me back and immobilize me, I throw Murugan at her. She- I? She catches him, and swings at the girl. Before she can bring the sword down on her, though, the balding man dives at her with a tackle and I can see her stagger and flinch as the chains on my arms disappear- he has hit her with the instant-death ability. She is me, though, and should be able to regenerate from- To my horror I realize I have only half my store of magic. The same must go for her. The magic does not duplicate along with us. Of course.

“Marieken,” I yell, and with her last strength she tosses Murugan back at me. I rush forward, and stab at the balding man. I hit him in the leg, and I feel Murugan bite into his soul, restoring some of my power. I reach for the other me, and we conjoin again, mixing into one.

Almost instantly, the death spell hits me again. Before it can incapacitate me, I swing my sword down on the man, and this time I almost cleave him in half. Murugan devours his soul, and I expend the extra energy on recovering from the death effect. I am getting faster and faster at it, and this time it is barely ten seconds before my heart is beating again. My other opponent is already gone again though, and outside I hear helicopters and sirens.

That’s good, Murugan says. Our strongest opponent is dead. We can feed on the souls of the lesser men that arrange themselves against us to restore our power, then flee.

“Yeah,” I growl. I wonder what has become of me. The Marieken I was a few months ago seems like a distant dream, a mirage. She was never real, I realize. What I am now is closer to the ‘real’ me than she ever was.

I rush outside, the sun still hurting me from my near-burnout state. The university campus has been completely surrounded by soldiers, cops, and men in black from the Ministry of Mysterious Business.

“Marieken Mithras,” a man with a megaphone yells. “We have you surrounded. We will shoot to kill with antimagic ammunition. You can’t escape. Turn yourself in and accept to be put on paraphysical blockers, or we will kill you.”

They are ants, Murugan says. A chill goes down my spine, because I believe him. There are plenty of shadows on the university grounds, and I effortlessly shadow-step behind the police lines and drive my sword into the back of the man with the megaphone. Energy flows into me, and I split into two. In the confusion, it takes the police several seconds to open fire, and when they do there are two of me, running through their own ranks. All they hit is each other as several people start screaming ‘hold your fire,’ and half the cops and soldiers attempt to flee. The other Marieken and I weave through the crowd with staccato movement, staggered teleports mixed with running. Underneath the first helicopter we rejoin, and as it opens fire on us we merge with its shadow. I abandon my physical shape, store Murugan in my shadow, and turn into a mass of tentacles, mouths and eyes. I wrap around the helicopter, which immediately malfunctions as I crush it and devour it. Matter is matter, I realize. I can break down all matter. It doesn’t have to be flesh. There is flesh mixed in with the steel though, and for a moment I am confused before I remember helicopters have crew. I laugh maniacally, as I turn back into a girl and swing Murugan around blindly, wounding several cops and killing at least two. My stores of energy replenish at staggering speed, and I get high on killing again.

All hell has broken out, and the military and police forces are now in full retreat. They barely bother shooting at me anymore. I can’t believe that after almost dying five times in rapid succession against the other magicians, these people can’t even scratch me.

I really am a god, I think, manic thoughts speeding up and my thoughts slowly drowning in bloodlust. By the time my conscious thoughts take on a coherent form again, there are dozens of dead soldiers, cops and men in black scattered throughout the university courtyard. Everyone else has fled. The city air raid siren is going off, and in the distance- far out of my reach- two military helicopters make a wide circle around me, no doubt observing me.

“Jesus,” I mutter. “I don’t feel a thing.”

Don’t be ashamed, mistress, Murugan chimes in.

“Yeah, you would say that,” I spit back.

What now, I wonder. I have achieved nothing. If anything, my life is all the more worse off than it was six hours ago. My quest to get Doctor West to explain anything, anything at all to me ended in the wholesale massacre of government agents. If I really am a Nightmare Demon now, then maybe I should try to live like one? Set up a demesne in some forgotten corner of the city and prey on random people, maybe fight over territory with other demons? The idea is ridiculous. I want to go to school and have fun with friends who aren’t scared of me, and I would like to do so without repeated attempts on my life. Now that I think about it, Sareth, Hiro, whoever the three goons from just now were- I haven’t actually done anything. I mean, I’ve absolutely done things wrong at this point, but I didn’t start them. If people would stop trying to murder me for a bit, maybe things would calm down and improve?

My ruminations are cut short by the sound of motorbikes pulling onto the campus grounds. It’s Hiro’s sister, accompanied by a whole group of leather-jacket wearing boys in old-timey American fashion. I sigh, and take an educated guess at what's coming next.

“Aha,” Nozomi de Vries says as she parks her bike, and takes a samurai sword from one of her gang members. “I thought that was Hiro’s sword when I watched the livestream.”

Someone was livestreaming my fight? If that’s the case then literally everyone thinks I’m a monster now. Kate, Ruby, my dad- god fucking damnit.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” The girl wearing fake fox ears asks me.

“I am really tired. I want to go home.”

“Why did you kill my brother?”

I take a deep breath. “I found out I was Moontouched a few weeks ago. Only days later I get tested for Paraphysical Aptitude, and find out I’m the second strongest person ever measured. The government puts me on pills. My parents disown me. I get sent to a group home. Not long after, a bitch from my school tries to murder me. She’d been killing Periphery Demographics left and right, you see. On the brink of death, I realize how to turn her spell around, and she drops dead instead of me. Hiro walks in, and assumes I’m the serial killer. I try to explain, but both the close brush with death and the rush of magic coursing through me have addled my mind. We fight. He wins, and I die. The second time I died in quick succession. Lying in a pool of my own blood I see what I can only describe as a vision, and the vision taught me things about the world I struggle to put in words, and when I try nobody believes me. The result, however, is that I am borderline unkillable and can manifest stuff at will. The second round with your brother, with me now awakened to tremendous magic, is over in seconds. I win, and I try to return to my life. I try to get help in both mastering my magic and understanding what was actually going on from Ruby-Lynn and Robin, but struggle with blacking out and psychotic episodes. Instead of helping me, I am kicked out and left to fend for myself. I mentally break. I freak out. Then police raids my house and claims I have been overcome with Nightmare Corruption. I use Hiro’s sword against them-”

“Marieken,” Nozomi interrupts me.

“I use Hiro’s sword against them, but it’s cursed and-”

“Marieken, I get it,” she interrupts me again. “You can stop. I get it.”

“I- what? What do you mean?”

“The only thing I wonder about now is what on earth compelled you to destroy an entire police regiment and eat a military chopper on live TV.”

“I- god fucking damn it,” I swear, getting frustrated. “I was here to ask for help from a scientist, and got ambushed by a group of three freaks out to kill me. People just keep trying to kill me.”

“I see,” she says.

I split my twin shadows into tentacles, and I reach deep into my mind to draw on as much magic as I can. My aura flares to life, roaring like a thunderstorm.

“I see, and I understand, but do you understand why I am going to have to kill you, right?”

Again. Again. Again. Is this my life now? A non-stop flood of weirdos with magic powers attempting to end my life? Though, as I think about it, shouldn’t they run out of people with paraphysical aptitude scores high enough to bother me at some point?

“No, I don’t understand that,” I scream. “I don’t want this. Can everyone just leave me alone? If people don’t bother me, I won’t bother them. I swear.”

“Marieken, nobody would believe that even if it was true. What if you keep growing more powerful? You’re already upsetting the balance of the world simply by being in it. I can’t sleep soundly at night knowing that an emotionally unstable girl capable of being anywhere, at any time, can kill me with a thought. The world governments won’t tolerate it either. If I don’t kill you, who knows what drastic measures other groups, other nations, will eventually steep to? Should I sit around until the Americans unleash weaponized Nightmare Demons on the city like they did in Vietnam? Should I flee this city before the Soviets fire a nuclear missile at it to stop you from going berserk and threatening everyone on the planet at once? It is better if you die here and now. I don’t want to live in a world where I turn on the news and see that you’ve killed two hundred people after some moron tried to gank you.”

“That is ridiculous,” I scream. My voice cracks, I can’t help it. There are tears welling up in my eyes. “I didn’t ask for this!”

“That’s life. You don’t ask to be born, you suffer, and then you die.”

“Why- what- why don’t you put your money where your mouth is and kill yourself then? What a hypocritical way of arguing. I’m so tired of you people pointing at how terrible the world is as an argument to do nothing, or worse, as an argument to kill me!” The high I felt from earlier is subsiding, and my thoughts become crisp and clear, almost painfully so. A thought bubbles up. “You know what. Maybe I’ll go and do something about it. What will it take to buy my freedom, or the freedom of all Periphery Demographics, do you think? Taking the king hostage? The American president, maybe? That Soviet Mastercomputer thing that is ruling the Russians?”

“This is what I mean,” Nozomi sighs. “As long as the vaguest inkling exists that you might do something like this one day, they’ll never stop coming. You will suffer. The people around you will suffer. All Periphery Demographics will suffer because from today onwards, they’ll tighten the screws ever further to prevent another ‘Marieken Event’ from occuring.”

“A Marieken Event?” I spit at her in disbelief. “This,” I gesture wildly, “all this is happening because I cannot go for two days without someone trying to kill me or steal my soul. This is happening because the government created this nonsensical hatred of periphery demographics in the first place because they want magic to go away. Otherwise my parents wouldn’t have disowned me, I would have a normal and stable life and then there wouldn’t be any problem to begin with!”

“Marieken,” Nozomi says. “Do you understand what the world would look like without the suppression of magic? If everyone had a random grab-bag of mystical powers and the most mentally ill would also be the ones who could impose their vision of what the laws of physics ought to be the most? We would return to a mythical past where sorcerer-kings fold reality into a pretzel while vying for godhood. Billions would die, literally.”

A thought stops me dead in my tracks. That is it, isn’t it? What they’re trying to prevent, have been desperately trying to prevent since that thing with the moon landing is the mass-empowering of mankind with magic. A revolution of a scale previously- The Aeon of Horus, a voice in my head chimes in. For a second I mistake it for Murugan, but it is actually the lexicon that miss Juliet left in my brain through hypnosis, to help me fight the Nightmare Demons. “Yeah?” I ask out loud. The lexicon doesn’t answer.

“Yes,” Nozomi answers, thinking I’m talking to her. “Yes, Marieken. Imagine every-”

“No,” I say. “That’s not what I mean, I was talking to someone else.”

“What?”

“The Aeon of Horus,” I say. “That’s what that’s called. An Aeon is a time period I think? A bit like a century?”

“What are you talking about?”

Yes, mistress! The turning of the wheel, Murugan chimes in. Ages make way for ages, as generations make way for generations.

“The turning of the wheel,” I mutter. “The coming age.” Just thinking about these concepts, abstract and half-formed in my mind, sends the magic inside of me into a wild frenzy. Shadow is brought to a boil, and I am overcome with a manic excitement. “I think you’re being woefully pessimistic, Nozomi. It isn’t nightmare corruption that’s driving the buildup of magic. It’s wonder, isn’t it? The second world war didn’t cause the reality seizure, the moonlanding caused it. It’s believing that anything is possible that fuels magic. In this society, that is almost exclusively the domain of the mentally ill. Can you believe that? They’ve- they, these normal people, with their consensus reality, they’ve built a world where believing that ‘anything is possible’ is the purview of the clinically insane.”

“This conversation is going nowhere,” Nozomi says, and she pulls out her sword. It looks dull in the morning sunlight. It’s just metal, I realize. It isn’t like Murugan.

“This conversation has done more to straighten out my mind than any other conversation I’ve had in the past few months,” I reply.

Are you going to fight, mistress?

“Yeah.”

If she won’t listen to you, then convince her you are right in battle. There is no need to kill this one. She is a samurai, like you. Make her yield, make her swear her blade to you.

“I don’t think that is how it works, Murugan. I killed her brother, after all.”

“You’re talking to yourself again, Marieken.”

“Sorry,” I mutter. “Let’s fight. But if I win, you swear your blade to me. You’ll follow me wherever, okay?”

“What?” Nozomi says. She seems insulted. “You’re deranged, Marieken. This isn’t an anime.”

I laugh. I heartily laugh, and point at her headband. “You don’t believe that yourself, catgirl.”

“Fox,” she corrects me. “Foxgirl.”

I draw Murugan, and at the same time Nozomi raises her hand. All her biker goons raise their guns at me.

“Are you really content ordering middle aged drug dealers and bikers around all your life?” I ask her. “Don’t you want more?”

“There is no ‘More,’ Marieken,” she sighs dejectedly.

“Jeremy moment,” a raspy voice yells out behind me. I spin around, and see my previous assailants standing in the door opening.

“I killed you?” I try to yell, but it comes out more like a confused question.

Mistress, focus, Murugan yells in my head, and I barely dodge Nozomi rushing towards me at a ridiculous speed.

“Jesus,” I swear, “Hold up,”

“Enough talking,” she growls as she comes to a stop just past me. A second later a cacophony of gunfire rains down on me, and almost tears my body to shreds. Fuck! Focus, Marieken, focus, I tell myself. I have to take out her support first. I let go of my body, and a second later I have corporeal form again, chained to a nearby bench. “FUCK!” I scream. I can barely keep track of all threats around me, let alone respond to them. At least the bullets aren’t magic, or antimagic or whatever, and my wounds are easily regenerated.

“Who the fuck are you guys?” Nozomi asks, looking at the three goons strolling out of the university annex.

“The watergraaf sent us to assassinate Marieken de Vries,” the scrawny man in the tweed jacket says. “She almost got the better of us, but alas. I am a necromancer.”

“Huh?” Nozomi answers. “I’m fighting this broad, so undo your spell.”

“Not happening,” the necromancer, who I assume is called Jeremy, replies. “Tjeerd, distract her while Nehelennia and I get-”

“NEHELENNIA?” Nozomi bursts out laughing. “The twelve year old in the sailor moon cosplay is called Nehelennia!?” I don’t get the joke, but it’s funny enough that Nozomi almost doubles over with laughter.

“I’m not taking lip from a furry,” the girl spits out. A second later she frowns. “Oh,” she says. “That is a cute trick.”

“Awww,” Nozomi says. “You’re trying to get into my mind.”

Huh, I wonder. The chain ability requires some form of telepathy? There are pre-requisites to ‘hack’ abilities like that, Ruby-Lynn had explained to me earlier. Is her pre-requisite tied to my mental state? Like, she’s using metaphorical fetters to physically chain me up?

I take a deep breath, and try to remember what Ruby-Lynn taught me about shielding my mind. If she can’t reach my mind-

There are chains in the way. I can’t close my mind, because the chains are in the way. They’re indeed sprouting from my mind. The sensation is fascinating, but I can’t spend time on introspection now. I need to get moving before the violence erupts in full force again.

“The first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer-” the balding guy begins, but Nozomi immediately interrupts him.

“Aired first as a two hour special cut together with the next episode, and partially rethreads the movie and then sets up the series as an alternate continuity,” Nozomi reacts almost instinctually.

“His ability kills you if you get a question wrong,” I helpfully bring up.

“No pressure,” Nozomi replies.

“Nehelennia, silence her,” Jeremy orders.

“I’m not one of your puppets,” she complains. “Don’t talk to me like that.”

“Not one of my puppets yet,” Jeremy corrects her. “So be sure to not let her get the better of you, or you’ll wake up with a beautiful piece of thread around your cute, petite heart.”

Jesus.

“Jesus,” Nehelennia says. For a second I see her waver.

“You could switch sides,” I suggest.

“Shut the fuck up,” she spits at me. “They’re paying me almost a million guilders for this. That, and clearing my criminal record.”

“You’re a child,” I say, slightly confused. “How can you have a criminal record?”

“Different species, different set of rights,” she says, shrugging.

Behind Nehelennia her balding ally bombards Nozomi with a barrage of pop-culture questions.

“In the first theatrical screening of Star Wars Episode Four,” he begins.

“It was just called ‘Star Wars,’ and if you’re talking about pre-release screenings, Jabba the Hutt was not yet a snail person but instead a human gangster.”

“Wow,” he replies. “Euh, in two thousand and six a French-Japanese television series aired on Disney subsidiary channel Jetix.”

“Fucking Ōban Star-Racers? You’re asking me about Ōban Star-Racers?”

“Euh, euhm, the original-”

“Short movie called Molly, Star Racer.”

“The first French-Japanese-”

“Ulysses thirty-one. Next question.”

“I see that you’ve got your French-Japanese animation lore down. Jeremy, I’m dealing with a fellow expert. Permission to reveal my full powerlevel?”

“What?” The tweed-jacketed necromancer replies. “I don’t care? Just kill her.”

Several of Nozomi her goons raise their guns, but she motions them to stand down. “I want to see where this is going,” she laughs.

“Don’t get confident, woman,” the balding trivia-wizard says, grinning. “The Makai Knight from Chapter of the Black Wolf fights the Horrors, which are based on-”

“Nightmare Demons,” Nozomi replies. “Which is why the show was eventually pulled from television, as accurate portrayals of paraphysical phenomena were deemed unacceptable under the revised Normalcy Guidelines. And the show isn’t called ‘Chapters of the Black Wolf,’ scrub, it’s called Garo. Chapters of the Black Wolf was the title of an early English dub, the translation quality of which is widely considered to be not very good.”

“Wow,” he replies. “This woman doesn’t deserve to die, Jeremy. She’s like, an ensouled human being.”

“Excuse me,” Nozomi says. “That’s your ability? You can kill people who you believe deserve to die? And that is based on their knowledge of pop culture trivia?”

“What, and I deserve to die because I don’t know the answers to your stupid trivia questions?” I yell.

The lumbering man takes a deep breath, as if to calm building rage. “Don’t make me out for a shallow nerd. Pop culture is the religion of the modern era. It informs our entire society, and if you stumble through life blind, without even absorbing the basics of the culture that shapes our entire world, do you then deserve to vote? To consume resources that real people need?”

“Jesus, you really believe that, don’t you?” Nozomi asks.

“What the fuck?” Nehelennia says.

“What court are you,” I try probing her.

“Wouldn’t you like to know, shadow-witch?”

“Can everyone stop talking and go back to killing each other?” Jeremy suggests.

“I was trying to,” Trivia Hitler begins before he is interrupted by Nozomi dashing past him and striking his head off his shoulders.

“Sure,” she says.

Get her men-at-arms while she’s busy with your opponents, Murugan suggests.

“That’s not very fair,” I say.

Mistress, no warfare is fair! Save your honour for when you meet your equals on the battlefield. The samurai does not concern herself with the honour of the lesser bannermen following her foes.

“Oh,” I reply. “I’m still chained up. I think Nehelennia wisened up to me cutting off my own limbs because she’s attaching her chains to my shadows now. Hey, Nehelennia, are you sure you want to try outrunning Nozomi and dying for the sake of Trivia Hitler and Professor Pedophile?”

“AAAAAAGH,” she screams, scrambling backwards as Nozomi points her sword at her. “Fuck it.”

The chains locking me in place dissolve, and I shadow-step in front of Nehelennia as Nozomi dashes towards her. I only barely parry her sword, but to my surprise her blade chips and cracks as it clashes with Murugan.

Pathetic.

“You cannot win from me, Marieken,” Nozomi says, staring me in the eyes. “You might be stronger, you might have more magic, you might have a cooler sword, sure.”

“But?” I ask.

“But you’re inexperienced, and beyond Paraphysical Aptitude scores of fifty, experience is all that matters.”

The next second she is gone, wind rushing past me. Jeremy screams as his hands fly through the air.

“Help me,” Nehelennia mutters. “I’m siding with you, okay? I’m siding with you, just help me.”

I look around, and I realize Nozomi is dashing around the courtyard. Her brother moved faster than a car, faster than a jet maybe. Nozomi is moving so fast I can barely track her, and then I lose her. She’s still speeding up, I realize. The pressure of the air she displaces breaks all the windows on the university campus. Then her soldiers open fire on me and Nehelennia. I throw my shadow up as a physical manifestation, and a quarter of a second later I lose one of my legs as Nozomi speeds past me. I regenerate it, but don’t manage to keep my shadow-shield up at the same time. To avoid both me and Nehelennia being turned into swiss cheese- which I doubt she can survive- I grab her and shadow-step as far as I can manage, ending up on the top of the campus building. A tenth of a second later I just barely manage to warp my body into the shape required to deflect Nozomi’s blade before she cuts Nehelennia clean in half. Another tenth of a second later the sonic boom behind her knocks me on Nehelennia on the ground. Blood spurts from her ears. Just her eardrums, I pray, as I scream for Nozomi to fight me and me alone. I sharpen my senses as far as my magic allows me to, and I see a rush of wind flutter in the distance. As I jump up, I thrust Murugan forward where I predict she’ll be, and miss. The sonic boom rattles me, and then Nozomi passes by again- straight through Nehelennia, who was trying to scramble to her feet. She’s turned into a pink mist from the sheer force.

“NO!” I scream. “FUCK!”

Mistress, you have to get faster.

“Fuck off,” I scream as I dash off the building and try to connect my shadow to as many of Nozomi’s goons her shadows as I can. I rip their shadows away from them, manifest them into a mass of hungry mouths that tear into their previous owners. Instead of chowing down into meat, their teeth only find rapidly evaporating dream-stuff, nightmare matter.

“They’re not real,” the wind whispers as it dashes by and I can narrowly avoid being beheaded at the cost of my left arm. “They’re the ghosts of gangsters past, reanimated with magic,” the wind explains as I narrowly dodge being turned into paste by air displacement.

Mistress!

“I don’t know,” I cry as I shadow step across the campus, burning through magic at a frightening speed. Wherever I go, either Nozomi already is there and batters me with either her blade or the shockwave from her sheer speed, or dream-gangsters suddenly step around the corner and open fire on me.

How can I fight someone I cannot even track?

Mistress, you-

“I’m running out of fuel, Murugan,” I cry as I let go of my physical shape, and become a living shadow, teeth and fang and claw and eye, absorbing as many of the shadows on the courtyard as I can.

Nozomi stops moving in the middle of the field, now surrounded by my almost omnipresent form, leering at her with hundreds of eyes, chattering at her with dozens of mouths.

“You really are a Nightmare Demon,” she says.

I can’t speak with a dozen mouths, so I just lash at her with my shadow-tentacles to rip her to pieces. She effortlessly dodges, throws away her battered sword and makes a strange gesture with her hands.

“It’s been a while since I’ve had to use actual magic, you know,” she says. “Instead of just taking people apart with physical ability alone.”

There’s no way, I think. There’s no way that wasn’t magic. Nobody can run at supersonic speeds and expect me to believe that was ‘physical ability alone.’

A mental probe rams into my head, a bit like how Ruby-Lynn would attack me during our practice. Except Ruby-Lynn’s felt like a sharp spike trying to pierce my defenses, trying to drive a stake into my brain. This is an avalanche. A wall of force, not to penetrate my mind but to flatten it outright. I try to throw up walls and realize I am out of my depth. I can’t hold this kind of violence at bay. Then I realize she’s still casting a spell. She’s kneeling on one leg, muttering and moving her hands. She’s trying to flatten my mind with a psychic attack while casting a spell at the same time.

Murugan, I mentally cry. Murugan, help me.

I’m a sword, the de-manifested sword says somewhere inside my soul. You are the magician. I am but the knife.

I’m a magician, I mentally affirm. I have fought off Sareth’s attack, I have fought off Hiro. I’ve mentally evolved again and again and found myself something akin to a god. I just need the right mental state, and then I can win. Theoretically I am the stronger magician, after all.

Sareth truly believed she deserved my magic, and tried to steal my soul through that mindset. That’s not something I can ever emulate. It’s not in my nature. It’s not who I am. Trivia Hitler could kill because he truly believed some people deserved to die. Could I bend my mind in the shape required for magic like that? Probably not.

My magic is something stranger. I am a shadow. A fake. I am not real, an illusion cast on the wall. That’s what I have to work with. If I have to come up with a spell, I need to lean into ‘my’ magic. Manifesting and dispelling conjured matter, teleporting around, they’re all simply extensions of how I’ve come to see the world. They’re not really spells. If I put my mind to it, what could I really achieve? Just today I’ve refined my abilities tenfold and then learned to copy myself, just because the situation called for it.

Whatever magic Nozomi is about to launch at me, it is almost certainly going to kill me or at least cripple me to the point she can easily finish me off, I realize as my mind starts to crack and splinter under the weight of her simultaneous psychic assault.

I am a shadow on the wall. Matter is too. None of this is real. Creating things slurps up magic, magic that is stored somewhere. Not in the body. In the mind. My mind is clearly not inside my body, though when I take my human shape, it’s uncomfortably intermingled with it. Attached to my brain, poured into a shape that can fit in human neurons. Thoughts of constructing a different brain, of messing with the cellular automata that make up my body flash through my mind, but it would take me months if not years to fully probe exactly how my body ticks, even with my supernaturally amped understanding of my own biology.

If I survive this, I should find a quiet spot and take apart my body until I can build a better one.

Time slows down and I realize that no matter how fast I speed up my thinking, I’ll nonetheless run out of time eventually. I need a spell, a magic, now.

I’m not real. At least my body isn’t. But what is? I conceptualized it as a flame casting a shadow. The object casting the shadow must be the real ‘me,’ but it is beyond my understanding what exactly that is. Something that takes the form of ‘Marieken’ as this light beyond the world passes by it.

Shadow court. Light beyond the world. What if I let the light through? Can I wield light as well as shadow? There’s no time to come up with a real spell, no time to experiment. All I can do is reach for this ever-distant, abstract ‘real’ me and try to get it, or her, to change her shape. To move out of the way. Isn’t- I realize I’ve never actually been changing my shape. To change the shadow on the wall, you have to manipulate the object in front of the light source. I’m not actually the shadow. I’ve been telling myself that, but I’m not. I am the thing casting the shadow.

I reach out and I connect both halves of my ‘self,’ a process seemingly initiated on both ‘ends’ at once. We meet in the middle, and I touch something so far beyond my understanding that it shatters my mind before Nozomi can.

Light pours from beyond. I am a tiny candle of darkness, and an ocean of light rushes past me. There is no hope of maintaining myself in the face of the onslaught of radiant violence bearing down on me. I let go, and a light brighter than the sun, brighter than I imagine an atomic bomb to be, extinguishes the little shadow that was once ‘Marieken de Vries.’

It is music. It is light. It’s angelic, and it is horrific. A million years of the laughter of children, of artistry and sunrises and a billion quiet moments of religious awe. It is all these things, and yet this is only the surface. It burns, and it screams. The deeper, the stranger it gets. Who could ever imagine what magnetic fields dream about? Who could attempt to fathom that the processes of stellar formation and the math underlying evolution have thoughts to begin with, let alone contemplate what they hope for?

It is cruel, some thing that was once me realizes. There is no ‘I’ here, but there is still something that ‘is,’ even in the absence of everything that once made this ‘thing’ into Marieken Mithras.

It is cruel, this light. A deep evil pervades it. A feeling of hate. All the light in the universe, everything good and everything beautiful, and it too can feel. It can dream. All it feels is hate, and all it dreams is nightmares.

Something is wrong. Something is horrificially wrong, some thing realizes, and slowly the light takes on shapes. It takes on hues real and unreal. Patterns, fractal and organic. Shapes real and not real. Structures form, both intelligent and animalistic. There are palaces here, I realize. Palaces which dream, and are in turn inhabited by palaces both larger and smaller than themselves.

A thing that precedes what was once ‘me’ is dragged along, and experiences a billion years or more of boiling hate in the form of love, of yearning, of sunset after sunset and is then battered and beaten by searing heat, reforged by stellar or even godly fires into something that once again resembles Marieken.

[CHAPTER BREAK]

A choir of angels sings to me as little creatures of light dress me in silk robes. Real silk, I realize. Not the pale imitation we have on earth. There’s no describing the room I am in. Gold wishes it could be an element as perfect as the stuff they’ve built this place out of.

Come, something akin to a computer program running on nothing but an infinitely complex magnetic field interacting with itself to sustain itself tells me. I follow.

God does not look like what I expected Him to look like. His head is that of a rooster, and his legs are writhing snakes.

I am the lord of all matter, He tells me. I am the lord of all that is worldly, the lord of the abstract processes that give rise to all physical things, and lord of the abstract processes that arise in turn from all physical things.

Queen of Air and Darkness, speak and explain why you have intruded on the heavenly realm, He bids me.

Here in this palace, there can be no distinction between me and him, and yet we are separate beings somehow. I answer in his voice, and He speaks to me in mine.

Queen of Air and Darkness, he tells me. You are not the Mithras, and the Sun has been declared off-limits to you and your ilk. You will be fettered, you will be veiled, and cast back down into the shadow realm. Transgression against the highest God will not be tolerated.

Angels sing lamentations for me, and fairies, spirits of intellect, fields of computation and the souls of the unborn and the dead accompany me, fluttering around me, as chains of light and darkness are wrapped around me before I am unceremoniously thrown out of the splendour of heaven again.

[CHAPTER BREAK]

Marieken Mithras

I wake up in a field, grass smouldering from heat around me. As I get up, I feel more clear-headed than I have ever been. It’s hard to remember now, but I’m certain I’ve just seen heaven. Seen the truth of all things, the man behind the curtain.

In the distance, Amsterdam rises up out of the fields surrounding it. It looks different from how I remember. It’s so lonely, lacking the suburbs or any of the infrastructure outside the center and a few neighborhoods around it. Endless fields, farms, and canals surround it.

“Hahuwh?” I mutter. I look around for Murugan, and cannot find him. I’m naked as well, I realize, and I manifest some clothes to protect my modesty. This is a profound act, I realize. It is ‘sinful’ somehow to be clothed. By dressing myself I am hiding from the watchful gaze of God.

“Oh,” I mutter. “Christ.” If I haven’t completely lost my mind, I’ve just met God. A chicken-headed and cruel God, but undeniably God.

With nothing else to do, I start walking towards the city. It’s further away than I realized, and as a horse-drawn cart catches up to me I start to wonder if I’ve gone back in time.

“Oh,” the straw-hat wearing farmer on the cart says. “Moon girl. You shouldn’t be walking. Here, climb on my cart.”

“I shouldn’t be walking?” I ask him as he stops his cart, and I climb on next to him.

“You are too humble,” he says.

“Right,” I answer. “Could you tell me where I am?”

“Huh?” He replies, confused. He sinks into thought for a second, then cheers up. “You’re a newborn! You’ve just fallen down from the moon,” he says. “You’re on the road to Oetelwaard, moon girl. Oh, blessed! I am blessed. Please, let me escort you to the monastery.”

“The monastery?"

“This must all be awfully confusing to you. You’re a moon girl,” he says, pointing up. “Your kind falls down from the moon. Here in Oetelwaard, the monastery takes you in. You’re a holy being, after all. Oh, I am blessed. Seven years of good luck for the man who helps out a wayward moon girl, after all.”

“Ohhh,” I say, “Ooooh. I see.”

What the actual fuck, I think to myself.

END OF MOONLIGHT CANTATA PART 1 - TUNE IN NEXT TIME FOR MOONLIGHT CANTATA: QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS