CW: social anxiety, humiliation, dissociation, discussion of hell, discussion of institutionalization, psychoanalysis, psychiatric abuse, OCD triggers (executive function, sexual/romantic feelings, thoughts causing harm), torture, incontinence, gendered religious metaphysics, religious police, parental death, underage exposure to erotic media, masturbation, sexualization of peers, self-harm, imageboards, vomit, school punishment
Click.
“How often do… things like the incident I saw happen?”
“First… second time in four years.”
“I’m sorry if I. Caught you at a bad time and made assumptions.”
“No, your assumptions were completely right. Your timing was just batshit insane.”
“…huh. So like how often do you go outside.”
“Third time in… two years. Last time was just around the corner to pick stuff up from my mom.”
“Whoa. So you’re the real deal huh. Did this used to happen before you… withdrew?”
He opened his mouth and moved it silently. A gob of something like gum floating in his back teeth. “…define …this.”
“How often would you do something that would get you kicked out of a coffeeshop.”
“That doesn’t… tell you anything. First time I didn’t get kicked out. Didn’t last time either but I ran out which is basically the same.”
“…is it? People run out to like, catch a bus all the time. Again I’m sorry if I” -
“The time before that was the video.”
“Right. So that was the first - but like you can’t have like, never gone outside. Never talked to people.”
The man was… chewing his cud, like a cow or a goat. His eyes had misted over. “Oh. Oh oh oh. Thanks, you gave me a place to start. Have you ever seen… an an-an-shit!-an…”
“Animation? I know more people who are into stuff like that than you might think.”
She didn’t even call it anime. Did she really expect him to believe that?… Suddenly his voice seemed much more natural. Slightly stuttering, but almost arrogant. “OK, have you seen one called Hell Harrowing?”
“I’ve heard of it, but never gotten around to it.” She did prefer novels at the end of the day.
“OK, so in Hell Harrowing, the main love interest, the girl who falls from the sky, Azamiel Kelvoth, is the Daemon of the Cornerstone - she’s been imprisoned since birth in the deepest room of hell. And when she lands on Earth, and meets Astig - literally the first person she’s met other than through the mirrors, but that’s another thing - the first thing she wants to do is get back down there.”
“And does she?…”
“Well, no, but… Shunny Najda already barely got that series approved by the Ecclesia. He had to give it a happy ending for normies. But it’s one of the greatest series of all time anyway.”
“…do you think she should have?”
“Uhhh… look, if you haven’t seen it, I don’t think you have the context to have this discussion.”
“OK fair enough. Is it what you’d want?”
His eyes rolled back and forth for another 30, 60, 100 seconds.
“…I dunno… if wanting even matters to me anymore. When I want something, these days, I just find the easiest thing I can do to make it stop. Usually that’s something I have here. Porn, posting, ordering food online. Do you really think you’re going to get something interesting out of this?”
“Well… it’s a kind of uninteresting that’s not supposed to happen, which is interesting in itself.” She was describing the mission of Punkin - was she, in a sense, just trolling him? She’d never started a thread there before, that had always been her ethical line in the sand, despite knowing she was better trained and intentioned to provide the information she permitted herself to consume. But now she was realizing that she had wanted to, and that she also knew what she wanted to do better. “The thing you just said about wanting, it almost sounds like you’re quoting some old Miwa scriptures I know, but they wouldn’t consider any of those things a legitimate…”
“…way to stop wanting things? I know.” (From lurking /r/ - Religion and /mo/ - Monasticism.) “But it’s not like I think I can stop either. It’s more like… there’s too many little things I want and don’t have to even think about what I’d want in the best case.” He flashed back to thinking about the Seer In The Half Light the other week and almost went nonverbal like at the beginning of the call again. No, if he put it that way, a room all alone wasn’t what he wanted in the best case… that was why he’d never cared that much about Azamiel… but might it be better than anything he could have, might it be better than everything else except one out of infinite possibilities? This was all going too fast, he couldn’t explain it to her, he might be able to point her to the right posts…
“Anyway, I meant more like, you must have gone to school. You can’t have been… like that all the time, even if you were, that’s what school is for. There’s people who resist, I’ve read about some hard cases…” maybe if this didn’t work, she could write about some of those. “But you don’t seem like the type of person who wants to do that.”
She had the strange feeling that she was penetrating the depths of some recurring dream, picking away at some thing she already knew that had been compacted into night, as she watched his eyes dart, almost roll. (He blinked - he was aware of it - he tried to look at her as if he was looking at the sun.) “I think it was what they wanted. But I could never figure out what they wanted. Not in 12 years. By the end I wanted so badly to get out. Grade 12 I could barely do my work because I wanted so badly to get out so I was scared to get out so I was scared to do my work. But I really wanted to get out so I did it anyway. Graduating Grade 12 was the only and last thing I ever did, maybe. I was like, catatonic maybe 80, 90 percent of the time I was at home. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud like I’ve typed this in messages but never said it out loud. Forcing myself to write like, one line of a final project at a time. Just pushing myself through like a sticky darkness to the light where I could see my pencil. Like the Sea of Pumice. Mom would try to pull me out of it like five times a day which wasted even more of it. I didn’t even try entrance exams. I threw them all out, oh jeez, did I say that? I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m” -
The camera switched off.
Goddess. This was like trying to start a broken laptop running.
With non-specialized spells off the internet.
She might have just broken it.
It came back on five minutes later. The face was squinting and had lines from the pillow across it.
“I don’t think this is answering your question,” his voice drifted out calmly and thinly.
“Well, are you OK to keep going?”
“If we are going to, you are going to have to not ask that.”
“Well maybe we should have something like…” She already had a bit of a sense the “safeword” analogy she had been thinking of was going to set him off. Psychologists had to have a word for that, though, right? What did they call it?
“You have a psychologist, right?”
“I was a fan of yours from your clearance application exam.” Otti Tserghan, one of the “Heavenly Henge” of six maximum clearance Ecclesiastic psychologists, spun her signature gel pen back and forth, thwacking against her prematurely leathered, manicured fingernails. A dramatic sweep of platinum fell across her gold-complexioned face. She was actually three years younger than Rraihha Braz. “I don’t understand anything of this case. How did you give in to such mundane justifications, such banal distortions?”
“I didn’t give in to anything,” Braz elaborated. “I didn’t do anything but feel.”
“See, there’s what I mean. You know exactly what the privilege of contact with the [Taboo Preserver] demands of just feelings, and why. Or else you would have…”
“Acted on it? Spoken of it?”
“You did, in fact, speak of it. Which is why we are here."
On an empty car of a train travelling at an hour the regularly scheduled trains had been abruptly cancelled along the Elthazan-Silmenon railroad. Even moor-hills like the piles of debris pulled from foundations slid past each other, the furthest and most inert the blue-white flyleaf of the C’harn Western Shield.
“Yes. I have no excuse for that.”
“Then what kind of error do you think it was?”
She counted the bars of wheel-clatter as she said nothing. Obvious answers kept forming in her mouth and then being shot down by the snipers in her brain. Time was repeating, not passing, for her, as closely and helplessly as she watched the repetitions add up to a passing.
The rest of the train was empty except, in every other car, a squad of three military Preservers, uninformed of the specifics of their mission, alternately deploying an interference spell so strong Braz could feel it buzzing like a power tool against the back of her skull for the duration of these sessions. They spent the rest of the time charging it while Braz was held in a meditative trance in her car, fixated on a complex symbolic fractal and unable to think of Ymañn. Thanks to this arrangement, the paper wards between the train windows fluttered only slightly, within the designated safe five millimetres, as she racked her brain over her cursed feelings.
The words came out hollow; she let them pass as a show of cooperation after 15 repetitions. “I tried to balance a feeling with an action. Normally, that’s what confession is, but in this case…”
“Your own exam essay on retributive justice demonstrates that you don’t believe this is necessarily a complete break.” Tserghan balanced the pen on its tip and spun it from one finger (a childhood tic, a hypnotic trick, a distraction?…) “Actions permitted to balance feelings, even though the incompatibility between the two must be settled by the outcome of the action, not the feeling itself? …I would have guessed you were operating on something like that yourself, but it seems you’re still hiding something.”
“But those feelings I wrote about are still something. They can be described in some terms, some intelligible relations within the Order, not just a word floating in the void. They stop people from doing things, they make them shake or freeze up or lash out or cry, they inscribe themselves as beliefs. If not for the fact that this spell even works…”
“None of those are the feeling itself. Feeling is its own layer of the manifold.”
“I know this - it’s also one of the ways I can detach feelings and let them go.”
“Mm-hmm. But you can’t for this one, right? And of course here we get into different kinds of feelings - the experience of the sky being blue can’t be detached from the sky, no matter how much you explain it in terms of anything else, not even if you know what the colour blue is and try to replace the affect with that information. Whereas if you associate the blue of the sky with happiness or sadness, that’s not irreducible in the same way, it’s an incomplete conceptual loop -“
“Which is closer to what love is, right, even false or forbidden love? Except apparently it’s rhi - how does it work? Doesn’t that defeat everything we’re saying about irreducible layers - if that were true couldn’t we solve all cheating, all matchmaking? Unless it’s simply that, by confessing - it wouldn’t even have to be a lie, ‘I love him’ could be true in all kinds of ways that wouldn’t be improper, but by saying it there, by implying that, I went back and poisoned it. Yes, it would make more magical sense if the substrate of the spell was the association, it would be more discrete, more present in the interaction itself. And maybe, with your help, there would be some way to break it -”
Tserghan sucked air through her teeth. “Getting colder. I have no idea how the spell works, but I’ve heard that excuse from the most vulgar kinds of “forbidden lovers”… Of course there are people who genuinely do make themselves suffer by misidentifying an ordinary feeling as a [taboo] one, but nothing in your profile has ever suggested you would be one of them. Suppose that’s true - then why do you say it in the first place? Where does the suspicion start?”
“When I start to listen to the stories. The uhhh - infodumps.” She could almost explain them better, she realized, one by one - each such a novel, individual phenomenon that the common longing elicited by all of them could only be something as lofty and distant as nothing or love. And of course her eyes danced across his shoulders and his hair, such different kinds of soft at once - “OK. OK,” she breathed. Now she felt like she could say something she meant, without all this flooding back in “I still think I - crossed a boundary between layers. Maybe not… from nothing to something, but a boundary nonetheless. Which is the same thing I was afraid I would have been doing if I simply resigned.” Now it felt as if the sun was coming out from behind a cloud. (Though outside, it dipped behind a dome downed with gorse.) “If I changed what we actually had for…” The ward in the window becoming more agitated.
“You made that possible, too. You made a whole request, not to get away but actually to get closer - I was on the committee that approved it. Were you aware of these feelings then? A lot of people want me to pin it all on the clinging man, another Serpent coiling too close and destroying what it desires. I think that would be less interesting, but of course if it’s true… after all it was a risk in his dossier…”
“That’s not what I mean. If I thought that was happening I wouldn’t have…” she trailed off, losing confidence in her own counterfactual - after all, would she have believed any of this about herself if it hadn’t happened? - and watched Tserghan take a note of it with the strangely satisfying internal bracing that had long since replaced the ordinary flinch at criticism or judgment by others. It had been so long, even in this situation… she had almost forgotten it amidst the numb, tingling nightmare-static, through which she could see clearly only at the cost of feeling nothing.
“Yes. Although we’ve basically given up. I play video games during sessions and bounce ideas for Feed posts off him sometimes.”
Right, she should have checked out his Feed earlier, he had mentioned early on he had one. She opened @MoePhrenology on the phone screen she glanced down at in her lap when he didn’t seem to be paying too much attention.
Wait a second. She had seen this account on Punkin… cited positively.
Everyone knew Scarecrows had more in common with their targets than the median civilian - that some were worse, even if you didn’t think the whole enterprise made them so by default - but mostly they maintained some cognitive dissonance about it, and she couldn’t imagine anyone acting like the man she had seen in that coffeeshop and not imagining the thread about themselves.
Of course she didn’t know from that if he posted on Punkin Patch himself. She could just ask any time she wanted but didn’t want to scare him off. But the very first thing she saw on his profile was a string of reFeeds of OITO’s bathroom stall waifu drawings. Word searches showed some familiarity with other famous Yonaf “Howling Tamarind” Schvyxer, Zilchon Ye Rubber Mage, Elilletha CubeRecursion. While being clever enough about it to justify it purely as self-deprecating humour, he addressed them like his favourite doujin artists (themselves a whole board on Punkin), in tones of almost pained admiration.
“How long have you…”
“I’m not saying, because if they give up they have to transfer me, right?”
“Has that… happened to you before?”
“Five times.”
…In Elthazan, that was the maximum number before you got moved to the Specialized Care system.
She couldn’t figure out why they would hesitate with a guy like this.
Maybe if Specialized Care was what they still made it look like on bad TV, a pre-psychological Heretics’ Asylum the villains would scheme to put the heiress in. But she had taken a medical reporting course at Yn Dahh’t. It didn’t even mean going anywhere. Sometimes they could put you in touch with a specialist in another country online. Or one might make arrangements to have you live on residence at their Academy, with all kinds of amenities, expenses paid out of their research budget, an indefinite vacation. Contact restrictions were a whole other thing and only used under extremely strict circumstances.
“Has anyone suggested a Specialized issue?”
If this just turned into her helping a guy who didn’t know he could get Specialized Care get it, it might turn into more of a feel-good story than she had been planning.
Oh well. Gallvren would love it.
Why do you always want to prove something’s wrong, she’d ask over lemon-glazed biscuits and tea at midnight, why not make the most of living in a world where things are good most of the time?
Because even if you assume that, people don’t need me to tell them what things are like most of the time. I’m interested in the rest of the time.
Sure, but maybe it’s not what the Goddess wants you to do. Maybe you’re not gonna find the special thing you’re “needed” for anyway, so you can just do what you like.
But this is what I like, and I don’t know how to make myself needed for it!
Her cheek so close the rhi in the air tickled.
“Of course not. I mean, not since the last guy. There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just a pathetic piece of shit.”
She’d been bracing for something like this, but something about his voice - a flippancy that both completely believed itself and knew what it sounded like, detectable even through a dazed stiffness like reading a script for the first time - still stung.
“In the sense of choosing to, or of being innately?”
“Oh man… Is this all just to trap me into saying a Heresy?”
What? Maybe he did believe Specialized Care still meant getting locked up in a spooky abbey. “Obviously if I say innate I’m just trying to parse your internal perceptions, I’m not taking it as a consistent belief.”
He blinked. “…are you a psychologist?”
“No."
“Then I don’t believe you. Only a psychologist is allowed to ask that.”
“That sounds like something someone would say in an Inquisition drama from the last postwar era. Did someone… tell you that?”
“Isn’t that where psychology comes from? You know that, right? I’m not talking to some common-permission fake news site or Domesday “reporter” am I? All this for” -
“Shut up!” His attitude had completely changed, although he sounded more like he was talking to himself than her, talking offstage like in a bad play. “I know the origins but like… you were just telling me about Shunny Najda, the man whose entire career is built on plausibly deniable heresies, let alone things you just say in conversation because you don’t mean literally.”
“I know all about things you just say in conversation because you don’t mean literally. I do that all day on Feed. I thought this was going to be something different!”
“Well then what you just said, taken literally, is plainly heretical!” Every human being, every form of matter, you learned from the age of theoretical reason at 7, could be described in terms of its elements, Chaos and Order, the Serpent and the Goddess, the Serpent of fire born at the outer edge of the world, the endless dark circumference, coiling in yearning love toward the Goddess, self-producing symmetry, infinitely complex and infinitely simple fractal dancing at the centre of the world. The Order of the Goddess was Good, and every human who occupied the position of the Serpent in striving towards Her had the inalienable potential and drive for good, as it was implicit in their very imperfection. As far as Marzanna was concerned, the Ecclesia could hammer out the metaphysics endlessly - every human being was the important part. And of course no one would call heresy on that in an everyday context either, people called each other stuff like that all the time on Punkin, on Feed, on the chans. Journalists if anyone still had a lot of language taboos that the internet had lifted. Heresy wasn’t even an actionable category in most contexts other than public distribution regulations and military courts. The kinds that the Inquisition still concerned itself with were very clearly defined as Dark beliefs.
“Yes, and you can’t force me to be theologically specific enough for it to be enforceable. Protection of Disordered Individuals Act 37A. You’ll know that if you’re a real journalist right?”
OK, damn it, that was on the books here. He could have heard it from a psychologist, or from edgy shitposters online. “Uhh, good catch, now I know you’re awake. Where’d you learn this?”
Luskonneg blinked again to distract himself from the fact that the man looked more like an egg (the shape of his face) or a chicken (the staticky wattle of hair off the middle of his forehead). “Tell me - has your curriculum reached the origins of modern psychology yet? Or have you watched any dramas like Endless Ward?”
Luskonneg started coughing to suppress his derision and ended up hyperventilating. Not that he really had any idea what was supposed to be so bad about Endless Ward but he’d overheard even people in his class making fun of it and the screenshots had ugly lighting that made everything sort of look like it was inside a snowglobe in an over-lit room and his mom went into a glaze-eyed trance in front of it at 3:00 in the morning when he was supposed to be sleeping. When those clipped, upturned voices flickered under the door was the only time he could make noise, even walk right past her. “I prefer… the books.”
That wasn’t true but he had read on Choreopedia that even Najda was influenced by Yukhil Tsÿo, the pioneer of Inquisitorial mystery who had branched out into psychological mystery at the end of his life. And the show he had been
“No - I mean - yes but I wasn’t paying any attention.” By now Luskonneg could sit through most of an entire lecture, eyes open and staring ahead, basically not seeing or hearing anything. It would be a kind of cool trick if he could explain what it even was, let alone how to do it. He thought of it as a kind of lucid dreamlessness.
“Hmm, well just let me know if you already know something.”
He was starting to do it now, to get away from the egg-chicken-man, the image becoming too distracting. In class the black pocket was big enough to just absorb his anxieties, a cavernous pool where he could watch them circle like sharks and beat them away with the weak flashlight of his self-awareness without the punishing video game grind spilling over into his physical surroundings.
“It developed from the Inquisition. Not, as you might expect, just as a way of getting more accurate confessions. It was because in dealing with heretics, they found they had to distinguish heresies from ordinary thought patterns. Amongst each other, they started seeing heresies built into ordinary thought patterns. Clerics had always had the opportunity to observe this in confessions, particularly the Analytic Confession, but it was only after Inquisitors started interrogating each other recreationally that they could systematically begin to determine all the folds, all the iterations.”
Smack. The flat of the flame-bladed, flame-heated Inquisitorial sword fell across the naked slope of the [Taboo Preserver]’s back, left a mark like a train track, a sward of singed hair. Fat quivered and flinched.
“Don’t misunderstand. None of this means I blame you. As little as you’ve told us, I can only imagine, a woman like Rraihha Braz, an aristocrat, a fossil of the old world… they aren’t used to seeing from the Serpent’s head, pushing through the blind storm of their own Chaos to arrive at the truth of themselves and their duties. They think they can still stand in the position of the Goddess, can dance Her dance and know Her Order as their mere peace, their certainty.”
“This isn’t about… politics or theology or whatever. It’s just… my fault. My fault like it was before. I brought it back with me.”
Smack. Strange and wonderful shapes and colours raced across the uncharted walls of his interior city, the dizzying underground where he fell behind. Somewhere, a wish that Braz could see him, maybe even somehow that she could be the one to purify him of herself, fell past him into the endless dark, escaping the Inquisitor’s sight. “And ours. We didn’t grasp that the [Taboo Preserver] would need such further training in the recognition, the pursuit of the Order you protect - of which you are the cornerstone. They dress you up in these trappings, this title, as if you yourself were some passive ceremonial object, some… mystic courtesan of old Silmenon or C’harn. But you are a masterpiece of the Order that can only be uncovered by the Serpent’s striving, and the application of the Goddess’ Order to that striving - the culmination of the discoveries of scientific psychology, scientific magic. Our fault was that we thought you would not have to participate in the work yourself. So work with us. Identify your fault, explain it.”
The point of the sword tickled the underside of Ymañn’s chin. A warm, wet volume balanced in the hammock of his pants, then fell stepwise…
A dog’s snout lifted the Inquisitor by the back of the neck. Another gripped the sword - showing no reaction to the heat - the third held its long jaws open sideways around his gut.
“No, no, it’s… OK, I requested this, remember?”
The dogs were silent. The one with the sword shook its head, ears swinging gently. The one holding up the merely-startled-looking Inquisitor turned and set him down on the edge of a divan set far back into the curtains. The third picked up a square of silk stitched with swallows in its mouth and started mopping up the pillows around Ymañn’s buckled knees.
“I um. Ahem. I hope my comments about the archaic world weren’t taken as referring to the honourable beasts present. That’s a human distinction between humans; you have your ways and so much of our great struggle is still to approach their perfection in our own appropriate form.”
The one that had picked him up growled deep from within the coils of its ribs, like huge stones grinding together.
“In any case, I may have gone a bit too far. But you don’t look catatonic as you did before.” Ymañn lifted up his eyes to where the cool glare of small frameless glasses had settled on him again. The Inquisitor brushed dander and flecks of saliva off his red vest and bulging hat. “Are you ready to begin the difficult movement of revisiting and letting go of your feelings for Rraihha Braz?”
“Well yeah,” Marzanna corrected measuredly, “although it was important that they were talking to industrial mages outside the Ecclesia too, and applying the same principles of systematization to the raw observation that had been accumulating in Ecclesiastical records for centuries. And Miwa too, we played - sorry, I got my diploma from a monastery - a significant role. This sounds like a kind of Ecclesiastical-biased account - is that where they were from?” The Kingdoms and the Ecclesia had their own separate psychiatric guilds, although they shared some of the same pools of public resources and were governed by the same professional norms.
“…I don’t know.”
“Don’t know? Well, did you get referred through a family doctor, or school, or Confession?”
“School. I had one through my family doctor before but they made me get another one.”
“…that sounds extremely unusual, do you have records?”
“Oh Goddess. Probably my mom does. Or some of them might be in the boxes under…” that would take like half a day to search, and nuke the closet. It wasn’t like I would have anywhere to put things back.
Even then, Marzanna thought, it was unusual to hear an Ecclesiastical account that privileged the Inquisition over the Confessional that much. At least from a psychologist promoting the approach.
“I- I don’t have to be Ecclesiastical about it, if that’s triggering. I can ask the same question in Miwa concepts, actually.” The Miwa Synod had officially incorporated their own psychiatric guild no more than thirty years ago - just three and half before Marzanna was born - and she would have to be careful to be careful of trespassing on their licensed territory now, let alone that of their When you say you’re a pathetic piece of shit, is that Swimming or Current?”
“Uhhhh - remind me what either of those mean…”
“According to Maullan’s Derivations, all sins and heresies can be shown to be incoherent movements from Chaos to Order, from the Serpent to the arms of the dancing Goddess. The incoherent movement appears to lead towards the Goddess - for example, towards her afterimage in the Dance - but remains in Chaos. An incoherent movement, of course, is a failed fragment of Order - its own true Order can be derived from its start and end points and redirected. It is, in one of Maullan’s more colourful images, the onanism of the Serpent."
“Onanism? Like when…”
“Yes, exactly like that.”
“Does that mean people shouldn’t… my health class said…”
“What do you think?”
“Well, if the form of all sins and heresies is onanism, maybe onanism is implanting the sins and heresies in my brain… Is this all happening because I… I… sometimes, when I’m in my room alone and I can hear mom is sleeping I -”
Yukhil Tsÿo was also the author of the lesser-known stories, published in an underground journal, that had been adapted more recently to the web-only animation Ero-Guro Puzzlebox. It wasn’t that erotic, or that grotesque, but he didn’t know if he could handle that much either and as soon as a collar began to slip down exposing a long scar he-
“Well, you didn’t want to admit you had those fifteen minutes ago. Very good.”
“But wait. If I do. Why are you asking me questions? Why are you trusting me? Why do you think it matters what I think you mean? Will you tell me if I make a mistake?”
“You grasp the root of the problem correctly. It’s why you’re talking to me, not an ordinary person, not even a Cleric. The Inquisition, after all, weren’t good enough to figure out people like you, couldn’t find their way through to people who lied to themselves before lying to others. Not as profound as the lies to yourself that would open you onto the Dark, but of the same form. But see - am I correct in assuming you just told me something you wouldn’t have told me four or five minutes ago?”
Luskonneg blinked.
“And the only information you have to go on is what I say, and you don’t trust me. You shouldn’t trust me, if I have hidden sins and heresies in my head.” Luskonneg tensed as he leaned forward in the stretch-marked blackberry vinyl easy chair, in anticipation of nothing.
In Ero-Guro Puzzlebox there was a Dark sect that used a both-chicken-and-egg symbol to represent the secret principle they held above both Goddess and Serpent. He had kept his laptop in bed after turning off the lights so his mom couldn’t see that it wasn’t on his desk and rolled over with his back to the door and held it open in the tent the blanket made between his back and the wall. It had been a great plan and he’d had to close it like ten times he’d been so nervous and now it was like this doctor’s face had appeared to punish him, or escaped from the gap in reality created by his hiding.
Man, that one was kind of similar to the thing that happened with the skull recently, he remembered in a cutaway of lucidity.
He wondered what that “Seer In The Half Light” had to say about Yukhil Tsÿo. They must have had a favourite adaptation. There were probably pages about it on the site he hadn’t looked at. Had they seen Ero-Guro Puzzlebox?
The flaming skull was there again and he squinted and was staring back at the face in his screen (uncomfortably cute and uncomfortably ugly at the same time, as much as its obscene detail was thankfully censored by the low resolution of the webcam and the spit flecks and finger oil on his screen) as he remembered. The memory not only a reference for the concepts he was trying to find as little of his way around as he needed to, but a weird unavoidable sort of resonance itself, which meant he was in another trap, a trap that could take months or years to spring, unlike the ones he had walked into recently. (And hadn’t all this, from the outage to the video to the interview, all been one trap?) Ironic, as exactly what he was trying to remember right now was how he had gotten through it, gotten used to it, the day after day year after year everything traps. And this had been part of it - the not seeing the face in front of him the way he didn’t see the desks and the chalkboard, the reservoir of darkness. He kept calling it different things and wouldn’t remember any of them when he surfaced from it.
“Yes, but those sins and heresies have limited forms, that we have discovered scientifically. At least those of normal people, who don’t give in to the Dark.”
“And how do you know I won’t give in to the Dark?”
“You’re worried about it, aren’t you?”
Was he? He’d been thinking about this just last night when he’d been watching - why did he watch that right before seeing a new therapist? Maybe because it would give him something to talk about, maybe because he wanted to convince himself that the thoughts about “ero” and “guro” weren’t necessarily Dark things, maybe because he didn’t want to spend a week thinking maybe at least the Dark would be something -
“Can I ask you something…” Ymañn struggled, lifting his lungs like weights… “that never made sense to me. The Dark Lord… half the thoughts I can remember from him when I wake up, and they stick with me, they stick to me and my memories, like a bad taste from food in my mouth.”
“Mm-hmm.” The Inquisitor sounded unimpressed even though Ymañn hadn’t said anything to be impressed with yet.
“…are about the Dark, what would make him Dark, what would happen if he was Dark, the Dark within him already. He’s terrified of it, he hates it. If we can do that, if we can make the Lord of the Dark fear and hate the Dark, why can’t we… just change him. Just turn him, just let him live a normal life, or even use his powers for good or whatever instead of this. I’m sorry, I know I should have asked this earlier, I didn’t really like thinking about it that hard when I joined but now she’s gone and you’re here and it feels like I have to anyway.”
The Inquisitor whistled like a split straw and rubbed the edge of the blade on his stubble. “That’s all? They sure picked a dumb one this time, no wonder you fell in love with your handler or whatever it is I’m here for. Goddess - when we’re in charge again it won’t be like this.”
Ymañn reddened. He still couldn’t accept that it was love. Why did clinging and blushing have to mean love. Why weren’t those the stakes of every relationship for everyone. Let alone someone who lived in a top secret room in a labyrinth sleeping all the time. But he’d been OK with the room and the sleeping because it was already like that. Because if everything was like that there was no point in distinguishing love anyway. He rubbed his stubble in sympathy with the blade.
“The Dark knows hate. The Dark knows fear. It knows nothing better than those things. It can even direct them against Itself. But It knows nothing else. The moment It derives a sense of Order, of the Form of the Goddess that allows It to approach Her, of the Will of the Serpent that drives the approach, It will undo every stitch, follow us all the way back… Our entire strategy, from General Martolod’s first memo, has been to turn the Dark against Itself at Its own heart.”
“So don’t lose hope. As long as you keep doubting yourself, you’ll never lose yourself to the Dark.”
The Goddess and the Serpent spoke at once.
Luskonneg gulped what felt like a silver ball of air into his throat.
“But here, tell me everything, be fully yourself, and I will be your mind’s loyal opposition.”
“I know about those. Current and Swimming.” His voice was determined, not quite his own, falling on himself from miles away, like sky at the top of a chasm. “In certain Miwa traditions” - his vocal mannerisms were falling back into that man's - “you can divide your “self” into Current and Swimming. The Current is something that simply happens; Swimming is something you have to keep exercising. Importantly, this has nothing to do with which one you identify with: things that come from the Current can be some of the most important parts of you, and you can Swim in a wrong direction, even knowing it’s the wrong one!"
“Is one the Goddess and one the Serpent,” Luskonneg had asked dully.
“Well, think of it this way. If you’re the Goddess, there’s no distinction. Your Current and your Swimming are the same dance. The distinction exists because on one hand, all sorts of momentary Currents spawn from Chaos, and on the other, there’s his love for her, which is a deeper Current, but he has to Swim to follow.” Luskonneg nodded like a bobbing puppet. “Now, there’s also the question of Swimming with or against the Current - the one saves energy, the other wastes it.”
“Yeah, that’s about right.” Very much the way a kid would phrase it on a high school essay, but deceptively well-founded, she pounded out in Notes app.
“So,” in a more naive voice, as if answering what if… like… you don’t have any good Current.”
Luskonneg/Dr. Mark’eg furrowed his brow. “Well, what do you mean by good?”
The journalist furrowed it back. “That uhhh, sounds like depression. Did you ever get meds for that?”
“I did, they took away even the little bit of good Current I could get, like when I watched anime.”
“Hmmm. I hear more about that with antipsychotics, do you remember what it was called?”
“N-no, I think I scratched it out of my mind, Za-something, I tried to look it up.” He had even started a thread to ask on /psy/ but he wasn’t going to summon those anons back into his head.
“Zeparmine?” It had been discontinued from public production and even the Apothecary ten years earlier, but you could still get it through some Specialized Care labs that had research supplies. It had been billed as both an anti-depressant and an antipsychotic, and used a magically altered microdose of the umbrella-shaped flower known in Miwa tradition as “The Firmament of the Skull”.
“I think… I think… I can’t tell you. I can’t see the letters on the memory any more. So I can’t confirm any statement about it.”
Marzanna was taking notes in greentext because it was the only way she could think in words fast enough to keep up. “That’s a… very particular way of talking about yourself.”
“I’m good at paying attention to my thoughts now. I did a lot of therapy.”
“I never used the word good. Did you mean good as in aligned with the Goddess, or as in pleasurable feelings? There’s another prevailing answer to your previous question, as it were, that I wasn’t telling you. The Current, right or wrong, springs from the depths of Chaos, at least relative to us - it is the Serpent as He manifests in us, and its drive towards the Goddess is ours. But we can only reach Her, only separate the right and wrong Currents, by Swimming.”
“I had… pleasurable feelings… last night.”
“So you do have good Current,” the hard-boiled eyes in the egg-head swivelled. “Now you see why I ask you questions, even if I can’t trust you, so I can catch you in a lie.”
Had that really counted? Luskonneg’s face went hot and liquid, like the surface of the planet reverting to its primordial crust.
On the pillow, it was starting to rise and fall like a poorly inflated air mattress.
“I watched an episode of some stupid show.” He hadn’t managed to do the other thing after all. He was still trying to do it with his mind. B-bu-but, that isn’t, good. Mom says it isn’t good when I watch that stuff, she says” (what stuff? He tried to remember the criteria, if there were criteria, he had no idea), “that I don’t really like it.”
“It’s not just her you don’t understand. I don’t understand her. I’ve never claimed to understand her. I don’t even want to argue about her. I gave up trying to understand the way you’re telling me to that time… it was too far for me, too hard for me, I can’t live the way you’re asking me to, but she didn’t ask me. It’s like in The beauty of the Goddess is like a melody that comes to me on the harp…. that I cannot remember where I first heard and at first I believe I just invented it, until I remember Elthazan playing it around the fire that scrabbled like a child’s hand at the Dark Lands. And then I remember that melody did not begin with Elthazan either, or with whoever taught it to him. It has always been there, in the very possibility of form, dancing into appearance here and there, remembered out of the Chaos of a mind. We can reach for Her, we know how, because She reaches out to us, inevitably, in the act of dancing through every corner of the universe. There is no void too far for Her.”
“Was your mother the only one you grew up with?”
“Dad died… at the office. He always worked really long hours. Not because anyone made him. Something like me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For a few years, Mom thought he had just run away and was trying to open an investigation. I didn’t believe it had happened until I was like ten.”
And because he couldn’t watch something that wasn’t good when he was also trying to be good, he only watched it when it brought some Current stronger and thicker and redder than good to the surface.
And what even was good? The icons of the Goddess at the Ecclesia on Sundays when mom could drag herself out, the horrible turning sameness of the crystals in the light? It wasn’t a Current, so it was Swimming but Swimming towards what?
“But I thought you said we should always Swim with the Current. So, if I had some good Current before the meds, I should have tried to Swim with it somehow, right? What would that… look like? Just watching stuff I like would be like, just letting the Current take me, right?”
“Well, what happens if you just feel the Current and don’t do anything?”
“…nothing.”
“Well, how about this. If you don’t make any distinction between doing the thing and feeling the Current, and a Current wants to do something, what do you do?”
“…nothing. It’s still hard. I still have to try.”
“So if you’re in a bad Current, you just don’t have to do anything.”
“But how do I make myself have a Current to do good things. Like talk to people. What if it just never happens.”
“We have some idea what the Currents are now. They’re a chemical thing, reactions, that resonate with ambient rhi.” Marzanna was trying to puzzle this out still - had they really not touched his meds at all between a recalled novelty drug and whatever they had him on now, which had to be pretty vicious with the way he kept zoning out? “That still sounds like depression. So with school, like people stuff, you would just hang back to yourself, not do anything you weren’t told, nothing that drew attention to your… issues?”
“When I was on the Za… not gonna call it anything else.” His eyes flashed to the side as if checking with someone. “The next guy wanted to let me try because I wanted to get good at it.”
“But let you try, completely unmedicated.”
His stare was hazy, no longer through but above her, and almost nostalgic. “How else would it be try?”
“That’s what it always was, music and reading and everything else I do here, that was enough for me, that was why I came here. I didn’t want to do what you guys are so obsessed with - I didn’t want to try, I didn’t want to reach, didn’t want to strive, didn’t want to struggle. And since love would have been that, even friendship I was fine with . But that wasn’t what it was with Rraihha.
“You wanted to be a woman.” The Inquisitor’s eyes flashed with sudden understanding, and Ymañn wondered for a second if the world had changed while he was in here in ways he couldn’t understand. For an Inquisitor to identify the Hierogamy with gender this simply, and in a way that contradicted what he had already heard of their framework… all humans were more Serpent than Goddess in relation to Her infinity and perfection, and abandoning the sibyllic authority , this could only mean leaving the category of woman empty of the human content that had pressed so warmly against his shoulder, introducing ancient melodies from the midwinter rituals of a C’harnian great house to his plastic keys until the smell of juniper candles seemed to fill the air… cold as he preferred to be cold and open when he was alone.
“No, the receiving is also a moment of the Serpent. And there’s a moment of the Goddess who journeys towards you, Silmenon himself called Her the Beautiful Questing Girl.”
“Don’t lecture an Inquisitor on Hierogamy. What, did you get that from a Domesday video?”
“The last [Taboo Preserver] left me a whole library, remember? I read stuff here too. That’s what I started talking to her about, you know.”
“You’re having fun making that kind of face for the first time, huh? Never done it in your life, not even when she was here, and now that you’ve fucked up the most important job in the world you act like you get to make that face. Maybe we should get rid of that library. You aren’t really just waiting innocently for Her if you’re reading - The eyes creep like the Serpent along the page.”
“Did you do your schoolwork? Were you more functional on your own? Were you OK with your teachers?”
“That went, too. I was really absorbed in math for a few years. Then they started introducing these… trick problems, in fonts that made it hard to look at the page. My mom would ask for accommodations. They’d make it worse. I just stopped doing more than I needed to not get held back. The meds made it easier to see how little things were worth to me.”
His monotone sounded like he was dictating to some disinterested scribe. That had to be how he could manage talking to her this long, she realized, by being completely somewhere else. Head to the side on his pillow, like he was talking himself to sleep, staring down the insect tunnel of his ear.
“So what did you spend most of the day doing?”
“…things. Movements, itches, stress positions, hurting myself, things I had to do over and over again. Trying to start new things Mom thought I should try instead. And… I got on this. It was the only thing that felt like nothing in a good way.”
Oh that was a pull-quote.
“What parts of the internet?” This was starting to pull into her wheelhouse.
“Anything that had games and anime, anything that had people talking about things that I would recognize, which was mostly that. 42chan. Panopticon. I’ve had so many accounts on here, you have no idea, since I was 12. Every time anyone would get mad at me about anything,” he chuckled from some warm depth for the first time she’d seen, even… smiled? “I’d just make a new one and come at them saying the opposite thing. I just used it like 42chan.”
She blinked. She’d heard stories like this before but - “Wait, how did you do that, Feed uses your Ley-pose.”
“Right. Oh, ahhh, shit. Just a weird spell-program I found on /mat/ one night. It’s not in any of the archives, they patched it up a few years ago, I don’t have it any more, I don’t remember it -”
That was all plausible and there were archives of patches she had privileges to check but it was exceptional for an exploit to stay active that long, that a kid randomly stumbling around public boards could have found, and without any reverse spell locating its users.
….
“I don’t know where to start. It’s too many. It’s too much.”
“Well, where would you like to start. Are there any… would you term grievances? Things that were done wrong, for you specifically.”
“What, like getting bullied or some shit? Yeah it happened but… I didn’t sign up to talk about that. You could find someone normal who was bullied and people would be sad and angry about.”
Marzanna paused and took more notes. She had heard her fair share of bullying stories, from either side, on Punkin; a few she could have made into stories, and hadn’t because… people would obviously get sad and mad about them. It would be within the world they expected, albeit an exception to that world. The cases in which journalists were allowed to report on those directly instead of compiling them for the relevant mediating bodies - for which they could be rewarded as well as for a successful public story - were narrow anyway.
“…peep- I mean- things!”
“Are you trying to lie? Make no mistake - you can’t lie to me on purpose. You’re doing it so much to yourself that it’ll come out backwards.”
“No literally I tried to say the wrong word.” He already couldn’t remember if this was true or not.
“So you want to talk to someone? What do you want to talk to them about?”
“I don’t know. People say it would be good if I did! And it seems to make other people happy, so maybe it would.” It wasn’t so much that he wanted to, as that he couldn’t prove it wouldn’t make him happy, so he held onto the possibility that it might.
“Do words ever come as a Current? Fully formed?”
“That I’d want to say to someone? Yeah, and then when I try it’s like the Current - turns around.”
“Turns around? There isn’t another Current - a thought, a feeling?”
“No, it’s the same as the original Current, equal and opposite - it’s not even a Current, it’s not even anything, I just can’t. It’s like a mirror - an invisible wall.”
The psychologist’s glasses were like a mirror, or an invisible wall, mercilessly transparent so that he could reach across them and not touch.
With what? What was he even referring to in the first -
The invisible wall slammed back into his face.
“And then there’s usually another one and it’s… worse. And they get worse and worse the longer I can notice them.”
Eyes. If you could reach through the glass - if you could break the glass - if you could break the mirrored surface up with its own blood - like an egg smashed with a chicken inside.
“Is everything all right? Your eyes look kinda red."
He squinted his eyes closed so hard when he reopened them the red placenta of capillaries at their back was splattered all over his swimming vision. Layered with fluorescent green like retro screen glare.
“Not just Currents but a storm, sweeping over everything. And the whole storm is just ripples on a big wave in a bigger -“
“And about how often does this happen a day.”
“Every time I try to talk to someone if I don’t like, know the exact words, so I can kind of close my eyes and skip between the Current coming up and the words coming out my mouth.”
“You speak to people with your eyes closed.”
“I- I think? Maybe?”
“What’s the difference between that and here?” The doctor’s voice was stern. Did that mean he was lying again?
His eyes weren’t even open any more, were they?
“I’m supposed to talk to you.”
“What’s supposed to? What happens if you don’t? What happens differently when you Swim in it?”
“If I don’t I want to die.”
“That sounds like a very useful thing, to be able to impose on yourself.”
He had never thought of it that way before. “But I can’t.” He took a few more seconds loading. “Impose it on myself, I mean.”
“So does someone else impose it on you?”
“…I don’t know. I guess my mom or teachers sometimes, but it’s not like it always happens with either of them. It feels more like it’s already happened.”
“What you seem to be telling me is that there’s a negative Current, a powerful enough negative Current to break through your “invisible wall”. Which would fit your story of not experiencing positive Current at all.”
“Yeah! That makes sense!” Maybe all these weird metaphors were going to help somehow after all. Except what could he do with that? “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? I can’t make these Currents, positive or negative. And I need them to Swim.”
“All right. But as we’ve established, you’ve been in Currents you haven’t identified. And if you don’t Swim in them, nothing happens - you might never know they were there. That’s why I want you to pay very careful attention to them. …If I told you you were supposed to talk to one person this week, who would you pick?”
“No one. I mean, there’s no one in particular. I can’t say who I want to talk to because I haven’t talked to anyone. …Isn’t it dishonest to just start talking to people if you have no idea if you’ll be interested in them? …For me it’s more like, I know I probably won’t be interested in them, because I’m probably never going to be interested in anything.”
“Well, it’s a bit like jumping into a Current you can’t see."
“That sounds like something that’d get you killed! …But some of them are starting to do lewd things already, so maybe that’s what it’s really about. They pretend to want to jump in a Current that might get them killed because it might let them do lewd things.”
“…that’s one theory, yes. Although it’s more popular in Silmenon” - he wrinkled his nose slightly - “than here.”
Just like my Silmenonian animes! cackled the meme voice in his head. His mom wrinkled her nose almost the same way when she caught him watching them. Was that why they made stuff like Ero-Guro Puzzlebox? But people in those were also really honest a lot of the time in ways other people on the internet said were unrealistic. They were also making passionate commitments of friendship to people they had no interest in doing lewd things with, although other people on the internet liked imagining if they did.
“The journeyman cleric in health class says wanting to do lewd things is supposed to come from talking to people… was that backwards?”
“No, that’s a correct coiling of the Hierogamy. But he also told you that you need to know someone’s comfort level with or conditions for talking about lewd things to a high level of context before you talk about them about them, so it doesn’t just “come from” that one way.”
The internet appealed to Luskonneg, he thought, because he didn’t have “talk to”, just “talk at” people, and if they got tired of it they could just block him without acting like he was forcing them to care.
Luskonneg nodded.“But-but also I heard someone else saying it’s weird to think about it with someone you talk to… so it doesn’t make sense how anyone starts with either of those things!”
“So you don’t talk to people, but you hear them saying this?”
Luskonneg startled back, as if he could have been caught in a lie so deep it would implicate its own sentences. “Yes? W-we were, walking together, on the field trip. Never mind. Don’t believe me. I don’t believe me.” He wasn’t sure if his voice sounded aggressive or scared. We were actually talking about uhhh, who we’d like to,”
“That’s not what I have in my notes from either your parents or your teachers, and if you were talking you could have just asked them. Don’t make this more difficult.”
He fell silent, collected himself. “I just… eavesdrop. Sometimes.”
“And do you ever eavesdrop on a conversation you want to join?”
“I think I have but I can’t remember any of them. Just the feeling of wanting and then that getting so loud I can’t hear the conversation or even remember it when it’s over.”
“Is it possible that you’ve wanted to do lewd things from eavesdropping?”
“From… from…” He was melting and skipping.
“What if I told you you were supposed to pick something you wrote down, something you found interesting, and talk to that person about it.”
“Wait how would they know… I know… they know… about the thing. Also none of them are interesting.”
“What did you even talk about. A sheltered military aristocrat and a sheltered spell rotator. The curve of the world outside?”
The dogs took turns licking Ymañn’s back and he winced where the saliva stung. The Inquisitor sat imperiously again on the arm of the couch. “It started out like… well, when she’d come to collect her notes on my dreams. She would stay and let me talk about my life here, just let me explain things. Like I used to do on Panopticon, like I did with the dogs for years.”
“The dogs weren’t enough? You’re framing this as something you only did for yourself - to see the Order inside you take shape, or less charitably, to hear the sound of your own voice.”
“Ahhhh I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!” He started banging his head on the pillows until one of the dogs picked him up by the scruff of his neck again - not the back of the shirt, which was removed, but teeth gently gripping around the flesh of his neck without piercing, laying him down on the couch at the Inquisitor’s feet while another slunk its heavy head across his torso to keep him from moving. The Inquisitor fidgeted awkwardly. “I didn’t mean to… but there is a difference, right?” He looked up at the dog that had set him down. They blinked. “Language. Here I can just explain things the way I would in my head, you understand them the way you understand me. With her I could see how much she already knew, and make new pieces, new shapes, and fit them together - the conversation itself was the discovery of Order. I already said some of this in the…” wincing at the thought: “application, didn’t I?”
“The application in which you said you were mature enough to accept all this without compromising your mission, yes.” The Inquisitor glanced back at the sword and the dog still holding it lifted it higher into the gauzy skylight. “We believed you even in spite of your previous history.”
“I’m” - he squinted, tensed; the dog’s nose poked the underside of his chin. “I didn’t want anything but for things to continue the way they were.”
“Neither did she.
“But I already feel all sorts of things like that.” Tears were rolling down his cheeks now. “I don’t know if I did the right thing, or if I’ll die wondering about the life I could have had, the Dark Lord’s thoughts get into my mind, and I feel bad for him and wonder about other ways to contain him, or get mad at him and want to kill him, all this ugly Chaos that comes up in Confession and therapy but doesn’t go back down like when I’m with her. It all contradicts the mission. Why is this worse to just live with? Why can’t the wrong things cancel each other out.”
“It isn’t. You act against all those, and you act with this, because it’s good, yes? If the other wrong things went away, this wouldn’t. A wrong goodness is worse than a wrong pain, because it can’t be healed. It must be cut out at the root, and I believe you’re still hiding that from me. But we can take this as slowly - and yes, painfully - as you need.”
“Thank you,” he choked, “thank you,” to the dogs, “please don’t protect me any more, it’s fine, it’s fine… Next week, Dr. Mark’eg?”
“Oh no. This is an urgent investigation. They’ve given me your inverse sleep tracking,” the Major Doctor Inquisitor held up a paper seal whimsically as he gazed up into the skylight. “I’ll be back next time you’re due to be awake for more than three hours.”
“And so, did you?”
“Over and over. Exhaustively. Until I saw every single path I could take and bad ended all of them. I could… do this week after week, maybe, if you wanted. It could be a column. A collection of short stories. A… don’t. I don’t want anyone to hear
“That sounds like it would take quite a bit of will, which usually helps, but see… it’s not a path. There isn’t an end state. There’s just treating people as people and living alongside them. This is a mistake a lot of people make.” On Punkin, at least - she almost wanted to say, but still couldn’t tell from his Feed if he was one of the 50% of people like him who would identify with them or despise them.
“Then why are you asking me? Why isn’t it OK for me to live like this?”
“Well, I don’t know that it isn’t. Is it, for you?"
“That’s not even… a question with a real answer.” It produced its answer when asked - waves of aching Current, of wanting something that he had simply tried so hard to get even though he didn’t know what it was, couldn’t keep an image in his head. Waves that dissolved into spray. Spray that might have been arterial, blood in the waves.
A tall and angular girl, her face a sort of diamond. Her hair a bristle-mop of black so dull it looked like plastic. She could bend her fingers back really far. She wore shirts with daringly deep collars because there was nothing there.
She had once given everyone in the class invitations to a birthday party, then rescinded almost all of them the next day because her parents couldn’t have that many people over. The few that she weren’t had reputedly gone to all the quiet awkward kids in class except Luskonneg.
Luskonneg would look around the room and, if he couldn’t hear anything anyone was saying, keep himself awake and outside himself by systematically imagining sexual encounters with everyone, letting the sum of the letters on the left side of the handout decide the object of his fantasies based on a numbering system. She had come lowest at first in his ranking of expectation, and had moved to highest just from how tense that awareness made him. He imagined picking up and being picked up by her back and forth.
She was last on his list of people he should try to talk to, because usually he sat in the lunchroom on his own, starting and destroying doodles around the models of his notebook, the line shaking by accident then on purpose, and tried to listen in on the conversations around him. Since he got off the meds, which allowed him to sometimes forget things he had done at the cost of an almost total short-term amnesia about everything else (the real thing his mom had wanted him off them for) he had managed to attach two or three fragmentary sentences to almost everyone in the class, except for her and the kids who went up on the rooftop.
He sat trying to listen, flipping through his notebook, staring at the flickers of sentences, trying to notice Currents.
It felt like trying to pin down tadpoles in moving water.
…wouldn’t those be moving in the Currents themselves? Swimming, for that matter, but he was the one who was supposed to Swim, right? He couldn’t Swim because he couldn’t feel the Current.
The metaphor wasn’t making sense any more. But part of him was taking it literally and even the letters on the page seemed to be swimming. He put his head down and let meaningless words scrape up and down against the edges of his skull.
His food was curdling, rotting in his mouth. He couldn’t swallow. He got up and bolted to the bathroom.
Luskonneg spat the half-chewed food into the sink, eyes avoiding the mirror as if one of the mysteries of the school was supposed to appear, before someone knuckled his head into it en passant - “Dude, can you do that somewhere else, like a rainbarrel or something?”
People did all kinds of things to him when he couldn’t see them, to the point that a teacher had said it sounded like he was making up ghost stories, which maybe he was.
He put his hand out in front of him to push back the door that was swinging back on him. Let it go and turned back to the hallway and she was there.
He had three more days to go until his next session. He had been over all his fragment notes, found nothing, been trying to take more every day, although the more he tried the more rapids so maybe he was swimming against the Current or lying to himself again. Dr. Mark’eg had only asked him to talk to one person, and he knew that whenever he got that one in, that he was supposed to, he wouldn’t be able to try with anyone else. That was the bargain of supposed to, that was how supposed to worked; vampiric, it drained the Current from anything less than itself. That was why he did the bare minimum of homework he could get away with, staring blank-eyed and motionless at the paper under Mom’s nose until the clock began to bite.
He had nothing to say to her, but if he didn’t force himself now, he might never again.
Why was he thinking like this? It wasn’t as if he wanted to talk to her or even do other things with her more than anyone else on his list, of which she was at the bottom. She hadn’t even gone on his list of plausible targets. Maybe it was just the mystery of this encounter, the omen of it happening the first week he had to do something like this, that it was a “flag”.
But weren’t those kinds of things a manifestation of Order (that you were told not to interpret without professional guidance, but people in anime and plays and old books always did anyway)? Also hadn’t Dr. Mark’eg pointed out all these times he was lying to himself?
Had he put her at the end of his list because he was really attracted to her? Had he left her off the list of candidates for the same reason? Was he what he had just figured out people on 42chan referring to as… a tsundere?
He felt, for some reason, that he couldn’t be a tsundere because he didn’t have the self-control. This was the same reason Dr. Mark’eg had told him not to try to talk to anyone he was too attracted to - which made her a natural candidate, except for everything that was happening now (he was half-consciously shadowing her down the hall). If he was a tsundere there was no way to trust himself to adjudicate this.
Well, he could pick someone boring in the middle, but it seemed to him that a sufficiently powerful falsifier could pick something out from the middle or worse - simply do the same in reverse. That was what it felt like, at first, when he started enjoying the fantasies of her. Like the way he would start to get more pleasure in his private onanism when it started to hurt.
But wasn’t this just clashing Currents, again? Which had happened every time he’d tried to follow through on starting a conversation now, in fact it had become more and more obvious the more he was aware of it, a perfect loop of self-awareness: he’d think of something he wasn’t sure about, derive the opposite extreme of the potential flaw, and get stuck between the two.
He shoulder-checked someone a few inches taller than him. “What the hell, man?”
He scooted reflexively three steps back, bumping into someone else. At the commotion she turned back, slightly alarmed gaze colliding with his like a halfhearted dodgeball.
His attraction, his trepidation, neither gave him a pretext to say anything that wouldn’t be flagrantly breaking the rules from health class. The rapids of thought breaching the surface of his skin.
“Lus… Kennough? Did Ms. Preuddyfog send you or something? Tell her” -
…what was it tsunderes said? “I-it’s not like I like you or anything!”
He realized what he had done wrong within seconds. The Public Morals Committee suspended him for the next three days.
“You let the negative Currents win.”
“But they didn’t feel like-“
“They didn’t get you what they wanted, did they?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted in the first place!”
“You didn’t want to get suspended.”
“That’s the fucking Public Morals Committee’s Fault.” (Looking back on it, this was the beginning of everything that happened with the Public Morals Committee.) “They don’t know shit about the Dance of the Goddess. They’ve never even seen a novel alternate theology refute itself, like on every other episode of Ero-GurRRRPPP.”
“On what? You can tell me anything here, same as in Confession. You already wouldn’t be telling anyone else any of this, right?”
“N-no. It’s an animated web show from Silmenon, inspired by Yukhil Tsÿo, the director was a staffer on-"
“That doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily care.” Dr. Mark’eg pushed his glasses up his face. “So the important part is, did you reverse your thoughts or your words? Did you like her or not?”
“How would I know?” This was the culmination of days of cold, driving thought during his suspension. “We never got to talk. And I wouldn’t have had anything to talk about.”
“So why were you guessing that and saying it backwards?”
“Because I guessed I was backwards in the first place!”
“From what?” He still hadn’t explained the fantasies because there was a fifty-fifty chance they would disqualify him from talking to anyone at all.
You can tell me anything here, same as in Confession. You already wouldn’t be telling anyone else any of this, right?
“…Currents…”
“Positive Currents?”
“No.”
“Then why did you guess backwards? See, you’re lying to me again. You can’t identify a Current that you reversed, so the reversed Current was the original. Except that as an original, it was already doubly reversed from its intended effect: to offend its object, by implying that you liked her. You can’t go out on limbs like this.”
“I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for you!” His neck muscles tensed, his lips flared and his consonants mashed like a little kid or sometimes his mom.
“Yes. We are performing experiments. If you don’t follow the instructions exactly, they are going to be more dangerous than the neutral course of action.”
“Then we should stop.” Luskonneg’s voice was trembling now, he was clutching his knees, like the boy around his age in Ero-Guro Puzzlebox who “Because I’m - really - bad at following instructions. I can get stuck on every single word in five, ten different directions. I’m never going to get it right.”
“In that case, when you’re in a position where you have no good options, pick the low-risk failures. The ones that simply remove yourself from the situation so you can try again.”
“But eventually that selected all the way down to zero.” (He didn’t want to get into the stuff with the Public Morals Committee or anything yet, he didn’t know if he would be able to keep his cool.) “I can talk in situations like a psychologist’s couch or whatever this is. Not unconditional trust but like… dispassionate observation. That’s kinda what Feed is like too - even if people get mad at me, they’re letting me be there to get mad at. Like a big shooter lobby except I hate those. It’s part of the game.”
“Hmm. I’m still a bit confused about the way you talk about Currents - did the shrink who introduced you to that concept never talk about Eddies? How a big Current can have smaller sub-Currents in it that flow opposite the main one, and that sometimes when you’re doing the opposite of what you want - or even wanting the opposite of what you should - you’re stuck in an Eddy and you don’t have to Swim against it, just sideways until you find the real Current again?” She couldn’t explain what “Swimming sideways” was supposed to look like, she had doubts about whether she was any good at it herself, after all she was here, getting pulled into what was starting to feel like a whirlpool - but that was one of the things therapy was above all supposed to facilitate, because Swimming sideways could feel like Swimming blind.
“I saw that in a thread on /mo/ once, around when I stopped going. My therapist told me to read theories on this from anyone but him, there’s too much misinformation.”
“…maybe on 42chan, but if you go to a normal library, stuff is censored for accuracy. Not that there isn’t lots of disagreement, but if you’re not in a treatment yourself it’s not unhealthy to expose yourself to that."
“I… I did. I argued with it, because it pissed me off.” He laughed. “I got banned three times going in those threads, because it pissed me off so much! Don’t tell me… don’t tell me you’re gonna piss me off too…”
“The problem here, and it’s one I know you’ve been taught to identify, is that you’re trying to prove two opposite things at once. That there was nothing special about your relationship, and that it was worth risking this much not to leave. And I suspect you’re hiding selfishness as selflessness too - do you really believe in him so little that he couldn’t have found some other way to resolve his loneliness? He’ll certainly have to now.”
Braz dragged a long inhale and exhale through pinched nostrils, spooled a long thread of light through pinched eyes.
“What’s most surprising to me is, in the C’harnian aristocratic tradition you grew up immersed in, there’s an abundance of stories and models of love tragically abandoned for duty, forgotten and persisting only in spells or signs, impenetrable interconnections. They get rewritten in plays for the comfortable masses today, but those songs are what set you apart in your interpretation of the law, the Scriptures, military duty…”
“Not those ones in particular, especially. But yes. It feels like… too much, to actually see myself in one of those. I can try to live up to them, but they don’t happen any more.”
Tserghan sighed and spun her pen, clacking between her fingers in polyrhythm with the train. “If they were to happen to anyone, they would happen to you.”
“You said you were a fan of my clearance exams - so why are you only focusing on the ethical ones, and not looking at Catch and Release?”
One of the subheadings of her mission effectiveness essay. Tserghan’s eyes lit up. “Go on.”
“Cowardice, envy, despair, the kinds of ordinary Chaotic thoughts that would undermine my duties in high-pressure situations, but don’t necessarily disqualify me from them - I treated all other mission-inappropriate thoughts as belonging to this category. ‘Catch and Release’, and ‘Limited Animation’ is also relevant, the splitting thought into frames - I pluck them out of the Current, name them, and complete, balance or release them as needed. With Ulwenn the vast majority I was able to process into the higher Orders I convinced you of in the exemption applications. The rest… what was left of them by the time I would have needed to sacrifice anything? What could I truly say I ‘needed’, I ‘felt’? I was only able to confess it at the end because it was such a paltry, empty word. An abstraction. Like the Magical Background Radiation they’re theorizing in the Mysteries departments now. Enough to discount as zero each by itself, but heavier than the moon counted as one.”
“…that’s less Traditional terminology than I’d have expected you to use.”
“I thought I’d always felt indifferent to these kinds of feelings because I’ve been able to reduce them like this. For people I find beautiful, or people I find admirable. However special the person, the things I desire or admire are just aspects of Order I can already strive to realize in myself, to the extent it matters to me. The ‘feelings’ that don’t go in those circuits were never enough to count by themselves. Maybe if they had been stronger it wouldn’t matter. The Seer In The Half Light I met… was beautiful, and melted me down in a way I haven’t been in decades, but that was in what we did, what I accepted. There wasn’t a desire fully contiguous from appreciation to the consummation, I had to jump into it, for my own reasons. And I did used to do that, until it stopped balancing out. I know Ulwenn feels the same and he never did.” She wouldn’t say anything he had told her about the one time. Even if that had been the final weight on the scales after all. If they wanted that out of her they’d get his permission. “In fact, I guess that’s one of the things about him. Maybe it feeds back, shorts out if two people look at each other through those same eyes, splitting each other into frames, knowing they can stop at any time.”
“All true lovers know that about each other. They don’t crash into each other. They can stop, so they don’t have to. That’s the dance.”
“…huh.”
“None of this explains why you didn’t leave as soon as you could count the feelings as one. You’re still trying to explain this as if you didn’t want anything. A bubble, protected from those feelings forever, or purified by one confession - did you really believe that?”
“…The Dark Lord is supposed to die at some point. The last one made it to what, forty-five? Ymañn Ulwenn went into this service to get away from the world. But then he’ll have to come out again. I haven’t - let myself finish a thought about what we’d do then, because that would be more than nothing. But it starts…”
“Well, sadly, that’s a conflict of interest as much as a romantic entanglement in the presente. Wanting the Dark Lord to die too fast is the most common emotional liability we have to deal with among people who work on containment. Although this would be the first time someone’s made him a love rival.”
“…I don’t think about him like that, though. The Dark Lord, I mean. I don’t think about him much at all.”
“The way you don’t think about the [Taboo Preserver]?” Tserghan sensed her weakness.
And for a second she wavered - if she released the feelings without counting them - which was her mistake, that, exactly - how many more could… “No, I don’t even catch those.”
“Hm. And you think of the [Taboo Preserver]… how? Sex? Marriage? A horse and carriage? A boy to mother? An old man to nurse? Or some kind of hand-holding heroic having each other’s backs?” Tserghan grinned at the possibilities.
The way the lump in his soft throat bobs when he catches a phrase to edit before speaking.
Breathe out.
The way he scratches his head when he’s embarrassed and shakes loose bits of dandruff and hair.
Breathe in.
The sea-ice shade of those eyes, like something C’harnian aristocrats would say about themselves in poetry except it wasn’t true, or she couldn’t see it as true, she only saw gunmetal.
The images were coming in a flood and leaking out the corners of her eyes.
Zero, one - uncountable.
She didn’t know where to start counting.
“If you release the thoughts before you can complete them, you can’t guide them to the right part of Order. And then they build up, right? …When he’s out your two-way age gap will be even bigger.”
Tingling, dripping blush dropped across her face like a roller shade. The longer she hesitated, the worse Tserghan would make it. She spluttered into action:
“That’s such a small part of it. A softness that doesn’t feel indulgent to sink your hands into, to grind against, to… knead.” What was she saying? What were these words? The edges of her incomplete fantasies were closing in on her like a whirlpool. “The thing I was saying earlier about desire… It makes sense for him. I’m not comparing his body to something more perfect. He’s already let go of it for that, but it clings anyway, it wants to follow and I want to drag it with him.”
“That sounds somewhat particular, but not unfindable for someone of your resourcefulness, nor do I believe you’d never have seen it before.”
I don’t use my resources for that - but I could, if the alternative was [taboo] - but that wasn’t, isn’t my mistake. “When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time imagining being old. Everything else made sense to me. There was a butler I would steal books from, he’d sleep with his eyes open and I’d always wonder if he was just pretending.”
“Was this a crush?”
“No, although it probably shaped what those could look like. There was a way I imagined he looked at things… Like I was saying before about how I split everything into frames, instead everything blurs together, like through a fine frost. But you can still see really beautiful precise geometries through it, like crystals of light. It’s probably not a way anyone really sees things, it’s not how time really works, you have to sort of look at it sideways. But when I’m with him I feel like that’s what he’s doing, and I’m trying to look -”
“All this encoded in one feeling. A solipsistic pleasure.” Tserghan laughed drily. Braz was about to protest as the train went into a tunnel. Sweeping darkness and churning noise momentarily cut her off, as the amber incandescent light that snapped on in the dark on its magic circuit sent golden crescent blades swinging around Tserghan’s smile.
Marzanna closed the call and sat in her chair for almost an hour, feeling vaguely ashamed of herself. There was nothing here except for her to link this guy to a reliable psychologist, an actual Specialist in… well the thing is it was hard to tell where to specialize, he seemed to have every problem at once. But that was its own area of specialization. The Complex Comorbidities Clinic at Romarosa would be able to sort it out. He certainly didn’t have any trouble explaining himself, once he let himself trust you the way he did his audience online, even though like online it didn’t really feel like he was talking to you, like he had filtered you all the way out.
If she tracked down the institutions he’d been through - she’d managed to get him to cough up one name, the psychologist with him through high school, who’d taken him off the meds - Dr. Mark’eg - on the other hand, she might have a fairly mundane malpractice investigation on her hands. It wasn’t what she had been looking for but she could be motivated enough by conscience if it was something she stumbled into directly, if she didn’t have to weigh it against all the other vast statistical clouds of conscience-reasons. As soon as she pulled herself out of the thickening crystal of early evening light, the kind that was too otherworldly to just sit in, she looked for the name within the years that matched Luskonneg’s fragmentary recollection on Winter City’s Educational Intervention roll.
It wasn’t there. Had he given her a fake name? Or was his memory even less reliable than she’d assumed?
There were so many strange details to this story, another voice was whispering in her hear if this wasn’t what you’re looking for, what is? Punkin had been her first proof that reality was rotting out from under everyone’s feet, like the creaking shrine at the Southeast corner of Yn Dahh’t she’d percolated so many of her ideas while volunteering to maintain. This would be the second.
The strangest wouldn’t come for three days. Her email to Romarosa had bounced back from an Ecclesiastic interception address. The kind you got if you tried to, say, message a wanted Dark materials distributor without having opened an investigation through proper channels.
When Gallvren asked about it at dinner - she’d had to tell her, they’d planned a bit of the approach together - she lied and pretended they hadn’t even had the interview yet.
Three days later, for the first time in her life, Marzanna Etnexheyr received her Ecclesiastical Asset Activation Slip in the mailbox, printed on thin red washi paper folded with the Inquisitorial Seal.
The boards had cracked entirely, the liquid night was beneath, and she had no idea where she was.