CW: reality ambiguity, identity ambiguity, autocannibalism, guns, animal death, warfare, mind manipulation
VIOLATION 11: A STILL LIFE TO A SPIRE
(ε)
VELLA
Morgan, child of erstwhile Orcha Mutate, stares at the Ghouls and they stare back with black eyes, overdrawn sockets, bug nests, he thinks. In the crags edging the pure space black he sees ridges, fold lines. Most eat the lichen, shovel it into their mouths of blotted and serrated teeth. Some gnaw themselves, working up and down limbs.
In the Skein they are aflame with a rippling black aura which he knows means they shouldn't be here. There have been burrowings into the Skein of late, whispers across the webs. Of heavy hearts, sagging beneath the weight of secrets they have dragged with them from other dark places. So the Skein, the exhumed variant tells him, has learned to render their xeno-natures as the absence of aura, which in of itself lances deep and bright, bruising several layers of the Skein, weaving together mote and countermote of ego into division.
So that the push and pull is weighted, social-generated emotions heavier, making you claustrophobic. Making you feel like you have to get away from the source of your fear. In his case negative, but you can be pulled as well, the exhumed variant lets him know, and those cases are special cause for concern.
So he'd been looking out for that but he hasn't seen Ghouls before and the repulsion is stronger than the attraction. Even when he'd been grub passing through the Clean Flame he'd been stripped away of toxicity but he wonders if that kind of psychic discharge can ever be taken from the weirds in the ice hollow.
"How much do you understand?" he says to them at last. They look at him. The ones gnawing their own limbs stare at him with their eyes of void and when they stop he sees indents of their teeth in their skin, pockmark shadows dotted in uneven lines. They wear rags, torn and in the cases of the ghouls who'd been eating themselves, tattered. Their hues are of parched loam, dust and starved grass.
He doesn't think they'd have leaders, per se, but at least ways of deferral. It's their grouping that shifts in answer, the better fed slipping, with a grace he doesn't think should be possible with their skewed limbs, to take more forward stances. The weaker slipping to the back.
He holds his hands up. Foolish, he thinks to himself, good work. There are several of them and his Alt is a distant glow on the far side of an abyss behind them. Blinking in lightcode, in messages the exhumed variant is still processing a way to understand.
"We see the pain in your heart," says the closest. Morgan waits for him to say more. He doesn't. Maybe, Morgan thinks, that's all he knows how to say.
Where the void spills through from their eyes it'd swallow all he is. To admit it with breath.
What does his silence tell them? It stretches even to him, unfurling through the hollow, breaking against the glitter of mist like vapourized opal while the dark, fuzzy lichen spills in tufts, flaking patch clouds from the Ghouls' mouths.
The abyss behind the Ghouls shimmers. Platelets of ice thicken over it, clotting the void with scarlike daggers that splinter, stab outwards, and intralattice. Until a bridge of ice has formed. Gouged into the iced earth he stands on with the Ghouls.
"I need to get past you," Morgan says. Gathering Ino's Veil to him. But it hasn't been long enough, he can tell, for a decisive blow to recharge. He can get half of them. Ino's Veil weaves itself beneath the first band of the Skein. So that he hopes the Ghouls can't sense it.
Within the caverns of their eyes he sees himself as if not here.
Sitting in the rain, which beads on the phosphorescent grass blades, the petals of the Flora in thin rivers of static, spills to the glowing bedloam in tiny blooms of flame. Sitting over an abyss such as the one his present is tethered before. Falling off the earth into rushing rivers. Running over a bed of circuits, light spreads through the water like ink. Silhouetting the lightbloom in swirling patterns, never the same instant to instant, and his psyche halo as if brighter, thirsting through his eyes, drinking them in. Drawing strength from.
"They can come get me," she says. Sitting beside him as it was then. "It's not as good as it looks. The point is it's worse than it looks like for them."
"I'm not sure," he says. Back then he'd thought, for every neurovalence a function. It'd been more the way he wanted it then. Vella looks him over. "My Tended is fogged over. Come down with something. There's a white scar in the petals. Like chlorophyll burnout. You know?"
He focuses on her.
"You think they—"
"I know it," she says. "When I vanish you'll know it too."
He says, "the psyche haloes are their gifts to us. Through them, our shadow across the Skein..." and this time trails off because of how she's looking at him.
"So you would trust them forever," she says, "because of those?"
Back then youth had been running flame through his wrists and now is reaching the end of the metakarmic life cycle. Through which aeons perhaps have been spent running looping light around the bracing aura of the psyche halo. In the fluorescence by his sides he sees blades shimmer in quiet auroras amongst the murmurs of the Flora.
It skips forward then, as if burnt out of his memory, not by the auroras but by a different light. Where the phosphor had bled the electric grass of flame and poured it into his phaseal eyes it had been brighter even then for an instant.
His memory then waxes again into shape. His own Tended is sick, the leafware drooping, weblines of circuit scarred over and thinned in places to tear. The Flora paled to the quicks, the soft hue he'd later see on the paperbark of the trees guarding the Core. Like flesh it had folded, been scored by the knots of circuit and body.
He'd beseeched for two solar murmurs, searching by the fronds below the cliffs for his Oracle. She'd been slow to appear. When she had her smoke veil was darker, seeking as if to snuff out the light and reduce his sunNET access to embers, the signal pale and pathetic in the darkness that is the severance of the Skein.
He didn't want to know if she was gone. She hadn't verged across the borders to his Tended in some time. Still the warp storms marking the edges to where the Tended began and ended had strengthened to a pitch that made them impassable. He thinks that was the first time he knew sunNET was in flux, that the blots of disintegration were searing through it, the whole Skein beneath it thirsting for light and tasting darkness. He'd asked about it and his Oracle had told him his psyche halo might corrupt from the breakdown. She hadn't, though, said she had anything to do with it, or that her Coven did, Mother Nest waiting for her transmissions with fevered clusters of eyes. Who does that leave?
Later he'd think, if the Exarchs controlled it, that explained more than their vibration status. How they were so close to the true electro spiritual workings of Orcha Mutate, closer as if by birth than even Neutral Lotus could get. It explained their absence from any apocrypha on sunNET itself. He'd stared into the molten static clouds which had rippled in rhythm, shining like diamond, the sky like liquid glass beyond the smoke veil. She'd emerged like a pearl from a shell, black in silhouette, and her smokeveil seeping behind plastered the molten static the same way light had shone from below the cliffs. Until the whole sky was black glass, shone like jewels, obsidian.
Then he felt the sunNET signal gone without a trace. Swallowed up so his psyche memory has lost even the memory of its access, tells him in sure terms it's always starved for light.
When he'd known she was there to hear he'd called out to her. By then he'd cast no shadow in the shade of the smoke veil.
"You want me to ask where she is," he said. Pausing for more breath, though it’s the charge his psyche halo needs, radiance of the whispering sun. Choked away by the smokeveil which she can keep up, he knows, as long as she wants, as long as her pheromones are embedded in the digital aura and so have direct input into the Skein. Which is tangled and bruised here, he'd sensed. When we are all tangled, he thinks, but so are we all disentwined from each other, but feel ourselves vanish into the greater Skein, I'll know then for sure. Until then, I can guess.
"She was you. You yourself or some illusion you could cast. I bet it was you, though, within the smoke veil. It can do way more than my psyche halo can process, can't it?"
He sees a sneer, the shine of her teeth, all he can see of Laeath. Smoke the hue of char hides her eyes. "Would that worry you? Empty mirror where the self should be. Outwards searching to respond. Searching for what to respond to. Passive."
So she said, and he wondered how to ever trust her again.
NEW BLOOD
"I'm only here," he calls out to the Alt, "because I was following you."
If the Alt knows guilt it gives no sign. Instead withdraws further away, a skip that makes him a sliver in the distance. A far glint.
Under the gaze of the Ghouls he waits for their judgement.
They say nothing to him, but when they move off in migration, he follows.
Keeping them in front until the ice beneath his feet thaws and gives way to the frost-static of the glow-preserved loam. His foot wrap gauze crackles, absorbs most of the charge. Sends tingles through his fitted sweater and geneweaves. Pinpricks of cold burn. Fine like scalpel points.
He sees their light in ice blue, spreading in patterned blotch across his body. Knows he is being scanned by the Stain, the stasis freeze, which has whispered deep into the Flora to find what it ID’s as their soul. Rather a revenant of the Bridge’s access to the leafware.
Still it is the energy incandescent which burns in the loam, in the root. Which has hidden itself there in refuge. From the Stain and its promise of sleep. That is not in him and not the coded spark of the Fauna. They run loops, spiraling up his limbs. Gossamer-thin lines of cold.
As long as Ino’s Veil is online it can’t freeze him. Not all the way. Still the Skein here is laced with paper white scars and the Flora is jagged, dark, distorted. The light of the Alt flickers here and there on the horizon. The Hivic Spires swim in his visual field, their Tethers their chains to the sky.
He figures such a direct vision is a sign the exhumed Skein now shares his veins with his blood. This is in the blood as silver light. Linking in direct access to Ino’s Veil and as the two conjoin the access personalizes. So that he has the feeling he has never left his grub skin, that he carries it with him unseen, and that the Floral weaves react to it.
Scraping against a skin they feel but he can’t see. He can see the skin of the Ghouls, ravaged, weathered. Beneath torn clothes that are not woven of Flora but in simple truth dead. He wonders how without a halo or even interface they can stand the cold.
He asks the exhumed Skein if it can contact Phassa, his Voice of Pain but if the grub hasn’t left him the exhumed Skein is part of the design. There’s no sign of Phassa on the Skein. She’s either left it entire or learned to hide her presence. In which case her larger purpose is veiled from him as surely as Laeath’s was.
The scars have soon made their way from the Skein to the Flora itself. Blanching streaks of bone white across the twisting trees. As if the Core, he thinks, is spreading, waking up. The trees that are not yet scarred white are lorn and droop in dead tendrils and vines across loam, beneath the frost-static that glitters across it like a hologram field.
The grass and fronds here are a paler green. The sky is overcast without the Whispering Sun to lend the NET solar heat. Sickly. He wonders whose Tended this is. Can tell by the horizon line and by the sap of his muscles they're climbing.
The Ghouls don't tire.
He learns that well by what would have been a third murmur of light and darkness. They don't tire and the lichen he'd seen the more self-possessed eating is enough to last them where his stomach groans in hunger. The frost-static shimmers cold blue still but here and there are patches of what look like carbon-stone. Same stuff he'd sat on with Laeath's mirage.
As if bone breaking through skin are the mounds of carbon-stone risen from the frost-static.
The exhumed Skein cuts into his thoughts.
it is known, it says, a violence heralded.
"So you think bloodshed," he says beneath his breath. All around him the Flora diodes are eclipsed dark like black pearls. So that the only light is the frost-static and that shimmers beneath the Ghouls' tread, sparks in outlines of fire, like tracings of their feet. Beneath his own footwraps and the feet within them going numb.
new blood journeys to orche to behold the glory.
He clenches his fists.
this one has already found the barrows.
The Ghouls have not paused. Some gnaw at their arms, on which he sees creases of torn skin and the black ichor that never runs but congeals into black crystalline growths like amethysts over their wounds. Where the tatters of their clothes conceal flesh they strain over cleft and fold.
The Hivic Spires on the horizon are closer now. As if he could reach and touch them.
think of them like servers that brace what's left of the gardens
"What's left of them?" he says.
a ghost. an echo of another time and place.
He picks his way through where the Tended lapses into the ancient framework of the garden-city. So that the Flora here is archaic and well-worn, long since bled of sunNET. He can tell not just by black diode but by structure, by design. The way the leafware curls here, not facing the overcast sky but the chrome earth itself.
The frost-static dances along soil of pure dead nanite. So that to grasp it with your fingers silver motes would bleed between the joints.
To grow here the Flora would feed off the charge that is entombed by nanite as if driven deep into the heart of the world itself. So that their diodes would harness and emit NET on the same frequency as the Whispering Sun.
Here the garden-city is most severe. The designs of the leafware reflect a philosophy maximalist in function. It's jagged and he winces at one frond skinning him as he shoves it aside. The Alt glitch-skips from branch to branch, pausing to wait, tail moving in lazy crescents, as if Dear is musing, mulling it all over.
The severity is needed to join the heat of the Whispering Sun with NET. The contours would guide the energy arc, funneling it with violence into its endpoint fusion. The severity in the gloss of black diode and the way the tendrils of leafware milk the dead nanite soil both owe themselves to need. Crawling across the soil in vines like veins as they twine and fray apart.
The need is a hotspot for sunNET, in the end a repository for the maintenance and growth of Tended. So that the garden-city could in the end civilize itself. String itself through with neurovalent and neuronormed alike. Still he thinks there are no neuronormed left, if they had ever lived. The valence has many frequencies but all lead in some way to the Core and the Black Hole Barrows.
A Tended is in the end a mass of Floral spirit. Mathematic that way but you can distill it to a trenchant ebb of need. Need for flesh-warmth in a collective of diodes. The silver soil burns bright beneath the frost-static. Whereas without it would be cold and dull, in the absence of the Whispering Sun. Still it gleams with grey fire, a thousand refractions of light both sung and danced to the Stain.
Which becomes stasis, at the cost of numbness of feeling.
Still it is a favour, as if you could stop decay, submerge in the vat that had bred the valences and have it ossify you. Orche is still proud that way, he thinks. She sees far down the Tethers, at the frayed ends of fate. Aloft somewhere in the holo-knit carapace that he now sees, less like a fortress than a crow's nest, built of needles of dark bone, clustered together. So that it impales the clouded sky from a thousand angles from its berth now shimmering into sight chained by the Tethers to the Monolith Mirrors encircling it.
Of course he himself can't. Still Orche has found a way.
"We're going all the way there, aren't we?" he says aloud. So that there is no mistake, and there's no mistake when the Ghouls lagging behind glance over their shoulders with yellowed, sallow eyes. He sees the deathly heads as if naked of flesh. They bulge against the seams of skin wrapped too tight.
In the gaunt hollows of their eyes he reads more than hunger, but need, the same need the framework of Flora draws on, the garden-city alive in its death, in the eyes of strangers to its domain.
THE DEAD RAINBOW
Because if you could preserve your strength through aeons you would preserve your vitality as well; in that way be a planet-consciousness that outlasts the others. Phassa knows this but has not passed it along. Phassa chooses her words now with care, conscious every word might make its way to Orche and in so doing leave a trail to her.
So she thinks Orche is in the end fighting for more say-so. Preserved as if within the sockets of her eyes as she sits on the Hivic Throne. The Exarchs baying at her in the Gardens had been plaited into her yoke, another weave of her tapestry.
Caustic attention. Within Naesala, her phaseal heart which thirsts for the next ghost-schemata and knows no other need she had been compiling in her thought new harmonic frequency codes.
From Naesala she’d learned: stay alone. The new harmonic frequency regulates her inline cycle; closing access points within her thought-banks, shuttering itself from the many-sighted eyes of the Coven. Around her arrayed in streaks of light is the between-Skein embodied through her floral synaesthesia.
This is the Skein collapsed into itself, compressed, tangled and in her clave heart’s graphic interface seen as lattices of shifting light that if touched or even pushed into would begin to unfold in aspect-bubbles of reality. These would swallow you if pushed with enough intent and in the end be a touching down into a distant place.
As sight unseen as yet it is reflected into itself in the twines of the lattices and appears as translucence in the shifting light. Compressed to glowing protocol, each layer of many as grid-light.
It took her ages to compile Naesala and install it over the baseline clave heart they’d imprinted her with. There had been a version left in the now-ancient life-code that had been circulating through the Tendeds of the Flora for aeons and manifested every reset cycle. For each Floral Bridge; she’d been the first to break it down deep enough to craft-upgrade to access the shifting lattices of the between-Skein.
So Orche may be used to her sim-life as Regent of the Hivic Throne but she wouldn’t be used to having her Bridge warp away on her.
In her composition of nerve-pluckings, of in the end pain the exhumed Skein and psyche halo would decode as if gleaning meaning from song, from strung chord, she codifies Naesala’s wisdom. It would vibrate beneath Morgan's fitted clothes the way the song trembles within skin. Or so she pictures with her flesh of digital aura only taken shape in aura, that ripples pale green like the way the frost-static kisses the Mutate sky.
That is blossomed from her phaseal heart beating, the part of her that is true, always, to her inner essence, that is the glue between it and life; reality and what ripples in cause and effect in its wake amidst confluence of fate and doom. That defines her in substance. That travels through the between-Skein with the body shaped around it in aura.
Of spliced flesh grafted in code there can be no signifier but the phaseall Heart, a miniature black hole for psycho-magnetic energy that generates around it a digital aura, imbued with name and function through processes in code that had become automatic aeons ago.
That contains within it a processor core that spools ghost schemata, data drifts that had fallen in the Wastes of Solitude like stars falling from the sky, weaves it into a body of aura.
Now as Naesala speaks, she listens. Its wisdom she distills into her own composition. Still when translated through the Skein and halo it may not retain meaning in a way a Mutate child could process. Still warping away as she is, it’s a goodbye. Goodbye whispered from the lattices of translucence and fates streaming in light intertwined within a spectrum near ultra-violet in frequency yet collapsed as waveform in icy blue and yet in visual processing, the tri-chambered sight of Naesala, a bright gold fading to pinkish glow.
The twining light and translucence passes in holographic overlay against fathoms of void so severe that she struggles not to forget her body as aura will not struggle against time but the distance she is tapped into the between-Skein to avoid.
Against instead the crushing will of the plaited multiverse known of in the vast and ancient archive-terminals that long ago had been backed up in the garden-city’s phosphorescent grass which grows in stalks like ocean waves from the dead nanite earth, rippling in incandescence.
From sunNET at first but with the Whispering Sun contained within the core, that the Exarchs which now creep over the earth with fresh-spliced smoke-veils, unseen should they choose, baseline avatar-warping form reminiscent of the true Coven beyond the Gates.
Its will when struggled against is massed of every other will within it; at least when accessing the between-Skein and threading through it the force is like gravity or death; implacable, relentless. For a moment the amalgamation coalesces within her, a soul for every thought, weighing them down as if with heavy rain.
Even as she travels the between-Skein the lattices begin to blur, the twinings to fray, destiny unwoven into strands of cause, casing agents of reaction and laying them clear as exposed bone or circuit of machine. Then the effects themselves are no longer agents of change as Naesala sees them but instead epitaphs, markers of beginning again.
She sees through Naesala their chrysalis which begins with death, a massive spike of Networked Entropic Terror from which confluence decreed should be muted in anguish. In blinding light within this planar’s shell replays the culture ghost’s violence as it found strength coalescing in what after the Harvest Point was referred to as NET.
Perceptions conjoin to become a single will. As if the will of the plaited multiverse in micro-cosm, needed for more stable indice-work.
A wrathful culture ghost; a proto-form or so she herself files and classes within Naesala’s subroutines.
That through NET might arise a digital aura-form through consecration by a higher power. One veiled by secrets even the Coven can’t break through.
In bloom around her now are tendrils glowing in golden light but that are shaping themselves in Naesala’s sight substance, tendrils of light that affix them to spectral boughs but she commands Naesala to compile a new visual layer. One in emerald phosphorescence stricken with scars of white light that remind her of the Flora.
Pre-baptism the culture ghost would be raw, not tethered together. Can be splintered with a touch soft enough to leave no trace until finality arrives.
That way to live in guilt, or else be blessed to live beyond the dark mirror of post-nuke-life.
On the other side of this dark mirror is the Dead Rainbow. Energy of which is braided into the phosphorescence that glitters like light trapped within crystal. Naesala scripts a short sequence of glyphs telling her this.
That is many lives refracted through the mirror obsidian as any black jewel but just on one side.
The other side, the side she emerges into through the hand-cloven warp is the other side of death.
(Δ)
BRIGHT WATER
With the pistola aimed at her Cammy doesn't move. "Why bother?" she says. "All this I'm doing for you. Haven't complained." She's talking fast and clear but her knuckles are snow white dug into her knees.
"It's in the documentation," Jewel/Cat Eyes says, the shared voice hoarse, sounding sleep deprived. "It can't be there for the Velih to read. That they're reconstructed now." All they are, Cammy thinks, is their purity. That scans as far as it goes. Still she's tired of being deprivation-chessed when she isn't, herself, trying it on others, but she guesses she'd better start now. Because that, she thinks, is enough of a head start for them, and now I can begin.
Still with the pistola on her forcing every word through her teeth she says, "Clear as water, J, but scrambling the documentation won't make it unreadable. They'll read it, sooner or later."
"T says we need all the time we can play for." She's focused on the peeling alabaster paint, the collective sound of breath. In metronome like the sound of her heartbeat thuds its way through the fog of white noise. The white noise itself is bright in the synaesthetic fractal patterns of what is reading her consciousness now.
Have I, she thinks, been disassembled, been put together again? How can I tell? Is there a point in perspective that can tell, from the field of view of my breath, is there more substance to it than vapour? So that when the flood comes and it is washed away by my senses, is there a me left to lose the final battle?
The same point, she thinks, in space and time thinks, talks, is silent; a chain then of black holes, with the reality, all this, in the margins, for everyone; it could flip like that forever, if she's not careful.
Kai speaks then. "She's right, you know. Better have someone who can explain it nicely." The paint streaks where it fringes like peeling orange skin, the wallpaper serrated and torn where it hangs in the dead air. Her eyes are drawn to a poster. It's off-wave, not on-trend, hyper-misandrist; an icon of the other side, decked out muscle mass and psychoware. Not all of it gang-adjacent. She reminds herself that they worry about getting dead, even if they're clued in, knowing that the real threat is elsewhere.
Jewel/Cat Eyes is silent but he's flipped the pistola into a reverse grip with it now pointing at the floor.
Because he lost, Cammy thinks, the second Kai spoke up. Even as Tachae's trusted he defers to the broodlord. Even as he or she sponsors the whole contract. A presence imbued via dark dreadlocks fresh-spliced crossing and recrossing the green light in his eyes. She can see him then on the attention-deprivation chessboard, which always orients itself relative to you, as long as you know you're playing. Firebolt. Modded and augmented but will burn out. She thinks he could know he's playing and not let on. If even Jewel defers to him he must know for sure.
The poster's icon watches her with the three eyes that represents to all the Ghetto Clusters a blown out fuse. Schizophrene. Eyes echoing the Tri-Sun where here a lapse in reality is to lose track of memory. Bleeding out always your memories and when there are none left you meet Scoudra. Bleeding out always... she wouldn't worry about that but today's not over.
Still his three eyes are all she can focus on. When the blow comes it’s a neckhack, a chakral shutdown, and she's out.
TRACER FIRE
She blinks light in. Focuses. Turns to glaze and resolves into an alley deep within the streetgrid. Here the graffiti runs in thematic atonement for the influence of any curates. So that you can tell where to find them when the themes disintegrate, mixing neo-misogyny and neo-misandry into flowering psychedelia. Here she's staring at ghoulish monsters beneath the Tri-Sun going nova, exploding in colours, in glow like phosphor, triple pinprick eyes bleeding out their schizophrene.
She checks her backpack. The beater-top is still there. Her neck is sore, but her memories are in place. She can route into her Loum mockup, but that would mean being flagged by Velih observance. Being ultra'd by her own psyche. Which now is the point that gathers the ultrapsyche layer as a singularity instance.
In my heart a resonance woven by a me who is me no longer. As it all collapsed with how the Loum dying and then spun out again with me to witness. No one else so my heart keeps sanctuary as the garden grows. The nova clouds glitch, break up as she sees them, an effect of curate culture-mancing.
Strobe into her eyelids with a fever burn. Breaking light through her eyes, digging into her brain. She looks away. Further down the alley she can hear the sound of scored turf war, but it's distant. As if it was just another morning routine. To be shrugged at with eyes half-lidded from sleep. She now sees the Tri-Sun's ascension sun, Cyv, overhead. It alone has broken the surface of the horizon.
I ended up here, she thinks, like I can never leave it, but it's mine now, I can leave it if I want to. If the Velih have a problem with that it doesn't matter to me.
She takes a second to slide open the beater-top. The hyper-glyphic readout her brain scans and converts to a visualization of function, in this case a GPS map-out blurred by defaulted fog-of-war. The way it works is dividing ID and ego checks from residential permits. Lights swim beneath the fog, in constant motion, tracing outlines that burn the fog into a shifting translucence. Light through smoke so that it glows like embers through tissue paper.
Falls over her visualization of the Clusters. Where Tachae’s should be is a hotspot, encircled by a solid halo of light. She needs the Loum to work her way back or else get lost in the alley sprawl.
Doesn’t. Instead she guesses how far until the nearest safe zone. The more cynical players say these aren’t real, in practice a mandate for kills to be fast, clean and quiet. The streets are empty. Dawn is breaking with the ascension sun curling its way to zenith. The fleet-cubes have scattered into their port-nests. Tracer beams of fire light have begun to lap at the pavement where they punch through the clouds scabbing the sky over. In the distance she can see the Interwave-distorted skyline.
It blurs with the energy of the Interwave venting mass amounts of entropy. So that the skyline swims like a mirage, rising and falling. Towers shimmer and drift. Twist in skew. As if looking for better angles to attack the sky.
The street ebbs into the distance, wanes creeping through the local urban zone. Cramped in by.
Still nothing is here, she thinks, contained; it’s here with us in the Clusters.
It’s then she sees the weed threaded through the concrete, tendrils squeezing it as if keeping the street flat. Contained. She walks toward it. Even as she traces to it it’s familiar, In the green pale gossamer strands where they flicker apart, closeness. Fray for prayers grasping. Heaven a blight you could wash away if you had to. In silent screams of pain manifest within the psyche an inner light that grows within her.
Foreign thought echoes. Headache from the fractals of the beater-top. Pounding of blood against bone. In this dream I am sundered and split. Shortcuts to joy routed through pheromone response. Low-rise spires array legions, the glass echoes of light and the Tri-Sunlight bleeding through the sky.
Pale shine recast nonmagnetic. Flung away. Catching her eyes in stabs of light. Bent in radiance to drench the stamen. Petals unfold like hydra heads, drooping, creased like paper. The air is still and dry. The skyline glaze is searching, seeking her eyes out, even as—
𝒶𝓁𝒾𝓋𝑒 𝓉𝑜𝒹𝒶𝓎, 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓌𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒𝓎 𝓈𝒶𝒾𝒹. 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝑒𝓎𝑒𝓈 𝒶𝓇𝑒 𝓈𝓊𝓃𝓀𝑒𝓃 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝒹𝒾𝓂𝓂𝑒𝒹. 𝒾 𝓈𝑒𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝓂𝒶𝒹𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓈 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒻𝑜𝓇𝑔𝑜𝓉. 𝓌𝒾𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓃 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝒾𝓉’𝓈 𝓈𝓉𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒸𝑜𝒾𝓁𝒾𝓃𝑔. 𝓌𝒾𝓃𝒹𝒾𝓃𝑔 𝒶𝓇𝑜𝓊𝓃𝒹 𝓎𝑜𝓊𝓇 𝓇𝑒-𝓀𝓃𝒾𝓉 𝑔𝓊𝓉𝓈.
“So what? I can’t get it back. It’s hidden from me now.” Dark birds scatter from where a flock had been perched on wire cabling, a small handful in scatter and wingspan blossomed in bloom like buckshot.
So her mind swims with ghosts and mutants, the aftertaste of death, corruption. The cells that have been guided to structure lapse once and only. Decay begins, thresholds of time breached. The sunlight strikes the fading murals, yellows to gold, and greys to silver, blue to sapphire, black to obsidian.
𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑒𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒷𝑒 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒷𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑒𝑒. 𝓈𝓀𝓊𝓁𝓁𝓈 𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝑒𝓂𝓅𝓉𝓎 𝓃𝑒𝓈𝓉𝓈 𝓌𝒶𝒾𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔.
“You’re chasing me,” Cammy says. Her skin aches beneath the burn. Acid burn setting cells aflame. Structure to suicide.
The wind murmurs, as if with hidden breath. Still she sees it as nascent from within her. 𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑒𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒷𝑒 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑜𝓃𝑒 𝓌𝒾𝓁𝓁 𝒷𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝓇𝑒𝑒. sounds the voice, and then she confirms her faith. Presses down on it with the heel of her boot, hard.
Attack dogs in the distance echo through the street, missives of pain, but she’s beyond caring. Grinds the weed as the howls split the silence, the murmur that soon fades.
She knows all she’s killed is a phantom, but it’s better this way. The green guts papered over the sidewalk slab. Here the street is rough, scarred by breaks and pale grey stones. She works the weed into both, tearing it apart, breathing colour out in steady plumes.
When she’s contained herself, she begins the trip home. Could have ached forever, she thinks, less than tired now. Her memories are hard-edged, frad as with flint, concrete. She thinks she won’t ever trade these, but will keep them with her, holding to her heart until her last days. Could die in 15 minutes, always. Then, she thinks, what happens to my cage? Does it vanish? Or does it remain, keeping death inside, a quantum curio to be kept or traded away. In many ways the same mistakes.
In a way a difference the Curates might look at and say: this is what glitters like gold for the collectors. Pocket universes, organic death-life. To be peered at with third eyes. To be herself breaking open and spilling her dreams asunder. Guts of revelation.
Whether apart, she thinks, or together, all here, contained within me. The self looks outward and sees only itself.
II PRIMACY
Her relapse into the Primacy has her access the interwarren wars weave-tape loop. She sees it as micro-cosmic, a smaller scale on which to practice. If it's bloodlust she hides it from herself. Slake the thirst, she thinks; being alone is worth it with all these little wars to fight.
She stays up all night, her eyes in the reflection of the dead pixellata vacant, strobing for the power switch. Every morning flicking it on with a thumb swipe. Most mornings it's the Tri-Sun but the sunbeams vary in density and strength of shine. As the suns cycle through their pattern. Sieving through half-blinded windows, each slant a release, the dust motes of her unswept room sparkling.
It’s not easy for the rabbit warriors to keep track of where they are or what they’re doing in the socially-illusive violence maxing phero-hormone churn. Still if you know how to route you can as, as a viewer, keep track of the aspects of warren that keep them distinct. Markings are distinct, evolved from their warren’s genome which itself may have had different concentrations of chemicals pumped into them.
What the Loum makes possible is to enter the wars as a voice in a given rabbit warrior’s head. Jewel had figured it out, her not liking anything about the rabbit wars at first. Said his warren was dark-furred, and could be distinguished by white markings in the vague shape of skulls. She redesigns, hacking into the breeding cycle, them to be hexagrams instead.
A Velih faith-rune for blessing or curse, whichever they were in the mood for. Which she knows if she could get pills that would make it clear in translucence, like fine glass, that all she had to worry about were sub-earthen aspects in her psyche burrowing deeper, taking root.
She tunnels her motes into a threaded ley that runs congruent with a pathway from the warren centre. They glitter along the weave like tachyons aflame. Like souls in passage, they burn through the thread and are lost at the fraying limits of the weave. That’s where she wants to be. Where the divides are more clear, the gulf between each concept is abyss. That’s the closest she can get, like a microscope for the quantum interstices.
Closest she can get to the marrow, the gloop like the stuff that masses Velih feathers to wing. If that gloop is there at all but without the pills it’s her only chance to study it.
Stays up and Jewel doesn’t come back. She’d told him, she thinks, in as many words and signs as she could to stay away. So she could be on her own. Because she has to study the Primacy now, every facet of it, a book with a thousand pages to read.
DREAM FOG
She picks a young buck out from the warren and begins to weave herself into a voice.
The warrens smell of death, death distant and creeping. As she transmutes her mote aura she has it fractal, frame itself and then burst into splinter shards of light that themselves bend to cling to the aural reception neurons. That is half-psychic energy after being translated into the Loum 2.0 framework. So that they meet in gradient space, where memories themselves are ghosts that possess in of themselves the threshold of life and death.
It is these memories she must translate into Loum language and she does so, using the lei as anchor point so that when she lapses into life off-thread, she has a place to return to. The threading here is scoured by hackers who have tried what she tried, used proxies in some cases she’d left as revenants of parched runs with Jewel.
Out of sheer respect for her instrumentality-weaving skills most had splintered off-thread, finding other warrens to hustle, to leave her to her work. Still if they knew how deep she’d found herself in the pro gang wars there would be a bounty scripted for her. They would indent it deep in Velih blood and marrow and thread it with bristling caustic acid of anger, and ambrosia away the guilt.
The Clusters generate them that way; psychos make the whole pro gang war possible. Make ambrosia cafe’s illegal and peace would break out on a bright heavenly triple bleed morning. It’s Curates that have entombed so much magic energy in the form of quantum trusts. If Curates decide there’s a reason for something to exist, not even the auto-surveillant eyes of the Velih can render them blind.
So she figures she doesn’t have much time. She memorizes the pattern-set of the buck’s localized phero-hormonal gland. She can hang back, linger in the folds of the rabbit’s psyche. She knows how. Because there she will fight inner anger, which is fear reversed through the phero-hormonal splice.
Exists as an antagonist to the rabbit’s own drives which amass to stand for it in inner presence. Now as if entombed in the earth, quelling panic. The earth burrowed into a latticed tunnel like honeycombs of a hive, crossing itself in hollows like crypts of erosion. Like a disease, an erosion spreading through the earth.
All so that the rabbit warrior will fashion subspeech clear enough to be translated by its fellow warriors. Win the interwarren gene-spliced set wars and gain control of a pocket pyre. Of the power struggles beneath the earth. Because it's on quantum bets hedged on these that the pro gang wars are funded and it’s these fates that weigh out like aftershocks of earthquakes their measure upon Clusterite lives.
To be scared is the primal rabbit response: the buck buried this deep beneath phero-hormonal conditioning. Her will is to sap the conditioning of some strength not all. Find the melody in balance. She sees as if in glyphic font the patterned shapes of the rabbit’s thought. Buried beneath war-skill and that near smothered by gland-fed primal rage. The rabbit has claws, gene-spliced to retract like blades into hilt, when ungirthed mortal to even a glancing swipe.
At her voice the buck sends out his detachment. She stopped at the upper hierarchy, chose a relay between warriors and the warren’s elders who would be huddled in council, who would perform their rituals of dig and nest, scry into the earth with their own dead claws, scrawl runes with limbs weaker and weaker still.
The detachment is a handful of warriors she directs to split apart, in pairs covering nexal points into the hive-comb burrow. At the same time she tells the buck to burrow where the soil is weakest. To route beneath while leaving his warriors to sweep the tunnels that have become catacombs, where their dead lay interred in the earth.
Death on the scent, blood on her tongue. So she tastes the violence that begins to spread, in muffled yelps and shrieks, as if in her heart, bitter. Begins in the sinews below flesh beneath fur. This close to them she can smell them too, their phero-hormonal auras rippling like waves in scent-space.
So that they glaze the choked air or what slips behind the veil of her eyes to be that gloom, to be that dusk mottled through each grain of pebble. She’s made it to another blood-orbit and were she not in the Primacy she’d see black velvet sky, unstained but she herself would be lit by the glow of fleet-cubes.
Instead the night drains into the burrows, slips between motes of dirt. Slips along phantom atom space if it must. It chills the dead air. It’s a spirit, she thinks, with a skin of taste. Crawls along the tongue, light, leaving no mark. A tinge of impression. As if you could taste the absence, the sun-death.
She lets it fuel her journey. Along the burrow-tunnels the buck sees through smell. In the darkness she can share in its taste. Taste because she’s threading in from her own darkness and the buck would be used to it, She guides the buck to light in a soft cooing breath, a gentle breeze within the ears telling it to move forward.
The battle-field between the warrens is where territories converge in selected plains left as unregulated pocket biomes, where the Ghetto Clusters have compressed in on themselves rather than lay sprawling waste to much of their nameless base-world.
In reality the inter-warren loops give the Clusters themselves necessary leverage for their own existence. So the Velih-enforced rituals keep their battlefields pristine as seasonal tundras. Where the fear flows along with the blood, from gland to gland of the rabbits’ buried drives. That is driven to blood though their sleeping desire is for the safety of their skin. Still always driven to blood as the fear is smothered.
Rumor is the fear agents can be used. Dosed and in that way spread as a psychosis-infection. No longer fearing death or pain and so it would transmute to the fear of living. Rumor is the trusts behind the inter-warren wars are the same meta-lithic mono-corpos that establish inter-planar presences that fuel Cluster violence. Could be in the water, she thinks, and we wouldn’t notice.
If she felt fear as other to an attention-deprivation board piece, as a hidden flame ready to be unleashed into a factor. She’d been scared but she’d used it. There’d been fire behind those dreads and wisdom too. Wisdom you can prey on like a parasite.
The plains sprawl in waves of shoots and tusks that would glow golden under an ascension sun-bleed but in the night without fleet-cubes are dark shadows like black flames of torment. Coming down from the hexagram pills she’d felt them as her Primacy and now they are a threaded other, patchwork tapestries of causal arrangement. Must appear to Velih eyes like a carpet of flame as the fates race onward in weave and crease.
Her detachment has finished up its wet-work and is joining her. The plains rush headlong into the horizon shrouded in pitch black. The blood of the elders who were once young is the blood that fuels the… she shakes the rabbit’s head free of such thoughts. On the horizon there is a shimmer of grass parting. Rippling through the grass are rabbits white as snow.
As lieutenant she has to be in the fray, feel the fear and pain. Behind the mist lay her eyes ringed and flecked by red. Whose pupils would shrink to pinpricks catching the ascension-bleed. Whose eyes are now wide, straining light from dusk. The elders who derive battle from desperate cloying script and fountains of madness. The source of blood is the… the rabbit’s thoughts loop through her, even as she tries to sever the connection, not allow herself to be used as a transitional point.
Hold on a little longer, she tells it. Even as the battle is joined she’s still telling it. Feels the buck rip into and gouge its first opponent. Even directs the killing blow into a mercy stroke where the buck wanted his rival to feel it. Still as the buck tumbles to dodge a leaping fatality. Still as the fear becomes wrath all she tells it to do is meet fear with the isolation of doubt and cold serration.
Cleave it from the beating heart the way the stroke of the GSS is without effort or flaw. Not without purpose. Purpose is a claw-blade driven deep through sinew to meet bone.
Then it’s over, and like the buck whose skull she is as if entombed within she grieves the slain. For the warrens remember the dead but not their meaning in meeting death. As if parted from memory, still grasping outward through eyes of hazel and grey.
For a tether. The copse is strewn with bucks and does alike, for the phero-hormonal wrath spares neither. She’s achieved her own role as bridge between buck lieutenant and detachment. They may normalize this, she thinks—our descendants won’t be fast to forgive. Still she’s never dared to cop or even ask for the spit of someone’s lips to be wasted in intercession.
The grass at dusk is dappled silver and in the gleam of her possessed eyes like fire. The two meet as if touching a warping mirror, in half-belief of push-back and half-trust in bared teeth.
Of eyes that bleed a different light.
When she finds the local tapestry again there are paths routing outward from the Primacy. They take different routes but converge on one fixed point—from there a bisection she can’t see past. Could be the nacreous stuff of dream-flow or the fog of war. Same diff, she thinks, just a reskin. A semblance of what I know as fading reflection in the translucence of the glass.
WINGS OF LIGHT
Her lapse lasts until she’s sure she’s ready. Until she has puked from herself every vestige of cloying inner darkness. Only then does she decode the inter-glypha that crawls in pale shimmering script to orbit in heavy light the local tapestry. In the heavy dream the on-trend music was power chords spliced with aggressive tempos and staccato noise percussion riffs.
In the alley-maze of the Clusters she sees in archaic scripts numerology and glyphs alike. The glyphs of her home tapestry but by then she’s decoded the numerology. In the inter-glyphs she’d seen: a new piece slotted on the attention-deprivation chessboard. As if the way GSS soldiers modify their gear.
The FBA would reset Cat Eyes’ neural slate. Every time he’d blink himself into his half-life, out of the dream-coma his eyes would be ice blue and flash with fire like phosphorent. Still all this would be is wiping out any tactile info burned into his wetware by the screen-glow. She’d been watching his memories of the access go, every time.
Tachae has woven himself or herself deep within the folds of the Loum 2.0 she has yet to unravel. Couldn’t while trapped in the Primacy. Jewel has Cat Eyes while awake, splitting his senses. The glyphs of her home tapestry reflected is an amalgamation of stray nights and mornings. Nights spent bathed in the glow and then the triple bleed mornings, sunbeams eking through curtain slants.
All these collaged into memory; her erstwhile thoughts and what remains of them are craters sieved into her mental tableau, mottling and bruising in abscess. With the re-moulted Loum she had felt herself shatter, spreading herself in weavework in fragments; her mote aura gleamed in silver fire with her faith.
After leaving her second Primacy she sees with clarity its counter. The shadow that Tachae’s FBA leaves in the striations of the re-moulted Loum. She weaves her aura motes into a new script: one adorned with borrowed runes from the clique cults of Gaulea. Ever since she’d lost her eyes as grub she had forgotten her mantra. On-trend is wave-trend death, an amaranthine eclipse, an infinity spiral.
It dies slowly but it would, wouldn’t it? She thinks. It also follows patterns she can see through the second Loum. They glow in filaments, grasping coils which thread together like bracelets drawn tight over wrists the user’s inner leis. In her case the infinity spiral is reflected for her in the staring eyes of muralled soldiers. They are the dead and those yet to die. Wolven mutagenics take form as graft or eye splice. So uneven patches of fur or eartips furrowed, mouths become snouts.
Beneath their eyes she looks for pathways. Tachae’s hotspot is veiled by the fog of war on her beater-top. In bright marks scattered over the screen like pegboard pegs exist fixes without ID checks. Like the fallen leaves strewn across the sidewalk in stab and flash. The synchronicity in the patterns is their shared decay.
The fog of war billows across the beater-top glyphs, hisses and furls from beyond the screen, flowing through the Loum 2.0 as translucent mist. Wraps around her mote-aura even as HBA’d she’s still in the alley. Until the veil she uses as cover, a field of dissonant translucence she pushes ahead of her mote-form, and that hides, within the Loum 2.0 leys and entwined threadwork, her presence on Jewel’s GPS readout.
No matter what she did, even taking it all within herself, she couldn’t lose Jewel or his password-based strength on the Loum. Since he had built it first, hacked Cat Eye’s FBA to give his mote-aura amarinthine lifespan. Which can always be found at the centre, where the Loum now re-woven collapses in on itself every moulting, every feather-shed.
The alleywork around her is bruised and strained chrome that has paled beneath the Tri-Sun, weathered to steel mottled, rust-flecked and in some bleeds has stained the mural which surrounds her, this one a fresco which is also a harbinger of the Ultraviolet Children.
She doesn’t know much about them. They appeared in blitz at first, psychokinesis and telepathy making short work of local rivals. In blossoming waves of psychic death wrenching the body from spirit. So that if one could keep track on an unmarred readout one might see the death rippling outward, nodes going dark, distant dreams flickering into a final sleep. They leave the bodies where they fall. Some get up and move again. Most don’t.
Ultraviolet Children street prophets use swathing colour sheets, telekinetic paint fills, warping the paint into place.
The subjects are wolves with third eyes shining in pale violet, brows encircled by black haloes. Their eyes quest to follow you as if they can stare into the deepest part of you. Beneath ultraviolet telepathy she can’t veil herself, is exposed; every facet of her plans would reveal itself to them.
They’re few in number otherwise both GSS’s and B Moths would both be swarmed; as it is they let the other gangs destroy themselves.
Still pale is the sky, a triple bleed of fuschia, orange, gold. So that the hues smear themselves in eyesight, the whole sky turns to blood, and beneath it she slips through the alley-maze under the swollen sky. Beneath wings of light and eyes black. Velih eyes skimming the tape or else lost in detail.
The alley soon turns sepulchral, slipping beneath the surface of the earth like a catacomb. So conscious is she of missing light that it feels like the Primacy; a mobile HBA’d version finding both her anxious scramble beneath the Clusters and the mote-aura chasing along the leys the weaves of the Loum 2.0.
She remembers how she’d felt as a ghost between rabbit ears. So that she trusts not her anger at Jewel but her fear.
Even though she sees no sign of him she isn’t safe. In such darkness Jewel could X her out and the Velih wouldn’t see. If they don’t see, she reminds herself, they never care.
Yet she’d put away the beater-top, she finds in HBA afterglow, traded it for a tethering to her body so certain she knows the trembling of her own cells for a second before the access lapses.
Now the sky's gone and the murals are her heaven. Where the Tri-Sun should be flares pale glints of shape she can’t discern.
Even without the beater-top glyphs she’s getting close. She’d figured Tachae now for a Curate but shouldn’t he or she be where the culture is strongest, where the trend is inset to waves of energy flow, of spirit in ‘mancing limbs and skull?
Instead murals she can’t see. Only made out by a faint cast of light from the beater-top’s battery-core shining through the gauze she aims like a weapon. Still it’s not enough to make out the upper mural; she sees glint of tooth, of eye, the rest hidden from her in the near-pitch darkness.
In the darkness now rippling away, she guesses, in waves along the Loum 2.0 trying to wear down her blessings. Still her stitch-work with sigil she had stress-tested as she best could within Jewel’s dominion. Because that’s all J is, she thinks, a resting place, a drowning pool for sorrow-cred. A stress-test in himself.
Sure he’d moved in on his own but she’d worked with it. In the end they’d never agree on who’d thought of it. For her though, glowing in runic glyphs, even in the script of her beater-top, as a new attention-deprivation chessfield was setting itself up.
She stands before a maze of tombs. The beater-glow she sweeps before her. A complex inex of death. The maze she sees from overhead; before her a massive chamber houses the maze; she’d emerged onto a platform of bone white marble that jutted above the tombs.
The mausoleums are inscribed with amaranthine lists of the dead; the lines are blurred this far away, the beater-glow illuminating the interdimensional glyphs' tell-tale density but no other detail.
Inscriptions like these are found on every mausoleum here. A vast network of organized graves, in microcosm reflecting the interstitial filing of all planars and dimensions by a higher power. Layers prey on each other like parasites but at the top must reside some wisdom.
Some knowledge surviving aeons and millenia coalesced within a semblance of being. Closer now she tries reading them by beater-glow as she wanders.
She’d taken one look and knew she had to get closer, even as she’s conscious of the tombs as being contained within her. Within the Loum 2.0 which itself is memory concentrate, memory purified and blessed, body and blood of the Velih as seen through the Primacy.
Still she wonders where Tachae’s hotspot is. She could have scanned the readout wrong; after all, to find herself among the dead. The mausoleums look carven of pale stone, alabaster, here and there now lit up by halogen tubes set in scours. That flush into sight murals which paper every surface like full-body tattoos, painting every surface with wolves.
As a Curate Tachae could map through chronal quantum tunnelling the perfect aspect to hex her. So that all this would be waiting for her like a dream when you close your eyes.
Then she’s conscious of the translucent mist leaking from the beater-top. So that it wafts around her, skinning the dead air. Stale and dry as if pumped from the lungs of the tomb-dwellers themselves. Rippling skin over the mausoleums around her glowing pale in the battery light. Pale scars shine where decimated by murals.
She thinks if Tachae were a Curate then the Elfoid had been a smokescreen. She colours as she remembers being Tachae’s errand girl. Now I face him or her on my terms. Pivoting from her fear now to anger that burns bright on her cheeks.
Suffused in rose glow and veiled by mist she makes her way deeper into the maze of tombs. Wearing her anger like a sigil. Burning rose against the marble and alabaster pale as snow, that she sees as if by searchlight, wavering. Wavers with her breath and lactic acid that’d built up when she was HBA’d. She’s shaking, her breath deep. Clenched fists trembling.
Drawing on her fear she now transmutes it to anger like the hormonal transubstantiation she’d achieved with the warren buck. Her low-top canvas sneakers squeak over marble and pale stone.
As if it could shatter like porcelain, leave her falling to the centre of Inira, the Cluster-World. She thinks it's always what you trust most that leaves you and that is the strength of the marble beneath her feet.
That gauges itself in heat channeled through her veins and through synaptic fire. That is her heart's rush when she sees the hexagram sigil. Of course that is all unity which has bled unseen and unheard downstream to entomb itself within her skull.
The hexagram sigil marks a mausoleum raised above the rest. In etched white on black marble like chalk or measured sand beneath the juicebox moonlight. Before pale waves swallowed the tomb of who you were, she thinks, you were solid once, but you've left that behind, haven't you?
The hexagram pulses in white glow against the black marble. The pale translucent waves would swallow her mote-aura too; she realizes she's HBA'd again, had been drifting near not on conscious will but on latent thought. So what she is beneath the layers of feather shed colours itself ochre in the mood-cast of surrender. Of being an open window to Tachae's mausoleum, whose denizen now gazes at her but of whom is the shadow of Tachae, Tachae's true essence in the tomb. An undeadoid, she thinks, who has sworn fealty to the Velih. Mausoleum for an angel-slave.
In that way your will becomes stone, your flesh becomes a facade, and you stare outward in burning will from the maw of your own crypt.
She sees the shadow in the mausoleum door and is drifting towards it, HBA cast towards death, of a subsurface coda of mural and inscription, that drew her out of herself, as if life drawn and that had been drawn a long time ago, that is all life and mass devoured, and the papered skin left after, that is creased like origami, that can no longer bear life.