Desisted

She escorted me to a holding room where I might sit with my thoughts. To call the breeze on which I coasted ‘levity’ is a profanity upon the very concept, but the millstone that collared me did hollow somewhat with helium, that it would float.

Of course, questions remained on whether my case’s paperwork would fall in the wastebin only some links along the Church’s chain of command, far before reaching the pinnacle. The misapprehensions I’d fostered and neglected to clear placed me as a conventional familiar, albeit one deployed in an arcane massacre where the victims’ answers to ‘why?’ and ‘how?’ remained tenebrous, so my expectable treatment would be a pitying baptism and a knife through the neck.

Obligation, and empathy for the families, perhaps bound Savani to advocate that I instead be exorcized and inquisited. That success would be hers to achieve. I wouldn’t help. Like every day, today was an anniversary to celebrate my complacency, as though competing for medals in some immobile Olympics.

I did have options. If I confessed I had communed with God, supposing I didn’t bungle the communique, and came across not as a provocateur or liar, that would pique the Church into action. Of course that was making some high assumptions of my social abilities, but my goal was the Pontifex. Why not facilitate that attention?

Well it wasn’t really anyone else’s business what had happened between me and Czjeir.

Was it not my responsibility to be more upfront with those trying to help me?

Well... okay, first of all, to say it was about helping ‘me’ was false, so my personal outcome was likely inconseque—

—orrrr just take a kind view of charity for once. Why do you even care if it’s about you? If it’s a good thing that you want to happen then you should encourage it, duh.

Right, but, second thing, uh...

...

I just, didn’t really want to?

MMMMHMMM. Alright alright, now let’s hear your justification for that. The reason you would hesitate to divulge to authorities the reality of your condition, by which they could respond to you more appropriately, indeed with urgency enough to fast-track you to the Pontifex, the one figure you can imagine (and hence whose time you’ll waste, you egotistic slob) blessed enough to exterminate you, is?

I don’t know.

‘I don’t know’, khar har har. It’s because you think that woman’s incompetent and you don’t want to die. Duh! You want to continue doing arbitrary bullshit for as long as you can as though it’s all inconsequential. Did you forget why your death is objectively the right thing?

Excuse me, I’ve made steps towards that.

Yes but you can take more steps. Why haven’t you? It’s because you’re a liar. You’ll drift as far as the current takes you then cede yourself to a riptide, so you can dismiss every course as tried and unviable. And that’s an excuse to dodge accountability. You can’t be so slippery around me, Mephi.

Okay, well, my motive fundamentally here...

...

Well, okay, I suppose—I suppose, there were questions still my, somewhat peculiar, situation had left me with, that I kind of, wanted...

Oh oh okay, yes, let’s play that simulation to its end. You’re going to ask the Pontifex why you got anointed, right?

W-well, such a hypothetical won’t necessarily translate into action... there’s a lot of assumptions, to reaching that point, which you’ve jumped over... for one, I probably, won't speak.

And expect him to have some wonderful logical mechanical purpose to you, to keep you around, right?

Well, isn’t the conceit you’ve advocated to uh, validate my movements in this direction as one I ought reinforce harder, that the Pontifex would finalize some... extremely, roundabout form of posthumous judgement, and kill me?

Do the maggots that bleach your skin come wriggling out of your skull? That’s my point. What your grimy little heart prays for is another out, and what your slimy cheese-brain figures is that Czjeir cares just enough to keep you. I’ll unveil the magic trick. Whatever reasons for your permanence you’ll hear from the Pontifex, you’ll discard as unsatisfactory and run. So here’s what you need to practice. Once you see the man in the red veil, the position you assume is one fast on your knees. Go, “my Sweet Ardour, I am sorry, my atonement can come only through death...”

I-I-I, ugh, come on, the Pontifex doesn’t... if he has his own judgements, to supersede those is arrogance.

“...as your glorious torments have educated me to the horrors I have inflicted! But a pusillanimous bulb of vomit as me is unfit for your holy directives. By the one flash of sincere virtue I will ever show in my dismal existence, I beg that you seriously kill me.”

Can’t you ever get another routine? You’re propounding a course that’s as much cowardice as—

—OH HELLO YOUR NAME IS MEPHI? Did I just hear the squeak of a righteous worm who justifies the existence of soul-eating monsters? Go ahead then and explain that rationale for me.

...

...

It’s kind of, incredibly convenient, that it wound up, manifesting like that... but, logically, there’s no reason for me to live, so, you’re right. He needs to kill me, huh... I guess that was the conclusion I already had when I started this.

Convenient, how about ‘appropriate’? ‘Fitting’? ‘Apt’? Perchance even ‘horrible’, but that one carries a hint too much sympathy to even cross your mind, huh? So you know what to do now?

...

...Yeah...

AND THAT IS?

...advise the authorities...

OKAY!! THEN WHY AREN’T YOU DOING IT!!!!!

I had been leaning against the white brick wall of the holding-room, but the strength to do even that wilted. My shoulders and neck skidded down to the bench I was seated upon as though I were a snail descending from a wall to the floor.

I knit my hands over my chest as I stared at the door. Screams rocketed in my flesh; I supposed I might again explode, provided I simply permit it.

My frailty exacerbated the bullying. Don’t you understand that death will be your reward, this time, for finally doing the right thing? This is how you pass the trial. The Pontifex will be overjoyed to know you resisted the temptation to live.

I know these arguments I pose against myself are hypocritical, contradictory, and without any moral consistency short of the fundamental idea that every second I spend breathing is evil, though that is, well, true. Regardless of that, their semantics were flawed. If I by death escaped the responsibility of my sin the first time, why should a second exonerate me? Because Czjeir decided to impress the thirst for penitence into me by ensuring I’d torment more innocents? Because Czjeir decided I ought be punished by punishing others, as though in that equation I suffer more? What kind of misapprehension was that of the nature of this country’s God?

“I’ll ask it,” I muttered. My arm slipped from my chest to dangle off the bench.

Rankled by my vapidity, and the note of plain reluctance underlying this insincere promise, my conscience raised its baton. I scooched my shoulders back up the wall, crossed my wrists on my knees, and tilted my head.

If there was no trial but that which I imposed on myself, I abruptly reasoned, and by that reason led my conscience to flinch, why not indeed author it such that death by the Pontifex was its conclusion?

Was it not a glorious thing to know I had died before buckling to mindless impulses? Was that not the most impeccable death Mephi tel-Sharvara could ever have?

“Haha,” I laughed.

A grim warmth momentarily strangled my doubt.

I desired to die by the Pontifex. I wished to be slaughtered with that kind of pyrrhic dignity.

What an exquisite solution. The meaning of my life was to die in such a way that I could be construed as a good person.

Of course daggers of criticism punished me for a thought so hubristic, but the logic of my self now worked. I was simply a vain and selfish being that, naturally, would not bother with inconveniences when I could instead indulge in the faith others would stupidly give me. It was the right thing to do anyway. Savani appeared capable and doubtlessly well-virtued. The implication she needed my testimony to garner the Church’s attention was in itself a slight, although naturally it would help.

The austere face of the closed door surveyed me. I again tilted my head, gripped my wrist.

Though the door wasn’t locked, that I go wandering to her violated procedure anyway. If or when she returned to check on me, I could tel...

“Hauhh,” I sighed, craning the back of my head against the wall. “Why.”

Why had I racked myself into overblown grandiose suicidal delusions just to remind myself that I never do things and so reignite the whole sequence. I pressed my palms against my brow, as if to scrub my skull from my head.

Why was I such an unquenchable idiot.

“You got to here. You did okay,” some ghost whispered from the brick.

Why couldn’t I ever do just even one tiny mite of anything right.

“It’s just trust.”

I was awful and I needed to die. Like actually die. Not just play stupid pretend games where I could glorify a rope around the neck or a laser from God as excellent riveting fun.

I laid flat on the bench, kneading the smooth crook of my larynx. Thin skylights rimmed the ceiling far above me, their reflection off the white stone so bright as to be caustic. I raised my hand against them.

My hand flopped back to my stomach. Risen by heartbeats that murmured like tides, tingles of electric thread floated options to me as would a hotel steward stoop and whisper menu items to a bedraggled lich.

Thanks for the concern, but no...

The Hunger snapped its appendages to my shoulders and nudged my neck worriedly. Had it a corporeal form, I would have grabbed this abomination by the gullet and bashed it upside-down against the brick until it whimpered and scurried back into the dirt.

What an impossible dream as any. Rejected and aggrieved, the Hunger seethed as a pyroclastic mass greater than all the peaks of Dahjimet, foot raised to crush me with a reminder of that powerful gradient I had been avoiding.

Not like I had anything better to do, in these slow ticking hours, than enjoy another pissing-match into the void! Or so I wished to retort.

I exhaled to release the tension.

My shoulders cracked as I curled onto my side and looped my elbow over my head. The door stood as ever in its sentinel position.

A strange kind of serenity closed over me then. For all the toil it took to scrape my mind of its whirlpools, the only true requisite for success here was surrender.

Not to the sadistic crowing of the moralist that masqueraded as my conscience, though I couldn’t deny its point as right, and not to the impulsive hedonist whose chaos would unmake me, though I couldn’t deny its regard for my welfare as innocently barbaric.

Rather, to an advocate of a more balanced sentiment, that being my veritable owner Czjeir.

Whatever, I could say, to my imagination’s insipid products. A stupid animal that eats, whines, and shits will nonetheless garner cuddles and treats provided its form appeals to its master’s fancy. As blasphemous upon His pristine tastes as the observation may be, of all the souls subject to the snares of this ophidian era, I was the one he selected.

Of course, that thought in itself carries many presumptions. The ambiguity of the ‘why’, once I accepted divine motives as impenetrable to a moron like me, laid over me as a warm knitted blanket. Cotton beneath the tweed bench-cushion pressed against my cheek, and my curled arm severed the view to the door.

So anchored, I stepped out.

My body had left itself scrunched against the corner of the room when I returned, with feet upon the bench and palms curled on the stone, again stuck in the direction of the gradient. Not surprised by this phenomenon after having experienced it on the wagon, I unwound myself to sit normally and stretched my shoulders back, spine crackling.

Alright, what was the situation so requiring my input as to break the stupor. Did I hear the front door thud, or a new scuffling of footsteps and paper as Savani received the Abbot?

But as I squeezed my aching shoulders only dust-motes whirled in the silence.

Orange light of evening spilled in now from the skylights, casting itself upon the air. Night would fall quite imminently. But how late was the hour exactly? I folded my knee to my chest as I turned to face the door.

Rather, had I missed the Abbot?

How, when I hadn’t moved from this room. Unless—but skimming over the screamers, no new voices had joined the din. Indeed I had properly directed the Hunger so as to obediently do exactly the nothing that had been demanded of me.

So it was on the authorities’ end. Savani had explained, before she departed, that she would bring the Abbot here to examine me before transferring charge of my case and transportation over to him. Assuming those plans still in place, since Savani had not advised me to otherwise or to anything else past that first briefing, he simply had not arrived yet.

I stood up. I had heard people entering and exiting the building over the day, and knew the palatines had departed shortly after Savani took me. Perhaps she was only now free to step out and retrieve the Abbot?

Watching faces of doors passed me through the hallway to the reception area. Nobody was there. Taking the room’s vacancy as permission to trespass, I entered as if to inspect a museum exhibit, posed with such interactive props as the wall-clock and the abandoned desk. The desk’s seat had been pushed in and papers filed, leaving its top bare but for those glass paperweights and a lone candlestick, around which lingered no smell of smoke, but only more of the carpet’s thick musk. Quills and ink pots rattled in the drawers.

I closed the last drawer carefully. It seemed Savani had packed up for the day.

Which, the wall clock attested she should. The brightness of the light deceived the truly late hour; True Night would fall in only a handful of rotations, and she would be stretched to finish her business quickly enough to get home before curfew.

No traffic, pedestrian or otherwise, occupied the street of the businesses outside the window. Glimpses of the dark interiors of the buildings opposite suggested them closed, their clientele and operators departed until morn.

I tried the door. It juddered against me, locked.

Under the stupid gaze of that smiling mural, I backed up to the middle of the room. The clock sounded a dry thc-thc-thc, as a man gulping his spit in the desert.

So I figured, she had forgotten me.

Various explanations existed for why that might happen. Many aspects of today had seemed chaotic for law enforcement, which may have outprioritised me, or which may have incurred stress-induced miscommunications around my situation until it had been discarded from thought. Still—still, surely, the most minor figment of regard ought to have impelled her to check that there was no task she had neglected. So I imagined she might be exhausted, and exhilarated to return to more routine habits, such as the comfort of returning home, where she might enjoy a cooked meal and the company of family, which certainly sounded a more fulfilling use of time, and would naturally occupy more of her concern, than anything that could involve the would-be familiar implicated in a multiple homicide with an undiscerned deadline to full ghouling that she had shoved in a backroom for six hours but had obeyed her judgements so perfectly and made so little trouble that she just plain forgot about it, mostly likely, probably.

I mean, of course. OH BUT HAVE YOU CONSIDERED SHE’LL MAYBE BE BACK SOO—yes I DID actually, but of course, of course!

It’s just so—ugh.

And the craziest thing was that it didn’t matter. The Hunger’s patience was not so short as to force me out of this building by tomorrow, provided I still saw merit in staying here. I could fesibly, and should strategically, wait overnight in that little room with the door left open so as to spring my existence on Savani when she came in tomorrow. Hopefully—hopefully, hah—the shock of my presence and outrageousness of my vigil would rattle her with a reminder of her own oaths that this time, would stick.

Otherwise let the clumsy bitch have precedent to doubt her conscientiousness eternally.

Or, well, like it matters.

Whatever.

With a pert sigh, I marched back down the hall.

All empty buildings die at night, as though shifted to another dimension, wherein by isolation bizarre creatures may breathe. I’m perhaps an inhabitant of this observatory wrongly transposed upon a shape bolstered to reflect light, free when unseen, pure when sequestered, but for whatever superfluous reason bound to inflict myself upon the space humans actually used. Maybe I am simply too excellent for anyone to leave alone. But if everyone could comprehend how worthless I actually am, perhaps... I was as always, churning more spume.

Again in the holding room, I crossed my arms on the bench and buried my forehead on my wrists. My jaw ached from how tightly I clenched my sharpened teeth; sharpened too, drawing back to observe, were my nails.

Though these discoveries exhausted me, they did not surprise me. I had no urge to fix them.

But my blouse as I looked down was pure white, as though I had brought it new this morning and not murdered anyone in it. This confused me for as long as it took to remember the incident in the farmer’s house.

When I reformed from that puddle of eviscerated mush, I must have included replacements for the clothes I ruined and vaguely understood I consumed then.

“Ugh,” I muttered, head slumping upon my arms.

Savani might have taken me more seriously if I’d shown up presenting more obvious signals of imminent danger, such as, being covered in blood. I hadn’t erred consciously by fixing my attire, but I had made things more pointlessly difficult.

Scowling down the hole between my head and my chest, I envisioned my blouse—well, this imitation wasn’t even my blouse. Wet with a starchy smear of red, it soon stuck, drenched, to my chest.

I peeled the wet fabric off my chest, sucked it, spat it out. Though otherwise perfect, this manufactured blood tasted of chalk and satisfied nothing.

That old palatine’s manner towards me had been correct. Either by experience, or by sharp insight (devoted to the field that more rightly served his eye than ‘occultist’), he intuited me as deeply pretentious. My speech and mannerisms were not the indicator; rather, my ghouling exposed my nature to him in a way he promptly decoded. A familiar capable of rending apart bodies, or of butchering a room into a slaughterhouse, but that outwardly appears human and unscathed, is not presenting its actual form. It is rather condescending to a script, whereby it might not appear strange or offensive, despite knowing itself vastly more powerful.

Joyful libido damns conmen and tricksters to openly wear their tells, and strict predators will discard their lure once in range to ravage the prey. A personality that manifests the capacity to change between human and something else—or in an extraordinary case, anything else—but chooses to present as a human, is a cowardly hermit with a superiority complex, so the evidence points.

I grimaced over my shoulder at the door.

It did not turn to stone or iron at my urging, supporting my little hypothesis.

Night had choked out the evening; now only a dim shroud of moonlight defined any silhouette.

I was probably a shapeshifter.

Great.

Oh, whee.

Suppose it’s time to kill, what, 18 more hours meditating on that discovery until I could drop more crap on Savani? I peeled the stupid wet blouse off my chest again, fluffed it back into dry white silk. To what, ~experiment~ with my “powers”, and allow their existence to complicate a plan that was already perfect? Pinned under my shoulders, my hair strained against my scalp. To blubber to whoever saw me, “I’m s-s-s-s-soooorry, I only look human! And uh, I can change that, but I won’t.” Oh, why? Are you lying? Are you scared? No, genius, I’m taking advantage of you.

Absolutely riveting. Just absolutely riveting, Mephi.

And it wouldn’t matter that I manifested in this way, besides! Go manifest as a, a, I don’t know, a basilisk, a buzzard, a broomstick tied and bound to this cupboard, the specifics only merit regard once it starts imposing inconveniences upon others, and you have the capacity not to be inconvenient.

“Tahh,” I laughed, rolling my neck.

Twenty minutes and this anger disperses. Choose to dissect it, and logic kills it quicker. Since what I should do is wait again, for Savani...

With my head craned back, my foot tapped against the floor.

What I should do—what would get me to the Pontifex, so I could petition to die, and thus end the hypothesized suffering of some twenty-something individuals, as well as prevent some number of unnecessary future murders...

My hands squeezed tight on my arms, my jaw clenched again as to ache.

Awareness of the hunger’s daggers radiated across me comfortably, as might standing too near a campfire leave the skin warm, but reddened with burns.

As always, what I should, should, should, should, should, should, should, had to do!

A stern, percussive ‘clack’ sounded through the room—

“Fuck it.”

—as I eased myself to stand, with the door open ahead of me, I took the action truest to myself.

I surrendered.