ANTHROPOMORPHIC

For several days wandering, I wafted in hypnogogia. Dreams flowed thicker than days. Solve, coagula. Solve, coagula. Petty little alchemists glimpsed God in the comma. We’ll remake, we’ll reshape, we’ll drive chrisels into the art. They’re not at a tenth of reality. Cycles, cycles, cycles, what writ the kinetics to motion? If He will make alterations, the comma is simply where He is best heard. Defy it, and you will fall.

Solve—omni—coagula, a diamond turns and shines by a different face. Every known paradigm goes to the dark, but the order remains, and the sculpture remains, always what it was.

Much like this constant desert, much like its blank horizon. Screamers scraped inside my skin, the ptarmigan witch newly among them. The scrabbling nails slid off, for once, too dull to cut but not forgotten, just blunted in my stride.

So there clarity hit. I seized with horror for a moment so transient, the paroxysm failed to even judder my gait. It was only by the stolid, leaden aftertaste that my speed did wilt.

I had failed to circumvent my apparent penchant for murder and psychophagy. Though an inevitable conclusion once left to my faculties, even after leaving that internment office, and even if only to please my own vanity, I could have resisted much longer.

I have truly no compunctions about witches dying. In that way, I’m actually normal. They are unfettered filth who gave up their humanity for the delusion of love in a cesspit. From every thought, word, and act of them there squirms an ineffable heinousness, overt that a glimpse stuffs the gut full with sludge, through which an excess of dreamy initiates squint to instead read the ghosts left on the palimpsest. Every one of those beasts to their pillows one day whispered, ‘I’ll be a superhuman.’ Like they’ll measure where the pinnacle lies more finely than God. Because instinct screams that all they are, and all they became, for all their efforts, is not even human.

Sand settled against my feet.

I drew up my palms to look upon them. For a predator’s, remarkably clean.

It is an odd thing to know, objectively, that you have left a demographic that has been such a keystone as ‘species’, and still not truly feel you have changed at all. I suppose it is true much as how no epiphany of the self comes by committing homicide.

I turned my hand. Woven thoughtlessly by effortless reflex, as sleek in its forming as a sheet of quicksilver, I envisioned the nails black and sharpened; they conformed.

Desire and intentionality seemed greater operators in defining my structure than precise knowledge of anatomy or chemistry. I rapped my fingers over my palm.

I rapped my fingers over my palm...

A hard bubble from a tar pit strained inside my neck. Screamers in tempest through the insides whirled that wished to ravage me until I was as chunks fed through a combine, but even as the wells behind my eyes lapidated into granite, these sensations all drifted very far from me, the way the sky guides the clouds out of sight. Stimulus was devoured, and gone far under, to somewhere I couldn’t reach.

No, no conscionable voice could say this constitution belonged to a human. Beyond shape, was the physiology, the sorcery, the senses, the diet, it was all an incompatible state. If there is such an innate condition as ‘humanity’, then I could surely say I had lost mine.

But then why could I say I had lost that humanity and still struggle to say what was missing? What does define this faculty? Was it the ability to defy one’s own urges, or the awareness of one’s self as extant? No, because I had known people lacking the former and witches who had the latter. So what was it? What was the crux? How come this word is so sacred?

What had I done to myself?

I took a long breath. That inner heat and tightness numbed far before it could hit my skin.

This was probably a situation where most people would cry. I could envision myself doing so: bawling, screaming, writhing on the sand and making a great show of it. I tapped my nail to my lip.

To the west loomed distant mountains, not that hard to reach or scale. Would it awe me to see the expanse of desert, the enormity of the peaks, or the nests of those sneaking chukar, and find that quiet sanctity I adored with simple interest as my guiding thread...

Out cracked a grin like a knife.

Right! Like I had been given all of this just so I could go be a human!

Wandering threads of static snapped together into one golden path, that sunbeam that sliced straight to Amsherrat. Rolling locomotion over the dunes resumed, quickly.

Give God a broken instrument and he’ll still play a symphony. In His hands, it can’t very well do anything else! I just needed to die first, before I could do any good.

I’d come to the somewhat delusional and definitely inflated belief that the purpose of my existence was to, ah, repeat the process I had inflicted upon the ptarmigan witch, upon other similarly eligible targets.

‘The purpose of my existence,’ ‘eligible targets’. Well, the implication is sick, right? Corollary says, that there would be, ah, a certain predestiny... or perhaps not predestiny so much as predisposition, that acting as an utter abomination basking in self-satisfied superiority now entitled me to act as an utter abomination basking in self-satisfied superiority, because God had taken me and pointed my tether.

You know, like the courses I’d dropped, the people I’d smothered, the love for anything outside me I never bothered to commit, actually that all worked out. As sentimentality goes, God still adores everyone, and as functionality goes, my poison is premium for cleaning up the deviant, lawbreaking sludge that fellates its own hideousness now that it’s Long Night.

So it’s me! I’m the most righteous sinner alive! Hah, HAAAAAAAA.

If that isn’t true, why is there a punchline? God knows all I do is a joke. Hahaha, hahaha.

Sorry.

Well, no, how to explain this? The perfection of this. Put it as testimony for the acolytes failing in faith, who question the pit of the sky as an ear or just air, how severely my spirit was pampered.

Because there’s this prayer I’ve been slinging ever since I could think. It goes: You're evil! Repugnant, you’re awful, who’d ever want you, you’re careless, soulless, you have no heart, you’re useless to everyone, I do everything wrong, kill me, I am useless, I am just totally wrong, God, I am a monster!

When spelling your language like this, be careful. I incanted my wishes more devoutly than Bishops trill psalms in the seminary, I cast them beneath every drowning, buoys as much as a more humble heart yells, ‘help me!’. Why did this string sever? Why is my joy in hate? Because you're just evil, repugnant, you’re awful, who’d ever want you... I figure you’re familiar by now.

Now every particle of me was this ten-thousand decibel scream, rhythm by rhythm reciting always the cant of my favourite sutra.

To remain reprehensible, but still bask in the vanity of standing one shade lighter than the pitch. To trample and crush this scum, carpet under my feet that they were, whenever I danced a step. The wish was twisted and endogenous, brewed from every grain of hatred within me, the contract I would fantasize about but never be bold enough to voice or sign – which, before Czjeir, I had.

Die for your sin, padme hum, I hate you, amen! My thesis on my self breezed the peer review!

And now... I was what, some weird familiar?

Necks of dunes fell by leaps. Through my blood there beamed the warmth of a seraph’s million gold wings unfurling, their phantom feathers tousled and teased peak by peak on the gale I cut, ready to burst into form should I let them, each to wreathe this body like those manic pinions of a carnation in bloom. And would that not be glorious! What is false about me wearing the badge of my master!

Some weird familiar – it seems fair enough.

So, you holy thing, forfeit those concerns of measure and ethics. Take comfort, you pet of God, that your obedience is absolute, and has been foreseen.

As a human being, you failed at every point anyway.

And yet when I came to that town, Rajj, I could still only be Mephi tel-Sharvara.

Rajj was a city I had not known existed until it slammed into me like the face of a cliff. Upon the magnetic web that is the real centre of my perception, and that I was following as my compass towards Amsherrat, an orb crackled abruptly from the west and lashed out to me with a static tether. The root of this signal, which I followed, was Rajj.

To clarify, I wasn’t hungry – well, rather, I was only as hungry as anyone gets when they skip a few days of meals. Which is to say, no supernatural pains, urges, prisoners, or otherwise impelled me towards this direction, and to speak of the conglomerate of these factors I personified as the Hunger, it still happily slept aside that window.

When I stopped attending the web, the magnesium blot on my cortex dimmed into a stain faint enough to ignore completely, and even when I was focusing, nothing stopped me from dismissing the pull and bypassing the town, which actually, initially, I did.

Dunes of open desert rolled beneath the blue sky into forever before me. This way was Amsherrat. Behind me, terraces of tiny pale flat-roofed houses clogged together into tight alleys, as the pyramidal structure of the city buttressed against a large rock formation (that shaded it from the sand and heat, a convention that dated the city back to the Heresies if the stone had not been placed there by Czjeir) afforded space for only one road.

I tinked my nails across my teeth, contemplating.

Amsherrat had witches. Rajj though, most likely, didn’t. When the signal emits from a populated nexus, that is a little too bold. Consider the ptarmigan witch. She may roll her life in her palms until she hexes her hands into soot, but even she, with self-aware courtesy, hedged her lodgings well outside of Yeshimar.

So the string that reeled me back towards the city this time was just curiosity. Whatever criterion made a heart, ah, palatable, for my purposes, could be further scrutinized here. To reject Rajj for Amsherrat also now felt like passing a table arranged explicitly for me, and the single soul seated there with elbows up awaiting my company, wearing a gaudy cone hat and chewing on a party whistle was Czjeir. After all the effort, you’d cry to tell him ‘no’.

Fine, fine, RSVP. I pivoted on the dune-peak and trudged down the slope, which had such height it shrank the city beneath it into a toy on the rock-face.

Sand sucked my ankles, left, right.

So, uh.

Do I just...

...walk in?

A mad centrifuge shot acid through my throat; I seized, choked, tripped over my feet. How novel it was to crumple to such incredible, inexplicable nausea without being actually sick. Flat on the sand like a sizzling fish, I retched sputtered ‘ah’s and ‘uogs’, as though that would untie the nooses closing on my guts.

Well, nothing loosened. Nothing was physically wrong. The issue was – was...

Was, I mean, just look at me!

I mean, I hadn’t committed to the wing thing in the end, thank God, but how the hell was I...

A tremor quaked up from my core. My teeth chattered and sweat oozed over me like a protective film. I didn’t even need to breathe, and yet the sensation that I couldn’t still urged to me that I was dying. And, I don’t know, that’s hilarious. Right? A step removed, the sun clouds with a cataract, and this whole plight becomes very funny.

Slobbering to dress as some supernal daemon then salted over nothing as is right for a proud slug.

It was all an insignificant issue. There was an incredibly obvious way to enter Rajj without imposing myself on its people, and that was, just walking in, like a regular person.

It’s not a sin to concede, every once in a while.

You know you’re not here to make friends. So just don’t be stupid. Who needs to know?

I trembled at the distant watching houses. In my mind there beamed a sun itching over in Amsherrat. Still, I shoved my body forward to Rajj.

The sky dimmed strangely then. All the somatic effects of nausea and vertigo battered my body, objectively, but it was as though, between sensation and meditation, some cold dead man’s switch had triggered and severed the synaptic line. I knew exactly how terrified I was, as much as I would know the distemper of a misaligned woodpress, but until the machine is inoperable, (a far off deadline given the only operation I required was ‘walking’), the discomfort is not really my issue.

Sorry, I guess.

Just so useless that I need to do this to even get down a hill.

It is what it is. Whatever.

I sighed, the sand now pleasantly dark and cool under the shadow of the rock formation. An archway stood at the mouth of the city, carved with icons of dissolving stars and bulls tossing their necks (indeed Heretical), positioned only some meters before several stairways up to the first terrace and a large tamped on-ramp for the city’s main road that disappeared up a bend.

Again hesitation overtook me – the recurrence of fear, as though it were festering, for me, was truly irregular.

Though, the very state of knowing where I needed to go by my own initiative was also quite novel. So perhaps the trepidation was simply a byproduct of my principal question, for once, being the ‘how’, of ‘how should I do this,’ and not the ‘what’, of ‘what should I do.’

Was it trepidation? The tiered structure of the city drew from me a dream of leaping rooftop to rooftop that I would crash straight upon that crackling sun. When I recognized I lacked the will to do this, I pressed my cheek on the archway and groaned.

Huh.

I supposed that was what I wanted to do, really. Well, too bad I failed at being brainless enough to properly learn histrionics, so that self-fellating ego massage could go and die in a landfill. I took a rattling breath, peeled myself from the cool stone of the arch, pulled down the hood of the cloak I had conjured (a fast bandage from the subconscious coward) and trudged up a stairway.

Before I crested to the terrace, a shudder choked me to brace against the tiled stone wall, squinting and sweating as if I would there vacate my guts.

—What the, again!?

Shut up, shut up, shut up! Worthless! You know what you need to do, and you’re going to do it. God, how inconvenient. If I could stutter against my instincts and wrestle myself past the not-even-obstacles that beset me every five steps, nobody else had any damn excuse for falling short of their goals.

I hadn’t been in public for so many years, but I also hadn’t liquefied into an ooze more perspiration than person during my studies in Amsherrat either. Well, uh, not so consistently. Two minutes I afforded myself to settle. A strangled knot still deflected about my insides, but at least had receded from my face.

It’s the best I would get. I spat a breath, uncrossed my arms, and entered the streets of Rajj.