Sophistication

Out through the streets of the city, I went. Up crannies and allies along the quiet upper tier, I loped steady, up here and there...

Yes, and now—

We wait.

Yeah.

Sorry. The steps to refine a morass of true hatred are perhaps more drab than my enthusiasm implied. Our emulsion unfolded like a big prank, the one between ‘I’ and ‘society’, by the fervid commotion I had activated inside this meta-organism, of ‘people’ and ‘civility’, by doing so laughably little. Yet the whole dragon thrashed. Palatines dashed! Households evacuated! Even the dusty clerics I saw, all huddled up like shivering bear cubs in their sanctums. But where had I, so dramatically evil and dramatically here, gone? Avoiding people is easy when you have an intrinsic sense of where nobody is. I actually spent most of that afternoon lounging on a wall and ‘watching’ the vast reaction my single tap of ‘existing’ had set off, and observing the leaves fallen from the massive cedar beside me. (But please let nobody in their panic do anything too stupid?)

An organism alerted to an invasive bacterium will shiver itself sick with fever to kill it. Rajj all that afternoon retched air over the privy.

Shadows slanted long. Purple shade cowled the sunlight’s blare off the streets. I had lost the hour, but True Night would arrive soon, if not be already present. I dipped off the wall.

Roads throbbing with people all through the day now laid vacant as plague-stricken ruins. Invitations did tease me, to marvel down these pristine boulevards, and partake in the lingering print of the spectres living here mere hours before. Yet a tightness lingered, from what should be absent souls, in the empty air like silk filaments tugging against me, decrepit, but taut.

Hearts were not truly severed from this place. Bunkered inside houses, with arms curled around children and wives, the mental gaze of Rajj still scoured the roads as much as did the patrolling palatines, as though by psychically scouting, could I be here, could I be there, they would possibly defuse me from butchering everyone overnight. They were terrified.

Some must be praying. For them I wished Czjeir would grant multitudinous comfort.

Others weren’t, or couldn’t receive it.

The tile underfoot sucked endless smeared pounds of sludge and sludge, out of a fount in my heart down to my soles, of a weight that anchored me motionless.

What gargoyle did all these wriggling pinworms think I was? Didn’t I say my intentions? Who has any cause to cower except that fermented barfing of pond-scum Hejat? It’s the usual deja vu, nobody heard me or took the words seriously, but it’s not as though they’re being irrational, Mephi.

Fury dissipated like vapour. The remnant cooled into a slag that burbled out only more sludge.

It’s just me. I was just stupid, a nuisance, a menace, obnoxious by his presence, too impulsive, too aggressive, with bad opinions, never kindly, never pleasant, unflattering, cruelly critical, charitable when he shuts up, selfish when he’s not here... because we’re in SO MUCH PAIN you LOUSE mephi and why on EARTH aren’t you SOLVING ALL OF IT. Sorry, I’m sorry, I know I’m a, scourge. B-b-but then why do you want me if, if, if it’s, if my tongue is ribbed in salt, why beg me to lick shut your wounds? Is it so that I can be you? Or test how, delicate I can be? Or just, inoffensive, as a bulbous cloth-headed effigy erect on a stick? But what if you are wrong? What if I do think you’re stupid? Then, then, then—you should smack on some lipstick and kiss the bloody mirror! Go rut your tail against it, too! Since in the end, that’s all you want. Does corporeality let you pretend you’re not utterly exposed before even the cirruses? If I can see you’re a gaping leech, a hagfish, a loach, a squiggling eel mired in its own filth and squealing, do you think I’ll transpose you into a freshwater pond so the incredible volume of shit you giggle about producing can brown it up too? And fashion you into a glimmering discus? Do you think I even can, if you prescribe me, ‘twice a day, go feed the piss-loach’? No! I want that bloated little monster squeezed until it pops. I’m not even the tender of the aquarium! But I guess you resigned once you realised the thing shreds flesh down to the skeleton. ‘Oh, SOMEBODY has to go pet it’. Mephi, why aren’t you? Don’t you care? Despicable, you are! An utter coward, you are! Thank you Mephi, you’re so sweet—so don’t you know then I can WORSEN YOUR PAIN UNBELIEVABLY? IF I’M YOUR ONLY SHELTER, WATCH WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I DISAPPEAR! AND YES THE PROBLEM PUMPS OUT FROM YOUR HEART. YOU LIAR. RAPIST. KIDNAPPER. PERVERT. MURDERER. CHEATER. WITCH. YOU WANT TO GOBBLE ON FISTFULS OF SHIT. I AM LESS SUFFICIENT THAN SHIT, SO WE SAY IN CONCERT: FUCK ME AND FUCK YOU. You know how it goes...

It’s whatever. Old Mephi tel-Sharvara, stirring up dustbunnies of putrid hogwash again. It’s a storm of vile aspersions or it’s grovelling ‘sorry sorry’ on my knees for nothing. It’s an impasse. There’s nowhere to go in it.

But then why bother with anything? There’s no point then, nothing. Nothing...

The life inside my cells wanted to wilt away. I often knew the sensation. My soul would be dispersed onto the wind then like dust; and the physical corpse left behind to commandeer, just an empty simulacrum, of a thing already dead, a hard hollow skin, devoid of living flesh, soul, or sentiment... the sensation wanted to happen.

When it tried, Czjeir’s heart flared against it like a billion-watt bugzapper. Actually an eerie peace had levelled me through that whole dialogue; it was the same peculiar levity I’d been coasting on since claiming that ptarmigan witch, a sensation of contentment of alignment in all creation, and grandiose purpose for my place in it, that Czjeir had still picked me.

Crimson trellises locked me in so that I could not be dispersed.

Shien’s spittle, I could not believe I was alive. More than anything else, I needed to be screaming ‘thank you!’.

Uh, just, baby steps though... s-still an ex-cabbalist... we’ll get there. Maybe... or something. Ahah... mhm.

I flicked up my chin and marched a step onwards—

WHAT INFIDEL DO ALL THOSE GODLESS SHREWS THINK CZJEIR IS? AH HAH, HAHAHA! YOU QUIVERING FINCHES, LET THEM ALL TREMBLE! BEHOLD IF YOU WANT! HERE I AM, NOW 1 2 3 SCREAM, OH NOOOO AHAHAHAAHAAAAA, AAAAAA! It’s a joke, I’m just a joke, you’re all going to be fine. You don’t need to worry. Whoo... ahahahahah.

(I observed an odd phenomenon wherein misery mired me upon motionlessness, but manic ecstasy surged up when I moved forward. Through attributable in its intensity and supernaturally literal manifestation, that being, the quagmire to the screamers (though they remained presently mute), and the mania to the hunger (though it remained presently mild), to my abnormally raised condition, the core trend was not irregular. This observation reinforced my conception of the condition as an extrapolation, extension, and exaltation of attributes already extant in me, since this was quite analogous to how I always approached people. For this reason I care to note it.)

Palatine patrols had thinned for True Night. Blips hunting me two-by-two now went alone, the remnant of Rajj’s guardforce both properly anointed for nocturnal traipsing and energetic enough to press for more hours. In number: five, six, approximately, allowing for signals too weak to spot. I didn’t even bother to hide. And besides, True Night’s my inhabitance anyway.

(Personality is a core element of all supernatural manifestations. The rhetoric remains consistent whether applied to a ghoul, a witch, or a familiar. I could not, though, think it accurate to taxonomise myself in any of those categories; psyche itself then may be an intrinsically core aspect to any metaphysical phenomena. My rationale, firstly, on ghoulhood, I retained my mental faculties, though a ghoul that retains an illusion of mental faculties to itself may be possible, regardless, Czjeir ought not intervene if this was a ghouling condition. I also could not be a witch. In essence the original supposition of ‘some weird familiar’ remained the most suitable, but incorrect, as the implication of a familiar is the aetheric progression into ghouling. Such progression may be extant, but infinitesimally slow. By intuition I didn’t sense it. This was an odd state to be.)

Ho hum—I drifted around the tier to the least populated, least visited, most isolated ward I had prior observed, like how a goose floats on the water, not hugely conscious, nor hugely unconscious. Larger chapels grated me off since I knew people were still huddled in them; their facades bore like stern rebukes, ‘go away, not for you here, you intruder, you pest, you—‘ alright, alright. The more desolate streets were more comfortable anyway and more gravid with refreshing, mysterious airs.

For who smoothed this brick, or who trimmed these gardens, or who swept this stone...

A priest exited a small chapel. I withdrew a step, into an adjacent street. He locked the front doors, clenched the lacquered wooden Czjeirphet hanging on his pendant, then paused, sighed, and departed at a brisk, tense pace.

When I stepped out, the darkness and distance separated us like the gulf of a river, so though his gaze flit here and there, our encounter closed yet as asymptotes.