Prologue

One was there to witness, just as before when the last god had died.

Emerging discreetly from his screen of trash, he crept near to the cinders and cruor of fallen Akasha, draped over by a glaucous, low mephitis.

No member was left of her - of them - and her killer was without trace. Only Elesarp remained as his invidious companion; spavined and sere, incapable of tongue but the gutter and growl of slow cremation.

Strange, he thought, that the Godqueen's blood was so lustrous. Fulgent, as if still hot with the souls she had amassed.

He knelt, dabbed it on his fingertips, and tasted it to his lips.

Desinence

Above the feculent carnage, a rudiment of brilliance levitated. Nascent still, nebulous in contour, it illuminated the quiesced rows and dwellings of Elesarp in a dull spectrum; fallow, fuscous, fulvous. Nothing spurred to disturb its coronal tacet.

It rose slowly, but lingered, as if to look back. On the world once of men: Antelucan now, eerily ciselysian, not deceased but dormant.

Then abdicated from it, up into the littoral of the Deep Sea, and thence to the place of its forebears.

The New Sun

Into the horde a selcouth presence came, with candent wrath, with reckless purpose. It skirred into the thousand manes, like a dengue, winnowing and threshing indiscriminately; hewing the goetic pleach to strike for the core.

Something came with it, something in the blood. A cunning venom that devoured the dead and vented living fire. It shut the ululation of the damned, smothered by the roar of a soliform aborning.

And when both eidolon and blight had reached her howling heart, a hundred hands irrupted; rending with gruesome, hysterical sthenia, they sundered thews and bone, til their phthisic trunk was split, and eructed an enceinte bolide to vanquish night.

Red on Red

He did not get far before she appeared to him, a ruck of silhouettes that coalesced through the firelit dim.

But she was no longer the Godqueen; as he, she had become something more. A vermian leviathan, a sarcous mass of scavenged bodies thrutched together, limbs twisted and agley, a nidorous hulk.

"Come closer," spoke a hundred sibilant voices, and when he did not, they did. Its feet and hands all lurched and stumbled, disconcordant, a hundred eyes all stared with desperate hunger.

"Come closer!" a hundred voices squealed, and he did. With trembling steps, with outstretched arms, he went to do his work. What came next took all that he had, but he had what it took.

Then only a single voice sighed; "Lord," frail and forlorn, "you've come back to me."

Its weight descended, and crushed him to a pomace.

Matin

From a specific distance, the igneous bloom of Elesarp revived a very old memory: Light low on the horizon, smudged by charcoal clouds and attenuated by the remoteness of winter. He thought this projection of his undertaking more than coincidental. Somewhere in that burning carcass hid the heart of dawn.

Closer, that hideous redoubt was a mighty pillar of sempiternal flames, retching up a melanotic nimbus. Its cacophony the aubade of an aeon's ghosts.

He knew of a postern safe from the blaze, and there met a hermit armored in garbage, equally as surprised to meet him.

Plainly, he requested, "I am for the doyenne. Do you know where I can find her?"

Bemused, the hermit answered, "I know where she can't find me."

"Are you one of her children?"

The other shrugged, ignorant or careless of that question's threat. "I am one of yours, Alastor. " Then mulled, and evenly confided, "Go to the Edifice of Cydonia. Call her name: Akasha."

"So I will. But that was not her name before."

Rage

The Panoptes of Elesarp was trammeled in her own web.

Sedulous she had culled together her host, sucked the surviving life from their limp husks; until a thousand selves crowded out her own, a hundred thousand memories buzzed in her like a swarm of bees; her pillaged ipseity the single flower from which they all drank, into which they deposited their foul pollen.

Around and around the keep's blasted districts and courts they drove her, through Kron and Ampridatvir and Talislanta, their funeral galleries and gutted tenements, and she could not close her hundred eyes to the abject ugliness that she had sponsored. She learned instead to withdraw into the hum and keen of the strangers' music, the places in their thoughts that could not be mapped in words, and excited her corpulent length into a dancing fury.

Around and around, so her rage and horme purified, undivided.

Hyuri's specter walked the streets of the last city on a hundred crooked, shambling feet.

Patience

Ask a man: What is patience?

If he is young, then to him patience is a willful tolerance. An inconvenience, no different than the patience of a stalking animal. Better nerve than patience, better to challenge than to obey.

If he is assiduous, then to him patience is the luxury of procrastination. A deception for the indolent. Better action than patience, better to proceed than to wait.

If he is powerful, then to him patience is a rightful ordering. An accommodation for authority. All things in their accorded time! Better patience than anarchy, better to forestall than to cede.

If he is old, then to him patience is the lees of sorrow. Anyone can forgive a young fool, but an old fool is an embarrassment. Better patience than regret, better to forbear than to grieve.

Patience, today, for tomorrow. Patience, my love, wait for me. Patience, my child, for soon you'll grow.

Patience, death, wait for me.

Metamorphosis

The world unfurls to the mind that unclenches. He made federation with the terrene, and so was multiplied by it; became proliferate, polypresent, and in quintessential composure clasped with a hundred fingers the esculent soils, the sorbile air.

Perceiving his teleological identity, he stuck his nose beneath death's viscid surface, then concluded there is nothing abstruse behind a mirror. His invented sun was already there watching in the reflection.

But telaesthetsia randomized the organization of thought, discarnate will vied with eidetic appetite. Would he cease to be participant, slouch into an asemic force? Conceit induced him; so he fabricated a body for himself, reimagined from pieces of Dwlf and Amidash, levied with the imperfections of the flesh, leavened with the facilities of a god. Immediately he understood the significance of voluntary reincorporation.

I am the new tellurian.

Conception

When he had digested that last bittersweet draff of his psychosis, he sensed the cluthe's pollution was depleted. With angry, febrile effort, he commoved his heavy limbs and eyes back into waking. The torfire had exhausted its crude fuel; together he and the dowager of Cær Brae were bundled naked under a thin blanket, so that she could furnish him with her body's heat.

He became instantly, absurdly aroused by her, a reaction he had wholly forgotten, and tried to stand to hide his distress. But she had stirred and sensed his motive, and cleaved to him, importuning: "Yes, yes, welcome life!" He could feel directly her sensuality, the softness and roundness of fertility; his counterpart instinct swelled to arrest control.

In a vulgar fury he tore away their cover, and took her to her back. But her small cry brought a sudden, unhappy stop; his breath and voice shook upon her throat, "Do not goad me further to this base act."

She cried again, her keen nails raking his shoulders, and she seethed at his ear: "What now, man? You fear the surrender of sex? Yes, surrender! I my body make vulnerable to you, you your emotion make vulnerable to me. It is in surrender that we abolish our own walls."

So he submitted, to himself and to her; and as he entered her he felt that he had entered into her, she became more real and he less so; and as he released he felt that he had become released, his body abluted and ablated, and only his senses remained - momentarily suffused with hers, then rushing upward, outward, across the dark of the sandveldt and in all directions.

In the sepulcher of Cær Brae, the Allmother curled, sobbing; her lover gone.

Do You Remember Love

He wrenches himself through the walls, always behind them, blind and trapped. He can hear the rain outside. He fights down asphyxia, reminded he is still in fever, and coaxes the crawlspace past him. Now he is hunched in a thin covert, a place he knows... knew.

Then is Nilet, huddled with him.

Oh, Nilet. After all, I forgot.

"Will you?" she has asked, her eyelashes high, and thick with wet.

"I do will." he makes his voice low, emphatic.

She is several summers more graced by the Lady than him, but a diminutive creature, that provokes his protective, masculine urge. She has - in spite of that, he thinks - a confidential ease that could unman him, at a time when he is on the cusp of proving out to be a man.

He nears her lips. "I will to be eternal to you as the sun."

She leaves him close but accepts no kiss. "It's boyish to think in such absolutes. Even gods die."

He does not know whether to evince anger, or despair. "You think me a fool young in love."

She is casual and amused. "You are. A young fool, and in love."

She nestles her forehead with his, warmth to his cool, but she leaps out into the rain before he may complete the kiss, meeding him no anodyne.

"I will remember!" he solicits, and chases her mischief.

I will remember you, my love.

False Positive

It is often said that experience, belief, and truth are subjective. This is a naive assertion. It is incomplete.

A man is not only the sum of his experiences and actions. He is also the product; a compounding sum. Experience is not the engine of the consciousness. It is a vehicle; consciousness not its operator, but its captive.

Belief is not a scale, it is an agonist. Belief is not confined by dimension. Belief is abductive, belief is conditioned, belief is schizotypal. Belief is the calx of experience: And experience is to belief as belief is to truth. There are no metempirical truths!

Truth is a dangerous word, but all words are dangerous. Words, and truth, are not like the traded sands but as marble. Haptically strict but concealing a mystery of possibility, translimited by the sculptor's chisel. Truth is a prostitute, truth is a currency, truth is a democracy, and belief is to truth as truth is to society.

This triumvirate forms an ecosystem. It is inhabited. It is policed by Doubt. It is governed by Lies. It is schooled by Imagination. It is gardened by Apophenia. A man may change his mind; a society may change its truths. We measure these epistemic transitions as progress, but that is an etiological fallacy. Change forms no syllogisms. Change can only husband change.

Convalescence

"Is it raining?"

His rough murmur was cast disembodied, unfamiliar. The girl had cosseted him up in what rags she had, and cuddled in with him by the torfire, stoked for his convalescence.

"Not since Hyuri stole the last of it."

His head felt thick, his vision promiscuous, but even her voice betrayed how shrunken and lone she had become. Not the girl of his dream, no. The bereaved dam, apposed with her strange cognate.

"I can hear it. Its insane susurrus, the stink of the firmament."

She tightened their filthy coverlet, "You're still sick with delusions," but it was she shivering. "Tell me what you've seen."

"I walked a long road. The Lady made the stones hot, I felt her sweet tongue on my bare feet. I stood at a bridge over a ruddy confluence, in it I saw the implicit taction of our multiplexed destinies. Athwart the river's progress was Iylum, the weir of the eschaton.

"I beheld myself, in autumn's beaming, as the hand of death. I beheld myself in winter's retreat as the last man. I beheld myself, in spring's chaos, as the tree of life."

Ague

A mail of motile leaves dressed him. Like insects, skittering iridescent on his skin; aurulent, rutilant, verdant. At his hiemal touch the squirming foliage wilted and abscised. Naked to his bones, bereft of all efficacy, he looked up from the bottom of Hyuri's contaminated maw.

There in gloom he waited, to taste the sapid dawn. His limbs loured, wooden, his ribs their pulp disgorged. There and thus she found him. A girl, bearing clay amphora, and wide actinic eyes.

She said, "Now is the aphelion of your kith."

He drank. The vessel mouth became a river, and heaved backward the blood of the ten-thousand; until Iylum's own leaked from his lips. So his roots grew tumid, his boughs pullulated and surged. He reached high into the unknowable distances of the plenum, the far abyssopelagic of the night. And he sniffed the breeze of the galaxy for the direction of the new sun.

Infection

She unwrapped the swaddling that bound his left hand, and the hoary scourge it kept. The agent of Iylum's assassination. Wary at the ferly scar she scrutinized, then recoiled.

"Cluthe!" she exclaimed, to his dismay: This a thing she should not scry. "Here is the doer that massacred a hundred worlds!"

"Natheless, here we are," he assuaged, while the curatrix rummaged in the sordor of her fane. "Pigfeathers," she croaked something like. "Trimodal pathogen," and approached him with a knife.

She ticked one finger of hers, that bled a drip into a mortar of water. "Apoptosis, first."

She ticked one finger of his, from the blighted hand. "Conditionally: Apothanasia."

The two component drops sank like pendants, then diffused as a sanguinary brume.

"And?" he prompted. She proffered him the bowl. As he drank, she reciprocated: "Apotheosis."

Predicates

He asked: "What is dreaming?"

From the loam of the den she selected a stone, fist-size and worn, and bandied it to him in a lazy arc. When he caught it in one palm, she explained:

"Dreaming is the stochastic hand that picks from the dopants of anamnesis and pitches intuition to the heuristic gaze of the nous. It is the mean of science and prescience."

He dropped the stone, so that she winced. He asked: "How do I reconcile the necessity of hope with nomological certainty?"

Eager, she counseled: "Do not strive to hope, but strive to doubt." And indicated her adventive children; a manifest contradiction. "Doubt is the great annealant. All propositions are inevitably falsifiable. Knowledge is the amalgam of credibility and belief. The division of possibility and impossibility is not an immobile line, it is a mobile field."

Still he hesitated, the diffident verificationist. But her conviction had swept him, for conviction is the magnet of the will. Become anxious, he pled: "What use to grow wings when I am chained to a millstone?"

She grinned, a rictus of knives. "I will eat your chains. And you are already alate."

Contingency

Up from tranquil suspension she came floating, lifted forcibly. Out of the seat of sleep deeper than sleep, away from that place beyond place. Down from the Deep Sea, retrieved mid-thought from its ethereal internetwork of transeunt collusion, epistemic warfare, and synthetic sentience.

The one who seized her, interrupted a wayward delving for a sympathetic power, she knew him. The godtouched, the catalyst. The keeper of time. So she would be the one to court him, in a contest of probabilities.

She coiled in on herself, then made the body sensate. She stood to face him, and in grudging deference, recited the invocation: "Do you ever dream about surrender?"

Children of the Dunes

It was during the Exodus that the witch-queens of the Lemsarp ward disseminated out onto the sandveldt, and began their self-imposed exile in the tomb-cities they call cærs.

You would be right to assume that life in these austere, subpellucid conditions, away from the metropolitan verve, is one of supreme tedium. As an expedient, and with some cunning which remains opaque to our best scientific insight, these "Allmothers" have constructed a race of golem-servants; their children.

Subsequently the witch-queens have reinvented the lost art of dreaming, employing these un-children like in a puppet play. They dance (intricately), they act (convincingly), they sing (mellifluously), all to deliver a complex form of kinetic allegory. The guard-consorts of the Allmothers, their Husbands, are depended on for oneiromancy.

During my stay in Cær Brachan I witnessed and painstakingly transcribed one-hundred and thirty-eight of these dream-performances, along with their given interpretations as supplied by the Husband. Thus, I began to recognize some common elements that made for a sort of syntax throughout the plays. Imagine my chagrin when, inquiring to the Husband as to the nature of this metalinguistic code, I learned that the dreams are not only highly structured - they are in fact rote!

There are (I was informed) 1587 specific dreams, this number being sacred to the Allmothers. The immediate question is clear: How many of these are intended for military functions?

... Heretics of Elesarp, Farhen Brektr

Accouchement

He lay long-again on the buried roof of Cær Droi in equivocal, supine rumination.

The Husband's plea clung to him like a geas. It achieved a limited fruition, and a paradox resounded in him:

Does hope sublimate woe, or does woe subvert hope?

His thoughts, long coopted by the contravention of an amplified being, wrestled the fugitive arguments of causation opposing conation. His many lives, his many faces. The enormity of that-before, the equipoise of this-now. Was it immaculate formula, or incredible chance?

Reason scored:

Causality is an artifice - the fitz of experience.

The Husband was right. This decision was his. And must be his poiesis, else he be the hostage of impulse.

To kill a man makes a murderer; to kill a million makes a conqueror; to kill them all...

What god am I to fate the last of men?

So his thoughts came around like a wheel, a retread of their own tracks.

This is sophistry.

He stared up into the floor of the universe, decanting his mind. The jetsam and lagan of inquest and acquest strewn across the buoyant fluid of impartial awareness; just like the patternless glim and glum of an interstellar cloud. An abrupt and jarring paranoia spalled his immanence - irrationally he recalled the spooked fluttering of a brace of joulops against water - not merely psychosomatic but external. Those stars stared back at him.

Who will judge my judgment?

Husband

As she died her Husband woke.

Standing titubant, with cathartic trembling he shed his long inertia. And finger condemning, in procellous voice he adjured:

"What god are you to stifle the purpose of men?"

Then stooped as though burthened by the weight of consciousness. His next and final words were slurred and elegiac.

"This is the world; there is no other."