Sans Seraph

  • The List: Of love and avarice

    The petitioners have gone, the lair is quiet. All that remains is the soft jingling cascade of tribute as it falls down the mountains of similar baubles that have come before it. The metallic glow reflects the ever-burning firelight around the vast chamber that is both my court and my cage, as I sit forever jailed by the chains of responsibility to the mortal folk. They cannot have this time, however, when the day is done, and my decrees and advice have been spilt, and my mind is free to wander out over the astral sea, across the infinite reaches of creation, to her.

    Caudegecari, a queen in her own right, serves the Queen of Justice in a far distant land. Where I am made to be a sage and advisor, she screams down bloody and terrible from the heavens, and brings her wrath to the enemies of dragonkind and goodness itself.

    When we first met the world was young, and so were we. There were great evils to fight back then, terrible monsters that crawled out of the places of the world that had yet to be weathered with wind and time. They would prey on the young mortal races, and even corrupt some of our numbers, but we stood, and fought, and buckled but never broke. Throughout the centuries we guarded the world until the world could protect itself. Eventually some of us were told to curl our claws and hide our fangs. We would retreat to the very depths of the earth that had troubled us for so long, occupying the dark places so that the darkness could not return. Over the millennia I grew fat on the gold and gems that were given to me by those I protected, hewn from the very rock within which I now dwelt. When I reach out to her though, I feel a very different life.

    **********

    I am death. I am the arrow that streaks down from the skies and pierces the heart of evil. The wind rips past my eyes and the sun reflects off my golden scales. I am a meteor, the hammer of my mistress the Queen of Justice. I descend upon the blackness that is my quarry and with fang, and claw, and magic I rend it apart until its evil dissipates into a mist of blood and meat. I am injured, but I am alive, and will continue on. I retreat to the shallow cavern that has become my lair on this hunt. Unlike others of my kind, I am given no tribute from the younger races who I protect. In exchange I am given my freedom, to forever be a nomad, a weapon. Yet in this brief moment of rest, as I close my eyes listening to the rain and thunderclaps in this blasted land, I stretch out my perception to a place I have only visited a few times in the several millennia of our courtship, a great stone cavern, warm and bright, heaped with gold and peppered with jewels, to her.

    Kaerloldrega, wisest of the servants of the Queen of Justice, holds the reins to my hearts. When the seas still boiled and the earth still cooled, we fought side by side against forces that would make today’s quarry shiver. After the great battles had been fought, and she had been tasked with a far different role than she possessed in those stricken days, it was an age before we saw each other again.

    There was a time when we would move about the world in the forms of mortals, as humans, elves, dwarves; always careful to avoid detection. I wore the from of an elf, tall, with dark skin, and golden eyes, sitting in a bazaar in a great desert city now lost to time. I sipped on cool water and was immersed in the sights and sounds of all that the mortals had accomplished. I set myself to scan the crowd, because as did we play at the game of subtlety, so did our great enemy, but instead of my mark, I saw the radiant glow of another.

    She walked into the cantina as a wizened old human, his back bent, frail, but eyes of molten fire. I instantly recognized her, and our eyes met, the sun dimming around us as the recognition hit. We sat together until the set sat and rose again, all thoughts of my quarry having left my mind. She spoke of the small group of people she had revealed herself to, who did the bidding of our queen and were dispatched from her lair. I followed her into the mountains to the vast cavern filled with riches she had been hording. We dropped our assumed forms, and tangled ourselves together, telling the stories of all of our time away. I fell asleep, for how long I do not know.

    The thunder cracks, and a distant roar reverberates out over the wrecked landscape. I am back in my body, and my mission continues.

    **********

    The years have rolled on and the doomed races have grown. I have watched them crawl from the mud to the caves, then to houses made of stone, and brick, and wood. I have seen forests grow and fall, and rivers of blood be spilt, against demons and their own. The enemies of the great dark places are few now, and in the greatest of ironies, those we have shepherded all these years, having no more great enemies to fight, have sought to make us their targets.

    Where once I had a great hall to entertain the visits of diplomats and kings, my wisdom traded for all of the wealth they could design, now I have moved deeper into the earth, my horde raided, my scaled form now residing in the very dark lairs of my race’s former enemy. I feel safe, for now, though my wards and alarms occasionally alert me to interlopers, which are dispatched quickly and violently. My mind has slowed, and I no longer hear the mental orders from the Queen of Justice, nor do I know of her fate. My metabolism slowing to a crawl, I spare energy for only one thought, that of my beloved, lost to time.

    After a great war of the mortal races, I served on the council of a very important man. Battles were fought differently now, sword and spell had given way to machine and gun. Armor was replaced with suits of power, and death was handed out by numbers calculate by hands far away.

    A great warrior was to be given an honor by the man I served, and I was present to fulfill my duties to the Queen of Justice to oversee the transition from war to peace. I was busy at my desk when the warrior arrived to be briefed on the ceremony. I looked up after feeling a presence, and there, at the end of the long hall, skin as black as night, and eyes as gold as sunfire, stood the most imposing woman I had ever known, and I recognized her instantly as my beloved.

    The ceremony was done, and I approached her. I wore the form of a shrewd, bespeckled crone at this time. I saw those brilliant eyes immediately light up with recognition. The war concluded, the ceremony over, and with no more mental missives from our Queen, we spent the next century together. We would hole up in my new high-rise, a great tower built over my vast horde. We would change forms to two young lovers, and live together in a vehicle, traveling the roads built by the smaller folk. For a decade we toured as musicians, two women fronting a bad that decried the violence and injustice that had begun to rear its head in the world.

    We would spend long nights together under the stars, with no light save those above and those within us, reflected out over a calm lake. We’d talk of when this could be forever, when the darkness was done, when we could live as ourselves, the mortal races finally safe from evil. After a long while the darkness did end, but the evil had changed forms, just like us, and now we were hunted things.

    **********

    I stepped out of the shadows into a quiet world. It had been ages since I had heard the call of any of my kind. After they eradicated the demons the mortals had turned on us, so driven to be the masters of this ball of mud they saw as their own. Slowly they found us in our lairs, in our disguises. They ruled this world for eons before their own greed turned it toxic. Then they left, and the world was quiet.

    I had spent my existence as a hunter, a soldier, and now there was no quarry. No enemy or beast remained, and worse, no leader to call off the hunt. I stood on the precipice of doom, on a windswept peak over looking a healing world, and saw that I no longer had a place in it. Until, at least, I felt something familiar in the rocks below my talons.

    Vibrating up from the depths of the mountain, I felt a faint voice inside of my mine, and it was unmistakable. Her, my companion, my one true light in this world, still lived. With ever ounce of strength that remained in these ancient bones I tore down through granite, basalt, metal, and a rainbow of minerals until I found a single spot of warmth, and in that warmth I breathed fire, and eyes that had been cinders reignited into a conflagration, and for a moment there was nothing but fang, and claw, and scale, and the roars of surprise and anguish at rebirth became the sirens of delight as we once again embraced after too long of a time apart. As far as we knew, were all that remained, and in this moment it did not matter our fate, so long as it was intertwined.

    We watched as the world slowly healed, as strange new intelligences arose and fell, never again to achieve the heights of our once charges turned antagonists. We became stewards of a garden that had never been allowed to flourish, and even as the sky grew bright and the garden desiccated, we still spent each remaining second not too far from each other. My companion through history became my lover into eternity, and though we had spent so long enveloped in the light of each other’s company, none of it compared to the heat of our passion that carried us into forever.

  • The List: A dairy of madness

    The List: A dairy of madness

    ^^^this was my damn prompt <3

    She swirled it around in the glass, observing as the legs fell quickly into the reserve, not clinging to the walls like mammalian excretions. It was wetter, thinner, yet the taste was very reminiscent of the milk produced by humans and animals alike. It behaved similarly too. It could be made into butters, mixed with powders, and even looked similar.

    “You said an almond made this milk, Loretta?”

    “Yes, Sister Phage, well, no. It’s…” Loretta stammered. She could see the pale hand of her superior grip the glass tensely, the liquid slightly more tan than her sun forsaken appendage.

    Sister Phage raised the glass to her black lips and tilted it, letting a small amount into her mouth. She closed her eyes and waited for the life force to be drained from her, yet it did not come.

    “Curious,” said Sister Phage. Resolute, she threw her head back and drained the remaining liquid in the glass in one go, letting out a sharp exhalation as she prepared for the darkness to take her, but it did not come.

    Loretta shrieked and dashed toward her mistress, but she was waved away. The elder cleric smoothed out her habit and stood tall.

    “Loretta I need you to send a missive. This changes everything.”

    The members of the clergy gathered in the great ritual hall under the Tabernacle. Carved out of the raw granite of the cliff the cathedral sat on, the altar of the chamber was flanked by two fountains, one that flowed with water raised from the depths of an aquifer, pure and nurturing, and another that excreted a calcifying sludge of milk harvested from the nuns of the clergy. The two represented the poles of the gathered mass’s power: water to give life, and milk to take it, the very building blocks of necromancy.

    Sister Phage stood behind the altar flanked by Loretta. The sister’s angular visage betrayed none of the anxiety that she felt, but Loretta could see it in her posture, the way she blinked way too fast, and clenched her delicate, pale hands behind the small of her back. Loretta could feel the tension radiating off of her. Years of service under the Sister had trained her in her most subtle mannerisms. She desperately wanted to take it all away, to pull it into herself and hold it for her, but she knew it would never be allowed.

    “What my assistant has discovered,” belted the Sister, “is a milk that does not take. I have tested it on myself, and felt no ill effects.” Her eyes scanned the crowd as the murmured to themselves.

    “Then it cannot be milk!” One of the priests from Norbir stood up and shook his emaciated fist at the Sister. “If it does not take away the force of life, it cannot be considered a milk. No teat ever discovered has produced anything but.”

    The Sister cracked a wry smile, exposing her brilliantly white teeth and oily-black gums. “This milk came not from a teat, but from a plant. An almond, to be exact. Fed with water, baptized in it, the fruit of the almond tree excreted its lactescence, and thus, we are left with this.” She gestured to Loretta, and who then unveiled a tarnished silver cart beset with a great goblet of almond milk, and surrounded by even more of her experiments.

    “With this milk we can make cheese! Butter! All of the dairy products we had to sacrifice our very lifeforce to taste, now without the pain of hastening our demise. We have freed ourselves from the shackles of taking!”

    Sister Phage threw up her hands and rocked back her head, letting escape a great cackle that made Loretta’s heart melt with awe. She was dumbstruck by the power of this woman, and how they had just changed the world.

    Those gathered on the pews suddenly grew restless, and it was not long until priests and matrons alike were erupting with calls of “Heretic! and “Blasphemer!”

    One of the elder priests ran out of the ritual chamber and returned with two footmen. “Seize these witches and have them thrown into the oubliette.”

    As the guards approached, Loretta toppled the goblet of almond milk, dipped it into the fetid fountain of mammalian milk, and cast it in a great arc over the guards. Their forms withered and grayed under the sapping power of the liquid. She grabbed the hand of her mistress and ran out of the chamber, down deeper into the catacombs below. She had expected her hand to be cold, but it felt so alive and warm. It was, however, every bit as frail as it had seemed.

    It wasn’t until they had run long down winding, fetid corridors and past a great iron barred door and locked it behind them that she realized her transgression. “Mistress I’m sorry. I acted without thinking, I didn’t mean to grab your hand.”

    “You did fine, Loretta.” She beamed at that utterance. She did fine. It was not very often that the Sister had given her praise, but she treasured each and ever moment of it.

    Sister Phage brushed off a collection of cobwebs that had gathered about her skirts. She cast a brief incantation and a pale green globe of light ignited and hovered beside them. They found themselves in a great ossuary filled with the bones of the faithful long past. It appeared for the moment they were safe.

    “They’ll find us soon,” said the Sister. The ghastly light of the spell bounced off the yellowed bones of the fallen, and cast a sharp shadow onto the Sister’s pensive face. “That did not go as I expected.”

    Loretta paced around the chamber. “I think we’re blocked in, mistress.” The only escape seemed to be the door from which they entered, and a small air vent that was centered in the ceiling, high above them, and far out of reach. She had to admit that she had often imagined herself trapped in a room alone with the Sister, but never thought it would be under this particular level of duress. They had spent long nights in various labs together, her helping Sister Phage with her experiments, but there was always an agenda, always a direction. Now, they were simply stuck.

    She reached in her pocket, and pulled out a small vial of the almond milk. “Mistress!” She held up the small flute of fluid, its beige cream sloshing around and coating the inside of the glass. “Perhaps, we can make use of this?”

    Slowly the Sister turned to regard her assistant. Her first look was scornful, but it quickly settled into something Loretta could only discern as pride mixed with pity. “If only it could, my loyal companion. Perhaps if it were still water it could be used to give life to these long forgotten bones, and I might summon an army to strike down our enemies, or if it were true milk I could cast it upon them, and bring some of them to hell with us.” The Sister stepped closer to Loretta and regarded the vial. “This is only useful from a culinary perspective, I’m afraid.”

    Suddenly, her usual stoic demeanor lit up, and the Sister stepped in close and fast to Loretta. “You sweet, smart girl.” She wrapped her hands around her assistant’s so they both grasped the vial.

    The novice blushed, the pale hint of pink in her cheeks showing through her lab rat complexion. The moment froze in time. It was so beautiful, to be here surrounded by the dead, her hand being grasped so tightly by the woman she adored and fawned over.

    Taking the vial from Loretta’s hand, making sure to gently brush over her fingers as she did so, Sister Phage set to work. As a necromancer of some power, she had enough energy to raise some of the dead in the chamber as mindless thralls, but with the promise of such a delightful thing as butter that would not send them back to their restful sleep, she could coax the spirits themselves back to their bodies from beyond.

    She bid her ghostlight to fly around the chamber, igniting the long lost stubs of candles placed around the room. This tomb had been long forgotten, but these spirits would once again be honored with her discovery. As she stood in the middle of ossuary she began to furiously shake the vial, churning it into almond butter as she spoke forth her incantations in a deep, guttural, profane language. Scraping sounds rang out of the bones of so many long lost ancestors of the clergy began to seek out their others and reknit.

    Slowly feet, legs, torsos, and whole skeletons began to form out of the collective mortal remains. The vial had now begun to float in front of the Sister as a sickening glow emanated from it, shadows swirled inside, and lighting lashed out to strike the hearts of each fully formed corpse, their flesh having been knitted onto its ossified rigging by the spell.

    The spell reached a crescendo as the last bit of light burst forth from the vial, and the corpses inhaled their first breaths in centuries. Sister Phage plucked the small offering of almond butter from the air, and held it in her palm, outstretched in offering to her army.

    “Try it. It’s delicious,” she said with a wry smile, as the groaning horrors descended upon the sacrifice, each one desperate to have their first sensation of taste after unnumbered years of oblivion. When each one had a drop of the world-shattering concoction, they turned to her, hungry.

    “That’s all there is my darlings, but there is more upstairs. Go forth and you may feast on all that you find, almond milk and flesh alike.”

    On her queue, Loretta flung open the iron door to the room and the ravenous horde burst forth into the tunnels of the catacombs. It was not long until the screams started. She turned and gazed in awe at her mistress, who poured with sweat and panted from exhaustion.

    “Sister, is there anything I can do for you? You seem on the verge of collapse.”

    “I’m just hungry, my dearest Loretta.” Sister Phage weakly paced over to her assistant. She stared, unblinking, at Loretta as she moved closer, her driven locomotion forcing her back against the rock of the cavern. When Loretta could move no farther, the Sister pressed herself up against her. She slowly raised her hand to Loretta’s chin, and gripped it, forcing her to look her in the eyes. “For this,” she said, as she pressed her black lips against hers, the passion of their kiss only amplified by the screams of the dying clergy all around them.

    In that one passionate moment, a line had been crossed between them, and as they stepped hand in hand over the bodies of their former fellows, they vowed together to bring the glory of nut milks to the land. It had changed them, and it would change the world. Their message would be carried to all of the corners of the earth, held aloft by rotten flesh, and bolstered by their love.

  • The List: Out with a smile

    I’m going to leave the prompt off this one because it spoils the story. Enjoy 🙂

    Navigation first reported the issue to the captain a few days after a micrometeor impact caused a total failure of our main engines. A day after that, I was asked to run the calculations on what was deemed a “computer error.” I spent two days working with the shipboard AI, then in simulation, then plastering the entire wall of my office with paper running calculations of every trick of orbital mechanics I knew, and I came to the same conclusion every single time.

    No matter what, we were going to intercept the star.

    The best I could do with our remaining options was get us locked into an orbit with our monopropellant that would take us 6 weeks, but still bring us to just two hundred kilometers above the surface of the hypergiant. Radioing for rescue put the nearest vessel at 6 and a half.

    We are all victims of physics.

    I spent the next two days in a drunken haze. I asked the quartermaster to increase my alcohol ration by double. It was denied, but then an appeal was granted by the captain. When I finally decided to rejoin the world, the announcement had recently been made to the crew. I crawled half dressed out of my quarters to the bridge to see several of them gathered around the main screen, staring at a single white dot in a field of black. No one moved, no one spoke, they just stared into the void at their doom.

    The next two days can only be described as a complete break down of all societal norms. We were a research vessel. Outside of the captain and a few others, the constitution of the crew was not very adept at handling such inevitabilities as death by solar disintegration. There were two suicides immediately. My fellow physicist, whom I admittedly never really liked, broke past the captain’s cordon in the cargo bay and spaced himself. We had to watch his body orbit the vessel for a long while until it slowly started to drift from the solar wind. The janitor’s assistant, and who I later learned was her lover, exsanguinated herself in the shower. There was a short funeral for both of the departed, and then the remaining crew set about busying themselves with their own concerns.

    The janitor was noticed by security to be building something in the storage closet off the cargo bay. I’d stay up with the captain drinking through the remainder of the “good booze” and we’d watch her on the monitors, but did not care enough to investigate. We were all overcome with a malaise that had been present with our species since we first ventured out into the seas, only this time, instead of the darkness of the deep rising up to claim us in some tempest, we would slowly drift toward a growing disk of light, calmly approaching the end of the proverbial tunnel.

    After a week, the voice of the janitor came over the ship wide address system. “I love when you open a new condiment bottle. It feels like you’ve uncovered some unending river of goodness. ‘My ranch will never end. My children and their children shall roam these hills and dip their nuggets until the end of time.’”

    I stared back at the captain over the card table, dumbfounded by what was probably the most nonsense thing I had ever heard over a PA system.

    “If that joke at all lifted your spirits, come on down to Lindsey’s Laugh Lab, conveniently located in the port storage bay in the cargo hold of this soon to be cooked turkey.”

    The crowd that had gathered in the cargo hold was a sight. Wretched forms covered in sweat and rags, malnourished, unwashed, and before them a makeshift stage, some lights, and a video screen showing a white disk, now bigger than the last time I had cared to glance at it. Below the screen was a hand written banner that simply said “Be Home Soon :)”

    Upon the stage, sitting on a stool, casually gripping a microphone wired into the ship’s console by the door, was Lindsey, the janitor. She had her coveralls tied about her waist, and she looked radiant under the harsh glow of the sterile, cool-white lights.

    After a minute or two, confident that her audience had arrived, she spoke. “Thank you all for coming. My name’s Lindsey, and welcome to the last comedy club you’ll ever be in.” Not a single smile was cracked. “Geeze, tough crowd. Is anyone from out of town?” Again, the gathered crew members stared at the person dying on that stage, their mind’s clearly unable to process what was happening.

    “Alright, alright. Listen, I know things are bad, but there is no sense being so morose about it. You know, they always say that we see a bright light before we die, I don’t think this is what they meant though.”

    I noticed the captain swaying half-drunk next to me chuckled under his breath. “Yeah, and they didn’t mention anything about the heat, either,” he said.

    Lindsey rose up from her stool and started to pace about the stage. “Sir, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me, but, yeah, what’s up with that? I’m starting to think maybe we’re going to a not so nice place. Maybe the Christians were right.”

    I looked around the gathered throng and, though hard to admit, I saw a marked shift in everyone’s demeanor. They stood a bit straighter, the haze had begun to clear from their eyes. Lindsey continued on a bit longer, mostly making dark jokes pertinent to our situation, and after about half an hour she closed out her set.

    “Alright everyone, that’s my time. You’ve all been a terrific audience. Drive home safe and don’t forget to tip your wait staff.” She walked off stage and moved over to the console where she dimmed the lights off and on in a dizzying fashion, and beatboxed into the microphone before simply walking out of the room.

    I decided to peak around the corner of the door and watched her walk briskly down the hall and eventually disappear toward the crew quarters. The gathered crowd mulled about for a bit, making small talk, and then eventually returned to the remainder of their lives.

    The next day there was a sign up sheet posted on the bulletin board in the mess. It seems Lindsey was organizing a sort of open mic and planned to have nightly shows at the makeshift storage stage. Josef, the ship’s medic, had signed up to perform and simply listed his talent as “cards.” Insanely curious to find out what kind of talent “cards” was, I, and what appeared to be the entirety of the crew, crowded around the stage later that evening.

    Lindsey stood once again on the stage, patiently waiting for the crowd to settle down. The spirits of the gathered damned were much higher tonight, and it appeared some of them had even taken the opportunity to shower.

    “Tonight we have Josef, our resident sawbones, who I’m told will be performing a few card tricks for you all.”

    Josef trudged up on stage and stood before us all, his pale complexion made ghastly by the cool white of the lights.

    “So, I need someone to draw one of these cards,” he held out a splayed out deck to the crowd, and Tilly, one of the mechanics, drew one. She looked at it, put it back in the deck, and Josef blinked at her, and delivered a deadpan “four of clubs.” Tilly gave a manufactured gasp and nodded in the affirmative, and a nonchalant clap went up from the crowd.

    This continued the exact same way, in rapid fire succession, with Josef having an audience member choose a card, put it back in the deck, and him declaring loudly what it was, for several minutes. Eventually someone shouted out “do you know how to do anything else?”

    Josef stood on the stage wide-eyed, arms at his sides. “I said I can do cards, okay? I did cards.” His delivery was so curt that everyone began to chuckle. It was absolutely absurd. Cards at that point had lost all meaning. Days of existing, waiting to die, had lost all meaning. There was nothing left to do but laugh.

    Josef walked off stage and Lindsey reappeared. “So, how about this heat wave, huh? Someone turn down the sun.” She did another fifteen minutes and then closed the same way. Flashing lights, beatboxing, exit.

    I woke up in the middle of the night and headed to the mess. Perhaps it was the furious pace I had been drinking alcohol (we had long burned through all prepared booze, and the botanist had begun mass production of hooch in the garden)but I found myself quite parched. I was somewhat surprised to see that I was not the only one with a similar idea, as Lindsey sat alone at one of the cold plastic tables, gripping a mug of hot tea. I grabbed a glass of water and motioned to the seat across from her and she nodded her approval.

    We sat in silence for nearly five minutes before she let out a long sigh.

    “When Victoria killed herself, I thought I’d do the same. After all, we’re all going to die soon anyway, but it felt so wrong that she left me, and I was so mad for so long, and then I wanted to space myself out of guilt for even being mad at her.” She gripped the mug of tea tighter and I could hear the tears in her voice before I could see them fall on the table.

    “But then I turned that anger into productivity. At first I was just cleaning things up in the storage room. Just going about my janitorial duties, and then I fell apart.” She looked up at me with a kind of crazed expression like she had found some sort of secret truth. “It was all so pointless, whether I cleaned or didn’t, it all ends up the same, I’m burned to a cinder, but that’s just it. Something always gets us, we all arrive at the same station no matter how we get there, and it was hilarious.”

    She spent the next twenty minutes or so telling me how she made the stage out of empty crates she found and stuck a piece of old plasterboard to it, how she figured out how to adjust the lights, extend the cables on the intercom mic so she could walk around. She seemed so alive, so purposeful, and it was so refreshing to see.

    That night, after I left her alone in the mess hall, was the first time I had a restful nights sleep since the discovery of our inevitable destruction. With so few days left, and with the destination so sure, it seemed far better to face my fate with a smile than in fear and loathing.

    The days wore on, and the image of the disk of the star grew to encompass the entirety of the display. Soon, sunspots could be observed easily with protective lenses. The life support systems had ceased being able to regulate the temperature of the crew compartments, and the ambient was over forty-five degrees. Communications had failed, and various hull breaches had been reported on the outer-most decks. This would be our last day, our last hours.

    The whole of the remaining crew that had survived the heat and despair filed one last time into Lindsey’s Laugh Lab. Lindsey sat as she always did on her stool, though there was a weakness in her posture. Though our suffering would be physical before the end, I sensed that our minds remained sharp. We’d truly have the last laugh.

    “You have got to love these new headlights, why do they make them so bright?” Lindsey’s words were ragged as they fell from parched lips. She did a tight five, and we were treated to an acapella act by the boys in the quartermaster’s cabin, and Aaron, the chief of security, read a poem from Frost. The irony was not lost on us:

    Say something to us we can learn
    By heart and when alone repeat.
    Say something! And it says “I burn.”

    Alarms rang out and were silenced. The ship groaned and creaked. After the roll of acts was finished, Lindsey once again took the stage.

    “I want to thank you all for being such a great audience. You really have made these last few weeks something special. Now though, I think it’s time to go home.

    The last thing I ever saw was a brilliant white light. It enveloped me from every corner, and I knew no fear.

  • Just keep swimming

    Just keep swimming

    I’ve been focusing rather hard recently on finding somewhere I belong, some sense of community in this new identity and body I’m finding myself in. Considering how little I slept last night, and how puffy my face is from crying, it’s going well.

    Nothing is wrong, really. I went to play a very interesting DnD variant last night, and had fun. Everyone there was nice to me. I will go back and hopefully continue to push through my own bullshit and make friends. For right now though, I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.

    I’ve made it my goal for this year to branch out and widen my social circle. That’s not to say I don’t have a lovely group of friends and a partner that I adore, and I have already made some new friends since coming out, but I feel this very deep longing to be part of something that I honestly have never really felt before.

    It was so easy before. When I was wandering through life, pretending to be a guy, being mad at the world, hating myself, I had no problem being alone. Afterall, who would want me? Why should I have any joy when I’m trapped in this body I despise? For thirty-five years I went through the motions of what I thought it was like to be a person. Now, though, the mask is off, and I really can’t put it back on. So much of how I moved through the world was hidden behind the character of the man I played at being, that I never developed a sense of self. Now, at my early middle-age, I get to figure out all of the things that people usually have decades to work out.

    I’ve realized that not only do I have next to zero social skills when I’m not drunk off my ass (nor confidence in who I am) that I also exist in this liminal space where I don’t feel like I belong with men or women. It also seems like the other trans people around me are much younger, and are getting to learn who they are without having to unlearn as much programming as I do. It’s a very isolating feeling.

    I’ve lived half a life. I have the greatest of hopes that things will get better, but from down here, that feels so far away. I’ve felt that sense of belonging that I crave now before, at raves, at Burn, and I can’t help but be mad that he got them, and I didn’t. Even though I can still go to those things, I’m older, and that wild, young, free person is a bit more subdued now (and much, much more jaded.) I can’t help but feel resentment for all the time I didn’t get to be young, and gay, and a woman.

    I’ll be thirty-seven soon, and, statistically, my life is about half over. Subtract the years of abuse I put my body through, and the chronic anxiety, and I probably have less than that. It would have been far easier to just kill myself, but I’ve never been much for taking the easy way. The truth is, I’m a lot of things, but a coward is not one of them. I can repeat that over and over again to myself, but it doesn’t make the pain of feeling like something other go away. I know a lot of this is my own internalized fears, and a lot of it is just needing to grow more into who I am, but being essentially a teenager trapped in a grown woman’s body is the most supreme of mind fucks.

    I guess until it gets easier I just have to trust that forward is the only direction. It’s all part of the becoming. I spent so long in a state of arrested development, and I’ve gone through so much fire and ash to get to this small precipice, that to stop now would be a disservice to my past self (yes, even him.)

  • I will fear no evil

    I will fear no evil

    I recently got a new piercing and it’s made me think a lot about fear.

    Fear is not an emotion that I like to subscribe to often. I think of all of the vast range of human emotions, it is the most belittling. Fear leads people to do horrible things, inhuman things. Fear leads to panic, which often leads to death. Fear leads to war, to genocide, to living a half life in the shadow of something that is rarely so big in the light.

    Yet even though I like to say that I don’t live with a lot of fear, I do. I was afraid to get my nose pierced. I was incredibly anxious, nervous, but ultimately afraid of the pain, the change in my routine, the unknown of how it would affect my life. Even immediately after, some of that lingered. In the end though, it didn’t really hurt, and though it has been annoying adjusting my routine, I quite enjoy it. It gave me ownership over a part of my face I’m not too happy about, and that was my goal. However, in the week leading up to my appointment, I was very much on the fence. Even in the moment, I wasn’t too sure about my decision, even though I had spent a good amount of time considering it. I tried to call those emotions everything else but fear, but they were.

    My mother used to always say that there are only two emotions, love and fear. I don’t like to give that heinous witch too much credit, but she had some wisdom. If you really want to be reductionist, I think that you can boil things down to just though two emotions. I think sometimes intelligent people can get caught up in all of the myriad ways we can define and categorize things, yet it’s hard to not look back on all of the times we walk forth into the void, pushing past all of the uncertainty and doubt, and move forward into greater things, that it wasn’t those things that kept us from doing it sooner, but ultimately fear. After all, isn’t anxiety mostly just a fear of being wrong, of having too little information, and making the wrong choice?

    I spend a lot of time thinking about why I didn’t transition sooner, when it seems like the time was right a decade ago, and, though there is an argument to be made that I wasn’t ready (because dear god, I wasn’t) it was really my fear of being something that I had been told was horrible to be my whole life that stopped me from even considering it. I spent so much time trying to make anything else work, that I missed out of so much of my life, all mostly because of an emotion that in hindsight is just so small, yet casts such a big shadow in our lives.

    Some fears are instinctual. Being afraid of what can destroy you bodily is healthy. When your gut tells you that something you’re about to do is sketchy, then it’s usually a good idea to listen to it. Fear definitely has a purpose in our lives, but the real problems are the fears that we’re taught. In a vacuum, there is no reason to be afraid of all of the things that society tells us are wrong. These fears are little lions with amplified roars, echoing off of cave walls. These are fears that are meant to control us, and make us bend to the will of others. These are the tools of evil, and those that seek to work it have used the same formula to get their way since the beginning of time.

    The right likes to tout the idea of the “woke mind virus” as if the idea of being awake is somehow bad, as if it is better to live in the dark then to be shown all of the messiness and splendor of what is going on around us. They are ultimately afraid of losing what they have worked so hard to achieve, and those that follow them have co-opted that fear as their own. Now they decry that their cause is righteous, that the way people like me live is against some divine order, when really, they’re just afraid of the truth: there is no order, and not them, nor you, nor me, are indistinguishable from god, and when everything is the same, nothing is special. We’re all born, we live, we die, and the cycle repeats until the last proton decays. Our lives have no more meaning that the actions of a hydrogen atom fusing with another, and honestly I think that’s rather beautiful.

    I think when you take out the idea that life is special, it takes the pressure off. The roar isn’t so loud, and you can see the actual beauty in everything. The absurdity of it all is fascinating, because when nothing is special, everything is. There’s a duality to existence and oblivion that makes the whole idea of judgement, of caring what others do and shrinks it down into an oddity. The only law is to cause no harm. To stand in the way of other’s trying to live their life is an affront to the flow of the universe, a violation of a physical law that is far bigger than you could ever hope to encompass. I think we’re seeing a change here, and on the other side of it we will realize how childish it was to live with so much fear and hate.

  • A hole at the bottom of the sea

    I’m sick, it’s injection day, and, shockingly, I’m miserable. I’m doing that thing I do, less than I used to, but still frequently enough that it’s annoying, where I just can’t help but wonder, “What the fuck is the point?”

    Sometimes I feel like the immense weight of everything is resting on my shoulders, like I’m being crushed under the mass of existence. I feel like if I can just move, a little bit, I could rest, and gain some perspective, but the waters are pouring in, never-ending, and nothing really seems to change. It makes one feel like every change they’ve ever made, every bit of progress, has just been trading one ring of hell for another.

    I know I’m not alone in this. This is, above all else, the curse of my generation. We work ceaselessly, breaking our minds and bodies, so that we may earn less, have less, and be less satisfied with our lives. I’m sitting here now, on my way to my day job, so supremely unsatisfied, yet there isn’t really anything I can do about it. Finding a new job, even if it happened in the current market, would just been trading one devil for another. I’ve done it before. The novelty carries you along for a while, but eventually it always ends up the same. Birth, death, rebirth, in a never ending cycle; a constant search for meaning, success, something that will heal instead of hurt. The realm of the human has become the realm of hungry ghosts, always starving, never full.

    I’ve always been a huge proponent of, “if something isn’t working, change until something does,” and, yes, there were things I needed to change, that is for damn sure, and I am massively better than I was, but there just seems to be something wrong with the world, something I can’t get past, and it bothers me that I’ve reached a point where perhaps change is no longer than answer. The Buddhist thing to do, then, would be to try acceptance, but, that doesn’t seem right. These forces feel external, and acquiescing to them feels like losing.

    The deck is definitely stacked against us. If I could take a temperature reading of the world, then we would be close to boiling over. This state of constant agitation though, of being a bubble waiting to pop, is so pervasively anxiety inducing, that right now, in this moment, I’m really struggling to see the point.

    There used to be things that you could do that would matter. You could sell everything you own and move to the woods, except there are no jobs in the woods. You could get a remote job doing something creative, except those have all dried up. You could go back to school, except now the career you train for doesn’t even want you, or perhaps, doesn’t even exist when you graduate. Then you find yourself saddled with debt that can never be paid back, slaving away for some job you’ll never enjoy, doing the same thing, day in, day out, never growing as a being.

    You may say, “Well do with less. Cut back, do something that makes you happy, even if it doesn’t pay as well.” However when a studio apartment costs $2000 a month, how do you even consider that an option? There is no where to go. You’ll cling onto your shitty job, and your shitty life, until you and your shitty, burnt out, depressed, spiritually annihilated body die. You’ll be told how much better you have it than others, and how you’re free, and the whole time you’ll wonder if freedom ever existed.

    You’ll try to fight, and the hegemony will kick you back down, and serve you processed food, and flash fashion trends and ICE killings in front of your eyes on a black rectangular mirror that you paid $999.99 for the privilege for them to do so. Just make it make sense to me. My queendom to someone who can.

    I usually like to end on a bit of hope, or call to action, but sometimes I think it’s okay to just lay out what you’re feeling. Screaming into the void has become one of my favorite pastimes of late. I know there’s hope, you see little pieces of it every day, but it’s just that: fragments, specks of dust, little bits of joy you hold onto while the tempest roars around you.

    How about this: I know that this is what they want. I know that the point is to be worn down, ablated by the hate and fear, so that only the kernel of your soul remains. Well, today I think it’s winning, or, maybe it already did, but as long as I’m still here to scream, the darkness can’t consume me.

  • Jagged little pill

    Jagged little pill

    I have to take these supplements every day or else my joints hurt. Yes, I’m getting older, and yes, I’ve been doing blue collar work my whole life, but more than that, I spent at least a decade, probably more, simply not caring about my body.

    I’d assume this is somewhat typical. When you’re young you think you’ll live forever. You can watch your wounds close up in front of you whilst you search the cabinet for a bandage. For me though, I wanted to be broken. I wanted to use myself up, to sacrifice my body and to leave a husk to blow away in the wind, or some other such poetic drivel. Before I came to the realization I was trans I hated myself. I saw no reason why I shouldn’t work myself to the bone, do risky things, and not drink and smoke myself into a stupor every night. A very common phrase of mine to toss out was “I’m just waiting to die.”

    Now, to my employers, this made me an excellent worker. I’d do the hard things. I’d work late, lift too much, get paid too little. I didn’t care. In a way it was a cowardly way to approach suicide, though, after a while, it started to be clear to me that I was far more resilient than I gave myself credit for. I was going to suffer before my body wore out, and I was starting to worry that I might not be up for it. The answer then came to be that I would have to hasten myself off this mortal coil. Being a firearm enjoyer, the quickest answer seemed to be eating a nine millimeter sandwich, but that seemed to be letting myself off easy. I still wanted to suffer.

    So i figured one day, at some point in the future, I’d drive myself out into the woods, toss a rope over a limb, and hang myself. Not a far drop, I wanted to suffocate. I wanted to watch the world fade away, grasping at the rope futilely as my instincts betrayed my desires, then all of the anger would make sense. The body I’d hated so much for so long would cling to a world that I hated so much, and me, the real me, that lived inside, would finally end, and with it, all of the suffering I had to endure.

    I didn’t though (obviously.) I’ve always been a fighter, and more than my share of stubborn, so I had to try one more thing, and, lo and behold, I finally had my answer. Transition literally saved my life. Now, however, I have to deal with some very interesting consequences.

    The longer I’ve been transitioning, the more I have trouble relating to that person that wanted to hang himself. Not only because that dim world I lived in has gone, but because that is not all who I am now, or perhaps ever was. When I think about my life before, it is so hard to think of it as mine. I know, logically, that all of those events happened to me, but the extreme disassociation I had for the first part of my life has left me in a state of arrested development, such that here, while going though a second puberty, I find that I truly have to learn who I am all over. Whoever I was before, and the experiences I had, has come to have very little bearing on who I am now. The things I liked to do, the way I dressed, the people I liked to be around, all of those are in flux.

    Aside from my partner, I feel so supremely alone in this world. Not only is this a lonely time, but naturally, as we get older, we drift away from the things we liked to do in our younger years. I have no lived experience telling me where to move on to now though. It is frustrating, and anxiety inducing, but all so exciting. I’m trying new things, slowly making new friends, but where as a teenager it is so easy to be fluid, I’m a thirty-six year old woman. I have a job, responsibilities, and, yes, aches and pains that have pigeon-holed me.

    Experiencing such a great change in the middle of my life is by far the biggest mental trip I have ever been on. Perhaps on a daily basis I have to catch my breath and reassert myself into the world, lest I be swept away into the waters of disassociation by the massive “what the fuck” of it all. I’m sure, as time goes on and I get farther into my transition I will cement this personality more, but for now, it is quite the experience.

    For now though, despite everything going on, I just have to live my life. The world, the country, the species, all of it is literally burning down around me, the difference is now I don’t want to be swept away by it all. I’m all full of piss and vinegar, and that fighting spirit, the little part of him that held on so that I could raise like a putrid flower from his corpse, isn’t going to shy away from living while everyone else wants me dead.

    In the end, he got want he wanted, but I like to think that as he slowly fades into oblivion, that the anger he expected has been replaced with a certain peace watching me step out into the light.

  • Misanthropocene

    Misanthropocene

    As we find ourselves coming to the end of the year it’s usually a good idea to pause and reflect on the past and take a look toward the future. There isn’t a lot to do when you’re stuck inside, hiding from the deluge and wind, but sit around, staring at each other in the candle light, watching the shadows dance long down your lover’s face, hoping that when the calm finally returns, there will be something of the world left to salvage.

    The amount of apathy I have toward the world at the moment I feel is a decent reflection of the apathy that got us all here in the first place. Our planet is angry, and instead of responding to a changing world, and trying to either adapt, or prevent disaster, we as a species have decided it is better to fight each other, and ignore the bigger threats. How can we possible deal with our failing infrastructure and increasingly record breaking weather events when the boys are wearing dresses, the children are using litter boxes, and the elderly are intent on burning the world down around them just to stave off the cold of old age? We are gambling with the one thing there isn’t more of in this universe: time, which, as someone who doesn’t gamble at all, seems like a bad idea. What do I know though, I’m just some trans woman with an inner monologue and empathy.

    This year has been hell. Sure, there’s been a lot of good, but I’m sure that my fellow Americans will agree that the general feel in this country is that hope is fleeting. Prices are higher, jobs are disappearing, and even those that “voted for this” are beginning to see just how wrong they were. To put it simply, we done fucked up. How can anyone do anything but look to their own survival in times like this? When you can’t eat, or get your meds, and every day you’re told that society is collapsing around you, how are you supposed to put up a fight?

    This time of year there are always a lot of posts like this, and videos talking about the year, but the most pervasive ones I’ve been seeing have contained a message that circles around this: if all you did this year is survive, then that’s good enough, and, sure, that’s valid, even in good times there are some of us struggling, but these aren’t good times, and if we are already, as a civilization, knocking on the doors of survival, at the hands of our own duly elected leaders, then how do we expect to survive when the actual doom comes? We sit on the face of this planet (giggity) and proclaim ourselves masters over nature, but some bronzed pedophile and his Gatsbian court of ghouls has brought us to our knees. We are victims of a terrible intelligence, but that pales in comparison to the one thing we are all victims of, physics, and if we cannot survive a baboon, then I shudder to even begin to imagine the untold suffering that we are about to witness in the next century.

    The dams and levees are breaking, crops are failing, every summer is hotter, every winter colder. If these warning signs are ignored, then when the real shit comes, when mother nature tenses and begins to shrug us off the surface of the earth to save herself, then it won’t matter that the bible isn’t taught in schools, or that the girls are kissing each other, or that a Puerto Rican is doing the halftime show. There will be death, not noble, not bright, but total, brutal, in the way that only a cruel and uncaring universe can mete out.

    My hope is that this past year has taught some of us that it is easier to leave others alone than to try to control them. Above all, as long as whatever someone is doing isn’t hurting others, then they should be allowed to do it. We spend far too much time caring about the actions of others, and not enough working on ourselves and trying to better the collective. At this critical point in our history as a species, if we do anything that does not contribute to the greater good, it should be considered a moral crime. Take care of yourself, take care of your neighbor, and take care of your planet. One day, even if we turn our shit around, we will need to find a new home, and we cannot gain the knowledge and build the technology we need to do that if we are constantly bickering with each other.

    So stop it. Live your life, let others live theirs, stop giving so much of a shit about the things you don’t like. It’s selfish. We are selfish, and it’ll be our downfall. If you care about yourself, your children, your friends and family, then you have to also care about the rest of us. There is no more distinction. Never before has the line “the only thing required of the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” been more poignant. So if all you did this year was survive, then in the next you should riot. Tear down the enemies of mankind that have made you only able to survive. We are running out of time.

  • Where the waters do not curve

    Where the waters do not curve

    One year ago today I went on a date with an amazing girl at a Mexican restaurant on Alki Beach. We were both shy and awkward. She forgot her ID and so neither of us had a margarita, which was fine, because she doesn’t really drink. We went for a walk on the beach. It was very cold, though I was much colder than she was. We decided to sit in my car with the heater running, and talked for hours. I stayed up past my bedtime.

    This morning I woke up next to her, the same as I have for many mornings now. Of course my first lesbian relationship would be one in which I very quickly U-Hauled. I had a Halloween party the weekend after our first date. The night before was the first time she slept over, and she helped me set up for it, but didn’t attend. I was too scared of things moving too fast. That night, at the party, I kept bringing her up, and was summarily met with questions such as “well, why isn’t she here?” I was scared. I didn’t want to rush, but I hadn’t quite grasped that I was caught up in a wave of feelings that I could not control, and day visits became nights, became weeks, became months, and now, I’ve spent a year with her.

    I love her so damn much. I’ve never felt so understood by someone, or let myself be so open. I don’t know where I’d be now, I don’t know how I’d have gotten through the last year, as rotten as it has been, without her next to me. She has let me radiate all of my chaos into her life, and stood by quiet and composed and ready to help me put myself back together. Similarly, she’s harnessed my stubbornness and unyielding march toward progress to her own benefit. We work very well together.

    I have some pretty major trust issues, mostly stemming from my upbringing. Until recently, I’ve seen my life as some great cauldron, run through with cracks, and filled to the brim. The water leaks out, and I am furiously applying clay to patch the holes, failing to see that the cracks are getting smaller, and the flow of love into the vessel out weighs the flow out.

    I’m very lucky. I have an wonderful partner. I have amazing friends. I have been in amazing relationships in the past, and they are now very dear and wonderful friends. I suppose that is what healing is, at least for me. If I am a coiled spring, cold and tense, then the love that has been brought into my life by accepting myself, and welcoming the acceptance of others, is the heat of the torch that is straightening that spring. Slowly I’m starting to unwind. I’m starting to forget that I was ever coiled, holding up the weight of the world. I can’t begin to thank all of the people that have helped me along the way.

    Ram Dass says that “we’re all just walked each other home.” We all remember trauma. We all enter into this world formless, and have others beat us and shape us on the anvil of adolescence. The world looks at us with a cold eye, and says that we must do this, and say this, and think that, but love eventually returns us to that immutable shape. We are not the sum of our experiences, quenched in oil and set rigid in the sky. We are the same lump of clay we always were. Sometimes we’re a pitcher, or a plate, or some horrific sculpture born from the mind of a narcissist, but never fired, never set.

    The hands of love reach down to us and smooth our edges. They push and prod and make us into something new, something better, and then remake us all over again. It’s up to us to accept the change, and the help, and realize that nothing is wrong with us, and that the only thing you’re doing wrong is standing still.

  • Friends in ‘booch places

    Friends in ‘booch places

    Last night, whilst traipsing around Capitol Hill with my friend, posting flyers for my other friend’s meme coin, I visited a kombucha shop that was entirely unmanned (which is a sentence I never thought I’d write.)

    You walked up to the locked door, scanned the code, created an account, and let it know you were there. The door unlocked and you walked inside. There was a multitude of different kombuchas on tap, as well as a few little sitting areas, a restroom, some swag, a little red light therapy trial box; the whole thing was very modern and kitsch, but the really amazing part, was that there were no employees. Now, there were an inordinate amount of cameras, so surely someone was watching to make sure we didn’t make a mess, or steal anything, but it was surreal. My friend poured a medium ‘booch out of the tap, paid on the app, we used the bathroom, visited the downstairs yoga lounge, then were on our way.

    The really interesting part is how seamless it all was. At the time we visited, there was no one else in the shop, so I had to imagine that if it had been staffed by a human, that person would have been bored to tears, busying themselves with menial tasks, or truly doing nothing and idly doom-scrolling. My initial reaction to this was “wow, someone could have been paid to be here, but instead the whole job is done, essentially, by a robot,” which then made me realize no one needs to do this job.

    The fact that I even had that thought tells you how infectious and pervasive our participation in capitalism is. Sure, the company that runs that shop could have paid someone minimum wage to be bored to death working there, or, they can make it completely self service. Not only does it make sense from a business perspective, as labor is always a huge part of overhead, but when you view this from the lens not of “they’re taking our jobs” but from “they’re freeing us from labor” you see how great of an idea it is.

    With the rise of AI and how much that technology is being leverage in creative spaces, then it makes sense to be angry with technology. Creative pursuits are exactly what humans should be doing. Throughout time technological advances have led to more leisure time that has been followed by more creative endeavors. Technology should always be welcomed when it frees us from doing menial tasks. With the rise of agriculture, more humans could take up other occupations, and thus art, science, and a million other industries were created.

    Freeing labor is exactly what technology should be for, but when labor is free, and the people have time to themselves to think, to work together, to look around at the world rather than focus on survival, then the institutions that control that labor begin to feel their foundations quaking. Your boss, your government, and the corporations that they serve do not want you to be free. They do not want you to find a better way. If it were up to them, we would all still toil daily, hunting and gathering, while they tithe us for “safety and protection.”

    Marx himself wrote extensively on how advancements in technology would one day culminate in truly freeing the proletariat from all forms of grunt work. Even despite the push back, the slow march of progress continues on. We are seeing a time where the current clandestine “rulers of the world” are shaking in their nickers trying desperately to keep us in line. They force us to toil in the dust while they leverage inventions created because of the liberation of labor against us. They show us that our pursuits of art and literature, of leisure, can never compete with the efficiency of their machines, all while the fruits of our creativity command even higher respect despite it.

    Those who seek to control you fight a losing battle to history and the inexorable march of time. Progress will continue, and they have thrown in their lot with the losing side. They have artificially created tragedy just to maintain their control, but it will never work. Through all of the chaos in politics, and racism, and bigotry, and all of the rivers of blood and ruined cities and lives, we, the meek, the down-trodden, the great driving force of progress, will eventually be free of their machinations.

    If there can be fully autonomous kombucha bars in Seattle, and robots can build cars, and make food, and even a small group of people can then take the time to truly live rather than sweat, then those that seek to hold us in the dirt with a boot have already lost, and that, in a very small way, is giving me hope.