ꙮ The desert flies past you. Dyu summoned you up a hippalectria, when you said you wanted to return to the City for a time, without asking questions. If and when you wish to return, the Kin at the gates will do the same. And so the desert flies past you, and so you see the white walls of the City rise in the distance, and then in the nearness, and then you are within their shade.
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- Tan'neave Snake Salme
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← Active ScenesThe Red Column
#saint
lets her hood fall back, lets the desert light scour her skin. What might it do? Kill her slowly twenty, thirty years from now? That’s more years that she’s ever had before. She drops from the hippalectria easily, returns it to its keepers at the gates, and walks steadily toward the red column.
ꙮ It is uncomfortable, to be certain, but– bracingly so, in a certain way. Nothing that’ll kill you fast, at any rate. The Rohsu barracks are a bit closer to the Temple than the Gate, but only a bit - you walk past a number of fountains with people standing under them and getting misted by the water. It’s a hot day, today. (It’s always a hot day, on Mu, you think.) The barracks are mostly empty when you get there - a pair of young Rohsu sparring violently in a circle. The Red Column sits at the centre of the grounds, exactly where you left it.
nods politely at the Rohsu if they look at her, says, “shade and comfort” in the right sequence of words, and strides straight up to the column like she belongs there. That’s a trick she learned when she was very young. If you pretend like you belong somewhere, people generally don’t question you. Not that anyone would here, anyway.
: “I’m back,” she says. “Or am I only interesting when I’m wearing a mask, Aion-käyttää-väkivaltaa?”
i like that name. it is a good name. it is a fitting name.
ꙮ The blue-green glassy heart of the Red Column flickers, slightly, with light.
thinks, can you hear me thus, or do I have to speak?
you can hear me, like, this, can you not? i am not… degrading myself… by moving molecules of air around for you to hear my words. why should you do the same, when this suffices?
does laugh at that, moving molecules of air around. I can hear you like that, yes. Do you remember me? Do you remember what I told you, when I chose that name?
you told me that i owed you a story. i liked how bold that was, of you. i liked that very much.
thinks, I also told you it was a covenant. I don’t give names in that language to things I don’t love. Aion-käyttää-väkivaltaa. It was a name for myself as well. I have done some violence, though not, perhaps, as easily as others of your kind do. Would you like to see?
you are like me in this way, yes, yes. i would like to see that very much as well.
reaches out to touch the column, hand set right where the exploded crystal heart hangs, and she says, I will show you. I will let you in. Will you give me a story in return? We can trade. Or we can play a game, where we try to snatch truth from each other, if you’d rather. It seems you could use the excitement.
we are already playing the game where we snatch truth from each other. it is a good game. i enjoy it. ⁂
ꙮ And then the Red Column opens to her in methexis, and its mind is utterly unlike anything Salme has encountered before, including the Mother of Monsters. Utterly, profoundly disorienting; like she’s walking on the ceiling, like her legs move her arms and her arms move her mouth and her fingertips move her other mouth. Too many arms, too many legs, two of everything, or four of what there ought to be two of. Look down. Look down at your hands. All of them.
takes a slow, bracing breath and lets it be disorienting. Not a day ago, she was a million gazes refracted. She was the bones of the earth. She was the shadow and the wind whistling through it. Unlike anything she’s ever experienced before—isn’t that almost every wondrous, horrifying step? Is this what you were, once? Did they call you stoicheia? Though I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself.
hahahahahaha! this is a good game. you are so small. you are so small and you think with your meat. and yet you are also so large and have been so many things. how glorious! how glorious.
ꙮ It takes you some time to find all of your hands.
ꙮ Two of them are flesh and bone, pressed against the Red Column, feeling the cool of its contours.
ꙮ Two of them, glyph-work, bright neon violet limned in black, pressing back against the flesh-and-bone hands, mirroring the motion. The other– how many? Two? Two thousand? Infinity? Who can say– the other are part of the whirling, howling mass of you, crackling and sparking, laughing and cruel and beautiful.
knows that sometimes there is a point in knowing, in counting things precisely. Knows that sometimes there is no point in trying to count—that is sometimes madness. Sometimes you can only approximate. In a length of thread. In the acknowledgement that there are many and less than many, sometimes a shifting amount. She presses her forehead against the pillar. She cannot grasp the glyph-work hands, but she would if she could. And then the memory shifts. ⁂
is so small underneath the corpse-sun of Mu, though then, only days ago, she did not yet know it was a corpse. Or. She did not know the precise shape of it, the death-state. She is small, and she is standing beside five others, four howling creatures—Dust-Drinkers, they were called that day—bound against them. There is a memory, burning gnosis unspooling from her in the form of lightning, striking one, two, three of them. And then she gives it her body riddled with hits, ripping pieces from her, and the Dust-Drinker’s rage, in knowing it won’t kill her, can’t, because her companions still stand. 🙧
ahahahaha! you fought well. you fought well. and, clearly, you walked away from the fight. i suspect they did not.
shows it Qarina, screaming, slamming her hammer into them in answer.
asks, You said I feel true. That I carry it around like the Weapon’s hammer. What did you mean?
the coördinates of the world warp and weave around you. you are more-than-real. not like we were. in a different way. but more-than-real.
doesn’t nod, but it knows she would nod if it needed her to nod to express understanding. So it was all of us, not me, specifically, that felt true?
yes. but. they did not see us. you saw us.
says, You saw the Mask. I could feel you peering at it. I’m used to being watched, but that was something else. Did you know what you were looking at, then? In the methexis, there is a promise—a lick of violence, of flame, of destruction. A whole world’s worth, two hundred and sixteen times.
ꙮ You feel something very like licking several hundred lips at once.
it was heavy. so heavy. so true. so real.
says, It is heavy. She shows herself, an image of herself, a few years younger, though she looks, in a way, much older. Her smile is pleasant, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Her eyes, her eyes—her eyes only see flame, only see where the world will eventually burn. I’ll show you an end, if you tell me what the yazhn gave to you. And I’ll show you more, if you tell me more of your story.
ꙮ One of your hands - one of the glyphworked ones - reaches out, presses fingers hard against the cold glass from the inside. It would- it would- something.
the yazhn gave me myself, again. ⁂
ꙮ And then there’s a whirlwind. A thousand thousand disembodied arms, and legs, and feet, a kaleidoscope of imaginary and impossible colorful, translucent organs. Your mind’s desperate attempts to attach image to an abstraction. Spheres that pulse and grow and then shrink. The vague sense that you are, at any given time, only able to perceive a sliver, a facet, a single facade of this– of yourself. And threaded through it all - disconnected, disconnected forever, but reunited in the moment of an explosion of gnosis, frozen in time and space - a swarming flood of glyphs and sigils that never repeats itself.
tries to see through the noise, to make sense of the sliver—the glyphs she understands, it’s the rest she wants to look at. It had joined with a human, once, had it not? And she is both human and more-than. She tries.
ꙮ It expands. It expands to fill every corner of your mind. And you know that this, unlike the glyph-half, is a force that has not, could not, join with a human, it would burn their mind to a cinder instantly. The true face of an Elemental is overwhelming, soul-searing power, mindless and hungry and as ancient as starlight.
steps back from her attempt with a chagrined smile. She had to try, though. She always has to try. And then, because fair’s fair, she gives it one world-death, one end-of-all-things, a crueler one, because the Sword-Saint dies before the Mask makes it to the shrine, ripped apart by Canker-Galls when they were ripping apart the remains of Canker-Galls with their blunt human teeth. There is satiation in this, there is the taste of sweetness, and then there is pain, and the Mask goes dark, turns upside down, and then it is borne by a child. The child runs as the world ends and fire sears their feet. The impression they left in the Mask is too faint to know their age, their gender, let alone their name. There is only this brief sprint on too-short legs, a shallow tally on a wall that seems like a cave, and then a break as the world ends.
says, Did you get your name back with your self? It was the first thing you lost, right, when you were subtracted from the count of things which are.
ꙮ With two voices, one near-shivering in immense satisfaction, one quiet with regret, it says:
our name was algol, once. we forgot. we forgot. and then when the yazhn gave us the gift of ourselves. it was written in us, you see. over, and over, and over. only we could ever read it. only together.
ꙮ And the part of it which is roiling, hungry power absorbs a sharp, fierce lightning-bolt, an echo of the frozen gnosis-storm which it is trapped within, and it laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and you feel it too, and because you are also part of it, right now, you also laugh, although you might not, were lightning to strike your human form. You would probably not laugh, at all.
might not laugh. Might also laugh. Isn’t sure, but the experience is novel, at least, and lets it be simply that. Does not try to make sense of the part of Algol which is power and hunger and burning and ancient, simply accepts that it is. And then she shows it another world-death, this one a bit out from the end, a village, dancing, but the dancing is frantic and strange, and the feast laid out on the tables are not harvest crops but Canker-Gall honey sacs, and the laughter—and there is laughter—is mixed with crying, and the Sword-Saint is standing there, watching, not understanding how this happened, why this is happening to them, and then there is violence, there are monsters at the gate, and there is blood, and there is another tally mark before the fire even touched their heels.
asks, How did the yazhn give you back your self? What did they give you? And with the question, she calls to mind Ravhi’s face—was it he, and so recent, or was it someone else?
aahahahahahahah he is. gentle. he is far too gentle to have given me back myself. although. he did break the rule for which we were the inspiration, – and it sounds enormously, obnoxiously proud of itself for this fact – and so he must have fire in his heart after all. to attempt the forbidden thing. to succeed, even. ahahahah. ⁂
no. our reunion is much, much older than that. not the first of them to have come forth. but close to it. when we had nearly burnt them all out. in utter desperation did their head priest attempt a foolish and beautiful magic. it took ten thousand years for them to be able to get close enough to touch me. ahahahaha. but it did work. he gave me myself. and he gave me lightning. ⁂
ꙮ And you realise something dreadful, about the cool blue-green crystal glass which four of your hands are touching, in that moment, in that memory. 🙧
does not draw her hands away from the glass. Acknowledges it. Sees it. And then shows Algol the end of all things. Or. Not quite. ⁂
wonders if they have a taste for different kinds of violence. This one always sticks in her craw. This one is ugly. This Sword-Saint had a family. This Sword-Saint saw the end coming. This Sword-Saint knew his poisons, knew how to make it like going to sleep, like a very sweet dream, like a stopped heart. The memory of this violence is sweet, sweeter than the honey of the Canker-Galls. He doesn’t tell them, of course. His two daughters and his son, his husband and his wife, all of them he sends to sleep, to death, before the world goes overripe. He picks a knife for himself, though. She thinks—and so they think—that he should’ve. That he should’ve made it hurt worse, maybe, hurt more. That choosing this is not choosing. He picks a knife for himself. ⁂
shows the Sword-Saint after him, a young man, slipping through the house filled with the dead. He picks up the Mask from a pool of blood that has started to dry, but the Mask itself is still white, white, white. ⁂
asks, Can you show me, precisely, how it happened? Can you show me in a way I understand? I don’t care if it hurts. I just want to understand. 🙧
ꙮ The part of Algol that is power – the part of it that is mindless and cruel, still, even reunited with itself such as it is, burgeons and swells and shines with a light that makes the hair on the back of your neck go up, although you could not say why. (And it, too, experiences this, because it is you, and it laughs, and laughs.) And it remembers - and its memory is fragments, is the warmth of the Yazhn’s scales and the heat of the incineration and the warmth of his robes in the sand and the heat when they were incinerated, too – and then, quietly, glyphs swarm in, and paint a picture, literally - points of darkness against the blinding light, shifting and telling a story like a paper puppet-play. ⁂
ꙮ A Shade, trudging up to a Kin of eld. That Kin, calling out into the sands. A swirling whorl of power, surrounding– nothing, nothing at all, glyphs somehow surrounding Emptiness, not Algol’s light shining behind it. And then the Kin reaches out, towards the Shade; shrugs it on like an ill-fitting coat, and jumps, bodily, into the Elemental’s mouth. The light goes brighter than bright, and the glyphs explode in nine directions, and what is left is a crystal, embedded in a pillar of red rock which the sand melted and burnt and became, caught, like the Sun itself, in an eternal moment. 🙧
breathes out slowly. I see, she thinks, and she does. And what of when you were separated? When did you lose yourself, if you remember? And in payment, she pours a new memory, a memory it might know, the moment she found herself caught in—talons like obsidian, a wingspan of starlight, her heart ripped out, her self ripped apart, over, and over, and over, and over. And drawn over it, like a palimpsest, her own despair as Sword-Saint after Sword-Saint watches the end of all things helpless to change anything at all but maybe, perhaps, their moment of dying.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,
ꙮ It says, because it does not like that one, but also, the part of it which is power laughs, harder and crueler than it did before. ⁂
once we were one. truly. one. we know this. where i begin, i end. where i end, i also begin. we were a loop. unbroken. we shone brightly.
and then we were– lost. wandering. aimless.
can thread see the instrument that clipped it short?
ꙮ It seems to have largely recovered from whatever its reaction was to Salme’s proferred memory rather swiftly. The light pulses fitfully in the background, with the suggestion of wetly malicious chortling that you would probably miss, were you not sharing in its laughter at its own expense. 🙧
swallows, and she is not sure if this is wise, but she offers anyway. Would you like to try? I don’t know … I was able to, with help, repair a broken thread of memory within the Mask. I could try to help you. Within the link her intentions are laid bare. She wants the information. She also wants to give Algol this, if they want it.
ꙮ Algol’s starlight billows with indignation and rage. Not at Salme - but she feels it, herself. It would know this, it would give many things to know this. ⁂
But it would take a miracle.
adds her own rage to Algol’s, her frustration spilling over, and the tears she wanted to cry in the caves, in front of the heart, when—when—they spill over helplessly here. And it is powerlessness, and it is the fact that for all her power it is still not enough, and for all her work it is still not enough, and that she will never understand any of this at all.
ꙮ And for all Algol’s power, for all its overwhelming, elemental light and glyphborn shadow… it rages with her, and they are alike, in this.
shows it, shows it, not violence, but—a wish for violence. A childish, stupid wish. A boy, with strawberry-blond curls and so many freckles, freckles that seem to multiply as the chain of time wears on. Algol knows because Salme knows every part of his body. Algol knows because Salme knows precisely what his hands and mouth felt like. Algol knows because Salme cannot forget, because this stupid cruelty is inscribed on her bones, the way this boy took and took and took from her and then was too ashamed to admit he’d touched her in front of anyone at all. And Algol knows because Salme knows how badly she wanted to rip him apart, then. With her hands. With her teeth. There are flashes of violence—slaughtered animals, killed quickly and with care to their suffering—and Algol knows Salme’s hands know violence, not toward a person but at least towards a creature. And now Algol knows how she raged and raged and raged over this boy and dreamt of ripping out his eyes, tearing out his throat, rendering him mute and raw and bleeding, even as she meekly kept her mouth shut and moved the fuck on. It is a small thing, the smallest thing she could offer, probably. That is how small she feels right now, for all the immensity of her rage.
gathers herself and says, The one who walks beside the Weapon. Do you know him?
ꙮ It is small, Salme is small, and yet it burns bright as starlight, burns as bright as the end of a world. On the outside of the Red Column, the sparring Rohsu stop to look as the pillar flares up, brighter than either of them recall it flaring up before, but– the Yazhn of Yazhn’s guest surely is where it is right for her to be. She must be doing the Yazhn of Yazhn’s work. And so one cuffs the other gently on the shoulder, and they laugh and begin another duel. ⁂
he walks tall again. we cannot read his name. once, we could have done. no longer. but he is our brother, and he walks tall again. he is also the Weapon, as i and i are algol.
tells them, his name is Suhaël.
suhaël and qarina, who are the Weapon. why has the priest not performed the work that united them more often? is he a fool?
doesn’t know. She intends to ask, but she thinks many people will have the asking of him with that specific question. She returns with another question of her own—you were not killed or unmade, but ‘subtracted from the count of things which are.’ Do you know what that means? Is there a … concept of the fathomless?
when i was not, i was-not. i was shade, and no-thing. truth and lie. a vacuity and an emptiness.
thinks, and there is some violence in her thoughts, unformed and roiling as they are, she thinks: that’s a horrible thing to do to anything. Thinks that even the part of Algol that is nothing but power and cruelty doesn’t deserve that. Thinks that just because she is prey she can’t resent a predator. Thinks, thank you, that is helpful.
asks, I am not sure I have anything else for you today. Is there anything you would like?
when i was. when i was one. no part of me was cruel. i was bright and i was fierce and i hunted and i destroyed those-things-which-should-not-be and i took their patterns and their power and i inscribed them into my self and remembered every secret i had ever consumed but i was not cruel. the lie made us cruel. the lie made us cruel. ⁂
you should come back. sometime. you should bring others. they are heavy and full of truth and true things. bring the one who dreams of flying because even though his dream is not delicious to us it is still true.
pauses, and for a moment thinks of—but of course they could only mean Awoken. Nods. Then asks, What was the lie?
the lie that i was no-thing. the lie that made me no-thing. that which clipped the thread of my text from the brightness of my meaning. that which made me incomplete.
nods again, and then, and then—she draws liminal gnosis into her body, as much as she can, trying to become a thing of liminality. Her hands are small and rest against the glass-that-was-once-a-man, and their glyphworked hands are on the other side. She draws as much liminal gnosis as she can and tries to reach through, only briefly, to touch their hand, to hold it.
ꙮ And you think you can, like that. For a brief moment. And you think you feel Algol billow softly in amusement, and also, at the same time, some part of it which still remembers what it once was, remembers the duty it once held, clasps its hand briefly around Salme’s. And then the moment passes.
steps back. Harm can make us cruel. A cascade of images—her, as a girl, full of grief and full of rage and hate and cruelty. Kept to herself, kept small, kept out of the way, but there, nontheless. Amusement, at comparing that to what Algol has suffered—and the suffering they can inflict. And certainty that, like anything, Algol has a future where it can be other than they currently are.
ꙮ A parallel certainty, that Algol is itself, here and now, in its own way, and it has the lightning. (And, in some way… you feel, you think, you imagine perhaps, it has found a way to perform that original duty, albeit at a remove. But you think, you would not suggest that to its face. Or maybe you would, and you-and-it would both billow amusedly with light.)
sees and acknowledges that certainty back before gently laying the link down. I’ll come back, and I’ll bring my bluejay.
turns, and approaches the Rohsu.
ꙮ One of them gets a real, real good thwack! in on the other, who falls on his ass, laughing. “Alright, alright, you blunt-horned little– ahem!” He sees Salme approach and frantically scrambles to his feet and brushes off the dust as the Rite evaporates. “Can I help you, ma’am?”
: “Two questions, if you’d be so kind. If I’d like to request an audience with Yazhn Ravhi, are there proper channels to observe?”
ꙮ He looks at his buddy, who gives him the universal-across-planes whaddayalookinatmefor look, and then back to Salme. “I’d say go to the Temple and find a Yazhn and they’ll be able to sort you out.”
smirks a bit. “So that’s a no. Okay. Second question. If I wanted to find lodgings for myself where I don’t particularly want to be found, is there a place I might stay?”
ꙮ The scales around his horns darken, instantly, but he bravely soldiers on. “Vehru Zilze’s, on the 45th angle, near the crossing of the fourth ring from the Temple.” And then, in a conspiratorial whisper, “(He makes the best date pies.)”
grins back at him, equally conspiratorially. “Thanks for the tip.” And then with a little salute, she makes her way toward Vehru Zilze’s.