op2024
odium
Fetzen
Divorarel
Noctis
Pickled Piper
Timemaster
Tetsue
Argetlam350
Izurich—— Ximbic-8: XCC, Blilhamr, Intake
Stirred from a soundless, sceneless muse mid-sentence, he awoke.
Was I even asleep? he doubted.
No, sleeping, waking, transitioning from one to the other — that was different. Distinct. This sensation stung, like a thorn torn from the mind, a rip through memory, a tear his consciousness fixated on in an attempt to correct. A distraction, as was this place of being, all so utterly unfamiliar.
Often though he reconnoitered, he could make sense of neither when nor where.
He focused on what little he could.
Foggy, translucent molds arched roundabout, forming a chamber—a membrane by which light was captured, held, and reradiated mildly yet wholely as a diffuse warm white bath, the warmth of unstained molten wax fresh from the wick of a lit lume. A glow. Plastic, gelatinous, not entirely transparent. Shadows of shapes roved just beyond, incoherent smudges of matted earthen brown fringing fresh-tilled clay proceeding fuzzy, patternless, variegated in all directions. Upon or within, pastel pigment streaks twisted and swam. He thought perhaps they were glyphs, a variation on the Lanna alphabet. He thought perhaps they were alive, in the sense that mitochondria are alive in cells. Bigger, fiercer — akin moreso to trematodes, flukes, or worms. He thought he was glad they were there, and he was here, all parties constrained by and to their own dimension. Within, there was air and pressure of comfortable levels, clean yet not sterile. No sense of antiseptic. To his mind, the space he occupied welcomed life.
“—history is local,” lingered his voice in his ears, deep, confident, capable. Self aware, he paused, reflected on his own slow, even cadence. Something wasn’t right. There was a disconnect. His words, his place.
Momentum impelled him forward, “Fear and suspicion guide humanity. Before contact, it was fear of self. After contact, it was fear of the other. Excuse me, but where am I?”
It occurred to him that he was not aware of anyone to whom he posed his question. The blur of the wall loomed insurmountable at the forefront of his attention, impossible and alive with vague moving forms and soft inobtrusive hues.
Yet he was not alone.
Rich, creamy, and cool on the nostrils, the other presence awakened long-buried memories of vacation in Vietnam, of a gac and agar-agar gelée, of ruddy brown cousins and aunts and ignorance’s blissful illusion of freedom climaxing in earnestly running barefoot, naked, and dangerous alongside his half-kin and flame vine-fringed jungle streams to the five lakes and leaping wild into one of the waterfall-churned tepid pools kept cool by the shadows of towering teak and sprawling flame trees. All before boarding school, before Monteray Bay, before ... what he was on the verge of discussing or, a matter of distinct possibility, carelessly divulging.
Again he forced himself to be alert, to observe. This time, he began close, familiar. Gazing down at his hands, he saw they were black, smooth, matte, without nails nor whorling lines on his palms nor prints on his fingers. Beyond his grasp, empty space, his kneecaps swathed in canvas weave bush pants colored green, like moss baked in the sun midway through a drought until it withered and dried not quite to brown. Barefoot, his toes the same as his hands. Broad, dense, meaty. Strong, smooth hands and feet. Vague imprints of where nails should be, so as to make them feel normal.
Against his bare feet, the wall. Warm, soft, smooth, like a firm layer of solid paraffin.
A string wriggled by, and he pulled his knees up, his feet away, and sat in a modified fetal position.
“You are present, aware, the full scroll of your saga. This place is a tusdta, mansion of memory. This place is Blilhamr, mansion of mansions. Your tale is worth, is tempo-fatidic. Please, continue,” urged an impression across from him.
It lilted across from perhaps a rather tenuous and translucent arced table. To his ears, the tone was gentle, intermittent, androgynous, like the downward spiral of splayed oak leaves into long bent forest grass, not quite turned, not quite fall — just tired and spent. He lifted his gaze up from his knees, up and over the vaguely opalescent sheen of surface that he imagined as a table, a barrier, a means of separating him from his answerer. The words danced across it, frictionless, and landed in his lap. The table, an extension of the walls, the barrier. The answerer, a fog into which his mind could not penetrate. There was just too much to see, so he closed his eyes. Again, he heard himself speaking. Automatic, atonal.
“We lied, initially. The Val’gara were not our first contact with xenos. First came the Deceivers, beings recurrent in our history depicted both as demonic and angelic. God and gods. It is not unfair to claim they were the ones who groomed humanity, directed our evolution. They predated us, but Earth is not their home. That we lie about, too. We discarded them as mere mythology. Did. Such was their preference. Ours as well, until we acquired means to contain them. After containment, we discarded them in fact, in truth, in reality — just as we, up until that point, discarded any knowledge of them. Now we don’t know what to believe. A few cling to the old lies. For most, nothing. Or belief in one another, I guess.”
His voice was not his voice, he realized. Toneless, without accent. Drugged. Slow. Hypnotic.
His eyes opened, and he concentrated on the space directly before him. On the small area atop the table. Hitherto it was blurry, beyond grasp or even the memory of a grasp. Now, he focused intently. Ignored all the other, wild stimuli. Steadily, the space between him and the voice clarified, sharpened. Just one thing at a time. This was one thing, one but many. A hologram in the shape of a sphere hovering above the apex of the smooth, translucent arc of table.
“I’m sorry — tusdta, fatidic? What is does that even mean? What is happening?” he managed to push out, before his focus collapsed back into trance.
“It means we are working together to remember who you are, from a known quantity in your past and talking forward. Like death, life flashing before your eyes. You see your scroll unfurl, you enter heaven. Until you reach the present, you won’t understand how you arrived. Please, continue,” again urged the presence.
It made a kind of sense, perhaps he died somehow. Perhaps this was some sort of intervening afterlife. He had no reason not to, so he talked and talked. The stranger listened, and for some reason that helped.
He shared his place in the multiverse, beginning with his religious upbringing where he was indoctrinated with a painting of a proxy war betwixt angels and demons — only to, as an adult, learn they were two sides of the same coin. How Earth developed technology to constrain the supernatural factions to their own domains. Of his time at Monteray Bay where he, for the first time, encountered a Val’Gara hatchling in the aquarium tanks. It had infected a deep sea fish, one which was caught and placed inside a pressurized tank. An anglerfish, he thought, or moray eel. It sought to escape, but fortunately couldn’t. The memory of that dark, chemiluminescent chamber still haunted him. The numerous times he awakened in a cold sweat, terrified the wet chill coursing over his body was the water from that tank as the fiendish alien-terran hybrid escaped, were like buckshot through his soul.
Something clicked in his mind, and he realized the holographic sphere was a map, a world in a state of constant transformation. Fissures ran through it, outlines of oceans or continents, if it were a planet. A small one, a planetoid. It seemed too irregular for gravity to have smoothed it. Oblate, but like a dodecahedron, but with many, many more faces. An order of magnitude more. Rivers ran through it, but they seemed too calculated to be natural. Too layered. Maybe it was just a ball of rubberbands, suspended ferrofluid, a mass of magnetic shavings. He couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. The small gold pulsing point in the sea of silverglass, maybe that was here, a point for which he possessed no context.
“There is — or was — a point in our history where we were anti-Earth, where the so-called songbirds devoured Sol’s outer planets. Their cosmic screams and wing-beats arrived as high-frequency gravity waves, alarming us to their presence. We were helpless. Then, perhaps before we even became aware of them, they were eradicated. Limited, then, to light speed information. By what, we still don’t fully know. President Amon spoke of a savior, a liar, a ... pervert. His ‘ace in the hole,’ he called it. The rampage ended at Saturn, which miraculously still possessed all its rings in the aftermath of that celestial brawl. We didn’t escape unscathed. The chaos drew in the Val’gara, a mothership known as Dreadnaught. It ripped a gash through North America and the Sahara. Fortunately, forces more advanced than those native to Earth stumbled across the monstrous bio-vessel’s path, answered our wide-spectrum plea for aid at the price of Africa’s natural resources. So with the help of the Red Technocracy’s anti-matter bombardments and Xanathan Industry’s quarantine technology, we survived. I was too young, I think. Safe in Australia, getting my skin grafted on over and over until it needed replaced with this — this eternal darkness. Then I trained. Then I left Earth to fight enemies I knew nothing about on worlds unfamiliar for reasons above my paygrade. No faces, no names. Just orders. I envy old man Oakes. During the First Contact War, he had reasons to fight. Him and his brother, heroes. All over the streams. Action figures. Before that war, the public knew nothing of aliens. After, it felt like we were drowning in xenos.
“Fate tugged us away from the Terran Alliance and into the United Earth Federation. There, we were but one of innumerable Earths, unimportant in the broad scheme of things. F67X was our designation. A random four character sequence to represent everything we ever knew, all that we were. To ensure humanity’s survival, we sent out city ships, like the Exigent sent to the Gnaritas system. Like the Helistron bound for Terra and Careo Fas. After all that, it became a blur. Xenophor, a Technocrat installation where a god played cat-and-mouse with my life. The Multiversal Fault, Cataclysm, Earth Prime — whatever you want to call it. Suddenly, there was no more UEC. No other Earths. Just F67X. And ... some, maybe all, maybe more than before — our outer planets were back. Pluto, Uranus, Somnus, and Erebus. Who can know for sure? The liar Apollo entrusted with all our lives? Apollo believes this world is just a copy of the original, that we all are actually dead. And I can’t even remember where I was or if I was even on Earth when it happened! I woke up on Vega, felt strange — still feel strange! Polluted. A marionette. Came back to Earth by way of something unholy, a massacre in my wake. Arrived to learn about the Iberian Incident, the portent of another Val’gara invasion, this Ximbic thing — perhaps it is protecting us, but who knows what its intentions are? I was suppose to be guarding the mayor of Allure City, Idereen. I fell asleep, and I can’t wake up. I’m just here, maybe in my mind, for sure in another unfamiliar place, talking ... rehashing my miserable life like a talking corpse.”
A shimmer, a voice, “The lens through which you view this experience, with all its scratches, smudges, and imperfections.”
“I suppose.”
“Are you dead?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. It was an intimate question, but so often those matters are easiest to disclose to strangers. He thinks back on his host of losses, still somehow vivid in his mind, albeit a fractured mirror tinted white, as a specter. When did he begin writing it in a dark place in his mind, when did it become a daily mantra — a grounding mechanism?
“I am dead.
My step pa is dead, we were never near; both to blame.
My wombats are dead; dearer than mates, dearer than life, loving, perfect, pure. Wish I spent more time with ‘em, but I was ... away.
My ma is dead, and I can’t sort these feelings of annoyance and affection.
My siblings are dead, I bet. None blood. I don’t know. We fell out, after ...
Weren’t really family in the first place. Just cobbled together by various desires and needs.
I’m dead, that I’m certain. I died long ago. This artificial flesh. This lab-garbage flesh. A gap in my mind nothing fills, purged from history. A decade, maybe less, maybe more. Mayhaps I’ve always been dead, these memories mere ripples of intersecting lives, mirror images lived and lost, in worlds alike yet not my own.
It doesn’t matter, I am dead.”
With eyes shut and ears rife with memory, he hears in his mind the question, You have found your voice, Poet. What is, to you who still breathes, this conscious death?
“When none remain who care for me, and none for whom I care.”
Reaching into the sphere, across from him, a shape, a tendril, a wisp. He wasn’t sure. It was all so surreal, so rather magical. He felt like he was being told to do something, to find someone, to ... to grieve, but not alone. Subtle, almost imperceptible, the gold he sensed signified his place in this world shifted and the space around him warped.
He stood in a warped little shop, lots of books and bottles. Ornate wood shelves and pillars all begrimed in ancient dust, tapestries molded. Color everywhere, unfaded despite the obvious lack of upkeep. Nothing flat, nothing except the floor his disoriented posterior dropped to. A boy—a man was seated beside him, catatonic, handsome, blond, a mischievous, dopey grin on his face. A sure sign the kid was a space case. Pretty and dumb, his type of friend.
Darkness endowed,
Chrysalis splinters,
Confusion apparent,
Arousal point withers.
Alas, my words so gallant hew apart the moment phallic.
A monster loomed before him, apparently pleased with itself. It set its hooded, drooping gaze upon him, mysterious, chimeric. Like the eyes of a dragon. Full of ... amusement. Booming, its voice cast him backwards, rolled him over, and filled his ears with laughter. He opens his mouth to speak, but the creature stopped him with an open palm.
“What — what — what! That’s all your hoomins say,” — the creatures huffs, “Gleaming through your corduroy thigh, a furry rodent holding an ahnk like a chew toy? A pet? Nevermind all that, for I, Belacrazu, offer you sweet imbibement!”
Tristan sits up, suspicious of the proffered nectar so dainty in its crystal-spa vial, like a potion from a videogame. He suspects it is edible, container and all; a gusher. However, as he takes in the long-necked, bearded, boisterous demiurge, he can’t help but mutter his opinion,
“Are you some sort of perverse matchmaker with that toxic attempt at a rhyme?”
“DRINK, Elfin Saddle!” Belacrazu bellows in teary, bleary, weary-eye offense, walls shuddering and cabinets surreptitiously closing in terror of his lifted voice. “Or don’t, mere mortal toadstool,” he adds, rather relatively demurely, placing the amuse-bouche on a small table within Tristan’s grasp, “it makes no difference to the great Belacrazu whether you accept his hospitality or leave — dragging this portrait with neither frame nor backing in tow!”
—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, Ci-punk Cubes
Neon glare waxes and wanes erratic, rapid, pallid through a rectangular frame of hydrocarbon-infused water-quartz nearly as wide as the tarred timber interior wall. A buzz faintly accentuates the high hues, rousing Mateo from his slumber. Half-awake, he feels sturdier, off. Not himself, not the way his memory insists in recent tones of fear, anger, and exhaustion. Not in that bad way. More like how he, as a child, imagined himself one day older, strong and fierce.
O bounty of premium sleep! Mateo revels, casting wide his limbs in release of an inward laugh, almost feeling hopeful, like a kid. Too dumb to grasp the grit.
Wiggling his toes beyond a blanket, he slits his eyes. Misty rose briefly paints the blackened ceiling and walls, then shifts to dim citrine, then opaque chalcedony. All too blurry to decipher, to comfortable to recognize as unfamiliar. Afterimages of a pleasant rest.
What a halcyon dream, demanding something more of me. A chase, a wish.
Elation wings my yearnings out of prison, taking flight among the stars beyond the bars. I set my back on common plodding caution, not knowing what fate forms with each fresh step. Unafraid to embrace something more. Something better than ... well.
This.
Closing his eyes, Mateo lets out a long sigh. It seems to travel further, emerge from someplace deeper. His ears twitch, devouring his velvet purr. There is no echo, no reverb off the walls. Just the faint buzz, rising and falling in volume. Like a distant unending waterfall of crackling static, white noise. Uneager to face the day he recalls awaits, he lingers and, disconnected from the net, sets his mind to wander.
Long time since I’ve played at lyricist.
It was just a dream, anyway. A fantastic fabrication of utter nonsense. Reality is rough, not motivating music. But ... I wish it was. I’m so damn sorry for what I am. The foolish pain that fleeting vengeance bought me. The cheapening of life, my own among it. Cut short for petty reasons by my blade grasping hand.
Again, he sighs.
“Sister Milaszo, I’m sorry. Fesyen, I’m sorry.”
“If I kill again, it’ll be — it’ll be because I can’t stand to live if I were to choose not to.”
He isn’t sure how, but something in him feels different. Perhaps not so much for the better, but for the good.
Deciding it is time to face his fate, he slits his eyes again. Darkness lingers in the room, its shape neon red strip lights hidden in recesses and under ledges — all awash in a shifting external glow, the window. Beneath him, he becomes aware of a mattress. Wasn’t I on a floor, or is this the work of Jag’s crew? It is cozy, he could easily sleep on it forever. A blanket weighs over him, but doesn’t weigh his spirit down — plain dark gray; maybe wool with how warm it feels. A real textile, for once. Glancing down, he ponders his toes warm still in his red Vertx. They seem bigger. Thicker. So faintly lit, it strikes him that a toe is maybe missing from each foot. He wiggles them, they feel intact. Squinting through lashes thicker, longer than before, he notices little black claws penetrating the tips of his toes, perhaps just a feature of his hex-clad socks he hadn’t hitherto seen.
I gotta poo, he determines with distant urgency.
Sitting up, he pushes the blanket off. Automatically, the room brightens. Red light shifts to a soft, clarifying amber. He sees his hand, his palm. No, not a hand. It is a paw. Big, broad, with pills, fur, claws. Leaping up, the blanket spills on a warm ceramic floor. Confusion fills his mind, and he spins while standing still. Around him rotates the room — bed, wall, window, shelf, mirror, doors. His jacket hangs on a hook on the wall, a-low kicks underneath. Mateo orients, then steps to the mirror. Around his neck, his red flecktarn collar, Matewooof tag. Stretching tight around his waist and hips, his swim trunks; same pattern and color as his collar. Cyberhair, bright red, spiked, accounted for. Moonhowl animating tattoo, present. Yet not right. Everywhere, hair. Mid-brown, patterned with darker brown lines, like sweeps of chocolate. A snout snarling back at him with long, black-tip canines.
“I’m a werewolf!” he rumbles, his voice deep, rough.
Shock rips through him, threatening to knock him down. Catching himself on the wall, his eyes trace his four-finger paw splaying out across the tongue-and-groove slats. He pants, a bit of drool cascading to the warm ceramic floor, then he diverts his attention back to the mirror. Feeling goofy, he grins, exposing his perfect black canine.
“I’m so darn cool! Stronk boy! Stronk! Rrwar!”
Mateo’s bowels rumble.
“Oh yeah, I gotta poo,”
In response, a holographic series of red arrows paint the floor from his feet to the door. He guesses via contact lens, probably self-lubricating given its imperceptible comfort. Words scroll in front of his eye and a voice intones,
«
—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, the Sodality
A podium appears before Lionel Duperie, almost as soon as he steps from the portal. Sleak, silver, resonant. Yet it doesn’t seem cold, like the metals he is familiar with. It seems warm, like a strain of wood. Before him, in a vast, open plaza, it is easy to determine the nature of the throng. Humans, displaced, confused, questioning. They, like him, doubt the sagacity of their decision to immigrate to Ximbic, never knowing what was on the other side. Yet, his mind is full of the knowledge the place implanted. He knows where he will go to fill his belly, to rest his head, to in soft stillness collect his thoughts.
Nobody who came here feels lost, only in disorder.
That is his purpose, he senses. To help bring focus to the madness of this massive population with which he is intimately familiar, despite himself being alien — a native of Terra.
—— Ximbic-8: Torhyfiel, the Fae Fields
Dew shimmers on his eyelashes as Czes stirs from his nap, a quiet, dreamless, healing slumber. His clothing damp, his flesh cool but not cold. Not rain, not quite a drizzle, yet he can feel a limpid layer soothe his skin, almost imperceptible. A mist, a cloud. It fades distance to mystery, but still, above, far off and away, he watches strange stars scintillate and reel, their light tinged lavender by the flesh of this world. Twilight still reigns, just as it did at the moment of his arrival, imbuing in this land an aura eternal, changeless.
My new home, Czes ponders, strains to hear anything. Nothing. Bold enough to fill his ears only is his beating heart and the light breeze beating at his open vest, but it seems so still, so empty. Yet so splendidly tranquil.
Tracking his hand, he pulls a silver watch from the small waist pocket of his gray tattersall vest. It features friendly forest creatures in an idyllic countryside, a goose and rabbit prominent, with Carre, London 1725 inscribed in black title. A Maltese cross drapes the lid, now open and revealing the passage of nine numerals.
No day-night cycle. Always dusk, always dawn, he considers, straightening his cap, always a dream yearning to wake, eager to rest.
Finally upright, he feels no prod, no guidance. Neither barrier nor road manifest before his vision. Thus, he is free — he might journey anywhere, but knows neither direction nor destination. Just shapeless, diffuse impressions within the beckoning, undulating mist. Motes of light, within which he imagines translucent silver-veined wings, glint roundabout. Then, in the depths of his belly, a rumble reverberates through his abdomen and into his mind. Hunger, thirst — even here, even immortal, he is susceptible to the agonies of the human condition. His mouth suddenly dry, he sucks the dew from his fingers, steps forward, and walks.
Onward he moves, even as soft, sparkling tendrils arise from the periwinkle veil, ensorceling his limbs and teasing his fair, full cheeks, their manner haunting, evocative. Pocketing his watch, his awareness of time dissipates, as with all else half-sensed in this endless midsummer night fog. All the better to enjoy it, feet nude with shoes laced together and flung over his shoulder. Crisp air florid in his lungs. His mind drifts, traveling nowhere. His fingers brush something, startling him from his reverie. The grass seems oddly larger. Not merely taller, not merely lengthier of blade. Larger. What was once grass beneath his bare feet softens to moss, then hardens to pebble, then softens to immense moist chunks of rich black soil. Tiny gem-like flowers strain like stars through the blackness, stalks terminating in a ven diagram of three rings lit by a gentle opalescent glow.
Perhaps I’m smaller, he muses.
I wonder what Lionel is doing, and all the others of the Comte Foundation. I hope my employees got their share, my instructions were clear. But ... well, I can’t control corruption, only root it out where I find it. That’s why I left, why I passed through the portal. I grew rich off their labor, and for what? Now I’ll remind myself how to start from nothing.
More steps, more time. Alarm buds from the soil and clings to his hackles as towering plant-life, blades arching overhead, bury him in shadows lit intermittently by darting glintflies and noisy sapdragons. One makes a brief nest of his shoulder, eyeless, mouthless, claws sharp, wings like spun gold licked by chartreuse glass.
Alarm tainted by wonder.
He stops abruptly, glancing backward over his shoulder. His movement sets the fey beast alight, and it vanishes into the dew-burdened darkness in a corkscrew of resplendent amber dust. Focusing, he can make out the shape of his path, a corridor of bent and wavering blades unburdened of their moist globes by his journey hence.
Maybe I should head back, he considers. But he knows there is no guarantee he’ll, in doing, restore his stature. Instead, he plods onward.
Weariness fills his legs, and he finds himself resting on a vermilion spot-cap mushroom, a morel lattice suspiciously nigh. Along the way, he plucked a berry from a vine. Now, it is larger than his head. Violet, smooth, with a dimple on one end. Leisurely, he tosses it from one hand to the other. He looks around. No longer does he see the fog, as massive walls of grass obstruct sight in every direction. The only hint at its presence is dew weighing down the bottom of blades. Earlier, one such droplet thoroughly slaked his thirst. He listens. Wind sings through the tall fronds. Bugs lull his senses to an undulating tune of white noise with their rapidly beating wings. He breathes, and his nose twitches. Teasing his nostrils is the unmistakable scent of fire converging with meat, of fat drippings sloughing onto the hearth coals. A familiar, distant aroma, one he remembers permeating many a hall with comity and warmth.
—— Ximbic-8: Detcin
Detcin did not possess Ivplec’s adytum, nor that of any Lodika. Nor did he scry a kalachakra within which to meditate. Wherever he was, he was far enough away that he lacked connection with his kin who in solitude roamed lead lakes and dwelt upon the osmium peaks of Panjiis Uor, yet nevertheless were of one mind. This lack of connection did not immediately bother him, for unlike the place before, here was no imminent threat, no sense of compelled brutality, no subservient performative bodily servitude. Nevertheless, he found himself at a wont for ritual, for being among the whole and sensing his whole’s fettle.
He stood on a cliff, overlooking a vast canyon. Above him, a violet light around which, through flesh, seemed to seep as a large, luminous orb along a fibrous track. An odd type of star, but one which gave light and night to this particular place. Beyond it, he saw no obvious place to cast his sundong, no perspective nor direction whereby his spirit might sense the Nail Storm — but perhaps he was in the eye of that great spirit, the great bodhi that touched Lodika, united them, and guided them.
Solemn, he sat and observed. Down in the canyon’s depths, he saw the Reaex loping joyful and free. Then he noticed something as the light swam overhead, the way the colors were painted with wild intent on the metallic world’s geometric, harsh, sharp surfaces and seemed to sing. They were speaking to him, yet it was a language he did not at present understand. He knew, however, that words were not what created meaning, but rather the form of their presentation. This was a welcoming song in graffiti on the face of a cliff, an audio-interaction between electromagnetic wave and excited pigment.
Stirred from a soundless, sceneless muse mid-sentence, he awoke.
Was I even asleep? he doubted.
No, sleeping, waking, transitioning from one to the other — that was different. Distinct. This sensation stung, like a thorn torn from the mind, a rip through memory, a tear his consciousness fixated on in an attempt to correct. A distraction, as was this place of being, all so utterly unfamiliar.
Often though he reconnoitered, he could make sense of neither when nor where.
He focused on what little he could.
Foggy, translucent molds arched roundabout, forming a chamber—a membrane by which light was captured, held, and reradiated mildly yet wholely as a diffuse warm white bath, the warmth of unstained molten wax fresh from the wick of a lit lume. A glow. Plastic, gelatinous, not entirely transparent. Shadows of shapes roved just beyond, incoherent smudges of matted earthen brown fringing fresh-tilled clay proceeding fuzzy, patternless, variegated in all directions. Upon or within, pastel pigment streaks twisted and swam. He thought perhaps they were glyphs, a variation on the Lanna alphabet. He thought perhaps they were alive, in the sense that mitochondria are alive in cells. Bigger, fiercer — akin moreso to trematodes, flukes, or worms. He thought he was glad they were there, and he was here, all parties constrained by and to their own dimension. Within, there was air and pressure of comfortable levels, clean yet not sterile. No sense of antiseptic. To his mind, the space he occupied welcomed life.
“—history is local,” lingered his voice in his ears, deep, confident, capable. Self aware, he paused, reflected on his own slow, even cadence. Something wasn’t right. There was a disconnect. His words, his place.
Momentum impelled him forward, “Fear and suspicion guide humanity. Before contact, it was fear of self. After contact, it was fear of the other. Excuse me, but where am I?”
It occurred to him that he was not aware of anyone to whom he posed his question. The blur of the wall loomed insurmountable at the forefront of his attention, impossible and alive with vague moving forms and soft inobtrusive hues.
Yet he was not alone.
Rich, creamy, and cool on the nostrils, the other presence awakened long-buried memories of vacation in Vietnam, of a gac and agar-agar gelée, of ruddy brown cousins and aunts and ignorance’s blissful illusion of freedom climaxing in earnestly running barefoot, naked, and dangerous alongside his half-kin and flame vine-fringed jungle streams to the five lakes and leaping wild into one of the waterfall-churned tepid pools kept cool by the shadows of towering teak and sprawling flame trees. All before boarding school, before Monteray Bay, before ... what he was on the verge of discussing or, a matter of distinct possibility, carelessly divulging.
Again he forced himself to be alert, to observe. This time, he began close, familiar. Gazing down at his hands, he saw they were black, smooth, matte, without nails nor whorling lines on his palms nor prints on his fingers. Beyond his grasp, empty space, his kneecaps swathed in canvas weave bush pants colored green, like moss baked in the sun midway through a drought until it withered and dried not quite to brown. Barefoot, his toes the same as his hands. Broad, dense, meaty. Strong, smooth hands and feet. Vague imprints of where nails should be, so as to make them feel normal.
Against his bare feet, the wall. Warm, soft, smooth, like a firm layer of solid paraffin.
A string wriggled by, and he pulled his knees up, his feet away, and sat in a modified fetal position.
“You are present, aware, the full scroll of your saga. This place is a tusdta, mansion of memory. This place is Blilhamr, mansion of mansions. Your tale is worth, is tempo-fatidic. Please, continue,” urged an impression across from him.
It lilted across from perhaps a rather tenuous and translucent arced table. To his ears, the tone was gentle, intermittent, androgynous, like the downward spiral of splayed oak leaves into long bent forest grass, not quite turned, not quite fall — just tired and spent. He lifted his gaze up from his knees, up and over the vaguely opalescent sheen of surface that he imagined as a table, a barrier, a means of separating him from his answerer. The words danced across it, frictionless, and landed in his lap. The table, an extension of the walls, the barrier. The answerer, a fog into which his mind could not penetrate. There was just too much to see, so he closed his eyes. Again, he heard himself speaking. Automatic, atonal.
“We lied, initially. The Val’gara were not our first contact with xenos. First came the Deceivers, beings recurrent in our history depicted both as demonic and angelic. God and gods. It is not unfair to claim they were the ones who groomed humanity, directed our evolution. They predated us, but Earth is not their home. That we lie about, too. We discarded them as mere mythology. Did. Such was their preference. Ours as well, until we acquired means to contain them. After containment, we discarded them in fact, in truth, in reality — just as we, up until that point, discarded any knowledge of them. Now we don’t know what to believe. A few cling to the old lies. For most, nothing. Or belief in one another, I guess.”
His voice was not his voice, he realized. Toneless, without accent. Drugged. Slow. Hypnotic.
His eyes opened, and he concentrated on the space directly before him. On the small area atop the table. Hitherto it was blurry, beyond grasp or even the memory of a grasp. Now, he focused intently. Ignored all the other, wild stimuli. Steadily, the space between him and the voice clarified, sharpened. Just one thing at a time. This was one thing, one but many. A hologram in the shape of a sphere hovering above the apex of the smooth, translucent arc of table.
“I’m sorry — tusdta, fatidic? What is does that even mean? What is happening?” he managed to push out, before his focus collapsed back into trance.
“It means we are working together to remember who you are, from a known quantity in your past and talking forward. Like death, life flashing before your eyes. You see your scroll unfurl, you enter heaven. Until you reach the present, you won’t understand how you arrived. Please, continue,” again urged the presence.
It made a kind of sense, perhaps he died somehow. Perhaps this was some sort of intervening afterlife. He had no reason not to, so he talked and talked. The stranger listened, and for some reason that helped.
He shared his place in the multiverse, beginning with his religious upbringing where he was indoctrinated with a painting of a proxy war betwixt angels and demons — only to, as an adult, learn they were two sides of the same coin. How Earth developed technology to constrain the supernatural factions to their own domains. Of his time at Monteray Bay where he, for the first time, encountered a Val’Gara hatchling in the aquarium tanks. It had infected a deep sea fish, one which was caught and placed inside a pressurized tank. An anglerfish, he thought, or moray eel. It sought to escape, but fortunately couldn’t. The memory of that dark, chemiluminescent chamber still haunted him. The numerous times he awakened in a cold sweat, terrified the wet chill coursing over his body was the water from that tank as the fiendish alien-terran hybrid escaped, were like buckshot through his soul.
Something clicked in his mind, and he realized the holographic sphere was a map, a world in a state of constant transformation. Fissures ran through it, outlines of oceans or continents, if it were a planet. A small one, a planetoid. It seemed too irregular for gravity to have smoothed it. Oblate, but like a dodecahedron, but with many, many more faces. An order of magnitude more. Rivers ran through it, but they seemed too calculated to be natural. Too layered. Maybe it was just a ball of rubberbands, suspended ferrofluid, a mass of magnetic shavings. He couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter. The small gold pulsing point in the sea of silverglass, maybe that was here, a point for which he possessed no context.
“There is — or was — a point in our history where we were anti-Earth, where the so-called songbirds devoured Sol’s outer planets. Their cosmic screams and wing-beats arrived as high-frequency gravity waves, alarming us to their presence. We were helpless. Then, perhaps before we even became aware of them, they were eradicated. Limited, then, to light speed information. By what, we still don’t fully know. President Amon spoke of a savior, a liar, a ... pervert. His ‘ace in the hole,’ he called it. The rampage ended at Saturn, which miraculously still possessed all its rings in the aftermath of that celestial brawl. We didn’t escape unscathed. The chaos drew in the Val’gara, a mothership known as Dreadnaught. It ripped a gash through North America and the Sahara. Fortunately, forces more advanced than those native to Earth stumbled across the monstrous bio-vessel’s path, answered our wide-spectrum plea for aid at the price of Africa’s natural resources. So with the help of the Red Technocracy’s anti-matter bombardments and Xanathan Industry’s quarantine technology, we survived. I was too young, I think. Safe in Australia, getting my skin grafted on over and over until it needed replaced with this — this eternal darkness. Then I trained. Then I left Earth to fight enemies I knew nothing about on worlds unfamiliar for reasons above my paygrade. No faces, no names. Just orders. I envy old man Oakes. During the First Contact War, he had reasons to fight. Him and his brother, heroes. All over the streams. Action figures. Before that war, the public knew nothing of aliens. After, it felt like we were drowning in xenos.
“Fate tugged us away from the Terran Alliance and into the United Earth Federation. There, we were but one of innumerable Earths, unimportant in the broad scheme of things. F67X was our designation. A random four character sequence to represent everything we ever knew, all that we were. To ensure humanity’s survival, we sent out city ships, like the Exigent sent to the Gnaritas system. Like the Helistron bound for Terra and Careo Fas. After all that, it became a blur. Xenophor, a Technocrat installation where a god played cat-and-mouse with my life. The Multiversal Fault, Cataclysm, Earth Prime — whatever you want to call it. Suddenly, there was no more UEC. No other Earths. Just F67X. And ... some, maybe all, maybe more than before — our outer planets were back. Pluto, Uranus, Somnus, and Erebus. Who can know for sure? The liar Apollo entrusted with all our lives? Apollo believes this world is just a copy of the original, that we all are actually dead. And I can’t even remember where I was or if I was even on Earth when it happened! I woke up on Vega, felt strange — still feel strange! Polluted. A marionette. Came back to Earth by way of something unholy, a massacre in my wake. Arrived to learn about the Iberian Incident, the portent of another Val’gara invasion, this Ximbic thing — perhaps it is protecting us, but who knows what its intentions are? I was suppose to be guarding the mayor of Allure City, Idereen. I fell asleep, and I can’t wake up. I’m just here, maybe in my mind, for sure in another unfamiliar place, talking ... rehashing my miserable life like a talking corpse.”
A shimmer, a voice, “The lens through which you view this experience, with all its scratches, smudges, and imperfections.”
“I suppose.”
“Are you dead?”
For a moment, he didn’t answer. It was an intimate question, but so often those matters are easiest to disclose to strangers. He thinks back on his host of losses, still somehow vivid in his mind, albeit a fractured mirror tinted white, as a specter. When did he begin writing it in a dark place in his mind, when did it become a daily mantra — a grounding mechanism?
“I am dead.
My step pa is dead, we were never near; both to blame.
My wombats are dead; dearer than mates, dearer than life, loving, perfect, pure. Wish I spent more time with ‘em, but I was ... away.
My ma is dead, and I can’t sort these feelings of annoyance and affection.
My siblings are dead, I bet. None blood. I don’t know. We fell out, after ...
Weren’t really family in the first place. Just cobbled together by various desires and needs.
I’m dead, that I’m certain. I died long ago. This artificial flesh. This lab-garbage flesh. A gap in my mind nothing fills, purged from history. A decade, maybe less, maybe more. Mayhaps I’ve always been dead, these memories mere ripples of intersecting lives, mirror images lived and lost, in worlds alike yet not my own.
It doesn’t matter, I am dead.”
With eyes shut and ears rife with memory, he hears in his mind the question, You have found your voice, Poet. What is, to you who still breathes, this conscious death?
“When none remain who care for me, and none for whom I care.”
Reaching into the sphere, across from him, a shape, a tendril, a wisp. He wasn’t sure. It was all so surreal, so rather magical. He felt like he was being told to do something, to find someone, to ... to grieve, but not alone. Subtle, almost imperceptible, the gold he sensed signified his place in this world shifted and the space around him warped.
… Ϟ
He stood in a warped little shop, lots of books and bottles. Ornate wood shelves and pillars all begrimed in ancient dust, tapestries molded. Color everywhere, unfaded despite the obvious lack of upkeep. Nothing flat, nothing except the floor his disoriented posterior dropped to. A boy—a man was seated beside him, catatonic, handsome, blond, a mischievous, dopey grin on his face. A sure sign the kid was a space case. Pretty and dumb, his type of friend.
Darkness endowed,
Chrysalis splinters,
Confusion apparent,
Arousal point withers.
Alas, my words so gallant hew apart the moment phallic.
A monster loomed before him, apparently pleased with itself. It set its hooded, drooping gaze upon him, mysterious, chimeric. Like the eyes of a dragon. Full of ... amusement. Booming, its voice cast him backwards, rolled him over, and filled his ears with laughter. He opens his mouth to speak, but the creature stopped him with an open palm.
“What — what — what! That’s all your hoomins say,” — the creatures huffs, “Gleaming through your corduroy thigh, a furry rodent holding an ahnk like a chew toy? A pet? Nevermind all that, for I, Belacrazu, offer you sweet imbibement!”
Tristan sits up, suspicious of the proffered nectar so dainty in its crystal-spa vial, like a potion from a videogame. He suspects it is edible, container and all; a gusher. However, as he takes in the long-necked, bearded, boisterous demiurge, he can’t help but mutter his opinion,
“Are you some sort of perverse matchmaker with that toxic attempt at a rhyme?”
“DRINK, Elfin Saddle!” Belacrazu bellows in teary, bleary, weary-eye offense, walls shuddering and cabinets surreptitiously closing in terror of his lifted voice. “Or don’t, mere mortal toadstool,” he adds, rather relatively demurely, placing the amuse-bouche on a small table within Tristan’s grasp, “it makes no difference to the great Belacrazu whether you accept his hospitality or leave — dragging this portrait with neither frame nor backing in tow!”
… Ϟ
—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, Ci-punk Cubes
Neon glare waxes and wanes erratic, rapid, pallid through a rectangular frame of hydrocarbon-infused water-quartz nearly as wide as the tarred timber interior wall. A buzz faintly accentuates the high hues, rousing Mateo from his slumber. Half-awake, he feels sturdier, off. Not himself, not the way his memory insists in recent tones of fear, anger, and exhaustion. Not in that bad way. More like how he, as a child, imagined himself one day older, strong and fierce.
O bounty of premium sleep! Mateo revels, casting wide his limbs in release of an inward laugh, almost feeling hopeful, like a kid. Too dumb to grasp the grit.
Wiggling his toes beyond a blanket, he slits his eyes. Misty rose briefly paints the blackened ceiling and walls, then shifts to dim citrine, then opaque chalcedony. All too blurry to decipher, to comfortable to recognize as unfamiliar. Afterimages of a pleasant rest.
What a halcyon dream, demanding something more of me. A chase, a wish.
Elation wings my yearnings out of prison, taking flight among the stars beyond the bars. I set my back on common plodding caution, not knowing what fate forms with each fresh step. Unafraid to embrace something more. Something better than ... well.
This.
Closing his eyes, Mateo lets out a long sigh. It seems to travel further, emerge from someplace deeper. His ears twitch, devouring his velvet purr. There is no echo, no reverb off the walls. Just the faint buzz, rising and falling in volume. Like a distant unending waterfall of crackling static, white noise. Uneager to face the day he recalls awaits, he lingers and, disconnected from the net, sets his mind to wander.
Long time since I’ve played at lyricist.
It was just a dream, anyway. A fantastic fabrication of utter nonsense. Reality is rough, not motivating music. But ... I wish it was. I’m so damn sorry for what I am. The foolish pain that fleeting vengeance bought me. The cheapening of life, my own among it. Cut short for petty reasons by my blade grasping hand.
Again, he sighs.
“Sister Milaszo, I’m sorry. Fesyen, I’m sorry.”
“If I kill again, it’ll be — it’ll be because I can’t stand to live if I were to choose not to.”
He isn’t sure how, but something in him feels different. Perhaps not so much for the better, but for the good.
Deciding it is time to face his fate, he slits his eyes again. Darkness lingers in the room, its shape neon red strip lights hidden in recesses and under ledges — all awash in a shifting external glow, the window. Beneath him, he becomes aware of a mattress. Wasn’t I on a floor, or is this the work of Jag’s crew? It is cozy, he could easily sleep on it forever. A blanket weighs over him, but doesn’t weigh his spirit down — plain dark gray; maybe wool with how warm it feels. A real textile, for once. Glancing down, he ponders his toes warm still in his red Vertx. They seem bigger. Thicker. So faintly lit, it strikes him that a toe is maybe missing from each foot. He wiggles them, they feel intact. Squinting through lashes thicker, longer than before, he notices little black claws penetrating the tips of his toes, perhaps just a feature of his hex-clad socks he hadn’t hitherto seen.
I gotta poo, he determines with distant urgency.
Sitting up, he pushes the blanket off. Automatically, the room brightens. Red light shifts to a soft, clarifying amber. He sees his hand, his palm. No, not a hand. It is a paw. Big, broad, with pills, fur, claws. Leaping up, the blanket spills on a warm ceramic floor. Confusion fills his mind, and he spins while standing still. Around him rotates the room — bed, wall, window, shelf, mirror, doors. His jacket hangs on a hook on the wall, a-low kicks underneath. Mateo orients, then steps to the mirror. Around his neck, his red flecktarn collar, Matewooof tag. Stretching tight around his waist and hips, his swim trunks; same pattern and color as his collar. Cyberhair, bright red, spiked, accounted for. Moonhowl animating tattoo, present. Yet not right. Everywhere, hair. Mid-brown, patterned with darker brown lines, like sweeps of chocolate. A snout snarling back at him with long, black-tip canines.
“I’m a werewolf!” he rumbles, his voice deep, rough.
Shock rips through him, threatening to knock him down. Catching himself on the wall, his eyes trace his four-finger paw splaying out across the tongue-and-groove slats. He pants, a bit of drool cascading to the warm ceramic floor, then he diverts his attention back to the mirror. Feeling goofy, he grins, exposing his perfect black canine.
“I’m so darn cool! Stronk boy! Stronk! Rrwar!”
Mateo’s bowels rumble.
“Oh yeah, I gotta poo,”
In response, a holographic series of red arrows paint the floor from his feet to the door. He guesses via contact lens, probably self-lubricating given its imperceptible comfort. Words scroll in front of his eye and a voice intones,
«
Welcome, Matewoof, to Blilhamr, N’ki district, a place for Earth refugees!
I am your Ximbic-8 Integration Companion, you can call me Xehtic.
You indicated an excretory urge. Let me help you with that! Please follow the arrows to the public sanitation station and I will guide you through the advanced waste management activity (awma). Here in Blilhamr, we pride ourselves on hygiene. Nobody wants to get sick breathing in fecal aeresol. To prevent that horrible fate, we have a variety of options! Are you the type who enjoys the go or do you prefer not to deal with your dookie duty? Do you allow your dump truck to carry a load or is it deposit-only?
»I am your Ximbic-8 Integration Companion, you can call me Xehtic.
You indicated an excretory urge. Let me help you with that! Please follow the arrows to the public sanitation station and I will guide you through the advanced waste management activity (awma). Here in Blilhamr, we pride ourselves on hygiene. Nobody wants to get sick breathing in fecal aeresol. To prevent that horrible fate, we have a variety of options! Are you the type who enjoys the go or do you prefer not to deal with your dookie duty? Do you allow your dump truck to carry a load or is it deposit-only?
… Ϟ
—— Ximbic-8: XCC, N’ki District, the Sodality
A podium appears before Lionel Duperie, almost as soon as he steps from the portal. Sleak, silver, resonant. Yet it doesn’t seem cold, like the metals he is familiar with. It seems warm, like a strain of wood. Before him, in a vast, open plaza, it is easy to determine the nature of the throng. Humans, displaced, confused, questioning. They, like him, doubt the sagacity of their decision to immigrate to Ximbic, never knowing what was on the other side. Yet, his mind is full of the knowledge the place implanted. He knows where he will go to fill his belly, to rest his head, to in soft stillness collect his thoughts.
Nobody who came here feels lost, only in disorder.
That is his purpose, he senses. To help bring focus to the madness of this massive population with which he is intimately familiar, despite himself being alien — a native of Terra.
… Ϟ
—— Ximbic-8: Torhyfiel, the Fae Fields
Dew shimmers on his eyelashes as Czes stirs from his nap, a quiet, dreamless, healing slumber. His clothing damp, his flesh cool but not cold. Not rain, not quite a drizzle, yet he can feel a limpid layer soothe his skin, almost imperceptible. A mist, a cloud. It fades distance to mystery, but still, above, far off and away, he watches strange stars scintillate and reel, their light tinged lavender by the flesh of this world. Twilight still reigns, just as it did at the moment of his arrival, imbuing in this land an aura eternal, changeless.
My new home, Czes ponders, strains to hear anything. Nothing. Bold enough to fill his ears only is his beating heart and the light breeze beating at his open vest, but it seems so still, so empty. Yet so splendidly tranquil.
Tracking his hand, he pulls a silver watch from the small waist pocket of his gray tattersall vest. It features friendly forest creatures in an idyllic countryside, a goose and rabbit prominent, with Carre, London 1725 inscribed in black title. A Maltese cross drapes the lid, now open and revealing the passage of nine numerals.
No day-night cycle. Always dusk, always dawn, he considers, straightening his cap, always a dream yearning to wake, eager to rest.
Finally upright, he feels no prod, no guidance. Neither barrier nor road manifest before his vision. Thus, he is free — he might journey anywhere, but knows neither direction nor destination. Just shapeless, diffuse impressions within the beckoning, undulating mist. Motes of light, within which he imagines translucent silver-veined wings, glint roundabout. Then, in the depths of his belly, a rumble reverberates through his abdomen and into his mind. Hunger, thirst — even here, even immortal, he is susceptible to the agonies of the human condition. His mouth suddenly dry, he sucks the dew from his fingers, steps forward, and walks.
Onward he moves, even as soft, sparkling tendrils arise from the periwinkle veil, ensorceling his limbs and teasing his fair, full cheeks, their manner haunting, evocative. Pocketing his watch, his awareness of time dissipates, as with all else half-sensed in this endless midsummer night fog. All the better to enjoy it, feet nude with shoes laced together and flung over his shoulder. Crisp air florid in his lungs. His mind drifts, traveling nowhere. His fingers brush something, startling him from his reverie. The grass seems oddly larger. Not merely taller, not merely lengthier of blade. Larger. What was once grass beneath his bare feet softens to moss, then hardens to pebble, then softens to immense moist chunks of rich black soil. Tiny gem-like flowers strain like stars through the blackness, stalks terminating in a ven diagram of three rings lit by a gentle opalescent glow.
Perhaps I’m smaller, he muses.
I wonder what Lionel is doing, and all the others of the Comte Foundation. I hope my employees got their share, my instructions were clear. But ... well, I can’t control corruption, only root it out where I find it. That’s why I left, why I passed through the portal. I grew rich off their labor, and for what? Now I’ll remind myself how to start from nothing.
More steps, more time. Alarm buds from the soil and clings to his hackles as towering plant-life, blades arching overhead, bury him in shadows lit intermittently by darting glintflies and noisy sapdragons. One makes a brief nest of his shoulder, eyeless, mouthless, claws sharp, wings like spun gold licked by chartreuse glass.
Alarm tainted by wonder.
He stops abruptly, glancing backward over his shoulder. His movement sets the fey beast alight, and it vanishes into the dew-burdened darkness in a corkscrew of resplendent amber dust. Focusing, he can make out the shape of his path, a corridor of bent and wavering blades unburdened of their moist globes by his journey hence.
Maybe I should head back, he considers. But he knows there is no guarantee he’ll, in doing, restore his stature. Instead, he plods onward.
Weariness fills his legs, and he finds himself resting on a vermilion spot-cap mushroom, a morel lattice suspiciously nigh. Along the way, he plucked a berry from a vine. Now, it is larger than his head. Violet, smooth, with a dimple on one end. Leisurely, he tosses it from one hand to the other. He looks around. No longer does he see the fog, as massive walls of grass obstruct sight in every direction. The only hint at its presence is dew weighing down the bottom of blades. Earlier, one such droplet thoroughly slaked his thirst. He listens. Wind sings through the tall fronds. Bugs lull his senses to an undulating tune of white noise with their rapidly beating wings. He breathes, and his nose twitches. Teasing his nostrils is the unmistakable scent of fire converging with meat, of fat drippings sloughing onto the hearth coals. A familiar, distant aroma, one he remembers permeating many a hall with comity and warmth.
… Ϟ
—— Ximbic-8: Detcin
Detcin did not possess Ivplec’s adytum, nor that of any Lodika. Nor did he scry a kalachakra within which to meditate. Wherever he was, he was far enough away that he lacked connection with his kin who in solitude roamed lead lakes and dwelt upon the osmium peaks of Panjiis Uor, yet nevertheless were of one mind. This lack of connection did not immediately bother him, for unlike the place before, here was no imminent threat, no sense of compelled brutality, no subservient performative bodily servitude. Nevertheless, he found himself at a wont for ritual, for being among the whole and sensing his whole’s fettle.
He stood on a cliff, overlooking a vast canyon. Above him, a violet light around which, through flesh, seemed to seep as a large, luminous orb along a fibrous track. An odd type of star, but one which gave light and night to this particular place. Beyond it, he saw no obvious place to cast his sundong, no perspective nor direction whereby his spirit might sense the Nail Storm — but perhaps he was in the eye of that great spirit, the great bodhi that touched Lodika, united them, and guided them.
Solemn, he sat and observed. Down in the canyon’s depths, he saw the Reaex loping joyful and free. Then he noticed something as the light swam overhead, the way the colors were painted with wild intent on the metallic world’s geometric, harsh, sharp surfaces and seemed to sing. They were speaking to him, yet it was a language he did not at present understand. He knew, however, that words were not what created meaning, but rather the form of their presentation. This was a welcoming song in graffiti on the face of a cliff, an audio-interaction between electromagnetic wave and excited pigment.
… Ϟ
