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 Posted: Tue Jul 03, 2018 12:19 pm
 Hide in the company of others all you want, Jack. They won't leap to your rescue, they won't stand up for you, and they won't sleep ill over your cooling corpse.
I'll cut my window of opportunity out of your brick paranoia.
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Posted: Wed Jul 18, 2018 8:57 am
In a world of magic and murder, getting my GED feels so mundane. It feels beside the point. But I have it now, and that old pridefulness takes it up. Mine mine mine it says, like the stubborn march of my heart.
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Posted: Wed Feb 06, 2019 7:07 pm
[ TW: Gore ] it’s all a simple grammar lesson, really: trauma made home in your body
as soon as your body became
trauma is your body becoming
trauma on your body becomes
familiar & strange
through trauma, your body has become
strangeI've become rich in all I have lost, made richer with 14 pounds. This body shed it like a sickness. Like so much dead weight. This body wants to make holes in itself -- little pockets of emptiness begging for nothing. Open testimonies to all I've endured. I wonder how much I need anymore, how much different I am from youma now.
I expected changes when I left Axinite's office a newly made General. As a Captain, this body made extra parts in itself and that revelation filled me so past capacity that I choked without metal. What came of General I expected in passing minutes. Headaches for a second pair of eyes. Elongating fingers. Horns. Tails. Wings. There exists no prediction to tell us how these bodies go, how they twist themselves. I only knew that I could expect, so I expected addition.
But I left that office untouched by oddity. Black crawled further up this body as it had at Captaincy and nothing more happened. A day passed, then two, then three. I thought this body stabilized itself.
My gut was still sore from crystal splinters, fragments thick as a finger that were shot into this body by the youma we hunted. Poorly they healed because the extraction process left embedded fragments. Surgery was scheduled, though it wasn't of immediate concern. I could live a few days, a week, a month with its discomfort. I thought the pipes were worse. Still are, for how I can't lean against walls without feeling these ribs trying to exit the skin. For how I can't sleep on my back at night. For how their conductivity sends me into paroxysms when I encounter senshi like the one in purple pants. These shards wouldn't hamper me. I carried on.
I spent a week as a general. I accepted my new duties and had my office moved to one of the upper floors. Now I had more space, but I only considered meaningless things to fill it. Knickknacks meant to advertise my personality type, my achievements. Unworn medals to adorn my desk. More bookshelves to fill with more books that I read and will never reference again or haven't read and will never read. Platters of food on a table to make false promises of warmth and care, both perhaps borrowed from Axinite himself. I could leave it empty, I reminded myself, but that seemed a waste. This castle was so full of dead air, dead space. That I dwelled on this thought at all was a waste.
I left that office intending to see other offices. I thought I would visit Zircon's and stop at Arsenopyrite's on the return trip, but six steps in, this stomach opened up and these guts fell out and tripped me like a wet jump rope. Like so much cooked sausage spilled over the floor. And that's what I saw -- a butcher's delight. A horrorshow. I panicked.
I couldn't stop panicking. Couldn't stop gathering up these pieces of me to myself, to the hole in this body, pressing them back in like they'd somehow fit in order again. Even the ones cleanly detached. Especially the ones cleanly detached.
I had names for them, these lost pieces of meat. Liver, spleen, kidneys. Large intestine, small intestine. Some of those names had names. Duodenum, jejunum, ileum. They flooded out like a temper tantrum.
The floor was black. The stones were black-washed with blood. Repellent to that were a handful of glittering shards, glinting their smiles at me out of a fat brick that I recalled was a liver. All of this happened in a few seconds. A handful of heartbeats. This body was whole, then it wasn't, then it pulled itself to the ground with things never meant to leave it. I was trapped in its critical failure. Trapped and unable to do anything for it. I could only watch, and listen, and smell.
I heard wet crackles like bacon on a griddle. It smelled like a restaurant in that hallway. I remember feeling hungry.
I remember feeling sick but having nothing to feel sick to. I called for my mother; I hadn't thought twice about it. It hadn't been a year yet. The dead were calling for the dead. I tried to picture her face, but small details were missing from that thought. I couldn't remember what her haircut looked like, what shade of lipstick she usually wore, how her earrings brushed her shoulder when she turned her head to look at me. I remembered her, but I didn't. My mind recalled this spayed version of her, movie-perfect, distant, isolated, completely docile. My mother, the woman who ran my life for fifteen years, docile. Standing there, a teacup in hand at the end of a veranda, smiling like a vapid fool. Like a Hollywood dream.
I laid in a pool of organs, organs that fell from this body, and I cried because I couldn't remember my mother as she was in life. I remembered a figment. A copy as stilted as Eion Risk.
Then I remembered my dad, my brother -- both gone. Rowan who was gone. Elex's life, also gone. Five seconds must've passed since this body unraveled itself. I was awash in my losses, written like ink into me.
My communicator wasn't a thought. This was a personal tragedy, not a martial one. I tried to think of a name to yell down that old hallway. Tried to think past the ichor and murk. I thought of Schörl first, then Heliodor, then Ceraskia, then Tiberius, then Chrysocolla. Aue. Kamacite. Noctua. Arsenopyrite. Pyrophanite. Adamantine Spar. Amphitrite. Axinite. I could pick no one in that list of names; why would they come?
Why should they come?
I was a nightmare as a Captain. Always infringing on them, always looking down at them. Always nosing out fault after fault until I was satisfied they had nothing more to pose as threat. I paid my rent for this body with compassion. I left none of it for others -- spared none of it for others. Now I faced that truth like I faced an appendix. I would die alone, in this hallway, a mess of hot blood, with no familiar face to see me off. An open-and-shut medical quandary. A footnote for partial youmafication and officer inefficiency. A teenaged tragedy. A casualty. Worst of all, a number.
I decided I hated it. Still steaming, six seconds later, first remembering to breathe again, I hated it. I called for help down that hallway, white with fright, quaking with blood loss and rage. Raw and churning. I felt cold and I knew I was over. I heard footfalls. I remember thinking: I only felt cold as Elex. As Eion. Not like this.
Never like this. This is dying. I should've purified when Lysithea and Castor offered it.
Footfalls came closer. I was eight seconds in, staring at a puddle of black where it reflected a flame flicker. It looked like a dozen tossed writer's desks, each inkwell once faithfully full and now dashed across the floor. Thick pools of it spreading, making their black mirror. Movement shifted in that surface; someone nearly reached the mess of me, but I kept looking at that fire. I was on fire. I was burning.
But I wasn't. Lying there, staring at that fire, fearing to move, shaking relentless, a pile of black-stained and glittering clothes, I was fire. I am fire. I am fire and I burned the lot of officers I could've had as friends, colleagues, confidants. Youma am I, but still juvenile. There's so much more to learn. Staring at that reflection, feeling lifted, feeling heavy for how that body suffered loss, still afraid that this meat-gnarled, exposed spine might snap with a subtle move, I felt fearful and raw and real. I felt unwound from my coddling righteousness. Lying there, growing distant from me, was a mess of half a person.
Hands found me. Two pair -- both black-gloved, one bare past wrists. Lieutenants by how they moved and smoke and felt like life. Like no one trawled the hope out of them yet. One olive-haired, one pink, both unfamiliar to me. They pulled this wreck out of the halls. Pulled a miracle out of me, and I barely learned their names.
Still, I survive. All I lost was everything I never needed. I traded it for insight, for self-awareness.
I am the world's most secret trauma. I am a burial ground of rawness and heat.Latin: And it's less to endure punishment than it is to deserve it.
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Posted: Thu Apr 25, 2019 1:40 pm
I expected no accolades after the seminar. Most faces looked befuddled, skeptical, dismissive. Few questioned what was said, fewer still found it inspiring. Tanzanite and Alkaid found it laughable, if the latter had humor left to laugh.
It failed both my aims. No captains and betters sought personal youma, in the weeks between then and now. The air feels silently charged. Human officers walk these halls. People with a second face to wear on the surface. Things like me dwindle in number, and with what for our future? Slow [xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] disintegration. Someday soon this body will eat itself, and my only legacy is a futile fireside chat. What changes with talk?
Better that I do much more. I scouted the Rift, took stock of the parts nearest the Citadel. All types lurk there -- humanoid, feral, mammalian, am[xxxxx]n, reptilian, aquatic, arachnoid, insectoid, regal, loping, timid, vexing, caustic. So many there waste their hours in this dearth of everything. They wait with no concept of time. They take their quick passages to the surface, take their energy, take their starse[xxxxxxxx]ake their chance to return with spoils that they just as quickly consume. Just as quickly burn for a rush that means nothing anymore. How could it, without humanity?
I never ascribed much emotion to youma; acting and reacting are such human affairs. But while I looked for youma dens, [xxx]accoon tailed me. One that looked killed seven times over, flattened out like Barbary. It never attacked. Couldn't [xxxxx]. Mos[xxx]it watched. Then it raised up a mirror in its claws, as if possessed by Gratitude's dec[xxx]it ghost. Like it was tha[xxxxx] me for speaking on its behalf.
I took that mirror. Still it sits beside me. I don't know whether it's an empty gift or a malicious hint to be more self-aware. Do more exist or is it the only one? If there are more, how do we find them? Who claims right to them? I don't know its origins, whether a trap from the [xxxxxxxxxxxx] or an artifact as old and sobering as the gold-webbed vial. Maybe it's a memento from the ruined kingdom, or fresh m[xxxx] engineered in that abysmal place, or maybe its beginnings don't matter at all. Dwelling on it proves as useful as th[xxxxxxxxxxx].
It behooves me as a General [xxxxxxx]gence to report these things. This, the [xxxxxx]- I would write them both into the Database. However scanty my information, it's more than what's available. We've so much more to do to make our information useful, accessible, palatable. But to put that cat to work on promised projects proves more a b[xxxxxx] than to do them myself. Than to pass them down to un[xx]aine[xx]han[xx] li[x]e Vitri[xxxx]
This digression must s[xxx]; I have to make real this work. I must solve th[xxxx]irror's mystery.
I only know its purpose. It showed me as much -- once snapped, one half reflects what the other sees. What's left for this, for the seminar, for all my thoughts and plans, is to mak[xxxxxx]on out of them. Better to t[xxxxxxxx]l than to
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