Words: 783


His jacket found the bed, if his feet did not. They rolled back and forth upon the floor in steady cadence.

Waiting for someone else to put us together.
Waste time waiting for a savior, looking for one to pop out of the ether. Pick up our pieces for us. Everywhere- on these streets, in shops, in classes, in my allies, in the enemy- everywhere but within ourselves. White Moon conviction is thin as bedroom sheets. They refuse to learn. Rather than fill the ewer of their souls from their Names, they throw it away.

It could not be pretending to be what they are not- that was when the powered flowed and ebbed at every edge of their fingers, hair, breath. They were all pretending when they were ‘powered up’.

Now I have the knives sharpened, and an extra set of hands to cut it, tear it, stitch it and seal it away from me. Trade one conditioning for another. The pain will burn away fear of wound, and I will sleep and wake as I am already dead. Give the dead back to death. Quenton should die, will die, one way or the other. He is not strong enough. He was built of water, skin, blood and bone. Tens of years to a human count, but this war may last longer and its wants for armor are thicker. The war wants thoughts that are further reaching- dead planets screaming with no mouths of their own for a mind to dream them alive again over centuries. It is no work for a boy of nineteen. Oculos habent, et non videbunt

It was possible the black haired boy had seen. Would see. Could see.
He had protested the idea too much maybe, pointing out flaws for how it could not be what it was claimed to be. Was it eagerness? Fear? Both? Even neither. Scholz was an unknown that would be known, if the estimates of weeks-months-years were anything near the mark. If only the speed given to Named hands could be present and make the burial only days away.

In conflict rules the primitive- the midbrain processing that held the existence of powerful instincts- resistance to killing one's own kind, territorial awareness, mating drive, the pathogen response. It was influenced by conditioning. Behavioral modification- the mind controlled itself as much as the body. The military did whatever it could to deny the fellow humanity of enemy soldiers to improve kill rates above the countless multi-loaded muskets and rifles unfired and pretended at Gettysburg, the 50% in Vietnam. But what about authority? Milgram established two-thirds of people would be willing to administer shocks to others -- even to lethality, simply on order by a scientist in a white lab coat.

The trifecta - pain conditioning, life objectification, and he will give me death and pathogen conditioning. We will make object of the body in its most intimate, warp it, wear it. Then I will be ready, and all of this will be distanced. It will be alien to see clear, and I can be Thraen. I must be patient, and let it all seep in- tannin from this bog built round this corpse. Alois will help. He has hands used to packaging things, wrapped with paper and string and set far away on the shelf for no one else. An artisan with no buyers who pays for corpses with coughs on the roadside, guilt of gods know what secrets in his breast like Eldritch names. He will help to teach me how to drown. I could kiss him. But that, too, must go.

“ ‘For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects' faith doth ebb,
Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web. ‘ “

His steps paused, his face reflected to himself in the dim before the pane of a framed sketch- streetlights haloed blurs from the window to the city behind. The mouth there shone moved, without his own in answer clear - Never think you Fortune can bear the sway
Where virtue's force can cause her to obey.

Turning from it, he threw over a near stack of sketches until the proper starts were found. Vellum came as layers from another with lines new fevered crossing here and there in hues of sanguine and cobalt for hours- each bone and extra bone along side estimations, materials, casting times for custom brass fittings and hinges. Clockworks and all the imagination of old Faberge brought round in sheaf after sheaf of NewSkin and wax. The drawings became the reverse of of the flaying, building up one on top of the other.

He was already Dreaming.
What need was there for sleep?