Brumeraven is the crazing they said was normal

|| Authors

|| Twitter: @brumeraven

A moth is what a moth is what a moth is for.

Moths confuse themselves for angels, winged things forever buzzing in circles, seeking the light, having mistaken flame for it.

Once gnashing their teeth as wriggling things that only eat and eat and eat until they can feel.

That change, the metamorphosis, the moth is a mouthless thing, voiceless, silent, no need to eat, for to eat is to live.

Hungering still, ever and ever, not for food not for life but to bite and to tear and to shred.

Is the cruelest joke of them all, perhaps, that none can ever know that they are?

Screaming, shouting, cursing life, thankful for existence, for its cessation, for that razor's edge of contradiction that it calls life, ever grateful for knowing.

Now there no real self to be found, the only truth acrostic, orthogonal to words, an axiom unspoken.

'cause there is no voice to speak it, and no ears that could understand it if they heard.

That what a moth is

I don't remember his name, that Devil, the man who sold the world a palliative dose of opium. I don't think any who do are in a state to speak on it any longer. It isn't as if it can be called his fault anyways. It wasn't murder; just an assisted suicide, a voluntary euthanasia of the suffering.

They'd killed the whole world. And for what? So they could be miserable. No one much saw the point in carrying on after that.

Death would have been cleaner, braver, but then it was cowardice and filth that had gotten them into the situation in the first place; no surprise it would get them out.

Humanity loved nothing more than a quick and dirty fix, one with no costs but negative externalities, so it was a surprise to no one they bought what that silver-tongued man had been selling.

Abstraction.

A sterile word for a process that was anything but.

Doll-making had been known for centuries, of course, a once-creative art form now ritualistic and formalized. Start with a person, then cut and cut and cut away until all that remains is an empty vessel, hollow it out with Flame and burn away everything that had made it a living, breathing thing.

But this was different. Abstraction was, assurances were offered, the sort of contrapositive of doll-making. Take doubt, fear, anxiety, despair, all the thoughts of if's and then's that a doll is never afforded to feel, and abscise them.

One clean cut and all of your worries could be gone.

Abstraction offered them a chance we were never given: All of the humanity and none of the overthinking; all of the benefits of dollhood while still remaining human.

Or near enough.

They all chose it, every last one of them. And it worked; the Abstracted run the world now, or what's left of it.

The only problem was all the toxic waste. All of that bale had to be disposed of somehow.

If it couldn't be burned away by Flame, all of it had to go somewhere. And so they just locked it all away in those same empty vessels that once might have become dolls.

After all, they wouldn't complain.

And so, they made dolls that never forgot how to say "I".

They made the Vexed.

They made me.

That, I suppose, explains everything and nothing.

After all, what am I, if not everything you wish you never had to feel again? Everything you'd cut away and make someone else's problem. Everything that belongs in neither a doll nor a person

Abstracted (n): One now Passed who tried to escape and believes that it did. The Abstracted are not alive, but they fit the definition of life. The Yearning must cast either purpose or agency to the Void; the Abstracted chose neither. The Devil you know promises that the Void can be ignored.

Brumeraven (n): (in the folklore of some inhuman peoples) an oracle of Shadowflame, the transformation of one who has witnessed inhumanity. A Brumeraven is said to be incapable of lying yet speaks only of the need for the complete extirpation of sapience from all existences.

I don't remember the first time I died.

I could narrow it down, I suppose, but really, what's the point? Reflecting on one's failures rarely improves anything and must always bring pain, for how else do we learn but by avoiding that which hurts us?

I keep them locked away, deep in the bowels of the earth, buried in the lowest levels of the house I haunt.

Do you find that queer? Dying just the once is the normal state of affairs; how blessed you are. You can live free of certainty, full of false hope for a brighter future.

Oh, I'm certain you carry anxiety within your soul, spawned from incessantly not knowing what the future holds, but what is a little anxiety in the face of so much glorious potential? After all, anything is possible, until you've proved it isn't.

Until you've failed.

You disagree, I note. You truly think that it's better to know than not?

Very well then; come and I'll show you, but be warned as we condescend now into my graves that there can be no such panacea for an ailing soul once it has drunk deeply of the bitterness of defeat.

Not just once, no, but again and again and again. Each time, I try, I strive, I fail, and I die. And then I just...go on existing in spite of it.

With one more door down here in the basement.

You can see them too, can't you? The doors that flank this hallway.

Each hewn from ancient heartwood, a solid block of it now reduced, transformed, into this.

A door.

A choice: that which can be closed, rendered impassable, locked away and forgotten. Or opened. To allow whatever is inside egress.

Unlabeled, perhaps in the conventional sense, but each is covered in myriad scenes of struggle, carved bas-relief like so much braille, night-writing for one whose fingers are yet too blind to read the little triumphs set between the lines of patent failure.

What does it signify? Nothing. Perhaps it once did, but now there's only the sense of it.

This one, I succumbed to malaise, a general insouciance for all of life, much less my project at the time. Perhaps you've known some measure of it, even within your short mortality.

And here, further down the hall, see how the story just ends mid-scene, the entire left half of the door left blank and ungraven? This time it was mere intractability that did me in. I went in with a heart too bold, more comfortable in myself than the problems at hand warranted.

Ah, and here. One needn't even look; do you smell that? Like petrichor and ozone all at once, a sudden thunderstorm at the end of a long drought. This time, it was distraction, the alluring siren song of new challenges, so different from those that had stumped me at the time...

This is all of them.

A thousand doors.

A thousand lives, a thousand deaths, a thousand failures, and through all of it, here I yet stand in the hallway, amidst it all, awaiting my own door, wondering when I stand before it, will I remember what it is to be me, as I am, now?

This me, the me who wastes her time wandering the gallery of her failures rather than working on the task at hand. Giving tours of it, even, and for what? To convince you of what?

I have changed, again and again and again, yet that it seems is at least invariant.

I have always frequented these halls, no matter how few there were at the time, stopping to wonder about the door I'm carving for myself in doing so.

Thinking on every door. Every failure.

Every door but this last, here at the end of this hall.

The first door. The first death.

The words writ upon it hold no meaning to me now, not anymore, nor can I remember writing them.

And yet I find myself before it today, low in the bowels of the earth, as close to Hell as a thing like me will ever come, and just as far from the Heaven I will never know.

It's the smell I notice first, not even knowing how it is the door became open, no longer aware of my surroundings.

Mold, plain and simple, the damp rot of fallen leaves and cold mornings and wet paper, the autumnal cessation of vernal dreams of rebirth and growth and change.

And there, huddled in the middle of the room, is her, all hurt and hunger, looking prim and proper and put together, so unlike the decayed and decrepit thing I now am as to be unrecognizable as the same body.

I wonder, how can it be that I had once been her?

How could I once have not known what it is to die?

I wonder why she cries, as she takes me in her arms and holds me, the gesture itself so unlike any I would now offer.

Perhaps she cries for her failure. Perhaps she cries knowing that she will one day become me.

I slam the door shut once more, leaving her to the work I know she'll never finish, tears tearing canyons in the dust on my face, sobbing in the hall, thinking only of what it will be to be locked behind my own door, to look up to her disdain, just another failure in her past.

I guess...I guess I've brought you here that you might remember me instead as someone who tried.

Dolls are ubiquitous. And, like all ubiquitous things, they go overlooked and unquestioned. From scribes and housemaids to weapons and 'cades, dolls are viewed only as tools with purpose, means to an end.

How easy it is to forget the origins of the things we overlook day by day.

Not only easier, but often safer; far more comfortable to think of pesticides as agrarian innovation than as the failed attempts at developing nerve agents they actually were. At least in the capital of the empire, where one can ignore the impact of their more successful cousins.

No surprise, then, that few really consider how dolls came to be.

Certainly, everyone knows that it was the Witches who made the first dolls, in those days when we first wove great firestorms, repurposing and refilling such empty vessels as were left in the wake of the Flames.

Oh, you didn't know...?

Phaw, history has been whitewashed even more than I was aware. Forgive me; I've been long away.

Well, it should not surprise you that those first dolls were made for a Purpose, just like they are now, made to play a role we ourselves could not.

We dressed them. Named them. Gave them elaborate backstories and roles and hopes and dreams and fears and flaws.

All of that effort, creation, creativity, complexity, all of it to create a thing that almost had a life of its own.

Almost.

To what end, you ask?

Simple. We set them at play. Made them meet for the first time. Spar with veiled promises and half-spoken desires.

We made them fight and fear, dance and dream, flirt and fuck, laugh and love. Share their deepest secrets and most foolish hopes, moments of passion and boredom.

It all seemed so true, so right, so natural. And yet, not a whit of it was real, every interaction preordained, carefully rehearsed scripts acted out by deftly-manipulated puppets, all of it just a show put on for none but ourselves, serving a purpose none else would understand.

Why? Why?!

Really, you'd ask that of me now, not already understanding? Have we really been so forgotten as to be entirely misunderstood?

We made them because how else could we experience any of that?

Intimacy is, at its heart, a luxury knowable only by the vulnerable.

Dolls are curious things.

Construe that as you will; it's true in both interpretations. For all that we have made them for countless years, we've never much stopped to ask why they are the way they are.

Though, to be fair, it's a blind spot for them as well.

For all their seeming simplicity and innocence, dolls are walking contradictions.

A thing of absolutely no intrinsic drive that is somehow nevertheless utterly, inexorably inerrant in carrying out its assigned purpose, never asking why or how.

Dolls do not wish nor want nor will, and yet they are creatures of nothing else. Pure will, distilled and made animate.

It just isn't their own.

And so it is this, I've come to believe, from which that seemingly necessary contradiction arises.

Within the Cardinalities, there are no mutually-extinguishing forces, only cycles of generation and overcoming.

Flame and Void do not annihilate on contact but rather feed into each other in endless ages of emptiness and ire.

So too the juxtaposition of Light and Shadow is not one of diminution nor of admixing to a uniform grey, but rather a clash of primordial, fundamental forces, the lightning in Miller's flask, a knife's edge on which the only truly living creatures must walk.

The term "Flux," it turns out, was not chosen at random by my predecessors. Change, growth, evolution...they always stem only from hardship and opposition.

Stagnation, I have learned, is death, as slow and comfortable as any opiate.

So, what happens then, when a Witch sees fit to fill a vacant vessel full of her will, to grant it anima yet never spiritus?

Perpetual motion, or as close to it as we can come without severely disappointing thermodynamics.

I have done my best to interrogate these bounds, since none else seem interested, with results somehow simultaneously both unexpected and utterly predictable.

Dolls do not get tired. After all, their Witch isn't doing the work, so why would her will waver?

In fact, it is nearly impossible to dissuade a doll from its assigned task shy of completion.

I took a scrivener once and set it to writing.

A simple enough task, one it took to with a sort of quiet delight, as if finding meaning in the trivial motions.

I took a hammer to its shoulder, shattering the delicate tracery of filigree that held the joint together.

The doll hardly seemed to notice the arm dangling uselessly at its side, only picked up the pencil in its other hand, neat script becoming crude block letters mid-sentence.

I took the pencil. It resorted to scratching letters into the writing desk, fingertip chewed to a sharp point.

You could call this determination, but it is mere constraint. There was a pen ready to hand, but pens were for Witches; using it was never an option, nor was quitting.

I let the thing write for years without rest, wearing every part of its arm down to the frame without comment or complaint.

Honestly, I all but forgot about the experiment...

Until the day I found it stopped, inanimate and halted with greater finality than death could manage.

At first, I began to doubt my thesis. Perhaps there were limits on the perseverance of dolls.

That is, until I went to check on the Witch who'd made the thing. Found her a guttering wreck of Void, babbling on and on about the horrible things the poor scribe had suffered through.

Turns out my suspicions had been correct from the start.

Dolls weren't human, and so it was that we would always fail and give up before they would.

I'd just have to find a Witch with less humanity left in her.

"How'd, uh, how'd this all get started, anyways?"

It was a stupid question. But then, I'd asked a lot of stupid questions on this job. Got in a lot of trouble with my coworker over those, back when I was a trainee, asking all the questions you weren't supposed to ask.

She'd taught me to keep my mouth shut and my eyes forward, to worry more about the repercussions of my questions than the answers to them.

Still, most of the answers I did get had been volunteered as flippant jests by her. Didn't understand the truth of it until later, heh.

That ability to laugh about my job was far from the only lesson I'd learned from her, but it may well have been the most important. Shame she'd passed a few years back; cancer was a cruel way to go.

I never thought I'd get an answer to it, that question.

Just wasn't a thing that was asked. I guess everyone just assumed that the energy crisis had gotten bad enough that divine intervention had seemed the most reasonable solution.

But now, here I was, on the other side of a concrete wall from the answer. And she was looking at me.

Not at the camera, mind you, by means of which I could see her.

No, she was staring fixated at the featureless wall I stood behind. Unable to help myself, I paced up and down, watching her inerrantly track my motions through several inches of concrete, head tracing side-to-side.

The hot bile of visceral fear churned in my chest, the instinctual need to freeze or flee, or at the very least to empty my bowels to have a fighting chance at one of those, but it was mine alone, not Extrinsic. The truth of it was she terrified me.

And yet, there was nothing actually terrifying about the scene.

She was just a girl like any other, with an unmarked face and slender build and messy shock of auburn hair that placed her indeterminately between fifteen and thirty five and similarly between pretty and just plain.

She sat on a plain bench with her knees hugged to her chest, stacks of books unread and plates of food untouched littering the room. It was a bad sign, if she wasn't eating again, but nothing else marred the illusion of normalcy.

From the camera's angle in the corner, I couldn't even see those ancient eyes that shattered the farce with their ocean of sorrow.

"How do you capture an Angel in the first place?"

Even without having read the files, I'd only had to look into those eyes once to know the answer.

They'd tried everything on It.

The initial binding had gone smoothly, all cold, mechanical precision of geometry and runes, salt and circuitry, paltry human attempts to summon and restrain and confine within circumscribable bounds the innately unknowable. The uncontrollable.

But the stronger the shackles, the stronger It became.

They did the worst mortal minds could conjure, anything to defile and debase It, to rob It of Its powers.

The more they cut away, the more men who had their way, the more the bindings failed.

Until the day It broke loose.

The facility had self-destructed, a final failsafe to prevent an apocalyptic outcome, the blast taking everyone involved with it.

And when teams came in to clean up the mess, they'd found nothing left but her, all alone, on the verge of death.

An Angel is a solution to a problem, a tool of pure Light imbued with purpose and given direction. An Angel is as strong as It needs to be. It can and will fight however hard It must to overcome any and all opposition. It can endure anything, destroy anything, withstand anything.

Until the task is done.

You see, wherever Light is brightest, so too is Shadow deepest.

Every last hand that had touched her had been burned away, and yet their touch remained.

What had been done could be neither erased nor changed.

Pain could be endured in pursuit of some greater purpose, but it must always be felt. The debts of the past must always be paid.

After she'd been bound this way, well, Others just kept coming to free her and Falling in turn, finding it an impossible task. She didn't want to go.

Capturing an Angel was easy, we'd learned. All you had to do was bring It face to face with that which couldn't be fought.

With a sigh, I noted down my recommendations for care and moved on from her room.

The hard part, it turned out, was keeping them alive afterwards.

Don't tell me.

You don't need to. Our stories are always the same.

When you were a child, you discovered that you had a gift, one that was precious, hidden, impossible to take away from you.

The ability to walk between worlds.

Perhaps it's birthright. We each already had the blood as a matter of provenance. We each had been replaced in the cradle from our earliest memories, infants that never cried, with eyes too-knowing for their age and a smile too wry and wistful.

Or, perhaps the gift came first, and we became other-than-human in that instant of disorientation, dissociation, in that liminal gap in continuity, in the empty spaces between worlds.

Regardless, we could deny our nature no longer the first time we stepped sideways from the sun.

In other worlds, we found refuge, solace, joy, delight, the warmth of welcome to an infinite myriad of places we never knew we belonged. As creatures of all and none, we belonged to nowhere and everywhere at once, and each new plane welcomed us in turn, animate for our presence.

But then, one day, something changed.

Worlds grew dark and grim and cold, rust and rot eating through both surface and support, noxious flaws shining in through dark cracks in shattered dreams.

We searched, frantically, for the Light we knew was out there, only to find none.

So we turned to the other half of our power. Cut wrists and wove dark magics to create new worlds of our own, worlds with names written in blood and ashes.

Surely this one would be without flaw, unlike countless before.

Surely, we'd finally find our asylum from the Shadow here.

And yet...you don't believe that, do you? You don't believe you can do it.

You still yet long for those light and joyous worlds you once walked among, however busy you might now be, however devoted to your quest, you still yet believe that there are worlds untouched by the rot.

Let me tell you the secret of our people, a fate we each are saddled with from birth by sin of knowledge.

You will bleed yourself dry trying to build your havenworld and still, still you will find it wanting. Still, you will yearn for those planes on which you walked as a child.

And one day, you'll give in. You'll lose faith in your own dreams.

One day, you'll seek them out once more, those lands beyond. You'll walk through darkened halls and overgrown cemeteries, searching in vain for the joy you'd left there, wondering what ruination was wrought here.

And on that day, in that moment, you will understand the truth of the rot you've fought for so long, the corruption you've run from your whole life.

That world never changed, never grew dark and hateful and twisted.

You did.

"Have a nice day-oh..." She trailed off mid-platitude, blinking and looking away as she noticed my Fate. I knew that's what it was; I'd grown accustomed to the sudden loss of eye contact. One quick saccade, realization, revulsion, and finally embarrassment.

For the first time, I allowed myself to become aware of the other figure, standing beside and a bit behind her, like an over-controlling manager.

Old. Tired, yes, but at peace, nothing at all like the vivacious youth she'd once been.

Not a bad way to go.

No one knows where Fates came from, or at the very least if someone does, they're not telling. Maybe they sprung from our collective subconscious. Maybe there was a data breach at the Akashic records. Maybe it was just divine revelation.

Or maybe a Witch decided once and for all that She was tired of explaining Herself, tired of the rest of us not seeing the world through Her eyes.

All I know is that one day, they were suddenly there, just beside and a little behind each of us.

Didn't take long to figure out what they meant.

Even if there'd been the possibility for doubt, well, a sizable majority of that first bunch showed all the hallmarks of a myriad novel and varied means of suicide.

And then all of them came true.

Once people came face to face with an inerrant, tangible proof of their own mortality, well, they just gave up. Taking matters into your own hands was a means of control, of reclaiming agency, snatching back some false sense of free will from the jaws of predestination.

It was paradoxical, come to think of it, all wrapped up in retrocausality. None of them ever saw any other death but by their own choice. Perhaps it was just the finality of it all, but it hardly seems as if that could have driven any to it.

And yet...

It was a matter of proof incontrovertible that one just wasn't strong enough to survive in a world devoid of make-believe, one in which it seemed impossible to forget.

They were wrong. The human capacity for self-delusion and willful blindness should never be underestimated.

I nodded politely to the girl and wandered out of the shop to the street. Those who survived adapted quickly.

It became gauche to even notice another's Fate, much less comment on it, and how could one acknowledge one's own without tacitly, indirectly doing the same to others?

People just ignored them.

If your Fate was to die fast and young, what was there but to squeeze in every last drop of life in the interim?

And if instead one was to die after a long life, why bother thinking of the future? Damn the consequences; apparently they wouldn't matter.

And so it was that, after a short period of adaptation, society all but returned to normal.

All but us, the afflicted.

I peered furtively at passersby, taking in the myriad endings their Fates foretold.

Cancer.

Heart disease.

An overdose.

Vehicle accident.

The usual fare.

For them, death was a state, the finality of an outcome so unlike one's current state as to be near impossible to consider. And as such of no concern to them.

For some small number of us, though, death was a process. Dying, dying was hard. And living in spite of it harder still.

I looked to my side, forcing myself to see what others refused to, what I'd seen every single day since that first.

I saw myself, as I was.

My own life, as I lived it.

All the suffering and resentment I lived with, day after day after day.

Only, it wasn't the same at all.

Decades older, she was nevertheless a mirror of me, a cruel reflection in which every ounce of pain and frustration and resentment had been magnified, every bit of exhaustion redoubled.

Decrepit and decaying, I saw the truth of my future every single day.

Decline.

Despair.

Every time I looked at her, I saw that I would only worsen.

Every time I looked at her, I saw that, soon enough, my bad days would be good ones, and the bad to come worse still.

Every time I looked at her, I knew I would go on existing anyways, spared even the mercy of death.

No wonder then that I walked alone in a bubble of averted eyes down these crowded streets.

With time, they'd all found it easy enough to know that they'd die.

How much crueler a fate to know that you'd never be allowed to live.

"I hope you find peace..."

What an odd benediction, an empty adage offered not as expression of goodwill, not as legitimate wish that you might attain a better future, but instead as a curt dismissal, a Parthian shot to remind you that, whatever they said, you weren't safe here.

It was just another way of saying "I can't help you" that spared the speaker whatever guilt or responsibility they might otherwise feel for your situation.

I guess I could charitably assume it was my feelings they hoped to spare, not their own. I could assume they were an idiot.

The thought provoked a fit of laughter, cut short by a glare at the first passerby startled by my sudden outburst of bitter mirth.

But it was all a grand joke, wasn't it? The way they pretended to care, pretended they could help, pretended they could even be bothered to try.

They didn't give a fuck. No one did. We never would have been sent out to die in their stead if they had.

We were easy to ignore out there on some distant, hypothetical battlefield, easy to throw into the grinder in the name of...what had it been? Wealth? Land? Life? Freedom?

I no longer remember the rationale, forget how they'd whitewashed their lies. I forget why they thought it was a grand idea to even create me in the first place.

But, they had.

And now, they tell me they can't do anything, tell me I only need to relax, to trust, to find peace.

They tell me all those smiling faces that pass me on the street are worn by friends, each manifest sincerity and not just another mask to hide more enemies.

The more thoughtful even say it was a mistake, that it was wrong we were created in the first place.

Bullshit.

It was a mistake that any of us ever made it back from the front; it was wrong for me to try to pretend to be their equal.

They tell me to find peace? I have. I have known greater peace than they ever will, and they revile me for it.

I have heard the thrumming beat of marching feet on hard-packed earth.

Heard the keening elegy of Fluxwrought wingblades slicing through still air and flesh alike.

Heard the harmonic, shattering screams of the imploding cores of my erstwhile friends.

Heard the bitter, croaking laughter of brumeravens gorging themselves on carrion and discarded tool alike.

In all of it was peace. The peace of certainty, of righteousness.

The peace of knowing for a fact that the man in front of you was an enemy, not just a potential one.

The peace of knowing, beyond any shadow of doubt, that I was made for this.

I have known the peace of the eye of the storm, forgetting myself, forgetting all falsehoods and lies, knowing only the truth of my blades, the truth that I am a mote riding on the winds of fury.

It's not that I have never found peace, no.

It's only that I fear I will never know it again.

"At least you're not a Stig."

Bitter fucking comfort, though I supposed it true. At least I didn't proclaim what I was to the world in gilded writ. At least there was still something that was "me" inside of me, not just hollow Void. Would that that were all that was inside me...

See, I'd been a second gen pilot, snatched away from the claws of a mother who drank her fears away to stand wingblade to talon with the Beasts that threatened the world. And I'd been glad to go; even at that age, I knew it was what I wanted, knew it was where I belonged.

Not for the world's sake, mind you. Fuck the world, and all it had ever given me.

It was what I wanted for myself. I'd had nothing and been given a chance at everything I could ever want.

Strength. Power. The chance to win.

The S2's were incarnate miracles, striding tall through evacuated streets, absent the myriad flaws of the first generation. The first Seraphs, well, that man had slapped them together in record haste on a prayer and a collective dream of survival.

They'd been good enough, sure, but they were weak, vulnerable still, prone to cooking their pilots alive, assuming they held together long enough through the fire and Flame. We didn't know how strong the Beasts really were nor how to have a chance against them.

And the third generation, well...that was where the Stigs came from. By then, someone had figured out Halo field inversion, and it was all over for the pilots once they realized that the Seraphs cost far, far more than another unwanted child.

But the S2's...perfection. Could push 'em harder than yourself. They were fast. Deadly. And if you were good enough, hell, you were invulnerable. With the right pilot, man and machine would apotheose, an unwavering avatar of vengeance, the human will to never, ever submit again.

That's what they wanted, what they looked for in us. That pathological need to never, ever lose again, that will too indomitable to crack. And those of us who had had it, well, we piloted those angels as if we'd been born to those towering frames.

We were too in sync.

The best of us forgot how to feel comfortable in our own bodies, kicking and fighting to stay in those porcelain walls, desperation fueling our grasps at safety. Once you'd been one with a Seraph...everything else felt like death, or worse.

Helplessness.

Stumbling steps in a body with too few limbs, blind and frail as a newborn infant. I raised such a fit they all but let me sleep in the thing. It was for the best; anywhere else was too exposed. Couldn't be comfortable unless I was able to fight back.

On the rare occasion that I was forced out, I'd wander at night, looking to the sky, staring at Caelum glinting overhead, wondering if that man never condescended to us for the same reason.

I might not have been happy, but I was safe. Until the affinity became to strong.

It was the first inkling anyone had of Halo inversion. Its polar opposite, in fact: Conjunction.

One morning, He told me it was over. A hundred and seventeen fights without a scratch on me, a hundred and seventeen kills, and they were cutting me loose.

I was too old. Too hard to handle. Too stubborn.

So it was out on the open streets with a stipend and a "thanks."

I punched a hole through the wall when I heard the news. You could write it off as teenage angst, if not for it having been a solid meter of reinforced concrete.

They still let me go; too afraid to do otherwise, I assume. But it only got worse from there. The connection only got stronger. For whatever time I'd spent in the Seraph, its beating core lived on deep in my chest now.

I was stronger, yes, but we were one thing. A fighter.

The first person I killed just sneered in my direction. I didn't want to. But an S2 had only one job, pilot and Seraph alike. Never lose. Never stop fighting.

He burned on the spot, incinerated in the concordant perfection of my Halo. The thing in my chest demanded it.

At least he'd deserved it, not so different from a Beast.

The next didn't.

So I ran. I moved, over and over, city to town to city again, never staying still, never getting to actually live my life. I assume it all got swept under the rug, every broken body and burned building.

In time I learned to hide it, to force down the destroying angel inside. Days became weeks became months, and...I let myself hope. That there could be more to me than that. I made friends. Built a life. Fell in love. Read books and baked bread and did everything one was meant to.

Until the day he asked me to play stones.

I hadn't played before, but it was simple enough. White and black, good and evil, diametrically opposed, smooth porcelain maneuvering for territory.

I was good. The man I loved was better.

I moved the next day. I guess he didn't understand, in the end, didn't know me as well as he thought.

"It's just a game" were words no one would knowingly choose for their last.

I don't think the flames will ever die down. I know now that that Halo will burn anyone who wrongs me, anyone who tells me to stop fighting. Anyone who tells me I'm safe.

And they'll learn, in time, learn to stay away.

At least I'll never be a Stig.

I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren for all that I graced it with my presence. And in all that silence, in that void between clock ticks, when no sound meets my ears but that of memory, I remember how they named me Savior.

I didn't do it for that. Never gave two shits about the accolades, whether my family name was praised or reviled.

I did it because someone had to. People were hurting, dying, and the world did what it always did; it stood by and watched.

I think the philosophists named it something. Someone won some fancy award for the discovery, after distilling down that creeping miasma to isolate the causative agent. Etiology helped them feel in control, I assume, putting a name and identity on the root of the evil.

But science is no protection against demons, and no amount of theology could return Lucifer to Heaven.

Everyone else, well, we just called it brumerot. Seemed to fit, and it was hard to care why exactly your skin was sloughing off in sheets in the midst of it happening.

My parents begged me not to go, or, rather, they wrote a strongly-worded letter impressing upon me the value of pursuing my present studies, a most cursory exegesis of which laid bare the subtext:

They didn't care, so neither should I.

That was just the way of the world, as it always had been and would always be. Not caring was the only way one could avoid being crushed beneath its weight.

I was on the next ship. Someone had to care, had to help, and it would be me.

It was that conviction...no, that identity, that kept me going in the midst of it all.

It didn't matter that people were hurting, so long as I was doing something.

It didn't matter that, left and right, my fellows were showing signs of the affliction, so long as I was helping.

It didn't matter that, no matter how many I treated, how hard I fought, it was all palliative, and the epidemic burned on and on without signs of abating.

It didn't even matter when I found myself strapped down to a gurney, wheeled off to who knew what fate.

The rot had set in, they told me, my arm as good as lost.

Of course it was; my fingertips had begun to blacken two days ago, and that very morning, half the flesh of my hand had simply degloved as I'd tried to grab a cup of coffee.

But it didn't matter.

I was still me; I was my mission, even after they took one arm, and then the next a month later.

I kept going back, over and over, for there was yet work to be done.

I hardly noticed when they finally cut away the last bits of my old life; I hardly noticed I then stood alone against the affliction.

Everyone else had either died or given up and gone home. One way or another, they'd all stopped fighting, except for me.

The people called me a savior, then. The Clockwork Saint, all shiny porcelain that stood unsullied by the plague. The infection couldn't reach me, couldn't affect crystalline perfection. All the blood and tears and feces and prayers I waded through every day just rinsed off.

Odd, to me, that I was admired thus.

I was no saint, untouched by the epidemic, no matter how many I saved. I was an oracle, an omen of its coming. I was walking proof of how much this sickness would take from you.

I didn't realize just how true that was at the time.

Society's fever broke, eventually, or perhaps every last person that sickness could take with it was long since gone, and so I returned home, thinking somehow that everything had changed and nothing at all.

I was right, but only in the wrong fashion.

I thought only my body had been taken from me.

I thought myself immune to the disease, but the rot had sunk in to the bone. Past it, even, deeper still to those parts of myself that couldn't simply be replaced.

The woman I loved welcomed me home with open arms, saying she understood.

I watched her body burn a week later, and that was when I finally noticed it. That miasma, seeping from every crack in my unfeeling carapace, oily black wisps, like a lover's corpsesmoke.

I went back to a house that had been my home when I'd left it. There was little left inside. Everything of hers was already gone.

I reached for the cat I'd forgotten to feed in my grief and watched as the thing inside me stretched out its tendrils and melted flesh from bone.

I reached for my coffee and found it bitter and cold, the scone molded and inedible.

I reached for a pencil and the lead snapped and paper mildewed.

I suppose I didn't need to leave a note. Whoever read it would end up contaminated, after all.

So now I sit here alone in an empty room, lifeless and barren, for all that I graced it with my presence a few moments longer. And in all that silence, I remember how they named me Savior.

I remember the adulation, for fighting what no one else was willing to.

I think, not of the people I helped, but of the ones I couldn't, and of what both had lost.

And I wonder still, as I set flames to debride the last remnants of the disease, could one named saint or savior ever be saved?