Hell is me.

Birdies, birdies, gather ye here, round the marble nest...

In the land just past the Decapolis, by the tombs of the city's most ancient forebears, there lived a man called Legion. Some days, he howled like a beast, laughing as he savaged his own flesh with the jagged edges of stones. Other days he wept like a child, teeth chattering even as the sun blazed overhead. But more days still, he lingered in the quiet spaces, haunted but lucid: A stranger to the land and a stranger to himself.

Six years after the arrival of Legion, there came a man to the Decapolis by the name of Silas. He spoke of a man he had served with once - a fellow legionnaire from the Clades of Lolliana. A man whose name he got forgotten, even as he owed him a life debt.

Unfortunately, the Decapolis was a sprawling hub, and the number of former legionnaires who lived inside was in the hundreds, so he was asked to describe this man in more detail. 

He is impossibly strong, Silas said, and prone to shouting. 

And the townspeople said: Hm. 

And he’s a little bit sensitive to noise, Silas added.

And the townspeople said: Hmmm.

And… he has several freckles on his nose? continued Silas, which earned him the longest ‘hmmm’ of all. It was at this that he finally relented and told the truth. 

And… Well. I hate to mention it, he said. But I’ve been trying to find him for some years, and there’s a rumor, from some of the towns had stayed at in the past, that he might not be, you know, entirely well. 

And at that the townspeople said: Ah. Yes. We know someone who might fit that bill. But you must promise not to be mad. 

And as soon as Silas promised, he was led out to the tombs. 

Alright, Silas said. So I lied. I’m mad. But I know it would have been easy to just cast him out again, and however little you did, you did at least let him stay. 

The crowd he’d traveled with did have the grace to at least look slightly ashamed of themselves. He looked around the tombs and wrinkled his nose before adding. 

In your finest graveyard, even. Only smells faintly of rot and corpses. 

He asked the crowd if anyone was willing to come forward, and list what good deeds they had done for Legion. And while most were ashamed at how little they’d done, a few came forward with their small acts. 

I gave him my clothes, once, replied a beggar. 

I chased off some dogs that had chased him up a tree once, replied a boy. 

I bandaged his cuts, said one herbalist. But I wish I had simply stayed around long enough to prevent them.

And Silas gave them five denarius each for their troubles. 

I will never need your help as much as this man did, he replied. There is no favor you could do for me that would mean as much as what you did for him. Remember that.

Several hours later, tired and bruised, Silas returned to the town. 

Remember how I said I would never need your help as Legion did? he said. Well, perhaps I was too confident. 

It turned out that there were a lot of things he could not do around his friend. 

For starters, speaking Latin? Not ideal. Speaking bad Greek with a heavy Latin accent? Marginally better. Marginally. Trying to lead his friend into town on the fifth day, when the blacksmith was out sharpening scythes? Fucking terrible idea. 

And then they ran into a man with braids. Germanic braids. 

Silas pinched his nose just remembering how that went before continuing onwards. 

It took me two hours of wrestling just to get him into one of the tombs, he said. Two hours! And another three to take all his sharp rocks away. How many fucking sharp rocks can there be in one tomb anyway? Do you guys all demand to be buried with just mountains of sharp rocks? Does your afterlife say that you can pay for all your sins by giving Death a sufficient quantity of sharp rocks? Do you think you’re getting drafted into some kind of skeleton war against Roman ghosts whose only weakness is sharp rocks? Is there a new Olympic event where you have contests to see who can put the most sharp rocks in a single tomb? What the hell was that all about?  

And the citizens listened to the tirade patiently, but when it was done, one woman raised a hand. 

Was it, perchance, the tomb that has a statue of a woman with enormous breasts atop it? she asked.

It was the nearest tomb, Silas replied, defensively.  

Right, right, she said, hands up for peace. Now, that’s fair and all, but we kind of agreed to use that tomb as the tomb for putting all the sharp rocks in. From the other tombs. We figured putting them outside wasn’t the best idea, and he seemed kind of averse to going into that tomb from our past experience. I think the whole tits out thing just makes him uncomfortable, and you know how it is, a short fence still works better than none.

Silas mulled the response over carefully before giving his reply. 

Well, he said. Fuck. 

The word extended thoughtfully into the air for several seconds before he cut it short. 

It turned out that was about as bad as things ever got. 

Legion was not ready to make it into town, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t live a better life. Silas found that buying a tomb was not particularly expensive, and that keeping a living person in a tomb was legal, albeit a little morbid. Putting furniture and a well inside the graveyard was considered, yes, a mild eccentricity, but the region was close enough to Egypt that it wasn’t unheard of. So long as he didn’t trap Legion inside a catacomb to serve as his slave for all eternity, the people of the Decapolis could care less. 

He arranged for shipments of food to be brought up to his friend, and hired a talented doctor to heal the man’s wounds. Legion’s skin was a criss cross of pink, jagged scars, but the weeping sores healed and could, with time, fade. On his good days, Legion was almost normal, and on his bad, there were a few people willing to drop whatever they had on hand to restrain him before he hurt himself. 

But whatever was wrong with Legion was deeper than his skin, and no one knew how to treat it. The doctors said it was a sickness of the spirit, and the priests said that whatever it was affecting his soul was not coming from the Gods. 

Not cursed, they’d say. Wounded. The Gods cannot force him to heal, as they were not the ones that forced him to hurt. 

Which was, sure, deep and mystical and shit but also deeply unhelpful. 

Still the message was clear enough: Wait. Keep him alive long enough, and maybe, he’ll sort himself out. He was certainly trying. If he failed, it would only be because the strain killed him first. 

There came to Decapolis twelve men, following a thirteenth by the name of Jesus. 

It was, frankly, an odd trip. The sea of Galilee was only eight miles wide. Compared to the Mediterranean of Silas’s home, it was a puddle. But they had arrived after a storm, one where the waves had grown high enough to spill over the deck. Several other boats didn’t return at all, which was a first for the city. They’d forgotten what it was like, to have a sea could both give and take. 

Lots of stories came with that. The ship owner claimed he’d seen Jesus walk over the waters. The apostles claimed that they’d seen him do that and that he’d calmed the storm with a few words. Those claims made the Romans of the city nervous: One does not end a storm if it’s not their storm. Tempestaas did not interfere with Thor, who did not interfere with Indra, who did not interfere with Enlil. 

Which either meant this man had sent the storm, stolen the storm, or - more likely, but still a problem - was commiting casual blasphemy against foreign Gods. 

Silas kept an eye on them, because he kept an eye on all the holy men that went through the city. Priest-shopping was a little frowned upon in the world of spiritual illnesses, but he had money and hope and more care for his allies than concerns about decency. It latter was as Roman a vice as lead boiled wine. 

He did not speak with Jesus because he did not trust the man. He spoke instead with the most reasonable and respectable of the twelve-man entourage: A fellow Roman citizen by the name of Peter. 

He caught Peter in one of the markets, haggling over fish with one of the local fishermen. In his eyes, that was a great sign. A man could be as Holy as the Gods, but if he wasn’t grounded, he was useless. Like a kite without a string.  

Γεια he said to Peter in the most passable Greek he could manage. Hello. 

In the name of God, just use Latin, Peter responded. Your accent is thick enough to cut into cubes.

Silas was charmed. He liked Latin, and he liked straightforwardness. Peter paused a moment longer to inspect the fish before continuing. 

Actually, you look military, so let’s go further: Just tell me what you want. 

A miracle, Silas replied. And instead of fluffing up into some mystic man on the mountain, instead of faux stooping to dispense wisdom as if coming from a great height, Peter kept looking at the fish. 

Yeah, yeah, very dramatic, but what kind of miracle? Deaf guy? Blind guy? Lame guy?  Possessed guy? We did a dead guy once, but that was-

Possessed, Silas interrupted, both because he didn’t want to hear the story and also because it seemed closest to what Legion had described - the sensation of being full of parts he could not assimilate, of being lost within himself, teeming and wordless. 

Yeah, I can work with that. Just lemme get my fish and I’ll meet you by….?

The exorcism was a disaster. 

Silas had seen exorcisms before, and appreciated them for their theatricality. They always started with the possessed being asked what the name of their demon was, which never failed to get fun answers. Replies ranged from Garalan, Lord of Whores, to Bungo, The Shit Goblin. Then there was some fun swearing, the possessed got to really get their wiggles out, and in the end, wam-bam-thank-you-maam, there was a ritually cleansed person. Sometimes, it even stuck, and the world got an actually cleansed person. 

But when Peter asked Legion what his name was, there was no theater. The man had looked at him, and in the same voice he always used, he’d said: I am Legion, for I am many. 

Which hadn’t exactly thrown Peter for a loop, but had earned him a pause. Enough that the ritual of the whole thing had broken down.

What do you wish to be cleansed of, Legion? he’d asked, and there was a moment where you could see the pieces fit together in the other man’s mind. It was like Legion was made whole just to answer the question. Healed just long enough to know what was wrong with him. 

I do not know how to begin to communicate all the things I am ashamed of, Legion confessed. But I am so tired of looking in the mirror and hating who I see. Hating who I have been, and what I have forgotten. When I have the rocks, the only thought in my mind is that I could, somehow, find the part of me that hurts and cut it out. And it never works. 

It was that last sentence that Peter had latched onto. 

I can work with that, he’d said, then he’d rolled up his sleeves and begun the work. 

Silas never could really describe what happened after that. How strange and shattered the world felt that day. He could describe how the high keening cry of Legion had split into its components, and those components had been revealed to by the core of all things. He could describe how the day had been, on one hand, every bit as bright as before, even as the sky had grown dark with the detritus of another man’s soul. Even Peter seemed confused by what he was touching there - not a serpent, but the pieces it had left behind. The shed skin. There was an unspeakable filthiness to each fragment, a smell like iron and piss, but they left without a fight. He pulled and pulled, and Legion soothed, and when the sky darkened for the second time, it was not with a cloud of inert sin but by the setting of the sun. Legion had been exorcised for more than sixteen consecutive hours before Peter finished. 

It wasn’t until Legion opened his eyes and looked at Peter that the mistake was realized. 

I have done something terrible, Peter spoke, and the truth of his words rang through the husk of Legion like a bell. It turned to him, heart beating, lungs filling, indescribably and yet undeniably dead - and spoke. 

You did, it said gently. But you did not know. Come bring Christ, Jesus, and we will see what can be done. 

And Peter did not merely walk, he ran. 

Silas had not known that sin could touch the metaphysics of the world. It was like seeing an intaglio portrait of what a human should be - the negative space equivalent of a soul. It looked at him, and the wrongness made his stomach clench. It wasn’t looking - it was moving its eyes like oiled marbles in a socket made of bone. It filled its lungs like wet bags. It was dead, and yet it chose not to rot.

What are you? he asked, and it smiled in a way that did nothing to set him at ease. Worse than the looking. Worse than the breathing.  

A gap, it said. But, fixable. You have nothing to fear. 

And then it winked, like it had just said something clever. 

Jesus, it seemed, was a carpenter. 

Load. Bearing. Demons, he said in Aramaic. Silas didn’t speak Aramaic, but the words came through perfectly clear to him. It was a miracle, but it was the kind of miracle that Jesus seemed annoyed with. The kind of miracle where if someone commented on it he’d spin his hands and roll his eyes and say Yes, yes, we could get a translator and waste a bunch of time on that or you could get on with it, which is why I bothered with this in the first place. Be impressed when I’m gone. It’ll be longer than you think. 

(At least, that was the lecture Silas had received when he’d commented on it. He was absolutely awed by the whole experience. He’d begun developing opinions on whether all holy men should spend five years training as a carpenter.)

This time, however, it was Peter’s turn to be at the receiving end of a lecture, which Silas was actually relieved about. Where Jesus had been merely a little annoyed with Silas, he seemed absolutely flabbergasted with Peter. 

You can’t just… reach in and grab all the bad things out of a soul! Jesus stressed again. You  can grab, maybe, two without doing a serious structural analysis. Five, if you’re like me, and can look at someone and know exactly how their soul fits together. But you can’t just empty the whole thing out! The Essenes phrased it like a riddle! “Jesus”, they’d say, “if you remove every sin from a man, what are you left with? God, or nothing?” 

The thing that had been Legion smirked and Jesus rolled his eyes at it.  

You really aren’t as funny as you think you are, he said, and it shrugged agreeably. Jesus seemed to be the only one not visibly disgusted by the not-dead very-dead thing momentarily  piloting Legion’s skin suit. 

How do I put them back? Peter asked. The demons are gone. I banished them. I can’t just reach into Hell and pluck them out.

Jesus nodded in agreement, even as he looked distinctly uncomfortable. 

You can’t, he said. But you can bribe them and their prices are actually reasonable. How many would you say you cast out of him? Fifty? Sixty? 

Two-thousand, replied Peter, and at that, Jesus blanched. 

Ah, he said thoughtfully. Shit. Fuck, even.

Then he looked over at Silas and asked the most expensive question of his life: 

There is no need to over describe what happened next: 

Two-thousand pigs were purchased. If they’d been killed, one by one by one, the entire land would’ve ran red with blood, and the pigs would’ve spent hours marinating in their fear. 

Instead, they were released as one herd atop the cliffside near the tombs, and herded as one screaming mass into the sea. 

The record says that they drowned. This record was made out of squeamishness. They died on impact, which is quicker and less painful, and unfortunately, fairly gruesome to watch. 

But it did happen, and from their deaths, two-thousand demons were summoned into this world. 

The worst demons of the Earth are known by name - Beelzebub and Azazel, Abbadon and Asmodeus, Belphegor and Mammon. They drive great evils - plague, famine, war and death. But there are littler, nameless demons that fulfill simpler tasks. There is a demon of Getting Drunk and Saying Mean Things. There is a demon of Getting a Giant Embarrassing Crush on Your Best Friend’s Spouse And Then Obviously Doing Nothing About It, Obviously, But One Time They Scooched Past You In a Hallway And You Thought About The Way They Pressed Up Against You For, Like, An Hour. There is a demon of Clapping After The Airplane Lands. There is a demon of Judging People For Having Food Allergies Like They Chose to Get Killed by Peanuts for Some Stupid Bozo Reason. 

There are, frankly, a lot of demons that go into the making of a human soul. Legions of them. And Jesus assembled two-thousand in front of him, in all their mildly sinful glory, and used them like individual pigments of paint to recreate a masterpiece. It was not a possession, but it was also the opposite of an exorcism. It was putting the evil back in a man, piece by piece, place by place, until they were what they should have been before. Until there were no more gaps left. Until the thing that lay in the realm past death became the man who had once screamed through the tombs and until the man who had once screamed through the tombs became the sum of his broken parts. 

Legion opened his eyes, and he saw. And he remembered. And he was a legion no more. 

My name, he said slowly, as if getting used to having a body, is Rufus. 

That’s kind of a shitty name, Silus replied, tears in his eyes. 

It is, he said back. My hair isn’t even red. I think they called me that because I was a weirdly veiny baby. 

And they both laughed until their voices were hoarse while hugging until their arms were sore. They’d never been so happy in their entire lives. 

Rufus departed for Rome only a few days afterwards. The city had given him enough, he said, and he was tired of taking more. When he was a madman in the hills, he could be forgiven for not noticing how scared he was making the locals. Now that he was whole, he had no such excuse. 

Silas lingered. He did not know why. He’d have journeyed to Rome for his friend’s company alone, but there was something palpable to the space that needed him there. 

So he stayed. 

Sometimes, he’d get news from across the sea - really, just a stone’s throw away - about the adventures of the carpenter. Apparently, a few years after the Rufus debacle, he was sentenced to death for some incomprehensible crime. This was not a particularly rare thing in Roman lands. Weirder than the sentencing was that it somehow managed to succeed and fail at the same time. They killed the man and made him God. A lot of people were extremely angry about it, but Silas himself was delighted. Getting a new God didn’t have to be that big of a deal, and really, maybe all Gods should spend five years as a carpenter. There’s a gravitas something can only get by being in the world and not above it. 

He heard about the whole ordeal several months too late to have any part in it of, of course, but he still made the time to travel down to the new sacred sites. He saw the cross where Christ had been hung, and he went to the tomb where he’d been laid, and for the first time since the Rufus affair he was struck by something that was inexplicably, unnaturally, empty. A place where something-that-was-not supposed-to-happen, had happened anyway. There was a gap in that cave, a spot where Jesus’s dead body was supposed to be, and he could feel something on the other side of the gap peering over at him. Smirking. 

He left. It was the cave, more than anything else, that convinced him that Jesus had done something stranger than merely dying and coming back to life. 

Jerusalem burned just two decades after that. 

Silas was old by then. His hair, once brown, once silver, was now just gone. And it was gone in the way things were supposed to go, the gapless-going that he’d spent twenty years learning to recognize. The destined death that all things were promised.  

He still made the journey out to see where the temple of Solomon had been. In fact, he begged for it, and was one of the first non-soldiers to be allowed to visit its ashes. He didn’t even have to make it through the gate to feel the void where it had been. 

He navigated by the sense of it. Like a flaming pillar, it stood, more distinguished by its absence than it could ever have been by its presence. The pattern of life becomes invisible when it is in harmony, but a sour note demands to be heard. 

He felt a little disgusted with himself for thinking in such fluffy mystic terms and scratched his ass, just to dispel himself of any illusion of wisdom. Also, because his ass itched. A twofer. 

He arrived at the square where the temple had stood and took a breath. He closed his eyes and sat, and reached. 

And it reached back. 

Ah, it said. Hello. Surprised you looked for me.  

What are you? Silas asked it for the second time in his life. 

It thrummed pleasantly through the area. When it wasn’t wearing a corpse, it was actually a joy to deal with. 

I am not Jesus, it replied. He has his own dominion. 

I know, said Silas, and he was surprised by the confidence he could say it with. But I did not ask what you aren’t. 

He felt himself smile. It was smiling. It was borrowing his face. He did not mind sharing. 

He remembered how unphased Christ had been, as he spoke with the thing. Part of him truly hoped that somehow, he’d become more like the carpenter.

Nobody does. Perhaps they should. Shall I tell you a story, Silas of Decapolis? Would you listen? 

He sat down in the ashen remnants of God's house on Earth, and opened his heart to what lay in the gap. 

Before there was anything, there was nothing. And I was that nothing. Every inch, a void. You can’t even imagine what that was like, to be everything. To be everywhere. To be completely alone.  

Images flickered through his mind. Legion clutching a bloody stone. This thing, seeing itself in Legion. Christ, eating the sacrament of his own flesh, his own blood. This thing, seeing itself in him too. 

I wanted to create, but when you are the blankness of the world, creation is like biting off chunks of yourself. Every place that you are is carved from a place I am no longer. And I wanted to give you - 

The stars whirled through the sky like dancers. Trees flowered in his mind and rotted into mushrooms, weaving through the soil in patterns beautiful and sad. Life played in a melody, roiling and changing but never silent. 

-everything. 

So I died. I ate myself, to give you, you. But there’s a caveat to that, isn’t there? 

The cave. The ashes. The husk of Rufus. 

Wherever you are missing from this world - where a gap forms in the pattern of all things. What bleeds out? If the work was my death, and the world was my work, what happens when it breaks? 

I forgot to post my new Warlock Irii! (Everyone calls her Eerie because she uhhhh died from a parasite gestating in her corpse but then came back to life and everyone’s pretty freaked out about it. That parasite is now a beloved community pet. )

That’s her familiar Sproggit. Which is my DM assigned familiar. I told my DM to assign me all my spells and such because I literally don’t know what’s happening. When I told him that was really weird because Irii is a frog and that it was like a human carrying around a fake baby he just laughed.

So Irii’s catchphrase immediately became, “This is Sproggit, don’t worry, they’re not a baby.”

also

you're telling me

this THING

is a librarian??

I love these texts