Layer 13: Ghost Against The Machine

Ithurtithurtithurt! Fuck! What’d the little shit have to do that for? I open my heart up to a fellow ruthless seeker of knowledge, and this is the thanks I get? All I wanted was to enlighten… I just wanted to know… And know, I would. This wouldn’t be the end of me. This metal body was all I needed to survive. Right now I was painfully aware of the shriveled, emaciated form that used to be the Man In Yellow being kept alive by this scorpion-shaped iron lung. I was wearing the skin of the Manticore right now, not the other way around. I owned the Manticore. It would be another step to accumulating knowledge. I just needed some upkeep, is all.

We arrived at the Spire, myself and the Man In Black, finally. The sun was low in the sky, and too big, casting a deep orange glow over everything not coated in stretched-out shadow. . I knew they had been keeping an eye on me, but for what, exactly, I wasn’t certain. They couldn’t have known of the Umbral Plot just from watching me; I didn’t even understand it all myself. I was just a cog in some larger machinations. So why? Why did I have to mask my intent and go along with the plan and just trust that The Moon Was Watching Over Me? I worried, and worried that worry was showing, and spiraled into a twitchy wreck before I even entered the Hive. I tripped over the hem of my chartreuse velvet gown getting out of the car, just a little, but in conjunction with my fidgeting, it was enough to (probably) come across as suspicious.

And then I saw that thing. The giant bug with the face of a man, slinking like a tiger and jingling like a wind chime. Silver chains dangled from a hollow carapace as it stalked towards the car.

“What do you want?” the Man in Black asked with a frown.

“I require healing!” came the creature’s raspy reply. “Please, fellow of mine in service to the Sun… It hurts so so much. The pain consumes—”

“Alright, alright, spare the theatrics and follow.”

The creature seemed overjoyed at this. “Oh, thank you! I am in your debt, truly, truly, thank you!” It bounded behind us now, like a deathly skinny puppy with double the number of legs it should have had. I, too, was overjoyed. This… thing demolished any ability of mine or my companion’s to get hung up on subtleties.

We reached the door of the Spire.

Eyes shut, I still saw. I saw fire in the aether, where it should have died. I saw shimmering iridescent waves of heat tear newborn stars to shreds and birth new ones in their wakes, I saw mighty suns implode in mere instants to dirths of light. But, none of these things I saw in much detail. I saw little bits of each of them, washing over my eyelids like waves of film, and I let the tides carry imagery as flotsam to my vision without holding onto anything in particular. While I don’t remember all of what was in front of my eyes, hell, I hadn’t even really taken in most of it to begin with, I got the gist. I saw the universe as a single shimmering continuum of death and rebirth, with no bias towards my own planet or another. In essence it was the purest documentary never recorded and ever shown, entirely objective and entirely alien to anything I could (or wanted to) enjoy seeing.

Because, yeah, it was a painful watch; salt from this visual tide burned my eyes and nostrils. Warm, salty thin liquid sloshed to the back of my throat and chafed it raw with the particulate it carried, the idea that I was seeing the mind of something greater than myself and yet all the colder for it.

Despite myself it still birthed a new phrase to swim around in the overcrowded tank of ideas in my head: Observe the Archetypes, capitalized exactly like that, as though “the Archetypes” were some idea of religious importance.

Alice sat on her bed and watched as Alistair’s eyes twitched frantically in their owner’s sleep. It was hard to watch, but they needed to rest after a stunt like that. But goddamn, she thought, if I don’t have half a mind to run out while you’re out cold, and see how you like it… But she remained at her purple-clad companion’s side.

A skeletal hand coated in thin, taught skin pulled the elaborately gilded wooden door to the Spire open. I could have sworn it was solid brass last time, Seelie thought for a moment, but such frivolous things were not to be contemplated right now. Right now she was about to have an audience with the Sun King Oberon, or at least one of his avatars, and she had to be focused even if she was technically employed by his wife. The heavy door swung open, and a tall, thin form with milky pale blue face and sunken, beady eyes bowed slightly. He parted his puckered, thin lips and offered a simple, “Greetings.” A few loose, wispy hairs grew from the sides of his sharply wrinkled scalp, and his nose was so small and flat as to appear nonexistent from even a conversational distance, though the shape of his face wasn’t distorted to reflect this. If anything it appeared disproportionately stretched out in the center, without a nose to give context to the surrounding space. In short, this doorman was clearly inhuman.

“We’re here to speak with Head Archsee Puck,” came the blunt response from the Man In Black.

The milky-skinned man nodded and tossed his blood-red cape over himself, revealing a beautiful outer layer of golden thread. Seelie gasped quietly in awe of the sudden transformation, but followed dutifully along with the Man In Black. The tiger-like mass of metal stayed behind the pair and didn’t appear to be able to enter. Nevertheless, Seelie pressed on with her companion. She didn’t have any particular reason to dislike the creature, but it seemed to ooze danger from its swollen metal form, and in her line of work that was reason enough to keep one’s distance.

The hallway seemed infinitely long. Portrait after doll-like portrait of mechanically posed gentlemen and ladies lined the vermillion walls, their eyes not quite following the observer so much as seeming to always look past them. Just next to them.

Behind them.

It was only after three times passing by the repeated image of a tall fellow with a pipe in one begloved hand and a slightly-too-long skull in the other that Seelie realized they were walking in circles. It took more repetitions before the shadows cast in the orange glow from the bracket lights betrayed the slight negative tilt the hallway was on—in other words, that it was not a hallway at all, but a ramp.

She tapped the Man In Black on the shoulder. “Where is he taking us?” she asked, with a touch of uneasiness in her voice.

Even that slightest touch perked up the ears of the perpetually moonlit doorman.

“I assume, to one of the meeting rooms upstairs. We’re going up, by the way— not just in circles,” he hastily added.

He underestimates me, Seelie thought. “I see. So who’s our friend?”

A swirling flash of gold and crimson erupted ahead. A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it metallic glint. And then all was still again, as if nothing had happened.

Layer 14: Golden Sun

Two nine-inch metal rods—curse nails— blossomed from the Man In Black’s wrist. He could do nothing, say nothing, so overwhelming was the shock. Extending a trembling hand, he wrapped a finger around the flat head of the left nail—

“I wouldn’t do that.” It was the trembling, yet resounding voice of the doorman. “There are some important veins thereabouts, held together by nothing but the Spell you’re under. If you want them removed, you’ll walk by my side and let Seelie follow us alone. Oh yes—” he paused to acknowledge Seelie's taken-aback-ness— “I’ve known your name for a while. I was at the table when we decided to start watching you.”

The paintings grew and warped to cover the hallway— stairwell? Ramp?— ceiling, floor and all. All the stately, important looking subjects, too, morphed into one person, not faceless but of implacable features. Look askance and nothing would have seemed out of the ordinary about their face, but focusing on closer details revealed the quantum visage he held. Eyes neither bulging nor beady, nose neither pinched nor flat, lips neither thin nor full. His jawline shifted shape, too, like waves hitting a shore. The one constant was the aura the figure gave off— that of a king. A warm, charismatic ruler who nonetheless held more power than even the most benevolent individual could justifiably wield. One word sprung to Seelie’s mind:

Gold.

As a metal, it conducts heat very well, leading it to often be warm to the touch. It’s also quite soft and malleable, as a well-intentioned ruler might be susceptible to influence from his subjects and advisors. As a color, it’s bright and warm, perhaps the brightest of all; as even without a metallic element, gold can only be conveyed as a gamut of pale yellows to dark oranges, a spectrum of warmth. In these ways gold was the symbol Oberon, the Sun King, had been assigned, and such was the impression he made.

The milky pale doorman knelt silently, and was met with a chorus of deep, whale-like rumbles with the odd buzzing click tossed in. It was brain-rattling gibberish, to Seelie, but the doorman seemed to understand. After what felt like an eternity, he unfolded his nearly-insectoid form and faced Seelie once more. “I have been ordered to introduce myself. I am Nosferatu, first Leecher of the legions that will be. I have aligned myself with my deadliest threat so that I, and the children born of my bite, may stalk the shadows. Whether under the sharpest midday sun or softest glow of the Hunter’s Moon, Nosferatu’s Legion will never be cleansed away!”

Seelie knew the rumors, of course. She was an avid user of the Necronomicon Forums, where you couldn’t throw a stone without hitting some bait thread about “VAMPIRES IN REAL LIFE???” She usually ignored them, as did most savvy users. Using the name of an already-known monster archetype in the title of a thread was a sure sign, more often than not, of lazy bait. It’s easy to get attention when you talk about something people already know. Most true stories were titled something less specific, but not so vague as to be endlessly applicable (for that was another genre of hoax entirely); think something like “I’ve been feeling anemic on my walk home.” Actually this was remarkably similar to the thread Seelie had been reading before she was dragged along to the Spire. Although Nosferatu is pretty on-the-nose, name-wise, she thought.

The whole time she fell inside her own head, like a hole, like a bottomless pit, eyes bore into her forgotten physical form. One pair belonged to Nosferatu, two glimmering obsidian beads sunken into desaturated teal leather. One of the pairs did not belong to the Man In Black, who presumably valued the structural integrity of his ulnar veins too much to turn and join the viewing party. Most of the eyes, though, not pairs but raw numbers of eyes, new ones each time you looked, belonged to the painted avatar of the Sun, that raw Mobius strip portrait of power covering what had to be the entire interior of the tower. If Seelie could pull herself back out from her thoughts, she would have been able to understand Nosferatu’s meaning, when he asked the Sun King, “Please forgive me.” She would have known what it meant when he cradled her head in the crook of his arm and appeared to kiss her neck, oh-so-delicately. Maybe then, she would have understood his plea for forgiveness was both to the one he served, and to Seelie herself.

As it stood, pure sensation was her mind’s only lifeline to her body and soul; so it was that with the relief of heat draining from her over-pressured cranium that Seelie’s perception returned. And it returned sharper than ever, as well. The first comparison she could make, recency bias being what it is, was to her first time with Powder Pleroma. At least, that’s the name it was sold under; an experimental new stimulant that combined cutting edge medical technology and mysticism tested by centuries. Seelie was pretty sure it was run-of-the-mill cocaine. In a similar vein, though, this… Power, yes, that was the only way to describe it, this overwhelming ability to perceive and react, held a similar kind of mystique. It was the kind of appeal that only some forbidden fruit can hold.

I, The Manticore, paced by the heavy door. I’d been waiting for what must have been an eternity, I hadn’t consumed any fear in a few nights, and I was in pain, leaking rusty blood from a thousand newly-opened gaps in my armor. The once-orange sun was now little more than a meaty purple-red silver on the far horizon. What’s keeping them? I thought.

And then the door unlatched, from the inside, loudly. A familiar set of long, thin, milky-blue fingers came into view to push the door further open.

As the wall between inside and outside shrank, I realized I could not smell a single fully human soul in the corridor inside. I could pick up the same once-human-now-programmed machine mind that all the Men In Black had, and two presences of cold power surrounded by… something, something with such multifaceted mental force behind it that I didn’t even want to have to consider it. It’d be like trying to figure out a person’s psychology by starting with the atomic makeup of brain matter and hormones, too massive a task to ever be useful. But that was it; there was no capacity for fear anywhere in the Spire. Fuck this, I thought. I’m going hunting. Even with my boundary field destroyed, the barrel I shot fish out of, I’m still the fucking Steely Manticore. If you didn’t fear me, even a little bit, you were either lying, insane, or unconscious.

Some would say that the Manticore’s entire existence was born from a desire to be observed as intimidating, either with knowledge or physical prowess.

Another goddamn line. More of this crap had been invading my thoughts, all this flowery prose that stood in staunch opposition to me, the beast who collects fear to understand it. That’s what I’d always been, all the way back to the days when I killed for knowledge, to know what we breathed for.

It was nice, finding a framework to understand one’s purpose; especially after so long spent drifting from fascination to stray fascination.

With that happy thought, I set out

Something crawled and prickled, beneath my metal skin.

Layer 15: I Know A Ghost

I awoke in a cold sweat in a bed of pale powdery sand. The repetitive sound of waves crashing, again and again, nearly lulled me back to sleep, but some small squirming hook in my brainstem kept wriggling and jerking me awake, so I sat up. As I did, my skin seemed to tighten around me ever so slightly as my sweat evaporated into a salty shell. The sea ahead of me was a sludgy teal, and it was at this point I realized what sensation was keeping me awake.

The smell.

Ahead of me lay a literal dead sea; chock-full of nutrients if the color was anything to go by, but home to nothing to eat them. All that potential energy just went to waste, rotted in the harsh sun… which wasn’t actually so bright as I thought. Looking up, I couldn’t quite make out a distinct shape of the sun, though it did hang directly overhead in a cloudless sky. Sending my gaze earthbound once more, I looked inland this time. Behind me, rolling dunes stretched for a good 500 yards or so, studded with a forest of ornate crosses that nonetheless seemed patched together from sheet metal. A few had bent over in the sea breeze, making the picture even more reminiscent of a maritime grove. Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you; I couldn’t manage to focus on anything so far from the primal sea in front of me.

Was it really the stink of excess? I sat there, taking in the scent with nothing better to do, and couldn’t answer. It did remind me somewhat of the smell of the woods, when condensed in the Manticore’s boundary field, but it felt so… wholly one, as if every part of every thing had decayed into it. This sea reeked of assimilation the same way those foul black rivers of death did. Images flashed through my head; fuzzy images of flesh flaking off bones in a swirling tide, fish and insects and even smaller things picking away at bone only to fall apart themselves, minds and souls decaying away in the same way. And yet it wasn’t wasted, it was instead becoming potential energy for new life to grow from.

I… I don’t think that’s quite right. I don’t know why I thought of it that way at first, but my instinctual response wasn’t one I agreed with. This rotting sea was sickening me, at the thought of its existence. I have to get off this hellish beach, covered in this jagged white sand with all these flimsy reminders staring at my back (because I don’t dare turn from the waves now.)

I have to go home. But there is no home. Everything past the dunes is gone, and everything in front of me is going away.

As panic set in, a slender figure in a long white robe (dress?) emerged from the crosses behind me. I felt like I should know… her? But I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t describe her in any qualitative sense, nor even in database tags. She was such that only vague aesthetic language flitted across my mind when I saw her, words like “ethereal” and “fleeting” along with phrases along the lines of “like a ghost beneath a full moon” or “the physicality of a salp colony”. The word “colony” set off another string of synapses, sending words like “coral” and “cancer” and “polyp” to fly across my mental corkboard, but I had to pull myself out of my head.

And she was gone, just as quickly as she had shown up.

Then back again, right at my side. She tapped my shoulder. “Time to wake up.”

Alistair shot awake in their chair at my slightest touch.

I was drenched in a second layer of panicked sweat tightening around me once again. I was freezing, too, except for the small warm handprint on my shoulder. I turned to my left and saw Alice watching over me. “You ok?” she asked me with a slight smile. “You were thrashing around in your sleep. I didn’t want you to fall out of your chair, so…”

I struggled to piece together what happened. I remembered opening a car door to return to the Juno Reactor, and then I must have fallen asleep, or else passed out… Goddammit. I hate this. I hate it. I just want to know where I was, what I did, what I should know, I hate this, I hate all these gaps in my memories.” I cut myself off when I realized my thoughts were coming out of my mouth.

“It’s ok! Really, not much happened. You came in, collapsed, and I just kinda”— she pantomimed dragging something too heavy to lift— “carried you over to your chair.”

That was not carrying, I thought, but kept my commentary to myself. “Thank you. And, I'm sorry.” Alice had no response. I don’t know if she heard me or not; even though I fought the tightening of my vocal cords with everything I had, sometimes my voice just wouldn’t make more than a squeak, and I feared this might be one of those times. “Thank you, Alice.” That was all I really needed her to hear.

The moon rose low that night. It hung in the cloudless sky like a limelight, or maybe an eye. Said sky seemed so much closer to the ground than it should have, like the world’s verticality was… well, maybe not reduced so much as shifted downwards. Usually in Wintertree, the omnipresent skyscraping spires seemed to hold the sky up like a sanctified ceiling, only failing to deliver the illusion of the outdoor cathedral on the foggiest nights. Tonight, despite the cloudlessness, a different fog set in over everything. A silvery light of clarity, as blinding as any impenetrable pea soup. The Hunter’s Moon bore down on the city tonight.

Layer 16: The Night That Fate Stood Still

I was enraged. And starving. I just needed fear, and this damnable follower wouldn’t even provide me that. My head spun inside its metal casing. I felt thin blood pool in the tips of my shriveled, vestigial limbs. I felt the paste that could once have been called a heart slosh that rusty fluid through mostly-hollow veins. Despite this raging dizziness, I had a duty; I owed it to the man I once was, the Man In Yellow, the man who killed for knowledge, to keep consuming; souls, minds, bodies, or maybe just brains, the intersection of the three.

I picked my way through hazy tunnels and tore through false walls like a man possessed, though I’d long since lost that excuse. Now I just had to make things right, or as right as they could be. FUCK! White-hot pain tore through my remaining nerves, emanating and pulsing from my mutilated ear like sound through a subwoofer. I throbbed, every bit of the gnarled flesh that once was a Man In Yellow on a quest for knowledge shuddered like a dying pulpy heart.

And still, I pulled myself forward.

Creaking metal spikes tore through cardboard, plastic, and brick in equal accord. Wires snapped and sparked beneath my claws. Something burned in my wake. I’m sure my pained blade to the universe caught someone’s eye, but everything just hurt and I needed my family again.

A courtyard garden. A man reads a book on a stone bench. The cover is inscrutable, as are his features. The shape of his face, the tone of his skin, even the length and color of his hair are obscured by an ever-shifting oily haze. Surrounded by tall stone walls, he would have been invisible to the universe were it not for a lone observer standing in the falling snow, close enough that you can tell she knows him. She’s pale, and tall, with long blonde hair so light it’s almost silver. Despite the wintry weather, she’s dressed in a thin white sundress, the kind you’d see someone wear on a walk to the beach. And she may as well be standing in sand, not snow, for how bothered she is by the chill, eyes on the man drowning in information.

The man and the woman are holding hands now, book and castle and snow nowhere to be seen. In their place, there’s an enormous meadow soaking in the dying orange rays of a day well spent. Two children, both who seem to take after their mother in looks, are running around in some anarchic revision of tag that only children can comprehend. The pair from the courtyard sit on the grass, the woman in her same dress and the man in a blurry mess of khaki and seersucker, I can’t remember what it was that day.

Yes, these are my memories. Not all so idyllic as this, of course. There were days where I was alone in my study, weeks even, without so much as seeing the sun. There were certainly nights my wife screamed at me that I was never there, that I only cared about my inane scrolls and endless research, and the kids howled from their beds knowing their parents fought. There were tensions between my work and my family, to say the least, but I never thought they’d impede me in any way.

Then that one fateful night. I had stormed off to a certain castle after a bad fight, determined to prove the worth of my work before the Society of the Ancient Chamber. They were my second family, my true family, for they were the only ones who understood the dire importance of my days spent consuming information. Something was different today. I could usually expect a warm greeting and warmer drink to tide me over while waiting for everyone to arrive. We’d wait in a high-ceilinged entrance hall, various shoes clicking on black and white checked tiles as we milled about chatting and sipping tea or cider under merry orange candlelight from high above. We’d then retire to a Round of throne-like armchairs in some cloistered chamber. There we would discuss the occult, the nature of our findings, and things such as, along with cracking jokes and forming repertoire. It was half work meeting, half social gathering, and a full-time preoccupation for me. Despite our egalitarian seating arrangement, I was something of a big-shot, close to the (very) unofficial leader position. As ashamed as I am to admit it now, I felt more at-home there than I did with my wife and children.

Today was different. I swung open that familiar heavy oak door and was greeted not with warmth, but the inside of a hollow obsidian prism. A blue glow spilled from who-knows-where, revealing my acquaintances and colleagues standing in a circle around some mangled puddle. I hustled into place, and the meeting began.

“Scholars, I have seen the Truth with my own eyes.”

I don’t know who said it, but murmurs spread throughout the circle.

“I have nearly scratched divinity. If you have any trust in me, or what you’ve seen in your studies, listen well. The people outside of this room are nothing but playthings for the enlightened and the divine. Toy with them as your urges dictate, and don’t worry about the consequences. That absolute and brutal rule of the strong and knowledgeable is what makes divinity divine. I have seen it.”

Everyone fell silent.

And I don’t remember much after that. We drifted apart with hardly any parting words, and I eventually found myself at home. It was then that I realized how fully I had accepted my nature, how entirely I internalized my newfound justification for auto-idolatry. I was a puppet of the divine, yes, but I am also destined to be that same force. My head spun. This is… Awesome. As in, it inspires awe in me, to behold myself.

I mustn’t get carried away, though. I have duties, as one who can ascend to the highest throne.

“Humanity is a god. A fractured and failed one, but one with all the pieces to stand amongst the Sun and Moon. There is a power in the record of our species that is matched by the Sun’s explosive isolation or the Moon’s proximal pull. The power of our human mind is so great that we could, potentially, alter our very cells, even atoms, with the power of concentration alone.

As members of this Society of the Ancient Chamber, holders of this knowledge, you now have exclusive access to any of the people below us. Make them your followers, forge alliances, assimilate them into yourself, when you feel the time is right, and who knows? You might become the avatar of Yaldabaoth.”

This final word, this final name, seemed to make the room shudder.

I opened the door to my home. Unlocked, as was the norm. This was a pretty nice and trusting corner of the world. Behind me, I dragged a silver axe. With each breath, my yellow pinstriped blazer seemed to shrink around my chest like a python squeezing the air from my lungs. And looking back, that was the first time I saw myself from the outside, the first time my face was clouded in the silvery cocoon of the ethereal and unknowable.

In this moment, I have no need for such weak-willed, spinelessly empathetic beings. I need my true friends, those truly devoted to finding Truth, I need to be known again and loved again by the crowd in dark blue. But I cannot sleep, and when I can, I cannot dream. It is only in dreams I feel known and loved, accepted, admired even. I’m looked up to, respected, for my knowledge, for that intangible pleroma that won me nothing but pain in my waking hours. I swung the axe down with all my might. Again and again. I obliterate the bodies, those temples upon which entropy feeds. One less agonized heat sink. I made a difference to that one. Not everyone can be saved. They’ve seen too much of me. This is for the best. I didn’t know I had those thoughts at the time, but if I had them now, in retrospect, I must have had them all along. Squelches turn to crunches turn to hollow thunks, as my might drives the head of the axe into the rust-stained floor.

This is the first time I remember what my self-worship wrought.

A stomach, maybe even mine, grows bloated, and from my deepest viscera I belch a sickening pink cloud of vapor with a hiss. It fades away into the cool evening breeze. My clawed legs begin to carry me back to the onyx pyramid, or castle, or whatever it is these days.

The Manticore clicked its way down those frozen asphalt rivers with intentionality, like it was stalking something, though it had no particular target in mind. Maybe “sensible” is the only criterion my prey needs to meet; not so insane as to be fearless, of course, but not so tied up in illogical superstition as to avoid things that go bump in the night. Things like me. Beneath the metal mask, a lipless face twisted into a smirk.

Yes; I have had my humanity rejected for me, I have been exorcised from this society, the one place I can call home. There is no place for well-intentioned evil in this world. So I must continue to eat past satiation, because it’s all I can do when left to my own devices. Better to destroy the world than myself, if something must be destroyed.

My thoughts were interrupted by a tide of noise behind my back. Footfalls, you could have called them, once, but these were frenzied and hungered, like the steps of a hundred-legged monster. Or… No, these were human footfalls. I whipped around

Or meant to

Some kind of instinct kept me turning with what felt like the pace of a particularly slow hour hand, like these scythe-like claws were baked into the pavement each time I took a step in my clumsy tank-controlled reorientation. It took all my remaining will to force those pneumatic contractions to go through. I was so tired that my muscle might as well have not existed, that my split limbs may as well just be rotting bone scraping patched-together metal at this point.

And then I saw it.

A procession all in black, each member plucking one long veiny string (or maybe a stringy vein) from their arm with lunatic abandon. But now, their listless shuffle had been replaced with a lunatic full tilt sprint, and the careful extraction of the string became equally frantic. Some had sloughed skin off their arms to approach the string’s origin. Others had started scratching at the base of the string, and still others had broken off the offending arm entirely, pulling the string from the shoulder stump among shards of bone. The most disturbing were the ones who had forgotten the string all together, letting it trail behind them like a banner as they dashed forth.

This lunatic Wild Hunt surged past me, just as they did as individual shells in my hunting ground. Whether this was the tax they paid to a being superior in its knowledge, a good turn in thanks for letting them march past earlier, or simply ambivalence towards my existence, I didn’t know; but as loathe as I am to admit it, I was grateful all the same. I hold just one fragment of the Shattered God within me, and a crowd holds many; that’s just simple math. No matter how much better my single fragment is, more of Yaldabaoth’s will is held in the collective consciousness than in any person. So, I reasoned as the maddened footfalls swelled up around me, I too should hunt. I should lead a hunt of my own. I should take the burden I was forced to bear and distribute it among many. It reduces harm to hold it in common.

The moon bore down as the Manticore had this revelation. poppop PopPop Pop Pop BAMBAM. On either side of the street, lightbulbs exploded under some mysterious silver pressure. Glass rained down and chimed upon hitting the pavement. The only light, now, came from the sky. The giant round moon, ever watchful, that seemed to be within grasp now, lit the cloudless sky a deep blue.

The same blue as the Society’s robes.

The Manticore had an idea.

basked in heavenly silvers and blues

for the first time since that hated day in the obsidian pyramid

he felt truly alive.

A papery fluttering sound emerged from the craggly overlapping sheets of brass on his back. Eventually, it morphed into more of a buzz, or a hum, and with a mighty crunch, oblong plasticy wings burst forth. The Manticore allowed them to carry him to his destination, and so the limp multi-legged form took to the darkened skies.