The flayed man had been singing, as he walked across the dirt road, the jagged stones biting into the exposed muscles of his feet. It was a song that the woman who had birthed him had sung, a long time ago, back when he had been little more than a cloud of possibilities, a tiny being that contained an infinity of wonder inside his tiny skull.

“Oh little lotus flower, in the shadow of the Great Wall…”

But the wonder had faded over the years, the oceans of possibilities crystallizing into an unyielding I, his proclivities slowly growing, expanding until they overcame all pother attribute, becoming rough stone that tumbled and burned in the great furnace that was the world.

“Oh little lotus flower, far, far away…”

And it had turned, that rough stone, it had ground against the unyielding masses of humanity, had shed its edges and produced Nergui, who had lacked brilliance and worth, whose facets were clouded and shot with veins of red and gold, brittle and yet unique in his smallness, in his unimportance.

“Oh little lotus flower, shinning like the moon…”

And now it had been torn apart by tiny hands, hewn down to a sliver, a tiny little fragment of the I, to be reduced to ego, as the id of the swarming gods inside him was in control of the body, moving one limb at a time, slowly merging, running together until their voices were one voice, his voice, until the lungs and the tongue and the mouth formed the words that the fragment pined for, that smelled of milk and honey and incense, burning at the feet of the Buddha.

“Oh little lotus flower, gone, gone too soon…”

And the fragment ascended from the mass, that was now churning inside it, ascending higher into the recesses of the brain that had remained functioning, when the reptile and the monkey had perished screaming, into those higher planes where thought and being and identity dwelt and ignited a tiny spark, that would soon become a flame to consume him.

“Gone, gone too soon…”

The flayed man sang his lullaby and it was now a hymn, a war-song for his own mind, that turned the waters of those intelligences in his favor, causing an ego to rise from the churning waters, an island of the self that had perhaps once Been Nergui, infused with knowledge of those worlds without language of distance or time. And it saw, the Nergui, the expanses of the world and beyond, as they folded in around it until they fit into his mind. It saw its place in the universe, the teeming millions of lives and minds around it in this world and beyond it, their voices lost, impossible to be carried across the vast darkness. It knew they were alone, all so terribly alone; that there was no way for them to reach each other, not in this place of distances, of failing bodies, of flesh and identity.

And the Nergui knew then, the tenets of its faith that would stem from itself: it knew its mantra, the verses of the prayers that would be sung in its name. It felt the gentle, empowering caress of the faith of those millions that would worship the flayed man’s scriptures, its gospel of contact. It knew the mantras they would sing to it and the smell in the abode of its temples, the sacrifices of mothers’ milk and incense, set at its effigies’ feet.

“Oh little lotus flower, in the shadow of the Great Wall…” the Nergui sang and the teeming trillions sang with it, somewhere in the vast unknowable distance of the future. “Oh little lotus flower, far, far away…” they would weep for themselves and for the Nergui and for Creation. It knew, right then, that the Nergui would need a vessel, a means for it to leave this place. And so it scanned the world without distance or time and it saw the great formless behemoth that dwelt above the world and it smiled a red smile.

“Oh little lotus flower, shinning like the moon…” it prayed to itself.