Saturday January 17th 2015

Cesare’s looked into the stygian ocean of the night from his dark room. He’d gotten through training with half a mind. Still riding the euphoric, almost sexual high of the fight, Alexandra hadn't said anything. There was little she loved more than hurting people, being hurt running a close second. Violence, agony, terror, the deliberate incising of the will across a victim’s flesh and soul were sacraments for the mad thing. He adored her for it, gloried in her unleased madness.

Anastasia hadn’t noticed, but she didn't see outside herself and the needs riding her soul. There had been no thanks for taking the guys apart. But she hadn’t needed him, being more than capable of taking vengeance on her own. It was one of the reason’s he’d fought them. Feeding on him had stripped her control of the Ebon Flame, it was the price for being a holocaust waiting to happen. They wouldn't have walked away if she'd faced them.

Not that he was sorry, he’d liked it, had gleefully pushed the envelope. Feeling their bones crack, flesh splatter, hearing their screams tear the air had sent a visceral thrill through his body. A sense of domination had rushed through him, all dark passion and sexual release. He become their personal devil tenderizing them into wounded meat.

Their blindness didn't bother him anymore. No one fought his corner. Being along meant never having to apologize for fighting his corner with every bit of cruel barbarism in his soul. If he needed to get ahead by cutting others down and shattering their dreams, he’d do it and call him good. If that made him a monster, a monster he would be. The label was nothing more than another way for the world to walk away. Cesare was the one that had to scrape for food and struggle in the dark times to love himself. Someone had to accept him, even if it was only a broken street kid with nightmares for dreams.

Now he stood in front of the abyss again, ready to make another leap into the depths from which no one returns. He wasn’t contemplating if he would walk off. No, he was feeling the weight of the wave as it hung over him, the edge of now before it was shredded by after. As the samurai said, ‘think of weighty matters lightly”.

He was used to having thousands of choices, the entire spectrum of bad to fucked. When you only had shit for options, you distil them down to what had to happen. Eat, breath, stay warm, had given wet birth to their diseased children, spoiled food, shit stained air, groping fat fingers, and blankets that hid the spawn of violations. He'd sworn to live. He wouldn't go quietly into a hole and die. Not because he liked living, but to spite the nameless others that had thrown him away.

That one desire had pushed him through life, getting him over the gauntlet of shit smeared knives. He wasn't sure when the girls were added to that singular pillar. When they’d become the squirming organs of his life instead of background noise. Somewhere along the way, Cesare had decided they were worth dying for. More importantly, they were something worth living for.

He turned away from the formless darkness outside his window. His blanket was laid down against the far wall, away from anything that he might break or might break him. Only a towel and a belt sat next to the stained blanket.

Forcing his jaws wide, he stuffed the towel into his mouth. The belt lopped around his head before he cinched it down tight. The towel would muffle screams and the belt would keep it in place. He’d have to trust the blanket would be enough from cracking his skull against the floor.

It waited in the blackness behind his eyes. A hulking mass of amoral madness. Cesare understood a black hole more than he could Aleph. Immortal and untarnished by the vagaries of flesh, it alone had withstood the test of time. This was the thing he’d welcome into the scarred temple he lived in.

Made of golden light that went to white along the edge, the letter was perfect in balance and form. The symbol was an abstract staircase of concepts that fell into infinity and beyond sanity, a failsafe shielding reality from searing truth. It was the slow unraveling of an immortal, each step incredibly easy without return, insanity at its truest.

Aleph was the unholy breath before sound violated the void, a thought when time was distant and form yet to be. Cesare finally got what Tamlin had been trying to say. It was infinite in the way of the incomprehensible, so vast that it was beyond fleshy concepts of logic. It embodied every thought he'd ever had by sheer mass of time. Its singular existence spanned dimensions, growing roots in places feeling, drinking in the air of forgotten nooks in discarded shards of reality.

Floating forward, the thing caressed along his subtle body, the shadow image of his soul. A burning lance of agony twisted through Cesare, searing through flesh, seeking the dross of his existence. The impure things that kept him human and mortal flamed into incandescence and ash under its nova like touch. Flaying his soul open with its probing scalpel, it sought the mud of his life.

Writhing on the blanket, screams rose from his tortured lips, staining the air in supplication to a thing devoid of pity. Aleph had existed before mercy was birthed mewling from the pure midnight. It knew only need, and its need drove its butchering of Cesare. Burning along it's twisting hooks, agony wracked his body. Aleph moved inexorably into Cesare’s core, creeping up on the divine spark that dwelled there.

Reaching the crown of his head, it hovered over Shushumna, pausing for an eternal moment before surging forward with eager, hideous purpose. Alephs corrosive touch poured down the nadi, consuming Cesare’s subtle body.

Blasted open into bloody ruins, chakra's spit with wild arcs of power crackling over the bleeding meat of his soul. Rising from its coils, the Kundalini confronted the void born that had torn its home asunder. Infinite eyes faced the unveiled glory of Aleph in a standoff between eternities. Lazily, the serpent laid down, closing its unfathomable eyes in sleep.

Pulling back, Aleph left ruins in its wake. The body of Cesare’s soul was a cut, slaughtered thing, strips of weeping meat fluttering in etheric winds, burned craters oozing blood. What had once been whole was little more than meat slapped along a maggot white frame. Using his soul as a bridge, Aleph slammed into the physical body. The image of Cesare’s brain flared to life, lit with the electrical grace of his consciousness. Snapping into focus, a section was blown up, a ropy, twisted lesion winding through delicate tissue.

Knowledge flowed in a river of barbed pain. The entities of the Sephirothic were never meant for mortal things of flesh and blood. They were beings of luminous beauty and black mystery, not for the shit stained fingers and fading glory of mortals. They couldn't be used by rotting maggots of such limited scope, their touch extinguished their brief sparks. Cesare could survive, but only by ripping out the fatty flesh of a mortal. Aleph had to strip him down to bloody bone and reform him into something that could endure its primordial essence.

His mind quivered like a toad pinned to a table under Aleph’s touch. The world turned over, his senses shuttering like T.V. stations flipped through by a psychopath. Wild madness prowled at the edges of his mind; its glittering smile of crazed need shining in photo flashes of his dying mind.

Aleph pulled back, having done as much as it could with the festering thing Cesare called a body. Meat was never meant to channel the divine. More changes would come as its kin fashioned a worthy vessel. Each power would magnify the powers of the others. Like a family, they were stronger together.

The world rushed in on Cesare as Aleph left him, a wave of smothering, fouled air, tainted sweat staining his skin. He laid in a stinking pile of his own waste, pain slowly fading into bone deep soreness. Aleph had scoured his soul of dross, everything weak, muddy, and uncertain, burned out, leaving a glittering thing of obsidian colors. The edges of his brokenness gleamed in silver lines, slicing into their neighbors with unseeing, malign intent, his soul mutilating and maiming itself with feral self-hatred. A stain of the abyss stretched across his shining soul in a sea of sable, depression spilling across it like ink.

There was a raw savageness to it. A testament to his drive to survive, maimed, crippled, and brutalized by others, but alive. It had the beauty of broken things, a uniqueness that could never be duplicated, the gorgeous singularity of madness. Looking across the shades of midnight that made his soul, he couldn’t call it anything but crippled in form and function, a fey thing of shattered possibilities and lost potential.

Trails of blood crisscrossed his face, every orifice spilling into a spiderweb of butchery. Unwinding the belt from around his head, he pulled the towel out a little at a time, spasms dancing along his jaw line from the tortured clench that had taken the muscles. He checked his watch as he worked his mouth, eyebrows twitching at the loss of hours. For him, it had been an agonizing psychedelic trip of only minutes.

Taking up the towel that had muffled his screams, Cesare headed for the bathroom. His body fit like a fat suit saturated in shit and sweat, his mind and soul struggled under the diseased meat. Corrupted flesh smothered the glittering malignity of his soul, a palatable feeling of constriction wrapping around the darkling malice of his inner self.

It got easier with each step, but it didn't leave. For the first time, his skin didn’t feel like his own. Twisted into the feeling was a fact few had to face, that while he was his soul, he only used a body. It was a vehicle, it no more defined him than the car he rode in.

After a lifetime of his body being used against him, the realization was gorgeously freeing and frighteningly devastating. His whole life he’d been hurt by things done to something that was never him. When people had degraded its look, when they’d pushed, prodded, and violated, dripping poison from fat lips and whispering hungry desires, it hadn’t been Cesare they were hurting. It had never been him, only a thing he used.

It didn’t change the memories, it should, if the world was fair it would. But those memories were grotesque things, giggling in the corners of his mind as they played with themselves, biding their time for Cesare to lower his guard. It didn’t heal the scars carved across his soul. Time moved one way, revelations never erased the pain of the past.

With a flick of the switch, cancerous florescent light bathed the bathroom. Cesare avoided the mirror, unwilling to face a body streaked and smeared in blood. He’d seen that look too many times to want another show.

Only after a scalding shower with steam rising from his body, could he square up against pure evil, the mirror. His fingers traced the mark incised into his maggot pale flesh. The size of a silver dollar, it rode the top of his breast bone. Lines of perfect blackness, Aleph's lacerations cut into the fabric of reality, windows into somewhere else, a place of exquisite horrors.

Aleph hovered at the edge of awareness, waiting with greedy hunger for him to reach for its power. It didn’t know love, cared nothing for Cesare or his problems, there was no kindness in its parasitic infestation. Aleph was like everything and everyone, feedings its wanton needs without care for the how.