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[Magus]

Crows In The Songbird’s Belly

Taraha Tanahrus, The Tail-Eater - Eternity Between Blinks

Barry had seen many a strange thing traversing the wilderlands of King’s Kedwen with his band. Rats bound to one another by their tails; tangled by the tips, they were aptly called rat-wheels, each pink limb a spoke and thus they spun upon the axis of the knot. Snakelings in the seremonths, in the dry and drought of the moon-span of Sun’s Height, suckling upon their own tails; hungry and without food, they ate of themselves and formed the sign of the wagon’s wayward feet once again.

Circles and cycles, he’d seen them so many times that the portent was no longer a conscious sighting. No longer out of the ordinary, being so common and droll and oft observed.

Today, the omen of the Godwheel was not lost upon him. First the rat, then the serpent, now himself.

When the shadow of his shadow came to; when the Eye That Was Not, opened; when he felt the thrumming in the place further than the bone, he ate not a cowering little old crone but the essence of his very self.

He could not tell if his soul came to because of the inexorability, the doom, of his hunger or by virtue of the defiance of its siren song.

He could not tell if he had called upon it or it called upon him.

Yet still, it had come to jump into his waiting jaws.

How does one know where they begin and their Nine-damned soul ends? He thought as he took a bite out of his eternal half.

There was no texture to the soul, no shape to the intangible. But, oddly enough, Barry could not help but compare it to the chew of a juicy fruit. Something oh so very south o’ the Ydden, succulent and satisfying to the parch. The difference lay in that the fruit was himself.

Berry… He thought distantly, unable to exhale his bitter laugh while stuck in the malaise, the fugue, of the black feast set upon himself.

Autocannibalism of the soul was the most dichotomic of acts. It felt profane and burned like all the Hells, Damnations and Periditions twain, Nine combined and multiplied; it felt divine, kingly pleasures and Seven Heavens intertwined, sweeter even than Turchian black wine.

A serpent suckling upon its own tail.

No substance insubstantial left from within the circuitous, incestous river of himself. Famished spirit took upon the teat of the soul; the soul took back the excess as a mother wipes away the milk from her unlumened babe.

Yet none of the mana truly fed him, smoke before the strong wind of his eld spirit. Everlasting contentment destined to come from without rather than within. Barry could gorge himself on the flesh of his soul all he wanted; it would not sustain him much beyond the staving-off of the beast in the belly.

Cheap pipe full with tarwood that it was, the black feast—the autocannibalism of his eternal half—would kill him, eventually and inexorably, in spasming bouts of hacking cough, long and slow.

He would die but better that it be so than the alternative: Emilia rent unto her base constituents and erased, root and stem, from the Wheel of Woe and Weal.

Barry, son of Malas and Frita, had died that accursed day fighting the warlock’s pup, anyhows. What stood here, wearing his bones, was something else.

Not a man, not nearly a god.

Something else.

With pain and pleasure he lost himself to the whispers of kith and kin; blood and darkness. Blood made black under the moonlight. Excruciation and release in equal measure, despair and desire made into one.

Whatever little bit of the kennen goddess’ dwindling influence left in the recesses of his mind was thrown into the churning maelstrom at the base of his spirit. Fire assimilated to a greater flame; subsummation.

Tears of tar burned down his cheeks with all the bite of eschallot cut with blind blade.

Souls, Barry now knew, were wrought very much like said onion; many lifetimes layered atop one another, plaque upon teeth, lamina bleeding unto lamina. Spirits were, in contrast, the distilled personhood that bore them, but a simplified reflection of a mortal; flesh and mind interwoven, made one, then trimmed of the fat.

The soul was so much more than a single man. It was them all, past and present, bound together and made greater than the pitable sum of its parts. And upon the work of lives uncountable, the sorcerer drank, imbibing in the knowing of good corn of all those that came before.

A rat-wheel spinning upon the axis of the tangled knot.

To gnaw upon but the outer shell of the eternal psyche is to learn things beyond mortal ken, he thought, words of a wizened, wandering sage coming as easily to an uneducated peasant hick as did breath.

His soul pulled wool of starry night over his eyes as it, in twain, scoured the scales from his sight. In blindness, he saw. In deafness, he heard. In absence, he was.

Ethos, settled in the cracks of himself, heavy on the shoulders of his hollowed-out spirit. Unsatiating that it were, the hunger persisted, blunted only by the fugue of the black feast.

‘Luxae,’ mocked his soul, a word of Power it had heard from another.

‘Skorro,’ the marrow of his bones spat back at itself, candor like parent correcting child. What Barry had learned as the Kedweni letter ‘r’, trailed and lilted, almost as if in song. This was speech from another realm, sothron-like. It reminded him of a Floreni’s haggle.

Without ever hearing its like before, he knew the meaning in the Keddish tongue: Darkness.

That Which Is Not Seen, But Is There. In Absurdus

That Which Sleeps When Awake. In Paradoxum.

That Which Is Not, Yet Is. In Absentia.

Visions of lifetimes past sped by his unseeing eyes. Each but a pang of a flash of faraway fulgur yet containing the multitude of years, their details sand between the cracks of his mortal mind.

A single grain caught in the well of his mental palm.

He saw himself that was not him.

A figure, cowled in the shifting shadow of their very spirit, knelt amidst standing stones. The rocken fingers arose from fine grains of sand, water but a half span up, the waves ebbing and flowing in their dance as doth the Twins upon the eventide.

Ghelach Dubh and Gheleach Geal; Moon of Black and Moon of White. Both present, balanced above the fingers, watching the figure in the palm of stone.

From within the figure burned things not of this world, from beyond the skein of the natural and unto the Place Where Stars Dwell.

The shackles of the Center of their fell spirit strained against the prisoners-that-were-not-prisoners within.

This was the curse of the yonic dark, of the primordial stillness; that which took and would forever take, unending. The black hoarfrost which regarded existence as it did iron left in the cold of night; ripe crop to spread upon and decay.

How could one close the Eye That Was Not?

How could one feed a hunger to devour worlds?

How could one stop the Ending of all that ever will be?

‘They eat of the Mannah of Heaven; Biadh de na Neamhan.’ The figure spoke, an insect with the voice of the hand that caught it; unbroken stone.

The figure's eyes opened, looking at he that was not himself.

The figure spoke.

‘But that is not the recourse thy finds thyself in, doth it, link of my chain and blood of my blood?’

They arose from the half-span waves, froth still clinging to their form shadowclad. A coat for one who was a coat.

Within the dark of themselves, was more of what lurked outside; nothing.

Hollow, leafless, mute.

Their voice, tree without root.

‘Thy hath not spoken the endspell; the threshold is held. In the stead of the Sundering of the Veil, thy hath not fed thyself.

‘The hunger, it carves thy out. A mewling chick, a newborn, is always hungriest. Soon, at maturity, thine eagerness shall wane as doth the Gheleach Geal.

‘But, for now, a lesson shall be prithee.’

Eyes with iris of flame, red as wine and the blood of a bull, met with eyes of deep summer green and heartwood sap. Ancestor and descendant separated by more than age but connected through the bond of soul. Both bearers of the line of Luaithreach, of He Who Remains.

Two Children of the Stars, inheritors of a legacy older even than the gods of this world.

The figure spoke as did the night; in the whisper that tickles the ear.

‘Sup upon the Sea of Spirits.’ They said while still in the palm of stone, words heard behind the hearer. ‘Open the doors of the Ainmhidh Dubh, the beast trapped in the navel. Let in the waters of the Place Between All Places and the hunger blunted shall be.

‘The trick is not to ravage any singular source of the world breath, but to take from the vast coffers of existence itself. Of the natural, of the wild places.

‘No longer are thine but a man, food for a mortal of no kennen hyd is paltry substitute. Eat of the sun when it reaches the height of the sky. Eat of the Moon of White when it opens its eye. Eat of the Mannah taken from the Vault of Heaven.

‘Eat of Biadh de na Neamhan.’

The Lone Sparrow II - 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E.

“Biadh de na Neamhan.” He whispered, voice like the leaving of the breath from the vessel of the lungs; deathly in flesh and yet, in spirit, emboldened twice-over. Commensurate with the closeness of passing over the boundary of the Pale was his conviction.

Though the figure had barely spoken a mouthful of words, knowledge made itself known in the basin that was the Sorcerer’s head.

Noesis flooded in—the ken beyond mortal ken—specks of knowing collected throughout the lifetimes of many men, dew upon the leaf of the tree of psykosis.

He knew without ever having done. Instincts old and eld in origin yet new to the Sorcerer came upon him.

Barry heeded them, uncaring of whatever may happen. He could only resist for so long, the fear cloying and baleful.

He did not want to die, not now that he had just grasped sturdy branch in the drowning of his being. Not now that he had a recourse other than ‘sit still and play fiddlestick with your very soul til Black Crow or White Gull come upon you’.

Besides self-preservation, this was not an end he would wish upon any but the most foul-hearted. No matter how divine the experience of bathing himself in the eternal soul be, to stay any longer risked worse fates than death.

He had felt his sense of self slipping away, his very identity subsumed in the infinite sea of other lives. A breath more of the tainted air of the chains that binds All Things, and Barry would’ve fallen to the sleep last taken; a black, dreamless sleep.

One more blink and he’d not even know he stopped existing, lost forever in swefen; in dream unlucid and danse sphenic.

The Sorcerer did as his ken told him.

Barry opened his mouth and the shadows of the temple opened theirs as well. Ethos, heavy upon his shoulders, made of the dark his domain.

Skorro, he spoke in the voice of his soul.

A crown blind upon his head and a scepter unseen in his hands, he made manifest a reality in which the absence of light was no simple wanting but instead living extensions of himself, arbiters of his will.

Orifices conjoined by thread fatal, the shadows all but Dyeus canals; an organism wrought of the nothing between all bodies of darkness; he, the Spider Atop the Welkin Web.

They breathed in, they ate and feasted with abandon of the Mannah taken from the Vault of Heaven.

The waters of the Spiritual were sucked into the vacuum, filling the Sorcerer’s dried-out Center in the interstitial fluid of the cosmos.

Fulfillment from without rather than within was his wont, he now knew.

A world-eater ate of the world, afterall.

The mana tucked in between the folds of the Physical fled not before him, running instead towards the point of convergence that was his navel, channeled through the sympathetic interstitia that bound All Things.

Rain befell the world within himself, enkindling the roots planted deep in the marrow of his bones and allowing them to sprout as was their wont. The very same creeping, trailing, parasitic rootlings that had sucked dry the soil of his spirit and that had brought existential famine upon the Sorcerer.

Subsummation was the introduction of fire to greater flame; it needed fuel and lots of it for the process to complete, for the seed to sprout. For nigredo and subsequent albedo, the ken-beyond-mortal-ken told him, outside energy was required in accordance to the given substance being subsumed.

A god’s holy flames, to be stripped of divine will and be made one’s own, cost much more than two-score-and-ten-pence.

Its cost was the stuff of spirits and soul.

Its cost was the blood of existence itself.

The air turned stale. The stones at his feet began to crumble, brick turned to ash beneath the heatless fire of his presence. Color drained from the world, returning it to as it was born and as it was dying; the End of All Things.

In the fugue of his feast, he did not see a frail, shaking, wide-eyed crone that stood the stature of a tyke backing away as fast as her ember-dwindling constitution would allow. A mouse before the feast of a lion, Fortuna had blessed her with luck she most needed: predator cared not for prey of so little meat when it had already caught something so much greater.

The Divine Ethos imbued upon the flagstones of this holy place was no mere pittance. It would do to snuff and sate the ardent flame of his thirst. It would do to quiet the Ainmhidh Dubh, the beast trapped in the navel.

With Barry suckling upon the soft, fleshly insides of reality-in-between as would a common man sup muttonshell ormer at seashore, a word of Power slipped from him almost unbidden. It was a thing done in peasant’s haste and fear of waste—as a wench throws leftovers into the aetpot, the Sorcerer threw a dwindling, and that would be otherwise unused, spell into the cauldron at the base of his spirit.

Luxae, whispered the dying breath of his soul before it returned to wherever it rested when not called upon. The command reverberated inside the confines of his distilled being as did a Dominidas bell inside its tower.

In the world within himself lay a lake, black under the stars, not reflecting the light so much as trapping it beneath the fetid grasp of its blood. A tiny ripple spread from the lake’s core; Luxae, carried therein.

Two heard the call, the sorcerous mandatum, that rang throughout. In the wake of the middling, eddie-like waves, the blacken waters boiled.

And from the grand nubelaeic tapestry—the lake that was not a lake, the Welkin Web That Binds—sprouted two trees from two stars to reach the Heavens from which they were taken. Seedlings of the Sorcerer’s foes, one from a Priest of Red and the other from a warlock’s pup; a giant wrought of the bodies of many men.

The stars were seeds and the seeds, endospores; dead, dessicated, dormant things meant to, after having their coats ripped apart by bile and acid, germinate when in contact with nutrition.

The festering hunger at his navel, the very same exacerbated by said seedlings, had worn away at their imprisoning skins, letting loose two things taken from two gods, one Black and the other White.

A plague of locusts-starved burst free from the shell of their winter slumber, given movement by the smell of abundant, would-be crop.

An ember-once-a-sun was revivified, given second life by the fresh breath of essence.

Stars-flame of dandelion gold. Void-fire of hellebore black. Twin opposites bloomed from the now watered soil of his spirit, climbing over the bounds of the Center and spilling unto the pathways mahneanic until they reached the threshold gates of the aura.

They spewed forth with all the volatile propensity of vomit.

A halo of two parts bled from his skin: a corona of xanthean yellow and a veil of abyssian black made into flame, one nullifying the Power of the other in their revolution. Were they not restrained by their danse sphenic, both would act as was their wont upon supping so much blood ephemera.

They would’ve annihilated the matter of two-span-radius centered on the Sorcerer, body included. One, through the fusion of substances unto heavier versions that were no longer themselves. The other, through pure, antithetical deletion of physical existence itself.

The Sorcerer looked down to arms made of vaporous shadowstuff. Black stars gone sick in the night looked back as heliotropic motes of cintrine-white swam through the flesh of his mana.

These and the halo that extended from them were but heralds of the greater things inside his belly. But leaves for the twin trees inside the Center of his spirit. He traced their roots all the way down to where their seedlings—their endospores—had sprouted, following the scent of mana.

To the base of his distilled being, to the Center, he went.

Barry’s perception of the First Basin was one of true darkness amongst the comparatively middling shadow of the rest of his spirit. The kind of dark that cannot be seen through, not even in peripheral vision.

The kind of dark that would repudiate the touch of light and the flame of torch.

By accident, as a man might put too much of his weight upon a door that is unlocked, he fell into and beyond the threshold.

The Chaqra Agni, the Subsuming Flame, the noesis—the ken beyond mortal ken—told him. A whisper on the wind of a foreign sage long since turned to dust and returned to the Wheel.

He awoke without waking, walking upon a place that was wrought of himself.

Where the Eye of the Mind was an expanse of infinite black grounded only by greyen water, the Center of the Spirit was a lake beneath the stars.

Siren songs of ice and ash sang mutely in the background, chanting without words the same thing in minutely-different ways.

As Above, So Below.

As Below, So Above.

So Above, As Below.

So Below, As Above.

Two trees, one wrought of the burning blood of the sun and the other of the black ichor in between, shot up from the cloying waters of his Center, drinking in the nighten sky above.

With either fire or locusts in place of leaves and gelatinous membranes, of hellebore black and dandelion gold, took place of bark; utterly alien things made in the facsimile of what a sapling was to be. Veins that smoldered with iridescence pulsed throughout each, marking them as the living, gestating beings that they were.

Like botfly larvae in between the folds of skin of a greater thing.

From the pinpricks so very high above fell starlight like food from the Heavens.

Mana, Barry realized.

These stars coincided with his channels mahneanic, the spiritual veins that crossed all over his Inner Shadow. These were their apertures, the floodgates that separated and conjoined in tandem. Their light winked in the ebb and flow of substance insubstantial to within the Center of his spirit.

Barry thought to look down and see himself, be it in the form of starflesh or meat upon mortal bone, but neither future held true before the present.

The Sorcerer was but a wisp of attention and awareness, a pinprick of perception transplanted and extended down unto the well of his spirit. A thing of the mind and without form.

And so, with nothing of himself to look at, Barry returned his attention to the mana that fell down to the face of the black waters that was his Center.

Time passed as did the Flowing-River Breath; slow and steady with an undercurrent fast and doom-like.

The stars above winked out, one by one, turning hollow and returning to the natal black of his Center.

When the last light fell away from above, below the reflection of them remained. Undaunted by the dark, it seemed. And so the Sorcerer slept.

With two constellations made into the skeletons of trees.

With the lake of his spirit filled to the bursting, reflecting colors of every hue no longer there above.

The hunger, abated and fulfilled.

In the belly of the Songbird’s spirit were a hoard fit for crows; twinkling, maddeningly-shiny gems swimming through the waters of night.

Mana.

Fickle blood ephemera. Ether distilled. Cosmic interstitial fluid. Matter immaterial. Flesh-made-simple. Spiritual humor. Substance insubstantial. Juice-wrung-dry-and-made-pure. Existential essence. The stuff of spirits and soul. Divine clay of the gods Themselves.

Mannah taken from the Vault of Heaven.