Breaking the mold

Chapter 8: humanity

In my slumber, I communicated with my people and was able to expand my mind as wide as it would go; however, during my days, I had no memory of my Taylorn existence. Even now, only bits and pieces come back to me.

It is strange how memory works. We can go our entire lives as angry young men and in the impotence of dementia, we seem to only remember the most poignant of memories.

To give an example, it has been years since the dark times in the human body but I remember a girl. I was 10 or 11 perhaps but she ran around the playground with flowing wavy, blonde hair. She wore a pink windbreaker and smelled of strawberries.
In retrospect, I'm not sure if she actually smelled of strawberries or if it was simply my favorite of the human smells but she was perfect in the light of the dawn. That mid-morning light when children go to play without the luxury of complicated playground equipment and rather a wood chip floor with a metal ceiling to accompany their demure fragility.

There she was and there I was and she was in love with another little boy as I stood on the outside looking in. I was the child who couldn't remember how to ask to go to the bathroom in Spanish so the Spanish teacher let me wet my pants. I was the kid who put periods between words as I had not mastered the intricacies of the English language and yet... Ah, the immortality of that bubble in my shapelessness now.

I remember as a young man, I once stopped at a stop light and in a day dream, I accidentally unlocked a smidgen of my Taylorn consciousness.  For a moment, not only did I feel like I didn't belong in this world but I felt disassociated from my body as well.  Think of a time that you were at a party that some friend had dragged you to and then left you with people you didn't know or recognize.  Now what if one of those people was yourself?

Life was a blur to me. So much violence and recklessness. I remember trying to destroy my mind with drugs as a young man. The strain of philosophy and complex algorithms I did not understand weighed on my mind as they had on my form as an energy creature.

I endured great pain at the hands of mortal villains because of my awkwardness. I simply tried to enjoy the fruit of humanity without focusing on the bitterness of it and was often ostracized for my troubles. Some line in the Sand that humans would always draw between each other and then tell me that I couldn't cross it because it might make someone uncomfortable.

As years passed in my human form I crammed myself full of everything they had to offer and it was never enough. Books seemed dull and they missed their obvious motifs; equations missed a denominator or variable which would inevitably unlock the universe to them. I never shared with any of them my findings. I realized that they were too young and in my 73rd year of life, I began to awaken. My human mind began to die and with it, it released my Taylorn thoughts more and more.

The irony is I would sit by the window looking out into space and would secretly be imbued with such knowledge of the universe, even if I could relay the message to younger humans, they would never understand.

This race was too focused on its selfishness on the things that made them different to ever understand how they could be pure energy that observed the laws of strict relativity.

In my wheel chair, I sat by an open window. A nurse sat by close at hand. I felt the breeze and heard a voice. It was Taylorn and called to me for an assessment of humanity.

The swoon of war

The preternatural fog came rolling in over the hills from the cannon fire still shelling the mainland over the not too distant hills. Fuille stood next to the door in a shed that barely stood next to a half-standing house.

Through the fog of war and poison gas, shock troops came with flame throwers and bayonets burning and stabbing or shooting the survivors of this recently shelled village. Fuille had lost his pistol and his rifle in the struggle of escaping an enemy platoon but he still held strong to an 18 inch survival knife. He considered it lucky as he was Jewish and the number 18 was sacred to him. It was his pride and joy and he expected it to save him today.

The extermination squad drew nearer as Fuille's heart began to beat harder till it felt like it would explode. Sweat ran down his exposed back from where a grenade had burned his shirt off from the collar to his trousers.

The only light in the air was red with flecks of yellow flames and he could see them now as he ceased sharpening his knife to conceal the noise of it. The black gas mask shown through the dim light as the majority of the enemy passed by the shed where Fuille was hiding.

A few troops stood around smoking a cigarette, laughing and breaking glass and rock. They spoke in a foreign tongue that stung his ears with hatred. The soldiers began to move off and he slid down the shed door in relief as he heard their voices moving off.

Fuille looked into the void of the shed and pondered how everyone he knew was likely dead and possibly just missing. He pictured their faces and began going through his memories of them and let out a small whimper and a tear before tightening straight up.

Someone was still there. Fuille could hear his foot falls among the sound of flames coming towards the door. As the door slowly squeaked open, Fuille could see the front of the gas mask which he grabbed and broke the glass in the eye holes, pulling the soldier's back against his chest.

Plunging the 18 inch knife under the soldier's ribs slowly, he began to struggle and the gas mask slipped off. Underneath was a boy of about 20. His innocence caused a swoon as Fuille spoke, "shhh shhh shhh."

The life slipped from him and Fuille held him like a father holds a sleeping babe. Romantic wasn't completely the feeling but there was a romance to death. As Fuille guided him to the floor, he held him and cried in fear, anger and remorse for humanity.

Fuille sat in the mud holding the dead body in his arms and in what he would later find was mental shock, he drifted into the darkness holding his victim.

Life after death

Contessa wandered the chaotic crowd with the blood of a demonic immortal on her. Roedric's naked body lay motionless on the floor. People ran left and right in front of her eyes as they rammed into each other and some even got trampled to death.

There was a calm in her soul despite the chaos and evil permeated her with all the times he'd made love to her and roughly. She had no idea that evil had infected her too but she was glad to be rid of him.

All of a sudden she became painfully aware that things had changed for her. The people around her seemed to move slowly. they moved so slowly that when she moved through the crowd time seemed as if it would stop and then begin slowly again when she stopped.

She reached out and would circle men and women who ran with fear on their faces from some unknown terror that drove men mad. It wasn't the monster anymore because the monster was dead but rather the lack of monster that left good men to their own devices and left a void for a great evil that had to be filled.

She became painfully aware of the ground beneath her feet as she realized her shoes had melted off. Great cobblestones which should have hurt but the pads on her feet had grown thick and she began to realize that it was not her feet that she now walked with.

"Even in death, you plague me, Roedric," she mumbled.

A voice came from the dark recesses of her mind and spoke.

"You've invited me in sorcerer."

She instantly recognized Roedric's pet name and voice. They had been in the magicians guild together and she was no stranger to magic, however things were happening to her that were not in her normal repertoire.

"I killed you, monster."

There was a laughter in her skull as she felt her self moving away from the town at such incredible speed that the terrifying momentum became like a great vortex that tore her clothes from her.

In the spinning darkness, she saw something come through and run a gaunt gray finger up her naked side.

"You killed the possibility of good. For no man is an island once he's become what we are," said the dark creature in Roedric's voice.

"You see, Contessa, Man is given a second chance only so many times."

"I gave you second and third and fourth chances and you blew them all, Roedric!"

The great laughter reverberated through her again.

"Is that who you think I am?"

There was a silence as she was struck deaf.

"Roedric is dead. You killed him. All that's left is in your mind. You have a construct of what you remember about him but being infected with the disease he had, I am now you. I sound like Roedric because that is what you know to call this disease but your soul fights itself now."

There was a silence when she realized that she could no longer blame Roedric for the way she felt inside. The demon turned into a plague of fingers that crawled up her legs like thousands of spiders. They permeated her skin pours, they lapped at her sex. They caressed each sinew into growth as she began to rise a new.

The phoenix is said to rebirth from flames and the vampire sees each blossom of the night as if he were seeing heaven but this was neither. This was a rage that permeated her newly preternatural soul.

It writhed inside of her like a great snake that struck her heart with a fatal blow filling it with venom.

At twelve feet tall she was only a few feet above where Roedric stood but she was ten times as fierce. Her hunger for blood was fueled by what he had done to her and where she was once broken she filled the holes with rage.

The town stood quiet as a few kingsman went round picking up and fixing the destruction wrought from the earlier scene. It had been two days and there was still blood around the village that could not be scrubbed off.

"Out out damn spot..." sang a village custodian in bemused irony.

The royal blue and ashen flags were no longer waving but rather an eerie calm had struck the town at this moonless night.

There was a slight breeze but they only caressed the banners as much as a poor player whose jokes were told to a deaf crowd.

The giant doors that stood at the entrance to the town looked out into the woods like sentinels guarding a gold filled keep. From the woods, there were noises that befit the night and some that did not; however there was none like the explosion that came from a woman scorned and a demon born.

What thrust itself towards the great stocky doors was not, by any means an average Were. It had the body of a wolf but the wings of a bat and the head of a dragon. It was as if the changeling virus that permeated your average Were had mutated into what the scorned mind could make it.

Each transformation into Were was different as any hunter of them would tell you. That is why the legend varies from place to place but she was more dragon than wolf and as she slithered from the tall oaks, the doors seemed to cower in fear as the rocked back and forth with the wind that came from her movement.

There was first a loud crash as the bolt behind them fractured but held. Then the second crash blew them off their hinges and crushed half a house that stood not 10 feet away. Those inside were killed instantly not from rubble but from the shock wave which shook their nervous system loose and destroyed all life within them.

Her violence permeated the village as some ran from their houses and others simply stayed inside and prayed until they too were crushed from reverberations and falling debris.

Her siege lasted hours as she destroyed the village that failed to warn her. The people that failed to stop her from Roedric's charm.

As the siege ended and the town lay burning in rubble, all 12,000 souls who lived there lay dead in a barricade of rubble.

She sat at the center of the destruction and seemed taller than when the transformation first occurred. The fur burned off of her and the scales of the dragon formed underneath it to protect her from the flames.

By morning a full grown dragon sat atop the rubble and began to slowly shrink to a naked woman lying atop a pile of ashes. Not a soul had told so not a soul knew but as she lay atop the still warm heap of a life she had just burned to the ground, she felt alive again.

Not every fairytale has a happy ending

Royal blue sigils on ashen black cloth sighed atop wooden thatched houses around a stone square.  The worst kind of animals shouted from the open windows and around the circle of buildings hungry for the blood of the creature that was now dragged through the crowd and tied to two posts with thick rope.  The thick smell of the animal fat on the torches and in the fire pits around Eden permeated the air and his face looked just like any of theirs except frightened.  He wasn't afraid of the fight he might have.  He wasn't afraid of the people, but the hatred burned him to his core and made his skin shiver.

A hooded man walked out with a whip.  The magistrate stood on the stone alter that he was tied to and read off his crimes.  They were but dissonance among the jeering of the crowd and when he was done reading, there was a deathly silence that ensued.

"One!...."

A sharp pain tore into his back and rippled through him as Roedric cried out in pain.  His face stretched forward, morphing into the demon he kept inside and ripples of the wolf within him permeated his skin.

"Two!..."

The pain shot through him again and he saw their faces. His body transformed into a 10 foot tall beast that crossed man with wolf and he looked on the crowd through a red tinted hue.

"Three!..."

The faces of the virgins he had consumed flashed before his eyes and the lust for their bodies and flesh stunk like rotten meat between his teeth.  His memories of all those he had consumed and the absent pleasure it had given him ate away at his soul as that lash reverberated through his body like a knife.

"Four!..."

He saw his dearest Contessa in the crowd and heard her cries from the night she had caught him attacking a young girl of seventeen and though his eyes were that of the Were, she knew who he was and went to run.

"Five!..."

He watched her running from him and he could smell her blood through his nostrils and it drove him mad with lust and pain and shame that he desperately tried to end by grabbing her to show her that there was two inside of him; including the one she loved.  It was not him who attacked those girls...

"Six!..."

The pain shot through him and the anger arose within him that he could be so stupid as to not seek a cure earlier for the condition he had been in; if for nothing else than for Contessa.  For his love who his lust for blood could have been cured by her love if he had let it.

"Seven!..."

He swore that he would not be the beast anymore.  He swore that he could control the Were within him if he was just given another chance.  If he could just be given the time and means to seek Necromancy or any of the cures that could bring these girls back and reverse the damage he had already done.

"Eight!..."

God! if it would only end, he thought.  Roaring out in pain and tears towards the crowd.  His soul sank and he submitted to the death happening within him as he realized no one could see his tears from the wolf's eyes and he could think of nothing more; save the pain from a broken heart as she stared at him with a cold gaze.

"Nine!..."

It would appear that depression was where he would live for now as his world faced him and spat at him and threw literal jibes and rotteness at him.  He fell to the platform and thought of nothing as...

"Ten!..."

"Eleven..."

"Twelve!..."

Half the crowd thought the thirteenth lash would kill him as a demonic creature of magic and evil but he was laying there on the slab not moving and gathering a storm of darkness that could break with...

"Thirteen!...."

The ropes snapped free and he arose on his hind legs as his giant claws hung at his sides and a pair of wings erupted from his back to fill the square.  He grabbed the rope and threw it down and howled at the crowd who understandably assumed their deaths were imminent.

A silence fell over them and people literally froze with terror mixed with his force of will that forbade their bodies of movement.  Before any of this had happened he had been a skilled magician and that power to captivate people into freezing was apparently only amplified by the Were within him.

He threw the whip down and concentrated.  He concentrated harder than he ever had before till his form began to change again.

Standing before the crowd was a naked man whose clothes had ripped from the transformation.  He looked out on them and wanted to hate them but he had accepted who he had become.

"You have hunters among you who could hunt me.  You have those among you who will still hate me once you learn what I have to say.  I am an immortal.  You cannot kill me thought you can wound and capture and enslave me.  You can torture me and throw me in a pit and I wouldn't fight you because I have accepted what I did to your town and..."

He turned to Contessa.

"and... a.. and to you, my love.  Ropes and chains can bind me and I would allow you to hold me accountable for what I have done but I am not the monster inside of me.  I will not let it define me no matter how powerful it is."

He sighed and sat down as the holding spell took a lot out of him and he began to lose a grip on the crowd as he let some of them go.  They stood still and listened to him.

"I have the power to fight the monster and it took thirteen lashes for me to even try.  I've been with it longer than many of you have been alive and though years of loneliness and monstrosity commanded my soul, for 5 of those 700 years, I have been happy."

He turned away from Contessa and to the crowd as more of them began to drop from his spell.

"There has always been a monster within me but for a moment in all my years there has been a light and for that, I am ready to kill the demon to live among you as any of you are."

"There is not a man who is without his demons and not a woman who has seen the torment of the soul.  I beg of you only mercy and love and forgiveness.  Should you seek to have a way to hold me accountable for my testament, I stand ready to submit."

The crowd fell deathly silent and he too fell the same way to look into their eyes as he dropped his hold of everyone including Contessa.  That was the moment she took the magistrate's blade and cut off his head.

Heaven on Earth

As I walked down the street, I felt his footsteps in the ground, I could see his soul glowing red with malice and my wings stretched out from my back.

The street was poorly lit in the witching hour of 3 - 4 AM but the brick walls on either side of me only about 10 or 12 feet from me on either side cast strange shadows of creatures unseen and unknown in a constant struggle for life.

His shock was apparent when I turned around and must have appeared to levitate to him as only those meant to see can see an angel's wings. Great blue glowing wings with three on each shoulder that I decided to let him see and he fell to his knees.

The wind blew and it was cold. Not temperature wise because the night was more than likely 70° or 67° at the most but the cold ran through me and I stretched it to him for the warmth of life is extended only to humanity and not God's chosen.

"You have been Judged Arnold Ramase and I have waited for you here. Your desperation drove you to this life but you began to enjoy it, didn't you."

As is the fashion, I awaited his response of, "yes, my lord... My angel... I don't know what to call you..."

"My name is Samael and you will know this as you will be one of few humans on earth to be taken by the angel of death himself. Know thy father, child and go with God."

He began to clutch his head and I let the light of the heavens shine upon his soul. In awe, his eyes opened and began to bleed. I cut the power of the heavens for a moment and as life slipped from him, I held him in my arms and cradled his dying body.

"Some have called me valkrie and others guardian, today if you might before your eyes close, call me savior. Call me savior child for your race is too small to be given such divine right as his love. You are all meant to be damned!"

He lay on the ground choking on the blood in his throat as his cells had been destroyed by the light.

"Damn you child, speak!"

It was too late and I watched his soul ascend.

"Why then do you not love your chosen as you would a criminal," I called to the heavens. "Why are we not worth the right of repentance?"

As I wept over the lifeless body of this vicious criminal who was with God, I knelt in the street and an animal from somewhere knocked over a trash can lid. The filth of the world covered my legs where I knelt and I was blatantly aware of how small I was. My wings swelled and strained in a stretch. The torment subsided and I stood up, lost the emotion to something I could not fathom and walked home shaking the blood off me as if it had never touched my garments.

This is the life of heaven on earth, I thought to myself as I prepared for another day amongst the living as one of them on disguise.

The tell-tale printer

In the cold, darkness of a poorly insulated house, the light from the power button of our wireless printer pulsates like the beating of a elderly heart. It sits there on the desk with as much dust as any antique and the same amount of judgement as it fills the room with light and then returns me to a resting room.

It repeats this action: light that fills the ceiling like some projection of a mid-summer dream and then darkness where I sense the calmness and verisimilitude of dignified reality. Then as I get used to the darkness the joy of the ceiling light comes back, only to return me to the now petulant darkness. Then light! Oh such light that lasts an instant and shows me all the things in my messy room I thought I'd lost. Now darkness! Wretched terrible darkness and light!...

I can't take it anymore and I go for its life blood! I turn the overhead light on and the room fills with the dirty yellow light from the single room light above me. Half asleep, I rummage around the back of the printer for its jugular.

It's difficult to find and for a moment, I wonder if there even is one? Have I killed this agonizingly beautiful creature which pulsates vacillating light and darkness as part of its waking dream? Does it think of my snores as a paltry annoyance and wish it could turn me off as I sleep beneath it's heart beat and am bothered by its perturbing yet necessary life?

As the 1/2 second ends that I think all of this, I find its chord and it turns out it's just a printer and inanimate object after all. I rip it's chord from its backside and shout, "you're dead now you flickering bastard!"

Yet as I go to sleep, the thoughts of my friend the printer haunt me and I think of how it's been doing that for years now and never have I unplugged it. Yet in the end, darkness is truth and I tend to sleep better without light, however small or bright.

I drift off to sleep with the dead things all around me. Sweet sleep at last.

Highway to hell

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. He felt himself swerve slightly as he held his neck from a shooting pain that seemed to arise when he had turned his head to follow an eager BMW driver; the sun, flashing in his eyes, he swerved back towards the road and away from the median.

"Goddamn BMW drivers! They're all assholes! Every fucking one!" He said as driving began to return to normal.

A fog began to gather as large bushy clouds rolled in overhead and Jack began to think about his family. His little boy smiled at him in his head and his wife said, "just come home safe," as he thought about her beautiful curls around his shoulders caressing him to her heavenly embrace.

He decided he would call her but as he called, the phone would just ring and ring and ring with no answer or even a message machine. He hung it up as he meandered through this eternal road.

He began to think about all the bad things he'd done in his life and the bad things he'd recently done on the trip he was on. The fog seemed as thick as water as he looked out on the road and couldn't see even a mile down the road.

As he tried to slow down to stop, he found that he couldn't move his leg; it was glued to a constant speed going down the highway.

He tried his radio and Enya began to play. He began to scream. He tried to roll down the window and the fog that rolled in was steam.

Suddenly, the Enya halted and a voice spoke, "welcome to hell, you cursed the Lord while driving and so you shall now drive for all eternity to remind you of your blasphemy."

The highway elongated in front of Jack's cranium. His eyes weighed like thousand pound weights. His heart raced and he only begged for sleep and a crash so the road would end.