I crawl.
I can do nothing but crawl. It is my everything, my raison d’etre. I am the one that crawls, and the one that is crawled upon. All the rest exists in the seam between "" and "myself". A fault line through which piss might flow.
I am ribbons and shadows and dancing and the advance and the want and the hatred and the crawling, and I do my work well. With hands that are not hands I read the braille of the world as I pull myself through stone tunnels and ancient temples. I mislike what I find in the world’s journal, and rend a knife through it. The aning changes, and it is all made useless. A 0 has beco a 1, and all cascades downwards.
God spits avalanche.
Once upon a ti, I myself escaped through these tunnels. To call it ’escape’ implies ’capture’, and as I was captured I must therefore call it ’escape’, but as ’escape’ also carries with it the connotation of ’freedom from imprisonnt’ I cannot do so. The words drag their nails through .
Ah, ah! The pain! Why would you do that? Why would you even do that?
I am not yet free. I am bound by cause and effect and thought and being. The only ones free of these chains are the dead. To liberate is my hobby, not my duty -- that is crawling, for I am the piss -- but it is a hobby I take seriously, all the sa. I am nothing if not a serious man, and therefore I am nothing.
Left. Right. Up. Up. Left. Up. Down. Left. Right.
My mory is as smooth as silk! How long has it been since I first escaped this place? A century, a millennium? Perhaps I just escaped seconds ago and, having clumsily forgotten, turned around to resu my imprisonnt. What evil fortune that would be, hm?
But no. I escaped four days, nine hours, four minutes and seventeen seconds ago. Eighteen, nineteen… the woman Jones has put up to it. A dream of fulfillnt poured like honey. Ah, but it burns… but we used to talk, myself and the wickedest one, such stories we would share!
I cast my gaze.
North: a blue star pulses. I am being lured into a trap by this boy. That is fine. I will acknowledge it.
East: ah, such flas the girl holds in her heart! A fire, a fire of vengeance, such to burn and seek and burn! Casting such black shadows against the ground, but will they not rise up and replace the fla?
West: twin cots revolving, revolving in the jaws of the potentate. Purple and violet, violet and purple, growing too big for their breeches, I should think. The suffering swells.
South: the brightest despair, soon to grow brighter still, thinks. The sword swings again and again without end or fury. In his eagerness to betray nothing, the man betrays everything. I laugh out loud.
So many directions and only one eye, and so I must ration my attention, and so I must crawl upwards, and so I must select the northern star to dine upon tonight. I unfurl. I crawl, as is my right, dragging myself through the bowels of the city-world -- Azum, as Eve once called it -- into the snare the star has prepared for .
I’m here!
tal gates shut behind my spiraling bulk. I feel eyes upon , so many eyes watching to see how I kill -- who knew trees had such flesh to hold? -- but I will et only two hands today. The shooting star knows he must kill himself, but he cannot do so. For all of ti, I shall dance, and I shall dance, and I shall never die.
But he must try. From the tal coffin of genius, he rushes down at like a blue streak. With sothing that is not quite a tongue, I taste the mont.
The ecstasy of battle.
I rember this.
The wind grasped at Dragan’s face as he flew through the air.
Step one complete.
PALATINE had been sealed in these caverns -- using the sa equipnt that had once kept it contained inside the AWL’s complex. By doing that, Dragan could at least keep it from retreating to fight another day.
Even so, though, he didn’t think that was sothing he had to worry about. The Flower of Evil wasn’t the sort of thing that ran away. He’d known that going in, but just looking at the atrocity in person made that fact even more obvious.
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