sadoeuphemist

There are two worms, and the first is called destruction. It festers at the roots of things and sends them tumbling down. 

The second crawls among the ruins with all the squirming creatures, and whispers in our ears and says: 

"There is profit to be made." 

(shamelessly stolen from Beast: The Primordial)

All categories, by their nature, are human constructs, artificial. We may pretend there's a difference between a thing warm-furred and a thing with scales that crosses the sea, but link blood to blood and you'll find a tangled skein of nerve and vein. We all crawled out of the water, once. We all burnt in the heart of a star.

So here's the difference between the kin, just a blood-thick membrane between them.

ANAKIM
Nightmares of Helplessness
to walk and feel the world shudder beneath you

You are the giant, the earthquake, the storm, the enormity that sends humans cowering. Some may say you represent the fear of Power, but the truth is much simpler: humans are scared of things bigger than they are.

Cruelty comes naturally to you, with every shift and rearrangement of your limbs, as if effecting pain from a great distance. You have been dimly aware of others' suffering, their fear, but there have always been more consequential things to focus on. Namely, your own satisfaction. You have never had quite enough food, enough space, enough opportunity to exert your will. No matter. You continue striving. This is not ambition, or even appetite, not any more than it is your lungs' ambition to take in air. You're a growing child. You need to eat. It's as simple as that. You've crushed people, animals, heard their bones break, heard them whimper and beg and scream. You are of the Anakim. All this is beneath you. 

NOCTIS 
Nightmares of Vulnerability
to reach out from the darkness to extinguish a flickering flame

You are the boogeyman, the stranger, the hidden knife, the thing lurking in the darkness. Humans feel the hairs stand up on their necks and know fear of the Other. They live in terror that there's something out there that wants to hurt them.

There's something absent from you, you've always known that, and so you've lived so as not to attract attention. People nod past you, take you for granted, and that's how you like it. Humanity fascinates you, the mundanity of their day-to-day lives, and you enjoy playing with them at your leisure. You are never bored, but very easily distracted. Sometimes you want to see them joyous. Sometimes you want to see them suffer. You've never known satisfaction, satiation. There's only ever the dull disappointment at the end of your most in-depth pursuits, after you've finally revealed yourself to them, after you've broken your toys to see what's inside. Still, no matter, it's not as if there's a shortage of humanity anyway. You are of the Noctis. They're all equally beautiful to you.

ABYSSI
Nightmares of Insignificance
to study a mirror and look upon an empty face

You are the depths, the abyss, the leviathan, the gaping maw that threatens to swallow everything whole.  Humans all know fear of the Void, and perhaps that proves the truth of it: they fear that everything they have wrought so far is worthless.

No matter where you look, you see yourself. In the television screen, in the shrieking invective online, in a politician's smile, in the averted eyes of your fellow subway passengers. There's a pleasing reliability to this pattern, as if you could extend outwards and outwards and outwards until there's just the molecule-thin membrane of your skin encompassing everything. People are mostly horrified by you, once they see you clearly, and yet none of them can ever look away. You would be happy alone, and you are. If there's any disturbances that happens around you - a spate of suicides, a doomsday cult, a lost generation - that's only inevitable. These things happen, and you happen right alongside them. You are of the Abyssi. The end of the world comes turning on its axis.

NIRGALI
Nightmares of Contamination
to turn your gaze upon the world and reveal it as diseased

You are the plague, the swarm, the rotting corpse, the inevitable revulsion humans feel at their world. Some may say you are the fear of Entropy, but what humans really fear is seeing the world without delusion.

You've never been satisfied with the easy answers, popular narratives, the trends and factions of the day. Inconsistency rankles you, all the little blind spots people maintain in order to continue living their comfortable lives. Everything you've previously believed, you've since reevaluated and judged as insufficient, all the twisted hypocrisies standing out in knots on the back of your mind, crawling up the back of your neck. In truth, you take a great pleasure in gouging out the hypocrisies one by one, like so many wriggling maggots. There's a teeming beauty in it. Flesh rots, and the maggots and bluebottles swarm in and feed. People may resist your accusations, but more often than not the horrifying reality of it becomes too compelling for them to deny. You are of the Nirgali. You cannot help but pick at lies.

STRYGOI
Nightmares of Exposure
to claw out the heart and feed on dead flesh

You are the harpy, the ghoul, the gawker, the set of leering eyes that feed on humans at their worst. Humans are wracked with fear of Judgement, but in simpler terms, humans are scared of each other.

Unlike your many siblings, you were human, once. That part of you is long since dead now, a distant memory, but you can still recognize it in others, with a sort of yearning that verges on nostalgia. Other people become precious to you, fragile sparks of potential that you hope to cradle and nurture into fully-actualized human beings. A hot red reminder of what you once were. The marrow in the bone. Of course, it never happens. The past is the past, and all the yearning in the world won't turn back time. People are stumbling, nervous, fallible, perhaps even more so under your gaze, incapable of realizing their full potential. That's fine by you, though. The appeal of nostalgia is in its bittersweet tang, the delicate stirrings of loss. You are of the Strygoi. You could watch them struggle and fail forever.

URGES: 

HUNGER FOR POWER
The Tyrant

ANAKIM
Jo's a ball-buster, quite literally. She's crushed a man's testicles, felt them pop in her grip. All fully justified, of course: he got violent first, and as a woman all her self-defense classes tell her to go for the groin, the eyes, the throat. Jo's blunt, assertive - enough in itself to arouse resentment - and she's learned to target men with violent tendencies and poor self-control. It's not that she's after pleasure, or revenge. Too many men view violence as posturing, a show of strength. Women don't have that luxury; they have to aim to disable, to kill. Jo's just marking out her territory.

NOCTIS
Reynold's a health inspector for the city, and sometimes he likes to go above and beyond the call of duty. He visits sites ahead of schedule, incognito. He looks up employees' personal details, follows them on social media, occasionally takes a drive out to their houses. Most people hold quite a bit of resentment for their jobs, and Reynold puts that to use. When he's doing his inspections (stringently thorough, of course), he asks all the right questions, knows what to look for. He feels a certain ownership of them. He wants them to succeed.

ABYSSI
Ari's a cabbie and he's assembled quite a collection of regulars by now, knows their schedules - people who'll find his cab waiting and ride around for hours, going nowhere in particular because they have nowhere they want to be. The guaranteed income's nice, of course, but really Ari just likes the driving, the long and empty side streets, the skyline blotted out by buildings, the numbing hum of traffic. Sometimes his passengers can't stop talking. Sometimes he lets them sit in silence. Sometimes they tell him to drive out to a bridge overlooking the river, or to the entrance of a subway station, or to the front of a skyscraper, and that's the last ride they ever take with him. He always makes sure they reach their destination.

NIRGALI
Ms. Blaise is an assistant principal, and she's absolutely diligent with dealing with problem students. She makes calls to parents, asks about their home lives, sets up meetings, is always perfectly understanding. She can always get right to the heart of the matter, tell you why a student's acting out. It's such a tragedy, though, that none of her cases ever seem to get any better. The parents are always indignant, belligerent, the children always lashing out and resentful. All her insights only ever seem to give them more cutting insults to hurl at each other. She never gives up on a student, though. That's just not her way.

STRYGOI
Dave's a self-made man, worked his way up from the mail room. Did night school, got his MBA, was promoted to supervisor, and now he's got a corner office. He's given a commencement speech at his alma mater, does volunteer work at the local homeless shelter where he talks up job opportunities and shares his story. Every time one of his guys gets hired, or gets the slightest promotion, Dave's always there to hype it up beyond all measure. Sometimes he stands at his window, looks down at everything beneath him, and imagines a tower teeming with his little people, all crawling atop each other in an attempt to reach the top.

HUNGER FOR ACQUISITION 
The Collector

ANAKIM
Zmei's been arrested for theft, sure, done time for it, but more often than not he just takes what he wants. If a man or woman takes him home for the night, in the morning he'll help himself to their food, any money they leave lying around, any shiny bauble that catches his eye (he's partial to silver). "A gift for me, yes?" he'll say, daring them to deny him. If he can't find anyone for the night, he'll turn up at an old acquaintance's without warning, and leave with what he likes. He doesn't use violence, of course. If anyone's strong enough to stand up to him, he'll leave empty-handed without any fuss. After all, there are so many more people out there who won't dare to speak up.

NOCTIS
Rose collects teeth, children's teeth, and it's slow but rewarding work. She doesn't take them by force, of course not; children lay teeth out for collection all the time. The key is the timing: there's only a single night in which to strike, before the teeth are secreted away by the parents to disappear somewhere into the trash. That's fine by Rose, though, there's a certain joy in just watching, night after night, being privy to a child's development, waiting patiently for the harvest. Rose has a full set of baby teeth from a single child, pieced together over years, and that's the prize of her collection, her pride and joy. Lately, though, a thought's been turning over in her mind - oh how she'd like the full set of adult teeth as well. 

ABYSSI
Yin's hometown lies on the coast, and the storm a few years back was one of the worst they'd seen. That's history now, people are rebuilding, but Yin's found a little hollow just off the coast where the floodwaters ran back into the sea, where everything washed through and a few things stayed. That's where she dives deep, in that murky depth full of things not worthy of salvage, rotting timbers and rusted metal and the refuse of houses and homes and lives. She goes down there once a day, sorts as best she can according to their previous owners, rebuilding a hollow effigy of their lives. Every few years, she adds to her collection.

NIRGALI
Tim's a culture vulture, an outsider artist, and his photos of roadkill have gotten him quite a bit of acclaim. They're like diagrams of a death, a life turned inside-out. Anyone can look and see that here's where the tire crushed the spine, flattened fur into the asphalt; here's a tiny paw outstretched in a panicked attempt to flee. There's also an unnerving clarity of background to his photographs: he renders quiet neighborhoods and scenic roads into crime scenes. The dead dogs and cats are what get the most attention, sure, but they're not Tim's favorites. He only shares his most precious photos with a very select audience: the drivers who helped him make his art.

STRYGOI
Anya owns a picturesque apple orchard just outside the city, a momentary retreat from the cares of the world. Many of her employees are previous customers of hers, lured by her charm and enticing tales to give up city living and start a new life working at her orchard. She has each of her new employees plant and tend to their own sapling as a symbol of their growth. And then, weeks or months later, when their new lives inevitably fall apart, she transplants their saplings into a little out-of-the-way grove. They flourish there; they're well fertilized. Anya makes sure her trainees always leave a part of themselves behind.

HUNGER FOR PREY
The Stalker

ANAKIM
Darius likes to hunt, it's that simple. It's a good, clean predatory urge. He doesn't have the teeth of a wolf, nor its packmates, but the basic principle is the same. His fingers dig into flesh, rip out chunks of muscle, spill blood. Sometimes he'll manage to get his arm around their neck, his fingers up their nostrils, and he'll choke them out in a matter of seconds, but more often than not it's a death by attrition: a faltering, a stagger, a collapse, and then Darius' hands digging in. They're usually still conscious when he starts to feed, but that's only because by then he's too eager to restrain himself. Whether they're screaming or not is entirely incidental.

NOCTIS
Father Landon isn't the only predator in his diocese. He's watched more than one troublesome priest be shuffled around from parish to parish, and he's uncovered their past sins. Their victims are often skittish, reluctant to trust someone in Father Landon's position, so he's had to get creative in collecting his evidence, the precious little mementos of the sin. Then he plants his little scraps of bait where his fellow priests are bound to find them. Sometimes they turn to prayer. Sometimes they have a breakdown and confess. Sometimes they're driven to re-offend. Father Landon doesn't have a preference either way. He's just in it for the hunt. 

ABYSSI
Brianna hit her Awakening early. She's in middle school now, captain of the swim team, and there's a special initiation ritual she's established. They sneak down to the beach, a quiet spot where they won't be disturbed, and then they swim out to sea. It's always just Brianna and the new recruit, swimming as far as they can until their limbs weaken, until the current's too strong and they're gasping for breath, as the rest of the team watches from the shore. No one ever drowns; Brianna makes sure of that. She just wants them to get a taste of what it's like.

NIRGALI
Vanessa likes blood, likes the uncovering of it, the revelation of what lies beneath the skin. She's learned to sniff it out from behind long sleeves and scars, learned to recognize those who have already gone digging, or those who have the gnawing urge to start. She shows them her own designs on her forearms, tempts them, coaxes them, arranges it so that they can both bleed together. There's never any completion to the designs, never any sense of fulfillment, just the constant urge to keep digging deeper. Vanessa lives vicariously through her prey. At least for them, there's eventually an end to their search.

STRYGOI
Dawson owns the big empty house on the south side of town, full of big empty rooms with high rafters where he invites people to stay. They're always just temporarily out of a home, just until the next payday, just until they can get back on their feet. He provides them with toiletries, food, all the basic necessities, accepts their promises that they'll pay him back. And then the weeks stretch on into months, and they're still living in the big empty house, huddling in the empty rooms, helplessly indebted to him. He's always very compassionate when he turns someone out. They've had their chance, after all, and there are always so many more people who need a place to stay. He never really abandons anyone, though. There's so very little difference between the inside of his house and the outside of it.

HUNGER FOR PUNISHMENT
The Judge

ANAKIM
Ogre got his nickname back in high school, where he learned that the only thing you're worth is what you're owed. Hurting people got inconsistent results at best. Being on the wrestling team, with a set of rules that laid out just what he could expect when he hurt people - now that opened up the world to him. Ogre likes rules, oaths, contracts, promises, IOUs and debts. He's good at collecting what's been promised to him, and even better at extracting promises from people. He's even drawn up a meticulous exchange rate - so many bones broken for so many unfulfilled debts.

NOCTIS
Even among zir fellow monsters, Jess is a boogeyman. No one knows zir real name, or zir assigned gender, what ze does in zir human life. No one knows how ze hunts, or how ze picks zir prey. It's just, sometimes people disappear. Sometimes some terrible secret emerges in the wake of their disappearance: child abuse, or date rape, or sexual harassment. But more often than not, there's just the absence: the absence of motive or meaning or justification, the absence left in other people's lives. That's the way Jess likes it. So much cruelty is senseless, arbitrary, inflicted without reason. Why should justice not be the same? 

ABYSSI
Ahmed and Patrick are a pair of Abyssi lovers. Patrick's an interior designer, and maintains a collection of photos of the homes he's so carefully crafted: intimate, almost intrusive pictures that reveal how his clients live. Then Ahmed uses that knowledge to go sneaking in. He keeps watch as the inhabitants of his lover's homes grow uneasy, dissatisfied, until the homes and possessions and lives they thought they wanted begin to box them in. He waits until they lash out, disrupting his lover's designs. And then he tears their homes apart for them. 

NIRGALI
Angela's a lawyer known for her pro bono work, her tireless advocacy for those with little other recourse, the poor and marginalized who would otherwise be railroaded by the legal system. It's taxing work, and her victories are few and far between. It's not court wins she's after, though. Her cases inevitably highlight the injustices inherent in the law, leaving almost everyone involved with a bitter taste in their mouths afterwards. And she visits her own brand of justice on them afterwards, one that comes to them in their sleep, on many crawling legs.

STRYGOI
When Benjamin comes for people, most of them mistake him for an angel. He catches them in a moment of guilt, snatches them up and carries them away to some dizzying height, and tells them that God has intervened in their lives. They must make a choice, he tells them: to confess themselves as sinful and repent, to declare themselves unworthy and relinquish all hope of salvation, or to give themselves up entirely to God's judgement. Benjamin has seen people take all of the three options. It's not his fault that all three options tend to lead to people leaping to their deaths.

HUNGER FOR UPHEAVAL
The Destroyer

ANAKIM
Grace is fascinated by cars, by how even the puniest person can command two tons of metal and send it hurtling through the world with deadly force. She thinks it gives people a sense of what it feels like to be her. When she goes joyriding, she revs the engine at stoplights, cuts in, blares her horn, taunts, challenges, dares other drivers to stand up to her. She relishes her impromptu drag races, the flares of road rage, other cars vying alongside her until she inevitably swerves the wheel and slams into them in a carnage of steel and glass and bone and blood. It's almost comradely, she thinks. Almost like making a friend.

NOCTIS
Lester loves breaking glass - windows, picture frames, mirrors, display cases. There's something about the fragility and transparency of it that appeals to him, as if people have erected the flimsiest of barriers between themselves and the world. He comes in the dead of night and breaks into people's homes, shattering their delusions of security. His real pleasure, though, is watching them try and go about their lives afterwards, watching their facades crack again and again each time they stumble upon more of the shards of glass he's hidden.

ABYSSI
Naia tries to keep her appetites contained to her volunteer work for the city, helping clean out homeless camps and reveling in the detritus of other people's lives. But inevitably she goes seeking out disaster areas - typhoons, earthquakes, floods - wandering among the ruins of a city and witnessing the traumatized survivors struggling in the aftermath. She doesn't consciously cause any of the destruction, no. It's simply an inevitability, as regular as the tides rushing in, as regular as a city's expansion and rot. As regular as her pangs of hunger becoming uncontainable.

NIRGALI
Amon breeds all sorts of spore and bacterium and virus, his home full of Petri dishes and centrifuges and planters full of rich, moist soil. It's amusing, he thinks, how ill-equipped society is to deal with outbreak, how simply his strains can be bred given the right sort of equipment and know-how, and how a little package sent through the mail or left exposed in a public place can cause such complete pandemonium. It's not even that his little projects are particularly deadly. It's that the world is such a fertile medium for chaos.

STRYGOI
Diana works as an assassin, ironically because she deeply believes in the value of a human life. A single person can have an impact on thousands, even millions of others, and a single bullet can do the same. The targets she's commissioned to kill tend to be especially prominent or influential in their communities, but Diana's no elitist. Off the job she's found that any random person on the street, seen through the scope of her rifle, will have just as significant an impact in their deaths.

"I have no hands," said the snail, "and so everything I own I acquired through mere accretion." It sprawled limply across the ground, its body slack and undifferentiated, as if even the effort of speaking was too much for it to bear. "Everything I crawled through, everything I rasped up against, everything I took up for a moment and forgot to set back down - they all left their traces on me, particulates..."

Its voice dripped with disgust. "The crumbled remains of bone," it said, "left rotting in the damp places. Wood-ash. Broken shells. Limestone and sediment, fossils, debris - things dead for decades. There was something living wrapped in these once, something vital, and I -" Its voice hitched. "I don't remember how or when I got them. I only remember their presence as they are now, atop me, this fossilized arrangement. I passed through the world and I kept things beyond all worth of keeping.

"There was no plan in this," it said, and gazed up at the spiraling tower of its shell, eyes dull atop its stalks. "I mixed no mortar, laid no brick. I never once imagined living here. This began as a tiny lump on my back from the moment I was born, a calcified knob of bone. I resented it at first, this useless vestigial thing, longed to be rid of it. I flexed my back, strained myself hoping to pry it loose as it cut sharply into my flesh. But instead I've scabbed over the edges again and again, built it up imperceptibly along the lines from which it was first formed. It has grown, and grown, and grown, beyond my control or volition, from everything I've ever abandoned, ever forgotten -  

"Is it beautiful?" the snail said. "It is beyond my comprehension." Its eyestalks swayed and reeled, tracing spirals, until it grew dizzy and lowered its head. "I could not have made this willingly. And yet I bear it all the same, and watch it overshadow my flesh ..." It stretched out its neck, twisted and turned to show the glistening texture of its skin. "Am I beautiful? Or do I carry beauty with me, distinct and separate, as a thing that will outlast me? A thing I only came to build by gnawing habit. That I could never again reproduce. A thing that I could not help but build if I was to keep living."

The snail let out a breath. "Well, yes," it said. "It is quite useful, I suppose. I retreat into it for shelter, and for comfort, and it is smooth and well-formed against my skin. I could not live without it. But, you see - 

"I have a cousin, a slug," the snail said, its voice trembling. "And we are otherwise alike, in form and capacity and function. My foot is no less strong than hers, I can climb and crawl just as well. Except - except I carry everything I own with me.

"And she survives, just as well as I do, and finds comfort and shelter and - and that sense of safety, all without a shell to hide her.

"That's all usefulness is, isn't it," said the snail, and shrunk back, resigned, disappearing backwards inch by inch until only the shell was visible. "It's everything we've accumulated that we can no longer live without." 

There's a horror living in your head. It's yours, entirely. It doesn't map to anyone else's. Doesn't that make you feel special? You've got something that's exclusively your own. 

I've got my own horror, and so does everyone else, presumably. We can only talk about it in vague terms, and it only occasionally solidifies into an incomprehensible metaphor. Mine is shards of glass staring up like dead eyes from the ash and sand. Even that's too specific. It's other things too. It depends on the time of day and the weather. 

Our ineloquence makes us believe that the horror is amorphous, ever-shifting. We find like-minded people and we hammer out a jargon for it, big, expansive terms with no set definition, words capable of containing the world. Only a philosopher could properly understand them, but even an idiot can shriek out the words and feel a chill. It's coming, it's coming, it's here, it's coming; we say the words and it's surrounding us; we say the words and we're grasping at the edges of a vast and protoplasmic thing.

It's a mass delusion, though. Your horror is not mine, no matter how much we may agree it is. You can see it now in your head, can't you? How to describe it? Its borders are perfectly defined and intricate, tendrils crawling around the edges, reaching into the crevasses in your brain. Whose face does it have? Say the name. It wouldn't mean anything to anyone outside a small group of people, just a random name in the phone book, so you don't say that, right? You grasp for a word that someone else might be able to understand. You could map it out, probably, if you were so inclined, but it would take a lifetime. You'd have a spiderweb of string and pushpins, old photos, newspaper cutouts, words scrawled on scraps of paper. It would stretch across the walls of your house. You'd look like a lunatic. And you're not. You know you're not. Other people have talked about it too, a thing like this, though not entirely. All the distinct little differences in experience. But it's close enough, right? Close enough to a reality. Close enough to cling to.

So you take your horror and you file the edges off. You generalize. You find that something close enough in the outside world and you adopt the vocabulary as your own, just grateful for the ability to finally speak. You take your horror and you make it universal.

There's a horror in my head, and it's not yours, not at all. That's the only thing for sure we have in common. Mine is a pyramid of human skin, sagging and weighty like a dumpling, its surface prickled with gooseflesh. It's clammy. Ugh! I can feel it sweating from here. It's not your horror, is it? No, no, not at all. Tell me all about yours. Be specific. Be a lunatic. It's good to talk. It's good to let it all out. It's good to speak the truth.

Because what we do, in our mass delusion, is we let all our horrors blur together. We ink out intricate, personal maps and then we pile them on top of each other and let the ink bleed through. Until it's huge and blotted black and faceless, until it's ready to swallow us whole. Kundera talked about totalitarian kitsch, a smiling bland face that swallows us whole with happiness and the sentiment of the universal brotherhood of man. This is a kind of kitsch too, isn't it, this is anti-kitsch, this is apocalyptic kitsch. This is an aesthetic we can project into the void and hear the voices screaming back, until it seems like the whole world is screaming in horror with us. This is the stark perfect picture of our despair. This is the growing black tide that we're all going to have to beat back together, or we're all going to suffocate and drown.

But it doesn't happen, and instead we all drown separately, in disparate groups, except for those of us who don't drown at all. And we stare out in shock because that makes the horror worse. How are they not dying? How can they not see? How could you abandon me at this, my hour of need? I'm drowning! I'm drowning! Can't you see that? Can't you feel the suction of the tide? 

Listen: there is a horror in your head, and it's not mine, and it's not anybody else's. There are points of overlap, sure. There are good and useful group projects. And then you will wander down the tributaries of your horror, you will feel its tendrils grasping, and you will look around and you will find your friends and compatriots have abandoned you. No. They were never there to begin with. There are people being dragged down in the privacy of their overgrown lawns, the roots creeping up from the grass, far from your sight. There are people privately quietly suffering with all their variegated horrors creeping up to play. And it's not your horror, and it doesn't fit into your map, but it's there, and that's all you need to understand.

There's a horror in your head, and it's as real as mine, it's as real as anyone else's. I won't understand it completely, and maybe no one ever will. That doesn't take anything away from it. We like to think we'd all shriek in unison, but our voices rise and fall away one by one. The closest we can come to compassion is to understand that we intersect in convenience, and that we are not abandoned when we diverge. We are all in this together. We are all very much alone.

I have to go. I have my own problems to deal with. Take care of yourself, especially when no one else will. Navigate the edges of your horror. Tend to it. It is as unique and intricate and as beautiful as you are.

Walk your lonely paths, and pull it out by the roots.

The Black Rope is braided together from your hair, your dead skin cells, every scab and clot and bit of detritus that has sloughed off your body, every matted wad harvested from a shower drain combed out and braided together into a dead black cord. It is slightly thinner than your wrist and hangs suspended from the sky, dancing in the wind, one end disappearing into the distance. You can grasp it easily, loop it around your arms, and it supports your weight. The Black Rope is greased with your oils and sebum, made shiny and pliant so that it coils and bends with ease. It feels familiar against your skin.

It has been made especially for you, over the course of a lifetime.

The Black Rope sheds hairs as you touch it, black lines that mark out paths on your skin. They hide in the furrows of your palms, they cling to your sweat, impossible to peel off. You dig into your skin with your fingernails and the black lines merely writhe across your flesh like snakes. You are marked. The blades will come and trace along the lines, trace along your destiny, slitting you open according to the meridians of your body, following the paths of your veins. You cling to the Black Rope regardless. It is the only thing you have left of your life.
 
The Black Rope stinks of shit, of sweat, of unwashed hair. It coils like entrails. It is real, visceral, in a way that nothing else is. The Black Rope is warm. There is some decomposition in its tightly woven core, some process of decay that gives off heat. The Black Rope cradles you, comforts you. Knotted, it serves as a harness. Pulled taut, it serves as an anchor. You feel its imprints in your flesh, the thin black hairs pressed deep into the welts, embedded in the inflamed skin.

The sky looms infinite and grey above you. You grip the Black Rope, and you begin to climb.

"In the first he makes the demi-gorge equal to 24 toises⁶ in the square, 25 in the pentagon, 26 in the hexagon, 27 in the heptagon, 28 in the octagon, 29 in the enneagon, and 30 in the decagon, and all higher polygons.⁷
. . . 
"His flanks are on right lines, drawn from the center of the figure through the extremities of the demi-gorges.⁸
. . . 
"...120 toises, from the center of the figure to the middle of which he suppose a perpendicular to be drawn, and to be divided into n+1 parts (n being the number of the sides), two of which he allows for each of the demi-gorges, and three for each of the capitals⁹, from the outer extremities of which last, rasant¹⁰ lines of defence, drawn to the extremities of the demi-gorges or curtain, determine the lengths of the flanks, which are on right lines, drawn from the center of the figure, and the positions and lengths of the faces of the bastions."¹¹1. Etymologically, DEMIGORGE would seem to derive from demi-, half, and gorge, throat: a blocked windpipe, the inability to swallow. Or, perhaps, a reminder that our appetites are not entirely essential. It follows a string of false cognates beginning from Demiurge (δημιουργός, craftsman, the creator of our debased world) to Demogorgon (a deity invented wholesale by Lactantius in third century AD, Dicit deum Demogorgona summum) to Demogorge (the God-Eater, a deity invented by Alan Zelenetz and Bob Hall for Marvel Comics in 1982). The deities share no etymology or genealogy but the similarity of their names, words picked for what they sound like, stripped of any definite meaning and inviting supposition. All variants of DEMIURGE are gods or demons that rule the world, born of word association. 

2. Demigorges are military deities, the genii loci of bastions. A bastion is a pentagrammic projection from a fortress, a promontory into a hostile sea. Despite this, a bastion is also held as a place of safekeeping and preservation. By the rules of the demigorges, the only way to defend something (our nation, our freedom, our way of life) is to assert it outwards offensively.
 
3. Demigorges are completely artificial, twice-constructed, "formed by producing". A curtain veils and reveals, serves as an element of theater. Demigorges are formed through an artificial revelation, the curtains parting to reveal what has deliberately been kept hidden.

4. Even a bastion, as an extension of a fortress, forms its own politics and political capital. Every forward thrust collects its own power, finds its own center. Pioneers build colonies, explorers found nations. A nation expands from the point of a blade.

5. Demigorges are anatomical, part of some larger organism, functioning according to bilateral symmetry. Man creates the world in his image. Demigorges are what remain between a face and an extremity, between what sees and consumes and what extends outwards.

6. A toise is a unit of measurement for length, area, and volume simultaneously. It is either exactly 6 feet, or exactly 2 meters, or 1.8 meters, or about 3.799 square meters, or 8 cubic meters altogether. Within a toise, all conceptions of distance and space fold into one another. To mark out a border is to enclose a territory, to claim a territory necessitates inhabiting it in three dimensions. Maps make fortresses, make nations.

7. As a demigorge is composed of multiple toises, it is simultaneously one-, two-, and three-dimensional, existing within all planes of order and expanding to fill the space it is allotted. It inhabits the space of higher polygons. It inhabits the space of a straight line.

8. A demigorge is pierced through its flanks, through its still-beating heart, crucified upon a divine geometry. Crucifixion splays the condemned out on display as a deterrence to other potential offenders. A demigorge, up to its extremities, is a display of the potentiality of its violence enacted upon itself. 

9. The figure is drawn, divided, sliced into parts, the capitals being accorded a larger portion of the share than the demigorges. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's. 

10. Rasant: archaic, meaning long, sweeping, curving, arcing off into the distance, such that a shot fired will fall off and merely graze the target. Such a term presumes that an army's strength weakens at its extremities, that there are no weapons of war that can inflict destruction from miles away. The arc is of history, the last line of defense a wavering, dying line tracing back to a past where there was a limit to our abilities to destroy.

11. Any attempt to define a demigorge necessarily degenerates into archaic jargon and obscurantism, the words themselves imbued with a quasi-mystic power due to their mystery: the essence of the occult. Meaning is obliterated; we are left with fleeting bits of familiar-sounding phrases, word association, trying to piece together an equation we no longer understand.The demigorges stretch from the outer extremities, the last lines of defense. They determine the positions and lengths and faces, our bastion walls stare out of us. The demigorges are artificial, we have constructed them in their entirety (As we constructed squares and pentagons and enneagons? Or was that always merely our uncovering of a higher geometrical reality?). What have we created for ourselves?
 
12. A demigorge can be understood as an absence, an incompleteness, an amputation. It is a mathematical remainder. It is that which is wanting. A curtain is a court is an enclosure, is a theater of laws and security and fortification and all the promises of nation. A curtain encloses a space for playacting, the representation of something that otherwise doesn't exist. The curtains part and a barren stage is revealed, dancers with their legs amputated. Bastions project outwards into hostile territory, but the nation itself is hollow, reduced to nothing but border, nothing left behind it. Its Flank is taken away, to the Angle of the Demi-gorge.

Jonny Devoid-of-Flesh is pure abstraction. Jonny does not exist so long as there are those of us capable of conceptualizing him, entombing him in symbol and metaphor. Jonny is the end of all things, the end of the identification and individualization of things, the end of all ontological distinction. Jonny is Apocalypse. Jonny is the Worst Thing in the World. 

Apocalypse, from the Greek meaning Uncovering. Revelation. The lifting of the veil to reveal the hidden truth of the world that suddenly brings the entirety of our existence up till then into sharp and stark relief. The world as it is now works, beautifully and hideously in its slow and implacable grind, all its parts labelled and mislabelled and slotted into impossibly complex interlocking systems. We squabble and vie against each other, socialism vs capitalism, democracy vs fascism, entombing the world bit by bit in flesh until we can look out upon it and see nothing but ourselves. The world doesn't make sense without us to perceive it, to define it, to render it into forms of ideology. Jonny's the end of all that, the abandonment of all delusion. At the Apocalypse there will be no more separations, merely the all-encompassing realization that the world makes sense and that only in the moment of its fulfillment do we finally understand what all our tumultuous broken lives were for.

Jonny Devoid-of-Flesh isn't here yet, Jonny will never be here, that's the worst thing about him. Jonny doesn't cast a shadow. On the Day of the End of the World, we will peel back the veil and discover nothing new, reveal only our own haggard faces staring back.

Pray to Jonny. Abandon thought. Abandon flesh. Hollow out your skull and make room for him to exist. Jonny Devoid-of-Flesh has no ears to hear our prayers, no lips to speak the truth. Pray to Jonny. You're only ever talking to yourself.